The fact that Australia has the largest functioning lithium-ion battery in the world, and yet the Federal Government of Australia has done nothing but ridicule and belittle its usefulness should give anyone a clue as to the power of the coal lobby in Australia.
Any news of the flexible uses of this battery should be published far and wide just to blow away a lot of the misconceptions about 'anything other than coal and gas' that are rampant throughout much of Australia's mainstream media.
This is difficult because taxpayers often take a dim view on their money being spent on marketing government programs. Unfortunately with large companies advertising directly against programs that often run contrary to what is in the public interest, it is arguably in the public interest to market public sector programs.
This issue being what is the difference between this and tax payer funded propaganda...? It's a tough area of discussion by any stretch, but its become clear that advertising/informing the public is kinda needed to offset the campaigning against public programs from large industry.
Yep, my mistake.
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.
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.
[[Citation needed.]]
How much was the shortfall?
How long could the battery have sustained the shortfall?
How much damage would there have been at the usual response time?
How what is the ROI without government subsidy to building huge battery storage?
Regarding the ROI and subsidies, I guess you would need to compare them to the billions received by the incumbents :)
The power crisis in South Australia has been extremely costly. The cost for the proposed fast start gas power plant was 380 million.
The state-wide blackout cost businesses 367 million.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-12-09/sa-blackout-costs-coul...
This battery will cost taxpayers 50 million over 10 years, apparently. Seems like a pretty good deal.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-12-01/tesla-giant-battery-of...
What worked in the article?
It only says the battery supplied less than 2% of the lost power for about 5 seconds before regular power generators took over.
It is supposed to kick in and help support the South Australia power grid when power drops. It did that, faster than the designated backup did.
It worked as designed.
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.