From pv magazine Energy Storage
State-owned generator Stanwell has announced it has moved to lock in major shifts to the state of Queensland’s grid, as it signed an exclusivity agreement with Quinbrook Infrastructure Partners for the massive Gladstone State Development Area (GSDA) Energy Hub. This area is located some 500 kilometers north of Brisbane.
The latest agreement is a rapid escalation of a recent partnership between the two companies, arriving little more than a month after they made a deal for Quinbrook to work on a 12-month pilot test at the site of the Stanwell coal generator with battery industry heavyweight CATL’s EnerQB battery energy storage system (BESS) technology.
Although announced as being partially designed for shifting solar energy, with CATL providing both new hardware and software, the deal centres on 1,080 MW of open-cycle gas turbines integrated with synchronous condensers, backed by a colossal 780 MW / 6,240 MWh (eight-hour duration) BESS supplied by CATL.
The deal remains in the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) phase, with financials or final timings not detailed.
CATL and Quinbrook’s EnerQB BESS
The EnerQB BESS acting as an eight-hour battery for Quinbrook was first announced back in March, the landmark approach coming after two years of design and development by CATL.
At the time, Quinbrook’s CEO in Australia, Brian Restall, said the EnerQB BESS was much more energy dense than existing technologies, adding that the advance is the result of design enhancements rather than a shift in CATL’s cell technology.
“It is an evolution more in the design of the container,” he said. “It is not to do with the chemistry of the cells, it’s how we do the configuration in the containers to keep the temperature down so it’s got much lower parasitic load.”
“There are other marketing announcements which talk about an eight-hour battery and the configuration but the technology that they are using is a two-hour or four-hour battery designed and run at half speed,” he said. “It’s not a specific design for an eight-hour battery. They are almost 80% less energy dense than the new design and they have 4-5% higher parasitic load than the new design.”
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