Solar maxxing with Lisan Al Gaib, Jesse Peltan

Summary

Podcast Summary: DER Task Force – "Solar Maxxing with Lisan Al Gaib, Jesse Peltan"

Date: May 5, 2025
Guests: Jesse Peltan
Hosts: DER Task Force Crew

---

Episode Overview

This episode brings on Jesse Peltan—energy entrepreneur, founder of Type One, and self-professed "solar maxi"—to explore the wild potential of solar energy and distributed energy resources (DERs). The crew dives deep into the limits of solar deployment, the feasibility of going “Type 1” as a civilization, and the comparison between solar, nuclear, and fossil fuels across both practical and physics-first lenses. The discussion stretches from Jesse’s early days buying solar off eBay at age 12, to the exponential growth trajectory of global solar capacity—touching community grids, AI, the role of China, and what real abundance might look like.

The episode features a recurring blend of high-level system thinking, practical grid and technology insights, and fun moments, making it both rich in content and deeply engaging.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Background: Jesse’s Origin Story of a "Solar Maxi"

• Early Obsession: Jesse got into solar as a kid, buying panels off eBay at age 12, fascinated by the math and the plummeting cost curve ([03:06], [05:06]).
  • “I would probably say [I’ve been] a solar maxi since I was a kid... watching the solar cost curve come down below a dollar a watt.” — Jesse [03:06]
• Entry into Energy: Started with an LED business before college, leasing LEDs to commercial clients skeptical of the tech due to CFL failures ([10:53]).
• Trajectory: Progressed from LEDs to college energy businesses, then into bitcoin mining leveraging West Texas’s unique power price structures ([14:41]).

---

2. The Case for Solar Maxxing

Solar as Planetary-Scale Energy Solution

• Abundance Orders of Magnitude: Jesse puts solar at the top not only now, but at planetary/civilizational scales, citing 173,000 terawatts of sunlight versus humanity’s 18 terawatt primary energy use ([31:11], [33:35]):
  • “If you ask about energy on a planetary scale, it is just solar; everything else is a rounding error.” — Jesse [31:11]
  • “Not only are we not using 1% of the energy available on the planet, we're using 1% of 1%.” — Jesse [33:35]

Why Solar Outcompetes Fossil and Nuclear

• Physics Limits: You simply can't 10x or 100x global energy supply on fossil fuels without “completely altering the atmosphere,” both due to CO₂ and oxygen limits ([34:03], [41:25]).
• Potential for Nuclear: Even if we mine all uranium/thorium, solar still wins on absolute planetary available energy; nuclear is long-term significant, but ultimately solar dominates ([55:00], [56:29]).
• Materials Case: The physical material demand for solar (glass, silicon, aluminum—all common) scales much better and more sustainably than the fuel-intensive supply chains for fossil or nuclear ([57:31]).

Economics: The Downward March of Costs

• Cheaper and Cheaper: Solar achieves rapid cost declines due to learning curves and manufacturing scale; battery costs are plummeting too, especially in China ([65:08], [69:33]):
  • “Batteries on a distributed basis in China is some of the cheapest energy on the planet.” — Jesse [65:08]
• Distributed = Cheaper T&D: With solar and batteries on homes and businesses, transmission/distribution costs—40% of the typical US grid bill—drop ([74:51]).
• Ubiquity Is Coming: Solar will follow the trajectory of LEDs: high initial skepticism, but total ubiquity is inevitable ([13:24]).

---

3. The Solar + Storage Combo—More than Just "Clean Power"

• Storage Everywhere: Batteries are valuable not just with renewables but for grid stability and load shifting—“batteries everywhere” is a core component of the vision ([07:07], [08:42]).
• Reverse Economics: The group highlights that once batteries are ubiquitous, bolting on solar is incredibly easy and valuable, as batteries already come with bi-directional inverters ([09:08]).
  • “Once you have batteries everywhere, it's a no brainer to just cover every roof in solar panels.” — Jesse [07:32]

Balcony Solar: The Micro to the Macro

• Policy Wish: Highlights the potential of “balcony solar”—plug-and-play, ultra-low-cost panels for urban dwellers—drawing from policy in Germany and elsewhere ([09:29]).
  • “We need a balcony solar type policy in the US... with a battery, that's most of a house.” — Jesse [09:29]

---

4. How Load Growth (Data Centers, AI, Bitcoin) Will Accelerate the Shift

• Flexible Loads Are Good: Bitcoin mining, and especially AI/data centers, are fundamentally flexible and drive improved grid utilization. These loads can shut down during scarcity, smoothing peaks, helping integrate renewables ([15:38], [19:10], [21:17]).
  • “The growth in data centers will actually make the grid more flexible and drive renewables up.” — Jesse [21:17]
• Parallelification: AI and bitcoin are both "embarrassingly parallel," meaning their compute can match low-cost power windows, shifting OPEX/CAPEX tradeoffs further toward renewables ([18:13]).
• Industrial Demand is Stabilizing: “All load is not created equal”—if new loads (data, crypto, industrial) don’t coincide with traditional residential peaks (e.g. HVAC), they lower the cost for everyone ([27:36]).

---

5. Civilizational & Kardashev Scale Thinking: "Type One"

• Solar Is Type 1: The so-called "Kardashev Scale" of civilization energy mastery is already accessible tech-wise, thanks to silicon PV, which Jesse dubs “quantum converters” ([40:33], [41:25]).
  • “All of the technology that's necessary for type 1 already exists today. We're already living in the sci-fi future.” — Jesse [41:25]
• Limits of Fossil & Nuclear: On million-year horizons, only solar yields true abundance given Earth’s raw inputs and sustainable rates. Nuclear is significant, but not on solar’s scale ([56:29], [59:36]).

---

6. Abundance, Energy Poverty, & the Global South

"Leapfrogging" with Decentralized Solar

• No Wires Needed: Cheap solar and storage will expand energy access for the "energy poor" world, where grid rollout is prohibitively expensive ([125:07], [127:00]).
  • “You can just bring the panel and the battery anywhere, and you don't need any infrastructure.” — Host [126:43]
• Distributed Future: The global south is already adopting solar locally—even where grid power exists—due to unreliability, cost, and the ability to get the basics (lights, cold drinks, cell chargers) ([127:50]).
• China's Role: China’s dominance in solar manufacturing will shape geopolitical power as distributed solar replaces oil supply chains ([128:22], [129:10]).

---

7. China’s Scale: Exponential > Everything

Mind-Blowing Stats

• Factory Scale: New Chinese battery/solar plants are the size of San Francisco; manufacturing capacity will soon be able to build the energy equivalent of the entire US grid every year ([143:22], [145:21]):
  • “That’s an entire US worth of electricity per year!” — Jesse [145:21]
• Exponential Solar: China is deploying and exporting solar at a rate that puts other sources to shame and will soon far surpass the world’s current primary energy consumption ([139:14], [139:49]).
  • “Solar has been 10xing every 10 years for 50 years now.” — Jesse [139:18]

---

8. The Grid’s Evolution: Distributed, Fractal, DC?

Fractal Grid Vision

• Fractal Build-Out: The future grid will be built out at many scales—home, local grid, national superhighways—determined by local generation and economic tradeoffs ([167:29]).
  • “The grid's going to be fractal... huge, medium, and tiny all at once.” — Host [167:29]

The AC vs DC Transition

• DC Maxi? Most modern appliances are fundamentally DC (LEDs, computers, EVs), so as we rebuild with solar/batteries, DC architectures could gain major ground. Cost and legacy inertia remain barriers ([148:51], [149:44]).
  • “Most of the things you interact with… are already going to be DC… Even data centers.” — Jesse [148:51]

---

9. Debunking Abundance Fantasies—Vertical Farms, Synthetic Fuels

• What NOT to Do With Abundance:
  • Vertical Farms: Insanely energy-intensive and makes little sense compared to outdoor agriculture ([94:00], [95:29]).
  • Synthetic Chemical Fuels: May work for aviation, but not for mass deployment ([97:08], [97:44]).
  • Desalination: Reasonable and easily handled with solar-scale growth ([94:34]).
    • “To provide all our food with vertical farms, we're talking about orders of magnitude growth in energy use.” — Jesse [95:29]
• What Abundance Is Good For: Water, metals, and powering intelligence (AI)—all scalable and meaningful for human progress ([99:46]).
  • “Eventually, most of our energy will go to powering intelligence, whatever form that takes.” — Jesse [99:46]

---

10. Reliability, Longevity & Practical Considerations

• Longevity: Modern solar panels (especially bifacial designs) can last for decades—there are panels from the 1970s still operational ([130:31]).
• Practical Deployment: Much of the global growth will come from “good enough” deployments—panel stacking, cheap local grids, basic autonomy, not full western redundancy ([122:17], [122:49]).
• Maintenance: Batteries will need more frequent replacement than panels, but the majority of system infrastructure lasts long and is easily swapped ([131:34]).

---

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On planetary energy potential:
  “We could stack solar panels kilometers high… over the entire planet. We're not going to run out of materials to make solar panels out of.” — Jesse [58:26]
• On China’s dominance:
  “They are building an entire US worth of electricity generation per year… That’s insane.” — Jesse [145:21]
• On abundance skepticism:
  “I'm not very bullish on making mass amounts of chemical fuels from solar or nuclear. Just use the energy where possible—it already arrives for free.” — Jesse [47:52]
• On decentralized DER deployment:
  “The vast majority of things people want—cold drinks, a television, a way to charge their cell phone—you can enable with very, very cheap infrastructure.” — Jesse [127:50]
• On the future grid:
  “The grid’s going to be fractal… huge, medium, and tiny all at once.” — Host [167:29]
• On civilization’s next step:
  “All of the technology that's necessary for type 1 already exists today. This is not science-fiction. We're living in it—crystalline silicon quantum converters at scale.” — Jesse [41:25]

---

Timestamps for Core Segments

| Segment | Timestamps | Description / Highlights | |--------------------------------------------|--------------|------------------------------------------------------------------| | Jesse’s Solar Origins & Early Entrepreneurship | [03:06]-[13:24] | Childhood solar fascination, LED business, early takeaways | | The Case Against Fossil/Nuclear, For Solar | [30:28]-[59:36] | Physics, planetary scale arguments, material and economics basis | | Storage Everywhere & Solar Economics | [07:07], [74:02], [65:08], [69:33] | Why batteries will be ubiquitous, cost curves, distributed solar | | Load Growth (AI, Bitcoin, Data Centers) | [14:41]-[27:36] | Deregulated power, flexible loads, how new demands improve grid | | Kardashev Scale, Type 1 Thinking | [40:33]-[42:15] | Civilization energy limits, planetary abundance | | China’s Exponential Scale & Impact | [143:22]-[146:05]| China’s factory scale, global implications | | The “Fractal” Grid & The AC/DC Question | [148:51]-[157:48]| How future grids and appliances evolve, could DC dominate? | | Abundance—What We Do (and Don’t) Need Energy For| [94:00]-[104:08]| Why vertical farming is dumb but desalination is easy | | Longevity, Maintenance, The Path Forward | [130:31], [166:34]| Panel/battery lifespans; building energy abundance in the real world|

---

Tone & Language

The speakers are technically precise, irreverently funny (“quantum converters” for solar panels), sometimes caustic toward energy sector dogma, but always deeply curious and committed to abundance. Radical optimism about the physical opportunity is always balanced with realism about economic, cultural, or supply chain obstacles.

---

Conclusion

This episode is a must-listen for grid nerds, climate tech strategists, or anyone curious about how energy abundance transforms society. Jesse Peltan demonstrates how thinking in millennia, not decades, unlocks radically different choices for today’s infrastructure—and how the tools to build a type 1 civilization are not futuristic, but already here.

Find Jesse on Twitter or follow The Abundance Institute for more. For the host summary: If you’re still listening—you’re a real one.

Transcript

[A]

What is Type one civilization?

[B]

A Type one civilization. So, I mean, there's different definitions of this.

[A]

Wait, wait, we can't start this way. We're restarting right now.

[C]

Okay, I think you should.

[B]

Welcome to another edition of Thunderdome.

[C]

Woo.

[A]

Okay, now we're starting. We're here with Lee San Al Gaib Muadib. Jesse Pelton.

[B]

I don't think I'm really worthy of that title, but do you know why.

[A]

We call you that? No, actually, why do we do you guys?

[C]

I don't know where that came from.

[D]

Well, it came in like minute 90 of like, a podcast about the holy wars.

[A]

That's right. Oh, yeah. Because we started a whole war.

[D]

I'm pretty sure Jesse stole the title from me. We were going to let me be it, and then we realized that I'm not actually the right person.

[A]

The problem here is, is that we recorded the Holy War EP in January and you were supposed to come like, the next week. And we were like, we have our savior. This whole war is going to spread like wildfire. And then.

[D]

And then our savior now it's did not sick.

[A]

We've been rescheduling. Now it's April.

[C]

It's like late April.

[A]

It's like late April. And we just forgot. We're like, what is. What is the so fired up about? Yeah, what were you so mad about?

[C]

I don't know.

[A]

I think we finally just called bullshit on. I'm just a solar maxi now, so. Oh, it was a Maddie Glaze. It was the. It was the paper. It was the paper. Yeah, I actually legitimately just forgot that. Do you know what we're talking about?

[B]

Yeah, no, I remember that.

[A]

Yeah, you remember. So I think Casey Hanmer was my, like, solar maxi, like, entry. He was like my gateway drug. But you really, you, like, you gave me the real. You got me hooked. I'm like fully Solar Maxi now after, I think at Durvos.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

We're in the bar after the second after the solar after party. The after after party. And you were just going off. I was like, dude, this is. We gotta. You're the. You're the. This is the truth. You're speaking truth. So here we are. Now everyone gets to hear it.

[C]

I'm excited.

[A]

I think that was the worst intro we've ever.

[D]

Yeah. I was like, so who are we with?

[A]

We're with Jesse. He's the founder of Type One.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

What is Type One?

[B]

It's my personal company. I'm not like, it's not there yet.

[A]

It's like a catch. All of.

[C]

Well, you were just talking about how it's basically a holdco at this point. Yeah. This is his Brickshack Hathaway.

[A]

Yeah. In stealth mode.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Okay, we're going to start with our normal questions. When did you first get dirtpelt?

[B]

I mean I have been a solar, I would probably say maxi since I was a kid.

[A]

Like I remember before even people knew what maxis were.

[B]

Yeah. I was watching the solar cost curve come down below a dollar a watt. I was like reading as a kid. Yeah.

[D]

How old are you? I was like, you're really dating. I was like, you're really dating yourself right now In a young way.

[B]

So I think this was 2012 when it hit a do like a dollar a lot on the cost curve show.

[D]

And you were, and you were.

[B]

I would have been like, I don't know, 16 at the time or something. But I've been watching it for a while before that. But I, I got like really into, I mean I was a math nerd as a kid and like solar was the coolest thing to me. But the, I got like into, you know, PV tech and the like total energy potential from solar is just completely unparalleled.

[A]

You knew this like then like you were like doing a dollar a nerd.

[B]

I was a nerd.

[A]

So when you give me. Cuz we're gonna have, we're gonna have you get. Do the whole like primary energy bit. But you were thinking about that like 13 years ago.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

That's crazy. So you were just like, you came out dirt pilled.

[D]

Yeah.

[B]

I mean like people have been thinking about this for a long time. I mean there's like paper. Okay.

[D]

When did you.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

But like, but was there like a.

[D]

Was there an event? Like I feel like I was derpilled at a very young age. But I also like, I saw like Al Gore is An Inconvenient Truth and I was like, that was it for me. Climate change was it for me.

[A]

But that's like, that's climate pill.

[D]

I know, but like then it became Dur's event. But it's like there was an event.

[A]

Yeah, yeah.

[D]

Right. Like what, when did like, I don't know, did you have an like electrician in your family or an engineer?

[A]

When did you first encounter solar?

[D]

Yeah, just like a baby crawling on solar panels.

[B]

You know, I, I can't remember the exact circumstances I encountered solar in. I mean I remember like looking really into solar. I remember buying solar panels. I forget what age it was, 12 or something.

[A]

What?

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

You buying solar panels at 12.

[B]

Yeah, I got it.

[D]

You might be our youngest. You might be like our youngest dur.

[B]

Pill. At the time they had these amorphous silicon thin film. It was like unisolar. I think they're like 128 watts and they like roll out on a, like.

[A]

You were doing flexible solar then?

[B]

Well, I mean, yeah, it's, that was what was available. And I got a good deal on.

[A]

Them on the Internet, like a little switchboard.

[B]

And you're like on ebay.

[D]

You bought solar off ebay? I was imagining like a solar backpack or something, you know.

[A]

That's pretty. This is pretty cool.

[D]

This is wild.

[A]

Yeah, I'm, I, I see you're already blowing my mind.

[C]

But that, I mean, that just confirms profit status.

[A]

Yeah, I think this is why. Again, this is why you're in the blood. It's in your blood. What's the, Is there a analogy from the, the worm's blood or doesn't the baby like, talk to the mom in the womb?

[D]

The dust.

[A]

That's kind of. Jesse.

[B]

Okay.

[C]

Okay.

[A]

Anyways. Okay. So basically before you can remember.

[B]

Yeah, I mean, for. Yeah, I mean, there was a time that I can remember that I like, didn't know about solar, but it was, it was pretty early on. Like I.

[C]

Those were dark times.

[B]

I guess.

[A]

Okay, so what's your favorite dirt? Is it solar?

[B]

I mean, it's.

[A]

What type of solar? Wait, sorry.

[D]

Maybe it's not solar.

[B]

So, I mean, I think it would have to be solar. But I do think that storage is absolutely critical in that story. That like solar alone is not nearly as useful as solar plus storage. And I think, like, we're already seeing this, but there's going to be no such thing as solar without storage. Yeah. Just a few years.

[A]

So solar and storage.

[D]

Yeah, the combo.

[B]

I mean, I can't. I love all.

[D]

No, I like it because, Because I feel like storage only can like solve a lot of problems, but doesn't necessarily, like, take advantage of the solar side. You know, people are like slinging batteries places. Yeah. Without, like.

[B]

I think we would put batteries everywhere. Even if we never used any solar or any wind and we ran everything on coal, we would still put batteries everywhere just in order to improve load factor and not have to build so much capacity in generation and transmission and distribution. Batteries will be everywhere. But then the thing is, once you have batteries everywhere, it's a no brainer to just cover every roof in solar panels.

[C]

Yeah, yeah.

[A]

Right. That's actually weirdly an underrated.

[C]

It's like the reverse. It's the reverse.

[A]

People think of like solar and then you like add a battery to get like more economics out of the solar. But you and I have been talking about this, like thinking about it in reverse from like the TDU perspective. You actually. Batteries should be everywhere and they should. You just like get as much if you're charging them with solar behind the meter. It makes the battery way more economically valuable.

[B]

Yeah. I mean, like, people often associate batteries with wind and solar and that's like a valuable use case. Yeah. But really a battery is for anywhere where you have a regular frequent fluctuation in power flow. So that could be load.

[C]

It could be generation peak and average are meaningfully different.

[B]

Yeah. And meaningfully different on a, like a daily basis. Like a high frequency basis.

[C]

Yeah, yeah. Not once a year or something like that.

[B]

Yeah. Not like a seasonal. But then the most valuable place to have a battery is where you have a variable load and solar. So like.

[A]

Right.

[C]

Yeah. The inherent value of storage is on both sides then.

[B]

So you're going to put batteries on every home, every business, like everything. That's not. I mean, even in a lot of cases where you have something that's very high load factor, you're still going to have battery storage, but batteries are going to go everywhere. And then once you have batteries everywhere, then the solar is so valuable. And it's also cheaper to hook up because you already have your bi directional inverter from your battery. Yeah. So you're just doing a DC coupled array on your existing battery storage system.

[C]

All right, wait, before we get too into this, I was like, we're going.

[A]

To take the next like hour to unpack what you just said. So we're going to come back to that.

[C]

Want to come back. I think we want to hear a little backstory before we get into wait.

[A]

But also can. I thought you were going to say like balcony solar, to be honest. So if it's not your favorite dirt, can we just like show some. Love to.

[B]

I love balcony solar.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

I mean, I think we should. We need. We need a. We need a balcony solar type policy in the U.S. i mean, Utah did this recently where I think they have a 1200 watt limit. Yeah. But you can actually do a lot with that because if you put 4 or 5 kilowatts of like DC solar panels. Yeah. With a battery to where you're basically doing like a high capacity factor, you know, 1 kilowatt, 1.2 kilowatt supply, like that's most of a house. Yeah. And it could be a plug and Play system.

[D]

I love that. Does it go where on the balcony does the solar go?

[B]

So like typically on a railing just.

[D]

Hangs over the railing.

[A]

This like doesn't exist in the U.S. yeah, yeah, it's.

[B]

It's very common in Germany.

[A]

But isn't it like 30 cents a watt there?

[B]

Yeah, it's like super cheap because you don't.

[A]

There's nothing. You just like.

[B]

It's just a panel and a micro inverter and you put in the wall.

[A]

And you just plug it in.

[C]

Yeah, you literally plug it into your wall.

[B]

Yeah, it just like it backs. You got to talk about.

[A]

Yeah, okay, sorry, go ahead. We're going to come back to balcony solar too.

[C]

So you first got dirt pilled at some point. That's not even memorable. I'm curious though. Okay, you're 12 years old. What about after that? Like, were you doing energy stuff in college or. Yeah, like give us like the last five, six, seven years.

[B]

I mean, my first energy business was like an LED lighting business. This was back when people were like skeptical around LEDs. These are more expensive. Are they really gonna last?

[D]

They'd been burned by the CFLs.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. And the CFLs were terrible. And we had all kinds of propaganda to get everybody to use the CFLs, but they were objectively, they were bad. The lighting quality sucked. They had a lot of problems with Longev because of the ballast in the or the power.

[D]

CFLs were not abundance. But LEDs are abundance.

[B]

Yeah. Yeah. LED.

[A]

What is the CFL again?

[C]

The spinny one.

[D]

The spinny ones that were like, they're bad lighting. They were more efficient but they were like hazardous to throw out. And like, basically we spent all of our political capital telling people to buy them. But the we, I mean the like transition energy efficiency.

[A]

I miss this whole boat.

[C]

You've definitely seen a cfl.

[D]

You've seen a cfl.

[C]

It's like the spiral, but it's like.

[A]

But it's like, oh, I see.

[D]

It's like you. We put, we pushed like one of the first energy efficiency initiatives was basically pushing a bad product and then LEDs came out and everyone was like, I don't trust you that they're better. But like they are better.

[A]

Gotcha.

[B]

Yeah. So I basically just bought a bunch of LEDs and then like leased them to people where I was like, I will lease it for a fraction of what you're going to save in electricity relative to what you're spending on the CFLs right now. And it's like a no risk option.

[C]

So you just did like energy services agreements, basically on LEDs?

[B]

Well, yeah, it was like to homeowners, basically like a lease. I mean like mostly commercial, but to commercial.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

I was in college at the time. This wasn't like a huge business, but that was my, my first business.

[C]

What was your cost of capital?

[B]

I would just put my own money. This wasn't huge. I did like a few of these installations. Yeah.

[C]

That's awesome.

[D]

I love that.

[A]

That's crazy.

[C]

Okay, so 16 years old, buying solar panels on ebay in college, buying LEDs and leasing them to business owners happened after that.

[B]

It was interesting. I think I actually might have, I'm trying to remember this, but I think I actually might have gotten into solar. I think it was around the same time as the leds because I got like really into the. I just like saw the Math on the LEDs and it was just a no brainer. It was so much more efficient than you can like the, the return on capital was so ridiculously high that I was like, everybody's going to have these. And you know, at the time people were really skeptical. But like now it's like, of course you have LED lighting. Like, and I think solar is going to be the same thing where there is this high initial cost and a lot of people skeptical and then eventually it's just going to be ubiquitous and people aren't even going to think about it.

[C]

It's a no brainer. Duh. Yeah.

[A]

But leds feel less radical than solar everywhere.

[B]

Yeah, I mean they like if, if.

[A]

I just heard like solar going the way of LEDs and got kind of depressed.

[B]

Yeah, I mean, I think the like LEDs are, they were a huge improvement in lighting efficiency. Yeah, but lighting isn't that big of a portion of our. I mean it used to be a.

[C]

Bigger portion once was the whole thing.

[B]

But yeah, yeah, it's no longer such a big portion.

[A]

Right.

[B]

Like the really exciting thing about solar is just the amount of solar that's available and the fact that it's already distributed everywhere. It's like UBI for energy.

[A]

That's pretty good.

[C]

That sounds all right. Yeah.

[A]

Okay, so can we go there? Are we still going backstory? I mean, what's next?

[C]

I'd still like to know what happened.

[A]

Take us from LEDs.

[C]

Okay, so you're in college hawking LEDs. Yeah.

[D]

I feel there's like five more businesses before we get where we are.

[B]

Yeah, I mean I've done a number of things, but I guess after that the next major thing I did. So I built a company to do bitcoin mining in West Texas. And this was back in the era when bitcoin mining was done primarily with coal. Primarily in China.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

What year Was this started? 2017. Did that for a few years. Yeah. And this was like, at the time, people were just looking at the EIA website and being like, oh, power in Texas is 5 cents a kilowatt hour. But there's so much nuance to that because it's the most free market there is on earth for electricity. So there's all these things you can do to lower your cost. There's like responding to real time prices and responding to transmission price cycles. Rcp. Yeah. So you can get power in West Texas for way cheaper if you're willing to have a little bit of reduction in your uptime. And there was this kind of thought at the time of, oh, no, you want to run these machines 247 and it's. No, you don't. That's not the case in almost any industry. You want to run in every hour where your marginal revenue exceeds your marginal cost. And if you are running at times where your marginal cost exceeds marginal revenue, you're losing money.

[A]

Yeah, well, there's also. There is a crossover point on like lowering OPEX costs to like paying down capex.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

But I think I remember at the time because I was very into the bitcoin, like, mining stuff. I didn't ever mine, but like that whole, you know, energy Twitter was all. Everyone was like, doing that math at some point on time. Yeah, it was, but it was like 88 with like 80 or 85% uptime. You were like, radically.

[B]

Yeah. At the time.

[A]

Better off economically.

[B]

At the time, it was about a 95% uptime. You had half of the cost of operations versus 100%. Yeah. So it was.

[A]

But then if you went below, like, it cuts off.

[B]

You can keep going. Well, you could. Yeah. I mean, there's like a, you know, Pareto distribution of power prices. So you get most of the value in the first couple hours you cut and then it's less and less.

[D]

But.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, I was a lot less active on Twitter at that time.

[A]

That's. Have we even talked about this? Because I got into bitcoin and Ders at the same time in like 2016, 17 in Texas.

[B]

I don't think we've talked about those.

[A]

We haven't.

[B]

Wow.

[A]

Okay. Sorry, guys.

[D]

Oh, that's good.

[A]

I do feel this way, that, like having gone through that cycle, everyone, the whole AI thing came along and we're like, we already did all this Thinking. And with bitcoin mining. Yeah, it was like all like, we were just like, you pick up any insight or talking point from them and you're just like, oh, this works for AI.

[B]

Yeah. So like bitcoin mining is a specific case of like parallel computing.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And in general, like the, the thing with parallel computing is that you don't have, you're not serially limited.

[A]

So what does parallel computing mean? Oh, you mean just like.

[B]

Yeah, so you can process a bunch of things in parallel on a bunch of GPUs or ASICs or whatever it is, rather than being serially limited. A lot of things that we use CPUs for, you have to finish one task before you can move to the next one. But when you can do things in parallel, then the absolute speed of any specific one doesn't really matter. What matters is just the cost per unit of compute. So you can do all sorts of things that you can't do in these mission critical serially limited processes. Where if you're like, if you're training an AI model over four months and you have an hour of downtime, but your power cost is half, there's a lot of things you can do to dramatically lower your cost. That because your cost of compute is then lower, you can actually deploy more units of compute and you could actually finish the task sooner and cheaper.

[A]

Oh, interesting.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

Because there's that trade off between cost like OPEX costs and just putting more capex in.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

So AI training is parallel.

[B]

Yeah. So most of the what is parallel.

[A]

Versus non parallel processes, you can split.

[B]

Into a bunch of different tasks and you don't need to finish one task before you move on to the next thing versus a serial process where you have to.

[A]

No, I get that, but I mean.

[D]

Like a normal person. What is an example?

[B]

So like a GPU in your graphics processing unit in like a gaming computer and is going to run all of these, your shaders and your textures and all of these things that can be done in parallel versus the game engine typically runs on a cpu. So there's more of these serially limited tasks. When it comes to more large scale use cases, it's things like if you want to do weather modeling or 3D rendering or fluid dynamic simulations, all those.

[A]

Computationally intensive, all the really big stuff.

[B]

That you're going to use a data center for, you have some amount of parallelization so you have a ton of GPUs and you'd have a lot more flexibility. And this is the other thing on the bitcoin Mining is that, I don't know, Bitcoin miners kind of took credit for. We're pioneering this. This is so new. But people on the traditional computing side like HPC had been doing responsive operating their computers in response to real time prices basically since there were data centers and since ERCOT was a deregulated market, it's been going on for a very long time.

[A]

Oh, that's interesting because I feel like that's a big question now. It's like are data centers flexible? But you're like yeah, they have been.

[B]

Yeah, it depends on the use case. If you're like running a mission critical server, so it's like somebody has to access their bank information or you're like running a security system or that kind of stuff. You need, you know, high, high, high reliability and you're willing to pay a ton for power.

[C]

You just want it on call.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

Ready to respond.

[B]

Yeah, but, but if you have something that's a, like generally most parallel processing, you're not.

[A]

So you're just saying like a lot, like most high.

[B]

Most of the growth is in the. Yeah.

[A]

Is in parallel.

[B]

Yeah, yeah.

[A]

Meaning like your expectation is that a lot of data center usage will be flexible.

[B]

Yes. And I think over time it's going to end up becoming more flexible because historically we've been upgrading our lithography equipment every couple years. And as that starts to slow down, as we reach the limits of Moore's law, we're going to start capitalizing that equipment over longer and longer time frames. And so the cost per unit of silicon is going to come down. And when the cost per unit of silicon comes down, then the energy becomes more like higher relative importance and then basically we're going to have a scenario I think where computers are all like most of your large scale data centers are going to be much more flexible than people would expect is possible today.

[C]

Yeah, and what we just heard a minute ago is you don't even need much flexibility for it to matter a lot.

[B]

You have to have a huge impact. But even that is like, even the mission critical applications are doing things like deploying battery storage on site that both improves their reliability and allows them to respond to whether it's transmission price signals or just a few hours of crazy high prices without impacting their operations. So I think all data centers are going to become more flexible and some of that's going to be enabled through distributed energy resources and some of that's going to be enabled just like by actual real time optimization of your compute.

[A]

Also I just want to Set the scene for everyone. Jesse has like a hundred awesome takes like this. We're probably just going to rip through this is what we're going to do this for like two and a half hours. So just buckle up. So like whatever rabbit hole we go down, let's just, let's just, let's just do it. Yeah, I think what you're saying is, I feel like an underrated point in how we're talking about load growth right now is I've been saying like this is all good, like low growth is fantastic. Like we're going to build shit, we're going to figure out novel ways of dealing with it. There's a lot of like fear and almost like it's, I want to say like FUD or just like I feel like a lot of people in our industry are like we can't interconnect, like we can't blah blah blah. And everything's, everyone's like freaking out and I'm like data centers are going to realize how to get on site power like using the paper Duncan Road or whatever. People are just going to start solving the problem with the tools they have available to them and it's going to radically change how we think about grid build outs. And I remember a big thing there was this whole conversation because of directly in the eye of the whole ESG thing when bitcoin was coming along and ESG was very like World Economic Forum, we love the US dollar hegemony. Like let's fud bitcoin which I think was always like behind a lot of the attacks, not the climate. Like they just used climate as a club basically. But they were like we, they were like, they were thrashing bitcoin. Like you guys are like using so much power. This is like not going to whatever. And so the whole bitcoin community went so deep on like on energy, on additionality basically they're like no, we are going to, we are installing in Texas right now solar like co locating solar and wind and bitcoin that allows us like upsize how much solar and when we're building at a certain interconnect so that when prices are high we're going to shut down the bitcoin and you actually get like net additional peak capacity solar and wind like when it's needed most at high prices. And I feel like that same argument just extends to all this gigantic computing load we're bringing on. If what you're saying is true that 4, 5 to 10% downtime, their costs are cut in half and we're basically massively overbuild tail capacity on the grid. You follow what I'm saying?

[B]

Yeah. So I think this is when we need it most.

[A]

There's going to be way, way more capacity because we're building so much data center load.

[B]

Yeah, I think there's a number of things in there that I want to touch on. So like the.

[A]

Should we also talk about what you did after bitcoin mining? We're just going to pick that up later. There's just be one long intro.

[B]

I think that we're going to see much more of the distributed energy resources deployed with the wave of AI compute than we saw deployed with bitcoin. Because in bitcoin there was this problem of cost of capital was super high and everybody, despite their claims to be very low time preference was extremely high time preference. So people were looking at projects on a one year, two year, three year basis and data centers and there are.

[A]

New LLCs and stuff. And people are like, how am I going to bank this random company that sure they bought $100 million worth of GPUs, but I don't think they're going to be around in two years.

[B]

Yeah. And when Google wants like Duncan's not.

[A]

Signing up with those guys.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. And then I think the other aspect is that we're in a scenario now where most of the data center growth.

[A]

For a while by the way, I think that's true of a lot of these AI companies too. But maybe the narrative is like they're more credit worthy.

[B]

Well, I mean I do think that, I mean you see Google, Amazon, Facebook, they're all buying gigawatts of renewables every year. New build out of capacity. There's a million things to touch on here. But this is another thing of people talking about big tech is going in on nuclear and they are doing some nuclear stuff. But every year the amount of renewables they buy just dwarfs everything that they have in nuclear and planned in nuclear. There's a ton of building going on already. And then even if the companies themselves didn't do that, just the response of supply would respond to the increase in demand. So renewable developers would see the. And the benefit on this for consumers is that the consumers your prices are, your cost of electricity is driven by your load profile. So you have a bunch of demand concentrated in one part of the year. So like in Texas, half of our peak demand, both in the summer and the winter is from your H Vac. It's like primarily residential H Vac driving these huge price Intervals. But then because you disproportionately consume during those times, like we're having to build all this capacity that we only get to capitalize over a few hours. But when you have high load factor, like industrial use on the grid, we get better utilization of grid infrastructure.

[A]

So. And also they don't. It's, it's, it could be like inverse, it could be like the inverse of H Vac load. Meaning like the 10 hours, the 10% they're willing to be down is like those 10% peaking hours that I haven't.

[D]

Actually like spend enough time digging in on. But I was like usually additional load in the grid net positive for customers from a pricing.

[B]

Yeah.

[D]

So. But the whole like all the narrative that's out there is like this is going to hurt customers.

[B]

Yeah. So the important part here is that like prices vary on a real time basis. So if you have a load that is highly correlated with the existing load profile of residential customers, it's just going to compete against them in those hours. But if it's not correlated or it's inversely correlated, then you're going to end up just improving load factor and being able to use like already lowering prices.

[A]

So what Colleen said is like, but if you're adding load in the same exact load all the time, that does constrain supply.

[C]

And I think that was a big argument like in early EV days for example, because people weren't sure when that load was actually going to show up. So it could either increase load factor or worsen it. Yeah, it depends on when they plug in.

[B]

Yeah, it does depend. Although I think people have been thinking about this for a very long time. There's this article from, I think it was New York City back in the 1910s or something where they were talking about the. Because at the time people were building some electric cars and they were talking about if we replaced half of the horses in New York City with electric cars, how it would improve load factor and lower prices.

[A]

Sammy Insole is just ahead of the game. I mean he was, he was in New York. But you know, I'm saying.

[B]

Yeah, I mean this is, this is, these are things that people have been thinking about for a very long time. And I don't know, people like kind of act surprised or like we don't know what to do. But like the fundamental, you know, physics and economics around this is not really different than it was. We have new technologies to play with, but like it's the same problems we have always been facing on the grid.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

And it's like techno economics are all the same. Yeah, yeah.

[A]

Okay, so I do. Just because there's probably more there. You said a couple points you wanted to unpack.

[B]

I mean, we could. Okay, I'm sure we can circle back.

[A]

Before we continue to go rabbit holes down rabbit holes. I do want to try and get it get out of you. You're like more like a central view that like a lot of these things radiate off of. Like, do you have like a overarching view on the, on the like, where energy is going? I think one thing we've obviously talked about is like nuclear is not going to be big and solar is going to be huge and like all the drivers of that. But there's like fundamental physics approaches you've taken at that question and also like economic lenses you put on it. So I don't know what the. Like. Right. I don't even know if that's your core view. That is like a core view I've taken away as like you have made it so obvious to me, like where things are going over the next 50 years that I don't think has been articulated like, well enough in our space. Like, feels like radical to me in.

[B]

A lot of ways.

[D]

So tell us what that is.

[A]

So I don't want to.

[D]

What's your view?

[A]

I don't want to point out like.

[D]

James is hinting at his, at your.

[A]

View, pushing out, pulling a point out of your core view. Or maybe, I don't know, you don't think about it that way.

[B]

But yeah, yeah, I mean, I guess I'll preface with. So I think big is a relative term here. So I do think that over the long term, humanity is going to develop significantly more nuclear capacity than we have today. That being said, it is going to be absolutely dwarfed by solar just because solar is a far more abundant resource. The question I was really interested in is if we look at this problem on different scales, like what, you know, like how does this evolve over time?

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

And if you ask about energy on a planetary scale, it is just solar, like everything else is a rounding error. The total primary energy today at least you know the way.

[A]

What is primary energy?

[B]

So this, so this is like the energy before conversion losses. So this is like the chemical energy in all of the coal and all the energy and all like the, the chemical potential energy that we have in our energy supply. I mean, it's also like the, you know, the nuclear energy we have and the solar and everything else. But I also have some gripes with the way Primary energy is calculated.

[A]

But we're going to come back to this.

[B]

The like, you know, figure that you'll get for primary energies is about 18 terawatts. Now if you compare that to other like energy flows on the planet, figure it's 18 terawatts for what is like human primary energy. So 18 terawatts would be on a continuous basis of like, what is the like instantaneous power of our like primary energy supply.

[A]

Wait, so of what we use, but that's on the demand side or the potential.

[B]

So that's, that's of, it's like how.

[C]

Much coal we burn, how much gas we burn.

[A]

Oh, so all of the, on the consumption side, all that primary energy, all of the gas, like Pre conversion is 18 gallons.

[B]

Yeah, pre conversion. So this is the like.

[A]

So it's demand, that's a continuous demand.

[C]

Nuclear heat is being produced to turn a turbine like all that.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. So all of that altogether 18 terawatts. And if you look at other sources of energy on Earth, we have about 50 terawatts of geothermal heat flows. So like half of that is from radioactive decay and half of that is from just primordial heat from when the Earth formed. And then so we've got, you know, 18 terawatts of human primary energy around 50 terawatts of geothermal. Like tidal is a rounding error. It's like 2 or 3 terawatts or something. And the like the sunlight that reaches Earth on a, or the sunlight at Earth's atmosphere on a continual basis is 173,000 terawatts. So it's 1,000 times just wild, like our current primary energy supply. So like not only are we not using 1% of the energy available on the planet, we're using 1% of 1%. Yeah. So there's like, there's so much more energy available to humanity than we currently.

[A]

Have access to what is like primary energy supply of nuclear and of fossil fuels.

[B]

So if I'm remembering this correctly, I think fossil fuels in total are about 16 terawatts and everything else.

[A]

16.

[B]

Yeah, and everything else.

[A]

But how does that make sense? Because we're consuming 18.

[B]

Well, so, so the other 2 terawatts is everything else. So it's like all the hydro and all the nuclear and all the, you know, wind and solar and like.

[A]

Oh, but I mean of like if I like.

[C]

Reserves.

[A]

Reserves.

[B]

Reserves. So this is a really interesting question because the thing is like I, I don't think we are going to run out of fossil fuels anytime soon. Like, we have better technology all the time. A lot of the technology hasn't even reached other parts of the planet. But it wouldn't matter if we had an infinite source of coal just like sprouting out of the ground. The, the. Even if we had an infinite amount of carbon to burn, we still have a finite amount of oxygen to burn it with.

[C]

And getting very fundamental.

[A]

Okay, so how much. What is the. Using oxygen? What is the oxygen? Peak oxygen. People are talking about peak oil demand. They're totally missing the beat. It's peak oxygen.

[B]

We would hit limits way before we could potentially burn all of the oxygen. But what if you had an infinite amount of fossil fuels and you could use all the oxygen in the atmosphere to oxidize all the carbon in those fossil fuels? You'd get the equivalent of about three years of sunlight on Earth.

[A]

And so we don't have like a continuous refresh of oxygen. You're just saying, like, if we did.

[B]

Oxygen is refreshed by a photosynthesis. But we are currently, currently exceeding. Right, right. But we are currently exceeding the rate of photosynthesis, which is why CO2 levels are going up.

[A]

Right.

[B]

So in order to like, the, the rate that we can do on a continual basis is just photosynthesis, which is just biofuels.

[A]

But so if I wanted to think about if my like, limiter is oxygen supply, what's like the maximum primary energy I could ignite on a continuous basis? So like, what's the maximum theoretical limit of instantaneous fossil fuel use on the planet? Do you know that?

[B]

Off the top of my head, I don't know. But I mean, we're. So we're currently increasing CO2 concentrations by about 2 parts per million per year. But 50% of the CO2 that we're emitting is being absorbed by the oceans and by the biosphere and the like. These rates are going to vary over time because these carbon stores don't have like an infinite amount of capacity.

[C]

So the, the ocean gets more acidic.

[B]

And like biomass, but in the long.

[A]

Term, like, everything's going to get more green.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

So isn't there just me, like more plants because there's more CO2?

[B]

Well, there's, there's like. See, I would honestly, I respect the position that like, like I respect more. The position that more CO2 is good than CO2 just doesn't matter. I don't think it's correct, but I think like, yeah, it's at least an argument addressing.

[D]

It's an interesting argument you can make that is like, it's an. It's an argument accepting the fact that carbon, that, like, fossil fuels change carbon.

[B]

It's like the. I think the physics is just completely undeniable that, like, there is. You put CO2 in the atmosphere, it absorbs infrared light, and that is, like, going to cause a heating on the planet. Like, if we had no greenhouse gases on the planet at all, we would be. Instead of an average temperature of around 15 Celsius, we'd be like negative 18 Celsius average. So we'd be completely frozen over. Like, it would like.

[D]

I mean, I'm of the belief that we save our fossil fuels for when we're about to go into an ice age and then we just, like, heat them back up.

[A]

I. Colleen, literally, without fail, your climate views always comes back to the thermostat. To the thermostat. I just had to point that out every time.

[D]

Every time, yeah. It's Earth Service fossil fuels.

[A]

I mean, it's your spot.

[D]

It's not wrong.

[A]

It's not wrong.

[B]

I mean, I do think that eventually in the long term, there is no avoiding geoengineering. In the near term, we could just emit less CO2 and kind of leave things how they are. But over the long term of the Earth, there are massive changes over geologic time that if we want to continue to survive, we're going to need to have some control over the heat flows and the chemical composition of the atmosphere. Life has been around for a long time on Earth. I think Earth is around 5 billion years old, but in around half a billion years, it's going to get too hot from just the heating of the sun. Like, the sun is continuing to expand. And as the sun continues to expand, Earth is going to get hotter and hotter. So if we want, like, civilizations that last for hundreds of millions or billions of years, we're going to have to do something about that. Like.

[C]

Yeah, geoengineering is baked in. Yeah.

[A]

Okay. So if I try and synthesize that, it's. We are already past the rate of, like, equilibrium on fossil fuels using oxygen supply. So obviously we could go further, but we're already redlining. It's a way of interpreting that.

[B]

It's a complicated question because the capacity is not fixed. So as CO2 levels change, then it changes the amount of potential carbon that can be stored at that level. But the real problem with this is we are currently exceeding the rate that CO2 is being sequestered and oxygen is being replenished. But even if you look at the rates Today and it's about 2 ppm per year change. But because of that torque on it, currently half of that is being absorbed by the biosphere in the oceans. So if we 10x'd our CO2 emissions, it's not going to 10x the rate of change is going to 20x the rate of change.

[A]

Yes.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

So this is like, like the real limit is like if you want energy abundance, it just simply isn't possible from fossil fuels.

[C]

You just can't do it.

[A]

Yeah, can. Okay, this. I want to keep this as brief as possible interjection, because I do. I think it's like kind of important context, like type one civilizations and stuff. I think a lot of what drives your thinking is like the theoretical energy limits that humanity can reach. And I know there's like some scales that exist of like what types of things humans can do based on energy consumption. Is that. Wait, so there's, isn't that like what's behind Type one and.

[B]

Yeah, so there's the, there's the Kardashev scale, which is the. So like type 1 on the Kardashev scale would be a civilization capable of like directing energy flows on planetary scale. Yeah, Type two would be on the scale of a star and type 3 would be lots of stars, like a galaxy. Now I think if you look at type 2, type 3 is extremely sci fi. But all of the technology that's necessary for type 1 already exists today. This is not. We are already living in the crazy sci fi future. It's like crystalline silicon that can like harness the energy of the sun, that can directly like quantum converters for the energy and photons to electrical current. Yeah, like that is extremely sci fi high tech stuff that is now being produced at like massive scale.

[C]

So if I should call them quantum converters, that's so much better.

[A]

It's so much better. So yeah, on that. So my distillation of that is. Only. Basically we could through solar, like through existing solar technology, 10,000x the amount of energy we consume currently. Even if you start thinking about like 3 or 4 or 5 Xing using fossil fuels, you're like starting to like dangerously completely alter the atmosphere through like an imbalance of oxygen resynthesis based on like, I mean like how much O2 you're depleting from the atmosphere, the CO2.

[B]

Increase is going to be a problem way before the oxygen depletion becomes a problem.

[A]

Yeah, but the like, but even still, it's like if you want to 10x using fossil fuels as a technology, you have A problem?

[B]

Well, yeah, the problem here is basically like, okay, so we need to, we would need to 4x primary energy in order for the whole world to have the same level of energy abundance as the average American. If we want to have everybody be like wealthy Americans, we're talking more like a 10x in our energy supply. If you do that with fossil fuels, there's a very short duration that you can run that without running some serious risks. So I don't claim to understand all of the dynamics of the Earth system to where I can make like.

[A]

But I'm just talking like swaggy orders of magnitude, right? So 10x is already like, you're topping out on fossil fuels potential at 10x from where we are today. I mean, from like a civilizational advance.

[B]

Advancing perspective, possibly quite before that. Because like, if we, if we take the example of 10x, right? So we go from. Instead of increasing CO2 at 2 parts per million per year, it's closer to 40 parts per million per year. We have some historical precedent that this would be a really bad idea. So the Permian Thoracic extinction was an event where volcanic activity, you had a bunch of carbon dioxide and some sulfur compounds and other things that were released into the atmosphere and acidified the oceans. We went from about 400 parts per million CO2, which is about where we are today, to about 2,500. So we're talking about, if we were increasing our CO2 at that rate because of the leverage, we're talking about this happening in the human lifetime timescales increase of CO2 equivalent to the mass extinction event that we called the Great Dying, because it was.

[A]

You don't need to even fuck with climate science. Like, you can just do that math and be like, you're just. That's everyone. Where America currently is within one person's lifetime, we're at like mass extinction levels.

[B]

But I mean, I'm, Yeah, I'm not claiming to say that again.

[A]

I know there's not like, I think.

[C]

That'S quite actually how that math worked, right? It.

[A]

Oh, because you said, what, 50 parts per million?

[B]

Well, so, yeah, we're currently at 2. You would, you'd go about basically a 20x. You're like, you know, roughly 40 parts per million increase. And there are like changes in the absorption rate and stuff. So this is not like, it's not very.

[D]

This is, this is napkin math.

[B]

This is napkin math.

[D]

We're taking this as napkin math.

[B]

You know, at 40 parts per million years, you're at 2,400 plus.

[A]

2,000.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

So you're at 2500 which is what it was when the oceans acidified and there was this massive extinction event.

[C]

To do a 10xing of energy or a 4xing.

[B]

If we 10x to do the, to.

[C]

Do the wealthy American version.

[A]

If everyone on earth consumed a wealthy American today. But even you're cooked.

[B]

Even the Forex. Right. Like the, the 4x is more like a, you know, 7x or something in terms of the.

[C]

Yeah, none of it's good. If we go from 400 to like a thousand, that's not good.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Alex Epstein's whole argument for example is like slow dying is like energy is good. We need more energy. It's going to give us like more plants. And you're just like, dude, you're just. Your argument plants and help the diet completely fails immediately. Yeah, he's a mouth breather who is not in on the existing technology. We have already being like way more sci fi than fossil fuels on like a order of magnet, like how much we can use energy.

[B]

Yeah, I mean I think, I think.

[A]

That that's, that's what I'm extracting out of your argument. Alex Epstein is a mouth breather.

[B]

I think that ultimately the question on CO2 is going to be a moot point because it's going to just come down entirely to economics costs. I think that there are a few use cases where fossil fuels are legitimately the cheapest way to do it. So if you want to aviation, but aviation is 2% of our global emissions. It's like even if we never touched, there's a huge difference between we're going to use fossil fuels to run aviation and shipping and we're going to 4x or 10x the amount of fossil fuels on the planet. And then there's also the fact that it's not that fossil fuels are bad, it's just that when you burn fossil fuels you have these externalities you have to deal with. But we have tons of fossil fuels in the ground. They're useful for all kinds of things. We're going to continue to extract them and use them as chemical inputs for things, plastics for a very long time. Whether it's plastics or it's fertilizer, you use natural gas with steam.

[D]

And I'm saying there's a lot of. Yeah, there's a lot of things that like I don't want to go back to like glass vials for vaccine syringes or like every time I go to the doctor's office I'm like, man, we really need plastic.

[B]

Well, plastics are really useful and you could theoretically make them from. You can, you can synthesize them otherwise.

[A]

This is what I was going to ask you next. If we're using, if we have tons of solar that's super cheap, where does like using power demand? Yeah, to like make plastic or weird biofuels for like other cases actually become economic or like you can just keep doing like using fossil fuels for plastic and then just have some like actually do carbon sequestration or like do your geoengineering of like rebalancing.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

CO2 production or whatever.

[B]

I'm, I'm not very bullish on like making mass amounts of chemical fuels from solar energy or nuclear energy or any kind of like. Yeah, I think that directly using the energy where possible is going to make a lot more sense. And if you did want to make chemical energy for long duration energy storage, I don't think you should go all the way to methane. You can just go to hydrogen and not have to mess with capturing direct air. Capture of CO2 is a ridiculously expensive prospect. You're capturing air and you need that.

[C]

To turn hydrogen into methane.

[B]

Well, you need a source of CO2. So most of the people who are looking at doing this are looking at starting with direct air capture. And we're going to get our carbon from the atmosphere because there's not enough. We're going to run out of carbon in the ground, which is not going to happen. There is way more carbon in the ground than there is in the atmosphere, like orders of magnitude more carbon in the ground. And even if we, if you wanted a source of CO2 to make like synthetic things, even if we did run out of fossil fuels and you wanted a source of synthetic CO2, I think we would much more likely get that from concrete or cement production. Because when you decompose limestone, calcium carbonate, you get CO2 and it's a concentrated source of CO2. So it's way cheaper to capture CO2 when it's concentrated versus when it's, you know, 400 parts per million. Like if you're talking about the amount of air that you have to move and process to get, you know, 400 kilos of CO2. If you could do it at perfect 100% capture rate, you're moving a million kilos of air to get 400 kilos of enormous CO2. It's a huge amount. And then you typically a lot of these processes, you have to make large temperature changes, humidity changes. There's like a lot of energy that goes into changing that. I think people are typically looking at on the order of like 2 to 5 megawatt hours of energy per ton, which you're like by comparison, like coal emits about 1 ton of CO2 per megawatt hour. So you would need on the order of 3-5-megawatt hours of clean energy to just the energy to offset 1 megawatt hour of coal. It's way more sense to just use the energy where you have it, especially because it's already distributed everywhere than to. Half of global shipping is for fossil fuels. Fossil fuels are. They're high energy density relative to a battery, but they're not rechargeable. So if you have like, you know, coal I think is about 8 kilowatt hours per kilogram. I think gasoline's around 13. And you know, lithium ion battery may only be like 2 or 300 watt hours per kilogram. So there's this like huge differential between them. But you can recharge a lithium ion battery, like an LFP battery 10,000 times.

[C]

Yeah. Whereas the, the, there's this enormous machine behind fossil fuels that are sort of continuously replenishing it.

[B]

Yeah, well, yeah, you need to ship these things and transport them on a continual basis.

[A]

Of global shipping is for fossil fuels?

[B]

Yeah, it's roughly half. I think it might be 40.

[A]

But yeah, if we stopped using fossil fuels tomorrow, half of global shipping would cease to exist.

[B]

Yeah, I mean I think we would end up like using.

[A]

Has anyone done the map?

[C]

We probably use those ships for other.

[A]

Things, but the like all the way. Like how much energy goes into people.

[C]

People have worked on this before. Yeah.

[B]

I think it's still. It's a pretty small portion of the total like energy, but it is a continual cost and it's just one of these things of like, like when you talk about energy density, like there are so many ways to cut that. Like what units are you looking at? What is your boundary?

[C]

I see.

[A]

So you talk like everyone. Basically you're saying that there's the whole like density maxis basically like solar and storage will never win on density. And you're like, I put a panel on my roof and I have a lithium ion battery and I just replenish for 25 years. You have to do like global trade for 25 years, like moving things around.

[B]

Yeah, I mean I think like we just have to use consistent units. So it's like, okay, if we look at the, the, you know, specific energy density. So energy per unit mass of fossil fuels.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

That's higher than a Lithium ion battery, but it's a lot lower than a photon. A photon comes automatically from the sun. We get to use hydrogen in the sun. We don't even have to break the hydrogen. We get to use fusion from the sun, which is wirelessly delivered all over the entire planet.

[A]

Modular reactor every day is a solar panel.

[B]

Yeah, it's your small modular receiver.

[C]

Receiver.

[B]

That's right. Like you can. You like. Because the fuel, you don't have to move the fuel. The actual amount of mass that you have to interact with is actually quite small. Like the Breakthrough Institute did a study looking at this recently. And solar plus storage is comparable in terms of the materials you need to build a terawatt hour per year of generation, whatever. I forget what units they chose on this, but you're within a factor of two whether you choose solar or nuclear.

[A]

So why does that matter?

[B]

Well, ultimately it's an input into cost.

[A]

I see, so you're.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

So I mean, so the density point is how are you, how do you square like shipping with the density Conversation. You're just talking about it in terms of cost.

[B]

One way to look at this is like if you, if you ship solar panels and batteries versus shipping, like shipping fuel and diesel generators, the amount of shipping that you need, you're talking about. I can't recall the numbers off the top of my head, so I don't want to misstate this, but I think you're talking about the order of a 600 times difference in the amount of mass you have to ship for the amount of delivered useful energy. Because you're not shipping the fuel. The sun is shipping the fuel.

[A]

Yeah. Wait, say that last.

[B]

Say that the sun is shipping the fuel.

[A]

No, no, no, right before that.

[B]

The amount of useful energy that you can deliver with like 1 ton of solar and batteries is hundreds of times as much as you can with one ton of chemical fuels.

[A]

Right, right. So it's just about moving it around.

[B]

Yeah, I mean it's, it's about moving it around. It's about, you know, extracting it from the ground. It's about like all of the inputs and cost, all of the things that you need.

[A]

Okay, so can you. I remember at some point when we were talking about this too, you were, you talked about like nuclear's primary energy. I think you were literally talking about like uranium stores on the planet.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

How does, how does so fossil fuels, you can 10x. You're a total joke. Because solar can do 10,000x from where we are.

[B]

Well, I mean, I don't think we can 10x fossil fuels. But.

[A]

Well, I know, I'm just saying like on orders of magnitude, like you can't even. You're already. We are where we are. There's no going past where we are. Solar, you can see a theoretical limit 10,000 times beyond where we are. Where does nuclear sit on that scale?

[B]

Yeah, so I, yeah, I'm working from memory on this, but when I was looking at this previously, if you look at the total amount of fissile material in the crust, I think in uranium it's about 1 million years of sunlight and thorium is another 4 million. So roughly 5 million years. And I think it's comparable on deuterium in terms of fusion. Deuterium is a form of hydrogen and if you took all the deuterium from all of the oceans, it's comparable to the amount of fissile material. You know, you compare that to Earth has at least a billion years left in it if we manage it well, if not, you know, two. So the nuclear is significant. It's something that can grow significantly from where it is today. But it's still in the long run. Like if you look at the amount of energy, like energy flows on our planet over the long run, it is a tiny rounding error. Everything is solar.

[A]

So you're saying of a out of a solar can go for a billion years because it's as long as the planet is around. You just listed like if you're using.

[D]

All.

[A]

Fissile material on Earth, you get like 10 million years at what sort of primary energy scale?

[B]

Fissile. And so that would be like equivalent in terms of years of sunlight that you're seeing on the Earth. So like the sustainable like run at.

[A]

The sun for 10 million million years. So in order 100x off.

[B]

Yeah. So you could sustainably use about 1% of the like 1% of the energy of the sun for at least over a billion years. Like Earth can probably last longer than that, but. Right, but so like from a near term, like a lot of stuff like.

[A]

That is like actual a lot of nuclear waste.

[B]

This, this would be like digging up the entire crust of the Earth and all like. Yeah, like getting all of the deuterium out of all of the water in the oceans. And like I don't think that that's quite realistic.

[D]

Like for comparison, the right technical economic potential. But the theoretical.

[B]

Yeah, I mean for comparison, what you would need to have like the equivalent in PV is you're talking about enough panels to cover like 1% over conversion. So something like 5% of like 4 or 5% of Earth's surface area. But Earth is made out of solar panel materials. So if you look at the most abundant. The most abundant mineral on Earth is silicon dioxide. It makes up more than half of Earth's crust. So the solar panels are made primarily out of silicon, oxygen, and aluminum, which are the three most common elements in Earth's crust.

[A]

Have you thought about how much of a. The existing raw input materials it would take to capture some percentage of the amount of solar that hits the Earth?

[B]

So it's about a centimeter of dirt to capture, like, for whatever area. So if you want like a square kilometer of solar, you need about 1 square kilometer at 1 centimeter of material. So it's like a very tiny amount of the Earth's crust that you need in order. We could stack solar panels kilometers high with the resources that are available on Earth over the entire planet. We obviously wouldn't do that, but we're not going to run out of materials to make solar panels out of.

[D]

I love that you're thinking about this on the life scale of the planet.

[A]

Type one being to the limit.

[D]

Yeah, I love it so much.

[C]

So the argument that, like, the rare person I see who tries to sort of take on Elon's solar maxi case will basically speak to the materials challenge, right. And say, look like the amount of materials producing a megawatt hour of power via nuclear are much lower than solar and storage, I think what I'm hearing.

[B]

Is no, yeah, that's not really true. So nuclear is a lot less in terms of material that you need than fossil fuels. It's comparable to solar and storage at today's technology for both. So if you look at like, the Breakthrough Institute had a study on this, and I think it's like a factor of two in their figures. Although the solar of, like, what it.

[A]

Takes to build a nuclear plant versus solar.

[B]

Yeah, if you're talking about, like, generation on a, like, on an annual basis. So not like nameplate capacity. A nameplate capacity. Solar is way less than nuclear in terms of materials. But on a total materials, it's about a factor of two difference. But the materials for solar is most of the weight for solar is. Well, I mean, in the study, most of the weight was actually the steel mounting structure, but the actual solar panel itself, most of the weight is glass, which glass is primarily silicon dioxide with, you know, some sodium in there, which are some of the most abundant elements on the planet. We were never going to run out of glass. Right. And even the silicon in there Is just refined silicon dioxide. So the primary constituents of the solar panel are extremely abundant things that also don't have to be done at the same level of precision. So you can mass manufacture solar panels and if you have a half percent defect rate, who cares? It's just like you replace some panels in the field and it's not a big deal. You have to do nuclear to a much higher level of precision than you.

[C]

Wait, sorry. But so what about the batteries then that you would have to add?

[B]

The batteries are actually a smaller portion than even the solar. They're quite tiny in terms of the.

[A]

Because this is like raw material input into building on a one to one megawatt hour. For megawatt hour. It's also a generation of nuclear and.

[B]

Solid to kind of. To do this in broader strokes. Right. Like you can get a 700 watt solar panel that's about the size of a 4 by 8 sheet of plywood or OSB and the same mass. And you know, you're depending on how much like the average American uses about I think like 1.3 kilowatts of power on an average basis. Yeah. So if you wanted to do that with solar, you need depending two of those. Like. Yes, 6 or 7 kilowatts of solar. So you're talking about like 10 of.

[C]

These pounds for baseload. Yeah, yeah, yeah. For average.

[B]

So like, you know, 10 of these panels, like 10 sheets of plywood is the amount of mass that we're talking about. 10 sheets of plywood per person to say that we can't make 10 sheets of plywood per person of mass of material.

[A]

And these are just like incinerating the atmosphere with fossil fuels or it's glass.

[B]

Like the windows here. We're talking about more glass. We're not talking about crazy. I mean, so there are potential material constraints in solar with the way that we are. Current cell technology, the most common metallization, uses silver paste. So silver is a thing that could be scarce. But there are existing solar cells, people are making them today that are 100% silver free, that use copper and the actual amount of silicon active material that you need. You're talking about something that's very small. Yeah, like we're talking about something that's on the order of 100, 150 microns in thickness. Yeah, like extremely, extremely thin. We're talking about like. And silicon does take energy to refine, but like you're using such a small amount of it. I mean, it's like, it's comparable to using like aluminum foil like, the amount of actual energy and materials you need to make solar panels is not a lot, which is why they're cheap. Like, if it took $500 of energy to make a solar panel, you couldn't sell it for $100.

[A]

Okay, so can we talk about that side of like, just cost, basically? Because like, that, I mean, you do dovetail into like when you start looking at just like raw material inputs. I think what you're saying is they're about 1 to 1 or 2 to 1, like on like a mass basis or just like total amount of material. But like, solar is just radically cheaper in the raw materials themselves and easier to manufacture. Meaning if you're just pound for pound building this thing versus that thing, obviously this one's going to be cheaper. I think that's what you're saying. Can you take that to costs now?

[B]

Yeah, there's a couple things to drill in on there. So if you want to do solar on a continuous basis or like nearly continue at least, like comparable capacity factors to nuclear. There is a project in, I think in Abu Dhabi that's currently being built with us. It's 5.2 gigawatts of DC panels of solar. I think it's 19 actually getting built.

[A]

I saw the headline, I was like, 50, 50 this gets made.

[B]

I don't know if that one specifically is going to get built, but there's similar things being done in China, and this is storage costs. In China, there are like battery storage systems going in at $70 a kilowatt hour.

[A]

Yeah, like fully installed.

[B]

Like fully installed. Like not just battery cells. Like the total. Like battery cells in, in modules, in a container with the inverter, with like, developer fee, everything, like on a concrete pad, like actually hooked up to the grid for less than $70 a kilowatt.

[D]

Hour, which is country.

[C]

What is 5x less than you might see utility scale in the US 5x?

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's. I mean, it's a huge difference in cost. And we see this in a number of things. Like, residential Solar in the US is about $3 a watt. In the rest of the world is about a dollar a watt. In China, it's half of that. Like, the solar and batteries on a distributed basis in China is some of the cheapest energy on the planet. And really the only thing they have going against them is that their primary solar resource, at least in southern China, is not as good as it is in the U.S. yeah.

[A]

Okay, so like, go further on. Like, how does solar cost compare to nuclear?

[B]

So it is you know, highly variable versus like depending on where you are in the world. But if you take numbers of like.

[A]

If you're in Sweden in the winter, like.

[B]

Yeah, it's more of like a. I mean, part of it is. Yeah, part of it is geography and part of it is like regulations and tariffs and development costs and like the actual cost to deploy.

[A]

I mean, same argument for nuclear. So let's just like strip that out and just look at like theoretical limits.

[B]

Yeah, I mean if you take, if you take like if you wanted baseload solar, it would cost about $6 a watt. Doing it at a dollar a watt DC on the, on the panel side, you know, plus I think there's like how much dollars a kilowatt hour storage.

[A]

To make it a 24,7.

[B]

Yeah. You know, if you compare that to. I do think that nuclear can get down to those costs. Like, but what is. It's not. I mean, I think the, I think our most recent nuclear build came out at like $15 a watt, which is.

[A]

And what about in like in China? What are they building nuclear at?

[B]

I wouldn't know off the top of my head. I mean, I think it's, it's. I mean, to give you, I guess a number to look at for China though, on how China views nuclear versus solar or like both of them generally. So China is currently building more nuclear plants than the rest of the world combined. They are building a lot of nuclear. But last year in terms of new generation on the grid, solar contributed 25 times as much to new generation than nuclear. It was the biggest growing source in terms of like terawatt hours. Not, not like nameplate capacity. It's the biggest growing.

[A]

Yeah, but even like, okay, so us, our, our latest build was 15. But what's like a generous. Well, I mean like a number for nuclear compared to $6 a watt.

[B]

I mean we used to build nuclear plants at like, you know, five or six dollars a while. Yeah. Back when our dollar was worth less than this and before we did have a period of time that was very cheap for nuclear like that. Like we were, when we were first originally scaling nuclear, we got like plant costs a lot lower than where they are today. So I do think that there is a lot of potential for nuclear to improve. But I don't think that, like, I don't think that the comparison, like, I do think one of the things that we'll do with solar is this kind of like large baseload type generation. But this completely misses the fact that 40% of the cost of Electricity right.

[A]

Now I was going to get, I was trying to build, I was building us towards that. So in an optimistic case for nuclear or like you just. We were good at it and we were building it at 5 to 6.

[B]

I mean, I think realistically you can probably like, if you, if you did.

[A]

Both of these, I'm not going to like hold you, you can sweat like, but again, orders of magnitude.

[B]

Yeah, I think realistically you could do both of these things on a relatively comparable basis depending on geography today, in today's terms. Not in today's terms. In today's terms, solar. It would be cheaper to do this with solar, but I think, I mean.

[A]

With existing technologies and what nuclear has shown it can do with existing technology.

[B]

So this would be existing technology, but at a, like a different point on the cost curve than where we are today in terms of nuclear, like nuclear, we're building mostly the same types of reactors.

[A]

But yeah, I'm just saying like at a time we were building at 5 to 6, theoretically we could do that again right now your math is $6 a watt as well for solar, both on like 24, 7 flat out basis. How much cheaper could solar get from here theoretically? And how much could nuclear get with like again like existing technologies without some like radical breakthrough? Like if you keep following, you've been following the cost curve since you're fucking 12. Like how 24, 7 solar, where does it, where does it get in 50 years?

[B]

So we're, we're installing solar at about a dollar a Watt in the U.S. but other countries already, already installing utility scale solar for cheaper than that. Yeah, I think that 50 cents a watt is a quite reasonable target in terms of the solar side of the equation. Because there are places on the planet where people are currently doing that today with today's panels. I think that in the long run it's possible to get below that with automation. So like automated install of solar panels. So using robots to actually deploy panels in fields, I think you're going to get below that, which seems to make.

[C]

A lot of sense. It's not terribly complicated.

[B]

Yeah, I mean there are companies working on this. There are people that are doing this at small scale today. I think that's going to become more common. There's also just more simple optimizations that happen. But the big cost for the longest time has been the battery storage side. But the battery storage is finally cheap.

[A]

Yeah. So like if utility scale solar gets to 50 cents a watt, how cheap does storage get over the next 25, 50 years to get to Making that installation round the clock.

[B]

Yeah. So I think, I think that it is a reasonable near term target that solar can get to $100 a kilowatt hour everywhere on the planet because that batteries can get to $100 a kilowatt hour everywhere on the planet because China is already below today.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Like you could buy a home battery storage system in Europe that has no tariff on China for like $150 a kilowatt hour.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

So there are already like extremely cheap storage systems even at very small scale that you can buy. Yeah. And if you think of this on like a, you know, on a dollars per watt continuous sort of basis, this is going to vary by geography, but you need somewhere on the order of like 16 to 20 hours of storage. So at $100 a kilowatt hour it's $1.60 a watt or about to $2 a watt in terms of capex on the storage side. So most of your capex is at this point on the solar side already. If you want to. If you have a solar plant operating at a 25% capacity factor, you're talking about 6 hours of generation per day. So on average of 6 hours. So if you have a 1 megawatt solar farm, it'll have 6 megawatt hours.

[A]

Of production to 4x the solar relative to the dollar per watt of, of storage.

[B]

Yeah. So you need, you need more.

[A]

So for that 50 cents, it's 2 bucks and 2 bucks basically. Ish. Yeah.

[B]

If you were at 50 cents a watt on the solar, then you're talking about. Yeah, two bucks and you know, like. Yeah, about two bucks, a little less. But you know, get China's current cost, you're talking about the storage is about $1 a watt for like all of the storage that you need to take solar and make it. Yeah, it's not, this is still not 24 7. On the same way that like a nuclear plant is 247 and that you have cloud cover variations and things, but you're talking about extremely high capacity factors at this point.

[A]

Yeah, but even still, that doesn't make solar sound that much cheaper than nuclear.

[B]

So I think, I mean the big.

[A]

But you're saying because there's 40, you have to deliver nuclear.

[B]

Yeah, the, the delivery cost is going to be the biggest thing. I mean, you're going to have a mixture, especially in the near term, you're going to have a mixture of different energy technologies and the best technology is going to vary by location. So if you're in northern Germany, there's a huge incentive for you to use nuclear. You have very little solar production at the time of your peak energy demand. And on a nuclear power plant you have a 1 gigawatt nuclear power plant has 2 gigawatts of waste heat. So if all you need is a bunch of low grade waste heat and that's like your peak primary demand, it's a great way to do it. But for most of the planet, I think solar is going to absolutely dominate in terms of cost and especially when you include transmission and distribution costs. Like today it's about 40% of the cost on the grid and being able to actually deploy. And you don't get like, it's not a, a perfect like one to one benefit on this, but having more and more of the generation done on a distributed basis is going to lower the amount of the cost that you are paying in transmission and distribution.

[A]

Yeah, you could, you could do the like $3 a watt just at your home.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And then like not need the grid.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. I mean you're, you're like this again, depends on like geography and your profile. Do you need a backup generator to provide some dispatchable capacity on a cloudy week or whatever? But the thing about the dispatchable generators is that those are actually very cheap on a per watt basis. The expensive thing about them is the fuel.

[C]

They're just expensive to run.

[B]

If you are legitimately just using the generator as a backup generator, it's way cheaper to do that than to go build a dispatchable power plant and transmission and distribution and everything that's needed.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[C]

Backup power is like, I mean less than a dollar a watt. That's, it's not expensive.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

Where do we go from there?

[A]

We had a bunch of others.

[C]

I think we just blew through our list.

[A]

But I, I mean, I still don't, I mean I just. You're still talking about an order of like two.

[D]

Well, I, so I think I still want to understand like, so thinking about this, obviously very long solar in the billion year time scale. You said you think there's a mix. Like I don't know, like how do you see like the next like 10, 20, 50 year like transition going? Like are we from that perspective? I mean I think within like a million years it's 100% solar. Like where does.

[B]

Well I think, I think the way to sum this up would be that like in the near term all that matters is solar and gas and in the long term all that matters is solar and nuclear.

[A]

Hmm. Yeah. So you're, you're less bearish on nuclear than I thought you were.

[B]

I mean I don't think that like I'm, I am.

[A]

Because when we've talked before you've like shredded like nuclear is not like at least in the next like 25, 50.

[B]

Years, but in the, in the, you're.

[A]

Looking at that from like current regulatory regime or supply chain. Like you're taking into like practical factors.

[B]

Yeah, there's, there's a lot of problems in the near term that I think are not like insurmountable but are not going to be solved extremely quickly. So like all of the people who built our nuclear power plants back in the 70s and the 80s are either dead or retired.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And we didn't lose 100% of the knowledge. But the supply chains, all the people who built the components, like the companies went under. You have like. We're not literally starting from zero, but we are starting from way further back.

[C]

The industry's pretty bare bones. Yeah, yeah.

[B]

We are not deploying massive reactors at scale. We started out actually building small reactors and we went down the cost curve by making the reactors bigger. But the like right now we're kind of like debating about policy and then we have people that are trying smaller reactors and smaller reactors are great to like prototype a design or like make a few units, but I don't think that they're ever going to be cost competitive against like large scale reactors on a, like on a long term basis. I think like we could make nuclear cheap but in order to do that you have to do mass manufacturing of like large module, like large modular reactors.

[A]

Yeah. You don't buy SMRs.

[B]

I personally don't. I mean I think they will have some use cases potentially but like I think the, like the benefits to them are often overstated. And that say you're doing even like a 20 megawatt SMR, right. You're still doing that at like a substation level interconnection. There's not a, like you cut some transmission, which is the cheapest part of transmission and distribution, but you do nothing on the distribution side. So two thirds of TD costs are distribution.

[A]

Why don't you put one next to a data center?

[B]

So there are cases where you can do this, but even if you do that, say you put a small energy reactor next to a data center. It's not as simple operationally as just I have nuclear is 24 7, my data center is 24 7. I plug the cables together and it runs. Xai had to install Tesla megapacks on their Tennessee facility that was running on natural gas just to deal with the millisecond level fluctuations in demand from the GPUs. If you have a big spinning mass is great if you want to do something like spin a big mass or run an incandescent light bulb. But a data center load. Data centers are going to install batteries anyways just for operational reasons.

[A]

Like power control.

[B]

Yeah, it's about, if you want instantaneous power, the battery is going to be able to respond at a larger magnitude and more quickly than anything else.

[A]

Yeah. So you're, I mean you are, you're, you think nuclear is feasible from like a theoretical limits approach. It's, it's, it's more comparable. It, your argument is almost radical in that like people are like nuclear from like a physics approach is like radically better. And you're like, they're actually kind of like pound for pound. You're, you're, you're actually saying they're like 247 to 24 7. You probably end up at like similar costs, less distribution. Like maybe solar edges out by a factor of two. But like if you then take into account like we can get better and better at nuclear and build them on bigger, bigger, bigger scales like you kind of like they may just be similar cost.

[B]

You're going to see automation happen in solar and you see automation happen in nuclear and the tech is going to get better. And like from a fundamental resource perspective, there is a ton of nuclear material on Earth. There's like we have plenty of uranium. Like your average rock off the street has more energy in uranium than like in terms of energy density. Just a regular, like a crushed granite gravel has a higher energy density than gasoline. There's tons of potential energy from nuclear on earth. And I don't think that the like, like the, I don't think that the waste is an insurmountable challenge either. I think that like the answer there is you use breeder reactors that you can actually get higher burn up so you get way more energy out of the same amount of nuclear fuel. You don't have to use much processing. I think there's like, there is real potential in the future of nuclear. I just don't think that like the idea that we are going to build hundreds of nuclear reactors very quickly is feasible.

[A]

You're, you're just, it's, you're, it's more of a practical argument than it is a like first principles physics argument.

[B]

Yeah, I mean there is a first principles physics argument which is a little bit different, which is like okay, if we, if we kind of zoom out on Earth on an energy basis and we go back to like the, you know, we've got 173,000 terawatts of sunlight coming in, you know, about a third of that gets reflected. We have about 120,000 terawatts that hits the surface. You know, we're currently at 18 terawatts of primary energy, but the radio forcing from CO2 is somewhere on the order of about 1,000 terawatts. Right. If we built 1,000 terawatts of nuclear on a primary energy, we'll be back at the same amount of heating that we currently have today. And there is a solution to that. It's just that you have to.

[A]

Same amount of heating.

[B]

Yeah, the same amount of heating as we're getting from CO2 currently. If you look at the radiative forcing from CO2, if you just build that much heat, unleashing that much heat, you're going to. And there is a solution to this. It's a solvable problem. But the solution is that you have to reject sunlight. So the thing is like, really from a fundamental physics perspective, for every watt of heat that you generate on Earth, regardless of where it's coming from, if you want to keep the temperature balance, you have to reject a watt of sunlight because that's the only other source, like, that's the source of energy for the planet. Like, we're not going to significantly change the amount of geothermal heat flux coming up from the core. So really the only lever we have is the sunlight coming in and the long wave radiation coming out.

[A]

Mm. And what could you actually build? A thousand. What about like a landmass? What would you actually need to do.

[B]

To build a thousand terawatts of solar? Of solar, yeah. So, you know, solar is, in terms of a like, primary energy basis, it's 1 gigawatt per square kilometer. So you need 1,000 square kilometers to do a terawatt on. Like, that would be if you had like 100% efficient panels plastered, you know, edge to edge on the whole thing. If you have 20% efficiency, you need five times as much. If you have 50% row spacing, then it's 10 times as much. But I guess one way to look at this is. The total amount of land area that we currently use for structures built up things, roads, that kind of stuff on planet Earth is about 1 million square kilometers. So a million square kilometers on a primary basis is a million gigawatts or a thousand terawatts of sunlight. That's hitting just the developed parts of the world that we have today. The built up areas and cities and things like that. Is 1,000 terrawatts is 1,000 terawatts.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Now that's still. And that's 1,000 terawatts peak. So it'd be a quarter, that'd be like 250 on an average basis. But I guess an interesting point to bring in here is that most of the energy that's needed to run civilization is actually already solar. So almost all of the energy that we use, if you look at primary basis primary energy on the real physical basis of energy before conversion losses, it's all sunlight for growing plants, for farming. We have 48 million square kilometers of farmland, which is about 10,000, 12,000 terawatts of sunlight that is powering that. So 12,000 terawatts of sunlight, 18 terawatts of primary energy.

[D]

Right.

[A]

So you're saying 1,000 terawatts are hitting developed lands, but we're using 12,000 in agriculturally.

[B]

Yeah. I mean the numbers there would be it's a thousand, like if you take 1,000 watts per square meter, but really it's over four because you have to account for capacity factor. But it's like 250 terawatts of sunlight hitting all of the developed areas and about 10,000 hitting our agricultural land compared to 18 of primary energy that we use today. So another way to look at that is if you wanted to have as much energy and you would get this in electricity, if you wanted to have as much energy on a primary energy basis, we would have to capture 18 over 250. So less than a tenth of the sunlight that is hitting existing built up areas.

[A]

Wait, can you say that again? Did you guys pitch that?

[D]

I'm like how many roofs need.

[B]

I mean, yeah. Another way to look at this is like you could. I had a post on this a while ago and I'm blanking on the exact numbers here, but rooftops and parking lots alone in the US provide more than enough space to generate like we would generate more than our current roughly 4,000 terawatt hours a year if we covered all of our existing rooftops in solar panels. Rooftops and parking lots.

[A]

So that's 18 terawatts.

[B]

So the 18 terawatts is like global primary energy. This figure would be for the US or another way to look at this is on average the power density of solar in terms of watts per square meter. It's 1,000 watts at the primary resource. But Then after adjusting for efficiency and capacity factor, you're about 50 watts. But the average building, like residential building in the US is about 15 watts. The average commercial building is about 25 watts per square meter. So a single layer of solar panels on average is going to produce equivalent to the energy demand of two stories of commercial or three stories of residential building.

[A]

Right. So you're saying just by covering our existing building stock, we get like much of the way there as far as feeding existing power consumption.

[B]

Yeah. On a, on a volumetric basis, we could generate an excess of electricity. There's still going to be mismatches and we'll still need some dispatchable capacity.

[A]

I'm still just trying to compare to like I called alexepping a mouth breather. So like, you're, you can't do better than we're doing currently with fossil fuels because of warming. How, like, could we take 100x leap in, like go to 180 or 1800.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Terawatt hours per year in primary energy consumption or sorry, production with solar and like not use a ton of land. Like, what would be like the landmass required to actually do that? So you're basically saying we can go like one to one now. Well, yes, in like, developed areas. But like, what if I want to like 100x what we're currently.

[B]

If you have 1% of the Earth's surface area, what are you inventing over here?

[A]

Bitcoin, baby?

[B]

Well, I mean, I think like 100xing humanity's energy supply is a lot less ridiculous than it may at first sound. Like we've, you know, we've, we've done this before. Like 100x would only be. That's a 10x per person and a 10x in population. Like that.

[A]

So you're like, you're like, you're like, that's crazy. And you're like, it's actually not that crazy.

[B]

Like if you continue current growth trends, we will get there like a 10x.

[D]

The population feels pretty crazy to be. Yes.

[B]

I mean, we've done it before. We like, we did that over, you know, like last couple hundred years. The. That's like, you know, if we're talking over the scale of hundreds or thousands of years, I think that's absolutely possible to have.

[D]

I just have like a quick, just like a quick side comment because I feel like we started this with you as Lisa Nai, but I'm feeling like more Benesserit vibes. This like thinking in centuries.

[A]

Yeah, that's true.

[D]

So I don't know.

[A]

Oh, interesting.

[D]

But I do think this is like a very.

[A]

Our plot, our plan.

[D]

I don't think I've ever like thought about this in like millennial timelines, like millennium timelines before.

[A]

And that's why I love.

[D]

Yeah. It's like really, like very fundamental.

[C]

Yeah, yeah.

[A]

And what's. What I love about it is when people are talking on those timescales, they're always like, nuclear is always the clear answer. And you're like, actually it's not really.

[B]

Yeah, it's like, I think it's going to be part of the answer. Like, I think, I mean, if you, yeah. If you took this as a red.

[D]

Foundation, like, if you said, if you.

[B]

Take the kind of like maximal case.

[A]

Of Colleen's, like, I gotta slow my brain down. So keep up.

[B]

If you take the maximal case where humanity is going to capture all of the energy available and put it all to use, let's say we figure out how to cheaply do all of it, right? We get all of the uranium out of the crust, we get all of the deuterium out of the oceans. We use all the sunlight available on earth. We have about 100x difference in the energy available from sunlight over the next billion years.

[A]

We got that one already.

[B]

So I think we are going to figure out how to use all of these different energy sources. But if you're talking over long timescales, it is just solar. Even if you look at say, expansion beyond the Earth and we have free reign, we can dig up, we can take apart Mercury, we can do whatever. 99.9% of the mass in our solar system is the Sun. Yeah. There just is like, even if we took all of the hydrogen in Jupiter and Neptune and like we're basically just.

[A]

Like, to get type 2, why don't you just use this, the thing that's already, I mean, even to use the.

[B]

Star you asked to get type one, you just use the energy that we're already getting. Because the thing is like, if you really want to get to, if you actually want to get to like type one type levels, right. If you're talking about, about getting to a single or double digit percentage of the sun's energy on Earth, that's when the heat begins to matter. And whether you do thousands of terawatts of nuclear and then you set up a bunch of white panels outside to go reject sunlight, or you just do solar panels and eventually you're doing mass scale modification of the way that the Earth interacts with sunlight. Regardless.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And there are, you know, like there's, there's a lot of nuance on how to go into that.

[A]

But like, but so can, can we come back to just the. We want 100x primary energy production on the planet. How much land mass do we have to use with solar?

[B]

So 1% of the Earth's surface would be approximately a hundred X increase in terms of primary energy. Now the way that primary energy is defined I think is not very. Or the way that we currently use primary energy is not very useful in this context because if we were doing this on a real physical basis, we'd be measuring the energy going into the solar panel rather than the electricity coming out. The same way that we measure the energy going into a diesel engine rather than the energy coming out of it. But so on a physical primary energy basis you only need 1% of the surface area of the Earth to get a 100x in terms of real primary energy. If you're talking about useful energy. And useful energy actually ends up being pretty similar because modern solar panels are low 20s percent in efficiency. There's some stuff that's as high as 24, 25 that's comparable to a regular like a small scale piston combustion engine. Some of our bigger stuff is 50 or 60% but we're talking about maybe a factor of one and a half or two difference in terms of the conversion between actual real primary energy and electricity.

[D]

Useful work well and then usually solar can be installed a lot closer and so then you don't have as many line losses.

[B]

Yeah, line losses are not a huge portion. It's more like the cost of. The cost of the capex on the, the actual system.

[A]

Like so I think I kind of want to string together because I know you, you work with the Abundance Institute. Have you read Ezra Client, the Abundance book?

[B]

I have not.

[D]

No.

[A]

I.

[D]

You don't read everything with the word abundance in it?

[B]

I do not.

[A]

Does this may be controversial but like there I. Well I think in the, I think in the book, you know, it's, it's. They're like do like desalination and like biofuel. Like basically like do all vertical farm, you know and so you're. A lot of what you're saying, I think rejects a lot of that thinking. Like if I could we have 12,000 terawatts of sunlight to do sunlight to agriculture to do the equivalent in vertical farming. Sounds insane.

[B]

It's insane. No, it is, it is insane.

[D]

Sorry, what is the abundance argument of vertical farming?

[A]

I don't even know, I didn't read it.

[C]

I think the vertical farming example is more of kind of like, think creatively. Yeah, it's not. I'm not sure if they're necessarily making the literal case for vertical. Vertical farming. I think they're just kind of saying this is a highly energy consumptive thing that we could do if our energy were cheap. I think it's more of a mechanism.

[A]

But even on that level you're like.

[B]

It'S dumb if you take. So I think three of the examples from the book were desalination, like synthetic chemical fuels and vertical farming. And there are massive differences in the energy intensity of those three things. Desalination is already possible and practical today. Like there are entire countries that run 100% on desalinated water. Water is not that energy intensive to desalinate. So it's roughly on the order of about 3 kilowatt hours of electricity per cubic meter, which is about, about the amount of water that an American household would use in a day. So 3 kilowatt hours would be like a tenth of the electricity consumption of a household. So it's like meaningful. It's like lighting or something. But it's not like.

[A]

What about to vertically farm for that ohm.

[B]

So vertically farming, there are some efficiency gains you can possibly get relative to just outside farming. There are a lot of things that we can make improvements to, but there are also areas where you lose. So for example, if you wanted to run the same, you wanted to produce the same amount of corn using a nuclear power plant in a vertical farm versus just growing the corn outside, you're losing about two thirds of your primary energy in the conversion process initially. And then you're losing something like another 50% or so in the LEDs. And then your actual photosynthesis is not that efficient either. Like natural photosynthesis I think is about 1%. And you can have it. You can get a little bit better than that with a spectrally selective led. But like, yeah, we're talking about massive, massive quantities of energy that on a completely different scale, like you're like, desalination would be a rounding error on our current energy use to provide everybody on the planet with 100% desalinated water to provide all of our food with vertical farms, we're talking about orders of magnitude growth in the amount of energy we would need.

[A]

And it's a similar extension to like chemical fuels.

[B]

So yeah, I think chemical fuels are in between where it's completely doable. Like if we wanted to make all of our aviation fuel from synthetic fuels. Yeah, it's A tiny amount of our energy supply. It would be more expensive than just getting them out of the ground. So I don't like, you know, whether I think.

[A]

Well, so. Yeah, sorry, go ahead.

[B]

Yeah, I think whether we end up doing that or not is going to be a question of policies. Like I think some of that's going to happen in Europe I think like. But I don't think that, I don't think we're going to make synthetic fuels purely on a cost basis relative to bringing them out of the ground. Like not anytime in the near future.

[C]

Is there any world. Yeah. Is there? And aviation fuel is one thing that's a relatively small source of demand. Natural gas.

[D]

Right.

[C]

Is there any world where we're synthesizing $6 of MMBtu natural gas?

[B]

I would be very skeptical about that. On a pure energy input basis, an MCF of natural gas is about 293 kilowatt hours. So if you want like $3 Mcf you're talking about, you would need $1 a kilowatt hour or one penny a kilowatt hour electricity and free capex. And free CO2.

[C]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[B]

And that's, you know, assuming no energy is required on the capture of the CO2. If you just had like a pure supply of CO2 ready and you could just make your.

[C]

Yeah. In an outrageously unrealistic circumstance, you need a center kilowatt hour power.

[B]

Yeah. And I mean theoretically at $6 an MTF, if you also had free CO2 and free CapEx on your equipment, you could theoretically do it at 2 cent a kilowatt hour electricity, which I think is also not reasonable. And it's also like the main thing we do with natural gas is make electricity.

[A]

But you could run your backup Jenny on it, right?

[B]

Yeah, you, you can. But like even I don't know, like for if we're talking about just backup generation, like you're biofuel, whatever. Like it's just not put biogen, diesel generator.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

I didn't realize. I never like made this connection. But you're a lot of the like abundance, whether it's Ezra Klein's book or not, a lot of the high usage like high energy intensity things that I hear about are things like carbon capture, vertical farming, Like synthetic fuels. You're kind of like rejecting all of those as like none of this is going to make sense. Even believing how like cheap energy is going to get through solar. Like what would we use? Like what's your, what's your vision of abundance? Like what would you use all this energy for if we were to like 100x stuff.

[B]

Well, I think there are a number of things we'll use it for in the near term and in the long term it's really like, I think it's going to ultimately go to powering intelligence, whatever form that takes. That could be silicon based, could be biological. I think there's going to be some split, but that's going to be I think where most of our energy ends up going. I think there's also a basically unlimited amount of things we can do with, with metals that just having more metals available, we can build more things and metals are pretty energy intensive and there's an unlimited supply of metal oxides in the planet that we can put energy into to reduce to pure metals and build things with. I do think that we will see mass scale desalination and I do think that we will see far more productive farmland than we have today. And you don't have to go to vertical farming to do that. So you can do things like stuff provide water and change the amount of nutrients in the soil. And so like, like the, oh, you're.

[C]

Not even going to greenhouse yet.

[A]

You're just like if I can massively desal stuff, I can like dump water wherever I want.

[B]

You can grow like, you can grow plants outside using sunlight, the most abundant resource on the planet. And we can make the process of, of, of that like agricultural production way more efficient than with relatively easy things like the, the constraint on plant growth isn't Sunlight, it's not CO2, it's primarily water and nitrogen and then it's like a couple other nutrients.

[C]

Could you make the case? One constraint on farming though is seasons. And that's why say a greenhouse is interesting because it makes that farmland365 productive.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. And I do think, I mean we already grow food in greenhouses. I think we'll continue to do that and probably do more of it.

[A]

We still need water for that.

[C]

Yeah, for sure.

[A]

So you still got to sell water.

[C]

For case where indoor, not vertical but indoor can be useful. And if you have a greenhouse and you have really cheap solar, you might put supplemental lighting up, right. To like extend the day, to like help trigger like photoperiods and plants and stuff like that.

[B]

I think, I think this depends on what you're growing.

[C]

I'm talking about weed. Yeah, no, whatever. Strawberries, you know, like certain higher value things.

[B]

So I think something like strawberries, we're.

[C]

Probably not growing wheat in a greenhouse.

[B]

You can see like localized production just to have the freshest strawberry possible of like this was grown with just the perfect mix of nutrients and lighting that.

[C]

But also like outdoors you get strawberries for a month, right? Yeah, you know, like what about 12 months?

[B]

And there are, I mean we have a pretty good supply chain in terms of shipping stuff around to do that. And the shipping energy is way, way, way, way, way less than the energy that's actually needed in terms of the like primary energy input for growing things. I think that for some like small high value products, we will do some like indoor farming or vertical farming, like.

[C]

Pharmaceutical things maybe or like, I mean.

[B]

A lot of those things you can synthesize from other like more basic inputs. I mean we might do some of that, but I think that we're talking about most of our land use for agriculture is for growing cereal crops or grazing ruminants.

[C]

And that part, wheat and soybeans and corn.

[B]

Yeah, that part is not going to be done vertically. Like we're not going to have vertical cow farms where we have hundreds of square kilometers of internal space. Even just the. This is the other thing. If you wanted to do this vertically, just the land area, right. We were talking about 48 million square kilometers of current farmland. That's 48 times all of our other land use combined. Like imagine all of that in buildings. Like, like even.

[C]

Yeah, even if it's one tenth of that, that's still a shitload of buildings.

[B]

The amount of steel and concrete and like this is completely like it's, it's in a completely different scale than something like desalination that we can do with a fraction of the electricity that we're already using. Yeah, yeah. And have virtually like limitless amounts of water. Yeah.

[A]

Okay, so can I. Oh, sorry, go ahead.

[D]

No, no, go.

[C]

No, no, I have a left turn to take so.

[A]

Well, I just want to like synthesize what. Try to like. Yeah, you're. What you're saying is actually again very interesting and radical in how like simple it is. Which you're like what we would do with lots of energy is like more water and more metal. Like just keep doing the things we're doing just like, like it'll just be like way easier and cheaper and abundant and like everything could be steel or whatever, like aluminum or whatever. Because like it's so easy to make so much energy.

[B]

We can build bigger building. And I do think like we'll, I mean there's a number of things that'll happen at the same time. So we're going to continue to improve the efficiency of a lot of our energy use. So I do think, like, we'll have better insulation, we'll have better insulated buildings, we'll have, you know, more efficient heat pumps. But we'll also make the buildings bigger. Actually, like, energy use per square foot will go down, and I think per person will go down. But I think also there's a realistic chance that the current, like, trends in population decline we're seeing in certain areas of the planet are not going to sustain over the long term and that eventually population will increase. And as we do that, we're going to use more energy just because we have more people. And then there are things where we will actually see an increase in energy intensity by doing things in a healthier way. So currently most buildings don't have any ventilation whatsoever. We just rely entirely on leaks to exchange air. And that air gets exchanged through a wall that has a condensing surface and grows mold. And then you have mold spores going in and out of buildings all the time. And it's just not a very healthy way to do it. And you can use a dedicated air supply with a filter and a heat exchanger. And that does slightly increase the amount of energy you're using for H Vac, but it gives you healthier. And similarly, we'll have better lighting in buildings. The light levels indoors, if I'm remembering this correctly, you're talking about direct sunlight outside is about 100,000 luxury, you know, in the shades, like 10,000 lux. Indoors, we're talking about like 100 lux.

[C]

This is very interesting. Like, I was thinking about this when we were talking about LEDs at the beginning of the conversation. There's like a whole new class of lighting coming out now that endeavors to make the indoors as bright as the outdoors, which you just could never do with encampment.

[A]

Just from the like, I collect my solar, I get a 30% conversion loss. I put that into a light light. I'm not gonna like, get back to then. 10,000 lux indoors, right? Like, that seems crazy.

[C]

Just use more energy.

[B]

Yeah, well, I mean, so you're like.

[A]

Using the sun to just like make the sun.

[D]

Their homes aren't bright enough.

[C]

Yeah, it's kind of interesting. Like there's people who are like installing ridiculously light bright LED lamps in their house and they're like, yeah, I have like way more energy throughout the day. I never realized. Yeah, because it kind of sucks to be inside.

[A]

Just think about, like when you're out in the sun and like moving around and like moving your body, you're like way Happier and more energetic than just like sitting in an office all day.

[D]

Yeah.

[A]

It's because of how much energy you're like being partially.

[B]

There are a number of health reasons why you would want brighter lighting. I'm not saying that we necessarily need to go 100% as bright as it is outside. And even if you have.

[D]

No, I've just literally never heard about this before. So it's just like I feel like.

[C]

This is pretty new. Yeah.

[B]

This is like there's of lot A.

[A]

First time I heard about it was Jesse, you like a lot of things.

[B]

There's a lot of interesting research with this. So there's some pretty strong evidence that rates of myopia are increasing and a big part of that is lower lighting levels indoors.

[C]

Myopia.

[B]

So like short sightedness.

[C]

Ah.

[B]

So the like I was like people are pretty myopic.

[C]

I agree with you.

[D]

Literally also I'm so glad you asked that. I was like internal.

[C]

Interesting.

[B]

There are real health effects on this. Another one is a lot of people talk about blue light in terms of sleep schedules and you want to avoid blue light at night and all this. But it's not the absolute level of blue light that's the most important factor. It's the contrast in lighting and spectrum between the middle of the day and the end of the day. So in a natural environment we get this extremely bright quite blue light in the day and then in the evening the sun goes down, you have more filtering through the atmosphere, it becomes more red, it becomes more red, it becomes less intense. And this helps set your circadian rhythm. And when we have just extremely dim indoors all the time, it completely messes with that.

[C]

Your rhythm's all fucked up. Yeah.

[B]

So and this is the other reason of like you have people that are going back and saying like oh, incandescents are better than LEDs and they are not like incandescent.

[A]

Again they're not freezers like Alex. Epstein.

[D]

Epstein.

[A]

Epstein. They're not, they're not.

[B]

I think they just don't understand the like all of the factors that are necessary to make like all the things that you want in lighting. Like you do want blue lighting in the daytime. That is important. And you can't get that with a, with an incandescent. I mean theoretically you could put a spectral filter where you're just filtering out almost all of the red and like just you make a crazy less efficient incandescent or you can just have like.

[C]

High intensity crazy stuff.

[A]

But there is a funny like oh, the wokes ruined like lighting and Then it's like you just like go further back pre lights. Like I think you guys are saying you just like be outside. Like it's not, it's not incandescent versus LEDs that are the problem.

[B]

Well, this is part of, I think.

[A]

The actual answer just solar max and fucking blast through LED, like get your 5000 lux indoors. Well, the like it's so. It's the as dumb as, I don't know, it's just funny.

[B]

There's another way to do that. So I do think we'll have artificial lighting sources that are very intense and that'll be very helpful, especially for people living in very like extreme latitudes where you don't get a lot of sun in the winter.

[C]

But I mean even here is brutal in the winter.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

For most people on most of the planet. I mean even here just having more windows is really helpful. Like just having more windows exposed. And we'll make better windows, right? We'll put energy into making more windows and better ones where we have, you know, triple pane windows that are like have low E coatings on them and you can get good insulation value with them. And we'll just have better lighting quality because people have more windows.

[C]

The other cool thing about LEDs, I just have to say this is you can just have them change their spectrum throughout the day so they can just be fully respecting of your circadian rhythm. And it's kind of awesome. In my apartment, we've programmed our bathroom light to be like deep, deep red in the middle of the night. So if you wake up to pee the and you turn on the lights, it doesn't like wake you up. Yeah. And it's actually awesome. Like it's really cool. But you can do that throughout the whole day, right? You can have it just like follow the sun.

[A]

Yeah. No man. Any distance.

[C]

No, I'm a candle guy, actually.

[A]

You are going to take a left turn. I also have a big left turn, which is why I literally just opened a beer because we haven't even talked about.

[C]

I have a middle mid left turn. Okay, so we've talked a lot about stationary power, Right. How we're going to produce electricity. We briefly talked about mobility and mentioned, for example, aviation fuel. When we, when I try to think about mobility in the in the U way, in the like fundamental millennia sort of way. And also I've been reading foundation. Like what is the long term, like what is the next like interesting source of power for mobility, whether that's fuel or storage, you know, however you want to frame it like right now, you know, starship uses liquefied natural gas. I believe airplanes use jet fuel. But like airplanes aren't actually particularly advanced. Like what, where does it go? Like what do you know what I mean?

[B]

It's a good question. I mean some of this depends on the development of a few different technologies. Like theoretically you could do an aluminum air battery that has comparable energy density to gasoline but actually a much more efficient extraction of that energy. And so like running that to get much more range. Yeah, you could actually potentially get more with that, with running it through an electric motor and have a simpler motor. And like I don't.

[C]

You get less speed though, an electric.

[B]

Motor versus not necessarily. I mean depends on how you, how you run your engine. I mean most of our, like most of our planes are running at lower speeds than they already could just because of the fuel consumption.

[C]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, interesting. But you know what I mean?

[B]

Like I think one of the underrated.

[C]

Spaceship like blue glowing thing, you know, like, like what is that gonna be?

[B]

I. I don't know there. I mean I think like, I do think that like you will see battery powered small aircraft more common. Like I think uber air type stuff is like, I think that's gonna happen. I think the battery technology is already good enough for a lot of.

[A]

I mean we already see it with drones. Drones. I mean.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

Why aren't those just gonna get drones?

[D]

And you get then like the smaller airports like totally fundamentally changes like the airport strategy because you don't have to fuel up at the hubs. You can like go from small airport to small airport.

[B]

Yeah, I do think that.

[A]

Why is that?

[D]

Yeah, because they have to refuel. So that's like why it's so hard to go from like small, small airports to each other. Because like they don't often have refueling stations. They're only at the major hubs.

[A]

Just because they have like massive infrastructure.

[D]

Yeah.

[A]

Huh. But you have the grid everywhere.

[D]

You have the grid everywhere. Yeah, kind of. It kind of like it would like, it would like increase the ability to. The ability for airlines to do offer those types of routes in a way.

[B]

That they don't usually offer.

[C]

That's interesting.

[B]

I mean I think you will need some pretty big upgrades to enable like the type of charging that would be necessary for.

[D]

Yeah, but like those would probably be.

[A]

But also like we're already talking about that with data centers and stuff. Like the.

[D]

Yeah.

[A]

The limiting factor on infrastructure fields diminished with power than with like massive gas pipelines.

[C]

Okay. So aluminum air. That's the only Thing I heard, well, I mean there.

[B]

So there's a lot of things that could, and I'm not going to pretend to know the answer to this, like theoretically, liquefied hydrogen has an extremely high specific energy density. You know, we used it on the upper stage on our moon missions. Like it's, there's an argument to be made that we might do some liquefied hydrogen. I think compressed hydrogen, not really the same because you have the weight of the tank and you don't get the, the benefit of a liquid fuel is that you don't have these massively heavy tanks to contain the. Easy to deal with. But it's not, it was not going to be easy to deal with because like liquid hydrogen is extremely cold and it would require a lot of refrigeration infrastructure and, and fueling infrastructure and things that we don't have. But like theoretically in the long future maybe we'll use that for aviation. You could do fuel cells that can get very efficient, you know, high power density, extract energy.

[A]

Planetary space missions, can we have like, would it be like an on ship SMR or something?

[B]

I mean I always thought like why.

[A]

Isn'T nuclear the only application is just like space?

[B]

Well, it depends on how far in space you're going, right? Like if you're going to deep space, like the outer solar system, nuclear is definitely the way to go.

[A]

Just because the fuel density actually matters there.

[B]

It's more just that the sun trails. So it's like the further away from sun you are, the intensity of the sunlight fades as you go out. So Earth and Mars, you still have pretty good solar resources, but once you start getting out to you know, Neptune, Jupiter, etc. Like it's extremely, extremely weak.

[C]

Is there a nuclear kind of actually a little difficult on Mars also because of the thin atmosphere. I mean how do you reject all the heat?

[B]

There, There are ways to do this. Like you could do, I mean you could do a geothermal exchange loop and it's going to be expensive, but it's not that crazy. You could do radiators. Like radiators can be pretty effective because.

[C]

You'Re, you just push a lot of air through them.

[B]

I mean like actual like radiator, huge radiative heat transfer.

[C]

Yeah, yeah.

[A]

Like in like into black body space.

[B]

Basically like just black body radiation out into space.

[C]

That would be gigantic for a nuclear reactor, right?

[B]

Like, yeah, I mean you're talking about.

[C]

How many starships are we talking about?

[B]

Like so yeah, I mean, sorry, is.

[D]

The nuclear power plant on Mars or on a Spaceship on Mars.

[C]

And I'm just talking about how do you do. How do you do the waste heat manufacturer?

[A]

Can I set my thermostat.

[D]

Can we just take the nuclear waste heat and ship it to my apartment on Mars?

[B]

Yeah. I mean, I don't have the figures for this off the top of my head, but the physics of how you would look at this is like your black body radiation scales with the fourth power of temperature of like, absolute temperature.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

So relatively small differences in temperature can give you a lot of radiative power. Yeah. So I think, like, that's a practical way. I don't know in terms of like, the thickness of the Martian atmosphere or how realistic it is to use like, nuclear. To like, to reject nuclear heat into the atmosphere versus doing radiators versus doing, like, rejecting it into the ground. I mean, part of it is like, a lot of the heat that you're going to want on Mars is for people. So you're probably going to do like, you know, co generation. Yeah, I think.

[D]

Yeah.

[C]

For the human greenhouse. Yeah.

[A]

For Colleen's apartment, my apartment and my vertical farm. I'm not going to Mars, man. But is there.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Have you read the Three Body Problem trilogy?

[B]

I have not read it, no.

[A]

I feel like the whole.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

I feel like actually traveling meaningful distances in space is like. Just feels way too far. Like there's like.

[B]

It may not even be possible, Right? Yeah, yeah. Like, I think going interplanetary is absolutely possible. And I think that's well within technology that we can do. Yeah. We don't know if it's possible to go from one, like, stellar system to another.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

It just may not be. It may be that, like, the amount of interstellar dust is just too abrasive on any ship of any reasonable speed. And it may be that if you send a ship at a lower speed that just entropy, it's going to decay. That you can't, like, actually make a practical system that can go that far.

[C]

Well, you can't just like, cryogenically freeze me and shoot me out there in a little coffin.

[B]

I mean, maybe, but depending on what speed you're going, you might be traveling for hundreds of years. And you have to have a, like, cryogenic cooling system that can maintain itself.

[C]

For hundreds of years.

[B]

And I feel like a lot.

[A]

I feel like a lot embedded in a lot of what you're saying is like something I felt, which is like, at least thinking about nuclear is like you need some, like, insane fundamental breakthrough that we haven't seen, which always could happen. So like it's like isolated to nuclear. But you're almost when I hear you in the aggregate talking about like what we're going to use all this energy for like not very optimistic about like interplanetary. You're kind of like bearish on a lot of the more forward looking. You're almost like the limits of the physics that we have are already like we can kind of see the horizon.

[B]

In a way I think on a lot of stuff, yes. And I think but even that is still, still extremely exciting. It's like okay, a 4x in global energy gets everybody on the planet to the energy abundance of an American.

[C]

Yeah, we're so rich.

[B]

That's pretty awesome. If you think on like I like.

[A]

That it's, it doesn't feel black pilled either.

[B]

Well if you have like on a, on a primary energy or take electricity first. Right. I think the average American is about 1.3 kilowatts per person. Right. So like, like you need roughly six or seven kilowatts of solar, of solar panels. Gets you an American level of energy abundance. That's an amount that's being produced in china today for $1,000. $1,000. You need to add some storage and it's not perfectly the same but the difference between having no electricity and having on average the amount of electricity of an American and generally pretty high availability in like the global south, like that's a huge difference.

[A]

Yeah, yeah.

[B]

And not that much money to make it happen.

[C]

I think it's actually incredibly cheap.

[D]

It's cheap especially if you think about like and again I'm obviously in an ideal world like it would be 100% reliable, whatever, however percent reliable the US grid is etc. Etc. But I remember back when I was like in my heard analyst talking to some company that was installing you know like solar, they like a little community microgrid like in some Caribbean island. And then they were like yeah, like if someone just like uses too much power we just like flip them off. And then like the hurricane, hurricane was coming. They're like yeah, we're just like moving some solar panels off the racking to like store them. And I just think too like there's, if you're talking about how do you do it cheaply and how do you do it quickly to some extent. Like there's the V1 which is get people really cheap power that works like 95% of the time.

[B]

Yeah, I mean you're going to have some level of power availability 100% of the time and you just it's just there's going to be some differential wait.

[A]

So I would just want to unpack. You're saying something interesting. You're like, if you think about our conception of like solar deployment, it's like doubly certified, like 180 mile an hour wind, like rated racking. And you're like, if you're just like giving someone six to seven panels, you just like throw them out there, they give you what you need and then when like there's a storm coming, you just like pack them up.

[D]

I think, I think deployment is not about like deployment of electricity as like, like reaching. And I'm not saying we shouldn't necessarily think about it this way, but like, as like reaching, like American or like quote, quote unquote, like Western standards of power generation. And sometimes I think that holds us back to like actually deploying energy.

[A]

Yes.

[D]

Because then you get. And I think this is actually like. I very quickly like refreshed myself on the other things in abundance that I feel like I had talked about with people, which was like the. We have done so much around like increasing safety and permitting and things that I actually think are important, but like, we've probably like, like, we've probably swung too far in one, like the, the other way. Right. Like we had.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Where's the, where's the balcony solar?

[D]

Yeah, where's the balcony solar?

[A]

Right.

[D]

And so, yeah, I don't know. I just feel like we, if we do more like things like balcony solar and just be like, yeah, get some panels out there, like, you could do that in a reasonable way and like create a lot more abundance quickly. And then with like a significant increase in electricity, people can then do more things which then can like presumably bolster and like, allow them to better enable that and like make that more reliable over time.

[A]

Yeah.

[D]

I don't know. We tend to think like, we must do everything exactly right the first time versus this like incrementalism, which is how like the grid started anyway. Right. We started with like, let's have some light bulbs sometimes.

[B]

Yeah, yeah.

[D]

Right.

[A]

Let's just start slapping solar everywhere.

[B]

Yeah, Well, I think, I think there's a number of interesting threads to pull on that. I mean, generally like this whole conception of, okay, you need fossil fuels, like for the, it's for the, you know, the developing world. We're like, you know, we. These solar panels, that's for rich people. And like really these people, they need, you know, cheap, reliable power property. Yeah, well, it's exactly. There's a number of things Wrong with this one is that it is actually way cheaper to get extremely high availability of electricity from solar and storage on most of the planet than the German perspective of the 10x difference in summer and winter production is not the case. When you're at the Ukrainian. For most of the world, for most of the planet's surface area, that is just not. Not remotely true.

[C]

Especially for the most of the world that is in energy poverty.

[B]

Right. The people who need this most. And then there's so many other things that we take for granted in our infrastructure that if you think of building from scratch, it's just to build a new coal plant and transmission and distribution and all the meters and have all the people who read the meters and have all the people who administer, who send out the bills and collect the bills. And the whole, like, that whole system is like, there's a massive bureaucracy and like a huge amount of capital that's sunk into the system that we're running today. That just isn't feasible on most of the planet. And then even the alternatives here, it's like, okay, you have people who are running, like, distributed diesel generators that don't have reliable diesel supply. You have people who are like, like distilling their own crude oil over a bonfire to get fuel and buying fuel in water bottles on the side of the road. It's not as simple as you just go down to the Buc EE's or the Exxon and get gas. You're talking about supply chains going out to rural, rural parts of the world that do not have the fuel supply infrastructure.

[A]

Like, Colleen's comment further is like, it's weird. The lens people always bring. Like, when we talk about Ders, we're like, oh, you don't need wires anymore. And everyone's just like, that's so, like, it's like a frivolous comment in a lot of ways. But, like, in 90% of the world.

[D]

If you don't have wires, then, like.

[A]

Yeah, it's just like, radically exactly what's gonna enable, like, massive adoptions of, like, much more energy consumption. Because you can just bring the panel and the battery anywhere, and you don't need any infrastructure.

[B]

Well, and you see this happening even in places that do have power grids. So, like, in Pakistan, they're importing gigawatts of solar panels because the power grid is expensive and unreliable. And you see this all over the place in the Global South. Like, I have a friend who builds microgrids in Africa, and people are buying, like, solar powered lights. Even people that have a like a power pole next to their house because either the grid power is too expensive, too unreliable or the interconnection is too expensive. And there's all sorts of practical problems that you can just completely subvert by buying your own solar and storage. And the vast majority of the things that people are going to want to use power for especially immediately you can enable with very, very cheap infrastructure. It's things like.

[A]

Sorry, go ahead.

[B]

People want to have even before something like air conditioning they just want a cold drink.

[A]

Yeah. Like a little cooler.

[B]

Yeah like a mini fridge. Huge deal. It's like television. It's charging cell phones and not having to go to the village over in order to pay someone to charge your phone. It's eventually I think e mobility first at small scale of things like motorcycles and bicycles and light trucks and light cars. Like those are the things that people are going to want.

[A]

You know who's going to sell all that to them?

[B]

China.

[A]

Yeah like they all want like oil.

[D]

Does that make you so mad?

[A]

No, not at all. It just like it's like it makes.

[D]

Me so mad when I think of all the like the fact that we.

[A]

Invented solar and lithium ion and China owns it.

[D]

Stupid.

[A]

It's very stupid.

[D]

Like no, they don't really know.

[A]

It's more it's like an underrated when you think of you connect the dots from like okay we don't need to build power grids anymore. You can just buy solar and storage and then the trading relationship you're going to have with a country who makes all of it versus American hegemony came from we owned all this oil supply chains basically we provided access to cheap energy to the world. It's just like let that play out over 50 to 100 years.

[B]

Well I also think there's a pretty big difference in the dynamics around if you're an oil importing country you may have a few months in geologic storage.

[A]

Maybe you buy a few panels, you.

[B]

Got those you don't have 30 years of fuel.

[C]

The leverage your supplier has over you. That's true when you. Yeah because to you basically build this machine that then needs continuous fuel input. You've sunk all your capex in the machine so you're stuck with the machine and now you're sort of. You're just a buyer, right? Yeah but yeah when you buy in 25 year chunks you're actually kind of in the driver's seat or at least alter geopolitics.

[B]

Even the 25 year chunks is not like it's not like you Buy it. And after 25 years it runs out.

[D]

Out.

[B]

Right.

[A]

It's just like worse.

[B]

Your panels are running at you know, 80 to 90% after 25 to 30 years.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Some of them are going to break and some of them are going to have issues and want to be replaced.

[A]

But the one thing I was going to ask you about is like in your, the math you were doing like on $6 a watt, solar nuclear can last for like 50, 80 years. Obviously there's probably a ton more capital you have to put in over time, but like. Well they're going to be like old rusty solar panels that are just still like putting out after 70 years.

[B]

Well, I mean there are, there's stuff that was, that was made in the 70s that's still running today. Yeah. That like the, the like and there are, there are a whole bunch of different like degradation pathways but like most of the panel failures that we saw were bad back sheets.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

And now that bifacial panels are just like standard, you don't have that problem. There's, it's glass on both sides. You don't have moisture intrusion. So the like the primary failure pathway is gone. You still have light induced degradation on P type solar cells, but N type solar cells basically eliminate that. There is potential induced degradation which you can alleviate with the way that you set up and run your system. You can do a reverse voltage to reverse that process. But we understand the mechanisms around the degradation of solar and we've actually addressed most of them and we made some panels that like back in a long.

[A]

Time ago, there's no moving parts.

[B]

Right. I mean there's, you will replace your batteries will have degradation over time and you will refresh out your batteries every once in a while. But you don't change out. You're not replacing the entire infrastructure. Your inverter, eventually, depending on how well you cool it, you have to replace it. But a lot of the stuff that you have to put in there like your, all of your bus bars, all of your like. Yeah, that is, you don't have to change that out.

[C]

It's like this copper.

[B]

Yeah. You're swapping out a wear component.

[A]

You know, my, my, my big brain geopolitical like how to keep the US Dominant. What like if our energies are for a day. What I would do use the dollar's supremacy to like the strength of the dollar to like mass import every like solar and battery we can get our hands on to create like free energy that now you just have like for 30 years to like overcome the like the like, high labor cost, I mean, our labor costs are higher, but if you have like radically cheap energy, you can like use the buying power we have today to like import the cheap energy. We need to like, start creating our own shit again. Well, I mean, I think, you know what I'm saying.

[B]

I think it's actually not even like the biggest hurdles aren't even like, we have places with very cheap energy. Texas energy is extremely cheap. We have very cheap natural gas. We have very cheap electricity. We are building a lot of manufacturing. But I think the real competitive advantage that China has, I mean, they have a couple different things, but I think the one that's really under addressed is just the focus on supply chains. We have all these extremely fractured supply chains where we're shipping a component across multiple countries and multiple. Like in China, when they make solar panels, they're like making. They're digging up the material and making the polysilicon and making the, you know, the ingots and slicing the wafers and making the cells and putting the cells into modules in the same city, often in like, the same, like complex. Right. They'll build these industrial parks. And we used to do this for all kinds of stuff. We do this with our, like our old coal and steel industry. We'd have these big complexes of power plants and steel plants.

[A]

Yeah, you're like, you just need raw material access.

[B]

Yeah. And we need better focus on supply chains. There's a bunch of regulatory stuff we have to change. I think there's also just a cultural problem where people used to view the word industry in the highest regard for something to be industrial. It was done at scale in a very efficient and like, well thought out way. It wasn't this like, you know, small scale kind of hack job stuff. This was like the height of human progress. And now when you hear the word industry, it's just like, oh, like whatever it is, if you, if I just say like the food industry, it's. People are going to hear a negative connotation in that. And that's. I think that's like a fundamental cultural problem. And I think part of that is like China was very recently in real poverty and they have seen all of the value that comes from building industry. And the US is extremely removed from extreme poverty. And so we don't like quite have an appreciation for all of the systems that are necessary for the lives that we enjoy today. And we also don't have an appreciation for what could be done if we made those systems better.

[D]

Yeah, I think that's what I Meant when I said like earlier, like doesn't that make you so mad? It was less that like China's doing it and more that, that China is going to like own these things and more like like we can't. That we can't. And that like yeah. And that like we say that we want to but like we don't really seem to do the things that would actually like initiate the change.

[B]

Yeah, I mean I think, I think we could do it. I mean we are seeing similar.

[D]

I think we could do it too.

[B]

Supply chains being built like we now have about 50 gigs gigs of module manufacturing capacity in the U.S. i think we have about 30 gigs of polysilicon capacity. We're still quite low on ingot and wafer and cell, I mean sorry on wafer and cell capacity but none of those things are things that like are things that we can't do in the US no 100% and I do think that that capacity is going to get built. I do wish that we had a much bigger focus on this earlier because I think people don't appreciate just the rate of solar deployment that is going on currently.

[C]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[D]

I used to so my go to in bars when I meet someone who's like very anti solar is usually like we need to do solar so that we can beat China at doing solar and be the global dominant solar producer. And that like is usually pretty effective.

[B]

Yeah.

[D]

And I just think like we need more of that energy.

[B]

Well I think, I think part of this is solar. I think we need to, we need.

[D]

To understand why do people not like solar still and like that's going to make us lose. That's not just going to like not do solar. Like the US not doing solar doesn't mean that like everyone else doesn't do solar. It actually just means that we are now just not part of the global solar market.

[B]

Yeah, well I think, I think, yeah I think that's a really good point. And also like I think people, people need to understand that one China is installing more solar than the rest of the world combined. Right. This is not a like I've seen people talking about these like, like schemes, you know they're, they're trying to make our grid unreliable while they're.

[D]

I don't think any of that to be clear.

[A]

I know you don't. Right.

[B]

But like there are these, there are these people that will say this as like oh you know, they're building coal. It's like well actually last year the fastest growing slice of the generation in absolute terms not in percentage terms was solar. It was the largest contributor to new generating new generation in the last year. And the exponential growth on this is the thing that I think people just don't understand. People for the longest time were saying solar, it's not even 1%. It's like, oh well, it's not even 2%. Oh well, it's not even 7%. Oh well it's. Yeah, but the, the like. So if you, if you want to have like. So if you look at literally like.

[A]

Years, how fast it's growing, it's going.

[B]

To like be this, this is, this is what I think is the real thing of like the scalability of solar, especially once you start adding automation into this is just like you're not going to be able to pump out nuclear plants at this sort of rate. Like China in the last two years built as much solar as like all of their nuclear. They built half of like the amount of solar they built in the last two years is equivalent to half of the nuclear generation in the US that we built over decades. Yeah, yeah, they built it in two years from solar. And the solar is still growing exponentially. If you look at internal like Chinese solar industry targets, like what the manufacturers think, think the market is going to be like at like 2030, they're talking about like 2, 34 gigawatts or sorry, 2, 34 terawatts of solar on a DC basis.

[A]

Where does that exponential curve go? Like do. If you carry it out like 50, 100 years, you think of like the transition of, you know, you see the use of primary energy and oil and the chart just goes like, it's like biomass is here and then like there's a big bump from coal and then petroleum just like blows out. Are we just going to like get another exponential curve of from solar essentially that just like dwarfs, even those scales I think over the next like 50 years.

[B]

Yeah, I think solar.

[A]

Are we going to like 10x the.

[B]

Solar has been 10xing every 10 years for something like 50 years now.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

So it's like it's been incredibly consistent in this exponential growth. And at every point in the process people are like, oh well we cross, couldn't possibly sustain this for one more year. Like there's that, that famous chart of the like all the IEA projections flatline every flat line every year and every year it grows exponentially.

[A]

Where, how on a primary energy scale like the 18 terawatts, where do we go with 50 more years of that?

[B]

Well, so like if you look at today Right.

[A]

Does it just replace existing fossil fuels or does it like.

[B]

I think it's going to go, I mean it's going to go way, way above it. Because even just, just the energy, just to get the whole world up to an American level of energy, we're talking about a 4X and we will get some efficiency gains with electrification. So maybe how fast do we get there? I think it's going to happen quite rapidly. So I think that there will eventually be a declining part to the S curve, like decelerating growth. But I think that people are, I mean people have obviously been way too fast to call that for the entire history of solar. And I think like, realistically we still have quite a bit of exponential growth.

[A]

Do you think that happens in our lifetime?

[B]

That the, the, like the cap. We will we 4x, will we forex? Oh, definitely, yeah. I think, I think in our lifetimes for sure.

[A]

So like in the next 50 years, if you had to guess, what is, I think solar's primary energy production?

[B]

I think solar. I mean, so currently today, right, I think we've got about 1.6 terawatts of solar or so, right. On, on Earth, like Totally. We're 10xing every, every 10 years, roughly. Right. So you know, at that same growth.

[A]

Rate, that's our total primary energy in a decade.

[B]

There's still, there's still a capacity factor on that. Right. So like that's on a D.C. basis. Right. But also there's the, like the fact that that solar is providing electricity which is more valuable than just like chemical energy.

[A]

There's a loss factor on that.

[B]

Right. So I think that by 2040 it'll be comparable to current energy on the planet today. I think by 2050, yeah, just from solar, I think by 2050 it's going to well exceed it. I do think that, I don't know where to call where that starts decelerating. I think that depends on a lot of things. Depends on of what happens with AI and automation. Like if we get really good install automation, nobody had to round up and centrally plan. We're going to go farm 48 million square kilometers of farmland. It was just farming is profitable. I'm going to go do that. And so I think you could see massive, massive deployments of solar farms driven by all sorts of demands. I think the intelligence question on like what happens with AI energy demand, I think in the near term a lot of things may be overestimated, but like over the long term there's an unlimited amount of energy we can pour into Intelligence, like there's no visible end in sight of what is useful there.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

Okay, I have another question prompted by Isaac Asimov. So right in the book there's a big space space tower, right? So that you don't have to land your spaceships. They can just like, you know, just like stick you in the tower and then send you down on the elevator, right?

[A]

These elevators, yeah.

[C]

And then at a different point there's like rings around the planet that they built. And while reading this, all I could think was like a democracy could never do this, right? Like these are like hundred year projects. Like no one's going to get on board. People will hate it like a quarter of the way through. Now that's all kind of silly, but when talking about like massive scale of manufacturing and industry in China. Like I saw the video recently of like the new I think Catl factory and it's fucking gigantic.

[B]

Like it is the BYD one. That's like the size of San Francisco.

[C]

Oh yeah, it's byd. Yeah, it's the size of San Francisco to make that.

[A]

Gigafactories are like a small block in the like crazy factory basically.

[B]

And like with the people.

[C]

Can't imagine a private American corporation ever doing that. It's really hard for me to imagine now. And I like, I know China is not like full blown communism anymore, but it's still like a high.

[D]

High touch.

[C]

High industrial policy country. Right? It's a high industrial policy country. High touch. Yeah, I like touch. I don't know, it's just something I can't help but think about. Like when we're the scales we're talking about, there's like an ingredient missing to do that.

[B]

Yeah, I mean I think there's a few ingredients missing. There's like, you know, part of this is policy. Part of this is like we've just absolutely wrapped ourself in red tape. Part of this is cultural and I think you're 100% right that people do not appreciate at the difference in scale here where like the rate like China's still growing exponentially on their solar deployments. The targets for what their solar and battery manufacturing capacity. I'm not saying that they're necessarily 100% going to use all of that domestically in their country, but what that could do, right? If you take 2 terawatts of solar and about 8 terawatt hours of storage, that's an entire US worth of electricity generation. That's like, like 4,000 terawatt hours a year of 24,7 solar power. They're going to be able to make that every single year when by like 2030. Like this is extremely.

[A]

That's the craziest thing I've ever heard.

[B]

This is like the, like that, that.

[A]

Actually of all the things you've said that blowed my mind, I've like that's, that's fucking insane.

[B]

This is like current capacity announced and under development. Even the stuff that like they're making today, like, and not all of this is utilized at 100% and like I'm not saying that for certain crank if you're talking about industrial capacity, it's like.

[A]

That'S not like that's how much oil we get out of the ground. That's like 30 years of oil.

[B]

Right?

[A]

So it's like multiply that by 30.

[B]

The exponential. This is what I'm saying of like, like, like the. This is like this is, this is like the, the amount of solar and storage that they're building is equivalent to building an entire U. S. Power grid, an entire US power grid per year.

[A]

Every year by 2030.

[B]

By 2030.

[A]

What?

[B]

And like there's no other why. That's resource on the.

[A]

Why did you. Why did it take two and a half hours? This is why we pod for long. Because you just find the nuggets like that. That's fucking insane. Yeah, but what is this? Like I think even wrap my head.

[B]

This is the thing that I like, I'm so frustrated about. About the like western conversations around solar is that we talk about solar is like, oh, you know, it's low energy density or oh, it takes up so much materials, whatever. And I'm like it's like farmland. The only thing that you're going to be able to deploy at terawatt scale every single year and it lasts for decades. Like the decline curve on a horizontal well in the Permian. You're talking about what is China at now in terms of solar and what.

[A]

Is the US in terms of global energy consumption?

[B]

In terms of global energy consumption, like what percent?

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

I'd have to think about this.

[A]

For a minute, but just because I'm like you're making a new biggest energy consumer every year.

[B]

I think on a primary energy basis we're about 10 kilowatts per person and I think we have about 340 million people.

[A]

So out of the 18 are doing the math. I love how you just always go.

[C]

To primary just going.

[B]

So it's like roughly three out of the 18 terawatts.

[A]

Yeah, I would have guessed like 10 to 15%.

[D]

Yeah.

[A]

What?

[C]

And that's. You're. You were saying specifically they were manufacturing.

[B]

That's the manufacturing capacity.

[C]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's not necessarily installing.

[B]

Right.

[C]

But still, it's insane.

[B]

But they would have. That will, that will be. They will have set up the ability to do that. Whether or not they actually do that or whether that goes to the rest of the world or how that all. It's like an entire us every year.

[A]

I can't ramp.

[B]

There's no other energy source that can grow like that. There's no other like. And because people can just deploy it distributed, you don't need like a crazy centralized operation to be able to go put it everywhere.

[A]

There's two questions I've been wanting to ask you. This is like kind of a crazy segue, but we're gonna do it. We're gonna do it. Is D.C. like, why are we doing shit in AC? So like, if you're, if you're like producing a U.S. power grid every year, in 10, in five years, five years, why the fuck would we be living in an AC paradigm anymore? You could just rebuild the entire US grid, like all DC and distribute it with one year of output. So how is this going to change how we build power infrastructure? Are you a DC maxi as well?

[B]

I wouldn't necessarily say I'm a maxi, but I'm definitely very bullish on dc. I think just to kind of outline this, like most of the things you interact with on a daily basis are already going to be dc. Like LED lighting is dc, a computer is dc, an ev, it charges dc solar DC solar DC battery, DC heat pump. Right. High efficiency heat pump dc, dc. Right. All of our big energy users, data centers. So data centers are full of computers and they ultimately do run dc. There's been like early, early data centers actually ran on a DC architecture and then they adapted them to run inside of buildings that had first 120 volt AC and then like 12208, like three phase, low voltage, three phase. And there's kind of been this like progressive change. And you know, you're now.

[A]

But ultimately like the servers are dc.

[B]

Yeah, the servers are dc. And you're now seeing like DC is always dc and like you're, you're, you're seeing basically the DC go from. It used to be just the actual chips in the computer are running dc and now it's at the rack level or even at the row level, you're having dc. So you're seeing more and more integration on a DC basis. And there's a ton of efficiency benefits to that. When you run things ac, you get inductive losses because you have this changing electric current which creates a changing magnetic field which induces a current. So you create your own losses inside the wire by having this changing electrical direction. And you can eliminate that going D.C. but then also D.C. you're like for the same peak voltage and same peak current. You're running a. You effectively can run your wires at higher voltages because you get to use the voltage rather than the RMF or the root mean square voltage.

[A]

I'll give you that one. Keep going.

[B]

Like, like, basically like ac, you have to insulate it to be able to handle the peak, peak of that. Like you know, the peak of the waveform. And D.C. you get this constant waveform. Okay.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

So it's kind of like why we use a TV problem. It's like why we use 3 Phase AC because it just like helps us fill in that balance single phase. But DC is like you can get, it's just like. Yeah, it's as good as you can.

[A]

Get stuff like can canceling the waveforms with each other.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. There's a lot of like you can get really into the nuance of this of like even in like the AC power supplies in a typical computer you'll first rectify the power to get a DC signal.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And then you will like do your voltage transformation at way higher frequencies. Like 60 Hz is a terrible frequency to do a lot of that because you need, need a lot of capacitors to be able to smooth out that power. So a lot of your solid state transformations are already happening with a DC input anyways. The real thing that's nice about AC is that regular oil filled transformers are just extremely cheap and that allows us to very quickly and cheaply have big voltage differences. So we can, we can generate power at a medium voltage and ship it at high voltage and bring it back down to medium voltage and bring it into low voltage. And it is more expensive to do that with dc. Whether that eventually becomes close to your.

[A]

I don't know, bullish and not a maxi.

[B]

Yeah. And there's a bunch of other stuff of like AC is really useful for things, but even a lot of things that we drive. AC will actually first transform something to dc. We'll use an AC motor in an ev you'll use a DC source and then you'll have your motor, your actual drive control unit is going to generate its own frequency based on what is actually required for the car. It's Going to supply exactly what's needed to run that it's own little bespoke AC. Yeah, the sort of just dumb 60Hz regular signal. I think that's going to be less important in the future. Especially like when everybody has batteries everywhere.

[A]

Wait, so if I just under. Is the implication of what you're saying a step back on transformers being really cheap. How much of like I know my. My fridges are 240.

[B]

Or 100 probably depend. Most fridges are like 120. But commercial fridge might be if I.

[A]

Think of like my computer, my car, my fridge, my like most of just like standard stuff I use or even like go to a data center server racks or whatever. Like within any given system are there varying components that want different voltages so that like having it all be AC to dc you can use like a cheap transformer on each of them. I know the I like. I know my computer charger is a converter but is there there also like a voltage change happening in my computer that's different than like my car? Obviously. But like how relevant in any like household appliances are one thing. But like you still want an AC system architecture just because it's like even if you have a solar and storage on site, it's more expensive to like step that up and down based on your usage on site.

[B]

Yeah. And I, I'm not an expert on some of the details here so I will couch this in that. But like my, my understanding on this is that when you're talking about lower voltage transformation so things of like inside a computer, it's actually cheaper to do that kind of if you, if you want like a lower DC signal it's cheaper to do that with solid state electronics than it is to use like your typical magnetic windings. But if you're trying to transfer something up to like hundreds of kilovolt level.

[A]

Oh, that's really interesting. So do you know blixed because I was going to ask about this too.

[B]

Yeah. I don't know enough about this to be able to give a real take on where I think that. I think there's potential there from my understanding, but I'm not going to be able to make a prediction of. Is it all going to go solid state? I don't know. I still think that there's.

[A]

Based on what you're saying is like in some smaller cases solid state does win.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And there's also like theoretically there's like a lot of surface area for Blix to like.

[B]

Yeah, I think theoretically a lot of Stuff you could go straight from D.C. to like distribution voltage. And like, that might make sense. And I mean. Yeah, I think, well, we have like so much inertia in the current electricity system that we have and the voltages and all the standards and everything, like from first principles, we probably wouldn't do it that way. There's all sorts of things that we're doing that aren't really optimal from. We chose 60 Hz and Europe chose 50 Hz because this was a compromise between the low frequency systems that were used to drive motors. We had stuff that was like 10 to 30 hertz and the high frequency stuff that was used to drive lighting. Because your light bulb actually slightly dims 60 times a second. So there's some slight like flicker on. Even an incandescent bulb does this because it actually cools off and heats up 60 times a second. And so you.

[C]

And if you were lower frequency, you would actually notice it.

[B]

Yeah. And so, but the thing is, that.

[C]

Was just like a choice.

[B]

Yeah. So we just kind of like split the difference and like, rather than building two parallel power grids, we're like, this is good enough for lighting. It's not as good as a hundred hertz system for lighting. There is still some flicker and some people are sensitive to it. And even with an incandescent bulb, there's still flicker. The only way that you don't get any flicker in a light bulb is if you run it dc. And the. And like a motor.

[A]

I'm not just a Mark Jacobson was right guy now I'm a. I'm a. Edison was right.

[B]

Well, this is like our boy right.

[D]

Here on the table.

[A]

Dollar in his head.

[B]

There's, there's a lot of.

[A]

That's Einstein.

[D]

Oh, shoot. Sorry.

[C]

Whatever.

[A]

Same thing.

[B]

I think there's a lot of value in dc, but there's a lot of stuff that's still going to run ac. Like, even when you have a DC battery in a car, an AC motor has. An AC induction motor has a lot of advantage. You don't need any permanent magnets, rare earth metal. You can build that with just iron and copper. If we want to make massive and massive amounts of motors, do a lot of stuff like, that's a really useful pathway to have.

[A]

Right. Okay, I got what I. Oh, this is the second question I had for you. Why doesn't and will they ever Tesla make their own cells?

[B]

Their own battery cells?

[C]

Yeah, I mean, I think they, they make cells.

[B]

They have like a partnership with Panasonic, I think, and they have like, they have factories in the US for sells. I don't know exactly like how much of that is Tesla Run versus Panasonic and they're making the.

[A]

I still thought they, they got a lot of cattle stuff.

[B]

I mean they do, they, they do. So they buy like LFP from Catl. Yeah, I, I don't know. I mean I think their, their standard range model 3 was doing that for a while and I don't know if they're still doing that or what they're like currently.

[A]

There's nothing like stopping them from like vertically integrating that component.

[B]

Yeah, I mean most of their NMC batteries are made by either Tesla or Panasonic and I don't know, that would.

[C]

Be for the S and the X. Right.

[B]

And the long range model 3 and performance model 3.

[A]

How cheap can they get Tesla the cells?

[B]

Yeah, I mean, I don't know exactly how cheap NMC is going to get. I think there's always going to be a cost premium, at least from how I'm looking at it relative to lfp. Just because LFP uses the, the most abundant stuff possible. And I think LFP is more than good enough for the vast majority of things that we want to do and in fact better in a lot of critical ways. Like LFP has much better durability than nmc. So that's actually way more important for a stationary energy storage system than like you know, like double digit percentile difference in your energy density. Yeah. Like whether the thing on my wall weighs, you know, £300 or £400 really doesn't matter. And even in the scale of like a battery in a car, it really is not that important.

[C]

Yeah, it's kind of funny how like six, seven years ago nobody was using lfp. There's this very established technology, like nothing new has happened really other than I guess manufacturing scale. The only people, the only batteries you could buy, like stationary batteries you could buy from LFP were from these like two pretty niche companies. Like in the US at least you could like Blue Simplify. Yeah, simplify. And like Blue Ion or whatever it was called. Yeah, it is a weird thing and it just makes me think like, it makes me wonder, is there another one of those? Like bifacial is another one. Whereas like suddenly all the panels were bifacial.

[B]

Well, I do think that there's some stuff in the pipeline like that. And like you, you remember those, those LFP batteries that people used to buy for EV conversions? Like, like the yellow ones?

[C]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. With the little terminal things. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[B]

I Think there are some nuances in development. So it's not like the general technology is still lfp, but there's differences in the electrodes and the way that the process happens. The battery's energy density has improved, material use has gone down. There's a lot of things that fed into the cost difference. Part of that is just scale that like you're doing it at larger scale. But there are a lot of real technical innovations that are just more detailed components of the system than just the broader technology. And we're seeing similar stuff on solar. Generally it's all silicon based solar panels that have scaled. But it's like you used to have these aluminum, the BSF cells, the back surface field, they had like an aluminum layer on the back. And then you went to Perk and then you have like now Topcon is growing and the people are now looking at like heterojunction versus back contact and like.

[C]

Yeah, all always these like weird improvements. Yeah.

[A]

What about like the big leaps? Like are you like a perovskite guy?

[B]

I am not a propskite guy. I, I'm, I don't really get it either, but I'm very skeptical on the longevity and durability. Yeah, I mean I do think like in general going to multi junction cells obviously is going to make better use of the spectrum, but there's a lot of detail on that that is not so like cut and dry. For example, if you run your two cells in series, you have to match the opacity of the two cells, otherwise you're limited by the lower performing cell. So as the spectrum of sunlight changes over the course of the day or over the course of the year with the angle of the sun, you may match those cells for a perfectly clear day in the middle of the summer and then actually end up limiting your performance at other times. And so there's all of these different considerations you have to take into account when you start going into multi junction. That we use multi junction in space, but space has the same spectrum all the time, but there's no atmospheric filtering.

[A]

You have just orbiting and you're directing interact with the sun all the time.

[B]

And those are completely different. Those are generally gallium arsenide based. And you have these much, much more expensive processes where you have to grow pure crystals of these elements on thin films. And despite the fact that it doesn't take very much material, requires very expensive equipment, maybe one day we'll get better at doing that stuff, but it hasn't happened really in a very long time. And so I mean, I think silicon is already like we have solar cells that are just pure like silicon solar cells that are 27% efficient today. And like you put them in a module and they lose a little bit going from cell to module. But we are like that's pretty darn good. Like not that long ago, like when I first started looking at solar, we were like 10 or 12%. Yeah. So we've doubled the efficiency of the panels in like the last 10 to 15 years.

[C]

What about sodium ion? Is that interesting to you?

[B]

It is interesting. I don't like, I think that the people were screaming way too much about the scarcity of lithium relative to how scarce lithium actually is on the planet. And as soon as there was a price signal for people to go produce lithium, they did.

[A]

Well, what was that guy? He had a sodium ion company and he just like shut it down and return the capital to investors and posted about like what changed.

[B]

Oh really?

[A]

Basically it was like, doesn't make sense anymore. And I think one of them was like, we thought lithium would stay scarce. He like listed like what changed in the world. That now we've like changed our thesis, which I thought was pretty cool. I don't know a lot about the company, but I do think that there are. Darren, the Unigrid, they're very focused on. On just safety applications which I think does like there. Which is interesting because I think the. That one company was like, we thought it could get cheaper. But Unigrid is just like safety. Like it's just more safe.

[C]

It's like a performance thing.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, it's like for that quote, performance benefit, people will pay.

[B]

Well, there are a number of like different performance benefits. Another one is like low temperatures. They typically perform better so you potentially don't need as much heating of the batteries. So maybe if you're in a northern area, like a northern climate, you get better for your car or whatever. Yeah, it might be better for your car. Might be better for like a grid stale storage system where you just have less in terms of H vac costs. Like there might be some use cases. And I do think that there's also value in having the option in terms of supply chains. Like a lot of the equipment and a lot of the processes are just the same as lithium ion. And there are some differences like graphite versus hard carbon and differences in the processes. Not perfectly plug and play, but if you build out an industry based on if for whatever reason lithium became scarce for some period, I don't think it's ever going to become Scarce indefinitely. But if you saw some massive growth in demand for lithium and then the price of lithium goes up and then you have some, some ability to shift production over to sodium ion that could be quite valuable even if you look at. It's been a while since I looked at this calculation. But on total planetary scale if you wanted to store all of the energy in the sunlight on earth we have plenty of lithium on the planet. But there is also just. Sodium is extremely easy to get and we have tons of Sodium hydroxide is a massive input for all sorts of industries already.

[A]

What just happened? Do you guys have anything else? I feel like I just, I could just keep prompting you and you just like drop bombs consistently. Is there anything you wanted to talk about that we haven't talked about?

[B]

There's one thing that I remember on the the like micro grids and like looking at like development of solar and over most of the planet. So I do think that a lot of those areas are going to end up installing solar and storage without there being a grid there. But I think in the long term they will build grids.

[C]

Agreed.

[B]

Because there's, there's like value like there are some people who think there's always.

[A]

Going to go to networking.

[B]

Yeah. It's just, it's trade. It's like.

[A]

I think it's just going to change how we, how we build.

[B]

Absolutely.

[A]

Like both bottoms up and from where we are it's going to gradually alter how we build infrastructure.

[C]

I say the same of big utility scale dirs like big off grid industrial stuff will eventually just become the hub of some new grid. It won't be off grid forever. That's just extremely unlikely. Something will connect to it. Someone will move next door.

[A]

I just think the grid's going to be fractal. So you're going to have giant utility scale solar storage gas. You're going to have like solar storage gas in a hub that like a home in that hub will also have solar storage gas. So you have like huge solar storage gas. Then you have like a hub that has solar storage gas and then you have like a home in that hub that also has solar storage gas. And so it's just like fractally built out based on like the, the like efficiency trade offs of the capex of those assets in those areas versus like TND capacity effectively.

[B]

Yeah. And differences in load profile. People forget we built out a 765kV transmission system for coal plants. Just because you get to then build a bigger coal plant and serve a customer base that has on average, a higher load factor. So you get to run your plant at a higher capacity factor. And like, it's. I think, you know, we're going to see a higher percentage of electricity being generated locally and consumed or used locally. But then I think we're also going to see more high voltage transmission.

[A]

Yeah. Yeah.

[B]

Just because we are increasing the total amount of electricity we're using, and there's still going to be consistent differentials between geographic areas where it makes sense to trade.

[A]

There's like, super highways. And then like.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

Were you going to say anything or were you just like, I'm done.

[D]

I. My brain's, like, broken In a good way.

[A]

Do you guys have anything else?

[C]

I don't think so. We thoroughly went through our list.

[D]

Yeah, very thoroughly.

[C]

Yeah, I think we're set. This was very fun.

[A]

Jesse, you're the man. You always blow my mind.

[D]

This might be our longest pod.

[A]

Yeah, it had to be. I'm saying it, like, deservedly so.

[D]

Oh, yeah. No, like, we, like, we kind of went in expecting it was going to take this long, and it did.

[B]

It was a little slow to start.

[A]

But if you're still here, you're a real one. You'll hear more from Jesse.

[D]

Yeah.

[C]

We got to bring you back.

[A]

Where do we, where do we find you? What's your, what's your. Do your plug right now.

[B]

I mean, I don't really have anything to plug here.

[A]

Go buy a battery and sign up for a free night's plan in Texas.

[B]

I mean, you can find me on Twitter if you want to, like, check out my stuff. It's just, just Jesse Pelton, but, you know, check out the Abundance Institute. We're doing policy stuff, like, trying to get, like, clear, clear a bunch of red tape, make it easier to build. Ders, like, there's, I, I, I don't really have a lot of stuff to.

[C]

Plug, but that's pretty good right there.

[A]

Thanks, man.

[C]

Alrighty. See you guys. Listen on, listen on.

[A]

This is the truth.