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Businesses Australia Power

Elon Musk's Battery Farm Is an Undeniable Success (popularmechanics.com) 95

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Popular Mechanics: More than two years after winning an electricity bet, Elon Musk's resulting Australian solar and wind farm is an almost total success. The facility powers rural South Australia, whose population density falls between Wyoming and Alaska, the two least dense U.S. states. In 2016, South Australia experienced a near total blackout after "an apocalyptic storm -- involving 80,000 lightning strikes and at least two tornadoes," Vox explains. In the aftermath, a Conservative politician blamed the push for renewable energy for the extent of the blackouts. For those even passingly familiar with Musk and Tesla's online presence, the rest won't be surprising. The head of batteries at Tesla said he was sure the company could do better, an Australian billionaire asked if he was serious, and Musk jumped in to promise his team was. The rest is history. Musk reached his goal 40 days early, and the Australian billionaire funded the project as promised. We can argue about whether or not private citizens should have to rely on a billionaire angel investor to get a steady supply of power or make the shift to renewable energy, but in this case, the bet benefited a shortchanged rural population beginning almost immediately.
[...]
Just 1.7 million people live in South Australia, which is a nice size to consider a test market for technology like this. Rural grids tend to be left behind, because the ratio of required hardware and infrastructure is still so high per consumer -- much more-so than in a big city, where the same short length of wiring could power thousands of homes. And building a facility that acts as a battery can help smooth out the natural ebbs and flows that come both from renewable energy technology and from the spread out, failure-prone nature of more rural grid sections. This smoothing has saved South Australians a ton of money, already much more than the $50 million cost that Tesla passed on to its Australian investor. The battery facility "reduced network costs by about $76 million in 2019," Bloomberg explains, "savings [Garth] Heron, [Neoen's head of development in Australia] said would be passed on to businesses and households in the state. The battery's introduction also slashed the cost to regulate South Australia's grid by 91 [percent], bringing it in line with other regions in the nation."

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Elon Musk's Battery Farm Is an Undeniable Success

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    • he may be part Android, not that thereâ(TM)s anything wrong with that.

    • Australia only had to trust Musk to install the batteries. That is done. The batteries have known reliability and come with a warranty, so no more "trust" is needed.

      Besides, depending on a billionaire to maximize his profit by completing a contract on schedule is a lot better than depending on a politician to keep promises.

      In greed we trust.

      • by dfghjk ( 711126 )

        Not true. The design did not exist and the technology was unproven, so the buyer accepted risk regardless of warranty. If the product failed to deliver, Australia suffered.

        • No because they didn't have to pay if he didn't deliver
          • If he didn't deliver. But what if he delivered the product, but the benefit was not what he had claimed?

            However, the product *also* delivered (on the promise), so everybody wins.

            • By "deliver" I didn't mean turn up in a van with the batteries in the back, I meant provide the product to the agreed engineering specification in the agreed time frame.
              • Nor did I. Delivering according to the agreed upon engineering specs is not synonymous with delivering the promised benefits.

                You think you need X. You design and build X. And then in practice you discover you really needed Y. It's always a risk when trying new things, no matter how solid the theory (In theory there's no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.)

                The surprise unexpected benefits they've been seeing are the Good Twin version of that.

      • In greed we trust.

        Once again, filthy lucre saves the day.

  • by im_thatoneguy ( 819432 ) on Wednesday March 11, 2020 @06:14PM (#59819732)

    The challenge is that it's easier to save someone money than it is to make money.

    Let's say you can make a widget for $10 that competes with $20 priced products. You sell it for $13. Consumers "save" $7 per widget but you only make $3 in profit.

    Open Source faces the same conundrum. You can "sell" support on a Linux distribution for $50. That "saves" each customer $100 vs Windows 10 but you don't get to pocket that $100.

    Capitalism doesn't have a mechanism for automatically rewarding pro-consumer actions. If consumers saved $80 million in the first year on a $50 million dollar battery but they only made $1 million in profit on the $50 million battery the free market wouldn't reward the investment.

    This is one of those cases where the government investing public funds can make a lot of sense. The government spends $50 million on a battery. The citizens save $300 million over 4 years and there isn't a need for a profit mechanism. The government could even just operate it as a "public option". If the gas peaker plants are cheaper, use them. The mere existence of cost-effective competition saves the money even if it's never charged and discharged.

    • If Musk priced his product wisely, his profit is baked in. What he is selling isn't so much a new widget as much as new technology that improves an older one. You are not changing the grid, the originating source of power, or anything that the consumer is paying for in their monthly bill regarding generation. It's the grid upkeep that's improved, which helps rural areas. What Musk is looking for is bigger investment, but that's still not being taken up by wary investors. There is no mention of his trou
      • by AK Marc ( 707885 ) on Wednesday March 11, 2020 @06:45PM (#59819814)
        The problem with Tesla is there is so much subsidy opposing them. If they sell at cost, the fossil fuel industries sell at a loss, and get subsidies from the government to fill the gap. So Tesla must sell at a loss to compete with the subsidized industries, then use their "success" to get subsidies moved from fossils to them. At that point, they get a bigger payoff.
      • by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Wednesday March 11, 2020 @07:40PM (#59819962)

        If Musk priced his product wisely, his profit is baked in.

        You are missing the point. Of course Musk is profiting.

        But his profit is completely disconnected from the value of the "public goods" that the Australian people receive. Their grid is now more reliable, more flexible, and cleaner, regardless of Tesla's profit.

        The difference between Tesla's profit and the value delivered to the customer is what Karl Marx called Surplus Value [wikipedia.org]. It was one of the few things that Marx was correct about, and it is a problem with "pure" capitalism.

        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by Anonymous Coward

          Marx was correct, or at least has not been proven wrong, about a lot more than this.

          It's the people who expanded on his theories, with Lenin and Mao as the worst offenders, who really went off the reality scale.

          I am no expert, and I do not know what he got wrong and what he got right. All I know is anyone who speaks about armed revolution and forced redistribution of wealth should spend a minute thinking about the kind of people who rise to the top during a violent endeavor, especially on the side with the

          • it was fine until it became an -ism and all the parrots and triffids started reciting it by heart ... but you have the same -ism in capital so both of them are (imo) very likely (once-been) great ideas turned to dogma. I'm starting to think that's what -ism stands for. But Elon sure puts the E- in entrepreneur heh, superkudos , i don't know why but i feel the man to have a way more charismatic aura than besos despite the not being the richest guy. How much of that profit gets poured into the moneypit Space
        • It was one of the few things that Marx was correct about, and it is a problem with "pure" capitalism.

          Claiming that added value is a "problem" is a problem with "pure" communism ...

        • I think that is incorrect - over time, in an market with competition, capitalists will compete to lower prices until the surplus value reaches zero.

          Musk's project was the first time a grid stabilizing battery farm had ever been tried, so it was risky. As it so happened the risk paid off, so society (taxpayers) made a nice profit. If it had turned out to be ineffective, society would have lost. Given those possibilities, it doesn't seem there was any "surplus value". Just a calculated risk that paid off.

        • Patents, including business process patents, copyrights, exclusive right to deliver value and demand a portion of the value delivered are the mechanisms we have come up with to reward innovators. It is not perfect. But it works partially.
      • by rtb61 ( 674572 )

        Tesla used the opportunity in South Australia for more than anything else, marketing. They knew it would succeed and South Australia provided the ideal opportunity to probe it, lots and lots of land area for renewables, keep in mind South Australia is 45% larger than Texas. With major below sea level artificial reef desalination plants in the the two gulfs, the amount of food South Australia could provide to it's trading partners would be huge. You have to enjoy hot dry weather though but the trade off real

    • I think you'll find that it is very profitable. https://electrek.co/2018/01/23... [electrek.co]
    • Except of course, if the government does it, it ends up costing them twice as much, and/or only works half as well. That's because they have no economic competition to deal with, so they have no incentive to keep costs down over time nor to provide the best possible service with what they spend. Their incentives are political rather than economic.

      You have the economics of the situation messed up anyway. Read up on Consumer Surplus [wikipedia.org] and Producer Surplus [economicshelp.org]. Profit is the reward for pro-consumer actions. If you

      • Nonsense. Government can produce much cheaper results than private industry. For example, municipal utilities on average have much lower prices for the same quality of service. Why? Because there's no highly paid executives, and no profit sharing with shareholders.

        • You're trying to compare a government directly-run service with a government-controlled service. Those both suffer from government.

          It's different when you're comparing those government services with actual private sector competitive services where the government isn't making all the important decisions and/or limiting competition.

          • The government always makes decisions and limits competition. There's these things called laws.

            • Yes, and sometimes they use their power to just keep competitors from killing each other and defrauding customers which results in a competitive and efficient market and other times they instead use their power to dictate exactly what a company can do, what they will charge, that there can only be one company providing a particular services, what their profits will be, who they can hire, and how they will operate.

              The second situation isn't much different than them just doing it themselves, except of course

              • by spun ( 1352 )

                "their" free power? That's our power. Government is just we, the people. If we let corrupt and venal corporations dictate our laws instead of reigning in the power of the rich to corrupt our government, that's on us. And the rich.

                Here in the USA, We have constitutional protections against bills of attainder. We can't regulate just one company. For example, right wing assholes want to regulate Facebook into giving them a platform, but the constitution prevents laws like that.

                • Government is made up of individual politicians, bureaucrats, and various other officials, all making choices based on their own reasons and incentives. It's certainly not just "we, the people", because we don't all agree on anything. You've fallen for the fallacy of composition.

                  The government establishes monopolies and regulates that one company pretty frequently. The example I was responding to in the OP was related to utilities.

      • Except of course, if the government does it, it ends up costing them twice as much, and/or only works half as well.

        I've worked with corporations and governments, and I do not find that to be the case.

        Governments are at least non profit, so they aren't in the habit of squeezing every last drop of possible revenue out of a project or product and slashing every last possible cost, to the point of killing the product. Yes, they tend to be less than agile, but they also tend to plan, and generally staff with moderately useful people.

        Companies are hit or miss. They can be cheap, lean, fast, with good quality (SpaceX), or they

        • Since you seem to want to make IT comparisons, are you familiar with the saga of healthcare.gov? That's a typical government IT project. Over promised, under-delivered, over budget, and late. The IRS uses a 60+ year old computer system because they've now failed at least six different times across multi-decade projects to create a new system to replace it, while still managing to spend almost a billion dollars on attempted upgrades.

          When a private company fails, they fail. People stop investing, people leave

    • by ras ( 84108 ) <russell+slashdot ... au minus painter> on Wednesday March 11, 2020 @08:35PM (#59820090) Homepage

      The challenge is that it's easier to save someone money than it is to make money.

      Nah, that wasn't the challenge this time around.

      The challenge is just about everybody in the electricity industry said that batteries were a money loser. The claim was they are so expensive they simply did not make sense. Even more amazingly, there were old electrical engineers lining up to say the would hurt grid stability. (How anybody with an engineering degree could even let that thought persist in their head long enough to put it in paper is beyond me.) In that environment nobody was going to pony up the money to install a grid battery.

      As the article said, it was a storm + Elon + politicians that broke the dead lock. The storm provided the headlines, Elon assumed the risk, and the politicians pounced like vultures at the opportunity those two created: getting free publicity by doing something about a high profile problem using somebodies else's money.

      The amazing thing wasn't saving money vs spending it, or anything like that. The amazing thing was the economists, bankers, power engineers and administrators were almost to the man wrong. Gradually news filtered out that when a coal fired turbine tripped out (as they do every few weeks) triggering megawatt fluctuations, guess what - those fluctuations didn't happen. Turns out a computer with near unlimited power (albeit for a short duration) at its disposal can react to grid problems in milliseconds - who would have thunk it?

      There has always has been what's called a FCAS price [aemo.com.au], which is money someone can earn by providing short term stabilisation to the grid. Everyone knew about this. AMEO publishes reports showing about $0.5M/day (!) is paid to FCAS providers [aer.gov.au]. Everyone also knew that when things go wrong, electricity and FCAS prices go through the roof. Here "go through the roof" means go from $80/MW to $500/MW when a lightening strike took out the inter connector between two Australian states (QLD and NEW in 2018). You don't need a lot of time buying power at 1/5 the cost you can sell it to make a pile of money.

      The weird thing is that despite everyone knowing all that, and everyone knowing (or at least should have been able to predict/model) how a large battery would perform, they still claimed they were financially infeasible. They were even claiming that after a random event triggered the installation of a battery, despite all their sage advice. (It was double down or admit you are a moron, I guess.) Now someone is making money out of the things they've all pulled their heads in and man + dog is lining up to borrow the funds, to install the things, and make a little cash. Apparently storms, Elon and random politicians aren't needed any more - it just takes one working example. I noticed one popped up at my local Uni [uq.edu.au] in the past few months, along with a big outdoor display showing how much money it is making.

      If capitalism really ruled supreme these battery facilities would have been installed long ago. Instead the power industry seems to be run more like a flock sheep following gut feelings.

      • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        Employees of an established business that is about to be destroyed by new technology think that the new tech won't work and will cause all sorts of problems, even though the engineering says otherwise. Not in the least bit shocked.

        By the way $40/MWh (I assume you mean Australian dollars and megawatt-hours) is incredibly cheap. Nuclear in the UK costs more than twice that at normal times! It's on a par with on-shore wind.

        So if that number is correct then battery backup is looking extremely good for replacing

      • The challenge is just about everybody in the electricity industry said that batteries were a money loser. The claim was they are so expensive they simply did not make sense.

        That is actually still true in many cases. Telsa's battery makes a lot of money on account of the grid setup they are in and the fact that they have a monopoly in Australia on instant frequency correction. The AEMO never considered sub 6-minute corrections in the FCAS price and the market is priced and regulated accordingly. Sidenote: Telsa has been lobbying for a while to get the pricing structure changed as they are not being paid fair market rates for the service they are providing to the AEMO.

        Along come

      • In business this is what's called a "reference customer" and as the name implies it's what new actors use to get their foot in the proverbial door. Traditional industry has a particularly large amount of senior people who are reflexively hostile to everything new and the only way to get your foot in the door with something new is to offer it to them at no or a very low expense to them so the non-existent risk overrules their reflexive objections.

        Previously worked at a company trying to commercialize a ne
    • The challenge is that it's easier to save someone money than it is to make money.

      Let's say you can make a widget for $10 that competes with $20 priced products. You sell it for $13. Consumers "save" $7 per widget but you only make $3 in profit.

      Capitalism doesn't have a mechanism for automatically rewarding pro-consumer actions.

      Sure it does: market competition and profit motive.

      The existing market you describe consumes $20 widgets. If a competitor wants in on that market, they need to capture customers; one way to do that is through price. Selling a competitive product at $13 makes the competitor $3 in profit.... which is $3 of profit they did not have before. The first seller loses out on their $10 of profit, but a free market allowed a new competitor to earn a profit. To the competitor, it's new money. That's their first incenti

    • by Bengie ( 1121981 )
      This is a classic "value is greater than the sum of its parts". Most of the time capitalism is good enough, but some times the value added is much greater than the cost, but that value is diluted into society as a whole, there is no monetary value gain for anyone directly involved.

      It's like the issue of health care. We might say we're not willing to pay The $100,000 to keep someone alive because they'll never be able to pay it back, yet letting a person die is a net loss of $1mil+ almost regardless of who
    • And why would you sell such a product for $13? You would sell it for like $19! Or maybe $18. Just enough to significantly undercut. Once you do that the maker of the $20 product will have to find a way to reduce their cost or go out of business. Depending on which it is, you may either have a steady stream of profits or the competition may suddenly be selling for $13 or even worse $12. But the initial price in your scenario is way off.
      • Once you do that the maker of the $20 product will have to find a way to reduce their cost or go out of business.

        Or use their financial/political leverage to squeeze out the
        upstart competitor before they can get a foothold in the market.
        That's how capitalism works in the real world, unlike in
        the economics textbooks.

  • by WindBourne ( 631190 ) on Wednesday March 11, 2020 @06:17PM (#59819738) Journal
    while the pro-AE will call this the end of regular power.
    What is missed is that this huge battery was simply used to smooth the grid over. It does not replace any coal generator.

    Utilities are looking at this not as how to complement AE to provide them with days or hours of energy, but just a couple of minutes at best. Utilities around the globe will use this to replace load-following systems, and keep their FF plants going (for CHina, shit-loads of coal, for places like America, nat gas).

    We really need to encourage utilities to move towards distributed storage, not large.
    • by Dunbal ( 464142 ) *
      Yeah most people have figured out that batteries store power, they don't magically produce power.

      We really need to encourage utilities to move towards distributed storage, not large.

      Depends on the country. Somewhere like China with cities that have 40 to 60 million people each it can be both large AND distributed... the population of California in one city. That's a lot of electricity and a hell of a jolt when everyone turns off their tv and goes to sleep.

      • by aberglas ( 991072 ) on Wednesday March 11, 2020 @07:08PM (#59819868)

        At least not for very long.

        They were added to provide minute by minute grid frequency stabilization. A very special application for which a relatively small battery is a good solution.

        But this is not the same as storing power overnight when the sun goes down or the wind don't blow. Pumped hydro is still probably the way to go for that. Or possibly a much, much bigger and less economical battery if their prices continue to fall dramatically.

        Most of South Australia is completely empty with no grid power at all. Th bit with the people in it is the South East, which has a moderate population density.

        • A bigger battery is more economical, not less. It enjoys greater economies of scale, and therefore is cheaper per Wh.

          • I suspect that once you're talking about even small grid-scale deployments, your economies of scale have mostly been tapped out.

            Meanwhile, the profit margins per kWh for overnight power buffering are much smaller than for grid stabilization - sounds like you can easily sell back power for 5x what you paid to stabilize the grid for a few seconds or minutes. But nobody wants to pay 5x as much for power all night long - if people will pay 2x as much for overnight power compared to daytime power, then your gro

            • And, to top it all off, pumped hydro (aka a gravity battery) is several hundred times cheaper

              If you have the terrain.
              Not so good for a vast desert downunder.

              • True, but as I recall, almost nobody lives in the Australian interior, and there's lots of water along the coast.

                There's also some other interesting gravity battery options being explored - e.g. an automated electric boom crane that moves giant concrete "legos". between tall and short stacks. Don't know that anyone's actually built a working facility yet though.

              • Here it is - looks to be dozens of promising candidate sites in Australia: https://www.sciencealert.com/s... [sciencealert.com]

        • Why not both?

          Some of the capacity of the battery is reserved for frequency stabilization. Some is used for "day trading", discharge when the spot price goes up, recharge when the spot price goes down. Usually due to the abundance or lack of renewable generation.

          They don't have anywhere near enough capacity to run the entire state exclusively on stored renewable power. But they do store some, for greedy capitalist reasons.

        • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          Australia has huge potential for offshore wind that supplies 24/365. Batteries only needed for smoothing, not medium term storage.

    • Utilities are looking at this not as how to complement AE to provide them with days or hours of energy, but just a couple of minutes at best. Utilities around the globe will use this to replace load-following systems, and keep their FF plants going ...

      You have no idea. PG&L is replacing natural gas powered peaker plants with 700 MW x 4 hours (not tesla) and a 350 MW x 4 hour battery systems. It is meant tame,nay, wring, the neck of the duck curve. Florida and Texas also announced plans for it.

      This does nor replace the coal plant immediately but it is providing a way for solar plants to supply energy when the sun is down. Solar with storage will eventually replace all the coal plants.

      No new peak power plants starting from this year or next. Seven

      • by AvitarX ( 172628 )
        I think the current systems are more to help when a cloud rolls over, not the sun is down.

        This isn't to say it's bad, it's just not (yet) an overnight solution.

        Things move fast though.

        India just recognized 1,000 protesters from facial recognition and ID photos, 5 years ago that was fantasy land facial recognition.
        • I think the current systems are more to help when a cloud rolls over, not the sun is down.

          I think you should not post on topics that you are clearly clueless about.

          Solar is spread across a wide area. A cloud isn't going to make a significant difference across the grid.

          As others have pointed out, systems like this are aimed at larger problems, such as the Duck Curve. The Duck curve doesn't require overnight output -- it's the evening only.

      • Solar plus wind with storage will eventually replace all the coal plants.

        FTFY.

    • by samkass ( 174571 )

      Utilities are looking at this not as how to complement AE to provide them with days or hours of energy, but just a couple of minutes at best.

      Its storage capacity is roughly 30 minutes of the entire wind farm's generating potential. It has sometimes allowed the wind farm to generate power at full capacity and store it, even when demand drops a bit, increasing efficiency. It can also augment the farm by 10% for 3 hours when extra demand is needed. And it prevents gas generators from having to come online to shore up power during spikes.

      Sure, it doesn't replace coal, but it makes things better.

    • What is missed is that this huge battery was simply used to smooth the grid over. It does not replace any coal generator.

      There's no coal generation in South Australia to replace.

      They're on gas, wind and solar.

      And with the battery able to respond to demand, even though its storage is tiny, it is the top of the peak demand that it supports. That energy would have been generated by gas. Now it is (largely and under normal circumstances) wind power from the previous night.

    • This is not completely true, the battery actually replaced gasoline based generators that spin up if the load on the network is too high, but it takes them some seconds to spin up so they do not prevent all the blackouts. Such battery puts these on-demand generators out of work immediately because its so quick to react to grid demand.
    • You may have missed where renewables were also installed.
  • by BrookSmith ( 2949941 ) on Wednesday March 11, 2020 @06:20PM (#59819748)

    What is "wind farm is an almost total success"?, is that some sort of participation award?

  • Look, power requirements spike. All power plants should be designed to operate at peak efficiency and then install a battery - or better yet - a series of batteries situated at strategic locations.

    Cost in the requirements to buy and maintain the batteries, just as you cost in the requirements for power distribution from the power plant.

    Given how difficult/expensive/polluting it is to rapidly increase the various types of power plants, anything else makes no sense.

  • Part of how this battery works in the grid is that it stores power from low demand/high generation periods and parcels it out during high demand periods. It creates an arbitrage play between different rates. The power generators are a bit peeved because that money is going into the battery owner's pockets (and the rate payer's also save money) rather than the power generator's bottom line.

    • The rates change because the costs to produce change.

      Power producers are typically very, very happy to be selling their "surplus" power to anyone who will buy it, because the alternative means taking generation offline. That means either the plant is either sitting unused and not making any money or, in the case of coal especially, burning fuel to stay in a "ready" state and not selling any energy.

      And when peak demand comes, they will have to bring faster acting but more expensive power online to cover it;

  • by Bandraginus ( 901166 ) on Thursday March 12, 2020 @01:14AM (#59820660)

    Australia is currently governed by an ultra-conservative party. Our prime minister had this to say about the proposal for the battery before it was built:

    “I mean, honestly, by all means have the world’s biggest battery, have the world’s biggest banana, have the world’s biggest prawn like we have on the roadside around the country, but that is not solving the problem,” Morrison mocked in July last year, just a few months after waving a lump of coal around parliament.

    Just two weeks after being brought online, it stepped in and provided power on the grid within milliseconds when the Loy Yang coal fired power station when offline on Dec 14th. This prevented a cascading outage of the grid. It did it again on Dec 22. These events alone practically paid for itself right there and then.

    Apart from the obvious financial success of the Tesla Big Battery (by doing power arbitrage), it also provides a crucial role in helping manage the frequency of the grid. A new upgrade to the battery (additional 50MW/64MWh), helps it reduce the need for synchronous generation, which helps more gas plants drop off because they are no longer needed to help provide inertia in the grid.

    I should also mention that the "billionaire" isn't just any billionaire. It was Mike Cannon-Brookes, the co-founder of Atlassian, who urged Musk to install the battery. And I don't believe he was actually a financier of the project, he just helped facilitate the deal.

    • The problem is that the benefits are all about smoothing the power over the entire network, and just one or two of these is enough to realise that across the entire countries network.

      So unfortunately building more of these does not make a great deal of sense - we all clap each other on the back for implementing a technology that basically replaces nothing, but does provides a really good new service to help balance the network.

      This is not a solution to solar and wind powers difficulty in providing effec
      • That's a good point. Not every battery on the grid should be performing FCAS duties. Those duties can probably be carefully dolled out to select batteries around key areas in the grid. The rest of the batteries are still good for power arbitrage, for which they'll still earn a pretty penny. Capitalism at its finest!

        There was an article recently about VW planning to bake virtual battery (vehicle to grid) technology into all of its (future) electric cars. The article itself wasn't interesting, but the nu

  • What happens to all that lithium (and the rest of the battery cell) once the batteries lose their capacity? In 10 years, I think is what the claims are. Can the cells be recycled?

    • by Whibla ( 210729 )

      What happens to all that lithium ... In 10 years, I think is what the claims are.

      10 years is almost certainly a considerable underestimate for most of these battery installations. Think how many lifetime extensions have been applied to the various forms of generation over the years (20+ years in some cases).

      Can the cells be recycled?

      Assuming there is no fire (due to 'explosive' discharge caused by dendrite growth directly connecting anode to cathode) then yes, recycling batteries is relatively trivial. Virtually all the raw materials, and certainly all the 'rare' and 'useful' ones, are still present at the end o

      • by EvilSS ( 557649 )

        Assuming there is no fire (due to 'explosive' discharge caused by dendrite growth directly connecting anode to cathode) then yes, recycling batteries is relatively trivial.

        Well that's weirdly specific. What if there is a fire caused by a direct lightning strike? Or a fire caused by arson? What if the fire is due to a meteorite strike?

  • Is itâ(TM)sa success, who does SA have the highest electricity prices in the world?
    • Is itâ(TM)sa success, who does SA have the highest electricity prices in the world?

      Because you live at the ass end of nowhere, with very few other people. Running a power line to you at all is ridiculously expensive, because of sheer distance, and once it gets there, there aren't very many of you to divide the costs among. If it wasn't for government policy that you should have power, you probably wouldn't have power at all beyond what you could generate yourselves.

  • Some real talk here.

    The primary benefit realised by the battery isn't the ability to stabilise the network in a traditional sense.

    Its not providing base-load power, battery power storage is still not able to supply the grid for any length of time as it just cannot store enough.

    What is does do is act to smooth out issues with surges and millisecond power losses. Its highly efficient at doing that and has provided a huge benefit.

    HOWEVER - you really only need one or two of these things to 'smooth' th
  • The battery is LOCATED in rural SA, but it is hooked into the NATIONAL grid.

    It powers primarily the state of SA, but also provides FCAS etc services across the country. And while SA does have small towns, of the 1.7m people in the state there was about 1.3 of them in the capital by memory (been a few years since I've checked the numbers on my old home town). So this piece is a bit misleading for that.

    It destroyed the prices of this secondary market because it can respond so quickly, and has made massive differences in stability of power generation. This is however not new news. https://www.abc.net.au/news/20... [abc.net.au]

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