Elon Musk hints at Tesla finally increasing Powerwall availability

Elon Musk is signaling that Tesla is ramping up Powerwall production and will finally increase the availability of the home battery pack.

Tesla has been production constrained with the Powerwall for a long time.

The demand has been strong in several markets, like the US and Australia, but production hasn’t been able to catch up despite significant ramp-ups.

As we previously reported, it took Tesla about five years to deploy the first 100,000 Powerwalls, and then it deployed 100,000 more home battery packs in 2020 alone. Despite the ramp-up, Tesla couldn’t catch up to the demand, and it even had to tie Powerwalls to solar power systems and stopped taking orders for the home battery pack.

Last night, Tesla CEO Elon Musk shared the Powerwall page and suggested that people should order for “blackout protection”:

The comment was likely in response to the electricity issues that California is currently having and the brownouts that some are experiencing.

However, you still can’t order the Powerwall for backup power. When following Musk’s link, you end up having to order both the Powerwall and Tesla solar panels. But in a follow-up tweet, Musk said that Tesla might open up orders for Powerwall by itself by the end of the year:

For now, supply is too low, but ordering a Powerwall by itself should be possible end of year.

This would signal that Tesla might be expecting to increase production capacity and be able to improve the availability of the Powerwall.

We recently reported that Tesla is planning new energy products coming this year, including an updated Powerwall. The company has also been ramping up solar installations recently since those are now mostly combined with Powerwalls, and it looks like the automaker has already been ramping up production.

But catching up to demand has been hard. Around this time last year, Musk said that Tesla had a backlog of around 80,000 Powerwalls.

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