Bargara’s Community-Scale Tesla Battery System Nears Prime Time

It won’t be long before a Tesla Megapack battery installation at Bargara near Bundaberg in Queensland starts soaking up locally-generated surplus solar power.

In March last year, Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk announced five locations in regional areas of the state would have large-scale, network-connected batteries installed to support continued uptake of renewables. Collectively, the batteries at Hervey Bay (Torquay Substation), Bundaberg (Bargara Substation), Townsville (Black River Substation), Yeppoon (Tanby Substation) and Toowoomba (Torrington Substation) will be capable of storing up to 40MWh of energy.

The battery units, transformer and cables are now all in place at the Bargara site and full energisation is expected in June.

Queensland Treasurer Cameron Dick and Member for Bundaberg Tom Smith, who toured the new facility yesterday, seem pretty impressed with progress on the project.

“The Bargara battery will store excess low-cost solar power produced in the middle of the day before supplying it back to the local community during peak consumption in the evening,” said Mr. Smith. “The energy stored in this system is enough to run 478 average homes for one day, which is great news for the local area.”

Bargara Big On Solar Energy

The Tesla battery system will see plenty of use – in Bargara, solar panels are a very common sight on the rooftops of homes and businesses.  Across the 4670 postcode area, which includes Bundaberg, more than 17,569 small-scale solar systems had been installed by the end of February this year, with a collective capacity of around 86,760 kW.

“It’s great to see the jobs and opportunities being delivered by this project through Energy Queensland,” stated Mr. Smith on Facebook. “After all Bundaberg is the number one city in Queensland for rooftop solar!”

The claim was more than just an idle boast. Looking at Clean Energy Regulator data, the 4670 postcode currently ranks second in Australia for installed small-scale PV capacity¹ and ranks first for the number of solar system installations.

Bargara and the other sites were selected based on their proximity to existing infrastructure, potential for rapid deployment, ease of connection to the network and high penetration of rooftop solar. Mr. Smith pointed out that by installing batteries in the community rather than some distance away, this helps avoid transmission losses.

Mr. Smith said grid-connected batteries of this nature will be critical for achieving Queensland’s renewable energy target of 50 per cent by 2030.

Construction of all the batteries has been led by Yurika, which is part of Energy Queensland – a group of electricity distribution, retail and energy services businesses 100% owned by the state. Yurika gained some previous hands-on experience in the installation of big-ish batteries through two previous projects in Townsville; one of which was a 4MW/8MWh Tesla Powerpack project at Bohle Plains – Queensland’s first community-scale battery.

The Bohle Plains project experienced a hiccup in April last year after a fire broke out, but it was quickly contained and the facility was able to continue operations. What happened in that incident isn’t clear.