The Rockefeller of solar - by Stephen McBride
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The Rockefeller of solar<br>No drilling required
Stephen McBride<br>Aug 16, 2026
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In today’s Diary:<br>The castle lab for impossible machines
A desert full of lungs and kettles
The 39th drop of solder
“I can do whatever I want”
Casey’s final boss battle
You’re one of the first 30,000 rational optimists. Thanks for helping reach this milestone. Next stop: 100,000. You can help us get there by forwarding this to everyone you know and clicking “like” and “restack” like your kids’ future depends on it!<br>Dear rational optimist,<br>NASA has reprimanded Casey Handmer more than once. His crime? Solving problems too quickly.<br>So he quit to work on something much harder.<br>Today Casey makes natural gas out of sunlight and air, identical to the stuff that heats your house and cooks your dinner.<br>I’ve visited more than 70 frontier-tech startups this year. Terraform Industries may turn out to be the most important.<br>Terraform works out of a castle across the road from the site of Lockheed’s original Skunk Works, where Kelly Johnson built the finest aircraft in history, including the U-2 and the SR-71 Blackbird.<br>I walked through the entrance and read three words painted on the floor…
The second thing I noticed was all the flags, one for every nationality on the team. Here they are behind me and Casey:
The castle is a labyrinth. You walk through one room, find a door, and there’s another room behind it. And in that room, someone is inevitably building something cool. There’s a ramp running through the middle that Casey’s kids ride scooters down.<br>Casey talks fast, like someone pressed fast forward on his voice box. I noticed he answers the questions he finds interesting, not necessarily the ones you ask. The man is constantly scanning for the next puzzle worth his time.<br>Propped against his keyboard is a business card. It reads: “I can do whatever I want.” Also on his desk: a solar-powered fan hat:
It’s a desk-toy version of what Terraform builds at scale:<br>Machines that use solar power to produce unlimited quantities of cheap synthetic natural gas
Casey got this idea while working on a Mars base at NASA. Getting to Mars is “easy.” The problem is getting home. A rocket can’t carry enough fuel. So we’ll have to make it from the carbon dioxide in the Martian atmosphere and water frozen in the dirt.<br>Casey realized this far-off Mars idea works better on Earth, which crucially has paying customers.<br>He spent a year experimenting in his garage and came to “the horrifying realization that synthetic fuel was not going to happen if I didn’t do it.”<br>Making synthetic fuel isn’t a new idea. During WWII, Germany, cut off from oil, produced 124,000 barrels of fuel a day from coal, which is mostly carbon.<br>Petrol, diesel and natural gas are all hydrocarbons. Carbon is floating in the air around you. Hydrogen is in every drop of water. Turning these abundant natural elements into fuel is simply a matter of rearranging their atoms.<br>So why is there a graveyard of startups that tried to make hydrocarbons instead of drilling for them? Cost. Until recently the electricity needed to stick carbon and hydrogen together cost about 10X the price of the resulting natural gas. So they built exquisite machines to try to make it up on volume. They ended up with the worst of both worlds: expensive electricity powering expensive machines!<br>Casey believes making cheap synthetic fuel is now possible because the cost of solar power has plunged and continues to plunge.<br>If you think this idea is crazy, consider this. My ROS co-founder Dan Steinhart presented Terraform as one of seven bleeding-edge innovators to watch at a conference in Zurich. This conference was well-attended by Nobel-prize-winning scientists. After Dan’s talk, scientists keep seeking him out to talk about Terraform. They were glad someone is finally doing this. One said he’d had the idea to turn electricity into natural gas years ago—but the electricity costs made it impossible.<br>Casey is the most bullish person on solar I’ve ever met. He’s also totally uninterested in powering the world with panels.<br>It’s why I call Terraform…<br>The anti-solar solar company.
Casey taught nuclear physics at Caltech and will tell you: “I’m not anti-nuclear. I’m somewhat reluctantly pro-solar.”<br>“Think about the ideal energy system. A flat rock you point at the sky. Nothing spins. Nothing gets hot. Photons in, electrons out. No moving parts, no specialized labor, no exclusion zone, no armed guard, no twenty-year license... that’s a solar panel.”<br>Where solar doubters go wrong is not updating their priors. Yes, solar was once just an overly subsidized hippie dream.<br>In 1956 one of the Bell Labs scientists who invented the solar cell worked out it would cost $1.5 million to run an average American home on panels. In 1975 a watt of solar cost $128. Today it’s about 11 cents, a 99.9% decline.
Solar was 54% of all new US energy capacity in 2025,...