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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.
It more appropriately would be called the largest group of batteries.
The technical term for that is: "battery".
technically battery is actually the correct definition as a battery is not a single cell, it is a collection of cells which together are a battery, assuming they are all connected then this would indeed be a single battery.
It's probably more than enough though to deal with any transient demands causing the blackouts - these can be killers.
The UK has a hydro equivalent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinorwig_Power_Station
Though this isn't something you can move about or setup quickly. Musks solution is quite portable and quick to install, plus not dependant on any geographic features, and this make it VERY!!! attractive for this kind of application :)
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 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.
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.
The Burj Khalifa isn't the worlds tallest building, it's just a bunch of 1-story buildings stacked on top of each other. It more appropriately would be called the tallest stack of buildings.
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?
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!
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.
So an African in the Americas is shipping European tech made in Asia to Australia?
All I can say is that Antarctica is under-represented.
I'm sure the penguin is involved somehow. It would be hard to pull of such an operation without Tux somewhere in the chain.
Musk has been building an inventory of power-wall batteries because nobody is buying them. They are sitting there costing money, so this is a brilliant play.
There are so many batteries that they are stored in the old set where they filmed the moon landing hoax and chemtrail juice
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
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"?
Because this is Slashdot, the once proud home of technology savvy nerds, but now the rest home for a lot of anti-technology reactionary anti-science people.
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.
And no doubt they have looked at the alternatives. One thing to note is that Australia got to their sad state by using some of the alternatives.
And for the folks that have an issue about the guvmint being involved, well, which power source doesn't? Finally though, what is overlooked here by so many is that battery systems are even considered in the mix. With Los Angeles installing a battery peaking system, and now this project, it is just pathetic that so many people here are simply opposed because of because. I guess their sense of wonder at just how impressive we have become at storing electricity in chemical systems has evolved.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
I wonder if Musk understands that a single large battery group might not meet grid demands despite its size. A key factor is discharge rate, and for grid stabilization discharge and charge rates need to be, on occasion, much faster than what is required for cars or even home supplies.
Well you better go tell Mr Musk! Some random guy on Slashdot can save the day again by giving all of the engineers and scientists working for him some really basic information that they no doubt have completely overlooked.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
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.
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.
Indeed. It's effectively acting as a peaking plant. An extremely responsive one.
Dear Diary...today I was pompous and my sister was crazy.
One thing to note is that Australia got to their sad state by using some of the alternatives
To be fair, South Australia go to that sad state. Australia as a whole has no problem with power, but they also don't have enough interconnect capacity to SA to help them along.
The problem was no so much that they used some of the alternatives, but more that they didn't use them correctly and were overly keen to cut baseload capacity without testing if the market could handle what they needed.
The September outage was a one in 50 year storm which took out several UHV transmission lines linking to the supply of baseload and the interconnects. The entire grid lost synchronisation. There was plenty of capacity but no baseload to synchronise.
The December outage was again a storm this time taking out 300 individual power lines. There was plenty of capacity.
The February outage was caused by marketing masturbation. There was a capacity shortage due to some peaking plants refusing to power up their generators due to contractual disagreements. The day after the outage energy consumption was actually higher than the day of the outage and yet no problem occurred.
Now while the current problems are the result of storms and market failure, the future is due well and truly due to mismanagement. SA doesn't need batteries, they need either another interconnect or another baseload supplier. Instead they closed 700MW of baseload, and claimed tax credits as a result.