Residents of the little border town of Presidio, Texas were getting fed up with outages caused by its 62-year-old powerline, a tenuous link to electricity stretching over 60 miles of storm-prone wilderness. The scrappy town decided to solve the problem by doing the thing that Texans do best: go big. Yesiree Bob, they've gone and built themselves what they say is the country's largest battery, and they're calling it "BOB", an acronym for "big-ol' battery."
The $25 million project includes a building the size of a large house, equipped with a sodium sulfur battery that can supply the town with all the power it needs — 4 megawatts — and it'll keep on going for up to eight hours. Not only will this building-sized battery kick in when that single transmission line goes down, it's always standing by as a backup, ready to add a few watts here and there to keep the power balanced, alleviating brownouts and similar problems.
So what we have here is a gigantic uninterruptible power supply (UPS). Come on, Presidians, go all the way and build another one like this. Hook up a few solar panels and maybe a wind turbine or two, and you might be able to go off the grid altogether, right there in the heart of Texas. [Link]
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