5 ms·
Have you heard of Tesla's batter in south Australia? It was recently expanded to 193 MWh. Care to guess how long it'll run at full power? Around 60-100 minutes.
by eldaisfish 6y ago
Have you heard of Tesla's batter in south Australia? It was recently expanded to 193 MWh. Care to guess how long it'll run at full power? Around 60-100 minutes. At its rated power of 100 MW, it can power around 25% of South Australia's lowest demand. That's it. At peak demand, the fraction is lower still.
Cars have a fraction of the energy storage capacity of a single battery site and not all cars are connected to the grid at all times and neither will all their stored energy be usable.
Batteries aren't the silver bullet many imaging them to be. The real solution is expanding transmission capacity, building more renewables and supplementing that by nuclear or hydro.
- lightgreen 6y agoFor the comparison, average nuclear power plant produces 1000MW around the clock. The goal of Australia batteries was to normalize short production/consumption fluctuations, not as general universal battery storage to deal with renewable uneven production.
- eldaisfish 6y agoMy point was simply to illustrate that batteries are not a viable energy storage method for the scale of energy required on even a small power grid. South Australia's power grid is relatively small compared to many similar regions.
- missedthecue 6y agoI don't know if there's enough lithium in the world to stabilize a global renewable grid and make 100 million electric cars per year forever and make 1.5 billion phones a year and all the other things we use batteries for.
- bluGill 6y agoHopefully we start to recycle batteries better. Most people throw their old broken phone in a landfill from what I gather. (broken, there is a market for non-broken phones)
- kwhitefoot 6y agoLithium is very abundant. It's the 25th most abundant element at about 20 mg per kg in the Earth's crust. It is present in seawater at a concentration of about 0.2 ppm in seawater, about 230 billion tons total. If electricity is going to be so cheap then we can just extract lithium from seawater. Plus dead lithium batteries can of course be used as a high grade ore. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium
- kalleboo 6y ago25% of lowest demand sounds amazing! I'm mostly a pessimist about renewables due to the storage issue so I would have guessed more like 2-5%. Assuming lowest demand is at night, that means that building just 3 more batteries you could power the whole state for an hour at night?
- bluefirebrand 6y agoAgree, I'm missing some context to see why your parent post thought this was good enough. I suspect that "Lowest Demand" is being thought of in two different ways.
- eldaisfish 6y agoeven at the lowest demand, a large, grid-connected battery can only provide minutes of back up power, and that too for only a fraction of already low demand. A storage battery is not a viable means of balancing demand and supply over a time period longer than minutes. What's needed is not more batteries but better transmission, more hydro where possible and where hydro is not possible, more nuclear.
- bluefirebrand 6y agoWhen you're talking about lowest demand are you talking about for the whole grid? A city block? A building? A condo? And I agree. I worked in solar and storage for a while. It's not a replacement, it's just an extension. It works out ok for a battery system for a building but anything larger they just don't last long enough
- eldaisfish 6y agoOnly the south australian grid, which is not a relatively large grid. South Australia's population is small, under two million and it's demand fluctuates between 400 - 3000 MW. For comparison, the Canadian province of New Brunswick has a comparable peak demand but fewer than a million people.