In an interview in 2017, Elon Musk was told that electricity was becoming a luxury for some, if not for most people living in South Australia. In South Australia the electricity price had skyrocketed. Knowing this Elon Musk said his team would work harder.
Back in 2016, the Australian Blackout was a large scale power blackout that happened due to the storm damage on the Electricity infrastructure. Because of the interconnected nature of the electricity transmission network, wherein the failure of one node would rapidly lead to the failure of the other, thus a cascading failure resulted in the entire blackout of the southern central part of Australia affecting almost 850,000 families in total. The gale storms and lightning made the already declining infrastructure of South Australia worse. Being a country which has the largest coal reserves and natural gas reserves, not to mention that most of the areas in Australia get an exceptional amount of sunlight, one might expect the energy prices to be cheap. But unfortunately Australia has the sixth most expensive energy in the world.
The situation has gone worse, where according to an Australian Competition Consumer Commission ACCC, says that people pay more than 44% than an average family did 10 years ago. Musk pledged that he would build an electric farm that would stop the frequent outages happening in Australia. He even said that he would do it for free for the South Australian Government if it took more than a hundred days. Today the world's largest lithium ion battery farm is live in Australia and Musk delivered the farm in 63 days after signing. This ended the high price hikes, prolonged outages and not to mention the political brawls over battery powers in Australia.
Tesla created the 100 MW batteries in the Horns Dale power reserve, which mostly uses wind and solar power, costing Tesla around $50 million. This resulted in the network cost being slashed to about $76 million and also reduced the cost to regulate South Australia's grid by 91%. A bloomberg financial analyst noticed the effects the battery farm had saying, " Not only has the Hornsdale Power Reserve identified how batteries can physically help the grid, it has also showed how they can make money along the way". Tesla said in a statement the completion of the world's largest Lithium ion battery in record time shows that a sustainable effective energy solution is possible and hope this project provides a model for future deployments around the world. With this Musk proved that renewable energy can be stored in storage solutions and can be used in the event of failure of the large scale network transmission, a feature too common in tornado and other natural disaster hit areas.
Tesla has been pushing its battery storage solutions and solar panels after it acquired Solar City a venture started by Musk's cousin in June 2016 for $2.5 to $3 billion. Musk said that the reason for this is creating a seamlessly integrated Tesla battery and solar power product that looks beautiful. It was completed later in 2016. with the merger completion Tesla Motors incorporated changed it's name to Tesla Incorporated. Musk is pushing hard for solar energy. He compared the sun to a nuclear fusion reactor without the nuclear waste. After acquiring the solar city, Musk designed the solar roof, which is designed to look like normal roof tiles where the photovoltaic cells would male up the entire roof surface rather than mounting the traditional solar panels to the existing roof. the most important announcement came in the form of battery storage solutions- Tesla Powerwall 2. A home battery product that was introduced to store the surplus power either from the solar panels. As of 2020, tesla is still tinkering about the product, three years after announcing the concept, having done trail installations with two different iterations so far.
There's still work in progress, despite being announced three years back, Tesla still hasn't performed many actual installations of it's Solar roof. During an annual shareholder meeting, Musk said that the third iteration of the tile was being worked on. Musk is pushing hard for solar energy as a means to replace traditional coal power plants which remains largely active in energy hungry countries like India and China and nuclear power plants. The latter produces nuclear wastes that remains within the environment for decades. Not only Musk, even countries whose entire economy traditionally revolved around crude oil and petroleum products are now pushing for renewable energy. Petroleum exporting countries which came after the discovery of vast reserves of crude oil and natural gas steadily diversifying their economy.. Saudi Arabia where the annual rainfall average is around 400mm and petroleum products contributing to 60% of GDP has begun investing in renewable energy. Meanwhile two giants, Indian and China who still operate coal power plants for their hungry economy have shown one of the world's largest solar power farms in the world. Kamuthi, Tamil Nadu in India the southernmost state has a power capacity of over 648 MW. It covers almost an area of 10 sq. Km. It was the largest solar power plant in 2016 comprised of more than 2.5 million individual solar modules at a cost of $659 million. This power plant now produces enough electricity to power 15,000 homes in India. India consumes 4.9 million barrels a day and china consumes 13.5 million gallons a day which together consume about 18.5 million barrels a day still do not even come close to the US despite having one eighth the combined population of India and China. The combined population of India and China consumes around 20 million barrels a day. The demands of petroleum in the developing nations continued to increase while India is slated to overtake china in the consumption of petroleum by the year 2025.
Though reality may seem grim, many countries are steadily moving on to renewable energy with government's giving its citizens tax breaks and incentives to move on to renewable energy. Countries like Iceland became the first ever country to completely move on to a renewable form of energy, becoming the largest clean energy producer per capita. Germany, India, Ireland, Israel and The Netherlands have announced plans to ban fossil fuel cars starting in 2030. Britain, Taiwan and California will ban them in 2040 and Norway in 2025. Tesla continues to expand in the renewable energy sector and continue to produce electric cars manufacturing sector. Tesla will continue to play a vital role in the coming decades to take people off the non renewable energy resources. You can do your bit too to prevent climate change in our lifetime. Simple things like turning off lights, fans etc. saves a lot of unnecessary power consumption.
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