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

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: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.