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There aren’t enough letters in the alphabet to classify this monstrous battery China’s built. D x 1,000? Not even close. With arrays larger than a football field it can store a whopping 36 megawatt hours of power.
Apparently China is gung-ho on embracing renewable energy sources, and to really take advantage of solar arrays and wind farms you need to be able to store up power when there’s an abundance, for times when there isn’t. So electric car maker BYD and the State Grid Corporation of China built the massive battery as part of a larger energy project in the country’s Hebei Province that’s capable of generating 140 megawatts of renewable energy. And they’re both part of an even larger initiative to create a more reliable smart power grid for the entire country.
According to Popular Science’s calculations, 36 megawatt hours is enough juice to power somewhere in the neighborhood of 12,000 homes for an hour. Or, give you a full day of talk time on your iPhone 4S. That’s right, I went there. [CleanTechnica via Popular Science]
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“36 megawatt hours is enough juice to power somewhere in the neighborhood of 12,000 homes for an hour. Or, give you a full day of talk time on your iPhone 4S”
wow! As described, this suggests that my iPhone 4S consumes “36 megawatts in day”! Hmmm….
It’s a joke, you’ll get over it.
In other news, this would be unbelievably expensive and inefficient – the reason that nobody’s done this is that it’s totally not worth it.
Not to mention probably using a year’s supply of lithium or other valuable substance
Saying that, although it’s probably useless as a backup system in event of a power station failure, it is probably quite handy for regulating the supply as it can meet spikes in demand instantly – no waiting for power stations to come online when everyone puts the kettle on!