“Day for history books:” Hazelwood becomes first coal plant to transition to big battery
“Day for history books:” Hazelwood becomes first coal plant to transition to big battery
Hazelwood big battery officially commissioned, becoming first of many big batteries to be built at the site of a former coal generator in Australia.
It's good to see projects like this being implimented. There is a lot of work still to be done in moving to cleaner fuels and every step like this gets us a bit closer.
I would like to see more investment in putting in place recycling/end of life processes for things like batteries, we don't have a great record in that area when we can't just send everything overseas. Hopefully that will come too, but I suspect we will end up playing catch-up with stockpiled batteries etc. at some point.
A few other articles for anyone interested: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-06-14/first-big-battery-at-ex-coal-site-goes-live/102477230
Love this!
For what it's worth, Nissan is starting to use old Leaf EV batteries for power storage at its casting plant in Dandenong.
That's a cool use for them, if we end up with a lot of them, I wonder if houses with the space could use them for cheap storage.
I have read something about that being done before. The batteries are made up of a bunch of individual cells wired together, so they can be disassembled, have the bad cells removed, and the good cells can be used to re-create "new" batteries. In the article I read a homeowner had made his own system doing that, so it is obviously something that can be done without a huge investment if you know what you are doing.
The cells that are not appropriate for re-use in other applications can be used to recover a lot of useful material. But we really need to be investing more in the facilities (and technology) to do this, preferably before we end up with warehouses full of stockpiled batteries going up in flames.
I wonder how cheap they'd be, as the storage capacity is quite a bit more than the average home battery!
With the fire risk lithium batteries pose, I do not hold great hope that ENGIE will manage this well, given their history of causing coal mine fires because they didn't think the sprinklers were necessary... Lol