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

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

martyb writes:

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: 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