The Tesla Powerpack is a rechargeable

lithium-ion battery A lithium-ion or Li-ion battery is a type of rechargeable battery that uses the reversible intercalation of Li+ ions into electronically conducting solids to store energy. Li-ion batteries are characterized by higher specific energy, energ ...

stationary

energy storage Energy storage is the capture of energy produced at one time for use at a later time to reduce imbalances between energy demand and energy production. A device that stores energy is generally called an Accumulator (energy), accumulator or Batte ...

item, intended for use by businesses or on smaller projects from power utilities. The device was manufactured by Tesla Energy, the clean energy subsidiary of

Tesla, Inc. Tesla, Inc. ( or ) is an American multinational automotive and clean energy company. Headquartered in Austin, Texas, it designs, manufactures and sells battery electric vehicles (BEVs), stationary battery energy storage devices from h ...

The Powerpack stores electricity for time of use load shifting, backup power,

demand response Demand response is a change in the power consumption of an electric utility customer to better match the demand for power with the supply. Until the 21st century decrease in the cost of pumped storage and batteries, electric energy could not b ...

, microgrids,

renewable energy Renewable energy (also called green energy) is energy made from renewable resource, renewable natural resources that are replenished on a human lifetime, human timescale. The most widely used renewable energy types are solar energy, wind pow ...

integration, frequency regulation, and voltage control. The first prototype Powerpacks were installed in 2012 at the locations of a few industrial customers. After July 22, 2022, the product was no longer listed for sale. Tesla Energy offers other battery energy storage devices: the Powerwall, intended for home use, and the Megapack, intended for

electrical grid An electrical grid (or electricity network) is an interconnected network for electricity delivery from producers to consumers. Electrical grids consist of power stations, electrical substations to step voltage up or down, electric power tran ...

use.

History

As Tesla, Inc. developed batteries for its electric car business, the company also started experimenting with using batteries for

. Starting in 2012, Tesla installed prototype battery packs (to later be called the Powerpack) at the locations of a few industrial customers. The batteries allowed customers to store energy to be used for peak shaving, load shifting, backup power, demand response, microgrids, renewable power integration, frequency regulation, and voltage control. Using these techniques, some early customers were able to reduce their electrical bill by 20%. In November 2013, Tesla announced that it would build Giga Nevada, a factory to produce lithium-ion batteries, like those used in the Powerpack. The success of the early Powerpack installations led Tesla to announce in April 2015 that it would apply its technology to a home energy storage system, the Powerwall. During 2015 and 2016, Tesla deployed a combined 300 MWh of Powerwall and Powerpack technology.

Powerpack specifications

The Powerpack is a bigger unit with 100 kWh (first generation) and 210 kWh (2nd generation) of storage for commercial and utility grid use. To meet the variety of energy needs in industry, "Powerpack is infinitely scalable", said Elon Musk. The late 2016 Powerpack 2 probably uses 21700 cells. As of March 2020, the 232 kWh version with inverter cost $172,707.

Examples of Powerpack installation

Tesla installed a grid storage facility for

Southern California Edison Southern California Edison (SCE), the largest subsidiary of Edison International, is the primary electric utility company for much of Southern California. It provides 15 million people with electricity across a service territory of approximate ...

with a capacity of 80 MWh at a power of 20 MW between September 2016 and December 2016 to reduce the local loss of

peak power ''Peak power'' refers to the maximum of the instantaneous power waveform, which, for a sine wave, is always twice the average power. For other waveforms, the relationship between peak power and average power is the peak-to-average power ratio (PAP ...

after the Aliso Canyon gas leak. the storage unit was one of the largest accumulator batteries on the market. Tesla installed 400 Powerpack-2 modules (80 MWh) at the Mira Loma transformer station in California. The battery storage serves to store energy at a low network load and then to feed this energy back into the grid at peak load. The principal way of adding peak generation capacity prior to this was the use of gas-fired power stations. In 2017, Tesla used Powerpacks to deploy 100 MW/129 MWh of battery storage at the Hornsdale Power Reserve in South Australia, the biggest deployment of lithium-ion grid battery storage in the world at the time. Powerpacks continue to be used by utilities to meet smaller-scale grid energy storage requirements. For example, a 25 MW / 52 MWh deployment of Powerpacks is in use at the Lake Bonney Wind Farm in South Australia.

Market

At the announcement, a larger battery called Powerpack—storing 100 kWh of electrical energy—was projected to be available for industrial consumers, reaching a price point of $250/kWh. The Powerpack was projected to comprise the majority of stationary storage production at Gigafactory 1 while Powerwall would play a smaller part, giving Tesla a

profit margin Profit margin is a financial ratio that measures the percentage of profit earned by a company in relation to its revenue. Expressed as a percentage, it indicates how much profit the company makes for every dollar of revenue generated. Profit margi ...

of 20 percent.

Price tendency

In September 2016, Tesla priced the Powerpack at $445/kWh, and a system with 200 kWh of energy and 100 kW of peak power was the cheapest available priced at $145,100. A bi-directional 250 kW inverter costs $52,500. By October 2016, a limited system of Powerpack 2 cost $398/kWh. A 22 MWh system can cost €15 million.

Volume tendency

Musk predicted in 2016 that the utility power will need to increase to supply more electric vehicles, eventually reaching an equilibrium with about 1/3 of power coming from distributed energy and 2/3 from utilities. Battery storage is one of the ways to mitigate the increasing

duck curve The duck curve is a graph of power production over the course of a day that shows the timing imbalance between peak demand and solar power generation. The graph resembles a sitting duck, and thus the term was created. Used in utility-scale elect ...

, particularly in California.

Competition

BYD's energy storage system is another competitor of Tesla's Powerpack.

UC San Diego The University of California, San Diego (UC San Diego in communications material, formerly and colloquially UCSD) is a public land-grant research university in San Diego, California, United States. Established in 1960 near the pre-existing Sc ...

installed this system, which has 5 megawatt-hour (MWh) capacity—enough to power 2,500 homes—in September 2014. BYD is a large supplier of rechargeable batteries, and is also known for its leading position in electric buses. Sonnen and AutoGrid collaborated on combining house batteries into a large-scale utility-level grid storage system. Eos claimed a battery price of $160/kWh in 2017, before the cost of integration by Siemens.

References

External links

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Why Tesla is backing batteries
BBC
2015 Conference call with Elon MuskWhole transcript, subscribed.
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{{Tesla Motors Powerpack Grid energy storage Lithium-ion batteries Products introduced in 2012 2012 in technology