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https://reneweconomy.com.au/the-technology-is-there-batteries-are-reinventing-the-grid-and-leading-way-to-100-pct-renewables/>
"The head of Tesla Energy in Australia, Josef Tadich, well remembers the day in
2017 that his team learned they had been mandated to build the now famous Tesla
big battery in Hornsdale, promised by their boss Elon Musk to be delivered in
just 100 days, soon after the statewide blackout in South Australia.
“There was kind of a stunned silence in the room,” Tadich says, not so much
because of the speed they had promised to deliver the project – although that
was challenging enough – but because of the scale.
No one had built a battery in the world that big, or anywhere close to it.
Tesla Energy itself had only been set up in Australia less than two years
earlier – Tadich was the very first employee – and up to then it had deployed a
mere handful of C&I projects using a few 50 kW Powerpack batteries.
Now they had to do something at a scale – 100 MW and 129 MWh – and a speed and
a level of sophistication that no one had imagined. And it meant that the
market operator and grid owners had to change the way they thought about the
operations of the National Electricity Market, Australia’s main grid.
“We had to redefine the way a generator worked in the NEM,” Tadich says in an
exclusive interview with
Renew Economy and its weekly podcast,
Energy
Insiders. “That was a pivotal moment in how we how we viewed the energy
transition.”
The Tesla big battery at Hornsdale was delivered on time, and quickly made its
impact on the market – smashing the cozy little gas cartel over the frequency
control market, stepping in to stabilise the grid when big coal generators
failed or when networks tripped.
But it was the speed, accuracy and flexibility of the technology that had the
biggest impact – then, and now, as grid experts seek to negotiate the path to a
grid that is free of fossil fuels, and is no longer dependent on spinning
machines.
Tadich remembers that it was the speed and versatility of the battery
technology and the inverters that stunned the experts and the grid and market
operators. They had not imagined – and the rules had not allowed for – a
machine could be a generator (discharging) one second, and a load (charging)
the next.
“How do you go from plus 30 megawatts to minus 60 megawatts so quickly?” Tadich
remembers one asking.
At one meeting with the grid operators, it was suggested that the speed of
response of big batteries might be one second, or less. But in reality it was
in milliseconds, and Tesla initially had to deliberately slow down the response
so everyone could understand what was going on.
“I think that AEMO (the Australian Energy Market Operator) really led the way
there in the way the system operates, and every system operator in the world
was and is watching,” Tadich says. “There was a lot of pressure when you’re
doing that, but we paved the way.”"
Share and enjoy,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics