Most of the world was focusing on the Model 3 portion of the Tesla Q1 earnings letter last night. But buried down toward the bottom of that communication, the company reiterated its goal of tripling its energy storage business in 2018. “2018 should be a very important year for our energy storage business,” the letter read. “We continue to aim for a three-fold increase in MWh deployed for our energy storage products this year.
“In Q1, energy storage deployments grew 161% from Q4 2017 to 373 MWh, which includes the 129 MWh South Australia project that was installed last year with final commercial transfer occurring in Q1. Electric utilities and power producers around the globe are increasingly appreciating the value proposition of our Powerpack storage systems based not only on economic benefits but also on the operational benefits of faster response time and greater reliability of the electric grid.”
That giant battery in South Australia surprised people with its insanely fast response the first time it was called upon after it was commissioned — an astonishing 140 milliseconds. That’s how long it took for it to start providing power to the grid when a nearby coal generating plant went offline unexpectedly.
Editor’s note: Admittedly, this is being marked/communicated as a big surprised, but this is how batteries work, and Younicos communicated this point to us well several years ago in Berlin, especially via these two graphs:
Such perfomance is making other utility companies sit up and take notice. Tesla is in talks to provide a similar grid-scale battery to Queensland, Australia. It is also working with Consolidated Edison in New York, Xcel Energy in Colorado, and PG&E in California.
Elon said on the conference call last night, “Tesla may have a gigawatt-scale deal announced in a matter of months.”
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