Tesla Inc, an engineering company originating from Silicon Valley most famous for its more luxurious electric cars, operates with this mission statement: they aim to "accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy."
The company recently launched a facility which has been dubbed a "gigafactory." It's a lithium-ion battery factory which began mass production of battery cells in January 2017.
Elon Musk, a world-renowned engineer, inventor, and entrepreneur famous for his roles with numerous major scientific and economic enterprises like SpaceX, PayPal, and OpenAI, believes that Tesla's gigafactory concept has serious potential to benefit the entire world civilization in a major way. It could help transition the whole planet onto sustainable energy - including the parts of the world where access to energy and electricity are seriously lacking.
As he describes it,
"The advantage of solar and batteries is that you can avoid building electricity plants at all. You could be a remote village and have solar panels that charge a battery pack that then supplies power to the whole village without ever having to run thousands of miles of high-voltage cable all over the place."
By Elon Musk's estimation, it would probably only take 100 of those gigafactories to sustain not only the United States, but the entire world. But here's the thing... Tesla, Inc. probably isn't able to build 100 of those factories all on their own. So what would have to happen?