China Builds the World’s Largest Battery

Worlds Largest Battery, Made in China

The largest battery in the world has arrived, and you likely won’t be surprised where it landed: Hebei Province, China. The State Grid Corporation of China (SGCC) and electric car maker BYD–the company that most recently made big headlines a few years back when Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway took a 10 percent stake–have teamed to create a massive battery array capable of storing 36 megawatt-hours of electricity.

That’s enough to power something like 12,000 homes for an hour during a total power failure, and enough for SGCC authorities to declare it the world’s largest energy storage device. The $500 million facility is constructed of arrays of BYD batteries “larger than a football field,” according to an SGCC press release, and they should increase the region’s renewable energy efficiency by up to 10 percent.

The array, located in Zhangbei, isn’t just a stand-alone battery. It is hooked into 140 megawatts of wind and solar power generation projects as well as a smart grid transmission system. Together, these elements represent China’s push toward a smart grid system that can generate renewable energy when conditions are ripe and store excess energy in its new battery array for use when energy generation troughs throughout the day.

Developing Electrical Storage Facilities

The Deputy Director of China’s National Energy Administration is calling it the model for the future of Chinese renewable energy development, which means it will probably be the first such battery facility of many. That’s good for both China and BYD, which has been having a bit of trouble selling its electric cars both at home and abroad.

And it’s an intriguing test-bed for the rest of the world as well. There’s been a lot of chatter globally about using various kinds of energy storage devices to smooth the peaks and valleys inherent in wind and solar power generation so that we can rely more heavily upon them. Now that China’s gone and done something on a truly large scale, the rest of us have a real-world project to watch and learn from.

Below are some comments from the original posting of this article

by hollycow

40,000 dollars per house for 1 hour during a total power outage, doesn’t sound too cost effective.

Lithium-Carbonate Mining

by sethdayal

Yup thats $15K a kilowatt hour enough to cover 12K homes for 1 hour.

Gee what if the we had one of those large area two week periods in the middle of the winter with no wind.

Lets see 24*14*500/12000 or $14 Million per household.

Now there’s a deal a greenie is a gonna go for sure.

by z7u2v

This… is a step towards a back and forth annoyance match.

While it might actually end up being a good thing to antagonize others into jumping on board the bandwagon for lithium, etc. It does nothing to smooth over issues between the U.S.A. and China.

>Lithium isn’t much of a renewable resource by the way. That’s assuming they are using lithium with their iron-phosphate-style batteries {something this (and many other articles} doesn’t touch on.

It looks neat.. too bad it’s “Made In China”

by Aldrons Last Hope

Kudos to china (again)….they are being forced into this corner because they are really dependent on our oil. And since they buy the majority of their oil, they really have no choice. In the west it’s a different story, we make billions off of our oil. Even countries like Russia, Saudi Arabia, etc (top oil producing countries) have American or European companies as partners…so we are making billions off of their oil as well. And countries that don’t want to cooperate (Iraq, Iran)…we know what happens to them. We will not see a project like this in the west..dare I say…ever.