Most people have never heard of J.B Straubel.
You can see him here, standing behind Elon Musk.
He's one of Tesla's less flashy co-founders.
He spent much of his career as the company's second in command.
He's played a huge role in starting today's electric vehicle revolution.
I'm Alejandro de la Garza, and I write about the
world's race to cut emissions and avert catastrophic climate change.
I went to meet Straubel in Nevada,
where he's working to solve a big problem for the energy transition:
how to find enough materials to build huge amounts of batteries
to store renewable energy and get ourselves off of fossil fuels.
As we ramped at Tesla, when we started building hundreds of thousands of cars per year,
that's when it really dawned on me what a challenge the supply chain was going to be,
as we eventually needed to build millions of cars per
year to transition the whole fleet to electric.
Almost all the systems and products needed for
sustainability have energy storage included in them,
whether it's an electric vehicle or
a home energy storage system or an electric airplane or electric bus.
The demand is going to be so much higher,
and we need to source massively more battery materials from every place we can.
Just mining more battery materials both has a big environmental impact,
it's also hard to find enough of these critical materials.
For nickel and copper, we've been looking hard for these things as a species for 100 years.
To just sort of quickly go out and find a whole bunch more of it, it's not an easy proposition.
So recycling can fill a really critical part of the the gap needed.
Straubel's home in Carson City is full of all kinds of engineering projects.
He's covered this hillside with solar panels to power computers that mine cryptocurrency.
The point isn't to make money.
Being around people too long makes him anxious,
but he can relax when he's working on this sort of thing.
It's a kind of a zen place to be and to be able to do engineering and do it when the weather's nice,
you know, you can be kind of selective about when you do this stuff.
Straubel has always been into this sort of thing.
As a child, he built a miniature hovercraft and homemade blast furnace for fun.
His mother says screwdriver was one of his first words.
As a Stanford student, he constructed a battery-powered Porsche,
welding his own parts and writing its internal code from scratch.
He belongs in the category of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, who imagined a whole new architecture
for delivering a service to humans.
A few years after college, Straubel helped found Tesla and worked as its CTO for 15 years.
Former executives say he was responsible for some of the company's most important innovations.
He could come in on any problem and very quickly would get to the root of the issue,
and sort of make suggestions, and those turn into you know the real breakthroughs there.
In 2019, Straubel left his job as Tesla's number two to manage Redwood full-time.
Redwood is planning to become the first U.S.-based
company to produce some of the most crucial materials
for making batteries, and they're making much of it with recycled electronics.
Well, at Redwood, we're trying to build really the ecosystem behind
energy storage for all of the materials,
the supply chain for how those materials are most efficiently created and delivered to manufacturing
and linking that in a circular way to the end of life for all of the different products,
production waste, everything that that ecosystem generates.
I visited this huge construction site, where Redwood's plans are taking shape.
A facility here will process newly mined minerals and recycled batteries into two materials
we need to make lithium-ion batteries:
copper foil and cathode active material, a powdery mixture of cobalt, lithium and nickel.
Redwood will supply them to battery cell manufacturers, like Panasonic,
which builds cells in Tesla's Gigafactory just a few miles away.
There are batteries from every sort of electronic device,
from wireless headphones to power drills to electric toothbrushes.
If all goes as planned, metals from devices like
these will help build a new generation of electric cars.
What's so inspiring to me about a circular supply chain and fully reusing and recycling those metals
is that you can keep using them infinitely.
They're not degraded.
They're actually almost 100 percent reusable,
so once we mine them the first time to make the products,
then we just need to set up the right type of system to reprocess them
and run that off sustainable energy, and that architecture can be sustainable
for hundreds, thousands of years into the future.
If you look at the actual curve of CO2 in the atmosphere
and sort of look at the data of that over the last, you know, almost hundred years,
it looks like we haven't done much of anything at all.
Even, despite all of the efforts of Tesla and EVs and solar and everything else that's been done,
it's continuing to accelerate and rise and set records every single year.
I am optimistic and, you know, very confident we will solve this.
I think it's going to be harder than most people expect,
and I think it will require probably more time and more
difficulty along the way than most people expect.
We will get to sustainability overall.
We have to.
We don't have a choice.