Community battery for Bondi, wind farm for regional Vic

Residents of Sydney’s beachside suburb of Bondi will be able to share some of the benefits of solar power without their own panels, after it became the latest locality to have a community battery installed.

Renters and apartment dwellers are among those who’ll be able to access a program linking households to Ausgrid’s centralized system of nine community batteries, saving significant power costs.

Launched by Ausgrid under the federal government’s Community Batteries for Household Solar program, and supported in partnership with Origin Energy and Energy Australia, the project could save some customers more than $200 a year.

Meanwhile the federal government has signed off on a new wind farm in western Victoria that will power more than 200,000 homes.

The battery program is a huge win for the community and will accelerate the shift to cleaner, cheaper and more reliable renewable energy, local Wentworth MP Allegra Spender said.

“Renters and apartment dwellers have been locked out of lower power bills for too long, but the launch of ‘Energy Storage as Service’ will finally enable them to share in the benefits of Australia’s rooftop solar revolution,” she said.

Ms Spender and Energy Minister Chris Bowen unveiled the energy infrastructure and ‘energy storage as a service’ at Bondi in Sydney’s east on Saturday.

The program is the next stage in the evolution of community batteries, Mr Bowen said.

“We need grid-scale batteries, big, huge megawatt-scale batteries, which are important for the grid, but we also need community batteries,” he said.

“We can begin to see the direct financial benefits for customers of having batteries like these across the network.”

Allowing customers to store electricity locally reduces their need to buy energy from the wider grid, Ausgrid chief executive Marc England said.

“Eligible customers in the vicinity of Ausgrid’s community batteries use the network less and therefore pay less in network charges,” Mr England said.

Federal Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek on Saturday approved a new 55-turbine wind farm in Horsham which will generate enough energy to power 202,000 Victorian homes.

Located at the Wimmera Plains Energy Facility, the project also includes a large-scale energy storage battery that can store up to 400 megawatt-hours of dispatchable energy.

​It will save the equivalent of 370,000 cars each year in greenhouse gas emissions and will support almost 300 jobs while limiting natural destruction to less than a hectare, the minister said.