Stanwell's battery arrives in 2027. Here's what it means for the station.

Stanwell Power Station sits 22 km west of Rockhampton, past Gracemere, fed by coal from the Curragh Mine and water from the Fitzroy River through the Eden Bann Weir scheme. Its units came on line between 1993 and 1996, and the station marked thirty years in 2023.

• 1,460 MWmaximum output from four units
• ~15%of Queensland's electricity
• 1993 to 1996units commissioned; thirty years of operation in 2023
• 24,000 MLannual water allocation from the Fitzroy River

Central Generation runs the station with a team of 200. This year's overhaul of Unit 3 ran from 30 May to 24 July 2026. That is what a station looks like when its owner intends to keep running it.

• 300 MWoutput, four hours of storage: 1,200 MWh
• $747minvested by Stanwell, the station's state-owned operator
• Early 2027commercial operation expected; site works began May 2024
• 324Tesla Megapack 2XL units, installed by Yurika, 115 construction jobs

Stanwell is building it on site, on land it already owns, plugged into transmission that was paid for decades ago. Four hours of storage is twice Tarong's, which means it can carry the whole evening peak, not just the front of it.

The people who will run it are the people who run the station. Yurika, a Queensland Government-owned contractor, is installing it, with local business contracts around it. No new corridor through grazing country, no new easement, no new fight.

It is not the only battery near Rockhampton. Genex Power, a private company, has run a 50 MW / 100 MWh battery at Powerlink's Bouldercombe substation since late 2023, on a 132 kV bay that was already there. It earns by buying power when it is cheap, selling into the evening peak and holding frequency. Nobody had to put it at the station. It plugs into the same wires and does the same job for the units. The private batteries already running in Queensland.

Before. On a sunny Central Queensland day, rooftop and utility solar floods the grid from about ten in the morning. Prices go to nothing, and the coal units get pulled down to minimum load and held there through the afternoon. Around five, the sun drops off and demand climbs, and the units are ramped hard back to full output. Every one of those cycles heats and cools boiler tubes, headers and turbine casings. Do it every day 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 the midday surplus instead of the units backing off, then feeds it into the evening peak instead of the units ramping. With four hours in the tank, it covers the peak from start to finish. It also holds the grid's frequency, a job that used to mean running units below full output to keep headroom, and it covers a trip in a fraction of a second.

One 300 MW battery does not flatten the whole day for four units, but four hours takes the worst of it off. The Queensland Energy Roadmap pairs coal to at least 2046 with up to 3.8 GW of storage by 2030 for that reason, and Stanwell's own target is 5 GW of storage by 2035.

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

• Ask Rockhampton 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 Stanwell lines, back it, and say why: it is what keeps the four units running.
• Tell your state member and your councillors that the Stanwell battery is the model, and that you want the next one.
• If you work at the station, at Curragh or for a contractor, sign up below. We want to hear how the units are running.

Other stations

• Tarong →
• Kogan Creek and Chinchilla →

Get in touch