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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
Why? Depending on the design parameters, the batteries may last much longer. Even if some batteries have degraded, it is more cost effective just to add new units instead of replacing units with some life left.
Also, if it has achieved payback in less than 2 years, any performance after that is profit. If you re-visit after 5 years, you won't see a loss.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
You're off by a couple orders of magnitude. 16 of these things could cover the entire US nicely.
who said that?
All I'm saying is that the battery is used to make the supply of fossil fueled electricity more stable by storing energy near where it is used. A function that would NORMALLY be accomplished by having a fossil fueled plant online to take up the slack. However, the logistics of transporting fuel and generating power is pretty difficult in the middle of the country and there is no water sources available, which makes electricity production even more logistically difficult (and expensive).
The battery solution helps with logistics and costs, the grid can operate with acceptable margins with less cost and less spinning reserve. Fossil fuels are still where the energy comes from. This has not changed and isn't likely to change in the near future.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
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.
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
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
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.
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!
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
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.
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.
PG&E is retiring three, count them, one, two , three, peaker plants and replacing them with batteries. They are designed to store 1.2 GWh, 300 MW for four hours. Already.
In less than a decade battery price will fall so much we can store days worth of electricity usage. My Tesla Model 3 stores 75 kWh. That is one week of usage by my home in the winter. 2 days of storage in the summer. We are there.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
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.
How much we have spent on oil exploration? how much in cobalt exploration? Are you sure there is no more cobalt to find? Are you sure there is no substitute?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
No power plant runs 100% of the time, there are all kinds of scheduled and unscheduled outages. We reliably know when the sun will be up and we can generally predict the wind. Batteries are a good candidate for replacing NG peaker plants, which cost about $300 million to build and run only about 5% of the time.
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.
Lithium is not a rare element, it is extracted from the salt brine under dry lake beds like Searles Lake near Death Valley. There is lots of it.
I drive various Toyota Prius's, most are at the 230,000 mile mark. The batteries usually top up at around the 80% range, a few still have a 90% capacity, not too shabby. The Prius began selling about 20 years ago, those batteries are more costly to replace because they are one unit, later cars have a series of connected batteries, easier to replace a faulty one. Now there is a new business opportunity in 'reconditioning' older rechargeable batteries, instead of replacing the entire battery. Newer Prius batteries are easier and cheaper to replace.
>> 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
...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.
For bulk storage of power pumped hydro is probably better than batteries. However even pumped hydro which is traditionally a super fast response, so for example Dinorwig in the UK can go from zero to 1800MW in 16 seconds if the turbines are kept spinning in air (with a reserve capacity of 9.1GWh) which is much better than even a gas turbine and orders of magnitude better than coal/nuclear it is still over two orders of magnitude slower than a battery pack which can respond in 100ms. Frankly every grid in the world could do with some of these for grid stabilization purposes. The battery pack is just amazing in this role.
So much ignorance.. So little time..
Look, you go take an undergraduate course in AC power and call me when you pass and know what the difference is between using the square root of three and the square root of two when discussing AC power systems. You are going to need some basic understanding of transmission lines and power distribution grids or we are wasting our time.
I may be no Westinghouse or Tesla, but there are really good engineering reasons the power grid works as it does and really important economic reasons this isn't going to be changing all that much any time soon. The grid of today works essentially the same way the initial power distribution systems of the early 1900's and apart from the control systems it's going to work on the same principles after the next 100 ears of operation.
We are not going to have some technological advance in power distribution technology that just makes all my objections to your hair brained ideas go away. The engineering principles, physics and economics just don't allow for your dreams to come true. I'm sorry you don't understand, but I don't really have time to make you into an electrical engineer, and if you won't give my arguments their due consideration, I don't really have time.
"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).
It's warrantied for 15. https://hornsdalepowerreserve.... and expected to last much longer.
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.
And since the battery was turned on this past Friday,
From the very first sentence of The Fucking Summary "Last December, Tesla switched on the world's biggest lithium ion battery " It's been a year.
That aside, how much did this battery cost?
I don't know, again, maybe read even the fucking summary:
It is particularly impressive when you consider that the massive Tesla Powerpack system cost only $66 million
If you want to critique something here is the error in the logic:
While the battery saved $40m to rate payers, the owner of the battery didn't make $40m. Those were savings passed on largely to consumers. The battery pack did make like $16m in profit so the payback period is more like 5 years not 18 months.