South Australia is the 5th most populous Australian state, out of 6 total states in Australia. It has had a left-leaning government in power for the past 15 years.
South Australia has a lot of mineral resources and a very large land area but it is mainly desert.
Since renewable energy is cool with left-leaning governments, South Australia has built a lot of wind farms. The wind farms are heavily subsdised by the government. There is also a federal program called the Renewable Energy Target which mandates that electricity retailers purchase electricity from renewable power sources (eg wind and power).
The result of the market manipulation is that coal power plants are shutting down. This is putting further pressure on the renewable energy sources which fundamentally cannot provide baseload power in the first place. This is why South Australia draws electricity from interstate where baseload power is generated from coal.
A lot of people are arguing about the power outage in South Australia last year. The almost entire state (population >1.7 million) lost electricity for at least a day. Some people were without power for up to a week. As you can imagine there are a lot of negative consequences when the power goes off. For example the content of a zinc smelter solidified, destroying it.
There were a lot of factors to the blackout, but had there been sufficient baseload power within the state the blackouts wouldn't have occurred. It is a very politicised issue and lefists refuse to accept that the government created dependence upon renewable energy was responsible.
Following the blackouts, later in the summer there were planned brownouts as there wasn't capacity to meet demand.
Ok, now to why they decided to spend $50 million on a battery that can power the state for 3 hours.
Basically the Government of South Australia wants to look like they are doing something. Just like any government they want to be popular and to have the appearance of providing solutions to people's problems. The battery isn't the only thing they are doing. They are buying expensive gas-powered aero derivative generators that can be spun up and spun down quickly when required to meet demand.
So what the Government is doing is purchasing power sources that can compensate for the fluctuating electricity generated by wind and solar. They don't seem to be concerned that these measures will increase the overall cost of providing electricity as they seem to be primarily motivated by an objective of not backing down on the promotion of renewable energies. They don't seem to want to admit that the consequence of renewable energy is less reliable electricity and much more expensive electricity. In order to address the cost issues, the Government are criticising the electrity operators, accusing them of price gouging, in other words pointing the finger at private operators to take the blame off their own policies.
Elon Musk is like a celebrity, the battery idea sounds 'cool'... so basically this is a big PR move showing South Australians that their government is 'taking action'.
I think everyone knows the reality that this is basically a overreaching government trying to cover their arses and Elon Musk coming in way to do so with a big price tag attached. The big price tag actually helps the government because it puts a metric on the amount of action they are taking.
The way to ensure there is adequate electricity to meet demand it to deregulate the industry. That way people who care about wind and solar can pay for it and people are wish to save money can pay for coal generated electricity. Deregulation would ensure the optimum price through competition. While the governments of Australia persist with regulation and subsidies the problem will get worse. Actually the government of Victoria, the 2nd largest state of Australia is seeing one of its major coal power stations shut down and summer this year (in 6 months time) is predicted to have more blackouts, not only in South Australia. Wholesale electricity prices are increasing in Victoria by more than 100%. There is no end in sight for this because the leftist governments of are Australia persisting with their agenda and the federal government, although conservative, appears to be afraid to depart from the leftist narrative.
