Tesla has confirmed that it will soon launch virtual power plants using Powerwalls in Texas and Puerto Rico.
The company even confirmed it already has some significant power capacity in Puerto Rico.
Virtual power plants are becoming one of Tesla’s most underappreciated products.
Tesla is using its existing and growing fleet of Powerwalls to aggregate their power capacity and offer electric grid services to utilities while compensating homeowners for using their home battery packs.
The company’s California virtual power plant has already proved successful in its first year.
Now Tesla has been looking to bring virtual power plants to more markets where its Powerwall is popular.
–
The Tesla exec even confirmed that the company already has over 350 MW of Powerwalls installed in the territory, which means that it can quickly make a sizable impact.
State officials are increasingly turning to an unexpected technology: giant batteries.
These Mack truck-size systems, which can quickly spew stored electrons onto the grid when power plants sputter, played a crucial role in avoiding outages over the past week, as scorching temperatures shattered records across Texas. And they are renewing debate about the role of clean energy in stabilizing the Texas grid, as the batteries are ideal for harnessing wind and solar energy.
Power system operators across the country are watching closely to see how Texas manages this crisis. While the perilous combination of prolonged triple-digit temperatures and overstressed power plants and transmission lines is plaguing Texas at the moment, it could hit most regions at any time. Changes in the weather and thedeteriorating condition of regional power grids make the entire nation increasingly vulnerable to outages for longer stretches of the year.
“Texas is experiencing what everyone in the country is going to be going through in some form or fashion in the years ahead,” said Aaron Zubaty, the CEO of Eolian, which owns and operates large energy storage projects. “All the systems are not necessarily designed for operating in these types of prolonged events at the edge of design and engineering specifications. … These are the types of weather events that can cause weird things to occur that no one has ever thought about at all types of plants.”
The National Weather Service warned that “oppressive and persistent heat will become increasingly dangerous and potentially deadly” in much of Texas, and that many areas of the state “have already experienced a yearly record number of hours of dangerously high heat index reading.”
–In Texas, the grid so far has held despite heat more extreme than many parts of the state have ever faced.
The outsize role battery storage is playing in keeping the power on is welcome news to clean energy companies, which have been fighting the fossil fuel lobby’s efforts to place blame for the state’s electricity woes on the increasing share of renewables in its energy mix.
Battery storage is a boon to wind and solar, as it allows them to capture and store the energy created at times when it may not be needed and then make it available to ratepayers at peak hours.
But amid this heat emergency, batteries have also proved useful in bailing out more traditional power plants.
When a large coal facility got knocked offline during peak hours this week amid the stress of the extreme heat, energy that was being stored in batteries elsewhere in Texas was quickly dispatched to carry the grid through the evening. The batteries were also crucial to keeping the power on when a nuclear plant hiccuped and went offline earlier in the week, said Doug Lewin, a Texas energy consultant.
When the Commanche Peak nuclear plant suddenly dropped offline with no warning a few weeks ago, this is what the sudden impact to generation looked like.
Batteries ability to respond instantly makes them particularly useful for this kind of dramatic and unexpected outage – and in fact, that’s just what happened.