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The US electric vehicle and storage manufacturer shared information about its Megapack energy storage business and Megapack XL, the stationary battery storage product that Tesla claims has the highest energy density on the market.
At Teslas recent Investor Day at its Gigafactory in Austin, Texas, the US electric vehicle (EV) and battery storage manufacturer revealed some interesting facts about its Megapack energy storage business. Teslas energy business was one of many parts of this three-and-a-half hour Investor Day held on March 1. Sidelined towards the end of the conference, he provided some new insights into the rapidly expanding Megapack business.
Mike Snyder, Senior Director of Megapack at Tesla, provided an overview. Snyder has worked at Tesla for nine years, which is just under ten years of Teslas large-scale energy storage business. As in the automotive industry, the first ten years have been grueling as Tesla has expanded its US Megapack production facility to meet growing demand for its large-scale stationary storage product. Its Megapack factory in Lathrop, California is appropriately named the “Megafactory,” although it is the small cousin of Teslas four Gigafactories in Austin, Fremont, California, Berlin, and Shanghai, which together produce 40,000 EVs a week. .
According to Snyder, more than 16 GWh of Megapacks have been installed worldwide so far, with the goal of reaching 100 GWh this year. In his opinion, 100 GWh will be the annual production in the next few years, which is a large increase after the 16 GWh in the first ten years. The latest product is the sixth generation of the Megapack XL, with 3 MWh per lithium-ion battery unit. According to Snyder, the Megapack XL is the stationary storage tank with the highest energy density on the market, capable of storing up to 300 MWh in just under half a hectare of land. According to Snyder, this is twice the energy density of a gas-fired power plant.
Snyder was joined onstage by Drew Baglino, Teslas Senior Vice President of Powertrain and Energy Engineering. Both Baglino and Snyder highlighted Teslas mastery of power electronics, as the company "supplies more power electronics annually than the solar and wind industries combined." Cumulative production so far has been 1.4 TW between Teslas vehicle and stationary storage products. Coupled with Teslas extensive in-house capabilities in software development, the Megapack can operate in "virtual machine mode," providing synthetic inertia to the electrical grid. According to Baglino, it is no longer just a question of injecting clean energy into the grid, but of "adding energy stability" to the mix. As Megapack costs continue to drop,
As in the case of cars, Teslas ambitions in the field of Megapacks are impressive: the long-term goal is to increase annual production to 1 TWh, which would represent 25 times the annual production capacity of the current Tesla factory. Lathrop. The Lathrop factory itself was quite an achievement, as Tesla transformed a JC Penney distribution center into a state-of-the-art manufacturing facility for its Megapacks in less than twelve months. The Lathrop megafactory was completed in September of last year.
Speed ??is also essential when building Megapack projects. Snyder highlights the plug & play nature of the Megapack and that Megapacks can be easily chained together to form massive, smart power blocks that can be easily connected to power grids around the world. In the last four years alone, Tesla has quadrupled the speed of installation of Megapack projects, while reducing the labor required by three times.
Tesla Investor Day also covered advancements on the distributed storage front, with Teslas Powerwall being the flagship product. Whether its the Megapack and front-of-the-counter storage or the Powerwall and behind-the-counter storage, we can expect all of Teslas stationary energy storage products to complement what the automaker is doing on the front of vehicles. electrical. Both are key elements in Teslas vision to get to a "sustainable energy land," in the words of Elon Musk on Investor Day. While the 2030 goal on the electric vehicle front is to produce 20 million vehicles a year, the 2030 goal on the energy storage front is to hit the 1 TWh mark. According to Tesla, this will require an investment of between $150 billion and $175 billion, which is equivalent to less than a third of Teslas current market capitalization. On the other hand, it is about five times the amount of investment accumulated by Tesla to date (28,000 million dollars). |
