World's largest li-ion battery--again!

I was just talking about the largest li-ion battery in the world a few weeks ago.  And already this record is to be broken by an even larger one, in California.

From Electrek:

For the past few months, Tesla and CEO Elon Musk have been teasing a giant battery project that would dwarf even the company’s 129 MWh Powerpack project in Australia.

Today, we learn that Tesla is working with PG&E on a massive battery system with a capacity of “up to 1.1 GWh” in California.

Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E), one of the largest electric energy companies in the United States covering nearly 16 million people in Northern and Central California, submitted 4 new energy storage projects to the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) for approval today.

Three are third-party owned projects to be connected to PG&E’s grid, but the fourth one is “a proposed utility-owned 182.5 MW lithium-ion battery energy storage system (BESS) located within PG&E’s Moss Landing substation.”

Tesla would be providing the battery packs for the giant project, which would be able to output 182.5 MW of power for 4 hours, which represents 730 MWh of energy capacity or over 3,000 Tesla Powerpack 2s.

PG&E also has the option to increase the capacity to 6 hours for a total of 1.1 GWh.

Earlier this month, Tesla CTO JB Straubel announced that the company has deployed over 1 GWh of energy storage – a capacity that he says is “undeniably making an impact.”

If this new project is approved and deployed to its full potential, it would represent more energy capacity in a single project than what Tesla Energy deployed since its inception 3 years ago.

[Read more here]

Elon Musk recently said that Tesla battery sales each year would be equal to the sum total of all previous years--at least for the next few years.  Apparently battery sales are profitable.  That's pretty good news for the company--and for global warming.  182.5 MW (the output of the 730 MWh of storage per hour over 4 hours) is equivalent to 0.7% of California's total electricity generated.  However it is equivalent to about 5% of PG&E's renewables generation output.  And that's just this battery--the utility has others, and this was just one of the four proposed energy storage options to the regulator.