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Dive short:

• Tesla’s third-quarter energy storage use rose 75% year over year to 6.9 GWh, the company said in its report on Wednesday. Earnings update for the third quarter of 2024. The company is on track to more than double storage deployments by 2024 by 2023, Chief Financial Officer Vaibhav Taneja said at an upcoming meeting. revenue calling.
• Tesla’s Lathrop, California, Megafactory produced 200 utility-scale stationary Megapack storage units in one week this quarter, equivalent to an annual production rate of 40 GWh, and the Shanghai Megafactory is on track to begin shipping in the first quarter of 2025 units. , the company said in its earnings update.
• “It won’t be long before we’re shipping 100 GWh per year of stationary storage at Tesla,” CEO Elon Musk said during the earnings call. “The energy sector is doing extremely well, (and) the opportunities ahead are enormous.”

Diving insight:

Tesla’s deployment in the third quarter fell quarter-over-quarter, from a record 9.4 GWh in the second quarter, due to “customer readiness (and) the location of orders being fulfilled ” rather than production or demand issues, Taneja said.

“Our pipeline and backlog continue to grow quarter over quarter as we fill our 2025 production slots, and we are doing our utmost to meet demand,” he said.

Tesla’s energy business had a gross margin of 30.5% in the third quarter, the highest on record, despite lower shipment volumes for the 3.9 MWh Megapack units, the company said.

Tesla expects “deployments to grow sequentially in the fourth quarter,” and Powerwall 3 integrated solar and storage system Volumes should increase in the coming quarters, Taneja added.

Powerwall deployments reached a record for the second quarter in a row in the third quarter, the company said, with more than 100,000 systems participating in virtual power plant programs.

Tesla’s stationary storage transports will “eventually grow to multiple terawatt hours per year (because) if you’re not at the terawatt hour scale, you’re not really moving,” Musk said.

A fully sustainable global energy system requires 30 TW of renewable energy production, 240 TWh of energy storage and $10 trillion in capital investments, Tesla said in its Master plan 3 report.

The report identified “zero insurmountable resource challenges” to the vision, which is contradictory The concerns of some analysts on the supply and long-term availability of critical battery minerals.

“There is no very rare material that we don’t have enough of. We actually have enough resources to use the entire human civilization (and) make it completely sustainable,” even as electricity consumption from electric transportation increases, Musk said.

But despite Musk’s reassurances about sufficient supply, lithium refining capacity is a near-term “bottleneck” in Tesla’s supply chain, Musk says. said last year.

Tesla is spending more than $1 billion on it build a lithium refinery in South Texas, that will “aggressively increase the supply of battery-grade lithium hydroxide available in North America,” the company said last year. Images Teslarati published in March it can be seen that construction is progressing on the 1,200 hectare site.

Taneja suggested on the earnings call that the refinery will “begin production” next year, but did not give an exact timeline for its commissioning.