A large wind farm will charge the batteries.
Tesla.
By the end of the year, the state of
South Australia will be home to the world’s biggest battery, if Elon Musk and Tesla make good on an ambitious commitment. The battery installation will be hooked up to a 99-turbine wind farm (which is still being built) and serve as an energy reservoir to ensure that the region has enough power, even during times when power demand peaks.It’s fun to imagine an enormous Duracell battery sticking out of the ground, but in reality, the massive installation will be a network of batteries housed in Tesla-made units called Powerpacks. Together, they will make up what the company calls the “largest lithium-ion battery storage project in the world.” Tesla isn’t saying how many Powerpacks will be required for the project, but it will pack 100 megawatts of power capable of energizing over 30,000 homes, according to the company.
Watch out, Energizer Bunny
“The best way to think about [the project] is a large field of refrigerator-like Tesla Powerpacks,” says Mark Tholke, the chief development officer of Advanced Microgrid Solutions. That company installs batteries made by Tesla into buildings for businesses, which can then store energy when power prices are low, and discharge it later to help save money and ease the strain on the electrical grid.
Systems like the one in Australia will also need to include inverters to convert the DC power that’s stored in the batteries to AC, which is used in the electrical grid.
Each Tesla Powerpack has 16 layers of batteries inside, and those battery pods, as the company calls them, contain cells.
“It starts with the individual cell,” Tholke says, which are small enough to “hold in your hand.” They are the fundamental building block of a battery, and in this case, the cells are a model called 2170, and made in an enormous Tesla facility in Nevada called the Gigafactory.
Those 2170 cells are Tesla’s multitaskers. They not only go in the company’s Powerpacks, which are designed for utility-scale usage, but also in their Powerwalls (meant for home use), and the Model 3, the company’s much-hyped production-level electric vehicle.
