Bennetts Creek marks Wärtsilä’s tenth BESS project in Australia to support the country’s National Electricity Market (NEM), and the first project delivered in collaboration with Flow Power. Bennetts Creek will join the retailer’s rapidly expanding portfolio of renewable energy and BESS projects, providing community benefits plus reliable, firmed supply for Australia’s grid and its renewable energy retail contracts.
Bennetts Creek will also provide frequency regulation, a key ancillary service, which offers a steady, valuable income stream that complements energy arbitrage and helps meet key compliance requirements for BESS projects. It also plays a crucial role in keeping the grid stable as traditional generators retire.
“Flow Power shares our commitment to accelerating Australia’s clean energy goals, and we look forward to collaborating on their largest project to date,” said Suraj Narayan, Managing Director, Wärtsilä Energy Storage Australia. “This project demonstrates how advanced batteries can deliver both reliability and revenue. As the National Electricity Market transitions to a lower carbon system with increasing variable renewable energy, systems with strong frequency response capabilities, like Bennetts Creek, will be ideally positioned to tap into these new high-value opportunities.”
The project will utilise Wärtsilä’s Quantum hardware, a fully integrated, modular, and compact energy storage system (ESS) designed to ease deployment and optimise sustainable energy across project locations and market applications. Wärtsilä’s controls and optimisation software, GEMS, will serve as the project’s intelligent power plant controller, managing the integration of the energy storage system. It conducts intelligent power control and optimised energy management operations for the entire plant to meet grid requirements and response times, charge and discharge the battery appropriately, and maximise project value. This project will be delivered under an engineered equipment delivery (EEQ) contract with Wärtsilä providing guaranteed asset performance under a separate long-term service agreement.
“The Bennetts Creek Battery is a significant milestone for Flow Power,” says Tom Harrison, Flow Power General Manager Energy Projects. “The project will provide firm power and energy storage capacity to support additional renewable energy projects in Victoria and strengthen our growing project portfolio across the National Electricity Market. We look forward to collaborating with Wärtsilä to deliver this exciting new project together.”
