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The $65/kWh Incentive Making US Batteries Compete with China · Clean Power Hour

• 0:51
  Tim Montague: Welcome to the Clean Power Hour. Live today is Friday, the third of April.
• 0:54
  Tim Montague: Welcome to my co host, John Weaver, the commercial solar guy. Hey, Tim, bringing you the latest and greatest wind, solar and battery news. Every other Friday, it's good Friday, John, which doesn't mean a lot to me, because I'm not religious, but I know that it's a big holiday for a lot of people, and hopefully somebody's paying attention.
• 1:19
  John Weaver: Well, it is great holiday, lots of people, hopefully being good human beings. That's, that's, that's the aspiration
• 1:28
  Tim Montague: every Friday is Good Friday
• 1:29
  John Weaver: for me. Yes, there you go.
• 1:31
  Tim Montague: Tim, well, let's get into the news. John, I am fresh off the travel, going to re plus southeast. I was in Atlanta for three days. Great to visit with some colleagues and customers, but you have been busy developing community solar in the New York market. We're going to talk about one of those projects known as Farmer Brown solar.
• 2:01
  John Weaver: Farmer Brown solar, absolutely. This was our first community solar project we developed as part of a push in the New York State. A few years back, we ended up being part of a team that deployed about 72 megawatts of solar, and this is the first one that we did. It's online. It's running and it's in NYSERDA, which is upstate New York territory. And as you can see on the screen, while some of you can see on the screen, it's mostly a big square with a nice chunk up on the top left. It's about 4.8 4.7 megawatts AC, about gaining on six megawatts DC, single access tracker. And you know, it's a cool project.
• 2:51
  John Weaver: It's located in Appalachia, New York, so upstate, close to, uh, Binghamton, kind of in the center ish, but the lower portion of upstate, so southern upstate.
• 3:01
  Tim Montague: I had a noteworthy arrival back into Champaign yesterday, and the airplane had to do a roundabout around the city, and I it was just great because we're flying in a circle, so the airplane is tilted, and I'm looking down at the city of Champaign and noticing all these small solar farms. Some of them are behind the meter, but many of them are front of the meter, community solar projects like this one.
• 3:26
  Tim Montague: And what struck me is just how well solar blends into the landscape. It you really don't notice it that much anymore, now that we're used to looking at solar farms. And you know, there's solar farms next to junk yards and next to tank yards and all kinds of built environment stuff. And it just it boggles the mind that some people are really irked by solar farm fields, but I am not one of those people.
• 4:01
  John Weaver: So this is a field, farm field that hadn't been worked in probably 10 years. We were told it was a grass field, but interestingly, to the top right, you can actually see some greenhouses. So this farmer who owns this land, they've been working in greenhouses for years. We actually helped them replace a couple, because windstorm blew off some of the plastic coverings. And that was part of our lease payment for the land. It was to just support it. But this is a cool project.
• 4:34
  John Weaver: It's just nice and clean and square, and I'm gonna go visit it and touch it one day came online, q3, q4, of last year, and there's about 1234, well, close to 10 more, roughly, that are going to be coming online in the next, you know, 12 months ish, so welcome.
• 4:56
  Tim Montague: Really cool.
• 4:56
  Tim Montague: That's, that's very cool to see your work coming to fruition. It is very gratifying.
• 5:03
  John Weaver: Yeah, that's the biggest project we've been a part of. So that's that particularly, that's pretty, pretty awesome
• 5:09
  Tim Montague: and proud of it.
• 5:09
  Tim Montague: If you could do some quick math, a, you know, a six or seven megawatt DC solar farm might be enough power for how many homes?
• 5:23
  John Weaver: Well, the standard rule of thumb the world likes to use these days is that 1000 houses per megawatt, so 10 kW ish offsets the electricity usage of a household, which is close.
• 5:36
  Tim Montague: So this would be a 6000 on the order of 6000 homes could be powered by one community solar farm, correct, yeah.
• 5:46
  John Weaver: So this is just, this is one of them. It's cool.
• 5:49
  John Weaver: Yeah, we'll be plugging. About 10 of them in the New York State upstate. So we're going to help 60,000 people get electricity.
• 5:56
  John Weaver: And saying it that way is pretty cool, actually, 60,000 people.
• 6:00
  John Weaver: Man, that's a city.
• 6:02
  Tim Montague: I like it. Yeah, absolutely. All right, we've got a story in Canary media by Julian Spector from the 23rd of March. Suddenly, the US manufacturers a ton of grid batteries. It is kind of interesting how we don't notice, don't notice, and then all of a sudden, oh yeah, it's a big number, yeah.
• 6:24
  John Weaver: So the headline data that I grabbed out of it was that at the end of last year, Canary found 70 gigawatt hours of manufacturing capacity at the end of this year, they're expecting that to just more than double up to 145 now last year, we think we installed around 50 to 55 gigawatt hours. So then hypothetically, the US capacity could have offset that, but it wasn't in place, of course, yet to offset it, because those batteries were made a year or two ago. But then this year, we're thinking like 8090, 100 So potentially, the US capacity manufacturing capacity could 100% cover domestic demand, as long as they have the right product and the right price. But with the domestic content, 10% adder that helps things a whole bunch, makes it, you know, just that much stronger. And then the US people, I think, they get paid $35 per kilowatt hour, no 45 per kilowatt hour for manufacturing cells and assembling a battery system in the US. So you got 10% coming off the top. So let's say you deliver at 200 bucks a kilowatt hour. So now you're knocking off 20 and then from the bottom you add 45 so that's $65 per kilowatt hour that are, you know, that's a third of the price. That's a full 1/3 of the price off the manufacturing cost that various parties can do. And so that brings the cost down from, say, 200 and this is for larger projects, 200 down to, say, one 135, one 135 which you know, we know in China, if we were in China and buying in China, and deploying in China the 80 bucks a kilowatt hour, but then you got to add, like a 50% tariff, which brings it up to 120 so now 120 versus 135 is not a very big spread. So it's, it's pretty interesting to see these volumes, the costs, the way the incentives work out, and you know how it's driving it. I mean, I'm against tariffs in general, but whatever we got them, I guess we have a tax credit to offset them, however weird that is, we take the money off that we add the money to the top, and then take it off on the side somehow so, but we just have a lot of capacity coming, and that is pretty cool to me.
• 9:03
  Tim Montague: Yeah, that no, that statistic that 100% of our grid expansion could be covered by batteries is a good one. And you know, we have to remember that it's not cheap to run power plants of any flavor. And you know, peaker plants, for example, are quite expensive. So utilities are installing grid scale batteries for a reason, and that is the economics of batteries. But let's talk about Tesla's foray into, I guess, part two, foray into solar panel manufacturing. I mean, this story's been around a little bit, but
• 9:46
  John Weaver: seems to be firming up a tiny bit. There seems to be hints here and there of they've ordered
• 9:52
  Tim Montague: $3 billion of solar panel manufacturing equipment. And I don't know if they've ordered
• 9:59
  John Weaver: it yet. It's not, I don't know if it's been ordered, but it's definitely being they're getting quotes. It seems, I
• 10:05
  Tim Montague: see they're looking to buy $3 billion yes, worth of solar panel manufacturing from Maxwell technologies, and there was one other company I can't remember now, yeah.
• 10:20
  John Weaver: So there has actually been multiple companies they visited. They visited. So apparently, a trip occurred where Tesla officials went to China and talked to some of the biggest hardware manufacturers.
• 10:28
  John Weaver: They visited Maxwell, who I really am a fan of because of perovskites, and we actually talked about him a couple weeks ago. They also visited some other groups, and they said that the hardware is supposed to be delivered before auto you know, is that October. That's a short timeframe to deliver. You know, 100 Gigawatts of manufacturing gear, whatever that's actually going to mean, but it seems to be something real,
• 11:01
  Tim Montague: honestly, this doesn't surprise me at all. I mean, it is a large purchase, 100 gigawatts, okay? Our our native capacity in the US is somewhere around 50 gigawatts, isn't it?
• 11:13
  John Weaver: Now, modules seem to be in the 60 to 70, but, yeah, close, close.
• 11:20
  Tim Montague: And so that you know the whole Well, it was the the inflation Reduction Act originally, and then the O triple B, which is a mixed blessing. It's not but, but anyway, there's this whole drive towards Fiat free or Fiat compliant equipment has incentivized some solar panel manufacturing in the US, I think. And this may be part of that. I guess what I don't quite understand. There's, there's various forces at work, right?
• 11:56
  Tim Montague: There's this acceleration of of the phase out of the ITC, which incentivizes, on some level, domestic manufacturing. But then there's the whole ITC going away on solar equipment, right in 2028 which then does not incentivize domestic manufacturing, right? So, correct, correct. But in any case, I think it's a good thing if we can make the stuff on US soil. It just logistics are much simpler that way. We saw during covid that the ports had trouble keeping up with all of the economic demand for stuff coming from overseas, and that became a log jam, and you don't want your solar panels stuck on a container ship.
• 12:48
  John Weaver: No. Now I mean, I'm not as worried about that because of how good china is at making stuff. What I what I really want to see, though, is I'd love to see Tesla, if they're going to have these conversations and push things and do whatever it is they're trying to do for Uber efficiency with their data centers and everything else. You know, because SpaceX is now pushing for like, a $2 trillion IPO, it would be cool if they were to kick off the perovskite era in a massive purchase like this. That seems a little risky, though, but I don't know. They're kind of known for doing risky things, so I don't know that's what I would like to see. That'd be really cool to see just just because 100 gigawatts, I mean, and there's also a key question, though, what does 100 gigawatts mean? I know that sounds weird, but do they actually mean 100 gigawatts of solar panel manufacturing capacity? Or do they mean 25 gigawatts of poly, 25 gigawatts of wafers, 25 gigawatts of ingots, or 25 gig watts of cells, and then 25 gigawatts of modules? Because a lot of people get confused when they report on stuff like, for instance, regularly in the Georgia Q Cell reporting they're like, nine gigawatts of capacity. No, it's three and three and three and three and stuff like that. So, so I just don't know yet, but I assume it's 100 because, the way I've seen wording, but 100 would consume the whole US market and and it would consume the whole goal that Tesla had so to build a manufacturing base that instantly meets its end demand means there's more to the story.
• 14:39
  John Weaver: You know, you can't just build 100 gigawatts once and then be like, All right, I'm done. Let's throw it away. You know, they're going to start exporting those panels or something I don't know, or take over the US market, and be like, All right, we're now number one, and that'd be cool.
• 14:54
  Tim Montague: Yeah, I guess we need, we need more. I don't know we need, we need some better ways to talk about the volume of solar manufacturing. Because when I hear 100 gigawatts, I think 100 gigawatts of solar panels, but you're right is that they, they may be doing ingots, wafers, cells, so there's, there's four major components right, going into the solar panels, including the solar panel, but the ingot wafer cell, and all of those get measured in in gigawatts as well. Yep. All right. Well, let's talk about a story in electric about the global renewable energy economy.
• 15:37
  Tim Montague: We we broke a record in 2025 the world added a record 814 gigawatts of wind and solar, reshaping energy fast. By Michael, oh, sorry, Michelle.
• 15:50
  Tim Montague: Lewis in electric March 19.
• 15:54
  John Weaver: So the so we all know that wind was a record this year, massively, up almost 50% and solar was up a little less than John Weaver wanted, but still up 17% which is awesome.
• 16:06
  John Weaver: And that means wind and solar, of course, blended together, up 17% beautiful. There was one key number, though, that really made me smile. The amount of electricity that this capacity will generate in 2026 will be just over one petawatt hour.
• 16:28
  John Weaver: We're now in the petawatt hour era. Tim, I mean, we have been already, but because we're already at like, five gigs of renewables deployed, so we've been doing more than one petawatt hour. We don't like three, four or five petawatt hours of electricity from renewables, maybe 678, but now we just knocked off a full petawatt in a year. And what that means? I know somebody's like, What the hell does petawatt mean? What it is, it's, it's the global electricity demand is about 33 petawatt hours. So this is a big chunk of electricity, and it's going to run for decades, and it's going to get repowered, hopefully, for decades after that. So we may have just installed 100 years worth of electricity, one petawatt hour a year. So maybe 100 petawatt hours was just dropped onto the planet of electricity harvesting potential over the next century. And I don't know, I just like big, round numbers like petawatt because it sounds cool.
• 17:32
  Tim Montague: What I want to know is, why did wind jump so much? 47% year over year. That's a big jump.
• 17:37
  John Weaver: China. China. China jumped it as everything. China is now getting much more hardcore into wind. They've seen some massive price drops over the last few years. They're doing awesome offshore, but it really almost all the growth was in China for wind. It was, it was a big, big growth here, and it was necessary because wind had been slowing down for a few years. We really want wind to keep pushing. If we could, it would help. So, so I just like that number. It was big, cool, one petawatt hour. I'm gonna get that tattooed.
• 19:04
  Tim Montague: I like this too.
• 19:04
  Tim Montague: Avoiding 138 billion in gas imports from just one year of installations is a huge signal.
• 19:12
  Tim Montague: 130 8
• 19:13
  John Weaver: billion man, that's like a percentage of the global annual economy, right? That's like a non that's like a real number. I mean, once you break a billion, you know, Tim, you know you're in my billion that we both have. So just big, cool number.
• 19:34
  Tim Montague: All right. Story in Ember energy, about India, global solar PV installations reached 647, gigawatts in 2025,
• 19:48
  John Weaver: it's almost the same story as the prior one, except one key detail in there.
• 19:50
  John Weaver: I thought was so cool. If you could scroll down to that chart, if they let you, because that's my pay. I pay for that account.
• 19:56
  John Weaver: So maybe they won't let you, but there's a cool chart that shows, oh yeah, there it is. So if you could mouse over the Indian number and then mouse over the US number at the top of that chart, the green and the red, oh, look at that. You got to zoom in so everybody can see it.
• 20:13
  John Weaver: But what it's showing is that when you zoom in on India, what would look on the US? 45 gigawatts deployed India, 49 and I want us to be number one, because, you know, rah, rah, rah, but I want India to grow, because India is important. You know, the bottom, of course, is China. The blue is the rest of the world, and then India and the US up at the top. And that's 100 gigawatts almost from India and the US, which is pretty cool. China's still blowing everybody away, but it's just nice to see India, because they're the largest country on Earth man, and they may electrify faster than anybody.
• 20:52
  John Weaver: So that's a great place to see such massive growth. And I'm, I'm just happy to see that number. I've seen hints of that being the case already, but I, you know, I didn't see official stuff, but now for the first time, I've seen somebody say India deployed more than the US.
• 21:06
  John Weaver: And I think that's awesome.
• 21:09
  Tim Montague: Yeah, it's pretty incredible. China is installing 8.4 times as much solar as the US. Is granted, they have three times the population, but still, they're really going after the clean energy transition?
• 21:25
  John Weaver: Four Yeah, 4x a population.
• 21:31
  Tim Montague: 4x population, yeah, yeah.
• 21:34
  John Weaver: I mean, and they should be going after the energy transition. I mean, look what's happening right now in the world. I mean, we, I'm reading that 20% of the world. Liquid natural gas facilities are now gone, just gone for three to five years. You know, this is it's not just about, you know, cleaning the atmosphere. It's about national safety. It's about control of your borders, protecting your citizens, staying in power.
• 21:59
  Tim Montague: Yeah, I'm a big fan of national security and getting your energy from solar and wind is definitely a national security play. Even though we have lots of indigenous fossil fuels, there's plenty of reasons, like we see right now with the war in Iran, which is very clearly an oil war and good for the oil industry, they're making bank, but not good for consumers, and who knows how long that is going to last. All right? Red electrica authorizes the first renewables that can contribute to dynamic voltage control. Story forms from the company, company redia, whatever redia is,
• 22:52
  John Weaver: it's a utility.
• 22:52
  John Weaver: It's a grid management firm.
• 22:55
  John Weaver: It's like an ISO in the US, we have independent system operators in the ISO. ERCOT, okay, so this is that, but for Spain, and the reason this is interesting is because Spain crashed their grid, and it was because of voltage control and other related items. These are things that were illegal or not approved. I don't want to call it illegal, but maybe illegal, but renewables were not approved to offer these services, and this is part of the reason Spain's grid crashed for a day and a half, two days, because these services weren't being delivered properly. And since then, Spain has now made legal for these services to be deployed onto the grid and and so this is interesting. This is saying the big grid is saying, all right, we have instability because we are losing all of our thermal capacity and that big spinning mass, the big physical metal thing. Well, let's lean on our big, massive energy sources.
• 23:56
  John Weaver: And at the same time, Spain is also chasing utility scale batteries that are grid forming.
• 23:59
  John Weaver: So they're they, they're looking forward, and right now, there's lots of headlines out there saying the price of electricity in Spain has gone up less than anywhere across Europe because they have so much solar that the natural gas collapse and the other energy issues that are happening aren't affecting them as much. So they are benefiting now by the billions of dollars.
• 24:25
  John Weaver: That 130 $8 billion number you saw, Spain is getting some of them. Pakistan's getting some of them. There's a lot of these countries out there that are saving a lot of money, 10s of billions across Europe, I saw in a headline, is being saved because of this. So I think that's pretty cool. So just
• 24:45
  Tim Montague: for those of us not as smart as you, John, explain the importance of voltage control.
• 24:52
  John Weaver: All right, so, and first off, I'm not an electrician, so somebody's gonna correct me, but the grid has to run within certain technical specifications, like, there's a hertz, so the number of times that that big spinning mass spins, and then there's the voltage that's on the power lines. And if these numbers run out of a certain range, the power grid physically, literally becomes unstable, like, because all your hardware is meant to run based on electricity moving at a very specific pace, and if that pace speeds up or slows down, literally, your clocks will run faster or slower because the electricity coming into them is coming at a different pace. So you need these machines that manage stability. And historically, they had these big generators.
• 25:46
  John Weaver: And the big generators had a turbine that was spinning, going at 60 or 50 rotations per second. That's your hertz in the US. It's 60 hertz, 60 spins per second. Well, when you get rid of all these big power plants, and that big spinning thing goes away. That big spinning thing was important because, let's say the grid has an issue, or a whole bunch of people turn on the electricity, well, they're going to suck energy out of the grid, and the voltage will drop, and that could make it unstable.
• 26:19
  John Weaver: But this big spinning thing, it has a mass, and it's just going to keep spinning no matter what's going on. And so it's kind of stubbornness. It's giant mass. The fact that it just spins kind of stabilizes everything around it. And when we pull those things away, how do we stay stable? It's like having somebody in the family.
• 26:41
  John Weaver: They're just, all they do is wake up and go to work every day. They're not anything special. They just do their thing. They're stable. They pay their bills, they're important in the community. And they just do their thing like a bus driver, very important. So just spinning mass moving away. We need to find new bus drivers sort of, kind of, because this is an important piece of gear and and, you know, as we get rid of thermal, you know, coal and gas and nuclear, even that uses this stuff, we have to figure out a way to stabilize the grid.
• 27:13
  Tim Montague: Now there's electronics. This new legislation gives solar plant operators some new capabilities.
• 27:20
  Tim Montague: Is that the fundamental
• 27:21
  John Weaver: here, it doesn't give them new capabilities. It allows them to use capabilities they already had. So elect like the electronics within a solar system have the ability to do this voltage work. It's not as the same as the way us big spinning mass works, but they do have the ability to offer these they call them services, like you're servicing the grid.
• 27:48
  John Weaver: You're helping the power grid.
• 27:48
  John Weaver: So these electronics in solar panels, in wind turbines, can offer these services. So now they're being allowed to replace what was happening as gas and coal is shut down so the the inverter within your solar system has everything needed to run the grid. I mean, you know this because we've had off grid solar forever. You know, a battery and some solar panels can run a house, can run a military base, can run a city.
• 28:17
  John Weaver: But you know, we're now translating this to the big grid, and the big grids a little more comp, a lot more complex, a lot more dynamic, and so now you have millions of little dots going up and down, and we're using the electronics to stabilize it and offer support.
• 28:37
  John Weaver: A pat on the back. All right, you got this? I can get you back to 60 hertz, dearest power grid, you know, make everything work properly. So it's this is the real fundamental here is that the grid is asking for more responsibility, asking for more work from renewables, not just electricity, but now grid support, and so this is a second level responsibility. This is a this is just a step up to the big table. It's like we're no longer just hanging out pouring electricity, and now we are fundamentals to the grid. And this is a step to the point where coal and gas is, I don't you know, gas is going to be there for support for a long time. Coal's going away. And this is, see, this is steps of that. This is a national government saying, all right, we believe this. We're moving forward with it. And it's, it's, it's pretty cool, and it's gonna keep happening, grid forming, grid forming, inverters.
• 29:44
  Tim Montague: Very cool. Yeah.
• 29:44
  Tim Montague: We forget here in the US that you know, there are other places in the world where renewables are further along. And so I did a quick, a quick perplexity search, it looks like 15% of, oh, sorry, 20% of their electricity in Spain is coming from solar. So you know, we're lucky in the US to be nipping at what six, 7% solar,
• 30:17
  John Weaver: eight and a half last year, aiming on, aiming 10 this year.
• 30:21
  Tim Montague: I can't keep up. I can't keep up. All right, let's talk about wind power. There was a watershed event with a the largest solar farm, sorry, the largest wind farm, offshore wind farm, delivers first power to the grid. This story is in Riviera by David Foxwell from 24 March. What's the story?
• 30:48
  John Weaver: John? Virginia has a big power plant coming, the coastal Virginia offshore wind facility, seadow, and that's the biggest that's being developed in the US, and it's officially putting juice into the grid. And so that's the cool, neat headline. There's some little nuances around that I want to chat about, but it's just good that we're now seeing these plants move forward, especially after they are being so aggressively attacked by the current regime in Washington, DC. So this is just a big one.
• 31:24
  John Weaver: You know, the one that's off the coast of Massachusetts. I forgot the name of it right now. Starts with letter V, vineyard wind.
• 31:32
  John Weaver: It's fully online. Another one off of Rhode Island, feeding Connecticut and Rhode Island. I can't remember the name of it right now. On the tip of my tongue, it just started construction. One in New York is now delivering energy. So all five of these plants are moving along really nicely that Trump tried to try to stop, and that's just awesome. And this is the big one, and this big one's moving fast, and I think it's supposed to be done by the end of next year, but that's a lot of juice, and that's awesome.
• 32:03
  John Weaver: Yeah, $11.5
• 32:05
  Tim Montague: billion project.
• 32:05
  Tim Montague: It's a big
• 32:07
  John Weaver: project, yeah? So two things I want to add on real quick. So costs were increased for two reasons, one of them$228 million due to the suspension. And we talked about on the show when Trump shut down construction, right? They say it cost a quarter of a billion dollars Tim for that shutdown.
• 32:29
  John Weaver: Some of it was rental fees on boats. $5 million a day. Oh my gosh, 5 million bucks in a single day. Now the other one that they say is unsure, but they also paid $580 million in tariffs. Half a billion dollars in tariffs have been paid so far, and they're going to try and get it back, because they're going to sue. But even then, they paid half a billion the interest rate on a half a billion dollars in extra money spent over the course of a year.
• 33:00
  John Weaver: You know, five here, 580 million. Geez. Tim, 58880, there. Let's do one year at 0.08% that's $46 million in interest. Tim, so I would like that interest, if you could help me out there. You know anybody there, I'm sure you know somebody, Tim, that's
• 33:25
  Tim Montague: crazy sums of money at stake.
• 33:28
  John Weaver: It's just like goofy numbers.
• 33:30
  Tim Montague: And what I don't get is, you know, this is economic growth, this is jobs, this is tax revenue for local and state economies. It's so good for our economy and the future of our country. So why would anybody want to stop this stuff? I do not understand.
• 33:51
  John Weaver: Not anybody mentally stable, but I understand why he did it because, you know,
• 33:58
  Tim Montague: it's just politics. That's why
• 34:02
  John Weaver: it's worse than politics, let's
• 34:05
  Tim Montague: talk about perovskites, one of our favorite topics, GCL, Opto electronics wins China's first commercial perovskite silicon tandem PV module order.
• 34:19
  John Weaver: And the coolest part is that they have a warranty in it, a 25 year performance warranty that's similar to standard solar panels. I just want that was the key kicker in this article, and there's a couple key items in there that are really nice, but that was the key thing, because people were always like, what's the warranty? What's the warranty? That's the warranty.
• 34:41
  John Weaver: 25 year perovskite warranty in the wild.
• 34:49
  Tim Montague: Yeah. Now, granted, this is a fairly small project, 1.2 megawatt of solar modules, but story in PV magazine by Vincent Shaw March, 24 and it is cool. I have to say, it's cool to see these tandem perovskite modules hitting the market and getting contracts and coming to fruition. Obviously, this has been a long time in the coming and you, you know you were, you're excited about this 25 year warranty, because that's one of the challenges with perovskites, is keeping them, keeping them viable over time.
• 35:37
  Tim Montague: Granted, this is, this is tandem, and they're achieving 25% efficiencies. So so the the perovskite is, is just adding a couple of points of
• 35:51
  John Weaver: no efficiency, not in this one, not for GCL. GCL is a unique product in the perovskite space. So perovskites for GCL is like 19 to 20% efficiency, and the silicon is only like 10 that's what I learned covering GCL. If this is the same product that they they were showing off a year or two ago when I met with them in Germany, they actually have a 19% perovskite, because they said they, they said they knew how the silicon worked. So they wanted to just put simple base silicon, and then, okay, but the Delta,
• 36:24
  Tim Montague: the Delta achieved, right? Because we have commercial panels, commercial photovoltaics, that are 23% efficiency.
• 36:33
  John Weaver: 25 is the record.
• 36:33
  John Weaver: If you want to go to Ico, Ico is at 25% but that's like the top of a single layer.
• 36:41
  Tim Montague: Take. A risk of buying a a hybrid panel that's lesser known than a pure PV panel.
• 36:55
  John Weaver: Well, so number one, these panels will this is the first at 25 26% so this for G for whoever bought this, they were legally required to this is a dictation by the state government of China. Perovskites are coming. So right now they're at 25 26% this is the initial batch. This is what's minimal.
• 37:18
  John Weaver: In fact, they may start off the first delivery at 27 to 29% because I know that GCL was at 26% with this product two years ago, sure, and they're probably at 28 now. The the procurement said it had to be at least 25% so these companies are required to build this capacity as a state pushed thing now in three years, by 2030 these are going to be 30% there's already cells in the lab that are at 34% that means there's modules at 32% so that exists a 32% solar panel in the world, perovskite, tandem, whether it's finalized on a manufacturing line, I don't know. In fact, you know where I think it is, Tim that Maxwell Tesla article, I think they're going to bust out a 30% solar panel. I think that's where we're going to see a 30% solar panel first. I think that literally might be the first transaction where we have that.
• 38:16
  John Weaver: And it's that's going to be it.
• 38:21
  John Weaver: And every percent you increase your efficiency, you drop your levelized cost of electricity by about 5% so if you have the exact same hardware, the exact same everything outputting 1% more efficiency, almost 5% drop in the cost of electricity. So that's why you would take a risk going from 25 and now let's, let's also repeat something that 25 is super cutting edge.
• 38:51
  John Weaver: There's only, like 100 megawatts of capacity in the whole earth.
• 38:55
  John Weaver: Of that product maybe a gigawatt. So the majority of the stuff we're selling is in the 21 to 23% range. These days, I just bought some Canadian solars at 23.3% that's the highest percent I think I've ever bought. That's awesome. So really, we're jumping from 23 to 2623 to 30.
• 39:09
  John Weaver: That's a big jump. That's a 30% jump, that's a 15% price drop in electricity. And you know, the way the big players compete, they're competing on like, tenths of a cent per kilowatt hour. So, you know, dropping 5% for 1% that's awesome. What the goal, though, it's to drop 40% by going from 23 to 33 and that's what China's aiming for.
• 39:40
  John Weaver: They want to dominate the new technology. But when you say,
• 39:43
  Tim Montague: I just got to push back a little bit here, and when you say, an increase in in 1% efficiency yields a 5% reduction in L Coe, yes. Does that include the fact that the tandem solar technology is more expensive on the front end,
• 40:05
  John Weaver: it's not that's the key. The standard solar panel, it's going to cost you, you know, a 23% solar panel cost you 10 cents a watt, the layer to add, the perovskites you're going to add, let's say one cent per watt in cost, because you're only adding one film, only one or two machines, because you already have a massive manufacturing line, it costs, you know, 10 cents. Now you're going to add one machine, two machines that cost one to two pennies, but you're going to jump the efficiency and the wattage coming out of that solar panel by 1020, 30% so what's going to occur is that the same piece of hardware, it will cost more in absolute dollars. So the old solar panel costs 200 bucks.
• 40:53
  John Weaver: The new one's going to cost 220 but the price per watt is going to fall because that 200 to 220 adds 10% of cost. Well, if we add 2% of efficiency, that 10% of cost is equal to 10% more output. Now it's even now if we jump 10% efficiency, now, the price per watt is going to fall like I have another article I wrote where it was suggested that the price per watt of a perovskite module would be about eight cents a watt, whereas a standard module would be like 10 the perovskite tandem, and a pure perovskite module would be like five cents a lot, because perovskite is cheaper to make than silicon. So. The price per watt and the output of electricity will fall, even though the absolute dollar amount will go up by just a tiny bit. But it's not going up a lot. It really isn't. There's only a cup. And this is me reading, and it's evolving, but it's really it's only one or two or three machines out of, like, 40 machines that need to be added to the manufacturing lines to make this work. So, so it's not, it's not going to go up in cost right now. It might be, you know, these panels might be 2030, cents a lot, because they're coming off of 100 megawatt line, and there's only two companies making them, etc, etc. But that's going away. And that's it's going to be, it's going to be a cheaper product that's more efficient.
• 42:26
  Tim Montague: So you're predicting that in 10 years, all solar modules are going to be tandem,
• 42:32
  John Weaver: uh, 10. I mean, they should be, but I don't know there's, there's going to probably be reasons not to. I mean, we still have OLED modules at 10 to 15% that sell. Maybe there's just going to be reasons that we don't like perovskites in the world for some reason in certain applications.
• 42:53
  Tim Montague: Yeah, all right, let's talk about cleaning solar panels. Fraunhofer has some data showing that certain cleaning agents may actually negatively impact the production of solar modules. You know, when I think about cleaning solar modules, the rule of thumb that I've always heard is use deionized water. Period. That's still
• 43:21
  John Weaver: that's still it. It hasn't changed,
• 43:23
  Tim Montague: and that's all well and good if you have access to deionized water. That's my question. Is like when you have a massive solar facility out in the middle of nowhere and you have to truck deionized water to that facility, that's got to get expensive. But what? Why are people using other types of cleaning agents? The story is, Fraunhofer warned some cleaning agents may reduce PV module performance by up to 5% by Emiliano Bellini, our good friend at PV magazine.
• 43:59
  John Weaver: So what they did, they just looked at various chemical cleaners that were out there for cleaning glass,
• 44:07
  Tim Montague: like Windex, yeah, and,
• 44:10
  John Weaver: and some of them, though, were promoted as specifically for solar. And they're just looking at these common items and saying, all right, what are people using in the real world, and let's see how it works. And if you look at the story, there's actually a picture of the person who's using the cleaning agents, like spraying them on and stuff. If you find the original research, and they're just saying, Okay, what are people buying? What's really being purchased? Let's look at it. And they found that two of them actually damaged the solar panels, and it's like, wow. And, and that's not, obviously, that's not good. I mean, a loss of 5% we were just literally seconds ago talking about how valuable a gain of 5% was. Now it's like, or you want to take that 5% and just throw it in the trash. Here's one way to do it.
• 45:03
  Tim Montague: Yeah, the trouble appears to be that it damages these chemicals, may damage the anti reflective coating, leading to optical losses that translate into reduced PV performance. And this does kind of make sense to me. You know that anti reflective coating is a coating, and yes, you know, there's this other question of how much that coating is going to degrade over time. There's various elements within the solar panel that are degrading. The PV itself is degrading, but also these coatings. It's complicated.
• 45:36
  Tim Montague: Anything else about this that we should know?
• 45:45
  John Weaver: You know, it's funny, some people say you don't clean your panel. Some people say you do. It really comes down to where you're located. I've heard in the northeast, I hear at most once a year, unless you have a really dirty site. In the southwest, every six months or in the springtime, so that you clean yourself before the good season starts. But then also pay attention. To your local pollen, because pollen has a big effect.
• 46:11
  Tim Montague: In my mind, you definitely want to clean your solar panels once a year, at least, just your vertical Windows on a building get dirty.
• 46:17
  Tim Montague: That's why window washing is a thing. They accumulate grime and dust in bird droppings and solar modules are definitely exposed to all that stuff. Even more so, because they're at an angle, they're not vertical. I think the more vertical, the less problems you get with accumulation. And obviously, the more horizontal, the bigger the problem. Them, because there's just stuff falling out of the sky constantly, and depending on how much rain you have to wash that stuff off, which, luckily, here in the Midwest, we have lots of rain to naturally clean the solar modules. But even with that, you still have to clean the modules, yep. All right, should we do one more story?
• 47:06
  John Weaver: Oh, one. Let's see.
• 47:06
  John Weaver: Oh, wait, let's do a fast let's do two. We'll do one really fast, and then the second one's cool. Okay, so the first one is going to be the world's tallest wind turbine. I saw you go to that on the document you knew I was clicking on it, the world's tallest wind turbine, almost 1000 feet. Actually, more than 1000 feet is going up in Germany. It's going to be taller. It's going to be the second tallest building in this in the country. Wow. What about that 360 meters? Soon as 60 meters to feet, it's going to generate 300 it's 1100 feet.
• 47:41
  John Weaver: Tim, it's bigger than the let's see empire state building height. What date was this published?
• 47:51
  Tim Montague: Tim, this is from April 1.
• 47:57
  John Weaver: So it's a size of the Empire State Building a wind turbine. And look at that. And it's going to go up and down.
• 48:03
  John Weaver: It's going to have an elevator that lifts it and lowers it.
• 48:09
  Tim Montague: So when you asked about the date, though, is there some gotcha about this?
• 48:15
  John Weaver: It's April 1 Tim April Fool's Day. Come on. You gotta laugh more.
• 48:24
  Tim Montague: Well, now I'm confused, because the story looks totally legit, but look how tall that thing is. It does seem a little extreme,
• 48:36
  John Weaver: and be the tallest thing. And look at the size of that base. That's like the size of a building. Man, the tall is the Empire State Building. So there's a video down there. Do they
• 48:47
  Tim Montague: admit it in the story? Though, that it's that is not true.
• 48:50
  John Weaver: I don't think so. I looked it up. Then they have a telescoping device that, once it's built, then it's gonna go.
• 49:00
  John Weaver: There's no way that this would be financially viable or stay.
• 49:03
  John Weaver: But look how gorgeous this would be. Just look at it. Look at that going up, man, there we go.
• 49:09
  John Weaver: You could live in that thing like you could build like a 20 person, 20 apartment building in there and just live there. I just thought it was April 1. It was funny. It does look real.
• 49:25
  John Weaver: It's great article. They did some good stats that led me share it. Not a single person on the internet said it was fake. I just I knew it was fake. But anyway, so April 1, all right, last story of the day, Tim, a gentleman named Ben, built a plug in solar system for 66 cents a watt AC. Technically, it was even cheaper on the DC. But I just wanted to bring that up because Ben Paulos, he's a guy who I know on blue sky online, and he put, built this system.
• 50:02
  John Weaver: He bought the modules used. It's he was aiming for 65 cents a watt, but he actually got it to 6667 cents. And it's just a cool story. It showed him going through the process. And he's really big into legislation.
• 50:15
  John Weaver: He's a consultant in the helping politicians understand solar. So he's like, he's big in it, but it's cool to see, it's really cool to see somebody who's in the biz, who isn't normally an installer, getting to get on a roof and do it for real and touch it like, that's one of the neat things I think about. Plug in solar. It might do. It might bring people closer to solar in a different way than they would have been. You know, because nobody sees my solar projects, they're like commercial solar.
• 50:47
  John Weaver: What do you mean? I don't see that in the world. You're right.
• 50:49
  John Weaver: They're all a bunch of flat buildings. We don't exist. We build it. We go away. At least residential solar, you see it.
• 50:54
  John Weaver: So this is just kind of a neat way for people to touch solar and and it. And Ben just goes through it. He goes through every way he did it, where he found the solar panels, where he bought the gear, what he did and everything, and that he did it on his friend's house instead of his own house, because he said, That's really smarter. Don't do it on your house first.
• 51:16
  Tim Montague: I feel sorry for his friend, but yeah, good story from Ben Bentham Paulos in TV Magazine from March 27 the theory and practice of plug in solar. Did this? This table from go sun? Did you look at that table?
• 51:32
  John Weaver: I saw pictures of it. I've seen them floating around. They're out there. Solar Panel tables. They're like on the internet here and there.
• 51:37
  John Weaver: I've never bought one. I should scroll up a. You can see it right there. There you go. This out to the woods Logan. And they have others. They have other tables too. I've seen from them.
• 51:48
  John Weaver: There's big tables of like a 600 watt panel. I've seen out in the world. They're out there. Lots of cool gear, man. But I like balcony solar. I'm worried about it. I hope it doesn't take away from big solar getting built, because people think, Oh, I've installed my panel. I don't care anymore. You know, we got to go away from that, because everybody's gotta do like, 15 kilowatts of panels. We really want to do stuff.
• 52:18
  Tim Montague: I don't think it's gonna kill solar. I think it opens, I think it opens a market that is here to foreclosed renters, being a big one, people that can't afford a full system.
• 52:36
  Tim Montague: You know, those people are just never going to go solar. So balcony solar is a great gateway for them and a way to reduce their power bill with much less out of pocket. That and community solar, I mean, it's both, and I think they're both cool and important. And, you know, obviously, balcony solar is on a tear right now. I wish community solar was on the same tear. It feels to me like balcony solar is on a bigger tear than community solar, but we only have a handful of community solar, real community solar markets in the US today.
• 53:16
  Tim Montague: It's true. Balconies coming all right. Well, check out all of our content at cleanpowerhour.com Tell a friend about the show. That's the best thing you can do to help others find this content. And with that, I'll say, how can our listeners find you?
• 53:31
  John Weaver: John, you can come to one Broadway in Cambridge, can knock on the front door of the building and then get access to the 11th floor of the CIC building, and then come visit my office in downtown Cambridge, Massachusetts, or you can email me at John, at commercial solar guy, you go to our website, commercial solar guy, calm, there's a lot of ways to find me. I'm around. I'll be at Chase tonight at six drinking a beer.
• 53:58
  John Weaver: You can join Tim,
• 54:00
  Tim Montague: all right. Well, we'll be back in two weeks on the 17th, I'll be coming to you live from Tennessee, Tennessee, from A to be announced location, but that should be a very interesting event. And I want to thank you, John, for bringing us so many great stories. With that, I'll say, let's grow solar and storage. Thank you so much.