With the U.S. reportedly set to overtake South Korea to become the world’s biggest utility-scale energy storage market this year, Elon Musk’s electric vehicle maker Tesla has announced the arrival of the “Megapack” battery.
Tesla
According to a new press release from the Palo Alto-based company, the new utility-scale battery — which is supplied fully assembled — enables the company to “deploy an emissions-free, 250 MW/1 GWh power plant in less than three months on a three-acre footprint,” a speed four times faster than that for a fossil fuel plant of the same size, according to the company.
Tesla wrote about it in its press release:
Megapack significantly reduces the complexity of large-scale battery storage and provides an easy installation and connection process. Each Megapack comes from the factory fully-assembled with up to 3 megawatt hours (MWhs) of storage and 1.5 MW of inverter capacity, building on Powerpack’s engineering with an AC interface and 60% increase in energy density to achieve significant cost and time savings compared to other battery systems and traditional fossil fuel power plants.
Along with an AC interface, the Megapack also includes DC-connectivity for solar grids, essentially giving it plug and play capability for any type of power grid interface. Tesla’s Megapack product page further describes its “All-in-One-System” design:
“Every Megapack arrives pre-assembled and pre-tested in one enclosure from our Gigafactory — including battery modules, bi-directional inverters, a thermal management system, an AC main breaker, and controls. No assembly is required, all you need to do is connect Megapack’s AC output to your site wiring,” Tesla detailed.
According to the press release, the Megapack is connected to the company’s Powerhub utility-scale monitoring and control platform and can be integrated with Tesla’s Autobidder machine learning program for automated energy trading. Tesla claims its customers have used Autobidder to dispatch more than 100 GWh of energy worldwide to date.
Tesla confirmed that the Megapack is going to be used at the upcoming Moss Landing project in California with PG&E
