Victoria, Australia may have inadvertently picked the DER control protocol for the world!

5 June

The Australian state of Victoria’s ‘Emergency Backstop Program’ forced all inverter manufacturers to implement the CSIP-AUS protocol (120+ vendors, 2k+ models), in effect creating a de facto global standard.

The Problem: too much of a good thing

Australia has a problem like few others in the world: it sometimes generates too much (!!) electricity from its abundant residential rooftop solar panels. With the highest uptake of household solar in the world, one in three Australian households are currently powered by photovoltaic (PV) solar panels [1]. And an uptake of one in two households is anticipated by the end of this year.

Between government subsidies, streamlined installation programs, and plentiful sunlight, approximately 15% [2] of eastern Australia’s total electricity in 2024 was generated from rooftop solar. While this is great in general, on sunny (read: lots of solar energy) but cool days where people don’t need air conditioning, it can create an imbalance in the electric network. The laws of physics dictate the extra power has to go somewhere.

If electric grid operators can’t turn off enough generation or store that power (e.g. into batteries), then they have to start disconnecting parts of the grid. This avoids damaging equipment, starting fires, or accidentally tripping protection systems, which all have the potential to cause widespread blackouts.

Enter: the Emergency Backstop (EBS) Program

Fundamentally, Australian electric grid operators needed a way to control how much electricity residential solar panels exported to the grid. They have control protocols to manage other electric generators (e.g. hydro, coal, gas). And as residential solar became a significant source of total electricity, it also needed to be similarly managed.

A typical control protocol provides information to the grid operator's computer control systems about how much electricity is available. This protocol provides levers for the operator to increase, reduce, or completely turn off that power. As a result, Australia needed its consumer solar inverters to support a similar control protocol that would provide the grid operators with the necessary data and control mechanisms. However, because individual home owners want to maximize the value of their solar investment, they never want to ‘turn off’ their solar. As a result, the grid operators created a compromise to use this control protocol only in cases of emergency, to protect the larger electrical grid. Hence, the Emergency Backtop Program (EBS) was created [3].

While many states in eastern Australia are pursuing their own EBS programs, the state of Victoria was the first to enact and deploy its EBS program [3]. The program built on the success of South Australia’s Flexible Exports program, which was also based on CSIP-AUS.

The first phase of Victoria’s EBS rolled out in October 2023. It required large sites (over 200kW in size) be installed with ‘EBS compatible’ inverters. The second phase, launched in October 2024, expanded this requirement to include small and medium sites (under 200kW). The result is that all inverters deployed in Victoria must now be EBS compatible.

EBS compatibility required CSIP-AUS

To simplify purchasing for residential owners, a list of qualified inverter vendors was produced [5]. But under the covers, the state of Victoria standardised on the Common Smart Inverter Profile (CSIP) with some additional extensions from extensive deployments in Australia (‘AUS’) called ‘CSIP-AUS’. CSIP-AUS is a variant of the original CSIP protocol from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ IEEE 2030.5 protocol.

CSIP was originally created in 2013 by the California Public Utility Commission as part of the Smart Inverter Working Group (SIWG) and ratified into the IEEE 2030.5 specification later that year. While it nominally had broad support, the protocol did not receive substantial deployment or corresponding operational experience. Outside of limited trials, to date few Californian utilities run CSIP utility servers to manage CSIP-compatible devices.

However, back in Australia, early solar programs in South Australia adopted the Californian CSIP and found that it needed some extensions (e.g., site aggregation and dynamic operating envelopes) to fully meet their needs. Thus, with the additional ‘AUS’ extensions, CSIP-AUS has now become the de facto standard in Australia. It meets all the technical requirements and has been deployed across Australia in various forms for more than five years of operational experience at scale. In other words, CSIP-AUS is well tested and known to be stable and effective.

Global inverter vendor reaction and ultimate support

Globally, the business of building DC to AC electrical inverters is price competitive with low margins. As a result, asking all of the inverter vendors to implement a standardised software control protocol, even one that was well-known, open, and tested like IEEE 2030.5s CSIP-AUS is going to get pushback. However, given the solar incentives in Australia and the high rate of residential sales, global Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) ultimately chose to support the new protocol en masse. SwitchDin’s experience is that the financial models of these OEMs do not support them paying for the inevitable ongoing software support costs for multiple control protocols.

To date, 2047 different inverter models across 120 vendors have been added to the official [5] Clean Energy Council (CEC) approved list. This list includes many brand name inverters like SunGrow, Tesla, SMA, SolarEdge, Fronius, Enphase, etc.

Result: CSIP-AUS is now the global de facto standard

CSIP-AUS is in no way a perfect protocol and remains a work in progress. It will of course continue to evolve based on operational experience and emerging use-cases like household batteries. That said, SwitchDin’s significant deployment experience of 5000+ active sites under management, is that it currently solves the control protocol challenges for rooftop solar in Australia. And could do so for the rest of the world.

Given the non-trivial cost of implementing a new or different protocol across an equivalently broad array of inverter manufacturers, it’s hard to see that there is another business case that makes as much sense. In other words, whether or not it was the intention, CSIP-AUS is the protocol that’s already implemented on the majority of the world’s inverters and as such, has become the de facto standard.

Going Forward

As the rest of the world catches up to the penetration rates of behind-the-meter Distributed Energy Resources (DER), the importance of control protocols like CSIP-AUS will only increase. As the IEEE evolves the larger CSIP protocol, and incorporates the ‘AUS’ extensions back into the mainstream, hopefully inverter vendors will be willing to make minor tweaks to their implementations.

Australia’s innovative SwitchDin is helping lead the standards CSIP group in upstreaming the ‘AUS’ extensions back into the main protocol as well as standardising support for Flexible Connections. And others are working on additional capabilities like support for battery inverters. Perhaps in the future, an open source implementation will become the common framework to ease integration for future OEMs and devices. However, in the meantime it’s hard to see another protocol displacing the popularity and uptake of CSIP-AUS.

Footnotes:

[1] https://www.energy.gov.au/news/australia-hits-rooftop-solar-milestone
[2] https://aemo.com.au/-/media/files/major-publications/qed/2025/qed-q1-2025.pdf ; ‘Distributed PV’ - Table 4

[3] https://aemo.com.au/learn/energy-explained/fact-sheets/rooftop-solar-management-fact-sheet

[4]https://www.energy.vic.gov.au/households/victorias-emergency-backstop-mechanism-for-solar

[5] CEC Approved Inverters List: https://cleanenergycouncil.org.au/industry-programs/products-program/inverters https://cer.gov.au/document/cec-approved-inverters

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