Community Battery Research

Community Batteries are a shared neighbourhood battery solution where solar energy can be stored and retrieved. They offer an alternative to individual households purchasing their own battery storage system, saving them thousands of dollars and improving the state’s clean energy supply. Ausgrid has made a long-term commitment to renewable energy announcing it intends to progress plans to trial shared community batteries, in what could be a first for NSW.

We are preparing to undertake a trial of community batteries. Our goal is to offer our customers a storage solution that aligns fully with their expectations and allows them to take advantage of distributed energy resources and save on their electricity bills.

Customers subscribing to a community battery could enjoy benefits that don’t apply to customers who have installed a home battery system. These benefits could include:

• No upfront and installation costs
• No maintenance costs
• The potential to offer a range of different storage size options
• Flexibility to change storage sizes if photovoltaic (PV) system size increases, or consumption patterns change.

A community battery, like any valuable shared asset also has the potential for wider community benefits such as:

• Increased overall levels of storage in the system, reducing peak demand and placing downward pressure on wholesale prices
• Improved ability to address targeted network voltage and capacity issues, some of which result from increased solar PV penetration preventing the need for traditional investment solution
• Economies of scale, especially when coupled with diversity benefits of storing energy for multiple customers, which could reduce costs by over 50% compared to individual batteries
• Improvements to customer equity by potentially providing an equitable solution for customers who are tenants or who live in apartments who don’t have, or can’t access solar - enabling energy trading.

Register your interest

To inform the trial we are proposing to undertake customer surveys and research to better understand customers’ priorities and preferences in regard to using batteries. We are asking for community members to register an interest to be part of our research or to be kept updated on our findings into how to make these community batteries a reality.