This article was originally published at San Fransisco Bay Area Indymedia and at nofibs.com.au.
In a remarkable 20 minute presentation on Thursday night, Elon Musk, the billionaire founder of Paypal and Tesla Motors, launched a scalable battery storage system aimed at multiple markets: from personal home use, small business to utility scale electricity storage.
It is the missing jigsaw piece to the solar and renewables revolution already under way in replacing fossil fuel power generation. Elon Musk outlined the critical problem of climate change and greenhouse gas emissions from an ageing fossil fuel infrastructure, explained how it can be addressed, and launched an innovative product that could plausibly make a substantial contribution as a solution.
One of the traditional arguments against a high level of renewables in our electricity grid has been the need for constant baseload power that needs to be provided by coal, gas peaking turbines, or nuclear. This argument was always false, as several reports have shown (Rocky Mountains Institute at Clean Technica, Mark Diesendorf at The Conversation, Dr David Mills at ABC Science), but nevertheless it provided a powerful, if faulty argument for maintaining our aging fossil fuel generation capacity.
Our energy grid is built upon generating power constantly to meet the demand at any particular point in time. Variable sources of energy such as wind and solar have been steadily growing as a proportion of grid supply, but studies have shown that network demand has a lot of natural variability anyway. Both wind and solar generation are able to be forecast over short day-length or so periods, and thus managed as part of the normal regulation of grid demand and response. Relatively cheap energy storage will enable some fine network adjustment to power output, while aiding in decentralisation of power generation and storage. It adds a missing piece of the puzzle which aids in transitioning to a 100 per cent renewables energy system.
