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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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On a late-night House vote, Tesla’s slump, and carbon credits
Current conditions: Tropical storm Chantal has a 40% chance of developing this weekend and may threaten Florida, Georgia, and the Carolinas • French far-right leader Marine Le Pen is campaigning on a “grand plan for air conditioning” amid the ongoing record-breaking heatwave in Europe • Great fireworks-watching weather is in store tomorrow for much of the East and West Coasts.
The House moved closer to a final vote on President Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” after passing a key procedural vote around 3 a.m. ET on Thursday morning. “We have the votes,” House Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters after the rule vote, adding, “We’re still going to meet” Trump’s self-imposed July 4 deadline to pass the megabill. A floor vote on the legislation is expected as soon as Thursday morning.
GOP leadership had worked through the evening to convince holdouts, with my colleagues Katie Brigham and Jael Holzman reporting last night that House Freedom Caucus member Ralph Norman of North Carolina said he planned to advance the legislation after receiving assurances that Trump would “deal” with the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean energy tax credits, particularly for wind and solar energy projects, which the Senate version phases out more slowly than House Republicans wanted. “It’s not entirely clear what the president could do to unilaterally ‘deal with’ tax credits already codified into law,” Brigham and Holzman write, although another Republican holdout, Representative Chip Roy of Texas, made similar allusions to reporters on Wednesday.
Tesla delivered just 384,122 cars in the second quarter of 2025, a 13.5% slump from the 444,000 delivered in the same quarter of 2024, marking the worst quarterly decline in the company’s history, Barron’s reports. The slump follows a similarly disappointing Q1, down 13% year-over-year, after the company’s sales had “flatlined for the first time in over a decade” in 2024, InsideEVs adds.
Despite the drop, Tesla stock rose 5% on Wednesday, with Wedbush analyst Dan Ives calling the Q2 results better than some had expected. “Fireworks came early for Tesla,” he wrote, although Barron’s notes that “estimates for the second quarter of 2025 started at about 500,000 vehicles. They started to drop precipitously after first-quarter deliveries fell 13% year over year, missing Wall Street estimates by some 40,000 vehicles.”
The European Commission proposed its 2040 climate target on Wednesday, which, for the first time, would allow some countries to use carbon credits to meet their emissions goals. EU Commissioner for Climate, Net Zero, and Clean Growth Wopke Hoekstra defended the decision during an appearance on Euronews on Wednesday, saying the plan — which allows developing nations to meet a limited portion of their emissions goals with the credits — was a chance to “build bridges” with countries in Africa and Latin America. “The planet doesn’t care about where we take emissions out of the air,” he separately told The Guardian. “You need to take action everywhere.” Green groups, which are critical of the use of carbon credits, slammed the proposal, which “if agreed [to] by member states and passed by the EU parliament … is then supposed to be translated into an international target,” The Guardian writes.
Around half of oil executives say they expect to drill fewer wells in 2025 than they’d planned for at the start of the year, according to a Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas survey. Of the respondents at firms producing more than 10,000 barrels a day, 42% said they expected a “significant decrease in the number of wells drilled,” Bloomberg adds. The survey further indicates that Republican policy has been at odds with President Trump’s “drill, baby, drill” rhetoric, as tariffs have increased the cost of completing a new well by more than 4%. “It’s hard to imagine how much worse policies and D.C. rhetoric could have been for U.S. E&P companies,” one anonymous executive said in the report. “We were promised by the administration a better environment for producers, but were delivered a world that has benefited OPEC to the detriment of our domestic industry.”
Fine-particulate air pollution is strongly associated with lung cancer-causing DNA mutations that are more traditionally linked to smoking tobacco, a new study by researchers at the University of California, San Diego, and the National Cancer Institute has found. The researchers looked at the genetic code of 871 non-smokers’ lung tumors in 28 regions across Europe, Africa, and Asia and found that higher levels of local air pollution correlated with more cancer-driving mutations in the respective tumors.
Surprisingly, the researchers did not find a similar genetic correlation among non-smokers exposed to secondhand smoke. George Thurston, a professor of medicine and population health at New York University, told Inside Climate News that a potential reason for this result is that fine-particulate air pollution — which is emitted by cars, industrial activities, and wildfires — is more widespread than exposure to secondhand smoke. “We are engulfed in fossil-fuel-burning pollution every single day of our lives, all day long, night and day,” he said, adding, “I feel like I’m in the Matrix, and I’m the only one that took the red pill. I know what’s going on, and everybody else is walking around thinking, ‘This stuff isn’t bad for your health.’” Today, non-smokers account for up to 25% of lung cancer cases globally, with the worst air quality pollution in the United States primarily concentrated in the Southwest.
EPA
National TV news networks aired a combined 4 hours and 20 minutes of coverage about the record-breaking late-June temperatures in the Midwest and East Coast — but only 4% of those segments mentioned the heat dome’s connection to climate change, a new report by Media Matters found.
“We had enough assurance that the president was going to deal with them.”
A member of the House Freedom Caucus said Wednesday that he voted to advance President Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” after receiving assurances that Trump would “deal” with the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean energy tax credits – raising the specter that Trump could try to go further than the megabill to stop usage of the credits.
Representative Ralph Norman, a Republican of North Carolina, said that while IRA tax credits were once a sticking point for him, after meeting with Trump “we had enough assurance that the president was going to deal with them in his own way,” he told Eric Garcia, the Washington bureau chief of The Independent. Norman specifically cited tax credits for wind and solar energy projects, which the Senate version would phase out more slowly than House Republicans had wanted.
It’s not entirely clear what the president could do to unilaterally “deal with” tax credits already codified into law. Norman declined to answer direct questions from reporters about whether GOP holdouts like himself were seeking an executive order on the matter. But another Republican holdout on the bill, Representative Chip Roy of Texas, told reporters Wednesday that his vote was also conditional on blocking IRA “subsidies.”
“If the subsidies will flow, we’re not gonna be able to get there. If the subsidies are not gonna flow, then there might be a path," he said, according to Jake Sherman of Punchbowl News.
As of publication, Roy has still not voted on the rule that would allow the bill to proceed to the floor — one of only eight Republicans yet to formally weigh in. House Speaker Mike Johnson says he’ll, “keep the vote open for as long as it takes,” as President Trump aims to sign the giant tax package by the July 4th holiday. Norman voted to let the bill proceed to debate, and will reportedly now vote yes on it too.
Earlier Wednesday, Norman said he was “getting a handle on” whether his various misgivings could be handled by Trump via executive orders or through promises of future legislation. According to CNN, the congressman later said, “We got clarification on what’s going to be enforced. We got clarification on how the IRAs were going to be dealt with. We got clarification on the tax cuts — and still we’ll be meeting tomorrow on the specifics of it.”
Neither Norman nor Roy’s press offices responded to a request for comment.
The foreign entities of concern rules in the One Big Beautiful Bill would place gigantic new burdens on developers.
Trump campaigned on cutting red tape for energy development. At the start of his second term, he signed an executive order titled, “Unleashing Prosperity Through Deregulation,” promising to kill 10 regulations for each new one he enacted.
The order deems federal regulations an “ever-expanding morass” that “imposes massive costs on the lives of millions of Americans, creates a substantial restraint on our economic growth and ability to build and innovate, and hampers our global competitiveness.” It goes on to say that these regulations “are often difficult for the average person or business to understand,” that they are so complicated that they ultimately increase the cost of compliance, as well as the risks of non-compliance.
Reading this now, the passage echoes the comments I’ve heard from industry groups and tax law experts describing the incredibly complex foreign entities of concern rules that Congress — with the full-throated backing of the Trump administration — is about to impose on clean energy projects and manufacturers. Under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, wind and solar, as well as utility-scale energy storage, geothermal, nuclear, and all kinds of manufacturing projects will have to abide by restrictions on their Chinese material inputs and contractual or financial ties with Chinese entities in order to qualify for tax credits.
“Foreign entity of concern” is a U.S. government term referring to entities that are “owned by, controlled by, or subject to the jurisdiction or direction of” any of four countries — Russia, Iran, North Korea, and most importantly for clean energy technology, China.
Trump’s tax bill requires companies to meet increasingly strict limits on the amount of material from China they use in their projects and products. A battery factory starting production next year, for example, would have to ensure that 60% of the value of the materials that make up its products have no connection to China. By 2030, the threshold would rise to 85%. The bill lays out similar benchmarks and timelines for clean electricity projects, as well as other kinds of manufacturing.
But how companies should calculate these percentages is not self-evident. The bill also forbids companies from collecting the tax credits if they have business relationships with “specified foreign entities” or “foreign-influenced entities,” terms with complicated definitions that will likely require guidance from the Treasury for companies to be sure they pass the test.
Regulatory uncertainty could stifle development until further guidance is released, but how long that takes will depend on if and when the Trump administration prioritizes getting it done. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act contains a lot of other new tax-related provisions that were central to the Trump campaign, including a tax exemption for tips, which are likely much higher on the department’s to-do list.
Tax credit implementation was a top priority for the Biden administration, and even with much higher staffing levels than the department currently has, it took the Treasury 18 months to publish initial guidance on foreign entities of concern rules for the Inflation Reduction Act’s electric vehicle tax credit. “These things are so unbelievably complicated,” Rachel McCleery, a former senior advisor at the Treasury under Biden, told me.
McCleery questioned whether larger, publicly-owned companies would be able to proceed with major investments in things like battery manufacturing plants until that guidance is out. She gave the example of a company planning to pump out 100,000 batteries per year and claim the per-kilowatt-hour advanced manufacturing tax credit. “That’s going to look like a pretty big number in claims, so you have to be able to confidently and assuredly tell your shareholder, Yep, we’re good, we qualify, and that requires a certification” by a tax counsel, she said. To McCleery, there’s an open question as to whether any tax counsel “would even provide a tax opinion for publicly-traded companies to claim credits of this size without guidance.”
John Cornwell, the director of policy at the Good Energy Collective, which conducts research and advocacy for nuclear power, echoed McCleery’s concerns. “Without very clear guidelines from the Treasury and IRS, until those guidelines are in place, that is going to restrict financing and investment,” Cornwell told me.
Understanding what the law requires will be the first challenge. But following it will involve tracking down supply chain data that may not exist, finding alternative suppliers that may not be able to fill the demand, and establishing extensive documentation of the origins of components sourced through webs of suppliers, sub-suppliers, and materials processors.
The Good Energy Collective put out an issue brief this week describing the myriad hurdles nuclear developers will face in trying to adhere to the tax credit rules. Nuclear plants contain thousands of components, and documenting the origin of everything from “steam generators to smaller items like specialized fasteners, gaskets, and electronic components will introduce substantial and costly administrative burdens,” it says. Additionally the critical minerals used in nuclear projects “often pass through multiple processing stages across different countries before final assembly,” and there are no established industry standards for supply chain documentation.
Beyond the documentation headache, even just finding the materials could be an issue. China dominates the market for specialized nuclear-grade materials manufacturing and precision component fabrication, the report says, and alternative suppliers are likely to charge premiums. Establishing new supply chains will take years, but Trump’s bill will begin enforcing the sourcing rules in 2026. The rules will prove even more difficult for companies trying to build first-of-a-kind advanced nuclear projects, as those rely on more highly specialized supply chains dominated by China.
These challenges may be surmountable, but that will depend, again, on what the Treasury decides, and when. The Department’s guidance could limit the types of components companies have to account for and simplify the documentation process, or it could not. But while companies wait for certainty, they may also be racking up interest. “The longer there are delays, that can have a substantial risk of project success,” Cornwell said.
And companies don’t have forever. Each of the credits comes with a phase-out schedule. Wind manufacturers can only claim the credits until 2028. Other manufacturers have until 2030. Credits for clean power projects will start to phase down in 2034. “Given the fact that a lot of these credits start lapsing in the next few years, there’s a very good chance that, because guidance has not yet come out, you’re actually looking at a much smaller time frame than than what is listed in the bill,” Skip Estes, the government affairs director for Securing America’s Energy Future, or SAFE, told me.
Another issue SAFE has raised is that the way these rules are set up, the foreign sourcing requirements will get more expensive and difficult to comply with as the value of the tax credits goes down. “Our concern is that that’s going to encourage companies to forego the credit altogether and just continue buying from the lowest common denominator, which is typically a Chinese state-owned or -influenced monopoly,” Estes said.
McCleery had another prediction — the regulations will be so burdensome that companies will simply set up shop elsewhere. “I think every industry will certainly be rethinking their future U.S. investments, right? They’ll go overseas, they’ll go to Canada, which dumped a ton of carrots and sticks into industry after we passed the IRA,” she said.
“The irony is that Republicans have historically been the party of deregulation, creating business friendly environments. This is completely opposite, right?”