Hornsdale Power Reserve saves $8.9m in 6months

Posted on August 8, 2018 by Mike — No Comments ↓

Hornsdale Power Reserve – also known as the Tesla South Australia battery, the 129MWh solar/energy storage battery has saved the state $8.9m in six months, according to Renew Economy and their analysis of spot market pricing in 2018.

Hornsdale Power Reserve

The cost of the Hornsdale Power Reserve hasn’t been made public, but at ~$800 per installed kWh the cost comes out to around $100m (with around $50m paid by the government), which fits the whispers we’re hearing around the traps.

The partnership between Tesla and South Australia was inked in July last year as Elon Musk and then-Premier Jay Weatherill decided on Neoen’s Hornsdale wind farm as an installation spot. The Tesla Battery was then completed on November 24, ahead of its December 1 operation deadline (Musk made a bet with Weatherill/South Australia that Tesla would install the Powerpack batteries by December 1 or the project would be free).

According to an analysis undertaken by RenewEconomy and investigated further by Clean Technica, The battery saved $5.7m in its second quarter of operation. It bought power at an average price of $79/MWh and sells it at $191/MWh (a figure somewhat distorted by a very power-hungry January – with that month removed the price goes down to $141/MWh). The estimated savings for the full 2018 are expected to be around $18m.

It’s important to note that the battery is still trading 30MW (of its total 100MW) of capacity so there is space to expand operations should the government be so inclined.

If you’d like to read a more detailed account of how much money the Hornsdale Power Reserve has saved South Australia in 2018 click here to read Stephen Parker and Bruce Mountain of the Victoria Energy Policy Centre investigate the economics of energy generation/storage.

If you’d like to see more stats on how the HPR is going, price-wise – there’s a rolling 72 hour graph of each battery charge/discharge with spot price data available via this link.

Hydrogen energy storage in French Guiana

Posted on May 30, 2018 by Mike — No Comments ↓

Hydrogen energy storage – French hydrogen specialist HDF Energy have announced their Centrale électrique de l’Ouest guyanais (CEOG) project, which will be one of the world’s biggest solar-plus-storage power plants. The $90m USD plant is expected to generate around 50 GWh per year and will store energy using hydrogen instead of the usual lithium-ion.

Hydrogen energy storage – Centrale électrique de l’Ouest guyanais in French Guiana

With an equivalent 140 MWh of energy stored, CEOG will be the biggest power plant worldwide storing renewable energy using hydrogen.

The world’s current largest storage project, which was,developed by Tesla and Neoen in South Australia at the Hornsdale Power Reserve, has a slightly lower size – 129 MWh. It uses lithium-ion technology rather than Hydrogen. Neoen have also looked into alternative methods of energy storage, however – they are currently in the middle of building an “Electrolyser” Hydrogen Superhub at Crystal Brook in South Australia.

Hydrogen energy storage technology

According to the manufacturer HDF, the hydrogen energy storage tech has a number of benefits over lithium-ion, such as enabling the storage of energy for long periods of time with minimal loss. It’s a very simple process to store the energy as hydrogen – you just need an electrolyzer, storage tanks, and a fuel cell.

Firstly the electrolyzer separates hydrogen and oxygen from a water molecule. The resultant hydrogen is then pressurised and stored in tanks. In the fuel cell the hydrogen is combined with oxygen, which then allows the production of electricity and steam.

Hydrogen has been suffering a tough time of it as late as the efficiency is quite difficult to improve – typical ranges are from 75-80%, according to PV Magazine (click the link to read a fantastic, in-depth article about the future of storing energy as hydrogen). Further losses of between 5-35% result from compression and cooling of the molecular hydrogen. Even for on-site use or with a direct feed into the gas network, you’ll see conversion efficiency of around 70%.

We need to continue the research to see if the efficiency of hydrogen can be improved and it’ll be very interesting to see what the numbers are from both the French Guiana project and the superhub at Crystal Brook. We’ll keep you posted!

Neoen’s Coleambally solar farm construction

Posted on January 30, 2018 by Mike — No Comments ↓

French renewable energy and battery storage developer Neoen has reached a financial close on its 150MW AC Coleambally solar farm in NSW. Construction has already started and, according to the official website, it’ll consist of approximately 560,000 solar panels on 550 hectares of land 5km north east of Coleambally, which is about 65km from Griffith.

The Coleambally solar farm

“We started developing this idea a year ago. We found the land, we signed a PPA (power purchase agreement), and organised the grid connection (and) now we have reached financing and it will be in production before the end of the year. That is less than two years from idea to production.”

Neoen’s Australian Operations CEO Franck Woitiez told RenewEconomy.

According to their discussion, Woitiez questioned the viability of pumped hydro, referring to the $2 billion turned $4.5 billion turned $8 billion “Snowy 2.0” scheme which has been laid out by Malcolm Turnbull’s federal government and is now being discussed, with an investment decision to be made later this year. After a $29m feasibility study showed it is unlikely the project could operate in the “merchant market” given its size and scope, it’ll be interesting to see what happens.

Woitiez rubbished and said solar and storage would be a far cheaper and faster option:

“You could build 2,000MW (the amount of power Snowy 2.0 will generate) of solar, add storage, and provide reliable and dispatchable and cheap electricity in half the time of hydro, and at a lower cost.”

Would be be better to let the market dictate terms here rather than handing over an exorbitant amount of taxpayer money for sub standard technology (or, if you believe the government, a ‘nation-building project’), poorly run by public servants? Well, how did the NBN turn out? Obviously sensible policy structure need apply – you can’t trust the private sector to regulate themselves – but the last year or so of solar farms in Australia has proven that large scale renewable investment can be a viable, mutually beneficial option.

You can follow Franck Woitiez on Twitter via his handle @fwoit or clicking here.

Neoen, founded in 2008 and currently with 1,125MW of renewable energy ‘in operation or under operation’ as of April last year. No word on how much they have now as there’s been a lot of movement by them recently, especially in Australia – Neoen are also responsible for the Bulgana Green Power Hub, the Tesla Battery in South Australia (known officially by the grid as the Hornsdale Power Reserve), and Melbourne’s solar powered trams. They also built the 300MW Cestas Solar Park in France in 2015, which was the biggest solar farm in Europe at the time.

Loy Yang Power Station & Tesla’s Battery

Posted on December 21, 2017 by Mike — No Comments ↓

South Australia’s Tesla solar battery was put to the test yesterday and it performed admirably – delivering its full 100MW of power to the grid in 140 milliseconds as the Loy Yang Power station tripped and went offline late last week.

According to Energy Minister Tom Koutsantonis, the battery, which has only been live for less than a month, tripped 140ms after the Loy Yang A3 went offline. This resulted in an immediate loss of 560MW and the Tesla battery (also known as the Hornsdale Power Reserve), reacted immediately, despite being almost 1000km away.

The AFR quoted Koutsantonis via an interview on 5AA radio last Wednesday:

“That’s a record and the national operators were shocked at how quickly and efficiently the battery was able to deliver this type of energy into the market,” Mr Koutsantonis said.

He also noted the rapid speed in comparison to the existing emergency generators:

“Now if we got a call to turn on our emergency generators it would take us 10 to 15 minutes to get them fired up and operating which is a record time compared to other generators,”

Loy Yang Power Station

With the closure of the 1600MW Hazelwood dirty coal power station earlier this year, the Loy Yang Power station in Traralgon has been doing some heavy lifting.

Technically it’s split into to sections, Loy Yang A and Loy Yang B. If you count them as one station it’s the largest power station in Australia, generating over 3000MW of power.

Loy Yang A was bought by AGL Energy in 2012, and Loy Yang B was sold by Engie and Mitsui to Alinta for $1 billion last month.

It’s a base load supply station and produces about a third of Victoria’s energy requirements.

As such the 100MW the Tesla was able to provide is a drop in the bucket if there was to be a major issue affecting the whole station, but it’s a step in the right direction and amazing to see how well the solution works in a ‘real-world’ situation.

Bring on another 500MW of lithium-ion baseload power!

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Hornsdale Power Reserve

Hornsdale Power Reserve saves $8.9m in 6months