From StockNews.com: Tesla Motors Inc (NASDAQ:TSLA) is at the forefront of what it believes will be a battery-powered revolution, and this week may well mark the beginning of that nationwide movement toward a clean energy future.

That’s because the largest grid-scale battery network in history will go live this week. From Bloomberg:

Three massive battery storage plants—built by Tesla, AES Corp., and Altagas Ltd.—are all officially going live in southern California at about the same time. Any one of these projects would have been the largest battery storage facility ever built. Combined, they amount to 15 percent of the battery storage installed planet-wide last year.

Wind and solar power generators need a place to store the clean energy they produce, hence the need for big battery farms like the ones opening up this week. Although the battery industry is maturing at a rapid pace, there’s still much more work to be done:

But this is a revolution that’s just getting started, Tesla Chief Technology Officer J.B. Straubel said in an interview on Friday. “It’s sort of hard to comprehend sometimes the speed all this is going at,” he said. “Our storage is growing as fast as we can humanly scale it.”

The price of lithium ion batteries has plummeted in recent years, now making them a viable alternative to natural gas-burning “peaker” plants that go online as needed during peak energy use hours. Tesla believes it can continue to scale the new system extremely quickly and meet its ambitious goals of delivering 15 gigawatt hours of battery storage a year by the 2020s.

Some analysts aren’t convinced the new technology can grow at quite that rate, but so far, it hasn’t been wise to bet against Elon Musk.

Tesla Motors Inc shares fell $1.45 (-0.57%) in premarket trading Monday. Year-to-date, TSLA has gained 18.37%, versus a 2.43% rise in the benchmark S&P 500 index during the same period.

TSLA currently has a StockNews.com POWR Rating of A (Strong Buy), and is ranked #3 of 25 stocks in the Auto & Vehicle Manufacturers category.

This article is brought to you courtesy of StockNews.com.

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