New solar farm Powers Hawaii at Night
Tesla to provide batteries for energy storage battery in Kauai, Hawaii.
Although its production electric car continues to get more attention, Tesla continues quietly develop its energy storage business.
Today, the still incomplete gigafactory in Nevada is the assembly of battery packs for Tesla Energy Division stationary energy enterprise storage.
Some of these packages will be deployed to Hawaii in a cooperative effort with another company related to Tesla CEO Elon Musk.
The picture of the battery will be used to store energy from a solar farm run by SolarCity on the island of Kauai.
Tesla CTO JB Straubel said at the meeting of shareholders of Tesla recently that the construction of the farm of Kauai battery soon start according Seeking Alpha.
Musk is the chairman of SolarCity, and cousins Lyndon and Peter Rive run the company.
The Hawaiian site will provide a reasonable percentage of Kauai's power needs, Tesla said, and will be operated jointly with the utility Kauai Island Cooperative KIUC.
The utility hopes already generate 50 percent of the power of the island from renewable sources by 2023, so this project is clearly a step in that direction.
Map Tesla and SolarCity to build the solar panel farm and combined energy storage on 50 acres just north of the city of Lihue, Fortune reported in February, when the project was announced.
KIUC pay SolarCity May 14 cents per kilowatt-hour on a 20-year contract for both the solar farm and energy storage network.
Batteries will be used to provide energy when sunlight isn t available for solar panels to capture.
Solar panels with coupling batteries allows excess energy to be stored for later use, a particularly important ability to stabilize the electrical network when intermittent and unpredictable renewable energy sources are added.
Hawaii is a very good environment for renewable energy because the isolation of the island chain gave some of the highest electricity prices in the nation.
Most electricity in Hawaii is produced by the combustion of oil that must be shipped to tankers islands.
It has no natural gas supplies, and no deposits of coal, so that the oil is the only source of fuel for the electricity used by its 1 million to 4 million inhabitants.
The cost of importing oil has utilities Hawaii more receptive to the addition of renewable energy.
SolarCity has received approval from most Hawaiian regulators earlier this year, although the start of construction appears to have been pushed back from its original target date of April.
The company had previously said he hoped to complete construction before the end of the year.
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