Latest / Core Memory / Solar Energy's Second Act — EP 88 Joel Jean

Transcript

Solar Energy's Second Act — EP 88 Joel Jean · Core Memory

0:01
SPEAKER_01: All right, today we have a tale of woe and hope.
0:04
SPEAKER_01: The tale of woe is that the US has fallen terribly behind when it comes to solar technology.
0:11
SPEAKER_01: China is far and away the dominant player in manufacturing solar cells and panels.
0:18
SPEAKER_01: It is also building more solar panels than the rest of the world combined.
0:24
SPEAKER_01: This is an issue if you think solar has a future, and I think it has a very bright future.
0:30
SPEAKER_01: But there's a moment in time coming up where the U.S.
0:34
SPEAKER_01: could actually have a chance to compete again.
0:37
SPEAKER_01: And this all hinges on some solar technology that revolves around things called perovskites.
0:43
SPEAKER_01: These are crystals that are potentially cheaper and more efficient than
0:49
SPEAKER_01: the silicon-based technology we've been using for decades.
0:54
SPEAKER_01: The U.S. and China are in a race to figure out who can master perovskites first.
1:00
SPEAKER_01: Our guest today is Joel Jean.
1:02
SPEAKER_01: He is the CEO and co-founder of Swiss Solar.
1:05
SPEAKER_01: They have been doing some of the most pioneering work on perovskites for more than a decade.
1:10
SPEAKER_01: They think they are close to being able to manufacture these things.
1:14
SPEAKER_01: Joel is going to walk us through the last few decades of solar technology.
1:20
SPEAKER_01: History,
1:20
SPEAKER_01: how we got to where we are and how perovskites work
1:24
SPEAKER_01: and how they could potentially create a much more competitive landscape for the U.S.
1:30
SPEAKER_01: and the rest of the world against China.
1:33
SPEAKER_01: We will see.
1:34
SPEAKER_01: I'm Ashley Vance.
1:36
SPEAKER_01: This is Core Memory.
1:38
SPEAKER_01: Here we go to learn about solar technology.
1:57
SPEAKER_01: Joel, thank you for coming.
1:59
SPEAKER_01: How are you?
2:00
SPEAKER_01: Thank you.
2:00
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I'm good.
2:01
SPEAKER_00: I'm good.
2:02
SPEAKER_00: Friday afternoon.
2:03
SPEAKER_01: I think we met for the first time a couple months ago?
2:08
SPEAKER_01: Months ago.
2:09
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it gave me nostalgia.
2:11
SPEAKER_01: You guys are near where Tesla's original headquarters were, which I didn't visit back
2:19
SPEAKER_01: When it was actually happening,
2:21
SPEAKER_01: but when I was doing my book on Elon,
2:23
SPEAKER_01: I like to go to all these places just to feel what they were like.
2:26
SPEAKER_01: And then I saw all these photos from,
2:29
SPEAKER_01: from back in the day, but it's, it's a little historic, uh, chunk of Silicon Valley.
2:35
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
2:36
SPEAKER_00: Right on.
2:36
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
2:36
SPEAKER_00: Off of industrial and San Carlos.
2:38
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
2:39
SPEAKER_00: Um, we,
2:39
SPEAKER_00: we actually had one of the Tesla co-founders in the office once and he was like,
2:43
SPEAKER_00: I think this used to be our building.
2:44
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
2:45
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
2:45
SPEAKER_01: I mean, it is quite possible that as they expanded,
2:48
SPEAKER_01: they actually were in your building at some point.
2:52
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
2:52
SPEAKER_00: Anyway, a little bit of good history there.
2:55
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
2:56
SPEAKER_01: So I want to use this as an excuse to get to know the solar industry better.
3:03
SPEAKER_01: And, you know,
3:04
SPEAKER_01: I feel like from where I sit,
3:07
SPEAKER_01: a lot of what you see is Clearly solar has improved in price and performance
3:14
SPEAKER_01: at this, this very steady clip over the last, whatever, 20, 30 years.
3:19
SPEAKER_01: And, and then, so you've got this story of solar is succeeding in a lot of ways.
3:24
SPEAKER_01: And then you have this story of, and we'll get into all this.
3:28
SPEAKER_01: And so maybe I'll misspeak at some point,
3:29
SPEAKER_01: but my impression is that the United States invented A lot of the technology that is
3:36
SPEAKER_01: at the heart of the global solar industry,
3:40
SPEAKER_01: but that over the last 15 to 20 years,
3:43
SPEAKER_01: China really perfected manufacturing this stuff and has just become
3:50
SPEAKER_01: the dominant player in solar,
3:52
SPEAKER_01: both from a manufacturing standpoint and from actually deploying solar technology.
3:58
SPEAKER_01: And if you read The news, I mean,
4:00
SPEAKER_01: people would say these days they will install more solar this year,
4:05
SPEAKER_01: I think, than the rest of the world combined.
4:07
SPEAKER_01: And so it really looks like this incredibly dominant force.
4:11
SPEAKER_01: I know the US does still have some.
4:13
SPEAKER_01: Solar manufacturers.
4:15
SPEAKER_01: I know Germany has been big on solar for years,
4:18
SPEAKER_01: but to me, from where I sit, it really looks like this is very China-heavy story.
4:23
SPEAKER_01: It's like not great for the United States, possibly not great for the world.
4:27
SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
4:28
SPEAKER_01: Maybe it is if they could just make tons of cheap solar.
4:30
SPEAKER_01: But, you know, solar is going to be a thing, which it is, and continue on this trajectory.
4:38
SPEAKER_01: It seems like perhaps not the U.S.'s shining star.
4:41
SPEAKER_01: And so I don't know,
4:44
SPEAKER_01: can you,
4:45
SPEAKER_01: after he's rambled all of that out, I mean, is this, is this generally true?
4:50
SPEAKER_01: What, what is, what is the state of the solar industry to start with a very broad question?
4:56
SPEAKER_01: Oh my gosh.
4:57
SPEAKER_00: I love it.
4:59
SPEAKER_00: There's so much there.
5:00
SPEAKER_00: I mean, the, yeah, I mean, Tell a story you start from the beginning.
5:05
SPEAKER_00: It's like, where does solar start?
5:06
SPEAKER_00: It started in 1954 with the Bell Labs, right?
5:09
SPEAKER_00: The very first silicon solar cell was invented at Bell Labs.
5:12
SPEAKER_00: So right around the time of the transistor.
5:15
SPEAKER_00: Right around the same time.
5:16
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
5:16
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
5:17
SPEAKER_00: Um, so they figured out how to make a, you know, roughly five, 6% efficient silicon cell.
5:23
SPEAKER_00: Um, it, the very first use case was in satellites.
5:27
SPEAKER_00: So the Voyager satellite in like 1958, I think was launched with solar cells.
5:32
SPEAKER_00: Um, So it's,
5:33
SPEAKER_00: we'll come back to this,
5:34
SPEAKER_00: but it's kind of a nice full circle moment where we've now brought solar globally
5:40
SPEAKER_00: at gigawatt scale.
5:40
SPEAKER_00: And now we're talking about putting it back in space.
5:42
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
5:43
SPEAKER_00: Right.
5:43
SPEAKER_00: Right.
5:43
SPEAKER_00: Right.
5:44
SPEAKER_00: Space X and so on.
5:45
SPEAKER_00: So, but we can come back to that.
5:46
SPEAKER_00: Um, I think you're The basic flow of like, yes, US invented it, China scaled it.
5:52
SPEAKER_00: It was kind of the story.
5:53
SPEAKER_00: I think there's several kind of key players along the way.
5:56
SPEAKER_00: And even to oversimplify there,
5:58
SPEAKER_00: I think like, you know, the US played a big role in developing the core technology.
6:04
SPEAKER_00: Germany and Japan actually kind of sequentially in the opposite order played
6:09
SPEAKER_00: a huge role in actually scaling it, deploying it.
6:11
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
6:12
SPEAKER_00: At a time when it was not economic to do so.
6:15
SPEAKER_00: Japan chose to incentivize much rooftop solar, so they created a market there.
6:19
SPEAKER_00: Germany deployed gigawatts of solar in the 2000s, 2010s.
6:24
SPEAKER_00: At a time, really,
6:25
SPEAKER_00: even before that,
6:26
SPEAKER_00: when it didn't make sense to do it just purely economically,
6:29
SPEAKER_00: they put in feeding tariffs and had incentives to actually create this market.
6:33
SPEAKER_00: Not the sunniest country.
6:34
SPEAKER_00: Not the sunniest country, yeah.
6:37
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
6:38
SPEAKER_00: Germany's like what, like Boston or something?
6:40
SPEAKER_01: It's like similar to the solar resource.
6:42
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
6:42
SPEAKER_01: But it was a green technology push and they were shutting down nuclear and
6:47
SPEAKER_01: so they were committing to this future.
6:50
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
6:50
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
6:51
SPEAKER_00: And like, thank God, right?
6:52
SPEAKER_00: Like the rest of the world really has Germany and Japan to thank for like laying
6:56
SPEAKER_00: the groundwork, right?
6:57
SPEAKER_00: Creating that market that then China came in and scaled the shit out of.
7:00
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
7:00
SPEAKER_00: And, you know, they built it out in a way that maybe no one else in the world could have.
7:05
SPEAKER_00: So, you know,
7:06
SPEAKER_00: well-deserved,
7:07
SPEAKER_00: they had a strategy that lasted, you know, every five-year plan is the same thing.
7:10
SPEAKER_00: Let's go make solar, make more solar, let's go export it.
7:14
SPEAKER_00: And that extended to the entire supply chain in a way that now,
7:17
SPEAKER_00: you know,
7:18
SPEAKER_00: China owns 90% of,
7:20
SPEAKER_00: you know,
7:20
SPEAKER_00: silicon panel making,
7:22
SPEAKER_00: solar panel manufacturing,
7:23
SPEAKER_00: cell manufacturing, wafer manufacturing, even upstream, right?
7:27
SPEAKER_00: So polysilicon.
7:28
SPEAKER_00: So it's really this...
7:30
SPEAKER_00: Kind of crazy, yeah, story of global kind of like handing off a baton.
7:35
SPEAKER_00: I missed Australia,
7:36
SPEAKER_00: by the way, like a lot of the early technology was developed also in Australia.
7:39
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah,
7:40
SPEAKER_01: because yes,
7:41
SPEAKER_01: out of these like Australian universities that then some of
7:45
SPEAKER_01: the leading researchers like became entrepreneurs in China, right?
7:47
SPEAKER_00: I mean, yeah.
7:48
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, PhD students of Martin Green at University of New South Wales.
7:52
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
7:52
SPEAKER_00: You know, legendary kind of godfather of silicon solar.
7:55
SPEAKER_00: Um, a lot of those folks, yeah,
7:57
SPEAKER_00: PhD students,
7:58
SPEAKER_00: postdocs went off and started SunTech and like your,
8:01
SPEAKER_00: you know, like all the Chinese giants.
8:04
SPEAKER_01: So in, and there was one thing I wanted to be sure to do,
8:07
SPEAKER_01: cause I knew we were going to talk about this, um,
8:10
SPEAKER_01: a lot during this episode breakdown for me,
8:13
SPEAKER_01: before we get back to the history for one second,
8:16
SPEAKER_01: um, the difference between a cell, a panel.
8:19
SPEAKER_01: Um, just these different, the, the core components of, of what we're going to be discussing.
8:23
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, absolutely.
8:24
SPEAKER_00: So I think probably everyone knows what a solar panel is.
8:26
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
8:27
SPEAKER_00: So the,
8:28
SPEAKER_00: the breakdown of that is like a solar panel is basically a bunch of cells strung up
8:31
SPEAKER_00: and electrically in series, um, with,
8:34
SPEAKER_00: you know,
8:34
SPEAKER_00: glass on both sides or on one side with a plastic back sheet with a frame around it.
8:39
SPEAKER_00: So it's the traditional kind of panel you see on rooftops or in the field
8:42
SPEAKER_00: for utility scale solar farms.
8:44
SPEAKER_00: Um, the cells themselves are the core kind of power generating engine, right?
8:48
SPEAKER_00: In a solar panel.
8:49
SPEAKER_01: So almost like a semiconductor type,
8:51
SPEAKER_01: like I might think of as a chip or something like that in computing land.
8:56
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
8:56
SPEAKER_00: It's like a giant chip.
8:57
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
8:57
SPEAKER_00: Right.
8:57
SPEAKER_00: It's a giant chip,
8:58
SPEAKER_00: a silicon single wave,
9:00
SPEAKER_00: like single crystal of silicon wafered really thin,
9:03
SPEAKER_00: a typical, you know, semiconductor wafers, maybe 500 microns thick.
9:07
SPEAKER_00: Uh, this is factor of, you know, two, three thinner.
9:11
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
9:11
SPEAKER_00: So maybe a hundred, 150 microns.
9:14
SPEAKER_00: Um, so it's a really thin, like kind of wafer of, of silicon, very brittle.
9:18
SPEAKER_00: Um, but we've figured out how to make these a massive, massive scale, right?
9:22
SPEAKER_00: A gigawatt scale factory pumps out a couple of millions of these a day,
9:25
SPEAKER_01: a couple million a day.
9:26
SPEAKER_01: And then in China's dominating both the, the cell and the panel end of this.
9:32
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
9:32
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
9:32
SPEAKER_00: The panel a little bit less so, but the further you go upstream, the more they dominate.
9:36
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
9:37
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
9:37
SPEAKER_01: And you said we started in.
9:39
SPEAKER_01: 1956.
9:41
SPEAKER_01: Was it 54?
9:42
SPEAKER_01: 54.
9:42
SPEAKER_01: 54 at 6% efficiency.
9:45
SPEAKER_00: And then what are we at today?
9:46
SPEAKER_00: Today, the world record cell is around 27.8 or 20.
9:51
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
9:51
SPEAKER_00: In the high 27s.
9:52
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
9:54
SPEAKER_00: Whereas, you know, commercial produced cells are kind of more in the maybe 24 to 26% range.
9:59
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
10:00
SPEAKER_01: And then,
10:00
SPEAKER_01: and then,
10:00
SPEAKER_01: and that's like when people hear that solar has been getting better at
10:04
SPEAKER_01: the steady clip over all this time and getting Ever closer to parity
10:09
SPEAKER_01: with other fuel sources.
10:10
SPEAKER_01: It's that, that efficiency number just going up
10:13
SPEAKER_00: year by year.
10:14
SPEAKER_00: Yes.
10:15
SPEAKER_00: It's actually the efficiency.
10:16
SPEAKER_00: There's one nuance there, which is like, that was the cell efficiency.
10:19
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
10:19
SPEAKER_00: So the cell is the part that's like most fundamentally limited by physics,
10:23
SPEAKER_00: by thermodynamics to that, like,
10:24
SPEAKER_00: you know,
10:25
SPEAKER_00: there's like a 30% limit,
10:26
SPEAKER_00: but the panel efficiency is usually what people talk about and think about.
10:30
SPEAKER_00: It's like, how efficient is the panel?
10:32
SPEAKER_00: So once you've integrated these cells into this glass sheet, right?
10:36
SPEAKER_00: What's the power conversion efficiency?
10:37
SPEAKER_00: So usually it's that number that we think of as like going up by say half a percent
10:41
SPEAKER_00: a year for decades.
10:44
SPEAKER_01: I see.
10:44
SPEAKER_01: I see.
10:44
SPEAKER_01: And like, how do you improve panel efficiency?
10:47
SPEAKER_01: I keep asking massive
10:48
SPEAKER_00: questions, I'm sure.
10:50
SPEAKER_00: No, they're fantastic.
10:50
SPEAKER_00: You know,
10:52
SPEAKER_00: you have to be able to explain sort of the basics
10:54
SPEAKER_00: to make sure you really understand it.
10:56
SPEAKER_00: Right.
10:56
SPEAKER_00: So like, let me see if I really understand it.
10:58
SPEAKER_00: Right.
11:01
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, when you're trying to make a solar cell or panel more efficient, like...
11:05
SPEAKER_00: Okay, let's start with the panel, right?
11:06
SPEAKER_00: To make the panel more efficient...
11:08
SPEAKER_00: Like the kind of most straightforward,
11:10
SPEAKER_00: let's say like easy way is to just like capture the low hanging fruit in
11:13
SPEAKER_00: the panel construction.
11:15
SPEAKER_00: So like maybe you make your glass kind of textured
11:17
SPEAKER_00: so it captures light more efficient so you're not reflecting as much.
11:20
SPEAKER_00: Maybe you add an anti-reflection coating.
11:22
SPEAKER_00: Maybe you make your polymer layers, the plastic layers inside a little bit more transparent.
11:27
SPEAKER_00: So those are the kind of low hanging fruit at the panel level.
11:30
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
11:30
SPEAKER_00: But ultimately it comes down to can you make the cell more efficient?
11:33
SPEAKER_00: Right.
11:34
SPEAKER_00: And there's always going to be some laws going from the cell to the panel.
11:36
SPEAKER_00: So the cell, how do you make the cell more efficient?
11:38
SPEAKER_00: It's like that's where the semiconductor engineering comes in, right?
11:41
SPEAKER_00: You make the material better.
11:43
SPEAKER_00: You do something called passivation,
11:44
SPEAKER_00: which means you reduce the kind of defects in the like at the interfaces
11:51
SPEAKER_00: where you can lose charge, lose carriers, lose energy to heat.
11:55
SPEAKER_00: And you kind of plug those up, right?
11:57
SPEAKER_00: So you apply what we call a passivating layer to that.
12:00
SPEAKER_00: So that's really how,
12:01
SPEAKER_00: that's kind of been the core trajectory of the solar industry over
12:04
SPEAKER_00: the last 20 years is to push the cell efficiency up.
12:07
SPEAKER_00: You go through better and better, better structures to passivate the silicon.
12:11
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
12:12
SPEAKER_00: Right.
12:12
SPEAKER_00: So that's why if you hear about silicon technologies like PERC and TopCon
12:15
SPEAKER_00: and Heterojunction,
12:16
SPEAKER_00: like each of those is a better way to passivate the,
12:20
SPEAKER_00: sorry, the, the, the silicon cell.
12:21
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
12:22
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
12:22
SPEAKER_01: And, and are we, Still improving at this 0.5% per year, or are we capping out on that now?
12:31
SPEAKER_00: We're kind of capping out on it.
12:32
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
12:32
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
12:32
SPEAKER_01: I remember when I was writing about you guys, it seemed like we're hitting limits, right?
12:36
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
12:36
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
12:37
SPEAKER_00: And that's like a fundamental limit in solar.
12:39
SPEAKER_00: Like people are kind of like, okay, why,
12:41
SPEAKER_00: you know, solar is so inefficient and like, it's only like, you know, 25% of it.
12:45
SPEAKER_01: It doesn't sound that great.
12:46
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
12:46
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
12:47
SPEAKER_00: Like that's why are you making this shitty technology for,
12:49
SPEAKER_00: you know, like you could just do better.
12:51
SPEAKER_00: Right.
12:51
SPEAKER_00: Like, um, And it turns out physics is hard to beat.
12:55
SPEAKER_00: Thermodynamics is a thing.
12:57
SPEAKER_00: And the reason you can only reach this limit of,
13:01
SPEAKER_00: for silicon, 29.5%,
13:02
SPEAKER_00: for any material,
13:03
SPEAKER_00: about 30% single material,
13:06
SPEAKER_00: is because there's this trade-off between how much of the light you capture from
13:11
SPEAKER_00: the sun, which is this spectrum.
13:13
SPEAKER_00: It's not a single wavelength.
13:15
SPEAKER_00: It's a broadband source.
13:18
SPEAKER_00: How much of a light you capture and how much energy you pull out of each wavelength
13:23
SPEAKER_00: of light, each photon.
13:24
SPEAKER_00: So there's this tradeoff where you choose a single material, let's say silicon.
13:29
SPEAKER_00: For silicon,
13:31
SPEAKER_00: below 1,100 nanometers,
13:32
SPEAKER_00: like all the visible,
13:33
SPEAKER_00: some infrared, some UV, you can capture and convert efficiently.
13:37
SPEAKER_00: Below that, or a longer wavelength than that, you lose.
13:40
SPEAKER_00: It just transmits it.
13:42
SPEAKER_00: And that's true for any single material you choose.
13:44
SPEAKER_00: Um, so even if you chose a different material that had,
13:48
SPEAKER_00: I don't know, an 800 nanometer, what we call a band gap, right?
13:50
SPEAKER_00: The, the threshold at which it kind of stops converting,
13:53
SPEAKER_00: it will capture the,
13:54
SPEAKER_00: the higher energy light,
13:55
SPEAKER_00: lower wavelength light more efficiently,
13:58
SPEAKER_00: but it will transmit from 800 on rather than 1100 on.
14:02
SPEAKER_00: So you're losing more light to transmission,
14:04
SPEAKER_00: even though you're committing to the rest more efficiently.
14:05
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
14:06
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
14:06
SPEAKER_00: Sorry.
14:06
SPEAKER_00: I get kind of got,
14:07
SPEAKER_01: no, it's good.
14:08
SPEAKER_01: No, it's good.
14:08
SPEAKER_01: But, and then.
14:10
SPEAKER_01: I don't follow this industry super closely.
14:13
SPEAKER_01: So like this,
14:14
SPEAKER_01: as far as hitting this limit,
14:15
SPEAKER_01: I mean, is this a, it's obviously something you guys have known about.
14:19
SPEAKER_01: Is this a, uh,
14:22
SPEAKER_01: In terms of competing against oil,
14:24
SPEAKER_01: natural gas, wind, is this seen as a major issue in the very near term?
14:32
SPEAKER_01: Are people still think they can eke out enough gains over the next few years
14:36
SPEAKER_01: to stay competitive?
14:38
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I just don't know how to
14:39
SPEAKER_00: think about this.
14:41
SPEAKER_00: I guess what's important to keep in mind is that it's not efficiency that we really care about.
14:45
SPEAKER_00: So if you're a person trying to run your house or your factory or whatever,
14:49
SPEAKER_00: or charge your car, it's You don't really care about the efficiency.
14:53
SPEAKER_00: You care about how much the electricity costs, right?
14:56
SPEAKER_00: So the dollars per kilowatt hour, we call that levelized cost of electricity, right?
15:00
SPEAKER_00: LCOE in the industry.
15:01
SPEAKER_00: But really it just comes down to, okay,
15:04
SPEAKER_00: efficiency is a factor,
15:05
SPEAKER_00: but it's like how much energy can you generate with this solar panel,
15:07
SPEAKER_00: including all the other stuff that has to go into the system to allow you
15:11
SPEAKER_00: to deploy it, right?
15:11
SPEAKER_00: The labor to install it,
15:12
SPEAKER_00: the racking, the wiring, the transformers, all this stuff in the system.
15:18
SPEAKER_00: What matters,
15:18
SPEAKER_00: the important thing to keep in mind is that we're now at a point where all of
15:22
SPEAKER_00: that stuff integrated over the lifetime of a solar project makes
15:26
SPEAKER_00: the solar electricity actually cost competitive with alternative sources.
15:30
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
15:30
SPEAKER_00: Right.
15:30
SPEAKER_00: So it's now the cheapest source of electricity we have.
15:32
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
15:33
SPEAKER_01: That's what I was going to ask you.
15:33
SPEAKER_01: So it is, it's the cheapest.
15:35
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
15:35
SPEAKER_00: In, in many places it is the cheapest.
15:38
SPEAKER_00: It's actually dependent on how much sun you get.
15:39
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
15:39
SPEAKER_00: So in Germany,
15:40
SPEAKER_00: you know,
15:42
SPEAKER_00: if you have higher power prices, right,
15:43
SPEAKER_00: like you can be competitive,
15:44
SPEAKER_00: but it's not going to be as cheap as, you know, in Arizona.
15:47
SPEAKER_01: This episode is brought to you by Brex.
15:50
SPEAKER_01: I spend all of my time inside of
15:52
SPEAKER_01: the world's most ambitious companies making rockets, semiconductors, robots.
15:58
SPEAKER_01: Very often the business is struggling and then all of a sudden things click and take off.
16:03
SPEAKER_01: Then the company's expenses spin out of control.
16:07
SPEAKER_01: They either have to clamp down,
16:08
SPEAKER_01: start counting pennies,
16:10
SPEAKER_01: or cross their fingers,
16:11
SPEAKER_01: hope for the best that the quarter or the year comes out okay enough.
16:15
SPEAKER_01: Brex was built to handle exactly these situations.
16:18
SPEAKER_01: It helps you move fast, spend smarter at the same time.
16:22
SPEAKER_01: They've got credit cards, banking, expense management all in one place.
16:26
SPEAKER_01: They've got AI technology looking over everything, taking care of tasks for you.
16:32
SPEAKER_01: No more chasing down receipts.
16:34
SPEAKER_01: We use Brexit Core Memory.
16:36
SPEAKER_01: It has been a godsend and given me back so much time.
16:39
SPEAKER_01: Giants like Anthropic and Zoom.
16:42
SPEAKER_01: Use Brex as well, and so do tens of thousands of startups.
16:47
SPEAKER_01: You should use Brex and you can find out exactly how to do that by going
16:51
SPEAKER_01: to brex.com
16:53
SPEAKER_00: slash Core Memory.
16:55
SPEAKER_01: And go back to the history part just for one second.
16:57
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I know obviously there were U.S.
16:59
SPEAKER_01: solar manufacturers and still are, but not as many as there were.
17:04
SPEAKER_01: But when you were saying that Japan, Germany really embraced this, Australia...
17:09
SPEAKER_01: So the U.S.
17:10
SPEAKER_01: did embrace it,
17:11
SPEAKER_01: but just not, um,
17:13
SPEAKER_01: not enough or,
17:14
SPEAKER_01: or in there were,
17:16
SPEAKER_01: you know, the U.S. is pretty pro oil and has political things going on.
17:19
SPEAKER_01: Is that, is that what was going on?
17:22
SPEAKER_00: Oh my gosh.
17:22
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
17:23
SPEAKER_00: I mean, go all day about what the oil companies are doing.
17:25
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
17:26
SPEAKER_00: The US, actually, it's funny, right?
17:28
SPEAKER_00: The oil companies were kind of the innovators in solar back in the 80s and 90s.
17:32
SPEAKER_00: BP and Exxon, you know, all these players had huge solar efforts.
17:37
SPEAKER_00: They kind of pushed the technology in many ways.
17:41
SPEAKER_00: They sort of gave up on it.
17:43
SPEAKER_00: And I think there is this era of, I guess, like, you know, cheap oil.
17:48
SPEAKER_00: And we had a lot of,
17:49
SPEAKER_00: you know,
17:50
SPEAKER_00: actually,
17:50
SPEAKER_00: the start of it was sort of like in,
17:52
SPEAKER_00: you know, 73 and 79, we had these oil crises, right?
17:54
SPEAKER_00: And like, That was the peak of the U.S.'s R&D funding for solar in history.
17:59
SPEAKER_00: I think like $3 billion equivalent of federal funding for solar.
18:03
SPEAKER_01: And that was like what?
18:04
SPEAKER_01: Nixon, right?
18:05
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I was doing another episode right around that time.
18:08
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, because of the oil crisis.
18:10
SPEAKER_01: It was like we had plans to build a thousand nuclear power plants by the year 2000
18:15
SPEAKER_01: to be energy independent.
18:16
SPEAKER_01: So this is all fitting into the same push.
18:18
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
18:19
SPEAKER_00: And it, well,
18:19
SPEAKER_00: just like an,
18:20
SPEAKER_00: an aside, like, I mean, we just saw like the street performance closed, right?
18:23
SPEAKER_00: Right.
18:24
SPEAKER_00: Like they're saying,
18:25
SPEAKER_00: IEA is saying like, this is the biggest, you know, energy crisis in history, right?
18:30
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
18:30
SPEAKER_00: Comparable and even like worse than those, um, those energy crises.
18:35
SPEAKER_00: So like, who knows what we'll see in the coming years.
18:37
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
18:38
SPEAKER_01: So, but back in the early 1970s,
18:41
SPEAKER_01: like when you're talking about this figure of, of, of, of R&D,
18:45
SPEAKER_01: When you said it was the most,
18:45
SPEAKER_01: it was just that the U.S.
18:47
SPEAKER_01: government was putting, like,
18:49
SPEAKER_01: by percentage of money that it spends on R&D,
18:52
SPEAKER_01: that was the highest it ever was into solar?
18:55
SPEAKER_00: It was the highest in terms of, like,
18:56
SPEAKER_00: total dollars going into solar research in the U.S. And, like,
19:00
SPEAKER_00: the federal government historically has been the biggest,
19:02
SPEAKER_00: the more constant, constant supporter of R&D and solar, right?
19:05
SPEAKER_00: Like, for those decades, you know, 70s, 80s, 90s, like, solar was not this big industry.
19:09
SPEAKER_00: So it was really government funding that kept it going and enabled it
19:12
SPEAKER_00: because it was seen as a strategic industry and now that's coming back.
19:16
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
19:16
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
19:16
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
19:17
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
19:18
SPEAKER_01: And obviously,
19:18
SPEAKER_01: clearly,
19:19
SPEAKER_01: I'm sure people have written extensively about this and I'm just a moron,
19:23
SPEAKER_01: but I mean,
19:23
SPEAKER_01: the Department of Energy has been putting money into this for decades
19:27
SPEAKER_01: and I'm sure other branches of the government as well.
19:30
SPEAKER_01: But then from this,
19:31
SPEAKER_01: this like 2000s to now,
19:34
SPEAKER_01: what the U S government still funding things,
19:37
SPEAKER_01: but decided this was, was up to businesses to now develop for the most part.
19:43
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
19:43
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I don't think I can speak to the kind of the government's perspective
19:46
SPEAKER_00: on this necessarily.
19:47
SPEAKER_00: I think they,
19:50
SPEAKER_00: there's always been with different administrations in the U S kind
19:52
SPEAKER_00: of like fluctuations in how consistently we support these kinds of efforts.
19:55
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
19:56
SPEAKER_00: Um, China has not right.
19:58
SPEAKER_00: Every five year plan is the same thing.
20:00
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
20:00
SPEAKER_00: Let's invest more and more and more in building up our supply chain.
20:03
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
20:04
SPEAKER_01: So I remember,
20:04
SPEAKER_01: I remember this moment when,
20:07
SPEAKER_01: um, you know, solar companies were I want to say it's like maybe like 2008-ish.
20:14
SPEAKER_01: I just remember them being massively valuable on the New York Stock Exchange
20:19
SPEAKER_01: or NASDAQ, whatever they were listed on.
20:21
SPEAKER_01: And then all of a sudden, yeah, the Chinese glut comes and companies are going bankrupt.
20:28
SPEAKER_01: So did China, they made this a national priority.
20:34
SPEAKER_01: They were going to get into it.
20:36
SPEAKER_01: Was the intention like always to make this just unpalatable to everybody else
20:42
SPEAKER_01: by going so gung-ho or it was just,
20:46
SPEAKER_01: um, they were captured by the same fever and just executed extraordinarily well?
20:53
SPEAKER_01: Um...
20:54
SPEAKER_01: Does that make sense?
20:55
SPEAKER_00: Kind of, kind of, yeah.
20:56
SPEAKER_00: So the question is like, why did China kind of take off and not the US in this space maybe?
21:01
SPEAKER_01: Well, sort of.
21:02
SPEAKER_01: I just remember China going so all in and the market being devastated on such a massive level.
21:10
SPEAKER_01: And maybe it's an unfair question,
21:11
SPEAKER_01: but in my head,
21:13
SPEAKER_01: I was just wondering if they're like, we're going to own this industry.
21:16
SPEAKER_01: We're willing to lose money on this.
21:19
SPEAKER_01: We're just going to.
21:20
SPEAKER_01: Manufacture so much that it's not worth anybody else's while to be in this.
21:24
SPEAKER_01: And then in the end we'll be the place that makes solar.
21:29
SPEAKER_00: I don't know if it was as like master planned as that.
21:32
SPEAKER_00: There's some perception actually that it was like,
21:33
SPEAKER_00: it's very in a way bottom up,
21:35
SPEAKER_00: but shaped by sort of the milieu of like the government's kind of perspective
21:38
SPEAKER_00: on this,
21:38
SPEAKER_00: their five-year plans kind of tell the rest of the provinces and like
21:41
SPEAKER_00: the local governments, like what they should be doing.
21:43
SPEAKER_00: Yep.
21:45
SPEAKER_00: Because this was in these central government plans,
21:50
SPEAKER_00: they were essentially propagating this to all the local governments like,
21:53
SPEAKER_00: hey, you should be supporting and creating jobs in this space.
21:58
SPEAKER_00: What these local governments did was give free land,
22:02
SPEAKER_00: subsidized electricity,
22:03
SPEAKER_00: super cheap labor, tax benefits, cheap capital all around to scale up.
22:10
SPEAKER_00: This is something that is just not accessible anywhere else in the world.
22:14
SPEAKER_00: And ultimately what did happen was they ended up supercharging their entire supply
22:20
SPEAKER_00: chain because you could say it's not economic.
22:23
SPEAKER_00: It was definitely not a free market driven kind of thing.
22:26
SPEAKER_00: But in the end,
22:27
SPEAKER_00: these firms were incredibly hyper competitive with each other and they kind
22:31
SPEAKER_00: of forced each other to build and build and build.
22:35
SPEAKER_00: It's like the early days of Silicon Valley,
22:36
SPEAKER_00: you had,
22:37
SPEAKER_00: you still have like engineers in China,
22:39
SPEAKER_00: solar engineers, like on, all on a WeChat channel, right?
22:42
SPEAKER_00: From different companies, like sharing trade secrets.
22:46
SPEAKER_00: How do we make this better?
22:47
SPEAKER_00: And like, yeah,
22:48
SPEAKER_00: that's like,
22:49
SPEAKER_00: you know,
22:49
SPEAKER_00: not really a free market kind of behavior necessarily in the way we think
22:53
SPEAKER_00: about it today,
22:54
SPEAKER_00: but it does lead to a really massively, you know, successful, fast driving industry.
22:59
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
23:00
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
23:00
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
23:01
SPEAKER_01: And so when we read now that China is Building and deploying more solar than
23:08
SPEAKER_01: the rest of the world combined.
23:09
SPEAKER_01: These are like numbers you believe.
23:12
SPEAKER_01: I mean, is this like accurate reporting from the press based
23:15
SPEAKER_00: on what you see or like overhyping?
23:18
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I'd say it's definitely true.
23:19
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
23:20
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
23:20
SPEAKER_01: And so like,
23:21
SPEAKER_01: what does that mean for the rest of the world potentially over the next 10 years or
23:26
SPEAKER_01: so?
23:27
SPEAKER_01: Like should, you know, should the U.S. be doing Way more, or is China the same thing?
23:33
SPEAKER_01: China's just kind of like,
23:34
SPEAKER_01: we're committed to this, we're going all in, and maybe it's the wrong strategy.
23:40
SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
23:41
SPEAKER_00: I guess it's a matter of philosophy.
23:44
SPEAKER_00: It's like...
23:45
SPEAKER_00: I come actually from a very climate action kind of background.
23:49
SPEAKER_00: That's kind of how I really got into this in grad school.
23:52
SPEAKER_00: And part of me,
23:54
SPEAKER_00: certainly at that time,
23:55
SPEAKER_00: I think I had this view that, hey, really,
23:57
SPEAKER_00: if China wants to build a ton of super cheap solar,
24:00
SPEAKER_00: even sell it below cost and let us decarbonize, why not?
24:05
SPEAKER_00: It sounds great for the world.
24:06
SPEAKER_00: And I put it right now in the same bucket as like a carbon tax,
24:10
SPEAKER_00: which is something that like economists love, right?
24:12
SPEAKER_00: It's like economists love.
24:13
SPEAKER_00: It's like, okay, yeah, this is the most economically efficient thing, right?
24:16
SPEAKER_00: Comparative advantage, they make it, we deploy it.
24:18
SPEAKER_00: They, you know,
24:20
SPEAKER_00: if we put a carbon tax, like, yeah,
24:22
SPEAKER_00: like the economy will shift in a way that configures itself to the lowest cost way
24:25
SPEAKER_00: of decarbonizing, right?
24:26
SPEAKER_00: Like same kind of theme,
24:28
SPEAKER_00: but I think both are Really not,
24:31
SPEAKER_00: from a political economy standpoint, just not tenable.
24:35
SPEAKER_00: If you say, okay,
24:36
SPEAKER_00: we're going to transition to clean energy,
24:38
SPEAKER_00: but all the jobs and all the economic benefits are going to go to China,
24:42
SPEAKER_00: why would the US, the voting populace actually choose that?
24:47
SPEAKER_00: So I think that's the way I think about it,
24:50
SPEAKER_00: is you need to have manufacturing capacity,
24:53
SPEAKER_00: you need to have innovation,
24:54
SPEAKER_00: you need to have It basically benefits going to where you want
24:59
SPEAKER_00: to actually like deploy this thing, right?
25:01
SPEAKER_00: Like, and that means manufacturing.
25:03
SPEAKER_00: Like all those things come from manufacturing the technology,
25:06
SPEAKER_00: manufacturing the products locally.
25:08
SPEAKER_00: Right.
25:08
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
25:08
SPEAKER_00: In some level,
25:09
SPEAKER_01: at some level.
25:10
SPEAKER_01: And so, and you were saying you, you first got interested in this while you were in grad school?
25:15
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
25:16
SPEAKER_00: So I, well,
25:16
SPEAKER_00: I started out actually like just,
25:18
SPEAKER_00: I was a Stanford undergrad and got interested in like semiconductor research.
25:22
SPEAKER_00: But then really quickly got into solar, went to MIT to do my PhD in solar technology.
25:27
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
25:28
SPEAKER_00: And that's where I kind of like really got educated, I would say, on climate.
25:31
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
25:31
SPEAKER_01: And what year are you starting your PhD work?
25:34
SPEAKER_01: That was in 2011.
25:35
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
25:36
SPEAKER_01: So the solar market has kind of collapsed in the-
25:40
SPEAKER_00: In the
25:40
SPEAKER_01: hole.
25:41
SPEAKER_01: Right.
25:42
SPEAKER_01: But you're still saying
25:46
SPEAKER_00: you were still called to go do this.
25:48
SPEAKER_00: Well, so- I was dumb, by the way.
25:53
SPEAKER_00: I was not thinking that globally at the time.
25:55
SPEAKER_00: I was kind of like, oh, okay.
25:57
SPEAKER_00: I've heard about this energy thing.
25:58
SPEAKER_00: We're going to run out of oil and gas eventually.
26:01
SPEAKER_00: We should probably find some alternatives.
26:04
SPEAKER_00: That was kind of like the...
26:05
SPEAKER_00: The depth of my sort of macro thinking at the time.
26:08
SPEAKER_00: But I think quickly there became this motivation of like, oh, like,
26:11
SPEAKER_00: actually,
26:11
SPEAKER_00: I think there's an IEA report like a year or two later that was like, oh,
26:15
SPEAKER_00: by 2017,
26:16
SPEAKER_00: if we don't trans if we don't stop building new fossil fuel infrastructure,
26:20
SPEAKER_00: we're going to be locked into two degrees Celsius.
26:21
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
26:22
SPEAKER_00: Right.
26:23
SPEAKER_00: That was kind of like a wake-up call because I was like, okay,
26:25
SPEAKER_00: that's the year I'm supposed to finish my PhD and I can't just wait until then
26:29
SPEAKER_00: to start doing something actually useful.
26:31
SPEAKER_00: So then that was kind of the start of a snowball of like, okay, we're going to actually do that.
26:35
SPEAKER_00: Actually, we'll help transform the industry, transform how we generate energy.
26:40
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
26:41
SPEAKER_01: And so this is kind of like where we're going to turn to Um,
26:45
SPEAKER_01: the next chapter of the chat,
26:47
SPEAKER_01: which is around these things called perovskites,
26:50
SPEAKER_01: which has taken me a long time to say correctly, as you know, but I think I got it.
26:54
SPEAKER_01: You got it.
26:54
SPEAKER_01: I got it.
26:55
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
26:56
SPEAKER_01: Um, so the, well, okay.
26:59
SPEAKER_01: Why don't you tell us what a, okay.
27:02
SPEAKER_01: Here's where we're going to head is there's a,
27:04
SPEAKER_01: there's a moment in time here,
27:05
SPEAKER_01: possibly where the U S could make a comeback in manufacturing solar
27:11
SPEAKER_01: because these Perovskites,
27:13
SPEAKER_01: which we're going to explain, um, are, it's a new, new type of solar technology.
27:19
SPEAKER_01: Nobody's fully, fully figured it out yet between the U S and China and others.
27:24
SPEAKER_01: And so, so there's this moment in time where it looks like it has the promise
27:29
SPEAKER_01: of possibly being the better solar technology.
27:31
SPEAKER_01: And so if you could.
27:33
SPEAKER_01: Figure out how to make it better than anywhere else.
27:36
SPEAKER_01: The U.S. could have a crack at this thing again.
27:40
SPEAKER_01: And so why don't you tell us, yeah,
27:42
SPEAKER_01: explain what a perovskite is because if you go,
27:44
SPEAKER_01: I will warn people,
27:45
SPEAKER_01: if you go Google it,
27:46
SPEAKER_01: it gets very confusing quite quickly for probably a couple reasons we'll get into.
27:51
SPEAKER_01: But yeah, take a crack.
27:53
SPEAKER_01: So what is a perovskite?
27:54
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
27:56
SPEAKER_01: And why, you know, why are we, where does it fit in, solar?
28:00
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so...
28:03
SPEAKER_00: Perovskites are just a general term for a sort of semiconductor that takes the form
28:09
SPEAKER_00: of this like crystal, right?
28:10
SPEAKER_00: So this mineral called perovskite, right?
28:12
SPEAKER_00: It's certain crystal structure and you can make synthetic materials take that crystal structure.
28:18
SPEAKER_00: So it's an ABX3.
28:20
SPEAKER_00: It doesn't matter.
28:21
SPEAKER_00: It's basically just crystal structure that you can make with different kinds of materials.
28:25
SPEAKER_00: And it turns out that there's a certain class of what we kind of consider
28:28
SPEAKER_00: as like solar perovskites.
28:30
SPEAKER_00: So like materials that are particularly good At absorbing light and converting that
28:34
SPEAKER_00: into free electrons that can, you can extract and generate power from.
28:39
SPEAKER_00: So that, that set of like solar perovskites, um, is, is something that in a way is unique.
28:45
SPEAKER_00: I think at like a very fundamental level, it's like, it's the.
28:51
SPEAKER_00: It's like the first,
28:52
SPEAKER_00: I would say like advanced semiconductor material that we found that actually behaves
28:56
SPEAKER_00: as well or better than, um, sort of traditional semiconductors.
29:00
SPEAKER_00: And that sounds a little bit esoteric.
29:02
SPEAKER_00: Silicon.
29:03
SPEAKER_00: Silicon or three, five semiconductors like allium arsenide.
29:07
SPEAKER_00: Um, usually when you, so, so there's a silicon was always a thing, right?
29:11
SPEAKER_00: And like, sorry, I'm going to like go back to history a little bit.
29:12
SPEAKER_00: No, I think we should.
29:13
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
29:14
SPEAKER_00: In 2008, we had this giant shortage of silicon for solar.
29:19
SPEAKER_00: Solar overtook semiconductor industry for use of silicon.
29:24
SPEAKER_00: So there's a shortage.
29:25
SPEAKER_00: Prices were super high, like $100 per kilogram.
29:28
SPEAKER_00: So then we were like, okay, well, what do we actually do?
29:33
SPEAKER_00: We're going to be short on this key material.
29:37
SPEAKER_00: It's super expensive.
29:39
SPEAKER_00: That's why there was all this hype around thin film solar.
29:42
SPEAKER_00: It was like, oh,
29:43
SPEAKER_00: this is a material that can absorb all the light in a 100th of the thickness
29:48
SPEAKER_00: of silicon.
29:49
SPEAKER_00: So it's like, okay, we make it out of thin films.
29:52
SPEAKER_00: Great.
29:53
SPEAKER_00: Less material use.
29:55
SPEAKER_00: All of those materials, they tended to be less efficient.
30:00
SPEAKER_00: None of them actually surpass the performance of silicon.
30:03
SPEAKER_00: So you're stuck kind of competing on cost and you make it cheaper.
30:06
SPEAKER_00: For the first time with perovskites, right,
30:08
SPEAKER_00: it's also a thin film,
30:09
SPEAKER_00: less than a micron thick, so actually thinner than all those other technologies.
30:12
SPEAKER_00: Like for the first time,
30:13
SPEAKER_00: you actually have a technology that can actually boost the performance above
30:17
SPEAKER_00: the limit of silicon, but actually be cheaper.
30:20
SPEAKER_00: Okay, to make.
30:21
SPEAKER_00: Cheaper to make.
30:22
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
30:23
SPEAKER_01: All right, pod friends, I am here to tell you about SendCutSend.
30:27
SPEAKER_01: They are a manufacturing company.
30:29
SPEAKER_01: Phenomenon.
30:30
SPEAKER_01: Whether you're working on your own car or you're a giant automotive company,
30:35
SPEAKER_01: a rocket maker,
30:37
SPEAKER_01: if you need metal cut, machine, or bent, you're going to Send, Cut, Send.
30:42
SPEAKER_01: They'll do it for you right and they will do it for you fast.
30:46
SPEAKER_01: Go to sendcutsend.com slash Core Memory for a 15% discount on whatever you're trying to make.
30:54
SPEAKER_01: We love Send, Cut, Send.
30:55
SPEAKER_01: Go visit them today.
30:58
SPEAKER_01: And so, so perovskite,
31:01
SPEAKER_01: if you Google it,
31:01
SPEAKER_01: cause I have, I mean, like you mentioned, so it's a, it is a crystal.
31:05
SPEAKER_01: There's one definition of this, that is this crystal that occurs in nature.
31:09
SPEAKER_01: And this crystal just has a certain structure that happens to be well suited
31:14
SPEAKER_01: for this task at hand.
31:16
SPEAKER_01: And then we have made synthetic perovskites like, like based on this structure.
31:21
SPEAKER_01: Yes.
31:22
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
31:22
SPEAKER_01: And that, and that's kind of the, the magic here, right?
31:24
SPEAKER_01: Is that, um, I mean, I'm sure they're hard to make, but they're relatively makeable.
31:31
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
31:33
SPEAKER_01: In a synthetic form.
31:34
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, to your point, like, yeah, it's like this crystal structure, we make it in the lab.
31:39
SPEAKER_00: And I mean,
31:41
SPEAKER_00: the key here is really like,
31:42
SPEAKER_00: usually you have to make a semiconductor super, super, super perfect, right?
31:46
SPEAKER_00: Like you have a silicon wafer for a semiconductor or solar,
31:49
SPEAKER_00: you know, it's like five, six nines pure and semiconductor even more pure.
31:54
SPEAKER_00: So every millionth atom out of place, right?
31:55
SPEAKER_00: Like it's like super, super precise.
31:57
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
32:00
SPEAKER_00: You need that.
32:00
SPEAKER_00: You need that to be able to prevent a bunch of loss of energy to heating.
32:06
SPEAKER_00: And what's unique about these perovskites is that they are crazy defect tolerant.
32:13
SPEAKER_00: And they're very tolerant to these kind of missing atoms or things out of place,
32:18
SPEAKER_00: ions moving around.
32:19
SPEAKER_00: Even with all that kind of imperfectness,
32:21
SPEAKER_00: it's still super, super able to kind of not lose that energy to heat.
32:28
SPEAKER_00: So for the first time,
32:29
SPEAKER_00: it's like this material that is just like made at super low temperatures,
32:33
SPEAKER_00: like 100 Celsius or so.
32:36
SPEAKER_00: And yet it has the performance of like a perfect crystal of silicon that you make
32:41
SPEAKER_00: at 1400 Celsius.
32:43
SPEAKER_00: So it's like this weird kind of crazy material that just turned out,
32:46
SPEAKER_00: it kind of shocked the solar industry when it came out in like 2012.
32:50
SPEAKER_01: What happened in 2012?
32:53
SPEAKER_01: We must have known about perovskites for a long time.
32:56
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, we've known about it for a couple of decades, but never in the same form.
33:02
SPEAKER_00: It was considered what we call a dye.
33:06
SPEAKER_00: There's a class of solar cells called dye-sense dye solar cells.
33:09
SPEAKER_00: It was using organic dyes to absorb the light and then a different material
33:13
SPEAKER_00: to extract the current.
33:15
SPEAKER_00: So perovskites were first used as a light absorber in that structure.
33:20
SPEAKER_00: So it was kind of like, okay, this seems to do pretty well.
33:23
SPEAKER_00: But then in 2012,
33:24
SPEAKER_00: there's this paper published by Oxford and by a team in Japan that showed that, hey,
33:30
SPEAKER_00: like actually you can use this thing and it can actually transport the charge
33:34
SPEAKER_00: and absorb light.
33:35
SPEAKER_00: So you can use it kind of much more like a traditional semiconductor.
33:39
SPEAKER_00: And they showed a 10% efficient solar cell from day one.
33:43
SPEAKER_00: And just to put that in perspective,
33:44
SPEAKER_00: I spent my PhD making solar cells out of various new materials,
33:47
SPEAKER_00: like quantum dots and organic materials.
33:49
SPEAKER_00: And I had never made a solar cell in five years that was more than 5%
33:54
SPEAKER_01: efficient.
33:56
SPEAKER_00: I've made a lot of crappy solar cells in my lifetime.
33:59
SPEAKER_00: None of them hit 10%.
34:01
SPEAKER_00: So this was one that was the very first paper was 10%.
34:04
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
34:04
SPEAKER_01: Okay, okay.
34:05
SPEAKER_01: And so this material...
34:07
SPEAKER_01: Around 2012 starts to get people excited, but we're here in 2026.
34:12
SPEAKER_01: And when I was researching my story on you, um,
34:15
SPEAKER_01: and asking my friends in the solar industry,
34:18
SPEAKER_01: they're like, ah, Perovskites, everybody always thinks this is going to work.
34:22
SPEAKER_01: It never works.
34:23
SPEAKER_01: And so it's held this promise of,
34:25
SPEAKER_01: like you said,
34:25
SPEAKER_01: being not only cheaper to make,
34:29
SPEAKER_01: but at least comparable, if not better in terms of efficiency as well.
34:33
SPEAKER_01: So yeah,
34:34
SPEAKER_01: like holy grail,
34:35
SPEAKER_01: but we're obviously not using this,
34:37
SPEAKER_01: you know, mass producing these all over the place right now.
34:41
SPEAKER_01: And it's been, what, 15-ish years.
34:43
SPEAKER_01: And so there's
34:47
SPEAKER_01: So there's been problems and people,
34:48
SPEAKER_01: I just got some skepticism about them when I was digging into the story.
34:54
SPEAKER_00: I think that's very fair, right?
34:55
SPEAKER_00: It's very fair.
34:58
SPEAKER_00: People, academics,
35:00
SPEAKER_00: university press offices, really like to hype up their publications, their research.
35:07
SPEAKER_00: There's these cool demonstrations of really efficient solar cells with perovskites
35:12
SPEAKER_00: in the early 2010s, but that doesn't mean it's anywhere near production ready.
35:17
SPEAKER_00: You get this hype.
35:18
SPEAKER_00: The whole industry hears about these innovations.
35:20
SPEAKER_00: It's like, yeah,
35:20
SPEAKER_00: that's a cool technology,
35:23
SPEAKER_00: but it You know, we knew then it was like decade plus out, right?
35:27
SPEAKER_00: But like people who just read an article about Profsky,
35:29
SPEAKER_00: it's like, oh, this is the future of the industry.
35:31
SPEAKER_00: It's like transformative technology is ready to go.
35:34
SPEAKER_00: Like you get the perception that like, oh, it's here.
35:36
SPEAKER_00: And then like 10 years later, it's like, oh, it's not here yet.
35:38
SPEAKER_00: Like, why is it not there?
35:39
SPEAKER_00: The reality is it's like the technology has been developing steadily in the background.
35:43
SPEAKER_00: Efficiency, more importantly, stability, how you scale it, manufacture it.
35:47
SPEAKER_00: All of those things have been just stepping up and up and up.
35:50
SPEAKER_00: And that's really, I think, the disconnect.
35:53
SPEAKER_00: Between the perception from folks who aren't following closely with the folks
35:55
SPEAKER_00: who are in the industry and seeing this improvement.
35:57
SPEAKER_01: So it's kind of,
35:58
SPEAKER_01: it's like gone through these hype cycles already and people are a little deflated,
36:02
SPEAKER_01: but,
36:02
SPEAKER_01: but we always, people knew there was always going to be this hard work, um, to do.
36:07
SPEAKER_01: And one of the biggest,
36:08
SPEAKER_01: when we were talking, I mean,
36:09
SPEAKER_01: it seemed like the biggest issue or one of them is this,
36:14
SPEAKER_01: um, these things have to sit outside for 20 to 30 years on solar panels.
36:18
SPEAKER_01: That's, that's the expected Lifetime of a solar panel.
36:21
SPEAKER_01: All these economics are built around this and people's perceptions.
36:25
SPEAKER_01: And so this has been one of the issues of perovskites is that when we take them,
36:31
SPEAKER_01: make a cell, then make a panel, we just haven't...
36:34
SPEAKER_01: They're brittle.
36:35
SPEAKER_01: The temperature fluctuations, all these different...
36:39
SPEAKER_01: Chemical processes happening around them in the panel that we haven't gotten close
36:45
SPEAKER_01: yet to proving that they can, they can withstand that period of time.
36:49
SPEAKER_01: I mean, is that the biggest thing that's been holding them back?
36:52
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
36:53
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
36:53
SPEAKER_00: I, I would say so.
36:55
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
36:55
SPEAKER_00: Cause we, I mean,
36:56
SPEAKER_00: we showed,
36:56
SPEAKER_00: even with our like, you know, very first demonstration of these tandem cells, right?
37:00
SPEAKER_00: Where you put the props get on silicon.
37:02
SPEAKER_00: Um, we were showing,
37:03
SPEAKER_00: you know,
37:03
SPEAKER_00: quite efficient,
37:03
SPEAKER_00: you know, 24% kind of efficiencies, which is like quite competitive already.
37:08
SPEAKER_00: But the stability was not there.
37:10
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
37:10
SPEAKER_00: So yeah,
37:10
SPEAKER_00: how do you make this thing,
37:12
SPEAKER_00: you know,
37:12
SPEAKER_00: this like soft, squishy material, thin film, how do you make it last for 30 years?
37:17
SPEAKER_00: Really hard.
37:18
SPEAKER_01: Well, yeah,
37:19
SPEAKER_01: because you were saying they're kind of relatively easy to make and
37:24
SPEAKER_01: that they have these other properties where they're less exacting than silicon,
37:29
SPEAKER_01: but they...
37:31
SPEAKER_01: It was never clear to me when I was doing the story on you
37:33
SPEAKER_01: if they break down more easily than silicon cells over time or it was just more of
37:42
SPEAKER_01: a factor of we've spent decades and decades and decades refining
37:46
SPEAKER_01: the silicon-based cells.
37:49
SPEAKER_01: Are they inherently worse at surviving these conditions?
37:54
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's a good question.
37:55
SPEAKER_00: It's a bit of both.
37:57
SPEAKER_00: So the raw material is actually like just, you know, it's formed at lower temperatures.
38:01
SPEAKER_00: It can degrade at lower temperatures.
38:04
SPEAKER_00: It's got various factors, like it's an ionic semiconductor rather than covalent.
38:08
SPEAKER_00: Ions move around.
38:10
SPEAKER_00: So it's like kind of more sensitive to different conditions,
38:13
SPEAKER_00: like, you know, electric fields, high temperatures, things like this.
38:16
SPEAKER_00: So it is more sensitive.
38:18
SPEAKER_00: But that said, I think if you look back at the, again, history of solar, like silicon...
38:24
SPEAKER_00: You know,
38:24
SPEAKER_00: it took from the 1950s to the 70s to kind of get to even like a reasonable sort
38:31
SPEAKER_00: of solar panel.
38:32
SPEAKER_00: And then obviously with a different level of investment,
38:34
SPEAKER_00: but like in the 70s,
38:35
SPEAKER_00: you had this like Program to try to run by,
38:41
SPEAKER_00: funded by the government,
38:42
SPEAKER_00: supported by JPL,
38:43
SPEAKER_00: to actually get silicon cells and modules from less than 10 year life to,
38:49
SPEAKER_00: sorry, more like a one year life to like a 10 plus year life.
38:52
SPEAKER_00: And from 75 to 85, they were able to achieve that.
38:56
SPEAKER_00: So it took that amount of time to like prove it out and get it to a point
38:58
SPEAKER_00: where it could actually demonstrate like kind of
39:00
SPEAKER_00: the modern lifetimes we consider standard, right?
39:04
SPEAKER_00: 10, 20 plus years.
39:05
SPEAKER_00: And that's true of every solar technology that's ever been commercialized, right?
39:09
SPEAKER_00: Cadmium Telluride, CIGS, all of these thin films, right?
39:13
SPEAKER_00: They've been around for 50 plus years and they took a lot of time.
39:16
SPEAKER_00: They showed these same kind of instabilities early on,
39:19
SPEAKER_00: you know,
39:19
SPEAKER_00: meta-stabilities,
39:20
SPEAKER_00: issues with just like kind of like things you don't understand and you're trying
39:23
SPEAKER_00: to figure out why and like change things to experiment and just like,
39:28
SPEAKER_00: Iteratively kind of improve the technology to the point
39:30
SPEAKER_00: where you actually understand how to keep it rock solid under different conditions.
39:34
SPEAKER_00: And I think it's the same thing with broskites.
39:36
SPEAKER_00: It's like, even though, yes, it's harder, it's a matter of time.
39:39
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
39:40
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
39:40
SPEAKER_01: And this is what you guys have been working on.
39:42
SPEAKER_01: I mean, so Swift Solar,
39:43
SPEAKER_01: you guys have,
39:45
SPEAKER_01: for people who haven't read my story or know anything about you guys, I mean,
39:50
SPEAKER_01: you've got a bunch of people on your team who have led Breakthroughs
39:54
SPEAKER_01: with perovskites over the last decade plus and done some of
39:57
SPEAKER_01: the pioneering research here.
39:59
SPEAKER_01: So you guys have been working to make the cells,
40:03
SPEAKER_01: make the panels,
40:05
SPEAKER_01: put them through testing to show that they can Survive these conditions,
40:10
SPEAKER_01: but really, I mean,
40:11
SPEAKER_01: this has been the quest for you guys over the last few years as you've moved out
40:15
SPEAKER_01: of R&D stage into trying to get to this fabrication stage.
40:20
SPEAKER_01: And so where are you at?
40:22
SPEAKER_01: What do we know about your perovskite cells and panels?
40:27
SPEAKER_01: Good question.
40:28
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
40:28
SPEAKER_00: I mean, so my co-founders are really, really, really good, right?
40:32
SPEAKER_00: Our founding team,
40:32
SPEAKER_00: I think in early team members were some of the truly like the world experts
40:37
SPEAKER_00: in perovskites made the very first perovskite tandem cells on silicon and
40:42
SPEAKER_00: on perovskites.
40:42
SPEAKER_01: Can we describe what a tandem cell is super quick?
40:44
SPEAKER_01: I mean, so you're mixing it with, with silicon cells.
40:47
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
40:47
SPEAKER_00: That's actually, I don't know why we skipped that.
40:49
SPEAKER_00: I think that's actually the fundamental benefit
40:51
SPEAKER_00: of perovskites is you can actually use it to boost the power performance of silicon.
40:55
SPEAKER_01: Because they, they, they absorb different wavelengths of light, right?
40:59
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
40:59
SPEAKER_00: They absorb the, well,
41:00
SPEAKER_00: they absorb kind of this,
41:02
SPEAKER_00: the higher energy part of the spectrum, they absorb more efficiently.
41:05
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
41:05
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
41:06
SPEAKER_01: So, so you've got,
41:08
SPEAKER_01: I'm going to mess this up,
41:09
SPEAKER_01: but you've got silicon and perovskites working together and,
41:11
SPEAKER_01: but they're both,
41:12
SPEAKER_01: they're,
41:13
SPEAKER_01: they're able to, um, Kind of bring in different aspects of, of the soul of the sun.
41:19
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
41:20
SPEAKER_00: Is that right?
41:20
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
41:20
SPEAKER_00: So think of it as like you stack two cells on top of each other.
41:23
SPEAKER_00: One's absorbing the visible light.
41:25
SPEAKER_00: One's absorbing the infrared light.
41:26
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
41:27
SPEAKER_00: And they're both doing it more efficiently than if you just had one material
41:29
SPEAKER_00: that absorbed all of it.
41:30
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
41:31
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
41:31
SPEAKER_01: And, and,
41:32
SPEAKER_01: but even though perovskites are,
41:34
SPEAKER_01: are, are arguably have been supposed to be more efficient.
41:37
SPEAKER_01: Like why, why would you not just do all perovskites?
41:40
SPEAKER_00: Mm.
41:41
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
41:41
SPEAKER_00: So there was that trade-off, right?
41:43
SPEAKER_00: That we said earlier where because of the solar spectrum,
41:46
SPEAKER_00: you can't choose a single material that is super efficient across
41:49
SPEAKER_00: the whole spectrum.
41:49
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
41:50
SPEAKER_00: So if you just use this perovskite cell, it has the same kind of efficiency limit, about 30%.
41:56
SPEAKER_00: The benefit of actually splitting the spectrum is that you can have a higher efficiency limit.
42:01
SPEAKER_00: So we actually raised the ceiling with a tandem from 30% to 45%.
42:05
SPEAKER_00: Right.
42:06
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
42:07
SPEAKER_00: That's the boost.
42:08
SPEAKER_00: That's the step change.
42:08
SPEAKER_01: And 30 was kind of the record around silicon.
42:11
SPEAKER_01: 30 is the fundamental limit.
42:12
SPEAKER_01: Limit.
42:12
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
42:13
SPEAKER_01: The record is around 28.
42:14
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
42:14
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
42:14
SPEAKER_01: So up to 45% and 45 is, that's like in a lab somewhere.
42:18
SPEAKER_01: This is a, or is this
42:20
SPEAKER_00: out in the world?
42:20
SPEAKER_00: That hasn't been demonstrated.
42:22
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
42:23
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
42:23
SPEAKER_00: The record today is about 34.8.
42:24
SPEAKER_01: Oh, 45 is the theoretical.
42:27
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
42:27
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
42:27
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
42:28
SPEAKER_01: Sorry.
42:28
SPEAKER_01: What was the, where are we at today?
42:30
SPEAKER_00: About 34.8.
42:31
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
42:32
SPEAKER_01: In a, from a, from a research lab.
42:34
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
42:35
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
42:35
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
42:36
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
42:36
SPEAKER_01: And then, so tell me where you guys are at.
42:38
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
42:38
SPEAKER_00: So the thing is like we said, so we've set the very first world record with that technology.
42:43
SPEAKER_01: The tandem.
42:44
SPEAKER_00: With the tandem technology in research labs.
42:47
SPEAKER_00: And then we just stopped focusing on efficiency.
42:49
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
42:49
SPEAKER_00: Because we're kind of like, okay, we know efficiency is sort of like solvable with perovskites.
42:55
SPEAKER_00: That's sort of the benefit is like,
42:56
SPEAKER_00: you know,
42:56
SPEAKER_00: everyone and their mom can make a perovskite that's like decently efficient
42:59
SPEAKER_00: and many people can make very efficient ones.
43:02
SPEAKER_00: Almost no one in the world can make a stable perovskite.
43:06
SPEAKER_00: Maybe no one in the world, you could say, but we're pretty close.
43:09
SPEAKER_00: We think we're one of the closest in the world to making actually a perovskite
43:13
SPEAKER_00: that can survive for 30 plus years in the field.
43:15
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
43:16
SPEAKER_01: I mean, when you say no one can make a stable perovskite, I mean,
43:19
SPEAKER_01: people are obviously making things that they are testing and like demonstrating.
43:24
SPEAKER_01: I mean, you guys...
43:25
SPEAKER_01: So like what exactly when you say stable, you mean survive the 30 years?
43:30
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
43:30
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
43:30
SPEAKER_00: We used to use stable and reliable kind of durable kind of interchangeably.
43:34
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
43:35
SPEAKER_00: Um, there's technically differences,
43:36
SPEAKER_00: but like, yeah, it's just like, can, can this thing last under real conditions?
43:40
SPEAKER_00: I see.
43:41
SPEAKER_00: And yeah, maybe I said that too strongly.
43:43
SPEAKER_00: It's kind of like, it's not that we can't make them like stable.
43:46
SPEAKER_00: It's just that we want like stable is a, there's a spectrum, right?
43:50
SPEAKER_01: Like nobody's proven that they can match just the silicon cells over time.
43:55
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
43:55
SPEAKER_00: I don't think anyone in the world could say I can make a perovskite cell
43:59
SPEAKER_00: that can match silicon on durability.
44:02
SPEAKER_00: Right.
44:02
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
44:03
SPEAKER_01: And how many, how many like perovskite startups would the U.S.
44:06
SPEAKER_00: have, would China have?
44:10
SPEAKER_00: So the U.S. is, you know, older Mac do about five.
44:13
SPEAKER_00: Europe has a couple,
44:15
SPEAKER_00: a few other countries on the board have a couple,
44:17
SPEAKER_00: and then China has, you know, a bunch.
44:19
SPEAKER_01: A bunch.
44:19
SPEAKER_01: And you're all fundamentally competing to prove that you can hit the stability mark.
44:25
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and scale it and prove that it's cost-effective and all that.
44:29
SPEAKER_01: And it's like a race, I mean, to see who can do this.
44:32
SPEAKER_00: Yeah,
44:32
SPEAKER_01: I'd say so.
44:33
SPEAKER_01: And then China is like,
44:35
SPEAKER_01: So China is barreling forward in that they seem to be selling perovskite cells or
44:41
SPEAKER_01: at least making them.
44:42
SPEAKER_01: I mean, when I was poking around,
44:44
SPEAKER_01: there were,
44:45
SPEAKER_01: it looked like five companies with factories and tons of money
44:50
SPEAKER_01: and building these cells.
44:53
SPEAKER_01: And so, I mean, China does this sometimes.
44:56
SPEAKER_01: It's like,
44:57
SPEAKER_01: we're just going to move ahead with the manufacturing and dial that in and show
45:01
SPEAKER_01: that we're Serious about this,
45:03
SPEAKER_01: even in the U S tends to be a little more,
45:06
SPEAKER_01: let's get the science fully bags before we start,
45:10
SPEAKER_01: you know, we, we,
45:11
SPEAKER_01: we can't just go knock on somebody's door to get $500 million until we've proven
45:16
SPEAKER_01: that this is going to work or at least like vaguely close to working.
45:20
SPEAKER_01: And so, so like when China,
45:21
SPEAKER_01: when I see China already manufacturing these, um,
45:25
SPEAKER_01: and this isn't like asking you to But I mean,
45:30
SPEAKER_01: if you're saying that nobody can make a stable perovskite
45:33
SPEAKER_01: and they're manufacturing them,
45:34
SPEAKER_01: then the assumption is the ones they're making are not going to last 20 or 30 years
45:40
SPEAKER_01: as far as you know.
45:41
SPEAKER_00: I think they would tell you the same thing.
45:44
SPEAKER_00: They're trying to iterate.
45:45
SPEAKER_00: They're deploying stuff,
45:46
SPEAKER_00: fielding it, and seeing it degrade, and then trying to improve that over time.
45:51
SPEAKER_00: You can choose to do that at hundreds of megawatts,
45:53
SPEAKER_00: gigawatt scale if you want,
45:55
SPEAKER_00: if you want to set some money on fire,
45:57
SPEAKER_00: which the Chinese government is happy to do strategically.
46:00
SPEAKER_00: So that might actually work.
46:01
SPEAKER_00: We'll see.
46:02
SPEAKER_00: But I guess my thesis is that scaling something up and improving it
46:08
SPEAKER_00: with continuous improvement in manufacturing It's not the same as making this sort
46:11
SPEAKER_00: of binary step changes that sometimes are needed
46:14
SPEAKER_00: to solve these technical challenges.
46:16
SPEAKER_00: Right.
46:16
SPEAKER_00: So that's something that I think we've excelled at is like with limited resources
46:20
SPEAKER_00: to be real, right?
46:21
SPEAKER_00: As a US startup is like, we've,
46:22
SPEAKER_00: we've been able to kind of continuously advance the technology in serious ways.
46:27
SPEAKER_01: And clearly you're committed to this.
46:28
SPEAKER_01: So like, do you,
46:30
SPEAKER_01: have you solved all the technical,
46:33
SPEAKER_01: do you feel like you've,
46:34
SPEAKER_01: you've now solved them and you guys are ready to go to the next stage
46:37
SPEAKER_01: or you still have things that you have to figure out?
46:40
SPEAKER_00: I think there's like two levels of solving things, right?
46:43
SPEAKER_00: There's one that's like, okay,
46:46
SPEAKER_00: have you built enough understanding and collected enough data to have conviction
46:52
SPEAKER_00: that this is like solved or solvable, right?
46:57
SPEAKER_00: In reasonable time.
46:58
SPEAKER_00: And then there's the like,
46:59
SPEAKER_00: do you have the data that shows that this will back a 30-year warranty?
47:03
SPEAKER_00: I would say like, I have the first, not the second yet.
47:06
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
47:08
SPEAKER_00: So it's still a journey to go from,
47:10
SPEAKER_00: we have this fundamental proof data and accelerated lifetime testing that shows
47:15
SPEAKER_00: that, hey, this thing can be stable enough to go the distance by 30 plus years.
47:20
SPEAKER_00: We're still working on getting data and iterating on the package,
47:24
SPEAKER_00: the thing you've put in the field to collect the data and show that,
47:27
SPEAKER_00: hey, this can actually prove the equivalent of a 30 year lifetime.
47:30
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
47:31
SPEAKER_01: So when I've been to your factory, I mean,
47:33
SPEAKER_01: I see you guys making cells and panels and then You've got some up on your roof
47:39
SPEAKER_01: where you're testing them.
47:40
SPEAKER_01: You've got ovens to put them through the heat stress.
47:45
SPEAKER_01: And then you've got, you've got these, what did you call them?
47:47
SPEAKER_01: Like lamp, um, the, the things that.
47:50
SPEAKER_01: Solar simulators.
47:51
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
47:51
SPEAKER_01: The solar simulator.
47:52
SPEAKER_01: I mean, there's incredibly bright lights that.
47:54
SPEAKER_01: Shine on them all day.
47:55
SPEAKER_01: And so, so you're producing these and you're putting them through the test,
47:59
SPEAKER_01: but you guys still feel like you've got a couple of steps to,
48:02
SPEAKER_01: you see a line of sight on proving they could last 30 years,
48:06
SPEAKER_01: but you have not yet made one that you would say,
48:08
SPEAKER_01: I know this is going to last 30 years.
48:11
SPEAKER_01: Is that right?
48:12
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
48:13
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
48:13
SPEAKER_00: I think we'd be drowning in cash if we had, um, you know, we're, we're, we're on our way.
48:18
SPEAKER_00: I would say like, we have some of the best data in the world.
48:20
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
48:20
SPEAKER_00: Right.
48:21
SPEAKER_00: Like it's, it's, it's not the definitive proof 30 year lifetime.
48:25
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
48:26
SPEAKER_01: And when these different startups, I mean, do you guys, are you competing on?
48:31
SPEAKER_01: A different recipe around the perovskites,
48:33
SPEAKER_01: a different manufacturing process, a little bit of all of this.
48:38
SPEAKER_01: I mean, because sometimes it's just like, okay, we're all building these the same way.
48:43
SPEAKER_01: Now we're trying to figure out all these things on the edges.
48:45
SPEAKER_01: Or do people just have fundamentally different approaches, you know, right at the base level?
48:50
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I mean, there's some of each, I think.
48:52
SPEAKER_00: There's a lot of variables here, right?
48:53
SPEAKER_00: Like how you design the solar cell stack.
48:55
SPEAKER_00: There's many layers built into there.
48:57
SPEAKER_00: So like the materials you choose,
48:58
SPEAKER_00: how you manufacture those layers, the product format that you put it in.
49:03
SPEAKER_00: So yeah, I think...
49:06
SPEAKER_00: I guess one aspect of that is around how do you make the cell itself as stable as possible?
49:11
SPEAKER_00: So it's like the design choices, the compositions in the perovskite you choose.
49:14
SPEAKER_00: And like,
49:14
SPEAKER_00: that's one aspect I think we've developed a lot of understanding
49:17
SPEAKER_00: and secret sauce around as well as like patented, you know, IP.
49:21
SPEAKER_00: And that's something that actually every single company in the world that set
49:24
SPEAKER_00: a world record with perovskites has used.
49:26
SPEAKER_00: They've used our IP on that.
49:28
SPEAKER_00: Okay, okay.
49:28
SPEAKER_00: So that's one aspect.
49:29
SPEAKER_00: Like, legally?
49:30
SPEAKER_00: I mean, no one's in production, so.
49:33
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
49:33
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
49:35
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
49:35
SPEAKER_00: But yeah, it's like, we've done some of the foundational work.
49:38
SPEAKER_00: I think that made it possible to make these efficient and stable.
49:40
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
49:41
SPEAKER_00: So people recognize that, um, that was in academic labs to be clear before starting Swift.
49:46
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
49:46
SPEAKER_00: Um, but we'd licensed the IP into Swift.
49:48
SPEAKER_00: Um, but then there's another piece that's like, how do you manufacture these things?
49:51
SPEAKER_00: And that's something that we've spent many years actually iterating on
49:53
SPEAKER_00: and developing our own manufacturing methods that can do this very fast and uniform
49:57
SPEAKER_00: and, you know, reliably.
49:58
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
49:59
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
49:59
SPEAKER_01: I mean, your office is super cool.
50:01
SPEAKER_01: It's like this mix of, um,
50:03
SPEAKER_01: Industrial machines you can buy,
50:05
SPEAKER_01: but then also all this stuff you guys have handcrafted over the years.
50:08
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
50:09
SPEAKER_01: And, and I could tell, I mean,
50:10
SPEAKER_01: we were talking,
50:10
SPEAKER_01: some of them, you,
50:11
SPEAKER_01: you guys, the original co-founders was in your, in your apartment or your house.
50:17
SPEAKER_01: And, and you guys, I'm sure you guys were sleeping by them every night.
50:20
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
50:20
SPEAKER_00: Well, my co-founder, co-founders Max and Kevin at the time were, were the main engineers.
50:25
SPEAKER_00: They're incredible like engineers.
50:27
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
50:27
SPEAKER_00: And they were prototyping this, these tools.
50:29
SPEAKER_00: We don't want to be a tool manufacturer to be clear.
50:31
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
50:32
SPEAKER_01: But you had to.
50:32
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
50:33
SPEAKER_00: We had to.
50:33
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
50:34
SPEAKER_00: And a lot of it's like in the early days,
50:35
SPEAKER_00: you're trying to figure out like, what are the parameters that matter?
50:38
SPEAKER_00: Like change recipes,
50:39
SPEAKER_00: change designs and like change how you measure these materials and like to be able
50:43
SPEAKER_00: to control and design the tools that make them,
50:45
SPEAKER_00: the software that controls those tools, like that is, you know, invaluable.
50:49
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
50:49
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
50:50
SPEAKER_00: We have an amazing team that's been able to kind of make that happen as well
50:53
SPEAKER_00: as making solar cells and making panels out of them.
50:55
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
50:55
SPEAKER_01: Well, and clearly you guys have reached some stage that you're confident about
50:59
SPEAKER_01: because you just recently acquired these assets from a German,
51:04
SPEAKER_01: massive German solar player.
51:06
SPEAKER_01: And, and they had been looking to build plants, I think in Arizona.
51:12
SPEAKER_00: They had a factory in Arizona.
51:13
SPEAKER_00: They were building one in Colorado.
51:14
SPEAKER_01: In Colorado and, and ran on tough times, um, for all the reasons we outlined earlier.
51:20
SPEAKER_01: And so like in one sense,
51:23
SPEAKER_01: You were able to buy some of their IP and assets at a distressed price,
51:28
SPEAKER_01: but just the fact that you were doing that seems to signal that you guys are ready
51:34
SPEAKER_01: to take some kind of new step towards manufacturing.
51:39
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean, can you break this down?
51:41
SPEAKER_01: They have expertise on the leading edge
51:45
SPEAKER_01: of clearly more traditional silicon-based solar technology.
51:49
SPEAKER_01: And so were you just buying that?
51:53
SPEAKER_01: To get the silicon stuff and some manufacturing,
51:56
SPEAKER_01: or was this all gearing up to start manufacturing perovskite-based cells and panels?
52:03
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so this is really exciting, right?
52:05
SPEAKER_00: Over the last few months, this is something that we've been just super excited about.
52:09
SPEAKER_00: And this acquisition, the reason it matters right now is...
52:13
SPEAKER_00: We're right at this inflection point.
52:15
SPEAKER_00: We talked about all the stability challenges, perovskites.
52:18
SPEAKER_00: We feel like after this decade of development,
52:21
SPEAKER_00: we have shown 1,000x improvement in stability over the last few years.
52:25
SPEAKER_00: We're at a point now where I think we see that coming together.
52:28
SPEAKER_00: We believe that it's going to work,
52:30
SPEAKER_00: and it's a matter of scaling that up and proving it to the world.
52:34
SPEAKER_00: The perovskite technology being ready is one piece of it.
52:38
SPEAKER_00: There's also like this current,
52:39
SPEAKER_00: you know,
52:39
SPEAKER_00: massive demand for energy from AI and like for AI data centers and just kind
52:44
SPEAKER_00: of like this general like push towards domestic,
52:47
SPEAKER_00: you know, reshoring domestic manufacturing.
52:50
SPEAKER_00: So that's coupled with policy,
52:52
SPEAKER_00: supportive policy for domestic manufacturing,
52:54
SPEAKER_00: for deploying domestic content, for all these things, right?
52:56
SPEAKER_00: And tariffs as well,
52:58
SPEAKER_00: all kind of like moving in the same direction of like The U.S.
53:00
SPEAKER_00: needs a crap ton of solar.
53:03
SPEAKER_00: The Perovskite technology is ready.
53:04
SPEAKER_00: Silicon is running up into its fundamental performance limits.
53:07
SPEAKER_00: And we're super well-placed with this technology we've been developing for
53:11
SPEAKER_00: a decade now to kind of build on the foundation of silicon and make
53:15
SPEAKER_00: that next generation leap.
53:16
SPEAKER_00: So with Mallory Berger,
53:18
SPEAKER_00: which was the leading European solar manufacturer,
53:21
SPEAKER_00: they actually had this technology called heterojunction technology,
53:25
SPEAKER_00: which is one of the two leading silicon technologies.
53:28
SPEAKER_00: And they were the Western leader in that.
53:30
SPEAKER_00: So by acquiring their core assets and bringing on their team, right,
53:33
SPEAKER_00: according to their former CEO,
53:35
SPEAKER_00: their former technical leadership,
53:37
SPEAKER_00: we now have, like,
53:37
SPEAKER_00: the best Western silicon,
53:39
SPEAKER_00: you know,
53:40
SPEAKER_00: HAT team and capability and equipment IP under our roof combined with this, like,
53:46
SPEAKER_00: you know,
53:46
SPEAKER_00: best-in-class perovskite from the U.S. And we think that that combined is the key.
53:51
SPEAKER_00: That's what's going to unlock the ultimate solar manufacturer.
53:53
SPEAKER_00: Okay, okay.
53:55
SPEAKER_00: Okay, I have a few questions.
53:56
SPEAKER_01: On some of this, I could never tell if you're being modest or...
54:01
SPEAKER_01: Like when you guys say you're,
54:04
SPEAKER_01: you have this line of sight, you're close on the perovskite stuff.
54:07
SPEAKER_01: I mean, are you like, yeah, I mean,
54:10
SPEAKER_01: obviously you would tell me if you were just,
54:12
SPEAKER_01: you were just going to start mass manufacturing these things
54:15
SPEAKER_01: and you'd solved everything.
54:16
SPEAKER_01: I can't,
54:16
SPEAKER_01: I just can't tell if you,
54:18
SPEAKER_01: you see it, um,
54:19
SPEAKER_01: you're optimistic and you see it in your head that you've got this all solved
54:23
SPEAKER_01: or like you already know.
54:25
SPEAKER_00: I've been doing this for a long time.
54:26
SPEAKER_00: Right.
54:28
SPEAKER_00: I'm not the most, um,
54:31
SPEAKER_00: let's say boastful person around,
54:33
SPEAKER_00: but I'm also like, I, I, I'm not like, I don't want to mislead anyone.
54:39
SPEAKER_00: Right.
54:39
SPEAKER_00: Like it's really easy.
54:40
SPEAKER_00: I think like these kinds of things always take more time and more money than anyone projects.
54:45
SPEAKER_00: And that's why all these startups fail.
54:47
SPEAKER_00: And I think we have to be clear-eyed about that.
54:50
SPEAKER_00: But that said,
54:51
SPEAKER_00: I am genuinely the most optimistic by far as I've ever been about this company and
54:56
SPEAKER_00: the trajectory we're on and about the technology and the state that it's in.
55:00
SPEAKER_00: So I think it's really a unique time in the history of this company and also in
55:03
SPEAKER_00: the history of solar.
55:05
SPEAKER_00: Well, we're taking that first leap beyond the 30%, you know, potential of solar.
55:09
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
55:10
SPEAKER_00: So it's like, it's a pretty cool time as a solar nerd.
55:12
SPEAKER_00: I can say that like with full heart.
55:13
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
55:14
SPEAKER_01: Like, yeah.
55:14
SPEAKER_01: And so, and then in, so,
55:16
SPEAKER_01: so you will be making traditional,
55:19
SPEAKER_01: the plan is to make traditional silicon cells as,
55:23
SPEAKER_01: as you are still refining these last bits and pieces.
55:26
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
55:26
SPEAKER_00: So what's cool about this is like,
55:27
SPEAKER_00: it gives us a real, like what we consider a bankable path to scale.
55:31
SPEAKER_00: So this proven technology, no technology risk really with the silicon.
55:36
SPEAKER_00: Turns out that this heterojunction technology that my burger pioneered is
55:40
SPEAKER_00: the best bottom cell for making a tandem on.
55:42
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
55:42
SPEAKER_00: So you can put a profsket directly on top of that and make it a really, really good tandem.
55:45
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
55:46
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
55:46
SPEAKER_00: So the way we see it, it's like, here's a proven technology.
55:49
SPEAKER_00: It's competitive in the market.
55:50
SPEAKER_00: We can build it at gigawatt scale right here in the U S.
55:53
SPEAKER_00: We can commercialize that.
55:54
SPEAKER_00: And in parallel,
55:55
SPEAKER_00: we can mature the Perovskite technology to the point where it can actually go right
55:58
SPEAKER_00: on top.
55:59
SPEAKER_00: But all along, we're already serving the US market.
56:02
SPEAKER_00: We're serving customers who want to buy domestically produced solar today.
56:06
SPEAKER_01: And even if you get this up and running in the traditional,
56:12
SPEAKER_01: more traditional approach, are we actually competitive on price
56:17
SPEAKER_00: versus China?
56:19
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
56:19
SPEAKER_00: I mean, so most of the world, the short answer is no.
56:22
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
56:23
SPEAKER_00: China has done an incredible job scaling and bringing down costs for silicon.
56:27
SPEAKER_00: The unique thing about the US today,
56:29
SPEAKER_00: and I think has been consistently building over multiple Administrations is
56:35
SPEAKER_00: that we see the value of reshoring and having,
56:38
SPEAKER_00: reshoring solar manufacturing, reshoring supply chains.
56:40
SPEAKER_00: So there's this push to make this happen.
56:42
SPEAKER_00: There's this push, right?
56:42
SPEAKER_00: And it's like natural,
56:43
SPEAKER_00: anytime you have a smaller new industry, it's going to cost more to manufacture.
56:47
SPEAKER_00: I don't deny that.
56:48
SPEAKER_00: But I think with the kind of current strategic push,
56:51
SPEAKER_00: there's a window of opportunity right now where we are competitive.
56:53
SPEAKER_00: And if you look at,
56:54
SPEAKER_00: you know,
56:55
SPEAKER_00: even Chinese imports or,
56:56
SPEAKER_00: you know,
56:57
SPEAKER_00: Southeast Asian imports into the US,
56:59
SPEAKER_00: solar panel prices are, you know, around 30 cents a watt.
57:02
SPEAKER_00: And certainly that's a lot higher than you could buy a panel for in China,
57:05
SPEAKER_00: but that's the reality in the U.S.
57:07
SPEAKER_00: And what we're seeing in the U.S.
57:08
SPEAKER_00: is that U.S. produced product is going at a premium.
57:11
SPEAKER_00: Everyone wants it.
57:11
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, there's some incentives, but people also want a really secure supply chain.
57:15
SPEAKER_00: They're like, oh,
57:15
SPEAKER_00: you know,
57:16
SPEAKER_00: I saw that solar shipment get blocked because of forced labor concerns,
57:19
SPEAKER_00: tariff concerns, whatever.
57:21
SPEAKER_00: Um, so that's really where I think there's a premium on domestic product
57:25
SPEAKER_00: and we can absolutely be competitive with where the market is today in the U.S.
57:29
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
57:29
SPEAKER_01: So the U.S.
57:31
SPEAKER_01: Wants to bring manufacturing back.
57:33
SPEAKER_01: It sees us as strategic.
57:35
SPEAKER_01: At the same time,
57:36
SPEAKER_01: I keep running into many startups where it's like the current administration,
57:40
SPEAKER_01: if you are at all seen as like a green technology,
57:43
SPEAKER_01: this is like a black mark against you.
57:45
SPEAKER_01: I mean, so, you know, so it's like a weird world.
57:48
SPEAKER_01: You feel like you're caught between two worlds where it's like, yes, we want manufacturing jobs.
57:52
SPEAKER_01: We want to make this stuff in the U.S.
57:55
SPEAKER_01: Um, and, and we can see this being strategic, but also we hate green technology.
58:02
SPEAKER_01: I mean, is that the, do you, is this a battle you face or not?
58:06
SPEAKER_00: Not, I mean, not directly.
58:08
SPEAKER_00: I think that the way I think about it is like solar is actually.
58:12
SPEAKER_00: The one energy source that everyone can agree on.
58:16
SPEAKER_00: It's actually pretty bipartisan.
58:17
SPEAKER_00: It's remarkable.
58:18
SPEAKER_00: If you look at polls,
58:19
SPEAKER_00: it's like 70% of American adults are supportive for more solar in the US,
58:23
SPEAKER_00: especially if it's made domestically.
58:25
SPEAKER_00: So it's something that everyone agrees on.
58:27
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, there's some rhetoric left and right,
58:29
SPEAKER_00: but it's really underlying what you're seeing is consistently
58:32
SPEAKER_00: across administrations,
58:34
SPEAKER_00: there's It's like bipartisan agreements that, yes, we should produce it locally.
58:38
SPEAKER_00: So we have 45X manufacturing tax credits to support that.
58:40
SPEAKER_00: Yes, we should actually support domestic content behind that.
58:43
SPEAKER_00: And, you know, yes, we should tariff imports that are selling under cost.
58:46
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
58:47
SPEAKER_00: So there's like this consistent thing that we think is growing and not going away.
58:50
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
58:51
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
58:52
SPEAKER_01: Some of like the more futuristic stuff,
58:55
SPEAKER_01: like I was just in Nevada with JV Straubel, the Tesla co-founder.
59:01
SPEAKER_01: He has...
59:02
SPEAKER_01: New company, Redwood Materials.
59:03
SPEAKER_01: It does battery recycling, but we walked through.
59:06
SPEAKER_01: Cool company.
59:07
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's really, it's actually amazing.
59:09
SPEAKER_01: And I hadn't been there in like two or three years and I couldn't even put
59:15
SPEAKER_01: a number around how much bigger it was than when I was there last.
59:17
SPEAKER_01: But, you know, they were fine.
59:19
SPEAKER_01: So they get people to send all kinds of electric batteries,
59:23
SPEAKER_01: but a big chunk is our car batteries.
59:25
SPEAKER_01: And, you know,
59:26
SPEAKER_01: what they were finding was they would get the batteries,
59:28
SPEAKER_01: they would still have like 50 to 70% of their life left.
59:33
SPEAKER_01: And so instead of putting it through this whole recycling process
59:36
SPEAKER_01: where Redwood actually breaks it down to the elemental level,
59:41
SPEAKER_01: you're getting out raw lithium and nickel and all these things,
59:44
SPEAKER_01: he was like, oh, well, these still have enough in them.
59:48
SPEAKER_01: Let's lash a whole bunch of them together, tie it with a solar...
59:54
SPEAKER_01: Field.
59:55
SPEAKER_01: And then they had like a little mini,
59:56
SPEAKER_01: this was all powering this mini data center in a container,
1:00:00
SPEAKER_01: like totally off the grid, man.
1:00:02
SPEAKER_01: I mean, it was wild.
1:00:03
SPEAKER_01: So you had, you had, I don't know the size of it.
1:00:05
SPEAKER_01: It was like these two, um, decently big, but not like crazy big solar farms right next to it.
1:00:12
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I would,
1:00:13
SPEAKER_01: it was like,
1:00:13
SPEAKER_01: it was like, I would call it like a half football field, maybe even less.
1:00:17
SPEAKER_01: And then.
1:00:18
SPEAKER_01: And then tons of these batteries all connected.
1:00:20
SPEAKER_01: And Redwood did have to figure out some technology to kind
1:00:23
SPEAKER_01: of create some equilibrium through all the electricity,
1:00:29
SPEAKER_01: orchestrate it to work well and then feed into this data center.
1:00:33
SPEAKER_01: But then, yeah, I mean,
1:00:35
SPEAKER_01: like we are in the middle of this clear, insatiable appetite for data centers.
1:00:41
SPEAKER_01: So, okay, this is a very long question.
1:00:43
SPEAKER_01: But like, so I've seen this done for like a, A conax trailer sized data center.
1:00:50
SPEAKER_01: Is it, is solar like actually,
1:00:52
SPEAKER_01: you know, a reasonable way to power larger data centers or is it just take too much?
1:00:59
SPEAKER_00: I thought you were going to go ask about solar recycling, but powering data centers.
1:01:04
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:01:05
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I think it's, it's a very reasonable way, right?
1:01:08
SPEAKER_00: Like if there's a lot of talk around like You know,
1:01:11
SPEAKER_00: nuclear fissions, modular reactors, fusion reactors, geothermal.
1:01:15
SPEAKER_01: Like things are just getting more and more exotic and yeah.
1:01:18
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:01:18
SPEAKER_00: So like that's, that's the kind of milieu we're in, right?
1:01:21
SPEAKER_00: But like the reality is like, you go look at the hyperscalers, right?
1:01:24
SPEAKER_00: You look at Google,
1:01:25
SPEAKER_00: you look at AWS,
1:01:26
SPEAKER_00: you look at, you know, Microsoft, they're all deploying a crap ton of solar.
1:01:29
SPEAKER_00: And that's like the, the,
1:01:31
SPEAKER_00: the main source of electrons,
1:01:33
SPEAKER_00: you know, like, and yes, you also need these firm sources.
1:01:35
SPEAKER_00: You need flexibility with batteries and so on,
1:01:37
SPEAKER_00: but they're also seeing solar as like The foundation for all this.
1:01:42
SPEAKER_00: And does it need to be right next to your data center?
1:01:44
SPEAKER_00: No, it could be on the grid.
1:01:47
SPEAKER_00: But certainly there's a lot of interest from those kind of companies also
1:01:49
SPEAKER_00: on deploying modular solar next to your modular batteries, modular compute.
1:01:55
SPEAKER_00: So you can put all those together and in some way,
1:01:58
SPEAKER_00: you can basically avoid the years long kind of transmission weight
1:02:02
SPEAKER_00: to get interconnected to the grid.
1:02:03
SPEAKER_00: And that's really like a huge advantage for folks who like every day is millions
1:02:07
SPEAKER_00: of dollars kind of opportunity costs.
1:02:09
SPEAKER_01: So you're saying, so the Googles and Microsofts of the world are buying tons of solar today.
1:02:14
SPEAKER_01: And then what?
1:02:15
SPEAKER_01: Then they're building big solar farms in the US?
1:02:18
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:02:19
SPEAKER_01: Because I just don't feel like, I mean, maybe I'm just not paying attention.
1:02:21
SPEAKER_01: I feel like, well, most of the big data centers I've gone to are either hydro or gas.
1:02:30
SPEAKER_01: So yeah, I just didn't know.
1:02:34
SPEAKER_01: Um, maybe I haven't been to the right ones or maybe this is just happening now or,
1:02:37
SPEAKER_01: or I just haven't paid attention to the right things.
1:02:40
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:02:40
SPEAKER_00: So, I mean, a lot of the new data centers, right?
1:02:43
SPEAKER_00: They're trying to get online quickly.
1:02:45
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:02:45
SPEAKER_00: So how do you get a new generation?
1:02:46
SPEAKER_00: It's maybe gas.
1:02:47
SPEAKER_00: If you can get the turbines, it's gas, right?
1:02:48
SPEAKER_00: You can do it quickly.
1:02:50
SPEAKER_00: Um, but most of these companies are also buying a ton of solar through PPAs.
1:02:54
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
1:02:55
SPEAKER_00: Right.
1:02:55
SPEAKER_00: And sometimes even like Google just acquired Intersect, right?
1:02:58
SPEAKER_00: This renewable developer.
1:03:00
SPEAKER_00: So like they're actually building or buying these like kind of solar projects
1:03:03
SPEAKER_00: or solar and storage projects.
1:03:04
SPEAKER_00: So that's all happening.
1:03:05
SPEAKER_00: It may not be, it's in many cases, like not next to your data center.
1:03:08
SPEAKER_00: So you're not even going to see it if you're like going to visit the data center.
1:03:11
SPEAKER_01: But isn't the transmission always like I was,
1:03:13
SPEAKER_01: you know,
1:03:14
SPEAKER_01: Elon will tweet out like,
1:03:15
SPEAKER_01: oh, we could Cover some small part of, you know, a country.
1:03:20
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
1:03:20
SPEAKER_01: And have, you know, have enough energy for the entire world.
1:03:23
SPEAKER_01: And then Bill Gates always writes underneath like, oh, but you need to deal with transmission.
1:03:27
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:03:29
SPEAKER_00: They're both right.
1:03:31
SPEAKER_00: They're both right.
1:03:32
SPEAKER_00: Right.
1:03:32
SPEAKER_00: But we do have a lot of wires in this country.
1:03:34
SPEAKER_00: Like, yes, it's old.
1:03:35
SPEAKER_00: Yes.
1:03:35
SPEAKER_00: We want to like improve it and put a bunch more transmission,
1:03:37
SPEAKER_00: like high voltage transmission lines around.
1:03:39
SPEAKER_00: But like a lot of it does exist.
1:03:41
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:03:42
SPEAKER_00: Like in many places you can just put solar on the grid and.
1:03:45
SPEAKER_00: Power, you know, a load somewhere else.
1:03:47
SPEAKER_00: Like, yeah,
1:03:48
SPEAKER_00: you have to make sure it's balanced and there's a lot of like a huge amount
1:03:51
SPEAKER_00: of complexity around it.
1:03:51
SPEAKER_00: But in the end,
1:03:52
SPEAKER_00: it's like you're generating electrons,
1:03:53
SPEAKER_00: you have the wires, like you can make it happen.
1:03:55
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
1:03:56
SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's a super stupid question, but look, I mean, I don't know.
1:04:01
SPEAKER_01: It's running through my head.
1:04:02
SPEAKER_01: So maybe it's running through somebody else's,
1:04:04
SPEAKER_01: you know,
1:04:04
SPEAKER_01: I just remember driving to Mojave for years because I would always go out there
1:04:07
SPEAKER_01: for aerospace stories and different stuff.
1:04:09
SPEAKER_01: And you see these massive solar farms.
1:04:14
SPEAKER_01: But it's like,
1:04:17
SPEAKER_01: I'm sorry to everyone if this is a stupid question,
1:04:19
SPEAKER_01: but like literally, so,
1:04:20
SPEAKER_01: you know,
1:04:21
SPEAKER_01: why are American deserts not just like full of more solar
1:04:27
SPEAKER_01: if this is all transmissions feasible and cost is good?
1:04:31
SPEAKER_01: And yeah, I mean,
1:04:33
SPEAKER_01: because I actually feel like I don't,
1:04:35
SPEAKER_01: I feel like there was a moment in time where I saw these appearing all the time and
1:04:38
SPEAKER_01: then I don't see new ones as often as I did.
1:04:43
SPEAKER_00: I think, um...
1:04:44
SPEAKER_00: So it's still happening.
1:04:47
SPEAKER_00: We're deploying 40 gigawatts of solar every year in the US.
1:04:50
SPEAKER_00: So it's like no question it's still happening, these large-scale solar farms.
1:04:54
SPEAKER_00: They're happening in a lot of different places,
1:04:55
SPEAKER_00: like the most maybe prime sites,
1:04:57
SPEAKER_00: the most easiest, like easy to permit, easy to kind of cover the land kind of sites.
1:05:02
SPEAKER_00: Best transmission, whatever, are taken up.
1:05:05
SPEAKER_00: But that doesn't mean you can't still build many,
1:05:08
SPEAKER_00: many hundreds of gigawatts to terawatts of solar.
1:05:10
SPEAKER_00: Elon's right.
1:05:12
SPEAKER_00: It takes 100 square miles or whatever, 100 by 100, to power the entire US a few times over.
1:05:18
SPEAKER_00: It's pretty remarkable how much you could actually deploy.
1:05:21
SPEAKER_00: We could power the whole US with the amount of land that's currently used for coal mining.
1:05:28
SPEAKER_00: You truly could put a lot more solar on the grid.
1:05:32
SPEAKER_00: And it is happening.
1:05:33
SPEAKER_00: It's just like now it's considered sort of like a proven energy source.
1:05:36
SPEAKER_00: So we actually don't talk about it
1:05:38
SPEAKER_01: very much.
1:05:38
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
1:05:39
SPEAKER_01: Right.
1:05:39
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
1:05:40
SPEAKER_01: And then in Australia, I mean,
1:05:41
SPEAKER_01: Mike Cannon Brooks,
1:05:42
SPEAKER_01: he and a partner,
1:05:43
SPEAKER_01: they're funding this huge,
1:05:46
SPEAKER_01: huge array that was going to like send power underwater to Singapore.
1:05:52
SPEAKER_01: But I feel like that, yeah, through a cable.
1:05:54
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
1:05:55
SPEAKER_01: But then I feel like that's gone through undulations.
1:05:58
SPEAKER_01: And now Australia, I think is going to, Keep it.
1:06:00
SPEAKER_01: If it happens, I don't know.
1:06:01
SPEAKER_01: Like I always hear these giant projects and then things fail and
1:06:05
SPEAKER_01: the economics actually don't seem to work out.
1:06:08
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:06:08
SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
1:06:09
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I can't speak to that one specifically.
1:06:10
SPEAKER_00: I don't know what's going on,
1:06:11
SPEAKER_00: but like one of the kind of cool things about solar is that like,
1:06:15
SPEAKER_00: it's one of the few technologies that scales modularly.
1:06:18
SPEAKER_00: It doesn't need to be, you know, a 10 by 10 square mile kind of array.
1:06:22
SPEAKER_00: It doesn't even need to be One by one square mile.
1:06:24
SPEAKER_00: It can be, you know, as small as one panel or like 10 panels on your rooftop.
1:06:28
SPEAKER_00: Right.
1:06:28
SPEAKER_00: And it doesn't lose efficiency.
1:06:29
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:06:30
SPEAKER_00: It's more expensive at small scale,
1:06:31
SPEAKER_00: but like the,
1:06:33
SPEAKER_00: the kind of cool thing is like,
1:06:34
SPEAKER_00: you can actually distribute these in a,
1:06:35
SPEAKER_00: in a pretty wide way, rather than like one big nuclear plant.
1:06:39
SPEAKER_00: You can have like a lot of these anywhere.
1:06:40
SPEAKER_00: Right.
1:06:40
SPEAKER_00: And you know, I mean, everyone knows this.
1:06:42
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
1:06:42
SPEAKER_00: Um, and it does quite well economically,
1:06:44
SPEAKER_00: even if you chunk it up into a bunch of little, little projects.
1:06:48
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:06:48
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
1:06:49
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
1:06:49
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
1:06:50
SPEAKER_01: Um, When I wrote the story on you guys, you know, I got a bunch of cool.
1:06:55
SPEAKER_01: I didn't know about this.
1:06:56
SPEAKER_01: And then I also got a bunch of never going to happen.
1:06:58
SPEAKER_00: I feel that alive.
1:07:01
SPEAKER_01: So I got a mix.
1:07:02
SPEAKER_01: I got a mix of, uh,
1:07:04
SPEAKER_01: uh, Swift is not actually, I mean, I'm not saying this was like a flood or anything.
1:07:08
SPEAKER_01: It was just, I'm just giving you a couple, couple notes.
1:07:10
SPEAKER_01: Um, yeah.
1:07:11
SPEAKER_01: Um, I mean, some of them were self-serving.
1:07:13
SPEAKER_01: It was a couple other startups are like, no, we're, we're ahead of them.
1:07:17
SPEAKER_01: And then.
1:07:18
SPEAKER_01: Definitely some perovskite skeptics who,
1:07:21
SPEAKER_01: some of these people seem to know what they were talking about.
1:07:23
SPEAKER_01: They're like, I've been in solar for 30 years, never going to happen.
1:07:28
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
1:07:31
SPEAKER_01: And then a little bit of, yeah, China's going to win this.
1:07:38
SPEAKER_01: So, I mean, I guess my overall...
1:07:42
SPEAKER_01: I'm used to doing this.
1:07:42
SPEAKER_01: So my overall impression was that even among some knowledgeable people in
1:07:48
SPEAKER_01: the solar industry, still serious skepticism around perovskites winning.
1:07:54
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:07:55
SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's, it's fair, right?
1:07:56
SPEAKER_00: It's, it's a hard thing and it takes a long time.
1:07:58
SPEAKER_00: So it's anytime you say, okay, yeah,
1:08:01
SPEAKER_00: this is going to happen like in one,
1:08:03
SPEAKER_00: two, three, four years, like you, You could be wrong, right?
1:08:06
SPEAKER_00: And that's happened a lot, I think, over the last 10 years.
1:08:08
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
1:08:08
SPEAKER_01: No, I mean,
1:08:08
SPEAKER_01: there's just things like carbon nanotubes
1:08:10
SPEAKER_01: where I feel like I wrote this story 800 times and then after you do it enough,
1:08:16
SPEAKER_01: you're like,
1:08:16
SPEAKER_01: I'm not ever going to say anything about carbon nanotubes again,
1:08:21
SPEAKER_01: no matter what you show me.
1:08:23
SPEAKER_01: And when I was going over the perovskite stuff,
1:08:26
SPEAKER_01: I'm not saying it's like totally apples to apples, but I was just like, oh, I see.
1:08:29
SPEAKER_01: So everybody's Kind of like edging each other out on these efficiency numbers
1:08:34
SPEAKER_01: and they're like kind of science experimenting on their way.
1:08:37
SPEAKER_01: But it did,
1:08:38
SPEAKER_01: it was feeling,
1:08:39
SPEAKER_01: it was feeling,
1:08:41
SPEAKER_01: um, it was feeling sciencey as opposed to mass manufacturing in bits.
1:08:47
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:08:47
SPEAKER_00: Which is like, you're not shy about.
1:08:49
SPEAKER_01: I mean, that's what you're trying to figure out.
1:08:51
SPEAKER_01: It just, I, yeah, I don't know.
1:08:52
SPEAKER_01: It felt like I was trying to gauge, um, Two years away, 10, 20.
1:08:59
SPEAKER_01: That's, I think that's where my head was at.
1:09:01
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
1:09:01
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:09:01
SPEAKER_00: I think you got to take it step by step, right?
1:09:03
SPEAKER_00: The reality is like you,
1:09:04
SPEAKER_00: you have to,
1:09:05
SPEAKER_00: I like, it's not a science experiment today, but like, yeah, we do science.
1:09:08
SPEAKER_00: Like we advanced the technology through science.
1:09:10
SPEAKER_00: Yes.
1:09:10
SPEAKER_00: That's natural, right?
1:09:11
SPEAKER_00: Like, I think.
1:09:12
SPEAKER_00: We've announced,
1:09:14
SPEAKER_00: we've done pilots,
1:09:15
SPEAKER_00: we've started a pilot in Texas on utility-scale solar farm with Plenitude,
1:09:18
SPEAKER_00: a major developer.
1:09:20
SPEAKER_00: We've done with the DOD as of last year that we also announced.
1:09:23
SPEAKER_00: There's actual product going into the field and under test today.
1:09:27
SPEAKER_00: So it's definitely in that journey,
1:09:30
SPEAKER_00: but it's not yet to a point where I would say,
1:09:32
SPEAKER_00: yes, absolutely, tomorrow this is going to be out there at massive scale.
1:09:37
SPEAKER_00: It's a journey.
1:09:38
SPEAKER_00: It's going to take three to five years to get to that gigawatt scale.
1:09:42
SPEAKER_00: Where it's actually competitive.
1:09:43
SPEAKER_00: Why do you
1:09:44
SPEAKER_01: guys even publish
1:09:45
SPEAKER_00: patents?
1:09:46
SPEAKER_00: Why do we do patents?
1:09:47
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:09:47
SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's like if, I mean, you know, this is not like some anti-China.
1:09:52
SPEAKER_01: I love China, you know, but this is some reality.
1:09:54
SPEAKER_01: I've done stories where the U.S. was like leading in windmills too.
1:09:59
SPEAKER_01: And then, you know, China got the source code to...
1:10:02
SPEAKER_01: Um, the controller in this windmill and the company I was writing about
1:10:06
SPEAKER_01: in Massachusetts was like,
1:10:07
SPEAKER_01: you know,
1:10:07
SPEAKER_01: went from the world leader to bankrupt in like 18 months,
1:10:10
SPEAKER_01: you know, and, and,
1:10:11
SPEAKER_01: and obviously SpaceX,
1:10:12
SPEAKER_01: I mean, Elon's talked about this some of the past of like, this is hard to do.
1:10:17
SPEAKER_01: I'm not going to publish the patent.
1:10:18
SPEAKER_01: Good luck to you.
1:10:19
SPEAKER_01: If you can like figure out how to do it.
1:10:21
SPEAKER_01: Um, yeah.
1:10:22
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
1:10:22
SPEAKER_01: Why, why disclose anything when.
1:10:25
SPEAKER_01: Um, especially in solar where it
1:10:28
SPEAKER_00: looks like it could be quite dangerous to do that.
1:10:30
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:10:30
SPEAKER_00: I mean, we don't, I would say we don't patent most of the stuff we do for that reason.
1:10:35
SPEAKER_00: So we keep things as trade secrets, you know, secret sauce, like things in the company.
1:10:40
SPEAKER_00: Um, but that said,
1:10:41
SPEAKER_00: there are some areas where it's like,
1:10:42
SPEAKER_00: if it's very clear,
1:10:43
SPEAKER_00: like when someone is violating a patent and you know, you've kind of.
1:10:47
SPEAKER_00: Develop that.
1:10:49
SPEAKER_00: You do want to protect that.
1:10:50
SPEAKER_00: And we've seen actually in the solar industry increasing litigation
1:10:52
SPEAKER_00: or increasing protection of IP, even in China.
1:10:57
SPEAKER_00: So all kinds of Chinese companies suing each other.
1:10:59
SPEAKER_00: In the US, there's First Solar kind of creating this new investigation into Topcon technology.
1:11:07
SPEAKER_00: So there's these different kinds of dynamics where having IP at least gives you
1:11:12
SPEAKER_00: a freedom to operate that is really valuable.
1:11:15
SPEAKER_00: And that's something that we...
1:11:17
SPEAKER_00: We want to use it defensively, right?
1:11:18
SPEAKER_00: Like we want to kind of protect our interests and be able to like actually, um,
1:11:22
SPEAKER_00: manufacturers this thing without being kind of unfairly attacked from all sides,
1:11:25
SPEAKER_00: which if someone else patented what we did could happen.
1:11:28
SPEAKER_01: Is this the type of thing where.
1:11:31
SPEAKER_01: You guys figure it out.
1:11:32
SPEAKER_01: You start manufacturing these panels and then somebody can buy one
1:11:37
SPEAKER_01: and reverse engineer from what you've done or it's more on this chemistry level
1:11:41
SPEAKER_01: where it
1:11:42
SPEAKER_00: would be quite difficult to figure that out.
1:11:44
SPEAKER_00: I think it's a bit of both.
1:11:45
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, there's some stuff that you could see if you like did
1:11:48
SPEAKER_00: a cross-sectional scanning electron microscope image or something.
1:11:51
SPEAKER_00: But some stuff like it's in how we make it.
1:11:54
SPEAKER_00: And I think that's where there's a lot of secret sauce, right?
1:11:57
SPEAKER_00: And like, how do you tweak these recipes?
1:11:59
SPEAKER_00: How do you manufacture this?
1:12:00
SPEAKER_00: And that's what we don't.
1:12:01
SPEAKER_00: Try to patent.
1:12:02
SPEAKER_00: And it's not obvious if you open it up.
1:12:04
SPEAKER_01: So if there is like an apples to apples on the technology
1:12:07
SPEAKER_01: at some point around perovskites and,
1:12:10
SPEAKER_01: and then it always comes back to this, well,
1:12:13
SPEAKER_01: China's going to make it cheaper because of labor and a number of other factors,
1:12:17
SPEAKER_01: but you guys would be, well, okay.
1:12:19
SPEAKER_01: So you're kind of partially hoping and betting that you get there first,
1:12:23
SPEAKER_01: you become this like dominant player for some period of time
1:12:27
SPEAKER_01: with this new technology.
1:12:29
SPEAKER_01: And then.
1:12:30
SPEAKER_01: And then the other bet is just that the U.S.
1:12:32
SPEAKER_01: wants to do this and the West wants to do this and is willing to possibly pay
1:12:40
SPEAKER_01: a premium to
1:12:41
SPEAKER_00: make that happen.
1:12:43
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:12:43
SPEAKER_00: So the question is kind of like, is that what's going to happen?
1:12:46
SPEAKER_01: Well, I'm just playing this out in my head.
1:12:48
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
1:12:50
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
1:12:54
SPEAKER_01: I feel like...
1:12:57
SPEAKER_00: I don't think it has to be one or the other.
1:13:00
SPEAKER_00: I didn't mean to make it sound like we're the only ones who can solve this.
1:13:05
SPEAKER_00: I think there are multiple players in the world who can develop this
1:13:09
SPEAKER_00: and commercialize it,
1:13:10
SPEAKER_00: and many people are making great progress, so I don't want to discount any of that.
1:13:13
SPEAKER_00: I think we're as well-placed as anyone, especially in the US and the Western world, to do this.
1:13:18
SPEAKER_00: That doesn't mean that China can't also succeed in parallel.
1:13:21
SPEAKER_00: And then it's a question of, okay, well, who's going to make it?
1:13:23
SPEAKER_00: Who's going to sell it?
1:13:24
SPEAKER_00: Where are you going to sell it?
1:13:26
SPEAKER_00: I think the U.S. needs to make some of its own solar.
1:13:28
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:13:29
SPEAKER_00: That's something I believe.
1:13:30
SPEAKER_00: That's something I think a lot of people believe.
1:13:31
SPEAKER_01: Weren't you texting me early?
1:13:33
SPEAKER_01: I mean, isn't there like a thing where the China's like maybe cutting the U.S. off?
1:13:36
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:13:37
SPEAKER_00: I mean, that's the funny thing is like, yeah,
1:13:40
SPEAKER_00: like China has this strong control of like these different parts of
1:13:43
SPEAKER_00: the supply chain.
1:13:44
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:13:44
SPEAKER_00: And actually, yes,
1:13:46
SPEAKER_00: we're building up like domestic production capacity,
1:13:48
SPEAKER_00: but like all of that's relying on Chinese equipment.
1:13:50
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
1:13:50
SPEAKER_00: Almost all of it.
1:13:51
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
1:13:51
SPEAKER_00: To go in your factory.
1:13:52
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
1:13:53
SPEAKER_00: Ours is not.
1:13:54
SPEAKER_00: No, no, I mean, I mean, you're a
1:13:56
SPEAKER_01: generic factory.
1:13:56
SPEAKER_00: The generic solar factory in the US or elsewhere in the world uses Chinese equipment.
1:14:00
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
1:14:00
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
1:14:01
SPEAKER_00: And like, usually that's like fine, right?
1:14:03
SPEAKER_00: It's like going back to our other point,
1:14:04
SPEAKER_00: like if they make their equipment cheap and good and like we import it and we use it
1:14:08
SPEAKER_00: to make products, great.
1:14:10
SPEAKER_00: But yeah,
1:14:10
SPEAKER_00: there's this new announcement like this week,
1:14:13
SPEAKER_00: this news that the Chinese government was like influencing Chinese manufacturers
1:14:18
SPEAKER_00: to say like, hey,
1:14:18
SPEAKER_00: like maybe you shouldn't sell that Leading edge manufacturing equipment
1:14:22
SPEAKER_00: for solar cells to the U.S. Yeah.
1:14:24
SPEAKER_01: And was it U.S. specific or like the West broadly?
1:14:27
SPEAKER_00: Um, I don't, to be honest, I don't remember.
1:14:29
SPEAKER_00: It's, um, yeah, it's, these are like rumors, right?
1:14:33
SPEAKER_00: Like Chinese workings.
1:14:35
SPEAKER_00: Right.
1:14:36
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
1:14:36
SPEAKER_01: But yeah, I mean, it's just, it seems, yeah.
1:14:38
SPEAKER_01: I mean, when you,
1:14:40
SPEAKER_01: before that even came out,
1:14:41
SPEAKER_01: it was just when I was running through the,
1:14:44
SPEAKER_01: the numbers and like what we were talking about, I'm just like, oh, well.
1:14:48
SPEAKER_01: China could just like do this themselves and the rest of
1:14:51
SPEAKER_01: the world would just be hosed if they, if they wanted to do it that way.
1:14:55
SPEAKER_01: I mean, and they often don't care about, um, international markets on some stuff.
1:14:59
SPEAKER_01: It's like the domestic market's big enough.
1:15:01
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:15:01
SPEAKER_00: Um, but like to, to add to that, like that was like, they called out Tesla, right?
1:15:06
SPEAKER_00: In that article,
1:15:06
SPEAKER_00: it was like,
1:15:07
SPEAKER_00: they're talking about like, oh,
1:15:09
SPEAKER_00: the Tesla announced they were doing this like $2.9 billion purchase
1:15:12
SPEAKER_00: from solar equipment.
1:15:12
SPEAKER_00: Right.
1:15:13
SPEAKER_00: To like build up domestic manufacturing and.
1:15:17
SPEAKER_00: That's a huge threat to China.
1:15:19
SPEAKER_00: They're like, okay, well,
1:15:20
SPEAKER_00: this huge company in the US is going
1:15:22
SPEAKER_00: to build out this massive capacity using our equipment.
1:15:25
SPEAKER_00: So, oh shit, maybe we should not let that happen.
1:15:28
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
1:15:29
SPEAKER_00: The protection.
1:15:30
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:15:30
SPEAKER_01: This was for Tesla to make their own solar panels?
1:15:33
SPEAKER_00: Sells and panels.
1:15:34
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:15:34
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
1:15:35
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
1:15:35
SPEAKER_01: I can never tell if they're... Well, I don't want to get you in trouble or anything.
1:15:38
SPEAKER_01: I mean...
1:15:39
SPEAKER_01: I can never tell if they're still serious about that or not.
1:15:41
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it feels like so many ups and downs.
1:15:44
SPEAKER_00: They're definitely making some serious bets.
1:15:45
SPEAKER_00: Okay,
1:15:46
SPEAKER_00: so they were
1:15:46
SPEAKER_01: buying Chinese manufacturing equipment to come to the US for Tesla
1:15:52
SPEAKER_01: to make
1:15:53
SPEAKER_00: panels.
1:15:53
SPEAKER_00: I can't speak to like where they stand today,
1:15:55
SPEAKER_00: but I think they're definitely exploring that for sure.
1:15:57
SPEAKER_00: And that's been widely reported in the last couple months.
1:16:00
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
1:16:00
SPEAKER_01: I know like Tesla obviously was doing the solar roofs and stuff and it seems,
1:16:05
SPEAKER_01: I don't know, I don't see a lot of them around.
1:16:08
SPEAKER_01: But like Tesla aside for a second,
1:16:10
SPEAKER_01: is the solar roof in general like a thing that will ever happen?
1:16:17
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:16:17
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I think it's happening in small ways here and there.
1:16:19
SPEAKER_00: It's like, it's more of a niche product, right?
1:16:22
SPEAKER_00: Roofs are hard.
1:16:23
SPEAKER_01: And it's going to be more expensive.
1:16:25
SPEAKER_01: It's going to be more expensive.
1:16:25
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
1:16:26
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:16:26
SPEAKER_00: Because every roof is different.
1:16:27
SPEAKER_00: Like, you know, you have to kind of customize it.
1:16:29
SPEAKER_00: It's going to be less efficient than just putting panels somewhere in a desert.
1:16:32
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:16:32
SPEAKER_00: So ultimately, like it's going to be more of a niche product, but it's, it's a nice to have.
1:16:36
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:16:37
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:16:37
SPEAKER_01: And then I have like friends who bought in the solar early and did their house
1:16:41
SPEAKER_01: and like they're battling with PG&E and PG&E is like always changing the rules
1:16:46
SPEAKER_01: on them and everything.
1:16:46
SPEAKER_01: I mean, yeah.
1:16:47
SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's just, it's like.
1:16:49
SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
1:16:50
SPEAKER_01: It's annoying when there's this thing that
1:16:51
SPEAKER_00: should obviously
1:16:52
SPEAKER_00: be good for the world.
1:16:56
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, you'd think so.
1:16:59
SPEAKER_01: Besides perovskites, I mean,
1:17:02
SPEAKER_01: is there a debate around other technologies that if we see silicon getting
1:17:09
SPEAKER_01: to this limit or we're right up against it,
1:17:12
SPEAKER_01: there must be other things people are betting on or perovskites is like,
1:17:16
SPEAKER_01: There's a consensus in the industry that it's like, that's, that's it.
1:17:19
SPEAKER_01: That's our only kind of
1:17:21
SPEAKER_00: hope here.
1:17:22
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:17:22
SPEAKER_00: I mean, uh, like as an observer of the industry, right?
1:17:26
SPEAKER_00: Like I think within the industry, we've seen many technologies come and go, right?
1:17:30
SPEAKER_00: Like again,
1:17:31
SPEAKER_00: cad tells the IGS,
1:17:33
SPEAKER_00: organics,
1:17:33
SPEAKER_00: Dyson style cells,
1:17:34
SPEAKER_00: quantum dots,
1:17:35
SPEAKER_00: you know,
1:17:35
SPEAKER_00: all these like, you know, stable of, of new materials and technologies and.
1:17:43
SPEAKER_00: I've worked on a lot of these and I've seen that none of them have been able
1:17:47
SPEAKER_00: to actually outperform silicon.
1:17:49
SPEAKER_00: And there's various physics reasons why certain materials are not going to
1:17:53
SPEAKER_00: as good as other materials.
1:17:55
SPEAKER_00: It's really hard to find and develop a material in a way
1:17:59
SPEAKER_00: that actually can compete inefficiently with a technology that we've learned how
1:18:03
SPEAKER_00: to control over seven decades.
1:18:05
SPEAKER_00: And perovskites are really the only one, I think, that have in some ways ever come along.
1:18:11
SPEAKER_00: Since silicon was developed, that can actually like match that and do it economically.
1:18:16
SPEAKER_00: So I don't see it like likely, I don't see it on the horizon.
1:18:19
SPEAKER_00: I don't see any technology right now that is anywhere near as competitive
1:18:23
SPEAKER_00: as perovskites in terms of like advancing that frontier.
1:18:26
SPEAKER_01: So like, this is kind of, this is the moment.
1:18:28
SPEAKER_01: I mean, either, so perovskites work or they don't for this 30 year period.
1:18:33
SPEAKER_01: And then if they do, everybody's shift, this would be just massive.
1:18:38
SPEAKER_01: I mean, the whole industry would shift.
1:18:40
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:18:40
SPEAKER_00: I think the industry will shift.
1:18:42
SPEAKER_00: And to me, it's more of a matter of like when than if.
1:18:44
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
1:18:44
SPEAKER_00: It's like, it's going to take time.
1:18:46
SPEAKER_00: Every technology takes time, but it'll get there.
1:18:48
SPEAKER_01: And like out of all those other technologies that you've seen come and go,
1:18:52
SPEAKER_01: um, Undoubtedly for a fatal flaw or a couple in how you
1:18:58
SPEAKER_00: make them and
1:18:59
SPEAKER_01: all that.
1:18:59
SPEAKER_01: I mean, is there some,
1:19:01
SPEAKER_01: as we enter this era of AI making scientific discoveries, I mean,
1:19:07
SPEAKER_01: but is there something that everybody knows would be the like idealized evolution?
1:19:13
SPEAKER_01: Um, molecule or something in that,
1:19:16
SPEAKER_01: that grab bag that,
1:19:17
SPEAKER_01: that is the,
1:19:18
SPEAKER_01: the, the most prized one, if we could just figure out this one or
1:19:21
SPEAKER_00: two things.
1:19:22
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:19:22
SPEAKER_00: I mean, a lot of people have tried.
1:19:24
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:19:24
SPEAKER_00: Um, so like, yeah,
1:19:25
SPEAKER_00: there's a many academic labs and folks that we've collaborated with in the past too,
1:19:29
SPEAKER_00: who have tried that.
1:19:29
SPEAKER_00: Um, I think it's,
1:19:31
SPEAKER_00: you know,
1:19:31
SPEAKER_00: it's plausible, but I think it's not likely to be real step changes of a perovskite.
1:19:35
SPEAKER_00: It's like, if, if, you know, 20 years ago, if you said, Hey, make me the perfect solar material.
1:19:41
SPEAKER_00: Someone who could pull that out of a hat would pull something very similar to
1:19:45
SPEAKER_00: a Profsky out of that hat.
1:19:47
SPEAKER_00: It would just be a Profsky that maybe is a little more durable,
1:19:49
SPEAKER_00: a little more like less ionic and ion moving it around and stuff.
1:19:53
SPEAKER_00: Just like something similar to a Profsky.
1:19:55
SPEAKER_00: So I think it's much more likely that it's some refined version of a Profsky
1:19:59
SPEAKER_00: that turns out to be kind of the way forward.
1:20:01
SPEAKER_00: Like longer term than...
1:20:04
SPEAKER_00: Then some completely new material or architecture.
1:20:07
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:20:07
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
1:20:08
SPEAKER_01: Is this down to like a US versus China race or does Europe have perovskite research?
1:20:15
SPEAKER_01: Um, I mean, I'm sure they've researched, but they're legit players in this, this startup world.
1:20:21
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:20:21
SPEAKER_00: I mean, Europe, I think has done a lot of the foundational research and profs guys.
1:20:25
SPEAKER_00: They're in many ways, like kind of a pioneer.
1:20:27
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:20:27
SPEAKER_01: You guys, a bunch of guys from Oxford, right?
1:20:29
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
1:20:30
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:20:30
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:20:31
SPEAKER_00: So there's a lot of good work happening there.
1:20:33
SPEAKER_00: I think because of the market there,
1:20:35
SPEAKER_00: it's actually been a very challenging place to commercialize anything.
1:20:37
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:20:38
SPEAKER_00: Um, we've seen,
1:20:39
SPEAKER_00: you know,
1:20:39
SPEAKER_00: there's one major company there,
1:20:40
SPEAKER_00: Oxford, that has been kind of an early leader in that space.
1:20:43
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
1:20:44
SPEAKER_00: The first to come out of the labs.
1:20:46
SPEAKER_00: So there's certainly a,
1:20:47
SPEAKER_00: you know, serious competitor and a good, you know, a good company, I think.
1:20:51
SPEAKER_00: In the US,
1:20:52
SPEAKER_00: there's sort of more of an opportunity and a better market for bringing this
1:20:56
SPEAKER_00: to scale.
1:20:57
SPEAKER_01: In Australia?
1:20:58
SPEAKER_01: Because they were such a research powerhouse for a while in this.
1:21:03
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I mean,
1:21:03
SPEAKER_00: there's great research there as well on perovskites,
1:21:06
SPEAKER_00: so I wouldn't discount that for sure.
1:21:08
SPEAKER_00: But again,
1:21:08
SPEAKER_00: it's like from a market scale and commercialization kind of opportunity standpoint,
1:21:12
SPEAKER_00: it's like US is a big one, India is a big one, China is a big one.
1:21:17
SPEAKER_01: I think you said like, Thank God Germany did what it did.
1:21:21
SPEAKER_01: When I had a guest from the nuclear industry on,
1:21:24
SPEAKER_01: you know,
1:21:24
SPEAKER_01: I mean, he was kind of holding Germany up as the country that did the exact wrong.
1:21:29
SPEAKER_01: Oh, oh.
1:21:30
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
1:21:31
SPEAKER_00: Those are both true.
1:21:32
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
1:21:32
SPEAKER_00: I think, like,
1:21:32
SPEAKER_00: I don't think they should have stopped nuclear,
1:21:35
SPEAKER_00: and I think they should have deployed solar.
1:21:36
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
1:21:36
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
1:21:37
SPEAKER_00: Those are both true, right?
1:21:38
SPEAKER_00: You should do a ton of nuclear, you should do a ton of solar.
1:21:40
SPEAKER_01: Just not have turned off all the nuclear plants with a war that Russia's involved in looming.
1:21:46
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
1:21:47
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:21:47
SPEAKER_00: No, I don't think anyone should turn off nuclear plants,
1:21:50
SPEAKER_00: but you should also deploy a crap ton of solar.
1:21:52
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
1:21:52
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
1:21:52
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
1:21:52
SPEAKER_01: Do you pay attention to the nuclear industry?
1:21:55
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I'm not a nuclear physicist, so I follow it from my kind of observer standpoint.
1:22:00
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, okay.
1:22:02
SPEAKER_01: Okay, this has been a fascinating, for me, discussion.
1:22:07
SPEAKER_01: Was there anywhere we didn't go that I should have?
1:22:10
SPEAKER_01: Because this is still a bit new to me, yeah.
1:22:15
SPEAKER_00: I think one thing that comes to mind actually,
1:22:17
SPEAKER_00: one thing that came to mind actually when you were talking about the solar
1:22:20
SPEAKER_00: for data centers was There's actually,
1:22:23
SPEAKER_00: I think a lot of opportunity for solar to kind of be like,
1:22:25
SPEAKER_00: be the foundation for like AI.
1:22:27
SPEAKER_00: And I, you know, I wrote a thing on my solar for AGI, right?
1:22:30
SPEAKER_00: Like, um,
1:22:31
SPEAKER_00: I was talking to Jeff Dean last week and he, he,
1:22:34
SPEAKER_00: you know,
1:22:34
SPEAKER_00: he's obviously like thinking a lot about how do you power data centers with solar
1:22:37
SPEAKER_00: and like he and many others like him, I think in there, okay.
1:22:40
SPEAKER_00: There's no one like Jeff Dean, but like other books.
1:22:42
SPEAKER_01: For people who don't know,
1:22:43
SPEAKER_01: I mean, just a long time, uh, resident genius at, at Google and AI chief.
1:22:50
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
1:22:50
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:22:50
SPEAKER_00: I hope he's not mad at me if I say he's now an investor at Swift.
1:22:54
SPEAKER_00: He is backing Swift.
1:22:56
SPEAKER_00: And I think part of the reason is that we share this belief that the future
1:23:01
SPEAKER_00: of AI is going to be heavily powered by solar.
1:23:03
SPEAKER_00: It's the fastest thing you can deploy.
1:23:05
SPEAKER_00: It can match the speed of AI.
1:23:06
SPEAKER_00: It's on this learning curve that's getting cheaper and cheaper and cheaper, right?
1:23:09
SPEAKER_00: 20% decline in cost, every doubling of deployment.
1:23:13
SPEAKER_00: So it's on this kind of same trajectory as AI growth.
1:23:16
SPEAKER_00: And when you combine solar and batteries...
1:23:19
SPEAKER_00: It's like a perfect power source for AI data centers.
1:23:23
SPEAKER_01: In my head,
1:23:24
SPEAKER_01: I'm skeptical just because I'm picturing some egregiously large solar farm to power
1:23:31
SPEAKER_01: the data centers that I've been running across.
1:23:35
SPEAKER_01: I don't even know the scale of these things anymore.
1:23:38
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:23:38
SPEAKER_00: I mean, some of them, yeah, where you have land, yeah, you do it, right?
1:23:41
SPEAKER_00: Like where you don't have land,
1:23:43
SPEAKER_00: you put on a grid that's connected to a place where you do have land.
1:23:45
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:23:46
SPEAKER_00: So I wouldn't say it's like the only power source,
1:23:48
SPEAKER_00: but I think it can certainly be the foundational data source,
1:23:51
SPEAKER_00: sorry, power source for these data centers.
1:23:53
SPEAKER_01: Well, and again, I try, I mean, I swear to God, this is not like anti-China or anything.
1:23:58
SPEAKER_01: I just try to be a realist about these things.
1:24:00
SPEAKER_01: It's just,
1:24:01
SPEAKER_01: so what you just said,
1:24:02
SPEAKER_01: it's like if you pair solar up with batteries, well,
1:24:05
SPEAKER_01: it happens that like China's dominant and completely dominant in both of those.
1:24:10
SPEAKER_00: Well, we better get building, right?
1:24:13
SPEAKER_00: We better get building.
1:24:14
SPEAKER_01: You know, I mean,
1:24:14
SPEAKER_01: there's just,
1:24:15
SPEAKER_01: there's like some of these fundamental realities that it's like, yeah, I mean,
1:24:19
SPEAKER_01: sometimes I don't feel like I feel like the US is play acting sometimes
1:24:24
SPEAKER_01: where it's like, oh, that would be nice or we want to do that.
1:24:26
SPEAKER_01: But then you just quickly start ticking off what needs to happen.
1:24:31
SPEAKER_01: And you're like,
1:24:31
SPEAKER_01: well, we've got some pretty large fundamental problems that need to be solved then.
1:24:36
SPEAKER_01: And you don't seem to be spending the quantity of money that it would take,
1:24:42
SPEAKER_01: like anywhere near the quantity of money to solve that.
1:24:45
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
1:24:46
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
1:24:46
SPEAKER_00: So, so like, how do you, how do you get over that?
1:24:49
SPEAKER_01: Like, Yeah, well, I mean,
1:24:50
SPEAKER_01: I think there's beauties in our political system and then there's difficulties.
1:24:57
SPEAKER_01: It's just when the whims of politicians change every four years and you just have
1:25:03
SPEAKER_01: to have some kind of commitment to this stuff.
1:25:05
SPEAKER_01: And it's kind of weird because we're actually fantastic at building data centers.
1:25:11
SPEAKER_01: We're like amazing at software.
1:25:13
SPEAKER_01: We're fantastic.
1:25:14
SPEAKER_01: We have more data centers than the rest of the world combined.
1:25:17
SPEAKER_01: And then you just need these other Bits and pieces.
1:25:20
SPEAKER_01: I, I'm going to sound like a dullard,
1:25:23
SPEAKER_00: I think on this,
1:25:24
SPEAKER_01: but you know,
1:25:24
SPEAKER_01: it's like we can raise capital for so many things,
1:25:27
SPEAKER_01: you know,
1:25:28
SPEAKER_01: and people get excited and you just see trillions of dollars pouring into things.
1:25:31
SPEAKER_01: And then I feel like.
1:25:33
SPEAKER_01: Areas like solar and batteries and then stuff that I'm always obsessed
1:25:37
SPEAKER_01: with around
1:25:38
SPEAKER_00: robotics, like actuators and stuff like this.
1:25:41
SPEAKER_01: It's like all these key pieces of the puzzle.
1:25:42
SPEAKER_01: We're just, we're just sort of, um, take like, not as seriously.
1:25:47
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
1:25:47
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:25:47
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
1:25:48
SPEAKER_00: Totally.
1:25:48
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:25:49
SPEAKER_01: Drives me slightly insane.
1:25:50
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:25:51
SPEAKER_00: I mean, we, we, there's so much that needs to change.
1:25:53
SPEAKER_00: Right.
1:25:53
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:25:54
SPEAKER_00: Um, I, I think there's like kind of a.
1:25:57
SPEAKER_00: Yes, the government needs to do stuff.
1:25:59
SPEAKER_00: We can take a page out of the Chinese playbook and how they dominated solar
1:26:03
SPEAKER_00: and storage and all that.
1:26:04
SPEAKER_00: There's all these kind of policy mechanisms,
1:26:06
SPEAKER_00: the cheap capital,
1:26:07
SPEAKER_00: the consistent funding for research, the loan guarantees and tariffs and stuff.
1:26:14
SPEAKER_00: And we're starting to use some of those tools on a policy standpoint.
1:26:17
SPEAKER_00: I think from a private sector standpoint, what can we do, right?
1:26:20
SPEAKER_00: I was like, just dudes.
1:26:23
SPEAKER_00: What can we do here is like, I think we look for these breakpoints, right?
1:26:27
SPEAKER_00: We look for these inflection points where there's like a technology step,
1:26:29
SPEAKER_00: for example,
1:26:30
SPEAKER_00: with perovskite tandems,
1:26:31
SPEAKER_00: but that's true of like new chemistries and batteries sometimes,
1:26:34
SPEAKER_00: things like that,
1:26:35
SPEAKER_00: where you can actually imagine kind of like getting the private sector
1:26:38
SPEAKER_00: behind something like this because there are venture scale returns behind it, right?
1:26:41
SPEAKER_00: So like perovskite tandems, right?
1:26:43
SPEAKER_00: Like we're seeing increased momentum behind it because instead of investing
1:26:46
SPEAKER_00: the nth silicon factory,
1:26:47
SPEAKER_00: you now have this technology that can potentially upend the industry.
1:26:50
SPEAKER_00: Right.
1:26:51
SPEAKER_00: And that's a time when you can actually Like kind of just destroy the moats
1:26:55
SPEAKER_00: that were there before.
1:26:56
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:26:56
SPEAKER_00: And that's not to say that like China's Silicon moats are anywhere near gone
1:27:00
SPEAKER_00: when we switched to Prosket Tandos.
1:27:02
SPEAKER_00: That's certainly not true.
1:27:03
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:27:03
SPEAKER_00: But like when you make this change,
1:27:04
SPEAKER_00: there is an opportunity to kind of reinvent the supply chain,
1:27:07
SPEAKER_00: reinvent the industry and rebuild it in a place that it didn't exist before.
1:27:10
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:27:11
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:27:11
SPEAKER_00: Right.
1:27:12
SPEAKER_01: I mean, all this sounds expensive.
1:27:14
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
1:27:17
SPEAKER_01: So you guys would not be,
1:27:20
SPEAKER_01: you wouldn't turn down large quantities of money
1:27:23
SPEAKER_00: to help build these factories.
1:27:25
SPEAKER_00: No, no, we would not.
1:27:26
SPEAKER_00: But it's not as much as any of the hyperscalers is spending on data centers next year.
1:27:30
SPEAKER_00: Right, right, yeah.
1:27:31
SPEAKER_00: We could build an entire domestic solar industry on far less than that amount.
1:27:36
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
1:27:37
SPEAKER_01: Okay, well, this has been fascinating.
1:27:38
SPEAKER_01: Thank you so much for your time.
1:27:40
SPEAKER_01: I feel like getting to know you just these last couple of months has been cool
1:27:44
SPEAKER_01: because I I kind of go in and out of subject areas and I feel like you're...
1:27:51
SPEAKER_01: I always appreciate when somebody comes from academia
1:27:56
SPEAKER_01: who can also explain what's going on in human terms that I can understand.
1:28:04
SPEAKER_01: Maybe you're very good and you've pulled the wool over my eyes, but I feel like you're...
1:28:11
SPEAKER_01: Accurate and conservative on,
1:28:13
SPEAKER_01: on setting expectations around some of this stuff, which is, you know, is, is nice.
1:28:21
SPEAKER_00: I appreciate that.
1:28:22
SPEAKER_00: Um, it's, yeah, it's hard to, hard for me to, to not try to find the facts, right?
1:28:27
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, no, but I mean, I mean, it's,
1:28:30
SPEAKER_01: it's like,
1:28:30
SPEAKER_01: it's super,
1:28:31
SPEAKER_01: super helpful,
1:28:32
SPEAKER_01: at least to,
1:28:33
SPEAKER_01: to level set and, and have some idea of how all this is going to play out.
1:28:37
SPEAKER_01: So, um, okay.
1:28:38
SPEAKER_01: So the best place for people to go is probably like Swift Solar.
1:28:41
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, siftceller.com.
1:28:43
SPEAKER_00: You can find me on LinkedIn or email or tweet or whatever.
1:28:46
SPEAKER_01: Okay, okay.
1:28:48
SPEAKER_01: Well, Jill, thank you so much for being on the show.
1:28:50
SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
1:28:51
SPEAKER_01: I really appreciate it.
1:28:53
SPEAKER_01: The Core Memory Podcast is hosted by me,
1:28:56
SPEAKER_01: Ashley Vance, and or Kylie Robison, or both of us together.
1:29:01
SPEAKER_01: It is produced by me and David Nicholson.
1:29:04
SPEAKER_01: Our theme song is by James Mercer and John Sortland, and the show is edited.
1:29:10
SPEAKER_01: Always by the John Sortland.
1:29:14
SPEAKER_01: Thank you so much to Brex and SendCutSend for all your support.
1:29:18
SPEAKER_01: And thank you most of all to everybody for listening or watching.
1:29:23
SPEAKER_01: We love you.
1:29:24
SPEAKER_01: Please leave us a like, a review, a subscribe, all those tremendous things.
1:29:30
SPEAKER_01: Thank you and we'll see you again.