Do you know how the world’s largest battery look like?
Every during peak hours in Los Angeles, a natural gas-burning power plant they call a “peaker” is used to supplement the power plants. It is usually during the morning and the afternoon, before and after work respectively, that this peaker is activated by engineers.
But because California’s Public Utilities Commission already set a target that requires utilities to build their capacity to store energy, to use more renewable energy and to cut the state’s greenhouse emissions to 80% by 2050, the local utility Southern California Edison Co., has picked the world’s largest battery by AES Corp. to be their energy backup. It has beaten 1,800 other offers as a replacement to the peaker, a first time that an energy storage device won against a conventional power plant in a competition.
Source: Giphy
Source: EV West
AES has worked nine years with electric-car batteries and acquired knowledge on assembling batteries. In their Long Beach facility will lie the 18,000 lithium-ion battery packs that would be the peaker alternative.
This new storage battery has the capacity to store and distribute 100 megawatts of power an hour for four hours. It also doesn’t contribute to gas fossil fuel emissions as it will be charged using solar power in the morning and wind during the night.
Not so fast though. The mega-battery will be operational come 2021.
