A change to solar power regulations in South Australia, designed to prevent the electricity grid from overloading and causing potential power instability, has been delayed by more than six months.
The leading technology, dubbed "Flexible Exports", allows rooftop solar panel owners, through inverters, to send double the current number of kilowatts to the electricity grid — but it can also limit the amount of solar power that households can export, depending on overall demand for electricity.
South Australian solar panel owners can currently export 5 kilowatts of electricity to the grid but, under Flexible Exports, they could export 10kW.
A trial of the technology has been underway since 2021 and was set to become a requirement for new solar power connections from December 2022.
But that has been pushed back until July 2023 because of manufacturing delays.
The SA government said the setback was because of the fact that the majority of manufacturers would not have been able to achieve compliance by the December 1 deadline.
Adelaide-based panel installer NRG Solar's managing director Eddy May, whose customers have participated in the trial, said it had so far proven highly successful, and that updated inverter technology had largely resulted in households being able to export more power to the grid.
"They've been able to export double the amount of anyone else in Australia," Mr May said.
"Overall, financially, you'll be better off."
'We wanted to do something smarter'
On the flip side, Flexible Exports can limit the amount of solar electricity households can provide to the grid when generation levels are high, but consumer demand for energy is low.
When that happens, the network can become overloaded, affecting the stability of supply for customers, and potentially causing outages.
But Mr May said that, so far, instances of potential oversupply during the trial had been minimal.
"For the majority of the time, you'll be able to export more solar than what you would prior to this flexible export coming in and [only] for a small amount of time, it might be less," he said.
SA Power Networks' Paul Roberts said the trial had benefited the overwhelming majority of the 330 participants, with six losing solar export capacity only for a couple of hours.
"Out of the trial we can see that people are capable of exporting up to 10kW 98 per cent of the time," Mr Roberts said.
Mr May said updated technology was "a blueprint for the future".
"In 20 years' time, this is how it'll be for everyone in the world," he said.
Mr Roberts said that when interstate networks have not had sufficient capacity to manage solar, they had imposed export limits that were either zero or very low.
"We're faced with the same option and what we decided was we wanted to do something a lot smarter," he said.
According to SA Power Networks, four types of solar equipment are compatible with the updated technology already, meaning that customers could opt in earlier than the revised date.
