Pumped hydro versus batteries: what actually firms the grid
Two thousand megawatt-hours. That’s roughly what Genex Power’s Kidston pumped hydro scheme, built into an old gold mine near Georgetown in north Queensland, is designed to deliver at 250 megawatts of output, running flat out for eight hours. Compare that with the Victorian Big Battery near Geelong, rated at 300 megawatts but only 450 megawatt-hours […]
Renewable Energy Zones: the plan behind the pushback
Drive the Golden Highway out past Dunedoo on a quiet Sunday and you’ll see the survey pegs before you see any turbines. Orange tape on fence posts, a contractor’s ute parked on a verge, a paddock with a easement corridor mown through the middle of it. That’s what a Renewable Energy Zone looks like in […]
Gas peakers versus big batteries: who firms the grid?
Six-fifteen on a still, hot evening in late January. Rooftop solar has fallen off a cliff, air conditioners across three states are pulling hard, and AEMO’s dispatch engine is hunting for the next few hundred megawatts in five-minute intervals. Somewhere a gas turbine at Tallawarra or Uranquinty is spinning up. Somewhere else, a battery the […]
Grid-forming inverters: why the grid suddenly needs them
On 28 September 2016, South Australia lost every one of its large synchronous generators within about seven seconds, and the state blacked out. AEMO’s final report into that event, Black System South Australia 28 September 2016, is still the document every system engineer in this country has read at least twice. It’s the reason we’re […]
Kidston pumped hydro: the mine that became a battery
Two hundred and fifty megawatts, up to eight hours’ worth of it, sitting in a hole in the ground that used to produce gold. That’s the pitch for Kidston Pumped Storage Hydro, and after years of slipping dates it is finally in the phase where the numbers start to matter more than the promises: commissioning. […]
Virtual power plants explained: MW, MWh and the fine print
Here’s a number to sit with: AGL’s virtual power plant fleet and Origin’s Loop VPP each now coordinate tens of thousands of household batteries and solar systems across the grid, but on any given afternoon the amount of power they can actually push back into the network at the same moment is a fraction of […]
Transmission versus distribution: who owns the poles and wires
Drive along the Hume Highway between Yass and Wagga and you’ll pass under a line of steel towers strung with conductor thick as your wrist, running at 330,000 volts. Twenty minutes later, in a Wagga side street, you’ll see a wooden pole with a transformer the size of a wheelie bin feeding six houses at […]
South Australia’s renewable energy record: what it hides
On a mild, windy afternoon in late spring, South Australia’s grid can run for hours on nothing but wind and rooftop solar, with gas generators idling in reserve and the local coal fleet a memory going back to 2016. That’s not a projection. AEMO’s own market data has recorded periods where wind and solar have […]
Snowy Hydro: government giant, contested projects, uncertain returns
Snowy 2.0 has been under construction since tunnelling began in earnest in 2021, and five years on, Australians are still waiting. The project’s estimated completion date has moved more than once — the current position, as reflected in Snowy Hydro’s own public communications, is first power sometime in 2028, with full commissioning later still. The […]
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: […]