AustLit

Epigraph: How exactly Elon Musk became caught up in a provincial election on the other side of the world is something of a complicated matter, as is the story of how the state’s energy supply became so politicised. […] On 9 March 2017, some 162 days after the [the Adelaide storm that cut off power to a million homes], Lyndon Rive, then head of Tesla’s battery division, was in Melbourne to hold an elaborate launch event at a former power substation. During the ceremony, Rive would claim that Tesla Inc. and its batteries could solve South Australia’s power problems in 100 days, if someone would just let it. […] As news spread of the wager, some South Australians greeted it with a characteristic level of mistrust. The world might have cheered, but some in the state looked on warily as two billionaires made a $50 million bet on the welfare of 1.7 million people in a place where neither lived. South Australians, on the whole, may be supportive of renewable energy—that wasn’t the issue. What they didn’t support was the privatisation of the power grid—they had demolished a Liberal government for selling it, and elected Labor to do something about it—but after sixteen years of uninterrupted rule and one big, bad blackout, infrastructure policy was now seemingly being decided over social media. (Royce Kurmelovs)

Epigraph: What was beyond the Neighbourhood, beyond its well-known perimeter? (Elena Ferrante)