This Week in Solar

Plug-in solar is one of the best defenses average Americans have against skyrocketing electricity bills. Sadly, not every state legislature agrees.

Some state representatives are stuck battling utility monopolies in committee, just so that their constituents can legally use the sunlight that hits their homes.

If you’re excited about potentially lowering your electric bill without a permit and live in one of the states below, here’s what you can do to help move this battle forward.

Listen to this episode on:

* YouTube

* Apple Podcasts

* Spotify

This Week In Solar is always brought to you by Exact Solar, your locally owned, 20-year-old solar installer.

Energy costs are skyrocketing, and no one seems to have a good plan to fix it. Between natural disasters, capacity auctions, utility rate hikes, and data centers gobbling up power, energy just keeps costing more.

You have no control over how much someone charges for power for your home or business, but you can choose to opt out of the cycle by going solar. If you live in New Jersey or Pennsylvania, Exact Solar would love to work with you to see if solar is a good fit for your property.

Whether you have cash to pay for solar up front or you want solar for zero dollars down, we have an option that will fit your needs.

Just click “Show Me How Much I Can Save With Solar” below, submit your info, and we’ll show you the numbers!

Here’s What to Say if You Live in These States (Legislation Died or Failed to Advance)

If you live in:

Rhode Island, Washington, Illinois, Minnesota, Wyoming, Oregon, Missouri, Indiana, Arizona, New Mexico, Georgia, and Idaho.

Contact:

Your state representatives and senators, as well as local environmental and renter advocacy groups.

Tell them:

Say that you expect plug-in solar to be reintroduced in the next legislative session as a standalone bill, and that you are building a coalition to support it.

Remind your reps that UL 3700 certification requires automatic anti-islanding, and that because of that safety regulation, plug-in solar is already being safely deployed across several states.

Then point out that traditional rooftop solar is inaccessible to Americans who don’t own their homes, and that plug-in solar solves that.

To summarize, tell them that these systems are safe, and that killing these bills directly harms renters and low-income households who need immediate utility bill relief (and gives them a solution that doesn’t require government subsidies).

(If you’re wondering what that bit about UL 3700 and anti-islanding means, it’s just a guarantee that if the grid goes down, the system shuts off in milliseconds. So it means that plug-in solar poses zero risk to utility workers when people buy and install proper kits. Germany has over 4 million of these installations with zero lineworker incidents).

Here’s What to Say if You Live in These States (Legislation is Pending)

If you live in:

* Awaiting Signature: New York (the SUNNY Act) and Vermont.

* Active in Chambers: California (SB 868), Massachusetts, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Delaware, North Carolina, Ohio, and Washington, D.C.

Contact:

* For New York and Vermont: Contact the Governor’s office and ask for a signature.

* For the others: Contact your state representatives and senators, as well as local environmental and renter advocacy groups.

Tell them:

Remind them that while traditional rooftop solar can cost upwards of $20,000 for cash or a loan, plug-in kits cost between $400 and $2,000 and plug directly into a standard 120V or 240V outlet with no need for expensive electrical panel upgrades and contractor soft costs.

Make it explicitly clear that these bills do not ask for state funding or tax credits. They simply remove outdated bureaucratic red tape so consumers can spend their own money to lower their electric bills directly.

Urge them to publicly support the specific plug-in solar consumer access bill currently moving through their chamber.

Here’s What to Say if You Live In These States (Where It’s Already Legal)

Disclaimer

This Week in Solar is an informational and educational publication. The legislative tracking and advocacy strategies shared above do not constitute formal legal advice. Legislative language, utility rules, and local regulations vary widely by state and can change rapidly. Before purchasing or installing any plug-in solar hardware, always review your specific local state statutes, municipal electrical codes, and utility tariff documents to verify current compliance requirements.

If you live in:

Utah, Maine, Virginia, Colorado, Maryland, Connecticut, and New Hampshire.

These states have officially signed laws legalizing plug-in systems up to 1,200W (and a nation-leading 1,920W in Colorado).

But these states have now shifted from passing the law to enforcing it, and there’s still a chance that an HOA or township will try to stop you from installing plug-in solar.

Contact:

Your state’s Public Utility Commission (PUC) and the state legislators who sponsored the bill.

What to tell them:

First, read the law in your state and understand what your rights are. In states with renter and HOA protections (like Colorado), the law preempts homeowners’ associations and landlords from banning balcony solar.

Once you know your rights and you’re ready to install, if your local utility demands a formal interconnection agreement, a pre-install inspection, or proprietary equipment for a UL 3700-certified kit, report them to the PUC (if you’re legally allowed those things under new laws in your state).

Sources

https://pluginsolarguide.com/

https://www.brightsaver.org/legislation-tracker/

https://pluginsolarusa.com/

https://www.reddit.com/r/pluginsolarusa/

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit exactsolar.substack.com

This Week In Solar is always brought to you by Exact Solar, your locally owned, twenty-year-old solar installer for Southeast PA and New Jersey.

We’d love to pay you $500 if you refer a friend to us and they go solar (We only install in New Jersey and Pennsylvania; please do not refer anyone outside those states).

All you have to do is:

* Click the “Refer a Friend and Earn $500” button below.

* Fill in your information (we need your address to mail you a check if your friend goes solar).

* Select Aaron Nichols as the sales representative.

* Add your friend’s name and address.

* Get a $500 check mailed to you if your friend goes solar with us!

Aaron talks with Mike McGuire, a Professional Engineer and the founder of H2DC. Mike is a 30-year engineering veteran whose firm is licensed in all 50 states.

He specializes in the technical side of distribution engineering (figuring out how to integrate massive solar loads into aging utility grids that were never designed to handle two-way power flow).

Listen to this episode here, or on:

* YouTube

* Apple Podcasts

* Spotify

Connect with Mike on LinkedIn here.

Expect to learn:

* How savvy engineers use modeling to downsize projects just enough to avoid multi-million dollar utility grid upgrade fees.

* About new sophisticated off-grid systems that use automatic transfer switches (ATS) and batteries to run heavy industrial loads independently.

* Why anhydrous ammonia, created from solar, air, and salt water, might be the carbon-free fuel that replaces fossil fuels in the next 80 years.

Quotes from the episode:

“The cost of solar has dropped dramatically, making it easier for people to develop solar. The cost of regular utility provided power has gone up and keeps going up at a pretty steep rate. You really don’t need the incentives anymore.”

— Mike McGuire

Transcript

Aaron Nichols: Mike, when I was connecting with you and your team before the show, you mentioned that the shift from small municipal utilities to large corporate structures has driven up electricity costs and then noted that solar is becoming more viable even without incentives as utility costs rise. So how has this changed the way that solar projects are being integrated into the grid?

Mike McGuire PE - H2DC: Well, that’s slightly two different things, but they’re related. The price of solar has come down dramatically. 20 years ago it was $8 a watt to buy a solar module. Now, you can buy entire ground mount solar for 75 cents a watt for extremely large facilities. You really don’t need the incentives anymore.

As far as integration, the whole grid thing has evolved. In Massachusetts and New Jersey, high incentives led to a tipping point around 2010. It filled up the electric company’s circuits. Once power starts flowing in the other direction from all these little distributed generation sites, it eventually comes back to a substation where they have limits on the equipment. Massachusetts has been to hell and back on this. The utilities got crushed by the number of applications.

It wasn’t fair to put the cost of repairing the grid on regular ratepayers, so they put those costs on the solar developers. In congested areas, the utility might tell you it costs $5 billion to upgrade the circuit for a 300 kW project, or you can “sneak in under the wire” if you reduce it to 125 kW. That’s the trade-off we see now.

Aaron Nichols: I’m very excited to talk to you today and learn more. I am a sales and marketing storytelling minded person, but I have a lot to learn on the technical side. Welcome back to This Week in Solar. I’m your host, Aaron Nichols, and my guest today is Mike McGuire. Mike, would you quickly introduce yourself?

Mike McGuire PE - H2DC: Sure, I’m an electrical engineer, and our firm is licensed across the entire US—all 50 states, DC, and Puerto Rico. (Not Guam yet!). Part of our shop does distribution engineering. We calculate how much energy you’re going to need for a store—lighting, outlets, appliances—and size the electrical needs.

With distributed generation, we look at how much you’re putting in. There’s “behind the meter” where solar takes a bite out of existing loads, or you’re a net producer dumping power back on the grid. 20 years ago, that was straight net metering. It’s primitive—like an abacus. They take a picture of your meter odometer every month and compare the two. Over the years, utilities complained about a glut of energy at certain times, which they call the duck curve.

Aaron Nichols: I’ve heard of the duck curve, but please refresh my memory.

Mike McGuire PE - H2DC: It’s a glut of energy available on the lines when everyone’s solar is dumping on the grid at the same time. Let’s also talk about peak demand. Every summer, when people leave work and come home, both locations have the air conditioning on. That uses a lot of power and can cause brownouts. Utilities then have to “wheel in” power from an open market at a premium—sometimes 5 to 200 times the normal price.

They share that pain with big commercial users through a “speeding ticket” called a peak demand charge. Some manufacturing plants pay as much for their “speeding ticket” as they do for their regular consumption. Now we’re seeing time of use (TOU) charges for residences too, where you might pay 10 times more for electricity between 4 p.m. and 10 p.m.

Aaron Nichols: Where do you and your company come in to help fix this?

Mike McGuire PE - H2DC: We’re the electrical engineers. We figure out how to integrate all these systems—pairing modules, combining them with inverters. We’re the cooks; the customers tell us what they want on the menu, and we figure out how to get it done and deal with the utilities.

Aaron Nichols: You’ve been a PE for 30 years and in solar for 20. What are the major changes you’ve seen?

Mike McGuire PE - H2DC: Grids are getting full and processes are getting complicated, but now we have energy storage. To combat that duck curve and the peak demand, you capture energy and hold onto it for a few hours. Batteries are the easiest solution. Instead of tapping the utility to charge an electric car—which is a bigger load than most A/C systems—you hit the battery.

For the future, I think we’ll see more off-grid solar. I don’t mean a camp on an island; I mean solar running specific loads while the sun is out, regulated by batteries so clouds don’t “pull the rug out” from under you. If the batteries run low, you use an automatic transfer switch (ATS) to snap back to the grid. This is “solar without the utility.” In New England, solar energy per kWh is much less than utility rates, which draws people in.

Aaron Nichols: Mike, if you were to guess what energy looks like 80 years from now, what do you imagine?

Mike McGuire PE - H2DC: It will still be electric. How we make it will change. I don’t think fossil fuels or uranium will be enough. I believe we’ll use “modern fuels” we can’t even think of yet. One I like is anhydrous ammonia (NH3). It has no carbon, stores like propane, and its energy content is between propane and natural gas.

If you have a glut of solar, air, and salt water, you can create NH3. Industry is working on making the manufacturing plants smaller and more efficient. It can also be used for fertilizer. That might be a go-to fuel in 80 years.

Aaron Nichols: Thank you for coming on, Mike. For everyone listening, that’s been This Week in Solar.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit exactsolar.substack.com

Plug-in solar is sweeping the nation.

What started as a fringe, under-the-radar DIY movement (look up “guerrilla solar”) will soon be a legally protected appliance class across the United States.

Curious where your state stands on legalizing anyone’s right to harvest sunlight? Read on.

Listen to this episode on:

* YouTube

* Apple Podcasts

* Spotify

If you’ve gotten some value out of this week in solar, please consider subscribing (for free) so we can continue to bring you more!

When it comes to plug-in solar, states have wildly different attitudes.

A few have made moves to eliminate utility red tape, while others have killed bills under heavy pressure from utility and labor monopolies.

States where legislation has passed

Five states have officially signed plug-in solar bills into law. These are:

* Utah: The pioneer that started the movement when they signed their 1,200W limit into law in March 2025.

* Maine & Virginia: Both signed their respective 1,200W limit bills into law in April 2026.

* Colorado: Signed into law on May 7, 2026. HB 26-1007 sets the national high-water mark with a 1,920W limit and explicitly stops HOAs from interfering with homeowners’ rights to put a few solar panels on their property.

* Maryland: Signed into law on May 12, 2026. HB 1532 is unique because it specifically exempts smaller systems under 391W from needing UL certification or building code alterations.

* Connecticut: HB 5340 passed both chambers on June 4th

States where legislation is advancing

These states have active, moving legislation.

* Awaiting Signature: New York, New Hampshire, and Vermont.

* Active in Chambers: Illinois (SB 3104 successfully advanced out of committee), California, Massachusetts, Hawaii, Delaware, North Carolina, Oklahoma, and Washington, D.C.

States where legislation’s been killed stone dead

Utility pushback, union opposition, and legislative gridlock effectively stalled progress in 11 states for the 2026 session.

* The Casualties: Washington (the plug-in solar exemption was explicitly stripped from a broader energy bill before passage), New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Wyoming, Indiana, Missouri, Arizona, New Mexico, Oregon, Georgia, and Idaho. Opponents in these states largely cited fire risks and technical interconnection concerns, causing bills to either fail a floor vote or die in committee. Sponsors in these states are forced to regroup for 2027.

States with no Legislation

16 states remain entirely without explicit legislation. Utilities in these states continue to apply outdated, heavy-handed interconnection rules designed for massive rooftop arrays to simple 120V plug-in systems.

* The Holdouts: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, North Dakota, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, West Virginia, and Wisconsin.

Sources:

https://pluginsolarguide.com/

https://www.brightsaver.org/legislation-tracker/

https://pluginsolarusa.com/

https://www.reddit.com/r/pluginsolarusa/

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit exactsolar.substack.com

Aaron talks with Dr. Janette Freeman, VP of Business Development at Fabtech and a leading expert in the circular economy for solar.

Janette is a former minister and mindfulness coach who transitioned into renewable energy to help solve the issue of solar waste.

Listen to this episode on:

* YouTube

* Apple Podcasts

* Spotify

Connect with Janette on LinkedIn here.

If you feel you’ve gotten some value out of this week in solar, go ahead and give us your email so we can continue sending you more solar news!

Expect to learn:

* Why it currently costs $15–$16 to recycle a panel versus $1 to landfill it (and why that gap is closing fast).

* The difference between metal stripping (solar recycling level 1) and the advanced separation of glass, copper, and silver (advanced solar recycling).

* How the solar industry ended up being the first industry in history to impose recycling standards on itself (before being forced by legislation).

Quotes from the episode:

“Clean energy has to take care of their circularity and the end-of-life panels. We can’t be in clean energy and add to a problem on the other side of it.” — Dr. Janette Freeman

“What I would hope is that within 80 years, human beings evolve enough to handle this kind of technology... that will determine if we actually still have a planet that’s inhabitable and we can live on.” — Dr. Janette Freeman

Transcript

Aaron Nichols: Janette, why aren’t more solar panels recycled when they reach the end of their useful lives?

Dr. Janette Freeman: Basically, the main reason is cost, because it costs to recycle solar panels. And sometimes that is a sticker shock for a lot of customers and companies. Because we’re a new industry, and because waste in solar panels is new, people don’t know about it. The infrastructure for recycling centers is just building because it’s not a typical recycling product to recycle. In 10 years that won’t be the case. There will be more of an infrastructure, more education, and more companies that are budgeting in advance for the cost of recycling.

Aaron Nichols: So at the moment, it’s more of a problem of incentives than anything else. We just haven’t lined up the incentives correctly for everyone to make it happen.

Dr. Janette Freeman: I think you could say it like that. Everyone always takes action based on certain incentives, right? But I don’t like that to sound like, unless there’s all kinds of handouts and financial incentives, then it’s not gonna happen. There’s a lot of incentives. One major incentive is a company’s social governance. It’s part of their social influence. They don’t want their company to be known as filling the local landfills with the solar panels that are providing power in the communities.

Aaron Nichols: And we’ll get to that. I know that you mentioned that social norms are a very powerful motivator when people are talking about a company and what they’re doing or what they’re not doing. We’ll get to that down the line, but for anyone who’s listening, welcome back to This Week in Solar. I am your host, Aaron Nichols, the research and policy specialist here at Exact Solar in Newtown, Pennsylvania. And my guest today is Dr. Janette Freeman. I know you’re at Fabtech—I forgot your title. Would you please introduce yourself and talk about your day-to-day life at Fabtech?

Dr. Janette Freeman: Thanks so much for having me on, Aaron. So my name is Janette Freeman and my title is VP of Business Development. To give a little bit of history, Fabtech’s been around over 25 years. We started out in the refurbishing of electronics, from cell phones to all kinds of different things. Then we got into solar panels about 15 years ago. About six years ago, they brought me on. Fabtech is a family company, basically. My brother-in-law and sister started it. They had been in the salvage market, not really in renewable energy. They brought me on to really build relationships in the renewable industry space so that we could get those used solar panels off solar farms in large quantities. It didn’t take long for me to realize that reuse is only one part of the puzzle; recycling is a very key part of that circularity.

Aaron Nichols: And what were you doing before? I know there was a quick sidebar there. What did your brother-in-law and sister pull you away from?

Dr. Janette Freeman: For about 20 years before that, I was actually a minister in churches. I founded and served new thought ministries. I also did coaching on the side and had written three books. My work was working with people with their personal mindset and deeper spirituality. I was an expert in mindfulness and meditation training. After I had gotten out of nonprofits, I was teaching in psychiatry with mindfulness and behavioral management. I was craving something brand new. I just said to my sister one day, I wonder if there’s anywhere where my particular skill set will meet your growing needs. It’s been great fun; it fills my need to do something with purpose that makes the planet a better place.

Aaron Nichols: That is so awesome. I certainly can relate to that. I ended up in this business because I was surfing and trying to figure out what to do with the rest of my life in Ecuador. I had just done some yoga teacher trainings and realized that if I spent the rest of my life deploying clean energy, I could look back and feel like that was a good use of a life. Going back to that purpose angle—even though solar has this green image, a lot of panels end up getting taken down and thrown away far before they need to be replaced. Can you elaborate on why that is?

Dr. Janette Freeman: There’s actually a lot of reasons and they’re usually good reasons. In larger commercial rooftop projects, they might come off early because of a roofing issue, a transference of ownership, or technology increases. 10 years ago we had 250-watt panels; now you can put a 650-watt panel on. Those are typically the reasons: decommissioning, repowering, or ownership change. The other reason is breakage from weather incidents.

Aaron Nichols: So it’s not always motivated specifically by business reasons. It’s no one’s fault.

Dr. Janette Freeman: Right. There’s usually a good reason.

Aaron Nichols: So what do we do about it? Where do you guys come in?

Dr. Janette Freeman: Reuse is always a priority if panels can be reused. That’s first choice before recycling and definitely before landfill. Reuse comes in when panels can be resold. There’s a big difference; 250-watt panels still work, but we can’t really do anything with them because we can’t resell those. Nowadays, it’s really over 320 watts where there is resale value to cover the labor, testing, and marketing costs.

The second choice is recycling. Solar panels are sturdy pieces of equipment made with many different materials that have to be recycled separately. The aluminum frame and junction box come off, then the glass is separated, and then the solar cell is processed to pull out precious materials like silver, copper, and lead. Some metals recyclers just strip the frame and landfill the rest—that is no solution. We want “real recycling” where the entire panel gets recycled. Recycling prices have already come down since I started five years ago. As the price of silver goes up and demand increases, I can see a time where recycling costs very little or is even free. Right now, landfilling might cost $1 or $2 versus $15 or $16 for recycling. That’s why 90% of panels are still being landfilled, which is entirely too high. However, we’re seeing prohibitions. Texas and California have legislation banning solar panels from landfills.

Aaron Nichols: That’s really good news. I got into this industry because of the amount of trash I saw while traveling through the developing world. You mentioned social pressure is something you believe will change this. How can we ethically and in a friendly way put the pressure on?

Dr. Janette Freeman: Social influence has always been a factor—you don’t want people to see you throwing a plastic bottle in the garbage when there is a recycling bin. In the last five years, I’ve noticed a huge difference in companies making it a policy to recycle. Part of that is driven by the consumer in communities where solar farms are being installed. People don’t want those panels in their local landfills. The industry is actually pushing the industry to do things the right way, which is pretty admirable.

Aaron Nichols: It is. I live very close to Kate Collardson, who started solarrecycle.org. She mentioned that we’re the first industry in history to impose recycling upon ourselves before anyone made us do it.

Dr. Janette Freeman: Yeah, I was just going to mention that. We were talking at the RE+ conference in September and you were saying that. I was like, “Yay us!”

Aaron Nichols: Well, Janette, I ask everyone who comes on this show the same closing question. My grandma turned 80 last year. 80 years means she was born in 1945—a world where clean energy didn’t exist. PV wasn’t invented until 1954. Within her lifetime, solar went from a niche technology to the cheapest power source in the world. What do you think clean energy looks like 80 years from now?

Dr. Janette Freeman: I’m going to say a little twist to this. Our technology is increasing exponentially now with AI. What I would hope is that within 80 years, human beings evolve enough to handle this kind of technology. What we see in the world will be directly related to if human beings evolve to think more of the common good versus selfish needs. That will determine if we still have a planet that’s inhabitable. Of course, clean energy then will be the normal way that we have energy.

Aaron Nichols: That’s a beautiful vision. Janette, where do you like people to find you online?

Dr. Janette Freeman: LinkedIn is the best place—Janette Freeman. And of course, my website is fabtech.net.

Aaron Nichols: Great. Thank you so much for coming on today. That’s been This Week in Solar.

Dr. Janette Freeman: Thank you so much. Bye bye.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit exactsolar.substack.com

What’s New:

Two of the solar industry’s leading independent testing labs, Kiwa PVEL and RETC, just dropped their 2026 solar panel reliability reports.

The high-level takeaway is: solar panels are becoming more efficient and delivering higher energy yields than ever before, but their failure rates during extended laboratory stress testing have skyrocketed to historic highs.

We don’t say this to scare you; it’s just another reason to work with a reputable, locally owned installer that’s done their research when you’re considering going solar.

You can listen to this episode here, or on:

* YouTube

* Apple Podcasts

* Spotify

If you’ve learned something from This Week In Solar and you’d like to learn more, drop your email below, and we’ll keep sending you free solar news!

Why it Matters:

For a high-quality, locally-owned solar installer like Exact Solar, it’s absolutely critical that we can stand behind the promises that we make to home and business owners.

Those promises are only as good as the equipment we use to build our systems.

We’re brand-agnostic in the systems we build, and we’re always testing new equipment to ensure home and business owners get the best experience.

It’s our name on the roof, not the manufacturers’. If the system breaks, we’re the ones who get called to fix it. Most home and business owners only have a vague idea of who manufactured their solar panels, but they know who installed them.

Historically, standard certifications kept catastrophic equipment failures from happening on a large scale. But as the market scrambles to meet surging energy demands, manufacturers are cutting corners to save on costs and increase output.

We are seeing thinner encapsulant layers, zero-busbar designs, and significantly thinner aluminum frames. Thinner frames and glass mean higher rates of glass breakage and cell cracking when panels are exposed to simulated heavy snow, high winds, and severe hail storms.

Let’s look at the numbers coming out of the labs:

* 87% of manufacturers evaluated in the Kiwa PVEL Scorecard experienced at least one test failure.

* More than 10% of the tested module samples failed during the intensive 2,000-hour damp heat test (this means that layers separated and moisture crept in).

* Not a single solar panel model managed to achieve “Top Performer” status across every single test category for the first time in history.

How to Find The Top Performing Panels:

If you’re interested in going solar, here’s how to make sure you’ll own a system that’s built to last.

If you are working with a well-established, locally owned, reputable installer, ask them what equipment they have worked with extensively and like.

They have years of experience and will help you find the equipment that works best in your area, for your unique climate.

If you want something to cross-reference with, these five brands earned high honors as both a Kiwa PVEL “Top Performer” and an RETC “Overall Highest Achiever” for 2026:

* JinkoSolar

* Trina Solar

* JA Solar

* Qcells

* LONGi Solar

Sources:

Photovoltaic Reliability and Standards Development

Latest PV Module Reliability Scorecard shows unsettling uptick in failures

RETC solar panel report shows troubling performance issues

Latest RETC solar module quality report reveals significant issues

2026 PV Module Index Report

The 2026 PV Module Reliability Scorecard

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit exactsolar.substack.com

Aaron talks with Dr. Ryan Wartena, CEO and Founder of Southern Beams Builds and creator of Dragonwings.

If you don’t already know what Dragonwings are, you should. They’re insanely cool. Imagine off-grid power in a box, Blade Runner style.

You can look at ‘em here.

Ryan has a PhD in electrochemical engineering and a long resume of awesome achievements. He’s now building robotic solar generators that unfold from shipping containers.

Listen to this episode here, or on:

* YouTube

* Apple Podcasts

* Spotify

Connect with Ryan on LinkedIn here.

If you’ve learned something from This Week In Solar and you’d like to learn more, drop your email below, and we’ll keep sending you free solar news!

Expect to learn:

* How Dragonwings is moving off-grid solar away from slow, custom construction and toward a production line manufacturing model.

* Why Ryan picked the 20-foot shipping container shape (it’s perfect for something very specific).

* How these cool mobile solar units are powering everything from NFL games to off-grid villages at Burning Man.

Quotes from the episode:

“I think Dragonwings has been part of a collective dream... let’s not have to do a lot of wiring in the field. Why can’t we just have something to drop it down and it opens up and does the thing?”

— Dr. Ryan Wartena

“This may be one of the fastest ways to deploy renewables if we can build solar generators like cars... the economics are there, and now it’s about that speed.”

— Dr. Ryan Wartena

Transcript:

Aaron Nichols: Ryan, I’m so excited to finally meet you. Ever since I saw a video of Dragonwings just unfolding out of the shipping container, like some sort of amazing sci-fi robot, I’ve wanted to meet you and talk to you. Would you please introduce yourself, just kind of discuss your background in the solar industry a little bit and talk about the creation of Dragonwings?

Dr. Ryan Wartena: Absolutely. Well, thank you, Aaron. I’m Dr. Ryan Wartena. I’m the CEO and founder of Southern Beams Builds, and we build Dragonwing Solar Generators. It’s the first to market three-phase power renewable solar generator with all integrated solar, batteries, power conversion, and the key point is it has enough solar panels to generate enough energy to feed a three-phase power system.

And so it’s been a bit of a dream. I think Dragonwings has been part of a collective dream that anyone who’s been involved with solar has been kind of wanting as far as like—let’s not have to do a lot of wiring in the field. Why can’t we just have something to drop it down and it opens up and does the thing?

A bit of my background: I have a PhD in industrial electrochemical engineering from Georgia Tech. I did a postdoc at the Naval Research Lab where I started developing micro battery technologies and then another postdoc at MIT for Professor Yat-Ming Chiang while he was starting up A123. My job was on the self-assembling battery. But through all of that, I realized like, even if we had the “everlasting gobstopper” of batteries, we’d really need an energy operating system to coordinate batteries with solar, the grid, and all the loads.

Aaron Nichols: Mm.

Dr. Ryan Wartena: In 2008, I founded a company called Geli—Growing Energy Labs Incorporated. We were pioneers in software for energy storage, and we sold that company in 2020 to Hanwha Q-cells. After that, I took a step back and looked at how long it took to develop commercial solar storage. I saw productized solutions for residential and utility scales, but nothing for commercial and industrial (C&I). C&I starts at say 20 or 30 kilowatt power and can scale up to a megawatt.

Commercial developers didn’t want to develop small projects because there was as much headache as a bigger project. What if we can provide a product that, as soon as it’s delivered, is ready to provide power service? That’s where Dragonwings came from—a desire to build an all-in-one system to productize solar, building power plants like cars on a production line.

Aaron Nichols: Right. That’s, I think, the thing that I love the most. The cool factor is just so off the charts. Go to dragonwings.co, just watch the video, watch these things unfolding. They’re such a statement. So obviously you were solving a problem in the market, but how important were aesthetics in the design process?

Dr. Ryan Wartena: I am an artist, and I love to make things beautiful. Back at Geli, our first energy storage system in 2006—instead of putting it into a gray box, I designed a turquoise hexagon. We’ve been blind to power systems; we just know they work. There’s always been an intention here to make whatever we do absolutely beautiful.

The design for Dragonwings was functionality-driven. We wanted it to open at the push of a button and not take up much ground space. That led to the horizontal scissor design, which we have a patent on. The form factor was inspired by a 20-foot shipping container—they go everywhere, they’re standardized on fork pockets and corner posts. So the beauty followed the engineering. It is the beginning of solar robotics and robotic architecture.

Aaron Nichols: Now, just to bring the story down to Earth—what can an average Dragonwing power? How many EV chargers would the average one be able to handle?

Dr. Ryan Wartena: We put four level-two chargers on Dragonwings. In the wintertime, we’re going to make between 50 and 70 kilowatt-hours; in the summertime, up to 150. So we can do like two cars in the winter and six cars in the summer. We recently sold a unit to Hyundai and they’ve been using it every day this winter charging one or two cars.

Aaron Nichols: I think another obvious place my mind goes is disaster zones or places that need to be electrified. Is that something y’all have worked on?

Dr. Ryan Wartena: Absolutely. Dragonwings can be multi-use. You can use them for charging construction equipment or EVs most of the time, and when there is a disaster, they can be utilized for emergency response. We’re working with state agencies in California and organizations like Direct Relief and the Footprint Project on this.

Aaron Nichols: Yeah, and the portability is a huge asset.

Dr. Ryan Wartena: One of the design goals was to make sure we could put two of them onto a 53-foot flatbed trailer. We have a potential military application coming up for exactly that. Because we fit into the shipping container ecosystem, we fit right into the global logistics industry.

Aaron Nichols: Very cool. And what’s been your crowning moment so far?

Dr. Ryan Wartena: We have two Dragonwings at Levi’s Stadium right now for the Super Bowl. They’ve been operating great in conjunction with Sunbelt Rentals. We also had units at the Google I/O conference. NextTracker bought a Dragonwing and has been using it for nearly two years on construction sites.

Aaron Nichols: I imagine it’s faster to put a hundred Dragonwings in a field than to build a traditional project.

Dr. Ryan Wartena: I believe that too, Aaron. We’re talking with Tier 1 construction companies who are building data centers. We’ve actually started looking at our first data center rack over here that we’ll be putting into a Dragonwing to do certified renewable AI compute. Delivering Dragonwings to a site the day you sign a lease means you can start generating revenue immediately.

Aaron Nichols: Roughly how many Dragonwings exist in the world today?

Dr. Ryan Wartena: We’ve built eight. One prototype and seven that are all online and deployed across California, Arizona, and the Mojave Desert.

Aaron Nichols: Nice. Haven’t they been deployed at Burning Man yet?

Dr. Ryan Wartena: All of them have been to Burning Man. This last year we had five Dragonwings powering a whole village of 330 people—kitchens, sound systems, and even an electric sauna.

Aaron Nichols: If you had your way, where is it going?

Dr. Ryan Wartena: I see it developing into fields of Dragonwings for fast setup. This may be one of the fastest ways to deploy renewables if we can build solar generators like cars. We’ve had inbounds from over 50 countries. A lot of the world runs on gas and diesel generators at the edge of the world; I’d love to see us have an international reach and develop projects of 20 or 50 megawatts.

Aaron Nichols: I hammer on this all the time—there are enough parking lots in this country to cover several states.

Dr. Ryan Wartena: Exactly. Through my experience at Geli, I saw the hurdles of C&I solar. Often it’s a REIT that owns the building, managed by a management company, with a short-term lease. No one is motivated to put in fixed solar. But with Dragonwings, you can. It doesn’t necessarily increase the property value or the taxes because it’s mobile. Having that flexibility and multipurpose use is what opens the market.

Aaron Nichols: Ryan, what do you believe clean energy looks like 80 years from now?

Dr. Ryan Wartena: In 1999, I asked myself the same question. At the time, it looked like it would take 1,000 years to get to 100% renewables. Then China stepped in and increased solar panel production by 10x, and financial solutions like PPAs gave it another step function. I’d like to believe in 80 years, we will be running on 500% or 700% renewable energy. I think we can get to near 100% in the 2030s.

AI and electric vehicles are asking us for more and more energy, so it’s about who can build and deploy it fastest. I can see the world running on 500% renewables in our lifetime.

Aaron Nichols: If you like to be found online, where do you like to be found?

Dr. Ryan Wartena: LinkedIn is a great place. We have an Instagram under Southern Beams, or you can contact me directly at [email protected].

Aaron Nichols: Ryan, thank you so much. That’s been This Week in Solar.

Dr. Ryan Wartena: Awesome, thank you, Aaron.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit exactsolar.substack.com

What’s New:

Earlier this year, Elon Musk set an aggressive goal for Tesla and SpaceX: to build 100 gigawatts (GW) of annual solar manufacturing capacity in the United States within the next three years. The plan’s moving forward, but there’s a lot to overcome.

You can listen to this episode here, or on:

* Substack

* YouTube

* Apple Podcasts

* Spotify

If you’ve learned something from This Week In Solar and you’d like to learn more, drop your email below, and we’ll keep sending you free solar news!

Why it Matters:

To put this into perspective, the entire U.S. solar industry added 43.2 GW of capacity in 2025, and America’s largest domestic manufacturer, First Solar, projects adding 18 GW of capacity by 2027.

If successful, Tesla alone would more than double the entire country’s domestic solar manufacturing capacity.

The center of this planned expansion is a massive new factory under development in Brookshire, Texas, right next to Tesla’s existing Megapack Megafactory.

Here’s where it gets really interesting. Normally, solar panels that are “manufactured” in the U.S. are actually just “assembled” in the U.S.

Making a solar panel is a multi-step process that starts with raw polysilicon that’s turned into ingots, wafers, solar cells, and finally the finished module.

Because building solar cell manufacturing lines requires massive capital investments, highly specialized cleanroom environments, and complex chemical processing, U.S. companies don’t generally manufacture all the components.

Instead, they import ready-made photovoltaic cells (overwhelmingly made by Chinese manufacturers or their subsidiaries in Southeast Asia) and perform only the final mechanical assembly in America.

This final stage involves soldering the imported cells together, sealing them between protective glass and a backsheet, and framing them in aluminum.

Tesla is designing this factory to be completely vertically integrated. That means the process will include:

* Ingot growth and wafer slicing

* Photovoltaic (PV) cell production

* Finished module and panel assembly

While the surging electricity demand from AI data centers and electrification makes the timing perfect, there are a few logistical issues to overcome:

* Supply Chain & Sourcing: Tesla is reportedly spending nearly $3 billion to purchase cell manufacturing equipment from top Chinese suppliers. However, there are risks, including U.S. Section 232 tariffs on raw materials like polysilicon, and potential Chinese export restrictions on solar tech.

* Massive Power Demands: Operating 100 GW of shared cell and module manufacturing will require up to 1,200 MW of power. The industrial transformer market faces two-year wait times, but Tesla hopes to bypass this by manufacturing its own transformers.

* Space and Labor Constraints: Producing 100 GW will require an estimated 43 million square feet of factory space (four times the size of Tesla’s Gigafactory Texas) and an influx of roughly 22,000 workers (I mean, hey, it’s more jobs than a data center).

Hitting 100 GW by 2028 is highly improbable. But Elon Musk is famous for convincing investors he can do the impossible, and then finding ways to pull it off.

If Tesla successfully executes even a third of this plan in the next three years, they’ll be a dominant force in the American solar energy market. By manufacturing the panels, the inverters, the home batteries (Powerwall), and utility-scale storage (Megapack), Tesla could offer home and business owners a domestically manufactured “solar energy system in a box” that doesn’t need any non-Tesla components.

It could also make solar even more cost-effective for anyone who invests in a solar energy system with a reputable, locally-owned company like Exact Solar.

Sources:

Assessing Elon Musk’s massive 100 GW solar ambitions

Tesla is building a massive Texas solar factory in its clearest push yet for 100 GW

How Tesla’s Ambitious Solar Plans Could Soon Power the Stock Higher

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit exactsolar.substack.com

In This Week In Solar’s one hundredth episode, Aaron Nichols sits down with Mr. Money Mustache.

They dive into the unnecessary red tape surrounding traditional solar installations and explore some highly unconventional, DIY ways to capture the sun’s energy without asking for permission.

Pete became an internet legend under the pseudonym Mr. Money Mustache. By optimizing his spending, earning, and investing (and always maximizing for fun while minimizing cost), Pete managed to retire at the age of 30.

Pete is also a self-proclaimed “eco-nerd” who loves harnessing the free magic energy from the sky that is solar power.

You can listen to this episode here, or on:

* YouTube

* Apple Podcasts

* Spotify

If you’ve learned something from This Week In Solar and you’d like to learn more, drop your email below, and we’ll keep sending you free solar news!

Expect to learn:

* How Pete bypassed city permits by buying cheap used solar panels on Craigslist and wiring them directly into his electric water heater for free hot water.

* Why solar is so expensive in the United States compared to countries like Germany and Australia (hint: it’s mostly administrative red tape).

* Pete’s wild DIY trick using a $20 farmer’s bucket heater and a direct solar connection to turn his hot tub into a 120-degree cauldron of free, sun-powered hot water.

* How to make sure you’re working with a reputable, locally owned solar installer like Exact Solar.

Quote from the episode:

“It takes very little resources to manufacture a solar panel... You put it in the sun, it's paid back its manufacturing costs within something like three months in terms of the embodied energy. And then it's like 30 more years of profit that you're helping the earth.”

— Pete (Mr. Money Mustache)

Transcript:

Aaron Nichols Hey guys, a quick note before today’s episode with Mr. Money Mustache. Pete, who I interview, has a huge risk tolerance. He’s known for doing out-there things and he’s gonna describe some things that are pretty unsafe. Now, if you are interested in putting solar on your home, consult with qualified professionals. Electricity is no joke. You can really hurt yourself and we would hate to see that. So, please talk to us at X-ACC Solar if you live in New Jersey or Pennsylvania, if you’re thinking of putting solar on your home, and do not go messing around with the electricity in your own home unless you have qualifications. Now, without further ado, enjoy today’s interview with Mr. Money Mustache.

Aaron Nichols Pete, I know you as Pete. The world knows you as Mr. Money Mustache. Not too long ago, you asked me to help you break down the solar energy system you’d put on your roof and you’d done something really unique with it. So I’d like to launch into that story.

Mr. Money Mustache (Pete) Oh yeah. Sure. Okay. So the background is that I’m an electrical guy in the past, like an electrical engineer, and I’ve done wiring, full houses. So I’m comfortable with all your electricity stuff. But what I don’t like is a lot of red tape and permits and high fees that usually comes with solar, especially like the city we’re in right now, Longmont, is a little bit solar unfriendly compared to some other cities. So I just had a bunch of solar panels that I got off of Craigslist and I wired them up and really just chucked them onto my roof. I didn’t even mount them. I just made like a little metal frame and set them in there. And then I ran that DC current right into an electric water heater. And because of the principles of electricity, a heating element doesn’t care whether you’ve done gone through a fancy inverter and made AC or not, it’s just like solar panels right into the water heater and then I got free hot water for like a year and a half total cost of like just the cost of the solar panels on Craigslist so maybe like $800 of solar panels and I made about $400 of electricity with them in just the first, like per year I guess. So it’s like a giant return on investment compared to these systems where you spend many thousands of dollars in order to save like a little bit more per year. But it takes like sometimes 15 or 20 years to pay it back.

Aaron Nichols So for anyone who doesn’t know, I mean you have written online and published all sorts of stuff about how to financially and how otherwise optimize your life. Would you just give the audience an overview of who you are, what you’re about.

Mr. Money Mustache (Pete) Yeah, okay, that’s a bigger story. I, on the internet, I write as Mr. Money Mustache, although my real identity is not a secret either. And the basic idea is I like to optimize everything, maximizing for fun, preferably at minimal cost, especially when I was younger, when I didn’t have a lot of money. So what that led to is optimizing my whole spending and earning and investing. And it led to me being able to retire when I was 30 years old, just in time to start raising a child, get married, raising a kid and now I’ve been retired for like almost 22 years because I’m like coming up on 52 years old so it’s just been like a giant fun story of freedom and then I decided to start writing about this at some point and that’s where the Mr. Money Mustache blog was born.

Aaron Nichols Yeah and you’ve been a big fan of solar for a long time I mean the building we’re sitting in now which for anyone who doesn’t know you own this building it’s like half co-working space half community center yeah and it is powered by the Sun.

Mr. Money Mustache (Pete) Yeah somewhat like it’s a grid-tied solar system and during the summer it makes more electricity than we use and during the winter it runs a deficit so we have to pay a power bill and pull it out of the grid.

Aaron Nichols So why are you such a fan of solar?

Mr. Money Mustache (Pete) Just because it’s magic free energy from the sky. It’s like raining the equivalent of money down onto you everywhere on earth. So why wouldn’t you want to harvest it? It just seems super cool to me.

Aaron Nichols Yeah. I remember, I mean, you’re actually one of the reasons I wound up in the solar industry was reading your story of how you actually got solar on this building.

Mr. Money Mustache (Pete) Oh, I didn’t know that.

Aaron Nichols Yeah. This was years ago before I was still a vagabond just traveling before I decided to do the installer training that I did and everything that took me here I was just like my god he made solar sound so cool.

Mr. Money Mustache (Pete) Yeah well thanks. Yeah. And I also like it because I’m a closet eco nerd as well right like I care about the environment I don’t like pollution so anytime I can displace fossil fuels with clean energy I like that too. But if you do it with the right little tweaks on how you do it it can be more profitable and less hassle and that’s also what I like.

Aaron Nichols So let’s talk about ways that people can use this amazing technology without permission and also how they can be safe doing so.

Mr. Money Mustache (Pete) Yeah. Yeah. Some of the stuff I do is not always safe.

Aaron Nichols I’ve been with you for some of those experiences.

Mr. Money Mustache (Pete) Yeah. Like when we took the tree down to the coworking space.

Aaron Nichols Oh yeah. Some big heavy stuff falling down.

Mr. Money Mustache (Pete) Yeah. I’m a little bit of a honey badger. I might have used up a couple of my nine lives if I were a cat. So don’t exactly do what I do, but you can choose the things that are safe. So what I would recommend... What first comes to mind with today’s solar environment is you buy one of those like all-in-one solar generator battery units, have dropped in price so much. Your solar panels go straight into that and it’s just got a bunch of plugs on the front. And if you get a big enough one, you can have thousands of watts of solar going in there and thousands of watts coming out to power all your stuff, like your hot tub and your electric car and anything else that uses a lot of power. And it can be completely off grid. So you don’t need a permit to do it. And that’s the easiest way to get comfortable and have some fun with solar. And then you can scale up from there. And then there’s like the new laws, which you might mention in this podcast that allow you to have like a mini grid tide system, right?

Aaron Nichols Yeah.

Mr. Money Mustache (Pete) Then of course, if you have a big enough house and a big enough budget, then it starts to shift over to become profitable to do the big array and make it grid tied. And that’s what we did here at this building because I really wanted it to make a surplus of power and then, you know, get credits that last through the seasons.

Aaron Nichols Yeah. Big fan of the battery option, just getting a little battery and plugging appliances into it because power’s just getting more and more expensive. Like you said, those things are cheap and that’s such a great option, especially for, let’s say, renters who don’t own their home. They don’t have the option to put solar on their roofs, but their bills just keep going up and up. There’s nothing stopping you. And it’s not even dangerous from buying a solar panel on Craigslist, buying a battery bank on Craigslist and plugging your refrigerator into it. Yeah, and the cool thing is, especially I moved from Longmont to Denver, in Denver we have time of use pricing and from 5 to 9 p.m. each day the price triples just for those few hours. So you can do tricks like have one of those batteries on a little timer, even if you didn’t have solar it could just charge from the grid and then it flips off the power supply at 5 o’clock and then your fridge runs from 5 to 9 on cheap power and then it recharges itself after hours, simplest system of all. We can later like put in the show notes or something exactly how this would work. So that’s level one. Or if you plug some solar panels into that low cost battery, then you don’t even have to charge it from the grid. Anytime you have time of use pricing, then it becomes like typically at least twice as valuable to do some solar tricks, right? Because you’re displacing the more expensive power.

Mr. Money Mustache (Pete) Right.

Aaron Nichols And you powered your hot tub as well, you said, with that same system that you were using for your water heater.

Mr. Money Mustache (Pete) Yeah, it was kind of similar. Not exactly. But what I did is I bought this what’s called a bucket heater. You can buy these things on Amazon. They’re like $20 and typically they’re used by farmers. It looks like a curling iron, but it’s meant to be dunked into water and you plug it into an AC plug. And it just heats up a five gallon bucket of water for like farm use or whatever. But it turns out if you leave one of those plugged in and dunked in your hot tub, it’ll heat the whole thing up just fairly slowly and just like any resistive heater you can run it on AC or DC, right? So I had my bank of 12 solar panels on my roof running down, I put like a normal household plug on the end of those wires and I just plugged in this farmer bucket heater and it was actually a little bit overpowered so it was putting out a little bit more than it was supposed to which is still safe because it’s underwater and it would heat the whole hot tub sometimes like in the right season I would get home and my hot tub would be like 120 degrees wow like I’d actually have to cool it down before I got in it’s just like a giant cauldron and make some soup in there. So that was fun because you know hot tubs are fun all the time. But they’re even more fun if you know that it was heated by the Sun that day.

Aaron Nichols Yeah, this is what I love about solar energy man is that there’s like obviously we have these big utility scale solar farms and those are cool in their own way, but just like the creative stories I hear from people like yeah, Keely my wife and I. Shortly after we got married to celebrate she bought me a yurt trip and we snowshoed in in January to a yurt up north of Fort Collins like three miles in and the whole thing was powered by solar and a big Blue Eddy battery bank. So you had your fireplace and you could just grab dead wood from outside, warm yourself with the fireplace and then you had string lights to charge your devices or you know light to play UNO by in the night or...

Mr. Money Mustache (Pete) It’s amazing. It is fun. If you happen to appreciate it, like most people do, it just feels more magical to just think about the electricity you’re using and how it shone from the sky onto you and then you’re using it that night.

Aaron Nichols So what I know that you’re a big fan of reducing waste in general and you also talk a lot on your show about how the average American just wastes so much. So what mindset do you think needs to change for people to get on board more with solar?

Mr. Money Mustache (Pete) Well, I like it to be... Like people have to know how simple it is. And like there’s still a lot of misconceptions because solar is still a bit of a political topic in the U.S. Right. So people have been brainwashed into thinking that it’s not good or it’s not cost saving or that there’s some hidden environmental damage that you’re not seeing and then you’re only seeing the nice part of it. But like none of that is true. It is just purely all good. It takes very little resources to manufacture a solar panel in it. You put it in the sun, it’s paid back its manufacturing costs within something like three months in terms of the embodied energy. And then it’s like 30 more years of profit that you’re helping the earth. So I think the main thing is just... people of all types, you know, and all political persuasions and all different audiences should just get to know it and share it with their audiences or share it with your friends if you’re not a content creator or whatever. And the word should spread. But I think the real key is it has to be simple because with the salesman that comes to your door with a clipboard and tries to sell you like $25,000 overpriced sale, like overpriced solar system, that makes everybody think it’s complicated and expensive, which it doesn’t have to be.

Aaron Nichols Yeah, well and a lot of that I mean as someone who works for a solar installer so much of the cost is permitting.

Mr. Money Mustache (Pete) Yeah, it’s the labor to get the labor and time to get paperwork through local bureaucracy.

Aaron Nichols Yeah, and multiple inspections and they want you to change your work, right?

Mr. Money Mustache (Pete) It was already done. Well the first time right like unnecessary structural things.

Aaron Nichols Yeah, the panels are lightweight.

Mr. Money Mustache (Pete) Just bunch of junk like that.

Aaron Nichols I was having a conversation about this with someone last night at one of the Colorado climate week off. And we were talking about how, you know, there’s countries that have streamlined the process. Like Germany is an example. Australia is an example where there’s a national process and it’s much easier to go solar and therefore solar costs a lot less. But here in the States, it basically comes down to local egotism. It’s like people saying, well, our process is way too important for us to streamline. We have to do stormwater and we have to do all this stuff. And but yet there’s people who have done it.

Mr. Money Mustache (Pete) Yeah I know well people who work for cities and building departments like they don’t always have the same incentives. Right. Like if they were paid based on how many solar systems got installed or even how happy the homeowners are about the solar system, about the policies, then they would have different incentives and they’d do a better job. Right now, their incentive is just to keep their jobs. Which is like, well, okay, you tell me what rules to enforce and I’ll enforce them really well. That’s how I keep my job, which is obviously gonna lead to some shitty types of customer experiences when we’re the customer.

Aaron Nichols If you wanted to, let’s say, leave the audience with just a quick tip for anyone who wants to get started tomorrow, save some money with Solar. I think we might have already covered it, but you’ve done so much of this.

Mr. Money Mustache (Pete) Yeah, would buy... I wouldn’t do the DC hot water thing that I did or anything like that. If you have a hot tub, then the curling iron solution could work and we could include a diagram of how to do it because that’s not too dangerous. But if you really want to be safe, just buy a portable generator, as they call that, like a solar generator, which is really just a battery pack with a solar input and then various outputs. Buy one of those and you can get like a pretty big one, like a one kilowatt hour one off Amazon for about three hundred dollars now. It used to be a thousand dollars. And then you just buy some solar panels on Craigslist. So don’t buy the solar panels of the same brand like Blue Ready or whatever, because they’ll be hundreds of dollars for like just a few hundred watts of panels. You buy them on Craigslist where it’s like 50 bucks for a 200 to 300 watt panel. As long as you have a place to set that out in your driveway or a balcony or wherever else, then you’re immediately producing a lot of power. Then... How much you save is a little bit debatable because, you know, it depends on how much you spend on the equipment, how sunny it is where you live, how much the power costs where you live, but it’ll definitely be fun regardless of what you do.

Aaron Nichols Yeah.

Mr. Money Mustache (Pete) And then the savings come when you start to have more solar panels that are going into a big load that typically uses a lot of electricity, which is why I went straight to heating because heat takes tons of energy. So anytime you can heat your house or some water, then you don’t need storage. It’s just going to the water and that’s when the numbers start to add up to like significant dollars that people might care about.

Aaron Nichols Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. I mean, I have a solar panel and a battery bank. I use them when I’m camping, but I will occasionally like plug our little toaster oven into the battery bank when we’re just heating up bagels. And you’re not going to save much, right? Like your toaster oven, even though that’s a high wattage device, it’s still only using 10 to 15 cents an hour of electricity. Like a bunch of dimes don’t really add up very fast.

Mr. Money Mustache (Pete) True but it’s that mental just I didn’t have to pay for this.

Aaron Nichols Yeah and so that’s really nice.

Mr. Money Mustache (Pete) I actually enjoy that so much that I’m still gonna do it anyway.

Aaron Nichols Right.

Mr. Money Mustache (Pete) It all depends on you know start small and learn and then you can always go bigger later as well.

Aaron Nichols Yeah so I’m very excited to ask you this last question because I’ve read your blog for so long and I know that you’re also like an urban planning enthusiast and kind of a futurist in some ways but I ask everyone who comes on this show the same closing question. I thought of it when I spoke at my grandma’s 80th birthday party last year. After speaking at her birthday party, I realized that 80 years means that my grandma was born into a world where what we call renewable energy effectively didn’t exist. The whole journey of solar PV basically from the invention of the cell to it being the cheapest power source in the world now happened within my grandma’s lifetime. Before that, like we had basically barely figured out how to harness electricity. The only way we knew how to make it was just digging stuff up, bringing it to a central place and burning it and sending it out.

Mr. Money Mustache (Pete) Yeah. Oh, we did have, um, how old is hydropower with electric dams and stuff?

Aaron Nichols Think that’s getting close to as, as a world as electricity itself.

Mr. Money Mustache (Pete) It is. Yeah.

Aaron Nichols But the question I ask everyone who comes on, so knowing that we’ve seen so much change in the last 80 years and we’ve gone from within one person’s lifetime not having this to it now being the most effective way to generate electricity. What do you think energy looks like 80 years from now?

Mr. Money Mustache (Pete) Oh, I think it’s going to be pretty abundant because there’s no way it’s going to get more expensive. It’s not like in the old days when I worried about peak oil and we’re like, oh, the oil is going to run out and then we’re going to, it’s good. The price is going to go up and it’s going to be terrible. It’s only going to get cheaper. The sun’s not going anywhere. So it’s gonna, I think you’ll just see more abundant electricity at lower prices and then we’ll think of more fun stuff to do with it. Like hot tubs for everybody. And like obviously electric cars, will eventually be electric airplanes as the batteries get higher density. And of course now with AI data centers, we’ve thought of lots of ways to burn tons of electricity too. So thank goodness solar arrived just in time for that because we’re gonna need like many gigawatts of that generation as well.

Aaron Nichols Yeah, you’re lucky you retired before AI.

Mr. Money Mustache (Pete) Oh yeah, because it would make me obsolete.

Aaron Nichols Maybe, yeah, I don’t know.

Mr. Money Mustache (Pete) But I feel that people... people who are in technology and also understand how to use AI, their worth is getting magnified because it’s basically you have a bunch of workers that work for you and you command this army of super intelligent robots. Yeah. And so the people who have mastered that are making more money than ever and being more productive than ever.

Aaron Nichols I’ve heard of this. It’s like bring your own software, bring your own agents to your next job.

Mr. Money Mustache (Pete) Yeah. Where you don’t want to be is like, you know, a customer, a telephone customer service representative, because an AI already can do better than that, even with the voice. That can even have the voice. There will be some jobs displaced, every past generation of technology has always just created more jobs, even while it erased obsolete jobs. So I think that’ll be true with AI too. We’ll see.

Aaron Nichols Well, where do you like to be found if you do want to be found? Online or otherwise?

Mr. Money Mustache (Pete) Yeah. Well, online is good since we’re creating a podcast right now. So just Mr. Money Mustache, if you look me up. You’ll find my website. You’ll find any other stuff that I’ve done. And if you’re local to Colorado and the Denver area, then you can always, you could even see where we’re hanging out right here, which is the PHI collective. PHI stands for financial independence. And it’s our social club and coworking space where we have now like about a hundred members who live around here and socialize and work together and stuff. So this is the real thing that’s... That’s more fun is in person socializing rather than just online.

Aaron Nichols Yeah. Well, thank you so much for taking the time and for coming on and for everyone listening. That’s been this week in solar. I’m honored to be a guest next week.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit exactsolar.substack.com

What’s new:

The U.S. energy storage sector just posted its strongest first quarter in history, installing 9.7 Gigawatt-hours (GWh) of new capacity.

Why it matters:

I don’t like to throw large numbers at you without context. Here’s what you need to know to understand what 9.7 GWh means:

* Battery capacity is measured in energy. Energy is power (measured in Watts) times time (expressed in hours). Whenever you see something measured in kilowatt, Megawatt, or Gigawatt hours, that’s a measure of how long that amount of stored energy can power an electrical load. When we’re sizing batteries for home and business owners at Exact Solar, we always ask, “What do you want to power, and for how long?”

* It’s enough energy to power ~300,000 homes for a full day in an outage. If that much capacity were backing up New York City, it’d power the whole city for an hour and a half in a full outage.

It’s a ton of energy, and we’re deploying it at breakneck speed. Battery deployment is one of the best solutions to the many problems that we’re facing with energy prices in the U.S.

Wholesale power costs are soaring, and geopolitical tensions continue to drive up fuel costs. Data centers have caused a massive surge in electricity demand.

You don’t need to have a deep understanding of energy markets to know that this is a mess that won’t be easily solved.

Right now, everyone wants power from a grid that was built before many people’s grandparents were born and desperately needs repairs. It’s a perfect storm that’s likely going to get worse before it gets better.

On top of all of this, extreme storms and power outages now happen far more frequently.

What’s standing in the way:

Washington politics.

According to the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA), 467 solar and storage projects currently have permits pending and are vulnerable to politically motivated delays. Industry leaders warn that stalling these permits threatens American energy security and could push electricity bills even higher.

The U.S. is rapidly building the storage capacity needed to support AI’s power needs and stabilize the grid, but maintaining this momentum will require clearing federal permitting bottlenecks.

Sources

US energy storage has record breaking Q1 2026

Energy Storage Market Outlook Q2 2026

SEIA: AI is fueling a massive US energy storage boom

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit exactsolar.substack.com

Aaron talks with Vaughan Woodruff, the founder of Equinox DG.

Vaughan’s an interconnection expert, industry veteran, and “muck shoveler” who tackles bureaucratic and technical hurdles that no one else wants to take on.

If you’ve ever wondered why we haven’t connected way more solar to the grid, this one’s for you.

Listen to this episode here, or on:

* YouTube

* Apple Podcasts

* Spotify

Connect with Vaughan on LinkedIn here.

Expect to learn:

* Why connecting solar to the grid has become a nightmare (13 states still don’t even regulate the process).

* How a federal mandate 20 years ago led to 39 different sets of state rules.

Quotes from the episode:

“We used to use libraries. We went to the library to get information and then we downloaded it. We now are seeing our kids learn off the internet where they are uploading things and downloading things. That’s what’s happening on the grid.”

— Vaughan Woodruff

“If we do this right, what I think this does is really enhances people’s control over their own economic and political lives... it’s about getting that power back into the hands of people.”

— Vaughan Woodruff

Transcript:

Aaron Nichols: Vaughan, you’re probably one of the only interconnection experts I know. You’re definitely the only public-facing interconnection expert I know. And for anyone listening who’s unfamiliar, can you just give a quick definition of interconnection and then give a high-level overview of the problems we’re facing as an industry?

Vaughan Woodruff: Well, first off, you’re living the good life if you can keep us at arm’s length. That’s great. Interconnection is the process the utility uses in order to make sure that anything that it connects to its grid is safe. This happens at the transmission level for big utility scale projects. The stuff I focus on is really on the distribution system—so everything ranging from small residential projects up to say community solar scale projects.

And so the interconnection process is typically, you know, a customer or someone acting on behalf of that customer applies to the utility. The utility goes through a set of procedures to check whether things are okay. And then it either gives the thumbs up or thumbs down or a thumbs up and says, “Hey, it’s going to cost this much money to upgrade the grid in order to be able to accommodate your project.” And the big piece that I focus on is how we regulate utilities for that because they’re monopoly utilities and really regulating them is how we make sure that we’re serving the public interest.

Aaron Nichols: Okay, awesome. Will you give just a general overview of who you are in the solar industry and what your day-to-day life looks like at Equinox DG?

Vaughan Woodruff: Yeah, I don’t know what I am in the industry. I’m a little bit of a vagabond. I started out in this industry like 20 years ago when it was largely a plumbing and heating industry. We were doing solar water heating at that time. And over the years as PV got more inexpensive and more affordable, it largely converted into an electrical contracting world. I started a company that started in solar water heating, moved into electrification—so solar PV, energy storage, heat pumps, as well as EV charging. Man, it’s been so long, I sometimes can’t remember.

I did that for roughly 12 years with the founder and ran the company. And then we merged with a larger national, multi-state company up here in the Northeast. I’m originally from Maine, where I live now. I have always kind of jumped between local work here in Maine—Maine’s a nice small state, a lot of connections here. I was the chair of the industry trade group through a pretty tumultuous gubernatorial administration here, so really worked to kind of build coalitions, both within the industry and with other advocates, and even with utilities and commissioners. Most recently, I’ve really focused on interconnection. It’s an issue that really impacts our ability to deploy solar, energy storage, and EVs that are able to backfeed to the grid at scale. It’s a really complicated and bureaucratic process. For some reason in my life, I always pick the things that nobody likes to do.

Aaron Nichols: You’re a muck shoveler.

Vaughan Woodruff: Yes, exactly. Beating your head against the wall. Because at the end of the day, it’s impact, right? There’s not a lot of glory in it, but it’s absolutely important. Interconnection is just really important to have folks in the weeds doing this stuff who understand how it works and can help bring coalitions together to drive change. I’m trying to do that, but we’ll see. My success will be measured probably as I’m sitting in my rocking chair late in life reflecting back.

Aaron Nichols: Well, for everyone who’s listening, welcome back to This Week in Solar. I’m your host, Aaron Nichols, the research and policy specialist here at Exact Solar in Newtown, Pennsylvania. My guest today is Vaughan Woodruff, who’s an interconnection expert and industry veteran, as you heard. It was lovely to hear you say the thing about the rocking chair. I talk about that all the time. I believe that if I spend my life putting my energy towards deploying as much clean energy as I possibly can, I’ll be able to look back at the end of it and say that I had lived a good life and that it mattered.

Vaughan Woodruff: Well, I saw you post about a grandfather who kind of gave you an earful. I had a grandfather who sat in that rocking chair. I think we probably had some examples there for us to think about as we have a chance to think about life in its full breadth.

Aaron Nichols: Yeah, absolutely man. So would you give just a general high-level overview of the problems we’re facing related to interconnection as a country and why it’s become such like a tangled messy ball of string?

Vaughan Woodruff: Yeah, the answer to that question largely dates back 20 years ago. In the mid-2000s, the Feds made it very clear that this was a state responsibility to regulate. There was actually a bill that got passed, the Energy Act in 2005, that said essentially every state within the next couple of years should put together interconnection rules. At that point, a lot of states only had regulations on the books having to do with big utility-scale stuff where you have to do engineering studies for every single one of them.

If you read the Energy Act—I won’t do it here because I want your listeners to stay engaged... it basically says you need to do this, every state you need to do this. And then at the end, if you look very carefully, it was an optional thing for the states to do because of “states’ rights.” What ended up happening from there were essentially maybe 39 different routes that states took. This process is essentially the same everywhere: you have a customer applying, the utility needs to assess the project and its grid to evaluate if it can be okayed in a few days or needs a big detailed study on the physics to figure out whether it’s safe.

We have 37 different sets of rules and 13 states that don’t even regulate it—they just leave it up to the utilities. So at that point, it’s just whatever the utility feels like. A big part of this is really about having consistent, enforceable rules. We don’t have that. It makes it really, really complex.

Aaron Nichols: Right. Yeah. I know that people in the industry love to talk about interconnection in Australia and how simple it is... How do we get somewhere to something like that as a country? How do we get the incentives right to make sure that we build a better system?

Vaughan Woodruff: One of the challenges is that utilities in this country are incentivized to be conservative. Safety and reliability doesn’t benefit from taking lots of chances. You take chances and the grid goes down—that could be life and death. It’s bureaucratic. When new technologies like distributed energy resources come in, it butts heads against utility practices. Oftentimes the solutions actually benefit both.

I was involved last year in a proceeding in New Hampshire where the utilities were initially very reluctant to look at IREC’s model. But after months of digging in, it became clear that good, strong, clear policies benefit the utilities and their staff as well. Number one, we need uniformity—some sort of underpinning foundation that’s roughly the same. In Australia, they have very high penetration rates and there’s a lot of innovation going on. I think at the end of the day, that diversity in the United States is wonderful but also challenging when it comes to scaling and standardization.

Aaron Nichols: So if I’m hearing you right, it seems like the utilities have been regional monopolies forever and have been incentivized to move very, very slowly... Is that about right?

Vaughan Woodruff: The paradigm has shifted. I like to think about it—we used to be libraries. We went to the library to get information and then we downloaded it. We now are seeing our kids learn off the internet where they are uploading things and downloading things. That’s what’s happening on the grid. People are now able to upload their energy and be generators and producers. That’s complicated. Now we’re expecting to see increasing amounts of renewable energy on the grid owned by a bunch of different people. States are grappling with how the utility model fundamentally changes. It used to be safety, reliability, and affordable costs. A lot of states are now saying there’s a fourth leg to that stool, which is decarbonization.

Aaron Nichols: It is such an interesting problem. I think when I was reading Gretchen Bakke’s book, The Grid, she was talking about how we insist on talking about electricity as if it’s a commodity like boxes of bananas, but it’s not. It’s instantaneous.

Vaughan Woodruff: Agreed. The grid is a really complicated thing. What we’re actually paying for on electricity bills is hard to understand. Right now we’re in the middle of a cold snap here in Maine, and folks don’t understand the electricity is really expensive right now because we actually have oil generators running because we need the capacity. It’s really complicated.

Aaron Nichols: Yeah, and I think the average person just doesn’t want to think about it at all. The only time in America that we think about the grid is when it’s not working. What’s an example of a company or maybe a state that does a really good job with interconnection?

Vaughan Woodruff: New Mexico has done a really strong job. They updated their procedures in 2023 to make sure energy storage is dealt with. More recently, the District of Columbia actually recognized that perfection is the enemy of the good when you’ve got these ticking timelines. They issued an order that created a program called a temporary conditional interconnection program, or T-SIP.

They essentially said: we’re going to tell the utilities you can increase staffing in the near term and stock up on standard equipment like transformers. One of the most critical parts was this idea of creating a conditional authorization to operate. A lot of commercial and community solar projects right now are looking at meeting place-in-service requirements which rely heavily on the utility. That blew my mind—that a customer’s tax credit is going to be dependent upon an electric utility to meet a timeline. DC said if there are grid upgrades required, a customer can build and power up—maybe not to 100% capacity right off—so they can meet the tax credit requirements. It’s a really great solution to a very near-term problem.

Aaron Nichols: That’s what I’m most excited about. Now obviously we’re going to get better at this stuff over time. What do you think clean energy will look like 80 years from now?

Vaughan Woodruff: I think 80 years into the future, I hope the utility still exists but acts more as a market and is more responsive to customers. I hope we see power return to our individual customers. One of the things that’s most exciting to me about this work is to get that power into the hands of people—to enhance people’s control over their own economic and political lives.

Aaron Nichols: Man, that’s something I can definitely get behind.

Vaughan Woodruff: Yeah, and we do it together. There’s another opportunity here where we do it fragmented and those who have are able to step away from the grid, while the folks left behind carry the load. We need our own individual power in a way that makes sure others are also able to exercise theirs.

Aaron Nichols: Vaughan, where do you like to be found?

Vaughan Woodruff: Well, I like to be found in the woods in Maine. For folks looking for me that don’t come to the woods, you can see my company Equinox DG on LinkedIn or at equinoxdg.com. We’ll be launching a course with HeatSpring at the end of February on the history of interconnection—I put “riveting” in the title because we’re going to do a lot of storytelling to make sure this stuff is accessible.

Aaron Nichols: Amazing. For everyone listening, that’s been This Week in Solar, and thank you all for tuning in today.

Vaughan Woodruff: Thanks, Aaron.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit exactsolar.substack.com