“World-leading” array of massive eight-hour solar batteries to reboot Australian manufacturing

The Australian infrastructure investor Quinbrook has unveiled plans for a series of massive eight-hour solar batteries that they say will offer Australia the best – and possibly the only chance – to protect Australian manufacturing and attract new industries.

The plans unveiled by Quinbrook Infrastructure Partners would involve three such batteries in Queensland – in Brisbane and the industrial centres of Gladstone and Townsville – and possibly two in NSW.

Together, they would comprise 3 gigawatts and 24 gigawatt hours of storage capacity, with two thirds of it in the sunshine state, and a further gigawatt and 8 GWh in NSW. Another may be built in the Northern Territory, where Quinbrook is involved in the first, locally focused stage of the massive Sun Cable project.

Quinbrook co-founder and managing partner David Scaysbrook says the plan to build large scale solar farms with eight hour batteries will get the country one step closer to the “holy grail” of 24/7 renewable power.

“This is the ‘dam busting’ moment for this country’s decarbonisation,” he says.  “Solar teamed with battery storage is the engine room of the energy transition. It is the anchor technology combination to deliver low cost power.”

Quinbrook describes the plan as a “world-first”, simply because of the scale of the plans and the nature of the technology that they are using from China’s CATL.

The first project will be located near Brisbane at its Supernode battery, and will involve a 250 MW, 2,000 MWh fourth stage addition to its previously announced plans.

Other batteries, potentially sized at up to 800 MW and 6,400 MWh, are being considered for the industrial hubs and port cities of Gladstone (at the Miriam Vale Renewable Energy Hub), and at Townsville, at the Landsdown industrial precinct and a project dubbed the Woodstock renewable energy hub to the north of the city.

Gladstone is particularly interesting, given that one obvious customer for a project of this scale – Rio Tinto – is searching for a storage option to back up its wind and solar plans for the Boyne Island smelter and Yarwun refinery. The Miriam Vale renewable hub could also provide the renewables to support plans for a green iron industry in Gladstone.

At Townsville, Scaysbroook says the paired solar farms and eight hour batteries would also supply low cost power to support his company’s own $8 billion plan to manufacture silicon and build the largest polysilicon plant outside of China. Both are key components of the global solar PV industry.

And he says other manufacturing industries that could be lured to Australia by the attraction of low cost reliable green power, in much the same way as South Australia is already doing.

At a media briefing, Quinbrook described its plans for eight hour batteries as a “world first”, which is not quite true because the state of NSW has already agreed underwritten contracts for five eight-hour battery projects as part of its efforts to build storage capacity to replace coal.

But that does not match the scale of what Quinbrook is doing, and Scaysbrook insists that CATL’s EnerQB technology is unlike any that has been proposed before.

“This the first battery technology to be specifically designed for an 8 hour charge and discharge,” Scaysbrook told Renew Economy.

“The energy density of this new product delivers double the MWh (megawatt hour) capacity for only 20% more land footprint. Because the new EnerQB is designed specifically for solar shifting it has a substantial cost advantage compared to inefficiently using 4 hour battery technology for an 8 hour use case.”

Quinbrook – despite its recent ties with software billionaire Mike Cannon-Brookes’ plans for the ambitious Sun Cable solar and battery project in the NT – is perhaps less well known in Australia’s corporate arena than overseas, where it has built some of the world’s biggest storage projects.

It has invested more than $A10 billion of equity in more than 40 GW of energy infrastructure assets, including large four hour batteries in the US and the UK, as well as wind, solar and other technologies.

Scaysbrook says that “Trump 2.0” will present opportunities for Australia in being able to provide an offshore haven for US industry, and despite the potential “smokescreen” around energy that can be expected in the upcoming federal election, there is no doubt that renewables are cheaper than fossil fuels.

“Wind, solar and batteries are the cheapest. We know this because we are the (one of the) biggest builders of these technologies, he said.

And, he insists, despite Trump 2.0, or even because of it, Australia has a unique opportunity to deploy renewables and storage at scale, and develop and exploit critical minerals and a skilled workforce to forge new industries “in the same way we have done ‘off the sheep’s back’, in iron ore, coal and LNG.”

He said it is significant given the Future Made in Australia opportunities being championed by the current federal government.

“Whoever controls critical minerals, controls the energy transition and it’s time, as a nation, to connect the dots between our abundant natural resources and now even lower cost renewables in order to create the industries that are urgently needed because of the times we are now living in,” Scaysbrook said.

“Australia is amazingly well placed to leverage its cost advantages and resource wealth to become a leading host nation for new export industries serving the needs of the global energy transition.”