French energy giant Engie and Macquarie’s Green Investment Group are to jointly fund the construction of a 150MW/150MWh big battery at the site of the now closed Hazelwood brown coal generator.
The announcement, which comes four years after Engie closed what was Australia’s dirtiest power station, continues the trend of using the sites of closed or ageing coal and gas plants to build battery storage to support the switch to 100 per cent renewables.
Construction has already begun on the Hazelwood Battery, which will be built and maintained over a 20-year period by US-based Fluence, using – for the first time in Australia – its sixth-generation Gridstack product and its AI-enabled bidding system.
The battery should be operating by the end of 2022. It will be operated by Engie and will participate in frequency control ancillary service markets, trade in financial products known as Caps, and will also help time shift the output of wind and solar, or as much as it can with a one hour storage envelope.
But the Hazelwood Battery is also likely to get considerably bigger over time, both in terms of storage and size, as the site has 1,600MW of dormant transmission capacity.
“There will be more,” Augustin Honorat, the head of Engie in Australia and New Zealand, told RenewEconomy in an interview on Wednesday.
“We think there will be more in the future both in terms of capacity, but also in depth of storage. But the studies we have done, show that for the moment probably the one hour storage is the best for the market.”
Honorat said the length of storage could be expanded to two or four hours, as the market for “arbitrage” and time shifting the output of wind and solar grows, and there is room for up to 1,600MW of capacity.
The Hazelwood battery is just one of a number of big battery projects in the region, many of them at the site of ageing or closed coal generators.
EnergyAustralia is proposing a battery of 350MW and up to four hours storage (1,400MWh) near Yallourn, while AGL is planning a 200MW battery with up to four hours storage at the site of Loy Yang A.
There are already three big batteries operating in Victoria – at Gannawarra, Ballarat and Bulgana – and Neoen is putting the finishing touches to its 300MW/450MWh Victoria Big Battery which is due to be officially opened imminently.
There are another half dozen big battery proposals at various stages of development in the region, including from the likes of Syncline and Maoneng. See RenewEconomy’s Big Battery Storage Map of Australia for more details.
Honorat says Engie is also looking to develop a pipeline of between 2GW and 3GW of large scale wind and solar farms, but not at the Hazelwood site. The most advanced of these projects is the Hills of Gold wind farm in NSW.
He told RenewEconomy that Engie is also looking at more big battery projects, both at standalone sites and also co-located with wind and solar farms.
Engie is also developing two renewable hydrogen projects in Australia, one in Victoria and another in Western Australia with the fertiliser group Yara.
Engie will hold a 70 per cent share in the Hazelwood battery and Macquarie’s GIG will hold 30 per cent.
“Macquarie has expertise in energy markets and batteries, and they have complimentary skills,” Honorat said. “It’s a good way to develop something that is still a bit of an emerging technology.”
The media release claimed the Hazelwood battery would be Australia’s largest privately-funded and owned utility-scale battery. That is debatable, given that AGL is building the 250MW/250MWh Torrens Island battery in South Australia.
The ticket price for the Hazelwood battery was not revealed, but prices are below $1 million a megawatt, so it is south of $150 million.
“GIG is committed to supporting the green energy transition and storage is critical in enabling ever-expanding renewables capacity and use, to ensure that electricity networks are resilient, reliable and flexible,” Greg Callman, the global head of energy technology at GIG said in a statement.
Aaron McCann, the head of Fluence in Australia said energy storage is now moving to its next phase of privately-financed large-scale batteries for grid flexibility, which he said was the key to an orderly energy transition for the NEM.
“The Hazelwood Battery will be the product of Fluence’s latest- generation technology, supported by our rapidly growing team in Victoria and the most widely adopted automated trading platform available in Australia today.”
Lies, myths and greenwashing. Good independent journalism is time-consuming and costly. But small independent media sites like RenewEconomy have been excluded from the tens of millions of dollars being handed out to big media companies from the social media giants. To enable us to continue to hold government and business to account, to cut through the lies and the misinformation about the renewable transition, and to help expand our work, you can make a voluntary donation here to help ensure we can continue to offer the service free of charge and to as wide an audience as possible. Thank you for your support.
