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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.
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.
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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
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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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.
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.
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"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.
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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.
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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
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.
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.
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.
Converting a high quality form of energy - electricity - into a low grade form (heat) to store it is a terrible idea. The conversion rate for solar thermal is only about 40%. Some form if kinetic or potential energy are much better - several can do 80% or better.
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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.
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.