Australia’s Quinbrook readies eight-hour BESS rollout for 24/7 renewable power

Australia’s Quinbrook plans to deploy an initial 3 GW/24 GWh of its new EnerQB lithium-ion BESS, developed with Chinese battery giant CATL, to support major new industrial hubs in the states of Queensland, New South Wales (NSW), and the Northern Territory.

Quinbrook said the BESS will be teamed with large-scale solar and wind projects to serve existing partners and new commercial and industrial customers at sites across the country, including in Brisbane, Gladstone, and Townsville.

The company said the longer-duration storage solution, when paired with solar, is capable of delivering one of the most competitively priced power options available and will help support-value adding industries in Australia.

Solar-powered production

David Scaysbrook, co-founder and managing partner of Quinbrook, said the EnerQB has been specifically designed to cost effectively time shift more stored solar electricity than ever before, providing industrial customers with the ability to power a double eight-hour-shift manufacturing operation entirely from solar.

“It is a game changer in terms of what it does to the cost of electricity,” Scaysbrook said. “When you put it with solar in places like Queensland, that has very high levels of irradiation, it allows us to capture more solar, more hours of the day. We can cost-effectively shift that solar energy. This will be materially more cost competitive than existing batteries. This isn’t the holy grail but it’s getting us closer to 24/7 renewable power.”

Described by Quinbrook as the “world’s first” eight-hour duration lithium-ion battery, the EnerQB is the result of two years of design and development alongside battery industry heavyweight CATL.

Quinbrook Asia-Pacific Managing Director and Regional Leader Brian Restall said the energy storage solution is much more energy dense than existing technology, adding that advance was the result of design enhancements rather than a shift in CATL’s cell technology.

Containers reconfigured

“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.”

Restall acknowledged that there are products that run as eight-hour batteries in Australia, but said, “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. It’s not a specific design for an eight-hour battery. They are almost 80% less energy dense than the new [EnerQB] design and they have 4% to 5% higher parasitic load than the new design.”

Quinbrook said the EnerQB is an evolution of the solar and battery storage projects it has built in the United States and United Kingdom, which use a four-hour battery energy storage solution for the time shifting of solar power to deliver cost competitive renewable power.

“This battery is not a battery that you quickly cycle and arbitrage and play the market,” Restall said, with reference to the practice of charging when grid electricity is cheap and discharging during periods of high grid demand. “That’s not what this does. It does one thing every day. Same thing every day – full charge and full discharge when the sun goes down.”

First systems

Quinbrook said the initial 3 GW of EnerQB projects is already largely committed, with the first of the batteries to be installed at the company’s Supernode battery and data center project in Brisbane, which has now been expanded to include a fourth stage.

Construction has already commenced on the first of the Supernode stages, that will deliver an eventual 760 MW/3,096 MWh nameplate capacity. The fourth stage will add an additional 250 MW/2 GWh capacity and is expected to be delivered in 2026.

“We’re expanding Supernode from three stages to four stages,” Scaysbrook said. “We’ve already got the land, already got the permits, and got the interconnection application underway. Our Gladstone project will be done in conjunction with the timing of our solar projects that are still in the planning stage. Similarly for Townsville and we do have customer demand for up to 1 GW of these projects in NSW. We’re looking at sites, right now, in NSW.”

Scaysbrook said the EnerQB solution offers a range of benefits not only to Quinbrook projects and customers but also to enhance grid stability and support the federal government’s Future Made in Australia initiative.

“Australia’s green superpower ambitions are entirely dependent upon how cheap we can make power in Australia,” he said. “That is the on-off switch for a Future Made in Australia. Large-scale renewables, particularly solar teamed with battery storage, is the engine room of the energy transition. It is the anchor technology combination to deliver low-cost power.”

From pv magazine Australia.