Cautious Hold on Tesla Amid Energy Storage Growth and Supply Chain UncertaintiesWe are maintaining our Market Perform rating until we can gain greater clarity on the durability of the regulatory credits. Batteries + Existing Nat Gas. On the call, Musk highlighted that batteries can double the grid’s output without building any new generating assets. In our white paper, Plug, we dive deep into this thesis of attaching batteries to existing natural gas plants. The U.S. has about 560 GW of natural gas power capacity, but they operate just above 50% utilization. By attaching batteries on site, we can increase plant utilization similar to nuclear at 90% and store the additional energy, adding up to 200 GW of power capacity without any new generating assets. With four-hour storage, this would require 800 GWh of batteries, or a decade-worth of our estimate of Tesla’s 2026 capacity.