Tesla has teamed up with global catamaran racing championship, SailGP, to help the fledgling sport’s usually diesel-fuelled mobile recharging stations switch to solar and battery storage.
SailGP said it had worked with Tesla over a period of eight months to engineer the fully portable, off-grid clean energy solution, to use to recharge the batteries used in the F50 racing catamarans to power their electronics, hydrofoils and communication systems.
The result, successfully tested in Sydney earlier this year, was a mobile recharging container equipped with four 13.5kWh Powerwalls and 15kW of solar PV.
The “excellent application” of the Powerwall system was noted on LinkedIn this week by Josef Tadich, a senior manager of engineering at Tesla in Australia.
“We were able to replace the existing diesel genset with 4 Powerwalls (20kW) operating off grid with 15kW of residential PV that then charged the individual SailGP battery packs for the race,” Tadich explained.
“Grid-forming battery inverters provide a great opportunity to replace traditional gensets in applications like this, eliminating the need for genset maintenance/operations, noise and emissions, and the expensive shipment of diesel to what are often remote locations,” he said.
Read more: One Step Off The Grid
