Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time.On a sweltering February morning, staff at electricity supplier AGL were preparing for a potentially catastrophic day on the grid.
Instead, it’s a virtual power plant: a far-flung network of privately owned rooftop solar panels and batteries dispersed across thousands of houses on the eastern seaboard. In return for a credit on their bills, Debono and other customers like him have agreed to allow their power providers to take control of their devices at certain times and utilise the combined force of their stored solar energy.
Origin Energy, which runs Australia’s biggest virtual power plant, called Loop, thinks the technology’s scale and potential have been “completely underestimated”. Groups of thousands of homes fitted with solar panels and storage batteries are enabling power utilities to aggregate stored solar energy and call on it to help stabilise the power grid when needed. In return for a credit on their bills, a growing number of customers like Tony Debono from Cobains in Victoria have signed up.“Some of those were customers with home batteries that were able to respond within 100 milliseconds to frequency imbalance in the grid and offer power,” she says.