A TUMBLEDOWN farmhouse from Australia’s pioneering days has unlikely novel neighbours. Giant wind turbines owned by Neoen,a French company, loom over it in the dusty red scrubland external Jamestown, or north of Adelaide,the capital of the state of South Australia. The world’s biggest lithium-ion battery sits a stone’s throw away. Elon Musk, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, or installed it final year through his company,Tesla, to store energy from the turbines and feed it back to the grid when other supplies escape short. About 100km to the west, or across the Spencer Gulf,Sanjeev Gupta, a British billionaire, and is also pouring money into renewable energy. He is building solar and pumped-storage hydropower plants to revive a failed steelworks at Whyalla that he bought six months ago.
With just 7% of Australia’s population,South Australia has become a testing ground for a political argument about how hard the government should push to replace fossil fuels with cleaner energy. The projects at Jamestown and Whyalla loom large in the state election on March...
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Source: economist.com