Monday, 17 August 2026

Quinbrook Infrastructure Partners has closed AUD 469 million (USD 327 million) in debt financing for the 260 MW/1,216 MWh third stage of its Supernode battery in Southeast Queensland, Australia, with the stage underpinned by a 15-year offtake agreement with Queensland government-owned electricity generator Stanwell Corporation, according to ESS News.

The same report said Stage 2 has entered commercial operation with 250 MW/1,040 MWh online, lifting the storage facility to 520 MW/1,858 MWh across the site. Supernode is planned as a 780 MW/3,074 MWh campus once complete.

Battery supplier CATL has set out what it will deliver for the final stage. Per ESS News, the company said it will provide Tener S systems for Stage 3, drawn from its Tener series.

That marks a shift in product line for the site. CATL supplied its EnerC Plus systems for Stages 1 and 2, with the equipment covered by a Long-Term Service Agreement, ESS News reported.

Stage 3 accounts for the balance of the campus design, taking the project from the 520 MW/1,858 MWh now operating to the planned 780 MW/3,074 MWh total. The Stanwell contract fixes an offtake path for that capacity over 15 years.

Meine Electric's iron-air battery has entered a utility-scale pilot led by Atal Incubation Centre - Anna University (AIC-AU), which will test the technology under utility-scale operating conditions, according to ESS News.

The cost case is the pitch. Meine Electric claims its technology can reach a levelized cost of storage below USD 0.05/kWh, ESS News reported. That figure is the company's own claim rather than a measured pilot result.

AIC-AU's role is evaluation rather than supply: the incubation centre is running the project and assessing how the chemistry behaves at utility scale.

Researchers at the University of New South Wales have started a three-and-a-half-year project examining how inverter-based resources interact with grid protection systems, according to ESS News.

The project, named PROFILES, runs until the end of 2030 with a total budget of AUD 12.9 million, ESS News reported. About half of that funding came as a grant from the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA), according to the same report.

Work will combine modeling, simulation and hardware-in-the-loop testing to assess fault-current behavior and the protection requirements that follow from it, ESS News reported. Fault-current behavior is the pivot: protection schemes on conventional networks were designed around the current signatures of synchronous machines, and inverter-based plant does not reproduce them.

ESS News lists Transgrid, AEMO, ElectraNet, Power Electronics, SMA, Tesla and Siemens among the industry partners. The mix spans transmission network operators, the market operator and inverter and battery suppliers, which puts both sides of the protection question - the devices producing the fault current and the relays reading it - inside the same programme.

The ARENA contribution means public money covers roughly half the cost, with the balance carried elsewhere in the consortium, per ESS News. The end-2030 completion date sets the horizon for any findings feeding into protection settings or connection practice.

Ola Electric has launched a stationary storage business in India, according to ESS News, with a lithium iron phosphate (LFP) battery portfolio that runs from residential backup units to utility-scale systems.

At the top of the range sits the Mahashakti platform. ESS News reported that each liquid-cooled container carries 6.26 MWh of energy and 2.5 MW of power, and is natively configurable for durations of 2 to 4 hours.

The company has signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Axis Energy covering the potential deployment of up to 20 GWh of battery energy storage systems by 2032 under the Mahashakti platform, per ESS News.

On timing, deliveries of the residential Shakti Gen2 system are scheduled for November 2026, ESS News said, with commercial and utility rollouts following from March 2027.

The commercial launch lands against a national procurement pipeline. Current Indian plans call for at least 44 GW of battery energy storage capacity to be added by 2030, according to ESS News. That target frames the addressable market the Axis Energy MoU is aimed at, since the 20 GWh figure is contracted as a potential volume rather than a firm order.

The LFP chemistry choice covers the full product ladder rather than a single segment, spanning residential backup through to utility-sized ambitions. The 2-to-4-hour configurability of the Mahashakti container matches the duration band typically procured for grid-connected storage tenders.