Tesla's Giant Battery In Australia Saved $40 Million During Its First Year, Report Says (electrek.co) 213
Last December, Tesla switched on the world's biggest lithium ion battery in South Australia to feed the country's shaky power grid for the first day of summer. Neoen, the owner of the giant battery system, released a new report for the first full year of operation and revealed that the energy storage system saved about $40 million over the last 12 months. Electrek reports: The energy storage capacity is managed by Neoen, which operates the adjacent wind farm. They contracted Aurecon to evaluate the impact of the project and they estimate that the "battery allows annual savings in the wholesale market approaching $40 million by increased competition and removal of 35 MW local FCAS constraint." It is particularly impressive when you consider that the massive Tesla Powerpack system cost only $66 million, according to another report from Neoen. Here are the key findings from the report:
- Has contributed to the removal of the requirement for a 35 MW local Frequency Control Ancillary Service (FCAS), saving nearly $40 million per year in typical annual costs
- Has reduced the South Australian regulation FCAS price by 75% while also providing these services for other regions
- Provides a premium contingency service with response time of less than 100 milliseconds
- Helps protect South Australia from being separated from the National Electricity Market
- Is key to the Australian Energy Market Operator's (AEMO) and ElectraNet's System Integrity Protection Scheme (SIPS) which protects the SA-VIC Heywood Interconnector from overload
- Has contributed to the removal of the requirement for a 35 MW local Frequency Control Ancillary Service (FCAS), saving nearly $40 million per year in typical annual costs
- Has reduced the South Australian regulation FCAS price by 75% while also providing these services for other regions
- Provides a premium contingency service with response time of less than 100 milliseconds
- Helps protect South Australia from being separated from the National Electricity Market
- Is key to the Australian Energy Market Operator's (AEMO) and ElectraNet's System Integrity Protection Scheme (SIPS) which protects the SA-VIC Heywood Interconnector from overload
But!? (Score:2)
Were communications to its control computers *encrypted*??? ;-)
Yeah, but that's like money (Score:2)
CEOs only care about fossil fuel kickbacks. Money is just a convenient way of measuring yachts, vacation houses, and all expense paid trips to corporate retreats.
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If I tell you a chunk of compressed carbon that I artificially limit the supply of is worth more than another type of compressed carbon that is geologically more rare and pretty, is it "worth" more? Or did I rip you off by making you pay me $2,500,000 for something that costs $2?
Same goes for yachts. Mine got dinged up and has a slight scratch, so I gave it to the CEO for $3, along with this run down villa in Spain that I say is now worth $2.
So, cash is only worth something if you accept it's valuation. Le
The multiplier effect (Score:2)
The AUS experience suggests an architecture at scale Grid Operators can site to reduce dependency, detrimental reliance on peaker plants and cut rates - aka clean up its image, reliability and rate structure givebacks.
Re:The multiplier effect (Score:5, Informative)
Not really. This is the edge case of isolated grid. It has very little meaningful commonality with well interconnected grids.
Notably, you can substract "Tesla" from the story and it still makes sense. Battery storage has been used successfully in other similar places. It's just that in the past, PR has been less than stellar because those deployments were on islands, usually to the tune of single MW or so. This is showing that with significant amount of work, they could create a system that has a total of 35MW of momentary output. Which is great, because peaking an isolated grid is a complete and utter bitch to get done right.
But that's not even remotely true in a large, well connected grid where balance is achieved through the fact that where someone has deficit, someone else likely has surplus. And we have about a century worth of experience how to balance such interconnects for maximum efficiency. In current consideration, there just isn't that much use for fairly expensive frequency control with a battery system when you have a multiple redundancies to handle this across any large interconnected grid.
The good news here is that isolated regions will no longer have to pay exorbitant amounts for their electricity where they can't really tap into large interconnected grid for some reason (such as geographically remote location as is in this case). It's likely to be a massive improvement for such locations if rolled out en masse.
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But, it is not an edge case or applicable only in isolated areas. PG&E is replacing three peaker power plants [utilitydive.com] with battery storage. A well connected grid, and the application is not momentary load balance for frequency control. It is a well predicted clear rise in demand over four hours. Batteries are kicking the gas turbines out.
Again the story, needlessly
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Power plants in the West already work on razor thin margins. That's the status quo. And if you're even remotely sold on the idea that "batteries can replace peakers based on what I read in this story", you haven't actually read the story with any degree of understanding.
First and the most obvious problem is material science. You're not just going to produce terawatts of battery capacity which would be needed for the project size of your suggestion. Then there's the problem that while high momentary output a
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And then you actually read the report, specifically page nine, and then came back to apologise for thinking that being a sarcastic twat passes as intelligence on slashdot.
The FCAS component is the key (Score:4, Interesting)
There are multiple solar farms in Australia that are currently not connected to the grid because they haven't been able to get their output stability to the point that the network operator will allow them to connect. The FCAS component of the farms always increased the cost and reduced the output significantly but was key to keeping the network stable.
This has been a relatively new change though, a couple of years ago solar compliance was taking a week to 10 days before allowing connection. Now it's out to 6 months or more. This unfortunately caused RCRTomlinson a large civil contractor to collapse as they had final payments on projects tied to the grid connection of projects.
https://reneweconomy.com.au/rc... [reneweconomy.com.au]
Battery tech making great progress. (Score:3)
Every sector will see fundamental changes. 40% of the cost of tunneling is the HVAC system designed to remove diesel fumes from confined spaces. Replace diesel earth movers with battery powered ones, and you get a 40% cost savings. The Boring company cost savings is expected to be 40%. Coincidence?
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Seven years later? It's over 10 years after the Roadster was delivered to customers.
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Yeah, that doesn't stack up. BUT the Boring IS making a big improvement on tunneling using batteries. Other tunneling projects used absurdly long and massive extension cords (sounds like a joke, but it's not). The BC drives batteries away from their tool while attaching fresh ones -- This speeds up the process and cuts costs. They WOULD benefit from a lowering of battery cost, but only if they manage to get their tool to apply a lot more energy faster and need even more batteries. I haven't heard of an
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To make solar-only power generation viable, this needs to get up to ~24 hours.
For that part of Australia, probably only needs to be able out provide ~12 hours of power, since there is almost never an overcast or snowy conditions like you would see in other parts of the world...
30 years doesn't seem to unrealistic, and would probably be more like ten when you factor in constantly diminishing cost of batteries over the next decade.
How much is Tesla's? (Score:3)
Panasonic owns a lot of the battery tech, or part of the gigafactory, or something. I know they let Tesla put their name alone on everything, but I'm curious about the IP/ownership there.
Anyone have a good summary?
Re:How much is Tesla's? (Score:4, Informative)
You too can save enormous amounts (Score:2)
If you wreck the grid first driving up your costs.
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Another uninformed clown. Our grid is fine here in SA, the only issue was due to a storm bringing transmission towers down.
Yep not everyone can pay 47 cents a kwh (Score:2)
https://www.afr.com/news/austr... [afr.com]
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Another lie, I pay 30c per kWh. That is the normal price. With my 2kw solar my bills are very small.
Decommissioning? (Score:2)
What're the costs associated with disposing of this number of batteries as they reach end-of-life? Are they recyclable? Anyone got a good link to info on this?
It Won't Last Long (Score:3, Funny)
Given the natural laws of Australia, unless it proves ridiculously dangerous to human beings (as is every man-made and natural thing in AU), it's going to miss out on the survival model.
Now, if it were to, say, electrocute someone every few weeks, it would fit right in.
It *HAS* to be making an effort to kill and/or eat people if it's going to fit in with everything else in Australia.
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"Where's the tailpipe though, it can't work without a tailpipe, Daddy says!"
That tail pipe you seek is over there... See? Where the logistics for transporting the fossil fuels is cheaper... Over there, near the coast.
Re:Cue the denialists... (Score:4, Interesting)
who said that?
All I'm saying is that the battery is used to make the supply of fossil fueled electricity more stable by storing energy near where it is used. A function that would NORMALLY be accomplished by having a fossil fueled plant online to take up the slack. However, the logistics of transporting fuel and generating power is pretty difficult in the middle of the country and there is no water sources available, which makes electricity production even more logistically difficult (and expensive).
The battery solution helps with logistics and costs, the grid can operate with acceptable margins with less cost and less spinning reserve. Fossil fuels are still where the energy comes from. This has not changed and isn't likely to change in the near future.
Re:Cue the denialists... (Score:5, Informative)
For years now we have had fossil fuel shills claiming that wind/solar/etc... will NEVER work (and should not even be looked into) because they do not provide a constant supply of power (when the wind stops, or sun goes down), or provides a peak surge when demand increases.
The success of the Big Battery shows those claims to be false
It's obvious you don't know either the argument being made nor how a power grid has to work. And you OBVOUSLY don't understand what this battery solution is actually doing.
The PROBLEM with Wind and Solar is that they are unreliable, you cannot schedule them to meet demand, you have to take the power and use it, store it or throw it away when it is generated from these sources. Sure, you could dump it into batteries and use it later, but this is extremely inefficient and expensive to do on an industrial scale. On an electric grid, every watt of electrical power must be generated the instant it is used or the grid becomes unstable, goes out of frequency spec, voltage specifications and fails. Currently there is reserve capacity provided by mechanically rotating machines, to keep things stable and in specifications, this reserve covers for instantaneous demand changes, transmission line failure induced transients and things like that. This is why they keep power plants online, spinning and ready to push power. Another plat may trip, a transmission line may isolate part of the grid and change the local load seen. This reserve capacity is used to keep the grid up because it WILL trip off line if things get out of whack too far.
The Tesla battery is used to mimic this rotating storage, but it has a finite amount of power stored. The purpose is to allow time for the grid operator to bring additional electrical supplies online to make up for equipment failures or unexpected load changes. The battery is located in an area that suffers from being difficult to provide rotating power generation capacity. Giving "time" is the key. The more time the grid operator has, the more it can do to manage the flow of power and keep the grid within specs and providing power to it's customers.
However, that battery provides backup power for a very short time, just long enough to keep the grid stable. Not enough time to make up for the day to day variations of wind and solar or provide a peak load for the grid on a hot cloudy still day.... In order to do that, your battery will need to be a couple of orders of magnitude bigger than what they have now. Remember, you are suggesting that we use batteries to hold the grid up for HOURS or DAYS when wind and solar are not producing enough power to meet demand. Right now, the battery being used is only capable of doing this for tens of min, and only while the grid is being reconfigured to fix what ever problem happened to trigger the event.
Re:Cue the denialists... (Score:5, Interesting)
Remember, you are suggesting that we use batteries to hold the grid up for HOURS or DAYS when wind and solar are not producing enough power to meet demand. Right now, the battery being used is only capable of doing this for tens of min, and only while the grid is being reconfigured to fix what ever problem happened to trigger the event.
PG&E is retiring three, count them, one, two , three, peaker plants [utilitydive.com] and replacing them with batteries. They are designed to store 1.2 GWh, 300 MW for four hours. Already.
In less than a decade battery price will fall so much we can store days worth of electricity usage. My Tesla Model 3 stores 75 kWh. That is one week of usage by my home in the winter. 2 days of storage in the summer. We are there.
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You are in denial. The problem is that the materials used in many batteries are finite and some are rare. I saw one report that at current production rates, we had about 365 years of lithium. At the ramped up rates predicted by Tesla for car and utility batteries, it drops to about 17 years. As the supplies go down, the price will go up and not down and at the end - way up. Other rare metals will also suffer - they're called rare for a reason - and all also have the problems of mining that people complain a
Re:Cue the denialists... (Score:5, Insightful)
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The amount that may eventually be found isn't the real problem. It's completely possible that there are more resources out there - or maybe not - we just don't know. But the difference is that coal and oil and natural gas exploration has been going on for much longer than the 17 years we may have left.
To ramp up a search for rare earths, lithium, and cobalt in such a short time and be successful in a search (assuming there are reserves to be found), to develop the mining site without causing more environm
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some are rare. I saw one report that at current production rates, we had about 365 years of lithium.
Yes, Lithium is too rare to be used for large-scale grid energy storage. It should be reserved for portable applications like cars and laptops.
This means a longer wait, but other technologies are on the way, that lack the energy density of Li-Ion, but will work for grids.
But it took the Japanese massive R&D investment over decades to get Li-Ion tech to where it is now. Pumped hydro is still looking good.
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Yes, Lithium is too rare to be used for large-scale grid energy storage.
There are about 2 trillion tons of lithium in the ocean. It can be co-produced at desalination plants.
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Lithium is not a rare element, it is extracted from the salt brine under dry lake beds like Searles Lake near Death Valley. There is lots of it.
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Lithium is not a rare element, it is extracted from the salt brine under dry lake beds like Searles Lake near Death Valley. There is lots of it.
Sure, there is lots of it.. But refining it to usable purity takes quite a bit of energy... What kind you ask? Why electricity of course.
Lithium and Aluminum have similar purification processes and both consume a LOT of energy, electrical energy. Where do you suppose all that electricity comes from?
Reminds me of those Hydrogen Economy hawkers who try and claim it solves the carbon dioxide issue because only H2O comes out of the tail pipe while totally ignoring where H2 gas comes from when made in indus
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Lithium and Aluminum have similar purification processes and both consume a LOT of energy, electrical energy. Where do you suppose all that electricity comes from?
Anywhere. Literally anywhere. Electricity is fungible, more fungible even than oil, more fungible even than natural gas, both of which are extracted in a plethora of grades. But electricity is good anywhere, no matter where it came from.
Lithium can be and is refined from the same power sources aluminum is refined from—hydroelectric dams. But it could come from a fleet of windmills backed by batteries just as easily, and probably less environmentally destructively (nothing gets flooded to install m
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Fossil fuels are finite too. (Also "rare Earths" aren't particularly rare despite their name). There are battery technologies that don't use cobalt. There are technologies under development that use sodium which is enormously abundant.
There are other types of battery technology being developed for stationary storage - for mass power storage, you don't have quite the constraints you have for mobile power like an electric car so you can use materials that would not be optimal for use in a car or a mobile phon
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There is a near infinite supply of lithium in sea water. It costs more to extract that conventional mining so nobody does it at the moment. However it is something like 20USD a kilo from sea water compared to 3USD per kilo from mining. Lithium batteries are well over 100USD per kilo. And is only based on known reserves of lithium, which is not the same as exploitable reserves, and assumes no recycling.
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Did you copy and paste that from a 1970s discussion on peak oil and just change some of the resources?
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No power plant runs 100% of the time, there are all kinds of scheduled and unscheduled outages. We reliably know when the sun will be up and we can generally predict the wind. Batteries are a good candidate for replacing NG peaker plants, which cost about $300 million to build and run only about 5% of the time.
Don't be daft, you know what I mean by "Schedule generation capacity." Knowing when the wind will blow is not scheduling it.
The problem is we can predict demand and schedule our power generation capacity to match. You cannot tell the sun to shine or the wind to blow when you WANT it to, like when you need the energy. You can predict what your windmills will produce, sure, but you cannot schedule it, as in "tell the wind when to blow" to meet demand.
Say for instance it's a cold calm winter's night and e
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It's obvious you don't know either the argument being made nor how a power grid has to work.
Oh, really, how does a power grid "have" to work? Just because the gird mostly works in a certain way today, does it mean it must always be so? Renewables have to "fit" into the existing grid and its principles while they are the "minority" source of supply. If they ever become the main supply, it's highly likely that the grid will adapt to serve them. There is a lot of research going on with this, like about DC microgrids powered by renewables that co-exist with the main grid...and so on.
The PROBLEM with Wind and Solar is that they are unreliable, you cannot schedule them to meet demand, you have to take the power and use it, store it or throw it away when it is generated from these sources.
Yes in that sense
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So much ignorance.. So little time..
Look, you go take an undergraduate course in AC power and call me when you pass and know what the difference is between using the square root of three and the square root of two when discussing AC power systems. You are going to need some basic understanding of transmission lines and power distribution grids or we are wasting our time.
I may be no Westinghouse or Tesla, but there are really good engineering reasons the power grid works as it does and really important econ
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I understand the energy storage of coal and oil, and gas.
But we never seen to consider the volume of such and the infrastructure required to use these are power sources (rail lines, piplines, shipping, refining, etc.).
Massive batteries make more sense to me.
The world needs more molten salt plants. They look awesome and can provide baseline power.
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Dream on...
Storage may be part of the answer and has it's use in modern electrical grids, this Tesla plant demonstrates that. But we are a far cry from a totally renewable solution, even in Australia where Tesla has this plant running. As a short term power source in remote areas, batteries have a place.
However, those who point their finger at this application and say "See! Batteries could make us 100% renewable" are mistaken. Even in the land down under this isn't true. Their power still comes from fos
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The answer is just so fucking easy, no big battery, just fit batteries to people's houses and the power runs of those and the grid balances out the charge so that it pretty much generates the same amount of power all of the time, and the distribute batteries level out the load. Now add solar panels into that and even small vertical access wind turbines and that is the energy requirement for domestic use covered, with enough solar panel area in the burbs to cover medium and high density domestic use.
Still n
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Yea, right... Again ignorance oozed out... Residential power usage is but a small slice of the pie here.
The issue here is economics, physics and how the technology works. None of that goes away because we wish things where different.
Fossil fuels are the USA's main source of electrical power and that shows no sign of changing anytime soon. Natural Gas supplies have been hugely impacted by fracking technologies, we are the "Saudi Arabia" of Natural Gas right now, which has driven the price of this fuel dow
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Why do old dirty fossils pretend the only solution is more old dirty fossils? And then think nobody notices? Seriously. Gasoline doesn't need cheerleaders, put your tits away. You're done here. Cheesus.
The batteries were charged in part by dirty old fossil fuel generators, to allow them to serve there ancillary support function.
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nonsense,
1. The battery is charged by a wind farm : https://hornsdalepowerreserve.com.au/
2. Its nowhere near where it is used, look at a map of South Australia
Its used to provide stability to the network in the even of outages that a clunky old spinning generator cant possible match in response times
It will maintain a drop in voltage/frequency across the network while other system can come online and provide support, then it goes back to getting charged for free
South Australia electricity market also allows
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But, but, but the US President says that coal is both clean and beautiful...
And it IS if you are looking to get blue collar votes from West Virginia and Ohio ....
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Such hostility.. I was merely stating the obvious political truth. You know how politics works, the idea is to gain votes, by adopting positions or making statements to please as many voters as you can.
Personally, I know that coal is dying and it's because Natural Gas is cheaper. Heck, Natural Gas is so cheap, even nuclear plants are too expensive now.
Re: A word about that then. (Score:2, Informative)
Natural Gas is so cheap, even nuclear plants are too expensive now.
They've been too expensive for 40 years.
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Personally, I know that coal is dying
And where coal is not dying, it is being mechanised. The days of labour-intensive underground mining are well dead.
Re:A word about that then. (Score:4, Interesting)
And where coal is not dying, it is being mechanised. The days of labour-intensive underground mining are well dead.
... and the big savings is not when a robot replaces the first human miner, but when it replaces the LAST human. Because then the mine no longer needs ventilation, lighting, safety equipment, redundant support structures, rescue equipment, triple backup pumps and generators, etc.
These add up to huge expenses. Once you have no humans down-hole, you can cut a lot of corners, and save a lot of money.
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you don't want your expensive robots to be crushed in a cave in either
For a robot, 99.999% reliability is "good enough". For humans, your safety systems need to provide 99.99999% reliability. A rough rule of thumb is that each extra nine doubles the cost.
Re:A word about that then. (Score:5, Insightful)
...and renewable energy with battery storage is now starting to eat Natural Gas' dinner: https://www.greentechmedia.com... [greentechmedia.com]
It is clear that Natural Gas Peaker plants are on the danger list of becoming extinct due to:
1. Battery storage reacts in ms to loss of grid power which is much faster than spinning up a gas fired steam turbine.
2. Battery storage has lower maintenance costs due to no moving parts
3. Battery storage can be used to capture any local power produced and from other sources on the grid including surplus Nuclear so providing power buffering
4. Battery storage has no emissions
5. Saves costs by not paying for keeping Natural Gas Peaker plants on standby
6. Renewable energy + battery storage is scalable from domestic (small) to industrial (large)
You can't deny that the economics of renewable energy + storage will kill off Natural Gas Peaker plants and that will be good for the environment.
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No one solution is the correct answer. Your 100% renewable pipe dream isn't either.
Base load Natural Gas is currently the cheapest per megawatt that you can get, which is why even the cheap nuclear option is getting squeezed. The proven reserves of natural gas in the USA are literally HUGE and it's cost is projected to remain historically low for decades so building that NG plant is a low risk investment.
The problem with renewables is their unpredictable nature. You cannot schedule generation capacity
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Your numbers are off.
Pumped: >80% (http://energystorage.org/energy-storage/technologies/pumped-hydroelectric-storage)
The Tesla Battery: 80% (https://www.inverse.com/article/49260-tesla-world-s-largest-battery-price-detailed-in-new-report)
And we do, by definition, need to get to 100% renewables. Because even if we ignore the environmental effects, the non-renewables will eventually run out (or rather, become too rare to be worth extracting).
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weren't you guys the ones saying we couldn't pick winners and losers, the market should decide? Well it decided, your shit isn't worth doing.
Uh, it was regulation that decided that. The market would have continued to mine coal as recklessly as possible with regards to operational safety and with zero emissions controls.
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This is NOT about energy storage (Score:3)
It is about short term frequency and phase stabilization. It was a once of opportunity for a relatively small battery to do some good. And it was felt that if anyone tried to build a second battery to do the same the price for the stabilization would drop to the point that it would not be economical, and so that will not be done.
There are some plans in SA to store energy, by pumping sea water up to some old desert mines. Unclear whether they will go ahead.
And the big missed opportunity for South Australi
Re:Here's the important missing bit: (Score:5, Insightful)
Why? Depending on the design parameters, the batteries may last much longer. Even if some batteries have degraded, it is more cost effective just to add new units instead of replacing units with some life left.
Also, if it has achieved payback in less than 2 years, any performance after that is profit. If you re-visit after 5 years, you won't see a loss.
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Re:Here's the important missing bit: (Score:5, Informative)
Not "may". It's warrantied for 8 years, rated for 15.
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It's warrantied for 15. https://hornsdalepowerreserve.... [hornsdalep...rve.com.au] and expected to last much longer.
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This "come see in 5 years when all the batteries have to be replaced" reminds me of that hybrid car hit piece that fudged a bunch of short life expectations onto a Toyota Prius to try and make it look like it was worse for the environment than a Hummer.
And what a success it was! You can easily point out exactly how that thing was utter BS, and the same person will continue citing it as why a Prius is worse for the environment than a Hummer. The same way, your breath is being wasted here :-/. The GP will tur
Re:Here's the important missing bit: (Score:5, Informative)
It is hard to find even one 5 year old electric car with dead batteries, why would these ones specifically die? They don't even have to suffer vibration.
You're saying that you would predict 100% replacement after 5 years.
The correct number would be <1% or ~ 0.
The residential version has a 10 year warranty with a 70% capacity guarantee and a 15 year expected lifespan.
The commercial version seems to be guaranteed to hold 80% capacity after 5000 cycles, which in this use case would probably mean 5000 days, or 13+ years.
20 months is less than 2 years. Simply buying these and operating them could bring a large investment return for whoever first approaches the local utilities for a contract. All over the world.
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Simply buying these and operating them could bring a large investment return for whoever first approaches the local utilities for a contract. All over the world.
They only bring these returns in specific places where fast response ancillary support is needed. Anciallary pricing can be hundreds or even thousands times normal pricing, for short periods (which batteries can serve).
There is a limited number of these situations around the glove. They don't even have use for another one in South Australia, this one solved the problem.
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Battery pack prices are dropping, 10% per year. In seven years it will cost half as much. More and more
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Yes, ancillary prices are indeed hundred or even thousand times normal, but such pricing lasts a few minutes.
But that is where these batteries are 'saving' money.
Yes, if batteries continue to get cheaper, there will be more financially sound use cases.
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which in this use case would probably mean 5000 days
No. Which in this use case would mean 4-5 times that. The hornsdale power reserve does not see their batteries cycled daily, and even if they did only a small portion of it is used for storage. Rapid charging and discharging occurs for only short bursts (seconds) at a time and the battery spends most of its time sitting quite steadily.
Re:Here's the important missing bit: (Score:5, Informative)
after, say, five years, by which time all the cells will have had to be replaced at least once.
Citation needed.
Actual data collected from Tesla car owners shows that the battery packs still have over 90% capacity after 220000 km (160000 miles).
https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1110149_tesla-model-s-battery-life-what-the-data-show-so-far [greencarreports.com]
Do you have some reason to think that a land-based installation will lose capacity much faster? Seems like land-based should be better than car-based as you don't need to worry about weight.
P.S. When the Prius first came out, I heard this claim that the car would be insanely expensive because the battery pack would wear out and need to be replaced at huge cost. I sure see a lot of taxi services using Prius cars, so I'm assuming that in actual use a Prius is not insanely expensive. Taxi services won't use a car that costs too much.
According to this, a Prius battery pack will last at least 10 years and isn't expensive to replace:
https://www.torquenews.com/1083/can-toyota-prius-battery-last-250000-miles [torquenews.com]
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OP is conflating cycle life with deep cycle life.
The hornsdale power reserver is warrantied for 15 years or 5000 cycles. It will last for significantly longer than that given the battery has not seen massive swings in charge frequently.
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That must be one of the most ridiculous statements I have read on /.
Apparently, in your world, the pumping capacity of a pump is independent of the size of the pump.
In the real world, you can't just increase the capacity of pumped storage by increasing the size of the reservoir, because you also need to add pump capacity.
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No, it's because the P60 and P75 share the same battery. Instead of having 3 battery sizes (60kWh, 75kWh and 100kWh) Tesla simply locks out the P60s at 60kWh, leaving the "spare" as either a software unlock option (like for natural disasters) or to give you extra battery longevity since the wear is spread across 25% more batteries.
An
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And the bank is vastly overbuilt. It was designed to maintain its rated capacity for 10 years, then they added another 10% raw capacity for good measure. And the 10 years is based on the
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It's a 20 month breakeven IF the Real World (tm) matches the estimate. Do note that while the Title said "saved $40 million", TFS says "they estimate that the battery allows annual savings in the wholesale market approaching $40 million".
Note that word "estimate", it's important. It's the difference between "saved $40M", and "might save $40M". And since the battery was turned on this past Friday, that $40M is NOT a description of what the battery has done, but of what it might do over the next 12 month
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If it, and its infrastructure (the building it's in, the wiring, etc) actually cost the $90.2M that another article says it did, then it'll pay for itself in three years or so. And then they'll have the hassle of recycling it. [magic happens] Won't that be fun?
There, FTFY. The battery bank doesn't EOL at three years.
With that said, battery recycling does suck, and I certainly hope that this period of using non-recyclable electrolyte comes to an end soon. I wonder how those glass electrolyte batteries are doing...
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That aside, how much did this battery cost? Less than $385M, I assume since it's part of a plan that cost $385M. If it, and its infrastructure (the building it's in, the wiring, etc) actually cost the $90.2M that another article says it did, then it'll pay for itself in three years or so. And then they'll have the hassle of recycling it. Won't that be fun?
It's stated right in the summary that the battery project cost $66M.
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True. However, another article on the subject used the number $90.2M. Which might just mean that the one article was in Aussie Dollars and the other in US dollars. Or it might mean that one or the other or neither was correct.
Note also that exactly what was included in the $66M or $90.2M wasn't mentioned. The battery only? The battery plus wiring to link it to grid? All that and the building? All that, the building and the break roo
Re:Here's the important missing bit: (Score:4, Insightful)
And since the battery was turned on this past Friday,
From the very first sentence of The Fucking Summary "Last December, Tesla switched on the world's biggest lithium ion battery " It's been a year.
That aside, how much did this battery cost?
I don't know, again, maybe read even the fucking summary:
It is particularly impressive when you consider that the massive Tesla Powerpack system cost only $66 million
If you want to critique something here is the error in the logic:
While the battery saved $40m to rate payers, the owner of the battery didn't make $40m. Those were savings passed on largely to consumers. The battery pack did make like $16m in profit so the payback period is more like 5 years not 18 months.
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say, five years, by which time all the cells will have had to be replaced at least once.
Based on what? Ignorance of load cycles on these batteries or ignorance of the performance of them?
FYI they are warrantied for 15 years and expected to last 20-25 before needing replacement. They've been in place a year and barely scratch the surface of their cycle capacity.
Re: Here's the important missing bit: (Score:2)
Batteries require raw materials that arenâ(TM)t infinite.
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The raw materials that batteries require can be recycled easily, including into new batteries.
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For bulk storage of power pumped hydro is probably better than batteries. However even pumped hydro which is traditionally a super fast response, so for example Dinorwig in the UK can go from zero to 1800MW in 16 seconds if the turbines are kept spinning in air (with a reserve capacity of 9.1GWh) which is much better than even a gas turbine and orders of magnitude better than coal/nuclear it is still over two orders of magnitude slower than a battery pack which can respond in 100ms. Frankly every grid in th
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Where it really 'makes' $$$ is that it reduces those times where conventional power generators kick back on delivering additional power until wholesale prices skyrocket - this is where they would usually make a killing. By meeting demand the battery reduces this wholesale power pricing jump.
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A lot cheaper anyway. You still have to pay for this system itself. By "pay for itself" it means it cut costs enough to do so. It that $66 million is saved on a hundred billion in electricity production, it would be a tenth of a percent in savings.
Re:By my calculations on the back of a beer bottle (Score:4, Interesting)
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You're off by a couple orders of magnitude. 16 of these things could cover the entire US nicely.
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To do what? Provide power for the entire US? The US uses around 10,000,000 MWh/day, so I think you're going to need a couple extra...
To balance the ebbs and flows of power in the current US grid, just as this battery is doing for Australia. Like for like. And it only takes 16 because there are three grids in the US, rather than one.
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Uh huh. Thats why South Australia became a net EXPORTER of electricity for the first time ever in 2018.....
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We do not have a shaky power grid, the only time we had problems was due to a storm creating mini tornados which brought the lines down. Why do so many people spread this lie?
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>> You've lined up a bunch of standardised lithium cells in a box and then sold them at cost? Yeah, of course it'll work
If it was that easy. There's much more involved
- Logistics for hundreds of tons of Li Battery. The horror of any shipping and insurance company.
- Interconnections at 3 levels
- Packaging
- Cooling
- Protection
- Battery management over lifetime
- Equalization of batteries
- Network management
- Building and site management
- Fire safety equipment
- Electrical safety equipment
- High power Wiri
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If it was that easy. There's much more involved
Most of the following was pretty much stuff you could do by ordering parts and following instructions until you got to
- Communication and synchronization with the grid
- Managing Grid Economics
- Daily operations
That's where some actual brainpower has to be applied, and clearly it has been since the project has been a series of success stories. And you forgot one really important part, actually having the trained personnel on hand and then sending them off to do the job. Nobody else seems to have been particularly interested in doing it on this scale until now. As it happens, Tesla had all the piece