Like so many other car companies, automakers like Tesla have realized that the future success of a brand depends on the services it can offer just as much as it does on the cars it sells. To that end, we recently heard of the company developing its own robots, although electric vehicles like the upcoming Cybertruck remain its chief concern. The company is expanding to make way for all these new ventures, particularly in Texas, where the brand has a strong presence. Company CEO Elon Musk moved there late last year, presumably to oversee the company's new Terafactory, and now we've learned that Tesla wants to become an electricity provider in the state too.
According to reports from CNBC, Tesla has filed an application with the Texas Public Utility Commission in order to sell electricity in the state. Thus, it seems that Tesla's mystery project we reported on a couple of months back was meant for this purpose. Those massive batteries on-site are where Tesla will be capable of storing 100 megawatts of energy, which it would like to now have connected to the grid. Following the freezing temperatures we saw in Texas earlier this year, this application will likely not see much pushback, since Texas has its grid isolated from the rest of the country and must therefore be self-sustaining.
The application was filed under a new subsidiary called Tesla Energy Ventures, but while other utility-scale energy storage systems have been built by the company in other regions with more on the way, those have thus far not been used to sell electricity to the public but rather to help other companies manage their energy generation, storage, and consumption processes. With the Texas regulatory offices showing that they have failed to reinforce the grid for challenges like extreme cold, the addition of a supplementary source of power should be well received.
Should the application be approved, Tesla's energy division that sells solar panels and the like will provide employees to make sales and provide customer service. We see no downsides to this, and it goes to show that car companies will never be just that ever again.