Waratah Super Battery: Team grows in race to build giant “shock absorber”

A new name has been added to the list of companies entrusted with delivery of Australia’s biggest big battery, with professional services giant WSP tapped to provide owners engineer services for the the 850MW/1680MWh Waratah Super Battery in New South Wales.

WSP said late last week that it has been engaged to work alongside Akaysha Energy to ensure the “timely completion” of the Priority Transmission Infrastructure Project that is being built on the site of a demolished coal plant south of Newcastle.

The Waratah Super Battery, or WSB, is the biggest committed battery project in the southern hemisphere and will be the biggest in Australia’s grid when complete – although potentially not for long.

Final state approvals for the project were rushed through in February by the former Coalition government, with the aim of getting the battery up and running by 2025, in advance of the earliest possible closure date of the Eraring coal-fired power station.

At that time, the government also announced that the WSB would be built by the newly emerging Akaysha Energy, in partnership with transmission network company Transgrid.

“We are working with Akaysha and its delivery partners to provide trusted technical advice for the timely completion of this critical project,” said WSP project manager Caitlin Barnes in a statement on Thursday.

“Together, we will support Australia’s energy transition and play our part in building a clean, reliable and resilient electrical supply for our communities in NSW.”

As RenewEconomy has reported, construction of the WSB has been cited by the Australian Energy Market Operator as one of the principal reasons why fears of short term breaches of the reliability standard have been removed, particularly in the still coal dependent states of NSW and Queensland.

At its place on the grid in the NSW Hunter – Central Coast REZ, the battery will play a similar “shock absorber” role to the 300MW/450MWh Victoria Big Battery near Geelong.

The instant response and flexibility allows the market operator to run transmission lines at their full capacity, allowing more power to be delivered to major demand centres such as Sydney, Newcastle and Geelong.