Solar Power: The Future or What?

Chuck Bryant, there's Jerry over there. The sun is shining, our collars are popped, tongues of our shoes are hanging out, and um, it smells really nice in here. That's right, which must mean one thing. Chuck, It's time to talk some stuff you should know? She is? Can I say that? Sure? All right? Good? Well I just did, didn't you did? Uh? So? Uh? We are at SLEE talking about solar power today, and I'm a little psyched about this one because I was

putting this thing together over months. Dude, you would think solar power is such a hot, sexy topic. You know that there would be just reams and reams of just stuff to research and there is, but it's all really wonky and really technical, and there's a lot of stuff that contradicts other stuff. And I get this feeling of dread researching this, that the cheerleaders and champions of solar

power are losing their resolve to an extent. They'll still sell you a solar panel, They'll still tell you a solar is great, and I know that they truly believe that, but I think that they are worried that it's it's not taking off like they expected it too. But then let me just caveat that with one other thing, and then we'll get started and I'll be quiet for the

rest of the podcast. If you look at the numbers and the figures, solar has quietly um made a name for itself and established itself, at least in the United States, to an astounding degree. So I'm not quite sure what I'm picking up on when I get the sense that they're worried, because if you look at it, it's actually doing really, really well and growing all the time. Let's

discuss solar power. Yeah, power from the sun converted into electricity, right, so you can say screw you power company, yeah, or pay me power company. You could say, take this power bill and shove it. So the sun. Uh, this is pretty neat here at the beginning of this that you put together here, Um, the sun ray. The Sun's rays give off about a thousand wats of energy per square meter. So if you pull the camera back a bit and you look at Texas, let's say, a lot of sun

in Texas, a lot of land in Texas. There's a lot of a lot of stuff from Texas. There really is some stuff. No, that's true. I was gonna say the good thing about Texas. You could completely cover it with solar rays and no one but the people who live in Texas would have a problem with it. Oh boy, oh boy, oh gear Goo Google. All right, Um, So if you look at a mass land mass that's as big as Texas, they receive a little under seven hundred terra wats over the course of one hour on a

on a at noon on a sunny day. Seven terra wats. Yeah, it sounds like a lot, but is it a lot? Who knows? Who could possibly know? If you want to compare that, you're being coy uh. In that same hour, the total amount of human mage energy energy production on planet Earth. And this is all energy production that you could possibly dream of is seventeen point seven terra watts compared to seven hundred terra wats. That's forty times less than what the sun delivered to Texas and in just

that hour. Yeah, right, And the Union of Concerned Scientists happen in group who I love. Um, they say that eighteen days of sunshine that hits across the entire Earth contains the same amount of energy stored in the entirety of the planet's reserves of coal, oil and natural gas. If you dug up and burned every bit of coal, oil and natural gas, it would only produce as much

energy as eighteen days worth of global sunlight. That's astounding. Yeah, And these are you know, these are facts that have fifty caveats beneath each of them, which we're going to talk about. But it is a prime example, and I think just a good way to kind of indicate just how much energy potential energy there is coming from the sun every day. Yeah, And just I mean to to point out the obvious. The great thing about solar is there is no greenhouse gas emissions when you use solar electricity.

It's just clean energy and it's free because it's from the sun, that's right. And before you start typing, oh yeah, but what about you got a lot to make. These things were made it to look on and then before you do that, we're going to talk about all that stuff. But Josh very clearly said, once you have these things

set up, that's that's when the real benefit comes. Yes, And if I hadn't said it, I was going to eventually well no, you basically said it, like you know, when they're working, when they're active, they're not using fossil fuels. Thank you, Chuck. All right, so let's go back in time a bit, because if you think solar power, you think, oh, well, this stuff, you know, was invented in the nineteen seventies, not so you have to go all the way back

to eighteen thirty nine, believe it or not. When a French physicist name Alexandra Edmond, Uh, Josh says this back quere I mean I practiced it a million times. Queriller, I think be querillar. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's a tough word. Yes it is. There's a couple of extra continants in that.

It just shouldn't be there, that's right. So, uh, this dude He's the one that first demonstrated the photo voltaic effect, which is basically the ability of a solar cell to turn sun into electricity all the way back in right, but no one knew exactly how this work. They just knew that at work. He was burned at the stake later on for his black magic. Right, So just about forty about forty years later, there's a guy named Charles Fritz, and he, in the eighteen eighties built the world's first

rooftop solar array. Coincidentally, just a year after Edison launched the world's first coal fire power plant. UM. But this early solar array was terribly inefficient. It didn't do very much. It could bay basically power um. Jeez, I don't even know what it could power a mouse trap? How about that, which doesn't even need electricity. That's how little power that

this thing produced. Um. But it definitely demonstrated that it was possible to generate an electrical current um from sunlight in a way that it was a proof of concept, basically saying just give it like ninety years and we'll understand this better. And who was that that was? Fritz? Ye, Fritz was a good guy, but he was no, Einstein, Uh, Einstein. It would take Einstein, that is, to really explain how this all worked in nineteen o five, because he had

a knack for doing that. I'm not sure if people realize that he was a good explainer, maybe the original explainer. Well he would put it in terms that you could really understand, like like consider the sandwich. Imagine the sandwich is the sun, and then it just go from there and you'd be like, you understand what he's saying. Yeah, And if you think, uh, Einstein, oh yeah, he won a bunch of Nobel Prizes for relativity. Not so. He won the Nobel Prize in Physics for explaining the photo

electric effect. He didn't win for relativity. No, I didn't know that. Holy cow, what is unless I'm wrong? And if i am, I'm gonna have a lot of egg on my face. That's all right, Well we'll cook it off with some good old solar electricity. Gross. It is gross, but also so is the idea of cooked egg in

your beard. So Bell Labs in nineteen fifty four, if you want to talk about the modern PV cell, that was the and uh thanks to the US government really in the US military, they funded a lot of this early research, because if you've ever looked at a picture of sky Lab or any of our great satellites, you'll notice that they all have these big solar wings. Yeah. Yeah, they're solar powered. And it was because of US government research in the fifties that we were able to develop those.

I think they launched the first solar powered satellite in nineteen fifty four, no. Fifty eight, and then just six years later they launched the first solar powered satellite whose solar panels could track the Sun, which is still a pretty whiz bang thing to have for your solar array. And this is nine sixty four. So the US government invested in the earliest research and everything was going along

really smoothly. Um. But one of the things that's always been a problem for solar is oil in natural gas and coal are just so cheap, and our infrastructure is set up to burn those things and get electricity for them. So solar has always been an upstart. But at one point in nineteen seventy three, oil was not very cheap all of a sudden because of the OPEC embargo that created the energy crisis that made it really un cheap.

So much so that the United States looked around and said, we need to find other sources of energy, and they really looked really hard at solar and it actually gave solar technology a big old boost. Yeah, and that boost came by way of offering tax credits for the first time in the United States for businesses and residents. Said hey, if you want to put in solar power, and they still do this today, we'll give you some tax credits.

It will make a lot cheaper for you. Um. There has been I guess we could call it the the solar Battle at the White House since nineteen seventy nine. Jimmy Carter had very famously had solar panels installed on the roof of the White House, uh to heat water for for them and for the pools and for the kitchen and stuff like that. And Uh, Reagan had them taken down in eighties six. So there are a couple

of stories about how this went down. Um. The cynic will say Reagan as a statement had them taken down even though they were working fine, because he was all for the fossil fuel industry and it was a very symbolic gesture. Other people will say that's not what happened. At all. The roof needed repair that the solar panels were on, and they took down the solar panels to repair the roof, and then the White House officially says they did not put them back because it would be

very unwise based on cost. Is a direct quote. Uh so that's you know, that's the party line right now. I've never heard that one. That sounds like a new gingrich you are And if you ask me, well, that's a direct quote. Um, George W. Bush put uh solar power back into the White House. Say what what? Yeah? I didn't know that. Yeah, he put solar for the water heaters for the White House pool and then put solar panels on top of the roof of the grounds

maintenance building to how out there. He did not have them on top of the actual White House, but he had solar solar power installed at various places around the White House. This was w or h W. This is w okay, Wow, that's really surprising. Yeah. Um. Carter's for his part, one of his he has two on display. One of them is at the Smithsonian and one of them is right here in Atlanta at the Carter Center. You can go look at one of those solar panels.

There's also like a Museum of Science in China that got their hands on one. It's on display in China too. Oh yeah, which makes sense because after after the U. S. Government kind of turned its back on solar, China came along and said, oh, we'll take that ball and ran with it. Sure, going back to Reagan though he didn't. I don't want to let him up too easy with this.

Um the fact that they just said it was unwise based on costs because he gutted the Department of Energies Renewable Energy research and Development budgets, like totally gutted him, and he eliminated the tax breaks for wind and solar. Um. I'm not sure for how long, but for a million years, I would guess now, because they're back. Uh. And it was Obama who came back and very publicly installed solar

panels back on the roof of the White House. And of course the first thing I thought was that that Trump probably went in there and smashed him with a sledgehammer on his first day in office. But apparently they're still there. They're still there, huh, still there and still working.

He didn't take them down. Wow, we so one of the other things that UM the government did to help solar along during the Carter era was to to offer tax breaks, like you were saying, but because of the really really high cost of installing a solar electric system, UM, it was basically viewed as a sweetheart deal, tax break for the rich. That's how the first solar tax credits were viewed because solar was so expensive, so they were

a little bit before their time. But over the course of those ensuing years from the early eighties on Moor to today, a UM, because we've had breakthroughs and technology UM of manufacturing, of creating new kinds of semiconductors, of making traditional kinds more cheaply, the price of solar has

dropped eight percent in the past decade. Yeah, I mean it's really to the point now where it's I mean I looked at some of the prices and I was like, you know what, that's that's now I think fairly affordable for for most kind of middle class Americans if they want to put in solar power, because you know, eventually it's going to pay for itself. That's the whole the

whole idea. Either you're either you're trying to pay this, you know, get cheaper bills and have it pay for itself over the years, which is going to happen regardless, or you're someone with some money that just wants to, um, do the right thing by the environment and get off the grid as much as possible. Yeah, it's just that upfront cost, not the cost over the life of the setup.

It's the upfront cost. But there are things like you can there UM like energy saver, renewable energy, mortgages, home loans basically you can take out they have UM really special good financing and rates and stuff like that. Um, there's a lot of things you can do that we'll talk about to get around the upfront cost. But you you hit the nail on the head, and it's really worth saying again you can expect your solar um electrical home system to pay for itself over the lifetime of

the setup. Yeah, and we'll talk more about price later, but just poking around like it's sort of an average US household, you can plunk down about fifteen grand to cover your electricity needs, which and that's I think after the text credit if I'm not mistaken right, And again, you know, there are so many factors where you live, how much energy use, how big your house is, the weather where you are. So this is a big, big

broad statement. But if you're just looking for a general range, it's not like it costs fifty or sixty dollars anymore to do this, right, So you want to take a you want to take a break and then come back and talk about what actually is going on in those solar cells. Let's do it, Chuck, okay, dude. So um, there are three ways as far as humans are aware of right now, that you can get energy from the sun. You can get it by converting it into electricity what

we're gonna talk about. Basically, you can turn it into chemical energy, which is it's far out though, it's like storing energy in the bonds of molecules, like through artificial photosynthesis. That's pretty cool. And then you can also convert it into heat. But when you're talking about solar energy, most people think of these solar into electricity, which is called photovoltaic um energy, and that's basically what we're going to

be talking about. Yeah, Like when you drive to the neighborhood and you see those shiny panels on a roof and think, my god, those are ugly. That's true, man, it's true. We'll get to that too. Uh So, that's what we're talking about. These photo voltaic cells. They are made up of semiconductors, materials called semiconductors. And these days, and you know, we're talking a second about how this might be changing in the future, but about all these

solar cells these days are using silicon as the semiconductor. Right. Silicon is a crystal, which means that it has a really tight atomic composition. Right, it's not very it's extraordinarily stable um, which is kind of a thing because you want a somewhat unstable um arrangement of atoms or else you won't get this electricity to work. But no, you can't. But that's exactly right. The flow of electricity basically but

with um. The reason why they use silicon is because it is a semiconductor, which means that it gives you a large measure of control over where that electricity flows and how it flows. So rather than just using pure silicon, which um will will allow you to direct the control of electricity but won't produce any electricity, they actually dope it with other materials to produce two different types of

silicon film. UM, ND type and P type. That's right. So, uh, for the ND type, which is stands for negative, they're gonna dope it. And I love that word in this case with phosphorus that has five electrons, so it's gonna bind to the silicon that has four electrons, and so that leaves you I can even do this kind of simple math with one free one extra electron leftover, just dangling out there like it's wearing shorts that are way

too short. Yeah, it's looking for a place to go. Basically. Um, the way I sort of saw this was like a couple of apartments next to each other. One has an empty room and one has an extra roommate. Okay, that's a great one. So the other type is this P type, the positive it's doped with boron has three electrons, and so this is the other apartment. This is the one it's gonna bind with silicon, and it leaves that unused bond open. So that's where you have your extra space

where the electron can go. Right. So when you take ND type silicon film and P type silicon film and you put them up against one another, UM, you have a situation where that extra electron wants to flow to the other side and fill the unused bond, because again, the universe is always moving towards homeostasis. Right. Yeah, that roommates like, hey, you've got an next room, Can I come crash in there? Yeah, And they say, wait, wait, we need somebody to get you off of the couch.

And in this case, that somebody is sunlight, because sunlight is made up of photons, which are energy carriers of the electromagnetic spectrum. And when they hit this doped silicon, they come bursting into the room and they kick that that lazy electron into the other apartment where there's an open bedroom and everything is filled very nicely. That's right. So this electron flow, these electrons moving around and flowing in this single direction. I think we said that yet

it only flows in one direction. Electricity does well, it does in this one in this case. Yeah, that's the basis. This electron flow is the basis of electricity. And what they do is they put these metal contacts on the top and the bottom of the cell and then you can direct that electron flow out of the cell to be used as electricity in your home. Yeah, that's that's

the soul or cell and in a nutshell. And the solar cell is the basic unit of the of what you think of when you think of like a solar panel or whatever, it's that one little square and that square is connected to other squares um and and they they form what's called a module. And when you put like um a nice little uh frame around it and put it on a stand or whatever, you have yourself a solar panel. When you have a bunch of solar panels together in a group, all working together, that's a

solar array. So technically, when you point at someone's roof and you say, look at that solar panel, you're saying, look at that solar array. And now you can correct that person from the back seat and they'll make you get out of the car. People say that, look at that solar array, universe. I would think people would more say, look at those solar panels. Well, then that would make sense. I had just set it up so it didn't make

any sense, so someone would swoop in incorrect. So the person who knows what it's really called is around with complete morons. We say things like look at that solar panel. When they see a group of solar panels. All right, now, I got you we're talking about right, all right, So it's it's it sounds simple, and it is kind of simple, and it's um complexity that makes no sense at all. But it's a little more complicated because, like we said, electricity in this case is only flowing in one direction,

which means it creates a direct current. And that's a problem because uh we you know, if you we talked about in the Bone Wars episode about the the uh what they called not the power of Wars, the current current wars, the War of current. That's right, d C did not win. Um, So we have to convert that d C current to a C current. So what the solar panels need is something called an inverter. Yeah, and the inverter is basically like the brains of the whole set up. And there used to be a big problem

with inverters. Um. They were very clunky, and you would basically have one inverter for an entire solar array, and um, the solar inverter would would kind of modulate the amount of electricity that was going through it out to the house or the circuit panel, and it would base whatever it was doing on whatever the lowest common denominator of

the whole array was giving it right. So if you had one dirty solar cell, or there was a cloud going over just one solar panel out of like twenty, the inverter was basically delivering electricity based on that one that one cloudy panel, or that one dirty cell. That's not the case anymore, It really wasn't. The solar industry wised up and they said, we can do better than this, and they came up with what are called micro inverters.

And now a micro inverter is responsible for um either one panel or just a single cell, and so that one cell could could be a dirty or cloudy at any given point, but it's not going to drag down the whole thing because there's all these other inverters that are are running the show on their own too. How can you got to clean these things? Did you see that? I didn't, but I did see that they were virtually maintenance free? Oh really, yeah, that's what I say. Um,

all right, so let's talk about powering a house. Uh And just like four years ago, two thousand fifteen, and these are pretty good numbers, eight hundred thousand houses and businesses in the United States had solar panels. And that's not to say they were um dependent on them, but they were at least doing some of the work right,

which is not bad. Um. And like you said, once, once it's up and running, not much maintenance going on, and you're looking at probably and the number they often throw out is just you know, for twenty years, you can expect this thing to work like a charm. Yeah, twenty years is the low end. I saw the averages about twenty five years. When you buy a solar setup that you can just put it up there and be like, oh, um, this is great. I don't even need to think about

this anymore. UM. But if you do want to invest in this, if you're like, okay, I can swing this, I want to contribute, I'm going to go solar. There are some steps you want to take UM to kind of wisen yourself up so that when you deal with the installer you'll know what you're talking about and when the first thing you want to do is to do an energy audit on your energy consumption, which is basically figuring out how much electricity you use in your house.

UM at any given time, probably want to figure out what your peak is and then just kind of plan for for that. Um. See, what I don't get is like you can look at your power bill and tell that you need to do it a separate audit outside of that. Well, the reason why it's good to do a separate audit outside of that is you can identify

areas where you can improve things. It's it's kind of like, no, you don't have to do it, but you could do an energy audit, and when you do, you can be like, oh, I think if I added insulation to the attic, it would come consumption by its right. Yeah. Yeah, It's kind of like, um, if if taking on the project of getting solar installed on your home wasn't a big enough headache for you, add this to it, you know what

I'm saying. But it's a good it will definitely you will find some places where you can cut your energy consumption. That's the benefit of an energy audit. And this is just happens to be a good time to do it. Yeah. And you know the other thing you have to decide as you're pricing this out, and you can call a company they will they will come out these days and

basically tell you what you need. Um, you know if you get a good, highly recommended company, and apparently some of the smaller companies are much more highly recommended than the larger companies from what I read online. But they will come out and say the question they're gonna say is, uh, and this is really the most important thing for you to decide is how much of what percentage of of your household energy do you want to come from solar?

And if you're like they'll they'll say, okay, well here's what you need. If you say, you know what you know, if I can cover I don't have much roof space, I'm happy with covering my UM power usage, then they'll say, all right, well, then let's work within your system. Or you may just be you may not have a choice unless you uh, you know, it all depends on your roof and the way it's sloped and the way it's faced and all that stuff. Right. Um, yeah, there's a

lot of considerations. UM. And again you're you're the person you hire to do this is going to be able to provide you with all this information and ask all the right questions. But if you want to know what you're talking about going into it, um, you can find out kind of about how much electricity you could expect a solar array on your roof to produce um down to your actual house. Like there's all sorts of solar potential maps online yea, and calculators. It's really They make

it kind of really easy on you these days. It's easy. And let's just be honest, Chuck. It's fun too because it'll show you like how much money you will actually not only like how much you'll save over the course of the lifetime of the solar array. And you'll have a do you good idea of how fast the thing will pay for itself. It's it's pretty cool to do um.

But you'll have an idea of, uh, this thing is gonna pay for itself in eight years, or this thing is gonna pay for itself in twenty five years, and that will largely depend on where you live in the country. But everything I saw from everywhere, from Union of Concerned Scientists to Energy dot Gov is that everywhere in the United States you can expect your solar array to pay for itself eventually over the life of its over its

own life. It might take a little longer in Seattle than in Phoenix, right, but you know, that's how things go. You got better music in Seattle and better food, well maybe the food to watch you got the You got the music though for sure. Sorry Phoenix, we we love you. Yeah sorry uh, last of the meat puppets. So I talked about the angle of these panels and the angle of your roof. Um, it's called the angle of inclination.

Is what is how you have to set these If you have all all the money in the world and in nowhere to spend it, you can actually get systems that have motors that will move and follow these panels, will follow the sun across the sky, stay in perfect uh, stay at the perfect angle of inclination. That is super expensive, though, it is. That's the technology I was talking about from that they had figured out for saddle. Yeah it is,

but yeah, it is still kind of expensive. Um. What I've seen though, is rather than invest in figuring out how to make those kinds of setups cheaper, they figured out how to catch more diffuse sunlight, that kind that gets scattered by clouds. That makes sense on a solar panel, so you don't necessarily have to have it. Um, the kind that tracks the sunlight, and you can still get as much electricity as you're gonna need to power your house basically no matter where you are in the country,

just from the solar panels that they make these days. Yeah, so uh ideally, um, your array is going to be pointing true south. That's not to say if your roof is set up in such a way that it doesn't point to south, you can't have solar because like you said, they've come a long long way over the years with

how they can collect the sunlight. But if you're facing true south and you're at a good angle that's as close to the area that you're in as close to the latitude as possible, you don't have a lot of trees around and no big buildings, then you're a really good candidate to provide energy for your house. We should say also, that's if you're in the northern hemisphere. We have listeners in the southern that's true. So I would say if you're in Australia, you would want it to

face true North. But everybody knows that the sun is so ridiculously hot in Australia that you don't even need solar panels. It just powers everything, just blazing down on everyone. You can bury your solar panels underground in Australia, that's still work better than here. It's like you can scrape me son. So um. The other thing is weather, Like

it's never weather is never predictable. But what you're gonna do is look at the data in your area, look at average monthly sunlight and stuff like that, take into account rainfall, and in the end you want to design for because you want power all the time. If you're going you want to design for your worst month. Um sort of like now, not really, I was about to say, just like those initial inverters, you're only as strong as your weakest member. But you want to take into account.

Let's like, let's say it rains every single day in a month, you lose your job, dog dies, just absolute worst month, right, So then they might say, all right, throw on an extra panel for your dog, right and you'll be just fine. So um, if you're all hyped up about this, there's we just kind of opened the can of worms. There's a lot more to take into account. But again, just hire somebody reputable, do your research, and they should be able to guide you through process a

lot more than we can. But I do strongly advise going on and figuring out your like you need to know what you need to know kind of thing. Does that make sense? Yeah, for sure. Um. And you know earlier you mentioned that these things were ugly and for a long time they were the bane of existence of a lot of people in certain neighborhoods. Some homeowners associations still won't allow them. Um, but they've gotten better looking over time. They've gotten um, closer to the roof line, um,

a little bit more attractive. And I think, in my opinion this is just me speculating. Just the perception is changed. And now when you see them, you don't think, oh my gosh, I'll get an ugly thing on the roof. You think, well, you know, those are solar panels and it might not blend in perfectly with the roof, but there, you know, there's a big benefit as well. You don't even think like hippies live there anymore. Normal people live there normal So Um, there's also solar roof tiles that

are really starting to come along with those versions. Yeah, they're nuts, how they're also they're super durable, they're very pretty. Um. I don't own any because they're extremely expensive, but they if they can get the cost down to anything approaching like a normal sized roof. It's just like game over man. That's it. It's exactly like the the the each one of these tiles is like a solar cell or a solar panel, and it's a whole roof's worth of them.

They're super durable, but they also cost about five to ten times the amount of a normal roof these days, which is just you're you're never gonna pay for it's never gonna pay for itself. Yeah. I mean, if you're spending I don't know, twelve to fifteen grand on a roof and you have to spend up to a hundred and fifty thousand for that roof to be solar, that's a lot of dought. I saw like two hundred in one case, but yeah, somewhere between a hundred and two

hundred for a new roof. Yeah. But the people that are doing this are you know, the very well healed who want to be able to brag about their solar roof quite frankly. Yeah. And I mean if they're doing that and they're they're you know, generating solar for their house, more power to them. That's fine. I mean, it's just I Tesla needs to get that that price down quite a bit. Come on, Tesla. So we need to talk

a little bit about efficiency. So, um, you know, how much of the Sun's energy we can convert into electricity? Is that efficiency? And way back when they first started this stuff in the nineteenth century, it was one not even one percent, So it was mainly just like, hey, look what we can do now a little bit. Um. Now it's at not true, it's about now. Um, it's not as much as I would have thought when I

started uh doing this research. And you can't ever get to a pent I think they said at the very max these days because of energy loss and conversion and stuff that the tip top upper limits about eight seven percent that we could ever get. That's like the physical limit for conversion. I mean it's the sun. It's not

like you know, the sunlight. You don't use fills up landfills, you know for sure for sure, um, But the there is a lot of room for improvement between that current and right um, and we're actually starting to make those those kind of gains. Um. One of the ways to do it is to make solar panels cheaper. So even if they are just at efficiency if the process of making them is cheaper, you can put more solar panels up and the average person can afford it. That's one

way to go. A better way to go is to focus on making those materials as ridiculously efficient as possible. And what they found a promising new material called parov skite. I think that's how you say it. It's kind of a clunky word. It really is um and I think it was discovered by Russians or Soviets back in the day.

It really does um. But the one of things about parov skite, this mineral, is that it is really really efficient when it comes to the blue end of the spectrum, the blue to ultraviolet high energy UM photons that comes streaming through. Normally, those kinds of photons are too energetic to interact with the phosphorus or the boron that's that uh silicon is doped with, so it just passes through and it's like completely wasted high energy light. The parov

skite actually interacts with those way more efficiently. The problem is it doesn't really interact with the lower energy stuff that silicon does. So the highest efficiency solar cells that you can get are typically made with silicon and Parov Skype put together, so it captures as much stuff as

you can hope for. And these are starting to creep up into the the high twenties low thirties range, and as Parov Skype manufacturing gets easier and easier, we should be able to expect to see solar panels that are you know, thirt efficient, which is a lot you know that extra seven percent, that's a huge difference. Yeah, and I don't think we mentioned the reason that we're trying to make this move to prov skite anyway. It's because it's it's cheaper. You can make it cheaper than the

silicon ones. So you know, one day, hopefully, uh, they could be all prop skite because they're developing stuff that's going to capture more of what the silicon can capture in that right. Yeah, that's yeah, that would be wonderful if if they figure out how to tinker with provskite so that they don't need the silicon at all, because there are a lot of problems with silicon, which we'll talk about. Right. So, um I mentioned earlier in the show about uh selling your um like pay me power company,

and that wasn't a joke. In fact, I didn't even know this was a thing until like shamefully like five years ago, when I learned that if you produce more energy with your system then you use you can actually not everywhere, but in many many places now you can sell that back to the power company and not only are you not paying. In fact, we talked about this in one of the episodes, might have been the Sun or the Bill Gates Renewable Energy episode, that's what it was. Yeah, yeah, yeah,

I remember, but I couldn't. I knew. We talked about like grids and stuff like that, and now that's where it was good call. I think so, But um, they will cut you a check, which is pretty amazing. Um, and here's the best part, even to me. I was like, well, I mean, do I want to check from Georgia Power for whatever nineteen dollars a month? I sort of do. But what I would really rather do is past that forward,

pay it forward, like they say. And there are places that have programs where if you have excess solar energy, you can send that to the power grid and then apply the leftover as a credit to the bill of a family in need, which is awesome. It is pretty awesome. Everybody comes out super great. Yeah, I wonder what the money. I mean, that's the one thing I don't know. It's like, how much more are you making? Is it a check for nineteen dollars or is it like three d bucks

a month? I don't know, And it would definitely depend on a couple of things. How much electricity costs in your area, and um, how much your utility company pays for buyback electricity, and then also how much you're overproducing to you know, Yeah, there's a bunch of factors. But I'm just kind of curious. It's like a lot of money or is it do I really honestly don't know, but every little bit counts if you're a family in need. Right.

So there's another thing that would be great, Um, if you have all this excess solar energy when you know it's really really sunny out, Um, if you could somehow capture it to use it later during nighttime or on a cloudy day or something like that. And so a lot of people have said, well, that'd be great. I mean, that just makes a solar solar electric home system perfect.

Let's build batteries that do that, And so there are home batteries that are meant to be connected to solar outfits, like Tesla makes one of those two, LG makes one, Mercedes Benz makes one. It's a home battery. Um. The problem is that they are also really expensive, on the

order of five six seven grand um. And so if you're spending twelve grand on your solar array and you spend an extra six grand on your home battery, you just spent an extra fift of the cost of your solar array to back up your your home with solar electricity when the sun is not shining as much. That's a huge enormous added expense. Yeah. And the one thing I was because you know, like you, I think my interest got peaked a little bit from my own house.

It's like, man, this is really appealing to me now here my late forties. I could buy a system that will see me through till my death. Probably I don't know about that. At the time it starts breaking down, I'll be long gone. Well, let's hope not. Uh. And my first thought was, you know, we get a lot of brown outs and blackouts and power outages for some reason in my neighborhood. Is just it just happens a lot.

It seems like every rainstorm. Uh, certainly anytime there's snow is a brown out where it's like the powers like almost out, but it comes back and then almost out or I think it just sort of flickers. I wish they'd call it something else. It sounds so gross. The brown out sounds gross. Yeah, it does. It sounds gross. Gray out. How about a gray out? Let's call it that. Are you thinking about like a butt hole? Yeah? Or poop or something, you know, like poop just squeezing out

of your electrical outlets or something like that. Like that sounds like a very like archbunker thing to say, like I'm gonna go upstairs and have a brown out. Yes, yes it does. Dropping the Browns off at the Super Bowl or okay, I get you. So the only way the Browns could make it to a Super Bowl? Oh man, Yeah, Texas and Ohio super happy with you today. Um So my first thought was like, oh man, I get on Solar and there's a blackout going on because we we

went out. I think I talked about this on one episode when they we had the big snowstorm a couple of years ago. We were out for three and a half days. That's unconscionable. I mean, it was a long time to be without electricity, to the point where it was like, all right, I'm a little bit worried about my family. Um, so I thought, man, I'll get solar and all those suckers will be without power and I'll

have power. That is not the case, um, unless you're if you're storing on a battery, you can do that. But during a power outage, UM, there's something called islanding. It's very dangerous. It's basically when you're pumping electricity back into the power lines that all the that Georgia power thinks and the linemen are dead, so they're going to work on these and you're still pumping power back into it. They can't have that, so the power goes out as well.

It'll kill it'll kill alignment for sure. Um. But if you have a battery back up, you're fine. Like you said, like that's where you're getting your juice from. But your your solar system is going to disconnect you from the grid to keep that from happening. But there's actually that

happens elsewhere, chuck. If with if people have a generator, some people will plug their generator into an outlet in their house and reverse the flow of electricity from their generator throughout their house, which can create is landing as well. That crazy. Yeah, yeah, well, I mean that's a kind

of a thing. Now. That's a lot of new houses have whole house generators built in and as soon as the power cuts off, that thing automatically fires up right right, But this is like affordable generator that they're plugging in reverse into their homewiring. It's not a good idea for any any anyone. I mean, there are safe ways to do it. That is not one of them. Should we

take another break? Yeah, let's all right. We'll take one final break everyone, and we're going to talk a little bit about some of the downsides because there are some to solar power. I want to say, there's one other

type of battery I found. Um it's a mechanical battery where you your solar power system uses all that excess power to to to power a pump that pumps water up to a raised area, and then at night er on a cloudy day, when you need the extra electricity, it releases that water to spin over a turbine, which creates an electrical current in that awesome a little power plant in your house. Basically, yeah, you do. And it's green too. It's hydroelectric, solar powered hydroelectric batteries. What that

is pretty amazing. So uh, we mentioned silicon not being great. There are it's obvious that UM to create and this is an argument a lot of times against electric electric cars and hybrid vehicles. UM, we all like to drive them and stuff, but is a greenhouse effect when it comes to making this stuff. Minding minding these materials, uh, is not great. It is very environmentally, it's very harsh on the environment. And I don't think anyone makes any

bones about that. UM. Transporting all this stuff gonna burn a lot of fossil fuels. Manufacturing all the stuff burns fossil fuels. But like you said earlier, that is true.

But once that process is finished, that's it. No more greenhouse gasses forever, right, And some people will double down at this point and be like, well, whoa whoa Like creating solar cells is actually really really harmful because it requires the production of something called nitrogen trifluoride, which is a greenhouse gas that's seventeen thousand times more potent than

carbon dioxide. Bad stuff. And when you work into the idea that you have a whole house battery that's made of cadmium, lead, nickel, all all of which have to be mined and which has to be replaced everything ten years, your solar arrays seems much much less green. And that's these are all very legitimate arguments. There's they're not incorrect at all, but they're also current limitations, and they're all surrounding production and transportation and all that stuff can be

worked out. And when that stuff gets worked out, you still have solar producing clean energy with green or with um fossil fuels. Even if you worked all that stuff out, when you deploy them and actually create electricity from them, they're still going to produce greenhouse gases. So solar will always have that advantage. And it just has a bunch of kind of front loaded obstacles that need to be overcome through breakthroughs in the short term. Yeah, for sure.

I mean, it's no contest in the end, especially if you're talking about the life of a solar system, considering like twenty five years, let's say, over the twenty five years of burning coal and natural gas, it's just not even close. Yeah, and I mean, like if you start getting more and more solar um involved and like transportation, then you knock out those greenhouse gases for transporting like solar panels from place to place because it's solar powering

the transportation too. There's a lot of stuff we can do that that we just haven't quite figured out how to do yet. But it's not physically impossible to overcome them. Yeah, and you know, there's also people that say, hey, we you know, the entire country could run on solar and wind. Some people say maybe not. Other people say no, it totally could. But there are a lot of big obstacles.

When you talk about converting a nationwide system, uh from a fossil fuel system two renewables, it's it's not easy and frankly, it will probably never happen on that scale. Um, maybe I'm cynical. I think I think it's cynical. I think if we look a hundred and fifty years in the future, maybe even a hundred seventy five, even I would say it's entirely possible. I could see it. Well, that would require and and if you do the math,

that's about right. That would require several generations of people dying out who would fight this tooth and nail to their grad right, certain people who would have to die out first. But there are a lot of real obstacles to this, um. I mean, our infrastructure just is not built for this, Like we would have to completely rewrite

how we do things. Yeah, So the infrastructure is set up in a centralized manner where you have a power plant and that power plant is built wherever, and you burn coal or whatever and create steam which turns to a turbine that creates electricity, and that electricity goes out to the area that that that power plant serves. That's not how renewables like solar or wind work. They have to be built where the wind or the sunlight is, and so you have to build a bunch of them

wherever you can. And then those things all have to be connected. So it's a decentralized way, um that you have to connect them together to the current grid, which means running a lot more transmission lines from these new solar arrays that you're going to build wherever to connect them to deliver that electricity throughout the country. Yeah, and there's also and uh, there are fluctuations in the weather. You know, we already talked about your sort of at

the behest of what your weather is giving you. Uh. And we're not saying when the wind doesn't blow, your lights go off, believe me. But it does have an effect. And so you have to compensate for this stuff. And compensating for this stuff, and on a national grid, UM is expensive and I don't even think we've quite figured out how that's gonna work yet, have we. No, there's some proposals. One is to UM basically create batteries, like just use the same solution that people have for their houses.

We just need to take that excess stuff and store it for use when the the sun isn't shining. They figured out that for a an electrical storage system to store twelve hours worth of electricity for the US electrical grid would cost more than two point five trillion dollars. To that's quite a bit. Other people are saying, no, no, we just have to get better at more efficient long distance transmission lines. That's what we talked about in that

Bill Gates episode. One of the things was that smart grid where we can easily shuffle UM solar that's generated in Scottsdale up to Portland. Oregon, you know, or Portland, Maine for that matter. Yeah, I mean they're everywhere in the United States at some point. There's a lot of sunshine going on at once, and you can send that to places. I know we're picking on Portland Seattle again, but if you can produce in Phoenix and send it to Portland, that's great. And I mean, let's let's be

honest here. Two point five trillion dollars is a lot of cheese. But I saw somewhere someone point out that there's a an estimate that to fully convert over the US electrical grid to solar only would be about four trillion dollars, which, again is a lot of money, but in the grand scheme of things, and when you really think about what that investment is going towards, it's not that much. And frankly, it's kind of doable if there's a political will to do it. Yeah, I get you.

Another solution would be for every house to have its own solar ray, every car to have its own solar power. That's what I'm banking more on is like more and more people doing this to the point where it's you know, it's not part of the infrastructure of the grid. But

it's a you know, still making a big dent. But that's going to be the hardest sell because you're just completely eliminated all of the power companies and they're not exactly known as lightweights when it comes to things like lobbying. That's true. And another you know, you look at the subsidies going on now, and that's really clear who's better

at lobbying. Federal subsidies for power companies who produce solar are about five and thirty three million bucks compared to thirty two billion dollars for natural gas alone in two thousand and sixteen. Right, that's just text bricks and subsidies for investing in deploying that kind of energy. Yeah, and solar still is pretty expensive per megawatt hour compared to like you said, fossil fuels are just cheap. Still, they

really are. And here's here's the problem to Chuck. There's there's a conundrum where when you deploy a lot of solar electricity um in a utility, it actually tends to depress wholesale electrical prices across the board. So a company has an incentive to not deploy solar because they can charge more for electrical produced from like coal and other fossil fuels like they normally do. That's right, But if you put one in your house, uh, you're not only

paying for your own elector or whatever. You're subsidizing your own electrical bill. You possibly are getting money back or helping a family need um. And it's also an investment in your house. It actually increases the value of your home because, you know, unless someone just hates them and wants to to reak in it up and yank them off the roof when they come in there, it's going to be a selling point. You know, you're like, hey, moving to this house, They've already paid for it, and

you don't have a power bill. Yeah. There was a study from the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab that found that a solar setup increase the value of a house in America by about fifteen grands. Right. So when I said they've already paid for it, what I really mean is they're passing that onto you. Exactly, they passed the costs onto you. Do you got anything else? I got nothing else, man, I'm I'm gonna legit. Look into this, let me know how it goes. Man. I I'm really interested I have

a dude, doubt like we have. I don't think we could do our whole house. But we have this one roof in particular. Now that's uh, I can't see from the street. It's uh, you can only see it from one place in the house, and I think it faces south and I have to measure the panels, but I could probably fit like eight panels up there. That's not enough for my whole house. Hey, that whatever little bit works, that could power my Frankenstein experiments, right exactly, you're bringing

inanimate matter back to life. Um. One other thing, Chuck, There's a big obstacle that's facing us worldwide, and that is that we haven't figured out how to get solar energy from the oceans collected over the oceans to the rest of the world, which is going to be a big challenge. But if we could figure that out, problem solved. Just build a solar array the size of Texas, maybe over the Great Pacific garbage Patch, and there we go.

I feel like I've seen research into that, and maybe not the oceans, but like solar blankets over water, now am I making that up? I mean I'm sure that that you could have them in like coastal areas or whatever. But that that means like you couldn't swim in those coastal areas, you know, which is going to depress the value of the real estate there. So I would guess we would want them like really far off shore. But how do you get that electricity back to you know,

where it's needed on land? That's the question I think. Yeah, just though a big solar uh floating solar blanket over an off shoal short oil rig and just plug it in and just plug it in. Yeah, there you goblem solved. Uh. If you want to know more about solar, go check it out, see if you can maybe swing it for your house. And if so, let us know about it. We want to hear that. And Chuck will keep you

updated too, won't you sure? Uh? And since I said Chuck will keep you updated, friends, that means it's time for a listener mail. Oh no, sir, you I know you're being coy because to your right and Jerry's chair is Alexander Williams and not Jerry. No, Jerry's standing over there. This is all getting weird. It is getting a little weird. We're playing musical chairs and Jerry's the loser. That's now

Jerry Snipper, the Loser. What we've done though today is asked Alex Williams, one of our colleagues and pals here in the office, to come in. And we don't do this much, but when we really love a show and someone sits fourteen feet from us, well and they do something really special. I mean, this is special stuff we're talking about. That's why I said, we really love it. Okay, we asked him in, and here he is to talk

about your great show, Ephemeral. What a comfortable chair, Cherry, I can see what a great chair is that, Frank. This is Frank. Well he's sitting on Frank. That's right. So welcome Alex. We wanted to have you here to kind of tell everybody about your show because we love your show and we could talk about it all day, but we thought it would be better if you came in and kind of told the folks like the thought behind Ephemeral and what what prompted you to do it

and what they can expect from it. So go, okay, Um, well, it's a it's a podcast about artifact, right, the stuff that gets left behind and uh, you know, trying to illuminate you know, maybe dark or or sort of forgotten corners of history by you know, when we have them,

by playing the artifacts. And it's an audio show, so specifically, you know, we started with ideas of like tape and you know, film and video, but then you know, sometimes you get into areas where there's just really no artifacts or artifacts that don't really translate into into the audio medium, and then so you experiment a little bit. And so the series itself, it's ten ten episodes posted trailer, right, and the first season, Yeah, the trailer itself stands on

its own. I think you've said before, I hope. So, yeah, it's it's an eight minute this little story about um we'll call it like my first there was no podcast, then my first radio show. It's a show that I a loose you know, connection of thoughts that I would make on my parents Answering Machine. That was my fully

produced first show at least that I remember. And so in each episode you kind of find a recovered or formulaly lost or um uh it just kind of overlooked peace and then kind of dissect it and explain it and talk about like it's place in the universe, right, And I think one of the episodes was about um kind of a long lost original TV network, right, the Dumont Television Network. Yeah, you guys ever heard of Dumont?

I had not. Uh. In the Golden Ager television there's four TV networks, ABC, CBS, NBC also with US Today, all big radio companies beforehand, I mean big, big, huge brands, and Dumont was a television manufacturer that got into the broadcasting game at the very beginning. They were the fourth network when there was only four. They were only around for I think just a little over a decade and something like twenty thousand broadcasts have been almost completely lost

because things just weren't recorded then. Uh, there was no real way to record life television. What they would do is they'd make something called a kinescope, which should take a TV screen and you filmed it with your film camera,

and then you have a real that looks terrible. And the only reason they make that is so they could send it off to you know, you're in California and your affiliates not connected to New York, DC, Philadelphia, etcetera, on the coaxial cable and so then they show it once in California and then they would trash that thing or tape over it or you know, film over it because there was no reruns then right early TV was live.

It was weird because of it. So the little snippets that we have of it left that the few kinescopes that got saved, it's something like three or you know, somewhat complete broadcast. They're mostly held by individual collectors and a fewer and institutions like the Museum of TV and Radio in New York. That's awesome. You also covered one of the topics that we've covered in the Best about the Call Your Brothers, which was very cool, And I think that's one of my favorite things about the show

is is so wide ranging. It's like the best episodes of this American Life or nine nine percent invisible as far as your approach goes, And that's why I think I loved it from the beginning. You were in the Call your Brother's episode very briefly. I know you did a walk by, huh, I did I did a line reading. We'll just leave it at that will be an easter egg for listeners. So all all ten episodes, plus the trailer out they're available now wherever you get your podcasts

right indeed, you have a second season coming. Second season. We did our first recording for yesterday. I nice. Yeah, how's it going? So far? So good? I got a lot of reading to do. Man right on, we'll get to it. We won't keep you any longer, but thank you for coming by. And if you want to check out a femeral everybody, you can go check it out on what, the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, wherever you get your podcasts, go check it out now all

of those things. Someone asked me to put it on an old tape for them, but I haven't done that yet. That would be a cool way to get it would be. Thanks for coming by, Alex, Thanks for having me on. Guys. Well, if you want to get in touch with this, like Alex did, you can just drop by the studio j K. Instead, go on to stuff you Should Know dot com, check out our social links, or you can send us an email to Stuff Podcast at I heeart radio dot com.

Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeart Radios. How stuff works. For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H