Tesla’s New Virtual Power Worth More Than its Auto Business? | In Depth

hey everybody i'm zach and i'm jesse and you're watching in depth oh now you know [Music] we're brought to you by abetrootplanner.com use our link in the show notes below to get a 30 day free trial to the premium app and we're also brought to you by bigbattery.com no matter what you need to power big battery can provide you with the latest battery tech at the best price per kilowatt hour guaranteed their batteries are easily installed require zero maintenance and they're made right here in the us pick up yours today at bigbattery.com and use code now you know for five percent off at checkout all right we've been saying it for a long time on this channel that all the signs were pointing to tesla becoming a power grid utility company then on tesla time news on monday we reported on tesla's announcement that they have indeed launched a virtual power plant or vpp in california that tesla owners of powerwalls and solar will be able to sign up for starting july 22nd now i know that to many people even people who are smart and watch this channel this news may seem a bit like so what vpp omg nbc i have no idea what you guys are talking about and i don't blame you this is completely new technology something that has never been seen before okay so how does it work all right well let's start by looking at what happens when you turn on your air conditioner on a super hot day or what we here in new england call a scotch remember you're not alone if you're turning on your air conditioner then chances are your neighbors are also turning on theirs and this is on top of all the other stuff that you might have on like your computer your lights your microwave so just take a look at this chart here from urcot this is texas's grid operator as the temperature goes up so does the demand for electricity makes sense and as you can see from this chart most of that extra demand on a hot summer day is from residential customers you and me so now you turn on your air conditioner which requires a lot of power and the electrical grid is now maxed out because duh more people are demanding power than usual okay so what can the grid do well option number one i guess is they can do nothing which would basically lower the voltage you know you sometimes encounter those sags in your voltage where it's supposed to be 110 and it starts to go to like 108 and appliances don't like this they like to get exactly what they're looking for and so this generally is not a solution to the problem it's not going to solve anything so option number two is your electrical utility can shut off parts of the grid so maybe they decide to just shut off your neighborhood's power for an hour or two during the peak hottest hours of the day oh what can i do today yeah not a great option for the utility because it affects a lot of customers adversely so are there any other options well the utility can fire up a peaker power plant if it has one at its disposal so this is like a natural gas or coal-fired power plant and they're specifically designed for peak loads that's why they're called peaker plants um but doesn't that take a while to spool up and everything yeah uh take a look at this chart here according to the eia only about 25 of us power plants can start up within an hour so what utilities have to either sag the voltage or black out the power until those peaker plants come online or the utility can fire it up before the peak and try to time it but that's hard to do i mean because it's a moving target with temperature and time and many other factors so if they start the plant up too early you may not have needed it and so you just wasted all that money running a power plant that you didn't need well all those seem like sub-optimal options for the utility isn't there another option well okay there's option number four they could buy some power from somebody what do you mean buy power from someone how do you buy power uh yeah give me uh two lottery tickets a pack of smokes and uh some power how much would you like we got a special on 100 megawatts this week we got a three pack for a hundred thousand dollars yeah there's over 10 000 power plants in the u.s that power the grid utilities can buy power for short periods of time from neighboring utilities that want to sell access but it ain't cheap utilities can pay up to 10 times more than the average rate for power during peak times because it's supply and demand well i mean this option sounds good to me didn't you just hear me though i said it can cost utilities a bundle to have to buy this power it's it's supply and demand when the demand is high supply is low prices go through the roof yeah i don't care utility's going to pay for it not me that's where you're wrong you are a rate payer right so whether you see it on this month's bill or not you will eventually pay for it i mean what do you think those utility company executives are going to take a pay cut but you know what i think you're making a mountain out of a molehill i mean so what if occasionally on a really hot day the grid has a problem for a couple hours i mean the system's been working pretty good for decades so let's not worry about it well to that i have two responses the first is that decades ago and let's go back to my childhood in fact in the early 1970s if we lost power on a hot summer day it might be annoying but i don't remember too many businesses run by computers or on the internet oh you know why because there were practically no businesses run on computers or in the internet back then the hardware store that i worked at could still function because we had a manual cash register our pricing gun was manual our front door was manual and heck even our ordering system was this like giant book it took up like an entire counter and uh it's the biggest book you've ever seen and basically once a week we would flip through it jot down what we needed and we would call the resupply on the phone so power could go out we could stay open so my first point is that until computers and the internet became commonplace you're right losing power for a few hours here and there wasn't the end of the world but today without power i can't think of too many things that can still work i mean stores restaurants offices home businesses schools pretty much everything needs power constantly or else everything stops working but an even bigger point is that the electrical grid is getting more and more affected by extreme weather and there's going to be more and more extreme weather so take a look at this chart from climate central which is an independent organization of scientists and journalists it shows u.s power outages from the year 2000 to 2019 that affected more than 50 000 people okay so what are we looking at here all right so in gray that little squiggly line at the bottom that's non-weather related outages so think uh you know equipment failures accidents things like that pretty low numbers and steady right now in yellow that line the one that's going crazy there that's weather related outages wow i mean that's wildly unpredictable and it looks like it's not getting any better no yeah it's getting worse i mean utilities love predictability but as the weather becomes less and less predictable utilities are gonna have more and more blackouts okay so it is a big problem and it's gonna get worse but isn't this the part of the show where we tell them that tesla has the answer exactly yes tesla has come up with three important technologies that can help solve this problem their virtual power plant or vpp can help harden the electrical grid so that means less outages right can also lower costs so cheaper electricity for everyone right and make the grid cleaner so cleaner air and healthier planet for everyone exactly doesn't that sound good yeah oh it sounds good kind of sounds a little too good it sounds almost like it's too good to be true i mean cheaper cleaner better why haven't utilities already done this well let's take a look at how tesla's vpp works and then i think you're gonna see why traditional utility companies were never gonna do it themselves okay so they're basically just three pieces to a vpp solar panels home batteries and software i'm sorry but what makes you such an expert at this i mean you don't work for a utility well i kind of do you see eight years ago solarcity now tesla installed solar panels on my roof and two years ago tesla installed four powerwall batteries in my house and then last year my local utility allowed me to sign up for a program where i can let them national grid control my power walls national grid can use power from my batteries whenever they want to help power my neighbor's houses what let's step back so i have four power walls right each power wall has about 13 kilowatt hours of energy stored so 4 times 13 equals 52 kilowatt hours of power stored in my power walls that's enough power to power the average american home for almost two days so national grid powers your neighbor's house for two days i don't get it not exactly okay so during hot summer days when as we showed here there's a lot of demand for power national good gets to use my battery's power for typically three hours during the hottest part of the day that 52 kilowatt hours that i have is enough to offset a lot of air conditioners in the neighborhood yeah i mean let's do the math a typical window air conditioner uses between 500 and 1500 watts of power let's say a thousand watts as average so if national grid uses your battery for say three hours those 52 kilowatt hours could power 17 of your neighbors window air conditioners exactly so for up to 60 days in the summer and up to five days in the winter national grid typically draws down the power from my batteries and it's not just your batteries exactly if it were just my batteries then i'd only be helping reduce demand by about 17 households but i'm not the only one with power walls around here now i tried to find out how many people are part of the national grid connected solutions program in my area and i did find a preliminary report for the first year of the program which was 2019 when it appears that there were only 65 of us according to this report massachusetts was the first state to officially incorporate what's called behind the meter battery storage as it's called now it's two years later and i'm sure there's way more of us battery owners in the program and it's actually expanded to seven more states but yeah that's the problem i don't know exactly how many of us there are and this leads us to tesla's new vpp program that they just announced in california now we don't know much about that yet either we don't know how many powerwall owners will sign up i'm sorry to interrupt but other than you being a nice guy why did you let national grid use your power walls you're right it's not just because i'm a nice guy it's because national grid is paying me to use my power walls how much did they pay well i was part of the daily dispatch program and the winter targeted dispatch program so you can see here you can earn some decent bucks does that say 225 dollars per kilowatt yep so yeah i earned over 2 000 last summer just letting them use my power walls and i barely even noticed that they use them yeah you can see some screenshots here that i have of my tesla app which shows basically whenever you know what's going on with my system whenever the battery is being used or whenever it's being powered up and um i would never notice anything going on in the house but every now and then i'd look at my app and be like oh you know what i'm helping my neighbors right now so the power walls not only give you backup power in the case of a blackout but they also allow you to store your own power that you generate on your roof to use and now you're able to make money from the grid so not only were you saving a bunch of money now you're actually making money wow i was a mini power plant so i mean like i was saying we don't know how many power wall owners will sign up or what the incentive will be or even how it's going to be managed yeah i mean will tesla aggregate all the power and then sell it as a block to say pg e when the prices are high enough right we don't know if tesla will use its auto bidder ai software to monitor the grid and bid on selling blocks of power to the utility oh sorry what's you what's auto better again right auto bidder is this really cool software that tesla developed that does two things one it aggregates all the data from all the solar and powerwall users using ai it learns and then predicts when there will be excess power at each home with the power wall and solar panels it has to know about all sorts of things like weather and daily energy usage patterns it has to know that like you come home at six and you plug in your card like has to learn all that stuff which up until now how would you even begin to do this without ai you'd have a big department full of people like oh okay it's six o'clock charlie's solar system is about to go online like you did there's no way you know what i manage that exactly on a daily basis exactly because i mean we're talking thousands of people so then the next thing that auto bidder software does is it monitors the electrical grid and predicts when it will need power oh i see so it's like thursday at 11 a.m for instance and auto better is watching all of these tesla homes that are part of the vpp and it predicts there'll be excess solar power coming up at noon right and it's watching the southern california electrical grid and it predicts that at noon there's going to be a deficit of say 100 megawatts of power needed to power all those air conditioners going online autobiter can then offer pg e 100 megawatts of power at some price to fill their need but how does it work i mean how does auto bitter deliver all that power to all the right houses yeah i i always got stuck at that too i'm like i understand ai kind of and i understand this but like how does it control all the houses but here's the cool part that nobody really gets until you get a powerwall so when powerwalls are installed in your house the powerwalls have the hardware the interconnect switches inside them to take your house on and off the grid in milliseconds so fast that when it switches you can't even tell right i mean i remember we were doing a show right here and i heard a tree fall and it knocked out the power the you didn't notice anything really change and we kept recording the show we walked out outside later on and the wire to our house was cut by a big tree that came down and it does this all the time like as soon as it it notices anything weird in what's coming in from the grid it'll cut us offline instantly for like five minutes then it'll check the grid okay everything was fine but i mean that can be protecting your house from weird you know surges and stuff like that all of this it happens in milliseconds and you don't notice any difference yeah it really is amazing i mean you just mentioned um you know if there is a power sag like if the voltage does drop yeah it takes you offline keeps giving you 110 volts um even while your neighbors might be getting really bad power and by bad i mean it can be noisy power like if something is going on in the grid um you don't notice it because you're not watching the waveform but like it can be getting really choppy and your powerwall just levels it all out for your house you don't even notice it and that's what i mean by like until you get one you don't really know what you just think it's a box right so since auto bidder is communicating with your power walls through an internet connection auto bidder can say okay zach's power walls at exactly 1201 pm you're going to start feeding power back onto the grid until let's say 12 30 pm i see and in fact it wouldn't even have to say until 12 30 it could say until right now right it gave me oh uh the the price just changed quick you're you're now back online you're you know uh or hey the price of electricity just dropped pg e is making way more they're they're paying to get rid of their electricity let's start charging up these batteries that i have under my exactly wings i mean and pg e doesn't have many batteries um and the batteries that they do have are from tesla um that is the really exciting part about a vpp is that it's managing power in a way that we've never been able to manage power before yeah i mean normally you think of a power plant it's this one big building somewhere controlled by a bunch of guys with hard hats now we're talking about my house is part of this virtual power plant there's no hard hats here there's no guys walking around with clipboards it's all just software controlling it and that's why it seems so unreal because it's like wait a minute your house is being controlled by tesla right so imagine at 1201 the grid all of a sudden gets a bunch of power just as it was needing it for all those air conditioners to start turning on and the crisis is averted and unlike a slow peaker plant that can take minutes if not hours to ramp up tesla's vpp can do this in milliseconds exactly tesla's vpp turns your solar panel covered house into a mini power plant now couple your house with dozens hundreds thousands of other solar and battery houses and you have a new power plant that you didn't have to build that doesn't pollute and that helps stabilize the grid now we've been predicting this for years and it's now coming true yeah a lot of people made fun of us when we came out with our previous videos saying like what are you guys talking about tesla's never gonna do this right and now they're doing it so now how big a virtual power plant are we talking about here i mean the average natural gas peaker plant is around 500 megawatts so how many homes would need to be a part of a vpp to equal one traditional peaker plant well let's say that the average tesla power wall household has two power walls there might be some with one might be somewhat three or four but let's say the average is two so that's 26 kilowatt hours of battery storage and let's say that the average solar panel system that tesla installs is five kilowatts which is the average here in america okay so basically we take 500 million watts which is 500 megawatts and what do we divide it by well if you needed that 500 megawatts for just one hour we could divide it by the 26 kilowatts of the average powerwall system but let's make it last for four hours which is kind of an industry standard use case and that's for battery systems like they need the the mega wattage for four hours right because that's typically what they need to block some time that's like the biggest block you'd ever need it for okay so 26 kilowatt hours is the average amount of powerwall battery storage per home let's divide that by four so we get 6.5 uh kilowatts right so each home can deliver 6.5 kilowatts an hour for four hours okay so we divide 500 million watts by 6.5 kilowatts and we get 76 920 three homes needed so as of may of this year tesla had installed about 200 000 powerwalls around the world so you can think of that as about a peaker plant maybe a little bit more than a peaker plant and we just learned from elon testifying during that lawsuit in delaware last week that tesla expects to deliver another 30 to 35 000 this quarter tesla actually has orders for 80 000 power walls but chip shortages are a limiting production so i don't expect to see 500 megawatt numbers coming out of tesla's southern california vpp to start but you can see that as more households join the vpp tesla can grow the capacity of this vpp every day as they install more solar panels more solar roofs and more power walls and that's kind of what i wanted to get at here when you build a power plant that's it whatever you built like that's what it's going to put out but with a vpp if charlie adds solar in a power wall you can just add them to your vpp and tesla isn't paying for that extra capacity right because charlie actually gets the benefit of having it would be like if you took a you know a peaker plant and you were able to like break it into a bunch of pieces and you'd be like here have a piece of power plant and instead of it just being a valve that would just like sit on your desk it'd be like harold what is that oh it's a part of a peaker plant you know it that wouldn't help you right having a small piece of a virtual power plant means that when you know the grid goes offline a tree comes and cuts down your power you still have solar which can go into your battery pack which can power your house pretty much indefinitely yeah the utilities will be paying tesla for this power because tesla is a virtual power plant and utilities pay power plants for power so then tesla will be getting this money which will in turn pay powerwall and solar customers exactly which makes solar and powerwalls a more enticing uh product for people to buy which means more and more people will be getting solar and power walls and i just want to go off on a little bit of a tangent here there was an assembly woman in california who wanted to propose a bill that would kill net metering yeah and why do you think that is because utilities see this coming and they're like how can we stop people from doing this don't let them have net meters net meters basically allow you to either have power flow into your house or out of your house back to the grid and you get paid if power goes out of your house right and the utilities hate this right because you become a utility right and the only reason that net metering exists is because of laws right as soon as tesla becomes a utility and essentially they are a virtual power plant and they can be buying and selling the power intelligently and storing it in batteries customers aren't necessarily going to have to rely on net metering in order to make money now it is important that the law stay in place uh net metering specifically but it gives a whole bunch more clout exactly to people who want net metering to exist because there are no utilities that want net metering to exist no that's a really good point right now when utilities say something to legislatures most people are like i don't know whatever the utility wants i i don't i don't get it how it works when you become a part of the utility and you now understand what these laws are about you're going to be going wait hang on what did you just say no i don't agree with that assembly woman i don't want that bill and now you're going to have a utility company tesla's virtual power plant that can go and say hey actually no we do want to keep net metering right and we're a we're actually a big uh utility so you better listen to us and there's so many other things that utilities are doing behind the scenes we don't talk about them that much like limiting the amount of solar you can put on your house even if you have the real estate even if you have uh you know there aren't trees blocking it utilities can prevent you from putting solar on your house because they go that's too much solar for you they did it to us i mean back in 2013 right before we got our electric cars we said we're gonna be getting an electric car soon so we're gonna need more than our bills show and they're like nope you can only get what your bill shows i'm like but we're getting an electric car and they're limiting us up there's a guy in our town who has 20 a 20 kilowatt system on his house he doesn't have a gigantic house or anything he just has covered his entire roof and solar he's able to constantly have more power generated from his house than he needs which is exactly what a vpp would want right and that's why he took him over a year to fight the utility to get that extra solar on his roof because he was like i'm going to be getting two teslas yeah this is truly going to be a game changer tesla's vpp is going to speed up the transition to sustainable energy this totally fits tesla's mission but now i hear what the naysayers are saying you forgot one thing there you two elon fanboys this whole plan of yours relies on batteries lots of them tesla can barely make enough batteries for its cars how will it be able to make enough power walls to blanket the earth oh yeah that's a good point but remember each tesla electric car is the equivalent of five or six power walls so what well for many hours of the day those electric cars with really big batteries in them are plugged into a charger all right and we did a whole episode on v2g and how with just one piece of hardware tesla will be able to turn on vehicle to grid allowing cars to power the grid exactly to get that 500 megawatt power plant that we just talked about you'd only need 26 000 model 3s or wise as opposed to 76 000 homes and tesla already has over a million cars on the road that's equivalent to over 37 power plants already so you see we just got our first glimpse of tesla's first us-based vpp don't be surprised when tesla announces vehicle to grid as part of its vpp now i know again we're getting lots of comments of like well but you need special hardware and i don't think it can happen it's not hard to do just needs a bit of hardware at your house and then basically your mobile battery becomes a vehicle-to-grid battery and having a vpp unlocks the incentive for doing it i mean tesla didn't have any reason to put the proper you know diodes or chips in your car to make you know bi-directional charging happen but now with the vpp if they can go hey you know we could really expand our vpp if all these cars um could be on the network yeah it would be very incentivizing the other point would be more charging stations tesla already has some uh incentive programs where uh companies can install chargers at their place of business it's usually a hassle for that business because they have to pay for the installation although they get the chargers for free if there was more of an incentive for tesla to install these chargers maybe they could offer a little bit more money and this would allow people to drive to work plug in their cars leave them plugged in and then at noon you know when ac is pumping as hard as it can and the grid needs more power draw down a little bit of your battery not all of it draw it down a little bit and then towards the end of the day five o'clock or whatever when most of that demand diminishes charge it right back up and you drive home with a full battery everybody wins yeah i mean as the grid gets more and more unstable with extreme weather more and more people are to want a solution if we look at the ford f-150 lightning that just came out it has vehicle to grid one of their selling points was put in this special box that ford will install for you and you can plug your f-150 into your house power your house for up to three days during a blackout now theirs probably does not allow you to interconnect to the grid because their box probably is not as sophisticated as a power wall and that's where i think a lot of people are just like well it'll just do the job of a backup generator and that's great we're going one step further here or a whole lot steps further here being able to store power in your cars and then use that on a grid just unlock so many things and i think the stopping point for so many people is just that this seems like science fiction this seems like well this can't happen for 40 years it's happening now the technology is here it's actually not that complicated but it does need to be unlocked with things like ai and i think most of us when we talk about ai are just like i don't know i don't know what ai does i don't know how it works think of it as just basically a room full of guys with spreadsheets right i mean it's able to do this amazing amount of data processing and predictability that up until this point was just not possible and the other point here too is that we do spend a lot of money on just backup you go look at any municipal building any school any office building there is going to be a huge backup generator go around the back of the building or someplace you know the the less desirable areas around the building you are going to see probably a fenced off area with a gravel thing around it and there's going to be this big box and it's probably going to say kohler on the side of it and it's a giant generator just to power the backup system of the building right because as we talked about these buildings cannot lose power if you're leasing a big office building you're paying that landlord a lot of money to make sure that your computers will never lose power and so they sit there for months years at a time without being used they have to be serviced and maintained all so that for a few minutes sometime they'll turn on and save the day and you're right they cost a lot of money they're big and ugly and they're usually powered by natural gas or diesel and they're just sitting there and you don't see them as soon as you start seeing them though it's like you'll just start seeing them everywhere you have to understand how much these systems cost and they are not cheap to maintain it's not like they just sit there there's an engine in there right anyone who's ever tried to start up their lawnmower after uh you know a season after a winter knows that it's like that thing doesn't really want to sit there and just accumulate gunk in its cylinders and stuff like that and again people will spend that kind of money on their own homes on smaller uh generators i just got the notice from my generator maintenance company says hey zach you got to spend another 250 bucks this year to maintain your generator to make sure it'll start for you and that's just basically because it's a little gas engine and they've got to you know change out a couple filters and things i got to spend that every year if i want that thing to start up when i need it and that's what i'm saying this is the alternative to that and it has so many other benefits i mean it would be one thing if it was like buy this box and it'll do the same thing as the generator um but you don't have to maintenance it people would go oh really i'm very interested in this box that you're going to sell me now if you can go hey buy this box sometimes you're going to be making money from the you know you know how you pay your electrical grid oh yeah i know i have to pay my electrical bill well what if some you know months it was negative you were making the money so here's the little hint you watch till the end of the video i think you deserve it yeah um in the early stages of this you're going to get paid the most amount of money so you just heard from me i get checks from my utility for thousands of dollars that's not going to happen forever as more and more people get batteries the value will go down but in the early days it's really high because the utilities are going whoa this is way cheaper for us than having to go buy the power or or do something else so my little hint to you guys is if you're on the fence about getting power walls in your area and solar maybe factor this in because it's probably coming to your neighborhood soon because you know seven states now have it and so you could be getting checks for hundreds or thousands of dollars for letting them use your power walls yeah and i'm excited to see what tesla's vpp is going to be offering uh for incentives as well i mean they're going to be using your battery system that essentially they're only selling right now as like a backup or if uh there's you know differential and pricing you know you could be making money that way but for the lion's share of most people who are buying power walls they're just buying them for backup right but now you're going to be able to use that for something other than arguably the one use that most people bought it for so if you join this vpp in southern california on july 22nd please share with us uh what the deal is we'd love to see like what kind of money per kilowatt can you get paid for letting them use your batteries and i mean i really think that this is going to see a dramatic change in the way that we think about solar i think that for a lot of people uh they wanted solar because they knew it was the right thing to do in terms of like the planet um but the utilities just did not want you to stop being their customer it was like well we don't want to slow down there sonny boy we don't we want you to keep paying us money every month so they would fight they fought tooth and nail in every single state and every single municipality to try and prevent people from putting solar on the roofs because they would lose out on that revenue now having tesla as this vpp as this utility they can go out and fight they can say uh yeah joe should have as much solar on his roof as he can possibly fit yes that pine tree you know either needs to come down or we're not going to put solar on this particular section because it just doesn't make economic sense but there's no reason not to pack 12 kilowatts on his roof that is going to cover more than the electricity than he generates what happens when half of the people in the united states are generating more power than they use suddenly what do we need all this other generation for yeah i mean you might be hearing us speak right now and thinking well this is just going to offset a couple peaker plants and that's great news no this is going to become the power for this nation and hopefully for the world and if you're watching this and you're like well how come i don't hear analysts talking about this stock analysts who watch tesla closely yeah they're always wrong they're always behind they're always just talking about how many cars they're going to sell this quarter they don't get tesla energy it just goes over their head batteries and stuff they're just maybe they you know count how many power walls are sold we're talking about something where tesla's gonna repeat what it did in the car business look it when we started this show if we had told you that tesla would have 71 of the electric car market in the u.s you would have said we were crazy and you would have said what are electric cars right because they pioneered that entire industry now go to the utility industry where's their competition who do you hear is doing exactly what they're doing no one so what do you think is going to happen in a few years when tesla becomes the number one market leader in this market why do you think they bought solarcity it was the number one solar provider in the country because elon gets it he doesn't look at just quarter quarter quarter he looks at year decade he looking he's looking out long term because he sees what's going to happen and he knew that if you could get solar on enough roofs you would become a power plant and add this on to tesla's other products such as power packs and mega packs and it's not going to be that hard for them to transition to a large energy provider yeah who else is making solar roofs and installing them right now right the one thing that most people after they've heard all of the information how much money they would save the one thing that would stop a solar installation is usually one person in the household or both i don't like solar panels they look kind of ugly i don't like the look of it that's the one thing and as soon as you can go oh well honey these panels are going to last longer look great um and we're not going to need to replace them we're going to last a lifetime right it's become our roof right uh that's that's going to be the nail in the coffin because i think that a lot of people can get the panels on the roof i think that they look fine for me i know that other people disagree so if if just imagine if all the roofs in this country were covered with solar there wouldn't be too much extra power that we would need to generate and uh we've got the freaking land for it it goes back to first principles when you start talking about this you're inevitably going to have an uncle over in the corner of the room who's going to argue and well actually our solar is bad for the grid and you can't have batteries in anybody you need so many batteries to be stuck up to the sky and you'd cover the whole world in solar panels and let's go to that battery argument for a second let's say that uncle joe there over there in the corner and his barca lounger is right and we can't make enough batteries fast enough uh we've talked about on the show and we'll continue to that there's other ways to store power besides these little lithium batteries you can store it in a cryo battery which is just liquid oxygen or you can store it in a hole in the ground you can store it in a tower that you build like you can store it so many different ways and they're not that expensive in fact they're cheaper than what we're doing now so that's what's going to happen there's going to be storage popping up all over the place it won't just be power walls and we're going to solve this problem we're going to store solar during sunny days we're going to store wind during windy days and we're gonna have all the power we need and there's gonna be so many advances in geothermal systems that can reduce the amount of power that we need to draw as a nation um that could make a huge difference you know i'm actually looking forward to the day that i'm on my deathbed on that day what i would like you to do is take out this video and play it for me as i slowly drift off into the great unknown because i am right i know i'm right about what's going to happen in this country and i know that we're going to have an awesome energy future and as we have more and more cheap energy it's going to become practically free we're going to be able to do more and more that is what's going to unlock so much more about technology is cheap or free energy right and you know it gets into this whole like oh but you got to recycle the batteries the cheaper electricity gets the easier it is to recycle the batteries the easier it is to make more solar panels with using even less carbon dioxide per solar panel exactly it makes everything greener it's just the the more you get the better everything gets and yeah you could recycle almost anything if you have enough energy to do it right now when you roof your house you don't even think about it you just hire a roofing company you pick out some color and they roof your house whether it's rubber whether it's asphalt whether it's steel right you don't think about it why it doesn't matter it doesn't matter right in the very near future you'll call up the roofing company and they'll be like what style of solar roof do you want how much power do you want to be generating how much money do you want to be saving how much do you want to be investing now do you want to be doing a power purchase agreement there's so many different things that are going to change in the future about how we live in houses which are these things that have not changed for hundreds of years and the three things we just talked about with this vpp is what unlocks all of this the auto bidder software the solar and the batteries those three seemingly simple and unconnected things unlock this future power abundance that we're gonna have and it will be green that is the best part is that we're not talking about you know building a bunch of you know coal power plants and you know ash ponds and all sorts of awful stuff it's going to be solar it's going to be wind it's going to be batteries and elon said this so many times he said tesla energy is going to surpass the value of the automaker side of the company and just for too many of us we're just like i don't even know what that means so i'm not even going to think about it well think about it look at the stock price today if tesla energy which is still tiny compared to the auto part starts to blow up think about where the stock price is going to go because think of all of the different industries that this is going to disrupt it's going to disrupt oil industries it's going to disrupt the utility industries add all of those together in fact we did an episode called elon the disruptor where we pretty much did a series yeah we did an entire series where we talked about this it is going to absolutely dominate it is going because it's going to have the cheapest electricity at all times now if you're watching this and you're like this i mean it's exciting i want to learn more we did an entire series elon the disrupter series not many people watched it i think because it did go over most people's heads and it seemed too far-fetched but one of our arguments in that series was for a vpp and it's now coming true so i urge you go check it out right here because we walk through all of the different industries that he's going to disrupt so thank you so much for watching this episode of in depth we hope you enjoyed it we'll see you next week on friday for another episode we'll see you on monday for tesla time news so be sure to hit the subscribe button hit the notification bell so that way you don't miss any of them we'll see you next week now you know

Channel: Now You Know

Views: 315,461

Keywords: tesla time news, now you know, zac, jesse, news, update, elon musk, model x, model 3, model s, model y, supercharger, NYK, electric cars, EV, technology, science, funny, autopilot, electrek, tesla roadster, model 3 performance, model 3 dual motor, TSLA, elon musk twitter, Tesla Model 3, tesla supercharger v3, cybertruck, Plaid Model S, plaid+, starlink, china, 3D, tesla vpp, vpp, virtual power plant, auto bidder

Id: snqBKk4Rpjw

Length: 37min 57sec (2277 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 23 2021