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

Post by jburgess777 » Sat, Jul 08, 2017, 12:28 PM UTC

sitkack wrote: post #39

burntrelish1273 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The other advantage of substation level energy storage is in not having to upgrade the feed circuits. Design for average consumption not peak. Storage and renewables make the edges of the network resilient.

Post by _lbaq » Sat, Jul 08, 2017, 12:42 PM UTC

aphextron wrote: post #119

Can anyone comment more generally on using lithium ion batteries for grid scale storage? It seems nonsensical to me. Lithium makes sense for cars where power density is essential. But with grid scale storage, there are so many drawbacks, including 1.) High fixed cost vs. other batteries 2.) Degradation from dendrite growth 3.) Need for constant cooling 4.) Possibility of catastrophic failure in case of short circuiti…

Post by shoo » Sat, Jul 08, 2017, 12:43 PM UTC

amygdyl wrote: post #94

shoo wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Failure to act on climate change has a game-theoretic cost. Taking unilateral action massively improves your negotiating position and reduces the cost for other countries to reduce their emissions via economies of scale Thanks - I wasn't aware of that. Are there any books / articles that go into this in more detail and might be accessible to someone with a decent math + comp sci education but no knowledge of game t…

I'm also appreciating the same as you quoted above. But I keep defaulting to a painfully pessimistic imagination that is the costs are collectively going to be so moot so much sooner than any expectation, due to unforseen extreme results. Am I going through a depression or something manic, maybe, because I don't believe we're not all suppressing contemplation of the outlier worse consequences of climate instability a…

Post by nl » Sat, Jul 08, 2017, 12:46 PM UTC

petra wrote: post #52

nl wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How much is the price for kwh stored/dispatched , over the long term ? that's the missing data here. And btw: i don't know the economics of this project, but in general, if this was cost effective, Musk would have tons of customers(including power companies), to supply power during peak hours and save them a lot of money.

Post by philipov » Sat, Jul 08, 2017, 12:55 PM UTC

WJW wrote: post #124

zyngaro wrote: post #115

So basically we are transitioning from a fossil energy based world to lithium based one. Why does media never talk about the sustainability of build lithium ion batteries at large scale? Have the recycling problem been sorted out (I have a couple of lithium ion batteries and I don't know what to do about them) I also heard that lithium is very very scarce on Earth.

It's not talked about in "the media" (at least not front page stuff) because it is not a huge problem. While "scarce" is relative, global demand until the year 2100 is estimated to be between 12 and 20 million tons, while currently known reserves are about 39 million tons. So we should be good for at least 80 years. Recycling is also a solved problem, though we'll have to build a few more factories to keep up with th…