“It’s the most powerful battery energy storage system (BESS) in the world,” Nick Carter, CEO of Akaysha Energy, tells ESN Premium following the switching on of the 850MW/1,680MWh Waratah Super Battery in New South Wales, Australia.
The claim made by Akaysha Energy, which had been acquired by global investment powerhouse BlackRock in 2022, refers to the power output of the battery storage system.
As reported by Energy-Storage.news at the start of the month, the Waratah Super Battery started partial operations with the first 350MW/700MWh coming online, ahead of full operation later this year.
Carter explains that this represents the largest connection point across Australia’s National Electricity Market (NEM), which spans its eastern and southern states. However, several challenges have been encountered in building a BESS of this size, including the operationality of the System Integrity Protection Scheme (SIPS) with transmission operator Transgrid.
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“Enabling that first half of the SIPS has been a massive amount of work. On the face of it, the SIPS seems very simple in terms of what it’s doing, where we get a signal from Transgrid to ramp up generation,” Carter says.
“That all sounds straightforward, but the actual implementation of it, and doing it at the speed at which we need to do it, in conjunction with the grid connection, in conjunction with the control system, across 288 inverters at a massive site, is really, really hard for a single connection point. That’s been massively challenging, so getting it to this point has been a huge win for us.”
The SIPS contract for the Waratah Super Battery is widely recognised as the largest of its kind in Australia. It enables Transgrid to send signals to the BESS to inject energy into the grid while simultaneously instructing paired generators to adjust their output.
Specifically, the SIPS Control System can monitor 36 transmission lines in real time and respond instantaneously to system events.
This dynamic balancing act prevents disruptions and allows existing transmission infrastructure to operate at higher capacities, effectively “running harder” without compromising reliability.
The Waratah Super Battery will also serve as a stopgap measure through the SIPS until the Hunter Transmission Project – a major infrastructure initiative to connect inland REZ to the rest of New South Wales – comes online.
This major infrastructure project will see the construction of a new overhead 500kV transmission line spanning around 100km between Bayswater in the Upper Hunter and Olney in the Lower Hunter. It is hoped that this project will be completed by early 2028.
In the meantime, the Waratah Super Battery will also play a role in stabilising the grid and reducing wholesale electricity prices by discharging energy during periods of high demand.
The impact of Powin’s bankruptcy on the Waratah Super Battery
One of the biggest challenges Akaysha Energy faced in developing the Waratah Super Battery was the bankruptcy of US-headquartered battery storage system integrator Powin Energy.
In May 2025, the organisation filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy after admitting it struggled to compete with Chinese OEMs’ integrated BESS offerings.
One of the biggest concerns surrounding the Waratah Super Battery at the time was how this could impact the development of the utility-scale project and what implications the situation would have.
This was hot on the mind of Carter and the Akaysha Energy team when delivering the BESS site; however, Carter notes that the situation has gone “incredibly smoothly” so far.
“Having Powin go bankrupt halfway through the commissioning process was not optimal, but we managed to get out of jail on that, and the whole thing has gone incredibly smoothly at the moment,” Carter tells ESN Premium.
Over the years, Powin secured several contracts with Akaysha Energy in Australia, namely the Waratah Super Battery and the 300MWh Ulinda Park site in Queensland. Danny Lu, Powin’s executive vice-president, expressed the organisation’s excitement in branching deeper into the Australian BESS market to Energy-Storage.news in 2023.
Powin began as a developer of battery energy storage system (BESS) projects and pivoted towards system integration and assembly, buying cells from multiple sources to put into its two BESS hardware solutions, Powin Pod and Centipede, integrated with its StackOS energy management system (EMS) and controls platform software.
The company statement alluded to uncertainties over levels of US import tariffs and the future of tax credit incentives as industry headwinds. Powin’s publicly disclosed battery cell suppliers, CATL, EVE Energy, REPT Battero and Hithium are based in China, while its sole US-headquartered supplier, KORE Power, is also still manufacturing in or importing from China after cancelling plans for a gigafactory in Arizona.
A couple of months ago, as Powin warned of layoffs and the potential cessation of business activities ahead, Carter revealed via LinkedIn that Akaysha had hired a number of key staff from the system integrator.
This week, the deal for another US-based system integrator, FlexGen, to buy most of Powin’s assets was completed after approval by the US Bankruptcy Court in New Jersey. FlexGen CEO Kelcy Pegler told ESN Premium last week that one motivation for the deal was to “provide continuity” to Powin customers’ assets in the field.
Potential grid-forming capabilities
Another key discussion point with Carter centred around grid-forming inverters and how Australia could potentially be a leader in the use of this technology, owing to the amount of renewables already connected to its grids.
As previously reported by Energy-Storage.news, in 2023, AEMO introduced system strength measures, where all new storage needs to be grid-forming to be interconnected to the grid without a large penalty. As such, many projects in Australia today are being delivered with grid-forming capabilities.
Indeed, Tesla’s head of business development and sales, Megapack APAC, Shane Bannister, said last month at the Clean Energy Council’s Australian Clean Energy Summit 2025 in Sydney that “I don’t think we’re [Tesla] going to sell another battery in Australia that’s not grid-forming.”
Talking with ESN Premium, Carter hints that the Waratah Super Battery could technically provide grid-forming abilities thanks to components provided by Sungrow and Hitachi.
“When we look at Sungrow, which is a supplier, we’re using their grid-forming technology, and the Hitachi PCS that we’re using on Waratah and Ulinda are capable of doing it. But at the moment, they’re grid-following,” Carter says.
“They’re the last projects, I think, in the NEM that will be grid-following. Every other project we’re doing is grid forming.”
Interest in grid-forming inverters has continued to grow in Australia. This recently saw Fluence’s Rob Hills, APAC vice president of engineering and commissioning, and Sam Markham, growth manager, Australia and New Zealand, deem the technology a trend in the NEM for the foreseeable future.
The topic is set to be explored at the upcoming Battery Asset Management Summit Australia 2025, which is set to take place on 26-27 August in Sydney next week. You can get 20% off your ticket using the code ESN20 at checkout.
