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I cant help but think that its biggest benefit appears to be that it can exploit weaknesses in the bidding and pricing systems created by the cartels and administrators that manage how electricity is billed and managed on the national grid.
Once they reengineer these pricing and supply systems, those benefits might not necessarily continue as I am sure the cartels want to maximise their profits. So that might dramatically impact on the viability of more battery systems
But at least if it pays for itself in some way thats a good thing for SA.
Its original purpose was to provide power stability in the event of grid breakdowns and demand surges - not to act as a fluctuating "share price" trading mechanism !
There was no mention in that article if it managed to avert any possible problems through our last Summer - from a power perspective we might have sailed through unaffected with or without it. Maybe we can never know.
The writer makes the point -
“So that’s great for the first battery in the market,” he added, “but if you’ve already had 55 per cent of the FCAS that are now gone, right… and a 90 per cent drop in price, then the business case for the second battery, of course, is a bit less attractive.
“So I wish the second battery in South Australia a lot of luck!”
So Frequency Control Ancillary Services (FCAS) - ie holding the grid at a stable 50hz appears to be its biggest benefit by being able to be activated and deactivated in 200 millseconds and to take advantage of micro periods of frequency instability.
That is one aspect of grid stability, and no doubt helpful for overall grid stability.
Actual power supply as an alternative generator source for a prolonged period is another - so how would the battery system perform in the event of the loss of an interconnector or as happened, the strom damage toppling of multiple towers and loss of the other wind generated supplies.
My understanding is that it actually has a relatively low total energy availability (not a lot of power for not a lot of time), but maybe thats enough to protect the rest of the system ?
As someone who lost power for approx 2.5 days and 4 days last time this occurred and had to throw away fridges and freezers of food and be unable to function normally - I am much more interested in how the system will protect me from that sort of outage than whether it was able to make money by micromanaging FCAS !
I guess I have a foot in both camps here !
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