Michael Graham Richard (@Michael_GR)
Technology / Clean Technology
May 8, 2015
Elon Musk does it again
It’s barely been a week since Tesla unveiled its Powerwall energy system, which scales from residential houses to massive gigawatt-hour utility scale. Not enough time for much to happen, right? Well, apparently people have been waiting for something like this and there’s a lot of pent up demand. On its earnings conference call, Elon Musk mentioned that they already received 38,000 reservations (the Powerwall will start shipping this summer) for the home system and 2,500 reservations for the much bigger, commercial-scale battery systems. That’s a lot in less than a week (more reservations have no doubt come in since the Tesla call on May 6)!
Musk said that just the production of storage batteries for the various versions of the Powerwall could alone “easily” take up the entire capacity of Tesla’s $5 billion, 50GWh factory in Nevada, which isn’t even fully built yet.
This level of interest means, according to Musk again, that the Powerwall storage system is sold out until mid-2016. If you want one, make a reservation sooner rather than later.
SolarCity/Promo image
Reservations made for about $800 million in batteries
Some analysts are Bloomberg did the math (see below), and estimate that all these reservations, if people actually end up buying the Powerwalls, add up to about $800 million of revenue for Tesla. The math is a bit fuzzy, but a spokeswoman for Tesla said that it “looks right”, which probably means that it’s not totally crazy.
Here’s how Bloomberg Business crunched the numbers behind the $800 million:
-The Powerwall home batteries designed to be paired with rooftop solar systems received 38,000 reservations, according to Musk’s comments during Wednesday’s earnings call.
-Some customers order more than one battery, with an average reservation amounting to somewhere from 1.5 to two batteries. Musk described the total demand as “more like 50,000 or 60,000” batteries in early reservations. Let’s call it 55,000 batteries.
-The Powerwall comes in two designs sold at different prices: $3,000 and $3,500 each. Let’s split the difference: $3,250 apiece.
Total Powerwall Orders So Far: $178.8 million.-Musk said the company has received 2,500 reservations for the commercial-scale batteries and that the typical installation comes with “at least 10 Powerpacks.” So that’s 25,000 units totaling 2.5 million kilowatt hours.
-Musk used Twitter last week to disclose pricing for the Powerpack at $250 per kilowatt hour.
-Total Powerpack Orders So Far: $625 million.
Combine home and commercial, and you get $800m.
by Bob Tregilus and used with permission/CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
It’s probably a safe bet that Musk and his team are already working on getting Gigafactory #2 started as soon as possible. This might be dependent on financing and other things, but it doesn’t look demand for batteries will be a problem, since the original plan was to use just 1/3 of the Gigafactory’s production for storage, and the rest for electric cars. Now we learn that the whole production could go to just storage…
Via Bloomberg
