Cargill. Cargill is collaborating with Tesla and Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) to install a 1 MWh Tesla energy storage product at the company’s Fresno, California beef processing facility. The Tesla batteries will be charged daily from the existing PG&E electricity grid system during off-peak hours, when electricity rates are lowest. The electricity stored in the batteries will then be used when rates are the highest each day during peak use times (peak trimming). By doing so, Cargill is reducing its contribution to the daily state power peak, when less environmentally friendly electricity generation might otherwise be required to meet demand.

Electric utility cost savings are estimated to be more than $100,000 annually. As the first large-scale battery installation at a Cargill meat processing facility, the company hopes to learn from this project for future potential use of this technology at its plants around the world.

Energy and IT company LichtBlick is collaborating with Tesla to integrate Tesla’s new Powerwall Home Batteries into the energy market.

LichtBlick and Tesla will initially start their collaboration in Germany and the companies plan to expand their relationship to the EU, the USA, Australia and New Zealand. LichtBlick believes that the number of households and companies which generate and store electricity is set to increase sharply over the coming years.

Using its SchwarmDirigent IT platform, the company links decentralized producers and storage systems and connects them to the energy markets. LichtBlick already operates a digital power plant in Germany with more than a thousand decentralized units. Once linked to the cluster, Tesla Powerwall will be able to draw excess wind and solar power from the electricity network and then, during calm or cloudy periods, use this electricity in buildings or feed it back into the network. Consumers who integrate their batteries into the cluster will benefit from energy market revenues through LichtBlick.