Solar

“We think that there's a generational kind of paradigm shift happening in the energy industry, where the last five decades of energy were defined by coal and then Natural gas as the marginal megawatt. And the next five decades will be defined by solar batteries…”

“Nuclear energy is the safest form of energy, empirically. If you look at the amount of power generated versus the amount of deaths it's even safer than solar, which is very strange, because how does someone die from solar? But actually, most solar is installed…”

“By the time, like any of these SMRs actually get near production, the TCO of solar will be like, 10 or 12 dollars per megawatt hour, and it will be 80% of all the power generation.”

“That reactor won't even get turned on until 2030. The entire world will be covered by solar by then, so it won't matter.”

“Nuclear energy for the past 50 years has been the cleanest form of energy, no carbon emissions, the safest form of baseload, which people find really surprising, but fewer human deaths per terawatt hour than any other baseload, And even any other energy source…”

“Solar has really had a standout year in 2025 increased by 636 terabyte hours. So that's twice the size of the UK's annual electricity demand. Huge amount of additional electricity globally that's coming from solar. And the really interesting trend that we foun…”

“We've now had over the last 10 years, the average was 27%.”

“My gut feeling now is that maybe 2026 is the year where that relative growth rate will step down a little bit, and we'll see slower relative growth, even though we might still again get a record absolute increase.”

“How long does it take for sources to go from a hundred terawatt hours to a size like 2000 terawatt hours? And if you look historically, no source has ever made that jump as quickly as solar has. Right behind it is wind with just a few more years.”

“The implication to me is that batteries should be growing at roughly two to three times the rate that solar should to play catch up here. And so we have this, you know, we started off with this, like, very bullish solars meeting the vast majority of new, like,…”

“They're not the answer. They are supplemental energy that can help, and they're kind of filling a gap until, you know, more jet generation comes online, and depends on what form of that jet generation can be.”

“Even when a product is made in the United States, and in solar, solar specifically, It is still cost competitive with other forms of technology. You look at Lazard's LCOE models and those cost charts, solar is always going to be right on the bottom, and that i…”

“Meanwhile, you know, the cost of a PPA, a power purchase agreement, for solar is well off the lows. What kind of lows happened around twenty-twenty, and it's the cost, again, of delivered electrons from solar is, you know, probably 50% plus more expensive than…”

“I think it's also true that in a, you know, generally in a stable demand environment, each megawatt of solar that comes on is worth a little bit less. The most valuable solar that came on was the first megawatt, and then you get to a point where the supply of …”

“We're going to need nuclear. Wind is not going to be enough. Solar is not going to be enough. Let's just all acknowledge that we'll take it. We'll take everything we can. But the fact that matters, I think for the next decade, natural gas, you know, is probabl…”

“If you're trying to turn solar into 24 hour, you need a 16 hour discharge duration, basically to produce power, you know, between the time the sun goes down to the time the sun comes back up.”

“Actually to get true hundred percent, 24 seven coverage, the battery or the excess build out is massive. It is really expensive. It's on, it's like basically on par with nuclear costs.”

“So long story short I don't think the same game that worked in solar works in green hydrogen.”

“China has deployed more solar in, like, the last three months than the United States has ever deployed ever.”

“And it seems pretty clear now that based on where the cost curves are going, the next five decades of energy are going to be defined by solar and storage.”

“Texas is about 20% right now in the fuel mix.”

“My opinion is that the rate of solar deployment will go up so fast as the costs continue to go down that it might just not matter. That we'll have so, it'll be so easy and low cost to deploy solar and storage that the economics of building nuclear reactors jus…”

“The cost to make the electron has gone down really significantly over the last 20 years, largely driven by the build-out of solar. But the cost to move the electron has gone up very significantly because our infrastructure is aging, and utilities have this kin…”

“Eventually in the 10 or 15 or 20 year timeframe, you'll have an abundance of electrons from nuclear. In the meantime, you have an abundance of electrons from net gas. You have an abundance of electrons, frankly, from solar. And all of these things will ultimat…”

“And the way I would describe the paradigm shift very simply is the last five decades of energy have been defined by coal and then natural gas. And the next five decades of energy will be defined by solar and battery storage. And by the way, it has nothing to d…”

“Talking with our member companies who have low-cost resources that they're ready to build, You know, whether it's large-scale wind, solar, storage, and the like, and they're not able to deploy, right? They are tangled in red tape, they are stuck in line”

“If you look back to 1800, even biomass today is used more than it was in the 1800. Oil is used more. Gas, coal, everything is used more. And solar and wind were simply additive.”

“Twenty-twenty-four, they've installed two to three times the amount of solar that America did per capita.”

“He has a wildly exaggerated view of where solar and batteries will go. And I'd love, if we could make a bet 50 years out, I'll make a bet, solar never gets to 10% of global energy.”

“Nuclear is so obviously, so clearly the best climate solution that you could find, right? So if you care about the fact that we're putting more CO two in the, you know, in the atmosphere every single year, and you look at all the options, you know, options tha…”

“So last year more than 90% of new energy in the U.S. Came from solar, wind, and batteries. So we're already heavily transitioned to solar. In the first two months of this year, 98% of our new energy came from solar and wind.”

“Well, the Chinese basically in certain sectors like solar and cars and batteries, they give away free land, free labor, free capital. Sometimes it's slave labor in some cases. So that's not like, that's not free trade. And then even with all that, then they se…”

“Texas is roughly five percent solar”

“It is twice the cost to do solar than it is to do Nat gas.”

“These methane plants are half the cost of solar. They can get stood up in Less than two years to generate a gigawatt.”

“If you bring a hundred megawatts of gas generation, we count that as about 70 megawatts of reserve contribution. If you bring a hundred megawatts of solar, we may count that as eight to 10 megawatts of reserve contribution. You know, very, very conservative, m…”

“If you have solar wind at 25 dollars a megawatt hour today, which is feasible, those are good wind and solar projects, but maybe not even the best And you take that, that's with the ITC or PTC in the case of wind, and you take away that subsidy, you probably g…”

“At 25 dollars a megawatt hour, you are less than the marginal cost of natural gas generation. So you can build those wind and solar resources solely at, and you'll make money solely off the avoided cost of burning gas at existing natural gas power plants. Wher…”

“And in those regions, like probably solar is still cheaper on a levelized cost of energy basis than geothermal, even subsidized even when geothermal is subsidized and solar is not for quite some time, but you don't add geothermal because you're competing with,…”

“It's like 17 months from start to finish. 17 months. So that's probably in my opinion, the single most valuable underwriting feature of solar, which is you put a dollar in, you can start generating revenue in 17 months from that dollar going in.”

“You could study it like mathematically and it hasn't been a great place for returns. And you could look at, you know, there was a massive amount of venture capital put into solar. 1520 years ago, and it didn't work.”

“There are factories worldwide now, now turning, churning out more than a terawatt of solar per year with no signs of slowing down. If anything, production is increasing to 30 to 40% per year, which is just Bananas.”

“In terms of energy we can give every man, woman, and child on Earth the amount of energy we enjoy here in the United States, which is about 20 barrels of oil per person per year with something like six percent of Earth's surface under solar, which is, It's a, …”

“Solar and wind, which is where we're Which is what's filling the gap are the lowest cost energy sources for power in the world in most countries today.”

“Then, a few days ago, the report came out that in twenty-twenty-four, we just saw the latest data. Solar and storage account for 84% of the capacity added to the grid.”

“Solar is a supply chain business, and we were one tiny part of this supply chain business.”

“Solar had used up a lot of the flatland that we talked about earlier, and so there started to become a lot of projects that were on undulating terrain”

“A modest, 599 gigawatts of solar installed last year globally.”

“Solar is just on its way up. You know, it's more than forty billion dollars in the trail in 12 months. And storage now invests more than wind does in the States.”

“You know this year, we're probably gonna have more solar installed in toto, cumulative, than wind.”

“As far as debt goes, we haven't seen it. We've seen people be able to raise debt at the corporate level via, via venture debt or via corporate debt. Now, those are very low leverage numbers, right? They're not the 80, 95% that, you know, you will get in solar.”

“A gas plant in PGM is close to 80% accredited load, and solar with no storage is eight percent.”

“I've, you know, watched and talked to dozens of companies and founders, and I think Oftentimes making the same mistake as they were trying to commercialize some kind of better mousetrap for energy storage, which is they underestimated the pace at which the cos…”

“You're not going to put solar in storage to supply a 500 to gigawatt, 500 megawatt to gigawatt scale data center. I mean, it's just not feasible.”

“We went from 10 dollars a watt when I started to a dollar a watt when I was, ah, leaving, and really people have taken it almost an order of magnitude down from there, and it's just extraordinary.”

“I think batteries are going to be as big in industry, if not bigger, than solar in a lot of ways because of their impact on automotive.”

“You can't go short on, like, technical, technological revolution, right? You can't, like, short solar or some crazy shit like that. It tends to be wrong. We tend to figure stuff out over time. You know, at best, you're right for a little while, and eventually …”

“I think the second thing is indeed to what extent we keep underestimating the speed at which solar and batteries to some extent also wind, but to a less extent have achieved cost savings and actually are deployed.”

“So the first wave of cost down for solar and batteries was actually largely driven by R&D. These were advances in cell chemistries increases in efficiencies, and so on. It really drove the cost down. But already in the last decade for both of these technologie…”

“In many places around the world, like solar is the cheapest form of power generation by a large margin.”