October 10, 2023
Mitch O'NeillNote: I’ve published an article with more details on the first 11 days of operation at Renew Economy.
At 1pm market time (2pm AEDT) on the 9th of October two new energy markets started in the NEM, the Very Fast Contingency Frequency Control Ancillary Services. These two services require assets to respond to a fall or rise in frequency within about a second or less by changing the output of their generator or load to attempt to arrest that fall or rise in frequency.
The two biggest new requirements for these new contingency FCAS markets compared to the current ones are faster response times and in some cases faster meters.
Participants can deliver very fast FCAS while also delivering fast, slow and delayed FCAS. This means if a participant is already providing contingency FCAS, and has fast enough meters and operational response times, then they’d likely want to participate in the very fast markets.
So who participated on day 1?
In total there were:
A lot of capacity was offered from these providers. While the market operator only procured 50MW of raise and 17MW of lower on average, which they’ll increase over time as part of their Go-live Plan, the average capacity being made available by participants was 567MW for raise and 448MW for lower. A healthy amount of interest!
While large amounts of very fast FCAS raise capacity was offered by the big batteries, it was primarily the C&I aggregators who were the majority of the enabled capacity.
A closer look at the average raise enabled capacity:
A closer look at the average lower enabled capacity:
It’s a great achievement by these DER providers to be registered into the very fast service from day 1, and interesting to see them undercutting big batteries in the raise market.
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