PERTH, June 13 -- Eighteen new community batteries will be wired into Western Australia's electricity grid over the next year, the federal and state Labor governments announced on Saturday, the same week the Australian climate minister and COP31 negotiations president was in Bonn telling reporters that the world needs to get off fossil fuels. The batteries are a 6.6-megawatt addition to the country's distributed-storage capacity, modest at the absolute scale of the Australian National Electricity Market but politically the part of the energy transition the Labor government is using to demonstrate that the international ambition has domestic delivery to back it up.

The 25-million-dollar project, of which 9.34 million dollars is federal fu...