US-headquartered battery storage project developer Pacific Green Technologies has followed its ramp up of activities in the UK with moves to secure land for a pipeline of projects in Australia.
Pacific Green announced its “strategic entry” into the Australian market on Friday (6 October). Through a local subsidiary, it has brokered agreements with undisclosed parties to secure land sites on which it can develop large-scale battery energy storage system (BESS) assets in Portland, a city in the Australian state of Victoria.
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The company claimed that this will entail the development and construction of a total 1GW/2.5GWh of battery parks in the area through a division of the company dedicated to ‘Energy Parks’.
Pacific Green hopes to begin construction in 2024, for the BESS facilities to go into operation in 2026.
The company, which has been involved in various areas of low carbon energy development and environmental technologies since a pivot away from unrelated business areas in 2012, is incorporated in the US low tax state of Delaware.
Its two main areas of focus at present are BESS assets and concentrating solar power (CSP) plants. Within battery storage, to date the publicly listed company’s efforts have been bearing fruit in the UK, although it has agreements and partnerships in place with various entities around the world including companies owned by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
In March 2021, it signed an exclusivity agreement targeting the development of 1.1GW of energy storage in the UK by this year with infrastructure project developer TUPA Energy. In December 2022, Pacific Green acquired the in-development 249MW/373.5MWh Sheaf Energy Park project in southern England through that partnership, as reported by our UK sister site Solar Power Portal.
That followed the pair’s first project, Richborough Energy Park, which is 99.8MW output and 99.8MWh capacity and located on a site adjacent to Sheaf. Having reached financial close on Richborough in June 2022 for £28.25 million, Pacific Green then sold it on to energy transition investor Sosteneo Fund HoldCo S.à.r.l. in June this year for £74 million.
Biggest BESS in New South Wales ‘fully operational’
In other big BESS news from Australia, developer Edify Energy said this morning that its Darlington Point and Riverina project in New South Wales (NSW) is now fully operational.
The project comprises three separately operated but co-located systems adding up to a total of 150MW/300MWh and it is currently the biggest BESS project in the state.
Energy-Storage.news has covered Darlington Point and Riverina in some detail as its development cycle progressed, with Edify and the project’s 90% owner, asset manager Federation Asset Management announcing the completion of construction in May. Edify owns the remaining 10%.
The two parties said today that the project’s systems have begun importing and exporting electricity at full nameplate capacity, helping integrate growing shares of renewables into the National Electricity Market (NEM) to which NSW’s grid, and those of most of the rest of Australia, are connected.
The BESS assets are also equipped with advanced inverters that enable it to provide inertia to the grid – a role that has been traditionally played by the large rotating mass of thermal generation equipment – and a key aspect of how renewable energy and storage can replace the fossil fuel assets in Australia.
Just a few days ago, Edify got Australian federal government approval for a solar-plus-storage project in Queensland, which would combine 600MW of solar PV with a 200MW/800MWh (4-hour duration) BESS.
