Here you can find Solar Panels and technological accessories related to Solar Energy: Click Here If you want to learn about Solar...
Here you can find Solar Panels and technological accessories related to Solar Energy: Click Here
If you want to learn about Solar Panels, to advise you before buying or to build your own Solar Panel: Click Here
The Dyson Sphere. This enormous construct has shown up in several science fiction books and TV shows, most notably for me in the episode Relics of Star Trek The Next Generation, first imagined by author Olof Stapledon and more formally explored by physicist and mathematician Freeman Dyson in 1960. The sphere could be constructed by a Type 2 Kardeshev civilization, and encompass an entire star to capture nearly all its solar output. Contrary to popular belief, the Dyson sphere wouldn't be a solid shell that encases the star, but rather a swarm of satellites around it. We clearly don't have the engineering skills to pull something like this off, and it's been theorized that it would take the material equivalent of a planet the size of Jupiter to create the satellites. So why am I prattling on about Dyson spheres today? One of the most important and relevant topics that we've discussed here on The Tech Between Us has been renewable energy. Over the last few years on this podcast, we've discussed new materials that make energy conversion more efficient. Talked in-depth about methods of energy storage, and last year looked at new ways energy is being distributed to where it's needed most. As we were preparing topics for this year, it occurred to me that while we've had great conversations about many aspects of green energy, we've never discussed the actual gathering of energy from natural sources. To help us understand the latest innovations in solar cell technology, we have with us Scott Wharton, CEO of Tandem PV. So, Scott, before we begin, can you tell us a little bit about yourself? What's your story? Thanks for having me. I'm the CEO of Tandem PV, and I would say I'm a serial entrepreneur. This is my fifth startup scale up in a row. I've done. I've been really fortunate that I did two early stage, start ups in the Voice over IP industry, and they both went public. And then I started the world's first cloud video conferencing service. So I think I had the right idea, but I was a little early. It was three years before Zoom. Had an exit for the company. And then after three startups in row, my wife said, would you mind not doing another startup for a while? So I went to a company called Logitech that we all know. And I built an internal startup for hardware video conferencing that went from 62 million to over $1 billion a year. We became the global market leader and hardware that work with Zoom, Microsoft, Google. And then almost a couple of years ago, I came to Tandem PV to move the needle on clean tech and helping hopefully save the world. Sounds great. So back to a startup. Yeah, I'm a junkie. I guess I couldn't help myself. So what does Tandem PV do? Obviously you're involved in solar technology, but from a specifically, from a product and a technology, what is it that you guys do? So we're making a next generation solar panel. So we make the panel itself. Okay. And we're using a completely new material science called perovskites. It's a good dinner party conversation thing that you can pop in there or cocktail party. Yeah. If I can pronounce it, that is. Yeah. Perovskites. It was named after Dr. Perovski, Okay. a Russian scientists about a couple hundred years ago who discovered this crystal structure. Okay. In the Ural Mountains. But only about a dozen years ago did people realize that this makes an incredible solar panel semiconductor technology. So part of what we're doing is commercializing this technology for perovskites. And we're making a solar panel with perovskites on top, traditional silicon on bottom. So essentially it's a mechanically stacked solar panel sandwich. Okay. And the beauty of that is we can capture a lot more light than either of them collectively. So it's more light, better performance. And we can talk about perovskites but it's it's a miracle semiconductor that's better faster cheaper. Wow. Yeah. Usually you get you get to choose two of those and it sounds like for perovskites you get all three. Yeah. That's part of why I'm so excited to join this company. Because, yeah, it's a winning combination. The challenges we'll get into, it's it's it's a pretty hard thing to do. We've got a bunch of really smart PhDs and a whole bunch of different disciplines. I was explaining to a friend of mine last night that it's got what part of what I like about it. It's got so many different disciplines, like it's got physics, material science, chemistry, electrical engineering, metallurgy, mechanical engineering. So you kind of need to know all of these things and put them together. It's part of why it's so hard to crack. Interesting. Well, definitely dive a little bit more into that technology specifically here in just a moment. But let's start at the macro level. You know, global energy requirements. No secret. I mean we're using, you know, more and more energy, all kinds of technologies demanding more from what we have currently have today, and even more so from within the energy industry. Where do you see all this going? What what do you see as the key drivers? And specifically where do you see a renewables fitting into this picture? I think one of the things that people don't know is that over the last ten years, solar technology has gotten 90% cheaper. Okay. And along with that, so it's about 99% cheaper than when it started, but only in the last ten years, 90% cheaper. And I think most people know that batteries have gotten cheaper, but they don't know it's about 70% less. So the combination of those two have really completely transformed the energy industry, where solar used to be this neat little thing that people liked if they were green, but now it's actually the cheapest energy source on the planet. Okay. Yeah, it used to be the little nephew you kind of pat on the head and it's like, okay, you know, run along. But now it's really grown up. It seems like. Absolutely. So just to give you a couple of stats to show you how far it's transformed, that I bet the listeners are not thinking about. So last year in the United States, 2024, of all the new energy out in the US, 90% of it was solar batteries and wind, 90% of incremental energy and solar. Of that was in the 60s. Next year, you know, in a year where we're talking about, oh, we're going back to fossil fuels and drill, baby, drill, 93% is forecasted to be solar batteries and wind. So it's winning because of the economics. So this is new energy coming online. All the new energy coming online. So basically almost all of the new energy coming online is is solar and solar plus batteries. And with all the discussion about fossil fuels and nuclear, we get into all that. None of that's actually happening. This is all a myth. We'll talk about those myths in a little bit. But all the, the, the incremental demands that are being met with solar and renewables, I mean, all, you know, the investment in data center power due to artificial intelligence, all that is just really there are being met through renewables rather than, like you were saying, rather than more oil and more nuclear and so on and so forth. For the most part. So if you look at that extra 10%, that's natural gas, nuclear, geothermal, offshore wind, all these other things. So it's actually very small. There's more hype in newspapers about what might happen than what's actually happening. Okay. Well that's interesting. So yeah, back in the day and this is going way back, back to the 70s. In the 80s, I remember my dad investing in solar technology. I mean, he had a lot of brochures. He was reading a lot. Obviously the technology like you had mentioned is advanced quite a bit since then. But wouldn't solar be considered mainstream or even a mature technology today? Absolutely. I mean, one of the things interesting about solar is that when you compare it to all the other technologies, it's pretty much off the shelf. You make it in a factory, and you can install it in a power plant or at home within a few weeks or months. If you think about natural gas or call, it takes years to build these things nuclear. A decade. So it's yeah. Longer than that. Yeah. So it's I would say it's the most mainstream standardized technologies that we have. And I think the listeners know that standards usually win, especially because as you have a standard, can get better, faster, cheaper. And, you know, not everything is bespoke like installing other kinds of power sources. So that's part of why it's winning, is that every year it just gets a little bit more standardized and less expensive. And what you guys do at Tandem, you're introducing perovskite. Would you consider that a major disruptor in this market or is it more of an incremental advancement? I it's funny, it's almost a little bit of both. So part of why I was so excited to come into perovskites is that we just established that solar is the future of energy. But today, and almost all of our new energy is going to happen in some combination of solar batteries. And then in the industry, the consensus is that perovskites are overwhelmingly going to be the future. So in some ways it's a complete disruptor in that it's a completely new material science. So there's no direct line from silicon panels to perovskites. Oh, okay. You're basically starting with a white sheet of paper, right. From a technology point of view. But to the extent that it's evolutionary, it's just building on what we're already doing as a society, moving to using solar and kind of building on top of it. So part of why I was so excited about it is that we're no longer in a situation where you have to evangelize to the power companies about solar, like they got it. Right. This is what they're doing. So part of what we're doing is just building a better mousetrap. Now it's a hard, better mousetrap. And we can talk about all the science. Sure, let's do that. If you want to, but, but but it is fundamentally extending what we're already doing. So I like that from a market point of view. You don't need to explain anymore to someone what a solar panel is. And to some extent, our strategy is to just build a drop in solution that integrates with all of the other electric systems. Okay. It's just much more dense and cheaper. Okay. Let's dive into a little bit, about what perovskite is. To me. It sounds like a mineral, and it sounds like something we dig out of the earth. But what exactly is perovskite? Yeah, it's actually not a mineral. It's a crystal. Oh. It isn't okay. It sounds like one. It does sound like it, but it's a it's a crystal structure that has three different elements. And you could swap different things out of it that gives it that unique properties. But it really, really relates to the structure because you can change that level of perovskites and things around that. So it's a very, very thin structure. Basically what we're doing is creating an ink that we put on glass and it's one micron thick, 100 nanometers. So it's about 200 times thinner than existing silicon panels. In fact it's about 1/100 of the width of one of your hairs. So super, super thin. It does not use any rare earth minerals or metals. And there's no mining involved. In fact, we we actually make it in a lab in California. Really? Okay. Yeah. And that was actually my next question is obviously there's a lot of discussion these days about rare earths and, you know, shortages thereof. So there really is not a shortage of perovskites. I mean, if you guys are able to build it in the lab, No, there's no shortage of it. It's completely abundant based on abundant elements and materials. Okay. One of the things I'm very excited about this is not only do we get to disrupt the solar industry by making something better, faster, cheaper, bring it back to the United States with Silicon Valley innovation. If you think about our energy security, and we've already established that solar is is the majority of new power and I think part of what's motivating me in the team is how do we control some of our own destiny, not in every area, but at least in some critical, critical areas like energy and cars and semiconductors. And that's been the I mean, they've been the crux of, like you were saying, increase, you know, domestic energy output. That's right. So you can talk about oil all you want. But the reality is solar is cheaper. So probably what another thing that the listeners don't know as the biggest deployer of solar energy in the US is Texas. Right. Yeah. Traditionally the oil center of the US. And still and yet they are the largest deployer of solar energy in the US. In fact, Texas, last year passed California. So with all the rhetoric about California being green, environmentally friendly and Texas being hostile, Texas is deploying the most solar in the US and wins, partly because I think they have friendly policies on the deregulation side, but partly because they're, you know, they're greedy. They they it's got great economics. So that's the way capitalism should work. Right. And we've got lots of land here in Texas that’s just sitting out there doing nothing. Lots of land, lots sun and, a growing economy needing lots of power. So it's a good fit. Can't beat that. So from a manufacturing standpoint, you've mentioned that, you know, that perovskite is simply this thin, ink layer that's laid on top of solar panels. What else goes into the actual manufacturing of a perovskite based solar cell? Is it just that, or is there other things that are involved? Well, the way we make this panel is very similar to thin film technology. So there are other thin films that you put down that are different than silicon. In this case it's perovskites. So it's going to look similar to very other thin film solar panel technologies where you take this ink from perovskites, you put it on the glass. Typically there's glass on both sides to seal it and protect it. And then you've got a bunch of transport layers that move electrons off of the solar panel out into the world. So there's there's a bunch of layers very thin layers, though, you know, usually, in the nanometer millimeter scale. And the thickest part is really the glass that kind of encapsulates it and puts it together. So I think if you if you saw one of these things, it would look exactly like another solar panel in every way. Just the differences. Instead of using silicon on the top to capture it, it's perovskites, plus the silicon off the shelf that we buy in the bottom. So how did you guys come up with perovskites? I mean, it sounds like a lot of R&D was involved. And did you guys partner with one of the national labs. How did you guys come up with this stuff? Yeah, it's kind of all the above. So first of all, I joined, a little less than two years ago as the CEO. The founders of the company. Colin and Chris, they they both have PhDs in material science and applied physics from Stanford. So, you know, a bunch of dummies. So, so, Colin actually built the first perovskite Tandem cell in the world when he was at Stanford doing his PHD. So that was about 12 years ago. And then Chris, the other founder, has more than 40 years experience in solar at big companies, small companies. So combined, they had a tremendous amount of experience at building solar. And they've been working on this. They started the company in 2016. Okay. So it's been nine years and it's been a lot of hard work in R&D. Now they've done it in concert with, we have some partnerships with the Department of Energy, the California Energy Commission, who have been supportive of us through grants, but also various universities like the University of North Carolina, San Diego, University of Washington, etc.. So it like a lot of things, it takes a village and it's we've built on, I'd say, a lot of foundational technology. Okay. This is a deep tech. Like it's taken a long time just to get it to where where, you know, it's going to take ten years before we get our first revenue. So it's it's a hard technology. And how far down the road are you guys with commercialization of the technology? I know that's kind of you know, your role is to come in and, you know, turn it from an R&D project into something that has a steady revenue stream. How far down the road are you guys on that? Well, we're pretty close now. So we today we have an R&D factory in San Jose, California. Okay. And we make about 150 solar panels a week. That's a good amount, but but they tend to be smaller because we're doing them both for R&D purposes, not for sale. Okay. Also, you're the tools that you need to build these things. As you can imagine, they're like it's football field size. Like this stuff is complicated and expensive. Really? Okay, I didn't realize it was that big. They’re huge. So today we're making these on the R&D scale. We just raised some money that is allowing us to build our first commercial factory in the United States. So we're kind of... Congrats. building that right now. And the plan is that we would start. Yeah. Thank you very much. Not easy to do in this environment. Absolutely not. I also good validation of kind of the team and where we are. And our plan is to start selling these panels sometime in the first half of next year. So not that far away. Yeah, just just around the corner then, I mean I mean a year in from a technology senses I mean yeah, that's no time at all for a new technology. It still feels far out of the way. But, close enough. That's it for now. Stay tuned for the next episode, as Scott and I dive deeper into the specifics of perovskite and its uses in solar energy capture. Until then, explore more content from Mouser's Empowering Innovation Together series on clean technology by visiting mouser.com/empowering-innovation. ...
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