Tesla installs 100,000th Powerwall home battery, sees “inflection” in storage market

Tesla – already busy leading the pack on grid-scale big battery installations in Australia and around the globe – has quietly announced a milestone on the home battery storage front – the installation of its 100,000th Powerwall.

The not-insignificant achievement rated a one-line mention in the company’s latest results announcement on Thursday morning (Australian time), as follows: “In Q1, we installed our 100,000th Powerwall.”

The statement also noted that the company had seen an increase in “cross-selling within the energy business,” with more than 40 per cent of Tesla’s residential solar customers opting to invest in “at least one Powerwall” as well.

And Tesla also reports that it has seen an “inflection” point in interest in utility scale storage, particularly since the launch of its “megapack”, a pre-assembled battery pack with up to 3MWh of storage that is 15 times bigger than its previous Powerpack units.

“(Mega-pack” is gaining traction,” the company says in its report. ” We have seen an inflection point in interest for utility level storage, primarily driven by progress in reducing costs. At the moment, the demand level for this produce remains above our capacity.”

That order book is being driven by projects such as the expansion of the original “Tesla big battery” at Hornsdale – which is adding 50MW/64MWh to its existing capacity of 100MW/129/MWh – and is likely to be a top candidate for the project that could replace it as the “world’s biggest”, a 600MW Victoria big battery near Geelong.

How the Powerwall is faring in Australia is very difficult to quantify – the comprehensive battery market report published by SunWiz earlier was not permitted to share any of the Australian sales data from manufacturers.

But we do know it has been one of the leading suppliers to South Australia’s hugely successful home battery and virtual power plant scheme, which last week put the total uptake of subsidised systems at 12,334, so far.

As One Step reported here, Australia’s home battery market is coming along nicely, with households installing a record 22,661 systems in 2019, amounting to a total capacity of 233MWh.

SunWiz puts the cumulative tally for Australia at 73,000 battery storage systems, or 1099MWh of battery storage installed since 2015, of which home battery systems make up 738MWh of that capacity.