Queensland battery to match Tesla

AGL Energy has partnered with Singapore’s Vena to build a new battery storage system in Queensland matching SA’s Tesla one.

AGL Energy boss Brett Redman announces the new joint-venture battery project in Queensland on Wednesday. Picture: AAP

Elon Musk’s giant Tesla battery in South Australia faces a new competitor after AGL Energy partnered with Singapore’s Vena to build a new storage system in Queensland matching the billionaire’s world-beating facility in size.

AGL will buy output from the 100-megawatt project at Wandoan as part of a 15-year operating deal. However, bragging rights matching the Tesla chief’s record may prove short-lived, with the South Australian battery in line for a further 50 per cent capacity boost to 150MW from its current 100MW size by March.

Still, AGL said its $120m facility would be able to power up to 57,000 homes once completed in late 2021, providing storage to soak up the state’s booming solar output.

The battery system “will enable AGL to leverage excess solar generation in Queensland and provide capacity when the Coopers Gap wind farm and other ­renewable power sources are not generating,” AGL chief executive Brett Redman said.

Vena — owned by investment fund Global Infrastructure Partners — will build, own and maintain the battery as the first stage of the ambitious Wandoan South project which plans to generate up to 1000MW of solar power and 450MW of energy storage over several phases.

AGL is increasingly shifting its investment focus to clean energy despite owning some of the ­nation’s largest coal plants in Liddell and Bayswater in NSW’s Hunter Valley and Loy Yang A in Victoria’s Latrobe Valley. Liddell has been under the spotlight amid a joint government probe assessing risks to the electricity grid from its planned exit.

However, the power giant said it did not expect to further ­extend the Liddell plant, citing cost and safety concerns.

AGL agreed to add an extra year to the planned retirement of Liddell until the 2022-23 summer to avoid supply shortfalls in the national power grid over peak summer months, but said further delays to its retirement did not stack up.

“It is getting to the point that to extend its life would require significant additional investment and so we continue to put forward that the 2022-23 schedule is right from an economic point of view and a safety point of view,” Mr Redman said in Brisbane on Wednesday.

Federal Energy Minister Angus Taylor and NSW’s Berejiklian government announced in August the creation of a commonwealth-led taskforce to consider extending the life of Liddell or replacing the baseload station which supplies more than 10 per cent of the state’s power needs.

AGL said it continues to find new defects in the Liddell plant as it approaches a half century in operation after starting up in 1971.

“The interesting thing in an ­intellectual sense is that we’re routinely finding issues with this plant that nowhere else in the world have they found. That’s ­because it’s such an old plant and it doesn’t have anything to compare to,” Mr Redman said.

Concerns have flared within the industry that both the state and the broader electricity grid face a repeat of the market chaos that followed the hasty closure of the giant Hazelwood coal plant in Victoria two years ago, which contributed to a 40 per cent surge in power prices.

With coal providing 80 per cent of NSW’s electricity supply and the state importing 95 per cent of its gas needs, NSW Energy Minister Matt Kean has warned the government must be realistic moving to renewables and keep every supply source in the mix ahead of Liddell’s closure.

AGL has a $2bn string of ­investments in the pipeline with two pumped hydro projects with 500MW of combined capacity at Kanmantoo in South Australia and Bells Mountain in NSW, a 50MW battery at Broken Hill, and a gas firming power station in Newcastle.