Welcome to the Gigafactory | Before the Flood

I mean that fossil fuel industry is the biggest industry in the world. They have more money and more influence than any other sector. So, I mean, do it; the more that they can be sort of popular uprising against that, the better. But I think the scientific fact of the matter is we are unavoidably headed towards some level of harm. So, the sooner we can take action, the less harm will result.

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What is your grand vision for all of this? Quite a big factory is to get the cost of batteries down to the point where it's affordable. But batteries are critical to a sustainable energy future. The Sun doesn't shine all the time, so we’re gonna store it in a battery.

How is this gonna help developing nations that have massive populations that need to have power? The advantage of solar and batteries is that you can avoid building electricity plants at all. So, you could be a remote village and have solar panels that charge a battery pack that then supplies power to the whole village without ever having to run thousands of miles from the high voltage cable over the place.

It's like what happened with landline phones versus cellular phones. In love developed countries, they just didn't do the landline phones; they just went straight cellular. We actually did the calculations: say, like, what would it take to transition the whole world to a sustainable energy? What kind of throughput would you actually need?

And you need 100 Giga factories. So, a hundred of these. A hundred of these? Yes, that would make the United States—no, the whole world. The whole world? The whole world. All energy, that's it. Yeah, that sounds eligible. That sounds cool.

Yeah, a Giga factory, when it's complete, will have the largest footprint of any building in the world, counting multiple levels. That could be as much as 15 million square feet. So, Tesla can't build a hundred Giga factories. The thing that's really gonna make a difference is if companies that are much bigger than Tesla do the same thing.

If the big industrial companies in China and the US and Europe, the big car companies, if they also do this, then collectively we can accelerate the transition to sustainable energy. And if government sets the rules to favor sustainable energy, we can get there really quickly.

But it's really fundamental: unless there's a price put on carbon, we're never gonna be able to make the transition that we need to in time.

Correct? Yeah, the only way to do that is basically with a carbon tax.