Australia's biggest battery switches on at former NSW coal site
United States-based asset giant BlackRock's Akaysha Energy on Tuesday said it had activated the first batch of capacity from its $1 billion Waratah Super Battery, a project spanning the size of eight Australian rules football fields at the shuttered Munmorah Power Station site on the NSW Central Coast.
The huge storage system would initially work like a 'shock absorber' to buffer the network from disruptions caused by events such as lightning strikes or bushfires, the company said.
Grid-scale batteries, with response times measured in split seconds, are seen as essential to Australia's green energy shift because of their ability to soak up surplus renewable output in daylight hours and use it to plug gaps in supply and stabilise the system at times of low wind and sunlight, or during unexpected outages.
While the Waratah Super Battery would initially be limited to 350 megawatts, it would reach 850 megawatts with 1680 megawatt hours of storage once it ramped to full capacity, which may be as early as the end of the year, Akaysha said on Tuesday.
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This would make it the most powerful utility-scale battery in the world, although other larger projects are under construction elsewhere in Australia and the world.
Australia is experiencing one of the world's fastest energy transitions as polluting coal-fired generators, which still supply most of the grid's electricity, reach the end of their lives, while wind and solar farms are expanding their role in the grid every year. Australians are also world leaders in per-person solar uptake, with more than 4 million homes – or one in three – now fitted with rooftop solar panels.
However, all those solar panels are making far too much electricity in the middle of the day when the sun is brightest, and hardly any when the grid needs it most – in the evenings when the sun sets and demand spikes as people arrive home and turn on lights and appliances.
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