Central West Pumped Hydro is in the early stages of project assessment and development on private land near Yetholme, located between Bathurst and Lithgow, within 2.5 hours of Sydney.
Altura is working to develop the Central West PSH Project (325MW, 8 hours storage, 2,600MWh) to a "shovel ready" status in anticipation of a market signal for bulk energy storage in the coming years.
The Project is well positioned through Altura’s early development activity, with the benefit of 2 decades working owner’s-side; 10 years continuous hydropower experience and recent learnings from the Goat Hill PSH project in South Australia.
The project will provide opportunities for economic diversification for the community of Central West NSW, sitting comfortably within the landscape and land uses in the local area.
The project will provide significant benefits at local, regional and state levels both directly and indirectly:
- Improve local infrastructure used by the Yetholme community.
- 200 construction and 30 operational jobs, developing local skills and experience in the delivery of grid scale storage.
- significant reduction in water consumption of the power generation sector, making the electricity sector more drought tolerant and making water available for other uses.
- regionally enhancing system security to support the intermittent and variable dispatch of renewable energy generation.
- Reduce wholesale electricity supply prices for mass-market residential and business customers as a result of the increase in the generation supply and demand balance, providing commercial and industrial business energy customers with affordable energy supply arrangements.
- reduce volatility in market pricing by providing generation into a market experiencing high demand and providing load into a market experiencing low demand.
- improving the network to assist in meeting peak power demands including when no variable renewable energy generation is available.
- providing synchronous capacity (inertia) required to support the deployment of wind and solar projects, which are required by Australia’s network operator AEMO.
- reduce balancing and transmissions costs (such as deferring or avoiding network upgrades and interconnections; and through provision of synchronous inertia) and are a favourable option for all participants in the energy market.
Altura Group value the input and feedback from the community and would love to hear from you.
Please contact us by email or phone, or visit us at one of our open-door days.