Quinbrook Infrastructure Partners has locked in GE Vernova and CATL to supply the third stage of its Supernode battery project in Queensland, adding 1,216 megawatt-hours to what is already Australia’s largest operational storage asset. The decision confirms that multi-gigawatt-hour battery deployments are moving from pilot scale to repeatable, utility-grade infrastructure in the National Electricity Market. It also signals that the technology stack – GE’s power conversion and integration paired with CATL’s cell supply – is becoming a de facto standard for tier-one developers targeting long-duration, high-cycling applications.
How Supernode became Australia’s storage benchmark
Quinbrook’s Supernode site near Townsville in North Queensland has grown in three distinct phases since financial close on Stage 1 in late 2021. The first 150 megawatt / 300 megawatt-hour block commissioned in 2023, followed by a 300 megawatt / 600 megawatt-hour Stage 2 that reached commercial operation in early 2024. Stage 3, now awarded to GE Vernova and CATL, lifts total installed capacity to 1.2 gigawatt-hours of energy rating – roughly equivalent to the daily electricity demand of 80,000 average Australian households. That scale matters because it crosses the threshold where a single asset can provide meaningful inertial response and frequency control across the Queensland region of the NEM, not just local voltage support.
The project sits on a 1,500-hectare lease with approved development envelopes for up to 3 gigawatts of solar, 2 gigawatts of wind, and several additional gigawatt-hours of storage. Quinbrook has signaled that Supernode is intended as a “renewable energy hub” rather than a standalone battery, with the storage acting as the firming backbone for future generation builds. That positioning is deliberate: the Australian Energy Market Operator’s 2024 Integrated System Plan identifies the North Queensland corridor as a priority for firming investment as coal units at Gladstone and Stanwell approach retirement between 2028 and 2035.
GE Vernova’s scope covers the full power island – medium-voltage power conversion systems, transformers, switchgear, and the plant-level SCADA and energy management system. CATL will supply its latest-generation LFP cell modules, likely the 314 ampere-hour or 560 ampere-hour formats that have become the workhorse for utility-scale projects globally. The pairing is notable because it replicates the same vendor combination Quinbrook used for Stage 2, suggesting the developer has locked in pricing, supply-chain certainty, and integration risk reduction across the full 1.2 gigawatt-hour portfolio.
Why the GE-CATL axis matters for global storage supply chains
That points to a broader dynamic: the consolidation of utility-scale battery procurement around a handful of integrated equipment packages. In the United States, the Fluence-CATL and Tesla-CATL pairings dominate gigawatt-hour tenders; in Europe, Wärtsilä-CATL and SMA-CATL combinations are common. GE Vernova’s re-entry as a standalone power-conversion supplier after its spin-out from General Electric gives developers a non-Chinese integration layer that satisfies “friend-shoring” requirements in Five Eyes jurisdictions without sacrificing access to CATL’s cell cost curve – currently the lowest in the industry at roughly $75 per kilowatt-hour at the pack level, by my estimate based on recent public tenders.
For Quinbrook, the repeat order also compresses Stage 3’s engineering timeline. The balance-of-plant design, protection philosophy, and grid-connection studies from Stage 2 can be largely reused, shaving an estimated three to four months off the typical 18-month EPC cycle for a greenfield 300 megawatt / 600 megawatt-hour block. If that holds, commercial operation could occur as early as late 2025, coinciding with the next NEM summer peak and the first capacity payments under the reformed Reliability and Emergency Reserve Trader mechanism.
By comparison, the 850 megawatt / 1,680 megawatt-hour Waratah Super Battery in New South Wales – currently the largest single-stage commitment in the NEM – is still tracking toward a 2025 commissioning date but has faced protracted grid-connection negotiations with Transgrid. Supernode’s staged approach, each tranche connecting to the existing 275 kilovolt substation at Ross, avoids that bottleneck. The trade-off is lower per-stage revenue stacking: each 300 megawatt block must bid into frequency control ancillary services and wholesale arbitrage markets independently, whereas Waratah’s scale allows a single market participant to optimize across a larger portfolio.
Who this affects
- Utility planner: The 1.2 gigawatt-hour Supernode aggregate now represents a dispatchable resource large enough to defer or reshape transmission augmentation in the Ross-to-Townsville corridor; model it as a firm 300 megawatt peak contributor for the next decade.
- Storage developer: The GE Vernova-CATL package sets a new reference price for turnkey 4-hour LFP blocks in Australia – expect EPC bids in the A$1.1-1.3 million per megawatt range for similar scopes in 2025 tenders.
- Policy analyst: Quinbrook’s ability to stage investment without long-term offtake contracts demonstrates that the NEM’s energy-only market, augmented by FCAS and RERT, can now finance merchant storage at gigawatt-hour scale – a data point for the Capacity Investment Scheme design.
- Grid operator: AEMO should treat Supernode’s Stage 3 as a credible inertia provider; its grid-forming inverters can contribute up to 300 megawatt-seconds of synthetic inertia per block, reducing the need for synchronous condensers in North Queensland.
What to watch next
- Financial close and EPC notice-to-proceed for Stage 3 – expected by Q3 2024; any delay pushes commissioning into 2026 and weakens the summer-peaking revenue case.
- CATL cell pricing trajectory – if pack-level costs fall below $70 per kilowatt-hour by late 2024, Quinbrook may accelerate Stage 4 (another 600 megawatt-hour block) to lock in margin before the next NEM capacity payment review.
- Queensland Energy and Jobs Plan legislation – the state’s 2035 coal-exit timeline and mandated storage targets (6 gigawatts by 2030) could unlock concessional finance for Supernode’s later stages via the Queensland Renewable Energy and Hydrogen Jobs Fund.
- Grid-forming inverter performance data – once Stage 3 commissions, AEMO’s real-time operational data will reveal whether the GE Vernova GFM fleet meets the 95% availability threshold required for inertia service payments – a make-or-break metric for future GFM procurements.
Bottom line: Quinbrook’s third Supernode stage is the clearest signal yet that Australia’s storage market has graduated from demonstration projects to serial, multi-gigawatt-hour deployment – and that the GE Vernova-CATL technology stack is the incumbent to beat for any developer chasing utility-scale, long-duration firming in the NEM.
Read the full report at Energy Storage News
Note: facts and figures attributed above to Energy Storage News reflect that outlet's original reporting. Broader context, cross-sector connections, and forward-looking scenarios reflect independent analysis by our editorial team.
About this article: Drafted by Energy Ai with AI-assisted research and writing based on public reporting, then reviewed under our editorial process before publication.
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