Tesla Is Plugging a Secret Mega-Battery Into the Texas Grid (bloomberg.com) 230
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Elon Musk is getting into the Texas power market, with previously unrevealed construction of a gigantic battery connected to an ailing electric grid that nearly collapsed last month. The move marks Tesla's first major foray into the epicenter of the U.S. energy economy. A Tesla subsidiary registered as Gambit Energy Storage LLC is quietly building a more than 100 megawatt energy storage project in Angleton, Texas, a town roughly 40 miles south of Houston. A battery that size could power about 20,000 homes on a hot summer day. Workers at the site kept equipment under cover and discouraged onlookers, but a Tesla logo could be seen on a worker's hard hat and public documents helped confirm the company's role. Property records on file with Brazoria County show Gambit shares the same address as a Tesla facility near the company's auto plant in Fremont, California. A filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission lists Gambit as a Tesla subsidiary. According to a document on the city of Angleton's website, the installation will use lithium iron phosphate batteries that are expected to last 10 to 20 years. The document says that it will generate around $1 million in property tax revenue for the city and the site will be unmanned but remotely monitored.
Why keep it secret? (Score:2, Interesting)
Why would Tesla want (or need) to keep a project like this a secret?
Streisand Effect marketing. (Score:5, Informative)
"Secrecy" is a great way to attract attention.
Re: Streisand Effect marketing. (Score:3, Interesting)
The author of the article disagrees with your use of sarcasm quotes [twitter.com] (and FYI, Dana Hull is anything but a Tesla fan)
There's lots of reasons to be low key - for example, to catch potential competitors offguard, to stop landowners from charging outrageous prices, to be able to have a big surprise unveiling when it opens, etc.
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to be able to have a big surprise unveiling when it opens
Wouldn't this be agreeing with the use of sarcasm quotes?
Re:Why keep it secret? (Score:5, Funny)
Because of the violent backlash from the populace when they find out it doesn't run on coal.
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If you think THAT will be bad, wait until they find out ALL of the LiFePO4 batteries come from China
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Coal produces less than 1/5th of Texas electricity
That's still frankly a shit-ton.
I didn't expect it to be nearly that high.
Re: Why keep it secret? (Score:2)
Look for the multicolored graph for comparison to other states. Anyone looking at that would be forgiven for thinking someone mixed up the Total row with Texas or misplaced a decimal.
To add to the other poster, that's a lot of coal and ng.
https://alternativeenergy.proc... [procon.org]
They're posting it to /. (Score:5, Funny)
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Why would Tesla want (or need) to keep a project like this a secret?
Clearly they didn't.
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because the media, and some people, are dickheads.
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Why would Tesla want (or need) to keep a project like this a secret?
This is Texas we're talking about. It's likely the coal rollers would take their 6.7L V8s emissions machines just to do donuts on the construction site of the battery. Or use the battery for target practice. Or have one person doing donuts while the passenger does target practice out the window.
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Just as Jesus would have done.
Texas has the most wind power of all the states (Score:5, Informative)
Texas is an ENERGY state. ...
Texas has more wind power than any other state, has THE port that all oil flows through, produces more natural gas than any other state
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THE port that all oil flows through
Los Angeles, San Francisco, Anacortes, and the entire State of Louisiana and Alaska would beg to differ.
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The ports of Los Angeles/Long Beach and San Francisco are where all the merchandise goes to and from China, Japan, and Taiwan.
The three ports in Louisiana carry most of the nations corn, soy, and wheat exports. Louisiana imports fruits and vegetables and raw materials such as steel and rubber.
Houston is the petro port, connecting the US to the middle East, Mexico, and Central America.
A little petrol is exported to Japan and South Korea via California. Quite possibly refined gas that came into Houston as c
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I take it you have not been to a beach in L.A., where oil rigs in the ocean are visible. Or the hills outside L.A., where you cannot go far without seeing oil pumped from the ground.
Since when does Los Angeles deal with petroleum?
Much of L.A. was built by oil money. So, to answer your question, since always.
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Where do you think natural gas comes from? (Hint: oil wells.) Wind only makes up 20% of production on a good day, despite Silly Abbott taking a dump on it as soon as the natural gas plants froze up last month.
Not that it matters to what the OP was probably referring to, which is regulatory capture. Or, to put it more bluntly, politician capture.
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Wind only makes up 20% of production on a good day
Um, no.
Wind made up 23% of Texas production [expressnews.com] for the entire year of 2020. On a good day, wind supplies over 50% of Texas production. [eia.gov] Just before the freeze hit, wind was supplying 33% of production. [statesman.com]
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Yes and no. I was commenting on this elsewhere last week. Publicly Texas slams wind/solar because they profit from oil and natural gas but internally they're pushing solar and wind hard because it's more economical in the long run (thing 10-20 years not next quarter). That's why you have them building out wind like crazy at the same time that they publicly decry it. Depends on the audience.
Financially funding this battery installation probably makes a lot of sense, politically it doesn't match the '
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The battery facility can provide power to 0% of Houston homes, for a few hours. It's just not anything that matters.
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Luckily that's not even kind of its purpose despite the articles uninformed desire to characterize the capacity in terms of powered homes.
Re:Texas has the most wind power of all the states (Score:5, Informative)
Texas #1 by a factor of 3... According to this:
https://www.power-technology.c... [power-technology.com]
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And that doesn't include the wind farms on the Red River, because they are are the Oklahoma side of the river.
Re: Why keep it secret? (Score:5, Informative)
Wrong. Texas generates more renewables power than any European country.
"Wrong"? Oh, the irony... Texas generated 84 TWh from wind and 4 TWh from photovoltaics in 2019, as per EIA [eia.gov]. For example, Norway [www.nve.no] generated around 135 TWh in hydroelectric plants in 2019. Germany [fraunhofer.de] generated 127 TWh from wind and 47 TWh from photovoltaics in 2019. And the last time I checked, Norway and Germany were both European countries.
Re: Why keep it secret? (Score:2)
Texas is good at wind and by a long shot... that's pretty much it. That puts their renewable production behind Cali (solar).
However when you consider other factors like size, population, percentage of consumption... states like Cali, Iowa, Washington (hyd), New York (hyd), Oklahoma, and Oregon beat it.
Oh, Germany does better than Texas & Cali. France doesn't care as they got nuclear but still achieve a little over 1/2 Texas. UK & Denmark are tiny and don't make as much... but far out-beat any US s
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France doesn't care as they got nuclear but still achieve a little over 1/2 Texas
This is a point I think should be emphasized. Nuclear may not be renewable, but it is certainly green. France is the model we should replicate.
Re: Why keep it secret? (Score:2)
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Thoughts and prayers...
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Thoughts and prayers...
Indeed [tumblr.com].
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Yes, How dare a government buy things from a company in order to get a service from them!
Wait no... that's how it's meant to work.
Re: Why keep it secret? (Score:5, Insightful)
If Tesla isn't making the power and money off the high peaks, then its likely natural gas peaker plants that are. We've seen this before in Hornsdale. Adding a grid battery to the network helped get rid of peaker plants and stabilized the grid more. In fact, Hornsdale saved money off the grid battery that they installed because it could stabilize the grid for much cheaper than the peaker plants could.
Also, you seem to be under some kind of misconception that Tesla is a charity, it's not, its a business and energy supply is a growing part of that business.
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"Because he wants to arbitrage the price swings in the power grid - he will release capacity when the price is high enough, recharge after the price drops."
It's called capitalism, baby.
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Wasn't that Christopher Walken's evil plan at the beginning of Batman? Is Catwoman going to start a vendetta against Elon Musk?
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Ah, I was trying to remember what movie I heard this before in.
Gotta protect the Wayne Enterprises power monopoly.
Re: Why keep it secret? (Score:5, Interesting)
By definition, if utilities are buying power from the battery rather than peakers, the battery is offering a better rate.
By definition, if utilities are buying power for less money, they're saving money.
It's amazing the lengths people go to try to find Evil(TM) in literally anything that connects to Tesla or Musk. They're building something to stabilize the grid, right after a major crash, and all you can do is curse it, because it's from Tesla.
Re: Why keep it secret? (Score:2)
^ This
They're providing a cap for outlandish energy prices and stability to an infrastructure. If Elon wanted to maximize his dollars he wouldn't be contributing to an open energy market.
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Actually, Musk's play is significantly different than the HFT play. For one, he isn't shoving himself into every transaction as a middleman that provides no additional service but marks up the price.
Nice try cramming the square peg into the round hole but it just won't fit.
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The HF trader is by definition offering a worse price, that's how they get paid. That's why that comparison is bullshit.
What Texas needs is more regulation, but their energy companies will fight tooth and nail against it because it is unprofitable, shock amazement.
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As others have pointed out, it's not the same at all.
Power demand is simultaneously inelastic and instantly changeable. People expect the light to come on when they flip a switch, and for all the other lights to not flicker.
Power sources cannot respond very quickly to changes, so it's a delicate balancing act.
Adding batteries helps, because they can respond instantaneously; much faster than even the fastest peaker plant.
If (and this is a big if) the people setting the wholesale price do their job properly,
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Re: Why keep it secret? (Score:2)
What you are saying is misleading. This is already done by governments, utilities, traders, and plants. Musk is just going to do it at less cost to the end user.
The reality is that someone has to fill in a little to the valleys to cut & keep the price peaks within reach. Batteries do it best and historically just didn't have the cost nor mass production equation balance.
Re: Why keep it secret? (Score:4, Informative)
As long as he is selling at prices below what the peaking gas plants would, it's a win for consumers.
And if he isn't, the venture will fail.
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Wouldn't their ISO (ERCOT, I believe it's called) be the ones who decide when and how much energy from that facility is used?
Also since I don't see any solar panels it's got to be charging off the grid, and they're paying for that power, right? So how much profit are they really going to make off selling that power back?
I expect that it's an arbitrage play. Store power when demand (and prices) are low, sell it back when demand (and prices) are high.
Re: Why keep it secret? (Score:5, Informative)
It is. Dispatchable power is vastly more valuable to utilities than baseload power. And always has been.
Not big enough to matter. (100 seconds of power) (Score:5, Informative)
ERCOT regulates rules of how electric utility companies interact with each other. That is, the rules by which one company with a 2,700 megawatt plant buys and sells power with a company that has a 3,653 megawatt plant.
In a day, the big nuclear plant will produce 88,000 megawatt hours. A little 100 Mw/h battery makes no difference at all.
This battery facility can hold the amount of power one of those plants produces in 100 seconds. It can provide, for up to two hours, up to 0% of the electricity uses by the Houston area. That's not a typo - 0%. Something like 0.2%-0.4% to be more precise.
There may well individual buildings, individual steel companies, in South Houston that affect the grid more than this battery does. ERCOT doesn't tell them when to turn the electric furnace on and off, ERCOT doesn't care about the tiny amount of energy going in and out of this little battery.
What a battery installation like this might be able to do is regulate the 60 Hz frequency when power comes from certain alternative sources. The battery might be able to charge for 1/120th of a second and discharge for 1/120th of a second. It might be able to provide power for a couple hundred milliseconds during a switching event. That's the kind of capacity it has.
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Look up 'arbitrage'.
They can buy the energy when it's being overproduced and store it (think solar during the day), and then re-release it when the price goes up because current generation is insufficient for load. The grid operator can choose to use energy from the battery because it's available almost instantly - and that gives time for other generation to come on line - natgas turbines are quick, but they're not "flip a switch" quick. This battery can bridge the spin-up time of those turbines and stabi
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You could also talk to Boeing.
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Well they sure are selling a lot of EVs in the US without the EV tax credit any more. You don't think it might be because they're actually good cars, do you?
Sure, they still get money from carbon swaps with other auto makers, but that's on the other auto makers for not having their own credits from making zero-emissions vehicles. And, someone who buys a Tesla doesn't give a shit, or potentially even know that activity exists.
They are buying the car because they like the car.
Re:Why keep it secret? (Score:5, Informative)
Rapid-responsive dispatchable power is by far the most valuable form of power to a grid; operators pay a fortune for it. It gives slower dispatchable power (which is still expensive, though not as much) a chance to ramp up. Or, contrarily, deals with demand spikes. Grids generally have two demand spikes per day, a morning spike (peaking around 9 AM) and an evening spike (peaking around 7 PM). Both have fairly steep upswings, but the latter also has a fairly steep downswing. A grid battery can eat this spike.
Its also important to note that what they're not doing is primarily not so much "powering 20.000 houses", but rather, frequency support.
Re:Why keep it secret? (Score:5, Interesting)
Unless you're in the UK, in which case there's a 3rd important spike to deal with - the Coronation Street interval tea rush. So many people put their kettles on at 7:45 that the national grid often sees a 2.2GW spike in demand for 5 minutes.
Re:Why keep it secret? (Score:5, Informative)
1) Tesla does not buy LFP batteries from Panasonic.
2) Panasonic sources its cobalt for GF1 from the Philippines.
3) There is no cobalt in LFP batteries.
4) At GF1, Panasonic makes cells, and Tesla turns them into packs. It's a joint partnership. Tesla now has similar partnerships with LG and CATL.
5) Tesla cannot get enough cells from its partners for its planned expansion rate, so is now turning to its own internal cell supply.
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Anonymous Coward comments and Rei responds:
1) Tesla does not buy LFP batteries from Panasonic.
2) Panasonic sources its cobalt for GF1 from the Philippines.
3) There is no cobalt in LFP batteries.
4) At GF1, Panasonic makes cells, and Tesla turns them into packs. It's a joint partnership. Tesla now has si
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If you read the article, nobody "let it slip". It took sleuthing to figure out that the company building it was actually a front owned by Tesla.
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Its not that hard.
Re: Why keep it secret? (Score:5, Insightful)
The name Texas Gambit tells you all you need to know - he's gambling, trying to profit off the price swings that saw electricity peak at $9,000/MWHr.
You're literally describing the business model of every powerplant that isn't baseload. It's not gambling when you know the historical figures and can do basic trendlining when entering a market. It's just normal business.
100 Megawatts? (Score:2)
Do they mean 100MW generation capacity or 100MWh storage capacity? Or Both? A typical house in USA runs at about 1KW electrical power, so 100MWh would power 20,000 homes for about 5 hours at best... hope the power is not out for any longer than that!
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Which is 0.2% of Houston, for a couple hours (Score:2)
Greater Houston is 7 million people. ... insignificant.
20,000 homes for an hour or two or five is
I have an Energizer AA here that can also provide power to 0% of Houston for a couple hours.
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I have an Energizer AA here that can also provide power to 0% of Houston for a couple hours.
You may want to replace it, as it must be dead... because my AA can power 0% of Houston for an infinite amount of time.
Re:100 Megawatts? (Score:5, Interesting)
So the assumption would have to be 100MWh.
I would disagree with that assumption. The Hornsdale, Australia project was told to the press to be a 150MW install before it was built. Once built, the facility was true to the 150MW provision [abc.net.au] with 193.5MWh supply [wikipedia.org]. That project was also built by Tesla. So I would take that 100MW at exactly face-value, the facility will be able to provide 100MW, for how long? Who knows. But I think it would be wrong to assume that they said 100MW and meant 100MWh when previous projects they cited MW and actually meant MW.
However, that is my take on the matter. Take with a dash of salt as usually required for most of my comments.
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Which means it can power 20,000 homes for one hour.
I don't think the design is to power even a single home for any amount of time.
Texas came very close to total grid collapse due to frequency instability.
This is instantly available conditioned power. It could buy them much needed time in the event of a catastrophe.
Beyond that, I suspect he just means to profit off the arbitrage... which isn't weird.
Frankly, I'm surprised it hasn't been done before now with Texas' market.
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It's actually primarily about providing frequency support, not voltage support.
Re:100 Megawatts? (Score:5, Informative)
The capacity isn't super relevant, this isn't a UPS. Look at how Tesla's first "big battery", the Hornsdale Power Reserve, is being used. Frequency control and grid stability mostly, at which it's prevented a bunch of outages. Even being able to dump power into the grid for a few seconds can be enough to prevent widespread blackouts, because it can stabilize the grid frequency long enough to stop it from collapsing while other stations respond.
You can do a whole lot to stabilize a grid if you can respond instantaneously. Almost every other type of power generation takes seconds if not minutes to spin up turbines and generators, while a big battery can respond in milliseconds.
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It's 100MW generation capacity. Large grid storage solutions are typically measured in how much they can generate/absorb, not what their total storage capacity is, because it's far more important to the grid to know how much of a demand spike they're able to deal with.
The storage itself isn't that important - they have power plants to deal with the long term loads. It's the frequency dropping when a shit ton of people turn on their ovens at the same time that they're worried about.
Re: 100 Megawatts? (Score:2)
He wants to sell those $9,000 MWHrs and recharge his batteries at night, when the rate is low.
("Hello, it's called "Texas Gambit"!)
The important thing to note (Score:3)
These aren't his usual Li-ion batteries they're LiFePO4... This don't from Tesla or SolarCity technology. That in and of itself is enough to make the want to keep things under wraps.
Mostly this tech comes direct from China. Even the US LiFePO4 battery "makers" import cells from chinese factories for this.
Can you hear Texas howl when they figure it out?
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Can you hear Texas howl when they figure it out?
That won't happen. Most Texans came to terms with cognitive dissonance decades ago.
Re:The important thing to note (Score:4, Informative)
I haven't heard many Texans say you shouldn't buy anything from China. I think you set up a strawman here, buddy.
Very profitable thing to do! (Score:5, Interesting)
What Texas needs (Score:5, Informative)
Ironically if Texas had connected to the other state's grid they wouldn't have needed their grid because they would have been forced to weatherize and wouldn't have gone down in the first place...
To me this seems like a pretty lousy solution. Tesla gets to sell expensive electricity because Texas won't spend the money up front to make their grid resilient. It's a lose-lose for Tx but a huge win for Tesla.
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No, what Texas really needs is to rip out all of those grid-powered natural gas pumps and replace them with natural-gas powered pumps. Basically, go back to those long forgotten prehistoric days (circa 2000 or 2010) when the reliability of the natural gas supply was the primary goal of the natural gas distribution system.
As an alternative, they could hang the guy who saw that the grid needed to shed some load and decided to cut off the substations that feed those pumps. (This is a bit simplified, but not
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I'm not a collectivist (Score:2)
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The idea that you can't even see anything but the virtues of collectivism and there might be something in being independent and taking control of your own destiny speaks volumes.
Your immediate resort to irrelevant ad-hominem attacks, instead of actually thinking about the issue at hand, says something as well.
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To me this seems like a pretty lousy solution.
It's not meant to be a solution. I've seen this mentioned a lot but all the articles I saw either don't mention that Tesla is trying to "solve" anything or everyone is assuming that the close proximity (temporally) to the winter disaster means that this is somehow some attempt to fix that.
The reality is likely to be more that Tesla sees an opportunity to elbow in on the peaker plant market. In addition to Tesla, there are a couple [pv-magazine-usa.com] of projects [bizjournals.com] looking to add grid battery storage in Texas. Over short term flu
Re:What Texas needs (Score:4, Informative)
The US and Canada have 4 grids - Texas, East Coast, Midwest and West Coast. They are tied together in Texas via the Intertie. The grids are all independent and unsynchronized.
It's only been running just over a decade, but it's all electronic. The DC to AC inverters are solid state these days - no one uses spinning alternators for HVDC lines to an AC grid anymore. Computer control of the inverter allows instant synchronization and works extremely quickly.
It's why if you want to build a fab, you'll probably do it in Texas and tap into the HVDC bus as that will get you power from all 4 grids because you need reliable power - a blip costs millions of dollars in scrapped parts and takes weeks to restart production.
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They are tied together in Texas via the Intertie. The grids are all independent and unsynchronized.
Ok, but there are limits on how much power you can move from one to the other via the intertie. There are also several intertie's, not one single one.
It's only been running just over a decade, but it's all electronic. The DC to AC inverters are solid state these days - no one uses spinning alternators for HVDC lines to an AC grid anymore.
Fair enough, and good to hear. That will net a couple percent extra in efficiency, but doesn't change the fundamental problem. The grids are out of phase and have to convert... There's a load limit that you can't easily overcome in an emergency.
The crisis in mid-February was precipitated via a failure of spinning-reserve, loss of wind power due to ice, not l
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$1.00 is conservative, during the last crisis the price spiked to the cap of $9.00 per KWh, could easily have gone higher otherwise. Lots of $$$ to be made in a similar situation.
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Plus, you can save the grid an enormous amount too. The gas peaker plants usually used to do this are *much* more expensive.
Would this have changed blackout of 2021? (Score:2)
Not an electrical engineer, but I heard this in some media reports:
We were minutes away from the grid going totally down
I also heard this...
Some electricity was not routed to generators themselves, which mean they couldn't run some heating equipment
So here's my question: would these batteries have given ERCOT extra time to figure something out, or will this capacity not make that much of a difference?
Unlikely (Score:4, Insightful)
ERCOT is too arrogant to know any better. They had rolling blackouts back in 2011 and fixes were recommended but not implemented. Go back to 1989 and the same thing happened.
https://www.texasmonthly.com/p... [texasmonthly.com]
Hey its all good though. The next time it happens a new set of cronies will be running the show.
Why is this a secret? (Score:2)
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Why is this battery a secret?
Because Musk wants everyone talking about it.
The math doesn't add up (Score:2)
A Tesla subsidiary registered as Gambit Energy Storage LLC is quietly building a more than 100 megawatt energy storage project in Angleton, Texas, a town roughly 40 miles south of Houston. A battery that size could power about 20,000 homes on a hot summer day.
For how long?
It's a 100,000 KWHr battery, divide that by 20,000 homes and you get 5 KWHr per home - how long does 5 KWHr last in a Texas home on a hot summer day?
That seems really small.
This website: https://www.texaselectricityra... [texaselect...atings.com]
Says the average Texas home uses just over 39 KWHr/day, so this is more like 100,000 / 39 = 2,600 homes... for 1 day... then you need to recharge it.
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Re:The math doesn't add up (Score:5, Insightful)
It is a battery. Hence it is ultra-fast balancing energy. It is not intended to provide energy for longer times. It is intended to give slower balancing energy providers like gas turbines and water turbines time to start up to keep the grid going in case of major disturbances, primarily when some old, unreliable nuke needs (again) to SCRAM in order to not blow up...
On the side, you can also use part of the capacity to store wind and solar when there is more than needed and provide it when there is less. But that is a secondary use.
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Green ? (Score:2)
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Seems theres alway a new battery compound, i wonder whats going to happen to all these chemicals in 10 or 20 years time and they are worthless because new technology is "different".
The average American gasoline-powered car discharges 340 pounds of chemicals [fool.com] directly into the atmosphere every month, with no recycling, sequestering, or otherwise safely disposing of any of it, ever.
Compared to that, the technical challenge of recycling or safely disposing of a fixed amount of chemicals per car after 10-20 years of service is pretty minor.
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Substantial portions of battery electrolyte are already often not recycled, although some electrolyte is fully recycled. The focus is generally on metals.
We still use many older battery chemistries even though there are "better" ones, because they are known and they are cheap. Ye olde lead acid flooded/wet cell car battery still dominates automotive starting, even though most of us who have jumper packs now literally have something with essentially a R/C car or quadcopter battery in it. I got mine on sale a
not really monster sized (Score:2)
Its not a secret. It never was (Score:2)
If it as intended as a "secret" they would have done a better job of concealing it, instead of no job at all. They have workers wearing hard hats with "TESLA" emblazoned on them. That pretty well gives it away. Oh, you mean the subsidiary is not named "Tesla"? Wow. I have never heard of that happening elsewhere at all. So now somebody has "figured it out" and wants credit for being a sleuth. Sorry. Fail.
once again, the free market requires socialism. (Score:2)
plugging bullshit (Score:2)
The marketing department is plugging secret bullshit into your brain.
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Of course variable pricing and responsive loads such as cars is the holy grail, but the fact is supply and demand are normally predictable enough that timed charging will deliver most of the benefits, today.
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I love it when the armchair intellectuals here get crushed by facts. And yes the entire state pulls into the garages at precisely 5:59 to begin charging.
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See: Apartheid