Whether batteries can save the world is a great responsibility to throw at an inanimate object, but of all the tools at our disposal, batteries are our best bet for creating a safe green sustainable and reliable energy system.
This is something we often say here around solar panels and wind turbines alone won’t be the solution for sustainable energy because the sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow away batteries.
And not only are batteries revolutionizing the way we generate electricity, they also provide an unprecedented opportunity to change the way that electricity is distributed.
We are talking about decentralized electricity grid, some recent meteorological disasters in our own city and around the world have proved that our 20th century electricity network will not survive.
Ottawa 21st Century Climate Here in Canada We are almost a week away from an unprecedented wind storm in six days There are still areas of the city without electricity and people are wondering how we can prevent this from happening again can.
Elon Musk has already made his opinion very clear about the battery-powered future. Elon recently said that the only way to convert our entire global electricity consumption to green energy is to produce an epic amount of batteries. Which puts that number at 300 terawatt hours.
But what it means is that it is also good to get a sense of scale that there is 1 000 times more batteries than the full global capacity to produce batteries.
Right now it will take Tesla’s Giga Nevada battery factory 1500 years to produce 300 terawatt hours worth of cells at the current rate of 40 gigawatt hours per year so we need a lot of batteries and that’s just Elon Musk giving us an estimate Know that he has a tendency to underestimate really complicated projects.
So honestly the actual number is much higher than honestly it may very well be impossible to do this on a global scale, there is no shortage of people who will tell you this.
But I wonder if people ever said the same thing about electricity. Imagine going back to the 1700s and telling Benjamin Franklin that someday every house in the world would have its own supply of electricity.
He will probably ridicule you for ridiculing the crazy people at Nikola Tesla and the dude literally scoffed at his theories on free clean energy even after he invented the modern alternating current system and people will continue to ridicule Elon Musk and his batteries.
This hasn’t stopped early adopters from implementing battery power projects, we can only look at Tesla numbers for energy storage deployment to understand how this industry is growing in 2017 Tesla Energy produced 358 MW by 2018 Hours of stationary battery storage deployed.
This number grew to over 1 000 megawatt hours which can also be called a gigawatt hour and then in 2021 Tesla increased again by deploying 4 gigawatt hours of battery storage.
So that’s a substantial amount of growth, and Tesla executives say the demand for these energy storage products far exceeds the company’s capacity to produce them, Elon Musk said.
It said earlier this year that Tesla could actually produce more energy storage in 2021, but chose to prioritize electric vehicles for material supply, giving no reason to think Tesla could adequately scale that capacity. cannot increase what the company is converting to its energy products.
Moving away from nickel-based battery chemistry and to iron-based cathodes, iron is an abundant and inexpensive material that would allow a greater amount of cell manufacturing at a much lower cost.
Also under construction at a new Tesla factory which will be a three megawatt hour shipping container-sized battery dedicated to the mega pack unit built exclusively for grid scale energy projects Tesla projected at the new factory output.