The biggest news is when the energy would be supplied: the evening. “What makes this exciting is basically that it’s dispatchable solar that will be available at night,” says Peter Rive, the chief technology officer of SolarCity. The system is slated to be running by the end of 2016, said Rive, and will likely use Tesla batteries for the energy storage component. The battery will draw power from an accompanying solar array. SolarCity and the Kauaʻi Island Utility Cooperative jointly announced last week that they’ve entered into a solar power purchase agreement in which SolarCity will provide 20 years of power from a 52-megawatt-hour battery installation that will be able to send as many as 13 megawatts of electricity to the island’s grid. Indeed, SolarCity - which is chaired by Tesla CEO Elon Musk - has just announced plans to bring precisely this combo to Hawaii, a state that continues to lead the way when it comes to the adoption of solar and batteries, thanks to its towering electricity costs, which are the highest in the nation. Manghani adds that while there have been pioneering initiatives and pilot projects prior to now, it does appear that this solar plus storage technology is beginning to arrive. “In the last few months we’ve seen the frequency of these project announcements go up,” says Ravi Manghani, an energy storage analyst with GTM Research. So is it happening? The answer seems to be yes - 2015 has seen several key announced, completed, or experimental grid-scale projects pairing batteries and solar photovoltaic panels. The ultimate effect might be to displace electricity generated from coal or natural gas, and convert an inherently “intermittent” renewable energy source - solar - into a more constant one. In May, when Tesla Motors announced its new battery product to vast media buzz, the talk was all about people putting batteries in their solar-powered homes, and thereby becoming that much less reliant on the grid.īut there was always another and perhaps even bigger side of the story - the idea that very large scale batteries or battery packs could help out the grid itself by storing large amounts of solar energy for use in the evening or at night. Tesla has kept deploying microgrids since, and we now learn that the company has over 120 of them in operations around the world.Published by the Washington Post on September 16, 2015. The microgrid saved the nearly 600 residents of the island more than 100,000 gallons of fuel per year previously used to supply them with electricity. The first flagship microgrid project with SolarCity was on the island of Ta’u in American Samoa, where Tesla deployed a microgrid consisting of a 1.4-megawatt solar array and a 6-megawatt hour energy storage system with 60 Tesla Powerpacks: The idea is to have a self-sufficient energy system using self-produced renewable energy stored in batteries and supplying a small community or facility.Īfter the acquisition of SolarCity, it made even more sense for Tesla to get into the microgrid business since it now had expertise with both batteries and solar power. Tesla has over 120 operational microgrids around the world using its batteries and renewable energy, according to a new comment from an executive.Įver since the launch of Tesla Energy and its stationary energy storage products, Tesla started working on microgrid projects.
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