NSW firming tender finishes with 3GWh of batteries operating
Serguey Asael Shinder2 min readThe second firming round under the New South Wales Electricity Infrastructure Roadmap is now fully operational: four projects, about 3GWh of dispatchable capacity, roughly 8% of the state's FY2026 summer peak demand, and more than AU$1.8 billion (about US$1.26 billion) of investment. The contracts — Long-Term Energy Service Agreements — went to projects delivered by AGL Energy, Akaysha Energy, Iberdrola Australia and Enel X, selected back in November 2023.
The detail worth pausing on is that every winning project is a battery. The tender was technology-neutral about how the firming is provided; the market answered with storage alone. Two years ago that outcome would have been an argument. It is now a procurement result, with the plants running.
The scheme's operator is not finished: tenders are open for an indicative 2.5GW of generation and a further 12GWh of long-duration storage, with another generation round expected in the fourth quarter and a firming round in early 2027.
What it means
Delivery is the measurement, and this one delivered. Announced megawatt-hours are cheap; a round where the awards were made in 2023 and every project is operating in 2026 is the rarer artefact. Compare it against any capacity mechanism in your own jurisdiction on that axis, rather than on the size of its headline.
Technology neutrality produced a monoculture, and that is a real question for the next round. Four for four batteries means the tender design rewarded exactly what batteries do well - fast, short-duration firming - and nothing that needs to run for days. The follow-on tender explicitly targets long duration, which reads like the scheme noticing the same thing.
And "8% of summer peak" is the number to argue about. It is a usefully honest framing - firming measured against the hour that hurts rather than against annual energy - and it is also a reminder of scale: a billion and a half dollars buys under a tenth of one state's peak.