Tesla Powerwall Launch
Questions on ElonsFAQ asked in this interview (2)
Transcript
0:15Elon MuskAll right, welcome everyone to basically the announcement of Tesla Energy. All right,
0:25Elon MuskSo what I'm going to talk about tonight is about a fundamental transformation of how the world works, about how energy is delivered across Earth. This is how it is today.
0:38Elon MuskIt's pretty bad. That sucks. Exactly. I just want to be clear because sometimes some people are confused about this. This is real, okay? This is actually how most, most power in the world is generated with fossil fuels.
0:55Elon MuskAnd if you look at the curve, that's a famous curve of the Keeling curve, which shows the growth in CO2 concentration in the atmosphere. And every year it ratchets up, it gets higher and higher and if we do nothing, that's where it's headed to levels that we don't even see in the fossil record.
1:16Elon MuskSo this is. Well, I think we collectively should do something about this.
1:28Elon MuskAnd not try to win the Darwin Award for us and a lot of other creatures too. So the way the grid works today is you've got coal, you've got natural gas, nuclear, hydro and wind and solar, but not enough wind and solar, obviously.
1:48Elon MuskSo that's sort of the, the grid typically in most countries. And then you'll, you'll notice something which is that the, there's a quite a big difference in peak to trough usage.
1:58Elon MuskSo the, the peak usage is typically at least twice the, the trough usage. So please bear that in mind. I'm going to reference that again later in the presentation.
2:07Elon MuskThat, that's an important point. So what we're here to talk about is the solution. I actually think it's really a fairly obvious solution, but it's something that we need to do.
2:18Elon MuskAnd the solution is in two parts. Part one, the sun.
2:26Elon MuskWe have this handy fusion reactor in the sky called the sun. You don't have to do anything, it just works, shows up every day and produces ridiculous amounts of power.
2:41Elon MuskOkay, the. Now a lot of people aren't clear on how much surface area is needed to generate enough power to completely get the United States off of fossil fuels.
2:56Elon MuskMost people have no idea. They think that it must be some huge amount of area. Like maybe you need these satellites in space and like space solar power. If anyone should be in favor of space solar power, it should be me.
3:10Elon MuskBut this is completely unnecessary because actually very little land is needed to get rid of all fossil fuel electricity generation in the United States. That blue square there is the land area that's needed to transition the United States to a zero carbon electricity situation.
3:32Elon MuskIt's really not much. And most of that area is going to be in rooftops, so you won't need to disturb land. You won't need to find new areas. It's mostly just going to be on existing.
3:45Elon MuskThe roofs of existing homes and buildings. So I really think that image is an important one to bear in mind when people are thinking about solar power. Like, how much will it take?
3:54Elon MuskIs it going to take some enormous amount? No, it's just that blue square. Okay. Blue spark. Now, the obvious problem with solar power is that the sun does not shine at night.
4:10Elon MuskI think most people are aware of this. So this problem needs to be solved. We need to store the energy that is generated during the day so that you can use it at night.
4:23Elon MuskAnd also, even during the day, the energy generation varies. There's a lot more energy generated in the middle of the day than at dawn or dusk. So it's very important to smooth out that energy generation and retain enough so that you can use it at night.
4:41Elon MuskNow, what you may not have noticed in that earlier slide where I showed the blue square was that there was one red pixel. In the blue square was a red pixel.
4:52Elon MuskNow it's zoomed in so you can see that red pixel. That is the size of the batteries needed to transition all of the United States to being solar with batteries.
5:03Elon MuskOkay? It is a very tiny amount. Okay? One pixel. Just remember that one pixel is the size of the batteries needed to. For the United States to have no fossil fuel generated electricity.
5:20Elon MuskThis is no room at all. So not a problem for solar or batteries. Now, the issue with existing batteries is that they suck. Okay? They're really horrible. They look like that.
5:40Elon MuskThey're expensive, they're unreliable. They're sort of stinky, ugly, bad in every way. Very expensive. You have to get some sort of. You know, you need to combine multiple systems.
5:54Elon MuskThere's not one integrated place you can go and buy a battery that just works, which is what people really want to buy. So we have to. We have to come up with a solution.
6:06Elon MuskThat's the missing piece. That's the thing that's needed to have a proper transition to a sustainable energy world. So the missing piece is what we're going to show you tonight,
6:45Elon MuskSam.
7:26Elon MuskAll right,
7:33Elon MuskSo this is. This is a product we call the Tesla powerwall. And if you look back against that wall, you'll see a whole bunch of them as well, in different colors.
7:43Elon MuskSo you can pick your favorite color. And it looks like a beautiful sculpture on the wall. So it's very important. I want to point out a few things that are very important about this the fact that it's wall mounted is vital because it means you don't need to have a battery room.
8:02Elon MuskYou don't have to have some room filled with nasty batteries. It means that a normal household can mount this on their garage or on the outside wall of their house.
8:14Elon MuskAnd it doesn't take up any room. I mean, it's flat against the wall. It has all of the integrated safety systems, the thermal controls, the DC to DC converter.
8:25Elon MuskIt's designed to work very well with solar systems right out of the box. And it's. So it addresses all the needs. And if you're thinking about sort of buying a battery, what does this provide you?
8:39Elon MuskWell, it gives you peace of mind. So if there's a cut in the utilities, you're always going to have power. Particularly if you're in a place that's very cold now.
8:48Elon MuskYou don't have to worry about being out of power if there's an ice storm. You can actually go, if you want, completely off grid. You can take your solar panels, charge the battery packs, and that's all you use.
9:03Elon MuskSo it gives you safety, security, and it gives you a complete and affordable solution. And the cost of this is $3,500.
9:24Elon MuskAnd it's, and it's designed so you can stack them on the wall. So if you look at the wall in the back, you'll see that there, there are, you can, there are some that are paired up.
9:32Elon MuskSo you can have two. You can actually stack up to nine of the power walls. So you have. I mean, even if you've got a pretty big thing going on, you can have 90 kilowatt hours.
9:41Elon MuskThat's a lot. And very importantly, this is going to be a great solution for people in remote parts of the world where there's no electricity wires or where the electricity is extremely intermittent or extremely expensive.
9:58Elon MuskSo you can take the Tesla powerwall and it can scale globally. And in fact, I think what we'll see is something similar to what happened with the cell phones versus landlines, where the cell phones actually leapfrogged the landlines, and there wasn't a need to put landlines in a lot of countries or in remote locations.
10:18Elon MuskSo people, people in a remote village or an island somewhere can take solar panels, combine it with the Tesla powerwall, and never have to worry about having electricity lines.
10:28Elon MuskI think this is going to be great. Having electricity lines is not the most pretty thing in the world. So being able to just have this solution that just works wherever you are, I think is going to be Incredibly helpful to, to people that don't have electricity today.
10:46Elon MuskSo,
10:58Elon MuskSo you can order the powerwall right now on the Tesla website. Actually go to teslaenergy.com and you can order the powerwall right now. And we're gonna start, we're gonna start shipping in approximately three or four months.
11:15Elon MuskAnd initially the ramp will be, will be slow because these, these packs will be made in our Fremont factory. And then next year the ramp will go much, much higher as we transition to the gigafactory in Nevada.
11:31Elon MuskSo this is a good solution for homes and perhaps for some small commercial applications. But what about something that scales much to much, much larger levels? So for that we have something else.
11:46Elon MuskSo we have the power pack.
11:54Elon MuskSo the Tesla power pack is designed to scale infinitely. So you literally make this into a gigawatt hour class solution. You could go gigawatt class or higher. And in fact we already have one utility that wants to do a 250 megawatt hour installation just using the power pack.
12:20Elon MuskAnd now I think it would be a good idea, this would be a good time to transition the power that we're using in the building to being battery powered.
12:30Elon MuskOf course. So let's go to the camera feed to. Let's go, let's go check out the power meter.
12:44Elon MuskOh wow. The grid, it's actually zero. This entire night has been powered by batteries.
13:02Elon MuskNot only that, the batteries were charged by the solar panels on the roof of this building. So this entire night, everything you're experiencing is stored sunlight.
13:21Elon MuskSo when I say scalable, I really mean scalable. So we can do gigawatt class installations with the power pack. It's, the whole system is designed, literally designed for infinite scalability.
13:35Elon MuskSo we could power a small city like Boulder with a gigawatt hour class pack. And we can, we can keep going here. So let's, let's. What I want to do is explore what is needed, what's really needed.
13:49Elon MuskSo to transition the world to sustainable energy, is this actually possible? Is it something that is within the ability of humanity to actually do, or is it some insurmountable, super difficult, impossible thing?
14:02Elon MuskIt's not. So with 160 million power packs, you can transition the United states. Okay. With 900 million, you can transition the world. You can basically make all electricity generation in the world renewable.
14:19Elon MuskSo. And primarily solar. It will be so. And then going a little further, if you want to transition all transport and all electricity generation and all, all heating to renewable, you need approximately 2 billion power packs.
14:37Elon MuskNow that may seem like an insane number and I'm very tempted to do the, you know, the, the billion thing, but restrain my hand.
14:51Elon MuskBut in, in order to, to. It's like 2 billion power packs. Is that, is that a crazy number? Is that an impossible number? It is not. In fact, the number of cars and trucks that we have on the road is approximately 2 billion.
15:06Elon MuskAnd every, every 20 years, approximately, that gets refreshed. There's 100 million new cars and trucks made every year. So the point I want to make is that this is actually within the power of humanity to do.
15:19Elon MuskWe have done things like this before and so it's not impossible. It is really something that we can do and in fact it's something that obviously we're starting to do with, with Gigafactory1.
15:38Elon MuskSo yeah, so the way we're approaching the Gigafactory is really like it's a product. So we're not really thinking of it in the traditional way that people think of as a factory, like a building with a bunch of sort of off the shelf equipment in it.
15:57Elon MuskWhat we're really designing in the Gigafactory is a giant machine. It's actually, it's a really think of like, it's like a product of Tesla. We're making this really big product that doesn't happen to move, but it's really big.
16:12Elon MuskAnd, and that's what we're doing is Gigafactory version one. And we're building that in Nevada right now. And there will need to be many gigafactories in the future. And with, you know, this, I don't, I do want to emphasize that this is not something that we think Tesla's going to do alone.
16:28Elon MuskWe think there's going to need to be many other companies building sort of gigafactory class operations of their own, and we hope they do. And the Tesla policy of open sourcing patents will continue for the Gigafactory and for the power pack and all these other things.
16:50Elon MuskSo we want to show people the most importantly that this, this is possible. That if you look at that, that's the future we could have. Where the curve slowly rolls over and goes to zero, no incremental CO2.
17:08Elon MuskThat's the future we need to have. And that's something that, and the path that I've talked about, the solar panels and the batteries, it's the only path that I know that can do this.
17:22Elon MuskAnd I think it's something that we must do and we can do and that we will do.
17:41Elon MuskSo thank you all for coming tonight and I hope you had a great time. Thanks,
17:50Elon MuskSam.