{"id":9867,"date":"2017-03-14T08:04:47","date_gmt":"2017-03-13T21:34:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.solarquotes.com.au\/blog\/?p=9867"},"modified":"2017-04-18T14:40:15","modified_gmt":"2017-04-18T04:10:15","slug":"billionaires-gambit-accept-musks-offer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.solarquotes.com.au\/blog\/billionaires-gambit-accept-musks-offer\/","title":{"rendered":"Billionaire’s Gambit – Why we should accept Musk’s offer."},"content":{"rendered":"

\"deal\"<\/p>\n

Last Thursday in a trendy re-purposed Substation near Melbourne, Elon Musk’s cousin Lyndon Rive claimed he could solve SA’s energy\u00a0woes in 100 days.<\/p>\n

How?<\/p>\n

By installing 100-300MWh of batteries.<\/p>\n

Big Call.<\/p>\n

A day later, via Twitter, Aussie tech billionaire Mike Cannon-Brookes asks Musk if he’s serious about “100MW1<\/a><\/sup>” of batteries in 100 days. Musk wagers he’ll deliver and install them in 100 days or it’s free.<\/p>\n

What is Musk Actually Proposing?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Musk & Rives’\u00a0“solution to SA’s power woes” is\u00a0“100 – 300MWh” of energy storage.<\/p>\n

The batteries they want to use are the Tesla Powerpacks. These are are steel cabinets with 15 Powerwalls worth of batteries in each. A single power pack can provide 210kWh of storage, which can be punched out to the grid at a max power of 50kW.<\/p>\n

So 100-300MWh of storage will come with a corresponding 23.8MW – 71.4MW of power.<\/p>\n

In the scheme of things 23.8MW is not\u00a0very much grunt. For context it’s about the same as 10 modern wind turbines operating at full power.<\/p>\n

So I’m going to work with the upper end of Tesla’s offer: 300MWh and 71.4MW.<\/p>\n

At what cost?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Musk later tweeted that Tesla don’t do ‘mate’s rates’ but can do these batteries – to anyone buying over 100MWh – for US$250 per kWh.<\/p>\n

That works out at a nice round $100 million AUD per 300MWh. But that’s at the factory gate. You still need to ship those 1500 x 1.6ton power packs to Australia (about a tenth of the capacity of a modern cargo ship or 20 x 747 cargo planes worth).<\/p>\n

What is also not included in that $100 mil is the inverters, site works, cabling, installation, substations and commissioning.<\/p>\n

My guess is that the total, installed cost could easily be double the headline cost of AU$100m. It is going to be installed by Australian labour, and have you seen the cost of Aussie tradies these days?<\/p>\n

Will it work?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Depends what you mean by ‘work’.<\/p>\n

Elon has promised to have it “working in 100 days or it’s free”.<\/p>\n

As far as I’m concerned,\u00a0‘working’ should mean: ‘up and running and preventing any more blackouts in SA’.<\/p>\n

But Elon is not crazy enough to make that promise. And he can’t, because 71MW of battery power is not enough to magically make\u00a0the SA grid invincible.<\/p>\n

What Elon has promised\u00a0is that the batteries will be\u00a0installed and commissioned in 100 days.<\/p>\n

I have no doubt that, if Tesla send over their best engineers, they can get the batteries bolted down, wired, up and operational (although 100 days including shipping them from the US is ambitious).<\/p>\n

So what will a fully operational 71MW\u00a0Tesla battery do for the SA grid?<\/strong><\/p>\n

A large(ish) battery will definitely contribute to grid\u00a0reliability. But the one proposed is too\u00a0small to prevent all future blackouts – especially as wild weather becomes more frequent and fossil generation gets older and more fragile2<\/a><\/sup>.<\/p>\n

Here’s what\u00a0300MWH\/71MW of batteries can do:<\/strong><\/p>\n