Silver City Energy Storage Centre

Silver City is a 200 MW / 1,600 MWh Advanced Compressed Air Energy Storage (A-CAES) facility in late-stage development in Broken Hill, New South Wales, providing up to eight hours of long-duration storage. Hydrostor's A-CAES uses grid electricity to compress air, captures the heat in above-ground thermal storage, and stores the compressed air in a purpose-built hard rock cavern held at constant pressure by a water head; on discharge the air is recombined with the stored heat and expanded through a turbine. The project stores excess renewable electricity when transmission capacity is constrained and sends it down the same lines later, and reserves 50 MW / 250 MWh to provide backup power to Broken Hill during network outages. It has received grid connection approval from AEMO and Transgrid, holds a Network Service Agreement with Transgrid and a Long-Term Energy Service Agreement from AEMO Services, and has a project design life of 50+ years.