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Tesla Unveils New Large Powerpack Project For Grid Balancing In Europe (electrek.co)
Tesla has unveiled a new large Powerpack energy storage project to be used as a virtual power plant for grid balancing in Europe. It consists of 140 Powerpacks and several Tesla inverters for a total power output of 18.2 MW. Electrek reports: Tesla partnered with Restore, a demand response aggregator, to build the system and offer balancing services to European transmission system operators. Instead of using gas generators and steam turbines kicking to compensate for losses of power on the grid, Tesla's batteries are charged when there's excess power and then discharge when there's a need for more power.
Restore UK Vice President Louis Burford told The Energyst that they are bundling their assets like batteries as a "synthetic pool": "By creating synthetic pools or portfolios, you reduce the technical requirements on individual assets that otherwise would not be able to participate [in certain balancing services]. By doing so you create value where it does not ordinarily exist. That is only achievable through synthetic portfolios." For those interested, Tesla has released promo video on YouTube about the project.
Restore UK Vice President Louis Burford told The Energyst that they are bundling their assets like batteries as a "synthetic pool": "By creating synthetic pools or portfolios, you reduce the technical requirements on individual assets that otherwise would not be able to participate [in certain balancing services]. By doing so you create value where it does not ordinarily exist. That is only achievable through synthetic portfolios." For those interested, Tesla has released promo video on YouTube about the project.
I have a hunch this is Tesla's true end game. I don't think Musk honestly believes he'll reach $650B market cap in 10 years by selling cars. I think he believes he'll reach $650B market cap by selling these. By turning his gigafactory into a "product" that can be mass-produced, he'll be able to scale up and deploy at a rate and cost that nobody else can match.
Leaving the gigafactory off as collateral in Tesla's last bond issue is pretty interesting as well.
Maybe making electric cars, and giving away patents, was the excuse he created in order to justify the creation of the gigafactory in the first place? It's like giving away lanterns to sell kerosene.
If this is the case, Tesla intends to be this century's Standard Oil -- a company that makes stored energy more accessible.
Hey may never have intended automobile production to be profitable. Maybe he just wants the world to demand his batteries.
In terms of responsiveness, coal and oil plants are like 7200 rpm 3Gbps SATA HDDs, Nuke plants are like 5400 rpm IDE HDDs in RAID 0. Gas plants are like SSDs. Batteries are like L3 cache. Solar and wind are network connections, the former giving a relatively fixed amount of data over the day which changes by the hour, and the latter shoving random amounts of data down the pipe.