South Australia teams with Tesla, Neoen to build world's biggest Li-ion battery

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-07-07/south-australia-to-get-worlds-biggest-battery/8687268

by astdb • 9 years ago

153 76 9 years ago

abc.net.au

synicalx2• 9 years ago

We have a long history here in SA of being the first people in the world to do stuff, and it nearly never (I mean this literally) works out well.

For once, I'd love it if our ever changing State Government would just spend its limited budget on tried and tested solutions rather than pissing money up the wall on things that may or may not work.

pascalo4• 9 years ago

When it comes to power generation, tried and tested also means to rely on something like gas or coal fired power plant. Do not want.

synicalx2• 9 years ago

Or hydro, or nuclear, or wind etc etc

Lxr• 9 years ago

Examples?

bigger_cheese• 9 years ago

I'm not from SA but I think the Desalination plant they built to supply drinking water to Adelaide was a pretty infamous example.

Untit1ed• 9 years ago

Allowing women to both vote and stand in parliament is the classic example.

perilunar4• 9 years ago

It's not exactly first or untested - Tesla recently build an 80 MWh battery farm in California. I'm pretty sure they know it will work.

daveytea• 9 years ago

There's also a long history of tall poppy syndrome and cutting down innovative ideas to keep the status quo.

Things that were first done/discovered in SA: - military tank - sunscreen - hills hoist - early version of wifi (controversially)

References: http://www.abc.net.au/local/stories/2014/07/23/4051703.htm http://insidesouthaustralia.com.au/5-amazing-south-australia...

nl2• 9 years ago

When are we ever the first to do anything (since we gave women the vote anyway. Maybe Don Dunstan did some stuff.. in the 1970s)?

Batteries are well proven technology now. Here's the Tesla one in California: https://arstechnica.com/business/2017/01/a-look-at-the-new-b.... Batteries are very much the tried and tested solution now. This is just a bigger set.

Our wind-farms are nothing special. We get much less power from them than most places in Europe. Even the eviro-nuts (/sarcasm) in Texas get up to 23% of their power from wind (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-rise-of-wind-...). SA gets around 33%.

Pretty much all of SA's problems are because of geography. We don't have many people (~1.5M, almost all of whom are in Adelaide) and we are a long, long way from anywhere else. That makes taking part in the national market difficult.

ridgeguy• 9 years ago

There aren't many tried and tested solutions for grid energy storage.

Pumped hydro is probably the best known and longest used. It's reliable and low risk. It's only practical if geography includes two adjacent large bodies of water with significant altitude differential. This isn't exactly rare but it's unusual, so pumped hydro isn't often a solution.

Other than p.h.? Thermal (molten salt)? flywheels? These are rare and early in development. Each has its own reliability issues.

If grid-scale storage is needed, it seems like Li batteries are the best understood, lowest technical risk option for now.

pascalo4• 9 years ago

This is certainly a step in the right direction for South Australia.

pascalo4• 9 years ago

I should qualify why: The South Australian power network, due to its increasing reliance on Wind and Solar, struggles with fluctuations in the network. The battery will aid to stabilise the grid in peak demand times.

tacticus3• 9 years ago

So what were the causes of the queensland outages with their coal?

It was transmission tower failures that took out the network for the significant outage.

caf• 9 years ago

This paper, in which the authors develop an argument that market structure and incentives for frequency control are driving instability, is worth a read:

http://www.escosa.sa.gov.au/ArticleDocuments/1047/20170208-I...

roenxi• 9 years ago

South Australia has a population of ~1.7 million. I'm reading this article as:

* Battery ($140 million)

* Gas Power Plant ($360 million)

These costs are noticeable but not unreasonable.

SA will hopefully turn a nominal profit, although the principle of 'if it were the profitable option, private enterprise would have done it' suggests this will be an economic drag at least in the short term.

I suspect this move is a knee-jerk reaction to the power outage in 2016; so I am very interested in what the long term impacts of this are. I'm adding this to my watch list along with the German Energiewende to see where it is in 2020. It is a very interesting tour-of-force by Tesla and hopefully we discover positive things about large-scale lithium deployments.

shard972• 9 years ago

SA's population might be relatively low but at the moment they seem to be having a manufacturing slump with the pullout of major car companies so from that perspective there should be enough labor to gather there.

senectus1• 9 years ago

where did you get those numbers?

Cause TFA says if he doesnt get it done in 100 days it'll cost him 50 mil

But the promise could leave Mr Musk significantly out of pocket if he fails to deliver to deadline.
He estimated it would cost him "probably $50 million or more" if the 100 days lapse without the battery installed.

rndmio• 9 years ago

I'm guessing, but would imagine that the contract to build and install is priced up as above, but if they fail to get it all in in 100 days it's only the batteries themselves which are free, the rest of the job still needs to be paid for.

SEJeff• 9 years ago

Official announcement from Tesla: https://www.tesla.com/blog/tesla-powerpack-enable-large-scal...

xupybd• 9 years ago

I really hope this works out to be worth the investment. It seems storage is the missing piece to the renewable energy puzzle.

syncsynchalt• 9 years ago

Based on other comments here it seems like SA sees large price spikes that this should smooth out, so I suppose it's possible it will pay for itself not just in a more stable energy utility but also in real Dollarydoos.

gluczywo• 9 years ago

Unfortunately no word on durability and maintenance guarantees. What happens after a few years when batteries lose most of their capacity? Who is going to take care of recycling? I'm honestly curious about details because as opposed to lead-acid batteries industry, there is no profitable or existing li-ion recycling market.

audunw• 9 years ago

What happens after a few years when batteries lose most of their capacity?

That's rather pessimistic isn't it? In their cars, which is arguably a less stable environment, they don't seem to fall much beyond 70-80% capacity. The lose capacity quickly at first, but then it stabilizes. I haven't heard anything that implies that a lithium-ion battery in a stable, temperature environment will lose "most" of their capacity, i.e. over 50%.

And unlike cars, it's not like the value of the battery becomes so much less when they lose capacity. There's plenty of space, that's not the problem. They could just add a few extra batteries if they want to keep the capacity (more likely they will add more batteries other places).

Of course battery capacity loss will be part of the contract. Tesla will probably guarantee a certain capacity after a certain time, and they will tell the customer how much loss they can expect. It will all be taken into account when calculating the profitability and life-time of the system.

Why would they report this in the media? It's not something most people is interested in. It's the kind of thing you find in datasheets for the product.

sgentle• 9 years ago

I wonder if that could be part of Tesla's cross-market strategy. You can put fresh batteries in cars where high energy density is really important, then as the capacity drops you reuse them in lower energy density applications like commercial power.

perilunar4• 9 years ago

I'd be interested to know more about the politics behind this decision. The Federal government (generally conservative and anti-renewables) was pushing for pumped hydro energy storage, which would have cost several times as much and taken years to build (and made renewable energy look worse for longer).

This looks very much like the state Labor government giving the federal government the finger.

stirlo• 9 years ago

Got any sources that show pumped hydro to be more expensive?

manicdee3• 9 years ago

http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/snowy-...

This project is about expanding the output of the Snowy Mountains scheme, which means greater demand on the storage capacity, not forgetting 1000km of transmission lines to get the energy to Adelaide which means the grid components that failed them last time are in exactly the same place.

The proposed expansion is $1/W capacity.

The expected price for the Neoen project is in the order of $1/W ($100M for 100MW output, 129MWh capacity)

Note that the actual price on the SA battery is not known, and there has not even been a tender out for the Snowy expansion much less accompany at work digging tunnels suddenly finding that Australian conditions are breaking their equipment more than expected :)

The expected cost overruns on the SA tender are aporoximately zero, the expected cost overruns on a large hydro project between initial estimates and completion are approximately 100% based on industry standards.

perilunar4• 9 years ago

The Cultana proposal was A$500 million for 300 MW, which is more expensive per Watt but not several times. No way they could build it in 100 days though.

http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/news/south-australia/pumped-hy...

jackgolding• 9 years ago

Giving the finger is an understatement, watch this: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-03-16/josh-frydenberg-jay-we...

NamTaf• 9 years ago

To reinforce the point, he's talking about the guy literally standing next to him. It's got to be one of my favourite parts of our otherwise desolate, depressing political landscape in the last 5 years.

I'm glad SA is going this alone. The Federal govt is too tied up in politics to produce a functional solution based on hard data. It'd be all talk and no action and by going it alone, SA undercuts that.

prawn• 9 years ago

It is.

An inevitable campaign based on electricity prices is easily the biggest risk to the state government. The state opposition hasn't really built a viable identity in recent years, but many people are quickly incensed about rising bills.

For Labor, pitching that they are standing up to the Federal government and moving forward regardless, is a reasonable strategy against that.

jussij3• 9 years ago

As someone living in Australia, I think the pumped-hydro is nothing more than a thought bubble introduced to take the heat out of renewables debate, which the government was loosing.

They announced it as a certainty, even though the design was nothing more than the one page press announcement, the project feasibility study yet to started and no construction expected for many years, if it indeed it is feasible.

The government is pretty much 100% anti-renewables with their pet love being coal with their catchcry being Coal is good for humanity.

Currently they are considering a $1B government loan to an Indian coal mining company, only because no bank will lend them the money.

My take on this SA announcement is it might end up being a big blow for the government.

If it works out as designed and fixes some of the issues in the SA electricity grid, it be egg on the face of the government, since they insist the SA grid is a disaster only because it has such a high reliance on renewables and is missing a coal powered generator.

beedogs• 9 years ago

It will also vindicate Jay Weatherall (premier of SA), who publicly blasted the Federal Energy Minister to his face at a press conference recently.

bquinlan• 9 years ago

Isn't 129MWh of capacity a bit low for 100MW of peak discharge? That would provide 77 minutes of power at peak discharge. Does anyone have any insight into the rationale for this capacity?

davedx• 9 years ago

From what I've seen this is quite common with batteries -- the rated power output number is usually in the same ballpark as the storage number.

I'm no expert, but I would guess it's because most of the time the wind will be blowing somewhat, so you will rarely need peak discharge. Most of the time the batteries will be providing load smoothing and frequency regulation.

itengelhardt• 9 years ago

According to Tesla's website (https://www.tesla.com/powerpack) each Powerpack has 50 kW / 210kWh with a scalable inverter power ranging from 50 kVA to 625 kVA.

So they could have gotten a system with 100 MW/420 MWh

tacticus3• 9 years ago

Really hot days only need a very short time of power to cover the 4 to 6 PM sort of time before the temps drop.

pongogogo• 9 years ago

Do you need multiple batteries though to really stabilise the flow? I.e. these look like they will be right at the point of power generation, guessing that the bulk of inhabitants will actually be in Adelaide, why not put the batteries there after you have suffered the lossiness of transmission? Directly in people's homes would also probably be more effective...

manicdee3• 9 years ago

The losses will happen somewhere, and the power is coming from the wind farm anyway. Combining grid interconnect with what is already there probably makes the power engineering easier.

renesd2• 9 years ago

Also Australia is one of the most expensive places on the planet - in the urban centers. They already have space near the wind farm for very cheap. As a bonus you don't have a giant Samsung Galaxy situation near so many people.

nextweek22• 9 years ago

I'd disagree with having batteries in people's homes. They produce heat, require space (which has a cost), require maintenance and an inverter, they are not fault tolerant, they'd be a massive risk to people in the event of a fire (would you like to be a fireman going into a home that had a massive Li-ion battery in?).

A better place would be at the generation source with substation batteries for smoothing out blips.

renesd2• 9 years ago

Tesla sold a financial product. The government needed to cover some of the risk of when power lines go down, or if something goes wrong in another part of the network. It needs to cover this risk quickly for political reasons.

The chance of another similar storm knocking out the power lines again, which now have bigger maintenance crews, is very small. But if there is another blackout and they didn't do anything? They'd be in big trouble with the newspapers.

So Tesla really sold a risk product. Since SA could have spent the money on more generation. But not all people understand that.

The 100MW stage of that wind farm cost $250 million, and took some years to reach agreement, and some years to build. By promising to build the battery quicker, they have covered that risk during the time they need it.

They could have installed another wind farm the same size in a different part of the state in order to reduce the risk, and fill up the valleys of power generation. That has been proven to work too, and the benefit is you have more power generation in the peaks.

The cost of the blackout was estimated to have cost $367 million to business. 12% of the businesses had backup power generators themselves, and about a third of the businesses had bought insurance for such situations. Life critical systems are required to have independent backup power.

By the time it's built there will probably be a similar amount of solar power installed as the battery (by current rates of installation). There's 2,034 MW of industrial solar being constructed in Australia for 2017. This doesn't include stuff going onto roofs of houses, of which there are millions of houses already covered and more being done. 5KW solar installed in Australia can be done for $5,000AUD or less for a 5KW system. That's $100 million AUD for 100MW on 20,000 homes.

There's also a lead smelter which is being upgraded, so it will have modern equipment which lets it use power more dynamically... effectively making it a battery. It can take in power, or not, as it needs. They can also shut down their power hungry desalination plant if needed (which they don't really need when there is not a drought).

So now they have a backup battery, a backup gas power plant, and backup power lines to another state, more efficient industrial power users, and hundreds of thousands of small independent solar power generators.

They've definitely covered their arses.

drcross• 9 years ago

They could have installed another wind farm the same size in a different part of the state in order to reduce the risk.

From a macro level, wind and solar makes the most logical sense when twinned with battery storage, the nature of the power they produce and to a lesser extend how users consume that power is unpredictable, so the battery is used for peak shaving the demand and supply.

nl2• 9 years ago

It's not just insurance if power goes down. It'll knock the edges off the price-peaks, which SA suffers badly from.

Gas fired power stations don't fire up until they can get the maximum price possible, and often try to drive the price higher by stopping producing power. SA is very vulnerable to that because there is no backstop of coal prices. OTOH, the minimum price of wind power and solar is much lower.

These batteries will kill the peaking gas generator game.

robbiep• 9 years ago

Whilst not overtly disagreeing with any of your major points, the alternative to this 'financial product' as you term this infrastructure investment (an asset on the ground is hardly a financial product, because a financial product is worth nothing once it's term ends, whereas even when the cells can hold no more charge they're going to be worth a residual in recycling) is an alternative where we are actually building more infrastructure - gas or coal.

This one arrangement has the potential to totally change the completely derailed energy policy discussion in australia, which continues to default to a coal or gas fired immediacy and future, out of fear over rationality.

We shall see either way

suyash2• 9 years ago

Didn't they announce last year that the largest battery manufacturing plant was being built near Reno, NV as part of the Gigafactory. Now all of a sudden this one in Australia, what's the deal?

manicdee3• 9 years ago

This is a battery installation, not a factory.

tacticus3• 9 years ago

Not a factory. This is a battery stored peaking power plant.

suyash2• 9 years ago

thanks for clarifying.

thomasfoster96• 9 years ago

South Australia is getting a battery, not a battery manufacturing plant. The Gigafactory makes the batteries.

neillyons• 9 years ago

Wow. This story makes you believe anything is possible.

dao-2• 9 years ago

100 MW. For comparison, here's a >30 years old pumped storage power plant with a capacity of 1,045 MW:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markersbach_Pumped_Storage_Pow...

kalleboo2• 9 years ago

Which took 20 years to get running instead of 100 days and required favorable terrain.

dao-2• 9 years ago

Construction started in 1970 and it's been running since 1979. That's nine years, with ancient tech and the GDR's limited resources. There's no reason to believe a similar project should take nine years today in Australia.

askvictor• 9 years ago

Does anyone know if large scale capacitors are being investigated for this sort of application (or in home storage)? Strikes me as more appropriate than batteries; don't really need to store that energy for months, but rather hours or days. I know that Tesla utilises economies of scale, but still curious why I've never heard of large scale capacitors even being researched.

extrapickles• 9 years ago

The Energy density of capacitors is very low (10-100x less than lithium) and they cost quite a bit more per watt-hour.

Capacitors are good if you need power for seconds rather than the minutes-hours that batteries are good at.

icanhackit3• 9 years ago

Anyone here played the real time strategy game Total Annihilation or its spiritual successor Supreme Commander? I remember playing with a friend around 1998 and he told me off for using energy storage as opposed to just collecting/producing more energy sans storage. His argument was that my economy should never be at the point that I'm saving energy for a rainy day - I should be spending as I collect/produce so that my potential is always maximised. I told him I need a buffer for when I'm spending more than I'm producing or if I lose infrastructure in battle.

Either way, we played each other over LAN one day and sure enough he took out a few of my nuclear plants, but I had enough energy stored to keep bombarding his base with artillery and eventually struck his commander despite being in the negative for energy production vs consumption. I won. He changed his opinion after that.

It's good to save for that rainy day.

lmm3• 9 years ago

The costs and benefits in those games are set deliberately at a point where the decision of which to build is interesting. No such restriction applies to reality. I very much doubt the relative costs of production and storage in game are at all close to what they are in real life.

icanhackit3• 9 years ago

doubt the relative costs of production and storage in game are at all close to what they are in real life

Aren't most games a form of allegory?

jlg23• 9 years ago

I very much doubt the relative costs of production and storage in game are at all close to what they are in real life.

The benefit is not constant either; in areas with regular outages you have a very high incentive to build energy storage (food spoils in the fridge, you cannot do laundry, your router needs power etc). Add a choice of semi-viable alternative energy sources to the mix and the decision is just as interesting as it is in games.

Real World Scenario(TM) - Northern Republica Dominicana:

* rolling blackouts (typically 8h, from 9am to 5pm; once a week); at least once a week some drunk driver takes down a pole (usually fixed in 2h)

* capped electricity bills for low income households

* no enforcement of security standards (not sure such exist at all) - so an array of old car batteries will do just fine. bonus points for investing another $50 into acid-resistant flooring.

* solar power works, but without sun tracking only for 5 to 8h/day

* wind power works, but not everywhere (jungle is a great barrier for wind)

* water pressure is so low you need a motorized pump just to flush your toilet

[disclaimer: I spent 6 months in that part of the DR in the last 2 years]

EDIT: Only 2nd hand, but from 200[345] - in an economic standoff between government and energy producer the navy sent "generator ships" that anchored near the shore of Puerto Plata and delivered electricity to the local population through cables they ran through the water.

rb8082• 9 years ago

Doesn't anyone know how long these industrial sized Li-ion batteries last?

If its anything like my Nexus 6p it'll need replacing within a year.

nextweek22• 9 years ago

Such information is more than likely commercially sensitive. However, given the large number of cells, a charge controller can optimise charges to ensure optimum cell use.

Bit like wear levelling with SSD drives.

Your phone probably has an erratic charge discharge cycle.

Most Li-ion batteries have 400-1200 duty cycle. That should give this project a 3 year cycle a least.

rb8082• 9 years ago

Infrastructure is usually measured in decades though, I would have thought < 1 decade isn't good enough. Maybe its easier to maintain large scale batteries.

South Australia teams with Tesla, Neoen to build world's biggest Li-ion battery

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