A new project powered by Tesla Megapacks is helping alleviate the United Kingdom’s hundreds of millions of dollars in grid balancing costs that occurred from the pandemic.
The pandemic has greatly changed electricity use as more people have stayed home and changed their energy use patterns.
These changes are costing electric utilities in new grid balancing costs.
In the UK, the National Grid reports 718 million pounds ($932 million) in balancing costs from March to July — a 39% increase over the last year.
Bloomberg reports that for the first time this week, a Tesla Megapack project has been used by the National Grid to help balance the grid and alleviate those costs:
“A project using giant Tesla Inc. batteries was used to help balance supply and demand in Britain’s electricity market for the first time this week.”
We previously reported on the project, which uses 6 Tesla Megapacks for 15 MWh of capacity, and deployed in July.
At the time, they said that the battery system is going to be operate dusing Tesla’s new Autobidder system:
The utility-scale energy storage facility operates using Tesla’s cutting-edge ‘Autobidder’ AI software.
Earlier this year, we reported on Tesla’s Autobidder product, a step toward becoming an electric utility.
The platform is used to better and more directly monetize energy storage assets, like Tesla’s Powerpacks, Powerwalls, and the new Megapacks.
Back in June, Tesla was officially approved as an electricity generator, like an electric utility, by local authorities in the UK.
In recent years, Tesla has greatly accelerated the deployment of energy storage.
Powerwall, its home battery pack, has a long waitlist and the automaker has secured several larger projects using its Megapack.
Author: Fred Lambert
Source: Electrek
