Innovative energy company South Street Energy was recognised at the 2022 National iAwards, in the Sustainability and Environmental Solution for the Year category, for its pioneering Distributed Generation Network, which enables the owners of small scale solar, wind and biogas generation systems to sell renewable electricity to the wholesale electricity market.
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“South Street Energy has fundamentally changed the National Electricity Market by enabling the owners of small-scale renewable generation systems to directly participate in the wholesale market for the first time,” managing director Marco Bogaers said.
The solution ensures that renewable energy is sold into the market that is paying the highest price, increasing the value of renewable electricity.
Professor Bruce Mountain, Director of the Victoria Energy Policy Centre describes South Street Energy’s Distributed Generation Network as innovative, saying, “South Street Energy has applied its detailed knowledge of metering and settlements to come up with a very clever product. It is likely that this will considerably improve the attractiveness of distributed renewable generation, particularly for those installations with large grid export volumes that would otherwise receive low, or even no price for their exports to the grid.”
DSI Holdings is a Victorian engineering company that designs and tests automotive transmissions. Spokesperson Phillip Brown says, “We have a 100kW solar energy system that powers our ‘powertrain dynamometer’ transmission testing system. Before we signed up with South Street Energy, any excess energy we generated just went into the grid and we got very little for it. In the last year, South Street Energy has enabled us to earn $7,000—and all we had to do was install a meter.”
“This has given us an incentive to expand our solar generation system, and I can see it encouraging many more businesses to incorporate renewable energy generation because they can get a financial reward as well as reducing their emissions.
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South Street Energy were able to work with a food distribution company with a 300kW rooftop solar generation system. South Street were able to reduce the company’s electricity bills by $12,000, and increased the value of their renewable electricity from $19,200 to $30,400—or from 7.5 cents to 11.9 cents per kilowatt hour.
