Report: Tesla Secretly Builds a Huge 100 MW Battery in Texas

Tesla is best known as an electric car company, but the company also has a thriving business in the field of battery storage – including batteries for electric electricity network. Bloomberg reports that Tesla is currently building a battery installation in the new home state of Texas, Elon Musk’s Tesla CEO. The project is in Angleton, about an hour south of Houston.

Tesla has not announced the project, which is operated under the name of an obscure subsidiary of Tesla called Gambit Energy Storage LLC. When a Bloomberg photographer visits, a worker discourages taking photos and says the project is ‘mysterious’. The project apparently consists of 20 large batteries covered by white sheets.

A document on the City of Angleton’s website contains some details about the project. It is listed as a Plus Power project, but contains a photo of a Tesla battery case. Plus Power counts two former Tesla employees among its drivers. Plus confirmed to Bloomberg that he started the project, and then sold it to an unknown party.

The installation will use lithium-iron phosphate batteries that are expected to last 10 to 20 years. According to the document, it will raise about $ 1 million in property taxes in the city of Angleton. According to the document, the website will be unmanned, but it will be monitored remotely at all times.

Texas has its own electrical network that is overseen by the Texas Electricity Reliability Board. “Angleton forms a particularly volatile ‘node’ on the ERCOT energy network and the larger system will benefit from the energy-balancing features that the battery can provide,” the document reads.

The network in Texas received a lot of attention in February after exceptionally cold weather left several days without power. In a sarcastic tweet Musk wrote last month that “ERCOT does not deserve the R.”

And Musk has much reason to worry about the quality of the electrical network in Texas. Not only has Musk recently relocated to the state, but both of his companies – SpaceX and Tesla – are expanding their footprint there. Tesla is building a car factory in the Austin area. SpaceX has long had a testing facility in McGregor, Texas, about halfway between Austin and Dallas. Recently, SpaceX dumped resources in its Boca Chica launch facility at the southern tip of the state.

An ERCOT official told Bloomberg that the secret installation has a proposed trading date on June 1, so it could be completed.

Back in 2017, we covered Tesla’s construction of a massive battery installation in South Australia. At the time, the 100 MW system was the largest in the world. According to Bloomberg, the new Texas battery system will be at least that big.

In the long run, large battery facilities will be needed to shift volatile solar and wind power in a timely manner. But many battery installations today do not have enough capacity to do much of this. Tesla’s South Australia battery, for example, had just enough capacity to deliver power for just over an hour at its full 100 MW of power.

Rather, early batteries are used to smooth out short-term fluctuations and keep the supply of power perfectly balanced with demand. If a power station unexpectedly fails or demand suddenly rises, a battery on a scale can provide power for a few minutes, while electrical utilities make the necessary adjustments.

Utilities traditionally address this by assisting natural gas-powered plants 24/7. Because these ‘peak plants’ can only be used for a few hours a year, the energy they produce per kilowatt basis is very expensive. Batteries can accumulate excess power at times when they are plentiful, and then release them at times of the highest demand, allowing electrical utilities to retire some of their gas-fired peaker plants without compromising the reliability of the network.

As batteries become cheaper, it will become cheaper to install even larger batteries to balance supply and demand over a 24-hour cycle, enabling them to rely more on solar and wind power. This is why analysts expect batteries on the scale to be a massive growth market over the next decade or two; it is going to require a lot more storage capacity to give the electric grid to carbon.

List photo by Mark Felix / Bloomberg via Getty Images