It's Tuesday. Most big batteries earn their keep by shifting energy across the day. Australia's most powerful one is mostly paid to wait for something to go wrong.
In today's edition:
🔋 Big Story: Waratah goes to full power
⚡ Quick Hits: nickel-hydrogen orders, pumped hydro, solar repowering, Paris geothermal, India's factories
💰 Capital: New York's two-way storage contracts
📋 Policy Watch: a solar stockpiling cap, SPP's stopgap, a geothermal caucus
📊 Chart of the Day: 690 GW of solar in one year
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The Big Story
Waratah Super Battery hits full power as the NSW grid's shock absorber
Akaysha Energy's Waratah Super Battery, sized at 850 MW and 1,680 MWh on the site of the shuttered Munmorah coal plant in New South Wales, is now operating at full capacity after final sign-off late last week, RenewEconomy reported. Under a System Integrity Protection Scheme contract with Transgrid, it will hold up to 700 MW and 1,400 MWh ready for grid disruptions, letting existing lines carry more power into Sydney, Newcastle and Wollongong.
"The Waratah Super Battery is a game changer for NSW."
The project arrives about 18 months late, after construction delays, one transformer failure and damage to another in final testing, according to the article.
Final tests finished after a replacement transformer arrived on site.
Transgrid CEO Brett Redman called the protection scheme Waratah is contracted to deliver "the biggest and most innovative in Australia."
Source: RenewEconomy
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Quick Hits
Technology milestones from across the grid
Five hardware and data milestones, from Changzhou to Oak Ridge.
EnerVenue opened its nickel-hydrogen battery factory in Changzhou, China, on Sept. 24 at 250 MWh a year and booked its first MW-scale order, 11 MWh for solar at a Chinese oil and gas site, delivering from December. Energy-Storage.news
Oak Ridge National Laboratory's 2026 hydropower market report counts 22.23 GW of pumped storage, 82% of US utility-scale storage, with 74 projects totaling 59 GW in the pipeline. Renewable Energy World
Foundry-Logic estimates that repowering aging US solar farms could add 67 GW by 2040 without new land, plus nearly 92 GW of co-located storage, a technical-potential figure rather than a forecast. Heatmap
Coriance finished drilling a 2,000-meter geothermal doublet outside Paris that will supply 93% of a district heating network for about 14,000 homes from late 2026. ThinkGeoEnergy
India added 50.6 GW of module and 9.7 GW of cell manufacturing capacity in H1 2026, Mercom data show, leaving total cell capacity at 36.6 GW against 261.7 GW of modules. PV Tech
The Capital Stack
New York awards 950 MW of bulk storage on two-way price contracts
NYSERDA picked eight four-to-eight-hour lithium-ion projects totaling 950 MW, plus 719 MW of renewables, in its first bulk storage solicitation, representing more than $3.7 billion in private investment, Utility Dive reported. Developers bid a strike price against a monthly reference rate on 15-year contracts: NYSERDA tops up the shortfall when markets pay less, and developers pay back the excess when they earn more. New York had just 80 MW of bulk storage running as of March against a 6 GW goal for 2030, Canary Media reported. The projects are selected, not built, and target operation by end-2030.
Source: Utility Dive, Canary Media
Also in the capital stack:
Arevia Power, a solar developer two years ago, is pursuing an Idaho data center complex with a 450 MW on-site gas plant, Heatmap reported. Heatmap
Policy Watch
Commerce capped pre-tariff solar imports, limiting new importers to 2,000 cells and 55 modules a week until the 15% Section 232 tariff starts Dec. 4, shutting the door on stockpiling before the price jump. pv magazine USA
SPP's interim resource adequacy rules for its Western balancing area drew FERC protests from its own market monitor, WAPA and Basin Electric after only 4.7 GW of 9.2 GW showed up April through August, against 6.5 GW expected. The stopgap would run until mandatory adequacy starts June 1, 2027. Utility Dive
A bipartisan Congressional Geothermal Caucus launched with 17 members, led by Reps. Andrea Salinas (D-Ore.), Nick Begich (R-Alaska), Jake Auchincloss (D-Mass.) and Jeff Hurd (R-Colo.), aiming to propose legislation for new geothermal technologies. ThinkGeoEnergy
Chart of the Day
The world installed 690 GW of solar in 2025
Global solar additions hit 690 GW in 2025, up 15% on 2024, lifting cumulative capacity to 2.96 TW, about 12% of global electricity consumption. China installed 415 GW, about 60%, ahead of India at 54 GW and the US at 43 GW.
Source: pv magazine USA, data from IEA-PVPS Trends in Photovoltaic Applications 2026 · September 28, 2026
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