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*??? ;-)
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! --
A lot cheaper anyway. You still have to pay for this system itself. By "pay for itself" it means it cut costs enough to do so. It that $66 million is saved on a hundred billion in electricity production, it would be a tenth of a percent in savings.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
You're off by a couple orders of magnitude. 16 of these things could cover the entire US nicely.
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.
Such hostility.. I was merely stating the obvious political truth. You know how politics works, the idea is to gain votes, by adopting positions or making statements to please as many voters as you can.
Personally, I know that coal is dying and it's because Natural Gas is cheaper. Heck, Natural Gas is so cheap, even nuclear plants are too expensive now.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
This battery has nothing to do with green. Its a specific ancillary service that batteries are well suited for. Its has basically solved their problem and therefore they don't even need another.
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
Uh huh. Thats why South Australia became a net EXPORTER of electricity for the first time ever in 2018.....
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!
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.
Uh, it was regulation that decided that. The market would have continued to mine coal as recklessly as possible with regards to operational safety and with zero emissions controls.
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.
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.
To do what? Provide power for the entire US? The US uses around 10,000,000 MWh/day, so I think you're going to need a couple extra...
What are you even rambling about AC?
If you wreck the grid first driving up your costs.
Powerplants bring home 150 billion a year in revenue. But their profits are in 5% range, they typically pay 3% dividend. 7.5 billion profit. Batteries are attacking its most profitable sector. The base load powerplants barely make money.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Natural Gas is so cheap, even nuclear plants are too expensive now.
They've been too expensive for 40 years.
This is how you attract people to your side, by insulting them?
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Personally, I know that coal is dying
And where coal is not dying, it is being mechanised. The days of labour-intensive underground mining are well dead.
We do not have a shaky power grid, the only time we had problems was due to a storm creating mini tornados which brought the lines down. Why do so many people spread this lie?
https://www.afr.com/news/austr...
And where coal is not dying, it is being mechanised. The days of labour-intensive underground mining are well dead.
... and the big savings is not when a robot replaces the first human miner, but when it replaces the LAST human. Because then the mine no longer needs ventilation, lighting, safety equipment, redundant support structures, rescue equipment, triple backup pumps and generators, etc.
These add up to huge expenses. Once you have no humans down-hole, you can cut a lot of corners, and save a lot of money.
Yeah, I'd really like to see some citations on that.
I would guess it's the prison industrial complex and the war on drugs.
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
>> You've lined up a bunch of standardised lithium cells in a box and then sold them at cost? Yeah, of course it'll work
If it was that easy. There's much more involved
- Logistics for hundreds of tons of Li Battery. The horror of any shipping and insurance company.
- Interconnections at 3 levels
- Packaging
- Cooling
- Protection
- Battery management over lifetime
- Equalization of batteries
- Network management
- Building and site management
- Fire safety equipment
- Electrical safety equipment
- High power Wiring
- Huuuuge Inverters
- Protections
- Maintenance concept
- Redundancy concept
- Safety concept
- Grid interface with high-power reversible transformers
- Transmission lines and connections
- Communication and synchronization with the grid
- Managing Grid Economics
- Daily operations
>> They're all buoyed up by huge investment and break even at best
Stop complaining.
That's good for society, and for Tesla who grows instead of feeding directly fat investors. And even they like the "company growth"
aaaaaaa
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"
...and renewable energy with battery storage is now starting to eat Natural Gas' dinner: https://www.greentechmedia.com...
It is clear that Natural Gas Peaker plants are on the danger list of becoming extinct due to:
1. Battery storage reacts in ms to loss of grid power which is much faster than spinning up a gas fired steam turbine.
2. Battery storage has lower maintenance costs due to no moving parts
3. Battery storage can be used to capture any local power produced and from other sources on the grid including surplus Nuclear so providing power buffering
4. Battery storage has no emissions
5. Saves costs by not paying for keeping Natural Gas Peaker plants on standby
6. Renewable energy + battery storage is scalable from domestic (small) to industrial (large)
You can't deny that the economics of renewable energy + storage will kill off Natural Gas Peaker plants and that will be good for the environment.
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
Your numbers are off.
Pumped: >80% (http://energystorage.org/energy-storage/technologies/pumped-hydroelectric-storage)
The Tesla Battery: 80% (https://www.inverse.com/article/49260-tesla-world-s-largest-battery-price-detailed-in-new-report)
And we do, by definition, need to get to 100% renewables. Because even if we ignore the environmental effects, the non-renewables will eventually run out (or rather, become too rare to be worth extracting).
If it was that easy. There's much more involved
Most of the following was pretty much stuff you could do by ordering parts and following instructions until you got to
- Communication and synchronization with the grid
- Managing Grid Economics
- Daily operations
That's where some actual brainpower has to be applied, and clearly it has been since the project has been a series of success stories. And you forgot one really important part, actually having the trained personnel on hand and then sending them off to do the job. Nobody else seems to have been particularly interested in doing it on this scale until now. As it happens, Tesla had all the pieces in one place specifically because they were doing all this related work. Now that it's obvious that it's profitable, it's going to happen more.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
you don't want your expensive robots to be crushed in a cave in either
For a robot, 99.999% reliability is "good enough". For humans, your safety systems need to provide 99.99999% reliability. A rough rule of thumb is that each extra nine doubles the cost.
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.
To do what? Provide power for the entire US? The US uses around 10,000,000 MWh/day, so I think you're going to need a couple extra...
To balance the ebbs and flows of power in the current US grid, just as this battery is doing for Australia. Like for like. And it only takes 16 because there are three grids in the US, rather than one.
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.
You are to stupid to read English. I never opposed anything, just describing facts and where that payback presently exists, something you seem to not comprehend.