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Tesla Unveils New Large Powerpack Project For Grid Balancing In Europe (electrek.co)
Tesla has unveiled a new large Powerpack energy storage project to be used as a virtual power plant for grid balancing in Europe. It consists of 140 Powerpacks and several Tesla inverters for a total power output of 18.2 MW. Electrek reports: Tesla partnered with Restore, a demand response aggregator, to build the system and offer balancing services to European transmission system operators. Instead of using gas generators and steam turbines kicking to compensate for losses of power on the grid, Tesla's batteries are charged when there's excess power and then discharge when there's a need for more power.
Restore UK Vice President Louis Burford told The Energyst that they are bundling their assets like batteries as a "synthetic pool": "By creating synthetic pools or portfolios, you reduce the technical requirements on individual assets that otherwise would not be able to participate [in certain balancing services]. By doing so you create value where it does not ordinarily exist. That is only achievable through synthetic portfolios." For those interested, Tesla has released promo video on YouTube about the project.
Restore UK Vice President Louis Burford told The Energyst that they are bundling their assets like batteries as a "synthetic pool": "By creating synthetic pools or portfolios, you reduce the technical requirements on individual assets that otherwise would not be able to participate [in certain balancing services]. By doing so you create value where it does not ordinarily exist. That is only achievable through synthetic portfolios." For those interested, Tesla has released promo video on YouTube about the project.
Sounds good in theory. Batteries aren't cheap, and these don't have huge capacity. The big deal is that they can instantly meet the drops or absorb the peaks. But guess what, they grid does this pretty good on its own already. All this does is reduce the need for idling "spinning reserve".
A couple problems with that. The battery defeats the value of the gas turbine in providing "fast" response regulation up or down-- the turbine is no longer the go-to fast response source. Secondly, storage is generally most valuable close to demand, and not close to generation.
Where batteries will help is plants that cannot be competitively spun up and down fast enough for grid "fast" response-- they can use the battery to achieve a better ramp rate. Unfortunately, prices need to drop nearly an order of magnitude for the value to stack there.
The most logical solution is to fit out the existing power plant and interconnections. Solar panel every roof in the suburbs and double battery pack them and you are mostly done, by far the most competitive solution, especially financially speaking. This because the fit out can be financed in depth, for example some people who can afford it, can directly invest in it, by fitting out their own property to produce more electricity than they need, store the excess during the day and sell it at night. Others of course could lease to buy, still getting their electricity and selling the excess to help with the lease. The cheapest option, the home owner does nothing and simply allows it to be installed for a discount on their electrical price with an option to buy out the equipment in the future. For property investors, they can really effectively invest in their property by fitting it out, and selling electricity to their tenant at the market rate, whilst selling the excess back to the grid, a lot more people could become power plant operators.
This only really works in some countries (AU and US lots and lots and lots of burbs) and for the EU only some cities, most are built up with close in rural, not much suburbia. So on the whole a larger installation makes sense but in the smaller cities with a higher proportion of suburbia, that distributed power generation and storage makes much more sense.
Still the first company to jump and offer it, will win a decided lead in market share ie owning the solar system and batteries on other peoples properties and basically providing market access with collective bargaining. They can hit the market for a better price for their clients, a much better price and keep a percentage as ongoing sales, whilst of course generating much zero tax income. Zero tax because profits from sales of equipment would be covered by tax deduction by direct investment in equipment, poorer suburbs investment covering profits from middle class suburbs.
The power companies will be slow threatens existing power plant investments. Manufacturers of course not so much, it really suits them, hell, even a corporation like Amazon could jump into distributed power generation and storage, using their global buying power to generate that investment opportunity. This is a real snooze and you lose investment, those who get in first, will basically lock up the markets (specific cities, the best ones) they gain a market share lead in.
Coal is fucked.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
I have a hunch this is Tesla's true end game. I don't think Musk honestly believes he'll reach $650B market cap in 10 years by selling cars. I think he believes he'll reach $650B market cap by selling these. By turning his gigafactory into a "product" that can be mass-produced, he'll be able to scale up and deploy at a rate and cost that nobody else can match.
Leaving the gigafactory off as collateral in Tesla's last bond issue is pretty interesting as well.
Maybe making electric cars, and giving away patents, was the excuse he created in order to justify the creation of the gigafactory in the first place? It's like giving away lanterns to sell kerosene.
If this is the case, Tesla intends to be this century's Standard Oil -- a company that makes stored energy more accessible.
Hey may never have intended automobile production to be profitable. Maybe he just wants the world to demand his batteries.
Maybe Tesla's, or maybe someone else's. Tesla isn't the only battery maker
True, but Tesla are the biggest, thus you would expect them to be able to supply more easily and more cheaply.
Why leave money on the table for someone else to grab with a battery only solution?
Also true, but Tesla is selling a complete end to end to solution of out box now. Any other option, while it may be better and cheaper, probably requires someone to design, build, test, project manage multiple suppliers etc which means risk and delays. A bird in the hand etc.
If the grid did this well already, then Tesla's batteries wouldn't be having such a massive impact on the cost of balancing.
In terms of responsiveness, coal and oil plants are like 7200 rpm 3Gbps SATA HDDs, Nuke plants are like 5400 rpm IDE HDDs in RAID 0. Gas plants are like SSDs. Batteries are like L3 cache. Solar and wind are network connections, the former giving a relatively fixed amount of data over the day which changes by the hour, and the latter shoving random amounts of data down the pipe.
Secondly, storage is generally most valuable close to demand, and not close to generation.
That depends on the purpose of the storage. Storage designated for grid stability (e.g. batteries rapidly compensating a shift in frequency while peakers come online) is most valuable close to the generation. The lights stay on if the generators don't trip on load/frequency deviations.
Storage for the purpose of dispensing energy continuously at regular intervals (e.g. batteries compensating for the peak demand after sunset) however is most valuable close to demand as there are less system losses.
They just announced they are building a Giga-factory in China that will produce both batteries and cars: https://electrek.co/2018/05/14...
Elon Musk has nothing to teach here.
A battery responds faster (sub-second response times), takes up less space, and potentially has less environmental impact depending on electrolyte chemistry. Sounds like you could learn something.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Storage designated for grid stability (e.g. batteries rapidly compensating a shift in frequency while peakers come online) is most valuable close to the generation.
Not true. Storage for grid stability is most valuable in the portion of the grid that is susceptible to instability. South Australia is a great example. They have instability due to the great distance of much of the generation supply over a inadequate transmission infrastructure.
Not sure how big a battery with a 1728MW power output and a capacity of 9.1GWh (33 TJ) is, but I suspect at least as large as Dinorwig is. The environmental impact of which is basically limited to arctic char going extinct in the feed lake. Though that might well be in part due to the fact they where mostly moved to other suitable lakes before it when live.
However Dinorwig takes 16 seconds to go from nothing to full power and that requires the turbines are being spun in air prior to opening the valves. Otherwise it takes in the order of 90s to get to full power. I would expect a battery to be sub one second.
Though a quick Wikipedia check shows that China alone has 6.6GW of pumped storage under construction. In Europe Ukraine is building 2.2GW of pumped storage.
Batteries have a place for short term grid stability or places where pumped storage is not viable. However for Europe and North America at least pumped storage is probably more viable for grid stability at the ~1minute plus range than a battery pack.