11 June 2020 — In Australia, all the grid scale batteries are of 2 hours or less duration. Figure 1 Source: ITK.How long do they last?
Batteries are great and they are certain to play a key role – especially in sun drenched Australia – to harness renewable resources to power our homes, businesses and cars. To do that, however, these assets will need to deliver large scale ‘time shifting’ of electrons from when they are generated to when they are needed.
Since the first ‘big battery’ opened in 2017, a key feature of almost all the grid-scale batteries installed in Australia has been a focus on size and a lesser concern with duration. For example, the original Hornsdale Power Reserve had a capacity of 100MW but could only store 129MWh. This means that at capacity of 100MW, the full battery only held enough electrons to discharge for 77 minute
