The Ledger, every show

“When you look at the capital cost per kilowatt of nuclear with everything that is known today, it's much more expensive than even highly curtailed renewables.”

“Yeah, I mean, these, today's factories are really automated. If you're building a new factory today, you know, in China or the U.S., the labor differential is less than 10% of cost of goods sold. It might even be less than five percent.”

“I believe that solid-stage transformers are going to replace passive ones.”

“Now the backplane voltage of the racks will be 800 volts or even higher. And then you can use a SST based solution to go from medium voltage, 34 KV all the way to 800 volts with no gray space rooms with UPSs and power distribution panels and anything like that…”

“And you can remove 70% of the stuff in the in the electrical diagram and a similar amount of footprint”

“An SST can have a cost similar to a traditional oil-filled transformer but at the same time provide functions that would be That would be provided by popcorn components around the transformer. Functions like overcurrent protection, fault isolation, what an aut…”

“I'm not so sure that it is going to be as dramatic as people think, both because I think there's a little bit of the toilet paper problem going on here... You've got all of these companies that think AI is going to be massive and want AI to be massive, and th…”

“It's not like the refineries are in China because the technology to refine lithium is in China. Like, that's definitely not the case at all. It's purely been, like, the capital investment to build the refinery is the lowest in China. And it's not labor either,…”

“All the precursor, almost, I want to say all, over 90% of the precursor in the world is for battery cathodes is produced in facilities where the wastewater, the, like, sulfates and that are in the wastewater of that process kind of can just go directly into th…”

“1.5 terawatts is the total amount of renewable energy capacity that will need to be deployed on an annual basis to maintain the sustainable energy economy. And that's basically keeping up with plant retirements. So on a steady state basis, 1.5 terawatts is how…”

“So when we do this with a solid state transformer, we basically move the 60 hertz transformer to a hundred kilohertz transformer, And that makes it much smaller, like, 50 to a hundred times more power dense”

“Solar inverters are the largest source of underperformance on utility-scale solar plants. It's not the modules. You'd think it would be the modules, because there's so many of them, and they're out in the field, and you worry about hail, and you worry about wh…”

“The energy business was heavily supported by the vehicle business through many years, to be frank, but finally kind of got out of that bird's nest and was able to fly on its own and generate serious profits and bring cash back to the Tesla broader company, and…”

“Especially as we got into the 2017 and 2018, there was a cell sort of pinch. Panasonic was having a hard time ramping, and we didn't have enough cells to go around between vehicles and energy, and so we had to kind of, like, pare back on the Powerwall build pl…”

“The same thing happened, by the way, in the COVID crisis where, you know, there were semiconductor shortages. It was kind of like, hey, vehicles, the breadwinner energy, you know, you're going to have to get the scraps and figure it out. And I don't, I think t…”

“When you look at, like, Optimus as an example, which is the robot program at Tesla, like, why is Optimus going quickly at Tesla? It's because, you know, hey, we're, there's a lot of reuse of platform technologies, whether it's, like, how do you opt, like, a si…”

“Until there's applications where there's real money flowing in the other direction, we may see a little bit of a correction as well.”

“And if this becomes enough of a hot button issue, I see we will be, I think the government will do that.”

“Those fiber bundles are not that much smaller or different in size than what you would bury for a high voltage transmission line”

“One of the fun things that we put in the paper was a comparison of how much material humans just move out of the ground every year in total, and the amount of material required for just the This renewable energy economy, and it's actually like a factor of 10, …”

“The world's leading producer of silicon carbide, which is a key power semiconductor, is based here in the U.S.”

“At Heron Power, we're focused on building solid-state transformers to use silicon and software to replace steel, oil, and copper in power conversion at data centers, large-scale energy installations like solar and battery projects and others.”

“If you look at, you know, China, they are so thoughtful about building these industrial areas, you know, everything that you could possibly need to build a car which has 7000 parts in it, you know, is within less than a three hours drive.”

“You know, while I was at Tesla, we started using silicon carbide to make drive inverters in cars because the incremental cost of the more expensive transistor was more than outweighed by the savings in battery because the drive inverter could be so much more e…”

“So silicon carbide went there, and then silicon carbide went into the drive inverter to make the drive inverter about one percent more efficient, which you're like, oh, that doesn't seem like a lot, but when you think about, you size the battery to give you, l…”

“In fact, I have some statistics here. You know, power transformers, these are generator transformers. Demand is up is over double since 2019. For generation step-up transformers it's up over 250%. Distribution transformers up over a hundred percent.”

“Transformers are not really designed to run at their rated power, you know, as long as they do in these Desert power plants, you know, where they're, first of all, very hot, because they're sitting in the sun, and second of all, because they're running at name…”

“When SolarCity saw the coming sort of net metering change of policy, they knew that it was almost existential to them to have a great battery offering.”

“Ultimately, you know, they took a bet on Tesla on our team on the energy side and it ended up paying off for them when they ended up getting an opportunity to participate with the vehicle business in China and vehicle business in other places.”

“The first supercharger, it's sometimes called, like, V-II or V-I, you know, the chargers in the supercharger are the onboard charger for Model S. Like, it's, it really, like, that's just, I think, exemplifies the platform play that is possible with smart reuse…”

“And so when you stack that all up and you replace that with a renewable electrified pathway, you can get almost a tripling of end use efficiency, well, sort of well to wheel or primary energy to end use efficiency boost, which actually is the, One of the first…”

“The interesting thing about both China and the Netherlands which are my most personal recent experiences with, you know, truly prevalent charging everywhere. They're really not doing this, even though they're charging everywhere.”

“If you actually look at the typical home built after the seventies, you know, or maybe even the sixties in some cases, there's a 200 amp main panel that barely ever peaks above 50 amps.”

“These materials, once they're kind of deployed, they will be redeployed in some fashion with not perfect recovery, but to the point where the ongoing resource requirement is just, is not that challenging.”

“Things like the CHIPS Act and other stuff that the U.S. Is Industrial policy that's really driving investment in large capital projects will build that ecosystem back, and then it will be easier to get these things done.”

“I built the mega factory with my team. You know, my team was super awesome. Hello in Lathrop, California in 11 months. It was a JCPenney warehouse. 11 months later, the first product came off the line.”

“I like the idea of a federal highway trust fund for the grid. It never has existed.”

“It actuates in hundreds of milliseconds and can actuate, you know, once every couple of minutes, and it's really not meant to actuate more than, like, a couple thousand times in its total lifetime.”

“Silicon carbide 10 years ago was 600 volts or 1.2 kilovolts. You know, nowadays they're silicon carbide devices that are 2.3 KV capable or 4.6 KV capable.”

“The transformers are generally made these days in, like, China, India, and Mexico. Very few of them are actually made in the US.”

“Tesla had done a very early, we call it like, it doesn't even have a name, it was called, you could call it like Powerwall Zero. It was like a sort of cobbled together Model S battery module. I think we did a thousand of these early systems with SolarCity. And…”

“One of the reasons why We went with cylindrical cells in the first place was because they were the only batteries built in, in high volume”

“The gig factory in Reno was a huge risk taken by Panasonic to build a single factory bigger than all other factories combined in a new country where they had never done battery manufacturing before in a state with no manufacturing base, Nevada, you know, with …”

“Puerto Rico is still one of the largest power wall markets, which is kind of wild, because there's not a lot of people in Puerto Rico. But I think it might be the single largest power wall market still.”

“Yeah, we didn't actually have that name solidified until the day before the Powerwall presentation in 2016.”

“The average person driving, you know, less than 40 miles a day on average. In fact, like the 95th percentile trip is, is, is like 40 miles. You only really need to charge today's EVs with ranges of 200 to 300 miles once every Three days, four days”