Comment by PinguTS | Hacker News Reader

Comment by PinguTS | Hacker News Reader

This piece is clearly written by someone, who as no glue about the grid. (or wants to make a buzz out of nothing special)

Battery power is always faster then generator power. That is the reason why every data center has battery backup for immediate reaction and generator power for the longtime backup. Normally, the battery size is designed that the minimum time is at least twice as long as to start the generator.

Exactly that has happened with the grid. It is also not related to some contracting. Because the whole grid is connected. So the battery will always kick in, it does not matter where it is located.

Actually synchronizing the grid is tough task. A friend and colleague from my University started in this business after he made his Master Thesis tens of years ago.

By monitoring the frequency of the grid you know if there is too much energy produced (too less load, frequency to high) or vice versa. Everybody basically can do this from home. There are some maker projects and personal projects who do that.

> (or wants to make a buzz out of nothing special)

It's important to note it is something special. The battery works, and it works better than the existing solutions.

This is very important and big news in Australia, because the coal lobby is so strong and powerful they have been telling the public for a year now the Tesla battery will not work and is a waste of money. Obviously some people such as yourself understand how the thing works, though I would bet a massive percentage of "people on the street" have no idea, and only understand what the coal lobby is telling them.

It's important to take every opportunity to educate the public about the real facts, and this event is a fact. The sooner the public learn the truth, the better.

On a broader note, it is important that in the age of (mis)information, that genuine advancements/improvements on tech are advertised properly.

This is difficult because taxpayers often take a dim view on their money being spent on marketing government programs. Unfortunately with large companies advertising directly against programs that often run contrary to what is in the public interest, it is arguably in the public interest to market public sector programs.

This issue being what is the difference between this and tax payer funded propaganda...? It's a tough area of discussion by any stretch, but its become clear that advertising/informing the public is kinda needed to offset the campaigning against public programs from large industry.

“Unfortunately with large companies advertising directly against programs that often run contrary to what is in the public interest“ - uh? I think you meant the opposite of what you wrote. ;)

On the contrary I mean the exact opposite of what I don't mean in not that case.

Yep, my mistake.

Absolutely right grecy.

The fact that Australia has the largest functioning lithium-ion battery in the world, and yet the Federal Government of Australia has done nothing but ridicule and belittle its usefulness should give anyone a clue as to the power of the coal lobby in Australia.

Any news of the flexible uses of this battery should be published far and wide just to blow away a lot of the misconceptions about 'anything other than coal and gas' that are rampant throughout much of Australia's mainstream media.

> and it works better than the existing solutions

A few seconds faster, but with less than 2% of the required power.

What are the claims from the other side about why "the Tesla battery will not work"? If the claims are "it won't provide enough power to matter", this data seems to support those claims, unless I misunderstand how the 9MW provided by the Tesla battery (the HPR) resolved the sudden loss of 560MW.

The issue is that it helped stabilise the frequency which prevents circuit breakers kicking in and possibly taking South Australia off the air like it did previously. In other words it did exactly what it was bought to do.

As I understand it, the article is about the frequency stabilisation market. The existing reserves are able to pick up the loss of energy eventually, but reliability of the grid depends on more than just total reserve power. That is why the frequency stabilisation market exists. As the article points out, no one was expected to lose power here.

Power systems are highly nonlinear. At any given time there are power generators spun up and able to deliver more power. In the case of hydro, for example, vanes can control the flow of water. More water at one generator means everyone's turbines can spin slightly faster. Throughout the day, many such adjustments are made to match the load with the supply, e.g. with predictive adjustments every 15 minutes, say. But the systems can only respond so fast and each station can only pick up the frequency so fast. When a large enough generator drops out, or load suddenly increases (lots of people turning their kettles on during an ad break on telly, for example), numerous things can happen, including increasing supply, reducing loads and tripping breakers. In the worst case, some consumers lose supply. The advantage of electric batteries, being pointed out here, is that they can react in milliseconds, helping to stabilise the supply. This can prevent those corner cases where dropping consumers from the grid, due to cascading failures (highly nonlinear events), is the alternative.

>It's important to note it is something special. The battery works, and it works better than the existing solutions.

[[Citation needed.]]

How much was the shortfall?

How long could the battery have sustained the shortfall?

How much damage would there have been at the usual response time?

How what is the ROI without government subsidy to building huge battery storage?

The citation that it works is in the article.

Regarding the ROI and subsidies, I guess you would need to compare them to the billions received by the incumbents :)

The power crisis in South Australia has been extremely costly. The cost for the proposed fast start gas power plant was 380 million.

The state-wide blackout cost businesses 367 million.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-12-09/sa-blackout-costs-coul...

This battery will cost taxpayers 50 million over 10 years, apparently. Seems like a pretty good deal.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-12-01/tesla-giant-battery-of...

>The citation that it works is in the article.

What worked in the article?

It only says the battery supplied less than 2% of the lost power for about 5 seconds before regular power generators took over.

The battery is not supposed to replace the Victorian Loy Yang. That's one of the biggest power stations in Australia.

It is supposed to kick in and help support the South Australia power grid when power drops. It did that, faster than the designated backup did.

It worked as designed.

It's most likely news to most of the country that the battery would have this benefit to the whole grid. That was the target audience.

It's likely popular on HN because hey cool this entire country has a backup battery by Tesla and it's doing cool stuff.

I don't think it's making "a buzz out of nothing special"... you compare it to every data centre with battery backup which is a standard thing, but scaling that to apply the same principle at a full grid scale rather than a single data centre is not nothing special.

Something that was interesting and buried down in the comments is that they're supposedly contracted for 35MW of fast-response power to maintain grid stability based on engineering of current generators/etc.

If that's true then Tesla is already providing 1/5th of that capacity today.

I think the reason that the battery put out the amount it did was that that was size of the local shortfall, 1,000 miles away from the problem. You can see that at other times, the battery has put out its full 100MW rating.

Have you ever seen propaganda for a mineral before? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXyEfo27Z38

Of course this is obvious!

But - disappointingly - it has to be continually pointed out here in Australia. The coal lobby is strong.

So what you're saying is that Tesla's battery solution is better than what Australia was already using?

Tesla's battery is better at doing what it was designed for, compared to coal plant(s) that are better at doing what they're designed for. In conjunction with one another, both technologies work incredibly well.

In addendum to this, I'd like to mention that things that are designed for a specific purpose are good for that specific purpose.

And in general, things that are made to work well together work better than things not made to work well together. This also applies to things that happen to work well together, despite not initially being designed to.

The first rule of Tautology club is the first rule of Tautology club.

https://xkcd.com/703/

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