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September 27, 2026 \u2014 3:08pm<\/p>\n
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Remove items from your saved list<\/a> to add more.<\/p>\n AAA<\/p>\n The disaster began with a low-pressure system building in the Great Australian Bight. It was a one-in-50 year event. When it tore across South Australia on September 28, 2016, it unleashed havoc that no one had anticipated. A string of supercell thunderstorms not only dumped sheets of hail and rain, but tornadoes unspooled from their vast bellies.<\/p>\n One carved through Wilmington, a town on the route between Adelaide and Port Augusta. It tore down gum trees and collapsed a farm shed. More crucially, it demolished five transmission towers and cut critical transmission lines.<\/p>\n Almost 20 more of these steel giants soon went down across the state. Over 80,000 lightning strikes were recorded. By around 3.50pm, South Australia was effectively isolated from the rest of the grid and out of power.<\/p>\n For some the power was back up within 8 hours, but for others it would take days. At the Flinders Medical Centre, a diesel back-up failed and 17 intensive care patients had to be moved. Embryos at a fertility clinic were lost and the contents of a zinc smelter at Port Pirie cooled and solidified.<\/p>\n Before the rain stopped falling, the blackout was fodder for Australia\u2019s unceasing culture war over climate and energy policy, with Barnaby Joyce and then-SA Independent Senator Nick Xenophon at once blaming intermittent wind power for the blackout.<\/p>\n SA\u2019s then-premier, Jay Weatherill, pushed back. \u201cFor people to be saying those things without being actually appraised of all the facts demonstrates that people are using this to play politics, instead of responding to what is a state emergency,\u201d he said that night. Later he would make the case that storms, not the state\u2019s rapid deployment renewables, caused the blackouts.<\/p>\n Over the following days the disaster became something like a policy Rorschach test. Federal Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg blamed over-reliance on renewables in SA, since some wind farms had automatically shut down to protect themselves once the transmission lines went down. One Nation\u2019s Malcolm Roberts called for all Australian governments to \u201cexit all climate change policies.\u201d<\/p>\n The political combat dragged on over coming months, as heatwaves rolled across the continent and fears of shortages grew. Then in March 2017 Lyndon Rive, Tesla\u2019s vice-president for energy products, at the time visiting Australia, boasted that his company could alleviate SA\u2019s immediate problems by building a giant battery, and it could do so within 100 days of signing a contract for less than $100 million.<\/p>\n Atlassian co-founder Mike Cannon-Brookes saw the boast reported in the Australian Financial Review<\/a> and addressed a tweet directly to Tesla\u2019s boss, Elon Musk.<\/p>\n \u201c\u201dHoly s#%t\u201d, he wrote. \u201cLyndon & @elonmusk<\/a> \u2013 how serious are you about this bet? If I can make the $ happen (& politics), can you guarantee the 100MW in 100 days?\u201d<\/p>\n Musk took up the challenge. \u201cTesla will get the system installed and working 100 days from contract signature or it is free. That serious enough for you?\u201d he replied.<\/p>\n In the end, the battery was built in 63 days from the signing of the contract, and the consequences of the challenge are hard to exaggerate.<\/p>\n At the time, any grid-scale power infrastructure took years of planning and then years of construction, and cost eye-bleeding sums, but in 2017 the cost of batteries had started to fall after Tesla\u2019s completion of its vast $US5 billion Gigafactory in Nevada.<\/p>\n A big battery of the sort Musk was proposing is basically a bunch of car batteries strung together. What is now known as the Hornsdale Power Reserve proved that grid infrastructure could now be made from off-the-shelf parts at speeds previously unimaginable.<\/p>\n Jean-Christophe Cheylus, chief executive of Neoen Australia and New Zealand, the French-based renewables company which built and operates Hornsdale, said the speed of the project depended on the \u201cperfect alignment of many planets\u201d.<\/p>\n Related Article Though unproven at grid-scale, the technology was already readily available. Neoen happened to have a spare main transformer \u2013 a piece of kit that can take months to secure \u2013 in Australia at the time, the SA government issued planning approvals at high-speed and federal regulatory agencies backed the scheme. Having been spurred into action by a bet, Elon Musk flew Telsa packs to Australia rather than waiting on shipping.<\/p>\n \u201cEveryone was very, very curious and willing to do it because it was a world first,\u201d said Cheylus.<\/p>\n Following testing, the Hornsdale big battery was officially opened next to a wind farm 200kms north of Adelaide on December 1, 2017. With a capacity of 100 MW it was around three times the size of any other lithium-ion battery installation operating in the world at the time.<\/p>\n Soon after the battery began operating, other benefits became clear too, explains the Grattan Institute\u2019s Tony Wood. Like other storage technologies, it can soak up cheap energy during the day when renewables are abundant and sell it back into the grid during the evening peak \u2013 but Hornsdale could do far more than that.<\/p>\n Traditionally coal and gas fired power stations have not only made power, but help stabilise the frequency of electricity streaming through a grid with their vast spinning turbines. Hornsdale demonstrated that big batteries could provide what is known as \u201cvirtual inertia\u201d, detecting potentially destabilising shifts in frequency and injecting stabilising electricity in the system in milliseconds, cheaper and faster than the big old spinning machines.<\/p>\n Early reports said Hornsdale saved consumers $40 million in 2018 and $160 million in 2019 via these so-called Frequency Control Ancillary Services. On one occasion, when the state was \u201cislanded\u201d from the rest of the national grid due to instability, Hornsdale\u2019s FCAS capability saved $14 million in just five hours<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull recalls the SA storm as a watershed moment for Australia. It drove him to push for the Snowy Hydro 2.0 scheme to serve as a giant battery to store the nation\u2019s growing renewables supply.<\/p>\n \u201cSouth Australia was a big wake-up call for me because it made me realise that we were rolling out variable renewables without any real consideration about how they should integrate with the grid,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n \u201cNo consideration was being given to the issue of storage, and in those days batteries were nowhere near where they are today. It was a very, very important moment, to make us realise that if we were going to move into a grid where most of our primary generation was from solar and wind, we were going to need to have a lot of storage.\u201d<\/p>\n As Snowy Hydro works towards completion of its delayed mega-scheme, Australia already leads the world in the per capita use of both domestic and grid-scale batteries.<\/p>\n Neoen boss Cheylus said that once Hornsdale served as proof of concept, competitors in Australia began exploring grid-scale batteries \u2013 as did operators across the world. There is now so much battery capacity in Australia that it is beginning to displace more expensive gas during the evening peak, driving down power costs.<\/p>\n \u201cThe significant increase in large-scale and household battery capacity<\/a> is changing how electricity is produced, consumed, and priced across the day,\u201d AEMO executive general manager of policy Violette Mouchaileh said in April, when it reported that Australia\u2019s battery boom had seen capacity doubled over the previous year.<\/p>\n During the March quarter, grid-scale batteries set prices across the grid nearly a third of the time, it said, while gas-powered generation was squeezed to its lowest quarterly average since 1999, and coal-fired power fell to a record-low first-quarter contribution.<\/p>\n According to Cannon-Brookes, Hornsdale proved that big batteries could do crucial work once reserved for coal. \u201cTen years on, Australia has more grid-scale battery capacity per person than any other major economy, and last week we hit a record 80 per cent of renewable energy on the national grid.<\/p>\n \u201cThat\u2019s awesome progress, but we need to keep building. We need more storage, more transmission and a stronger grid \u2013 that\u2019s how Australia becomes a more prosperous and secure renewable energy superpower.\u201d<\/p>\n Greg Bourne, a councillor at the Climate Council and former regional president of BP Australasia, said the \u201centrepreneurial spirit\u201d with which Hornsdale was championed by the billionaires behind the bet, but also by governments and agencies, proved to be defining.<\/p>\n \u201cOn the one hand you\u2019ve got those who were embracing the future, then you had those who still wanted to hug the past.\u201d<\/p>\n Get to the heart of what\u2019s happening with climate change and the environment. Sign up for our fortnightly Environment newsletter.<\/a><\/p>\n Save<\/p>\n You have reached your maximum number of saved items.<\/p>\n Remove items from your saved list<\/a> to add more.<\/p>\n![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/82f20d02c3317d6f26d10eb9f00007c69dc0006315371f06818d580291c6968e.gif\")
The billionaire\u2019s challenge that spurred the battery revolution.Photos: Tom Fedorowytsch, supplied. Digital image: Stephen Kiprillis<\/p>\n![\"Batteries](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/a2194614dd1b969e182fa60006ae7e59204a621c.jpeg\")
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Nick O’Malley<\/a> is National Environment and Climate Editor for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. He is also a senior writer and a former US correspondent.Connect via email<\/a>.From our partners