ASL GM speech at Energy Storage Australia Conference

Energy Storage Summit Australia 18-19 March 2026

Keynote Speech: Thimo Mueller, General Manager Commercial, ASL

 

Good morning everyone.

Earlier in the panel discussion, we spoke about what’s required to deliver energy storage projects. A key takeaway for me was the need to collaborate and accelerate across the development cycle.

ASL’s role in NSW LTESA tenders is to provide investors with market price and revenue certainty ahead of – or in addition to – any offtake contracts. This achieves two key outcomes. First, it unlocks development budget to further progress projects. Second, it supports final investment decisions being made earlier.

An LTESA is not a golden ticket, though. Project development risks remain. To help mitigate these risks, there is a coordinated effort in NSW involving government, the Energy Security Corporation, and our other partners to support developers and investors.

Today, I want to provide an overview of our progress toward key objectives and what’s required to achieve them.

ASL is the independent Consumer Trustee under the NSW Electricity Infrastructure Roadmap. Our role is simple: we turn ambition into action by creating credible, durable investment signals and bringing forward the infrastructure needed to benefit consumers.

We started in NSW. We’re now working across the NEM and the WEM, and more recently we have launched a new program in South Australia. Our growing role reflects a broader reality – governments across Australia want to accelerate the energy transition. Capital is global, and Australia must position itself as an attractive destination for investment.

In January, ASL released its 2026 Investment Priorities for NSW. We’re calling on projects to come forward and bid in a way that supports financial close or final investment decision, while delivering value for consumers.

Our priorities are threefold:

1. Generation projects that produce during high-price hours, such as wind and solar hybrids.
2. Medium-duration firming and wholesale demand response.
3. Critically, long-duration storage.

Our system plan for NSW is ambitious—16 GW of new renewable generation by 2030, and 42 GWh of long-duration storage by 2034. It needs to be ambitious, because that’s what delivers the best outcomes for consumers. The future grid is clear: it will be dominated by variable renewable generation, and it will need storage that stabilises the system, is flexible, and long-lasting. Not just for evening peaks, but to get us through dunkelflaute events – extended periods of low wind and solar. And we’re backing that ambition up with action.

Since 2021, under the NSW Roadmap, we’ve supported almost 3 GWh of firming and over 30 GWh of long-duration storage. In our most recent long-duration storage tender, we awarded contracts to six projects totalling over 12 GWh of capacity alone. That’s more than 40 per cent of NSW’s 2030 minimum objective, delivered in a single round.

And these aren’t just announcements. They are real projects, moving from development to financial close, into construction and operation. Twenty-five projects currently have an LTESA:

• Five are operational.
• Two are in commissioning.
• Five are under construction.

That gives us 12 projects beyond financial close, with 13 still in development. Of those 13, six are early-stage projects that were awarded an LTESA just this year. This progress reflects the significant effort developers are making to achieve COD, despite ongoing challenges.

Let me give you a few examples.

The first project ever awarded a long-duration storage LTESA was Limondale BESS, a 50 MW / 400 MWh project. It was awarded an LTESA in 2023, becoming the first long-duration battery supported under the scheme and helping to kick-start the pipeline of new eight-hour-plus battery projects we are now seeing. It is currently in commissioning and approaching commercial operations.

Also in 2023, three battery projects were successful in our firming tender. One – Smithfield BESS – is now operational. The other two, Liddell BESS and Orana BESS, are close behind and on the cusp of commissioning. The successful VPP in that tender became operational last year.

Only a few weeks ago, we announced the outcomes of our latest long-duration storage round: six projects, totalling 12 GWh, all long-duration storage batteries. One of these – the Great Western Battery – will have 3.5 GWh of storage when it’s built, making it one of the largest batteries currently under development. Another, Bannaby BESS, with over 11.5 hours of storage, is quite possibly the deepest lithium-ion battery in the world.

So, what’s coming next?

We have one firming tender currently underway, seeking 500 MW of capacity to support the Sydney-Newcastle-Wollongong region by December 2027. Results from this tender will be announced in May this year.

We also have two major long-duration storage tenders upcoming in our tender plan: 12 GWh in Q2 this year and another 12 GWh in Q2 next year. Assuming all projects are built, this would take us well above our targets.

In parallel, we’re analysing the level of firming infrastructure required beyond this to maintain long-term reliability as coal exits and renewable penetration increases. We’ll have more to say on how much is needed and what types of firming infrastructure can best support the system. What we do know is that this capacity needs to be in place by the end of the decade, and that tenders will be run well ahead of that—later this year or early next year.

Why? To give all projects the best chance of competing, and to allow long-lead-time projects to prepare and come forward. These tenders may also introduce new LTESA products to address specific system challenges.

So, how do we support these projects to get built? They’re progressing because we’ve built a framework that gives investors confidence. We provide a long-term investment plan through our Infrastructure Investment Objectives report: a 20-year development pathway that identifies the infrastructure we need, and a 10-year tender plan to incentivise that investment.

Our Long-Term Energy Service Agreements for storage projects provide capped annuity payments that help bridge the gap between what the market pays today and what’s required to invest in new projects. In short, they address the missing-money problem for longer durations. They don’t replace market signals; they enable projects to respond to them. And they’re enabling innovation too.

We’re seeing that innovation play out across the NEM. Some projects have an LTESA, some don’t. But critically, the LTESA is designed to work alongside new and emerging commercial structures, moving with the market. Virtual tolling, capacity swaps, network support contracts. All contribute to a broader revenue stack, with the LTESA providing support or protection in the background. That’s the kind of commercial creativity we want to see, and we’re seeing it reflected in our tenders too: through partial contracting, sculpted payment profiles, and waiving payments in certain years.

As the market continues to evolve, we are evolving our products with it. Our new Hybrid Generation LTESA is designed for co-located generation and storage projects. The market shift has been clear and fast. There are now over 25 GW of hybrid projects in the NSW pipeline alone. Adding storage to generation creates value that makes these projects worthwhile, for both investors and consumers:

• Shifting generation to peak periods.
• Reducing curtailment and improving MLFs.
• Improving dispatchability and grid stability.
• Enhancing system value and reliability.

Greater value for investors. Greater value for consumers.

We developed two commercial product structures to support hybrid projects and took them to the market. One is a fixed-shape, fixed-volume product. The other shares price risk while encouraging projects to chase higher market prices. And we got some great industry feedback.

The introduction of a hybrid LTESA was strongly supported. We also heard that there is no established standard for hybrid projects yet, either technically or commercially. In response, we’re increasing flexibility around how these projects can be structured, as long as they remain aligned with policy intent. Our generation tenders seek new megawatt hours of energy entering the system, and the hybrid projects we support need to reflect that.

Both structures received support, but from an investment perspective the message was clear: most developers and investors prefer the risk-sharing mechanism.

This is the product we will take to market in Q2 this year. It will be the first Generation LTESA tender in two years, following the period in which the Capacity Investment Scheme operated in place of NSW LTESA tenders. It will also be our largest LTESA tender to date, seeking 2.5 GW of projects.

The new product will be open to both wind and solar, paired with a medium-duration battery. We’re excited to see what this unlocks. The market is moving fast, and hybrids deliver additional benefits to the system and to electricity consumers. At ASL, we’re here to promote that.

And we’re seeing results. Across our NSW tenders, we’ve now contracted over 30 GWh of long-duration storage, signalling a scale of investment Australia hasn’t seen before. That investment is already delivering tangible benefits: infrastructure being built, improved grid reliability, new jobs and regional development, and better outcomes for consumers. But we’re far from done.

Any project pipeline will experience attrition. We know that, and we’re prepared for it. We’ll continue to procure and de-risk the path forward as we move into the delivery phase, bringing forward large-scale generation, storage, and grid infrastructure on an unprecedented scale.

To succeed, we need policy certainty beyond election cycles, a clear investment strategy with supporting mechanisms, capital capable of managing diverse risk and return profiles, a skilled and scalable workforce, and strong community support.

But most importantly, we need a culture of collaboration, partnership, and persistence to meet the challenges ahead.

Thank you.