There are three main areas that a neighbourhood battery may impact the distribution network: solar hosting capacity, local energy management, and voltage impacts.
In all assessments of network impacts, it is important to keep in mind, and use as a base case of comparison, alternate ways in which these network impacts could have been resolved. For example, how much better is the neighbourhood battery increasing hosting capacity compared to how it could have been increased from upgrading the distribution transformer?
In all areas, high quality data for Australian household electricity demand and solar generation (5-min resolution) can be obtained from the Nextgen trial, based in the Australian Capital Territory (ACT), which began in 2016 and ended January 2023 (with the installation of 5,000 BTM batteries in Canberra homes or businesses).