Renewable energy generator and retailer Flow Power has achieved financial close on a 100MW/223MWh battery storage project in Victoria, Australia.
The company, which began as a utility serving commercial and industrial (C&I) customers but now also sells residential electricity, said this morning that it has closed financing on its Bennetts Creek battery energy storage system (BESS).
Bennetts Creek is located near Hazelwood North in Victoria’s Latrobe Valley, a region historically known as one of Australia’s centres of coal mining and coal-fired power generation.
Flow Power did not disclose the terms of financing, which was provided by banks Westpac and SMBC Australia. The utility noted that its majority shareholder, Canadian pension trust OPSEU Pension Plan Trust Fund (OPTrust), supported the company in the transaction.
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It is the company’s first large-scale standalone BESS project and is expected to be completed in 2028.
Flow Power’s business model is based on offering flexible electricity pricing through wholesale market exposure, with the company owning a 100% renewable generation fleet of wind and solar PV.
Customers can take advantage of cheap daytime solar, for example, and the company’s new residential plan offers users a AU$0.45/kWh (US$0.30/kWh) feed-in tariff between 5:30pm and 7:30pm when solar generation tails off and evening demand peaks.
Wärtsilä will deliver battery storage equipment and control systems. The contract win comes not long after the Finnish marine and engine power solutions company’s energy storage division was hired for an expansion to Origin Energy’s BESS project at Eraring Power Station in New South Wales (NSW) that will make it Australia’s biggest BESS, at 700MW/3,000MWh.
Flow Power has also hired NSW-headquartered balance of plant (BOP) contractor Zenviron for the Bennetts Creek project. Zenviron recently worked on another project in the Latrobe Valley, the 100MW/200MWh Latrobe Valley BESS for developer Tilt Renewables.
That project was officially inaugurated a couple of months ago by Victoria’s minister for climate action, energy and resources Lily D’Ambrosio.
The state became the first in Australia’s National Electricity Market (NEM) to achieve more than a gigawatt of simultaneous battery charging, setting the new record on 23 September.
