Tesla big battery loses “biggest” title as Torrens Island finally ready to charge up

The original Tesla big battery at Hornsdale has already lost the titles of biggest battery in the world, and biggest battery in Australia, and is now poised to lose even the state title as the new Torrens Island battery starts to charge up.

The Torrens Island battery – owned by the country’s biggest coal generator AGL Energy – is being built at its main gas complex near Adelaide, part of a plan to turn the company’s ageing fossil fuel facilities in new clean energy complexes.

The battery is initially sized at 250MW and 250MWh, but is likely to add more hours of storage as the arbitrage market develops. It could reach up to 1,000MWh, or four hours storage. But even at this level it trumps the expanded Hornsdale Power Reserve, which is now sized at 150MW/193MWh.

The Torrens Island battery is being built by Finnish group Wärtsilä and, like the Tesla big battery at Hornsdale, will also feature grid forming inverters and will initially focus on providing grid services, hence the low amount of storage duration.

ElectraNet, which owns and operates the state’s transmission network, says the Torrens Island battery has now executed the projects’s transmission connection agreement, nearly five months after the construction was complete in November last year.

This timetable contrasts sharply with the mere 100 days it took the original 100MW/129MWh Tesla big battery to be built and connected in 2017 – to satisfy the twitter boast by Tesla boss Elon Musk.

RenewEconomy understands that the delay in the approval of performance standards is believed to have been caused by issues around the battery’s electrical “noise” on the grid, which needed to be solved with the installation of special harmonic filters.

“Full energisation and commissioning activities for AGL’s Torrens Island battery will happen in the next few weeks,” ElectraNet’s head of customer connections, Niketan Tyagi said in a statement.

“We have been providing essential support in the testing and commissioning of the auxiliary load of this project while waiting for the required performance standards to be approved by the Australia Energy Market Operator and our team.”

AGL’s project director for the battery Thomas Hill said it was a significant milestone for the project.

“The Torrens Island battery is an important asset, both for AGL’s portfolio and the state of South Australia,” he said in a statement.

“The battery will support the uptake of greater levels of renewable energy, improve the security and reliability of the grid and help to put downward pressure on power prices. It’s also a key pillar of our plan to transition the Torrens Island site into an integrated, low-carbon industrial Energy Hub.”

Another new battery is also due to shortly join South Australia’s growing portfolio of storage assets, with the 41MW Tailem Bend battery nearing completion for owners Vena Energy, which has also added a 118MW second stage solar farm to the Tailem Bend facility that was the first utility scale solar farm in the state.

South Australia is already running at an average 70 per cent wind and solar over the past 12 months, and 80 per cent over summer, which leads the world in a gigawatt scale grid. It is expected to reach at least 100 per cent “net renewables” after the new transmission link to NSW is completed in a few years.