17 September

I hope Wang 9 (one of the biggest batteries in the world) gets the same public enthusiasm when it opens as the original Wang coal-fired plant did in 1958. Wang 9 will have the same capacity as the old station (500-1000MW). It puts Lithgow on the map, globally. It’ll be owned by one of the biggest oil companies in the world (Shell), showing they know where the money now is in energy. Lithgow is a prime position for renewables infrastructure because of the existing high-voltage grid. And unlike the old station, which released over 370 million tonnes of pollutants (it’s all we knew back then), Wang 9 won’t release a single gram of any pollution. We should be cheering this superb engineering.