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Can solar plus storage fix one of the thorniest problems of the energy transition?
To talk about renewable energy these days is to talk about power lines. “No transition without transmission” has become something of a mantra among a legion of energy wonks. And following the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, which contains a massive pot of subsidies for non-carbon-emitting power but little in the way of delivering it, legislative and regulatory attention has turned to getting that power from where it’s sunny and windy to where it’s needed.
Hardly a day goes by in which some industry group or environmental nonprofit isn’t assaulting the inboxes of climate journalists like myself with another study or white paper stressing the need for more transmission. But I’ve also recently noticed a newer group of advocates popping up: the batterystans.
Now, virtually everyone in the renewable energy space loves talking about the massive growth and potential of batteries to store power generated by renewables for when it’s needed most. Here the Inflation Reduction Act’s honeypot of subsidies and the long economic trends are working together. The price of batteries really is falling dramatically, and their deployment has been ramped up.
For most people, batteries are a complement to transmission upgrades. But to a much smaller group, the falling prices of solar and batteries may obviate the need for transmission expansion entirely.
Let’s start with the more mild case. As Duncan Campbell, Vice President at Scale Microgrids told me, “If you go deep on power grid expansion modeling studies, they all assume an enormous build-out of transmission well beyond what we’ve done in the past and I think demonstrated to be well beyond the current institutional capacity.” In other words, you can pencil in as much transmission build-out as you want, but the chances we’ll actually do it seem at least short of certain. “It’s quite reasonable to suggest when doing something super ambitious that it’s a good idea to have a diversified approach,” he said.
That diversified approach, for Campbell, includes storage and generation both on the transmission part of the grid — like utility-scale storage paired with solar arrays — and on the distribution side of the grid, like rooftop solar and garage batteries. The latter two examples can also work together as a “virtual power plant” to modulate consumption based on when power is most expensive or cheap and even sometimes send power back to the grid at times of stress.
“At the end of the day it seems undeniably prudent to think about what solutions are going to complement large-scale transmission build-out if we want to meet these goals. Otherwise it’s a concentrated approach that carries a lot of risks,” Campbell told me. “Technologically, VPPs and DER [distributed energy resources] can help. Especially in those worst situations.”
This balanced approach would not actually face much opposition from advocates for a substantial transmission build-out, even if sometimes this “debate” — especially on Twitter, I’m sorry, especially on X — can get polarized and contentious.
“They’re complementary, not competitive,” Ric O’Connell, the executive director of GridLab, told me. “Transmission moves energy around in space, storage moves around in time. You need both.”
O’Connell pointed out that storage in some cases could be thought of a transmission asset, something analogous to the wires and poles that move electricity, where power could be moved on very short time frames to help out with extremely high levels of demand, a lack of generation, or transmission congestion. We’ve seen this already in Texas, where storage has helped take the bite out of extremely high demand recently, and in California, where it has helped alleviate the rapid disappearance of solar power every evening.
“The shorter duration storage stuff is working to address congestion and streamline transmission operations. In that sense you can put it in the same category as a grid enhancing technology,” O’Connell said.
While nearly everyone I talked to was eager to say that storage and transmission could complement each other, even if some leaned on transmission more and others were more bullish on storage and distributed energy, there was one person who actually did represent a clear and polarizing view: Casey Handmer.
Handmer is a Cal Tech trained physicist who used to write software for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and founded Terraform Industries, an early stage start up that’s looking to develop the “Terraformer,” a solar-powered factory that would create synthetic natural gas. Immodestly, he “aims to displace the majority of fossil hydrocarbon production by 2035.”
More modestly, he describes himself as “effectively a puffed up blogger who runs a pre-revenue (i.e. default dead) startup in an area peripheral (at best) to grid issues,” but is nonetheless, again, immodestly “pretty confident that my analysis is correct,” he told me in an email.
“My views on this matter are unconventional, even controversial. Arguably this is my spiciest hot take on the future of energy,” he wrote on his blog.
He thinks that the falling price of solar and batteries will make large-scale transmission investments unnecessary.
The price declines in battery and solar will continue, allowing people and businesses to throw up solar wherever, pair it with batteries, to the point where solar is “5-15x” overbuilt. That would mean that solar wouldn’t need to be backed up by any kind of “clean firm” power, i.e. a source that can produce carbon-free electricity at any time, like nuclear power, pumped-hydro, green hydrogen, or natural gas with carbon capture and storage.
While extreme, his views are not so, so, so far off from other renewables maximalists, who view solar and battery price declines as essentially inexorable. If they’re right, resource adequacy issues (i.e. that it’s much more sunny in some places than others) could be overcome by just building more cheap solar and installing more batteries.
“Adding 12 hours of storage to the entire U.S. grid would not happen overnight, but on current trends would cost around $500 billion and pay for itself within a few years. This is a shorter timescale than the required manufacturing ramp, meaning it could be entirely privately funded. By contrast, upgrading the U.S. transmission grid could cost $7 trillion over 20 years,” Handmer wrote in July.
As for the case that transmission is needed to get solar power from where it’s sunnier (like southern Europe or the American Southwest) to where it isn’t (Northern Europe, the rest of America), Handmer argues this isn’t really a problem.
“Solar resource quality doesn't matter that much. Solar resource is much more evenly distributed than, say, oil,” he told me. “Almost all humans live close to where their grandparents were able to grow food to live, and crops only grow in places that are roughly equally sunny.” He also argued that “solar is about 1000x more productive in terms of energy produced per unit land used than agriculture,” so building it will be economically compelling in huge swathes of the world.
As he acknowledges, his view is pretty lonely. He seems to yada-yada away what developments in battery technology would be needed to make this all work (although presumably ever-cheapening solar could just charge more lithium-ion batteries). One estimate suggests that to have “the greatest impact on electricity cost and firm generation,” battery storage would have to extend out to 100 hours — about 25X more than they do now.
This is where I say what you’re already thinking. This combination of technofuturism, contrarianism, work experience in the space industry and comfort with back-of-the-envelope math to make strong assertions makes Handmer sound like — and I mean this in the most value-neutral, descriptive way possible — another proponent of the rooftop solar, home battery, electric car future: Elon Musk. (Handmer used to work at the Musk-inspired Hyperloop One).
When I asked him why he’s an admitted outlier on this, he chalked it up to “anchoring bias in the climate space ... before solar and batteries got cheap, analyses showed that increasing the size of the grid was the best way to counter wind intermittency. But when the assumptions and data change, the results change too. The future of electricity is local. As a physicist, I was trained to take unusual observations to their utmost conclusion.”
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The Loan Programs Office is good for more than just nuclear funding.
That China has a whip hand over the rare earths mining and refining industry is one of the few things Washington can agree on.
That’s why Alex Jacquez, who worked on industrial policy for Joe Biden’s National Economic Council, found it “astounding”when he read in the Washington Post this week that the White House was trying to figure out on the fly what to do about China restricting exports of rare earth metals in response to President Trump’s massive tariffs on the country’s imports.
Rare earth metals have a wide variety of applications, including for magnets in medical technology, defense, and energy productssuch as wind turbines and electric motors.
Jacquez told me there has been “years of work, including by the first Trump administration, that has pointed to this exact case as the worst-case scenario that could happen in an escalation with China.” It stands to reason, then, that experienced policymakers in the Trump administration might have been mindful of forestalling this when developing their tariff plan. But apparently not.
“The lines of attack here are numerous,” Jacquez said. “The fact that the National Economic Council and others are apparently just thinking about this for the first time is pretty shocking.”
And that’s not the only thing the Trump administration is doing that could hamper American access to rare earths and critical minerals.
Though China still effectively controls the global pipeline for most critical minerals (a broader category that includes rare earths as well as more commonly known metals and minerals such as lithium and cobalt), the U.S. has been at work for at least the past five years developing its own domestic supply chain. Much of that work has fallen to the Department of Energy, whose Loan Programs Office has funded mining and processing facilities, and whose Office of Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chains hasfunded and overseen demonstration projects for rare earths and critical minerals mining and refining.
The LPO is in line for dramatic cuts, as Heatmap has reported. So, too, are other departments working on rare earths, including the Office of Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chains. In its zeal to slash the federal government, the Trump administration may have to start from scratch in its efforts to build up a rare earths supply chain.
The Department of Energy did not reply to a request for comment.
This vulnerability to China has been well known in Washington for years, including by the first Trump administration.
“Our dependence on one country, the People's Republic of China (China), for multiple critical minerals is particularly concerning,” then-President Trump said in a 2020 executive order declaring a “national emergency” to deal with “our Nation's undue reliance on critical minerals.” At around the same time, the Loan Programs Office issued guidance “stating a preference for projects related to critical mineral” for applicants for the office’s funding, noting that “80 percent of its rare earth elements directly from China.” Using the Defense Production Act, the Trump administration also issued a grant to the company operating America's sole rare earth mine, MP Materials, to help fund a processing facility at the site of its California mine.
The Biden administration’s work on rare earths and critical minerals was almost entirely consistent with its predecessor’s, just at a greater scale and more focused on energy. About a month after taking office, President Bidenissued an executive order calling for, among other things, a Defense Department report “identifying risks in the supply chain for critical minerals and other identified strategic materials, including rare earth elements.”
Then as part of the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, the Biden administration increased funding for LPO, which supported a number of critical minerals projects. It also funneled more money into MP Materials — including a $35 million contract from the Department of Defense in 2022 for the California project. In 2024, it awarded the company a competitive tax credit worth $58.5 million to help finance construction of its neodymium-iron-boron magnet factory in Texas. That facilitybegan commercial operation earlier this year.
The finished magnets will be bought by General Motors for its electric vehicles. But even operating at full capacity, it won’t be able to do much to replace China’s production. The MP Metals facility is projected to produce 1,000 tons of the magnets per year.China produced 138,000 tons of NdFeB magnets in 2018.
The Trump administration is not averse to direct financial support for mining and minerals projects, but they seem to want to do it a different way. Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum has proposed using a sovereign wealth fund to invest in critical mineral mines. There is one big problem with that plan, however: the U.S. doesn’t have one (for the moment, at least).
“LPO can invest in mining projects now,” Jacquez told me. “Cutting 60% of their staff and the experts who work on this is not going to give certainty to the business community if they’re looking to invest in a mine that needs some government backstop.”
And while the fate of the Inflation Reduction Act remains very much in doubt, the subsidies it provided for electric vehicles, solar, and wind, along with domestic content requirements have been a major source of demand for critical minerals mining and refining projects in the United States.
“It’s not something we’re going to solve overnight,” Jacquez said. “But in the midst of a maximalist trade with China, it is something we will have to deal with on an overnight basis, unless and until there’s some kind of de-escalation or agreement.”
A conversation with VDE Americas CEO Brian Grenko.
This week’s Q&A is about hail. Last week, we explained how and why hail storm damage in Texas may have helped galvanize opposition to renewable energy there. So I decided to reach out to Brian Grenko, CEO of renewables engineering advisory firm VDE Americas, to talk about how developers can make sure their projects are not only resistant to hail but also prevent that sort of pushback.
The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
Hiya Brian. So why’d you get into the hail issue?
Obviously solar panels are made with glass that can allow the sunlight to come through. People have to remember that when you install a project, you’re financing it for 35 to 40 years. While the odds of you getting significant hail in California or Arizona are low, it happens a lot throughout the country. And if you think about some of these large projects, they may be in the middle of nowhere, but they are taking hundreds if not thousands of acres of land in some cases. So the chances of them encountering large hail over that lifespan is pretty significant.
We partnered with one of the country’s foremost experts on hail and developed a really interesting technology that can digest radar data and tell folks if they’re developing a project what the [likelihood] will be if there’s significant hail.
Solar panels can withstand one-inch hail – a golfball size – but once you get over two inches, that’s when hail starts breaking solar panels. So it’s important to understand, first and foremost, if you’re developing a project, you need to know the frequency of those events. Once you know that, you need to start thinking about how to design a system to mitigate that risk.
The government agencies that look over land use, how do they handle this particular issue? Are there regulations in place to deal with hail risk?
The regulatory aspects still to consider are about land use. There are authorities with jurisdiction at the federal, state, and local level. Usually, it starts with the local level and with a use permit – a conditional use permit. The developer goes in front of the township or the city or the county, whoever has jurisdiction of wherever the property is going to go. That’s where it gets political.
To answer your question about hail, I don’t know if any of the [authority having jurisdictions] really care about hail. There are folks out there that don’t like solar because it’s an eyesore. I respect that – I don’t agree with that, per se, but I understand and appreciate it. There’s folks with an agenda that just don’t want solar.
So okay, how can developers approach hail risk in a way that makes communities more comfortable?
The bad news is that solar panels use a lot of glass. They take up a lot of land. If you have hail dropping from the sky, that’s a risk.
The good news is that you can design a system to be resilient to that. Even in places like Texas, where you get large hail, preparing can mean the difference between a project that is destroyed and a project that isn’t. We did a case study about a project in the East Texas area called Fighting Jays that had catastrophic damage. We’re very familiar with the area, we work with a lot of clients, and we found three other projects within a five-mile radius that all had minimal damage. That simple decision [to be ready for when storms hit] can make the complete difference.
And more of the week’s big fights around renewable energy.
1. Long Island, New York – We saw the face of the resistance to the war on renewable energy in the Big Apple this week, as protestors rallied in support of offshore wind for a change.
2. Elsewhere on Long Island – The city of Glen Cove is on the verge of being the next New York City-area community with a battery storage ban, discussing this week whether to ban BESS for at least one year amid fire fears.
3. Garrett County, Maryland – Fight readers tell me they’d like to hear a piece of good news for once, so here’s this: A 300-megawatt solar project proposed by REV Solar in rural Maryland appears to be moving forward without a hitch.
4. Stark County, Ohio – The Ohio Public Siting Board rejected Samsung C&T’s Stark Solar project, citing “consistent opposition to the project from each of the local government entities and their impacted constituents.”
5. Ingham County, Michigan – GOP lawmakers in the Michigan State Capitol are advancing legislation to undo the state’s permitting primacy law, which allows developers to evade municipalities that deny projects on unreasonable grounds. It’s unlikely the legislation will become law.
6. Churchill County, Nevada – Commissioners have upheld the special use permit for the Redwood Materials battery storage project we told you about last week.