It started with a bet between billionaires.
In March 2017, Atlassian boss Mike Cannon-Brookes challenged Tesla boss Elon Musk to come up with a thought bubble about using batteries to solve Australia’s energy problems southern
“Tesla will install the system and run it for 100 days from the signing of the contract or it will be free,” Musk replied.
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Not to be outdone, Mr Cannon-Brookes upped the ante.
“Legend! You’re in mate,” he replied, before promising to pull strings to secure “mate rates.”
The Twitter exchange has been widely mythologised: in the eyes of some, it’s an almost Damascene moment when Australia gave up its fear of renewables and embraced battery storage.
It’s certainly true that it catalyzed the creation of Neoen’s 150-megawatt Hornsdale Power Reserve (aka the Big Battery), which first turned on nearly five years ago.
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But then SA Premier Jay Weatherill recalls the billionaires’ Twitter pranks as a double-edged sword.
“It was certainly not choreographed; it was a shock to see that,” he said.
“We were about to launch ours [energy] plan… and included a renewable technology fund of about $150 million, and one of the first off-range taxis was likely to be a grid-level battery.
“This exchange [then] It just happened to create a huge problem for me, because everyone was telling me to take what seemed to be the deal of the century.”
Damaged power transmission towers near Melrose from the time of the blackout in September 2016. (ABC News: Dean Faulkner)
Context is important here: three major blackouts in SA in less than six months, including the statewide outage in September 2016, had poured gasoline on an already heated energy debate.
The Twitter exchange came a week before the equally high-profile, but much more bitter, clash between Weatherill and then federal energy minister Josh Frydenberg over renewables.
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While Musk later joked that all he had been doing was “talking crazy,” Cannon-Brookes has said that her own initial tweet had equally humble origins.
It was late at night and Mr Cannon-Brookes was looking after his young son when he spontaneously responded to an Australian Financial Review article about Tesla’s battery plans.
“I just tweeted Elon, was he serious?” he said on the 100 Climate Conversations podcast.
“I went to bed and then he came back and… we went back and forth negotiating and then all hell broke loose.
“Suddenly [then prime minister] Malcolm Turnbull was on the phone and went a bit crazy for a couple of weeks.”
Mike Cannon-Brookes was stunned by the response to his revealing tweet. (ABC)
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“It was a turning point”
During 2017, when Mr. Musk enjoyed rock star status among renewables supporters, Tesla’s proposal had obvious political advantages.
But Tesla wasn’t the only interested party; indeed, it was a Zen Energy push that had put batteries on SA’s agenda.
Despite the push for Tesla’s submission, the SA government had committed to a procurement process to assess individual submissions on their merits.
Elon Musk received a rock star welcome during construction of the battery in September 2017. (ABC News: Andrew Burch)
“The way I chose to do it was to call Elon Musk directly and say, ‘Good idea, we’re about to open a bidding process, we’d like you to make an offer,'” Weatherill recalled.
“He then graciously tweeted: ‘Had a great chat with the Prime Minister of South Australia.'” That took the immediate pressure off me.
“Fortunately they won the bid properly, but obviously I expected them to win because the reputational benefit and the pulling power and the publicity that Elon Musk was able to generate was obviously powerful.”
On the other hand, “it would have been embarrassing for me, or not so much, but a missed opportunity, if I hadn’t won,” Weatherill said.
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For energy expert Marija Petkovic, part of the battery’s power was the way it provided proof of concept.
“Those of us in the energy industry have known for a long time that battery storage would be one of the key pieces of technology that will get us to a highly renewable grid,” he said.
“But it’s always hard to be the first to go off the mark.
“Having that first project built and up and running was a big deal – it really allowed everyone else to follow suit afterwards.”
Marija Petkovic is the founder and managing director of Energy Synapse. (Supplied)
The battery itself has not been entirely without controversy. In June, Hornsdale Power Reserve was fined $900,000 for failing to provide grid stabilization services as required in 2019.
But it also recently won approval from the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) to offer grid-scale inertia services to the national electricity market.
“Batteries provide fairly negligible power [wholesale] market, but where they provide value is these ancillary services,” said Petkovic.
“There are about 100 more in the pipeline – not all of these projects will go to construction, some are very early stages … but it’s pretty promising.”
Ms Petkovic says there are dozens more giant batteries on the horizon. (Provided by: Tesla)
Although Weatherill lost the subsequent election, he remembers those months of 2017 fondly.
“There are a lot of downsides, but that’s one of the advantages of making big decisions that mark new trajectories,” he said.
“It was a turning point and quite exciting.”
Jay Weatherill and Elon Musk struck up what was widely reported as a “bromance.” (Facebook)