Elon Musk's 100-Day Bet Update: World's Largest Battery Bank Halfway to Completion
Tesla founder Elon Musk has promised to build a battery complex in South Australia to solve the power problems that have been plaguing the region for years. For a twist, the billionaire promised to have it up and running within 100 days starting Friday, Sep. 29, or it's free.
Musk is one to make careful bets, though. The deal for the 100-megawatt battery was signed off before the weekend, starting the 100-day countdown for Tesla to complete the project, according to Bloomberg.
At that point, the Tesla founder revealed that the project, capacity-wise, was already halfway done. Roughly 50 megawatts of power storage was already up and ready on the South Australian site, giving Tesla plenty of room to complete the project by their self-imposed December deadline.
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It's a pace that impressed even Musk himself. "It's not fully done yet but roughly at the 50 megawatt level, I would have that done in two months, it pretty mind-blowing," he said.
Tesla will be running the facility for the South Australian government, working with French wind farm expert Neoen in a project that would cost $50 million, a sum that Musk will shoulder if he can't deliver on time, according to ABC News.
The race is on after the interconnect deal was signed. "Tesla and Neoen now have 100 days to complete the largest lithium-ion battery storage project in the world," Musk said in a statement.
"It will help solve power outages, reduce intermittencies and manage summertime peak load to support the reliability of South Australia's electrical infrastructure," the futurist added, as quoted by the Huffington Post.
The project would go a long way to provide the more than 30,000 homes in the region with stable power, as Musk noted earlier, calling it "a fundamental efficiency improvement for the grid."
This would make the project, based around the Hornsdale Wind Farm in Jamestown, Australia, the largest lithium-ion battery in the world. Elon Musk himself is hands-on at managing the project, having just visited the site on Friday.
