South Australia’s Big Battery Goes Flat

Anyone remember South Australia’s Great Big Green Battery? The one they paid Elon Musk a cool $90 million to build?

Spoiler alert: It doesn’t work.

South Australia’s big Tesla battery is being sued for allegedly failing to live up to its promises to help rescue the power grid in the event of catastrophe.

The 150-megawatt battery was being paid to be on standby to pump energy into the grid at short notice in order to arrest a system failure in the event of a major power plant or transmission failure.

But the Australian Energy Regulator (AER) alleges it did not deliver as promised during a major Queensland coal plant failure in 2019, “creating a risk to power system security and stability”.

A massive, taxpayer-funded renewable energy scheme that doesn’t work?

I’m shocked. Shocked, I tell you.

Still, at least SA has reliable coal-fired power stations to fall back on… oh, wait, it shut them all down and built wind farms instead. How’s that working out?

The Federal Court legal action against owner Hornsdale Power Reserve comes months after the AER successfully sought financial penalties from wind farms for failures associated with South Australia’s statewide blackout.

So in response to a green energy scheme that catastrophically failed, the deep-green South Australian government splurges taxpayer’s money on another green energy scheme…

The AER alleges Hornsdale Power Reserve — owned and operated by the French renewable energy company Neoen — failed to provide the services it was paid for by the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) between July and November 2019.

ABC Australia

Remind me: what’s the definition of “insanity” again?

Still, don’t let it be said that the Big, Flat Battery is a complete failure. It’s working very well indeed for some.

M. Night Shyamalan twist: corporate grifters are raking it in.

The Tesla big battery in South Australia – officially known as the Hornsdale Power Reserve – delivered a windfall profit to its Paris-based owner Neoen in the first half of 2020 […] the Hornsdale battery has delivered total earnings (EBITDA) in it first two and a half years of operation of €54.4 million, which translates to $A88 million – for a battery that cost a little over $A90 million.

Renew Economy

It’s hard to decide who are the bigger fools: the politicians who keep flushing taxpayer’s money down the vast, green sewer of “renewables” scams, or the taxpayers who keep voting for them.

Still, at least the battery hasn’t caught fire. Yet.

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