Nonrenewables are a walking dead at this point. I wouldn’t personally tell the story of it through Musk—I think cost curves and China are a more relevant framing—but the end point is much the same.
Yes, Tesla’s role in battery storage is actually odd and niche—their importance seems to be reducing the skill level required to built a battery energy storage facility by packaging batteries into self contained modules that contain all of the required equipment (thermal management, inverter, etc). The battery cells come from Asia.
The question to which Musk is relevant is not “how did we get to a world where battery storage is feasible” but “why would someone be investing in this ten or fifteen years ago when the technology was not there”. It seems to me to be a case where a futurist calculation that ignores the engineering details plus seemingly naive reasoning that the rest is “just engineering” would have actually given the right answer.
I need to remake the graph with more recent data, but here is a graphic of US energy additions.
https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/53977597462_2095add298_k.jpg
Nonrenewables are a walking dead at this point. I wouldn’t personally tell the story of it through Musk—I think cost curves and China are a more relevant framing—but the end point is much the same.
Yes, Tesla’s role in battery storage is actually odd and niche—their importance seems to be reducing the skill level required to built a battery energy storage facility by packaging batteries into self contained modules that contain all of the required equipment (thermal management, inverter, etc). The battery cells come from Asia.
The question to which Musk is relevant is not “how did we get to a world where battery storage is feasible” but “why would someone be investing in this ten or fifteen years ago when the technology was not there”. It seems to me to be a case where a futurist calculation that ignores the engineering details plus seemingly naive reasoning that the rest is “just engineering” would have actually given the right answer.