Tesla set to bulk up lithium-ion battery

Bloomberg

The world’s biggest lithium-ion battery is about to get even bigger, with Tesla Inc set to beef up capacity at the Hornsdale site in South Australia.
The system will be expanded by 50% to 150 megawatts, according to an announcement from Neoen SA, the French company that operates the site. The storage site has already saved consumers more than A$50 million ($34 million) in its first year of operation.
Since its 2017 installation, the battery has helped to stabilise the grid, avoid outages and lower costs by offsetting the intermittency of renewable power generation. That’s helped blaze a trail for other plants around the world.
“The Hornsdale battery is a ground-breaking project that has proven what batteries can do for our electricity system,” said Darren Miller, head of Arena, the government’s renewable energy agency, which is helping to fund the expansion.
Affordable utility-scale batteries are seen as the missing link needed to make solar and wind power realistic competitors to fossil fuels. While green sources can be cheaper, they lack the reliability of traditional fuels, making the carbon-intensive energy difficult to jettison, which is necessary to avoid catastrophic impacts from climate change.
In the meantime, the storage industry is increasingly important in places like South Australia, which has relatively less access to traditional fossil-fuel sources such as coal and natural gas. While Tesla’s outback battery was never intended to be a cure-all for the state’s power problems, it has provided valuable insights into the potential contributions storage systems offer grids.
A raft of big battery projects are in development in Australia as energy planners focus on firming up the country’s expanding wind and solar capacity.

Germany will be a better home for Tesla: VW CEO
Bloomberg

Volkswagen AG’s chief executive officer, who’s grown increasingly chummy with Tesla Inc’s Elon Musk, said the
electric-vehicle maker may find Germany a more accommodating place for manufacturing than its home state of California.
“What Tesla probably is looking for is the environment, the infrastructure, to build high-quality cars, which is probably much more the case here in Germany than on the West Coast of the United States,” VW CEO Herbert Diess told analysts and investors on a call.
Musk announced last week that Tesla will build a vehicle and battery factory on the outskirts of Berlin, plus an engineering and design centre within the city limits. While the plant will be the second to assemble Teslas outside the US — one near Shanghai is on the verge of making cars for sale — the company’s massive facility in Fremont, California, isn’t going anywhere.