Excerpt from energy-storage.news
A boost for investment in battery energy storage in much of Australia is strongly expected to come from 1 October onwards, when new National Electricity Market (NEM) rules come into effect.
The change primarily concerns the introduction of Five-Minute Settlement (5MS) of wholesale electricity market prices in the NEM, replacing the 30-minute wholesale electricity spot market settlement period rule which has been in place since 1998.
The Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) had determined in 2017 that the rule change was coming. It had been scheduled for introduction in mid-2020, but the COVID-19 pandemic caused AEMO to delay it until this October.
In a statement at the beginning of this month, the Operator and then later the regulatory Australian Energy Market Commission (AEMC) confirmed that 5MS was on-track to be introduced as rescheduled.
AEMC also announced last week that it has drafted rules that will govern payment and incentive mechanisms for frequency response to keep the electricity grid stable and functioning properly.
5MS is set to be “massive” for battery storage, Energy-Storage.news heard earlier this year in an interview with Lillian Patterson, policy and regulations expert at Australian national trade group, the Clean Energy Council.