Elon Musk apparently grew a little flustered recently during a Tesla earnings call when he was asked almost to the exclusion of everything else about his plans to build Gigafactory, the world’s largest battery factory. But he’d better get used to it because the work’s implications go far beyond electric cars and could be repurposed into virtually every other industry. From Alan Ohnsman at Businessweek:

“Tesla has dubbed the project the ‘gigafactory,’ and it would make Musk a force in both U.S. manufacturing and electric power. The plant he envisions would have more capacity than any other to make lithium-ion batteries.

‘This has a huge impact beyond Tesla,’ said Harley Shaiken, a labor economist at the University of California, Berkeley. ‘It gives enormous legitimacy to battery production and the future of the electric car because that lies in the battery. It’s high stakes, high technology.’

Tesla plans an investment of $4 billion to $5 billion by 2020 and will fund about $2 billion of the total, the Palo Alto, California-based company said in a presentation on its website. The convertible bond offering could grow to $1.84 billion, according to a separate statement.”