Tesla for the day

A SmartPlanet Daily article by Charlie Osborne:

Tesla Motors, Panasonic, and other firms are planning to invest $965 million in the construction of a lithium-ion battery plant. According to a report from Japanese publication Nikkei, the US-based plant has a live date of 2017, and the factory will handle "everything from processing raw materials to assembly."
Panasonic, an investor in Tesla Motors, is inviting a number of Japanese materials makers to sign on, and total investment is expected to top a hundred billion yen (nearly a million dollars), according to the publication.
The batteries that will be manufactured at this plant will be small and lightweight, and designed for electric vehicles. Tesla hopes to bring down the price of EVs to our traditional fossil fuel cars through the construction of the plant. Tesla's cheapest EV, the Model S, sells in the US for roughly $70,000.
Nikkei said that the plant will supply Tesla with batteries, but may also supply Toyota and other automakers. "Home use" storage battery manufacture is also being considered to boost production numbers.
While Tesla hopes to boost EV sales this year to 35,000, helped in part by the Model S, Panasonic is moving towards the automotive industry in a bid to improve financial losses caused by sluggish display and television sales.

A SmartPlanet Daily article by Kirsten Korosec:

Tesla Motors' all-electric luxury car— along with the company's fast-charging network— has been called a game changer for the auto industry. But what about the electric utility industry?
Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas thinks it will. In a note to investors, Jonas doubled the firm's  projected price for the stock from $153 to $320, citing the potential for Tesla to disrupt industries outside of its automotive niche, reported Bloomberg. The price hike is linked largely to expectations that Tesla CEO Elon Musk will reveal details this week on his plan to build a gigafactory battery plant that aims to lower the cost of battery cells.
Jonas wrote in an investor note entitled Nikola’s Revenge: TSLA’s New Path of Disruption:

Tesla's quest to disrupt a trillion dollar car industry offers an adjacent opportunity to disrupt a trillion dollar electric utility industry. If it can be a leader in commercializing battery packs, investors may never look at Tesla the same way again.
During the company's fourth-quarter earnings call last week, Musk confirmed plans to build a massive lithium-ion battery factory. Although the details were few and far between, Musk did say that plans were in the works to integrate precursor material, cell, module and pack production into one massive facility. 

Jonas argues the cell production from the battery plant has the potential to double Tesla's share of the global car market. If Tesla can become the world's low-cost producer in energy storage, the company could disrupt adjacent industries, according to Jonas.
The Morgan Stanley investment note argues Tesla cars— 370,000 of which will be produced annually by 2020— could act as a mobile energy storage fleet. In the note, he asks and then answers: "Does Tesla make high-performance automobiles, or a mobile fleet of electrical grid storage? Technically, both."
Morgan Stanley calculates that the roughly forty thousand Tesla cars on US roads contain 3.3 GW of storage capacity. equal to 0.3 percent of US electrical production capacity and fourteen percent of total UD grid storage, including pumped hydro. By 2028, the firm estimates Tesla's 3.9 million cars in North America will have an energy storage capacity of 237 GW (and 384 GW globally), equal to twenty-two percent of today's US production capacity and nearly ten times larger than the entirety of US grid storage that exists today.
There are questions and plenty of uncertainty in this rosy picture. For one, how capable is Tesla of producing battery cells? 

Rico says that's what Panasonic is for...