alt Hacker NewsYeah in South Australia where it’s over 70% renewables the batteries have been reported to have profit of $46million in a year on a $90million capital cost project.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hornsdale_Power_Reserve
No doubt the profits will come down (as long as the free market can do its thing) but for now it’s a crazy market. There’s a reason graphs of battery installations are a hockey stick right now.
I will call out one thing for European readers. You’re suspiciously absent on lists of battery build outs. You guys don’t have lots or lobbying from legacy power providers wanting to maintain the ridiculously high peak prices by any chance?
As in everywhere in the world except europe has a hockey stick of battery build out growth happening right now. (Not a criticism just an Australian confused at why europe as a whole has fewer battaries than australia).
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Cannot find a graph of battery capacity growth for Germany right away, but anecdotally (stories in the news and number of startups I‘m aware of), that market is super hot right now.
Edit: according to [1], numbers predict a coming tsunami of battery installations for Germany
[1] https://www.pv-magazine.de/2025/01/13/uebertragungsnetzbetre...
Less renewables in the mix and useless politicians mean they aren’t as needed, or perceived as needed. Spain could use some ASAP, no idea why they haven’t built them.
IIRC Musk was trying to get AEMO to reduce the time increment for trading power so they can do even higher frequency trading.
Why do you think we go to Australia for sun?
And our wind turbines seems to have crazy maintenance costs…
Don’t give our politicians more ideas, let the market just solve this please. They are already taxing energy to death because of ”fairness”.
> I will call out one thing for European readers. You’re suspiciously absent on lists of battery build outs. You guys don’t have lots or lobbying from legacy power providers wanting to maintain the ridiculously high peak prices by any chance?
The European power grid has multiple interconnections between the various countries, and some of those counties already have their grid scale storage (mostly pumped hydro). So it's much less needed.
So why would the countries heavy on renewables in their mix invest a lot in batteries? For instance the UK can rely on French nuclear and Norwegian hydro as a grid scale alternative source. While sometimes there are continent wide issues (we've had twice a month of low winds + overcast which impacted negatively wind and solar), the grid is sufficiently diverse and dispersed that it works pretty well.
As the recent outage in Iberia showed, it's slightly more complicated than that and batteries could still have a part to play to smooth demand ups and downs. And there are still a bunch of battery projects, even in France that doesn't have that much renewables in its energy mix, being heavy on nuclear.
> I will call out one thing for European readers. You’re suspiciously absent on lists of battery build outs
If I had to pull reasons out of my ass for this, I'd suggest South Australia and Texas both have a great deal of land with shitty agricultural output (as compared to Europe) and a lot more sunlight. I suspect building batteries is obviously very profitable today in Australia and Texas today, and companies will target Europe when the tech is a bit cheaper and the most profitable markets have been saturated.
Planning rules are just really onerous and inefficient. I've seen a number of reports of battery facilities denied planning permission in Scotland over concerns like "noise" and (slightly more reasonable) fire service access roads.