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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.

5 of 272 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Government Subsidy by wienerschnizzel · · Score: 2, Interesting
  2. 100 working days, bureaucracy accounted separately by what+about · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  3. Re:Hope he included shipping times by Mr+D+from+63 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The preferred packaging of batteries for this type of application is a standard shipping container. They can install an assembly of batteries in a shipping container, along with a charger and cooling as needed, ready to connect when it gets delivered. The container is part of the battery system. This minimizes the cost of transport, and makes connection upon delivery pretty simple. So they just need to send a steady stream of 'container batteries' that can be installed as they arrive.

  4. Re:Government Subsidy by aaarrrgggh · · Score: 5, Interesting

    kWh(B) - the cycle discharge rating of the battery. The bi-directional inverter is generally rated at 20% discharge rate (5-hours).

    Basically to make it work they need 20-30 commodity pad-mount transformers and a dedicated 35kV circuit (or two), and level concrete pads. S&C had a similar product for years as a UPS, but this is considerably more elegant.

  5. Re:Government Subsidy by HornWumpus · · Score: 2, Interesting

    These are the people your looking for: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

    Many years ago, they were clients. Nice folks, Adelaide is a really nice city. I guarantee you, they crunched the numbers four different ways, then hired consultants to crunch the numbers (as cover). I also guarantee you they are very concerned about good and bad publicity. Not wanting politicians sticking their noses into things outside their competence, like grid operations. Which is what bad publicity gets you in SA. At the time they were winding up the regional power pool, which tells you how long ago this was...damn I'm old. I'm pretty amazed ETSA could move this fast, they couldn't have done it back then.

    I've never seen such an incompetently managed network in my fucking life. Apparently, a government PHB had hired EDS to do the job. EDS was running the servers for ETSA in fucking Victoria, apparently over IP by carrier pigeon. As a practical matter their network didn't work, no local shares 'allowed'. It took all day to move a file from one workstation to another, all work had to be done against data on the hard drive.

    I assume they fixed this a decade or more ago, but at the time 'the contract is signed, nothing anybody can do about it, for years.'

    And there it sat. No spider of Cat-5 as they setup their own, floor at a time, outlaw network and servers. Bunch of law abiders, I didn't really understand them, WTF, do what you gotta do. Route around EDS for fucks sake. (Adelaide is smug about being 'not a prison colony', like the rest of Australia is. Bunch of goddamn law abiders.)

    --
    John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'