The car sales of Tesla are creating the battery production volume that allows to be price competitive for the grid solutions. Grid scale battery storage will be the future, as the car industry alone is going to increase the world battery production by about 100x, driving down the prices strongly, and not even counting the second life of car cells in storage after they are down on capacity.

I've been meaning to do the math on how much capacity used car batteries can be continuously recycled into grid storage where capacity/weight isn't a big deal but haven't gotten around to it.

My hunch is that those used batteries will single handedly store peak reusable energy for down times if electric cars grow to dominate the market.

The current automobile production is over 70 million/year. The battery capacity for a single car ranges from 30-100 kWh. The current middle class is offering 60kWh (Model3, Bolt, Leaf 2019). So if we assume only 30 kWh/car at the end of the useful battery life, we get about 2 TWh of used battery capacity every year - though that point of time is quite in the future, as batteries are expected to last at least 10 years, if not more. As a comparison, the daily energy usage of Germany is about 1.6 TWh.

Hm, I wonder where they will get enough lithium, or they are using some other technology?

In a Tesla battery pack there is only about 8 kg of lithium used - less than lead in a normal car battery. As lithium is a rather common element, it shouldn't be too difficult to mine it in the neccesary amount. Current mining capacitly is set by the comparatively low demand before electric cars.

Lithium will never be a problem. Cobalt and rare earth elements will be.

Is lithium hard to acquire? Sure, it's costly to mine, but it's not like there are shortages. Besides, it seems that Australia is a major producer of lithium.

The history of business is littered with companies that got into business to do A, discovered they couldn't make that work unless someone tackled B, did B because nobody else was doing it well enough, then stopped doing A because they were doing so well at B.

Do you have a couple of examples?

Amazon got into the business of selling goods online, but it turns out that renting their computers to others is way more profitable

Amazon isn't stopped doing A and I would say thet they are still more known as A company - average person on street probably don't know AWS. That said, I am sure there is good examples company doing A but abondoning it to more profitable B.

F5 was a load balancer for a video game. In that article about financial concerns of pot growers in Colorado a few months back there were two people moving into services and out of growing.

And some restaurants switch to wholesaling and distributing their more noteworthy products and either close the restaurant or hand it over to somebody else to manage.

When you used to be the customer for your new product you have access to a wealth of insights about what could make the product work. If you are better at that than your old product, well...

BHP. Farming company bought by Miners. Then Mining company run by Farmers. Then steel making company run by Miners, Then Steel shipping company run by steelmakers, then corporate disaster.

Docker was originally an internal tool to power dotCloud's platform.

The point behind Gigafactory1 and any subsequent gargantuan battery plants it's to drive the cost of all Tesla batteries down. Decreased cost per unit is increased margin. The reason Elon is pushing, pushing, pushing is because the longer he has the (diminishing) lowest cost of batteries, he's ahead of everyone else. People thought he was of his rocker when he bought Solar City; it's all one giant play to have the cheapest cost per battery.

Sidenote, commercial and utility battery backup like this have been sold for over 10 years. Unless you were a hotel in Vegas, you probably weren't noticing. Did they sell many, dunno, but they've been working at every distribution for a long time.

Where's Tesla's secret sauce in this solution: the battery chemistry, the control circuits or well-engineered integration of the parts?

How much a threat is constrained lithium supply to the business model?

FYI this project wasn't built with Panasonic / Tesla / Gigafactory batteries. They were purchased from Samsung:

https://cleantechnica.com/2017/09/30/tesla-using-samsung-sdi...

Wow, that's even more impressive in some ways. That was a huge gamble to rely on another company (though perhaps they already have a good relationship I'm not aware of) and it's great that the system was "easy" enough to build with different parts (though, again, perhaps they've always kept multiple vendors in mind)

Tesla's core innovation is that they don't give a fuck about nonsense opinions, they care about facts - science and engineering.

Plenty of other viable technologies exist, we just need some rich science-aware people to help us roll them out.

Maybe little more than big-time name recognition and a first-mover advantage (but I imagine there's some good engineering and a few patents in there, too). That worked long enough for IBM :)

In the long run, it does seem like a bigger business opportunity than the vehicle based business.

There was a link here recently with a video of a consultant talking about a Model 3 tear-down. He basically said the "Skateboard" was amazing, the rest of the car was sub par. The were most impressed with the battery pack, saying it was was above and beyond anything they had seen with cell to cell voltages being astonishingly close.

Also the electronic control systems, motors, suspension, and drivetrain. You know, everything but the fit and finish.

Isn't all that part of the skateboard?

Are they unique in the fact that they're uniquely producable by Tesla?

I agree it's a much more tangible market from my perspective (ref. the prod issue on the vehicle side) and is only really purchasable by state actors.

If they can get the first mover advantage actually rolling before someone else enters the market than this will be a huge boon to their bottom line.

Tesla is as much a battery company as Cray was a refrigeration company.

You mean, except for the fact that Tesla sells batteries, whereas Craig never sold refrigeration products?

Seymour Cray sold Freon cooling systems with an integrated supercomputer. Famous for it. Any bio of Cray will speak of his pioneering work in refrigeration. “Remove heat” was practically design rule #1. Hilarious stories are told of Cray machines where the processor crashed but not the refrigeration, and a block of supercomputing ice was found the next morning.

So it is with Tesla, who will be remembered for their batteries.