Tesla and its CEO estimate that continuing to invest in oil, natural gas and coal will cost $4 trillion more than in clean energy.
Elon Musk has made it his mission to transform civilization as it is today.
The Techno King, as he’s known at electric vehicle maker Tesla, sees himself as an innovator, whose mission is to solve the most pressing problems facing the planet.
He also believes that his role is to give people a dream, hence the promise to contribute to the conquest of Mars in the coming years.
But while he waits to see humans inhabit the Red Planet, Musk is tackling the energy emergency that continues to divide fossil fuel advocates and environmental activists, who believe that saving the planet begins with eliminating polluting energy.
The billionaire and Tesla (TSLA) – Get a free reporthave just released Tesla’s Master Plan 3, which they present as the path to achieving a fully sustainable global energy economy through end-use electrification and sustainable electricity generation and storage. This plan had been first announced by the serial entrepreneur on March 1 during Tesla’s investor day in Austin, Texas, but not in detail.
According to the 41-page white paper, converting the world to clean energy requires an investment of about $10 trillion, Musk and Tesla claim. This is $4 trillion less compared to the $14 trillion projected to be spent over the next 20 years on fossil fuels (oil, natural gas, and coal) at the 2022 investment rate.
“This paper finds that a sustainable energy economy is technically feasible and requires less investment and less material extraction than continuing with the current unsustainable energy economy,” Musk and Tesla argued. “While many previous studies have come to a similar conclusion, this study seeks to advance thinking related to material intensity, manufacturability, and manufacturing investment required for a transition across all energy sectors across the globe.”
You can read Tesla’s master plan 3 HERE.
Model 3 vs. Toyota Corolla
To achieve a world without fossil fuels, the billionaire and Tesla are betting on renewable energy and increasing electricity storage capacity. They propose to massively build, in the next 20 years, solar panel factories and metal refineries to boost the world economy.
They argue that in an electric economy with sustainably generated power, most of the upstream losses associated with mining, refining, and burning fuels to generate electricity are eliminated, just as downstream losses associated with unsustainable end uses are eliminated. electrical.
However, some industrial processes will require higher energy input (for example, producing green hydrogen), and some mining and refining activities need to increase (related to metals for batteries, solar panels, wind turbines, etc.), they warned.
They propose six steps to fully electrify the economy and eliminate the use of fossil fuels: repower the existing grid with renewable energy and switch to electric vehicles because, they say, EVs are about 4 times more efficient than internal combustion engine vehicles, due to to increased powertrain efficiency, regenerative braking capability and optimized platform design.
“As a specific example, the Tesla Model 3’s power consumption is 131 MPGe vs. a Toyota Corolla at 34 MPG, or 3.9 times less, and the ratio increases when upstream losses are taken into account, such as energy consumption related to the extraction and refining of fuel”, Musk and Tesla stated.
MPGe stands for miles per gallon equivalent, or the equivalent of how many miles an EV can travel using a gallon of gasoline.
The other steps to achieve a sustainable energy economy are to electrify the high-temperature heat supply and the production of hydrogen. Tesla and Musk believe that industrial processes that require high temperatures, such as the production of steel, chemicals, fertilizers, and cement, can be served directly by electrical resistance, electric arc furnaces, or buffered through thermal storage, to harness renewable energy from low cost. when it is available in excess.
electric planes
Also very interesting is the fact that Tesla and Musk advocate electric planes and boats. They explain that both continental and intercontinental shipping can be electrified by optimizing speed and design routes, to allow for smaller batteries with more frequent charging stops on long routes.
As for aircraft, short-haul flights can be electrified through optimized aircraft design and flight path at current battery power densities, they argue.
“Longer-haul flights, estimated at 80% of the energy consumption of air travel (85 billion gallons/year of jet fuel worldwide), can be powered by synthetic fuels generated from excess electricity renewable by taking advantage of the Fischer-Tropsch process, which uses a mixture of carbon monoxide (CO) and hydrogen (H2) to synthesize a wide variety of liquid hydrocarbons, and has been shown to be a viable pathway for the synthesis of synthetic jet fuel they said.
Finally, Musk and Tesla recommend building the generation and storage portfolio: solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries.
In all, the billionaire estimates that 30,000 gigawatts of renewable energy capacity and 240,000 gigawatt-hours of storage batteries will be needed. Demand for metals, such as nickel, lithium, copper, graphite, cobalt, manganese, needed in the development of batteries and other clean energy equipment, will also skyrocket, according to Tesla and Musk. They estimate that approximately $502 billion will have to be dedicated to the extraction of these metals and $662 billion to their refining.
However, Musk and Tesla argue that the volume of extraction for metals in their scenario will be much less than the volume of resources currently extracted for fossil fuels.
According to the Circularity Gap Report 2023, 68 gigatonnes (Gt) of material, excluding biomass, are extracted from the earth each year. Fossil fuels represent 15.5 Gt. In a sustainable energy economy, material extraction will decrease by 10.8 Gt, with most of the fossil fuel extraction replaced by 3.3 Gt of renewable material extraction, Musk and Tesla said.
“We are trying to convey a message of hope and optimism based on real physics and real calculations,” Musk said last month. “No, it’s not wishful thinking. Earth can and will move towards a sustainable energy economy and will do so in its lifetime.”
