The climate crisis, how the giant battery that Australia has begun building works

by 2025 to’Australia It will equip itself with a bigger and stronger one Battery Gardens world, capable of ensuring brutal power 600 MW / 1,600 MW/hour. To achieve ability Melbourne Renewable Energy Hub (MREH)This is the name assigned to “Super battery“Suffice it to say that he can be well fed 200,000 homes For two and a half hours during the most demanding periods for the electricity network. But this is only the first phase of the project, where the battery complex can be expanded to ensure ultimate power 1.2 gigawatts (1200 MW) for a minimum of 2400 MW per hour. As the name suggests, the massive infrastructure will be built in Melbourne, state Victoria. More precisely in Milton, on land in the western area of ​​the city, where at the end of November 2023 Construction work has begun to lay the foundations of the project. This is made possible thanks to a partnership between the Victorian Government’s State Electricity Commission (SEC) – which is contributing $245 million – and Equis Renewables Australia, a subsidiary of the Singapore headquarters.

The first part of the super battery, expected to be completed by 2025, will rely on three separate complexes, each equipped with 200 MW (One for four hours or 800 MWh of power and two for two hours or 400 MWh). like Defined by regenerative economics The agreement signed by the two business partners stipulates that the 400 MWh battery components will be 70 percent owned by Equis and 30 percent by SEC, while the 800 MWh battery will be approximately half-owned (51 percent by Equis and 49 percent by SEC). .

Australia’s infrastructure will have batteries as its core unit Tesla Megapack battery energy storage systems (Pace), similar to that used in building Cantilever Energy Storage (KES) In Kapolei on the island of Oahu, Hawaii. Each Tesla Megapack is a large energy accumulator capable of storing up to 3.9 megawatt hours (MWh), which is Lithium-ion battery It weighs 23 tons and is slightly smaller than standard containers. In Hawaii the final structure will consist of 158 Tesla Megapack cars, with a total of more than 560 megawatt hours of energy. The Australian infrastructure will be much larger and more robust, given that it will be able to be relied upon well into its final phase 444 Tesla Megapack, totaling 1,600 MWh. The total capacity will be 1,720 MWh, but as shown in The Renewable Economy, the connection points bring the final calculation down to 1,600 MWh.

The installation of such infrastructure in Australia is necessary to (partly) compensate for the future closure of Power plant The Loy Yang A coal-fired plant provides 4.5 gigawatts of power. The plant is scheduled to be completed in 2035. The Melbourne Renewable Energy Center is just one of the virtuous initiatives created by the Australian government to achieve key energy goals. Renewable energy By 2030. In fact, the super battery will be connected to the grid Wind farms And SolarContinuously storing huge amounts of… green energy To be distributed to hundreds of thousands of private and public buildings.

Pieces CO2 emissions And others Greenhouse gases (eg methane) related Fossil fuels It is considered of fundamental importance to combat Climate change and achieving climate neutrality goals – “net zero” – by 2050. Without these concrete steps towards achieving our goal Renewable energy sourcesScientists estimate that we will be doomed to live in a world that is much warmer than it is now 2.7°C compared to the pre-industrial era by the end of the century, with disastrous consequences for the environment and humanity as a whole. But right now, according to recent UN research, we are not reducing fossil fuel consumption, we are doubling it.