The Queensland government surprised many when it announced last year that the state would construct two new pumped hydro schemes, dwarfing the troubled Snowy Hydro 2.0 project in NSW.

Professor Bartlett also says it is high risk for Powerlink to connect the pumped storage schemes by only one new line of 500kV towers that carry a double circuit, due to the risk of fires or vandals bringing down towers.

There’s a reason that others haven’t gone that big," Professor Bartlett said.

“At this point in time, the only serious battery proposals that we’ve got on our book are lithium-ion batteries, and all of them have congested around a 2-hour storage time, which tells us that that’s what the market deems as economic at this point,” he said.