PLEA Network

23 May 2018, Renew Economy, SA Liberals vow to continue energy transition, go big in batteries. Dan van Holst Pellekaan, the energy minister in the newly elected South Australia Liberal government, has vowed to continue the state’s dramatic energy transition and show other states “how it can be done”. In a keynote speech to the Australian Energy Storage conference and exhibition in Adelaide on Wednesday, van Holst Pellekaan said expectations that the election of a Liberal government would be the end of clean energy in the state were false. “We heard about the end of renewables and return to energy systems of the past,” van Holst Pellekaan said. “The transition is underway, and the transition will continue. It is being driven by the fundamental economics of clean energy as the lowest cost new build energy source. “South Australia will lead and show the world how a sensible transition can be done.” In the speech, and in a later interview with RenewEconomy that readers will be able to download next week from our Energy Insiders podcast, van Holst Pellekaan says the focus will be on an “orderly transition” built around storage. And apart from large-scale storage projects such as the Tesla big battery at Hornsdale and other battery storage projects, pumped hydro, hydrogen and solar thermal, he said his government was keen to embrace household storage. Read more here