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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday July 31 2019, @09:48AM   Printer-friendly
from the re-energizing-the-power-industry dept.

Tesla's Megapack Battery is Big Enough to Help Grids Handle Peak Demand:

Tesla announced a new massive battery today called Megapack that could replace so-called "peaker" power plants, which provide energy when a local electrical grid gets overloaded. Tesla says that Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) will deploy several Megapacks at Moss Landing on Monterrey Bay in California, which is one of four locations where the California utility plans to install more cost-effective energy storage solutions.

Each Megapack can store up to 3 megawatt hours (MWh) of energy at a time, and it's possible to string enough Megapacks together to create a battery with more than 1 GWh of energy storage, Tesla says. The company says this would be enough energy to power "every home in San Francisco for six hours." Telsa will deliver the Megapacks fully assembled, and they include "battery modules, bi-directional inverters, a thermal management system, an AC main breaker and controls." Tesla says the Megapack takes up 40 percent less space, requires a tenth of the parts to build, and can be assembled 10 times as fast as alternative energy storage solutions.

Also at cnet.

Would also have the benefit of essentially instant activation versus peaker plants which take some amount of time to spin up, even if kept warmed up and idling.


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by FatPhil on Wednesday July 31 2019, @10:19AM (5 children)

    by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Wednesday July 31 2019, @10:19AM (#873483) Homepage
    Isn't this just a version of what Musk promised to Australia years ago? (The one with the promise that if Tesla was late, they'd get it for free, and he wasn't late - stick that in your pipe, Musk-haters.)
    https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/30/world/australia/elon-musk-south-australia-battery.html
    That was 100MW, so the equivalent of 30 of these small packs.
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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Wednesday July 31 2019, @11:05AM

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Wednesday July 31 2019, @11:05AM (#873486) Journal

    The Australian thing could be considered a custom solution, and now this is the company's standardized unit for big installations.

    14 kWh for Powerwall 2, 3,000 kWh for Megapack 1.

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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 31 2019, @12:00PM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 31 2019, @12:00PM (#873494)

    You're mixing up your units there.

    These batteries have 3MWh, they don't say how much they can throw out at once

    The SA battery is 129MWh, and it can put out 100MW at a time. (For 1.29h before it goes flat)

    The thing that makes the Megapack new is that its a complete prefab plug and play solution, and you can stack them for more capacity, rather than doing a full design and onsite build for each setup.

    • (Score: 4, Interesting) by deimtee on Wednesday July 31 2019, @04:16PM

      by deimtee (3272) on Wednesday July 31 2019, @04:16PM (#873599) Journal

      Going straight from a bespoke 129KWh to a 3000KWh plug and play system is a pretty big jump in capacity really. Impressive.

      These batteries have 3MWh, they don't say how much they can throw out at once

      TFS implies a six hour discharge, which would mean a supply of 500KW per Megapack.

      The SA battery is 129MWh, and it can put out 100MW at a time. (For 1.29h before it goes flat)

      Simply scaling that to 3MWh would give a supply of 2.3MW
      So probably somewhere between 0.5 and 2.5 MW per pack.

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    • (Score: 2) by driverless on Thursday August 01 2019, @06:37AM

      by driverless (4770) on Thursday August 01 2019, @06:37AM (#873893)

      One thing that the press release avoids mentioning in any way is the lifetime of these things. Assuming it's a mass of 18650s, how many full charge/discharge cycles can it handle? How about partial discharges? How long before it's a 70% of its initial charge capacity? At 50%?

    • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday August 01 2019, @08:28AM

      by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Thursday August 01 2019, @08:28AM (#873916) Homepage
      GOod catch - but I will throw the disclaimer that my shitty keyboard drops keypresses occasionally, and I do know what the 'h' implies. I was using 100 as a gloss for 129, because 1 s.f. is enough for government work, and the limit of my memory capacity.
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