Briefly and maybe not 100% truthy: the state of South Australia produces a lot of its electricity from a wind farm. It brings in extra power from another state over a giant cable (the interconnect). A while ago a storm damaged the interconnect and this triggered cascading failsafes that shut down a lot of the state.
The wind farm has been a thumb in the eye of the federal government, who is huge on coal. The feds lost no time blaming the blackouts on renewables and sticking it to SA. Elon Musk offered to install a giant battery in what seemed to be a wild-arse publicity stunt. SA said ok do it, and they're getting a giant battery and their energy independence back.
I had been lightly skeptical until you framed it as a move in spite of the federal government. There were some missing pieces to the puzzle in my mind where I wasn't sure why if we had a technical solution (the interconnector) then why won't we just solve the policy and pricing problem that stops us utilizing it.
Partly because I have never seen Australian states as particularly at odds with eachother or the federal government, but the idea of taking the choice of coal or renewables into our own hands is actually really compelling.
Just before that last step, I believe there were 50-100 bids to provide the battery solution. Tesla may not have been a local bid, but I'd say there are other advantages in Musk even visiting Adelaide - made world news, might inspire business confidence, etc.
Tesla's battery guy said they could solve SA's power woes within 100 days. Atlassian co-founder Mike Cannon-Brookes tweeted Elon: "how serious are you about this bet? If I can make the $ happen (& politics), can you guarantee the 100MW in 100 days?"
Elon replied: "Tesla will get the system installed and working 100 days from contract signature or it is free. That serious enough for you?"
Mike's response: "legend! ️ You’re on mate. Give me 7 days to try sort out politics & funding. DM me a quote for approx 100MW cost - mates rates!"
For anyone who wants some more background, here is a report from march this year by AEMO, the australian energy market operator:
> Renewable generators now represent approximately 43% of
South Australia’s local installed capacity (2,297 MW), with gas-fuelled
and liquid-fuelled thermal generators providing the other
57% share (2,987 MW).
Batteries are used in lieu of pumped energy storage for several purposes:
- emergency use: it's much faster than even the fastest pump sets which can switch over in seconds
- load smoothing to avoid spooling up/down expensive peakers too much
- daily energy arbitrage by downstream / middle consumers to buy off peak and use at peak in time-of-use billed electrical services
- store solar energy for night use
129 MWh is enough for a medium-sized town or charging several hundred Teslas.
Really though, the focus shouldn't be on huge, central systems. The savings and grid resilience is realized with many few MWh systems spread to local substation-level. This has the potential to smooth out the load to be more/less constant and makes large-scale demand more predictable.
The other advantage of substation level energy storage is in not having to upgrade the feed circuits. Design for average consumption not peak. Storage and renewables make the edges of the network resilient.
UK Power networks recently completed a 2 year trial of a 6MW/10MWh battery system which was installed as an alternative to adding a 3rd circuit to meet future peak demand of a town. At the end of the trial they produced a projected business case for future deployments of:
South Australia is the 5th most populous Australian state, out of 6 total states in Australia. It has had a left-leaning government in power for the past 15 years.
South Australia has a lot of mineral resources and a very large land area but it is mainly desert.
Since renewable energy is cool with left-leaning governments, South Australia has built a lot of wind farms. The wind farms are heavily subsdised by the government. There is also a federal program called the Renewable Energy Target which mandates that electricity retailers purchase electricity from renewable power sources (eg wind and power).
The result of the market manipulation is that coal power plants are shutting down. This is putting further pressure on the renewable energy sources which fundamentally cannot provide baseload power in the first place. This is why South Australia draws electricity from interstate where baseload power is generated from coal.
A lot of people are arguing about the power outage in South Australia last year. The almost entire state (population >1.7 million) lost electricity for at least a day. Some people were without power for up to a week. As you can imagine there are a lot of negative consequences when the power goes off. For example the content of a zinc smelter solidified, destroying it.
There were a lot of factors to the blackout, but had there been sufficient baseload power within the state the blackouts wouldn't have occurred. It is a very politicised issue and lefists refuse to accept that the government created dependence upon renewable energy was responsible.
Following the blackouts, later in the summer there were planned brownouts as there wasn't capacity to meet demand.
Ok, now to why they decided to spend $50 million on a battery that can power the state for 3 hours.
Basically the Government of South Australia wants to look like they are doing something. Just like any government they want to be popular and to have the appearance of providing solutions to people's problems. The battery isn't the only thing they are doing. They are buying expensive gas-powered aero derivative generators that can be spun up and spun down quickly when required to meet demand.
So what the Government is doing is purchasing power sources that can compensate for the fluctuating electricity generated by wind and solar. They don't seem to be concerned that these measures will increase the overall cost of providing electricity as they seem to be primarily motivated by an objective of not backing down on the promotion of renewable energies. They don't seem to want to admit that the consequence of renewable energy is less reliable electricity and much more expensive electricity. In order to address the cost issues, the Government are criticising the electrity operators, accusing them of price gouging, in other words pointing the finger at private operators to take the blame off their own policies.
Elon Musk is like a celebrity, the battery idea sounds 'cool'... so basically this is a big PR move showing South Australians that their government is 'taking action'.
I think everyone knows the reality that this is basically a overreaching government trying to cover their arses and Elon Musk coming in way to do so with a big price tag attached. The big price tag actually helps the government because it puts a metric on the amount of action they are taking.
The way to ensure there is adequate electricity to meet demand it to deregulate the industry. That way people who care about wind and solar can pay for it and people are wish to save money can pay for coal generated electricity. Deregulation would ensure the optimum price through competition. While the governments of Australia persist with regulation and subsidies the problem will get worse. Actually the government of Victoria, the 2nd largest state of Australia is seeing one of its major coal power stations shut down and summer this year (in 6 months time) is predicted to have more blackouts, not only in South Australia. Wholesale electricity prices are increasing in Victoria by more than 100%. There is no end in sight for this because the leftist governments of are Australia persisting with their agenda and the federal government, although conservative, appears to be afraid to depart from the leftist narrative.
"The almost entire state (population >1.7 million) lost electricity for at least a day. Some people were without power for up to a week"
I can personally attest that I was without power for about 3 hours. Large parts of the state were back online overnight. Sure there were places where it took a week, but I'm quite sure that even a system that can provide 'only' 3 hours of baseline load would have made a huge difference. (Especially because once you know there is a a problem, you can selectively and in a controlled way start shutting down subsystems, both reducing load and lessening impact over a sudden, unplanned shutdown).
You're forgetting about the cost on the environment that coal burning power plants create. No one ever takes the damage of our environment into consideration of how much something really costs us.
Of course there is renewable power environment cost as well, batteries aren't very green to produce or dispose of. But over all, we are better off by not burning coal even if there are more upfront costs.
What about the environmental costs of these batteries? Have reserves been made for the cost of safe disposal?
If you say that one technology is environmentally destructive and must be replaced but never bother to evaluate whether or not the replacement is actually better this just makes things worse.
You missed his point. If a person is getting something for cheap (coal fired electricity) while allowing the rest of society to pick up the tab (dealing with climate change), perhaps they shouldn't be allowed to. Putting a dollar value on the damage being done through burning coal and adding that to the bill of the people who prefer to burn coal is the best way for them to take responsibility for their actions.
Your arguments seem to be straight from the conservative playbook. No doubt then you would also object to people getting handouts from the govt. A situation where a person gets cheap electricity and allows someone else to pay for it sounds exactly like a handout.
To level the playing field, let's start by removing the reported $AU4Billion/annum subsidies in Australia to fossil fuels. That amounts to over $AU400 per household per year of taxpayer funds...
The blackout had nothing to do with insufficient base load power and everything to do with the storm damaging lines. The wind farms actually produced more then enough electricity at the time - the problem was delivery - http://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2016-09-28/sa-power-outage-exp...
The storm caused extra load on the interconnector. The power went off when the interconnector shut down. The interconnector is needed because there is inadequate power generation within the state. There is inadequate power generation because coal generators were shutdown in favour of renewables.
The South Australian Government were patting themselves on the back about their high proportion of renewable energy but the reality was they were dependent on importing coal derived electricity form interstate. The storm exposed this dependency.
You got a lot of down votes in this thread, but you're 100% correct in saying that SA's reliance on wind power has caused these problems, and that is entirely politically motivated.
