Tesla has been chosen by the Southern California Edison’s Mira Loma substation in Ontario, California to build an 80MWh battery plant that will be able to provide power to 2,500 homes for a full day. California Governor Jerry Brown indirectly initiated the action by mandating the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) to stabilize grid power following the gas leak at Aliso Canyon last October, when 100,000 tons of methane leaked into the atmosphere.
Power storage is a fast-growing business, according to Tesla CEO Elon Musk. He says this market has a “super-exponential growth rate” that is “several times that of what the car business is per year.” Tesla did not reveal pricing and other details, but did say that the power storage facility would be ready by the end of the year.
The plan for storing power in batteries for peak time usage is actually years old, but has been accelerated since the Aliso Canyon incident, which forced more than 4,500 households to move into temporary quarters. The leak took a total of 112 days to clean up, and released as much methane as 572,000 passenger cars emit in a full year. As a greenhouse gas methane is 50 times as dangerous as carbon dioxide, and such leaks can have a tremendous detrimental impact on the environment.
Tesla and several of its competitors in the power storage industry will come together to create a system that will essentially “time shift” grid power from off-peak hours to peak hours, theoretically eliminating the need for conventional power stations to come online during high load times.
The original plan for the CPUC was to have 1,325 megawatts of power storage facilities by the year 2020. This will ideally be sufficient to power more than 41,000 homes for a day.
Tesla has also acted as its own general contractor for this project – similar to what they’re doing with their Gigafactory in Nevada, which will ultimately produce battery packs for Model 3 and future Tesla EVs.
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