Melbourne, 25 October 2022 – With unprecedented market events, skyrocketing electricity prices and businesses facing high electricity retail rates, now more than ever, businesses are looking to reduce their cost of energy. Savvy energy users are leveraging their existing assets to benefit from the current market volatility, by participating in the energy markets to capture value without exposure to higher costs.
Jeff Renaud, Head of Enel X Asia and Oceania, said, “Businesses are acutely aware of today’s energy market volatility, and many are feeling it in their retail rates. We help corporates use this volatility to their advantage with wholesale market participation which earns a new revenue stream while supporting Australia’s energy transition. The more flexibility a business has with when it consumes grid power, the more value that can be extracted. We’re seeing diverse sectors capitalise on this opportunity including grocery and cold storage operators, data centres, agriculture, and manufacturing. These organisations recognise the importance of harnessing their flexibility to support sustainability objectives by enabling more renewables and replacing coal generation.”
Today marks the one-year anniversary of the Wholesale Demand Response Mechanism’s (WDRM) commencement, which enabled large energy users to participate in the wholesale electricity market. Enel X, Australia’s largest Virtual Power Plant operator1, remains the first and only registered demand response service provider in the WDRM2. Enel X has seen a strong and growing appetite from businesses to participate in the wholesale market, signing up more than 100MW3 of wholesale demand response capacity to date.
The National Electricity Market has been affected by global and local factors including international gas and coal prices, extreme weather, interconnector outages, and planned and unplanned generator maintenance. In periods of tight electricity supply-demand balance, Enel X’s portfolio powers down or switches to backup generation to give instantaneous support to the grid. During these periods, participating businesses have earned upward of $8,000,000 for supporting the grid over the past year.
“With market volatility predicted to stay, large energy users need to think differently about their energy use. We anticipate there are hundreds more MWs that can be harnessed to support the energy transition. There are growing opportunities for revenue across the wholesale market and frequency control markets. Increasingly we are supporting businesses to explore their flexibility, and how to optimise it by pairing energy market participation with battery storage and solar PV, to maximise renewable energy use as well as earnings,” Renaud added.
References
- Bloomberg New Energy Finance, 2019
- RenewEconomy, “Huge Milestone” as AEMO switches on demand response in major market reform, 27 October 2021
- Registered capacity and capacity to be enabled
