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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: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 31 2019, @12:00PM (3 children)
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
Going straight from a bespoke 129KWh to a 3000KWh plug and play system is a pretty big jump in capacity really. Impressive.
TFS implies a six hour discharge, which would mean a supply of 500KW per Megapack.
Simply scaling that to 3MWh would give a supply of 2.3MW
So probably somewhere between 0.5 and 2.5 MW per pack.
No problem is insoluble, but at Ksp = 2.943×10−25 Mercury Sulphide comes close.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Thursday August 01 2019, @06:37AM
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
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves