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Infigen says Lake Bonney battery now in full production

Lake Bonney Tesla battery
Et tu, Brutus?
Giles Parkinson
7

Infigen Energy says its Lake Bonney battery is now in full production, taking the number of grid-scale batteries in the state to three, and the total in the main grid to five.

The 20MW/52MWh battery – made with Tesla Powerpacks – is situated next to Infigen’s Lake Bonney wind farm, which total 275MW across three projects.

It will join the original Tesla big battery at the Hornsdale Power Reserve (100MW/129MWh) and the Dalrymple North battery (30MW/8MWh) next to the Wattle Point wind farm, adding valuable storage options to a grid now dominated by wind and solar, and likely to head to “net 100 per cent renewables” by 2030.

The Lake Bonney battery had been expected to enter full service earlier this year, but like most other new projects in Australia has experienced commissioning delays.

The $38 million battery will source revenues from the FCAS market and storage and arbitrage from the neighbouring wind farms,  where there is incentive to store some power in the battery if the prices are low, and sell later at higher prices.

It will also increase Infigen’s ability to provide “firm” electricity supply contracts to commercial and industrial customers. This graph below, courtesy of the Climate and Energy College and their OpenNem.org.au resource, shows the regular activity so far this month.

Infigen had a good month in November for wind generation, up 34 per cent over the same month in 2018 to 193,000 gigawatt hours. So far for the year to date, production is up 15 per cent, mostly due to the beginning of production at the Bodangora wind farm.

A fourth battery in South Australia, a 10MW/10MWh battery installation at  Lincoln Gap wind farm is set to joint the grid in the new year, while  Sanjeev Gupta’s Simec Zen Energy plans a bigger 135MW battery at Port Augusta and Tilt Renewables is also considering a 20MW/40MWh battery at its Snowtown wind park.

Alinta has also signed up to a huge solar and battery park., and the Tesla big battery is to get bigger, growing 50 per cent as part of a new plan to provide grid inertia, as well as the arbitrage, FCAS and system back-up services it currently provides.

 

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Comments

7 responses to “Infigen says Lake Bonney battery now in full production”

  1. BeanBoy Avatar
    BeanBoy

    May you rapidly transform the network so all can understand the benefits you bring.

  2. MG Avatar
    MG

    Woah, thats a ton of November GWh! I think you either meant MWh, or you meant to drop the three zeros!

  3. Andrew Roydhouse Avatar
    Andrew Roydhouse

    Is anyone else getting a bit suspicious of Gupta’s projects on the never never?

    It has been a long time since he first spruiked his RE plans but has anything actually even been tendered?

  4. trackdaze Avatar
    trackdaze

    So that’s +20Mw,+,+,+ for battery

    And intermitant coal is still -500Mw with the breakdowns?

  5. rob Avatar
    rob

    And once again S.A. puts the rest of this backwards Nation to shame. Go my Beautiful State…GO!

  6. JackD Avatar
    JackD

    SA has always been visionary and is very credit to the work of the current LIBERAL government and the previous Labor governments under Jay Weatherall and earlier, Mike Rann. Whilst the Greens might well crow about their success in driving the ACT to almost 100%, their task is so much smaller than what’s required for SA.

    My state, Victoria is moving ahead to try and recover ground after after years of previous incompetent Liberal State Government stalling tactics (its better to build more Gaols to house criminals than it is to actively support building of Wind and Solar Farms to combat reliance on the old Latrobe Valley Lignite burners).

    Queensland is trying to do something but it will go backwards if / when a LNP state government is elected. So much for CopperString MK2!!

    Even dear old NSW is looking like its has “seen the light” and is beginning to realise the types of gains they might expect from RE generation.

    All of this just makes our decrepit Federal Liberal and National Coalition Government look increasing stupid, obsolete and isolated. It really is an almost compelling case for far less and not more central government – so much for co-operative Federal State relations and interworking..

  7. Dimwit Lamb Avatar
    Dimwit Lamb

    I wish people would stop misusing the term ‘arbitrage’… ” The simultaneous purchase and sale of equivalent assets or of the same asset in multiple markets in order to exploit a temporary discrepancy in prices.” Storing energy when there is excess production and then selling it when there is higher demand is NOT arbitrage because it is sold at 2 different times. It is NOT temporary… it can happen every day and often does in a predictable cycle. Energy delivered in the morning isn’t the same product as energy delivered in the afternoon. When a PEAKER fullfills this same role, NOBODY calls it arbitrage. It is a matter of the characteristics of the management of any grid to need this flexibility, not a temporary market inefficiency that is quickly eliminated, as the term ‘arbitrage’ implies. It is economic illiteracy and poor understanding of the situation to use this term in the sense of this article. It implies that energy storage is only needed because of some fluke of the market.

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