energy storage

Panasonic confirmed being a partner in Tesla’s battery factory early in the development of the project, but other than some estimates from Tesla, the electronic giant never committed to a dollar amount in investment until today.

Tesla made clear its plan to remain in control of the project and to contribute the majority of the estimated $4 billion to $5 billion investment required to build its massive battery factory. Panasonic confirmed today that it plans to invest between $1.5 billion and $1.6 billion in the Gigafactory.
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Following last week’s announcement to invest $1 million in battery research with the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Tesla Motors opened its Gigafactory internship program for applications while visiting the University of Nevada, Reno earlier this week.
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SolarCity announced today a new project with the Temecula Valley Unified School District to install 6 MW of solar energy capacity and 2.6 MWh of energy storage at a total of 19 schools in the district. The solar installations will mainly consist of carports using the company’s ZS Beam system (see picture above).
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Tesla Motors confirmed to Electrek that the company is now installing the Powerwall, a new home energy storage system, for “pilot customers”:

“We are currently in production and have started installing Powerwalls with pilot customers. Over the next few weeks we will continue to ramp up volume production,” Tesla spokeswoman Alexis Georgeson said.
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SolarCity announced today that the company signed a power purchase agreement (PPA) with Kaua’i electric utility (KIUC). SolarCity already built a 12-megawatt solar array for KUIC which  went into operation in September 2014 and now supplies 5% of the island’s electricity, but under the new deal, the California-based solar installer will develop a new solar array and a massive 52 MWh energy storage system to provide electricity when the sun is down.
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According to a report from the San Diego Union-Tribune, Tesla inked a deal to install battery packs at 3 Escondido high schools in the San Diego County school districts. The 3 projects are approved to start installation in a few weeks and be completed by the end of the year – making the deal one of the biggest to date for Tesla’s new energy storage products.
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The deal is to supply “Powerpacks”, the commercial and utility scale version of Tesla’s Powerwall, to Advanced Microgrid Solutions (AMS). The startup, which offers technology-agnostic services to deploy energy storage systems, said the deal was the first battery supply agreement and more will come.

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11:24 PM
power wall is “beautiful, fits on the wall, garage wall or outside wall of your house. 6 inches thick. 3 feet across and tall. Really easy to fit in garage or your house.”

[11:25 PM] Mark Gurman: Connected to Internet.
Smart micro grids
Ten year guarantee
[11:25 PM] Mark Gurman: “Nothing remotely in these price points”
“Our goal here is to fundamentally change how the world uses energy”
[11:26 PM] Seth Weintraub: Tesla’s selling price to installers is $3500 for 10kWh and $3000 for 7kWh. (Price excludes inverter and installation.) Deliveries begin in late Summer.

[11:27 PM] Mark Gurman: Musk says great for cold climates when there are power outages and ice storms
Good thermal management system for very cold environments

[11:29 PM] Jon Jivan: Wayyy below suggested price of $13k by some outlets. Nice to see it come in so cheap.
[11:29 PM] Mark Gurman: “Going to be huge in Germany”

[11:31 PM] Mark Gurman: Doesn’t require heavy foundations
“the integration at the system level is the big differentiator”
Ready to scale to a very large scale today

[11:32 PM] Mark Gurman: they’ve been using it for a year in house

[11:33 PM] Mark Gurman: Tesla will continue to open source the patents on all these
[11:34 PM] Mark Gurman: Giga factory designed in the same as a giant car
Fundamentally different way than approaching manufacturing and engineering

[11:39 PM] Mark Gurman: Installable by two people in half hour to an hour
Installation prices up to distributors

[11:42 PM] Mark Gurman: “This would be bigger in terms of pack utilization than the car industry, actually comparable size”
[11:43 PM] Mark Gurman: international, still need to figure out certified installers however

[11:43 PM] Mark Gurman: it’ll scale as fast as we can scale it.

[11:44 PM] Mark Gurman: international next year
Germany and Australia late this year

[11:44 PM] Mark Gurman: China early next year

Musk said “we own tesla energy.com” when asked if they’d change from tesla motors as name

Update: Here’s our first look. Looks familiar

https://twitter.com/TomerDavid_/status/593964617161805824

https://twitter.com/markgurman/status/593967615887872000

Update: Tesla Energy!

Tesla Energy Press Kit

 

We’ll be covering the Tesla Battery announcement later tonight but Tesla just unleashed the livestream page. Check back soon. We’ll run down the highlights here. We’re expecting Tesla to announce home and industrial battery products that allow users to store solar and lower cost, high availability electricity for use at night or during higher cost/watt time periods.  The battery will be a down payment and rental fee which should more than pay for itself in electric bill savings.

There has been further speculation that, with this announcement, Tesla Motors will change its name to Tesla, Inc or Telsa Energy to note that it is an energy storage company, not just a car company.  We’ll find out more soon, stay tuned.

 

While Tesla’s stock price gained 6% this morning after a note from Deutsche Bank, short interest on Tesla’s stock increased to 21.3% of the outstanding shares. This is the highest level of short interest on Tesla in the past 13 months. Short interest contributed greatly to the previous few surges of Tesla’s stock price. In early 2013, short interest was over 30 million shares when Tesla reported a profit. Investors started covering their short position, which created a lot of demand for Tesla’s stock.

Tesla is holding an event Thursday to announce their home energy storage products. Historically, Tesla’s stock price increases prior to an announcement and then decreases after the event. This is commonly referred to as “buying on the rumor and selling on the news”. So far, this current event is not an exception with Tesla’s stock price gaining over 20% since Elon Musk tweeted about the upcoming event to be held at Tesla’s design studio in Hawthorne.

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