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Elon Musk on How to Build the Future

(www.ycombinator.com)
1106 points sama | 1 comments | 15 Sep 16 18:05 UTC | HN request time: 0.204s | source
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iMuzz ◴[15 Sep 16 18:20 UTC] No.12508474[source]▶
Question/Answer I found interesting:

Sama> How should someone figure out how they should be useful?

Elon> Whatever this thing is you are trying to create.. What would be the utility delta compared to the current state of the art times how many people it would affect?

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milkytron ◴[15 Sep 16 18:55 UTC] No.12508769[source]▶
Certainly very interesting, in fact I wrote this down when I heard it. And if you look at the projects he's working on (Renewable energy, cars able to powered by renewable energy, and preserving life outside of Earth), they all affect a great portion of humanity, and have a very large affect.
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soufron ◴[15 Sep 16 19:20 UTC] No.12508992[source]▶
Affect like how? As of today they're useless, except for Tesla who's motivating car automakers to go towards autonomous cars - but they had the tech before.
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marvin ◴[15 Sep 16 19:35 UTC] No.12509111[source]▶
Tesla's energy storage enables people to use solar energy at night, without the process being a big hassle. If it gets cheap enough, it will make solar power competitive with fossil power in most scenarios. Currently, the battery installations are a cost-competitive alternative to fossil ways of covering peak load. Calling it useless is probably a stretch.

Ditto with Tesla's cars; they aren't a drop-in replacement for gasoline cars in all scenarios but I've heard more than one Tesla owner say that they will never buy a gas-powered car again. So obviously that implies greater utility for the person in question than any current gas-powered car.

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intended ◴[16 Sep 16 06:02 UTC] No.12512153[source]▶
So what happens to the batteries when they go bad or old?
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1. collinmanderson ◴[16 Sep 16 22:00 UTC] No.12517672[source]▶
Yes, likely you'd need to get all-new batteries every 10 years[1] or so. (And likely recycle the old ones.)

The good news is that batteries are getting about 8% more efficient every year (price per kwh) [2]. So 10 years from now batteries will be 1.08^10 = ~2.15x as efficient [3].

So when you replace them, they'll cost half as much for the same amount of energy storage (and probably half the space too). It's basically Moore's law for batteries except slower.

[1] https://www.tesla.com/powerwall

[2] https://cleantechnica.com/2015/03/26/ev-battery-costs-alread...

[3] or is it 1/(.92^10)? That would be 2.3x