Elon’s Solar Silliness
At Davos, Musk went off the deep end on solar. Again.
Three years ago, Tesla unveiled what it called Master Plan Part 3. The 41-page document claimed that a “fully electrified and sustainable economy is within reach through the actions in this paper.” Those actions included repowering the grid with renewables, switching to electric vehicles (no surprise there), widespread adoption of heat pumps, electrifying high-temperature heat delivery and hydrogen production, and “manufacture the sustainable energy economy.”
I debunked the report in my piece, “Elon’s Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Battery Math,” by pointing out that the amount of battery storage it required was ludicrous. Using simple arithmetic, I showed that achieving the goals laid out in that report would require 960 years of battery production from all of Tesla’s Gigafactories.
That background is relevant because Tesla’s CEO, Elon Musk, continues to promote some of the same silly claims about solar that the company made in 2023.
Last month, at the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Musk was interviewed by BlackRock CEO Larry Fink about the future of technology, space, AI, and energy. About midway through the conversation (video is here), Fink asked Musk what it would take to generate enough solar energy to “electrify the United States.”
Musk replied with the same silly claims about solar energy that he has been making for more than a decade.
Let me be clear, Musk is one of the true geniuses of our age. The technological prowess he has demonstrated with SpaceX’s rockets is gobsmacking. The same goes for Starlink. His 2022 purchase of Twitter (now X) was a pivotal moment for free speech in the US. Even though I’m a longtime critic of electric vehicles, I must give him credit for founding Tesla, which is now the world’s second-largest EV maker. And of course, Musk is, by far, the world’s richest person. Forbes puts his net worth at $788 billion! Further, while other zillionaires are sunning on their superyachts, or swanning around at Paris Fashion Week, Musk is still working like, well, a madman.
Put short, I have a lot of respect for what Musk has done. But for a person with such an astonishing intellect, it appears that he doesn’t understand the vast size, limits, and complexity of our energy and power systems. Or, perhaps he’s simply talking his book. Either way, his claims about solar energy don’t pencil.
Let’s take a look.
