It’s a PR pitch too good to be true.
A global battery giant launches two new products in Australia, declaring one of those products could be the solution to a power crisis engulfing South Australia.
Within 48 hours, the global tech guru chief executive of said battery company pledges on social media to deliver a solution in 100 days, or provide it for free.
Social media goes nuts, as social media does. And before long, it seems South Australia’s unreliable power problems might be solved via a trans-Pacific Twitter deal between billionaires.
Politicians scramble for Elon Musk’s number, eager not to miss the opportunity to genuflect before a global tech deity with more Twitter followers than they could ever hope to match.
But before we all get carried away, it’s worth pointing out that Tesla’s fix for SA’s power problems probably won’t eventuate. Here’s why.
Tesla isn’t the only company proposing a battery fix
They don’t have the celebrity figurehead of Elon Musk, but there are already several companies proposing big battery solutions for South Australia. And some of their proposals are already well advanced.
Zen Energy, chaired by the Rudd government’s carbon-pricing tsar Ross Garnaut, has been working on plans for a battery storage of up to 150 megawatts (MW) at Port Augusta.
Lyon Solar wants to build 200-250 MW of large-scale batteries in several projects around the state.
And that’s just the start.
Tesla is late to the party
The South Australian Government has already dangled a sizable carrot to the power market to try to encourage both a new source of electricity generation and a new source of dispatchable renewable energy.
Last year, it issued a tender for supply of 75 per cent of the Government’s own electricity usage for a new market entrant, and another for the remaining 25 per cent to come from dispatchable renewables (batteries or another storage solution).
Those tenders have since closed, which means if the Government were to field offers from a new player — say Tesla — it could run into probity problems.
There is money for storage options from the Federal Government currently on the table, via the Australian Renewable Energy Agency.
But that brings us to the next problem.
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