China is expected to add 95 to 120 gigawatts (GW) of solar power in 2023. China added 87 GW of new solar power into operation in 2022 making the total installed capacity to 392.6 GW at the end of 2022. China probably already added 30-40 GW in 2023 to bring its total installed solar to 420 GW and 520 GW at the end of 2023. The world installed 268 GW of new solar capacity in 2022, with annual installations expected to hit 315-350 GW in 2023.
Global installed solar generation capacity reached about 1.1 TW in 2022. Total global wind power capacity is up to 837 GW at the end of 2022 with 78 GW added in 2022. This is one fifteenth of Tesla projection of a final total of 30 TW of solar and wind. There should be about 6-8 TW of solar and wind by 2030 and 16-18 TW of solar and wind by 2040.
We are adding solar at about half of where Tesla expects the world to plateau at adding 610 GW/year of solar and 402 GW/year of wind.
Tesla projects the world will need 2.3 TWh per year of megapack fixed storage or 60 Lathrop-sized megapack factories. The world needs about 6 Megapack fixed storage factories to supply the conversion of the global electrical grid. We will need these six Megapack for grid factories by 2028-2032.
As the electric truck and car market (cybertruck and Semi get up to full scale) get up scale there will be a need for another 30 or so Megapack factories. We are at 10% of that final level of annual EVs currently and will get to 20-40% of annual EVs in the next 3-6 years. This will mean the Vehicle driven demand for Megapacks will scale to 10-15 Lathrop Megapack factories over the next 3-6 years. This will mean adding 2-3 Tesla Megapack factories each year starting in 2025 through 2040.
Tesla and its competitors will need to have 30 Megapack equivalent factories by around 2030-2032. If Tesla makes 20 of those Megapack factories it will cost $8 billion in Capex for initial construction and Tesla would be making about $400-500 billion per year in revenue from those factories around 2030. This will scale to $1 trillion per year by 2040. The additional Megapacks in the 2030s will be for the home, commercial building and planes and ships markets. Tesla could have a relatively captive market for Megapacks used for truck megacharging if Tesla dominates with Semi and Cybertruck as I predict. Cybertruck are mostly a North American market product and Tesla has 60-70% market share. It is more difficult to make competitive heavy electric truck technology than it is to make adequate electric cars. The 20-30% advantage in range and efficiency that Tesla has in passenger vehicles will translate to a 30-50% advantage for large trucks.
Tesla Lathrop megapack factories cost about $400 million each and produce about $20-25 billion each year in revenue.
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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When will 100% of mining and manufacturing be consumed by making replacement batteries for the billions of them aging out? What happens when recycled metals don’t perform?
Atoms are atoms- they can be recycled until the protons decay but there are other losses. There will never be a time when 100% of mining manufacturing is replaced by recycled.
How much more money will be pumped into the economy when people don’t have to waste their money on buying gas anymore? And maybe products will be cheaper because transporting them will be cheaper with solar and batteries, thus saving the consumer more money that can be pumped back into the economy.
It seems that Tesla Megapacks has better SW and full integration then the competing BES companies.
However this isn’t such a complex case and probably this advantage will be closed soon.
When that happens, Tesla will probably still keep a nice market share, but due to competitive market, it will have relative low margins.
I think grid backup batteries will not be lithium based, as the high energy density is not needed.
I can’t tell if it will be compressed air, or hydrogen, or aluminum-sulfur batteries or hot stones . Lots of people working very hard to win the prize of severe quadrillion dollars
Lots of people working on car batteries and grid storage for the last 30 years; still Tesla got there first, and the competition lags way behind.
Tesla buys almost all of its batteries from others (Panasonic, LG, SK, BYD, CATL. Tesla is also currently develing their own form factor (4680) for use with almost any chemistry – LFP, Sodium Ion, Lithium NCoMg, etc. Plus Tesla is also building its own Lithium processing plant.
What I am trying to say is this – Elon Musk is brutally hyperfocused. He will do whatever it takes to dominate BEV cars, reusable rockets, self-driving cars, underground tunnelling, space-based internet, or his version of ‘free-speech’ social media.
If he ever gets focused on cellphone manufacturing and the cellphone ecosystems (which would be a natural progression of combining Starlink with X (Twitter’s ‘everything off chute), then he would need levels of protection multiple times better than the secret service.
If you are dealing with China, get your money in advance (and get it out of the country). You are whistling in the wind otherwise, as that is an economy in the wind, operating at the whim of a single melomaniac who believes he is competent to manage everything singlehandedly, even while existing in a bubble of ignorance created by his own inability or fear of having competent subordinates to delegate to. Oh, yeah, and he’s evil.