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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, Insightful) by Muad'Dave on Wednesday July 31 2019, @11:01AM (15 children)

    by Muad'Dave (1413) on Wednesday July 31 2019, @11:01AM (#873485)

    I love the idea, but I'm concerned about the durability of the batteries and ongoing maintenance costs of a plant like this. Also, how catastrophic and dangerous would a battery fire be? 1GWh of capacity is a lot of lithium to burn.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 31 2019, @11:41AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 31 2019, @11:41AM (#873488)

    Are they using the same 18650 / 2170 cells they use in their vehicles? [thedrive.com]

  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Wednesday July 31 2019, @11:55AM (13 children)

    by GreatAuntAnesthesia (3275) on Wednesday July 31 2019, @11:55AM (#873491) Journal

    1GWh of energy is potentially a very large explosion / fire, no matter what medium you use to store it. You can't get around that.

    • (Score: 3, Touché) by c0lo on Wednesday July 31 2019, @12:43PM (11 children)

      by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday July 31 2019, @12:43PM (#873505) Journal

      1GWh of energy is potentially a very large explosion / fire, no matter what medium you use to store it.

      Ummm... hydro? I'm yet to see plain water on fire and I can't quite call the burst of a dam an explosion.

      --
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
      • (Score: 3, Insightful) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Wednesday July 31 2019, @01:18PM (3 children)

        by GreatAuntAnesthesia (3275) on Wednesday July 31 2019, @01:18PM (#873519) Journal

        Alright, you win that one.

        What I was trying to get to is that being able to store and release large amounts of energy is necessarily written into the design spec of ANY such technology, so no matter the medium used, there is going to be a risk of sudden, unintentional, energy release and therefore potential disaster. There's just no getting around it.

        • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday July 31 2019, @02:33PM

          by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday July 31 2019, @02:33PM (#873554) Journal

          Of course you are right and I was quibbling just on the examples/terminology you used.

          As I'm going to quibble on a slight imprecision in

          What I was trying to get to is that being able to store and [missing the "quickly" qualifier here] release large amounts of energy is necessarily written into the design spec of ANY such technology, so no matter the medium used, there is going to be a risk of sudden, unintentional, energy release and therefore potential disaster.

          Look, you can see the production of aluminium as "storing energy". You can release it [wikipedia.org], but you need to arrange the thing in a special way to get a powerful release (i.e high contact surface between aluminium and air). Without it, you can store zillions of tonnes of aluminium for zillion of years until you are going to get that Gibbs energy and aluminium oxide back

          See also flow batteries [wikipedia.org] - most of them can survive an uncomtrolled mixture of the two liquids without bowing in you face.

          From quibble to quibble turns out that, if you really, really want it, you can actually get energy storage solutions that won't blow into your face. True, you are going to pay something for it (e.g. larger storage space and/or lower power/energy density).

          --
          https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 31 2019, @03:24PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 31 2019, @03:24PM (#873579)

          Win? He's an idiot unless he thinks that much water can't ever be dangerous.

        • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday August 01 2019, @08:36AM

          by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Thursday August 01 2019, @08:36AM (#873918) Homepage
          Don't give in so easily!

          With hydro, you're not storing it in the medium, you're storing it in the location! (For proof, remove the earth, the water will no longer have the potential energy it once had, therefore it wasn't storing the energy![*])

          (Oh, and I have a comeback from the predictable "I can physics too" comeback...)

          [* Please do not try this experiment at home, some people live here.]
          --
          Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
      • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 31 2019, @01:45PM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 31 2019, @01:45PM (#873531)

        hydro? I'm yet to see plain water on fire and I can't quite call the burst of a dam an explosion.

        But...

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dam_failure#List_of_major_dam_failures [wikipedia.org]

        so who needs an explosion?

        • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday July 31 2019, @02:07PM

          by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday July 31 2019, @02:07PM (#873542) Journal

          Just nitpicking. Get's worse with age, but keeps one fit to find counterexamples. A good way to keep ones critical thinking ability active even when overall thinking capacity diminishes (grin)

          --
          https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 31 2019, @04:03PM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 31 2019, @04:03PM (#873594)
        To store 1 GWh of energy in a water reservoir 1000 m above sea level, you'd have to pump nearly 400,000 metric tons of water, 400 million cubic metres. Don't tell me that such a quantity of water sliding down suddenly won't cause at least as much damage as a 1 kiloton tactical nuclear weapon.
        • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday July 31 2019, @10:11PM

          by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday July 31 2019, @10:11PM (#873749) Journal

          400,000 metric tons of water, 400 million cubic metres litres.

          Last I checked 1m3 of water = 1 metric ton. So, still in the 400,000 cubic meters range (a cube with a 70-ish meter side)

          Don't tell me that such a quantity of water sliding down suddenly won't cause at least as much damage as a 1 kiloton tactical nuclear weapon.

          No, it won't. 1kT TNT [wikipedia.org] is the energy equivalent of 4e12 J (vs 3.6e12 J for 1GWh).
          Now, consider the power and you''ll see some magnitude order of difference between the two.

          Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that 1GWh released accidentally is something to scoff at. Just that you can apply reasonable engineering to protect against a release in seconds while a release in 0.1ms needs some costly engineering.

          --
          https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
      • (Score: 2, Funny) by nitehawk214 on Wednesday July 31 2019, @04:40PM (1 child)

        by nitehawk214 (1304) on Wednesday July 31 2019, @04:40PM (#873604)

        I'm yet to see plain water on fire

        I guess you didn't see Cleveland in the 1960s:

        https://www.alleghenyfront.org/how-a-burning-river-helped-create-the-clean-water-act/ [alleghenyfront.org]

        --
        "Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
        • (Score: 4, Insightful) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday July 31 2019, @06:11PM

          by DeathMonkey (1380) on Wednesday July 31 2019, @06:11PM (#873653) Journal

          Don't worry, the Trump admin is busy ensuring we too shall be able to view such a glorious spectacle!

      • (Score: 2) by krishnoid on Wednesday July 31 2019, @07:07PM

        by krishnoid (1156) on Wednesday July 31 2019, @07:07PM (#873686)

        Then again, I haven't heard of a lot of water damage over wide areas in building-height topographies from a lithium explosion.

        Hmm -- they should build the Lithium batteries into a location in the dam itself. Save on transmission costs for charging, and then when you do get an explosion, you can get a *really* awesomely destructive one. Maybe work it into a parody disaster movie with one really bad engineering decision after another.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 31 2019, @03:41PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 31 2019, @03:41PM (#873584)
      Indeed. 1 GWh is only slightly less than the energy in 1 kiloton of TNT. The explosion would be comparable to a small tactical nuclear weapon.