California Battery and EV Car Mandates Will Help Tesla Reach $1 trillion by 2030

Ron Baron of Baron Capital believes Tesla’s electric car and battery storage business will be worth $500 billion each by 2030. This will give Tesla an estimated total market cap of $1 trillion in the next 11 years. Baron’s firm, which has $28.3 billion in assets under management, holds 1.65 million TSLA shares. He gives Tesla a better than 50-50 chance of hitting the $1 trillion level. They will be the biggest car company with 10 million to 15 million cars sold per year eventually.

Bloombergnef has increased its forecast for lithium-ion batteries by six times to 1783.5 gigawatt-hours in 2030 versus previous estimates of about 300 gigawatthours.

California Leading the Way with Gigawatts of Utility Scale Batteries

California established the first energy storage target in the USA in 2010. AB 2514 established a target of 1,325 MW of energy storage by 2020 for the state’s three investor-owned utilities (IOUs). The state added a new target in 2016 with bill AB 2868, which calls for 500 MW of behind-the-meter storage. California will likely add another 2000 MW of required storage.

Pacific Gas & Electric has been authorized to replace three natural gas-fired power plants in the state with utility-grade lithium-ion batteries.

There is a 300 MW lithium-ion battery from Dynegy, as well as a 182.5 MW Tesla battery system. Installations from Hummingbird Energy Storage (75 MW) and mNOC (10MW) allow the entire clean energy initiative to reach a total of 567 MW. The battery systems have four-hour ratings. The total energy rating of the entire project is 2.27 GWh.

19 thoughts on “California Battery and EV Car Mandates Will Help Tesla Reach $1 trillion by 2030”

  1. For more than a decade California utilities have been using “demand response programs” that range from cycling residential air conditioning units on and off, to fully automated “load shedding” strategies controlled by computers, to emergency programs where large industrial customers voluntarily reduce their electricity demand in less than an hour upon request. They also use “dynamic pricing” that rewards the customer for voluntarily reducing power consumption during peak periods and incentives/rebates for buying energy efficient products.

  2. So, if I get this right: Major share market investment company buys millions of shares, and then tells the world that these shares are really good and should go up in price.

    He might be right, he might be wrong. But the conflict of interest here means that we should greatly discount what he says.

  3. Yes. New comment system. New random name. “Greencoffee” is better than average.

    Once you log in you can change the name to your choice.

  4. I fail to see what’s a “subsidy” here. The State is putting the money it would otherwise spend on other forms of power generation into storage + solar/wind instead. And it’s taking advantage of the fact that batteries are already being mass produced for the auto industry by private markets.

  5. Sometimes battery banks are cheaper than running more lines, though. If your long range transmission lines are only 45% utilized averaged across a day, then there’s plenty of off-hours to move the energy on the current infrastructure if you can store it and then move it later. So fill up the batteries at night, and discharge them during the day which reduces needs across the transmission infrastructure.

    Doing a HVDC blitz too early is probably a recipe for a white elephant project.

  6. Don’t assume that Li battery storage is too expensive. It might be economical now given the dropping price of Li battery.

    Instead of looking just at storage California should also look at demand control. The ability to turn off or turn down air conditioning and refrigeration for short period of time either remotely or by voltage sensing.

  7. High cost battery storage might be cheaper than instant on gas turbine right now while offering more functionality and reliability.

  8. Can we at least use proper units. What is 1GW of energy storage – the ability to supply a GW for 1 minute, 1 hour, 1day?

    Nothing wrong with using GW hours is there? Then at least we know what we are talking about.

  9. True, but billions of dollars of development are being pumped (at an increasingly frenetic pace) into Lion batteries at No expense to grid builders by the auto industry. Economies of scale are already pushing down Lion prices very aggressively. Other tech may prove more efficient some day but the infrastructure for Lion will come sans the billions in investment to the grid sector….. and it is here today, saving money Today by enhancing (dramatically) the value of Wind and Solar with steady delivery that the grids need. Sometimes “good enough” is the best product.

  10. Because they’re much heavier and won’t give as much range for the same mass of vehicle. Sodium ion might be good though.

  11. Connect BEVs to the grid during work hours, and let the cars AI arbitrage kWhs. No need for utility graft, and a cure for the duck curve. Plus it does not rely on coercion like most government “solutions”.

  12. A mandate for HVDC long run transmission lines should have preceded for leveling added renewable energy to the grid. Going after the lower hanging fruit should be the rule of a thumb. We are not going to use Lithium Ion utility batteries anyway, they are too expensive, rather we should be busy developing and building cheaper Zinc air and Sodium ion and air batteries for that.

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