Ford lands its first customer for energy business. Buy this pivot by the auto giant?

Ford Motor may be primed to become a strong play on buzzy market trends as it ramps up its new battery energy storage systems, or BESS, business, according to a few shops on the Street. On Monday, the automobile company said it would supply up to 20 gigawatt-hours of storage capacity to renewable power developer EDF Power Solutions over five years. The agreement marks the first major deal closed by Ford Energy, or the carmaker's BESS unit that debuted last week, according to a company statement dated May 11. "Today's announcement reinforces Ford's positioning as a domestic supplier of BESS… this [could be] the first of potentially several large customer announcements this year," Morgan Stanley analyst Andrew Percoco said Monday in a note to clients. Morgan Stanley has an equal-weight rating on Ford. It also has a $14 price target on shares, implying roughly 4% upside from Friday's close. Ford Energy aims to capitalize on a boom in artificial intelligence and other buzzy investing trends that require a lot of energy and the infrastructure that supports it. Under its first deal, the business will provide EDF access to as much as 4 GWh of DC Block battery energy storage ​systems per year. …