Elon Musk: All-Electric Transportation Will Double Energy Demand

Tesla CEO Elon Musk was interviewed at the CodeCon 2021 convention this week. He covered a number of topic in an approximately one-hour interview.

Towards the end of the interview he was asked by an audience member “do you think we could have a supply chain issue with energy down the road?”

Musk answered:

“The full answer is likely, I’ll try to give you the short version: If we shift all transport to electric, then electricity demand approximately doubles, maybe a little more than doubles, and this is going to create a lot of challenges with the grid, especially for distribution to neighborhoods, and this is why Tesla has a product, the Solar Roof and Solar Retrofit, is because even if you increase sustainable power generation at the utility level, you’re still going to have a distribution problem, where you need new high power lines, new medium power lines, you need to dramatically increase the size of the substations, which means you’re going to have to start knocking down houses to increase the substation size.

“This is really unworkable unless you have significant local power generation . . . one way or another we’re going to have a lot more electricity generation, and this is primarily going to come down to solar and wind combined with batteries”

The full interview can be seen here: