Byd (002594.SZ) for the first time into Tesla’s energy storage business.
On June 5, late LatePost reported that BYD subsidiary Verdi Battery has reached a supply agreement with Tesla to supply the Shanghai energy storage plant, planning to supply energy storage cells to Tesla in the first quarter of next year. Verdi battery will become the second battery supply of Tesla’s Shanghai energy storage plant, and the first supply is Ningde Times (300750.SZ).
Cell is the main raw material for the production of energy storage battery system. Tesla and BYD did not respond to Jiemian News as of press time.
Zhang Jinhui, a senior researcher at Xinhua Information, told Jiemian News that Tesla introduced Verdi Battery as the second energy storage cell supplier to get a better price while ensuring the security of the supply chain.
Tesla’s Shanghai Energy Storage Gigafactory officially started construction in May this year, and it is scheduled to complete mass production in the first quarter of next year.
The Shanghai Energy Storage Gigafactory is Tesla’s first energy storage Gigafactory project outside the United States and the second energy storage Gigafactory worldwide.
The Shanghai Energy Storage Gigafactory is located in Nanhui New Town, Pudong New Area, Shanghai, covering an area of 204,000 square meters, which is equivalent to 28 standard football fields. It is close to Tesla’s Shanghai Gigafactory, the world’s largest production base for its electric vehicles.
The initial plan of the factory is to produce 10,000 commercial energy storage battery systems and an energy storage scale of nearly 40 GWh. The plant’s capacity is about a fifth of China’s production of energy-storage lithium-ion batteries last year.
Megapack It will become the flagship product of the Shanghai Energy Storage Gigafactory. It is the third-generation fixed energy storage product launched by Tesla in 2019, mainly aimed at large enterprises and utilities.
Each Megapack unit can store more than 3.9 MWh of energy, which can meet the electricity demand of 3,600 households in one hour, and can theoretically meet the charging demand of about 50 Tesla Model Y units.
An important reason for Tesla’s new energy storage Gigafactory in Shanghai is that only China has the large-scale mass production capacity of lithium iron phosphate cells, and lithium iron phosphate is the mainstream technology route of energy storage cells.
Ningde Times is currently Tesla’s most important supplier of energy storage cells.
Ningde Times and BYD ranked among the top two in global energy storage cell shipments last year, with Ningde Times shipping more than 70 GWh and BYD shipping over 25 GWh, according to consulting firm InfoLink.
Some of the energy storage products produced at the Energy Storage Gigafactory in Shanghai will supply the domestic energy storage market and some planned overseas, Tesla Vice President Tao Lin said at a press conference.
On the opening day of the Shanghai Energy Storage Gigafactory, Lingang Group also signed the first order of Megapack China for commercial energy storage system with Tesla, purchasing a total of eight Megapack units.
Zhang Jinhui once told Jiemian News that Megapack has relatively high prices and has sufficient orders in the global market, and the products produced by Shanghai Energy Storage Gigafactory are mainly going the export route rather than focusing on the domestic market.
According to Tesla’s website, the Megapack energy storage system can last two or four hours optional. The power and capacity of the 2-hour product are 1.9 MW / 3.9 MWh; the 4-hour product is 1 MW/3.9MWh, and the earliest delivery time of both products in the US market is the first quarter of 2025.
Among them, the unit price of the 2-hour product is more than 2 million US dollars (about 14.49 million yuan), or about 3.7 yuan / Wh, which is more than six times the bid price of the domestic energy storage system.
Tesla’s current business covers electric vehicles and renewable energy, the latter including photovoltaic and energy storage.
In 2023, Tesla’s power generation and energy storage business generated $6.035 billion (43.6 billion yuan), up 54% year on year. During the same period, Tesla’s total installed capacity of energy storage was 14.7 GWh, up 125% year on year.
In the first quarter, Tesla’s revenue was $1.635 billion (11.8 billion yuan), up 7% from a year earlier. During the same period, energy storage deployment was 4.1 GWh, the highest in a single quarter.