Tesla’s big battery in South Australia may prove the viability of renewables
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Re: Tesla’s big battery in South Australia may prove the viability of renewables
#2This article, like Turnbull, is incorrectly equating cost with price. Emissions are a cost. Price + emissions = cost. Renewables have been beating coal on cost for quite a while, only now they can start to win on price.
Re: Tesla’s big battery in South Australia may prove the viability of renewables
#3FYI: 129 MWh would be about 1300 42U-style racks for batteries alone.
Source: there's a guy in socal (Jehu Garcia) building a reclaimed peaker 1 MWh pack in about 10 racks from used batteries and equipment (50 kW 480VAC inverter) on the cheap in order to store energy off-peak (plus possibly charge using solar) and use it at peak supplemented by grid power. This is how manufacturing and other heavy industry / large electrical consumers can save money right now in US day-of-use billed grid systems.
Re: Tesla’s big battery in South Australia may prove the viability of renewables
#4Would someone explain what this battery is for or the surrounding context? The article spends most of its word count on abstract politics.
Re: Tesla’s big battery in South Australia may prove the viability of renewables
#5Would someone explain what this battery is for or the surrounding context? The article spends most of its word count on abstract politics.
Batteries are used in lieu of pumped energy storage for several purposes:
- emergency use: it's much faster than even the fastest pump sets which can switch over in seconds
- load smoothing to avoid spooling up/down expensive peakers too much
- daily energy arbitrage by downstream / middle consumers to buy off peak and use at peak in time-of-use billed electrical services
- store solar energy for night use
129 MWh is enough for a medium-sized town or charging several hundred Teslas.
Really though, the focus shouldn't be on huge, central systems. The savings and grid resilience is realized with many few MWh systems spread to local substation-level. This has the potential to smooth out the load to be more/less constant and makes large-scale demand more predictable.
Re: Tesla’s big battery in South Australia may prove the viability of renewables
#6Can Tesla deliver the batteries in the next 100 days? Tesla had a battery shortage last quarter when production couldn't keep up, and had to delay some car deliveries.[1] With Model 3 deliveries starting, is Tesla's battery production sufficient?
[1] http://money.cnn.com/2017/07/03/technology/tesla-battery-car...
Re: Tesla’s big battery in South Australia may prove the viability of renewables
#7I'm happy this is happening but if it requires $50M in tax payers dollars it's not exactly viable now is it?
Re: Tesla’s big battery in South Australia may prove the viability of renewables
#8[deleted]
Re: Tesla’s big battery in South Australia may prove the viability of renewables
#9Would someone explain what this battery is for or the surrounding context? The article spends most of its word count on abstract politics.
Briefly and maybe not 100% truthy: the state of South Australia produces a lot of its electricity from a wind farm. It brings in extra power from another state over a giant cable (the interconnect). A while ago a storm damaged the interconnect and this triggered cascading failsafes that shut down a lot of the state.
The wind farm has been a thumb in the eye of the federal government, who is huge on coal. The feds lost no time blaming the blackouts on renewables and sticking it to SA. Elon Musk offered to install a giant battery in what seemed to be a wild-arse publicity stunt. SA said ok do it, and they're getting a giant battery and their energy independence back.
Re: Tesla’s big battery in South Australia may prove the viability of renewables
#10I'm happy this is happening but if it requires $50M in tax payers dollars it's not exactly viable now is it?
Are roads and public schools not viable?