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Megapack: Utility-Scale Energy Storage
- CaliforniaKarl 7y agoI know it should be obvious, but when I read 'Utility Scale Storage', I was thinking "Oooooooo, have they come up with an improvement to Lustre file stores? Or were they rolling their own?" Of course they're talking about energy storage :-)
- sp332 7y ago"on a three-acre footprint" Is there a reason these installations are always shown laid out very flat? Is there a disadvantage to stacking them up or at least putting them on different floors of an appropriately-reinforced building?
- Zekio 7y agoWell I would assume they weigh a ton and moving them and/or replacing them will be less troublesome if you can just bring a crane or something similar
- bertil 7y agoAmusingly, heavy things carried up and down by cranes are a promising way to store electricity.
- Dylan16807 7y agoI can't really agree with 'promising'. A tower that can lift 100 tons 50 meters is not exactly cheap, and only stores 13.6 kilowatt hours.
- redler 7y agoHere’s a company pursuing that very idea. https://qz.com/1355672/stacking-concrete-blocks-is-a-surprisingly-efficient-way-to-store-energy/ https://qz.com/1355672/stacking-concrete-blocks-is-a-surpris...
- mbreese 7y agoExactly. It’s really the same principle as pumping water uphill except using concrete blocks and a crane. Potential energy is potential energy. I’d just love to see it in action.
- Dylan16807 7y agoAh, if you actually build the structure out of the items you're lifting, then that certainly changes the math. Compared to just lifting with a crane you get a thousand times the capacity at the same infrastructure price.
- amirhirsch 7y agoconsider off shore gravity batteries that can drop mass down 2 to 4km. Major fixed cost is Hvdc out 100miles, but it’s extremely scalable after that.
- Geee 7y agoI wonder how much more energy this setup would store if they added cranes. Also it could be possible to make a circular vacuum maglev train out of these and add energy to it by accelerating.
- mbay 7y agoThere was an episode of Nova about energy storage that included a company that made kinetic energy storage devices. IIRC they had 5000 pound flywheels that spin in a vacuum and can be installed in your home. Expensive to purchase and install but essentially unlimited lifespan and totally renewable.
- Cthulhu_ 7y agoI've heard about either a working system, or a calculation of something like that but with regular trains. Long story short, it can't actually store that much energy. More efficient (and less mechanically complicated) would be pumping water up a hill into a lake.
- astrodust 7y agoLead-acid batteries are pretty damned heavy and would make a great kinetic battery as well as a chemical one.
- IshKebab 7y agoYes, it's more expensive. They're not normally situated where land is expensive. You can ask the same question about car parks. Same answer. Building up or down is expensive.
- sneak 7y agoSpace isn’t an issue in the places you need to locate these things, with a few notable exceptions (eg Japan). Building up is a lot more expensive, and there is no shortage of available land on Earth at the moment.
- FluffyKitty 7y agoProbably just the simple economics of cost of land vs cost of construction of a new building + ongoing maintenance. I'm sure if they ever saw need to place this in a city they would construct a building. But for now, it's probably cheaper to just build out where land is cheap (and possibly closer to generation source) and then transport the energy to where it's being used.
- malandrew 7y agoHow safe would it be to put large quantities of a potentially unstable alkali metal in close proximity to lots of humans?
- core-questions 7y agoI mean, we all sleep with phones under our pillow, so
- floatrock 7y agoI know your comment is meant as a potshot, but it actually points out an interesting side-point: safer than putting in a natural gas plant. In California, the Puente gas plant made headlines last year because they found it was cheaper to create battery storage than an equivalently-sized gas peaker plant. A large part was permitting and land rights. People don't want an emissions-spewing gas plant in their backyard, but an array of batteries in what looks like every other industrial warehouse is much more palatable. (Time-to-go-live was another factor: battery arrays are modular and can be distributed across multiple sites to further minimize risk, a gas plant is a massive multi-year centralized organizational challenge with all the associated costs and all-or-nothing risks) https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/sce-picks-major-battery-portfolio-in-place-of-puente-gas-plant https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/sce-picks-major...
- elihu 7y agoBesides land being cheap outside of cities, it might also be a safety thing. Like, you might not want batteries close enough that if one catches fire it could catch the rest on fire too. You might also want easy access for fire crews.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Darkphibre 7y ago>All Megapacks connect to Powerhub, an advanced monitoring and control platform for large-scale utility projects and microgrids, and can also integrate with Autobidder, Tesla’s machine-learning platform for automated energy trading. Oh. My. God. pow(What_could_go_wrong, 2);
- whatshisface 7y agoI'm glad to hear that Elon Musk solved options trading, the complexities were really bugging me.
- 693471 7y agoHow do you think the grid currently works? This is nothing new, really.
- kccqzy 7y agoIt's just trading. Maybe the ML makes some mistakes and someone loses some money while someone else gets some free or negatively priced electricity.
- Darkphibre 7y agoHmm, valid point. I hadn't thought of the risk factors on the downside. That just leaves the common attack-vector concern for any grid adding this into their ecosystem.
- lolc 7y agoIt's just trading and can flash-crash the grid.
- Faaak 7y agoWhen they come to Europe (CH at least), Tesla's gonna eat up the lunch (in the ancillary services field at least) of everyone. Even more so with the new renewable capacity added every day.
- semi-extrinsic 7y agoI dunno, it seems like the function of these Megapacks is to replace natural gas driven peaker plants? Europe doesn't have nearly as many of those as the US does. AFAIK Switzerland in particular has exactly zero, thanks to all that lovely hydropower that can be turned on and off to match solar/wind fluctuations. In fact, Switzerland alone has hydropower equivalent to 10 000 Megapacks. This basically means you can install all the renewables you want.
- Scoundreller 7y agoAnd with hydroelectricity often comes pumped-storage opportunities.
- eisa01 7y agoThe coal and nuclear phase outs across Europe will lead to a need for new flexible capacity. That should at least partly be covered by battery peakers.
- CarVac 7y agoNuclear isn't flexible capacity; plants are always run at max output. If it is to be phased out the replacement needs to have more long-term output than a battery, unless the renewables become incredibly overprovisioned.
- pertymcpert 7y agoAlways run at max output? This doesn't seem right to me, they have moderators for a reason don't they?
- 7y ago
- state_less 7y agoThis is good news! Are there competitors in this space or is Tesla going to absorb marketshare for the next few years? It seems like it could be a very big market. I'd be happy if we end up seeing more inexpensive battery production.
- lettergram 7y agoThey make the claim the giant lithium battery grid is “cleaner” than the “dirty” natural gas “peak power” plants. I’m curious, what’s the environmental damage of this overall? These battery packs likely degrade, lithium has to be mined, etc. Natural gas also has a cost to mine, to burn (though if I recall, the off gases are co2 and water vapor, lower levels of NO2, etc) Looking from the outside it looks like both options honestly may pollute or have the same environmental impact long-term. One is just a cost we don’t see immediately (or is don’t me in another country)
- azernik 7y agoIt also depends on how much you value CO2 emission reductions to the non-global-warming environmental damage (e.g. toxic chemical leakage) caused by battery production and decay.
- 693471 7y agoThere are tiny amounts of lithium in the batteries and we have tons of lithium on the planet. The real environmental / human rights issue is around cobalt and they're allegedly close to completely removing cobalt from their battery chemistry.
- the8472 7y ago> Looking from the outside it looks like both options honestly may pollute or have the same environmental impact long-term. Not sure how you come to that conclusion. Lithium is not a fuel that is consumed in the process. It is a recyclable component. And there is no dangerous imbalance in the global lithium cycle. Which can't be said about the carbon cycle. Just because every technology entails some environmental impact does not not mean all impacts are the same.
- fuzz4lyfe 7y ago>It is a recyclable component. In theory, batteries are not currently recycled in any scale equivalent to these proposals. Plastic is also recyclable but most of it ends up in landfills due to it being uneconomical.
- dantheman 7y agoThis is fantastic, incremental progress like this adds up quickly.
- drcross 7y agoI sincerely hope that Tesla can increase cell production to keep up with demand for all their products. When you look at product lines like this it makes you realise the scale and breadth of Elon Musk's influence and even if only half of his endeavours prove to be as successful as they seem like they will be he will be written about extensively in history books.
- woodandsteel 7y agoRegarding cell production, at the Q2 earnings meeting Tesla talked about increasing it to 1-2 terawatt hours per year, about a hundred times the current rate. No, I'm not kidding. https://cleantechnica.com/2019/07/24/liveblog-tesla-q2-2019-earnings-call-livestream/ https://cleantechnica.com/2019/07/24/liveblog-tesla-q2-2019-...
- AndrewBissell 7y agoThey also used to talk a big game about how much power generation capacity they were going to install at SolarCity. Now that business unit is a shell of its former self.
- xiphias2 7y agoAt least they realize that they have to plan big if they want to decrease CO2 emission of the world significantly. Their plan can fail, but I don't see any better plan.
- SECProto 7y agoMusk said (about an hour before you posted your comment) that SolarCity is hoping to manufacture 1000 solar roofs per week by the end of this year. [1] Most of Musk's company goals are aspirational, and the means to the end often change. For example, Falcon 9 first stage was supposed to be reusable by landing it in the ocean with a parachute, but they found it didn't work. Instead, they lengthened the first stage booster dramatically so it would have the propellant margin to land propulsively. [1] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1156005185656782848?s=20 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1156005185656782848?s=20
- amirhirsch 7y ago4 meter radius bore, go 2km down, then bore a 10 km tunnel. fill it with water to generate power, pump water out to store power losing 20% roundtrip. (pi * ((4 meters)^2) * (10 km)) * (1 (kg / liter)) * (9.81 (m / (s^2))) * (2 km) = 2.73946879 gigawatt hours
- ladberg 7y agoDo you know how hard/expensive it would be to even dig out a hole that wide and deep?
- amirhirsch 7y agonope, but I know that someone at Tesla knows (who also works in the boring field). Probably costs less than one rated for humans, where they quoted $10M per mile. So 10km ($62M) we're at $22 per kwh. Losing 20% of the energy every time will add up to about $40K per cycle so after like 6000 cycles it will be roughly the same price as $100/kwh lithium. I'm not sure about the technical issues regarding narrowness and depth, though a quick search indicates the deepest hole was a Russian made a 9 inch diameter hole 40,230 feet deep and had to stop because it was too hot. Anyway, I bet that offshore gravity batteries can also scale up very cheaply once you get over the HVDC cable fixed costs (this almost certainly means building 10GWh level capacity to justify a $100M cable to a place where ocean depths are 2-4km)
- Retric 7y agoCosts to dig go way up 2km underground. This might be less so with your example as you don’t need access tunnels, but it’s still significant.
- amirhirsch 7y agoI guess I'm just trying to introduce the idea that cheaper boring will reduce capital costs for pumped hydrostorage (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricit... ) I don't think lithium ion batteries, which are optimized for their energy density (mass per joule), belong in grid storage situations where we should care mostly about lowest cost total capacity (regardless of round-trip losses) and lifetime.
- abdullahkhalids 7y agoAnyone have any estimate on the cost of these Megapacks?
- epistasis 7y agoThe best number I've heard for the Australian battery is $500/kWh after full installation. Individual battery cells are less, but inverters, packaging, and heat control add up. I'd guess that for a big install they could probably get closer to $350/kWh these days, but that's a WAG.
- Cthulhu_ 7y agoSo one of these units would cost 1-1.5 million (if my math is correct) - that doesn't actually sound too expensive for utilities like this, especially given how operating costs would be lower than the gas peaker wotsits that were mentioned earlier.
- egdod 7y agoLithium batteries seem like a weird choice for large-scale power storage that just sits in one place. Lead is a lot cheaper, and its heaviness doesn’t matter in that application.
- simonebrunozzi 7y agoCorrect for "new" batteries; however, sometimes "used" Li-Ion batteries are "recycled" into static storage, and they can be cheaper than lead batteries.
- Scoundreller 7y agoNot sure if any insurer will cover used lithium batteries of unknown provenance in a multi-ton cube.
- simonebrunozzi 7y agoThey are almost never from "unknown" provenance. e.g. used Tesla car batteries, you know everything about them already (tech specs, years in operation, and number of charges).
- Scoundreller 7y agoex-automotive-service might be the worst case provenances. Would make sense if Tesla kept a life-time score of subjected G-forces and vibration for the pack so they could bin salvaged cells.
- Retric 7y agoLead batteries have a shorter lifespan and require more maintenance. The additional weight and volume also increases shipping costs. Oddly enough, you can get a lithium ion car battery jump starter for less than the cost of a car battery.
- Scoundreller 7y ago
- ggm 7y agoThe energy regulatory model in Australia is complex, and broken. And rather than simplifying it, it is going to be made even more complex, and probably more broken, to resolve the problems. Tesla is not the problem, the 30 minute bidding model, and the state/federal divide on energy policy, and the monopoly capital rent-seeking behaviour of encumbent privatized generators using coal and gas, and guaranteed yields on capital investment, and weak regulatory oversight, and a lack of national coordination, maybe they are the problem. But Tesla exposes the problem: the Neoen battery stack has been fantastic, but needs to be kept in perspective: To use this for more than FCAS (frequency stability services) nationwide, means re-building the national transmission grid to favour battery models. Parliamentarians got up on their hind hooves and brayed about how it couldn't keep lightbulbs on for more than 20 minutes and was a waste of money: They didn't for one minute admit it wasn't designed as a longterm power store, but as a frequency-control store, stability, and for peak-price bidding to cap off supply-price disfunctions, its working fine: Something like 60% of its capacity is for private bid to earn money, 40% contracted to the state for their goals. It is a real game changer but needs to be understood, its not like a Pumped Hydro unit, or a synchronous condenser (although it is more like that, than PHES) It is its own beast. Its response speed is so fast, the regulatory behaviour models have to adapt to cope with it. A Five minute bid pricing model is coming in under 2 years I think. I hope the majors don't work out a way to "game" it because my hope is, other mega-scale battery and PH systems will be onstream then, and be able to survive in it, and drive some more coal and gas out of the system. We have a fictional belief in "base load" power here rather than responsive power. We also lack useful tools like demand management which can be used to bid alongside supply for pricing to avoid having to turn on nasty dirty generators, when the option to time-shift load exists (supermarkets and places with huge thermal mass can time-shift their AC and cooling or heating budget, and so avoid load) Meantime, people are arguing for a de-centralized model using household batteries where resilience is kept in the customer distribution net, as well as at the transmission net level. There are competing pressures around "how shall we fix it" which are not simple. If you want to read a good overview of this, look for stuff written by John Quiggin, an economist in Queensland who has written on the stuff-ups in privatized energy supply in Australia and the market failure.
- cmroanirgo 7y ago
- lazyjones 7y agoI'd imagine that this minimum size of 3MWh is ideal for fast charging locations, combined with solar panels on the roof. A by-product of SCv3 development? If it costs around $200/KWh or less, it's very attractive for a variety of commercial applications with PV capability and non-uniform electricity needs.
- eyesee 7y agoI would not be surprised if Megapacks are what will power the Megachargers for the forthcoming Tesla Semi. A simple-to-deploy solution for carriers that doesn’t require significant site prep. Inverter power output of 1.5MW would align very well with the stated charge rate and buffering 3MW of energy is probably sufficient for 2 full charges without requiring a massive and rapid draw on the grid.
- Cthulhu_ 7y agoFor sure; I foresee that Tesla will be able to build off-the-grid charging stations with one of these and a roof of solar panels. I mean assuming cars with a 100 kWh battery, you could do up to 30 charge cycles (not counting losses of course).
- castratikron 7y agoFast charge is DC, they wouldn't use an inverter. Theoretically if the semi can handle it and the voltage were the same they could connect the semi pack directly to the megapack battery to charge. It would only get you to 80% charge but it would be simple to implement.
- eyesee 7y agoThe inverter could be used to recharge the Megapack from power mains. Though if it is connected to a solar array the inverter might be skipped. I'm sure they can exclude that component for such installations.
- dharma1 7y agoAwesome. I hope they get a ton of orders. These will probably use the dry battery electrode tech they got from Maxwell?
- cagenut 7y agoThey say it scales up to 3MWh but whats the smallest purchasable unit?
- Animats 7y agoThe Powerwall.
- Animats 7y ago...Autobidder, Tesla’s machine-learning platform for automated energy trading. Tesla customers have already used Autobidder to dispatch more than 100 GWh of energy in global electricity markets." Tesla is in Enron's business?
- johnvanommen 7y agoI used to work for a company in California that does this. I'm not sure how commonplace this is, worldwide, but there are definitely companies trading energy. https://www.ferc.gov/market-oversight/mkt-electric/california.asp https://www.ferc.gov/market-oversight/mkt-electric/californi... The California Independent System Operator (CAISO) operates a competitive wholesale electricity market and manages the reliability of its transmission grid. CAISO provides open access to the transmission and performs long-term planning. In managing the grid, CAISO centrally dispatches generation and coordinates the movement of wholesale electricity in California and a portion of Nevada. CAISOs markets include energy (day-ahead and real-time), ancillary services, and congestion revenue rights. CAISO also operates an Energy Imbalance Market (EIM), which currently includes CAISO and other balancing authority areas in the western United States. CAISO was founded in 1998 and became a fully functioning ISO in 2008. The Energy Imbalance Market launched in 2014 with PacifiCorp as the first member or EIM Entity. The EIM serves parts of Arizona, Oregon, Nevada, Washington, California, Utah, Wyoming and Idaho.
- samstave 7y agoWasnt the whole business model of Enron was to trade energy, and price fix to their advantage? I recall in january or feb of 2001 - right when Enron was at their peak douchebag-ness... I lived in San Jose ca - and my energy bill jumped to $900!
- s_Hogg 7y agogah I watched The Smartest Guys In the Room the other day and that was only one of the things they tried to trade. Interestingly, their broadband trading thing doesn't look as insane a decade or so later. They tried to do a deal with Blockbuster for on-demand video streaming but couldn't get it to work. A decade or so later and we've got Netflix, which can make the technology work. Now we just need to wait one more decade and someone will figure out the "make money" bit. As far as losing cash hand over fist goes, the only thing that's really changed is you boast about it instead of hiding it with an elaborate system of frauds these days.
- nisten 7y agoThe impressive thing is that this is competitive even before we have a carbon market in place which would make all gas peaker plants too expensive if they had to pay a market rate for dumping/storing their carbon.
- Causality1 7y agoI'd be interested in an examination of how the purchasers and vendors of these battery storage installations manage the balance of capacity and life expectancy vs wasted cost. If you build an installation that exactly matches your needs, you're putting a full charge cycle on the batteries on a regular basis, which reduces their ultimate lifespan and limits your ability to cope with unusual power demands. On the other hand, if you overbuild for your needs, you increase the total lifespan of the installation and your emergency capacity but at the cost of greater initial investment as well as the inescapable fact that even the unused portion of the capacity has a finite lifespan which is always (very slowly) expiring regardless of whether it's being used, so your per-dollar lifespan could be lower with a larger capacity. I'm also interested in how well real-world installations are matching the expected figures when it comes to amortized cost and life expectancy. Does the operating budget for something like the Hornsdale Power Reserve include the cost of replacing the entire thing when its cells are worn out in 10-15 years?
- Cthulhu_ 7y agoIt likely wouldn't be a big bang replace job, just a few cells / year. That won't do much for the total cost of ownership, but would avoid bursts. Also, I don't know what that would cost, nor how much the alternative solutions currently in place cost. I'm sure Tesla will spin it so that their TCO looks a lot more attractive than their competitors. Also, who knows where battery technology might be in ten years; given that these are modular batteries, they could replace them over time with higher capacity ones.
- ethagknight 7y agoI wonder why Tesla is selling these systems instead of deploying them directly and profiting off the arbitrage? If Autobidder was as good as they imply, then realistically Tesla should be in position to capitalize off global energy markets on their own, earning far more than just the sale of the system.
- notatoad 7y agoBecause they need cash, probably
- ethagknight 7y agoYou can always find debt for profitability in the energy markets, and this seems pretty low risk as energy investments go.
- notatoad 7y agoBut you can only take on so much debt as a company, regardless of market, and telsa is kinda already stretching that limit (or at least they are according to HN comments)
- bduerst 7y agoThey are. Tesla is debt leveraged to hell which is why they're saying they're going to raise another $2B in cash from equity and bond sales to pay some of it off. Tesla needs cash, and lots of it.
- astrodust 7y agoDebt hurts your fundamentals and hurts your stock price. Cash helps your stock price. If you're concerned about stock price, sell for cash.
- gingabriska 7y agoIt depend on how you use the debt. If are able to make slightly less ROI (due to cost of capital, cost of servicing debt) at larger scale, it's worth having debt and will have positive effect on stock price. The relationship is not as simple as you claim.
- boringg 7y agoWhat Tesla did -- use the contract from Australia as a MVP for their generic utility scale product offering. Took their lessons learned from the Australian offering and streamlined it so they can make an "easy" product for deployment reducing custom costs. A good marketing piece for any utility considering installing a product of similar specs. Also distracts from some of the other narratives taking place.
- Pfhreak 7y ago> A good marketing piece for any utility This seems like a win-win-win to me. Tesla gets paid, the utility gets to show off how cool they are (and how they are investing in going green) without breaking the bank, and the rest of us (hopefully) experience less carbon emissions. Ideally, that utility runs the battery for a while and it proves to be useful/profitable enough that they decided to change some of their future plans to include more renewable/battery tech.
- m3kw9 7y agoWhen they have large purchasing power they have price leverage on cells
- rsuelzer 7y agoI assume they are just using a bunch of 18650 cells?
- matahwoosh 7y agoprobably 2170, but yeah, small cylindrical batteries
- sidcool 7y agoThis is actually huge. Tesla is again thinking and executing way ahead of anyone else. I don't attribute it all to Elon Musk. But there is some life force in Tesla that's pushing it along even when naysayers, sometimes criminally, try to destroy Tesla.
- skewbone 7y agoThere are other players in the modular utility scale energy storage space. GE and Fluence are two examples. https://www.ge.com/renewableenergy/hybrid/battery-energy-storage https://www.ge.com/renewableenergy/hybrid/battery-energy-sto... https://fluenceenergy.com/ https://fluenceenergy.com/
- sidcool 7y agoYes, but Tesla is actually doing equally good or better than the incumbents. And this is on top of a car company. It is hard to overstate what Tesla has achieved. There is a reason why Tesla has crazy fans.
- AndrewBissell 7y ago"naysayers, sometimes criminally, try to destroy Tesla" Who & what did you have in mind, exactly? The only example which comes to mind is the skabooshka lawsuit, which Tesla had to drop when their megacorp legal resources finally ran up against an opponent with some funding, thanks to crowdsourced donations. Given that essentially every major executive (other than Elon Musk) and huge chunks of the Tesla board have all left the company and furiously dumped their stock, I'd say there's plenty of naysaying coming from within as well. Not exactly the signs of a vital corporate "life force" at work.
- S_A_P 7y agoI don’t always agree with the way he’s conducted himself and I don’t understand why people overshare on Twitter when the upside is minuscule and downside is huge. But Elon does seem to be pushing make the world a better place. I’ve a feeling he will be viewed more favorably by future generations. I work in energy and I am super excited to see alternatives to fossil fuels come online.
- WalterBright 7y agoOne thing puzzles me. LI batteries are appropriate for cars because of their high energy density. But for grid applications, density is not much of an issue. They can have large, heavy batteries. So why not use a cheaper/joule battery technology for grid applications?
- imtringued 7y agoBecause both demand and supply aren't there yet. Grid storage isn't needed yet and when it is lithium ion is cheaper because its cross subsidized. This leaves the grid battery manufacturers with no market so they don't expand production.
- jillesvangurp 7y agoThat might happen long term but short term the lack of production capacity is the problem. And right now a lot of companies are investing in vastly expanding production capacity for lithium ion batteries. We've simply never needed batteries at this scale before EVs started happening. Tesla seems early in the grid storage market. Probably some companies are trying to come up with cheaper ways to do that. So, long term, I think cost will go down by quite a bit. Ten years from now, there will probably be a few companies cranking out cheap batteries for grid and domestic use that are optimized for $/kwh instead of kg/kwh.
- CPLX 7y ago> We've simply never needed batteries at this scale before EVs started happening. Is that really true? There a a LOT of lead acid batteries out there, considering there's been at least one sold alongside nearly every internal combustion engine larger than a handheld tool.
- ed_balls 7y agoEconomy of scale which should help bring costs down. It's easier to take them to Mars.
- Cthulhu_ 7y agoI can think of a few reasons (as a layperson). They're heavily investing in li-ion battery production, really optimizing for that one in particular. But I think they can also produce the battery packs in huge amounts and sell them in multiple products - Powerwall, Powerpack and now this one. And I suspect these ones are more easily manageable.
- Iv 7y agoAs much as I love what Tesla is doing there, I'd like to point out that they are not the only or even the biggest player ine the field: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battery_storage_power_station#Largest_grid_batteries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battery_storage_power_station#... There are other tech than lithium ion (namely, Sodium-sulphur) that seem more appropriate for applications where weight is not an issue.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Faaak 7y ago> they are not the only or even the biggest player ine the field Well, from your link, they indeed _are_ the biggest player by power ?
- amelius 7y agoMore power only means they run out of energy quicker :) Energy is the more informative metric here. You can easily construct a low-energy storage solution that generates huge amounts of power for a very short time. The power column is only a result of the number of households and outage duration that the plant was designed for.
- Faaak 7y agoMore power also means higher bids and more frequency control which is very useful too for 1st layer ancillary services. Energy is good, but power is also very important. You can stabilize the frequency (with active power) and the voltage (with reactive power). Both are traded and needed.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Cthulhu_ 7y agoThe downside on those ones seems to be that they need to be heated (and kept at a heat) of 300-350 degrees and they are quite corrosive if there is an emergency. Not saying li-ion batteries are safe, but they and how Tesla has modularized them give me a lot more confidence to leave in an unattended location. Of course, it's all situational so there's a place and purpose for these things as well.
- amelius 7y agoFor comparison, 3 MWh allows a MacBook Pro to run for about 15 years continuously.
- _-_T_-_ 7y agoTesla has been quietly installing 'powerpacks' in New Zealands power grid for the past two years.