Tesla has opened its Megafactory in California. This new facility will be producing the company's large-scale battery system Megapack.
The Lathrop Mayor Sonny Dhaliwal confirmed the news of the factory in a Facebook post. It was later deleted and re-posted. He said that we are proud to be home to the Megafactory, Tesla's latest expansion. Our community will produce the future of green energy.
Lathrop is a small city in northern California that houses the factory. It is located near Tesla's Fremont automotive plant. The distribution center for Tesla, 870,000 square feet, is also located in Lathrop.
The electric automaker's Gigafactory, in Sparks (Nevada), was manufacturing Megapacks and other energy storage products. Although this is the first Megapack facility, it's not clear if other storage products such as Powerwall or Powerpacks will be moved to the new factory.
The automaker's Energy division is excited by the new factory. The Megapack is intended for utility-scale storage of energy, as opposed to the Powerwall which is a battery product for home use. In order to store excess energy, utilities are pairing large batteries with solar and wind farms. The Arizona electric utility Salt River Project just last week launched a Megapack project of 100 megawatts.
Elon Musk, CEO, confirmed in a June second-quarter earnings conference that there was significant unmet need for storage products. He said that Megapacks were almost sold out by next year and that Powerwall would be in demand for more than 1 million units annually.
Musk stated to investors that the bottleneck is not due to production capacity. He also said that cell supply and a global shortage of semiconductors were creating production ceilings.
He said that we use many of the same chips in our Powerwalls as in a car. Powerwalls or cars? We need to produce cars so that Powerwall production can be reduced.
However, the chip shortage seems to be not going away. The White House will host its second summit on Thursday with purchasers and manufacturers of semiconductors in order to discuss the continuing effects on the technology industry.
