A DECADE ago, the main landmark in Port Augusta, a town in South Australia, was a 200-metre-tall chimney puffing fumes from a coal-fired power station. “You could see it from 40-odd kilometres out,” says Gary Rowbottom, who worked at the plant for 17 years.
Today, however, there are no hints of this history. The chimney is gone and the sky is a pristine blue. The chief landmark now is a tall tower topped by a dazzling light, where sunlight reflected from 23,000 mirrors on the ground is focused to power four giant greenhouses in which tomatoes are grown. Next door is the newly built renewable energy park, and 250,000 solar panels.
Port Augusta is representative of a remarkable shift that has swept South Australia. In 2007, just 1 per cent of the state’s electricity came from solar and wind. (see below graphic) – the highest proportion of any major grid in the world. On days that are particularly sunny and windy, it powers itself with 100 per cent renewables. That happened on and for a 10-day consecutive stretch in December 2022. The state is now racing to ramp this up to renewable-only power year-round.
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Coming from neighbouring New South Wales, where just 31 per cent of electricity is from renewables, I find this clean energy rush highly enviable. It is also highly instructive to the wider world, which needs to rapidly wean itself off fossil fuels to avert a climate disaster. To find out how such progress is possible, I have crossed the border to meet those leading the charge.
South Australia covers almost 1 million square kilometres – more than seven times the area of England – but has a population of just 1.8 million. Almost 90 per cent of the state is desert, so most people live along the wetter, cooler south coast, largely in the capital Adelaide.
The state’s renewable energy push began in 2002, when the South Australian Labor Party was elected to government. Its initial interest in renewables was in fact economic, says , the state’s current energy minister under its latest Labor government. At the time, South Australia’s electricity was very expensive, partly because its large, spread-out grid is paid for by a relatively small population, and partly because the previous Liberal government had privatised the .
Weaning off fossil fuels
The Labor government wanted to “smash up the monopoly” of the newly privatised coal and gas-fired power stations to drive electricity prices down and “the obvious answer was renewables”, Koutsantonis tells me at his office in Adelaide. The government realised the desert could actually be a “massive opportunity” because it provided the vast amounts of space, sun and wind needed for competitive renewable energy generation, he says. In 2002, the government approved the state’s first wind farm on the Fleurieu peninsula. This opened the floodgates to more renewable energy projects, with 24 onshore wind farms and five large-scale solar farms now operating. In 2008, it also began incentivising households to put solar panels on their roofs by offering generous payments to them for any excess solar energy that was fed back into the grid.
“We had this at our house and suddenly I was getting credits on my electricity bill because I was selling more than I was using,” says , a former librarian in Adelaide who co-founded a solar panel installation business called Suntrix in 2009. As word spread, people rushed to get panels and cash in, she says. Now, more than 40 per cent of South Australian homes have them – one of the highest rates of uptake in the world. One afternoon last month, a major new milestone was reached when the state’s .
The drive for solar power
Certainly, as I drive around, the enthusiasm for solar is evident. There are panels carpeting the roofs of homes, shops, pubs and public toilets. I meet Adam Langham, a chemical engineer in the Adelaide suburb of Netley, who has 58 panels on his house and car port. They produce 12 times more power than he, his wife and two children consume. The government discontinued its subsidy in 2011, but smaller payments are still offered by private electricity companies, meaning the family makes more than enough money to pay off the upfront cost of the installation. “I’ve had quite a few friends call me up over the years and say, ‘OK mate, solar panels, what’s the go?’ and I tell them, ‘they’re a no-brainer – go for it’,” says Langham.
Wind energy has also been received more warmly in South Australia than in New South Wales, where a planned wind farm near the town of Berrigan was recently scrapped due to a community backlash. One Berrigan resident told the local newspaper the project would “pose physical and mental health threats to our children”. Here in South Australia, however, there are framed paintings of wind turbines in my motel room in the town of Burra.
What explains this difference in attitude? , a public health social scientist at the University of Adelaide, says one reason may be that South Australia has a long history of being progressive. It was one of the first places in the world to allow women to vote and stand for parliament, for example, and the first Australian state to decriminalise male homosexuality.
Wind farm developers are also getting better at working with communities, says , who heads the South Australian branch of Neoen, a company that is building the state’s biggest wind farm, Goyder South. For example, it funds community projects near its wind farm sites, including local clubs and sporting teams; encourages its contractors to employ local businesses; and hires First Nations people to supervise construction in case of the discovery of artefacts or remains. For the Goyder South project, the company will also offer annual payments of AUD$1000 to $5000 to every household within 6 kilometres of a wind turbine as a goodwill gesture.
I do, however, meet some people for whom the switch to renewables has been challenging. Rowbottom and around 400 colleagues, for example, lost their jobs in May 2016 when Port Augusta’s coal station, the last one in the state, closed. Few were able to find jobs in the town’s new renewable energy sector, which required fewer staff and different skills. Rowbottom initially had to move to Queensland to work at another coal power plant, but has since found employment back in Port Augusta.
There have been other hurdles to overcome. In September 2016, South Australia suddenly faced its biggest test yet when almost the entire state experienced a . “It was the first state-wide blackout like that in Australia in about 50-odd years,” says at the Sydney arm of the Clean Energy Council, which represents Australian renewable energy businesses.
The blackout was triggered by a violent storm that knocked over more than 20 electricity pylons and cut three of the four major transmission lines in the state. Coal enthusiasts in the federal government seized on the event to argue that renewables were unreliable. For example, Scott Morrison, Australia’s treasurer at the time, who became its prime minister from 2018 to 2022, accused the South Australian government of “switching off jobs, switching off lights and switching off air conditioners and forcing Australian families to boil in the dark as a result of their Dark Ages policies”.
Koutsantonis believes the state’s supply would have gone down regardless of its energy mix, due to the severe damage to transmission lines. But the mocking that South Australia received made the government there determined to prove the naysayers wrong, he says. “We hated the ridicule we got from the rest of the country.”
“After the blackout, a whole bunch of very positive things were put into place that have led to South Australia now being where it is – a world leader in terms of its renewables uptake,” says Zuur.
In 2017, for example, the state government to provide grants or loans to businesses that could offer new technologies that would make the grid more resilient.
Backup batteries
One project to get funding was a giant battery – the first of its kind in the world – to provide back-up in the event of major grid disturbances. It was built by Tesla following a between Mike Cannon-Brookes, Australia’s best-known tech billionaire, and Tesla boss Elon Musk. Musk told Cannon-Brookes that Tesla would get the battery installed and working in less than 100 days, otherwise it would be free. Luckily for Tesla, it achieved this in 63 days.
The and looks like hundreds of refrigerators lined up in rows in a field. Each is filled with lithium-ion cells that are all connected to form one big battery with a capacity of 194 megawatt-hours. The facility monitors the frequency of the local electricity grid and if it suddenly rises or falls, the battery rapidly charges or discharges to stabilise the grid.
This has since proved its worth on multiple occasions, including in August 2018, when lightning strikes caused widespread grid problems across the eastern half of Australia. Major blackouts occurred across New South Wales and Victoria, but the lights stayed on in South Australia, as the battery was able to rapidly reverse the sudden drop in grid frequency. Inspired by its effectiveness, Victoria and New South Wales have since built their own big batteries.
The same is true in several US states that are also ramping up their wind and/or solar generation. California, Texas and Florida have recently built or are building big batteries to help maintain the stability of their grids as they change their energy mix.
Another innovative project that emerged after the blackout was a ““, also built by Tesla with some initial government funding. It comprises a network of solar panels and batteries that Tesla installed for free on more than 4000 government-owned social housing properties across South Australia. Tesla uses sophisticated software to coordinate the individual systems so they function like a single power plant. This allows it to trade surplus solar energy stored across the battery network on the electricity market.
This appears to be a win-win for everyone because it makes money for Tesla, reduces electricity costs for the social housing residents and helps to stabilise the grid so that blackouts are less likely for the wider community.
I meet Craig Renton, who lives in a social housing property in the outer Adelaide suburb of Elizabeth. He joined the virtual power plant in August last year and says it is “really good”. “My wife and I are pensioners and it saves us money – about AUD$60 a quarter – which makes a difference,” he says. Renton uses a machine to help him breathe at night and if there was a blackout in the past, “I had to get up to get the generator going, but since we got the battery, now the power comes back on within 5 seconds”, he says.
Equitable access to renewable energy
Renton says there is “no way” he would have been able to afford solar panels or a battery without the scheme. In this way, the virtual power plant is helping to address a key criticism levelled at these technologies, which is that they are typically only accessible to the wealthy. “One of the principles that we have in this energy transition is that we want to make sure we don’t leave anyone behind,” says at the South Australian government’s energy department, who has helped manage the project.
Despite all this progress, however, average electricity prices are still higher in South Australia than in most other parts of the country. This has meant there has been “a bit of fatigue creeping in” among the community, with people questioning the benefits, says Koutsantonis. Electricity prices have remained stubbornly high because South Australia still relies on gas-generated electricity to fill the gaps on days when there isn’t enough sun and wind, and gas has become increasingly expensive in recent years, he says.
As a result, the most pressing matter now is to find ways to store the excess solar and wind energy produced at particular times of day or on certain days, so it can be used when there is a deficit, instead of falling back on gas, he says. One solution may be to use excess solar and wind energy to power electrolysers that split water to make hydrogen. This hydrogen could then be stored and converted back into electricity when needed, either by burning it or feeding it through hydrogen fuel cells.
To test this idea, the state government will commit AUD$600 million to building a hydrogen power plant near the town of Whyalla, which is due for completion in 2025. If it works, the state will be able to meet its target of and will probably have the world’s first large fossil fuel-free grid based on solar and wind energy. “If we can decouple ourselves from coal and gas prices, we decouple ourselves from international price shocks, and then all of a sudden the cost of power is just what it’s costing us to generate it,” says Koutsantonis.
According to Zuur, there is no reason why other parts of the world couldn’t replicate South Australia’s rapid adoption of renewables. The state has certain advantages, including large amounts of space, sun and wind, but other places can tap into their own advantages, he says. For example, nations with less land, like the UK and Japan, have built wind farms offshore, while Iceland, which gets little sun, uses alternative renewable resources like hydropower and geothermal energy to .
Personally, seeing what South Australia has achieved in a relatively short space of time has filled me with optimism that the world will be able to wean itself off fossil fuels sooner than we think. Although its energy transition hasn’t been perfect, it has shown that the key ingredients for success are strong political leadership, winning community trust, willingness to try new technologies, equitability and, most important, never giving up.
Alice Klein is a New Scientist reporter in Sydney, Australia
