AGL has responded to the AEMC’s draft determination on Integrating Energy storage systems in the NEM. The draft rule makes a number of changes to integrate storage into the NEM, and also shape the rules to facilitate the future market where storage and hybrid systems are likely to play a much bigger role in firming up the growing amount of renewable energy, including:
- introducing a new registration category, the Integrated Resource Provider (IRP), which would allow storage and hybrids to register and participate in a single registration category rather than under two different categories;
- providing clarity for scheduling obligations that apply to different configurations of hybrid systems, including DC coupled systems (which have different technologies behind a single inverter) who will have flexibility to choose whether those technologies are scheduled or semi-scheduled;
- transferring existing small generation aggregators to the new category, and enabling new aggregators of small generating units and/or storage units to register in this category;
- enabling aggregators registered in this new category to provide market ancillary services from generation and load; and
- amending the framework to recover non-energy costs based on a participant's consumed and sent out energy over relevant intervals, irrespective of the participant category in which it is registered.
AGL has reservations about the application of network charges to storage assets and has encouraged the AEMC to reconsider their findings.