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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."
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.
Dollars are not SI units, and financial info has traditionally used Roman numerals as multipliers. MM = thousand thousand = million.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
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...
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.
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.
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
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.