Another giant battery proposed for Upper Hunter, 11km up road from Liddell

A new company is pitching a 400 megawatt (MW) / 800 megawatt hour (MWh) battery in the Upper Hunter Shire Council town of Aberdeen, just 11 minutes drive north of AGL’s massive storage project. 

Maziewood has started a development application for the battery, sited across a road from a Transgrid substation, which has an estimated cost of about $600 million. 

Managing director Daniel Walsh says they’ll offer frequency control and grid stability services, but wouldn’t comment on the kind of return possible given the volatility of the National Electricity Market (NEM) over the last two years. 

“We’re long on storage, and we see there’s quite a big requirement for long and short-to-medium duration storage,” he says. 

“We still think it’s a strong area of the network [despite similar projects proposed nearby], and a significant requirement for energy storage projects, especially with the large amount of firm power coming offline.”

Walsh says the company is looking at a number of small projects and in generation, but the Aberdeen battery is the largest on their books.

Maizewood’s scoping report for the Aberdeen battery shows it received preliminary technical advice from TransGrid in November last year around a connection to either a transmission line or directly into the substation, 6km away.

The 25-year project will cover a nine hectare site and take up to two years, the report says. 

The Upper Hunter location is a popular one for battery storage projects. 

AGL’s potential 500MW and four hour (2GWh) battery at the site of the shuttered Liddell coal fired generator, 11km away, was approved in 2022 and is expected to reach financial investment decision later this year, at least for a first stage.

Firm Power hopes to get its Muswellbrook BESS, a 150MW/300MWh installation, running by next year, and also in the area is the Esco Pacific 135MW battery (no storage duration specified) to be built next to its proposed 135MW Muswellbrook solar farm.

But this area isn’t quite as congested as Tamworth, two hours up the road from Aberdeen, where at the start of the 2023 eight major projects were jostling for position. 

Among the competitors are Equis Energy, which has chosen a site 800m away from the Tamworth substation for its 300MW/1200MWh Calala battery, and Maoneng which had already secured the paddock right next door to the substation for its 200MW/400MWh Tamworth Big Battery.

But getting through the NSW planning process is no easy feat, following recent criticism by developers complaining of lengthy delays that threatened to create a shortfall of capacity, as the state seeks to accelerate the green energy transition that will replace the state’s ageing coal fired power station.

See RenewEconomy’s Big Battery Storage Map of Australia