Intelligent Control
Prices in the Australian electricity markets can fluctuate wildly throughout the day, and are often negative.
Plants can be charged (up to one thousand dollars per MWh) for the privilege of supplying energy to the grid. Ancillary service recovery costs can be similarly burdensome.
Using Sundial, plants can automatically cease generation when conditions are unfavourable, and save their bottom line.
FCAS Recovery
FCAS stands for Frequency Control Ancillary Services. When necessary, AEMO responds to AC frequency issues on the grid. In order to restore the grid to a nominal 50Hz, AEMO will call upon reserve capacity to start generating. The cost of this reserve generation can be significant, and is passed on to generators who were supplying energy during the event.
LGC Prices
Renewable plants can create and sell Large Generation Certificates for each MWh of energy they supply to the grid. The price of these certificates will offset any negative market conditions. Sundial uses a reliable data feed to get the latest LGC prices, and factors these into its calculations.
Market Prices
Sundial has a direct market price feed from AEMO. Sundial maintains real-time awareness of dispatch prices, and is able to predict upcoming price fluctuations.
On July 3rd 2021...
Throughout the morning, large amounts of cloud cover disrupted solar generation across south-eastern Queensland.
In addition, the flow of energy between Queensland and New South Wales was constrained. AEMO called upon FCAS reserve generation capacity.
The energy prices were good that day, but the FCAS recovery costs were horrendous. These costs were borne by plants throughout Queensland... except the plants using Sundial.
Sundial has a deep understanding of market conditions. By keeping their plants shut down throughout the day, Sundial saved owners thousands of dollars per MW of capacity.
Sundial kept the plant off, saving thousands per MW
Configurable Behaviour
Sundial is capable of understanding and catering to the specific needs of your plant. For example:
- Support ramp rates Some energy authorities require plants to ramp up and down. Sundial understands our clients’ ramp rate requirements, and starts the shut-down process before negative market prices even arrive.
- Tolerate communication outages Australian renewable energy plants are often in remote locations, with unreliable Internet connections. With this in mind, Sundial provides control signals for present and future dispatch intervals. Even if a plant’s Internet connection drops out, the on-site systems will be capable of responding to problems in the market.
- Hysteresis During certain days and times, overall profitability for power generation can hover around zero. Instead of repeatedly turning a plant on and off in response to slightly positive or negative profitability, Sundial plant operators can configure a hysteresis band. Within this price band, Sundial will refrain from changing the plant’s state.
Key Metric Visibility
Sundial includes a graphical control panel that’s accessible anywhere on the web.
Using the Sundial control panel, plant operators can observe all aspects of Sundial’s behaviour including a wide range of metrics gathered from their plant such as:
- Power generation
- Current Price
- Temperature
- Voltages
Contact Form
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