EnergyAustralia’s Yallourn coal mine in Latrobe Valley, Victoria.
Photographer: Carla Gottgens/BloombergAustralia Is Quitting Coal in Record Time Thanks to Tesla
Elon Musk helped accelerate a transformation of the country’s electricity grid to replace fossil fuels with clean power — now it's a testing ground for global climate action.
Like so much in our modern era, Australia’s high-stakes gamble on renewable energy starts with an Elon Musk Twitter brag.
South Australia’s last coal-fired power plant had closed, leaving the province of 1.8 million heavily reliant on wind farms and power imports from a neighboring region. When an unprecedented blackout caused much of the country to question the state’s dependence on clean power, Tesla boasted — on Twitter, of course — that it had a solution: It could build the world’s biggest battery, and fast.