South Australia, renewable energy

‘Giant wind turbines owned by Neoen, a French company, loom over the dusty red scrubland outside Jamestown, north of Adelaide, the capital of the state of South Australia. The world’s biggest lithium-ion battery sits a stone’s throw away. Elon Musk, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, installed it [in 2017] through his company, Tesla, to store energy from the turbines and feed it back to the grid when other supplies run short. About 100km to the west, across the Spencer Gulf, Sanjeev Gupta, a British billionaire, is building solar and pumped-storage hydropower plants to revive a failed steelworks at Whyalla that he bought six months ago. With just 7% of Australia’s population, South Australia has become a testing ground for a political argument about how hard the government should push to replace fossil fuels with cleaner energy. The rest of Australia, too, is paying more attention than it normally would. The last coal-fired power station in South Australia closed two years ago. While the bigger eastern states still rely on coal for most of their electricity, South Australia now gets almost half of its power from wind and solar, the highest proportion in the country. (The rest comes mainly from gas.)’ – Source: ‘The power and the furore’, The Economist, March 10 2018, p.51).

See: Renewable energy.