Tesla's 'Dangerously Ambitious' Gigafactory Could Save U.S. Battery Business

Interesting fact presented in the beginning of the article: all the government funded research/companies went belly up.

Food for thought: Is it because of the sheer difficulty of such ventures? Or is it because the money went to the wrong hands?

I'm a founder of an energy storage company, Lightsail Energy.

To say all government funded energy storage companies went belly up is an exaggeration. Many still survive, although you will note a strange anti-correlation between government funding and survival. In my opinion a lot of money did go in the wrong hands. The main problem is that the government is totally confused as to its actual funding strategy -- you need significant, continuous supplies of capital to develop and commercialize hard technology -- every time it fluctuates you impose major stresses and delays.

In at least a few cases, the problem was that the government provided support, and thereafter withdrew it. This was most problematic for the DOE Government Loan Guarantee program -- after Solyndra (a major recipient) went belly up, the government called on their debt in a series of energy storage companies, particularly A123 and Beacon Power. That was the bankruptcy trigger.

On the other hand, it is not exactly like those companies were doing so well anyway. They were fragile, though they might have had a bright future.

The statement at the end of the article that "[e]ven if the company fails to sell 500,000 vehicles a year, some of the gigafactory’s batteries could be used in the stationary storage market (which helps explain why he wants to build in the southwest, where solar and wind power farms can be incorporated.)" doesn't make sense to me as a reason even worth consideration, especially given in the same article is the statement that "it would exceed production of every other battery factory in the world – combined". The importance of location in the southwest US for the fledgling alternative energy market seems completely irrelevant if one is striving to become the worldwide majority supplier of a multi-billion dollar market. The access to the port of Galveston would certainly be valuable in shipping that product to the likely majority market offshore, but many other states with ports would likely be interested in a multi-thousand job plant.

This $5 billion battery factory is intended to enable production of half a million EV cars per year by 2020.

It's more amazing to me to think of the scale required in the mid 2020's when EV cars could be 10's of millions per year.

What kind of draw can you put on these batteries?

An 85kWh battery may be more useful in every garage than this article claims. The added expense is claimed to "keep consumers away", but really it means things like solar panels become more useful.

If you are able to charge your car via power you generate and it can supply enough power back to run your home, you can get some huge benefits. You can have power at night that you generated during the day. No need to suck power from the grid. During outages, you would likely still have a few days of power. And finally, if we actually take full advantage of this, our power infrastructure could directly use these cars to distribute and store energy and route around outages, increasing stability in a huge way.

All in all, this could usher in an era of crowd-sourced power generation. One of the primary reasons that hasn't been feasible was the ephemerality of power on the grid. You consume it just after it's produced. We have no good way to store it. But with hundreds of thousands of 85kWh capacity batteries plugged into the grid, we suddenly have a start.

I think paying an extra $20,000+ for a car if that's a potential outcome is worth every penny.