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On April 9, Tesla announced that the signing ceremony of its energy storage superfactory project was officially held in Shanghai. Wu Xiaohua, deputy secretary of the Party work Committee of Lingang New District, and Tao Lin, vice president of Tesla Company, signed the contract on behalf of both sides. The super factory will specialize in the production of its energy storage product Megapack. Initially, it is planned to produce up to 10, 000 commercial energy storage batteries a year, with an energy storage scale of nearly 40GWh, and a wide range of products covering the global market. It is understood that the plant is scheduled to start construction in the third quarter of 2023 and start production in the second quarter of 2024.

This is Tesla's first energy storage super factory project outside the United States, and it is also Tesla's second super factory in China. In July 2018, Tesla, together with the Shanghai Municipal Government and the Shanghai Port Management Committee, jointly signed an investment agreement on the pure electric vehicle project to build a Tesla super factory with R & D, manufacturing and sales functions in the port area. The factory includes four areas: vehicle production area, test area, spare parts production area and joint workshop (maintenance workshop). In December 2019, the first batch of Model 3 models produced by Shanghai Super Factory were delivered, and then the Model Y model was introduced to achieve domestic production. Tesla retail 439800 vehicles in the Chinese market in 2022, an increase of 37.1% over the same period last year, according to the Federation of passengers.

It is understood that Tesla energy storage business started in 2015, through household storage products Powerwall and commercial storage products Powerpack into the field of energy storage. In 2016, Tesla further improved the home optical storage plate after acquiring photovoltaic leader SolarCity, and launched upgraded versions of Powerwall2 and Powerpack2. In 2019, Tesla officially launched the Megapack large-scale energy storage system for the utility-level energy storage market. It is understood that the current Tesla energy storage system is mainly produced by the Nevada super factory in the United States, but the production capacity is only 3GWh. In September 2021, Tesla announced that the Las Rope Super Factory in California would start construction to produce Megapack, an energy storage product with a capacity of 40GWh, and for the first time to use Ningde era lithium iron phosphate battery in the energy storage system.

According to Tesla's financial report in 2022, the shipment volume of energy storage system 6.5GWh in 2022 increased by 64% over the same period last year, and the revenue of energy storage business was 27.225 billion yuan. Prior to this, the scale of Tesla's energy storage business was not high and its profitability was not strong. Tesla's energy storage business revenue from 2019 to 2021 was 10.681 billion yuan, 13.011 billion yuan and 17.782 billion yuan respectively.

At present, Tesla energy storage business orders are growing. According to the tracking of public information on overseas energy storage projects, by the end of 2022, Megapack global reserve orders exceeded 10GWh, with the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia accounting for 69%, 13%, 10% and 8% respectively. As of February 2023, the earliest delivery date of the reservation page on Megapack's official website has been postponed from the third quarter of 2024 to the fourth quarter of 2024, which includes the climbing contribution of the company's new 40GWh Megapack capacity in California last November.

The industry believes that Tesla's choice to open an energy storage super factory in China may aggravate the inner volume of the energy storage track with strong demand downstream. According to relevant data, the top five manufacturers of global shipments in 2022 are Ningde Times, BYD, Yiwei Lithium Energy, Samsung SDI and Ruipu Lanjun, of which Ningde era shipped 47GWh energy storage batteries, an increase of 181% compared with the same period last year. The global market share reached 43.4%. According to the Ningde Times Financial report, the revenue of the energy storage battery system business in 2022 was 44.98 billion yuan, an increase of 230.16% over the same period last year, accounting for 13.69% of revenue, which is the fastest growing of all businesses.

Followed by BYD, BYD's global shipments of energy storage batteries were 14GWh in 2022, an increase of 211% over the same period last year and a global share of 11.5%, ranking second in global energy storage battery shipments. At present, BYD's energy storage batteries are mainly supplied internally, but in 2022 it began to work with other automakers to supply power batteries to other automakers, including Tesla.

The heat of the energy storage battery race track, on the one hand, benefits from the goal of carbon peak carbon neutralization, which creates a good opportunity for the rapid development of energy storage. On the other hand, the technology of energy storage battery based on lithium battery is developing rapidly, and the energy density, power density and cycle life of lithium-ion battery are greatly increased. For example, the energy density of lithium-ion battery is more than double that of ten years ago, and the power density is increased by about 50%. At present, a relatively complete industry chain has been formed. From the point of view of the industry, Tesla's large-scale layout of energy storage battery capacity in China is bound to intensify this track competition.

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