Renewable energy has long been touted as a major requirement in the fight to stave off the world’s growing climate emergency. Governments have been slow to act, but prices continue to come down and the case for renewables grows stronger by the day.
However, renewables have always struggled around the issue of availability. Solar power only works when the sun is shining, and wind generators only when the wind is blowing. The obvious solution is to create some kind of large, grid-connected battery to store excess energy in off-peak periods, and use it to prop up the grid when renewable outputs are low. These days, that’s actually a viable idea, as South Australia proved in 2017.
Building The World’s Largest Lithium-Ion Battery
The blackout was caused by storms taking down transmission lines, but the politics of the day laid the blame at renewable energy’s door. Credit: ABC News
On the 28th of September, 2016, the state of South Australia faced an unprecedented storm. Wind gusts exceeded 120 km/h, and pouring rains threatened to flood low-lying areas. Amid the chaos, major transmission lines and interconnectors were damaged, and the entire grid went down. 1.7 million people were suddenly without power.
Thankfully, in the hours following, civilization remained standing. Emergency crews were able to bring the grid back to life relatively quickly, with most parts of the state up and running within 24 hours. Despite this, the incident was quickly used as a political football, with the reigning pro-coal Federal Government placing the blame squarely on the state’s heavy use of renewable energy. This was provably false, but sp ..
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