A massive Tesla-installed power storage facility has been constructed and is now currently up and running at Southern California Edison's Mira Loma substation in Ontario, California. The facility was just announced last fall, and now it currently holds enough energy to power up 15,000 homes for four hours - roughly 80-megawatt hours of electricity with a peak output of 20 megawatts.
Tesla's Battery Cell Technology
According to TheVerge, it's designed to reduce the need for peaker plants. Peaker plants are expensive to install and even maintain, especially when, in some areas, they are only used for a few hours a day - or even a year.
Why Tesla's Powerpacks Are Better
The 396 Powerpacks that Tesla installed for SCE were all developed and assembled at the company's Gigafactory situated in Nevada. Though 80-megawatt hours of batteries might sound like a lot of energy, it's actually just the same amount of battery capacity that the company puts into its cars in just four or five days of production.
The SCE facility at Mira Loma features 396 Powerpacks, each packed with 16 pods of batteries inside. Each pod has 12 bricks of cells, and each of these bricks features 85 battery cells, totaling to about 6,462,720 individual "2170" battery cells, which was so named because they are 21 x 70mm cylinders.
Advantages Of Tesla's Powerpacks
According to TheLosAngelesTimes, in addition to utility-grade storage systems such as this, Tesla's Power packs can also be powered by utilizing solar panels or other small-scale electricity generation to build microgrids, which are small electrical systems that can power entire islands or other remote facilities.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk predicted last year that the constantly growing battery business would receive a growth rate that is probably several times that of the growth of the car business per year. He also believes that the battery business would grow more and more and will become a global trend in the near future.
