Teslas giant battery in Australia reduced grid FCAS service cost by 90%
17 replies, posted
Tesla’s giant Powerpack battery in Australia has been in operation for about 6 months now and we are just starting to discover the magnitude of its impact on the local energy market.
A new report now shows that it reduced the cost of the grid service that it performs by 90% and it has already taken a majority share of the market.
When an issue happens or maintenance is required on the power grid in Australia, the Energy Market Operator calls for FCAS (frequency control and ancillary services) which consists of large and costly gas generators and steam turbines kicking in to compensate for the loss of power.
Electricity rates can be seen reaching $14,000 per MW during those FCAS periods.
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The system is basically a victim of its own efficiency, which the Australian Energy Market Operator confirmed is much more rapid, accurate and valuable than a conventional steam turbine in a report published last month.
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“In the first four months of operations of the Hornsdale Power Reserve (the official name of the Tesla big battery, owned and operated by Neoen), the frequency ancillary services prices went down by 90 per cent, so that’s 9-0 per cent. And the 100MW battery has achieved over 55 per cent of the FCAS revenues in South Australia. So it’s 2 per cent of the capacity in South Australia achieving 55 per cent of the revenues in South Australia.”
South Australia is reportedly the only state that has seen a decline in FCAS costs over the period. Some estimates put the savings at over $30 million in just four months.
https://electrek.co/2018/05/11/tesla-giant-battery-australia-reduced-grid-service-cost/
this distributed all around the world, and we're in the future babeeeh
I'm genuinely interested to hear download's take on this. If I recall correctly, he was pretty adamant about how this battery system was a waste and would not only fail to provide the hoped-for services, but would actually backfire and further strain the power grid and potentially cause problems.
His education and experience in power generation makes his thoughts genuinely interesting to me, especially seeing as he was pretty much the only contrary voice I saw in regards to this battery system. I'm curious if he has any insight to the flip-side of this report.
FCAS is just one very small part of the energy system. An important part, but not the only part. Providing FCAS is not the same as providing long-term dispachable power which is needed for renewables to replace conventional sources. FCAS generally only involves discharge times of a few minutes at the maximum, providing dispachable power to homes and businesses is an affair that requires discharge (and storage) periods of days.
The South Australia grid is an example of a very extreme system where basically any improvement in FCAS will lead to huge profits for anyone who wades into it.
I'll give you a more detailed response tonight. It's 9am on a Saturday morning right now and I have places I've got to be.
But FCAS is one of the main points of the battery, and always has been. It's clearly saving consumers a lot of money. Conventionally fueled power plants seem pretty bad at it, as it seems only lower efficiency plants such as OCGTs and coal plants are capable of it, which cost the consumer a lot. Seems traditional plant owners also created a cartel to extract huge amounts of money for no reason, which the battery has smashed.
Obviously a 100MW battery isn't going to be enough to move everything to renewables. Isn't it the lack of a capable FCAS response that caused several of your blackouts, including the big one awhile ago?
Okay, if you want to claim the main purpose of this battery is FCAS, sure. But then this is just further evidence this isn't the "solution" to solving the myriad of problems with high renewable grids. People are trumpeting this (including you if I remember correctly) that this is proof a 100% renewable grid is financially possible when at no point is it evidence for that.
No, nine wind farms had improperly configured breakers between them and the grid (in violation of the performance specifications of the farms the operators had supplied to the AEMO) and automatically disconnected because of some small transients on the grid due to the storm. A few minutes later 200MW of additional wind capacity went off-line (off the top of my head it was due to high winds shutting down the turbines). At that point the interconnector that has a maximum capacity of 650MW peaked at 850MW before disconnecting. Naturally, the loss of 850MW on a 2000MW or so grid caused everything to collapse.
It seems like pretty good evidence that it works. It's saving consumers money, providing a better service, and will likely have more than paid for itself by the end of the year. It's a big step in the right direction, and reduces the need for inefficient power plants quite a bit. If you want to completely eliminate non renewable base load generation then yes, you will need more storage.
Didn't those misconfigured wind turbines trip due to some smaller interconnectors tripping and then being reset, causing the voltage to fall and rise in quick succession? The battery reserves most of its capacity for emergencies, since it can respond at the millisecond level perhaps it could've arrested those fluctuations before they became an issue.
Yes. And they weren't supposed to trip because of something as inconsequential as that. Again, off the top of my head, the owners of the turbines had declared in their performance modelling of the turbines that they would disconnect at a certain frequency drop (±3Hz?) but in reality disconnected at a much smaller frequency drop (±1Hz?).
Doubtful, the sensors that tell FCAS to turn on probably have a similar speed to the sensors that disconnect the turbines. They are after all designed to protect equipment from all sorts of transient events by actuating very rapidly.
Yeah but they did because shit happens and when shit happens it's nice to have a backup system specifically designed to handle shit happening.
I can't wait for this to come to America so our utility companies can save 80% on energy costs and use that windfall to lay off 30% of the workforce, declare their pension fund insolvent, and raise prices 20% while giving their executives eight figure bonuses.
Electricity rates can be seen reaching $14,000 per MW during those FCAS periods
you might as well build another powerplant with that money
I think the idea is that batteries would allow FCAS to operate without loss of generation capacity (i.e. instead of shutting off a wind farm completely, the grid switches to draw power from batteries while the wind farm recovers).
well the thing is in the right areas in the US it would help balance between grids, allowing for renewables in one part of the country to help offset in another so you don't need as many base load generators.
I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if they started some ad campaign showing "the dangers of batteries" where they show footage of thermal run-away in laptop and cellphone batteries, to be honest.
More like lay off 50% of the workforce, and 30% will be lucky enough to get decent severance packages that they sign contracts that prevent them from collecting unemployment or anything after to get, whatever the absolute limits really are for being completely fucking greedy, oh and then raise prices by over 40%. This is the US after all.
The Australian populace and government are pretty anti-nuclear, it'd be ideal that's for sure, but it's probably not going to happen. Honestly the grid is stuck being majority powered by fossil fuels for the foreseeable future. Even if the government did a backflip and broke new ground for a nuclear plant tomorrow, it'd still take 4 or 5 years before it's fully operational.
Probably more like 8 to 12 years these days.
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