Casey Handmer: prediction

Transcript context

…How much additional solar power capacity do you think we could be putting on, that's manufactured in the US, by 2028? This is a good question. When Russia invaded Ukraine, I thought, finally the Europeans will see sense and they'll pull the trigger on, “We need to localize production of solar panels from dirt to the finished module,” which is roughly a four-stage process. They didn't. They're still paying Russia a billion dollars a day for the privilege of being invaded. But at the time I thought they could probably do that in about two years. I think the United States could probably do that in two years or less if you started today. It's currently 11 o'clock. So we're going to start cutting checks by noon. You could ramp up pretty quickly. A lot of technology already exists here. It's not like it has to be invented from scratch. It's mostly a case of putting in a phone call to all the different manufacturers here, in Germany, and so on and saying, “We need you to 10x the size of your factory, starting today, blank check, go.” A lot of your predictions seem to be not predictions, but more like, “If we had World War II-levels of motivation, if we had Manhattan Project-level intensity around doing a specific thing, how fast could we do it? Like if Elon was running the government, how fast could it happen?”…

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