My Dear Grandchildren,
This is a picture of the world you will experience during your life time.
I want to bring Tony Seba to your attention. MIT. MBA from Stanford. Futurist. Writer. Entrepreneur. Clean energy guru. Author. Recently I spent time watching this presentation: https://nam02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fyoutu.be%2FO-kbzfWzvSI&data=02%7C01%7C%7Cd77bab2c4bf64fbad23308d7ebc27a0e%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C637237092812471170&sdata=UrW1MffnD1CqkOPcoHTF%2Bs0GEPc198G%2FxmSCGlOpzb0%3D&reserved=0
Really quite fascinating. Optimistic. Something to counter today’s feelings. The subjects are not new. Disruption and Creation. Technology Disruption.
In this presentation, most of it is about the disruption of Energy and Transportation. His time frame: 2020-2030.
The most important piece of technology in this presentation is battery storage! Seba forecasted years ago that the cost of battery storage would drop 16% per year in the past decade. In fact, he says it dropped 20% per year. Six years ago there were 3 mega factories developing Lithium Ion batteries. Today there are 121. Other reports seem to confirm this. Ten years ago, from one report, the cost per KWh was $1000. Now, the cost is supposed to breach $100 per KWh this year. (COVID-19 might impact that?) The same report had the cost dropping to $60 per KWh by 2030. Importantly, battery cost has dropped significantly more than forecasted for well over a decade and that trend is expected to continue. In short, Seba’s thinking seems to be sound.
Other data. Tesla’s Nevada 1GW factory will be larger than the aggregate of all other Li-ion battery factories in the world. (Musk speech). Also, Berkshire Hathaway’s NV Energy is building the largest US solar farm and 8th largest in the world, also in Nevada. It will create enough power for over 260,000 homes. Power generation will start in 2021 and be fully operational in 2022. Even more relevant, they will have 380 MWh of back-up battery power, enabling 1.5 GW of storage. Right behind this facility is one already built by Next Era Energy, with about the same amount of battery back-up against slightly less solar production. In my opinion, these are inflection point activities.
Seba’s forecast is that cheap Li-ion battery cost opens up everything, or shuts down everything. It opens up electric vehicles, electric commercial vehicles, autonomous vehicles, on-demand transport, solar and wind electricity, a decentralized electrical grid and many other things. It shuts down fossil fuel, Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) automobiles, coal and natural gas electric utilities, centralized power generation, oil in the ground, the sale/value of pre-owned vehicles with ICE technology, and many other things.
Battery storage and cost is at the center of a convergence of battery power, electric vehicles, autonomous vehicles, in-demand transport, and solar. And Seba says that this convergence will happen in this next decade. By the end of the decade the world will look differently. He believes it will be one of the fastest disruptions in history.
There is this matter of $0 cost oil. Of course, that isn’t real and once the world survives COVID-19 and energy demand normalizes the price will be back dependent on renewed demand. Even now, it is back between $26-$29 ppb. Of course, within the past year it has been at $63. Has the supply issue been worked out? Who knows. Seba’s point is that this convergence will be driven by economics.
I knew wind and solar were now equal even to natural gas. I knew the grid was a just in time infrastructure from all of the solar power CA has been dumping anywhere because they cannot consume it when it needs to be consumed. That issue has always been about storage, and Tony is saying that the progress has been very steady – and this I had not tracked. Very encouraging.
His futurist point is that electrical power may be available in very strange places. For example, in your garage. If you are still choosing to own a car, it will be electric, and your battery storage will be many Xs more than it is today..
I have been in computing since the mini-computers hit the market at the start of the 70’s. But it wasn’t unless 2018, when I spent that year helping the two lady entrepreneurs develop an emotional wellness app, that I actually took a step forward in my sense of things. Learning about the App business altered my perception of things. The big revelation for me was when I realized, in my gut not my brain, that the telephone was simply another app on a computer, carried in our pocket. This change in perception, a true experience in phenomenology, altered my view of the world.
The convergence discussed in this video – EV, Solar, autonomous vehicles, on-demand transport – and the power with which he delivered the message, has altered by sense of things on this subject. Following are a list of questions I have had, for which I had no answer. The answers shown here are his.
Why autonomous vehicles? Even during this testing phase, they are more than 6X safer than the average car. And the technology will go up two more levels before it is in widespread use.
Why EVs? Will be much cheaper than ICE. Will be 10X cheaper to maintain. They have 18 moving parts to 2000 for an average ICE vehicle. They will last 3X longer. Among other things, this will cause the used ICE car market to plunge.
Solar is growing 38% a year since the year 2000. It is now competitive with natural gas. The missing piece was storage. If they really fix that, game on.
By the end of the decade, everything that moves will be autonomous: delivery trucks, trucks, buses, tractors, wheelchairs, scooters. Tony’s forecast.
Compute power: this is z subject I have had a feel for in my life, even being a non-engineer. I started with mini-computers, and 16k core memory in computers, and coding in assembly/machine language. Everyone knew we needed a higher level language – that’s what the engineers called it. When we got the space and power, we could become less efficient in our mapping to core compute capability. And of course, the rest is history, Moore’ law etc. Without Moore’s Law there would have been no Microsoft, let alone Apple. Seba’s point is that compute power, not just in memory and processing speed, but also in things like graphics, just continues to expand. Thus, what happens when you put that power into a phone? You wake up a year later, and it isn’t a phone any more, it’s a computer. And in a way, it took years for people to get this. The kids got it in terms of playing games. But they knew nothing about business and couldn’t see beyond that. The adults just didn’t see it. Then the app business showed up, apps went beyond games, apps got real serious, and now we have a full-blown computer in our pocket that exceeds the power of conventional computers, perhaps at the century’s turn, and maybe even a decade after that. And all of that power is going to be sitting in EV cars, trucks, homes, etc. and it is just a matter of time before people show us how to use it.
TaaS: Transport as a service. Electric, autonomous, on demand. Vehicles will be owned by fleets. Most people won’t own a vehicle. Instead of having a fleet of vehicles that are in use 4% of the time – parked somewhere the remainder of the time – the efficiency number will get to 40%. Within the decade, there will be a 70% reduction in the purchase of new cars. He claims that by end of decade it will cost 1/10th as much to be transported over TaaS as over a ICE vehicle that you own. You might pay a $100 per month subscription service to a transport service. There will be many fewer cars on the road. By 2030, 1/5th as many cars.
He sees all of this dropping energy consumtion by 80%, and CO2 emissions by 90%.
He has a list of 2020-2030 technologies: AI; Precision Biology; Robotics; Solar PV; Batteries; Sensors, Internet of Things; 3D Printing; 3D Visualization; Mobile Internet and Cloud; Big Data/Open Data; Computing; Blockchain; Unmanned Aerial Vehicles/ Nano Satellites.
My study of Blockchain Technology two years ago for a Sheik Abdullah made me familiar with that technology and the Internet of Things that is related to it. (Also, electronic currencies, but they are a sort of app on Blockchain). Unfortunately, as I told you, I lost him to a heart attack at the start of 2019, and my education stopped. 3-D printing I don’t get. Intuitively I don’t understand this. I need to study it. The other technologies are known to me, superficially in many cases.
Believe it or not, it took me a week to pull this together – and hour here and an hour there. So I hope you enjoyed it. If you watch the video – which you may even have seen before now – I am sure you will enjoy it. Better than most.
Take care,
Jack
