The deal was announced in a short social media post by Tesla, which famously doesn’t engage with the press. It was also separately announced in a little more detail by the customer in a press release.
The systems will be deployed at Intersect Power solar-plus-storage projects in the US. To date, the company’s projects have concentrated in California and Texas, the country’s two leading energy storage markets by state.
The agreement builds on an existing relationship between the pair, with Intersect Power having already ordered 2.4GWh of systems from Tesla to date, for projects already in operation or currently under construction.
That represents what Intersect Power called its Base Portfolio, through which it developed 2.2GWdc of solar PV alongside the BESS assets, financed in 2021 through a variety of structures with big-name financiers including Morgan Stanley and Deutsche Bank.
Energy-Storage.news reported yesterday (18 July) that the developer has raised a further US$837 million for three 160MW/320MWh Texas BESS projects, all set to comprise Megapacks. Two of those will be optimised by Tesla’s Autobidder software platform.
The biggest Intersect project brought online to date with Tesla battery hardware appears to be Oberon, a California solar-plus-storage project featuring 679MWp of solar PV and 250MW/1000MWh of battery storage. It went into commercial operation in late 2023.
Size of deal exceeds Tesla’s 2023 storage shipments
To give an idea of scale for the latest deal, Tesla’s full-year energy storage shipments for 2023 totalled 14.7GWh. The company’s Megapack factory in Lathrop, California, is scheduled to ramp up to 40GWh annual production capacity by the end of 2024, according to the company in its Q1 2024 results announcement.
More than half of the 15.3GWh order will be utilised across four projects in California and Texas which are expected to be in operation by the end of 2027, according to Intersect Power.
The current iteration of the Megapack features up to 3.9MWh energy storage capacity, as listed on Tesla’s site, a little short of the increasing trend for manufacturers to pack as much as 5MWh or even more into a 20-foot ISO standard containerised format.
Megapack does, however, come integrated with Tesla’s power conversion system (PCS) hardware. with Tesla Energy senior director Mike Snyder talking up the “plug-and-play” capabilities the company’s vertical integration enables.