17 ms·

Tesla big battery outsmarts lumbering coal units

267 points by beardicus 9y ago

tbabb 9y ago
The shortage was 560MW, and the Tesla facility provided 7.3MW, or 1.3%.
- toomuchtodo 9y ago
  4 seconds faster (within milliseconds of the frequency drop event occurring) than the coal plant contracted to provide frequency response services. "But in reality, the response from the Tesla big battery was even quicker than that – in milliseconds – but too fast for the AEMO data to record. Importantly, by the time that the contracted Gladstone coal unit had gotten out of bed and put its socks on so it can inject more into the grid – it is paid to respond in six seconds – the fall in frequency had already been arrested and was being reversed." TL;DR The reserve system did this to show its skills. It can respond faster than any existing base load generators, and can derive revenue not only from providing energy on demand, but also grid services (in this case, frequency response). Tesla plans to provide these services in a virtual fashion with vehicles in the future: https://i.imgur.com/oLBNeW4.png https://i.imgur.com/oLBNeW4.png
  - throwaway7645 9y ago
    When a contingency happens (loss of equipment such as a generator), units respond pretty much immediately due to governor response in the unit itself (good ole' inertia). Most RTO/ISOs in the USA (I know AEMO is in Australia) have a very large amount of power already ready to go if a unit trips offline. Using batteries to help with this is being worked on. They already exist, but new market rules are being drafted in order to allow them to be taken advantage of and properly compensated. The term is stored energy resource. Google that term in conjunction with ISO-NE, PJM, MISO, SPP, NYISO, CAISO...etc.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - caf 9y ago
      Market settings in the Australian NEM mean that generators tend to set their governors with very wide deadbands. http://www.escosa.sa.gov.au/ArticleDocuments/1047/20170208-Inquiry-LicensingInverterConnectedGeneratorsIssuesPaperSubmission-KSummers.pdf.aspx?Embed=Y http://www.escosa.sa.gov.au/ArticleDocuments/1047/20170208-I...
      - throwaway7645 9y ago
        Interesting...sounds bad for reliability. Do you know why that is allowed?
        caf 9y ago
        The requirements were relaxed because the intention was to have an entirely market-driven mechanism for frequency control. The system reliability impacts were an unintended consequence.
- jobu 9y ago
  The takeaway (if I'm reading the graphs correctly) is that the Gladstone coal unit took over 3 minutes to respond to the Loy Yang failure. It was contracted to respond within 6 seconds, but couldn't. Fortunately the Tesla battery was able to respond within milliseconds and cover the gap. It's a good bit of PR for Tesla, and could have some negative implications for coal or gas fired backup units.
  - pwagland 9y ago
    Where did you get the three minute response time number for Gladstone? It is not backed up by the article, it only mentions that it should respond within six seconds, but that "Data from AEMO (and gathered above by Dylan McConnell from the Climate and Energy College) shows that the Tesla big battery responded four seconds ahead of the generator contracted at that time to provide FCAS (frequency control and ancillary services), the Gladstone coal generator in Queensland.". I would love to see more information on the actual impact that this had. edit: Updated with the response time from the article
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - jobu 9y ago
      The article is a bit sparse, but take a look at the output of the Loy Yang 3 and the Tesla (HPR) in this graph: http://reneweconomy.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/HPR-frequeny-fig-2-copy.jpg http://reneweconomy.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/HPR-fr... Tesla ramps up as the LYA3 is dropping at 1:59am, then the Tesla drops off a bit before 2:02 am as the Gladstone generator kicks in (not in the graph)
      - jermaustin1 9y ago
        There are two types of people in the world: those that can extrapolate meaning from an incomplete set.
        9y ago
- freeflight 9y ago
  That's because it didn't need to provide more to make up for the slump in frequency, that was the whole purpose of the exercise. The Honesdale Power Reserve can deliver up to 100 MW; 70 MW of those for 10 minutes and 30 MW up to 3 hours and it was built in less than 100 days. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hornsdale_Wind_Farm#Hornsdale_Power_Reserve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hornsdale_Wind_Farm#Hornsdale_...
jimjimjim 9y ago
maybe things like this are why elon is getting hit pieces against him in some areas of the media. he is either a threat or a disturbance in the following industries: auto, oil, coal, electricity, aerospace. Most of these don't like things changing.
gwbas1c 9y ago
I'm not a grid-scale engineer. My guess is that these batteries work by pushing more electricity into the grid when voltage / frequency is low; and putting less electricity into the grid when voltage / frequency is high.
- lykr0n 9y ago
  Out of the wall in the US we get 120v @ 60Hz (elsewhere is 220v to 240v @ 50Hz). If the load becomes too high, the frequency starts to drop. Inductive (motors and such) loads do not fare well when the frequency drops which can cause serious damage. Capacitive or Resistive loads can handle a bit more fluxation, but the whole system is built around the idea that voltage and frequency are fixed. Fluxations can cause grid failures, brownouts, or damage to consumer electronics. AFAIK, that is precisely what is happening here. The batteries are dumping energy into the grid to bring the frequency back up to where it should be. What's cool is that Tesla was not contracted to do, but did anyway. Good PR.
dsfyu404ed 9y ago
Water is wet and using a battery to cover high speed changes in supply/demand works exactly the way you'd expect at the car, datacenter and grid scale. This is really just a fluff piece.
- targafarian 9y ago
  But in an industry like power generation / "the electric grid," the obviousness of this might be outweighed by momentum (and money?) for the status quo. Especially in regulated services like these (roughly speaking, and depending on the implementation, the industry behaves like a monopoly with more/fewer government-imposed controls), the message and the politics are important to line up, or else a superior technology might only be adopted decades after it's actually viable. So you might find it to be fluff, but it's good for people to read actual in-the-field success stories.
- sov 9y ago
  "This is obvious to me and therefore obvious to everyone" isn't the most compelling take on the article.
- will_hughes 9y ago
  It's obvious to you and me. It's not obvious to Joe Voter who wonders why the South Australian government spent millions of dollars on this battery boondoggle by some American millionaire. The more the message gets out that the battery is working, today, and is already covering for shortfalls / screwups by large scale (non-renewable) generators the better. So, yeah, fluff piece.
- BLKNSLVR 9y ago
  A refreshing change from the factually incorrect fluff pieces about coal and gas that much of Australia's mainstream media like to publish.
matt2000 9y ago
Does anyone know what would have happened if the battery wasn't available? Some sort of brown out?
- thisrod 9y ago
  Not much. Without the battery, everything would have happened as expected; with the battery, it happened a few seconds faster than expected.
  - Fronzie 9y ago
    What I gather from the (incomplete) data, indeed the backup plant would have fired up in about 6 seconds. Isn't it wasteful/inefficient/expensive though, to fire up a whole plant if just providing a few seconds of electricity from a battery is enough to bring a grid back to nominal frequency?
    - makomk 9y ago
      The reason the frequency dipped is because not enough generating power was online to supply the demand. In order to bring it back up to nominal frequency and keep it there, something had to keep supplying the extra power required for as long as it was being used.
  - stephen_g 9y ago
    Maybe significantly cheaper though. Our generators often advantage of these events to gouge the grid by having 'unexpected maintenance' and restricting supply to force the market operator to buy their capacity at a much higher price. Having this battery act in a way that isn't profit motivated could actually change this market a lot.
pcl 9y ago
Archived copy: http://archive.is/ma5rh http://archive.is/ma5rh
british_india 9y ago
Yes! Elon!
PinguTS 9y ago
This piece is clearly written by someone, who as no glue about the grid. (or wants to make a buzz out of nothing special) Battery power is always faster then generator power. That is the reason why every data center has battery backup for immediate reaction and generator power for the longtime backup. Normally, the battery size is designed that the minimum time is at least twice as long as to start the generator. Exactly that has happened with the grid. It is also not related to some contracting. Because the whole grid is connected. So the battery will always kick in, it does not matter where it is located. Actually synchronizing the grid is tough task. A friend and colleague from my University started in this business after he made his Master Thesis tens of years ago. By monitoring the frequency of the grid you know if there is too much energy produced (too less load, frequency to high) or vice versa. Everybody basically can do this from home. There are some maker projects and personal projects who do that.
- nl 9y ago
  Of course this is obvious! But - disappointingly - it has to be continually pointed out here in Australia. The coal lobby is strong.
- vvanders 9y ago
  Something that was interesting and buried down in the comments is that they're supposedly contracted for 35MW of fast-response power to maintain grid stability based on engineering of current generators/etc. If that's true then Tesla is already providing 1/5th of that capacity today.
  - greglindahl 9y ago
    I think the reason that the battery put out the amount it did was that that was size of the local shortfall, 1,000 miles away from the problem. You can see that at other times, the battery has put out its full 100MW rating.
- barblovesnigs 9y ago
  Dude doesnt know what hes talking about.
roenxi 9y ago
This response by the battery is really interesting. And it is certainly helping the Australian grid. However, it is worth noting that the Australian grid, South Australia's in particular, is so woefully mismanaged that almost anything goes. South Australia is in the running for the most expensive electricity in the world [1]. As far as I've been able to tell, we aren't building coal or nuclear because there are outrageous political risks (opposition party & green lobby policy will probably make them uneconomic in the next decade); we aren't building anything else because because the economic option is coal. I think there is some sort of fracking ban that seems to have caused a gas shortage - I don't really understand that. Long story short; Australia has looming electricity generation problems due to government policy and this battery is helping, but it is not fixing them. [1] http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-11-17/curious-adelaide-the-problem-of-power/9158240 http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-11-17/curious-adelaide-the-p...
- ImaCake 9y ago
  My understanding is that no one wants to build new coal power plants because renewables are going to be cheaper regardless of any government subsidies.
- Jedd 9y ago
  If you're including regulatory oversight (or lack of) under the 'management' heading, I'd definitely agree. "Since 2009, the electricity networks that own and manage our “poles and wires” have quietly spent $45 billion on the most expensive project this country has ever seen. Allowed to run virtually unchecked, they’ve spent vast sums on infrastructure we don’t need, and have charged it all to us, with an additional fee attached. The spending was approved by a federal regulator, and yet the federal government didn’t even note it until it was well underway." [1] > As far as I've been able to tell, we aren't building coal or nuclear because there are outrageous political risks ... That adjective 'political' is not needed there, and serves to distract from the bigger, actual risks attached to those obsolete technologies. (With my usual caveat that I'm assuming people using the word nuclear mean only fission.) > .. we aren't building anything else because because the economic option is coal. Is it technically still an 'option' if you think there's only one? Anyway, we (Australia(ns)) are not special. Coal is not a sensible choice -- economic or otherwise -- anywhere on the planet. Unfortunately many places, including here, haven't comprehended that yet. Or rather, the people that run the country -- both within and outside of the government -- prefer the extant power generation and delivery infrastructure for a variety of fairly obvious reasons. [1] https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2014/july/1404136800/jess-hill/power-corrupts https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2014/july/1404136800/jes...
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
a4dev 9y ago
An early test of the battery control system and it responded! What the article does not say is that the lumbering coal fired units also responded within milliseconds due to the enormous inertia of their turbo-generators. This happens before their throttles open purely due to the physics of the situation. The energy involved is substantial.
hanbura 9y ago
>the Tesla big battery responded four seconds ahead of the generator contracted at that time to provide FCAS (frequency control and ancillary services), the Gladstone coal generator in Queensland. I find it curious that a coal plant would be contracted with keeping the frequency stable when both hydro-storage and gas power plants provide better response times than coal. Is it normal in Australia that coal plants do grid stabilisation?
- NamTaf 9y ago
  Gas is tied up largely in export contracts, and the whole thing about Australia being both somewhat flat and dry means hydro basically doesn't exist (it exists only in the literally 1 place on the mainland continent we have any "significant" snowfall). The biggest surprise to me was that a plant in Gladstone (Queensland) was contracted to prop up a plant in Victoria. These two places are 1375 miles apart. Then again, I guess the linky bits between the wires must be pretty high-speed, so the speed-of-light propagation of the grid conditions wouldn't take too much extra time.
- greglindahl 9y ago
  You're confusing coal plants as flywheels and coal plants generating power -- two different things, two different timescales.
thisrod 9y ago
It's worth pointing out that this battery only solved a second order problem: what to do when one thing unexpectedly breaks. The big technical problem in Australia is what to do when the weather forecast says that a whole lot of things will stop generating power at the same time, and it would take a very large battery to help with that.
- rolandnsharp 9y ago
  Not many thunderstorms in Uluru mate.

267 points by beardicus 9y ago

tbabb 9y ago

The shortage was 560MW, and the Tesla facility provided 7.3MW, or 1.3%.

toomuchtodo 9y ago
4 seconds faster (within milliseconds of the frequency drop event occurring) than the coal plant contracted to provide frequency response services. "But in reality, the response from the Tesla big battery was even quicker than that – in milliseconds – but too fast for the AEMO data to record. Importantly, by the time that the contracted Gladstone coal unit had gotten out of bed and put its socks on so it can inject more into the grid – it is paid to respond in six seconds – the fall in frequency had already been arrested and was being reversed." TL;DR The reserve system did this to show its skills. It can respond faster than any existing base load generators, and can derive revenue not only from providing energy on demand, but also grid services (in this case, frequency response). Tesla plans to provide these services in a virtual fashion with vehicles in the future: https://i.imgur.com/oLBNeW4.png https://i.imgur.com/oLBNeW4.png
- throwaway7645 9y ago
  When a contingency happens (loss of equipment such as a generator), units respond pretty much immediately due to governor response in the unit itself (good ole' inertia). Most RTO/ISOs in the USA (I know AEMO is in Australia) have a very large amount of power already ready to go if a unit trips offline. Using batteries to help with this is being worked on. They already exist, but new market rules are being drafted in order to allow them to be taken advantage of and properly compensated. The term is stored energy resource. Google that term in conjunction with ISO-NE, PJM, MISO, SPP, NYISO, CAISO...etc.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - caf 9y ago
    Market settings in the Australian NEM mean that generators tend to set their governors with very wide deadbands. http://www.escosa.sa.gov.au/ArticleDocuments/1047/20170208-Inquiry-LicensingInverterConnectedGeneratorsIssuesPaperSubmission-KSummers.pdf.aspx?Embed=Y http://www.escosa.sa.gov.au/ArticleDocuments/1047/20170208-I...
    - throwaway7645 9y ago
      Interesting...sounds bad for reliability. Do you know why that is allowed?
      - caf 9y ago
        The requirements were relaxed because the intention was to have an entirely market-driven mechanism for frequency control. The system reliability impacts were an unintended consequence.
jobu 9y ago
The takeaway (if I'm reading the graphs correctly) is that the Gladstone coal unit took over 3 minutes to respond to the Loy Yang failure. It was contracted to respond within 6 seconds, but couldn't. Fortunately the Tesla battery was able to respond within milliseconds and cover the gap. It's a good bit of PR for Tesla, and could have some negative implications for coal or gas fired backup units.
- pwagland 9y ago
  Where did you get the three minute response time number for Gladstone? It is not backed up by the article, it only mentions that it should respond within six seconds, but that "Data from AEMO (and gathered above by Dylan McConnell from the Climate and Energy College) shows that the Tesla big battery responded four seconds ahead of the generator contracted at that time to provide FCAS (frequency control and ancillary services), the Gladstone coal generator in Queensland.". I would love to see more information on the actual impact that this had. edit: Updated with the response time from the article
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - jobu 9y ago
    The article is a bit sparse, but take a look at the output of the Loy Yang 3 and the Tesla (HPR) in this graph: http://reneweconomy.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/HPR-frequeny-fig-2-copy.jpg http://reneweconomy.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/HPR-fr... Tesla ramps up as the LYA3 is dropping at 1:59am, then the Tesla drops off a bit before 2:02 am as the Gladstone generator kicks in (not in the graph)
    - jermaustin1 9y ago
      There are two types of people in the world: those that can extrapolate meaning from an incomplete set.
      - 9y ago
freeflight 9y ago
That's because it didn't need to provide more to make up for the slump in frequency, that was the whole purpose of the exercise. The Honesdale Power Reserve can deliver up to 100 MW; 70 MW of those for 10 minutes and 30 MW up to 3 hours and it was built in less than 100 days. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hornsdale_Wind_Farm#Hornsdale_Power_Reserve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hornsdale_Wind_Farm#Hornsdale_...

jimjimjim 9y ago

maybe things like this are why elon is getting hit pieces against him in some areas of the media. he is either a threat or a disturbance in the following industries: auto, oil, coal, electricity, aerospace. Most of these don't like things changing.

gwbas1c 9y ago

I'm not a grid-scale engineer. My guess is that these batteries work by pushing more electricity into the grid when voltage / frequency is low; and putting less electricity into the grid when voltage / frequency is high.

lykr0n 9y ago
Out of the wall in the US we get 120v @ 60Hz (elsewhere is 220v to 240v @ 50Hz). If the load becomes too high, the frequency starts to drop. Inductive (motors and such) loads do not fare well when the frequency drops which can cause serious damage. Capacitive or Resistive loads can handle a bit more fluxation, but the whole system is built around the idea that voltage and frequency are fixed. Fluxations can cause grid failures, brownouts, or damage to consumer electronics. AFAIK, that is precisely what is happening here. The batteries are dumping energy into the grid to bring the frequency back up to where it should be. What's cool is that Tesla was not contracted to do, but did anyway. Good PR.

dsfyu404ed 9y ago

Water is wet and using a battery to cover high speed changes in supply/demand works exactly the way you'd expect at the car, datacenter and grid scale. This is really just a fluff piece.

targafarian 9y ago
But in an industry like power generation / "the electric grid," the obviousness of this might be outweighed by momentum (and money?) for the status quo. Especially in regulated services like these (roughly speaking, and depending on the implementation, the industry behaves like a monopoly with more/fewer government-imposed controls), the message and the politics are important to line up, or else a superior technology might only be adopted decades after it's actually viable. So you might find it to be fluff, but it's good for people to read actual in-the-field success stories.
sov 9y ago
"This is obvious to me and therefore obvious to everyone" isn't the most compelling take on the article.
will_hughes 9y ago
It's obvious to you and me. It's not obvious to Joe Voter who wonders why the South Australian government spent millions of dollars on this battery boondoggle by some American millionaire. The more the message gets out that the battery is working, today, and is already covering for shortfalls / screwups by large scale (non-renewable) generators the better. So, yeah, fluff piece.
BLKNSLVR 9y ago
A refreshing change from the factually incorrect fluff pieces about coal and gas that much of Australia's mainstream media like to publish.

matt2000 9y ago

Does anyone know what would have happened if the battery wasn't available? Some sort of brown out?

thisrod 9y ago
Not much. Without the battery, everything would have happened as expected; with the battery, it happened a few seconds faster than expected.
- Fronzie 9y ago
  What I gather from the (incomplete) data, indeed the backup plant would have fired up in about 6 seconds. Isn't it wasteful/inefficient/expensive though, to fire up a whole plant if just providing a few seconds of electricity from a battery is enough to bring a grid back to nominal frequency?
  - makomk 9y ago
    The reason the frequency dipped is because not enough generating power was online to supply the demand. In order to bring it back up to nominal frequency and keep it there, something had to keep supplying the extra power required for as long as it was being used.
- stephen_g 9y ago
  Maybe significantly cheaper though. Our generators often advantage of these events to gouge the grid by having 'unexpected maintenance' and restricting supply to force the market operator to buy their capacity at a much higher price. Having this battery act in a way that isn't profit motivated could actually change this market a lot.

pcl 9y ago

Archived copy: http://archive.is/ma5rh http://archive.is/ma5rh

british_india 9y ago

Yes! Elon!

PinguTS 9y ago

This piece is clearly written by someone, who as no glue about the grid. (or wants to make a buzz out of nothing special) Battery power is always faster then generator power. That is the reason why every data center has battery backup for immediate reaction and generator power for the longtime backup. Normally, the battery size is designed that the minimum time is at least twice as long as to start the generator. Exactly that has happened with the grid. It is also not related to some contracting. Because the whole grid is connected. So the battery will always kick in, it does not matter where it is located. Actually synchronizing the grid is tough task. A friend and colleague from my University started in this business after he made his Master Thesis tens of years ago. By monitoring the frequency of the grid you know if there is too much energy produced (too less load, frequency to high) or vice versa. Everybody basically can do this from home. There are some maker projects and personal projects who do that.

nl 9y ago
Of course this is obvious! But - disappointingly - it has to be continually pointed out here in Australia. The coal lobby is strong.
vvanders 9y ago
Something that was interesting and buried down in the comments is that they're supposedly contracted for 35MW of fast-response power to maintain grid stability based on engineering of current generators/etc. If that's true then Tesla is already providing 1/5th of that capacity today.
- greglindahl 9y ago
  I think the reason that the battery put out the amount it did was that that was size of the local shortfall, 1,000 miles away from the problem. You can see that at other times, the battery has put out its full 100MW rating.
barblovesnigs 9y ago
Dude doesnt know what hes talking about.

roenxi 9y ago

This response by the battery is really interesting. And it is certainly helping the Australian grid. However, it is worth noting that the Australian grid, South Australia's in particular, is so woefully mismanaged that almost anything goes. South Australia is in the running for the most expensive electricity in the world [1]. As far as I've been able to tell, we aren't building coal or nuclear because there are outrageous political risks (opposition party & green lobby policy will probably make them uneconomic in the next decade); we aren't building anything else because because the economic option is coal. I think there is some sort of fracking ban that seems to have caused a gas shortage - I don't really understand that. Long story short; Australia has looming electricity generation problems due to government policy and this battery is helping, but it is not fixing them. [1] http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-11-17/curious-adelaide-the-problem-of-power/9158240 http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-11-17/curious-adelaide-the-p...

ImaCake 9y ago
My understanding is that no one wants to build new coal power plants because renewables are going to be cheaper regardless of any government subsidies.
Jedd 9y ago
If you're including regulatory oversight (or lack of) under the 'management' heading, I'd definitely agree. "Since 2009, the electricity networks that own and manage our “poles and wires” have quietly spent $45 billion on the most expensive project this country has ever seen. Allowed to run virtually unchecked, they’ve spent vast sums on infrastructure we don’t need, and have charged it all to us, with an additional fee attached. The spending was approved by a federal regulator, and yet the federal government didn’t even note it until it was well underway." [1] > As far as I've been able to tell, we aren't building coal or nuclear because there are outrageous political risks ... That adjective 'political' is not needed there, and serves to distract from the bigger, actual risks attached to those obsolete technologies. (With my usual caveat that I'm assuming people using the word nuclear mean only fission.) > .. we aren't building anything else because because the economic option is coal. Is it technically still an 'option' if you think there's only one? Anyway, we (Australia(ns)) are not special. Coal is not a sensible choice -- economic or otherwise -- anywhere on the planet. Unfortunately many places, including here, haven't comprehended that yet. Or rather, the people that run the country -- both within and outside of the government -- prefer the extant power generation and delivery infrastructure for a variety of fairly obvious reasons. [1] https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2014/july/1404136800/jess-hill/power-corrupts https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2014/july/1404136800/jes...

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

a4dev 9y ago

An early test of the battery control system and it responded! What the article does not say is that the lumbering coal fired units also responded within milliseconds due to the enormous inertia of their turbo-generators. This happens before their throttles open purely due to the physics of the situation. The energy involved is substantial.

hanbura 9y ago

>the Tesla big battery responded four seconds ahead of the generator contracted at that time to provide FCAS (frequency control and ancillary services), the Gladstone coal generator in Queensland. I find it curious that a coal plant would be contracted with keeping the frequency stable when both hydro-storage and gas power plants provide better response times than coal. Is it normal in Australia that coal plants do grid stabilisation?

NamTaf 9y ago
Gas is tied up largely in export contracts, and the whole thing about Australia being both somewhat flat and dry means hydro basically doesn't exist (it exists only in the literally 1 place on the mainland continent we have any "significant" snowfall). The biggest surprise to me was that a plant in Gladstone (Queensland) was contracted to prop up a plant in Victoria. These two places are 1375 miles apart. Then again, I guess the linky bits between the wires must be pretty high-speed, so the speed-of-light propagation of the grid conditions wouldn't take too much extra time.
greglindahl 9y ago
You're confusing coal plants as flywheels and coal plants generating power -- two different things, two different timescales.

thisrod 9y ago

It's worth pointing out that this battery only solved a second order problem: what to do when one thing unexpectedly breaks. The big technical problem in Australia is what to do when the weather forecast says that a whole lot of things will stop generating power at the same time, and it would take a very large battery to help with that.

rolandnsharp 9y ago
Not many thunderstorms in Uluru mate.