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

theguardian.com

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

#161

Post by greglindahl »

sitkack wrote: post #38
burntrelish1273 wrote: post #3

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.

Flywheel systems are currently sold for short-term power interruptions in datacenters: outage -> flywheel power -> diesel generator

Most datacenters use batteries instead.

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

#163

Post by Redoubts »

illektr1k wrote: post #138
vamur wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

129MWh is a laughable amount of storage when you need at minimum 10000MWh per day for 1mln people. So you would need at least $12.5bln to build enough plants for just one day per 1mln people. And that's not counting maintenance. For that price 2-3 nuclear plants can be built which can last 30-50 years unlike the 10-20 years of lithium storage. Instead of hideously expensive (and potentially explosive) lithium storage…

I, for one, can't wait for SI Units and their prefixes (Kilo / Mega / Giga / etc) to be adopted globally. 129MWh / 10GWh / 1M people / 12.5G people

I’d be satisfied with joules instead of watt hours.

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

#164

Post by vamur »

greglindahl wrote: post #157
vamur wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why wouldn't it? NG plants are already used to meet grid demands.

NG plants can't start delivering power in seconds. That's what "stabilization" means. You're right that NG plants do play an important role in the grid today, but it's a "we predict that we'll need more power generated in an hour" role.

Gas turbines can be started within minutes. And majority of grids do not currently use "stabilization" within seconds. This sort of requirement is caused by the unreliable and unpredictive solar/wind generation.

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

#165

Post by TheSpiceIsLife »

nl wrote: post #131
TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

happy to trade a few tax dollars for much lower power prices That's optimistic . I guarantee you will be paying more for electricity generation because of this battery. There's no way the incumbents would allow this thing to be connected to the grid if there wasn't a dollar (quite a few dollars) in it for them. Giving money and power to politicians is like giving car keys and whiskey to teenage boys. Regards, former…

There's no way the incumbents would allow this thing to be connected to the grid if there wasn't a dollar (quite a few dollars) in it for them. There are no major non-renewable incumbents left in SA. The renewables love this because it lets them load shift. That's good for them but good for me too. AGL has a small gas fired station but screwed up during the outage by not firing up one generator. That lost them any fr…

> There are no major non-renewable incumbents left in SA.

AGL operates 8.562 gigawatts of fossil fuel (coal / gas) power plants, and 2.33 gigawatt renewables (hydro / wind / solar).[1]

The 1.28 gigawatt gas fired Torrens Island Power Station in Adelaide is the largest power station in South Australia.[2]

South Australia has 16 operating wind farms with a total installed capacity of about 1.473 gigawatt.[3]

It definitely looking like we'll see, in our lifetimes, a future where wind + storage provides a significant majority of electricity in South Australia. My argument is there's no way this future will also provider cheaper electricity.

Why charge less when you can make people pay more?

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AGL_Energy#Operations_and_sign...

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torrens_Island_Power_Station

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wind_farms_in_South_Au...

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

#166

Post by sctb »

calafrax wrote: post #118
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.

What are you a denier? Once we have consensus that means we shut off debate and stop doing economic analysis. Get with the program buddy.

Please stop posting like this and re-read the guidelines:

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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

#167

Post by acchow »

mhandley wrote: post #75
acchow wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mentioned location, but that advantage can't really be understated. How can you have pump storage near every major city? It's not feasible in most places. Then there is the enormous transmission cost to get the energy to (and from) that remote location. Batteries can also meet fluctuations in demand instantly. Hydro cannot.

For wind at least, it turns out you want to put the batteries as close to the wind turbines as possible, rather than close to the consumer. The reason is that this evens out the power delivery over the grid. If you put the batteries close to the consumer, the grid from the turbines to consumer must cope with peak generation capacity (powering peak demand, plus charging batteries), whereas if the batteries are close t…

This makes a lot of sense but would never have occurred to me.

What are the real-world consequences if you fail to "cope" with demand or generation - increased probability of systemic failure? Something blowing out?

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

#168

Post by tootie »

sitkack wrote: post #34
sametmax wrote: post #26

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.

Who pays the cost when the wind turbine melts down?

Known in the industry as Denmark Syndrome.

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

#169

Post by TheSpiceIsLife »

prawn wrote: post #113
TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

happy to trade a few tax dollars for much lower power prices That's optimistic . I guarantee you will be paying more for electricity generation because of this battery. There's no way the incumbents would allow this thing to be connected to the grid if there wasn't a dollar (quite a few dollars) in it for them. Giving money and power to politicians is like giving car keys and whiskey to teenage boys. Regards, former…

Who shouldn't get the money and power? The incumbent power generators or the politicians?

Well, both.

The Libertarian in me thinks we should deregulate the energy market, and that means starting with removing subsidies to fossil fuels and renewables.

My left-leaning political sense thinks we ought nationalise the energy industry as it's too important to leave to the whims of the market, and work out a cost factor to apply to the waste products of energy generation.

My right-leaning political sense says nationalising energy assets would be a disaster and that we need stable base-load energy, because the alternative is untenable.

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

#170

Post by willholloway »

Frogolocalypse wrote: post #80
willholloway wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jehu Garcia's Youtube videos are definitely worth checking out, the guy is doing cool things with 18650 lithium ion cells. He converted a VW bus into an electric vehicle. My main takeaway after watching his videos and others in the same vein is that lithium ion battery packs are the gasoline of the 21st century. You can build 18650 packs for electric bikes, scooters, boats etc... or build your own Power Wall type hom…

I'm going to look myself, but do you have any links about the 18650 packs? Edit:cheapest aliexpress ones i see are about usd$2.00 each. That's not bad though.

Check ebay, packs from hover boards that got recalled are available.

The cost can be $1 a cell, a pack might have 20. Each cell might be 10-12 watt hours. It takes 3 cells to produce 12 volts.

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