Tesla has launched its new Oasis Supercharger, the long-promised EV charging station of the long run, with a photo voltaic farm and off-grid batteries.
Early within the deployment of the Supercharger community, Tesla promised so as to add photo voltaic arrays and batteries to the Supercharger stations, and CEO Elon Musk even mentioned that the majority stations would be capable to function off-grid.
Whereas Tesla did add photo voltaic and batteries to some stations, the overwhelming majority of them don’t have their very own energy system or have solely minimal photo voltaic canopies.
Again in 2016, I requested Musk about this, and he mentioned that it will now occur as Tesla had the “items now in place” with Supercharger V3, Powerpack V2, and SolarCity:
All of those items have been in place for years, and Tesla has now discontinued the Powerpack in favor of the Megapack. The Supercharger community can also be transitioning to V4 stations.
But, photo voltaic and battery deployment haven’t accelerated a lot within the decade since Musk made that remark, however it’s lastly taking place.
Final yr, Tesla introduced a brand new mission referred to as ‘Oasis’, which consists of a brand new mannequin Supercharger station with a photo voltaic farm and battery storage enabling off-grid operations in Misplaced Hills, California.
Tesla has now unveiled the mission and turned on a lot of the Supercharger stalls:
The mission consists of 168 chargers, with half of them at the moment operational, making it one of many largest Supercharger stations on this planet. Nevertheless, that’s not even probably the most notable facet of it.
The station is supplied with 11 MW of ground-mounted photo voltaic panels and canopies, spanning 30 acres of land, and 10 Tesla Megapacks with a complete vitality storage capability of 39 MWh.
It may be operated off-grid, which is the case proper now, based on Tesla.
With off-grid operations, Tesla was about to convey 84 stalls on-line simply in time for the Fourth of July journey weekend. The remainder of the stalls and a lounge are going to open later this yr.
Electrek’s Take
That is superior. A bit late, however superior. That is what charging stations needs to be like: totally powered by renewable vitality.
Sadly, it will likely be a lot tougher to open these stations sooner or later because of laws that Trump and the Republican Social gathering have simply handed, which removes incentives for photo voltaic and vitality storage, provides taxes on them, and removes incentives to construct batteries – all issues which have helped Tesla significantly over the previous few years.
The US is probably going going to have a couple of robust years for EV adoption and renewable vitality deployment.
