Tesla is working hard to decrease Southern California's dependence on fossil fuels. The company brought a major project online in the region a few weeks ago, and the 80 MWh Powerpack station was officially inaugurated yesterday with a few comments on the status of Tesla's stationary energy storage efforts.

The event also happened to coincide with the start of production on the exciting Powerpack 2. The upgraded technology has twice the energy capacity of the previous generation Powerpack.

Tesla CTO JB Straubel stated, “It’s sort of hard to comprehend sometimes the speed all this is going at. Our storage is growing as fast as we can humanly scale it.” The project took only 94 days to complete. “There were teams working out there 24 hours a day, living in construction trailers and doing the commissioning work at two in the morning. It feels like the kind of pace that we need to change the world,” he shared.

Projects such as this seek to relieve the reliance on "peaker stations" during periods of high electricity use. Peaker stations, which use fossil fuels to generate power, only operate during these periods. The Powerpacks collect and store energy from the grid during non-peak times and release it during times of high demand so as to prevent the need to activate the peakers.

Tesla has several larger projects in the pipeline that will all benefit from cheaper batteries and production increases. The day when we're completely free of fossil fuels could be just on the horizon.


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