Electric car maker turned ‘integrated sustainable energy company’ Tesla installed 98MWh of energy storage in the final quarter of 2016, according to its financial results released last week.
As Tesla gears up toward the long-awaited launch of the ‘affordable’ Model 3 in the US in the second half of this year, the company reported on an eventful final quarter of the last one. This included its merger with closely-linked residential and commercial solar installer/leaser SolarCity and also with German engineering firm Grohman.
While our PV-focused sister site PV-Tech reported that Tesla-SolarCity made a “major miss” on its solar installations for Q4, managing just 201MW of a forecasted 298MW, the company’s electric vehicle sales appeared to be in rude health, with “record highs” of existing Model S and Model X range motors reported.
Cash reserves also increased from US$300 million in Q3 2016 to US$3.4 billion by Q4, while the company’s overall revenue for the year was up by more than 70% from 2015 to 2016. Model 3 manufacturing lines are almost up and ready, Tesla said, at both its Fremont car assembly facility in California and the Gigafactory battery plant in Nevada. Production is set to begin in July, after prototypes began to be made in early February. Not only that, but Tesla began refering to the Nevada plant as Gigafactory 1, its joint production facility with SolarCity in Buffalo, New York as Gigafactory 2, and said that it will finalise locations for Gigafactories “3, 4 and possibly 5” during this year.
Aliso Canyon leak contributed bulk of Q4’s energy storage
It is still early days for the combined weight of Tesla’s merging with SolarCity to begin demonstrating why the company is now calling itself the world’s only “integrated sustainable energy company”, with the much-touted solar roof tiles still to come and the aforementioned miss on Q4 solar installations from SolarCity’s earlier guidance.
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