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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?
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.
The battery's purpose isn't power generation, it's load smoothing, like a capacitor in electronics. It has to be able to provide (or absorb) a lot of power in a very short time (milliseconds to seconds) to keep the grid in spec; solar can't do that, fuel-powered generators respond too slow, etc.
So even if they built a solar/salt power station, they'd still need the battery.
You lost me at "real hippies worked"
The battery's purpose isn't power generation, it's load smoothing, like a capacitor in electronics. It has to be able to provide (or absorb) a lot of power in a very short time (milliseconds to seconds) to keep the grid in spec; solar can't do that, fuel-powered generators respond too slow, etc.
So even if they built a solar/salt power station, they'd still need the battery.
Because of the large number of inverters in a utility-scale solar plant, it can provide reactive power, even when not feeding the grid, ie, when the sun isn't shining.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
Yeah we know. The summary already stated that.
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?
Reality is, a new power plant in every city. Basically every residence in the burbs with their entire roof with solar panels. One battery pack for their household and one battery pack for the grid. The power station and grid is already built, all you need is the generators, solar panels and batteries and every typical western city now has a new already build power station and they only need to fit it out. Reason why a second battery pack, it takes surplus energy from homes and uses it for commercial and medium/high density housing. You still need power planets for industrial and likely for vehicle charging and isolated major battery storage to balance out renewables on a large scale. You would still likely need nuclear, just the right design, to ensure energy reliability (don't want a major hail storm to put you city right out of business for month on end, slowly adding replacement panels at the current rate rather than an overnight replacement of millions of panels). That nuclear can also be used for high energy recycling for zero waste cities (more effective to use energy than to dump material and find it's replacement).
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
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
This is already being charged by wind power. Why would switching to solar suddenly make it much more efficient?
Over 50% of South Australia's electricity comes from sun and wind-based sources, so perhaps you need to educate yourself before jumping to conclusions.
Well it was built to stabilise a nearby wind farm, but yeah I don't think it cares where the power comes from to charge it.
The Australian Energy Market Operator, which operates the grid, is essentially a large integer linear program (CPLEX, I believe). It know what equipment is attached to the distribution grid and what the demand is, and it decides what lines get turned on (and in which direction; the Bass Straight connection can work both ways, for example) and whether storage systems are storing or draining and whether new turbines get turned on. It optimises for overall cost.
The thing that complicates it is that the Hornsdale battery reacts faster than the integer linear program. A pumped hydro system (such as you find in the Snowy Mountains) can't turn from storing to generating anywhere near as fast as the battery can. So while the AEMO is working how how best to balance the grid, Hornsdale has already started doing it.
That's one of the reasons the existing power companies didn't like it: they all realised that they wouldn't get paid as much because by the time AEMO decided who should be pumping energy into the system, Hornsdale would already be doing it.
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Getting naked and tripping balls in the Haight isn't considered work by anyone outside of hippies.
Now don't you have a regimen of pills to take before pudding night at the home?
Oddly, a "real hippy" is probably his boss now.
I don't trust atoms -- they make up stuff.
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.
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
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
SA has not has a significant power outage for two years now. Our grid is working very well indeed thanks.
Bass Straight
Apparently autocorrect has not heard of Bass Strait. It's the water between Victoria and Tasmania.
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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.
Where do you get 3 years?
My car is a 2013, the battery is nowhere close to needing to be replaced, and I'm not exactly nice to it, most days I use pretty close to its full capacity, and charge it back to 100% every night.
No, 3 years isn't even close. You can probably expect 10 to 20 years out of an appropriately sized lithium ion battery bank.
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.
The grid isn't screwed. It's actually in excellent shape and getting it into that position has been a fundamental drive in the retail power price. The so called "gold plating" of our grid, combined with a disperse population, traditional generation far away from population centres, and most recently home solar all contribute to the high price.
How does home solar contribute? Well a portion of our electricity bill goes to grid maintenance. In my own state over 30% of houses have solar panels. That's 30% no longer paying for grid maintenance, and in many cases, actually being paid thanks to net metering.
Want to roll back the cost of electricity? Just run for government office with the position that people shouldn't pay for or expect reliable power. That's been done twice in my recent memory and both those incumbent premiers proceeded to lose the election.
Because of the large number of inverters in a utility-scale solar plant, it can provide reactive power, even when not feeding the grid, ie, when the sun isn't shining.
Most inverters are capable of VAR management, but solar farm developers in most places generally don't want to pay for the extra SCADA to manage it, nor do they want to oversize their inverters.
Well it was built to stabilise a nearby wind farm, but yeah I don't think it cares where the power comes from to charge it.
Would make sense to charge when power is cheap or negative ( get paid to absorb power) and fees back when need stability or prices go up.
No, it did not stabilize a wind farm. It stabilizes grid transients due to limitations of the transmission system serving the region.
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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)
wow.. just how out of date are you? pssst. its the 21st century not the 19th.
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
The point of Hornsdale is to provide power REALLY fast to keep the grid in balance (in terms of frequency and voltage) should there be a sudden drop in power output of a major generator or generators ( wind farms or solar plants) or a sudden spike in demand in order to then allow slower sources of power like gas turbines to spin up and provide proper replacement to the grid.
Its entirely possible that (in certain circumstances) the sudden spike in demand or drop in supply will only be very short and Hornsdale can provide enough to tide things over without any of the gas turbines or other sources needing to kick in at all
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.
More likely a "former hippy".
The ascent of Stan
Textbook hippie man
Get rest while you can
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
It wasn't. It was built to stabilise the grid, the goals are slightly different.
A power grid requires a precise balance between supply and demand to exist at all times. If that balance is disturbed, then there can be rapid collapse. This happened in the major South Australia blackout in 2016; which occurred when a major power line failed causing a supply deficit. The deficit was large and most of the major power plants in the region were shut down to allow wind and solar to operate. Wind and solar farms have no supply response capability, so could not assist. The few fossil fuel plants which were active at the time used all their reserve power to make up the deficit. This should have been enough to stabilise the grid, however, the system continued to deteriorate due to an unexpected problem: the wind farms in the region started shutting down on an undocumented (*) safety system which protects the wind turbines from grid instability; this caused a chain reaction making the grid instability progressively worse, until collapse was assured.
The grid operator AEMO (like grid operators in other countries) pays generators (and other companies) for grid stability services, which means a capability to rapidly increase or decrease demand/supply in the event of a grid imbalance.
Due to the nature of the SA grid, with weak long power lines, low demand and high wind/solar generation without the capability for supply response, the fossil power plants in the region were being paid huge grid stability fees to run their plants at idle, just so that they could step on the gas in the event of a power line failure or power plant failure.
The wind farm operator decided to get in on this stability services market by procuring a battery grid stability system. With the battery, they have secured a long-term contract with AEMO for supply of 30 MW-20 minute stability services. The battery is oversized for this, and allows the battery owner to bid for supply of additional stability services on a day-to-day basis when prevailing grid conditions require additional supply of stability services.
The spare battery capacity when not being reserved for grid stability usage, can be used by the battery owner for price arbitrage - charging using low cost overnight power and discharging at peak times when power costs are high. However, the main business case was income from supply of stability services. The key issue here is that the performance and location of the battery are ideal for grid stability services and its generous supply has greatly reduced the market price of stability services.
(*) - generators connected to the grid have to have "fault ride through" capability - so that if there is a grid voltage anomaly, or a short grid interruption, the generator must not shut down. While the output is allowed to reduce in the event of low or absent grid voltage, it must immediately be restored once normal grid voltage returns. For example, if there is a brownout at 50% of normal voltage, the generator must not shut down for at least 1 second. In SA, the wind turbines officially complied with the ride through capability required and declared to the grid operator. However, the manufacturer included an undocumented setting which limited the number of ride through events in a given time period - once this limit was exceeded the ride through capability was disabled and the turbines would trip immediately on a grid problem. This was not declared to the grid operator and hence not included in their simulations and stability calculations.
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.
Seems like a bad idea to me. Grids rely on one entity being in control and calling the shots. When that control is lost and everyone starts doing their own thing, the potential for a mass blackout increases substantially.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
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.
Yep. A friend has a Tesla and put solar on his roof. He's never gone negative since.
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".
>the Hornsdale battery reacts faster than the integer linear program
It's a good thing they didn't use a floating point linear program.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
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.
skip the solar portion. Just heat the salt with excess electricity and then be able to use the heat to drive steam. However, do note that even in that case, it STILL does not respond as fast as batteries. These guys are making a grid that should actually destroy less electronics on it than anything in America or Europe.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Yes, point conceded. The new institution.
Meet the new boss.
Same as the old boss.
I don't trust atoms -- they make up stuff.
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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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.
Because of the large number of inverters in a utility-scale solar plant, it can provide reactive power, even when not feeding the grid, ie, when the sun isn't shining.
Most inverters are capable of VAR management, but solar farm developers in most places generally don't want to pay for the extra SCADA to manage it, nor do they want to oversize their inverters.
It won't happen overnight but if there's money to be made, some will start doing it and more will follow. Unless the cost is *extremely* prohibitive, the appeal of making money when the sun is NOT shining will garner at least a few early adopters.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
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.
Because of the large number of inverters in a utility-scale solar plant, it can provide reactive power, even when not feeding the grid, ie, when the sun isn't shining.
Most inverters are capable of VAR management, but solar farm developers in most places generally don't want to pay for the extra SCADA to manage it, nor do they want to oversize their inverters.
It won't happen overnight but if there's money to be made, some will start doing it and more will follow. Unless the cost is *extremely* prohibitive, the appeal of making money when the sun is NOT shining will garner at least a few early adopters.
There isn't much money to be made in the US, but their are some general requirements put in place by NERC that can force it to happen. Traditionally, large plants provide plenty of ride-thru support in the US, so its not a big enough problem to warrant high payments for ancillary services, and those services are used relatively little.
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.
When people correct you, take a moment to contemplate that they may be right instead of going full Dunning-Kruger.
8 kWh/day is not 333 W/h, it's 333 W.
And while I can't speak for your electricity bill, mine is in Wh – not W/h.
The rest of your math seems to hold up, though I'd be more interested in math showing that the amortized cost of permanently parking a Tesla car in your garage is actually cheaper than grid electricity... color me skeptical.
"...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
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.
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.
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.
I'm not the poster who replied to you anonymously. But personally, I find that that discussions tend to be more engaging, intellectual and genuine when I don't open with a line like "So let me drop some cluebombs on your idiocy here broheim". YMMV.
Anyway, I can tell my attempt at engaging are falling flat, so I'll get out of your hair now.
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).
to 'sink' 8kW into a battery in an 8 hour day, you need a thousand watts of solar. which is a single mid-size panel.
Most of your calculations are pretty good. However, I have not seen any 1000 watt solar panels on the market. Medium mid-sized panels are 100 watts. Large panels are 250 watts.
So, you would not need one mid-sized panel. You would need 10! That's a lot of area, and a lot of money. It's more difficult than you think.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
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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... :)