Telstra

Mobile towers located in many regional areas face some of the harshest conditions in Australia with searing temperatures. In the wake of the Black Summer bushfires, it was found that only three percent of the mobile tower outages were due to fire damage. The main reason for the loss of networks resulted from the mains power being out.

In 2021 the Australian Federal Government funded a national project $13.2million initiative Mobile Network Hardening Program to extend the battery back-up for mobile base stations in regional and remote areas across Australia.

As part of the $13.2million initiative working with Telstra, Battery Energy deployed 22 MWh of Batteries and Active Management Solutions to provide twelve hours of backup power for a minimum of ten years across varied sites nation-wide. Due to the critical nature of the program, a solution was required that had remote management and transparency to the remote sites.

Battery Energy built and supplied over 8,500 SunGEL Ultra batteries in four months in combination with an embedded Battery Energy Asset Management system to actively keep the battery systems balanced and remotely managed.

However, unlike other energy storage systems on the market, these batteries are not reliant on the management system and should the management system go off line during a natural disaster, the critical back up power will continue to operate.