According to Electrek, Tesla was spotted piling up a large number of Megapacks outside its Nevada Gigafactory. It’s unclear if this is due to a backlog caused by supply chain issues or if a new giant battery is in the works.
Drones regularly fly over Tesla factories in an attempt to document progress. These days, they mostly fly past the Texas Gigafactory and the Berlin Gigafactory, Tesla’s newest factories that are still growing as the automaker begins ramping up production. It’s been a long time since people saw drones or planes fly over the Nevada Gigafactory near Reno and found something interesting.
A Twitter user named OttoPilot flew a drone over the Nevada Gigafactory and found a surprising number of Tesla Megapacks outside the factory.
The Megapack is Tesla’s largest stationary energy storage product, which can hold up to 3MWh of energy capacity in a container-sized package.
We see over 500 Megapacks in this photo, which would represent up to 1.5GWh of energy capacity. That’s more than Tesla delivered in an entire quarter, all in one place.
However, it’s unclear why all those battery packs are there. Tesla manufactures Megapacks at the Gigafactory in Nevada, as well as at the new Megafactory in California, but it’s unclear why so many are there.
Electrek speculates that it could be that Tesla is preparing to ship for one or more energy storage projects, or it could be waiting for parts.
Tesla has had a lot of recent success with the Megapack, as it has become the choice for utility-scale energy storage projects. For example, Tesla recently deployed a 730MWh project for PG&E in Northern California.
At a company-wide meeting last month, Elon Musk told Tesla employees that PG&E CEO Patricia Kessler Poppe contacted him after launching the project, telling him that the company was so happy with the project that they planned to deploy it More energy storage capacity.
This project with PG&E in Moss Landing is one of the largest battery systems in the world, however, there are now more than double that number of Megapacks outside the GIgafactory in Nevada.