About

Hi! I’m Chris. I’m a true believer in the good that solar (and wind, and batteries) can do for the world, and that’s what I’m here to write about.

There’s a ton of great innovation happening, and a lot of culture shifting, too. As the world warms, it can’t come soon enough. It’s too late to prevent the tragic consequences of climate change, but the faster we act, the less damage there will be. I want to share the exciting news about those shifts, and I hope to get you excited about it, too. (There’s also a lot of really crappy and greedy obstructionism happening. That won’t be my main focus, but I’ll share my anger at some of that, as well.)

I started on this path on Labor Day weekend, 2025, by reading Bill McKibben’s fantastic book Here Comes the Sun. I expect to share some of the insights from it here, but I cannot recommend it highly enough. Phrases like “paradigm shift” have long been eye-roll-inducing corporate jargon, but that’s a good word for McKibben’s message. In short: transitioning to solar is essential, eminently doable, and imperative. And here we are!

I don’t have a background in solar energy, or any other kind of energy, for that matter. In my day job, I’m a software developer. I don’t even have solar panels on my own roof (yet!). But since that fateful weekend, I’ve immersed myself in this fascinating world (well… mostly fascinating; let’s be honest, some of it can be pretty boring).

Solar Noon’s Core Principles

This list will grow and change, but I want to set out some basic philosophical tenets to frame what I’m talking about here.

1. We don’t have time for that shit - Where “that shit” is any other proposed solution to the climate crisis, or indeed, to humanity’s energy needs generally at this time. Nuclear (fission or fusion), carbon-capture, geoengineering, terraforming Mars; to hell with all of that. A lot of it can seem fun, exciting, and sci-fi, and let you imagine there may be a silver bullet. But we already have the silver bullet (it’s solar (and wind, and batteries), in case you didn’t get that yet). And even the proven technologies from that list are way too expensive, uncertain, and slow to build to even bother talking about. Until we’re not burning fossil fuels anymore, at all, to hell with all of it. Every dollar or minute spent on those pie-in-the-sky boondoggles is a waste of that dollar or minute going toward the infinite clean energy that we already know how to build and use.
2. Pay-back and profit are great, but shouldn’t be the whole story - Part of the miracle of solar (and wind, and batteries) in 2025 is that it’s become the cheaper way to generate electricity, and not just the cleaner way. That’s fantastic, and it’s the fulcrum that leverages this whole conversation. That said, in the context of the climate crisis, we’re talking about the future of humanity here. The future of all life on Earth, in fact. We’re talking about mass extinctions. We’re talking about huge, irreversible changes to the fundamental ways our planet works. There’s a moral imperative here, homie. So if the investment by some big electric utility won’t “pay off” for that corporation for X more years vs. continuing to burn coal or gas, that’s not good enough.
3. There’s a future where people never worry about energy again - The potential of solar (and wind, and batteries) is so immense that, if we pushed this revolution far enough, there would more electricity than we could even use. Leave the lights on! Turn the A/C however cold you want it! Drive everywhere, and build all the damned datacenters you want! It’s a long way off, it’s hard to even conceive of, and it may never happen. But the gift of the miracles that turn sunlight (and wind) into electricity is really that big. We could get there. It’s a choice.
4. TBD