Battery for state power grid. Really?

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Long story short, South Australia's power grid is at its limit and they are not ready to upgrade. Elon Musk comes along and says he'll build the worlds biggest battery and that will solve all of their problems. It looks as if they're falling for it. What's the world coming to?

For the benefit of members not located in Australia, it is worthy to note that this is indeed a 'long' story and unfortunately directly connected and affected by Political ideology presenting here.

It is correct to say South Australia's power grid and HV interconnection to generation facilities on the East Coast has limitations relating to capacity.... as does present in other States during peak loading demand.

The SA issue became apparent following a severe storm event that resulted in several South Australian HV transmission towers [thus feeders] collapse. SA is really at the bum end of East Coast interconnection GRID.
A certain variety of political entities seized upon the event to push their anti-renewable energy agenda.

Generation capacity is NOT the major problem, nor type of facility generating this power. It is GRID capacity and redundancy, so lets not get distracted here.

The root problem is ideology and those who push an agenda that places commercial profit above community need..... and entrenching environmentally compromising practices such as burning coal for base load generation.

The other less obvious problem is that of the education system and short attention span/memory of the general public who install idiots and sleaze bags to positions of power - the 'power' to determine and deceive.

Thats the 'power problem' we have here.
 

PRR

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> they're already limiting on peaks so I have doubts about the base supply capacity.

The Peak/Base ratio is WHY storage makes sense.

Peak-to-dip ratio of electric demand is often 20:1.

You have to supply the peaks (or have blackouts). So over a day the system runs average half of capacity over very large areas, even less over small areas.

Power sources generally do not match load demand. Many large systems run best at steady load. Coal burners have heat-up and shut-down losses so you like them run steady. Nuclear plants are expensive so you like to keep them running hard. Solar and Wind are very inconvenient because they do not happen when the load peaks. (You'd think solar and air-conditioning go together, but building heat lingers long after the sun goes down.) Transmission lines are very expensive so you like to work them steady.

Storage can be an answer. My town takes say 20MW peak, 1MW at night, so needs a 20MW transmission line from the dam, but the 24hr average is nearer 2MW. With perfect storage, we could run steady 2MW on the wire, sell the other 18MW of aluminum. Or grow our town radically without buying more wire.

Or store Solar/Wind on a bright blustery day to use later in the week when it is calm and cloudy with an oppressive tropical front hanging over.

Traditional storage is water, either a dam allowed to rise and deplete, or two lakes at different elevations. However the supply of both is limited and the US has mostly out-grown water power sources. (All the fall of Connecticut rivers was allocated in the 1800s.) And water-front property is fashionable, so now draw-down is limited when rich homeowners object when the lake turns to mud-flats around a shallow puddle. Locally fish-kill has been a big issue.

Batteries "can" be a patch on the problem. Store energy long-term and release it short-term. Same as water supply systems which pump to a tower day and night, then release a great gush for a fire or TV football halftime.

Historically the cost of batteries was absurd compared to added cost of boiler and wires to cover the peaks. Cars have a similar problem: you want 100HP to merge onto the freeway, but then cruise at 20HP. The Prius uses battery storage to even-out the load on the engine. Good results, good price but not great. Popular but not taken-over the world.

Tesla goes all the way with all-electric, which means Musk is committed to producing insane quantities of batteries. Cars need high Energy/Weight ratio, and this means he may have some supply of "reject" and "used" batteries which are low energy for their weight. Power grid storage is not so weight sensitive (they don't go anywhere). Such second-grade batteries "could" be fine storage to take peak loads off the grid. Batteries are not offensive like coal, oil, or even gas generators, so may be placed in town, even per-home, reducing distribution loads down to the small lines.

But does Musk have enough? My guess is that (when I commuted) my car-energy was similar to my home-energy. Converted to all-electric, this suggests big car battery and bigger (less dense) home battery. So we are likely to see "all" cars gone over to all-electric before we see a respectable penetration of home batteries. This is probably a thousands-fold increase over current battery production, so all the growth-pain of an expanding industry which works in high-energy material and liable to leak nasty-stuff into workers and neighborhoods.

(I'm less "worried" about exploitation of low-pay workers. We are on the verge of automating most drudge labor and putting much of the world out of work. A battery factory is a natural for automation.)

In the short-term: Musk and others can not supply enough battery storage to shave more than a small part of our electric peaks. But they can get people excited about the idea.
 
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I saw an episode of NOVA recently which covered most if not all storage solutions and the one that perked my interest most was about flywheel energy storage for grid power. Thought it was interesting as the bearings are maglev inspired.

Here is the episode: YouTube

Seeing as magnets are the bearings the flywheels should by rights last for decades without much if any need of maintenance.

Flow batteries are also awesome.

YouTube
YouTube
 
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Tesla goes all the way with all-electric, which means Musk is committed to producing insane quantities of batteries.
Tesla uses Lithium Manganese Cobalt Aluminum Oxide battery which has tremendous energy density -- the limiting factor may be cobalt which is largely mined by hand in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Cars need high Energy/Weight ratio, and this means he may have some supply of "reject" and "used" batteries which are low energy for their weight.

Batteries for the Chinese vehicle market are Lithium Iron Phosphate variety lower energy density which is appropriate for the Chinese urban market. There isn't a similar long distance market as with the US. i.e., we think nothing of hopping in the car and babysitting the grand-kids 30 miles up I-287

I read about the shortage of lithium from many of the stock-market touts, quite reminiscent of the shortage of rare earth metals. the number of holes drilled in the earth for lithium has increased 20x in the past two years, and development of brine deposits has doubled. Price theory at work.

Unfortunately, the cobalt yield outside the Congo is not great. You can get some cobalt in extracting nickel, but yield is only 2% and what do you do with all that nickel?
 
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