Australian state governments of Western Australia and the Northern Territory have budgeted for measures to support renewables in the past few days, primarily through supporting batteries at large-scale, residential and community level.
Home batteries in a South Australia delivered significant revenues from their first six months of participation in a virtual power plant to help balance the grid, even with only an initial 1MW – 2MW of aggregated customer systems participating.
“The bottom line is that this is a good business decision. We will get back our money in eight to 10 years at the current price of power. As the price of energy goes up, we’ll pay it back even quicker.”
In the past couple of weeks, national and state government organisations in Australia have announced various stages of development for solar projects with a range of advanced and innovative storage solutions attached.
AutoGrid has been developing “co-optimisation” capabilities that will allow residential battery storage deployed to mitigate power outages to continue participating in market opportunities.
Developers of two significant solar-plus-storage projects in the Australian state of New South Wales have been given the go-ahead, with only minor conditions added to their proposals.
Major Australian utility company AGL has signed a 15-year contract for “operational dispatch rights” to a 100MW battery storage system to be built in Queensland.
As energy storage becomes an increasingly integral part of a renewables-based system, interest in and discussion around non-lithium (and non-pumped hydro) technologies increases. A team of experts from CENELEST, a joint research venture between the Fraunhofer Institute for Chemical Technologies and the University of New South Wales take a deep dive into redox flow batteries.
