Doesn’t get any more macro than this.
Post with details over on the Tesla board (Master Plan Part 3: Sustainable Energy for All of Earth). One item of interest is that Musk’s name is not on this document, neither as a contributor nor an advisor.
-IGU-
240 Terrawatts of storage.
30 Terrawatts of renewable power
10 trillion dollars of investment.
I have some work to do today so I cannot parse this now. However, we could check to see how many Gigawatts of storage manufacturing can come on line each year, minus the estimated amount of storage that will reach end of life each year. The problems, like not enough lithium or cobalt are not dead ends, rather profit opportunities and engineering challenges.
The 30 Terrawatts, mostly of solar, is the same.
The 10 trillion is interesting, just financing this would make enough money to start a dynasty. However, the opportunities for trade that 30 terrawatts and 240 terawatts present represent could make someone like Enphase the next “largest market cap in the world”
We really should do some free thinking and scenario running with this.
Cheers
Qazulight
These numbers are big enough to not mean a lot unless compared to how much is invested (spent) on our current energy infrastructure annually and/or how much consumers spend on energy today. Not just direct spending, such as filling up a gas tank or heating a home, but indirectly through shipping charges, etc.
Mike
I’m to the point where I don’t know what to believe or hope for anymore. Musk/Tesla seem very optimistic - this CAN be done, it is not unreasonable. Then you get stuff like this come out: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/04/06/outdated-us-energy-grid-tons-of-clean-energy-stuck-waiting-in-line.html. TLDR: the grid itself is near capacity, and getting new generation sources online involves years of paperwork, LOTS of money, usually in order to add high-power capacity lines to get the new power generation onto the grid itself.
Exactly. That takes work and time and I have not even been able to read the entire report. I have seen enough impossible things in the last 40 years that this seems possible and figuring out how to make the most money off of it seems like the right thing to do.
Just some musings. . . we can expect about 10 percent of the installed battery storage base to roll of every year. (This is a wild guess and it could be as low as 2.5 percent or as high as 40 percent, but for discussion 10 percent is easy math) If 240 terawatts is installed, then we will need 24 terawatts of battery production to keep the installed base at 240 terawatts. Not having read the report, I do not know if that includes transportation storage and hand held device storage.
Just glancing at the upfront numbers it appears that we need 6 times the storage than we do the production. That is an interesting metric I would like to delve into in the report.
Also the 10 trillion would be very interesting, because, as you say, how much is new money and how much is directed money. Just a quick and gross thought, how much are we spending replenishing oil reserves. That money would be freed up for investment in solar panels. Of course it is unlikely that it will appear that way as the world wide economy would tend to grow quickly and consume the capital then regurgitate it back into the economy where it would end up in either panels or storage.
Cheers
Qazulight (Gotta go, building custom barn doors)
Or the problems that we see outlined here:
TLDR; there’s lots of money for big energy and other infrastructure projects, but other requirements of the funding bill are going to keep it from being deployed quickly.
It’s the problem that Ezra Klein labeled “everything-bagel liberalism.” If every ostensibly good idea or policy preference gets loaded into every process for every project, you can’t do things fast enough or cheap enough to achieve your goals. If every project has to have all of: community input and challenge rights, full environmental analysis and zero unmitigated environmental impact, full protections for labor, buy American protections, and broad inclusion of frontline communities…well, you’re not going to build very much very quickly. To build fast enough to affect climate in time, you’re going to have to be open to the possibility that maybe among the many projects that get built, some might not be great.
ON POINT! No solution is perfect for all possible future perfection-state requirements, but that’s not a reason to build an incrementally BETTER solution now, and keep improving it!