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Tesla Energy Storage rose to 64% in 2022 from a year earlier. The company continues to increase its production capacity to provide key components for a sustainable energy future.
Tesla's energy division is growing rapidly and has shown great results in 2022. According to the report, the company beat expectations with total sales in Q4 of $24.3 billion, of which $1.3 billion came from its solar and energy storage business. Although this is only a small part compared to the automotive business, it shows rapid development. Sales growth in these divisions was nearly 100 percent compared to Q4 2021.
As data from the report showed, growth in the energy business was mainly due to battery storage. Solar installations increased compared to 4Q 2021 by 18% to 100 megawatts. For all of 2022, 348 megawatts were deployed, up from 345 megawatts in 2021. The growth was only 1%, however this was the best result in the history of the company since 2017.
“Solar deployments increased by 18% YoY in Q4 to 100 MW, one of the strongest quarters in recent years. Despite supply chain challenges, we deployed 348 MW of solar in 2022, the highest deployment since 2017. Our solar installation team continues to improve installation efficiency, enabling higher volumes and stronger economics.”
Energy storage deployment increased to 2.5 GWh in Q4, reflecting an impressive 152% growth from the same period a year earlier. Thus, in 2022, Tesla deployed 6.5 GWh of energy storage, up 64% from a year earlier, when almost 4 GWh was deployed.
“Energy storage deployments increased by 152% YoY in Q4 to 2.5 GWh, for a total deployment of 6.5 GWh in 2022, by far the highest level of deployments we have achieved. Demand for our storage products remains in excess of our ability to supply.”
Much of this impressive growth has been made possible by a new Megafactory in Lathrop, California, where Tesla manufactures Megapacks. Its annual capacity is 40 GWh when it reaches full operating capacity. At the moment, the company is in the stage of increasing production.
“We are in the process of ramping production at our dedicated 4O GWh Megapack factory in Lathrop, California to address the growing demand. This factory should help to further accelerate growth of energy storage deployments.”
During the Q4 2022 Earnings Call, Elon Musk recalled that energy storage systems are one of the most important components of a sustainable energy future. He said that by developing and manufacturing all its products, and especially Megapack, the company strives to achieve this goal as quickly as possible.
“So, energy storage also saw record growth and that is continuing to accelerate. That's always worth remembering that the three pillars of a sustainable energy future are obviously electric vehicles, solar and wind, and then the third key item is stationary storage to store the energy from solar and wind because obviously, the sun doesn't shine all the time and the wind doesn't blow all the time.
So you have those three things, you can convert all of it to a fully sustainable situation many times over, actually. So, I would like to just make it clear that there is a path to a fully sustainable future for humanity, and our goal at Tesla is to accelerate progress on that path as much as humanly possible. So yeah, so we were obviously ramping up Megapack production. And we expect it to grow at a rate quite a bit faster than our - the goal output.”
One of the investors' questions was how many Megapack factories would be needed to secure a sustainable energy future. Musk said the company is considering this carefully. At the same time, it is looking for the right ways to achieve the goal of 1000 gigawatt-hours per year of production as quickly as possible. Musk said that later in the year and in 2024, investors will be able to get more information on this.
“It's a good question. It's not something we -- I think we'll provide an update about that in the future, but it is something we're thinking about very carefully. I really kind of like what is the fastest path to 1,000 gigawatt-hours a year of production. And you'll see announcements come out later this year and next, that answer that question.”
© 2023, Eva Fox | Tesmanian. All rights reserved.
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Article edited by @SmokeyShorts; follow him on Twitter
About the Author
Eva Fox
Eva Fox joined Tesmanian in 2019 to cover breaking news as an automotive journalist. The main topics that she covers are clean energy and electric vehicles. As a journalist, Eva is specialized in Tesla and topics related to the work and development of the company.
