Elon Musk

Elon Musk: Hello everyone. Well, I must say I'm very impressed with this meeting room is amazing. I feel like I'm in a waterfall, and it's really lovely here. And that was incredible performance.

So I must say I'm quite delighted to be here this morning talking to you and to experience this wonderful event, and everything that, Indonesia has to offer. It's, amazing being here in Bali and Indonesia. So, and I hopefully everyone saw the mangrove forests, because those are very impressive.

It's, several hundred thousand, acres of mangroves, that I think have been replanted, if I recall correctly. So there are a lot of great things happening in Indonesia and the rest of the world. And overall I would say I'm quite sort of optimistic for the future.

I think the. You know, we should never be complacent or entitled, but I do think that if we're not complacent or entitled, that the future will actually be great for the world, and I think we're headed to a bright future overall.

So, and with respect to water, I've always thought, you know, we should we call Earth Earth, but actually Earth is seventy percent water by surface area. So we've technically, I think if aliens came here, and a lot of people think aliens have come here, 'cause they're always asking me, they're always asking me about aliens.

The They would, they would name us Water because we are seventy percent water and only thirty percent land. So the what that means is the potential for solving any given water issue is extremely good because there is so much water. There's obviously desalination required at times and the transport of water, but desalination, as I think most people know, has become very inexpensive, and is,

And so really the availability of fresh water is simply about, energy and transport. So that's, when I talk to even very well-read, very very smart people, in the United States, they will often think, "Well, there's the water crisis is unsolvable."

But in fact, it is, it is very solvable. And with our continuing breakthroughs in the efficiency of of desalination and Anyway, I think we've, we've got a we've, we've got a great water future ahead of us, and I think a great sustainable energy future ahead of us.

As I mentioned, the, because the cost of desalination has dropped so much, if you're just talking about water for individual consumption or water in, say, a hydroponics facility, some kind of, you know, where you're not simply put it, putting it on the ground for crops, but actually have some sort of contained facility that minimizes the amount of evaporation, I think you can basically turn any part of the world green, including the entire world.

So it just begs the question of where does the energy come from? And here's where I think, solar energy is very much, underestimated in terms of its capability. So if you think about what would the Earth be without the sun?

The Earth would be a frozen dark ice ball at roughly three degrees above absolute zero. It would be quite unpleasant. So, or you know, very cold and dark.

But because of the sun, well, we are not we're at a quite a nice temperature, quite pleasant, sort of all roughly three hundred, three hundred degrees above absolute zero, and the sun powers almost the entire ecosystem is solar-powered. When you say like, "Well, how much electricity how much land would it take to generate, electricity?" there's a gigawatt per square kilometer of solar, radiation that reaches the surface.

So for every square kilometer, there's a peak power of, roughly a gigawatt, which is, comparable to a power station. Now, the sun doesn't shine all the time, obviously. So when you net all of that out and say, "Well, what, how, what, how much energy per day does one square kilometer yield?"

It's roughly one gigawatt hour per square kilometer per day, which is still a lot. So, and if you do the rough math to power the United States, which is a heavy user of electricity, would only take, would take less than a two hundred kilometer by two hundred kilometer solar array to power the entire United States.

And if you drive through the United States, there's plenty of sections of the United States where there is basically no people. Or another way to think of it is a small section of the Sahara could power all of Europe, or or the world.

Now, I'm not saying you would be so concentrated in the placement of solar power because it's better to be more distributed, but the sheer magnitude of solar power that is available is often not quite understood. But the math of it is very clear.

So I'd really would strongly recommend sort of a solar plus battery combination of, or wind plus solar, can solve all of the world's energy needs by a lot. Something I would encourage everyone in the room to look at is, and you touched on that briefly, is that the cost of solar power has dropped dramatically over the years.

So, if you were to, say, look at the cost of solar power five years ago or ten years ago or twenty years ago, it would've seemed cost prohibitive. But the cost of solar power today is extremely low. And and the cost of batteries to store the energy is, has also dropped dramatically.

The cost of battery, storage, of electricity has dropped by a factor of ten in the past five years. So the So many of the studies that were done in times past when batteries were very expensive and solar power was very expensive.

And I would just encourage everyone to, basically take another look at the cost of solar and the cost of batteries, and I think you'll find that you're pleasantly surprised. Well, it's an it's a, it's an honor to be here, and thank you very much for listening to my words, and I hope you have a fantastic conference. Thank you. Host: Thank you Mr. Elon Musk.

Please return to respective seats.