A grid-scale battery is being built on the edge of a border city, designed to store surplus renewable power and release it when demand peaks.
The project sits beside existing transmission infrastructure, which cuts the work needed to connect it to the wider network. It also carries a long-term fund for the host community.
Image: Aerial view of Wodonga, by Wongm via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.
What is being built at Baranduda
The Baranduda Electrical Energy Reserve will be a battery energy storage system, or BESS. That is a large bank of batteries that charges when electricity is cheap and plentiful, then discharges it back into the grid when demand rises.
The State Electricity Commission, Victoria's government-owned renewable energy company, has taken a minority equity stake of $43 million in the project. The announcement and site event took place on Thursday 17 September 2026, as reported by The Border Mail.
The battery will hold 400 megawatts of power capacity. A megawatt is a measure of how much power a plant can deliver at one moment. Storage comes to 1.86 gigawatt-hours, where a gigawatt-hour measures how much energy the system holds in total. Together those figures give a duration of 4.65 hours, which the state government says is the longest storage duration of any battery in Victoria.
Where it sits and why the location matters
The site is in the Baranduda Industrial Estate off the Kiewa Valley Highway, on land next to the Wodonga Terminal Station. It sits directly on the existing Victoria to New South Wales electricity interconnector, the high-voltage line that moves power between the two states.
That position saves time and cost. A project that connects at an existing terminal avoids building a long new transmission connection. The site covers about 17 hectares and is roughly 310 kilometres north-east of Melbourne.
Birdwood Energy Australia managing director Alex Merritt-Smith said the location was ideal because it sits just over the fence from the terminal that feeds the main interconnector.
Who is delivering the project
The battery is being delivered through a joint venture between Birdwood Energy and the superannuation fund Aware Super, with Birdwood's Australian arm led by Mr Merritt-Smith.
The SEC's investment secures half of the battery's output for 15 years through a 15-year offtake agreement. An offtake agreement is a contract to buy the electricity a project produces, which gives a developer certainty about revenue before construction begins. The SEC says that power will support supply to Victorian hospitals, schools and government infrastructure.
The project was fast-tracked through the state's Development Facilitation Program in 2025. That pathway lets larger developments be assessed more quickly than a standard planning route. The proposal had earlier been put forward at a similar size by Birdwood Energy alone.
The SEC Victoria site carries the agency's current list of generation and storage investments across the state.
Jobs during construction and after
Construction is expected to begin in November 2026 and create about 150 jobs during the build. Ongoing operational roles follow once the battery starts operating in late 2028.
The finished project is expected to consist of four independent 100 MW units, an arrangement that lets parts of the battery keep working while others are serviced. It will hold up to 372 battery packs the size of shipping containers.
Part of that supply chain is local. Birdwood's lead project engineer, Simon Youl, said the battery packs are being sourced from Wilson in Wodonga. Using a local supplier keeps some of the spending inside the region rather than sending all of it to interstate or overseas manufacturers.
What the battery does for the grid
SEC chief executive Chris Miller said the system can run continuously for more than four and a half hours at full capacity. He said that is enough to power around 200,000 homes through the evening peak.
Duration is the key difference from earlier batteries. Most large batteries built so far discharge for one to two hours, which covers a short spike in demand. A system that runs for closer to five hours can cover a longer stretch of the evening, when solar output has fallen away and households are drawing power.
Construction timing aligns with the retirement of the Yallourn coal-fired power station, due in 2028, and with the growth of renewable generation on the grid. Longer storage helps cover the periods when wind and solar output is low.
The Victorian government says it has commissioned 23 energy storage systems to date, with 12 more in the pipeline.
The community fund for Wodonga
A community benefit fund for Wodonga will be established once the battery is running. It is expected to be worth around $100,000 annually, with consultation on which local projects it supports.
The SEC is also working separately with traditional owner groups on sharing financial benefits. That work sits outside the community fund and involves a different group of recipients.
Baranduda is a small settlement within the Wodonga local government area, so the fund and the construction jobs both land in the same municipal footprint. Residents in the Baranduda locality are closest to the site and to any effects during the build.
What it means for the wider border region
Wodonga has long functioned as a regional service centre on the New South Wales border, with transport, health and logistics employers. A project of this scale adds construction work and a long-term operational asset to that base.
Energy projects also tend to draw related interest once they are operating. A working battery on the interconnector gives the region something concrete to point to when it argues for further infrastructure investment.
The scale of the pipeline suggests this will not be an isolated project. With 12 more storage systems in the government's pipeline, the border region's position on a major interconnector could keep it in contention for future work.
Readers can look at the Wodonga council area in more detail, and use the Victoria local guide to see how localities across the state are profiled.
Works Cited
Humboldt, Hana. "Batteries Coming to Baranduda Expected to Bring Six-Figure Community Boost." The Border Mail, 17 Sept. 2026, https://www.bordermail.com.au/story/9352181/baranduda-gets-43m-in-state-funding-for-battery-storage-system/.
State Electricity Commission. "SEC." SEC Victoria, n.d., https://www.secvictoria.com.au/.
Wongm. "Wodonga-victoria-aerial." Wikimedia Commons, n.d., https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wodonga-victoria-aerial.jpg.