South Australia's landmark Hornsdale Power Reserve battery storage system was recently upgraded and will be able to provide inertial support to the grid.
The project, owned by French developer Neoen and built in partnership with system provider Tesla, was completed and commissioned in just 100 days back in 2018.Neoen recently said that the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) has approved it to provide vital system services.
As variable renewable energy from wind and solar power increases on the grid, so does the inertial demand on the system that is so important to keep the network stable. The rotors of conventional power systems with thermal generators, such as coal generation, provide this inertia, and today, advanced inverter technology can generate system inertia instead of the traditional way.
Blair Reynolds of inverter manufacturer SMA explains how it works: Grid-tie inverters provide a "synthetic inertia" that mimics the way generators in fossil-fueled power plants produce AC waveforms, allowing the grid to operate reliably at a single frequency.
With 64 percent renewable energy on the South Australian grid, the need for this inertia is urgent.
Neoen said Tesla's Virtual Machine Mode (VMM) has been successfully upgraded at the 150MW/193.5MWh Hornsdale Power Reserve (HPR) plant, adding to the range of application scenarios that can be executed by battery storage systems, and it has previously been involved in the energy arbitrage and frequency control assisted services (FCAS) markets.
The developer says HPR can now provide 2,000MW of system inertia, equivalent to a 15% shortfall across the South Australian grid.
The upgrade was financially supported by the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA), which provided A$8 million and A$15 million to the South Australian government over five years under the existing Renewable Energy Integration and Energy Storage programs, respectively.
"HPR was revolutionary when it was commissioned in 2017 and will continue to play its pioneering role in the future," said Tom Koutsantonis, South Australia's Minister for Energy and Mines.
"It is leading the way in inverter-based technology innovation - paving the way for more much-needed large-scale energy storage projects in Australia and other countries."
A landmark project in Australia's clean energy development, HPR has also received some financial support from the National Clean Energy Finance Commission.
AEMO hopes to support a maximum instantaneous renewable energy share of 100 percent in the National Electricity Market (NEM) it oversees by 2025, and AEMO CEO Daniel Westerman said the grid-scale battery storage system "demonstrates that it can support Australia in seizing the energy transition opportunity of the century ".
This is a big step forward, and many more battery storage systems that provide system inertia will follow
In October 2021, testing of grid technology began at the 50MW/75MWh Wallgrove battery storage system in New South Wales, a Tesla-supplied system built by Lumea, a subsidiary of transmission operator Transgrid.
Tesla competitor Fluence is piloting a 50MW/50MWh battery storage system in Broken Hill, New South Wales, where advanced inverters will use Fluence's similar virtual synchronizer (VSM) model to support weaker parts of the grid.
In fact, ARENA is currently offering $100 million in funding for advanced inverter + battery storage projects. ARENA said earlier this month that it received 54 proposals from which it will shortlist 12 projects totaling 3050MW/7000MWh for decision and public announcement by the end of this year.
In addition, ARENA said it will support utility Edify Energy's battery storage project at Darlington Point in western New South Wales, which will provide $6.6 million in funding.
Edify is using the Tesla Megapack battery storage system to build three systems totaling 150MW/300MWh, of which one 25MW/50MWh system will provide inertia to the grid.
