- Tesla has unveiled its third Master Plan outlining the company’s vision for a energy transitioning to clean sources for the USA and the world.
- The plan list six bold steps showing the actions needed to fully electrify the economy and eliminate fossil fuel use.
- The 6 steps detail the electricity demand assumptions for the sustainable energy economy and leads to the electricity demand curve that is modeled.
Modeling was done on the US energy economy using high-fidelity data available from the Energy Information Administration (EIA) from 2019-2022c, and results were scaled to estimate actions needed for the global economy using a 6x scaling factor based on the 2019 energy consumption scalar between the U.S. and the world, according to IEA Energy Balances. This is a significant simplification and could be an area for improvement in future analyses, as global energy demands are different from the U.S. in their composition and expected to increase over time. This analysis was conducted on the U.S. due to availability of high-fidelity hourly data.
This plan considers onshore/offshore wind, solar, existing nuclear and hydro as sustainable electricity generation sources, and considers existing biomass as sustainable although it will likely be phased out over time. Additionally, this plan does not address sequestering carbon dioxide emitted over the past century of fossil fuel combustion, beyond the direct air capture required for synthetic fuel generation; any future implementation of such technologies would likely increase global energy demand
The plan projects a need for 30 TW of predominantly wind and solar capacity, along with 240 TWh of energy storage.
Link to the full plan HERE
Author: Bryan Groenendaal
