Featured Aussi Powerwall, Musk pisses off climate deniers

If this is how a company does its stuff, we could all be better for it. Well done to Tesla, this has definitely shut a lot of critics up!

The current crop could now see it's not the shutting down of coal power stations that crippled SA power grid. Will be interesting to see what their next argument would be. Hopefully it won't be the battery is harmful to make and will create a big landfill... Just watch out for news articles at the Murdoch press.

BTW, are you folks in America claiming Murdoch one of yours? If so, it's not too bad given you have Musk to cancel out each other!

SM-G900I ?

 

129 MWh? That's a drop in the bucket for most power outages. Say 12,000 homes for 1 eight hour period. To make a difference, you'd need one of these in every neighborhood. And wasn't that blackout caused by failure of transmission lines and interconnection infrastructure that required ALL power generation to go offline because there was no demand (the power must be consumed)?

 

Well my understanding is South Australia shut down its coal plants in anticipation of renewables and now they have a heckuva a crisis of escalating elec costs. They cannot use the coal as it has all been long-term contracted to China.

Give Musk credit for trying to help, but they got a big prob that Musk knows about.

 

G'day,

South Australia (one of our states) had one, small, coal-fired power station using poor quality coal from Leigh Creek (SA) but this was closed some years ago and their power is/was delivered via the national grid from adjacent states (Victoria and NSW) that burn brown (Vic) or black (NSW) coal as well as these two states having a large availability of hydro-power as they share our pitiful attempt at mountains that sometimes get snow that fills dams. Still, we don't have earthquakes of any size either.

Without coal of any useful sort, SA is going renewable by necessity, mostly wind and solar. Nuclear not an option politically.
All our black coal of value is in NSW and Queensland (the exportable stuff) while Victoria has only low-calorific-value brown coal, but masses of the stuff, and the power stations to burn it (although a big old one closed recently adding to the messy politics of the SA problem).

The recent kerfuffle was indeed initiated by a severe storm in SA that took out critical transmission lines and the grid/administrative system failed to handle the situation competently. Then state and federal politicians got involved in a blame-game, to raise the chaos to an even higher level.

But it's good to hear that the SA Musk battery plant is completed, regardless of its actual ability to totally handle another 'storm'.
And Elon can now go back to making cars?

David S.

 

Was Musk’s battery plant prioritizing this project over Model 3 battery production?

 

And I thought you were a true believer! (Chuckle, chuckle)!

 

No doubt the battery plant will be used to power the homes of the rich and powerful when the next outage occurs.

 

Just whose responsibility is it for the power grid anyway? Since the power companies get the capital costs and maintenance costs baked into their rates, is it not them? Yes government can allow rate adjustments, participate in bring together unaffected power companies resources in time of local disaster, etc. But ultimately it is the power company that provides the proposal of how much investment to make that ultimately proposes the rates, the rate approval agency who like to look good by keeping the rates low and the customers who demand the lowest rate that deny the proper investment in infrastructure for the future. IOW, it is us cheap voters.

I didn't run my business that way nor did I run my personal life that way. But others do. A neighbor was asking me about how much he needed in income for retirement the other day. The one who has a mortgage, a second mortgage, three car loans, a mortgage on a cabin in the mountains, a boat and a few toys. A year away from retirement and he has all these avoidable costs (and a financial advisor who is telling him that he can afford all these things).

Sadly, it is any polititian's or manager's lot to be criticized for investing (be it in product development, training, education, roads or whatever) while the critic who succeeds them will eventually reap the rewards of that investment. It goes in cycles.

 

Companies do that all the time. Many cannot do them all well at the same time.

 

Huh! Over here, some companies can't even do one thing very well. Correction they do charge well for the poor service.

 

How does south Australia achieve 50% renewables? all solar + wind, or is hydro in the mix?

 

I don't know, but - isn't that like asking whether Ford is prioritizing some of its Communications business, or Automotive or finance over the other? Don't most companies segregate their various business dealings? Aren't Tesla's solar mfg & battery mfg separate entities? not sure what the point of the 'business-priority' inquiry question is - i guess.
But anyway, seems like there's some hubbub here, making this all about one particular blackout, whereas the article references blackouts/ brownout being all too frequent down undah. is there some notion that solar doesn't help many of those kinds of power challenges?
IOW - so what if the latest blackout isn't helped by solar ... is that supposed to be a rationale for NOT benefiting /needing the megawatts of solar? .... because someone referenced the wrong power failure? Between that, & complaining about, "it's not enough power to make a difference!".... i'm not sure which is worse.
Oy
Tangentially, hey! if enough solar/wind comes online down undah, Australia can sell more of its Brown coal to Japan, & Australia can then make tons of money reforming it (right there in Australia of course) into hydrogen, so that Japan can claim their fuel cell cars are clean in their country. & so what if Australia has mountains of coal ash from the process. and never mind the CO2 released while you're at it. Maybe while they're at it, Japan can wag their "finger of Shame" at Australia for being involved in such a dirty process. Oh the irony.

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I understood that battery manufacturing issues were hampering Model 3 production. That is why I asked the business priority question. Both use the batteries produced by Tesla.

 

o i c .... I believe the model 3 uses a newer/different type of a cell then the prior Tesla carss, & I don't think those new cells are used in the storage systems iirc.
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The cells in the Australian project were sourced from Samsung in Korea.

Tesla Using Samsung SDI Battery Cells In 129 MWh South Australia Facility | CleanTechnica

The battery assembly problem in Nevada is unrelated.