I’m glad to see Tesla accounting for producing hydrogen for running the Haber-Bosch process to make ammonia. The mods here once removed a couple posts of mine on this subject to Off Topic Galore, and my attempts to get questions about this on earning calls have never received enough shareholder votes to make the cut. Now I feel validated and vindicated. Sweet, sweet justice
.
Many notable omissions:
1) No estimates of how the lower cost and higher usefulness of renewable energy will increase the quantity demanded relative to current energy demand. Basic economics. When a substitute good arrives that is better and cheaper than the traditional option, markets consume more of it. Tesla's MPP3 thesis begins with the statement that the current energy economy is wasteful and points out that electric motors and heat pumps will increase efficiency, but they omit the next step of the analysis that would predict that lower marginal costs of consuming energy will likely
increase the average wastefulness of energy consumption over time. Nor does Tesla include estimates based on autonomous driving, proliferation of robots, internet of things, 5G, and other new energy-hungry technologies just waiting to gobble up cheap solar power.
2) Sustainable chemicals and lubricants. Tesla mentions Fischer-Tropsch synthesis for the first time ever, but only for producing fuels for boats and aircraft and not for anything else. Petroleum and natural gas are also used for non-fuel applications; energy is not the only problem to solve for sustainable civilization, but a bunch of electricity will be needed for the carbon capture and hydrogen production feedstocks for F-T synthesis. We need plastics, solvents, lubricants, synthetic rubber, wax, asphalt, pharmaceuticals, etc.
View attachment 925557
3) Boring Co and SpaceX integration in Tesla’s plan as Elon had promised a year ago. There are some obvious possibilities for Boring Co and Tesla, but not clear how SpaceX fits in besides maybe the carbon capture and F-T synfuels aspect.
4) In line with point 1, desalination. Climate change and human use patterns are drying up rivers, lakes and aquifers. This is a serious problem, existential risk to civilization. Indoor agriculture and shrinking the animal food industry could help but I’m not going to bank on either of these happening with certainty. Desal mainly has two problems, energy and distribution of both the waste and freshwater produced. The energy cost is going to fall and Boring Co underground aqueducts might be of use for distribution.
5) Computation and data transmission. The Internet, AI training, data centers and cryptocurrency mining are still growing rapidly, with total volume of processing and transmission continually outpacing the savings from energy efficiency improvements. Information technology electricity consumption has been growing exponentially for decades with no end in sight. Tesla does not appear to have modeled for this in MPP3 in their assumptions about the demand for electricity.
In summary, MPP3 looks like a conservative base case which represents Tesla’s estimates of the minimum that needs to happen to transition the world to sustainable energy without introducing austerity policies. However, I doubt that it will even be on the right order of magnitude of what will really happen if solar and battery cost trends continue, and, as Tesla noted, the targets of MPP3 would require merely 0.2% of Earth's land area so there's plenty of room for upside. I still stand by the general reasoning I presented in this thesis last year:
mashable.com
electrek.co
