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A conversation about perovskite, scale, and “soft costs” with Tandem PV CEO Scott Wharton.

What happens after solar modules get cheap? The relentless cost declines for solar technology driven by mass production and steady innovation — largely in China — has resulted in a commercial ecosystem where pricing is dominated by everything but the solar panels themselves.
In this world, a more efficient panel is not necessarily one that costs less to buy from a supplier, but rather one that can optimize on these “soft costs,” getting more energy out of the given time and money spent on installing the panel. This will come to matter more and more as solar costs inevitably plateau — and especially if Congress decides to eliminate clean energy incentives under the Inflation Reduction Act, which, combined with high tariffs on solar imports from Asia, could take away solar’s cost advantage over new natural gas-fired power.
At least that’s the thesis of Tandem PV, which uses so-called perovskite technology to build solar panels that, the company says, are already more efficient than existing silicon panels, and could become almost twice as efficient as existing panels as the technology improves. Perovskite refers to a group of minerals that share a similar structure and which, when stacked with silicon, can absorb a broad range of light, maximizing the efficiency of converting light to electricity.
I spoke with Tandem PV chief executive Scott Wharton about why he thinks that even in this era of rock bottom costs, greater performance will still win the day. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Why does it not matter so much that your solar panels are a little more expensive than other ones?
Well, I would say, for the whole history of solar panels, the cost of it was really high. There was this move to get the cost down, reduce the green premium, etc. We’re now in a world where that view is, I would say, antiquated.
And by cost, you mean the cost of the physical module.
The cost of the panel itself, yeah. The reason why is that for utility scale, which is where we’re focused on, only 20% of the cost is the panel. So 80% of the actual cost of a solar deployment — which is what matters, right? The cost of deploying it — labor, land, the balance of systems, the construction loans. It’s typical, I would say, of engineers — everything’s about the commodity. Whereas from my experience, it depends on the total cost. What we’re doing is, we’re saving the cost where it matters: on the labor.
So I guess the argument you’re trying to make is that even if the upfront cost of the panel is higher, the higher efficiency actually does make the kind of physical cost over time go down — and then all the soft costs, I imagine, are basically the same. Or is there any argument why the soft costs would be different, too?
First of all, I’m not sure that we will charge a premium. We want to be the same or cheaper. But even if we did, the point is that most of the cost is in those other things: labor, land, and installation. So if our panel has 30% more power in a single panel — a 28% [efficient] panel is about [third] more [efficient] than a 21% panel — then you need 30% fewer panels.
The other thing I learned recently is that people think that, oh, you just have this huge parcel of land and everything is equal. But a lot of times, when you’re deploying solar, you can’t actually fit everything on one parcel. So there’s a savings from having more density.
There’s also an issue where a lot of the best solar locations are taken, or you don’t have a ton of choice, necessarily, about where you put your panels because co-location matters so much. So it’s even more important to have efficiency in how you use that land.
Where is Tandem PV on the trajectory from lab to mass deployment?
We just announced a $50 million [Series A funding round], and we’re building out the first significant commercial perovskite factory in the United States. Conventional wisdom for manufacturing is, you put it as far away as possible. I think when you’re trying to do something really new, it’s probably the same story: It seems cheaper, but it’s not. Because if it takes you six more months because you’re flying back and forth and people don’t understand each other, then that actually costs you money and time and delay. We’re going to emphasize quality and speed over cost.
If we do this right, then the theory is, we’ve become the next, First Solar — that’s our intention. We want to take back solar leadership from China, which is a bold statement, but I think we’re on the journey. I tell the team, it’s like a bicycle race, where you go slowly, slowly, slowly, and then there’s a point where you need to break out. Well, I think we’ve broken out. Whether we fall flat on our face because we’re exhausted or we jump out ahead, we’ll see what history writes.
Obviously a big story in the solar industry is cost declining so much, and that’s tied to, a very specific technological stack. What do you guys have to do besides demonstrating results to tell the story that a different technology might be necessary?
So number one, there’s a reason why people are interested in perovskites. It’s 200 times thinner than traditional silicon panels — no rare earth minerals or metals, no mining.
What people don’t know about silicon solar is, you’ve got to heat this up to, like, 2,000 degrees Celsius to purify it, and it’s very, very expensive. We’re using the same glass and basically putting on a 1 micron-thick layer of ink. So we’re adding a little bit of cost, but you get a lot more energy for it than what you add.
The second thing is, we’re not actually competing with silicon so much as we’re building on top of it. As silicon technology gets better and cheaper, our product gets better and cheaper. And then the third thing is, see point number one, where we started. If you have a 28% or 30% [efficient] panel — by the way, silicon hits its physics limits at 26%. It can never get better than that. So we’re already better than where silicon is. And as labor and land become more expensive in the United States and around the world, it actually is cheaper to make something that focuses on where all the costs are.
I know you’re not in mass production yet, but are you going out to utility scale developers? Do they want a more efficient panel, or are they just comfortable working with the stuff they normally work with?
It’s both. They like what they have, but their feedback is — especially given all the supply chain risks that are going on around the world — if you can build it, we’ll buy it. We’re basically building something that is the same thing they already have, for a market that we already know. And is there a market for electricity? Yeah, there’s going to be a huge shortage of it with the AI boom. So we feel pretty confident that if we can build this, they will come.
Putting aside public policy issues, what’s to stop one of the big Chinese solar manufacturers from using this technology? People have been talking about it for decades.
It’s like any hard thing. It’s not a secret that people want to have rockets and go to space, it’s just a very, very hard technology. It’s the same thing as, why did Google and Apple win back the mobile phone war from the Japanese and the Germans and others? It’s a leapfrogging thing. I think the market’s up for grabs.
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The former FERC chair explains why Chris Wright is likely to succeed where Rick Perry failed.
Neil Chatterjee thinks it’s going to go better this time.
Eight years ago, Chatterjee was the chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, and Trump was the president. When Trump’s then-Secretary of Energy, Rick Perry, asked the commission to ensure that generators able to store fuel on site — which in the U.S. largely means coal and nuclear — get extra payments for doing so, thus keeping struggling power plants in business, it rejected the proposal by a unanimous vote.
“There’s no doubt my 2017 experience — that was politically driven,” Chatterjee told me, though he did concede that Perry was “right to be concerned about retiring generation at the time.” The Perry plan had been heavily influenced by the coal industry, he told me, and the regulatory structure of “compensating plants for having the attribute of on-site fuel … it was just a bit of a stretch.”
Now there’s a new Trump administration, with a new Secretary of Energy and a new FERC — and on Thursday, Energy Secretary Chris Wright asked the commission to do something else. He put forward what’s known as an advance notice of proposed rulemaking, directing FERC to come up with ways to help to make sure the grid can deal with another large-scale transition.
“They’re just apples and oranges,” Chatterjee said of the two requests. “This is a much more elegant, much more thoughtful exercise.”
Wright’s letter lays out the challenge of integrating large loads — i.e. data centers — onto the grid, arguing that they “must be able to connect to the transmission system in a timely, orderly, and non-discriminatory manner.” Doing so, he said, will “require unprecedented and extraordinary quantities of electricity and substantial investment in the Nation’s interstate transmission system.”
The overall thrust of the proposal is to make things easier and faster, including suggesting that interconnection studies for large loads that have their own generation or are flexible could be finished in just 60 days — which, if successful, could take a process that can last for years and get it done in less than a season.
The notice suggests a number of reforms for FERC to consider, including faster interconnection for “large loads that agree to be curtailable and hybrid facilities that agree to be curtailable and dispatchable” — touching on what has been the hottest subject in energy policy this year.
Tyler Norris, a Duke University researcher who has been one of the leading promoters of load flexibility, called Wright’s notice a “BFD” — that is, big effing deal — in a brief email to Heatmap.
Norris elaborated further on X. The proposal “appears to have done the near-impossible — generate overwhelming bipartisan enthusiasm — in what may be the most positive cross-sector response we’ve seen yet to DOE action under Secretary Wright,” he wrote.
Wright’s proposal suggests that both new data centers and new sources of power should be studied together for interconnection. While this sounds like it would be adding complexity, it may actually be simplifying the process. “Such an approach will allow for efficient siting of loads and generating facilities and thereby minimize the need for costly network upgrades,” the proposal says, reflecting the twinned desire to get more data centers on line faster while shielding electricity consumers from higher costs.
Another of Wright’s suggestions, however, might face more opposition. He argues that “load and hybrid facilities should be responsible for 100% of the network upgrades that they are assigned through the interconnection studies.”
This is designed to address the possibility — already being realized in parts of the country — that the network infrastructure required to bring data centers online could lead to higher costs for all electricity customers served by a given utility as it spreads out those costs to its rate base. The risk, however, is that utilities won’t like it. That’s because in most of the country, utilities earn a regulated rate of return on their investment in grid upgrades (by way of customer bill payments, of course), creating an incentive for them to continue to spend.
Those dynamics may be changing. Utilities once enjoyed primacy in Washington on electricity policy, especially among Republicans, but have seen their status slip of late in favor of a new force: big tech companies with big data centers.
“The hyperscalers have the influence to counteract the utilities here,” Chatterjee told me. “And that’s a new dynamic, historically — when it came to FERC, when it came to DOE, when it came to, quite frankly, Congress. People are sensitive to their utilities.”
Wright’s proposal, Chatterjee said, is trying to balance several different considerations the White House faces.
“This is the most vexing issue before the commission right now. And the reality is, it’s not clean politically within FERC, within DOE, even within the White House. There are differences of opinion on how best to thread this needle,” he told me, pointing to divides between those who want to drive AI development as fast as possible and those who are concerned about electricity prices.
By contrast, the Perry proposal to FERC was widely recognized as being primarily about supporting the coal (and to some extent nuclear) industry.
“I really think what DOE has put forward here is kind of an elegant solution that touches on everything,” Chatterjee said. “It’s not preferring particular sources of generation. It’s for flexibility — flexibility is having its moment.”
The proposal has already won some plaudits from the technology industry. In a letter to the White House, OpenAI Chief Global Affairs Officer Christopher Lehane wrote that the company “welcomed the news last week that DOE recommended to FERC that it assert jurisdiction and create standardized rules for large load interconnections.” He also noted that OpenAI’s data centers “are designed to be curtailable — reducing their draw or even returning power during peak demand, helping to protect reliability and avoid higher costs for consumers.”
The DOE gave FERC an April 2026 deadline for final action on the proposed rulemaking, and FERC said Monday night that comments would be due by November 14.
Chatterjee said he expects FERC to eventually issue rules based on the proposal on a unanimous and bipartisan basis.
“I think the initial thought was, Oh, here goes the Trump administration again, leaning on FERC. This is actually a thoughtful exercise that I think most people in the energy space recognize is necessary to be done.”
On global emissions, Bill Gates on Chinese nuclear, and a geothermal breakthrough
Current conditions: Hurricane Melissa made landfall over Jamaica as one of the strongest Category 5 storms on record before barreling north toward Cuba • A cold front will send temperatures plunging as far as 15 degrees below average across the mid-Atlantic and the Northeast • The Colombian Andes are bracing for flooding amid up to 8 inches of rain forecast for Wednesday.

The Trump administration’s all-of-government approach to thwarting construction of offshore wind turbines has included the Department of the Interior de-designating federal waters to turbine development and the Department of Transportation yanking funding, in addition to various steps taken by other agencies. Now the Department of Health and Human Services is taking its swing at the industry. On Tuesday, Bloomberg reported that Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. directed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to open an investigation into the potential harms offshore wind farms pose. In late summer, the agency instructed the CDC’s National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health to prepare research about wind farms’ impact on fishing businesses. The effort included Kennedy personally meeting with NIOSH director Josh Howard, in the course of which he gave Howard — a career physician and lawyer who previously oversaw federal efforts on September 11 victims’ health — specific experts to contact, according to the newswire report. The U.S. Surgeon General’s office has also been involved in the initiative.
It’s part of what Heatmap’s Jael Holzman called “Trump’s total war on wind,” an assault that started on President Donald Trump’s first day back in office. Earlier this month, oil major Shell’s top executive in the United States warned that the precedents the administration was setting risked being weaponized against fossil fuel companies once Trump exited power.
In the first real decline ever forecast by the United Nations, global emissions are now expected to fall by 10% below 1990 levels by 2035, according to a report issued Tuesday. But the world remains far off from the 60% reduction goal scientists say is necessary to keep warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius, the target leaders committed to when they signed the Paris Agreement a decade ago. “Humanity is now clearly bending the emissions curve downwards for the first time, although still not nearly fast enough,” Simon Stiell, executive secretary at the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, told Bloomberg on Tuesday. “We have a serious need for more speed.”
The latest assessment comes as the U.S. is withdrawing from the Paris climate negotiations and other countries are paring back spending on decarbonization ahead of the UN climate talks in Belem, Brazil, next month.
On Tuesday, Bill Gates released a provocative new treatise on climate change in which he laid out what he sees as necessary ahead of November’s climate summit. Before that, on Friday afternoon, the billionaire philanthropist gathered with half a dozen journalists in a conference room in Manhattan to discuss his latest ideas over lunch. Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer, who was in attendance, has a good breakdown of some of what Gates discussed. I also attended the lunch and wanted to highlight another point Gates made: The West is losing the race for new nuclear power. When it comes to fission, China is building more reactors than anyone else, and helped perfect the Westinghouse AP1000 before its successful construction in the U.S. Gates’ own reactor developer, TerraPower, had plans to build its debut plant in China prior to the souring in relations between Washington and Beijing nearly a decade ago. When it comes to fusion, he said, there’s no topping how much funding China has directed toward the technology.
“The amount of money they’re putting into fusion is more than the rest of the world put together, times two,” Gates told us. “There is a substantial amount of Chinese capital going into that, and in fission, they built the most reactors.”
Chemical giant Honeywell has announced a new technology that converts agricultural and forestry waste into ready-to-use renewable fuels that can directly replace the carbon-intensive fuel used by large ships and airplanes. The so-called “Biocrude Upgrading” processing hardware can be provided in modular form and equipped to ships at a moment when global regulators are seeking to slash the roughly 3% of planet-heating emissions that come from cargo vessels. “The maritime industry has a real need for renewable fuels that are immediately available and cost effective,” Ken West, Honeywell’s energy and sustainability solutions president, said in a statement. The news comes nearly two weeks after Trump “torpedoed” — as Heatmap’s Katie Brigham put it — efforts at the International Maritime Organization to slash emissions from regulated ships.
The geothermal startup Eavor said Tuesday that its breakthroughs in drilling had slashed the time it takes to drill its wells underground. The Canadian company said that the results of two years of drilling at its flagship project in Geretsried, Germany, showed its efforts to dig to hotter and deeper locations are working. “Much like wind and solar have come down the cost curve, much like unconventional shale [oil and gas] have come down the cost curve, we now have a technical proof-point that we’ve done that in Europe,” Jeanine Vany, a cofounder and executive vice president of corporate affairs at Eavor, told Canary Media’s Maria Gallucci.
The breakup of the ancient supercontinent 1.5 billion years ago transformed the Earth’s surface environments and laid the groundwork for the emergence of complex life. That’s according to new research by Australian scientists at the University of Sydney and the University of Adelaide. The findings challenge what has long been called the “boring billion,” a time when biological and geological changes effectively stalled. The plate tectonics that reshaped the planet triggered conditions that supported oxygen-rich oceans and fostered the appearance of the first eukaryotes, the ancestors of all complex life. “Our work reveals that deep Earth processes, specifically the breakup of the ancient supercontinent Nuna, set off a chain of events that reduced volcanic carbon dioxide emissions and expanded the shallow marine habitats where early eukaryotes evolved,” Dietmar Müller, a University of Sydney professor and the study’s lead author, said in a press release.
Rob talks New Jersey past, present, and future with Employ America’s Skanda Amarnath.
Electricity prices are the biggest economic issue in the New Jersey governor’s race, which is perhaps next month’s most closely watched election. Mikie Sherrill, the Democratic candidate and frontrunner, has pledged to freeze power prices for state residents after getting elected. Can she do that?
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob talks to Skanda Amarnath, the executive director of Employ America, a center-left think tank that aims to encourage a “full-employment, robust-growth economy.” He’s also a nearly lifelong NJ resident. They chat about how New Jersey got such expensive electricity, whether the nuclear construction boom is real, and what lessons nuclear companies should take from economic history.
Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap, and Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University. Jesse is off this week.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You can also add the show’s RSS feed to your podcast app to follow us directly.
Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Robinson Meyer: Is there a nuclear bubble? … As people who are interested in long-term decarbonization, number one, this is quite reminiscent of the environment that hit clean energy companies right as Biden was taking office. And number two, is there a nuclear bubble, and what does this mean for how we should think about nuclear going forward? Because at the end of this, I think the only way that any of this helps the climate is if we build a lot more plants.
Skanda Amarnath: We are definitely in a moment when there’s a lot of froth. I don’t want to say everything — it’s always like, it’ll feel unfair and not accurate to go after every single proposition that’s in markets. Like for example, Rick Perry’s Fermi America, they did an IPO and raised a lot of capital pretty successfully. And they have a plan for how they want to build a lot of stuff out — gas, solar, batteries. They want to build four AP1000s, the large, light-water reactors that are seen as the most recent that we’ve built in the United States, and they think they could do them at the same speed that China builds those same reactors.
On the surface of it, there are parts of it that seem interesting and promising. On the other hand, there’s also parts of it that feel very much wrapped up in the speculative frenzy. It gets more exaggerated when you get to like examples like Oklo. They seem to be very politically connected, specifically to Chris Wright. That plus some very small milestone successes in the fuel supply chain are now being sort of magnified into, They’re going be very successful in building out there first of a kind technology. And even in the space of small modular reactors, what they’re offering seems at least substantially more risky than what may be — outside of the space, so even compared to GE’s proposition for a small boiling water reactor, the technology that’s involved with like Oklo is kind of out there.
And one of the things, the lessons of nuclear, if you look through the history, is the more new stuff you’re doing, the harder it is, the more likely it is that you will get heartburn in terms of cost, in terms of schedule, and you never want to do this again. And it’ll involve a lot of bankruptcy, as it did with the case of the Georgia reactors that were built in the last decade. And so this is a sign that there’s clearly a lot of hype and a lot of willingness to take risk, and it’s not really backed up by fundamentals. That can be sometimes overrated in a boom. But that is something that people will look to in a bust and say, what were we doing here? Why was the price of the stock so high?
Mentioned:
How Electricity Got So Expensive
New Jersey’s Next Governor Probably Can’t Do Much About Electricity Prices, by Matt Zeitlin for Heatmap
Previously on Shift Key: The Last Computing-Driven Electricity Demand Boom That Wasn’t
Meta lays off 600 workers
Amazon lays off 14,000 workers
This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by …
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A warmer world is here. Now what? Listen to Shocked, from the University of Chicago’s Institute for Climate and Sustainable Growth, and hear journalist Amy Harder and economist Michael Greenstone share new ways of thinking about climate change and cutting-edge solutions. Find it here.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.