Price of energy storage equipment for power stations in Australia

Our smartly designed, IP-rated battery energy storage systems (BESS) are adaptable, easy to transport and install, and suitable for Australia's harshest conditions. Designed to the highest standards, our units can be sized from 1MW to 200MW ensuring flexibility, modularity and redundancy at 11/22/33KV output voltages.

Australia's electricity supply needs to reach a minimum of 50% renewable energy by 2030 and zero emissions well before 2050 to efectively tackle climate change. Energy storage technologies are a vital complementary technology to renewable energy enabling Australia to transition to a clean, reliable, afordable electricity grid.

The energy cost (the reservoirs) amount to about $70 per kilowatt hour. Thus, the expected cost of a 1,000 megawatt pumped hydro energy storage system with a head of 600 m and 14 hours of storage is about $1.8 billion. There are effectively an unlimited number of suitable sites for pumped hydro energy storage.

As a result, South Australia is already pursuing a number of energy storage projects including the Tesla-Neoen battery that began operating in December last year, solar thermal power with storage and potentially the world's second pumped hydro plant using seawater.

A study at the Australian National University (ANU) identified about 3,000 low-cost potential sites around Australia with head typically better than 300 metres and storage larger than one gigalitre (see Figure 3). The sites identified have a combined energy storage potential of around 163,000 GWh.

Australian electricity options are short briefings on the principal energy sources and storage options being debated in Australia, including: coal, natural gas, wind, nuclear, photovoltaics (PV) and pumped hydro energy storage (PHES).