Pioneering community wind farm wins federal funds to add a big battery

The first community wind farm to be built on Australia’s main grid, an award-winning two-turbine project in Hepburn in central Victoria, will soon add a community battery, after plans to install energy storage were awarded federal government funding.

Hepburn Energy said on Tuesday it had been granted up to $500,000 from the federal government’s $200 million Community Batteries for Household Solar program to add storage to the Hepburn Wind site in Leonards Hill, about 100km northwest of Melbourne.

The battery, which is permitted for up to 10MWh of energy storage capacity, will join turbines “Gale” and “Gusto,” which were installed back in 2011 by a then 1,900 member cooperative led by founding chair Simon Holmes à Court. (The co-op now numbers 2,009 shareholding members.)

Also on the cards is a 5MW solar farm, to help fill wind generation gaps that modelling has found to be occurring most often in the middle of the day.

“This announcement comes after years of work on our hybrid solar and battery farm project, which received its planning permit last year,” Hepburn Energy said in a statement on Tuesday.

“Since then, we’ve been looking for potential funding sources to make this dream a reality, and we were thrilled to receive a pre-election commitment from the now-sitting Australian government.

Hepburn Energy says the federal funding will enable it to deliver Stage 1 of the battery project, somewhere between 5-10MWh. It then hopes to scale up to the full 10MWh “as other funding sources become available.”

“But in the meantime, this is a huge step forward for our co-operative and we’re excited to welcome this new chapter,” a statement says.

Hepburn Energy is one of the first recipients of the Albanese government’s much heralded community battery grants to be made public, following the news last week that Yarra Energy Foundation had won funding to install a BESS in the inner-city Melbourne suburb of Richmond.

Federal Labor’s Community Batteries for Household Solar program divides its $200 million between Chris Bowen’s department of energy and climate and ARENA – $29 million and $171 million, respectively.

For Arena’s part, the agency has allocated $120 million for a first round of funding, to be split evenly between projects proposed by Distributed Network Service Providers (DNSP) and applicants that are not DNSPs. Applications for round one close on June 30.

The department has moved faster awarding its grants  – although it appears to be leaving it to successful applicants and local government MPs to announce the results of the competitive process.

The Hepburn community battery was one of just two eligible participants in a non-competitive second stream of department funding, with a total of just $1 million up for grabs. The other party is Geni.Energy Limited in Narrabri, New South Wales.

In the competitive stream, the remaining $28 million of the department’s money is being divided between 56 eligible locations across all Australian states and territories (except for the NT), with grants of $1,000 per kWh or up to $500,000 each.