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ladies and gentlemen,please welcome the dean for the college ofengineering, manos maragakis. good evening, ladiesand gentlemen. my name is manos maragakis. and i am the dean of thecollege of engineering. and i would like to thankyou very much for joining us for the 2015 college ofengineering distinguished lecture. i would like tobegin our program
by recognizing some specialguests in attendance today. chancellor for nevada system ofhigher education, dan klaich. president mark johnsonand his wife, karen. executive vice presidentand provost, kevin carman, and his wife, susan. chief strategy officer forgovernor sandoval's office, dale erquiaga. president for truckeemeadows community college, maria sheehan.
and president for westernnevada college, chet burton. thank you very much all forhonoring us with your presence. the college of engineering atthe university of nevada-reno is dedicated to its visionof national and international prominence. and its mission and dedicationto make a transformative impact on our region and our nation. at the same time, it isthe fastest growing college at our university.
our undergraduate enrollment hasdoubled the last seven years. and our faculty and staff haveincreased by over 50 percent. at the same time, we areprivileged to be surrounded by a dynamically growinguniversity, and a very comprehensiveuniversity, that has the same focus ofnational prominence and for making an impacton the local, and region, and our nation. we are dedicated to ourmission and we are optimistic,
like never before,that we are going to accomplish ourmission of producing a globally educated andcompetitive workforce, on producing stateof the art research, and on engaging onhigh-impact outreach activities for ourcommunity and the nation. and today's lecture is partof our outreach activity to our region. our distinguishedlecture series are
focused on bringingtimely topics and distinguishedspeakers to our community for the benefit of ourcommunity and of our students. and i'm very happy to say thatthis event, for the last six years, has been organizedin collaboration with our advisory board, andunder the leadership of sara lafrance who isspearheading this effort. and at this pointi would like to ask sara to join me andintroduce the speaker.
well thank you all forbeing here this evening for the college of engineering'sdistinguished lecture series. in 2013, jb straubel wentback to his old school, stanford university. he delivered a presentation toa group of stanford engineering students. he talked about thefounding of tesla motors. calling it a funand crazy story. he also talked about thepossibilities of the time
we live. i think you are really lucky,he told the stanford students. i can't imagine a bettertime to do research, science, engineering, or entrepreneurshipall around energy. and as he talkedabout tesla's mission to promote sustainabilityin transportation, near the end of thispresentation he said something that i think clearlydefines his everyday life. you can accelerate in anelectric car, he said.
you can do it quietly, andcivilized, and have fun. our featured speaker thisevening, jb straubel, is a person who hasacted boldly, often against the mainstream,or the mega trend. yet in a quiet, andhighly creative way, he has shown how much he enjoysthe transformational work he's involved with at tesla. jb is the co-founder andchief technical officer at tesla motors.
his career has shown howadvanced battery technologies and electric cars can pave theway to its energy independence and economic development. he has also beena strong advocate for the role educationmust play if innovation is to change our lives. his interest in electricvehicles goes way back. as a boy inwisconsin, he rebuilt a discarded golf cart hefound at a junkyard at age 14.
he later built a customelectric bicycle. and then an electricporsche 944 that achieved a world record forelectric vehicle racing. in 2008, then only 32 years old,was named innovator of the year by mit technology review on itsannual list of top innovators under the age of 35. jb holds a bachelor's degreein energy systems engineering and a master's degree in energyengineering from stanford. he is also a lecturerat his alma mater
where he teaches a popularenergy storage integration class in the atmosphereand energy program. as a co-founder oftesla, jb has overseen the technical and engineeringdesign of the company's vehicles focusing onthe battery, motor, power electronics, and highlevel software subsystems. he's also responsible for newtechnology evaluation, research and development, and allsoftware, electronics, and propulsion acrossthe tesla portfolio.
his impressive ascendancyhas been punctuated by the same senseof wonder and joy that led him to rebuild thatgolf cart from the ground up so many years ago. follow what you find fun, hetold one group a few years ago. not the mega trend thatwill be profitable. follow what you areincredibly passionate about. this is what jb has donethroughout his entire career. now let's see it first hand.
[video playing] please join me in giving awarm welcome to our featured speaker this evening,mr. jb straubel. thank you, sarah, for thatvery kind introduction. it's always hard for me tohear all these words describing things i've done in my career. it's mainly because tesla issuch an amazing team project. i feel this incredibleprivilege of going to work every day with thesmartest bunch of people
that i've ever had thechance to encounter. so it's a huge partof what makes it fun, what makes it possibleto do all that we've done. it's amazing to be here atthe university of nevada-reno. and the reception we'vegotten in northern nevada since we decided to movesome of our manufacturing here, as i think most of youare aware, the gigafactory, has been incredible. and the community has beenso welcoming, so open,
and so enthusiastic for whatwe're trying to achieve. it's far more than,i think, we even expected-- than we couldhave expected when we first came here. so today i just want to giveyou a little bit of an overview, a big picture view ofwhat tesla has done, what we're tryingto do, and then also a bit of a view into howwe relate to education. i think that's animportant part of this.
and especially, beinghere at the university, it's something i think it'scritical to talk about. and it will be akey part of how we plan to be successfulin working both in nevada, but around theworld, and around the country. so perhaps to get started, maybea brief history and a reminder of what tesla is all about. the company is incredibly young. it's easy to forgetthat sometimes
when you see thebrand, and you see all of the excitement about this. but the whole company isonly about 12 years old. it was only back in 2003that we got started. and we started withabout five people. it was an incredibly small team. it took us five yearsbefore we could even get the first product to market. it was a very quiet,kind of anonymous time.
and that first product wasa tesla roadster in 2008. and then it took us anotherfour years of hard work before we could getthe model s to market. so there was a long history kindof building up before things started to really accelerate. and this year has been probablyour most exciting year to date. in 2015, we've had thelaunch of tesla energy, early this year, whichwe'll talk more about, the launch of the modelx, much more recently,
and the company's grownto over 13,000 employees. which, again, is amazingfor me to imagine, given where we were justtwelve short years ago. and it's that incrediblepool of talent and that group ofpeople that are really making this all possible. you can see some pictures ofa few of the different sites, the fremont factory,the gigafactory, and i think the place to startwhen thinking about tesla
is what the historyof batteries did. tesla and batterieshave been intimately linked together since thebeginning of the company. and for almost 100 years, thewhole part of this century, lead acid batteries that peopleare pretty familiar with. the same kind that's in almostevery vehicle on the road today to start it were the status quo. that is what people experiencedwith energy storage. and even in the late1990s, lead acid batteries
were the best batteriesthat people could find to make electric vehicles. general motors making the ev1,their best electric vehicle at the time wasa phenomenal car, but it had a really bad battery. and with lead acid, thebest that you can do is perhaps surround 100 miles ofrange, usually less than that. you couldn't get agood acceleration. you couldn't get goodhandling, because the battery
was too heavy. and fundamentally,you couldn't make a car that would competewith gasoline head-to-head. the car was too expensiveand had too little range. so it was in the early2000s that lithium ion was a technology thatwas invented mainly for consumer electronics. and when people startedcarrying around cellphones and carrying aroundlaptop computers
that was when the desirefor portable energy storage went through the roof. it wasn't actually cars thatcreated this sort of new desire and new pull for technology. so it was in about2004 when tesla first launched what became thevery first lithium ion vehicle in the market. the tesla roadster was a brandnew type of electric vehicle. this was a car that nobodythought was really possible
at the time. i can't remember howmany of my friends i would talk toand say, hey, we're starting this electricvehicle company. it's going to be so exciting. and they would comeback to me and say, oh, like a golf cart, orsomething like that. that sounds great. well it took a lot of effortto change people's perception.
and with lithium ionbatteries, for the first time we could make a car that couldhandle, it could accelerate, and it had enough rangeto compete with gasoline. the tesla roadstercould go over 200 miles. it had acceleration that wasunder four seconds zero to 60. and it really blewpeople's minds on what electric was capable up. and it ushered in sortof a new generation of electric vehicles.
but with lithium ionbatteries it wasn't enough. the roadster had alot of limitations. we had to build that cararound a chassis that was made largely out of a lotus elise. we didn't startfrom the ground up. we had to startwith a car that we could manage toconvert with a very small team and a small budget. we had to start with the lotuselise chassis and convert it.
however, the nextvehicle we did, the model s. whenwe started that we had a clean sheet of paper. we knew we couldn'tmake a car that would compete withgasoline without really doing over the entire equation. we couldn't convertsomething else. so with the model s we startedliterally from the ground up. it was an absolutelyclean sheet of paper.
there was no sort of pre-vehiclethat it was based on. and we really built thatcar around the battery pack. this picture was basicallywhat the model s architecture looks like. if you strip the entirechassis of the car away, and just sort of look withlike x-ray vision into the car, that shape on the bottomis the battery pack. that battery is sortof the foundation for the wholevehicle architecture.
it's where most of theweight in the car is. so you can kind of see thatif you have this car with all the weight that fardown, it sets up the whole equation foramazing handling, braking, all the vehicle parameters thatyou want kind of come naturally when you get this weightdistribution right. it also let us havehuge cargo volume. and it let us build a carthat was much different than a converted gasoline car.
we also were able toaddress safety in a way that no othergasoline car could. the entire front of thecar was free to become sort of the optimal crash structure. we didn't have a biggiant engine up front. we could make that entirefront nose of the car absorb energy in a crash. and that's part of what helpedus make the model s the safest vehicle that nhtsahad ever tested.
it was a kind of amazingbreakthrough in that regard. and, overall, wedidn't aim to just make the best electric car. with the roadster wehad to make something that would shake up the market. but with the model s we knew toscale, and to grow the company, we would have to do somethingthat would be the best car out there, bar none. and we wanted to go and competehead-to-head with gasoline.
and be the best vehicle thatthe world had really ever seen. and this was a prettyaudacious goal. for a company that, arguably,had never built a car before. we were a brand new team thathad no production capability. and it was our first car. so there were plentyof people telling us this was animpossible challenge. this is too much to biteoff in the first car. and it probablywasn't going to work.
but, in the end, itactually did work. and i think theignorance of that team, or maybe the inexperienceof that team, was incredibly helpful for us. we didn't know whatwe didn't know. and we didn't have a lot ofpreconceived notions on maybe how a car should bebuilt, or how cars always have been built. instead, wejust started over and designed it from a clean sheetof paper in the best way
that we thoughtit should be done. and it ended up settingmost of the benchmarks. we won the motor trend carof the year in 2013, which is a very prestigious award. this sort of woke up detroit. and it woke up themanufacturers in germany. and they said, well,maybe that's a fluke. how did they do that? and then this yearwith consumer reports,
we were able to almostbreak the rating system. getting 103 out of 100 points. it was somethingthat they had never been able to do before becauseevery other vehicle on the road had some inherent compromises. so the rating scalewas set up around those inherent compromises. they never imagined somethingthat could have acceleration in under three seconds zero to60, that's sort of lamborghini
and ferrari acceleration. and then also have almost100 miles per gallon of energy efficiency. on top of that,the safest vehicle that had ever been tested. so it was sort of thisstring of superlatives that people didn't expectcould all get linked together. and fundamentally, wewere able to do that by leveraging new technology.
we didn't have the limitationsthat gasoline vehicles had and we could start overand sort of break the mold. the other key thing,of course, was range. the model s moved the bareven further on range. 270 miles is, today, the highestrange model s that we make. and this is enough rangewhere you can basically do all of, evena week's driving, without having to reallyworry too much about charging. this was a key factor.
and still today most otherelectric vehicles on the market have under 100 miles of range. so this has been one of the mostimportant factors for adoption of electric vehicles,and especially advanced electric vehicles. and to follow up themodel s, just a little over two weeks ago, weunveiled and announced the model x. this is a sportutility vehicle that we've built on the sameplatform as the model s.
so we were able to doit relatively quickly. and we're able to buildit in the same factory, in fremont, as the model sleveraging similar battery and motor technology. but with thisvehicle, we've taken kind of all ofthe great extremes that we had with the models into a different vehicle segment, into the suv segment. so it has three rows ofseats, comfortable seating
for seven people, and stillwell over 200 miles of range, over 250 miles ofrange, in fact. we've also innovated a prettyinteresting new door structure. a really completely newdoor structure on this car. and this wassomething, again, where a lot of people inthe vehicle industry sort of looked at this, andkind of scratched their heads, and said, why wouldwe try and do that? doors work really well.
and why not just go the waythat everybody else goes. and we looked atthis and thought of trying to finda way that we could use modern sensors,modern actuators, and, really, robotics tomake a door experience that would let you have much betteringress and egress to the car. and with thisfalcon-wing door, you can step directly intothe third row of seats. and you can also open this doorin an incredibly tight space
next to cars where youmay have parked beside it. it actually has two hingesand a number diffraction actuators so the doorcan change its path when it opens next to an obstacleto avoid the obstacle. so sensors in the door are ableto see the outside surroundings and then change the waythat the door is opening. today that's pretty easy todo with computers and sensors. but if you looked at how a doorworked 50, or 100 years ago, it would have seemed unheard of.
so it's taking advantageof this new technology to do these new things. this is also the first evthat has 5,000 pound towing capability built instraight from the start. most electricvehicles, people tend to think of as under-powered,they can't carry very much. this is the opposite. we can tow an entire vehiclebehind it, a camper, a boat, all these different things.
and have plenty of power totow that through the mountains, accelerate in just the sameway that you would always expect to do. and with the models and the model x, we still had one problemthat we had to address. and this was, how doyou take a road trip? you can always charge yourcar at home, in your garage. you can charge it at work. but we knew that we needed away to make electric mobility
have the same kind of freedomthat gasoline vehicles enjoy. people have the romanticideal that you're going to hop inyour car, and you're going to drive across thecountry at moment's notice, maybe grab your bagon your way out. not very many people actually dothis, but the ability to do it is very important. and maybe it's not all ofthe way across country, but maybe it's afew hundred miles.
and, historically, evsnever could do this. if you wanted to go outsidethe vehicle's range, you had to plan anovernight stop, which just wasn't practical. so we invented something wecall super charging, which is a very fast dccharge to the vehicle. we connect directly into thebattery pack of the vehicle and we can charge itup to 135 kilowatts. it's the fastest chargingstation and the fastest
charging mechanism onthe planet, by far. it's almost three times fasterthan the next fastest charger. and this has let us,basically, recover hundreds of miles of drivingrange in tens of minutes. we can stop for 20 or 30minutes and then drive again on the freeway forthree plus hours. so suddenly a roadtrip became possible in an electric vehicle. you could drive betweensan francisco and la.
we could drive,literally, across country. and several yearsago, we started building a network ofstations to do this. we didn't want torely on someone else to build these stations. we couldn't find a governmentthat wanted to do it. a state body doing it was kindof a patchwork of solutions. and we decided thatthis was strategic. that this was something thattesla had to do ourselves.
i think the bestanalogy is a cell phone. if you had a cellphonethat didn't have a network it wouldn't be very useful. maybe the network could kindof broadcast from your house, but then as soon asyou left your house, or as soon as youleft your home city, the phone would stop working. so we kind of lookedat in that way. we didn't look at it inthe gas station model.
we looked at in acell phone model. and having a coverage map therewas compelling and complete was really important. so today, if we look at themap of where superchargers are, we can drive coast-to-coast,nonstop, using nothing but the supercharger network. just here in nevada, we havethe whole i-80 corridor covered. there's a station in truckee. then there's also astation, several stations--
i think we have four-- spanningall the way across the i-80 corridor, and then continuingeastward through utah. so this is a prettybig game changer. suddenly you cando everything you wanted to do in an electriccar that could never do before. we've also kept a building thisnetwork in europe and in asia. we now have chargers have strungthroughout china and japan. and in europe, it'sactually more dense than it is here in the us.
in fact, in europe, wesell more vehicles today even than we doin north america. this has been anincredibly strong market, with the price ofpetroleum as high as it is relative to priceswe enjoy here in the us. and overall, we'rebuilding out that network. we're opening a new superchargestation every 24 hours right now. and we're buildingout that network,
not just for the s and thex, but for future vehicles. this is something that we see asthe ev ecosystem, an investment we have to make to keepgrowing the product portfolio. and tesla was not foundedto make expensive cars, or to make luxury, orhigh performance cars. this is a misconceptionthat comes up all the time. and it's, perhaps,understandable based on the cars thatwe've built to date but it is not our mission.
our mission is to make carsthat everyone can afford and to change theelectric mobility equation so that essentiallyevery vehicle could have the opportunity to be electric. and we've always had athree-step plan to do this. the first step wasstarting with the roadster. a relatively expensivecar because technology was expensive. and we could sort ofhave limited market
with expensive new technology. just like cellphones werein the size of a suitcase when they first started. and then the step two wasto make a medium volume car at a lower price point. this was the models and the model x. we've built tens of thousandsof model s and model x's per year, up almost tenfold fromwhat we could do with roadster. and step three, isactually with the model 3.
so this vehicle is whatwe're developing today. most of the peopleinside of tesla are no longer workingon the s and the x, but they're hardat work designing and inventing allthe technologies to go into the model 3. and this car is aimingat a $35,000 price point, with more than 200 milesof real world range. so it's a completely newplatform, different technology
base, and aimed at buildinghundreds of thousands per year, instead of tens ofthousands per year. there's one challengewith this though which is scaling up theentire production operation. we have enough space inour fremont vehicle factory to build hundreds ofthousands of vehicles. that factory, when it wasowned by toyota years ago, actually built almostthat many vehicles. so the world knows how tobuild a lot of vehicles.
the bigger problem is whereto get enough batteries. and this is aninteresting graph, if people can see it at all. but these bars on theleft are basically what happened withthe world's battery production over the lastmaybe half a decade. it's been growingfairly steadily and just to help in case you can'tread that key, almost all these batteriesare made in asia.
the biggest battery players aresamsung, lg, panasonic, sony, those are the companies. and they're making batterieslargely because they also made consumer electronics,and they needed batteries for those products. so it's kind of alogical thing that they would have also gotten into thebattery manufacturing business. now last year,tesla was about 10% of that world battery market,which is pretty phenomenal
actually, in and of itself. but it still sort of fitsinto the overall structure of how this works. panasonic is our largestbattery provider and partner. and we sold around 35,000vehicles that year, in 2014. and you can kind of seehow that would work. now the problem is when wescale and continue ramping toward model 3, we getto somewhere about here. so looking forward to 2020,when we expect to be building
and selling about 500,000vehicles per year, we need around 35 gigawatthours of energy storage per year just to feed intothese vehicles. now that was more batteries thanthe whole world made in 2013. so this is a big problemand it was something that we've kind of seen comingseveral years in advance. and while it is a big problem,matching our supply chain and ramping that up. we also saw this asa huge opportunity.
because instead ofjust building batteries the same way that they'vebeen built for years and years we've thought, shouldn'tthere be a better way to do this when we want tobuild so many more of them? there must be a more efficient,more cost effective way to do this, when the markethas grown by this much. so we had a vision to createa totally new type of factory, something that would be muchmore vertically integrated, and something that wouldtake raw materials in one end
and then go all theway through the process to completed batterypacks out the other end. this was kind of a crazyidea in the beginning, and we weren't reallysure exactly how this would come together. but, ultimately, this idea iswhat became the gigafactory. and we worked forquite a few years before actually ending uphere in nevada in setting up partnerships and defininghow this factory would
operate internally, and whatwould be the ins and outs. but at the highlevel, this is going to be one of the biggestfactories in the world, by far the biggest batteryfactory in the world. and we're able to achievean economy of scale by doing that that can drivethe price down on energy storage much faster thanpeople expected. instead of just buyingincrementally more batteries made in the same way thatconsumer electronics are made
from those samecompanies, we're deciding to build batteries closeto where they're needed, close to the vehicleproduction, and close to where the sources of rawmaterials are going to be. so this factory will be ableto build a half million cars per year and havea total capacity of almost 50 gigawatt hours offull battery packs per year. we also had a vision to makethis factory essentially net zero energy,almost self-contained
from an emissions andenergy point of view. this is something that wasvery, very, very important to all of our customers. people buying teslavehicles are doing that because they careabout sustainability, they care about the environment. and they didn't wantus building batteries in a way that was damagingto the environment, that would seem sort ofcounter intuitive,
if they're buying a productthat had a supply chain and manufacturing trail thatcreated a lot of damage. so, again, we saw anopportunity to really embrace what customerscare the most about and also invent afactory that could have an interesting andnew type of energy source and do this in avery unique way. today, we've startedconstruction, just actually over a year ago westarted construction
just east of sparks. this is a picture fromshortly after we broke ground. we've continued building. and i have to say, hats off,to the nevada construction partners and tradesthat we're working with. construction here hasmoved extremely fast. it's part of why we wanted tobe in nevada in the first place. but, again, it's exceededour wildest expectations on how efficiently and howfast that we could actually
build and implement here. and today, the factoryis still growing, still becoming abigger and bigger site. and we expect to have some ofthe first employees actually starting in the factoryeven in the next few weeks. and we'll be buildingthis facility out for years and years to come. but our strategy is to actuallydo operations in one half, even as we continueto expand and grow
the other half of the factory. we didn't want to wait untileverything was complete and then have one giant opening. instead, we want to havea phased approach where we can add employees and addproduction capability as we grow. i should also notethat we're hiring. and we'll show this link again,but this is sort of something that i think has really madethe community and the state here
very excited. and it's actually happening. for the first time,we're beginning to hire large numbers of people. we have several hundredpeople working on site now. and more than several hundredif you count construction. and this will be ramping upsteadily over the next months and years to come. so we really encourage anyonethat's interested in this
to get in touch with us, lookup what jobs are being offered. it's a pretty diverse mix. and one other thing ishould maybe mention is that while we're soexcited by all the enthusiasm that the whole communityhere's had for this project, it's really prettyoutrageous in some ways. we've had any numberof drone over flights, and helicopter overflights, and i'm sure everybody's watchedthe drone videos on youtube,
small airplanes, photographersroaming the hillsides, and all of this. it's gotten a little bitout of control though. and this is still an incrediblyactive construction site. we have to take safetyvery, very seriously, both for our employees,but also for people that happen to be inor around the site. and i just want tocaution everyone that, especially if peopleare trying to sort of get
a sneak peak of thesite-- we're happy to show anyone what's going on. it's not secretive. nobody needs to sort oftrespass and break in to come and take a picture. we'll be happy to show you. and, unfortunately,just this last week we had a bit of an incidentwith some photographers from the reno gazettejournal that ended up
putting some of our team membersin a little bit of basically in a difficult situationfor their own safety. so this is something that alsois tough for us to manage. we treat the teslafamily like a family. we're still pretty closeknit and very small. and we want to bevery welcoming, and we want to have everyonesee what we're doing and be a part of it, but wehave to be really careful when things come to addressingour own team member safety.
so just to lookat the next slide at some of the differentthings that we're hiring for at this factory. this is a really diverse mix. i think a lot of peoplehad maybe the misconception that this is only going to besome kind of giant labor pool of people assembling cells. this is actually going to be amuch more diverse work group. we're buildingengineering and r&d
teams that are going tooperate out of this factory. we already have engineeringteams working out of the site, out of construction trailers,but they're working there. and this is goingto keep growing. so were hiring productionengineers, manufacturing engineers, people that arehelping to design the control systems in the buildingitself, the energy systems, all the way through materialshandlers, human resources. this factory is going to haveits own ecosystem of people.
they can run, andmaintain, and support everything that'sgoing on there. it's not going to be somesatellite facility that's remotely controlled bysome headquarters far away. this is a really key point. and i think it's critical tomake it successful that it has that feel. it needs to feel like astart up in its own right. so this is the breadth ofstuff that we're looking for.
again, if you know peoplethat are interested, or if anyone here isinterested, please check us out. the main missionfor this gigafactory has been also drivingdown the cost of storage. so something that maybeis taken for granted is the amount of sort ofeffort that the world has put into energy storage todate hasn't really equaled what's happening today. today there's morecompanies working
on reducing thecost of batteries than ever there were before. and as we're ableto scale this up, and as we're able to find waysto drop the price of storage much faster thananyone expected, we have this opportunityto do something that we've long felt wasa bit of a missing piece. as i said before,all of our customers care deeply aboutsustainability.
we founded the company to makesustainable transportation. and electric vehicles arenot completely sustainable unless the energysource that charges them is also sustainable. perhaps that's prettyobvious but it's something that's really important. and we don't want to haveelectric vehicles that are powered from fossil fuels. we'd like to have thempowered from renewable energy,
whether it's solar or wind. unfortunately though, solarand wind are, of course, intermittent. and the times when youwant to charge your vehicle might not be the times whenyou have solar energy falling on your roof, or on themiddle of the desert if there's autility scale plant. so the missinglink here has been how do you directly couplerenewable and sustainable
energy through toelectric transportation but also through to other loads,when and how those loads need to be powered. and the obvious answerto this, seems obvious, has been to apply energystorage in the same way that we're playingit in vehicles, but to apply it on the grid. and earlier thisyear we launched a completely separatebusiness unit
called tesla energy, where we'releveraging the same battery architectures, andchemistry, and ecosystem that we've built for vehiclesinto some new stationary energy storage products. and there's twoproducts here that we're pretty excited about. one is called thetesla powerwall. and this is aresidential battery pack that mounts in your garage, oron the outside of your house,
pretty much anywhere you want. it's all-weather rated. some people even want tomount it in their living room, or inside their house,they're excited about it. but it fits into theoverall product ecosystem that we're creating. the branding isconsistent with the car, it's consistent with thecharging systems that we build. and it allows customers to havea seamless link all the way
from solar panels on theroof, through to powering and charging theircar, and through to powering therest of their house if they want tochoose to do that. so to us this was areally cool missing piece. and it's made possibleby the low cost batteries that we can createby the sense of scale that the gigafactory gives us. it also has somepositive feedback
because as we sellmore power walls, we can also reduce the priceof batteries even faster for vehicles. so there's a kind ofself-reinforcing effect here as the entireecosystem grows. the other product isthe tesla powerpack. this is a utility scale batterysystem, or commercial scale battery system. this single battery pack isabout 100 kilowatt hours.
and you can kind of seefrom one of our engineers, here, standing in frontof it, what the scale is. it's sort of like alarge refrigerator. and this isn't quite assexy or as fast and sleek as the powerwall is,but it's very powerful. and this batterypack, on its own, can power a small business fora number of hours, or completely eliminate the peak loadsof small businesses. but we've alsodesigned this in a way
that we could scalethem in parallel. so that we can connect multiplepowerpacks together into arrays so that fields likethis can be possible where we can aggregatehundreds of powerpacks together and link theminto the utility structure so that we can start tostore utility scale solar, or large scale wind farm output. and this gives us achance to actually start adjusting and affecting the waythat the entire electric grid
works. if we want to actuallyget to a world where we are able to integratelarge, large, amounts of renewable energy,we have to start doing more and more of this. and there's several excitingpilot plans and projects that we're looking at, righthere nevada, doing things like this, with some of thesolar and wind resources here. but our vision here isn'tjust to stop at small scale.
ultimately, thevision is, how do we get to very, very large scale? how do we get to essentiallynot using any fossil fuels? that's the exciting futurethat we really want to get to. and this visionis not impossible. if you look at whatland area is required to eliminate 100% of the fossilfuel use in the us from solar, it's surprisingly small. this would eliminate all of thefossil fuels, all of the oil,
and diesel, and petroleumused for transportation, all the coal and naturalgas used for electricity, and all of the natural gasfor heating, all of it. if you had a solararray that big you could stop burningfossil fuels in the us. that's a prettycompelling solution. of course, this wouldn't beall one giant solar array in central kansas,but it would actually end up being distributedall around the country,
just like is happening now. we would see utility scalesolar going in the desert. we would see solar panelson top of buildings and on top of homes. and this can continuescaling if we have storage to a placewhere the whole grid, and all the energy we usecan be sustainable. and we can't do this soon enoughbecause we have a huge carbon dioxide problem facing us.
the concentration of carbondioxide in the atmosphere has grown extremely rapidlyin the last decades. most people are probablyfamiliar with this, but this is a reallyserious problem, and it's formed byburning fossil fuels. in just the last year,for the first time in severalhundred-thousand years the concentration of carbondioxide in the atmosphere jumped over 400parts per million.
that's a pretty amazing, verytangible, very measurable, threshold that we've passed. didn't get a lot of fanfarebut this was a huge deal that happened earlier this year. and a lot of people are quickto say that this is just an impossible problem. this must be too difficult.how can we really do this? it's going todestroy our economy. it's going to just betoo much of a cataclysm
to shift all of our energyuse away from fossil fuels. but history is full of very,very difficult challenges. even with the model s, peoplesaid this was an impossible challenge, it can't be done. and this is notsomething that-- you know we really are scared of. i think that there are plentyof examples of places where this has worked in the past. and one that i think isan interesting comparison
is if we look about 58years ago this week there was an interestinganniversary that we passed, which was-- probably nottoo many people remember this but, what this was wasthe first man-made satellite in orbit around the earth. the soviet union thenlaunched sputnik which completely shocked the us. it sort of caught usvery much off guard. and we were really far behind.
we didn't have anywhere closeto this type of technology. we weren't ready to catch up. and, again, most people weresaying this is impossible. we can't catch up. it's too difficult.there's too much of a lead. but this spacerace, of course, i think we all know how it ended. less than 12 yearslater, we actually landed people on the moonwhich was pretty amazing.
not only did we catch up butwe changed all of history and we went to a completelydifferent playing field. so this was, i think, anamazing interesting example that literally was just thisweek 58 years ago from when this race started. the key point here is thatto me sustainable energy is this generation's moon shot. for many, manyyears we've kind of looked around for whatis the next exciting,
or sort of stimulating,incredibly challenging thing that's going to rise up. and the transition ofall of our energy sources over to renewable andsustainable energy is equivalent to this. in fact, in many ways it'smore difficult than this because it's a longer challengethat will affect more people. and that moon shotchallenge, some of the interestingoutcomes of that,
that endured for a lot longerthan just the single footprints or the landing ofpeople on the moon have been what it didto the education system. that space race changed the waythat science and engineering were looked at in the educationsystem for decades to come. almost immediatelypeople started taking science more seriously. educators got muchmore involved. people were buildingmodel rocket experiments.
and it became something that wasthe cool subject, the en vogue subject, that everyone knewwas important, and understood and could tangibly connectto real world goals. and it led to basicallyinspiring a whole generation of innovatorsengineers, scientists who went out and created many,many different companies. they ended up buildinga new economy that wasn't there previously, andcreated millions of jobs. so this was kind ofan interesting picture
from a book that is one of myfavorites called, rocket boys. and it was about agroup of teenagers, at that time, who got soinspired by the space race that they startedbuilding rockets and basically changedtheir whole career trajectory from being incoalwood, west virginia. to one where they endedup working at nasa and becoming engineers. and i think it's also kindof interesting and fitting
that they were incoalwood, west virginia because that ties directly backto what we need to do today. and i hope that we can findways to inspire students that are also in communities thatare full of fossil fuels where the entire economy isdominated by fossil fuels to get into asustainable energy race. but it's a race with ourselves,and against ourselves. this isn't something where it'sus versus the soviet union, it's us against really whatwe've done to ourselves.
and already many differenteducation institutes are leading in this regard. this is not something wherewe're starting from scratch. there are manystudent organizations, student projects,solar car racing is one that has been nearand dear to my heart, that i participated inand had great fun with. it's also been a place wherewe recruit many students from, solar decathlon,building efficient homes,
and efficient solar structures. also, differentcurricula that are focused on sustainability,or energy efficiency, or renewable energy. arizona stateuniversity has what was then the firstschool of sustainability focused in that school. also, we see thechance for outreach to younger generations.
not just at universitylevel but creating programs that go back to k through12 classes and get people started and excitedabout this much sooner. right here at universityof nevada-reno, i understand there's a reallyinteresting program doing just that, taking engineeringback to k through 12. and this is thetype of thing that i think is really critical tothis problem going forward. at tesla this is somethingwhere we are ramping up
our involvement very quickly. we see this as one of thebiggest opportunities, but also a bigchallenge to continue scaling the entire movementtoward electric vehicles, and toward sustainable energy. we can't do this alone. we need talent. we need people thathave been trained and understand thiswhole industry.
so there's several ways thatwe're engaging with education right now. universities is one key way. this picture is ofa group of interns that we've had justthis last summer. we're also reaching out totech and vocational schools. and we're beginning programs,as well, that go through into k through 12 schools. and just to highlight a coupleof different things here.
this focus is spread all the waythrough very advanced research. we're doing materialscience and physics research on batterycell materials with dalhousie university. we're doing interesting newr&d on manufacturing processes and technologies withunlv, in an agreement we just launched last week. and we're also doingtraining for team members and workforce to beable to understand how
to build these new products. there are differences in howyou build an electric vehicle, or how you assemblea battery pack, than in many other products. in training peopleahead of time, and being ready to be ableto do that, is a key enabler. this is what has happenedwith our intern population. so the internprogram is something we started very early on attesla, years and years ago.
and there was a lot ofapprehension, actually, when we first started this. some people are kind ofnervous about having interns in the company, andrunning around, and trying to do key design tasks. how would this really workwhen we didn't have everything under control ourselves? but we've been able to steadilygrow the number of interns we have year on year.
and last year wehad over 600 interns in our engineering teamsand in our production teams at tesla, which is great. this has been such ahuge boon to the company. it's hard to overstate. and it's exciting,every summer when we have this influx ofpeople from universities all over the world. we have people from europeand asia, everywhere.
you can almost sensethe energy level in the whole companygoes up a few notches. people are workinglater, and they're running around in the cafeteriain flip-flops and tie-dye, and skateboarding to work. and it's just a really coolway to bring the excitement that a generation of people arefeeling for these technologies back into the companyon a regular basis. and we end uphiring about a third
of the people that workas interns at tesla on a permanent basis. so it's been both arecruiting tool, but also way to help educate and toenergize the company. and we're also launching today,actually, an internship program for the gigafactory. this isn't exclusivelyinto the bay area, it's not a california thing. this is something wherewe want to hire interns
into every level ofwork that's happening right here at the gigafactory. so we're just in thebeginning of this program, but i want to make sure thatpeople both at university of nevada-reno, and alsounlv, are fully aware of this and really reachout to this program. and like we have withthese previous summers, i'm sure we'll have peoplefrom all over the world but having this tight connectionto the local community
is really important to us. we're here to stay. we don't want to havea workforce that's imported from somewhere else. and as many people as we canbring on board and recruit from the localcommunity i think it makes that tie even stronger. the other key thing that we'vebeen doing, or fostering, and getting involved in,university race programs
and competitions. there's a universityof pennsylvania program, related toelectric vehicle racing, which has been a really,really amazing group. we've hired severalof these students and they've been able to inventthings on these race cars that were quite cutting edge. new technology that reallydidn't exist other places. and we're activelylooking for more ways
to get involvedin these programs. this is something wherewe have a few projects now but we would love tohelp support, get moving, inspire other programs,even if they don't directly work with us. and i think this isa way to give hands on training toengineers and students in a way it's difficultto get in classes. we see people that haveparticipated in these projects
and actually built hardware,and had to race it, and had to make itwork in the real world, tend to bring adifferent mindset, both in projectmanagement but also in really justunderstanding the ins and outs of how to makethings really work. and we've also been working ontech and vocational training programs. and something that we've kind oftried out this last year that's
been working quite wellin an externship program where we bring educators, fromdifferent schools-- and we've tried this with several peoplefrom the local community here, from differentorganizations. we'll bring themto tesla, and have them work in tesla rightalongside of the people in the company for several days. and really learn exactlywhat it's like inside. what do we really needfrom the workforce?
what skills are important? which skills aren't important? and there's nobetter way to do that than first-hand experience ofactually being in the company and working alongside people. and then those educators cango back to their difference institutions, bringthat experience, and bring that knowledge,and sort of custom tailor, in some ways, they'recurriculum programs
so that they're the mostrelevant to serve real world workforce. i think this can transcendfar beyond just tesla. we're not doing this just tohave a pipeline of candidates, but we really want tohelp tailor curriculum to be the mostrelevant that it can be for this entiresustainability revolution that's coming. the next phase of this thati think is just starting,
and we really haven't engagedin this anywhere near as much as i would like us to yet. but working with kthrough 12 is going to be incredibly important. the co2 problem, and theglobal warming problem that we're facing, is byits nature a very long term problem. it's not something that wascreated in one generation. and it's not something that canget fixed in one generation.
so the people that arejust entering school today are the ones that aregoing to, unfortunately, be tasked with themajority of the work and actually fixing andsolving this problem. and they're going to be livingwith the results of what we've done for the lastseveral hundred years for the nextseveral generations. so it's reallyimportant that we start to get them on an educationtrack that understands this,
that has hands-on experiencewith the technologies we know today that are going to beso important to solving this in the future. and with that, overall, i thinkthat education is probably the most powerful toolthat we can really go to to solve someof these issues. technology is critical,and it's important, but educating people to helpmove technology forward, to make it better, and tofind ways to educate people
so they can starttheir own companies, start their own enterprises,and build new factories is really what'sgoing to solve this. we can't scale it withoutgrowing in a geometric way. so there's a quote thati think is really nice. it kind of sums this upfrom nelson mandela, which is saying, education isthe most powerful weapon we can use to change the world. and our mission isto change the world.
we're not alone in this butconverting a whole energy revolution from fossilfuels to renewable energy is going to be a huge taskthat's going to take engagement from every university,and every state, really every person on theplanet if we want to succeed in this mission. so with that, ithink i'll wrap it up and i understand we havea couple of questions from students in the audience.
thank you, jb. my name is [inaudible]. and i'm a [inaudible]science major. i'm a graduate student. so my question specificallyis about, what type of internship opportunities willyou be providing, especially for someone who isstill in college, or has just enteredgraduate school? and especially for what majors?
well what type ofopportunities will we be offering forstudents and graduates, i think is the question. and we have a widelist of opportunities. we're not hiring justone type of engineer. by the nature of the problemthat we're attacking, it's a prettymulti-disciplinary problem. so we're hiring chemicalengineering students, civil engineering students tohelp with building factories,
mechanical engineering, reallyalmost every discipline. and all the way throughproduction planning. there's some critical rolesin manufacturing execution that i think areoften overlooked. and we're putting morefocus on those things than i think typicalcompanies might do. so for us, excellence inmanufacturing and excellence in manufacturingexecution is going to be a key part of howwe plan to succeed at some
of these new facilities. so, across the board,the opportunities are pretty wide ranging. hi, thank you for your talk. i'm with the material scienceengineering department. and i have a question, it seemsthat battery technology has advanced so quickly inthe past 5 to 10 years, that lithium basedbatteries are currently the large share ofthat, but there are also
some other batterychemistries that involved other costly,strategic materials like cobalt. withthis in mind, where do you envisionthe main challenges and directions forward tobe in making batteries, or lithium batteries,sustainable technology for automotive applications? it's a good question. at the heart of it, isreally where do we see,
i think, how do we plan to makethese materials that are used in batteries today sustainable? or how do we envision growingthat supply chain, i think? so, lithium is the onethat everyone talks about, of course. are we facing alithium shortage? things like this. the answer is simply, no. there's a huge amount oflithium in the earth's crust.
it's one of the mostprevalent elements. we do have to focus heavily onrefining technology, and making sure that there's capacityand technology ready to refine lithium at a good cost. and we've been lookinglocally, and actually have just signed acouple agreements with one nevada-based miningcompany, pure energy minerals, to extract lithiumright here in nevada. actually it's silver peak,it's a town just about three
or four hours south of here. but some of the more importantmaterials in batteries actually are nickel, as youmentioned, cobalt as well. these materials,our focus is looking at how do we bring the supplychain closer to the factory. we don't want to end upmining nickel, for instance, halfway across the world andthen moving it to the factory. that, alone, has a bigenvironmental footprint. so we're workinghard on bringing
all of the majorsupply chain components coming into the factory,the raw materials, as close as we possibly can. that's been a key focus ofthe whole activity developing around the gigafactory. so we're working directly withmining companies actually, some in canada, some herein the us, some in mexico, to make sure we can getthat as close as we can. ultimately, it alsominimizes cost.
so we minimize the environmentalimpact and we can minimize cost in that way. thank you. my name is justin [inaudible],and i'm a computer science and engineering student. my question is, thenext generation model 3 will be a bit of a newfrontier for tesla given it's expected marketand price, how much of the car in terms ofshared, or new parts,
will be expected to be differentfrom the existing model s and model x? yeah, how much ofmodel 3 will be new from existing model s andx. for better, or worse, most of model 3 has to be new. x, we were able to build ona lot of common components with s, but model3 we can't do that. so we're inventing a wholenew platform for model 3. it's a new battery architecture.
it's a new motor technology. brand new vehicle structure. so it's a lot of work. and this is somethingthat we started on even a few years ago. and, as i mentioned, it'skind of the core focus inside the companynow, looking at r&d and engineering investment. but it is a brand new vehicle.
and it has to be. hi my name ismckenzie colar, i'm an environmentalengineering major. and i like to asktesla what they're doing to cut the emissionsproduced by their factories? i appreciate the goal of a moreefficient, zero emissions car, but i want to knowwhat they're doing to cut the emissions producedby making these cars? that's kind of the same questiona lot of our customers ask us.
and i think the gigafactory ismaybe the best example that we can talk about with this. we, from the get go, from thefirst concept of this factory, wanted to make it a netzero energy facility. so the most visiblething that we're doing is covering the entiresite with solar power. the whole roof ofthe gigafactory was designed, from thebeginning, with solar in mind. we kept all of the mechanicalequipment off the roof.
we didn't put extrapenetrations through the roof that we didn't need to. and it's a very,very clean surface that we can completelycover in solar. that's not enough solar, though,to power the whole factory. so we've also gone tothe surrounding hillside areas that we couldn'tuse for other functions and we're addingsolar power to those. the other interestingthing is we
wanted to manage theemissions of the gigafactory. solar power can dosome of that, but we took a kind of radicalmove in the beginning and said we'reactually not going to burn any fossilfuels in the factory. zero emissions, we wanteda zero emissions factory. just like a car. so instead of, kind of, fightingthis battle in hindsight, we just said we're not evengoing to have a natural gas
pipeline coming to the factory. so we didn't even build it. and it kind offorced the issue when you don't have natural gas. none of the engineerscan say, oh, but, it'll just be moreefficient just let me use a little bit. sorry, we don't even have it. so it's been kindof a fun activity.
and just a lot of interestingchallenges that come up. but every single stepof the process we've been able to reinvent andcome up with clever solutions. using heat pump technologythat ends up actually much more efficient than justburning natural gas for steam. and in the end, wehave a facility that has basically no emissions. the only emissions arerelated to the vehicles that might go there that aren'telectric, or things like that.
but we'll try and attackthat one piece at a time. my name is davis[inaudible], and i'm a mechanical engineering major. what is tesla's visionfor autonomous driving? not only as a technologicalchallenge and capability of each vehicle, but also as adeep and broad societal change? good question. we didn't have much time toaddress that in the talk today. but autonomousdriving, something
that we callautopilot technology, we've put a lot offocus into this. and a lot ofsoftware engineering and electricalengineering people are working on thisproblem right now. it's something thati think is more or less inevitable in vehicles. if you look at the pace ofdevelopment of computing technology, and ofsensing technology,
it's only a fairlyshort amount of time before we're able tohave a vehicle that can more or less pilot itself. and i think the way we seethis is evolving out of safety and active safety features. cruise control that'son every car today is actually a very, sort of,limited amount of an autopilot. the car is kind ofautonomous in one direction, in a pretty not veryintelligent way.
but that's continuing to evolve. today we have radar thatcan sense the distance to the car in front of you. and now you have cruise controlthat's adaptive and intelligent in that way too. many other cars have that. we're adding in ultrasonicsensors and cameras. so the next step is the carcan be referencing itself relative to cars around itand start to maintain steering
distance away from cars. in an electric vehicle we havekind of an inherent advantage because the entirecar is drive by wire. you might not really thinkabout this intuitively, but a computercontrols everything happening in the car. it's basically a wire going toa computer from the accelerator pedal. it's a wire going from acomputer into the battery.
and that computerhas the ability to control all thedifferent functions. so if we were smartenough to write software that could take thesensors from cameras and do what thehuman brain is doing, we could make an autonomous car. and i think that we'll seecars that are basically 90% autonomous in a surprisinglyshort amount of time. something on the order of10-ish years, not decades.
and it's going to be agreat thing because people are pretty bad drivers. by and large, people thinkthey're great drivers, but they're actuallynot that good. and what the main thing thatautonomous driving is going to do is save a lot of lives. if you could have a vehiclethat was 10 to 100 times safer than a human driverwhenever it was engaged, that would sort of transform theway that we look at cars today.
and i think that'san inevitability. it's coming. it's going to makea transportation just that much better. just like airbags wereinvented, seat belts, anti-lock braking systems,autonomous driving, or active safetysystems, are going to be a next layeron top of that. however that last5% or 10% of driving
is going to be a long tail. it's pretty difficult,if you've tried to drive a car in downtownmanhattan at rush hour. or through a really congestedconstruction area for a couple miles, or an emergencysetting, those kind of things are where i think havinga human available to be in the loop is stillgoing to be important part of it for quitea few years to come. so it's an importanttechnology set though
and it will end up makingtransportation safer and changing societyin a big way. on the vehicles themselvesare there mechanical systems? so you said the vehiclehad a computer that transmitted your controlsto the entire vehicle. are there mechanical systemsas like a safety backup in case the computer were to fail? that's a good question. steering has that for sure.
actually, braking has thatas well, in most cases. so, for instance,steering the way that most modernpower steering works is with an electric motorthat's assisting you. but you still have adirect mechanical link from the steering columnthat's in front of you through to the gear into therack that controls the wheels. so you can physicallyovercome the electric motor. you can kind of do an inputthat's different from that.
so you're kind of having amechanical link in parallel with the link from the computer. braking systemsare the same way. there's still a mechanicallink from the pedal through to a hydrauliccylinder to engage the brakes. of course, if the carwants to engage the brakes and you don't, that'sa hard thing to undo. but with steering it's themost critical one where there's still a mechanical link.
hi my name's jackson hedges. i'm also a mechanicalengineering student. if you were a student at theuniversity of nevada, what would you do to leavethe greatest impact. well it's probablythe same answer i'd give if i wasa student anywhere. which is somethingsara alluded to in the beginning, which isfollow what you're really passionate about.
it may seem like reallysimple basic advice, but i'm always surprisedhow many people tend to not do that. and it's a really powerfulthing when you just love what you're doing. suddenly it comes naturally. you enjoy spending time on it. you can work on it until2:00 in the morning and forget that it's2:00 in the morning.
that's, i think, themost important thing. find whatever it isthat you love most, and what comes easily,and naturally, in terms of enjoyment and justput all your energies in that direction. it's, i think, a really,really powerful thing that naturally lets you leavethe biggest market. it doesn't matter ifthat's trendy or not. in some ways i think it'sactually more important
if it's not trendy becausethen there's more of a chance to make even a bigger markbecause other people aren't going in that direction. so that would be, i guess,my super simple advice. well i think we're alreadyquite a bit over time. so i apologize for that. but thank you foryour questions. it's great to be here. and thanks for your time.
i want to thank jb for thiswonderful and inspiring presentation. i want also to thank mycolleagues and the students for putting this wonderful[inaudible] presentation that shows the breadth and depthof the college of engineering. and i just want to affirm ourcommitment to a delivery based on excellence thatis going to affect not only our students, facultyand staff, but our community and the world.
finally i would like tothank the president's office for working with our officein the college of engineering to bring this event to life. and i want to thank allof you for your attendance and have a good night.
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