The body that runs WA’s main electricity market wants the power to control household appliances from pool pumps to solar panels to help stabilise the grid from rocketing levels of renewable energy.

With one in four WA homes sporting solar panels and expectations battery take-up will soon soar, the Australian Energy Market Operator has warned these devices are a problem for grid security if not managed properly.

AEMO has proposed changes that would allow it, either through retailers such as Synergy or other third parties, to reach behind the meter and control the demand or output from those devices.

Households would not be forced to participate, but those that did would be paid for the service as if they were any other generator.

AEMO chief executive Audrey Zibelman gave an example of a sunny afternoon where demand for electricity was low but households with solar were pumping big amounts of power into the grid.

She said that under current arrangements, traditional generators such as coal-fired power plants had to scale back their production to ensure the grid did not get overloaded.

To make matters worse, Ms Zibelman said those same conventional generators had to rapidly increase their production late in the afternoon as output from solar panels fell with the setting sun.

She said a better alternative would be to bank excess solar energy in batteries when storage technology became widespread, and encourage households to use that power in the evening.

Giving evidence to a Lower House parliamentary inquiry looking into microgrids, Ms Zibelman said behind-the-meter, or distributed energy, technologies had the capacity to help lower power prices if co-ordinated well.

But she warned they could exacerbate existing problems such as peak demand periods, which cost a fortune to supply and required heavy use of gas-fired and diesel-fired generators if handled poorly.

“The availability of using distributed energy resources can be a solution if they become part of the orchestrated management of the power system, but they remain a problem if we cannot have access to them,” Ms Zibelman said.

“Then we have to manage a power system around them.”