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Robinson Meyer:
Hello, it’s Wednesday, July 15, and in the past month, record-breaking heat waves have struck across the Northern Hemisphere. Europe smashed daily and monthly records a few weeks ago in a heat wave that led to as many as 14,000 excess deaths. This week, there’s record-breaking heat across the northern United States and parts of Canada, and smoke is cascading down to the East Coast and Midwest from Canadian wildfires. It’s clear that climate change is pushing our infrastructure past the point that it was designed for. So what if we pushed it back? That’s what an Israeli-American startup named Stardust has proposed. As I first wrote about last year for Heatmap, Stardust has raised $60 million to build what they call a geoengineering system. They want to spray a proprietary substance into the stratosphere that will reflect sunlight back into space, cooling the earth and counteracting global warming.
Robinson Meyer:
Now, this idea has been around for a long time. You might have heard it before, but most proposals have suggested using sulfur aerosols, the same substances that are released when a volcano erupts. Stardust believes that its material, which is made of silica and calcium carbonate, is superior to sulfur aerosols, that it’s easier to spray from planes and track with satellites. And it says we’re only a few years away from its technology being ready to deploy. Now, the last time I talked to anyone from Stardust, they hadn’t yet revealed the substance or how they plan to govern the technology that they create. They have since done so. So joining us today is Stardust CEO and co-founder Yanai Yedvab. He’s a former nuclear scientist for the Israeli government. He was deputy chief research scientist, in fact, at the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission, which oversees the country’s nuclear program, a topic I got into in my last article about Stardust last October. We’ll stick it in the show notes. This time, though, I wanted to talk to him about this new particle and about how Stardust believes its technology should be governed. I’m Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap News, and you’re listening to Shift Key. Yanai Yevab, welcome to Shift Key.
Yanai Yedvab:
Thanks a lot. Excited to be here.
Robinson Meyer:
It’s good to see you again. We’ve now talked a few times. I wrote about Stardust back when you came out of stealth mode earlier this year. We were excited to have you at Heatmaps San Francisco Climate Week event. We’ve never done a Shift Key episode, though, so I wanted to use this time to have a more extended version of a conversation that I think we’ve already had in some form, but also there’s been some new developments from Stardust lately. And I want to talk about those as well.
Robinson Meyer:
Solar radiation management or solar geoengineering, obviously something that’s gotten more attention lately, but it’s also something that people have talked about since at least the 1990s. Stardust, though, is the first private company to get into this research, at least the first private company with the amount of funding that you have. So why now? Why have you chosen this moment to research solar geoengineering as a private company?
Yanai Yedvab:
Very shortly before answering the question, I just want to mention that we’ve done our first article with you. So I’m particularly excited to revisit and to share some of the new exciting things that happened since. And now going to your question, first of all, you’re right. It’s not a new concept, right? It’s been around since the 90s. And as any, I’d say, scientific concept, it always starts with basic research. This has been the case, I would say, for probably every great grounding technology. Like if you’re looking about life-saving drugs, if you’re looking at genome sequencing, it always starts with basic research. But then at some point comes the question whether we need to move forward from basic research to actually develop technologies or, in this case, developing options for policymakers. And to your question, why now? I would say that we are at the point in the timeline of how this crisis is evolving.
Yanai Yedvab:
That we may be in a situation that in a few years from now, policymakers will need to make very difficult decisions regarding stabilizing the system. Again, this is not a silver bullet. This will not replace any other technology that is aimed to deal with the most important problem, which is reducing emissions and transitioning to green energy. But we may be in a situation and it may not be very far away that we will need to complement it with another, I would say, tool that has, a different rationale which is essentially to buy us time because I think that we are already at the point that we understand that buying time, may become critical and that we are not decades away from the point that we will need to make these decisions.
Robinson Meyer:
Can you talk about your decision making and your decision to start Stardust or your decision to begin working on this issue? Because, you know, in your description, it sounds like you’re talking, it says, you know, we’re a few years away from where policymakers may want to have this other tool or may need to have this other tool. And it’s definitely true that the impacts of climate change have gotten worse. We just saw the big heat wave in Europe. But I do think it’s a bit, it presumes a bit to be like, well, we should start. We’re a few years away from when things are going to get so bad, they’ll want to have this option. So can you talk about your own decision-making in starting Stardust and why you decided that this was a tool that made sense for the world to have.
Yanai Yedvab:
So, in fact, you know, when we started looking into climate, this was like, well, it’s four years ago. We didn’t start with a decision to your point that we want to develop a solid reflection technology. It was a much more exploratory journey where we’re trying to understand, you know, the fundamentals of this crisis. Asking yourself, you know, first principles questions. What do we know about warming? How severe is it going to be in the next few years if we continue to warm our planets? What’s the prospect of some of the mitigation plans? And one of the things that we realized is that continuing doing only what we’ve been doing over the last few decades may just not be enough. Obviously, we need to do much more. If we’ve done more in terms of emission reductions over the last few decades, maybe we wouldn’t be sitting here now and discussing. We would have found, you know, we’re a mission-driven team. We would have went and dealt with some other problem, right? But we’re not at that place. And when we started looking into sunlight reflection technology, we were saying to ourselves, yeah, maybe.
Yanai Yedvab:
There is a tool here that, if developed properly, if developed to be safe and responsible, could play a very important role. And going back to my answer to your previous question, you know, when people started researching this field, the natural choice was to start with sulfate. It made a lot of sense because this is the example we get from nature. And the first thing, like I would say, any reasonable person would have done was to start with this. And the good news about sulfates is that we know that they can, in fact, produce this effect of stabilizing temperature. However, it comes with a very long list of side effects. I’m sure you’re familiar with them. Acid rain impacting the ozone layer and very large uncertainties in spite of all the research. And to your question,
Yanai Yedvab:
we started from a very different starting point.
Robinson Meyer:
So sulfate aerosols are what everyone has assumed solar geoengineering would look like, I would say, prior to Stardust’s work. And that’s because, as you said, we have these great natural experiment for them. Basically, volcanoes inject, when they erupt, some volcanoes inject stratospheric aerosols into the atmosphere. Those aerosols reflect sunlight away from the atmosphere, thus cooling the planet on very short timescales. We’ve seen it happen in the past 40 years of climate science. We have great observational evidence for it. We have great long-term evidence for it. We kind of know seemingly how these particles or aerosols work. Behave in the atmosphere. That’s not what star dust is doing, though. Tell me a little about the system and why you chose not to deal with sulfates.
Yanai Yedvab:
First of all, you’re completely right, right? We know that sulfate produced this effect. We know also that it comes with this long list of unintended consequences and downsides. You know, some people are afraid of, you know, dispersing millions of tons of material, which is essentially toxic around the heads of them and their children.
Yanai Yedvab:
We know that it impacts those on there. We know that the uncertainties in spite of all this research are still very, very high. And we’re asking ourselves, can we do better? And the way we chose to treat it is by asking another question. We were asking a question that was hypothetical at that time. Let’s say we will be successful in developing this technology, right? And we come in and pitch it to Europe and to policymakers and to the public. What will be the questions that people may ask us, right? Like starting from the end and going backward. What is it that you actually want from this technology? How can we make sure that this technology is safe? What happens when these particles fall on the ground? What will it do to us, to our children, to other components of the biosphere? How sure are we that we are not solving one problem, but then bringing two or three additional problems to the table that weren’t there to begin with? And we were saying, for ourselves at least, that we believe that the technology may be worth the consideration of policymakers. And eventually decisions won’t be made by us. We’ll probably come back to it. It will be made by governments. but that it’s worth their consideration.
Yanai Yedvab:
Only if we are able to check all these boxes to make sure that the particles are safe, to make sure that we can actually control this technology much better than what you can do with sulfate to make sure that you can start it very gradually and carefully to make sure that you don’t find any surprises as you start. So this, to your question, what was our starting point or what was the decision we took? This was the decision we took, that we are trying to give policymakers an option that we were hoping at that time, and now we can discuss what we’ve done over the last three or four years, but we were hoping that we’ll be safe, responsible, and controlled.
Robinson Meyer:
So tell me about the system that you developed, because actually since the last time we talked, Stardust has made a number of announcements, including about what the particle is, which was previously not something we talked about. So tell us about the system that you believe Stardust has developed.
Yanai Yedvab:
First of all, thank you for that. And I think you’re right by stressing that this is a system. The particle is only one component in this end-to-end system that we’re developing. So it includes two types of particles that are composed from two ingredients. One is amorphous silica. To give some context, amorphous silica is used in the two-space. We are all brushing our teeth every day as food additives in the food we’re eating. It’s also existing in a structured material for some living creatures. And the other component, which is calcium carbonate, which is essentially what you can find in limestone, in eggshells. So the idea was to start with materials that are naturally abundant, that are known to be safe. And essentially we build two types of particles. One is spheres of amorphous silica, essentially homogeneous spheres, and the other one is more complex core shell particles composed from a core of.
Yanai Yedvab:
Calcium carbonate surrounded by a shell of amorphous silica. Apart from being safe and being part of the natural system, And we have already evidence at the lab that these particles are far more inert than.
Yanai Yedvab:
Sulfates or essentially any other candidate that was proposed so far, suggesting that the impact on the atmosphere will be essentially that we will not have any negative impact on the atmosphere. Another feature is that these particles are biodegradable, which means essentially that once they fall on the ground, they disintegrate to become once again structured material for these living creatures. The reason we insisted on biodegradability is because one of the things you want to make sure is that you avoid bioaccumulation, that you don’t end up, you know, after a few decades finding that these particles accumulate and you don’t know what to do with them. So, we developed these two types of particles, we’ve developed a delivery system capable of dispersing these particles at the atmosphere in a very controlled and accurate manner, and we’ve developed the monitoring and control system, which in our view is an essential part.
Yanai Yedvab:
Of this technology, essentially making sure that you can actually monitor all the aspects of the technology. Just to give you one example, we came up with a technology, to tag our particles, essentially to put a unique fingerprint or, if you will, a QR code on each batch of particles, which enables you, to follow them around as they move across the sky. I think about it conceptually like a constellation of satellites where you have this global dashboard and you can see the particles. So we’ve developed all these parts of the system, released a series of publications together with our academic collaborators. I’m very proud of our scientists and engineers that worked very hard to put it out. And the idea was to put it to the review of the scientific community. We’re, let’s say, getting very good positive feedbacks. Again, there is still need for external review and validation like you always do with new scientific results. And we also need to do much more research. The research is definitely not complete, but I would say that we are at a point that we believe that we have a foundation, for what eventually could be a safe and controlled option for policymakers,
Yanai Yedvab:
to decide on deployment of this technology.
Robinson Meyer:
What are the questions you feel like you don’t understand about this system? Where does research still need to be done?
Yanai Yedvab:
Okay, so I’d like to divide my answer to three types of questions. And in fact, this was the first paper we released was exactly trying to put what we think are the questions we need to answer. Exactly like you’re asking. What is it that you need eventually to answer in order to be able to establish credibly that this system is safe and controlled? And this falls into three buckets. The first one has to do with questions that are related to human health. You know, questions, is it toxic? Are there any short or long-term effects on the health either of people or other components of the biosphere? The good news about these questions.
Yanai Yedvab:
That we have decades of experience in other, I would say, use cases, and you have very good and established protocols and criteria to decide what is safe and what is not safe. So obviously, there will need to be a decision whether you adopt these protocols into this use case, but it’s a very good starting point. And the short answer is that we were able to establish the safety of our particles with respect to human health. So in my view, this question is checked.
Yanai Yedvab:
The other bucket has to do with the impact on the chemistry of the atmosphere and its composition. You know, questions like, will you have a negative impact on the ozone layer? Will you change the composition of the atmosphere? And similar questions. There I would say, Rob, that we have very positive results at the lab, but you still need to complement them with results that will need to be established in field tests. So there I’d say that the results are promising, but to your question, there is more research which is required, and definitely we’ll come back to it when we discuss our next steps. The third part has to do with the climatic effect. Climatic effect in many aspects is the most challenging one because there you cannot do testing at the lab. There, you need to do testing at scale. One of the things which is unique about our technology is that we can do a similar approach to how you do clinical trials. When you are trying to establish the safety of a new life-saving drug.
Yanai Yedvab:
You don’t go and distribute it to the entire population. You start with a very small ensemble. You test for safety. You have very clear success criteria. Only after you meet these criteria, you enlarge this ensemble, do additional tests, and go step by step. And the idea is to do it similarly with our technology. Essentially, to establish our confidence with respect to these climatic effects, The idea is to do the stepwise.
Yanai Yedvab:
Approach where you will start very low, orders of magnitude below any level that could have any climatic or environmental effect. Test for aspects of safety you can test there. Only when you gain enough confidence and collect enough data, you move to the next step. And through a process that will probably take several years and combined with our monitoring capabilities, we plan to answer these questions. So I would say from all these three buckets, the place where we feel that there is still the largest amount of work to be done is with respect to this climatic effect. But we were coming up with some methodology how we are suggesting to deal with it. By the way, you cannot do it with sulfates. This is something that sometimes people overlook, and the reason you cannot do small-scale testing with sulfates, you need to start.
Yanai Yedvab:
With essentially deploying the full amount, and the reason is that you have a huge background, a few hundred thousands of tons of sulfates up in the atmosphere, which, if you think about it for a second, means that the small-scale experiment you can do is around one million tons. And obviously, this is not an experiment. This is essentially deployment. So one of the unique features, one of the places where we feel that our technology may have a very clear advantage is with respect to this challenge.
Robinson Meyer:
How does the particle break down? Like, describe the biodegradability of the particle. And have you tested the biodegradability of the particle in its spherical form? Because I understand these materials exist in nature, but it does feel like in these two distinct forms that you’ve created for distribution, maybe it has some new structural properties or it doesn’t exactly behave as other forms of the material would behave? What is the natural process by which these materials break down?
Yanai Yedvab:
Yeah, so I’d say the main, like, because most of Earth is covered with water, essentially the oceans, the most important question there is how these particles behave when they fall into the ocean. And to your questions, we’ve done extensive testing, not relying, as you were saying, on the evidence from natural creatures, like testing our particles in an environment which are representative of the environment they will have in the ocean. Essentially putting samples of these particles in ocean water and testing it for several months. And there are ways to measure how this particle essentially is dissolved in the water. And the mechanism, again, without getting too technical, is that, you know, water is able to penetrate into the inner parts of the particle in this way, like essentially dissolve it to become, as I was saying, this structured material once again, which will create the next generation of seashells, of algae, and so on.
Robinson Meyer:
And we know that water breaks down the spheres because it seems to me that, I mean, look, we encounter silica in daily life. It’s in those like little packets you get in products and electronics, and you’re not supposed to eat them. It says don’t eat this, but evidently we’d be spraying some form of silica kind of everywhere under a deployment scenario. Do we know that the body or the climatic system can break down this material at the scale that it would have to be produced and distributed and deployed in order to have the climatic effect that we want?
Yanai Yedvab:
This is a very important question. I appreciate that you’re asking. So the short answer is that it depends on the, I would say, the molecular structure of silica. You have silica in the form of quartz. Quartz, by the way, does not dissolve in there. And we know it like quartz is, you know, part of dust and dust does not dissolve in ocean water and also carries other problems. This is one type of silica which is not appropriate for what we’re doing. At the same time, you have amorphous silica.
Yanai Yedvab:
Which is not crystalline by nature, and this is known to actually dissolve, and even more importantly, does not have some of the problems that you have with quartz with respect to human health. So the short answer is yes, we’ve tested it, and the reason that our silica, unlike the example that you’ve mentioned, does dissolve has to do with the specifics. You know, in the end of the day, Rob, a lot is in the details. And here, this is the reason you need to do testing, extensive testing. You know, modeling is great, but only once you are testing your own product in real life condition, is how you can get, I would say, confidence and certainty that you’re actually able to meet these requirements. And, you know, you were speaking about dissolving in water, but I will take it one step further. I would say any of these aspects. When you’re asking, will our particle impact the ozone layer? So again, you need to do testing for our particles at a relevant environment. This is what we’ve done, as I was saying, at the lab. We need to do it in the outer environment. This is the next step. We can talk about what is required for it. But again, you need to test for every aspect of this system.
Robinson Meyer:
I want to talk about that, but I do want to just lean into, I agree the details are important, and this isn’t a science podcast and I’m not a scientist, but it does seem to me that if you ...
Robinson Meyer:
It’s an inert particle — or it dissolves, right. If it dissolves and breaks down in water is it really inert because on the one hand we’re saying oh it’s inert when it’s sprayed in the atmosphere and on the other hand oh but it dissolves in water but a a particle that dissolves doesn’t seem to me to be a particle that could be inert so and then if it’s inert then it would bioaccumulate right because that’s you know plastic for instance is inert and what we’ve learned is that plastic is bioaccumulating in tissue so Walk through, how can it be inert and also dissolve in water and break down through a number of natural processes that exist in the Earth system already?
Yanai Yedvab:
It sounds like a paradox, right? And the short answer is the difference between the air atmosphere, the stratosphere, where we need these particles to be inert, which is very, very dry, contains primarily sulfates and a few other trace gases. But much, much cleaner and drier than the atmosphere. And yes, you’re right. In that environment, the particle is inert. And once it falls on the ground, where you have enormous amount of water and vapor and all the other components, these components are able to dissolve it. But I think that I would say the more fundamental point that you’ve been making in your question is that essentially you need to meet a very strict set of requirements. Part of it has to do with the stratosphere. Part of it has to do with the atmosphere. And to your question, why do we believe that the right way to do it is to actually develop the technology? It’s because in the end of the day, only when you’re walking through these problems and you are able to do, for example, I would say.
Yanai Yedvab:
Micromanagement of the surface properties of the particle and make sure exactly as you were saying that it will be inert when it’s up there in the sky but once it falls, it will dissolve is when you have a potential to come up with a solution that works. So yeah, it looks like a paradox but the bottom line is that we were able to demonstrate that we can do both. That we can make sure that it’s inert up there but it dissolves when it falls on the ground.
Robinson Meyer:
Tell me about the next steps as you envision them.
Yanai Yedvab:
So I think the most important thing to do is now is to, let’s say, expand. We are working already with leading scientists around the world, leading universities in the U.S., in Europe and in other places to do much more of that and to provide our particles to other labs that will do testing, that we’ll be able to, do external validation of the work that we’ve been doing. I think that when we’re looking at the next, I would say, year or so, this is the most important thing.
Robinson Meyer:
You hinted at some next experiments or next testing that needs to happen. So what exactly are the next steps in figuring out the safety of the particle?
Yanai Yedvab:
So as I was stressing when I was discussing the challenges, eventually it will be essential to test this technology out in outdoor environment. Specifically, Rob, in order to test for these climatic effects, because climatic effects you cannot test at the lab, because these are large-scale phenomena, and you need to make sure that you’re testing them at the right scale. And there is no other way around it. We firmly believe that these outdoor experiments should only be done, working hand-in-hand with governments that will need to put the regulation that will have to take place only when you have specific regulation. And this is the only way that Stardust will do this kind of experiment. As I was elaborating, what’s unique about our technology is that we are able to go a very long way through lab testing and modeling before you need to actually make a decision and to move to other testing. But if you’re asking me what is very important and when we have an opportunity to speak to salt leaders, to policymakers, is for governments to start thinking seriously.
Yanai Yedvab:
How the regulatory framework, particularly of the R&D phase, will look like. I think that for the evolution, not only of Stardust, but of this ecosystem, to move forward in a way that will be, you know, provide eventually options for policy makers, this is the next step. For them to set up the rules, how you do it, to put the guardrails for, you know, entities like Stardust and hopefully others that will try to develop their own technology, to have clarity on what are the requirements they will need to meet.
Robinson Meyer:
You referenced the need for outdoor experiments eventually. In the field, I think among people who have been thinking about governing these technologies as their job for a long time, there’s a taboo around outdoor research or a de facto observed ban because the challenge is it’s very hard to say where outdoor research ends or an outdoor experiment ends and deployment begins it’s a gradient it’s hard to say in this amount is not going to have an effect or that amount is going to have an effect there was an american startup that distributed some sulfates or claimed to deploy sulfates a few years ago, it got in trouble, but also it doesn’t seem to have been releasing enough to maybe have an effect. But where do you think the line on outdoor experiments are? Because I understand you’re saying you’re not going to do it until there’s regulation. But while you’re waiting for regulation, presumably you’re a company, you’re going to still want to move forward. So where is that line on what makes something an outdoor experiment? Yeah.
Yanai Yedvab:
So, I think that essentially, as you were saying, when you’re speaking about a standard reflection technology outdoor experiments, you’re speaking about experiments that have any potential.
Yanai Yedvab:
To do any level of impact on climate and the environment, right? So, you know, because humanity is dispersing a very wide spectrum of particles, I would say in very large quantities, right? And not as an experiment. So we’re doing it as an uncontrolled, this is part of the problem. This is why we’re having this conversation, right? As we speak, and over the last few decades, we’ve dispersed, Rob, not, you know, one ton or 1 million tons or 1 billion tons. We’ve dispersed a thousand billion tons of polluting, right, and greenhouse gases, polluting gases and greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, right? So this is the problem we are trying to deal with. I would say in this case, we should be understanding the sensitivities, very careful in making sure that any outdoor experiment that may have the slightest impact on climate or the environment should be done under the supervision of governments. And respectfully, I would say you’ve mentioned that others were dispersing sulfates, essentially trying to deploy this technology at small scale. I would say respectfully, I disagree with them. I don’t think this is the right way. We are trying to do any effort we can.
Yanai Yedvab:
To make sure that we are developing the technology, but the questions regarding these sunlit reflection technology outdoor experiments and eventually deployment will be for governments.
Robinson Meyer:
There’s a Harvard experiment coming up later this year or next year where they’re going to draw outdoor air into a chamber and then release sulfates, I believe in that case, into the chamber. It’s been controversial. Does that count as an outdoor experiment to you?
Yanai Yedvab:
I’m not sure they plan to do it with sulfur. I think they want to test different types of solid particles. But this experiment is an experiment that does not involve dispersal. I think that stretching this argument that the rationale to it has to do with impacts on climate and environment to experiments that essentially do not involve dispersal, in my view, would be a very ... Like, this was not the intent, or these are not the concerns that brought people to say we don’t want this type of experiments. Because in the end of the day, it is true that it is done at the outdoors, but eventually they’re not dispersing anything to the atmosphere. I think it’s great that they’re doing it. I think that this is a very neat idea, and I’m looking forward to see the results of their experiments.
Robinson Meyer:
Have you done research like that experiment before?
Yanai Yedvab:
This type of non-dispersal experiments, we’re having ideas, but the short answer that we’ve not done. To give a complete answer, we have done, and this was published, and we are very clear about it. We’ve done a very limited number of monitoring checks to check our measurement equipment using commercially available and safe simulants like robotic white smoke at very small amounts. But as I was saying, this does not constitute a sign of reflection technology experiment, let alone an experiment where you don’t disperse anything to the atmosphere.
Robinson Meyer:
Just to be clear, when you were releasing white smoke to calibrate the machines, right, was that happening up in the atmosphere? Or was that happening? Just what was that experiment?
Yanai Yedvab:
Yeah, like we were using an aerobatic airplane that was doing like this kind of aerobatic show where they dispense white smoke and we were taking advantage of it to test our measurement equipment. It’s something we’ve done a few times in the past and it was important to calibrate our equipment system.
Robinson Meyer:
But that’s not an outdoor experiment because it didn’t, the white smoke, in your view, did not, was not going to affect the climate.
Yanai Yedvab:
It’s a white smoke, right? Like you do it in every aerobatic show in quantities which are much higher. Again, I firmly believe that you should be very careful in limiting our ability to study these effects by stretching the concept of outdoor experiments exactly to these places where people are asking, okay, can we use white smoke that we’re using every day? Yeah, my answer is definitely we can.
Robinson Meyer:
But other than that, other than releasing white smoke at altitude and using it to calibrate the machines, have you done anything else that would be considered an outdoor experiment, releasing anything outside?
Yanai Yedvab:
Yeah, only this kind of experiment with this kind of commercially available simulants to measure.
Robinson Meyer:
Like just those experiments.
Robinson Meyer:
Stardust has reported, according to E&E News, has been working with this lobbying firm, Holland & Knight, to, as you said in a statement, inform members of Congress about the work and the need for appropriate and robust oversight. What do you think regulation of an outdoor experiment or of solar geoengineering should look like? What would need to be in place before you say, okay, We’re now going to conduct some kind of experiment.
Yanai Yedvab:
So first of all, I want to be very clear. It’s not for us to establish this regulation, right? We will be the company that will be regulated, and it’s a very thin line. In the end of the day, for this to work, you will need an all-ends effort where governments and regulators will need to decide on regulation. There is a lot of place and we’ve stressed it for academy doing basic research and also for non-profit so we want to be very careful in saying in the end of the day this will be a regulation that will be imposed on us and we are not the ones that need to decide what should be this regulation having said that, i’d say that first of all you want to make sure why you need to do these experiments Because as you’re saying, it needs to be very clear what’s the goal of these experiments, what do we expect to learn from them, how this will answer, like you were asking earlier, the most important questions that will give us the information whether we should or could move forward with this technology.
Yanai Yedvab:
So what are the goals? What are the criteria for such an experiment to be conducted in a safe manner? Are you able to shut it down or change it if something goes wrong? How sure are you definitely at the first stages that you’re not making any impact on the climatic system or on the environment before you collect enough data and gain enough confidence to then for these policymakers to make decisions on the next step? So in principle, I would say these are the questions that I expect. And as you’ve mentioned, when we were discussing policymakers, one of the lines, I kept telling them, listen, this is a technology. That is not decades away. We are in a position that in a few years we will need this technology and also we will have a technology that will be ready for this stage. And you think it’s your role to think hard, what are the requirements that you will eventually impose on entities like Stardust? And I would hope in a few years, also a few others, that they will be operating in this field.
Robinson Meyer:
Stardust is a U.S. company incorporated in Delaware. You work in Israel, and I think your lab and facilities are in Israel. We’re talking in somewhat hazy terms about regulation. If the U.S. Regulated outdoor experiments, would you then conduct them under the U.S. auspices? If the U.S. didn’t regulate them or didn’t allow them, but Israel did, would it that case you conduct them? In Israel, if a third country allowed them, would you go to the third country?
Yanai Yedvab:
So the short answer is that we believe that it should be governments in plural, that will build, you know, the governance framework and the regulation which is required here. How this will come about, I would say it’s too early to decide. And we are not yet at a position that we can say something. My expectation for governments is to start thinking about it seriously, how this will come about. You know, I think we’ve mentioned it in our prior conversations. One of the models that we take inspiration from is the way the world dealt with another global environmental challenge, which is the all in the ozonal, right? It was the late 80s and the beginning of the 90s. And essentially, in that case, it was a process that was led by the U.S. In fact, it was a nexus of the U.S. Academy, which researched the problem. You know, some of the leading scientists in the U.S., it was the U.S. Company developing the substitute to these malicious refrigerator gases.
Yanai Yedvab:
And the U.S. government, which was able in the course of three or four years to consolidate, in that case, a multilateral coalition that eventually signed the Montreal Protocol, which on one hand banned the use of these malicious refrigerators, but at the same time put in place the criteria for the substitute that the company, that DuPont, developed. So when we’re looking at precedents, I would say this is probably the biggest triumph of environmental diplomacy, whether in this case it will happen exactly this way or otherwise too early to say and also dependent on many things that are not at our control and too early to say.
Robinson Meyer:
I think a lot of the questions here get at this bigger question that we’ve talked about before, but that I want to make sure we discuss now, which is why should a private company do this work? On Stardust’s website, you describe yourself as an R&D organization. You’re doing R&D. But R&D is usually done by the academy. And in fact, we think of it as a market failure. We think of it as something that companies generally don’t do unless they’re trying to bring a product to market. In the case of Stardust, because you’re a private company, it seems to me there’s going to be pressure to deploy. There’s going to be pressure in, you have $75 million, it’s a lot of money, but it will run out. And as you get closer to that date, as it’s three years from now or five years from now or seven years from now, and the venture cycle turns over, there’s going to be pressure to deploy and pressure to find some way to monetize the research that you’ve been doing. And that’s going to generate pressure to then actually use this technology, whether or not it’s ready. That’s just the incentives that come with being a company. So why is Stardust a company and why should a private company do this kind of work?
Yanai Yedvab:
So, you know, this is a question we thought hard about, when we started because we, Stardust, I can speak for myself and for my co-founder and for our entire team, is a very mission driven team. For most of us, it’s the second career. We all have kids. We want to make sure that we’re doing the right thing and eventually leaving our kids a world that is, I would say, not worse than what we got from our parents. And we were thinking hard what’s the best way to promote this option. And in fact, we looked at precedents and you were saying.
Yanai Yedvab:
R&D always starts at the academy, and you’re completely right.
Yanai Yedvab:
I would add to this that if you look, I would say most, if not all, the groundbreaking technologies that were developed that eventually benefited humanity. We mentioned a couple of times the life-saving drugs, genome sequencing, space, and many other examples. Eventually technology was developed by a company. Because when you move from basic research to applied research and development of technology, this is what you’re doing in companies. And, you know, I think that from your perspective or your audience perspective, I would argue that the question they should ask ourselves, let’s play it forward, fast forward five or ten years from now, Right. Do you want at that point when policymakers are at the position that they understand that they need a tool to stabilize the temperature, do you want to make sure that they have option? I would argue that the answer is yes. And if the answer to this question is yes, then I would say humbly that most presidents suggest that at some point you need a combination of this research that is done in academy with companies because technology is developed by companies.
Robinson Meyer:
Why not be a nonprofit that develops this technology and then owns this technology? Because a drug genome testing, even rockets in the case of SpaceX, all of those have some kind of commercial use. But it seems like this technology’s only commercial use will result from its deployment or at least Stardust being contracted by a government or governments to deploy. And so... Given that being a company means having bottom line pressures, needing to turn a profit, needing to find a market for your work, why develop this technology as a company and not as, say, a nonprofit?
Yanai Yedvab:
First of all, as I was saying, we contemplated on this question very, very seriously before we started. I would say two fundamental reasons. One is the ability to extract resources in companies. And you’ve mentioned you have an ability to get resources which are higher and enable you to move faster and also to do much more of the testing which is required here. And the other reason is to incentivize talent, you know, to get top talent and to incentivize it. And again, it’s not something that we’ve invented. This is the common, I would say, the mainstream way to make sure when you need to solve a problem at this scale. I want to come back for a second to a comment you made a minute ago regarding our investors.
Yanai Yedvab:
And let’s say a couple of things. First of all, before we chose to partner with our investors, we made sure that we’re aligned in terms of what we’re trying to achieve here. And specific, and, you know, if you get into our website, you have guiding principles that essentially guide our work. And we made sure that we are aligned with them, both with respect to the mission and to these guiding principles. And wherever this was not the case, we just didn’t partner with them. And every one of our investors understand that for them to get a return, and obviously they want to get return for their investment.
Yanai Yedvab:
There will need to be a government that will actually make decisions because if you think about it realistically, Rob, this is the only way that this could be translated into something which is at scale. All the other scenarios I would argue humbly are, I understand that some people think about them, but they’re just not realistic. So the reason that my investors encourage me to make sure that we are working with governments and we are following these guiding principles is just because this is, in this case, in their best interest. And I’m putting aside the fact that they’re also aligned at the level of values.
Yanai Yedvab:
But in the essence of it, this is the only way it could move forward.
Robinson Meyer:
Last question, since you brought up investors. Are all the investors in Stardust private VCs? Is there any state money in Stardust, either from the U.S. government or the Israeli government or any other government?
Yanai Yedvab:
No. The short answer is no. No state money from any government at all.
Robinson Meyer:
Yanai Yedvab, thank you so much for joining us on Shift Key.
Yanai Yedvab:
Thanks a lot.
Robinson Meyer:
And that’s the show for this week, but remember to stick around to the end of this episode for a conversation between Heatmap Labs and Scott Wharton, the CEO of Tandem PV, a leader in perovskite solar technology. We’re excited to have them as a sponsor. We’ll be back next week around this time with a new episode of Shift Key. Until then, Shift Key is and remains a production of Heatmap News. Our editors are Jillian Goodman and Nico Lauricella. Multimedia editing and audio engineering is by Jacob Lambert and by Nick Woodbury. Our music’s by Adam Kromelow. Thanks so much for listening. We’ll see you next week. Stay cool.
Scott Wharton:
When people made the first silicon solar panels, they were small and they were inefficient and they fell apart right away. We kind of forget that because today they’re bulletproof. Perovskites are now almost as good as where silicon is, but in only 12 years. You need a combination of efficiency and durability and manufacturability to sell stuff. So on the efficiency side, a few weeks ago we unveiled that we broke 30% on a panel, not a cell, so 30.4%. So that’s already way better than a silicon panel will ever be.
Mike Munsell:
That was Scott Wharton, CEO of Tandem PV, a California-based manufacturer of perovskite silicon tandem solar panels. And I’m Mike Munsell, Heatmap’s vice president of partnerships. I sat down with Scott to discuss why perovskites are finally ready to scale, the surprising economics of domestic solar manufacturing, and how he believes Tandem PV will become one of the biggest names in US clean energy. Stay tuned today and over the next few Shift Key episodes to hear more from Scott.
Scott Wharton:
Hey, I’m Scott Wharton. I am the CEO of Tandem PV. We are making a next generation solar panel that is better and cheaper than what’s out there.
Mike Munsell:
What is Tandem PV? And just tell me the history.
Scott Wharton:
Tandem PV, we’re making this new kind of solar panel. It’s based on a new material science, which I’m sure many of the listeners have heard of. It’s called perovskite. It is 100 times thinner than an existing silicon panel. It’s cheaper to make. its higher efficiency. And the company itself has been around for about 10 years. We just actually hit our 10-year anniversary. One of our founders built the first perovskite when he was at Stanford getting his PhD a dozen years ago. So we’ve been doing this as long as anybody out there. And my background, I’m a serial entrepreneur. I’m like a startup junkie, and this is my fifth thing in a row.
Mike Munsell:
Where did you come from before Tandem PV?
Scott Wharton:
I worked in some early stage telecom voice for IP companies, and I was really fortunate. Both of them went public on Nasdaq. Then I started the world’s first cloud video conferencing service. So I like to say I had the right idea, but it was a little early because it was three years before Zoom. After three startups in a row, my wife said, would you mind not doing another one for a while? So I went to Logitech and took a small group to making it the world’s largest video conferencing hardware business. So before I came here, I was running a $2 billion global manufacturing business, launched hundreds of products around the world, and I’ve been at Tandem PV now as the CEO for three years, kind of leading the charge from R&D phase into commercialization.
Mike Munsell:
What was it that made you make the leap into clean energy at this moment?
Scott Wharton:
Well, it was a combination of things. I actually started my career way back when at the Solar Energy Industry Association, but it was just too early there. So I’ve been following solar for a long time. I’m just kind of eager for the right opportunity to get back in. You know, at the same time in Logitech, I had achieved everything I wanted to achieve. Like we built our business to more than a billion dollars a year. We’re the market leader. And I met, first, one of the investors at a conference in Germany, and he was telling me about his portfolio. He said, I got this thing, perovskites, and I was thinking, what’s a perovskite? I didn’t really know what it was. But as I heard more from him and I met the founders, I think what I realized is that this was going to be the next big breakthrough in not only solar, but I think in the energy market. And the founders were doing amazing work. They were brilliant, but their focus and their skill and background was more on R&D and technology. And my background was in scaling companies. So it’s kind of like the peanut butter and chocolate where we put together our skill set and got really excited about it. And one thing led to another, and I dived out of my big, cushy corporate job back into startup world.
Mike Munsell:
Can you talk more about the history of perovskites? I’ve been in the space 13 years now, and I think I’ve been hearing since I joined that it’s always going to be the next big thing. So is it the next big thing, and why now, if so?
Scott Wharton:
It is the next big thing, but I think, unfortunately, in a lot of new technologies, people maybe get a little bit over-exuberant, and they either over-hype it or are too optimistic about where they’ll be. I would say if you compare perovskites to silicon, it took silicon about 70 years to get to where it is today. And when people made the first silicon solar panels, they were small and they were inefficient and they fell apart right away.
Scott Wharton:
We kind of forget that because today they’re bulletproof. Perovskites are now almost as good as where silicon is, but in only 12 years and continue to get better. And one of the reasons why I’m very excited about where we are in the perovskite space is that you need a combination of efficiency and durability and manufacturability to sell stuff. So on the efficiency side, a few weeks ago, we unveiled that we broke 30% on a panel, not a cell. So 30.4%. So that’s already way better than a silicon panel will ever be. And then on the durability side, we’re showing that we’re less than 1% degradation per year. So I think the combination of those two things we keep hearing, that’s far and away better than what’s out there in the market. And that’s what you need to be able to sell.
Scott Wharton:
And then the last thing is you need to be able to manufacture at scale. And we now have a pilot plant up and running that’s making panels that are 60 times bigger than where we are in R&D. So you take the combination of those things and we are on the cusp of shipping our first panels out into the market. And then our plan is to basically build a high volume line and start scaling in 2028. So I know there’s some skepticism in the market. I would acknowledge I think that’s broadly true. There aren’t many players that I think are where we are with this combination. So we’re going to be one of the first, not the first to be able to scale perovskites commercially. I know there are others that are shipping some small units, but I think we’ll be among the first to have some higher volumes. And then I think that that’ll kick off the market to start scaling.
Mike Munsell:
Can you talk more about the manufacturing? Is it in the U.S., or where are you manufacturing?
Scott Wharton:
Yeah, so we did our ribbon cutting for our factory in April. So we have a demonstration size plant in Fremont, California. So kind of where NextPower is, where Tesla is, it’s kind of the clean energy golf in Silicon Valley. Even though it’s demonstration, it’s a reasonably big size, the size of a football pitch. But it’s still small relative to what a high volume solar manufacturing plant is. but we’re building large-scale panels. And part of the goal of this demo plant was to show, can we go from R&D size to large size? And in January, we built our first prototype. And ever since then, we’ve been improving. So the plan is to get to as good or better to where we are in R&D, and we’ll be able to start shipping up some significant number of panels.
Mike Munsell:
And will those be shipped from Fremont?
Scott Wharton:
They’ll be shipped from Fremont.
Mike Munsell:
Is that sort of the plans for a larger manufacturer hub when you get out of the pilot phase?
Scott Wharton:
We haven’t picked our factory yet. We’re in the site selection process. But I think one of the things that’s interesting is because of the tax credits that are still maintained, I know that there’s some people like, oh, the tax credits went away. And I go, they did for consumers, but not for manufacturing. That was actually voted in in a bipartisan way by both the Democrats and Republicans. And because of that, the United States, believe it or not, is the cheapest place in the world to build solar panels, even cheaper than China, which most people don’t know. So we will pick another high volume location, but it’ll definitely be in the United States because of that.
Mike Munsell:
Can you talk more about the United States being the cheapest to manufacture? That’s not something I don’t think is a widely known fact.
Scott Wharton:
Yeah. When you add in the tax credits, the tax code is the 45X credit. So that’s for manufacturing for solar and other things. And you factor in the cost of delivering these products. The net cost is actually cheaper than if you built it in China.
Mike Munsell:
And can you tell me just what the manufacturing floor looks like today? Are you using automation? What does that look like? It’s pretty automated.
Scott Wharton:
So we don’t have that many people today. Most of the factory is zero touch where human beings aren’t touching it. And when we go to high volume line, it’ll be almost completely automated in that respect.
Scott Wharton:
One of the things that’s interesting about perovskites is that it’s more like a semiconductor process or more like what First Solar is doing because it’s a thin film. So it allows us to basically use a lot of off-the-shelf manufacturing tools that are built for the semiconductor industry or industries like things like for making windows and TVs. That allows us to kind of access these tools that already have economies of scale and are pretty mature, but repurpose them for perovskites. So it’s one of the reasons, you know, I get asked sometimes the question, why is this different from, you know, CleanTech 1.0 in the early days? And I would say one of the things different is that the tools are much more robust. And then the second thing that’s interesting about perovskites is that they’re both cheaper to make but higher performance. So, you know, when they had the early days of thin film, it was kind of cheaper but worse, kind of like a joke. It was like the Spirit Airlines of solar.
Scott Wharton:
That didn’t work out so well. But because we’re better and cheaper, and by cheaper, I mean that when you have a very high efficiency panel, you’re basically lowering the costs where they matter for customers. So every percent of efficiency, by our own calculation with some customers, is about $0.04 a watt. So if you go from $0.22, $0.23 to $0.30 a watt, you can both have a panel that is very competitive and cheaper because you’re saving on all the stuff that matters to the cost of a solar developer or an IPP. Land, labor, racking, balanced systems, etc. So it’s pretty exciting that we’re in this position that we can be both a premium product, but also the cheapest one to deploy.
Mike Munsell:
That was Scott Wharton, CEO of Tandem PV. In our next conversation, we talk through demand for domestically produced solar modules, the impact of tax credits and tariffs, and Tandem PV’s growing pipeline of customers. Stay tuned for that conversation after the next episode of Shift Key.
Los Bronces mine in Chile. ARIEL MARINKOVIC/AFP via Getty Images
The startup team observes the test reactor at the Idaho National Lab. Clean Core Thorium Energy
