The Tech Between Us Ep. 3

Raymond Yin
What are the common misperceptions about solar energy? In this exclusive podcast episode with Scott Wharton of Tandem PV we separate fact from fiction.

We mentioned earlier that there are, we'll call them misconceptions about solar energy and the technology as well as usage and whatnot. Let's talk about some of those and get your take on these. And I am seeing these through research on the internet. So number one, we should abandon solar because fossil fuels are cheaper.

Scott Wharton 
Well, it's just fundamental false. Fossil fuels are not cheaper anymore. And I think this is the challenge. I was watching a TV show with my wife. It was some so-called energy expert on CNN or something, and he made that claim and she was yelling at the TV and me, why don't you tell them that they're wrong? And I go, this stuff has been moving so fast. His information was true four years ago. It's just not true anymore.

Raymond Yin 
Really? Okay, so even that recently it was true?

Scott Wharton
That's right.

Raymond Yin 
Okay, so solar technology has moved so quickly that, I mean, we can easily do searches and whatnot and find something from say, 2015, 2018 that it's like, oh, that's fairly recent, that should be an accurate number. But really, I mean, the information is out of date that quickly.

Scott Wharton 
Fundamentally so, and I think even people thinking about it from a political point of view, from the first Trump administration to the second one, if you were deploying solar in the first Trump administration, you had to pay a green premium to roll out. It's the opposite now.

Solar is cheaper. That's why Texas is rolling out more solar. So I think this idea that we're going to go back to fossil fuels, it doesn't make any sense ,economically. And I am optimistic that people will not do it because if you look at the cost of fossil fuels, I saw a chart recently, that it has not changed in the last 100 years. It's basically been pretty flat.

If you adjust for inflation, and I already told you 99% for solar, 90% in the last 10 years, and this all shows about how we're going to take it one generation cheaper. 

Here's another myth. So a lot of the oil that the world uses actually based on transportation, and one myth is that electric cars and electric vehicles are not growing. That's completely wrong. I mean, I think in the US now we're about 20% of cars, and the line is still going up. Another interesting stat that we're not privy to, because it's out of the US in the developing countries, more than 50% of electric bikes, which is what most people ride, they don't use cars. They're electric. So they're moving with no subsidies very fast to 100% electric. The whole source of energy is cars, trucks, all these other things. They're going to be electrified, and then you won't have any demand for oil. So I think we're hitting peak oil if not this year, very soon. And then it's going to precipitously drop. People won't even drill for it because you won't be able to recoup your investment.

Raymond Yin 
Right? Yeah. It would no longer be cost effective at that point.

Scott Wharton 
Not if there's no demand.

Raymond Yin 
So, the next myth that I saw is that solar can't meet the base global energy demand.

Scott Wharton 
Well, I think it's partially true, but will not be true in the near future. So I think it is true that the sun is intermittent, but the twin engineering advances in solar and batteries are causing that to largely go away as these batteries get cheaper and they go, like I said, they go from two hours to four to now eight hours. We can handle most of our load. So I saw the other day, a stat earlier this week, there were a hundred days in California where there's part of the day where a 100% of the demand for California for energy was handled only by renewables.

Raymond Yin
Oh, okay. Interesting. 

Scott Wharton
A hundred days, already. And that's growing rapidly. And the expectation is that in 10 years, it'll be every day until eventually the fossil fuels that are providing some of that extra energy will keep reducing because of the power of batteries.

Raymond Yin 
Okay. Yeah, I mean, looking back, it was always fossil fuels providing the base load and say solar or renewables kind of chipping in. And so it sounds like before too long, I mean that whole thing will be reversed. It'll be solar and renewables furnishing most of the base load of electrical requirements. And then you'll turn on a fossil fuel plant or a gas plant or something like that when you need it.

Scott Wharton 
Yeah. Think in the next 10 years, you'll see a transition period where most of the coal plants will be shut down around the world. The United Kingdom actually shut down their last coal plant, even though they invented coal power, so they’re completely coal free. 

Raymond Yin
Oh, I didn't know that; interesting!

Scott Wharton
And their economy is fine. We are rapidly shutting down coal plants in the United States, not for environmental reasons, but we're shutting them down because they're too expensive to run and maintain, and we're really not building any new ones. So natural gas is a useful transition technology, but it is competing with batteries. I'm not advocating that we shut everything down immediately. I think that’s crazy, but I think the economics of that are taking care of it. And then, like I said, I think there are these new longer duration storage technologies that don't need to be as small and dense, like in our cars and phones, that you can put out there that are better and cheaper, that will be more geared at storage. That will probably compliment lithium batteries, things like sodium and phosphate batteries and other technologies that have longer duration. So I think that it's partially true. In 10 years, it will be completely untrue. 

One other myth I would add to that is that people will say, you know what, the sun really only shines in California, in Arizona, but if you're in England, there's no sun shining. Well, it's actually not true. You actually get 60% of the sun shining in London as you do in LA. And the reason why you know this is that green stuff is still growing. The sun's still out even though it's cloudy.

The other thing is that there's actually more solar deployed in northern Europe and Germany than there is the United States, and it's very cloudy, so it's not as good as California, but it's a myth that there is no sun there. And solar power is actually booming in Germany and Denmark and other places where they don't have as much sun as we have in California.

Raymond Yin 
So you just said that there's more solar deployed in Northern Europe than there is in the United States?

Scott Wharton 
Per capita. That's true.

Raymond Yin 
Oh, okay. Per capita, really? I would've never guessed. I mean, just because here we have so much land, and there it seems like everything is all compact.

Scott Wharton 
It's true, but their energy is more expensive, relatively speaking, so there's a better benefit to deploying solar. The other thing that's interesting, there have been some innovations on the public policy side where, I'll give you an example In Germany, you can deploy what they're calling balcony solar, where you can go out into a Home Depot or the equivalent, and you can get a balcony solar, and you just hook it up and plug it into your electrical system, and you don't need a permit. You just plug it in. And it's exploding there because it's so cheap and easy, and people just go to the store and they just hang it up on their balcony. Now, it's not as good as hanging it flat, but it's so cheap that people in Germany are going, hey, I'll just buy that, and I don't have to pay as much money to the electric producer. So that's an example of where it's not just a technology innovation, it's a public policy innovation. Whereas in the US, we have permitting, and every district and locality has different rules, whereas Germany, they just said, nope, we're going to make it standardized across the entire country. And it's one of the reasons why their solar is actually booming, where people just put it out on their apartment balcony in this case.

Raymond Yin 
Oh, interesting. Now, I mean, how much energy can you actually get from something? Is it significant enough that it makes a difference from a day-to-day standpoint?

Scott Wharton 
You can't power your whole house, but it makes a dent.

Raymond Yin 
Really? Okay, interesting. Once again, would've not guessed that just a single small solar panel would make any kind of difference that would be worth going out and getting it.

Scott Wharton 
I'd say in Europe, they use less electricity per capita than we do, and then you can put up more than one of them. You can put up a handful of them.

Raymond Yin 
Got it. Okay. And that actually brings us to our next myth. Once again, this is out there. It costs more to produce solar panels and installations than they will ever generate over a lifetime.

Scott Wharton 
Well, it's just patently false. It's patently false that there have been a number of studies from very socialist organizations like Goldman Sachs and McKinsey that show that solar is clearly cheaper, and they're getting cheaper and cheaper to install. Our stuff is going to allow you to save more on labor and land. So one fact that I didn't think to mention, is that today the cost of the panel has gotten so low that for utility scale panels, 80% of the cost is actually not the panel. It's labor, land, installation, the balance of systems. So one of the reasons why our customers are so excited about what we're doing is that we're saving money on that 80%. And I think the listeners know that labor and land only go in one direction, they go up and the technology is going down. So this is going to become more and more a bigger part of the cost of a solar deployment overall, over time. So part of our value prop is that we can even charge a premium and then still be cheaper, overall. I mean, the other thing is, when you're doing coal and gas and all these things, you're paying for energy in perpetuity, and that will likely go up, whereas the sun is and wind, once you've install the stuff, it's free. So, yes, you have some stuff more upfront, but we're pretty good in this country of knowing how to do project finance and amortizing it. And with that, solar is cheaper.

Raymond Yin 
Okay. Yep. Yeah, like I said, to me, I read that and I thought, well, I can see, maybe once again years ago where that may be back when my dad was looking at investing in solar in ‘70s and ‘80s, but a lot of the cost has been driven out of it.

Scott Wharton 
Yeah. I mean, like I said, even in the last Trump administration, that statement was true.

Raymond Yin 
Okay.

Scott Wharton 
It's not true anymore.

Raymond Yin 
Got it. Okay. So solar technology has advanced so much in the last 10 years that these misconceptions are no longer true.

Scott Wharton 
It's almost like somebody saying that AI stuff, it's just not that good. I can't write a paper or do some of those tasks. It's like, that was true a year ago.

Raymond Yin 
Yep.

Scott Wharton 
This stuff's moving.

Raymond Yin
Yep, exactly. And our final myth here, solar technology uses toxic chemicals that will poison the environment.

Scott Wharton 
It's one of these things that people say, that has a small grain of truth, but it's fundamentally wrong. I'll give you an example. So in our solar panels, we use lead. Traditional solar panels, also use lead.
First of all, I don't think anybody says that burning gas and oil is good for you from a health point of view, right? So there's that. But we use tiny metal lead now. We both encapsulate these things to last for 30, 40, 50 years.

So there's no leakage of that. And I would say for our panels, we use so little lead that if you took a standard lead acid battery from a traditional gas car and you did the equivalent amount of lead in our panels, you would filled up five football fields worth of solar panels. So it's really, really, really small. And we have some patents on recycling these things and making sure that they don't leach. So it's kind of one of these things that I think the fossil fuel industry throws out there that has a sand’s grain of truth, but it's not, when you compare them apples to apples, obviously fossil fuels and other things that we're putting in the environment are way worse for you. So yes, you use a little bit of lead, but it's super, super, it's minuscule.

Raymond Yin 
Scott, well really appreciate your expertise on busting our myths and giving some insight into new solar technology. Really appreciate it.

Scott Wharton 
Yeah, really appreciate the discussion. Thanks for having me. And thanks for all the listeners. Hope you enjoyed our discussion.

Raymond Yin 
Thank you for listening to our subscriber exclusive episode. We hope you'll explore more of Mouser's Empowering Innovation Together content. Stay tuned as Mouser explores more technologies throughout the year by visiting mouser.com/empowering-innovation.