This is A Climate Change. This is Matt Matern, your host and guide. Garrett Nilsen, Deputy Director of the US Department of Energy, Solar Energy Technologies Office. Garrett, pleasure to have you on the program.

As you're being here, Matt, really excited to discuss all the work going on here at the DOD and in the solar industry at large.

Well, tell us a little bit about your background and what, what brought you to this position at the Department of Energy?

Yeah, sure. So well, I'll give you a quick background about how it started the solar energy to begin with, it's kind of interesting. So from when I was young as a Cub Scout, my dad used to work for an optics company. And he came home one day with a big lens that we use to basically cook a hole cook a hot dog in the driveway, which include burning a hole through the heart.

This is the coolest thing in the world, the power of the sun. And fast forward, like, you know, not in probably seven or eight years, I grew up in Connecticut outside Hartford, and I drive down in New Jersey for baseball camp every summer. I'm driving us to huge warehouses outside of New York, New York, what are they doing the roof up there? Like, shouldn't we be using that for like growing food or energy or something like that. And then finally, fast forward a few years after that's right after I finished my undergrad, I'm sitting in the dentist's office, and I pick up a National Geographic magazine that talks about the world after oil.

And it says, you know, if we cover some certain percentage of America's urban and suburban rooftops, and solar energy, we can power America. And so it was at that moment in time, all of these kinds of stars align.

And that's what made me want to get into solar energy took me a few more years, but I ended up at the DOD, which I think is a excellent place to be just because of the perspective that we get to have, you know, the 100,000 foot view, as most traditional sense to touch on and work on basically every facet of solar energy that you could think of here in the United States to accelerate deployment. So that's, that's the very fast about how I kind of ended up here and what brought me into Seoul.

Well, fascinating story, I think all of us can relate to as young kids playing with magnifying glasses and seeing, you know, what, what can happen when you concentrate the rays of the sun? It's a powerful tool. So we've seen a tremendous trajectory in the development of solar over the last 50 years.

And and you're, you know, the Department of Energy has pretty ambitious goals as to what percentage of power the US will derive from solar going out till 2050. We have to develop a tremendous amount of power. Are we on track? How much have we sped up that process, say in the last two years?

So it's we are there's still work that needs to be done. We're seeing tremendous growth still year over year in terms of solar energy with well over 100 gigawatts deployed today. But if we look out, our office released something called the solar futures study last fall, where we looked into how much solar energy are we gonna need on the grid to decarbonize the electricity standard covers 95% of electricity sector, figuring out that last 5% is very tricky from the modeling has been cost standpoint.

But if we look at it from 95% decarbonisation of the spectrum, we need roughly one terawatt of solar energy deployed on the grid today, which is about 10x. What we have out there right now, to do this, we need to be averaging a deployment in the neighborhood of about 35 gigawatts a year between now and 2025. And averaging between about 60 gigawatts a year between 2025 and 2013.

And sustaining that deployment. And right now we deploy in the neighborhood of about 20, maybe a little bit more gigawatts per year. So this is much, much more than we used to have permits on a year on year basis. But there's still some work to be done to be able to deploy at the speed and volume that we need to reach our goals.

And so there's a number of factors that go into how we can we can certainly drive that deployment and also department manager are very focused, especially for this administration to driving down those costs, reducing those barriers, and making sure that we can accelerate that deployment curve to meet those ambitions, decarbonisation goals for both electricity sector and 2035. And beyond that, looking at the entire economy by 2050.

Now currently, we're relying a lot on Chinese made solar panels. Correct. And what are we doing to reduce that reliance?

Yeah, correct. A vast majority of the modules in the US these days come from Asia in general, a number of cases it's, you know, Chinese companies that have facilities in Southeast Asia. And so over the years, there have been, you know, policy decisions to put tariffs on different devices. I'll just be very clear that my office we don't we don't make policy decisions we don't work on tariffs are very much technology oriented.

The way we've been thinking about it is one How can we drive down the cost of manufacturing in general such that we might be able to manufacture here be and be cost competitive on a global scale? We also try I looked at the future to new technologies where we might be able to say, leapfrog the current incumbent of silicon, and find something that might be more amenable to domestic manufacture. The biggest item coming out recently is the inflation Reduction Act.

And so I, again, I'm not a policy person, I'm a career technology guy. But there's a raft of incentives in there, which should drive domestic manufacturing, to the point where we feel that the USA maybe eventually be able to be self sufficient in terms of its manufacturing capacity to reach those very ambitious goals.

And so it's a combination of driving technology forward, driving down manufacturing costs, in general, working with manufacturers to help them understand and opportunities in the United States where they can cite manufacturing facilities and so forth.

And then now we have a kind of a policy construct wrapped around it, which should really accelerated when we're seeing a lot of announcements from very major manufacturers about potential plans to build out here in the United

States. Well, that's, that's exciting, and, and a good development, because obviously, it doesn't make sense to have our energy future in the hands of other countries. When we can make these panels here in the US. We certainly had the technology, I think we were the forerunners in this technology at one point in time, correct?

Yeah, absolutely. You know, I mean, the first solar cells were really reduced in practice at Bell Labs in the 50s. And if you look out to like the 70s 80s, and 90s, USA was a dominant manufacturer of solar modules, wrongly in that case for space or remote applications.

But then eventually, over time, particularly in China, they they put policies and kind of broader plans in place to really ramp up the capacity that they have there. And that subsequently just based on economics shifted the shifted the market, mainly back from refraction, say towards towards Asia. Well,

I saw that you had been in the process of helping develop this cadmium telluride process for solar panels. Tell us a little bit about that. And, and why the Department of Energy is excited about that technology.

Yeah, so cadmium telluride is has been around for a while. And the Department of Energy is one of the early investors in kind of that basic science and technology, we continue to invest in it today. So we in the United States are the largest employer of cadmium telluride modules around the world, we got about 16% of our solar electricity from Canada and Saudi Arabia are home to the largest cadmium telluride manufacturer and for solar.

And so this is a space where it's, you know, it's an alternative to traditional Silicon has some advantages in terms of the processes that are used to deposit the material in terms of some performance factors compared to silicon in terms of cost, you know, it's competitive here in the United States with important silicon.

And so this is something where we want to continue to push that technology forward, continue to drive ahead in a space where we have the leading industrial entity in the world in this technology space.

And so we're continuing to look at how do we drive up efficiency? How do we drive down costs, and increasingly looked into how can you maybe combine Kevin's or right with, with other technologies, and what we call tandem devices, to see what what the next generation of modules can be in that space.

So we're always very excited to be investing in that area and helping, you know, domestic company has really continued to maintain a competitive and technological advantage.

I guess the question then is, how does the Department of Energy, decide whether or not to invest? And they, you know, there's a concern that the government is then picking winners? And is the government well positioned to pick winners? That type of question arises?

Well, I should say that, you know, that vast, not all, almost all our research, the goal was to have that make it into the public domain. And so while we redo a lot of research on Capitol Hill, and there is no large catatonia here, there are some other smart casual companies in the United States that are also able to leverage that research, our role at the Department of Energy is really to continue to push science forward and engineering forward in a way that is ultimately best pre competitive.

And so we wanted to make sure that we're getting things out into the public domain, and that we're also kind of helping those technologies be transferred and utilized in a in the private sector writ large. So yeah, we want to make sure that we're investing in pushing science and engineering knowledge forward. And then ultimately, the private sector can make decisions based on economics and other factors about how they want to utilize that in the broader market space.

Well, it's certainly important. I think the government has a role in that even though I was you know, playing devil's advocate a bit. I mean, you look at we would be essentially unilaterally disarming if our government isn't involved in that space, because the, you know, the Chinese government, for sure, and the European governments, for sure are involved in supporting technology companies in their respective regions. So It would kind of be silly for us to, you know, cede all territory and let them kind of beat us on the technology front.

Right. And I agree completely. And we do certainly the DOD does support, you know, startup businesses does support tech transfer to larger businesses. I think. Now we're just as an as an agency, very cognizant of trying to find our sweet spot where we get the most bang for our buck. And then Tom technologies over to corporate or private sector entities that can then get the most bang for their buck for the next section with appointments.

Yeah, we want to make sure we understand exactly what is going on in the private sector, what we can bring to them in terms of new technologies, how we can leverage our brilliant national labs or brilliant professors at universities, and just the incredible industrial base that we have right research base that we have to drive those technologies forth, and then subsequently connect them to the private sector so they can be utilized for for national game. And so I think that's a that's a very important role that we play in one that we take very seriously.

Well, you're listening to A Climate Change. This is Matt Matern and our guest today, Garrett Nilsen, Deputy Director of the US Department of Energy's Solar Energy Technologies Office. We're talking with Garrett about solar and, and what the future of solar looks like, as well as what the President looks like. We'll be back in just one minute. Stay tuned.

You're listening to A Climate Change. This is Matt Matern. I've got Garrett Nilsen on the program today, Deputy Director of US Department of Energy's Solar Energy Technologies Office and Garrett, we were talking about some new technologies that the Department of Energy is helping deploy or investing in, I guess, one question I have is, are those investments that the department is making in terms of loans or those grants, or both?

Ah, so from our office, specifically, we fund everything through grants, or another vehicle we call a cooperative agreement, which is a style of grant. Our office doesn't do loans, that trend away comes from the loan programs office, they're looking to do with very large investments and say manufacturing facilities, first of its kind, large scale generation, the storage systems and things of that nature, but our office is focused on delivering grants and financial assistance through those mechanisms.

Okay, I saw that one of the things that you're working with is I made mispronounces pero, scuba eights, which are a cheap alternative to silica. And maybe you could tell us a little bit about that, and why the Department is excited about that one.

Sure. So it's a perovskites. And so for obviously, it's basically a structure of materials that you can then swap in and out different on different elements. And what's really interesting about perovskites is that we've we've seen just a rapid increase in terms of the efficiency that researchers are able to make with devices, going from single digits efficiencies up to 20.

Plus, as you can see, over the course of a few years, which was really eye opening, one of the challenges today has been of course, making them durable enough to last the 20,30, 40, 50 years, we need to reach the kind of cost goals that we feel are needed to have rapid deployment.

So what's really interesting about perovskites is that is also able to be deposited, I should say, in in very simple processes, a silicon solar module takes you there's a mining element of the original quartz, you can process that over to very pure poly silicon, cut that into wafers, processed it into a cell, put it into modules, there's a lot of steps in there that can be time and energy intensive.

Process gates with the right mix of materials, you might be able to deposit this using rule to rule coding. And the US has many roles, role coders and expertise and roles rural voters around the United States or other more simple deposition processes, which then cut down on the number of steps might allow for the ability to increase some of the the automation which can also drive down costs.

And it leverages technologies where might already have assets in the US or the bare minimum, we have a lot of expertise around the manufacturing techniques that go with it. So we're very interested in this space. It's something that we're investing a fair amount in every year, both in terms of driving the research forward, and universities and national labs to understand how they work, how they degrade how we can make them more durable.

And also starting to fund some of the work with some of the earlier startup companies we're looking at how do we translate this out to learn scale and others a lot of hype around these things, and we believe that it's certainly exciting, but there's still a lot of work to go before we can be printing, you know, many square miles of this to be deploying the terawatts of solar energy that we'll need. So we're excited about the prospects of what prospects could be but but there's work to be done and we're excited to be helping you.

But it is an exciting area and I guess one of the things I'd ask you to kind Explain to us is the efficiencies that you're talking about? And that what does that mean in, in kind of, like day to day language? And and kind of, you know, to us as consumers of this?

Yeah, sure. So, you know, when we talk about efficiency, we're talking about the number of photons essentially, that hit us or a cell that can then subsequently be converted into electricity. And so the solar modules that are put out in the world today, whether they're silicon solar cells, perovskites, cantar, what have you, these are all considered what we call single junction solar cells.

So there's one positive and one negative and the light hits, it knocks and electrons lose an event able to go out and do some sort of work, you kind of theoretical maximum for a single junction solar cell was a little bit over 30%. It's called the Shockley Quasar limit.

But in the practical end of the spectrum, it's it's closer to, you know, in the low 20s to mid 20s percent in terms of efficiency. And we see module makers and solid makers trying to push up against that efficiency limit, which is really exciting. And more we see those sellers go up the west area, we need to make the same amount of energy, which then reduces rooftop usage, reduces land consumption, and so forth.

So we're looking to try to see how can we maximize reaching those kinds of efficiency limits? But then looking at how do we push beyond that? How can we take two single junction devices and put them on top of one another to make what we call a tandem device. This is something that is still in its infancy, that we're very proud to be funding and national labs, universities and working with some businesses were thinking about this as well.

So we can continue to drive up the efficiency of modules, which then drive down costs on everything else. So you can imagine if you have a much more if you have a more efficient solar module, not only do you need less area, but you need less steel for the racking and tracking or to put in the field and so forth, there's a lot of system level efficiencies that derive from it, which is why that's an area that that the research community focuses on a lot.

But I should say that efficiency is great. But also we all we also need things to be durable and to be lasting 20 or 30 years to make the economic world longer to make the economics work as optimally as possible. Right.

So just pivoting a little bit, can you tell us a little bit about what the department is doing regarding Grid technologies, and and now that we're making so much more solar power, we certainly hear about that there are challenges in storing it for those rainy days.

And those times when the winds not blowing or the sun's not shining? And, you know, I've I've talked to some guests about storing it in hydrogen, and what is the department doing? Kind of related to storing energy, whether it's hydrogen or battery technology? What, what are your thoughts?

Yeah, so the DoD is obviously taking the storage challenge very seriously. And looking at a wide diversity of different storage technologies. Now we're here predominantly about kind of working on Ion Batteries today, this is what we're seeing deployed for, you know, two for a hour kind of durations and storage.

And, you know, things like hydrogen will be very important. If we want to be able to transfer energy, let's say, as a student, a storage medium, like hydrogen, or storage from for some other time, maybe beyond that, from that, you know, storage window. Our office is also a big investor in concentrating solar thermal power.

And what's beautiful about concentrating solar thermal power is that you can store thermal heat pretty efficiently. And so we're looking at long duration energy storage through the use of say molten salt in large vats that can then be used in concert with a concentrating solar thermal power system, or as a standalone asset connected to the grid to be able to provide some of that longer duration storage.

And you know, for folks who are really interested in long duration storage, I encourage people to look into our long duration storage Earth shot. Here, the Department of Energy, this administration is launching a number of Earths to drive down the costs and different aspects of absorb technologies, hydrogen and other technologies to to drive the decarbonisation of the US.

And so storage is is absolutely something that we look at, we try to look very closely at the interaction between solar energy assets and storage, and how can we control both most optimally, to use them most efficiently, and then turn to the grid writ large, there's a lot more technology that I could go into to that gets me really excited about that will work in concert with solar and storage to make the solar driven grid of the future.

Where are we in, in relationship to storage and doing it efficiently? And, you know, as you're talking about the molten salt storage, is that really be being done commercially? And where can we expect it to be in 234 or five years? Is it going to is there going to be enough of it to deal with the massive amount of new solar and wind that's coming online?

Yeah, so you know, in the near term, given the amounts of solar that we're probably going to see deployed and Different localized penetration levels, which should be pretty good, we're kind of looking at my on in the relative near term to shift, store direct to shift energy around. For thermal storage, like molten salts, that is something that we see deployed in concert with concentrating solar power systems around the globe.

And since a lot of great lessons being learned there, we're still learning lessons from some of the early thermal energy storage deployments here in the United States. But there's still more research to be done and more kind of demonstration to be done to drive that customer acceptance. And so we're hoping to drive some of that demonstration work for over the next few years, with a goal that this can be adopted among other storage solutions.

And maybe in the latter half of the decade to or maybe a little bit after that into the 2030s. To really fill that longer duration gaps, we can think about storing energy for weeks, days, months, whatever it is, that becomes a little bit more economical than say, using lithium ion batteries. I think the good thing is though, is that regardless of the storage medium, the more we make, the more we learn, the more costs come down.

And so right now, the grid storage space is absolutely benefiting from the scale that we're seeing in cars, car base, lithium ion batteries, cost drivers that are pushing that down. Then as we see other countries and other parts of the world try out different technologies.

As we try out different technologies, we expect to see a cost per one all those come down as well, to the point where they're economically feasible as well, looking at the grid as far as, or I should say map of the US in terms of price, per kilowatt, and for for electricity and seeing where it's at right now, around 10,12, 15 cents in many places.

Are we going to see that continue to go down as we implement more solar and wind? Or are we going to see the cost of energy, electricity go up as we deploy more of it.

So way we are looking at it in our in our solar future study, we dedicated a section of the report this where we did some modeling, and we said alright, with some modest improvements in technologies, and continue to kind of movements around the current trajectory of cost curves, we believe that we will be able to reach a broader decarbonize or decarbonized economy with potentially even saving money for the consumer.

And that doesn't even count the broader benefits of say, removing, you know, polluting assets from from our air and associated health benefits and so forth. So there's there's work that's needed, but we believe that it is possible to be delivering those things.

Well, you're listening to A Climate Change. This is Matt Matern, your host. And I've got Garrett Nilsen, Deputy Director of the US Department of Energy, Solar Energy Technologies Office, we're talking about solar, and we'll be back in just one minute.

You're listening to A Climate Change ma, this is Matt Matern your host, and I've got Garrett Nilsen, Deputy Director of the US Department of Energy's Solar Energy Technologies Office. And Garrett, we were just talking about the cost of electricity.

And it was noticing that California is a bit of an outlier at 25 cents, I think, a kilowatt hour and, and wondering, you know, we've got a lot of listeners here in California kind of wondering why why are why is our cost higher than other markets? And is there something that we're missing here?

Yeah, I mean, I, you know, California is obviously on the forefront of, or has always been on the forefront in terms of moving away from fossil assets, adopting new technologies, and now these days adopting new ways of charging for technologies such as time use rates. And so there's, there's a whole mountain of different things that go into determining someone's electric electricity rate, particularly as it kind of varies throughout the day.

And so, you know, I'm not going to pretend that I'm an expert at defining market costs and the drivers of markets in general, but we feel that as we continue to put more solar assets out there, as we continue to figure out how to balance all of these assets on the grid, that we will see reductions in cost for the consumer.

But again, these are these are very complex processes setting a utility rate it's not as simple as say setting maybe a water rate or something like that. But again, we feel like we're just continuing to drive down costs around technologies writ large that ultimately they will be adopted by market forces and that should subsequently drive down cost to the consumer.

So well, it's hard for me to let pass that comment of it's easier than water rates out here in California there's a pretty complex battle over who gets the water and how much it could should cost everybody so I thought that through force Aryan, but maybe it's more simple than something else. So that's a fair point.

I didn't need to touch a sensitive topic but yeah, it's it's a pretty hot topic right now.

And you know, I think crossed the the entire American Southwest and probably other places too in the States. So water rates and what we should charge is a big, big question. Yeah, I mean, it's it's a great thing that California has achieved, I think in April 100% of its electricity for a moment in time was all renewable, which was a pretty fantastic leap.

And I think, you know, we're seeing other states ramp up their usage rates of renewables. And, you know, I think that's a tremendous thing, or the question is, how can we encourage it to go further? And we were talking a little bit offline about new markets for solar, maybe you could tell us a little bit more about what, what the Department of Energy is looking at in that area?

Yeah. So as as we, you know, our core mission is driving down the electricity that go into consumers are continuing to look at new markets, both in terms of have we generate electricity closer to its point of consumption? Or how can we get dual benefits of solar energy? So the one that people try to talk about building integrated photovoltaics?

And how can we actually integrated photovoltaics into the building envelope, so they're serving both the purpose of the building envelope and generating electricity at the point of consumption, which can then cut down on any transmission costs and all those other things that come with moving electricity. Another one we're interested in particularly given vehicle I haven't of electric vehicles is beautiful integrated photovoltaics.

Now, it doesn't require a lot of electricity to power a battery, but you can just get marginal amounts or a little bit amounts from something that might be integrated into a car, that's certainly something that we're very interested in. People get to us most excited these days is an area of the intersection of agriculture and global tax, something we're being called agri Voltex. In the industry, what's really interesting about this is one, you know, there's a number of people out there and prime farmland country that are concerned that solar is coming in, and taking farmland to the US for solar at the detriment of, say, agricultural uses.

And so we're investing a lot in research to understand, alright, if we can put the module set up a little bit higher, like what happens to the crops that we could potentially grow underneath these modules, and we're seeing some really fascinating results, both in terms of potentially increasing growing seasons and like the hot southwest, growing different kinds of maybe higher margin crops underneath modules and set underneath modules in different areas.

And we're also seeing just maybe an increase in production. And one really exciting part in related to water is a reduction in water use. One thing that's really interesting is that, you know, you put modules over something, and we're investigating what the spacing has to be, and so forth. When you grow crops underneath it. Well, one, you have a little bit more shade over the crop.

So you're gonna keep a little bit more of the groundwater in the ground, which allows you to use the water, you have a little bit more efficiency, it's also really interesting is that, you know, plants sweat, and so they perspire some water that will go up and hit the back of a module, which will cool the module in the pour your module is, the more efficient it is, and it's operating.

So you ended up in this really interesting kind of like symbiotic relationship. And so we're really trying to quantify and study rigorously, the kind of confluence of agriculture and formal texts, whether this is crop growth underneath plants, pollinator species being grown on these plants, so then help the productivity of surrounding farmland, we're even looking at like, how could these be done if you're harvesting livestock of different types.

And so there's a lot of really interesting work to be done there. There is a program called Inspire through the National Renewable Energy Lab, which was looking into this for a few years and really driving a lot of test sites in this area.

And we feel that as we can find kind of like symbiotic relationships between solar energy and agriculture, we can end up in a situation where there's less concern, I'd say about arguments around how to and should be used. And maybe it can actually be a win win for solar and agriculture instead of just one winning or the other, which is how a lot of people tend to view it today.

Well, that is fascinating. And certainly the symbiotic nature of one helping the other is something I hadn't heard about and you know, be great if if both areas are getting wins from it, because we do have a major water problem, certainly in the American Southwest and we need to get it get some some solutions to it pretty quick.

Yeah, that's totally fair. And the more we can do to just think about the economic use of whether it's an input like water, whether it's land or anything else, the better off we'll be as a company.

You know, I do have a question in terms of you know, as we continue to get more efficient solar panels that are going to deliver more energy as a consumer should they wait or you know, till you get the most efficient and tenure It's time or should you buy them now?

And no, hey, I'm not gonna get the most efficient, but I'll get the best one that exists today and it will be good enough to put on my house.

I mean, I'm, I'm always on the side of $1 to need save today is worth more to me than $1 I might save in the future. So I know I personally when I when I went solar on my roof, I put it on basically, as soon as as soon as I bought my home, because I saw that I could save money in the immediate term. And, you know, I think the important thing for people to look at is what savings can they have today?

How will that impact their household and then you know, also look at the payback periods. So but only takes a few years, the payback period is a little bit different everywhere in the United States only takes a few years to pay your system back, then you could potentially move on to a higher efficiency technology, you know, maybe before the system on your roof stops working.

And so it's a, it's a constantly evolving kind of landscape, if people have to will forget what they want to save what they want out of their solar system. If you're more and more people today, we're very concerned about just being self sufficient, and not wanting to rely on the grid as much.

So if that's a driver that changes the economics soon, you might say, well, I'll take the products all as they work today, the solar power, the storage, and so forth, so that I can have that peace of mind. And I have the energy right there.

So, you know, it's a little bit of a personal question for everyone. But I'm on the side that if I like to save $1 today, and you know, October of 2022, that's better than me potentially saving $1.05 and October of 2025, or whatever, whatever that time might be. So that's just my personal opinion.

Well, I think that some of us also are looking and saying, hey, what can we do to help the environment? And absolutely, there may be some degree of costs associated with it. But it's, it's a cost worth bearing, given kind of our duty to the planet to be something of a good shepherd to, to the environment that we live in? What about the non hardware costs of solar? What are what are those and what should be kind of taken into account when considering solar?

Yeah, so it's not a hardware cost, what we call refer to as soft costs are non trivial, this is the cost of anything you can drop on your foot or holding your hand. And, you know, in the US today, and it's been this way for a while for residential source system, depending where you are in the ballpark of about 60% of the cost comes from soft costs.

And so this can be the costs related to permitting your system related to any siting and zoning issues relating to the finance costs, labor costs, customer acquisition costs. And so there's just a lot of different pieces that go into things that are not physically going on your roof. And so our office is aggressively going after trying to work with all these, we have a platform called the solar app plus, which is something that we're rolling out to local jurisdictions across the country.

So they can use to bring uniformity to permanent processes are making it easier for companies to pernix permanent is done, you know, at the local area. So they it's permanent zone, and I do things slightly different each jurisdiction. So I'm going to bring uniformity that made it easier for people to do business by throwing out the same kind of information in different areas. So that's a big one, we're trying to drive down those costs.

And we're trying to share data about about TV systems, their durability, their payback, to make financiers and other entities more comfortable this return dragged down financing costs. Now we're working to share more information with homeowners, so they understand solar, and that they can engage more productively with with installers, so there might be less loss leads and drag down a customer acquisition.

And that's how this we're working with groups like utilities to drive down the interconnection cost of the system. So how do we reach a cost that comes with connecting somebody to the grid, because the utility has to study its connection, particularly for large scale systems. So we're working with every possible player in that space to drive down those timelines and bring new technologies to those spaces.

And so while we do a lot, and we're known for on the hardware research end of the spectrum, we are investing heavily and both of our time and effort to to drag down the self causes as well. And we were hoping to see some great process and we've already seen some great progress today.

Well, that's great. I recently had Mayor Rex Parris from Lancaster is one of the first netzero cities in the US. And his one of his first acts as mayor back in like 2008 was to eliminate essentially the permitting process for solar. So if you came in there with a request to do solar, within 30 minutes, they had to approve your permit.

That's awesome. I love that and like what just real quick, you know, we're seeing like the solar app plus let me resize you can cut down by over two weeks on average. We're seeing single day permanent now. And it's awesome to hear about a group like Lancaster really pushing the ball forward on that. And now that's an example the rest of the country can follow and hopefully for me, you know, nationwide, right?

Well, you're listening to A Climate Change, this Matt Matern, and I've got Garrett Nilsen, Deputy Director of the US Department of Energy's Solar Energy Technologies Office. And we'll be back in just one minute.

You’re listening to A Climate Change this is Matt Matern, your host and I've got here, Garrett Nilsen, Deputy Director of US Department of Energy, Solar Energy Technologies Office. And Garrett, I wanted to ask you a little bit about some of the new technology that you had talked about earlier, as far as incorporating the solar panels into buildings, maybe commercial buildings, I'm wondering if residential buildings, so it just kind of part of the design were just kind of pieces in is part of the building versus a, an add on to it.

And another thing that you talked about was regarding cars, I saw recently, there's a new car manufacturer that has fold the cell, the solar cells on the car, and it and it powers the battery, and you can literally charge it without ever plugging it into the grid, which is pretty phenomenal.

Yeah, maybe I'll maybe I'll start with that. And that's, that's definitely exciting, we're seeing a number of major car makers really start to think about how to do that. Um, you know, of course, the energy density of a source, oftentimes the amount of energy that it creates, it takes a while to fully charge a car.

Or if you really think about it, like at the if you're only adding, let's say, a few miles here and there, I forget the exact number of miles and I start doing Dave, let's say you add a few 10s of miles to that person's really only driving about 30 miles every day anyway. And so you could see a situation where you're really able to, to do maybe all of your local driving based off them directly son, song coming directly onto your car, which is, which is really exciting.

And so certainly work that needs to be done to understand how can we integrate all these cells, you know, how do you operate?

How do you fix cells, if something goes wrong, and things of that nature are at the Infancy what's really exciting what this might be able to do in the long run in the vehicle space, we're even seeing people say, put modules are sells on the tops of tractor trailers, where if you have a refrigeration unit or something back there, you may be able to run a portion of that off of electricity that you're just gathering as you drive, which can then subsequently cut down on the amount of gas or other fuels that you use and cut down your carbon footprint.

So some really exciting stuff going on in that space. On the building side of things and the residential Island, you know, California is moving towards a mandate that every home must be solar ready, which is really exciting so that solar can be deployed quickly if someone wants it or even at the time of installation.

Now, of course, there are products out there like a Tesla solar shingles. CertainTeed is another company that has kind of a shingles product. So you're seeing those become a bit more prevalent, they're still a bit more expensive than the traditional modules themselves. But as again, these are things we're markets evolves, we hope to see the cost come down further. And for people who are, you know, maybe a little bit more aesthetically conscious, like this can be a good place for them to go. So that's really exciting.

And what's also neat is we're seeing Sorgen integrated in different kinds of goals, we run something called the American made solar prize, which is a prize program for new startup businesses trying to come up with clever ways to help the deployments or one of our original Prize recipients called phase three solar out of Oregon is working with the manufactured home community such that they can integrate solar at in basically the factory when they're manufacturing at home.

And then when it goes out into the field, boom, there the solar is and it's ready to go. And so I think what's great is as we see the cost of solar come down, we're seeing more and more creative business models come along, figure out how we can integrate solar to different parts of our lives and and hopefully a vast majority inside of our building so we can consume as much as we can close to where we need it.

Well, yeah, you're talking about like just inside or I thought you were alluding to like in commercial buildings, there's a tremendous amount of light that that hitting the surface of a building. Is there is there a way are they working on ways to convert that energy into or that light into energy?

Obviously referring inside of a building that's a little less economical at this point and it's not really a space that we really invest heavily in or yeah that much at all. Yeah, we're really focused on say those those rooftops and it's part of the reason why I got into solar to begin with is again you see these massive rooftops and we could be deploying solar energy on top of and in that case, you know, we're looking at different ways of systems to reduce the amount of weight that's up there to open up more roof space to being utilized because some places have weight limitations.

How do we make sure that we can you know, I guess deploy things as fast as possible so reduce roof penetrations and things of that nature to get solar up in those large areas as possible this i whenever I fly into a city, I'm always looking out the window looking for all those big multi acre buildings and always makes me a little upset.

There's not enough solar or any solar on a lot of them and so that's, that's a big driver of For me to keep working on this space and getting out every day will tell us said did the inflation Reduction Act give any incentives for commercial building owners to put solar up on those buildings?

I forgot if it's specifically offhand for commercial buildings themselves, I'd have to double check that I don't know all the lines are there, but we're continuing, they're continuing investment tax credits, which can help buy down the cost. There's also production tax credits are now available for solar energy as well. So it gives people some different ways in terms of thinking about financing and realizing other economic gains from your system.

And so now I know that there are a lot of large companies out there two data points or, and I have to believe that with these other incentives in place, we're going to see more and more moving into that space as people try to hit both their their green goals, but also, you know, increase profitability or drive down costs.

In other words, when you talk about production tax credits, are you really talking about tax credits that benefit the manufacturers primarily?

Well, it's funny, you should say that, because there's there's two kinds of production tax credits. So there actually is a part of the inflation reduction act that is focused on the production of solar cells and solar modules. And that's what we really think is going to be a driver towards driving domestic manufacturing.

But then on the other side, for system deployment, there is an investment tax credit, where if you invest X number of dollars, you're credited y percentage of that against your tax. But there's also productions, if you have a system that is producing X amount of megawatt hours, then you could potentially get a tax credit for that you have to pick one or the other when you're a system developer.

So the production tax credit has been around a while for the wind space, and now they're opening it up for the solar energy space. And so just give us flexibility for people who are investing in systems and owning systems in terms of different ways that they can potentially realize benefits economic benefits from their systems themselves.

Now, you mentioned wind now finally, in into the program, I don't know if you solar guys are kind of in competition with the wind folks. Or, you know, Where Where did you know I read recently, that wind is the cheapest form of electricity. So we're catching up? How far are you guys away from each other?

Yeah, I'd say it's friendly competition. I always prefer sunny days to windy days. So maybe I'm a little bit bias. But yeah, so I mean, we're, I think we're neck and neck in terms of the largest or lowest ball scare electricity costs, but we know we're going to need them working together. And the nice thing is, is that there is some symbiotic relationship where the wind tends to blow harder at night than it does during the day, which obviously complements solar energy really well.

And when we think about decarbonizing the electricity sector, the research that we've done our solar future study, we get to decarbonize electricity sector by 2035, we saw electricity, about 40% of electricity come from solar, roughly 40% of electricity coming from wind, and then the final percentage from a mixture of other assets.

And so we think that Well, of course, we want to be in a little bit of friendly competition, like there's plenty of room at the table for both of us, you help kind of reach this low carbon future, and, and we're rooting for each other, that's for sure.

Well, that's good to hear. So is there a wind office at the Department of Energy? And, you know, do you guys work together? How does that go?

Yeah, there is a Wind Energy Technologies Office, and we work very closely with them, I think the biggest stuff we do is thinking about the integration of both of our assets to the grid. So we invest a lot, particularly at the bulk transmission level. But how does that greater operate with intermittent assets like solar and wind going on there and storage.

And you know, the arcing that's that's really an important thing is, these are what are called inverter based assets. And so the world today has been powered by basically what are called inertial assets, you have something that's spinning at 60 hertz, and that maintains the frequency of the grid. But as we move to inverter based assets, you're going to need, you know, new ways of maintaining that frequency on the grid and when stores or all inverter based assets.

So we're investing together in the future of what are called Grid forming inverters and allow these bids to help support the grid instead of just being attached to the grid and just kind of not doing much. And so just being giving electricity, but also managing extra standard good, I should say. So there's a lot of that's just one example that have emerged together.

But we're also looking at communications and sensing on the grid, bringing new tools to great operators, looking at improving communication systems, forecasting cybersecurity. There's just a wide breadth of stuff that we can work on together to make the grid as resilient and powerful as in the future. And we work very closely with the wind team on that.

And among other offices in the department, there's a lot of people who will tell us a little bit about what work is being done and maybe in particular, what the inflation reduction acted to or is doing to help foster a more resilient, stronger grid because I've certainly read a bit about the dysfunction and allottee of our electricity grid, because it isn't really nationally driven. There's a lot of different state systems and multiregional systems that don't always work so well together.

Yeah, and so in the DoD is investing in kind of everywhere from the distribution grids of large transmission grids to entire internet connections to make them work more seamlessly with one another. I think there's actually a lot of really great stuff inside of the infrastructure. So in that case, you know, large investments and thinking about how can we improve transmission technologies make them more efficient.

So we can use the transmission that we already have more efficiently and at lower costs. There is a lot of investment in what are called just kind of demonstration purposes, a whole new office of clean energy demonstrations here in the Department of Energy, whose role is going to be to invest in first Rakhine technologies, as you can see being done in subsequently being deployed in adopting the grid to make the grid more resilient space.

And so it's really one of these things where it's kind of an all of the above approach, and we're seeing some really great stuff here, the infrastructure bill, I forget the specific names of the stuff inside of the inflation Reduction Act. But then, you know, there's continuing discussions about how we can be helping with other things and permitting a bit of interconnect permitting of transmission and things of that nature. So there's really a multi pronged approach I happen from the policies that we're seeing around DC and the department energy here is here to help support the implementation of these, of these of these policy developments, which is our key role.

I think, I think at the end of the day, people want to know one thing about the solar energy or the environment energy is, there's a lot of different futures and a lot of different ways that we're building the future.

We're here to help make sure that we're doing the research such that gerontology is there to be able to have a resilient, secure and operable grid, no matter what the policy future is, no matter how the grid evolves, we want to make sure that we're not being surprised by any new technology, we're here ready to implement it for the betterment of the American people in the American economy.

Well, great work, Garrett, really appreciate you being on the show and the great work you're doing in the Department of Energy. You know, it's fascinating stuff. And it almost sounds like building a plane as you're up in the air. I mean, because things are technology is moving so fast, there isn't really another way to do it.

And, you know, it's impressive the breadth of the work that Department of Energy is doing and and how we're scaling up for a clean energy future.

So, thank you, kudos to you and all your colleagues there. You're listening to A Climate Change. This is Matt Matern, your host. You can follow us on podcast at Apple Music and Spotify. And come back listen to us next week.