AGL adds 250MW battery at South Australia’s Torrens Island
AGL has added to the rush of large scale battery storage announcements, unveiling plans for a 250MW facility in South Australia.
AGL Energy will build a giant 250 megawatt battery at South Australia’s Torrens Island to back up the state’s wind and solar supplies, the latest in a series of big storage investments as the power grid moves away from coal.
Australia‘s largest power generator said the battery, with a duration of up to four hours, would be adjacent to its existing 1280MW Torrens power station, the biggest gas fired plant in Australia which will shut down over the next few years after operating for a half century.
“This battery is another step in the state’s energy transition while at the same time allowing a rapid response to changes in renewable generation when our customers and communities need it,” AGL chief executive Brett Redman said.
AGL in August revealed plans to convert its Liddell coal power station in NSW’s Hunter Valley into a giant battery park as it moves closer to shutting down the ageing plant in the 2022-23 summer, underlining an accelerating transition to renewables from the fossil fuel that currently props up the grid.
It’s targeting the rollout of 850MW of battery units by 2024 although Torrens still awaits a final investment decision.
The energy operator has already announced plans to operate a Queensland battery, buying output from the 100MW project at Wandoan as part of a 15-year operating deal signed in late January.
Investors are making bigger bets on the storage technology amid forecasts that by 2035 nearly 90 per cent of power demand in Australia’s national electricity market could be met by renewable generation during periods through the day. However, that will require up to 50 gigawatts of large-scale solar and wind to be added under the most aggressive plan to cut emissions, representing nearly all the current capacity of the market to be built in just two decades.
That goal will also need massive investment in storage to back up renewables with up to 19GW of dispatchable resources such as batteries, pumped hydro and fast-start gas plants called for in the next two decades.
Elon Musk’s Tesla in September super-sized South Australia’s giant lithium ion battery by 50 per cent to help hand the state extra storage back-up for its ambitious renewable energy goals.
The $US400bn ($548bn) Tesla also put Australia’s biggest power companies on notice it is coming for their business, as chairman Robyn Denholm flagged the company’s ‘‘humungous’’ battery installation in Victoria would be “the size of a gas turbine”, pitting the US giant’s clean energy ambitions against fossil fuel.
Other states are also moving ahead with NSW Energy Minister Matt Kean putting batteries in the mix in a new scheme aimed at incentivising the replacement of all coal-fired power plants with renewable energy by 2042. On the global stage, billionaire Andrew Forrest has also outlined an audacious plan to eventually produce 235GW of renewable energy, or five times the current capacity of Australia’s power grid.
South Australia’s grid boasts the largest share of renewables in the world although authorities have warned it remains vulnerable to a power grid blackout unless it can solve problems integrating huge supplies of rooftop solar.
One third of the state’s households have rooftop solar systems installed but the strong uptake has created issues for the renewables-heavy grid, with solar at times generating so much surplus energy that demand falls near zero, destabilising the power system.
The problem of low demand in renewables-heavy South Australia is also seen spreading to Victoria and Queensland, the Australian Energy Market Operator has warned.
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