renesd
Joined 10 years ago
Joined 10 years ago
Mods, please fix the title?
Because it's a giant waste that is destroying the planet, and is economically irresponsible and noncompetitive?
Why should the arseholes who produce things that break in one year have a competitive advantage over companies that do the right thing by their customers and by the planet?
The chance of another similar storm knocking out the power lines again, which now have bigger maintenance crews, is very small. But if there is another blackout and they didn't do anything? They'd be in big trouble with the newspapers.
So Tesla really sold a risk product. Since SA could have spent the money on more generation. But not all people understand that.
The 100MW stage of that wind farm cost $250 million, and took some years to reach agreement, and some years to build. By promising to build the battery quicker, they have covered that risk during the time they need it.
They could have installed another wind farm the same size in a different part of the state in order to reduce the risk, and fill up the valleys of power generation. That has been proven to work too, and the benefit is you have more power generation in the peaks.
The cost of the blackout was estimated to have cost $367 million to business. 12% of the businesses had backup power generators themselves, and about a third of the businesses had bought insurance for such situations. Life critical systems are required to have independent backup power.
By the time it's built there will probably be a similar amount of solar power installed as the battery (by current rates of installation). There's 2,034 MW of industrial solar being constructed in Australia for 2017. This doesn't include stuff going onto roofs of houses, of which there are millions of houses already covered and more being done. 5KW solar installed in Australia can be done for $5,000AUD or less for a 5KW system. That's $100 million AUD for 100MW on 20,000 homes.
There's also a lead smelter which is being upgraded, so it will have modern equipment which lets it use power more dynamically... effectively making it a battery. It can take in power, or not, as it needs. They can also shut down their power hungry desalination plant if needed (which they don't really need when there is not a drought).
So now they have a backup battery, a backup gas power plant, and backup power lines to another state, more efficient industrial power users, and hundreds of thousands of small independent solar power generators.
They've definitely covered their arses.