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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?
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.
Flat-out wrong on the battery lifespan, to be honest.
3-5 years is what a laptop battery is expected to provide, 3 years when kept at 100% (which is bad for them) and randomly without warning discharged down super low (which is bad for them) instead of the long-lifecycle capacity patterns that fixed ground installations can use because weight is not really an issue.
http://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/how_to_prolong_lithium_based_batteries goes into a lot more math, but even EVs limit their batteries to the 25%-85% overall cell capacity for that reason. Fixed installations like this PowerBank can limit it further as needed, generally to the 45%-75% range as design parameters (so only charging to 4.0V instead of the "full" 4.2V per cell) and attempting to keep things in the 65-75% range as much as possible.
In the use-case of this power bank? It's meant to cover the first milliseconds and provide brief power dumps to cover other surges, allowing power generation that takes minutes to shift as load changes. So it's very likely staying inside of that 65-75 sweet-spot and these batteries will last 10+ years without a problem.
- WolfWings, too lazy to login to /.
My only real concern is how much battery waste this will lead to.
Lithium-ion batteries are 100% recyclable. Currently they are not recycled due to economics but that will change in the future either due to regulation or a shift in economics.
Cells need to be replaced every 3-5 years.
Actually, for grid scale stuff it's more likely to be every 20 years because they do not need to function at 100% capacity and Tesla has developed excellent technology to prolong the lifespan of their batteries due to their use in EVs. However, that's just for current battery technology. Solid state lithium-ion battery cells should have an increased the capacity and lifespan.
the only somewhat-environmentally-safe way to store energy long-term is thermal.
Wrong. Lithium-ion and sodium-ion batteries are both sustainable solutions.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
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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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.
My understanding is that the model is based on slow spin-up fossil plants, and doesn't accurately account for a battery that can go from 0 to 100% in a fraction of a second.
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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
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.
There are few if any places on the US grid where they have the stability problems that the Australian battery is being used to manage.
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.