The article, of course, is guilty of exactly what it accuses its opponents of -- truthiness. They say that this is affordable, and then don't even say how much it costs! He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense [1]
This is true, but I'd note this quite from the article:
Nyhan showed a clear tendency for people with high numeracy skills to misread graphs about gun control or climate change, even when they’d just correctly read the same graph about soap.
To address you specific point though - the price is less than A$150M/$US115M[1].
By comparison, the SA government is also building a new 250MW gas fired power station which costs A$360M[2].
It's difficult to compare the two because they are such different things of course. But I'd note that at periods of high wind generation the power price in SA does drop to zero, but the peak price is very high. It seems likely the price of energy from the wind farm plus battery will be extremely competitive with gas, and the investment price seems roughly proportional for the amount of energy made available.
How much is the price for kwh stored/dispatched , over the long term ? that's the missing data here.
And btw: i don't know the economics of this project, but in general, if this was cost effective, Musk would have tons of customers(including power companies), to supply power during peak hours and save them a lot of money.
>Musk would have tons of customers(including power companies), to supply power during peak hours and save them a lot of money.
Assuming such customers don't already have existing contractual obligations with existing providers nor assets whose valuation depends on no significant changes to current operations.
It isn't the case. There are many businesses(both utilities and others) who could use a peak shaving solution, especially one as scaleable as batteries.
EDIT: what's unique about the australian installation(in 100 days), is that it is politically driven, or risk management driven(to reduce the risk of outages). see[2].
And so, using a healthy dose of skepticism, All i'm saying: If there's a real economical solution for the big problem of energy storage, real deployments are the test, not politically/risk driven deployments, or psychological/marketing[1] driven deployments(like we see with the power wall).
And this is a repeating pattern with musk(a marketing genius, definetly, and very smart overall), succeeding quite well on the higher end of the market, but when it comes to the more commodity end, his companies are less stellar: see First Solar, or the fact the Renault-Nissan sells more electric cars than Tesla.
How do you know? Do you have access to the contracts that, for example, a large provider like PG & E signs with it's partners for their current "peak shaving solution"? Do you have detailed access to their balance sheets and appraiser information?
From their latest 10k[0], Gas related equipment represents 26% of the value of their assets. They would, have to write some non trivial amount off because they would no longer have any use of it by switching to use batteries like these. What would their majority shareholders think in response to that? What if they are also invested in the supply chain of such? I assume those would be non-zero losses.
If you are implying that economics of a thing can be decoupled from politics, then I think that is a faulty belief. You won't get "real deployments" unless current providers are out competed on whatever front (economics/politics) or routed around and made obsolete in some fashion, because they stand to lose economically based on their current investment. Whether you agree with how Elon (or others) is going about it, is irrelevant in so much as you aren't in direct opposition or exposed to the risk of such changes.
I'm not long TSLA nor have no future plans to be so.
>> economics of a thing can be decoupled from politics,
Did i imply that ? i just said that the australian project has little relevance to companies who do seek energy storage, because their reasons, motivations, are different, and this greatly affects cost sensitivity.
But you know what? i don't understand politics.
Maybe Australian Politicians didn't expose the low, low cost of stored kwh using this system, because they are humble.
> i just said that the australian project has little relevance to companies who do seek energy storage, because their reasons, motivations, are different, and this greatly affects cost sensitivity.
>>All i'm saying: If there's a real economical solution for the big problem of energy storage, real deployments are the test, not politically/risk driven deployments, or psychological/marketing[1] driven deployments(like we see with the power wall)
Because other energy companies aren't worried about political risks? If that was the case, why would companies lobby government officials/politicians at all anywhere in the world? I'd think all energy companies have similar considerations, but how they choose to weight them may be different.
A theoretical company might save $300 million dollars in yearly operational costs with a upfront cost of $1 billion to $INSERT_WHATEVR_BATTERY_SOLUTION_PROVIDER, but if they are exposed to $26 billion to "investments" of a $100 billion total that are expected to perform for the next 30 years and have to revalue that suddenly (to the downside, to be clear), then I know they are going to think twice about how to move forward.
Maybe for historical or regulatory reasons those are not always accessible, whatever their value. And in any case costs have been moving lightning fast, so something that I priced up for a utility a couple of years ago may now be a fraction of the CAPEX...
The UK regulatory system is being tweaked furiously to try to remove impediments to otherwise worthwhile arrangements as far as I can see. One can argue about whether it's being done right.
How much is the price for kwh stored/dispatched , over the long term ? that's the missing data here.
Oh, I didn't realize that was what you meant.
That data isn't really missing, it's unknown because it will be sold at market prices. Obviously the behavior of electricity prices is fairly complex, but for batteries I'd imagine it would make sense to dispatch at any point where the price received is higher than the price paid during charge (perhaps with a risk factor? A little unclear about the behavior regarding expected future prices).
SA historical market prices are available at[1] or per year at[2]. There is a large report on them available at [3].
To summarize, SA wholesale prices average A$123/MWh (US$93/MWH) last year. By comparison, according to [4], wholesale rates in California are around $US30/MWh.
I believe the smaller Tesla battery install in CA is known to be price competitive. I haven't tried looking for the numbers for that though. Either way, it's difficult to imagine that if it is price competitive in CA it won't be even more competitive in SA.
Yes. For residential installations they banned the 'charge during cheaper power, discharge into the grid during high power' thing for subsidised solar.
[1] http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/