Apple announced this Wednesday that it’s constructing a massive battery storage challenge at a Northern California photovoltaic farm it spearheads in 2015. But what the employer didn’t share is that the battery packs will come from Tesla.
The newly-announced setup, which will save up to 240 megawatt-hours of energy, to be permitted using the Monterey County Board of Supervisors in 2020, according to files submitted at the final year. It will consist of 85 Tesla lithium-ion “megapacks” and be used to help save energy at the company’s corporate headquarters in Cupertino. Monterey County’s planning chief demonstrated that Apple will use the Tesla batteries in an electronic mail. Apple declined to comment. Tesla did not reply to a request for comment.
Tesla first introduced the megapack battery device back in 2019. The 60MW storage setup Apple will be using is not Tesla’s biggest, though. The employer has built better typical battery storage solutions in Australia and south of Houston, Texas of around 100MW in size. Still, Apple touted it as “one of the greatest battery initiatives in the country” in a press release, saying the battery system may want to energy greater than 7,000 residences for an entire day. The Tesla batteries will make it possible for Apple to store energy generated by using its 130-megawatt solar array at the farm, which is known as California Flats.
The project was quietly approved last year. “The undertaking with clean power — solar and wind — is that it’s via definition intermittent,” Apple VP Lisa Jackson instructed Reuters on Wednesday. “If we can do it, and we can show that it works for us, it takes away the concerns about intermittency and it helps the grid in terms of stabilization. It’s something that can be imitated or constructed upon by using different companies.”
While Apple makes use of lithium-ion batteries in many of its products, it’s no longer acknowledged to be working on any grid-scale projects. The organization is reportedly growing a lithium iron phosphate battery for its electric vehicle project, though.
Apple and Tesla don’t have a lot of overlapping history, though each agency is notorious for poaching the brain from the other. Tesla CEO Elon Musk also said in December that he tried to pitch the thought of Apple shopping for his enterprise returned in 2018, but that Apple CEO Tim Cook “refused” to take the meeting.
Tesla is nicely-recognized for its electric cars, however, it’s spent years attempting to construct up a power storage commercial enterprise to praise the solar products it obtained when it bought Solar City. It has gotten increasingly more concerned in large-scale power storage initiatives like Apple’s over the years in addition to its home battery business.
While it’s still modest in contrast to the billions of dollars generated via Tesla’s automobile business, the energy storage division’s merchandise has already netted at least one different odd bedfellow customer: in 2019, Volkswagen announced it used to be the use of Tesla batteries at some of its Electrify America charging stations.
