Akaysha Energy: BlackRock’s big battery bet on the NEM

Three hundred and fifty megawatts. That is the nameplate power capacity of the Waratah Super Battery, the New South Wales project that put Akaysha Energy on the map — and the number that still gets repeated in a lot of coverage without enough care about what comes after it. Let’s be careful with that number: 350 MW is power, measured in megawatts. The energy storage behind it is 700 MWh, which tells you the battery can deliver that output for two hours. Those are different things, and in a firming market they matter differently.

I’ve been watching Akaysha’s project pipeline move through the planning and connection queues for a couple of years now. The company has grown quickly — arguably faster than most observers expected when BlackRock’s climate infrastructure fund completed its acquisition of the then-startup back in 2022. Since then it has assembled one of the larger utility-scale battery development books in the NEM, and its approach to grid-forming inverter technology has put it at the centre of a technical debate that AEMO has been prosecuting loudly in its system strength work.

Where Akaysha came from #

Akaysha Energy was founded in Australia and built its early pipeline before the BlackRock deal closed. The acquisition by BlackRock’s climate infrastructure arm gave the company access to capital at a scale that genuinely changed what it could attempt. BlackRock’s climate infrastructure business has committed to deploying billions into the energy transition globally, and Australian grid-scale batteries — with the NEM’s well-documented stability problems as coal exits — made a logical target.

The Waratah Super Battery, located near the existing Liddell and Bayswater sites in the Hunter Valley, was always the anchor project. It secured its connection agreement with Ausgrid and has been progressing through construction milestones. The Hunter Valley location is not accidental: it sits in a part of the NEM that has historically relied on synchronous coal generation for system strength, and as Liddell closed in April 2023 and Eraring’s timeline has continued to be contested, the transmission region around that area has become one of AEMO’s more closely watched system strength zones.

Waratah, Orana, Ulinda Park — the pipeline in plain terms #

Beyond Waratah, Akaysha has been developing a portfolio across New South Wales. The Orana project and Ulinda Park represent the next tier of the pipeline, though the connection timelines for projects at this scale are rarely straightforward. The NEM’s generator connection process — governed by the National Electricity Rules under the AEMC’s framework — involves multiple stages of studies, and large batteries are still working through how the rules apply to grid-forming versus grid-following inverter technology.

A worked sense of scale helps here:

I’ve kept Orana and Ulinda Park as TBC because the position on those projects has moved on from the figures that were circulating in earlier planning documents, and I’d rather say that plainly than repeat a number that may no longer reflect current applications. Akaysha’s own announcements and any updated connection enquiry data from AEMO’s Inputs, Assumptions and Scenarios Report are the right places to track those.

Grid-forming inverters — why this matters more than it sounds #

This is the part of Akaysha’s story that deserves more attention than it usually gets in general coverage. Most utility-scale batteries built to date use grid-following inverters. They synchronise to the existing grid voltage and frequency — they follow the wave, essentially. Grid-forming inverters do something harder: they can establish and maintain voltage and frequency themselves, without relying on synchronous machines to set the reference.

In a NEM that is losing coal-fired synchronous generation faster than new synchronous capacity is being added, system strength has become a genuine constraint. AEMO’s 2024 Electricity Network Infrastructure Plan (the ENIP, which superseded the Integrated System Plan work) and the associated system strength frameworks spell out the problem in considerable detail. The short version is that some regions of the NEM are already operating under system strength constraints that limit how much inverter-based generation can connect or operate — and grid-forming batteries are one of the technical responses.

Akaysha has been explicit that Waratah will use grid-forming inverter technology. That is a meaningful design choice, not a marketing position. It also means the project sits inside a live technical and regulatory debate about how AEMO assesses and values grid-forming capability, and whether the existing market frameworks adequately compensate for it. AEMO has been working through that question across several consultation processes. The answer, as of mid-2026, is still being worked out — and I think that regulatory uncertainty is one of the underappreciated risks in Akaysha’s pipeline, even with BlackRock capital behind it.

The Capacity Investment Scheme and where Akaysha fits #

The federal government’s Capacity Investment Scheme has been the primary support mechanism for new dispatchable storage in the NEM. We’ve written about whether the CIS is quietly picking winners in terms of technology and project scale, and about how batteries compare to pumped hydro as firming tools. Akaysha’s projects are directly relevant to both questions.

The CIS offers revenue underwriting through contracts for difference — it sets a floor and ceiling on the revenue a project earns, which matters enormously for project financing. For a battery developer trying to sign project finance debt against uncertain spot market revenues and FCAS prices that can swing enormously, a CIS contract changes the conversation with lenders. Akaysha has been active in CIS tender rounds, and Waratah has been cited in connection with that support mechanism, though the precise contract terms are not public at the level of detail that would let you model the project economics from the outside.

It is worth being clear about the broader comparison: pumped hydro projects like Snowy 2.0 offer longer duration storage but have faced significant cost and schedule overruns. Two-hour batteries like Waratah are better suited to the short-duration arbitrage and FCAS markets; they are not direct substitutes for the multi-hour firming that a hydro project provides. Anyone spruiking batteries as a complete answer to firming without specifying the duration assumption is skipping the hard part of the analysis.

Revenue model: FCAS, energy arbitrage, and the unknown #

How does a 350 MW / 700 MWh battery actually make money in the NEM? There are a few layers. The most immediate has been frequency control ancillary services — FCAS — where large batteries have demonstrated they can respond faster than any thermal plant and capture significant market value. The Victorian Big Battery (Moorabool, near Geelong) demonstrated this clearly after its 2021 commissioning, and the data from that project informed a lot of the investment thesis for projects like Waratah.

Energy arbitrage — buying cheap overnight or midday solar-heavy periods and discharging at evening peak — is the other pillar. The NEM’s duck curve, with solar suppressing midday prices and spiking the evening ramp, is genuinely well-suited to a two-hour battery if the spread is there. The spread has not always been there, and FCAS prices compressed as more batteries entered the market through 2024 and 2025. This is the central tension: the revenue case that justified the first few large batteries starts to erode as the fleet grows, because batteries are their own best competitors in the FCAS market.

That is not unique to Akaysha — it applies to every large battery developer in the NEM. But it does mean that BlackRock’s underwriting assumption, whatever it is, has to account for a market that looks different in 2030 than it did in 2022. The CIS underwrite exists partly to manage exactly this risk.

Akaysha in the broader transition picture #

Sitting alongside the Squadron Energys and the AGL-scale developers, Akaysha is a relatively focused asset. It is not a vertically integrated retailer, not a transmission company, not an infrastructure fund with forty asset classes. It is, essentially, a battery developer with serious capital backing and a technical thesis about grid-forming inverters. That focus is a strength in execution; it may become a constraint if the revenue environment for two-hour batteries in New South Wales tightens more than the models project.

I’ve spent enough time reading AEMO’s quarterly energy dynamics reports to know that the NEM’s need for storage capacity is not in serious doubt. What is in doubt is the exact price at which that storage gets compensated, and whether the regulatory frameworks — the system strength frameworks, the FCAS market design, the CIS contract terms — will evolve fast enough to keep the investment case intact as the fleet scales. Akaysha is essentially a bet that they will.

There is a chess analogy I keep coming back to, probably because I played too much of it in my twenties: developing a strong piece to a good square is necessary but not sufficient. The question is whether the position around it develops in a way that lets the piece function. Waratah is a strong piece. The square looks good. The position is still being played.

For more context on how firming technologies compare in the NEM, our piece on pumped hydro versus big batteries covers the duration question in some depth. And if you want the policy architecture that underpins most of this investment, the Capacity Investment Scheme analysis is a reasonable starting point. AEMO’s own Integrated System Plan publications remain the most rigorous public document on where the NEM is headed, and the ARENA project registry tracks funded storage projects if you want to cross-check pipeline claims against public commitments.

— Anjali Rao, Grid & Storage Correspondent

Photo by Jose Manuel Esp on Unsplash