Tesla’s Enormous Battery In Australia, Just Weeks Old, Is Already Responding To Outages In ‘Record’ Time

Washington Post - Brian Fung

(Neoen/Tesla/hornsdalepowerreserve.com.au)

Less than a month after Tesla unveiled a new backup power system in South Australia, the world's largest lithium-ion battery is already being put to the test. And it appears to be far exceeding expectations: In the past three weeks alone, the Hornsdale Power Reserve has smoothed out at least two major energy outages, responding even more quickly than the coal-fired backups that were supposed to provide emergency power.
Tesla's battery last week kicked in just 0.14 seconds after one of Australia's biggest plants, the Loy Yang facility in the neighboring state of Victoria, suffered a sudden, unexplained drop in output, according to the International Business Times. And the week before that, another failure at Loy Yang prompted the Hornsdale battery to respond in as little as four seconds — or less, according to some estimates — beating other plants to the punch. State officials have called the response time “a record,” according to local media.
The effectiveness of Tesla's battery is being closely watched in a region that is in the grips of an energy crisis. The price of electricity is soaring in Australia, particularly in the state of South Australia, where a 2016 outage led 1.7 million residents to lose power in a blackout. Storms and heat waves have caused additional outages, and many Australians are bracing for more with the onset of summer in the Southern Hemisphere.
The Hornsdale battery system, which uses the same energy-storage tech found in Tesla's electric cars, is one of chief executive Elon Musk's newest projects. In March, Musk, who is known for setting high goals and only sometimes meeting them, vowed on Twitter to deliver a battery system for South Australia's struggling grid within 100 days or it would be free. By early July, the state had signed a deal with Tesla and the French-based energy company Neoen to produce the battery. And by Dec. 1, South Australia announced that it had switched on the Hornsdale battery.
Fed by wind turbines at the nearby Hornsdale wind farm, the battery stores excess energy that is produced when the demand for electricity isn't peaking. It can power up to 30,000 homes, though only for short periods — meaning that the battery must still be supported by traditional power plants in the event of a long outage.
A spokesman for Tesla didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.
Nonetheless, the Hornsdale reserve has already shown that it can provide what's known as “contingency” service — keeping the grid stable in a crisis and easing what would otherwise be a significant power failure. And, more important, the project is the biggest proof-of-concept yet that batteries such as Tesla's can help mitigate one of renewable energy's most persistent problems: how to use it when the sun isn't shining or the wind isn't blowing.
"When you think about energy storage, it's not a [power] generation resource," said Stephen Coughlin, the vice president of energy storage platforms at the Arlington-based AES Corporation, which is behind several battery projects in California, the Netherlands and several other countries. "What it's really doing is providing a much-needed injection of reliability and resiliency into the network overall."
Where it can take as much as 10 minutes to spin up a traditional turbine in a pinch, added Coughlin, it's not uncommon to see systems such as Tesla's intervene in fractions of a second.
This isn't Musk's only experiment with large-scale batteries. Last year, Tesla said it had equipped a small island in American Samoa with thousands of solar panels and batteries that could serve the area's 600 inhabitants, shifting them almost entirely off fossil fuels. In October, Musk responded to the hurricane crisis in Puerto Rico by offering to discuss building a solar grid for the island. Parts of Puerto Rico are still without power, months after Hurricane Maria ripped down power lines and other energy infrastructure.
An electric grid consisting of distributed solar panels, paired with a large battery, could prove transformative for some island economies, analysts say. Under normal circumstances, the price of imported fossil fuels can become a drain on local businesses. But the abundant sunshine at tropical latitudes makes solar energy extremely cost-efficient.
"[Big batteries] definitely can be a game changer for island or island-type economies," said Ravi Manghani, director of energy storage at GTM Research, a market analysis firm. "Hawaii, for instance, has one of the highest retail rates in the U.S. [for electricity], and that's because of the cost of shipping diesel or other fuel oils which currently are used by a lot of the existing facilities."
What's more, he added, spreading solar panels out across an island reduces the likelihood of the entire grid going down because of storms.
Other battery projects, including in the United States, have already helped manage spikes in demand. For example, a major 2015 gas leak near Los Angeles that kept some gas-fired plants from producing energy at peak times prompted Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas and Electric to announce energy storage projects that were completed earlier this year, according to Sam Wilkinson, an industry analyst at IHS.
In an April report, Wilkinson highlighted the rapid rise of China and Australia as energy storage leaders.
"For the first time Asia accounts for more than one third of the global pipeline" for energy storage, the report read. "This underscores the importance that China, Australia, South Korea and India are all predicted to have in the global market."

Links

• Hornsdale Power Reserve
• Elon Musk's massive backup battery took just 140 milliseconds to respond to crisis at power plant
• The real reasons why our power prices are going up
• Tesla powers a whole island with solar to show off its energy chops
• Power boost: How Australia will avoid summer blackouts
• Renewable energy to reach cost parity with coal by 2020

Climate Change Is Happening Faster Than Expected, and It’s More Extreme

InsideClimate News - Bob Berwyn

New research suggests human-caused emissions will lead to bigger impacts on heat and extreme weather, and sooner than the IPCC warned just three years ago.

Scientists warned in 2017 that not enough has been done to protect millions of people from an expected increase in dangerous heat waves. Credit: Chris Hondros/Getty Images

In the past year, the scientific consensus shifted toward a grimmer and less uncertain picture of the risks posed by climate change.
When the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued its 5th Climate Assessment in 2014, it formally declared that observed warming was "extremely likely" to be mostly caused by human activity.
This year, a major scientific update from the United States Global Change Research Program put it more bluntly: "There is no convincing alternative explanation."
Other scientific authorities have issued similar assessments:

• The Royal Society published a compendium of how the science has advanced, warning that it seems likelier that we've been underestimating the risks of warming than overestimating them.
   
• The American Meteorological Society issued its annual study of extreme weather events and said that many of those it studied this year would not have been possible without the influence of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions.
   
• The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said recent melting of the Arctic was not moderating and was more intense than at any time in recorded history.

While 2017 may not have hit a global temperature record, it is running in second or third place, and on the heels of records set in 2015 and 2016. Talk of some kind of "hiatus" seems as old as disco music.

'A Deadly Tragedy in the Making'
Some of the strongest warnings in the Royal Society update came from health researchers, who said there hasn't been nearly enough done to protect millions of vulnerable people worldwide from the expected increase in heat waves.
"It's a deadly tragedy in the making, all the worse because the same experts are saying such heat waves are eminently survivable with adequate resources to protect people," said climate researcher Eric Wolff, lead author of the Royal Society update.
Atmospheric scientist Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research said climate science has progressed in all directions since the IPCC report was published in 2014. He works with a group of scientists trying to update the IPCC reporting process to make it more fluid and meaningful in real time.

"The need to build resilience is clear and missing in action," Trenberth said. "The result is we suffer the consequences at costs of hundreds of billions of dollars."
One of the starkest conclusions of the Royal Society update is that up to 350 million people in places like Karachi, Kolkota, Lagos and Shanghai are likely to face deadly heat waves every year by 2050—even if nations are able to rein in greenhouse gas emissions enough to keep the average global temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius, as per the Paris climate agreement.
There's also an increasing chance global warming will affect a key North Atlantic current that carries ocean heat from the tropics toward western Europe, according to a 2016 study. It shows the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Current weakening by 37 percent by 2100, which could have big effects on European climate and food production.

Melting Ice and Risks to Oceans and Ecosystems
The Royal Society report also notes:

• An increasing risk that ocean acidification will rapidly and significantly alter many ecosystems and food webs;
   
• A concern that crops grown in high-CO2 conditions could be less nutritious, leading to mineral deficiencies;
   
• That the commonly accepted wet-areas-wetter and dry-areas-drier scenario has regional nuances with important implications for local water management and food production planning; and,
   
• That scientists are finding more links between melting Arctic sea ice and weather extremes like heat waves, droughts and blizzards.

The U.S. Global Change Research Program, an interagency group whose work went through exhaustive peer review and emerged from the Trump administration's political review mostly unscathed, also cited several emerging conclusions that are much clearer today than five years ago.
Among them are changes in ocean ecosystems that go far beyond rising sea levels. Ocean acidification is increasing, as is oxygen loss, and scientists are more acutely aware than before of the severity of their impacts. In some U.S. coastal waters, these trends are "raising the risk of serious ecological and economic consequences," the report noted.

The most ominous of its chapters addressed the risks of surprises like "tipping points" or "compound extremes"—sucker punches, combination punches, and even knockout punches. "The more the climate changes, the greater the potential for these," it said.
"Uncertainty is not our friend here," said Penn State climate scientist Michael Mann. "We are seeing increases in extreme weather events that go well beyond what has been predicted or projected in the past. We're learning that there are factors we were not previously aware of that may be magnifying the impacts of human-caused climate change." Among those are "subtle mechanisms involving the behavior of the jet stream that may be involved in explaining the dramatic increase we've seen in floods, droughts, heat waves and wildfires," he said.
"Increasingly, the science suggests that many of the impacts are occurring earlier and with greater amplitude than was predicted," Mann said, after considering new research since the milestone of the IPCC's Fifth Assessment, which served as the scientific basis for the Paris Agreement.
"We have literally, in the space of a year, doubled our assessment of the potential sea level rise we could see by the end of this century. That is simply remarkable. And it is sobering," he said.
In general, there should be more monitoring of global warming impacts, but all those programs are threatened under the current administration, Mann said. "Continued funding to support research is critical," he said, "and here, again, we encounter a very unfavorable political environment where fossil fuel-beholden politicians that run the White House and Congress are doing everything they can to defund and suppress research on climate change science and impact assessments."

Links

• The Most Accurate Climate Models Predict Greater Warming, Study Shows
• Global CO2 Emissions to Hit Record High in 2017
• How Responsible Is Each Country When an Extreme Climate Event Strikes?
• In Alaska's Thawing Permafrost, Humanity's 'Library Is on Fire'
• How Big Oil Lost Control of Its Climate Misinformation Machine
• Electric Trucks Begin Reporting for Duty, Quietly and Without All the Fumes

This Year’s Best Movies, Books, And Podcasts About Climate Change

Grist - Amelia Urry

I don’t know about you, but I spent a good portion of this year escaping. When your day job involves running fact-checks on the bizarre and short-sighted decisions that will determine the future for you and everyone you know, well, it helps to take a time-out every once in a while.
And there was some high-quality escapism on offer this year, from superhero blockbusters to dystopian page turners. But even in the fluffiest, most candy-coated realms of pop culture, our anxieties about the world have a way of creeping in. We’ve been steeping in this stuff and it shows, from the increasingly beleaguered comedians of late-night who have to keep coming up with new jokes about Paris climate talks to robo-future shoot-em-up Blade Runner 2049’s thinly veiled warnings about devastating environmental change.
So here are some of the most notable pieces of entertainment that brought the Grist staff down to earth this year:



The Leftovers
The best thing on TV in 2017, and maybe ever, was the last season of The Leftovers. The premise is that 2 percent of the population spontaneously evaporated from the earth one day, and those remaining — the leftovers, you see — have to deal with the disappearance of their loved ones. One story line follows the Guilty Remnant, a cult dedicated to remembering the event with tactics that range from annoying to emotionally terrorizing to literally terrorizing. The overwhelming public response to the Remnant is: “Leave us alone, so we can stop thinking about what we’ve lost.”
I don’t believe it’s meant to be an analogy for the climate conversation, but I saw so many similarities. Part of the resistance to acting on climate change comes from an unwillingness to acknowledge what is already lost — certain sea-level rise, locked-in temperature increases, and irreversible change to our environments. It requires a kind of reckoning, a mourning, that most people would rather not undergo. If you watch the show as a portrayal of that kind of internal struggle, it’s really jarring.
Eve Andrews, Associate Editor

Geostorm
I love disaster movies. The Day After Tomorrow, 2012, Deep Impact — give me a ridiculous global threat for our main characters to race against, and I’ll watch every rerun on SyFy. This year’s disaster flick is Geostorm. Given its 13 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes, let’s just say this climapocalyptic blockbuster won’t be taking home any statues this award season.
The plot hinges on a government-run satellite system that controls all weather on Earth. Things go wrong, the satellites malfunction, and extreme weather starts leveling cities. It’s an overblown portrayal of the threat posed to life on earth by geoengineering and climate change.
Is this movie at all scientifically accurate? Nope! But if you, like me, enjoy watching people get frozen by ice storms, thrown around in tornadoes, and wiped out by skyscraper-leveling tsunamis, it’s worth a watch. Preferably in 4DX.
Cody Permenter, Social Media Manager



Science Vs
“Alternative facts” was the final straw: America has kind of lost its grip on reality. Gimlet Media’s podcast Science Vs cuts through the crap: Do vitamin supplements do anything? Is 100 percent clean energy possible? Do women’s menstrual cycles actually sync up?
The podcast’s fearless host — Australian science journalist Wendy Zukerman — combs through the latest science, chats with experts, and cracks jokes that would make your dad proud. You might not always like all the answers (listen to the organic episode, dear Grist reader). But that’s sort of the point. It’s the antidote — not the anecdote! — that America needs right now.
Kate Yoder, News Editor

Bill Nye: Science Guy
If you grew up watching Bill Nye give zany televised lessons on the fundamentals of science, you’ll probably enjoy this introduction to the man behind the bow tie. Directors David Alvarado and Jason Sussberg originally set out in 2014 to make a fun documentary about Nye’s legacy of communicating science by being irresistibly goofy. But then 2017 happened. “With the Trump administration, it became so much more serious,” Alvarado says.
The resulting film follows Nye on his quest to protect science education from creationists and climate change deniers, venturing into creation museums and theme parks to debate evolution. It’s not a purely flattering tribute, though it also delves into questions about Nye’s pedigree as a scientist (he has B.S. in mechanical engineering) and about how much he loves the limelight.
Justine Calma, Justice Fellow



Okja
This movie is deranged, in the best possible way. If you know anything about director Bong Joon Ho, that won’t surprise you at all — his last feature to hit American theaters was 2014’s Snowpiercer, a parable of class warfare and global warming set on a perpetual motion machine of a train. Talk about a plot device!
Okja takes on globalization and animal agriculture with the same off-kilter enthusiasm, pitting terrifying, twinned Tilda Swinton against a South Korean farm girl and a friendly giant of a genetically engineered pig. The filming famously turned the director vegan (at least for a few months) and having watched it, I can see why! But its charms outweigh the ick factor, largely thanks to Ahn Seo-hyun’s performance as Mija and her bond with the lovable Okja.
Amelia Urry, Associate Editor

Chasing Coral
Many people I know are truly scared to watch this documentary because they think it is all doom and gloom, and we’ve got enough of that going around as it is. But Chasing Coral is more than that — it’s luminous, honest, funny, and moving, a love letter to the magic of nature and the joy that we get from exploring the world. The filmmakers take us underwater to some of the most exquisite coral reefs and fish communities remaining on the planet, giving us a front-row seat to climate change in action.
I’m going to host a showing of the film for friends in the new year. Eulogy or wake-up call, I think it’s worth being moved by the stunning and humbling complexity of our oceans and the coral that has been its seedbed.
Kate Jackson, Director of Networks



Sourdough
Sourdough is a ridiculous and playful novel by Robin Sloan (who, full disclosure, wrote a blurb for one of my books). I mean, c’mon, it’s about sentient sourdough starter. It’s also the most realistic and compelling guide to the modern food debate I’ve encountered.
The story takes place in the San Francisco Bay Area, the scene of an ongoing struggle between two very different versions of foodie utopia. On one side is an Alice Waters–like character who champions tradition, artisanal labor, and the flavors of nature. On the other side there’s a Soylent-inspired company promoting exploration, efficiency, and new creation. According to the classic sci-fi formula, the story would be about how technological advancement creates a monster that must be defeated. But this book refuses to take sides. Like most of us, the novel values culture and tradition, but also yearns for newness and exploration. Like most of us, it’s wonderstruck by technology while also skeptical of it.
If everyone engaged in making a more equitable and sustainable food system took the lessons in Sourdough to heart, I think the partisan debate would end. It’s the techie-hippie divide that’s unnatural — most of us want a bit of everything.
Nathanael Johnson, Senior Writer

S-Town
If you haven’t heard 2017 breakout podcast S-Town, please tell me what rock you’ve been living under so I can build a nuclear bunker there that would make John B. proud. The story, from the producers of This American Life and Serial, documents the life of one disillusioned, brilliant, misanthropic horologist as he alternately despairs and rejoices in the human capacity to muck up the best intentions. And, yes, that means he talks about climate change A LOT. As narrator Brian Reed laments, that doesn’t always make for uplifting conversation. (SORRY for boring you, Brian.) But it does make for some pretty gripping radio.
Amelia Urry, Associate Editor

Terrestrial
Terrestrial is an environmental podcast like you’ve never heard (case in point: Its unofficial tagline is “We’re fucked. Now what?”). Currently in its second season, the show profiles individuals making tough choices in the face of climate change, like a conservative hunter who breaks rank to defend public lands or a teenage girl who joins a group suing the government over climate inaction. The show tackles big issues — like climate change, air pollution, and environmental justice — and tells those stories in a way listeners can relate to.
Jesse Nichols, Contributing Assistant Video Producer

Thor: Ragnarok
I was worried about the planet turning into a giant garbage patch where violent cage matches serve as the only distraction from pollution and massive income inequality. Then, I watched Thor: Ragnarok. Now, I’m thrilled about our planet turning into a giant garbage patch where violent cage matches serve as the only distraction from pollution and massive income inequality, as overseen by emperor Jeff Goldblum. Now there’s a magnetic personality!
Darby Minow Smith, Senior Managing Editor



Links

• From hotumn to meatmares: The words that defined our planet this year
• Here’s the good news about Earth from this year
• 2017 will be the warmest year in history without an El Niño
• Coastal cities are in serious jeopardy, new sea-level rise study shows
• Trump’s lawyers tried (and probably failed) to throw out the kids’ climate lawsuit