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.

Re: When all you have is a hammer

[EnsilZah]

This has nothing to do with solar.
When the solar roofs are installed they'll have their own batteries installed at the house.
This is about backup an load balancing.
When you have a battery farm that can instantly start providing power to the grid and run for four hours, you can save a whole lot of money.
This is cold hard capitalism at work.

Re:Tesla or Panasonic batteries?

[EnsilZah]

I believe the battery chemistry IP is at least shared between Tesla and Panasonic.
Tesla is funding some research in stuff like battery longevity, reducing reliance on scarce resources, etc.

The production of the cells is done by Panasonic with Tesla as the client, but with Panasonic investing in the infrastructure.

Everything above the cell level, integration of the cells into larger modules, cooling, software, electronics, etc is done by Tesla.

Units!

[Roger W Moore]

When it comes to energy storage the usual number to quote is how much energy it stores. The rate you can drain energy from it, while not irrelevant, doesn't tell you much because it provides no idea of how long it can provide that power for: a few seconds to cope with surges, an hour or two while they start up a power station or 12+ hours to smooth out e.g. solar power.

Since the article appears to confuse MW with MWh at one point I suspect that this is yet another example of journalists not understanding the difference between power and energy.

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.

Re:Tesla or Panasonic batteries?

[WindBourne]

no patents.
The 2170 is supposedly based on Tesla's R&D and it is trade secrets, not patented. Panasonic contributed the equipment, that is all.

Re:Tesla or Panasonic batteries?

[LynnwoodRooster]

Do you know who owns the patents (Tesla, Panasonic, Gigafactory)?

patents are not property and cannot be owned

False. Chief Justice Roberts wrote:

“[A patent] confers upon the patentee an exclusive property in the patented invention which cannot be appropriated or used by the government itself, without just compensation, any more than it can appropriate or use without compensation land which has been patented to a private purchaser.”

Patents are property, per the US Supreme Court. End of discussion.

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.

Re: When all you have is a hammer

[Rei]

That is the official rated lifespan for Tesla's grid products. Accelerated lifecycle testing is not a new concept. It's also worth noting that degradation in Tesla's vehicle batteries has been very, very low. Early model-year Model S taxis with several hundred thousand kilometers on them still show over 90% capacity retention. And the grid products use a longer cycle life chemistry.