@casey-handmer · 81 positions · 2 changes of mind · On ppll ↗
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.
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Each column is a stretch of time in which the same views came up; a new column starts when one appears or goes quiet. Quiet means nothing on it in our sources for that stretch, which is not the same as a change of mind; Dropped means they said they no longer hold it; tap the card for which claim and when. Revised means the view carries on but one of its claims was dropped. Each row is one view, in the same place all the way along. The number is how many claims in that stretch; we hold 5 in 2019, 2 in 2020, 5 in 2021, 0 in 2022, 16 in 2023, 11 in 2024, 37 in 2025, 10 in 2026.
Solar keeps getting cheaper faster than anyone forecast, and will supply nearly all energy
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.
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
Ramez NaamAuthor and clean-energy investor who has been publishing…The data paint an incredible picture: One that shows the price of solar electricity from utility-scale systems dropping by anywhere from 30-40% with each doubling of cumulative solar deployment.↗Solar's Future is Insanely Cheap (2020)rameznaam.com · 14 May 2020
Their wordsThe data paint an incredible picture: One that shows the price of solar electricity from utility-scale systems dropping by anywhere from 30-40% with each doubling of cumulative solar deployment.
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.
Casey HandmerPhysicist, formerly at NASA's Jet Propulsion LaboratoryFollowing 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 · 11 Oct 2023All korrents from this piece
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.
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.
Casey HandmerPhysicist, formerly at NASA's Jet Propulsion LaboratoryThe default climate discourse in recent years has been congruent to an acceptance that curtailing CO2 emissions would require the regrettable but ultimately impersonal de-industrialization and re-impoverishment of most of the world, which is both morally repugnant and politically impossible to achieve without first use of nuclear weapons.↗Radical Energy Abundancecaseyhandmer.wordpress.com · 11 Oct 2023All korrents from this piece
Their wordsThe default climate discourse in recent years has been congruent to an acceptance that curtailing CO2 emissions would require the regrettable but ultimately impersonal de-industrialization and re-impoverishment of most of the world, which is both morally repugnant and politically impossible to achieve without first use of nuclear weapons.
Their wordsFrom these exchanges I got the impression that they were unaware of just how unequal and poor (yes, poor) the world is today and what would be the trade-offs if we really were to decide to fix the volume of goods and services produced and consumed in the world at the current level.
Their wordsThe rapid drop in renewable energy costs in the last decade (alongside huge improvements in battery technologies) has started to break this deadlock.
Their wordsCheap solar is the unlock that brings human progress and climate action from the realm of fundamental incompatibility to complimentary inevitability.
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?
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.
Casey HandmerPhysicist, formerly at NASA's Jet Propulsion LaboratoryThe 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 · 11 Oct 2023All korrents from this piece
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.
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.
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.
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
Their wordsYet solar development is hopelessly snarled by dozens of different development regulations which begin with the assumption that it will permanently and severely harm the environment unless proven otherwise, at exhaustive length.
Casey HandmerPhysicist, formerly at NASA's Jet Propulsion LaboratoryThe 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 · 10 Nov 2023All korrents from this piece
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.
Their wordsThe primary driver of increased impact, longer time scales before displacement, and catastrophically high levels of avoidable pollution is environmental protection regulations.
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.
Their wordsBut then all you need to connect that to the outside world is like an optical fiber, right? An optical fiber cable which you can string up on poles, you can run underground, you could even use microwave links if you really wanted to.
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.
Their wordsyou're going to have to build your own power plant for them, which is how it used to work. Like if you if you had an aluminum plant back in the day, you would be building your own power plant for it as well.
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.
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.
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.
Their wordsNo, Artemis is still trapped in a pre-Starship paradigm where each kilogram costs a million dollars and we must aggressively descope our ambition.
Their wordsEven for $5.2b per launch, Orion is so overweight that there does not exist a booster nor an upper stage that can launch it to Low Lunar Orbit and return it to Earth.
Their wordsThis is symptomatic of an agency who, compromising their technical integrity on their flagship program, subsequently lost the ability to maintain technical integrity anywhere else.
Paul GrahamCo-founder of Y Combinator and ViawebOne reason Starcloud has been so successful at fundraising is that it's a bet on launch costs decreasing, and that's like betting on Moore's Law in the 1990s.↗@paulg on Xx.com · 1 Sept 2026
Their wordsOne reason Starcloud has been so successful at fundraising is that it's a bet on launch costs decreasing, and that's like betting on Moore's Law in the 1990s.
Their wordsEither the incumbent space industry adapts to Starship by finding ways to produce much more space hardware for much lower cost, or dozens of other new companies, unbound by tradition, entrenched interests, and high organizational overhead, will permanently take their business.
Their wordsEven if all of Elon Musk’s wildest Starship dreams come true, transport costs will dominate the total capex of any space-based solar system, by many orders of magnitude.
Their wordsMore broadly, for every industrially valuable ore, there is already a competitive and adequate, if not spectacular, supply chain here on Earth.
Their wordsThe economics of orbital “datacenters” or essentially glorified Starlink satellites with a bunch of GPUs attached are likely to be even better than Starlink.
Their wordsAt even $500/kg, launch cost is only 5% of the total satellite deployment cost, so a lunar mass driver is unlikely to drastically improve the economics of space-based AI, by reducing launch costs.