Slashdot Mirror
Elon Musk Promises World's Biggest Lithium Ion Battery To Australia (cnn.com)
Elon Musk is following through on his promise to solve an energy crisis in Australia. From a report: His electric car company, Tesla, has teamed up with a French renewable energy firm and an Australian state government to install the world's largest lithium ion battery. Paired up with a wind farm in the state of South Australia, the battery will be three times more powerful than the next biggest in the world, Musk said at a news conference in the city of Adelaide on Friday. "If South Australia's willing to take a big risk, then so are we," he said. The announcement comes after billionaire entrepreneur Mike Cannon-Brookes threw down the gauntlet to Musk in March, asking if Tesla was serious when it claimed it could quickly end blackouts in South Australia. "Tesla will get the system installed and working 100 days from contract signature or it is free. That serious enough for you?" Musk wrote on Twitter at the time.
The preferred packaging of batteries for this type of application is a standard shipping container. They can install an assembly of batteries in a shipping container, along with a charger and cooling as needed, ready to connect when it gets delivered. The container is part of the battery system. This minimizes the cost of transport, and makes connection upon delivery pretty simple. So they just need to send a steady stream of 'container batteries' that can be installed as they arrive.
kWh(B) - the cycle discharge rating of the battery. The bi-directional inverter is generally rated at 20% discharge rate (5-hours).
Basically to make it work they need 20-30 commodity pad-mount transformers and a dedicated 35kV circuit (or two), and level concrete pads. S&C had a similar product for years as a UPS, but this is considerably more elegant.