Following on from Elon Musk’s pledge to the South Australian government that his company, Tesla, will complete a 100MW power storage facility within 100-days of signing an agreement or build it for free, the Californian-based company has unveiled the first of its battery arrays in the north of the state.
This power storage facility is being built in response to the now-infamous South Australian summer blackout of 2016, where, after suffering a political and a public backlash due to the blackout, the South Australian government looked for a sustainable solution to ensure it can build deployable grid-scale energy storage options with a capacity of at least 100MW.
When complete, this battery storage will eventually consist of a 100MW / 129MWh ‘Powerpack’ system that will in turn be paired with French renewable company Neoen and its Hornsdale wind farm near Jamestown, South Australia.
Currently on track to become the largest lithium-ion battery storage project in the world, when complete, Tesla claims that the Jamestown facility will help solve power outages, reduce intermittencies and manage summer peak loads in order to support the reliability of South Australia’s electrical infrastructure, while at the same time, provide enough power for more than 30,000 homes—which it also says is equal to the amount of homes that lost power during the blackout period last year.
The South Australian government’s deadline for the completion of the project is December 1, 2017.
