Kogan Creek has had a battery next door since 2024. Here's what it does for the station.

Kogan Creek sits in the Western Downs near Chinchilla, dry-cooled, fed by a four-kilometre conveyor from Kogan Creek Mine next door. Both are owned by CS Energy, a Queensland Government corporation. It was commissioned in 2007, which makes it the youngest coal unit in the state.

• 750 MWone supercritical unit, the largest single generating unit in Australia
• 2007commissioned; the state's youngest coal unit
• 2 Mtof coal a year from Kogan Creek Mine, by conveyor
• 131employees at the station, plus the mine

Dry cooling means it draws only bore water. Its output can power about 900,000 homes. CS Energy is also building the Brigalow gas peaking plant on the same site, another sign the company plans to keep the site working.

• 100 MWoutput, two hours of storage: 200 MWh
• $150minvested by CS Energy, including substation works
• July 2024began operating in the National Electricity Market
• 80Tesla Megapack 2 units, built with Downer

CS Energy put the battery next to Kogan Creek Power Station, in its own words, "to utilise the site's existing attributes of grid connection, water, available land and workforce". No new corridor, no new easement. It charges when the grid has a surplus and discharges at the evening peak.

At 100 MW against a 750 MW unit it cannot flatten the whole day. What it does is take the first slice off the midday dip and the first slice off the evening ramp, every day, and it shows the site is where the next, bigger one belongs.

It is not the only one on the Western Downs. Vena Energy, a private company, built the 100 MW / 150 MWh Wandoan South battery at Powerlink's Wandoan South substation for $120 million, and it has run since August 2022. Neoen runs 540 MW / 1,080 MWh near Chinchilla and is building a third stage. All of them plug into the same network Kogan Creek feeds. The next battery out here does not have to be CS Energy's, and it does not have to be at the station. The private batteries already running in Queensland.

Before. On a sunny Western Downs day, rooftop and utility solar floods the grid from about ten. Prices go to nothing, and Kogan Creek gets pulled down to minimum load and held there through the afternoon. With one unit, that is the whole station cycling, not a quarter of it. Around five the sun drops off, demand climbs, and the unit is ramped hard back to full output. Every cycle heats and cools boiler tubes, headers and turbine casings. Do it daily for years and you get tube leaks, cracked headers and unplanned trips. That, not calendar age, is what shortens a unit's life.

After. The battery soaks up part of the midday surplus instead of the unit backing off that far, and feeds it into the evening peak instead of the unit ramping that hard. It also holds the grid's frequency, a job that used to mean running below full output to keep headroom, and it covers a trip in a fraction of a second.

The Queensland Energy Roadmap pairs coal to at least 2046 with up to 3.8 GW of storage by 2030 for that reason. Kogan Creek has land, water, connection and workforce ready for the next battery; the only question is when.

Storage helps "manage minimum system load, supporting coal unit reliability".Queensland Energy Roadmap, Queensland Treasury, 2025

• Ask Western Downs Regional Council to treat grid storage as firming infrastructure in its planning scheme, assessed like a substation, not like a generator.
• When the next battery is proposed near the Kogan Creek lines, back it, and say why: it is what keeps the unit running.
• Tell your state member and your councillors that Chinchilla is the model, and that the site is ready for a bigger one.
• If you work at the station, the mine or a contractor, sign up below. We want to hear how the unit is running.

Other stations

• Tarong →
• Stanwell →

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