Welcome back everyone, I'm Jordan Geisigee and this is The Limiting Factor. Tesla's Mega Pack business for grid scale battery energy storage more than doubled in 2023 and much more growth is expected in the coming years thanks to expansions already underway in Lathrop, California and Shanghai. This raises the question, how big could the Mega Pack business get and by when? To answer that question, today I'll walk you through my assumptions on how the adoption of battery energy storage will evolve between now and 2050, the potential market size of each phase and how much of that storage market Tesla could ultimately take. Before we begin, a special thanks to my Patreon supporters, YouTube members and Twitter subscribers as well as RebellionAir.com. They specialize in helping investors manage concentrated positions. RebellionAir can help with covered calls, risk management and creating a money master plan from your financial first principles.
First, note that the forecasts I created in this video should be considered back of the napkin estimates. There have been thousands of pages of content written on the topic of grid storage and how it's expected to evolve over the coming years. What I'm providing today is a rough interpretation of how I expect the grid to evolve with a focus on Tesla. As usual, I'll include my assumptions and thought process so that you can form your own view. Let's start with Tesla's estimate for the size of the grid storage market for batteries. Last year, after Investor Day, Tesla released a white paper titled Master Plan Part 3 Sustainable Energy for All of Earth. In that paper, their estimate was that for the US alone, the total amount of 8-hour lithium ion storage required to make the transition to renewable energy was 6.5 terawatt hours. That's helpful because it gives us a fair estimate for the maximum amount of batteries required.
However, it's not a forecast, so it doesn't include information on what's likely and by when. As a side note, the paper doesn't define what's meant by 8-hour lithium ion storage. As far as I can tell, it just seems to be using 8-hour duration as a somewhat arbitrary unit of measurement to show how much energy is stored and released. In this case, that's 8 hours of duration multiplied by 815 gigawatts of power for a total of 6.5 terawatt hours of energy. That means the 8-hour duration doesn't seem to be implying anything about the duration rating that Tesla expects that most grid storage batteries will actually have.
Moving along to add some granularity on duration and timeframes, let's bring in forecasting from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, or NREL. NREL expects that, for the US, the deployment of grid storage to support renewable energy will progress through four phases between now and 2050. You may notice that as the four phases progress that the durations get longer, why is that? Two reasons. First, as grids increasingly shift to intermittent energy sources like wind and solar, they'll require greater reserves of grid storage to provide power when there's demand spikes or shortages in supply. Second, it's more difficult to make long-duration energy storage cost effective. That's for several reasons, but let's cover just two.
First, longer duration storage has fewer revenue opportunities over the course of its life because it charges and discharges more slowly. Yes, grid storage that takes longer to discharge will typically last longer, but there's a limit to that. And in the meantime, the storage will be incurring expenses like maintenance, property taxes, and financing costs. Second, typically lower price volatility is seen on longer timeframes, which makes the revenue lower when energy is needed at the peaks. The fact that longer duration storage has fewer revenue opportunities and earns less for them means that cost is one of the primary limiting factors for the deployment of longer duration storage.
However, the cost of energy storage is continually getting cheaper thanks to economies of scale and technology improvements, so we'll gradually see more and longer duration energy storage projects deployed over time. Although NREL's four phases do provide more granularity than Tesla's monolithic 6.5 terawatt hour estimate, they still don't provide specific years for when they expect the phases to occur. They don't specify the types of technologies that will be used for grid storage, and they measure the capacity in terms of gigawatts of power and don't provide a figure for gigawatt hours of energy, all of which is important if we want to combine NREL and Tesla's estimate to create a forecast.
With that in mind, let's trim the information out of the NREL table that we don't need and then fill in the blanks. The first line of the NREL table includes capacity from before 2010 from pumped hydro. I'll delete that line because it's capacity that's already installed. The last line of the NREL table focuses on multi-day to seasonal capacity. Tesla's model assumes that seasonal energy storage will be handled by hydrogen, and I agree with that assessment. In the book, Monetizing Energy Storage by Ian Stoffel and Oliver Schmidt, they show that by 2040, grid storage durations of 16 hours or less will be dominated by lithium-ion batteries, and storage durations of 16 hours or more will be dominated by hydrogen. If you'd like to read that book, it's available for free online and I'll link it in the description. Since today's focus is on battery energy storage rather than hydrogen storage, we can eliminate the last line. But I'm still going to build in four phases for today's analysis rather than three. Why? Because there's significant overlap in the duration ranges in the NREL table for phases two and three. NREL overlap them for good reason, which is that the primary grid services they list can use multiple energy storage durations. However, my goal today is to look at how much of each duration is needed and by when, which means we need clear differentiation between the phases. So, I'm going to break the second and third phases into three phases, which cover durations up to four hours, eight hours, and twelve hours, and I'll leave phase one at up to one hour. As a side note, up to four hours means between one and four hours, and so on. But I'm listing specific durations, such as one, four, eight, and twelve hours rather than duration ranges, because it makes the calculations all do in a moment easier.
Next, let's add some labels to each phase to provide a better understanding of the type of grid services each phase will focus on. Note that I'm just listing a primary grid service as a point of reference. The storage deployed in each phase could all be used in around a dozen different grid services. Phase one is labeled operating reserves for services like frequency regulation to stabilize the grid. Phase two is labeled peaking capacity that can be used to replace gas powered peaker plants. Phase three is labeled time shifting that can be used to smooth the load over a 24 hour period. Lastly, I've labeled phase four as renewables firming, which refers to the deeper reserves that I expect to be required to transition the grid to renewable energy.
As for the development years, in my view, longer duration storage options will start being adopted as soon as the price is low enough to spur demand. And the lower the price, the quicker the adoption and the greater the demand. So beside the year column, I've added a column for dollars per kilowatt hour. A rough guess for when the price of battery cells reached the point where four hour grid storage with batteries became commercially viable was when the industry average cell prices reached $120 per kilowatt hour in 2020. Note that doesn't include the total installation cost. That is, I'm assuming that the total cost of storage roughly scales with the cost of the battery cells, which are the dominant cost in a battery energy storage project. From that $120 per kilowatt hour figure for four hour duration. Interestingly, we can get a rough idea of when eight and 12 hour duration will start becoming commercially viable. Eight hour storage will have half the revenue opportunities in a given timeframe and 12 hour duration will have roughly one third the revenue opportunities. That means the cells for eight and 12 hour storage will need to cost half to one third $120 per kilowatt hour or $60 and $40 per kilowatt hour. Energy storage of less than one hour actually has different economics and is often sold by power capacity rather than energy capacity. But to keep things simple, I quadrupled the cell price for four hour storage to arrive at the $480 per kilowatt hour for the phase one operating reserves. That threshold was crossed somewhere between 2013 and 2015. Again, these are very rough estimates, but they provide a quick and easy way to guess when a specific battery energy storage duration became viable or will become viable. Cell prices for LFP battery cells are widely expected to hit $60 per kilowatt hour in the next year in China, which will enable phase three and they're expected to hit less than $40 per kilowatt hour by 2030, which will enable phase four. On that note, it's unclear at this point whether lithium ion batteries will be able to hit $40 per kilowatt hour. But even if they don't, it's likely that sodium ion batteries will.
With those starting years in mind, I created a 20-year window for each phase of storage deployment to give a general idea of the overlap that will occur between the phases and the time scales involved to transition to renewable energy. But bear in mind, these aren't meant to be definitive timeframes. With the basic framework of the table in place, let's start filling out the figures related to how much power and energy need to be deployed. Starting with power, Enroll again provides broad ranges here, which makes it hard to pin down a specific amount of storage capacity deployed for each duration.
However, hopefully in one of their other slides, for 2050, they provide a more detailed split of roughly one to one to point three for storage durations of up to four hours, eight hours, and 12 hours. Note that's not exact and I incorporated some of my own assumptions. For example, first, Enroll forecast that 12 hour storage in 2050 will all be from legacy pumped hydro and they don't show any growth in that market from 2020. As I said earlier, I expect that by 2040, the 12 hour storage market will be dominated by ion based battery technologies.
So by 2050, I expect the prices to be so low that they actually encourage growth in the nine to 12 hour storage market to help buffer deployments of renewable energy. The second assumption comes about because Enroll didn't provide data on the timeframe for one hour or below for their storage modeling slide. The four phases slide does show less than 30 gigawatts, but that's based on a middle of the road estimate. That means we'll have to take an educated guess for the power deployment for one hour storage that scales roughly along with the other durations.
With all those assumptions in mind, I've estimated 64 gigawatts for phase one, 320 gigawatts for phase two and three and 106 gigawatts for phase four. Outside of the ratio derived from the Enroll table, why did I pick those specific numbers? Two reasons. First, Enroll's forecast was a middle of the road estimate, and I expect that in the long term battery prices will be lower than they expect, which will drive a faster transition to renewable energy.
Second, because as we'll see in a moment, adjusting for duration, these numbers line up with Tesla's estimate of a maximum of 6.5 terawatt hours of lithium ion storage in the US. That estimate is of course overly bullish by 2050 because it's a maximum, but I'll make some adjustments later in the video that'll moderate that forecast. With the gigawatts of capacity and the average duration in place, it's straightforward from here to calculate the number of gigawatt hours required. By multiplying the gigawatts of capacity by the duration of the energy storage,
the result is 64 gigawatt hours for phase one, 1.28 terawatt hours for phase two, 2.56 terawatt hours for phase three, and 1.28 terawatt hours for phase four. That adds up to a total of 5.18 terawatt hours, which of course doesn't add up to the 6.5 terawatt hours in Tesla's estimate. That's because we're using a range of durations rather than the eight-hour duration that Tesla is using across the board. To account for the difference in units, I've converted all the energy figures for each duration into their eight-hour equivalents.
Using four-hour duration as an example, a battery pack that has a four-hour discharge duration can cycle twice as quickly as a battery pack rated for eight hours. That means for the same number of gigawatt hours, it can move twice as much energy. Therefore, 1.28 terawatt hours of grid storage. With a duration rating of four hours is equivalent to 2.56 terawatt hours of grid storage with a duration rating of eight hours. After running that calculation for each duration,
the total amount of eight-hour equivalent energy storage comes to 6.472 terawatt hours, which is close enough to Tesla's 6.5 terawatt hour figure. With the core of the forecast in place, the next question is, how much annual production will be required to supply these multiple terawatt hours of batteries? To answer that, it's just a matter of dividing the amount of energy deployment for each battery energy storage duration by how long we can expect each to last. That is their service life.
I'm going to assume 10 years for one-hour storage, 20 years for four-hour storage, 25 years for eight-hour storage, and 30 years for 12-hour storage. I picked 20 years for four-hour storage because Tesla currently offers up to a 20-year warranty on their megapacks. But beyond that, the numbers are just educated guesses. That's because estimating the life of battery energy storage is difficult. Most people would assume that the life of a battery would be strictly determined by its cycle life,
But reality is a bit more complex. That's because it's not just charging and discharging that causes degradation to megapacks. It's also the amount of time that the packs spent exposed to extreme temperatures and adverse weather conditions. That means it's not worth going too far into the weeds with trying to predict the service life of different grid storage durations for this video. After dividing the amount of storage required for each duration by expected service life, the amount of annual production capacity required is 6.4 gigawatt hours per year for Phase 1, 64 gigawatt hours per year for Phase 2, 102 gigawatt hours per year for Phase 3, and 43 gigawatt hours per year for Phase 4. But this is just for the US. What about at a global level? Let's assume that the rest of the world has roughly the same split of phases, timeframes, and durations that the US does. As I said earlier, Tesla estimated 6.5 terawatt hours of lithium ion batteries needed for the US, but they also estimated 46.2 terawatt hours needed for the world.
That means to convert from the US production estimate to the global production estimate, we need to multiply by 7.1. The result is 45 gigawatt hours of production per year for Phase 1, 454 gigawatt hours per year for Phase 2, 724 gigawatt hours per year for Phase 3, and 305 gigawatt hours per year for Phase 4, for a total of 1.528 terawatt hours per year. How does that compare to Tesla's estimate for global battery energy storage production? Tesla divided 46.2 terawatt hours by 20 years of service life to arrive at 2.3 terawatt hours per year of production required to transition the world to sustainable energy. So my estimate for global annual production comes in at about 2 thirds of Tesla's estimate. That works out well, because Tesla's estimate is for full decarbonization at a global level, and I don't expect that to occur in the next 25 years.
Given that most countries have set targets to decarbonize by 2050, 2 thirds makes for a good base case forecast. With the global forecast in place, let's look at how much of the global market share for battery energy storage Tesla can absorb with their megapack products. According to trendforce, for 2023, the global battery energy storage market was about 117 gigawatt hours, and according to Tesla's Q4-2023 earnings call, they deployed 14.72 gigawatt hours. That means Tesla deployed about 12.5% of global battery energy storage production in 2023. In 2022, the number was 12.8%, and in 2021, it was 6.6%. However, last year in 2023 was the first year that Tesla began scaling their first dedicated megapack factory, which they'll duplicate and scale over the coming years, and they're already planning to quadruple production capacity by the end of the year. With that in mind, I expect Tesla to take at least 15% of a global battery energy storage market over the coming 10 to 20 years.
What about a more bullish case? To work that out, it becomes more speculative. Let's walk through the methodology I used. I started by looking at current global energy demand from all sources, and divided up the global energy market into six regions and two countries, India and China. In the second column, I entered the share of the global energy market that each region or country represents. In the third column, I took a guess at what I think Tesla's maximum market share could look like in each region or country. Let's look at the assumptions that went into each. In the US, for the first three quarters of 2023, 13.142 gigawatt hours of grid storage was installed. Tesla deployed 11.522 gigawatt hours of grid storage in those same three quarters. Although we don't know where that storage was deployed, most of it was likely deployed in the US, and that's where Tesla's built their first megapack factory.
That is, Tesla currently dominates the battery energy storage market in the US, and that looks unlikely to change. So my assumption is that Tesla's maximum potential market share in North America over time could be as high as 75%. As for South America and Europe, they're the regions that are the nearest to the US, both geographically and geopolitically. But there will likely be some competition from China and local production, so I assumed a maximum of 50% market share. China has a strong and highly competitive local manufacturing base, but Tesla has a good relationship with China and they've already started working on their first megapack factory there, so I assumed a 25% market share. The Asia Pacific, in which I've included countries like Japan, Korea, Indonesia, and Australia, have a good relationship with the US, but they'll likely also have local battery production along with imports from China. So I'd be surprised if Tesla gets more than 25% of the market there as well. India's a big question mark because it's doing its best to build a domestic manufacturing base, so Tesla's growth in India depends on what kind of agreement Tesla and India can come to for imports and manufacturing. But even if they do come to an agreement, I expect competition from local companies. So again, I expect 25% maximum market share for Tesla. Lastly, Central Asia, Africa, and the Middle East are loaded with geopolitical question marks and they might get most of their battery storage from China. Furthermore, I don't know how fast they'll make the transition to sustainable energy, which could mean that by 2050, those countries see a smaller share of their total energy market transition to battery energy storage. So I've given Tesla at best a 10% market share in each.
After multiplying each region's or country's share of the global market by Tesla's share of each of those markets, then tallying up the results. It gives Tesla a maximum potential global market share of 35% for battery energy storage. Then if we plug the high case and the low case into the four phases from earlier, we can see that in time Tesla could be deploying at minimum about 229 gigawatt hours per year of grid storage and at most 535 gigawatt hours per year. Before we move on to the summary, what are the major risks to Tesla's grid storage business? I see too. The first is delays with connecting the megapacks to the grid and transformer shortages. According to Wood Mackenzie, those issues have resulted in up to 80% of the projects coming online being delayed. I'm not sure how solvable those two issues are and whether they're trending towards better or worse. It's potentially a good topic for the next video of the grid storage series. The second risk is battery supply. Currently the best cell chemistry and form factor for grid storage is prismatic LFP battery cells. Tesla's wholly dependent on that chemistry and form factor from companies like CATL. That's a strategic risk that may hold back their growth potential. Yes, there are rumors that Tesla's building their own prismatic LFP battery cell production in Nevada with spare equipment from CATL. But even if that's the case, it's going to take years to hit meaningful scale. The same is true for the 4680, which so far is only using a nickel chemistry and a form factor which may or may not be suited to grid storage and is still struggling to ramp.
In summary, let's answer the question in the title of the video. How many megapack factories will Tesla build? Based on all the assumptions I shared today, if each megapack factory continues to be 40 gigawatt hours like the template factory and life trip, and Tesla needs to deploy 229 to 535 gigawatt hours per year, in the next 5 to 10 years, we'll see a minimum of about 6 and a maximum of 13 megapack factories. For some perspective, Tesla's currently using about 150 gigawatt hours of cells per year for all their products. So as long as the grid storage products have a similar profit margin to what Tesla's earning on average for their products today, over the next 5 to 10 years, there's a potential for Tesla to increase their market cap by 350% from just grid storage hardware. Note that doesn't include the profit Tesla could make by using their megapack hardware to build a business around selling power into the grid, which is another profit center altogether.
As a final note, I've made a few bonus slides based on the four phases of energy deployment and global regional demand to take guesses as to where and when Tesla will deploy megapack factories for the 15 or 35% market share scenarios. Bear in mind, this is highly speculative because one of the most difficult things to predict is exactly when and where Tesla will build a new factory or new product. This first slide shows all the information on one page with the number of factories and the years. The next slide shows the 15% case on a year by year basis. The last slide shows the 35% case on a year by year basis.
The first impression here is that this looks like a lot of work and a stretch, but megapacks are far easier to manufacture than a vehicle and that's reflected in the cost of the factories. A megapack factory costs about $400 million, whereas a Gigafactory for vehicles costs $5 to $10 billion. That means that for even the high case of 35% of the global market share, where Tesla would need to build 13 megapack factories in the next decade, the total investment is only equal to one Gigafactory. And Tesla's built three Gigafactories over the past five years alone, and Berlin, Shanghai, and Texas. So 13 megapactories in the next 10 years isn't a stretch. If you enjoyed this video, please consider supporting the channel by using the links in the description. Also, consider following me on X. I often use X as a testbed for sharing ideas, and X subscribers like my Patreon supporters generally get access to my videos a week early.
On that note, a special thanks to my YouTube members, X subscribers, and all the other patrons listed in the credits. I appreciate all of your support, and thanks for tuning in.