When a world leader in grid scale batteries says they are not the way to net zero electric power it is a big thing. Tesla has produced what is says is the optimal net zero plan and it uses almost no batteries for grid scale storage.

The grandiose title of this quick study is “Sustainable Energy for All of Earth”. Woohoo!

See https://www.tesla.com/ns_videos/Tesla-Master-Plan-Part-3.pdf

The most detailed part is about bringing net zero to America and the primary point of interest is this. The total grid storage required (by them) is 120 terawatt hours. Of this just 6.5 is with batteries. That is a minuscule 5%. Batteries have almost no role to play. I agree.

I love that we are now into the land of terawatts, which is trillions of watts. I foolishly thought gigawatts were big. Remember the 100 watt lightbulb that you held in your hand? Think trillions instead. But then Federal spending (and taxes) are now in the trillions so it is all of a piece, but I digress.

Absent their batteries, how does Tesla propose to store the enormous amounts of juice required for net zero? In a word — hydrogen. Unlike batteries, hydrogen has never been deployed at scale so there is no way to know what depending on this magic elixir might cost. That is a huge advantage when it comes to fantasy projections, right?

Keep in mind that this study merely finds that net zero is “technically feasible”, as have many others. That just means it is physically possible, not that it is realistically possible. For comparison it is technically feasible that America is powered by gerbils running in cages.

The value of studies like this is that they show just how ridiculous net zero really is. Here are a couple of points to that effect.

On the storage front they say we need a whopping 120 TWh for net zero. But Gregory’s hour by hour analysis found that we need something like 250 TWh just to replace today’s fossil generation with intermittent renewables, keeping today’s nukes and hydro.

See my http://www.cfact.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/WOJICKREPORT.pdf

For net zero as described by Tesla we would need more like 400 TWh, at least. So their impossible storage number is less than a third of what might actually be required.

Moreover, they say we would need over 5 million MW of generating capacity, mostly wind and solar. Today we have roughly 1 million MW. So all we need is five times what we have after first scrapping most of that. This is truly ridiculous.

Note too that while the study attempts to estimate the cost of some of this impossibility, it ignores a lot of it.

There is nothing for the vast infrastructure to take all this hydrogen to wherever it is supposed to be used. Presumably they are going to make it where the wind blows, the sun shines and there is lots of water to use up. Not sure where that is.

Then too there is the new transmission and distribution grid to get all this green juice to all the people, vehicles and uses it needs. Nothing on that. If we make it they will get it? We are talking about rebuilding the entire US electric power system from the ground up. Not a problem? We are Tesla.

When they go global it gets even funnier. As I read it global power need at net zero is something like twice America’s. But China alone already produces more juice than the US, EU and UK combined. The developing world’s use of electricity is growing rapidly. Guess they missed that part.

All things considered the stupidity of this study is bigger than the hubris, more or less, depending on how you measure it.

Just to repeat, net zero studies like this are very useful. They measure the fantasy. Bring on the gerbils.