You say "...a bank of batteries capable of delivering 1.1 megawatts of power even for a short amount of time is fairly improbable in this application"...
You were right to comment on the inappropriate units used in the press release but as it stands your explanatory comment is conceptually wrong - because a megawatt is a unit of POWER running continuously and has no time dimension at all.
And, conversely, a megawatt-hour is a unit of ENERGY that can be consumed over any time interval depending on the electrical demand. For example, it could be delivered as 1 megawatt of power for 1 hour, 2 megawatts of power for half an hour, 4 megawatts of power for a quarter of an hour, and so on. Or (much more likely in practice) 0.1 megawatts of power for 10 hours!
Winston Energy's high-capacity batteries roll off the assembly line
In order to power the first floor of the newly battery-ified University of California, Riverside’s Bourns College of Engineering, workers installed a 1.1 megawatt bank of high-end lithium-ion batteries. But what does that even mean? Well, given that a the median AA battery contains about 1 watt-hour of electricity, that’s the equivalent of 1.1 million AA batteries.*
Which, because I know you’re wondering, is almost enough AA batteries to cover the entire bottom of an 50 meter long, Olympic-size swimming pool.
The purpose of all this energy storage? Taking the building off grid by storing energy gathered by a roof-mounted bank of solar panels. Eventually, the school hopes to leverage this initial, $2.5 million donation of batteries from Winston Global Energy CEO Winston Chung to power the entire building.
If the future of cities is solar power, we’re going to be seeing a lot more of these kinds of energy storage projects. Right now they’re breathtakingly expensive, but the point of rolling them out is that there is just as much efficiency and cost reduction to be learned from actually building these things as there is from innovating new designs for the batteries themselves.
*I’m assuming that press releases claiming that the battery bank is “1.1 megawatts” mean “1.1. megawatt hours,” because a bank of batteries capable of delivering 1.1 megawatts of power even for a short amount of time is fairly improbable in this application.
Photo: Winston Energy
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