Three massive battery storage plants—built by Tesla, AES Corp., and Altagas Ltd.—are all officially going live in southern California at about the same time. Any one of these projects would have been the largest battery storage facility ever built. Combined, they amount to 15 percent of the battery storage installed planet-wide last year.

Ribbons will be cut and executives will take their bows. But this is a revolution that’s just getting started, Tesla Chief Technology Officer J.B. Straubel said in an interview on Friday. “It’s sort of hard to comprehend sometimes the speed all this is going at,” he said. “Our storage is growing as fast as we can humanly scale it.”

A Fossil-Fuel Disaster
The new battery projects were commissioned in response to a fossil-fuel disaster—the natural gas leak at Aliso Canyon, near the Los Angeles neighborhood of Porter Ranch. It released thousands of tons of methane into the air before it was sealed last February.

In its wake, Southern California Electric (SCE) rushed to deploy energy storage deals to alleviate the risk of winter blackouts. There wasn’t any time to waste: All of the projects rolling out this week were completed within 6 months, an unprecedented feat. Tesla moved particularly nimbly, completing in just three months a project that in the past would have taken years. 

Eoin Treacy's view

The Porter Ranch gas leak made headlines in Los Angeles all last summer but it was a blessing for Tesla because it gave the company an opportunity to demonstrate how it can deploy its batteries at scale in a tight timeframe.

Batteries are an essential piece of the renewable energy, electric vehicle puzzle. Every innovation that brings down battery costs has an outsized effect on a host of other sectors. Tesla, with its now completed giga-factory, is well placed to benefit from these emerging themes.

The share rallied for seven of the last eight weeks and its now testing a previous area of resistance near $260. Some consolidation of the short-term overbought condition now appears to be underway and it will need to hold at least half the recent advance if potential for additional higher to lateral ranging is to be given the benefit of the doubt.