The first big car manufacturers have now begun to look at the viability of Vehicle to Grid (V2G) technology, which uses energy harvested from road cars to balance the demands of electricity grids and to help overcome the intermittent nature of wind power. The theory is that by providing stored power when it is needed, the power usage highs and lows could be flattened so that a significant percentage of the coal-burning power stations could be closed down, as they exist simply to deal with the peaks in demand.
This is still in its early stages of development but Tesla has been busy developing techniques that will help the process. In Seprtember 2016 a major storm damaged critical infrastructure in South Australia, causing a state-wide blackout and leaving 1.7 million residents without electricity. Further blackouts occurred in the heat of the Australian summer in early 2017.
In response to this the South Australian Government looked for a way to guarantee that its residents would not have to face such problems again and called for grid-scale energy storage options with at least 100 megawatts of capacity. Tesla proposed a 100 MW Powerpack system, paired to a wind farm near Jamestown. The company took only 90 days to install the required 396 Powerpacks, which enabled the state to dispatch wind energy to the grid 24 hours a day, seven days a week, with full control of when and how much power could be fed into the grid, which meant that 30,000 homes could be upplied with power, no matter what the weather was doing. The rival Victorian government has since commissioned two large-scale, grid-connected Tesla "battery farms" for a solar facility near Kerang. These have proved that renewable energy sources can be a realistic total replacement for traditional power generation.
The idea is catching on fast with Recurrent Energy, a wholly owned subsidiary of Canadian Solar, applying to build a 350-megawatt solar power plant to the east of Palm Springs in California, including a battery facility capable of storing an equal amount of energy.
Capturing energy and managing energy flows is one of the key facets of modern Formula 1 and such technology may well find its way into such industrial-scale developments.
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