Grid Scale

Tesla earnings are slipping — but its battery business is booming

Tesla earnings are slipping — but its battery business is booming
A Ninedot Energy site with Tesla Megapack batteries and a solar canopy (courtesy: NineDot Energy)

Tesla’s second-quarter net income fell 45% compared with a year ago as the company’s global electric vehicle sales tumbled despite price cuts and low-interest financing, but its battery business has seen a notable boost.

The Austin, Texas, company said Tuesday in its quarterly earnings report that it made $1.48 billion from April through June, less than the $2.7 billion it made in the same period of 2023. It was Tesla’s second-straight quarterly net income decline. Tesla said it posted record quarterly revenue “despite a difficult operating environment.”

On the other hand, the company’s energy-storage business took in just over $3 billion in revenue, double the amount in the same period last year. Tesla also said it set a new battery deployment record in Q2, with 9.4 GWh deployed. In Q1 2024, Tesla deployed 4.1 GWh of storage.

“Deployments will fluctuate from period to period with some quarters seeing large increases and others seeing a decline,” said Tesla’s Chief Financial Officer Vaibhav Taneja on the earnings call. “Recognition of storage gigawatt hours is dependent on a variety of factors, including logistics timing, as we send units from a single factory to markets across the world, customer readiness, and in case of EPC projects on construction activities.” Moving on to the other parts of the business, service and other gross profits also improved sequentially from the improvement in service utilization and growth in our collision repair business.”

Last week, Intersect Power announced portfolio-level construction debt, tax equity, and term debt financing for three battery energy storage systems (BESS) – Lumina I, Lumina II, and Radian – each of which will be comprised of 86 Megapacks, Tesla’s BESS. Lumina II and Radian will be operated by Autobidder, Tesla’s real-time trading platform. In Tesla’s eyes, the Autobidder platform helps differentiate its storage products in a heavily competitive market – Taneja argued it gives Tesla “much more of an edge.”

The three sites will move from concept to commissioned in under 12 months, Intersect Power said, and each will provide a capacity of 320 MWh of battery storage with a two-hour duration. These batteries provide additional flexibility to Intersect’s Texas operating fleet, offering 1.2 GWp of solar power with 1 GWh of battery storage.

On the earnings call, Tesla CEO Elon Musk addressed concerns about the future of clean energy deployments under a second Donald Trump presidency, especially given that the tech mogul has already endorsed the Republican. Citing the possibility of a repeal of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), Musk said Tesla might actually benefit from such a move.

“I guess that there would be some impact, but I think it would be devastating for our competitors and for Tesla slightly,” Musk said on the earnings call. “But long term probably actually helps Tesla, would be my guess. But as I said this before in earning calls, it — the value of Tesla overwhelmingly is autonomy. These other things are, I think, no way it’s relative to autonomy.”

“At the end of the day, when we are looking at our business, we’ve always been looking at it whether or not IRA is there,” Taneja said. “And we want our business to grow healthy without having any subsidies coming in, whichever way you look at it. And that’s the way we’ve always modeled everything.”

This article contains reporting from the Associated Press.