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Tesla's Giant Battery In Australia Reduced Grid Service Cost By 90 Percent (electrek.co)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Electrek: Tesla's giant Powerpack battery in Australia has been in operation for about 6 months now and we are just starting to discover the magnitude of its impact on the local energy market. A new report now shows that it reduced the cost of the grid service that it performs by 90% and it has already taken a majority share of the market. It is so efficient that it reportedly should have made around $1 million in just a few days in January, but Tesla complained last month that they are not being paid correctly because the system doesn't account for how fast Tesla's Powerpacks start discharging their power into the grid.
The system is basically a victim of its own efficiency, which the Australian Energy Market Operator confirmed is much more rapid, accurate and valuable than a conventional steam turbine in a report published last month. Now McKinsey and Co partner Godart van Gendt presented new data at the Australian Energy Week conference in Melbourne this week and claimed that Tesla's battery has now taken over 55% of the frequency control and ancillary services (FCAS) services and reduced cost by 90%. "In the first four months of operations of the Hornsdale Power Reserve (the official name of the Tesla big battery, owned and operated by Neoen), the frequency ancillary services prices went down by 90 percent, so that's 9-0 per cent," said Gendt via Reneweconomy. "And the 100MW battery has achieved over 55 percent of the FCAS revenues in South Australia. So it's 2 percent of the capacity in South Australia achieving 55 percent of the revenues in South Australia."
The system is basically a victim of its own efficiency, which the Australian Energy Market Operator confirmed is much more rapid, accurate and valuable than a conventional steam turbine in a report published last month. Now McKinsey and Co partner Godart van Gendt presented new data at the Australian Energy Week conference in Melbourne this week and claimed that Tesla's battery has now taken over 55% of the frequency control and ancillary services (FCAS) services and reduced cost by 90%. "In the first four months of operations of the Hornsdale Power Reserve (the official name of the Tesla big battery, owned and operated by Neoen), the frequency ancillary services prices went down by 90 percent, so that's 9-0 per cent," said Gendt via Reneweconomy. "And the 100MW battery has achieved over 55 percent of the FCAS revenues in South Australia. So it's 2 percent of the capacity in South Australia achieving 55 percent of the revenues in South Australia."
...can it keep an iPhone X powered for 24 hours?
what a surprise they complain that they want more money...
why not operate a solar powered salt powered station to generate power and get paid more money... because would earn you more money be more efficient and truely sustainable
oh its harder than paying a third party to ship battery... hence they just complain...
john
Imagine five or ten of these in America.
It'd be a real infrastructure project that would benefit people.
Oh wait, not under this Congress.
Is in what is called "ancillary services".
An ongoing issue with operating and maintaining an electrical grid is how to balance electrical generation with electrical consumption. The two vary throughout the day; for example, solar energy adds a surge of power to the grid during sunlight hours, while peak consumer demand for electricity happens around 7-8pm. If you have five minutes, I suggest you watch this video, produced by Vox, discussing it further.
How do electrical companies then compensate for the differences? Or for contingencies, like when an electrical generator needs to be brought offline for emergencies or maintenance? This is where "ancillary services" plays a vital importance. Utilities are desperate to find an efficient way to store surplus power generated when supply is higher than demand, so that it can then be released when demand is higher than supply. Currently, when supply is too high, it is reduced (ex: solar panels and wind turbines turned off), wasting energy. When supply is too low, expensive generators are brought online to meet demand. But if we can make battery technology cost-efficient to store surplus electricity for peak-demand use, it would save vast sums of money, as this article highlights.
My only real concern is how much battery waste this will lead to. Cells need to be replaced every 3-5 years. Until superconductors or high-energy-plasma devices become reality, the only somewhat-environmentally-safe way to store energy long-term is thermal. Hopefully molten-salt storage technology succeeds in this regard.
There are already lots of "them" (load balancers), but the others perform worse.
BoNeRs!
Just about anything works
https://www.smh.com.au/busines...
https://instituteforenergyrese...
It gets better. Tesla thinks that they're responding too quickly to be paid the real price of electricity.
Ask me about repetitive DNA
If Tesla is not getting paid because the accounting system can't keep up with their service profile, isn't some part of 90% savings due to the fact that the consumer isn't paying the bill? If so, how much of it?
No: one charges the other and vice-versa.
In other words: FREE ENERGY BABY!
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Not necessarily, because the "benchmark" used here was "conventional steam turbine". Steam turbines indeed do take quite a few (tens) of minutes while to take the load depending on their status.
Gas turbines on the other hand do not, and neither does hydro. Both are commonly used for load balancing specifically for this reason. The comparison is... odd. Having read the paper, I'm assuming that this is some kind of a unique market that didn't actually have access to any common spinning reserve sources. The size of the market, with 30MW being sufficient for all of its load balancing for the time tested appears to confirm it. This seems to be a very localized grid with minimal interconnections with outside world for load balancing purposes. Most of the lucrative markets in the world are large interconnected ones.
No,it's the size of the installation that makes the change,not the source of the heat t make steam to turn the turbine. Gas plants are run smaller because they're peakers and responsiveness is worth more than efficiency. Small turbines=less efficient.
There's a NOVA show called search for the super battery. Lithium (like tesla's) is great for cars and phones because it's lightweight and stores a reasonable charge, but somewhat expensive. After talking about lithium batteries they said pretty much anything (not nobles) could be made into a battery. Then they put up a list of the most abundant elements in the earth's crust (among them Si, S, and O) and said if you didn't mind a battery that was large and heavy, pretty soon there'll be batteries made out of that stuff cheaply. The ingredients are plentiful and making them was cheaper, for example no need for a humidity-controlled clean room meant they could be made on a large but efficient assembly line with machines made for food handling. Also nontoxic, the interviewer scooped some up and ate it, said it tasted like sand.
So yeah, Australia, Nevada, and Texas all have plenty of vacant land they could put big, heavy, cheap batteries on, and store power with. Save the lithium for batteries that go places.
What is it that you think this thread is talking about? The paper specifically talks about battery usage in place of spinning reserve.
Source of steam is pretty irrelevant in the turbine for this purpose. What matters is that steam turbine takes a while to take load even when it's spun up. Gas turbine, not so much. Which is why you generally don't use steam turbine as low latency spinning reserve, and instead use a gas turbine or a hydro setup on a nearest river.
The current method for keeping the frequency stable is lots of plants with heavy turbines and generators spinning at high speed - 3000 or 3600 RPM. If load increases or decreases, it takes time for all this mass to speed up or slow down, and this keeps the frequency stable.
Molten salt plants use these same, heavy steam turbines, and so will act to keep the network stable like traditional plants.
It is when this first system is not enough that batteries and gas turbines come online, to support the network while steam plants ramp up their fuel burn (or molten salts increase their steam generation, which should be faster than coal- or oil-fired plants can). Batteries can also absorb power while plants overproduce if the load unexpectedly drops.
Prediction for end of Universe #42: Fencepost error in Quantum_bogosort.cpp
Is in what is called "ancillary services".
If the 90% efficiency as claimed, is true, then, a big battery as the power grid ancillary service could be duplicated in other countries
Perhaps Tesla could make lots of money by selling the Chinese lots and lots of big batteries as 'ancillary services' for the Chinese national power grid
The battery is in South Australia which is notoriously flat. The nearest significant hydro power would be 1000km to the east and even there it may be short of water some of the time.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Utter fucking stupidity troll.
If you has any idea, you would know the battery is in a remore rural area for start, never mind it not being able to get anywhere near the energy of a nuke bomb.
What a dumg fuctard you are, which part of the US are you from?
In Germany, in 2012 the law was changed to require certain mechanisms for load smoothing in solar generation. Medium to large solar plants have to provide a "remote control" for the grid operator to reduce their output in case of excess generation.
Small solar plants may use a fixed maximum output of 70% of installed capacity instead. That cuts the generation peaks at noon when solar output is highest, and also helps to avoid excess generation.
C - the footgun of programming languages
"Gas turbines on the other hand do not, and neither does hydro. Both are commonly used for load balancing specifically for this reason. The comparison is... odd."
Yeah. They should have compared it to all those hydro installations in the desert.
you have to take into account the full service cost of the battery array, when all of it needs to be replaced.
It's not the miracle solution you think.
What happens when there are two of them? Will the grid overload or go into instability?
They just use them as needed. No problems would be created. But if the first battery handles 90% of the needs, they have no need for another one, or at least another of that size.
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SA power prices are some of the most expensive in the world. At one point they were the most expensive. Minimal interconnection has driven up the price, gold plating of the distribution network and generators that game the market to get maximum price.
Ultimately the cost of privatisation. This battery is well overdue and has effectively handicapped existing generators from gaming the market.
Area51 - We are watching...
Gas powered turbines or hydro cannot respond as fast as a battery. Grids love battery.
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
You mean like the Hoover Dam that is in the middle of the desert?
You mean like the Hoover Dam that is in the middle of the desert?
Yes, all of the Hoover Dams in Southern Australia.
Inheritance is the sincerest form of nepotism.
Yes, and there's the Aswan dam. Note that the story is about Australia, though.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Gas turbine on the other hand can be installed pretty much anywhere. I'm speaking from personal experience, which is on pretty much the opposite side of the world, where there is some elevation and some flowing rivers.
But in most cases, gas turbine is probably the most reliable, quick and resilient after hydro when it comes to spinning reserve.
They don't have to. Grids have existed for something around a hundred years now. Pretty much anything and everything hooked to the grid can handle short term frequency fluctuations. It's literally required to.
Producing "better than needed" is of negative value in industrial capacity, because it means you overbuilt it. The key aspect of engineering on industrial scale is getting the product into the sweet spot, where it's just good enough to meet the need. Which means that end client pays for his exact needs, and not extra needs he doesn't have.
And when you're talking industrial scale, you're talking costs vs benefits.
I mean, you only have what, pretty much every river in deserts that is ever dammed. Such as, say, Nile?
Please don't talk about things you know nothing about beyond pop culture garbage. No, nuclear doesn't glow, and yes, many dams are built literally in the middle of the desert specifically to provide irrigation in addition to power to certain desertified areas.
These batteries can be dispersed all around the grid. It can improve the power factor of inductive load dominated sub-grids and transformers.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
The obvious question is, why won't government step in and manage the distribution by capping profits to certain percentage of revenue? This is a fairly common action to take when privatizing large monopolistic actors such as power grid providers.
Heck, Australian investors actually own a sizable chunk of my nation's power grid. We had problems with them just raising prices to the maximum allowed on yearly basis. That's why you put such limits in place. To prevent monopolistic, anti-competitive actors from raising costs on the users.
>No, nuclear doesn't glow
Did Cherenkov radiation stop happening?
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
This is industrial deployment, not hipster tech. Every little bit of the tech you're overbuilding raises prices for everyone.
We could certainly put a power generation on every corner. It would cost you, just as the kind of deployment you're suggesting would. But it is possible, and it would certainly improve power factor of inductive load dominated sub-grids and transformers as you put it.
One thing that most people forget in industrial deployment, is that you need to get it just right. Not too much, and not too little. Too little, and you suffer blackouts and brownouts. Too much, and everyone is overpaying for infrastructure, and your region rapidly loses any heavy industry it ever had while everyone else looks at moving out to a region with lower living costs for basics.
South Australia appears to be one of those special places where power costs are nutty specifically because of power generation oligopolies. And even then, their other boast in addition to "lower costs" is "we overbuilt it and are providing quality that is better than needed and utterly irrelevant".
This story is really about Australia's screwed up energy market and lack of infrastructure.
love is just extroverted narcissism
that make sense. This is a good change. Cars with batteries - well do not make too much sense to me. This seems to be a modern solution to some problems that we have and one that actually works and is feasible not only technically but also financially.
Actually, Gas turbines are still too slow for truly handling the frequencies and load following. However, batteries are far too expensive to handle the load for LONG periods of times. The combo of these really does make good sense. As to using steam, yeah, a bit surprised, but they are probably taking a couple of their old systems and using it for that.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Good point. Still frequencies and voltage DO matter to a number of equipment esp electronics. Battery combined with steam (which is more cheaper to run than turbines) appears to be a decent solution. I just wonder if it is cheaper and cleaner.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Seriously, any of the old coal plants that are being shut down, would be ideal to simply install a heavily insulated salt tank and use it for converting excess electricity to heat and then load following as needed. It could be backed up by nat gas if needed. Nice cheap way to convert old equipment into cheap storage.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Most electronics will handle wide variations in frequency and voltage. Pretty much everything uses "universal" power supplies which will happily work from 47 to 63 Hz, and 100 to 264 VAC. This is probably more about the grid not shorting itself out, with a massively wide spacing between generation systems getting out of sync and trying to drive the grid at different frequencies or voltages.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Yeah; that's the problem: THE CURRENT SYSTEM. At its heart, it is 1800s technology STILL being flogged to serve today. We really need to completely overhaul the entire grid, but the people who would have to pay for it are the people making all the money from THE CURRENT SYSTEM and its inefficiency.
The whole point of the battery is that it is the FIRST response, not the LAST response to surge current demands. Tesla has shown pretty conclusively with this trial that trying to feed the grid directly from the turbine is grossly wasteful; however this wasteful state is precisely where Big Energy has long made the most profit.
In all reality, this will not change until the last drop of dead dinosaurs and the last fart of natural gas is burned by these a-holes; then they'll be demanding we let them burn effing COAL again. :facepalm:
If we don't dismantle the CURRENT SYSTEM, build actual green energy instead of making one stopgap after another decade after decade, and stop BURNING STUFF to make electricity, we as a species are DOOMED. ANYTHING that prolongs our change from the CURRENT SYSTEM to the latter is just exponentially increasing the cost to our grandchildren.
We are ALREADY at the point where this cost will likely be inescapable decimation of the human population; we need to face that and try to fix it instead of engaging in still more of the politics of rats on a burning ship, which is what we've been doing for the last 40 years.
Cheers,
mnem
Pants are highly overrated.
Does the dam have to be in SA? Why can't it be in another State? The added delay between spooling up additional output from a dam in Darwin for power in Port Lincoln should be about 10 milliseconds, given the speed of electricity. You can basically have generation spread everywhere and pay essentially zero penalty for "delay" of transmission, thanks to that 300,000 km/s velocity of electricity.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Well, it IS Australia, they did build the massive Darwin River Dam, that holds back a huge amount of water - and didn't put a single turbine on it... Not the best thinking there...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
There are two types of power, base and peak. Base is usually something big and steady that doesn't change easily, like nuclear, large coal, etc. Peak is used when the grid has temporary (4 hour duration to minutes) demands. This is usually a gas turbine which is kept at idle until demand increases ("spinning reserve").
The gas turbine is much more expensive per kWh than base load plants. This has driven energy storage development (such as pumping water uphill at night and running a hydro turbine off of it during peak) because it would be much cheaper to have a larger amount of base load and just store the extra until it's needed. Unfortunately, most of the pump-drain solutions have low efficiencies.
I'm guessing the Tesla Industrial Powerwall whatever eliminated a lot of those inefficiencies and reduced the mega-engineering investment required for pump-drain storage, which is where the cost savings come from.
- Sig
Not to mention alpha rays ionizing the air around to make it fluoresce. Nuclear does glow, if it has high enough activity of right radiation.
I think the problem was that they weren't connected enough to the greater grid.
That's why the battery was needed, it was the cheaper solution.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
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California, probably.
...we are to trust the analysis of someone who uses watt/h as a unit... of... um... what exactly?
Still frequencies and voltage DO matter to a number of equipment esp electronics.
What electronics? Most electronics based on switching circuits will happily accept 50Hz or 60Hz. and significant variations from there. The remainder of electronics are more than happy with quite significant deviations. In order to even be qualified to be plugged into the outlet you need to be able to handle -6/+4% deviations (on a 50% power system). By comparison the frequency regulator will attempt to maintain +/-1%. Many grid connected systems will trip out on under / over frequency long before you get to that -6/+4% range. Our own 50MW turbines can't handle more than a 2% deviation. Chances are if you're hitting that -6% mark it's because a chunk of the country is now sitting in darkness.
Right, the world's electricity doesn't work. We don't have stable grids. They're all crashing all the time because of lack of batteries.
In the real world on the other hand, this technology has been working for what, a hundred years at this point?
Not sure what you are talking about, gas turbines are cheap power in the US where gas is super cheap. Both coal and gas load follow, but gas is pretty fast response so it matches well with solar and wind, as well as matching any rapidly changing demand.
With batteries you pay for power twice. Once for generating, then again for storing. They are very fast acting so can be useful in certain places where the grid cannot adequately handle stresses, mostly frequency response and voltage support. The US grid doesn't not have many places where those issues are big enough to warrant spending on batteries. South Australia had a particularly bad situation with inadequate transmission lines supplying remote generation.
The other folks already addressed your strange misconceptions about how modern electronics work. Hint: Stable grids have existed for close to a century now. That's before the digital computers, when load balancing was done literally by people, manually. You do not need the kind of fine control that this battery tech supposedly provides. It's like someone trying to sell you a residential tap that can manage temperature switching in millionth of degree increments. You do not need this kind of accuracy, and you do not want to be paying for it either. It's doable, but utterly useless.
Which gets us to the second point. It is hypothetically possible that battery installation is going to be cheaper in some limited conditions. Overall however, this is/has not:
1. Producer of energy. You still need to get that power somewhere.
2. Anything even close to 1:1 input to output ratio, which means it loses power. Likely in significant amounts.
3. Cheap to install, and not likely cheap to maintain either. This is where it might eventually become cheap enough for some edge case usage scenarios. Unlikely to become cheap enough to be efficient for any kind of a sizeable roll out. This one is actually quite simply about economies of scale. The sheer amount of lithum you'd need to balance grids world wide would require a complete rethink on how we extract lithium in the first place. The amounts we can get by basically spreading water over desert and letting the sun dry it out is nowhere near required. So if this ever goes beyond edge case usage, it will simply kill itself with increase of raw materials costs.
A gas turbine yields significant power after 10 seconds, around 30 seconds it is at 50% power and 100% is less than a minute.
Depending what your purpose of your (reserve power?) plant is, you just take several of the turbines.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
There are two types of power, base and peak.
That is a financial distinction.
From a power grid point of few that is irrelevant. Here you have:
Base, same as above, and load following. You have to load follow all the time, regardless if you are ramping up in the morning, follow the shifting peak over daytime, or follow down to base in the night.
Peak has no real counterpart, it is just load following.
Then you have "balancing power", fast reacting plants (and that has nothing to do with peak, you need them all the time), you really need them 24/24 ... not only at peak.
Then you have "reserve power", a 3 or 4 step set of reserve power plants that either can take over "load following", or even base load.
(Sidenote: a typical peak load plant obviously could also provide base load, but not for the price of a typical base load plant)
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Which is why every home should have a 10kwh or so battery backup tied directly to the grid from inside their house. It can charge from mains or local solar/ wind options.
If not that then every substation should get a couple of megwatts of batteries. That way as the grid fluctates power does and load balances itself nicely.
No more lights going down because a drink hit atree 10 miles away
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
"...So it's 2 percent of the capacity in South Australia achieving 55 percent of the revenues in South Australia."
It's providing 55% of FCAS, not electricity - the 100MW battery represents 2% of the energy in AU.
What does this mean? Where is the FCAS charged on my residential electric bill? Will customers see a savings on their electric bill? How much does FCAS represent for each KW consumed?
This is like saying the new printer in the office is printing 55% of the pages for an office and is printing those pages at a 90% savings over the old printer - big deal, something no one outside the electric company ever thought about is now cheaper.
Wow.
Ken
You want to pay to run a cable from Nevada to Australia?
you idiot
What part of "OR" do yo u not get...e.g. I even in Southern Australia you've got the technology to install a Gas Turbine.
The option wasn't JUST hydro. Geez, I guess if you want to just be contrary and difficult ignoring reality is an option, but people tend to ignore you after a while.
Australia is pretty flat. Also where the battery is, South Australia is known as 'the driest state in the driest continent on Earth'. (they don't count Antarctica).
Don't expect water to be much help there.
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My understanding is that many grids in 3rd world nations have lots of issues with frequency and voltage. My old GF was from Panama and had issues. Other friends and in-laws have come from India, Mexico, and Costa Rica. I have heard over and over about having electrical items burn up/out. OTOH, relatives/friends from Germany, Scotland, SOuth Korea, and Japan have never mentioned having electrical issues.
America's grids survive due to shear size. Basically, you can borrow electricity from another part of the grid while your turbines are ramping up.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Samsung TVs exploded too and washing machines.
So what? Save you a few bucks having to watch a Michael Bay movie :)
I canâ(TM)t imagine not having my Galaxy... itâ(TM)s fucking Korean dude.... mmmm Korean.
Fuck iPhones.
I've seen pics of these batteries dozens of times, they appear to be in a fairly arid region of South Australia.
Why on earth is there not a simple tarpaulin / tent or something set up above the batteries to significantly reduce the heat on them? Surely they get, bloody hot and it damages them over time.
Since I'm not an engineer, I'll assume there's a very logical explanation.
I Will say though, if you don't know, SA can get very very hot, near as high as 50c at times, an metal box in the desert would likely exceed that even.
That must be why they are already using it, and someone wrote a slashdot article about it...
In order to make use of pumping water up a hill, you need an actual hill. Some parts of the world are really quite flat.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Your understanding is ignorant at best, and just plain idiotic at worst. The main reason why 3rd world grids have problems is because they're underdeveloped in terms of infrastructure, which is one of the definition for "developing" country status. It's the same problem why they have severe problems with other public services as well.
The fact that most of developed countries didn't have a major blackout for decades should be more than enough to tell you that you're categorically wrong in your understanding of how grids work.
So, is this kind of radiation present in nuclear plants?
The trolls are getting really awful lately.
Sure. Said battery will cost you more than your house. Likely your neighbourhood's houses too.
That is if you actually push all houses to have it. For purposes of reliability utterly irrelevant in residential use.
See, this is the part that I used to enjoy about slashdot of the old, that I really don't like about the current one. It's full of opinionated and ignorant people talking about things they have absolutely no understanding on outside popular culture references. As a result, they make claims that are beyond idiotic.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=whic...
Apparently they do.
Australia is the driest *inhabited* continent.
That said, even South Australia has 185 potential pumped hydro sites that may be able to store 500GWh of energy:
http://www.anu.edu.au/news/all...
I suspect if Australia can do it (in theory) then other, more uppy/downy-ground nations could do it also?
So it's not all bad news, Australia could, in theory, become 100% renewable in a very short time. It's not like there is a lack of space for PV panels, solar thermal, geothermal, wave, wind or alt-nuclear generation. As a very geologically stable continent it could even charge (up front...) to store other nations nuclear waste, enabling it to fund renewable power construction.
This must worry those heavily invested in traditional power generation.
Apparently they do.
= Yes you are right.
All those potential sites, and still they went with the biggest battery in the world instead...
Even with potential sites, you still need to find enough 'potential water' to make use of them.
What the fuck are you smoking? TFA tells you you are full of shit. It saved 90% of the money. Why don't you email them and let them know it's not needed and save them the full 100%?
Because the initial problem the big battery was meant to solve the problem of the link between the states having problems/ being disconnected. As an added bonus it makes the entire countries grid more stable, but that wasn't its main role. Mostly it was put in because they are relying heavily on wind/solar and need the balancing due to that.
If the link goes down again, they can stabilise their own section instead of having a blackout of the entire state.
Your understanding of just about any topic is worth about a pinch of salt. After it's already been thrown over your shoulder in a category 5 hurricane.
3rd world anything will have issues, that's why they are 3rd world.
There are a few theoretical reasons the frequency matters. i.e. any type of power factor compensation added on the lines (capacitors) are tuned assuming the nominal frequency. Conventional transformers within the grid itself are designed to a particular frequency. How much variation there is and how much efficiency that steals from the system, I don't really know.
There is one particular aspect that did matter a lot in the past: synchronous motors, i.e. clocks were a simple way for consumers to have accurate timekeeping. It was so important that grid frequency was/is regulated by law in many places. That is probably mostly irrelevant now in the digital era, but still a legacy thing.
Read onward in this thread. There are several people that explain in significant detail why it's utterly irrelevant in real life applications.
Remember the time when ACs on slashdot actually could comprehend written text and not just suddenly kneejerk bomb the long conversation with "I didn't read this discussion thread, TFA said this, you appear contradict it at a glance, therefore you're wrong!"
Yes.
There was also Elon's bet with South Australia, and the fact that it's using largely proven technology, and it is quite fast to set up (Elon didn't lose his bet).
Pumped hydro takes years to set up, not weeks.
I hear cows also fly.
(If you ship then in an airplane, but just like you just did, we'll ignore that caveat).
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Are you agreeing with me again?
Pumped hydro is a bit more than largely proven as well.
Yes, it seems so.
That battery is making money and saving more, apparently it's been very effective in load or frequency balancing, or whatever it can do.
https://247wallst.com/energy-b...
And while pumped hydro is certainly well proven, you'd still be getting planning permission and building approval at this stage, assuming you've acquired a suitable site, and yes, water. Yet the battery has been up, running, and earning money for many months now.
Now all we need is more lithium (or a high performance, safer and cheaper alternative... :)