
Tesla big battery outsmarts lumbering coal units - beardicus
http://reneweconomy.com.au/tesla-big-battery-outsmarts-lumbering-coal-units-after-loy-yang-trips-70003/
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PinguTS
This piece is clearly written by someone, who as no glue about the grid. (or
wants to make a buzz out of nothing special)

Battery power is always faster then generator power. That is the reason why
every data center has battery backup for immediate reaction and generator
power for the longtime backup. Normally, the battery size is designed that the
minimum time is at least twice as long as to start the generator.

Exactly that has happened with the grid. It is also not related to some
contracting. Because the whole grid is connected. So the battery will always
kick in, it does not matter where it is located.

Actually synchronizing the grid is tough task. A friend and colleague from my
University started in this business after he made his Master Thesis tens of
years ago.

By monitoring the frequency of the grid you know if there is too much energy
produced (too less load, frequency to high) or vice versa. Everybody basically
can do this from home. There are some maker projects and personal projects who
do that.

~~~
grecy
> _(or wants to make a buzz out of nothing special)_

It's important to note it _is_ something special. The battery works, and it
works better than the existing solutions.

This is very important and big news in Australia, because the coal lobby is so
strong and powerful they have been telling the public for a year now the Tesla
battery will not work and is a waste of money. Obviously some people such as
yourself understand how the thing works, though I would bet a massive
percentage of "people on the street" have no idea, and only understand what
the coal lobby is telling them.

It's important to take every opportunity to educate the public about the real
facts, and this event is a fact. The sooner the public learn the truth, the
better.

~~~
leereeves
> and it works better than the existing solutions

A few seconds faster, but with less than 2% of the required power.

What are the claims from the other side about why "the Tesla battery will not
work"? If the claims are "it won't provide enough power to matter", this data
seems to support those claims, unless I misunderstand how the 9MW provided by
the Tesla battery (the HPR) resolved the sudden loss of 560MW.

~~~
wbhart
As I understand it, the article is about the frequency stabilisation market.
The existing reserves are able to pick up the loss of energy eventually, but
reliability of the grid depends on more than just total reserve power. That is
why the frequency stabilisation market exists. As the article points out, no
one was expected to lose power here.

Power systems are highly nonlinear. At any given time there are power
generators spun up and able to deliver more power. In the case of hydro, for
example, vanes can control the flow of water. More water at one generator
means everyone's turbines can spin slightly faster. Throughout the day, many
such adjustments are made to match the load with the supply, e.g. with
predictive adjustments every 15 minutes, say. But the systems can only respond
so fast and each station can only pick up the frequency so fast. When a large
enough generator drops out, or load suddenly increases (lots of people turning
their kettles on during an ad break on telly, for example), numerous things
can happen, including increasing supply, reducing loads and tripping breakers.
In the worst case, some consumers lose supply. The advantage of electric
batteries, being pointed out here, is that they can react in milliseconds,
helping to stabilise the supply. This can prevent those corner cases where
dropping consumers from the grid, due to cascading failures (highly nonlinear
events), is the alternative.

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roenxi
This response by the battery is really interesting. And it is certainly
helping the Australian grid.

However, it is worth noting that the Australian grid, South Australia's in
particular, is so woefully mismanaged that almost anything goes. South
Australia is in the running for the most expensive electricity in the world
[1].

As far as I've been able to tell, we aren't building coal or nuclear because
there are outrageous political risks (opposition party & green lobby policy
will probably make them uneconomic in the next decade); we aren't building
anything else because because the economic option is coal. I think there is
some sort of fracking ban that seems to have caused a gas shortage - I don't
really understand that.

Long story short; Australia has looming electricity generation problems due to
government policy and this battery is helping, but it is not fixing them.

[1] [http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-11-17/curious-adelaide-
the-p...](http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-11-17/curious-adelaide-the-problem-
of-power/9158240)

~~~
icc97
This is not the first time I've heard Australians complaining about the green
lobby.

From what I understand one of the major problems Australia is the sheer
distance the electricity has to travel and the infrastructure required for
such a small population.

Solar power seems such an obvious choice, yet many Australians seem to be
against it.

~~~
greglindahl
In Australia, being green or anti-green is a big part of politics. The party
currently nationally in power is anti-green.

Interestingly, because of the combination of great solar conditions and long
distances, if you want to build a house in the middle of nowhere, it's cheaper
to buy solar and a battery than hook into the grid.

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tbabb
The shortage was 560MW, and the Tesla facility provided 7.3MW, or 1.3%.

~~~
jobu
The takeaway (if I'm reading the graphs correctly) is that the Gladstone coal
unit took over 3 minutes to respond to the Loy Yang failure. It was contracted
to respond within 6 seconds, but couldn't. Fortunately the Tesla battery was
able to respond within milliseconds and cover the gap. It's a good bit of PR
for Tesla, and could have some negative implications for coal or gas fired
backup units.

~~~
pwagland
Where did you get the three minute response time number for Gladstone? It is
not backed up by the article, it only mentions that it should respond within
six seconds, but that "Data from AEMO (and gathered above by Dylan McConnell
from the Climate and Energy College) shows that the Tesla big battery
responded four seconds ahead of the generator contracted at that time to
provide FCAS (frequency control and ancillary services), the Gladstone coal
generator in Queensland.". I would love to see more information on the actual
impact that this had.

edit: Updated with the response time from the article

~~~
jobu
The article is a bit sparse, but take a look at the output of the Loy Yang 3
and the Tesla (HPR) in this graph: [http://reneweconomy.com.au/wp-
content/uploads/2017/12/HPR-fr...](http://reneweconomy.com.au/wp-
content/uploads/2017/12/HPR-frequeny-fig-2-copy.jpg)

Tesla ramps up as the LYA3 is dropping at 1:59am, then the Tesla drops off a
bit before 2:02 am as the Gladstone generator kicks in (not in the graph)

~~~
jermaustin1
There are two types of people in the world: those that can extrapolate meaning
from an incomplete set.

~~~
leereeves
While we're extrapolating meaning, I noticed that the first graph shows the
HPR kicked in a few seconds before the frequency stopped dropping. Does that
mean that the HPR did little to nothing to arrest the fall in frequency, and
that it was the Gladstone generator, which the article says activated four
seconds after the HPR, which deserves the credit?

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thisrod
It's worth pointing out that this battery only solved a second order problem:
what to do when one thing unexpectedly breaks. The big technical problem in
Australia is what to do when the weather forecast says that a whole lot of
things will stop generating power at the same time, and it would take a very
large battery to help with that.

------
a4dev
An early test of the battery control system and it responded!

What the article does not say is that the lumbering coal fired units also
responded within milliseconds due to the enormous inertia of their turbo-
generators. This happens before their throttles open purely due to the physics
of the situation.

The energy involved is substantial.

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hanbura
>the Tesla big battery responded four seconds ahead of the generator
contracted at that time to provide FCAS (frequency control and ancillary
services), the Gladstone coal generator in Queensland.

I find it curious that a coal plant would be contracted with keeping the
frequency stable when both hydro-storage and gas power plants provide better
response times than coal. Is it normal in Australia that coal plants do grid
stabilisation?

~~~
NamTaf
Gas is tied up largely in export contracts, and the whole thing about
Australia being both somewhat flat and dry means hydro basically doesn't exist
(it exists only in the literally 1 place on the mainland continent we have any
"significant" snowfall).

The biggest surprise to me was that a plant in Gladstone (Queensland) was
contracted to prop up a plant in Victoria. These two places are 1375 miles
apart. Then again, I guess the linky bits between the wires must be pretty
high-speed, so the speed-of-light propagation of the grid conditions wouldn't
take too much extra time.

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gwbas1c
I'm not a grid-scale engineer. My guess is that these batteries work by
pushing more electricity into the grid when voltage / frequency is low; and
putting less electricity into the grid when voltage / frequency is high.

~~~
lykr0n
Out of the wall in the US we get 120v @ 60Hz (elsewhere is 220v to 240v @
50Hz). If the load becomes too high, the frequency starts to drop.

Inductive (motors and such) loads do not fare well when the frequency drops
which can cause serious damage. Capacitive or Resistive loads can handle a bit
more fluxation, but the whole system is built around the idea that voltage and
frequency are fixed. Fluxations can cause grid failures, brownouts, or damage
to consumer electronics.

AFAIK, that is precisely what is happening here. The batteries are dumping
energy into the grid to bring the frequency back up to where it should be.
What's cool is that Tesla was not contracted to do, but did anyway. Good PR.

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jimjimjim
maybe things like this are why elon is getting hit pieces against him in some
areas of the media.

he is either a threat or a disturbance in the following industries: auto, oil,
coal, electricity, aerospace. Most of these don't like things changing.

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pcl
Archived copy: [http://archive.is/ma5rh](http://archive.is/ma5rh)

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matt2000
Does anyone know what would have happened if the battery wasn't available?
Some sort of brown out?

~~~
thisrod
Not much. Without the battery, everything would have happened as expected;
with the battery, it happened a few seconds faster than expected.

~~~
Fronzie
What I gather from the (incomplete) data, indeed the backup plant would have
fired up in about 6 seconds. Isn't it wasteful/inefficient/expensive though,
to fire up a whole plant if just providing a few seconds of electricity from a
battery is enough to bring a grid back to nominal frequency?

~~~
makomk
The reason the frequency dipped is because not enough generating power was
online to supply the demand. In order to bring it back up to nominal frequency
and keep it there, something had to keep supplying the extra power required
for as long as it was being used.

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dsfyu404ed
Water is wet and using a battery to cover high speed changes in supply/demand
works exactly the way you'd expect at the car, datacenter and grid scale.

This is really just a fluff piece.

~~~
targafarian
But in an industry like power generation / "the electric grid," the
obviousness of this might be outweighed by momentum (and money?) for the
status quo. Especially in regulated services like these (roughly speaking, and
depending on the implementation, the industry behaves like a monopoly with
more/fewer government-imposed controls), the message and the politics are
important to line up, or else a superior technology might only be adopted
decades after it's actually viable.

So you might find it to be fluff, but it's good for people to read actual in-
the-field success stories.

