Luciferase, I think it is meant to be a backup for conventional
generators. It could if the dam was full replace Hazlewood for 17.5 hours.
Or if a coal fired station lost one turbine, say 250 Mwatts it could replace it for 140 hours.
In the situation we have now it could be very valuable.

Guys, from what I recall the Tesla battery system was only good for a very very short time. And that was only for a very few suburbs.

It cannot sustain normal base load power for the kind of time that would be required of it.

It was a political stunt at best.

ALL the renewables and batteries and so on are band aid fixes. None of them are cost effective and able to give on-going reliable base load power like Hydro, or Nuclear.

Greens go home get out of politics you are costing us and wasting our money so that you can remain in politics for NO good reason other than to satisfy your own personal and selfish agenda at the expense of the Australian people.

And take all this renewable crap with you!

Altav, from what I have read the SA battery is 120 MWatt/hr.
Of that 20Mwatt/hr is contracted to supply network services ie
frequency control and black restart ability.
The other 100Mw/hr is to buffer the wind farm output to cope with
gusty windy days. Just like putting a large capacitor across the output.

Useful, but will not solve our present problem and was never intended to do that.
Good strong breeze in SA at present 1337 Mwatt from wind alone.

Yes ALTRAV, snowy 0.2 is a pumped hydro system. It only has water to generate power by gravity, AFTER you have used power to pump the water up there in the first place. These are usually used as profit making systems. Cheap power is used at off-peak to pump the water, then the water is used to generate power when prices are higher at peak usage. The generation of the falling water produces about 15% less power than was required to pump it up there to start with.

They are used as a buffer to handle excess power. There is a small one on Warragamba dam in Queensland, although we hear nothing of it's use or usefulness.

As Bazz says, it really is a water battery, with the usual loss power as it requires more power to charge than is returned.

Of course a water battery such as this, has a much longer productive life than any chemical battery, such as the South Australian foolishness, & is effective with coal fired systems.

Currently the Danes with their excessive investment in windmills, have to give much of their power in good wind generation conditions to Sweden. They use the free power to pump water up hill in their hydro systems, then charge the Danes heaps to sell it back when the wind drops. In fact I read the Swedes were charging Denmark to take the power at one stage, although I don't know if this was actually true.

Hasbeen said;
In fact I read the Swedes were charging Denmark to take the power at
one stage, although I don't know if this was actually true.

The story I read was Sweden was charging the Germans to take the
Germans renewable power. So it is probably true that they are charging
anyone dopey enough to overbuild wind & solar.
Can't they just disconnect the wind farms from the grid and leave them
twiddling their thumbs ?

Guys, I did not know about this stupid idea of pumping water up just to let it flow down again, in all with little or no physical or financial gain.

I thought the Snowy scheme used the water stored in the highland lakes due to natural and environmental activity such as rain, melting snow, flow from the mountains above.

And the water naturally collected in the natural formation of the land high in the mountains. Then I thought by building a water/turbine/generator somewhere lower than this natural dam/lake, the water just flowed down and hey presto, we have FREE electricity.

If that is not the case then, as far as I am concerned you can stick this PC version of hydro-electric lies.

We are screwed. If we don't get rid of these scumbags in Canberra we are never going to get off our knees. Their greed and averace prevents them from thinking like socially responsible people, and thus we're screwed!