Sun, Silicon, and Xinjiang

Aluminum at modern aluminum smelters will require around 12,000 to 13,000 kilowatt hours per ton. As it turns out, polysilicon requires on the order of 60,000 kilowatt hours. So yeah, you were actually talking closer to five times the amount of electricity per ton of polysilicon relative to aluminum. So if aluminum is congealed electricity, then polysilicon is super congealed electricity. But again, I think really important to stress, that energy pays itself back many, many times over the solar panels lifetime. So the solar panel is made out of congealed electricity, but it's generating electricity throughout the year for 25 to 35 years, so. - A warm welcome back to DeCouple. Today I'm joined by Severe Wang. Severe, you work at the Breakthrough Institute and I'm not sure if your title's changed, but I'll give you a second to remind me again of who you are and what you do. - Sure, I'm the director of the Climate and Energy Research Program at Breakthrough. - Awesome, awesome. Okay, and we are gonna be talking solar today. It has been pointed out to me that my coverage of the topic is somewhat lacking. We've not had a dedicated solar episode. I'd like to refer to myself now as a bit of a reformed nuke bro. I think I've become a little more subtle and nuanced as I've explored more about energy. So this is not a show that has a kind of energy ideological base to it. I come to this genuinely interested and Severe, I've been really impressed with your data-driven analysis, even of controversial topics like Uyghur labor in the supply chain and the impact of Chinese coal on carbon intensity. I think you've admirably been very data-driven on those controversial topics, but more than that, I'm kind of just looking for a solar for dummies intro and then we're gonna get into the history of the deployment, incredible cost downs by a factor of 10,000 from the '50s till now, how that was accomplished, which I think is gonna be, big part of that's gonna be the China story. So I am really excited to dig in today. Thanks again for making the time. - Of course, thanks for having me, Chris. - All right, so maybe we'll start with this kind of solar for dummies part. This is an old technology. Like we're talking 1830s, where it's kind of starting off. If you just quickly, Cole's notes, just walk us through the emergence of this technology. - Many commentators make the point that even though now it is China that is the technology leader in solar technology, a lot of the DNA for solar technology actually originated in the US. A lot of it coming out of laboratory work from Bell Labs, solar cell technology got a major sort of supercharge with the space race as obviously we use solar panels to keep satellites powered. That happened to coincide well temporally as well with the Suez oil crisis in the '70s, which then supercharged a lot of interest from the Carter administration into solar cell research. And so for a long time, it was really sort of US public science efforts, hand in hand with private industry sort of rising to meet the call for, at that time, specialized products for sort of very specific targeted uses that sort of drove the technology forward. And then starting in the '90s, especially with growing public interest in climate change and in sort of alternative clean energy technologies that created sort of a new market case for solar technologies, gradually attracting interest from the Japanese, German, Taiwanese, manufacturers, all of whom sort of made a bunch of technical contributions over time to culminate in sort of the kinds of solar cells we have today. With really sort of the major ramp up taking place in the latter half of the 2000s with the rise to power of crystalline silicon in solar cells. - Right, right. So the very early work I was referencing before in the 1830s, these are sort of science experiments. I guess mostly European based. Einstein famously associated with the equals MC squared actually won the Nobel Prize for theoretically describing the photovoltaic effect. I thought that was a cool little tidbit. But as you're saying, the modern solar panel in the industry, as we know, it really gets its lift off, shall we say, with the space race, with the Soviets. - That was a great introduction. I think digging into that a little bit further, I wanted to ask you the relevance of the German energy vendor. We cover that a lot, obviously, on the podcast. Can you describe that's impact on supercharging the solar cost downs that we saw, I guess, in the 2000s? - Yeah, so the way a lot of climate/energy commentators put it is that the world ought to thank Germany for the energy window, for being basically the early mass buyer of solar panels as a result, sort of catalyzing this, the modern manufacturing industry, in essence. So basically, Germany offered a very, very lucrative feed-in tariff for solar energy as part of its early sort of coming out of the Kyoto Protocol sort of early stage energy transition policies. And that created a huge demand poll for solar projects, which also happened to coincide with China's entry into the World Trade Organization and a time period, basically, where there was a lot of interest in, well, what business opportunities do we have from sort of scaling up manufacturing of various products, some of which you've covered in earlier episodes of this podcast, at massive scale in China. And so those two sort of temporal trends, Germany's feed-in tariff policy and sort of the influx of foreign direct investment and significant increase in sort of domestic business interest in China in what are the up and coming future industries that are major business opportunities here sort of collided and kicked off the Chinese solar manufacturing sector. Yeah, we had a kind of energy vendor, North American edition in Ontario, similar, I guess, structure, 20-year feed-in tariffs. Some of ours were as high as 80 cents per kilowatt hour when the wholesale clearing price was something like four cents. So super generous, but I guess it was also sort of in Germany, build it and they shall come. Like this was, there was no real limits placed on it. If it gets built, you're gonna get this 20-year subsidy. So I guess that provided a lot of certainty for investors to really go all in on this. Yeah, it should be mentioned too, that sort of the number two player in this time period was also Japan, which similarly out of energy security concerns, as well as climate and environmental concerns as well as a secondary or tertiary factor, also had some significant sort of deployment incentives and industrial policy associated with solar deployment in Japan that also drove, and a lot of it was targeted to foster the Japanese solar manufacturing market, but this also additionally benefited other global solar manufacturing players. Is it still the case that the Japanese have the most solar per capita? No longer, it's no longer Germany. I believe it's actually the Netherlands or Belgium that has the highest solar per capita now, but Japan still is surprisingly high, higher than the US. Yeah. Those don't sound like particularly sunny places in Netherlands and Belgium. And Germany I think was at 50% of installed capacity in the 2010. So like just, what are they? I think they're like 60 or 80 gigawatts of installed capacity of solar. Like it's a pretty remarkable build out. We got a lot to cover, and I'm just trying to figure out the order to do it. I like how we've sort of given a kind of 30,000-volt historical overview. Maybe we should build on that slightly and as we'll lend in later to our discussion around China. Just to throw in a quick figure on your, 'cause we were just talking about gigawatts of German solar capacity. Right now, China has just passed 600 gigawatts of installed solar capacity. So that can provide a bit of a quantitative bookend for where we're going. Right, right, for sure. So as Germany is making these big investments and providing a big stimulus and again, investment, I'm sorry, certainty for investments around solar, China's entering the game. And I understand there was sort of a polysilicon shock in China where it got crazy expensive. There was maybe some tariffs from the Europeans due to questions around flooding the market. Can you expand on that a little bit? Yeah, so this sort of refers to a series of events that took place from around 2008 to 2014. The opening salvos of the solar trade wars which have continued to the present day, so to speak. So basically in the late 2000s, China was building a lot of new polysilicon capacity. And this was because at the time, demand for solar was dramatically outstripping the available supply of fairly purified, high-grade polysilicon that was suitable for solar panel production. And back then, solar panels needed a lot more silicon per watt. And so there was a huge sort of demand for this essential feedstock into the solar modules. And that ultimately culminated in Chinese entrepreneurs sort of rushing in to fill that step with the supply chain. It's a polysilicon is a relatively energy-intensive commodity to produce. And China at that time, as is true today, had the advantage of very low electricity price. And electricity is about 40% of the cost of polysilicon production. So China had a very natural advantage into sort of stepping into this market. But as is often the case in commodity markets, these markets are very cyclical. And so Chinese industry actually overshot. And there was a period of overcapacity around when the 20-auths moved to the 2010s where there was way more Chinese polysilicon production than there was demand for solar polysilicon. And so this is what ultimately prompted a few years later, the US as well as the Europeans sort of more tepidly, ultimately imposing tariffs on Chinese produced polysilicon. And the Chinese actually imposing retaliatory tariffs and then negotiating very hardball with the Europeans to get the Europeans to alleviate their polysilicon tariffs. - Okay, so I wanna sort of park our historical fast, whatever, I was gonna say fast forward. We've gone through it quickly because we'll talk later about the impact of breaking news in terms of the Trump tariffs into some degree, what preceded that. I believe there were some tariffs related to Uyghur forced labor. I wanna park that for a second though. And we've started talking about polysilicon. So I think it's worth my sort of solar for dummies explaining what a solar panel is, what it's made of. I think that's probably a good place to start. So we talked about sort of the basic development. I heard there's two types of solar panels, crystalline and thin. I'm not sure if that's worth diving into or if we should just get into what the sort of base ingredients are, the polysilicon, the ingot, the wafer, the cell, the module. I'll let you decide on that, Siever. - I'll try to keep it somewhat simple. For example, there's actually way more than just two types of solar cells. There's many different varieties of thin-film solar from the dominant one currently is cadmium telleride made by First Solar, an American company. But over time, there's been amorphous silicon. Yeah, various different types of thin-film. And even in crystalline silicon, there have been multiple revolutions of crystalline silicon solar cell technology. Just in the past 10 years, we've actually had no less than three transitions in silicon solar cell technology. Most recently, the shift from monocrystalline PERC cells passively emitted rear contact cells to TAPCON, which gosh, I don't even remember what the acronym for that is. So there's been a variety of changes. They've generally enchailed fiddling with what you put behind the solar cell. Obviously, thin-film and crystalline silicon diverge in sort of the semiconductor materials that you're actually making the cell out of that are excited by photons, hitting them, that therefore catalyzes the movement of electrons through the cell, thereby generating electric current and producing electricity. So the materials of the cell differ as well. And then there's also been progressive changes and sort of efficiency optimizations in how the cell is made. We've sliced the cells thinner and thinner at the same time we've made the cells bigger and bigger. So you're getting more power generation with less silicon and packing in sort of more watts per unit area of your solar module effectively, as well as the efficiency of those solar cells has increased. You're trying to use less silver metalization paste on the solar cell so that you're saving on silver. Silver is actually like 40% of the cost of solar cell manufacturing. - Really? - Yeah, it's a rather remarkable. And the reason why you use silver is because it's actually one of the most efficient conductors available, a better conductor than copper or aluminum, but it's literally a precious metal, yeah. - Funny aside from my episode with Alex Wellerstein on the Manhattan Project, I think it was just 'cause they ran out of copper in terms of the other industrial mobilization for the war, but they drained the entire, I guess it's like the Fort Knox of silver was, I forget if it was 10,000 tons or more of silver to use essentially just for a replacement for copper and they returned it all down to like a fraction of an ounce. But anyway, that's a total aside, but yes, silver is kick-ass for conductivities, so that's very interesting. So crystalline, I understand is the kind of vast majority in terms of commercial solar and the various thin film technologies are a bit niche, is that correct? - Yeah, that's right, yeah. It's like 95%, actually, no, it's actually now it's probably in excess of like 97%, 98% crystalline silicon versus like 2% thin film. - And what are the thin film uses? Again, crystalline, that's what we're thinking of when we're thinking of utility grade or rooftop solar. What are the thin film applications? - So I'll talk mostly about cadmium telleride, which is really the thin film market as it exists today, is mostly the cadmium telleride. It has some niche advantages. The panels are actually cheaper than monocrystalline silicon solar panels, but they are less efficient. So you're getting a little less juice, but your panel cost is a little lower. And then there's some advantages in terms of low light, dim light conditions, which make it slightly more efficient than monocrystalline silicon. Like for example, early morning or late evening or like in very cloudy or hazy conditions. But operationally, we're talking fairly small differences. - In terms of the energy culture wars, the cadmium thing is brought up as these solar firms are leaking heavy metals where they're placed. And there's a massive solar waste problem, which is not volume related, but heavy metal related. Sounds like that's such a small fraction. This just sounds like energy culture wars. - Yeah, the majority of crystalline silicon solar panels do not have cadmium or tellurium or heavy metals in them. And second off, I think first solar and cadmium telleride have gotten a huge, unnecessarily negative wrap from this. There was never any documented incident of solar panel dumping and then heavy metal leaching into groundwater or anything. And it's actually in the best interests of solar manufacturers to have really good solar module encapsulation so those active materials don't leak. First solar actually immediately went above and beyond and started committing at a very high level to we will take back all of our solar panels and we will recycle them all. So they actually have a extended producer responsibility scheme. So overall, heavy metals from solar panels is just not a thing I'm worried about. - Okay, so let's talk about the various products that go into the final module. I had Ed Conway on a while ago, he wrote a fabulous book called The Material World where he goes into the various key kind of commodities that are essential for civilization. One of them was silicon. Obviously talking about computer semiconductors but also solar. And we don't need to go into all the details of forgetting the name. It sounds like a Russian guy, the process of- - Krzysztof Steve. - Are we dealing with- - Yeah, there you go. - Polish, I think. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, that's a, you gotta be, you gotta clarify that these days. Slavic sounding name. But in any case, just let's nerd out a little bit on this. I mean, 99.9999% pure, I mean, that's nothing compared to the high-end chip purity. But tell us what you know about some of these processes because it, from reading Ed's work, it really is just miraculous what we're able to achieve at scale with these technologies. - Yeah, I think the solar manufacturing process is itself sort of a commentary on how incredible solar modules as a technology actually are. 'Cause essentially what you're doing is you're taking reasonably good quality quartz rock. You're grinding it up. You're running it through a smelter to get your metallurgical grade silicon, which is relatively purified form of silicon metal at that point. And then you melt and gasify that metallurgical grade silicon and deposit it using a process called the Siemens process, predominantly. There's a second process that is becoming increasingly prevalent called fluidized bed reactor polysilicon purification, but that's still by far the minority. And then people just sort of hammer apart those, or probably machines, hammer apart those U-shaped polysilicon chunks that you get from the Siemens process and you get small chunks of polysilicon. And then from there, you put them into a crucible, you melt them, and this is the Kraschowski process, presumably named after its inventor, where you basically, from that crucible full of molten, at that point, relatively pure polysilicon, you pull an ingot of polysilicon out of that crucible and then you use, nowadays you use diamond-encrusted wires to slice that polysilicon ingot into wafers, and then those wafers are actually what goes onto your solar module. So then at that point, what you just need to do is you need to add the front and back contacts to the wafer, you add your silver metallization paste, you maybe, you dope the wafer with dopants that produce the conductivity, and then you encapsulate the thing and then that's your solar module. - Right, right. And I remember reading, and people talk about aluminum as yield electricity, 'cause it's just so energy-intensive, that process of, I guess, turning bauxite into alumina. I understand the Siemens process and related polysilicon processes, I think are four times more electricity-intensive. So you mentioned before, silver was a big part of the cost, the final cost of a module, and energy. Whenever people add up percentages, I always find like they get higher than 100%, but can you just kind of review it for that, again, just sort of what the various costs are? - Yeah, aluminum's a great example. So aluminum at modern aluminum smelters will require around like 12,000 to 13,000 kilowatt hours per ton. As it turns out, polysilicon requires on the order of 60,000 kilowatt hours. So yeah, you were actually talking closer to five times the amount of electricity per ton of polysilicon relative to aluminum. So if aluminum is congealed to electricity, then polysilicon is super congealed to electricity. But again, I think really important to stress, that energy pays itself back many, many times over the solar panel's lifetime. So the solar panel is made out of congealed electricity, but it's generating electricity throughout the year for 25 to 35 years, so. - And I'm just trying to understand again, which part of the process is electricity-intensive? You get the silicon dioxide, I'm guessing, is the quartz, and you need to reduce away that oxygen. I think they actually sometimes burn it with coal or even biomass in some of these processes. - Yeah, predominantly coal, that's the first stage. So what you just referred to as the first stage, the metallurgical silicon production. So the 60 kilowatt hours of electricity per kilogram of polysilicon. - Per ton or per kilogram? I think you said ton before. - Yeah, so 60,000 per ton, 60 per kilogram, yeah. - Got you, okay, sorry. - Yeah, I need to, I should be consistent as well. That's for polysilicon purification, the Siemens process, that's the second step, that's the step that comes after the metallurgical silicon, where you put in the metallurgical silicon and then you get out five ends, purified solar-grade polysilicon. - Is that like an arc furnace? Again, I'm just trying to visualize like, what the hell the electricity's doing? - It's actually chemical vapor deposition. - Wow, okay. - So it's actually turning the metallurgical-grade silicon into like a gas and then depositing it in a reactor. Yeah, in a chemical reactor. - So this is pretty badass. And this is occurring at scale. I think one of the pushbacks to this idea that it's ultra-congeal electricity is that we make a bunk ton, I'll be family-friendly in my language here, of aluminum. Because of how efficient we become with polysilicon within solar panels, we make less of it than aluminum. So it is very energy-intensive, but I think it probably is a wash in terms of total production 'cause we maybe use a quarter or something. - Oh yeah, yeah. We're under two million tons per year of polysilicon production, but global aluminum production is like, oh gosh, it's at least over 60 million tons per year of, no, it's actually closer, no, it's actually gonna be about 90 million tons a year of aluminum production globally, so. - Okay, all right. Well, that puts things in perspective a little bit. Okay, so we've sort of gone through crushing the rock, taking the rock, crushing it. I won't repeat all the processes, but I think-- - Chris, can I insert a hot take here? - Yeah, please do. - Yeah, so my hot take is having just described the metallurgical grade silicon production and the Siemens process for polysilicon production. My hot take is that, you know, many people talk about China's dominance in solar from like the sort of Tim Cook, Apple, like electronics revolution, like BYD, electric vehicles. Like China is just like super innovative and like has automated factories and whatnot. And that's why, you know, China is good at producing batteries. That's why China is good at producing iPhones. And that therefore must be why China is good at producing solar panels. I have a provocation to offer, which is that solar is different. My expertise in solar is actually primarily in supply chains. I'm going to have to defer to folks on, you know, P-type, you know, solar cells and, you know, relative efficiencies and, you know, props get degradation and so forth. But as far as like the manufacturing goes, my contention is that solar manufacturing, the reason why China is good at solar manufacturing is more akin to the reason why China is good at metals and critical minerals, which is cheap energy and cheap feedstock. You know, it's more than that. You know, the Tim Cook story, it's part of it. Cause, you know, solar cell manufacturing is very highly automated, but solar cell manufacturing is just a fraction of the cost of the total like solar manufacturing process. And, you know, polysilicon is a major cost factor in solar manufacturing. And so at the end, you know, at the end of the day, like it's like a heavily, you know, metallurgical with a big dose of chemical sort of process. And so my cont, and in many of these, you know, critical mineral, aluminum, solar, when you look at how the cost decomposition of these steps, it's like 20 to 40% of your cost is the electricity or energy and 20 to 40% of your cost is the feedstock where you bought it from, like your raw material cost. It's, and it's actually not like that much more automated in China than it is anywhere else. Like China bought the Siemens reactor technology from Germany, originally. And as of course, innovated and improved upon it, but like fundamentally speaking, we're not talking about a revolution in automation at these earlier sort of very commodity sort of energy and intensity, metallurgical chemical steps. - Right, and just briefly, because we talked about like the purity that we end up achieving, this isn't just any old quartz rock that's starting off this process. I heard about, again, in Conway's book, again, for the ultra pure polysilicon for certain high-end computer chips, there's like one mine in, I think it's called like Pine Gap or something in the U.S. that is the sole source for the ultra, ultra pure polysilicon. - Spruce pine, yes. - Spruce pine. - I also thought that was weird, like the conifers, lots of conifers there. - Yeah, in North Carolina, yeah. So there's actually a bit of a clarification there, which is that, yes, the ultra pure silicon quartz rock, the ultra pure quartz rock is essential for solar manufacturing, but it doesn't actually go into the solar panels. So where we-- - The crucible. - Yeah, exactly, yes. So where we use the ultra pure quartz rock is in the crucible that grows the ingot. And you want an ultra pure quartz crucible so that it doesn't introduce impurities into the ingot as you're growing the ingot. And the crucibles, they're good for a few uses, but then you do need to dispose of, then they do become contaminated and you need to dispose of them. - And a crucible is just the container for this molten metal, is that correct? - Yeah, it sort of just looks kind of like a salad bowl with a flat base. - Awesome, this might be a good place, we mentioned the energy intensity to talk about where things are happening in China. I think from what I understand, the energy intensive parts tend to happen in kind of coal rich regions in the middle of nowhere in the inland areas. I guess nowhere is the middle of nowhere, but I'll stop being pejorative there. And the high value-wide stuff is happening more in the manufacturing centers. Coastal, could you expand on that? - It's really like a huge function of how economically competitive your metallurgical grade silicon production or your solar grade polysilicon production is gonna be is energy cost. Nowhere in the world do they make solar grade polysilicon where electricity prices are high. Well, okay, except for Germany, where they're now struggling. And the reason why they have it in Germany is because that's where they invented the process. But by and large, competitive polysilicon production is gonna be where electricity costs are low. They do make some in southern China, in provinces like Sichuan where there's a lot of hydroelectricity that's also cheap. But it's like for solar grade polysilicon, it's a highly electrified process and you need cheap electricity. And so that predominantly in China, it's gonna be produced in Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia or Sichuan. It's produced in other provinces as well, but those are some of the major centers. And the metallurgical grade silicon, that's a heavily thermal process. You need actually a carbon source in that reaction. So you actually do need in practice coal. And so much of that is in more of the China's coal heavy provinces, again, Inner Mongolia. I think there's something like Shaanxi and then also Xinjiang, yeah. - So, so far, co-located essentially with coal or hydro for cheap electricity. China, we're gonna get into this later, but installing just massive amounts really went exponential. I think 2022 to 2023 going from like 80 gigawatts installed that year to 200 and something. Are we able to leverage renewables in this sort of circular economy, I guess, of using solar electricity to power these processes? Or, I mean, I understand if an aluminum plant it doesn't have power for a few hours, a lot of the stuff's written off, you have major issues. So is this like very much a 24/7 process? - Oh, absolutely. More so than aluminum. Yeah, like aluminum looks flexible compared to solar-grade polysilicon production, yeah. Yeah, if you had a power interruption in the middle of the Siemens process, it could be catastrophic to the equipment and potentially very dangerous, yeah. - Okay, what's the danger from, incidentally? - Vaporized. - The reactor is very pressurized and the process is also extremely delicate. So if you interrupted it, it would just screw up that batch completely. You might have stuff like freezing or depositing in places of the reactor or the supply lines where it shouldn't be. And you might have stuff explode. People have died at polysilicon fabs. It's still very, people die in aluminum foundries. People die in steel mills. It's not exceptionally dangerous, but there are industrial accidents that have occurred. Yeah, you want stable power, absolutely. - So in Xinjiang or Inner Mongolia, are these like mind mouth? Like, I don't know. Lignite, is it bituminous coal? Is it just like a big mind mouth with a whole coal plant and all that electricity is going to the polysilicon factory? - Yeah, mind to mouth, not lignite, sub-bituminous or bituminous coal. But yeah, for some of these facilities, like for example, GCL, Poly, now GCL tech in Xinjiang, like I can find it. Oh, well, you can actually find it from satellite because it's got these big coal pits just to the south of it, that stretch on for like seven kilometers. And those coal pits have conveyors that run directly to the solar-grade polysilicon fab. - Wow, okay, okay. - They are deploying some on-site solar, actually. Like a couple of these fabs. I've looked at many of these fabs. I have a whole Google Earth project where many of them are bookmarked. Some of them install some on-site solar, but it reduces, it's basically coal savings, maybe. And they're not installing a huge amount. Like it's like a few megawatts, maybe. Next to facilities that might have like six gigawatts of coal on-site. - Wow, holy shit. Okay, so we bring up Xinjiang. That sort of naturally needs to lead into a conversation about Uyghur forced labor. There is US legislation on the books, I believe trying to penalize that. I heard there was like a massive number of solar panels that were kind of impounded in various customs locations in the US, this was several years ago. You also mentioned this process is highly automated as well. So again, avoiding the culture war side of things. What I appreciate about your work is kind of how data-driven it is, how responsible it is. So let's jump into the thorny issue of Uyghur labor, particularly in Xinjiang, but in the solar supply chain. - Yeah, so yeah, I want to qualify that statement about automation because it applies especially to solar cell and module production, but these solar-grade polysilicon production and sort of ingot growth and wafering, those are highly mechanized, but it's not robot arms really doing it. It's more sort of like metallurgical chemical. It's more like a chemical plant or a foundry almost. And then metallurgical grade silicon actually is still rather labor-intensive. And then I think the key thing here for people to understand about the ties between the solar industry and sort of the broader ecosystem of forced labor programs in Xinjiang is that it is an ecosystem, it's an industrial ecosystem. The way that heavy industry in China is organized is often organized into industrial parks. So you have this park that the county government or the provincial government basically sort of made available for heavy industries to sort of come in at very, very low land cost. And maybe the local government even sets up the local power generation and the local coal mines for you and gives you a special price on the coal or on the electricity so that your business just has really, really good fundamental economics. And so you have a polysilicon co-located maybe under the same company, maybe under a different company with like an aluminum smelter and with a metallurgical grade silicon factory and maybe a solar glass factory and maybe a spin-off that makes like silanes out of the silicon. And then you've also got the coal plant. - All co-located. - Yeah, yeah, all co-located. - Wow. - This is most typical of some of the outlying provinces like Inner Mongolia or Xinjiang. And so, and at the same time, because of the Chinese government's sort of campaign of cultural repression against the Uyghur, Kazakh and other Turkic Muslim minorities, Kyrs. Basically, the Chinese government is running what they call surplus labor placement programs, which are in effect programs that take Uyghurs who are often employed in small scale agriculture or Kazakhs who are employed in like traditional like livestock, husbandry, and are like, you are living in a sort of low income sort of hand to mouth sort of lifestyle. And we are going to sort of place you in the garment industry, the intensive sort of agricultural like cotton industry, pharmaceuticals industry, metals industry, mining. And then they'll place maybe 30 of these workers or maybe a hundred of these workers or maybe 200 of these workers at a given factory. There was recent sort of New York times and German reporting on these programs, which do show that some workers participate in these programs voluntarily. But at the same time, there is also strong evidence from even official Chinese policy documents, either publicly published or leaked that show that these programs are intended to sort of fragment Uyghur culture, put like sort of get parents out of the home, their children are then enrolled into boarding schools, the parents work very, very far from home. And then these programs are coercive as well, where government cadres, officials will go from house to house and sort of recruit for these programs. And if you decline that sort of a black mark against you in a province that is already subject to intense surveillance and other general repression where especially at its height, several years ago, if you had like a Quran study app on your phone, if you had traveled abroad, these would be sort of black marks against you that could be caused for you to be detained in the region sort of network of detention camps. And so with that sort of fear hanging over you, with every Uyghur person, every Kazakh person in the Uyghur region, knowing someone who has been detained in these camps, that's what's sort of hovering over their heads when someone comes and says, "Would you like to participate in this labor program?" And the final thing I wanna flag as well is that there are documented cases for testimony from either people who have sort of escaped from these programs or from their relatives abroad who have been in communication with people who have been involved in these programs, that even people who are highly educated, software engineers or nurses, who clearly are not underemployed have been detained and then maybe once they left the detention center, we're then enrolled in these programs. So it seems that they also, it's not trying to uplift unemployed Muslim minorities, it's also sort of a punitive measure. - You know, Steve, it's interesting. Like I've been covering China recently in a bit of a hyper-focused way. I find it fascinating. I guess I have like mixed feelings and in the one sense, I'm in awe of their ability to kind of out-produce, and particularly with Made in China 2025, talking again to Patrick McGee about their manufacturing capabilities, obviously as a nuclear stand, seeing a country pulling off nuclear economically and on schedule is inspiring as a lover of mega projects. But there is this dark underbelly, which we're starting to uncover in this podcast, which I think is, or this episode, which I think is really important sort of counterbalance. - You know, I draw a lot of parallels to America's campaign of repression and cultural assimilation against Native Americans. It's on that level. There are many weaker activists overseas, many of whom delayed becoming activists for years because they were afraid of what would happen to their relatives that they knew would be in captivity. But these activists still have not heard from their sister or their brother for years who have been detained. And so that's what I really look to is we know from overseas relatives of people who have been entrapped in this system just how terrifying it is. Even relatives who have been released from these systems, people make it very clear that in their conversations with family members that those family members still feel that they're being intensely monitored and live under the fear that if they step out of line again that they will once again, you're a run afoul of this. - I don't wanna spend too, too much time on this, but I guess how important is weaker labor forced or not to the production of solar panels? Is it, does it make them a lot cheaper? What's the story here? - That's exactly where I wanted to get back to, which is that, so first off, these industrial facilities that are making solar inputs or solar products are large facilities, like thousands of people, tens of thousands of people. So maybe we're, so in any one component, if it's the aluminum department or the polysilicon department or the coal-fired power department, maybe the level of weaker forced labor exposures on the order of tens to hundreds of workers. So there is that, there is first off that context. And so as a result, and because these are very mechanized, chemical or automated, well, especially at the later steps of the supply chain, automated, which takes place more broadly throughout China, I think that the Chinese government could reverse its Xinjiang policies tomorrow and the price of solar band modules would not change by a cent per watt. Yeah, or a tenth of a cent per watt. - And this weaker labor is, it goes beyond just the solar industry. It's in a whole number of industries across China. - Cotton-tubated requirements. - Some of them very far from Xinjiang, from what I understand. - There maybe has been a shift in recent years to place more weaker workers more broadly throughout China, including Eastern China, yeah. - Okay, okay, let's park that. I mean, we could talk a ton more about it, just I guess my concluding thought. You mentioned a few historical examples and none are perfect, obviously. But the one that struck me hearing about children sort of being placed in boarding schools was the residential school experience, which I'm much more familiar with here in Canada, having worked on Canada's largest native reserve and toured a residential school, which still stands with survivors, haunting, haunting experience. And, you know, the genocide definition goes well beyond the physical destruction of a people, but into the cultural destruction. So we'll park that there. In terms of the impacts on imports of this component of weaker forced labor or coerced labor within the supply chain, what's the reaction been from Europe and the U.S.? - Yeah, so the reaction has been very strong in the U.S. As you mentioned earlier, there is no Congress enacted the Weager Forced Labor Prevention Act, which essentially forces a very high burden of proof on any companies that would want to import, especially solar modules, but also, you know, cotton, tomatoes, aluminum, a whole list of other commodities that are sourced from the from Xinjiang. And so essentially the U.S. has an import ban. And as a result, and also in order to import parts into the U.S. that are on a specific short list of high risk products, including solar modules, the companies that want to do the imports have to demonstrate that they did not come from the weaker region. And so that is the reason why many solar shipments were impounded immediately following this rule, although solar companies have gotten better at this compliance. And also the solar sector has sort of recognized that this rule is here to stay and has reshuffled, you know, trade in solar commodities so that they no longer bother shipping products that will just get impounded to the U.S. - So how does that work given that I think it's 40 to 45% of the world's solar grade polysilicon is made in Xinjiang? - It's probably, so one thing that helps is that that percentage has probably fallen, not because they've shut down any of the facilities in Xinjiang, but because the industry has grown significantly. The most recent figures I have from like 2022 suggested that those figures had already fallen to about a third each of a third of metallurgical grade silicon and a third of solar grade polysilicon being made in the weaker region. And now I think, you know, with industry growth, I don't know what the most recent numbers are, but let's say like maybe a quarter if we're being optimistic. So that helps somewhat. Now there's more, you know, non-Sinjiang feedstock that you can source from to ship products to the U.S. - And the Chinese are obviously installing more solar, I think, than the rest of the world combines. Maybe those, the Xinjiang source polysilicon can survive in the domestic market quite nicely. - And Europe so far to answer the other part of your question is like, cares about this issue? Like there's a lot of private sector concern around solar panel sourcing. But in terms of regulatory terms, you know, Europe has just passed a forced labor regulation and is still in the process of implementing it and the implementation will take a couple of years to come into effect. So Europe in general has been moving slower. And, you know, in no small part because I think there is a bit of a recognition of how hard these supply chains are to trace. All supply chains through China are very opaque and non-transparent. And also, you know, maybe there's some awareness that essentially, you know, many countries' climate policy does sort of depend on cheap imports of clean energy technologies, including solar panels. - So is there a cost premium on organic GMO-free or Uyghur labor-free polysilicon or products derived from it? Is there a cost premium there? - Oh, yes, there is, yeah. - Really? - For polysilicon, it's very generous. And that's actually one major reason why non-Chinese polysilicon producers have been able to stay in business, especially for out-of-China manufacturers that care about sort of differentiating themselves. They are willing to pay top dollar for non-Chinese polysilicon. It's on the order of like four-fold to five-fold. And then for modules that translates into about a two-fold to three-fold price premium. - Wow. - Yeah. - Wow, and how significant is that part of the sector? But that's not insignificant in terms of the pricing. - Yeah, so it's kept about a quarter of global solar-grade polysilicon production outside of China. I mean, it's helped by the fact, you know, to go back to the, you know, like, can we compete with China, how dominant is China? We can make solar-grade polysilicon outside of China because we can make chip-grade polysilicon out of China. And we do at massive scales, including in the US. Like this is not an unknown technology. The challenge rather is actually, is that if you can make solar-grade polysilicon, you may as well go all the way to chip-grade polysilicon, which is a much higher end, higher value product, rather than fight the cheap Chinese solar-grade polysilicon producers, like to the death in that very, very narrow margins in this country. - Low margin. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - So, yeah. - It's not that we don't know how to make it. Like, it's actually rather competing again with the cheap feedstock and cheap energy. - But it's just trying to match that scale and the vertical integration and just these clusters you mentioned of, as you know, six gigawatts of coal next to an aluminum smelter next to a polysilicon, fab, et cetera, pretty extraordinary. While we're on it, one other question in terms of the energy culture wars this came up, I believe Michael Schellenberger publicized it and Italian had done some research, but I was looking at the carbon intensity of polysilicon and the idea that, you know, the life cycle emissions are actually much higher if you factored in the difference between coal-fired polysilicon production versus European-made, which would be, and maybe US, which would be made with cleaner fuels or sources of electricity. You had a kind of prolonged debate on Twitter. What was your findings and your take on this? - You know, one of the reasons why I reacted so strongly to that analysis is that I had done my own number crunching and come up with a number that was three times lower. So I knew there was something funny going on there. You know, that methodology was actually using very, very old literature. The author of that analysis was basically very, very paranoid about using any literature that relied on sort of industry figures, like maybe a little irrationally to the point of using like a paper from, I think like on the order of like 2005 to try and estimate, you know, energy inputs. And as a result, the carbon footprint of the solar manufacturing process. The thing is that solar manufacturing has just, it has gone through like several revolutions since the mid-2000s. For example, in like 2014, solar, you needed like 3.5 grams of solar-grade polysilicon per watt of solar, because, you know, you had losses in the process, wafers were a lot thicker back then, and now you're down to like 2.3. Siemens reactors have gotten a lot more efficient. And like we use less glass on the solar modules now, and like the aluminum frames are lighter. And yeah, so it's like, yeah, like it goes on, we use less silver paste on the modules now. So you compound like a 30% efficiency improvement there, a 40% efficiency improvement here, to the point where now like my figures, which I like highlighted in that figure, in that Twitter thread might be two times too high, which really means that, you know, those figures that, you know, Michael Schoenberger and a few others were highlighting are just significantly higher. At this point, I'm pretty convinced that, you know, even the most carbon-intensive solar module, if it's being installed on like a gas grid or a coal grid, it's gonna pay itself back in like two years max, no matter how carbon-intensive it is. Yeah. I'm not sure if you have the numbers off your, the top of your, is it the top of your ton? Anyway, at your fingertips, but like nuclear, I think in the latest, God, I'm blanking on them, it was an IPCC, it was an EU-based. EU-enough trapezoid, or no, no, no, no, UNECE. That's it, yeah. Saying like five grams per kilowatt hour of CO2 for nuclear. I forget where it went in solar rad, it was something like 15, I think 40 for solar. Not as maybe low carbon as you'd expect, but the Schoenberger, and remind me of the Italian gentleman's name, but. Yeah, Enrico, Enrico has his first name. Okay, we'll put that in the show notes, but what was the grams of CO2 per kilowatt hour? So Enrico was saying like 150 grams of CO2 per kilowatt hour, which is like gas with carbon capture. It's like pretty high, 150 grams of CO2 per kilowatt hour. My numbers originally calculated a couple years ago now, we're like, okay, most coal-intensive, paranormal imaginable might be like 60 to 70, like grams CO2 per kilowatt hour. And if I update those numbers for like modern panels, like I would have to really stretch to get 30 grams CO2 per kilowatt hour. And like realistically, probably a lot more like 20 grams CO2 per kilowatt hour. So it might be even lower than it was when it was produced more in lower carbon grids in Europe and America, because the processes have just got so much more efficient. Is that sort of the way to read this? Well, the efficiency improvements apply everywhere, like your solar module. But I'm just comparing like to the 40 grams of CO2 per kilowatt hour in the 2015 IPCC life cycle analysis, or the UN ECE I think was 2021. Yeah, that might have gotten a little better. Historically, let's say it was 40 in Europe and the US, and the claim from Schellenberger and Enrico was that, no, you're not looking at the carbon intensity of solar in Europe, we're looking at it in China, there's a lot more coal, so it's more like 150. And you're saying it might be now, even the most coal-intensive might be lower than historically what it was in Europe in 2015. I think it's just illustrative of just, like when you're analyzing and making comparisons of different energy technologies, like stay up to date on where the technologies are. Yeah, yeah, to highlight one specific technical issue, for example, with Enrico's analysis, like at that time, crystalline silicon solar, the standard was multi-crystalline silicon solar, where basically you took the polysilicon chunks and you sort of, you melted them in a metal crucible, and they formed sort of chunks. They're this sort of more like, almost like sort of blue camo-patterned solar cells that you still see sometimes, as opposed to like just the pure navy blue ones that you see now, which are monocrystalline. And then you just sort of slice that camo-pattern chunk. So it's a completely different process, it's just a completely different generation of solar technology. And so that like, it's like 20 years old tech, basically. Okay, let's move on a little bit to the cost downs. I mentioned in the introduction a, what is it, a cost reduction of a factor of 10,000 from I think it was about $300 per kilowatt hour in the 50s to 3.6 cents per kilowatt hour now. This is obviously not the full cost of electricity, full systems costs, but just the kind of LCOE of the solar project itself. So what are the main ingredients that account for that? And in terms of that fall off in price, like when did most of it happen? Are we likely to see more cost declines? Are we falling a curve here in terms of cost reductions? Like how cheap can we get, I guess, is the question. Well, I mean, I guess if you were going back to 1950, then I guess most of it happened between 1950 and 2008. But as far as, I focus most off on the modern era and like circa like 2013 solar modules were 80 cents per watt, 80 US cents per watt. And now they're, now the cheapest Chinese modules are on the order of 10 cents per watt. So, you know, one eighth what they were just, you know, 12 years ago. Yeah, really quite dramatic. And, you know, in the last 15 years, what has really explained that? I think the biggest thing is just economies of scale. It's just like gigantic, like your giga factories, but for every step of this solar manufacturing supply chain that, you know, just make the per unit cost a lot cheaper. You know, there's a lot of synergies with, you know, co-location and economies of scale. You have also sort of innovations in the solar cell technology. Like I said, you're just shaving as much as you can off of like every margin you want your polysilicon production to be as energy efficient as possible. You're making the wafers as thin as you possibly can. You used to saw the wafers with just steel wire. And now we're using diamond wafers, diamond wire, because it results in fewer losses from like silicon dust that you just leave on the table. These kinds of changes, you know, less silver on the silicon cell, just this relentless sort of cost down. This is really where sort of Kyle Chan sort of, like relentless sort of involution internal competition in China comes into play, which I would sort of describe as sort of like China will guarantee a market, China will guarantee if you are a Chinese solar manufacturer that you will do better than the foreign competition. They will tariff the foreign, the foreign, you know, solar that comes into China. They will guarantee that you will always do better than the overseas companies. But then when it comes to you versus the other Chinese companies, doggy dog, survival of the fittest. And I guess this raises the natural question. So something I've been, you know, in a very unsophisticated way as a dilettante pseudo economist. I shouldn't even use that title. Is this idea that, you know, neoliberal financialized capitalism is obviously good at derivatives trading, and I'm being pejorative here. Obviously financial services are actually very important. But speaking in more extreme terms, we're really good at installing solar, maybe not at the scale of the Chinese, but that's something that we've been quite competent with. We're pretty decent with installing gas turbines. Got pretty resilient supply chains there and can stand one of those up in a couple of years. Decent at wind, maybe not the best at offshore wind, but solar's really where, you know, certainly a lot of the demand growth, certainly not demand growth. A lot of the capacity is growing, for instance, in the US grid. That may change a little bit with, you know, disincentives from the Trump administration or at least lack of incentives. But in any case, this is something that financialized neoliberal capitalism can do in a way that I think it can't do nuclear. Maybe it could if there was a real energy imperative to do the nuclear, but not for, you know, not for climate reasons, for instance, right? And we've seen those struggles in Europe where there is a bit more of an energy imperative, but definitely in the US around deploying nuclear. So in any case, to make a long story short, you know, this model, this political economy in North America is good at solar because it's really low risk construction projects. It's highly modular, you know, a number of reasons there. There's land, et cetera. But perhaps this wouldn't be possible without the other political economy in China, which is able to create this incredible integration and produce at such massive scale. So this begs the question, how much would solar cost if it were like absent China, absent that political economy, if it was produced, say, in Europe or the US? How do we work on answering that question? I do have an answer to that question. I just looked at my graph of how solar costs have declined and I subtracted six years from it, which is a different, like, I think some people would tell you, oh, it just wouldn't be possible. Like you needed the Chinese system. But, you know, all of the incentives would have worked in the same direction. You would still want thinner wafers. You would still want less solar per, less silver per cell. You would still want the maximum efficient, you know, monocrysalin, silicon, solar cell possible. You know, maybe we wouldn't have gotten there as fast. But so yeah, I'm gonna say, I'm gonna throw in a number. I'm gonna say 30 to 40 cents per watt of solar module. Yeah. - So we've costed down from 80 in, what was it, 2015? - 2013-ish, yeah. - 2013 to 10 now, and you're saying it'd be about 30. What about just the scale? Like part of the idea of, you know, how cheap things have gotten is Chinese flooding of Europe and the U.S. with just sheer volume, which has driven down costs. Similar story with batteries there, in terms of some allegations of overproduction and dumping. Like could the U.S. and America produce as much in terms of sheer volume? - Yeah, I mean, I get it. I think it would be a few years behind, because again, equipment costs are only a fraction of solar project costs. - Yes, yes. - And there's been tremendous learning in solar, in how we do solar farms as well. Like, in fact, like 15 years ago, we would pour concrete and then like melt the solar racks in concrete. And that was extremely expensive and also required way more materials. And now we no longer do that. Now we just sort of jackhammer steel piles into the earth and then melt the solar modules onto that. So, you know, there's been tremendous learning and installation and project development, project siting, planning. So there's been a huge amount of cost down in just sort of the construction, procurements. - The EPC. - Yeah, EPC, yeah. - Yeah, yeah, no, that was interesting. I was looking at some graphs of this and like one third of the cost, I think we're at around $1,000 per installed kilowatt in the U.S. and about, I think 300 of that or one third is the actual solar module and one third is site preparation. - Maybe a little better than that. Maybe 800, 900, but yeah, on that order, yeah. - Okay, so that's really interesting. And again, Jigarshaw, if you're listening, we had this funny exchange. It was quite spirited. So that's why I feel okay bringing this up. But Jigarshposition was that solar wasn't more complicated of a construction project than nuclear. But what you're describing there, in terms of not even having to put a concrete foundation and just driving piles is interesting. I've also heard about ground based solar where you just get rid of the racking altogether. Is that a thing? - I'm very skeptical about that. - It sounded weird. - Panel longevity, like cows walking over your solar panels and just like taking a crap on them. They're not gonna be optimally facing or tilted. I am, I do not believe the just put solar panels on the ground thing, yeah. - Okay, I think we're like close to the end here. Maybe just a couple more questions. Again, in terms of the energy culture wars, this has come up a lot. Lifetime of like a modern panel, does that vary in terms of like higher quality versus lower quality panels, utility versus residential? Can you give us a number and a sense of sort of degradation? - I mean, these days, module manufacturers are issuing warranties for their panels on the orders of 20 to 25 years. And the, and most solar project developers are working under the assumption that the solar modules are gonna be good for 30 to 35 years. The modules have just gotten way more durable. Degradation has gone down, encapsulants have gotten way better. So the panels just last way longer. At this point, the biggest factor in like actual module lifetime is how well you take care of them. So utility scale projects that get better, taken care of them better than random panels on homeowner's roof or some car park somewhere will probably last a little longer. They'll get dusted more frequently. They will, people will take care of them. By and large, I think, you still see a lot of people being like, oh, 15 to 20 years, but that's way too short at this point. Like my working assumption is 30 to 35 years. - Yeah. - Again, I wanna try and stay away. Like this be a separate episode in terms of talking about how much, what percent solar we should apply on whatever grid and that's gonna change probably by the insulation. We'll leave those out 'cause we just physically don't have time for it. But one thing I think we need to talk about is the duck curve and the degree to which the costowns in four-hour stores, lithium ion batteries is affecting that. You used to live in California and you no longer do, but I'm sure you've paid attention to that. What's going on there in terms of that story? - Yeah, so California has passed now 10 gigawatts sort of in terms of like output input of battery capacity. - That's like that is extraordinary. So for four hours, they can put up 10 gigawatts for a grid. I don't know what the California grid consumes, but that is like, I never thought we'd see that. I'm ignorant of shit. - Yeah, California grid is about 40 gigawatts peak. Yeah, so it is remarkable. And China has I think 700 gigawatt hours wait, I have the number here actually. Yeah, 721 gigawatt hours of battery storage on their grid now. - Okay, okay. Which would probably be like one, if that's four-hour storage, then we're talking about 160, like just open up the batteries and you're letting on 160 gigawatts in any given second. Holy shit. - So storage is a thing. Yeah, some of the really like solar pilled people out there will say, and they are right on this, that we would build batteries out the Wazoo, even if climate wasn't a concern and even if renewables weren't a thing. - And again, in terms of being a culture worth thing, like they're fabulous with nuclear, they're fabulous with hydro. - Yeah, yeah. - Yeah, okay. And okay, so I guess lastly, I was reading net zero Australia's preparation for a talk I gave called A Tale of Two Elements. Check out the sub stack. I think it's my finest piece of writing to date. But there's ideas around, okay, this is just gonna get so cheap, the combination of solar and batteries, wind maybe less so, but the true sort of miracle energy technologies of the last several decades in terms of just scale of deployment, cost downs, et cetera, leaving aside all these questions of intermittency, et cetera, really are solar and batteries. And some of these exercises in net zero modeling, call for just like extraordinary amounts of solar and basically dealing with the intermittency and the seasonal issues by just crazy, crazy overbuilds, massive amounts of batteries, massive amounts of green hydrogen. In my piece, The Tale of Two Elements, I referenced sort of some of the early excessive optimism or delusional thinking of the so-called atomic Malthusians. I think about people like Harrison Brown or even I'm temporary blanking on the Hubbard, King Hubbard who worked for the Atomic Energy Commission, but these ideas about nuclear power plants, the atomic agro-industrial complex, we're gonna make all the deserts bloom with breeder reactors, we're gonna plant the whole, power the whole planet forever and there'll be energy too cheap to meter. Are we at risk of having similar delusions in terms of just how far of this can go in terms of the deployment and getting around these questions of nighttime and intermittency through just sheer brute forcingness with overbuild of both solar and batteries? A complex question and it's gonna vary geographically obviously, but I just wanted to get your sense in terms of where you sit on this question. Yeah, I think as a fellow friend of nuclear, I would caution the sort of the solar maxers against promising energy too cheap to meter because I might come back to bite them. I've thought a lot about this question as well. I think there's two schools of sort of solar maxing. One school is the distributed people who think that like solar and batteries are a shortcut to just not having to pay significant transmission and distribution costs anymore, which are actually where a lot of your grid costs come from. And so they'll be like, yeah, you just generate and consume the energy where it's consumed and then you don't need as many transmission wires and your grid is just way cheaper as a result. And my response to that is you need to actually demonstrate such a system and I think you're actually leaving a lot out of the conversation. I listened to a lot of these people sort of make these claims about their distributed energy systems. I just listened the other day to a three hour long, I think they're called the Deris Gang podcast with Jesse Pelton on how distributed solar is gonna eat the world. And it's like, no, I think there are things that you're not mentioning like backfeeding, observability of distributed residential sort of solar energy consumption and system protection that are not, your energy is not gonna flow from neighborhoods to other areas of the grid or whatever in that way. I think people have to actually demonstrate that such a system, which is radically different from our current system, can actually work. The second category of solar maxes, I think, I think they fall into the flaw of thinking that the solar battery gas system, which today is actually like really, really hard to compete with, like that is a cheap grid. Like if you're building a grid from scratch, like, yeah, that is a really cheap grid. They conflate it and think that you can just like get rid of the gas and that it'll still be super cheap. One, in fact, the reason that you have that, 10% of gas turbines in there is to prevent like significant cost ballooning, which you see in a lot of academic modeling of 100% renewable versus all the alternatives as you're sort of trying to push the system all the way to that 100% solar. So I think, and then, forget about it, anywhere in the world where it's significantly cloudy, New England, Alaska, Mongolia, Northern, like Hokkaido, Japan. The way I look at it, I want an optimal system, throw all the clean energy options into that system and then build what the model tells you to build. There's no reason to do it all with one thing or another. By all means, clean energy technologies will be competing with each other, but we should let them all run in the race. - I guess just one last question, in terms of the kind of you mentioned two sort of solar max divisions on as the distributed. Like, I think it's probably possible to design such a system for sort of light commercial residential use. But when we start talking about what's necessary for this to replicate itself, even just beyond the four pillars of civilization and other key inputs to modern life through industrial society, which often have sort of 24/7 sort of baseload power needs, just replicating the panels themselves, the polysilicon production, et cetera, requires kind of a different kind of power. And I think we are starting to see some, as you're mentioning, integration of solar into polysilicon production, but still for these 24/7 reliable processes or for data centers or whatever else, it seems like that's a challenge. Again, maybe in the perfect environment, we have super cheap natural gas, tons of batteries and solar. But are you aware, like there is a, I believe a polysilicon plant in the UAE next to a massive solar farm, which you can do the sort of, you know, the math for and calculate total output and say this plant is, you know, producing green polysilicon, you know, using nothing but the sun, but of course it's on the UAE grid and also uses five gigawatts of nuclear from Baraka and many gigawatts from natural gas as a part of, you know, being plugged into the grid. So are you aware of, I guess China would be where that would be a leading thing again of, and we sort of, I sort of touched on this question before, but I guess just this question of, you know, power heavy 24/7 baseload loads with solar. Is that happening anywhere to what degree? I guess China, right? Yeah, it's not happening in China. I've actually done this math for aluminum producers in China. There was one set of aluminum smelters in Inner Mongolia where there was a lot of solar deployed nearby. So I was like, okay, I have to do this. I just crunched like how much generation you would have from those solar farms. They were like large utility grade, the utility scale solar farms next to this, you know, set of aluminum lines. And it was 1% of the aluminum. (laughing) And I was like, oh, wow, okay. Yeah, it's hard. Like if you have steady baseload heavy industrial users and you just want to try to like build on site like renewables, like that is, that is hard. You know, China has some pilot scale projects that they have just recently funded where they want to try and deploy some packages to like, like they want to deploy like 10 gigawatts of renewable energy in Inner Mongolia associated with another Chinese aluminum, state-owned aluminum company, Smelter. But the goal of that is to run the onsite coal units at that Smelter less, you know, and reduce emissions, but it's not replacing the base load. And, you know, in addition to just getting 24/7 electricity, there's all the industrial heat, there's all the industrial heat challenges. Like people think of aluminum smelting as a fully electrified process, but like there are some processes like baking the anodes that go into your aluminum Smelter, for example, for the for the whole Haru process that actually require really high temperature and also required, by the way, carbon feedstocks. So, so like, or similarly, like metallurgical grade silicon is a furnace-based process. Blast furnace iron, you know, the examples are bound. So we don't have these solutions yet. I am a technological optimist. I do believe we will invent solutions for these challenges. There are, for example, some really interesting like molten ultralysis approaches for steel that could be an alternative to both the traditional blast furnace and the, you know, green hydrogen. But yeah, we don't have them yet. I think, you know, as I've become a bit less of a nuke broer, a slightly more sophisticated one. James Cronstein really credit him partially with pushing me along on that journey. But solar desalination sounds pretty kick-ass in terms of a process that can be run intermittently, usually in really, really sunny places and using really fucking cheap solar panels. That sounds like a really kind of ideal process. I'm sure it's starting to kick up. But I thought that was really interesting and it sort of popped my cherry in terms of being a little more open-minded. Again, me coming off of the scars of my local insane feed and tariff program here in Ontario and the culture wars. But again, I thought that was very interesting. So if anyone is, you know, outraged by this episode, that's sort of my entry point. I think there's room for really nuanced analysis here. Siever, thanks for doing that for us. I really appreciate your data-driven takes on this and a fascinating conversation. Thanks for making the time. - Thanks again for having me. Always a pleasure. - Today's episode was made possible through a generous donation from the Xerxes Foundation and from listeners like you making pledges on our sub-stack. If you'd like to join the tribe, please do head over to our sub-stack, smash that pledge button, or if you would like a tax-deductible receipt, you can hit the donate button and make a contribution through our fiscal sponsor. 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