Tesla CEO Elon Musk has claimed that it would take an investment of $10 trillion to shift humanity to a sustainable energy economy by 2050.
At the Tesla 'Master Plan' Investor Day event, the company said that such a transition was "entirely feasible."
The company has yet to provide detailed information on its analysis but has promised to share more at some point in the future.
This is Musk's third 'Master Plan.' Previous editions have been overviews of potential Tesla products and features that may or may not come to fruition, but this addresses wider, global, issues.
Master Plan 3 includes adding renewable power to the existing grid, producing more electric vehicles, installing heat pumps in homes and buildings, using high-temperature heat delivery and hydrogen for industrial applications, and building sustainably fueled planes and boats. Musk’s plan is to create “a sustainable energy civilization.”
"There is a clear path to a fully sustainable Earth - with abundance," Musk said. “It doesn’t require destroying natural habitats, it doesn’t require us to be austere and stop using electricity... I'm often shocked by how few people realize this."
Key to the company's thesis is that an electrified ecosystem has significantly less wasted energy, requiring around half as much energy consumption for the same standard of living.
Also central to making a renewable energy transition possible is around 240TWh of battery storage, 30TW of renewable power, and 0.2 percent of the world's land. Musk said that initial calculations put it at $6 trillion, but by making the study "more pessimistic" they came to an overall cost of $10 trillion, spread across the next few decades.
Those costs include mining and refining critical materials, and vehicle recycling plants, as well as the power generation and storage systems themselves.
"If this was spread out over 10 years it would be one percent of the global economy, over 20 years it would be half a percent, so this is not a big number relative to the global economy," Musk continued. Tesla claimed that in the last 20 years, $14 trillion was spent on fossil fuel infrastructure.
In presentation slides, Tesla estimated that renewably powering the existing grid would reduce fossil fuel use by 35 percent, switching to heat pumps and electric vehicles would cut another 22 and 21 percent respectively, while high-temperature heat delivery and hydrogen would save 17 percent. Five more percent would be saved by moving to sustainably fueled planes and boats - for a total of 98 percent saved.
"My personal opinion is that as we improve the energy density of batteries we will see all transportation go fully electric, with the exception of rockets," Musk said.
Pulling this off would require solar and wind deployments to jump three times over 2022 levels, EV production to grow 11 times, and battery production to soar by some 29 times, and maintain that level every year.
Musk pledged to publish "a detailed whitepaper with all of our assumptions and calculations," which will hopefully allow external experts to review the merits of the claims.
Likewise, Musk’s promise that Tesla owners with FSD would be able to earn passive income by sending their vehicles to autonomously pick up passengers as a robotaxi service has failed to materialize. In recent months, Musk has suggested that Tesla would make a standalone robotaxi vehicle, casting doubt on his original proposal that Teslas on the road today could qualify for such a service.
Civilization requires power. For a while, it can get by with the power supplies we currently use, fossil fuel, nuclear fuel; hydroelectric, solar, and wind. Only the last 3 are sustainable. The first two will run out at some point, very likely well before the end of this century, especially if the less developed parts of the world come up to OECD standards.
ReplyDeleteHowever, using fusion to breed fissile material for current nuclear reactors could play an important role well before the century’s end.
"New record results confirm to us that ITER will work well. Namely, in the 1997 experiments, the inner plasma-facing armor of the JET tokamaks was made of porous carbon fiber sheets. Although they withstood temperatures of up to 3000 degrees Celsius, they strongly absorbed the fusion fuel, i.e., the deuterium and tritium gasses, so that the reaction was 'smothered'. At the same time, a large amount of carbon dust was produced, which also absorbed the fusion fuel.
Since then, efforts have been made to avoid absorption of the fuel in the walls by using tungsten and beryllium armor, as it is common today. Earlier experiments were conducted with extra caution in 2014 because it was not clear how the fusion dust would be composed under the new conditions, how much it would absorb the fusion fuel, and whether it would self-ignite and be explosive. All these doubts were dispelled by the analysis of fusion dust particles carried out during the three-year period from 2017 to 2020 at the RBI ion microprobe in Laboratory for ion beam interactions, in collaboration with colleagues from the UK, Sweden, and Poland," explained Dr. Tonči Tadić, head of the Croatian fusion activities within the EUROfusion consortium and coordinator of the DONES-PreP Project Council in Croatia.
The requirements on a fusion device used as a breeder are considerably relaxed from the requirements for pure fusion. It is likely that an ITER-type device, could be used for fusion breeding on a large scale. Fusion breeding can support nuclear fuel for civilization, at 30- 40 terawatts (TW), at least as far into the future as the dawn of civilization was in the past. As pressures mount to address the effects of climate change through decarbonizing energy production, this success is a major step forward on fusion’s roadmap as a safe, efficient, low-carbon means of tackling the global energy crisis.