ENGIE, Macquarie’s Green Investment Group, and Fluence have joined forces to deliver Australia’s largest privately-funded and owned utility-scale battery. The project is fully committed and will connect to the existing network infrastructure at the site of the former Hazelwood Power Station in the Latrobe Valley.
Rated at 150MW/150MWh of flexible energy, the Hazelwood storage system will have the capacity to store the equivalent of an hour of energy generation from the rooftop solar systems of 30 000 homes and will play a critical role in increasing renewable energy capacity in Victoria, while delivering further grid stability for the state.
The project, funded by ENGIE and GIG, will be built, operated, and maintained over a 20-year period by Fluence. The project also represents the next major milestone in ENGIE’s commitment to repurpose the former Hazelwood Power Station, which was decommissioned in 2017, to create a long-term sustainable asset. As an established power generation site with access to 1600 MW of dormant transmission capacity, Hazelwood is uniquely placed to accommodate this first stage of the battery.
Construction of the battery is already underway and network connection agreements have been executed, with the battery scheduled to be operational by November 2022 to align with increasing demand in the summer months. The battery’s design and the Hazelwood site’s location provide the flexibility to scale up storage capacity quickly and cost-effectively in order to respond to network and market demand, including additional capacity for future contracts. It will also participate in frequency control ancillary service markets, delivering some stability to a grid increasingly comprised of intermittent renewable sources.
Fluence will utilise its sixth-generation Gridstack product in delivering the full turnkey project, the first Gridstack system to be deployed in Australia. Once operational, the consortium will use Fluence’s AI-enabled IQ Application to optimise the bidding of the Hazelwood battery’s capacity in the National Electricity Market.
Linkedin
