Worth a try!

[sn1987a (Barry)]

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-03-1...y-woes/8344084



Wow moving fast!

http://www.smh.com.au/technology/tec...10-guv9pj.html

[billdan (Bill)]

He's more than welcome to do my house (for free), and I will give him a lifetimes worth of free advertising.

[Exfso (Peter)]

I live in SA, definitely not holding my breath on this. Our power supply in this state is probably the worst in the World, and I don't think many would disagree. It is a disgrace.

[sn1987a (Barry)]

I say stop screwing around and not only take up the offer but increase it to a 2 or 3 Gigawatt contract for a further discount. Jobs, power problem solved and a good kick in the balls for the racketeering power companies.

[AndrewJ]

I can just see the future ( a bit like here when they were thinking of taxing people for collecting rainfall onto their roofs )
Elon eventually gives people the ability to make local islands ( say one block ) to make it more viable.
Govt loses income so taxes sunlight collection.

Andrew

[entity62]

This would be a better storage system, and South Australian made.

www.1414degrees.com.au

Darrell

[sn1987a (Barry)]

Well where've they been then?, they need to pull their head out and step up. All they gotta do is match 100 days and $250 Kwh pack end now.

[julianh72 (Julian)]

I'm sure that batteries will be part of the mix for energy stability / security, but I do worry about whether the reporters and politicians who are getting caught up in Elon Musk's plan to "fix" South Australia's energy problems have any grasp of the scale of what he is offering, and what it would take to "fix" things?

As I understand it, Musk is proposing a 100 MW.hr battery pack. That facility could store surplus generated energy (e.g. when the wind turbines are running while the demand for electricity is low), and then provide 10 MW for 10 hours, or 100 MW for 1 hour, for example.

According to the live chart on this page http://www.statedevelopment.sa.gov.a...ply-and-market at the time of writing this post (9:25 am on Wednesday 15 March), South Australia is generating 803 MW by Gas, 675 MW by wind, and 192 MW by solar photo-voltaic, for a total in-state instantaneous generation of 1670 MW.

So Elon Musk's "fix" will store enough energy to supply something like 6% of South Australia's current instantaneous electricity demand for 1 hour.

Hmmmm ....

[jenchris (Jennifer)]

Hi Julian,
The switching state of the systems means that most brownouts occur because when a load goes over a certain level, some areas have to be switched off completely - meaning an instant spinning reserve is produced that is as big as the smallest generator on the line.
That 6% may be enough to obviate switching off at all under some situations.
It would be better if load shedding were anticipated by smaller sections so that hi end usage like water heaters and ovens were switched on a separate supply so that they only were usable on a less than peak demand period.
Traditionally Monday morning at 7am was the peak load for the week. That is all the small businesses starting up and all the workers having showers and breakfasts.
Staggering part of that would be easy to do - a timer switch that stopped all water heaters in the country (obviously locally - as in in your switchbox)from going on would drop the peak demand by a huge margin.
For hi temperature periods, HVAC should be set to a rational level - not 16c as you find it in some supermarkets and hotels.
Set to 24, everyone would have a chance at a comfort level.
If households were paying for a max demand tariff, you can bet the system would change and we'd have spinning reserve coming out of our ears.
Batteries should be installed in homes that already have solar systems or at least in areas that have a high incidence of solar/wind generation - that way they can collect local power which is easier to rechannel area by area and won't affect the power factor as badly.

[julianh72 (Julian)]

@jenchris,

As I said, "I'm sure that batteries will be part of the mix for energy stability / security". You're also 100% correct that load balancing strategies (off-peak hot water, etc) will also help enormously.

100 MW.hr of batteries would be a very useful piece of infrastructure - but it won't "fix" South Australia's energy problems. Let's just remind ourselves of what actually happened on 28 September (the state-wide blackout which precipitated all the recent talk about energy security):

. 445 MW of wind production was lost due to system issues during the storm event. Elon Musk's proposed battery could have picked up that load for about 13 minutes - but only if it was located so as to still be accessible by the customers. Note that the fundamental problem was faults in the transmission system (the "poles and wires"), not the wind turbines themselves. If the transmission system fails, it doesn't matter how much generating capacity you have, the power can't get to where its needed!

. The load was shifted onto the Heywood Interconnector, which shut down when its automatic overload protection system kicked in. This meant that there was now a loss of supply of 900 MW (or about 6 minutes of battery back-up).

[Ref: https://www.aemo.com.au/-/media/File...ATE-REPORT.pdf ]

100 MW.hr of battery back-up may or may not have helped for the specific set of circumstances on 28 September (but only if it was appropriately located to deal with the transmission system faults), but it is simply not big enough to "fix" South Australia's energy problems.

Realistically, you are looking at multiple-gigawatt-hours of storage, at distributed locations across the state, to really provide the kind of security that people are envisaging. 100 MW.hr of battery back-up would just be the first small step in this process.

Don't get me wrong - I'm not arguing against pursuing this idea, just raising a note of caution that it could be a very expensive white elephant if it isn't planned and thought through properly. If nothing else, we mustn't let the politicians declare the problem to have been "fixed" if / when they sign a deal with Elon Musk (or whoever) to build a giant battery pack somewhere in suburban Adelaide.

[The_bluester (Paul)]

Originally Posted by jenchris

Hi Julian,
The switching state of the systems means that most brownouts occur because when a load goes over a certain level, some areas have to be switched off completely - meaning an instant spinning reserve is produced that is as big as the smallest generator on the line.
That 6% may be enough to obviate switching off at all under some situations.
It would be better if load shedding were anticipated by smaller sections so that hi end usage like water heaters and ovens were switched on a separate supply so that they only were usable on a less than peak demand period.
Traditionally Monday morning at 7am was the peak load for the week. That is all the small businesses starting up and all the workers having showers and breakfasts.
Staggering part of that would be easy to do - a timer switch that stopped all water heaters in the country (obviously locally - as in in your switchbox)from going on would drop the peak demand by a huge margin.
For hi temperature periods, HVAC should be set to a rational level - not 16c as you find it in some supermarkets and hotels.
Set to 24, everyone would have a chance at a comfort level.
If households were paying for a max demand tariff, you can bet the system would change and we'd have spinning reserve coming out of our ears.
Batteries should be installed in homes that already have solar systems or at least in areas that have a high incidence of solar/wind generation - that way they can collect local power which is easier to rechannel area by area and won't affect the power factor as badly.

What you are talking about is IMO one of the great missed opportunities of the smart meter rollout in Victoria.

With control down to the individual meter level, how much smarter would it have been to have load control on separate outputs for electric hot water and air conditioning circuits. Far better to be able to stop 50,000 air conditioners for half an hour, then fire them back up and stop another 50,000 elsewhere, leaving simple fans and more important, refrigerators and the like humming away happily than the brute force approach of rolling blackout load shedding of half a suburb at a time.

I wonder how many people in SA came home after a few days away to find a freezer full of spoiled food as a circuit breaker tripped on reconnection (Which does sometimes happen) and they were not there to rectify it.

Agree on the aircon setting though, It has taken me some years but I have managed to talk my wife up from 21 degrees to 24 and I am working on 26. I have not quite gotten my point across that the point where that 24 degrees is measured is up at the roof and the hottest part of the room yet. We seem to be the opposite of normal households where I want the temp warmer than my wife does.

[Larryp (Laurie)]

Agree on the aircon setting though, It has taken me some years but I have managed to talk my wife up from 21 degrees to 24 and I am working on 26. I have not quite gotten my point across that the point where that 24 degrees is measured is up at the roof and the hottest part of the room yet. We seem to be the opposite of normal households where I want the temp warmer than my wife does.

An air conditioning engineer once told me that domestic units can only lower the room temp by about 10 degrees, and if the thermostat is set lower than that temperature differential, the machine is only working harder for no further gain.
Even if its 40 degrees outside, I set my unit to 24 degrees and I find that very satisfactory

[jenchris (Jennifer)]

We seem to produce waste at prodigious levels.
Water heaters that don't connect to the waste heat from an ac plant.
Vertical walls facing the sun that could be moderated by a shield that produced either electricity or hot water. Why do solar cells sit on roofs?
For a small drop in effectiveness you increase overall efficiency. Make the cells into louvres that cover the West wall and East wall of the home.
Place black.pipe on a wall that faces the sun and heat your domestic water.
I made a frame a few years ago that had black pvc pipe in it backed with sizalation and faced with Lexan.
It cost about 200 dollars and produced 7kw of heating ALL DAY

[AussieTrooper (Ben)]

Originally Posted by jenchris

We seem to produce waste at prodigious levels.
Water heaters that don't connect to the waste heat from an ac plant.
Vertical walls facing the sun that could be moderated by a shield that produced either electricity or hot water. Why do solar cells sit on roofs?
For a small drop in effectiveness you increase overall efficiency. Make the cells into louvres that cover the West wall and East wall of the home.
Place black.pipe on a wall that faces the sun and heat your domestic water.
I made a frame a few years ago that had black pvc pipe in it backed with sizalation and faced with Lexan.
It cost about 200 dollars and produced 7kw of heating ALL DAY

It blows me away that new houses claim to have a 6 star energy rating, without something as basic as eaves on the northern side.
I recently had the eaves extended on my living room, and it is far more effective than air con.