It’s encouraging to hear this kind of optimisim made public!

Tesla Motors CTO JB Straubel was the headliner at Intersolar North America last week. He talked about the transition to lithium-ion batteries and how that opened the floodgates for electric cars and stationary storage (eventually); the synergy between EVs, solar, and grid storage; the growth of solar power and grid storage; blah blah blah.

I know, I actually love all that stuff as much as the rest of you — it’s what I read, edit, & write about every day(!) — but it’s basically all general history and trends we know all about. But then JB dropped the awesome-bomb:

“I think we’re at the beginning of a new cost-decline curve, and, you know, this is something where there’s a lot of similarities to what happened with photovoltaics. Almost no one [would have predicted] that photovoltaic prices would have dropped as fast as they have, and storage is right at the cliff, heading down that price curve. It’s soon going to be cheaper to drive a car on electricity — a pure EV on electricity — than it is to drive a gasoline car. And as soon as we see that kind of shift in the actual cost of operation in a car that you can actually use for your daily driver, you know, from all manufacturers I believe we’re going to see electric vehicles come to dominate the whole transportation fleet.

“Also, that same battery cost decrease is going to drive batteries in the grid. There’s going to be much faster growth of grid energy storage than I think most people expected. You suddenly get to have energy that’s 100% firm and buffered from photovoltaics that’s cheaper than fossil energy. And we’re within sort of grasping distance of that goal, which is very, very exciting.

“Because once we get to that, and there really is no going back, it will make sense to do this economically without any environmental consideration whatsoever. So that’s the amazing tipping point that’s going to happen within I’m quite certain the next 10 years.”

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