Tesla’s big battery in South Australia may prove the viability of renewables | Hacker News Reader

Tesla’s big battery in South Australia may prove the viability of renewables

theguardian.com

208 pointsfmihaila166 comments

This article, like Turnbull, is incorrectly equating cost with price. Emissions are a cost. Price + emissions = cost. Renewables have been beating coal on cost for quite a while, only now they can start to win on price.

that's true.

but to dig a bit deeper, who pays each cost and who benefits from the value?

  who directly benefits from the value of energy:
  - australian energy consumers
  - australian energy producers

  who pays the costs for energy prices:
  - australian energy consumers

  who pays the costs for australian emissions *:
  - people living in australia -- 0.3% of emissions
  - people living in world excluding australia -- 99.7% of emissions

* assuming each person currently alive in world has equal interest in global climate. this is pretty crude as people who arent born yet get to carry the cost too.

Clearly we cant account for these shared global costs sensibly unless enough countries reach some kind of global agreement. The current australian federal government is taking a regrettable approach of self-interest and is waiting for the larger/more powerful countries to lead the way. Australia has plenty of coal to sell in the mean time.

Failure to act on climate change has a game-theoretic cost. Taking unilateral action massively improves your negotiating position and reduces the cost for other countries to reduce their emissions via economies of scale. One country taking decisive action could trigger a chain reaction of political pressure.

Australia has a horrendous wildfire problem. The frequency and severity of wildfires has drastically increased over recent years. A small increase in global temperatures could render vast areas of the country effectively uninhabitable due to the risk of fire.

I think that most Australians are willing to act; that will is being subverted by a powerful coal lobby. They see the hellish scenes every summer. They see the immense financial, environmental and human cost. They see the weight of scientific evidence.

> Failure to act on climate change has a game-theoretic cost. Taking unilateral action massively improves your negotiating position and reduces the cost for other countries to reduce their emissions via economies of scale

Thanks - I wasn't aware of that. Are there any books / articles that go into this in more detail and might be accessible to someone with a decent math + comp sci education but no knowledge of game theory?

I'm also appreciating the same as you quoted above.

But I keep defaulting to a painfully pessimistic imagination that is the costs are collectively going to be so moot so much sooner than any expectation, due to unforseen extreme results.

Am I going through a depression or something manic, maybe, because I don't believe we're not all suppressing contemplation of the outlier worse consequences of climate instability and as a result are walking blindfold in a kind of negotiated but half acceptable death march into a slower extinction and because of this unseen compromise on the range of forecasts that are shorn of the scariest conclusions we're investing in hope and eliminating healthy appreciation of the dangers, and ultimately accommodating skepticism too much for that accommodation to be without inevitable negative effects ?

edit: final words arranged for grammatical clarity, no overt meaning altered by edit.

Personally I have found reading both history and philosophy is helpful - not in "solving the problem" but being able to manage emotion and anxiety about climate change. I think learning about previous periods of large-scale ecological change or collapse of civilisations helps to normalise the possible/likely/inevitable upcoming events intellectually. Philosophy helps to figure out a workable emotional response. I think there is some value in stoic philosophy that can be applied in daily living, particularly in terms of managing responses to loss (e.g. loss of one's health, or one's material possessions, or loved one's, or perhaps one's society)

There's also this - Roy Scranton's "Learning How to Die in the Anthropocene":

https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/11/10/learning-ho...

> The biggest problem climate change poses isn’t how the Department of Defense should plan for resource wars, or how we should put up sea walls to protect Alphabet City, or when we should evacuate Hoboken. It won’t be addressed by buying a Prius, signing a treaty, or turning off the air-conditioning. The biggest problem we face is a philosophical one: understanding that this civilization is already dead. The sooner we confront this problem, and the sooner we realize there’s nothing we can do to save ourselves, the sooner we can get down to the hard work of adapting, with mortal humility, to our new reality.

i am not sure if you will find any of this helpful but i hope that you can find some peace with time

Wow thank you so much for your very thoughtful reply. I'm glad you mentioned philosophy albeit I named my company after the most introspective and protective muse of Kirkegaard, so I have to find a way to not loop into a existentialism of my career. But as a reply I think you are correct in saying that I would benefit from a new sight of the philosophers to be at least a clearer mirror of the world than I am possessing now.

I'm possibly finally reaching the simple steps of normal reaction to events that so shocked me I blanked a considerable amount of my life memory and only recently was reunited with by a further trauma. But I have reacted to your comment by latching on to the health side of the equation as patently a relatively simple thing to incrementally improve that is likely to be a positive feedback catalyst. My mind is silently expressing a elongated and expressive Yep to that. But what you say about philosophy and understanding emotions is particularly apt, as it is a pain point that my memory loss is associated with the devaluation of emotions in my life at important times.

I'm unable to add to the thoughts of resources wars, except for mention of the emergency powers in place in the UK for 13 years now which are so draconian the only parallel is Soviet control over the population. Statewatch is a good place to source for the much ignored data and law. In my mind the powers have been long anticipating social breakdown and were ready over a decade ago. I can only wonder at the imagination of the technology advances in recent years without a accompanying chillier political climate and stagnating peacetime. I actually take solace from thinking that it is not a given, the seemingly inseparable advance of tech and the diminished capacity for liberties. I'm inclined to bet long and hard on the positive side of technology.

Thanks again for your thoughts. I've actually taken them to heart.

You might want The Prisoner's Dilemma, by William Poundstone, and if that intrigues you, Games of Strategy by Dixit and Skeath is a well-known textbook.

Game theory has important effects on economics and marketing, as well as the obvious politics.

Paradoxically, more frequent fires can often mean less severe fires. That's the rationale behind controlled burns and traditional aboriginal land management practices.

And because this is Hacker News, have a play with the simulation hosted at Fourmilab: http://www.fourmilab.ch/cellab/manual/rules.html#Forest

Some places getting dramatically hotter drier weather all the time does not lead to less severe fires.

Having written (as in, programmed, based on process knowledge from fire departments) a model for forest fires in Australia myself over the last few months, I feel that I can say that while a fine demo application of CA based modeling, this model is not an accurate description of forest fir behaviour (well unless it's just to illustrate how planned burns interact with their crude approximation of fuel load). E.g. it doesn't even consider slope and wind direction, or vegetation type.

Not paradoxically. No tree burns two times, so in the next fire you'll have less burning material. This is obvious, and bad.

I know that some trees have adapted to fires. Some pine cones are held closed by a resin that is sensitive to high temperatures. These cones will not open to release their seeds until the critical temperature is reached, out with the old and in with the new and such.

However, if there's nothing left ot burn and the whole ecosystem is destroyed, that's a problem

Works the other way too.

First country footing the massive startup bill will have an economy slowdown compared to other that can be dirty a decade or more while the tech and the solution become commodity.

Besides countries won't really change until it's in their economic interest. Taking from your example until the cost of fighting bush fires (and other climate change related stuff) is greater than the cost of implementing a national plan on the whole economy, things won't change. That's why the hop production crisis is a better predictor on government action than bushfires or heat strokes deaths.

>First country footing the massive startup bill will have an economy slowdown compared to other

not in the modern R&D driven economy. As an example, Silicon Valley is regularly footing the massive startup bill :)

>that can be dirty a decade or more while the tech and the solution become commodity.

and so lacking their own technology they would be naturally buying it from the "first countries" while the first countries will be reinvesting those money into development of even better tech thus ever increasing their lead.

if you think China is going to "buy" the technology, you're not paying attention

Yup, just look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Railways_CRH380A

Although I see it as a positive. The money spent to "buy" technology is essentially wasted money.

> Although I see it as a positive. The money spent to "buy" technology is essentially wasted money.

Is money spent to buy software also "wasted money"? How are you going to pay the engineers developing this technology?

Just because I make a living writing software does not mean I have to support all of this wealth transfer.

I can live on a decent wage. I don't need to make millions of dollars a year.

Screw "creatives" and screw this madness of royalties and license fees. Of what you're doing is of value to someone, they will pay you upfront.

The bigger economic problem is a tragedy of the commons. Everyone benefits from the energy that they individually get from fossil fuels. Everyone pays for a share of everyone's contribution to global warming. When you get all of the reward and only a fraction of the cost from your personal use, it is in your personal interest to have burned fossil fuels even when the total cost far exceeds your individual reward.

> who pays the costs for australian emissions *: > - people living in australia -- 0.3% of emissions > - people living in world excluding australia -- 99.7% of emissions

Not that straightforward. Effects of emissions is global, yes, but there are also local effects due to pollution, certain chemical byproducts, etc... meaning the local cost is higher than the average worldwide cost.

While travelling in south east Asia I spent 4 days in Saigon (Hó Chi Minh City). Air impacts locals immediately, it may have an effect everywhere long term but immediately for wife and I was pretty harsh irritation of each breath by the last day. We may have been sensitive to it (guess the US air comes at a price) but it was worse than I imagined.

To be fair, the maths behind rentability is tainted with so much agenda from all parts.

E.G: when you give prices for a nuclear plant in France, you include only assembly price and running costs. While for wind turbines you include assembly, disassembly, running costs and wiring (which must be underground by law). This makes it hard to make fair comparisons.

Who pays the cost when the wind turbine melts down?

the same process for when a coal fired power station breaks down. the price of regular maintenance and in the event of catastrophic failure, insurance.

It was a joke.

And who pays the cost when you need to decommission a nuclear power plant?

I'm not against nuclear in general, but accounting should be apples-to-apples.

I'm afraid you didn't read the sarcasm in "wind turbine melts down". The way I see it, the op was taking a dig at nukes

Ouch. You're probably right :)

Known in the industry as Denmark Syndrome.

The turnover of EDF in France in the 90" was above $40 billion. 60% of its production was from nuclear, hence the nuclear costed more than $24 billion each year just to be operated. For a country like France this is huge, several percent of the GDP of that time. But nobody was discussing about that issue mainly because the CGT union had a tight grip on EDF governance.

Yeah but not just that. We badly needed to develop the nuclear arsenal to stay relevant and having nuclear plants helped a lot with that, technically and politically. We can't really compete with numbers or gun power, so the bomb let us still have a word to say in big conflicts.

Now we can put the existing bombs in maintenance mode, or disassemble them into more modern ones, as we don't need that many. It's the right time to shift the energy source, because now it's all about energy again.

This is the only subject where terrorism actually helped. You can't nuke a bunch of suicide bombers or extremists hidden in a mountain. Hence you can't justify making Armageddon devices as easily as before.

One of the other costs of fossil fuels that isnt. mentioned as. much is the resultant pollution and environmental degradation. These externalities are real. Due to the air pollution that gets trapped in the LA basin, Los Angeles has the worst air pollution in the US. 1300 lives are cu5 short each year due to the smog and over the course of a lifetime, breathing the air will shorten your lifespan by a few years.[1]. Also, air pollution is thought to double the risk of dementia in women according to a recent study. [2]

Another grave consequence of bith global climate change and localized pollution is the loss of biodiversity and the chance to study and learn from other organisms and their unique genomes and adaptations.

1 http://www.thoracic.org/about/newsroom/press-releases/journa... 2 https://www.nature.com/tp/journal/v7/n1/full/tp2016280a.html

Can anyone comment more generally on using lithium ion batteries for grid scale storage? It seems nonsensical to me.

Lithium makes sense for cars where power density is essential. But with grid scale storage, there are so many drawbacks, including

1.) High fixed cost vs. other batteries

2.) Degradation from dendrite growth

3.) Need for constant cooling

4.) Possibility of catastrophic failure in case of short circuiting

In contrast something like Zinc-Bromine flow batteries have unlimited cycling with zero loss of energy storage, and are inherently composed of fire retardant materials, making them impossible to catch fire or explode [0]. The trade off is in energy density, but that shouldn't be an issue for fixed grid-scale deployments.

This story feels like forcing a solution with the power of good marketing, not solid engineering.

[0] http://redflow.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Garth-Corey-as...

Pretty sure they have good reasons, wikipedia lists low energy density / high areal costs and the need to be fully discharged.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zinc–bromine_battery

They aren't trying to solve the problem of 'doing it the best way'.

They're trying to solve the problem of 'what else can we do with these high performance batteries'. So they have some where else to put overproduction, have more buying power of raw resources due to scale, more research dollars to put into li-ion batteries responsibly, or they already have the well made hammer of li-ion batteries so everything is a nail.

129MWh is a laughable amount of storage when you need at minimum 10000MWh per day for 1mln people. So you would need at least $12.5bln to build enough plants for just one day per 1mln people. And that's not counting maintenance. For that price 2-3 nuclear plants can be built which can last 30-50 years unlike the 10-20 years of lithium storage.

Instead of hideously expensive (and potentially explosive) lithium storage, solution should be synthesizing and storing some form of gas. This gas can then be produced and stored in underground locations during summer, and then spent during winter.

It's a buffer to stabilize the grid though, so making gas wouldn't really solve the problem that the battery is supposed to solve.

Why wouldn't it? NG plants are already used to meet grid demands.

NG plants can't start delivering power in seconds. That's what "stabilization" means.

You're right that NG plants do play an important role in the grid today, but it's a "we predict that we'll need more power generated in an hour" role.

Gas turbines can be started within minutes. And majority of grids do not currently use "stabilization" within seconds. This sort of requirement is caused by the unreliable and unpredictive solar/wind generation.

I, for one, can't wait for SI Units and their prefixes (Kilo / Mega / Giga / etc) to be adopted globally.

129MWh / 10GWh / 1M people / 12.5G people

I’d be satisfied with joules instead of watt hours.

It's a peaking plant, you don't run it flat out all day, you charge it off-peak and then use it to help cover the 4pm-7pm demand surge.

I'm excited about flow batteries too, but they still have their analogues of the above.

1) Are prices publicly available yet? I haven't found one online, would be keen to know how much their 10kWh unit costs.

2) The cell has a finite lifespan which is analogous to cell degradation - the warranty covers up to 36,500kWh of delivered energy for the 10kWh model, which equates to 3650 full discharge cycles. This is more than lithium batteries, don't get me wrong, but they're not immortal.

3) I don't believe lithium batteries need constant cooling in most cases, especially since for bulk storage your discharge rate is going to be less than 1C.

4) Fair call, lithium batteries have some scary failure modes.

Also, the round trip efficiency of these batteries is only ~77% which is a fair bit lower than lithium (I think they're 90%+?) and represents a large loss of energy over the life of the battery.

Overall I agree that there are significant advantages to flow batteries, especially at grid scale, but they do have drawbacks too.

The article, of course, is guilty of exactly what it accuses its opponents of -- truthiness. They say that this is affordable, and then don't even say how much it costs! He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense [1]

[1] http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/

This is true, but I'd note this quite from the article:

Nyhan showed a clear tendency for people with high numeracy skills to misread graphs about gun control or climate change, even when they’d just correctly read the same graph about soap.

To address you specific point though - the price is less than A$150M/$US115M[1].

By comparison, the SA government is also building a new 250MW gas fired power station which costs A$360M[2].

It's difficult to compare the two because they are such different things of course. But I'd note that at periods of high wind generation the power price in SA does drop to zero, but the peak price is very high. It seems likely the price of energy from the wind farm plus battery will be extremely competitive with gas, and the investment price seems roughly proportional for the amount of energy made available.

[1] http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/news/south-australia/south-aus...

[2] http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-04-13/sa-gas-fire-power-stat...

One with a big enough sink could get paid to take power off the grid. I repeat, you could make money charging your batteries.

Yes. For residential installations they banned the 'charge during cheaper power, discharge into the grid during high power' thing for subsidised solar.

But for this it's the whole idea.

I don't think it would work like that because there would be a rapidly decreasing amount of cheap power to take as more storage came online.

How much is the price for kwh stored/dispatched , over the long term ? that's the missing data here.

And btw: i don't know the economics of this project, but in general, if this was cost effective, Musk would have tons of customers(including power companies), to supply power during peak hours and save them a lot of money.

>Musk would have tons of customers(including power companies), to supply power during peak hours and save them a lot of money.

Assuming such customers don't already have existing contractual obligations with existing providers nor assets whose valuation depends on no significant changes to current operations.

It isn't the case. There are many businesses(both utilities and others) who could use a peak shaving solution, especially one as scaleable as batteries.

EDIT: what's unique about the australian installation(in 100 days), is that it is politically driven, or risk management driven(to reduce the risk of outages). see[2].

And so, using a healthy dose of skepticism, All i'm saying: If there's a real economical solution for the big problem of energy storage, real deployments are the test, not politically/risk driven deployments, or psychological/marketing[1] driven deployments(like we see with the power wall).

And this is a repeating pattern with musk(a marketing genius, definetly, and very smart overall), succeeding quite well on the higher end of the market, but when it comes to the more commodity end, his companies are less stellar: see First Solar, or the fact the Renault-Nissan sells more electric cars than Tesla.

[1]https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/how-to-sell-ene...

[2]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14715679

How do you know? Do you have access to the contracts that, for example, a large provider like PG & E signs with it's partners for their current "peak shaving solution"? Do you have detailed access to their balance sheets and appraiser information?

From their latest 10k[0], Gas related equipment represents 26% of the value of their assets. They would, have to write some non trivial amount off because they would no longer have any use of it by switching to use batteries like these. What would their majority shareholders think in response to that? What if they are also invested in the supply chain of such? I assume those would be non-zero losses.

[0] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/75488/00010049801700...

Edit:

If you are implying that economics of a thing can be decoupled from politics, then I think that is a faulty belief. You won't get "real deployments" unless current providers are out competed on whatever front (economics/politics) or routed around and made obsolete in some fashion, because they stand to lose economically based on their current investment. Whether you agree with how Elon (or others) is going about it, is irrelevant in so much as you aren't in direct opposition or exposed to the risk of such changes.

I'm not long TSLA nor have no future plans to be so.

>> economics of a thing can be decoupled from politics,

Did i imply that ? i just said that the australian project has little relevance to companies who do seek energy storage, because their reasons, motivations, are different, and this greatly affects cost sensitivity.

But you know what? i don't understand politics.

Maybe Australian Politicians didn't expose the low, low cost of stored kwh using this system, because they are humble.

> i just said that the australian project has little relevance to companies who do seek energy storage, because their reasons, motivations, are different, and this greatly affects cost sensitivity.

>>All i'm saying: If there's a real economical solution for the big problem of energy storage, real deployments are the test, not politically/risk driven deployments, or psychological/marketing[1] driven deployments(like we see with the power wall)

Because other energy companies aren't worried about political risks? If that was the case, why would companies lobby government officials/politicians at all anywhere in the world? I'd think all energy companies have similar considerations, but how they choose to weight them may be different.

A theoretical company might save $300 million dollars in yearly operational costs with a upfront cost of $1 billion to $INSERT_WHATEVR_BATTERY_SOLUTION_PROVIDER, but if they are exposed to $26 billion to "investments" of a $100 billion total that are expected to perform for the next 30 years and have to revalue that suddenly (to the downside, to be clear), then I know they are going to think twice about how to move forward.

>> the australian project has little relevance to companies who do seek energy storage, because their reasons, motivations, are different,

If you'll read about the industry, you'll find this claim generally true.

Maybe for historical or regulatory reasons those are not always accessible, whatever their value. And in any case costs have been moving lightning fast, so something that I priced up for a utility a couple of years ago may now be a fraction of the CAPEX...

The UK regulatory system is being tweaked furiously to try to remove impediments to otherwise worthwhile arrangements as far as I can see. One can argue about whether it's being done right.

How much is the price for kwh stored/dispatched , over the long term ? that's the missing data here.

Oh, I didn't realize that was what you meant.

That data isn't really missing, it's unknown because it will be sold at market prices. Obviously the behavior of electricity prices is fairly complex, but for batteries I'd imagine it would make sense to dispatch at any point where the price received is higher than the price paid during charge (perhaps with a risk factor? A little unclear about the behavior regarding expected future prices).

SA historical market prices are available at[1] or per year at[2]. There is a large report on them available at [3].

To summarize, SA wholesale prices average A$123/MWh (US$93/MWH) last year. By comparison, according to [4], wholesale rates in California are around $US30/MWh.

I believe the smaller Tesla battery install in CA is known to be price competitive. I haven't tried looking for the numbers for that though. Either way, it's difficult to imagine that if it is price competitive in CA it won't be even more competitive in SA.

[1] https://www.aemo.com.au/Electricity/National-Electricity-Mar...

[2] https://www.aer.gov.au/wholesale-markets/wholesale-statistic...

[3] http://www.aemo.com.au/-/media/Files/Electricity/NEM/Plannin...

[4] https://www.eia.gov/electricity/wholesale/

The problems with this article are legion but what I want to know is what the real contract terms were?

I know Musk promised the 100-days or free thing, which makes a nice headline, but I really doubt that is what the actual contract says.

I may be wrong but would be very interested to know.

Hawaii and HECO are worth watching closely in the real world of energy and modern grids. http://www.utilitydive.com/news/hawaiian-electric-proposes-n...

There is a great deal going on in the energy world right now around storage of electricity, I think it's a shame opEd websites such as the Guardian feature and focus on Musk, a single entrepreneur and his companies, over the broader advances that are unfolding...

Hawaii gets 85% of its electricity burning imported oil.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Hawaii

If solar is cost effective then Hawaii should be an easy place to build it?

You would think so, but I've been following this for 4 years and there are huge issues to resolve. There is a pre existing grid designed to distribute electricity generated from imported oil which is now woefully out of date. There is huge home solar usage in Hawaii but the grid is incapable of redistributing surplus power created by owner panels. Storage for redistribution at a reasonable cost is the big challenge there, and is being watched closely by other regions and places before they emulate...

From the Energy Dive article I linked to:

'At the end of 2016, about 26% of Hawaiian Electric’s customers’ electricity was sourced from renewables, Greentech Media notes. Customer owned solar power was the largest contributor at 34% of the renewables total, followed by wind, 29%, and biomass at 19%.

On the Big Island of Hawaii renewables accounted for 54% of customers’ needs and on Maui and Molokai it was 37%.'

Here's a big Hawaii example of solar + battery:

https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/10/teslas-kauai-solar-storage...

By putting the two together, the combination looks like a conventional power plant in terms of the grid.

Why is Snowy Hydro 2.0 "ridiculous" and "silly"? What exactly is advantage of battery over pumped storage? Big problem with pumped storage is that it needs specific location, but it seems they already have it.

As I understand, pumped storage is cheaper, more energy efficient, more mature technology. I understand battery swithes faster. What else?

You mentioned location, but that advantage can't really be understated. How can you have pump storage near every major city? It's not feasible in most places. Then there is the enormous transmission cost to get the energy to (and from) that remote location.

Batteries can also meet fluctuations in demand instantly. Hydro cannot.

What enormous transmission cost? Total transmission loss of Australia is 5% (2014).

I already said battery switches faster. You are simply repeating what I said.

Uhm, 5% of national output is a lot of energy. That's not relatively bad or anything, but improvements in transmission would be like getting power plants for free.

High-temperature superconductors: I want to believe.

The Snowy Mountain scheme is around 1500km from Adelaide. It might help in the Eastern States, but transmission losses are significant over that distance, and in the Eastern States they haven't had the power problems yet.

Pumped hydro storage is also inefficient - about 20% losses.

For wind at least, it turns out you want to put the batteries as close to the wind turbines as possible, rather than close to the consumer. The reason is that this evens out the power delivery over the grid. If you put the batteries close to the consumer, the grid from the turbines to consumer must cope with peak generation capacity (powering peak demand, plus charging batteries), whereas if the batteries are close to the turbine the grid only needs to cope with peak wind demand (i.e generation capacity minus battery charging), which is considerably less. Source: from a conversation with someone in high in a major wind power generator.

This makes a lot of sense but would never have occurred to me.

What are the real-world consequences if you fail to "cope" with demand or generation - increased probability of systemic failure? Something blowing out?

Battery technology will continue to mature and at a certain point it will undoubtedly be the better option in most cases. Instead of a giant one-off civil engineering project every time (with all the ways that could go poorly), it would presumably be a relatively straightforward and repeatable install. Unless there is a dire need to bring a ton of storage online right now, it seems that investing in batteries is the better option.

I agree battery will be better in the future. But it doesn't follow that battery is better investment today.

On civil engineering project going poorly, I think that's the problem of poor project management, but I guess sometimes technical solution to management problem makes sense. I note pumped storage gets built routinely within time and budget without any fuss all over the world.

> but it seems they already have it.

The Snowy Mountains (the location of the hydro) is a very long way away from South Australia and not even in the same state.

So for SA location is a problem.

But I think the bigger problem with Snowy Hydro 2.0 is time and the cost.

The Snowy Hydro 2.0 feasibility study has only just begun and will be finished in December of this year.

If that study finds the project is feasible, it will be many years before the project even starts.

Compare that with the SA battery project which will be finished even before Snowy Hydro 2.0 finishes it's feasibility study.

Why is it important that something is done quickly? As I understand from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_South_Australian_blackout it was caused by once-in-50-year event. I understand political urgency, but technically there doesn't seem to be anything urgent.

Unfortunately, 1 in 50 year events seem to be happening more and more frequently.

And as yesterday's discussion on this pointed out, it's more about mitigating political risk; if there are any power outages in the next few months then the current state government is toast.

Firstly, I guess some of the urgency comes down to whether or not you think climate change is real and that it needs to be acted upon with some urgency.

As to the cause of the outage it is not quite as simple as that.

The SA government certainly believes in climate change since they decided to move away from coal and now get most of their energy from renewables.

But because of this, they got blamed for the blackouts by the opposition parties, who put the blackout down to the mad rush into renewables.

Now there is an election coming up next year, so I have no doubt the opposition would have used that same argument during that election.

But where I think this might backfired and why I think the SA Premier has come up with a master stroke, is come this December SA will have it's battery and in part because of climate change, it will be stinking hot all over Australia.

So if the SA battery works as designed and helps to keep all the SA air conditioners running at maximum, it will be a very big win for the SA Government.

"Once in 50 year event" means that there's a 2% chance of it happening on any given year, not that it happens only once every 50 years.

Virtually no voter appreciates the technical lack of urgency. One large voting bloc would be thinking "Labor has dropped the ball on electricity and must be removed!" and another would excuse a project like this as at least heading in the right direction.

(I'm South Australian.)

> Why is Snowy Hydro 2.0 "ridiculous" and "silly"?

Because, at best it's 10+ years and hundreds of millions of dollars away, and that is being very, very optimistic.

The Big Battery is not a pipe dream. It will exist in 100 days.

In general the problem with hydropower is, that it is the best energy source if you have the location. Therefore the good locations were developed early on, Hoover dam in the 1930ies, Aswan dam in the 1960ies, and now we are left with marginal locations. In a way we already reached peak hydro.

So basically we are transitioning from a fossil energy based world to lithium based one. Why does media never talk about the sustainability of build lithium ion batteries at large scale? Have the recycling problem been sorted out (I have a couple of lithium ion batteries and I don't know what to do about them) I also heard that lithium is very very scarce on Earth.

Seems like there is plenty of lithium, but mines are not keeping up with demand. Here's an interesting story from FT about Chile's lithium mines, with pictures:

https://www.ft.com/content/cde8f984-43c7-11e6-b22f-79eb4891c...

(You may need to Google for the title to bypass paywall: "Lithium: Chile’s buried treasure")

It takes time to construct new mines. When Tesla started building the gigafactory, they signed long-term contracts with companies building new mines in the US and Mexico.

It's not talked about in "the media" (at least not front page stuff) because it is not a huge problem. While "scarce" is relative, global demand until the year 2100 is estimated to be between 12 and 20 million tons, while currently known reserves are about 39 million tons. So we should be good for at least 80 years. Recycling is also a solved problem, though we'll have to build a few more factories to keep up with the increased amount.

Note that eventually, graphene based energy storage may take over anyway. Or possibly someone will invent proper hydrogen storage.

Finally, you could easily have found multiple studies by respected universities about the estimated amount of lithium on Earth, about the feasability of large scale recycling of Li-ion batteries and about transitioning into a lithium-based economy. If you are willing to take advice, reading up first before become alarmed and posting concerned comments will help a lot for your peace of mind.

What crystal ball are they using to predict the future out for 80 years? Are they making the assumption that there will be no technological paradigm shifts and demand growth will continue along current levels? Do they factor in the effects of climate change and global instability?

If you use an estimate of demand to justify increasing demand, you immediately, tautologically invalidate the estimate: the estimate did not account for your policy decisions based on itself.

If you want to know which assumptions they made, why not just read the studies and see for yourself? To be sure, predicting the future is super difficult. If we have a global thermonuclear war in 2020, we will probably not need any tons of lithium at all, what with everyone being dead. Same thing if we get hit by a really large asteroid, etc. Also if someone ever develops man-portable fusion reactors we might not need batteries at all. :)

Your point about the self fulfilling aspect of basing policy on research is well taken, though in this case the researchers used multiple scenarios for policy development, including one where lithium demand is heavily stimulated by eg subsidies on EVs and the like. That is the upper part of the range of 12-20 million tons of demand, which is still well below the lower bound of estimated reserves.

No studies were cited. I would love to see them.

The crystal ball comment is not helpful. The same argument applies to all forecasting. For instance next years budget may be invalidated by a financial crisis, a war, a new invention.

What a forecast does is provide a helpful generalization for questions like, 'can we really use Lithium batteries at that scale'. 80 years of expected availability doesn't mean we can will run out in 80 years, it does mean that in our short to medium term planning the risk of running out of lithium is low. So in the context of the question, 'should we be using lithium, as it is scarce?', the forecast is perfectly reasonably applied.

The same argument does indeed apply to all forecasting of what will happen by 2100. You can't predict what demand and supply will be 80 years in the future.

Had you changed the tone of your writing the answer would have been perfect. But thanks anyway very informative.

I love it when people make 80 year old predictions with a straight face.

Reminds me of "peak oil" when everybody was predicting us running out of oil. Today somehow that doesn't seem to concern us anymore. Some are even more concerned about over-abundance of oil (Saudi Arabia for one).

Between sodium ion batteries and flow batteries, we aren't likely to end up dependent on lithium.

Sodium ion aren't really commercialized yet but the cost implications provide a whole lot of motivation to figure it out.

Hopefully, we'll be mining asteroids by the time lithium scarcity becomes a problem

I've seen the media talk about the sustainability of lithium ion batteries at scale.

Isn't that an overstatement? Australia's installed generating capacity is 67GW and about 50% load factor. It needs at least 100 systems like that to make a significant impact on grid stability. Even in South Australia alone, at least 10x that much is needed.

Yup, it is. And you know what? Pumped storage the article calls "ridiculous" and "silly", is what is needed. It is 10x much, exactly as you said.

Price of battery systems seems to be same now per unit of storage and lower per unit of peak power. So that's fine: all things being equal, battery is definitely better than a pumped storage plant.

They just need whole lot more than this 1 battery to solve the problem.

FYI: 129 MWh would be about 1300 42U-style racks for batteries alone.

Source: there's a guy in socal (Jehu Garcia) building a reclaimed peaker 1 MWh pack in about 10 racks from used batteries and equipment (50 kW 480VAC inverter) on the cheap in order to store energy off-peak (plus possibly charge using solar) and use it at peak supplemented by grid power. This is how manufacturing and other heavy industry / large electrical consumers can save money right now in US day-of-use billed grid systems.

Jehu Garcia's Youtube videos are definitely worth checking out, the guy is doing cool things with 18650 lithium ion cells. He converted a VW bus into an electric vehicle. My main takeaway after watching his videos and others in the same vein is that lithium ion battery packs are the gasoline of the 21st century.

You can build 18650 packs for electric bikes, scooters, boats etc... or build your own Power Wall type home electric energy storage.

The costs of these cells coming out of China have gotten down to $1 each in some cases of excess inventory...

I'm going to look myself, but do you have any links about the 18650 packs?

Edit:cheapest aliexpress ones i see are about usd$2.00 each. That's not bad though.

Check ebay, packs from hover boards that got recalled are available.

The cost can be $1 a cell, a pack might have 20. Each cell might be 10-12 watt hours. It takes 3 cells to produce 12 volts.

Indeed. I hadn't actually reviewed ebay for electronics things for a couple of years, because any of the products I used to see there were significantly more expensive than anything I could get from aliexpress. It looks like, at least in this instance, that has turned around. I could even see individual 18650 cells for $1.

Great stuff.

He's trending hard, took me a few seconds to realize he was the 18650 dude I watch every week on youtube.

I'd love to emulate his work.

ecobot ! assemble !

HBPowerWall is also good. Australian guy with a 40KwH wall made from old laptop batteries. Lots of good content.

I had this idea 10 years go to use flywheels to buy cheap power and re-sell it during peak demand. Day vs night pricing will quickly normalize.

There are a few experimental installations of these around. I don't believe they are viable for larger scale storage, but fit smaller scale they seem competitive.

I think it's the other way around. Fly wheels can be extremely dangerous. It is really only large scale that they could be competitively safe.

Wouldn't some kind of gravity-based storage be cheaper/safer? Just lift some huge weights with excess energy, lock it in place, and then let gravity pull it down to reclaim it.

Both are back in sight these days.

Australian Synchrotron is already using three giant flywheels as an UPS, here is a short presentation. I am sure that you will be able to find enough information to determine if doing this would be feasible on a commercial scale.

http://www-conf.slac.stanford.edu/wao2012/talks/Thu_Aug9/McG...

Flywheel systems are currently sold for short-term power interruptions in datacenters: outage -> flywheel power -> diesel generator

Most datacenters use batteries instead.

Would someone explain what this battery is for or the surrounding context? The article spends most of its word count on abstract politics.

Batteries are used in lieu of pumped energy storage for several purposes:

- emergency use: it's much faster than even the fastest pump sets which can switch over in seconds

- load smoothing to avoid spooling up/down expensive peakers too much

- daily energy arbitrage by downstream / middle consumers to buy off peak and use at peak in time-of-use billed electrical services

- store solar energy for night use

129 MWh is enough for a medium-sized town or charging several hundred Teslas.

Really though, the focus shouldn't be on huge, central systems. The savings and grid resilience is realized with many few MWh systems spread to local substation-level. This has the potential to smooth out the load to be more/less constant and makes large-scale demand more predictable.

The other advantage of substation level energy storage is in not having to upgrade the feed circuits. Design for average consumption not peak. Storage and renewables make the edges of the network resilient.

UK Power networks recently completed a 2 year trial of a 6MW/10MWh battery system which was installed as an alternative to adding a 3rd circuit to meet future peak demand of a town. At the end of the trial they produced a projected business case for future deployments of:

Conventional reinforcement (another circuit): £5.1M

Future Net Method Cost (battery): £1.6M

This data is from figure 8 of "SNS Close down report v1.0". This report and other information about the trial can be found at:

http://innovation.ukpowernetworks.co.uk/innovation/en/Projec...

Briefly and maybe not 100% truthy: the state of South Australia produces a lot of its electricity from a wind farm. It brings in extra power from another state over a giant cable (the interconnect). A while ago a storm damaged the interconnect and this triggered cascading failsafes that shut down a lot of the state.

The wind farm has been a thumb in the eye of the federal government, who is huge on coal. The feds lost no time blaming the blackouts on renewables and sticking it to SA. Elon Musk offered to install a giant battery in what seemed to be a wild-arse publicity stunt. SA said ok do it, and they're getting a giant battery and their energy independence back.

For anyone who wants some more background, here is a report from march this year by AEMO, the australian energy market operator:

> Renewable generators now represent approximately 43% of South Australia’s local installed capacity (2,297 MW), with gas-fuelled and liquid-fuelled thermal generators providing the other 57% share (2,987 MW).

https://www.aemo.com.au/-/media/Files/Electricity/NEM/Planni...

Here's the article and discussion about it from yesterday:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14715679

I had been lightly skeptical until you framed it as a move in spite of the federal government. There were some missing pieces to the puzzle in my mind where I wasn't sure why if we had a technical solution (the interconnector) then why won't we just solve the policy and pricing problem that stops us utilizing it.

Partly because I have never seen Australian states as particularly at odds with eachother or the federal government, but the idea of taking the choice of coal or renewables into our own hands is actually really compelling.

Just before that last step, I believe there were 50-100 bids to provide the battery solution. Tesla may not have been a local bid, but I'd say there are other advantages in Musk even visiting Adelaide - made world news, might inspire business confidence, etc.

Tesla's battery guy said they could solve SA's power woes within 100 days. Atlassian co-founder Mike Cannon-Brookes tweeted Elon: "how serious are you about this bet? If I can make the $ happen (& politics), can you guarantee the 100MW in 100 days?"

Elon replied: "Tesla will get the system installed and working 100 days from contract signature or it is free. That serious enough for you?"

Mike's response: "legend! ️ You’re on mate. Give me 7 days to try sort out politics & funding. DM me a quote for approx 100MW cost - mates rates!"

South Australia is the 5th most populous Australian state, out of 6 total states in Australia. It has had a left-leaning government in power for the past 15 years.

South Australia has a lot of mineral resources and a very large land area but it is mainly desert.

Since renewable energy is cool with left-leaning governments, South Australia has built a lot of wind farms. The wind farms are heavily subsdised by the government. There is also a federal program called the Renewable Energy Target which mandates that electricity retailers purchase electricity from renewable power sources (eg wind and power).

The result of the market manipulation is that coal power plants are shutting down. This is putting further pressure on the renewable energy sources which fundamentally cannot provide baseload power in the first place. This is why South Australia draws electricity from interstate where baseload power is generated from coal.

A lot of people are arguing about the power outage in South Australia last year. The almost entire state (population >1.7 million) lost electricity for at least a day. Some people were without power for up to a week. As you can imagine there are a lot of negative consequences when the power goes off. For example the content of a zinc smelter solidified, destroying it.

There were a lot of factors to the blackout, but had there been sufficient baseload power within the state the blackouts wouldn't have occurred. It is a very politicised issue and lefists refuse to accept that the government created dependence upon renewable energy was responsible.

Following the blackouts, later in the summer there were planned brownouts as there wasn't capacity to meet demand.

Ok, now to why they decided to spend $50 million on a battery that can power the state for 3 hours.

Basically the Government of South Australia wants to look like they are doing something. Just like any government they want to be popular and to have the appearance of providing solutions to people's problems. The battery isn't the only thing they are doing. They are buying expensive gas-powered aero derivative generators that can be spun up and spun down quickly when required to meet demand.

So what the Government is doing is purchasing power sources that can compensate for the fluctuating electricity generated by wind and solar. They don't seem to be concerned that these measures will increase the overall cost of providing electricity as they seem to be primarily motivated by an objective of not backing down on the promotion of renewable energies. They don't seem to want to admit that the consequence of renewable energy is less reliable electricity and much more expensive electricity. In order to address the cost issues, the Government are criticising the electrity operators, accusing them of price gouging, in other words pointing the finger at private operators to take the blame off their own policies.

Elon Musk is like a celebrity, the battery idea sounds 'cool'... so basically this is a big PR move showing South Australians that their government is 'taking action'.

I think everyone knows the reality that this is basically a overreaching government trying to cover their arses and Elon Musk coming in way to do so with a big price tag attached. The big price tag actually helps the government because it puts a metric on the amount of action they are taking.

The way to ensure there is adequate electricity to meet demand it to deregulate the industry. That way people who care about wind and solar can pay for it and people are wish to save money can pay for coal generated electricity. Deregulation would ensure the optimum price through competition. While the governments of Australia persist with regulation and subsidies the problem will get worse. Actually the government of Victoria, the 2nd largest state of Australia is seeing one of its major coal power stations shut down and summer this year (in 6 months time) is predicted to have more blackouts, not only in South Australia. Wholesale electricity prices are increasing in Victoria by more than 100%. There is no end in sight for this because the leftist governments of are Australia persisting with their agenda and the federal government, although conservative, appears to be afraid to depart from the leftist narrative.

The blackout had nothing to do with insufficient base load power and everything to do with the storm damaging lines. The wind farms actually produced more then enough electricity at the time - the problem was delivery - http://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2016-09-28/sa-power-outage-exp...

You're forgetting about the cost on the environment that coal burning power plants create. No one ever takes the damage of our environment into consideration of how much something really costs us.

Of course there is renewable power environment cost as well, batteries aren't very green to produce or dispose of. But over all, we are better off by not burning coal even if there are more upfront costs.

What about the environmental costs of these batteries? Have reserves been made for the cost of safe disposal?

If you say that one technology is environmentally destructive and must be replaced but never bother to evaluate whether or not the replacement is actually better this just makes things worse.

"The almost entire state (population >1.7 million) lost electricity for at least a day. Some people were without power for up to a week"

I can personally attest that I was without power for about 3 hours. Large parts of the state were back online overnight. Sure there were places where it took a week, but I'm quite sure that even a system that can provide 'only' 3 hours of baseline load would have made a huge difference. (Especially because once you know there is a a problem, you can selectively and in a controlled way start shutting down subsystems, both reducing load and lessening impact over a sudden, unplanned shutdown).

I try to do some numbers the best I can.

Assuming cost of $1.25 per MWh (same as in California) this costs roughly $150 million. You would need 260 of these to cover all Australian households for $39 billion.

This is dayscale storage and emergency supply to stabilize electricity grid. It provides emergency supply for 30,000 homes and grid stabilization. Lithium energy competes in this category with Flywheel energy storage systems. 129 MWh's battery used alone could supply the daily electricity for something like 7000 household daily electricity usage. If it supplies only 1/4 of the electricity then 30,000 homes is realistic.

If Tesla learns how to reuse lithium with reasonable cost, this can scale. Currently Tesla recycles lithium into bricks used in construction.

The price would be $4900 per per household.

sources:

1. http://shrinkthatfootprint.com/average-household-electricity...

2. https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2017/07/all-the-details-on-teslas...

EDIT: I used average household energy usage and number of homes but used Australian population. The cost and number of units required was 3X too high. 1̶2̶0̶

So, totally worth it ($120 billion) for a 0.01% reduction in global ghg emissions.

Roughly $4800 per household. The price of huge flat screen. If it scales, it's acceptable solution for rich countries with cheap wind or solar.

(if it truly scales, the price will drop dramatically when volumes grow).

For an article that pretends to spread the truth, its surprisingly short of any proof, figure or any kind of data to support the political opinion. Isnt that what they ought to be doing?

When was the truth era?

I get the feeling that revelations similar to the "post truth" idea here, ie. commentators being shocked by the barefaced lying of the powerful, have been happening continuously for thousands of years.

Apocryphal or nor this is apt..

An Assyrian clay tablet dating to around 2800 B.C. bears the inscription: “Our Earth is degenerate in these later days; there are signs that the world is speedily coming to an end; bribery and corruption are common; children no longer obey their parents; every man wants to write a book and the end of the world is evidently approaching.”

Can Tesla deliver the batteries in the next 100 days? Tesla had a battery shortage last quarter when production couldn't keep up, and had to delay some car deliveries.[1] With Model 3 deliveries starting, is Tesla's battery production sufficient?

[1] http://money.cnn.com/2017/07/03/technology/tesla-battery-car...

When this first hit the news a few months back, Musk said they'd do it on 90 days or it'd be free.

That's a pretty big incentive to get it done quickly.

Now it's 100 days or free.

No, it was always 100 days or free.

"Tesla will get the system installed and working 100 days from contract signature or it is free. That serious enough for you?"

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/840032197637685249

I don't think it was ever 90 days, here's the original tweet

"Tesla will get the system installed and working 100 days from contract signature or it is free. That serious enough for you?" -- https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/840032197637685249

They indicated that the problem was with the extremely power dense 100Kwh packs that are now fairly common in the Model S and Model X. It may be that there is no similar issue with the less power dense utility scale packs.

Also note that there are 2 different kinds of cells involved, manufactured in different places.

The Small bordering on Medium size company I work for has a 30KW solar array on the roof of it's factory.

With batteries they'd basically be able to run the factory close to off grid, while the equipment requires high peak power it's average load is vastly lower.

I wonder if after another 10 years cycle Elon Musk will deliver or he will just "aim higher" and we'll still see "projection articles" instead of talk about results.

I'm happy this is happening but if it requires $50M in tax payers dollars it's not exactly viable now is it?

Are roads and public schools not viable?

You haven't checked into the cost of a typical freeway bridge lately, have you?

By various estimates the replacement cost of the US grid is about 2-5 _trillion_ (taxpayer's) dollars[1].

1. http://www.businessinsider.com/replacing-us-electrical-grid-...

For most utility buys, $50M is tiny. Plus, how can you say "not viable" without comparing the cost to the value that it provides?

For truly non-viable, see the recent coal boondoggles in the US. For example, this $7.5 BILLON waste:

https://arstechnica.com/business/2017/06/regulators-suggest-...

Or the wave of coal bankruptcies in the US:

https://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2016-06-08/bankrupt-...

As a South Australian, I'm (very!!) happy to trade a few tax dollars for much lower power prices. The extra tax is more than made up for in savings.

On this particular topic, the South Australian government's interests and mine are precisely aligned: We are both getting screwed over by power generators exploiting the intermittent nature of renewables to make bigger profits. Did you know they deliberately keep gas peaking generators off when it would be profitable to run them, because they can force the price to spike even higher and exploit the minimum billing periods?

I'm all for market driven solutions, but technology driven price disruption is a well known reason for market failure, and that seems to be what is going on here.

happy to trade a few tax dollars for much lower power prices

That's optimistic.

I guarantee you will be paying more for electricity generation because of this battery. There's no way the incumbents would allow this thing to be connected to the grid if there wasn't a dollar (quite a few dollars) in it for them.

Giving money and power to politicians is like giving car keys and whiskey to teenage boys.

Regards, former SA resident.

Who shouldn't get the money and power? The incumbent power generators or the politicians?

Well, both.

The Libertarian in me thinks we should deregulate the energy market, and that means starting with removing subsidies to fossil fuels and renewables.

My left-leaning political sense thinks we ought nationalise the energy industry as it's too important to leave to the whims of the market, and work out a cost factor to apply to the waste products of energy generation.

My right-leaning political sense says nationalising energy assets would be a disaster and that we need stable base-load energy, because the alternative is untenable.

There's no way the incumbents would allow this thing to be connected to the grid if there wasn't a dollar (quite a few dollars) in it for them.

There are no major non-renewable incumbents left in SA. The renewables love this because it lets them load shift. That's good for them but good for me too.

AGL has a small gas fired station but screwed up during the outage by not firing up one generator. That lost them any friends they have, especially since they blamed high gas prices, which the Federal Government saw as a criticism of them.

The interstate incumbents hated it enough to get the Federal Government to look at stopping it[1]. But then the Victorian Hazelwood coal fired plant closure was announced, and the coal industry lost a lot of credibility with the federal government. Basically the incumbents are suffering and are rapidly losing political power.

[1] http://www.skynews.com.au/news/top-stories/2017/03/14/south-...

> There are no major non-renewable incumbents left in SA.

AGL operates 8.562 gigawatts of fossil fuel (coal / gas) power plants, and 2.33 gigawatt renewables (hydro / wind / solar).[1]

The 1.28 gigawatt gas fired Torrens Island Power Station in Adelaide is the largest power station in South Australia.[2]

South Australia has 16 operating wind farms with a total installed capacity of about 1.473 gigawatt.[3]

It definitely looking like we'll see, in our lifetimes, a future where wind + storage provides a significant majority of electricity in South Australia. My argument is there's no way this future will also provider cheaper electricity.

Why charge less when you can make people pay more?

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AGL_Energy#Operations_and_sign...

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torrens_Island_Power_Station

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wind_farms_in_South_Au...

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