Australia Collie Battery
One of the biggest batteries in the world is being built right here in Australia using Tesla Megapacks.
It’s just received approval to triple in size, possibly making it the biggest battery in history.
There’s a huge battery there, but this battery will be even bigger. Well, that’s thanks to the approval to triple it in size. Australia Collie Battery
The reason they’re tripling it in size is because it’s working so incredibly well at this point in time.
Tesla mega packs are being used to expand what is called the Collie battery into a 560 megawatts/2,240 kilowatt hour system, which is the biggest in Australia.
It will be bigger than this one, but that one isn’t scheduled to actually be to actually begin being built until next year.
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French company Neon have won the contract to triple the size of the Coloury battery. The French renewable energy and storage developer is teaming up with Tesla.
It’s using Tesla Megapacks to expand this battery to be one of the biggest in the world, potentially the biggest. Australia Collie Battery
The first stage of expansion has already started. Construction underway to grow the Coloury battery to 219 megawatts/ 877 megawatt-hours.
In the second stage, Neon will add 341 megawatts and 1,363 megawatt-hours to the battery.
By the end of construction, the battery will be absolutely enormous, 560 megawatts with 2,240 megawatt-hours of generating capacity, making it bigger than the battery Synergies’ battery, which is a 500 megawatt/2,000 megawatt hour battery.
That battery is actually being built only a couple of miles away from this megabattery. So these batteries are being built in Western Australia.
They’ll help support the Perth grid. Now, in Perth, there’s an enormous amount of sun. It’s one of the suniest places in the world.
their power bills are going to go down. Right now, there’s a huge amount of solar there. This is going to support all that solar.
So there will be almost no loss of solar energy, which obviously there’s a huge amount of solar that’s usually not being used during the daytime, during peak hours.
And because it’s such a sunny place all year long, solar is incredibly effective there. So all that excess solar generated during the middle of the day, that’ll be sent to these megabatteries. Australia Collie Battery
Neon Collie Battery
Neon’s Collie battery will charge and discharge 20% of the average demand of the entire city on the Southwest interconnected system.
Stage two will provide 300 megawatts of storage capacity for four hours of discharging during evening peak hours.
So when the sun starts to go down, people get home from work, that’s when this battery will kick into play.
What this does is it removes fossil fuels from the grid. What happens often at that time of day, 6, 7, 8 PM, people get home from work, they to turn on the air conditioners, the house is really hot.
There’s a huge power spike. Sometimes what is needed then is these Pica plants. Elon Musk talked about how these big batteries are basically getting rid of Pica plants. Australia Collie Battery
These Pica plants run on either coal or gas, and they send huge amounts of power to the grid, about an enormous astronomical cost because essentially they are just turned on in this instance when there’s huge demand needs.
And that’s when your energy bills go right up, when the peaker plants have to turn on. Collie is a coal town, but yeah, its coal generators are going to shut down within the next five years.
This is basically speeding up the death of coal in Western Australia. The battery’s expansion will help Collie transition from a coal country, or basically a coal power, to one of the biggest renewable energy powerhouses in the world.
They’ll be capable of having a huge amount of excess energy on average days. It’s like Tony Sieber said, you need to build out around 200% of your energy needs with renewables to make up for the times when there might not be any sun and no wind.
That’s what Western Australia are doing. They plan on using a lot of that excess renewable energy. Australia Collie Battery
It’s going to be enormous amounts to create green hydrogen. Now, whether or not that plan will work, I don’t know.
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But Western Australia believes it’s hugely important for the future of its economic prosperity.
This is intended to address the risks the AEMO has identified related to the retirement of coal power plants, high penetration of rooftop solar, and increasing energy demand in Western Australia.
Tesla believes the energy storage business will continue to grow. It expects it to grow faster than its car business, and that has happened so far.
In the first quarter of this year, Tesla’s car business, obviously, sales went down, but its energy business actually increased in size.
Tesla mega pack deployments reached an all-time high in Q1 of 2024. That’s likely to continue growing really, really fast over the next few years.
Now, a lot of people think Tesla’s any division is not going to grow that fast because it’s competition, which includes CATL and BYD, their batteries are really cheap.
But what you’re paying for with these Tesla mega packs, and the reason that this French renewable energy giant, one of the biggest energy companies in the world, the reason they keep on using Tesla batteries, Tesla mega packs for their big batteries, because they have done this numerous times now, is because Tesla’s software works incredibly well.
It’s able to integrate these batteries into the grid and do it in a really seamless way. It’s not easy to do that that’s the trickiest part of putting these big batteries into a huge grid.