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Tesla’s giant battery in Australia reduced grid service cost by 90%

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Re: Tesla’s giant battery in Australia reduced grid service cost by 90%

#61

Post by Retric »

jessaustin wrote: post #41
Retric wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A human might average 100W per hour over a workday at say 10$ per hour to keep the numbers clean (1$ = 10Wh). 14,000$ per 1,000,000Wh is 72wh per dollar so far cheaper. Except this is instantaneous power so they would need 1,000,000 people to sit around doing nothing most of the day and then occasionally have have some or all of them work, because again that battery caps at 100MW. Really, people in AU don't pay 14$ p…

A human might average 100W per hour... This seems like the wrong unit to use. [EDIT:] I mean that power is already a "per time period" measure; there's no reason to say "joules per second per hour".

I am breaking the day down hour periods, and I think a human might average 100W over each of them.

Being slightly faster in a factory is often not very useful, but being slightly slower will quickly cause problems.

Re: Tesla’s giant battery in Australia reduced grid service cost by 90%

#62

Post by Retric »

Jedd wrote: post #40
Retric wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A human might average 100W per hour over a workday at say 10$ per hour to keep the numbers clean (1$ = 10Wh). 14,000$ per 1,000,000Wh is 72wh per dollar so far cheaper. Except this is instantaneous power so they would need 1,000,000 people to sit around doing nothing most of the day and then occasionally have have some or all of them work, because again that battery caps at 100MW. Really, people in AU don't pay 14$ p…

> Really, people in AU don't pay 14$ per kWh making 14$ per MWh meaningless. Agreed that consumers don't pay wholesale pricing - but disagreed it's meaningless. Consumers do (of course) end up paying an amount that includes the amortised cost of wholesale power over the course of their contract. Additionally, there are a range of incentives that result from these kinds of significant, if ephemeral, variations in whol…

> A backup generator that's never used actually is useless.

Having a backup generator for your data-center means you can have less batteries. Even if you never directly use it you are benefiting by reducing overall capital costs while still mitigating the same risks.

Put another way owning a generator can provide a revenue stream because you can sell that risk reduction to someone else. That's not a theoretical benefit that's cold hard cash.

Re: Tesla’s giant battery in Australia reduced grid service cost by 90%

#63

Post by thaumasiotes »

wcarron wrote: post #47
basementcat wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A rule of thumb is a large hamburger with all the fixings is about one kWh.

His point is that a Watt is a unit of power being equal to 1 joule per second. As an aside, this corresponds to an electric circuit with a potential difference of 1 volt and a current of 1 Ampere. Saying a human produces 100W/hr is wrong. What I assume he meant is this: A human can produce 100W for 1 hour, on average. This is reasonable, since humans produce about 1/8 Horsepower, on average; and 1 HP = 746W.

He meant a human can produce 100W. He specifically doesn't mean "for one hour"; he says the human works a full workday, producing 800 watt-hours of energy.

Re: Tesla’s giant battery in Australia reduced grid service cost by 90%

#64

Post by TheSoftwareGuy »

Retric wrote: post #61
jessaustin wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A human might average 100W per hour... This seems like the wrong unit to use. [EDIT:] I mean that power is already a "per time period" measure; there's no reason to say "joules per second per hour".

I am breaking the day down hour periods, and I think a human might average 100W over each of them. Being slightly faster in a factory is often not very useful, but being slightly slower will quickly cause problems.

Why not just use 100W, why specify over 1 hour periods? you would likely have a pool of bikers anyways so the averaging is builtin.

Re: Tesla’s giant battery in Australia reduced grid service cost by 90%

#65

Post by mrep »

_ph_ wrote: post #6
vosper wrote: post #2

For obvious reasons there's a lot of focus on Tesla's automobiles, but part of me wonders if these Powerpack grid batteries aren't the real innovation and killer product for the company.

The car sales of Tesla are creating the battery production volume that allows to be price competitive for the grid solutions. Grid scale battery storage will be the future, as the car industry alone is going to increase the world battery production by about 100x, driving down the prices strongly, and not even counting the second life of car cells in storage after they are down on capacity.

I've been meaning to do the math on how much capacity used car batteries can be continuously recycled into grid storage where capacity/weight isn't a big deal but haven't gotten around to it.

My hunch is that those used batteries will single handedly store peak reusable energy for down times if electric cars grow to dominate the market.

Re: Tesla’s giant battery in Australia reduced grid service cost by 90%

#66

Post by vosper »

ballenf wrote: post #22
vosper wrote: post #2

For obvious reasons there's a lot of focus on Tesla's automobiles, but part of me wonders if these Powerpack grid batteries aren't the real innovation and killer product for the company.

Where's Tesla's secret sauce in this solution: the battery chemistry, the control circuits or well-engineered integration of the parts? How much a threat is constrained lithium supply to the business model?

Maybe little more than big-time name recognition and a first-mover advantage (but I imagine there's some good engineering and a few patents in there, too). That worked long enough for IBM :)

Re: Tesla’s giant battery in Australia reduced grid service cost by 90%

#67

Post by wallace_f »

stephen_g wrote: post #60
jazoom wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is true and it blows my mind. It also makes me sad. We have some really smart and educated people in this country. What's the problem here?

Mostly the Coalition. Seriously. It’s clear from the AEMO market makeup etc. that almost all the cost increase was attributable to the cost of gas (due to Santos having contracts to export more gas than they had supply for to Japan etc., while the international gas price has fallen. So they are sucking up gas on the domestic market pushing up domestic prices and their liquefication operation is unprofitable anyway).…

>almost all the cost increase was attributable to the cost of gas

Unfortunately natgas prices determines price because it's often the price at the margin.

If policy makers care about efficiency, fairness, and reducing pollution, they would better-allow, or outright demand, price signals flow through to the marketplace.

Re: Tesla’s giant battery in Australia reduced grid service cost by 90%

#68

Post by RandomNameName »

vosper wrote: post #2

For obvious reasons there's a lot of focus on Tesla's automobiles, but part of me wonders if these Powerpack grid batteries aren't the real innovation and killer product for the company.

The point behind Gigafactory1 and any subsequent gargantuan battery plants it's to drive the cost of all Tesla batteries down. Decreased cost per unit is increased margin. The reason Elon is pushing, pushing, pushing is because the longer he has the (diminishing) lowest cost of batteries, he's ahead of everyone else. People thought he was of his rocker when he bought Solar City; it's all one giant play to have the cheapest cost per battery.

Sidenote, commercial and utility battery backup like this have been sold for over 10 years. Unless you were a hotel in Vegas, you probably weren't noticing. Did they sell many, dunno, but they've been working at every distribution for a long time.

Re: Tesla’s giant battery in Australia reduced grid service cost by 90%

#69

Post by agumonkey »

ggm wrote: post #56
pbreit wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m confused. Is it 90% savings vs regular power (awesome) or 90% vs “emergency” power (ok)?

It's 90% cheaper bids into a frequency stability service. It corrects for drift from 50hz. It doesn't supply power in that sense, it supplies a slightly out of phase AC to refocus the frequency back to where it should be. It does it inside milliseconds of a drift and prevents overreaction by other generators with synchronous power, and can do it more often for less "cost" (synchronous flywheel systems lose most of th…

So tesla power station acts like a nationwide super cap ?

Re: Tesla’s giant battery in Australia reduced grid service cost by 90%

#70

Post by paulsutter »

ggm wrote: post #3

This outcome is in a particularly distorted badly operated market, one where for no very good reasons regulatory power is not being applied, and distorted bidding for FCAS and peak supply has been the norm. It's hugely politicised, and in the context of a rejection of carbon trading and an attempt by the ruling federal liberal-national government to wedge coal into the mix (it's basically uneconomic now, and won't ge…

Ancillary services like frequency stabilization are the highest ROI application of batteries in the grid and nothing to sneeze at. Without batteries, transmission and especially distribution need to be sized to the highest momentary spikes in demand, and given the long lead time and high costs to upgrade these facilities, batteries are a great solution. They can respond instantly and solve the problem at a very low cost.

As for storing power overnight, batteries are on a similar manufacturing learning curve* as photovoltaic, albeit a few years behind. Most people thought PV could never be cost effective, until suddenly it was the cheapest. Batteries too will surprise the doubters. It's just a matter of time before batteries are more cost-effective than pumped hydro.

*Moore's law-style cost reductions were first observed in airplane manufacturing in 1936. Cost of manufacturing decreases with the volume produced:

http://www.uvm.edu/~pdodds/research/papers/others/1936/wrigh...

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