Battery day prediction: but first my guess about the history leading up to it. A couple of years ago Tesla were going through Model 3 production hell. A big part of the problems they were having was the constraint on battery production. 1/16
Apart from the rest of the car industry being woefully slow to realise that they needed to tie up supply, they've also been thinking far too small and so they are paying more per kWh than @Tesla. 3/16
The way @elonmusk thinks about these problems is to properly identify the problem and then solve that. So I imagine he pulls out a scrap of paper and does some rough maths. How much battery production do we really need? I think his answer is 2TWh per year. 5/16
2TWh per year is a number @elonmusk has mentioned a few times in passing. He says it like he is picking a random example but I rather think that it is calculated. It's a huge number. At Giga Nevada they'll be lucky to get 50GWh this year. But he isn't afraid to think big. 6/16
The way @elonmusk thinks is to define the problem and then work the solution - it doesn't matter if the target seems crazy or impossible - just go find the solution. So how can we get from 50GWh per year to 2TWh. A x40 increase! 7/16
Clearly we need to work this from multiple angles: increase the density through cell chemistry, improve the manufacturing process, multiply up the number of lines per factory, multiply up the number of factories. 8/16
Rumour is that a new cell chemistry is ready that gives maybe as much as 30% boost in cell density. So switching to this new chemistry would significantly reduce the number of cells that would need to be made to reach the 2TWh target. 9/16
What about the manufacturing process. Enter Maxwell... It looks like they can reduce the space footprint by up to x16 which means in any given factory you can produce significantly more cells per year. 10/16
Also Maxwell have apparently created a manufacturing process which doesn't require drying of cells so the throughput of manufacturing is very significantly faster. More cells per day from more lines gets us closer to that huge target. 11/16
During 2021 Giga Berlin will join Giga Nevada and Giga Shanghai and maybe shortly after that Giga Texas. By the end of 2022 we could have four Giga Factories - each would need to produce 500GWh of batteries to meet the target. Possible? Maybe. 12/16
Back in June 2019 @elonmusk said Tesla "might get into the mining business". Why would he say that. I think that at that time they had largely cracked the production and chemistry issues that would allow them to get to the huge target. So... 13/16
The next problem to solve is the supply chain logistics. There's a large amount of atoms to arrange in the right way to create 2TWh. To get the supply lined up is a difficult task. @elonmusk will look at all options to solve the problem - hence considering mining. 14/16
All the hints coming from Elon point at a massive step forward with batteries. It could be any one of the things I've outlined on its own would be a big breakthrough - but what if it's all of them at once? 15/16
@vincent13031925, @thirdrowtesla, @AlterViggo, @ValueAnalyst1, @alex_avoigt, @EVNewsDaily, @TeslaPodcast, @WR4NYGov, @HyperChangeTV, @stevenmarkryan Others? What do you reckon? I'm completely crazy with this thread or is this (any of this) a possibility? #batteryday
