Larry Jorgensen, the Homer Electric Association’s director of power, fuels and dispatch, at HEA’s battery energy storage system in Soldotna. (Sabine Poux/KDLL)
While the Tesla name evokes images of sleek electric cars and eccentric billionaires, a fleet of Tesla batteries in Soldotna is helping with a more mundane but important task — regulating the Kenai Peninsula’s supply of electricity.
Larry Jorgensen is director of power, fuels and dispatch at Homer Electric Association. On a frosty afternoon outside the utility’s generation facility in Soldotna, he walked through rows of padlocked white containers, stamped with the red Tesla logo and containing lithium-ion batteries.
“Each Megapack has about 2.5 megawatts of storage in it,” he said. “And then there’s 37 of them altogether.”
That’s enough to power 925,000 100-watt…