The Victorian Distributed Network Provider Jemena has decreased two new community batteries in Melbourne, which help to support further solar installations in the suburbs in which they were installed.
In around 6,800 km of Poland and wires, Jemena’s Electricity Network serves more than 370,000 customers and companies in a 950 square kilometer area in the northwest of the Melbourne area. Many Jemena customers already have solar modules on the roof and many more will install PV systems in the not too distant future.
“Over the next ten years, the number of our electricity customers with roof solar will double from 15 percent to around 32 percent,” said Jemena’s managing director of Networks Shaun Reardon. “The installation of community batteries in areas with a high absorption of solar on the roof is one of the possibilities to prepare our network for the future.”
Among the areas that are up to date on a high recording (for Victoria) are Bellfield and Coburg, where Jemena’s first two community batteries were installed. Each battery has around 400 kWh of storage capacity. The soaking of locally generated excess solar power during the day and the detachment of the stored energy in the evening when the network requirement is high and takes pressure from the network.
“There are around 130 houses and companies that access the locally generated renewable energies that are stored in the Bellfield Community battery’s battery, as well as around 245 houses and companies that access the energy stored in the Coburg battery,” said Rearon.
The installations were supported by the Federal Government’s 200 million dollar batteries for the federal government’s budget, in which a total of 400 energy storage systems are installed across the country. And there is more for Jemena as part of this program; in Alphadington and Flemington.
Support more solar energy
The new community batteries are part of Jemena’s wider efforts to support more installations of the solar power system in its service area. According to the company, the amount of solar energy that can be exported into the network back into its network has grown by more than 70 percent compared to the level of 2020.
“This was achieved by an optimization program that aims to ensure that the network is equipped for additional solar energy without customer care customers rely on power supply every day,” said Reardon. “We will continue to invest in new technologies such as community batteries in order to maintain the stability of the networks with increasing solar recording.”
In the Jemena network, single-phase connections are subject to a 10 kW solar inverter limit, but with an export limit of 5 kW. For three -phase connections there is a change of 30 kW and an export limit of 15 kW. Battery inverter counts towards the inverter capacity limits. Jemena wants to implement flexible solar exports from 2026, whereby the export limits for participating customers should be increased.
Community batteries as a canvas
As with some other community batteries installed in Australia, these two installations served as a canvas for artists. The Bellfield battery shown above contains works of art by Felicity Gordon, while that contains works of art by Marco Pennacchia in Coburg (below).
According to Jemena, residents and community groups were involved in the appearance and position of the batteries.
In my neck of the forest, I noticed that the infrastructure with authorized works of art tends to tend to attract Tagger, whose scribbling is repulsive. It is the unauthorized “empty” canvases that pull these malfirms into a fool like flies.
Apart from potential anti-Toy-Tagger attributes, most (authorized) community battery art that I saw looks great. While the murals themselves do not reduce the emissions by a single gram or a lower electricity bill by a cent; It is certainly much more interesting to look at than simple cupboards or those covered with childish cancer.
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