Cross-party backing for a new fossil fuel power plant in Australia has been criticised by experts and clean energy industry voices, who have said battery storage would be a more viable option to provide peaking capacity.
Construction has started on BHP’s “first off-grid large-scale renewable energy project”, totalling 38 MW of solar power and a 10.1MW/5.4 MWh battery energy storage system (BESS), at two nickel mines in Western Australia which supply Tesla for use in electric vehicle (EV) batteries.
Battery storage companies raised 159% more corporate funding in 2021 than in 2020, with funding activity reflecting the “significance of battery energy storage in the energy transition,” analysis group Mercom Capital has said.
Two new battery projects announced this week will see mining sites in Western Australia and the South American nation of Suriname greatly reduce their dependency on fossil fuel generation.
Hydrostor believes it can get three advanced-compressed air energy storage (A-CAES) projects totalling 1.1GW/8.7GWh built in California and Australia by 2026, but regulators elsewhere need to remove barriers for A-CAES and other long-duration storage technologies to thrive, the company’s CEO has said.
In the Philippines, Fluence has brought into commercial operation the first project in an order totalling nearly half a gigawatt, for vertically-integrated power company SMC Global Power Holdings (SMCGPH).
“Extensive works” to house two 125MW turbines have begun at Australia’s first new pumped hydro energy storage (PHES) plant in nearly 40 years, developer Genex Power has said.
Maoneng has been granted development approval for its proposed 240MWp/480MWh battery energy storage system (BESS) in Victoria, Australia, which in megawatt-hour terms will be the country’s biggest project of its type so far.
The start of work on a hybrid renewable energy project combining large-scale wind power, solar PV and energy storage, marks “an important moment in South Australia’s clean energy transition,” the state’s energy minister has said.
