One of Tesla’s most under appreciated and undervalued aspects of its business is energy storage, which has been expanding to record levels in recent quarters. That growth has been in large part due to their new dedicated Megafactory in Lathrop, California, which the company says is the ‘first of many’ to come.
According to the latest figures released by Tesla in their Q1 2023 shareholder deck, energy storage deployments increased to 3.9GWh in the first three months of the year. That was a massive 360% year-over-year (YoY) increase and the highest level of deployments Tesla has ever achieved.
To give some perspective on the rate of growth, Tesla deployed more capacity in Q1 2023 that all of 2021 (just under 4GWh). It was also 35% more than the 2.5GWh Tesla deployed in the last quarter, which by itself was a record and an impressive 152% YoY gain.
Tesla attributed this growth to their new Megafactory in Lathrop, which has a capacity of production 40GWh per year. But there is still a lot of upside potential as the Megafactory is still ramping production and has “more room to reach full capacity,” Tesla explained.
Tesla also isn’t stopping with just the Lathrop Megafactory, saying in their report “this Megapack factory will be the first of many.” They have already announced a second Megafactory in China which is expected to begin construction in Q3 2023. Tesla plans to start production in Q2 2024, with an initial capacity of 10,000 Megapack storage batteries annually, equivalent to 40 GWh.
