Tesla is building a massive battery for Texas

Tesla knows how to manufacture massive batteries, just ask Australia. Now it's producing another one as a backup for Texas.

As Bloomberg reports, Gambit Energy Storage LLC is a registered subsidiary of Tesla and is currently building a huge battery, capable of storing over 100 megawatts of energy, in Angleton, Texas. Although the project is being kept under wraps, the Tesla logo has been spotted on the hard hats of employees at the site, which is located roughly 40 miles outside Houston.

Last month, millions of homes in Texas were left without power for days following three severe winter storms over the course of 10 days. The utilities crisis was blamed on a lack of standard winterizing technology and frozen equipment, with Elon Musk tweeting at the time that the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (Ercot), which manages the flow of power to over 26 million customers in Texas, "is not earning that R."

The new battery is already registered with Ercot, and Warren Lasher—the company's senior director of system planning—has confirmed it's expected to come online on June 1 at a site adjacent to a Texas-New Mexico Power substation. The capacity it offers means around 20,000 homes could be powered "on a hot summer day."

In 2017, Tesla secured a contract for the world's largest lithium-ion battery based on a guarantee Musk made that it would be running within 100 days. The battery was required to help ensure South Australia no longer suffered repeated blackouts whenever a major storm hit the region. It now looks as though Texas is going to get a similar backup system this year.