Giant Tesla Battery Project Now Proposed For Silicon Valley (digitaltrends.com)

Digital Trends reports: Tesla's largest-ever Powerpack installation may be coming to Northern California. Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) applied to the California Public Utilities Commission for approval for a utility-owned 182.5 MW energy storage farm using Tesla Powerpacks at the company's energy storage site in Moss Landing... The Tesla project, however, would have an expansion capacity of 1.1 GW. The storage projects' purpose is to help keep electrical power levels even for PG&E customers. The storage facilities would feed power to the grid when consumption exceeds normal levels and during blackouts or other service interruptions.
Tesla's giant battery in Australia has already reduced grid service costs by 90%.

And speaking of power sources, long-time Slasdot reader judgecorp writes: A disused Stanley Black & Decker factory in New Britain, Hartford County.CT, will get a 20MW micro-grid powered by fuel cells, according to the first phase of a plan unveiled by the State Governor. It's a big deal because it will be the largest indoor micro-grid in the world, and will help provide a reliable power source for a data center in the old factory. Along with the other phases of the project, Governor Dannel Malloy hopes the deal will provide 3,000 jobs and lots of tax revenue.

Comments

Re:Tesla or Panasonic batteries?

[Rei]

The Powerpacks use Tesla's new 2170-format cells produced at the Gigafactory, which is a Tesla-Panasonic joint venture.

Moss Landing isn't in Silicon Valley

[Anonymous Coward]

Silicon Valley is a narrow stretch of the Santa Clara Valley, from Palo Alto to San Jose, where semiconductor companies were located during the 1980s. Moss Landing is a coastal area in Monterey County, which isn't even in the SF Bay Area.

Not Silicon Valley

[Local ID10T]

Moss Landing is on the coast, between Monterey and Santa Cruz. It is not silicon valley.

Re: When all you have is a hammer

[Rei]

1) The normal lifespan of the batteries is 15 years, not 3-5.

2) Consumer lithium ion batteries usually aren't recycled because they're tiny things that are more trouble than they're worth. EV and grid storage battery packs most definitely are recycled. For obvious reasons, because people want the large amounts of nickel, cobalt and lithium therein back. Right now Tesla's batteries are recycled by third party contractors, although eventually they want to incorporate the recycling process directly into their Gigafactories as a feedstock.

3) They do not have any unusual level of toxicity. The cathodes are in the form of inert metal oxides. The anodes are graphite. I cannot comment on the electrolyte as I don't know which one they're using - probably boron trifluoride or lithium hexafluoride. They decompose in nature to simple fluorine compounds. High levels of exposure to these can cause fluorosis, but there's no way you're going to consume more fluoride from "leaked batteries" (as if people were just stockpiling them, see #2) vs. from water fluoridation. As for lithium itself, we should probably be consuming more, not less (and again, see #2).

Re: When all you have is a hammer

[WindBourne]

so many lies there.
1) we have a 2013 Tesla (i.e. 5 years old), and we are still at 95% load. Basically the same as what it was at 5K miles. According to others, it will remain above 85% clear until 300K miles. All of that is a little bit longer than 3-5 years.
2) Tesla is already recycling their own batteries.
3) Hydro does not work well without water. And considering that CA is being hit by longer and longer droughts, and many of the reservoirs are still down, means a number of hydrodams are about to no longer work.
4) Energy storage spread around on a macrogrid, makes it possible for utilities to buffer their networks, handle varying demands and supplies, and deal with downtimes on the grids.
5) If CA was smart, they would add a number of nuclear SMRs around the state to provide various capabilities.

Let's be real, folks. Lots of misinformation here.

[Bruce Perens]

The Australia battery plant does not reduce grid costs 90%. It reduces the cost of frequency correction, which is a tiny percentage of the total grid cost. We should also be aware that this is only a power storage system, it does not produce any electricity on its own. The point here is that if there is an excess of solar, wind, hydroelectric, or fossil-fuel generated power at one point, this can be stored and released at another point in time. This release happens almost instantly, where with a more conventional "peaker" power plant, run on fossil fuels, takes much longer to get started before it can contribute power to the network.

Unfortunately there are economic problems with energy storage. Because the battery can respond to demand so quickly, it performs service that the fossil fuel plants were formerly doing. So, the fossil fuel plants sit idle a lot of the time, but we still need them because a battery can't provide all of the power we need during high demand. So, what the fossil fuel peaker plants are now going to do is a bit of a mystery. Go out of business? We'll have a lot more blackouts. Charge more for energy? They're going to have to. And regulators are going to have to allow that.

Re:When all you have is a hammer

[Nkwe]

Moss Landing generates 1020 MW, net. This battery provides about (182/1020 * 60) 10 minutes of backup capacity. I don't know if it's at all realistic to think you can find and repair a downed power line in 10 minutes.

No but in 10 minutes you may be able to switch to other transmission lines or bring additional generation online. If you can use batteries to buffer the load while other power sources become available, you can avoid brownouts and more importantly cascading failures.

Re: When all you have is a hammer

[Local ID10T]

The summary (and the article it links to) explain the proposal very poorly. The actual PG&E announcement is here: Moss Landing Battery Proposal

There are 4 battery systems being installed for a combined output of 567.5 MW and a specified discharge duration of 4 hours.

Tesla's contribution to this is a 182.5 MW x 4 hours discharge duration, aka 730MWh capacity. Pending approval is a further proposal to expand this to a 6 hour duration -approximately 1.1 GWh from Tesla.