South Australia storms: Power blackouts as Tesla battery is turned on

Wild weather triggers blackouts in South Australia near the Tesla battery, which was switched on for the first time today.

The Tesla battery system in Jamestown was turned on today, as wild storms felled power lines.

Wild weather in South Australia has brought down power lines and triggered blackouts in the communities around the state’s Tesla battery on the day it was switched on.

Data from SA Power Networks has revealed 208 homes in areas around the battery will be without power until as late as 11pm tonight after wild weather and more than 250,000 lightning strikes overnight felled power lines and cut supply.

Parts of Jamestown, where the Tesla battery is located, and around a dozen surrounding communities including Hornsdale, Caltowie, Canowie Belt are without power, with the network operator putting the outages down to storm activity and equipment breakages.

The outages come as the Weatherill government flicked the switch on the world’s largest lithium-ion battery on Friday for the first time.

The $50 million battery which stores energy from the nearby Hornsdale wind farm has been billed as a stopgap for the state’s energy supply, and can power up to 30,000 homes for over an hour in the event of a major blackout.

A spokesman for the Premier told The Australian that the nature of the storm damage to the transmission lines meant that the battery wouldn’t be able to power homes because equipment needed to be repaired to reconnect the homes to the grid.

Some parts of Jamestown will be back up online by 9pm tonight, and suburbs around the Canowie Belt were expected to be back up and running by 5pm this afternoon. Stone Hut and Laura will have power before midnight.

The Elon Musk-designed battery forms the showpiece of the Weatherill government’s $550 million energy plan, which uses diesel generators alongside existing conventional coal-fire and gas power and the state’s wind and solar farms to keep the lights turned on.