Tarong has a battery next door. Here's what it means for the station.

Tarong and Tarong North sit 45 km south-east of Kingaroy, fed by conveyor from Meandu Mine next door and by water from Boondooma Dam. Together they supply around a fifth of Queensland's electricity. In 2024 the station and the mine marked forty years of continuous operation.

• 1,400 MWTarong: four 350 MW units, commissioned 1984 to 1986
• 443 MWTarong North: one supercritical unit, commissioned 2003
• ~20%of Queensland's electricity from the two stations
• 30,000 MLannual water allocation from Boondooma Dam

Unit 3 is in a planned major statutory overhaul from 21 August to 6 November 2026. That is what a station looks like when its owner intends to keep running it.

• 300 MWoutput, two hours of storage: 600 MWh
• $514minvested by Stanwell, the station's state-owned operator
• 13 Feb 2026commercial operation began, on site at Tarong
• 2.1 GWthe Tarong site's combined capacity, the largest in the state

Stanwell built it beside the coal units, on land it already owned, plugged into transmission that was paid for decades ago. It charges when generation is high and discharges when demand is high or generation is low, and it can do that several times a day, responding in a fraction of a second.

The people who run it are the people who run the station. Operators, electricians and local contractors delivered it. No new corridor through grazing country, no new easement, no new fight.

Stanwell paid for it, and Stanwell earns from it: it buys power when it is cheap, sells into the evening peak and gets paid to hold frequency. The Megapack cells carry a warranty of up to 15 years, with a 20-year option, and when they are done the yard, the connection and the wires stay for the next set. Four private companies have built the same thing elsewhere in the state, on their own money, and they get paid only when the battery does the work. Who pays, and how long they last. The private batteries already running in Queensland.

Before. On a sunny South Burnett 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. The units run flat. The battery 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, so a trip becomes a maintenance job rather than a statewide event.

One 300 MW battery does not flatten the whole day for four 350 MW units. It 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 South Burnett 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 Tarong lines, back it, and say why: it is what keeps the four units running.
• Tell your state member and your councillors that the Tarong battery is the model, and that you want the next one.
• If you work at the station, the mine or a contractor, sign up below. We want to hear how the units are running.

Other stations

• Kogan Creek and Chinchilla →
• Stanwell →

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