Elon Musk’s bold goal: Saving the entire globe

Fast cars are just the start of a bid to revolutionise the energy industry

his has been the planet’s hottest ( northern) summer in recorded history, so it’s nice to know Elon Musk has commenced his grand scheme to transform the energy business so profoundly that there’s a chance Iceland won’t become the new Jamaica.

One small step in Musk’s plan involves merging Tesla, his electric car company, with SolarCity, his cousin’s solar panel maker. That deal — announced in August — has been getting all sorts of criticism from short- term- thinking Wall Street nincompoops, who groan that both companies are losing money and the merger won’t help.

Such doubts about Musk are like asking the Wright brothers in 1899 why they were fiddling with bicycle parts.

There’s so much more at stake than just a company or stock price. The future of energy is coming into view, driven by Musk and a growing number of investors and entrepreneurs.

In a decade or two, most homes and buildings will have cheap and super- efficient solar panels on their roofs and high- powered batteries in their basements or garages. The batteries will store power generated when the sun shines, for use when it doesn’t. Each of these buildings will be connected to a two- way power line that can allow anyone to buy energy or sell any excess.

Most cars will be electric, and fewer people will need to own one, since an electric, connected, selfdriving car will be able to work for Uber when the owner isn’t using it, which is 90 per cent of the time.

Your home solar panels and batteries will charge your electric car, so your home will supply most of the clean power you and your family need. You might not have to buy any electricity from some far- off power plant or fill up at a petrol station ever again.

Electric utilities will become a shrinking provider of last resort.

Some people will drive petrol - powered cars, but doing so will become about as unwelcome as riding a manure- dropping horse down New York City’s Fifth Avenue. Petrol cars will also become less convenient as filling stations go out of business or convert to electric charging stations.

Oil will still be needed for things like plastics and jet fuel, although advances in virtual reality might make business travel almost unnecessary. As demand for oil drops and prices plunge further, drilling new wells will become bad business. Before long, the amount of carbon we’re pumping into the air should drop dramatically.

Seem far- fetched? All the relevant trends point to such an outcome, probably sooner than you think.

The technology of rooftop solar is on a trajectory similar to Moore’s Law, which described how computers would get twice as powerful for the same price every 18 months for decades. The cost of solar has dropped 95 per cent since the 1980s, while efficiency has rocketed. With today’s technology, solar panels covering just 0.6 per cent of the US land mass could supply all the electricity needed for the entire country.

Meanwhile, when Tesla unveiled its first sports car eight years ago, a mass- market, all- electric car seemed more unattainable than a comfortable stiletto heel. But when Tesla took pre- orders for its Model 3 sedan in March, it signed up half a million buyers within weeks. Now, just about every major carmaker is betting on an electric fleet.

Viable home batteries will be supremely important to make all of this take off. Musk is about to open Tesla’s US$ 5 billion ($ 6.75b) Gigafactory in Nevada, and for the first time giant batteries for cars and homes will be manufactured on a huge scale.

And this i s where Musk and his “Master Plan, Part Deux” kicks in. He wrote about it in July, noting that the end goal of Tesla was never to produce hot electric cars ( even though Tesla just unveiled the fastestaccelerating car on Earth). Tesla built hot electric cars as an entry point for ending dependence on oil.

“The point of all this was, and re-

Doubts about Musk are like asking the Wright brothers in 1899 why they were fiddling with bicycle parts

mains, accelerating the advent of sustainable energy, so that we can imagine far into the future, and life is still good,” Musk said.

Tesla cars will be a part of a sustainable electric system: solar panels, batteries, software to manage power and trade it over networks.

One other factor will be turning one- way power grids into two- way exchanges. Startups such as Gridco Systems and Varentec are building that technology. As demand for traditional power- plant- generated electricity shrinks, it’s a good bet utilities will adopt these “intelligent grids”.

Such a complete system i s why Musk thinks the SolarCity deal makes sense, even if others rail against it.

Founded in 2006, SolarCity is the biggest solar panel company in the US. It was growing like crazy for years, and by 2015 it was adding 12,000 customers a month and was worth