South Australia Big Battery Launch
Questions on ElonsFAQ asked in this interview (1)
Transcript
0:04Elon MuskWay to go. Everything with the vast majority of the world is still fossil fuel power. And this is really just the beginning. But I think what this serves as is a great example to the rest of the world of what can be done.
0:19Elon MuskSo when this is done, which will be in just a few months, it'll be the largest battery insulation as measured by power by a factor of three in the world.
0:36Elon MuskBut there's still a long way to go. So we sort of need to do something about this. You sort of see the CO2 levels sort of bubble along and then it looks like a wall.
0:55Elon MuskSo it's very important that we take action and take action now and really explain it matters. It matters whether we make the transition to sustainable energy in 5 years, 10 years, 20 years, it really is going to make a difference.
1:14Elon MuskWe're doing everything it can to accelerate it and by working with people like Jay and his team that really enable us, enables this to happen. And with your support.
1:32Elon MuskAs you guys know, a year ago the situation was pretty dire. Yeah, first hand account that reason I was like, why is the place so dark? There's always electricity.
1:51Elon MuskYeah. So now there will be. Anyway, so one tweet leads to another and pretty soon, pretty soon that. So, yeah. So Mike, I saw this on Twitter. It's like, sure,
2:22Elon MuskNext day. By the way, can we do that? Yeah, Exactly. Now it's 280, I guess like even more trouble. So it was only a couple months ago that we met and made the announcement for the deal.
2:39Elon MuskAnd a couple months ago none of this was here and it was just an announcement. But talk is cheap. Action is difficult. The reason we want to work as hard as we possibly could and get as much done as possible was to show that it's not just talk, it's reality.
3:00Elon MuskAnd in fact, everything that you see here, this whole event, everything is powered by those packs.
3:13Elon MuskThere are no generators. This is all literally energy coming from that system over there that used to be that dirt panel. You can sort of get a sense for the progress that was made over time.
3:32Elon MuskThere you go.
3:52Elon MuskYeah,
4:10Elon MuskThis is the actual power flow.
4:19Elon MuskYou can get this on your phone. And so in a few months we'll be finished with the whole system and be delivering a 400 megawatts to South Australia.
4:41Elon MuskSo it feels like you wonder, well, how scalable, how scalable is the system? I mean, how much solar power do you really need to power Australia? And, and then how much battery pack space you need.
4:58Elon MuskIt's actually remarkably tiny. Do you see that sort of that red square is that's the amount of solar area that you need power over square there.
5:19Elon MuskIt's about, that's about a tenth the area of Sydney. Just like, oh, Sydney's pretty big. But still that's. It's really, I think it's about 9 pixels on the map there.
5:34Elon MuskAnd we were going to put the size of the battery pack, but it's way smaller than one pixel. So it's only 7km square kilometers of battery. It will 100 days.
5:48Elon MuskYeah, well, I mean, I mean think of this sort of like it's like satellites, the satellites, they're, you know, thousands of satellites going around Earth and they're all powered with batteries and solar, all of them.
6:01Elon MuskAnd there's some that have been up there for 20 or 30 years with zero maintenance. You can't send a repair person to go up and, you know, repair a satellite at 36,000 kilometers.
6:13Elon MuskSo. So they're designed to just work for 20, 30 years with no maintenance. And really Earth, Earth is itself a satellite. It's a satellite in the sun. And so it's pretty obvious that if small satellites can be solar battery powered, the big ones can too.
6:31Elon MuskThere's this game of loads of things, but I think people sometimes they're not quite sure, well, how big is it actually? And I just want to show it's really nice.
6:42Elon MuskIt's like so small and very careful. And that is actually what the future will look like. And the faster we get there, the better.
6:58Elon MuskAnd there's really just. There's three parts to it. So collect the energy from the sun, store it because the sun doesn't shine at night, and then charge electric cars for transport and that's it.
7:17Elon MuskWell, thank you, thank you for coming. Thanks for driving so far. I hope you enjoy so very much. Appreciate your support. And it's because of the support of people like you they were able to actually get the stuff time.
7:32Elon MuskSo thank you.