Tesla’s giant battery in Australia reduced grid service cost by 90%
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The battery couldn't have come at a better time. It's an initiative of a state labor government, now tossed out, and it's signals how much could have been achieved with decent capital investment in alternative power sources. That said, it's role here is frequency stabilisation not power: it's a tiny percentage of the states power burden. The states solar and wind was (alas) not required to have any associated storage capacity or supply FCAS services, both things which alter the economics in favour of more traditional coal, and gas peaked power supply.
There are more batteries on the way. There are pumped hydro systems in design. Things are getting better.
You described most energy markets on the planet.
Australia despite having abundant reserves of coal, gas and uranium as well as excellent solar and wind locations has some of their most expensive electricity prices in the world.
It’s clear from the AEMO market makeup etc. that almost all the cost increase was attributable to the cost of gas (due to Santos having contracts to export more gas than they had supply for to Japan etc., while the international gas price has fallen. So they are sucking up gas on the domestic market pushing up domestic prices and their liquefication operation is unprofitable anyway). But the Coalition instead chose to use the cost of electricity as a political tool in a bizarre anti-renewables push.
Economists have suggested that a large enough gas reservation policy (like WA has) would rectify that. The LNP could legislate it in a few weeks at worst. This would also benefit industrial gas users that have been struggling with big increases.
A more minor part (like what this battery is helping to stop) is the privatised generators gaming the market by constraining supply artificially to push up prices at certain high-demand times. Some of this also naturally happens with some of the older coal stations tripping out and falling off for a few hours (I think Liddel is only achieving something like 46% capacity on average or something?).
Unfortunately natgas prices determines price because it's often the price at the margin.
If policy makers care about efficiency, fairness, and reducing pollution, they would better-allow, or outright demand, price signals flow through to the marketplace.
Pull the other one, the risk is something like what happened in Germany. The cheap, reliable option in Australia is coal. So an investor has 2 options:
1) Invest in coal. At some point a Labor-Green government gets in and copies the German model - all your capital now makes a loss (ie, the plant you just built).
2) Invest in something else. This isn't as politically risky, but if the government decides that high power prices have to go and pours money into something (eg, new coal plants) then you just got set up as a marginal producer.
I mean, I haven't crunched the numbers, but unless wind/solar are legitimately the most cost effective options (which historically they most certainly have not been) then you would have to be a real risk taker to get involved.
Blaming that situation on the Coalition is too much; the political risks go way beyond them. The issue is that the Coalition wants cheap, the greens want clean, and Labor isn't committed either way as far as I know. And the regulator is a long way from perfect.
https://reneweconomy.com.au/plunging-costs-make-solar-wind-a...
The Coalition doesn't want cheap - they've spun coal so hard it's no longer politically tenable to unspin it.
Renewable energy only takes pressure off this demand (i.e. solar is fairly well correlated with hot weather, so actually helps a lot in reducing the peak on hot days (presumably from air-conditioning etc.) by hundreds of megawatts).
Australia's number 2 problem is all our power plants are aging and shutting down. I addressed that; because you seemed to be talking to it (eg, Liddel is only achieving something like 46% capacity). That is a looming issue. The problem here is also not the Coalition, as I mentioned.
Now SA appears to have a tertiary problem which is they have lots of wind energy and not enough storage to balance out the grid. The battery is addressing that and seems to be going well. This is also nothing to do with the Coalition, because the SA state government controls SA and the majority bounces between the two majors. The Weatherill government seems to have had the battery installed extremely quickly despite whatever you think the Coalition did to prevent it.
You aren't assigning blame correctly here. The big picture problem isn't that gas prices are high, and power problems aren't happening because of "mostly the Coalition".
In telecoms wholesale pricing in Australia, there would frequently be adjustments to the claimed capital costs to remove this gold plating incentive, but the energy side seemed to be much more accepting of whatever the distributors claimed.
The problem for both the US and Australia is that private investors have no appetite for coal, because the same money can just continuously install solar and get a better return - with no real problems with environmental lobbies, access to fuel, or anything. We're probably a few years away from grid expansions being built on the basis that they'll make money from people installing solar farms in the new areas.
"Ah! But China is subsidizing it's solar industry!" you say - well "who cares?" says I, the investor who China is effectively paying to build solar plants, and who gets to take a bunch of good PR from it.
Does the government just say "no" to letting wind and solar producers add capacity?
I watched this Melbourne University video which discussed this issue in detail. It went into detail on the economics of the Australian electricity market.
Really?
The 2017 Lazard report (which I think is generally pretty well regarded) has them at:
Coal, min: 60, max: 143
Wind, min: 30, max: 60
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#...
There are plenty of other sources on that page. You'll quickly find that most show wind power being cheaper than coal since around 2012 (even without a carbon price).
Generation is far from the only factor in power prices, anyway, and Australia is not nearly so blessed when it comes to the economics of power transmission.
Really, people in AU don't pay 14$ per kWh making 14$ per MWh meaningless. They are really paying to keep generating capacity online not for actual power. A backup generator that's never used costs infinite dollars per W, that does not make it useless.
PS: Well under 1 million beause people can generate more power in short periods.
With Australia's minimum wage, it's likely to be at least double this.
Anyway ~20$ /h * 24 h a day * 1 million people / -123 MW (Tesla capacity) = ~3,900,000 $ / MWh which is closer than I thought it would be.
Agreed that consumers don't pay wholesale pricing - but disagreed it's meaningless. Consumers do (of course) end up paying an amount that includes the amortised cost of wholesale power over the course of their contract.
Additionally, there are a range of incentives that result from these kinds of significant, if ephemeral, variations in wholesale pricing. Some of these incentives are bad for consumer, planet, etc.
> They are really paying to keep generating capacity online not for actual power. A backup generator that's never used costs infinite dollars per W, that does not make it useless.
A backup generator that's never used actually is useless.
Having a backup generator for your data-center means you can have less batteries. Even if you never directly use it you are benefiting by reducing overall capital costs while still mitigating the same risks.
Put another way owning a generator can provide a revenue stream because you can sell that risk reduction to someone else. That's not a theoretical benefit that's cold hard cash.
This seems like the wrong unit to use.
[EDIT:] I mean that power is already a "per time period" measure; there's no reason to say "joules per second per hour".
Saying a human produces 100W/hr is wrong. What I assume he meant is this:
A human can produce 100W for 1 hour, on average. This is reasonable, since humans produce about 1/8 Horsepower, on average; and 1 HP = 746W.
Being slightly faster in a factory is often not very useful, but being slightly slower will quickly cause problems.
Regardless, there is a good point to be made that South Australia was a strong competitor in the hypothetical 2017 Worlds Most Expensive Electricity Competition. It is possible that the batteries success is due to some quirk of their particularly poorly run grid. It is also possible that wind-battery combinations are now a competitive option. The situation continues to unfold.
[1] https://www.aer.gov.au/wholesale-markets/wholesale-statistic...
We think we’re boxing it off from that but if you look closer, through the abstract nonsense people peddle, you’ll see it comes down to a political yes/no process
You’re welcome to pretend otherwise. I’d rather just dispense with the notion life is anything but dialog back and forth, jockeying for acceptance and access into some clique or the “right” to build useful infra
I wish that were the case, but the simplest explanation of political reality both in AUS and USA is that our leaders owe favors to a few very rich people, in fact work for them.
I think its true this has always been a dimension of things, but the scale of this dimension set against other dimensions has substantially changed in the last two decades. Before this, there were some things that both (notional) sides were prepared to express some unanimity on.
For example: "soviet power plus electricity == socialism" did not actually stop anyone of a more rightist persuasion from investing in electic generation.. did it?
Were you trying to make some other point instead?
I was trying to make the point that if (like me) you want capital works, and national utility project investment, you don't want oppositional politics, you want the other model.
I am not in denial that there is another, or other models.
We had more overt bipartisan politics over a number of important things like housing, defence policy, capital works. We have gone to a more oppositional model even though this means less public utility outcomes happen.
Regarding pumped storage, I recently discovered some studies pointing out the potentially massive greenhouse impact of certain reservoirs that we must keep in mind.
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....
As for storing power overnight, batteries are on a similar manufacturing learning curve* as photovoltaic, albeit a few years behind. Most people thought PV could never be cost effective, until suddenly it was the cheapest. Batteries too will surprise the doubters. It's just a matter of time before batteries are more cost-effective than pumped hydro.
*Moore's law-style cost reductions were first observed in airplane manufacturing in 1936. Cost of manufacturing decreases with the volume produced:
http://www.uvm.edu/~pdodds/research/papers/others/1936/wrigh...
How good is that!
Strengthening the market for those services and working with AEMO to drive the networks or third parties to provide these services is the better option in my opinion.
The recent rule changes for 5 minute settlements in the wholesale spot markets will also alter the financial incentives for very fast start generation and drive investment in battery storage, perhaps even in the residential market.
Otherwise, I agree with what you say.
Power investment is not 'oh well, I'll put it into fish oil instead' money, these are firms who specialize in this niche and who are looking to invest in this niche. The lack of government commitment to PV and wind is a bigger threat to them than a requirement to spend more capital including storage and frequency supply logic.
https://www.energy.gov/eere/water/pumped-storage-hydropower
We have a few of those for decades, it is actually quite simple, when there is surplus of el. energy it is used to pump water on a hill and acumulate it there. When you need it, the water is than used to generate el. energy. This is the traditional way of flattening the spikes in el. grid.
Now I wonder why the batteries were choosen instead of water, are they cheaper? Does it acumulate more energy on less space than water, it is due to efficiency (there is some loss when you pump water up) or for Austrialia, the water based storage is just not an option (not enough water / hills)?
Apparently there's an argument about that, since there's a plan to upgrade the Snowy Hydro pumped storage system, but it'll cost $2B and it couldn't be done in 100 days like the Tesla installation. The other advantage seems to be that the battery can respond very quickly (0.14s), so it's still useful to avoid instability in the network.
What I love about it is that it’s forcing the governments hand. They have vested interests in the coal industry but cannot continue to overlook this when electricity prices are so high in Australia.
My hunch is that those used batteries will single handedly store peak reusable energy for down times if electric cars grow to dominate the market.
I agree it's a much more tangible market from my perspective (ref. the prod issue on the vehicle side) and is only really purchasable by state actors.
If they can get the first mover advantage actually rolling before someone else enters the market than this will be a huge boon to their bottom line.
And some restaurants switch to wholesaling and distributing their more noteworthy products and either close the restaurant or hand it over to somebody else to manage.
When you used to be the customer for your new product you have access to a wealth of insights about what could make the product work. If you are better at that than your old product, well...
How much a threat is constrained lithium supply to the business model?
https://cleantechnica.com/2017/09/30/tesla-using-samsung-sdi...
Plenty of other viable technologies exist, we just need some rich science-aware people to help us roll them out.
So it is with Tesla, who will be remembered for their batteries.
Sidenote, commercial and utility battery backup like this have been sold for over 10 years. Unless you were a hotel in Vegas, you probably weren't noticing. Did they sell many, dunno, but they've been working at every distribution for a long time.
A catalog of topical subscriptions, which you only offer after the user has signaled interest in a specific subdomain.
What’s galling about the immediate ask is the site knows literally nothing about my intents and is deigning to suggest content to me.
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- Find dom.webnotifications.enabled
- Set to False
If nuclear has to include the costs of dismantling the plants, batteries have to include the cost of building them. And wind generators are massive aluminum structures, which are extremely costly to shape.
Some day, maybe. Let's be fair in the meantime.
Naturally, launching rockets filled with nuclear waste comes with its own safety concerns.
The Falcon 9 carries 147 metric tons of RP-1, which is functionally the same thing as Jet A (both are kerosene), while a 747-400 carries 165 metric tons of Jet A.
For a very broad estimate, I'd say the carbon footprint of a thousand Falcon 9 rocket launches is somewhat less than the carbon footprint of a day's worth of aircraft travel, globally.
1: where "easy" means "literally rocket science"
I looked it up, and underground storage seems to cost about the same as launching into space with falcon heavy launches, at about 1700$ per kg.
[1] https://www.smh.com.au/business/underground-nuclear-waste-fa...
[2] https://www.quora.com/Rockets-What-is-cost-of-sending-1-kg-w...
You mention this like it is a "problem to be solved". It seems like a complete show-stopper to me. Rockets go down. Launch enough, and it will happen, regardless of all safeguards. There is no acceptable place on earth to shower hundreds of square kilometers with radioactive material with thousands of years half-life.
So now all nuclear waste across the country sits in pools instead of being disposed of properly.
This should be trivial to fix but I suppose the government would rather wait for a disaster to happen than to deal with it proactively
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_r...
At least in the US, the rail crash safety record is sufficiently poor for something this hazardous, and I think it's fairly well known how risky highways are.
This is mentioned in the Wikipedia article, I don't now what the current risk estimate is.
Suffice it to say, I disagree that there's anything trivial about a fix, be it dumping underground or reprocessing.
I also disagree that there's some kind of looming, impending disaster brewing in on-site waste storage. My understanding was that waste stored in pools has to be there because it still produces significant heat, so taking out that waste and dumping it underground isn't even an option. Only waste that no longer requires cooling can be moved underground.
Thats the point though. It should be moved into long term storage after that and not stay in the pool that needs to be cooled.
Transporting is not the issue you make it out to be. Transport on trains has been a regular spectacle for decades in Europe, especially between La Hague and German nuclear power plants and the storage site in Gorleben.
They are transported in nuclear flasks ("Castor" in German) under tight security measures in slow speed across extra checked railways lines. That takes a while, especially if every time ten thousands of protesters blockade the shipment and there is sabotage of the rail bed. All of that makes these transports extremely expensive.
You of course cant simply put them in normal freight trains or simply dont put them in storage at all. In the best case you have to move them once the plant gets dismantled which simply makes the final costs higher.
Nuclear power ignores most of those costs today and simply lets the public pay the bill in the end. To be a competitive power source the production price needs to also include the budget for waste management, which includes:
* Transport of nuclear waste
* Final storage of nuclear waste
* Cleanup of the power plant
This is not the case in most countries which makes nuclear power a highly subsidized energy source. The problem of final storage alone is an absolute nightmare, Germany realized their Morsleben and Asse II radioactive waste repositories were not suited for storage after all. Asse II has lost stability, became flooded and is at threat of collapse. It now has to be decommissioned, which includes a complete dig out.
Whose point? I'm genuinely curious if there's credible evidence that there's waste being needlessly cooled. This also smells like a false dichotomy to me, as there are other options besides the pool and moving to long-term storage.
> Transporting is not the issue you make it out to be.
Specifically, the only issue I'm alleging is that the overall risk of an environmental contamination/release incident increases with transport to central storage rather than storing the waste on site. That's my recollection of what I had read when I last looked into it. Do you have something (perhaps recent) to refute that?
> Transport on trains has been a regular spectacle for decades in Europe
I did specify the US, since I was responding to a comment complaining about Yucca Mountain.
The spectacle may well inure people to the risk, but the actual risk remains. It may even be higher if it's an attractive nuisance for terrorists.
> In the best case you have to move them once the plant gets dismantled which simply makes the final costs higher.
I'm not sure I follow why this is, then, the best case, nor why the final costs would be any higher if transport is delayed until decomissioning.
> To be a competitive power source the production price needs to also include the budget for waste management
Here I agree with you, but I think it's a mistake, even naive, to dictate in advance how to handle that waste, especially since you yourself go on to point out the pitfalls of "final" storage.
Today's waste could be tomorrow's fuel
Still, I don't think waste management is the (cost) issue you make it out to be, especially compared to failures like Fukushima and Chernobyl. Rare, ultra-expensive catastrophes are much more difficult to price in and are, arguably, what have really been killing nuclear, politically, if not economically.
I would argue after decades of usage and development state of the art nuclear power plants are relatively safe without major additional geographic risks like running them in places like Fukushima. The exception might be them becoming military targets.
> This also smells like a false dichotomy to me, as there are other options besides the pool and moving to long-term storage.
I understood your parents post that way and also your response. Might have been a misunderstanding on my part. The unnecessary long term storage in "common" storage pools after getting out of cooling pools sounds like an unnecessary risk to me, the normal solution should be to put them into dry cask storage in separate units. As long as they are not in dry storage containers a risk of water loss remains. After that they should be shipped to intermediate storage facilities, in such a way that they could be stored indefinitely in those containers under circumstances that can deal with a malfunction of the flasks. I am under the assumption, that most power plants are not designed to be intermediate storage facilities in the first place, but have them added on out of necessity.
>That's my recollection of what I had read when I last looked into it. Do you have something (perhaps recent) to refute that?
Which shortcomings of former dry cask storage flask do you recall? I was under the assumption they were relatively save for supervised transports. The only problem I recall was contamination of the outside of flasks in the 90s in Germany, but that was a scandal resulting from improper loading of the flasks.
>I did specify the US, since I was responding to a comment complaining about Yucca Mountain.
My point is that such transports are possible and are regularly executed in Europe, just not as normal cargo. There is nothing stops the US from doing the same. Its just involves a lot of effort and is expensive.
>I'm not sure I follow why this is, then, the best case, nor why the final costs would be any higher if transport is delayed until decomissioning.
That was from the position that they are not already in intermediate storage at side but still in cooling pools. The best case was concerning the risk of storing them this way.
>Here I agree with you, but I think it's a mistake, even naive, to dictate in advance how to handle that waste, especially since you yourself go on to point out the pitfalls of "final" storage.
Sure, but this includes at least the cost of storage in flasks in temporary sites for several decades with the option of relatively easy and save removal. Botched final storage "solutions" are a common problem we have to face today. And even when it simply comes to plant decommissioning, the risk mostly lies with the public when it comes to extra costs. Germany recently agreed to a final 24 billion cost to assume all liability for nuclear power plant decommission and final storage, where it is extremely doubtful this will be enough to cover even the best case for plant decomissioning. But it might even be the best solution available now, because otherwise the companies having run the power plants might simply declare bankruptcy for this segment and default on the costs entirely, leaving the long term costs yet again to the public.
It is simply not prudent to allow the production of nuclear energy by private entities without a solid plan, how the long term costs associated with it are to be financed. Which again, doesnt mean nuclear power is not a viable option, they might still be cheaper looking at the problem at constant availability if we value the reduction of CO2 emission enough. But the way we currently use it is simply leaving the associated costs for future generations for the benefit of a few companies.
Relative to what? I recall it's riskier to move than to leave in place, not anything about any specific technology.
> My point is that such transports are possible and are regularly executed in Europe, just not as normal cargo. There is nothing stops the US from doing the same.
Again, nothing to do with overall risk.
Incidentally, I think the differences between US and European rail infrastructures (including regulation thereof) is not to be dismissed so lightly.
> It is simply not prudent to allow the production of nuclear energy by private entities without a solid plan, how the long term costs associated with it are to be financed.
Here, I totally agree. It may well be that it's simply not prudent to allow private nuclear energy at all. As much as I'm generally not a fan of government running anything industrial,
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You have to decomission nuclear plants unless you want radioactive waste in your ground water. You don't have to do such a thing with wind turbines. You could just let them turn into industrial ruins. It's probably more economical to recycle the materials, but that's a choice.
> construction
All plants require that. Nuclear or coal plants are not made from unicorn hair and dreams. And modern wind turbine blades are made of reinforced fiberglass composites, not aluminium.
(which doesn't really change the point)
Yes, the PV/Wind sources are lower intensity of power, and yes they have energy input costs. But the delivered KWH cost is significantly lower.
This feels like an O/R planning exercise. What we want is to understand all the simultaneous input components to a complex set of cost and benefit outcomes, and have a grid of the models we could do.
(I'm pro nuke btw, but trying to be realistic)
Pumped Hydro have huge capital work costs and sit behind transmission system barriers often, but they can go on and on and on. They have a startup delay component. They have lower overall efficiency because of pump losses (don't over cost this, often the power used is marginal, or was going to waste anyway)
So whilst its a valid Question as written, it is a bit apples and bicycles comparison: they don't actually "equal" each other in how they respond, and for how long, and what associated outcomes are alongside.
I believe the Turnbull Snowy pumped Hydro is $2b+ of cost to dig new tunnels and is 5+ years off. the same investment at current prices ($150m for the neoen stack) means TEN of them could be deployed at the rate Tesla can supply batteries, inside the five year window. Arguably better use of the money but the $2b gives a huge amount more sustained power.
>it reduced the cost of the grid service that it performs by 90%
Let's examine "the grid service that it performs". What does this mean? Which "grid service" is it performing?
I imagine the "grid service" it performs is that of inputting energy: it's a source of electricity into the grid. So the claim can be re-written as:
>[the battery] reduced the cost of <putting energy into the grid> by 90%
Reduced, compared to what, a coal-powered steam turbine power station?
>When an issue happens or maintenance is required on the power grid in Australia, the Energy Market Operator calls for FCAS (frequency control and ancillary services) which consists of large and costly gas generators and steam turbines kicking in to compensate for the loss of power.