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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 happens when there are two of them? Will the grid overload or go into instability?
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.
BoNeRs!
I wonder if this is sustainable?
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?
Someday there will be a mistake, and it will make Hiroshima look like a walk in the park.
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.
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
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
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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...we are to trust the analysis of someone who uses watt/h as a unit... of... um... what exactly?
"...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
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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.
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