John Arnold

And so the cost to develop a solar panel keeps falling.

Now, a solar panel doesn't get you what you want.

You want electrons...

at the location that load is at.

And so there's a lot of steps to go from a solar panel to electrons in the right location.

Some of those are inflationary.

The panel itself is deflationary, but it requires land, it requires labor, it requires access to transmission.

It requires access to capital and the cost of capital, which was falling for a long time and has now been increasing for me over the past five years.

People love to talk about the cost of a solar panel.

And usually whenever you see these graphs, it's what's the cost of the panel?

And it's just kind of from top left to bottom right.

Meanwhile, the cost of a PPA, a power purchase agreement, for solar is well off the lows.

Lows happened around 2020.

The cost, again, of delivered electrons from solar is probably 50% plus more expensive than they were at the cheapest point in 2020.

And it's because the panel itself, again, becomes a smaller and smaller percentage of the total cost of the system.

Any advantage, continued technological improvements or manufacturing improvements are just getting at a smaller and smaller percentage of the total cost.

And meanwhile, the inflationary aspects of the system become a bigger and bigger percentage of total cost.

So that being said, there's a lot of ideas about how to bring load closer to where the solar is being generated.

And can you use some type of automation, factory automation or robotics to build the plant better, the solar field better?

better and cheaper way that requires less labor.