BYD is already being known as China’s main producer of electric cars. They also produce their own ferrous batteries for the cars, which they now use to store wind and solar power in what represents the world’s largest renewable energy storage based on batteries.
Having the size of a football field, the huge battery bank can store 36 megawatt-hours of power. The State Grid Corporation of China is the project’s beneficiary, seeking to improve their renewable installation’s efficiency by 5 to 10 percent.
The solar power project whose power is stored in these batteries can output a maximum of 40 MW and the wind farm can yield as much as 100 MW, smoothing the energy production on the grid by storing the power generated during spikes and peak production.
This technology is not cheap by any standards – it cost $500 million, but this is a technology that has already been adopted on a large scale by everyone, so China should also have it. Some use compressed air beneath mountains, others molten salts, but storing the intrinsically-intermittent renewable energy somewhere is a must for every country aspiring at being green, as long as V2G-like (Vehicle-to-Grid) solutions are still a distant dream.
However, by being an electric car manufacturer, BYD will probably also enter that area as soon as it will be able to.
[via inhabitat]