Tesla Builds World's Largest Lithium-Ion Battery in Under 100 Days

DooKey

DooKey

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Elon Musk just saved himself $50M by completing the largest lithium-ion battery in the world prior to his 1 December deadline. This sucker can hold enough power to supply 8,000 homes for 24 hours. If he could get Tesla's car building act together then maybe he could get Model 3's out into the market at a decent rate. Regardless, it's still a notable achievement to build such a large power center in such a short period of time.

The project is part of a $550 million plan by the state to guarantee energy supply following a statewide blackout last year that turned into a national political debate over energy security and costs. A 250-megawatt gas-fired generator, expected to cost $360 million, is also due to come online this summer to provide extra power.
 
Say what you will about Elon and his "handouts", or the dirtiness of mining for lithium (IMO the supply side is the issue not the dirtiness), but I feel that having batteries in the house will be the future of power distribution. You don't even need solar, simply storing power that otherwise needs to be cranked down in the twilight hours from coal/NG power plants and then being able to use it later when there is peak demand means less power plants needed in the long run.

Now if you can just get the cost of said household battery packs down, it'll be like solar where it used to be a luxury now it's much more affordable.
 
If this is in response to a state wide outage, then the real question is: how long will this battery "pack" will power the entire state? Probably only a few seconds. Seems like a stunt to me. The NG plant is much more useful.
 
There is a legitimate use for batteries in grid electrical distribution.

You don't need them to provide power for hours and hours - that number is just marketing fluff, and are great for the solar industry who really wants to provide power at night.

They are just there to provide a buffer. The "grid' may have hundreds of power plants running on it at any given time. None of them are 100% reliable - they break, fault, grid ties trip open, people hit power poles, large loads start and stop with no warning. Renewables can start and stop with no given notice.

All of that places stress on the grid. You put too much stress in there, and it starts to cascade and that's when you get brownouts and wide spread blackouts.

Batteries are just there to act as a buffer and smooth a lot of that out. It can provide power long enough for a standby plant to get online if a big one trips off. It can help a grid ride through a grounded power line until the local recloser opens. It can supply and absorb the surges that occur with starting and stopping large loads, and renewables changing status.

I think it's an impressive accomplishment, and I think battery storage is a good thing for the grid, but I question the purpose of putting all the storage in one big bank. If they had split that up into, say, 10 smaller batteries, and installed them at 10 various points across the grid, it would have added a lot more resiliency to the system while still providing the exact same net effect. But then you don't get to say you built the worlds largest battery, I guess.
 
sfsuphysics said:
Now if you can just get the cost of said household battery packs down, it'll be like solar where it used to be a luxury now it's much more affordable.
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The cost is already very low. Tesla products are marked up really high for what they actually consist of. You're buying the name.

From what I can tell, Elon Musk has banked most of his battery tech on off the shelf lithium cells like the 16850. They are a commodity item produced in the billions or trillions, cost next to nothing, and are trivial to wire up if you have any basic knowledge of electricity.



Tesla has come up with a few new cells to use in their batteries other than the 16850, but they aren't anything special/proprietary and are still available as off the shelf components. Tesla literally builds its batteries by purchasing metric fuck tons of off-the-shelf parts. Economies of scale insure these parts are insanely cheap.
 
And the little tidbit they left out:. The power shortage was based on the fact Aussies were relying on wind power which is unreliable in most parts of the world.
 
DigitalGriffin said:
And the little tidbit they left out:. The power shortage was based on the fact Aussies were relying on wind power which is unreliable in most parts of the world.
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It was a simple setting adjustment that technicians fixed, but the coal plants were too slow and expensive to save the day, something storage does not suffer from as it acts as the buffer to help that aging 1900s tech keep up with modern needs.
 
That's some really expensive electricity right there. I'm still rooting for 4th gen nuclear reactors that solve the classic problems of nuclear. Most people disregard the fact that most of their money goes towards manufacturing energy and not their own personal electricity bill. I just don't see this wind and solar ever being capable of delivering the necessary power at a reasonable price, and certainly not for massively energy intense manufacturing. It's easier to solve the nuclear problems than it is to solve the nano scale manufacturing challenges of batteries and solar panels.
 
It's not just for when you run out of juice in peak hours, but when you have oversupply as well. For instance, you can't just shut down a nuclear power plant, in some cases the utility will pay to have consumers use more electricity cause they can't store the excess. I capitalize on this in my state and charge my car overnight
 
Wierdo said:
It was a simple setting adjustment that technicians fixed, but the coal plants were too slow and expensive to save the day, something storage does not suffer from as it acts as the buffer to help that aging 1900s tech keep up with modern needs.
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South Australia shut down its last coal power plant in 2016. For the September 2016 blackout, the battery wouldn't have been enough to prevent the blackout as 400+ MW of wind disconnected in seconds and overloaded the interconnector with a neighboring state.
 
SLee said:
South Australia shut down its last coal power plant in 2016. For the September 2016 blackout, the battery wouldn't have been enough to prevent the blackout as 400+ MW of wind disconnected in seconds and overloaded the interconnector with a neighboring state.
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True, most of their coal plants are operating beyond their design life, so they got a big problem on their hand, compounded by lobbying to replace them with more of the same rather than modernize the grid like Europe did. It also complicates things that the Australian energy grid is operated as an open market rather than an essential service.

The coal plant that got shut down abruptly was done with little coordination, basically just based on owner's profit motives. The market reacted by spinning up gas generators and charging extremely high prices for the service in the energy "stock market" so to speak.

The point of the batteries is not to keep things running for hours, it's just to fill the demand gaps and give operators time to spin up whatever slow starting reserve they have and buy time. Also outside of emergencies they help keep energy prices in check, trading excess energy during high peak hours and then charging the batteries back up when things are slow again, it works great for Australia as prices there are some of the highest in the west.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-03-...ded-to-secure-future-of-energy-supply/8339116

Without getting too technical, the national electricity market is a machine. It has to stay in sync. It was designed last century to transmit power from huge clunking turbines and spinning wheels, not the nimble inverters connected to wind farms and solar cells.

With no more coal generators, and some gas generators lying idle, South Australia has become increasingly reliant on the interconnector from Victoria to provide not only supply, but the inertia required to keep the system frequency in balance.
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The aging infrastructure is a big problem, but they have to fix it sooner or later and ween themselves off their obsolete plants.
 
PaulP said:
If this is in response to a state wide outage, then the real question is: how long will this battery "pack" will power the entire state? Probably only a few seconds. Seems like a stunt to me. The NG plant is much more useful.
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Its a battery... No one said otherwise. Just a grid UPS.
 
CaptNumbNutz said:
The cost is already very low. Tesla products are marked up really high for what they actually consist of. You're buying the name.

From what I can tell, Elon Musk has banked most of his battery tech on off the shelf lithium cells like the 16850. They are a commodity item produced in the billions or trillions, cost next to nothing, and are trivial to wire up if you have any basic knowledge of electricity.
Click to expand...

So what's you're saying is if you have the know how to build something from scratch it can be much cheaper than if you bought one that is already premade for you? Wow color me shocked! Not. Solar power is affordable too for most, if you just do the legwork of installation and procurrment of parts.

But I wonder exactly how cheap they are, the videos you showed has them disassembling a Tesla car battery, I guess it's the same tech as the power wall? Well except for things like an inverter I'm sure. And the other video didn't really show much, yay he put batteries together in series, so how much more will it cost to make sure it is cooled? What about temperature regulation? any sort of logic software to detect faults? and of course as mentioned dc/ac inverter. I'm sure it can be done for cheaper than what Tesla sells, but I doubt it's as trivial as you're making it out to build one of comparable type. Yeah you can wire a bunch of cheap 18650 batteries you get on ebay together, but they're a tad more complex than that.
 
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