I'm really curious, why people are so obsessed with multiple Gigafactories. What does "buy a Gigafactory" even mean? Panasonic won't be happy setting up equipment at so many places while they still need to sell 700 million of the 18650 cells to Tesla under the 2013 purchase contract.
Can you please explain the benefits of setting up another GF in the middle of a desert, while the largest mines and markets for Tesla's cars are all quite far away from there? Tesla may get some incentives to build a GF there, UAE encourages foreign direct investment. But how is it good for the shareholders? Is it really better to build a GF there vs. some other place?
Most of the electricity generated from solar can be consumed right away, or stored in electric cars by demand shifting. There is no reason to first store everything into batteries, then extract that energy back. EVs are a nice grid stabilizing agents if they can charge when supply is excess. V2G can even supply power if needed.
It is no wonder that storage is a tiny sliver of the total solar generation market. For example, India now has 50 GW solar production, but is only considering a 10 MWh pilot storage project in New Delhi. Battery storage is still expensive and often unnecessary.
Man, you're stuck in the present.
Tesla and Panasonic are friends. In bed together. Model S and X still use 18650 for the foreseeable future, and even if they didn't, why do you continue to act like both Tesla and Panasonic wouldn't simply renegotiate that contract. It was intended to give Panasonic some guarantees that they would have a customer for the batteries if they dusted off some of their mothballed 18650 production for Tesla's benefit, because at the time of that agreement, Tesla was only producing around 20k cars per year, and could still easily have failed somewhere along the growth curve. Now, Panasonic would absolutely be on-board with building another GF, as the one they already have can only support 500k-1M cars, and Tesla already has more demand than that factory can meet in the next 3 years.
Currently most solar generation can be consumed right away (and the real effect is that the utilities simply run natural gas peaker plants less than they used to). This is because there is a very low amount of solar penetration into the market. Baseload power plants such as nuclear and coal cannot have their output scaled rapidly to match demand. Natural gas peaker plants are mostly used for this today. Presently, in most places solar is gaining popularity, utilities allow customers to treat the grid like a giant battery, putting power in during the day, and taking it out at night, through some sort of net metering regime. This does not reflect the reality of how the grid works, and in some places where solar has higher penetration these regimes are already starting to fall apart, and will continue to do so as more and more solar generation comes online.
As solar continues to grow, and ultimately becomes the primary energy source (as it is rapidly becoming the cheapest AND most environmentally friendly option), storage becomes imperative. The first part of bringing solar online just offsets fossil fueled generation, but as you reach a certain point, there aren't any more fossil fuel plants to shut down, and you need the batteries to be able to handle the night-time demand for power with excess generation from the daytime.
As of today, the cost of solar generation plus Tesla batteries to store it in over the lifespan of those components is VERY CLOSE to the retail price of electricity charged by the utilities. Its not that far off from breakeven for a household user to pay for 20 years of electricity vs pay for panels and batteries and go off-grid. The price of utility power rises in perpetuity, and the price of solar+storage is still falling. There will come a day very soon where the switch flips and there is an avalanche of demand for solar+storage and a vacuum of demand for utility power.