South Australia Tries Wind First, Now Solar – IOTW Report

South Australia Tries Wind First, Now Solar

Canada Free Press: South Australia, a state of 1.7 million people, is on a renewable energy kick and has encountered price and reliability issues. South Australia first invested in wind power and found wind’s reliability to be a problem when it shuttered its last coal plant that backed up the wind power and exposed its ratepayers to outrageous prices and massive black-outs. It then hired Tesla to install the largest storage battery in the world last November—a 100-megawatt lithium-ion battery—to provide back-up for wind’s intermittency, at a price of $50 million. Now, it will experiment with solar rooftop panels and Tesla Powerwall 2 batteries to form the world’s largest virtual power plant, costing $800 million. The project will cover 50,000 houses to be fitted with 5 kilowatt rooftop solar systems and 13.5 kilowatt hour Tesla batteries that together could provide up to 250 megawatts of solar power and 650 megawatt hours of storage.

The state government is providing a $2 million grant and a $30 million loan from its Renewable Technology Fund and plans to obtain additional funding from private investors. Tesla will be responsible for the installation.

Construction of the South Australia virtual power plant will begin with the test installation of solar panels and Tesla battery storage units on 1100 social housing properties from 2018 to 2019. Over half of those installations are to be completed by the end of this year. It will be followed by mass installations for a total of 50,000 households with the target date for completion set for June 2022.

The project is expected to lower energy bills for participating households by 30 percent. By aggregating the individual solar and storage installations to create a virtual power plant, it is believed that that solar power injected into the grid will be cheaper and help lower electricity prices.  more

11 Comments on South Australia Tries Wind First, Now Solar

  1. Fantastic! 50,000 houses in a population of over a mill.
    Smart!

    MJA people will die in the heat, right. Some will just murder/suicide when they go bankrupt and the kids are starving.

    Government peeps have taxpayer-subsidized gas generators right?

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  2. The word ‘virtual’ means fake. Like Elon Musk’s car company and space industry. N
    And yet people keep falling for this swindler. It makes as much sense as virtual currency.

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  3. and it’s not working? Obviously haven’t levied enough taxes. I am sure if they double taxes it all will work out just swell. I wonder if they teach laws of thermodynamics at the universities down there?

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  4. Well, at least they gave their scheme an accurate name. Virtual pretty much means make believe or pretend.
    From the Oxford dictionary : Virtual, adj. -almost or nearly as described, but not completely or according to strict definition.

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