MCL1981 wrote:When fully charged, the battery can power up to 30,000 homes for an hour. However, it will mostly be used to support and stabilise existing electricity supplies.
In other words, it has no meaningful practical application. How long does the wind need to be ripping with no other power consumption to charge this? Then it will last for an hour??? How much pollution will this battery create when it reaches the end of it's lifespan? A clean burning CNG or LPG generator would be more useful, safer, and probably cleaner.
The use is to stabilise the network . One of the main challenges for a power provider/ network is to keep the supply within tolerances , given varying demand. Voltage and frequency must be kept within 5 % or so . This has always been a problem. The bigger the network , the more users so it averages out , but you still have the problem of local variations , caused by lots of users on a limited supply line. Over a whole city, the sheer number of users means its unlikely everyone switches their electric heater on at the same time. ( there is still peaks at times like Dinner time). Narrow it down to a street , all on one transformer, and it can have quite an effect. I know when I was a welder , you would avoid welding just before meal breaks, because you would get a surge 1/2 way through your weld , when everyone shut their machines down to head for a break.
Solar and wind power add the dimension of sudden variances on the supply side as well as demand. Imagine a street where most houses have solar panels , and a cloud comes across. You have a sudden reduction in power production of maybe 5 k.w per house, just as bad as having every house suddenly turn on 5 k.w of load together. Reverse when the sun comes out form behind the cloud. a battery or capacitor storage system can react way more quickly to this than a gas fired turbine can. And it can be done at a local level , not at a power station many transformers away.
Electric railway power is a good example of this . if you have one heavy train a day , the effect of it accelerating from a station is quite large on the supply network. The network has to be heavy enough to provide that power , even though its once a day. If you have several trains per hour on the same network , the lumps smooth each other out , where you have regenerative braking , a braking train provides power for another train accelerating. The effect on the network is less , more power is been used overall , but spread out a lot more as trains accelerate and brake at different times.
This is not new , i think Swedish light rail lines had super capacitor "batteries "at each transformer, smoothing out the difference s between braking and accelerating trains.
The scale of this one is what is new, and i don't necessarily think it is a good thing. It would be better to have smaller batteries at each house or user, for the reasons mentioned above. Tesla seems to be best at marketing , from what I have seen of their home battery systems, they are no better or cheaper than many of their competitors. Nothing they produce is completely new , most has been developed by other manufacturers, perhaps the packaging the biggest difference.
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