According to Tesla tweet straight from Belgium:
140 Tesla Powerpacks now live in Belgium and balancing the European electrical grid 100 times faster than fossil fuel plants
Frequency control requires quick ramp up and ramp down of power. Nuclear power plants are very slow, so they don’t make sense to use for frequency regulation.
Tesla Powerpacks Balancing the Grid in Terhills, Belgium
According to ReNews:
The project – which Tesla says took six months to complete from inception to operation, with the battery installation itself taking about five weeks – was unveiled on Tuesday afternoon (Australian time) by the California based company via its various social media channels.
According to ReNews, the €11 million storage array, located at the Terhills resort, is pooled with a mix of demand response assets from industrial and commercial consumers, and is one of the largest batteries in Europe contributing to the grid.
While a fraction of the size of the 100MW Hornsdale Power Reserve “big battery” in South Australia, the Belgian battery bank will be used for similar “grid balancing” purposes on the European grid – as the video below explains.
It will combine with various demand response services to provide around 32MW of grid capacity. The number of Powerwalls – 140 – suggests storage capacity of 28MWh, but this will depend on the final configuration.
As I have written before:
All these green activities require consistent levels of electrical production which, in the case of solar panels, means the sun has to be shining–or that households have energy storage systems on site. The quest to find an energy-storage solution that could be manufactured and used on a mass scale is the Holy Grail of solar right now. And the company that finds an adequate technology that can be easily replicated will be the one to lead the next step in the solar revolution.
Recent research by GTM Research, the most respected research firm on the U.S. market, said out of the 4,400 battery-storage systems installed in 2016, 86 percent of projects were off-the-grid. In 2017, however, that balance is on its way to being reversed.
