A state election stirs a row about renewable energy in Australia

A TUMBLEDOWN farmhouse from Australia’s pioneering days has unlikely new neighbours. Giant wind turbines owned by Neoen, a French company, loom over it in the dusty red scrubland outside Jamestown, north of Adelaide, the capital of the state of South Australia. The world’s biggest lithium-ion battery sits a stone’s throw away. Elon Musk, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, installed it last year through his company, Tesla, to store energy from the turbines and feed it back to the grid when other supplies run short. About 100km to the west, across the Spencer Gulf, Sanjeev Gupta, a British billionaire, is also pouring money into renewable energy. He is building solar and pumped-storage hydropower plants to revive a failed steelworks at Whyalla that he bought six months ago.