When will we start seeing BDUs in dispatch?

This article is posted primarily to augment some direct communications with a significant number of our clients.  By posting here, we expect it will also be of interest to some others in our broader readership.

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On Monday 3rd June we wrote about how ‘(The main part of) IESS goes live today – Monday 3rd June 2024’.  With the changes made on that day as part of the broader IESS process process, it facilitated the possible emergence of both:

1)  bi-directional units (i.e. BDUs), and

2)  proper hybrids (as distinct from co-located units, as Ellise refers to them),

… but we’ve not yet seen any emerge in the ~2 weeks since.

We’ve not even (yet) seen the migration of the old-style scheduled battery units (i.e. with a DUID-G1 supply-side unit and a DUID-L1 demand-side unit) …

(Our understanding of) the Migration path for existing batteries

… but that’s not a surprise!  On 8^th May 2024, the AEMO advised us:

‘While registrations for new BDUs can technically begin from the IESS Rule effective date, i.e., 3 June 2024, the first BDU registration is not expected until the end of June 2024 at the earliest. This means that while the changes to the production environment to cater for registrations will be in the system, the first BDU will not be seen in the environment until the end of June. Existing BESS that must cutover from the current two-DUID model to the single BDU DUID model will begin from mid-July (26 batteries transitioning through March 2025), from which time they will also start to appear in production’

In an information session in the week just passed for Market Participants and other Stakeholders, the AEMO presented this diagram illustrating the intended cut-over process (and our recollection is that they mentioned Wednesday 3rd  July as the earliest possible cut-over date now):

Notwithstanding that this is ‘subject to change by AEMO, potentially without notice’ (and also that we might have misinterpreted something in here), I thought it would be worth sharing with our readers here to assist in the general level of awareness of what’s going on.

What we’re expecting to see …

Unless I have mis-counted, there are currently 26 batteries registered as scheduled units in the AEMO dispatch systems.

1)  We don’t know the exact dates on which each of these will transition …though our understanding is that this is quite likely to be staggered over many weeks from sometime in July.

2)  However we do envisage that the final form of each of the batteries will be DUIDs of the following form:

Our understanding is that any new battery not on the list above must be registered from day 1 as a BDU.