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Tesla’s big battery in South Australia may prove the viability of renewables

theguardian.com

81–90 of 172 posts

Re: Tesla’s big battery in South Australia may prove the viability of renewables

#81
post #50
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had this idea 10 years go to use flywheels to buy cheap power and re-sell it during peak demand. Day vs night pricing will quickly normalize.

There are a few experimental installations of these around. I don't believe they are viable for larger scale storage, but fit smaller scale they seem competitive.

I think it's the other way around. Fly wheels can be extremely dangerous. It is really only large scale that they could be competitively safe.

Re: Tesla’s big battery in South Australia may prove the viability of renewables

#82
post #70
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but it seems they already have it. The Snowy Mountains (the location of the hydro) is a very long way away from South Australia and not even in the same state. So for SA location is a problem. But I think the bigger problem with Snowy Hydro 2.0 is time and the cost. The Snowy Hydro 2.0 feasibility study has only just begun and will be finished in December of this year. If that study finds the project is feasible, i…

Why is it important that something is done quickly? As I understand from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_South_Australian_blackout it was caused by once-in-50-year event. I understand political urgency, but technically there doesn't seem to be anything urgent.

Firstly, I guess some of the urgency comes down to whether or not you think climate change is real and that it needs to be acted upon with some urgency.

As to the cause of the outage it is not quite as simple as that.

The SA government certainly believes in climate change since they decided to move away from coal and now get most of their energy from renewables.

But because of this, they got blamed for the blackouts by the opposition parties, who put the blackout down to the mad rush into renewables.

Now there is an election coming up next year, so I have no doubt the opposition would have used that same argument during that election.

But where I think this might backfired and why I think the SA Premier has come up with a master stroke, is come this December SA will have it's battery and in part because of climate change, it will be stinking hot all over Australia.

So if the SA battery works as designed and helps to keep all the SA air conditioners running at maximum, it will be a very big win for the SA Government.

Re: Tesla’s big battery in South Australia may prove the viability of renewables

#83
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who pays the cost when the wind turbine melts down?

And who pays the cost when you need to decommission a nuclear power plant? I'm not against nuclear in general, but accounting should be apples-to-apples.

I'm afraid you didn't read the sarcasm in "wind turbine melts down". The way I see it, the op was taking a dig at nukes

Re: Tesla’s big battery in South Australia may prove the viability of renewables

#84
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Works the other way too. First country footing the massive startup bill will have an economy slowdown compared to other that can be dirty a decade or more while the tech and the solution become commodity. Besides countries won't really change until it's in their economic interest. Taking from your example until the cost of fighting bush fires (and other climate change related stuff) is greater than the cost of implem…

>First country footing the massive startup bill will have an economy slowdown compared to other not in the modern R&D driven economy. As an example, Silicon Valley is regularly footing the massive startup bill :) >that can be dirty a decade or more while the tech and the solution become commodity. and so lacking their own technology they would be naturally buying it from the "first countries" while the first countrie…

if you think China is going to "buy" the technology, you're not paying attention

Re: Tesla’s big battery in South Australia may prove the viability of renewables

#85
post #38

FYI: 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 el…

I had this idea 10 years go to use flywheels to buy cheap power and re-sell it during peak demand. Day vs night pricing will quickly normalize.

Wouldn't some kind of gravity-based storage be cheaper/safer? Just lift some huge weights with excess energy, lock it in place, and then let gravity pull it down to reclaim it.

Re: Tesla’s big battery in South Australia may prove the viability of renewables

#86
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>First country footing the massive startup bill will have an economy slowdown compared to other not in the modern R&D driven economy. As an example, Silicon Valley is regularly footing the massive startup bill :) >that can be dirty a decade or more while the tech and the solution become commodity. and so lacking their own technology they would be naturally buying it from the "first countries" while the first countrie…

if you think China is going to "buy" the technology, you're not paying attention

Yup, just look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Railways_CRH380A

Although I see it as a positive. The money spent to "buy" technology is essentially wasted money.

Re: Tesla’s big battery in South Australia may prove the viability of renewables

#87
post #36
post #22

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This is true, but I'd note this quite from the article: Nyhan showed a clear tendency for people with high numeracy skills to misread graphs about gun control or climate change, even when they’d just correctly read the same graph about soap. To address you specific point though - the price is less than A$150M/$US115M[1]. By comparison, the SA government is also building a new 250MW gas fired power station which costs…

One with a big enough sink could get paid to take power off the grid. I repeat, you could make money charging your batteries.

I don't think it would work like that because there would be a rapidly decreasing amount of cheap power to take as more storage came online.

Re: Tesla’s big battery in South Australia may prove the viability of renewables

#88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, the maths behind rentability is tainted with so much agenda from all parts. E.G: when you give prices for a nuclear plant in France, you include only assembly price and running costs. While for wind turbines you include assembly, disassembly, running costs and wiring (which must be underground by law). This makes it hard to make fair comparisons.

The turnover of EDF in France in the 90" was above $40 billion. 60% of its production was from nuclear, hence the nuclear costed more than $24 billion each year just to be operated. For a country like France this is huge, several percent of the GDP of that time. But nobody was discussing about that issue mainly because the CGT union had a tight grip on EDF governance.

Yeah but not just that. We badly needed to develop the nuclear arsenal to stay relevant and having nuclear plants helped a lot with that, technically and politically. We can't really compete with numbers or gun power, so the bomb let us still have a word to say in big conflicts.

Now we can put the existing bombs in maintenance mode, or disassemble them into more modern ones, as we don't need that many. It's the right time to shift the energy source, because now it's all about energy again.

This is the only subject where terrorism actually helped. You can't nuke a bunch of suicide bombers or extremists hidden in a mountain. Hence you can't justify making Armageddon devices as easily as before.

Re: Tesla’s big battery in South Australia may prove the viability of renewables

#89
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given your other statements, I cannot take this statement on face value.

The storm caused extra load on the interconnector. The power went off when the interconnector shut down. The interconnector is needed because there is inadequate power generation within the state. There is inadequate power generation because coal generators were shutdown in favour of renewables. The South Australian Government were patting themselves on the back about their high proportion of renewable energy but the…

You got a lot of down votes in this thread, but you're 100% correct in saying that SA's reliance on wind power has caused these problems, and that is entirely politically motivated.

Regards, former SA resident.

Re: Tesla’s big battery in South Australia may prove the viability of renewables

#90
post #70
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but it seems they already have it. The Snowy Mountains (the location of the hydro) is a very long way away from South Australia and not even in the same state. So for SA location is a problem. But I think the bigger problem with Snowy Hydro 2.0 is time and the cost. The Snowy Hydro 2.0 feasibility study has only just begun and will be finished in December of this year. If that study finds the project is feasible, i…

Why is it important that something is done quickly? As I understand from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_South_Australian_blackout it was caused by once-in-50-year event. I understand political urgency, but technically there doesn't seem to be anything urgent.

"Once in 50 year event" means that there's a 2% chance of it happening on any given year, not that it happens only once every 50 years.
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