Less than a month after Tesla Inc. unveiled a new backup power system in South Australia, the world's largest lithium-ion battery is already being put to the test.
Tesla's battery last week kicked in just 0.14 seconds after one of Australia's biggest plants, the Loy Yang facility in the neighboring state of Victoria, suffered a sudden, unexplained drop in output, according to the International Business Times. The week before that, another failure at Loy Yang prompted the Hornsdale battery to respond in as little as four seconds — or less, according to some estimates — beating other plants to the punch. State officials have called the response time "a record," according to local media.
The Hornsdale battery system, which uses the same energy-storage tech found in Tesla's electric cars, is one of Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk's newest projects.
In March, Musk, who is known for setting high goals and only sometimes meeting them, vowed on Twitter to deliver a battery system for South Australia's struggling grid within 100 days or it would be free. By early July, the state had signed a deal with California-based Tesla and the French-based energy company Neoen to produce the battery. And by Dec. 1, South Australia announced it had switched on the Hornsdale battery.
Nonetheless, the Hornsdale reserve has already shown that it can provide what's known as "contingency" service — keeping the grid stable in a crisis and easing what otherwise would be a significant power failure.
And, more important, the project is the biggest proof of concept yet that batteries such as Tesla's can help mitigate one of renewable energy's most persistent problems: how to use it when the sun isn't shining or the wind isn't blowing.