Elon Musk and President Trump
They don't agree on everything
also - the 174 acre hyperscale bitcoin mining, renewable energy semiconductor manufacturing and data center campus in West Texas where Jesse Peltan is chief technology officer, a little about Cholla Petroleum, and Skybox Data Centers in Huston, and quite a bit about solar and wind power - it’s all connected.
Didn’t have time for an audio version - maybe update tomorrow
On 5/24/25, Jaime Jessup posted this on her substack:
She was reacting to some radical tweets by Jesse Peltan and Elon Musk’s seeming agreement. Pelton has been saying things like “Rounded to the nearest percent, 100% of earth’s available energy over the long run is sunlight...Fission is the only thing that even comes close, and it still rounds to zero…Solar is paramount for the future of humans…Sunlight on earth is 10,000X as powerful as all human sources of energy combined ”
Newsweek published an article 5/27/25 under the headline “Elon Musk Breaks With Trump on Energy: 'Oil Is Small-Time'” saying Elon Musk disagrees with President Trump and thinks solar power is the future, not fossil fuels or nuclear, backing the ideas of Jesse Peltan, the CTO/“chief technology officer” of Hodl Ranch Mining LLC, a start-up crypto mining project in the Permian Basin of West Texas, where he dreams of lowering the cost of bitcoin mining by getting power from wind farms.
image of Hodl Ranch Texas bitcoin mining facility, from matthewball.me, 2021, apparently an artist’s conception - actual site is just sagebrush
Jaime Jessup’s take - from her substack (above) - an excerpt, with many good points
“Yes, of course a huge, bloody great ball of fusion-powered flaming gas, 333,000 times the mass of the earth and 110 times its diameter, virtually on our doorstep in astronomical terms (93 million miles away) is the overwhelmingly dominant source of energy flux on our planet! How could it not be? We generate a tiny amount (from various sources) by comparison ourselves and there’s some stored energy in earth’s molten core - which makes its way to the surface in the form of volcanic eruptions, earthquakes and plate tectonic movements etc. But our star, the Sun, is basically the engine which drives all life and movement on the planet. I would have thought that was obvious. Peltan employs this indisputable and self-explanatory fact to dishonestly plug solar panels though, and Elon Musk is obligingly amplifying that message on his X platform.
What Peltan conveniently does not tell you about Solar energy availability:
In terms of energy density (MWh per sq km) solar is orders of magnitude less than nuclear or fossil fuels, meaning that in order to harvest it, you have to build thousands and thousands of acres of solar panels on farmland or treeless wild spaces - not very environmentally friendly.
It’s not available at night (duh, didn’t see that one coming).
It varies by season in high latitudes (during winter, north of 50 degrees, it’s virtually useless, i.e. not available).
It varies according to the weather (check out the voltage from your solar panels when the sky is leaden grey and it’s raining, or worse, see how much electricity is coming from your solar panels when they are covered in snow).
What Peltan does not tell you about fossil fuels:
Coal, oil and gas are hydrocarbons, which are the fossilised remnants of decayed organic matter. Oil and gas mostly derive from marine phytoplankton, coal derives from long dead prehistoric plants. The one thing they have in common is solar energy - plankton and plants convert solar energy into living biomass via photosynthesis. So fossil fuels are basically highly condensed prehistoric solar energy packaged into a neat, convenient, usable and readily available form beneath our feet! Which in my opinion you have to be certifiably insane (or possibly exceptionally malign) not to use on the basis of the pseudoscientific, unverified and unverifiable claim that they will wreck the weather and cause the ice-caps to melt! But if you want to be a zero carbon purist, then go for nuclear fission (even more energy dense than fossil fuels) before humanity finally cracks the holy grail of fusion. If you want to be an idiot, or you want to wreck the environment, the economy and civilisation as we know it, then go for solar panels and windmills.
So what Peltan is saying is that our ‘sustainable future’ consists of exploiting transiently available, low energy dense sunlight via land-hungry and environmentally unfriendly Chinese-made solar panels (complete with complimentary kill switches). This, according to Peltan, is ‘restoring the biosphere and creating a Type 1 civilisation’.”
Note: a Type 1 civilization is a term from The Kardashev scale - a classification system for hypothetical extraterrestrial civilizations. Type 1 is a civilization that has mastered the ability to harness all the energy available to its home planet.
Who is Jesse Peltan?
I had not heard of Jesse Peltan, and wondered why Elon Musk would promote his ideas. I learned that Peltan is a big influencer on Musk’s ‘X’, a great admirer of Tesla EVs, batteries, and Spacex, and Musk apparently agrees with Peltan that solar power is better than any other.
Here are some things I learned about Jesse Peltan:
“Jesse Peltan serves on the management team as a Vice President. Mr. Peltan is the Chief Technology Officer and co-founder of HODL Ranch Mining Company…(I believe the other ‘co-founder’ was Gideon Powell, COO of Cholla Petroleum).. Mr. Peltan also co-founded Autonomous.. (I haven’t been able to find out much about ‘Autonomous’.) ..with Mr. Powell and currently serves as the Chief Technology Officer, where he has designed and built multiple ASIC and GPU cryptocurrency mines. Mr. Peltan also leads technical research and development at HODL Ranch Mining Company and has developed solutions for operating cryptocurrency mines in various climates in Texas and developed demand side management strategies to capitalize on the growth in intermittent renewable energy in ERCOT. Prior to leaving his senior year to co-found Autonomous, Mr. Peltan attended the University of Kentucky, where he was a quadruple major in Mathematics, Economics, Philosophy and Environmental Sustainability. Mr. Peltan has been recognized by Forbes 30 under 30 in Energy for his work at HODL Ranch Mining Company.” Source – cryptosquare.org https://www.cryptosquare.org/wiki/jesse__peltan?lng=en-US
Timeline from Cholla Petroleum https://chollainc.com/about - (Peltan previously worked for Cholla) 2017 -Cholla Petroleum invested in "Hodl Ranch" through a JV (joint venture -with Skybox??) to build out the 1st hyperscale (150MW's) bitcoin mining campus in West Texas. 2019 -"Hodl Ranch" is acquired by a Silicon Valley start up while Cholla Petroleum spuds its first operated horizontal well located in Nolan, County.
Linkdin – “Jesse Peltan is the CTO of HODL Ranch Limited. He previously worked at Cholla Petroleum as Economic Feasibility Analyst. Jesse attended University of Kentucky in 2014.” emphasis mine
“Peltan alongside his team works to allocate their resources to lower the cost of bitcoin mining to make bitcoin more profitable overall. His innovative approach to harvesting natural windpower elements and renewable energy sources makes for low costs in Bitcoin mining,” source - https://sarsonfunds.com/crypto-kings-and-queens-emerging-leaders-in-the-world-of-digital-assets/ (2021)
In fairness to Jesse Peltan, I looked at some of his other tweets on X, and his advocacy of solar power is focused on rooftop installations, and covers for parking lots and farm shelters, etc - he is against covering good farmland with solar farms.
Skybox Data Centers, Huston, TX - the organization behind the Hodl Ranch site - I think
Datacenterdynamics reported in 2019 that Skybox was building the 174 acre West Texas Hodl Ranch.
It seems a little strange, but I found this for an address for contacting Hodl Ranch Limited: 71 Fort Street, P.O. Box 500, George Town, Grand Cayman KY1-1106: Cayman Islands
“The Hodl Ranch hopes to take advantage of low renewable electricity prices in Texas, quoting estimates as low as $0.024 per kilowatt-hour.
According to the website, the campus will be able to support not just cryptocurrency mining equipment, but all manners of dense, power-hungry hardware, like rendering farms and GPU clusters used for artificial intelligence research.
Skybox says the location benefits from 100Gbps connectivity, low corporate tax rate and an arid environment that “allows for hundreds of megawatts of low cost evaporative cooling.” Emphasis mine - cooling for all those banks of computers is essential, and normally very expensive - up to half the electric bill.
The company plans to expand the location with another three phases, and is planning to build more substations, delivering 300+ MVA of power capacity.”
I haven’t been able to find any up-to-date news on how far along the project has gotten since 2019 - that’s 6 years with no news that I could find perhaps someone can help me out?
What the big data centers like Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, and Google are doing
The trend is to ignore wind and solar because of the need for more power; power that is not fickle depending on the weather, because data centers can’t compete if they have down times - they need to be up and running 24/7. Perhaps the special advantages of plenty if cheap, subsidized and overbuilt wind, (except during occasional wind droughts) the aridity, and the availability of substations and transmission lines (connectivity) in West Texas are an exception, but most data centers are realizing they need gas turbine generators or nuclear.
Elon knows better. He just likes to be in the limelight.
On one hand, Peltan and Musk are betting on the narrative that solar = civilization, even if that means rewriting how intermittency, land use, and storage inefficiencies are framed. On the other, critics like Jaime Jessup are pointing out what many engineers already know: density matters, and no amount of rhetorical shine can turn a parking lot panel into baseload power.
That said, I think it’s too easy to write off rooftop solar or modular solar-integrated infrastructure (like farm shelters or warehouse roofs) just because grid-scale solar is flawed. What bothers me more is that Musk, who built a lithium-ion empire, still avoids real talk about what it takes to store solar power at meaningful scales. No one mentions that for every terawatt of renewables, we’ll need a massive companion industry in long-duration storage or overbuild plus curtailment strategies.
As for Hodl Ranch,if they’re pulling sub-$0.03/kWh pricing thanks to overbuilt ERCOT wind and no corporate taxes, good for them. But let’s be honest: that’s arbitrage, not a roadmap for global energy transition. And it won’t last if the grid gets tighter, subsidies shift, or crypto crashes again.