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Tesla’s SA big battery just got 50% bigger after goals thanks to Autobidder
- tupac_speedrap 6y agoJesus... is there any news websites nowadays without hundreds of scripts doing botnet shit in the background?
- H8crilA 6y ago136 requests to load this page, according to my Chrome debugger. This has got to end one day, but today is not the day. (please downvote my comment as it is absolutely off-topic, thanks!)
- bori5 6y agoThanks for the warning about the page, I found your comment helpful and no more off topic than countless other tangential comments that get made on HN.
- gpm 6y agoYes actually, lite.cnn.com. 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.
- consumer451 6y agotext.npr.org is excellent as well.
- gpm 6y agoEven better! 2 requests, the html and a favicon, both first party!
- dmix 6y agoA true inspiration for web design. This is what every news site should strive towards. Instead of getting clunkier like Reddit.
- SturgeonsLaw 6y agoI'll forever use old.reddit.com Between that subdomain, RES and a custom userstyle, Reddit is quite a pleasant experience.
- forgotmypw17 6y agoNot many, if any. It's why I browse without JS, and use third-party archiving tools to view content like this site, which is blank without JS. http://archive.is/KtNNE http://archive.is/KtNNE
- PhantomGremlin 6y agoYou don't need a third-party tool. 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.
- pabs3 6y agoYou can probably do the No Style thing automatically with Stylus: https://github.com/openstyles/stylus/ https://github.com/openstyles/stylus/
- forgotmypw17 6y agoBut I'm not using Firefox...
- beervirus 6y agoDisable JavaScript. Most stuff works fine.
- manicdee 6y agoThis is one reason why we use adblockers (malware distribution aside).
- fernly 6y agoCould somebody translate this into English? > 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?
- toomuchtodo 6y agoAutobidder uses ML and other signals to maximize the revenue for asset owners based on electric market data (real time and historical). It has a rough idea when the grid will be demanding power, how fast the storage project can charge and discharge, what the minimum aggregate state of charge should be, etc. Not affiliated with Tesla except as an investor, have gotten to test drive Autobidder as part of an engineering/procurement/construction storage project.
- ethbro 6y agoWhat are the industry incentives for Tesla to do this, instead of utilities? 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."
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- nordsieck 6y ago> What are the industry incentives for Tesla to do this, instead of utilities? 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.
- PudgePacket 6y agoSA = South Australia for the rest of the world.
- ckdarby 6y agoThanks, I thought SA was a company.
- czbond 6y agoThank you. I spent longer than I wanted pondering if it was a battery acronym.
- unmole 6y agoI've seen RSA in hockey and ZA elsewhere but never SA.
- aussiegreenie 6y agoSA is the norm in Sporting organisations SA Rugby or Cricket SA.
- vulcan01 6y agoWhen reading the title my mind thought "South Africa".
- greenknight 6y agoSA, we're heaps good!
- Animats 6y agoIs Autobidder a bug or a feature? 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.
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- rictic 6y agoEnron's crime wasn't speculation, it was fraud. 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?
- toast0 6y agoIt's a feature. 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.
- shoo 6y ago> 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. 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.
- Animats 6y agoThat's not clear. California briefly had total deregulation with a power auction ever half hour, and volatility increased so much that there were blackouts. Expecting markets to produce stability is naive. Markets don't typically converge on some equilibrium, they oscillate around it.
- sulam 6y ago> Neoen, who owns the Hornsdale Power Reserve, are close finalising testing that will increase the capacity of the battery from 100MW to 150MW. Surely the battery capacity is measured in joules or at least megawatt hours, not watts?
- gpm 6y agoReally I'd expect it to be measured in both. Megawatt hours measures how much energy it can store, megawatts measures how fast it can discharge.
- Tade0 6y agoThis is my pet peeve as well. But not being a native English speaker I figured I won't try to lecture people on this - not my language after all.
- balfirevic 6y agoThose are not English units.
- duskwuff 6y agoThe battery has a maximum safe discharge rate. I suspect the performance of a utility-scale power reserve is limited by its discharge rate, not its charge capacity. (This also makes it an apples-to-apples comparison to the peaking power plants it takes the place of.)
- vvll 6y agoThe size of the expansion is 64.5MWh of battery storage and 50MW of inverters according to this source: https://www.pv-magazine.com/2020/06/23/adding-50mw-64-5-mwh-to-teslas-big-battery-in-australia/ https://www.pv-magazine.com/2020/06/23/adding-50mw-64-5-mwh-...
- dkbrk 6y agoMaximum discharge rates for batteries are generally called "C" with units of hour^-1, though the units are often left off for some reason. 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).
- abledon 6y agowow, the video says it saved $150M, and they are only investing another $15M? amazing nonetheless, what other car company has market trading software as part of its energy division?
- SEJeff 6y agoWhat other car company has a legitimate energy division at all?
- EdSchouten 6y agoMitsubishi?
- SEJeff 6y agoFair. Mitsubishi Heavy Industries develops just about everything.
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- dmix 6y agoThis is good news but expansion of only 50% is underwhelming and $15m is small potatoes compared to other energy projects. Ideally they'd be significantly expanding this or building whole new plants.
- SEJeff 6y agoThey're building one in Ventura, CA that is about 3 times bigger than the one in south australia. It will be 100 MW/400 MWh whereas the Hornsdale power reserve is 100MW/129MWh currently and will be 150MW / 129MWh after this update. 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.
- zmmmmm 6y agoI'm curious what the lifetime of the batteries is and whether that is being fully incorporated into the evaluation of their cost effectiveness? Of course, given they have already apparently recouped more than their entire cost before even getting fully out of testing phase, it seems like this is not going to be an issue. But I still always do wonder how well this is accounted for with battery tech.
- sgc 6y ago100%. Nobody makes that kind of asset purchase without lifecycle analysis.
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- toomuchtodo 6y ago> But I still always do wonder how well this is accounted for with battery tech. https://maartensteinbuch.com/2015/01/24/tesla-model-s-battery-degradation-data/ https://maartensteinbuch.com/2015/01/24/tesla-model-s-batter...
- SEJeff 6y agohttps://insideevs.com/news/369722/tesla-jeff-dahn-new-battery-cell-1-million-miles/ https://insideevs.com/news/369722/tesla-jeff-dahn-new-batter... Tesla has battery cells that can last a million miles thanks to Jeff Dahn's research. Jeff Dahn is one of the original inventors of the Lithium Ion battery btw: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Dahn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Dahn
- toomuchtodo 6y agoMy point was that Tesla has proven the longevity of their cells under aggressive duty cycles with their high performance vehicles.
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- shoo 6y agoSouth Australia participates in Australia's National Energy Market (NEM): https://aemo.com.au/en/energy-systems/electricity/national-electricity-market-nem/about-the-national-electricity-market-nem https://aemo.com.au/en/energy-systems/electricity/national-e... 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-electricity-market-nem/data-nem/data-dashboard-nem https://aemo.com.au/en/energy-systems/electricity/national-e...
- sumedh 6y agoWhy is Vic so expensive?
- danielheath 6y agoIt’s markedly higher today than usual (unsure why).