Situated on the 10th floor of our Melbourne office is Australia’s largest installed office commercial battery storage unit, which we hope will help us better understand how battery storage can deliver price and reliability benefits for our customers in the future.

The 264 kVA, 368 kWh battery unit will be used to manage demand, with the ability to provide back-up capacity and enable Origin to test a full range of capabilities.

With the installation complete, Suvarna Govender from Origin’s Business Energy Solutions Innovation team is now focused on assessing the battery’s performance and functionality.

“While we may have installed the battery here at our Melbourne office, we’re actually conducting a trial on behalf of our customers,” said Suvarna.

“We’ll be looking at how well this battery unit runs in parallel with onsite generation and whether it can be effectively controlled by demand side platforms that understand our customer’s usage patterns and intuitively know how to respond.”

“We see these connected elements potentially delivering real price and reliability outcomes for our customers,” said Suvarna.

Origin’s Controls and Systems Engineer, Trent Moreschini, was responsible for the technical aspects of the installation.

“This has probably been one of the largest battery installations of its kind in a commercial building, so a real focus for the team has been understanding and complying with requirements set down within the Building Code,” said Trent.

“Already, through the procurement and installation process, we’ve gathered a host of learnings we can apply to future customer installations.”

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