So Ed Musk wants to install a battery farm.
This should be an interesting proposal and I will be fascinated to see
the specifications.
Will it be capable of supplying, with the help of a gas fired station,
a full day and night of Sth Australia ?
Assume at sunrise it is full charged, perhaps overnight from Victoria,
perhaps not, and from a local gas station.
That day turns out to be heavy overcast and no wind.
Will the battery be able to take Sth Aus through to the next morning ?
Remember Hazlewood will be shut down. Various conditions in Victoria
and NSW may mean no input from there is available.

That is what it really has to be capable of as a minimum.
However, what if the next day is not sunny and is quite warm.
The battery farm is now near flat. Do we now need one twice the size ?
We also need a battery charger twice the size !
Oh, yes, but we need to supply today's demand, so we need a battery
three times the size and a charging system three times the size.

Having just gone through two weeks of overcast and rain I just wonder
about the economics of storage, any storage.

Musk's offer is to build a bank of batteries.

Computations done by more maths oriented minds, put the duration, of the Musk battery, for SA, at one minute, before exhaustion.

https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2017/03/12/elons-fix/

Clearly a desperate Musks is after publicity, cheap and nasty publicity that sounds good but isn't much, on the ground.

As a South Australian I have grown to be very sceptical about power and about anything I hear about 'fixing' the problems. I would have thought that a reliable source of generation was more important than storage. Has there ever been anywhere in the world that has drawn on power from batteries for any significant length of time? Putting storage before generation is like putting the horse before the cart.

The whole thing sounds like a rich-man's experiment to me - with the connivance of the country's most incompetent government, which can't even agree to keep back 15% of local gas for our own use, so greedy are they for export dollars. And, of course, we will never forget the destruction of coal power by the morons.

Yes Fool on the Hill, I notice on the TV at lunch time today they spent
half an hour talking about it.
The problem is the politicians do not understand what they are talking about.
They kept referring to it as 100Mwatt.
The idiots do not understand that you cannot describe a battery like that.
It has to be 100MW/hour. A battery description MUST include time.
You said is was 1 minute.
That means it is a 1.6MW/Hr battery. Bloody useless !
No wonder he could do it in 100 days.
He could bring it out in his checked baggage.

The answer is coal-fired power stations, we have plenty of coal.

Whoops reading that referrence you gave that 1 minute was for the UK.
That article said 100 to 300 MW/Hr.
As SA's demand is about 3GW that means about 2 minutes to 6 minutes.

Still pretty useless.