The trial, part-funded by ARENA, supports new solar customers wanting to connect in constrained areas where the network is reaching the limit of its capacity to manage more solar.

In localised areas, the amount of solar exports can exceed the local network’s capacity to support it during rare periods on mild sunny days. Some parts can become overloaded, resulting in issues such as higher voltages and inverters switching off in response.

Additionally, when significant solar energy is being exported into the network at a time of low energy demand, this can create issues for managing security of supply.

These two issues have emerged significantly in South Australia, where more than a third of homes have solar and where rooftop solar has at times been able to meet the State’s entire electricity demand.

“We are the first to have to solve this challenge and we believe our highly innovative flexible exports solution will become the default offer for new solar customers across Australia as other States follow our lead,” said SA Power Networks Manager Strategy & Transformation, Mark Vincent.

“Currently, solar customers in South Australia are able to export the excess energy they create back into the network with a fixed maximum limit of 5kW (kilowatts) per phase.

“But in areas with a very high take up of solar, SA Power Networks is faced with the need to reduce export limits for new connecting customers.”

To manage these issues in other parts of Australia, networks sometimes have imposed very conservative fixed solar export limits, as low as zero.

SA Power Networks’ flexible export limits provide a viable alternative to imposing lower, fixed export limits for the whole year and, consequently, have attracted intense interest from the industry here and overseas.

“We are now able to offer new solar customers in constrained areas, a choice of either a smart new flexible exports option up to 10kW that changes the amount of export throughout the day in response to network conditions, or a flat 1.5kW limit for the whole year.

“We began testing this in surrounding areas supplied from the Sheidow Park substation in the southern suburbs and have now expanded this trial to the Blackpool (on Le Fevre Peninsula), Blackwood and Oaklands substations.

“Our trials in these areas have shown that customers utilising the Flexible Exports option were provided exports of 10kW for 98% of the time.

“Even though these customers are connecting in a constrained area, the flexible option gives them significantly more ability to export throughout the year than even our traditional fixed 5kW export option.”

ARENA has provided $2.09 million in funding to a consortium led by SA Power Networks to support the $4.84 million trial.

SA Power Networks and Victorian-based AusNet Services have partnered with industry-leading international inverter manufacturers, Fronius, SMA and SolarEdge, and energy management software company SwitchDin, to develop the technical capability needed.

SA Power Networks has been working nationally to support the introduction of consistent technical standards across Australia.

The flexible capability is likely to be adopted nationally as others deal with the same issues South Australia faces as a world leader in the shift to net-100% renewable energy.