Tesla’s EV growth might be gone, but energy storage is still surging

Seemingly to counter disastrous Q1 2024 EV delivery results, Tesla decided to release energy storage deployment early. Tesla’s growth in its electric vehicle business might be on pause right now, but its energy storage business is still surging.

Today, Tesla released its Q1 2024 delivery and production results. As we noted, the results were extremely disappointing as Tesla produced 433,371 vehicles and delivered 386,810 – about 20,000 fewer vehicles than even the most pessimistic estimates.

While Tesla had excuses for the reduced production, it didn’t explain the 46,000 vehicles added to inventory. The results killed Tesla’s growth story.

However, there’s a silver-linning, and Tesla made sure to highlight it in its release.

Tesla’s quarterly delivery and production reports generally only include numbers for its automotive business.

This time, the company included a note about its energy storage business:

We deployed 4,053 MWh of energy storage products in Q1, the highest quarterly deployment yet.

That’s indeed a new record. Tesla deployed 3,889 MWh in Q1 2023 and 3,202 MWh in Q4 2023.

I would note that Tesla released no numbers about its solar deployment in Q1 2024.

Tesla’s energy storage is indeed still surging, and it could grow a lot more this year.

The company’s Megafactory in Lathrop, California, where Tesla produces its Megapack for larger energy storage projects, has been spotted shipping out impressive numbers of battery packs:

Earlier this year, over 440 Megapacks were spotted in the factory’s shipping yard. That’s alone is over 1,700 MWh of energy storage being ready to ship out.

Tesla is currently also building a second Megafactory in Shanghai to produce the Megapack out of China. If the company can bring the factory to production this year, it could start contributing to its energy storage growth, but most of the growth is expected to still come from the Lathrop factory, which Tesla is still ramping.

On top of the Megapack business, Tesla is still ramping up Powerwall for residential energy storage projects.