Tesla battery performs well
Less than a month after Tesla unveiled a backup power system in South Australia, the world’s largest lithiumion battery is already being put to the test. And it appears to be far exceeding expectations: In the past three weeks, the Hornsdale Power Reserve has smoothed out at least two major energy outages, responding even more quickly than the coal-fired backups that were supposed to provide emergency power.
Tesla’s battery kicked in just 0.14 seconds after one of Australia’s biggest plants, Loy Yang in the state of Victoria, suffered a sudden, unexplained drop in output last week, according to the International Business Times. And the week before that, another failure at Loy Yang prompted the Hornsdale battery to respond in four seconds — 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 effectiveness of Tesla’s battery is being closely watched in a region that is in the grips of an energy crisis. The price of electricity is soaring in Australia, particularly in the state of South Australia, where a 2016 outage led 1.7 million residents to lose power in a blackout. Storms and heat waves have caused additional outages, and many Australians are bracing for more with the onset of summer in the Southern Hemisphere.