Drew Baglino "Fireside Chat" at Stanford Energy Solutions Week. Not new, but posted only recently so far as I can tell. He doesn't say much that people here don't already know, but it's good to hear him talk for an extended period.
Makes the excuse for solar roof delays that Tesla didn't pay enough attention to all the other roofing stuff around the solar shingles that needs to be gotten right. Says the shingles are great and cheap, which seems wrong to me.
Tuesday May 3, 2022. Drew Baglino, Senior Vice President of Powertrain and Energy Engineering for Tesla, sits down for a conversation with Yi Cui, Professor of Materials Science and Engineering and Director of the Stanford Precourt Institute for Energy and Will Chueh, Associate Professor of Materials Science and Engineering and Senior Fellow at the Stanford Precourt Institute for Energy, to share his experiences and what excites him in the energy storage space.
Notes (new information denoted in orange)
Drew seems genuinely excited about where battery industry is headed
"It seems likely that Peak Oil is near now, not because we're gonna run out of oil, which didn't end up being correct, but because there's just a better alternative. That's eventually going to be true of [natural] gas too, not because we're gonna run out of gas but because we're going to decide 'Hey, maybe we should use gas for really useful things only gas can be used for instead of heating people's homes...and businesses and industrial processes.' "
NEW - Drew believes no energy storage technology has been fully leveraged yet, not only lithium ion batteries but also
gravitational, compressed air, and other battery types, in part due to regulatory structures
Hundreds of TWh worth of batteries needed to electrify everything and 20 TWh total annual production needed to make transition fast enough. (As stated in my energy manifesto last week, I think we'll end up making more than this in the long run due to unprecedentedly low prices expanding the market for energy.)
Battery industry raw materials are the constraint on rate of scaling, not factories. Battery industry was previously buying the leftovers from the rest of the economy. Now we have an opportunity to design the mining and refining processes to be customized for batteries.
NEW - Academia and startups can help by researching:
- Better mining/refining/recycling techniques
- Sodium-ion batteries or other kinds of designs to hopefully be compelling for stationary storage without requiring lithium
- Moonshot battery designs that eliminate all use of metal in cathodes (iron, nickel, manganese) and instead uses graphite or other materials
- Better physics simulation tools to accelerate the rate of iteration for batteries, electrolyzers, or anode/cathode materials
Regulatory barriers, especially with mining, are putting undue burden on solving the existential problem of electrification.
NEW - A decade ago, Tesla was too pessimistic about Model S battery cell electrochemical degradation, but too optimistic about the other stuff like pack moisture sealing, battery management electronics, mechanical shock and vibration, and thermal cycling. Notably, these things "don't show up until you've been in the field for ten years" which does not bode well for lagacy auto and new EV startups.
NEWish - For Solar Roof, they had an "ivory tower" approach where they "spent a lot of time on the shingle and not enough time on the stuff around the shingle" like perimeter flashings and obstructions such as vents. The solar shingle is
"awesome", "super easy to build" and "not expensive at all". Confident that these issues will be solved with time and effort.
Confirmation that battery swapping loses to supercharging because it is more complicated, slower to install, more expensive on CapEx and OpEx, less reliable and takes up more room on total infrastructure.
Comments
Drew once again demonstrates excellent skills with technical communication and public speaking. As usual, he was friendly, polite and had good body language and was actively listening to questions and giving real thoughtful answers. He can get into technical details by memory in a regular conversation without prepared remarks. Clearly Drew is not a fakeypants politician like, for example, the chief engineer at Ford (refer to Munro Live Mach-E
interview).
Drew's statements about electrification of everything, hydrogen electrolysis and using gas (aka methane and propane) for irreplaceable applications other than heating adds to the evidence that SpaceX or Tesla will be working on electricity-powered hydrogen/methane factories as I predicted in these posts:
Post 1 (chemical section) &
Post 2.
Solar Roof will work great and make profits eventually, because solving a long list of tricky geometric and installation details is not a significant technical risk. It's mostly just a lot of work and development of software tools to speed up tile selection and layout. It's good to hear that the hard part is not the problem. Remember, they postponed most Solar Roof development work for years to go all-in on solving Production Hell.
