T1 Energy CEO Daniel Barcelo on building America's domestic solar supply chain from a 5-gigawatt Texas factory

TV.

What's going on?

How are you doing Dan?

Hey, I'm doing great. Thanks for having me.

Thanks so much. First time on the show. Would you mind introducing yourself and the company and then I'd love to know about the journey to the company and then I have a bunch of questions about energy but we can start with an introduction if that's okay.

Sure. Great. Uh uh Dan Barcelo um I've been doing energy all my life a native New Yorker now a proud resident in Texas and we're building a lot of different energy systems.

You know my journey took me a lot through different parts of the world building oil and gas systems and now we're really focused on building solar in America. Um it's exciting time to be doing it when everyone knows we need a lot of electricity and a lot of energy.

Yeah. How did you wind up with T1? So T1 was a company we we we saw the need for uh particularly utility scale grid level type of energy systems to be I don't want to say disrupted but needed to be impacted in a large way. Uh whether it's on grid level storage or whether it's on solar. uh we were we were were doing quite a bit on the grid level battery side and the battery side quite frankly had a a wall of competition from you look left it's Samsung you look right it's LG you look this way it's Panasonic and you got CL behind you and then oh my god here's Tesla but when you look at when when you look at solar it was very different in the United States it's predominantly was by Chinese companies uh the American technology of solar was something we kind of almost forgot how to do in the US and build it out uh but we had an opportunity to buy assets uh by the technology, by the knowhow. Now we run it. Uh we bought a 5 gawatt asset in Texas uh late 24 and we're building a a second part of the plant which I can get to in a second. So for us it was really about

you should have seen our our initial reaction to the T we saw first interaction with T1 was seeing the video of your facility and John and I were like high five. America's got it. We can build solar at scale. And then of course we figured out kind of you know the history of the company and created but we're excited that it's an American asset now.

Yeah.

And and look we we have a million square foot facility in Dallas that is you know we brought that from producing zero. Wow.

We commissioned that and brought it up to producing uh over 5 gawatts in annualized runway in November. So so that was a lot of work. A lot of robots in the factory but a lot of human a lot of humans uh you know so you know we'll we'll unfortunately is the yeah talk talk about uh maybe talk about the scale of the operation in the context of overall US solar panel production because I think people hear 5 gawatt and maybe they can wrap their head around that but it's a meaningful percent of of overall production is that right

the US is about 50 gawatt so this alone is about 10% of American production

uh it's extremely automated it has 1,200 people um it's running 24/7 except of Of course, during those ice storms that people don't know how to deal with in Texas, you know, [laughter] uh it's more about the people driving to work than the factory. Uh but it's a sign of significant scale. It's one of the most modern in the world.

Yeah. H how how does that 50 gawatts of capacity in the United States compared to China? Can you lay the sort of geopolitical backdrop and and get me up to speed on how much the American government is doing to support this effort? Uh so look, China China is up to over a thousand gawatts, you know, 1.2 terowatts of capacity.

Uh China's adding from last year probably close to 350 to 400 gawatt.

That's close to the American grid. So it's almost like China can add an entire grid.

Yeah.

Just in solar.

So the numbers are are wild.

Yeah.

I don't think I don't believe China's doing it to do, you know, lower carbon. I think China's doing it because they need to grow very very very fast.

And I think that's what you're seeing last two two or three years in the United States where solar and storage is also taking 75 80% plus.

Uh you asked about like what the US aspects for it. I think you know the US both Democrats and and Republicans have done a lot of disincentives and a lot of incentives uh for advanced manufacturing. You know whether it was the the IRA in the past or the OOTBA now uh those incentives are in place. a lot of tariffs in place. I think a lot of those create an ability for the US to be a level playing field with other competitors. Uh quite simply, I think America lost a lot of its manufacturing muscle. You know, we're building a new facility outside you it's it's about an hour north of Austin in Rockdale. It used to be an old Alcoa plant. Now it's just a piece of dirt. Yeah.

We're building a 2.1 gawatt solar facility there that's going to make the cells that go into our plant in Dallas.

So, what are the main what are the main bottlenecks? Is it purely capital? Because ideally T1 could just copy and paste the Dallas facility, you know, a thousand times. Uh, but what does it take to actually do that?

The solar chain is really cool cuz it has like it's almost like four different parts. It's got the digging out silica and making polysilic rocks. Then you're going into ingots and wafers. And those wafers are also very similar in the semiconductor industry. Then it kind of splits. The high-grade stuff goes to semiconductors. The lowgrade stuff goes to solar. Then you take a solar cell plant. The solar cell plant is basically a low-grade semiconductor plant. You're making, you know, making the cells, making a fab. And then those cells go to the low tech part, which is in Dallas. Dallas is where I always I always joke about it's like it's a 5 gawatt site with 50 trucks a day bringing in glass. Put in the cells in between and glue them together. And then you got 50 trucks a day going out with glass. So it's like Dan's glass company, you know, we just move them. But [laughter] but the cell the cell part is really interesting and that's where a lot of the advances come from specialty gases to process equipment engineers to uh process equipment that's very specialized. That's the higher tech part. Uh so for me it's very interesting as we go backwards and integrate to answer your question on how do we get more of it starts with contracts.

You know we we we we're a smaller company. We're not the scale of like what Elon's doing in terms of his announcement with solar right. I don't have unlimited capital and funds, nor do I want a lot of dilution on the on the as a public company. We need contracts. Those contracts then allow us to get the risk capital that we need to build these plants. Um, but the building part is not the hard part. I'd say the building part in America is more about navigating through certain regulations, navigating through certain delays there. Texas, I think, is very conducive. But as long as I have power, as long as I have access to water and we go full recycling on the water, but as we go into water and power and lowcost inputs, we feel we're in a great place in Texas to build.

Who who are the like main buyers? Like who are who uh is it is it uh you know traditional energy companies? Like who who who are you spending the most time with?

Or or will you actually sell to like an Amazon web services or Google who's like building out a a new data center? So we focus on utility scale and that that's capturing largest utilities but it's also capturing all the big tech companies that that you'd mentioned to we're usually selling directly through developers that then face those customers.

Uh some of them don't for confidentiality don't want to be disclosed. One of them Treaty Oak we recently announced they're a large developer based in Austin. So I imagine that they'll have a lot of their customers exactly what you just said. The demand for data centers uh is is surreal. The demand for power is surreal. A lot of the you know everyone knows we're waiting for turbines until 29 to 30. So you're not going to get that there. So if you want to start scaling power fast, you need you need solar and storage right now. So that that's a big big driver and that's the bulk of what's driving the demand.

Behind that some smaller utilities are looking to add to the grid and capacity. But by far the other big trend though is as you're running out of spaces to connect power and interconnections, a lot of things are shifting to behind the meter or distributed generation. This is where you're building first power islands. You're building data centers with power islands that can later connect to the grid because affordability is a big issue. Nobody wants a data center that's going to raise prices of electricity. And you know the scientist was very vocal about that in Florida like data centers going to bring good jobs and things but then you know what are they going to do to electricity prices. So I think it's really important that we that the industry gets a handle on how energy can can also um be in an area that's not going to put more stress on the grid.

So if I just to restate the current status of the business G1 is the first facility up and running. G2 you're building. What does the future look like? How far into the future? Obviously, you need the contracts to unlock new plans, but how do you want this to scale? Where else do you want to build? How quickly do you want to copy paste these facilities?

If I had the contracts, I'd love to copy paste Dallas like that. You know, whether it's, you know, six to six months to a year, those are those are fast. Okay.

Uh we've publicly said that we're, you know, on track uh to build G2 this year. M um and uh that's already started constructions starting construction we started that in December and and we're tracking to continue to build that. So so that's our our main asset our main focus. G1's operating G2 is in build and then if I go to the next part of the supply chain we get our polysilicon and our wafers from Corning and hemlock so that we we've completed the entire chain uh to be an American chain.

Yeah. How do you think about the data centers in space? Elon's notorious for vertically integrating, but there's going to be a lot of players. It's probably a slightly different solar panel than what you might put on the ground, I imagine. Uh, is that something where you're interested in talking to folks about a contract to deliver solar panels that would wind up on satellites in space?

I I'd love to, you know, I think uh when you look at siliconbased and probably more on the perk side than the Topcon side, uh there's quite a bit of demand for low Earth orbit in particular. rather than deep space. So this silicon wafers do work in space.

Uh so the question really becomes, you know, are we going to use it for terrestrial demand or space demand? Um obviously we're not sending up modules with glass, you know, up to space, but at the cell level or at the wafer level, we'd love to have feed into that as a customer base. Love to do that.

What do uh I mean uh being a public company CEO can be stressful. What do the short sellers get wrong about T1 energy these days? uh you know being an ex buysider and an ex sells cider writing research reports about it you know I know the journey to be a portfolio manager or to be a sell sign analyst and get a lot of things right they'll get a lot of things wrong

uh I think for the most part uh short sellers as competitors like to say like oh they're not going to make this or they're not going to you know do it the right way compliance with US law in terms of uh being a fiak you know foreign entities are concerned there's always concerns about the solar industry and misunderstandings about how China's influence is. Uh that's something that I think is an old story. Uh you know, we're an American company, American public company, New York Stock Exchange listed and uh you know, we bought an asset, you know, and we're running it and building it now, but let let's go for this. So that's that's one of the biggest parts. I mean, the other part, you know, I I get stressed cuz sometimes my IR guy goes, "Don't read Reddit today." I'm like, "Okay, but I want to." And I'm like, "No." And then someone says, "Hey, go kill yourself or go to this." like [laughter] Jesus, you know.

Well, fortunately, some of your fans have come over to our chat and they want to know when are we getting merch? They want T1 merch.

Any plans?

We we will put that site up as fast as possible and get the hat and get these things maybe without this logo here or this one here, but you know, get that there. But, um, yeah, no, we're excited to get the merch. We love we love our shareholders. We We're thankful for that. And uh you know I think we have a a good feeling for all those parts.

Yeah. Uh Jordy, any other questions?

Uh no, it was great to meet you and come back on as you have new announcements.

Yeah, I I have one more thing just I'd love to know the shape of the company. It feels like a you know an American reindustrialization process. How big is the company? It feels like you're a job creator. What roles are you hiring for? if this really really scales as I hope it does and I hope we're talking in a couple years and we're talking with a terowatt and everything with a T instead of a G. Um what what does the shape of the workforce look like?

We're 1,200 already in Dallas. Wow.

We're going to be 1500 in in Austin.

It's amazing.

Uh in Austin headquarters we're going to be over 100.

Yeah.

Uh you know if I can do my recruiting call, go to t1energy.com careers. We need engineers. Yeah. Uh the more rogue you are as an engineer the better. Uh this has to be a new style of manufacturing. I know I see you guys always uh you know ramp is your big sponsor. We start with our whole thing is our corporate policy for expenses is very simple. Do not buy anything illegal either good or service. Two it's corporate money. Be careful with it. Three we can watch everything you buy with your ramp card and we do with AI and it's awesome. And the fact that no one has to do T& reports or something. It's just about accountability as people and we just have to build as fast as we can, as quick as we can, you know, so throw some of the old uh rule books out. But that's part of the reason we wanted to be in Texas and in Austin. There's a lot of engineers there. Uh we need them from the semiconductor sector. We need them from the manufacturing sector, from the robotics sector. So, it's all about that growth and uh more contracts, maybe some contracts for space one day. Who knows? But uh the more contracts we get, the faster we can grow.

That's amazing. Well, thank you so much for everything you're doing. Thanks for taking the time to come chat with us. Uh, congrats on the progress. I'm rooting for you. I This is an amazing project.

Yeah, you should at some point I think we were live. The between the first time we talked about T1 and the second, the stock was up like I think 150% and uh [laughter]

that's why we're podcasters now. That's why we're the buy side. But yeah, thank you for the work you do.

Thank you so much for taking the time.

Loud and clear. Merch. That's the prior most priority, right? That's priority number two after re-industrializing America and for saving the solar industry, but uh it's a close second. [laughter]

Anyway, thank you so much, Dan. This was fantastic meeting you. You're welcome back anytime. We'll talk to you soon.

Let me tell you about Finn.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle your customer support, go to Finn.ai.

Uh checking in on Amazon. Yes,

reported earnings down 7 and a half%. I'm trying to find a good summary of the results.

Yeah,

while I work on that, maybe we head back to the timeline.

We can head back to the timeline. We can also do this Wall Street Journal uh you sort of trend piece about your AI habits. Obviously, we saw a lot of the 40 folks in the chat. Uh the new family intervention. We need to talk about your AI habit. People are getting clingy with their chat bots. This is a knock-on effect of relationships between artificial intelligence and humans. And the Wall Street Journal says it's giving their loved ones pause. So, I want to read some of this and you can give me your reactions. Tell me how you're using AI in your daily life with your family. Uh,

uh, before I tell before you do that,

give me some more details.

Amazon's projecting 200 billion of capex.

Whoa. That's at the gong. Can we get the can we get the mallet?

Let's begin the lambda lightning round. Now we have three great guests joining over the next half hour and it's lambda lightning round time. So let's bring down the mallet. You can take this one, Jordy. You're you're ready. Unhook the lambda mallet and hit the axon. Hit that apploving gong during the lambda lightning round.

Market doesn't like it.

But we like it. We like it.

We like big numbers.

We like it. We like capbacks. We're very excited to see that. Uh anyway, let me tell you about Octa first. Octa helps you assign every AI agent a trusted identity. So you get the power of AI without the risk. Secure every agent, secure any agent. And uh we will go into this Wall Street Journal article about how people are interacting with AI. So it started as an innocent hobby to entertain and distract herself while going through a divorce. Erica Aerson used Anthropics Claude to build a bot that generates images based on prompts from her and her friends. Soon she promoted Claude to an advisory position in her personal life. It didn't take long for her kids to think she might need a break from her new friend. These days, there are two kinds of people. Those who using AI for everything and well, everyone else. Super users are contracting out their work to groups of agents, amping up their productivity. They're dropping advice from chatt aka chat as if the open AI bot is their most trusted consiguary. counseling on everything from business strategy to weather or not. You should let your friend get a perm. It's an interesting question. Uh, everyone else is wondering if their loved ones may be taking things a bit too far. Maybe some tasks should be reserved for humans. Maybe there's dignity in that. Maybe some of us like the way things are. Aerson says Claude was particularly helpful as she navigated a relationship she suspected wasn't going to go anywhere. He was like, quote, this is Claude talking. Uh, hey, I don't [clears throat] think you're going to be able to extract yourself from this if you don't stop talking to this person for a while, says the Portland, Oregon resident who works in operations for a tech company. When she was later when when she was later to when she was later tempted to rekindle contact, Aches would check in with Claude. Stick to your guns, it told her. AI hasn't been beneficial for every relationship, though. While her kids watch TV, Aerson likes to tinker with Claude. Her sons don't approve. It's a waste of her time, says Grayson, 11. She puts a lot of time into AI just to make boring old pictures.

Wait, how is she making pictures with Claude?

Yeah, I'm very

They don't have an image model.

Must be calling some API under the under the hood. I don't know.

Is she like she's like on Claude code harnessing Nano Banano Pro.

Maybe she's talking about the SVG images.

Oh, yes. Maybe.

No, but there's an image in here that's her image and it looks like a Grock imagine image.

Maybe she's on Grock. This is This is an odd article. I I'm very confused by this. Uh Anderson 8 has a different complaint. The technologies accuracy chat GPT couldn't couldn't correctly identify a Pokemon. Another time he's just like this is unacceptable. Zero on Pokemon bench. I'm I'm sell the stock. It's going to zero.

It's over. [laughter] It's over.

It's over says Anderson, age eight. Uh another time Anderson struggled to get it to generate a suitable picture of himself. Once I only had one leg and once I had three legs, he said, "This is so cute thinking about this eight-year-old being like, "This this is slop. This is slop," says an 8-year-old. Eric Davik, a startup founder in Brooklyn, uses AI for recipe planning, workouts, business strategy, and vibe coding with his son. The 42-year-old also uploads recordings of his executive coaching meetings to Chachi Pit to analyze his progress. Um,

I've done some I I I asked I asked Chachi PT about uh uh a workout plan at one point. I I I don't go back to it that often. Recipe planning. I'll have it do I did have it do a deep research report all around where we could go to food.

Do you think it's actually good for Do you think Do you think LLMs are good for workout planning? Just taking like the like I typically want a workout plan that is I mean I don't we don't we work out every day and we kind of do a vibesbased approach. I would say

try to push it hard and not not we're usually talking about technology and business during our workouts.

Yes.

But uh I you know historically let's say when I was starting to work out

I would find a plan

but I wanted it to be from a specific person that was making that plan with with general with with an intention around it for

somebody in that state which was maybe like I've been weight training for six months at the time.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, there's a huge

And so if you just take like and the reason I ask is like I've had terrible luck doing recipes getting recipes from LLMs

because I think it just takes the average of every recipe for a certain item on the internet and just kind of gives it to you

and you can end up with like I think uh we tried to make waffles once and it just the waffle it was like clearly the recipe was just wrong because they were like really runny, you know, it just wasn't it wasn't working. It was likeough it had botched the different uh

Well, you haven't used the latest models. You throw you throw codeex 5.3 at that.

Yeah, but but it's No, but it's obviously not an it's waffle bench needs to be it's not an IQ thing. It's just it's just

we're creating waffle bench. We're moving the goalposts. Needs to be able to make waffles. Great waffles. [laughter] Anyway, let me tell you about Cognition. They're the makers of Devon the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. Um let's uh

anyways the wife of this of Eric the startup founder says

uh his wife is reluctant to use AI especially for any writing related task. A freelance journalist she doesn't believe the technology can replicate her 20 years of professional experience.

Uh her husband's use can annoy her like when she asked him to write an important email to her son's school. As she read it over something seemed off. I was like this is basically the same paragraph repeated three times says the 45-year-old. She asked him, "Did Chachi do this?" She says, "He admitted to it." She's probably not lying. He says, "I don't remember the spec specific instance." I love how they're just like cross interviewing.

Yeah. It's very funny because I I leaned the complete opposite way on uh on like preschool applications once and I was like, "Okay, I know that everyone else is going to be using AI slop, so I need to write extra conversationally." And so I'm in the application being like, "Hey, what's up? My name's John."

[laughter]

just like completely just completely organically writing like flow of state and then uh I was like I probably need to polish this up a little bit but I'm definitely not giving it the LLM flavor because I think that that's going to be a tell for a lot of people on the other side reading these they're like another thing that's is it's not that it's not this it's not that a lot of another hyphens like people are getting sick of this sloth but what do you think Tyler

yeah I just like don't resonate with this article at all like over like a Christmas break I think I onboarded my dad to cla code

like I'm like, "Yeah, you need to be using the best model." Like, why? You haven't tried four or five yet. Like, what are you doing?

Yeah. Yeah. But, but what what uh what what was the killer use case? Did you tell him like, "Write software, get on GitHub. Did you just get him set up?"

Just like anything,

like any task, just have Claude do it and it like it'll probably work. [laughter]

I mean, I I don't cook much, so I don't know about the the you know, recipe stuff, but

I mean, the funny thing is that like there are recipe you can just take a recipe book and open it. You can just Google a recipe, but you're like, I need Cloud Code to work for six hours to get me a recipe for waffles. It's like like that's not actually the promise. That's not actually like advancing. Like the advancing is like is like build me a piece of software that that will generate me a new waffle recipe based on all what what's happening in the news and what my kids are into and generate the images like do a lot more that would take a long time. Say like you're not actually going to be saving times if you're using LLM for something that's Googleable. So

yeah,

I don't know.

I don't know. It's it's just we're in a really weird moment right now where the models are good at so many things. They are also incredibly confident even when they're wrong. And sometimes you're making I I had a friend that uh got a ticket for

uh they were dictating a text into their phone while driving and they got pulled over and they were given a ticket and they were trying to figure out, okay, uh

they were trying to figure out, okay, am I going to get a point

on are they going to get a point on their license for this infraction? And I and the model was saying one thing,

but I've had other experiences very recently with models where they get it completely wrong. So I was like, okay, like you kind of got like an indication.

Good thing you probably Good thing you had me. [laughter]

The thing we were talking about you

that was something that was something else.

You texted me and I was like, I know more than Chad GBT about this. [laughter]

Anyway, let me tell you about public investing for those who take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service. And our first guest of