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Tesla big battery outsmarts lumbering coal units

reneweconomy.com.au

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Re: Tesla big battery outsmarts lumbering coal units

#5
post #2

The shortage was 560MW, and the Tesla facility provided 7.3MW, or 1.3%.

4 seconds faster (within milliseconds of the frequency drop event occurring) than the coal plant contracted to provide frequency response services.

"But in reality, the response from the Tesla big battery was even quicker than that – in milliseconds – but too fast for the AEMO data to record.

Importantly, by the time that the contracted Gladstone coal unit had gotten out of bed and put its socks on so it can inject more into the grid – it is paid to respond in six seconds – the fall in frequency had already been arrested and was being reversed."

TL;DR The reserve system did this to show its skills. It can respond faster than any existing base load generators, and can derive revenue not only from providing energy on demand, but also grid services (in this case, frequency response).

Tesla plans to provide these services in a virtual fashion with vehicles in the future: https://i.imgur.com/oLBNeW4.png

Re: Tesla big battery outsmarts lumbering coal units

#7
post #2

The shortage was 560MW, and the Tesla facility provided 7.3MW, or 1.3%.

The takeaway (if I'm reading the graphs correctly) is that the Gladstone coal unit took over 3 minutes to respond to the Loy Yang failure. It was contracted to respond within 6 seconds, but couldn't. Fortunately the Tesla battery was able to respond within milliseconds and cover the gap. It's a good bit of PR for Tesla, and could have some negative implications for coal or gas fired backup units.

Re: Tesla big battery outsmarts lumbering coal units

#9

Water is wet and using a battery to cover high speed changes in supply/demand works exactly the way you'd expect at the car, datacenter and grid scale. This is really just a fluff piece.

But in an industry like power generation / "the electric grid," the obviousness of this might be outweighed by momentum (and money?) for the status quo. Especially in regulated services like these (roughly speaking, and depending on the implementation, the industry behaves like a monopoly with more/fewer government-imposed controls), the message and the politics are important to line up, or else a superior technology might only be adopted decades after it's actually viable.

So you might find it to be fluff, but it's good for people to read actual in-the-field success stories.

Re: Tesla big battery outsmarts lumbering coal units

#10
post #7
post #2

The shortage was 560MW, and the Tesla facility provided 7.3MW, or 1.3%.

The takeaway (if I'm reading the graphs correctly) is that the Gladstone coal unit took over 3 minutes to respond to the Loy Yang failure. It was contracted to respond within 6 seconds, but couldn't. Fortunately the Tesla battery was able to respond within milliseconds and cover the gap. It's a good bit of PR for Tesla, and could have some negative implications for coal or gas fired backup units.

Where did you get the three minute response time number for Gladstone? It is not backed up by the article, it only mentions that it should respond within six seconds, but that "Data from AEMO (and gathered above by Dylan McConnell from the Climate and Energy College) shows that the Tesla big battery responded four seconds ahead of the generator contracted at that time to provide FCAS (frequency control and ancillary services), the Gladstone coal generator in Queensland.". I would love to see more information on the actual impact that this had.

edit: Updated with the response time from the article

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