Solar Energy's Second Act — EP 88 Joel Jean

All right. Today we have a tale of woe and hope. The tale of woe is that the US has fallen terribly behind when it comes to solar technology. China is far and away the dominant player in manufacturing solar cells and panels. It is also building more solar panels than the rest of the world combined. This is an issue if you think solar has a future, and I think it has a very bright future. But there's a moment in time coming up where the US could actually have a chance to compete again. And this all hinges on some solar technology that revolves around things called perovskites. These are crystals that are potentially cheaper and more efficient than the silicon-based technology we've been using for decades. The US and China are in a race to figure out who can master perovskites first. Our guest today is Joel Jean. He is the CEO and co-founder of Swift Solar. They have been doing some of the most pioneering work on perovskites for more than a decade. They think they are close to being able to manufacture these things. Joel is going to walk us through the last few decades of solar technology history, how we got to where we are, and how perovskites work and how they could potentially Create a much more competitive landscape for the U.S. and the rest of the world against China. We will see. I'm Ashley Vance. This is Core Memory. Here we go to learn about solar technology. Joel, thank you for coming.

How are you?

Thank you.

Yeah, I'm good. I'm good. Friday afternoon.

I think we met for the first time a couple months ago.

Months ago.

Yeah. You guys, it took— it gave me nostalgia. You guys are near where Tesla's original headquarters were, which I used to— I didn't visit back when it was actually happening, but when I was doing my book on Elon, I like to go to all these places just to feel what they were like. And then I saw All these photos from, from back in the day, but it's, it's a little historic chunk of Silicon Valley.

Yeah, right on. Yeah. Off of Industrial and San Carlos. Yeah. We actually had one of the Tesla co-founders in the office once and he was like, I think this used to be our building.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it is quite possible that as they expanded, they actually were in your, your building at some point. Yeah.

Anyway, a little bit of good, good history there.

Yeah. So I wanna use this as an excuse to get to know the solar industry better. And, you know, I feel like from where I sit, a lot of what you see is clearly solar has improved in price and performance at this very steady clip over the last, whatever, 20, 30 years. And then, so you've got this story of solar is succeeding in a lot of ways, and then you have this story of, and we'll get into all this, and so maybe I'll misspeak at some point, but my impression is that the United States invented a lot of the technology that is at the heart of, of the global solar industry, but that over the last 15 to 20 years, China really perfected manufacturing this stuff and, and has, has just become the dominant player in solar, both from a manufacturing standpoint and from actually deploying solar technology. And if you read the news, I mean, people would, would say these days they will install more solar this year, I think, than the rest of the world combined. And so it really looks like this incredibly dominant force. I know the US does still have some solar manufacturers. I know Germany has been big on solar for years, but to me, From where I sit, it really looks like this is a very China-heavy story. This is like not great for the United States, possibly not great for the world. I don't know, maybe it is if they could just make tons of cheap solar. But, you know, solar is going to be a thing, which it is, and continue on this trajectory. It seems like perhaps not the US's shining moment. And so I don't know, can you—

Yeah.

After he's rambled all of that out, I mean, is this, is this generally true? What, what is, what is the state of the solar industry? To start with a very broad question.

Oh my gosh, I love it. There's so much there. I mean, the— yeah, I mean, tell a story, you start from the beginning.

Yeah. Yeah.

Like, where did solar start? It started in 1954 with Bell Labs, right? The very first silicon solar cell was invented at Bell Labs.

So right around the time of the transistor.

Right around the same time.

Yeah.

Yeah. So they figured out how to make a, you know, roughly 5, 6% efficient silicon cell. The very first use case was in satellites. So the Voyager satellite in like 1958, I think, was launched with solar cells. So it's, we'll come back to this, but it's kind of a nice full circle moment where we've now brought solar Globally at gigawatt scale. And now we're talking about putting it back in space. Yeah.

Right, right, right.

SpaceX and so on. So, but we can come back to that. Um, I think you're— the basic flow of like, yes, US invented it, China scaled it. It was kind of the story. I think there's several kind of key players along the way. Um, and to even to oversimplify there, I think like, you know, um, the US played a big role in, um, developing the core technology. Um, Germany and Japan actually kind of sequentially and actually opposite order played a huge role in actually scaling it, deploying it.

Okay.

At a time when it was not economic to do so. Japan chose to incentivize much rooftop solar, so they created a market there. Germany deployed gigawatts of solar in the 2000s, 2010s, at a time really, well, even before that when it didn't make sense to do it just purely economically. They put in feed-in tariffs and had incentives to actually Yeah. Create this market.

Not the sunniest country.

Not the sunniest country. Yeah. Yeah. Um, Germany's like, what, like Boston or something? It's like similar to the solar resources. Yeah.

But so, but it was a, it was a green technology push and they were shutting down nuclear. And so they, they were committing to this, this future.

Yeah. Yeah. And like, thank God, right? Like the rest of the world really has Germany and Japan to thank for like laying the groundwork, right? And creating that market that then China came in and scaled the shit out of.

Yeah.

And, you know, they built it out in a way that maybe no one else in the world could have. So, you know, well-deserved. They had a strategy that lasted, you know, every 5-year plan is the same thing. Let's go make solar, make more solar, let's go export it.

Yeah.

And that extended to the entire supply chain in a way that now, you know, China owns 90% of, you know, silicon panel making, solar panel manufacturing, cell manufacturing, wafer manufacturing, even upstream. Right. So polysilicon. So it's really this kind of crazy story of global kind of like handing off a baton. I missed Australia, by the way, like a lot of the early technology was developed also in Australia.

Yeah, yeah. Because, yes, out of these like Australian universities that then some of the leading researchers like became entrepreneurs in China, right?

I mean, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. PhD students of Martin Green at University of New South Wales.

Yeah.

You know, legendary kind of godfather of silicon solar. A lot of those folks, yeah, PhD students, postdocs went off and started Suntech and like, you know, like all the Chinese giants.

So, and there was one thing I wanted to be sure to do because I knew we were going to talk about this a lot during this episode. Break down for me before we get back to the history for one second, the difference between a cell, a panel, just these different— the core components of what we're going to be discussing.

Yeah, absolutely. So I think probably everyone knows what a solar panel is. Yeah. So the breakdown of that is like a solar panel is basically a bunch of cells strung up electrically in series with, you know, glass on both sides or on one side with a plastic back sheet with a frame around it. So it's the traditional kind of panel you see on rooftops or in the field for utility-scale solar farms. The cells themselves are the core kind of power-generating engine, right, in a solar panel.

So almost like a semiconductor-type Like I might think of as a chip or something like that in computing land?

Yeah, it's like a giant chip.

Yeah. Okay.

It's a giant chip, a silicon single wafer, like single crystal of silicon wafered really thin. A typical semiconductor wafer is maybe 500 microns thick. Uh, this is factor of, you know, 2, 3 thinner.

Okay.

So maybe 100, 150 microns. Um, so it's a really thin, like, kind of wafer of silicon. Very brittle. Um, but we figured out how to make these at massive, massive scale, right? A gigawatt-scale factory pumps out a couple million of these a day.

A couple million a day. And, and then, and China's dominating both the, the cell and the panel end of this.

Yeah, yeah. The panel a little bit less so, but the further you go upstream, the more they dominate.

Okay, okay. And you said we started in 1956, was it '54?

'54.

'54 at 6%. efficiency. And then what are we at today?

Today, the world record cell is around 27.8 or 20— yeah, in the high 27s.

Okay.

Whereas, you know, commercial produced cells are kind of more in the maybe 24 to 26% range.

Okay. And then, and then, and that's like when people hear that solar has been getting better at this steady clip over all this time and getting ever closer to parity with other fuel sources, it's that, that efficiency number just going up year by year.

Yes, it's actually the efficiency. There's one nuance there, which is like, that was the cell efficiency.

Okay.

So the cell was the part that's like most fundamentally limited by physics, by thermodynamics to that, like, you know, there's like a 30% limit. But the panel efficiency is usually what people talk about and think about. It's like, how efficient is the panel? So once you've integrated these cells into this glass sheet, right? Like, what's the power conversion efficiency? So usually it's that number that we think of as like, going up by, say, half a percent a year for decades.

I see. I see. And so, and like, how do you improve panel efficiency? I keep asking massive questions, I'm sure.

No, they're fantastic. You know, you have to be able to explain sort of the basics to make sure you really understand it, right? So like, let me see if I really understand it, right? When you, yeah, when you're trying to make a solar cell or panel more efficient, like, okay, let's start with the panel, right? To make the panel more efficient, Like the kind of most straightforward, let's say like easy way is to just like capture the low-hanging fruit in the panel construction. So like maybe you make your glass kind of textured so it captures light more efficiently, so you're not reflecting as much. Maybe you add an anti-reflection coating. Maybe you make your polymer layers, the plastic layers inside a little bit more transparent. So those are the kind of low-hanging fruit at the panel level.

Yeah.

But ultimately it comes down to, can you make the cell more efficient? Right. And there's always going to be some loss going from the cell to the panel. So the cell, how do you make the cell more efficient? It's like, that's where the semiconductor engineering comes in, right? You make the material better. You do something called passivation, which means you reduce the kind of defects in the, like at the interfaces where you can lose charge, lose carriers, lose energy to heat. And you kind of plug those up, right? So you apply what we call a passivating layer to that. So that's really how That's kind of been the core trajectory of the solar industry over the last 20 years is to push the cell efficiency up. You go through better and better, better structures to passivate the silicon.

Okay.

Right. So that's why if you hear about silicon technologies like PERC and TOPCon and heterojunction, like each of those is a better way to passivate the perovskite— sorry, the silicon cell.

Okay. Okay. And are we still improving at this? 0.5% per year, or are we capping out on that now?

We're kind of capping out on it.

Yeah, yeah. I remember when I was writing about you guys, it seemed like we're hitting limits, right?

Yeah, yeah. And that's like a fundamental limit in solar. Like, people are kind of like, okay, why, you know, solar's so inefficient? Like, it's only like, you know, 25% efficient.

Like, it doesn't sound that great.

Yeah, yeah. Like, that's why are you making this shitty technology for, you know, like, you could just do better, right? Like, And it turns out physics is hard to beat. Thermodynamics is a thing. And the reason you can only reach this limit of, for silicon, 29.5%, for any material, about 30%, single material, is because there's this trade-off between how much of the light you capture from the sun, which is this like, you know, spectrum. It's just like not a single wavelength. It's a broad source, broadband source. How much of the light you capture and how much energy you pull out of each wavelength of light, each photon. So there's this trade-off where you choose a single material, let's say silicon. For silicon, below 1,100 nanometers, like all the visible, some infrared, some UV, you can capture and convert efficiently. Below that, or a longer wavelength than that, you lose. It just transmits it. And that's true for any single material you choose. Um, so even if you chose a different material that had, I don't know, an 800 nanometer, what we call a band gap, right? The threshold at which it kind of stops converting, it will capture the higher energy light, lower wavelength light more efficiently, but it will transmit from 800 on rather than 1100 on. So you're losing more light to transmission, even though you're converting the rest more efficiently.

Okay. Okay.

Sorry, I kind of got—

No, it's good. No, it's good. But, and then I don't follow this industry super closely. So like this, as far as hitting this limit, I mean, is this a, is this some, it's obviously something you guys have known about. Is this a, if in terms of competing against oil, natural gas, wind, is this seen as a major issue in the very near term? Or people still think they can eke out enough, you know, gains over the next few years to stay competitive? Or yeah, I just, I don't know how to think about this.

I guess what's important to keep in mind is that it's not efficiency that we really care about.

Okay.

So like if you're a person trying to, you know, to run your house or, you know, your factory or whatever, or your car, charge your car, like you don't really care about the efficiency. You care about how much the electricity costs.

Right.

Right. So the dollars per kilowatt hour, we call that levelized cost of electricity, right? LCOE in the industry. But really it just comes down to, okay, efficiency is a factor, but it's like how much energy can you generate with this solar panel, including all the other stuff that has to go into the system to allow you to deploy it, right? The labor to install it, install it, the racking, the wiring, the transformers, all this stuff in the system. So what matters, the thing, important thing to keep in mind is that we're now at a point where all of that stuff integrated over the lifetime of a solar project makes the solar electricity actually cost competitive with alternative sources.

Yeah.

Right. So it's now the cheapest source of electricity we have.

Okay. That's what I was gonna ask you. So it is, it's the cheapest.

Yeah. In, in many places it is the cheapest. It's actually dependent on how much sun you get.

Yeah.

So in Germany, you know, if you have higher power prices, right, like you can be competitive, but it's not gonna be as cheap as, you know, in Arizona.

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Oh my gosh. Yeah. I could, I mean, go all day about what the oil companies are doing. Like the US, actually, it's funny, right? The oil companies were kind of the innovators in solar back in, you know, the '80s and '90s. BP and Exxon, you know, all these players had, had huge solar efforts. They kind of pushed the technology in many ways. They sort of gave up on it. And I think there was this era of, I guess, like, you know, cheap oil. And we had a lot of, you know, actually the start of it was sort of like in, you know, '73 and '79, we had these oil crises, right? And like, that was the peak of the US's R&D funding for solar in history.

Okay.

I think like $3 billion equivalent, like, Of, you know, federal funding for solar.

And that was like what, Nixon, right? I mean, I was doing another episode right around that time. Yeah, because of the oil crisis, it was like we had plans to build 1,000 nuclear power plants by the year 2000 to be energy independent. So this is all fitting into the same, same push.

Yeah. And well, just like an aside, like, I mean, we just saw like the Three Gorges Dam closed, right? Like they're saying, IAEA is saying like this is the Biggest, you know, energy crisis in history, right? Yeah. Comparable or even like worse than those, um, those energy crises. So like, who knows what we'll see here in the coming years. Okay.

So, but back in the early 1970s, like when you're talking about this figure of, of, of, of R&D, when you said it was the most, it was just that the, the US government was putting like by percentage of money that it spends on R&D, that was the highest it ever was into solar.

It was the highest in terms of like total dollars going into solar research in the US. And like the federal government historically has been the biggest, the more constant, constant supporter of R&D and solar, right? Like for those decades, you know, '70s, '80s, '90s, like solar was not this big industry. So it was really government funding that kept it going and enabled it because it was seen as a strategic industry. Like, and now that's coming back.

Yeah. Okay. Yeah. But okay. And obviously, clearly, I'm sure people have written extensively about this and I'm just, Amora, but I mean, so the Department of Energy has been putting money into this for decades, and I'm sure other branches of the government as well. But then from this, this like 2000s to now, what, the US government still funding things but decided this was, was up to businesses to now develop for the most part?

Yeah, I mean, I don't think I can speak to the kind of the government's perspective on this necessarily. I think They— there's always been with different administrations in the US kind of like fluctuations in how consistently we support these kind of efforts.

Yeah.

China has not. Right. Every 5-year plan is the same thing. Yeah. Let's invest more and more and more in building up our supply chain.

Yeah. So I remember, I remember this moment when, you know, solar companies were— what I want to say, it's like, like maybe like 2008-ish. I just remember them being You know, massively valuable on the New York Stock Exchange or NASDAQ, whatever they were listed on. And and then and then all of a sudden, yeah, the Chinese glut comes and and companies are going bankrupt. And do you so did China they made this a national priority? They were going to get into it. Was the intention like always to make this just unpalatable to everybody else by going so gung ho, or it was just they were captured by the same? fever and, and just executed extraordinarily well. Um, does that make sense?

Kind of, kind of. Yeah. I, so the question is like, why did, why did China kind of take off and not the US in this space? Maybe?

Well, sort of. I just remember China going so all in and the market being devastated on, on, um, such a massive level. I, and maybe it's an unfair question, but, um, in my head I was just wondering if they're like, we're gonna own this industry. We're willing to lose money on this. We're just going to manufacture so much that it's not worth anybody else's while to be in this. And then in the end, we'll be the place that makes solar.

I don't know if it was as like masterplanned as that. Yeah, there's some perception actually that it was like it's very in a way bottom up, but shaped by sort of the milieu of like the government's kind of perspective on this. Their 5-year plans kind of tell the rest of the provinces and like the local governments like what they should be doing.

Yeah.

And because this was sort of in these, you know, central government, like, plans, they were essentially kind of propagating this to all the local governments, like, hey, you should be supporting and creating jobs in, in this space, right? So they, what these local governments did was, you know, give free land, super, you know, subsidized electricity, super cheap labor, right? Tax benefits, you know, cheap capital all around to scale up. Right. And this is like, you know, something that is just not accessible anywhere else in the world. Right. And ultimately what did happen was they ended up super— like kind of supercharging their entire supply chain because they're, you know, you could say it's not economic. It was, you know, it's— it was not definitely not a free market driven kind of thing. Yeah. But in the end, these firms were incredibly hypercompetitive with each other and they kind of forced each other to, you know, build and build and build and It's like the early days of Silicon Valley. You had, you still have like engineers in China, solar engineers, like on all on a WeChat channel, right? From different companies, like sharing trade secrets. Yeah. How do we make this better? And like, yeah, that's like, you know, not really a free market kind of behavior necessarily in the way we think about it today, but it does lead to a really massively, you know, successful, fast-driving industry.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. And so When we read now that China is building and deploying more solar than the rest of the world combined, these are like numbers you believe. I mean, is this like accurate reporting from the press based on on what you see, or yeah, like overhyping?

It's yeah, I'd say it's definitely true.

Yeah, okay. And so like what does that mean for the rest of the world potentially over the next ten years or so? Like like should you know should the U.S. be doing Way more, or is China the same thing? China's just kind of like we're committed to this, we're going all in, and and maybe it's the wrong strategy.

I I don't know. I guess it's a matter of philosophy. I mean, it's like you know I come actually from like a very like climate action kind of background. That's kind of how I really got into this in grad school. Yeah. And part of me, you know, certainly at that time, I think I had this view that. Hey, really, like, if China wants to build a ton of super cheap solar, even below, sell it below cost and let us decarbonize, um, why not?

Yeah.

It sounds great for the world. And it, it, I put it right now in the same bucket as like a carbon tax, which is something that like economies love, right? It's like economists love. It's like, okay, yeah, this is the most economically efficient thing, right? Comparative advantage. They make it, we deploy it. They, you know, if we put a carbon tax, like, yeah, like the economy will shift in a way that configures itself to the lowest cost. way of decarbonizing, right? Like same kind of theme, but I think both are really not like from a political economy standpoint, just like not tenable. Okay. If you say, okay, we're going to transition to clean energy, but all the jobs and all the economic benefits are going to go to China, right? Like why would the US, you know, the voting populace actually choose that? Yeah.

Yeah.

So I think like that's the kind of the way I kind of think about it is like You need to have manufacturing capacity. You need to have innovation. You need to have basically benefits going to where you want to actually deploy this thing. And that means manufacturing. All those things come from manufacturing the technology, manufacturing the products locally.

Right.

Yeah. At some level.

And so, and you were saying you first got interested in this while you were in grad school?

Yeah. So, well, I started out actually like just I was at Stanford undergrad and got interested in like semiconductor research, but then really quickly got into solar, went to MIT to do my PhD in solar, like in solar technology.

Okay.

And that's where I kind of like really got educated, I would say, on climate. Yeah.

And what, like, what year are you starting your PhD work?

That was in 2011.

Okay. So the solar market has kind of collapsed in the—

In the whole— Right.

But you're still seeing You were still called to go do this.

Well, so I, I was dumb, by the way. I was not thinking that globally at the time. I was kind of like, oh, okay, like, we're— I've heard about this energy thing. Like, we're going to run out of oil and gas eventually. Yeah, we should probably find some alternatives. That was kind of like the depth of my sort of macro thinking at the time. But I think quickly there became this motivation of like, oh, shoot, like, actually, I think there's an IEA report like a year or two later that was like, Oh, by 2017, if we don't trans— if we don't stop building new fossil fuel infrastructure, we're gonna be locked into 2 degrees Celsius.

Yeah.

Right. And that was kind of like a wake-up call because I was like, okay, that's the year I'm supposed to like finish my PhD. And I should— I can't just wait until then to start doing something actually useful.

Yeah.

So then that was like kind of the start of a kind of snowball of like, okay, what can I actually do that actually will like help transform the industry, transform the, you know, how we generate energy?

Okay. Okay. And so this is kind of like where we're going to turn to The next chapter of the chat, which is around these things called perovskites, which has taken me a long time to say correctly, as you know, but I think I got it.

You got it. I got it.

Okay. So the— well, okay, why don't you tell us what a— okay, here's where we're gonna head is there's a moment in time here possibly where the US could make a comeback in manufacturing solar because these Perovskites, which we're gonna explain, um, are— it's a new, new type of solar technology. Nobody's fully, fully figured it out yet between the US and China and others. And so, so there's this moment in time where it looks like it has the promise of possibly being the better solar technology. And so if you could figure out how to make it better than anywhere else, you could— the US could have a, a crack at this thing again. And so why don't you tell us, yeah, explain what a perovskite is, because if you go, I will warn people, if you go Google it, it gets very confusing quite quickly for probably a couple reasons we'll get into. But yeah, take a crack.

So what is a perovskite? Yeah.

And why, you know, why are we, where does it fit in to solar?

Yeah, so perovskites are just a general term for a sort of semiconductor that takes the form of this like crystal, right? So this mineral called perovskite, right? It's a certain crystal structure and you can make synthetic materials take that crystal structure. So it's an ABX3, doesn't matter. It's basically just crystal structure that you can make with different kinds of materials. And it turns out that there's a certain class of what we kind of consider as like solar perovskites. So like materials that are particularly good at absorbing light and converting that into free electrons that you can extract and generate power from. So that set of solar perovskites is something that in a way is unique. I think at a very fundamental level, it's like the first, I would say, advanced semiconductor material that we found that actually behaves as well or better than sort of traditional semiconductors. And that sounds a little bit esoteric.

Than silicon.

Silicon or III-V semiconductors like gallium arsenide. Usually when you, so, so there's silicon was always a thing, right? And like, sorry, I'm going to like go back to history a little bit.

No, I think we should. Yeah.

Like in 2008, we had this like giant shortage of silicon for solar. Solar overtook, overtook semiconductor industry for use of silicon. So there's this shortage, prices were super high, like $100 per kilogram. So then we were like, okay, well, what do we actually Like, what do we do? We're gonna be like short on this key material. Super expensive. So that's why there was all these, like, all this hype around thin film solar, right? It was like, oh, this is like a material that can absorb all the light in a fact, like a 100th of the thickness of silicon, right? So it's like, okay, we make it outta thin films. Great. Less material use. All of those materials, they tended to be less efficient. than silicon. None of them actually surpassed the performance of silicon. So you're stuck kind of competing on cost. Can you make it cheaper? Um, for the first time with perovskites, right, it's also a thin film, less than a micron thick, so actually thinner than all those other technologies. Like, for the first time, you actually have a technology that can actually boost the performance above the limit of silicon, but actually be cheaper.

Okay, to make.

To cheap— cheaper to make.

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Today.

And so, so perovskite, if you Google it, because I have, I mean, like you mentioned, so it's a, it is a crystal. There's one definition of this that is this crystal that occurs in nature. And this crystal just has a certain structure that happens to be well suited for this task at hand. And then we have made synthetic perovskites, like, like based on this structure.

Yes. Yeah.

And that, and that's kind of the, the magic here, right? Is that, um, I mean, I'm sure they're hard to make, but they're relatively, um, makeable. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Um, in a synthetic form.

Yeah. To your point, like, yeah, it's like this crystal structure. We make it, um, in the lab and usually, I mean, the key here is really like, usually you have to make a semiconductor super, super, super perfect, right? Like you have a silicon wafer. for semiconductor or solar, you know, it's like 5, 6 nines pure in semiconductor, even more pure.

Right.

So every millionth atom out of place, right? Like it's like super, super precise. And you need that. You need that to be able to prevent like a bunch of loss of energy to heating. And what's unique about these perovskites is that they are crazy defect tolerant. And they're very tolerant to these kind of, you know, like missing atoms or things out of place, ions moving around. Even with all of that kind of imperfectness, it's, it's still super, super able to kind of not, not lose that energy to heat. So for the first time, like, it's like this material that is just like made at super low temperatures, like, you know, 100 Celsius or so. And yet it has the performance of like a perfect crystal of silicon that you make at, you know, 1400 Celsius. So it's like this weird kind of crazy material that just turned out. It kind of shocked the solar industry when it came out in like 2012.

Like, what happened in 2012? You mean somebody, um, I mean, we must have known about perovskites for a long time.

Yeah, we've known about it for a couple decades, but never in the kind of the same form. Sort of, it was used, it was considered sort of a, what we call a dye. So there's a class of solar cells called dye-sensitized solar cells. It was using like organic dyes to absorb the light and then a different material to extract the current. So perovskites were first used as an absorber, a light absorber in that structure. So it was kind of like, okay, this seems to do pretty well. But then in 2012, there's this paper published by Oxford and by a team in Japan that showed that, hey, like actually, you can use this thing and it can actually transport the charge and absorb light. So you can use it kind of much more like a traditional semiconductor. And they showed a 10% efficient solar cell, like, from day one. And just to put that in perspective, like, I spent my PhD making solar cells out of various new materials like quantum dots and organic materials. And like, I had never made a solar cell in, you know, 5 years, um, that was more than 5% efficient. Okay. Right. Like, I've made a lot of crappy solar cells in my lifetime and like, none of them hit 10%. Yeah. Right. So this was one that was like the very first paper. Yeah.

Yeah. Okay. Okay. And so, so this material, around 2012 starts to get people excited. But we're here in 2026. And when I was researching my story on you and asking my friends in the solar industry, they're like, oh, perovskites, everybody always thinks this is going to work. It never works. And so, so it's held this promise of, like you said, being not only cheaper to make, but at least comparable, if not better, in terms of efficiency as well. So yeah, like Holy Grail, but We're obviously not using this, you know, mass-producing these all over the place right now. And it's been, been what, 15-ish years? And so, so there's been problems and people— I just got some skepticism about them when I was digging into the story.

I think that's very fair. Right. It's very fair because people, right, like academics, university press offices really like to hype up their their publications, their research, right? So yeah, there's these like cool demonstrations of really efficient solar cells with perovskites in the early 2010s, but that doesn't mean it's anywhere near production ready. So you get this hype. So the whole industry like hears about these innovations. It's like, yeah, that's a cool like technology. But it, you know, we knew then it was like decade plus out, right? But like people who just read an article about perovskites, it's like, oh, this is the future of the industry. It's like, transformative technology is ready to go. Like, you get the perception that like, oh, it's here. And then like 10 years later, it's like, oh, it's not here yet. Like, why is it not there? The reality is it's like the technology has been developing steadily in the background. Efficiency, more importantly, stability, how you scale it, manufacture it, all of those things have been just stepping up and up and up.

Okay.

And that's really, I think, the disconnect between the perception from folks who aren't following closely with the folks who are in the industry and seeing this improvement.

So it's kind of, it's like gone through these hype cycles already and people are a little deflated, but, but we always People knew there was always going to be this hard work to do. And one of the biggest— when we were talking, I mean, it seemed like the biggest issue, or one of them, is this: these things have to sit outside for 20 to 30 years on solar panels. That's, that's the expected lifetime of a solar panel. All these economics are built around this and people's perceptions. And so this has been one of the issues of perovskites is that When we take them, make a cell, then make a panel, we just haven't— they're brittle. They— the temperature fluctuations, all these different chemical processes happening around them in the panel that we haven't gotten close yet to proving that they can withstand that period of time. I mean, is that the biggest thing that's been holding them back?

Yeah, yeah, I would say so.

Okay.

Because we— I mean, we showed even with our, like, you know, very first demonstration of these tandem cells, right, where you put the perovskite on silicon, we were showing, you know, quite efficient, you know, 24% kind of efficiencies, which is like quite competitive already. But the stability was not there.

Okay.

So yeah, how do you make this thing, you know, this like soft, squishy material, thin film, how do you make it last for 30 years? Really hard.

Well, yeah, because you're saying they're kind of relatively easy to make and that they have these other properties where they're less exacting than silicon. But, but they— it was never clear to me when I was doing the story on you if they, they break down more easily than silicon cells over time, or it was just more of a factor of we've spent decades and decades and decades refining the silicon-based cells. And like, are they inherently worse, you know, at surviving these conditions?

Yeah, that's a good question. It's a bit of both. So the raw material is actually like just, you know, it's formed at lower temperatures. It can degrade at lower temperatures. It's got various factors, like it's an ionic semiconductor rather than covalent. Ions move around. So it's like kind of more sensitive to different conditions, like, you know, electric fields, high temperatures, things like this. So it is more sensitive. But that said, I think if you look back at the Again, history of solar, like silicon, you know, it took from the 1950s to the '70s to kind of get to even like a reasonable sort of solar panel. And then obviously with a different level of investment, but like in the '70s, you had this like program to try to like run by, you know, funded by the government, supported by JPL to actually get silicon cells and modules from you know, less than 10-year life to— sorry, more like a 1-year life to like a 10-plus-year life. And from '75 to '85, they were able to achieve that. So it took that amount of time to like prove it out and get it to a point where it could actually demonstrate like kind of the modern lifetimes we, we consider standard, right?

Yeah.

10, 20-plus years. And that's true of every solar technology that's ever been commercialized, right? Cadmium telluride, CIGS, um, all, all these thin films, right? They, they've been around for 50-plus years. And it took a lot of time. They showed these same kind of instabilities early on, you know, metastabilities, issues with just like kind of like things you don't understand and you're trying to figure out why and like change things to experiment and just like iteratively kind of improve the technology to a point where you actually understand how to keep it rock solid under different conditions. Um, and I think it's the same thing with perovskites. It's like, even though, yes, it's harder, um, it's a matter of time.

Okay.

Right.

Okay. And this is what you guys have been working on. I mean, so Swift Solar, you guys have, for people who haven't read my story or know anything about you guys, I mean, you have, you've got a bunch of people on your team who have led breakthroughs with perovskites over the last decade plus and done some of the pioneering research here. So, and you guys have been working to make the cells, make the panels, put them through testing to show that they can survive these conditions. But really, I mean, this has been the quest for you guys over the last few years as you've moved out of R&D stage into trying to get to this fabrication stage. And so where are you at? What do we know about your perovskite cells and panels?

Good question. Yeah. I mean, so my co-founders are really, really, really good, right? Our founding team, I think, and early team members were some of the truly like the world experts in perovskites, made the very first perovskite tandem cells, um, on silicon and on perovskite.

Describe what a tandem cell is super quick. I mean, so you're mixing it with, with silicon cells?

Yeah, that's actually— I don't know why we skipped that. I think that that's actually the fundamental benefit of perovskites. Yeah, is you can actually use it to boost the power performance of silicon because they, they, they absorb different wavelengths of light, right? Yeah, they absorb the— well, they absorb kind of this, the higher energy part of the spectrum, they absorb more efficiently.

Okay. Yeah. Okay. So, so you've got, I'm going to mess this up, but you've got silicon and perovskites working together and, but they're both, they're able to, um, kind of bring in different aspects of, of the solar, of the sun.

Yeah.

Is that right?

Yeah. So think of it as like you stack 2 cells on top of each other. One's absorbing the visible light, one's absorbing the infrared light.

Okay.

And they're both doing it more efficiently than if you just had one material that absorbed all of it.

Okay. Okay. And, and But even though perovskites are arguably have been supposed to be more efficient, like why would you not just do all perovskites?

Yeah, so there was that trade-off, right, that we said earlier where because of the solar spectrum, you like, you can't choose a single material that is super efficient across the whole spectrum.

Okay.

So if you just use this perovskite cell, it has the same kind of efficiency limit, about 30%. The benefit of actually splitting the spectrum Is that you can have a higher efficiency limit. So we actually raised the ceiling with a tandem from 30% to 45%.

Right. Okay.

Okay. That's, that's the boost. That's the step change.

And 30 was kind of the record around silicon.

30 is the fundamental limit.

Limit. Yeah.

The record's around 28.

Okay. Okay. So up to 45% and 45 is, that's like in a lab somewhere. This is a, uh, or is this out in the world?

That hasn't been demonstrated. Okay. Yeah. The record today is about 34.8.

Oh, 45 is the theoretical.

Okay. Okay. Okay.

Sorry. What was the, where are we at today?

About 34.8.

Okay. In a, from a, from a research lab. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. And then, so tell me where you guys are at.

Yeah. So the thing is like we said, so we set the very first world record with that technology, the tandem, with the tandem technology in research labs. And then we just stopped focusing on efficiency.

Okay.

Because we're kind of like, okay, we know efficiency is sort of like solvable with perovskites. It's, that's sort of the benefit is like, you know, everyone and their mom can make a perovskite that's like decently efficient and Many people can make very efficient ones. Almost no one in the world can make a stable perovskite. Like, even maybe no one in the world, you could say, but we're pretty close. We think we're one of the closest in the world to making actually a perovskite that can survive for 30-plus years in the field.

Okay. I mean, when you say no one can make a stable perovskite, I mean, people are obviously making things that they are testing and like demonstrating. I mean, you guys Do. So like, what exactly do you— when you say stable, you mean survive the 30 years?

Yeah, yeah. We use stable and reliable kind of, or durable kind of interchangeably.

Okay.

Um, there's technically differences, but like, yeah, it's just like, can, can this thing last under real conditions?

I see.

And yeah, maybe I said that too strongly. It's kind of like, it's not that we can't make them like stable. It's just that we want like stable is, uh, there's a spectrum, right?

Like nobody's proven that they can match just the silicon cells over time.

Yeah. Yeah. I don't think anyone in the world could say I can make a perovskite cell that can match silicon on durability right now.

Okay. And how many, how many like perovskite startups would the US have?

Would China have? So the US is, you know, order of magnitude about 5.

Okay.

Europe has a couple, a couple other, a few other countries around the world have a couple. And then China has, you know, a bunch.

A bunch. And you're all fundamentally competing to prove that you can hit this stability. Mark.

Yeah, and scale it.

Okay.

And prove that it's cost effective and all that.

And this is— it's like a race, I mean, to see who can do this.

Yeah, I'd say so.

And then China is like— so, but China is barreling forward in that they, they seem to be selling perovskite cells, or at least making them. I mean, when I, when I was poking around, there were— it looked like 5 companies with factories and tons of money and, and building These, these cells. And so, I mean, China does this sometimes. It's like, it's like we're just going to move ahead with the manufacturing and dial that in, and we'll show that we're serious about this. Even in the US tends to be a little more, let's get the science fully baked before we start. You know, we, we can't just go knock on somebody's door to get $500 million until we've proven that this is going to work, or at least like—

Yeah.

vaguely close to working. And so, so like when China— when I see China already manufacturing these, um, and this isn't like asking you to crap on competitors, but I mean, if you're saying that nobody can make a stable perovskite and they're manufacturing them, then the assumption is the ones they're making are not going to last 20 or 30 years as far as you know.

I think they would tell you the same thing.

Okay.

Right. Like they're, they're trying to iterate, they're deploying stuff. fielding it and seeing it degrade and then trying to improve that over time. You can choose to do that at, you know, hundreds of megawatts, gigawatt scale if you want, if you want to set some money on fire.

Okay.

Which the Chinese government is happy to do strategically. So like that might actually work. We'll see. But I guess my thesis is that, you know, scaling something up and improving it with like continuous improvement in manufacturing is not the same as making this sort of binary step changes that sometimes are needed. To solve these technical challenges.

Yeah.

Right. So that's something that I think we've excelled at is like with limited resources to be real, right? As a US startup is like we've, we've been able to kind of continuously advance the technology in, in serious ways.

And, and clearly you're committed to this. So like, do you, have you solved all the technical, do you feel like you've, you've now solved them and you guys are ready to go to the next stage or you still have things that you have to figure out?

I think there's like 2 levels of solving things. Okay. Right. There's one that's like, okay, have you built enough understanding and collected enough data to have conviction that this is like solved or solvable, right, in reasonable time? And then there's the like, do you have the data that shows that this will back a 30-year warranty? I would say like, I have the first.

Yeah.

But not the second yet.

Okay.

Right. So it's, it's, it's still a journey to go from, you know, we have this fundamental proof and data and accelerated lifetime testing that shows that, hey, this thing can be stable enough to, to go the distance. Yeah. 30+ years. We're still working on getting data and iterating on, on the package, the thing you've put in the field to collect the data and show that, hey, this can actually prove the equivalent of a 30-year lifetime.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So when I've been to your factory, I mean, I see you guys making cells and panels, and then you've got some up on your roof where you're testing them. You've got ovens to put them through the heat stress, and then you've got, you've got these— what did you call them? Like lamp, the things that—

Solar simulators.

Yeah, the solar simulator. I mean, these incredibly bright lights that shine on them all day. And so, so you're producing these and you're putting them Through the test, but you guys still feel like you've got a couple steps to— you see a line of sight on proving they could last 30 years, but you have not yet made one that you would say, I know this is gonna last 30 years. Is that right?

Yeah. Okay.

Yeah.

I think we'd be drowning in cash if we had.

Okay.

You know, we're, we're, we're on our way. I would say like we have some of the best data in the world on this.

Okay. Right.

Okay. But like, it's, it's, it's not the, Definitive proof, 30-year lifetime. Yeah.

And when these different startups— I mean, do you guys— are you competing on a different recipe around the perovskites, a different manufacturing process, a little bit of all of this? It means because sometimes it's just like, okay, we're all building these the same way. Now we're trying to figure out all these things on the edges. Or do people just have fundamentally different approaches, you know, right at the base level?

Yeah, I mean, there's some of each. I think there's a lot of variables here, right? Like how you design the solar cell stack, there's many layers built into there. So like the materials you choose, how you manufacture those layers, the product format that you put it in. So yeah, I think, I guess one aspect of that is around how do you make the cell itself as stable as possible? So it's like the design choices, the compositions and the perovskite you choose. And like, that's one aspect I think we've developed a lot of understanding and secret sauce around as well as patented.

Okay.

you know, IP. And that's something that actually every single company in the world that set a world record, um, with Perovskites has used. They've used our IP.

Okay. Okay.

So that's one aspect.

Like legally, or?

I mean, no one's in production, so. Okay.

Okay.

But yeah, it's like we've done some of the foundational work. I think that made it possible to make these efficient and stable.

Okay.

So people recognize that. Um, that was in academic labs, to be clear. Before starting Swift.

Yeah.

Um, but we'd licensed the IP into Swift. Um, but then there's another piece that's like, how do you manufacture these things? And that's something that we've spent many years actually iterating on and developing our own manufacturing methods that can do this very fast and uniform and, you know, reliably.

Okay. Okay. I mean, your office is super cool. It's like this mix of, um, industrial machines you can buy, but then also all this stuff you guys have handcrafted over the years. Yeah. And, and I could tell, I mean, we were talking, some of them you You guys, the original co-founders, was in your, in your apartment or your house and, and you guys, I'm sure you guys were sleeping by them every night.

Yeah. Well, my co-founder Matt, co-founders Max and Kevin at the time were, were the, the main engineers. They're incredible, like engineers.

Right.

And they were prototyping this, these tools. We don't want to be a tool manufacturer, to be clear.

Okay. But you had to.

Yeah. We had to. Yeah. And a lot of it's like in the early days you're trying to figure out like, what are the parameters that matter? Like change recipes, change designs, and like change how you measure these materials and like to be able to control and design the tools that make them, the software that controls those tools, like that is, you know, invaluable.

Yeah.

So we have an amazing team that's been able to kind of make that happen as well as making solar cells and making panels out of them.

Okay. Well, and clearly you guys have reached some stage that you're confident about because you just recently acquired these assets from a, a German, massive German solar player and, and they had been looking to build plants, I think in Arizona. Is it Arizona?

They had a factory in Arizona. They were building one in Colorado.

In Colorado. And ran on tough times for all the reasons we outlined earlier. And so like in one sense, you were able to buy some of their IP and assets at a distressed price, but like just the fact that you were doing that seems to signal that you guys are ready to take some kind of new step towards manufacturing. Yeah, I mean, can you break this down? They have expertise on the leading edge of clearly more traditional silicon-based solar technology. And so were you just buying that to get the silicon stuff and some manufacturing, or was this all gearing up to start manufacturing perovskite-based cells and panels.

Yeah. So yeah, this, this is really exciting, right? Over the last few months, this is something that we've, we've been just super excited about. And this acquisition, like the reason it matters right now is we're like right at this inflection point, right? Like we talked about all these stability challenges for Offsite. It's like, we feel like after this decade of development, like we have shown, you know, 1,000x improvement in stability over the last few years. Like we're at a point now where I think we see that coming together. We believe that it's, it's gonna work. And it's a matter of scaling that up and proving it to the world, right? So that, that, like, the perovskite technology being ready is one piece of it. There's also like this current, you know, massive demand for energy from AI and like for, for AI data centers and just kind of like this general, like, push towards domestic, you know, reshoring domestic manufacturing. So that, that's coupled with policy, supportive policy for domestic manufacturing, for deploying domestic content, for all these things, right? And tariffs as well. All kind of like moving in the same direction of like the U.S. needs a crap ton of solar. Yeah, the perovskite technology is ready. Silicon is running up into its fundamental performance limits, and we're super well placed, right, with this technology we've been developing for a decade now to kind of build on the foundation of silicon and make that next generation leap. So with Maurer Burger, which was the leading European solar manufacturer, right, they actually had this technology called heterojunction technology, which is one of the 2 leading silicon technologies. And they were the Western leader in that. So by acquiring their core assets and bringing on their team, right, including their former CEO, their former technical leadership, we now have like the best Western silicon, you know, HJT team and capability and equipment IP under our roof combined with this like, you know, best-in-class perovskite from the US. And we think that that combined Is, is the key. That's what's going to unlock the ultimate solar manufacturer.

Okay. Okay. Okay. I have a few questions on some of this. I can never tell if you're being modest or like, like when you guys say you're, you have this line of sight, you're close on the perovskite stuff. I mean, are you like, yeah, I mean, obviously you would tell me if you were just, you were just going to start mass manufacturing these things and you'd solved everything. I just can't tell if you You see it, um, you're optimistic and you see it in your head that you've got this all solved, or like you already know?

I've been doing this for a long time, right? And like, I, I'm not the most, um, let's say boastful person around.

Yeah.

But I'm also like, I, I, I'm not like, I don't wanna mislead anyone, right? Like it's really easy. I think like these kind of things always take more time and more money than anyone projects, and that's why all these startups fail.

Yeah.

Right. And like, I think like we have to be clear-eyed about that.

Yeah.

But that said, like, I am genuinely like the most optimistic by far as I've ever been about this company and the trajectory we're on.

Yeah.

And about the technology in the state that it's in. So I think like it's, it's really a unique time in the history of this company and also in the history of solar where we're taking that first leap beyond the 30%, you know, potential.

Yeah.

Of solar.

Yeah.

So it's like, it's a pretty cool time.

Okay.

As a solar nerd, I can say that like with full heart. Yeah. Like, yeah.

Yeah. And so, and then, and so, so you will be making traditional, the plan is to make traditional silicon cells as, as you are still refining these last bits and pieces.

Yeah. So what's cool about this is like, it gives us a real, like what we consider a bankable path to scale. So this proven technology, no technology risk really with the silicon. Turns out that this heterojunction technology that Mike Berger pioneered is the best bottom cell for making a tandem on.

Okay.

So you can put a perovskite directly on top of that and make it a really, really good tandem.

Okay. Okay.

So the way we see it, it's like, here's a proven technology. It's competitive in the market. We can build it at gigawatt scale right here in the US. We can commercialize that. And in parallel, we can mature the perovskite technology to the point where it can actually go right on top. But all along, we're already serving the US market. We're serving customers who want to buy domestically produced solar. Okay.

And like, even if you get this up and running in the traditional, more traditional approach, like, are we actually competitive on price versus China?

Yeah, I mean, so most of the world, the short answer is no.

Yeah.

China has done an incredible job, like scaling and bringing down costs for silicon. The unique thing about the US today, and I think has been consistently building over multiple administrations, Is that we see the value of reshoring and having reshoring solar manufacturing, reshoring supply chains.

So there's this push to make this happen.

There's this push, right? And it's like natural. Anytime you have a smaller new industry, it's going to cost more to manufacture. I don't deny that. But I think with the kind of current strategic push, there's a window of opportunity right now where we are competitive. And if you look at, you know, even Chinese imports or, you know, Southeast Asian imports into the US, solar panel prices are, you know, around $0.30 a watt.

Yeah.

And certainly that's a lot higher than you could buy a panel for in China. But that's the reality in the US. And what we're seeing in the US is that US-produced product is going at a premium. Everyone wants it. Yeah, there's some incentives, but people also want a really secure supply chain. They're like, oh, you know, I saw that solar shipment get blocked because of forced labor concerns. Yeah, tariff concerns, whatever. So that's really where I think there's a premium on domestic product and we can absolutely be competitive with where the market is today in the US.

Okay. So The US wants to bring manufacturing back. It sees this as strategic. At the same time, I keep running into many startups where it's like the current administration, if you are at all seen as like a green technology, this is like a black mark against you. I mean, so, you know, so it's like a weird world. You feel like you're caught between two worlds where it's like, yes, we want manufacturing jobs, we want to make this stuff in the US. And we can see this being strategic, but also we hate green technology. I mean, is that the— is this a battle you face or not?

Not— I mean, not directly. I think the way I think about it is like solar is actually the one energy source that everyone can agree on.

Okay.

Right. It's actually pretty bipartisan. It's remarkable. If you look at polls, it's like, you know, 70% of American adults like are supportive for more solar in the US.

Yeah.

Especially if it's made Domestically.

Yeah.

Okay. Right. So like it's something that everyone agrees on. Yeah, there's some rhetoric, right, left and right, but it's really like underlying what you're seeing is consistently across, across administrations, there's these like bipartisan agreements that yes, we should produce it locally. So we have 45x manufacturing tax credits to support that. Yes, we should actually support domestic content behind that. And, you know, yes, we should tariff imports that are selling under cost. Yeah. So, so there's like this consistent thing that we think is growing and not going away.

Okay. Okay. On some of like the more futuristic stuff, um, like I was just in Nevada with JB Straubel, the Tesla co-founder. Um, he has new company Redwood Materials that does battery recycling, but he, he, we walked through—

Cool company.

Yeah, it's really, it's actually amazing. And I hadn't been there in like 2 or 3 years and it had, I couldn't even put a number around how much bigger it was than when I was there last. But, you know, they, they were fine. So they get people to send All kinds of electric batteries, but a big chunk is our car batteries. And, you know, they, what they were finding was they would get the batteries, they would still have like 50 to 70% of their life left. And so instead of putting it through this whole recycling process where, where Redwood actually breaks it down to the elemental level, you're getting out raw lithium and nickel and all these things. They, he was like, oh, well, these still have enough in them. Let's lash a whole bunch of them together, tie it with a solar field. And then they had like a little mini— this was all powering this mini data center in a container.

Of course.

Like totally off the grid, man. I mean, it was wild. So you had—

that's cool.

You had, I don't know the size of it. It was like these 2, um, decently big, but not like crazy big solar farms right next to it. I mean, I would, it was like It was like, I would call it like a half football field, maybe even less. And then, and then tons of these batteries all connected. And Redwood did have to figure out some technology to kind of, um, create, create some equilibrium through all the electricity, throw it, you know, make it, orchestrate it to, to, to work well and then feed into this data center. Um, but then, yeah, I mean, like we are in the middle of this clear, insatiable appetite for data centers. Is it like, so, okay, this is a very long question, but like, so I've seen this done for like a Connex trailer-sized data center. Is it, is solar like actually, you know, a reasonable way to power larger data centers or does it just take too much?

I thought you were going to go ask about solar recycling. I mean, but powering data centers. Yeah. I mean, I think it's, it's a very reasonable way, right? Like if there's a lot of talk around like, you know, Nuclear fission, small modular reactors, fusion reactors, geothermal.

Like things are just getting more and more exotic and yeah.

Yeah. So like, that's, that's the kind of milieu we're in, right? But like, the reality is like, you go look at the hyperscalers, right? You look at Google, you look at AWS, you look at, you know, Microsoft, they're all deploying a crap ton of solar. And that's like the, the, the main source of electrons, you know, like, and yes, you also need these firm sources and your flexibility with batteries and so on. But they're also seeing solar as like the foundation for all this.

Yeah.

And does it need to be right next to your data center? No, like it could be on the grid. But certainly there's a lot of interest from those kind of companies also on deploying modular solar next to, you know, your modular batteries, modular, you know, compute. Yeah. Right. So you can put all those together and in some way you can basically avoid the, you know, years-long kind of transmission wait to get interconnected to the grid.

Yeah.

And that's really like a huge advantage for folks who like every day is millions of dollars kind of You know, opportunity cost.

So you're saying so, so the Googles and Microsofts of the world are buying tons of solar today and they're then what, then they're building big solar farms in the US?

Yeah. Yeah.

And like, because I just, I just don't feel like, I mean, I'm, maybe I'm just not paying attention. I just, I feel like, well, most of the big data centers I've gone to are either hydro or, or gas, you know? And so, yeah, I just didn't know. Maybe I haven't been to the right ones, or maybe this is just happening now, or I just haven't paid attention to the right things.

Yeah. So I mean, a lot of the new data centers, right, they're trying to get online quickly. Yeah. So how do you get new generation? It's maybe gas. If you can get the turbines, it's gas, right? Yeah. You do that quickly. But most of these companies are also buying a ton of solar through PPAs.

Okay.

Right. And sometimes even like Google just acquired Intersect, right? This renewable developer. So like they're actually building or buying these like kind of solar projects or solar and storage projects. So that's all happening. It may not be, it's in many cases like not next to your data center, so you're not even gonna see it if you're like going to visit the data center.

But isn't the transmission always like, I always, you know, Elon will tweet out like, oh, we could cover some small part of, you know, uh, a country. Yeah. And have a, you know, have enough energy for the entire world. And then Bill Gates always writes underneath. Like, oh, but you need to deal with transmission. Yeah.

They're both right. They're both right. Right. But we do have a lot of wires in this country. Like, yes, it's old. Yes, we want to like improve it and put a bunch more transmission, like high voltage transmission lines around, but like a lot of it does exist. So like in many places you can just put solar on the grid and power, you know, a load somewhere else. Like, yeah, you have to make sure it's balanced and there's a lot of like a huge amount of complexity around it. But like in the end, it's like you're generating electrons, you have the wires, like You can make it happen.

Okay. I mean, it's a super stupid question, but look, I mean, I don't know, it's running through my head, so maybe it's running through somebody else's. You know, I just remember driving to Mojave for years because I would always go out there for aerospace stories and different stuff. And you see these massive solar farms. Um, but it's like, I'm sorry to everyone if this is a stupid question, but like, literally, so, you know, why is the— are American deserts not just like full of, of more solar if this is all transmissions feasible and cost is good. And yeah, I mean, I, 'cause I actually feel like I don't, I have a, I feel like there was a moment in time where I saw these appearing all the time and then I don't see new ones as often as I did.

I think a lot of like, it's, so it's still happening. There's, there's definitely, we're deploying, you know, 40 gigawatts of solar every year in the US. So it's like no question it's still happening, these large-scale solar farms. They're happening in a lot of different places, like the most maybe prime sites, the most easiest, like easy to permit, easy to like kind of COVID the land, cut sites, best transmission, whatever, are taken up already.

Okay.

Okay. But that doesn't mean you can't still build, you know, many, many hundreds of gigawatts to terawatts of solar. Like there's, Elon's right, like, you know, it takes what, 100 square miles or whatever, right? Like 100 by 100 to like power the entire US a few times over, right? Yeah. It's, it's pretty remarkable how much you could actually deploy. Like we could power the whole US with the amount of land that's currently used for like coal mining.

Right.

So it's like you truly could like put a lot more solar on the grid. Um, and it is happening. It's just like now it's considered sort of like a proven energy source. So we actually don't talk about it very much.

Okay.

Right.

Okay. And then in Australia, I mean, Mike Cannon-Brookes, he and a partner, they were funding this huge, um, huge array that was going to like send power underwater to Singapore, but I feel like that— yeah, through a cable. Yeah. But then I feel like that's gone through undulations, and now Australia I think is gonna keep it if it happens. I don't know, like, I always hear these giant projects and then things fail and the economics actually don't seem to work out.

Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I can't speak to that one specifically. I don't know what's going on. But like, one of the kind of cool things about solar is that like It's one of the few technologies that scales modularly.

Okay.

It doesn't need to be, you know, a 10 by 10 square mile kind of array. It doesn't even need to be 1 by 1 square mile. It can be, you know, as small as 1 panel or like 10 panels on your rooftop, right? And it doesn't lose efficiency. Yeah, it's more expensive at small scale, but like the kind of cool thing is like you can actually distribute these in a pretty wide way rather than like 1 big nuclear plant. You can have like a lot of these anywhere, right? You know, everyone knows this.

Yeah.

And it does quite well economically, even if you, Chunk it up into a bunch of little, little projects.

Yeah. Okay.

Yeah.

Okay. Um, when I wrote the story on you guys, you know, I got a bunch of cool, I didn't know about this. And then I also got a bunch of never going to happen. I feel that a lot. Well, so I got a mix. I got a mix of, uh, uh, Swift is not actually, I mean, I'm not saying this was like a flood or anything. It was just, I'm just giving you a couple, couple notes. Um, yeah. I mean, some of them were self-serving. It was a couple other startups are like, "No, we're we're ahead of them." And then definitely some Perovskite skeptics who some of these people seem to know what they were talking about. They're like, "I've been in solar for thirty years. Never gonna happen." Yeah, yeah. And and then and then a little bit of of you know China's gonna China's gonna win this. So so I mean. I guess my overall— I'm used to doing this. So my overall impression was that even among some knowledgeable people in the solar industry, still serious skepticism around perovskites winning.

Yeah, I mean, it's, it's fair, right? It's, it's a hard thing and it takes a long time. So it's anytime you say, okay, yeah, this is going to happen like in 1, 2, 3, 4 years, like you You could be wrong, right? And like that's happened a lot, I think, over the last ten years.

Yeah. No, I mean there's just things like carbon nanotubes where oh God! I feel like I wrote this story eight hundred times, and then after you do it enough, you're like I'm not ever going to say anything about carbon nanotubes again, no matter what you show me. You know, and when I was going over the Perovskite stuff, I'm not saying it's like totally apples to apples, but I was just like oh, I see. So everybody's kind of like edging each other out on these efficiency numbers and they're like kind of science experimenting on their way. But it did, it was feeling, it was feeling, it was feeling sciency as opposed to mass manufacturing-y in bits.

Yeah.

Which is like, you're not shy about. I mean, that's what you're trying to figure out. It's just, I, yeah, I don't know. It felt like I was trying to gauge 2 years away, 10, 20. That's, I think that's where my head was at. Yeah.

Yeah. I think you gotta take it step by step, right? The reality is like you, you have to, I like, it's not a science experiment today, but like, yeah, we do science. Like we advance the technology through science.

Yeah.

That's, that's natural, right? Like I think we, we've announced, you know, we've done pilots, we've started a pilot in Texas on utility-scale solar farm with Plenitude, right? A major developer. Uh, we've done one with the DOD as of last year that we also announced. Like there's actual, you know, product going into the field and under test today. So it's definitely like in that journey, but it's not yet to a point where I would say like, yes, absolutely. This is like, yeah, tomorrow this is going to be out there like at massive scale. It's like it's a journey. It's going to take 3 to 5 years to get to that, that kind of gigawatt scale where it's actually competitive.

Why do you guys even publish patents?

Why do we do patents?

Yeah. I mean, it's like if, if, I mean, you know, this is not like some anti-China. I love China, you know, but this is some reality I've done stories where the US was like leading in windmills too. And then, you know, China got the source code to the controller in this windmill. And the company I was writing about in Massachusetts was like, you know, went from the world leader to bankrupt in like 18 months, you know. And obviously SpaceX. I mean, Elon's talked about this some in the past of like, this is hard to do. I'm not going to publish the patent. Good luck to you if you can like figure out how to do it.

Yeah.

Why, why disclose anything when, especially in solar where it looks like it could be quite dangerous to do that?

Yeah. I mean, we don't, I would say we don't patent most of the stuff we do for that reason. So we keep things as trade secrets, you know, secret sauce, like things in the company. But that said, there are some areas where it's like, if it's very clear, like when someone is violating a patent and you know, you've kind of developed that. Yeah. That like, You do want to protect that. And that we've seen actually in the solar industry, increasing litigation or increasing like protection of IP, even in China. So all kinds of Chinese companies suing each other, you know, in the US, there's, you know, First Solar kind of creating this new investigation into Topcon technology.

Okay.

Right. So there's like these different kinds of like dynamics where having IP at least gives you a freedom to operate that is really valuable. Right. And that, that's something that we, we want to use it defensively, right? Like, okay, kind of protect our interests and be able to like actually, um, manufacture this thing without being kind of unfairly attacked from all sides, which if someone else patented what we did, could happen.

Is this the type of thing where you guys figure it out, you start manufacturing these, these panels, and then somebody can buy one and reverse engineer from what you've done, or it's more on this chemistry level where it would be quite difficult? To figure that out?

I think it's a bit of both. Yeah, there's some stuff that you could see if you like did a cross-sectional scanning electron microscope image or something. Um, but some stuff like it's, it's in how we make it.

Okay.

And I think that's where there's a lot of secret sauce, right? And like, how do you, how do you tweak these recipes? How do you manufacture these? And that's what we don't try to patent. And it's not obvious if you open it up.

So if there is like an apples to apples on the technology at some point around perovskites, And, and then it always comes back to this, well, China's gonna make it cheaper because of labor and a, a number of other factors. But you guys would be— well, okay, so you're kind of partially hoping and betting that you get there first, you become this like dominant player for some period of time with this new technology. And then, and then the other bet is just that the US wants to do this and, and the West wants to do this and is willing to possibly Uh, yeah.

So the question is kind of like, is that what's going to happen?

Well, I'm just playing this out in my head. Yeah.

Um, yeah.

Yeah. Hmm.

I feel like there, there's this, like, I, I don't think it has to be like one or the other. I think, uh, I, I didn't mean to make it sound like we're the only ones who can solve this.

Okay.

Like, I think, you know, there are, there are other companies that are trying to Multiple solve this. players in the world who can develop this and commercialize it, and many people are making great progress. So I don't want to like discount any of that. I think we're as well placed as anyone, right? Especially in the US and the Western world to do this. That doesn't mean that China can't also succeed in parallel. And then it's a question of like, okay, well, who's going to make it? Who's going to sell it? Where are you going to sell it? And I think the US needs to make some of its own solar. Yeah, that's something I believe. That's something I think a lot of people believe.

Weren't you texting me earlier? I mean, isn't there like a thing where China's like maybe cutting the US off?

Yeah, I mean, that's the funny thing is like, like, yeah, like China has this strong control of like these different parts of the supply chain.

Yeah.

And actually, yes, we're building up like domestic production capacity, but like all of that's relying on Chinese equipment.

Okay.

Almost all of it.

Okay. To go in your factory.

Ours is not.

No, no.

I mean, I mean, your other people's, your generic factory, the generic solar factory in the US or elsewhere in the world uses Chinese equipment.

Okay.

Yeah. And like, Usually that's like fine, right? It's like going back to our other point, like if they make the equipment cheap and good and like we import it and we use it to make products, great. Um, but yeah, there's this new, new announcement like this week, this news that the Chinese government was like influencing Chinese manufacturers to say like, hey, like maybe you shouldn't sell that leading edge manufacturing equipment for solar cells to the US.

Yeah. And was it US specific or like the West broadly?

Um, I don't, to be honest, I don't remember. It's, um, yeah, it's, these are like Rumors, right? Yeah, like Chinese, uh, workings, right?

Okay. But yeah, I mean, it's just, it seems, yeah, I mean, when you, before that even came out, it was just when I was running through the, the numbers and like what we were talking about, I'm just like, oh, well, China could just like do this themselves and, and the rest of the world would just be hosed if they, if they wanted to do it that way. I mean, and they often don't care about, um, International markets on some stuff. It's like the domestic market's big enough. Yeah, yeah.

But like to add to that, like that was like they called out Tesla right in that article. It was like they're talking about like oh the Tesla announced they were doing this like two point nine billion dollar purchase of solar equipment right to like build up domestic manufacturing. And that's like that's a huge threat to China. Like yeah, they're like okay well this huge company in the U.S. is going to build out this massive capacity.

Yeah.

Um, using our equipment. So, oh shit, like maybe we should not let that happen.

Okay.

The protection. Yeah. Yeah.

This was for Tesla to make their own solar panels?

Cells and panels. Yeah.

So, okay. Yeah. I can never tell if they're— well, I don't want to get you in trouble or anything. I mean, I can never tell if they're still serious about that or not. Yeah. It feels like so many ups and ups and downs.

Uh, they're, they're definitely making some serious bets.

Okay. So they were buying Chinese manufacturing equipment to come to the US. For Tesla to make panels?

I can't speak to like where they stand today, but I think they're definitely exploring that for sure. And that's been widely reported.

Okay.

Okay. Last couple of months.

Okay. I know like Tesla obviously was doing the solar roofs and stuff and it seems— I don't know, I don't see a lot of them around. But like Tesla aside for a second, is the solar roof in general like a thing that will ever happen?

Yeah. I mean, I think it's happening in small ways here and there. Yeah. Like it's more of a niche product, right? It's like Roofs are harder.

And it's gonna be more expensive than—

Gonna be more expensive.

Yeah.

Yeah. 'Cause every roof's different. Like, you know, you have to kind of customize it. It's gonna be less efficient than just putting panels somewhere in a desert. Yeah. So ultimately, like, it's gonna be more of a niche product, but it's, it's a nice to have.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And then I have like friends who bought into solar early and did their house and like they're battling with PG&E and PG&E is like always changing the rules on them and everything. I mean, yeah. I mean, it's just, It's like, I don't know, it's annoying when there's this thing that should obviously be good for the world.

Yeah, you would think so.

Besides perovskites, I mean, are there, is there, is there a debate around other technologies that if we see silicon getting to this limit or we're right up against it, are there, there must be other things people are betting on or perovskites is like There's a consensus in the industry that it's like, that's it. That's our only kind of hope here.

Yeah. I mean, like as an observer of the industry, right? Like I think within the industry, we've seen many technologies come and go, right? Like again, CdTe, CIGS, organics, dye-sensitized cells, quantum dots, you know, all these like, you know, stable of new materials and technologies. And Like, I've worked on a lot of these and I've seen that like none of them have been able to actually outperform silicon. And, you know, there's various physics reasons why like certain materials are not going to be as good as other materials. It's really hard to refine a material in a way, to find and develop a material in a way that actually can compete on efficiency with a technology that we've learned how to control over 7 decades.

Yeah.

Right. And perovskites are really the only one I think that have in some ways, like, ever come along since silicon was developed.

Okay.

That can actually, like, match that and do it economically. Yeah. So I don't see it, like, likely. I don't see it on the horizon. I don't see any technology right now that is anywhere near as competitive as perovskites in terms of, like, advancing that frontier.

So, like, this is kind of, this is the moment. I mean, either, so perovskites work or they don't for this 30-year period. And then if they do, Everybody's shift— this would be just massive. I mean, the whole industry would, would shift.

Yeah, I think the whole industry will shift. It's— and to me, it's more a matter of like when than if.

Okay.

It's like, it's going to take time.

Yeah.

Technology takes time. Yeah. But it'll get there.

And like, out of all those other technologies that you've seen come and go, um, undoubtedly for a fatal flaw or a couple in how you make them and, and, and all that, I mean, is there some As we enter this era of AI making scientific discoveries. I mean, but is there something that everybody knows would be the, like, idealized molecule or something in that grab bag that is the most prized one? If we could just figure out this one or two things. Yeah.

I mean, a lot of people have tried. Yeah. So like, yeah, there's many academic labs and folks that we've collaborated with in the past who have tried that. Yeah. I think it's plausible, but I think it's not likely to be real step changes over perovskites. It's like if 20 years ago, if you said, hey, make me the perfect solar material, someone who could pull that out of a hat would pull something very similar to a perovskite out of that hat.

Okay.

Right? It would just be a perovskite that maybe is a little more durable, a little more like less ionic and ion moving around and stuff. Just like something similar to a perovskite. So I think it's much more likely that It's some refined version of a perovskite that turns out to be kind of the, the way forward.

Okay.

Um, like longer term than, than some completely new material or architecture or something. Yeah. Yeah.

And is most— is, is this down to like a US versus China race or does Europe have perovskite research? Um, I mean, I'm sure they have research, but are there legit players in this, this startup world?

Yeah. I mean, Europe, I think, has done a lot of the foundational research in perovskites. They're in many ways like kind of pioneers.

Yeah. You guys had A bunch of guys from Oxford, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oxford. Yeah. So there's a lot of good work happening there. I think because of the market there, it's actually been a very challenging place to commercialize anything.

Yeah.

We've seen, you know, there's one major company there, Oxford, that has been kind of an early leader in that space and the first to come out of the labs. So they're certainly a serious competitor and a good, you know, a good company. I think, you know, in the US, there's sort of more of an opportunity and a better market for bringing this to scale.

In Australia, or because they were such a research powerhouse for a while in this?

Yeah, I mean, there's great research there as well on perovskites, so I wouldn't discount that for sure. But like, again, it's like from a market scale and commercialization kind of opportunity standpoint, it's like US is a big one, India is a big one, China is a big one. Yeah, you—

I think you said like, thank God Germany did what it did. When I had a guest from the nuclear industry on, you know, I mean, he was kind of holding Germany up as the country that did the exact Act wrong.

Oh yeah, those are both true. I think like I don't think they should stop have stopped nuclear, and I think they should have deployed solar. Okay, okay. Like those are both true, right? You should do a ton of nuclear. You should do a ton of solar.

Just not have turned off all the nuclear plants with a war that Russia is involved in looming.

Yeah, yeah. No, I don't think anyone should turn off nuclear plants, but you should also deploy a crap ton of solar.

Okay, okay. Yeah. Do you pay attention to the nuclear industry?

I mean, I, I'm not a nuclear physicist, so I, I follow it from like kind of observer standpoint.

Yeah. Okay. Um, okay. Um, this has been a fascinating for me discussion. Um, is there, was there anywhere we didn't go that I, that I should have? Because this is still a bit new, new to me. Yeah.

I think one thing that comes to mind actually, one thing that came to mind actually when you were talking about the solar, um, for data centers was There's actually, I think, a lot of opportunity for solar to kind of be like, be the foundation for like AI. And I, you know, I wrote a thing on like solar for AGI, right? Like, um, I was talking to Jeff Dean last week and he, he, you know, he's obviously like thinking a lot about how do you power data centers with solar and like he and many others like him, I think in there. Okay. There's no one like Jeff Dean, but like other folks.

For people who don't know, I mean, just a longtime, uh, resident genius at Google and AI chief.

Okay. Yeah, I hope he's not mad at me if I say he's now an investor at Swift, but he is backing Swift. And I think part of the reason is that like we share this belief that the future of AI is gonna be heavily powered by solar. It's the fastest thing you can deploy. It can match the speed of AI. It's on this learning curve that's getting cheaper and cheaper and cheaper, right? 20% decline in cost every doubling of deployment. So it's on this like kind of same trajectory. As AI growth. And when you combine solar and batteries, it's like a perfect power source for, for AI data centers.

Like in my head, I'm skeptical just 'cause I'm picturing some just egregiously large solar farm to, to, to power the data centers that I've been running across. Or am I, I mean, I, I don't even know like the scale of these things anymore.

Yeah. I mean, some of them, yeah. Where you have land, yeah, you do it right. Like where you don't have land, you put it on a grid that's connected to a place where you do have land.

Yeah.

So I wouldn't say it's like the only power source, but I think it can certainly be the foundational data source— sorry, power source for these data centers.

Well, and again, I try— I mean, I swear to God, this is not like anti-China or anything. I just try to be a realist about these things. It's just so what you just said, it's like if you pair solar up with batteries, well, it happens that like China's dominant and completely dominant in both of those.

Well, we better get building, right? We better get building.

You know, I mean, there's just— there's like some of these fundamental realities that it's like, Yeah. I mean, sometimes I don't feel like— I feel like the US is playacting sometimes where it's like, oh, that would be nice, or we want to do that. But then you just quickly start ticking off what needs to happen and you're like, well, we've got some pretty large fundamental problems that need to be solved then. And you don't seem to be spending the quantity of money that it would take, like anywhere near the quantity of money to solve that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. So, so like, how do you, how do you get over that?

Like, yeah, well, I mean, I just think, I think, I think it's, it's, it's, it's, you know, there's beauties in our political system and then there's difficulties. It's just when, when the adminis— you know, the whims of politicians change every 4 years and, and you just have to have some kind of commitment to this stuff. And, um, it's kind of weird because we're actually fantastic at building data centers. Um, we're like amazing at software. We're fantastic at, we have more data centers than the rest of the world combined. And then you just need these other bits and pieces. I, I'm gonna sound like a dullard, I think, on this, but you know, it's like we can raise capital for so many things, you know?

Yeah.

And people get excited and you just see trillions of dollars pouring into things. And then I, I feel like areas like solar and batteries and then stuff that I'm always obsessed with around, yeah, robotics, like actuators and stuff like this. It's like all these key pieces of the puzzle, we're just, we're just sort of, Take like not as seriously.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, totally.

Yeah, drives me slightly insane.

Yeah, I mean, we we there's so much that needs to change, right? Yeah, I think there's like kind of yes, the government needs to do stuff. Like we can take a you know page out of the Chinese playbook and how they dominated solar and storage and all that. Yeah, there's all these kind of policy mechanisms, the cheap capital, the you know consistent funding for research, the you know, loan guarantees and tariffs and stuff like, and we're starting to use some of those tools.

Yeah.

On a policy standpoint, I think from a private sector standpoint, what can we do? Right. I was like, just, just dudes. Like, what can we do here? It's like, I think we look for these breakpoints, right? We look for these inflection points where there's like a technology step, for example, with perovskite tandems, but that's true of like new chemistries and batteries sometimes, things like that, where you can actually Imagine kind of like getting the private sector behind something like this because there are venture-scale returns behind it, right? So like perovskite tandems, right? Like we're seeing increased momentum behind it because instead of investing in the nth silicon factory, you now have this technology that can potentially upend the industry, right? And that's a time when you can actually like kind of just destroy the moats that were there before.

Yeah.

And that's not to say that like China's silicon moats are anywhere near gone when we switch to perovskite tandems. That's certainly not true.

Yeah.

But like when you make this change, there is an opportunity to kind of reinvent the supply chain, reinvent the industry. And rebuild it in a place that it didn't exist before. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, all this sounds expensive. So so you guys would not be you wouldn't turn down large quantities of money to help to help build these factories.

No, no, we would not. But it's not as much as any of the hyperscalers is spending on data centers next year.

Right, right.

Yeah. You could build an entire domestic solar industry on. Far less than that amount.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Well, this has been fascinating. Thank you so much for your time. I feel like getting to know you just these last couple of months has been cool because I, I kind of go in and out of subject areas and I feel like you're— I always appreciate when somebody comes from academia who can also explain what's going on in like human terms that I can understand. But you like, I, you know, Maybe you're, you're very good and you've pulled the wool over my eyes, but I always feel, I feel like you're, um, you're accurate and conservative on, on setting expectations around some of this stuff, which is, you know, is, is nice.

I appreciate that. Um, it's, yeah, it's hard to, hard for me to, to not try to find the facts, right?

So yeah, no, but I mean, I mean, it's, it's like, it's super, super helpful at least to, to level set and, and have some idea of how all this is gonna play out. So, um, okay, so the best place for people to go is probably like Swift Solar?

Yeah, so swiftsolar.com. Um, you can find me on LinkedIn or email.

Okay.

Tweet or whatever.

Okay.

Okay.

Um, well, Jill, thank you so much for being on the show.

Thank you. I really appreciate it.

The Core Memory Podcast is hosted by me, Ashlee Vance, and/or Kylie Robison. Or both of us together. It is produced by me and David Nicholson. Our theme song is by James Mercer and John Sortland, and the show is edited always by the John Sortland. Thank you so much to Brex and Send Cut Send for all your support, and thank you most of all to everybody for listening or watching. We love you. Please. Please leave us a like, a review, a subscribe, all of those tremendous things. Thank you, and we'll see you again.

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