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Elon Musk Promises World's Biggest Lithium Ion Battery To Australia (cnn.com)
Elon Musk is following through on his promise to solve an energy crisis in Australia. From a report: His electric car company, Tesla, has teamed up with a French renewable energy firm and an Australian state government to install the world's largest lithium ion battery. Paired up with a wind farm in the state of South Australia, the battery will be three times more powerful than the next biggest in the world, Musk said at a news conference in the city of Adelaide on Friday. "If South Australia's willing to take a big risk, then so are we," he said. The announcement comes after billionaire entrepreneur Mike Cannon-Brookes threw down the gauntlet to Musk in March, asking if Tesla was serious when it claimed it could quickly end blackouts in South Australia. "Tesla will get the system installed and working 100 days from contract signature or it is free. That serious enough for you?" Musk wrote on Twitter at the time.
Does Musk do anything that doesn't involve his hands in the taxpayer pockets?
It takes a while to get a package in South Australia from the US... wonder if we tip the Transport Unions we can get a free mega battery.
Enough to power ~8000 households for 8 hours at 2kW per household. Not quite going to solve any large-scale problem.
I am particularly amazed by the 100 working days.
I assume is a 24hr working day and does not include all bureaucrat approvals.
In Italy, you need 100 days just to have the request for planning being considered....
(Yes, this is one of the reasons we are going down the drain)
Looking forward for how this "bet" pans out.
The cost is right there in the article.
You know Hannity is just a paid mouthpiece right? When coal wants a subsidy they pay him, he spouts his crap, dumb orange idiots believe it, coal gets its subsidy for 'clean coal' and then nobody builds the 'clean coal' power station. Like the Mississippi Power plant that received all those subsidies and never delivered.
Does Musk deliver on his promises? Do you want to buy an electric car with a bunch of self driving features? Or a rocket to space?
Does Hannity? Well I expect they'll try to make Hannity President next, but being a whiney little shit paid to whine, and actually doing and delivering stuff is completely different.
Couldn't find details about the battery in OP. I mean, 3 times bigger than the biggest is good to know, but how much energy will it store?
1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 +1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 = 10
Stacking 10 batteries makes 1 battery bigger! Accomplished it!
The big problem of bigger batteries is that if they have some kind of accident, the batteries burn the victims!
The batteries are needed to top up the grid and to create power stability - keep the voltage and current in sync, keep the frequency stable and maintain voltage. They aren't meant to power any individual homes. They are for peaks when everyone turns on AC at the same time and the demand temporarily exceeds the generation or for cases where the wind suddenly dies and the sun stops shinning for a short period.
Take a utility in the southern USA, about 15% of their infrastructure is there for the extreme peaks in demand. The last 8% for Oklahoma Gas and Electric is used less than (I think) 12 hours a year. That's tens of billions of dollars. If a few well placed half billion dollar batteries could do the same thing it would be a good deal.
THIS is a battery.
I am particularly amazed by the 100 working days.
I assume is a 24hr working day and does not include all bureaucrat approvals.
In Italy, you need 100 days just to have the request for planning being considered....
(Yes, this is one of the reasons we are going down the drain)
Looking forward for how this "bet" pans out.
From the summary "100 days from contract signature or it is free." I assume they would wait to sign the contract until after the bureaucracy has been settled?
Why "from the US"? The cells are made in the far east, and the technology around them provided by the French company.
From the US because that's where Musk's company builds stuff. Where the components come from is a separate issue.
It seems inefficient if they were to ship the cells from China/Japan to the US first, and that the short delivery time is precisely due to Australia being much closer.
You are assuming they aren't carrying any inventory of the battery cells and other electronics in question. In reality they probably have substantial stocks so it's not as if they are ordering everything from scratch. That's the beauty of building multiple products using standard components.
But anyhow, isn't this olds? Unless my old brain suffers from Deja Vu again, wasn't this news many months ago?
Musk made the 100 day offer months ago. Now it appears they have taken him up on the bet. Hence it is now newsworthy.
I wish we had more refined lithium in our environment! Its like a healthy balm to all forms of life! (As long as it isn't a carbon based life form)
Calling it the 'largest battery' is a bit of a misnomer. It more appropriately would be called the largest group of batteries.
You are confusing the terms battery with cell. All batteries consist of one or more cells. So the word battery is the correct one regardless of size. A large array of connected batteries is still a battery.
What is the price if he delivers on time?
Whatever they agree to in the contract.
Why is that not in any of these articles?
Because they are probably still negotiating.
From TFA Tesla only promised the "worlds biggest". TBH that's pretty easy to deliver. If I was asking I would have instead requested the largest capacity in watt hours with enough actual capacity at the watts/second needed to meet my peak demands.
I'd also expect Tesla to start the state-side work well ahead of that signing, so the post-signature project is more of a 'deliver and install' than 'design, fabricate, test, deliver and install'.
And given the mass and distances we're talking about, I'd not even be surprised if there were components on Australia-bound ships before the signing, too.
It'd be a gamble, but a pretty solid one, with a huge publicity payoff.
I like this, this is good news for nuclear power.
Imagine a Q&A during an announcement of breaking ground on a new nuclear power plant.
Reporter: Would you care to comment on the recent meltdown at the Springfield nuclear power plant?
Person at podium: Oh, that was terrible and I feel sad for all those people displaced and otherwise affected. However we've made a deal with Tesla for their new battery backup system so nothing like that can happen here. We'll have enough reserve power on site to run the lights, computers, sensors, fire fighting systems, and cooling pumps for two days.
People believe new batteries are what wind and solar need to be replace coal and nuclear power. I believe that technology like this will help nuclear power more than it could wind or solar. A lack of a power source capable of running the cooling pumps was what killed the reactors at Fukushima. Chernobyl didn't have such a problem but that was (effectively) an experimental dual use (for energy or weapons production) reactor, it also lacked a protective dome that would be required had it been built anywhere else. Any new reactor would not likely even need a separate power source to shutdown safely but a big battery like this would be very useful for peak load management. It'd also look good to regulators, to the public, and look good for Tesla.
(Yes, I realize that I typed "power" when "energy" would be (more) correct, I just imagine that's how someone at a podium would speak to reporters.)
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Lithium ion batteries are the best choice when you need a *light* battery, such as in a laptop, phone or car.
For a fixed, permanent installation where weight isn't a big factor, other types of batteries (or other power storage technologies) are far cheaper.
Its supposed to be operational for summer, which is 5 and a half months away
after 1000 charges it should be fun to watch them dispose of the worlds largest poisonous explosive paper weight
"South Australia's population of 1.7 million people suffer regular power cuts and energy shortages. In September, much of the state was left without power after a storm damaged crucial transmission lines. Another major blackout happened in February after an unexpected spike in demand due to a heat wave."
Seem to me solar would be a much better solution than a battery center. Solar on houses, businesses, and strategically placed solar farms. If 1.7 million regularly suffer power cuts and energy shortages I think I'd solve that first.
Does nothing to solve the true energy crisis in South Australia. That being, we source our energy from the least economical source available.
Czech language for absolute beginners
Translation...
Public/external statement:
"Tesla will get the system installed and working 100 days from contract signature or it is free."
Private/internal statement:
"Tesla will get the system installed and working 100 days from contract signature or you're all fired."
100 days... if this means working days, that could be decades in real time in Venezuela. Not sure about Australia.
Smashing through the boundaries
Lunacy has found me
Cannot stop the battery!
Pounding out aggression
Turns into obsession
Cannot kill the battery!
BATTERY!
From one of the articles linked from a reader above, it's 100 days after the signing of the grid interconnect contract with whoever runs the Aussie national grid, not the supply contract with Musk.
Hope they have a site ready for him, leveling and concreting a section of land can take years. Yeah, yeah, I know Aussie is flat, but not that flat.
Trying to become famous by taking photos. Visit my homepage please.
until the flash photography makes it go crazy and it smashes the Sydney Opera House in a fit of rage.
Musk should of never taken that battery from the island.
Challenger disaster.
Engineers are constantly being overlooked, ignored, and muzzled when pointing out critical issues.
In fact a key aspect to successful engineering *Management* is finding (and hiding) errors or missing requirements in the spec, then charging for those as 'extras' when the problem inevitably surfaces.
Sometimes the problem surfacing involves death and destruction. Oh well, best time to invest is when there is blood in the streets.
I'd say it's a safe bet that the contract has some number of provisions that stop the 100-day counter for bureaucratic delays. Otherwise there'd be nothing stopping the government from dragging their feet and forcing the project past the deadline just for the free battery.
The blackout mentioned in the CNN article was not caused by a lack of renewable power generation but by poorly designed control algorithms. There was enough power production, but due to a relatively benign fault wind farm control algorithms took wind farms producing roughly 500 MW offline. With better control algorithms the grid would have survived the initial fault even without using batteries.
Batteries are definitly a part of the solution, because smarter control algorithms will need some local energy storage. However, just throwing batteries at the problem with the current control architecture in place is going to be hugely expensive and inefficient.
Now, if we put it in the world biggest Galaxy Note7, will it make the world biggest explosion?
You can all try to tell me otherwise, but I refuse to believe this isn't going to, visually, be a comically oversized AA.
"It'd be a gamble, but a pretty solid one, with a huge publicity payoff."
He's made the "gamble" before though, hasn't he? I think it was southern CA, there was a major gas leak, resulting in shutdown of gas turbines (no supply). The 100 days was used then to delivery battery systems an electrical supplier contracted Tesla for. NYT I believe had an article or two about Tesla and another company that supplied battery backup systems to ease the load during peak times.
This 100 days is standard operating procedure for Tesla re their battery systems. Maybe the new wrinkle is this is an overseas contract, but given Tesla's resolve to further overseas battery production and factory capacity given the US's political climate, I don't see how this is even difficult for them when it comes to sourcing material or making their parts. Building large battery systems is something they've done regularly, and a larger one would simply be an expansion, particularly to a friendly nation like Australia.
The little known french company is Neonen, a subsidy of also little known Direct Energie, which is owned at 35% by Jacques Veyrat's Impala SAS.
This for long term energy storage yes? Why not use a better chemical for this, and a local company like Redflow's zinc bromide flow batteries. Those shitters don't drop in capacity over age.
http://redflow.com/
Check
The customer is the government, on a high profile political gamble. there will be no bureaucratic delays.
The vast majority of the electricity generation by in Australia is provided by burning coal. Perhaps it's best to consider reality instead of assuming that most Aussies live in Bartertown getting their electricity from pig shit.
Ol Olsoc's fiction not mine.
I hear Samsung is considering putting it in their next phablet.
Perfect fro those long boring flights across the ocean, when you're just dying for some entertainment right there in your seat.
Lithium batteries matter for portable electronics and vehicles where size and weight matter. For off-peak power storage bulky alternatives like saltwater batteries are cheaper and safer. This was covered innthe recent PBS NOVA episode on batteries.
It wasn't a bet. It was all a scripted twitter marketing piece.
Storms blew the wires down - so a couple of blackouts (not low voltage "brownout" events that happen in developing countries with struggling electricity grids and the USA).
It's kind of funny to have an American being critical of Australian power transmission even on a bad day. Maybe you should complain about things closer to home that are in a far worse state?