Tesla's 2023 Investor Day was held at the Gigafactory in Texas. Tesla CEO Elon Musk unveiled the third chapter of Tesla's "Master Plan" -- a comprehensive shift to sustainable energy, aiming to achieve 100% sustainable energy by 2050.
Plan 3 is broken down into five core aspects:
Full shift to electric vehicles;
The use of heat pumps in the domestic, commercial and industrial sectors;
The use of high temperature energy storage and green hydrogen energy in industry;
Sustainable energy for aircraft and ships;
Power the existing grid with renewable energy.
At the event, both Tesla and Musk gave a nod to hydrogen. Plan 3 proposes hydrogen energy as an essential feedstock for industry. Musk proposed using hydrogen to completely replace coal, and said that a certain amount of hydrogen would be necessary in related industrial processes, which require hydrogen and can be produced by electrolysis of water, but still said hydrogen should not be used in cars.
According to Musk, there are five areas of work involved in achieving sustainable clean energy. The first is to eliminate fossil energy, to achieve the use of renewable energy, to transform the existing power grid, to electrify cars, and then to switch to heat pumps, and to think about how to heat transfer, how to use hydrogen energy, and finally to think about how to electrify planes and ships, not just cars, to achieve full electrification.
Musk also mentioned that there are a lot of things we can do right now, using different technologies to make hydrogen directly replace coal so that steel production can be improved, direct reduced iron can be used to improve industrial processes, and finally, other facilities in smelters can be optimized to achieve more efficient hydrogen reduction.
"Grand Plan" is an important strategy of Tesla. Previously, Tesla released "Grand Plan 1" and "Grand Plan 2" in August 2006 and July 2016, which mainly covered electric vehicles, autonomous driving, solar energy, etc. Most of the above strategic plans have been realized.
Plan 3 is committed to a sustainable energy economy with numerical targets to achieve it: 240 terawatt hours of storage, 30 terawatts of renewable electricity, $10 trillion of investment in manufacturing, half of the fuel economy in energy, less than 0.2% of land, 10% of global GDP in 2022, overcoming all resource challenges.
Tesla is the world's largest electric vehicle manufacturer, and its pure electric vehicle sales have been performing well. Before that, Tesla CEO Elon Musk has been strongly skeptical about hydrogen and hydrogen fuel cells, and publicly expressed his view on the "decline" of hydrogen development on a number of social platforms.
Earlier, Musk mocked the term "Fuel Cell" as "Fool Cell" at an event after Toyota's Mirai hydrogen fuel cell was announced. Hydrogen fuel is suitable for rockets, but not for cars.
In 2021, Musk backed Volkswagen CEO Herbert Diess when he blasted hydrogen on Twitter.
On April 1, 2022, Musk tweeted that Tesla would switch from electric to hydrogen in 2024 and launch its hydrogen fuel cell Model H -- in fact, an April Fool's Day joke by Musk, again mocking hydrogen development.
In an interview with the Financial Times on May 10, 2022, Musk said, "Hydrogen is the stupidest idea to use as energy storage," adding, "Hydrogen is not a good way to store energy."
Tesla has long had no plans to invest in hydrogen fuel cell vehicles. In March 2023, Tesla included hydrogen related content in its "Grand Plan 3" focusing on the development of sustainable energy economy plan, which revealed that Musk and Tesla recognized the important role of hydrogen in energy transformation and supported the development of green hydrogen.
At present, the global hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, supporting infrastructure and the whole industrial chain are developing rapidly. According to the preliminary statistics of China Hydrogen Energy Alliance, by the end of 2022, the total number of fuel cell vehicles in the world's major countries has reached 67,315, with a year-on-year growth of 36.3%. The number of fuel cell vehicles has increased from 826 in 2015 to 67,488 in 2022. In the past five years, the annual compound growth rate has reached 52.97%, which is in a stable growth state. In 2022, the sales volume of fuel cell vehicles in major countries reached 17,921, up 9.9 percent year on year.
Contrary to Musk's thinking, the IEA describes hydrogen as a "multifunctional energy carrier" with a wide range of applications, including industrial and transportation applications. In 2019, the IEA said hydrogen is one of the leading options for storing renewable energy, promising to be the lowest-cost option for storing electricity for days, weeks or even months. The IEA added that both hydrogen and hydrogen-based fuels could transport renewable energy over long distances.
In addition, public information shows that up to now, all of the top ten car companies with global market share have entered the hydrogen fuel cell vehicle market, opening the hydrogen fuel cell business layout. At present, even though Tesla still says that hydrogen should not be used in cars, the world's top 10 car companies by sales are all deploying hydrogen fuel cell business, which means that hydrogen energy has been recognized as a space for development in the transportation sector.
Related: What are the implications of all the top 10 selling cars laying out hydrogen racetracks?
Overall, hydrogen is one of the world's leading car companies to choose the track of the future. At present, the reform of energy structure is driving the global hydrogen energy industry chain to embark on a broader stage. In the future, with the continuous maturity and industrialization of fuel cell technology, the rapid growth of downstream demand, the continuous expansion of enterprise production and marketing scale, the continuous maturity of upstream supply chain and the continuous competition of market participants, the cost and price of fuel cells will fall rapidly. Today, when sustainable development is advocated, hydrogen energy, a clean energy, will have a broader market. The future application of new energy is bound to be multi-level, and hydrogen energy vehicles will continue to accelerate the pace of development.
Tesla's 2023 Investor Day was held at the Gigafactory in Texas. Tesla CEO Elon Musk unveiled the third chapter of Tesla's "Master Plan" -- a comprehensive shift to sustainable energy, aiming to achieve 100% sustainable energy by 2050.
Post time: Mar-13-2023