Elon Musk has given up on solar power (On Earth)

Has Elon Musk abandoned the Tesla Plans, on the electric economy, on solar energy as we know it? From the SpaceX IPO filing it was released yesterday, it sure looks like it.

Recap for those not into the Musk-verse: Tesla has released Four Master Plans for many years, and although the details have been different, the corridor has been adding electricity to the economy. Musk put it best in his first post: “The ultimate goal of Tesla motors … is to help drive the economy of mining and burning hydrocarbons to the economy of solar energy.”

But recently, one of Musk’s companies, xAI, has received the wealth of mining and burning hydrocarbons, using it many non-gas driven turbines empowering its data centers and plans buy another $2.8 billionand effectively strengthen the role of oil in the AI ​​industry.

It’s a curious turn for a businessman who built his empire on clean energy — and has no qualms about directing his companies to buy each other. SpaceX has spent $131 million on 1,279 Cybertrucks, and xAI has spent $697 million over the past two years on Tesla Megapacks, the battery storage systems that the company will use to drive supercars. But so far, xAI has not bought a lot of solar panels from Tesla.

Solar power is not missing in SpaceX’s file, everything is focused on space, which the company believes is the future of data center power. Earth’s solar system makes only a small mention – not as a power source for the xAI data center but rather as a demonstration of what SpaceX envisions a solar system from space will be.

It’s no secret that Musk and other Silicon Valley executives have been interested in solar energy from space. SpaceX claims that space-based solar panels can generate “more than five times the energy” of Earth’s due to 24/7 illumination. As AI data centers face opposition here on Earth, CEOs like Musk will start browsing giant servers in space with the help of 24/7 light. Hammer, meet the nail.

Although SpaceX can lower the cost of raising a data center into orbit, the economy is more difficult. The power costs of Starlink’s satellites are more than what a typical data center on Earth would cost, and shielding the chips from the effects of space weather may not be easy or cheap. It is also unclear whether AI training can be distributed across multiple satellites, leaving a large portion of AI work on Earth. It’s not just one problem that SpaceX has to deal with, but many.

It is possible that Musk sees the current position of xAI as a stopgap, that when SpaceX is able to raise expensive gigawatt servers into orbit – maybe a few years from now, in his mind – they will lose what is on the ground, natural turbines included and no longer have to think about NIMBYs. The danger, of course, is that he is wrong.

It’s not just NIMBYs that Musk is worried about, though. He is worried that the computers he wants from AI will surpass what we can provide here on Earth. Sprinkled in the SEC filing are descriptions of “terawatt-scale annual AI compute growth,” which will require power to keep up. This is an amazing picture when you consider that all the data centers in the world use the circuit 40 gigawatts today.

These are Musk’s “first principles” in practice. At one point, he decided that the world would need more terawatts every year, and he worked from there. “We believe that third-party estimates of the need for data centers are subject to the limitations found in the world and the lack of electricity may be greater than the estimates,” the company argues.

Is it possible? Sure, I think so. But imagine what people today use about 35,000 terawatt-hours of energy per year, or about 4 terawatts continuously. Demand for power has risen recently, and for AI, it’s probably in a growth phase, which may continue or decline. There’s no way to tell at this point, but if there’s one thing Musk has, it’s seeing what’s going on in his place and adding to it badly.

This is where Musk’s problems come to rest in the world. I’m no rocket scientist, but I suspect that sending solar panels on a flatbed vehicle uses less energy than sending them into orbit. Additionally, space-ready solar panels will need to be manufactured on an unprecedented scale. Not a permanent problem, but perhaps a distraction. We haven’t absorbed much of the sun’s energy here on Earth, for example.

The perfect should not be the enemy of the good. There is still room for change here on Earth even as we chase our dreams into the stars.

Three years ago, Musk and his colleagues at Tesla released their “Master Plan Part 3,” which clearly outlined “a plan to phase out fossil fuels.” A good place to start would be the xAI data center.