Sanjeev Gupta’s Port Augusta SIMEC ZEN battery gazumps Elon Musk’s at Jamestown
The merger of South Australia's ZenEnergy with the parent company of Sanjeev Gupta's GFG Alliance created SIMEC ZEN.
SIMEC ZEN Energy, part of Sanjeev Gupta’s GFG Alliance, will make Port Augusta the home to the most powerful lithium ion battery in the world at 120MW, eclipsing Jamestown where Elon Musk’s Tesla built its 100MW battery in 2017.
The Port Augusta project – part of the company US$1 billion, one‐gigawatt dispatchable renewable energy program in the upper Spencer Gulf – will be helped by a $10 million loan, as the final project given taxpayers’ support under the Labor state government’s 2017 Renewable Technology Fund.
The Port Augusta battery claims more advanced technology than the Tesla battery at Jamestown and was being planned before Elon Musk’s Twitter pledge to build his project. The SIMEC ZEN battery will be harnessed to a 280MW solar farm at Cultana, between Whyalla and Port Augusta, that will give energy security to the Whyalla steelworks taken over Gupta’s company in 2017.
The Cultana solar farm (the first of two)will have 780,000 solar panels spread over 11 square kilometres. Its 600 gigawatt hours of generation per year was enough to power 96,000 homes and offset 492 tonnes of carbon dioxide.
A British billionaire, Sanjeev Gupta was Whyalla’s saviour by buying the Whyalla steelworks from Arrium in 2017 for about $700 million, after years of downsizing and restructuring. He has pushed ahead since with a trail-blazing "green metal’ strategy to use renewable energy to lift manufacturing efficiencies and give greater control over the entire process.
Gupta believes there is a great future for energy‐intensive industries in Australia, with this the first step in GFG leading Australia’s industrial transition to more competitive energy.
Gupta plans to integrate his industrial operations in the upper Spencer Gulf with a raft of renewable energy projects. This will include cogeneration at GFG’s Whyalla primary steel plant using waste gas; the world’s largest lithium‐ion battery with the Cultana solar farm, and pumped hydro projects at GFG’s Middleback Ranges mining operations.