First look at Tesla’s new ‘most powerful battery system in the world’ project in Australia

Today, Tesla held an event to ‘celebrate’ their new giant Powerpack project in Australia. The company gave a first look at the project and confirmed that they signed the interconnection agreement with the local utility, which was the requirement to start the deadline for Elon Musk’s bet to “deliver the project in 100 days or it’s free.”

Tesla and Neoen, the wind power company operating the wind farm at the project, have now 100 days to complete the project after having signed the interconnection agreement with Electranet, which was approved by the utility authority.

Several of the Powerpacks are already installed and operational since Tesla powered the event with the packs, but the battery installation is not completed yet.

Tesla released a few images of the state of the site at Neoen’s Hornsdale Wind Farm near Jamestown, South Australia. Here are a few pictures and a quick drone flyover:

Once completed, the project is expected to result in the most powerful li-ion battery storage project in the world with a capacity of 100 MW. There are projects with bigger energy capacities, but Tesla’s is up there with 129 MWh.

South Australia started the project after a state-wide blackout during the Australian summer in 2016. The government solicited bids and Tesla was selected out of 90 competitive bids.

Tesla describes the usefulness of the system:

“It will help solve power outages, reduce intermittencies and manage summertime peak load to support the reliability of South Australia’s electrical infrastructure, providing enough power for more than 30,000 homes—approximately equal to the amount of homes that lost power during the blackout period last year.”

The system is powered by Tesla’s Powerpacks and inverters built at Gigafactory 1 in Nevada. While this project impresses with its size, Tesla’s Powerpacks are also being deployed in smaller projects in Australia over the past few months.

Recently, we reported on a single Tesla Powerpack battery saving an Australian town over $1.5 million in grid connection costs and a led a similar system was also deployed at a school in Queensland.

https://youtu.be/W9CiPs8E5xQ