But wont release the details on the price of the installation! 129MWh is tiny.
Huge press coverage, zero mention of contract cost. Hype central.
But wont release the details on the price of the installation! 129MWh is tiny.
According to Elon Musk it is 3x bigger than the next largest installed so far. Bit unfair to critisize it as "tiny" I think.
Tiny is the word, Tumut 3 alone is a 1800MW plant with 1500MWh of routine storage capacity:
https://georgejetson.org/2017/03/19/pumped-hydro-storage-an-australian-overview/Theoretical capacity of Talbingo dam for emergency use exceeds hundreds of GWh, with a bigger lower reservoir the routine storage could be increased easily. New build pumped hydro is a better scale for grid storage and is much more cost effective at these larger sizes, batteries scale linearly with cost and only make sense for small installations.
Kinda dismayed to see Elon Musk talking like this, as in
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2017/jul/07/tesla-to-build-worlds-biggest-lithium-ion-battery-in-south-australia.He says that a 80MWh battery would cost $100Million US. Taking the UK as an example, demand averages at around 35GW, so to provide a day's battery backup would require 24x3500 or 84000MWh. Which would cost $105 Billion US. That in itself is about the cost of eight ITER fusion reactors. (Of which, incidentally, only one has to work and problem solved.)
That's just for a day's brownout protection. In the UK we've seen periods of two months over which windfarm output is very low, and three weeks when it's next to nothing. So, a battery bank to cover the real situation (say 60 days of supply) would cost around six trillion dollars. That's more than twice the annual turnover of the entire UK economy, and makes the Apollo moon program look like mere pocket money at $25.4 Billion. (1973 value)
Though, I guess he doesn't intend to let those guys who can actually
measure that leccy stuff
ruin a good 'green energy' scam.
New build pumped hydro is a better scale for grid storage and is much more cost effective at these larger sizes, batteries scale linearly with cost and only make sense for small installations.
Where do you propose the SA government build a large pumped hydro dam? Where will they get the water from?
The work has been done to identify and cost out solutions for SA:
http://energy.unimelb.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0003/2269740/Opps-for-pumped-hydro-in-Australia.pdfThere are huge untapped sources throughout Australia, and the same techniques can be applied around the world.
