Billionaire Elon Musk defied his doubters to beat Friday’s 100-day deadline and install the world’s biggest battery in the Australian outback. He’ll probably relinquish that crown by February.
South Korea’s Hyundai Electric & Energy Systems Co. is building a 150-megawatt lithium-ion unit, 50 percent larger than Musk’s, that the company says will go live in about three months in Ulsan near the southeast coast.
With battery prices tumbling by almost half since 2014, large-scale projects are popping up around the world. Developers have announced lithium-ion battery projects with total capacity of 1,650 megawatts per hour in 2017, four times the amount for all of 2016, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance.
“Musk has set a benchmark on how quickly you can install and commission a battery of this size,” Ali Asghar, a BNEF senior associate, said in an interview. Falling costs are “making them a compelling mainstream option for energy-storage applications in many areas around the world, and projects even bigger than Tesla’s are now under construction.”
Though Musk’s Palo Alto, California-based Tesla Inc. is best known for making electric cars, the company sells its lithium-ion batteries to utilities eager for cost-effective ways to integrate renewable sources of power like solar and wind into their electric grids.
Musk agreed to up the stakes for South Australia, the mainland state with the biggest exposure to clean energy, by providing 100 megawatts of power, roughly the size of an electricity shortfall the region suffered in a February blackout.
Winning Admirers
His nimbleness in delivering the entire project before the summer deadline has won him fans among local politicians. South Australian Premier Jay Weatherill, who features a photo of Tesla’s giant battery on his Twitter profile, used Musk’s star power to help sell his pitch for the state to be a world leader in renewable energy.
With the battery sending power to the national energy market on Friday, Musk beat a Twitter bet that he could deliver the storage system within 100 days -- or he would foot the bill. The entrepreneur also met a target set by the state government of installing the battery by the start of summer, Dec. 1, South Australian Premier Jay Weatherill said in a statement.
The battery-storage industry is becoming increasingly important in places like South Australia, which has less access to traditional fossil-fuel sources like coal and gas than the rest of the nation. Instead, the region gets 41 percent of its electricity from renewable energy, one of the highest penetrations of wind and solar in the world.