The South Australian Premier Jay Weatherill will reveal a New energy policy tomorrow at 11am. The announcement comes on the back of conversations with Tesla Founder Elon Musk about how the company could assist the state (and the country) in storing energy made from their high volume of renewable energy generation.
Is it possible the Premier found a spare $100 million behind the couch? Maybe, but given the Prime Minister was also involved in the talks, its likely the announcement will include some share of federal funding.
It's time to take charge of our energy future. Tomorrow we will be releasing South Australia's new energy policy. pic.twitter.com/Hb0W9LjthI
— Jay Weatherill (@JayWeatherill) March 13, 2017
That new energy policy is likely include Tesla’s commercial power storage solution, PowerPack. This is scalable and more importantly fast to implement. Building a new coal-fired powerplant, even an ultra efficient one, is incredibly hard to make financially viable given a return on investment being 20-30 years. By that time, the world is expected to have moved on from a strong focus on coal, in favour of renewables. Coal power stations are also complex to build and can take around 8 to 10 years to build. South Australia needs a solution now.
As other coal-fired power generation reaches its end of life, other states will also face a power problem. Gas also has its issues, with international markets prepared to pay more than domestic retailers, which means despite having a large supply in Australia, domestic portions are not enough to service our growing needs.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has been in discussions with the SA Premiere and the Prime Minister this week and it looks like tomorrow’s announcement will outline the path forward. Its worth noting that Tesla’s latest acquisition, Solar City, was Musk’s other company (as well as SpaceX). Now under the banner of Tesla Energy, its possible the company brings their full solution to Australia, offering and end-to-end solar panel and battery storage solution to assist Australia’s power needs.
