Image credit: Dubai Electricity and Water Authority
According to Energy Storage News, the Dubai Electricity and Water Authority (DEWA) recently inaugurated a new battery energy storage system (BESS) powered by Tesla’s Powerpack at the Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Solar Park, which is the world’s largest single-site photovoltaic solar farm at this time.
The Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Solar Park, located 50km (31 miles) south of Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, has already achieved 1GW of on-site solar generation capacity. The BESS pilot project deploys 1.21MW of output, and 8.61MWh of capacity’s worth of Tesla’s Powerpack energy storage product.
The Powerpack is Tesla’s BESS product for commercial, industrial, and light utility-scale use cases. The Powerpack clocks in somewhere between the residential Powerwall product, and the massive, utility-scale Megapack product.
“The energy storage project using Tesla’s lithium-ion battery solution at the Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Solar Park, the largest single-site solar park in the world, aims to diversify the energy mix and enhance energy storage technologies” in the UAE, said DEWA managing director and CEO Saeed Mohammed Al Tayer.
“The pilot project will evaluate the technical and economic capabilities of this technology within the operational framework of electricity systems in solar photovoltaic power plants. It also tests the role of this technology in the integration between clean energy and energy storage to achieve maximum efficiency and reliability.”
The Powerpack-driven BESS at the Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Solar Park is the second-largest energy storage solution at the facility. The largest is a sodium sulfur (NAS) batteries-backed system from Japan’s NGK. Both energy storage systems at the solar park support bi-directional flow of electricity both to and from the grid, so energy can be stored from generated solar power and from the grid.
Planned expansions at the Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Solar Park will increase its generation capacity by up to five times what it is now by 2030. If all goes well with this pilot project, the facility could add a lot more Tesla Powerpacks to its energy storage solution in the future.
