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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.
twitter statements were news months ago, the deal actually being signed is new.
Enough to power ~8000 households for 8 hours at 2kW per household. Not quite going to solve any large-scale problem.
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.
Does Musk do anything that doesn't involve his hands in the taxpayer pockets?
What you don't see Musk telling us is how much it will cost if delivered on time. I can guarantee you it will be exorbitant. And then where is the cost benefit analysis vs other solutions? Musk won't talk about that stuff.
To summarize, a vendor (a.k.a. Tesla/Musk) is selling a solution for a blackout problem in South Australia.
Now tell me, WHY do you think we should ask the sales guy for the "cost benefit analysis vs. other solutions"? Do you honestly think if we burdened Musk with that he's gonna identify a solution other than the one he is selling, even if it was cheaper or better? Give me a break.
The burden of cost/benefit analysis is on the Australian government and no one else. Tough shit if they don't want to expend the time and effort to find a cheaper or better solution.
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.
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?
From the Sydney Morning Herald:
How much will it cost?
Costs were not detailed on Friday. Tesla founder Elon Musk has previously quoted US$250 ($AU330) per kilowatt-hour "at the pack level" for 100-megawatt-hour-plus systems.
The proposed system would contain 129,000 kilowatt-hours of capacity, meaning the project's cost would start at around $42 million. The head of Tesla's battery division has quoted a cost of about $65 million in the past. Other experts say a system of that size is likely to cost somewhere between $60 and $120 million.
hi!
That fails basic economics. If the embedded energy cost of a solar panel was greater than any possible eROI, they couldn't be sold at a profit. You might be able to get some suckers early on and government subsidies could help somewhat, but you're talking about a many multi-billion dollar industry with dozens of multinational suppliers and enormous factories. At some point, there has to be a positive eROI or the whole system would grind to a halt, as we can see from Solyndra which, despite large subsidies, failed.
But plenty of other companies are making good profits from solar (and wind, and batteries, etc.).
Solar panels (and batteries) will never have an eROI of, say, a drill head or gas turbine, but that's comparing apples to oranges. The total systems ROI of solar and wind farms are currently near, at or exceed various carbon and nuclear power systems.
If you want to make an argument that renewables will have a hard time replacing all baseload energy systems (because the power is more more diffuse, requiring a lot of land and more complicated grid management), that's a better argument to make. But any argument that starts with renewable energy simply not being able to compete in any context is wrong.
Not in the least. $65M (see earlier in the thread) for a 100MW peaking plant is cheap, not expensive.
Dear Diary...today I was pompous and my sister was crazy.