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Apple to build battery-based solar energy storage project in California
- VBprogrammer 6y ago> Apple said the project will store 240 megawatt-hours of energy, or enough to power more than 7,000 homes for one day. By my reckoning this would make it the largest grid connected battery in existence. 50MW larger than the Hornsdale Power Reserve. Edit: My reckoning was wrong.
- toomuchtodo 6y agoThere are larger. Moss Landing is about an hour northwest of this install (California Flats in southeastern Monterey County). > Phase 1 of Moss Landing Energy Storage Facility was connected to the power grid and began operating on 11 December 2020, at the site of Moss Landing Power Plant, a natural gas power station owned by Vistra since it acquired the facility’s previous owner, Dynegy in 2018. > At 300MW / 1,200MWh, the BESS is considerably larger than the 250MW / 250MWh Gateway Energy Storage project brought online earlier this year by LS Power, also in California. Not only that, but Phase 2 of Vistra’s project will add another 100MW / 400MWh and is scheduled for completion by August this year. > The site at Moss Landing then offers what Vistra called a “unique opportunity” to expand the project’s size and storage capacity even further: the company claimed that the industrial zone in which it sits offers the potential to support up to 1,500MW / 6,000MWh of energy storage capacity, “should market and economic conditions support it”. https://www.energy-storage.news/news/at-300mw-1200mwh-the-worlds-largest-battery-storage-system-so-far-is-up-and https://www.energy-storage.news/news/at-300mw-1200mwh-the-wo...
- VBprogrammer 6y agoNice! I hadn't heard about Moss Landing. It's only been operating for 4 months.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- blacksmith_tb 6y agoLooks like this [1] should be it - that's a lot of panels! 1: https://www.google.com/maps/@35.8713857,-120.3390994,7197m/data=!3m1!1e3 https://www.google.com/maps/@35.8713857,-120.3390994,7197m/d...
- 01100011 6y agoScary to see a major energy storage facility less than 20' above sea level and right next to the Pacific Ocean. I hope they have flood walls built to withstand a Tsunami.
- CameronNemo 6y agoThere is nuclear waste in the cliffs in San Onofre. They reportedly have nowhere to put it, and expect to only be able to store the depleted fuel there for a few decades.
- Wohlf 6y agoWhy isn't it in Yucca mountain?
- CameronNemo 6y agoHarry Reid? I am not old enough to know what happened there.
- toomuchtodo 6y ago"In January 2019 Governor Steve Silolak vowed that "not one ounce" of nuclear waste would be allowed at Yucca Mountain, and a May funding bill did not include funding for the site. In May 2019, the Reno Gazette-Journal published a long-form essay cataloging opposition to the Yucca Mountain project. According to a tribal elder, the Western Shoshone view Yucca Mountain as sacred and a nuclear storage facility "will poison everything. It's people's life, our Mother Earth's life, all the living things here, all the creatures; whatever's crawling around, it's their life too." The tribes say they lack funds to discredit federal safety claims, but will be directly affected by a potential disaster." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_repository#Opposition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_r... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_repository#Delays_since_2009 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_r...
- cma 6y agoReading up on it.. they store it 18 inches above high tide in single walled corrosion prone storage that can't deal with ground water moisture that is expected to eventually seep in and they came within 1/4th of an inch of dropping a barrel in a way that would break the air ventilation cooling system and require water cooling and possibly cause a Fukushima like radioactive steam release.. just a few miles from Los Angeles.
- deadc0de 6y agoTesla/PG&E are also building 182.5MW/730MWh presumably at the same site? https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-megapack-moss-landing-installed/ https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-megapack-moss-landing-instal...
- jeffbee 6y agoThat XYZ Energy Corp. of Delaware is building a storage facility, and that Tesla is selling battery packs in the same place, does not really imply two different projects. Could be the same project.
- deadc0de 6y agoNot really. Look at google maps sat view. These are two different projects.
- oh_sigh 6y agoBath County Pumped Storage Station("the largest battery in the world") can store 24,000 MWh, which puts it at 100x this battery. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_County_Pumped_Storage_Station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_County_Pumped_Storage_Sta...
- jkestner 6y agoAt some point you have to wonder what products these are practice for.
- Ninjinka 6y agoCars?
- stcredzero 6y agoSmart homes?
- GloriousKoji 6y agoA whole City?
- stcredzero 6y agoThe Apple Arcology? Their headquarters is a prototype?
- ben_w 6y agoWouldn’t surprise me, given Musk is hoping to do a Mars colony and Bezos is hoping to do O’Neill cylinders.
- stcredzero 6y agoI've been waiting for over a decade for IKEA to get in on the action with an IKEArcology! They already have model apartments with the square footage listed. They just need to establish different SKUs, and then instead of going to the warehouse to get your flat pack, you get a key card for the elevator and go up to your apartment! Though I think if the Swedish Meatballs became my staple diet, and I were exposed to their desert display daily, I'd die an early death. I've had those books on Space Colonization by TA Heppenheimer, and some of the illustrations inside have a definite IKEA-ish vibe.
- 01100011 6y agoHow does this compare with Tesla's offering, technology wise? It seems to me that battery-based storage isn't very advanced technology, and is something that is enabled by declining battery prices. I see Tesla fans pointing to it as another one of Tesla's trillion dollar markets, but it never seemed like something Tesla would have an exclusive lock on.
- fastball 6y agoExcept for patents nobody ever has an exclusive lock on anything. What Tesla does have is: 1. A helluva lotta actual battery cell production. 2. Practical experience deploying / analyzing / etc more Joules worth of batteries than probably anyone else. 3. Advanced battery research that is focused on more practical improvements than the pie-in-the-sky research we've seen a lot of over the past few decades ("this battery is flexible and has 10x storage of Li-ion and charges in 1 second") that never makes it out of the lab. With (3), there is always the risk (to Tesla) that one of these futuristic battery techs actually works out and makes it into production, but until then Tesla's approach (making improvements to things we know work in production / at scale) is probably a wise one.
- amelius 6y ago1 and 2 -> easily duplicated by some Asian country. 3 -> how much improvement are you talking about?
- gpm 6y ago> 1 and 2 -> easily duplicated by some Asian country. This implies some curious assumption that Asian countries are somehow innately better at this sort of work? I'm not sure that holds up. Certainly the environments are different, different standards for acceptable pollution, acceptable levels of corruption, wages, safety, government subsidies, etc. These vary as wildly within Asian countries (Japan, Korea, China, ...) as they do between western countries and Asian countries though, and it's really not clear to me which countries environment is superior. Assuming you're comparing to a high corruption low safety/environment/wages country... Lack of corruption and fraud goes a long way. Wages and safety cost less as things become more automated. I'm not sure how subsidies break down, but I suspect that there are more available for this sort of technology in the western world. Etc.
- fudged71 6y ago>enough to power more than 7,000 homes I get that this is used to quantify the energy capacity, but no homes are directly benefiting from this.
- pengaru 6y agoI fully expect grid energy storage to be where used BEV batteries spend the end of their usable life before getting recycled. It'd just be nice if the manufacturers would establish some vendor-neutral standards already, paving the way for this future. I hate the idea of buying a BEV with a proprietary battery of such obvious long-term value beyond my vehicle's needs, especially when it forms such a huge portion of the vehicle's cost. At this point I'm half assuming I'll need to DIY a powerwall out back when the time comes to replace my future BEV's battery.
- jonhohle 6y agoI watched this last week and was blown away at how useful "used" cells could be in the right hands. Also, imagining what low skill labor looks like a battery offset world. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PenPYwa00CA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PenPYwa00CA
- mustafa_pasi 6y agoMy understanding is that used laptop batteries are particularly good for this sort of thing, because what happens is that one cell (out of six or nine) dies and the laptop battery becomes unusable since they are wired in series, and then you have five (or eight) used but relatively healthy cells to reuse. I am not sure whether the same idea could be applied to a car battery with much more advanced battery management systems, since in those situations dead cells don't cripple the battery, so the other cells keep getting used until they lose efficacy. So I suspect cells scavenged from car batteries will be of lesser quality than those scavenged from laptops. Not totally sure if I have it right.
- mmaurizi 6y agoI'm imagining for a more advanced BMS system that manages dead cells for you, you don't scavenge cells but instead use the battery pack as a whole unit, just separated from the car. Think something like a conversion kit that turns your Model 3 battery pack that you've removed from your car into a powerwall.
- spockz 6y agoAre there any online resources if one is interested in how to write a battery management system? Suppose I have some battery packs around, I want to learn how to properly connect them to a home grid.
- voicedYoda 6y agoI've come across diy powerwalls that have battery management, but haven't looked in 3 years
- turtlebits 6y agoThis is an open source BMS if you want to see how it's done. https://github.com/Teslafly/OpenBMS https://github.com/Teslafly/OpenBMS Otherwise, there are lots of BMS's you can just buy a hook up to raw cells.
- lifty 6y agoI am curious what battery technology they will use. I have recently found out about Ambri's liquid metal battery (https://ambri.com https://ambri.com) which got me excited about grid level batteries. If this technology pans out it could be the missing ingredient for making renewables feasible.
- deelowe 6y agoDid they ever solve the corrosion issues with those?
- mensetmanusman 6y agoThat’s about 2-3 million Teslas of storage.
- gok 6y agoNo, a few thousand. 240 megawatt hours = 240,000 kilowatt hours, a BEV car is around 80 kWh
- fastball 6y agoTo be precise, 4800 if you are conservative and use the battery pack capacity of early production Tesla Model 3s (864,000 MJ / 180 MJ).
- mensetmanusman 6y agoThanks! Should have checked, my bad. Buying a few thousand doesn’t seem that newsworthy, Amazon just committed to buying 100,000 EV delivery vehicles...
- ZachAttach 6y agoThis installation is right at the base of my family ranch. I am excited to hear about the development of new ways to generate and store power, but man if these panels don't mess up the natural beauty of the area. I can only assume the batteries will as well.
- NickM 6y agoBattery storage is a great tool for leveling demand day to day, but I wonder how soon we're going to need to start looking at mechanisms for leveling seasonal demand. Many places need a lot more energy for heating in the winter, right when solar production is lowest. Synthetic methane seems like a great solution to these problems, and very few people are talking about it. If you used DAC for CO2, or got your CO2 from organic sources, and then combined it with green hydrogen to make methane, it would be a carbon-neutral fuel, and could take advantage of all the existing infrastructure we have for natural gas. Plus, it would also bypass the problem of trying to replace millions of gas furnaces and other appliances in existing buildings. LNG is ten times more energy dense than lithium-ion batteries by volume, and a hundred times more energy dense by mass; generating methane with surplus solar energy in the summer and storing it for later use in the winter seems like it might be doable.
- guepe 6y agoThere was recently on HN a discussion about a proposed solution for seasonal heat storage based in aluminum - air batteries.
- r00fus 6y agoDoesn't this simply mean you increase baseload during winter? Solar isn't a baseload power option, it's best used in a portfolio of energy sources. Energy fluctuations are what cost Texas so much the last month, and that could be greatly mitigated with battery storage solutions.
- michaelt 6y agoTo an extent. But imagine you were writing a plan for northern europe to become carbon-neutral for electricity, heating and transport. If you need the most power in the coldest, darkest months, and you manage to meet that demand with renewables that aren't solar, why have solar in the portfolio at all?
- samcheng 6y agoHonestly, good-old heat pumps work well for most climates. You heat up the ground underneath your house in the summer, and harvest that heat during the winter. That seems a lot more economical than synthesizing methane and hoping it doesn't leak back out into the atmosphere. If we can get synthetic methane from atmospheric CO2 to work in an economic fashion, I imagine we could also use it to directly reduce atmospheric carbon (maybe by permanently fixing it into a solid). Problem solved!
- speransky 6y agoWhy not a private nuclear power station, Apple
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- google234123 6y agoI wonder how much more a project like this costs than in California than in a state like Arizona.
- jp0d 6y agoHas anyone looked at copyrighting iPower?
- Wingman4l7 6y agoYes, because I trust a company that makes the design decision to glue their batteries into their laptops, to make battery facilities.
- villgax 6y agoNeed a plug n play open source design for 18650 cells kinda like Jackery. Minimal integration pain & maximum expansion or swapping out bad cells without dismantling the battery pack.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]