Do you know how long these cells can last in such a scenario ?
If you bring your lipo cell from 80 to 60% and back slowly you can get an order of magnitude more cycles. This lends itself well to solar storage scenarios where you want to level out the production and can plan around how and when it will charge and discharge.
ie by being a fast peaker supply, it stopped spikes in energy prices across the Aust Energy market which is where the savings of $40M come from.
Not that there is anything wrong with that - it still makes total sense for SA to deploy such a system in that case, but it's very different than say saving $40 million in fuel costs due to not spinning up short-term natgas generators or something.
This is direct state interference in a competitive market so the “floor” is still quite high. With more private operators entering the market the ability to game the system will be eroded further since everyone wants to get the easy money.
The savings were mostly due to cutting the fat out of the market gouging practices. No/little change to actual supply occurred.
Socialism would be hitting those guys with a big regulatory stick, or shutting them down for just providing a service. Not all state expenditure is socialist. Were monarchies involving heavy state domination of the economy socialist? No, and neither necessarily are liberal democracies with a state sector, especially if that state sector is exposed to market forces.
It's really annoying that so many mentions of socialism or capitalism on HN get the basics wrong. These terms have perfectly good established meanings that are actually quite specific.
So: Australia is sunny and it's consumption peaks generally follow the temperature due to air conditioning - so build more solar and pair it with more storage (batteries) instead of investing in coal and gas burning.
Thats is such a bizarre comment. No corporation has a right to make money, they have to earn it by providing a valuable service. If that service can be provided more efficiently another way, tough. That's what market forces are all about.
Yes the energy company commissioning the battery is publicly owned. You could squint and see some socialism in that. I've no argument there. However it's doing this because it is exposed to market forces, and overspending on peak power provision. Characterising responding to that market stimulus with capital investment is I think going a step too far.
Look at it another way. Is exposing public companies to market forces and having them react to those stimuli more socialist than protecting them from markets, or less socialist? Is it closer to pure capitalism or further away?
The problems have been interconnects failing, poorly maintained transmission lines failing, the market operator placing restrictions on renewables which meant that renewables were not allowed to try to keep the lights on, and reliance of SA on electricity imported from unreliable interstate supply (aka coal thermal plants that break down or simply fail due to high ambient temperatures).
All of SA’s energy problems are due to poor regulation, poor market operation, poor maintenance, Federal interference, market gaming by fossil fuel operators, and unreliable coal plants.
There will be similar returns possible for other batteries in NSW (a net importer, thus highly vulnerable to gaming of the market) and QLD with a large installed base of unreliable coal which means increasing need for ancillary services.
Coal is not reliable to start with, and the plant currently in use is old and getting to the point of being no longer economically viable. NSW and QLD grids will need significant support services as they transition from unreliable coal to dependable (but intermittent) renewables.
While the transition to renewables has indeed been rapid and jarring, that's not what has caused problems.
https://www.aemo.com.au/-/media/Files/Electricity/NEM/Market...
Failure of a meshed power system cannot be attributed to the failure of any single sub-system. Rather it must be a combination of factors including those you just mentioned.
The dependence of the power system on renewables (specifically wind farms)contributed in two ways to the blackout:
1. The majority of wind turbines provide little or no system inertia. By displacing synchronous generation with wind generation, system inertia is reduced which results in greater ROCOF during an event where there is a change in active power demand/supply. In the SA blackout, fast ROCOF overwhelmed the system's last line of defence- under frequency load shedding.
2. Some wind turbines contained a fault ride-through setting which AEMO was apparently not aware of prior to the blackout. Specifically, the setting caused the turbines to disconnect after experiencing a sequence of voltage excursions within a set time period. The disconnection caused a loss of active power supply to the grid which contributed to the drop in frequency and eventual collapse.
More peaks doesn't mean worse all things considered, it isn't a critique, it's just saying that battery viability is highly contingent on local power mix.
I don’t know what this system was designed for, but a product that costs $66M and saves $40M in its first year need not be designed for a long lifespan.
It seems scrapping this after 3 years still would net you a nice profit margin.
So, depending on how much designing for a long lifespan costs, that may be a thing of the past.
110% eco.
As opposed to say a synchronous converter which requires annual downtime and continual replacement of parts, and (being limited by inertia) can’t provide the same stability and support that a battery can.
On top of that these systems are still useful well below their original capacity, so they can rather than a sudden huge bill you simply add more capacity as the original battery’s degrade in a fairly predictable fashion. Over time you end up with a much smaller annual investment than your saving every year.
The li-ion externalities is mostly incurred once when mining. Although it's still in it's infancy, recycling li-ion batteries is already possible, and supposedly profitable. Especially when you can get an enormous batch of cells of exactly the same model as you would with this project.
The biggest problem in recycling li-ion batteries is that you may need different processes for different cells, so you need to sort them first.
I agree with your comment, but lithium is not mined. This is a common misconception and should be noted since we're chatting about externalities.
You are adopting implied reductionism around the "cost" side without having done the work (in my opinion) to justify that this concern outweighs the upside benefits of ceasing to use coal.
PS a lot of the minable lithium which isn't in Chile, is in Australia. So, we have low-miles lithium!
Erlich/Simons anyone?
Presumably that is why the same company is trying to kick off in Australia as well, even though we have higher regulatory and labour costs here.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-chile-albemarle-exclusive...
Human ingenuity not going to stop finding extractible sources anytime soon.
[1] https://waste-management-world.com/a/1-the-lithium-battery-r...
Sure, extracting copper has costs too, but I don't see the same handwringing about that.