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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
You're off by a couple orders of magnitude. 16 of these things could cover the entire US nicely.
It is hard to find even one 5 year old electric car with dead batteries, why would these ones specifically die? They don't even have to suffer vibration.
You're saying that you would predict 100% replacement after 5 years.
The correct number would be <1% or ~ 0.
The residential version has a 10 year warranty with a 70% capacity guarantee and a 15 year expected lifespan.
The commercial version seems to be guaranteed to hold 80% capacity after 5000 cycles, which in this use case would probably mean 5000 days, or 13+ years.
20 months is less than 2 years. Simply buying these and operating them could bring a large investment return for whoever first approaches the local utilities for a contract. All over the world.
after, say, five years, by which time all the cells will have had to be replaced at least once.
Citation needed.
Actual data collected from Tesla car owners shows that the battery packs still have over 90% capacity after 220000 km (160000 miles).
https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1110149_tesla-model-s-battery-life-what-the-data-show-so-far
Do you have some reason to think that a land-based installation will lose capacity much faster? Seems like land-based should be better than car-based as you don't need to worry about weight.
P.S. When the Prius first came out, I heard this claim that the car would be insanely expensive because the battery pack would wear out and need to be replaced at huge cost. I sure see a lot of taxi services using Prius cars, so I'm assuming that in actual use a Prius is not insanely expensive. Taxi services won't use a car that costs too much.
According to this, a Prius battery pack will last at least 10 years and isn't expensive to replace:
https://www.torquenews.com/1083/can-toyota-prius-battery-last-250000-miles
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Not really. This is the edge case of isolated grid. It has very little meaningful commonality with well interconnected grids.
Notably, you can substract "Tesla" from the story and it still makes sense. Battery storage has been used successfully in other similar places. It's just that in the past, PR has been less than stellar because those deployments were on islands, usually to the tune of single MW or so. This is showing that with significant amount of work, they could create a system that has a total of 35MW of momentary output. Which is great, because peaking an isolated grid is a complete and utter bitch to get done right.
But that's not even remotely true in a large, well connected grid where balance is achieved through the fact that where someone has deficit, someone else likely has surplus. And we have about a century worth of experience how to balance such interconnects for maximum efficiency. In current consideration, there just isn't that much use for fairly expensive frequency control with a battery system when you have a multiple redundancies to handle this across any large interconnected grid.
The good news here is that isolated regions will no longer have to pay exorbitant amounts for their electricity where they can't really tap into large interconnected grid for some reason (such as geographically remote location as is in this case). It's likely to be a massive improvement for such locations if rolled out en masse.
nonsense,
1. The battery is charged by a wind farm : https://hornsdalepowerreserve.com.au/
2. Its nowhere near where it is used, look at a map of South Australia
Its used to provide stability to the network in the even of outages that a clunky old spinning generator cant possible match in response times
It will maintain a drop in voltage/frequency across the network while other system can come online and provide support, then it goes back to getting charged for free
South Australia electricity market also allows bidding on price so the incumbent generators used this as a way to rig the prices and line their pockets;
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/aug/11/electricity-price-spikes-caused-by-energy-companies-gaming-the-system-report-finds
because of its speed the battery can prevent this type of price gouging
Not "may". It's warrantied for 8 years, rated for 15.
Seen on a Japanese food processor: "Not to be used for the other use."
For years now we have had fossil fuel shills claiming that wind/solar/etc... will NEVER work (and should not even be looked into) because they do not provide a constant supply of power (when the wind stops, or sun goes down), or provides a peak surge when demand increases.
The success of the Big Battery shows those claims to be false
It's obvious you don't know either the argument being made nor how a power grid has to work. And you OBVOUSLY don't understand what this battery solution is actually doing.
The PROBLEM with Wind and Solar is that they are unreliable, you cannot schedule them to meet demand, you have to take the power and use it, store it or throw it away when it is generated from these sources. Sure, you could dump it into batteries and use it later, but this is extremely inefficient and expensive to do on an industrial scale. On an electric grid, every watt of electrical power must be generated the instant it is used or the grid becomes unstable, goes out of frequency spec, voltage specifications and fails. Currently there is reserve capacity provided by mechanically rotating machines, to keep things stable and in specifications, this reserve covers for instantaneous demand changes, transmission line failure induced transients and things like that. This is why they keep power plants online, spinning and ready to push power. Another plat may trip, a transmission line may isolate part of the grid and change the local load seen. This reserve capacity is used to keep the grid up because it WILL trip off line if things get out of whack too far.
The Tesla battery is used to mimic this rotating storage, but it has a finite amount of power stored. The purpose is to allow time for the grid operator to bring additional electrical supplies online to make up for equipment failures or unexpected load changes. The battery is located in an area that suffers from being difficult to provide rotating power generation capacity. Giving "time" is the key. The more time the grid operator has, the more it can do to manage the flow of power and keep the grid within specs and providing power to it's customers.
However, that battery provides backup power for a very short time, just long enough to keep the grid stable. Not enough time to make up for the day to day variations of wind and solar or provide a peak load for the grid on a hot cloudy still day.... In order to do that, your battery will need to be a couple of orders of magnitude bigger than what they have now. Remember, you are suggesting that we use batteries to hold the grid up for HOURS or DAYS when wind and solar are not producing enough power to meet demand. Right now, the battery being used is only capable of doing this for tens of min, and only while the grid is being reconfigured to fix what ever problem happened to trigger the event.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
According to this, Panasonic has put about $5.5 billion in to the factory, and Tesla has put about $0.6 billion into it. So it's about 90% Panasonic's money, and most of their technology, in the Gigafactory.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Natural Gas is so cheap, even nuclear plants are too expensive now.
They've been too expensive for 40 years.
No one solution is the correct answer. Your 100% renewable pipe dream isn't either.
Base load Natural Gas is currently the cheapest per megawatt that you can get, which is why even the cheap nuclear option is getting squeezed. The proven reserves of natural gas in the USA are literally HUGE and it's cost is projected to remain historically low for decades so building that NG plant is a low risk investment.
The problem with renewables is their unpredictable nature. You cannot schedule generation capacity and expect a windmill to always meet demand. Sure, storage helps with that, but storage is limited and expensive (and don't forget inefficient). Most industrial sized storage solutions struggle to approach 70% efficiency. This means if you need a storage solution that can hold up your power grid over a calm cold night, you will need a LOT of batteries to keep the street lights and space heaters going while adding enough extra generation capacity on the windy days to charge everything up AND account for the 30% conversion loss. It's just not practical financially.
Don't get me wrong, build the renewable options, use battery storage where it makes sense, just don't fool yourself into thinking we are poised to replace all the Fossil Fueled plants with this anytime in the foreseeable future. Natural gas is way too cheap and your solution way too expensive.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101