Assessing the pros and cons of different operating envelopes implementations across Australia

As the adoption of residential distributed energy resources (DERs) increases, the opportunity of providing services by DER owners (via aggregators) also increases. However, the flows of electricity resulting from high volumes of services can cause technical issues in distribution networks, such as significant voltage rise/drop and/or thermal issues, particularly at low voltage (LV) levels. In this context, the use of operating envelopes (OEs) - time-varying limits at the customer connection point - is considered a potential solution to ensure network integrity whilst facilitating DER services. Nonetheless, OEs can be implemented in different ways since, in practice, the available infrastructure/data to distribution companies is what defines the most appropriate approach. To assist distribution companies, this paper assesses the pros and cons of different OE implementations tailored to different availability of infrastructure/data using as case study distribution companies across Australia.