Mere months after opening and already it seems as though Tesla’s vast battery in Australia is already proving its worth.
According to Renew Economy the 100MW facility had to bail out the Loy Yang A coal-fired power station after it tripped.
While the Tesla battery isn’t strictly designed for tasks like these, it was a brief but important demonstration that revealed the incredible advantages that come from using battery storage.
Unlike conventional redundancy systems that can take minutes or even hours to plug the gaps, the Tesla battery was able to feed 7MW of clean energy straight into the grid within seconds, instantly covering for the the coal plant.
It’s unlikely that Tesla’s battery will be doing something like this a lot in the future simply because it was providing electricity to a completely different district but as a showcase of what it can do it passed with flying colours.
Australia’s Tesla battery is the largest in the world and was famously completed within just 100 days after Tesla’s founder Elon Musk claimed that if they couldn’t do it in 100 days then Australia wouldn’t have to pay for the battery.
Of course Tesla succeeded in installing the 100MW facility within the allotted time and it is now connected to the Hornsdale Wind Farm where it, along with the wind farm will help provide a safety blanket of stability for a vast region that has often been plagued by blackouts.
One of the key advantages with battery storage is the speed with which it can respond.
While in this recent test the battery only provided 7MW, previous tests have shown that it is capable of going to full power in less than a second.
Speaking to the Australian radio station 5AA, Australia’s energy minister Tom Koutsantonis said that operators were “shocked” at how quickly the battery system was able to respond to situations like this.