West Arthur Energy, a project company owned by Western Australian developer Lacour Energy, has referred a wind generation site with a 4,000MWh battery energy storage system (BESS) to Australia’s EPBC Act.
The West Arthur Wind Farm would pair up to 92 wind turbines with a BESS of up to 500MW/4,000MWh, an 8-hour duration, about 3km south of Darkan and 40km east of Collie in the Shire of West Arthur, Western Australia (WA).
The Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act is Australia’s main federal environmental law. A referral asks the federal government to decide whether a project could significantly affect matters of national environmental significance, such as threatened species, and so needs approval as a “controlled action”.
It joins a run of recent BESS referrals, including AGL’s 500MW/2,000MWh Mount Britton BESS in Queensland and ACEnergy’s 250MW Joel Joel BESS in Victoria.
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Each turbine would be sized at 6-8MW, with a tip height of up to 253m. The referral does not state a total wind capacity, though 92 turbines at 8MW each would give 736MW. The federal government lists West Arthur as a 500MW wind farm.
That figure comes from the National Renewable Energy Priority List, which West Arthur joined in June 2026. The list is meant to speed projects through planning and environmental approvals but does not guarantee approval, as Energy-Storage.news reported when over 4GWh of battery storage was added to the Priority List.
West Arthur would connect to the South West Interconnected System (SWIS), WA’s main grid, which sits outside the National Electricity Market (NEM). The connection would run through the proposed Clean Energy Link-East transmission line to a proposed Cordering substation operated by Western Power, the state-owned network operator.
In October, the WA government named Acciona, UGL and GenusPlus as contractors for Clean Energy Link-East, including a new 330kV terminal at Cordering, as our sister site PV Tech reported when WA named the contractors to unlock 2.3GW of solar PV and wind. Western Power expects construction to finish by the end of 2029.
The referral gives an estimated start date of 1 July 2027, with construction taking two to three years and the project operating for an estimated 60 years.
The indicative disturbance footprint covers about 565 hectares of the 10,996.76-hectare project area, including 6.28 hectares of native vegetation and fauna habitat. About 1,738 hectares of mapped native vegetation are set aside as avoidance areas.
West Arthur Energy assessed significant impacts on threatened ecological communities, threatened flora and critical habitat for conservation-significant fauna as unlikely. Supporting studies include a targeted black cockatoo survey, bird and bat utilisation surveys and a bird and bat adaptive management plan.
The project was also referred to WA’s Environmental Protection Authority on 15 October 2026, which is deciding whether formal state assessment is needed. A development application was submitted to the Shire of West Arthur in September 2026.
Federal approval can take years. Recurrent Energy’s Sundown solar-plus-storage project, first referred in May 2022, received EPBC Act approval on 23 October, as Delta lodged an EIS for its 800MWh Vales Point BESS in New South Wales.
WA’s long-duration BESS pipeline grows
At 8 hours, West Arthur’s BESS would be longer in duration than the largest systems already operating on the SWIS. State-owned utility Synergy completed its 500MW/2,400MWh Collie Battery in February, while Neoen’s 560MW/2,240MWh Collie BESS is nearby.
Utility-scale BESS supplied a record 37.2% of peak demand on the WA grid on 9 May, according to Energy Policy WA, the state’s energy policy agency.
More capacity is contracted through the federal Capacity Investment Scheme, which awarded 1.9GW of renewables and 3.7GWh of battery storage in WA under Tenders 5 and 6, with all projects due online by 2030.
Wind-plus-storage is also gaining ground in WA. Swedish developer OX2 acquired a proposed 1GW wind farm north of Perth with a co-located 100MW BESS, which it plans to develop before the wind farm.
Elsewhere, Pacific Blue recently referred its 201MW/855MWh Bendigo BESS in Victoria to the EPBC Act, shortly before a 300MW/1,200MWh BESS in South Australia’s Riverland and ACEnergy’s Little River BESS were also referred.
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