“Popping up everywhere”: Gippsland’s large-scale battery boom

Overlooking the enormous retired Hazelwood open-cut coal mine is a small plot of land that contains rows and rows of 2.5 metre tall grey boxes. They don’t appear to be doing much, but these 342 batteries power over 30,000 Gippsland houses every night.

New energy in Gippsland: Systems like the batteries at Hazelwood are popping up everywhere – and they’re changing the way Australia’s grid operates as the country transitions from fossil fuels to renewable energy. 

🦎 The Monitor’s Jacob Wallace visited Engie’s Battery Energy Storage System (BESS) at Hazelwood to speak with BESS Coordinator Johnathan Vila, and discuss how the system works, how battery technology is changing and what it means for power bills.

What happened: Over the last three months, renewables and energy storage contributed to more than 50 percent of Australia's electricity. 

• This is a significant figure, as it represents the first time the nation’s power has been this far weighted towards renewable energy. 

• As the cost of building large batteries has plummeted their output around the country has almost tripled in the last three months.

Battery farms in Gippsland are a big part of these record-breaking numbers, dropping wholesale electricity prices by more than 40 percent compared to a year earlier.

How do big batteries work? There are two things to keep in mind when trying to understand how a large-scale battery works: How much energy is being generated and how much electricity people want to use. 

• Engie’s Johnathan Vila said supply and demand dictates when energy companies choose to charge a battery and when they choose to discharge it and sell energy to consumers.

Tell me more: Engie’s Hazelwood battery will sell electricity to consumers in the morning before beginning to charge up after around 11am, when energy prices are lower because less people are using power. 

Between 4:30-8pm the battery will start discharging again, sending electricity to consumers.

• 🗣️ “Usually prices are cheap or sometimes in the negatives [during the day] then at night time, when everyone comes home and starts cooking, using their kettle and heating, that's where batteries can come in and discharge. They [help to] manage that peak period,” Vila said.

What type of energy charges the battery?

“The batteries will take from anything: coal, gas, solar, whatever but most of the time it's charging when there’s very high renewable penetration,” Vila said.

• The Hazelwood BESS is a 150 MW system that can power roughly 30,000 homes.

• Vali said rooftop solar is really good for large-scale batteries because there is so much cheap excess solar energy during the day that can be absorbed.

Does this mean cheaper energy?

“What we're seeing is it's definitely helping to reduce prices,” Vila said. 

“Batteries are starting to replace gas. Gas is typically one of your most expensive forms of electricity. In heat waves, when demand gets really high, batteries often suppress the price because they can go in cheaper and earlier than gas plants.”

Popping up like mushrooms

Vila said when construction began on Engie’s Hazelwood BESS in 2021 there were three batteries in construction around the country. Now there’s 12 operating in Victoria alone – and nearly 50 around the country.

• “We've gone from around one gigawatt worth [of battery storage] to 10 gigawatt in just a couple of years,” Vila said.

🗣️ “Batteries are now growing like mushrooms, they're just popping up everywhere. It's just easy to build them, they take up a small footprint and have quite a large impact on how the grid can operate.”

New Hazelwood batteries

Vila said there were a number of BESS projects happening around Hazelwood:

• Tilt Renewables finished a 100 MW BESS near Morwell last year.

• EnergyAustralia has plans to build a 350 MW BESS at Hazelwood North.

• Engie has plans to build a second 150 MW BESS at Hazelwood.

“They're gonna have to start calling this lithium city at one point,” Vila said.