A deep dive from Bloomberg via Mining.com, April 5:
Like so much in our modern era, Australia’s high-stakes gamble on renewable energy starts with an Elon Musk Twitter brag.
South Australia’s last coal-fired power plant had closed, leaving the province of 1.8 million heavily reliant on wind farms and power imports from a neighboring region. When an unprecedented blackout caused much of the country to question the state’s dependence on clean power, Tesla boasted — on Twitter, of course — that it had a solution: It could build the world’s biggest battery, and fast.
“@Elonmusk, how serious are you about this,” replied Australian software billionaire and climate activist Mike Cannon-Brookes. “Can you guarantee 100MW in 100 days?”
Musk responded: “Tesla will get the system installed and working 100 days from contract signature or it is free. That serious enough for you?”
To the astonishment of many, Tesla succeeded, and today, almost seven years later, that battery and more like it have become central to a shockingly rapid energy transition. By the middle of the next decade, major coal-fired power stations that generate about half of Australia’s electricity will shut down. Gas-fired plants are being retired, too, and nuclear power is banned. That leaves solar, wind and hydro as the major options in the country’s post-coal future.
“It’s really a remarkable story,” said Audrey Zibelman, the former head of the Australian Energy Market Operator, or AEMO, the agency that runs the grid, and now an adviser to Alphabet Inc.’s X. “Because we’re not interconnected, we’ve had to learn to do it in a much more sophisticated way, where a lot of other countries will go once they’ve shut down their fossils.”
It may be Australia’s biggest power buildout since electrification in the 1920s and 30s. And, if successful, could be replicated across the 80% of the world’s population that lives in the so-called sun belt — which includes Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, India, southern China and Southeast Asia, says Professor Andrew Blakers, an expert in renewable energy and solar technology at Australian National University. That, in turn, would go a long way to halting climate change.
Building battery storage is just one critical piece of the national project, and AEMO and others are worried coal plants will shut before there’s enough additional electricity supply. Australia needs to increase its grid-scale wind and solar capacity ninefold by 2050. Connecting all that generation and storage into the grid will require more investment....
....MUCH MORE
As we said in a January post:
One of the more interesting bits in the 8K filing (and slide deck) was "Energy Storage" up 152% year-over-year in Q4. Elon is successfully building an entire new business inside of Tesla.
The "successfully" was underlined in the original and may get a second underline if Tesla and CATL and Tesla and Panasonic perfect the already-commercial iron batteries:
April 2022: Tesla's Pivotal Move In Battery Chemistry (TSLA)
July 2021: "What Tesla’s bet on iron-based batteries means for manufacturers" (TSLA)
Previously:
May 17, 2021
"Tesla in talks with China's EVE for low-cost battery supply deal -sources" (TSLA)
Well I guess Tony Stark Elon Musk is now officially Iron Man.....
*****
Back in 2018 we posted "Batteries: Lithium-Iron may be Competitive With Lithium-Cobalt" but with so many technologies that failed to scale-up over the years we are a little bit jaundiced about wasting the reader's time chasing every rabbit that pops up.
However, if this works, Elon may have found the chemistry for the next generation of Powerwalls.....
Also from 2018:"Ten years left to redesign lithium-ion batteries"
This time frame is not too restrictive.
Tesla and their battery partner, Panasonic, have removed a lot of the cobalt (60%) from their battery recipe and are on their way to zero cobalt over the next couple years.
So, more interesting than any time pressure is the potential spur to creativity on the question of alternative chemistries.
From the journal Nature, July 25:...
One more from 2018—apparently a great year for Iron Age types while I kept writing Bronze Age on my checks. ("Dad, what's a check?"):
Twenty Month Payback for Tesla 100-MW Utility Scale Battery Storage System
Elon (and Panasonic) may have just found another multi-billion dollar business.
Going forward the chemistry probably won't be Lithium ion, maybe
molten-salt or iron based, but the fact TSLA can now pitch this kind of
payback probably heralds the beginnings of lithium rush 3.0, or at least
the promotion thereof....
