Battery Energy Storage Systems – moving Australia forward

The energy transition remains at the forefront of the Australian energy sector’s mind as we enter 2025. Recent years have seen an uptake of renewable generation connecting to the grid as the push towards “greener” and “cleaner” energy resources have brought about the retirement of coal plants in favour of solar farms and wind farms. Last year’s connections process trends suggest the focus has now shifted away from building more renewables plants and towards the utilisation of existing generation infrastructure through storage solutions.

According to Australian Energy Market Operator’s (AEMO) September 2024 Connections Scorecard¹ there are more GWs of Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESSs) in the connections pipeline than any other technology type. This indicates Australian developers and asset operators are getting serious about leveraging renewable energy on the grid, decreasing the curtailment of renewables, keeping prices down during low renewable generation and providing additional system strength support. However, to unlock these many benefits, BESS proponents must first connect to the grid, a traditionally lengthy and complex process.

AEMO and the Clean Energy Council (CEC) launched the Connections Reform Initiative (CRI) in 2021 with the aim to address issues with the network connections process, namely long delays and an increasingly complex process. The Streamlined Connection Process (SCP) is one outcome of the CRI that has been put into action. The SCP program aims to identify improvement opportunities across the connections process to reduce the overall timeframe it takes a plant to achieve full operational output.

As part of this program, State Governments, Market Operators, and Network Service Providers have formed dedicated SCP teams of project managers and engineers. These dedicated resources are focused on delivering large scale battery projects in the range of hundreds of megawatts in the coming months.

CutlerMerz has been engaged as part of these dedicated teams to ensure they have the necessary capability and capacity to achieve the expedited timeframe. As part of the program, we have been working to identify where activities can be paralleled, and regulatory review timeframes can be decreased to achieve a reduced number of package resubmissions for the connection application and registration phases of the connection process. This uptake in engagement between the key stakeholders enables the identification of areas in the standard connections process that can be improved upon to ensure all future connecting plants benefit from the program.

[1] AEMO NEM Connections Scorecard – Sep 2024