Tesla recently opened a mammoth Supercharger station in Lost Hills, California, which features an 11-megawatt (MW) solar array and a 39-megawatt hour (MWh) battery, a demonstration of how businesses are beginning to look to off-grid energy solutions to avoid grid limitations and lengthy connection queues.
A new analysis by Australian energy tech startup Gridcog has provided some key insights into how the Lost Hills Supercharger station will manage with what would be – if not for its on-site, off-grid solar and battery system – a “very skinny” 1.5 MW connection to the local grid.
Tesla’s Long Hills Supercharger station will eventually support 168 Tesla V4 fast chargers, and as EV ownership increases in places like California, demand is likely to increase.
Gridcog modelled how Long Hills will play out in simulation, as well as how many customers the Supercharger station might be able to serve before they need to increase the size of their off-grid energy system.
Its model suggests that 64 per cent of charger visits will be able to be met by the Long Hills solar and battery system, with the grid supplying the rest.
Further, the simulation showed that the site would be most vulnerable in January and December, where there are fewer consecutive days of solar generation.
If Tesla wants to double visits from Gridcog’s simulated baseline of 8 visits per charger per day to 16, Tesla would likely need to increase the capacity of its solar array from 11 MW to 50 MW, and the increase battery capacity from the current 39 MWh to 60 MWh.
Tesla’s Long Hill Supercharger is just another example of businesses looking to find alternate options to traditional grid connections when they need additional energy supply. It has already been rolled out in Australia, albeit at smaller scale, usually to back up a single fast charger.
But with connection queues also stretching out in Australia, it seems only a matter of time before bigger solar and battery installations are used to support major EV charging hubs.
Joshua S. Hill is a Melbourne-based journalist who has been writing about climate change, clean technology, and electric vehicles for over 15 years. He has been reporting on electric vehicles and clean technologies for Renew Economy and The Driven since 2012. His preferred mode of transport is his feet.