As early as March of this year, Elon Musk has bet on Australia on Twitter: He claims that Tesla can build a 100MW lithium battery system in South Australia for 100 days, and if committed, this Battery system will be the largest battery in the world today, and Musk also said Australia will receive an unconditional full refund if Tesla fails to meet that target by the stipulated timeframe.
Tesla Construction of large lithium-ion battery pack (source: Reuters)
Eventually, Musk kept his promise that the battery system was officially launched earlier this month, and when the battery pack was officially released, summer in South Australia started in December, Also ushered in the peak of electricity in the past two weeks, the official name of the battery system Hornsdale Power Reserve completed the test.
As Australia South Australia has led the country, today we dominate the world.
Tesla and Australia South Australia will work together to deploy the landmark agreement - the world's largest large-scale lithium-ion battery pack project.
On December 14, a major power plant at the largest thermal power plant in the country, a major power plant that failed, led to a sudden shortage of electricity. The power shortage caused by the generator reached 560 MW, providing 170,000 Australian households with electricity for daily living . Musk announced before the public that Tesla's batteries solve the power shortage problem often encountered in summer in South Australia and it happened right now!
Just after the failure of that power plant, Tesla battery, some 1,000 kilometers away from the power plant, immediately delivered 7 MW of power to the grid system, with which the plant was able to troubleshoot immediately And it is worth mentioning that Tesla's battery reacted fast enough to almost complete power transmission in a blink of an eye, just as fast as energy regulator regulators in Australia had no time to count shipments.
The same thing happened again on December 22nd: Another failed thermal power plant at the power plant led to the loss of 353 MW of electricity, and this time again Tesla battery turned the tide In a few milliseconds delivered 16 MW of electricity to protect the grid system does not appear paralyzed.
Tesla Inc. set up the world's largest lithium battery storage facility for South Australia and Tesla CEO, Elon Musk, is proud to say "to solve the power shortage in South Australia from now on." For now, , Did indeed play a role in the ensuing electric accident and was therefore considered by many media as "power grid savior." But experts believe that it is worth noting that Tesla batteries should not be overreached, but it does not matter.
Zhang Wenjie, an expert in the Department of Engineering and Systems Science at Tsinghua University, said on ptt that 560 MW is a medium-sized unit, a national-type power grid, and will not crash out of a medium-sized unit. For example, Taichung Thermal Power Plant has ten units , Each of which is 550 MW each. When there is a tripping accident in Taichung thermal power plant, Taiwan will not collapse due to the absence of a Tesla battery storage unit.
Almost all grids have their own back-up energy resources, which store electricity during the power-up period and then release the previously stored power resources when needed, most of which use fossil fuels, fossils Fuel remains the most stable means of providing electricity in emergencies, and Tesla's battery system uses wind power, which many believe will or will replace our fossil fuels.
The project has an energy storage capacity of 100MW / 129MWh and is powered by Tesla's commercial Powerpack system, which interfaces with the Hornsdale wind farm, which is being developed by French renewable energy supplier Neoen.
In fact, Tesla's battery system can only support local grid systems, and Tesla batteries can not function at all if there is a power failure in Australia, and the battery can not be solo on its own problem.
Although Tesla's battery system is clean, large-scale and so on, there are still many imperfections that can power about 30,000 homes, yet 70 MW out of 100 MW can only last 10 minutes ; The remaining 30 MW can only provide 3 hours of electricity.
In South Australia, the official grid backup system is a thermal power plant called Gladstone Power Station, which also sent electricity to the grid a few seconds after a fault, although it was slower than Te Sila battery system, but it has largely alleviated the pressure on Tesla batteries.
In other words, although lithium battery power plants have a very fast response speed, they still can not finally get rid of the fossil fuel support.
Tesla battery system, there is another unavoidable problem: this rely on wind power to generate batteries, the stability can not be fundamentally guaranteed.Lithium batteries can only store a few weeks of power, once the charging resources are removed, It immediately begins to consume the previously stored electricity.In other words, Musk's oversized battery will become useless after the local season has passed, so for now, Tesla's battery system can only be used Electric peak backup system.
South Australia's wind power plants are large-scale and power supplies are uneven, so there is a lot of jump-offs that require Tesla batteries, which can be more costly to match with lithium batteries, but the power supply is still high It is for this reason that such lithium battery power plants are not universally available all over the world: governments do not want to spend money on something that is userless for most of the year.
Having said that, many analysts still believe that the cost of renewable energy and batteries will decline rapidly in the future, allowing such systems to compete with fossil fuels by 2025. Tesla's success in South Australia , But also let many government agencies see the potential of such battery systems, and they hope to find a way to reduce the cost of such systems and accelerate the phase out of old fossil fuels.