Grid-forming inverters: why the grid suddenly needs them
Two hundred milliseconds. That’s roughly how long a weak part of the grid has to arrest a fault before protection systems start tripping things out in sympathy, cascading into the kind of event AEMO doesn’t like writing incident reports about. A spinning coal or gas turbine does this almost by accident, because physics gives it […]
Gas peakers versus big batteries: the firming maths in 2026
I spent a wet Tuesday last month at a community consultation session in the Hunter, where a council planner asked the developer of a proposed battery project a question I’ve heard a dozen times in different accents: “why not just build the gas plant, it’s cheaper.” The developer didn’t have a thirty-second answer. Neither do […]
Genex Power under J-Power: what the Kidston bet looks like now
Drive the gravel road into the old Kidston gold mine in north Queensland and you come over a rise to find two enormous water-filled pits looking at each other across about 700 metres of ridge. That gap, and the roughly 220-metre fall between the upper and lower pit, is the entire engineering premise behind Genex […]
Virtual power plants: the 2026 reality check
A retailer rang a Blackburn North customer at 4.40pm on a stinking hot Tuesday in late January this year and asked, politely, to borrow four kilowatt-hours out of her Tesla Powerwall for the next ninety minutes. She said yes, because she’d ticked a box eighteen months earlier and mostly forgotten about it. That one exchange, […]
CopperString 2032: Queensland’s long bet on the north-west
1,100 kilometres. That’s roughly the length of 275kV transmission line Powerlink now has to build between Townsville and Mount Isa, give or take the final route adjustments still being worked through with landholders. It’s longer than the distance from Sydney to Melbourne, strung through some of the emptiest country in the National Electricity Market, to […]
VNI West: the interconnector stuck in a paddock dispute
Kerang’s saleyards aren’t far from where AusNet wants to run a 500kV double-circuit line across some of the best irrigated cropping and dairy country in northern Victoria. I drove through there back in autumn, and the orange “No Transmission” signs were still up on fence lines from Lalbert through to Wedderburn, two years after the […]
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 […]