Nice TESLA battery array- 100 M.W. !

In case of emergency, a 129 MWh battery should be able to keep South Australia running for a good extra 17 seconds!

With all the stories of Lithium-Ion batteries going up in flames, doesn't this sound like a disaster waiting to happen?

With all the stories of petroleum plants going up in flames, doesn't it sound like every hydrocarbon storage tank on Earth is a disaster waiting to happen?

Ohmahgawd they are head for the hills!!!!!

Have you been to South Australia? (I don't mean south Australia) There's not much there. A city of 1.3M, yes, but not 400k more in the whole state; 640k households. That's 200WH/household. It won't keep air conditioners running perhaps, but it'll keep the phones and Internet working.

Since the inverter output power is only 100 MW, so the 129 MWh battery should last more than an hour. This is more than enough to start any emergency diesel generators or gas turbines, which take 5 to

15 minutes to start and synchronize with the net.

How will that actually operate, assuming that there are no separate grids for essential and non-essential equipment? Will there be remotely controlled (and fast) switches that the power company can control to switch off air conditioners in the event of a blackout so they can effectively control the load to be below 100 MW before the Tesla inverter takes over?

Ok, that makes sense then. The Soviets tried to do something like that by using turbines as flywheels while yanking the control rods around on a reactor with a positive void coefficient, I read it didn't work out too good...

In practice, power companies make agreements with large loads such as metal smelters or paper machines to shread the loads if there is a severe energy shortage.

The BESS battery system in Alaska is capable of providing 40 MW for 15 minutes and during that time start the emergency gas turbines or diesels.

The 100 MW for a million+ population sounds quite a bit low.

The stupid test was initially required to be performed at the Leningrad RBMK power plant (now south of St. Petersburg).

Fortunately for the western Europe, the engineers at that site understood the risks and refused.

The test was then moved to Ukraine with known results :-(

Of course. But those are large installations and they probably have a lot more controllability. Over here, the kWh price such a company pays is proportional to the load they present during certain intervals which are indicated by the power company as a high-load interval. So the companies that try to optimize on their electricity bill already have the control equipment in place to reduce their load in these intervals.

That is why I wonder how it is done in this scenario. I can understand that high loads are turned off, but how do you do that in a city grid and will it be quick enough to switch over to the backup without having an interruption anyway?

In the past, we were introduced to "smart meters" that would provide metering with remote readout but also would enable remote switching by the power company "to operate the grid in a more efficient way during power shortages". As this was widely frowned upon, with the fear of creating a kind of classful grid where the consumers would have less reliable service than some others, it was finally removed from the spec and the "smart meters" that are now being installed do not have this capability anymore. I think it was limited to a single circuit per meter anyway.

So, when you want to use this kind of backup and you do not want to turn off entire neighborhoods, you probably have to install some kind of remotely controlled switches on high-power but not-so-essential equipment like air conditioners and electric heaters, and then you have to be able to turn them off in 10ms or so, with the guarantee that the remaining load will be below the 100 MW that Tesla is able to supply.

I still wonder how they are going to pull this off.

I didn't know that part. Shit!

How long can the energy just stored in the EM fields in the grid hold up? Long enough to switch in the batteries in AK apparently.

When the power fails it seems almost instant from my perception, but it's probably not actually instant.

About 5 microseconds per mile.

--

John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics

Actually, remote control (by grid signalling) new a/c units are pretty commonplace here. The power company can disable a/c for

30 minutes at a time, rolling suburb by suburb to reduce the load while keeping power on. I don't know more technical details though.

I haven't seen any announcement as to the chemistry of the cells that will be used to build the mega-battery for Australia. If it's Lithium Iron Phosphate, you can short the terminals and it won't explode. The wires will get hot, but there will not be a thermal runaway initiated battery fire. They could supply the NCA (nickel cobalt aluminum oxide) battery used in the Tesla motor cars. I believe that the lack of reports of embarrassing battery fires is a good indication that they're safe. However, it's most likely they will use the NMC (nickel manganese cobalt oxide) which is used by the Tesla Power Wall (and is cheaper than NCA. Sorry, but I don't have any info on the relative safety of NMC batteries.

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Are the big batteries made out of thousands of AA cells?

Is that the story that was in silicon chip magazine for april 1? As far as that battery is concerned it is only to make up temporary shortfalls while gas generators are fired up. It is big enough for that.

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I think it was quite clear that it is a 100 MW, 127 MWh system. I.e. it should be able to deliver 100 MW for about an hour.

It was my impression that the one and sole purpose of this system was to prevent "rolling blackouts" in the case of a power shortage or outage.

So, covering the capacity limit with rolling blackouts does not appear to be an option. It has to be more clever than that.

A detailed study of the power requirements of the area would have to be made, but covering a 640k-household area with a 100 MW power backup is going to be tricky at best, no matter how many non-essential customers you are able to cut off (assuming those do not include the households).

As so often in energy technology, the claims made on the evening news and in the daily papers rarely withstand back-of-the-envelope analysis.