South Australia teams with Tesla, Neoen to build world's biggest Li-ion battery
abc.net.au
abc.net.au
The chance of another similar storm knocking out the power lines again, which now have bigger maintenance crews, is very small. But if there is another blackout and they didn't do anything? They'd be in big trouble with the newspapers.
So Tesla really sold a risk product. Since SA could have spent the money on more generation. But not all people understand that.
The 100MW stage of that wind farm cost $250 million, and took some years to reach agreement, and some years to build. By promising to build the battery quicker, they have covered that risk during the time they need it.
They could have installed another wind farm the same size in a different part of the state in order to reduce the risk, and fill up the valleys of power generation. That has been proven to work too, and the benefit is you have more power generation in the peaks.
The cost of the blackout was estimated to have cost $367 million to business. 12% of the businesses had backup power generators themselves, and about a third of the businesses had bought insurance for such situations. Life critical systems are required to have independent backup power.
By the time it's built there will probably be a similar amount of solar power installed as the battery (by current rates of installation). There's 2,034 MW of industrial solar being constructed in Australia for 2017. This doesn't include stuff going onto roofs of houses, of which there are millions of houses already covered and more being done. 5KW solar installed in Australia can be done for $5,000AUD or less for a 5KW system. That's $100 million AUD for 100MW on 20,000 homes.
There's also a lead smelter which is being upgraded, so it will have modern equipment which lets it use power more dynamically... effectively making it a battery. It can take in power, or not, as it needs. They can also shut down their power hungry desalination plant if needed (which they don't really need when there is not a drought).
So now they have a backup battery, a backup gas power plant, and backup power lines to another state, more efficient industrial power users, and hundreds of thousands of small independent solar power generators.
They've definitely covered their arses.
From a macro level, wind and solar makes the most logical sense when twinned with battery storage, the nature of the power they produce and to a lesser extend how users consume that power is unpredictable, so the battery is used for peak shaving the demand and supply.
Gas fired power stations don't fire up until they can get the maximum price possible, and often try to drive the price higher by stopping producing power. SA is very vulnerable to that because there is no backstop of coal prices. OTOH, the minimum price of wind power and solar is much lower.
These batteries will kill the peaking gas generator game.
This one arrangement has the potential to totally change the completely derailed energy policy discussion in australia, which continues to default to a coal or gas fired immediacy and future, out of fear over rationality.
We shall see either way
Either way, we played each other over LAN one day and sure enough he took out a few of my nuclear plants, but I had enough energy stored to keep bombarding his base with artillery and eventually struck his commander despite being in the negative for energy production vs consumption. I won. He changed his opinion after that.
It's good to save for that rainy day.
Aren't most games a form of allegory?
This is tangential to what we're discussing, but TA was politicised:
What began as a conflict over the transfer of consciousness from flesh to machines escalated into a war which has decimated a million worlds.
I still remember the "defend the harbor" mission where you had one Moho mine and you had the long range destroyers showing up and desperately salvaging the long range Ranger missile ships for minerals because they were utterly nonthreatening but super valuable..
The map with a giant crevasse. The map with a ton of gunships. It was a really solid campaign. It felt like an amazing story even if the writing was simple to the point of parody just because everything was so well designed and fit perfectly together.
The benefit is not constant either; in areas with regular outages you have a very high incentive to build energy storage (food spoils in the fridge, you cannot do laundry, your router needs power etc). Add a choice of semi-viable alternative energy sources to the mix and the decision is just as interesting as it is in games.
Real World Scenario(TM) - Northern Republica Dominicana:
* rolling blackouts (typically 8h, from 9am to 5pm; once a week); at least once a week some drunk driver takes down a pole (usually fixed in 2h)
* capped electricity bills for low income households
* no enforcement of security standards (not sure such exist at all) - so an array of old car batteries will do just fine. bonus points for investing another $50 into acid-resistant flooring.
* solar power works, but without sun tracking only for 5 to 8h/day
* wind power works, but not everywhere (jungle is a great barrier for wind)
* water pressure is so low you need a motorized pump just to flush your toilet
[disclaimer: I spent 6 months in that part of the DR in the last 2 years]
EDIT: Only 2nd hand, but from 200[345] - in an economic standoff between government and energy producer the navy sent "generator ships" that anchored near the shore of Puerto Plata and delivered electricity to the local population through cables they ran through the water.
* Battery ($140 million)
* Gas Power Plant ($360 million)
These costs are noticeable but not unreasonable.
SA will hopefully turn a nominal profit, although the principle of 'if it were the profitable option, private enterprise would have done it' suggests this will be an economic drag at least in the short term.
I suspect this move is a knee-jerk reaction to the power outage in 2016; so I am very interested in what the long term impacts of this are. I'm adding this to my watch list along with the German Energiewende to see where it is in 2020. It is a very interesting tour-of-force by Tesla and hopefully we discover positive things about large-scale lithium deployments.
Cause TFA says if he doesnt get it done in 100 days it'll cost him 50 mil
>But the promise could leave Mr Musk significantly out of pocket if he fails to deliver to deadline.
>He estimated it would cost him "probably $50 million or more" if the 100 days lapse without the battery installed.
This looks very much like the state Labor government giving the federal government the finger.
This project is about expanding the output of the Snowy Mountains scheme, which means greater demand on the storage capacity, not forgetting 1000km of transmission lines to get the energy to Adelaide which means the grid components that failed them last time are in exactly the same place.
The proposed expansion is $1/W capacity.
The expected price for the Neoen project is in the order of $1/W ($100M for 100MW output, 129MWh capacity)
Note that the actual price on the SA battery is not known, and there has not even been a tender out for the Snowy expansion much less accompany at work digging tunnels suddenly finding that Australian conditions are breaking their equipment more than expected :)
The expected cost overruns on the SA tender are aporoximately zero, the expected cost overruns on a large hydro project between initial estimates and completion are approximately 100% based on industry standards.
There is nothing to tender against.
The plans for the Snowy Mountains expansion is nothing more than the one page press release.
http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/news/south-australia/pumped-hy...
http://www.ecogeneration.com.au/why-pumped-hydro-beats-batte...
I'm glad SA is going this alone. The Federal govt is too tied up in politics to produce a functional solution based on hard data. It'd be all talk and no action and by going it alone, SA undercuts that.
An inevitable campaign based on electricity prices is easily the biggest risk to the state government. The state opposition hasn't really built a viable identity in recent years, but many people are quickly incensed about rising bills.
For Labor, pitching that they are standing up to the Federal government and moving forward regardless, is a reasonable strategy against that.
They announced it as a certainty, even though the design was nothing more than the one page press announcement, the project feasibility study yet to started and no construction expected for many years, if it indeed it is feasible.
The government is pretty much 100% anti-renewables with their pet love being coal with their catchcry being Coal is good for humanity.
Currently they are considering a $1B government loan to an Indian coal mining company, only because no bank will lend them the money.
My take on this SA announcement is it might end up being a big blow for the government.
If it works out as designed and fixes some of the issues in the SA electricity grid, it be egg on the face of the government, since they insist the SA grid is a disaster only because it has such a high reliance on renewables and is missing a coal powered generator.
Jay ripped Josh Frydenberg another orifice.
While I do love Jay, Josh is not the sharpest tool in the shed.
I'd say he is missing a few sheep, broken loose from that upper paddock.
For once, I'd love it if our ever changing State Government would just spend its limited budget on tried and tested solutions rather than pissing money up the wall on things that may or may not work.
I think the infamy was unearned, and mainly due to people not understanding that it was never intended to run all the time, but is insurance for a time of crisis (which we will certainly have again at some point).
So, not a good example.
[1] https://www.sawater.com.au/community-and-environment/our-wat...
Things that were first done/discovered in SA: - military tank - sunscreen - hills hoist - early version of wifi (controversially)
References: http://www.abc.net.au/local/stories/2014/07/23/4051703.htm http://insidesouthaustralia.com.au/5-amazing-south-australia...
Batteries are well proven technology now. Here's the Tesla one in California: https://arstechnica.com/business/2017/01/a-look-at-the-new-b.... Batteries are very much the tried and tested solution now. This is just a bigger set.
Our wind-farms are nothing special. We get much less power from them than most places in Europe. Even the eviro-nuts (/sarcasm) in Texas get up to 23% of their power from wind (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-rise-of-wind-...). SA gets around 33%.
Pretty much all of SA's problems are because of geography. We don't have many people (~1.5M, almost all of whom are in Adelaide) and we are a long, long way from anywhere else. That makes taking part in the national market difficult.
Pumped hydro is probably the best known and longest used. It's reliable and low risk. It's only practical if geography includes two adjacent large bodies of water with significant altitude differential. This isn't exactly rare but it's unusual, so pumped hydro isn't often a solution.
Other than p.h.? Thermal (molten salt)? flywheels? These are rare and early in development. Each has its own reliability issues.
If grid-scale storage is needed, it seems like Li batteries are the best understood, lowest technical risk option for now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markersbach_Pumped_Storage_Pow...
For a battery plant, you can plop it down pretty much anywhere, it needs minimal planning.
If its anything like my Nexus 6p it'll need replacing within a year.
Bit like wear levelling with SSD drives.
Your phone probably has an erratic charge discharge cycle.
Most Li-ion batteries have 400-1200 duty cycle. That should give this project a 3 year cycle a least.
A better place would be at the generation source with substation batteries for smoothing out blips.
I'm no expert, but I would guess it's because most of the time the wind will be blowing somewhat, so you will rarely need peak discharge. Most of the time the batteries will be providing load smoothing and frequency regulation.
So they could have gotten a system with 100 MW/420 MWh
It was transmission tower failures that took out the network for the significant outage.
http://www.escosa.sa.gov.au/ArticleDocuments/1047/20170208-I...
Capacitors are good if you need power for seconds rather than the minutes-hours that batteries are good at.
That's rather pessimistic isn't it? In their cars, which is arguably a less stable environment, they don't seem to fall much beyond 70-80% capacity. The lose capacity quickly at first, but then it stabilizes. I haven't heard anything that implies that a lithium-ion battery in a stable, temperature environment will lose "most" of their capacity, i.e. over 50%.
And unlike cars, it's not like the value of the battery becomes so much less when they lose capacity. There's plenty of space, that's not the problem. They could just add a few extra batteries if they want to keep the capacity (more likely they will add more batteries other places).
Of course battery capacity loss will be part of the contract. Tesla will probably guarantee a certain capacity after a certain time, and they will tell the customer how much loss they can expect. It will all be taken into account when calculating the profitability and life-time of the system.
Why would they report this in the media? It's not something most people is interested in. It's the kind of thing you find in datasheets for the product.