Canberra virtual power plant wins top engineering award

The Australian Engineering Excellence Awards (AEEA), held in Sydney this week by Engineers Australia, have recognised a virtual power plant (VPP) from Reposit Power as one of the most innovative and outstanding engineering projects of 2018.

Reposit Power’s smart technology won the Sir William Hudson Award — the highest honour for a project-based nomination from Engineers Australia — in recognition of its work building a VPP in Canberra from customer-owned residential battery set-ups. Reposit builds VPPs by grouping individual home owners’ solar battery set-ups together to sell energy back to the grid when it’s needed most.

Claimed to be the first and largest of its kind in the world, the Canberra VPP project is designed to solve grid challenges that arise from wholesale market volatility, peaks in demand and generation, and poor power quality. Utility company Evoenergy partnered with Reposit Power on the VPP and more than 500 households are being rewarded for participating in the project.

“There has been a lot of discussion in the energy industry about building VPPs to solve grid problems, and it’s an honour to be recognised for building robust and reliable technology that is proven to help society,” said Reposit Power CEO Dean Spaccavento.

“We realised that creating a distributed electricity grid using residential solar battery set-ups would solve a lot of grid problems.

“Our smart technology acts as a gateway, by building VPPs to balance problems in the wholesale electricity market and on the distribution network.”

Leylann Hinch, Branch Manager Asset and Network Performance for Evoenergy, said the company has one of the most reliable electricity networks in the country and demand management activities like the joint VVP are an important tool to help maintain its quality of service in the ACT.

“Alongside Reposit we achieved successful trials discharging residential batteries through the Evoenergy distribution network,” said Hinch.

“The VVP is an important demand response source that can quickly reduce load on the network and when scaled up would prevent the need for load shedding in almost any scenario.

“We are really proud that Reposit won the Sir William Hudson Award for the ACT virtual power plant.”