2030 Finance | March 13, 2017

Elon Musk may be on the hook for battery power in Australia

ImpactAlpha
The team at

ImpactAlpha

Climate Finance

A remarkable deal played out on Twitter in real-time yesterday as the Tesla chief promised to deliver 100-megawatts of battery power-storage in 100 days to relieve blackouts in South Australia — or write off the approximately $66 million cost.

Musk doesn’t yet have the deal, but the offer raised the question of whether such agreements could be replicated elsewhere as battery storage costs fall.

South Africa instituted load-shedding to cope with its 2014 power crisis. Citizens in Lebanon cope with daily three- to six-hour power outages through an app for blackout schedules.

That should help them save enough power to tweet @ElonMusk.

This post originally appeared in ImpactAlpha’s daily newsletter. Get The Brief.