You’re listening to Unite and Heal America. This is Matt Matern, your host and I’ve got a great guest on the program today. Bill Nussey, graduate of NC State University engineer, Harvard MBA, holds several patents published three books, sits on several commercial nonprofit boards, CEO of free energy has his own podcast, kind of a competitor, but showing a spirit of collegiality coming on another, another show to to help us spread the word because it’s, that’s what we’re all about here.

And Bill sold his firm Silverpop to IBM for $270 million. So he’s, he’s a real, real deal entrepreneur. And he’s also the founder of an energy project. And, Bill, it’s great to have you on the program. Thanks for being here.

Matt, thanks for having me. I definitely am about spreading the word. And I really appreciate you guys helping me do it.

Yeah, well, I guess the challenge is where to start? I guess I would say, How did you get to this space? What What brought you what was your path to, to the environmental world?

You know, I spent most of my career in tech as a CEO, my first company that was literally 15 years old, when I started my first software company, kind of got addicted to it and had the good fortune to keep doing that my whole life until the last company I was running, was sold to IBM. And I had this great opportunity to step back and think what can I do?

That really matters. And my wife had this crazy idea that we should start by making sure that we give away a giant chunk of the money, so I don’t have enough to retire, that would ensure that I leaned into it and did something meaningful next. And I, I’m an engineer, so I started thinking spreadsheets, what’s the next big thing and holy cow did I discover? But I think it’s the most interesting business opportunity, and the most important thing we can do for the future, which is this whole small scale, clean energy transition, which no one’s getting.

So I was like, how do you get the word out? When no one gets it? How do you build businesses, and I thought to myself, I’m gonna write a book. So I started that project and ship the book a few months ago. And now I’m off to spread the word and also starting to spin up some new businesses.

Well, tell us about the book, give us give the listeners the title, and let’s talk about it for a minute.

The book is called freeing energy. And it’s all about how the small scale solar and battery systems, which people typically don’t pay a lot of attention to, unless you have one on your roof or something, and how these are disrupting the entire energy industry from the outside in. And if we think about the clean energy transition, which a lot of people think about, they typically throw the small scale stuff in the same bucket with a really large things.

And what I discovered was that there were apps while they both had the benefit of helping the climate and helping reduce carbon emissions and things like that, when you’re talking about building a giant solar farm, or giant wind farm, versus putting something on a roof on a church or a school or a community building, they are completely different business markets. And this is something very few people are focused on. And the entrepreneur in me felt that no one sees how different these business markets are. Nobody sees how exciting how unifying the small scale stuff is.

And that’s, I couldn’t believe it. So banging my head against the wall finally decided to write a book, I did a TED Talk to start with that got some traction. So I said, I’m gonna write a book and get tell everybody. And the book is dedicated to the 10,000 people that haven’t yet joined the industry that will, and how together, we’re going to change the world.

Well, I’m, I’m right there with you. And then I was just talking to somebody today about how I believe that if we, if more of us had rooftop solar, that it would disrupt the market, and it would create, really an energy boom, yeah.
So that we would have enough clean energy to power pretty much everything that we need. And I’m kind of a proponent of the hydrogen pathway, in part and I think one of the objections to hydrogen is, well, it takes a fair amount of energy to produce in a clean way.

But if we had abundant clean energy, which we’d have if we had more rooftop solar, we could produce more green hydrogen, which could then power our vehicles and things like that, even planes so on and so forth, which might even be cleaner than the battery operated cars.

I know that you know, battery. operated cars are kind of what the direction we’re primarily headed in. But I think there’s some room for for other innovations. But tell us how exactly rooftop residential solar is going to change the utility business in the US, and how it’s maybe changed already.

When everybody has talked about rooftop solar, large scale solar for the last 30 years, the conversation has, for the most part, begin and ended with the let’s save the planet. And what’s really happened almost silently, in the last 10 years is that these large scale solar projects have become cheaper than coal plants and gas plants and nuclear plants.

The news that a lot of people are missing is it in the last two years, on average, in the US, the small projects, rooftop solar, like you mentioned, that’s actually become cheaper than buying electricity from the grid, as a consumer as a resident, you know, and this dichotomy, about being cheaper, is captured by a story I have and free energy, that book, I was talking to a utility executive, and he says, Bill, you know, I’m all for individuals and families wanted to make steel green and put solar on the roof, but I’m a dollars and cents guy.

And in the end, it’s so much cheaper to generate large scale solar by putting in a giant field than it is to say, put a small system on a roof. Since I just think it’s a it’s not a real market. And I let that hang for a moment. And I said to him, I said, it’s cheaper for you the utility, and he was silent. And I said, let me let me let me test that a little bit.

So if you put up a giant, you know, 500 megawatt solar facility outside of town, is my electricity bill gonna go down the moment you turn that on? And he goes, No. I said, so if I put solar on my roof, and I turn it on, is my electricity bill gonna go down? It’s gonna go down immediately. So I hear you saying it’s cheaper. But I think what you’re saying is cheaper for you that utility.

The fact is that solar is the cheapest way to generate electricity. And the question at hand and the one I address in the book is, are the savings going to go exclusively to utilities, or families and communities and individuals is going to also be able to benefit from cheaper solar, and they’ll have the profits and air quotes actually show up as more money in their wallets. And that’s the there’s a big battle going on across the United States on weirdly, who’s going to benefit from solar.

So how are the utilities resisting these changes? And kind of how can we all push back on that, because I’ve, I’ve heard that is a problem that they’ve met made it like a little bit more difficult for the solar energy rooftop people to do as well as maybe they might, because they’re not buying it at reasonable prices, or that kind of thing.

That’s exactly what it is. And California has always led the United States and set the example for the United States and automobiles and pollution and particularly on solar. And in the craziest, you gotta be kidding me could not have scripted a horror movie kind of scenario. The people that make the decisions about this in California late last year came out with something that went would have taken had had been accepted from California being arguably the best state to put solar on your roof.

Heck, it’s required legally to put solar on your roof of new buildings in California. And this, this proposed law would have actually made California the worst state the most expensive state, to the point of almost shutting down the residential and commercial solar industry in the state. Fortunately, people marched, they went to the governor’s mansion, it was quite a quite a rally, quite inspiring, actually.

And it got put on hold. And now the people who design these policies are back behind their closed doors, trying to figure out what to do next. But one thing that people don’t realize, Matt, is that there’s a in the United States, there’s about 201 people. And again, in free energy, I kind of go into this a little bit. There’s two, there’s just 201 201 individuals in the United States that control the vast majority of electricity policy.

They’re called Public Utility commissioners or public service commissioners, and 13 states, they’re elected your state, California, they’re appointed by the governor. They have complete control over these decisions. They’re subject to some public input. But by and large, it’s their decision. It’s kind of crazy to me as I learned about this, I couldn’t believe it at first, because you have such a small group that almost nobody knows about that is setting the prices.

Things like whether local energy, rooftop solar, is widely adopted or not adopted at all. They control all that. So here where I live, we can vote for them. So I tell everybody, hey, go. Don’t ignore that part of the ballot. Go pay attention to it.

Right. That’s incredibly important. And we’ve talked about it a little bit on the show in the past of However, the Public Utilities Commission here in California did what you said and essentially was influenced by the utility industry to kind of crush rooftop solar, certainly push back against that. So we all need to let the governor know and let our representatives know that that is not the path we should be taking.

Because I think it’s the democratization of the power grid that will I mean, it’s it’s good for democracy throughout the country. I mean, having too much power in the hands of large utilities is not good for us as a country, just kind of like politically, it’s just having concentrations of power and wealth and decision making from small groups is, is not really democratic.

And in a small “d” way. For 100 years, it was the only cost effective way to make electricity affordable. So we’ve done it for the for 100 years, because it worked. But we have something new California is the place where new things come from. It’s a new technology. It’s called solar and batteries. And now we have a choice and we need to rethink the rules and the approach and who has the power?

Well, you’re listening to Unite and Heal America. This is Matt Matern, my guest, Bill Nussey, entrepreneur and leader in the free energy space. So we’ll be back in just one minute. Stay tuned.

You’re listening to Unite and Heal America and this is Matt Matern, your host and I’ve got Bill Nussey. Back with us, Bill’s book Freeing Energy. We’re talking to Bill about rooftop solar. I have a question for you, Bill regarding solar versus wind, which is cheaper, which takes more raw materials and energy to build? Is solar overtaking wind as the preeminent choice in the clean energy space? Or, or is wind have some advantages?

I love that question. And here’s the funny thing. You get a million opinions on an answer like that. And I was asking the same question when I started researching the book, and I got all all possible answers. So I did this actual crazy thing. I actually went out and read data, I read science papers, I went to the US government websites where tremendous amount of data is available. And it turns out that the answer is actually pretty simple. And when you look at the data, it’s really not even up for debate.

So for many, many years, wind was the cheapest way to generate electricity. But the funny thing is that solar and also batteries have a unique characteristic that distinguishes them from every other way we’ve ever generated energy. And that solar and batteries are technologies. They’re not machines, like a wind turbine, and they’re not fuels like natural gas, uranium, and oil and coal. And, you know, folks from California have reinvented the world by taking technology silicone and turning into chips and turning it into iPhones and turning it into flat screen televisions.

And that same thing, which is often referred to as Moore’s law, the lowering cost of chips doesn’t apply perfectly to solar and batteries, but it’s similar. And that every single year the prices is going to go down. So what’s happening is like here we are in 2022, on average, because it varies a lot by policy and location, and sunniness and wittiness.

But generally, on average, solar has now become the cheapest way to generate electricity even cheaper than wind. And the crazy fun thing is, while wind is kind of tapering out in its cost per kilowatt hour, solar is gonna get cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. And the craziest thing is that all the numbers you’ve ever read apply just to the giant utility scale projects.

What’s really fun for me, and the part that got me motivated to write a book about local energy was the price of the stuff you put on your roof is probably going to go down by half to maybe three quarters in the next 10 or 20 years. I mean, it’s going to go down so low, that it’s going to be cray cray to unstoppable economic tsunami of people switching to put solar on the roof as fast as they can.

Right. So in terms of raw materials, is solar kind of easier on the environment than say, building a wind turbine.

They’re about equal. And if folks want to go to my website, you can actually see the breakdown of all the materials it takes to build every kind of electricity generation including nuclear and coal. Where wind, where people that want to take a shot at wind will point out is that most wind turbines are built on a cement pad, a very large cement pad, and that’s a very large portion of the the weight of a wind turbine.

And if you if you don’t use a cement pad then when become slightly fewer materials and solar. If you do you if you do use a cement pad, which is gotta be pretty large to hold a wind turbine up, solar ends up having fewer materials. But here’s the thing, it’s that they don’t talk about enough. The vast majority of the weight of a solar panel is glass and steel, and aluminum.

And all of those are incredibly recyclable. So you might have some guests in the future, they can tell you how they’re figuring out a way to recycle wind turbines, wind blades, but a recycled concrete or something. But when it comes to solar panels, we figured out how to recycle steel. Aluminum is one of the most recyclable things in the world.

Glass, one of the most recyclable things in the world. So I think it’s essentially 95% of the weight of a solar panel is built of recyclable materials. And the startups and government funding to create markets for that recyclability are just taking off. So short answer is, nothing is even remotely as recyclable as solar, nothing comes close.

Well, I like the fact that solar isn’t really affecting the environment adversely as the potential of wind is that it could change some degree of wind patterns and fluid dynamics of if we’re taking all of that wind energy, we really don’t know. I mean, I did speak to somebody who was like a Johns Hopkins PhD, and, you know, felt that it wouldn’t be significant and wouldn’t be a problem.

But I’ve read, you know, so I’m, I’m fairly confident that we’re okay there. But you know, I think we need to study it more, because, you know, we probably, you know, humans have a history of making some mistakes. So I want to kick the tires on that one a little bit more.

Yeah. Every, every way we generate energy is going to have an environmental impact. And so that’s why you got to get the numbers out and look at what the actual impacts are. And if the answer seems too convenient, I like what you said, you got to take a deeper look.

Right? Are there mining limitations to the growth of solar? What kind of metals are we talking about? We have those metals in the US what? What does that look like?

Well, the majority of solar as 95% of the solar panels made are made out of silicon and silicon is, I believe, the second most abundant element in the earth, the part of solar that gets a little more expensive is copper and silver, particularly silver, and the price of silver has been going up. So there’s if you look across the world, the amount of PhD genius folks working on reducing the amount of silver or eliminating it in solar panels is pretty impressive.

So silver is the most expensive single component, and that price is getting pushed down by constantly reducing the amount of silver actual required for solar cell to work. And then you’ve got copper, right? You need copper everywhere, to every device that microphones you and I using the televisions, we can see each other on that monitors, this copper everywhere. But solar uses more copper per generated kilowatt hour than other types of renewable energy. So that’s an area we can improve as well.

Well, of course, we have both silver and copper mined here in the US, I don’t know if it’s quite is enough to fuel all the needs that we have for, for growth. What’s your understanding about that?

Well, in the history of the United States, this is one of the most exciting weeks we’ve ever had, because the President signed into law, the most comprehensive, aggressive business centered law to improve drive, domesticate, clean energy production here in the US. And one of the things that is part of this law, the Inflation Reduction Act to the IRA is a strong push to move raw material mining and production here back into the United States.

So whatever it is we do today, I don’t have the exact numbers. I know we import a lot. There have just been launched some major financial incentives to to move some of that money here. And of course, do so in a way that’s as environmentally friendly as it all possible. And I think that’s, that’s very exciting.

So I do think we’re going to see more and more of these clean energy projects and products originated and mined and manufactured here in the United States, which ultimately creates hundreds of 1,000s of jobs, which is, in and of itself an exciting outcome of the transition to clean energy.

Well, one of the things that I’ve read a fair amount about is what are we doing to compete with China and making solar panels and infrastructure because my understanding China’s kind of the world leader and a number of our manufacturers have been have lost the battle with them because I think they’ve you know, unfairly subsidized their companies.

And our government hasn’t done that. So we’ve kind of unilaterally disarmed visa vie China, which is kind of stupid. And have we have we turned a corner on that? Are we still so far behind? We’ve got major problems. One of the great things about this book was that when I was writing free energy, and researching it, really I traveled all over the world.

So one of the stories in the book is I sat down with the founder of the world’s largest solar manufacturer jinko, in his headquarters in, in Beijing and asked him, his English was excellent. He’d gone to university here and said, he said, the funny thing about the US, wagging their finger at us about government support is we put all of our financial information in the US public markets were traded on the US stock exchanges.

So if you, you want to understand how our money is coming from the government or not, you can actually go look, and I thought that was fascinating and bold. And I’ve done the looking and many other people have, and yes, the Chinese government makes it easier to get loans to build. To build manufacturing plants, they, they create local incentives, specifically around businesses that create jobs, which is a great way to get elected and to stay in political power in China. So they do have some advantages.

But as he pointed to me and sent me some articles back in, when the US was manufacturing solar, there was hundreds of millions of dollars of similar grants and subsidies made available to us companies. And I do think that China has cut some corners. And I think the story is more complex than that, though. And the great news is that this new Ira law that was just signed, really closes the gap.

In fact, if I was a Chinese solar manufacturer, I would be kind of pretty upset and proud, probably calling my you know, my, my local representatives in the US and saying, Hey, what those of us people are making an unfair competitive market. Anyway, everyone’s going to point fingers at each other for the next couple of years.

The fact is, that with the US government just passed is going to almost certainly create a resurgence of American manufacturing, and make it very economic for both American companies and Chinese companies to build solar products, battery products here in the US. And so today, 70% of the panel’s 90% of the cells are made in China, that number is going to slowly tick down in the next 10 years. And it’s going to have America doing more and growing percentage of that manufacturing.

Okay, well, that’s good to hear that we’re making strides in the right direction, I guess I would ask you, what can we do to further increase American production and so that we are more self sufficient and creating the solar panels and infrastructure that we’re going to probably need for the future and be less reliant upon China. When we come back from the break. You’re listening to Unite and Heal America. This is Matt Matern. And we’ve got Billl Nussey on the program and we’ll be right back.

You listen to Unite and Heal America. This is Matt Matern, your host, I’ve got Bill Nussey, author of Freeing Energy on the program and Bill, were just talking about China and their industrial policy on on supporting the solar energy industry, kind of industrial policy is a bit of a touchy subject here in the US, because we look at that and say, Hey, we don’t want to have government telling business what to do or look at, you know, when they do put their fingers on the scale, a lot of times they get it wrong, and, and it’s a certain degree of corruption of funding friends or whatever, hurting enemies, and we don’t like that here in the US and the free markets work well enough to send the money where it’s needed.

And don’t, you know, don’t have the government making decisions. And as an economics major, that’s my background. You know, I kind of get behind that. But I also know that government does have its place in making structural changes, look at the electrification of the United States. I mean, that was us governmental policy, the creation of the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Hoover Dam, all these things were industrial policy, and we look back and everybody says, Well, of course, that was a smart move and brilliant, you know, but nowadays, if somebody says, let’s do that, you get a lot of flack saying Oh, that was the, you know, that’s socialism.

So, there is this kind of fine line that we need to sell these types of policies in a way that people can understand that this is what we need to make some structural changes. And if we, if we wait for the market to do it, it may be too late. Is that a fair statement?

I think that it depends on the market you’re talking about. And I’m not an economist never even attempted to play one on a radio show. But I will tell you that, I think some products, categories, markets benefit from full out competition. There are others is a large set of products that really struggle, especially if you’re looking at competition between countries that have it, you just won’t be able to compete. There’s no there is no situation in my opinion. And I have started up in the solar manufacturing space.

It’s, it’s an industry I know very well, much deeper than writing my book. And I will tell you that as I as I interviewed people for freeing energy, this gentleman in China, I’ve told you about many other Chinese executives and also policymakers in the US, I heard industrial policy, China’s industrial policy over and over again. And in this story that really brought it home was the was one of the Chinese executives I was talking to, said, let me explain what that means. So he gets out his, his phone, and he pretends to hold it to his ear, as if he’s on a phone call.

And he says, Oh, my gosh, we made a mistake. We’re out of chemical x for the solar manufacturing. He said, Hold on one second. And he pretends to dial the phone. And he pretends to tell somebody and he says within one hour, someone’s going to show up with a pickup truck that has that material and my production lines won’t stop.

And he said anywhere else in the world that we manufacture anywhere else. In any other government scenario, the government’s have not been as as aggressive and driving industrial policy with China, China did is made sure that the people that make that chemical are down the road from me, they created incentives and pushed not just to have manufacturing, but the entire raw material supply chain all within a truck drive.

And so the whole system just runs really smoothly, even when you hit bumps. Every other country in the world, if I wanted some more of that chemical, because we maybe made a mistake or something went wrong, or just didn’t plan correctly. I’ve got to put in a procurement form, it’s got to be shipped, it’s got to go through import, it’s complicated could take a week, and that could affect my ability to maintain my 24/7 production lines.

And the moment I take them down, the cost of selling solar products, batteries goes up. So what’s exciting to me was while no Democrats nor the Republicans told us that the inflation Reduction Act that was recently passed, was industrial policy, it really is. And unlike China, which is very prescriptive, a little scary for me as a capitalist to think about operating there. But here, it’s a bunch of carrots. And they said, Listen, we know you could do what you want us businesses, we’re not going to regulate what you do.

But if you don’t make a little more money, if you do this, you can make a little more money if you do that. And you take that whole thing together. And you look at it from 50,000 feet, and it’s basically creating a US domestic supply chain to US jobs, US customers. And indirectly or directly it’s industrial policy that but in a way that’s palatable to the American capitalist psyche.

Right, that it’s not telling you what to do. It’s just giving you incentives to do things that are hopefully beneficial for the country. And we hope we hope that it works is the Biden administration doing enough to help the solar industry to to help the grid and improve the grid, so it can carry more electricity and more electricity more efficiently, increasing battery capacity, reducing the influence and power of utilities.

So it’s evening in the playing field supporting micro grids. I realize it’s about five questions there. But you know, you can you can pick and choose.

You know, if I had a chance, Matt, if you said, Bill, I’m going to get to a meeting with Mitch McConnell, with Schumer with Biden, they’re going to Nancy Pelosi, Kevin McCarthy, they’re all going to sit in a room with you and they’re gonna listen you for five minutes. What would you tell them about this? I would love to do that. And what I would tell them is, hey, great, Democrats, great, great work on helping us save the planet for our children.

Love you. Thank you very much. But let me tell you all a secret all six of you, five of you that you don’t know. There is an area of clean energy that you absolutely agree on. And you’re so busy fighting about the giant industrial policy and big old laws and billion dollar this and that is you don’t realize it. Almost everybody loves local energy.

Red, Blue, you know, South, North, West, East, everybody loves rooftop solar. And they would stop and think about it and say, Well, let me tell you why. Because first of all, if you build a giant solar plant, and you want to generate a megawatt hour of electricity.

If you build a rooftop solar, you’re going to create 10 times more jobs every time you do local energy over the giant energy and and those jobs are needed across every every community in the United States, not just the communities that are sitting on coal seams or sitting on oil, oil patches, not just the big cities or the deep red states, it’s every part of United States has enough solar, everywhere.

You put on your church, put it on your school, put it on your parking lots, put it on your homes. It’s an equalizer. This small scale stuff, you’re worried about energy equity Democrats, well, this is the fastest best way to do it. You can pass these big complex laws and fight with Republicans to get it done. Or you can just put solar on a community center in a low income, community of color.

And you know, what their electricity prices are going down immediately. And electricity for some of these families and communities is a disproportionately large mound of their wallet share. And, and is if anyone ever doubted because I’ve made this given this speech before I tell them local energy unites all political parties, and I have a whole section of the book about this. You just watch what happened in Florida. I don’t know if you’re if your listeners follow this.

But this battle for local energies is net metering battles played out in California most visibly, but in Florida, the utility convinced the Republican legislators to write a bill that basically gave them a bill and said, Hey, Republicans vote for this. And it’s like Florida, like California almost did. It’s going to make solar unaffordable for everybody. And you know, across party lines, all the Republicans in the Florida legislature voted for it being ready to go off to Ron DeSantis, his desk and what happened.

Ron DeSantis vetoed it. When it was visible, conservative Republican leaders in the United States vetoed a utility backed bill that would have made rooftop solar local energy unaffordable in Florida. And he said, I don’t remember the exact words but the gist of it was that Florida Floridians love rooftop solar, everyone loves it.

Why it creates 10s of 1,000s of jobs in Florida, and it’s growing like crazy. It puts money back in Florida wallets, people’s wallets, it, it’s a great way to provide resiliency with hurricanes coming and increasing. He didn’t say all that. But that’s the fact. And so listen, if if Ron DeSantis thinks that local energy is good for everybody in the state, I’m telling you, local energy is one of the great political uniter that’s available to us in the country right now.

And I think Ron DeSantis is just the beginning of what’s going to we’re going to realize is that red or blue, local energy is a win.

Yeah, it’s it’s definitely the way to go. And I think that Republicans who, you know, are thinking are now are in moving that direction. I mean, President Trump, or former President Trump had been really negligent and derelict and pushing the environmental projects forward and denying that we had an environmental problem to begin with.

And to me, that was unconscionable. And unfortunately, a lot of Republicans drove over that cliff with him, which was sad and scary, because the Republican Party once was a beacon of environmental policy. A Republican congressman from from California drafted and the Endangered Species Act, and the list goes on and on. I mean, tremendous contributions.

And all of a sudden, the Republican Party took a took a wrong turn and really wasn’t backing. What is the most existential threat that we face as a species. So glad to see DeSantis making the right call on that maybe it was to save his political skin going into what may be a tough election fight, but hey, we’ll take it take the wind whatever week whatever way when yet, yes, yes, yes.

So what’s next for the US government to make macro changes and shifts in policy to support renewables in particular? rooftop solar? So you have this meeting with, with Pelosi and Schumer and McCarthy and, and Biden. What do you what do you say to? to them? What can you do to improve rooftop solar going forward?

I would say it’s incredibly simple. It is so simple. It’s ridiculous. The United States has a law that makes it guarantees the right to put a satellite dish on your roof. Federal law can’t be overridden by the states can’t be written overridden by the homeowners association. No such law exists for solar. That’s the first one I would do. Just make it so that everyone can put solar on the roof. The other one…

And I’m gonna stop you right there for a second Bill because we’re gonna go to the break, but stay tuned. Bill’s gonna give a brilliant answer coming up right after the break. You’re listening to Unite and Heal America. And this is Matt Matern, your host and I’ve got Bill Nussey. And he’s freeing energy in his new book. That’s his new book’s title Freeing Energy, go out and get a copy and we’ll be back in just one minute.

Unite and Heal America. This is Matt Matern. And we’re back with Bill Nussey, Bill’s book Freeing Energy, and those promise to blow our mind in this next segment with how rooftop solar is going to change the world.

I got a chance to sit down with McConnell and Pelosi and the whole gang and they said, What’s one thing that you could tell us we don’t know, that would cause us to get excited about local energy to jobs, whatever, I would tell them and I’ll tell you, if I put solar on my roof in the United States, regardless of which part it is sunny or not sunny, you know, regardless of policies, it’s about $3 a watt.

So if you put an average 4000 watt 4k system on your roof, it’s $12,000. If you take those identical panels, I mean, like the same skews the same inverters over to Australia, you sell them in, in Australia, you put someone on the roof and Australian roof, and they install it, they turn it on, same parts, same hours of labor, the cost of that solar panel in Australia is going to be $1.10 in US dollars.

So $3 a watt to put the rooftop solar on a US roof $1.10 US dollars to put the same exact system on the roof in Australia. And why didn’t expect the IRA to address things like this, because this is still off most people’s radar. It’s three times more expensive to put solar, the exact same system in the US than it is in Australia.

So why is that? Well, it’s red tape Matt. There are 3,000 overlapping jurisdictions and rules and codes and checkpoints and county commissioners and all these things that just make it a bureaucratic rat’s nest to go through. So you if you do a typical rooftop solar, maybe 20% of the cost is actually the hardware. It’s so much red tape forms, fillings.

You know, I had to put on my roof mat and the rooftop company, the installers couldn’t turn it on until the county inspector came out to check it out. I said, Well, when they said the county inspectors coming Thursday, I said, Well, when when is the coming Thursday? And they laughed. And I was like, What do you mean?

He said, Well, he comes when he wants. I said, Well, hey, so do you want me to call you and he shows up and they go? They left again? Sick? No, we had to be there to the minute he shows up. I said, Well, he could have any number of questions like how do you he says, Our senior project manager, and he did sat in my driveway in his pickup truck. Waiting for some random time that Thursday for the county inspector to come and check out my system.

County inspector shows up as is. Hey, John, good to see you. Hey, Roy, nice to see you again. It looks good. Let’s just go take a look. Check the boxes. All right, you’re good. And I paid for the most expensive project manager at my solar installers part of my cost to sit in my driveway for a day or three quarters of a day. And the same thing happened when we had to wait for the power company to come out and inspect it too. And I could go on and on but you’re getting the point.

And in Australia, guess what they actually know that the installers, they they qualify them, you know what you’re doing? To punish you just take a photo with your phone and send it to me. I’ll take a look at it. Just tell me the parks using they’re already pre-qualified thing. You’re ready. Turn it on. So you can order I’ve been told you can order a rooftop solar system in Australia Monday morning, and you’re powering your house Tuesday afternoon.

Wow. That’s incredible. So yeah, I mean, we need to cut through the red tape I had on the show. Mayor Rex Paris of Lancaster and he’s got the first net zero city in Oh, yeah. California, I think in the country, maybe in the world. And his first edict or one of them is coming on as mayor was any solar installation was they had 30 minutes to approve it or disapprove it. And I think, I think to approve it, really.

So he basically said, hey, well, essentially what they’re doing Australia rubber stamping, hey, if you’re a provider, you’re trusted to know what you’re doing and putting the system up on the house. That’s, that’s what you’re licensed to do. That’s what you’re supposed to be able to do. So go do it. And let’s get out of their way so that we can get this done. And that’s what we should be doing across the country.

And there’s so many innovations. There’s something called solar app plus, which was developed by a consortium of 30 organizations, including folks from the Department of Energy, it’s available free to any community that wants to use it, any city, any county, and it basically does in a box for free and it provides an app and a back end system that does what Australia does. And sadly, the communities are adopting it at a very slow rate. I think it’s still under 100.

But there’s essentially 3,000 jurisdictions where this could apply. And I wish if I had had if I’d had McConnell and Schumer in a room I just said guys just tack this teeny little piece on Hear, hey, communities, you need to use solar wrap or something similar to what you need to get your approval turnaround time under 30 minutes.

This would take off, we would create 5 million jobs overnight. It’d be one of the biggest booms ever. But you know, I’ll take the winds when I can get them. I’m glad solar wind and domestic manufacturing are now have a have a real heartbeat in the US when the next one next time around?

Well, I think it’s important to maybe package something up like you’re saying and trying to get some, some people behind it legislative way, and maybe we can talk to some people. I mean, there are groups, I believe, have bipartisan bipartisan group in both the House and the Senate that are trying to work together on environmental policy, this is kind of an easy win. Seems as though we should work with other those representatives to get this up on the table as quickly as possible.

Best part is don’t even use the word environment, never mentioned climate, just say you want to create some more American good paying jobs faster than almost anything you could possibly imagine. Let’s put the solar on roofs. And you’re going to have a jobs, jobs explosion in terms of new people that are going to join that industry to go put roof top solar up as fast as consumers want it. It’s gonna be crazy.

So it’s a jobs bill. It’s not a climate bill, not an environmental bill, not an economic bill, two jobs bill. So I’m with you, Matt. Let’s go get them to do that and tell them it’s all about jobs.

Right. So what else could and should we be doing maybe at a local or state level that would would help drive the solar industry to the next level?

I tell people, two things. First of all get educated. There’s so much baloney out there. I was giving a speech the other day, some guy raises his hand he talks about solar panels and landfills and love solar, but he just can’t do it because it’s going to fill landfills. And I said, Go do go go. Don’t listen to what your neighbor told you actually go look at a paper read serious people.

There’s a whole paragraph a whole chapter in free energy on these myths. So first of all, get educated. Find out in from real sources, not from the talking heads on the TV, but from people that have done the work that actually look at numbers can show you the numbers, cite their sources, do that first, understand just how big the opportunity is.

And then second go vote. You know, most people don’t vote where they can for the I don’t know who they’re counting their public utility commissioners are go vote for them. Tell your tell your governor, hey, I want you to put these people in place because they get it.

Let me stop you there for a second, Bill. And just maybe you can debunk for our for our listeners, something that you brought up, which is is Is it a fact? Or is it a myth that solar is getting put into, you know, into a waste land landfills and stuff like that.

There’s a whole chapter in my book, and I have the solar myths on my website. But the the amount of waste generated if we took all the solar panels installed last year across the higher United States, and we threw them away, it’d be less than 1/10 of just the E waste. So that would be just 1/10 of the pile next to the televisions and laptops and smartphones.

So the waste from solar is tiny. And that’s assuming you, you throw away lots of aluminum and steel, which people are dying to recycle and easy to recycle. So if you just threw them all away, it’d be a fraction of the E waste regenerated today. And by the way, the E waste is a tiny fraction of municipal waste.

So you’re talking about less than 1% of all the municipal waste that we’re throwing and filling landfills out. If you if you throw it every single panel on the world today, it would be a fraction of what we’re throwing away more broadly, is municipal waste.

So no, it doesn’t move the needle. It’s an important problem to fix. We want to make sure we throw nothing away. But boy boy, it is not some existential threat to our landfills or our environment.

Right. And as a med read before, yeah, we’re doing a better job of recycling those materials. And for the listeners. I mean, I believe that most of the solar equipment has a useful life of 1020 30 years. So it’s not average life, 32 years, right, so you’re not throwing it away very frequently, if you are throwing it away. It’s not something that you just tossed in the trash after one use.

So if you’ve got a lot of valuable metals that you just take the frame off, and I talk about it in free energy, I talk about this company I’ve visited in France, and they’ve got a solar panel. That is the most recyclable solar panel ever made when you’re finished with it with it last 50 years. And when you’re done with it, you take an exacto knife or a robot but you take an exacto knife and just cut along the four corners of it.

The two pieces of glass separate and all the cells and copper wire fall out. There’s no lead. There’s no solder, there’s no glue, there’s no chemicals, and this works and it’s affordable. And so and this is an example of when we actually try to make these products recyclable. That they there’s virtually it’s it’s just like a sand which have really valuable parts that everybody wants. So wherever we are today, it’s going to become even more recyclable, they’re gonna last even longer. It’s an exciting future.

So where are you at as a solar manufacturer? Are you growing? What’s, what’s the new, the newest things that you’re up to?

Well, my mission is to build or gain build companies. I’ve been building companies since I was 15. I had my first software company when I was a sophomore in high school and my whole career has been building and growing teams, companies products, and for the book was a way for me to learn where our most interesting places to assemble teams and build companies.

And so for the next chapter of Bill nnessee, we’re going to be creating and spinning up a whole number of really exciting companies, including the one I referenced a moment ago, that are going to bring the clean energy future faster, cheaper, more equitably. And by the way, with some great returns for investors, that’s my story going forward, it’s gonna be a lot of fun.

Well, Bill, it’s been a pleasure having you on the program, I really appreciate the conversation and the work that you’re doing, and certainly go forth and multiply and create great, more companies more opportunities, this is exactly what we need. And I certainly want to be investing in good companies as I’m sure the listeners do.

As far as we know that that is a growth industry, we’re and we’re wise as a people to be investing in our future and a future that’s cleaner and greener and, and quite frankly, less expensive power source than, than coal or gas. And that’s a nuclear why not? This is kind of a no brainer, but here we are talking about it. And I think try to educate people as to this is with a path forward.

So thank you for the great work that you’re doing and your lesson to Unite and Heal America. This is Matt Matern, your host, and come back next week we’ll be talking more about the environment and what we can do to unite and heal our country and save the planet.

As you may know, your host Matt Matern of United heal America is also the founder of Matern Law Group, their team of experienced employment consumer and environmental attorneys are dedicated to leveling the playing field by giving everyone access to the highest quality legal representation contact 844 MLG for you, that’s 844 MLG for you or 84465449688446544968.