Tesla Hired by SoCal Edison to Build Massive 80MWh ‘Time Shifting’ Power Storage Plant
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Tesla has inked a deal with SoCal Edison to build an 80 megawatt hour power storage facility at the utility’s Mira Loma substation in Ontario, California. 80 megawatt hours, by the way, is enough to power 2,500 households for a day or charge 1,000 Teslas.
Slated to come online by the end of this year, the facility will come equipped with Tesla’s Powerpack industrial energy storage system, a massive battery designed to store surplus energy from the electrical grid during off-peak hours and deliver power during peak hours in a process known as “time shifting.” Time shifting increases the reliability and resiliency of electrical grids, allowing them to cope with sudden peaks in energy usage.
The deal follows a mandate by California’s Public Utilities Commission requiring that SoCal Edison and other public utilities install 1.3 gigawatts of storage capacity by 2020, according to The LA Times. Edison reports that the public utility is already ahead of schedule in meeting its yearly targets and predicts that the costs of energy storage will gradually decrease over time.
Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla has argued that the energy storage business is due for a massive windfall and will likely “have a growth rate probably several times that of what the car business is per year,” calling it a “super-exponential growth rate,” according to The Verge.
The project came about following a well leak at the Aliso Canyon natural gas storage facility, the largest such structure in the state, which put it out of commission. Rather than depend solely on natural gas to manage peak energy consumption from regional power plants, households, and business, Edison has opted to supplement natural gas storage with electrical storage facilities built by Tesla and others.
Tesla has not disclosed pricing, but has revealed that the costs meet state requirements for competitive prices. The company will manufacture the battery system at its massive Gigafactory in Nevada.
