Was talking to a guy about the Texas grid outages, so I thought I'd dig around a bit to see what the opportunity looks like for Tesla Energy.
What could Texas have done last year to help avert similar issues this year? Obviously their solution is megapacks, so I went onto the Tesla site to order some. $1B gets you 1,000 megapacks(770MW/3080MWh) of battery storage installed in Texas by Tesla. That seems expensive, but you have to factor in that probably saves the Texas grid ~$50-100M in frequency and ancillary services every year. Then you add in the storage benefits to a Texas grid with massive cheap wind and solar.....these battery packs would pay themselves off in 5-8 years at most.
Texas should have done that in 2021, then doubled their order every year til the grid is eventually balanced, fully decentralized, and ultra-resilient. The DoE would happily finance it and ratepayers wouldn't end up paying a dime. In a messed up grid like Texas batteries don't "cost" anything, the savings more than makes up for the pricetag. And that's likely true all the way thru to 120% wind/solar/battery.
Taken seriously and executed as if this were an actual emergency, starting such a project in 2021 probably gets the whole Texas grid transitioned in 10-12 years. Obviously the oil & gas industry would never let this happen, but Texas ratepayers need to understand it's doable and they'd likely not pay one incremental dime for the entire transition. They can order the first year's 1,000 megapacks literally
right off the website today.
TSLA investors need to understand the opportunity as well. Texas alone is probably $100B worth of orders and another $100-500M in basic maintenance services each year forever. Each % of this global market is astronomically valuable.