Tesla’s energy storage business picked up steam in the second quarter and even played a minor role in the company’s fourth consecutive quarter of profitability, according to earnings reported Wednesday.
Commercial and residential energy storage sales as well as solar are still mere slices of Tesla’s overall business, which is largely dominated by automotive. However, second-quarter results show some promise for energy storage, particularly Megapack, the utility-scale energy storage product that launched in 2019 and is modeled after the giant battery system it deployed in South Australia.
While Tesla does provide separate deployment stats for solar and energy storage, it combines the two when reporting revenue, making it impossible to fully measure the success of Megapack. However, Tesla made a point in its earnings statement to flag Megapack as a winner in the second quarter and noted that it turned a profit for the first time.
“There’s a lot of demand for the product and we’re growing the production rates as fast as we can,” Drew Baglino, senior vice president of powertrain and energy engineering, said during Wednesday’s earnings call.
For the past four years or so Tesla has been asking investors to view it as an energy company instead of just an automaker. Some analysts think that the real value in Tesla’s business will be when it actually achieves some level of parity between the two sides of the shop — a goal that Musk is also shooting for.
But energy storage and solar has remained in Tesla’s automotive shadow, despite assurances that these business products will eventually be equals. For now, energy storage remains a small, but growing, fraction of Tesla’s revenue.
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