Australia to replace coal plant with record-busting 850MWbattery

Newcomer Akaysha Energy won backing from investment giant BlackRock and now will build a gargantuan battery in New South Wales.

20 October 2022

Australia will build the world’s biggest contracted battery to help position the country to shut down its biggest coal plant. Newcomer energy storage developer Akaysha Energy won the contract this week to build it.

The startup will deliver an 850-megawatt/1,680-megawatt-hour behemoth called the Waratah Super Battery in New South Wales. The battery will sit on the former location of the Munmorah coal plant, and it will deliver capacity to the grid to support the 2025 closure of Eraring, Australia’s largest coal plant.

Akaysha’s project would far exceed the current record for the largest grid battery in the world, carrying battery-plant capacity into the realm of large thermal generators.

Today, Recurrent Energy’s recently activated Crimson Storage facility in Blythe, California claims the title of single-largest battery storage project at 350 megawatts/1,400 megawatt-hours. Vistra’s Moss Landing facility in Northern California has 400 megawatts/1,600 megawatt-hours (when fully operational and not shut down by fires), but that capacity total was achieved over two phases of development.

Of course, Akaysha needs to finish the project before it will win the title. Other companies could build something bigger before Waratah reaches completion. But the fact that Waratah has an official contract in hand enhances its odds of actually happening.

This also represents perhaps the highest-profile attempt worldwide to shut down coal plants and build renewables-powered batteries in their place. That’s a critical proof point for the global effort to stop climate change by zeroing out carbon emissions from the power grid.

“We believe a successful shift to a more sustainable energy future is dependent on the use of large-scale battery storage,” Akaysha Managing Director Nick Carter said in an email. “In fact, utility-scale energy storage technologies are very helpful in mitigating the variability of renewable generation as well as deliver grid reliability and resilience to the power system networks across the world.”

Australia’s renewable electricity generation has more than doubled in the last decade thanks to rapid growth in solar and wind production, according to the government. In 2021, renewable generation hit a record 29 percent. But the country’s transmission grid has limited ability to take momentary surges in production in one area and distribute it to other population centers.

That’s where Waratah comes in. It can help absorb renewable power and discharge it when it’s more in demand, as the big batteries in California do. But that’s not Waratah’s primary objective. Instead, it will maintain grid reliability by instantly discharging its massive capacity if disruptions like lightning strikes or bushfires interrupt the flow of electricity.

Having that in place allows the transmission lines to move more electricity throughout the day, because if a given line trips off, the battery will be there to fill in the gap, Carter explained.

“This project is a great example of how existing transmission infrastructure can be more optimally used in the face of rapid renewable generation growth and the decline in synchronous thermal generation,” he added. “By unlocking the excess network capacity, both existing and new renewable generators will supply more reliable and stable energy to the families and businesses of [New South Wales].”

https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/energy-storage/australia-to-replace-coal-plant-with-record-busting-850mw-battery