Gary Zhou 
Tesla announced in a tweet on Wednesday that it has installed its 200,000th Powerwall, the company’s home battery storage device. During a first-quarter earnings call in April, Tesla’s CFO Zachary Kirkhorn told investors that the company is still working through a “multi-quarter backlog on Powerwall,” implying that the number of installations will continue to rise in the coming months.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk stated on the earnings call that the company will no longer offer its Solar Roof panels without a Powerwall. He said that extensive solar panel installation combined with house battery packs (made by Tesla, of course) will transform every home into a distributed power plant.
“…Every solar Powerwall installation that the house or apartment or whatever the case may be, will be its own utility,” he said. “And so even if all the lights go out in the neighborhood, you will still have power. So that gives people energy security. And we can also, in working with the utilities, use the Powerwalls to stabilize the overall grid.”
He cited the February storm in Texas, which, when combined with record-breaking electricity demand, left millions without power in subzero conditions. In such case, he proposed, utilities may negotiate with Powerwall users to discharge stored electricity back onto the grid to fulfill demand.
“So if the grid needs more power, we can actually then with the consent, obviously, of the homeowner and the partnership with the utility, we can then actually release power on to the grid to take care of peak power demand,” he said.
Tesla will have installed 100,000 Powerwalls in April 2020, five years after launching the first-generation Powerwall. That means the company’s sales numbers were doubled in a single year after taking five years to achieve.
