Newly commissioned projects push batteries to output record, and a 5 pct share of the evening peak

Update to include new record on Friday evening.

A couple of newly commissioned big battery projects have helped deliver a new record for battery discharge into the National Electricity Market, in a foretaste of things to come as even bigger projects join the nation’s main grids in coming months.

According to multiple data points – including OpenNEM and GPE NEMLog – battery discharge hit a new record peak of 1,371 MW at 6.05pm on Thursday, right in the middle of the evening demand peak. That’s up from 1,306 MW reached in April, and three times more than the peak just two years ago.

The record was broken again on Friday evening, this time to 1,445 MW, at 6pm, more than 10 per cent higher than its record level two days earlier. Its share of the market at that stage was 5.5 per cent.

Battery storage is a relatively new thing on Australia’s grid, indeed the world’s grids. The first big battery was installed at Hornsdale in 2017 – and Australia now has more than 30 big batteries in operation or commissioning on its main grids.

The Thursday record was boosted by solid activity from the two newest battery projects, the 237 MW, 477 MWh Blyth battery in South Australia, the biggest in terms of storage in that stage so far, and the 200 MW, 400 MWh Rangeback battery in Victoria.

The new record output meant that battery storage accounted for 5.1 per cent of supply at the time, across the whole grid, which is believed to be the first time above 5 per cent. In some states, the percentage is already much higher, with South Australian peaking at 34 per cent, and Western Australia at around 18 per cent.

A number of new even bigger battery projects are currently under construction, or going through their commissioning phase, and many of these are being built at the sites of existing or former coal fired power stations.

These include the 850 MW, 1680 MWh Waratah Super Battery, which will be the most powerful in the country – in terms of megawatt capacity – and the biggest single power unit on the main grid.

It is being joined by the first stage of the Eraring battery, at 460 MW and 920 MWh, and the newly complete 300 MW, 600 MWh Tarong battery in Queensland that will now work through its commissioning phase.

Meanwhile, the first battery units at the 500 MW, 1,000 MWh Liddell battery have also been installed, while over in Western Australia work is continuing on two big batteries in the coal town of Collie, both sized at 2 GWh or more.

See Renew Economy’s Big Battery Map of Australia for more information.