Future of the Australian Electricity Market

[Chris Parks]

We have all seen the many new battery technologies that were going to magically be the next best thing and cheaper than sliced bread but strictly for large grid use this may be one answer. The first installation is now being planned and built in the US.

[Bushmiller]

Chris

Thanks for that link. It looks promising. I liked the fact that he was on top of the "Price performance ratio" and that he "Thought about cost from day one."

Edit: I would like to know more about initially raising the temp to the required 700°C and to what extent that temp is maintained by cycling the battery. In other words how sustaining it is. i was just a little scepticsl that it might be able to hold temperature and supply heating for external use. That just seemed a little too good to be true.



Regards
Paul

[Chris Parks]

The single thing that impressed me was that they are putting into service the first unit. That they got it out of the lab and developed the design, production and manufacturing processes in ten years was fairly impressive also. I suppose the heat maintenance levels might be IP he does not want to talk about except in the most general terms.

[woodPixel]

wow. Maybe too wow.

There was no discussion of voltage differences, current, cathode/anode deterioration, etc.

The temperature thing is an easy thing to do.

I REALLY loved the chemistry - it was instantaneously obvious.... self refining too.. gods I loved that.... but let me find the all-important voltage/amp equation!


edit: Give me a BREAK! This can't be real... Technology: Ambri

This is incredible. It can't be real. If it is - adios coal, nuclear and hello electrification of everything..... Crikey, these things can be put into the basements of buildings, or even a few for the outback town/farm..... Shipping is as trivial as a container, plugging in is trivial, charging is trivial, getting to capacity is trivial. Its all too good to be true.

[Chris Parks]

It would seem to be a company that is ripe for a sell out to a bigger company and that may be what they had in mind all along. The big players must be looking at them with cheque books in hand.

[Lyle]

ABC news rhis am. Seems the AEMC is going to reccomend the removal of the ban on charging households with solar generation a fee for exporting to the grid. Something about reducing the solar gridlocks.
Am I being cynical in thinking this is just another profit adjustment??
Australians with rooftop solar panels could soon be charged for exporting power into the grid, under proposed changes - ABC News

[Chris Parks]

Unfortunately the grid issues that exist are true and need to be managed as outlined in the linked story. Batteries are most probably the ultimate answer and if they were subsidised instead of addressing the grid infrastructure issues that might be an answer. Maybe grid installed larger batteries such as I linked to above could work and not one big one. Times are changing and there will have to be flexibility on both sides of the equation from both the generation and retail sides.

[BobL]

Here's a link to an interestingg "room temperature" liquid metal battery.

New Room-Temperature Liquid-Metal Battery Could Be the Path to Powering the Future - UT News

It's only at the "just invented" stage so they have a few issues to sort out.
Thing is, this is all in its infancy - about where morse code was compared to modern coms.

[Chris Parks]

Unfortunately until battery technology hits the streets it is vapour ware as the kiddies say. Many different labs are pursuing many different technologies including some very substantial research into solid state in Eastern Europe. The one I linked to seems to be the first to take the battery out of the small cylinder form and get it into production at this stage.

For those who want to understand more about the grid issues this link on what is known as the Duck Curve is worth a read The Duck Curve | NuScale Power

[Bushmiller]

Lyle

Interesting report. I notice that this suggestion is coming primarily from the SA system where there has been the largest uptake of domestic and commercial solar in Australia as a proportion of the State's demand. By that I mean QLD may have the same level of solar generation (I am just surmising as I have not checked the figures) but that is in a state where the demand is three times as much so the ratio is quite different. The issue in SA is that under some circumstances there is more solar generation than demand. Not all the time but is is fast approaching that situation and the article mentions that in one instance 100% of demand was supplied by solar (no wind?). In commercial systems the owners will just shut the panels down, but in a domestic situation this is impractical: For example, you may not be at home to switch your system off. No doubt down the track this could be modified to switch it off remotely from a mobile phone for example.

However, it does look as though they are recognising the situation where at times they will have to limit the solar generation because there is too much. They can do this via the commercial installations with the spot price, but it has no effect with domestic solar PV generation. My guess, and it is a guess, is that the commercial companies are starting to say they are disadvantaged by this arrangement and they are lobbying to restrict the domestic generators. Having said that I don't quite see how a price penalty on rooftop solar will limit generation: It still has to be turned off somehow.

The last comment I would make is that right at the end of the article it states that this is some years away!

Chris

I think the installation of domestic battery storage could be the next level of solar as soon as the batteries reduce in price to an affordable level. The Ambri battery looks very hopeful in that regard, but it is early days.

Regards
Paul

[Lyle]

What sticks with me is that apparently they knew this situation was approaching some 10-15 years ago. But now, their solution is to penalise the "generator". I wonder how those big solar companies will work around the penalties.

[Chris Parks]

The really interesting part of all this is recent announcements concerning massive roof top solar installations on commercial building roof tops by a company recently....Move to build grid-scale solar on industrial rooftops across Australia

This most probably follows on by a NSW Government decision in 2020.....NSW amends laws to pave the way for rooftop solar and big batteries – pv magazine Australia

Would I be cynical in noting that one of the principals in the company is an ex Liberal Premier of NSW and the plan was facilitated by a change of legislation by the current Liberal Government in NSW. I suspect if solar feeds back into the grid became a really big problem in NSW then it would be the residential systems that get turned off and not the large systems proposed in the first link.

I am more inclined to think that smaller multiple batteries installed at various places might be an idea that will fly. For instance every small town could have one and for some it would ensure a more reliable supply in times of fire, flood etc or simply that the grid supplying the town is old and things get broken. Smaller batteries are more easily transported and installed than one large one and if the one large battery has problems then the whole grid suffers but that is not an issue with multiple small batteries.

[russ57]

I quite like Redflow – Sustainable Energy Storage zinc bromine flow battery. 10kwh storage, 100% depth of discharge.
Getting a lot of business for remote area power, eg telecoms, wilderness etc.

[Lyle]

Weren't the distribution systems sold off to private consortiums. Instead of restricting the use of domestic solar, why not fix the systems to cope. We're supposed to be the clever country after all. Our climate lends nicely to solar.
Why not embrace that and design new developments to be capable of supporting solar. Maybe suburban storage of excess capacity.
Simplistic I know. But that'd make more sense to me than trying to screw more money out of those with domestic solar.
Those without solar would also benefit and not be left behind.
There must be other solutions.

[Bushmiller]

Under government ownership there were the generators and the distributors, who owned the transmission lines, substations etc. For years the government had reaped huge revenues and when they decided to privatise the entities looked extremely attractive from a revenue point of view. The government received a huge (one-off) windfall and the buyers inherited a system that had not been maintained sufficiently and was desperately in need of upgrades.

It is probably true to say that the system was never designed to cope with rooftop solar, but the problems are exacerbated by having an antiquated system in the first place. The distribution companies are blaming solar, but that is actually only part of the story and to a large extent a convenient excuse.

While I think that the next stage of domestic solar may well be the inclusion of batteries, that will only happen when the batteries drop to an economic price point, which has yet to be determined, and we householders have the ability to switch off their solar through the day thus enabling them to charge their batteries and the facility to release their stored energy to the grid at night at a higher rate.

There are two aspects of solar generation I have to check. The first is that when solar generation statistics are quoted they often don't include rooftop power supplied to the grid at any one moment in time. It is difficult to monitor this for the moment. There is information, of course, about how much rooftop solar is installed, but at any one time it will supply varying amounts of power. This is because some is being consumed in the household, the day is cloudy or the system is dirty and not generating to it's full potential. There is clearly a means of working out for revenue purposes how much a system has supplied, but this does appear to translate into a minute by minute figure.

The second aspect is that i have been told that the commercial installation have a price guarantee. The figure that has been indicated to me is $80/MWhr. That figure, if it is true, is nearly twice the average wholesale price at the time of writing. I stress that i need to verufy this, but if true debunks the statement that solar is now cheaper than the traditional mainstream supplies. I should also point out that the original incentives for rooftop solar are still in place and these vary between 44c/KWhr and 52c/KWhr. That equates to $440 & $520/MWhr!!!. I think those subsidies are due to run out within the next five years. The protagonists of solar power, including myself, tend to forget this.

Regards
Paul