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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.
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.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
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.
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.
Someone had to do it.
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.
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
If you changed that "HUNDRED" to a "THOUSAND" you would probably be closer to the mark.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Seriously, this is a complete non-story. For example, pumped-storage hydropower plants have been doing this for ages.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
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.
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.
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.
$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.
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.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
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.
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...
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.
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.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
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.
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...
Really? Is someone really paying 14 bucks per KW-hr??? I get my electricity for cents per KW-hr, not dollars....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
"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.
"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.
"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...
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
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.
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.
With an average rate of $500/MWh, spending 28x that to prevent a blackout seems reasonable.
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.
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.
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.
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
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.
Czech language for absolute beginners
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.
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell
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).
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
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.
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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.
- Chuq
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.
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.
I agree, and it is a negative consequence of typically fixed pricing in this market by government agencies.
Nobody with a modicum of sense is mining bitcoin at Australian retail prices.
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.
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.
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.
Does it go on forever?
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.
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...
- Chuq
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.