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

electrek.co

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

#111

Post by mabbo »

XorNot wrote: post #89
roenxi wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 p…

So why isn't that happening? It seems odd to me that in an ostensibly free market economy, a good investment opportunity would be ignored.

Does the government just say "no" to letting wind and solar producers add capacity?

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

#113

Post by Retric »

TheSoftwareGuy wrote: post #64
Retric wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

3x8 hour shifts adds up to 24 hours. This means our 6/7 of your shift ~everyone has been working for 6/7 hours. You might be able to stagger start times every 4 hours or even every 10 minutes over the day to smooth things out, but doing such an odd schedule would increase costs.

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

#114

Post by azernik »

ggm wrote: post #58
azernik wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bipartisan consensus is also a political process.

Yes. One which is increasingly absent from western electoral democratic process. Oppositional politics is currently the preferred model even though it wedges capital investment in infrastructure. Are you bringing anything to this conversation or just trying to win an argument here?

krl02 made the point that all these things are political processes. You brought up the example of past bipartisan investments as a counterargument; my understanding of your point was "we've had bipartisan consensus on investments before, therefore there wasn't a political process going on around that". I was pointing out that this also is a political process, and that krl02's model of economic decision-making as a political process still stands.

Were you trying to make some other point instead?

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

#115

Post by mikeash »

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…

Looking at solar and wind historically doesn’t make any sense. They’re emerging technologies with rapidly decreasing cost. You have to look at their costs now, not from before.

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

#116

Post by Frqy3 »

roenxi wrote: post #96
stephen_g wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Australia's number 1 problem is that the grid itself is too expensive. That isn't the Coalition, because it has been happening through the late Howard, Rudd-Gillard-Rudd, Abbott and Turnbull governments. Typical slow government problem, not any particular party. Obviously you aren't talking about that, so I didn't mention it. Australia's number 2 problem is all our power plants are aging and shutting down. I addresse…

And the grid is too expensive because the regulator allowed an effectively risk-free rate of return on investment that was too good to pass up.

In telecoms wholesale pricing in Australia, there would frequently be adjustments to the claimed capital costs to remove this gold plating incentive, but the energy side seemed to be much more accepting of whatever the distributors claimed.

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

#117

Post by rbg246 »

mabbo wrote: post #111
XorNot wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

So why isn't that happening? It seems odd to me that in an ostensibly free market economy, a good investment opportunity would be ignored. Does the government just say "no" to letting wind and solar producers add capacity?

https://youtu.be/vSz1fItPWIw

I watched this Melbourne University video which discussed this issue in detail. It went into detail on the economics of the Australian electricity market.

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

#118

Post by caf »

boyter wrote: post #10
spodek wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This outcome is in a particularly distorted badly operated market, one where for no very good reasons regulatory power is not being applied . . . You described most energy markets on the planet.

It’s particularly bad in Australia and South Australia where this battery is was the worst. Australia despite having abundant reserves of coal, gas and uranium as well as excellent solar and wind locations has some of their most expensive electricity prices in the world.

When the resources are internationally tradeable, the size of the local reserves doesn't really matter. The price faced will still be the market price.

Generation is far from the only factor in power prices, anyway, and Australia is not nearly so blessed when it comes to the economics of power transmission.

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

#120

Post by hinkley »

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?

F5 was a load balancer for a video game. In that article about financial concerns of pot growers in Colorado a few months back there were two people moving into services and out of growing.

And some restaurants switch to wholesaling and distributing their more noteworthy products and either close the restaurant or hand it over to somebody else to manage.

When you used to be the customer for your new product you have access to a wealth of insights about what could make the product work. If you are better at that than your old product, well...

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