‘We have the technologies now’- Cannon-Brookes busts open Coalition myth

Software billionaire Mike Cannon-Brookes has a happy knack of being able to “cut through”, which probably explains at least in part why he’s a billionaire and you and I are not.

Software billionaire Mike Cannon-Brookes - we have the technologies now.

When Elon Musk idly boasted in the wake of South Australia’s system black that he could fix South Australia’s energy problems in 100 days, Cannon-Brookes quickly hopped on to his Twitter account and challenged him to deliver.

And Musk did. His company built what has been casually called the Tesla big battery at Hornsdale in less than 100 days, and the battery has changed the thinking about the grid, repeatedly demonstrating its ability to keep the lights on, even when transmission lines are falling down around it.

When prime minister Scott Morrison – having ridiculed the Tesla battery, electric vehicles and other modern technologies –  happened to trip across the phrase “fair dinkum power”, Cannon Brookes jumped on the case, launching a social media campaign to turn the idea on its head.

Cannon-Brookes quickly debunked the idea of “baseload”, as so many energy experts and market operators already had, and made it clear that if  Australia was going to be fair dinkum about energy, it needed cheap, clean and reliable power, and fossil fuels were not the answer. See renewables and storage.

Read the story from RenewEconomy by Giles Parkinson - “‘We have the technologies now’- Cannon-Brookes busts open Coalition myth.”