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Tesla starts delivering Powerpacks for new large battery in Australia

The success of Tesla’s giant battery project in South Australia has attracted a lot of attention, especially from grid and energy asset operators.

It led to Tesla winning contracts for other energy projects across the country and it now started to deliver Powerpacks for one of those new projects.

Tesla’s 100MW/129MWh Powerpack project in South Australia came online last December.

It proved to be so efficient that it reportedly should have made around $1 million in just a few days in January. However, Tesla complained that they are not being paid correctly because the system doesn’t account for how fast Tesla’s Powerpacks start discharging their power into the grid.

The system is basically a victim of its own efficiency, which the Australian Energy Market Operator confirmed is much more rapid, accurate and valuable than a conventional steam turbine in a report published earlier this year.

Another report that came out last month even showed that the giant battery system reduced the cost of the grid service that it performs by 90% and it has already taken a majority share of the market.

All that success led to several other projects contracting Tesla to install more Powerpacks all around Australia.

In March, we reported that the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) announced that it will match a $25 million investment by the Victorian Government to jointly fund Victoria’s first two large-scale, grid-connected batteries as part of the Victorian energy storage initiative.

One of those two projects will use Tesla’s Powerpacks and as reported by Minister for Energy, Environment & Climate Change Lily D’Ambrosio today, Tesla started delivering the new battery packs:

The project in question is a 25 MW / 50 MWh battery system that will be co-located and integrated with the existing 60 MW Gannawarra Solar Farm near Kerang, Victoria.

It is not as big as Tesla’s project in South Australia, but it’s still quite a large Powerpack project and one of Tesla’s biggest projects to date.

Tesla CTO JB Straubel recently confirmed that the company has now installed over 1 GWh of energy storage after a record installation of 373 MWh of energy storage projects last quarter.

The milestone was achieved about 2 years after launching its energy storage division, but at the shareholder meeting last week, CEO Elon Musk added that he expects Tesla to install another GWh of energy storage in less than a year.

The fast acceleration of Powerpack deployment is due to projects like this one in Victoria.

Tesla also has even bigger plans for its energy storage system with a supposedly giant 1 GWh project in the works to be announced soon.

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Avatar for Fred Lambert Fred Lambert

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