The world’s biggest battery is finally on the way. A year or so ago an area just outside Los Angeles had a nightmare near-disaster. The Aliso Canyon natural gas reservoir leaked 1.6 million pounds of methane into the atmosphere sending 8,000 residents scattering. It was months before things returned to normal.
The city authorities realized they needed a solution if the area lost power again at peak time. Their solution was to build the world’s biggest battery with enough power for 2,500 households for a day. They asked Tesla to design and build a 20 MW / 80 MWh Lithium-Ion Power Pack System. No worries, Elon Musk said. Give me three months and I will have it done.
The World’s Biggest Battery in Business by December
The project should complete by the end of 2016. It will charge itself during off-peak, and release the power during peak to stabilize the grid. This will reduce reliance on natural gas for turbine generation. With solar, the city may eventually not need the Aliso Canyon natural gas reservoir at all.
This represents a significant step forward to reducing reliance on fossil and nuclear fuel, and switching across to tidal, wind, and sun. To date, the problem has been the intermittent nature of green power delivery.
The sun does not shine at night. The wind does not blow all day. The tide changes direction approximately every twelve hours.
The Future of Mega Batteries Looking Ahead
The California Public Utilities Commission decided in 2014 that investor-owned utilities should have 1,325 MW of energy storage online by 2024. We don’t know how large the next worlds biggest battery will be, although it will surely be larger than ten megawatts. Tesla has committed to building super-batteries at its giant Gigafactory. When Musk says that he means business, it seems he does.
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