Tesla Files To Become an Electricity Provider in Texas (cnbc.com) 64
Tesla wants to sell electricity directly to customers in Texas, according to an application filed by the company this month with the Public Utility Commission there. From a report: The application follows the start of a big battery build out by Tesla in Angleton, Texas (near Houston), where it aims to connect a 100 megawatt energy storage system to the grid. Texas Monthly first reported on the application, submitted by a wholly owned subsidiary of Tesla called Tesla Energy Ventures. Tesla has also built several utility-scale energy storage systems around the world, including one east of Los Angeles, another underway in Monterey, California, and two in Australia -- one in Geelong, Victoria, and another in Adelaide, South Australia.
Reading while tired (Score:4, Funny)
I read the headline as "Tesla files to become an electricity supplier in Tesla."
I shook my head and tried again.
"Texas files to become an electricity supplier in Texas."
I gave up after that. Is it the weekend yet?
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It may be closer to the truth [youtu.be] than you think.
Not to suprising. (Score:3, Insightful)
Being that they are trying to move their operations to Texas, they probably would want to have better control over their power. Texas Power Grid is a Mess so I would think Tesla who is in the energy market (not just cars) would want to protect their interests by providing power to the state they are operating in.
But Texas Government does have an interesting trend on outlawing things that is good for them. So lets see how well this works.
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would want to protect their interests by providing power to the state they are operating in.
They can get their daytime electricity at the nighttime rates and also help balance out the grid as a side benefit. This is probably more about powering their own facility when the time comes.
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Well powering their facility, but also a way to show off their products for other customers as well.
Tesla is not popular with politics, (on both the Left and Right) the companies growth and current size is largely from making products that people really need now, where there isn't too much competition in, and taking advantage of government intensives that weren't really targeted towards them.
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This is probably more about powering their own facility when the time comes.
Nope.
They want to make a point about many states not allowing net metering for household solar.
Point is in many states or cities, solar roof owners may not feed into the grid, or get an absurd price.
Tesla is planning to create so called "virtual power plants". This are solar roof owners with a battery. Preferable a battery that is over sized and can be charged from the grid as well.
Now you combine a few hundred of such owners to a "
Also every time the grid collapses (Score:2)
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Surprised the other energy suppliers in Texas are allowing it. Maybe they didn't lobby hard enough.
Peak demand is very profitable for them, and a big battery will really eat into those margins. Nightmare scenario is that more businesses get batteries that they can charge from solar or cheap overnight rates.
100 megawatt energy storage (Score:1)
...where it aims to connect a 100 megawatt energy storage system to the grid....
Since when is MW a unit of energy ?
Seems a meaningless PR story without any merit.
Like saying my car does 340 miles. (top speed ?, range per mile ?)
It happens to be the range before I have to refuel.
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Sorry, gallons per mile... (Where is the edit button)
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Most intelligent people can often deal with context and figure out what they mean.
100MW in its conext is 100 MWH (Megawatts per hour)
if you say your car does 340 miles, that is probably the going to be the range you get on a full tank, or a full charge. Unless the context has you working with a High End Racing car, where 340 miles per hour may be its top speed. As with racing cars we don't care much about their range of a full tank (or charge)
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Not necessarily. The amount of instantaneous wattage would be its capacity to handle peak demands. The amount of storage can grow over time but the connection capacity to the grid would remain the same.
Re: 100 megawatt energy storage (Score:1)
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100MW in its conext is 100 MWH (Megawatts per hour)
Pedantic nitpick: MWH = (Megawatts TIMES hours) not per hour.
But it isn't clear if that is what TFA meant. This appears to be based on an array of Tesla's Megapacks [wikipedia.org], which can produce peak power for two hours.
So TFA may be wrong, and it is really 100 MWH, or it may be correct that the power output is 100 MW for two hours = 200 MWH. Who knows?
There are dozens of other sites reporting this, and they ALL get the units wrong. So, apparently, the mistake originated with the bozo at Tesla who wrote the press
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I think they teach PR people to stay as far away from engineers as possible, since most press releases are utter bullshit. The executives don't want **actual** facts to be released, they want something that will run up the stock price. They don't need engineers poking holes in their pie-in-the-sky claims.
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I suspect that you are not as intelligent as you think.
Firstly, I believe that it is really 100MW (by the way, "Megawatts per hour" makes no sense in this context).
Secondly, if you follow the links back to the Bloomberg story, which appears to be the origin, you will find this comment:
"The battery's duration remains unclear, "
So I think that most intelligent people would think
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This is an example of why you should stick to what they know and not just make things up.
Tesla batteries are optimized for applications in Tesla cars. One of the things about electric cars is that you have a few hours to 'use up' all the energy in a battery. As a result of this tesla's "grid" batteries are typically optimized for 2hr and 4hr discharge times, meaning that their "100MW" instillation would be a 200MW-hr or a 400MW-hr instillation.
As a fun aside - this is actually a bit of an issue for the Spac
Re:Can Tesla defy the laws of physics now? (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Can Tesla defy the laws of physics now? (Score:4, Informative)
Minutes actually.
Oncor, and all the other Texas electricity transport providers have replaced all power meters with remotelly-controllable ones, also their neighbourhood distribution points are like that.
During the February fsckup, as soon as they had power to keep a HV line up to a city/area, they started shutting down residential customers but leaving all hospitals, firefighters, police (and neighborhoods of important people) up all the time.
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I was going to correct you, until I got to the parentheses. My nephew took his family to his in-laws' place because they had power pretty much continually since the mayor of either Dallas or Fort Worth lived down the street.
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Presumably they mean it's 100MWh capacity. Very unlikely it can supply 100MW.
That could run a Tesla factory for quite a while. Protects them against blackouts. Also protects them against high prices during the day.
If Texas had another major blackout event that lasted for days again it could cost Tesla a huge amount of money if they don't have backup.
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100MW is not laughable at all.
If you suddenly have an additional 100MW demand, and can not supply it: you have to black out a part of the grid - or the whole grid might collapse.
Hint: a standard 50 year old nuke provides roughly 500MW. And that you don't consider laughable: because it is a nuke?
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ERCOT is a grid wide operating power company.
And how much GW it has on "stand by" does not reflect in any way how quick it can react to power fluctuations.
You have no idea how a grid works. 100MW for instant reaction in both ways: drawing excess power from the grid, and supplying instantly if there is demand, that is quite a lot.
Try to transform that into a pumped storage plant.
The amount of "power on standby" is no measure for grid stability or how cool a super fast reacting battery is.
Re:Can Tesla defy the laws of physics now? (Score:5, Insightful)
I think if you charged the batteries at night when electricity is relatively cheap (the cost of electricity in TX is hugely driven by A/C in office buildings), and then sold the energy back to the grid during the day, you'd more or less have a license to print money.
Re:Can Tesla defy the laws of physics now? (Score:5, Insightful)
Texas wholesale electric prices spike more than 10,000% amid outages [reuters.com]
A maker of battery banks sees that and thinks, "hmm..."
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It's not just that. The main role of these storage facilities is not to simply "provide power", but rather, ancillary services.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancillary_services_(electric_power) [wikipedia.org]
It just so happens that battery storage is really good at providing ancillary services compared to traditional rapid-response power plants.
There is however a lot of complexity in terms of choosing when to charge and discharge, what contracts to accept or refuse, etc all based on forecasts of generation and consumption,
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Heresy! As we've all been told, the reason Texas lost power was because wind and solar don't work [statesman.com].
The only way to keep things running is more heavily subsidize oil and gas with taxpayer money. A billion here and there is what it will take. Forget these fantasies of using free wind and sunlight to generate
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Tesla's battery is to provide ancillary services [wikipedia.org], not bulk primary power.
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Please read the above link. Ancillary services involve things like voltage support, frequency support, dealing with surges / sudden cutouts, etc. They're not "tell power to only go to this really important thing".
Ancillary services can be a quite complicated topic and its importance is easy to underappreciate if you have no experience with the power industry. If you can't even be bothered to read at least a rough description of what it is, we can't even begin to have a conversation.
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The power services that Tesla offers, like the Megapacks is cut down on the need to have a backup power plant for cases when there is a surge of power, because the batteries can kick in during these surges.
Also these batteries work like a capacitors where the variable energy production from Wind and Solar can be stored and peaks can be saved during dips.
Fossil Fuel Energy and Nuclear they kinda always overproduce, but then trouble happens when they go above their production level, in which they have to star
Not possible (Score:3)
> Fossil Fuel Energy and Nuclear they kinda always overproduce
60 Hz = 3,600 cycles per minute.
Meaning a two-pole generator has to be turning at 3600 ROM to produce 60 Hz.
A four-pole generator has two cycles per revolution, so it MUST have just enough throttle to reach 1800 RPM.
If a generator were "overproducing" you'd have 65 Hz power instead of 60 Hz. The throttle HAS to always be just right, producing exactly the amount of power required, in order to keep the frequency at 60 Hz.
The mechanical mechanism
Not about design spec. Like driving uphill (Score:3)
> By "overproducing" they are saying that they can produce more energy than is currently needed, not that they are running their generators harder than designed spec.
It's not about design spec. It's like driving your car uphill or downhill. Going uphill (high load), your engine will need to produce more power to maintain 60 MPH than it needs to produce to go 60 MPH downhill (low load).
If you're going downhill and you floor the accelerator, you won't be going 60 MPH anymore!
In order to be going 60 MPH, yo
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You're talking really, really old, 1950s and earlier. I don't think anything built since then, even in China, uses a centripetal governor.
They're fun to watch on old make-and-break engines.
Emergency Solar (Score:1)
If the grid goes down again for any significant time how do they plan on recharging those batteries?
You could imagine emergency deployment of solar panels that could keep them at least partially charged, or building out additional solar capacity slowly once the batteries were in place.
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When the grid goes down, they plan to DISCHARGE those batteries and get paid $9k/MW to do it.
I'd be very content if they let me sell the power out of my own batteries back to the grid at that same rate which they could easily allow.
Griddy's fuck up was letting customers access a wholesale market with no realistic ability to hedge against their own usage. Tesla can do much better by only integrating customers who have local storage (batteries) and/or production (solar) and can themselves benefit from the sup
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I assume economically it makes better business sense to spend x to build for the 99.9% of the time when the grid is healthy, and not spend 10x to 100x to cover the 0.1% edge case.
I'm not saying the grid shouldn't aim for 100% uptime; It absolutely should. People can and do die when the power goes out. That said, it probably shouldn't be on one company alone to make that happen.
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I assume economically it makes better business sense to spend x to build for the 99.9% of the time when the grid is healthy, and not spend 10x to 100x to cover the 0.1% edge case.
It does not cost 10x or 1000x to cover the final 0.1%.
Or why do you think Europe basically only has a power outtake when there is a majour catastrophe, or some very odd chain reaction in the grid?
I personally never had a power outtake in my recent 55 years. The only power that once was gone, was scheduled and was for the street lig
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I can't say I've never had an outage, but I live in a relatively rural area with lots of thunderstorms and the occasional tornado. I'd be surprised if it averaged out to more than a few minutes per year.
The major outlier in that data set was our big ice storm in 1994. I had a friend near Ridgetop Tennessee, a map dot farm town, that was without power for a week. That was, hopefully, a once-in-a-lifetime storm.
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We have storms like this here too.
And about 10 years ago, in "east Germany", day long storms around freezing point made the pillars full with ice, so they collapsed. So a huge area in Germany was out of power.
Thy later blamed bad steel chosen 30 years before.
But thats it. Power nearly never fails here, and if it does, emergency trucks roll in. And the main power is restored after a day or two
REP Retail Electric Providers are easy (Score:1)
Tesla wants to take over electric energy supply (Score:2)
Tesla has also built several utility-scale energy storage systems around the world, including one east of Los Angeles, another underway in Monterey, California, and two in Australia -- one in Geelong, Victoria, and another in Adelaide, South Australia.
Tesla wants to take over the world. Not just a car company. Energy storage. Solar panels. Leading the transition to clean renewable energy.
Not to mention AI to run everything.
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It is all part of the ramp up of local tech by Culture Contact group, hopefully there be no need to call in Special Circumstances
Story is confusing (Score:4, Interesting)
Motive (Score:2)
I going to speculate that building power grid battery systems is in Tesla's interest in order to achieve powers of scale for production. Lithium-Ion is ideal for a mobile batteries and not stationary batteries. But it gives them a place to dump batteries that do not meet spec. This is the same motivation behind it's powerwall batteries but on an even larger scale. It's gives them plenty of room to experiment and tweak production methods.