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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.
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.
"I have a hunch this is Tesla's true end game"
Tesla CTO JB Straubel in 2014 - "“We are an energy innovation company as much as a car company.....“Tesla wasn’t founded to make cars. We have enough cars. We have *too many* cars. Tesla was founded to change the game in energy.....I really love batteries, I might love batteries more than cars"
https://electrek.co/2014/05/24...
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
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.