Chinese state media hails Tesla megafactory in Shanghai as sign foreign business is on board Tesla is set to open a new megafactory in Shanghai to produce large-scale rechargeable lithium-ion batteries known as Megapacks, according to a statement issued by the company on Sunday. Our next Megafactory will be in Shanghai 🇨🇳—capable of producing 10k Megapacks per year pic.twitter.com/KlVGq5gYOg — Tesla (@Tesla) April 9, …
That's been happening in Ireland's banking market for quite a few years. A lot of the banks have networks of 'cashless' branches and have pushed cash transactions over to An Post (the Irish Post Office) branch network. They've also simply been closing branches entirely. Every year we seem to have fewer retail bank branches and ATMs.
They've been pushing people online for years (decades at this stage) but their online services are often not exactly cutting edge stuff and they're walking away from physical retail banking as quickly as they possibly can.
It looks to me like they're opening a very large opening to be wiped out by far more nimble online banks as that market inevitably grows and strengthens. E-banking isn't really the traditional banks' area of expertise.
Is that a lot??
Each one is 3MWh, so total production of 30GWh of storage per year.
Some spitballing here... UK annual electricity consumption is 300,000 GWh/yr. (only likely to increase as electric vehicles and heat pumps are taken up more and more, and it's about 1.3% of world consumption)
A grid of 50% nuclear and 50% renewables + backup storage requires 150,000 GWh/yr renewables, and having 2 weeks spare capacity should be ample* to cover wind lulls. 2 weeks capacity would be about 6,000 GWh, or 200 years' worth of production from this factory (for battery packs with a good life of maybe 15-20 years plus another 10 years in various states of degradation). Just making a bit of a point that grid-scale storage is insanely prohibitively massive and expensive, and that these packs can only smooth out local fluctuations over timescales of hours, not days.
A properly functioning renewables grid is going to need very large scale interconnects over very large areas and significant overcapacity, and even then can't really work unless there's a very large baseload being picked up by nuclear.
* In fact it's probably far too much as it allows 100% of renewables to be offline for 2 weeks, that's a huge safety margin considering that even in the deepest lulls there's going to be some production somewhere.
Grid scale storage on Tesla's batteries is kinda stupid, but better solutions like vanadium flow batteries aren't being mass produced yet and they provide some early data to help figure out exactly how much backup margin will be needed, desirable sites relative to the renewables and the grid, etc.
The storage of flow batteries depends solely on the size of the tank you fill with the electrolyte solution. Need more storage, add another tank. That (or something similar) is what will make mass adoption of renewables possible.
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