S Australia has reaffirmed its dear for big Tesla battery projects with an AUD $five million (USD $iii.7 million) grant for a 25-megawatt, 52-megawatt-hour plant.

The funding, which is being matched by an equal amount from the Australian Renewable Free energy Agency, will go toward the AUD $38 million (USD $28 million) toll of developing a Tesla Powerpack-based free energy storage organization for Infigen Energy.

The system will be built next to a 278.v-megawatt current of air farm at Lake Bonney and connected to Australia's National Electricity Market via a substation endemic past ElectraNet, Infigen said in a press release. Structure is due to start in the coming weeks, the company said.

Infigen CEO Ross Rolfe said that the battery plant would help his visitor aggrandize its supply contracts from the Lake Bonney current of air farm to additional commercial and industrial customers in Southward Commonwealth of australia.

The plant will allow Infigen "to house at to the lowest degree an boosted xviii megawatts of ability depending on the customer load profile," said the company.

It will as well provide coincident services, ensuring increased security and quality of supply and fast response services "as required," Infigen said.

The Australian Fiscal Review reported that Infigen had looked at various options to firm up current of air generation, including pumped hydro and gas, before settling on battery engineering science.

The Infigen projection could become Commonwealth of australia'due south 2d-largest battery organisation, after the 129-megawatt-hr Hornsdale Ability Reserve, unless information technology is overtaken by plans for a 120-megawatt, 140-megawatt-60 minutes Tesla constitute in the aforementioned region.

But information technology is only ane of several big battery projects announced in South Commonwealth of australia. In Feb, for instance, Tilt Renewables unveiled plans for a 21-megawatt, 26-megawatt-60 minutes bombardment organisation attached to a solar constitute and wind farm in Snowtown.

The project would exist supported with an AUD $7.1 million (USD $5.2 one thousand thousand) regime grant, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation reports, and would exist accompanied by a 300-megawatt, 1.35-gigawatt-hour pumped hydro storage projection.

Tilt Renewables CEO Deion Campbell said the project would be the largest co-located current of air, solar and battery plant in the state.

Besides in South Australia, the electricity transmission company ElectraNet was due this July to take installed a 30-megawatt, 8-megawatt-hour bombardment system at its Dalrymple substation, near Stansbury in the land's Yorke Peninsula region. The project is function funded by the Australian Renewable Energy Agency.

The system volition work with local utility AGL's 90-megawatt Wattle Point Wind Subcontract and rooftop solar PV to provide upwards to two hours of backup ability in the event of whatever interruption to supply from the grid, according to ElectraNet, as well as providing fast frequency response services.

South Australia'due south continuing investments in big bombardment projects seem to point that concerns over Hornsdale'southward impact on the land'south energy market place may have been overblown.

They should also dispel worries that a modify in local government earlier this year might have affected the appetite for energy storage investments. In March elections, the Australian Labor Party was thrown out later sixteen years in ability.

It was replaced past the center-right Liberal Party of Commonwealth of australia, which nether one-time Prime Minister Tony Abbott took a downbeat stance on renewables.

However, in an interview published inRenewEconomy in May, South Australian free energy government minister Dan van Holst Pellekaan pledged to continue supporting the state'southward move toward green energy.

"Nosotros are going to accept the very best of what the former government had to offer in this space, we're going to reject the mistakes that they made, and meliorate on what they had to offer," he said.

Javier Cavada Camino, president of free energy solutions at Wärtsilä, said decreasing renewable energy pricing is making it harder for the South Australian leadership to accept a stance against renewables. "It's unstoppable," he said.

Simply Simon Hackett, engineering science evangelist at the Australian menses battery maker Redflow, told GTM it is important to make certain a focus on lithium-ion does not exclude other energy storage technologies.

"A primary attribute of government policy in the energy storage realm must be that government support programs are structured in a engineering science-neutral manner, to ensure the deployment of the most appropriate technology in each of the sectors in which information technology is applied," he said.