Tesla Megapacks put into context

Published on Wednesday, 9 November 2022

Tesla Megapacks

Tesla on Twitter announced: "Meet Megafactory, our new Megapack factory in Lathrop, CA 🔋🔋🔋"

Tesla's energy division has recently completed their new Megapack factory in Lathrop California , which they claim can produce currently 10'000 Megapacks a year. How much storage is that and how does this compare to a Hydropower pump storage plant?

Tesla megapacks Specs per pack

  • 4 Hour Duration
  • Power: 970 kW
  • Energy: 3,916 kWh per Megapack
  • Round Trip Efficiency: 93.5%
  • 9.12 m x 1.65 m x 2.79 m
  • 38,100 kg
  • ~$2 million per pack

Offer

An offer was generated on the Tesla Energy website to get an appropriate pricing for the largest system they offer.

  • 1000 Megapack
  • 969.6 MW Power
  • 3916 MWh Energy Megapack
  • Duration: 4 Hours
  • Delivery: Q3 2024
  • Estimated Price (California) $1,832,519,850
  • Est. Annual Maintenance $4,821,480 - Maintenance Price escalates at 2% per year

Based on this, we can see that 10'000 megapacks represent about 39160 MWh of storage (39 GWh), with a sales cost of approx $18 billion.

So how does this compare to the two latest large Swiss Pump-Storage Hydropowerplants?

Hydropower plants

Nant-de-Drance pump-storage extension

  • 1 Pump-storage power plant
  • Power 900 MW (Turbines and Pumps)
  • Storage 20 GWh
  • Duration: 19 Hours
  • Round trip efficiency: over 90%
  • Estimated Price 2 billion CHF
  • ~14 years to build and bring into operation

Kraftwerk-Linth–Limmern pump-storage extension

  • 1 Pump-storage power plant
  • Power 1000 MW (Turbines and Pumps)
  • Storage 33 GWh
  • Duration: 33 Hours
  • Round trip efficiency: over 90%
  • Estimated Price 2.1 billion CHF
  • ~10 years to build and bring into operation

Conclusion

The storage cost of the batteries is currently about a factor 4-9x the price of the hydropower plant construction but have the advantage of being available within about 18 months. What remains to be seen is how much battery degradation is a factor in these grid scale battery installations. At least Tesla is offering, from my understanding, a 15 year warranty on the Megapack.

The amount of storage produced by the factory represents more than 1 large hydropower plant per year.

The 39 GWh storage produced by the factory in one year is a huge amount, so much that it would cover around 25% of the expected total capacity that the IEA planned for the entire world by 2026.

Post-scriptum: new gridscale batteries in Europe

2022.11.22 - Cottingham: Europe's biggest battery storage system switched on - 196MWh

  • Power: ? (my estimate ~50-100 MW)
  • Storage: 196 MWh
  • use Tesla's AI software to match energy supply to demand
  • Commissioning in two stages in December 2022 and March 2023.
  • Supplier: Tesla
  • Cost: ? (my estimate $100 million+)

As usual, BBC is terribly uninformative about specifications and cost. If we assume 50 Tesla Megapacks, cost should be around $100 million+ and 50 to 100 MW based on the 2h or 4h megapacks. Interesting to see a Tesla system in Europe. I expect many more to come online.

2022.11.07 - RWE gives green light for 220-megawatt battery storage system in North Rhine-Westphalia

  • Power: 80 + 140 MW = 220 MW
  • Storage: delivering the required output for over an hour but full capacity not mentioned. 220 MWh to 440MWh.
  • 140 million euros
  • commissioning in 2024
  • Supplier: Not mentioned.

2021.07.22 - RWE bringing 72MW BESS in Germany online in November

  • Power: 72 + 45MW = 117 MW
  • Storage: 128MWh
  • €50 million
  • commissioning in end 2022
  • Supplier: CATL batteries