Virtual Power Plant – Performance 30/05/22 – 05/06/22
Iconic Solar has an example Solar and Battery system established to help people understand the financial benefits of solar and perks of connecting a battery to your home. This is the weekly summary of a residential Virtual Power Plant (VPP) in Winter, and a good overview to see battery performance in cold weather while sunny.
The house is a single phase property. The electrical meter board has 2 circuits for Lights, 3 circuits for Power, an circuit for the Oven, and an Air-Conditioning circuit. The property has a gas service.
In the event of a blackout, the system is able to stay powered (independent of the grid) and keep the house running. If a blackout occurs during the day, the system can use the power of solar PLUS the energy stored in the battery to provide power. Further, if the blackout occurs at night, the system will use the battery energy to power the home.
All circuits of the home are backed up, except the Air Conditioner.
The solar system is part of a Virtual Power Plant. A VPP is a private agreement between system owner and energy retailer. The system owner may be eligible for higher-than-average solar feed-in-tariffs. Moreover, the system owner can participate in ‘events’ where batteries discharge their energy to the grid to support a network outage, or sell the stored power at a high wholesale rate.
Often, Winter Virtual Power Plant owners receive credits as their electricity “bills” instead of costs. As a result, 6.6kW solar and battery system usually provides enough credit to cover the Gas bill for the property and provides a small amount of credit. Any additional credits are genuine cash to a bank account via direct debit. The battery performance in cold weather hasn’t significantly affected the typical profits, but the boost on Saturday has been helpful.
VPP Winter Performance
Here is the battery performance for the colder Winter week, for the week starting 30/05/22:
The Net Meter from the electricity retailer is connected and we are waiting for the retailer to activate the VPP arrangement. Additionally, self-consumption is activated in the solar monitoring app. The Daily Profit figures are extracts from the monitoring interface. A future update will come from the retailers monitoring data and give more accurate figures.
The investment into solar with batteries is shaping up to be a very nice income stream.
VPP System Details
Solar Panels: 17x 390W JA Solar Panels (6.63kW of solar facing North-East 35°)
Inverter: 1x AlphaESS Smile-5 INV (5kW inverter)
Battery: 1x AlphaESS Smile-Batt-10.1 (10.1kWh battery storage)
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