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“Do you ever think about electric cars?”
Between solar roofs, home batteries, and electric vehicles, Tesla could potentially “do more to fight climate change than any other company — perhaps any other entity — in the world,” Walter Isaacson muses in his much-anticipated biography of Elon Musk, out Tuesday.
But while the central character is at times painted as a heroic visionary (Isaacson’s previous subjects have included Steve Jobs, Einstein, and Leonardo da Vinci), the biography also makes it clear that Tesla’s mercurial CEO isn’t always the easiest to work with — or, in the blunter words of Bill Gates, he can be “super mean.” Here are some of the most surprising moments about climate and energy shared in Isaacson’s Elon Musk:
On Musk’s EV passion:
When Elon went with [Peter] Nicholson’s daughter, Christie, to a party one evening, his first question was “Do you ever think about electric cars?” As he later admitted, it was not the world’s best come-on line.
On education:
Musk also focused on electric cars. He and [his friend Robin] Ren would grab lunch from one of the food trucks and sit on the campus lawn, where Musk would read academic papers on batteries. California had just passed a requirement mandating that 10 percent of vehicles by 2003 had to be electric. “I want to go make that happen,” Musk said.
Musk also became convinced that solar power, which in 1994 was just taking off, was the best path toward sustainable energy. His senior paper was titled “The Importance of Being Solar.” He was motivated not just by the dangers of climate change but also by the fact that fossil fuel reserves would start to dwindle. “Society will soon have no option but to focus on renewable power sources,” he wrote. His final page showed a “power station of the future,” involving a satellite with mirrors that would concentrate sunlight onto solar panels and send the resulting electricity back to Earth via a microwave beam. The professor gave him a grade of 98, saying it was a “very interesting and well written paper, except the last figure that comes out of the blue.”
On investing in batteries:
Eager to keep the conversation going, [Tesla co-founder JB] Straubel changed the topic to his idea for building an electric vehicle using lithium-ion batteries. “I was looking for funding and being rather shameless,” he says. Musk expressed surprise when Straubel explained how good the batteries had become. “I was going to work on high-density energy storage at Stanford,” Musk told him. “I was trying to think of what would have the most effect on the world, and energy storage along with electric vehicles were high on my list.” His eyes lit up as he processed Straubel’s calculations. “Count me in,” he said, committing to provide $10,000 in funding.
On building the Gigafactory:
The idea that Musk proposed in 2013 was audacious: build a gigantic battery factory in the U.S. […] There was one problem, Straubel recalls. “We had no clue how to build a battery factory.”
So Musk and Straubel decided to pursue a partnership with their battery supplier, Panasonic […] Musk and Straubel were invited to Japan by Panasonic’s new young president Kazuhiro Tsuga. “It was a come-to-Jesus session where we had to make him truly commit that we were going to build the insane Gigafactory together,” Straubel says.
The dinner was a formal, multicourse affair at a traditional low-table Japanese restaurant. Straubel was fearful about how Musk would behave. “Elon can be so much hell and brimstone in meetings and just unpredictable as all get out,” he says. “But I’ve also seen him flip a switch and suddenly be this incredibly effective, charismatic, high-emotional-intelligence business person, when he has to do it.” At the Panasonic dinner, the charming Musk appeared. He sketched out his vision for moving the world to electric vehicles and why the two companies should do it together. “I was mildly shocked and impressed, because, whoa, this is not like how Elon usually was on other days,” says Straubel. “He’s a person who’s all over the map, and you don’t know what he’s going to say or do. And then, all of a sudden, he pulls it all together.”
On the origins of SolarCity:
“I want to start a new business,” Musk’s cousin Lyndon Rive said as they were driving in an RV to Burning Man, the annual art-and-tech rave in the Nevada desert, at the end of the summer of 2004. “One that can help humanity and address climate change.” “Get into the solar industry,” Musk replied. Lyndon recalls that the answer felt like “my marching orders.” With his brother Peter, he started work on creating a company that would become SolarCity. “Elon provided most of the initial funding,” Peter recalls. “He gave us one clear piece of guidance: get to a scale that would have an impact as fast as possible.”
On buying SolarCity:
When Musk announced the deal in June 2016, he called it a “no-brainer” that was “legally and morally correct.” The acquisition fit with his original “master plan” for Tesla, which he had written in 2006: “The overarching purpose of Tesla Motors is to help expedite the move from a mine-and-burn hydrocarbon economy towards a solar electric economy.”
On hating SolarCity:
The solar roof project caused enormous friction between Musk and his cousins. In August 2016, around the time he was teasing the new product, Peter Rive invited Musk to inspect a version that the company had installed on a customer’s roof. It was a standing-seam metal roof, meaning the solar cells were embedded in sheets of metal rather than tiles. When Musk drove up, Peter and fifteen people were standing in front of the house. “But as often happened,” Peter recalled, “Elon showed up late and then sat in the car looking at his phone while we all just waited very nervously for him to get out.” When he did, it was clear that he was furious. “This is shit,” Musk explained. “Total fucking shit. Horrible. What were you thinking?”
On really, really hating SolarCity:
There were four versions [of solar roofs], including those that looked like French slate and Tuscan barrel tiles, along with a house that featured the metal roof that Musk hated. When Musk visited two days before the scheduled event and saw the metal version, he erupted. “What part of ‘I fucking hate this product’ don’t you understand?” One of the engineers pushed back, saying it looked okay to him and that it was the easiest to install. Musk pulled Peter aside and told him, “I don’t think this guy should be on the team.” Peter fired the engineer and had the metal roof removed before the public event.
On cutting solar roof installation time:
[…] Musk clambered up a ladder to the peak of the roof, where he stood precariously. He was not happy. There were too many fasteners, he said. Each had to be nailed down, adding time to the installation process. “Instead of two nails for each foot, try it with only one,” he ordered. “If the house has a hurricane, the whole neighborhood is fucked up, so who cares? One nail is going to be fine.” Someone protested that could lead to leaks. “Don’t worry about making it as waterproof as a submarine,” he said. “My house in California used to leak. Somewhere between sieve and submarine should be okay.” For a moment he laughed before returning to his dark intensity.
On talking climate with Bill Gates:
“Hey, I’d love to come see you and talk about philanthropy and climate,” Bill Gates said to Musk when they happened to be at the same meeting in early 2022. Musk’s stock sales had led him, for tax reasons, to put $5.7 billion into a charitable fund he had established. Gates, who was then spending most of his time on philanthropy, had many suggestions he wanted to make. They’d had friendly interactions a few times in the past, including when Gates brought his son Rory to SpaceX. [...] Gates argued that batteries would never be able to power large semitrucks and that solar energy would not be a major part of solving the climate problem. “I showed him the numbers,” Gates says. “It’s an area where I clearly knew something that he didn’t.” He also gave Musk a hard time on Mars. “I’m not a Mars person,” Gates later told me. “He’s overboard on Mars. I let him explain his Mars thinking to me, which is kind of bizarre thinking. It’s this crazy thing where maybe there’s a nuclear war on Earth and so the people on Mars are there and they’ll come back down and, you know, be alive after we all kill each other.”
On dismissing climate philanthropy:
At the end of the tour, [Gates and Musk’s] conversation turned to philanthropy. Musk expressed his view that most of it was “bullshit.” There was only a twenty-cent impact for every dollar put in, he estimated. He could do more good for climate change by investing in Tesla.
On Bill Gates’ betrayal:
There was one contentious issue that [Bill Gates and Elon Musk] had to address. Gates had shorted Tesla stock, placing a big bet that it would go down in value […] Short-sellers occupied [Musk’s] innermost circle of hell. Gates said he was sorry, but that did not placate Musk. “I apologized to him,” Gates says. “Once he heard I’d shorted the stock, he was super mean to me, but he’s super mean to so many people, so you can’t take it too personally.”
[...] When I asked Gates why he had shorted Tesla, he explained that he had calculated that the supply of electric cars would get ahead of demand, causing prices to fall. I nodded but still had the same question: Why had he shorted the stock? Gates looked at me as if I had not understood what he just explained and then replied as if the answer was obvious: he thought that by shorting Tesla he could make money. That way of thinking was alien to Musk. He believed in the mission of moving the world to electric vehicles, and he put all of his available money toward that goal, even when it did not seem like a safe investment. “How can someone say they are passionate about fighting climate change and then do something that reduced the overall investment in the company doing the most?” he asked me a few days after Gates’s visit. “It’s pure hypocrisy. Why make money on the failure of a sustainable energy car company?”
On rejection:
Gates followed up in mid-April, sending Musk the promised paper on philanthropy options that he had personally written [...] “Sorry,” Musk shot back instantly. “I cannot take your philanthropy on climate seriously when you have a massive short position against Tesla, the company doing the most to solve climate change.” When angry, Musk can get mean, especially on Twitter. He tweeted a picture of Gates in a golf shirt with a bulging belly that made him look almost pregnant. “In case u need to lose a boner fast,” Musk’s comment read.
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Did a battery plant disaster in California spark a PR crisis on the East Coast?
Battery fire fears are fomenting a storage backlash in New York City – and it risks turning into fresh PR hell for the industry.
Aggrieved neighbors, anti-BESS activists, and Republican politicians are galvanizing more opposition to battery storage in pockets of the five boroughs where development is actually happening, capturing rapt attention from other residents as well as members of the media. In Staten Island, a petition against a NineDot Energy battery project has received more than 1,300 signatures in a little over two months. Two weeks ago, advocates – backed by representatives of local politicians including Rep. Nicole Mallitokis – swarmed a public meeting on the project, getting a local community board to vote unanimously against the project.
According to Heatmap Pro’s proprietary modeling of local opinion around battery storage, there are likely twice as many strong opponents than strong supporters in the area:
Heatmap Pro
Yesterday, leaders in the Queens community of Hempstead enacted a year-long ban on BESS for at least a year after GOP Rep. Anthony D’Esposito, other local politicians, and a slew of aggrieved residents testified in favor of a moratorium. The day before, officials in the Long Island town of Southampton said at a public meeting they were ready to extend their battery storage ban until they enshrined a more restrictive development code – even as many energy companies testified against doing so, including NineDot and solar plus storage developer Key Capture Energy. Yonkers also recently extended its own battery moratorium.
This flurry of activity follows the Moss Landing battery plant fire in California, a rather exceptional event caused by tech that was extremely old and a battery chemistry that is no longer popular in the sector. But opponents of battery storage don’t care – they’re telling their friends to stop the community from becoming the next Moss Landing. The longer this goes on without a fulsome, strident response from the industry, the more communities may rally against them. Making matters even worse, as I explained in The Fight earlier this year, we’re seeing battery fire concerns impact solar projects too.
“This is a huge problem for solar. If [fires] start regularly happening, communities are going to say hey, you can’t put that there,” Derek Chase, CEO of battery fire smoke detection tech company OnSight Technologies, told me at Intersolar this week. “It’s going to be really detrimental.”
I’ve long worried New York City in particular may be a powder keg for the battery storage sector given its omnipresence as a popular media environment. If it happens in New York, the rest of the world learns about it.
I feel like the power of the New York media environment is not lost on Staten Island borough president Vito Fossella, a de facto leader of the anti-BESS movement in the boroughs. Last fall I interviewed Fossella, whose rhetorical strategy often leans on painting Staten Island as an overburdened community. (At least 13 battery storage projects have been in the works in Staten Island according to recent reporting. Fossella claims that is far more than any amount proposed elsewhere in the city.) He often points to battery blazes that happen elsewhere in the country, as well as fears about lithium-ion scooters that have caught fire. His goal is to enact very large setback distance requirements for battery storage, at a minimum.
“You can still put them throughout the city but you can’t put them next to people’s homes – what happens if one of these goes on fire next to a gas station,” he told me at the time, chalking the wider city government’s reluctance to capitulate on batteries to a “political problem.”
Well, I’m going to hold my breath for the real political problem in waiting – the inevitable backlash that happens when Mallitokis, D’Esposito, and others take this fight to Congress and the national stage. I bet that’s probably why American Clean Power just sent me a notice for a press briefing on battery safety next week …
And more of the week’s top conflicts around renewable energy.
1. Queen Anne’s County, Maryland – They really don’t want you to sign a solar lease out in the rural parts of this otherwise very pro-renewables state.
2. Logan County, Ohio – Staff for the Ohio Power Siting Board have recommended it reject Open Road Renewables’ Grange Solar agrivoltaics project.
3. Bandera County, Texas – On a slightly brighter note for solar, it appears that Pine Gate Renewables’ Rio Lago solar project might just be safe from county restrictions.
Here’s what else we’re watching…
In Illinois, Armoracia Solar is struggling to get necessary permits from Madison County.
In Kentucky, the mayor of Lexington is getting into a public spat with East Kentucky Power Cooperative over solar.
In Michigan, Livingston County is now backing the legal challenge to Michigan’s state permitting primacy law.
On the week’s top news around renewable energy policy.
1. IRA funding freeze update – Money is starting to get out the door, finally: the EPA unfroze most of its climate grant funding it had paused after Trump entered office.
2. Scalpel vs. sledgehammer – House Speaker Mike Johnson signaled Republicans in Congress may take a broader approach to repealing the Inflation Reduction Act than previously expected in tax talks.
3. Endangerment in danger – The EPA is reportedly urging the White House to back reversing its 2009 “endangerment” finding on air pollutants and climate change, a linchpin in the agency’s overall CO2 and climate regulatory scheme.