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%

#101

Post by nl » Sat, May 12, 2018, 10:45 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…

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.

Really?

The 2017 Lazard report (which I think is generally pretty well regarded) has them at:

Coal, min: 60, max: 143

Wind, min: 30, max: 60

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#...

There are plenty of other sources on that page. You'll quickly find that most show wind power being cheaper than coal since around 2012 (even without a carbon price).

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

#102

Post by icebraining » Sat, May 12, 2018, 10:52 AM UTC

_o_ wrote: post #77

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 spi…

(Warning: I have zero expertise on this)

Apparently there's an argument about that, since there's a plan to upgrade the Snowy Hydro pumped storage system, but it'll cost $2B and it couldn't be done in 100 days like the Tesla installation. The other advantage seems to be that the battery can respond very quickly (0.14s), so it's still useful to avoid instability in the network.

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

#103

Post by icebraining » Sat, May 12, 2018, 11:03 AM UTC

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?

Docker was originally an internal tool to power dotCloud's platform.

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

#104

Post by chatmasta » Sat, May 12, 2018, 11:15 AM UTC

the8472 wrote: post #26

bassman9000 wrote: post #9

Zero emmissions If nuclear has to include the costs of dismantling the plants, batteries have to include the cost of building them. And wind generators are massive aluminum structures, which are extremely costly to shape. Some day, maybe. Let's be fair in the meantime.

> decomissioning You have to decomission nuclear plants unless you want radioactive waste in your ground water. You don't have to do such a thing with wind turbines. You could just let them turn into industrial ruins. It's probably more economical to recycle the materials, but that's a choice. > construction All plants require that. Nuclear or coal plants are not made from unicorn hair and dreams. And modern wind tur…

I'm not an environmental scientist, but I thought this argument is usually applied to the cost of mining and refining the materials used to make the batteries and solar cells, which are not necessary for other methods of electricity generation.

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

#105

Post by icebraining » Sat, May 12, 2018, 11:20 AM UTC

inopinatus wrote: post #35

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.

Tesla is as much a battery company as Cray was a refrigeration company.

You mean, except for the fact that Tesla sells batteries, whereas Craig never sold refrigeration products?

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

#106

Post by icebraining » Sat, May 12, 2018, 11:22 AM UTC

loosescrews wrote: post #36

ovao wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve actually never seen it approached any other way (triggered by a direct action), which is somehow even more obnoxious than the prompt itself.

Gmail at least used to do that. There was sometimes a link near the top of the page with text instructing you to click it if you wanted to enable notifications.

Slack too ("Slack needs your permission to enable desktop notifications"). But I don't find it more annoying than showing the prompt.

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

#107

Post by jeremyjh » Sat, May 12, 2018, 11:27 AM UTC

ovao wrote: post #24

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.

While not cost effective in the slightest, jettisoning nuclear waste into outer space is one proposition. Naturally, launching rockets filled with nuclear waste comes with its own safety concerns.

> Naturally, launching rockets filled with nuclear waste comes with its own safety concerns.

You mention this like it is a "problem to be solved". It seems like a complete show-stopper to me. Rockets go down. Launch enough, and it will happen, regardless of all safeguards. There is no acceptable place on earth to shower hundreds of square kilometers with radioactive material with thousands of years half-life.

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

#108

Post by zik » Sat, May 12, 2018, 11:38 AM UTC

_o_ wrote: post #77

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 spi…

They're not using it in the same manner as pumped storage. They're using it for millisecond level FCAS response. Turbines can't do that very well.

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

#109

Post by pjc50 » Sat, May 12, 2018, 12:23 PM UTC

jaddood wrote: post #100

vasco wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You don't really need a river to pump hydro up and down. As long as you have some kind of container for the water (usually a dam though not necessarily so,) you can pump any water. The cheapest to pump is probably sea water. I'm not really sure how cheap that would be compared to batteries, but it's still an option.

To make it cost-effective, you need a height advantage and a "natural" container. The ideal sites are mountaintop lakes. It's a fairly rare topography.

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

#110

Post by cf498 » Sat, May 12, 2018, 12:26 PM UTC

mmt wrote: post #72

klondike_ wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ri…

>Only waste that no longer requires cooling can be moved underground.

Thats the point though. It should be moved into long term storage after that and not stay in the pool that needs to be cooled.

Transporting is not the issue you make it out to be. Transport on trains has been a regular spectacle for decades in Europe, especially between La Hague and German nuclear power plants and the storage site in Gorleben.

They are transported in nuclear flasks ("Castor" in German) under tight security measures in slow speed across extra checked railways lines. That takes a while, especially if every time ten thousands of protesters blockade the shipment and there is sabotage of the rail bed. All of that makes these transports extremely expensive.

You of course cant simply put them in normal freight trains or simply dont put them in storage at all. In the best case you have to move them once the plant gets dismantled which simply makes the final costs higher.

Nuclear power ignores most of those costs today and simply lets the public pay the bill in the end. To be a competitive power source the production price needs to also include the budget for waste management, which includes:

* Transport of nuclear waste

* Final storage of nuclear waste

* Cleanup of the power plant

This is not the case in most countries which makes nuclear power a highly subsidized energy source. The problem of final storage alone is an absolute nightmare, Germany realized their Morsleben and Asse II radioactive waste repositories were not suited for storage after all. Asse II has lost stability, became flooded and is at threat of collapse. It now has to be decommissioned, which includes a complete dig out.