Jason Badeaux

Tesla’s innovation strategy — which focuses on transforming the auto industry as a whole — offers enduring lessons for any innovator, especially in terms of how to win support for an idea and how to bring new technologies to market.

Take solar since 1976. On average, module deployed capacity grew almost 40% per year while costs have fallen over 12% per year.

The cheapest possible carbon-free US grid involves vastly more centralized renewable energy, but it also involves vastly more distributed energy. What’s more, far from being alternatives, they are complements: the more DERs you put in place, the more centralized renewables you can put on the system. DERs are a utility-scale renewable accelerant.The... See more

The key to the value of DERs is that they make electricity demand more controllable. With energy generation and storage scattered throughout distribution grids, grid operators have a way to move energy around, both geographically and temporally, without firing up more power plants. They can absorb extra energy if there’s a dip in demand or produce ... See more

The underlying theme across all 8 of these bullets, except perhaps the last, is that each drives scale of battery production.

1/ Wealth is a claim on other people's time There are a lot of theories on what money is, on what wealth is. Economists have written very long books on this. It is debt, it is the evolution of barter, it is an information system, etc, etc. All of these are true in their way

By bringing demand more under grid operators’ control, DERs virtually eliminate curtailment, or discarding of renewable energy due to temporary oversupply, through 2045. Just as they allow transmission to be used more effectively, they allow us to consume more of the energy generated by existing utility-scale renewables.