Australia's Biggest Tesla Battery Storage System at Moorabool is on FIRE

[Someone]

Not sure when it's really needed and will actually do some work to prove itself.

Battery (hydro, and other short term methods of) Storage "works" best when its being utilized every day, which it is doing:
https://opennem.org.au/facility/au/NEM/VBB/?range=7d&interval=5m
They'll likely want to deepen the cycling but much of the power capacity can be held back for FCAS:
https://reneweconomy.com.au/victoria-big-battery-now-registered-as-biggest-non-hydro-player-in-fcas-market/

[trobbins]

Someone, thanx for that opennem website link.  It will be interesting to see how Moorabool progresses, and whether it will be tasked with more aggressive daily energy shifting like Hornsdale is doing.

[Someone]

Someone, thanx for that opennem website link.  It will be interesting to see how Moorabool progresses, and whether it will be tasked with more aggressive daily energy shifting like Hornsdale is doing.

Looks like it did over 50% depth of discharge across the 09/01/2022, then similar on the 13th. They dont seem to be particularly reactive to market pricing, so are playing it safe/friendly.

[floobydust]

Did you have any heatwaves with related grid shortages?

Here, a cold snap where it was dancing around -30°C for three weeks and we ran out of electricity, demand around 13GW and pool price peaked over $1.00/kWh 
It's mainly people plugging in ICE car block heaters ~600W at night so their car will start, or electric heaters. Coal-fired plants were the usual workhorses, solar is terrible in cloudy winter weather, not much from wind.
Mental note: build a heat pipe from Canada to Australia.

[Faringdon]

people plugging in ICE car block heaters ~600W at night so their car will start

Thans interesting , its a shame they dont put these on a timer and have them warm up the car an hour before drive time....or does the car need to be kept warm all night i wonder

[Siwastaja]

people plugging in ICE car block heaters ~600W at night so their car will start

Thans interesting , its a shame they dont put these on a timer and have them warm up the car an hour before drive time....or does the car need to be kept warm all night i wonder

One hour in advance is really enough unless the engine or battery is pure shit. But people are lazy and stupid and simply do not care.

My engine block heater is broken and blows the fuse, but the car starts just fine at -25degC. Yeah, it might not be optimum for the engine or emissions, so better would be to heat it up for an hour beforehand. But keeping it on all the night is massive waste.

You don't even need a timer, just plug it in and start making breakfast.

Though, if everybody drives to work at the same time, then the heaters are all on at the same time, too. Maybe just heat for 30mins, that's better than nothing at all, and spreads out better.

Here, a cold snap where it was dancing around -30°C for three weeks and we ran out of electricity, demand around 13GW and pool price peaked over $1.00/kWh

Had the same thing here in December. Close call on energy sufficiency, pool price peaked at 1.24€/kWh, that's 1.42USD! We are used to 0.05€/kWh energy pricing so obviously this pissed people off. Meanwhile, government is heavily subsidizing removal of oil burners and transition into electric heating. At -25degC if not earlier, all those fancy air source heat pumps have turned into COP=1 direct electric heaters. I'm still running oil in parallel with the heat pump during <-18degC, and it even has lower CO2 footprint than the grid has during those peak days, when back-up stations are brought up, so it's win-win for absolutely everybody/-thing, climate included, but it isn't media sexy, even if you just burn 200 liters of oil for heating, per year, to avoid burning a lot larger equivalent amount of coal elsewhere!

[Marco]

Battery (hydro, and other short term methods of) Storage "works" best

Best being most economical. At some point best and most economical will have to start meaning long term storage if all the renewable plans go through, at which point short term storage will likely become uneconomical because you have the sunk cost of the long term storage any way.

[Someone]

Battery (hydro, and other short term methods of) Storage "works" best

Best being most economical. At some point best and most economical will have to start meaning long term storage if all the renewable plans go through, at which point short term storage will likely become uneconomical because you have the sunk cost of the long term storage any way.

Extreme way to intentionally misrepresent the quote, taking the original:

Not sure when [the battery is] really needed and will actually do some work to prove itself.

Battery (hydro, and other short term methods of) Storage "works" best when its being utilized every day, which it is doing....

If you think long term storage is so viable, show us the figures. Over provisioning of generation (as grids have traditionally done) still looks to be cheaper. Doesn't matter what the generation sources are. Even if long term storage becomes a thing or massive over provisioning is done, it won't remove daily (or day to day) fluctuations that battery and hydro storage will still daily cycle against and profit from.

Unless you are imagining some perfectly ideal long term storage that will eat 100% of excess power through the "off demand" season and perfectly return it as required during the "on demand" season. In which case your model is too simplistic and idealistic to actually work in the open market. At a basic level that would oversize the generation capacity of the hypothetical long term storage plant, that could likely be more economically done with a smaller peak load/generation along side short term storage to flatten it out.

[trobbins]

So far this summer there have not been any significant long duration hot periods in Victoria (the state the Moorabool battery is in) or in nearby states which are grid interconnected, whereby the news has indicated peak grid power issues.  Luckily our instantaneous grid demand from hot weather from air-conditioning is somewhat aligned to PV production.  Although imho we have a long way to go before a large majority of people better align their daily consumption events to PV generation (even with a large grid distribution to average out the PV contribution), including aircon use as a partial thermal store buffer during the middle of the day.  It seems that some of the commercial PV farms are using trackers to optimise the revenue from generating in to the early morning and late afternoon peak consumption demands, but I don't see residential households specifically aiming for that type of operation yet (eg. panels on east and west facing roof sections given inverters typically have 2 MPPT inputs, rather than just on north facing roof sections).