SA battery thoughts
There's this worlds largest battery project going on in South Australia. Tesla sold a financial product. The government needed to cover some of the risk of when power lines go down, or if something goes wrong in another part of the network. It needs to cover this risk quickly for political reasons. The chance of another similar storm knocking out the power lines again, which now have bigger maintenance crews, is very small. But if there is another blackout and they didn't do anything? They'd be in big trouble with the newspapers. So Tesla really sold a risk product. Since SA could have spent the money on more generation. But not all people understand that. The 100MW stage of that wind farm cost $250 million, and took some years to reach agreement, and some years to build. By promising to build the battery quicker, they have covered that risk during the time they need it. They could have installed another wind farm the same size in...