South Australia’s Tesla solar battery was put to the test yesterday and it performed admirably – delivering its full 100MW of power to the grid in 140 milliseconds as the Loy Yang Power station tripped and went offline late last week.
According to Energy Minister Tom Koutsantonis, the battery, which has only been live for less than a month, tripped 140ms after the Loy Yang A3 went offline. This resulted in an immediate loss of 560MW and the Tesla battery (also known as the Hornsdale Power Reserve), reacted immediately, despite being almost 1000km away.
The AFR quoted Koutsantonis via an interview on 5AA radio last Wednesday:
“That’s a record and the national operators were shocked at how quickly and efficiently the battery was able to deliver this type of energy into the market,” Mr Koutsantonis said.
He also noted the rapid speed in comparison to the existing emergency generators:
“Now if we got a call to turn on our emergency generators it would take us 10 to 15 minutes to get them fired up and operating which is a record time compared to other generators,”
Loy Yang Power Station
With the closure of the 1600MW Hazelwood dirty coal power station earlier this year, the Loy Yang Power station in Traralgon has been doing some heavy lifting.
Technically it’s split into to sections, Loy Yang A and Loy Yang B. If you count them as one station it’s the largest power station in Australia, generating over 3000MW of power.
Loy Yang A was bought by AGL Energy in 2012, and Loy Yang B was sold by Engie and Mitsui to Alinta for $1 billion last month.
It’s a base load supply station and produces about a third of Victoria’s energy requirements.
As such the 100MW the Tesla was able to provide is a drop in the bucket if there was to be a major issue affecting the whole station, but it’s a step in the right direction and amazing to see how well the solution works in a ‘real-world’ situation.
Bring on another 500MW of lithium-ion baseload power!
