Hillhater said:
The Australian Energy Regulator (AER) is suing the operator of a massive Tesla battery over alleged failures to provide contingency services in 2019.
It has started legal action against Neoen-owned Hornsdale Power Reserve (HPR), which operates a 150MW/193.5MWh battery that is co-located with the 315MW Hornsdale wind farm in South Australia.
The regulator alleges that HPR failed to provide contingency frequency ancillary services (CFAS), which are needed to keep electricity flowing during a power disturbance, as promised.
It is suing for alleged breaches of the National Electricity Rules and seeking financial penalties, declarations and costs.
https://www.windpowermonthly.com/article/1728469/tesla-battery-operator-sued-australia-alleged-service-failures
Yeah that is an interesting situation.
Other articles on the subject, basically all saying the same thing.
https://www.afr.com/companies/energy/tesla-big-battery-in-sa-welched-on-vital-services-aer-20210922-p58txr
https://www.smh.com.au/business/companies/regulator-sues-tesla-big-battery-in-federal-court-over-power-grid-promises-20210923-p58u1b.html
Obviously to provide frequency control ancillary services (FCAS) you need a lot of raw MW power output over a sustained period, or else anyone would put their hand up and do it.
I have lost count how many articles/video reports from the ABC I've seen over the years reporting how this big battery is basically powering SA and saving it money and basically a miracle.
When I ever point out that the big battery doesn't
create any power etc I usually get told I am retarded and that the battery was actually built to provide FCAS etc, so what it does and how it works changes every time I attempt to criticize it.
But look at where we are with it now, its come to the point where a project funded by the taxpayer has to be sued by the government to force them to run it properly.
Obviously because South Australia's electricity grid is of 'mad max' equivalent quality, the battery operator Neoen was basically given this big battery and then decided to run it for just energy arbitration and just squeeze money out of it because it saw Australia as a bunch of morons.
https://media3.giphy.com/media/g3EGlx4Nirz7q/giphy.gif?cid=790b761154017902c0b3db8b7e34ba0308746c69d8f96051&rid=giphy.gif&ct=g
What NEON has done is instead of providing FCAS as intended, it runs for power arbitrage profits, where they suck in power when its cheaper and then dump it when the price of electricity goes up, this clearly can't be performed
at the same time as providing FCAS.
It obviously requires a lot of MWh always ready in the tank to provide FCAS, if the battery has been discharged to its limits dumping charged power when electricity prices are high then can only go into charge mode then it obviously can't provide FCAS.
The Neoen-owned Hornsdale Power Reserve was hailed as a miracle in that it was actually making a lot of money providing arbitrage, even though it doesn't create power it self, it just trades power.
This battery above anything just shows that South Australia's energy grid is incredibly sick, technically any regular base load power power station would destroy the HPR, because it could provide power when the market is high and provide FCAS, it all just points to the fact that SA doesn't have enough of it's own reliable power.
Just looking at this weeks SA power, we can see that South Australia still drew as much as
46% of its power (in purple) via the state of Victoria
coal via a big extension cord.
