9 ms·

Tesla brings online its 80 MWh Powerpack station with SoCal Edison

106 points by vermontdevil 10y ago

RangerScience 10y ago
I can't help but wonder (in the sense of curiosity, and in the sense of optimism) of the impacts of Tesla's battery and battery manufacturing technology, particularly in the wake of Samsung's recent battery quality issues. AFAIK, US manufacturing is known for higher costs - and higher quality. Between all the new* uses for batteries, and the Gigafactory.... I wasn't enough of a webdev back then to being paying attention, but, does this feel like Amazon's AWS early days? * Off-peak storage for on-peak discharge isn't exactly new, but why hasn't it been as big a thing? Is it just the sexiness of Tesla causing it to make the news, finally?
- rocqua 10y ago
  > Off-peak storage for on-peak discharge isn't exactly new, but why hasn't it been as big a thing? > Is it just the sexiness of Tesla causing it to make the news, finally? I'd guess simple costs. Tesla is actually pushing $ / MWh the hardest. They aren't high cost and high quality, they are low cost high quality. At least, that's what I gather from reading Musk's biography.
philipkglass 10y ago
After announcing the project back in September, we have now learned that Tesla and Southern California Edison (SCE) have completed the massive 80 MWh energy storage station using Tesla’s new Powerpack 2 at the Mira Loma substation. ... While Tesla and SCE haven’t officially launched the new substation yet, sources familiar with the new Powerpack installation told Electrek that it was completed a few weeks back – late December – and brought online so that the electric utility can start using it to manage peak demand. Deploying this project in only 3 months is really impressive. I think there's a pattern here: energy systems built from repeating small modules have systematically lower risks of cost/schedule escalation. See for example "Construction Cost Overruns and Electricity Infrastructure: An Unavoidable Risk?" https://www.researchgate.net/publication/262304928_Construction_Cost_Overruns_and_Electricity_Infrastructure_An_Unavoidable_Risk https://www.researchgate.net/publication/262304928_Construct... Look at Figures 2 and 3 in particular. The mean overrun by project type goes solar < wind < thermal (fossil) < nuclear < hydroelectric. That's basically the same ordering as "minimum viable project size." Coincidence? I don't think so. A small solar project can be a handful of panels. If you want to scale up to hundreds of megawatts, just tile a much larger area using the same panels and basic repeating structures. A lot of work can execute in parallel and sections can start generating output/revenue rapidly as they're completed, sometimes years before the project's last panel is installed. No such luck with a nuclear or hydro project: you can be on year 7 of an 8 year schedule and it's still generating zero watts because so little can happen in parallel. (This is also why I consider small modular reactors the last, best hope for a nuclear renaissance, but the latency for nuclear R&D is so high that renewables might "eat the world" first.) I rather expect that this Tesla installation, despite its impressive speed, was not particularly cheap. But if battery costs keep declining, in 5 years it could still be lightning quick to build another installation like this and cheaper than gas/diesel peakers. If that happens then storage-backed renewables become the very cheapest electricity source across large swaths of the Earth, threatening huge chunks of coal and natural gas demand. There may be a parallel risk to oil demand if Tesla and other auto makers execute well on their EV plans currently in the pipeline. I think Tesla faces some significant risks from the SolarCity acquisition, and execution risks on the Model 3, but I sure can't fault the ambition.
- tedsanders 10y ago
  Terrific comment, as usual. This is the key insight everyone. It's not about where the puck is today (of course this project is small and expensive relative to mature tech), it's about where the puck could be in 5-50 years. If battery costs continue to fall with economies of scale, and they become the least-cost solution, they would be bring characteristics that today's least-cost solutions lack. Batteries are modular, dense, and can be deployed extremely quickly. You don't need a years-long permitting and construction process to deploy them. If they continue following the cost curve they're on, they may change how grid planning is done, and even change the grid's very topology. In the Christensen sense, batteries may be truly disruptive - a new technology that is initially inappropriate but brings with it undervalued characteristics (like deployment speed/modularity) that eventually can change how business is done.
  - ams6110 10y ago
    > You don't need a years-long permitting and construction process to deploy them. Not sure where you live but this definitely is not the case in all areas. In my town the local utility has been trying to get approval to build a substation (standard design by any criteria, and needed to support increased demand) for going on two years but nobody wants it near their neighborhood.
- jessriedel 10y ago
  > The mean overrun by project type goes solar < wind < thermal (fossil) < nuclear < hydroelectric. That's basically the same ordering as "minimum viable project size." Relatedly, MIT Prof. Dennis Whyte argues that this is a/the key friction for the development of fusion power in this excellent semi-popular talk https://youtu.be/KkpqA8yG9T4 https://youtu.be/KkpqA8yG9T4 In particular, he thinks the latest generation of superconducting magnets will lower the minimum-viable size of fusion power plants, which will have a big impact on the feasibility of them being built by human institutions even if their raw numbers on paper are comparable to older style tokamaks.
guelo 10y ago
I don't know why this article keeps using the word 'massive'. 20MW is tiny at utility scale. For comparison the typical pumped-storage station has 1,000-3,000MW capacity.
- the8472 10y ago
  Pumped-storage exploits pre-existing landscape features. Battery storage is essentially building storage from scratch in places where no favorable geological features exist. How much would digging a mineshaft, a bedrock cavern and a lake or additional caverns just to pump water up and down cost?
  - throwaway91111 10y ago
    When weighted against cost and expected lifetime, it may not make sense to do this over e.g. solar + molten salt.
    - greglindahl 10y ago
      Except that utility-scale thermal solar + molten salt doesn't exactly have a good track record so far. It'd be great if it lived up to expectations...
- pokemon-trainer 10y ago
  80 MWh is massive for a battery. MW are a measure of power, not energy. You mean MW-h. It's incorrect to say something has a MW capacity when discussing energy storage.
  - deathanatos 10y ago
    > MW are a measure of power, not energy. You mean MW-h. It's incorrect to say something has a MW capacity when discussing energy storage. He's quoting TFA, > With a capacity of 20 MW/80 MWh It would seem sensible that the system has both metrics: a total capacity of storage, and a total rate at which it can supply that storage to things connected to it. Further, my understanding is that the parent you're responding to is correct: pumped-storage hydro tends to have much greater generation rates; Wikipedia lists an example of 360MW.
roflchoppa 10y ago
Does anyone know what is the cycle limit on these Powerpack station cells?
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- owenversteeg 10y ago
  I've got a good idea what the cycle limit is at normal discharge rates for these batteries, but the tricky thing in the calculation here is that the discharge rate is around 0.6C. That's very low (batteries of a similar size can put out fifty times that comfortably.) Discharge rate affects the usable cycles. So with an 80% cutoff 10C discharge you might get 300 cycles, but with a 1C discharge you might get 500 and a 0.5C discharge you might get 600. Given the very low discharge rate, I'm guessing these will be ran for around 500 to 1000 cycles, but that's just a rough estimate and the real number could lie anywhere between 300 and 3000. Temperature, pressure, charge rate, etc. all affect this.
  - tshannon 10y ago
    So what does that translate to in years of operation? Does Tesla basically get a nice recurring income stream with battery replacements every 5 - 10 years?
  - hollerith 10y ago
    "the discharge rate is around 0.6C" I looked up this "C rating". 0.6C means that the battery will be completely discharged in 1/0.6 hours. Well, more precisely, it means that it is producing 0.6 * X amps where X is the battery's capacity in amp-hours. Since discharging a battery at a rate of 0.6 * X amps usually produces less heat than discharging it at X amps, the battery is (usually) slightly more efficient, which means it will usually continue to provide power for slightly more than 0.6 hours. Hopefully, the person I am replying to will correct me if I have made an error here.
    - owenversteeg 10y ago
beachstartup 10y ago
well, well. edison and tesla, finally working together again.
foota 10y ago
I'm going to compare this plant to the largest pumped storage plant (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_County_Pumped_Storage_Station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_County_Pumped_Storage_Sta...). It has a listed cost of 1.6 billion USD built in 1977-1985, a capacity of 70,000,000 cubic meters of water (the sum of the lower and upper reservoirs on the wikipedia page) which at the max flow rate of 51,000 cubic meters per second is ~24 hours of generation at capacity. The page lists the generation capacity as 3000MW and so you can calculate a storage capacity of 72,000 MWH. These numbers give $533,333/MW of generation capacity and $22,222/MWH of storage. The article seems to show the cost for the Tesla station at $38 million. This gives $475,000/MWH of storage capacity and $1,900,000/MW generation capacity.
- greglindahl 10y ago
  Here's an apple, there's an orange. This battery project can be built in small increments and does not require local land in a proper geometry that can be flooded. Most good pumped storage possibilities in the US are built out already. Pumped storage also wastes more of the stored energy. It took 7 years to build the hydro facility? Wow.
  - jws 10y ago
    The recently rebuilt (2010) Taum Sauk reservoir only manages a 70% efficiency according to Wikipedia. I'm not seeing a number published for the Powerpack but I'd guess a 90% ballpark.
- maratd 10y ago
  Hydro is always going to be superior to pretty much anything out there. The problem with hydro is that we already tapped every possible source for both generation and storage. It's done. You can put a Tesla station anywhere in whatever size you need.
  - nol13 10y ago
    Nonsense, just have to make more rain.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
fcanesin 10y ago
Tesla is so hyped that 20MW/80MWh is bombastic news (by the wording in the article), a mean sized power plant is ~800MW. The grid is not interconnected ? Can't they pump up a hydroheletric reservoir ? I sure hope the new administration open the eyes for carbon sequestration and nuclear energy, US will be better and cleaner faster.
- adventured 10y ago
  We're going to at least see a nuclear push under the Trump Administration. They've touted that on numerous occasions. [1] The carbon sequestration I suspect is entirely off the table. [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-12-09/trump-s-team-is-asking-for-ways-u-s-can-keep-nuclear-alive https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-12-09/trump-s-t...
- rpedela 10y ago
  For a new technology, yes it is great news. If this and other similar projects work out, you will likely start seeing larger installations.

106 points by vermontdevil 10y ago

I can't help but wonder (in the sense of curiosity, and in the sense of optimism) of the impacts of Tesla's battery and battery manufacturing technology, particularly in the wake of Samsung's recent battery quality issues. AFAIK, US manufacturing is known for higher costs - and higher quality. Between all the new* uses for batteries, and the Gigafactory.... I wasn't enough of a webdev back then to being paying attention, but, does this feel like Amazon's AWS early days? * Off-peak storage for on-peak discharge isn't exactly new, but why hasn't it been as big a thing? Is it just the sexiness of Tesla causing it to make the news, finally?

rocqua 10y ago
> Off-peak storage for on-peak discharge isn't exactly new, but why hasn't it been as big a thing? > Is it just the sexiness of Tesla causing it to make the news, finally? I'd guess simple costs. Tesla is actually pushing $ / MWh the hardest. They aren't high cost and high quality, they are low cost high quality. At least, that's what I gather from reading Musk's biography.

philipkglass 10y ago

After announcing the project back in September, we have now learned that Tesla and Southern California Edison (SCE) have completed the massive 80 MWh energy storage station using Tesla’s new Powerpack 2 at the Mira Loma substation. ... While Tesla and SCE haven’t officially launched the new substation yet, sources familiar with the new Powerpack installation told Electrek that it was completed a few weeks back – late December – and brought online so that the electric utility can start using it to manage peak demand. Deploying this project in only 3 months is really impressive. I think there's a pattern here: energy systems built from repeating small modules have systematically lower risks of cost/schedule escalation. See for example "Construction Cost Overruns and Electricity Infrastructure: An Unavoidable Risk?" https://www.researchgate.net/publication/262304928_Construction_Cost_Overruns_and_Electricity_Infrastructure_An_Unavoidable_Risk https://www.researchgate.net/publication/262304928_Construct... Look at Figures 2 and 3 in particular. The mean overrun by project type goes solar < wind < thermal (fossil) < nuclear < hydroelectric. That's basically the same ordering as "minimum viable project size." Coincidence? I don't think so. A small solar project can be a handful of panels. If you want to scale up to hundreds of megawatts, just tile a much larger area using the same panels and basic repeating structures. A lot of work can execute in parallel and sections can start generating output/revenue rapidly as they're completed, sometimes years before the project's last panel is installed. No such luck with a nuclear or hydro project: you can be on year 7 of an 8 year schedule and it's still generating zero watts because so little can happen in parallel. (This is also why I consider small modular reactors the last, best hope for a nuclear renaissance, but the latency for nuclear R&D is so high that renewables might "eat the world" first.) I rather expect that this Tesla installation, despite its impressive speed, was not particularly cheap. But if battery costs keep declining, in 5 years it could still be lightning quick to build another installation like this and cheaper than gas/diesel peakers. If that happens then storage-backed renewables become the very cheapest electricity source across large swaths of the Earth, threatening huge chunks of coal and natural gas demand. There may be a parallel risk to oil demand if Tesla and other auto makers execute well on their EV plans currently in the pipeline. I think Tesla faces some significant risks from the SolarCity acquisition, and execution risks on the Model 3, but I sure can't fault the ambition.

tedsanders 10y ago
Terrific comment, as usual. This is the key insight everyone. It's not about where the puck is today (of course this project is small and expensive relative to mature tech), it's about where the puck could be in 5-50 years. If battery costs continue to fall with economies of scale, and they become the least-cost solution, they would be bring characteristics that today's least-cost solutions lack. Batteries are modular, dense, and can be deployed extremely quickly. You don't need a years-long permitting and construction process to deploy them. If they continue following the cost curve they're on, they may change how grid planning is done, and even change the grid's very topology. In the Christensen sense, batteries may be truly disruptive - a new technology that is initially inappropriate but brings with it undervalued characteristics (like deployment speed/modularity) that eventually can change how business is done.
- ams6110 10y ago
  > You don't need a years-long permitting and construction process to deploy them. Not sure where you live but this definitely is not the case in all areas. In my town the local utility has been trying to get approval to build a substation (standard design by any criteria, and needed to support increased demand) for going on two years but nobody wants it near their neighborhood.
jessriedel 10y ago
> The mean overrun by project type goes solar < wind < thermal (fossil) < nuclear < hydroelectric. That's basically the same ordering as "minimum viable project size." Relatedly, MIT Prof. Dennis Whyte argues that this is a/the key friction for the development of fusion power in this excellent semi-popular talk https://youtu.be/KkpqA8yG9T4 https://youtu.be/KkpqA8yG9T4 In particular, he thinks the latest generation of superconducting magnets will lower the minimum-viable size of fusion power plants, which will have a big impact on the feasibility of them being built by human institutions even if their raw numbers on paper are comparable to older style tokamaks.

guelo 10y ago

I don't know why this article keeps using the word 'massive'. 20MW is tiny at utility scale. For comparison the typical pumped-storage station has 1,000-3,000MW capacity.

the8472 10y ago
Pumped-storage exploits pre-existing landscape features. Battery storage is essentially building storage from scratch in places where no favorable geological features exist. How much would digging a mineshaft, a bedrock cavern and a lake or additional caverns just to pump water up and down cost?
- throwaway91111 10y ago
  When weighted against cost and expected lifetime, it may not make sense to do this over e.g. solar + molten salt.
  - greglindahl 10y ago
    Except that utility-scale thermal solar + molten salt doesn't exactly have a good track record so far. It'd be great if it lived up to expectations...
pokemon-trainer 10y ago
80 MWh is massive for a battery. MW are a measure of power, not energy. You mean MW-h. It's incorrect to say something has a MW capacity when discussing energy storage.
- deathanatos 10y ago
  > MW are a measure of power, not energy. You mean MW-h. It's incorrect to say something has a MW capacity when discussing energy storage. He's quoting TFA, > With a capacity of 20 MW/80 MWh It would seem sensible that the system has both metrics: a total capacity of storage, and a total rate at which it can supply that storage to things connected to it. Further, my understanding is that the parent you're responding to is correct: pumped-storage hydro tends to have much greater generation rates; Wikipedia lists an example of 360MW.

roflchoppa 10y ago

Does anyone know what is the cycle limit on these Powerpack station cells?

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
owenversteeg 10y ago
I've got a good idea what the cycle limit is at normal discharge rates for these batteries, but the tricky thing in the calculation here is that the discharge rate is around 0.6C. That's very low (batteries of a similar size can put out fifty times that comfortably.) Discharge rate affects the usable cycles. So with an 80% cutoff 10C discharge you might get 300 cycles, but with a 1C discharge you might get 500 and a 0.5C discharge you might get 600. Given the very low discharge rate, I'm guessing these will be ran for around 500 to 1000 cycles, but that's just a rough estimate and the real number could lie anywhere between 300 and 3000. Temperature, pressure, charge rate, etc. all affect this.
- tshannon 10y ago
  So what does that translate to in years of operation? Does Tesla basically get a nice recurring income stream with battery replacements every 5 - 10 years?
- hollerith 10y ago
  "the discharge rate is around 0.6C" I looked up this "C rating". 0.6C means that the battery will be completely discharged in 1/0.6 hours. Well, more precisely, it means that it is producing 0.6 * X amps where X is the battery's capacity in amp-hours. Since discharging a battery at a rate of 0.6 * X amps usually produces less heat than discharging it at X amps, the battery is (usually) slightly more efficient, which means it will usually continue to provide power for slightly more than 0.6 hours. Hopefully, the person I am replying to will correct me if I have made an error here.
  - owenversteeg 10y ago

beachstartup 10y ago

well, well. edison and tesla, finally working together again.

foota 10y ago

I'm going to compare this plant to the largest pumped storage plant (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_County_Pumped_Storage_Station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_County_Pumped_Storage_Sta...). It has a listed cost of 1.6 billion USD built in 1977-1985, a capacity of 70,000,000 cubic meters of water (the sum of the lower and upper reservoirs on the wikipedia page) which at the max flow rate of 51,000 cubic meters per second is ~24 hours of generation at capacity. The page lists the generation capacity as 3000MW and so you can calculate a storage capacity of 72,000 MWH. These numbers give $533,333/MW of generation capacity and $22,222/MWH of storage. The article seems to show the cost for the Tesla station at $38 million. This gives $475,000/MWH of storage capacity and $1,900,000/MW generation capacity.

greglindahl 10y ago
Here's an apple, there's an orange. This battery project can be built in small increments and does not require local land in a proper geometry that can be flooded. Most good pumped storage possibilities in the US are built out already. Pumped storage also wastes more of the stored energy. It took 7 years to build the hydro facility? Wow.
- jws 10y ago
  The recently rebuilt (2010) Taum Sauk reservoir only manages a 70% efficiency according to Wikipedia. I'm not seeing a number published for the Powerpack but I'd guess a 90% ballpark.
maratd 10y ago
Hydro is always going to be superior to pretty much anything out there. The problem with hydro is that we already tapped every possible source for both generation and storage. It's done. You can put a Tesla station anywhere in whatever size you need.
- nol13 10y ago
  Nonsense, just have to make more rain.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

fcanesin 10y ago

Tesla is so hyped that 20MW/80MWh is bombastic news (by the wording in the article), a mean sized power plant is ~800MW. The grid is not interconnected ? Can't they pump up a hydroheletric reservoir ? I sure hope the new administration open the eyes for carbon sequestration and nuclear energy, US will be better and cleaner faster.

adventured 10y ago
We're going to at least see a nuclear push under the Trump Administration. They've touted that on numerous occasions. [1] The carbon sequestration I suspect is entirely off the table. [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-12-09/trump-s-team-is-asking-for-ways-u-s-can-keep-nuclear-alive https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-12-09/trump-s-t...
rpedela 10y ago
For a new technology, yes it is great news. If this and other similar projects work out, you will likely start seeing larger installations.