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Input: Tesla Motors developed a giant backup power system in South Australia to combat the region's energy crisis  and switched on  the battery  on Dec. 1. (Jay Weatherill via Storyful)
Less than a month after  Tesla  unveiled a new backup power system in South Australia  the world's largest lithium-ion battery is already being put to the test. And it appears to be far exceeding expectations: In the past three weeks alone  the Hornsdale Power Reserve has smoothed out at least two major energy outages  responding even more quickly than the coal-fired backups that were supposed to provide emergency power.
 Tesla 's battery last week kicked in just 0.14 seconds after one of Australia's biggest plants  the Loy Yang facility in the neighboring state of Victoria  suffered a sudden  unexplained drop in output  according to the International Business Times. And the week before that  another failure at Loy Yang prompted  the Hornsdale battery  to respond in as little as four seconds â or less  according to some estimates â beating other plants to the punch. State officials have called the response time âa record â according to local media.
The effectiveness of  Tesla 's battery is being closely watched in a region that is in the grips of an energy crisis. The price of electricity is soaring in Australia  particularly in the state of South Australia  where a 2016 outage led 1.7 million residents to lose power in a blackout. Storms and heat waves have caused additional outages  and many Australians are bracing for more with the onset of summer in the Southern Hemisphere.
The Hornsdale battery system  which uses the same energy-storage tech found in  Tesla 's electric cars  is one of chief executive Elon Musk's newest projects. In March  Musk  who is known for setting high goals and only sometimes meeting them  vowed on Twitter to deliver a battery system for South Australia's struggling grid within 100 days or it would be free. By early July  the state had signed a deal with  Tesla  and the French-based energy company Neoen to produce the battery. And by Dec. 1  South Australia announced that it had switched on the Hornsdale battery.
A spokesman for  Tesla  didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.
Nonetheless  the Hornsdale reserve has already shown that it can provide what's known as âcontingencyâ service â keeping the grid stable in a crisis and easing what would otherwise be a significant power failure. And  more important  the project is the biggest proof-of-concept yet that batteries such as  Tesla 's can help mitigate one of renewable energy's most persistent problems: how to use it when the sun isn't shining or the wind isn't blowing.
Where it can take as much as 10 minutes to spin up a traditional turbine in a pinch  added Coughlin  it's not uncommon to see systems such as  Tesla 's intervene in fractions of a second.
This isn't Musk's only experiment with large-scale batteries. Last year   Tesla  said  it  had equipped a small island in American Samoa with thousands of solar panels and batteries that could serve the area's 600 inhabitants  shifting them almost entirely off fossil fuels. In October  Musk responded to the hurricane crisis in Puerto Rico by offering to discuss building a solar grid for the island. Parts of Puerto Rico are still without power  months after Hurricane Maria ripped down power lines and other energy infrastructure.

Teslaâs enormous battery in Australia just weeks old is already responding to outages in ârecordâ time