That's impressive. I assume most of the saving is from grid stabilisation, rather than supplying/storing energy but still.
Why is this not more wide spread? These figures suggest this is a no brainer. Am I missing something?
It does make at least some sense in most places, though.
(The 90 minutes capacity at full output is pretty much an inherent property of lithium battery tech, as I understand it. There's a slight capacity vs power tradeoff which can be tweaked, but only within a relatively narrow band, and the maximum charging rate is if anything even less flexible than the discharge.)
Also, it looks like there's already a small-scale battery bank providing frequency stabilization using Samsung lithium ion batteries in West Texas: https://www.energy-storage.news/news/minimal-downtime-younic...
Even if that is true, that only means you need to expand your battery capacity and split into multiple banks.
The savings are because you can use the energy generated by green sources to charge the battery if you can't use it immediately. That's free energy you'd otherwise throw away.
"The French energy company revealed that the entire system cost 56 million euros (~$66 million USD)"
Not true. The system is used for grid stabilisation rather than large scale power storage. It doesn't have the capacity to power South Australia for more than a few minutes at most.
Grid infrastructure isn't exactly agile. It's politics.
The complete process is documented end to end, free to see, and the enroll process in documented and "cheap" (~150kCHF, 100kCHF being for the warranty). You can start playing in the ancillary services field with 5MW, which is not that much.
PS: If a company in CH needs help in that field (process approval or swissgrid-compatible IT systems), let me know !
The batteries didn't "save" $40 million of electricity, they enabled one entity (Southern Australia's power operator) to trade more efficiently against the other participants, who were the losers in this battery deployment in the form of reduced profits.
Regulators in many states are now finally forcing utilities to examine the use of alternative solutions to fix grid issues. They are finding that battery installations can do a better job than new generation or transmission in many cases and the batteries can be cheaper over the long run. It's just a matter of getting the utilities to try something new and get out of their typical playbook.
Why is this not more widespread? There must be some barriers.
Happens a lot with renewables. You personally don't capture all the value you provide. This is part of the reason that rooftop solar should get paid more than the going rate but even 1:1 rates get attacked as some kind of scam, even as they reduce peak load which may be literally 1000x more expensive than average.
After that, solar should get paid grid rate.
I have no idea if anyone has bothered to calculate what the solar-induced demand is.
I saw elsewhere that battery price is going down 15% per year. So, over time, more grid topologies will be able to leverage this technology.
The only plausible reason I can come up with is that the 'savings' are very hard to attribute correctly, but then I still cant explain why no one before today noticed the potential savings and took a chance.
Anyone with experience in the industry have any thoughts?
I wonder if there was even the capability to manufacture such a large order at the given price point before Tesla built their gigafactory.
(b) Battery prices (and pricing for the balance of the system) have dropped pretty rapidly, I'm not sure why you're claiming otherwise. There have been recent years where these systems have dropped in price by ~25%[1]. That's not insignificant.
[1] https://www.utilitydive.com/news/not-so-fast-battery-prices-...
Was the decision taken years ago? This is the 100 days or free battery. But yes I accept the power companies may have been slow. But still it isn't just Australia that was slow, its the US, Germany, Denmark, the world.
Not exactly.
Australia's high prices were not due to a technology failure, but a regulatory one. The power generators were manipulating the market causing extremely high peak prices, and essentially being allowed to get away with it. Most other countries don't allow the market to wildly fluctuate so much, so the payback is far longer. Think decades and not years.
Not many investments offer that rate of return.
You may be right to suggest it may not be competitive in other locations though. I don't know.
https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/tesla-fulfills-...
EU is pretty good in that regard, it demonopolized the energy market, so if you build this battery yourself on your land you can just entered the market and start selling balancing offers. You will easily outcompete traditional producers and consumers on that market if the article is right.
The widespread rule of thumb was - batteries on grid level don't work. Seems this isn't true anymore.
Yes, the entire reported savings was by avoiding building a fast-response generator, which would cost tens of millions to maintain each year.
From the article:
> Has contributed to the removal of the requirement for a 35 MW local Frequency Control Ancillary Service (FCAS), saving nearly $40 million per year in typical annual costs
The article several includes other significant benefits as well that aren't even included in the $40 million.
Energy arbitrage is still a thing, but a smaller percentage of revenue compared to grid services (at least in Australia).
Disclaimer: TSLA investor
Edit: see hwillis's comment down below, he/she is obviously more knowledgeable about the topic than I am. I was wrong.
Maybe the other metals in the batteries make it worth recycling, but not for the lithium recovery (with today’s tech).
If my math is correct, the battery needs to last at least 10 years to break even if you factor in the cost of recycling the lithium.
If the battery pays for its purchase price in 2 years and the disposal cost is 1/2 the price of a new battery (doubt it's anywhere near that), then the it would still pay for the total cost of ownership in 3 years.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-06-27/where-3-m...
Each loss would encourage different kinds of secondary uses.
After the last economically viable use for electricity storage, however, there has to be an economic incentive to actually recycle the raw materials. Presumably this is when value of the raw materials exceeds the cost of their reclamation.
> I believe they experience all of those.
Hmm...would that explain the CPU performance loss of an aging cell phone battery? Lower discharge efficiency = less power available for the CPU = CPU throttles itself to lower power usage?
https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/55q7py/why_do_l...
Also the biggest issue with consumer batteries is typically heat management. Industrial batteries with proper thermal control systems will exhibit much better lifespans than a typical iPhone. Thus you should adjust your expectations for these batteries compared to what you’ve seen in consumer electronics.
$40m * 4 = $160m
$240m / $40m = 6 years
Edit: Mixed up cost and income?
https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1110149_tesla-model-s-b...
"But, overall, the data offer some basis for confidence that a Tesla Model S will lose—on average—less than 15 percent of its battery capacity over the average 150,000-mile (250,000-km) life of a vehicle."
Probably because Tesla undersells their batteries. During hurricanes or other disasters Tesla routinely unlocks the software limit, allowing customers more range (https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-unlocks-full-battery-capacit...).
It's the same with HDDs and SSDs, which always carry a decent safety margin to account for media wear.
For kWh capacity it's just a matter of counting the cells. Actual kWh will vary abit by measuring technique but I assume there is a way to drain the nominal Wh:s from them.