The Great Battery Shift
How Australia’s Silent Giants Will Rewire the Economy
This article is for general information only and is not personal financial advice.
By The Markets IQ
Unless you’ve been living under a coal stack, you’ve probably noticed the chatter.
Australia is changing.
Quiet, odourless, smokeless change.
Big batteries are steadily popping up across the country. They're grid-connected Virtual Power Plants (VPP). And they're now fueling your iced mocha latte maker. Which means they're fueling YOU!
Football-field-sized behemoth projects are being jammed into paddocks and old coal sites across Australia.
The kind of kit that can flick on 500 MW in an instant and eat a gas peaker’s lunch before the turbines even spin up.
This isn’t just an energy story. It’s a financial, social and environmental.
If batteries become the new backbone of the grid, we’re not just replacing plants. We’re minting a whole new class of utility assets.
Think Transurban (ASX:TCL), but instead of charging tolls on a freeway, they’re arbitraging electrons through time.
Let’s lay out the roadmap. Where we are, where it’s heading, and how the money could be made.
Australia’s battery pipeline
In 2017, 'big battery' meant Elon Musk’s South Australian PR stunt. Cute, but hardly system-defining.
But it blew the socks off the naysayers with an incredible performance of speed and reliability.
Good technology doesn't need an excuse to take over. It doesn't need an invitation. It just becomes the obvious choice.
Australia’s battery project pipeline is exploding.
The Clean Energy Council counts 69 committed storage projects totaling 12.5 GW / 32 GWh, with another 8.7 GW / 23.3 GWh under construction. Six more got the green light in Q1 2025 alone, adding 1.5 GW and 5 GWh.
Whenever you see megawatts (MW) or gigawatts (GW) with batteries, it represents the rate at which energy can be charged or discharged. So a higher MW/GW number, means more houses can be powered at once.
Megawatt-hours (MWh) and gigawatt-hours (GWh) are measures of the total amount of energy a battery can store.
This isn’t scattered pilots. It’s an arms race. The prize is only a leadership position in the Australian energy landscape.
Australia’s Battery Storage Project Pipeline (Source: Clean Energy Council)
The monster projects
Take the Waratah Super Battery in NSW. At 850 MW and 1,680 MWh, it will be the largest battery in the southern hemisphere.
Its role is about more than just storage. It's built directly into the state’s system integrity scheme, designed to keep the lights on when coal plants trip.
Origin Energy (ASX:ORG) is building out the Eraring Battery on the site of Australia’s biggest coal plant. When complete by 2027, the facility will deliver more than 700 MW and two GWh of storage, effectively replacing the very coal units it shadows.
Akaysha Energy is building the Orana Battery Energy Storage System in the Central-West Orana Renewable Energy Zone. A substantial 415 MW, 1,660 MWh will backstop the renewable buildout in the region
AGL Energy (ASX:AGL) is no bystander either. It's spending close to $900 million to build a 500 MW, two-hour battery, on the bones of the old Liddell plant. They're calling it the Hunter Energy Hub.
Further north, the AGL Tomago Battery is targeting 500 MW and two GWh hours of storage. The plan is to break dirt in the next few months. The price tag there is estimated at around $815 million.
Over in WA, Synergy is building the Collie Battery Energy Storage System. This project will reach 500 MW and 2,000 MWh, roughly the size of a small town’s electricity needs, and it has been designed specifically to replace coal.
Neoen (EPA:NEOEN), the French renewable developer that made headlines with SA’s original big battery, is pushing hard in WA.
And apparently Collie is a big enough for two monster sized battery projects.
Neoen is rolling out two stages, amounting to 560 MW and 2,240 MWh. Enough to charge and discharge a significant share of the grid.
Kwinana’s first stage, a 100 MW, 200 MWh battery, is ramping up to power 160,000 homes for two hours. Not bad, given WA had roughly a million homes in the 2021 census.
The second stage is even larger, scaling up to 225 MW and 900 MWh.
China Light and Power Company (HKG:0002) subsidiary EnergyAustralia is adding its own pieces to the puzzle.
At Hallett in SA, it is developing a 50 MW, 200 MWh unit that could expand to 150 MW and 600 MWh.
At Mount Piper, NSW, the company is planning a much larger 500 MW, 2,000 MWh project, recycling a coal station into a billion-dollar asset.
The tidal wave of grid-connected battery storage projects tells us that the tech has been proven, and now it's time for these big players to set themselves up for the long haul.
And that means dramatic changes ahead for our energy landscape.
What happens in rich countries like Australia, is bound to follow in developing countries as the price of the tech comes down.
The implications for this are massive, not least for fossil fuels like thermal coal, oil and gas.
By AEMO’s count, the National Electricity Market will need 22 GW of storage by 2030 and 49 GW by 2050, up from about 3 GW today.
Long-duration pumped hydro projects like Snowy 2.0 and Borumba are expected to provide a slice of that capacity, but no more than ten percent.
The overwhelming bulk will likely come from batteries.
And that's a massive opportunity for construction firms, copper miners, battery metal miners, battery makers and of course the battery owners and operators themselves.
From peaking plants to baseload
Batteries are quickly becoming the backbone of a new dispatchable system.
The first stop on this journey is peaking plant replacement.
Four-hour LFP units like Eraring and Kwinana BESS 2 could demolish the economics of gas peakers. They flick on instantly, dispatch into the evening peak, and soak up the fat that gas plants once relied on.
This could undermine the very business case for peakers that were designed to run just a few hours a day.
The Merredin Energy plant in WA is designed to run for about 100 hours per year, but can still be lucrative. For now.
The next stop is flexible baseload.
By the late 2020s, longer-duration storage of six to twelve hours, coupled with vehicle-to-grid support from EVs, could give batteries the ability to carry the grid through cloudy, windless stretches.
That's when storage starts to rival the role that coal and gas once held.
This is already happening overseas.
In California, 10 GW of batteries are now on call. In spring 2024 they discharged 7 GW at peak, cutting gas output from 10 GW to 5 GW in a matter of weeks.
At Moss Landing, the system has scaled to 750 MW and 3 GWh, with expansion capacity to double again.
Across Europe, 21.9 GWh of storage was added in 2024 alone, with ambitions to push to 780 GWh by 2030.
Australia will follow the same curve. The National Electricity Market is already preparing for a progression from batteries covering peakers to batteries providing baseload. As more projects come online, we will likely see gas peakers disappear, followed by baseload gas and coal plants.
The global race
The United States has already installed around 82.1 GWh of battery storage with another 162.5 GWh planned. It's on track to add 18.2 GW of new capacity in 2025 alone.
China is far ahead on raw scale, with 215.5 GWh already operating and more than 500 GWh under development. It also dominates the global supply chain for cells, minerals, and manufacturing equipment.
Europe, for its part, added 21.9 GWh of storage in 2024 and is pushing hard to convert legacy coal plants into clean energy hubs, as seen with projects like Thurrock in the UK.
And then there is Australia.
We now have some of the largest projects in the southern hemisphere either operating or under construction, from Waratah to Collie to Eraring. The pipeline is swelling, as are the vertical opportunities.
Home batteries join the fight
Not all the action is at the mega-scale. Households are stacking their own little electron vaults.
Australians bought 75,000 home batteries in 2024, taking the total to 185,798 units. Nearly a third of new rooftop solar installs came with a battery.
NSW leads, but Vic and QLD aren’t far behind.
Governments are sweetening the deal with NSW offering $1.5k for VPP-linked installs. Federal and state subsidies can stack up to $5k. WA’s throwing in up to $7.5k per install.
Not to be outdone, QLD is kicking in a rebate of up to $18.6k.
There are 420+ community batteries being rolled out. These sit on street corners and soak up the rooftop glut at noon, then hand it back at 6pm. AEMO thinks consumer energy resources will jump from 0.2 GW today to 37 GW by 2050.
The distributed layer: EVs and software
Home batteries are just the start. The situation will change quickly when EVs join the swarm. Bidirectional charging will let cars pump back into the grid. Your Tesla becomes a trader, selling juice at 6pm and charging at noon.
Coordinating this chaos needs software.
Companies like Fluence Energy (NASDAQ:FLNC), who offer Mosaic, an AI bidding system that can boost revenue by up to fifty percent.
Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) has Autobidder and Opticaster. FlexGen’s HybridOS keeps projects at 98 percent uptime with predictive maintenance and has increased revenue per kilowatt by 22%,
It's not just the big players making moves.
ASX smallcap Energy One (ASX:EOL) are carving out niches in software and trading platforms that plug directly into this new storage ecosystem.
They might not have the scale of Tesla, but they can provide the specialised tools and local expertise that larger players rely on.
This distributed layer also has consequences for the physical grid.
As storage proliferates, electricity could move more dynamically across regions, meaning transmission demand could rise.
Batteries smooth volatility, but the electrons still have to move where they're needed. That could bring another wave of infrastructure investment. New transmission lines, interconnectors, and upgrades that complement the battery boom.
These aren’t apps. They’re tollbooths. Whoever owns the software and the pipes, gets a high-gross-margin taste of every electron,
The edge
The Great Energy Transition is here.
It might not be getting the ticker tape parade it deserves, what with AI waltzing around like it owns the place. But rest assured, the battery space holds plenty of potential.
Within five years, electrons will move like money. Traded, optimised, and arbitraged. Forget about Bitcoin. That will be old money.
Opportunities abound in battery and associated infrastructure construction, electricity transmission, software, recycling, fancy agent and intermediary roles. And of course straight up owning the batteries themselves. be it via AGL or a battery storage REIT.
For every great disruption, there's big winners and big losers. So pick a side.
At The Markets IQ, we'll be honing in on our top picks to play The Great Energy Transition over the coming months.
This publication has been prepared by The Markets IQ, a division of Vitti Capital Pty Ltd (ABN 13 670 030 145), which is a Corporate Authorised Representative (001306367) of Point Capital Group Pty Ltd (ABN 41 625 931 900), the holder of Australian Financial Services Licence 518031. This report is for general information only and does not take into account your objectives, financial situation, or needs. It is not personal financial advice or a recommendation to buy, hold, or sell any security. You should consider whether the information is appropriate in light of your circumstances and obtain professional advice before making any investment decision. This report is intended solely for wholesale, sophisticated, or professional investors within the meaning of the Corporations Act 2001 (Cth).
Any views, probabilities, valuations, technical levels, or forecasts expressed are strictly the opinions of the authors as at the date of publication, based on publicly available information and assumptions which may change without notice. They are illustrative only and not predictive of future outcomes. Past performance is not a reliable indicator of future performance.
