Canberra virtual power plant wins engineering award

SA Power Networks, VPP

Canberra-based Reposit Power has received an award for its world-first virtual power plant (VPP).

The company was awarded the Sir William Hudson Award, the highest honour for a project, by Engineers Australia at a gala in Sydney last night.

The first and largest of its kind in the world, the Canberra VPP project solves grid challenges that arise from wholesale market volatility, peaks in demand and generation, and poor power quality.

More than 500 households are rewarded for participating in Canberra’s VPP.

Reposit Power CEO Dean Spaccavento said VPPs are the building blocks of our future electricity grid and it’s great to be recognised for developing world-class, ground-breaking and creative technology that benefits society.

“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,” Mr Spaccavento said.

“We realised creating a distributed electricity grid using residential solar battery setups 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.”

Reposit builds VPPs by grouping lots of individual homeowners solar battery setups together to sell energy back to the grid when it’s needed most.

Leylann Hinch, branch manager asset and network performance for Evoenergy, who partnered with Reposit Power on the Canberra VPP said demand management activities was a really important tool to help maintain the quality of service in the ACT.

‘We are really proud that Reposit won the Sir William Hudson Award for the VVP,” Mr Hinch said.

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

“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.”

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