Solar Manufacturing Politics, Global Expansion, and Australia's Synthetic Fuel Ambitions

Today on the Clean Power Hour Live, Tim Montague and John Weaver (the Commercial Solar Guy) dive into pressing developments in the solar industry. They examine the Trump administration's decision to rescind Biden's Defense Production Act support for solar manufacturing and discuss the potential impacts on the 50 gigawatts of planned domestic solar panel production. 

The conversation shifts to exciting projections that global solar installations could reach one terawatt next year—a staggering milestone representing approximately $1.5 trillion in economic activity across manufacturing and installation.

They also explore Australia's ambitious plans to build 6-gigawatt renewable energy "pods" combining wind and solar to produce green hydrogen and ammonia for export. 

Throughout their discussion, they contemplate the challenges and opportunities in the energy transition, from grid capacity issues to the potential of a hydrogen economy.

Key Topics Discussed:

1. Trump administration rescinding the Defense Production Act for solar manufacturing 

https://www.pv-tech.org/trump-rescinds-bidens-defense-production-act-support-for-solar-manufacturing/

2. Projections for 1 terawatt of global solar installations in 2026 https://bsky.app/profile/commercialsolarguy.com/post/3lkuvm7kduc2k

3. O&M of the Week from one of our projects - 9 mm?

https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7308436497660071936/?actorCompanyId=11504835

4. The group wants to build chunks of 6 GW wind+solar plants to make ammonia - what about airline fuels?

https://reneweconomy.com.au/fewer-bigger-turbines-approved-as-huge-green-hydrogen-project-wins-federal-head-start-funding/

5. Germany going in on renewables with $100 billion

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-03-14/merz-

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Tim Montague, your host, andwelcome to another episode of
solar and storage news thatwe're doing every other week
with none other than thecommercial solar guy, welcome to
the show, John.

Unknown (00:18):
Hey, Tim. How you doing

Tim Montague (00:22):
solar? Guy,

John Weaver (00:26):
that's that's only that's not me. I was hacked and
no longer have full control.
That's the story we're goingwith. Mr. Montague,

Tim Montague (00:38):
yeah, somebody took over. Somebody took over
John's Twitter handle. So checkit out. Yeah, totally,

Unknown (00:46):
that's, that's what it is.

John Weaver (00:56):
Hey, so you, you, are you starting a pickleball
club? Like, so I know it's notsolar, but we might get solar on
your building, but you do likeprofessional pickleball. Like,
how's this working? Because yougot a cool

Tim Montague (01:07):
hat. Yeah, I am officially a pickleball
developer. I've been apickleball player since 2020 I
grew up playing tennis, pingpong, racquetball, so rocket
sports are in my blood, and thepandemic triggered an avalanche
of pickleball playing because wecouldn't do anything indoors. Lo

(01:30):
and behold, I realized that wehave this thing called Winter in
Illinois, where there's snow andice everywhere, and we don't
have an indoor pickleballfacility or a good, dedicated
indoor pickleball facility inChampaign. So I am building the
CU pickleball club, and it's a16,000 square foot four court,

(01:50):
24/7 John, you can, you can dropin at 2am if you'd like and play
some pickleball while you'repassing through Central
Illinois. Alright, so that's mythat's my side hustle. It's
official. Tim Montague is apickleball developer. Cool. It's
going to be great. But fastestgrowing sport in America, in

(02:13):
case you hadn't noticed, wheretennis

John Weaver (02:18):
which aligns with the fastest growing solar a
generation source on Earth?

Tim Montague (02:26):
Yeah, I picked the two best industries to work in,
John, solar and pickleball. It'sjust luck of the draw. Can you
tip your camera down so we seemore of your beautiful body?
Thank you. Yeah. Yeah. Allright. Well, let's get into the
news. No shortage of good andbad news. Should we talk about

(02:51):
the defense production act?

Unknown (02:54):
Sure, yeah, absolutely, yeah.

Tim Montague (02:57):
So Donald Trump rescinds Biden's defense
production act, support forsolar manufacturing. This story
is out today on PV tech. I'llput it on screen here in a
minute. But you know, we wereall jumping up and down for joy
a couple years ago with thedefense production act, because

(03:18):
it incentivized onshoring andreshoring a manufacturing for
things like, what? Well,specifically,

John Weaver (03:29):
I think it's specifically solar panels was
the item in the production act.
So I think making modules, andthen maybe one or two levels of
them making panels and and Idon't exactly know how it
applies for the defenseproduction act like, does it
make domestic content required,or does because I saw one thing,

(03:51):
it stated it allowed certaingovernment agencies to invest in
solar power production,Something to that effect, to
move it forward, maybeincentivize but what this also,
it's just part of a broaderpicture of the incremental
changing of the governmentstructure by the current

(04:14):
administration and what. Andit's also then you have to think
about the future, about what'scoming next. And so this is just
another piece of a big machinethat was put together, and
little pieces are being takenout one by one. So, you know, I
don't exactly know how to makeuse of this piece of legislation

(04:36):
and fully understand it, but Iknow it's just it. It's part of
the bigger reality of what theenergy industry's evolving focus
is. One way of saying it, yeah,

Tim Montague (04:51):
I mean, governments do good things like
industrial policy thatincentivize things like
manufacturing of. Uh, variousthings, but we need things like
solar panels and the DPA, asit's called, defense production
act, incentivized domesticproduction of solar modules. And

(05:12):
here we are in 2025 John and theUS is gearing up for 50
gigawatts of domestic solarpanel manufacturing thanks to
this and other legislation,thanks to the IRA, the inflation
Reduction Act, and for somereason, Donald Trump doesn't

(05:32):
think that solar panel factoriesare important, I would imagine
that the governors of Texas,Georgia, Indiana, Arizona,
Colorado and other states willstrongly disagree with that,
because these factories meanjobs and lots of cash flowing

(05:57):
into your state, right?

John Weaver (06:02):
Yeah, governors don't make federal law, so
there's that. And, yeah, now isthat, you know, we have a House
of Representatives. Now therewas a letter, apparently, that
was written by a collection ofindividuals in the House of
Representatives saying, Hey,don't take our solar jobs. And

(06:27):
those individuals wouldpotentially need to be won over
to change the IRA. So there'sthat, but that's, you know,
there's so I was readingChristian Rosalind at CEA clean
energy associates. And he saidthat, as a consulting firm,
their opinion going forward totheir clients as no their base

(06:52):
case so and then they havemultiple cases, I guess, but
their base case is that the ITCand the PTC could end at the end
of this year, at the end of 25and that your projects have to
be in construction and movingforward before the end of 2025
to get safe harbor. So variousways of having 5% of the

(07:15):
project, and that there'sdifferent risks, there's
different ways that thelegislation could be adjusted
and different, and, and Congressis going to do what Congress is
going to do. So, so there's athere's a lot of questions about
what's coming now, and, and youknow these things. And as you
see defense production act,that's just another one. Yeah.

(07:38):
So

Tim Montague (07:38):
why do you think there's logic, though, to
pushing back on solar andbattery manufacturing in the
United States? Is there somegood reason why the Trump
administration wants todisincentivize these things?

John Weaver (08:00):
Yeah, yeah. There's a lot of money that supports
gas. In the country. There's alot of money that supports oil.
The US is the largest fossilfuel generator on Earth.

Tim Montague (08:16):
That's it. Yeah, yeah. I agree. I think it's just
a carrot for the oil industry orfossil industries. And look,
they already have plenty ofcarrots. We we give them all
kinds of free things andincentives. I think global
incentives for fossil fuels areto the tune of $6 trillion

(08:38):
something like that. Yeah.

John Weaver (08:40):
Little nuance, yeah, but yes, yes, that's the
number six, 7 trillion. Yeah.

Tim Montague (08:44):
It's pretty significant resources that
humanity puts into fossil fuels.
And in case you hadn't noticed,we're not stopping the burning
of fossil fuels anytime soon. COtwo levels are going up at one
ppm per year. And even if we,even if we fully make the energy

(09:05):
transition by 2050, and netzero, the economy, we were left
with a trillion tons of CO twopollution, Legacy co twos we, as
we call it, in the atmosphere,that we have to figure out how
to suck out. So that's yourhomework. John, suck, a trillion
tons of CO two out of theatmosphere. But should we talk
about a terawatt of solar nextyear?

John Weaver (09:28):
Sure, absolutely, absolutely. And if you don't

Tim Montague (09:32):
mind on on this thing called blue sky, what is
that anyway?

John Weaver (09:36):
That's just my Twitter replacement, where I'm
no longer the evil commercialsolar guy. I'm just a commercial
solar guy. I just wanted toshare it there, because I break
it down really nicely, verycleanly with a couple of images,
this terawatt thing, because Ithink it's a fun discussion to
have and and it's just, we're.
It could be that next year, theworld will install one terawatt

(10:02):
of solar panels. We're withinstriking distance, and there's a
pretty solid logic, and it's abig, cool number, and I think
the it's just representativesomething, and I think it
actually represents, like, twoand a half percent of global
electricity usage,hypothetically could be

(10:22):
generated by this one year ofsolar panel installation volume.
And so, so. So, I think lastcouple weeks ago, we talked
about there were almost 700gigawatts of new solar is
projected. And I reached out toBloomberg, Jenny Chase, and she
gave me some data showing whattheir predictions are, and then

(10:46):
where we actually end up. Andthen I looked at the growth
rates, because I have some soliddata going back to 1980 from
Bloomberg, also of how muchwe've installed each year. And
in this article, I put out a fewsolid charts and do a little bit

(11:07):
of math and show that there's aspit in chance. We go from the
600 gigawatts we installed lastyear to upper seven hundreds
this year, and from there, wejump to a terawatt next year,
which would be over 215gigawatts of new solar added in

(11:31):
one year, on top of a recordnumber and so, so that's like
The pitch, and it's because theworld's growing every year,
somebody tries to make one ofthese big predictions of big
jumps, it's always logical tosay, no, no, no, it's not that
big. Here's a million reasonswhy interconnection China is
slowing down. The United Statesmight pull back from its 50

(11:53):
gigawatts and it deployed in 24and but it still keeps happening
every stupid year and and thereyou go. So first off, I like
these numbers, so could you zoomin on there a little bit? So
$100 billion in solar panels ina terawatt, if they're at like
10 cents a watt, you know, wepay a lot more here, of course.

(12:14):
So it's probably more than 100billion but 50 cents a watt,
half a half a trillion dollarsgoing to labor in various ways,
engineers in the field, salespeople, inverter, 75 billion.
100 billion in racking, 200billion in gear. I just thought
it was cool numbers for what oneterawatt means, and and about

(12:37):
1.5 petawatt hours ofelectricity, I think is the
volume. And globally, we do,like 30 petawat hours, I think
is our number. So

Tim Montague (12:50):
that's how much, how much electricity are we
adding to the grid in 20 to 25Do you have any idea

John Weaver (12:57):
globally? I don't know, but it's growing a little
bit right now, a couple percent,so, so it's a chunk. So we're
like, maybe matching it rightnow. Maybe last year we matched
it so, but yeah, so there's afew charts that I would love to
show here that are just great.
It's a beautiful math.

Tim Montague (13:19):
Yeah. Well, if I try to go to the BNF story,
though, I don't think that'llrender, will it?

John Weaver (13:24):
Oh, no, you could just scroll down. Oh, okay,
yeah. So this is the BNF chart,shown growth, uh, historically,
and where we're at. You know, wecan see right there in the
middle, you see that 599, thatwas what we did last year. And
here's a couple of charts here,these two that are coming next,
the next tweet, no, well, thisis good one too. But this one

(13:48):
shows on the left, that's longG, and their projection that
we'd hit one terawatt in 2030and on the right, that's you,
dahlomer, and I think that's howI say the name who projected
that we hit one terawatt nextyear, and, you know, he lines up
with this projection, actually.
And so that was pretty cool whenI covered that couple years ago,

(14:08):
and was like, No way that's nothappening. And now we're sort of
kind of getting close to maybeit happening. And then the next
slide is kind of neat, and thisis where I got data directly
from Bloomberg. And so this is awe got three chunks of data
here. The pink is what BloombergNef projected. The yellow is

(14:29):
what actually hit. And then thecurvy line is where they were
relative the projection versusthe end number, and on average,
you know, you can see it updown, up down, but it's they're
mostly short. Only those threered ones that you see in the
middle are down years where theyover projected. We almost always

(14:52):
under Project at least over thistime frame. And it averaged 10%
Under projection. Over the lastfew years, during our crazy
upturn, it's been averaging like15% so the game was, look at
their projection, and thispercent, and that's where we're
really going to go. And that's,and that's, I think in the next

(15:14):
slide, I might do that. No, theone after that. There you go.
That's a number. So the realnumber that Bloomberg would
project is somewhere between729, and 761, based on going up
10 to 15% on their q4projection, which is amusing,

(15:36):
because they have an optimisticprojection, which is right in
between those numbers, wherethey say, Hey, we're gonna get
like, 12 and a half percentmore. So they have multiple
projections, and that's actuallyslightly off the pace for us to
get to one terawatt the nextyear, because that's only 10 to
15% off of 16% so, you know, weneed, we need a little more. So

(15:58):
it's just cool article. We'reclose to getting terawatt. It's
neat headline. It's a bigindustry. I you know, these are
the growth rates. This is thelast chart I made showing what
the growth rates were over thelast couple of years. And we've
averaged growing 36% and if wehit 30% two years in a row, then
we're there. So, so it'spotential. Cool headline. I like

(16:23):
the number. It represents atrillion dollars being sent on
solar panels, solar stuff in oneyear. Yep. I think even with the
US having challenges. We'restill going to see extensive
growth and change and and it'sjust going to keep hammering it,

(16:47):
and it's going to filter backnew technology.

Tim Montague (16:51):
We did 50, if we did 50 gigs right out of a
terawatt,

John Weaver (17:01):
we're 5% right?
Yeah, world's gonna go fine. Ournumber might be, might instead
of being 50 gigs, it'll be 35and all right, that's fine.
We'll get we'll rock off.

Tim Montague (17:16):
We did 40 in 2024 right? I believe so, which we
talked about last, last time

John Weaver (17:21):
in 23 we did 40.
And 24 we did 50.

Tim Montague (17:27):
Well, we did 50.
Okay, that's,

John Weaver (17:29):
that's yeah. So we went back. We changed it again.
Tim, so everybody's coming outwith the number at 50. See it
came out at 50. Yeah. So theyadjusted their numbers. Wood Mac
adjusted their number to 50 gigsand 40 for 2350 for 24 Yeah, 90
gigawatts in the last two yearsof solar added to the US. Pretty

(17:50):
cool number. But

Tim Montague (17:51):
you see how, if you're a solar panel maker,
let's say you're a big solarpanel maker, like, look like
long or Canadian solar. You wehere in the US, we think, Oh,
we're we're America, we'reimportant, but in the greater
scheme, we're not that importantto those companies and and so we

(18:14):
have to be careful. We scarethem away easily. And like right
now, Canadian solar is buildinga cell factory in Indiana, next
door to me, a true blue solarcell factory. They have broken
ground. Apparently, they have alive cam for employees to see.

(18:35):
It's not publicly available, butat some point I'll just drive
over there and walk around andshoot some photos, but, but as
we've seen, right, thesefactories, you know, think about
the Foxconn debacle inWisconsin. Foxconn was going to
make a lot of iPhones orsomething, you know, in
Wisconsin, and then thosefactories were just empty. So we

(19:01):
have to be careful. We actuallydo want to make the solar cells
in America.

John Weaver (19:08):
I got a project of the I got a project of the week,
a picture of the week. No, O andM of the week. How's that? O

Tim Montague (19:16):
M of the week?
Yes, I will try to share it onscreen. It's not my forte, but I
will try. But what's the story?

John Weaver (19:27):
The story is that we went out to a site to take a
couple pictures for ourmanufacturer. We found, I don't
know what the terminology wouldbe officially a foreign object
embedded in one of ourinverters. And I just thought it

(19:48):
was funny. But the cool part isthat the inverter is still
working, and we're we're justmoving along. I assume we're
gonna have to replace a frontpanel. On an inverter, because
eventually that will rust theit'll accelerate. And I don't
know, I don't see it last in 25years. Would you like me to
share this present? My

Tim Montague (20:10):
is it not? Is it not sharing properly? Sure, not
yet. Oh, how about now? There

John Weaver (20:16):
we go. Perfect. So click on the one on the left. I
had

Tim Montague (20:19):
to click one more button, one on the left. Okay,
fortress, yeah. So

John Weaver (20:24):
that's one of their inverters, one of their 12 kW I
think these are the envy. Arethese the NV inverters? I can't
remember the exact model, but itis 12 kW unit. It's installed in
Rhode Island, and it's this is aon grid, off grid battery,
charge control unit, and wethink that's nine millimeter

(20:45):
and, and somebody

Tim Montague (20:48):
shot the inverter,

John Weaver (20:49):
yeah, and it's still running. We checked the
serial number, and the serialnumber is up. And, you know, we
just went out to take a picture,because we had a question from a
state regulator about spacingand things like that. And so our
our electrician was on site, notelectrician, our civil was on

(21:12):
site. Took a few pictures, sentme this one, sent me the next
one. And And what's funny is, ifyou scroll, if you look to the
right there, the CEO of in thecomments. Maybe if you scroll
down a little view some morecomments there. The CEO of
fortress noticed this and said,Hey, if you need any help

(21:33):
working on this, yeah,apparently people get stuff shot
all the time. There she goes.
She said, if you need any helpwith this, let us know the name
right there at the bottom. So,Jane, yes, and so, but it's
cool. It's working. It's kind ofneat. I mean, it looks like a
small bullet, but the I'mcertain that the outer material
would start to break downeventually, and we would have an

(21:55):
issue, because that would startto rust, and has to stay there
for 25 years. So, but it'd bekind of cool to keep it there
just for the heck of it.

Tim Montague (22:07):
So let's zoom out for a second. Fortress power.
What are they known for?

John Weaver (22:16):
For me, I know fortress because they have a
highly capable inverter. Andtheir inverter is a, it's, it
can go on grid, off grid. It canconnect the battery. It has, you
know, all kinds of extra here,integrated. So they're a little
more expensive than yourstandard, just single,

(22:40):
standalone inverter. The keyfeature that I liked about them
and for this site, where it'sat, is that the inverter has the
ability to first look at the onsite demand and feed that with
solar. Then when the solar whenthe on site demand is being met,
excess generation will go to thebatteries, then when the

(23:02):
batteries get filled, then itgoes to the grid. And the reason
we have to do that is because onsite, generation is high. It's
above 60, 7080, at certaintimes. But the maximum export to
the grid here is 50 kW becauseit's a single phase transformer,
size, limited system. And thelocal grid only allows 50 kW

(23:24):
transformers, so we'd have tofigure, we had to figure out how
to feed the building 72 kW,while we would only peak export
ever 50. And it just so happenedthis inverter could do it and
and so for me, it's about ahighly functioning inverter,
apparently, take a ninemillimeter so

Tim Montague (23:46):
that's that was your install. Yes,

John Weaver (23:49):
that's our project.
And we have batteries there. Wehave three cool battery I'll do
a project of the week, a properproject of the week. Yeah,
that's our install. That's myprice. Nice. So please don't
shoot our inverters.

Tim Montague (24:05):
Internet. All right, we got time for one or
two more stories here. Just goahead and tell us about the next
story while I get this figuredout.

John Weaver (24:21):
All right, Tim, I'm good at telling stories. Uh,
I'll share it too. So, um, Ijust, I'm really interested.
There's this guy named Cody. Ican't remember his last name
right now on Twitter, who's,who's got a business where he's
trying to make synthetic fueland and so I'm interested in how

(24:44):
different companies, what wemight do. Oh, looks like you're
taking it over. Oh, good job.
And this coming out ofAustralia, they want to be a
like a hydrogen. Economy andammonia economy. And at some
point, I remember some group wastrying to make nitrogen so

(25:05):
fertilizers and other basicfuels, synth fuels, straight
from electricity. And this, Ithink, yeah, okay, yeah, so, and
there's

Tim Montague (25:20):
not obvious when you look at the story.

John Weaver (25:22):
Oh, well, the website, you know, renew
economy.com.au,

Tim Montague (25:27):
but I know the story. Yeah, renew economy is a
Australian publication, yes,sir, okay, yeah, I didn't even
know that. Yeah. John, so

Unknown (25:38):
this is pickleball player. Come on,

Tim Montague (25:40):
that's right. What do you expect?

John Weaver (25:42):
Yes, you're the party. You're the party jock on
the show. That's good. So, youknow, the headline is cool. I
actually didn't really careabout the headline. Fewer,
fewer, bigger turbines. Yeah.
What's really neat is that thisis, these are making, they're
making six gigawatt pods. Like,keep scrolling down. They have a
cool little art, art piece theydid to show off what they're

(26:03):
building, yeah, so they're thisthing. So they're making six
gigawatt pods of wind and solar,like one and a half gigs of
solar, three and a half fourgigs of wind, something like
that, that feed into thesecentralized machinery systems
that generate ammonia, export itstraight to the ocean and ship
it. And I don't know, it justseems sweet. It seems really

(26:29):
something like the if we couldfigure out, I'm you know, this
is version one of making fuels,of redoing the dinosaur. No, not
dinosaurs. I guess what, really,what makes a lot of our fossil
fuels is trees from way back inthe day, piling up because there
were no fungi to digest them. Sowe had, like, massive, deep

(26:49):
reservoirs of just deaddetritus. And then something
flipped, and something crunched,ate all that stuff, and then
that turned into our coal andthings. But we're redoing that.
We're remaking that with littleplots like 10,000 acres at a
time on the coast of Australia,maybe. And I hope that they
figure out how to do this. And Ihope we all learn how to lose 27

(27:15):
pounds of cortisol bailing fatwith a chair workout.

Tim Montague (27:21):
So does it say how cheap this wind power will be?
For example, because the thefigure that I hear folks like
Matt Campbell, who I'll bedropping an interview with soon.
I interviewed him at inner solarin San Diego a couple weeks ago,
terabase is like a penny a wattis, I mean, a penny a kWh is one

(27:45):
of the goals to unlockaffordable green hydrogen.
Penny, okay, is that numberfloating around somewhere in
this story? Do we know ice, noelectricity? It produces, yeah,

John Weaver (28:02):
because this electricity, they're going to be
building it and selling it tothemselves. So, so I don't know
how they're going to cost it.
You know, the cheapestelectricity I've heard, though,
for solar, it comes out ofIndia. Well, not, let me not
cheapest. Let me rephrase it,the purest price, that's a real
market price that's also cheapis, I'm told by, you know,
reading that it's India, becausethey don't give an incentive,

(28:27):
and they have, you know, cheapcosts. And so they do have some
import tariffs on modules forcertain projects. But I think
they have a lot of domesticsupply, little more expensive
than China, but they're at threecents a kilowatt hour. So So
unless the scale here is doingsomething different or something

(28:47):
I don't know, because I don'tknow if we're below three cents
a kilowatt hour at pure pricing,because India is pretty close to
the equator. I mean, this placemight be the northern side of
Australia, which is probablyamong some of the best sunlight
on Earth. And so, yeah, maybethree cents, maybe two and a
half, two, if something's weird,but, but I don't know, I'm

(29:09):
thinking three ish. So, so Ijust, I just think it's cool. I
want to see us figure out somefuels. I'm not sold yet on
hydrogen. It might still beearly. Batteries might come to
dominate, but having sent fuelsto take over, fertilizers and
things like that, seems like agreat path forward to start

(29:30):
things. Because green hydrogenfor electricity, sure, we need
that cheap, but green ammoniafor fertilizer, its pricing can
be stronger and it can sustainthis market and move us closer
to the price that energy needsand transportation needs
hydrogen at so it could be astep ladder from fertilizers and

(29:50):
other stuff industrial needs.

Tim Montague (29:57):
Yeah, the guy I like to follow. Around green
hydrogen is Peter KellyDetweiler. He's been running
around, giving trainings on thehydrogen economy, and last May,
I did an interview with himabout this. So check that out,
episode 207, of the Clean PowerHour. But, but it's, it's the

(30:22):
title of that show was promisesand perils of the hydrogen
economy. And that's the thingis, there are perils you need.
You need a lot of water. In thiscase, they're desalin
desalinating sea water, right?
Which is super energy intensive,totally doable, but super energy
intensive. And that's just thething, right? You need a lot of

(30:47):
water. It's a beautiful thing ifyou have plenty of water,
because it's H, 2o and you getoxygen and hydrogen, and then
you do things like make ammoniawith the hydrogen, or just
compress it, store it, burn itin a fuel cell vehicle.

John Weaver (31:10):
So have you seen the Michael Lieber blowed up?
Have you seen the micro thestaircase? Staircase? Yes,

Tim Montague (31:19):
yeah, that's a good one. Thank you. I hope
hydrogen

John Weaver (31:22):
can get halfway up that thing. I want to see it
happen, because I think it couldbe like a clean peak type of
source, similar to the waynatural gas right now, and the
peaker plants that only have 10,20% 5% capacity factors, and
they cost 50 cents per kilowatthour, 25 cents per kilowatt
hour. I don't mind paying 2550,for real, expensive peaking

(31:46):
electricity for 4% of the year.
10% Well, 10 may be strong, but,uh, you know, if there's a large
infrastructure of industrialhydrogen usage, and it's out
there being used, and then wehave these moments where, you
know, our grid needs a littlehelp, and the grid and the
industrial people can divert, orbe forced to divert, or

(32:09):
something, you know, have theirgrid hooked up to our grid
somehow there's if there seemslike there's a path where we can
Have these peaking gas plantsready to be burning hydrogen
that would just be cut off fromindustry, and because we'll pay
them four times as much for, youknow, 48 hours, something like

(32:29):
that, whatever is necessary. Sothis, I'm optimistic on these
things, and I I always getexcited by whiz bang. As you can
tell Tim, I brought you a storyabout one giant terawatt. And
now I brought you a second storyabout making synthetic fuels at
six gigawatt power plants. So

Tim Montague (32:49):
60 gigawatts, six nobody.

John Weaver (32:51):
It's 60 overall, because they want to build 10 of
those. Okay, so perfect. Thatwas the next part of the story.
We didn't get to it because wewere talking about 12 other
things, but they want to buildlike, 10 of these facilities
along this coast, or it's eitherthis group or a different group
in Australia who has also wantsto build little mini chunks that
are two to four. So it's likeAustralia is full of people with

(33:12):
very large dreams. I think it'sbecause that continent is so
giant, that country slashcontinent, it's as big as the
US.

Tim Montague (33:18):
You think about the solar resources, and
they're, they're like, prettyfreaking massive, yeah, and
yeah, Australia is not that biga population, but they could
just be an energy producer,right by harvesting photons and
turning it into fuels that canbe shipped around the globe,
right, or putting it on underseahigh voltage DC that, that thing

(33:41):
is still in the works, I think,or did that collapse? No, no.
It's moving along or underunderwater. HVAC is still
happening mid inch

John Weaver (33:50):
and along. It gets an approval here, approval
there. You know, Singapore sayswe're open to recognizing it. I
think the last time I sawsomething is that they said
they're open to officialconsideration of it. You know,
there's like we are officiallynegotiating, I think might have
been a recent conversation, so,so yeah, I'm that's just cool to

(34:15):
watch. Good job. Australia.
Please doing, please keep doing,science fair, science fiction
type of pool solar, things we

Tim Montague (34:22):
like. Oh, and if you haven't seen my interview
with Andrew Burch, you want todo that. He we talk a lot about
Australia, how they got to $1 awatt for solar, and he's the
founder of Open Solar, but socheck that out at Clean Power
hour.com that just dropped acouple weeks ago. I think we're

(34:45):
out of time, though, John,aren't we?

Unknown (34:47):
We have an infinite, yet finite amount of time. Tim,
that is

Tim Montague (34:55):
so tell our listeners how the heck they can
find you if they're not on bluesky. Uh,

John Weaver (35:01):
commercial solar guy, com, that's our website. We
have a contact us page, and I'malso on LinkedIn. I post stuff
there too. I try to putconstruction pictures to show
you that we're real. And webuild stuff and we make you dig
holes and put panels on rootsand things like that. And And
Tim, if you want to playpickleball at midnight. Where do

(35:23):
people go in Champagne?

Tim Montague (35:25):
CU pickle.com, is the website for the project.
Thank you for asking. And all ofthis content is at Clean Power
hour.com. I haven't started apickleball podcast yet, but that
will be happening at some pointtoo. But in the meantime, check
us out at Clean Power hour.com.
Please tell a friend about theshow. That's the best thing you
can do to help me and John andthe energy transition writ

(35:48):
large. And with that, I'll say,let's grow solar and storage. I
want to thank John Weaver forbeing here, and we'll see you in
two weeks. You.