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The government of Taiwan is reportedly planning to approach Tesla about setting up lithium ion battery facilities on the heels of Tuesday’s blackout, the island nation’s biggest power outage since 1999. The facilities would be aimed at storing renewable energy on the island. Tesla is using its lithium ion battery technology to help Australia and California to implement smart grid and grid storage, and we can learn from them in the future,” Taiwan’s Minister of Science and Technology Chen Liang-gee told reporters. Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen’s has pledged to make Taiwan nuclear energy free by 2025, and the talks of battery facilities with Tesla would be a crucial step in his plans of utilizing more green energy. Chen told reporters that the Taiwanese government would look to potentially form a joint venture with Tesla for the battery project as the government doesn’t have prepared a budget for the project. Tuesday’s blackout reportedly came after “government-run petroleum company CPC Corporation ran into difficulties while replacing the power supply for a control system responsible for sending natural gas to a power plant.” The plan is for Taiwan send a team of officials to the U.S. to talk with Tesla in the near future, although Chen would not be leading the talks. “We will try to check out whether there is a suitable solution…we will get in touch with them,” Chen said. Taiwan is just the latest area that is looking to strike a deal with Elon Musk and Tesla. Tesla secured a contract back in July to install the world’s largest lithium-ion battery storage system in South Australia. The Australia deal is for a 100-megawatt (129 mWh) Powerpack system to be paired with Neoen’s Hornsdale wind farm. The deal first came to a head in March when Musk committed to solving South Australia’s power crisis in 100 days through a Tesla Energy product or the system would be free. Tesla has not commented on the potential Taiwan talks just yet, but if they go well, another area will be joining Tesla’s energy revolution. Source

Australian transmission operator Transgrid has announced that it will install a 250 kilowatt, 500 kilowatt hour Powerpack installation in New South Wales to better manageme fluctuating energy demand and prevent blackouts. Transgrid operates the high voltage electricity transmission backbone for NSW and the ACT which connects the generators, distributors and large scale consumers of power. It is looking to energy storage as a means to smooth power spikes caused by renewables like solar which at the grid level, creates a spike in generation at midday that does not always correspond to usage. Unlike fossil fuel fired generation which can be throttled up or down as needed, solar systems generate electricity when the sun is shining and when it is gone, it’s gone. Tesla won a contract with Transgrid to provide its Powerpacks to several sites last year of which this is the first. Transgrid is using the installation to explore the potential of grid scale batteries on its network before adding more. In March, Tesla CEO Elon Musk threw down the gauntlet with an Australian billionaire on Twitter, guaranteeing that Tesla could restore stability to Australia’s regional grids with several hundred megawatts of Powerpacks in just 100 days or Tesla would install the system for free. This pilot installation could be the crack in the floodgates, as Australia’s unstable grid and high electricity prices prove to be fertile ground for grid scale batteries. Source: AFR (paywall)