The Central BESS
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Our Queensland town planners have supported ACEnergy to achieve approval for a 500MW Battery Energy Storage System (BESS) in Central Queensland.
Spiire was engaged to provide town planning services for a significant renewable energy project in Queensland, supporting the State’s clean energy transition.
The Central BESS is designed to help stabilise the power grid and minimise the risk of power outages, by storing energy during times of low demand and distributing energy back into the grid in peak demand. This will increase network capacity to support the connection of additional renewable energy sources, while improving its overall reliability.
The project site is strategically positioned next to the Bouldercombe Substation, to service increasing energy needs in nearby Rockhampton and Gladstone.
Our Town Planning team prepared the Development Application for the site, including a Material Change of Use and Reconfiguring a Lot. As one of the first BESS projects of this scale in the region, the application required a considered approach and helped establish the benchmark for the level of assessment, technical reporting and supporting information expected for BESS facilities.
The project also progressed within an evolving political and policy landscape, with new guidelines and expectations emerging throughout the process. Our planners provided ongoing strategic advice to interpret these changes, demonstrate alignment with relevant policy settings and respond to Council requirements as they developed.
We worked closely with Rockhampton Regional Council from pre-lodgement through to the resolution of conditions, helping to maintain momentum and achieve a positive result for the project and the region.
We coordinated input from multiple internal and external specialists to provide a comprehensive Development Application package for a project of this scale and complexity.
This included leveraging our in-house expertise to provide a Bushfire Risk Assessment, a Landscape Concept developed by our Landscape Architecture team, and a Visual Impact Assessment prepared by our former Visual Media studio.
We also assisted our client with community consultation alongside the formal public notification process, helping to ensure local concerns were understood and addressed.
Our team continued to assist throughout the appeal process, supporting the client to secure approval through mediation in the Planning and Environment Court in October 2025. This was a significant outcome for a complex project and a major success for the client.
