Global wind giant plans to plug battery storage into turbines at all new Australian projects, starting in NSW

A wind farm set for construction in the New South Wales Southern Tablelands is seeking to plug co-located battery systems into three-quarters of the project’s turbines, using a “DC-coupled” hybrid approach that has been piloted at an operational wind farm in Victoria.

Goldwind Australia late last year applied to the NSW department of planning to include co-located battery energy storage systems (BESS) at 53 turbine locations at its 75-turbine, 298 megawatt (MW) Coppabella wind farm, formerly known as the Yass Valley wind farm.

It is a significant development in the roll out of renewables in Australia. Nearly all new solar farm developments are now combining battery storage to create solar-battery hybrids, but the Coppabella project could be the first wind project to do this at scale.

And Goldwind plans to make these hybrid systems standard offering for the industry.

“We’re now including this in all of our development projects, and we’re providing the details on the solution to customers, so that they can plan that into their projects,” Goldwind Australia director John Titchen told the Tasmania Energy Development Conference last week.

“So, this will be available on all of our … 7-8 MW machines. But as you can see, we can apply it to existing machines, and so projects that using smaller machines can also have this.

“We are planning it on a New South Wales project, which has got 4.2 megawatt machines, and very large battery, considering the size of the project. So it’s a 290 megawatt project, 220 megawatts of battery, four hours of storage.”

In documents submitted to the planning department, Goldwind says the project’s design – originally proposed at 79 turbines and then trimmed to 75 and approved for that number in 2017/2018 – was reviewed in 2024/25 in light of updated advice on the integration of renewables on the NEM.

“The review identified that the addition of co-located BESS at turbine locations would be a major benefit, both to the project and, for its contribution to the National Electricity Market (NEM),” the documents say.

“The BESS units represent associated infrastructure for each of the turbines and improve the supply regime timing options for the wind farm. The maximum output from any turbine will remain generally the same but the power supplied can be better aligned with market demands.”

The resulting modification to the Coppabella project, lodged in December 2025, proposes to install 5 MW, four-hour BESS units at 53 turbine locations, across the wind farm, which is being developed around 30 km west of Yass, near the towns of Bookham and Binalong.

Each BESS unit would comprise up to six 40-foot, open-framed containers, pre-fitted with BESS and pre-wired prior to site delivery, which would be placed within the area either previously cleared for the turbine blade laydown and/or on part of the turbine hardstand.

According to the plans, each single BESS container comprises up to four Goldblock battery cabinets and one DC-DC converter. Each battery cabinet would have a nominal capacity of around 836 kW, maximum battery discharging power of roughly 5 MW, and a stored energy capacity of just under 20 megawatt-hours (MWh).

Goldwind says each battery would be connected into the power system of its co-located 4.2 MW wind turbine generator (WTG). “As 53 BESS units are to be placed at 53 turbine locations the combined size of the [Coppabella wind farm] distributed BESS is 223 MW,” the documents say.

As Renew Economy has reported, Goldwind has successfully piloted this hybrid wind and battery approach on the National Electricity Market by retrofitting one of the roughly 3 MW turbines at its 312 MW Moorabool wind farm in central western Victoria with a 2 MW/4.8 MWh GoldBlock BESS.

Titchen says the co-located batteries – which connect to the turbines via short underground cables – provide a range of benefits beyond energy storage and shifting (arbitrage), including reduced cost of construction, increased revenue potential, reduced project footprint, and better integration with, and support of, the grid.

“These batteries provide the market arbitrage opportunity, they also provide the ability for ancillary services and income, but the core of this technology is the lower infrastructure costs,” he told the conference in Devonport on Thursday.

“What we’re doing is connecting batteries directly into the DC bus, so that’s effectively in the middle of the turbine. So you put a battery on the hard-stand next to the turbine and connect it into the turbine, share a whole lot of the infrastructure.

“We’re sharing the converter, we’re sharing the civil infrastructure, we’re sharing the reticulation system, the transformation, the grid connection; so it’s a lower-cost way of deploying batteries.

“We all know that batteries are getting more and more competitive; the cost curve is going down. This takes another step, and so the result of that is we find that longer duration is competitive in this sort of configuration.

“One other attribute of it is that if you’ve got wind production and the market price is low, then you can store directly in the battery without having to go out into the transmission system to a battery somewhere else. So… that co-location means that there’s minimal loss between the generation and the storage.”

Co-locating battery storage with wind turbines also cuts time and money spent on “complex and difficult” grid connection processes, Titchen says – one of the major speed-humps currently hampering wind project development in Australia.

“This has one grid model [and] needs to do one set of grid studies – so that’s a major advantage in the practicalities of developing a project,” he told the conference.

“In terms of the grid characteristics – we measure grid characteristics in terms of the weakness of the grid – … this technology enables us to connect to what we call very low short-circuit ratios, a very weak grid, and we’ve been testing that it’s very good for the voltage and inertial support.

“Also, there is the potential that this could be the generator that starts a grid in the case of a blackout, because it’s a battery-backed inverter, it could [have] a black-start capability, and we’ve seen that operating elsewhere.”

For the Coppabella wind farm, Goldwind Australia is still awaiting a decision from the NSW government on its application to add the co-located batteries into the project’s design.

According to the planning documents, no change to the wind turbines is required, other than internal electrical and communications connections, and the approved turbine layout of up to 75 wind turbines is retained with the same dimensions as were previously approved (see Fig 1-2, above).

But it may be that the decision lands in the lap of the state’s planning arbitrator, the Independent Planning Commission (IPC), given it has attracted 83 objections – even though 65 per cent of those came from community members or organisations living/based more than 100 km away, including interstate.

For his part, Titchen notes that while the addition of co-located battery systems has “some additional requirements” for planners, largely around concerns about fire risk, there is not much else that stacks up against them.

“They’re not noisy, they’re not visually impacting, it’s pretty benign.” 

See also: “Just as common as solar-hybrids:” Most developers now including batteries in plans for wind

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