Solar and battery-powered homes face calls to join virtual power plants | The Business | ABC NEWS

By ABC News (Australia)

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Australia's consumer watchdog has found most people getting a battery under the Commonwealth's $7.2 billion subsidy scheme are spurning virutal power plants, or VPPs. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) noted fewer than a quarter of customers installing batteries were signing up to such schemes. This was even though customers on a VPP were, on average, better off than those who were going it alone, the ACCC found. Yolande Strengers from the Monash Energy Institute said the question of whether Australia can properly coordinate household solar and batteries was not a trivial one. More than 4 million homes have solar panels, while almost half a million now have a battery as well. "If we can be treating that as a coordinated resource … discharging that power when the system really needs it, and if we can also be charging those batteries when we've got abundant solar in the system, we can improve the efficiency of the overall system," she said. Professor Streng

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