
Tesla’s SA big battery just got 50% bigger after goals thanks to Autobidder - zeristor
https://techau.com.au/teslas-big-battery-in-sa-just-got-50-bigger-after-kicking-goals-thanks-to-autobidder/
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shoo
South Australia participates in Australia's National Energy Market (NEM):
[https://aemo.com.au/en/energy-
systems/electricity/national-e...](https://aemo.com.au/en/energy-
systems/electricity/national-electricity-market-nem/about-the-national-
electricity-market-nem)

The market operator, AEMO, hosts a NEM dashboard here - pretty interesting.
The first tab of the dashboard is showing the supply and demand in each
australian state that participates in the market. It also shows the flow
between the different states via interconnectors, highlighting which
interconnectors are at capacity. Some of the other tabs show the electricity
price & the fuel mix for each state: [https://aemo.com.au/en/energy-
systems/electricity/national-e...](https://aemo.com.au/en/energy-
systems/electricity/national-electricity-market-nem/data-nem/data-dashboard-
nem)

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sumedh
Why is Vic so expensive?

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danielheath
It’s markedly higher today than usual (unsure why).

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PudgePacket
SA = South Australia for the rest of the world.

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unmole
I've seen RSA in hockey and ZA elsewhere but never SA.

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aussiegreenie
SA is the norm in Sporting organisations SA Rugby or Cricket SA.

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sulam
> Neoen, who owns the Hornsdale Power Reserve, are close finalising testing
> that will increase the capacity of the battery from 100MW to 150MW.

Surely the battery capacity is measured in joules or at least megawatt hours,
not watts?

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Tade0
This is my pet peeve as well. But not being a native English speaker I figured
I won't try to lecture people on this - not my language after all.

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balfirevic
Those are not English units.

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abledon
wow, the video says it saved $150M, and they are only investing another $15M?
amazing nonetheless, what other car company has market trading software as
part of its energy division?

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foota
Maybe diminishing returns?

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epistasis
This is likely it, though I don't know the particulars of this grid. In most
grids, there's a small amount of super profitable frequency regulation to be
performed. However, there's very limited capacity needed for that. Doing
energy arbitrage over time is much more difficult to make profitable, usually.
A huge amount of new solar and wind in the US will be built with batteries
attached in the next five years, because it's easier to make energy arbitrage
work when you're an energy producer (and also make the tax credits for storage
work, which typically require that the batter is only charged from zero carbon
electricity).

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zmmmmm
I'm curious what the lifetime of the batteries is and whether that is being
fully incorporated into the evaluation of their cost effectiveness? Of course,
given they have already apparently recouped more than their entire cost before
even getting fully out of testing phase, it seems like this is not going to be
an issue. But I still always do wonder how well this is accounted for with
battery tech.

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sgc
100%. Nobody makes that kind of asset purchase without lifecycle analysis.

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fernly
Could somebody translate this into English?

> Autobidder is a real-time trading and control platform that provides value-
> based asset management and portfolio optimization, enabling owners and
> operators to configure operational strategies that maximize revenue based on
> their business objectives and risk preferences.

Is it that other power providers can bid for some big-battery output?

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toomuchtodo
Autobidder uses ML and other signals to maximize the revenue for asset owners
based on electric market data (real time and historical). It has a rough idea
when the grid will be demanding power, how fast the storage project can charge
and discharge, what the minimum aggregate state of charge should be, etc.

Not affiliated with Tesla except as an investor, have gotten to test drive
Autobidder as part of an engineering/procurement/construction storage project.

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ethbro
What are the industry incentives for Tesla to do this, instead of utilities?

It just seems kind of weird for Tesla to be saying "We'll sell you this thing
you tell me you need" and also "Here's us building a thing to help you tell
what you need."

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nordsieck
> What are the industry incentives for Tesla to do this, instead of utilities?

1\. Most utilities operate power plants, they don't operate power storage
facilities. From a capital efficiency standpoint, power plants want to be run
all the time, so there's not much that they can do that's particularly fancy.

In contrast, Tesla both buys and sells electricity, so they have the
opportunity to arbitrage across time. This is especially true in places where
the cost of electricity dips below 0.

2\. There are some utilities that have stored power (e.g. hydro dams). I
suspect that they don't employ the engineering talent to pull off something
like Autobidder.

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rurban
But those energy providers ("utilities") have the necessary political and
budget power to pull off something like Autobidder. In many countries they are
controlling local governments. Buying such a logistical solution is peanuts
for them, automation is everything.

They are already doing better things than just dumb ML, they have proper
models and constraint and planning software.

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toomuchtodo
If they had the will and resources to do it, they would’ve done it. Having
been in both engineering first and engineering last orgs, it’s clear they
cannot execute in this regard (like a tech company).

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woodandsteel
Right. Because these utilities have, as Ruban says, "political and budget
power" they are fat and happy, and don't bother with engineering innovation.

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ethbro
To be fair, in many cases markets are explicitly set up to preclude
innovation.

Monopoly grants with rate caps don't afford much aspirational budget for SV-
wage engineers.

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tupac_speedrap
Jesus... is there any news websites nowadays without hundreds of scripts doing
botnet shit in the background?

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gpm
Yes actually, lite.cnn.com.

It looks like the only scripts it loads are scripts to set up a single
analytics provider. F5 results in only 6 network requests, the page, the
favicon, a stylesheet, two js requests for the previously mentioned analytics
provider, and a request for a tracking pixel for the previously mentioned
analytics provider.

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consumer451
text.npr.org is excellent as well.

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dmix
A true inspiration for web design.

This is what every news site should strive towards. Instead of getting
clunkier like Reddit.

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SturgeonsLaw
I'll forever use old.reddit.com

Between that subdomain, RES and a custom userstyle, Reddit is quite a pleasant
experience.

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Animats
Is Autobidder a bug or a feature?

It's something Enron would have done. Get some energy storage, and then use it
to speculate in electricity futures. Buy low and charge, and sell high and
discharge later. Maybe hold back energy on hot days until the peak is reached,
then put it on the market.

A battery operator has more flexibility than most generators - they can sell,
but not buy. We'll know this is a problem when Goldman Sachs Renewable Power
LLC buys a big battery.

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toast0
It's a feature.

Adding a market participant with the motive and means to buy when the price is
low and sell when the price is high reduces the price volatility.

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Animats
That's not clear. California briefly had total deregulation with a power
auction ever half hour, and volatility increased so much that there were
blackouts. Expecting markets to produce stability is naive. Markets don't
typically converge on some equilibrium, they oscillate around it.

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nl
This is true, and one of the reasons the Telsa battery was able to make so
much profit was because it took the peaks off the very high peak prices that
other market participants were happy to allow to occur before.

There is a market regulator that stops most of the worst of the manipulation
that happened with Enron, but it is an imperfect system.

Large parts of Australia are on a single market, but with separate quasi-state
based pricing sections. South Australia had a difficult market, with large
amounts of renewable power (mostly wind and roof-top solar) and a single
interconnector to coal-fired stations in another state.

That left it very vulnerable to price spikes, especially at ~17:30 during
summer when people would get home from office and turn on their air-
conditioners. That would case huge price spikes.

The big battery is able to supply enough to get over much of that peak load
spike, and an additional gas generation peaker plant along with even more
geographically diverse renewables has fixed the rest of that problem. There is
a second interstate interconnect being built too.

