Energy Renaissance names Hunter region for Australia’s first battery “gigafactory”

Image: Energy Renaissance

The New South Wales Hunter region has been named as the preferred location for what is likely to be Australia’s first gigawatt-scale lithium-ion battery manufacturing operation, right in the middle of the state’s coal and gas heartland.

Energy Renaissance said on Tuesday that it would start building the $28 million, solar powered Renaissance One battery plant within weeks in the semi-industrial suburb of Tomago, where it expects to begin producing Australian-made batteries by mid-2021, and which is also the site of the country’s aluminium smelters.

The company’s director, Mark Chilcote, said that the 4,000 square metre purpose-built facility would be built by local property developer ATB Morton and have an initial battery production capacity of 66MWh per annum, with plans to scale to 5.3GWh a year within 10 years.

Chilcote said that the company had landed on Tomago as the site for the factory due to its easy access to the Port of Newcastle, for the company’s future export plans, and its proximity to highly-skilled talent from CSIRO’s Energy Centre and graduates from the University of Newcastle.

The region also has a skilled energy industry workforce that will be looking to transition from the declining coal power sector and could be fairly easily “re-skilled,” Chilcote says, and transitioned to battery production.

“Over 1,700 direct jobs will be created during the construction and operational phase and another 6,500 indirect jobs will be generated for the benefit of the Hunter,” he said on Tuesday.
 More than 1200 full-time equivalent workers will be required to operate the plant once it is running at full scale.

“The Hunter region has all the right skills, natural resources, expertise and an abundance in solar energy for us to develop a successful battery manufacturing business in Australia,” Chilcote said.

As RenewEconomy has reported, Energy Renaissance has been working on plans to build a battery “gigafactory” in Australia since 2017, when it looked like a deal had been struck with the Northern Territory government to establish a starter factory in Darwin.

That deal ultimately fell through when an agreement couldn’t be reached that satisfied both parties. But the plans got back on track in July, when Energy Renaissance won a co-funded grant from the Advanced Manufacturing Growth Centre (AMGC), including matched financial contributions of $246,625 towards a project goal of making batteries for Australia and export to Asia.

The grant is also being used to design an automated production line using robotics and automated quality control systems to increase efficiencies across Energy Renaissance’s planned manufacturing facility.