Education Project for Industry on Flexibility Services
As a continuation on from the SEANZ engagement with the FlexForum, where the practical, scalable and least-regret steps needed to enable households, businesses and communities to make choices which maximise the value of DER and flexibility are in play. SEANZ highlighted a series of barriers to households, businesses, communities and the power system making the best use of flexible resources.
There is a need to understand the knowledge gaps that exist for customer-facing DER providers like solar installers and integrators. To obtain this knowledge a survey was put together in which DER providers were interviewed to understand these gaps regarding flexibility, as well as to understand what these providers would like to know, to enable them to provide useful information and advice to DER customers. In enabling a greater understanding of flexibility, DER providers will be able to make suggestions to their customers that would lead to a greater value maximisation of DER assets (e.g. EV, PV, battery), which is critical in enabling the efficient electrification of Aotearoa New Zealand.
Ara Ake was commissioned to undertake work on behalf of the FlexForum and SEANZ to determine the gaps that exist for customer-facing DER providers – particularly related to flexibility. As a start Ara Ake formed up a scope, which outlined the intention of the survey which initially included questions to cover topics such as background knowledge on flexibility, regulation relevant to the electricity sector, different value streams for DER, software functionality and an understanding of the market environment. This was dwindled down to a survey that had its focus around known capability of DER products and services, the market environment and how knowledge gaps can be addressed. Technicalities around software functionality, as well as the regulatory environment were discussed with the first lot of survey respondents.
SEANZ members were identified and interviewed with the first draft report being completed in mid-2023. A second round of SEANZ members have been selected to be interviewed to seek a wider and focused outcome on the gaps so SEANZ, and Ara Ake are working on this second part of the project currently.
It is planned that this will enable us to act upon this information to help the industry with a clear outcome of increasing and driving more PV, battery systems uptake in Aotearoa New Zealand.
For more information contact SEANZ.
