Solar Power

“And so I looked into solar power on Mars and found that was really challenging, and then I looked into nuclear power on Mars and found that was the only way.”

“Solar power per megawatt takes five amounts, five times the amount of copper than a typical base load CCGT gas-fired turbine.”

“A one gigawatt data center needs five gigawatts of solar. Each gigawatt of solar takes up 7000 acres. So at five gigawatts, that's 35,000 acres. That's bigger than San Francisco.”

“The solar has gotten so cheap that you can actually kind of do the reverse process, and it makes financial sense, increasingly so over time.”

“Economically speaking we should have deleted trackers in 2016, right? Like the trackers are the systems that move the panels around. Obviously we're still in 2025 installing trackers.”

“We tend to conflate, particularly in this era, like, useful tech and lucrative tech, and those are not, like, there's technologies that are incredibly useful that are not particularly lucrative, like penicillin right now, like antibiotics are not, it's not, no…”

“Partly because it's not that lucrative, I think in the end. But also it's not that intentionally salient in the way that AI is.”

“Converting sunlight into energy about a hundred times more efficiently than plants do, and electricity is quite a bit more useful than corn.”

“Today, the cost of round-the-clock solar is actually lower than the cost of coal in many cases, particularly in India.”

“Today, you know, solar power installed is, you know, 30 dollars a megawatt hour. Without the tax credits, it's 50 dollars a megawatt hour. That's more expensive than 30 dollars a megawatt hour. I get that. But that's not out of the money. Right? New natural ga…”

“I think it is highly likely that in my lifetime, the world just runs on solar. Like if you just, you know, we all know compound interest is the greatest force on earth, but if you just look at the rate at which photovoltaic cell efficiency is compounding, batt…”

“Solar only pushes away the pollution to some other place. The manufacturing place, and then what do you do with the solar rejects, the photovoltaic cells which remain with you? So all those challenges are there. In the short term, yes, it's a better answer tha…”

“That we curtailed more than 600 gigawatt hours of solar in I think it was in April of twenty-twenty-three, up from in twenty-twenty, like, half that much.”

“According to our outlooks, by twenty-fifty, 40% of the generating capacity, just like electricity generating capacity in, in the U.S. Will be solar.”

“Solar is not just sort of one of the fastest growing, most important renewable energy technologies. It's one of the fastest growing, most important energy technologies, period. Like it will be basically The energy industry in the next couple of decades. Like, …”

“And actually in, in places like Spain, for example, there is so much solar being produced that they are curtailing solar production during the day. So actually it is possible to charge for some hours of the day at zero cost, or perhaps in some places, even at …”

“It'll, it'll still charge. It might only charge, you know, 10 miles worth or 12 miles worth or something like that if it's overcast or in a northern latitude, you know.”

“The district offset more than 80% of their energy consumption with solar.”

“We need about 5700 megawatts of wind. A part of solar and about 4300 megawatts of wind. So that's a lot, but you know, there's a, what a 3000 megawatt increase on wind and a 4000 megawatt increase on solar that we need to build ideally by 20, 35.”

“The mean cost overrun for solar power is one percent, and only two percent of solar projects ever have a cost overrun of more than 50%.”

“You know what the cheapest source of energy is today? Fusion. It's three cents a kilowatt hour.”

“New York City has a goal of installing one gigawatt with a solar by 2030, and I believe has about a third, is about a third of the way there, so 300 megawatts, and the sense is that it's possible to meet that goal, but they, the city would really have to accel…”

“The investment tax credit and production tax credit that helped, along with policies in other countries, drive the cost of solar power down by about 90% since 2009 and wind power down by about 70% since 2009.”

“So like Walmart, I think is now the largest U S commercial producer of solar power.”

“And now, in ninety-odd percent of the world, it's cheaper to build new solar and wind power than to build a fossil-fueled or nuclear power plant, and in upwards of half the world, it's cheaper than just running those thermal plants, even if building them costs…”

“Kit Carson Electric Cooperative that serves the area around Taos in New Mexico. Set a goal to get to a hundred percent of their daytime energy usage generated from local solar by 2022. And they are, they're making that goal. They're going to be there within a …”