Tesla spotted gathering massive number of Megapacks outside Gigafactory Nevada

Tesla has been spotted gathering a massive number of Megapacks outside its Gigafactory Nevada. Is it a backlog due to supply chain issues or a new giant battery is in the work?

Drones are often flying over Tesla factories to try to document progress.

These days, they mostly fly over Gigafactory Texas and Gigafactory Berlin, Tesla’s latest factories, which are still growing as the automaker is starting to ramp up production.It has been a long time since we have seen a drone or a plane fly over Gigafactory Nevada near Reno and spotted something interesting, but today is the day.

A Twitter user going by OttoPilot flew over Gigafactory Nevada and spotted an impressive number of Tesla Megapacks outside the factory:

Megapack is Tesla’s biggest stationary energy storage product, and it can hold up to 3 MWh of energy capacity in a single container-size pack.

We see more than 500 Megapacks in this picture, which would represent up to 1.5 GWh of energy capacity. That’s more than Tesla has ever delivered in an entire quarter all sitting in one place.

However, it’s not clear why all those battery packs are there. Tesla produces the Megapacks at Gigafactory Nevada, along with its new Megafactory in California, but it’s not clear why these many Megapacks are sitting there.

It could be that Tesla is preparing to ship them out for one or more energy storage projects, or they might be waiting for parts.

Tesla has had a lot of success with the Megapack lately, as it has become the option of choice for utility-scale energy storage projects. For example, Tesla recently deployed a 730 MWh project for PG&E in Northern California.

At a company-wide meeting last month, Elon Musk told Tesla employees that PG&E CEO Patricia Kessler Poppe contacted him after launching the project to tell him they were very happy with it and that they planned to deploy a lot more energy storage capacity.

For an idea of the scale here, this project at Moss Landing with PG&E is one of the largest battery systems in the world, and yet, the amount of Megapacks sitting outside GIgafactory Nevada right now is more than twice that.