5,300+ Solar Panels and 60 Tesla Powerpacks Fueling an Island with a Population over 55,000

Tesla Motors and SolarCity has invested 5,300+ solar panels and 60 Tesla Powerpacks on the South Pacific Island known as Ta’u.

The island of Ta’u has a population of a little over 55,000 people. The island is now being ran on 100% renewable energy.

The power is transferred from the solar panels to Tesla Powerpacks where they can store up to 6 Megawatt hours of storage. With the Powerpacks ability to store energy, the island can go three days without sun, and still have enough power in the reserves to fuel the demand from the community.

Fortune recently covered Telsa’s progression in renewable energy production on the Hawaiian island of Kauai. These islands provide an excellent source of sun, as well as a small area of land to cover when they network the electricity to different households.

The Kauai project produces a large amount of direct current (DC) from photovoltaic (PV) cells generated by the sun. Fortune covered the energy produce by the Kauai Island Utility Cooperative:

‘KIUC appears to be one of the first utilities to get a large amount of batteries from Tesla, a Silicon Valley-born tech company. The Kauai site will have 52 megawatt hours of energy storage on demand, or 13 megawatts of capacity. California utility Southern California Edison is buying 20 megawatts of Tesla batteries; that project could come online after KIUC’s.’

Below is a look at how Tesla and SolarCity are pioneering the renewable energy industry.

The Island of Ta'u Runs on Solar Energy

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