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The Great Western Battery approved for construction at Wallerawang is an elegant solution to stored energy.
It will be built in 16 months on flat land in a rather isolated area surrounded by trees. It will be on six hectares of land, and will be no higher than 2.5 metres.
Compare this to ATCO's plan to bulldoze and blast 200 acres of mature age forest, killing or risking the lives of endangered and vulnerable species of flora and fauna, in order to construct their pumped hydro power plant at Yetholme.
Compare the benign Great Western Battery to ATCO's plan to suck 3.3 gigalitres of water out of the Fish River to fill their huge dams, and then take a further 400 megalitres every year to top up the dams - water destined for Bathurst's drinking water, as well as the wellbeing of the entire Murray-Darling Basin.
With 500 MWh of storage, the Great Western Battery has 35 per cent more storage capacity than ATCO's power plant, and will not create the unimaginable and irreversible environmental destruction that the pumped hydro will wreak upon us.
There are better solutions to energy storage than pumped hydro.
The speed at which technology is advancing, such as in improved battery storage, should be enough for the NSW Government to stop ATCO before it is too late.
