Skip to main content

World’s largest battery on a desert solar farm would triple Tesla’s record

Recurrent Energy Solar Farm
Image used with permission by copyright holder

California may soon have a record-sized battery east of Palm Springs. The proposed electrical power storage unit would more than triple the capacity of the current largest battery in the world, the 100-megawatt Tesla installation in Australia, according to USA Today.

Recurrent Energy, a wholly owned subsidiary of Canadian Solar, serves as the parent company’s development arm for solar projects in the United States. Recurrent filed with the federal government for approval to build a 350-megawatt solar power farm east of Palm Springs near the Mule Mountains. The application also requested permission to build a battery capable of storing an equal amount of energy. In all, the proposed Crimson solar project site spans 2,500 acres of public land.

Recurrent Energy Solar Farm
Image used with permission by copyright holder

Just because the paperwork is in, however, that doesn’t mean the project is a done deal. Federal approval for such a project can take years. Recurrent Energy has not declared that it has a customer lined up to buy the energy.

California’s current energy production and usage profile show the wisdom of the proposed project. Extensive solar energy harvesting provides more than enough electricity to meet demands during the day, but the story changes when the sun goes down.

Without energy storage facilities or batteries, after sunset, California reverts to natural gas plants to generate electricity. Storage solutions large enough to power large regions haven’t been built fast enough to keep up with the potential of the current solar harvesting installations.

“This is something that we’re going to see a lot more of — solar companies baking in the potential, if not the outright installation, of storage into their systems,” GTM Research energy storage analyst Daniel Finn-Foley told USA Today.

“If you’re looking ahead three, four, five years out,” Finn-Foley continued, “it’s going to be increasingly a story about storage’s ability to enhance large, utility-scale solar.”

Recurrent Energy has already installed four large solar farms in Riverside County. The Crimson project will be in the same county.

Scott Dawson, Recurrent’s director of permitting, outlined the conservation and environmental steps the company took in planning the Crimson solar farm. The plans avoid infringing on the habitat of the species-threatened desert tortoise and disrupt less than five percent of sand dune habitat and woodlands than a previous plan for development.

If a utility customer such as Southern California Edison, Pacific Gas and Electric, or a regional government energy program wants to buy energy from the Crimson project, completion is more likely.

“If someone wants it, we’ll build it,” Dawson said.

Editors' Recommendations

Bruce Brown
Digital Trends Contributing Editor Bruce Brown is a member of the Smart Homes and Commerce teams. Bruce uses smart devices…
Digital Trends’ Top Tech of CES 2023 Awards
Best of CES 2023 Awards Our Top Tech from the Show Feature

Let there be no doubt: CES isn’t just alive in 2023; it’s thriving. Take one glance at the taxi gridlock outside the Las Vegas Convention Center and it’s evident that two quiet COVID years didn’t kill the world’s desire for an overcrowded in-person tech extravaganza -- they just built up a ravenous demand.

From VR to AI, eVTOLs and QD-OLED, the acronyms were flying and fresh technologies populated every corner of the show floor, and even the parking lot. So naturally, we poked, prodded, and tried on everything we could. They weren’t all revolutionary. But they didn’t have to be. We’ve watched enough waves of “game-changing” technologies that never quite arrive to know that sometimes it’s the little tweaks that really count.

Read more
Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards
Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.

Read more
AI turned Breaking Bad into an anime — and it’s terrifying
Split image of Breaking Bad anime characters.

These days, it seems like there's nothing AI programs can't do. Thanks to advancements in artificial intelligence, deepfakes have done digital "face-offs" with Hollywood celebrities in films and TV shows, VFX artists can de-age actors almost instantly, and ChatGPT has learned how to write big-budget screenplays in the blink of an eye. Pretty soon, AI will probably decide who wins at the Oscars.

Within the past year, AI has also been used to generate beautiful works of art in seconds, creating a viral new trend and causing a boon for fan artists everywhere. TikTok user @cyborgism recently broke the internet by posting a clip featuring many AI-generated pictures of Breaking Bad. The theme here is that the characters are depicted as anime characters straight out of the 1980s, and the result is concerning to say the least. Depending on your viewpoint, Breaking Bad AI (my unofficial name for it) shows how technology can either threaten the integrity of original works of art or nurture artistic expression.
What if AI created Breaking Bad as a 1980s anime?
Playing over Metro Boomin's rap remix of the famous "I am the one who knocks" monologue, the video features images of the cast that range from shockingly realistic to full-on exaggerated. The clip currently has over 65,000 likes on TikTok alone, and many other users have shared their thoughts on the art. One user wrote, "Regardless of the repercussions on the entertainment industry, I can't wait for AI to be advanced enough to animate the whole show like this."

Read more