Tesla to Build Large Battery for Texas Grid, to Power 20,000 Homes: Report

By Kevin Colleran On Mar 9, 2021

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Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk will construct a large battery that will connect to the Texas grid, Bloomberg News reported on Monday.

Gambit Energy Storage LLC, which is registered as a Tesla unit, is building an over 100-megawatt energy storage project in Angleton, Texas, the report said.

The battery could power about 20,000 homes in peak summer, the report added.

Tesla could not be reached for a comment.

This comes days after a mid-February storm temporarily knocked out around half the state’s generating plants, triggering outages that killed dozens and pushed power prices up to 10 times the normal rate.

In 2016, Tesla had won a contract to provide a 20-megawatt energy storage system at a substation owned by California utility Southern California Edison.

In other Tesla-related news, the electric car maker has been assured of lower cost of manufacturing in India. The government is ready to offer incentives to ensure Tesla’s cost of production would be less than in China if the carmaker commits to making its electric vehicles in India, transport minister Nitin Gadkari told Reuters.

Gadkari’s pitch comes weeks after billionaire Elon Musk’s Tesla registered a company in India in a step towards entering the country, possibly as soon as mid-2021. Sources familiar with the matter have said Tesla plans to start by importing and selling its Model 3 electric sedan in India.

“Rather than assembling (the cars) in India they should make the entire product in the country by hiring local vendors. Then we can give higher concessions,” Gadkari said in an interview, without giving details of what incentives would be on offer.

“The government will make sure the production cost for Tesla will be the lowest when compared with the world, even China, when they start manufacturing their cars in India. We will assure that,” he said.

India wants to boost local manufacturing of electric vehicles (EVs), batteries, and other components to cut costly imports and curb pollution in its major cities.

This comes amid a global race by carmakers to jump-start EV production as countries work towards cutting carbon emissions.

Are Amazonbasics TVs Good Enough to Beat Mi TVs in India? We discussed this on Orbital, our weekly technology podcast, which you can subscribe to via Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, or RSS, download the episode, or just hit the play button below.