Slashdot Mirror
Tesla's Giant Battery In Australia Saved $40 Million During Its First Year, Report Says (electrek.co)
Last December, Tesla switched on the world's biggest lithium ion battery in South Australia to feed the country's shaky power grid for the first day of summer. Neoen, the owner of the giant battery system, released a new report for the first full year of operation and revealed that the energy storage system saved about $40 million over the last 12 months. Electrek reports: The energy storage capacity is managed by Neoen, which operates the adjacent wind farm. They contracted Aurecon to evaluate the impact of the project and they estimate that the "battery allows annual savings in the wholesale market approaching $40 million by increased competition and removal of 35 MW local FCAS constraint." It is particularly impressive when you consider that the massive Tesla Powerpack system cost only $66 million, according to another report from Neoen. Here are the key findings from the report:
- Has contributed to the removal of the requirement for a 35 MW local Frequency Control Ancillary Service (FCAS), saving nearly $40 million per year in typical annual costs
- Has reduced the South Australian regulation FCAS price by 75% while also providing these services for other regions
- Provides a premium contingency service with response time of less than 100 milliseconds
- Helps protect South Australia from being separated from the National Electricity Market
- Is key to the Australian Energy Market Operator's (AEMO) and ElectraNet's System Integrity Protection Scheme (SIPS) which protects the SA-VIC Heywood Interconnector from overload
- Has contributed to the removal of the requirement for a 35 MW local Frequency Control Ancillary Service (FCAS), saving nearly $40 million per year in typical annual costs
- Has reduced the South Australian regulation FCAS price by 75% while also providing these services for other regions
- Provides a premium contingency service with response time of less than 100 milliseconds
- Helps protect South Australia from being separated from the National Electricity Market
- Is key to the Australian Energy Market Operator's (AEMO) and ElectraNet's System Integrity Protection Scheme (SIPS) which protects the SA-VIC Heywood Interconnector from overload
"Where's the tailpipe though, it can't work without a tailpipe, Daddy says!"
Were communications to its control computers *encrypted*??? ;-)
By my calculations on the back of a beer bottle, we need about 12 of these In each state and we all get free electricity!!!!!
It cost 66 million dollars. That's a 20 month break-even, presuming the performance doesn't drop too quickly or the system doesn't require too much maintenance. Naturally the performance will drop after two years, so while its first year of operation was financially impressive, it'll be interesting to revisit this project after, say, five years, by which time all the cells will have had to be replaced at least once.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
CEOs only care about fossil fuel kickbacks. Money is just a convenient way of measuring yachts, vacation houses, and all expense paid trips to corporate retreats.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
It's time to stop publishing these articles and start worshiping Elon
The AUS experience suggests an architecture at scale Grid Operators can site to reduce dependency, detrimental reliance on peaker plants and cut rates - aka clean up its image, reliability and rate structure givebacks.
“Helps protect South Australia from being separated from the National Electricity Market”
SA now doesn’t have enough generation capacity after the shutting down of their own coal power plants.
The words “National Electricity Market” = interstate coal power plants.
So, this battery helps the SA market have access to interstate coal power plants.
This is green?
They'll trade a dirty coal mine for an office park or factory production, or they'll starve and their blue unbrushed meth teeth will fall into their pabst and the sad generational poverty story will continue, but... weren't you guys the ones saying we couldn't pick winners and losers, the market should decide? Well it decided, your shit isn't worth doing. You want to live underground, move to South Africa. Plenty of work. Take your own free-market advice sometime, since you want to lord it over everyone else when they ask for investment. Enjoy your food stamps, ~55+% going to white rural Americans. Enjoy your minimum wage increase, your insurance coverage guarantees even if you're sick. Those aren't things a star-striped gun-pew'in Bush or a Trump or a Reagan gave you, no sir. Those are things they took AWAY from you. That they CONTINUE to try to take away, promising glory to the richest and you're all going to be the Corporation getting the tax cut, we promise. The brown water is safe to drink, just hold your nose and don't smoke. Hide in that coal mine too long, there won't be anything left to come back up for.
Face it, you've been cheated. You need a change. Lose the racism and pick up a rake, feckless entitled Republicans - or drop the attitude like everyone else is lazy, either one. I don't care which. Only you can prevent pants fires.
And if you want to be a big religious Christian prosthelyte, go for it - but you better say the Apostle's Creed when the camera's watching. Jesus was the original never-Trumper. He died for your sins and you'd kill him again.
Tesla switched on the world's biggest lithium ion battery in South Australia to feed the country's shaky power grid
South Australia, the place with the shaky power grid, isn't a country, it's a state. In fact it's power grid was so shaky it regularly had to buy power from the non-shaky grid in Victoria, which is also a state not a country.
I lick their nuts.
...I would have gone to reddit.
What happened to your class consciousness?
There are multiple solar farms in Australia that are currently not connected to the grid because they haven't been able to get their output stability to the point that the network operator will allow them to connect. The FCAS component of the farms always increased the cost and reduced the output significantly but was key to keeping the network stable.
This has been a relatively new change though, a couple of years ago solar compliance was taking a week to 10 days before allowing connection. Now it's out to 6 months or more. This unfortunately caused RCRTomlinson a large civil contractor to collapse as they had final payments on projects tied to the grid connection of projects.
https://reneweconomy.com.au/rc...
Every sector will see fundamental changes. 40% of the cost of tunneling is the HVAC system designed to remove diesel fumes from confined spaces. Replace diesel earth movers with battery powered ones, and you get a 40% cost savings. The Boring company cost savings is expected to be 40%. Coincidence?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Panasonic owns a lot of the battery tech, or part of the gigafactory, or something. I know they let Tesla put their name alone on everything, but I'm curious about the IP/ownership there.
Anyone have a good summary?
Your ad here. Ask me how!
The numbers say you're wrong, this saved over half its cost in 1 year. Even at a 5 year payback it still makes both market and grid logistical sense. It comes online way faster than new plants, and it's clean. Jobs.
It's literally a win in every direction pretty much anywhere power is being used, because it helps regulate the peaks and valleys, that's all it needs to do. You're being stupid to oppose such a basic solution. You are.
https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=12642660&cid=57354060 = THIS IS THE SAME LUCKYO MORON WHO EATS PLASTIC AND SAYS IT'S THE LATEST HEALTH TREND??? GTFO LYING IDIOT.
We've got enough denialist cowards here already thanks without your stomach-full of indigestible dunnage you swirling garbage patch personified.
You're sharpening your pencil to define it, but it's still already penciling out ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE AHEAD OF YOUR OIL SOLUTION IN EVERY WAY. Stop dithering, stop pretending, stop fake crunching numbers.
It works, it's cheap, it's 1/2 paid back in less than a year, and your excuses for continuing to doubt it's viable are as washed up as Trump's excuses for a Moscow Tower Project that he says everyone knew about.
Get honest or die learning how.
Saved who, specifically, $40 million? Who is it that's now $40 million richer than they would have been?
Certainly not energy consumers, they mostly pay fixed prices. Nor generators, they'll actually be worse off (they benefit from rapidly fluctuating spot prices). Electricity retailers would gain by smoothing out those fluctuations, but they pay for that gain in the form of hedging contracts - except now they're making some of those contracts with Neoen.
So I have to conclude that, if that money exists, most of it should be going to Neoen. So... how is their actual P&L sheet looking?
If they're not doing well financially out of this, then they're just blowing smoke, and this "$40 million" is about as meaningful as however many millions per week it was that the UK was supposed to save by leaving the EU.
You mean like you drill for oil in the Gulf, or how they still do mine for coal in Kentucky and West Virginia, as recklessly as is economically feasible?
If you demand that the customers must get that dividend, why not everywhere else? Cars are cheaper to make, but cars sold at high markups. Price per customer of internet is going down, wages for the workers in ISPs going down, yet prices go up faster than inflation. Insist that the savings of cheaper process should go to the customers, not the shareholders.
But you don't.
You only wonder who is getting that savings when the savings are from things your ideology wants you to hate.
Odd that.
It is about short term frequency and phase stabilization. It was a once of opportunity for a relatively small battery to do some good. And it was felt that if anyone tried to build a second battery to do the same the price for the stabilization would drop to the point that it would not be economical, and so that will not be done.
There are some plans in SA to store energy, by pumping sea water up to some old desert mines. Unclear whether they will go ahead.
And the big missed opportunity for South Australia is to store nuclear waste in the middle of nowhere on the Eyre peninsular. Could power their economy for decades. And SA already has lots of nuclear underground -- natural uranium deposits. Anyway, the politics of those words "Nuclear" and "Waste" were too much.
Incidentally, the geothermal plants that might be built there are actually nuclear powered. Not, like most geothermal, by being near the mantle, but rather being on top of a large, natural Uranium deposit.
Actual savings about 2.8 million, less than 10 per cent.
And that's giving their numbers the benefit of the doubt.
If you wreck the grid first driving up your costs.
"They contracted Aurecon to evaluate the impact of the project and they estimate that..."
All this says is that they hired Aurecon to gin up some PR. Nowhere does it say there are any savings actually fully attributable to the battery by anyone. Estimates are not news! They are just guesses about something you ought to know.
This is how you attract people to your side, by insulting them?
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
"The PROBLEM with Wind and Solar is that they are unreliable" - No, they're intermittent, but you will always have "some" load from solar during the day and almost invariably there is a fairly predictable wind.
If you scale them up enough, they surpass the load, and the excess is stored overnight using xyz storage tech, whether it's batteries or regenerators.
News flash - no power plant is 100% online. They account for that. You're a dithering moron making excuses using problems this product solves as your impetus and crutch at once.
Good. Free market capitalist economic theory is that all businesses should approach a zero percent profit margin. The only reason a business has a higher margin is if they are exploiting arbitrage of market inefficiencies at some level. That profit should attract competition which drives down margins.
Why would business invest at all in a competitive market? Because natural inflation should drive down the worth of their holding it they don't. I don't want any supplier of what we consider core needs of civilization to be making huge profits and going out of business the next year. It should be a boring, predictable business.
https://www.afr.com/news/austr...
The fact this worked and proved a return on investment in less than 2 years is going to totally change the worldwide power market. The CEOs and managers of power companies are NOT the mouthbreathing idiots babbling about baseload power. They care about money. This shows that batteries are finally cheaper than peaker plants and they WILL buy them to save money. This will add further pressure to eliminate coal and nuclear as "baseload" because renewables with batteries can fill the gap more cheaply. And natural gas, which you can turn on and off quickly, suddenly loses one aspect that makes it cheaper and now no longer necessary. Those who switch to renewables + batteries will make the most money, end of story.
The telsa battery IS a 60 million dollar FCAS. You saved 40 million by spending 60 million (and then some).
Literally, the only thing it is good for is FCAS, so quick frequency dip modulation. It is TRULY TERRIBLE as a backup power source.
What're the costs associated with disposing of this number of batteries as they reach end-of-life? Are they recyclable? Anyone got a good link to info on this?
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
Returning 8% of the cost in one year is not a great investment, especially when it will generate less and less as time goes on.
Given the natural laws of Australia, unless it proves ridiculously dangerous to human beings (as is every man-made and natural thing in AU), it's going to miss out on the survival model.
Now, if it were to, say, electrocute someone every few weeks, it would fit right in.
It *HAS* to be making an effort to kill and/or eat people if it's going to fit in with everything else in Australia.
That cobalt and lithium are completely destroyed when the batteries and motors using them are worn out! I mean, if only these elements were not atomically decomposed when that happens then we could do something like put them in another process cycle. We could even invent a word for it, maybe call it something-cycle? How about re-cycle...that sounds like a good word for what we could do (if only they weren't completely destroyed when the system they are in is worn out.) /sarcasm mode off ;)