We constantly hear about landowners fighting against solar - but at some point - some folks are gonna realize, we only need 1% of all land to power the world.

& If you don't act soon - you're gonna miss out on one of the greatest wealth generation opportunities of our lifetimes.

Time for 2025 updates to my annual “opinions about solar” thread. If you like these, you might like the second edition of my book, Solar Power Finance Without The Jargon. A 30% discount code WSQ0437 is valid on publisher website until end of November 2025.

www.worldscientific.com/worldscibook...

Seriously folks, this is fucking massive and awesome.

And it’s also what I want to do with community solar in the USA, except 5X in size per unit: 5MWac solar + 5 MW DC coupled battery, with the capacity side of the solar and storage varying by location.

I NEED to tell you the story of Tae Heung “William” Kim.

He's a graduate student at Texas A&M where he's working on a vaccine for Lyme disease.

He's a *legal permanent resident* of the United States.

And he's been in ICE detention for 12 days & counting, transferred Tuesday to South Texas.

So if you are looking for a project that really makes the world better...

develop a simple and cheap solar+battery+stove for Africa

On a Stanford @siepr.bsky.social abundance panel today, I offered this analogy for how US generator interconnection works outside ERCOT, which I was told was helpful: 🔌💡

Anyone want to start a charity to distribute high quality kits? I’ll buy the first ten and work the bill of materials.

‘a tiny solar panel paired w/a battery that provides indoor lighting and charges mobile phones can save ~$70/ye, exceeding the one-time hardware cost of the solar-plus-battery kit’

MAGA 2017: "Trump-Russia is a hoax and a slur."

MAGA 2025: "Trump-Russia is the basis for our foreign policy and anybody who doesn't agree should be primaried out of the party."

Two new solar records in ERCOT today: 24,818 megawatts of solar production equal to 54% of demand this AM. Tomorrow, if grid operators allow it, Texas could be 100% renewable for a large part of Texas Independence Day! Beautiful example of the "cowboy hat curve" tomorrow.

Power demand is sky high in ERCOT this morning. This is the first time ERCOT has ever served 80,000 megawatts in the winter. We have a new battery storage record with 4,578 megawatts deployed at 7:15. Once again, batteries are playing a major role to keep the heat on. #txlege

Another solar record in ERCOT today, this time with exactly 24,000 megawatts of output just a few minutes ago. That's 7,000 megawatts more than this time last year, a 40% increase in one year. Prices, of course, are low, <$15 per megawatt-hour.

Average cost to install residential rooftop solar:

🇺🇸United States: $2.60/W
🇨🇦Canada: $2.39/W
🇦🇺Australia: $0.58/W

Two solar records set in ERCOT today. Solar power produced 22,305 megawatts, the most ever. That was good enough to meet 48% of demand in ERCOT this morning. Before this weekend, the previous records were 22,078 and 44%. Wholsale prices were <$10/MWh or 1 cent per killowatt-hour.

This is a trove of (free) information on the state of the global battery sector! 🔋
🔌💡

On the coldest day of the winter, solar came within 600 megawatts of setting an all-time record in Texas. It was good enough for 7th all-time and only the 8th time that solar has exceeded 21,000 megawatts of production. (h/t @gridstatus.io) #energysky #txenergy 💡🔌

It's an orchestra. Battery cells feed packs, which feed the modules, then inverters - then to the grid. Per site there are hundreds to hundreds of millions of cells - each firing slightly uniquely.

Apply that across a power grid, a nation, and a planet - and we have many billions of performers.

It's going to be truly wild if we start transporting electricity around the country on *trains* because we can't build any f'ing transmission lines. coloradosun.com/2024/12/05/c...

BYD in China is building electric cars much cheaper than competitors. How?

This is the price comparison for different components.

From the NYT: www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

My first job out of college was at Enron, where shady accounting bankrupted America's then 7th largest company. There's a growing effort in DC to use similar practices to account for TCJA tax extension that I fear will have a similar long-term effect on the US. Let me explain.
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