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Australia’s biggest battery ready to prevent NSW power outages
13/8/2025
News
The first 350 MW/700 MWh of the Waratah ‘super battery’ has come online in the New South Wales (NSW) electricity grid to help protect it against emergencies.
At 850 MW/1,680 MWh, the Waratah battery will be the world’s most powerful in terms of power and energy storage capacity. It is located at the site of the former Munmorah coal-fired power station, about 100 km north of Sydney Australia. The battery was commissioned by the local government as part of plans to upgrade the state’s grid with clean energy as its coal-fired power plants are retired. Three out of NSW’s four remaining coal-fired power plants are slated to close by 2035.
Once fully operational later this year, the Waratah battery will provide continuous active power capacity of at least 700 MW and a guaranteed usable energy storage capacity of at least 1,400 MWh, says battery operator Akaysha Energy. It explains that the ‘oversizing’ of the super battery allows for its degradation over time, ensuring security of supply in the future.
The battery takes two hours to charge and can discharge its full power capacity into the grid in a matter of seconds, the company adds, minimising disruption to electricity supplies during emergencies.
According to EnergyCo, the NSW government body responsible for overseeing delivery of Waratah, the project is actually ‘more than just a battery’. In addition to the battery energy storage system that gives the project its name, it also includes an overarching control system, arrangements for paired generation services that help balance the grid during a power line outage, and upgrades to the state’s existing transmission network.
‘The Waratah super battery project is a system integrity protection scheme (SIPS). It allows transmission lines supplying the Hunter, Sydney and Illawarra regions to run at a greater capacity. It does this in part by having a utility scale battery on standby to inject power into the grid in the case of a power line outage due to a lightning strike, bushfire or other major events,’ explains EnergyCo. ‘In such events, the SIPS control system will send a signal to the battery to deliver more energy to the grid, while simultaneously instructing paired generators to reduce their output as necessary to balance the flow of electricity.’
The Waratah project will continue to play this role until the Hunter transmission project comes online in early 2028, which will allow electricity to flow from inland renewable energy zones to the rest of NSW, adds EnergyCo.
It also reports that the Waratah super battery can also play other roles on the grid, including discharging energy during periods of high demand, which ‘helps put downward pressure on wholesale electricity prices’.
According to NSW Minister for Climate Change and Energy Penny Sharpe, the Waratah super battery is ‘a crucial addition’ to state infrastructure. ‘As it comes online, it will help power our homes and businesses while stabilising the grid to avoid blackouts.’
