Tasmania’s Battery of the Nation bet hinges on one cable
Drive the Lyell Highway out past Derwent Bridge and you’re in Hydro Tasmania’s back yard, a chain of lakes and dams built up over nearly a century that most mainland readers have never heard of and that quietly does something no other state can claim: Tasmania ran on more than 95 per cent renewable generation […]
Waratah Super Battery: the shock absorber finally earning its keep
850 megawatts of power, 1,680 megawatt-hours of energy, sitting on a former coal ash site at Munmorah on the NSW Central Coast, and for most of its working life it won’t discharge a single megawatt-hour to the market at all. That’s the detail about the Waratah Super Battery that tends to get lost whenever someone […]
What the AEMO Integrated System Plan actually says
Pull up the AEMO Integrated System Plan and the first thing you notice is that almost nobody who quotes it in a press release has read past the executive summary. I say this having sat through two separate industry briefings this year where a chart from the document was shown, confidently, upside down in its […]
Akaysha Energy: the battery developer with no retail brand
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 […]
Borumba pumped hydro: where Queensland’s 2GW bet actually stands
Drive past Lake Borumba on the Mary Valley road out of Gympie and, on the surface, not much has changed in two years. The lake still sits placid behind its existing wall. It’s the upper site, cut into the range above it, where the real work is happening: tunnel boring, access roads, the early civil […]
Central-West Orana REZ: NSW’s first REZ, status check
Drive the Golden Highway out past Dunedoo on a clear morning and you’ll see the survey pegs before you see any steel. I did this run on the bike back in winter, out from Merotherie towards Wellington, and what struck me wasn’t the wind farms already spinning off in the paddocks. It was how much […]
What a capacity factor is, and why it actually matters
I rode out along the Copper Coast Highway past the Snowtown wind farm a few years back, on one of those long spring weekend rides you do out of Adelaide when the legs are willing, and counted eleven turbines standing dead still in a breeze that felt stiff enough to lean a bike into. Nameplate […]
WA’s SWIS grid: an island with no way to call for help
There’s no button in Perth marked ‘call for help.’ If a generator trips on the South West Interconnected System on a stinking February afternoon, there’s no interconnector to lean on, no neighbouring state to lend a few hundred megawatts while things get sorted. The SWIS is generally described as one of the largest electricity systems […]
Snowy 2.0: past $12bn, Florence stuck, and the timeline again
Somewhere under the Snowy Mountains right now, a tunnel boring machine named Florence is grinding through rock that has, at various points over the past couple of years, refused to behave the way the geotechnical reports said it would. That single fact (a machine the size of a small apartment block stuck in fractured, water-bearing […]
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 […]