Jason Badeaux

Tesla’s cell constraints are likely to continue over the medium term. Because its most profitable use of cells is likely to be in electric vehicles, we do not expect Tesla’s energy storage business to drive enterprise value meaningfully during the next five years.

Technology leadership is not defined by patents, which history has repeatedly shown to be small protection indeed against a determined competitor, but rather by the ability of a company to attract and motivate the world’s most talented engineers.

In order to build efficient, combustion-based generators, we needed to build them at economies of scale and extensive transmission and distribution networks to transport power along with them. Those wires are vulnerable to being knocked out by storms (or even squirrels), leading to blackouts, or supply shortages leading to cascading failure. That... See more

Delphia is the classic example of a network-effect based business model: as more users contribute data, the returns for funds using the data should theoretically improve. This creates a flywheel, in which more users are incentivized to provide data because hedge funds and other businesses (who benefit from crowdsourced data at scale) are willing to... See more

Elon Musk explained his commitment to the Model 3 launch, when he said: “The reason I slept on the floor was not because I couldn’t go across the road and be at the hotel, it was because I wanted my circumstances to be worse than anyone else at the company on purpose. Like whatever pain they felt, I wanted mine to be worse. That’s why I did it. And... See more

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

To achieve clean energy targets, many jurisdictions will have to overbuild renewables, increasing curtailment, or wasting of renewable energy. LDES could reduce or eliminate curtailment, allowing renewables to produce at full capacity whenever the weather is aligned.