Hazelwood site render

ENGIE, Macquarie’s Green Investment Group (GIG), and Fluence have partnered to deliver Australia’s largest privately-funded and owned utility-scale battery. The project is fully committed and will connect to existing network infrastructure to support the transition to renewable energy at the site of the former Hazelwood Power Station in the Latrobe Valley.

Providing 150MW/150MWh of flexible energy, the Hazelwood Battery Energy Storage System has the capacity to store the equivalent of an hour of energy generation from the rooftop solar systems of 30,000 homes and will play a critical role in increasing renewable energy capacity in Victoria, while delivering further grid stability for the state.

The project, funded by ENGIE and GIG, will be built, operated and maintained over a 20-year period by Fluence – a global market leader in energy storage products and services and digital applications for renewables and storage.

It also represents the next major milestone in ENGIE’s commitment to repurposing the former Hazelwood Power Station, which was decommissioned in 2017, to create a long-term sustainable asset. As an established power generation site with access to 1,600MW of dormant transmission capacity, Hazelwood is uniquely placed to accommodate this first stage of the battery.

Construction of the Hazelwood Battery is already underway and network connection agreements have been executed, with the battery scheduled to be operational by November 2022 to align with increasing demand in the summer months. The battery’s innovative design and the Hazelwood site’s unique location provide the flexibility to scale up storage capacity quickly and cost-effectively in order to respond to network and market demand, including additional capacity for future contracts.

“ENGIE’s long-term commitment to Hazelwood and the Latrobe Valley started as a power station operator, then as an investor in a multi-million-dollar rehabilitation project and now as the builder and owner of a new energy asset that helps with the decarbonisation of the energy system,” ENGIE ANZ chief executive Augustin Honorat says.