Report: Tesla is building a giant 100 MW battery in Texas

That is a very important job though and is dramatically cheaper than peaker plants.

I remember that some facilities were shutdown because their auxiliary power generation units froze. So if batteries would only supply these mission critical apparatus their overall effect can be multiplied.

Batteries are not going to substitute for winterized generation. They are to provide ancillary services such as frequency response (as you mention regarding the Tesla Hornsdale Power Reserve install), previously provided primarily by thermal generators, as well as short term dispatchable discharge (think expensive peaker plants). ERCOT (in Texas) also has a market for generators able to provide black start services (note the grid location of Gambit's install in this article, it sits at the intersection of transmission infrastructure connecting it to thermal generators in the area [1]).

During the rolling blackouts, no attention was paid to avoiding circuits that were powering natural gas compressors and other similar natural gas distribution infra [2] (sidenote: I expect Tesla to do well in battery backing such loads). More distributed battery infra makes the grid more durable, and less at risk for totally black starts [3] [4].

From the city's link to project information [5]:

"Will the battery provide energy to Angelton during a black out or natural disaster?

If charged, the battery can help the local electric system come back online by providing energy to ‘jump start’ electric generators in the. This service is called ‘black start’ capability; the battery is able to help the grid come back online after going ‘black’."

[1] https://openinframap.org/#9.18/29.1828/-95.4064

[2] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/giant-flaw-texas-blackouts-cu... (A Giant Flaw in Texas Blackouts: It Cut Power to Gas Supplies)

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_start (A black start is the process of restoring an electric power station or a part of an electric grid to operation without relying on the external electric power transmission network to recover from a total or partial shutdown.)

[4] https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/18/texas-power-outages-... (Texas was "seconds and minutes" away from catastrophic monthslong blackouts, officials say)

[5] http://angleton.tx.us/DocumentCenter/View/3793/Gambit-Energy...

I would argue that a water damn would be a better storage of energy than batteries. Although it can be environmentaly problematic depending where you put it, it can hold an enormous amount if energy which can be switched on in seconds.

TFA says 100MW, not MWh. So it's not clear if this is the maximum discharge rate or the actual storage capacity.

Side note – I don't think I'll ever stop being annoyed that we use Wh instead of J for things like this, very confusing to people and makes conversions harder.

Thanks for the figures. Can this also alter the economics of Texas' grid ? after all a stabler supply probably means stabler prices, the lack of control worsened the recent crisis I believe.

Right, the difference between these older, larger facilities and Tesla's massive and giant facility is Telsa has a dedicated person with magazine editors on speed dial, while Dynegy doesn't.

Also for comparison: a single pumped-storage plant will often have storage capacity in the GWh; e.g. the Linth-Limmern pumped storage part in Switzerland can store 33 GWh and provides 1000 MW peak power.

> which is pretty meaningless without also knowing the energy capacity

I disagree. You can reasonably assume a battery bank will have a capacity between an hour and a few hours.

Electrical distribution is a solved problem though and has been for almost a century. The notable part of that battery facility isn't the Siemens "gear", it's the Tesla batteries.

heh interesting, although considering Tesla kinda made the whole thing extremely fast, I'm not surprised they rebranded parts already available from other brands.

(dons his prophetic tie clip)

In 110 years time Elons' interstellar Universeship will dwarf both his battery and the Starship.

Better idea (maybe): store even more gravitational energy by sending heavy weights into orbit. Just use booster rockets to make it fall through the atmosphere, regenerating vast amounts of energy in the process.

The problem then being: how do you remove the mass you're extracting? Existing horizontal TBM systems make this much easier.

Geothermal looks promising, using the technology for drilling wells.

Not an expert by anymeans, but it takes a long time for those to start producing energy when required (5 mins+). I believe in Australia, the Tesla battery was able to start providing energy in seconds.

Actually I think batteries will be the cheapest option for a very long time. They can be produced at a much higher scale than today (I wouldn't be surprised if we see 10x the production in the next five to ten years and consequently prices below $30/kwh) and they can be setup incrementally. Most alternatives are fixed-size all-or-nothing affairs. Oh and the biggest downside of batteries, their low energy density doesn't really matter for stationary storage.

Pumped-water storage is a big thing elsewhere, but afaik Texas doesn't have any big mountains to make this convenient.

(also, these dams have failed before to great misfortune downstream)

Lithium, iron, phosphorus, and oxygen are all pretty abundant and cheap. The economies of scale and better processes need to kick in (even more) to make them cheaper. Say, steel was very expensive until the Bessemer process became widespread.

Gravity batteries are very low-density, and flywheels are prone to dangerous catastrophic failures. They also need mechanical generators which aren't free. I'm suspect that chemical batteries are the future.

It is actually. Pumped energy storage is crazy cheap and efficient, assuming you have land and water.

Batteries are just straight amazing, aren't they? Every other solution is just so complicated. Like pumped storage. You run power to a powerful electric pump, which moves water into a huge reservoir, which produces power through a hydro plant. Or a flywheel. You run electricity to a motor, which spins a huge piece of levitated metal, which then can run a generator.

A battery is an inert block you send electricity directly into and get electricity directly out of. It's quite literally a black box of electrical energy storage.

No other solution is ever going to be quite that simple -- electricity in, electricity out. There's always some other complexity, some other mechanism, some other pump, some shielding, some motor.

If only there were some technology available for conditioning the interior airspace of a building so that it stayed at room temperature year round...

Tesla batteries can operate in freezing temperatures in heat mode.

What is PES? I only can get results for Power & Energy Society, which seems tangentially but not meaningfully related

What is PES?

There are very few areas suitable for pumped energy storage. It requires specific topology and geology.

100 MW for 10 ms is 28 Wh.

I like your point about proper scientific units for headlines, and disagree with pumped energy storage. If you aren't gifted with appropriate geology, it really isn't nearly as effective an option, is it? Also, response time is a lot different. There is enough room for both it would seem.

As far as I read the article they are really talking about 100 MW maximum power output; they mention that the Australian version can supply that 100 MW for a bit more than an hour (so store a bit more than 100MWh), so they seem to be aware of the distinction but apparently don’t know (?) the energy storage capacity of the planned battery installation.