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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

5 of 213 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Here's the important missing bit: by whoever57 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    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.

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  2. Re:Here's the important missing bit: by steveha · · Score: 5, Informative

    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

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  3. Re:Here's the important missing bit: by Rei · · Score: 5, Informative

    Not "may". It's warrantied for 8 years, rated for 15.

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  4. Re:Cue the denialists... by bobbied · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

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  5. Re:Cue the denialists... by 140Mandak262Jamuna · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

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