A public consultation period has opened on plans for a vast renewable energy project including large-scale battery storage which would be used to power mining operations for Australian metals company Fortescue.
The Australian state of New South Wales (NSW) has received proposals for more than 34GW of solar, wind and energy storage for its South-West Renewable Energy Zone (REZ), more than 10 times the likely capacity of the site.
Experts from the Australian National University explain how battery storage installed at neighbourhood level can benefit a very wide range of stakeholders.
Cross-party backing for a new fossil fuel power plant in Australia has been criticised by experts and clean energy industry voices, who have said battery storage would be a more viable option to provide peaking capacity.
Construction has started on BHP’s “first off-grid large-scale renewable energy project”, totalling 38 MW of solar power and a 10.1MW/5.4 MWh battery energy storage system (BESS), at two nickel mines in Western Australia which supply Tesla for use in electric vehicle (EV) batteries.
Battery storage companies raised 159% more corporate funding in 2021 than in 2020, with funding activity reflecting the “significance of battery energy storage in the energy transition,” analysis group Mercom Capital has said.
Two new battery projects announced this week will see mining sites in Western Australia and the South American nation of Suriname greatly reduce their dependency on fossil fuel generation.
Hydrostor believes it can get three advanced-compressed air energy storage (A-CAES) projects totalling 1.1GW/8.7GWh built in California and Australia by 2026, but regulators elsewhere need to remove barriers for A-CAES and other long-duration storage technologies to thrive, the company’s CEO has said.
In the Philippines, Fluence has brought into commercial operation the first project in an order totalling nearly half a gigawatt, for vertically-integrated power company SMC Global Power Holdings (SMCGPH).
