A 238.5MW/477MWh standalone battery energy storage system (BESS) has been commissioned in South Australia, and an optimisation deal signed for another of the state’s largest BESS assets.
In big project news from the Australian state targeting 100% net renewable energy on its grid by 2027, French independent power producer (IPP) Neoen’s 477MWh Blyth Battery project is nearing commercial operation.
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Meanwhile, Australian infrastructure owner and operator Epic Energy has hired Habitat Energy as the route-to-market optimiser for its 100MW/200MWh Mannum BESS.
Blyth Battery to enable ‘baseload renewables’ contract for BHP
System integrator New HOrizons Ahead (NHOA) Energy and engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) contractor Elecnor Australia have completed construction and commissioning of Neoen’s Blyth Battery.
The IPP closed financing on Blyth in 2023, and it is located about 60km away from the company’s Goyder South Stage 1 Wind Farm. Neoen has a 70MW power purchase agreement (PPA) in place with mining company BHP, which the BESS will help it deliver. The batteries will also play into merchant opportunities in the National Electricity Market (NEM).
NHOA said that Blyth Battery’s construction and commissioning were completed on time and budget. It also met compliance requirements for South Australia’s Network Service Provider (NSP) Electranet and the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO). The project was also registered as a bidirectional unit in AEMO’s Market Management System in August last year, giving it the right to both charge from and discharge to, the grid.
Grid code compliance in Australia, including the Generator Performance Standard (GPS) certification that all grid-connected energy resources need to get from AEMO, is often cited as among the toughest in the world (Premium access).
For Neoen, currently the target of a US$6.7 billion takeover deal by Canadian asset manager Brookfield, Australia is a key market for its battery storage activities, which saw a 66% year-on-year rise in revenues from 2023-2024, going some way toward offsetting 9% falls in annual wind power revenues and 3% in solar PV.
The company is the owner of the landmark Hornsdale Power Reserve project in South Australia, the state and country’s first hundred-megawatt-scale BESS, while it has other significant BESS projects in construction or operation in states and territories including Victoria, Western Australia and Queensland and the Australian Capital Territory (ACT).
The cost of the Blyth Battery was previously given as around AU$337 million (US$208.5 million), and it received AU$17 million in funding support from an Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) competitive solicitation to equip it with grid-forming advanced inverters, enabling it to deliver network stability services such as inertia.
Neoen Australia CEO Jean-Christophe Cheylus said the company is “excited to start supporting BHP under our innovative renewable energy baseload contract.”
The IPP’s Goyder South wind power plant is part of Goyder South Renewables Zone which is being developed to comprise 1,200MW of wind, 600MW of solar PV and 900MW of batteries.
Habitat Energy to optimise 200MWh Mannum BESS
UK-headquartered route-to-market (RTM) specialist Habitat Energy said yesterday that it will optimise Epic Energy’s Mannum BESS.
Built adjacent to Epic Energy’s 39MWp Stage 2 Mannum Solar Farm, for which Habitat also manages market optimisation, the 100MW/200MWh BESS is due to go into commercial operation later this year.
Habitat Energy’s software platform, Evolve, overseen by the company’s traders, will enable bidding in the NEM. In an announcement of a deal to optimise a 200MW/200MWh BESS project in the ERCOT, Texas, market in the US a few days ago, Habitat Energy emphasised that its trades, while backed by Evolve’s AI-driven price forecasting and optimisation software, still benefit from human oversight.
There has been some debate globally in the BESS industry recently about so-called ‘Black Box’ automated AI bidding solutions and their perceived limitations versus software combined with human traders who have strategic insight and real-world trading experience.
The value of smart trading strategies was a hot topic of discussion at the Energy Storage Summit Australia 2025, held in Sydney last month by our publisher Solar Media. Wendel Hortop, Australia lead at market intelligence firm Modo Energy, noted in a presentation that in the NEM last year—the country’s biggest interconnected market spanning five states and territories—11% of total revenues for BESS assets came on just one day, 5 August, while four of the top ten highest-earning battery assets were in South Australia.
