The first of two large scale bat­ter­ies that will sup­port Victoria’s ener­gy grid has been unveiled in Ballarat.

Min­is­ter for Ener­gy Lily D’Ambrosio today opened the Bal­larat Ener­gy Stor­age Sys­tem (BESS), locat­ed at the Bal­larat Ter­mi­nal Sta­tion in Warrenheip.

The BESS is a state of the art lithi­um ion large-scale bat­tery that will deliv­er a 30-megawat­t/30-megawatt hour sup­ply which is capa­ble of pow­er­ing more than 20,000 homes for an hour of crit­i­cal peak demand before being recharged.

The BESS will be able to respond to chang­ing grid needs with­in mil­lisec­onds and will oper­ate 24 hours a day, sev­en days a week to sup­port crit­i­cal peak demand.

It’s one of two large-scale bat­ter­ies that are part of the Labor Government’s Ener­gy Stor­age Ini­tia­tive, which is sup­port­ing ener­gy stor­age tech­nolo­gies, dri­ving the devel­op­ment of clean tech­nolo­gies and boost­ing local economies.

The sec­ond large-scale bat­tery is the Tes­la 25 megawatt/​50 mega-watt hour bat­tery which is inte­grat­ed with the Gan­nawar­ra Solar Farm, south-west of Kerang.

This bat­tery will store renew­able ener­gy on site. Deliv­ered by Edi­fy Ener­gy, it is also expect­ed to pro­vide grid sup­port by sum­mer 2018.

With $25 mil­lion of fund­ing pro­vid­ed by the Andrews Labor Gov­ern­ment and the same amount matched by the Aus­tralian Renew­able Ener­gy Agency, these two large-scale bat­ter­ies are the most sophis­ti­cat­ed ener­gy stor­age ini­tia­tives in Australia.

Learn more about Victoria’s Ener­gy Stor­age Ini­tia­tive at ener​gy​.vic​.gov​.au/​b​a​t​t​e​r​i​e​s​-​a​n​d​-​e​n​e​r​g​y​-​s​t​orage