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Tesla to Build 129 Megawatt-Hours Battery Storage System in Australia

posted by Fnord666 on Monday July 10 2017, @05:21AM   Printer-friendly
from the don't-get-it-wet dept.

takyon writes:

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/07/tesla-build-titanic-battery-facility

Tesla announced today that it will build the world's largest lithium-ion battery system to store electricity in Australia. The 100-megawatt installation—more than three times as powerful as the biggest existing battery system—will be paired with the Hornsdale Wind Farm near Jamestown, operated by the French renewable energy company Neoen, in a deal with the state of South Australia. The Tesla battery should smooth out the variability inherent in sustainable power generation schemes.

"Cost-effective storage of electrical energy is the only problem holding us back from getting all of our power from wind and solar," says Ian Lowe, an energy policy specialist at Griffith University in Nathan, Australia, near Brisbane. The Tesla system, he says, will "demonstrate the feasibility of large-scale storage." It might also win over skeptics who doubt that renewables can match the dependability of conventional fossil fuel and nuclear power plants, says Geoffrey James, a renewable energy engineer at University of Technology Sydney.

[...] The battery installation will be a key feature of the state's aggressive move toward reliably generating half of its electricity from renewables by 2025. That drive suffered an image problem last September and again in February, when power blackouts hobbled the state. Conservative politicians were quick to blame South Australia's shift away from fossil fuels. "It's very easy to use a blackout to attack renewable energy," James says. Investigations concluded that the failures were not due to the reliance on renewables but rather to the collapse of transmission towers in one case and unexpected power demands in another. In addition to helping match renewable energy generation and use, James says, the battery facility's "high power capacity will be available in quick bursts" to keep the electricity's frequency in the right range in the event of grid disruptions and demand surges.

Also at BusinessInsider, The Washington Post, and Tesla.

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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by c0lo on Monday July 10 2017, @09:34AM (4 children)

    by c0lo (156) on Monday July 10 2017, @09:34AM (#537062) Journal

    Or is it necessary for each and every power generation facility in a specific region (in this case, South Australia) to be able to meet peak power requirements for the entire region by itself?

    I never said that. And no, that super-battery is not to be used exclusively by Hornsdale

    Here's the situation:

    SA has a single interstate connection to the "national grid" (which is not that "national" as the name implies, see page 2 of this (PDF warning) [aemo.com.au]).
    Most of the times, SA is an energy exporter - last year SA achieved 53% of its own consumption being generated from renewables [abc.net.au]. But sometimes it needs to import - in the few days every year when the wind doesn't blow (the neighbourhood with the Southern Ocean almost guarantees the coastal regions will be mostly windy).
    When the falls, SA needs to import a lot through that single interstate connection. In the conditions the thermal powered stations (mainly gas) are private and sometimes play scarcity games [news.com.au] (link is to a NewsCorp/Murdoch owned newspaper, which admits):

    South Australia Energy Minister Tom Koutsantonis said last week there was a problem with the way the electricity market was operating.

    “We have an oversupply of generation, yet the market is unable to dispatch that electricity to sufficiently meet our needs,” he said.

    “That is a massive, catastrophic failure of the national electricity market.”

    But if you look at it from a financial point of view, Pelican Point’s owners Engie may have had more to gain from keeping the plant closed than sending it online.

    Tony Wood, energy program director of the Grattan Institute, told news.com.au there was no evidence companies were withholding electricity supply deliberately to get higher prices for their product. But in a private system, companies are out to make money.

    Normally wholesale prices for electricity hover about $50 to $70 per megawatt hour (MWh), but during peak times they can get as high as $14,000MWh.

    The more power that’s available in the system, the cheaper the price generally becomes. So in times of peak demand, companies can get much more money because supply is scarce.

    Only one unit of Pelican Point’s power plant was running on Wednesday and getting its second unit online may have actually brought the price it was getting for its energy.

    “If the price for power stays high — at say $10,000 per megawatt hour — and stays there for several hours, (Engie) can make a lot of money,” Mr Wood said.

    “But if they start their second plant (sending more power into the system) and the price crashes to $300 per megawatt hour, they don’t make as much money.

    “I’m not saying that’s what they did, but it may be one reason they didn’t start the plant.”

    This is why SA govt commissioned the battery and also plans to build a state owned gas power station [abc.net.au]

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  • (Score: 1, Troll) by bob_super on Monday July 10 2017, @05:36PM (3 children)

    by bob_super (1357) on Monday July 10 2017, @05:36PM (#537200)

    > This is why SA govt commissioned the battery and also plans to build a state owned gas power station [abc.net.au]

    That sound terribly communist of them. What's next? Not selling public transportation to car and tire manufacturers? Not buying then bulldozing water supplies to towns before sending them trucks filled with $10 per liter water?
    What kind of coercive governments keep getting in the way of my freedom to establish contracts?

    • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday July 10 2017, @08:58PM (2 children)

      by c0lo (156) on Monday July 10 2017, @08:58PM (#537323) Journal

      What kind of coercive governments keep getting in the way of my freedom to establish contracts?

      A govt that protects its citizens from predatory pricing by acting as an operator on the market?
      If the utility market is controlled by companies putting extreme greed above the duty to provide the utilities, why not?
      You don't like the prices the govt has to offer you, feel free to contract your utilities with the other companies.

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      • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Tuesday July 11 2017, @12:51AM (1 child)

        by bob_super (1357) on Tuesday July 11 2017, @12:51AM (#537398)

        I'm pretty sure I can find lots of examples of public utilities competing against private entities, where the lawsuits only stop when the right politician happens to properly defund or hamper the action of the public utility, following a balanced election in which nobody could notice completely unrelated excessive contributions by said competitors...

        • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday July 11 2017, @02:34AM

          by c0lo (156) on Tuesday July 11 2017, @02:34AM (#537420) Journal

          On short term, lawsuits won't get them anywhere election-wise... the memory of what happened is too recent inside the electorate.
          Besides, the Aussies are pretty used with public utilities, state owned (totally or in part) operating on the market. The most recent of it: NBNCo [wikipedia.org].

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