SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Wednesday July 31 2019, @01:18PM (3 children)
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
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
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
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
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