> intended to store incredible amounts of energy
Each of these Megapacks can contain 1.5% of the energy contained in a petrol station. :) Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, these are realy nice and big batteries. That being said the energies stored in them are far from incredible.
These boxes were by all accounts manufactured in Nevada. They have been moved all the way to Victoria, lowered to the ground and hooked to the site’s wiring. They were not “charged” yet. The next step as part of the comissioning was to hook them up to the monitoring system before they are checked out.
No matter when you hook them up to be monitored there is a step just before it when they are not monitored yet.
> In general if you don't have a way to monitor an industrial-scale system you go in to your fail-safe state.
That is indeed a great idea. And if you read the report you can see that after they hooked up each box they put them manually into “maintenance” mode. This mode de-energises all systems in the box. It totaly makes sense that they thought this procedure is the correct one to reach the fail-safe state you mention. Turns out they were wrong. They learned this now and changed their procedures.