Tesla’s giant battery in Australia reduced grid service cost by 90% • Hacker News Board

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

#81

Post by tripletao » Sat, May 12, 2018, 6:51 AM UTC

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…

In what sense doesn't it supply power? If demand for power exceeds supply, then the frequency starts to go down. "Maintaining frequency" and "supplying the demanded power" are two different expressions of the same problem.

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

#82

Post by foobar1962 » Sat, May 12, 2018, 6:52 AM UTC

The 90% cost reduction claim disturbs me because I find it quite ambiguous. The original quote in the article is:

>it reduced the cost of the grid service that it performs by 90%

Let's examine "the grid service that it performs". What does this mean? Which "grid service" is it performing?

I imagine the "grid service" it performs is that of inputting energy: it's a source of electricity into the grid. So the claim can be re-written as:

>[the battery] reduced the cost of by 90%

Reduced, compared to what, a coal-powered steam turbine power station?

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

#83

Post by bdamm » Sat, May 12, 2018, 6:52 AM UTC

_o_ wrote: post #76

_ph_ wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Is lithium hard to acquire? Sure, it's costly to mine, but it's not like there are shortages. Besides, it seems that Australia is a major producer of lithium.

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

#84

Post by vasco » Sat, May 12, 2018, 7:00 AM UTC

_nalply wrote: post #78

Which one is cheaper to build and operate: Pumped hydro or batteries?

In a lot of places pumped hydro is at capacity. There's only so many rivers, but you can generally put batteries anywhere.

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

#85

Post by _ph_ » Sat, May 12, 2018, 7:02 AM UTC

mrep wrote: post #65

_ph_ wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The current automobile production is over 70 million/year. The battery capacity for a single car ranges from 30-100 kWh. The current middle class is offering 60kWh (Model3, Bolt, Leaf 2019). So if we assume only 30 kWh/car at the end of the useful battery life, we get about 2 TWh of used battery capacity every year - though that point of time is quite in the future, as batteries are expected to last at least 10 years, if not more. As a comparison, the daily energy usage of Germany is about 1.6 TWh.

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

#86

Post by plantain » Sat, May 12, 2018, 7:06 AM UTC

roenxi wrote: post #74

stephen_g wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

Fortunately, people have crunched the numbers:

https://reneweconomy.com.au/plunging-costs-make-solar-wind-a...

The Coalition doesn't want cheap - they've spun coal so hard it's no longer politically tenable to unspin it.

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

#87

Post by plantain » Sat, May 12, 2018, 7:07 AM UTC

foobar1962 wrote: post #82

The 90% cost reduction claim disturbs me because I find it quite ambiguous. The original quote in the article is: >it reduced the cost of the grid service that it performs by 90% Let's examine "the grid service that it performs". What does this mean? Which "grid service" is it performing? I imagine the "grid service" it performs is that of inputting energy: it's a source of electricity into the grid. So the claim can…

It's clearly explained in the article it's frequency stability it's talking about.

>When an issue happens or maintenance is required on the power grid in Australia, the Energy Market Operator calls for FCAS (frequency control and ancillary services) which consists of large and costly gas generators and steam turbines kicking in to compensate for the loss of power.

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

#88

Post by stephen_g » Sat, May 12, 2018, 7:08 AM UTC

roenxi wrote: post #74

stephen_g wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

Sorry, that doesn't make any sense. We have no pressing need for additional baseload capacity at the moment. The problem is entirely in high-demand times, and that is entirely sourced from dispatchable generation. This is mostly gas and hydro in Australia, and the price of gas drives the price, given the way the AEMO bidding market works.

Renewable energy only takes pressure off this demand (i.e. solar is fairly well correlated with hot weather, so actually helps a lot in reducing the peak on hot days (presumably from air-conditioning etc.) by hundreds of megawatts).

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

#89

Post by XorNot » Sat, May 12, 2018, 7:13 AM UTC

roenxi wrote: post #74

stephen_g wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

Coal is not cheap though. Or to be more accurate: coal has a bad ROI, which is what drives investment decisions. At this point in time, solar (using Chinese panels) has an ROI that outstrips coal power by a lot, and has less risk (panels start producing a lot faster and can be expanded online - a coal plant sits there costing money for 5 years till it comes online).

The problem for both the US and Australia is that private investors have no appetite for coal, because the same money can just continuously install solar and get a better return - with no real problems with environmental lobbies, access to fuel, or anything. We're probably a few years away from grid expansions being built on the basis that they'll make money from people installing solar farms in the new areas.

"Ah! But China is subsidizing it's solar industry!" you say - well "who cares?" says I, the investor who China is effectively paying to build solar plants, and who gets to take a bunch of good PR from it.

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

#90

Post by _ph_ » Sat, May 12, 2018, 7:16 AM UTC

_o_ wrote: post #76

_ph_ wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

In a Tesla battery pack there is only about 8 kg of lithium used - less than lead in a normal car battery. As lithium is a rather common element, it shouldn't be too difficult to mine it in the neccesary amount. Current mining capacitly is set by the comparatively low demand before electric cars.