Gigafactories bring the electrification of everything: Best ideas of the century

Batteries and harnessing solar energy have been around in one form or another for centuries, but it wasn’t until 2016 that these technologies arguably changed the world. That’s when Elon Musk, before his controversial political career began, opened the first “gigafactory” in Nevada, producing advanced battery, electric motor and solar cell technology on a large scale – giga meaning 1 billion, or “giant.”

The amount of renewable energy – in the form of solar, wind and hydroelectric power – available to extract on Earth could also be described as gigantic. In just a few days, the sun provides our planet with more energy than all the fossil fuel reserves we have ever discovered.

Harnessing that power reliably is another matter. Although the photovoltaic effect, where light energy produces electric current, was discovered in 1839 by Edmond Becquerel and the first practical solar panels were manufactured in the 1950s, it was not until the 2010s that technology advanced enough for solar electricity to become competitive with fossil fuels. At the same time, the invention of lithium-ion batteries in the 1980s made it possible to store this energy.

The gigafactory has certainly also helped advance these solar cell and battery technologies. Yet its impact lay less in any specific invention than in the way it brought all parts of electric car production under one roof. This supply chain integration mirrors what Henry Ford did a century earlier: populating the planet with Teslas instead of fossil fuel-powered Model Ts. “It gave us dispatchable solar power through batteries, and it gave us electric vehicles,” says Dave Jones of Ember, a UK energy think tank.

The economies of scale generated by the gigafactory have also had repercussions beyond electric cars. “This battery opens up all kinds of new things: the telephone, the computer and the possibility of carrying large amounts of energy at relatively low cost,” says Sara Hastings-Simon of the University of Calgary in Canada.

In fact, in recent years the cost of these technologies has fallen so much that many experts say the electrification of our energy systems is inevitable. In California and Australia, solar power is so abundant that grid operators make it available to users for free. At the same time, batteries are moving ever closer to storing energy as densely as fossil fuels, allowing us to start building solar-powered planes, ships and long-haul trucks – and completely freeing our transportation and energy systems from their centuries-old dependence on fossil fuels.