Latest / Clean Power Hour / Clean Power Hour LIVE Sept 7, 2023 w/ John Weaver & Tim Montague

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Clean Power Hour LIVE Sept 7, 2023 w/ John Weaver & Tim Montague · Clean Power Hour

• 0:53
  Tim Montague: Welcome to the Clean Power Hour live. I'm Tim Montague, your host today is September 7 2023. We're in the run up to Ari plus 2023 in Las Vegas. That has me really pulling my hair out a little bit I have left. Welcome to the show, John Weaver.
• 1:13
  John Weaver: I know all about the hair pulling events, Timothy. So yeah, it is stressful to, to pull a week, a week and a half out of your ongoing business to go to a conference even though you know, the conference has a lot of value has a lot of, you know, handshakes, it's good energy, to some degree. It's like, it's not a vacation, because you're going to work. But it's different. And it's challenging. Like, for instance, you were just telling me that you don't have your microphone, because it's in shipping there. And that's conferences are great. They're awesome. But it's also hard work to go to a conference. And, and yeah, absolutely. So I'm totally looking forward to it, and totally stressed out by it. So, absolutely. I hope everybody here is also listening to us is also going to the conference so we can shake your hand. Tim is going to have a booth. So stop by Tim's booth and say, Tim, you're the most awesome podcaster that I know of, because because you know, you are and you know and that well what's your booth number 10.
• 2:19
  Tim Montague: The booth is 2269 sans level 22269 sans level two, and we're going to be conducting interviews with a tonne of companies. I'm gonna rattle off a few of the names that we're looking forward to seeing in the booth, including Matt Campbell at Tara bass energy. And renewables a que Borrego and the CEO Mike Hall is going to do an interview. We're looking forward to meeting Hugh McDermott from ESS they are in iron flow storage company Ryan Marlborough old colleague of mine from edpr, who's now going out on his own I'm not sure what he's up to Vince Ambrose with Franklin energy, the residential storage company have a lot of storage companies. And you know, as you know, John, like you can't shake a stick without running into a storage company line energy. I'm a huge fan of line energy. They make residential and mobile solutions for storage, off grid storage solutions. Big fan of Lyon, and they're going to be in the booth, LG Electronics with their home storage solution. I believe that's what they're promoting. Of course, they also well, they do they still make solar panels. I'm confused about LG.
• 3:40
  John Weaver: No, I think LG pulled out of solar globally, fully. Yes, yeah.
• 3:45
  Tim Montague: But still in the game with their storage solutions. So weird that they got out of the solar module.
• 3:52
  Tim Montague: Business, I don't get that at all.
• 3:55
  John Weaver: It's challenging.
• 3:55
  John Weaver: It's challenging profit wise to mom, you know, when when, I mean, the reality is that the Chinese have made solar panels, a security, a national security thing. And they push the volume, and we're gonna have a story about this very quickly, actually. But when you're competing against a country, a nation that has said, this is fundamental, and everyone else is trying to be a capitalist, you just got you got a different machine going on. And so it's and we're gonna, you know, when we see this chart that we're going to share on the screen, Tim, you'll people will grasp what this is what this means to China. And, you know, a bunch of people, including myself, thought it might happen that once everyone else starts scaling with their solar module, work Europe in the United States. Oh, you know, the last two years, we've had some price appreciation through the polysilicon pricing and, and other things. But once China starts to scale, that price is going to collapse. And that price for modules has once again collapsed. So the question is, how the heck does LG stay in business? How the heck does Meyer burger, my favourite company, same business? How does everybody else do it when your global competition is the largest populated, well, second largest populated nation on Earth? Who has a different financial gain? And so I get it, I get why they pulled out.
• 5:25
  Tim Montague: Well, I don't know. It's like, once you go through the trouble of making solar modules, like everybody eventually needs solar modules.
• 5:34
  Tim Montague: They may not know that today. I would, I would guess that only a fraction of humanity knows that they actually need solar modules. But eventually everybody needs solar modules and everybody is consuming solar modules. It's like cell phones, right? 20 years ago, we didn't know that everyone was gonna have a smartphone. But lo and behold, everybody has a smartphone. And so yeah, they're somewhat of a commodity. And, you know, there's a few winners and, and many kind of also RANS.
• 6:08
  Tim Montague: But yeah, I just yeah, it's curious. But I who am I to tell them what to do?
• 6:18
  John Weaver: That's a great booth lineup, by the way, just, you know, we got off track, but you got a great lineup of people that you're interviewing. So I mean, that's really cool people.
• 6:27
  Tim Montague: Yeah, you know, I took the gloves off. Normally, we're very, we're very, we're very exclusive about who we bring on the show in general, because we need partners, we need companies that can support the show, not just bring their content to us, because we're swimming in content. And so we're looking for partners like chin Power Solutions, our annual sponsor, we're grateful for them, and we're gonna be doing an event in their booth. I think it's, I will I will look that up. What is their booth 2521. So check out chin power systems in Booth two, five to one, the leading manufacturer of three phase string inverters. I'm going to be doing a recording there on Thursday, at I think around 10 o'clock. So and I wanted to give a shout out to my Casey Tiger comm he and I and two of his colleagues, Melissa Baldwin, who's also also with Tiger calm, as well as Mark Socolow, who used to be with Tiger calm, but he's now with q cells. And this is a segue into our story about q cells because q cells is my favourite brand in North America. It's a Korean company, but you know, as far as solar panel makers that operate in the US q cells is my favourite brand. I don't know if you have a favourite Oh, you do have a favourite. It's called Meyer burger, and they soon will have a solar panel manufacturing plant in Colorado, right? Yep, yep.
• 7:57
  John Weaver: Yep. Solar modules in Colorado and no solar modules in Arizona. Solar cells in Colorado. Okay. Yes, yes.
• 8:08
  Tim Montague: And we'll put the story on screen, we may as well dive into the news. That's why we're here. Big announcement.
• 8:15
  Tim Montague: Hamas secures Pollack, silicone supply chain for solar power business in North America, I guess. You know, getting those raw materials is no, no trivial matter. But you would know John, what's the story? And why is this a story.
• 8:32
  John Weaver: So first, everybody expected this because because Harnois, the parent company of que Sal has a partial ownership of the rec silicon facility that's in Moses, Lake Washington. So this is in the northwest of the US. It's mostly powered by hydro like 90 95% some huge number of hydro electricity. So this is, this is hydro powered solar. Tim, how cool is that. And the facility makes approximately or at least prior before it shut down makes approximately 16 17,000 metric tonnes of poly per year, which roughly in my very rough calculation, turns out to be about seven gigs of modules per year. So a couple things. One, I think that that number is going to go up because it's old tech that was in that facility. I assume they'd been upgrading it with new hardware, but I don't know that. And so that's seven gigs of modules that can come from this facility that are US based. The the the news has been suggesting that it's a $3 billion, roughly $3 billion dollar contract spread over the course of 10 years. So 300 million a year. And then I start you know, doing a little math.
• 9:51
  John Weaver: So if we say 300 million a year goal turning into 16.2 metric tonnes, which is seven gigs per year, roughly the poly cost will be just over four cents a watt DC, which kind of jives then we add one extra variable. Right now, the IRA will pay or you see silicon $3 per kilogramme, which turns out to be three cents per watt, roughly. So that means our EC is going to earn about seven cents a watt for their silicon production in the United States, which is really interesting to us in the US does not have any other poly manufacturing. I know Hemlock exists and other couple other country companies exist.
• 10:43
  John Weaver: But the solar portion of it is more Mostly for non it or the poly silicon manufacturing is mostly not for solar. So I think this is the only solar focus poly silicon manufacturing on in the United States. And so that's pretty cool. There might be another source or to I'm not certain. They're also sourcing the silicon metal, at least some of it from Mississippi, silicon, solar or something like that. So a company down in the southwest or southeast Mississippi, probably where they're getting the metal from. And so this is a this is a borderline true, you know, supply chain, at least North America supply chain. So it's hard to
• 12:25
  Tim Montague: see silicon no longer affiliated with RTC the solar panel company.
• 12:30
  John Weaver: Correct. Correct.
• 12:30
  John Weaver: And they might even be separate from rec in Norway as well. But they might be a subsidiary
• 12:39
  Tim Montague: of Norway here. It says obviously, silicon of Norway.
• 12:42
  John Weaver: All right. Yeah. So then, so rec silicon of Norway as a separate company, then our EC of Singapore, which is now our ACO of India, because I believe Reliance purchase our EC and reliance is a massive Indian conglomerate. So yes, they are separate legal entities separate groups. So, but this is cool.
• 13:04
  John Weaver: This is Polly being made in the US, it's going to travel across the country to turn in some modules down in Georgia. And that's really sweet. I like that.
• 13:14
  Tim Montague: Yeah. And this leads into the next story, which is that clean energy associates as published their, their quarterly. They call it P V. S MIP. Supplier end of year module capabilities report or something like that. I've got the actual report, supplier market intelligence programme, the SMI P. I've not looked at this report before, but what what struck you about the report and then I'll put the report on screen,
• 13:44
  John Weaver: page 10. PAGE 10.
• 13:44
  John Weaver: Okay, page says what I want to talk about and, and, Tim, we're going to be in the annual terawatt error era, before we know it, and that's what this report is. And I just want to show everybody that screen and then they're also going to, you know, this is gonna go back to our opening conversation about why LG said, Hey, maybe this isn't our thing to be in solar anymore. Because so first off, look at 20. This, these are end of year numbers. So end of 2022, we had 405 gigs of capacity of manufacturing capacity. As you can see, it's clearly dominated by China with a big red chunk end of this year, which is you know, we're at the end of q3 right now, Tim, and of this year 866 gigawatts of manufacturing capacity. And of next year, Timothy, look at that big number at the top.
• 14:47
  Tim Montague: One year a lot.
• 14:47
  Tim Montague: Yep.
• 14:49
  John Weaver: Yeah, our our Oh, man, okay, now, of course, they show up going flat out. Nobody knows what the heck China's going to do for the next decade, they're doing what they need to do. You know, this is national security type stuff. Who knows what's going to come after that, it's definitely not going to go down. And it's definitely not going to stay flat. But who the heck knows. Because, you know, if we believe that we're only going to instal like 400 gigs this year, then that means the capacity factor of this 866 is somewhere close to 50%. It's not exact, because that's an annual ramp. And so at the beginning of the year, it's 405. At the end of the year, it's 866. So maybe the average over the course of the year is availability of 600.
• 15:33
  John Weaver: Who knows. But with that, we see that the capacity is coming in.
• 15:39
  John Weaver: And next year. Now let's, let's say a little more refined in 2025, we will be able to potentially deliver a terawatt of modules to the world now where the heck we're going to instal them what power grid can accept all that capacity? I don't know. But I do know that China is watching it and making a plan for reason. And so for China to have 930 gigs of manufacturing capacity, starting in 2025. There's a reason for I think that 200 gigawatt number that we see being installed in China this year. Might be a little different next year might be 300. Might be 400. I have no idea. I'm not, you know, gee, I don't know his country. But man, that's something going on there is you know, this year, China mind instal 200 gigs. You know how much solar is installed in the United States right now?
• 16:36
  John Weaver: 153 155 gigs. China will instal more this here than the US has installed in total, by the end of this year, we'll be at like 170 ish. I mean, anybody who says, What about China? Yeah.
• 16:53
  John Weaver: What about China? Bro? What about him? What about getting lapped of our last 20 year Tim all the work you and I have done worked our butts off. Bam, China. Hey, let's do that this year, like ah. So that's why LG is out of business for the solar panel solar panel business that this chart right here, it's just blue that that's a big heavy sledgehammer on the entire planet, a good sledge hammer, but from a capitalist perspective, it's a sledgehammer.
• 17:23
  Tim Montague: It's interesting that, you know, North America or the Americas, I don't know if that includes South America or white, but is going from six to 33 You know, between now and we're between from 2022 to 2024.
• 17:34
  Tim Montague: That's five acts. So that's the inflation Reduction Act. Yep. In short, really, right.
• 17:45
  John Weaver: It really is. That you know, Mexico is gonna get a couple of facilities. Max Aeon and maybe Brazil. You know, if we're talking South America, it's Brazil. Really? That's the only group. But yeah, and so that so yeah, I just, man, that's just, it's just massive.
• 18:04
  John Weaver: Just seeing that list. And I'm gonna write an article. terawatt and 2025 Oh, my goodness. What's gonna happen the module pricing module pricing is already collapsed. Yeah, module was the spot market for modules in China right now is 15 cents a watt. 15 cents a watt. Dude, when I started solar was four bucks.
• 18:26
  John Weaver: Yeah, well, I can't even think what's 15 into 415 times like 510. You know, it's it's just a math Oh, it's more than 10.
• 18:38
  John Weaver: We're talking like 30 Instead of dropped by 30 by 25. To 30x is how much the price of a solar panel has dropped since 2008.
• 18:46
  John Weaver: It's not even that long ago.
• 18:51
  Tim Montague: It says one supplier will bring us way for an ingot online. They're referring to q cells I assume.
• 18:57
  John Weaver: Us and yes, that's it.
• 19:01
  Tim Montague: And but isn't, isn't my we're gonna be doing wafer manufacture.
• 19:08
  John Weaver: Well, not wafer nor son has stated that they are exploring doing wafers. And if they can get the offtake agreements in place, then they're exploring it. As of right now Marburger is buying on the spot market from China. So as of now, the only official way for a group that's really got firm plans is to sell. Now there's that other group who says they want to do 10 gigs of wafers. But they, you know, they've been talking about doing perovskite they've been talking about doing this and that cubic, cubic PV, and in New York, so if they get that 10 gigs away for us online, great, more power tool. I wanted to do it. But let's see.
• 20:00
  Tim Montague: Anything else from this report we should talk about? I haven't really
• 20:04
  John Weaver: gone to the report, to be honest, maybe next week when I write a story on it.
• 20:06
  John Weaver: Well, the week after, but, uh, because I just I just that when I saw that headline number one terawatt, I just got, ah, you know, I, I kind of think, Hey, can I answer one of the one of the questions with with a story that we should have had on our list? Which I we should do. I like I like what I'm Andre here has asked because it's smart. Do we think more localised generation and the use of virtual power plants or better direction to large wind and solar farms? And first, I want to say that Texas in the last week or two, and maybe we even talked about it last week, Texas approved virtual power plants to power the grid to be part of the grid solution. And first off what it's cool that Texas is following California. I just want to piss off everybody from Texas by saying that Texas, follow California wind, follow California on solar followed California on energy storage, follow California on virtual powerful, but
• 21:11
  Tim Montague: it's also leading the other 49 states, right, like
• 21:16
  John Weaver: they should they need to catch up. They're the second largest state in the union. They got some of the best sunlight in the union. That's their job. They're catching up to where they should be. They've been under achieving Timothy.
• 21:27
  John Weaver: But now they've learned where their bread is. They've learned where their bread is buttered.
• 21:32
  John Weaver: And so do I think we should have more localised? Heck yeah. Do I think we should get rid of large distributed stuff? Yeah, I think are complementary. For instance, wind is very valuable. And wind is quite complementary to solar.
• 21:48
  John Weaver: It's heavy in the summer, it's heavy overnight, and winds as of yet, you know, people talk about these vertical turbines or their rooftop turbines, and that's warm and fuzzy stuff. But as of yet, nobody's deployed it. And until somebody does me who's you know, a wind neophyte? I can't say yeah, distributed wind, great, because it's not real yet. So I think it's a good mix of value for large and small.
• 22:13
  John Weaver: And I also think for solar, there's other sizings that wind can't do, which is small, distributed or distributed solar, that's larger than rooftop and larger than, and that's like community solar. I'm a fan of this middle sizing that solar is able to do the 250 kW, which is an acre, up through say, seven Meg's DC, which is five Meg's AC for community solar. And that's like, you know, up to 40 acres, that one to 40 acre chunk, I think, is a very valuable thing. Because it is distributed. It's located on a local substation, and it feeds nearby. So So Andre, yeah, I think I think virtual power plants are a great direction to go and scale to and to keep going with, I think they would be complementary to the large scale stuff. And it's a good mix of things in
• 23:14
  Tim Montague: both and right, we need we need Digi, we need distributed generation from wind and solar, well, solar primarily. And we need DG batteries. But we need grid scale. It's it's about fan we can't, we can't green the grid without both. And we only need one to 2% of the landscape. So that's the thing we already have 6% in, in roads and buildings, the real the real. Eye Opener statistic for me recently, John, about, you know, this whole transition that we're going through is that urban sprawl is way, way, way bigger of a footprint on our ecosystem on our land on our farmland, than the clean energy transition.
• 23:59
  Tim Montague: There was a study out of Tennessee that looked at this.
• 24:02
  Tim Montague: And they found that urban sprawl is 10x What the footprint of solar development is in the state and Tennessee is home to some very large solar farms. So utility scale, solar is happening big time in Tennessee.
• 24:20
  Tim Montague: But urban sprawl is happening at a much greater scale. And so when people say, Hey, we're careful now boys, your payment over the planet with your solar panels. I push back hard, and I say no, actually, urban sprawl is is paving over the planet.
• 24:35
  Tim Montague: Solar and wind are just going to be 2% of the landscape. And or, you know, even less if we went hard after, for example, offshore wind, but and we're going to talk about offshore wind here, which, you know, is good. It's good thing. It's a growing phenomenon. It's finally coming to the US. It's been happening elsewhere for 10 years. We're just late to the game as usual. I don't know what our problem is, John. So we're, we're good inventors of technology. But we're slow adopters of technology.
• 25:08
  John Weaver: Well, I mean, we know the United States is a fossil fuel. You know, how they talk about like middle certain countries have been taken over by the fossil industry. We know that half of our political structure is and even more than half of our political structure is on the pay payroll of the fossils, because they just have so much capital. They're just so ingrained into society. And so many people are dependent on these jobs. So you know, we know what happened in 1980. Well, we read about it, and we were young people at that time. But in 1980, we had a fossil fuel advocate, come on, and pretend like Jimmy Carter wasn't real.
• 25:50
  John Weaver: And while Jimmy Carter was pushing coal, he was also conscious that we needed something better to defend ourselves against fossil fluctuations, than we had 15 straight years of right wing, anti clean energy. And bam, that kills a whole bunch of stuff.
• 26:11
  John Weaver: Then we get eight more years of George W. Bush, who's just a straight up oilman. And there goes another hack for another Lost Decade of potential renewables. And then Obama had to do what he had to do because he lost control of Congress, and he had to do all of the above.
• 26:27
  John Weaver: So now we're at 2016. And then we have Trump. And it's like, Ah, so it's like, it's very clear why our clean energy industries have come along slowly, even though we invented the model. We're in silicon solar cell at Bell Labs back in like, what? 5553 54. There we go. So it's clear why we're, you know, made a whole bunch of money somewhere else and decided that let's screw the environment.
• 26:58
  Tim Montague: Let's talk about offshore wind. You know, there was a procurement recently this is this is somewhat related. The story is about the world's largest offshore wind turbine.
• 27:08
  Tim Montague: Up at the sun screen, world's largest wind turbine takes on typhoon comes on top. This is a website called offshore wind dot biz. It's it's an interesting story, John, and I'm not convinced. But you know, we had a procurement recently for offshore wind in the Gulf of Mexico. Right. And this is this is includes parts of Texas and Louisiana. And there was only one bidder in that RFP. I can't remember who that was, I think it was the Danish wind company.
• 27:40
  Tim Montague: It was considered a failure.
• 27:45
  Tim Montague: And, you know, I've just heard a few other analysts discussing this. And the the, you know, the signal was pricing wasn't wasn't conducive what the what the developers could produce in terms of a price, meaning the risk was too high. And the risk is what's happening in in the Gulf now, right? And I'll Florida called hurricanes.
• 28:11
  Tim Montague: Hurricanes are not friendly to wind turbines. And you know, does this story is about wind turbine surviving a typhoon but the the, the miles per hour in this story, were not that convincing to me. The question to you, John, is can we invent wind turbines that will withstand 150 mile an hour winds?
• 28:36
  John Weaver: If there's not a lot of stuff that can withstand 150 mile per hour winds, that isn't a concrete bunker. I mean, I'm from South Florida. And I've had to deal with 185 mile per hour wind code. And I've seen the buildings that are built to withstand 185 mile per hour wind cones, and they are bricks, they're just large bricks that are drilled into the ground. And so I don't know if a turbine can deal with that much. I mean, those are thin steel structures.
• 29:03
  John Weaver: So so especially I mean, did you see
• 29:10
  Tim Montague: hasn't somebody done a design where the the turbine tower actually sinks into the ocean? Under high wind conditions? I thought we saw a design, this doesn't show that this is about a 16 megawatt turbine by a company called goldwind. And yeah, it's an impressive machine. But the wind speeds were 85 kilometres per hour, which is like 6570 miles an hour. Right.
• 29:35
  John Weaver: 5052.
• 29:38
  Tim Montague: And that's, and that's chump change. In Florida speak, right? Well, or, you know, Texas, in Louisiana, for that matter, too, right? All of these areas are hit by, you know, really big storms. And they're getting bigger and more frequent. So.
• 29:58
  John Weaver: And so I'd also say, you know, it's more than just the storms in the Gulf. I mean, we just had a hurricane that came out and nothing in the Gulf, it's now a thing. It's now a thing that during the summertime tropical tropical storms, tropical tropical depressions can turn into a storm can turn into a hurricane in like three days, because the Gulf is shallow, and it gets hot. Like for instance, the water was over 100 degrees in the in the keys in the Florida Keys like a month ago. So so there's that but this offshore wind bid, there's another variable, offshore wind is trying to bid into the Texas ERCOT market. The Texas ERCOT market has solar at two cents, and the largest wind portfolio of almost any country on Earth at two and a half cents. And now offshore wind wants to come into double digits? I don't know. I don't know. I think it really comes down to the economics of it. Tim, I think with the recent inflation that's putting a little pressure on this offshore wind hardware, and the realities of the ERCOT Texas power grid market just makes it really challenging for anybody to have a financially viable project in the Gulf. So I, I, you know, I really think it has a lot to do with where they're competing, you know, if they were even in Massachusetts and New York, offshore winds pushing prices that are pretty strong. And those markets though, have fortunately slash unfortunately for the people paying bills, they have expensive electricity.
• 31:37
  John Weaver: So you know, I think it has a lot to do with the Texas market being some of the lowest price electricity in the country?
• 31:50
  Tim Montague: Yeah, could be, could be.
• 31:56
  John Weaver: So I bid a bid that two years ago might have looked better. It's a little bit off this year.
• 32:05
  Tim Montague: What do you mean?
• 32:05
  Tim Montague: Well, two
• 32:07
  John Weaver: years ago offshore bid offshore wind might have been at a better price, maybe not two years ago, maybe 2019 2020. Before the COVID inflation hit, and we had 18% inflation, at least from January of 2020 to last month. So jacking up the prices 18% And then doubling or tripling the effective interest rates. That's challenging for cash front for a front loaded cash heavy investment. So it's a it's a combo of factors, hurricanes, big risks, cheap market, they're selling into inflation, interest rates, you know, that's for heavy punches, punches from a Mike Tyson quality enemy. And, you know, just, it's challenging. It's challenging, this is not going to be and I love the fact that offshore has to compete with onshore and solar. Because I don't know, it's just cool. But but we'll see, maybe maybe in a couple years, the market will do what it's got to do. And there'll be some competition, but not yet.
• 33:15
  Tim Montague: Well, let's talk about Ukraine. Ukraine has kind of up ended energy markets in Europe. And I, I'm struggling to get the story on screen if you can put the story on screen. But what's the story? The latest?
• 33:31
  Tim Montague: The impacts on the clean energy industry from Ukraine?
• 33:38
  John Weaver: Well, this story specifically was about getting about them installing solar power during a war. I mean, there's just something hard core, like really hardcore about installing solar in a war. I mean, I
• 34:01
  Tim Montague: this is near Shinobu, right?
• 34:05
  John Weaver: Oh, I don't know exactly. To be honest, I'll look at this this giant thing for power. So
• 34:12
  Tim Montague: I think the story references that the that the solar array.
• 34:19
  John Weaver: Well, this is a wind turbine, this is a wind turbine. So what occurred is that we have people building 130 megawatt wind turbine field during a war, wearing bulletproof vests. Tim, Tim, how would you like to do some land development wearing a flak jacket? And one of those cool helmets driving around in a Humvee with your little check box? And and and also, no thanks, and then add one more variable. In the article they state during the construction period, they spent greater than 300 hours in bomb shelters. What do you think the union guys would charge for bomb shelter work? I mean, holy crap, man. If if I was a business person, and I had the opportunity to hire some dudes from Ukraine who had built a wind farm during a war, that's those are the most badass people on the planet.
• 35:16
  Tim Montague: Story Power magazine The story is a symbol of courage and invincibility detect completes wind farm despite war. And I can swear I saw a story about a solar farm recently related to this but anyway. A foreign country invade your homeland, many power projects might fall by the wayside, but for detect providing reliable power to customers and continuing to develop secure energy resources, which part of its wartime mission? So it sounds like detec is a Ukrainian company
• 35:47
  John Weaver: EPC Yeah. Windy PC man. Oh, man, imagine being on top of a tower. There's missiles flying by I mean, oh, I mean, power. Glory to Ukraine did Glory to Ukraine. No, good people. I I want to go there on vacation so I can spend money there. And, and, and help.
• 36:11
  John Weaver: Because we, they're they they right now are the defenders of freedom on Earth. And, and we need more we have
• 36:23
  Tim Montague: the Chilean Girl Scout wind farm. There's a name for you. So 14 megawatt wind farm.
• 36:34
  John Weaver: Rough rough man, good.
• 36:36
  Tim Montague: Danish Vestas.
• 36:36
  Tim Montague: Wind turbines. Doesn't say, Oh, they're sick. megawatt turbines?
• 36:45
  John Weaver: Yeah, so we're talking 1020 of them 20 units being installed, or 39 units being installed in the midst of a war. Oh, that's, there's something hardcore with that, Tim.
• 37:02
  Tim Montague: For sure, for sure. Alright, we're gonna talk about a solar truck. And not and not what you expect, really, I guess. But I did see this. And it is an interesting story. This is News, New Atlas, never heard of new Atlas.
• 37:23
  John Weaver: They're just one of the cool sites at like, 50 different people covered this press release when it came out.
• 37:29
  John Weaver: But what's really neat, there's a couple things neat about this one. This is really interesting.
• 37:32
  John Weaver: This is actually the part of the story that was the most interesting to me. It's a perovskite, silicon, thin film, solar module coming from mid summer. mid summer is I think, a Swedish manufacturer, who is linking up with First Solar and you know, mid summer, let's see mid summer, solar first solar, mid summers foray into the United States market. So there's something about mid summer and First Solar that maybe got tied together, maybe it was just first solar that bought a perovskite company. But I'm super interested in thin film companies getting in the perovskite. Because thin film is made in a very similar manner to prop skate. It's a vapour deposition thing where it's just, it's sprayed down, and it's sprayed down and layers, like that goes to put on big piece of glass goes into the first machine, they spray something goes to the next machine, they spray something and, and they do a whole bunch of that it's a lot more complex and just you know, fingers coming down. But perovskite plus silicone in the real world, Tim, and it's on a truck driving around and in Sweden, they think they might get 6000 kilometres out of this thing. That's pretty sweet. Because
• 38:57
  Tim Montague: covered hybrid truck offers three to 6000 Free miles a year.
• 39:01
  John Weaver: Yeah. How awesome is that? And the Oh, you have the roof, you have the sides, you have this trailer, they also are integrating a battery into the front of the truck as well into the trailer of the truck.
• 39:13
  John Weaver: And if you think about that, three to 6000 miles, we're talking diesel at well, in Europe, diesel is probably eight bucks a gallon, who knows. But you get 10 miles per gallon. If you're getting, let's say 4500 That's 450 gallons times six books. We're talking seven 810 1000 bucks a year savings just in fuel costs. That's pretty neat. And then coming just from the trailer, and but it's perovskite plus silicone, which is pretty sweet.
• 39:49
  Tim Montague: 13.2 kilowatt of solar. Yeah, you know, it might pencil. That's the That's the question. Right? That's the only question. Anything is possible.
• 40:02
  Tim Montague: It's just a question of the economics to make it, you know, feasible. And I don't know why they're, you're suggesting that they're that they're using some super high efficiency solar panels does it even? No,
• 40:22
  John Weaver: no, no, not necessarily high efficiency because I haven't seen any data on the profs guide silicone, this is thin film. So it could just very well be a 20 25% product. So not super high efficiency, not 30% Plus, but I'm guessing it's mid 20s. But it's their next layer product.
• 40:40
  John Weaver: This is brand new stuff for mid summer. This is profs guide plus silicone. And if this is the market, they get into wonderful, it's a thin film product, it's light, you know, 13.2 kW. If we think about the cost per watt, let's say make it two bucks a watt. So to instal it, it's gonna be less than two bucks because there's no racking.
• 41:01
  John Weaver: There's no grid connection, let's say Buck 50. So now we're talking $18,000 Let's just say 20 grand, that's going to pay for itself in three years.
• 41:13
  John Weaver: Without tax credits without incentives without anything, if it offsets 6000 miles a year.
• 41:17
  John Weaver: That's three years it's probably less than that it's probably close to two years but I have to do the math hardcore math to talk to them and sit down with some Swedish engineers but I think it pencils I you know, my you know, thumb in the air type number it pencils. So I just put I was really excited to see perovskite for silicone because occasionally Tim you've heard me mentioned perovskite plus silicone Maybe even once or twice on this show. So Oh, seeing profs guide in the real world is exciting to me makes autostadt
• 41:52
  Tim Montague: Yeah, these guys at mid summer I'm just looking at their website. They're they're really into a building integrated solar panels.
• 41:58
  John Weaver: Yeah, I actually messaged him once a year or two ago because they're making a rollable thin film product for residential markets. And they're aiming for the metal seam roof so that they can fit in the, in the rows in between. And when I told I messaged him, and I said, Hey, guys, you should come to the US. Because in the north, in the northeast, we have a big thing happening where there's a lot of metal roofs being sold.
• 42:26
  John Weaver: And if you guys can roll out your product on those metal roofs, that'd be great. People love it, because you don't have to, like drill into their roofs.
• 42:31
  John Weaver: Yeah, it's that centre one. And, and that's, that's, that's something that's coming. And I think you're going to start seeing residential, middle sized roofs or a mid summer solar roofs with thin film in a role that will just ship rollout and stimuli that
• 42:53
  Tim Montague: you could buy that product in the US for Merlin solar. Right. Well,
• 42:57
  John Weaver: Merlin solar isn't a rollout Marlin solar, though roughly standard size solar panel, that's just a sticker.
• 43:05
  Tim Montague: Not a standard size at all. It's it's a very unique size is that these guys that in Sweden, they're making a tile integrated solar panel. You know, a very narrow, long skinny one for metal roofs. And I don't know what this other one is something for membranes. But it's it's all about, it's all about thin. And we yeah, we we need. We need more and better products for solarizing all different types of roofs and roofs that are mechanically constrained not every roof can except traditional solar panels because the load is too high.
• 43:47
  Tim Montague: Right?
• 43:48
  John Weaver: And well, I mean, there's also just the fact that people don't have an interest in risking putting holes in their roof. I mean, that's just reality. And people once people think solar is ugly, I don't know what's wrong with those people. But once people don't just don't like the look of it.
• 44:03
  John Weaver: Great, cool. How about this, we'll make it the same colour as your roof and just stick it on there. And great if it's cheaper, if there's no racking if installation is lower, if if the weight is lighter, all that kind of stuff is great, especially in the Northeast who have these heavy snow loads and where you live heavy snow loads, like New Hampshire has like a 40 PSF snow load requirement in some places. I'm sure you know, I'm working on a site right now that had a 75 PSF. snow load number in the original documents from 10 years ago, snow 75 pounds, oh my gosh, that's a lot of wet snow. But that's that's what the numbers were. So nowadays, it's lower, there's less snow, which is scary. But I think it's cool product. I never really thought initially that perovskite plus thin film was the thing. But then after I saw first solar and mid summer, take a little bit of a investment in it. It started making some sets.
• 45:02
  John Weaver: They're both Vapour Deposition products. And one of the challenges of perovskite on standard silicone is that the manufacturing process of standard silicone modules has a much higher temperature than perovskites. Like, you know, 678 100 degrees, whereas profs guides are something like the two to 400 degree range that they can deal with. So somebody's going to do it. And at first solar ends up being the company that comes out with the first commercially available perovskite plus silicon utility scale module. I would not be surprised and anyway.
• 45:40
  Tim Montague: Let's talk about the Land of Enchantment. Story in Arizona Public Radio KNAW A can a you largest renewable energy infrastructure project in the US breaks ground in New Mexico. That's a bold statement.
• 45:55
  Tim Montague: I don't know if I believe that statement. But
• 46:02
  John Weaver: well, if you look at the 10 billion, the eight to$10 billion price is the key driver of the largest and it's a set of power lines. And then I heard and I haven't seen the details on it. It's been suggested they're going to connect to the largest wind farm that's going to be built in the US two to three gigawatt facility. And that's going to be the largest renewable facility.
• 46:25
  John Weaver: So so that's what the what the goal is. Yeah.
• 46:35
  Tim Montague: Building a big wind farm in New Mexico and then and then wheeling the power with this project to Arizona.
• 46:42
  Tim Montague: California South just a bit.
• 46:42
  Tim Montague: Yep.
• 46:45
  John Weaver: And one thing that's really kind of neat, and well, what neat, but maybe by the time it gets deployed will be less valuable. But the wind farm in New Mexico, and I looked this up, it was sunsets in New Mexico, Albuquerque, New Mexico, and roughly an hour and 45 minutes before Los Angeles, if the wind starts to pick up at, say, 430, Los Angeles time, because it's 6pm. And the sun is setting in New Mexico. Yeah, that's pouring straight into the evening peak of California. And it's going to start at 430, before the sun starts to hardcore drop in Cali. And that for California for the case, okay, so market is going to be really, really valuable. And, and then if we have offshore wind in California, where that will be, you know, swell, it won't be any appreciable distance off the coast relative to the sun setting. But we have those two sources of electricity. When power complementing each other, we're gonna have wind available from
• 47:55
  4: 30pm until you know, 7am 8am.
• 47:55
  4: And then what happens at 8am. In California, the sun comes up beautifully, and the solar starts pumping. Really, really interested in in that so. So I, you know, first the one negative of this, though is by the time this facility comes online in like a decade, for California sake, they're going to have so many batteries in place that they evening peak, I have a feeling is going to be a story that we read about. Back in my day Sunny, back in the early 2020s, we had an evening peak at 50 cents, but nowadays of these newfangled batteries, and it's going to be something like that, and the economics of that wind farm are going to be a lot less valuable than they were.
• 48:45
  Tim Montague: I mean, the story points out the USDA has estimated that we're going to need 60% More transmission by 2030, and three times as much by 2050. And that's, that's the thing, John, is we're going to just be pumping a lot more juice around period. Yeah, we can attack the duck curve in California with batteries. And we're doing that. And that's very important. But I don't really see the need for transmission declining per se.
• 49:15
  Tim Montague: But only time will tell, only time will tell. But yeah, with electrification of transportation and industry, that's a lot of electricity. is it's really hard to grok I mean, we're gonna have to get much better at expediting infrastructure period, right?
• 49:40
  Tim Montague: Even if you did all community microgrids. And I'm looking forward to an episode that's dropping in two weeks with Craig Lewis, who is the director of an organisation called Clean coalition, check them out clean coalition, based in California, that is working with utilities to basically take funds that they would normally put into transmission and distribution lines, and build community scale micro grids, solar, wind and batteries. But at, you know, at the scale of serving hundreds of 1000s of people, that is a much better use of those infrastructure dollars, any utility still wins because they have these costs plus, you know, financial contracts with consumers. And, and then you get resiliency, plus, right? It's not just a bunch of wires, it's wires and batteries and generation, and the ability to isolate and power your community when the grid goes down, which it's going to do. That's the future.
• 50:49
  John Weaver: I think transmission and batteries are going to fight a lot more than people think everybody keeps saying batteries are just going to be too expensive. And but you know what? The market will respond to the challenges and the politics of transmission.
• 51:05
  John Weaver: And just like everybody said, Ooh, solar panels, we can't do it. Well, they're gonna say the same thing about or they're saying the same thing about batteries. But that argument is gonna get beat up real hard.
• 51:20
  John Weaver: Just like China's doing the thing with those solar panels right now. They're gonna do the same thing with batteries. You know, there was a story in the Financial Times this past week that showed China's demand for batteries at like, x, and then their demand for or their future manufacturing capacity at like 5x And everybody's like, Oh, China's manufacture Train is going to put pressure on other manufacturers globally. Yep, they will. That's they're going to do and they're going to massively populate the world with batteries. And, you know, there was a, our good friend benchmark, and it's probably on our document list. He showed us that battery cells dropped.
• 52:00
  John Weaver: Simon, Simon Morris, he showed us the battery sales of again dropped below 100 bucks per kilowatt hour. Well, people were saying, Oh, it's never gonna go down again. Well, they were wrong, just like they were wrong about solar panels. They're wrong about batteries. There's a lot of wrong people out there, Tim.
• 52:16
  Tim Montague: Well, there is that thing called the technology adoption curve, right. As you double the amount of technology being used, the price drops by what 25% or something some big chunk, right. And we're doubling. We just we covered that with the solar panel industry, right. But let's talk about let's talk about this.
• 52:36
  Tim Montague: solar deployment is now happening at roughly 500 billion annualised rate. That is a very interesting graph this gentleman found on twitter, formerly known as Twitter X, formerly known as Twitter. What do you call it?
• 52:53
  Tim Montague: Tweet Now, John, I call it Twitter.
• 52:57
  Unknown: You still call it Twitter? Yeah. Yes. You're such a rebel. Such a rebel Musk can
• 53:02
  John Weaver: go to heck, Musk can go to zt. Yeah, now it's Twitter. And in a, it's nothing else until I leave it. And if he doesn't like it, I don't care.
• 53:18
  Tim Montague: So Patrick Collison, shout out to Patrick Collison, whoever you are.
• 53:25
  John Weaver: You can click on that. And that should get bigger if you
• 53:28
  Tim Montague: know, he found this graph this sources, Bloomberg Nef. Okay, that's my sisters,
• 53:32
  John Weaver: our good friends, our good friends,
• 53:35
  Tim Montague: our good friends at vnaf. So we're on pace for$500 billion a year in solar is that that the just
• 53:46
  John Weaver: well, so if they if you do an annualised number, and you look at those first, the last four quarters, on average, the last four quarters equaled about 500 million, 500 billion.
• 54:01
  John Weaver: And well, maybe it's annualised if you look at 125, so pardon me, if you look at q2 120 5 billion 125 billion times four 500 billion, that is the estimation for what the annual output is. And that number is going to go up. And because we're growing, you know, this, this last quarter globally, we put out a good number, but the q3 number and q4 numbers are going to be bigger. So the annualised number, by the time we get to q4, it's going to be 600 billion. So this is you know, this gentleman, if you look at his comment, what technology deployments were larger than this, the US is AP craft care for aircraft production during World War Two seems to be 400 billion global data centres 200 billion, you know, the French nuclear deployment, this blows that out of the water. This blows the Manhattan Project out of the water. There's nothing. I mean, anything. I mean, other than like food, you know, we do more money now than on oil, including the actual fuel
• 55:12
  Tim Montague: oil industry globally per year. Do we know?
• 55:15
  John Weaver: I mean, we do know, I think it's like 500 billion global oil industry revenue.
• 55:19
  John Weaver: According to market research, total revenues for oil and gas drilling came down to 4.3 trillion in 2023. Yeah, so I don't know. I don't know crap.
• 55:38
  John Weaver: But in terms of
• 55:40
  Tim Montague: the thing, that's the thing, Gregor McDonald, who writes this great newsletter, The Gregor letter, do you read the Gregor letter? Sometimes?
• 55:46
  Tim Montague: Yes. Yeah. And I've been I've been going back and forth with him. We're gonna bring him on the show. But he showed this chart recently, you know, showing global renewables as a fraction of the energy mix. And we're still less than, I think, less than 10%. globally. Now, in some markets like Europe and, and the US and China. We're in the, you know, in the teens and the 20s. But, but globally, we're less than 10%. And so that's the wake up call right for humanity. Because co2 levels are still going up, the problem is still getting worse. We're just tapping the brakes. Were not actually slowing down.
• 56:36
  John Weaver: Right now, in fact, it's not slowing down. It's accelerating. In reality.
• 56:42
  Tim Montague: We're increasing co2 levels, I think by a percentage point every year now.
• 56:44
  Tim Montague: Yeah, it's rough. It's, it's gonna be it's gonna be a bunch of black eyes for the foreseeable future. And that's why we need to develop those turbines that can withstand hurricanes. You know that. Well, you John,
• 57:01
  John Weaver: I'm doing it yesterday working on it, buddy.
• 57:06
  Tim Montague: All right, well, I'm looking forward to seeing you in Las Vegas. Have a safe train ride you're getting on a train right?
• 57:14
  John Weaver: Tomorrow at 1240 from South Station in Boston with Kristian Rosalind of clean energy associates former cohort at PV magazine USA and will be joining with another gentleman I think his name was Peter I forgot what his last name was.
• 57:29
  John Weaver: And he's so there's gonna be three of us on a train together for like two and a half days to him. And we're just going to be talking solar and probably complaining about being in a train for two and a half days.
• 57:40
  John Weaver: But it's gonna be it'll be something cool.
• 57:47
  Tim Montague: The Wi Fi works.
• 57:48
  John Weaver: I hope well, I got I got my, my magical cell phone that's gonna give us
• 57:54
  Tim Montague: if you have a signal wobbling across rural America, so you may not
• 58:00
  John Weaver: know true, very true.
• 58:03
  Tim Montague: Well, besides on that train on that two day train ride, how can our listeners find you Mr. commercial solar guy?
• 58:09
  John Weaver: Oh, they can visit my website commercial solar guy.com. Got to update that website a whole bunch. If there's a great SEO web designer out there who follows up and is reasonable in their work effort.
• 58:23
  John Weaver: We need somebody or last guy was a little too busy for us. And but we got to got to work on that. But commercial solar guy that accomplished solar and mass on Twitter, and John Fitzgerald Weaver on Linked In the best places in Tim, when people want to come to you and figure out how to market their new product in the solar industry, or to get us to talk about them on the Clean Power Hour. Where should they go?
• 58:52
  Tim Montague: Yeah, email me at Tim at clean power hour.com Check out clean power hour.com.
• 58:55
  Tim Montague: That's where all of our content lives. And give us a rating and a review on Apple and Spotify.
• 59:02
  Tim Montague: Tell your friends about the show. Subscribe to our YouTube channel and reach out to me.
• 59:05
  Tim Montague: We'd love hearing from our listeners. We look forward to seeing many of you in Vegas next week. And with that I'll say on commodity let's grow solar and storage. Take care John