In the latest news, Tesla's Kauai solar power facility has officially opened for business as of Friday, with a 13 MW SolarCity solar farm installation that would provide power to a Powerpack storage facility with 52 MWh of total capacity. The amazing thing about the new facility, with regards to the specific needs of the sun-soaked island Hawaii, is that it is able to capture energy from the sun especially during peak daytime production hours, and then keep that stored power, ready for peak consumption hours later at night.
How Tesla Can Help Hawaii's Power Consumption Problems
According to Tech Crunch, this is a relatively new reality for solar power generation, which has been made possible by Tesla's Powerpack technology, considered as the commercial version of its Powerwall home storage batteries. Hawaii is already a massive solar power consumer, but with Tesla's initiative, the company can, for the first time, answer the problem of peak production time overlapping almost at the same time need for power is at its lowest.
How Tesla Can Change Hawaii's Dependence On Fossil Fuel
Despite this, Tesla's new solar facility in Kauai isn't going to completely reduce or obliterate the island's dependence on fossil fuels. Hawaii will still rely on diesel shipped in to provide some of its power requirements, but the new facility will offset some of that and reduce overall usage of fossil fuels for power needs by around 1.6 million gallons per year.
According to Electrek, the new energy project was developed by Tesla in partnership with the Kauai Island Utility Cooperative, and it's the biggest solar storage facility in the world. It currently occupies a massive field that was once used to grow sugarcane.
Working Hand-in-hand
The project will be a key part of Hawaii's goal of using 100 percent renewable energy by 2045, and for Tesla, it is going to be the perfect way to demonstrate how it can deploy these kinds of facilities in order to fit similar needs around the world.
