Slashdot Mirror
Samoa Plans Switch To 100% Renewable Electricity -- Using Tesla's Batteries and Grid Controller (fastcompany.com)
An anonymous reader quotes Fast Company:
In seven years, the island nation of Samoa plans to run on 100% renewable electricity. Over the last year, the local utility has worked with Tesla to install a key piece of that plan -- battery storage, and also a software system that can control Samoa's entire electricity supply. In the past, like many islands, the country ran mostly on imported, expensive, and polluting diesel power. As recently as 2012, the country brought in 95 million liters of diesel.
Spurred by the cost and the threat of climate change -- Samoa is at particular risk from sea level rise and new outbreaks of climate-related diseases -- the country has been ramping up the use of renewables, with five large solar plants, a wind farm, and hydropower plants. But as renewable energy grew, the grid struggled with reliability.
"It had gotten to the point where just the solar, combined, could provide over half of the entire peak demand for the island, but they were having quite a few challenges managing that efficiently," says JB Straubel, Tesla's chief technical officer.... Tesla installed two of its "Powerpack" battery systems, and also developed and implemented island grid controller software that can control both the batteries and all of the power plants. "If a big cloud comes over the island and the solar drops very quickly, we can control the battery to make up the difference so we don't have to start a generator immediately, and we don't have to keep a generator running even when it might not be needed," says Straubel.
"It had gotten to the point where just the solar, combined, could provide over half of the entire peak demand for the island, but they were having quite a few challenges managing that efficiently," says JB Straubel, Tesla's chief technical officer.... Tesla installed two of its "Powerpack" battery systems, and also developed and implemented island grid controller software that can control both the batteries and all of the power plants. "If a big cloud comes over the island and the solar drops very quickly, we can control the battery to make up the difference so we don't have to start a generator immediately, and we don't have to keep a generator running even when it might not be needed," says Straubel.
Now that this is brought up, how does the Tesla power wall, solar cells, and battery operations affect Tesla's bottom line? Are these profitable profit centers?
I'm serious. The power drain of bitcoin mining is an incredible 24-hour powersink, and people have been rooting laptops, desktops, and critical infrastructure hosts to run it on botnets since it was first developed. It's an *insidious* 24x7 power drain on modern data centers. the advent of ARM chips at first led to smaller distributed devices without the resources or software to run these, but ehe growth of more fully capable ARM based operating systems has opened the door for putting these on devices throughout the Internet of Things (IOT).
This is about the non-american Somoa.
and more importantly, how "secure" will the grid be? Will it be Internet connected?
I also wonder if Tesla will be selling user power concumption stats to advertisers? /s
It will be disconnected from the public internet.
No. Tesla doesnt sell user data to advertisers, nor do they place ads on any of their platforms.
Glad I could clear that up for you
Given that the batteries are expensive, I'm sure there are significant capital costs. I doubt its more than the cost of the Diesel they are importing. 95 million liters are no joke.
Better for two reasons, it actually provides some data about the battery installation (it is 13.2 MWh of storage) and the site isn't packed with auto-play unstoppable video ad force-feeding like the FastCompany site.
But American Samoa, the U.S. territory, got Tesla batteries two years ago. This installation is 6 MWh, but since the population is much smaller (55,000 vs 195,000 for Samoa) it is enough to run the main island (Tutuila) for three days without needing any power production, and is nearly 100% renewable powered now.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
Is on Saipan, part of the Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas Islands. It was constructed back in 2014. And yes, Saipan is American and the system was built and is operated by a private business. It also works a hell of a lot better than the local government run utility company that the US government has poured millions into.
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
Woo woo - 100% free renewable power! But no mention of up-front capital costs. Given that batteries wear out and have to be replaced, some discussion of life-cycle cost would be interesting.
The summary links to a poor quality, ad-filled site, but this seems par for the course for /. these days. Even a tiny bit of effort Googling brings up more data though.
The entire project cost $8.8 million to install 13.5 MWh of storage, or $650/kWh, which is pretty good. The NREL (National Renewable Energy Laboratory) estimates the lifetime of a grid battery at 10 years. Estimates of swapping out new for old runs $250 kWh (the infrastructure and controllers are still in place, old batteries are recycled) so the average annual replacement cost runs $350,000, or about 3.8% of the original capital cost.
Pretty darn good! Woo hoo!
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
'This is about the non-american Somoa.'
Since this is a sensible decision we already suspected so.
Tesla has been investing in some research into longevity of the batteries.
So far it looks like they can maintain 80% charge after 800,000km traveled for the car batteries.
I'm not sure how that translates to the stationary batteries, because they have different power cycles, and a different chemistry optimized for their use, but overall should be pretty good.
Tesla has stated that battery recycling is part of the design of the factory that manufactures them, though I doubt it's become an issue yet.
Generally, I find it really hard to imagine that mining and refining the raw materials would be cheaper than getting them in the exact quantities and purity you need in per-packaged form.
Tesla is just selling batteries. If you look closely, it is at the center of everything from Elon Musk, except for the SpaceX, but SpaceX is special.
Electric cars are essentially batteries on wheels, as in, it is the only thing in an electric car that is not better and cheaper than in a gas car.
Tesla make batteries and cars with batteries, hyperloop is about battery powered trains, boring company intends to make tunnels for electric cars only, solarcity install solar panels (or tiles?) that charge batteries.
Consumer data is an asset of Tesla but it doesn't look like a master plan. Selling batteries does. And such news reinforce the idea that Tesla's batteries are the way forward. It is all they need. No need for user data, they aren't Google.
When people think of Tesla mostly they think of cars.
Those are doing well enough, sure, but longer term Tesla is more about battery tech than anything else - with cars just a part of that equation.
Tesla has been locking down a lot of supplies for batteries, like lithium. Tesla is really well positioned to dominate any field that needs batteries on a large scale.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
That seems quite high. I think that Tesla's battery costs are about $100/kWh.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
"Tesla has been investing in some research into longevity of the batteries.
So far it looks like they can maintain 80% charge after 800,000km traveled for the car batteries.
I'm not sure how that translates to the stationary batteries, because they have different power cycles, and a different chemistry optimized for their use, but overall should be pretty good"
I'm not convinced that Tesla's NCA battery cells are best suited for this use long-term; LiFePO4 should be much better and the greater number needed because of lower energy density should be offset by the lower cost and compactness is not such a big factor in large scale energy storage.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
And where are they sourcing lithium, cobalt, rare earth metals? Any consequences?
They've been reducing the amount of cobalt required, down from 11 kg per car for the original Roadster and early Model S to 7 kg for S and X beginning in 2016 and an estimated 4.5 kg for the Model 3
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
Current battery design uses 2.8% Cobalt. Next design, which is already tested, will have none.
Th rest is Lithium, Nickel, and Aluminum. No REMs.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Is that $100/kWh for just the battery, or for the battery, plus the grid control and infrastructure?
I've decided to Diversify my Holdings. I've divided my cash between my left and right pockets, instead of all in one.
I had not heard they found a way to eliminate the rare earth metals, seems like that would have been included in the bi-weekly /. "amazing new battery tech" posts.
I've decided to Diversify my Holdings. I've divided my cash between my left and right pockets, instead of all in one.
There are no rems in Tesla battery cells. The model 3 is using neodymium for 1 motor.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Is you'd done some research, you'd have found this... "Here is the first Fully Electric-Powered Airplane that is in mass production now and available to buy. It has a price tag lower than Tesla Model S (P100D) and 10x cheaper to run than its gasoline equivalent." https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
"rare-earth metals" is the name of a group of 17 elements of which only 1 element is rare. When the group was originally defined in around the year 1800 the elements were considered rare. But in modern times, that is no longer true and the elements are plentiful except for 1 element. Therefore, it is a misnomer to say that these elements are rare. The issue for battery manufacturing is geo-political rather than chemical.
Also, Cobalt is not in the group of rare-earth metals.
It would be very good for them to get off of anything they have to pay to bring in, that's for sure.
Ferret
Sic gorgiamus allos subjectatos nunc
This new tech was announced several years back and the first round of commercial production starts later this year or sometime next year. I forget when. Uses silicon. 30% high capacity and charges 8x faster, in the lab. In other labs, they forwent the faster charging and made it have 3x the cycles.
$2.5tril is about half a year of costs and subsidies for fossil fuels. Seems difficult to get numbers from an official source, but the articles I'm finding are claiming between $2tril and $5tril per year spent on fuel. So we spend 6 months of fuel costs to build a 100% renewable grid, then we start saving $2tril/year. What's the issue? That's ignoring the low end estimated $100bil/year healthcare costs caused by pollution from fossil fuel power plants.
Every year li-ion batteries get 10% cheaper and less polluting to create. Silicon li-ion is just starting production and is a pretty big improvement in every way. I see no reason to rush it, but we should be making a stronger effort.
They're not getting cash from the whims of some infinitely rich person. They're getting cash from venture capitalists that see no real losses. All of Tesla's "losses" are in the form of heavy investment into infrastructure. Even if Tesla closed their doors, the investors could sell off the assets for more than the amount they invested. Investing into Tesla is very low risk with a currently high return in the form of owning some portion of the very valuable assets.