Elon Musk in conjunction with Tesla Motors and Jay Weatherill, the premier of South Australia, officially switched on the power to the world’s largest battery, helping to power the blackout-prone state.

Elon Musk rarely gets news and social media attention for actually delivering on a deadline, but this time he did. According to the BBC on their report on the world’s biggest battery being turned on they dropped earlier yesterday (Dec. 3,2017) Elon Musk delivered on his promise to get South Australia the energy support it needed to keep its countries lights on. Musk promised to South Australia’s premiere earlier this year that he’d build a battery farm to solve his state’s problems in 100 days or they’d do it for free. Not only did he deliver on that deadline but got the battery operational well before the second deadline of turning the switch on by the beginning of December. Read the tweet that started it all below.

Back in March, politician Jay Weatherhill was just about to announce his plans to deal with Southern Australia’s energy woes. Although the country has an abundance of solar and wind resources, coal-fired plants are still widely used, although times are changing. To date, only about 17 percent of energy needs in Australia is met by renewable energies.

Embed from Getty Images

Embed from Getty Images

A tweet from Elon Musk in response to Jay Weatherhill’s proposed plans not only offered a possible solution, but bolstered Weatherhill’s platform about being open to innovation.

The battery is the size of an American football field, uses the same battery technology found in the Tesla Model S, X and, 3 so presumably, we’re talking about lots of lithium-ion cells working together Altogether this battery has the ability to power 30,000 average sized homes over one-hour which translates to roughly 100 MW.

All these batteries do is store electricity until you really need it. With Australia no longer willing to build coal-fired plants, renewable energies have been taking up much of the slack. Now, with this large battery to share some of the load, during peak hours when energy demand is high (a hot day) these batteries will kick in and help some of the wind powered and coal-fired plants out, thus preventing rolling blackouts.

It’s a win-win. South Australia gets to test this technology out and Elon Musk gets some PR. Now, time will tell if this giant battery delivers as promised.

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