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China Installed More Batteries in 1 Month Than the US Did All Year · Clean Power Hour

• 0:53
  Tim Montague: Welcome to the Clean Power Hour live bringing you the latest and greatest wind, solar and battery news from myself. Tim Montague, check out all of our content at clean power hour.com and welcome to the show. My co host, commercial solar guy, John Weaver,
• 1:08
  John Weaver: hey Tim. It has been a while since we've seen each other. Happy Friday. Happy Friday. Happy New Year.
• 1:14
  Tim Montague: Happy New Year holidays. It is our first show of 2026 2026 hard to believe it's 26 man, 2026 Yep.
• 1:23
  John Weaver: We are in the second quarter of the 21st, century.
• 1:27
  Tim Montague: We are. We are.
• 1:27
  Tim Montague: How are we doing? John, how are we doing as a species?
• 1:33
  John Weaver: Let's talk about that in the third quarter. If we get there. How's that? Some things we're doing great, man,
• 1:40
  Tim Montague: some things we need to we're still alive. We're still we're still kicking.
• 1:45
  John Weaver: You're definitely kicking. There's lots of kicking going on. This is not a doubt.
• 1:50
  Tim Montague: You know, I mean wind and wind and solar and batteries are going to continue to go up and down. The solar coaster is real. It's it's alive and well, but they're also here to stay. There's no doubt. And we're going to talk about a story today from Mark Jacobson in PV magazine about the pace of installation that China is making versus the US. And before I forget, I wanted to recommend a book about China for anyone interested in the differences between the US and China. John.
• 2:23
  Tim Montague: It's called breakneck by Dan Wang. It's getting a lot of press, and I'm early in the book, so I can't say a whole lot about it, but just in the introduction, and there's Chris letman joining us. Welcome Chris, but just in the introduction. Dan Wang points out that in China, the bureaucrats are largely made up of engineers, whereas in the US, the bureaucrats are largely made up of attorneys, and he's just setting the table for this is perhaps why China seems to be able to build things bigger, faster, cheaper than we are in the US. And he gives an example of how quickly they're able to build nuclear power plants and the pace that they're able to build nuclear is 10x that of what we're able to do in the US, which is pretty intense. And of course, they're building lots of wind and solar batteries too.
• 3:22
  Tim Montague: But before we get into the news, John, do you want to say anything else about the scorecard?
• 3:33
  John Weaver: The scorecard. What scorecard
• 3:36
  Tim Montague: us being in the second quarter, entering the second quarter, it's, I'd say it's, it's earth one, human zero.
• 3:43
  John Weaver: I don't know it's, it's, I mean, the humans have definitely done a whole bunch.
• 3:46
  John Weaver: We can influence this whole Earth
• 3:49
  Tim Montague: man. It's our, yeah, just like
• 3:53
  John Weaver: to win and lose.
• 3:53
  John Weaver: Yep, and we're doing some great things. There's 8 billion of us.
• 3:57
  John Weaver: Poverty is dropping globally.
• 4:01
  John Weaver: You know, we had some bumps in the last few years. Covid hurt us a bit. You know, now we're talking about my political scientist or Tim. We're outside of solar. But, you know, broadly and technologically, we're touching on the edges of things.
• 4:12
  John Weaver: I mean, maybe these next level computer chips we're designing will turn into something cool, will become, you know, semi intelligent, but, you know, llms are pretty neat. They're not AI, but they are pretty neat. And, and clean energy is pretty cool, and nuclear is cool, and one day we'll learn fusion, but not yet and but EVs are cool and public transportation and so many things we fly. We fly giant pieces of metal. We set things on fire, and then they circle the Earth. And what we do inside of them, we sit in chairs and sip tea,
• 4:45
  Tim Montague: and we raw dog sometimes.
• 4:47
  Unknown: Oh, geez, Tim,
• 4:50
  Tim Montague: raw dog meaning sitting peacefully and being bored. I challenge, I challenge our listeners to sit peacefully for four hours and be bored and not listen to music. I've started to practice going to the gym without my headphones, but it is hard to raw dog. But I had one more comment, and then let's get into this Mark Jacobson story, and that is that the human brain consumes about 15 watts, so it's not a lot of energy, and it is a very capable computer. And so while today's microprocessors, you know, computer chips, are quite hungry, there is the possibility that we could invent biological chips, so to speak, artificial brains that are very energy efficient. The human brain is quite energy efficient. So while AI is causing disruption of the grid and power prices to skyrocket, there is hope. But.
• 5:46
  Tim Montague: Yeah. The question is, will we survive the AI explosion? All right, that is the question.
• 5:57
  Tim Montague: Let's talk about Mark Jacobson, well known figure in the Oh.
• 6:01
  Tim Montague: This is Oh, yeah. So the story is by William Driscoll in PV magazine, but it's about a paper written by Professor Mark Jacobson at Stanford University, very well known figure. I'd love to bring mark on the show. If anybody knows Mark, I did meet him once at a conference and pitched him on the idea of climate restoration, and it didn't go well. But anyway, Mark has this wonderful analysis of the pace of the energy transition in China versus the US. And this is what you're seeing here on screen. China is the red line. They're going to have a clean economy at the current pace by 2050 and the US, lo and behold, is on path to reach that by 2048 so basically 100 years delayed 2148 oh, sorry, 2148 Yes, 100 years into the future, comparatively So, that is a bit of a wake up call.
• 7:00
  Tim Montague: I do think energy, clean energy, is a national security thing, right? If you can make energy to run your economy and your AI data centers on photons and wind from the sun, right? Like that is going to give you an economic and military, etc, advantage.
• 7:20
  Tim Montague: Would you disagree?
• 7:22
  John Weaver: I think right now, the United States invading countries like Venezuela and saying it's because of the oil is a highly motivational thing to get off oil. I mean, I believe, from my very limited paying attention to the situation that China right now is Venezuela's largest oil trading partner, working with their country, upgrading their infrastructure, buying their oil, and then processing it in China, and now the United States went after their biggest oil trading partner, and maybe not their biggest partner, sorry, but one of their partners, yeah.
• 8:02
  John Weaver: So there's a great motivation to not do any oil, because if sunlight makes your weapons and your cars and your vehicles mostly move, you know, they're still going to need some fuels, because we haven't made fighter jets with batteries yet. I don't think we'll, maybe we'll get there.
• 8:21
  Tim Montague: Yeah, it's conceivable, but that's yeah.
• 8:24
  John Weaver: So, so this is a great reason to get off oil, you know? So, yes, I without a doubt it's grabbing stuff from the sun so many different levels. You know, if your society can sustain itself during, say, a war, and you can't lock down the access of resources to that society, they're going to be much more patient in dealing with issues, you know, like Russia. Russia Putin specifically worked to make his country be able to be isolated from the Western world. For when he launched his outbound attacks, that was a thing of his. He made it a thing. And then when he started the Ukrainian war, he was he had defensive he was already in a defensive posture when he attacked, and having renewables domestically, power your fleet, power your homes, power your businesses, power your factories. Yeah, all of these things strategically prepare you for Modern Warfare. So I don't you know, it's just amongst many reasons that they're doing this.
• 9:31
  John Weaver: And then there's economics. You know, economics matter.
• 9:33
  John Weaver: Economics matter a lot. And you know what? I'm going to move a new article up to number two.
• 9:36
  John Weaver: Maybe I'll share it, because talk about the economics and, you know, maybe I'll argue that.
• 9:45
  John Weaver: You know, let me share it real quick. It's about Bloomberg. So last year, Bloomberg share screen. All right, don't show this again. Let me pick my little window. But last year, bankers, according to Bloomberg, made more money doing green bonds than making doing debt for fossil fuel. And right here is the paragraph, and that's pretty good for a couple levels.
• 10:17
  Tim Montague: One, well, let's read that. Let's read that out.
• 10:19
  John Weaver: Oh yes, okay, good point. Sorry. Lenders generated roughly 3.7 billion of revenue from climate related loans and bond underwriting in 25 compared to 2.9 for oil, gas, coal, according to Bloomberg, so that's 8.8 billion less. That's like 20% less, you know, that's a lot. That's, that's a quarter less money being made. And that's, you know, if Wall Street is what's pushing it, if the money, if the world is about.
• 10:50
  John Weaver: Money and power in which it is that's just, you know, the way it works. Then this is good.
• 10:53
  John Weaver: Then climate stuff, economically is powering ahead, and it needs to move faster for us as a species. But this is one path that we have to, you know, accept and move on with.
• 11:10
  Tim Montague: And when they say climate related. They're referring to energy transition related, basically, EVs.
• 11:18
  John Weaver: They have everything categorized pretty well what these various loans are, but EVs are a big one these days, because buying new cars, buying fleets, solar projects, wind project, battery projects, but, yeah, climate related, yep, so it's, it's, you know, it's just another path. It's a positive, you know, the analysis done by Professor Jacobson, very good, very smart. He sees it the and it's kind of like, okay, that sucks. Because, as you said before the show, Tim, what's the weather going to be like in the year 2150 if we take that much of a pace at slowing ourselves down? What type of civilization are we going to have?
• 12:01
  Tim Montague: So yeah, so we're and just to level set, we're at 430 today in the atmosphere, 430 PPM and and we are headed to 450 by 2050 at the current pace.
• 12:15
  Tim Montague: Okay? And welcome back.
• 12:27
  John Weaver: Yeah. Thank you very much. Sorry about that, everybody.
• 12:29
  Tim Montague: Video is oh, there we go. So so we're headed to 450 by 2050 and we're headed to 500 by 2150 so anyway, making the energy the point is, and I just dropped an interview with Peter Fikowski, my second interview.
• 12:44
  Tim Montague: He is one of the fathers of this new field called Climate restoration, which is basically, how do we get back to 300 ppm in the atmosphere? And the answers are not the energy transition.
• 12:59
  Tim Montague: Unfortunately, the energy transition is very important, and I feel very good about being an energy professional working on the energy transition. And thank you John, and thank you our listeners, all the solar and wind and battery professionals out there. Thank you for what you're doing. This is very important work, but we also have to suck a trillion tons of carbon out of the atmosphere to get back to 300 and it turns out there's microorganisms, little one celled organisms in the ocean that do this, and there are many, and the ocean is vast, and so we just need to shine a light on that. But let's move on and find another interesting story for our listeners. You have done a great job, John as usual, Project of the Year,
• 13:46
  John Weaver: project of the year, not even of the week for this one, but of the year.
• 13:50
  Tim Montague: So what's the project? I can put this on screen.
• 13:54
  John Weaver: Yeah, please do.
• 13:54
  John Weaver: This is our favorite project at commercial solar guy that we did for the year. This is on the national elevator industry education program. They have a they have a building in Warwick, Rhode Island, and it's, it's now got about 279 kW dc of Q Cell modules up there that will roughly offset. It should do more than 100% of their annual electricity in year 123, and this will bring them to zero, you know, we and it's just a nice, clean project with a lot of little nuances that were fun, and so I'm going to write a few stories about it. You know, for instance, we had to deal with anchors. We had a challenge with the structural when we were just about to buy hardware. The structural change significantly,
• 14:50
  Tim Montague: partially attached. No. This
• 14:52
  John Weaver: fully ballasted.
• 14:52
  John Weaver: Did have to do four anchors, though, safety anchors, okay, because the structural analysis forced us to squeeze our footprint, and that put us within a certain distance of the edge of the roof. Yeah. And now, and this is more cliff on the array, no and not for the array, for working the array, there's a new requirement in mass and Rhode Island. Some districts have put it on. Some jurisdictions haven't. But if you're within four feet, you have to put safety anchors for to allow mechanical attachments, for the sake of not falling off the roof when maybe working on the modules.
• 15:35
  Tim Montague: So the array is close to the edge of the roof.
• 15:37
  Tim Montague: That's what you're saying.
• 15:38
  John Weaver: Yes, yes, there's one side of it is about six feet from the edge, and if you're within 10, that's when you have to do these safety anchors, one every 10 to 15 feet, something like that. We ended up with four. Safety anchors. So a little bit of a challenge because it came out of the blue.
• 15:55
  John Weaver: We initially, we had a big roof to work with. Then the structural came back and changed their drawing, like they had given us a stamped letter that we could build anywhere on the roof. Then they came back and said, Now we're going to take that back. It's like, Oh, all right. So that was kind of challenging, because we had procured a product like we were almost about, we were about to buy unirack, and then they totally whacked it, and the customer didn't want us digging through the roof, putting in a bunch of attachments, so when they changed the structural we had to change the racking immediately. And as unirac didn't have a product that could work, ballasted on this roof, I see. So there's a lot about it.
• 16:31
  John Weaver: It's a very nice, clean product.
• 16:31
  John Weaver: And then the cool one about it is the customer wanted union labor. Our team is not union for construction. You know, we have couple teams that we work with.
• 16:42
  John Weaver: So we reached out to the local IBEW 99 and then they connected us with a few of the local contractors that exist. And so we then contracted with Newport renewables and their union labor team, and so Newport built the entirety of the project.
• 16:59
  Tim Montague: So give us some context. What is the Rhode Island CNI market like? What are the incentives in Rhode Island?
• 17:07
  Tim Montague: How well does commercial solar pencil?
• 17:11
  John Weaver: So commercial solar pencils. Well, this project with union labor and no depreciation has a payback under seven years.
• 17:20
  John Weaver: It's closer to six actually.
• 17:20
  John Weaver: Yeah, that's very good. Yeah, they received a grant for about 75,000 bucks. So we're talking, you know, for talking 279 kW, that's like 1020 cents, ish, something like that. Maybe eight to 10, eight to 20. Somewhere in that range, there is expensive electricity, which is really, you know, the biggest helper, you know, having to pay a lot for juice, because they're in the mid 20 cent per kilowatt hour, maybe low 20s for actual cost of electricity.
• 17:55
  Tim Montague: So that's one of the silver one of the silver linings of the AI Power Crunch that's going on. Electricity prices are spiking, which gets people's attention, and it makes solar pencil faster.
• 18:06
  John Weaver: Yep, yep. I say it all the time. US killing portions of the green New Deal is going to drive up utility generation costs because solar and wind were cheap, and now those projects are going to get squeezed. There's going to be higher demand. It's going to push up the national price of electricity. So that's, you know, it's, it sucks, but it's going to be, it's going to drive in a different way. It won't be as fast as a 3040, 50% tax credit, but it's going to do something else.
• 18:37
  Tim Montague: Yeah, I saw, I didn't, I didn't collect this story for our roster today, but just in passing, I saw a story about Nick Sarah's president or CEO talking, and he was like, Look, we need all sources. This is an all hands on deck to stabilize the grid and stabilize prices for customers. If we put our foot on the neck of wind and solar right now, this is going to hurt people and business owners and grid operators.
• 19:07
  Tim Montague: That's the bottom dollar, and that's that's pain and suffering. It's just not good for the economy, much less humans. So why do we have an economy? We have an economy so that we can have a good life.
• 19:19
  Tim Montague: And so what is government for, if not for helping us have a good life? I don't know. I really that's the only reason to have a government, in my opinion, is to help us have a good life. And somehow we got that wrong.
• 19:37
  John Weaver: We're working on stuff. We're working on stuff.
• 19:40
  Tim Montague: We are a work in progress, for sure. John, as individuals and as a species, and that's part of that's part of what makes life so interesting. All right, so what's next, John, second favorite project of the
• 19:53
  John Weaver: week, yes, yes, you just got to share it. See, you're laughing.
• 19:58
  Tim Montague: Oh, my goodness, that is a wonky project. I'm glad you got this.
• 20:03
  John Weaver: Yes, it was worthy.
• 20:03
  John Weaver: It was worthy of the document.
• 20:07
  Tim Montague: All right, so this is on Reddit. Yes, my neighbor's PV system is the title of click on that thing. And unfortunately, if you're not viewing this on YouTube, you're not seeing the photo. But it's a, it's a, it's a shed, like a gardening shed with a How would you describe that array
• 20:31
  John Weaver: with a ground mount racking system. Yeah, Grandma rocking the structure
• 20:36
  Tim Montague: structure on top of the house to its roof. Yes, that is very creative. It makes me think that that shed is going to fly away someday.
• 20:46
  John Weaver: Yes, absolutely without a doubt that. It's good.
• 20:51
  John Weaver: This is my favorite project of the week. You know where that is geographically? I have no idea.
• 20:54
  John Weaver: I just saw the image and I was done. I was happy. Time to move on. Yeah, that's pretty cool.
• 21:01
  John Weaver: Pretty neat. Yes.
• 21:02
  Tim Montague: So, all right,
• 21:04
  John Weaver: we got perovskite article, and this one interests me.
• 21:07
  Tim Montague: We haven't talked about Prov skies in a little while. Anyway, yeah, I don't want to bother
• 21:11
  John Weaver: people too much with my research and development pie in the sky stuff. I get a little annoying.
• 21:15
  Tim Montague: So this story is called Prov sky tandem solar panels selected for utility scale installation pilot, yes, by Ryan Kennedy from November 26 in PV magazine. I'll get this on screen here.
• 21:30
  John Weaver: One thing they specifically said, which I made me go, Oh my gosh. They call it early stage validation of performance and durability under utility scale operating conditions. So what they're going to do is they have sales pitch to somebody saying, hey, this perovskite product is going to work. It's going to work a 28% efficiency, and it's going to be going to do its thing, and it's probably going to last 20 years durability. These are the sales pitches around perovskites right now. And so this, this represents more real, but a field test in the United States more real than that. Oxford PV, company from the UK, which I don't trust at all. Yeah, yeah, this right there. That's major developers. They don't run pilots, and they see real commercial potential. And in my opinion, Plenitude, pltitude, which is a developer sees it as being real.
• 22:34
  Tim Montague: So yeah, and just so our listeners understand what perovskites do is they, they you can layer them on top of traditional crystal and PV or thin film, I think, for that matter. But and so you're getting an extra layer of energy producing material. And in this case, you're getting about a 5% bump, right, because state of the art commercial solar panels are around 23% right. I mean, if you buy a nice module today, 23% right. Probably, yeah, yeah. So they're knocking on the door of 30% with perovskites. The challenge is that perovskites degrade more quickly than PV, and so that's the question is, how long are they going to last?
• 23:18
  Tim Montague: And, you know, they're, they're working on it.
• 23:24
  John Weaver: I, you know, I, you know, Jenny Chase, she said she repeated something, somebody that told her, and it was really smart, and they said to birth a new solar technology is like raising a child. It's going to take a long time. And because people want to spend a lot of money on it, it just takes a long time to develop. And so, you know, I've been talking about perovskites for since 2000 eighteens, nineteens, and it takes a while for it to develop and become purely accepted, but it's moving fast, and there's a lot of testing going on and and the pricing, the dynamics are that I don't think we have to have a 20 to 30 year product in the first couple of rounds, because they're going to be cheap enough, and they're gonna have some sort of financial tools to lower the risk, to manage having to replace the modules, if necessary, once or twice. Sure, but
• 24:23
  Tim Montague: serious math, though it says it provides up to 40% more power from the same footprint, said the company. How does a 5% bump at the, you know, cell level or the module level, lead to a 40% increase. Well, if you think facility level four, so 40%
• 24:46
  John Weaver: so 8% over 20, so eight in the 20 would be, let's divide that eight divided by 20.
• 24:51
  John Weaver: Well, eight divided by 20 is 40% so that's it, right there. So if you're using solar panels that are 20% and you drop a 28 you get a 40% bump, okay, if you're using 24% 16.7% bump, gotcha, yeah. And when they start hitting 32% which is realistic, because we have cells at 34 popping up everywhere, 33 and 34 now you're talking a 60% boom, because you're jumping 12 from 24 that's a full 50% from Super cutting edge and from standard jump in 60% 12 divided by 20 is 12 divided by 20, 60% so, and that's where perovskites are headed. Middle of next. You know, by 2030, maybe we'll have products that are people are teasing us with 32% modules, is my guesstimate. We're so we have the cells now. So it's going to be a quick jump, I think, yeah,
• 26:47
  Tim Montague: all right, Alphabet acquires clean energy developer intersect for 4.7 5 billion. I do think this is a big story, and this was announced towards the end of last year, I think, but this story is from January 6 in utility dive, Alphabet acquires clean energy developer for 4.7 5 billion. The acquisition follows a prior partnership between Google and intersect and represents a new tactic to the tech giant's parent company in adopting is the tech giant's parent company is adopting in its decarbonization strategy. So I think this might be one of many acquisitions we see. But what's the play in your mind?
• 27:30
  John Weaver: John, so someone else said it as well. They said Google is buying generation assets and developers for control over siting, interconnection and delivery speed, not just getting PPAs. So this is Google saying the data center Rush is going to be real and the need for capacity is going to be massive, and that they're no longer comfortable waiting on developers on their own doing it that they want to bring development skills, assets and control of portfolios in house. And I, you know, intersect, for me, was always just a solar and storage developer. And I think they did win. They may have done wind first. Are they from, like, the Midwest, and they were a massive wind group.
• 28:22
  Tim Montague: First intersect, I think intersect is from California, but I'm not 100% All right,
• 28:28
  John Weaver: the big names, they confuse me. All their names are so weird, but they they're just a massive company, so it makes me the reason I like this, seeing this is because I, too, am a solar developer, and one day I'm hoping that somebody overpays from my company, because they see, you know, lots of things going on, and they believe in the commercial solar guy, and they're like, You know what? We can double or triple the value, or we just need it.
• 28:51
  John Weaver: We have no choice. And so this, this just represents the demand for energy. This is similar to that banker thing, you know, I bet you, Google is doing math too, and say, Okay, what's a better price for us? What's a better risk? You know, the bankers now made 3.7 billion off doing green deals. Well, they're not going to make any money off these deals now, because Google is going to finance it all. So this, this just represents a certain reckoning of what's really happening. And I like that image. It shows Google on a big oil well, I mean, they're not tanker. That's, that's like an oil tanker, but it's just the the idea behind it is that renewables, solar and storage, is so important, so important, that we, not only, not only, we're gonna buy the milk, we're not gonna just buy a cow. We're gonna buy a whole farm. We're gonna buy a whole breeding thing. We're gonna buy everything, the whole damn machine. And that's what they just bought. They didn't just buy PPA. They bought a PPA maker, right? And, oh, you know what? Why buy the car when you can buy the machine, making the car favorite, one of my favorite, raging against the machine lines. Yeah, I buy the G ride. They didn't want to buy the G ride. They bought the factory that makes the G ride.
• 30:07
  John Weaver: And that's, that's what happened. That's what I want to happen to commercial solar guy one day so I can retire and go to an island.
• 30:15
  Tim Montague: Yeah, an intersect has almost 11 gigawatts of clean energy capacity expected to be operating or in construction by late 2028 so that's the play here. They're acquiring a portfolio of existing assets and the ability to develop gigawatts of new assets.
• 30:34
  John Weaver: Yeah, yeah. I think the play is both. I think that's part of the play, the 10 point.
• 30:36
  John Weaver: You know, a friend of mine reached out to me, guy does my guy does some of my investing, and he said, John, do you think this is 40 cents? You know, 47 cents a watt. Is that a standard valuation? And I said, I don't think it's just buying the existing assets. I think this is looking forward another decade and buying another 100 gigawatts, or another 50 gigawatts of assets. That's that's the bigger play. So, big story, huge story, huge.
• 31:09
  Tim Montague: All right, I love it. I love it.
• 31:13
  John Weaver: And then we'll do the opposite. We're about to swing the emotions here of our folks, you're
• 31:19
  Tim Montague: talking about dominion. Yes, Dominion loses early court battle on CVO. W story and renew bit, renews dot biz, I'm not familiar with this outlet.
• 31:34
  John Weaver: What's the story?
• 31:34
  John Weaver: So see, though, I don't know what the name is, but it's the coastal Virginia offshore wind facility. Facility, yeah, and so what this is? So, first off, us, government came out and said all offshore leases are suspended for what all of them. At first they said it was because of radar. Then they said it's for top secret reasons. What? It's just because we know what we know the reason so it's just garbage. So now all of the leases, and I believe there are five of them, they're all suing.
• 32:09
  John Weaver: The administration is saying this is wrong. The real reason I grabbed this article because I wanted to show off a number, but, but so what really said?
• 32:21
  John Weaver: Sivo asked. Said, Hey, we need the right to cancel the stop work order while it's being litigated, because it's hurting us and the hurt you can see it, it's about $5.3 million a day.
• 32:35
  John Weaver: You got to scroll down a tiny bit to find it, but it said it's costing the developer $5 million a day on vessels alone. That doesn't count the interest on this loan. That doesn't count other workers, but that's just straight up. Vessels. Probably cost him 10, 20 million bucks a day for this delay. You know, hundreds of millions for each one of these things. And that's the pain that he's causing. You know what? They say it right at the bottom. They say, Yeah, you know, they should stop this, because all these fees, they're going straight to, guess who they're going straight to the residents of Virginia, and they're fine electricity bills.
• 33:12
  John Weaver: So like, Come on, buddy, because somebody's got to pay for those bills. And it's not going to be, not going to be the CEO of the company. It's going to be the people who, because this project is guaranteed to be profitable for the utility. The utility owns it. It's developing it, spending all the money on it, gonna make 10% on it, no matter what, no matter who does what to it. And so this
• 33:38
  Tim Montague: story is about dominion, the coastal Virginia offshore wind project, but worsted and equinor to European developers, wind developers are also suing, yep, but in this case, they have not been successful so far.
• 33:56
  John Weaver: So far, nobody's been successful at slowing the stop work order. So yeah, this is just one of a few and, and it's BS, you know. And the next story is really amusing. Tim, I'm funny. Today I'm bringing my my holiday cheer. But the next line item shows the first response, no, no. The next one is a wind
• 34:19
  Tim Montague: farms pose security threat. China is sitting duck, yes.
• 34:23
  John Weaver: So the logic put out initially was, yeah, see, you're laughing again, Tim, see, I'm doing good. I'm doing a good job. I'm proud of myself.
• 34:31
  Tim Montague: You are, you are dude. You are dude. I'm getting my laughs in. This is awesome.
• 34:33
  Tim Montague: Yeah.
• 34:37
  John Weaver: So the the original logic put out was, oh, no, we can't do this, because if we put wind farms, they mess with our radar and our enemies can attack us. Well, this is China's coast, and it's covered with wind farms, sure, yeah, especially right down there by Taiwan. I mean, what a
• 34:58
  Tim Montague: cluster, huh?
• 34:58
  Tim Montague: Yeah, it's like, if so,
• 35:02
  John Weaver: it's just, there's someone else shared with me a document, because this was a lawsuit at some point, and the Defense Department came out and did analysis and said, No, wind farms don't mess with our wind farms don't mess with our radar.
• 35:14
  John Weaver: We know how to manage this.
• 35:14
  John Weaver: We're big radar kids. We've been doing this for a while. So this is just another you know, Bs, I'm mad because you put a wind farm next to my Scotland, my Scottish, what's it called thing? My Scottish
• 35:30
  Tim Montague: golf course. Yeah.
• 35:30
  Tim Montague: So yeah, he's definitely got an ax to grind, and he's grinding it, man. Watch out. Watch out.
• 35:43
  John Weaver: So anyway, when it's good and bad, you know things are coming. Offshore wind is getting its butt kicked.
• 35:48
  John Weaver: Onshore wind is getting its butt kicked right now. It really it's rough, and wind is hard to build. Those are big projects.
• 35:55
  John Weaver: Man, they take years. It's harder to get a wind farm up than a solar project. It's for sure. So sorry for the wind folks.
• 36:02
  Tim Montague: Yes, winds, huge story about this open sea offshore solar project, but there's not a good photo of it.
• 36:12
  Tim Montague: I will put this on screen anyway. So the story is China Commission's world's largest one gigawatt open sea offshore solar project. China has brought a one gigawatt offshore solar power plant on online off the coast of Dong Ying Shandong Province, combining PV with energy storage and aquaculture. So it's a dual use project in what is now the world's largest open sea solar project in commercial operation.
• 36:39
  Tim Montague: So apparently this area has very shallow seas, and I maybe we can find a photo on another site, but I saw a photo which is not here. I'll put this on screen.
• 36:53
  Tim Montague: I'll put the PB magazine story on screen, and it's, it's like a ground mount, right? It's pile driven solar image.
• 37:03
  John Weaver: Image in the article is there? Yeah, I just put one in there, different article. Oh, on the document, good,
• 37:11
  Tim Montague: but it's a huge project. That page isn't loading for me because of my ad blocker.
• 37:21
  Tim Montague: Oh, good. Maybe you can share your screen. Sure. I'll stop sharing, and you can share it.
• 37:29
  John Weaver: Hopefully I don't hang up this time when I stop sharing.
• 37:34
  Tim Montague: Yeah, that was a good move, yeah.
• 37:36
  John Weaver: So check it out. So here I've seen this one before.
• 37:38
  John Weaver: I've seen some other images about it. Here we go. But it, yeah, this is it, though, yes, it's short. It's a low, low water. They have giant chunks of solar that are built off the shore, that are assembled, and then they're brought to cranes, which lift them up and drop them in.
• 37:54
  Tim Montague: And yeah, so it's more analogous to carport solar, I guess. Yeah, right. Those rows are like ginormous carports.
• 38:02
  Tim Montague: They're just planted on top of shallow ocean, and it's good for aquaculture, it turns out, so you can grow fish and maybe crabs. I don't know what they're farming, but we obviously have a big appetite for seafood, and apparently solar power.
• 38:20
  John Weaver: John, oh, yeah, so that's pretty cool plant. I the different places where they're put China's put in solar. This is related to what you talked about at the beginning of the show. Man, they're the engineers are like, yes, yes, we can see the truth. We don't have to follow the same financial rules as other places. And because of that, let's blast, let's build, let's do it.
• 38:43
  Tim Montague: Yeah, that book break neck is fascinating, fascinating read. Check it out.
• 38:46
  Tim Montague: All right, we have time for a couple more stories. Sure.
• 38:54
  John Weaver: You know what? If that's the case, let me, let's do this one. Let's, let's skip the silver story. We can do that one in a moment. Okay, but let's talk about this, the batteries.
• 39:02
  John Weaver: Because we haven't talked about batteries yet. You know, I like to talk about batteries. To talk about batteries every show now.
• 39:06
  John Weaver: Batteries are the new perovskites.
• 39:09
  Tim Montague: China brings online record best capacity in December 2025 Wow, that is they're going vertical. John going vertical, yes, yes. And I think they're going electric.
• 39:22
  John Weaver: Felix, he does a lot of car stuff. I follow him on blue sky. He's always posting EV stuff. So if you want to know way more than you ever want to know about EVs, follow this dude. Felix knows a lot. I think He's based in Germany, but he travels across Europe, always just taking cool pictures of charging and different cars and stuff. So if you want to know some EV stuff, but check this out. This is grid tied batteries hitting the hitting China's power grid this year. This is it, man, this is the takeoff. I don't know if anybody predicted this much capacity at the end of the year. We'll see, but this is awesome. This looks like there's solar charts from the prior years when they were just going nuts and deploying 80 gigawatts in December. Yeah.
• 40:08
  Tim Montague: So it looks like they almost 4x year over year.
• 40:12
  Tim Montague: This shows 2023 24 and 25 and the it was just shy of 30 gigawatts, 30 gigawatt hours in 24 and now it's a hitting close to 70, so two and a half, something like that. Not four, but,
• 40:33
  John Weaver: and this is happening around the world. This is happening around the world right now. So I just you know the capacities that are deploying are just so
• 40:43
  Tim Montague: huge, so and China did 65 gigawatt hours in 2025, what did the US did? Oh, 15.
• 40:47
  Tim Montague: China's doing a little more.
• 40:56
  Tim Montague: 344,
• 41:00
  John Weaver: x. Well, no, no.
• 41:00
  John Weaver: So, 15. Total us by more than 15. So that means China, actually data, or the US did about 50.
• 41:12
  Tim Montague: Oh, that's our total install base, 15 gigawatt hours.
• 41:15
  John Weaver: No, no, no, no, no, no, no. The 65 is 15 more than we did for the year. That means 65 minus 15 means we did about 50, just a little bit below 50 gigawatt hours. So China did 65 in December. We did 50 for the year. So China probably did two or three access on the whole year. They probably did 150 Gigawatt hours. I'm not certain the exact total, but I bet if we clicked on that article, benchmark might tell us this one yes, because that's the article where that image comes from. But maybe they're not, because benchmark also charges for a lot of access.
• 41:55
  Tim Montague: Let's see they're probably it's on screen now.
• 41:59
  Tim Montague: China best installations December, surpass us 2025 total.
• 42:03
  Tim Montague: Yes, oh, they're installations in one month.
• 42:07
  John Weaver: Yes, they're more than annual. Yes, that's what the interesting thing is. So then the question is, what they do for the rest of those months?
• 42:15
  John Weaver: 10? You know, I could probably do a quick estimate. We look at that line. Let's say it averages 10. So they did 110 gigawatt hours for the rest of the year, and then they did 65 so they ended up with 175 gigawatt hours for the year. Whereas the US did 50, so did about three and a half times the amount of batteries that the United States installed.
• 42:41
  Tim Montague: I wonder if this is incentive driven, because I know China is phasing out some government incentives. And you know, when you have a phase out, you have a pulse like we have right now. We have a mini boom going on because of the phase out of the ITC, that kind of thing.
• 42:59
  John Weaver: I don't think so with this, because I think this is their end of year, and so they have incentives that end at the end of every year that gets stuff installed. So, so I think this is incentive driven, but it's an end of year versus an end of the incentive. Okay, how's that like? You know, how we we always have a bump at the end of the year because of tax credits. I think this is similar ish versus the ITC, fade out, boom, whereas I would argue, in May, when China installed 90 gigawatts of solar, that was an incentive leaving that was the end of that incentive. So I think we might see this again next year, hopefully. I don't know, but all I know is that China is now popping when it comes to putting some solar capacity out there. So yeah, that's pretty cool.
• 43:45
  Tim Montague: You should probably share this long G story if you want to do it, because it's on Bloomberg. And, oh yes, Bloomberg, I'm not a I'm not one subscriber, subscribers.
• 43:56
  John Weaver: So this is interesting, and I'm gonna have a follow up article with it. But Longji joins the Chinese solar push to cut solar costs by reducing silver, and they're going to shift to copper, is what the data suggests, yeah.
• 44:12
  John Weaver: And so the copper move is cheaper. It'll knock the cost off. You know, cost of silver has driven up the cost of a solar panel by a penny, and a half per watt. So that's 10, 20% that it's pushed to price, the cost of silver would cut or move in. The copper would cut that in half. So there has been a push on getting rid of silver, pushing silver out. But silver works really well. It doesn't corrode it. It moves electricity better. It can be printed out thinner, I believe. So there's these things about it, that it's, it's just more malleable, maybe, than copper, but it's, it's useful. Not every solar panel will work best with silver. It seems like back contact, the ones where the solar cells, it's all black on the front, and you have the mesh on the back. So that would work better for copper, because the copper is bigger and you don't mind blocking it. But this is happening, and it's happening because price of silver is like 75 bucks an ounce or something, whereas it used to be 15. My brother buys a bunch of silver.
• 45:21
  John Weaver: He's rich now. He's probably loving it. You got silver coins, silver bars. Go and hang out with him. He's a he's definitely prepared for when everything collapses. I need to sell him some solar panels. It's a battery zone so I can go hang
• 45:36
  Tim Montague: out with them. Is the largest solar panel manufacturer in the world, apparently.
• 45:41
  John Weaver: Are they largest?
• 45:41
  John Weaver: Still, they call them largest in this
• 45:43
  Tim Montague: article, I looked on perplexity.
• 45:47
  John Weaver: All right, yeah. So they're, you know, to them, jinko.
• 45:49
  Tim Montague: Yeah, them and jinko. Long she in 2024, long as you produced 150 gigawatts of PV. Jinko produced 130 but that's some serious, serious manufacturing here in the US we're doing, if we're lucky, 50 gigawatts of solar panel manufacturer, right?
• 46:10
  John Weaver: Yep, yep, no, actually, 65 actually, we just had something put out. I saw from in 2025 Bloomberg. Well, maybe it's 26 here. Let me look.
• 46:18
  John Weaver: Let me look. Let me go back to
• 46:22
  Tim Montague: my Yeah. Speaking of solar panels, you know, everybody's looking for FIAC, free solar panels. And I'm curious who your go to is John the the names that I say a lot are Helene and Imperial Star.
• 46:38
  Tim Montague: Thank you, Chris. Let me. And what are the names that are on the tip of your tongue when it comes to FIAC, free solar panels?
• 46:51
  John Weaver: So for me, well, let me first off, I'm sharing something. I gotta get it into the room. Don't know how to do that. There we go. There we got it. So Helene is who I bought recently. But I think this list here on the right is a collection the top two thirds of it, you know, first solar, we don't buy. That's the big green chunk in the bottom. That's utility Q Cell. We buy a bunch of Corning. I didn't know they were actually making panels. I thought they were just making this stuff, but I guess they're moving all the way down Canadian solar and illuminate. I think those are going to be straight utility scale. This t1 energy company, they bought, I think a jinko factory, a five gigawatt factory, and they're making it bigger in Texas, maybe with jinko. Maybe it was someone else. I can't remember someone else, but I can't remember someone okay, but they are the ones that bought that, and they're selling out. Still fab.
• 47:42
  John Weaver: Worry that I would have never considered them on this list, but they're manufacturing jinko, I definitely don't consider because obviously they're China, so seg is 5050, Helene. I trust Suniva. I don't trust es foundry. I sort of trust because I think they're buying, like, domestic stuff, too. So we have a lot more people here to consider. You know, I don't have access to this full list. I actually asked Jenny Chase. I said, Hey, how do we always get access to a list like this? Does this mean I have to pay for the$65,000 subscription? Yeah, roughly. I don't know what the number is, but it's something like that. It's it's expensive, so I don't have the money for that one. I got the $400 a year.
• 48:28
  John Weaver: Read news constantly, subscription. Cool.
• 48:34
  Tim Montague: All right. Well, looking forward to seeing you in Boston on three for re plus northeast. We will have a live on January 23 so that's when we're back in two weeks and and then it's two weeks again before the RE plus northeast. So love to connect with our listeners though at re plus northeast or any other trade show. I'm also going to enter solar San Diego, also in February. I'm going to knapsack in Milwaukee in March.
• 49:09
  Tim Montague: Where can our listeners find you? John Weaver,
• 49:13
  John Weaver: well, I'll be at re plus for a day walking around because it's literally a bicycle ride away. I'll probably take the train, though, because too many roads across and commercial solar guy, calm, that's my normal place. We also posted a new story on LinkedIn, our project of the year, so you can comment on there and like it, so you can find me on LinkedIn.
• 49:31
  John Weaver: Commercial solar guy, calm, blue guy, or you could call Craig.
• 49:35
  John Weaver: He's our sales guy. Tell him what you want to build, and we'll help you. We'll help you build it.
• 49:40
  Tim Montague: And you can check out all of our content at clean power hour.com the most important thing is to tell a friend about the show. So many people who don't know about the Clean Power Hour yet, and they will appreciate the invitation.
• 49:53
  Tim Montague: Trust me, this is really good content, both the news roundups that we do here and all the interviews that we're dropping in between with that, I'll say, let's grow solar and storage.
• 50:04
  Tim Montague: Thank you so much, John, you.