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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."
"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."
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.
How come things that happen to stupid people keep happening to me?
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.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
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...
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.
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?
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.
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.
- Chuq
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.