Casey Handmer

The area of the panel is kind of the variable there.

So you can ask, well, what do you need in order to make the silicon?

Making solar arrays, making chips is a kind of multi-stage process, but basically you start off with silicates, which are rocks, ideally in a relatively pure form.

You chemically reduce them.

There's a couple of different processes that can do that, and then purify them into ideally like six nines of purity for solar array, maybe nine nines for really nice computers, silicon purity, and grow crystals, cut wafers, et cetera, et cetera.

So then the constraint is like, well, how quickly can you convert the crust into enough silicon to support silicon thought?

What does the silicon ecosystem look like?

Well, it's pretty quick.

If you're like one kilowatt per square meter and then you use that just to rip oxygens off the underlying dirt, it doesn't take all that long to... You need about 20 microns of silicon to make a solar PV array.

So...

Yeah, actual dirt has plenty of silicon in it.

So for example, setting up a brand new silicon refinery takes about 18 months.

Right.

Right.

But that's just with the current technology, right?

I actually think...

We may find ways.

So one of the nice things is if you have infinite free solar power, approximately free solar power, you can revisit a bunch of legacy industrial processes that have been optimized for efficiency and say, well, what if we just use twice as much power and we just want to do them faster and cheaper, right?

Like less capex, less lead time, more power, right?

Mm-hmm.