Elon Musk Quotes

I keep hearing about battery innovation, but it never makes it to my phone.

A ten-times increase in the weight-oriented density of batteries would enable so many other moonshots, if we can find a great idea. We just haven't found one yet.

The depressing thing about battery technology is that it gets better, but it gets better slowly. There are a whole bunch of problems in materials science and chemistry that come in trying to make existing batteries better.

A battery by definition is a collection of cells. So the cell is a little can of chemicals. And the challenge is taking a very high-energy cell, and a large number of them, and combining them safely into a large battery.

It comes up over and over and over again that a ten times increase in the weight-oriented density of batteries or the volume metric, the space-oriented density of batteries, would enable so many other moonshots that that's one that just constantly comes up over and over again, and we will start that moonshot if we can find a great idea.

As technology tries to maintain its dizzying ascent, one dead weight has kept its altitude in check: the battery.

Every great device, gadget, electric car, and robot would be even greater if batteries didn't suck so badly.

I went to the hardware store to buy some batteries, but they weren't included, so I had to buy them again.

It takes energy to get energy.

I'm really interested in harvesting surplus energy, energy that surrounds but we never really use.

The sun doesn't always shine; the wind doesn't always blow. This is why, if we want to rely on renewables, we need intelligent systems that integrate and coordinate different sources of energy at scale so that when one is scarce or unavailable, the others can automatically compensate.

Because America is the Saudi Arabia of natural gas. We have the world's largest reserves of natural gas, and the world's most sophisticated production and storage facilities, by a wide margin.

We have to control our battery development and testing.

It's an old magical principle - it's even filtered down into RPG systems - that magic, while taking a lot of effort, can be 'stored' - in a staff, for example. No doubt a wizard spends a little time each day charging up his staff, although you go blind if you do it too much, of course.

When we learn how to store electricity, we will cease being apes ourselves; until then we are tailless orangutans. You see, we should utilize natural forces and thus get all of our power. Sunshine is a form of energy, and the winds and the tides are manifestations of energy. Do we use them? Oh, no! We burn up wood and coal, as renters burn up the front fence for fuel. We live like squatters, not as if we owned the property.

Energy is liberated matter, matter is energy waiting to happen.

Energy is everything. Rubbing happy and sad together creates energy.

Energy is a very subtle concept. It is very, very difficult to get right.

At the end of the day, natural-gas peakers sit back there and get financed so that the Midwest corridor can have a huge [period] of four to five days of no wind. The peakers are running big time to make that up, because that is the swing piece that can always be turned on.

What do batteries run on?

Energy may be likened to the bending of a crossbow; decision, to the releasing of a trigger.

Energy is the measure of that which passes from one atom to another in the course of their transformations. A unifying power, then, but also, because the atom appears to become enriched or exhausted in the course of the exchange, the expression of structure.

We need to increase the capacity; we need to improve performance so that we are more effective at lending that kind of support.

Intermittency [in availability for wind and solar] changes the economics, particularly this requirement that the power company at all times be able to require power. That's large.

The most straightforward path would be if we could bring the cost of solar electric and wind down by another factor of say, three, and then have some miraculous storage solution, so that not only over the 24-hour day but over long periods of time where the wind doesn't blow, you have reliable energy. That's a path. But energy storage is hard. That's not a guaranteed path.