The UK Solar Trade Association (STA) has released the 'Best Industry Practice Manual – Management of Network Constraints on Solar PV Generation (Version 1.0)'. It is the UK's first such guideline for management and mitigation of network outages for Distribution Network Operators (DNOs) for solar farms connected to their networks.
Solar power plants lose on output from panels as a result of both planned and unplanned network outages. This leads to loss of revenue, something that STA says amounted to around 1% of total installed solar power capacity in the country between 2015 and 2017. In monetary terms, this was a loss of £10 million ($13.27 million) annually.
The document published by STA addresses these concerns while advising on legal and regulatory requirements for DNOs and relative impacts of constraints for solar generators. It also lists responsibilities and optimal processes for information-sharing between parties and notification of network outages, including a detailed glossary of terminology for physical network infrastructure.
"With nearly 13GW of solar capacity on the system and strong potential for growth in the next decade, it is important that solar generators are managed as efficiently as possible. This new manual will help DNOs and the industry to understand how best to do that and we hope all DNOs will want to adopt the recommendations in the manual as the industry standard as quickly as possible," said STA Chief Executive Chris Hewett.
The manual, which can be downloaded from STA's website, was authored by power systems engineering consultancy EA Technology.
STA will now be presenting the document to all British DNOs, Energy Networks Association and to other relevant stakeholders.