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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.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by choose another one on Monday July 10 2017, @10:58AM (2 children)
Talking in "towns" is a bit pointless - not exactly a standardised measure of capacity. The minute a town decides to have, say, a steel plant or an aluminium smelter the required power changes dramatically.
Better to talk in terms of how many hours of storage capacity vs. generation capacity. For example, the Gemasolar plant in Spain is usually quoted as storing 16hrs at it's normal power output - that is the kind of storage you need to match solar daily variation (it still won't match seasonal variation, but then you could, say, do all your nuke plant maintenance in summer to start to balance that out, as long as you have a reliably sunny summer, which Spain does). Gemasolar has run 24/7 for 36 days straight - that is the kind of reliability you want from base load power gen. It can only do it in summer though.
For wind, I reckon you need several days storage to cope with natural variability - and geographic dispersion isn't a substitute as shown in example europe-wide data here: http://euanmearns.com/wind-blowing-nowhere/ [euanmearns.com]
We are nowhere near those levels of storage with current battery tech, but progress is being made, maybe we will get there. Until then it's diesel gen sets keeping the lights on, to the tune of several GW of reserve capacity in the UK alone. Since the diesel plants are now small and distributed, less visible than the wind turbines (actually form the outside look a lot like teslas battery is supposed to), few people are noticing the real cost of keeping the lights on with renewables. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/may/06/uk-energy-bill-subsidies-driving-boom-in-polluting-diesel-farms [theguardian.com]
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Monday July 10 2017, @11:19AM (1 child)
Distribution also works to prevent/militate terrorist or foreign-power threats; taking out thousands of small-scale generators is far harder than taking out one or two coal (or nuclear) power stations, or the high voltage transmission lines.
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Monday July 10 2017, @02:42PM
They have been experimenting with this concept and it's called microgrids. The idea is to combine localized renewables such as rooftop solar and smaller wind turbines with batteries on local medium voltage circuits. Instead of a large tree like structure with generation and storage at the trunk, you distribute the storage over the smaller branches and balance it out with local renewables. The idea is a branch can survive a feeder fault by letting the storage take over allowing the local renewables to continue operation helping to keep the microgrid alive long enough to fix the fault.