South Australia is Australia’s wind and solar capital: resulting in an unstable grid and the world’s highest power prices.
One wheeze in purported answer to the debacle above was Elon Musk’s giant 100 MW lithium-ion battery. It cost taxpayers a cool $150,000,000 and delivers occasional spurts of power to the grid, whenever the sun sets and/or calm weather sets in.
Its principal purpose is to allow the nearby 200 MW Hallett Power Station a few minutes lead time to fire up its 12 unit, open cycle gas turbine plant, to thereby avoid a total grid collapse when wind power output collapses – as it did on 24 January (see above), when the state was hit by heatwave and 29,000 households were left powerless.
The dual fuel plant can run on gas, but, more often than not, it’s running on diesel and spewing tonnes of filthy, noxious, particulate matter into…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
Feb 21, 2019 @ 10:57:24
this battery has done a sterling job. It stopped a blackout in Victoria last year when Coal units broke down. Alas this year too many broke down. That is what happens when there is too much reliance on coal.
We should look at the profitability of the battery which is quite high and it has brought down wholesale prices.
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