Tesla pitches the Powerpack to farmers in Australia

As we previously reported, Tesla expects Australia to become an important market for energy storage. It has the world’s highest per capita penetration of rooftop solar with 15% of households using solar for a total of 1.5 million households across the country. Those households are already using residential energy storage solutions, like the installation with 6 Tesla Powerwall units we reported on last week.

Now Tesla is also looking to push its commercial and utility-scale solution, the Powerpack, in the country. The company presented the products to Australian farmers. Energy storage for farms “could be a massive area of growth”, says Tesla.

Nick Carter, Tesla Energy Manager in Australia, presented the company’s energy storage solutions before a group of Australian farmers at an Agribusiness Australia event in Melbourne earlier this week, reports ABC.

Carter sees battery packs as a potential alternative to the diesel generators on farms:

“I think really the energy system is going to change on the farm. I think you’ll see uptake in solar and more battery storage – possibly decisions being made about not putting more diesel generators or not connect that line to the farm when you can differ the energy to battery storage.”

He referenced Tesla’s recent 80 MWh project with Southern California Edison to demonstrate the potential of these projects at scale. The systems can offset peak demand, which is especially important in farming since it consumes a lot of energy at specifics times throughout the day. Carter said:

“You’ve obviously got to engineer and size the system. If you’re going to use say 2 megawatts at 9:00am or 7:00am in the morning, we can build a system around that and size the solar that goes with it or the grid connection.”

He added that Australian farms are often limited by rainfall and not land. Therefore, energy storage is an opportunity to take advantage of the available space:

“If there is land available, then use it for essentially mining or growing energy and if you’re grid-connected you could end up in the future when the rules change, selling it back as another revenue stream,”

We recently reported that Tesla reduced the price of the Powerpack system. Bringing the price down even only by one percent can open up the technology to a new market and expand the use of renewable energies. It looks like it could soon have an effect on Australian farms.