Islands in the Pacific Ocean are some of the most
practical places to install solar panels. Since there’s no natural gas
pipeline or rail line to haul in coal, islands like Kauai in Hawaii have
traditionally generated electricity by shipping in many barrels of
diesel fuel.
These days, because so many residences and businesses
have installed solar power, there’s a greatly reduced need to burn
fossil during the day — but at night, the generators kick in. Tesla
wants to change all that, with a massive new solar farm and energy
storage project on the island.
Much of renewable energy generation is intermittent: wind
and solar power generation peaks are often around times of low demand.
So Tesla (which changed its name from Tesla Motors last year largely
because of projects like this) offers the Powerpack, a massive battery
that can store electricity during the day when supply is abundant, and
discharge it when demand goes up after the sun goes down.
The Kauai project consists of a 52 megawatt-hour battery
installation plus a 13 megawatt SolarCity solar farm. Tesla and the
Kauai Island Utility Cooperative, the power company that ordered the
project, believe the project will reduce fossil fuel usage by 1.6
million gallons per year.
Like with the solar/battery microgrid installed on the
island of Ta’u in American Samoa last year, the KIUC project uses
Tesla’s Powerpack 2 battery system, built at Tesla’s Gigafactory in Nevada.
KIUC didn’t purchase the solar panels and battery system
from Tesla outright. Instead, the utility contracted with Tesla to
purchase electricity. There’s a 20-year contract in place to
buy the solar-generated power for 13.9 cents per kilowatt hour — in
effect, Tesla is now in the power generation business.
It’s the first major solar-plus-storage project for Tesla since its $2.6 billion acquisition of SolarCity
last year, and Tesla said in a statement that it “will work with energy
providers around the world seeking to overcome barriers in the way of
building a sustainable, renewable energy grid of their own.”
Stationary storage is "something I think will probably be as big as the car business long term," Tesla CEO Elon Musk said during a tour of the Gigafactory
last year. "And will actually have a growth rate probably several times
that of what the car business is per year. The growth in stationary
storage is really under appreciated. That’s a super-exponential growth
rate."
Earlier this year, Tesla opened a massive energy storage facility
in Ontario, California that was designed to reduce the need for “peaker
plants,” or pricey electricity generators that only run when demand is
particularly high. Use of Tesla’s Powerpacks both as replacements for
peaker plants and to time-shift renewable power generation appears to be
growing in popularity, and the company has a number of projects
underway at the commercial, industrial, and utility levels.
Tesla also offers a residential power-storage solution
called Powerwall that uses the same technology as Powerpack. In fact, a
Powerpack is simply 16 Powerwall battery pods encased in a weatherproof
box.
source: http://www.theverge.com
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