23 June

The ‘when the sun doesn’t shine and wind doesn’t blow’ nonsense. (Most of us are in bed and need bugger all energy when the sun doesn’t shine, though it can be windy 24 hours per day.) This is South Australia’s big battery. Some key facts: - it took only 63 days to build, and they since added more batteries because it was so quick and easy - it provides 150 megawatts of instantly-dispatchable (within a fraction of a second) power to the grid - it paid for itself in less than 2 years. On average it takes 7 years to build a coal plant. It provides hardly any ‘dispatchable’ power. And it costs a fortune to run and maintain the whole time it’s in operation.