It's build to power 30 000 homes in a case of emergency. But only for 1 hour.
No it was not designed for that purpose at all and will never be used in such a naive way. It is a piece of overall
grid systems engineering designed to stabilize grid frequency at fifty cycles per second.
https://www.aemo.com.au/-/media/Files/PDF/Guide-to-Ancillary-Services-in-the-National-Electricity-Market.ashxThe battery is adjacent to and wired into the adjacent Horndale wind farm, with both run by a French energy company Neoen. Tesla is outta there; they will not operate the battery. In fact they didn't even build it, the contract went to an Adelaide engineering firm, Consolidated Power Projects. Nor did Tesla make the component batteries, Samsung did.
Horndale currently exports its excess energy production into the national grid and is part of a trial showing that wind can supply a base load level of energy, known as
frequency control and ancillary services or FCAS, competitive with traditional base load sources like coal and gas.
“It will help stabilise the grid in a state that now gets more than 40 percent of its electricity from wind energy, but needs help when the wind dies down.
Storage can respond within a fraction of a second. It can address those stability issues very quickly without needing to resort to using large power plants,” said Praveen Kathpal, vice president of AES Energy Storage.
The battery will make brownouts less frequent and enable the local grid to restart faster and less expensively than before. It is not a peaking plant though conceptually related to temporary demand shaving.
As soon as there's a signal from the grid that there is a demand for extra electricity, then the battery will discharge briefly into the grid at the required rate.
During periods of low demand and high wind, it's recharged by Horndale. Thus the battery acts more as a load and frequency buffering system or power conditioning capacitor.
If the wind drops off or if there's a fault that happens near a network or a power station trips offline, this battery can rapidly respond for a short amount of time to provide voltage and frequency support in that local area until the rest of the generators in the system catch up and whatever other adjustments need to be made by the system operator.
It basically becomes a resource for system stability and security to protect against voltage and frequency disturbances. However it is not intended nor designed nor advertised as a fix-all solution for all possible energy generation loss scenarios (eg Puerto Rico).
The Australian state has faced widespread load shedding at times and a statewide blackout last September. Usually between 6pm and 7pm, there's a peak demand and the normal average peak demand in South Australia is something like 1600 megawatts. During heatwaves this becomes closer to 3000 megawatts.
Tesla says the lithium ion batteries in the Jamestown array have a life of about 15 years, depending on usage and how aggressively they are recharged. The battery components are replaceable and the circuitry should last 20 to 30 years.
The batteries used in energy storage facilities that connect to the grid are not exactly the same as those seen in Tesla cars but have some design elements in common. Tesla has partnered with Panasonic on the development and production of its Powerpack technology.
Despite this, it partnered with Samsung on the Southern Australia facility because Panasonic could not produce the required batteries within the tight deadline.Tesla will soon be facing stiff competition from power firms. Next year, a battery storage facility 50% larger than Tesla's in Australia will be turned on in South Korea."
I had thought the US had a near-monopoly on morons but that is not correct: there are leaders in Australia who have not a clue even today what the battery capabilities are, for example coal promoter federal Treasurer S. Morrison:
"By all means have the world's biggest battery, have the world's biggest banana, have the world's biggest prawn like we have on roadsides around the country but that is not solving the problem," Morrison said.