Path to a Sustainable Energy Future

A sustainable energy Earth is achievable without ecological destruction, requiring less energy and resources than current fossil fuel systems.

### Pathway to a Sustainable Energy Future: Feasibility and Solutions
* 🌍 There is a clear and achievable path to a sustainable energy Earth that does not require **sacrificing natural habitats** or leading an **austere lifestyle**.
* 🔋 Current global energy consumption is heavily reliant on fossil fuels, with **over 80% of primary energy** sourced from them, yet only **a third is used effectively** for work or heat.
* ⚡ Transitioning to an electrified economy can **reduce total energy use by half** compared to fossil fuel systems due to improved efficiency, making the goal of a **sustainable energy civilization** more attainable.
* 📊 A significant investment of approximately **$10 trillion over a decade** is necessary for this transition, representing only **1% of the global economy**, which is feasible given the scale of current investments in fossil fuels.
* 🌞 The land required for renewable energy sources like wind and solar is minimal, **less than 0.2% of Earth's land area**, allowing for sustainable energy development without displacing vital ecosystems or farmland.
* 🔄 The transition will not only require **less mining for resources** than the current fossil fuel economy but will also involve **recycling to minimize resource extraction and environmental impact**.
* 🚗 Key areas of focus include repowering the grid, switching to electric vehicles, implementing heat pumps, and electrifying industrial processes, all of which will **significantly reduce fossil fuel dependency**.
* 💡 The message is one of optimism and feasibility; with proper investment and technological advancements, a **sustainable energy economy can be realized within our lifetime**.

Master plan, part three. So, as Zach was mentioning, the thing that I think we wanted to convey more importantly than anything else that we talk about here is that there is a clear path to a sustainable energy Earth. It doesn't require destroying natural habitats.

It doesn't require us to be austere and stop using electricity and sort of be in the cold, or anything. The story—and I think that this holds together quite well and we will be actually publishing a detailed white paper with all of our assumptions and calculations—is that

there is a clear path to a fully sustainable Earth with abundance. In fact, you could support a civilization much bigger than Earth—much more than the eight billion humans—could actually be supported sustainably on Earth. And I'm just often shocked and surprised by how few people realize this.

Most of the smart people I know actually don't see this clear path. They think that there's not a path to a sustainable energy future, or at least there's not one that is sustainable at our current population, or that would have to resort to extreme

measures. None of this is true. So we're going to walk through the calculations for how to create a sustainable energy civilization. And to set the stage: today, our energy economy—let's be honest—it's sturdy and it's wasteful. Over 80 percent of

global energy—primary energy—comes from fossil fuels, and only one-third of that global energy actually ends up delivering useful work or heat. This is the problem statement, but we're here to talk about the solution. Yeah, it's like some of this I'm going to elaborate on.

Because there's a very wide range of technical expertise out there, from people who are, you know, whatever level nine wizards in the subject to people who don't do engineering at all. So, if you have a gasoline car, you're converting less than a third,

often maybe only 25 percent of the energy in the gasoline is converted into motion; the rest is turning to waste heat that does no good at all. And there's a lot of energy required even to get the oil out of the ground,

refine the oil, and to transport the gasoline to the gas station. So when you look at all that, for a typical gasoline car, it's actually going to be using less than 20 percent, fully considered, of the energy from the oil

that actually goes into motion. So when we see people doing calculations for what it takes to create a sustainable energy Earth, they assume that the same energy amount is required for an electrified civilization versus a combustion civilization. This is not true because most of the energy of combustion

is waste heat, and even to get the fuel to combust in the first place and get it to the end use, there's a lot of loss along the way. I mean, this is the primary energy consumption: 165 petawatt-hours a year. A petawatt-hour is a trillion

trillion kilowatt-hours, so it's a large amount of energy. But the nice thing about an electrified economy—we're going to talk about it—is that through end-use efficiency and through efficiency along every step of the way, actually the total energy use

Halves. So this is one of the most enabling aspects of electrifying everything: the sustainable energy economy is that much easier to accomplish. It's actually half the problem statement of the fossil fuel economy. Yeah, and we're being conservative here, so it could be better

than half, but we're trying to have assumptions that are reasonable, not overly optimistic; in fact, slightly pessimistic. So it's really better than half, but just say for—it's easy to make the argument that we need half as much energy with an electric economy

versus a combustion economy. Yep. So how the master plan works—you want to talk? Yeah. Um, so the thing that is needed at a very large scale that's not currently present is a vast amount of battery energy storage. Our rough calculations are that this is about 240 terawatt

hours, or 240,000 gigawatt hours. This is a lot of batteries, but it is actually a very achievable amount. Uh, we'll go into details on that. So that's a combination of electric vehicles and stationary storage. So if you've got solar or wind,

you've got to store the energy when the wind is not blowing, the sun is not shining. And so we're assuming sort of an 8:1 ratio of stored energy to power; so 30 terawatt hours of power—30 terawatts of power. Our actual capital

expenditure calculation for manufacturing investment is more like uh, 6 trillion, but we, you know, we made it higher to make it 10 trillion. And this is across mining, refining, you know, battery factories, recycling, vehicle factories—all the things that we're going to talk about needing to invest in.

To build a sustainable energy economy, yeah. If you look at the total world economy, it's just under 100 trillion. So if this was spread out, say, over 10 years, it would be one percent of the global economy; over 20 years, it would be half a

percent.  A very difficult economy. So this is, uh, yeah, not a big number relative to the global economy. As Drew mentioned, you need about half as much energy with an electric economy versus a combustion economy. And in terms of wind and solar, how much land would be used? It's less

than 0.2 percent of the land area of Earth.  Like, generally, people don't realize quite how much energy is reaching us from the sun. Um, it's roughly a gigawatt per square kilometer. And you know, the sun doesn't shine all the time, but it's, uh, if you

multiply that by, say, four to get the continuous power—four or five—then that that that gives you the land area of solar. And you can put wind and solar often in the same place. So a lot of places that currently have wind, you could have solar there and you double

your energy. You can also put wind offshore; it doesn't even need to be on land. So wind is even more flexible. If you put solar offshore too—yep. So Earth is 70% water anyway. The point is that, um, with a pretty, really a remarkably

small amount of Earth's land area, we can go fully sustainable. Yeah. And and and from, uh, to the resources and raw materials exist to support this transition. Uh, we'll go through that in detail, but we do not see any insurmountable resource challenges at

All in fact, in the end, we should be mining less ore to accomplish this economy than we currently do with the fossil fuel economy, and we're going to talk through that. Yeah, just to emphasize that again: the electrified economy will require less mining than the current

economy does; less, not more. Um, so this is the plan, and now we'll get into a little bit more of the details of the plan. Basically, five areas of work: first, repower the existing grid; second, switch to electric vehicles; third, switch homes, businesses,

and industry heating to heat pumps; fourth, high-temperature heat delivery and storage for high-temperature industrial and chemical processes, and a little bit of green hydrogen in there for chemical processes that need hydrogen; and finally, sustainably fuel planes and boats. These are the five areas, and we're

going to go into detail on all of them. Yeah, I mean, my personal opinion is that as we improve the energy density of batteries, you'll see all transportation go fully electric, with the exception of rockets. That's awkward, but you can make the fuel with CO2 and water, so you

can make methane with CO2 and water. So in fact, do that with just electricity.

Yes, exactly. So in fact, on Mars, if we hopefully get there at some point, the atmosphere is CO2 and there's water ice throughout Mars, so you can take the CO2

and H2O and turn that into CH4, which is methane and oxygen. So ultimately, even rockets can be electrified. So first, repowering the existing grid with renewables, and this is going to be a consistent theme. You'll see our estimates for the number of terawatts

hours, terawatts, and trillions of investment at the bottom of the page. You know, this is already actively occurring in front of us. 60% of the generation added to the US grid was solar in 2022, and actually, on a year-on-year basis,

solar deployment is growing 50% year-on-year as of 2022. So this is a serious upswing, and if we continue this trend, this is going to be behind us before we even know it. Yeah. Um, second, switching to electric vehicles,

again, a 21% reduction in fossil fuel use by doing this alone. Obviously, Tesla is heavily engaged in this activity, as along with many others. Overall, EV production grew 59% year-on-year in 2022, and EVs hit an amazing 10% market

share. I mean, it's an awesome milestone. I'm super excited to see that. I gotta... yeah, I mean this is uh, obviously happening very rapidly, and I think really, really old cars will go to a fully electric and autonomous, and so

driving a non-autonomous gasoline car is going to be analogous to riding a horse and using a flip phone. That's basically going to be the situation. And we actually took a somewhat conservative assumption here in terms of how many batteries are required because the more

the fleet is autonomous, the smaller the fleet needs to be, just from a utility basis. So we're not accounting for all of those benefits, or really much of those benefits at all, in this number. Um, and what does this fleet look like? You know, just a rough view from

Our perspective, of course, we could be wrong, but you know, you can see the sort of breakdown of the fleet by millions of vehicles. You know, our goal is to do 20 million electric vehicles a year.  Yeah, fewer vehicles will be needed, at least passenger vehicles, with autonomy.

There's some debate as to what that number is, but it's a number less than the number of vehicles needed today. There are roughly two billion cars and trucks in operation in the world today. Yeah, so what we show here is actually, I think, only 1.4 billion or so.

So we're representing 1.4 billion, or so, so a smaller fleet. And you know, the numbers are here in this presentation are around 85 million vehicles a year produced, just to give you a sense of how we're thinking about

this. Again, we're going to put all these assumptions up online and, you know, encourage people's thoughts. Yeah, so yeah, so we're basically heading rapidly towards an electric or autonomous future. Exciting! Yeah. Um, and one of the reasons why EVs are so

enabling is this end-use efficiency point. A Tesla Model 3 is four times more efficient from well-to-wheel than a Toyota Corolla. And that's all about the efficiency of getting the electricity into the car in a sustainable energy economy and then how efficient the car

is in transferring that stored energy to motion on the road when compared to the engine in the Toyota Corolla and all the, you know, extraction, refining, transmission, and distribution of the gasoline into the Toyota Corolla. And just for this is a fun reference: Model 3

Can drive over a mile on the energy it takes to boil a pot of water for pasta, and then it can drive another mile on the energy it took to cook the pasta. That pasta is one pound, and all three is like four thousand pounds, just to give

you a sense of just like what—like, it really doesn't use a lot of energy to move a Model 3, that four-thousand-pound object, down the road. Also, heat is a lot more energy than motion. Yeah, yeah. But people, you know, you just boil a pot

of water; you don't even think about it, you know? It's just interesting how efficient these cars are. Next, switching to heat pumps in homes. This is an industry, you know, right now. Heat pumps meet 10% of building heating needs; install rates are growing 10% year on year. It really

needs to accelerate. Heat pumps can serve, you know, heat applications up to 200°C in businesses and industry. And from an investment perspective, as you can see on this page, this is actually the lowest-hanging fruit in terms of displacing fossil fuels. Um, you might be saying, "What exactly is a

heat pump?" So heat pumps don't move—don't create heat; they move heat. When you think about like the natural gas furnace in your house, like it's generating heat itself, but what the heat pump is doing is actually moving heat

from outside of your house into your house. They're just an air conditioner or a refrigerator in reverse. So we're surrounded by heat pumps; there's, like, you know, they're all over this factory; they're in your house. And all this really is is about bringing them to

Displace all the fossil fuel heating in all of the homes, businesses, and industry that we can. From an end-use efficiency perspective, it's a three-times reduction in the total energy required to heat these buildings—so a real obvious thing to do: heat pumps.

There are heat pumps for cars, yeah, not as default, and at some point we might make a heat pump for our home. Yeah, maybe. Maybe next... a little bit more detail on electrifying high-temperature industrial chemical processes. So over 50% of industrial heat is greater than 400°C,

where you know, cement, steel, fertilizers, chemicals, plastics, metals refining all need like 1500°C. So we need a solution here. Ultimately, it's purpose-built equipment that enables electrification. You know, carbon graphite is stable up to 2800°C; there are other options in the

1500°C range, like silicon carbide and other materials. So the idea here is you create and store heat when renewable power is available. If this is a sustainable energy economy, you know, renewable energy is intermittent. Peak of the day, you've got more generation than

you need; you make a bunch of heat then, and then you transfer that heat into the industrial process 24 hours a day, using the stored heat you created when the sun or the wind was blowing. That's the concept here. And then on the hydrogen side, we also need green hydrogen to

decarbonize metals and chemical refining processes. This is things like ammonia making, steel... you know, there's roughly 120 million tons of hydrogen sourced from fossil fuels today to do these things. And hydrogen can also directly replace coal, which is currently used in a ton of steel production through a

The process called directly reduced iron. You can replace blast furnaces with a hydrogen-reducing, direct-reduced iron furnace. This is a way to eliminate fossil fuels from these aspects of the economy and the CO2 associated with them. Yes, so I mean, some...

of this, there's room to disagree, but some amount of hydrogen is needed for industrial processes. My personal opinion is that hydrogen will not be used meaningfully in transport, but shouldn't be. If you're going to use a chemical fuel, you should use CH4, not H2.

But nonetheless, it is needed for industrial processes and can be produced just by splitting water; essentially, something that's been done for decades. This is not rocket science. Yeah. And lastly, a small part of the pie, but a necessary part, is sustainably...

fueling planes and boats. Shipping accounts for three percent of global CO2; it's ripe for electrification. Even with lithium iron phosphate, long-haul ships can be fully battery-powered, so that's a great opportunity to electrify. Energy density is a little bit harder for...

planes, but short-haul is doable today. With some improvements, we'll get long-haul underway. But even in the meantime, we can leverage sustainable aviation fuels, produced and stored using excess renewable electricity. There's a lot of work going on in this space and...

it's... yeah, I mean, to really get long-range aircraft and long-range shipping to use lithium-ion, you need to redesign the ship and/or the plane to take advantage of the fact that it is a new...

Source of energy; it's a different architecture. So it's just like with an electric car, you wouldn't just, you know, take a gasoline car and stick a battery in it. That's very suboptimal. Um, it's much more efficient to have the battery be the structure of the car and

uh, you know, make it mass-efficient and optimized for a battery. For batteries, the same is done with the aircraft. Uh, you can get long-range aircraft uh, at around, with sales at around 450 watt-hours per kilogram, which you can buy right now, actually. It's

expensive, but I think that price will come down. So when we stack up all of these efforts, uh, we end up with the numbers we shared at the beginning of the presentation: 30 terawatts, 240 terawatt-hours, 10 trillion dollars, and

you're—you may be saying, like, 'I need some context. Is this feasible?' Spoiler alert: it's entirely feasible. Um, just looking at it from a growth rate perspective, how much do we need to grow the deployment of these technologies? We're talking about only a

3x growth rate in solar and wind deployment. Solar is already growing at a breakneck pace, as is wind. This gap is going to be closed really quickly. When we look at electric vehicles, they have to grow 11x. Well, they grew 60% year

on year last year. That growth rate is also going to close pretty—pretty darn—that gap is going to close pretty quickly as well. And lastly, storage; you know, Tesla's energy storage business has grown at 65 percent CAGR since 2016.

The global energy storage business is accelerating rapidly. All these gaps are going to close, especially as the momentum of the transition to sustainable energy accelerates. Of course, our goal is 20 million EVs per year and

one terawatt-hour of stationary storage per year, as soon as possible. Regarding this investment, Elon mentioned it's 10% of one year's

world GDP. Another way to think about it is how it compares to last year's investment in fossil fuel infrastructure. It's 60% of that investment. So, building this sustainable energy economy is less

than extending the fossil fuel economy from a year-over-year investment basis. Very doable.  Does this fit on the planet? Absolutely. Less than 0.2% of land. As a reference point, the total land area intensively farmed today is 12.5% of

all land. You drive around and see some farms, but you don't see them everywhere. This is an order of magnitude difference between farming and what we're talking about for sustainable energy land. It doesn't need

to displace farmland, forests, jungles, or any ecological preserve. It can be used in sparsely populated desert regions, barren areas, areas unfit for development or otherwise unused.  So, yeah, 0.2%

can fit into a lot of places. Yeah, it's essentially no meaningful ecological impact. In fact, transitioning to a sustainable energy economy would result in a substantial reduction in current ecological impact. It's a great way to put it. Yeah, and what about

the mineral extraction side? So this is a cartoon that sort of gives you a sense for all the ore and the like, extracted minerals that are coming out of the Earth every year. It's about 68 gigatons. So each truck has a ton...

What does this look like when we're in a sustainable energy economy? Looks like the fossil fuel extraction disappears; we replace it with the materials required to fulfill the sustainable energy economy, actually reduces. Now, it's not to say that we don't need to continue to explore...

you know, bring our mining and refining for the sort of new, specific materials for the sustainable energy economy. We do, but the investment in mass flows are all very achievable, just looking at what is already happening on the planet. Like, this is nothing out of scale of what has

been done and is already being done. And then we calculate it on a sort of, you know, element-by-element basis. The resources are there to support the transition. You know, this is cumulative demand to move in the sustainable energy economy direction until 2050, relative to

USGS resources today. You know, we're not breaking the resource bank for any of these materials. And then when we look at what really happens as we move forward, history teaches us the more we look, the more we find. What people think happens is, 'Oh, there's this many resources...' next

Year, there's going to be less because we're going to extract them. What actually happens is, as we extract resources, we find more. And you can see on the right what has actually occurred with the key materials for the sustainable energy economy since 2000, as

a sustainable energy economy has been growing, and Tesla's been growing, and all the industries around us have been growing. The actual resource availability has increased, not decreased. Yes, this still seems to be quite a bit of confusion about the about lithium. Lithium is extremely common; it's one of

the most common elements on Earth. There is no country that has a monopoly on lithium, or even close to it. There's enough lithium in the United States to electrify all of Earth if the United States was the only place producing lithium. There's enough

domestic material to electrify Earth. It's very common. The limiting factor is the refining of the lithium into battery-grade lithium hydroxide or lithium carbonate. That's the actual limiting factor, and the same is true for these other materials. And

again, these are not like crazy technologies; it's just the investments need to be made. And the investments, they're not gigantic; they just need to happen. Right. Um, nickel's maybe the trickiest one to solve, but as we

showed with the graph, there may be a need for like 30% of the world's nickel reserves. So, and the nickel reserves have actually grown. Yes, there is more. Yeah, exactly. So, and you only need nickel for, basically, aircraft, long-range boats, um, and very long-range cars or trucks.

But the vast majority of the heavy lifting for electrification will be iron-based cells, and the Earth is—iron is actually literally the most common element on Earth. So, trivia point: if you say, like, 'What is Earth made of by mass?', it is mostly made of iron, more than

anything else, and second, uh, oxygen, and then everything else after that. So, basically, we're a muddy rust bowl is what Earth is. So, an iron cathode is—sort of, you're definitely not going to run out of iron; there's so much iron, it's insane. So, yeah. So, yeah. And ultimately,

you know, this resource extraction—we go through this effort, we build these batteries, um, and then we recycle these batteries. So, ultimately, we're doing this to build this sustainable energy economy, but the amount of ore that we require is it really an order of

magnitude more or less because of recycling? Um, so, in the end, a sustainable energy economy is within our reach, and we should accelerate it. Yeah, I mean, so this is really the main message of today, and I really wanted today to be not just about Tesla investors who own stock, but

really anyone who is an investor in Earth. And what we're trying to convey is a message of hope and optimism, um, and and I hope optimism that is based on actual physics and real calculations; not—it's not wishful thinking.  Earth can and will move to a

sustainable energy economy and will do so in your lifetime. Thank you.

Elon Musk's Tesla Master Plan 3 in 22 Mins (SUPERCUT)

Farzad

Clear path to sustainable energy exists without harming nature or requiring austerity.

A sustainable Earth can support a much larger civilization than currently exists.

Many believe a sustainable energy future is impossible or requires extreme measures; this is false.

Current energy economy is wasteful; over 80% of global energy comes from fossil fuels, with only one-third delivering useful work.

Gasoline cars convert less than 25% of energy into motion; significant energy loss in extraction, refining, and transportation.

Master Plan: Key Components & Investments

Requires vast battery energy storage (240 TWh), achievable through electric vehicles and stationary storage.

Estimated capital expenditure for manufacturing investment is around 10 trillion dollars, less than 10% of the global economy spread over 10 years.

Wind and solar require less than 0.2% of Earth's land area; offshore options further reduce land usage.

Sufficient resources exist for the transition; less mining may be needed compared to the fossil fuel economy.

Five key areas: repower the grid, switch to electric vehicles, switch to heat pumps, electrify high-temperature industrial processes, and sustainably fuel planes and boats.

Repowering the grid with renewables is already underway; solar deployment is growing rapidly.

Electric vehicle production and market share are rapidly increasing.

Heat pumps are increasingly used for building heating, offering significant energy efficiency improvements.

Electrifying high-temperature industrial processes requires purpose-built equipment and heat storage solutions.

Sustainably fueling planes and boats is important but smaller-scale; electrification and sustainable aviation fuels are being developed.

The plan is feasible, requiring a 3x growth rate in solar and wind, an 11x growth rate in electric vehicles, and continued growth in energy storage.

The required investment is less than extending the fossil fuel economy.

Land use is minimal, less than 0.2% of Earth's land, and can utilize sparsely populated areas.

Mineral extraction will reduce overall due to recycling and the transition to sustainable energy materials.

Lithium is abundant; the limiting factor is refining, not resource availability.

A sustainable energy economy is achievable through a combination of technological advancements, investment, and resource management.

The message is one of hope and optimism based on physics and calculations, not wishful thinking.

Earth can and will transition to a sustainable energy economy within our lifetime.