Worlds largest battery to be installed in South Australia by Tesla

[Blue heaven]

I guess you are not retired, then?

see my answer to ICUDoc, that better explains it.

 

[Blue heaven]

BH, I gather you are saying that you are happy to pay these things IF everyone else is required to do likewise? As in, like me, you have spent lots of hard-earned money DECREASING your FF use and carbon footprint?
Is that right?

that's correct, if we look at every aspect of the long term financial costs of renewable energy/transport verses fossil fuel energy/transport renewable will be best for the majority of individuals and the country as one, homeowners/car owners have the ability to make a financial investment stretched out over 10-20 years, governments do also but they wont, everything is based on getting re-elected in 3 years time.

 

[WilburGreen]

Ummmmm, chuq, where is she wrong, exactly? Elon is a dreamer who does make things happen, EVENTUALLY. Renewables are great if you have abundant geothermal, or hydroelectric resources. Wave power has not yet made it into that league. Solar and wind simply cannot meet base load requirements and nowhere near enough battery power is being installed and it remains a very expensive option. What, by the way is going to charge those batteries?
Without the government loans Tesla would not have survived, though that loan has since been repaid. I don’t think the same can be said for government loans to the other car manufacturers.
Closing Liddell will be a disaster, and closing Hazelwood was not a really bright idea either. There are no plans for adequate substitution of either. The correct solution in our context is nuclear, given the size of the country, and its uranium reserves. But those reactors need to have been well on the way to completion well before any obsolescence closure of power plants.
Her point is foreign investors profiteering. Yes indeed, that is exactly what they are doing. You think Elon was here simply out of the goodness of his heart?
The Yank running AGL will be out of here just as soon as he has made his pile. I am quite sure he is not on a modest altruistic salary!!

Dborn you have been lead into the spruiking of base load. Baseload was a term introduced to justify the original coal power stations. The coal power stations take an incredibly long to time slow or increase their turbines, so they typically run at a fairly constant power output 24x7. So in the early days they introduced the off peak hot water systems, and attempted to put business onto tariffs that rewarded them for having a consistent demand, all under the term of creating a “base load”.
The bottom line is the coal and now nuclear run at a constant output and potentially will be generating when no-one wants to use the power. This baseload was a problem particularly in places where there was not a constant demand.
In South Australia where the minimal and maximum demands for power are radically poles apart, using a baseload approach has never worked. Domestic Hot Water Systems went to gas, and now domestic PV solar creates a low demand in the middle of the day.
Coal and Nuclear cannot cost effectively supply South Australia, unless you can find something to do with thousands of MegaWatt hours produced that cannot be used in South Australia.
So getting back to the battery, one of the tings is to stabilise in terms of power frequency, which will work way better than traditional methods, as well as the battery will give peaking power plants time to start up esp if there is a sudden generator failure. In South Australia case, the maximum demand in a day may be several times the minimum, so it needs constant changes in output during every day.

 

[NovoCasGreeny]

Dborn you have been lead into the spruiking of base load. Baseload was a term introduced to justify the original coal power stations. The coal power stations take an incredibly long to time slow or increase their turbines, so they typically run at a fairly constant power output 24x7. So in the early days they introduced the off peak hot water systems, and attempted to put business onto tariffs that rewarded them for having a consistent demand, all under the term of creating a “base load”.
The bottom line is the coal and now nuclear run at a constant output and potentially will be generating when no-one wants to use the power. This baseload was a problem particularly in places where there was not a constant demand.
In South Australia where the minimal and maximum demands for power are radically poles apart, using a baseload approach has never worked. Domestic Hot Water Systems went to gas, and now domestic PV solar creates a low demand in the middle of the day.
Coal and Nuclear cannot cost effectively supply South Australia, unless you can find something to do with thousands of MegaWatt hours produced that cannot be used in South Australia.
So getting back to the battery, one of the tings is to stabilise in terms of power frequency, which will work way better than traditional methods, as well as the battery will give peaking power plants time to start up esp if there is a sudden generator failure. In South Australia case, the maximum demand in a day may be several times the minimum, so it needs constant changes in output during every day.

Exactly!! This is what I was referring to with old school thinking. 'Base load' is nothing more than a fabricated term to help simple people think that the 'only' way to generate power is in a centralised hub and spoke model. Huge 'continual' generators in the hub and vast vast infrastructure required to distribute it to every part of every state. Now, when poles and wires and big power plants were 'cheap' this model worked in some ways. However, as you have touched on, the output is constant, and slow to manipulate. That's why we had the government offering incredibly cheap (subsidised) deals to big industrial users at off peak times, and load shedding built into their contracts. It was designed to soak up all the extra power that would be generated. The whole generation system was designed towards a one hour peak event, such a design is simply flawed.

Solar PV is doing a few things and can achieve many more. Firstly, it is moving and lowering this summer peak. It is moving it later into the night, and lowering the actual magnitude of the peak. With high domestic and SME electricity costs this is only going to help drive this peak out of the daylight hours, and start to reduce daytime net demand altogether. As households and businesses significantly increase their uptake of batteries it will start to reverse some of this trend, as the exports get consumed by the battery for overnight use. Given the cost/ benefit trade of solar vs battery. I personally think the current trends will continue, a lot of solar, with some batteries.

How rooftop solar has dramatically shifted and reduced peak demand

What will the future hold? a distributed grid with solar on every building and batteries to go alongside it. Hot water will be generated during the day. Cars will be charged during the day. Apart from large industrial users almost all power will be generated at or immediately next to the point of demand. Local spikes in demand will be taken care off with substation based batteries (powerpack installs). The grid infrastructure that exists will only be in place to act to charge the larger local batteries. Net grid demand will plateau and fall. The cost of 'connection' to the grid nowadays is now cost prohibitive. New subdivisions will soon stop paying millions and millions of dollars for grid connections, or at least massively reduce the size of the connection and favour solar on all new homes. They will establish energy communities and larger 'community' batteries as it will provide more reliable power, that is cheaper. The advantage in all of these is that the billions and billions of dollars required to upgrade and maintain the vast grid infrastructure built under the centralised model will not need to be repeated. Demand will continue to increase, but net demand will fall. As the price of solar PV and batteries continue to fall, and the price of grid power continues to rise, the outcome is inevitable. All that is required is the government to steady and steer the transition, not delay it clinging to the mode of operation from yesteryear.

 

[EcoCloudIT]

@NovoCasGreeny agree with what you're saying....however I still prefer to plug my car in overnight with a full charge each time I leave in the morning. To this end batteries will need to charge my car and power my house overnight. Until we're all driving electric cars and I can plug in wherever I may be each day then an overnight charge will be something I'll need to do....I have customers spread all over Melbourne so I don't have the opportunity of driving to a known location each day at work etc.

It's an exiting time, I believe when the PowerWall 3 (or 4) comes out the prices will be very tempting to make the switch to solar/battery designed in a way to be nearly off-grid capable....

 

[garyjac]

Exactly!! This is what I was referring to with old school thinking. 'Base load' is nothing more than a fabricated term to help simple people think that the 'only' way to generate power is in a centralised hub and spoke model. Huge 'continual' generators in the hub and vast vast infrastructure required to distribute it to every part of every state. Now, when poles and wires and big power plants were 'cheap' this model worked in some ways. However, as you have touched on, the output is constant, and slow to manipulate. That's why we had the government offering incredibly cheap (subsidised) deals to big industrial users at off peak times, and load shedding built into their contracts. It was designed to soak up all the extra power that would be generated. The whole generation system was designed towards a one hour peak event, such a design is simply flawed.

Solar PV is doing a few things and can achieve many more. Firstly, it is moving and lowering this summer peak. It is moving it later into the night, and lowering the actual magnitude of the peak. With high domestic and SME electricity costs this is only going to help drive this peak out of the daylight hours, and start to reduce daytime net demand altogether. As households and businesses significantly increase their uptake of batteries it will start to reverse some of this trend, as the exports get consumed by the battery for overnight use. Given the cost/ benefit trade of solar vs battery. I personally think the current trends will continue, a lot of solar, with some batteries.

How rooftop solar has dramatically shifted and reduced peak demand

What will the future hold? a distributed grid with solar on every building and batteries to go alongside it. Hot water will be generated during the day. Cars will be charged during the day. Apart from large industrial users almost all power will be generated at or immediately next to the point of demand. Local spikes in demand will be taken care off with substation based batteries (powerpack installs). The grid infrastructure that exists will only be in place to act to charge the larger local batteries. Net grid demand will plateau and fall. The cost of 'connection' to the grid nowadays is now cost prohibitive. New subdivisions will soon stop paying millions and millions of dollars for grid connections, or at least massively reduce the size of the connection and favour solar on all new homes. They will establish energy communities and larger 'community' batteries as it will provide more reliable power, that is cheaper. The advantage in all of these is that the billions and billions of dollars required to upgrade and maintain the vast grid infrastructure built under the centralised model will not need to be repeated. Demand will continue to increase, but net demand will fall. As the price of solar PV and batteries continue to fall, and the price of grid power continues to rise, the outcome is inevitable. All that is required is the government to steady and steer the transition, not delay it clinging to the mode of operation from yesteryear.

EXACTLY. Government is standing in the doorway and blocking the hall at the moment. Remember the rest ?

 

[mongo]

Question:
The Hornsdale battery is described as 100MW/129MWh . I'm counting 6 rows of 16 groups of 8 PowerPacks, a total of 768 PP.
Based on the standard literature of 50kW/210kWh per PP, that totals out to 38.5MW/161MWh.

Is the Tesla PP kW data incorrect or did I miss something?

 

[baillies]

I can’t find an article at the moment but it is actually 2 systems. 1 standard 30MW/~63MWh system operated by Neon, the other is a non-standard 70MW/~66MWh system contracted to SA gov, this second one doesn’t seem to participate in the market and appears to be in reserve for emergency only.

Some info here A month in, Tesla’s SA battery is surpassing expectations

Edit1: Found it Yes, the Tesla battery is massive, but it can do much more beside

“The battery complex can be thought of as two systems. First there is a component with 70MW of output capacity that has been contracted to the SA government. This is reported to provide grid stability and system security, and designed only to have about 10 minutes of storage.

The second part could be thought of as having 30MW of output capacity, but 3-4 hours of storage. Even though this component has a smaller capacity (MW), it has much more storage (MWh) and can provide energy for much longer. This component will participate in the competitive part of the market, and should firm up the wind power produced by the wind farm.”

Edit2: from the article linked in the quote above about the 70MW part

“This part of the battery is designed to last 10 minutes, which sounds short but is long enough to keep the grid stable while slower machines such as gas generators can respond.”

If you don’t know SA also bought a number of diesel generators as backup for this summer, they are due to be converted to gas longer term. The battery in theory gives the generators time to start, they haven’t been needed yet.

 

[mongo]

I can’t find an article at the moment but it is actually 2 systems. 1 standard 30MW/~63MWh system operated by Neon, the other is a non-standard 70MW/~76MWh system contracted to SA gov, this second one doesn’t seem to participate in the market and appears to be in reserve for emergency only.

Some info here A month in, Tesla’s SA battery is surpassing expectations

If they are co-located, that would make sense. The theoretical MWh of the one in the photo lines up, it's only the peak output that I'm not able to understand. So if they are running a set of PP at 3x loading for brief periods, that could explain it.

 

[baillies]

Not sure if you caught my edits above

Edit1: Found it Yes, the Tesla battery is massive, but it can do much more beside

“The battery complex can be thought of as two systems. First there is a component with 70MW of output capacity that has been contracted to the SA government. This is reported to provide grid stability and system security, and designed only to have about 10 minutes of storage.

The second part could be thought of as having 30MW of output capacity, but 3-4 hours of storage. Even though this component has a smaller capacity (MW), it has much more storage (MWh) and can provide energy for much longer. This component will participate in the competitive part of the market, and should firm up the wind power produced by the wind farm.”

Edit2: from the article linked in the quote above about the 70MW part

“This part of the battery is designed to last 10 minutes, which sounds short but is long enough to keep the grid stable while slower machines such as gas generators can respond.”

If you don’t know SA also bought a number of diesel generators as backup for this summer, they are due to be converted to gas longer term. The battery in theory gives the generators time to start, they haven’t been needed yet.

 

[mongo]

Not sure if you caught my edits above

Edit1: Found it Yes, the Tesla battery is massive, but it can do much more beside

“The battery complex can be thought of as two systems. First there is a component with 70MW of output capacity that has been contracted to the SA government. This is reported to provide grid stability and system security, and designed only to have about 10 minutes of storage.

The second part could be thought of as having 30MW of output capacity, but 3-4 hours of storage. Even though this component has a smaller capacity (MW), it has much more storage (MWh) and can provide energy for much longer. This component will participate in the competitive part of the market, and should firm up the wind power produced by the wind farm.”

Edit2: from the article linked in the quote above about the 70MW part

“This part of the battery is designed to last 10 minutes, which sounds short but is long enough to keep the grid stable while slower machines such as gas generators can respond.”

If you don’t know SA also bought a number of diesel generators as backup for this summer, they are due to be converted to gas longer term. The battery in theory gives the generators time to start, they haven’t been needed yet.

Thanks! I hadn't seen the edits.
So part is standard and part is high output power low energy.
Appreciate the references!

 

[baillies]

No worries, I found the other piece of related info, it seems the 70MW is basically permanently bid at the market cap price so it is only called when the rest of the market has failed to deliver.

"(Update: It has also been pointed out to RE that under the contract to provide system services to the SA government, Hornsdale is required to bid at $14,200/MWh for government FCAS so as “not to interfere in the market”.

It does not necessarily mean that the bids are cleared and only occurs when AEMO moves to a situation called VOLL (value of lost load), when the market reaches its cap as the supply/demand balance reaches a critical area)."

from here Tesla big battery setting market prices, including at $14,200 cap

 

[mongo]

No worries, I found the other piece of related info, it seems the 70MW is basically permanently bid at the market cap price so it is only called when the rest of the market has failed to deliver.

"(Update: It has also been pointed out to RE that under the contract to provide system services to the SA government, Hornsdale is required to bid at $14,200/MWh for government FCAS so as “not to interfere in the market”.

It does not necessarily mean that the bids are cleared and only occurs when AEMO moves to a situation called VOLL (value of lost load), when the market reaches its cap as the supply/demand balance reaches a critical area)."

from here Tesla big battery setting market prices, including at $14,200 cap

Wow, so the battery sits on the sidelines until no other power source is available, then it racks up $4/MWs or $280 per second at max capacity. With a 5 second head start on a standby generator, up to $1,400 per blip.
Hope in a few years solar, wind, and more batteries get things stabilized.