Burgeoning Battery Power

There’s a local boon in battery power happening.

Eraring is Australia’s largest power station supplying around a quarter of NSW’s energy needs and is Origin Energy’s only coal-fired generator.  

Origin has reached an important milestone in its plans to develop a large-scale battery at Eraring Power Station, receiving planning approval from the NSW Department of Planning and Environment (DPE).  

 

The proposed Eraring battery has an overall capacity of up to 700 MW and a dispatch duration of 4 hours, making it Australia’s largest battery project to achieve planning approval to date.  

There is also  a proposed Awaba Battery Energy Storage System (BESS), a 50MW stand-alone battery to be located adjacent to Ausgrid's Awaba Substation on Awaba Road.

Once operational, the Awaba BESS will provide a range of electricity and power market services - supporting Firm Power's mission to power the clean energy transition.

The Awaba BESS forms part of the Hunter Dispatchable Energy System (HDES) - a distributed stand-alone battery system for the Hunter region, designed to balance the grid and support the performance and future uptake of renewable energy in NSW.  View a Fact Sheet of the Awaba BESS project.

Firm Power are currently preparing  a socio-economic impact assessment (SEIA) for the BESS in Awaba. As part of this process, they are conducting a community survey to better understand community values, challenges and aspirations as well as potential impacts and benefits associated with the proposal.

The community survey is an opportunity for you to let them know:

• about your local area,

• what is important to you,

• any concerns you may have, 

• your views on project benefits.

You can find out more about the project at Awaba BESS | Firm Power, and take the community survey at Awaba Battery Energy Storage System Survey.

Climate Action on Our Doorstep

Just 14 km away is Eraring Power Station (EPS), owned and operated by Origin Energy. EPS has four 720 megawatt (MW) coal fired units, and one 42MW diesel fuelled gas turbine.

Eraring is Australia’s largest power station with a generating capacity of 2922MW, and accounts for approximately 25 percent of New South Wales’ power requirements.

In January 2021, Origin announced plans to progress the development of a major grid scale battery at Eraring.

This battery has a potential peak generation output of 700 MW. If it goes ahead it will be one of the largest battery projects (in terms of both peak power output and energy duration) in NSW and Australia.

Large-scale batteries can in theory be placed anywhere along the electricity grid. However, to take advantage of the infrastructure already in place and reduce the cost of the energy produced, Origin is looking at installing large-scale battery technology at many of their existing power stations, including the a 700MW battery project at the Eraring Power station.

Interestingly, a large-scale battery located next to a power station is not powered by the power station. Large-scale batteries operate independently, are connected to the grid and can continue to operate when the power station is not running or even after it may have been retired from service. Origin has committed to exiting coal-fired generation by 2032 and we anticipate that the capacity at Eraring will be replaced by a combination of renewables, battery storage and gas peaking power stations.

This was an excerpt from https://www.originenergy.com.au/blog/how-large-scale-batteries-support-renewables/