“Largest of its Kind” Tesla Stock (NASDAQ:TSLA) Notches Up With New Battery Power Plant in China

While most of us tend to focus on electric vehicle giant Tesla (TSLA) for, well, its electric vehicles, there is one part of Tesla that tends to go oddly underappreciated: its batteries. The things that make the cars go also have a great potential to keep the lights on at our homes. And they may be about to do just that in China, as Tesla will be building a new “grid-scale battery power plant” therein. The news sent Tesla shares up fractionally in Friday afternoon’s trading.

The new plant that Tesla is looking to build represents something of a novel approach to wide-scale power generation. While more and more users are looking to renewables like wind and solar for some part of grid-power operations, even the most fervent supporters of same know that there is a problem there: the sun does not always shine, nor does the wind always blow. So battery plants are being considered more and more as a way to store energy in the good times, to be parceled out to the grid later on.

And with Tesla’s battery factory in Shanghai already having produced 100 Megapacks—the kind of battery that works at grid-level—in the first quarter alone, Tesla might be able to set up such a plant fairly rapidly. It will be quite a plant, too; reports note that the project will be “…the largest grid-side energy storage project in China,” Tesla representatives noted. Given that one Megapack can offer one megawatt for four hours, that could indeed be a serious power project.

Try Before You Buy

Want to test-drive a Tesla? Well, you may have an opportunity to do just that thanks to a partnership effort between Tesla and the Electrify Expo, which will allow users to take a Tesla home for the weekend and put it through its paces before returning it. Tesla is just the first such company to go in right now, as Electrify Expo is looking to bring in more carmakers to the deal.

Though right now, this is limited to the Los Angeles show only, which starts tomorrow, expansions are likely to follow. Dubbed the “Electrify Weekender” experience, the event is likely to expand to Chicago, Dallas, New York, San Francisco and Seattle by the end of the year, with the Los Angeles experience serving as a way to work out any kinks in the program.

Is Tesla a Buy, Hold or Sell?

Turning to Wall Street, analysts have a Hold consensus rating on TSLA stock based on 14 Buys, 12 Holds, and nine Sells assigned in the past three months, as indicated by the graphic below. After a 75.97% rally in its share price over the past year, the average TSLA price target of $286.14 per share implies 11.93% downside risk.

See more TSLA analyst ratings

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