Jason Badeaux

Though it will require enormous upfront investment in the coming decade, laying a quilt of DERs over the nation’s distribution systems is the best thing we can possibly do to enable the rapid emission reductions we will need in the decade after.

Importantly, DER deployment is rapidly increasing – according to Wood Mackenzie’s second annual U.S. DER Outlook, we’re expected to reach 253 GW of DER capacity and demand flexibility potential by 2026. The sheer mass of behind-the-meter renewable energy coming online will fundamentally alter the nature of our electricity supply.

In terms of its function on the grid, the best way to think of Form’s battery is not as storage, but as the equivalent of a carbon-free natural gas plant. Rather than methane, it runs on renewable energy as fuel, but from the grid’s perspective, it provides basically the same service, which is reliable, dispatchable generation that can run for 100... See more

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

Tesla is by far the most advanced in releasing an FSD package, announcing in early 2020 that it had completed over 5 billion kilometers of testing under autopilot, against just 2 million miles over the past two years by its nearest competitor Waymo (backed by Google).