Tesla Big Battery Outsmarts Lumbering Coal Units After Loy Yang Trips (reneweconomy.com.au) 347
The Tesla big battery is having a crucial impact on Australia's electricity market, far beyond the South Australia grid where it was expected to time shift a small amount of wind energy and provide network services and emergency back-up in case of a major problem. From a report: Last Thursday, one of the biggest coal units in Australia, Loy Yang A 3, tripped without warning at 1.59am, with the sudden loss of 560MW and causing a slump in frequency on the network. What happened next has stunned electricity industry insiders and given food for thought over the near to medium term future of the grid, such was the rapid response of the Tesla big battery to an event that happened nearly 1,000km away. Even before the Loy Yang A unit had finished tripping, the 100MW/129MWh had responded, injecting 7.3MW into the network to help arrest a slump in frequency that had fallen below 49.80Hertz.
AC frequency (Score:5, Informative)
For the benefit of Americans reading: the nominal AC frequency in Australia is 50Hz, not 60Hz.
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Also, in Australia, electricity flows out of the negative post on the battery, through the attached circuit, and into the positive post
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Only because the windings of Australian generator coils all go counter clockwise...
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The electrons also flow upside down.
No. They spin the other way around.
Re:AC frequency (Score:4, Informative)
The Australian grid is targeting 50Hz, and had dropped to 49.8Hz.
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So if I interpret right, the extra supply (from the battery) meant that the generating station didn't bog-down and the grid was able to ramp-up to 50Hz again.
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So if I interpret right, the extra supply (from the battery) meant that the generating station didn't bog-down and the grid was able to ramp-up to 50Hz again.
Reading TFA, it seems the other generating stations didn't bog down as much as they could have. The grid was short ~500MW, and the Tesla battery can only make up ~100MW. It just stabilized the grid a bit until another generator could be brought online.
Re:AC frequency (Score:5, Insightful)
The Australian grid may have failed. The current was out of spec. If protection circuits activate, they'd shut down the grid. Tesla didn't fill all the missing need, but injected enough power in an "our of spec" event to ensure the grid couldn't fail from that event.
That small boost may have saved a major catastrophe. We may never know. But that it could is a great proof of concept. Battery-based storage can react faster than anything else on the grid, to smooth grid failures to prevent cascades. Now we know, we need them all over the US, before the next snowstorm in the North East.
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The grid wasn't short 500MW, it was down a 500MW power station.
Since the battery only needed to supply 7MW to correct the frequency, the grid was only short 7MW.
To say it was short 500MW would be assuming every power station running before the incident was running at maximum capacity. If that were the case, the back-up stations would have already been bought online.
Re:AC frequency (Score:4, Insightful)
It didn't respond too rapidly. The frequency was below the absolute minimum of 49.85Hz for normal operation.
Just putting out a wild idea: they configured the battery to kick in at 49.80Hz on purpose.
Re:AC frequency (Score:5, Informative)
Not quite. The original coal plant tripped, so the power that it was injecting ceased to be. In the very short term (tens of cycles), the energy demand on the system outweighs the supply, and frequency begins to drop. The remaining synchronized generating resources next engage "primary frequency response", which is an automated (governor) response that temporarily increases the output of the generators. By governor, there is a device in the generator controller that regulates the steam pressure to keep the rotation constant, so the energy imbalance creates mechanical drag that the governor attempts to correct. Each generator twitches up a tiny amount, the frequency decline is arrested, and the system stabilizes. You then have secondary systems that engage that drive the system back to a pre-loss state.
The battery in this contributed primary frequency response, as a direct response to the observed low frequency. In the United States, Energy Storage devices are not required to provide primary frequency response, since almost all frequency response is provided by steam units. As more coal plants are retired and replaced by Wind and Solar (inverter-based units), the US grid will need to adapt and modify its requirements.
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For those that don't know. The frequency of AC power is an indicator of the supply and demand status of the grid. The frequency is determined by the speed of the generators at the power station. If there is too much load on the generators, they slow down, and the grid frequency drops.
The Australian grid is targeting 50Hz, and had dropped to 49.8Hz.
.2 Hz is 0.4 %
How robust would a grid be if it was designed to run at 200 mHz? Would it flatline (DC) when there's a power loss? Or would it still just lose 0.4 %?
Frequency drop indicates overload (Score:4, Informative)
The drop in frequency itself isn't the big problem, it's a gauge, an indicator.
The frequency tells you how fast the generators are turning. They are automatically throttled to try to spin at the right speed to produce 50Hz. If they aren't producing 50Hz, that means they are full wide open throttle and still can't keep up. It means they can't produce enough power.
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Electric motors. If switching power supplies ever become a majority of load, the grid will have a reactance problem
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It has to do with current on the wire. A drop in cycles is an indication of problems in transmission. Which is probably what tripped the Coal fired plant.
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Read up on generators and how demand influences frequency.
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Read up on generators and how demand influences frequency.
When you're done, go read some man pages.
It astounds me that someone will take the time to write a post, but not take the time to actually answer the question that was asked. How that is that insightful?
Re:AC frequency (Score:5, Informative)
More demand / less supply > generators have to work harder > greater force needed to spin them > turbines slow down > frequency drops.
There's not really anywhere on an electricity grid where one can connect a meter and say "we need more power" so they monitor frequency instead.
Re:AC frequency (Score:5, Informative)
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First of all, OP isn't talking about injecting frequency. He was merely clarifying that the Australian grid runs at 50 Hz in case Americans are confused since the US grid runs at 60 Hz. Comprehend first, criticize second.
But if you're so much smarter than everybody else, including the experts cited in the article, then maybe you can explain how everyone else is wrong.
Since the London police are using variations in the grid frequency in their forensic work, you could even get some people out of jail. After a
Re:AC frequency (Score:5, Informative)
First of all, OP isn't talking about injecting frequency.
I didn't say he did. The summary talks about injecting 7.3MW to "arrest a slump in frequency".
When the system is overdrawn on power the high load slows down the turbine generators and the frequency drops. The solution is to add power to the system. The battery added 7.3 MW of power to the system which helped to bring the frequency back up to nominal 50 Hz.
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You have physical generators. Big spinners. As the current draw increases, they slow down from the load. So if you give more power at the frequency the big spinners are actually moving at at that moment, then you'll speed them back up to the desired 50 Hz.
Re:AC frequency (Score:5, Informative)
I've worked a little bit with data from the AEMO. I'm not a power distribution engineer, but I did to learn enough to be able to explain it badly. So here goes...
One way to think of it is that all of the equipment on a given segment of the network synchronises to the frequency of the network, but tries to nudge it ever so slightly closer to 50Hz. If every piece of equipment on the network does this, the network as a whole trends towards the correct frequency. The system can tolerate some drift, so each piece of equipment acting independently can force the network as a whole to keep to 50Hz as long as it isn't overloaded.
A typical alternator that you may find in a generation plant is designed so that it will produce 50Hz when fully loaded, that is, whenever the amount of power that it's designed to generate is being drawn. When none of the power is being drawn, it physically turns around 4-5% faster, so it might run at 52 Hz if you did nothing. So if the full power output of the generator is not being used, you need to physically slow it down.
That's easy, but of course the specific technique depends on how the alternator is being physically turned. If you can turn down the amount of fuel (trivial for hydro, almost as easy for a gas turbine), you do that, or you might use a mechanical or electromechanical governor on a coal plant.
The problem happens when the network is overloaded. When you draw more power from an alternator than it is rated to produce, this acts like an electromechanical brake, and it will run slower than 50Hz. You can't force an overloaded alternator to run faster, so any attempt to increase the frequency won't work. The only fix is to not overload it by adding more power to the system or reducing demand.
One of the key reasons why the South Australian government wanted to build the Tesla battery was because the AEMO couldn't get a generator turned on in time and so had to shed load by deliberately causing blackouts in South Australia [abc.net.au]. The amusing thing about TFA is that we may have just discovered that the Tesla big battery may be designed to protect the SA grid from the AEMO.
Just for completeness, I'm using the word "network" here to refer to a region for which the frequency is synchronised. I believe this is true for most of the NEM; TFA seems to indicate that Hornsdale (SA) and Gladstone (QLD) are synchronised. However, I seem to recall from the data that Tasmania's connection is via a HVDC link which can work in either direction, so presumably Tasmania's frequency doesn't need to be synchronised to that of the mainland.
The AEMO, by the way, is essentially a big integer linear program plus some human intervention in the case of emergencies. The ILP represents the network constraints (e.g. the capability of every generator, the maximum current of every distribution line, a squillion contract clauses) and tries to minimise dollars per kWh.
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Not quite. If you inject a 50hz signal into a 49.8hz signal youâ(TM)ll get constructive and deconstructive wave patterns but those harmonics will be treated out of the transmission line as substation. And you can say inject voltage or current depending on how the line is setup it all will help calculate power.
If you are matching impedances.
What you do in a grid is relieve the load on turbines, so they speed up a bit.
We should have batteries at every substation. (Score:4, Interesting)
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The resiliency of the power grid would be vastly improved if we put a battery pack (the size of a normal intermodal container) at each substation.
The resilience of the power grid would be vastly improved if we put a battery pack (the size of a normal outdoor dunny) at each house.
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Those dunny things are terrifying. [shopify.com]
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The resiliency of the power grid would be vastly improved if we put a battery pack (the size of a normal intermodal container) at each substation.
The resilience of the power grid would be vastly improved if we put a battery pack (the size of a normal outdoor dunny) at each house.
At what cost? Is it worth spending billions of dollars to reduce average downtime from 200 minutes a year [eia.gov] to some marginally smaller number?
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The resiliency of the power grid would be vastly improved if we put a battery pack (the size of a normal intermodal container) at each substation. These could act like your home UPS, fixing blackouts of a few minutes, when they occur. This also would make the grid much more able to use wind and solar sources, without so much need for standby diesel systems currently in place.
No, it would not be vastly improved since it is already very resilient in most places. Drastic improvement can happen where resiliency is an issue, which is not in very many places at present
Re:We should have batteries at every substation. (Score:5, Interesting)
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The resiliency of the power grid would be vastly improved if we put a battery pack (the size of a normal intermodal container) at each substation. These could act like your home UPS, fixing blackouts of a few minutes, when they occur. This also would make the grid much more able to use wind and solar sources, without so much need for standby diesel systems currently in place.
This is really not necessary. The number of blackouts that have been caused by generation issues is miniscule. The last major one in the US was in 2003 and protections against such events have been greatly improved since then.
The most cost efficient way to connect the battery would be to tie into a power plant transformer, or a substation, which would not eliminate any failure modes. The substation still would need protection controls that shut it down in the event that downed wires are detected. Blac
It is getting a little old (Score:5, Funny)
When is Musk going to stop making big promises and then following through?
He sure is a bad politician.
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When is Musk going to stop making big promises and then following through?
He sure is a bad politician.
Well, we're not on Mars yet, despite what this (pretty good) television show [wikipedia.org] make make us think.
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It'll never work.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Trying to remember why it wouldn't have worked. Because it might steal their market share? Yeah pretty sure that was their reason they didn't think it would.
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That's usually the reason why someone in a position of power criticizes a new idea from someone having demonstrated technical proficiency in their sphere of influence.
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It could be more benign (and egotistical) than that.. "if it worked, we would have thought of it long ago because we're so good at things!" Of course "worked" in their context still means "generates a huge profit" rather than "technically feasible" but still..
Rather Anti-Climatic? (Score:2)
I'm not sure how this is suppose to be amazing considering most computer folks at home who care about their systems use a UPS. I can see how not having a UPS and losing power at a key point might be a small disaster. Probably the only amazing part is that there are few systems that approach this size and scope but aside from that nothing new.
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Re:Rather Anti-Climatic? (Score:5, Insightful)
Grid level power management is utterly unlike your home UPS.
I think the article is overstating a bit given the scale, but the macro implications are impressive. Grid-scale generators are slow to ramp up and down - minutes to hours (or even days for startup of nuclear plants). Small, less efficient generators handle the small peaks (oddly enough, called peaking generator) that go beyond baseline generation and any under-utilization goes to waste so it's a careful balancing act. And even the peaking generators aren't instant response whereas the Tesla Battery IS essentially able to go from 0-100MW in moments (they should advertise this along with the Tesla speed records). This allows highly efficient supply of peak-demand (or, in this case, unexpected demand) which is pretty much unheard of.
Having 500MW go offline suddenly does Bad Things to the overall grid. Remember when one plant tripped offline ... I think in upstate NY and blacked out most of the northeast in a cascade failure several years back? Having something able to take a near-instantaneous load, even for a few minutes, is a massive benefit.
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This is fundamentally different from a UPS. A UPS takes over and provides power to a load when the mains supply is lost. It disconnects the mains power and generates its own.
The Tesla battery pushes power to the grid when the grid is overloaded and unstable (as manifest by a drop in frequency). Adding power to the grid stabilizes it and prevents shutdown.
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There are exactly zero other systems that approach this size and scope. That's the reason for the story.
This is the world's biggest grid-connected battery, and it works as advertised, if not better. It may be particularly craven of me, but that seems to be rare with infrastructure projects these days.
A slump in what? (Score:2)
If a power source goes offline, wouldn't you see a slump in voltage? Why the decrease in frequency?
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You probably see both but frequency dips first. If one generator goes offline in a group of generators, the others get more "demand', in order to keep up the same voltage, with more current draw they are slowed down similar to how putting more load on a gas engine will slow it's RPM down.
If they can't keep up, you would see a dip in voltage as well (a brown out) however it seems the battery packs kicked in before the generators dropped voltage.
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...with more current draw they are slowed down similar to how putting more load on a gas engine will slow it's RPM down.
That is literally what is happening. The engines at the power plants are slowing down due to the additional load.
Just like a Tesla car, the battery can go from no load to full load in milliseconds, where a mechanical engine takes significantly longer.
Asynchronous generators + slip (Score:2)
Most of the generators are of the asynchronous type (or induction type). This type or generatior produces no energy when the rotor runs at exactly the grid frequency. Not until the rotor of the generator spins faster than the grid, it produces energy to the net.
The difference between the rotor frequency and the net frequency is called slip, and is usually a few percent. For typical slips, the produced power is proportional to the slip.
So, if the load increases (or the generating power decreases), the (aver
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Well, there's one oversight.
I didn't describe the method for regulating the grid frequency. Every power station measures the current grid frequency and tries to move it towards the norm (50 or 60 Hz). Some power plants are better at this than others. Typically nuclear power plants are very slow to react and cannot typically be used for quick frequency regulation because of the thermal time constants in its steam generation. Water power plants, on the other hand, only need to open some valves to allow more w
Re:A slump in what? (Score:5, Informative)
They are both affected. But power companies will let the voltage drop while holding frequency as close to theoretical as they can. They even run 0.1 Hz high or low at the end of the day to get the correct number of cycles for the period.
If you've ever designed a power supply, you'd see that you must accept low/high voltages, but should expect the frequency to be fairly steady.
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If you've ever designed a power supply, you'd see that you must accept low/high voltages, but should expect the frequency to be fairly steady.
Most power supplies I've seen, and made, will accept anything from below 50 to above 60Hz. The frequency is pretty much irrelevant as long as the transformer (for a linear) is still efficient enough. Now that most of them are switchers, they'll even take anything from about 90 through 240V, and some of them are quite happy running off of DC.
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What were the specs for expected input power you got? Switchers don't care, but you started the design process with a power spec, the same spec every other power supply was designed against.
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If you've ever designed a power supply, you'd see that you must accept low/high voltages, but should expect the frequency to be fairly steady.
While I do expect it to be fairly steady, any experience I've had with power supplies doesn't have any major influence from frequency, especially within a few Hz.
Where it's critical is for things like induction motors and transformers
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Grid voltage is generally maintained easily enough by the other power sources.
But the frequency drops due to the other spinning generators being under heavier load and slowing down. As you drop the frequency, AC synchronous motors (fans, refrigerators, older/larger A/C units, etc etc) also slow down and use less power. So there's a balance point where the 600MW loss is offset by the drop in grid frequency.
If you had a system comprised entirely of non-spinning sources of power (eg Tesla's battery, or flow ba
Re:A slump in what? (Score:5, Interesting)
If a power source goes offline, wouldn't you see a slump in voltage? Why the decrease in frequency?
In DC, yes. AC is a different animal. The AC frequency is determined by the speed of the generators. When demand outstrips the supply, the generators slow down. Therefore, the frequency drops.
You would likely see a drop in voltage too. However, AC voltage is difficult to measure. Frequency is a much more precise way to measure the status of the grid.
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Most generators also have a voltage regulator, which changes the excitation / power angle. The generator produces MVA, which in polar notation is real (MW) and reactive (MVAR) power. Most generators try to operate near unity (MW/MVA = 1) to maximize income, but the controllers at each power plant probably twitched a bit to supply reactive power to keep the voltage levels stable.
Re:A slump in what? (Score:5, Informative)
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The other responses explain part of the issue, but a critical problem is that when one plant slows down, they all have to slow down to avoid creating a significant phase difference. You can only tolerate the tiniest of tiny out-of-phase generation between any two plants, or you end up really blowing something up.
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To really fuck things up, shutdown one phase while you leave the other 2 running. That's how you get bent generator shafts.
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If a power source goes offline, wouldn't you see a slump in voltage? Why the decrease in frequency?
Large generators are voltage controlled by the Automatic Voltage Regulator, or AVR. [srmuniv.ac.in] To simplify a complicated system, the rotor in large generators does not contain permanent magnets, but is instead an electromagnet. When output voltage drops, the AVR increases the current to the rotor coils. This keeps the voltage constant.
The frequency is a function of how hard the generators are pushing the grid, and how hard the grid pushes back. Again, the AVR at each power station has controls which attempt to p
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With coal generators, they are big spinners locked to the frequency of the grid. If you draw more power, you increase the load on the generator, and they slow down. But the voltage isn't as greatly effected. If the grid every went 100% DC, then you'd see the effect as a drop of voltage. As there is no frequency, and probably no spinners in regular use,
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It tripped. It didn't slow down.
back when we had our own server room (Score:2)
I don't see how it stopped an outage (Score:2)
The coal plant that failed was producing close to 600MW. The max output from the graph in the article showed the battery system inject less than 10MW max into the grid. Who pickup up the other 500+ MW? The other coal plant that came online within 6 secs. Basically all the batteries did was reduce the size of the brownout.
Re:I don't see how it stopped an outage (Score:5, Insightful)
The grid worked as designed. News at 11.
Steam plants don't come online in 6 seconds, they just don't.
First the UPSs, then load curtailment, hydro and combustion turbines, finally the steam plants and steam parts of combined cycle plants.
The real point (beyond the usual /. 'Ol Musky' blowing) is that apparently Australia was in spinning reserve violation when this happened. Your supposed to have enough power spinning to cover you single biggest unit/transmission line falling over (as they say in Australia).
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Even with a battery 5 times larger, it could only keep running for a finite amount of time. Another generator would eventually need to be added to the system.
Re:I don't see how it stopped an outage (Score:5, Insightful)
The coal plant that failed was producing close to 600MW. The max output from the graph in the article showed the battery system inject less than 10MW max into the grid. Who pickup up the other 500+ MW? The other coal plant that came online within 6 secs. Basically all the batteries did was reduce the size of the brownout.
The "spinning reserve" generally picks up the demand. "Spinning reserve" consists of machines which are on the grid but not at full load. The spinning reserve should be a minimum of the sum of the largest individual generator + the maximum estimated demand change that could happen in around 10 minutes (the time it takes for a gas turbine to start up). Generally, all that is necessary to change spinning reserve into real power is for a valve to be opened further. For combustion or steam turbines, this can occur in less than a second, and is automatically controlled by the generator controller - the generator demand signal will increase as grid frequency decreases. Spread across many generators, the increase in output is not a significant shock to any individual generator.
In this case, it seems that the Australian grid did not have adequate spinning reserve, which is why the frequency dropped. Many power stations are set to shut down in the case of large frequency variations (for machine protection), which caused the coal power station to shut down.
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Came on line? I assure you the backup was ALREADY on line, steam in the boiler with the generator turning in sync with the mains.
What it wasn't doing is pushing out power. Somebody or something has to advance the throttle to make that happen and apparently that takes about 6 seconds.
UPS, that's not a UPS (Score:2)
UPS, that's not a UPS,
THIS is a UPS!
hehe
The "stunned insiders" confuses me. (Score:2)
it was expected to time shift a small amount of wind energy and provide network services and emergency back-up in case of a major problem.
They had a major problem, and it did what it was supposed to do. How and why does this stun people?
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Electronics and electrical systems are supposed to be Solved Problems that Just Work when certified electrical engineers design them properly.
(Having said that... I was pretty stunned earlier this year, when, during a power outage, the UPSes in the DC actually kicked in and then the generators fired up. But that's only because twice before, they failed miserably.)
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The other day I was stunned when my automobile effortlessly transported me to and from the grocery store with no significant expended effort on my part.
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it was expected to time shift a small amount of wind energy and provide network services and emergency back-up in case of a major problem.
They had a major problem, and it did what it was supposed to do. How and why does this stun people?
Since this is new technology and Tesla, there were lots of naysayers who were predicting that it just wouldn't work.
It's news that it worked as it was designed to. It stabilized the grid. It was designed to stabilize the grid.
What? Who? How? (Score:4, Insightful)
The narrative and conclusions are a big dodgy. Everybody knew beforehand that batteries can jump in immediately to supply power. And the batteries did not stop a complete collapse, electrical networks are thoroughly analyzed and simulated and braced against major consequences if any one unit trips out. Major outages are quite rare over the decades, and all done without a single battery. Gas turbines can come on-line within 60 seconds and other interconnected plants often have enough reserve capacity to tide over small outages. Batteries are welcome as an immediate source, but they are still awfully expensive and awfully small in GWH.
Outsmarts Lumbering Coal Units???? (Score:2)
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So I'll bite, why would there be enough advantage to a space-based solar array to offset the problems that a space-based solar array would have over a terrestrial solar array?
'cause a terrestrial array is damn simple to maintain. Can send a $50,000/year employee in a pickup truck with a toolbox for minor service, or a crew of three guys with a small crane truck to replace an outright failed panel.
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No night, no clouds. 100% predictable.
Re: Weird (Score:3)
And the ability to roast anyone unlucky to be in the beam path.
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Yep, that is one of the major features. Who doesn't want an orbital death ray at their command?
That said, it's only really an issue if you intentionally design the array to be able to focus the beam much more tightly than normal power transmission designs call for - typical designs call for receiving antennas several square miles specifically to avoid that problem, keeping transmitted power densities on par with normal sunlight.
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Micrometeorites or other space junk smashing through it are anything but predictable.
Re: Weird (Score:2)
"Micro" means very small.
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No atmosphere. That's about 50% right there. But...
Launch cost has to be less than the cost of just building more on earth. Which means it will have to wait until we have orbital tethers or can make the photovoltaics on orbit from material we find in space.
LEO spends almost half its time in earth's shadow.
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My point is, nobody is going to launch anything until...never. It's just cheaper and easier on earth.
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Space array:
No reality, not feasible, 100% vaporware.
Will never happen. Ever.
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/201... [ucsd.edu]
PS: Anything that claims to be 100% predictable is not engineering, is not based in reality, and is bullshit.
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"So I'll bite, why would there be enough advantage to a space-based solar array to offset the problems that a space-based solar array would have over a terrestrial solar array?"
Sure, since the power would have to be sent as microwaves down to earth, you could grill little rocket man or some other nuisance.
Re:na (Score:5, Informative)
...where it was expected to time shift a small amount of wind energy and provide network services and emergency back-up in case of a major problem.
No, the primary purpose of the battery was to help the grid ride through transients just as the one described, not for time shifting. Who is writing this stuff?
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Re:na (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, no, it wasnt engineered to back up a power plant in Victoria, it was engineered to back up power in South Australia. There was an entirely different coal power plant that was supposed to back up Loy Yang (which is one of Australia's largest) - a plant that ratepayers have to pay to keep running on standby, which is supposed to hold the grid up until downed power plants can be brought back up and/or more baseload elsewhere ramped up. But from nearly 1000km away, the Tesla battery did the standby plant's job for it during its 4-second wakeup time - stopping and reversing the decline in grid frequency so that there wasn't even a meaningful blink in power quality.
This is not what the Tesla battery was designed to do. It was designed to deal with situations with downed lines / plants in South Australia, to keep the lights on there. It wasn't supposed to take over the work from standby plants halfway across the country. That it technically can should surprise nobody. But that's not what it was purchased to do.
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And "What happened next" did not stun electricity industry insiders. It was engineered to do the very thing it did.
But we're talking coal man, the energy of the future! If those old fashioned batteries have to kick in to replace coal's failings, how is coal ever going to show it's superiority? I'll just show myself out now.
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It also has to decide when to recharge itself, which I assume would use a similar logic, except looking for excess frequency conditions.
Re:na (Score:5, Informative)
In the UK, battery backed frequency response is an important contributor to frequency stability, and is operated with a dead band of 0.015 Hz. The power injection is required to be proportional to the frequency deviation from outside the dead band, reaching 100% rated power at 0.5 Hz deviation from nominal. Response time is a maximum of 1 s.
Additionally, in the UK, the requirement is that the frequency response is symmetrical. If frequency rises, then the system must absorb power - up to 100% of maximum rated power at 50.5 Hz, for a minimum of 15 minutes.
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Demand and supply upsets are presented mostly via deviation from ideal frequency. When there is a slow increase in demand it can present loads on generators and overloads in this scenario is what causes those generators to trip on overload. The energy market can predict these loads quite adequately and the national regulator makes requests of the generators to intervene appropriately. The grid is stable because it can be predicted for small loads (people in large groups tend to do the same thing day after d
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Its a bit complicated, in that the stress on the grid can be greater if demand is high and local wind is not producing. That is when the likelihood of a fault or sudden event will bring down a part of the grid is greatest. In that sense, the batteries offset low renewable production. Bu
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