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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...
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?