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INSPIRE
Power to the people WORDS
Kate Edwards
As Australia rapidly moves towards a renewable energy future, the excess energy that household solar panels are currently producing is creating instability for the grid. But Ginninderry is paving the way for a solution: Canberra’s first community-scale storage battery.
Remember the severe storm that occurred in Belconnen in the very early days of 2022? Some residents were left without power for up to six days. In the future, community scale storage batteries have the potential to protect local residents from this sort of scenario, by providing them with back-up power generated from the sun. And now, Ginninderry is trialling its very own community-scale battery – the first of its kind in the ACT. The aim is to then pass on their learnings to help lead the way for other community batteries to be built, not just throughout Ginninderry, but Australia, in order to make best use of all the solar power we’re generating. Currently, Australia has the highest uptake per capita of small-scale solar PV anywhere in the world*. Whilst this is excellent news, the expanding volume of renewable energy poses challenges for the stability of the grid, making the need for solar storage more important than ever. Or as Jessica Stewart, Ginninderry’s Sustainability Manager puts it in more simple terms, “Because we're
generating so much solar, we've got lots of excess power during the day. If that power isn’t used by householders, then it goes back into the grid. But the grid can only absorb so much power at any one time. What that means is that a lot of that energy is then wasted. We need to be able to store that power and put it back into the grid when it’s needed during peak times.” At the moment, State Governments and independent energy companies are rushing to build large utility-scale grid storage systems, whilst residents are encouraged to buy home battery systems. However, there is also an in-between solution: one that promotes local energy stability and resilience, potentially cuts costs of owning a household battery, boosts local hosting capacity, and increases the amount of renewables that can be installed across our neighbourhoods. Community batteries offer energy storage for around 100 households, with power capacities up to 5MW and have the potential to play an integral role in Australia’s transition to a decentralised grid.
As an all-electric suburb committed to renewable energy, Ginninderry has become home to the first operational community-scale battery in the ACT, which will test how community energy storage can work alongside residential solar systems and batteries. “We decided relatively early on to future proof Ginninderry for community batteries by allocating a patch of land next to each padmount substation. Back in 2016, the size of a battery was the same as a large shipping container, but the one we’re installing in 2022 is only 3 x 3 metres,” said Jessica. The first community-scale battery will be owned and managed by CWP Storage and, working with Evoenergy, will use the battery to trial communityscale energy storage solutions as a way to mitigate the need for traditional network upgrades. “The problem is, it can be expensive to upgrade substations to cope with the energy produced from solar,” says Jeff Allen, Business Development Manager at CWP Storage. “By installing smaller community batteries, like the one we’re trialling at Ginninderry,
