BLOG

A Twitter spat between Elon Musk and Mike Cannon-Brookes has now birthed the Hornsdale Power Reserve Project in South Australia.

What started as a twitter spat between Musk and Cannon–Brookes gave birth to the Hornsdale battery reserve. It took just 63 days from the signing of the contract to completion. The cost of this project was roughly 90 Million AUD$ ($70m).

In its first year of operation, it generated revenues of about $18m. The second year revenues for the first quota jumped five–fold compared to the year before. This was mainly due to a tornado tearing down a main line between Victoria and South Australia which made South Australia an “energy island” for nearly three weeks. (We expect more concentrated and violent weather events such as this to recur more frequently.) 

This means that in two years investors were able to recoup in revenue the cost of construction. As the investors laughed all the way to the bank, they were not alone. The South Australian government saved roughly $30m in 2018 in grid stabilisation costs. Before the big battery came along this industry was the sole preserve of fossil fuel using generators. 

Currently in Africa there are no grid scale battery storage projects completed. This is sad because instead of using diesel we could use our biggest free resource, the sun. Another very important benefit is the decentralisation of the power grid. With an aging infrastructure in many African countries, having redundancies spread out is important as we saw earlier in South Australia. With geothermal, hydro and wind all coupled with battery storage, Africa is in the best position to decarbonise its grid fully before most developed countries. 

EV batteries a source of electricity for the grid

I would want to advance another argument as well. The Kenyan government has put a target of 5% on all imported cars to be electric by 2025. In 2019 the country imported approximately 13,0000 four wheelers. EVs are essentially batteries on wheels. The Hornsdale capacity is 150MW. A Nissan leaf has a battery capacity of 40kw. 

There is the technology that called vehicle to grid. This means that you turn your car battery into a source of electricity for the grid. The technology is a bit complicated in that it needs a utility’s (Kenya Power) input for it to be viable.

Due to this constraint, car manufacturers are instead installing vehicle to load, which means instead of powering the grid, the car battery is used to power loads directly. So you basically have a car with a three pin socket like the one in the house used for powering tools drills etc. A good example of this is Hyundai ionic 5. 

Vehicle to grid power is not that farfetched and idea

The Hornsdale project cost about $70m. If you were to take just 5% of a car battery capacity, you would need roughly 75,000 cars to make up the same capacity. That’s 50% of the total car imports for 2019 in Kenya. African governments would do well to not only hasten the adoption of EVs (through, perhaps, zero taxes all EVs and their components) but to make vehicle to grid a standard for all electric vehicles coming to Africa. 

A good place to start doing this would be school buses. Their routes and operating hours are fairly constant. Not to mention a report by NPO Environment and Human Health Inc  which linked increased hospital visits to diesel emissions in school buses. Instead of looking for financing of big projects let us pool our collective populace’s resources and money in order to fund an “African Hornsdale”. 

This blog post is authored by John Msingo, the founder of renewable alternatives Ltd – a company that helps businesses reduce their energy bills and go green. The article is originally published on ESI Africa.