Jason Badeaux

Tesla may be a car company today, but Tesla won’t be a car company in 15 years. Rather, Tesla will be a full stack, vertically integrated clean energy company. They may still produce cars, but cars will represent a fraction of total profits.

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.

Each energy transition has enabled massive improvements to existing materials (wrought iron and later steel made using coal), created entirely new materials (polymers from oil-refined petrochemicals) and/or made low-cost manufacturing viable at scale (aluminum using electricity).

The future grid will be built from the bottom up, driven by new technologies, DERs, that are in many ways superior to their predecessors.

Autonomous electric ride-hail vehicles should benefit from much higher utilization rates than human-driven cars, not to mention lower labor and insurance costs. ARK estimates that, at scale, an autonomous electric taxi platform could price rides profitably at $0.25 per mile. As a result, autonomous rides could cost less than personal car... See more