Matt Weickert, Technical Chief of Staff
My foray into hardware began in 2024, when I showed up to a construction site as an ironworker two weeks after quitting my tech job. I was the only crew member who wasn’t a felon and still had all my teeth.
Terraform Industries has a way of collecting intriguing misfits and catapulting them into eyewatering amounts of responsibility. I was hired June 2025 as Casey’s Technical Chief of Staff, essentially a high level critical path expeditor role. From October 2025 through September of 2026, I had the privilege of leading the charge on Terraform’s R&D test site called Project Muroc. We speedran the land acquisition, permitting, and construction of an offgrid fuel synthesis plant in Southern California. This was a crucible project for both Terraform Industries and myself personally.
It started in October of 2025 when our CEO Casey Handmer looked over to me after gracefully relieving the former construction lead of his duties and asked “Will you do it?” I had been there for 3 months and heeded the call. Thankfully, my esteemed colleague Tiana Wong was there to support and had diligently researched available parcels of land along with knowledge of the regulatory frameworks we would be dealing with.
The first thing we did was drive to Bakersfield and develop a map of all of the relevant parties who could both help or block our project as it advanced through the process. Journeying through the permit landscape is bespoke for every project and region, particularly when you’re trying to build something that involves high voltage and hazardous materials in a configuration that has never existed before. Parties we met with included the planning department, environmental health personnel, the air quality district, building reviewers, and consultants. I grabbed every business card within reach at every waiting room and secretary desk.
Some conversations were more productive than others, and we kept showing up to understand how permitting and construction works with utility-scale solar. In total, we logged around 2,500 miles in permitting and construction visits. There was a tangible moment when the lead engineering manager of the building department realized that we were absolutely serious about doing this in a matter of months. He paused after I asked him about a non-conventional idea that would accelerate the timeline and began collaborating about how we could go about the permit submission process. I could feel his sentiment move to our side of the table.
At the end of the day, the crushing bureaucracy that is so easily vilified by accelerationists like myself is made up of normal people. While regulators at the Public Works department raised their eyebrows at our idea to convert sunlight and air into fuel, they did not actively want to harm our prospects at radically innovating the primary energy consumption layer of society. Despite what you may have heard about California, it is still possible to build here! Pleasant persistence worked as we consistently called to ask questions and check in on submittals, left voicemails, and followed up with emails and texts wherever the bottleneck existed. We brought cards and chocolates at Christmas time for every person we interacted with during the process.
The land that we selected was flat, secluded, fenced, near a town, and zoned for heavy industrial use. Once we selected the land, we made an offer and submitted our conditional use permit as soon as the tract went into escrow. This allowed us to know if the project was dead-on-arrival before the diligence period closed. It also gave us a head-start on breaking ground once the land was officially ours. Conditional use permits are approved on a monthly basis at the Kern County Planning Commission. Our permit was delayed by a month because the only employee that manages it was out and the paperwork wasn’t filed. Nuances like this can make huge monetary differences in a project’s execution.
In the Kern County halls of power, receiving our official approval for land use permitting in December 2025.
Once we knew the project location, we contracted a leading solar builder to design and install our 1.8 MW solar array. This was the longest lead time scope on the project and Planted Solar executed impressively during a time of intense competition from datacenter builders who needed similar utility-scale electronics.
We split the project into multiple permits that were submitted in parallel. This allowed us to move faster and not have an issue with one piece of the project holding up the rest from advancing. We engaged three structural engineers and an electrical engineer for the project after speaking with well over a dozen. As inexperienced construction managers, our first drafts were a far cry from the polished drawings that a larger, slower company would produce. Our earnestness came through as we rapidly iterated with new information and consistently followed up to ensure our counterparties had everything they needed from us to advance the work. We had to replace one of the consulting engineers for not moving fast enough.
Initial site improvements, adding a fire road and compaction March 2026
In the construction phase, we started with basic site improvements like adding a rolling gate, repairing a fence, compacting a fire road, and creating a gravel turnaround area for deliveries. Once this was complete, we drilled and poured concrete piers to mount our equipment skids and began the solar array buildout. Despite a small delay in material delivery and a few minor installation hiccups, the solar deployment was done on time.
Planted Solar rapidly executing the buildout of our solar array, May 2026
We bootstrapped industry knowledge by speaking with multiple contractors for all the trades (concrete, electrical, fabrication) to get an understanding of market pricing and estimation process. Most of our contractors were extremely collaborative and did great work. A mistake we made was being too collaborative with an electrical contractor on the design of our system. It turns out their ideas weren’t very good and their execution wasn’t there. We pivoted quickly to a new contractor that was much better. A lesson in always having a backup and taking the time to form an opinion before engaging a contractor on project architecture.
Our most difficult failure on the project was obtaining a permit for our battery system. One of our systems was not yet adapted for HVDC and needed 3-phase AC power, pushing us into a much larger class of battery than we originally intended. This larger battery triggered an extremely rigorous permitting process with the Fire Department who had a sordid past with large-scale battery projects in the area. Despite meeting the National Electric Code and California Electric Code with our product choice, the permit was denied because it is within the county’s purview to demand a higher standard than the CEC. This forced a pivot in our design to supply AC power and a large sunk cost of time and capital. Lesson: There is non zero risk in placing a large capital order before the permit is in hand.
Were the systems for which we were building finalized in their design? No. Was there in-house expertise that could guide the process? No. Did we have a clear idea of what it would take and how much it would cost? Definitely not.
The design changed constantly and we became adept at understanding when we needed to revise permitted plans and when the design was made accommodating enough to keep moving with the existing paperwork. We standardized around a shipping container footprint for the skids (8’ x 20’) and overbuilt the structural steel to handle changes in the actual equipment that would be mounted. Sometimes the best thing you can do for engineers in a design phase is to implement constraints for them to build around, rather than trying to build to a moving target.
The numbers:
- 58 days: Closing to permits and ground breaking
- 10 working days: Solar installation
- 50 days in the field
- 2500 miles driven
- 2984 panels installed
- 1.8 MW nameplate power
- $1.3m total cost (including land, site improvements)
- $60k costs attributable to errors, first timer n00b fees, and high speed preference
- $0.016/kWh: amortized power cost – best in North America. Not bad!
What are the takeaways? You must have urgency, conviction, and a willingness to figure it out in-flight. Pleasant persistence and comfort with looking foolish can be credited. We went into this fearing that maybe what the veterans told us was true. That any new build solar in the US would take four years and cost $1.40/W. This turned out not to be the case, but we could never have known if we didn’t do it ourselves.
The most rewarding piece of the project is seeing our engineering teams put the site to use. Since completing the infrastructure, Terraform Industries has notched a series of additional world firsts, producing offgrid CO2, hydrogen, and methanol.