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Tesla’s big battery in South Australia may prove the viability of renewables
- tootie 9y agoThis article, like Turnbull, is incorrectly equating cost with price. Emissions are a cost. Price + emissions = cost. Renewables have been beating coal on cost for quite a while, only now they can start to win on price.
- shoo 9y agothat's true. but to dig a bit deeper, who pays each cost and who benefits from the value? who directly benefits from the value of energy: - australian energy consumers - australian energy producers who pays the costs for energy prices: - australian energy consumers who pays the costs for australian emissions *: - people living in australia -- 0.3% of emissions - people living in world excluding australia -- 99.7% of emissions * assuming each person currently alive in world has equal interest in global climate. this is pretty crude as people who arent born yet get to carry the cost too. Clearly we cant account for these shared global costs sensibly unless enough countries reach some kind of global agreement. The current australian federal government is taking a regrettable approach of self-interest and is waiting for the larger/more powerful countries to lead the way. Australia has plenty of coal to sell in the mean time.
- jdietrich 9y agoFailure to act on climate change has a game-theoretic cost. Taking unilateral action massively improves your negotiating position and reduces the cost for other countries to reduce their emissions via economies of scale. One country taking decisive action could trigger a chain reaction of political pressure. Australia has a horrendous wildfire problem. The frequency and severity of wildfires has drastically increased over recent years. A small increase in global temperatures could render vast areas of the country effectively uninhabitable due to the risk of fire. I think that most Australians are willing to act; that will is being subverted by a powerful coal lobby. They see the hellish scenes every summer. They see the immense financial, environmental and human cost. They see the weight of scientific evidence.
- shoo 9y ago> Failure to act on climate change has a game-theoretic cost. Taking unilateral action massively improves your negotiating position and reduces the cost for other countries to reduce their emissions via economies of scale Thanks - I wasn't aware of that. Are there any books / articles that go into this in more detail and might be accessible to someone with a decent math + comp sci education but no knowledge of game theory?
- amygdyl 9y agoI'm also appreciating the same as you quoted above. But I keep defaulting to a painfully pessimistic imagination that is the costs are collectively going to be so moot so much sooner than any expectation, due to unforseen extreme results. Am I going through a depression or something manic, maybe, because I don't believe we're not all suppressing contemplation of the outlier worse consequences of climate instability and as a result are walking blindfold in a kind of negotiated but half acceptable death march into a slower extinction and because of this unseen compromise on the range of forecasts that are shorn of the scariest conclusions we're investing in hope and eliminating healthy appreciation of the dangers, and ultimately accommodating skepticism too much for that accommodation to be without inevitable negative effects ? edit: final words arranged for grammatical clarity, no overt meaning altered by edit.
- shoo 9y agoPersonally I have found reading both history and philosophy is helpful - not in "solving the problem" but being able to manage emotion and anxiety about climate change. I think learning about previous periods of large-scale ecological change or collapse of civilisations helps to normalise the possible/likely/inevitable upcoming events intellectually. Philosophy helps to figure out a workable emotional response. I think there is some value in stoic philosophy that can be applied in daily living, particularly in terms of managing responses to loss (e.g. loss of one's health, or one's material possessions, or loved one's, or perhaps one's society) There's also this - Roy Scranton's "Learning How to Die in the Anthropocene": https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/11/10/learning-how-to-die-in-the-anthropocene/ https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/11/10/learning-ho... > The biggest problem climate change poses isn’t how the Department of Defense should plan for resource wars, or how we should put up sea walls to protect Alphabet City, or when we should evacuate Hoboken. It won’t be addressed by buying a Prius, signing a treaty, or turning off the air-conditioning. The biggest problem we face is a philosophical one: understanding that this civilization is already dead. The sooner we confront this problem, and the sooner we realize there’s nothing we can do to save ourselves, the sooner we can get down to the hard work of adapting, with mortal humility, to our new reality. i am not sure if you will find any of this helpful but i hope that you can find some peace with time
- wklauss 9y ago> who pays the costs for australian emissions *: > - people living in australia -- 0.3% of emissions > - people living in world excluding australia -- 99.7% of emissions Not that straightforward. Effects of emissions is global, yes, but there are also local effects due to pollution, certain chemical byproducts, etc... meaning the local cost is higher than the average worldwide cost.
- fosco 9y agoWhile travelling in south east Asia I spent 4 days in Saigon (Hó Chi Minh City). Air impacts locals immediately, it may have an effect everywhere long term but immediately for wife and I was pretty harsh irritation of each breath by the last day. We may have been sensitive to it (guess the US air comes at a price) but it was worse than I imagined.
- sametmax 9y agoTo be fair, the maths behind rentability is tainted with so much agenda from all parts. E.G: when you give prices for a nuclear plant in France, you include only assembly price and running costs. While for wind turbines you include assembly, disassembly, running costs and wiring (which must be underground by law). This makes it hard to make fair comparisons.
- sitkack 9y agoWho pays the cost when the wind turbine melts down?
- senectus1 9y agothe same process for when a coal fired power station breaks down. the price of regular maintenance and in the event of catastrophic failure, insurance.
- sametmax 9y agoIt was a joke.
- danmaz74 9y agoAnd who pays the cost when you need to decommission a nuclear power plant? I'm not against nuclear in general, but accounting should be apples-to-apples.
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- FullMtlAlcoholc 9y agoOne of the other costs of fossil fuels that isnt. mentioned as. much is the resultant pollution and environmental degradation. These externalities are real. Due to the air pollution that gets trapped in the LA basin, Los Angeles has the worst air pollution in the US. 1300 lives are cu5 short each year due to the smog and over the course of a lifetime, breathing the air will shorten your lifespan by a few years.[1]. Also, air pollution is thought to double the risk of dementia in women according to a recent study. [2] Another grave consequence of bith global climate change and localized pollution is the loss of biodiversity and the chance to study and learn from other organisms and their unique genomes and adaptations. 1 http://www.thoracic.org/about/newsroom/press-releases/journal/health-of-the-air-ats-nyu.pdf http://www.thoracic.org/about/newsroom/press-releases/journa... 2 https://www.nature.com/tp/journal/v7/n1/full/tp2016280a.html https://www.nature.com/tp/journal/v7/n1/full/tp2016280a.html
- burntrelish1273 9y agoFYI: 129 MWh would be about 1300 42U-style racks for batteries alone. Source: there's a guy in socal (Jehu Garcia) building a reclaimed peaker 1 MWh pack in about 10 racks from used batteries and equipment (50 kW 480VAC inverter) on the cheap in order to store energy off-peak (plus possibly charge using solar) and use it at peak supplemented by grid power. This is how manufacturing and other heavy industry / large electrical consumers can save money right now in US day-of-use billed grid systems.
- willholloway 9y agoJehu Garcia's Youtube videos are definitely worth checking out, the guy is doing cool things with 18650 lithium ion cells. He converted a VW bus into an electric vehicle. My main takeaway after watching his videos and others in the same vein is that lithium ion battery packs are the gasoline of the 21st century. You can build 18650 packs for electric bikes, scooters, boats etc... or build your own Power Wall type home electric energy storage. The costs of these cells coming out of China have gotten down to $1 each in some cases of excess inventory...
- Frogolocalypse 9y agoI'm going to look myself, but do you have any links about the 18650 packs? Edit:cheapest aliexpress ones i see are about usd$2.00 each. That's not bad though.
- willholloway 9y agoCheck ebay, packs from hover boards that got recalled are available. The cost can be $1 a cell, a pack might have 20. Each cell might be 10-12 watt hours. It takes 3 cells to produce 12 volts.
- Frogolocalypse 9y agoIndeed. I hadn't actually reviewed ebay for electronics things for a couple of years, because any of the products I used to see there were significantly more expensive than anything I could get from aliexpress. It looks like, at least in this instance, that has turned around. I could even see individual 18650 cells for $1. Great stuff.
- politician 9y agoWould someone explain what this battery is for or the surrounding context? The article spends most of its word count on abstract politics.
- burntrelish1273 9y agoBatteries are used in lieu of pumped energy storage for several purposes: - emergency use: it's much faster than even the fastest pump sets which can switch over in seconds - load smoothing to avoid spooling up/down expensive peakers too much - daily energy arbitrage by downstream / middle consumers to buy off peak and use at peak in time-of-use billed electrical services - store solar energy for night use 129 MWh is enough for a medium-sized town or charging several hundred Teslas. Really though, the focus shouldn't be on huge, central systems. The savings and grid resilience is realized with many few MWh systems spread to local substation-level. This has the potential to smooth out the load to be more/less constant and makes large-scale demand more predictable.
- sitkack 9y agoThe other advantage of substation level energy storage is in not having to upgrade the feed circuits. Design for average consumption not peak. Storage and renewables make the edges of the network resilient.
- jburgess777 9y agoUK Power networks recently completed a 2 year trial of a 6MW/10MWh battery system which was installed as an alternative to adding a 3rd circuit to meet future peak demand of a town. At the end of the trial they produced a projected business case for future deployments of: Conventional reinforcement (another circuit): £5.1M Future Net Method Cost (battery): £1.6M This data is from figure 8 of "SNS Close down report v1.0". This report and other information about the trial can be found at: http://innovation.ukpowernetworks.co.uk/innovation/en/Projects/tier-2-projects/Smarter-Network-Storage-(SNS)/ http://innovation.ukpowernetworks.co.uk/innovation/en/Projec...
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- Animats 9y agoCan Tesla deliver the batteries in the next 100 days? Tesla had a battery shortage last quarter when production couldn't keep up, and had to delay some car deliveries.[1] With Model 3 deliveries starting, is Tesla's battery production sufficient? [1] http://money.cnn.com/2017/07/03/technology/tesla-battery-car-deliveries/index.html http://money.cnn.com/2017/07/03/technology/tesla-battery-car...
- imron 9y agoWhen this first hit the news a few months back, Musk said they'd do it on 90 days or it'd be free. That's a pretty big incentive to get it done quickly.
- jazoom 9y agoNow it's 100 days or free.
- prawn 9y agoNo, it was always 100 days or free. "Tesla will get the system installed and working 100 days from contract signature or it is free. That serious enough for you?" https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/840032197637685249 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/840032197637685249
- moreati 9y agoI don't think it was ever 90 days, here's the original tweet "Tesla will get the system installed and working 100 days from contract signature or it is free. That serious enough for you?" -- https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/840032197637685249 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/840032197637685249
- jsight 9y agoThey indicated that the problem was with the extremely power dense 100Kwh packs that are now fairly common in the Model S and Model X. It may be that there is no similar issue with the less power dense utility scale packs.
- sintaxi 9y agoI'm happy this is happening but if it requires $50M in tax payers dollars it's not exactly viable now is it?
- __Duncan__ 9y agoAre roads and public schools not viable?
- CodeWriter23 9y agoYou haven't checked into the cost of a typical freeway bridge lately, have you?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- cmyr 9y agoBy various estimates the replacement cost of the US grid is about 2-5 _trillion_ (taxpayer's) dollars[1]. 1. http://www.businessinsider.com/replacing-us-electrical-grid-cost-2017-3 http://www.businessinsider.com/replacing-us-electrical-grid-...
- epistasis 9y agoFor most utility buys, $50M is tiny. Plus, how can you say "not viable" without comparing the cost to the value that it provides? For truly non-viable, see the recent coal boondoggles in the US. For example, this $7.5 BILLON waste: https://arstechnica.com/business/2017/06/regulators-suggest-7-5-billion-coal-gasifier-facility-give-up-burn-natural-gas/ https://arstechnica.com/business/2017/06/regulators-suggest-... Or the wave of coal bankruptcies in the US: https://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2016-06-08/bankrupt-coal-companies-are-compensating-executives-and-costing-taxpayers https://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2016-06-08/bankrupt-...
- nl 9y agoAs a South Australian, I'm (very!!) happy to trade a few tax dollars for much lower power prices. The extra tax is more than made up for in savings. On this particular topic, the South Australian government's interests and mine are precisely aligned: We are both getting screwed over by power generators exploiting the intermittent nature of renewables to make bigger profits. Did you know they deliberately keep gas peaking generators off when it would be profitable to run them, because they can force the price to spike even higher and exploit the minimum billing periods? I'm all for market driven solutions, but technology driven price disruption is a well known reason for market failure, and that seems to be what is going on here.
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- cameldrv 9y agoThe article, of course, is guilty of exactly what it accuses its opponents of -- truthiness. They say that this is affordable, and then don't even say how much it costs! He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense [1] [1] http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/ http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/
- nl 9y agoThis is true, but I'd note this quite from the article: Nyhan showed a clear tendency for people with high numeracy skills to misread graphs about gun control or climate change, even when they’d just correctly read the same graph about soap. To address you specific point though - the price is less than A$150M/$US115M[1]. By comparison, the SA government is also building a new 250MW gas fired power station which costs A$360M[2]. It's difficult to compare the two because they are such different things of course. But I'd note that at periods of high wind generation the power price in SA does drop to zero, but the peak price is very high. It seems likely the price of energy from the wind farm plus battery will be extremely competitive with gas, and the investment price seems roughly proportional for the amount of energy made available. [1] http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/news/south-australia/south-australian-government-refuses-to-say-how-much-worlds-biggest-lithium-ion-battery-will-cost/news-story/ http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/news/south-australia/south-aus... [2] http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-04-13/sa-gas-fire-power-station-gains-international-interest/8442578 http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-04-13/sa-gas-fire-power-stat...
- sitkack 9y agoOne with a big enough sink could get paid to take power off the grid. I repeat, you could make money charging your batteries.
- nl 9y agoYes. For residential installations they banned the 'charge during cheaper power, discharge into the grid during high power' thing for subsidised solar. But for this it's the whole idea.
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- sanxiyn 9y agoWhy is Snowy Hydro 2.0 "ridiculous" and "silly"? What exactly is advantage of battery over pumped storage? Big problem with pumped storage is that it needs specific location, but it seems they already have it. As I understand, pumped storage is cheaper, more energy efficient, more mature technology. I understand battery swithes faster. What else?
- acchow 9y agoYou mentioned location, but that advantage can't really be understated. How can you have pump storage near every major city? It's not feasible in most places. Then there is the enormous transmission cost to get the energy to (and from) that remote location. Batteries can also meet fluctuations in demand instantly. Hydro cannot.
- sanxiyn 9y agoWhat enormous transmission cost? Total transmission loss of Australia is 5% (2014). I already said battery switches faster. You are simply repeating what I said.
- labster 9y agoUhm, 5% of national output is a lot of energy. That's not relatively bad or anything, but improvements in transmission would be like getting power plants for free. High-temperature superconductors: I want to believe.
- nl 9y agoThe Snowy Mountain scheme is around 1500km from Adelaide. It might help in the Eastern States, but transmission losses are significant over that distance, and in the Eastern States they haven't had the power problems yet.
- zik 9y agoPumped hydro storage is also inefficient - about 20% losses.
- anovikov 9y agoIsn't that an overstatement? Australia's installed generating capacity is 67GW and about 50% load factor. It needs at least 100 systems like that to make a significant impact on grid stability. Even in South Australia alone, at least 10x that much is needed.
- sanxiyn 9y agoYup, it is. And you know what? Pumped storage the article calls "ridiculous" and "silly", is what is needed. It is 10x much, exactly as you said.
- anovikov 9y agoPrice of battery systems seems to be same now per unit of storage and lower per unit of peak power. So that's fine: all things being equal, battery is definitely better than a pumped storage plant. They just need whole lot more than this 1 battery to solve the problem.
- olivermarks 9y agoHawaii and HECO are worth watching closely in the real world of energy and modern grids. http://www.utilitydive.com/news/hawaiian-electric-proposes-new-cheaper-grid-modernization-plan/446420/ http://www.utilitydive.com/news/hawaiian-electric-proposes-n... There is a great deal going on in the energy world right now around storage of electricity, I think it's a shame opEd websites such as the Guardian feature and focus on Musk, a single entrepreneur and his companies, over the broader advances that are unfolding...
- melling 9y agoHawaii gets 85% of its electricity burning imported oil. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Hawaii https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Hawaii If solar is cost effective then Hawaii should be an easy place to build it?
- olivermarks 9y agoYou would think so, but I've been following this for 4 years and there are huge issues to resolve. There is a pre existing grid designed to distribute electricity generated from imported oil which is now woefully out of date. There is huge home solar usage in Hawaii but the grid is incapable of redistributing surplus power created by owner panels. Storage for redistribution at a reasonable cost is the big challenge there, and is being watched closely by other regions and places before they emulate... From the Energy Dive article I linked to: 'At the end of 2016, about 26% of Hawaiian Electric’s customers’ electricity was sourced from renewables, Greentech Media notes. Customer owned solar power was the largest contributor at 34% of the renewables total, followed by wind, 29%, and biomass at 19%. On the Big Island of Hawaii renewables accounted for 54% of customers’ needs and on Maui and Molokai it was 37%.'
- greglindahl 9y agoHere's a big Hawaii example of solar + battery: https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/10/teslas-kauai-solar-storage-facility-offers-a-glimpse-of-the-companys-future/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/10/teslas-kauai-solar-storage... By putting the two together, the combination looks like a conventional power plant in terms of the grid.
- ekianjo 9y agoFor an article that pretends to spread the truth, its surprisingly short of any proof, figure or any kind of data to support the political opinion. Isnt that what they ought to be doing?
- noir_lord 9y agoThe Small bordering on Medium size company I work for has a 30KW solar array on the roof of it's factory. With batteries they'd basically be able to run the factory close to off grid, while the equipment requires high peak power it's average load is vastly lower.
- zyngaro 9y agoSo basically we are transitioning from a fossil energy based world to lithium based one. Why does media never talk about the sustainability of build lithium ion batteries at large scale? Have the recycling problem been sorted out (I have a couple of lithium ion batteries and I don't know what to do about them) I also heard that lithium is very very scarce on Earth.
- pavlov 9y agoSeems like there is plenty of lithium, but mines are not keeping up with demand. Here's an interesting story from FT about Chile's lithium mines, with pictures: https://www.ft.com/content/cde8f984-43c7-11e6-b22f-79eb4891c97d https://www.ft.com/content/cde8f984-43c7-11e6-b22f-79eb4891c... (You may need to Google for the title to bypass paywall: "Lithium: Chile’s buried treasure")
- greglindahl 9y agoIt takes time to construct new mines. When Tesla started building the gigafactory, they signed long-term contracts with companies building new mines in the US and Mexico.
- calafrax 9y agoWhat are you a denier? Once we have consensus that means we shut off debate and stop doing economic analysis. Get with the program buddy.
- zyngaro 9y agoNot a denier. Global warming is a fact regardless of what is causing it. Phasing out fossil fuels is a first step for more innovation in how we produce and consume energy.
- calafrax 9y agoSorry, I was just making fun of the tendency for commercially interested parties to push their products as energy solutions while not asking the kinds of questions that you are.
- aphextron 9y agoCan anyone comment more generally on using lithium ion batteries for grid scale storage? It seems nonsensical to me. Lithium makes sense for cars where power density is essential. But with grid scale storage, there are so many drawbacks, including 1.) High fixed cost vs. other batteries 2.) Degradation from dendrite growth 3.) Need for constant cooling 4.) Possibility of catastrophic failure in case of short circuiting In contrast something like Zinc-Bromine flow batteries have unlimited cycling with zero loss of energy storage, and are inherently composed of fire retardant materials, making them impossible to catch fire or explode [0]. The trade off is in energy density, but that shouldn't be an issue for fixed grid-scale deployments. This story feels like forcing a solution with the power of good marketing, not solid engineering. [0] http://redflow.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Garth-Corey-assessment__zinc_bromine_battery.pdf http://redflow.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Garth-Corey-as...
- walkingolof 9y agoPretty sure they have good reasons, wikipedia lists low energy density / high areal costs and the need to be fully discharged. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zinc–bromine_battery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zinc–bromine_battery
- lithos 9y agoThey aren't trying to solve the problem of 'doing it the best way'. They're trying to solve the problem of 'what else can we do with these high performance batteries'. So they have some where else to put overproduction, have more buying power of raw resources due to scale, more research dollars to put into li-ion batteries responsibly, or they already have the well made hammer of li-ion batteries so everything is a nail.
- vamur 9y ago129MWh is a laughable amount of storage when you need at minimum 10000MWh per day for 1mln people. So you would need at least $12.5bln to build enough plants for just one day per 1mln people. And that's not counting maintenance. For that price 2-3 nuclear plants can be built which can last 30-50 years unlike the 10-20 years of lithium storage. Instead of hideously expensive (and potentially explosive) lithium storage, solution should be synthesizing and storing some form of gas. This gas can then be produced and stored in underground locations during summer, and then spent during winter.
- everyone 9y agoWhen was the truth era? I get the feeling that revelations similar to the "post truth" idea here, ie. commentators being shocked by the barefaced lying of the powerful, have been happening continuously for thousands of years. Apocryphal or nor this is apt.. An Assyrian clay tablet dating to around 2800 B.C. bears the inscription: “Our Earth is degenerate in these later days; there are signs that the world is speedily coming to an end; bribery and corruption are common; children no longer obey their parents; every man wants to write a book and the end of the world is evidently approaching.”
- nabla9 9y agoI try to do some numbers the best I can. Assuming cost of $1.25 per MWh (same as in California) this costs roughly $150 million. You would need 260 of these to cover all Australian households for $39 billion. This is dayscale storage and emergency supply to stabilize electricity grid. It provides emergency supply for 30,000 homes and grid stabilization. Lithium energy competes in this category with Flywheel energy storage systems. 129 MWh's battery used alone could supply the daily electricity for something like 7000 household daily electricity usage. If it supplies only 1/4 of the electricity then 30,000 homes is realistic. If Tesla learns how to reuse lithium with reasonable cost, this can scale. Currently Tesla recycles lithium into bricks used in construction. The price would be $4900 per per household. sources: 1. http://shrinkthatfootprint.com/average-household-electricity-consumption http://shrinkthatfootprint.com/average-household-electricity... 2. https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2017/07/all-the-details-on-teslas-giant-australian-batteryt/ https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2017/07/all-the-details-on-teslas... EDIT: I used average household energy usage and number of homes but used Australian population. The cost and number of units required was 3X too high. 1̶2̶0̶
- calafrax 9y agoSo, totally worth it ($120 billion) for a 0.01% reduction in global ghg emissions.
- nabla9 9y agoRoughly $4800 per household. The price of huge flat screen. If it scales, it's acceptable solution for rich countries with cheap wind or solar. (if it truly scales, the price will drop dramatically when volumes grow).
- owebmaster 9y agoI wonder if after another 10 years cycle Elon Musk will deliver or he will just "aim higher" and we'll still see "projection articles" instead of talk about results.