If it Power Crisis in Texas taught us everything, it’s that the state has some serious infrastructure problems that don’t even the state supervisors are willing to resolve. Fortunately, everyone’s favorite high-profile Twitter troll, Elon Musk, may have a plan: a gigantic battery ready to connect more than 16,000 the flow of the houses into the state’s power grid.
Bloomberg came forward for the first time the news on Monday that a little-known Tesla subsidiary called Gambit Energy Storage LLC had begun work on a large energy storage facility in Angleton, Texas, a small suburb just south of Houston. An official from Ercot stated that the battery has a “proposed date for commercial use,” starting June 1.
The battery in question is said to be built to hold about 100 megawatts of power. To provide some perspective here, the Solar Energy Industries Association estimates that a single megawatt would be enough to power about 164 homes across the country – meaning that the Gambit project could hypothetically power about 16,400 homes. Which maybe not enough to get the nearly 3 million households that lost power during last month’s cold snap, but it’s still a significant number of homes with a significant number of people who wouldn’t stay behind icicles dripping from their ceilings or stuck life-imminent temperatures without water the next time a bitter cold snap hits the state.
Before Tesla took over, the Gambit project was initially led by a non-Tesla entity, Plus Power LLC. Some of the initial pitch documents that Plus Power filed with the state says that the battery center would charge with electricity supplied from a connection to a nearby 138 kV substation, and discharge electricity into the grid through that same connection. Per that pitch, the battery of this grid charges when energy prices are low – that is, during peak hours wind and solar production– and then discharged if there is an energy shortage.
When charged, the battery can help start up the local electrical system by “supplying energy to ‘jump start’ electrical generators,” explains the pitch deck. Not only that, but it would also be emission-free and far from view from nearby homes thanks to a few oak trees and other ‘substantial natural vegetation’.
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We’ve reached out to Tesla for comment and will update when we hear back.
While it’s unclear when the Gambit project changed hands, we do know that Tesla has been trying to get into the mega battery game for a while. In 2017, the electric automaker rolled out a 100MW battery farm in South Australia, that was then announced as “the largest lithium-ion battery in the world,” which was powered by electricity generated by a neighboring wind farm. In the meantime, we have seen Tesla’s revenues from the use of batteries and solar energy increase record heights over the last year.
It’s also worth noting that Musk has had a decent personal share of the Texas grid ever since he moved himself to Austin in late 2020 and soon begins to open new Tesla factories statewideAt the height of the Texas power outage last month, he has been rightly so called out Ercot, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, because he ‘didn’t deserve that R.’ Let’s hope the Gambit project is a little more reliable than some of the Tesla batteries we’ve seen in the past.