Tesla has unveiled plans for a new Supercharger project called ‘Oasis’, which will include 168 Superchargers combined with its own solar farm and Megapack battery system.
Early in the deployment of the Supercharger network, Tesla promised to add solar arrays and batteries to the Supercharger stations, and CEO Elon Musk even said that most stations would be able to operate off-grid.
While Tesla did add solar and batteries to a few stations, the vast majority of them don’t have their own power system or have only minimal solar canopies.
Back in 2016, I asked Musk about this, and he said that it would now happen as Tesla had the “pieces now in place” with Supercharger V3, Powerpack V2, and SolarCity:
Well, we now have Supercharger V4, Megapack, and SolarCity, which have been absorbed and then basically rejected by Tesla, and yet, we still have limited solar and battery deployment at Superchargers.
Earlier this year, we reported on a planned Supercharger project in Lost Hills, California, that we said could give us “a glimpse at the future of charging” due to the use of solar, a microgrid, and several pull-through charging stalls for trucks.
Tesla has now unveiled the project called ‘Oasis’ on Interstate 5 between Los Angeles and the Bay Area. Here’s a render of the project:
Max de Zegher, Tesla’s head of charging, released some details of the project:
- 168 stall Supercharger in Lost Hills, CA
- Only 1.5 MW grid service, ahead of a future expansion
- 11 MW of ground mount solar and canopies, on 30 acres of land
- 10 Tesla Megapacks with 39 MWh of storage
The main feature here is the large 11 MW solar capacity combined with 39 MWh of Megapack storage capacity, which enables Tesla to have a minimal grid connection.
Tesla has broken ground for the project:
de Zegher explains the need to go partly off-grid:
We’re working in lockstep with the utility, but due to local substation upgrade timelines, we would not have been able to meet 2025 charging demand. Although we’re typically grid connected, in this case, we’re leveraging the full Tesla ecosystem and our vertical integration.
However, Tesla is still planning to add more grid capacity at this site if there’s a need to increase the number of stations. de Zegher says that Tesla is prepared to double the capacity.
Electrek’s Take
This is awesome. It’s almost a decade after Musk said it would happen, but it is still awesome.
Top comment by David Long
The complaint in the article about how, even though Tesla makes Megapacks, that few Superchargers have them is probably more likely due to the fact that the margins on those Megapacks in BESS applications is ENORMOUS compared to Supercharger stations. In other words, Tesla makes a LOT more money a lot faster selling Megapacks to Australia than using them for (comparative) trickle charging at $0.35/kWh.
Before Musk fans use this to justify firing the entire charging team (and hiring back many of them), as it’s now happening after that, we have known about this project since February, which was before the team was fired.
So, the new team simply continues the project started by the previous team.
Tesla’s Supercharger deployment has gone down this year both on the number of stations and the number of stalls, but it is still growing and recently hit the 60,000th Supercharger milestone globally.
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