Battery companies say they are ahead of Tesla in race to secure...

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    Battery companies say they are ahead of Tesla in race to secure SA energy supply

    By business reporter Michael Janda
    Updated about 3 hours ago

    Local battery providers have challenged Tesla, saying their plans are further advanced and they could fix South Australia's energy problems more quickly.

    Tesla's head of energy Lyndon Rive sparked a flurry of publicity on Thursday last week when he told Radio National Breakfast that the company could fix South Australia's period energy shortages within 100 days using the firm's battery technology.

    Mr Rive repeated the claim at a business summit, after which he and Tesla's chief executive Elon Musk were challenged via Twitter by Australian Atlassian founder Mike Cannon-Brookes to back up the commitment.

    Mr Musk replied that Tesla would installed 100 megawatt hours of storage within a hundred days or do it for free.

    However, several Australian firms operating in the battery storage area - including Zen, Carnegie and Lyon Group - have said that they either could match or beat Tesla's commitment, or are already in the process of developing battery solutions for South Australia.

    Lyon Group partner David Green told Business PM that his company was better placed than Tesla to quickly deliver a battery solution for South Australia's energy problems.

    "As I understand it, their hundred day pledge is a hundred days from when they sign the contract," he said.

    "Before you get to the stage of being able to sign a contract to deliver a project there's about nine months worth of work that goes into identifying the land, going through the network connection process, extensive assessment of network flows and identifying the appropriate configuration of your project.
    "Firing the gun and signing the contract is probably the easy bit."
    Mr Green said his company's advantage over Tesla is that it already has one project announced in South Australia with three more to be announced "in the next couple of weeks".

    However, he is hoping that tomorrow's energy security policy announcement by the South Australian Government will include plans to make battery storage a priority.

    "Top of the list would be that there is a recognition of the need for batteries to play an appropriate role," he said.

    Mr Green said a big barrier to the widespread adoption of battery technology by energy suppliers was that current regulation and market mechanisms are geared towards generation and transmission, not power storage.

    "One of the impediments to batteries being fully deployed in the market is that they can't capture all the revenue that should be available to them, simply because of the way in which the regulations for the market are established."

    http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-03-...y-are-ahead-of-tesla/8349724?section=business
 
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