Ask most households in New South Wales who Akaysha Energy is and you’ll get a blank look. There’s no logo on a bill, no call centre, no retail tariff to compare on a comparison site. Yet drive the backroads near Wallerawang, or follow the transmission easement south of Gunnedah towards the Orana REZ, and you’re within a few kilometres of some of the largest batteries ever connected to the National Electricity Market. That gap between public visibility and physical scale is, I think, the single most interesting thing about this company.
Akaysha Energy is a battery developer, not a retailer or a generator in the traditional sense. It was founded in 2020 by a small team with backgrounds in infrastructure investment and project development, and it went from a standing start to owning the operating contracts on some of the biggest grid-scale batteries in the country inside about four years. In 2024, BlackRock’s infrastructure arm took control of the company in a deal reported to value the business at well over a billion dollars: a figure that tells you how quickly institutional capital decided batteries were no longer a side bet on the energy transition but a core piece of the NEM’s furniture.
Three projects, three different jobs #
The three assets everyone mentions in the same breath (Waratah Super Battery, Orana, and Ulinda Park) aren’t doing the same job, and that distinction matters more than the headline megawatt figures suggest.
Waratah Super Battery, near Munmorah on the NSW Central Coast, was conceived primarily as a system security asset. Its job, in large part, is to absorb a sudden loss of transmission capacity on the main interconnector feeding Sydney, buying operators time to stabilise the grid rather than running an arbitrage strategy across the day. It’s been built with substantial support from the NSW government’s own transmission planning, and its contracted capacity sits in the hundreds of megawatts – let’s be careful with that number, because Waratah’s exact contracted and total capacity has shifted across construction phases, and the figure worth checking is whatever AEMO’s current NEM generation information page lists for registered capacity on the day you’re reading this, not whatever was quoted at financial close.
Orana, out near Wellington in the Central West Orana Renewable Energy Zone, is a different animal: a large standalone battery built to firm the wind and solar coming out of that REZ, charging on cheap midday solar and discharging into the evening ramp. Ulinda Park, further north near Gunnedah, plays a similar role, pairing with the REZ’s transmission build to smooth the lumps that intermittent generation creates on a congested line. Readers who’ve followed our earlier look at how the Central-West Orana REZ status check has evolved will recognise the pattern: transmission gets built late, generation queues up behind it, and batteries get asked to do double duty – both firming and easing the connection queue pressure in the meantime.
Power versus energy, and why the brochure numbers mislead #
Here’s where I’ll put my engineer’s hat on, because this is the bit that gets abused in press releases across the entire battery sector, not just by Akaysha. A battery’s headline figure is almost always quoted in megawatts: the rate at which it can push power onto the grid. But what actually determines how long it can do that job is the megawatt-hour figure, the energy storage capacity, and the ratio between the two (the duration, in hours) is the number that tells you whether a battery is built for frequency response or for evening peak discharge.
A 200MW/400MWh battery can run at full output for two hours before it’s empty. A 200MW/800MWh battery of the same power rating can run for four. Both get described in marketing copy as “a 200 megawatt battery,” and both are doing completely different jobs in the market. Our explainer on what a capacity factor actually means covers a related confusion for generators; batteries have their own version of the same trap, and it’s worth asking, every time a new battery announcement lands, which of the two numbers is doing the heavy lifting in the quoted claim.
Orana and Ulinda Park were both designed with multi-hour duration in mind, consistent with their firming role. Waratah’s configuration leans more towards rapid response given its system security brief. None of this is secret. It’s published in AEMO’s NEM Registration and Exemption List and in the generation information updates AEMO releases periodically, but it rarely survives the trip from a company’s own announcement into a headline.
Grid-forming: the detail that actually matters here #
The more technically significant feature across Akaysha’s portfolio, and the one I’d argue deserves more coverage than it gets, is grid-forming inverter technology. Most batteries connected to the NEM to date use grid-following inverters, which need an existing, stable grid signal to synchronise against. Grid-forming inverters can instead establish their own voltage and frequency reference, which matters enormously as the grid loses synchronous generation from retiring coal units.
Our piece on grid-forming inverters and why the grid suddenly needs them goes into the mechanics, but the short practical version is this: as more of the NEM’s inertia disappears with each coal closure, something has to hold the system’s voltage and frequency steady during a fault. Grid-forming batteries are one of the only proven answers at scale, and Waratah in particular has been positioned, including in AEMO’s own system security work, as an early large-scale test of the technology in Australian conditions.
I’d call this the most consequential thing Akaysha has done, more than the raw capacity numbers. Anyone can build megawatt-hours. Proving grid-forming control works reliably at this scale, in a real system with real faults, is harder and rarer, and it’s a capability the rest of the NEM will need plenty more of as closures at Eraring and elsewhere proceed on schedules that keep moving.
The BlackRock ownership question #
It’s worth sitting with what the 2024 ownership change actually signals. BlackRock didn’t buy Akaysha as a speculative renewables punt. Infrastructure funds of that size buy assets with contracted, predictable cash flows – revenue streams backed by long-term offtake agreements, capacity contracts, or the Capacity Investment Scheme that the federal government has used to underwrite new generation and storage investment. The fact that a fund manager with trillions under management globally wanted this book of assets tells you battery storage in the NEM has moved past the venture-capital phase and into the same asset class as toll roads and airports: boring, in the best sense, with revenue that doesn’t depend on a single technology bet paying off.
That’s a different story to how pumped hydro has fared. Snowy 2.0 and Borumba have both run into cost and timeline blowouts that make headlines regularly; batteries, built in a fraction of the time with modular components shipped largely from overseas manufacturers, have simply been easier for capital to underwrite and easier for developers to deliver on schedule. Readers comparing the two technologies properly should look at our explainer on pumped hydro versus batteries for firming, because the trade-off isn’t really about which is “better”. It’s about duration, site constraints and how quickly you need the asset in the ground.
Where the capacity actually sits in the NEM #
Akaysha’s assets sit inside a broader build-out that the Capacity Investment Scheme has been designed to accelerate, and it’s fair to ask whether government underwriting is now doing more of the work than market pricing alone would. I’ve written elsewhere, in our look at how the Capacity Investment Scheme actually works, about the mechanics of that underwriting: a government-backed floor and ceiling on revenue that reduces the financing risk for exactly the kind of long-duration assets Orana and Ulinda Park represent. Whether that scheme is quietly picking winners among developers, as some critics in the sector have argued, is a fair question, and Akaysha’s rapid rise from a 2020 start-up to a BlackRock-backed portfolio worth well over a billion dollars sits right in the middle of that debate.
My own view, for what it’s worth, is that the scheme’s design is less the problem than its scale. Batteries were always going to win disproportionately under a mechanism built to reward dispatchable, quickly-deployable capacity. That’s not favouritism, that’s the mechanism doing roughly what it says on the label. The more interesting question is whether the generation pipeline behind these batteries, particularly in REZs like Central-West Orana, is actually keeping pace with the storage sitting ready to firm it.
What to watch next #
The practical test for Akaysha over the next couple of years isn’t whether it can win more development approvals: the company’s pipeline, by its own public statements, extends well beyond the three flagship projects already operating or under construction. The test is whether Waratah’s grid-forming performance holds up under real system stress events, the kind AEMO documents after the fact in its quarterly reports, and whether the REZ transmission that Orana and Ulinda Park depend on actually arrives on the schedule state planners have set rather than the schedule transmission projects in this country have tended to keep.
I keep an eye on AEMO’s published generation information updates the way some people check cricket scores: a habit from longer bike rides than I’d like to admit, where there’s nothing to do but think about load curves. The next entries worth watching are the registered capacity figures for Orana’s later stages and whatever AEMO’s engineering teams eventually publish on Waratah’s actual grid-forming performance under load. That’s where the real story sits, not in the next funding round announcement.
For more detail on the regulatory architecture these projects sit inside, see AEMO’s published market data and registration lists and the AER’s network and market performance reporting, both of which track the figures a company’s own press release will understandably round up.
– Anjali Rao, Grid & Storage Correspondent
Photo by dhahi alsaeedi on Unsplash