Giant Tesla Battery In Australia Earns A Million Bucks In a Few Days (electrek.co)

Long-time Slashdot reader drinkypoo writes: Last week, Neoen's and Tesla's massive battery was paid up to $1000/MWh to charge itself and now it could have earned up to 1 million AUD in the last few days by selling the power back to the grid to cover a coal plant outage. Unlike other forms of power storage, battery systems can be switched between states (charging, discharging, or idle) effectively instantly, which permits a stabilizing effect on the grid.
"What we are seeing here," writes Fred Lambert at Electrek.co, "is the Powerpack system enabling Neoen to sell electricity at up to $14,000 AUD per MWh and charging itself at almost no cost during overproduction."

Comments

Or just cut back on pointless Bitcoin 'mining'

[Anonymous Coward]

Cutting back on pointless cryptocurrency mining during a power shortage would also reduce the load on power grids during shortages.

Re:Or just cut back on pointless Bitcoin 'mining'

[skids]

No doubt... and a competently designed smart grid would allow even less pointless appliances to dip their power usage for short periods of time. However, as renewable penetration increases I think this problem will end up being solved mostly on the supply side with storage solutions... there are less cats to herd and the need for longer and longer term reserves will continue to grow for some time.

Re: Or just cut back on pointless Bitcoin 'mining'

[Anonymous Coward]

Bitcoin counts for less than 0.0000000001 of global power usage.

Re: Or just cut back on pointless Bitcoin 'mining'

[Anonymous Coward]

Bitcoin counts for less than 0.0000000001 of global power usage.

Wait 5 days & you'll be able to knock off a few zeroes

Re:Or just cut back on pointless Bitcoin 'mining'

[ledow]

Question:

If you offer a good at a certain price, predictably, in writing, with prices that rarely fluctuate much but that you control...

And people take you up on that offer.
And then you can't deliver.

Is that THEIR fault? Or yours?

If electricity were free and in short supply, sure, people using it for strange non-essential purposes would indeed be a bit immoral. But those people who want that electricity are paying for it.

If the money you're charging for electricity can't put in place infrastructure to deliver that electricity in the right places and at the right times, is it really the consumer's problem? Or the people promising electricity at those prices?

If you can't deliver it at that price, raise your prices. If the infrastructure needs to change to cope, or you need new technology or you have to pay to change the way you operate the supply... then you raise prices to compensate.

But complaining about people USING electricity, at the advertised prices? That's a bit stupid. If anything they are actually CONTRIBUTING to investing in the electrical network. It's all the energy-saving nutters who turn off every switch that's drawing 0.1W for a fraction of a second before they do so - those are the people literally taking the bare minimum they need and investing back the bare minimum to get it.

This is why getting energy companies to push green tech, energy saving bulbs, efficient appliances etc. is really, really, really stupid. To use a US analogy that's like gun manufacturers being forced to say that you should be buying less bullets. Or a washing machine company telling you to wash your clothes less often.

If you can't deliver for the price you advertise, pick a better price or get out of the market. That there's a glut of people who WANT to pay the price your offering for the product you're delivering? You really shouldn't be complaining - that's almost unheard of in business.

Hint: If that's causing shortages, change the charging structures so that you penalise heavy, instantaneous uses as well as peak load. Then you'll make more money from those uses, which you can use to cure that problem. It's almost like a tax - tax the things you don't want to happen, and then use those taxes to stop those things being a problem.

Re:Or just cut back on pointless Bitcoin 'mining'

[Anonymous Coward]

Electricity prices are typically highly regulated. Price gouging is typically not allowed.

Re:Or just cut back on pointless Bitcoin 'mining'

[Anonymous Coward]

No doubt... and a competently designed smart grid would allow even less pointless appliances to dip their power usage for short periods of time.

Like those owned by the dirty proletarians...

Re: Or just cut back on pointless Bitcoin 'mining'

[Anonymous Coward]

This is one of the stupidest things I've read in quite some time.

Re:Or just cut back on pointless Bitcoin 'mining'

[kaybee]

I agree, and it is a negative consequence of typically fixed pricing in this market by government agencies.

Re: Or just cut back on pointless Bitcoin 'mining'

[Rodyland]

Nobody with a modicum of sense is mining bitcoin at Australian retail prices.

Re: Or just cut back on pointless Bitcoin 'mining'

[scum-e-bag]

They're not delivering because they're government regulated enterprises. The current government is being dictated to by Kaczynskites. These Kaczynskites have the ideological goal of shutting down the power grid. Go read the manifesto, it's all contained there.

Degrade Time

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder how many cycles it can handle before replacement? Would like to see upkeep cost over time on an industrial scale. Sill good news for those of us hoping to use home battery technology at some point in the next five years.

Re:Degrade Time

[Rei]

The expected lifespan of a Powerpack is 15 years on grid duty.

As someone who's currently pricing electricity for a large project, it's easy to see how timeshifting of power can make a big difference. Our local utilities offer power as cheap as 2,5kr/kWh where the utility can cut off the supply at any time (kr ~= 1 cent), or ~3,5kr/kWh at the cheapest un-cut time-of-use rates, while the most expensive time-of-use rates are 15kr/kWh. That's a huge spread on power costs. And that's here where our power is essentially all baseload (over 99% hydro + geothermal). Places with more intermittent power should be expected to have a wider spread.

Re:Degrade Time

[gweihir]

It is not a car battery. It stays viable as long as it can hold a reasonable charge. Weight and space used do not matter.

Re:Degrade Time

[Anonymous Coward]

IF you read the article, there are a lot of assumptions and no real data as to how many actual mwh were stored and sold. The number in the headline is very optimistic. Nonetheless, there is an opportunity for a small amount of storage to help with overcapacity, if that storage is not already charged when negative pricing occurs. There are other reasons to keep the storage charged most of the time.

Re: Degrade Time

[dj245]

$1000/MW-hr only happens during emergency conditions. Itâ(TM)s $1/Kw-hr. Thatâ(TM)s a hugely expensive price no matter where you live. If thatâ(TM)s Teslaâ(TM)s shining example of price competitiveness, I am not convinced this makes any sense. It makes a lot more sense just to build out appropriate non-storage capacity at $0.10 to $0.15 per Kw-hr.

Re: Degrade Time

[guruevi]

Actually, it never happens. Electricity doesn't get offers at the time of necessity, the time to do a bidding transaction would destroy the grid. These prices, just like the oft-repeated German negative pricing is speculative pricing. It's the pricing on the equivalent of the stock market for energy. The actual consumers have a much more stable pricing model guaranteed or fluctuating over months, not seconds.

Re: Degrade Time

[Anonymous Coward]

You fail at math.
$1000/MWh is exactly the same as $1/KWh

Re: Degrade Time

[rtb61]

Here is how you build a distributed grid power station, it's called the burbs. The power station is already built, it just needs the generators and storage, solar panels on every suburban home and one battery pack for them and another battery pack for the grid. The entire roof solar panels. So during the day solar and at night batteries and when excess is available sell it to the grid battery and it supplies as necessary to the grid. The typical up coming system for most cities out of the snow zone. It is pretty close now and will shut down a whole bunch of coal power stations because they simply could not compete, seeing as the power station is already there and built, just needs the generators and storage.

The residents can either buy and install, rent and install or allow install and pay with a discount. If they are renting, the landlord can install and sell electricity to the tenant, watch out for rip off rates. Yeah, coal is done.

Re: Degrade Time

[Anonymous Coward]

That's what he said. And like he said, that's expensive.

Re:Degrade Time

[Unnamed Chickenheart]

I thought one dollar equaled 100 cents? :)

1kr ~= 10 cents.

Re:Degrade Time

[wed128]

It stays viable as long as it can hold a reasonable charge.

How long is that? that's what GP was asking...

Re: Degrade Time

[Anonymous Coward]

More dirty power? No thanks.

Re:Degrade Time

[gweihir]

For this installation, that will probably be nearly forever. Hence what is interesting is when units have to be replaced due to other reasons. Also note that it may not even be necessary to replace dead units as space does not seem to be an issue at the chosen location. It may be cheaper to just add a second installation next to it and let the first run until the other components reach end-of-life. For power-installations, that is usually 30-100 years, but the technology used here may have a different (lower) target lifespan.

I was merely pointing out that this is the wrong question to ask.

Nice

[jawtheshark]

The real question is: What was the capital investment required to build it and how much time is needed to break even in normal circumstances? From what I understand these are extraordinarily conditions.

Re:Nice

[skids]

Well, the product is meant to deal with abnormal circumstances, so that metric may be a bit off the mark.

$50 million was the initial cost estimate. AU has not revealed the final negotiated price.

Re:Nice

[Anonymous Coward]

Not the real question, that's overlooking the important part: What's the cost of not having it?

As people in brownout areas, or even those who suffer from blackouts, it can be quite a disruption to live without power.

Re:Nice

[aaarrrgggh]

Supposedly it was US$100MM construction cost (which seems high; I would expect closer to $50MM). Environmentally and economically, it is a great buffer when coupled to a wind farm like it is; the majority of wind energy is produced at night when demand is lower, and when you are at peak output it is difficult to sell/use all the power.

If you assume a 3,500 cycle life, 90% round-trip efficiency, and just time shifting, you need US$0.25/kWh delta between charging price and discharging price. If these are actually good for 10,000 cycles then you are closer to a more reasonable $0.08. Presumably they are also paid for other grid stabilization services, which would reduce the needed price delta by up to 30% or so.

Re:Nice

[hey!]

Closer to the right question, which is: is this the cheapest way to achieve this level of brownout protection and is that cheaper than the brownouts themselves.

Re:Nice

[Anonymous Coward]

AU has not revealed the final negotiated price.

That's a shame. People shouldn't tolerate so much secrecy when it comes to how their tax money is spent. Why aren't these crooks voted out of office?

As far as these batteries go. They're too complex and dangerous (they should use nickel-iron for stationary stuff), but they will work until we learn how to make capacitors that don't leak smoke like a Triumph leaks oil.

Re:Nice

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually it is more designed to deal with expected circumstances differing from hour to hour.
Battery buffers are great for this because they can change output instantly as and when the grid needs it.
Power plants have a specific warm-up time before they are actually producing power for the expected time, which in the case of coal plants can be up to a day in some cases.
There's been quite a few cases where peoples assumptions were way off because of various reasons, one I remember being an eclipse leading to a blackout when people turned on all the lights...
This was the days before renewables exploded in use. It's ironically more of a problem to deal with today because of said renewables.

But of course, one of the major issues with these battery buffers is the cycle-limits of lion, lipo and others.
Other chemicals are more toxic and lower energy densities.
We sorely need new battery tech for this sort of stuff to really take off.
There are a few promising research teams with interesting results recently, including one that found a way to scale another previous teams tech up.
Whoever wins is going to be all kinds of rich. Literally every tech-related industry wants better batteries.

Re:Nice

[Chris Mattern]

Supposedly it was US$100MM construction cost (which seems high; I would expect closer to $50MM)

"MM"? They were paid in chocolate candy pieces?

Re:Nice

[drinkypoo]

As far as these batteries go. They're too complex and dangerous (they should use nickel-iron for stationary stuff), but they will work until we learn how to make capacitors that don't leak smoke like a Triumph leaks oil.

I hope the glass batteries pan out. Stationary installations will be ideal places to use them. The initial energy investment will be fairly high, but they should have unprecedented lifespans once the tech has been fully developed. It's already over the 1k charge cycle mark.

Re:Nice

[drinkypoo]

Closer to the right question, which is: is this the cheapest way to achieve this level of brownout protection and is that cheaper than the brownouts themselves.

Brownouts can destroy equipment, and severe shortages can also lead to blackouts. Both of those things can literally kill people. Let's prioritize keeping the power on. There's no better/cheaper/more effective device for grid stabilization than battery storage, today.

Re:Nice

[msauve]

Dollars are not SI units, and financial info has traditionally used Roman numerals as multipliers. MM = thousand thousand = million.

Re:Nice

[Anonymous Coward]

For marketing wankers, M means thousand so MM means million.

Re:Nice

[hawguy]

As far as these batteries go. They're too complex and dangerous (they should use nickel-iron for stationary stuff),

Too complex and dangerous based on what? This 129MWh installation suggests that they aren't too complex or dangerous, though admittedly it's still early in its lifetime.

Re:Nice

[hawguy]

Closer to the right question, which is: is this the cheapest way to achieve this level of brownout protection and is that cheaper than the brownouts themselves.

Brownouts can destroy equipment, and severe shortages can also lead to blackouts. Both of those things can literally kill people. Let's prioritize keeping the power on. There's no better/cheaper/more effective device for grid stabilization than battery storage, today.

But there's still a cost-benefit decision to be made, even when lives are at stake. Money is a finite resource, and if the more you spend on brownout protection, the less you have to spend elsewhere that may save more lives.

Re:Nice

[gravewax]

Well, the product is meant to deal with abnormal circumstances, so that metric may be a bit off the mark.

$50 million was the initial cost estimate. AU has not revealed the final negotiated price.

No initial cost estimates by indusry were between $200 million AUD and $250 million AUD from estimates, But the SA government claimed it would be about $150 million and set that amount aside for it. actual number hasn't been published to my knowledge..

Re:Nice

[DontBeAMoran]

I'd take a guess and say they're too complex and dangerous compared to nickel-iron.

Re:Nice

[hawguy]

I'd take a guess and say they're too complex and dangerous compared to nickel-iron.

Sources?

You can't compare a single nickel-iron battery to a 100MWh installation and declare that nickel iron is less complex and safer for this purpose -- if it won't do the job, then it's not a fair comparison. You may as well say that rubber chickens are less complex and safer than batteries, which may be true, but they aren't going to do the job. And note that Tesla installed this plant in under 60 days, so it seems that they aren't all that complex.

Point to a large grid-storage nickel-iron battery installation. Most seem to use lead-acid, Li-ion, or a few other technologies.

Nickel-iron has one weakness that makes it less suitable for a battery that needs to quickly absorb or provide megawatts of power:

While the slow formation of iron crystals preserves the electrodes, it also limits the high rate performance: these cells charge slowly, and are only able to discharge slowly

Re: Nice

[Anonymous Coward]

Utilities seen to be a universal need. Otherwise, let the poor and ill people have brown outs. They may die faster, so less money needed to spend on them. See? Allowing brown outs is not acceptable. Not saying we should spend money like water, just saying that allowing brown outs is not really an option.

Re: Nice

[Anonymous Coward]

Huh. And here I thought all this time that "k" meant 1000.

Re: Nice

[dj245]

Keeping adequate spinning reserve is both cheaper and a better practice. Having to resort to battery power at those prices tells me that something is very, very wrong with the Australian grid. Perhaps Enron-style criminally wrong.

Re: Nice

[Anonymous Coward]

Brownouts can destroy equipment, and severe shortages can also lead to blackouts. Both of those things can literally kill people.

If you're too damn stupid and drink till you blackout just because the TV's out then you deserve to die.

With a name like drinkypoo you sound (and write) like your close to that same ending.

Re:Nice

[Anonymous Coward]

If you went with Nickel Iron batteries, you would require a lot more cells as the current handling is less as you have pointed out. Nickel Iron has a lot of disadvantages but most of those are not to important in a fixed installation where the area is available for physically bigger storage.
There is one great advantage though, extremely long life. I know of a set of batteries where I used to work that were installed at the end of WW2, still going strong when I left there 30 years ago, about 40 years installed at that time, and I think they are still there and working. If I could afford it, they are my choice of cells to use for my home power backup so as not to have to replace the battery every 5 to 10 years.

Denys in Australia.

Re:Nice

[Anonymous Coward]

The only time I saw the "M" = 1000 convention in broad use was in a decisively right-leaning, we-all-vote-republican-here company I worked for (P&G). That led to countless misunderstandings and sometimes even miscalculations over the years when dealing with outside suppliers, most of which assumed 1M equals a million.

Re:Nice

[Anonymous Coward]

Except for Goatse financials, for which millions are indicated by "CX XXX"

Re: Nice

[Anonymous Coward]

$50 million was the initial cost estimate. AU has not revealed the final negotiated price.

Nope. $250M. But like you say, that was the estimate. So likely twice that.

Re: Nice

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a leftist affectation. Using European variants for various words and punctation makes them seem more sophisticated to other leftists.

You are hilarious. You do realize you have this completely backwards? M for thousands and MM for millions is only found in the US and occasionally in the UK.

Europe, like the rest of the world, use SI and their local language.

Re: Nice

[kamapuaa]

Maybe the confusion is that nobody in the US uses MM either. Of course US people don't use it as an excuse to jump on a weird anti-European rant.

Hey, care to tell us how great the Nokia n900 was, and that diesel is obviously the best way to fuel a car?

Re:Nice

[Anonymous Coward]

Too complex and dangerous based on what?

Little things like this, the only difference is scale... And even with my feeble imagination, I can picture all the do-dads, thingamajigs, whatchamacallits, and doohickeys, and people watching every little flashing light it takes to keep this thing from blowing up the neighborhood. Look, all you gotta do is build a stack of nickel-irons, say, about the size of Ayers Rock, and you'll have more than enough backup for a pretty good part of the continent. Solar panels will keep it topped off for free. And you can pretty much ignore it for 50-100 years or so. You don't need a bunch of mad scientists to deal with and babysit all those finicky lithium ions and whatnot. You check the voltage with a light bulb. Nickel-iron is ideal for this application. Simple, reliable, robust, low maintenance... What more could you possibly want?

Re:Nice

[Anonymous Coward]

It's already over the 1k charge cycle mark.

That's still too low. Let's assume that it could go through a cycle a day, as that's generally the schedule the power demand fluctuates. I'm ignoring for the moment that it may only do a partial cycle. 1k cycles would only get you about 3 years with that assumption. The Tesla Powerwall batteries are already rated for over 3k cycles.

Re: Nice

[Anonymous Coward]

Brown outs ARE an option. Are you saying we should shut down, say, ambulance service to fund brown out protection? Or that we can do everything at all times with no financial constraints? There are trade offs to be made.

Maybe you save more lives by giving kids free (brown out Money diverted) bike helmets. Do you prefer giving some old person an extra day on a ventilator rather than yeo lids lives with helmets?

You ate a monster.
Or maybe you lack understanding of a complex topic. Your call.

Re: Nice

[Anonymous Coward]

Or maybe you lack understanding of a complex topic.

Says the guy with the false dichotomy argument.

Re: Nice

[Anonymous Coward]

Eating monsters is not that complex.

Re:Nice

[Anonymous Coward]

But there's still a cost-benefit decision to be made, even when lives are at stake. Money is a finite resource, and if the more you spend on brownout protection, the less you have to spend elsewhere that may save more lives.

Agreed. Everything is a cost-benefit decision. Do you really think brown outs should be an option? I'm surprised that it is, in your mind. But that's just me. Some people think internet access should be only an option, not a required utility. Again, I find that an interesting position, given the modern world. As long as I'm in the group that doesn't have to deal with brown outs and lack of internet access, then fine. Otherwise, screw that. But I prefer everyone to be equal with utilities - without brown outs.

Re:Nice

[Chuq]

That's a shame. People shouldn't tolerate so much secrecy when it comes to how their tax money is spent.

$50 million was the public contribution. There's also private investment - Neoen (the wind farm operator) has rights to use some of the capacity and we're not sure what sort of interest Tesla continues to have in the project - obviously they are getting a lot of the publicity here so may have provided some sort of discount (other than the "100 days or it's free" offer)

Re:Nice

[jrumney]

If they are using Roman numerals, then MM is 2 thousand, not 1 million.

Re:Nice

[aaarrrgggh]

As much as I do hate the MM abbreviation, the alternative “m” that is commonly accepted for million just pisses me off. The ambiguity of a single M likewise makes it a poor choice. I guess you could be pedantic and write 100M$... but what the hell...

Re:Nice

[msauve]

Whoosh. I see numerical illiteracy still runs rampant. I specifically said "as a multiplier." Ask your grade schooler how multiplication works.

Re: Nice

[Anonymous Coward]

And if you aren't clever enough to realise people often die without adequate cooling or heating, like say during a brownout?

Re:Nice

[hawguy]

Too complex and dangerous based on what?

Little things like this, the only difference is scale...

The only difference between "smart luggage" and a large scale grid storage plant is scale? Really, that's the only difference? A 100MW battery bank is pretty much the same as thousands of roller bags?

Re:Nice

[Anonymous Coward]

The only difference between "smart luggage" and a large scale grid storage plant is scale?

Yes, one will bring down an airliner, the other will destroy a city block, before the fumes hit. This tech is okay until we make something safe, but you probably should build a decent bunker around the facility. Regardless, the nickel-iron would be the best and safest for a power plant for the long haul for the obvious reasons I stated above.

Re:Nice

[Actually, I do RTFA]

I don't think I've ever seen billion written out as MMM or trillion written out as MMMM. I've never seen one thousand written out as M (usually k). I often see million as MM. I assume that's a carry over when someone made a decision a long time ago.

Re:Nice

[Anonymous Coward]

A 1 unit Tesla power pack actually has 1.2 units of storage, but the charger and inverter keeps it between 20% and 80% as much as possible. According to Tesla, a "full" charge+discharge cycle every day would have these units still operating at 100% of their rating for 10 years. For the AU installation, then also sized the station +20%, giving a full ~+40%. They claim that typical cycle rates are more like 40%, not 100% and the packs should last quite a long time.

Re:Nice

[hackertourist]

That would be 'in English/American financial information'. This use is uncommon in Europe, where SI units are used instead.
So, we'll consider 'MM' another silly Imperial unit ;)

Re:Nice

[thegarbz]

There's no better/cheaper/more effective device for grid stabilization than battery storage, today.

That depends on the technical requirements. Stabilising a grid requires a lot of different actions to happen at defined time intervals with a defined output. Battery backup is only one small component of grid stabilisation that operates on the fastest acting and most volatile areas. That doesn't mean it's better than gas turbines, just that it serves a different purpose.

Batteries by themselves attempting to prevent large brownouts would be prohibitively expensive. This is a great example of adding a battery to an energy mix that desperately needed it.

Re:Nice

[thegarbz]

I don't think I've ever seen billion written out as MMM or trillion written out as MMMM.

Yeah that doesn't happen. Specifically billion is often written out in terms of millions due to the unit of billion being ambiguous as either 1000 million or million million.

I've never seen one thousand written out as M (usually k).

Now you've just shown yourself to not do anything in financial circles. M is very commonly used to denote thousands. Though style guides from financial papers agree that the readership may find it confusing and recommend writting it in full, e.g. $100,000.

Re:Nice

[thegarbz]

Hi, European here. That isn't even remotely the case. We use MM = million and M = thousand constantly in the financial sector.

Re: Nice

[Anonymous Coward]

Last time I looked (about a year ago) 4.5k cycle domestic Li batteries were becoming entry level, much higher was available. The progress in longevity has been surprising.

Re:Nice

[Barsteward]

"Regardless, the nickel-iron would be the best and safest for a power plant for the long haul for the obvious reasons I stated above" - sounds like a new business opportunity for you.

Re:Nice

[drinkypoo]

Batteries by themselves attempting to prevent large brownouts would be prohibitively expensive. This is a great example of adding a battery to an energy mix that desperately needed it.

The system is working as designed in a worst-case scenario, so it has been conclusively proven that it works. The high cost to the consumer for energy coming out of the system only proves that such projects should be built by the state.

Re: Nice

[Anonymous Coward]

My understanding is that Li batteries can handle many times more cycles if you don't do a full raw cycle, which is why Tesla packs don't fully charge nor fully discharge. They sacrifice 20% of the raw storage to increase longevity. Your cellphone's battery would also last much longer if you didn't charge above 90% and stay above 20%. Like an SSD reserving some amount of storage for wear leveling.

Re:Nice

[thegarbz]

Oh yes I fully agree. It's a great system and a great idea, but it's no silver bullet for stability and may not be the cheapest way of stabling a grid depending on that grid's requirements. All of this needs to be taken into account.

Re: Nice

[Dog-Cow]

It may also save lives.

Re:Nice

[AvitarX]

Additionally, when dealing with money g is ambiguous too.

G is used for grand often enough.

K for thousand, and mm for million is unambiguous when dealing with money.

Re:Nice

[Anonymous Coward]

The best ideas often sell poorly.

L1011 vs. DC-10
Beta vs. VHS
Apple (before the iBullshit) vs. PC
Independent vs. republican/democrat
mine vs. yours

This is why the world suffers.

Re:Nice

[hawguy]

The best ideas often sell poorly.

L1011 vs. DC-10
Beta vs. VHS
Apple (before the iBullshit) vs. PC
Independent vs. republican/democrat
mine vs. yours

This is why the world suffers.

Beta may have had better specs, but it was also more expensive - players were more expensive, tapes were more expensive and early betamax units were limited to 1 hour recording time (versus VHS's 2 hours), meaning a movie required a tape change in the middle. And VHS was licensed to a number of manufacturers, while Sony wanted to lock in Betamax as their own format.

It takes more than better specs to declare a product "better", and the results showed that VHS was actually the better product when all factors were taken into account.

Re:Nice

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, there ya go.. All you people do is count the money (and it turns out Sony didn't really need the consumer market, which is also a way of cheating us of the better product and makes a good case for compulsory licensing). And that's why good ideas don't make it. That's why we don't get durable products. You settle for *good enough* instead of striving for something better. You find more profit in obstruction and scarcity than in innovation. That is the nature of your system. For those reasons and more all the best things we dream up wither away and die. This is why human development is so slow.

Optimization Algorithm

[aaarrrgggh]

I would love to understand how they optimize operation; I get the sub-transient and short-time operation logic, and at least at a high level predicting real-time price swings-- but as a whole I can't quite wrap my head around how they control it.

Do they control it based just on what they are paid to do at a given point in time, or does it simply act as a "good citizen" of the grid? Does it work on 24-hour look-ahead (or longer), or is it more responsive real-time? What is the minimum charge level they target?

It will be interesting to see how these large batteries work when there are multiple units controlled independently.

Re:Optimization Algorithm

[careysub]

They respond automatically to grid voltage or frequency drops. The accounting is done after the fact, but also I suspect automatically subject to previous agreements.

Re:Optimization Algorithm

[Anonymous Coward]

AEMO publishes demand and price forecasts for 24 hours ahead that are revised continually throughout the day and are based on historical demand and weather forecasts.

The battery is 100MW/129MWh, but apparently 30MW/90MWh is used for price arbitrage while the remaining 70MW/39MWh is allocated to the SA Government for FCAS.

Watching the data from the battery you can see that when prices spike, it discharges and when prices fall, it charges. I'm sure there's a deeper strategy to what it does though besides factoring in how much of a price swing it needs to cover efficiency losses to make a profit.

Re:Optimization Algorithm

[Bruce Perens]

Well, they can respond to grid voltage drops. Responding to a frequency drop doesn't really work, you must remain exactly in phase with the received frequency or it looks like a short-circuit to the distribution system. If the incoming frequency changes, the best thing you can do is probably disconnect.

So, I think that the way it works is that the power system operator has a SCADA network that controls the battery, ordering it to charge, stand by, or provide power as necessary.

Re:Optimization Algorithm

[tepples]

Responding to a frequency drop doesn't really work, you must remain exactly in phase with the received frequency or it looks like a short-circuit to the distribution system.

As I understand "Tesla Big Battery Outsmarts Lumbering Coal Units After Loy Yang Trips" from a few weeks ago: If you slightly lead the received frequency in phase, you can take load off the generators, which causes frequency to stabilize.

Re:Optimization Algorithm

[Bruce Perens]

If you slightly lead the received frequency in phase, you can take load off the generators, which causes frequency to stabilize.

OK, I need help with the math here because I'm not an EE and I'm probably doing this wrong.

A 50 Hz system was running at 49.8 . That's 4% off frequency. Consider that another generator in the system was still running at 50 Hz. The long-distance network runs at up to 800 KV. So, we have a (sin(pi * 0.04) * 800,000) voltage difference between the two points crossing zero on the AC wave meaning that it's + on one side and - on the other and I get about 100,000 volts difference. I just don't have a clue how the network would handle that.

Now, obviously a generator that's trying to help recover the network can lead by a really small amount. Just how small I'm not clear.

Re:Optimization Algorithm

[Bruce Perens]

Actually, it's worse than that, because if there's a frequency difference the positive peak and the negative one would be opposed soon enough. My attempt would work better for a difference in phase rather than frequency.

Re:Optimization Algorithm

[tepples]

If you can correct the overall phase a slight amount, then as your correction accumulates, it turns into frequency.

Re:Optimization Algorithm

[Bruce Perens]

Right. But what I see here is that no significant frequency diffference between generators is going to work, and even relatively small phase differences mean energy dissipated into the distribution system.

Re:Optimization Algorithm

[aaarrrgggh]

You can handle it on a sub-cycle level, shifting your output slightly forward on the waveform to the capacity of your system. You are just limited by your own capacity as to what you can do to stabilize things.

Re:Optimization Algorithm

[Bruce Perens]

Yes, this is what we call phase. It's still got to be pretty close.

Re:Optimization Algorithm

[thegarbz]

Responding to a frequency drop doesn't really work, you must remain exactly in phase with the received frequency or it looks like a short-circuit to the distribution system. If the incoming frequency changes, the best thing you can do is probably disconnect.

That isn't even remotely true. Responding to frequency drops is precisely what peaking plants do. You only disconnect if you're out of the suitable frequency range. Frequency is exactly how the grid power flows around. A frequency drop is the result of an overloaded grid, i.e. some coal turbine somewhere is desperately unable to keep pushing the required power and hoping someone else kicks on to help. On underfrequency the best thing you can do is kick in and start pushing power onto the grid. That is likely to push the frequency back to where it's supposed to be. If you disconnect during an underfrequency event you'll make that even worse and trigger a cascading blackout.

There is an entire market for stabilising the grid in Australia called the "Frequency Control and Ancillary Services" market (FCAS). Actually it's 8 markets. 30MW of of this Tesla battery is dedicated to 2 of those market (6 second responses to frequency deviation).

We covered previously how well the battery responded to the Loy Yang trip. As soon as the frequency deviated by 0.2Hz the Tesla battery crammed 8MW into the grid to stabilise it while the slower frequency controllers (gas peaking plants) responded. http://reneweconomy.com.au/tes...
Note from the graph the frequency stopped dropping instantly, slowly started raising (the 6 second market responding), and massively correcting 6 minutes later (the 6 minute market responding).

The AEMO is discussing whether to create it's own regulatory market for batteries which can respond far faster than 6 seconds.

Re:Optimization Algorithm

[thegarbz]

Consider that another generator in the system was still running at 50 Hz.

Why are you considering that? A 50Hz generator on a 49.8Hz system will cause that generator to draw a huge amount of power. It will either help pull the grid back up (if it has enough power) or it will be pulled down with the grid (if it doesn't have enough power).

Also there's grid inertia. This stuff doesn't happen instantly. Look at the graph linked you'll see on a sudden disconnect of 560MW it still took about a minute for the frequency to come down to that level.

Re:Optimization Algorithm

[thegarbz]

You're absolutely right about this. Significant differences don't work which is why generators will trip on significant under frequency. The rate of the shortfall of available power will determine if a generator trips on overload or under frequency. The inertia in the system is what causes frequency events to be the most common problem in cascading failures (such as a major generator going offline).

If a big unit trips, the frequency starts dropping.
Suppliers come online to try and push the frequency back up. The 6 second market responds quickly with lots of small generators.
If the frequency hasn't corrected or continues to fall within 60 seconds a second market with a larger generators will have kicked in.
If the frequency hasn't corrected or continues to fall within 5 minutes a third market with a even larger generators will have kicked in.
If the frequency hasn't corrected by then you're going to start seeing generators go out on overload.

If at any point during this the frequency drops below a critical value you'll start seeing cascading failures due to under frequency. But chances are before tripping on under frequency there will likely be major load shedding to try and keep the power system going (cutting off some customers is better than losing power to all of them).

Re:Optimization Algorithm

[AmiMoJo]

These days DC is often used for long distance transmission lines. It's more efficient and there is no problem converting it back to AC now that we have efficient solid state hardware to do that. That also allows the conversion hardware to match the local frequency. In fact in Japan they have two separate AC grids, one 50Hz and one 60Hz, tied together with this kind of AC/DC -> DC/AC conversion.

Long story short anywhere that multiple AC systems come together there is usually some conversion going on, either from DC or just to correct phase enough to avoid issues.

Re:Optimization Algorithm

[Anonymous Coward]

not electrical engineer here, but i think they don't
inject leading frequency, rather they inject reactive Amps.
so the voltage is at whatever frequency the grid is at, but
the AMPS are inject slightly ahead.
AMPS is moving electrons, thus a magnetic field, and
this will help the "spinning rust" to feel less torque and
thus speed up a bit and it has to happen over three phases.
the charged DC batteries are a big bottle of electrons on a mountain
top and really want to go skiing downhill.
with some (solid state?) control logic (secret sauce of tesla batteries?) the
skiing electrons can be converted-and-diverted to provide
leading AMPS on each phase ... or something?

Re:Optimization Algorithm

[Anonymous Coward]

Watching the data from the battery you can see that when prices spike, it discharges and when prices fall, it charges. I'm sure there's a deeper strategy to what it does though besides factoring in how much of a price swing it needs to cover efficiency losses to make a profit.

In other words, is a pump-n-dump scheme. I want in.

Re:Optimization Algorithm

[Bruce Perens]

I am just having a hard time with the concept that the first notification they have of a need to supplement the power grid comes in the form of a frequency sag. There have to be SCADA networks, and the network operator must know when they are over capacity.

Re:Optimization Algorithm

[aaarrrgggh]

You look at the real-time waveform rather than the integrated frequency and get a slew rate for each PWM interval, and marginally increase or decrease output to assist in maintaining the target waveform and thus frequency. (An AC generator watches phase angle in order to load or unload itself.)

At a grid level, frequency a more reliable measure than anything else, since increasing your generator's excitation current will temporarily boost output, until the point that the prime mover cannot keep up. Most voltage regulators are programmed with a V/Hz operation mode that lets them reduce voltage and frequency in tandem when overloaded, and increase them when overpowered.

The control networks will only act predicatively or reactively-- not really in a real-time mode. A number of things can be predicted - increased cloud cover with a weather pattern moving towards a solar array, same types of things with wind power. Demand-side, there is generally enough information in aggregate to see variations between day-ahead forecasts and real-time status. But, when you get transient events like a power plant or transmission line tripping offline, real-time interactivity of a battery system can mean the difference between major sub-systems tripping and needing to be slowly re-closed, and zero impact.

Re:Optimization Algorithm

[thegarbz]

I am just having a hard time with the concept that the first notification they have of a need to supplement the power grid comes in the form of a frequency sag. There have to be SCADA networks, and the network operator must know when they are over capacity.

This part of localised controls in a self regulating system. The system stability is dependent on having enough local control with enough speed to react to change. It only becomes unstable if you lack speed or capacity to regulate. Until these batteries existed speed wasn't an issue since detection of an event on the other side of the country was still orders of magnitude faster than anyone's ability to react to the event.

Think of it in terms of a bucket leaking water, and you and your friend are both pouring water in at a controllable rate to keep the bucket exactly half full. Now if your friend tells you he's about to stop pouring you can pour faster and keep that bucket exactly half full, but if you can't see or hear him and he suddenly stops, you're likely still in a very good place to correct yourself to keep that bucket half full without emptying it overflowing it. And ultimately the only thing that matters in this network is for it to not empty or overflow. Being exactly spot on perfect is not a requirement.

Now that said the whole concept of smart grids is that we are starting to get in a situation that is more intermittent and demanding of faster reaction times. Maybe some large scale SCADA systems will be implemented in the future, but right now unless you foul something up we are well within our means of controlling the system with lots of localised controls.

We were also able to refine oil in the 30s. Sure nowadays we do it a bit more reliability with more onspec products as a result, but the idea of many small control local controls working on a single system and keeping it stable is as old as control theory itself.

14 dollars per kWh is a lot

[Anonymous Coward]

Hydro costs like 5, coal may be 12.

Re: 14 dollars per kWh is a lot

[Anonymous Coward]

Hydro over here costs about 1-2 cents/kWh. So 14 dollars seems very excessive; who would pay that much for electricity?

Re: 14 dollars per kWh is a lot

[Streetlight]

I saw the $14/kWh and wondered if anyone, especially homeowners/renters, actually paid that for electricity. If I found electricity cost me that I'd disconnect from the grid and get my own generator running on the cheapest fuel - natural gas if available, diesel or gasoline and probably go solar, add a small windmill and a battery.

Re:14 dollars per kWh is a lot

[mspohr]

It's not constant electric supply. It's very short term grid stabilization which is worth a lot more.
Recent bids for solar electric with battery backup for constant electric supply come in at about 3-4 cents/kWh (without battery, it's about 2 cents/kWh).

Re: 14 dollars per kWh is a lot

[Anonymous Coward]

This is only for stabilization of the grid, and the critical part occurred over a few seconds... basically to prevent a much more costly brown out.

Think of it as taking an ambulance when you're shot instead of a taxi. yes, a taxi is much cheaper but at an overall much higher cost to your health.

Re: 14 dollars per kWh is a lot

[Anonymous Coward]

Hydro costs like 5

Hydro in South Australia?

We've found the wacko here...

Re: 14 dollars per kWh is a lot

[Anonymous Coward]

We do pay that, just that those spikes are amortised across the year by higher prices for each kWh. That's why in SA it's not uncommon to be paying $0.35 or more per kWh.

The battery capacitance is a great development

[Anonymous Coward]

It makes every aspect of energy production and transmission more efficient if you can store it like this. This will become a worldwide standard within 10-20 years, there's no point in building generating capacity if some storage capacity is all that's really required.

1000 to 14K per MWh?

[Anonymous Coward]

That is very high cost of peak power. A lot to pay for instantaneous backup.

Normal wholesale prices are $20 per MWh in the US. Even real time usually doesn't hit more than $150.

Re:1000 to 14K per MWh?

[Crashmarik]

That is very high cost of peak power. A lot to pay for instantaneous backup.

Normal wholesale prices are $20 per MWh in the US. Even real time usually doesn't hit more than $150.

This. Seems they would be better off trying to address the problem that causes their rates to spike.

Re:1000 to 14K per MWh?

[viperidaenz]

The rates spike because there is a power shortage. It's pretty simple.
To fix the problem they'd need to build more power stations that can spin up faster.
Australia has huge numbers of roof-top solar installation and nearly every house also has air conditioning.
This leads to big fluctuations in power generation and demand. Lots of sun = lots of power generation from solar, lots of power consumption from A/C. The two don't always run in sync, so there's big gaps to fill.

Re:1000 to 14K per MWh?

[Harlequin80]

https://www.aer.gov.au/wholesa...

The problem is the australian population is relatively low for the space that it covers. The networks are built around the normal demand levels and not able to cope with the very high peaks. This is made worse by the distances that power has to be transmitted.

Add onto that a complete lack of political will to build any large capacity power generation and you end up here.

It's going to get a lot worse before it gets better, The Loy Yang power stations in the La Trobe valley are coming up on end of life. They are the largest plants in Australia and provide 1/3rd of Victoria's power. Going to be up the creek without a paddle when they EOL.

Re:1000 to 14K per MWh?

[complete loony]

You forgot to add the political goal to sell the power network. On terms that allow the network operator to guarantee a return on any upgrades.

Most of the recent price rises in SA have gone into the grid infrastructure, not power generation.

Re:1000 to 14K per MWh?

[Harlequin80]

There is also that. But QLD has public ownership of its poles and wires yet the consumer is getting skinned, vs NSW which privatized it and is paying less. I get the feeling that situation could change at any time though. Bad regulation in NSW and consumers get skinned, QLD no longer needs to raise secret taxes and the price goes down.

As far as I can tell there isn't a direct link between public / private ownership and cost outcomes.

Of course then you have the situation in QLD now where 1 public owned corporation owns the rights to all smart meters, and if you change retail provider and are on a smart meter you need to pay to have your current meter removed and a new one installed. Ahhh just so obviously brilliant and economical.

Re:1000 to 14K per MWh?

[Anonymous Coward]

You've got that the wrong way around. SA and VIC are the two states with completely privatised electricity systems and they're also the two states that have had the least amount of price increases come from infrastructure expenditure.

Rises in NSW and QLD were driven by "gold plating" because their government-owned utilities can borrow money at government interest rates, but for some insane reason AER makes RTITs for government and private operators subject to the same commercial rates. This differential in allowable revenue vs cost of borrowing allowed the QLD and NSW governments to direct their utilities to borrow up big and spend as much as possible on "gold plating" so they could milk that government-private interest margin into general revenue.

Price rises in SA and VIC have been primarily driven by the removal of their cheapest generators (coal) and then relying on more expensive generators (wind, solar, gas and oil) stepping into plug the gaps.

Fourteen DOLLARS per kilowatthour?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's only, what, A HUNDRED TIMES what the power cost to produce?

And yet the article is written with such a "wow, isn't this great" tone.

You environmentalists have straight up lost yo damn minds.

Re:Fourteen DOLLARS per kilowatthour?

[wisnoskij]

If you changed that "HUNDRED" to a "THOUSAND" you would probably be closer to the mark.

Is that price right?

[Solandri]

the Powerpack system enabling Neoen to sell electricity at up to $14,000 AUD per MWh

The average price of electricity in Australia is AU$0.28/kWh, which is just $28 AUD per MWh. If they're really able to sell the electricity back at $14,000 AUD per MWh, then that points to serious, serious problems with the electrical infrastructure of the country. So serious that incidents like this are almost worthless as a data point for the viability and usefulness of such a system. Other solutions used in other countries are much more cost-effective.

Re:Is that price right?

[Altrag]

That would be $280/MWh but that's still a far shot from $14000/MWh so your point still stands.

As for other solutions in other countries I'm not really sure any are "much more cost-effective" as I don't believe any other countries have built out a battery pack system to the scale of the Australia installation. Of course the fact that Australia needed the installation (and I seem to recall it was a pretty rushed job to deal with an emergency of some sort) still kind of puts a question mark on the state of the country's power grid.

Overall though, its probably a combination of new tech that hasn't gone through its depreciation yet, plus whoever Neoen is just being greedy and charging through the teeth because they know Australia can't afford to say no. I'm not (yet) worried that this current cost per MWh is indicative of the long-term costs. Of course such a high initial cost could certainly slow down investment from other countries who might have considered such an installation, dragging out that depreciation capability.

Re:Is that price right?

[careysub]

Look at the graph in TFA it appears that they sold 30 megawatts for two one hour periods at this price, i.e. a total of 60 MWh. This is an extreme, but very limited marginal pricing event.

To your broader point, it is important to realize that the reason this battery backup was deployed in the first place is that this is an unusual, problematic local grid situation. This is a fix for a remote area of Australia, the edge of the 5th largest population center (Adelaide*) separated from it by 100 miles and isolated by hundreds of miles of emptiness from anywhere else. There is little redundant/backup infrastructure, or all that many people.

*The greater metropolitan area of Adelaide has a population of 1,317,000 which is 77% of the entire population of South Australia (which is 50% larger than Texas). Things get really sparse really fast out past Adelaide's metro area.

Re:Is that price right?

[aaarrrgggh]

The wholesale structure is different than the retail structure; while I doubt the premise of earning $1MM in a week, being paid to absorb energy for a few minutes and possibly up to a half-hour is common for grid stabilization as plants spool down. It averages out to a rounding error in the scale of the grid and given the limited duration.

Re:Is that price right?

[Anonymous Coward]

Firstly, you multiply by 1000 and not 100 when converting from cost per kilowatt hour to megawatt. Secondly, the article you linked to claims that the $0.28 estimate is too low. In fact, for South Australia, where the battery is located, they show a rate that is just under $0.50.

Re:Is that price right?

[Kristoph]

You are right, there are serious problems with the electricity grid in Australia. The problem is fundamentally that there are tangible periods of insufficient energy, at which points the price of energy increases dramatically. Under normal circumstances, when ample energy is available, the prices are very low. However, the consumer pays aggregate energy costs which do include these periods of very high cost. As these periods of insufficient energy increase, so does the cost paid by the consumer.

The solution, needless to say, is an energy source which is available immediately at the point where these periods of insufficient energy occur. As it happens batteries are the perfect solution for this ( and are also the most cost effective because their much cheaper to deploy then new power plants ). The more batteries are added to the grid ( owned by more operators ) the more competitive the market will be and the overall costs of energy to consumers will decrease.

Re:Is that price right?

[Carewolf]

Firstly, you multiply by 1000 and not 100 when converting from cost per kilowatt hour to megawatt. Secondly, the article you linked to claims that the $0.28 estimate is too low. In fact, for South Australia, where the battery is located, they show a rate that is just under $0.50.

With both your corrections that brings us up to almost 500AUD/MWh, we are still off by almost two orders of magnitude compared to the claim.

Re:Is that price right?

[sit1963nz]

$14 is the wholesale price during peak demand. $28 is the retail price which is averaged over a year "peak" times are typically around Breakfast and Dinner times when people are cooking, however a gas/oil/coal generator may take an hour or two to power up and then takes time to run down, especially from a cold start. Managing large power networks is a complex task where projection of loads, where the loads will be, what peaks there will be etc etc need to be accounted for ahead of time.

Re:Is that price right?

[mspohr]

The battery was installed primarily to provide stability to the grid. Australia has a poor grid and the previous year had several costly blackouts. The battery can respond within milliseconds to grid instability whereas traditional power plants take minutes at a minimum. The battery has saved the grid multiple times in the few months it's been operational. When you want to stabilize the grid, it doesn't require a lot of power for a long time... just short bursts of power when it detects problems.
So, paying a lot of money for a small amount of power for a short period of time makes perfect sense if it keeps the grid from going down.

Re:Is that price right?

[stabiesoft]

Sounds like an Enron wet dream.

Re:Is that price right?

[viperidaenz]

With an average rate of $500/MWh, spending 28x that to prevent a blackout seems reasonable.

Re:Is that price right?

[LynnwoodRooster]

Australia wants their own version of Enron and California, but they want it all dressed up in green...

Re:Is that price right?

[Anonymous Coward]

In some statistical distributions extreme events dominate the expectation from the function. Human financial markets tend to have such fat-tailed distributions.

Also what is probably happening is that the Coal plants have been able to game the system by having 'unavoidable' outages at just the right time to spike the price for their other plants. Now Tesla are making this harder for them.

Re:Is that price right?

[Anonymous Coward]

No it's common in many electricity markets to see spot prices like this for short periods. It's possible anywhere there are pinch points in the transmission network, and plant operators are able to game the system by having outages at just the right time to spike the price.

Re:Is that price right?

[Anonymous Coward]

But how large is Texas? I mean compared to Wales?

Re:Is that price right?

[yobjob]

South Australia has 0 coal plants. I think wind power is now the largest category producer so if anything it's the damned wind gaming the system.

Re:Is that price right?

[thegarbz]

Almost. There are several suppliers that operate on a 6 second timeline. Whether the battery has "saved" the grid at any point is entirely debatable. What is clear is that the grid has been more stable as a result of the battery being in operation, but so far it has yet to get near the point where it would cause a blackout.

Re:Is that price right?

[modrzej]

The battery's value comes from its short response on the time scale of milliseconds. Conventional power plants are mechanical systems, and because of that it would take orders of magnitude more time to start them up for backup power generation. For that reason, at all times, coal power plants generate a little bit more power than there's demand for. If some other power plant trips, the frequency drop is detected, and the surplus kinetic energy of the turbine is immediately transmitted to the grid to stabilize the supply. However, there's the cost. The power plant has to generate surplus power at all times just because it can't change its state fast enough in case of emergency. The battery technology, with its response times typical for chemical/solid state systems, slashes the cost of conventional power generation by making this surplus backup power unnecessary.

Yes, works as designed. So what?

[gweihir]

Seriously, this is a complete non-story. For example, pumped-storage hydropower plants have been doing this for ages.

Re:Yes, works as designed. So what?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not where it's live. I give a fuck about hydropowr.

Re:Yes, works as designed. So what?

[drinkypoo]

For example, pumped-storage hydropower plants have been doing this for ages.

The difference is that battery storage can be automatically activated in a fraction of a second, providing grid stabilization that avoids extreme measures like rolling blackouts.

Re:Yes, works as designed. So what?

[bug1]

Batteries can be use for grid stability.Batteries can switch on very fast.

A few weeks ago coal generators tripped, which would normally cause problems for the grid due to power spikes, a frequency drops (or something), anyway, this Telsa battery was able to active while the spike was in progress, its that fast.
Link about the cause of the spike
http://reneweconomy.com.au/coa...

I suspect the original story in the article is this one;
http://reneweconomy.com.au/tes...

Another story on Batteries setting prices
http://reneweconomy.com.au/tes...

They have a nice page to show Aus electricity generation sources as well, its a good site. (this one might have problems with noscript+ad-blockers)
http://reneweconomy.com.au/nem...

Re:Yes, works as designed. So what?

[nospam007]

"Seriously, this is a complete non-story. For example, pumped-storage hydropower plants have been doing this for ages."

This is a desert, no mountain and no water.

Re:Yes, works as designed. So what?

[Anonymous Coward]

Never a non-story, oppertunity to bash Tesla and Musk being over-hyped. Make Coal Clean Again!

Re:Yes, works as designed. So what?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, not a non-story. This works not only with hydroelectric power but any method and is really suitable for places where the source isn't constant over time (wave, wind, solar). And as others have pointed out the response time is quite different. But true, hydroelectric has been used to store energy when surplus and then use when needed.

Just curious, does anyone know the efficiency of water -> electricity -> pumping water -> electricity as opposed to storing electricity straight away in a battery? And how does this compare to the cost of a battery bank as opposed to just adding pumps to an existing dam?

Re:Yes, works as designed. So what?

[viperidaenz]

Got any examples of pumped storage hydro power that can react in less than a minute?
This battery reacts in a couple of milliseconds, and because of that it has saved the grid from a blackout due to a coal power station failing. The backup gas power station takes 30 seconds or so to spin up.

The entire state had a blackout in 2016 that may have been averted if they had this battery. A storm took out a bunch of major power lines, which caused protection systems to shut down some wind farms. The link to a neighbouring state grid was overloaded and tripped. The entire state went black. It's the reason they installed the battery in the first place.

Re:Yes, works as designed. So what?

[thesupraman]

Actually, IF you actually look, it is close to the coast, and there are 500+M high ranges in the area (also close to the coast), pumped hydro would be quite practical, as would the already tested locomotive type gravitational storage (cable haul a loaded train up a hill, the roll it down to generate power).

Batteries may be the current best price/performance, however most likely Musk is just a lot more can-do than any other vendor, so got in and did the job, where others wanted deeper government handouts, etc.

Re:Yes, works as designed. So what?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why yes, power production in Australia has been deliberately sabotaged by three gens to break coal, and the poor are the real victims. but some folks have made a few billion manipulating the markets.

Re:Yes, works as designed. So what?

[complete loony]

We shut down our coal fired power station. Since we have so many wind turbines, and we're connected to the other big generators in the eastern states.

Then one day we had a storm that knocked over a big power line to the eastern states. Our other power line was down for maintenance. Our wind turbines switched off to save themselves (perhaps a bit more sensitive than they needed to be). Then the whole grid went dark.

This battery was built as a knee-jerk political response to the event. As well as building some over priced diesel generators.

At least the battery was a good investment.

Re:Yes, works as designed. So what?

[aberglas]

Hydro reacts within seconds. All they need to do is open the tap. Fine for grid stabilization.

Re:Yes, works as designed. So what?

[Jeremi]

Hydro reacts within seconds.

Is "within seconds" fast enough? I presume "within milliseconds" is better, although I don't know how much better.

Re:Yes, works as designed. So what?

[Anonymous Coward]

Generators have big parts spinning at 3000rpm. They cannot stop instantly, but the frequency can drop slightly.

So Hydro is fast enough. Which is why it has been used successfully for grid stabilization for decades.

Re:Yes, works as designed. So what?

[Anonymous Coward]

Or perhaps more importantly, there is a lot of steam in the boilers that can give a burst of power for a short time.

Re:Yes, works as designed. So what?

[Anonymous Coward]

Would be nice to have charts like http://reneweconomy.com.au/nem-watch/ in the US, or even at the state level.. I live in the other WA :-)

Re:Yes, works as designed. So what?

[Anonymous Coward]

Me again, looking at the totals on that chart, Washington State's hydropower output alone would cover about 2/3 of Australia's electricity demand. A lot of it is exported to California and other states via HVDC and HVAC.

Re:Yes, works as designed. So what?

[Anonymous Coward]

no, within seconds is not long enough. As soon as you can't guarantee to be within margin of either voltage or frequency it means brown outs to prevent a blackouts. Which means machines resetting or not getting enough power causing all sorts of other problems.

Re:Yes, works as designed. So what?

[bug1]

Exporting to other states has been where the problem manifests.

It makes sense with renewable power to have a well connected grid, it makes generation more efficient, because it can be sold where its needed most, but that places a lot of demand on the national grid, or really the inter-connectors between the states grid.

In the past South Australia, where the battery got disconnected because one of the states transmission lines got blown over from a storm which caused a spike which disconnected the state from the national grid.

So they lost part of their generating capacity, which then stopped them from importing power from other states.

In theory, with the battery in place, it can stabilise the states supply (that wasnt knocked out) which prevents the state inter-connectors from tripping, so external power to come in and prevent a blackout.

Re:Yes, works as designed. So what?

[Anonymous Coward]

So the interesting part is their pricing model. This article highlights one part of the calculation - revenue. But ,to evaluate this project Tesla would need to calculate a whole bunch of variables including:

a) Construction costs
b) Materials costs
c) Charging costs
d) Staffing
e) Maintenance materials
f) Anticipated usage
g) Revenue from sales.
h) Decomissioning costs

Pricing is only a small part of the whole, but it can make or break the project. In about ten years time it would make an awesome post-grad economics project to see how well (or badly) their models performed.

Re:Yes, works as designed. So what?

[thegarbz]

This battery was built as a knee-jerk political response to the event.

Being knee-jerk doesn't make it wrong. The battery is designed in part to improve stability and stability is precisely what was impacted when the transmission line went down.

Re:Yes, works as designed. So what?

[gweihir]

Yes, it is. The classical generators have a lot of short-time reserves just from spinning. Incidentally, you _can_ keep hydro spinning in idle with pretty low power drain to get just that fast response and you can have flywheels in addition that can be coupled in or out very fast to extend that "spin reserve" time. Whether you need that is another question. The only thing about batteries is that they are cheaper and can be placed basically anywhere, and that is really nice. But there is no "revolution" here at all, got cheaper and a lot faster to put in a place where needed. The implications from the story are just fanboi bullshit, the advantages are elsewhere.

Re:Yes, works as designed. So what?

[gweihir]

And all those spinning generators with a lot of power stored in inertia say seconds are plenty. You really do not know what you are talking about. How do you think the gird was kept stable before computers, or even before eletronics?

Re:Yes, works as designed. So what?

[gweihir]

Indeed. They do have one big advantage though, storage like this can be built fast and basically everywhere. That is the real advantage here. The power-storage angle is not revolutionary at all. As to cost-efficiency, we will need to see how reliability and long-term performance really turn out. The current hype leads me to believe that they may not be that much better than existing solutions. Still, even a gradual improvement in that area is welcome.
 

Re:Yes, works as designed. So what?

[Anonymous Coward]

A few seconds is fast enough - who really cares if the lights blink?

Computers do, but they are covered by small UPS if need be. No economical need to cover the entire grid the same way.

Re:Yes, works as designed. So what?

[Anonymous Coward]

i am not sure if the pumped hydro is ONLY pumping/charging -or- ONLY dumping.
one could assume that both pipes are open but not fully open ... that is that the pipe for pumping
is open 95% and the draining/generating pipe is open 5%.
if there's a "situation" i doubt that lego-batman will walk from the monitoring-room to the valves and open one more
and close the other more ...
however, there's probably not a debate that something mechanical, e.g. a valve is always slower then something
solid-state, electronically?
one of course could envision a special single valve that link both dedicated pipes thus linking them into a ratio
that always gives 100 open (10:90, 50:50 (st0pid?), 90:10) ...

Re:Yes, works as designed. So what?

[drinkypoo]

one of course could envision a special single valve that link both dedicated pipes thus linking them into a ratio
that always gives 100 open (10:90, 50:50 (st0pid?), 90:10) ...

You said it: special. Using special things makes situations complicated and expensive. You probably could dramatically improve the speed, but it still wouldn't react as fast as the battery system and you'd only make it more expensive and failure-prone.

Re:Yes, works as designed. So what?

[viperidaenz]

But none of the 17 hydro power stations in Victoria have been able to keep their grid stable.
Prior to this battery their main backup power source was gas fired generators.

Re:Yes, works as designed. So what?

[ebvwfbw]

14 cents/kwh... that's expensive. I'm paying 8 cents/kwh without it. Offhand it appears someone is making out.

Re:Yes, works as designed. So what?

[thegarbz]

14c/kWh is only expensive if you live in the fairy land coal coal coal USA subsidising your own poor health. Where some people happily pay 20c/kWh instead of the alternative 8c/kWh + x days off your life due to lung disease /kWh.

Re:Yes, works as designed. So what?

[kaatochacha]

False dichotomy.

Wth are they doing?

[Zorpheus]

The peak electricity price at the German exchange was 135€/MWh. How do they come to 14,000 AU$?
The German network manages a large load of solar and wind power. Yet it is totally stable just due to backup power plants, which produce more electricity than is consumed.

Re:Wth are they doing?

[Anonymous Coward]

So you're saying it's a totally non-comparable situation? Please post less.

Re:Wth are they doing?

[ishmaelflood]

That is a peak for one 30 minute period. It is some function of the way the market is controlled, for instance yesterday the price peaked at $3/kWh, yet for the rest of the day it has hovered around $0.10 per kWh

Here's the past and future price estimates over 24 h

https://www.aemo.com.au/Electr...

And here is the far more entertaining power flow between the states

https://www.aemo.com.au/Electr...

As I write the '57%' renewable SA system is absorbing all the coal power it can get from Victoria and its '57%' renewable generators are actually supplying less than 20% of the state's needs.

Here's a snapshot on a nice sunny windless day last Saturday where SA's renewable generators were producing virtually nothing. It demonstrates that you have to have 100% baseload generation, you cannot rely on renewables to replace them, at least until we install hundreds of batteries the size of the one in SA.

http://res.cloudinary.com/engi...

Re:Wth are they doing?

[bug1]

The operator of the grid sets prices for 5 minute blocks of power, and generators dont bid for it the operator increases the price. There are problems when a big generator suddenly goes offline, and supply cant easily meet demand. Which causes spike in prices.

Generators have been accused of gaming the system also, and there are process underway to improving the bidding process.

Re:Wth are they doing?

[mspohr]

Germany has a solid, well managed grid.
Australia has a weak grid with frequent instabilities.
The battery has helped stabilize the grid and that is why they installed it. It provides a valuable service for short periods of time. The cost per MWh is high but it's only for a short time.

Re:Wth are they doing?

[Zorpheus]

I guess the difference is just that Germany has more reserve power plants. I thought this is the obvious conclusion of this "non-comparable" comparison.

Re: Wth are they doing?

[Anonymous Coward]

$14/kWh for 30 minutes and $0 the rest of the day still comes out at more than $0.50/kWh for the day and for most countries, electricity costs are on the order of $0.025/kWh. So it's still very expensive.

Re:Wth are they doing?

[Zorpheus]

That's the price chart of Germany of last week. The red and blue curve and the right scale. It doesn't go much over 50€/MWh: https://www.energy-charts.de/p...

Re:Wth are they doing?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because the grid is operated as a market and there are huge swings in electricity demand and production.

Electricity retailers aggregate demand from customers and then work out what their demand profile is and go and negotiate long-term supply contracts with generators. Obviously they don't get it 100% right, so then they need to trade power on a spot market.

On hot days like yesterday in South Australia (47C/116F) everyone stays inside and turns on air-conditioners. The air-conditioners work extra-hard in such heat. In South Australia hot days are strongly correlated with a lack of wind, so the state's large amount of wind generation is unavailable. This necessitates firing up peaking generation plants and importing electricity from the neighbouring state of Victoria.

Peaking generators are expensive to run open-cycle turbines and reciprocating engines running on natural gas and oil. These plants with hundreds of millions worth of equipment generally lay idle for 95% of the year. The money spent on them and the fuel to run them needs to be paid for in the handful of hours they operate, so they bid very high prices into the market.

The spot market works on 5-minute dispatch intervals. Every five minutes, generators place bids with the market operator to deliver so many MWs at a price. The market operator then dispatches generators starting at the lowest priced bid and working up until demand is satisfied. The price of the bid that satisfies demand is what every dispatched generator receives. Every 30 minutes there is a market settlement, where the prices of the previous six dispatch intervals are averaged together to set the final price that dispatched generators receive for the electricity they put into the grid.

What exacerbates the price rises so much is that large and cheap coal-fired generators have been shut down. South Australia and Victoria have lost over 2,100GW of base-load coal generation in the last couple of years and that has been largely made up for with higher-cost gas-fired generation.

Re:Wth are they doing?

[nospam007]

"Yet it is totally stable just due to backup power plants, which produce more electricity than is consumed."

That they pay neighboring countries to take off their hands. Countries whose power plant owners are not amused about that fact.

Re:Wth are they doing?

[Zorpheus]

"Yet it is totally stable just due to backup power plants, which produce more electricity than is consumed."

That they pay neighboring countries to take off their hands. Countries whose power plant owners are not amused about that fact.

No, that's a different issue. Yes, lots of electricity is sold abroad. Germany is pretty much using the whole EU to buffer its network. But the network providers always must have a few GW of backup power capacity, which is only used if there are any issues.

Re:Wth are they doing?

[lordlod]

The peak electricity price at the German exchange was 135€/MWh. How do they come to 14,000 AU$?

The significant difference is one of scale and distance. More specifically the number of power plants, their range due to power drops in lines and number of interconnects due to density.

The nearest city and major power consumer to Adelaide - the major city in the area we are talking about - is Melbourne, roughly 700km away. Most of the power generation which supplies Melbourne is on the far side, so even further.

In comparison, 700km from Berlin includes the entirety of Germany, Denmark, Netherlands, Austria, Czechoslovakia and about 90% of Poland, Belgium and Slovakia.

It is unsurprising then that there is several magnitudes more demand, supply and interconnects. With this will naturally come more stability, both in the spot price and overall network stability. The impact of one power plant having a fault in South Australia is to lose 10% of the supply. The impact of losing one power plant in Germany is hardly noticeable.

Re:Wth are they doing?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, big batteries will make this gaming harder.

Re:Wth are they doing?

[Streetlight]

Another non-comparable situation is Denmark. Apparently the country produces 110% of the needed electricity from wind. Obviously the situation is different as the country consists mainly as a peninsula and islands stuck in the North Sea with lots of wind. If south east Australia has wind and the land to build wind turbines, they need to get on with it.

Re:Wth are they doing?

[kaatochacha]

This is interesting, because as I understand it ( And I of course may be wrong) in the US, gas fired generation has come down in price enormously ( fracking, etc) compared to the old coal generation which has mostly gone offline due to costs.

Re:Fake news dot

[Anonymous Coward]

In other news, idiotdot commenters each earn over $3000 a day working from home debating things that didn't really happen - all using this simple trick that Obama really hates!

Re:Or just cut back on pointless Russian bashing

[PopeRatzo]

Now, FBI investigators have released the results of their investigation claiming that the blunt force trauma all over his body was self-inflicted.

“Mr. Lesin died as a result of blunt for injuries to his head, with contributing causes being blunt force injuries of the neck, torso, upper extremities, and lower extremities, which were induced by falls, with acute ethanol intoxication,” the report states.

In other words, the FBI is claiming that Lesin got so drunk that he repeatedly and violently fell on things until he killed himself.

If you don't think a Russian can get drunk enough to kill himself by falling all over the place, you've never gotten drunk with a Russian.

http://www.bbc.com/news/health...

Also, you messed up your link, comrade.

$14 per KW-hr???

[CrimsonAvenger]

Really? Is someone really paying 14 bucks per KW-hr??? I get my electricity for cents per KW-hr, not dollars....

Re:$14 per KW-hr???

[ZombieEngineer]

Try $14,000/MW-hr => $14/kW-hr

This is the result of a postal auction of supply versus demand. There was suddenly a drop of nearly 500 MW and the other generators are trying to ramp up to fill the void.

The quoted price is where power companies are willing to turn off entire suburbs. For what it is worth it was a very hot day in Melbourne and there would have been a serious backlash if a power company blacked out a suburb to save a couple of thousand dollars (a bit like Malaysian Airlines taking the Ukraine route to save about $1000 in jet fuel).

If you were a power company - at what point do you start cutting customers off?

Re:$14 per KW-hr???

[Anonymous Coward]

Free market economics.

In this case it makes sense because without that extreme pricing level for times when supply is constrained there's no incentive to add capacity to the system. With this, the economics of that battery look really good, they wouldn't with the pricing artificially constrained.

Re:$14 per KW-hr???

[viperidaenz]

on the wholesale market, yes.
power companies will pay a lot of money for power when generators go offline unexpectedly.
It's bad publicity when an entire state has a blackout.

Re:$14 per KW-hr???

[dunkelfalke]

Usually the power companies have contracts with some large customers like concrete factories or cold warehouses, who generally get cheaper electrical power but would have to participate in a rolling blackout at a moment's notice.

Re:$14 per KW-hr???

[thegarbz]

Actually those large consumers have contracts that cause them to pay the spot price. They are often happy to disconnect themselves at times.

Re:$14 per KW-hr???

[dunkelfalke]

That is the other possibility. I remember a story where a German aluminium smelter ordered and paid a large amount of electical power in advance and when the time came the smelter realised that at the then current electrical power prices they could make more money by becoming an electricity reseller. This has been a while ago, though.

Re:Or just cut back on pointless Russian bashing

[haruchai]

"If you don't think a Russian can get drunk enough to kill himself by falling all over the place, you've never gotten drunk with a Russian"

Boris Yeltsin got so drunk on a trip to Washington DC in '95, he tried to hail a cab to go get a pizza wearing nothing but his tighty-whities

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/new...

That Anyone Gets Paid A$14,000/MWh...

[Anonymous Coward]

...is the real problem with this idiotic system.

Re: That Anyone Gets Paid A$14,000/MWh...

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like a cheap way to run a few million pace makers.
Maybe you use it to electrically heat water to condense it into a bucket on a pull chain to flush toilets. Some people need a little power at all times at almost any price.

Re:That Anyone Gets Paid A$14,000/MWh...

[Anonymous Coward]

You might want to try reading the article, the $14k per MWh was a very unusual and short spike cause by a plant outage. Basically the grid in Australia works on a market principal, supply, demand and pricing. As demand (homeowners/businesses) begins outstripping supply (coal/wind/solar/etc facilities) the market price begins increasing. In this case due to the plant outage and increased demand the grid was dropping out of its normal operating frequency (brown/black out conditions), the market (via price) began screaming for increased production. The alternative would probably have been to begin rolling blackouts.

Re:Or just cut back on pointless Russian bashing

[Anonymous Coward]

And yet he survived, thus reinforcing the point that no Russian has gotten so drunk that they've died from repeatedly falling all over the place.

Re:Or just cut back on pointless Russian bashing

[Anonymous Coward]

And yet he survived, thus reinforcing the point that no Russian has gotten so drunk that they've died from repeatedly falling all over the place.

At what school did you fail logic & reasoning?

Ideological Suicide

[labnet]

Australia has been infested with hard left/green ideology in Victoria and South Australia.
They have been blowing up coal plants and putting in windmills leading australia to having close to the highest electricity prices in the world.
These fools in power then export vast quantities of coal to China, who are building 100 coal plants dwarfing anything Australia does.

Re:Ideological Suicide

[Harlequin80]

To a degree yep.

People can't seem to get their head around the fact that Australia is not a suitable country for 100% renewables. So building a new coal plant is off the cards.

That said SA is about the best location in the world to build nuclear plants. Massive uranium deposits, geologically completely stable, educated population and you could locate them near the junction of the 4 states.and supply the whole east coast on existing infrastructure. Oh the dream.

Re:Ideological Suicide

[Chuq]

People can't seem to get their head around the fact that Australia is not a suitable country for 100% renewables.

So, the country with some of the worlds highest solar irradiation levels, huge expanses of empty land, thousands of kilometres of coastline and is in the line of the roaring 40s wind stream, is not a suitable country for solar PV, solar thermal, wind (including off-shore), wave or tidal energy?

This Hornsdale battery has been a wake up call to a lot of governments in Australia, and when the SolarReserve tower in Pt August goes live it's going to generate a wave of similar generators elsewhere.

Yes, nuclear is another huge advantage that Australia has had in the past, and if we didn't have the renewable resources it would have been a great idea, but nuclear today is many times more expensive that renewables and the lead time to build such a station is about 10 years (including the politics of it). It would have been the ideal solution 30-40 years ago, but it's time has passed now.

The concept of a single nuclear power station in the outback supplying 4 major population centres is a risky one too. A 500MW coal generator tripping causes issues with the grid. Can you imagine if a single 1-2GW power station suddenly shut down? Also, I always thought nuclear power stations had to be near water for cooling.

Re:Ideological Suicide

[Anonymous Coward]

uhm, and why not? It would seem Australia just needs to deal with energy storage. The problem isn't renewable energy production. You find your energy needs, build a healthy safety margin for production. Store the excess in hydrogen or some other energy sink, and then when shit hits the fans use the battery for short term stabilization while the hydrogen power plants or whatever ramps up production.

Re: Ideological Suicide

[Anonymous Coward]

Complete opposite of the actual issue in Australia.. but keep trying!

Poorly implemented privitisation of electricity assets has impacted all states negatively including those without a large amount of renewables.

Re:Ideological Suicide

[Harlequin80]

It is the huge expanses of empty land that are the killer for PV or wind for Australia.

Sure the wind is always blowing somewhere, but the transmission distances are huge and you need to have the baseload supply. Comparing it to europe with 750+ million people and the related infrastructure power shifting is much much easier.

Australia is perfect for a renewable suplimented system. Not a whole hog replacement system. Not till batteries are way way cheaper.

Re single point of failure, I wasn't proposing shutting down everything else. Already there is a huge interconnect network that passes through the region and you would tap into that. It would also be a multi-generator site, exactly as Loy Yang is.

Water would be the biggest challenge. I don't know enough to know how water efficient a nuclear plant can be. CSG extraction produces masses of water in that region, I'm not sure if that is enough or if it's reliable enough

Re:Ideological Suicide

[Chuq]

It is the huge expanses of empty land that are the killer for PV or wind for Australia.

Sure the wind is always blowing somewhere, but the transmission distances are huge and you need to have the baseload supply.

That's easy - the wind/solar doesn't have to be built way out in the middle of the outback - you can still build just outside the major cities. In fact rooftop PV is about the only realistic generation type that has a zero distance transmission!

But the long transmission lines aren't a deal breaker, after all Loy Yang etc. are 150km+ out of Melbourne.

Re:Ideological Suicide

[Harlequin80]

How are you storing the power?

Sure you can generate with roof top PV, but how are you storing enough power to run everything when the sun isn't shining / wind isn't blowing or it's dark?

If you can make your wind farms geographically diverse enough then you can do that. Have melbourne wind farms feeding townsville for example. But it would require a massive overbuild of generation to cover for the days when things aren't blowy.

Either that you need some kind of effective storage system. And currently there isn't the battery technology to do that at a reasonable cost.

Re:Ideological Suicide

[Harlequin80]

Isn't that the same problem that every country has with renewables? And isn't that the single thing that prevents wholesale update?

You say that like energy storage is a trivial problem. Energy storage is THE key to a renewable energy future.

Re:Ideological Suicide

[Chuq]

Renewable and intermittent aren't the same thing. Many forms such as solar thermal and hydro have storage integrated. Some others such as tidal and geothermal are suitable for baseload. And of course you can integrate battery storage with any form or generation. Note the title of this post...

Re:Ideological Suicide

[Harlequin80]

He specifically stated wind & solar. Yes I conflated that with renewables.

There is a large scale hydro project starting now in Aus. I'm not aware of any geothermal suitable locations, and has anyone got large scale tidal power generation right yet?

For most people, the term renewables pretty much means solar and wind, which are intermittent, and the thing that stops them being a total, as opposed to partial, solution is the storage of the energy.

Re:Ideological Suicide

[Anonymous Coward]

A coal mine will pump out "a million bucks" every two or three hours. So whats your point?

Bullshit article

[aberglas]

Yes, most spikes are much smaller. Moreover, the storage capacity of the batteries is relatively small.

My understanding is that the batteries are mainly for frequency stabilization, on quite small time scales.

Re:Bullshit article

[Rei]

For the Australia battery, quite small = ~45 minutes from full to empty or vice versa.

Oh please.

[Anonymous Coward]

I donâ(TM)t recall George Washington ever tweeting or bitching on Facebook about power outages. He just dealt with it. Gimme a break.

The capacity is actually divided up

[Anonymous Coward]

The battery is owned and operated by a French company called Neoen, which provide electricity and services to South Australian electricity grid.

70MW of the power and 39 MWh of the energy capacity is contractually allocated for grid stabilization: responding to transients. This is about 2/3 and 1/3, meaning that it must keep itself 1/3 charged and not be operating at more than 1/3 load unless "something is wrong".

Details at http://reneweconomy.com.au/wha...

The remaining 30 MW of the power and 70 MWh of the energy capacity are available for arbitrage: Neoen may buy and sell energy to make money. This also has a grid stabilization effect, smoothing out supply/demand imbalances, but operating slightly slower.

Remember the battery is located at a wind farm. It's not uncommon for power to be free: the wind is high and the grid load is low, and the windmills are in danger of spinning too fast.

South Australia's grid is not great, meaning that like any thinly traded commodity, electricity is prone to severe price spikes in the event of a shortage. The battery's rapid response means that it can beat any other source to market when prices spike and take advantage of "surge pricing".

I don't know the full details of the algorithms, but it's basically "buy low and sell high". The challenge is to predict pricing: is it worth buying energy now to sell later, or should I wait for lower prices? The risk of the latter is that if prices go up instead, I won't have energy to sell.

And I'm sure their algorithms take wear and tear on the batteries into account too, and how much that adds to the eventual replacement costs.

Re:The capacity is actually divided up

[aaarrrgggh]

Thanks!! Great info.

Re: Or just cut back on pointless Russian bashing

[Anonymous Coward]

I've seen cases where someone died from drunk falling damage. Its usually head or neck only damage. The fact that his entire body showed blunt force trauma is extremely suspicious. I don't know why anyone would want to kill him but I would suspect foul play if anyone had a motive.

Re: Or just cut back on pointless Russian bashing

[PopeRatzo]

I've seen cases where someone died from drunk falling damage. Its usually head or neck only damage. The fact that his entire body showed blunt force trauma is extremely suspicious. I don't know why anyone would want to kill him but I would suspect foul play if anyone had a motive.

He was found in his hotel room, but many of the bruises could have happened as he stumbled home. Blackout drunks can do a lot of damage to themselves. It is not that uncommon for them to be found dead from self-inflicted injuries.

And if the Secret Society Illuminati DNC Clinton Reptilians wanted to kill him and not leave evidence of murder, do you really think that a Secret Society of DNC Clinton Reptilian Illuminati wouldn't have the means to do so? "Let's beat the guy to death, fill him up with alcohol to the point of ethanol-poisoning, not leave any forensic evidence, do it quietly enough that no one else hears it and then beat it out of there without being seen" does not sound like a plan an organization of super-villians would make. At least it wouldn't be my first choice.

Don't call victory yet

[Anonymous Coward]

The types of batteries used are consumption items, and you're yet to see the bill for when they need to be replaced.

You can do this easy

[Anonymous Coward]

In Arizona the have peak off peak battery inverter pay for themself in no time.
Dont even need panels but you are in Arizona why the hell not?