Tesla Powerpack in Japan

The Internet Initiative Japan Inc. (IIJ) unveiled the Tesla Powerpack lithium-ion battery pack at the Shirai Data Center Campus, Chiba, Japan and began work on November 1, 2019.

Photo credit: CloudWatch

This spring, Kinki Nippon Railway installed a large-scale Tesla Powerpack battery in a substation at a random railroad facility and talked how it can be used to save vehicles and peak outages during a power outage.

With this battery, the cost of electricity for air conditioning, which accounts for about 40% of the operating costs of the enterprise, will be reduced due to peak reductions and peak shifts. It is expected that the “peak demand (peak power)” will be reduced by about 15%. If the value of demand can be reduced in this way, the power of the contract can be reduced. IIJ plans to cut spending by 50 million yen over the next 15 years.

Photo credit: My Navi News

Tesla Powerpack is charged at night and discharged during the day when a lot of energy is required for air conditioning. Tesla Powerpack installed this time is 696 kW/h, and the site’s server can run up to 4 hours. From this, the electricity required for 5-10 minutes of operation of the air conditioner is always stored for emergency use, and the remaining power is used for peak outage and peak shift.

Installation and after-sales services will be carried out by Kansai Electric Power's subsidiary Kanden Solutions, similar to the Kintetsu Higashi Hanazono Powerpack substation. As another option, a conventional lead-acid battery was considered, but its service life was 3-5 years. This was an additional reason to choose Tesla Powerpack with a service life of 15 years.

In the future, when more servers are installed another Tesla Powerpack system will be introduced, similar to the one presented this time.