The Future of Solar

After graduating college, I found myself floating on the Patuxent River in a 42-foot boat. My days were filled with bright mornings as I wobbled to work on my sea legs and peaceful nights as I read by the dim lights, slowly rocked to sleep by the changing tides.

If I needed to travel anywhere by sea, I used the water. If I needed to power the lights, central air, or water pumps, I used the electricity stored in the solar-powered batteries.

I saved hundreds of dollars each month.

Just look at what the average American pays for utilities these days:

You could say I was living “off-grid,” but I thought it was just a natural way of life. It made sense to me and still does. I was completely self-sustainable and wasn’t beholden to the greedy utility companies. By using renewable energy, I felt a sense of freedom.

Ah, sometimes I wish I still lived on that old boat and could save more using renewables. But you know what they say — the two happiest days of a boat owner’s life are the day they buy the boat and the day they sell it.

Maybe one day I’ll get back to the sea.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. It’s easy to power a dinky boat with solar, but powering a household isn’t sustainable. However, a recent report from Rewiring America found that U.S. households could save $321 billion by switching to clean energy. That’s roughly $2,500 a year, provided the government offers tax incentives and rebates for installation costs. Also consider the cost savings of creating energy-efficient facilities, including universities, government and corporate offices, restaurants, and entire cities.

And with the aggressive push toward mass adoption of renewable energy, there’s a huge disruption taking place in the energy, transportation, housing, and agriculture sectors.

As you know, where there’s disruption, there’s money to be made.

But there’s one problem...

In order for renewables to compete with fossil fuels, we need a better way to generate and store energy.

The Death of Lithium-Ion

The variable nature of wind and solar power has been a major limitation on our ability to optimize electricity and storage. When the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow, you can’t capture energy, so you need to store the energy for later use.

The current standard for storing this energy is the lithium-ion battery because it’s relatively cheap to produce, but this is changing by the day. And we all know from our cellphones that the batteries don’t last very long. This is because lithium batteries gradually lose their ability to retain a charge and cease to work after a few hundred cycles.

These solid-state batteries also pose a fire risk. We’ve all seen the Teslas and other electric vehicles catching fire lately.

Lithium batteries also decay when not in use. And the journal Progress in Natural Science: Materials International found that varying temperature conditions produce various adverse effects on the stability of lithium-based batteries.

The negatives go on.

So what’s the solution?

Well, the most promising alternative is the vanadium redox flow battery (VRFB).

Infinite Energy

Because of their large-scale infrastructure, VRFBs are used primarily in energy storage applications and paired with large wind and solar farms.

The chemical vanadium is stored as a solution in four oxidative states and flows through the holding tanks. The cool thing is that the chemical solutions change colors when in different states.

Just like lithium batteries, VRFBs are rechargeable. However, VRFBs pose no significant safety or environmental threats, can be idle for long periods of time without losing storage capacity, are scalable, and can provide continuous power for longer than 24 hours.

Essentially, they can’t catch fire or lose charge.

VRFBs are theoretically limitless. As they produce zero emissions, lots of renewable companies are starting to use them to store the energy.

But we've got to think about setting these up logistically.

If you hook them up on a giant solar farm, you're going to need a lot of them. Much of the power is lost when transferring it.

It might look something like this. 

So you're going to need a direct hookup to each panel or section of panels.

I don't know if you've seen these massive wind farms, but the cost of hooking up a VRFB to each section just doesn't make sense.

That's where a new solar invention comes into play.

Doing Solar Right

You see, for years we've been doing solar wrong...

We've been orienting the panels horizontally.

But what if we stacked them?

That's what what one tiny firm is doing.

It's created solar towers that have already begun popping up across the United States, making the conventional model of installing solar farms obsolete.

Because of their unique, patented vertical design, these towers can generate all the power of a modern solar farm with just a TENTH of the land use...

Meaning they can be easily placed inside the cities and suburbs where power demand is greatest, instead of needing to be built in rural areas hundreds or even thousands of miles away like typical solar farms do.

Not only does this instantly free up hundreds of billions of dollars of increasingly valuable real estate for agriculture…

But it also eliminates the other BIG problem these solar companies are facing, which is the massive amount of power that’s lost in the transmission process. 

This $20 million firm has just unlocked a multitrillion-dollar profit opportunity...

Finally making solar power easily accessible for all 8 billion humans on Earth and landing early investors potentially life-changing returns in the process.

Stay frosty,

Alexander Boulden
Editor, Outsider Club

After Alexander’s passion for economics and investing drew him to one of the largest financial publishers in the world, where he rubbed elbows with former Chicago Board Options Exchange floor traders, Wall Street hedge fund managers, and International Monetary Fund analysts, he decided to take up the pen and guide others through this new age of investing. Check out his editor's page here.

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