The article, of course, is guilty of exactly what it accuses its opponents of -- truthiness. They say that this is affordable, and then don't even say how much it costs! He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense [1]
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
#12I'm happy this is happening but if it requires $50M in tax payers dollars it's not exactly viable now is it?
You haven't checked into the cost of a typical freeway bridge lately, have you?
Re: Tesla’s big battery in South Australia may prove the viability of renewables
#13I'm happy this is happening but if it requires $50M in tax payers dollars it's not exactly viable now is it?
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Re: Tesla’s big battery in South Australia may prove the viability of renewables
#14Would 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 los…
For anyone who wants some more background, here is a report from march this year by AEMO, the australian energy market operator:
> Renewable generators now represent approximately 43% of South Australia’s local installed capacity (2,297 MW), with gas-fuelled and liquid-fuelled thermal generators providing the other 57% share (2,987 MW).
https://www.aemo.com.au/-/media/Files/Electricity/NEM/Planni...
Re: Tesla’s big battery in South Australia may prove the viability of renewables
#15Would 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 los…
Here's the article and discussion about it from yesterday:
Re: Tesla’s big battery in South Australia may prove the viability of renewables
#16I'm happy this is happening but if it requires $50M in tax payers dollars it's not exactly viable now is it?
By various estimates the replacement cost of the US grid is about 2-5 _trillion_ (taxpayer's) dollars[1].
1. http://www.businessinsider.com/replacing-us-electrical-grid-...
Re: Tesla’s big battery in South Australia may prove the viability of renewables
#17This 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.
that's true.
but to dig a bit deeper, who pays each cost and who benefits from the value?
who directly benefits from the value of energy:
- australian energy consumers
- australian energy producers
who pays the costs for energy prices:
- australian energy consumers
who pays the costs for australian emissions *:
- people living in australia -- 0.3% of emissions
- people living in world excluding australia -- 99.7% of emissions
Clearly we cant account for these shared global costs sensibly unless enough countries reach some kind of global agreement. The current australian federal government is taking a regrettable approach of self-interest and is waiting for the larger/more powerful countries to lead the way. Australia has plenty of coal to sell in the mean time.
Re: Tesla’s big battery in South Australia may prove the viability of renewables
#18Would 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 los…
I had been lightly skeptical until you framed it as a move in spite of the federal government. There were some missing pieces to the puzzle in my mind where I wasn't sure why if we had a technical solution (the interconnector) then why won't we just solve the policy and pricing problem that stops us utilizing it.
Partly because I have never seen Australian states as particularly at odds with eachother or the federal government, but the idea of taking the choice of coal or renewables into our own hands is actually really compelling.
Re: Tesla’s big battery in South Australia may prove the viability of renewables
#19I'm happy this is happening but if it requires $50M in tax payers dollars it's not exactly viable now is it?
For most utility buys, $50M is tiny. Plus, how can you say "not viable" without comparing the cost to the value that it provides?
For truly non-viable, see the recent coal boondoggles in the US. For example, this $7.5 BILLON waste:
https://arstechnica.com/business/2017/06/regulators-suggest-...
Or the wave of coal bankruptcies in the US:
https://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2016-06-08/bankrupt-...
Re: Tesla’s big battery in South Australia may prove the viability of renewables
#20I'm happy this is happening but if it requires $50M in tax payers dollars it's not exactly viable now is it?
As a South Australian, I'm (very!!) happy to trade a few tax dollars for much lower power prices. The extra tax is more than made up for in savings.
On this particular topic, the South Australian government's interests and mine are precisely aligned: We are both getting screwed over by power generators exploiting the intermittent nature of renewables to make bigger profits. Did you know they deliberately keep gas peaking generators off when it would be profitable to run them, because they can force the price to spike even higher and exploit the minimum billing periods?
I'm all for market driven solutions, but technology driven price disruption is a well known reason for market failure, and that seems to be what is going on here.