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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%

#71

Post by ggm »

paulsutter wrote: post #70
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 c…

The particularly distorted quality of the Australian energy marketplace, distinct from all the other worldwide markets which I absolutely acknowledge are, in their own terms, equally distorted, but the quality here, is the drop in the FCAS service bid by 90%, for what we have to call better frequency stability: The battery responds faster, and there is significantly less visible perturbation to frequency stability, and it does it 9x cheaper than the prior market driven process.

How good is that!

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

#72

Post by mmt »

klondike_ wrote: post #53
toomuchtodo wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one has any way to dispose of nuclear waste (except reprocessing, which has significant cost and safety concerns). It sits in storage pools waiting for that day. Lithium batteries have no such issue.

Nuclear waste is supposed to be disposed of in an underground, geologically stable repository by law [1] but because of repeated government incompetence the project has yet to be completed. So now all nuclear waste across the country sits in pools instead of being disposed of properly. This should be trivial to fix but I suppose the government would rather wait for a disaster to happen than to deal with it proactivel…

I thought one of the other problems was the safety (or lack thereof) of actually transporting all that waste, rather than leaving it on site, initially in pools but eventually in casks.

At least in the US, the rail crash safety record is sufficiently poor for something this hazardous, and I think it's fairly well known how risky highways are.

This is mentioned in the Wikipedia article, I don't now what the current risk estimate is.

Suffice it to say, I disagree that there's anything trivial about a fix, be it dumping underground or reprocessing.

I also disagree that there's some kind of looming, impending disaster brewing in on-site waste storage. My understanding was that waste stored in pools has to be there because it still produces significant heat, so taking out that waste and dumping it underground isn't even an option. Only waste that no longer requires cooling can be moved underground.

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

#73

Post by arbitrary_name »

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…

Mandating storage or fcas capability for new developments is not the solution, as it would make such developments more expensive and less appetising to developers.

Strengthening the market for those services and working with AEMO to drive the networks or third parties to provide these services is the better option in my opinion.

The recent rule changes for 5 minute settlements in the wholesale spot markets will also alter the financial incentives for very fast start generation and drive investment in battery storage, perhaps even in the residential market.

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

#74

Post by roenxi »

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).…

> Mostly the Coalition. Seriously.

Pull the other one, the risk is something like what happened in Germany. The cheap, reliable option in Australia is coal. So an investor has 2 options:

1) Invest in coal. At some point a Labor-Green government gets in and copies the German model - all your capital now makes a loss (ie, the plant you just built).

2) Invest in something else. This isn't as politically risky, but if the government decides that high power prices have to go and pours money into something (eg, new coal plants) then you just got set up as a marginal producer.

I mean, I haven't crunched the numbers, but unless wind/solar are legitimately the most cost effective options (which historically they most certainly have not been) then you would have to be a real risk taker to get involved.

Blaming that situation on the Coalition is too much; the political risks go way beyond them. The issue is that the Coalition wants cheap, the greens want clean, and Labor isn't committed either way as far as I know. And the regulator is a long way from perfect.

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

#75

Post by adwn »

hinkley wrote: post #17
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 history of business is littered with companies that got into business to do A, discovered they couldn't make that work unless someone tackled B, did B because nobody else was doing it well enough, then stopped doing A because they were doing so well at B.

Do you have a couple of examples?

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

#76

Post by _o_ »

_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.

Hm, I wonder where they will get enough lithium, or they are using some other technology?

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

#77

Post by _o_ »

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…

If I understood correctly, they are using batteries in same manner as pumped storage:

https://www.energy.gov/eere/water/pumped-storage-hydropower

We have a few of those for decades, it is actually quite simple, when there is surplus of el. energy it is used to pump water on a hill and acumulate it there. When you need it, the water is than used to generate el. energy. This is the traditional way of flattening the spikes in el. grid.

Now I wonder why the batteries were choosen instead of water, are they cheaper? Does it acumulate more energy on less space than water, it is due to efficiency (there is some loss when you pump water up) or for Austrialia, the water based storage is just not an option (not enough water / hills)?

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

#79

Post by a1369209993 »

CommieBobDole wrote: post #55
sxates wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the carbon footprint of a thousand rocket launches?

Somewhere in the ballpark of a thousand 747 flights at maximum range, maybe a little less. The Falcon 9 carries 147 metric tons of RP-1, which is functionally the same thing as Jet A (both are kerosene), while a 747-400 carries 165 metric tons of Jet A. For a very broad estimate, I'd say the carbon footprint of a thousand Falcon 9 rocket launches is somewhat less than the carbon footprint of a day's worth of aircraft…

It's also relatively easy[1] to switch over to liquid hydrogen rocket fuel if you decide space lauches really must be hit with pointless double standards.

1: where "easy" means "literally rocket science"

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

#80

Post by anoncoward111 »

adwn wrote: post #75
hinkley wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The history of business is littered with companies that got into business to do A, discovered they couldn't make that work unless someone tackled B, did B because nobody else was doing it well enough, then stopped doing A because they were doing so well at B.

Do you have a couple of examples?

Amazon got into the business of selling goods online, but it turns out that renting their computers to others is way more profitable
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