Tesla published a 41 page Master Plan Part 3. This gives all of Tesla estimates of how many vehicles and types and energy storage and other costs and materials needed for full electrification of the world.
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.
Known for identifying cutting edge technologies, he is currently a Co-Founder of a startup and fundraiser for high potential early-stage companies. He is the Head of Research for Allocations for deep technology investments and an Angel Investor at Space Angels.
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This is the same fairy tale, updated for current tech, that the Rocky Mountain Institute trotted out over a decade ago and before. The TED talks are quite entertaining and inspirational with Amory Lovins.
The world doesn’t work this way. People do not hold these values and do not expend a large amount of their daily energy, passion, and focus on making the world sustainable – especially with such a high-technology focus, especially from the 75%+ part of the world that is not well-developed. Gradual substitution, updating, and optimizing of home, business, and community occurs in long equipment service life cycles driven by profit, opportunity, and local regulatory/ political circumstances.
We will not be meeting a single Paris Accord CO2 goal by 2100, much less 2050. ICEs will never be fully eliminated outside of western Europe and a few blue US states. Hybrids will dominate. Oil will not fall below 50M barrels per day, this century, with world reserves constantly being pushed out – 30, 40, 50…. years. We will adjust, mitigate, adapt, suffer, and persevere. Hunger will be significantly reduced but the world population will still hit 12B by 2100. Richer countries will contain large groups who will ‘virtue signal’ their minimal carbon footprint with very little traction outside of major metropolitan centres elsewhere in the world.
Tesla, in general, and Elon Musk specifically, has incubated, resuscitated, and driven forward an industry, even sector, that few thought possible over the last decade – with the resources, labour, consumers, and tech sitting idly by to be finally motivated and assembled by a visionary — but that is saturating and hitting political boundaries – irrespective of the increasing industries showing mediocre to token support. This is a rich world, enviro-zealot strategy – pleasant to dream about, but utterly simplistic in its business model and underlying assumptions in the motivations and resources of the ‘rest of us’ to buy in.
Data from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and Princeton’s Net Zero study ? GIGO. No nuclear included. Uranium is about six orders of magnitude better at storing energy than any of these battery techs, whose toehold in the current world energy scene is tiny.