Lloyd Alter on Treehugger.com reports on the delivery of a battery farm designed to handle peak power requirements currently managed using natural gas peaker plants. The source? Tesla:
One of those alternatives that people dreamed about just a few years ago was giant batteries, and Elon Musk promised that he would make them in his new Nevada factory. What is really astonishing is that in just three months, Tesla has delivered a giant battery farm with 396 stacks of batteries that can provide enough electricity to power 15,000 houses for four hours,…
Natural gas peaker plants are expensive and controversial; you want them near the user, but the NIMBYs come out in force. Battery packs are much simpler, they are modular and they are scalable.
Not everyone is sure this will work out. Lloyd references skeptic Jamie Condliffe of MIT Technology Review, who opines:
But there are some problems. First, lithium batteries remain expensive. It’s not clear how much this installation cost, but Bloomberg last year noted that Tesla will sell anyone a system a tenth the size of California’s for $2.9 million. Still, as electric cars hit the mainstream, large lithium batteries are expected to fall dramatically in price.
A bigger concern is with the hardware itself. Tesla doesn’t say how many cycles that the batteries in its Powerpack systems, which make up the installation, can tolerate before they degrade and reach the end of their useful life. But like other lithium-ion batteries, it’s likely in the thousands—probably around 5,000, the same as its Powerwall units. That’s not bad in a domestic setting, but could be quickly devoured in a grid setting.
Problem is, we’re not overrun with alternatives. The quest to build a great grid battery doesn’t sound too tough: it simply has to be cheap, made using common materials, and resilient to repeated charge-discharge cycles. The batteries don’t have to be portable, so factors such as size and weight aren’t a design constraint.
Given recent incidents of little smartphone batteries blowing up, I wonder how Tesla has safeguarded this “battery farm”. Space separation? Physical barriers? It’d be terrible if a single defective battery destroyed the rest of the farm long before they physically just wore out. And do they have a plan for recycling once they’re worn out?
