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Tesla has finished building the biggest battery in the world
- socceroos 9y agoI'm impressed with the pace at which they delivered this. If only all government projects were this efficient.
- liudmila 9y agohe will charge it with his own personal energy)) Wonder where he takes so much enthusiasm from)
- nmeofthestate 9y agoNot mentioned in the article - its capacity is 129 MWh. So, at full pelt it would output 100MW for an hour and 20 minutes... ish? Which I think is about 120 peoples' worth of power. (correction 1MW is not 1KW, so 120,000!) https://www.tesla.com/en_AU/blog/tesla-powerpack-enable-large-scale-sustainable-energy-south-australia?redirect=no https://www.tesla.com/en_AU/blog/tesla-powerpack-enable-larg...
- lawlessone 9y agoThe worlds biggest battery is a lot smaller than imagined. I was expecting something the size of a data center
- keenerd 9y agoFrom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hornsdale_Wind_Farm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hornsdale_Wind_Farm the battery can do 70MW for ten minutes and 30MW for three hours. They also say "capable of discharge at 100 megawatts" but that might be margin of safety. I wonder if things are limited by cooling? Maybe the battery only has enough cooling to sustain 30MW of output and doing 70MW for ten minutes is all heat soak.
- nmeofthestate 9y agoYep, I am just taking the headline 100MW figure as the output.
- electricityUser 9y agoI don't know what Australian electricity needs are, but we averaged 500 W over the last year in our 2-person household. This battery would be good for 10000 similar households for a day or 200000 households "for an hour and 20 minutes...ish".
- nmeofthestate 9y agoI used UK per capita electrical energy per annum, translated to an average power usage = 0.8KW. 100/0.8 = 120 ish peoples' power use. So yep - off by a mere *1000!
- edejong 9y agoIs that due to airco or electric heating? We have an average of 130W.
- jakecodes 9y agoI am not a battery expert by any means. But the article says: > with 100 megawatts of capacity. Isn't megawatts the measurement of power? Wouldn't Watt Hours be the measurement for capacity? Sometimes people use Apmere Hours also. Like the Chevy Bolt has 60 kWh of capacity.
- adaml_623 9y agoThat's a great point and the answer is that it has storage capacity measured in Watt Hours and it has a peak power supply capacity measured in Watts. Other comments have the details :-)
- marcosdumay 9y agoTurns out that power output is one of the most important measures for a battery. On some applications it's even more relevant than capacity. (If you have an internal combustion car, take a look at its battery, odds are power is written in way larger letters than capacity.)
- bamboozled 9y agoI'm Nitpicking, but it's a silly title. It should at least read, like "Elon Musk and his team built the biggest battery in the world".
- nmeofthestate 9y agoI also don't think this is "one battery" - is a warehouse full of large pizzas the biggest pizza in the world?
- ioulian 9y agoIsn't a battery just a name for the collection of battery cells? Tesla's (the car) battery is composed from a lot of units that can store electricity. Some RC batteries are just different cells/smaller batteries that are combined together in a nice package. I think even the batteries in cell phones are composed from different components (some of which doesn't even store energy).
- nmeofthestate 9y agoYeah this occurred to me after posting that pedantry. You're right. Even consumer batteries can have multiple cells.
- alex_duf 9y agoI think it's actually fair to call it "battery" instead of "batteries" from the outside the system behaves like one.
- fooker 9y agoYou can connect batteries to build what is effectively a bigger battery. Connecting pizzas, not very scalable.
- anovikov 9y agothat's still pricey at almost $400 per kwh of capacity... or about $0.2 per kwh of storage, several times the grid prices.
- keenerd 9y agoedit: I too can mix up GW and MW.
- anovikov 9y agoI was assuming 3000 cycles at 60% depth of discharge, which is what typical modern Li-Ion battery does, and an equivalent of 1800 full cycles. 129MWH over 1800 cycles is 232GWh, which is for $50M = $0.215 per KWh.
- Matt3o12_ 9y agoI would actually be very surprised if they only lasted for 500 cycles. Apple currently says their devices last 1000 cycles and Tesla is very careful with their batteries. They recommend not charging it below and above a certain percentage in their cars and it would surprise me if it was any different in their battery packs (though I believe they do not have such an option -- they just do it automatically). Furthermore, those packs have dedicated cooling and a low discharge rate, and are made for a lot of discharges (unlike iphones, which are made to be purchased every two to four years). According to Wikipedia[0], the original Powerwall was rated for 1000-1500 cycles and it would suprise me if Tesla's new powerwalls are not better. So, they should be even cheaper then your estimate, especially when you consider that they will probably be used well after the 20% capacity lose. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Powerwall#cite_ref-te2015-05-06_11-0 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Powerwall#cite_ref-te201...
- xh3n1 9y agoaww
- _yewy 9y agoAm I the only one who is completely fed up of this "cult of personality" mentality in tech and tech-related media? The article itself is not that bad, but the title here on HN makes it look like he built the damn thing himself. I know everybody is smart enough to understand that there were tons of people involved, but why put Elon Musk instead of, idk, Tesla. I don't have any problem with any single article on Musk/Jobs/you name it but on aggregate it makes me slightly mad. EDIT: I'm not trying to take anything away from Musk. He is a very succesful person for many good reasons.
- alex_duf 9y agoYeah same, I love the guy and that's not to disrespect all his involvement but I feel like using "Tesla" in the title would be more respectful for everyone's work... Edit: Title has been amended on their website, thanks Mashable!
- azeirah 9y agoElon Musk is a brand, it is only coincidental that he happens to be a real person as well.
- simonh 9y agoSo if I'd given you the Elon Musk brand 20 years ago and thrown the man in a Gulag, we'd still have Tesla electric cars, SpaceX rockets and solar roof tiles now?
- skybrian 9y agoWell, for Tesla, that depends on whether Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning would have gotten funding from someone else. Musk wasn't the founder you know.
- simonh 9y agoI know, but the only reason he took over was because they both bailed or got pushed. I suppose it's possible he was behind that, but he must at least have had the backing of the rest of the board and it seems unlikely they'd do that for nothing.
- fu86 9y agoI am not sure about that (biggest battery in the world). This looks like a battery "pack" (an array of batteries connected in parallel/series). This looks like just a marketing thing to me, because there is nothing new or special about it. Just "the biggest". Germany is also working on big batteries for years, but with a completely different strategy. A redox-flow battery with polymers and saline solution (https://www.nature.com/articles/nature18909 https://www.nature.com/articles/nature18909) Here is a recent german article about it (http://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/technik/brine4power-so-funktioniert-die-groesste-batterie-der-welt-a-1179827.html http://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/technik/brine4power-so-fu...) This kind of batteries will hold 700 MWh.
- frandroid 9y agoDo you understand that the word "battery" means "array"?
- qu1mby 9y agoOr the more polite variation: "'battery' actually means 'array', so it's being used appropriately in this case"
- quesera 9y agoA battery is an array of cells. The usage of "battery" is completely proper in this case, and it can be argued that the common usage is improper. ("prescriptive" vs "descriptive" rejoinder omitted for brevity)
- agumonkey 9y agoGod, I read "biggest building in the world" .. I need to get my gigafactory obsession in check.