Fortescue proves green grid can withstand major network disruption

When bushfires caused a major transmission disruption across our Pilbara energy network last year, Fortescue’s renewable energy systems did something many once believed impossible: they kept our grid stable without thermal generation.

On 1 October 2025, bushfires triggered faults on our transmission network, causing both circuits of a major overhead transmission line to trip simultaneously and remove all thermal generation from the system.

Despite the scale of the disruption, our solar generation and battery energy storage systems (BESS) responded instantly to maintain grid stability and continue supplying approximately 85MW of load across our network.

This event marked a breakthrough moment in the development of our Green Grid, the world’s first fully integrated industrial green energy system designed to eliminate fossil fuels from large-scale industry.

Unlike traditional renewable projects that feed intermittently into external networks, our Green Grid is a fully standalone, islanded power system delivering stable, dispatchable renewable electricity across our operations.

The event also demonstrated the growing capability of advanced inverter-based technologies, which are increasingly performing the system support functions traditionally delivered by fossil fuel-powered infrastructure.

Fortescue Manager of Operations and Engineering, Glen Carruthers, said the event challenged decades of conventional thinking in power system engineering.

“For most of my 35-year career in power system engineering, I thought this was impossible,” he said.

“It is a glimpse of the future and, bar the birth of my child, the most exciting thing I have ever witnessed.”

With commissioning underway at the 250MWh BESS at North Star Junction and 120MWh BESS at Eliwana, we’re scaling our Green Grid up to approximately 1.5GW of solar capacity, 800MW of wind generation and more than 5GWh of battery energy storage.

Artificial intelligence (AI) will also play a critical role in the future of our Green Grid. Today, we’re already deploying market-leading AI and digital optimisation systems that support real-time weather forecasting and grid responsiveness to changes in renewable generation.

This event demonstrates that a large-scale industrial network can remain stable, resilient and operational using renewable energy systems alone – a milestone with benefits far beyond Fortescue’s operations.

As we continue building our Green Grid, we are proving that heavy industry can decarbonise without compromising reliability, stability or performance.