Elon Musk has a great blog post up outlining Tesla's updated plan for the future - Master Plan, Part Deux.

From the point of view of this blog, Musk is the most important person on the planet as he's been the most successful at accelerating development of 3 of the 4 pillars of the clean energy economy - electric vehicles, energy storage and (to a lesser extent) solar power.

The first master plan that I wrote 10 years ago is now in the final stages of completion. It wasn't all that complicated and basically consisted of:

Create a low volume car, which would necessarily be expensive
Use that money to develop a medium volume car at a lower price
Use that money to create an affordable, high volume car
And...

Provide solar power. No kidding, this has literally been on our website for 10 years.

The reason we had to start off with step 1 was that it was all I could afford to do with what I made from PayPal. I thought our chances of success were so low that I didn't want to risk anyone's funds in the beginning but my own. The list of successful car company startups is short. As of 2016, the number of American car companies that haven't gone bankrupt is a grand total of two: Ford and Tesla. Starting a car company is idiotic and an electric car company is idiocy squared.

Also, a low volume car means a much smaller, simpler factory, albeit with most things done by hand. Without economies of scale, anything we built would be expensive, whether it was an economy sedan or a sports car. While at least some people would be prepared to pay a high price for a sports car, no one was going to pay $100k for an electric Honda Civic, no matter how cool it looked.

Part of the reason I wrote the first master plan was to defend against the inevitable attacks Tesla would face accusing us of just caring about making cars for rich people, implying that we felt there was a shortage of sports car companies or some other bizarre rationale. Unfortunately, the blog didn't stop countless attack articles on exactly these grounds, so it pretty much completely failed that objective.

However, the main reason was to explain how our actions fit into a larger picture, so that they would seem less random. The point of all this was, and remains, accelerating the advent of sustainable energy, so that we can imagine far into the future and life is still good. That's what "sustainable" means. It's not some silly, hippy thing -- it matters for everyone.

By definition, we must at some point achieve a sustainable energy economy or we will run out of fossil fuels to burn and civilization will collapse. Given that we must get off fossil fuels anyway and that virtually all scientists agree that dramatically increasing atmospheric and oceanic carbon levels is insane, the faster we achieve sustainability, the better.

Here is what we plan to do to make that day come sooner:

Integrate Energy Generation and Storage ...
Expand to Cover the Major Forms of Terrestrial Transport ...
Autonomy ...
Sharing ...

So, in short, Master Plan, Part Deux is:

Create stunning solar roofs with seamlessly integrated battery storage
Expand the electric vehicle product line to address all major segments
Develop a self-driving capability that is 10X safer than manual via massive fleet learning
Enable your car to make money for you when you aren't using it

Bloomberg has a progress report on the construction of Tesla's battery Gigafactory (now 14% complete) - Inside the Gigafactory That Will Decide Tesla’s Fate.

Elon Musk is also getting attention by announcing a sped-up production schedule that calls for a half-million electric vehicles per year by 2018 (advancing from 2020). Bloomberg noptes - "For a company that delivered just 50,658 vehicles in 2015, the ramp looks like a hockey stick".

There has been a lot of speculation about why Elon does the opposite of "over promising and under delivering" when it comes to announcing release dates, with one observer describing it thusly - "It goes something like this: People do paradigm-shifting work only when they're under tremendous pressure, so the key is to ensure deadlines are always impossible. This could help explain why Musk has never launched a product on time, yet no one seems able to keep up with him. It drives Wall Street nuts."

Whenever I see photos of the Gigafactory landscape I always wonder if Walter White is wandering around in the wastelands beyond...

The Tesla Powerwall was the big energy storage news item of last year (though it didn't meet with universal acclaim).

Technology Review had a good summary at the time of what Tesla was looking to achieve - Why Tesla Wants to Sell a Battery for Your Home.

Tesla is launching the home battery business partly because it’s already making vehicle batteries—and as a result it can benefit from the economies of scale that come from making both. Another reason is that the market for storage is expected to grow in concert with the use of solar power. Tesla needs both electric vehicles and solar power to boom if it hopes to fulfill the projected output from a vast $5 billion battery “gigafactory” it’s building in Nevada.

The ABC also has a good explainer from earlier this year on the economics of the Powerwall in Australia - Explained: The Tesla Powerwall and what it means for Australia's energy market (drawing from this analysis by Choice - Powerwall payback).

Tesla is apparently looking to launch a new version of the Powerwall mid-year - in the meantime RenewEconomy reports that they have stopped selling the 10kwh model of the original version - Tesla quietly removes 10kWh Powerwall back-up battery storage option.

The primary use case for home storage is daily cycling, also known as peak shaving, which can be applied a few different ways. The primary reason for the product existing is to store up solar energy made from customer panels during the day, which can then be used at night. In markets with net metering, there is no financial incentive for doing this. In markets with no net metering regulation, Powerwalls — and residential battery storage in general — could be game changers.

GreenTech Media has a report on Tesla's efforts to drive storage costs lower as the Gigafactory nears completion - How Soon Can Tesla Get Battery Cell Costs Below $100 per Kilowatt-Hour?

Ben Kallo at equity analyst firm RW Baird believes that Tesla's current battery costs are ~$150 to ~$200 per kilowatt-hour, well below the industry average pack costs of ~$350 per kilowatt-hour. ... Kallo suggests that the Chevy Bolt's battery costs "are significantly higher" than those of Tesla. Kallo suggests that Tesla "could reach its <$100 per kilowatt-hour target in the intermediate term as Gigafactory production ramps." ... GM sees its battery cell cost hitting $100 per kilowatt-hour in 2022. (GM is quoting cell cost, while Kallo is talking about battery packs. A complete battery pack "typically adds 20 percent above the cost of cells," according to David Snydacker, a battery expert at Dosima Research.)