Paul Gerke and Mike Casey break down the week’s biggest cleantech stories, including a massive lithium discovery in Appalachia that could reduce U.S. import reliance, Europe’s move to block Chinese-made solar inverters from EU-funded projects, and the rise of plug-in balcony solar systems in the U.S. They also discuss organized solar theft rings in Chile and welcome Heatmap News reporter Andrew Moseman to discuss Ford’s secretive EV skunkworks operation aimed at producing affordable electric trucks and reinventing the automaker’s EV strategy.
Paul Gerke:
Hey everybody and welcome back to This Week in Cleantech, your favorite 15-minute roundup of the biggest stories in climate and clean energy each week. It's Friday, May 8th, 2026. We've got a returning guest that we lured back into our presence. Andrew Moseman from Heatmap News will be joining the show shortly.
In the meantime, if you don't know my voice by now, I'm Factor This content director, Paul Gerke, joined as always by cleantech commentator Mike Casey of Tigercomm. Mike, how are you?
Mike Casey:
I'm good my friend. First, I want to talk about two things. First, I'd like to give a shout out to industry leader and Nextracker CEO, Dan Shugar. Dan just launched a video series on LinkedIn about how he and his team at the former company PowerLight helped commercialize CPV in Hawaii. So you might remember Dan for his Dinner with Dan series. At the time that made him the only CEO of a publicly traded clean economy company who was investing his own time evangelizing for the industry on this platform. He's up to this again, and God love him for it.
All right, Paul, number two. There is a word in the English language that you might not know. It's called thanatophilia. It is an obsession with ghosts and dead things.
And I say that as a precursor in expressing my deep disappointment with the New York Times. We cover the Times stories frequently here. Their outlet is typified by great journalism. We love having its skilled journalists on the show. But here it is, running this week, a story covering the same ground, an oppo dump, on cleantech advocate and California gubernatorial candidate Tom Steyer about his former firm's investment in coal.
To be clear, Tom is a former client of this firm. And I take no position on his candidacy, but we should be clear that the Times story is a nearly complete redo from its 2014 story on the same oppo dump. To be clear, Tom has no control over his old firm. He has insisted that his investments be kept away from fossil fuels, and by all accounts, they have been.
But someone in a time of existential crisis for the clean energy transition in America at the New York Times decided that one of its most prestigious news organizations in the world couldn't keep itself from what is basically a pointless, lurid act of thanatophilia.
Shame on you, New York Times, for doing that. Please find better things to do. Back to you, Paul, for story number one.
Paul Gerke:
Mike Casey, ladies and gentlemen. Quick round of applause, everyone. If you want to get your face or name on the show, we'd love to hear from you. Send suggestions or opinions our way. You can email us, TWIC, twic@tigercomm.us.
Paul Gerke:
As Mike mentioned, story number one this week. I'll let you do the honors with the headline. Mike, take us there.
Mike Casey:
All right, untapped lithium on East Coast could replace U.S. imports. U.S. Geological Survey finds. Hannah Northey from E&E News. This is a cool story.
Paul Gerke:
So according to new research by the USGS, the Appalachian region of the U.S. holds enough lithium to reduce America's reliance on imports for centuries. This is not an original thought, Mike, but I think somebody brought up that this happens every few years, that we just find a massive treasure trove of some important mineral that makes us rethink the way that we consider its rarity.
That area covers Maine, New Hampshire, and the Carolinas with an estimated 2.3 million metric tons of potentially undiscovered, economically recoverable lithium. That's enough to replace 300 years or so of U.S. imports at last year's levels. It could power 130 million EVs, maybe 1.6 million grid-scale batteries.
The U.S. imports about half of its consumption of lithium right now, with only one domestic producer. Mike, your thoughts?
Mike Casey:
Okay, one, having our own supply of lithium is a great start. And number two, we still need to send the lithium over to China to be refined, but we can't build the processing infrastructure until a resource we don't have enough of is surfaced. This is very encouraging and Lord knows as clean energy transition advocates, we want to cheer on economic development in the Appalachian region. We think it's great.
Paul Gerke:
Our second story this week, Nicholas J. Kermeyer from Euractiv, titled, Brussels Bars Chinese-Made Brains of Solar Panels from EU Funding. Tell me about it, Mike.
Mike Casey:
All right, so Brussels has told European partner banks to stop financing renewable projects using Chinese, Iranian, or Russian grid equipment from November 1st on.
So the measure targets inverters. These are the brains of solar panels that control how much electricity is fed to the grid. And enough of them were hijacked and shut down simultaneously that they could trigger widespread blackouts.
So the decision primarily affects the European Investment Bank, which alone funded 20% of all EU solar developments in 2025, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and national lenders like Germany's KFW.
So the restriction applies to any projects connecting to the EU grid, including Morocco and the Balkans. Between 2018 and 2024, Chinese inverters made mostly by Huawei and Sungrow grew their share of European imports from 45% to 61%. So this is not a small matter, Paul.
Paul Gerke:
First reaction to this story is it sounds an awful lot like the FEOC concerns that are bouncing around in our industry right now. While investors and developers wait for the Treasury to weigh in with more clear guidance about future projects and tax credit validity as a result of using equipment from those very same sources you mentioned, Mike.
So this in particular in Europe is a major win for European inverter makers. Austria's Fronius, Germany's SMA among the winners here. Industry group ESMC says European producers have enough capacity to cover what we need inverter-wise for the EU as they continue to build out solar there.
The EIB called inverters a strategic economic security issue both on the cybersecurity and industrial policy grounds, pledging to work with the Commission and industry to build a stronger, more competitive European inverter sector.
Mike Casey:
Casey Crownhart, always excellent at the MIT Technology Review wrote a piece, “The Balcony Solar Boom Is Coming to the U.S.” This is cool.
Paul Gerke:
We're talking about plug-in solar systems, not typical rooftop balcony solar. These are small solar arrays that can literally be plugged into existing home outlets with pretty headache-less setup. Often no electrician needs to be called.
These systems are usually only about 20 square feet. They generate about 800 watts. You can use them to charge your robot vacuum, among other things.
Many Americans have already installed them, but they don't have permission from the utilities. They're in a regulatory gray area. So late last year, Utah became the first state to explicitly allow balcony solar. They're ditching the standard interconnection requirements that you'd have to set up for rooftop, as long as the panels have a low enough power cap and they're certified by a national testing facility.
That seems to make sense. Basically, the thinking here is that 800 watts or so is not going to feed back onto the grid. It's not going to mess things up, so we don't need a ton of oversight.
Now there's about two dozen states considering similar legislation. Mike, do you think this could take off?
Mike Casey:
Before this scales up, there are still a few safety issues to sort out. In January, UL Solutions released a new testing protocol for these systems to address concerns around circuit overloads, ground fault protection failing when power flows back into outlets, and plugs staying energized after disconnection when the panels are in the sun.
They've already installed a million of these systems in Germany. So this is clearly doable.
So if we can sort out these safety standards, balcony solar could be a meaningful way to expand solar access here, especially for renters. Love it.
Paul Gerke:
Story four, Antonia Mufarech and Selcuk Gokoluk at Bloomberg News, titled “Chile Solar Panel Thefts Threaten Energy Infrastructure.”
Mike Casey:
So despite what haters here in the United States would have you believe, solar panels are actually very valuable. And Chile's seeing a wave of thefts from solar firms, feeding black markets for panels, copper, and other components.
Criminal gangs are running coordinated raids, scaling fences, disabling cameras, and hauling off dozens of panels at a time before police can respond.
One service delivery manager overseeing more than 60 solar parks said panel theft was rare five years ago. Since March of last year, his portfolio has recorded more than 30 thefts with one site hit five times in a single month.
Cables are actually the most valuable target at 86% of cases. Thieves strip the plastic sheeting and sell the copper for scrap.
Paul Gerke:
Yeah, makes sense. Those are easier to carry than the panels, I guess.
Chile's solar capacity has grown about 50 times in the last decade, going from about 3% of installed capacity to about a third of their installed capacity today.
Remote desert sites, sprawling footprints, entrenched organized crime make these solar farms pretty hard to secure.
Industry leaders warn that theft can shut down entire solar parks. It obviously drives up security and insurance costs and threatens grid reliability as well as future investments.
We've seen similar patterns here in the United States, mostly in California, a little bit in the UK. This just hasn't been a Chile problem, but as solar deployment grows, physical security becomes more of a concern and something we'll have to keep an eye on moving forward as the cost of everything skyrockets.
Mike Casey:
Dude, I am so psyched about this. Returning guest, Andrew Moseman from Heatmap News. “Inside Ford’s Secret EV Skunkworks.” Andrew, welcome back. And I gotta tell you, I'm happy with my hybrid, my new hybrid, but when I read about this, I'm like, can I justify getting a truck? So I'm just gonna tell you that upfront.
Hey, take us behind the story. What was your big takeaway in the reporting?
Andrew Moseman:
What's interesting is Ford invited the auto press, a bunch of us down to this campus on Long Beach. The whole point was, right, Ford got in early on EVs. In 2021, they put out things like the F-150 Lightning, the Mustang Mach-E, they've sold some, but they were expensive to buy, expensive to make, and Ford was losing billions.
And they at least have said the right things about seeing the writing on the wall with what's coming out of China, the very affordable EVs that Americans would buy if they could.
And they realized they just needed to do something drastically different in order to catch up to not even China, but just what GM and some others and Tesla have been doing here in America.
So they go back to this campus in Long Beach that they've owned forever since the Model T and Model A days and basically said, okay, we're going to put in a small team far away from Dearborn, far away from the company hierarchy and just charge them with making a smart EV platform where we can build an affordable EV, cheap to make, cheap to sell, and this is what's gonna save us.
Paul Gerke:
And where does that stand right now, Andrew? I remember hearing the first murmurs about this and I was one of those who was forlorn about the death of the F-150 Lightning, if you will. I was there when they rolled the first ones off the assembly line. I thought the technology was super cool. The vehicle-to-grid stuff was very promising. Tell me we're getting back to that in some way, shape, or form down the road.
Andrew Moseman:
Yeah, so the plan is that this place is going to churn out a sort of mid-sized, $30,000 truck next year, something more along the size line of the Ford Maverick than the full-size F-150, which would be great, right? There's lots of folks who would go in on that.
Where they are right now is clearly halfway. The feeling that I got was they needed a little bit of a bump for this. They had had all these bad headlines about having to cancel F-150 Lightning, all the billions of dollars of write-downs that they were taking on in order to transition their business away from their previous money-losing EV approach.
They wanted to show the world, hey, we're really on the right track, but the car is not coming out until next year. So we're just going to invite people down and show them the process halfway done.
And it is halfway done. When you go into this warehouse, it's a very cool, interesting place. The aesthetic language is borrowed from Silicon Valley app makers. That's what it feels like when you walk in. Open office, just people on laptops everywhere, no walls, no cubicles, the whole thing.
But even that, a lot of the stuff that they showed us, there’s a big chamber that's going to be for testing their batteries in any conceivable wind and temperature condition to build you a better EV truck. Well, that's not even really done yet. Some of the equipment there is done, some of it's not.
So it's just like this is a thing that is, even the process, the factory, the part of it that they wanted to show us is still a work in progress. They're really bootstrapping hard to try to get there.
Mike Casey:
Andrew, what I don't understand as someone who's never built or designed a car, to be very clear, but just as an outsider and a consumer, I just want to point out my ignorance. I don't understand why they don't take a BYD car, take it apart and say, how do those guys do it?
Because having been in BYD vehicles overseas, they're awesome. They're really, really good. And I don't understand why we don't have the humility to just start with the shoreline of what's already been established.
Maybe that's what they're doing, but I read the reports from you and others in great detail, and it looks like lots of original thinking when the original thinking's already been done by people who are winning at this already. I cede the floor, sir. I'm very interested in your thoughts on this.
Andrew Moseman:
Well, that is part of it though. There have been reports in months prior that Ford and others of these legacy companies were doing teardowns of Teslas and BYDs and just being aghast at mistakes that they made.
They took the car apart and saw, okay, right, we don't have to have these extra miles of wiring and all these extra computer processors to govern every single system.
They tore down a BYD or a Tesla and they saw the sort of zonal architecture that those cars have gone to where they have fewer computer processors that govern more things that just kind of do everything in a particular area of the car.
And it cuts down two miles of industrial wiring and just creates tons of savings and simplification and leads you to where BYD is with what they're calling the software-designed car, the software-governed car.
So Ford, yeah, they're doing a lot of iterating in terms of their own design, their own software and everything. But the other side of the coin is definitely them trying to duplicate what China and Tesla and others have already done, but in their own way. Absolutely.
Mike Casey:
Gotcha. I was struck by a line, I don't think it was in your story, but they had a Ford veteran who was kind of an internal critic who said, “In 30 years, we haven't changed much besides the way we fold the steel.”
The depth of traditionalist thinking at the Big Three is something I don't think a lot of people like me understand or appreciate. And I guess that's what they're trying to break out of in this piece.
Andrew Moseman:
Yeah. It's no coincidence that when they tried to duplicate a Valley-style, China-style factory R&D approach that they did it 2,000 miles from Dearborn.
It's hard for any of us from the outside to really truly appreciate the inertia and what it takes to get away from that.
And that's why I concluded the piece the way I did. You walk into Long Beach and they're doing and saying all the right things. Just from the way that the EVDC is laid out, having it so that all of these different teams can actually talk to each other, iterate things in a couple of weeks instead of doing a three-month process where you prototype something and present it to the board and some suit in the C-suite has to say yes.
All of that stuff, at Long Beach, they're doing it right. But there's no guarantee that what comes out of there is going to change the company culture. And that's what has to happen.
EVDC is about reinventing their design and manufacturing process. It's going to lead to the first car, this truck that we talked about that's supposed to come out next year. Even if it's delayed, they are going to make it. They're going to design it here. They're going to build it in Louisville. It's going to come out.
But the success of the company is going to rest on the processes created here actually making a dent in Dearborn once it's time for the rest of Ford to really, really, really this time turn over from ICE to EV.
Paul Gerke:
Let's roll to our cleantecher of the week. It is Brad Rouse, the volunteer executive director of Energy Savers Network.
The small nonprofit provides free weatherization and appliance upgrades to income-qualified families. Brad co-founded ESN back in 2016. He's helped reduce the power bills for more than 1,500 families in Western North Carolina since then.
Brad nominated this week by Don McAdam who reached out to me. Don, thanks for the shout and congratulations. Brad Rouse, our cleantecher of the week.
Paul Gerke:
And another shout out to Andrew for joining us on the show. Make sure to go check out Andrew Moseman’s column this week. We talked about it at great length. We want you to read it though. That's part of the deal.
Please subscribe, leave a little feedback, share some story suggestions if you've got something for the show. You can read every article we talk about each week. There are links in the episode description as well as on the post where this lives on factorthis.com.
Until next time, be good people.