New prime minister Scott Morrison learned South Australia’s Tesla big battery is more useful than the Big Banana in New South Wales.
Morrison said in July last year, just a few months after waving a lump of coal around parliament, “I mean, honestly, by all means have the world’s biggest battery, have the world’s biggest banana, have the world’s biggest prawn like we have on the roadside around the country, but that is not solving the problem,” RenewEconomy reports.
He also said “30,000 SA households could not get through watching one episode of Australia’s Ninja Warrior with this big battery. So let’s not pretend it is a solution”.
But the loss of two transmission lines on August 25 caused major power cuts in New South Wales and Victoria, with the Tesla big battery (Hornsdale Power Reserve) helping keep the grid stable and lights on in South Australia that day.
The Big Banana, on the other hand, didn’t help NSW electricity customers at all. “Such a shame they didn’t have a battery to help them,” RenewEconomy says.
The loss of two major transmission lines connecting the NSW and Queensland grids just after 1pm on August 25 – which the Australian Energy Market Operator attributed to lightning strikes – resulted in major load shedding in NSW and Victoria, including whole suburbs in Sydney and Newcastle, and elsewhere.
Without the Tesla battery in SA, as much as 84mW may have been lost on August 25. It was the households in NSW – with five major coal generators off-line due to repairs – that had to cop the cuts, RenewEconomy says.
While the big battery was providing a solution to an incident in South Australia, NSW had nothing in its generation fleet to respond quickly enough to provide a solution to NSW customers, it says.
