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Tesla's giant battery saved $40M during its first year, report says
- brisance 8y agoIt may be important for readers to know that Electrek has some kind of financial interest in Tesla.
- golfer 8y agoIndeed. Electrek is a biased source, and to be taken with a large grain of salt. They openly admit it. "Some writers of Electrek maintain positions in $TSLA and other green energy stocks" Https://electrek.co/about/
- taylorhou 8y agoalways felt there was a positive spin on anything Tesla coming from them. still a decent notifier of whatsup with Tesla regardless.
- jillesvangurp 8y agoNot the first time I've read this kind of dismissive tone with respect to Electrek's articles on this site. Maybe if you have better facts or articulated opinions, you could share them? Sure, they are biased, and quite openly so. It's quite obvious from looking at their site that they are not funded by the oil lobby and they are most likely somewhat concerned about such things as global warming and other tree-hugger stuff. It's not like they are being very secretive about that. However, that does not discredit their articles or mean that they are wrong about stuff. They generally do a fairly decent job of separating their opinions from facts they are reporting, linking to source materials, quoting individuals, etc. Decent journalism in other words. In this case they are reporting some simple facts, citing a few key people, and voice some opinions/interpretations that don't strike me as outrageous or unreasonable. There's no need for them to up sell/sugar coat this in any way.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- herewulf 8y agoI've read a lot of their articles. In general they are high on facts, low on fluff, and they are not afraid to criticize Tesla. It's what journalism should be. I think everyone without a vested interest in oil or short selling Tesla wants (or should want) to see them succeed. You don't need to own Tesla stock for that.
- vezycash 8y agoDo you know any other site that focuses on green tech? Should help even out the baises.
- SEJeff 8y agoGood disclosure, but as a regular reader of the site, I don't see a ton of bias in anything but the articles they publish and that they have sponsored links to amazon and whatnot. The content is overall quite good and relatively unbiased. Electrek is generally one of the first sources to post about tesla crashes or things catching fire with the facts and then their own "take" towards the bottom. The guy who runs the site (Fred Lambert) also is extremely active on the r/TeslaMotors reddit community.
- durkie 8y agonon electrek link if you're questioning the source: https://reneweconomy.com.au/tesla-big-battery-turns-one-celebrates-50-million-in-grid-savings-95920/ https://reneweconomy.com.au/tesla-big-battery-turns-one-cele...
- benj111 8y agoSo it cost $66 million and saved $40 million. That's impressive. I assume most of the saving is from grid stabilisation, rather than supplying/storing energy but still. Why is this not more wide spread? These figures suggest this is a no brainer. Am I missing something?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- pjc50 8y agoIt's new and the procurement cycles for these things are long. Also, Australia is coal country.
- sschueller 8y agoHow long do these batteries last?
- toomuchtodo 8y agoAt least a decade. This is why most grid services/frequency response revenue is going to be cannibalized from legacy thermal by utility scale battery storage. Energy arbitrage is still a thing, but a smaller percentage of revenue compared to grid services (at least in Australia). Disclaimer: TSLA investor
- qaq 8y agoif it lasts even 2 years it was already a good investment
- wirelessest 8y ago...if disposal is free
- LeonM 8y agoActually, lithium is quite valuable and can be recycled into new batteries. I don't have the numbers, but AFIAK, disposal is cashflow positive. Edit: see hwillis's comment down below, he/she is obviously more knowledgeable about the topic than I am. I was wrong.
- eutropia 8y agoSeems like an interesting take on peak energy supply -- charging it up for "free" from renewable sources and discharging instantly when needed. Edited for clarity: For people that are in the know regarding grid-level energy: is this the path of least-resistance for renewable adoption? I.e. Renewable+energy storage for peak demands, something else for baseline production?
- pjc50 8y ago> better ways to use clean energy? I'm not sure what this question is really asking? Better ways to store it to match supply to demand? In response to edit: > is this the path of least-resistance for renewable adoption? I.e. Renewable+energy storage for peak demands, something else for baseline production? This is a false dichotomy. There is baseline demand; on the other side the supply can be divided into dispatchable and non-dispatchable. Renewables can't be turned on by demand, so they're non-dispatchable. Perhaps surprisingly nuclear plants go in the non-dispatchable class; they produce a constant amount of power, apart from occasional month-long shutdowns for refuelling or maintenance. The path of least resistance is to just keep adding more wind and solar, for the time being. A certain amount of highly dispatchable gas plants are needed to cover the difference. The tricky thing is working out how they should be paid, as they run less and less often. The battery is then just another piece of dispatchable power generation, and can be paid to cover peaks. Eventually we reach a point where the spread on the spot market between high and low prices becomes very wide: there will be times when electricity is being given away, and times where a plant is fired up a few times a year to cover midwinter. A good market for more batteries.
- eutropia 8y agoSorry, edited my question to make more sense. I didn't really put enough effort in the first time.
- beastman82 8y ago$40M AUD, which is ~ $29M USD
- mmartinson 8y agoIt looks like the 66m is USD cost.
- burlesona 8y agoWhat is the recycleability of these things like? IIRC most batteries contain a bunch of rare earth metals and aren’t great for land filling. When these are worn out in 10-15 years how much environmental impact is there to replace / refurbish / recycle them?
- api 8y agoThey don't consume their materials. It's an energy storage medium, not a fuel. From what I've read the recycling yield is quite high, though not quite 100% due to that nasty second law of thermodynamics. I imagine big utility-scale and car-size batteries are easier to recycle than the tiny cells found in laptops and phones. The latter tend to be less standard and due to their small size and exotic packaging are going to have more packing material and plastic vs. "good stuff" like lithium.
- thawkins 8y agoOpen up the average car sized battery and its full of banks of small batteries like you get in laptops and cellphones.
- ryanmercer 8y agohttps://www.tesla.com/blog/teslas-closed-loop-battery-recycling-program https://www.tesla.com/blog/teslas-closed-loop-battery-recycl... Looks like 60-70% was being recycled in 2011. I imagine that's improved. Edit: here's more recent (and more detailed) coverage of Tesla's recycling https://medium.com/tradr/teslas-approach-to-recycling-is-the-way-of-the-future-for-sustainable-production-5af99b62aa0e https://medium.com/tradr/teslas-approach-to-recycling-is-the...
- Klathmon 8y agoIIRC at least the cobalt and nickel from lithium ion batteries are currently very recyclable, and in at least some cases it's actually cheaper to "mine" those metals from old batteries than it is to mine it from the ground. I think the bigger problem is getting people to actually recycle them, which shouldn't be a problem with these larger batteries in cars and buildings. Already the auto industry is really good at "recycling" parts by selling "cores" taken out of a car for replacement which get rebuilt and resold later, so the logistics and incentives are all there for it, and many are already buying hybrid batteries and doing the same process for them.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- haberman 8y agoFor a huge "site battery" like this, what does lithium ion offer over storing energy as mechanical potential energy (pumping/moving something uphill)? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_storage#Mechanical_storage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_storage#Mechanical_stor... I'm sure the battery can come online faster, but a it seems like a small battery can provide the "quick response" while the gravity-driven generator comes online.
- pjc50 8y agoThe energy density of mechanical storage is pretty terrible, and you need the right geography to help.
- haberman 8y ago> and you need the right geography to help. That's true of things like pumping water upstream, but I was thinking of something like this: https://qz.com/1355672/stacking-concrete-blocks-is-a-surprisingly-efficient-way-to-store-energy/ https://qz.com/1355672/stacking-concrete-blocks-is-a-surpris... I'm curious how much real estate it would take with that approach to equal the energy storage capacity of the Tesla battery.
- magnetic 8y agoMoving parts are a big downside.
- IshKebab 8y agoThat thing is never going to be commercial viable. It doesn't have the energy density to be worthwhile, and comes with all the hassle that a moving mechanical system brings (maintenance etc). Plus I don't believe their 85% efficiency figure. That's ludicrously good. Also most of the $40m/year saving of this battery is that it can respond in 100 ms which means they don't have to spend so much money buying electricity from other people when demand or supply changes suddenly.
- hn_throwaway_99 8y ago
- drpgq 8y agoI think it is definitely interesting, but doesn't South Australia have a particularly screwed up electricity system (and I say that as an Ontarian)?
- Reason077 8y agoOntario has one of the best and cleanest grids in North America, if not the world. Coal was completely phased out years ago, and dependence on gas-fired peakers is low. South Australia has the cleanest grid in Australia (except Tasmania), with extensive wind generation, but does not have the nuclear and hydro resources that somewhere like Ontario can call on. Thus it depends, at times, on dirty, lignite-fired imports from neighbouring Victoria for balancing. By building more solar and battery storage over time, SA can reduce the need for imports (and expensive gas-fired peakers), making their grid even cleaner.
- drpgq 8y agoAs an Ontarian, sure we have a decent amount of hydro and nuclear, but there's been a lot of problems. Fair Hydro for one.
- martythemaniak 8y agoAs an Ontarian, no one has been able to explain to me what our problems are. We have moderately priced electricity that is very clean and reliable. If the rest of the industrialized world looked like Ontario electricity-wise, we'd be decades ahead of where we are in fighting climate change.
- Scoundreller 8y agoPoliticized cancellations of power plant projects, instead building them far from demand and beefing up the grid because of the new distance. Wind and solar subsidy policies based on ??? Other than “wind and solar are good, we should pay whatever it costs, locked in for decades, to switch to it”.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- ricw 8y agoThis is going to become more and more common. Li-ion battery costs are falling at a constant ~15% per year and there is no real reason why this shouldn't continue. Similar to what Moore's law did to semiconductors, this will mean that batteries are poised to have a massive impact and eat any energy application that can't keep up. New tech will have a hard time to keep up simply due to momentum this has already developed, aka it will have to be at least a magnitude better AND keep on scaling. This is why Tesla is valued higher than GM, Daimler or pretty much any other car company. Tesla at it's heart is a battery company with products built around that. From what I've read, from 2025 onwards traditional internal combustion engines will not be able to compete on price with electric cars. Something similar will likely happen to energy storage, though this is of course still a relatively novel industry that has been spurred on by renewable energy's intermittent availability. Interesting times.. Edit: percentage of annual battery price drop after doing some googling
- taeric 8y agoI'm curious on how dominated this is by ability to mine the raw sources. Do they recycle well? Or are they just that ubiquitous that we don't have to worry about it, at all?
- ams6110 8y agoYes, I have similar thoughts, though I guess worst case it's roughly the same as mining coal but without the CO2 (and other unhealthy) emissions of burning it. Downvoted? I was intending to express that even with mining the raw materials, etc. it is probably a net positive environmentally.
- Zenst 8y agoOther sources of lithium being exploited, lithium is the new oil. https://www.technologyreview.com/s/538036/quest-to-mine-seawater-for-lithium-advances/ https://www.technologyreview.com/s/538036/quest-to-mine-seaw...
- gkfasdfasdf 8y ago
- Tade0 8y agoThis is only the beginning. Companies like this one here: https://eosenergystorage.com https://eosenergystorage.com Are already delivering zinc-air batteries which have many advantages over li-ion with one huge disadvantage being low power density - not a problem for grid storage. AFAIK if you shorted such a battery it would bleed out its charge without much fanfare.
- Wowfunhappy 8y agoIs anyone working on massively scaling up the production of these types of batteries, the way Tesla is with lithium?
- Tade0 8y agoSort of. Those mentioned secured funding for a plant: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180924005178/en/Eos-Energy-Storage-Secures-Strategic-Investment-Manufacturing https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180924005178/en/Eos... But the scale isn't there yet since only recently someone was able to finally demonstrate a rechargeable zinc-air battery.
- corradio 8y agoFor those who are interested, you can see in real-time the charge/discharge of the battery on the electricityMap: https://www.electricitymap.org/?page=country&solar=false&remote=true&wind=false&countryCode=AUS-SA https://www.electricitymap.org/?page=country&solar=false&rem...
- pugworthy 8y agoThat's a nice visualization!
- pgtruesdell 8y ago$66mm initial cost, so just short of a 20 month ROI. That's impressive.
- Scoundreller 8y agoIt is diminishing returns though. The more you shave the most profitable peaks and fill the deepest valleys, the less volatility you have to work with.
- why_only_15 8y agoThe world energy market is huge, though and this is in one small area. It also seems like a pretty easy thing to evaluate the utility of - energy costs are public domain, and the way that the batteries work is pretty clear. Calculate the possible cost/benefit over the last year and increase until you're no longer willing to build more.
- quillo 8y agoFor anyone that might be interested, here are live graphs representing different generation types and their current cost for the Australian energy market (caveat: not all of Australia): https://opennem.org.au/ https://opennem.org.au/ https://opennem.org.au/#/regions/sa https://opennem.org.au/#/regions/sa South Australia - where the battery is located - is an outlier in the Australian market due to its relatively progressive energy generation composition. It's worth noting the battery charge/discharge values depending on the market price of wholesale electricity. Arbitrage in action! :) The application is open sourced and available here: https://github.com/opennem https://github.com/opennem
- patall 8y agoI always like these kind of plots. Is there an explanation why in the last week the energy price went negative last week in SA but they kept running gas turbines? Is that due to insufficient capacity in part of the net or some special kind of long term contracts or? I have encountered this before but its sometimes claimed that gas power can be modulated within minutes why not here, especially since they very likely where aware of the negative prices well in advance.
- caf 8y agoYes, there are longer-term contracts, only a portion of the power is traded at the spot price. That said, you would think that the gas generator company could just bid the load they've agreed to supply under the long term contract into the spot market when the price dips negative. I assume there is a good reason why this isn't done.
- pjc50 8y agoThat's a horrifyingly large amount of coal there for a developed country.
- shard972 8y agoBecause the left in Australia is deathly afraid of nuclear and the right finds that it constituents are those who work in coal, one of our major industries. Our largest 3rd party, the greens just won't even consider nuclear, to them it's solar/wind or bust.
- DINKDINK 8y agoOne dynamic that's underestimated in markets where the optionality of substantial non-marginal costs (CapEx, RegEx, etc) is amortized over volume (rather than optionality charges: access charges) is that a 10% decrease in use will never (in the long run) result in a 10% decrease in costs of the product. i.e. Consider a Crusoe economy, where you buy a magic box that supplies free electricity 99% of the time. Do your electricity costs (in the long run) go down 99%? No because the electricity supplier will now have to amortize all their costs over the 1% time when you need to buy electricity. Regulation delays this (inevitable) blow up, allowing the magic-box seller to oversell the market before prices are allowed to adjust to snap down to what would have been the post-magic-box equilibrium without regulatory friction. Electric-utility arbitrage batteries are basically physical call-option contracts: you pay a premium for the right to purchase electricity below market rate. The question for a firm assessing this gambit is, is the ratio of the premium to in-the-money(ITM) payoff time profile worth the premium.
- timerol 8y agoNote that the arbitrage batteries can also respond faster than the rest of the grid, so you also gain some of the benefits of HFT with your call options.
- leeter 8y agoHonestly the concept here is not new, and the more I think about it the more likely I see levels of storage from fastest to slowest (and capacity in the same vein) ranging from batteries/capacitors to pumped storage systems. Between all of those they should be able to normalize the inputs into the grid I would think.
- throwaway12iii 8y agoAround 2,034 MW of industrial solar was built in 2017 in SA. More than 100MW of Solar was installed on rooftops from the time the battery was first discussed to the time the contract was signed. A lot more was installed after delivery. This means that these sources, along with industrial efficiency and scaling, they are in effect a virtual battery installed more quickly, and more cost effective than the battery. It is estimated that by 2023 the whole state can be powered by rooftop solar alone. The battery is good to suck up the excess wind power, and provide energy in times of need. There's still lots of peaks the wind+solar combinations don't cover. Like high frequency trading, the batteries are able to act quickly to demand peaks outstripping supply. However, most times this happens is on a hot day... and on those days it's extremely predictable. These are the times when gas wins. It's also the time when rooftop solar is the most cost efficient. Around 2020-2023 rooftop solar will decimate the gas providers. The wind farm batteries will probably still be useful in these times however. How long will that demand last? Will the prediction technology and dynamic industry power usage (including desalination plants) come online by then? What about smarter cooling technology? That's be rolled out too. One of the states main industrial power users also has started building solar and pumped hydro. Reducing gas further. These molten pools of metal are very much like virtual batteries. The wind farms have lots of excess sometimes. Well, that is being exported across state lines in these times. There's much more than can fill such batteries. Note that in times of excess wind, the gas is still burning at a less rate. Even though there's more than enough 'free' wind energy to cover their use. I expect this will change in time. What about other wind farms coming online in other parts of the state? These are supposed to cover the current valleys in power generation too. If all of the wind that is under construction or planned comes online by 2023, that's more than enough to cover the needs of the state even at peak... let alone the valleys. Electric car technology is expected to generate some demand, but mostly this will be charged with the excess rooftop solar/wind. Large batteries like this are an important, but stop-gap measure. It's cheaper to build another wind farm in a very different part of the state which has the same effect. Because it can fill up the valleys in power generation where the batteries currently snipe good returns. Probably they would be cost effective to buy more in the next 1-2 years, if they can be installed much more quickly than wind farms (that often require approval, whereas the existing wind farms can be fitted out with much less of an approval process).
- gok 8y agoI've often wondered if the plan is to use "worn out" batteries for this kind of thing. After 250,000 km, an electric car's battery might be down to only 80% of its original capacity, rendering it not ideal for cars any more. But grid scale storage doesn't care about energy per volume or per mass, so those old cells can be out to pasture for a few years before they are ultimately broken down.
- hmottestad 8y agoCan they be recycled and the lithium reclaimed to make new batteries?
- grecy 8y agoThe data coming in so far is that with a lot more kilometers that than Tesla's batteries degrade less than 10%
- gok 8y agoYeah I've heard that, yet when I picked mine up I got a speech about not using high speed charging too often, or charging past 90% all the time... I'm not convinced these battery packs are as durable as they say.
- andyidsinga 8y agoas battery prices drop - it will be interesting to observe Jevon's paradox in action as demand increases for the batteries and surrounding technology.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- pmarreck 8y agoIt cost $66 million but saved $40 million its first year? How's the projected rate of return on that guy look? It's about time people realize "green" can be profitable.
- caf 8y agoOne of the most interesting parts in the report, albeit brief, is on page 25 where they mention possible new frequency markets that can take better advantage of the capabilities of batteries. Particularly of interest is the "Simulated Inertia" market, where the battery operates without a frequency deadband configured.
- piscisaureus 8y agoIf these batteries are as good as the one in my iPhone, they'll need to be replaced after a year and a half. Given that the plant cost 66M, sounds like they're going to make break even approximately. But kidding aside, how long are these batteries really supposed to last?
- rcMgD2BwE72F 8y agoThere's little in common between an EV/stationary battery pack and a smartphone battery. What's the redundancy and the battery management/cooling system in the latter?