Graphite, Lithium and Cobalt Sectors Await Tesla Battery News

Tesla Motors Inc. (NASDAQ:TSLA) is set reveal a new generation of batteries, and according to Bloomberg, they’re “designed to store growing volumes of solar and wind energy.” The technology was originally designed for the company’s electric vehicles, and word is that if it hits the mark, Tesla “will have spun a significant second business off the technology.”

As quoted in the market news:

Nobody in the power industry has yet been able to come up with a cost-effective way to store large volumes of energy for later distribution. Tesla is making a bet that its huge $5 billion ‘gigafactory’ currently under construction near Reno, Nevada, will enable the mass production needed to drive down the cost of batteries and make them competitive for a broad range of customers, including traditional suppliers of electricity.

Tesla has scheduled an event Thursday at its design studio in Hawthorne, California, to announce both a Tesla home battery and what it called last week in a note to investors ‘a very large utility-scale battery.’

Already, those watching the graphite, lithium and cobalt markets are getting excited about the impending announcement. Simon Moores of Benchmark Mineral Intelligence released a note Thursday morning that looks at what exactly Tesla is set to announce. He states:

In what is likely to be one of the industry’s worst kept secrets, Tesla Motors is set to announce its first residential scale battery, powered by Gigafactory lithium-ion cells. In fact according to Benchmark Mineral Intelligenceestimations, Tesla could produce enough lithium-ion batteries by 2020 to power 3.5m homes.

Not much is known about Tesla’s first battery that can power your home … But it is a smart move designed not only as a fail-safe for slow EV adoption, but also to create a new market and fulfil Tesla’s grand Gigafactory ambitions.

If the battery pack that Tesla designed for Solar City is anything to go by (below), we can expect a lithium-ion battery that uses a nickel-cobalt-aluminium cathode and a graphite anode. The battery is expected to be roughly the size of a briefcase with a capacity of 10kWh, somewhat smaller than the 60kWh and 85kWh batteries Tesla uses in the Model S, but without the need to shift a two tonne car.

Tesla is due to make its announcement Thursday April 30, 2015 at 8:00 p.m. PST. Stay tuned for more information.

Click here to read the full Bloomberg report.