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Tesla's Megapack Battery is Big Enough to Help Grids Handle Peak Demand:
Tesla announced a new massive battery today called Megapack that could replace so-called "peaker" power plants, which provide energy when a local electrical grid gets overloaded. Tesla says that Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) will deploy several Megapacks at Moss Landing on Monterrey Bay in California, which is one of four locations where the California utility plans to install more cost-effective energy storage solutions.
Each Megapack can store up to 3 megawatt hours (MWh) of energy at a time, and it's possible to string enough Megapacks together to create a battery with more than 1 GWh of energy storage, Tesla says. The company says this would be enough energy to power "every home in San Francisco for six hours." Telsa will deliver the Megapacks fully assembled, and they include "battery modules, bi-directional inverters, a thermal management system, an AC main breaker and controls." Tesla says the Megapack takes up 40 percent less space, requires a tenth of the parts to build, and can be assembled 10 times as fast as alternative energy storage solutions.
Also at cnet.
Would also have the benefit of essentially instant activation versus peaker plants which take some amount of time to spin up, even if kept warmed up and idling.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by FatPhil on Wednesday July 31 2019, @10:19AM (5 children)
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/30/world/australia/elon-musk-south-australia-battery.html
That was 100MW, so the equivalent of 30 of these small packs.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Wednesday July 31 2019, @11:05AM
The Australian thing could be considered a custom solution, and now this is the company's standardized unit for big installations.
14 kWh for Powerwall 2, 3,000 kWh for Megapack 1.
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(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 31 2019, @12:00PM (3 children)
You're mixing up your units there.
These batteries have 3MWh, they don't say how much they can throw out at once
The SA battery is 129MWh, and it can put out 100MW at a time. (For 1.29h before it goes flat)
The thing that makes the Megapack new is that its a complete prefab plug and play solution, and you can stack them for more capacity, rather than doing a full design and onsite build for each setup.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by deimtee on Wednesday July 31 2019, @04:16PM
Going straight from a bespoke 129KWh to a 3000KWh plug and play system is a pretty big jump in capacity really. Impressive.
TFS implies a six hour discharge, which would mean a supply of 500KW per Megapack.
Simply scaling that to 3MWh would give a supply of 2.3MW
So probably somewhere between 0.5 and 2.5 MW per pack.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Thursday August 01 2019, @06:37AM
One thing that the press release avoids mentioning in any way is the lifetime of these things. Assuming it's a mass of 18650s, how many full charge/discharge cycles can it handle? How about partial discharges? How long before it's a 70% of its initial charge capacity? At 50%?
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday August 01 2019, @08:28AM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Muad'Dave on Wednesday July 31 2019, @11:01AM (15 children)
I love the idea, but I'm concerned about the durability of the batteries and ongoing maintenance costs of a plant like this. Also, how catastrophic and dangerous would a battery fire be? 1GWh of capacity is a lot of lithium to burn.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 31 2019, @11:41AM
Are they using the same 18650 / 2170 cells they use in their vehicles? [thedrive.com]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Wednesday July 31 2019, @11:55AM (13 children)
1GWh of energy is potentially a very large explosion / fire, no matter what medium you use to store it. You can't get around that.
(Score: 3, Touché) by c0lo on Wednesday July 31 2019, @12:43PM (11 children)
Ummm... hydro? I'm yet to see plain water on fire and I can't quite call the burst of a dam an explosion.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 3, Insightful) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Wednesday July 31 2019, @01:18PM (3 children)
Alright, you win that one.
What I was trying to get to is that being able to store and release large amounts of energy is necessarily written into the design spec of ANY such technology, so no matter the medium used, there is going to be a risk of sudden, unintentional, energy release and therefore potential disaster. There's just no getting around it.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday July 31 2019, @02:33PM
Of course you are right and I was quibbling just on the examples/terminology you used.
As I'm going to quibble on a slight imprecision in
Look, you can see the production of aluminium as "storing energy". You can release it [wikipedia.org], but you need to arrange the thing in a special way to get a powerful release (i.e high contact surface between aluminium and air). Without it, you can store zillions of tonnes of aluminium for zillion of years until you are going to get that Gibbs energy and aluminium oxide back
See also flow batteries [wikipedia.org] - most of them can survive an uncomtrolled mixture of the two liquids without bowing in you face.
From quibble to quibble turns out that, if you really, really want it, you can actually get energy storage solutions that won't blow into your face. True, you are going to pay something for it (e.g. larger storage space and/or lower power/energy density).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 31 2019, @03:24PM
Win? He's an idiot unless he thinks that much water can't ever be dangerous.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday August 01 2019, @08:36AM
With hydro, you're not storing it in the medium, you're storing it in the location! (For proof, remove the earth, the water will no longer have the potential energy it once had, therefore it wasn't storing the energy![*])
(Oh, and I have a comeback from the predictable "I can physics too" comeback...)
[* Please do not try this experiment at home, some people live here.]
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 31 2019, @01:45PM (1 child)
But...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dam_failure#List_of_major_dam_failures [wikipedia.org]
so who needs an explosion?
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday July 31 2019, @02:07PM
Just nitpicking. Get's worse with age, but keeps one fit to find counterexamples. A good way to keep ones critical thinking ability active even when overall thinking capacity diminishes (grin)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 31 2019, @04:03PM (1 child)
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday July 31 2019, @10:11PM
Last I checked 1m3 of water = 1 metric ton. So, still in the 400,000 cubic meters range (a cube with a 70-ish meter side)
No, it won't. 1kT TNT [wikipedia.org] is the energy equivalent of 4e12 J (vs 3.6e12 J for 1GWh).
Now, consider the power and you''ll see some magnitude order of difference between the two.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that 1GWh released accidentally is something to scoff at. Just that you can apply reasonable engineering to protect against a release in seconds while a release in 0.1ms needs some costly engineering.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2, Funny) by nitehawk214 on Wednesday July 31 2019, @04:40PM (1 child)
I guess you didn't see Cleveland in the 1960s:
https://www.alleghenyfront.org/how-a-burning-river-helped-create-the-clean-water-act/ [alleghenyfront.org]
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 4, Insightful) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday July 31 2019, @06:11PM
Don't worry, the Trump admin is busy ensuring we too shall be able to view such a glorious spectacle!
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Wednesday July 31 2019, @07:07PM
Then again, I haven't heard of a lot of water damage over wide areas in building-height topographies from a lithium explosion.
Hmm -- they should build the Lithium batteries into a location in the dam itself. Save on transmission costs for charging, and then when you do get an explosion, you can get a *really* awesomely destructive one. Maybe work it into a parody disaster movie with one really bad engineering decision after another.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 31 2019, @03:41PM
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Rupert Pupnick on Wednesday July 31 2019, @12:45PM (4 children)
What’s the market (or regulatory) incentive for utilities to improve availablity of their service? In other words, is there a market for this?
I presume there’s nothing different about the chemistry that allows greater energy densities or it would have been mentioned in TFA.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 31 2019, @07:12PM (3 children)
The problem this is trying to fix is the usage curve. Basically solar generates useful electricity from a few hours after sunrise to a few hours before sunrise, peaking at around 1 P.M. (due to DST). The peak power demand occurs about six hours later, peaking at six P.M. Note that solar won't generate a lot of energy during the peak time. So, if you have the giant batteries, you can shift the power generated in the morning and early afternoon, to the evening and night. That, in turn, reduces the amount of power you have to buy off the grid at insane peak power prices (in Southern California, it is over 30x the cost of baseline power, spots can go even higher than that). Now the difference isn't that high everywhere or all year, but the fact of the matter is that peak power is expensive.
In addition, peak power is wasteful because the peak plants are kept in various levels of hot start, so they are just burning whatever fuel they use, but not actually putting any useful energy into grid.
(Score: 2) by legont on Thursday August 01 2019, @12:17AM (2 children)
The less you buy this power the more it is going to cost because the total costs of the service will not change.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 01 2019, @02:20AM (1 child)
Do you realize this is specifically talking about grid-scale storage, right? The utilities have their own programs where they buy power at wholesale prices. If a utility installs this in the right location, it doesn't take that long to pay for itself even if they don't use renewable energy. Sure, assuming their electrical generation doesn't increase and they are buying the same amount off the grid, there is no possible way they would end up paying the peak rates or spot prices with proper timing. Sure, it would be met with an increase in baseline power cost, until supply increases as well and the prices reach equilibrium again due to the market pressure.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 01 2019, @02:46AM
I just realized that the evil plan of Christopher Walken's character in Batman Returns was to make huge piles of money off of just this sort of arbitrage.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 31 2019, @12:47PM (21 children)
No mention of cost but any comparison of wind or solar with nuclear should add the cost of these battery packs.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 31 2019, @01:13PM (18 children)
i dont understand the hate the intermitand nature of solar gets.
it's a reverse load. you dont run your fridge (compressor) constantly?
you dont kepp your lights running 24 hours?
you dont run your cookie baking oven 24/7?
you dont run your electrical water boiler all the time?
you dont store your handyman drill running on?
all your normal loads are intermitant, some times on, sometimes off.
i dont see the big central powerplant complaining about that?
so what if i carry some of the load myself (via solar) only during the day?
what the central powerplant should register when they measure is that it needs to "work less" (and thus can also only profit less from producing pollution and using up precious limited fuel sources). it's as if their were less customers during the day.
sure, batteries are good, but not a requirment to install grid tied solar, methinks.
(Score: 2) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Wednesday July 31 2019, @01:20PM (4 children)
> i dont understand the hate the intermitand nature of solar gets.
It's just hate for solar, full stop. Some people can't stand the thought of fossil fuel companies losing their profits. Weird, I know.
(Score: 2) by legont on Thursday August 01 2019, @12:22AM (3 children)
The total costs of the grid infrastructure will not change and will be divided among the users. The house next to me installing solar power means I am paying it's bills in electricity.
That's called "riding the infrastructure".
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 2) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Thursday August 01 2019, @09:34AM (1 child)
So make everyone on the grid pay a basic "grid maintenance fee" as the base of their bill, and then charge energy used on top of that. Just like you pay "line rental" for your phone and then pay for calls on top.
That's wasn't hard, was it?
(Score: 2) by legont on Thursday August 01 2019, @08:15PM
That "maintenance fee" will be almost what you pay now. I, for example, use less than half of electricity as compared to average and probably already being subsidized by others. Idle power generation is not much cheaper than at full capacity.
The only fair way to use new energy sources is to use them for new consumption only. You bought Tesla, you have a right to charge it from solar on the roof. The rest of your consumption you have to buy off the grid as everybody else or help them to pay their bills.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 1) by Sabriel on Thursday August 01 2019, @10:36AM
That's not a problem with solar, that's a problem with whoever's in charge of the grid and/or billing in your part of the world.
We have separate line items in our utility bill for the service (the grid), consumption (what gets used) and production (what gets produced, whether by solar, wind, hydro or anything else). Heck, there's even a line item for the cost to read the meter.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday July 31 2019, @01:23PM
Utilities try to keep solar down (lobbying state legislatures) with various fees or maybe bad pricing for selling it back. The battery could prove its worth by allowing you to use the extra energy yourself at night. If it significantly adds to cost of your installation, then maybe not. Powerwall 2 can be around $10k [cleantechnica.com]. But if you can get access to a subsidy [electrek.co]...
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 31 2019, @01:51PM
and then statistics come into play and why power companies can manage with a not-so-large power margins. That's why randomness is so important to functionality of the grid. If everyone turned on the fridge at the same time, it would no longer function no matter what.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Immerman on Wednesday July 31 2019, @02:23PM (8 children)
The "hate" is I think mostly the result of internalizing political talking points.
The legitimate criticism on the other hand...
The problem is that solar doesn't scale to a significant percentage of production capacity, and it's not nearly as good an investment for the grid as the raw production numbers make it look.
Without significant amount of energy storage on the grid every watt of power must be generated in the same instant it's consumed - turn on a hair drier at home and the power station miles away must immediately begin generating the extra power to supply it. Which means that to avoid rolling blackouts you need to build enough fossil generating capacity to handle peak load at times when all the intermittent sources have died down (or get society used to rationing power during such times, but that's a different conversation).
Now, there's nothing inherently *wrong* with that - but if you're normally producing half your power with renewables, that means half your fossil capacity is normally sitting idle - which means that they effectively cost considerably more to build per kWh generated, and the power they deliver is thus more expensive (and less profitable).
From a global warming perspective, solar panels are great. From a cost-per-kWh generated perspective, they're not bad, even beginning to edge out coal. But from a grid-scale cost/benefit perspective - it's a much uglier picture. You can't build solar power plants *instead of* fossil ones to increase peak load capacity, only as a supplement - which means capital outlay increases with no benefit to the bottom line.
Which means that as a society looking at what we're going to collectively pay per collective kWh used, we need to keep in mind that it doesn't actually matter if solar is cheaper per kWh generated than coal - it's still going to drive up the price of electricity unless "solar + backup power supply(batteries, coal plant, whatever)" is cheaper than coal. And currently that's mostly not the case. Obviously solar + fossil will never be cheaper than fossil alone, at least not without dramatic shortages or environmental taxes on fossil energy. However, solar+battery might eventually be able to - especially when you consider how quickly batteries can respond to demand fluctuations, and what that means in cost savings to other aspects of the grid (e.g. thinner power cables that only need to deliver average demand to a neighborhood rather than peak demand). And the fact that "battery" doesn't have to mean traditional chemical batteries - now that solar has gotten cheap enough, lots more money is being invested in R&D of more grid-friendly alternatives - a large stationary battery has very different design constraints than a small portable one, and things like pumped water and stacked stone (gravity batteries) become more attractive. As does compressed air, thermal storage, hot liquid metal batteries, carbon-fiber flywheels, etc,etc,etc,etc.
(Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Wednesday July 31 2019, @02:45PM (7 children)
Solar and battery technology are still seeing relatively rapid improvements. We'll probably see at least a doubling of maximum battery energy density and lower costs. And then there's grid storage stuff you mention, like pumped-storage hydroelectricity.
It bodes well and solar is continuing to grow exponentially [wikipedia.org], at least for now.
Solar is a good stopgap until we get fusion, or dare I say... thorium?
(And that's not to ignore natural gas, which is a better option than coal.)
By stuffing enough large-scale storage into the grid, we can accommodate a future in which almost every new home/building has solar panels on it, but a grid connection is needed to account for bad weather or high individual demand.
In a more distant future, every building with roof tiles should have "solar tiles" instead, or solar panels. And the grid will be powered by cheap fusion energy.
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(Score: 1) by nitehawk214 on Wednesday July 31 2019, @04:47PM (1 child)
Another place where utilities are resisting progress is on smart grids. To have more decentralized power like batteries and wind/solar the grid needs to be smarter. But that costs money and the utilities resist.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 01 2019, @07:22AM
It isn't just the utilities resisting. The one around here had to go through recertification of their meters to switch to smart ones. There are normally a handful of people at utility meetings and even less comment. There were 5 people there to comment because the smart meters would allow the meter to charge different amounts in each direction. There were 38 people there to comment about the smart meters causing everything from headaches, nausea, and muscle pain, to cancer, autism, and infertility. Finally, one of the board asked the utility representative for a six month delay because she wanted the utility to provide evidence that the meters were safe. "After all, these people didn't show up for nothing. There must be some sort of evidence it's bad, right?" My friend, the utility representative, just told her she could call one of their engineers would be happy to talk about it with her.
That was a long story, but should illustrate the problems they do have when they finally want to put them in. But, you really should Google it because that crazy goes quite deep.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Wednesday July 31 2019, @05:56PM (1 child)
I like your non-dystopian views of the future of the composition of the electric grid. Here's hoping for something even remotely close to what you've outlined.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Wednesday July 31 2019, @07:11PM
In solidarity with using less fossil fuel, I too raise my cigarette lighter in honor of your ideas ... wait, sorry about that.
(Score: 2) by legont on Thursday August 01 2019, @12:28AM (2 children)
The price for it will be similar to what we pay now for the whole electricity consumption.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday August 02 2019, @03:13AM (1 child)
Why would you assume that? It would cost a lot less to provide, and even a grid monopoly would still be in competition with the much more competitive battery industry.
(Score: 2) by legont on Saturday August 03 2019, @01:22AM
Let's take an extreme example. Hover dam will cost us roughly the same no matter how much electricity we get from it. All other, shall I call them classic, ways of getting electricity are very similar to this once all the costs are factored in, including, again for example, a cleaning costs of abandoned coal station, which will be more than building it. Note that the coal station clean up will not be done by the utility who owned it. Similar to mining industry the utility in question will simply go under and all the costs will come from taxes.
I am all for the new and green energy, but the way to get there is not what happens now.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday July 31 2019, @05:56PM (1 child)
OK, you don't understand it. But *ALL* the electric utilities do, because storage has been a big problem. If this solution works well, look for the electric utilities to start promoting solar, as long as they can get paid for storing the overflow. (They don't like generators, either.)
Without good storage solutions, when the amount of local excess generation gets above, I think it was 30%, the grid becomes unstable. This is not good for ANYBODY. With good storage, you still need to maintain the grid, and that's not cheap.
FWIW, if wind were a common, there'd be more hate for wind than for solar, because it's less predictable.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Immerman on Friday August 02 2019, @03:36AM
Indeed - if they can charge you... twice(?) as much to provide power on demand as they pay for your excess when available, then there's a nice economic window for someone to make money operating grid-scale battery facilities. Essentially you're renting space in someone else's batteries, along with use of the power grid to get the energy there and back again, and at least occasionally access to backup power generators. All handled invisibly for you.
Heck, with the right incentives you could radically decentralize the power storage as well - make it easy for any idiot to allocate N% of their home battery system to "grid support" for a fair market value and anyone with the capital could get in on the profit - even people with no generating capacity. I imagine a Powerwall could makes for a great alternative to an emergency generator, especially if it would actually pay for itself within several years and start turning a profit.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by DannyB on Wednesday July 31 2019, @01:52PM (1 child)
Solar and Wind are intermittent. With a good electrical grid, this matters less. It's always sunny or windy somewhere. Probably within the same state.
Every performance optimization is a grate wait lifted from my shoulders.
(Score: 2, Funny) by nitehawk214 on Wednesday July 31 2019, @04:44PM
If you live in Pennsylvania, there is at least one place it is sunny.
And it is windy fucking everywhere.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 31 2019, @06:15PM (2 children)
i want a home power station that is affordable. like hydrogen for $5k or something. stop wasting money and time trying to keep me on the energy plantation!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 31 2019, @08:23PM (1 child)
Not sure how affordable it is, but I found this a few weeks ago: https://www.solarwatt.com/ [solarwatt.com]
(Score: 2) by RedGreen on Thursday August 01 2019, @02:46AM
Apparently their garbage no-script detector messes with getting any useful information from them. A lovely way to get someone interested in what they have to say, sell, who the fuck knows, certainly not me.
"I modded down, down, down, and the flames went higher." -- Sven Olsen