Tesla’s SA big battery just got 50% bigger after goals thanks to Autobidder
techau.com.au
techau.com.au
The market operator, AEMO, hosts a NEM dashboard here - pretty interesting. The first tab of the dashboard is showing the supply and demand in each australian state that participates in the market. It also shows the flow between the different states via interconnectors, highlighting which interconnectors are at capacity. Some of the other tabs show the electricity price & the fuel mix for each state: https://aemo.com.au/en/energy-systems/electricity/national-e...
Surely the battery capacity is measured in joules or at least megawatt hours, not watts?
Megawatt hours measures how much energy it can store, megawatts measures how fast it can discharge.
For the purposes of an installation such as this, C is essentially a constant, depending on factors such as the chemical and physical construction of the cells and thermal management system of the batteries. Given C and the maximum power output, you can calculate the actual energy capacity of the battery.
Describing capacity in terms of power rather than energy reflects its usage in actual practice. I doubt the C of the battery is higher than 1/hour, and peaker plants can be brought online on a timescale of 10 minutes or so. So if the grid has a shortfall in power, the relevant question is whether the battery has the power capacity to make up that difference. If it can, it should have the energy capacity to last until the rest of the grid brings online more supply (assuming it didn't start at a low state of charge).
Then there is the absolutely monstrous PG&E Tesla battery at Moss Landing (also in California) which will start as 182.5MW / 730MWh, but is forecast to eventually grow to 1.1GWh of energy.
A contract for a "smaller" one with Hawaii Electric that works out to 135MW / 185MWh was just signed in March with Tesla.
etc.
The $150M savings is a little unclear - [1] gives is at $40M/year for 2 years.
Those savings are to consumers and businesses in the state, not to the government itself and there are a number of additional clean energy projects underway in SA, so the maths on the appropriate amount to invest in each one is difficult to calculate.
In particular, batteries save money by removing the (very high) peaks. They are important because they reduce the effectiveness of market manipulation which SA was suffering from. But increased diversity in power generation within SA and an upcoming second interstate interconnector[2] help with this too.
> what other car company has market trading software as part of its energy division?
I think every single energy division has energy trading software? It would be astounding if they didn't - I worked for a power company last century for a little while and they had energy trading software back then.
[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-11-19/sa-big-battery-set-to...
[2]
https://maartensteinbuch.com/2015/01/24/tesla-model-s-batter...
Jeff Dahn is one of the original inventors of the Lithium Ion battery btw: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Dahn
For this Tesla battery (frequency support), the battery isn't required to fully charge/discharge every day, and instead only charges/discharges in response to over/underfrequency events on the power grid (you can see its current status on their website [2]). Without following the day-to-day operation of the battery, you could estimate the lifespan of the battery will be 10 years+.
[1] https://vectorwebstoreprd.blob.core.windows.net/blob/vector/...
> Autobidder is a real-time trading and control platform that provides value-based asset management and portfolio optimization, enabling owners and operators to configure operational strategies that maximize revenue based on their business objectives and risk preferences.
Is it that other power providers can bid for some big-battery output?
Not affiliated with Tesla except as an investor, have gotten to test drive Autobidder as part of an engineering/procurement/construction storage project.
It just seems kind of weird for Tesla to be saying "We'll sell you this thing you tell me you need" and also "Here's us building a thing to help you tell what you need."
1. Most utilities operate power plants, they don't operate power storage facilities. From a capital efficiency standpoint, power plants want to be run all the time, so there's not much that they can do that's particularly fancy.
In contrast, Tesla both buys and sells electricity, so they have the opportunity to arbitrage across time. This is especially true in places where the cost of electricity dips below 0.
2. There are some utilities that have stored power (e.g. hydro dams). I suspect that they don't employ the engineering talent to pull off something like Autobidder.
They are already doing better things than just dumb ML, they have proper models and constraint and planning software.
Monopoly grants with rate caps don't afford much aspirational budget for SV-wage engineers.
Edit: Well, seems someone mitm'd their app to find API. Can plug that into something that can analyse entire NZ's trends.
it observes data and makes decisions continuously
> trading and control platform
it makes trades on the power markets as well as controls your battery
> that provides value-based
you can control a model of fundamental economic value embedded in the software, so your decisions can be made not just based on observed market prices, but also your own opinion of what things ought to be worth
> asset management and portfolio optimization,
you view batteries as financial assets and look for ways to optimally manage them to extract the most money, and you can view and manage multiple batteries as a single economic unit
> enabling owners and operators to configure operational strategies that maximize revenue based on their business objectives and risk preferences.
you can choose to have more money with more risk, or less money with less risk
>it observes data and makes decisions continuously
The correct term for this is "online", not "real-time" which has another meaning.
Do you have a different set of definitions?
This is a fairly specific area where special real-time deterministic operating systems are used etc.
I think your usage was fine, and the pedantic use of "real time" is dying anyway. There's a whole field of "soft real time" which blends into online, and some parts of the battery control SCADA systems may well be true real time anyway.
https://blog.syncsort.com/2015/11/big-data/the-difference-be...
It’s basically a market forecasting system which allows the operator to place bids on various energy markets such as supply, contingency and ancillary services. The battery has limited resources (power output and energy storage) so it needs to plan well ahead for making the most money for each watt-hour it buys or sells.
(please downvote my comment as it is absolutely off-topic, thanks!)
It looks like the only scripts it loads are scripts to set up a single analytics provider. F5 results in only 6 network requests, the page, the favicon, a stylesheet, two js requests for the previously mentioned analytics provider, and a request for a tracking pixel for the previously mentioned analytics provider.
This is what every news site should strive towards. Instead of getting clunkier like Reddit.
Between that subdomain, RES and a custom userstyle, Reddit is quite a pleasant experience.
It's why I browse without JS, and use third-party archiving tools to view content like this site, which is blank without JS.
Firefox + NoScript + Page Style->No Style
Fixes many many sites including this one.
Many sites are just fine without that final No Style step. It fixes many of the most recalcitrant sites. If that doesn't work I usually don't bother reading the article.
Similar trick for Safari. Just enable the Develop menu and you can check Disable Styles and Disable JavaScript and you get both the text and the pictures.
It's something Enron would have done. Get some energy storage, and then use it to speculate in electricity futures. Buy low and charge, and sell high and discharge later. Maybe hold back energy on hot days until the peak is reached, then put it on the market.
A battery operator has more flexibility than most generators - they can sell, but not buy. We'll know this is a problem when Goldman Sachs Renewable Power LLC buys a big battery.
By buying low and selling high, the consequence to everyone else is that the price of power is more consistent. The least consistent power producers are some of the greenest, like solar and wind plants. Since this is Australia, I'd hazard a guess that the peaker plants that this is competing against are likely coal.
So greener energy and more predictable prices, what's not to like?
Adding a market participant with the motive and means to buy when the price is low and sell when the price is high reduces the price volatility.
There is a market regulator that stops most of the worst of the manipulation that happened with Enron, but it is an imperfect system.
Large parts of Australia are on a single market, but with separate quasi-state based pricing sections. South Australia had a difficult market, with large amounts of renewable power (mostly wind and roof-top solar) and a single interconnector to coal-fired stations in another state.
That left it very vulnerable to price spikes, especially at ~17:30 during summer when people would get home from office and turn on their air-conditioners. That would case huge price spikes.
The big battery is able to supply enough to get over much of that peak load spike, and an additional gas generation peaker plant along with even more geographically diverse renewables has fixed the rest of that problem. There is a second interstate interconnect being built too.
Anecdotally, I've heard from people who work in business related to the australian energy market that it is sometimes profitable to push the electricity system in a direction that increases imbalances of supply & demand (i.e. increase the volatility of the actual system -- not merely the price) in order to maximise profit of an individual market participant.