Gary Zhou 
Scale and Tesla’s Master Plan Part 3 came up during Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s recent TED Talks interview. Head of TED, Chris Anderson interviewed Elon Musk, and shortly after a random musical interruption, Tesla’s Master Plan Part 3 came up. I’d previously written a short article about what we might expect Elon to share in the next chapter of Tesla’s Master Plan, and I suspected that artificial intelligence would be part of this plan.
Anderson asked why scale mattered and why Elon was obsessed with it. He added that Elon previously mentioned that scale was at the heart of Tesla’s Master Plan Part 3. Elon replied:
“In order to accelerate the advent of sustainable energy, there must be scale, because we’ve got to transition a vast economy that is currently overly dependent on fossil fuels to a sustainable energy economy.
“The energy’s got to be sustainably generated with wind, solar, hydro, geothermal; I’m a believer in nuclear as well.
“Since solar and wind is intermittent, you have to have stationary storage batteries, and then we’re going to transition all transport to electric. If we do those things, we have a sustainable energy future. The faster we do those things, the less risk we put to the environment.
“Sooner is better, and so, scale is very important. It’s not about press releases, it’s about tonnage. What was the tonnage of batteries produced, and obviously done in a sustainable way? And our estimate is approximately 300 terawatt-hours of battery storage is needed to transition transport, electricity, and heating and cooling to a fully electric situation.
“There may be some different estimates out there, but our estimate is 300 terawatt-hours.”
You can watch the full interview in the video below.
