Clean Power Hour LIVE January 4, 2024 w/ John Weaver & Tim Montague

Tim Montague: 0:38

And we are live. Welcome to the Clean Power Hour live today is January 4 2024. And we are going to be breaking down some of the best news from 2023. And some prognostications for 2024. And check out all of our content at clean power hour.com Give us a rating and a review on Apple and Spotify and tell a friend about the show. I want our listeners to know that I'm headed to California for 10 days, I'll be in San Diego, January nine to 19 going to Ari plus community power and inner solar. So please, if you're going to be in California, reach out to me. We'd love to connect with you and have a coffee or a beer. With that being said, welcome to the show. My co host John Weaver commercial solar guy. Welcome,

John Weaver: 1:27

Tim. Nice to talk to you. Happy New Year. Happy holidays. Merry Christmas.

Tim Montague: 1:31

Happy New Year.

John Weaver: 1:32

Some time I did.

Tim Montague: 1:35

What did you do for the holidays?

John Weaver: 1:38

Among other things, I rented a Tesla from Hertz, which was cool. Yeah. around that. And I have no charge. supercharger anxiety. They're always they're always full up and down the East Coast. It's like everywhere in Florida. It's great. It's good time. And so so that that's that's the most relevant to this Clean Power Hour podcast of ours is that I drove a great Tesla in South Florida. And it was nice and easy.

Tim Montague: 2:06

Normally you're driving a Kia right?

John Weaver: 2:10

Within Hyundai. Hyundai ionic five.

Tim Montague: 2:13

Yeah. And is, is supercharging a problem when you're traveling long distance on it with the Ionic,

John Weaver: 2:19

it's a little more challenging. There is no Supercharger network, there's fast DC charging. And if you combo, all of the ones that are out there, you can get it done. But if you just want to go say on Electrify America, which is supposed to be free for me for the first two years, then it's kind of a headache, because there's not as many. Sometimes they're full, but you figure it out and you get it done. But there's no anxiety with the Tesla. And you can and there's a lot more with the ionic you have to plan you have to think about it with a Tesla. It's like just go. Right? The car does it the car does it very fluidly. The ionic you as a human being have to do a little bit of work and oh my goodness. I just want to lay back and cruise.

Tim Montague: 3:01

Yeah. And Tesla's opening up their network, though, is that is that happening on the East Coast yet where they're allowing other vehicles to charge the network?

John Weaver: 3:10

So I charged at a Tesla, in downstate, near this nearing this New York City? Via what's it called a magic plug or something with my Ionic and it worked fine. It was a little slow. And there was a software thing I found online limits it to like 42 kWh 42 kW, so it's not a fast charge. But I think I saw in the headlines at January 1, it was supposed to open wider and be more broadly, we'll see. But yeah, it's supposed to be happening. Yeah.

Tim Montague: 3:42

I mean, these little things they matter. And yeah, that is one thing that Tesla got, right. They built a lot of chargers and they made the car find the Chargers very easily and it tells you hey, okay, you're going to charge here and here and boom, and it just works otherwise, I can't say I miss my Tesla, but I don't drive an Eevee anymore and and so I don't have range anxiety because there's gas stations everywhere. Someday I dream about owning a Kia I think that Kia Evie design is brilliant, but thinking

John Weaver: 4:18

isn't cool. I almost got the Kia Evie six. I walked into the Kia first, it just looked neater in the images. But the salesperson tried to toss like a$15,000 $10,000 plus markup on me. I was like alright, so yeah. He's like you'd like it's 70 G's. I'm like, no, just No, it's not spending.

Tim Montague: 4:41

Right? Yeah, yep.

John Weaver: 4:42

I just walked away from that with Tesla.

Tim Montague: 4:44

Right. We could talk all day about EVs. But we should probably talk about some other stuff. I I had the pleasure of listening to Barry cinnamons recent show where he makes some prognostications for 2024. Barry cinnamon is a solar installer in the Bay Area. Real OG I mean, he got into solar in the 90s. And he has a show called the Energy show. So check that out. I think it's energy show the energy show dot biz is the show's website or cinnamon energy as cinnamon Energy Solutions is the name of his company and Barry's really into electrification of everything, John, and that's kind of one of the themes, I think that we're gonna see in the solar industry, a growing drumbeat of emphasis on electrification of everything because, for example, we saw the collapse of the residential solar market and California in 2023, thanks to nem 3.0, right? They dinged net metering by 75% which makes solar worth less and and so the payback periods longer right and so consumers go man, I don't you know, 12 year payback, I can't get excited about that. I don't know if I'm gonna be in my house in 12 years. But what that does is it increases the importance of batteries. And the it increases the importance of other things that installers can install, like heat pump water heaters, or heat pump furnaces, you know, for HVAC, or evey charging infrastructure. So that is a theme I think that we are just going to see a lot of news and emphasis on. And then also, installers moving from resi into other segments of the industry from resi into CNI for example commercial industrial solar, which I think is a great opportunity for resi installers reach out to me if you're a resi installer and you want to become a commercial installer. That's one of my niches, I help installers develop the tools and technologies that they need to have in house in order to really attack commercial solar. But what's on your short list of prognostications for 2024, John?

John Weaver: 6:57

Big things for 24 is energy storage is going to keep growing, we're going to see low pricing of modules reverberate to the market, a little more energy storage prices are down again, you might start to see some record. Low price PPAs. Again, the United States apparently is going to see a huge amount of solar installed and turned on this year, a lot of it slipped from last year and into this next year. But next year, we're going to see, you know, projects that are started breaking ground this year turned on and next year, and so the pressure will actually because we're gonna start compressing the years, we're gonna see real pressure on labor, probably real soon, maybe we'll see equipment, stuff start to bother us again, because the growth will be a little more aggressive. The big number this year is gonna be like 37 gigs of solar 33. Huge number, but some of that slipped from last year. So the labor was done last year. But next year, we're gonna have a number that's I think, bigger than this number United States. And that's going to happen within the proper year. And so we're gonna have like, this year might be a big year for might be a big year for people trying to turn on projects, we could drive, which could drive everybody down the supply chain. So might be the first time we start seeing demand driven. Something for hardware for labor happen in the United States demand driven challenges on the industry could be interesting.

Tim Montague: 8:35

I'm not sure I follow.

John Weaver: 8:37

Oh, so like if we have to get the 37 gigs that are getting deployed this year? Or last year, sorry, 37 games was deployed.

Tim Montague: 8:46

30. Isn't it more like 30 and 23? My

John Weaver: 8:50

assault was 33. Okay, and I saw something else that said 35. And I don't know where the heck I'm getting 37 from?

Tim Montague: 8:56

Yeah, I think 37 might be the forecast for 2024. But well,

John Weaver: 9:02

let's just say this, let's say to this year was 30 to 33. And next year is 37. Or say 20. Fours 37. See top, Tim, I still don't know what year I'm in. But let's say we did 30, the 33 and 23 and 37. In 24. Well, the 30, the 33 that was deployed in 1923, or 2023 G's. Part of it was built in 22. Sure, we had a downturn. And so the resources, both human and machine and hardware, their purchase was spread over a two year window, some percentage of our 30 to 33 was done last year, which means we only had to deploy the people power of say 25 gigs of solar, maybe 20 gigs of solar, because so much of it came from last year, maybe like seven gigs worth maybe we didn't do 30 We did maybe we didn't do 33 Maybe we did 24 This year, and 20 fours are closer to maximum were 27. Somewhere in that range next year, though. Yeah, we're which is this year. We're projected to do like 37 to 40

Tim Montague: 10:19

Yeah, yeah, so I just put a carry media story carry media well known clean economy outlet covered this. We apparently did exceed 30 in 2023. They they're saying around 33 I guess and then looks like 37 to me for 2024 right And the orange is resi the purple or whatever that is, is non residential meaning commercial. And then the yellow is utility. Now,

John Weaver: 10:49

you see this big jump from 22 to 23. Right? That should have been a smoother thing. Yeah. And that means this this big thing and 23 some piece of it should be chopped off.

Tim Montague: 11:01

That was because of the IRA basically, right? Absolutely.

John Weaver: 11:05

Yeah, Ira hardware pricing being still up. Remember, in 22, we were in a time of modules cost and 55 cents. Now that same product, you can buy it for 20 sets. So, you know, a lot of things happened in 22. That slowed that down. And so next year, we're now we're gonna jump and you know, what would max always the conservative one, so? So would Mac things 40 or 37? I'm saying 42.

Tim Montague: 11:34

Okay, fair enough. Fair enough.

John Weaver: 11:38

Big, big vulnerable.

Tim Montague: 11:42

Yeah, I mean, I think we're headed Are we headed to 100 gigawatt territory in the next five years, something like that? Well,

John Weaver: 11:52

you know, I don't have us numbers. But I totally have a story on the docket, where I want to pontificate on maybe what's happening next year and beyond. And what some people think,

Tim Montague: 12:05

Oh, well, what's that story? We may as well segue to that I want to let's, let's keep this keep this thread. That

John Weaver: 12:11

sounds wonderful. So so the next story is, could we see four terawatts of solar deployed almost in 2030? Okay. Mathematically, it is possible. And it follows along some very clear logic that we can show and I tried to lay it out in my little storybook here. And many challenges, of course. But you know, if we, if we look at how the world has grown over the last 20 years, 40 years, actually, and I show a nice, beautiful graph, where I tried to describe it. So this is, so this is the volume deployed. This is starting in 2010. And this is going to 2023, we can see something happening here at the end, of course, the bottom is being driven by China. So significantly, yep. But we see it definitely growing. Now, if we go down to the next image, we can see what this looks like on a logarithmic scale. over this time period, we've had a consistent growth rate. There are definitely some periods where it fell below and it had to catch up, including recently, but it was close. And then it really caught up. And it's now kind of passive. If something like this, were to continue, go to the next page, go to the next image. Right now we are we can skip that one. Yeah, if something like this starts to continue, this is an analysis done by ua dolmar. And he sees 3.8 ish gigs to be deployed in 2030. And this is just a continuation of a doubling of capacity deployed roughly two plus ish years. That's big volume. That's almost four gigs. See that gray one. That gray bar is almost four gigs, and the first terawatt

Tim Montague: 14:08

for round terawatts.

John Weaver: 14:11

terawatts. terawatt, sir. Yeah, skip those gigs. measly little gigawatts. do that every day, man casual.

Tim Montague: 14:20

So we hit we hit a terawatt of of new solar installed in 2023. Is that the deal?

John Weaver: 14:28

No. No, early 22. The first terawatt was in early 22.

Tim Montague: 14:35

of global installed base. Yes, yeah.

John Weaver: 14:40

Yeah. And our next one will be in like 2720 26. Maybe this year, actually. I mean, if we did the first one in 22, and then we installed another 250, we knock off let's say we did 200. So we're at 1.2, at the end of 22. And then this year, we did say 350. So now we're at 1.55. Next year, we need 4.5 450. And I've seen estimates of 550 to 600. This year, we've hit our second terawatt probably. So scroll down a tiny bit. This is deployed capacity in that calendar year based on his team's analysis, cetera, et cetera.

Tim Montague: 15:30

Cool. Yeah, so globally, we will start deploying, potentially a terawatt per year and 2026 And then to two terawatts and 2028. And almost a four by 2030. Yeah, you know, the the grid it both here in the United States and globally is going to be 50%. Solar by 2050. Give or take a few years. And it's the fastest growing source of clean power on the grid. I mean, it's amazing, John.

John Weaver: 16:02

It's fast source of power on the grid, not clean power power. Yeah.

Tim Montague: 16:06

Right. It's amazing how much bigger solar is than wind now. I think we installed seven gigawatts of wind in the United States in 2023. While we were in selling 30 gigawatts of solar, now there's a bigger install base of wind. Right. So solar is playing catch up. Solar is having its heyday. And but we're going to eclipse when will we be eclipsed it on an annual basis? I think the total wind is going to be a little less than solar like 40%. But anyway, together wind and solar will be 90% of the grid. And some people want to install nuclear reactors, John, but I'm not one of them. too slow, too expensive.

John Weaver: 16:50

Yeah, well, I think we should still be installing them. It's a big power grid market.

Tim Montague: 16:55

On Mars. Yeah. On Mars. It's a great place for nuclear power plant.

John Weaver: 16:59

Sure. But we need to start here. We need to mount we got my military bases. We got them everywhere. We need to rebuild. And so we need to build something of everything. We got there's more than enough energy, money, energy investment, strategic requirements. You know, there's there's enough, there's enough

Tim Montague: 17:14

even Dan sugar thinks nuclear is a no bueno. Have you been following Dan sugars? Uncle Bob conversations with Uncle Bob? I haven't. I haven't Oh, check it out on LinkedIn. Go to go to next truckers page on LinkedIn. I'll find it if I can here. But it's a funny. It's a funny, little vignette series that he's been doing conversations with Uncle Bob, explaining things like, Oh, we don't have enough real estate? Well, yes, we have enough real estate, we only need 100 square miles right to completely green the grid with solar. I can't remember all the questions he answers but he answers to common questions that consumers have. And you know, what about nuclear? And the answer is, well, nuclear is just four times as expensive as solar. You can do it. We know how to do it. It's not a question of the technology. It's a question of the cost. And that's and the time and time is super precious John, we're at 420 ppm, bro, we got to get back to 300. How are we going to get back to 300? That's the thing, John, I'm excited about being a clean energy professional. And I love helping clean energy companies grow and become part of the clean economy and green the grid. That's all very important work. But net zeroing the economy is 40 gigatons of pollution. Net getting back to 300 ppm is a trillion tons.

John Weaver: 18:44

So in that article, there's a person who suggested we should be doing 63 terawatts of solar globally, which would be like 90% of energy, okay. When I talked about this article online, there's another person who said 400 terawatts of solar, because since fuels from co2, myself, I want to see nuclear powered desalinization and DAC, maybe if we're going to keep building stuff and keep experimenting, and then we'll have it with solar and then we'll have it with wind, it all plugs into the grid and it just runs. And I don't want that to be injecting co2 into the ground. I want us to be using it as building materials. I think there's an an invented technology of recombining co2. See this word? You know, I don't know anything about physics and chemistry. But the reason well, biology

Tim Montague: 19:46

is the answer, my friend, it's not planting trees, but it's putting iron in the ocean iron, ocean iron fertilization, as Peter kowski has demonstrated, you like a lot in his book, climate restoration, check out Peter for kowski.com. Peter is an astrophysicist. He ran the numbers. And the ocean is the answer. It covers 70% of the earth. Right? So it's a massive, massive amount of territory. And we have another great natural experiment called Mount Pinatubo in the 90s. That exploded big volcano, and it pumped a bunch of dust and iron and other things into the atmosphere sulfuric acid, but it will flatlined the global ppm of co2 in the atmosphere because of the iron that we and into the ocean. So we digress though, John, thank you for your story in PV magazine, we always want to call out the source, great story and PV magazine. And you have another story here. Oh, I found this story. Most read articles of 2023. I want to quickly go through this by Ryan Kennedy. And Ryan is prolific. So we're grateful for Ryan's work. And if I can only become more astute with the screenshare top 10 most read articles in the US and this and this resonates with Barry's list, which will harken back to hear throughout the show today. But some of the most popular stories, how long do residential solar panels last quick answer is a long time 20 to 30 years. California proposes blatant seizure of property and solar ruling. There's a lot going on in California. And I'm wondering is the CPUC just corrupt or asleep at the wheel. I mean, they're a very sophisticated organization. I'm just not sure why they're doing things like dinging solar for multifamily or multimeter. You know, we call this meter aggregation. And this is a thing in many markets where it is allowed for the landlord to become the power company. This makes great sense in multifamily housing or in warehouses, right 90% of commercial real estate is third party owned. And if the landlord could become the power company, then they are incentivized to upgrade the facility and put solar on that facility. Right. I don't know if you have any comments about meter aggregation is that loud in Massachusetts?

John Weaver: 22:19

Sort of, yeah, there's rules, you got to play with it. But you can do a, we have virtual power plants, different things like that we can't do this smoothly as, say, fill out a piece of paper. And you can take over all the bills cleanly and quickly. But there are ways to manage it via what we call the schedule Z. And it's essentially virtual net virtual net metering things like that to do

Tim Montague: 22:46

with it, we're gonna we're gonna have to get Canalys back on the show, see how things are going with James Geshe Wyler, and there's a company that I haven't had on the show, but I want to call energy 311. And there's, there's a family of companies that are doing this, but energy 311 specializes in this meter aggregation. And so they do the heavy lifting, it's just computers, right? You're, you instead of having 10 sub meters, you have one, you know, one landlord has all the meters now and then sells the power to the to the tenants. And then it's incentivized to, to, you know, solarize their facility. So anyway, let's keep going down this list, California rooftop installations dropped 80%, following nem 3.0. If you're not paying attention to the residential solar market, nationally, you may this story may have escaped you, but you'd really have to be asleep at the wheel, but nem 3.0 really put a nail in the coffin of residential solar. And you know, they saw this coming when they when nem. Three was passed in 2022. And then it was implemented in 2023. And it reduces the value of solar electrons by 75%. And the scary thing is, John, is that Barry cinnamon among others, okay, very smart guy, who knows the industry is, you know, predicting that this is the future of other markets in the US. And as I like to say on the show, what happens in California is going to happen elsewhere. California is the bellwether, when it comes to clean energy, California and Hawaii. So this does incentivize people to use batteries, battery, attachment rates have gone up, I think, to 70%. I don't know if this says that stat here, but

John Weaver: 24:32

I got that stat. Actually, I saw yesterday. Yeah.

Tim Montague: 24:37

And so you know, you do have, if you do solar and storage, then there is a value stack there that that gives you a reasonable payback. But that cash outlay, of course, is much greater, it's a bigger complex project. So, you know, luckily, we have companies like Sunrun that are going to do this, you know, as a lease, or PPA and make it affordable. But it's is you know, solar and storage is is is a big, a big buy. It's you know, it's at least a $60,000 project probably. And that's out of reach of most consumers. But anyway, then 3.0 That is what is incentivizing installers to innovate and to transition their businesses into other segments of the economy. Here we have great incentives for heat pumps, for example. And so if you can install solar panels, and then you can do meter, you can do service upgrades. Okay, install a bigger service to the facility, install heat pump furnace or heat pump water heater, and Evie, charging infrastructure, those are going to be good opportunities for installers. It's electrical infrastructure, and there's good incentives. So that's I think the trend that is going to become a national trend, frankly, Indiana killed net metering. Indiana was not a big DGX state to begin with. But, but now it's an even smaller DGX state, unfortunately. And that is my birth state. So it is near and dear to my heart. I am a Hoosier. But anyway, don't don't plan on being a solar installer in Indiana, if you're an Indiana company you're working in, in Illinois, or Michigan or maybe Wisconsin. What was that number for attachment rates with storage in California now.

John Weaver: 26:24

So I put the link to the tweet in there, and its battery tax rate is flying upward to 25%. As of November, it actually took a little while before it really started to move. So I wonder what changes have occurred. But it is very, very, I mean, just directly up. And you know, it's also actually, if you look at the chart above it, the total amount isn't up a huge amount. In fact, it was last month where the total amount of batteries was up a huge amount. It's just that total approvals is down so much, that the percent that are actually going through is really high. So it's really a story of sadness. So you got to show up look at this graph is really kind of a lot. I know

Tim Montague: 27:16

where the link is. Oh, I see it now. Okay, let's see. So I'm going to share this tab now. And we're looking at this bar graph. The red is NEM, 3.0. Pretty Okay, battery attachment rate. Okay. Unfortunately, through

John Weaver: 27:37

the roof, you're like, Oh, that's so awesome. Yeah. But if you look at the top, the red dots, yeah, that's the battery attachment. Now, that's number three. But the number of projects that are down, that are submitted is so far down, that that rate can double from last month, but it also fell 33%. So it's really like, I don't know, I guess the percentage rate is way up. But the total number of projects is down. So it's,

Tim Montague: 28:08

yeah, you saw an artificial bump in projects. They they slammed projects through in the spring, to beat out the nem 3.0. Right to get grandfathered into nem 2.0, which is why you see the spike in the spring of 2023. But then you see it fall, fall fall. And now we're What 63% lower than we were or something like that. It's it's it's a big dip. But anyway. Let's keep moving here. California's electricity duck curve is deepening, you know, as you clean the grid, the duck curve. Sorry,

John Weaver: 28:46

back. Yes. Switch back to the article. We're looking at the Yeah, there we go. Wonderful. California

Tim Montague: 28:51

duck curve is deepening. And that's because you know, as you as you increase the amount of wind and solar, it creates a duck curve. The only way to attack that is with batteries. Really.

John Weaver: 29:05

They are rolling out batteries through up to like six seven gigawatts of capacity. And if it's almost four per hour, we're talking 24 to 20, a gigawatt hours. So they're deploying massive amount of batteries. In fact, the next article is about that. Great.

Tim Montague: 29:24

How long do residential batteries last five to 10 years? I was when I was talking about five to 15 years. Yeah, I mean, it the technology there is there is a variety of technology. I say listen to Barry cinnamon. He does a breakdown on his podcast of of what he considers to be the tried and true providers. Franklin seems to be the one of the most popular solutions of late but there's there's a handful of them blue Eddie is in the resi storage space now. I'm excited about that. I'm a blue Edie customer I have a mobile portable battery by blue Eddie but story about Virginia Governor killing the Ford ca TL battery plant. Calling it a front for the Chinese Communist Party. Well, yes, the ATL is the largest battery company in the world. If I was governor, I'd want a $3 billion $3.5 billion project in my state. But apparently, Glenn Younkin did not want that project. So who knows? I don't know if you have any comment about battery factories, John.

John Weaver: 30:33

i It's really political when you I mean, I get it, you know, politics, politics, there's 50 states 50 governors. A battery project was also put on hold in Michigan, I believe that was associated with similar political sentiments. And the governor is very different there. But there were local, local, super local push back. So I don't know. It's interesting thing to watch worlds complex.

Tim Montague: 31:05

Yeah. You know,

John Weaver: 31:07

it's tough, a

Tim Montague: 31:08

lot of factories. On the drawing board question, just a question of how many will actually get built. And then they had a roundtable on rooftop solar policy. So check that out. I haven't listened to that roundtable. But it is, I'm sure worth a listen, if you're working in California, especially. But like I said, and Barry cinnamon says, this is the future for other markets. So you want to pay attention to California, and how they're, they're basically having a major tug of war with the utilities. We all have tug of wars. This is just a colossal tug of war. And then higher yields and vertical PV I'm sure you will be very excited to see this. And maybe you wrote about this. I don't know John. But the Netherland organization for applied scientific research discovered that vertical solar gets better production than you might expect. Have you ever done a Helia scope with a solar at 90 degrees? I have. And what kind of a of a what is that called? The kWh per kW up? Do you get with a vertical solar panel in Massachusetts? Is it like 500 kWh per kW P or?

John Weaver: 32:28

Yes, like it's above? It's above 1100. Okay,

Tim Montague: 32:35

because in Illinois rooftop solar a 10 degree like flat roof, commercial solar, which we would put a 10 or five degrees, right? You get 1200 kWh per kW up in Illinois in the Chicagoland area. And as you move that tilt up, of course, you're gonna, you're, you're gonna peak at 30 Okay, in Illinois, that's the peak basically. But then as you go to 90, you would expect that to drop. But apparently it's worthwhile. You know, the shocking thing for me was I ran a Helia scope in England. And the insulation, the kWh per kW P was horrible. It was like 600 Because England is very cloudy and it's very far north.

John Weaver: 33:19

But I think the further north you go the nicer it should be. But I don't know that answer

Tim Montague: 33:25

for vertical right? Yeah, vertical for vertical. Yeah, I haven't done it vertical Helia scope myself. What is the end I have been talking to a mechanical installer called Sunstar. Shout out to Helga beer Nath who's I think German, but he works in California, and he works across the United States doing basically d G, ground mount solar, you know, one to 20 megawatt racking, he does, piles, racking and module installation, but he also has a partnership with vertical racking company called sons bow, which I'd never heard of. But there's another racking company that I know that you've been in touch with that is targeting vertical, what is the name of that company? Do you know off the top of your head? Oh,

John Weaver: 34:11

geez, son,

Tim Montague: 34:13

son something.

John Weaver: 34:14

Yeah, of course. Everything sounds something vertical. Racking. Okay.

Tim Montague: 34:20

Well, well, yeah, we'll find it. So that was a nice roundup of the most popular stories. And there's some overlap there with with, with berries list. For example, residential solar revenues in California will plunge by 50%. According to Barry, that example, that's a big number. Yep. He also expects a national solar installer to go bankrupt. So there will be turmoil, right. A fast growing economy is one that has currents and eddies and blood on the floor. But that is just how capitalism works. Oh, interestingly, Barry predicts that Tesla will claw its way into the US residential inverter business. I didn't know that Tesla was working on residential solar inverters but I thought they were in the CNI inverter space, I think but well, they do

John Weaver: 35:29

definitely have a residential and it's definitely out there and it's taking over markets bear market. Okay. So yeah, which was surprising to me, I just didn't expect it to pop up. And I don't know, it's just I knew I knew, you know, a long time ago, they talked about being amazing inverter designers with their car. And what I was always hoping was a unified architecture between car charging, solar and battery, and a pure DC line from the sunlight to the car battery, I've been told that it's not really viable because inverters within the car, but maybe you could put a special plug. But, and so it never really happened the way I envisioned it. But what has occurred now within the Tesla home solar storage, of vehicular connection is that there has been a unifying of the platform, the solar, the inverter as an AC output, Max is an eight and eight 11.5 Kw AC inverter, and the Powerwall three can put out 11.5 Kw AC, the cybertruck. can charge are to vehicle to house at 11.5 Kw AC Yeah. And so there's now an aligning of the of the of the platform. And that kind of excites me because I would love to see a very well aligned solar plus storage plus vehicle platform. And it's 11.5 Kw AC. That seems like a good number. Yes, for residential

Tim Montague: 37:20

like, yeah, yeah. And the battery in a cybertruck is like 120 kWh. It's a lot of juice. You can you could run your house for a week on that. And

John Weaver: 37:31

wonder if you could take that little backup extra battery and like put it on the floor in your garage, and have it be the battery backup. Because there's an extra add on that are like 15 or 16 grand somebody estimated it to be based on some hacks code. Yeah. And it's like 40 kWh, so like, it's good price must

Tim Montague: 37:51

be heavy. How do you how do you lift that thing?

John Weaver: 37:54

Oh, yeah, good point. I guess you need a forklift.

Tim Montague: 37:58

I wonder if two people could lift it. Because I thought the battery in my model Y was 1500 pounds. That was a 60 kWh battery. And that was my recollect recollection that weighed 1500 pounds.

John Weaver: 38:11

You just got to do more squats, Tim,

Tim Montague: 38:13

I guess. Squat curls? I do a lot of squats because I play a lot of pickleball Oh, here you go. That was the highlight of my year. I did a lot of sailing and played a lot of pickleball in 2023. And I think I sailed in seven regattas.

John Weaver: 38:33

That's cool. That's dangerous. No,

Tim Montague: 38:35

not really. When you crash, you fall in the water. Well, and you were a lifer. So you were a flotation device. You don't drowned? I mean, accidents could happen, of course. But no, generally it's not that dangerous. It's a lot safer than driving a car. I think.

John Weaver: 38:57

You better All right, good. Got it. This

Tim Montague: 39:01

regatta Regatta. All right. You got a story about large scale battery storage, right? Yes.

John Weaver: 39:09

And I think we're at the beginning of scenes, and there's some cool graphs in there. I think we're at the beginning of seeing energy storage scale in goofy ways, like solar has been scaling. Sure. And, and the factories are coming online. And it just makes sense that it might happen now. And I think they're, I think even this person is already under estimating the year after that, but it's energy storage. So first off the number, they just have a number that they give, it's like, oh whiz bang, the What's his capacity? So they're, um, 53 gigawatts, and 128 gigawatt hours of capacity. And, you know, that's like one second of capacity. But really, you only need like, of global number. I mean, we can figure that out real fast. Actually, if we wanted to. That was like 29 kilowatt hours or something. 29,000 gigawatt hours, terawatt hours. And so it's grown. But look at the last two years. Look at 21 to 2200. Plus, we'll get 22 to 2300 plus 24 I don't know why it's not gonna be 100 plus again. And from the estimations I'm seeing for manufacturing capacity, like I see this one And it could be that cars are gonna eat it up. But I'm seeing that battery factory announcements or something like 10 terawatt hours approaching 2020 2032, something like that. And this is hundreds. This is 100 gigawatt hours. So point one terawatt hours, 10 terawatt hours. So we have 10. Coming. That's to two factors. That's two big jumps. It's good talk the talk. It sounds like one to 10 is like, what, four doublings, one to two to four, four to eight, eight to something. And then I guess you got two more, that's like six doublings to go from one to two to that number. And, and that's why I initially had stuck this one right next to the three terawatts of solar panels for terawatts of solar panels. I stuck them next to each other because I was like, Cool. These two numbers next to each other. These two articles make sense. But it's like we could be in the beginnings of an accelerated accelerated movement forward accelerated energy transition.

Tim Montague: 41:58

Yeah, I read a story about I wrote a story in 2023, about grid scale energy storage. And the statistic that stands out for me is that we, the Berkeley National Laboratory estimates we need six terawatt hours of battery storage to clean the grid, so to speak. And when I calculated was that would be 100x of what we have today. So in any case, we are installing a lot of batteries, it's clearly taking off from 22 to 23 was a big jump 133% in kWh, right, globally. And then they're estimating a slightly slower rate from 23 to 24. By always do

John Weaver: 42:41

that, why does everybody else do that? You know why they get serious? And they're like, ah, we can't estimate such foolish growth. Again, that wouldn't make sense. And but it always happens, and they're always wrong.

Tim Montague: 42:56

Could be could be.

John Weaver: 42:59

And not everybody. But actually, everybody.

Tim Montague: 43:06

So any other takeaways from this? I mean, these are nice graphs. I don't know, it's, it's hard to put this in context. But were the the the takeaway for me is we're still just scratching the surface with energy storage, but it's very important. It does, it is truly the way to attack the duck curve. And it's so it's good for grid operators. You know, just look at Texas, there's as much storage in the queue in ERCOT, as there is solar. And there's a reason for that it's good for the grid, and the grid operator is is incentivizing that right. Well, I'm gonna say that

John Weaver: 43:40

everybody should be watching storage, you should be watching it. And if you really wanted to get a job, right now, you should jump into storage because it's gonna grow stupidly fast. And it's gonna go from 120, whatever, 20 413 gigawatts this year or whatever was 100 gigawatt hours. And in four years, it's gonna be at a terawatt, because this year, the next year, it's gonna be like 200 plus, and then in 26, that's 427. That's eight. You know, now you're at a terawatt well before the end of the decade, and it's probably gonna go faster than that, because that's just the way it works. So I think I think energy storage is gonna grow faster from from a lower base, of course, but grow faster than solar right now. But the two in tandem, that's the magic. That's the magic right there. Yeah, that's now

Tim Montague: 44:40

do we want to cover this story about New South Wales? World's world's largest eight hour lithium battery approved in New South Wales arc energies to 35 megawatt 2200 megawatt hour lithium iron phosphate. Okay, so LFP batteries to be built in northern northern New South Wales has been announced. Yeah, I mean, the Australians are early adopters of storage for sure, right. And

John Weaver: 45:06

if lithium ion is doing eight hours, everybody that's in the eight to 12 hour battery length is now under a lot of pressure. And if lithium ion is able to make the move to eight hours, with all that extra hardware, everybody said it could never afford to do it. It's happening now, because battery cell prices are all like 70 bucks a kilowatt hour 70 to 80. And trending downward as scale comes up, Timothy. So it's like solar. So if it keeps trending down Does 12 hours open for lithium ion? Does 16? Could we have a 24 hour lithium ion battery that's cost competitive? Would it make sense? I don't know. 12 hour. But that suddenly tells me that maybe lithium ion might become competitive on a cost level in ways where lithium phosphate or lithium, whatever. But lithium based, can become cost competitive in ways that people never expected at prices that are pretty solid. I mean, this is still, you know, Tesla's website, still about 400 bucks installed. But, you know, a lot of other people are like, 200.

Tim Montague: 46:25

Yeah, lithium is good. It dominates the scene today. My my research from the summer and the webinars that I hosted with Reuters really was eye opening. I think, you know, ESS was featured prominently, they have an iron flow, battery technology. My favorite. I wrote about form energy, the iron air battery, they have 100 hour battery technology. It's a rust battery. So there's a lot of other and they're getting, you know, some big pilots going now in several places across the US.

John Weaver: 47:01

I think, you know, thermal voltaic battery. Have you heard of that one yet? I'm not sure. What's the company? Yes. So I didn't even realize what the heck I was reading. So. So I covered an article a few months back, we even covered it on the show, but it was by endwell. And they are working with a company who's got a battery that's close to being turned on. And the battery is a giant piece of ceramic that's heated up. And then the heat it gives off, I guess infrared is then collected by solar by thermal voltaic panels. Oh,

Tim Montague: 47:39

yeah, I haven't. I haven't studied the shell con covered this on his podcast.

John Weaver: 47:44

Oh, my goodness. It just it just like was so cool. Yeah. The thermal portion has efficiencies approaching 100%. Yeah, the photovoltaic, or the thermal voltaic portion is like 30 40% efficiency. So I'm open to really cool stuff coming. That would be just really sweet. And the US military, liked the technology from a survivability standpoint, what's the terminology use some confusing things, some nuances of it, and I don't fully get, but they pretty much assume that it's going to run at a very high probability for 14 days. And that's their two week backup ruling thing. And if they say if the things running at the beginning of the two week window, we can, we're super certain it's going to keep running for two weeks, whereas the emergency diesel generators have a 70% 80% survivability through a two week period, which is also which is highly driven by local access to fuel, because fuel resources can be scarce during times of complexity.

Tim Montague: 48:54

I have no idea what you're talking about.

John Weaver: 48:59

Generators not as good as solar and storage.

Tim Montague: 49:05

Okay, I understand that they are not as good. It's true. They are polluting they're, they're killing the planet. They're heating the planet. No way. No, but getting rid of them is easier said than done. Correct. What? What what else we're going to do? We got 10 minutes

John Weaver: 49:25

and minutes? Well, for solar just booked $700 million of cash in exchange for approximately 17.5 cents per watt. For every module they manufacture via tax credits that are allowed to be taxed via tax credit transfer. Yeah, so roughly $729 million tax credit, based on roughly four and a half gigs of manufacturing. This is just some math I did says that and since they told us 96 cents on the dollar. That means that and this is from the manufacturer's tax credit in the IRA in the inflation Reduction Act. And so first solar loop put out a press release right before the end of the year, talking up a whole bunch of money that they made and or whole bunch of money that they were given to help fuel their growth. And it's probably really valuable cash if you think about it, the fact that they're trying to expand so much and they need money to build facilities. I know they're leveraged against this money to some degree with the bankers. But now they have the cash and they have the legislation behind them. And next year, they double over the next couple of years toward 10 To 1510 to 20 gigs, you're gonna see this number pop through through 2029, which is when I believe the IRA, manufacturing tax credit might go away.

Tim Montague: 51:09

Okay, why does somebody want to buy these tax credits?

John Weaver: 51:15

Let's say I owe you a million dollars. Now I owe the government million dollars. And first solar has tax credits. You get some sort of discount on it. Yeah, this company had a $700 million tax bill, because this is dollar for dollar. And they got back like 10 20 million bucks. You know, I guess it's four. So this is 96 on the dollar. You know, maybe Citibank took a cent or two, and then the other person took 3%. And 3% of seven is 21 million. You know, Trump changed some of us.

Tim Montague: 52:05

Apparently, there's something you're not telling me, John.

John Weaver: 52:12

You're hired?

Tim Montague: 52:17

Well, yeah, this is a good story. And we're gonna see a lot more stories about tax credits, right, the IRA allows for much more fluidity, I guess, for lack of a better expression in the tax credit market. If you're a company installing a solar array, and you can't use the tax credits, you can sell them. Right and and now there are platforms popping up. I'm doing an interview with a company called basis, build with bases as their website that is creating a marketplace. And historically, the banks have been the marketplace. The banks have ruled this world. And now it's being democratized through technology like basis. And so it's a good thing, right? It just creates fluidity in the market. And, Fintech is good, like FinTech, if you if you couldn't use the tax credits, historically, that was a problem, right? 30% you get a 30% tax credit. So if you're doing a million dollar project, that's $333,000 of tax credits. It's a lot of money.

John Weaver: 53:30

And now, I hear that the smaller projects are getting like, somewhere in the upper 80s on the dollar.

Tim Montague: 53:37

Yeah, 85 cents. I think that's a figure I heard.

John Weaver: 53:41

But I haven't actually done any of it. So I don't know. Yeah. So. And first solar, of course, is really unique in that they're the only company that has a full stack right now today, happening at this very instant, across the supply chain. And they came into the IRA with it already happening. Have you seen this chart before? Tim?

Tim Montague: 54:04

I have not I don't know what what I'm looking at here.

John Weaver: 54:07

So this came from Credit Suisse. And this is Credit Suisse projecting that the project caught LCBO II will fall below a half a cent per kilowatt hour in the United States, because of stacked IRA. incentives. I projected it would go even below that. And now that we've had the collapse in the price of solar modules,

Tim Montague: 54:36

and on this graph, that's the $10. Mark. Yeah.

John Weaver: 54:40

$10.01 per kilowatt hour. That's 10 megawatt hours divided by 1000.

Tim Montague: 54:44

Yeah. So in 2025. The blue is solar LCL. ie the grey is wind LCMV. Yeah, it's cheap energy, man. It makes sense, right? Because the fuel is free. The fuel is wind or solar photons from the sun. And you don't have to dig stuff out of the ground. Well, you have to dig stuff out of the ground to build the solar panels, but then you're not digging fuel for the rest of the life of the solar panel the way you would with a coal plant. So just there's a logic to it. It's not it's not smoke and mirrors. It's real. Sunlight is free. It's also deadly. So don't want too much sunlight.

John Weaver: 55:36

So first solar is banking next year that no was going to be bigger.

Tim Montague: 55:41

Yeah, I, I am a fan of First Solar. It is truly our one and only like soup to nuts solar company solar panel company in the United States. q cells is chasing it. Luckily, but they're really the only one as far as I know, I don't know, maybe a couple others are now saying they're gonna do this right. But

John Weaver: 56:07

somebody's working on we're getting there. There's hundreds, there's like 80 gigs of panel manufacturing in certain pipelines. And similar in cells. I haven't seen the wafer numbers big but maybe it's decent size.

Tim Montague: 56:27

A lot of factories this year. This quote here is wonderful. Over the past year, nearly $100 billion dollars in clean energy manufacturing investments have been announced, with plans for close to 100 new facilities across the US. Now only 50 of those might get built but still that's a lot. 50 new Giga factories I could live with that.

John Weaver: 56:47

They're bigger than Giga factories. Terra factories. Five Giga factories. Five gig factories.

Tim Montague: 56:56

Yeah,

John Weaver: 56:57

that's and that's the small fry stuff.

Tim Montague: 56:59

A giga factory just means gigawatt scale. Yeah.

John Weaver: 57:05

All right. All right. It's time.

Tim Montague: 57:10

Let's wrap it up. We didn't get to talk through Barry's whole list, but check out check out the energy show. I love very cinnamon, I hope to see him in San Diego. If you're going to San Diego to InterSolar or sorry, plus community power, please reach out to me on LinkedIn or clean power hour.com where all this content lives. 24/7 Give us a rating and review on Apple and Spotify. Tell a friend about the show. And where can our listeners find you Mr. commercial solar guy,

John Weaver: 57:40

more solar guy.com. That's the best place got a contact us page. I also like Twitter, but I'm setting up my own place on my own website. I've started working on it, Tim where I'm putting out small chunks of news instead of writing full articles. And so slowly over time, I'm going to build that out because I get tired of the social media people doing the things they do and you know, and so so I'm changing it but commercial solar guy.com I'm also on LinkedIn is john fitzgerald Weaver and, and Twitter as solar in mass. massive volumes.

Tim Montague: 58:20

Nice. All right, John. Well, thanks. And I'm Tim Montague. Let's grow solar and storage. Take care.