What Casey Handmer thinks about energy
Physicist, formerly at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and founder of Terraform Industries, which is building plant to make synthetic natural gas from sunlight and air. Writes about energy, space and manufacturing at caseyhandmer.wordpress.com.
Casey Handmer did not write this page.
We collected these quotes from things they published elsewhere, and every quote links to where it was said. They have no account here and have not endorsed this site. Quotes are word for word; the short line under each one is our own restatement, not their wording. Their own site. Is this you? Claim it or ask us to remove it. Or tell us what is wrong here.
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36 dated positions, 2019 to 2026, in their own words. Our reading of what Casey Handmer has said — not written or endorsed by them.
Our readingWhere the solar positions argue about supply, these argue about what has to be rebuilt around it: seasonal storage treated as a heat problem, batteries replacing transmission, and a grid that shrinks rather than grows. The obstacle named throughout is permitting and delay rather than cost.
Their wordsDo we need to drastically expand the grid in order to metabolize renewables? No.
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Their wordsStarship can lift orbital power generation to about 100 GW with perhaps 10,000 launches per year, or about one per hour.
↗Space AI: I guess we’re doing Moon factories nowcaseyhandmer.wordpress.com 3rd of 3 in this piece
- 2 months earlier
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Their wordsDo we need to drastically expand the grid in order to metabolize renewables? No.
↗Energy Predictions 2025caseyhandmer.wordpress.com 1st of 6 in this piece
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Their wordsOn the flip side, these captive solar power plants will be curtailing approximately 75% of their generated power and will be able to provide net power on all but a few days per year.
↗Energy Predictions 2025caseyhandmer.wordpress.com 2nd of 6 in this piece
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Their wordsStoring electricity for months is economically difficult, but storing heat is easy.
↗Energy Predictions 2025caseyhandmer.wordpress.com 3rd of 6 in this piece
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Their wordsWhile heat pumps can achieve higher efficiency, consumer uptake has been much lower than expected because fundamentally, a heat pump is a 20 year bet on future power prices that most homeowners are unwilling to make.
↗Energy Predictions 2025caseyhandmer.wordpress.com 4th of 6 in this piece
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Their wordsBy 2045, natural gas will be used as LNG primarily for high performance supersonic aviation, shipping, and industrial heat.
↗Energy Predictions 2025caseyhandmer.wordpress.com 5th of 6 in this piece
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Their wordsThe only highly populated industrial country unable to trivially meet its electricity and synthetic fuel needs with solar alone is the United Kingdom, due primarily to a high population density and high latitude. The Nordic and Baltic countries are tiny by comparison. Among other problems, the UK needs to decide if it wants the future where energy is cheap and it is rich, or the future where energy is expensive and it is poor. If the former, it is time to get serious about large scale deployment of wind power, using home-grown vertically integrated technology at prices as low as $10/MWh.
↗Energy Predictions 2025caseyhandmer.wordpress.com 6th of 6 in this piece
- 4 months earlier
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Their wordsChina is surrounded by 15 countries who are mostly hostile to it, right? with no good like mountain ranges or rivers or anything to really separate them. And then they get all their oil, almost all their oil from the Middle East, right in countries that they don't control, don't have strong diplomatic relationships with on fleets of oil tankers that they can't defend because their navy doesn't have the ability to to operate effectively in the Indian Ocean.
↗China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmeryoutube.com 2nd of 24 in this recording
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Their wordsIt absolutely asymmetrically helps China. We're not currently working with China. They don't plan to, but like the physics is very obvious, you know, and synthetic fuels have been around for 100 years.
↗China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmeryoutube.com 3rd of 24 in this recording
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Their wordsAnd I think the United States could probably do that in 2 years or less if you started today. Like it's currently 11:00, so like we're going to start cutting checks by noon.
↗China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmeryoutube.com 5th of 24 in this recording
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Their wordsWe're not going to run out of natural gas at 1 gawatt per year indefinitely. Okay, what if we're doing 5 gawatts per year? What if we're doing 50 gawatts per year? What if we're doing 100 gawatt per year? Like, you can you can just break the situation.
↗China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmeryoutube.com 7th of 24 in this recording
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Their wordswell their cost of serving it is is like maybe a buck per million tokens or something like that and the cost of electricity is about 10% of that. So it's like 10 cents of electricity is generating $1,000 worth of economic value.
↗China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmeryoutube.com 9th of 24 in this recording
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Their wordsIt is not only the case that solar adoption, production, price decreases are continuing. They're accelerating. And the rate that they're accelerating is still accelerating.
↗China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmeryoutube.com 10th of 24 in this recording
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Their wordsYou you also don't know like in order to make that money back, you have to then operate that plant at that capacity for 20 years, right? And if I was looking at the same charts as they're looking at right now, I'd say what are the odds that in 25 years time we can produce gas turbines at a price that is relevant in a world where solar is already at its current price and batteries at a price where they're already like you cannot win.
↗China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmeryoutube.com 11th of 24 in this recording
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Our readingWithin a few years, the majority of newly broken-ground data centres will be mostly solar-powered.
Their wordsSo I think within a few years we'll probably see that like the majority of new DCs that are going in will be mostly solar
↗China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmeryoutube.com 12th of 24 in this recording
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Their wordsactually it turns out that you can significantly decrease power consumption with a very small reduction in overall compute. So if you if you've got like three really bad days in a row or something, you can actually just like you can dial back your power usage quite a lot without compromising your inference or or um or training.
↗China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmeryoutube.com 14th of 24 in this recording
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Their wordscentral takeaway is that is that the hyperscalers are not power cost sensitive they are power availability sensitive
↗China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmeryoutube.com 15th of 24 in this recording
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Their wordsIn terms of things that are causing us to lose to China, tariffs are neither here nor there because, as we've discussed, we're not sensitive to cost on power. But the environmental regulations that are actively preventing us from deploying renewable energy in the United States, like this is the reason Texas is winning. Texas is out deploying California 10 to1.
↗China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmeryoutube.com 16th of 24 in this recording
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Their wordsthe meta problem here is if we don't move our industrial stack off fossil fuels in 10 or 20 years, first of all, we'll get poor the same way you UK did, right? Because they ran out of coal basically. And the second thing is we'll get poor because we'll flood our coastal cities in Florida underneath climate change.
↗China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmeryoutube.com 18th of 24 in this recording
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Their wordsSo it's just very clear that like the average distance the electron is going to travel between generation and consumption is going to decrease in the future pretty radically.
↗China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmeryoutube.com 19th of 24 in this recording
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Their wordsAnd the bottleneck prior to what we call the industrial revolution was uh metabolism, right? It's just like how much like oats can a human or a horse physically digest and then convert into useful mechanical output for you know their their um their peasant overlord or whatever.
↗China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmeryoutube.com 20th of 24 in this recording
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Their wordsYou can revisit a bunch of legacy industrial processes that are have been optimized for efficiency and say, well, what if we just like use twice as much power and we just want to do them faster and cheaper, right? Like less capex, less lead time, more power, right?
↗China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmeryoutube.com 24th of 24 in this recording
- 9 months earlier
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Their wordsFor loads below $1000/kW, intermittent operation with some modest solar array oversizing is the winning strategy. Above $1000/kW, we charge and discharge batteries daily to run them.
↗Solar and batteries for generic use casescaseyhandmer.wordpress.com 2nd of 3 in this piece
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Their wordsA battery that’s discharging every day gets great utilization, but one that’s only there in case the sun doesn’t come up for two days in a row, barely gets used.
↗Solar and batteries for generic use casescaseyhandmer.wordpress.com 3rd of 3 in this piece
- 12 months earlier
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Our readingDelay in permitting clean energy kills more Americans every year than the September 11 attacks did.
Their wordsThe terrorist attacks on 9/11 killed 2996 people in a day of singular horror. Our ongoing indifference to regulatory inefficiency, considering only the area of green energy development, kills more people every year – more than 10 people per day, and that’s only within the US.
↗Permitting Reform Or Deathcaseyhandmer.wordpress.com 3rd of 4 in this piece
- 4 weeks earlier
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Their wordsPer doubling of production, costs have fallen a consistent 30-40% since 1970, but it’s only in the last few years that this price has become competitive with legacy electricity generation
↗Radical Energy Abundancecaseyhandmer.wordpress.com 1st of 7 in this piece
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Their wordsA number of commentators have consistently predicted that solar cost improvements will level out “this year” since about 1990, and yet if anything deployment, cost decline, and the learning rate have only improved.
↗Radical Energy Abundancecaseyhandmer.wordpress.com 2nd of 7 in this piece
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Their wordsThe logical end state of this displacement is not some hybrid grid with around 20% solar backed up by spinning generation, but a much more dynamic, versatile grid with around 200% solar generation and hours to days or weeks of battery storage, fully decoupling time of generation and consumption.
↗Radical Energy Abundancecaseyhandmer.wordpress.com 3rd of 7 in this piece
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Their wordswe will see batteries aggressively displace transmission as the most cost-effective way to ensure continuity of electricity supply, leading to an eventual pruning of the grid and drastic reduction in the average distance that power travels between production and consumption, even as the average time that power is stored increases.
↗Radical Energy Abundancecaseyhandmer.wordpress.com 4th of 7 in this piece
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Their wordsCheap solar is the unlock that brings human progress and climate action from the realm of fundamental incompatibility to complimentary inevitability.
↗Radical Energy Abundancecaseyhandmer.wordpress.com 6th of 7 in this piece
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Their wordsFollowing current trends to second order, >95% of humanity’s energy needs will be downstream of solar panels by 2042, just 19 years away, and alongside enormous expansion in direct use of electricity, fuel consumption will grow to more than $25T/year in equivalent dollars.
↗Radical Energy Abundancecaseyhandmer.wordpress.com 7th of 7 in this piece
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Our readingCheap energy will at least double global growth to 6% a year, tripling the world economy by 2042.
Their wordsWe expect growth to at least double to 6%/year, for a cumulative tripling of the global economy by 2042.
↗Radical Energy Abundancecaseyhandmer.wordpress.com 8th of 7 in this piece
- 8 weeks earlier
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Their wordsit is quite obviously impossible to enforce universal adoption of more expensive carbon-free energy through, eg, mandatory carbon offsets, as higher gas prices are political suicide regardless of system of government.
↗How to Produce Green Hydrogen for $1/kgcaseyhandmer.wordpress.com 1st of 3 in this piece
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Their wordswe have to follow the cheapest solar wherever it leads – in this case away from 100% utilization and high electrical efficiency.
↗How to Produce Green Hydrogen for $1/kgcaseyhandmer.wordpress.com 2nd of 3 in this piece
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Their wordsI am 100% confident that by the time we are mass producing this system at these prices later this decade, not only will this be the cheapest hydrogen available anywhere, it will also be the cheapest chemical energy and by far the most scalable
↗How to Produce Green Hydrogen for $1/kgcaseyhandmer.wordpress.com 3rd of 3 in this piece
- 4 years earlier
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Their wordsMy view is that space-based solar power is impossibly expensive and will never be used on Earth.
↗Space-based solar power is not a thingcaseyhandmer.wordpress.com 1st of 3 in this piece