Episodes
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Welcome to episode 242 of The Clean Energy Show! This week, we explore a groundbreaking proposal to connect Europe's and North America's power grids using undersea cables, a move that could revolutionize clean energy by balancing solar and wind production across continents. California is launching a new program offering free e-bikes to low-income residents, but there's a catch: applicants must sit through climate change and e-bike safety videos. Meanwhile, OPEC faces a harsh reality check as oil demand peaks much sooner than anticipated, leaving petrostate politicians scrambling. And in New York City, plans for mandatory e-bike license plates spark controversy.
Also in the show: Mercedes gets the green light for Level 3 autonomous driving in Germany, GM pulls the plug on its Cruise robo-taxi business, and BC Hydro opens a powerful new EV charger in British Columbia. All this and more, including the ever-illuminating Lightning Round!
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Get a monthly bonus podcast and more!Main Stories
California's Free E-Bike Program: Read more.
Transatlantic Power Grids: Full report.
OPEC’s Oil Demand Reality Check: Read the full analysis.
Other Highlights
Mercedes-Benz's DRIVE PILOT gets approval in Germany for Level 3 autonomous driving, allowing drivers to legally read, work, or watch TV while the car drives itself.
GM halts its Cruise self-driving taxi operations after safety incidents.
BC Hydro opens a new 350 kW EV charger in Oyama, BC, significantly improving EV travel in the region.
Listener Mail
The Lightning Round
US Supreme Court upholds California’s right to set its own vehicle emissions standards.
Global renewable energy installations hit a record 560 GW in 2023, compared to just 7.1 GW of new nuclear.
EV battery life may last 40% longer than previously estimated.
Study finds only 1% of EV owners would switch back to gas-powered cars, with cost savings being the primary reason.
BYD plans to introduce 6C charging technology, enabling 10-80% charging in just 7 minutes.
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We’re also preparing our year-end wrap-up! Let us know what stories from 2024 stood out to you and how you feel about the progress made this year.
Thank you for listening to The Clean Energy Show! See you next week!
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This week, we dive into the latest advancements in clean energy and sustainability! A universal ‘Plug and Charge’ protocol for EVs is set to roll out in 2025, promising a seamless, app-free charging experience for all electric vehicles. In Boston, a groundbreaking program prescribes solar power to low-income patients—an innovative approach to health and energy security. Meanwhile, scientists uncover a surprising factor contributing to global warming: the Earth is dimming, with reduced cloud cover playing a significant role.
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We also welcome back a beloved guest with a special EV announcement and discuss listener mail on passive solar building codes, spinning homes, and solar history. All that and much more, including quick updates on Hyundai’s fast-charging push in India and the Pope’s new electric ride!
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Highlights in This Episode: EV Charging Revolution: Learn how the upcoming universal 'Plug and Charge' protocol will streamline charging for all EV drivers. Source. Solar Power Prescriptions: Boston doctors prescribe solar energy to improve health and prevent utility cutoffs for vulnerable patients. Source. The Earth’s Dimming: Reduced cloud cover is accelerating global warming, adding a new layer of urgency to climate action. Listener Mail: Insights into passive solar design and how cities like Davis, CA, led the way in sustainable building practices. Pope’s New EV: Mercedes-Benz unveils an all-electric popemobile, showcasing the intersection of sustainability and tradition. Source. The Lightning Round Seaweed for Cattle: Feeding seaweed to cows cuts methane emissions by 40%. Kenya’s Renewable Transformation: From 60% fossil fuels in 2000 to just 6% today. Egypt’s Renewable Ambitions: 18.6 GW of new wind and solar by 2030. Battery Price Drop: Lithium-ion battery packs see the steepest price decline since 2017. Here's a gift link to the Bloomberg article. Heat-Related Deaths Contact UsWe love hearing from you! Share your thoughts and questions:
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Scientists in the Rockies are developing technology to detect attempts to dim the sun—a safeguard against rogue geoengineering experiments. A proposal for a 2,500-mile subsea power cable aims to deliver renewable energy from North Africa to Britain. Could it revolutionize energy trade or is it an oversized project? The most-watched primetime show in the U.S. is now powered by batteries, drastically cutting fossil fuel use. Could the NFL’s transition inspire other industries?
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Get a monthly bonus podcast, early access to our content, behind the scenes content, access to our members-only Discord community and thank-yous in the credits of videos and shoutouts on our podcast! Starting at just a couple dollars per month!Also this week:
Finland’s Nuclear Waste Solution: Finland leads the way with the world’s first permanent geological repository for spent nuclear fuel. Is this the future of nuclear waste management? Ukraine’s Resilient Renewable Energy: Despite attacks on its grid, Ukraine’s decentralized clean energy projects are proving harder for Russia to destroy and quicker to repair than fossil fuel systems. UK’s ICE Ban in 2030: The UK confirms it will stick to its 2030 ban on new petrol and diesel cars, with strong penalties for automakers that fail to comply. Updates on heat pump performance in extreme cold, a look at Norway’s sky-high car taxes, and Brian's adventures with a cold. Listener mail: Practical tips for EV owners and insights from parades powered by the F-150 Lightning. A Lightning Round featuring everything from BYD's vertical integration to agrivoltaics boosting grape yields and Mexico's net-zero commitment by 2050. Links from the Show Sunday Night Football Power Backup Morocco-UK Subsea Cable Proposal Finland’s Nuclear Waste Repository Ukraine’s Renewable Energy Strategy UN Conference on Plastic Pollution The Lightning Round Highlights China’s CO2 Decline: A 1% drop in Q2 2024 marks the first quarterly decrease since COVID-19. BYD’s Sodium-Ion Batteries: A promising grid-scale alternative to lithium-ion. Heat Pump Policies in Europe: 24 nations now support industrial-scale rollouts. Plastic Pollution Treaty Stalemate: Talks to curb production hit a wall, with future discussions planned.Catch us next week for more clean energy news and listener mail! Want to support the show? Join our Patreon for bonus content and early access to episodes. Don’t forget to subscribe and review us on your favorite podcast app!
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The latest developments from COP29, the annual climate summit, where world leaders committed $300 billion per year to help developing nations combat climate change—though many argue this figure falls short of the required funding. Meanwhile, as Australia faces a blistering heatwave, maintenance on coal plants exacerbates the energy crisis, adding fuel to the debate over fossil fuel dependence.
We also cover the groundbreaking approval of Hermes 2, the first Gen IV nuclear reactor in the U.S., which features a unique molten salt cooling system designed for efficiency and safety. Plus, Ann Arbor, Michigan, takes a bold step forward as residents approve a local clean energy utility, furthering the city’s commitment to sustainable energy.
Finally, California makes headlines with a plan to counteract potential federal EV policy changes under the incoming Trump administration, promising state incentives to EV buyers if federal credits are repealed.
COP29 Climate Finance and Fossil Fuel Stalemate
Australia’s Heatwave and Energy Crisis
Nuclear Innovation in TennesseeAnn Arbor’s Local Clean Energy Utility
California’s EV Incentive Backup Plan
The Lightning Round:
San Jose’s Electrified Train: Caltrain switches from diesel to electric on its San Francisco to San Jose route, marking a major shift toward greener transit.
Data-Powered Heat in San Jose: A unique project will use excess heat from data centers to warm six new apartment buildings in San Jose, demonstrating a creative way to reduce emissions.
Maine’s New Renewable Targets: Maine accelerates its renewable energy goals, aiming for 80% clean energy by 2030 and 100% by 2040.
BYD’s Advanced LFP Batteries: China’s BYD announces its next-generation EV battery, designed to offer longer range and greater safety.
California's Potential New EV Rebates: Newsom proposes state-level EV rebates as a countermeasure if federal incentives are reduced under the Trump administration.
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California is embracing wave power technology to generate electricity from ocean waves, which will help power thousands of homes. A new study challenges the long-standing belief that rooftop solar is a burden on California's customers, showing that it actually benefits the state. This update offers hope for the future of solar power in California. Read more from Canary Media.
China's Open Sea Solar Farm: China has just powered up the world’s largest open-sea solar farm, which also incorporates fish farming. This innovative project showcases the potential of combining solar energy with marine aquaculture to boost renewable energy production. More on this from Electrek.
COP29 Climate Talks: As COP29 unfolds, key figures are calling for a complete redesign of the conference. One major suggestion: reducing the influence of fossil fuel lobbyists, who currently outnumber climate negotiators. The conference is in its final week, and tensions are rising over the role of developing countries in achieving decarbonization goals.
More details on COP29 from Electrek.
The Lightning Round:
Air Pollution in India: India is currently experiencing extreme air pollution, with levels up to 130 times above the recommended safety threshold. Flights and trains have been canceled due to the severity of the pollution.
Bomb Cyclone: A bomb cyclone is forming off the coast of the Pacific Northwest, with winds strong enough to rival a hurricane. This rare weather event is a stark reminder of the power of climate extremes.
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Solar panels are built to last, often functioning for decades beyond their warranty. When they’re replaced, many are finding a second life in energy-poor regions like sub-Saharan Africa, where access to electricity can transform communities. Programs like Solar Sister help distribute these panels to power mobile phone chargers, e-bikes, and even entire villages. For example, an original Bell Labs PV cell from 1954 is still producing power 70 years later.
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This holiday season, Australia will pioneer V2G technology that allows electric vehicles to feed electricity back to the grid, helping balance supply and demand. Learn more about this development in Electrek’s report.
Could a single solar panel lift someone out of energy poverty?
In a surprising move, Exxon’s CEO has urged the U.S. to remain in the Paris Climate Agreement. This unexpected stance from an oil giant hints at complex motivations. Check out the details in Bloomberg’s report.
Listener Mail:
Alex: A listener and sustainability expert, Alex, wrote in to share insights on the longevity and recycling of solar panels, noting that panels can often be used beyond their initial lifespan for energy-poor regions. Nate from Oregon Seaweed: Nate, the chief scientist at Oregon Seaweed, left us a voicemail discussing the potential of kelp as a sustainable energy source. Bob: Listener Bob sent us an article on Canada’s proposed emissions cap on oil and gas companies. Learn more in this piece from the National Observer. Larry from Saskatchewan Renewable Energy Coalition: Larry invited us to discuss the Saskatchewan Renewable Energy Coalition, a group promoting renewable energy education in Saskatchewan.Join James at the Saskatoon Fantastic Film Festival Saturday, November 16, 2024 at 11 AM for a panel discussion on the films of Lowell Dean.
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Sheep grazing under solar panels in Australia are producing higher-quality wool! Could agrivoltaics be the future of sustainable farming? Scientists predict that the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) could collapse in just 15 years, threatening severe weather disruptions. Learn what this could mean for global climate.
Solar Panel Recycling Advances
A new plant in Georgia will soon recycle up to 99% of solar panel materials, taking a big step toward reducing solar waste. More details here: ElectrekListener Mailbag
Damon from Tasmania asks about carbon capture's effectiveness. Michael on Patreon shares insights into biochar and praises our climate activism.Automotive Updates
Toyota's Decline: With EV demand rising, Toyota’s production drops for the first time in four years. Electrek Ford’s F-150 Lightning Halt: Production of the Lightning will be paused for two months. ElectrekLightning Round
Honda’s Electric SUV Success: Honda's Prologue EV is outpacing the Chevy Blazer in sales, signaling strong consumer interest. Saudi Arabia’s Battery Push: The kingdom launches a tender for 8 GWh of battery storage, one of the largest in the world. Remote Work Reduces Emissions: A report finds Ottawa public servants working remotely produce 25% fewer emissions than office workers. The Energy MixContact Us
[email protected] or leave us an online voicemail: http://speakpipe.com/clean
Support The Clean Energy Show
Join the Clean Club on our Patreon or with YouTube Memberships to receive perks for supporting the podcast and our planet!
PayPal Donate offers one-time or regular donations.
Store
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Copyright 2024.
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Louisville has launched America's first 100% electric garbage truck fleet. These trucks are perfectly suited for waste collection with heavy loads, stop-and-go conditions, and low speeds.
James shares insights from The Saskatchewan Survivor's Guide podcast, featuring former center-left Canadian politician Cathy Sproule. Why climate policies often don’t get political attention, even among left-leaning parties. Revised episode!Listen to the Episode
Biochar: The Carbon-Saving Solution
Read the Minnesota Public Radio Article More from the U.S. National Forest Service
Biochar, a product of burning forest materials at low temperatures, could help sequester carbon when applied to soil, rather than releasing it. This technology offers promising results in fire management and agriculture.Hurricane Relief with Solar Microgrids
Following Hurricane Helene, the Footprint Project has provided North Carolina with solar-powered microgrids to replace polluting diesel generators. This initiative powers essentials, from food trucks to water filtration, sustainably.
Canary Media ArticleElectric Hydrofoil Ferries in Sweden
Listener Mail Claude from Lethbridge, Alberta:
Sweden has launched the world’s first-ever electric hydrofoil ferry service, a cutting-edge leap towards emission-free maritime transport.
Read More
Comments on UCP attack ads in the podcast’s pre-roll ads. Thanks for sharing, Claude! Derek:
Asks about biochar and its applications for carbon reduction. Lightning Round Highlights Electricity-powered garbage trucks launch in Louisville, CO. Bloomberg BNEF analysts find electrification outpacing hydrogen in decarbonizing sectors.
Hydrogen Insight Article Sri Lanka installing solar on religious sites with support from the Indian government.
Read MoreWe love hearing from you!
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Apple will use its waste heat from a data processing center to heat a small town. Uganda will swap out gas two wheelers for E-motorcycles for free. And Hyundai will stop celling combustion vehicles in Norway. This includes PHEVs.
Brian struggles with Apple Music.
James appologizes for getting Brian to buy Tesla stock.
James's LEAF does something weird again.
Chevy Bolt customers in Canada get shafted for 2023.
And the Bolt gets a modest price hike for the United States after the IRA rebates come into effect.
Out of Spec Reviews does some cold weather testing in Denver.
What EVs have battery heaters that world when the cars are unplugged?
More power substation attacks.
Biggest heat pump manufacturers.
Mitsubishi Electric
Carrier Corporation
Danfoss Power Solutions Co.
Daikin America, Inc.
Johnson Controls, Inc.
Brian’s Book Report - The Psychology of Money: Timeless lessons on wealth, greed, and happiness by Morgan HouselJames's predictions for 2023. Fleet EVs will rule the day.
Buy us a cup of coffee with PayPal Donate! eTransfer [email protected]Thanks for listening to our show! Consider rating The Clean Energy Show on iTunes, Spotify or wherever you listen to our show.
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@cleanenergypodCheck out our YouTube Channel! @CleanEnergyShow
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Your hosts:
James Whittingham https://twitter.com/jewhittingham
Brian Stockton: https://twitter.com/brianstocktonEmail us at [email protected]
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Why 2022 was a good year for clean energy (thanks Putin!), our EV of the year, solar on an abandoned nuclear power plant site, Brian gets stranded by the weather, James's Prius has troubles, and more evidence that the Tesla Supercharger network is the one to beat.
The sound of driving next to the Tesla Semi will amaze you. EU emissions are down despite cold weather and a partial return to coal.
Why American's should buy an EV in the first two months of 2023.
The U.S. Postal Service is finally big on electric vehicles and will go full electric soon.
The city of Tokyo mandates solar on the roofs of new homes and buildings.
Lyft is giving insentives to electric vehicle drivers basically covering the lease price of their vehicle, then they can save huge on gas and earn significanly more than than their coworkers driving gas vehicles.
Hydrogen and chip shortages are also covered.
And we wrap of the year that was 2022!
Buy us a cup of coffee with PayPal Donate Or Etransfer to [email protected]Thanks for listening to our show! Consider rating The Clean Energy Show on iTunes, Spotify or wherever you listen to our show.
Follow us on TikTok!
@cleanenergypodCheck out our YouTube Channel! @CleanEnergyShow
Follow us on Twitter! @CleanEnergyPod
Your hosts:
James Whittingham https://twitter.com/jewhittingham
Brian Stockton: https://twitter.com/brianstocktonEmail us at [email protected]
Leave us an online voicemail at http://speakpipe.com/cleanenergyshow
Transcript
Hello, and welcome to episode 144 of the Clean Energy Show.I'm Brian Stockton.
And I'm James William.
Welcome.
This week Lyft will incentivize drivers who drive EVs by paying them extra weekly fees.
And they're also considering throwing in a free vomit shield for late night rides.
Turns out the laser used in last week's Fusion Energy Breakthrough was also used as a set in Star Trek Trek.
I'm glad to see the scientific community helping out Star Trek, but where they really need help is with the script writing.
Tokyo mandates solar at all new buildings.
Unfortunately for their tiny hotel suites, this only requires a solar panel the size of the ones you find on Calculators.
The US postal Service commits to 100% electric vehicles.
Now, your package will arrive with a lower carbon footprint.
However, it'll still be late.
Plus, we'll have stories on the chip shortage not going away and why Americans should buy an EV in the next two months, and solar on an abandoned nuclear power plant site.
All that and more on this special year end edition of The Clean Energy Show.
Yes.
I would like to call this the year end spectacular.
That's how it's going to be.
Okay.
The year end spectacular of the clean energy show.
Yeah.
Which basically means we're going to go along this week.
Okay, Brian, we're late this week.
Why are we late, Brian? Why are we many days late? Why are our fans craving our show and unable to get their fix of the Clean Energy Show until now? Yes, well, I have a long story to tell about travel, winter travel here in the wilds of western Canada.
We were going to be one day late for the podcast because I was traveling, but it ended up to be several days late.
But, yeah, we had a lovely trip to Jasper, Alberta, Canada, which is in the Rocky Mountains of Canada.
It's an absolutely beautiful place.
Have you been to Jasper? I've camped at Jasper at Pocahontas Campground in the north, and I've been through there.
It is probably well, the locals like it better than BAMF because it's just less touristy.
But it's also known for its highway in the winter being shut down due to dynamiting avalanches.
They call it the icefields highway, or parkway, rather.
Yeah, well, that's the thing.
It is less touristy because it's harder to get to.
Like, BAMF is quite close to Calgary, but Jasper is an almost a four hour drive from Edmonton, which is the closest major city.
So we were talking recently in France, they have sort of banned some short haul flights because those can be covered by trains and we need to all be flying less.
But, yeah, we had to make this calculation of how to get there because it's like an eight hour drive to Edmonton and then a four hour drive to Jasper.
So if we drove it, that's 12 hours.
It's a bit too long.
I'm everyone else in my family has things to do, like exams, and they're not retired, old man, you can do whatever the hell you want.
Yeah, but we thought, well, we better fly, and that'll save us a couple of days because people have things to do.
So you fly to Edmonton, you rent a car, you drive that to Jasper.
So that worked fairly well on the way there, although it was starting to get cold and our flight was delayed a couple of hours out of Vagina, so it was kind of slow to get there.
But we picked up the rental car and I wanted to talk a bit about that too, because obviously we talk about EVs a lot on the show and we love EVs, and you and I were in it, though a bit of an EV bubble, like that tends to be all we think about and talk about.
But I just wanted to say, sometimes you forget the niceties of just a really nice car.
So there was four of us.
So we got this large Kia sorento SUV.
It's a seven cedar SUV, this very big vehicle, and it was great.
It made me think, like, obviously EVs are the way to go and we're obviously transitioning to EVs, but you can kind of understand why somebody would get into a Kia Sorrento and think, yeah, this is fine, we don't need an EV.
This works great.
It's a brand new car, only took half a tank of gas on all the way to Jasper.
Really? Even though it was like this large SUV? Yeah, everything worked great on it.
I mean, contrast, a couple of months ago, we rented a Toyota Corolla for something and that was less good.
I don't know.
Toyota Corolla, it's an inexpensive car, so you get what you pay for.
But I was kind of surprised how crappy it was.
I used to admire Corollas all my life.
I used to admire the car my son has, which is a Honda, honda City, like 20 years old.
I would have admired that because I've had these really crappy cars in my life.
But I did rent one, I did rent a Corolla when we hit a deer a number of years ago.
And I was thinking, this isn't no, because the Corolla and the Prius, the cost of ownership is equal or better for the Prius.
So if you just spend the extra money and get the Prius, you get so much more, and then you pay that much less in gas and everything.
So, yeah, I recommend you think about the cost of ownership when you buy a car.
Yeah, and more upfront for the Prius, but probably cheaper in the long run.
And then we ended up renting a Toyota Rav Four for the drive home, which I'll explain that in a bit.
So then we had another experience with another car, a brand new Rav Four, and that was decent, although I could never hook up the do Toyotas even have Apple CarPlay? That's a good question because they've avoided that.
I will say, though, that the ones that got into it do have the Apple and not the Android, but now they have both.
But that surprises me because I would have thought all new Toyotas have both now.
But was it older? No, it's brand new.
But on the Kia Sorento, the apple CarPlay hooked up right away.
It was great.
So we were able to use Google Maps on the navigation.
The Toyota, it said something about, you got to download the Toyota app to connect with your car.
And I was like, what? Toyota I did that.
And then it was like, it shows you what they're like, man, with the EVs, this is indicative of everything they do, and they've just got to slow to change.
The other thing we noticed was, like, we were driving away from the rental place in the Rav Four and we were like, oh, wait, did we forget the keys? Where are the keys? Where's the key? Fob maybe we drove away without the key fob and then after five minutes of looking, we realized it was in the ignition.
You have to put it in the ignition and turn the key to they started for you and you just got in.
They did.
They started for the way that used to work.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Which is actually kind of nice.
It's kind of nice to actually have a place to put the key.
But also my knee was bumping against it.
It just seemed super old timey.
So I did download this app that Toyota wanted me to download, and then it was like, okay, set up your account with Toyota in order to connect.
And I'm like, what? And then you needed like a Vin number, or it said you could like a QR code.
DNA profile.
DNA profile.
And it said that you can shoot, like, there's a VR code or a QR code on the screen, but I couldn't get the QR code.
And then they were like, okay, enter the Vin number.
And at that point, I gave up.
So anyway, the Kia Sorrento really loved it.
It was great.
But you still got those gasoline car negatives, which is by the time we got to Jasper.
And so, by the way, the weather the day before the wedding, so we were there for my my sister in law was getting married.
She got she got married to an F 18 fighter pilot guy.
Oh, no, I mean, he doesn't do that anymore, but oh, okay.
That's good.
We only have like, six F 18s in the Canadian military, and they may go out somewhere.
Why? It's kind of a big deal.
Yeah, it is a big deal.
They're the elite of the elite.
There's only six of them or something like that.
So congratulations to Alex and Dan.
Lovely wedding.
And the day before the wedding.
So this was going to be an outdoor wedding.
This was their plan.
An outdoor wedding in Jasper in the middle of the winter? Because it's cool.
It's Beautiful.
Was there an F 18 flying over? No Smoke.
But the day before the wedding, it was minus five celsius and sunny like it was perfect.
The day before the wedding.
Really? And then the day of the wedding.
It dropped to -20.
And Windy.
So the wedding.
Could not be held outdoors.
We had to go to the backup location in the Jasper Park Lodge and have it indoors.
So yeah.
It got super frigid midway through the trip.
So starting up the Kia sorento.
It started fine and everything, but it just took so long to warm up.
Like gas cars.
Just takes so long to warm up.
We went into Jasper to fill it up with gas.
It's like people say, one of the advantages of gas cars is they're so quick to fill up.
But I got to tell you when it's -40, it does not feel quick.
Nothing feels quick.
At -40 when you're filling up an SUV with the Tesla.
If we'd had the Tesla And by the way, there's Tesla superchargers on Main Street.
And Jasper.
There wasn't before.
But there isn't.
It wasn't before.
You would hop out of the car, plug it in, get back in your car.
That's all.
You know.
By the way, people, when you own a Test, it knows your car.
Knows your account.
Yeah, it's all connected, but you just have to plug it in and you can get back in your car.
But filling it up with gas it's -40 out.
I mean, it was like -30 something in windy and you're fumbling with the credit card and the gas pump.
Yeah.
The Shell that I go to, and then I haven't done this in a long time.
Thank Jesus.
Is I used to fill up the car at a Shell station, and it was so slow.
Every step.
Would you like a car wash? Yes.
No.
Would you like to enter your air miles? Yes.
No.
And it didn't come up quickly.
And then with the colder it was the logger took for the LCT screen to display.
Yeah, the displays on the pump are always kind of half frozen.
No.
And then, God forbid, something goes wrong with your credit card and you have to do it again or whatever.
So basically, you couldn't get a flight back for what is it, 45 an hour flight from away from us.
It's a 1 hour flight.
And so then on the way back, we drove the Kia sorento back to Edmonton.
We went to the airport.
The cold weather was starting to set in and on the west coast there's been blizzards and stuff.
So Vancouver had it worse.
Probably Seattle as well.
Where massive blizzards in Vancouver? And so we're nearby to Vancouver, and a lot of planes are coming from Vancouver, so the delays start to happen.
The cancellations start to happen.
We got to the airport and we thought we were good because we were there like a couple of hours before the flight and it was still on the board, it was still on time.
Oh, dear.
We went through the check in process and we got to our gate and then it was just a sort of a series of announcements about delay, delay, delay.
We were there for 4 hours and then after announcing all these delays.
Are your flights canceled by sealing.
So question though about is it hard to get a one way rental because you're not taking the car back? So how does that work? Is it more expensive? Do they let you do it? Does it depend where you're going? Yeah, well, I'll get to that.
Just a couple more things about the airport I thought were interesting.
So we're standing there waiting at the gate and there's all these announcements for all these flights and they're saying things like, oh, well, the pilot is here, but the crew is not here, they're coming in on a flight from somewhere and so that's delayed, et cetera, et cetera.
And there was a flight supposed to be leaving for Saskatoon.
It was -35.
And so they're like, okay, well, we can't board yet because the plane is too cold.
Oh, no.
I don't know if the heater on the plane was broken or something or I'm not sure what, but they said, oh, we got to hook up a heat cart to the plane and warm it up before people can get on.
And so there's some kind of external heater that they hook up to these planes.
And so they kept giving these announcements.
It's like, okay, well, we can't board until it's ten Celsius inside the plane and it's four Celsius now.
My guess is they would have to run the engines on the tarmac at great expense to heat up the plane.
And my guess.
Is also that it would be a slow process to get it from -30 or whatever it was to room.
Temperature.
So they probably be like warming up a car.
They'd have to use all this jet fuel to warm it up.
So they use these external heaters.
I guess.
But it was like, okay, well, it's now six degrees inside the plane, we could almost board.
I assume that flight was eventually canceled.
Six degrees.
Celsius, which is room temperatures, is about 20 degree.
Wow.
And you know what Brian, a lot of people across the continent are having these problems, moved from west to east and went on after you.
And lots of people listening, I'm sure, are dealing with this.
Yeah, and it speaks to clean energy again, because the same things that apply to electric cars versus gas cars apply to gasoline airplanes.
There are advantages in the cold weather to gasoline type fuel, and there's also disadvantages, well, I imagine if they were electric.
They would have got out the combustion heater as well.
To heat it quickly.
Yeah.
Or who knows.
But anyway, so they cancelled our flight and didn't tell us anything about what to do.
So we're like, okay, well we got to scramble and get a hotel nearby.
So we ended up spending two days stuck for two days at the hotel, the Radisson Airport Hotel in Edmonton.
And we had booked the flights through a travel agent.
So one of the benefits of that is that they have to deal with these problems.
Really? You booked through a travel agent? Yeah, it's just like an online travel agent.
It's not like you're traveling around the world, you're hopping to the next city.
Pretty much.
Why would you use a travel agent? It's a perk we have with a points card that we've got.
Okay, so you decided to drive instead.
Yeah, well, we tried to get them to rebook the flight and the best they could do was December 24.
Really? Which is tomorrow.
They're not paying for your hotel, are they? I don't think so.
I mean, we're going to get a refund and maybe we'll get a hotel credit or something like that.
We have this passenger rights thing in Canada now, so they're not supposed to totally be able to screw you over anymore.
But I don't know if we'll see how that goes.
When we were finally leaving the hotel on the morning that we left, this lady came into the hotel with her luggage and she said, I'm back.
I was at the airport and they canceled my flight again.
So I got to check in again.
That's not good.
Then it's Christmas.
It's the worst time of year.
Yeah.
So we were going to have to spend like four more days to waiting for the rebooked flight.
So you start looking into rental cars and we quickly discovered that everybody was basically outlawing one way rentals because they would have had no more rental cars left in Edmonton.
Right after the flights are canceled, they're going to be out of cars.
I see.
Everybody starts calling the car rental places because these are drivable distances for us here in the west.
So nobody would give us a one way car rental either.
And you try and book online and same thing, one way rental, no, not allowed.
So what we ended up doing was we went online to Enterprise and booked a two week rental for the car and the idea being that I would drive it back to Edmonton in two weeks.
Are you insane? Well, again, I'm the retired guy.
I've got nothing better to do.
Jesus, Brian.
Really? And there was four of us.
Like everybody wanted to get back for Christmas and everything.
So I thought, well, what the heck, two weeks from now I could drive the car back to Edmonton if I had to, hoping that we could work something out where I wouldn't have to do that.
But anyway, so, yeah, we went to pick up the car at Enterprise.
We had a book for 08:00 A.m.
And we said, okay, well, this is our plan.
We're going to drive it back in two weeks, but we'd rather just drop it in Vagina.
Is it possible you could do that? And so they fiddled around with the computer and they found a car that they were going to allow that for.
There's a bit of an extra charge because apparently they replate the car like they put Saskatchewan plates on it once it arrives.
So I think we still kind of lucked out that they found a car that they were willing to let go on the one way journey.
But maybe there's other people stuck in Vagina that need to get to Edmonton.
So maybe there's a massive yeah, I think I saw some of the news, actually.
Yeah, that's what we did at the airport.
Shout out to Enterprise Car Rental.
They saved Christmas for us.
It was a Christmas miracle.
I don't have to drive back to Edmonton two weeks from now.
They let us do this one way rental.
We did an eight hour drive yesterday and made it.
There was one other thing I wanted to mention about the car rental.
When you rent the car on the website it says, do you want to offset the carbon from your car rental? And it's basically an extra charge.
How much do you think they charge to offset the carbon on your rental? Is it a one time fee or a kilometer fee? It's just a one time fee.
$50? No, it was a dollar $25.
That's one seedling maybe.
I guess one seedling is better than nothing.
But that seemed unusually low.
Well, why wouldn't it if it made you if you believed that, if you if you bought into that, then yeah, that's great.
Buck 25 to not have any emissions.
But it is something I want to look into further because I do want to take some flights in the next few years now that I'm retired and I would like to offset that carbon in some kind of way.
But yeah, that's my long wow, that is something.
I wanted you to take a train for part of it so you'd have a trains plane as an automobile story for the rest of your life.
You could tell at the parties, but apparently, like, Vancouver was so much worse.
There was one airplane that the people were stuck for 13 hours on the tarmac.
Man, that is first nightmare.
It's tortured.
That should not be allowed.
No, it shouldn't.
I don't think it is allowed.
I think they passed laws against it, haven't they? Isn't it like 2 hours, 3 hours or something? That's the max.
Yeah, there's a law, they don't follow it.
I heard the passengers had to resort to cannibalism.
Well, you start to think, that guy looks pretty tasty over there after 13 hours you've been eyeing them up.
Yeah, well, they went through all the nuts and pretzels airplane.
That sucks.
That sucks.
The pilots you'd think would be like, I can't fly now.
I've just sat here for 13 hours.
I can't fly across the country for 5 hours.
Come on.
That doesn't seem to work out either.
After a couple of hours you got to just call it and go back.
Yeah, just even if you have to board off one of those little ladder trucks.
Just get off and walk on the tarmac into the airport.
Yeah.
I'm thinking if that ever happens to me, I'll just fake a heart attack or something and then I'll have to let you heart attack Stockton and his retirement strategies tips so you can begin book one day.
Fake a heart attack on a plane.
Let's talk about my worries and woes.
I have a Prius as our main car right now.
I've been trying to replace it with an EV.
Right.
The Prius is now, like I said, almost six years old.
Our five year lease ran out last spring and I was thinking five years, man, that's too long.
When we leased it, EVs will be I'll be wanting to get an EV.
Didn't work out because there's just not enough stock around and tells us that the Model three was in fact not $35,000 and they've gone up ever since in price.
So that wasn't doable.
And the other people didn't follow the suit too well anyway, so I'm still looking for an EV and that's my situation.
However, we had a scare with the Prius, a mechanical scare, which I've never had before.
Now, we've never had the Prius for more than five years before, but nothing has gone wrong.
Nothing rock solid like every little knob and everything, every hook, every cup holder, everything is perfect on those vehicles and that's why I like them.
However, my wife heard a gurgling sound in the cabin a couple of months ago.
And so the way the combustion engine works is you have antifreeze that circulates through the engine with a water pump.
Otherwise the friction from the way a combustion engine works with pistons rubbing against metal up and down that it gets too hot.
But they use that in the cabin to heat it.
So there's a little radiator in the cabin and a fan that blows so that's your waste heat from gasoline being only up to 20% to 27%.
Efficient electric cars, of course, are 90% efficient, but you get to use that waste heat.
And an electric car, you need to use 5000 watts to heat the sucker.
So I checked the antifreeze reservoir and it was empty, or empty ish and that's a bad thing because that goes into the engine as well.
So it was a problem.
We had to fill it with antifreeze and it kept leaking and there was nothing on the ground.
So I looked it up and of course, the first thing I find is head gasket gone, and it's beyond the five year warranty.
Yeah, that happened to me once on my dadson.
Well, that's a very old car from very old times.
But did you get it fixed, or did you blow it up for your phone? It wasn't crazy expensive.
What I remember.
Well, it's thousands of dollars.
I looked at $4,000, and the only thing that let me sleep at night was the fact that the car is worth so ridiculously much used that we could finally sell it and just turn it over, and we wouldn't really lose money on it or anything at all.
We'd still gain money for a down payment on a new car, even if it was another prius, however it turns out and this is a fluke.
So in the prius, there's a catalytic converter.
I want to get two into the woods here, into the weeds here, rather.
But the fluid actually goes through the catalytic converter on a prius.
And the reason is, this is an engineering play to increase the fuel economy.
So, because the catalytic converter is full of precious metals, a people are stealing them, by the way, off of priuses because they're oversized.
So stealing off a priuses, I've seen lots of videos on YouTube of people doing it really quickly.
They pump it up in the middle of the night, and it's gone.And it's a lot of money, so hopefully they don't steal mine.
My son said it wouldn't be ironic if they sold it just before you got it fixed or just after you got it fixed.
Anyway.
So, basically, they have to replace the catalytic converter because there's a fluid loop that goes through it.
The antifreeze actually runs a fluid loop through the catalytic converter to keep it cool.
And without getting too technical, it's because combustion cars have to change the mixture of gasoline.
They have to over mix the gasoline with the air to cool down the catalytic converter.
So there's sensors in your catalytic converter.
O, two sensors that keep it temperature sensors to keep it within a certain range.
So they have to reduce the fuel economy by increasing the mixture.
While the prius doesn't have to do that, it can keep a pretty fine mixture most of the time because it's cooling it in the fluid loop.
Another advantage of that is it heats the cabin quicker.
Because the catalytic converter heats up instantly.
You don't have to wait for the engine block to heat, which is a big thing.
The catalytic converter, the smoke, the exhaust that goes out of those things heats them up quickly.
So then your cabin ostensibly heats up quicker.
So that's what's leaking, and it's leaking into the gas.
The mechanic, apparently, after long searches, actually sniffed the gas, sniffed the exhaust, and said that it was in there.
But my wife and if I was there, I would have said, what are you doing? But she said, Is it covered under warranty? Because they gave her a price of $2,000.
And I've got problems with the other car that I don't need this.
We've got a kid going on a trip, and we were just strapped, but they said it might be and one guy went to another guy and another guy went to another guy and eventually talked to the manager.
The manager said, yeah, it definitely is.
We we've had these before because it's part of the hybrid system, I guess, which is guaranteed for eight years.
On most cars that have hybrid systems they consider this part of the hybrid system.
So it's guaranteed.
I hope so, anyway.
I hope they don't change their mind.
What a relief.
But yeah, it's a huge relief.
It's like a Christmas miracle because we almost took back the kids Christmas presents.
Not literally, but it would have been a lean Christmas, that's for sure.
So that's great.
And speaking of which, I had had it on Twitter with you know who and I canceled my Cybertruck reservation.
Let's face it, Brian, there's no chance.
I don't care how long he takes to get the Cybertruck out.
There's no chance I could afford one.
But I've also lost faith in just the fact that the Cybertruck isn't a stupid idea.
Like I don't have faith in him anymore.
And Mr.
Musk maybe it is, but I kind of relied on him to say that, yeah, this is a good idea, but it could be a complete bust for all I know.
It doesn't matter.
I have no money to buy the Cybertruck.
So it was just wishful thinking that I took my $150 Canadian back and I bought a gift for my wife, which I will be talking about because it has to do with I wanted gardening.
Okay, so growing weed then.
Sure.
Exactly what you could do in Canada.
Also, we talked a lot about you going to the next city over Saskatoon a lot and there being a Tesla supercharger there for what it is really cold and by the way in Denver.
It went from plus five celsius to -15 so 20 degrees celsius in 1 hour.
I mean the homeless people were caught off guard and the infrastructure must have frozen.
They call it a flash freeze.
And that yesterday and the day before I think has been happening all across.
But anyway, the superchargers in the one city that we have between our two major cities where we live went kaput except for one stall with two cables.
But yeah this is an issue across all the third party chargers as well.
But what happened here is that someone made a call and they got fixed in a day they're all working now for Christmas because people were anxious because a lot of people going back and forth for Christmas and they need these things to work or they can't make the.
Trip.
Well, I would be worried about that, too.
It's tesla being headquartered in California.
You would be worried that they may not have enough people here to be able to do that.
Well, they must have had either people who are floating around because there's so many superchargers or their own texts.
I don't know if the text at the Shop in Saskatoon can actually do it, but they fix them instantly.
And that's great, because everywhere else says, well, we've got to order it parts for two months or six weeks.
And all these other kinds of chargers.
Speaking of Denver out of spec reviews the YouTube channel that I like because it went down to -30 I think last night he's testing all kinds of things.
He's got Teslas, he's got Kias, he's got old Leafs that he's let get cold.
And he's testing the charging speed and the range because they don't get to do that.
We get this all the time where we live, but Denver doesn't always get such an extreme So he's, like, using the opportunity.
He stayed up all night to do this so that he can do all these tests.
Now, he's going to make a fortune of the YouTube content, but, yeah, he'll be able to test it out and we'll see how that goes.
He did say that a cold Tesla that's just been sitting there in -30 well, it wasn't always -30, but just sitting there without any heater plugged in.
Said it wouldn't charge right away.
So it took an hour to sort of get the system going, to heat up the battery enough that it would even start charging.
And, of course, batteries charge slower in the winter because they're cold.
They can't accept the charge that fast.
And you can leave your electric car for a few days unplugged if you have to, but you shouldn't.
So as we went to Jasper I left my Tesla plugged into our house.
Our home charger.
I just sort of set the charge level at 50% so it didn't need to charge while we were gone.
But it could always draw from the juice from the house to keep the battery warm as it dropped to minus.
Well, this is kind of sad, Bride, because we've always advertised ourselves as the experts on cold weather because it gets down to -40 here.
So the cold weather EV experts of the worldwide ones.
Better than Norway? Better.
Than Alaska.
Well, Denver's got some testing to do, too.
But he said that all the electrify America Chargers.
Were not working all of them because they're only good to a certain temperature it's like -16 -20 or something I might have it later in the show I'll check my notes.
That doesn't make sense.
No.
They said they didn't work.
They only rated to that.
So he knew that it's -32 or something here today as well and doesn't, including the wind, which is making it ungodly uninhabitable.
We should not be here.
We should be in Hawaii right now.
We should be.
This is terrible.
Let's see here.
I think my Leaf is unplugged my Nissan Leaf, my electric car is unplugged because for some reason it charges when it heats the battery.
So the battery heater.
Comes on at -17 celsius to -20 Celsius, which is quite cold.
So it comes on and it cycles off at minus twelve, once it heats up to minus twelve, but for some reason it can't operate it unless the car is charging.
And it's not just my car, it's the lease.
I even assume that the new lease, because they act pretty much the same way, that way.
So if you're just leaving your car, then it charges up to 100%, regardless of what you set it to charge to.
And of course, you don't want to leave an electric car at 100% because that stresses the battery for any length of time.
So what I've been doing, Brian, is I've been unplugging it and plugging it back in because I'm not using it because the heater isn't working.
So if another car is around, I'll just use the Prius or whatever to make shopping trips.
So I have been unplugging.
It could go for, I think, three days, eating the battery, and then I just plug it back in and let it go up again to 100% and then unplug it.
And yeah, that's what I have to do.
Unfortunately, other cars are not like that, but the Leaf is kind of wonky in that way.
Speaking of it, and it's still cold in the Leaf because your heater no heater, cabin heater is no heater.
Still looking at the diesel heater, it's a sad thing, okay, it's a sad thing, but I've been managing.
I did have a hard time the other day because it was frost on the inside of the window.
It was like -28 or something celsius and I had frost on the inside, because whenever you scrape the frost off it just falls under the dash as snow, essentially, and then that just evaporates in the sun or whatever, goes right back on the window again, if you don't have any heat blowing on it.
My scraper, for some reason, the inside of the window doesn't scrape very well, so it's like little lines scratching little lines in there trying to see and get my daughter at school.
But the school is over for now, for a while anyway.
I made it.
My son tempered house.
My house built as a passive solar house.
Though the other day was -32 and the furnace did not have to come on.
It was heated above the temperature, thanks to the sun just shining in the south windows and the fact that the house is decently insulated.
Modern houses, I always say when I bring this up, are much more insulated than my passive solar house.
And if you're new to the show, james lives in a two storey house that was designed as paso, lots of windows facing south super thick walls based on a design from I guess the 1970s here in Saskatchewan.
And there was a handful of these houses built and James was lucky enough.
Yeah, thanks to the 70s oil crisis, they decided to study it in a house called Saskatchewan House.
And this was sort of built after that.
It skipped out a bit on some of the installation, but they did things like double two x four offset stick construction so that there would be no thermal bridging.
You wouldn't have a direct contact between the indoors and outdoors.
And add things and they came up with the heat exchanger there for that house.
They invented a heat exchanger which is now used around the world in your house as well.
So some updates to past stories.
Yeah, the guy in Denver, the Autospec reviews YouTube channel guy says the new electrify America BTC charging stations do not work below zero fahrenheit which is -17 he said make sure you're not relying on one of these new stations for the next few days.
And these are brand new.
Brian.
These are brand new and they're not working below that so that's BS.
You got to give us a Tesla, Brian.
If Tesla went completely bonkers, they could be the world's ubiquitous charging network because they got that right, didn't they? No, the charging network is like the uptime is kind of amazing and they are starting to open that up to other people and apparently when they are broken, someone can get to them and fix them.
Like apparently which is not always the case with everyone else.
So they got to figure that out.
Okay, so another update.
So we were talking last episode about the fusion energy breakthrough, which we went quite deep into, but there was a little detail that showed up here on Bloomberg that I just thought was interesting.
The laser that they used for this experiment was in the movie Star Trek into Darkness.
They needed a location for that movie and it was at this national Ignition Facility lab where this laser is that they used for this fusion reaction.
Yeah, it's in the movie Star Trek into Darkness.
I thought that was kind of wild.
What year was that? Was that like ten years ago? That one is about ten years ago, I think.
Yeah, it's one of the modern Star Trek movies, but the laser was around then.
It's a military operation.
I'm surprised they got in and used it.
Yeah.
And possibly my favorite thing about this fusion stuff is that it always does look kind of cool.
Like these giant they really look like movie props.
They look like movie sets.
They look like science fiction.
It's maybe not practical as an energy source, but damn cool.
Not yet.
Anyway, it seems like it's going to be a while.
So if you are in the United States and most of you are.
We know that who listen to our show, as most shows have a largest audience in the United States.
Go buy an EV now if you're thinking about buying one.
Because not right now, but in January 1 or February, the first two months or so will get you a tax credit for all brands because you're going to have to look into this yourself.
But some American built EVs, we just found out that aren't eligible for the tax credit.
Now, like the Bolt EV may be able to claim half that credit, perhaps because the new tax credit says that your EV has to have its minerals sourced in the United States or countries that it has free trade with, which is Canada and a bunch of other countries.
And I don't think China counts, but it doesn't.
And that's a problem.
So if your batteries are built in China, as a lot of them often are, that can be a problem.
So, yeah, check about the EVs that you want to buy, the brand you want to buy and look into that because apparently the government just said that we'll figure it out in March.
We're going to need until March to figure this out to see which EVs, because it's hard to figure out how much of your car comes from the United States and how much of it comes from outside a free trade zone or something like that.
So is this like an interim ruling then, ruling that they don't even have an exact date? But if you are looking to buy a car, know that you're probably going to get a better tax credit than you might otherwise get.
Now, it might be the same depending on which brand you buy.
But the US.
Automakers are struggling to keep to get up to speed on this because they're going to have to shift their supply chains in order to make sure that some of them may not even try entirely.
But in order to get the full tax credit, which they're going to want to have, they're going to have to change things around.
That's not going to happen overnight.
It could be a year or so or longer before you're able to get that same tax break again.
So if you're thinking about if you're on defense, look into that.
Yeah.
So story here from the Guardian.
There's been some concern that emissions in the EU might go up this year because of all the problems with Russia and trying to get off Russian gas.
And so there have been some coal plants that have been kind of fired up again or increased their output because of the energy concerns going on in Europe.
So there was some concern that the emissions for Europe this year were going to go up, but it turns out they did not.
So there was some coal brought online that they weren't expecting to.
But the EU has been doing apparently enough other things with their regulations that overall, the emissions still did go down this year, which is great news.
That is great news.
And this is the Russian invasion of Ukraine changed things around, and still they were able to manage an emissions reduction, which is very interesting.
I don't think we know exactly why that is.
They probably are still looking into that.
These things take time.
But that's interesting.
Well, we know that the EU has been more strict on things like vehicle emissions.
So presumably all the kind of legislation that they've been working on for the last few years is starting to pay off.
Well, that's incredible.
If it is, Brian, that's because we look for that to happen down the road.
And if we start to see that, then that's pretty exciting stuff.
And it can be frustrating as those of us who watch this closely and watch it every day, because these kinds of agreements get made all the time, of agreements made, rules made to reduce emissions.
But overall, you still kind of see oil use creeping up a lot of the time, and it can be discouraging.
But we're trying to get the entire planet to move on all of this, and unfortunately, it just takes time.
Okay, well, I have something that tickles my fancy.
Here it is.
Somebody who drove past a Tesla semi truck and opened his window and recorded it.
So I have the recording for you.
But you know what it's like to drive by a semi with your window up, right? It's a noisy experience.
And this is, I would say, a little above city speed, not quite freeway speed, sort of expressway speed or something like that in the city.
The start of the recording is the window is down and he opens it immediately so it gets a bit louder.
But this is what it sounds like.
I mean, that's it.
Yes, that's freaking it sounds like now.
Yeah.
There's so many advantages to EVs that are just side advantages.
Imagine a world where it's not frighteningly noisy.
We forget how.
We just get used to it, right? Like, I grew up in a house right near a highway, and you just get used to that awful sound of semi trucks all day and all night.
And we don't have to live with that in the future.
I live near a highway that comes to the end because I live at the edge of the city.
So the highway comes to the end and the semi slow down, and they use their engine brakes, even though the signs tell them there's a fine if you do well, guess what? They don't give an F.
And those engine brakes are expensive.
What they do is they use the engine instead of the brake pads to slow the truck down, making the truck the engine sort of fight the wheels.
It's connected to the wheels, and then the engine is working in reverse or whatever, and it's just fighting the and it's just noisy as heck if the wind is coming from that and it's hell.
But you know what? Electric trucks like the Tesla Semi don't have engines to do that.
They have regenerative braking, the same things you and I have in our electric cars, which is great for them.
It's great for going down steep grades and not wearing out your brake pads or your engine because you don't have to gear down when you're going down those grades and make a mistake because that's apparently something that happens.
That's why you see run offs for brake run offs for semis.
Well, the regenerative braking just makes more electricity.
It makes the motors work in reverse and charges your battery up with your heavy load and is relatively quiet.
Well, I drove to Vancouver about two years ago in the early days of the podcast in my Tesla and I drove through the Rocky Mountains and I would always watch the regenerative breaking when I was going down a mountain and I had it set to range on the thing.
And the range one time going down a mountain jumped up 5 km.
Well, that's cool.
Yeah, because Herald wasn't 5 km up the next mountain or something similar.
Even in the Prius you could do that.
You can watch the regenerative breaking work too.
So that's cool.
Now, we used to do that in the mountains all the time.
So the US Postal Services is sort of reversing their course on electrification.
Yeah, this is a story we've covered every few months here on the show.
Of course, advocates for clean energy have been arguing that the US Postal Service should go hard on electric vehicles.
They came out with a very wishy washy, started out as maybe 20% electric vehicles as they're looking to replace their fleet.
They have a gigantic fleet of vehicles in the US Postal Service which are coming due for replacement anyway.
So they have increased the amount of electric vehicles a little bit over time and now they have finally given in and gone to 100% electrical purchases for vehicles starting in 2026.
So 75% of vehicles in the next few years and then by 2026 it's going to have to be 100% electric.
That's good.
It's a perfect it's it'd be stupid, let's put it this way, it'd be stupid not to because, you know, that sort of sector is they have it now, they have the trucks, they have the technology, it's shorter range and you're wasting money if you don't go EV.
That's the situation we're in with small local short haul trucking, let's call it.
So yeah, it'd be stupid not to.
No.
And the only issue might be supply of them.
But of course, everybody's ramping up and with the Inflation Reduction Act in the US that is encouraging all industry to ramp up production of all kinds of electric vehicles.
So this should be doable.
I noticed one of the suppliers might be oshkosh defense, like a defense contractor.
It's kind of weird.
So they're building electric vehicles for the post office.
Why not like Ford or somebody else? I mean, if someone gives them a billion dollars, why not? So they recently pledged to go 40% EV and the new purchase plan gets them to 75% by 2026.
You know, Brian, the year changes a couple of days to 2023 and then 2026 is going to look awfully close, isn't it? It's going to look pretty close, yeah, that's right.
Also change the number on your checks when you're signing checks at the grocery store.
Right? Because if you do the checks that I write was the last time you wrote a check? You probably have I haven't 2 hours.
Really? Long story.
Okay, we won't get into it.
So we've been talking about solar farms on formal coal plants, which is cool because what they do is they use the infrastructure that's there.
Because you have a coal power plant, you need to build a whole bunch of power transformers and power lines to connect to the rest of the grid.
So it's kind of convenient to do that.
Well, I found an example of where they're doing it.
On an abandoned nuclear power plant.
The site of the project is the Rancho Seaco, a former SMUD nuclear facility that was taken offline in 1989 after a series of troublesome incidents and a vote of no confidence from the public.
So the public basically had enough and said no, they shut the sucker down, which seems inconceivable now.
Well, 1989, that was the year The Simpsons started, so maybe that had something to do with it.
I've seen videos where they talk about the Simpsons has not helped the nuclear industry.
People actually think about that.
I didn't, but three eyed fish and all that.
So the 2000 acre site was eventually repurposed for the consumes natural gas power plant, which is still there, but they also now have added 1000 solar in addition to the 1000 natural gas.
So yeah, very interesting.
And why not? You have the property and apparently there was some property there to put all this stuff up.
So why not, why not add solar and make use of the utility? No, we need grid connections for all this clean energy and they often already exist.
Well, let's get into some of our main stories of the show before the new year happens.
We may have a new year's countdown if we keep going long on the show, but let's go.
Hey, it's the year end spectacular.
We're going long.
So this is a story from Electric Autonomy Canada study shows EV's potential to increase utility revenues but reduce customer costs.
So this is a study that happened in California and basically the gist of this is that particularly in California, there are lots of electric vehicles now.
So basically electricity consumption has gone up.
Like this is a natural thing, but utilities in California and here in Canada, most places are heavily regulated.
Like they operate often as a monopoly.
So since they're a monopoly, you don't want to let them just charge whatever rates they want.
If it was a true monopoly, they could just charge $5 a kilowatt hour and just make all the money in the world.
Because they're a regulated monopoly.
They're the only ones licensed to sell power.
But because of that, regulations exist so that they can't just take all the money they want from the customers.
They have to play fair as a monopoly.
So basically, as consumption goes up, the prices have to come down because the utilities are only allowed to make so much profit.
So it's really the first glimpse of the future that we are eventually going to see of really abundant clean energy and the prices starting to come down.
This is a somewhat artificial price is starting to come down because it's more from the regulations than from anything.
But it's a glimpse of the future.
The more electricity is made, the more money the utilities make and the less they have to charge people.
Well, that's an interesting study per kilowatt.
Where was that study? Electric Autonomy Canada.
Electric autonomy Canada is the website and the report is called electric vehicles are driving rates down.
And it's a study that looked at three California utilities.
Very interesting stuff.
So Google that if you want to know more.
Toyota or pardon me, toyota tokyo mandates rooftop solar.
This is interesting because Japan has kind of poopooed solar and wind.
They should have been on top of this a long time ago and they're only now doing it.
And you know, nuclear has been shut down for many years now since the Fukushima disaster.
And they shut down a lot of the nuclear.
You think they would have just hopped on the renewables right away, but they haven't.
But now they're really starting to come on board.
The Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly has approved new provisions to make solar installations mandatory for new homes.
The rules apply to homes with total rooftop areas of more than 20 buildings with rooftops smaller than 2000 m².
So some other buildings too, that aren't homes.
They will also require businesses to install solar arrays on 30% of the rooftop surfaces.
Some parts of the city could face requirements for 85% of all rooftops to be covered by PV.
That's pretty significant.
The new rules will require developers and installers to use solar panels from manufacturers that respect human rights too.
So there's some rules in there that you can't just buy any solar panels.
And Japan is not a solar panel manufacturer to my knowledge.
So I'm not sure if that means not China or or what that means exactly because I haven't heard about solar panels coming from a place that doesn't respect human rights aside from China, which is quite obvious.
And arguable, we seem to put up with it because half our stuff comes from China and three quarters of our stuff.
Yeah.
No, we've got all these rooftops all over the world.
They eventually will have all kinds of solar on them, and that will lead to the kind of abundance that we are planning for and hoping for that will make electricity even cheaper in the future.
This is for new homes.
Okay.
Not existing homes.
But we're kind of at a threshold now where if you're building something, you might as well include the solar because it's probably a bit cheaper to the factor the solar in.
When you're building a home, the wiring and everything is already pre done and accommodating for the solar.
And why not? I mean, yeah, you're outlaying a bit more money.
It's kind of like adding 5% to super insulate, but then you save that 5% in a short period of time that pays for that.
And it could be a few years, it could be less.
Yeah.
No, building codes have to change and plan for the future, for sure.
Okay.
So we often talk about wind turbines on the show, often gigantic wind turbines.
And I find this stuff super fascinating, just almost based on the size alone.
As we've discussed, these things are incredibly huge and long and difficult to transport.
So there's a story here this week on Electric World's.
Most powerful wind turbine blades arrive for installation.
So this is in Denmark.
These are 15 megawatt wind turbines.
These are, if not the biggest ones, the big ones.
Yeah, this is 15.
MW is around the biggest in the world right now.
But I wanted to mention offshore, we should point out that's, right, these are offshore wind turbines, which are the biggest ones.
But, yeah, they sent me down a bit of a YouTube rabbit hole, which I thought was really interesting.
Vestas is the company that makes these in Denmark, and they've got a really interesting YouTube channel where they show you some of the process of how they make these things.
And so step number one is a gigantic long factory.
Like, the factory is just super, super long.
And everything in it, all the equipment is all super, super long.
They make some of these things in molds, so they have to have these giant molds that are like, my God, like football fields long that then they have to then open up and somehow get these things out and transport them.
But, yeah, the YouTube channel gets a promotion for the company.
So it's a little bit of, like, slick promotion.
But you also get to see, actually how these things are kind of built, which I found totally fascinating.
Yeah.
And they are building these factories sometimes.
Now, if you have a really large offshore wind installation, they'll build them right at the shore because, as we said before, the hard part is transporting on roads because, well, it's very hard, especially the offshore ones.
That was one thing I was wondering about.
Yeah, it would make sense to but these factories are not cheap or easy to build, so they'd have to kind of think twice about where they're going to put them.
But it makes sense to build a new factory right by the shore.
Maybe they can make the factories modular like the World Cup Stadium that they're taking apart and putting somewhere else.
But we talked about that a couple of shows ago.
Yeah.
So that's, you know, it's the blades that can't be modular.
Like you can put little tubes on top like they're building.
Yeah.
Unfortunately, they're building a cell phone tower half a block away from me now.
A big one, probably 5G.
So the tube that is the structure in the middle is modular.
You put one little tube on top of another until it gets up there.
But the blade can't be I don't think anyone's invented a blade that is not one piece yet.
Right.
Yeah.
These blades is one of those football field size, literally like and beyond.
Yeah.
There's one of those cell towers going up near me and I was surprised how big around it is.
Yeah, me too.
Mine is not up yet, so we'll see how big it gets.
Maybe it's to give us faster communication for the clean energy show.
I don't know.
Yeah.
So Lyft is going to incentivize EV owners.
Lyft is the what do you call it? Ride sharing.
Ride sharing.
App based ride sharing.
Uber and Lyft are two different companies.
The main ones, I think, in the United States and Canada and many other parts of the world.
Drivers in California this is California only who own EVs can earn an extra $150 a week.
So if this is your job and you're not making a killing doing this, an extra 150 a week or 600 a month ain't bad for owning an EV.
I mean, Brian, in the States, with the incentives and the things and this and that, you could probably use half that just for the lease of an EV.
So if you're not driving an EV in California, you work for Lyft, you're crazy.
Go buy an EV, sell your beater or whatever you're driving and get a brand new EV with full warranty coverage and that will cover the cost plus your gas.
My goodness.
This is a great incentive, actually.
It caps out at $8,100, apparently.
I guess you get $150 for each week.
You complete at least 50 lift ride.
So it's not for your casual person, but that's not crazy either.
So the bonus caps out at $8100 and that's a fifth of the cost of a $40,000 new electric vehicle.
So yeah, a five year lease.
Basically it's covering the cost of a vehicle.
Right.
I mean, that's essentially what this is doing.
And then you save a crap load on gas.
A crap load, like crap load, especially if you can charge at home for a part of that time.
No, that's amazing.
There's another advantage here, Brian.
A DV go fast charging stations that receive a percentage discount up to 45% off if the EV go fast charging stations are working.
And if it's chilly, or if there's a bit of humidity in the air, or if the moon is full, they will not be working.
So that's up to 45% off if you have gold and platinum rewards status on the platform.
Because ostensibly you would charge at home and probably have to top up at some point during the day if you're doing it full time or just a long shift.
So boom.
Or I don't know what the charges are compared to home, but you might actually be competitive with home and just do a fast charge on the road.
And a non EV go public charging stations.
Lyft drivers can use Lyft's debit card.
Lyft Direct, it's called, to get 1% to 7% cash back.
And at home, the company has provided a discount of $140 off level two chargers from Wallbox, which is about 20% off.
That's decent.
That's one great way a company can decarbonize.
And it makes perfect sense.
No, it's great.
Okay, so we've got a story here from Hydrogen Inside, which is a website that covers the hydrogen industry.
And I just thought it was interesting because it reminded me of what we were talking about a few weeks ago with the Apple iPhone.
So Apple has introduced a clean charging feature on your phones.
I look for it on mine.
It's only available in the US.
So I couldn't see it.
It wasn't available in Canada yet.
But I think with the latest operating system on your iPhone, if you go into the battery section and you choose the sort of battery charging section under the settings, you can set your iPhone so that it will charge when the grid is cleanest.
So in the US, apparently, they have figured out when the grid is cleanest.
And so if everybody follows that with their iPhones, it can actually make a difference in terms of carbon intensity.
But this is sort of vaguely I mean, it's a much simplified explanation, but they're looking to do something similar in the hydrogen industry because one of the issues with a hydrogen is it's best to make it from clean energy sources.
Right? If you make hydrogen from purely solar and wind, it's a very clean green technology.
But if you're getting your power from the grid to make hydrogen, it can be varying degrees of dirty.
And so true, green hydrogen is made from clean, reliable sources.
But the article here on Hydrogen Insight is hourly electricity matching is the only reliable way to reduce emissions from green hydrogen.
And it's basically a similar kind of thing of we really have to keep track of where the energy is coming from if we're going to make proper, clean green hydrogen.
That's good, because there's going to be a lot of companies that are going to be saying that ours is blue, purple, gray, and you don't know what that means.
You don't really know how good their hydrogen is, how clean it is.
So this will be one way to keep track of that.
Now, one of the problems I have in looking for electric car is the ship shortages, which have screwed up everything.
They've made my Prius extremely expensive on the used market, which is a good thing, but it's been kind of weird.
So chip shortages are going to continue through 2023, says an article in Ours Technica.
We expect continued disruption to the global semiconductor industry and therefore continued supply chain shortages in the automotive industry through 2023, according to a new report in the Financial Times.
So that report was originally in the Financial Times.
The head of Ansemi said there is nothing you can do now to change 2023.
It's set in stone.
Basically, we'll be adding capacity every quarter, every month in 2023 to meet our demand, but still not going to happen.
The problem began during the Pandemic and is associated with shutdowns around the world.
So what happened is the Pandemic shutdowns way back in 2020 in March, and afterwards the automakers shut down temporarily.
So the chipmaker said, okay, you don't want our chips, we're going to start filling orders for other people who do want them.
And now that the automakers want them again, they can't get them.
It's as simple as that.
So as vaccines became available in production restarted, the silicon factories that would have made chips for automakers had already switched production capacity to other customers.
And chip plants are running flat out to meet demand.
They have been for some time, but have warned that the problem was not going to be solved anytime soon.
Consequently, automakers have had to reduce production.
It's a terrible time to be an automaker nowadays, or even idle certain lines of their cars and trucks and SUVs.
In some cases, car companies have shipped vehicles minus certain features due to being able to unable to get the 70 Kentucky needed to have those features.
Example, Brian.
General Motors has had to revise its plan to build 400,000 electric vehicles by the end of 2023, and that's been pushed back six months because of the chip shortage, which is too bad.
That's not good.
We wish that would not happen.
And the analysts at Auto Forecast Solutions expect the chip shortage will result in around 3 million fewer vehicles being built in 2023.
Which means that my car means for me, my used car is still expensive, so I don't have too much pressure, although my mortgage is becoming due and we got to wrap up our line of credit, and I don't want to fold that into the new mortgage and, oh, it's just hell.
In fact, we're working on the mortgage application as we speak because it has to be in tonight because apparently our mortgage broker said there could be another rate increase that we want to avoid.
Yikes.
Brian has been a fairly incredible year.That started with Mr.
Putin, that piece of garbage, that vodka drenched piece of garbage invading Ukraine, and that actually helped clean energy.
Yeah, that's kind of a weird thing, but it is true.
It really helped spark everybody towards getting off of fossil fuels because nobody wanted Putin's oil and gas, and I'm sure he wanted the opposite.
He wanted gas prices to go up, which they did.
But then people said, no, you're not going to take advantage of this.
We're not going to buy your gas.
And that's caused everyone else who needed their gas to come up with Plan B.
Plan B being a heat pump, for one, to get off natural gas heating for buildings and things like the US.
Agreeing to ship more liquefied natural gas to Europe, things like that, as an interim step.
But of course, clean energy being the total solution.
And second to that, and perhaps the biggest thing, is the inflation reduction enact, the weirdly named inflation reduction act in the United States, which was a shock when it happened because nobody thought a wood mansion was against it.
Suddenly one day they announced there was an agreement, and the world just jaws the drop to the ground.
And we talked to people in Bloomberg who were completely gobsmacked, but they had no idea this was coming.
And what a great surprise.
What a great day that was in August when that happened.
It took a while to realize, and people are still talking about how incredible this is.
Like, this is set in stone for ten years.
You can't undo it because they want people to invest.
You can't invest in something if it changes.
So solar manufacturing, we'll see how that goes in the United States.
But sourcing the mineral, it's going to boost, boosting United States, boosts the world, because the United States is a big economy.
Okay? So this is a big boost for everybody.
EVs mandated trucking, mandated charging infrastructure, billions, well, trillions of dollars.
It's just incredible.
And you can't understand it, and it ripples throughout the world.
Like, there's France.
People are upset that it's kind of a protectionist policy when it comes to some things, when it comes to the EVs having to be built there.
And Canada, we were in a really good position for green renewable energy investment, and now people are saying, well, no one's going to invest in Canada, so why do it here when you can do it in the United States? Even Canadians.
So the Canada is trying to come up with an answer to that, and that's going to take some serious policy to match what they just pulled out of their butt seemingly quickly.
Yeah, but the reality of the world is that the US.
Is often the driver of these kinds of big moves.
And the US.
Was really slow for a long time, maybe even going backwards in terms of clean energy.
But the US.
Often sets the tone, particularly for us here in Canada, but really for a lot of the world.
And they set the tone by making this incredibly large investment in clean green technology, which is great.
What do you think is the most important EV of the year as far as moving things forward on climate change and the most significant EV that came out? I would have to say the Ford F 150 electric, the lightning.
This is the heart of America.
That truck is so much a part of the world where we live, not just America, but here in Canada.
The Ford F 150 is so ubiquitous, they're just everywhere.
People here in North America love their giant big pickup truck, number one selling vehicle, period, in North America.
And of course, traditionally a very gas guzzling vehicle.
Well, now there's an electric version from Ford.
They're making a decent amount of them.
They're still not fully ramped up yet.
But the crazy thing is, apparently you can buy one.
Somebody pointed out that there's one on a lot sitting there waiting to be bought.
Where we live, I think there was a castle's order or something like that.
Actually, there was small used one that got returned.
And the one guy that I've been reading about who has one locally, he says, you couldn't tear that from my hands.
And he put a diesel heater in his just so he could have all of his range in the wintertime, because he's a contractor who tows and does a lot in rural places.
So he's got a lots of miles to put on.
But yeah, he loves it, I think.
The EVs curve.
The EV adoption s curve.
We've reached an inflection point there that really seems to be happening.
I mean, you don't feel it in North America as much, but you look at the numbers around the world, 15% 18% of new car sales were there, and it's just accelerating.
And the rate is accelerating year on year, too, is incredible.
Yeah, no technology can move with an S adoption curve, which means starts a little bit slow, then goes vertical, then levels off.
And we are definitely at the inflection point where this is starting to go vertical.
And electric car adoption is going to go fast from here.
And let's declare it the year of the heat pump.
Okay.
Now, I had hardly heard about heat pumps before.
One of the first then you started listening to our show.
Yeah, I started listening.
It's a good show.
One of the first places I've seen it was when I was shopping for pool heaters on Costco on their website, they had two or three heat pump.
Pool heaters.
Wow.
What are these? Where do these come from? Like, since the window people are thousands of dollars, but cheaper to use than electric heat, that's for sure.
You don't really want to use electric heat to heat your pool.
And natural gas heat is kind of not great either.
So, yeah, these are quite something that these things exist, and they're selling so many of them that look out.
No, and I was just watching a video on YouTube the other day about Warm Board, which is like an inflow heating technology for homes, for building particularly new homes.
There's lots of types of in floor heating, but this is just the one that I happen to see, a company called Warm Board, and they've partnered with a heat pump company so that you can put in a sort of an Arctic type heat pump to heat the fluid that goes through your floor and heat your house.
And this stuff is all happening quicker than even I would have thought.
That's incredible because you would have a boiler, a natural gas boiler where we live.
I don't know what other people are doing.
And you would put plumbing through your floor.
And these guys are just saying they're designing the whole thing around the heat pump for in floor heating, which is, may I say, a great idea for your new cottage.
It's a great idea.
And one of the things they mentioned in the video, because, of course, when they started doing this, yeah, it was all natural gas boilers that they were doing this with, but they started looking at, oh, hey, look at that.
California, they're outlawing, you know, gas heaters in 20, you know, 25 or 2030.
And, you know, this that kind of thing has been outlawed.
So if you're a forward thinking company, you know, you start looking at heat pumps to to do this in floor heating rather than, you know, gas boilers.
Well, what else do you think was important this year? Well, just on that sort of s adoption curve, I wanted to mention in Norway, this is a story that just came out a couple of days ago.
I'm reading it here on clean technica.
So we often talk about Norway as being on the forefront of EV adoption because they've got very friendly regulations.
Now, almost 90% of new car sales in Norway are plug in.
A few of those are plug in hybrids, but it's in the 85% range or 82% or something for full electric.
Anyway, there was a new record just set.
So in Norway, there was a record for the most cars sold of one particular model.
And this record goes back to 1969, and it was the Volkswagen Beetle.
So in 1969, the Volkswagen Beetle sold 16,699 units in Norway back in 1969, and that record was just broken by the Tesla Model Y.
Wow.
They have sold 16,701 Tesla Model YS in Norway, and there's a few days left in the year.
So that's a 53 year old record and broken by an electric car, which is cool.
So is the ubiquitous the Model Y will be as ubiquitous in 2023 as the Beetle was in 69.
Yeah, and you and I grew up in the there were Beetles everywhere.
And I've always loved beetles.
I've always kind of wanted one.
I liked the New Beetle.
I've never owned one.
Yeah, and if you think about the advancements in the vehicles themselves, I love Beetles, but they're a pretty crude car.
That was one of the things that was great about them.
The original Beatles, you could fix them yourself.
They were so simple and easy and cheap.
But you think about the advance in technology now with the Tesla Model Y and the built in computer and navigation and everything, and the safety of them.
I would not be wanting to drive around in a 1969 Beetle that would you know, the safety compared to today's cars is a little bit ridiculous.
Yeah, well, there's a guy locally here, we see him at the EV car shows that refurbished a Beetle and made it electric.
I don't even know if he's using lithium batteries.
I can't remember.
He's probably a show listener.
Clean energy [email protected].
Yeah, let us know.
But yeah, I see that all the time.
And he loves it, of course.
It's just fun to drive.
Yeah.
And I believe the clean energy show on YouTube, they did an episode about a Volkswagen Beetle conversion to electric.
Clean energy show on YouTube.
What do you mean? What did I clean? Energy.
Plus, the show is way too long.
You can't handle shows this long.
Yes, I meant fully charged.
We often talk about Tony Siba, and Tony Siba is a prognosticator in the world of new technologies.
A futurist is what he is.
A futurist.
He released a few videos this year.
I mean, he has the same kind of presentation, but he occasionally updates it.
And so if you go to the Tony Siba channel on YouTube, you can see his latest round, and he split it into five parts of his basically slide lecture where he talks about his predictions.
And so we talked about a few of them as he rereleased, you know, this latest version of the the talk a couple of months ago.
But we never talked about the final episode.
So part five in the series, it's the real good news part of the clean energy story.
I think I hesitated even to talk about it at the time because it seems too good to be true.
Like this prediction of his about where we're headed.
I think it's a great news story to end the year on if we want to talk about the good news that's happening in clean energy.
But his prediction from this final episode of his slide lecture series is that 90% of the economy can be decarbonised by 2035 in the key sectors of energy, transportation and food.
These are the key industries that are going to be disrupted by technology in the coming years.
So energy of course, solar, wind and batteries, transportation, of course, electric vehicles.
And with food, it's micro fermentation and the ability to make food, which is not quite so carbon intensive and going to be more localized.
Things like getting food from cows is very carbon intensive and really one of the worst things we can do for the environment.
But that's his prediction that in those three sectors, energy, transportation and food, 90% of the economy can be decarbonised by 2035.
And it's just going to happen because these things are better and cheaper.
And he thinks we can go net negative by 2040, which is within sight.
You and I will probably even still be alive then.
Speak for yourself.
We'll see how Christmas goes.
A lot of sweets around, a lot of deserty things.
Yeah.
So, I don't know.
It sounds almost too good to be true, but if you believe in the S curve of adoption, which we were just talking about for electric vehicles, we're at that inflection point.
We should be at the top of that S curve.
Perhaps by 2035, the demand for oil is going to plummet and the economy will decarbonize because all of these things are better and cheaper.
Well, Eric in California has written us again, and thank you, Eric, for doing so.
We appreciate everyone who takes the time to drop us a note.
We can't thank you enough because it just means a lot to us to hear from our listeners.
It says hi again.
James and Brian.
The California Public Utilities Commission has finally passed the solar killer rules, which I believe he brought up before in the show.
This is significant because California is the leader in solar adoption in the United States.
Apparently, according to this article which he sent us, those of us who have already have solar should remain in our current program for 20 years.
Thank goodness for small favors.
So thanks.
Eric in California.
Yes, it is nasty what they are doing.
They are reducing the amount that they pay you to feed solar to the grid down to, like, two or $0.03 or something.
It's not great, and it's a little premature, I would say.
We're not quite ready for something like that.
No, that's nasty.
And we just discussed Tokyo Mandating solar panels on buildings in other jurisdictions, and I will include our own in that here in Saskatchewan.
Shame on you, Sask power for killing solar here as well.
James and I are in the old program, and as far as we know, there's no time limit on it.
We're grandfathered into the old rate, which is basically our power meter will run forwards and backwards at the same rate.
They change that.
So they're now discouraging solar here because they're not paying the full rate, they're paying half.
The excuse, Brian, was that we don't want other people to have to pay more for their electricity who don't want solar panels because we're getting it off too.
We're making it too cheap for ourselves.
There's another way to do that.
This is a climate emergency.
There are some grids that get it and some that don't.
In California traditionally has been very good for this.
So this is a very weird reversal for them.
I don't know what they're worried about, but power companies are private and they're lobbying the government and crying to them on their shoulders.
We'd love to hear from our listeners.
It's the life of what gets us up in the morning, people.
Contact us at clean [email protected].
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But right now, it is time for the lightning round.
I lined Bryant.
It's not time for the lightning round.
And time for the lightning round was an hour ago.
It was ages ago.
It was yesterday.
Look, it's the year end spectacular.
We're going on.
This is how we end the shows.
We do it with a fast paced look of the week in clean energy and climate news.
So let's not doddle.
The new year is coming.
Electric says Tesla make a pack.
The country's utility scale energy storage battery system could be sold out for almost the next two years.
According to Tesla's own timeline, a single megapack unit is a container size.
So the shipping container sized three megawatt hour battery system with integrated modules, inverters and thermal systems.
What do you think? Yeah, well, everyone's scaling up battery production, but the first four batteries is so huge that there's going to be still shortages of batteries for the next few years.
Headline climate Negligence bill could let New Yorkers sue fossil fuel companies.
And this, Brian, is hilarious.
Let me get to it.
The climate bill negligence bill.
The climate negligence bill will allow private New Yorkers to sue to sew I've run out of steam myself.
I'm not going to make it to the end.
The climate negligence bill, which would allow private New York is to sue fossil fuel companies for climate damages, is modeled after get this, sit down for this one, the Texas abortion law.
This is how they decided to fight abortion in Texas, to let people sue.
If you knew somebody, you could sue them for getting an abortion or giving an abortion services while they modeled it after that, but for a good reason.
For the climate.
Texas controversial 2021 law by state Republican lawmakers and power of privacy is to sue people who aid in the bet and abortion.
The Supreme Court declined to block the law.
And guess what? Haha, supreme Court, your thinking is now going to do something good for the world.
And I know you don't like good things.
There is public support for fossil fuel companies to be held responsible for damages caused by climate change.
And I know you like sue and fossil fuels, Brian.
Yeah.
No, challenging them in the courts has been a great thing.
It's been very effective in certain cases.
I've mentioned before, there's a great podcast called what Roman Mars Can Learn About Common Law, and they talk about some of these kinds of issues.
The decisions lately of the Supreme Court in the US.
They've really gone against precedent.
They've gone against the history of the Court.
It's been a very weird turn to the court, but they've now established these new precedents, and it turns out these new precedents can be used for things like what you just talked about.
And speaking of creative litigation, 16 municipalities in Puerto Rico are using the same racketeering legislation used to bring down mob bosses and fraudsters against oil and coal companies, which is basically the same thing, accusing them of conspiring to deceive the public for decades over the climate crisis.
Good for them.
If that's not racketeering, I don't know what is.
The richest people in the UK use more energy flying than the poorest do overall, according to Carbon Brief who reported on this study.
So, yeah, just the rich people flying.
One rich person flying uses more than a poor person does in a whole year just for their flying.
And I feel like it's probably worse here.
I think where we live, the highest carbon footprint per person is probably where James and I live.
Well, it's time for a clean energy show.
Fast fact.
Amazon produced enough plastic packaging in 2021 to wrap the Earth more than 800 times in air pillows.
That is from an Oceania report quoted in EcoWatch 800 times.
Wrap the entire planet in pillow wrap.
Yeah.
So amazon.
Of course.
They've got the Climate Pledge arena in Seattle.
Amazon is trying to go all electric with their delivery vehicles, but it's a difficult business to try and make eco friendly.
Yeah, it is with the flights.
I live in a place where we live in a place you live in the same place.
All the flights from Memphis and the other hub, the shipping hubs, they fly over our house, Brian, every day.
If I'm sitting sun in my ass in the pool in the summertime and I look up, I see all these 747s going to China via Anchorage, where they refuel cheaper to stop and refuel than is to carry the full load of fuel.
It's constant.
It's just constant.
If you look at the flight tracking software, it's nonstop.
The flights coming back and forth.
It's a great year for solar generation in the EU in 2022.
Guess what? It's up 47%.
Visit the year before and it's the record breaking.
So that's another 50% gain.That's it's on fire, so to speak.
Top five countries.
Germany, eight gigawatts.
And, you know, Germany is a cloudy country, much cloudier than most of North America.
Spain came in second, a close second in Poland.
Netherlands and France was down at about 2.7.
They're starting to catch up.
Our technica Porsche's synthetic gasoline factory is coming online this week in Chile.
The plant will scale up from 34,000 gallons to 14.5 million gallons by 2024.
Now, right now, most of this is going to be used in Porsche racing car just so they can have race car events with Porsches that have sustainable fuel, supposedly synthetic.
Interesting.
And they need that much fuel for racing Porsche, probably because they train and they do all was probably lots of different racing car series.
So Porsche wants to keep combustion engines going.
And I understand that in a world where everything's an EV, you might want a Porsche.
Some people will like a combustion engine.
There'll be a fancy for that.
And this is one way that they see of getting around it, is using synthetic gasoline that is sustainably produced.
So the US deployed 5.19 gigawatt hours, or 1.44 gigawatt energy storage.
Last year, 91% was on the grid.
The rest would be in people's homes and businesses.
No, this is not last year.
This is Q, three of 2022.
Close to half the entire amount of storage installed in 2021.
So half in one quarter of the previous year.
So that's pretty cool.
California and Texas accounted for almost all of it.
So Texas, there's a lot of green energy in Texas.
Even though the politicians go around blaming falsely still to this day for power outages.
EU natural gas prices have fallen by close to 40% over the last week, so that they are now nearly back to the level before the Russian invasion.
I think it's because the weather hasn't gone crazy yet there.
But if you get our bomb cyclone moving, look out, because it's got to get cold.
We're almost done the show.
Brian GM Cruise of robotaxis have started service in Tesla's Austin, Texas.
So now the people in Austin, including what's his name, are going to see robotaxis driving around and doing what FSD is nowhere near being able to do.
So that's interesting.
By the way, we'll end the show this week on this good news story.
An F 150 Lightning, that's the all electric Ford pickup truck that was at a dealership in California that lost its power due to a major earthquake, kept the whole stink of business going.
In fact, they had three cars on the lot.
Three used, a couple of other used EVs.
They all had them going.
The Ford can output lots of electricity via their outlets.
And they said on Facebook, we're open for business.
This is a picture of our Ford powering, our business.
The cashier registers are going.
If you want parts, the lights are on, come on down.
So that is really cool.
And it's one of those major.
Things, right? Yeah, no, they have all kinds of outlets in the back for powering, a dealership, but usually a worksite.
Well, that is more than our time for this year.
If you are listening to us before the holidays, we want to wish you a happy holiday.
If you celebrate in any way, or even if you don't, and you're using the time off to get together with family and friends, we wish you the best.
And as always, by call us, email us, clean [email protected], check us out.
Thanks to all who have donated in the past week.
We continue to receive donations of people buying us coffee.
There's a link in the show notes if you ever want to do that, and we're so grateful to the people who have.
If you're new to the show, remember to subscribe on your podcast.
So you want to get new episodes? Big, big show or biggest in history.
Brian.
Happy New Year to you and Merry Christmas and all that.
And to our listeners as well.
Yeah, thanks everybody and we'll see you next year.
-
A net energy gain for fusion in a lab is a landmark scientific achievement but we're decades away from commercialization according to experts. We have to decarbonize the planet by 2050. Will fusion energy contribute? Utility solar farm that lays the panels flat on the ground is commissioned. The Salton Sea in California could provide all the United States lithium needs and then some (CNBC video link). And it could be the greenest lithium in the world. The Keystone pipeline spills its wares all over Kansas.
Will traditional nuclear energy be effective to reach our climate goals? A study casts shade on that idea.
17:36 - The fusion breakthrough in California. What it doesn't mean for the race to net zero and what it does mean for our grandchildren.
Free New York Times article on this.As well we’ll have stories on Canada cancelling fossil fuel subsidies, sorta, an update on the people shooting at a power substation causing blackouts, sails for cargo ships, people who hate wind turbines are more likely to think the moon landing was fake, plus a new study on traditional nuclear helping or not helping the fight against global warming, and much more!
A listener in Virginia asks us about a proposed new community solar farm near him and how he should deal with the misinformation floating around.
Buy us a cup of coffee with PayPal Donate! or e-transfer to [email protected]Thanks for listening to our show! Consider rating The Clean Energy Show on iTunes, Spotify or wherever you listen to our show.
Follow us on TikTok! @cleanenergypod
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Your hosts:
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See you next week!
Transcript
Clip: Simply put, this is one of the most impressive scientific feats of the 21st century.Brian: Hello, and welcome to episode 143 of the Clean Energy Show.
I'm Brian Stockton.
I'm James Whittingham.
This week fusion breakthrough, all clean energy needs have been met.
This podcast is no longer necessary a go.
Listen to Joe Rogan.
Oh, wait.
I'm hearing in my ear that people are overreacting to this.
News and commercialization is still decades away.
The world's first utility scale solar project is going ahead.
With solar panels sitting flat on the ground, these green energy hippies were just too lazy to put them up on a proper mount.
The salt and sea in California apparently has more lithium than Nevada's.
Lake Mead has dead bodies.
Some think there's enough lithium to power the entire United States.
And then some.
Huge congratulations to TC Energy's keystone pipeline that has successfully leaked more oil than any other pipeline since 2010.
Wait, I'm being told that's a bad day as well.
We have stories on Canada canceling fossil fuel subsidies.
While sort of an update on people shooting at power stations sales for cargo ships, people who hate wind turbines, and more are more likely to think that the moon landing was fake.
Plus, a new study on traditional nuclear helping or not helping the fight against global warming, and much more on this week's edition of The Clean Energy Show.
Yeah, so first up for me is an update.
As you know, I'm trying to get rid of fossil fuels in my own house because I love the planet, and I don't want to burn any more fossil fuels than I have good fuel.
So made a little bit of progress.
Been speaking to a contractor who could put in an Arctic type air source heat pump so I can get rid of my natural gas furnace.
And the latest update is that it's 16 weeks from when you order it because there's a backlog four months and they want you to pay upfront.
Oh, you got to pay upfront.
You got to pay up front.
Yeah.
So the point being this week, because we talked about these kinds of subsidies upfront 100%, right? You got to pay 100% upfront.Why is heat pump and then wait 16 weeks? Because there's just huge demand for them, which is basically what's going on all over the world.
Like, there's a couple of stories here.
I've got one from Clean Technica.
The title is Heat Pumps Are on Fire globally.
They mean, as in getting more popular, heat pump sales rose 15% in 2021, and they're expecting for something similar or greater this coming year.
Europe.
They rose by 35% in 2021.
And of course, they're very much trying to get off of Russian gas in Europe.
And heat pumps is definitely one of the ways to do it.
And there's another story here from China.
China is actually the world leader on heat pump adoption.
Of course, they have a very large population.
They do things big in China when they, when they do them.
So sales are up 35% in Europe and 45% in China for heat pumps.
So I bring this all up because we were talking in the last couple of weeks about subsidies that are available for things like heat pumps.
So I'm in the Greener Homes Grant in Canada, so I should get about $5,000 to help offset this cost.
In the US is the Inflation Reduction Act, and starting in January, there's going to be subsidies for people to do things like put in heat pumps and other kind of energy upgrades.
But I wanted to tell our listeners because there is going to be a global shortage of heat pumps.
So if it's something you're thinking of doing, start talking to somebody now and maybe beat the rush, because there's definitely going to be a rush in January in the US.
Can a person invest in a heat pump company? I mean, is there anybody who's on the stock market that would make a good investment? Not that I'm aware of, but I'm going to make a note of that and check later because yeah, that's probably a smart idea.
Well, get back to us.
I'd be curious to know.
And then certainly anyone who makes effective, the most cost effective heat pump and maybe the most efficient heat pump, they're going to win the game, especially if they patent that technology.
So, I mean, keep an eye on developments there because they are.
Sure, yeah, no, there's two things like the cost of the unit and then the efficiency of the unit.
Generally speaking, you're going to kind of be paying more upfront, which is the common refrain here on the clean energy show.
You're probably going to be paying more upfront for the equipment, but it will be hopefully cheaper in the long run.
It's a bit of a weird equation where we live because in this ridiculous frigid place and our natural gas prices are still quite good.
Our natural gas is still fairly cheap here.
So I'm not necessarily going to be saving money right away by doing this.
It's more of a long term gambit and I just want to get the gas out of my house.
Yeah, I was going to say paying for it up front.
You'd run the risk of them going out of business.
But then they're not going to go out of business, are they? The chances are I don't think so because it would be terribly wrong for a heat pump company to go out of business us at this point.
Yeah, I suppose the contractor could go out of business, but it should be fine.
Well, we'll talk more about that as we go along because heat pumps are the new thing, even where we live, apparently.
We're certainly going to monitor if you freeze into a Popsicle or not after you get your heat pump because we get down to -40 here as we talk about our electric vehicles.
It's much more of a no brainer if you're on the west coast or on the east coast of Canada or pretty much anywhere in the world where people live.
Pretty much anywhere in the world.
It's just our ridiculous climate.
And just coincidentally, we have fairly decent natural gas prices.
By the way, we're still looking for clean energy show property in Hawaii, if you have any.
Yeah, please.
Anyway, Brian, I want to say thank you to our donors because we've had big donations to the show.
Not just donations, which are humbling enough, but big ones.
And thank you to the people who have done that.
One person chose to do an email transfer, an e transfer, rather via email, because they didn't want to lose any fees and make the most of their donations that did that, and it worked out nicely.
So thank you to everyone.
I won't name you because you didn't say you could be named, but you know who you are.
We appreciate you greatly.
Thank you.
Thank you very much for your donations.
This is an independent production.
We've been doing it for over two years now.
And we do it because we love the show and we love the planet.
But it's also nice to get some money and so James can get a new toaster.
I guess we're approaching our third year pretty quick.
Before you know it'll be three years.
My goodness.
That's right, we're coming up on three.
Say, did you happen to see Saturday Night Live, the comedy live comedy show in North America? Here I saw part of it was Steve Martin and Steve Martin, I saw part of it they were doing in the opening monologue, which I thought was quite well done, they were doing each other's eulogies.
They had pretended to have written each other's eulogies.
And this is Steve Martin reading from his eulogy that he had prepared pre death for Martin short, his friend.
But I would always be haunted by Marty's last words, tesla Autopilot engaged.
I thought that was funny, so I played it on the show.
My son, he's been nagging me just before Showtime today, this big fusion announcement.
I was waiting to hear from him on this because he's one of these people, these silver bullet people, which is almost everyone.
It's probably 99% of the people listen to our show.
I'm sorry, but everybody has this silver bullet where it's a pet of theirs, an energy pet.
Yeah, whether it's nuclear as a whole, some people, or do that.
And then there's nuclear fusion, which has been talked about.
I mean, I learned about nuclear fusion from my hairdresser 25 years ago.
He's like, oh, it's coming quick, it's coming quick.
And you know, that's going to be the thing that's going to solve this whole problem.
And of course, a lot of people believe that, and there's nothing wrong with that.
I mean, it's been frustratingly long to get to the achievement that we're going to talk about shortly after we update some other stories.
But he says this, my first text from my son after the announcement is, oh God, you're going to hate this.
So right away he's assuming that I'm going to be upset by this because I've been telling them, arguing with him about nuclear, that you can't compete on cost.
And he says the first fusion reactor has been built that produces more energy than it consumes.
And later on, after a bunch of bickering and quotes and articles sent back and forth, he said, you said solar would be so cheap that it would be even cheaper than fusion, even down the line.
And I was actually quite excited about this announcement on a personal level.
I spent the better part of a week researching and digging into this so that I could talk about it on the show this week and have my facts straight.
Well, it turns out I was right.
Not to spoil the story, but I'm afraid I was right that it is going to be very expensive.
I'll get to it later, okay.
But it's not going to happen quickly and it's not going to happen cheaply.
And the people who made the announcement are the people saying that.
So it's not me poopoo nuclear.
I am, however, quite excited on a personal level that my kids generation and my grandkids generation will have power that won't have to deal with nuclear waste.
It'll be completely safe and completely it's a wonderful technology that has very few caveats of any I mean it's just aside from expense and not being developed yet into a power plant.
But yeah, we'll talk about that later.
Those substations, I keep seeing them in the news when I'm flipping through the channels.
It's turning into a big story.
The shooting of the substations.
Yeah.
So we talked about this probably last week where in North Carolina there was a shooting attack on an electrical substation and 30, 40,000 people were without power for almost a week.
Then a few days after that, news of gunfire near the Duke energy facility in South Carolina.
Now it seems like probably nothing happened with that one.
There were some shots heard, no power outages.
But there's a great article on NPR about this.
North Carolina attacks highlight the vulnerability of power grids.
So here's the thing.
There's 55,000 electrical substations around the US.
And most of them are kind of vulnerable.
These things are liquid cooled.
This is the main kind of danger.
They're liquid cooled so you can take a rifle shoot into them and then all the liquid drains out and then they overheat and then they fail.
Probably the whole thing fails.
And I'm guessing it's not just one component, not one capacitor or one individual component.
The whole thing has to be replaced.
We shouldn't be telling people this, but it is the dues and some of them have been over the years sort of fortified, like put up like brick walls and stuff.
Is that right? I didn't know that.
But there's 55,000 of them, and they're not going to be particularly well protected, of course.
Yeah, it's a concern.
I mean, it's maybe not something we should be worried about yet, but I don't know.
Who knows? Well, if somebody decided to get organized and attack on a coordinated basis, I mean, a week long power outage for tens of thousands of people is nothing to sneeze at.
And it sounded like it was awfully easy to do with.
I wonder if they had the knowledge of what they were doing or if it was just they were shot at it and got lucky and just got lucky.
I'm not sure.
I mean, presumably they knew.
I mean, it's this issue of the cooling liquid leaking out.
Well, let's hope it was a disgruntled power employee and not somebody who knows what they're doing and trying to disrupt the United States.
People talking about on television experts saying that you can't really protect the power, it's just not going to happen.
You have to find the people doing it and then get to it that way.
I mean, you could put up more barriers, and some of them do have brick walls around them or whatever, but it seems unlikely.
I mean, if it turns into a bigger problem, then perhaps there'll be a mass deployment of walls.
Not at the moment.
And one of the problems that I keep seeing mentioned is that a lot of these stations, they want to be away from people.
People don't want to look at them.
So they're kind of isolated.
In fact, some of them are extremely isolated.
They're very remote in rural areas, not near populations.
Yeah.
So ground mount solar.
I know that you brought this up on the show several months ago.
This is the idea of putting solar panels just completely flat on the ground without any hardware or panels really at all.
Yeah, they're just connected together somehow.
So you level the ground first.
You probably have to level it, make a nice, smooth, level chunk of land, and you probably have to make us sort of like drainage ditches and stuff like that.
So we have one now that's coming online in Texas.
And this is 100 MW.
This is a decent sized solar project.
Ten times what we have here where we live.
They're making 10 MW here, and it's just a normal one on regular mounts.
This is 100 MW.
This story is from Electric, and it will be the only utility scale solar farm that is mounted flat so far to date.
There's many advantages to this, but one of them is just that you can put more panels in the same kind of area.
That's right, because you're basically just sticking them up right next to each other.
So if you're in an area where land is an issue, and you don't quite have enough land for this stuff.
Now, of course, there's downsides to that, too.
Like you don't get the advantage of the angle of the sun.
But as we talk about frequently on the show, the whole solar system will eventually be so overbuilt that those kinds of issues aren't that big a deal.
But one of the biggest benefits of this, as near as I can tell, is they can just basically they throw a roomba on this thing to keep it clean.
But that's also one of the challenges, Brian, is the fact that they get dirtier because they just sit there.
There's not as much of runoff.
But then at the same time, the solution to that problem works quite well.
You say it's dirt cheap.
The robot can clean up to 2 solar every day.
So the robot can just kind of run continuously, like Arumba runs in people's houses.
So every 50 days it starts over.
The rough cost to clean a tracker plant one time is fifty cents per kilowatt hour.
This is a plant where they're mounted normally fifty cents per kilowatt hour per kilowatt.
And these panels can be cleaned for a year at wow, very interesting.
So you would save money.
Hardware is not cheap.
But the solar panels that I saw here, they track, they're on Movable, tracking things that track the sun east to west.
And of course, Texas is a lot farther south.
That's going to yeah, we're not in the far north of Canada.
We're in southern Canada, but that's still quite far north.
So if we had flat panels here, the winter production would be pretty abysmal.
Yeah, I don't think it makes sense.
I said it last time, I don't think it makes sense in winter climates.
Although I'm sure they could develop robots for cleaning snow if they had to.
But I think it also just works better where we are.
And the more northern you are, even northern half of the United States, it's going to make more sense to actually tilt them towards the sun, perhaps.
I assume economically it makes more sense.
Yeah.
Obviously Texas is a lot further south, so the angle of the sun is not as big a deal in the winter.
So yeah, there you go.
News from here in Canada against Canada had made a pledge some time ago to stop subsidizing fossil fuel projects abroad outside of Canada.
So the good news is that Canada has decided to stop any subsidies that would go to fossil fuel projects outside of Canada.
The bad news is they haven't canceled those projects here at home yet.
They haven't canceled those subsidies in Canada.
But what can I say? It's progress of a kind.
This was a pledge that Canada had made last year, and there was a deadline at the end of this year.
They said, okay, we're going to do it by the end of 2022.
So at the last minute, they have pulled it out and made that announcement.
But this is typical of the progress that's happening right now in clean energy, is that governments are just not moving fast enough.
But at least they're moving.
I wish they'd done it with inside the borders.
I mean, we're at a pretty critical time here, climate wise.
It'd be nice if they get on that.
Yeah.
Canada is a fossil fuel country.
It is a big part of our economy.
So, of course they're worried about killing the economy and that's why they haven't done it here at home.
But it's coming someday, I guess.
This is the Clean Energy show with Brian Stockton and James Whittingham.
Well, this was a very successful scientific experiment done in a laboratory to show that the process of fusion can be duplicated here on the Earth and that they can get more energy out of it than they put into it.
But let me say that the way they did it in this National Ignition Facility is not the way we're going to be generating electricity.
This was to study the process of fusion itself and study the lasers, the incredible lasers that they use to generate the power.
All right, it's time for full team coverage of the fusion breakthrough.
Okay.
The advancement by Lawrence Livermore national Laboratory researchers will be built on to further develop fusion energy research.
So this is a laboratory milestone, one that has been sought after for decades.
Brian and from an environmental perspective, fusion has always had a strong appeal because it's not dangerous.
It's different than fission, which is your normal nuclear power.
Fusion combines atoms rather than splits them.
Right.
It puts them together.
But it's very interesting and it's just hard to do.
And they haven't achieved a net energy gain, so it takes a lot of energy to create particles, atoms that want to fuse together.
It's hotter than the inside area of the sun.
The center of the sun.
Yeah.
Well, I watched the YouTube channel.
The Cleo abram YouTube channel.
Huge if true, is sort of the name of the series.
And a couple of YouTubers did you watch that? A couple of YouTubers built a fusion reactor in a garage.
Did they? And it worked.
But the key is they did not get more energy out than they put in.
And this has been the problem with fusion for all these years.
Takes a huge amount of energy, and they're not getting even that amount of energy out of it.
Until now, billions of dollars from governments around the world have been put into this, and this is the first time that it's happened.
I guess they got out 1.5 times the energy that they put in, using the world's most powerful laser to do this.
There is always a nagging caveat, however, with this, and in that all of its efforts by scientists to control the unruly power of fusion, their experiments consume more energy than what was going in.
But that changed.
Brian.
According to the New York Times, at on December 5, when 192 giant lasers at the laboratory's national ignition facility busted a small cylinder about the size of a pencil eraser that contained a frozen newbin of hydrogen.
Do you have any frozen new bins of hydrogen laying around the house? Probably not.
Let me check.
The freezer encased in diamond.
So that makes it even more rare.
Well, that sounds totally practical.
Well, that's what they did, and that's kind of yeah, it's a long story, but that's what they did.
They used all these lasers to get to that.
And in a brief moment, lasting less than 100,000,000,000,000th of a second 205 pardon me, 2.5 megajoules of energy, roughly the equivalent of a pound of TNT, I think.
The Sneeze At bombarded, the hydrogen pellet out of flowed from that pellet a flood of neutron particles, the product of fusion.
See, when you put things, when you put particles together, they create energy.
When you take them apart, they create energy.
Which carried about three megajoules of energy, a factor of 1.5.
Yeah.
And basically, this is how the sun works.
The sun is like fusion energy is as near as I understand it.
That's correct.
And obviously, the sun is producing endless amounts of energy for free.
It's doing a hell of a job.
So the solar panels on our roof are technically fusion.
Yeah, technically, wind is technically solar because you need the sun to create wind because it's the energy differences that create wind.
So some people like to call wind power solar power, and now we can call it fusion.
I don't know if you want to so does Tuesday's announcement mean we'll have cheap fusion energy soon? A lot of people, such as my uppity son, would say yes.
They assume, oh, it's a breakthrough.
They'll start manufacturing tomorrow.
A couple of years from now, we'll see solar panels going to the landfill.
Yeah, well, it's taken them, what, 50 years to get this far? Well, the answer is no.
According to the New York Times.
Okay, so even if scientists figure out how to generate bigger bursts of fusion, immense engineering hurdles would remain.
Experiments have studied one burst at a time, basically.
So a practical fusion power plant using this concept would require a machine gun pace of laser bursts with new hydrogen targets sliding into place for each burst.
That's the challenge.
They're using magnets and magnetism to float things and have a continuous repeating chain.
There's three different ways of approaches to fusion power, and this is basically an experiment at a nuclear weapons facility.
But there's a Canadian team working on something, too, and they're going to have a prototype power plant getting built in the UK.
But it still doesn't mean that it's anywhere near decades away.
So the torrents of neutrons flying outward from the fusion reactions would have to be converted into electricity.
That's another challenge.
Basically, the fact that they created more energy doesn't make a power plant.
Okay, so the laser complex fills a building with a footprint equal to three football fields.
So it's too big, too expensive, and too inefficient for a commercial power plant, at least right now.
A manufacturing process to mass reduce the precise hydrogen targets would have to be developed.
And that sounds to me nowhere near okay, let's put it into the contest.
Grinders.
Remember, we have to decarbonize the planet by 50% by 2030 and 100% by 2050.
China, if you're listening, 2060 is not good enough, and we can do it.
In fact, we have 80% of the technology available to 100% by 2030, I've read, if we wanted to.
Yeah, but we choose not to.
It's just things like heat pumps.
Like, there's going to be a waiting list for my heat pump.
We need to just crank up production of the existing technologies, win solar batteries and heat pumps.
We just got to make enough of them and that's all we need.
Yeah.
My son doesn't think that the world is coming together and will reach those targets.
I hope they do.
I think they'll miss them.
But at the same time, I think people underestimate the economics of clean energy from 2030 to 2050.
Like, it's going to just erase at least as far as power generation goes.
This is from Power magazine.
They're on top of this, too.
Tony Ralstone, a nuclear engineer at Cambridge University in the UK, told National Public Radio in the United States that unless more significant progress is made, fusion would be unlikely to have a major role in power generation for another 40 to 50 years.
Yeah, that's too late.
It's too late.
It's too late for me, too.
My kids might see it when they're my age or older.
My grandkids might live in a world where a solar farm erected today would come down and be decommissioned in 30 years.
And even then, it doesn't sound like it's going to be there.
Okay, it could be, but it doesn't sound like it would be.
Well, this is something we've talked about before, too, but there's so many super complicated energy systems that exist today, including things like nuclear.
Like making a nuclear plant is just insanely complicated.
Building an offshore floating oil platform to drill for oil, it's insanely complicated.
And if solar, wind and batteries existed 50 years ago, we wouldn't have done any of these things.
They're just too complicated and expensive when these cheaper alternatives exist.
And that's kind of the problem is that solar and wind and batteries and geothermal and other things that exist and are getting cheaper make it less profitable for investment into stuff like this.
Because there is going to be huge upfront costs to get the development there.
And then you're going to have to really back the technology in order to get the prices down.
So David Keith, climate expert, says fusion maybe but beware of the hype.
I don't know the details, he says, but for what it's worth, my my first professional job was in Canada's National lab, working big lasers for fusion.
And I have been interested since.
Getting more energy out than went in.
Into the laser is cool technical benchmark, but it has almost nothing to do with the practical requirements to make commercial power.
That's what people don't realize.
And you hear this silver bullet thing, I'm going to finish what he had to say, but they're just not looking at the whole picture, and maybe they're not hearing that one sentence.
That caveat at the end of the interview, which is really important.
Suppose one had a free supply of fusion reactions in Pellets.
You could make competitive electricity? He asks.
Hard.
Getting cheap energy from neutrons is really hard.
Even those neutrons, if they're free, it's really hard.
And worse when it needs a high vacuum.
So there's lots of just technical details that are hurdles, really.
Yeah.
Well, these YouTubers that made a fusion reactor in their garage yeah, like a vacuum is one of the big things for it.
You got to suck all the air out and they blew a breaker on their wall and then they lost all the air, and then they had to suck all the air out again.
It's still kind of cool that they made it and they sort of made it with these off the shelf parts.
You know, it's a lot of fun.
But yeah, it's just insanely complicated.
It's it's it is a genuine breakthrough.
Like, they got more energy out and people have been trying to do this for literally 50 years or more.
So it's a huge breakthrough, but nowhere in your practice.
But it's a slow churn towards commercialization, which is what we think of.
Right.
Another challenge is that it is as hot as the sun.
So that stuff breaks down when you have something that has to contain something that hot and a vacuum in particular.
So there's serious challenges here that I'm confident they'll work out.
And I think that next century there will be no wind turbines or maybe even solar panels that will just have fusion at the end of this century, sometime maybe 60 years from now, when it's cheap and cheap enough to spread 70 years.
I don't know.
I think it is the future.
It's just going to take a long sounds like it's going to take a long road to get there.
So Bloomberg says this.
It's still a long way from the breakthrough in California to building a fusion based power plant.
Well, this experiment generated excess energy on a small scale.
The industry needs to develop systems that can produce much more excess energy on a much larger scale.
This is 1.5 brian.
I heard ten X as kind of where they need to be, and that energy gain shows that the concept will work, but the systems are still.
Complicated and expensive.
The New York Times says this this is just taught off the press.
This is after the announcement, which happened a little while ago on Tuesday morning.
It says it will take quite a while before fusion becomes available on a widespread practical scale, if ever.
Probably decades, said Kimberly S.
Boodle, the director of the Lawrence Livermore facility where this announcement took place.
The director herself is saying probably decades.
So I'm not being a poopoo here.
I'm not being a nuclear naysayer.
This is from the horse's mouth, literally.
Now, other people in the industry will say, well, we've moved along fast and it's going to be better than that, but it's certainly going to be decades.
We might have something functioning next decade in some level, but it's not going to be commercially functioning that you can replicate and spread.
Okay, this is what she said at the good news conference.
Not six decades, I don't think, which is what most people used to say, I think not even five decades, which is what we used to say most often.
So that sounds like 40 years.
I think it's moving into the foreground, probably with concerted effort and investment.
A few decades of research on the underlying technologies could put us in a position to build a power plant.
Yet this is not around the corner.
I'm sorry.
I mean, I wish it was, but it's not.
Most climate scientists and policymakers say that to achieve that goal of limiting warming to two degrees Celsius, or even the more ambitious target of 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming by 2050, the world must reach net zero emissions by then.
And this, Brian, under any circumstance, doesn't seem like it's going to be any significant part of that.
Even under the most ambitious optimistic scenario, we still have to rely on what we have.
And what we have will become at least half as expensive in the next decade.
So, Katherine Hale, this is the Canadian climate scientist.
I'll just add this on here, she said on Twitter.
Yes, it's a huge technological advance, and yes, it will help us long term, but no, it won't get us out of the climate crisis we're in today.
The biggest invention we need right now, political and corporate.
Will we need Canada to stop those fossil fuel subsidies not just abroad, but here at home as well.
All right, I think this next story is the perfect one to go into because it's the exact opposite of what we're just talking about, the exact opposite of the incredibly complex world of fusion reactors.
So this is a story from clean technica wind power to cut cargo ship emissions by 20%.
So basically, what they're talking about doing, cargo ships take an enormous amount of fuel to ship stuff around the world.
They're going to put wind sails on them.
And you ever see, like, kiteboarding, is that what that's called? Or parasailing, where you can get on skis in the water, and you got a big sail in front of you to pull you along from your cottage.
There are some parasailers at our cottage.
It's a crazy sport, and I wish I could do it, but until it's passed me by anyway, they're going to do this on cargo ships.
So this is the sea wing sale from a French company called Air Seat.
Wait a minute.
It's going to be like a parachute? It's like a parachute.
Like, it's not like a sailing ship where you're putting up a sale, because I've seen pictures of hard sails put on ships, both new ships and retrofitting ships, and there's different rotating yeah, there's different rotating turbines that they've figured out for ships that kind of sit that look like a chimney.
Oh, I'm looking at a picture right now.
But yeah, it's like a parachute.
And now I assume the caveat is you've got to have the wind at your back for this to work.
What happens? The kite goes down? It looks like the ship is flying a giant kite.
Yeah, the ship is flying a giant kite, but I imagine there's prevailing westerly winds out on the ocean.
So if you're sailing west, just throw up your sail.
Maybe they can't use it on the way back.
Yes, this has been tested.
It should cut emissions by 20%.
Like, this is a thing, you know, wind power works.
I'm kind of speechless.
Like, this seems really cookie, to be honest with you.
When you go and fly a kite, the kite twirls around, it goes down into the ground, and you have to send your kid to go throw it up in the air again.
And then you know how that works? Well, you couldn't do that with this.
It'd be go hit the water, and then you'd be like, oh, well, I guess we're done.
I'm sure there's ways to people figure this out for parasailing, for kite surfing.
Why can't they figure it out for ships? Well, you got a dude who's very skilled pulling that parasail at the right time to get it lifted up again, and you become very adept at that.
But unless there's an automated AI system or something doing it, I don't know.
But I mean, this is not the ocean.
The ocean is a steady you're not looking at gusts on the ocean.
I'm not an atmospheric expert for oceans, but I assume that it's less gusty, that it's just a blow.
It flows regularly.
Yeah, and they're not talking about powering the whole ship this way.
It's a 20% reduction in emissions.
This should help.
So that's 20% reduction in the price that it takes to fuel those goods across the ocean, too.
Yeah, fuel is super expensive, and you would save 20% of your costs.
Yeah.
Well, that's interesting.
And maybe it would work with onboard sales as well.
The ones that I was talking about.
Brian, I wanted to talk to you about the sultan Sea.
This is a place that I passed by in my big California trip a number of years ago.
We went down to Calexico, which is right on the US.
Border.
There's a little town on the American side called Calexico.
On the other side looks very different.
It's called Mexicali, and it's kind of a cute thing.
And of course, there's lots of drugs going on there, according to the shows I've watched on TV.
Anyway, 40 miles north of the border, there's the Salt and Sea, which is this dead, salty lake bed.
Okay? It's always been that way.
And I guess in 1905, there was this overflowing of the Colorado River that overflowed some canals and filled it up partial way, I guess.
It's it used to be much bigger, years and years, well, decades even, perhaps centuries ago, I don't know.
But it filled up a little bit back then.
And then it became like this popular resort in the 50s for like, Frank Sinatra and celebrities would all just go over there from La.
And live in the saltwater.
And there's all these remnants of this 1950s vacationy place left to look at when you go.
It's a ghost town now, but there's lots of geothermal in the area.
Okay? And what I didn't know, what I just learned today, is that it's got a lot of bad dust.
So because it's geothermal, because the crust is between two tectonic plates, it's thin there.
And so the water just sort of gurgles up the brine from the ground water, and it gurgles up because it's heated, and then it brings with it minerals, including lithium.
And then the water dries and it just leaves the lithium behind.
So this could be the cleanest, greenest lithium on the planet, they claim.
And not only that, there's a lot of it.
There could be enough to power the entire United States'lithium needs and then some.
Yeah, of course, lithium being one of the key components in lithium ion batteries, which are kind of running the world right now.
So, yeah, there's lots of dust, including arsenic dust, which is kicking up, so people trying not to even live there anymore.
But there was this huge artist community.
I mean, you're getting close to Coachella and places like that down there.
Eleven geothermal plants producing 400 MW, which powers 350,000 homes worth just from geothermal.
So there's actually a lot of geothermal plants there, probably the most in North America, I'd guess.
The Earth's crust, like I said, is thin, so all this stuff gergles up.
Now, usually at a geothermal plant, they would put the brine back into the ground.
The water would come up, this hot brine, they take the energy out of it and transfer it to water to produce steam and then put it back in the ground.
But what they're saying is it could be a cheap way, since they're bringing it up already, to just turn that into a lithium extraction.
Right there at the geothermal plants or all of the eleven geothermal plants.
Lithium mining is usually water intensive and leaves behind contaminants.
And this bypasses those things.
And there's a cool 15 minutes video that CNBC did.
I put a link in your show notes for you to have a look at that.
Just wanted to pass that along.
And just some quick bad news.
The bad news story of the week, the Keystone Pipeline.
So this is one of the major oil pipelines that runs between Canada and the US.
Massive leak in Kansas.
So this is a company, TC Energy.Big controversy in Canada lately about expanding the Keystone Pipeline with kind of mixed results.
But I think it's just important to remember that pipelines, it's probably a safer way to transport than by rail.
There was a derailment near US not long ago with some oil on board that massive fire.
But 26,000 barrels of oil since 2010 coming out of that pipeline.
We'll be better off once we can stop doing that.
Why a world without pipeline leaks or oil spills? Wouldn't that be something? All right.
A nuclear study as a solution to global warming.
This is something I want to talk about because it's from Stanford.
They did a study and basically they said that in evaluating the solutions to global warming and air pollution and energy security, two important questions arise.
And they are should new nuclear plants be built to help solve these problems? A lot of people say yes without thinking about it.
I say, should existing aged nuclear plants be kept open as long as possible to help solve these problems? To answer these questions, the main risks associated with nuclear power are examined.
And the risks associated with nuclear power can be broken down into two categories.
One risk risks affecting its ability to reduce global warming and air pollution.
Two risks affecting its ability to provide energy and environmental security aside from climate and air pollution.
So the risks in the former category include delays between planning and operation, emissions contributing to global warming and outdoor air pollution, and costs as we talk about a lot.
Risks in the latter category include weapons proliferation risks, reactor meltdown risk, radioactive waste risk, and mining, cancer and land despoilment risks.
So new nuclear power plants cost 2.3 to 7.4 times those of onshore wind or utility PV per kilowatt hour, and they take five to seven years longer between planning and operation, five to 17 years longer, and produce nine to 37 times the emissions per kilowatt as wind.
Something you don't hear about.
The emissions that nuclear actually produces is not zero, and it's actually nine to 37 times the emissions of its energy output compared to wind.
So, as such, a fixed amount of money spent on a new nuclear plant means much less power generation.
A much longer wait for power at a much greater emission rate than the same money spent on WWS technology, wind, water and solar.
There is no such thing as a zero or close to zero emission nuclear power plant, says the study.
Even existing plants emit due to the continuous mining and refining of uranium needed for the plant.
And however, though all power plants emit 4.4 grams per CO2 equivalent per kilowatt hour from the water vapor and heat they release.
So water vapor is bad.
This is a question I have about the fusion plants, rather, is that are they emitting any water vapor? I haven't heard on that, and I will get back to you as soon as I hear something.
Or if you know something, always email us at the Clean Energy Show.
Clean Energy [email protected] this contrasts with solar panels and wind turbines, which reduce heat or water vapor fluxes to the air.
On top of that, because of all nuclear reactors, they take ten to 19 years or more.
Between planning and operation, there's two to five years for utility, solar or wind and nuclear causes a lot of emissions for 100 years.
Overall, emissions from the new nuclear 78 to 178 grams/CO2 per kilowatt hour, not close to zero at all.
So China's investment in nuclear plants take so long between planning and operation instead of wind and solar resulted, you know, because it chose nuclear instead of wind and solar because it took so long.
China's CO2 emissions were increased 1.3% from 2016 to 2017 in one year, rather than they should have declined by 3% if they went the way that we suggest here on the show.
Brian? Yeah.
Solar, wind and battery.
The resulting difference in air pollution emissions may have caused 82,000 additional air pollution deaths in China.
This is nothing.
This needs at literally between 2016 alone with additional deaths in years prior.
And since some feedback here that came in just as we were wrapping up last week's show, this is from well, let's listen.
Aloha, James and Brian.
My name is Ryan Nielsen.
I live in a little town called Gaylax, Virginia.
G-A-L ax like galaxy without the Y.
I originally grew up in Hawaii, hence the Aloha Go, Hawaii, for their clean energy.
I've heard lots of things about it on your show the last few months.
I've been listening for about six months now and never miss a week.
We started listening after we got our first electric vehicle, an ionic five, and have taken an increased interest in the environment and helping to save our planet.
We just found out yesterday about a solar farm.
It's going to be a 20 megawatt solar farm that's in the plans for our community just a few miles from our home.
And they're having a public commentary period for the next few weeks.
I will be going to a public meeting for it at our local library tomorrow, and I wanted to get your guys thoughts on the pros of solar farms in the community to counter all the negative as there are lots of outlandish and ridiculous claims that are out there and already being put out there.
So hope to hear from you guys and wanting to leave one of these messages for a while.
Mahalo for all that you do.
Well, thank you so much.
We love SpeakPipe Voicemails because we get to hear our listeners.
They're not just an intangible thing that we have to kind of imagine and people can listen to somebody else for a change.
It's like having a third host of the show, or a guest perhaps.
Congratulations on the Anna five.
That's great news.
Hoping you are enjoying it.
If you have any issues with it or any questions or concerns, let us know.
I know more about gaylax Virginia than I should, Brian, because I've been trying to find out, trying to find the solar farm proposal, and I can't find it.
There's lots of other ones, but I couldn't find it.
I went to the Galeax Library and I couldn't find it there.
Yeah, so I can't find anything about it.
So I don't know what the exact location is.
My only guess that a solar farm could be trouble is if it visually disturbs nature when they put it on a hillside or a high elevation.
That's the only thing that I can think of.
And I have seen something like that.
And I would say, well, why don't you put that in a valley? Or why don't you put it on a flat piece of land where you can't really see it? People probably don't even notice a solar or farms on flat land if you're driving down the highway.
If you're not looking for it, there's no negatives, Brian.
There's no negatives.
No.
And wind, it's kind of the same thing.
Like, there can be an issue with migratory birds and killing birds, but I think usually the people who are against wind turbines don't genuinely care about birds.
There's always small issues.
My brother was just telling me recently, he lives in rural Ontario, and this sort of came up at a local planning meeting for the small town that he was in.
And they weren't planning to do any clean energy, but it was just sort of on the agenda and they wanted to kind of get everybody's opinion, like the city councilors and everybody was against it.
He said, wow.
Yeah.
I don't think it would have been a year or two ago.
I think the rhetoric on Facebook, which is a lot of small town people, are even more connected to Facebook than anyone else because they need to be connected.
And there's not a Starbucks to go to, necessarily.
I do find that here where we live in a fairly rural area, and there's a lot of people on Facebook and they are in their bubbles and they are getting ridiculous information.
Now, I don't know what to tell you about people who believe in ridiculous information.
There's no magic bullet.
I mean, you can try and sit down with them and reason with them, and sometimes that works, but I wouldn't do that myself.
I'd like, screw that.
If you want to be dumb, be dumb.
If you want to have crazy ideas, fine, have crazy ideas.
It'll be built somewhere else.
It'll be built in another jurisdiction.
Well, I guess that's the one sort of saving grace of all this, because yes, absolutely.
There are going to be city councils everywhere voting this kind of stuff down, but it's a tide that can't be stopped.
Clean energy is better and cheaper.
It will eventually take over everywhere.
It's just unfortunate.
But I would encourage people to go to their city council meetings or whatever and speak on this topic, because sometimes if you don't, then nobody does.
Yeah, I just don't like getting into arguments with people who are cuckoo because you can't reason with somebody who thinks the Earth is flat.
And I don't like going to meetings.
Meetings.
I'm not a big fan of meetings, so I decided to start a podcast instead.
This is our way to contribute.
Yeah.
So 20 is twice the size of the solar farm that I looked at nearby, and they're building around here right now.
They are building bigger ones down the road.
But, you know, Virginia is actually a pretty good place for solar.
They have a lot of projects on the Go rooftop.
Solar is possible there.
The utility there has school bus rebates, which I happen to see just before I got his message, that they have they're buying a bunch of electric school buses, and they quite like them.
They are more expensive right now, but immediately the drivers are really praising them and liking them a lot.
We love to hear from you.
Contact us by email at clean [email protected].
We're on TikTok.
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Go there, find us.
If you'd like to look at us and leave us a voicemail like this one, which was fantastic, and we can't thank you enough.
SpeakPipe comclean energyshow.
But if you don't want to do that, send us an email.
We'll hear from you one way or another.
And that means it's time for the lightning Round, a fast paced look at the weak in clean energy and climate news.
Brian, if our show wasn't long enough as it is, it's long, and I apologize.
I apologize, I apologize, I apologize.
We are a long one this week.
Some people, they can't get enough.
Other people say, Come on, my commute is over.
You should be done by now.
A new clean energy poll from Abacus Research suggests 64% of Canadians realize that clean energy is cheap, affordable energy, which is pretty good, I think.
Speaking of naysayers, there's a lot in Canada.
That is the positive.It's cheap, it's clean.
You want to win over people in a small town.
Cheap.
You save money cheap.
Everybody likes money.
Everybody likes saving money.
Maybe people don't realize that.
They probably read on Facebook that it's more expensive.
We heard somebody say last week for the oil industry propaganda, that wind turbines have never worked anywhere in the world.
They've been in operation for decades.
OK.
So it's another one.There's two talking points for you.
Clean, cheap.
In our current climate, energy security is a big, big thing.
If you can control your own energy supply and get it from the sun, you don't have to deal with foreign dictators.
Toyota again in the news, they are telling their suppliers that hold on, we're coming up with a new three year EV plan, especially with what they deliver to Europe.
So it sounds like we're going to hear in the new year.
Toyota coming around on the EVs.
We'll see.
Oh, it's time for a CES Fast Fact clean Energy show.
Fast Fact from Eco watch.
In Europe, 40% to 60% of fish caught are discarded because they do not meet supermarket quality standards.
Nearly 50% is discarded in the United States.
So that is all.
Food waste is a big thing, Ryan.
Can't they turn it into pet food or something? Discarded.
Discarded.
I'd look into that further, further information you email us.
US gas prices peaked in June at $5 a gallon.
That's dollar 31 a liter, which is not where we peaked here.
We picked over $2, didn't we? Yeah, for sure.
I say to that.
In a study of 2055 German adults, a study found that a strong correlation between harboring conspiracy mentality and being unlikely to vote for wind turbines near your community.
Again, this gets back to our feedback from Virginia.
The correlation held regardless of if the referendum on the building of turbines was proposed by the supporters of the wind farm or its proponents.
So in another study of a similar amount of German adults, a conspiracy mentality was found far and away the biggest predictor of voting against the wind farm, much more so than age, gender, education level, sad or being politically right wing.
So if you believe in conspiracies, regardless of your political affiliation, regardless of your education and it's always sad to see educated people believe conspiracies.
But it happens.
I've seen it.
Yeah.
So Germany ranks third in the world for installed wind power capacity in 2020.
Almost a quarter of the country's energy came from wind and the government has pledged to double that by 2030, designated 2% of Germany's landmass to become wind farms.
So that's our time for this week, Brian, and it is more than time.
So thanks for listening to everyone.
We always appreciate it.
Tell your friends.
Spread the word.
Write it on bathroom walls, in public washrooms.
We don't care.
No, we like to hear from you.
As always.
Clean energy [email protected].
Check us out.
On social media, where our handle is at Clean Energy Pod.
By the way, if you're new to the show, remember to subscribe on your podcast app to get new episodes delivered every week.
And there is a donate button in your show notes if you care to buy us a cup of coffee.
We'll see you next week.
Probably one day late next this week, but we'll see you then.
I can't wait to do it again, Brian.
See you next week.
-
Tesla released their 500 mile/800 KM battery electric semi truck, proving that long-haul tranport can be electrified. A Texas fossil fuel foundation is fighting facts with misinformation campaigns and legal action to slow the adoption of clean energy.
Link to NY Times story on the Texas foundation (free link)New IEA report: Renewables will do in the next five years what they did in the last two decades. And, importantly
Triple A will now charge your dead EV in a number of U.S. cities, relieving range anxiety.
Someone shot up the North Carolina power grid. Blackouts are lasting days.
Tesla hate and road rage is on the rise.
France bans short haul flights but will it make a difference?
Climate scam tweets are way up since Elon Musk took over Twitter.
Nuclear power could be making a comeback in Japan.
A power cable under the sea connecting solar panels in the Sahara Desert to The United Kingdom.
Two thirds of Ford dealers are joining their program to sell electric vehicles.
Buy us a cup of coffee or a small island with PayPal Donate!Thanks for listening to our show! Consider rating The Clean Energy Show on iTunes, Spotify or wherever you listen to our show.
Follow us on TikTok!
@cleanenergypodCheck out our YouTube Channel! @CleanEnergyShow
Follow us on Twitter! @CleanEnergyPod
Your hosts:
James Whittingham https://twitter.com/jewhittingham
Brian Stockton: https://twitter.com/brianstocktonEmail us at [email protected]
Leave us an online voicemail at http://speakpipe.com/cleanenergyshow
Tell your friends about us on social media!
-
Brian talks about Wired.com's story on the benefits of processed foods. James is depressed because his beloved Nissan LEAF needs a new PTC cabin heater with a hefty price tag. The city of Houston has a boil water advisory because of a blip in their power grid. The Tesla Semi seems to be for real. Musk says it completed a 500 mile journey pulling an 81,000 pound load. The upcoming Sizewell C nuclear power plant in the UK was in need of public funding.
Why the Saudis have electric buses.
There's a new record size for off-shore wind turbines and it's 16 megawatts.
Ebike subsidies expand across the United States.
GM dealerships are repairing Teslas. Will they also fix James's LEAF?
Buy us a cup of coffee with PayPal Donate!Thanks for listening to our show! Consider rating The Clean Energy Show on iTunes, Spotify or wherever you listen to our show.
Follow us on TikTok!
@cleanenergypodCheck out our YouTube Channel! @CleanEnergyShow
Follow us on Twitter! @CleanEnergyPod
Your hosts:
James Whittingham https://twitter.com/jewhittingham
Brian Stockton: https://twitter.com/brianstocktonEmail us at [email protected]
Leave us an online voicemail at http://speakpipe.com/cleanenergyshow
Transcript
Hello, and welcome to episode 141 of the Clean Energy Show.
I'm Brian Stockton.
I'm James Whittingham.
I finally come clean this week about a secret I've been keeping for two months.
And, no, I'm not pregnant.
And, yes, I would make an excellent mother.
The city of Houston is under a boil water advisory.
Because of power outages.
Everything is bigger in Texas, including grid problems.
The Tesla semi completed a 500 miles journey with a load weighing 81 £0, or roughly half the weight of Elon Musk's eagle.
The upcoming Sewell Sea nuclear power plant in the UK was in need of funding.
Ultrawealthy prime Minister Rishi Sunak has stepped in with a cash infusion.
Oh, wait, I'm being told it's taxpayer money.
He's not an idiot.
All that and hopefully borrow this edition of the Clean Energy Show.
Brian I'm sweating like a hog and I'll tell you why.
Yes, I'm not a sick.
I was shoveling the driveway because it blew in.
And before the show, I frantically tracked down a plug in electric snow blower.
My partner was coming home for lunch and I said, can you swing by the Walmart because there's one left.
It was like $100 less than if I made this decision a few days ago.
I would have had all the Cyber Monday Friday deals, but I missed out on that.
But I found one with specs that was really good.
Now, I've got a battery operated snow shovel.
Not cutting it.
What's going to happen now is we're going to get trace amounts of snow for the next five years, but I say, fine, it's worth spending the money for that to happen, because it's worth it.
We've been snowed in and my partner had to park on the street and the driveway was daunting.
So I quickly assembled it at lunchtime.
While you were having your happy nap.
Yeah.
And I went out there with a short extension cord and did what I could.
And now I'm sweating like a crazy.
I'm soaked in sweat because my heart was going maximum, which doesn't take much these days, but when you're doing anything clearing snow, it gets the heart rate going, unfortunately.
So, like a plug in kind rather than battery operated, I guess, is a lot cheaper.
It is cheaper.
I did splurge, though, and get pretty much the most powerful one you can get.
It's about 14 amps.
You can get a 15 amp one, but then you have problems with your extension cords overheating and blowing breakers and things.
It's kind of the maximum that it will handle on an ongoing basis.
But I went out there with, I would say, a 15 inch drift and went right through it like it does a foot of snow.
But it will go under the drift and it will still keep going under the drift and you just go over it a second time.
So, yeah, I'm happy with it.
Those are a pain in the ass.
I've had them before because the extension cord but I knew that I wanted power, and this was a bigger unit, and it was a couple of couldn't really afford it, but I said, man, because we got to clean the sidewalks this year by city by law.
By city by law.
Yeah.
Well, just a quick update.
Last week I was complaining about GoComics.com, this website I go to every day to read daily comic strip.
It was down for a full five days and finally came back online.
They offered no explanation of exactly what happened.
It was supposedly a cyber security issue, which I had read on another website.
But anyway, our long nightmare is over.
It's back.
And coincidentally, this week on Saturday, it was Charles Schultz's, what would have been his 100th birthday, the creator of the Peanuts comic strip, the legend of newspaper comic strips.
It was his 100th birthday, so a lot of the comic strips had special tributes to him on Saturday.
So that was a lot of fun to read.
All the cartoonists got together and decided to do that.
And then the last thing, comic strips do you remember the soap opera comic strips when you were a kid? There were only a couple of comic strips that were not funny.
Yeah.
Give me an example of one, can you? Well, there's two main ones.
Mary worth.
Okay.
And Rex Morgan, MD.
And these trips have both been around for, like, 100 years by this point.
Anyway, I started reading them a couple of months ago because I was looking for new, exciting things to follow, and I'd always avoided them like the plague when I was a kid because it's like, this is ridiculous.
There's no joke here.
What's the point of this anyway? I've been reading for a couple of months now, and I'm starting to get into it.
It's kind of fun.
A bit speechless here.
You're reading soap opera comic strips after resisting them your whole life.
My whole life.
I mean, I thought, is it a gossipy? Pleasure, man, what's going on here? Yes.
I don't know.
I just like comic strips, and there's not enough good ones, so I just been looking to expand my horizons.
What happened to the creators? Did their kids take over? I mean, if these are 100 years old yeah, often that is the case.
I don't think that's the case with Mary.
We are Rex Morgan, but yeah, often it's passed on to a son or a daughter or a nephew or a niece or something.
I don't know.
They've all been around now, a lot of them, for 100 years.
I don't know.
It's a weird thing.
All right, Brian, I've got an announcement to make.
I've been hiding something from you for two months.
Wow.
You and the listeners.
Wow.
And it is regarding my leaf.
Oh, yeah.
My leaf has major problems.
It happened just before we recorded a show about two months ago, and I was so distraught, I couldn't bring it up, and I couldn't bring it up for two months.
I was just so unhappy about it.
That's terrible.
I don't know how the hell I made it through that episode.
But if you could find a very glum James about two months ago trying to struggle through an episode, I guess it's all muscle memory.
That's how we've done so many of these shows already.
Yeah.
And also, it doesn't have to be that good.
No, I mean, well, we try.
We do try for our listeners, don't we? Every week a good show.
Come on.
Okay.
Now, I know that we have a lot of long time listeners, but we also have a lot of new listeners.
And I wanted to just talk about electric cars with you for a little while, about the reliability.
And I don't want to just jump into it without talking about what model I have, because it's going to probably be different than what you are considering.
Although a friend of ours texted me the other night and was asking me about the Leaf, wanting to buy one.
And I said, well, here's what happened, and you can make up your own mind.
What had happened is my 2013 Nissan Leaf.
Now, remember, this is the first mass produced allelectric car by a car company.
They started making them at the end of 2010, and they made them for a couple of years in Japan, and then they opened up a Tennessee factory, and one in the UK as well.
Mine comes from Tennessee, and it comes from the United States and was imported into Canada.
So there's a few little things like daytime running lights that had to be added, and a bigger washer tank for some reason.
It's just one of those weird things just to get up to Canadian standards.
So it was imported already.
And Quebec, the problems with Quebec, they had just terminated at that time, but they had incentives for used vehicles that lowered the used market for Leafs.
And that's how I got one as cheap as I did.
It was about $10,000 in change, and that was a pretty good price at the time.
But it was a base model, so it was the base model S.
It had no cruise control.
And just when I started making those models, they put a heat pump in them in the upper trim levels.
They had three trim levels.
I had the low one, so I didn't even have a fast charger on mine, or a reverse camera.
Or there was some things I gave up to get a really cheap one, because everyone was designing the other ones.
Had I gotten one that was one of the other trim levels, I would have had a heat pump and a PTC heater.
PTC heater is basically like a toaster.
Now, these suckers and electric cars heat up fast.
They connect rate to the high voltage battery, and it's a heater that gets red hot and air blows through it.
So you have instant heat in your car, which is wonderful.
And when I preheat my car in the winter time even -40 I'll get into it and it feels like a toaster oven.
It just feels hot and dry and completely warm and habitable in there.
It's wonderful feeling.
If you leave it long enough, it'll melt all the snow that's on the car.
Right.
And that's what I do.
So in the leaf it will preprogram itself.
You just give it a departure time and based on the weather and how long it took to get to temperature and previous days, it will add more time.
I think up to 2 hours.
I'm not sure about that.
So I probably abused it and I lost my PTC heater.
So I have no heater in the car for two months now.
A month ago you were talking about getting your heater replaced under warranty, which I did.
Went up to Saskatoon and yeah, they replaced that under warranty and it was the same thing.
Your car and I and mine are the same in that sense.
That they just have a PTC heater.
Later models may have had both or at least a heat pump and yours for more efficiency.
Heat pump is like reverse air conditioner if you're new to the show.
And it works a lot more because a great deal of power goes into these.
I think 5000 watts goes into mine.
That's more than the car driving.
So your range goes down.
So since my heater broke, my winter range is excellent, by the way.
It only goes down based on denser or cold air.
Do you have a little bonfire going in there or something? No, I eat some beans sometimes before.
It's not a great experience.
And what I've done, we have an SUV that I thought initially I thought I would just place the SUV for the winter and it's going to be expensive and it'll heat up and it will be, you know, but then even without the damn heater, Brian, I just love that bloody car.
Like, I just love it.
I just love driving it.
I hate getting into the Prius, which is a combustion engine in the wintertime, it's cold anyway, unless your destination is a long ways away or you've warmed it up.
That thing takes a while to warm up too.
And it's not like an electric car and it just doesn't feel the same as an electric car.
And I finally got the wheel bearings fixed, so it was nice and quiet.
And I've decided that one of the great things about electric cars is after I had my wheel bearing fixed, because they were very loud, is when you get up to speed in the city, it's almost like you can feel the wind in your hair.
Like you could just feel and hear the wind and nothing else.
And it's just such an exhilarating feeling to just hear that.
And there's something I don't know, just beyond anything a gas car can do.
When I looked at yours, was covered under warranty.
I found somebody who spent $1200 in Canada, basically, to do it.
And the part was about six or $700, $700 for the part.
And then they did some labor.
Now, in the Leaf, I looked at doing it myself, but it's very complicated.
Basically, the whole inside of the car has to be taken apart.
And it's a $4,000 job in most cases.
Oh, no.
I spent ten on the car.
I just spent 2100 that I didn't have, fixing the front wheel hubs, which cost way more than they should have because I got screwed by a local shop because there's no Nissan dealer here to fix it.
I also need some front suspension work.
Now, the car is one month short of ten years old.
This is something important because we're talking about electric cars not needing maintenance.
And that is true for the most part.
And people say, well, it's electric car.
Something weird can go wrong in it.
Well, I guess this is it.
Aside from the battery, which are covered under eight year warranties.
Always.
Always.
You know, there's the charger, I suppose, could go in the car, that there's a built in charger that can wear out over time.
I would have to worry about that.
I could have some bad battery cells, so you might have to replace some modules at some point.
But the cars would have been great.
But some people put in diesel heaters.
Like, there's a guy in Swift Current who bought a brand new F 150 pickup truck, and he put in a diesel heater so that he wouldn't lose any range.
Like, you have a diesel heater in an electric truck? That's right.
It's basically this unit that you have to exhaust, and it just kind of burns away.
It is crazy.
And it's got electronic controls.
This is what people are doing.
And I don't know, did you ever know somebody who had a really old Volkswagen Beetle? Because I think, like, some of those had a propane heater because the Volkswagen Beetles were air cooled.
So you don't get that circulating fluid that you normally use for your heater in your car.
So old Beetles had a propane heater, which often apparently also did not work.
So, yeah, I knew a guy who had to drive around in the winter and a Beetle scraping the inside of the window because there was no heat.
Well, here's what I've done.
Okay, first of all, the part, it wouldn't be so bad if I was a Tesla out of warranty.
Twelve hundred dollars to go from an unusable car to a usable car.
Great.
I actually put in a space heater, like the one you have with a cottage into my car on a timer.
Like it's a plug into the lighter? No, it plugs into an extension cord.
Okay, so you just run an extension cord in there because when I was a kid, my parents had in their car a block heater.
A lot of people listening don't know what a block heater is.
That is a heater that heats the oil in a car in a very cold climate so that it will turn over, that it's viscous enough to turn over.
And we have them in all of our cars here.
But yes, my parents also had an interior warmer as well.
And you plugged it in with the block heater.
Yes, that's what my parents did.
Yeah.
And so same thing like, you can have your car warm in the morning.
I seem to remember it running overnight.
Do you remember my parents did that too? Just left both the heater and the interior one plugged in overnight.
Yeah, different times.
Because it would have been like a thousand watts, probably.
Yes, it would have been extremely wasteful.
And for what? I don't remember the snow being melted on the windows.
That's not something that I remember.
Yeah, no, I know somebody who used to do that, lived in an apartment building where the plugins in the parking lot were free.
Like you didn't have to pay for the electricity.
So I know somebody who did that kept it plugged in all night and all the snow melted on the car just because he didn't have to pay for the electricity.
It is warming up to the interior and at least getting it usable.
The problem is you have to run some air on the window to defog it at the lowest setting.
And if it's cold out, that feels really bad because we're talking what temperatures have we had here? Minus ten celsius -20, and it's going to get colder.
It's going to be high -20 in a few days.
I was hoping for a naturally warm winter and a lottery ticket win.
A couple of things that I was hoping for.
And if I got it fixed, I would have to ship the car all the way up to a city called Prince Albert, which is the closest Nissan dealer that is certified to do electrical work.
So basically when people do these fixes, they take out the front car seats and all the dash and they have to unplug the high voltage system underneath the car.
And there's also this fuse that is hard to get at, that always blows.
I confirmed it because I have sort of the computer connection to my phone app and it has the right error codes on there so that the heater is seen on the phone.
Now, I knew this was something that I worried about because I've seen it with other people.
I've seen it online a few times, but now that I'm really looking, I haven't seen it that much at all.
Like, there's a few references to it and there's people saying, well, it was bad welding and there should be a class action suit but there really isn't that many people.
I think a lot of people actually had them done under warranty because I'm only a couple of years off the warranty actually.
Well that's not true.
I don't know if this would have qualified for that, but a lot of the high voltage stuff did and the battery and stuff like that.
So I'm very depressed Brian, because and I haven't even told my partner yet.
My kids know, my partner does not.
She just thinks I spilled something in the car and I've got a heater going in there.
I'm just so ashamed of myself because I'm an electric car advocate.
I've been telling everybody they don't break down and I put my family at risk of this and now we don't have a car that's working.
So I drive my kid to school, it's a ten minute drive.
She doesn't complain.
Well, I don't know if this makes you feel any better and you've certainly told me this as well, like you crunched the numbers when you bought that car and it's basically probably already paid for itself.
If you think of all the fuel that you've saved, that was on all numbers, that was before gas went up.
Before gas went up.
So first of all, the car has been free so far? Basically, yes.
Another way I could look at it is that these things are selling for 6000 more than I paid for it.
Yeah, prices are up since when you bought it, so there's that incentive to fix it and not feel so bad about it or sell it to somebody in the summer.
No, well, I would never do that.
Never.
That would be awful.
Well, now that the evidence is out there by the way, you can't here's a tip for your kids out there.
If you buy an electric car in the summer that's used check the heater just because you want to make sure it works.
Now, if I had one of those models that wasn't the base model I would have had in my case a heat pump and a PTC heater.
Yeah.
So the heat pump, I don't know what they work efficiently at in a leaf.
It might only be -15, or something like that.
And it gets much colder where we are.
But I would have had some heat and I could've preheated it for a couple of hours and it would have got somewhat comfortable in there, you know, and that would have been fine.
Maybe not on every day, but most of our winter days aren't necessarily brutal.
Hopefully it would work out, I don't know.
Warm days are only five months away.
Shut up, shut up, shut up.
It can't be that long.
There's heated seats and front and back in the Prius or in the Prius and the leaf that helps.
There's a heated steering wheel.
That's great.
Now I've ordered off of Amazon for $30 a dinky little electric cigarette lighter, heated defroster.
So I will see how that works.
Is going to come in a couple of days.
I'll tell you next week if it does anything.
I had one many years ago when I was a teenager because my rear defrost didn't work my $300 car.
So I bought one at the hardware store, and I think it sort of did something.
So it's a little portable heater, like just 100 watts or something.
Just a cheap yes, about 100 watts.
But hopefully it will be better than just blowing cold air as far as the feeling of it.
But we'll see how I survive.
Actual really cold temperatures that are coming up this week, I may not you know how teenage girls dress for school? My daughter doesn't dress very warm to get her into school and even with the car, not have producing heat and try to convince her to put things on so she doesn't get hypothermia.
But on the bright side, Brian, I'm feeling better.
Yeah, well, like we were talking about last week, we sometimes don't dress for the climate anymore because we're just used to going from one warm environment to another warm environment.
I don't have a lot of stuff this week because Twitter has gone haywire, and I get a lot of my information from climate people and various activists on Twitter.
They've all left for mastodon and other places.
Like, they're all completely gone, and I hope they come back.
But there's talk of Tesla shareholders getting upset with Musk doing what he's doing because that seems to be affecting the Tesla stock.
Just the fact that he had to sell a bunch to buy that social media platform is a little crazy.
Anyway, I'm on the Chevy Voltage group.
I thought it was interesting.
Every now and again I see an interesting story that really talks about the economics of electric cars.
We talked about how mine for $10,000 covered the gas and my SUV.
That would have been five years of gas.
And that's just incredible.
And plus, you're saving the environment a little bit too.
Obviously, it's a lot more pleasurable too, but so somebody's paying $520 for a Chevy bolt.
This is one of the cheapest EVs.
You can buy the monthly payment for five years with no money down or anything like that.
And he's saying that he saved 175 gallons of gas, and at $4 a gallon, minus $60 a month increase in electricity, he's saving $580 a month.
Both has over two months.
Over two months.
It's like getting a car for very little money, and it will basically pay for itself in eight to ten years.So in his case, he's buying a brand new car and getting it free after eight to ten years.
The more you drive, the better deal it is.
Yeah, that's for sure.
And as they come down in price, this is going to be more and more things especially if you're dealing with fleets that do a lot of driving.
And free is one thing, but you're still saving you're still saving over a gas car.
So that's something.
The New York Times had an interesting piece about how the Saudis are trying to keep gas alive.
And one of the ways that they're doing it is they're buying a whole bunch of EVs and Ebuses for Saudi Arabia so that they can get this burn less gas.
They want to sell the gas to other people.
They don't want to waste any of it using it themselves.
That's a really good point, doing that.
That just struck my craw, like it's stuck in there.
Well, there's going to be sort of EV have countries and EV have not countries and yeah, that's keep selling them your oil, I guess.
So the Texas grid, what's going on there? Yeah, we talked about that occasionally.
Texas in the US.
Has its own electricity grid that tends to be cut off from the rest of the country.
And they've had problems lately and I just thought this was an interesting problem there's currently, and it should be ending today, but a boil watery advisory in the city of Houston, which is a massive city for the whole city.
For the whole city.
And so school has been canceled.
Yeah, that's first nation reserve up north kind of territory, or small town at least.
And it's because they had power outages at their water filtration system when the power goes out and they were supposed to have power backup and for some reason it didn't work.
But the water pressure drops within the filtration plant and once the water pressure drops down past a certain amount, they basically have to put out a boil water advisory so it's entirely possible the water is still safe to drink.
It's a precautionary thing.
It's a precautionary thing.
And they need to let it go for a couple of days, test the water again.
And they will probably lift the boil water advisory today.
But I just thought it was interesting because it's just one of those things where we don't think about necessarily in terms of the grid, why it's important to have a reliable grid.
And this is just one of those instances where a bad grid with frequent power outages can lead to things like a boil water advisory for a massive city like Houston.
These are things that I worry about with armageddon scenarios.
If there's some sort of war or something, we really need to have our water because we don't have a well in our backyard.
And I'm not currently collecting rainwater.
You're talking about doing that at the new cottage.
But I guess we could melt some snow during the winter.
Oh, yeah, not the yellow.
I'll just blow it into a big pile of my new snow blower and melt it.
Melt it with what, though, right? I have to collect firewood on the prairies.
That's no fun.
Burned gopher carcasses or something like that, I thought.
I would also mention these two Chinese companies announced that the production of the largest offshore wind turbine to date has been announced.
Because this is something we talked about before, so I thought I'd bring it up again.
You love a big turbine.
I do love my turbines to be setting records, Brian.
And we knew that this would be broken because there was rumors of it.
The previous record is 14 MW.
This is something that can power a house for two days with one rotation of the blade.
One little rotation can power your home and your family for two days, and now they've gone up to 16.
There's two companies in China that have developed 16 MW.
It's interesting to watch when professionals have discussions online about what the theoretical limit is.
But a lot of times in the clean energy space, people think that nothing can go any further, and it does.
There's always some sort of development or some sort of technique.
Some of it is just a placement where you place it.
They have better modeling now than they used to 20 years ago.
The groups on November 24 showed off the turbine factory in Fujian Province.
And the turbine has a 252 meters rotor diameter with 50,000 meters sweep area.
That is a large sweep area.
If you want to compare sweep areas, it's a large 146 meters.
The hub of it, the middle, the turning point, 146 meters.
One and a half football fields off the ground.
And I saw another wind turbine blade on the highway the other day, which is always an amazing sight to see.
Those checks right here.
Blades? Yeah, it was heading towards Moose Jaw.
That's interesting.
I wonder where from, because that's kind of where it was going.
Not sure.
That is actually the biggest restriction on this wind turbine size, is that you physically can't turn corners on any sort of roads with those wind turbines.
It was right here you saw when I saw one of Colorado was amazing.
It was just blocks long, and it's just, you know, the largest man made item I think I've ever seen up close.
It was like looking at a massive rocket or something.
Okay, so I've got a great story here from Hannah Ritchie, who is the head of research at Our World in Data.
And she is still on Twitter, and I would recommend following her.
She's a great follow on Twitter, amazing information.
So she's the head of research at Our World in Data.
Fabulous website that just collects all kinds of data and presents it in website form.
A lot of people have been going there through the COVID pandemic because it's a great place to go for sort of COVID statistics and stuff like that.
So she wrote this amazing article at Wired magazine, and it's about processed foods.
Every once in a while, people stop me on the street.
And they say, hey, are you the guy from the Clean energy show? Why are you promoting processed foods all the time? Go on.
The idea of processed food, it just has a really bad rap.
We all know, I think, that we should eat raw vegetables from the garden or whatever, and processed foods can be bad.
It turns out that there's sort of two categories.
There's processed foods and then there's ultraprocessed foods.
There's literally two categories to describe them based on how much processing.
It's just a massive oversimplification.
And this fantastic article summarizes everything, and it's things that we basically kind of talked about on the show before, but I just thought the article was great because it really explains it really nicely.
One example of a good instance of processed food would be iodised salt.
So iodine is a thing that we all need in our bodies.
And iodine deficiencies used to be a really common problem around the world, and increased risk of stillbirth and miscarriages reductions in IQ from lack of iodine.
That's why I'm so smart.
All the processed foods I've been eating, all that.
Yeah.
So reduce cognitive development.
But many years ago, we started adding iodine to salt.
So most salt is iodized, and this kind of fixes that problem.
But it's really the ultra processed foods that tend to be the problems, like, you know, snack foods like Twinkies and stuff like that.
So where would we get iodised salt in nature to keep us healthy before? I'm not sure where that even comes from.
Yeah, presumably our meat paleolithic cells were eating the right roots and vegetables or whatever.
I'm not sure it's the ultra processed foods that we really should be railing against.
Technically, something like Beyond Meat is ultra processed, but it's not that simple.
It's just an oversimplification to say it's bad because it's processed well.
So when I think of processed foods, Brian, I think of losing the nutritional value because of the way it's processed.
I think of added salts, and I think of added sugars.
That's a very common thing, too.
And spaghetti sauce.
And practically everything has sugar that doesn't need it.
No.
And as you said on the show many times before, it's not intended to be health food.
Like Beyond Meat is not intended to be health food.
It's intended to be a substitute for meat.
So ground beef.
So what you really need to compare it against is ground beef.
So when you do that, meat substitutes tend to be lower in calories, lower in saturated fat, and higher fat fiber.
Yes.
Really? Because I thought some of the criticism of these Beyond Meat and what's the other one called? What's the other one called? Yes.
Impossible Burger.
Impossible Burger.
That they were worse than regular meat.
Or maybe that's the beef industry saying that it could all be tweaked.
I mean, it can be whatever you want it to be.
We're still early stages here, right? I mean, we're still developing stages.
If people are saying, oh, this tastes like crap, well, then they can add in more fat.
They can add in more sugar or whatever.
So meat substitutes lower in calories and saturated fat and higher in fiber, which is good to their detriment.
Some are lower in protein and often contain lower quality protein, meaning they contain less of the essential amino acids that we need.
I didn't know there were different levels of protein.
That's something new for me.
Yeah.
When it comes to sodium, it's sort of a mixed bag substitute.
Burgers tend to be comparable to meat.
When it comes to sodium, the substitute sausages have less salt than their pork equivalents.
A lot of these substitute products are now fortified with B Twelve, iron and calcium, which is something you're not necessarily going to get from the meat.
The Impossible burger has more B Twelve and iron than beef does.
Really many plant based milks are fortified as well.
So on balance, they're probably a bit better for your health than the meat equivalent.
And I see this as just the beginning because we talk about the concept of food software that you can program the food that you're going to be making with precision.
Fermentation in the future will be inventing new foods that have protein in them and different tastes and different flavors that don't necessarily come from an animal or plant.
Or we can just tweak the things that are mimicking what we already eat, but to our taste, to what we like.
And chefs, I think a chef 20 years from now could be a bit of a computer programmer and just experimenting with different things, and it could be an interesting world.
Well, I've always been fascinated by that.
I think I saw, like, a documentary one time about somebody who was a chef at a fast food restaurant, and it's just the idea of that I find interesting.
Like somebody has to do, even if it's just regular meat, and somebody has to design that stuff to be then replicated literally billions of times.
It's a fascinating sort of thing.
It is.
And you go to the McDonald's campus and you see they've got all these chefs making a lot of money there.
And every time they come up with a new product, I always think of them and I think, you stupid buggers, you really screwed up.
You know, I'm very disappointed in this rap that you made.
This rap so that teenagers can put it together when they're hungover and use basic ingredients, and it's just crap.
All these chefs are making these things that are disappointing and everything that you eat.
I was talking to my family about Tim Hortons.
What a compromise of a restaurant that is.
Yes, everything is bad.
Even the donut.
It's a donut shop, and they can't even make a decent donut.
I don't want to be the old man here, but when I was a kid donuts were pretty damn good.
They're a lot better than they are.
There no.
And even Tim Hortons.
It was about 20 years ago, they switched, and they forced all of their franchises to buy basically frozen dough or frozen donuts.
Well, they make them in a factory.
I've seen the news stories on them.
They make them in a centralized factory, and they have baked them.
They just finished the baking process and specialized ovens here, which make them somewhat fresh.
But they're not a good product, which is not.
No, but up until that point, they were made in the restaurants, and they were slightly better.
So there's a couple more issues raised from this article.
First, the idea that food processing could alleviate malnutrition for billions of people.
So meat substitutes are mostly targeted at wealthy consumers.
But the implications of a backlash to process food are just as harmful for people with less money.
More food processing, not less, could improve health and nutrition in developing countries.
So there's a lot of countries that can't afford to eat a lot of meat, and in some ways, that's good.
In other ways, it's bad.
There are certain things that you lack in your diet, perhaps if you're not eating meat.
And some of those things could be added, like iodine to salt could be added into the thing.
And plus, there's an appetite for people that they may want to eat more meat in countries where they can't afford it, and this gives them an option that is like that that's similar to meat.
If you're new to the podcast, I should tell you that we talk about food on the show because it affects the climate.
The new technologies and food are lower.
Carbon, like, Impossible Burger is 25 times less carbon per gram than the hamburger.
No, the final point from the article is the carbon footprint.
I mean, it's absolutely insane how much lower the carbon footprint is from the substitute food than regular meat.
The environmental toll can be ten to 100 times lower than beef or lamb, beef being the most carbon intensive.
I came across another one the other day.
People often complain about almond milk.
Milk substitute made of almond because it uses a lot of water, you need tons of water.
It's growing in places that doesn't have water.
It doesn't have a lot of water.
And this is true of the milk substitutes.
Almond is the one that uses the most water, but it's like a 10th or 100th of the water needed if you get the milk from a cow.
Like, the water needed for the beef industry is insane.
So I would have assumed the opposite.
Wow.
It's not even close.
You're saying it's not even close? Well, because I've driven by those almond farms, and you see all the irrigation, and you see the outside the border, it's a desert.
So to join them in the desert and you think, wow, this is not a good idea.
No, but you see the chart for the carbon footprints, and beef is the most carbon intensive of all of the meats.
And one last thing here and again, it's from our World in Data.
There was a really nice graph of meat consumption per person around the world.
And so, quick quiz.
What country do you think eats the most meat per person? My initial response would be the United Kingdom or the United States.
It is the United States.
Yeah, that's kind of almost a stereotype.
It's a stereotype that appears to be true.
Argentina eats a lot of meat.
Australia eats a lot of meat.
So in the US.
It's 124 year per person, which is a lot.
Canada is now at 82.
Lot less in Canada.
That was surprising to me.
Now, why would that be? We have a lot of agriculture here.
We have a lot of land.
Why would we I don't know, except I know that anytime I've been to the States and you go to a restaurant and you order a meal in a restaurant, it always seems to be a very large portion of meat.
Yeah.
Yeah.But there's a wonderful graph there on our World in Data, meats applied per person.
This is 2017, so the data is a bit out of date, perhaps.
Well, the article is on wired.com and it's called The World Needs Processed Food.
I'll put a link to it in our show notes, and you can check it out there.
So the Tesla semi, according to a tweet by the CEO of Tesla, did its 500 miles trip with a full load.
Now, Tesla a few years ago announced that it was making a semi allelectric semitruck.
The CEO of Nicola, who is now, like, in prison, I remember reading his tweets.
He was really upset that this was against the law of physics.
There's no way you could carry an 18,000 pound load, which is kind of like the load that you want to carry.
The Tesla semi carry this 18,000 pound load 81,000 pardon me, 81,000 for 500 miles, which is, Bill Gates said, not possible.
I don't know why these people say these things, Brian.
Why do they doubt us? Why do they put themselves on the record saying it's not possible? Now, lots of people said that at the time that the Tesla announcement was suspicious because people didn't think it was possible.
But it's been so long since they made that announcement that battery density, the energy density, the more you can get more energy in the same weight of battery and volume than you could back then, it tends to improve by something like 18% a year.
But we're kind of there now, and it sounds well, we'll know in a couple of days, right? Because on December 1 of having an event.
Yeah, but apparently they've done it, and they've decided that he's invited Bill Gates to come have a ride.
And, you know, I was thinking that would be a fun thing to own.
And I know a lot of Tesla fanatics are actually got orders in for the semi just to have other driveway, some YouTube channels, which will be fun.
Yeah, definitely fun if they buy one and drive it around because they're fast without a load.
They're just really fast and quiet and tall and just such a weird thing for somebody to own.
And probably not that much more expensive than some of the highly spec pickup trucks that are out there for $120,000, be a couple of hundred thousand dollars, it sounds like.
But yeah, we'll learn more on December 1.
And looking to learn more about the charging speeds and the infrastructure and stuff.
Yeah, we'll learn how they plan to do it.
But it sounds like this is for real now.
If it is for real, this is a big deal because there's lots of people making electric semis, but they're making them for shorter scenarios, okay? They don't have the battery technology or the efficiency that Tesla has with their motors, their inverters, and the way that they have their batteries.
And plus they've just done pretty serious design with the aerodynamics and everything and maximize everything they can get and wait.
So we'll see.
But this is a game changer.
A lot of people are saying the cost per mile is going to be significantly lower enough that it will pull triggers on a lot of people will pull triggers on it right away once they see the difference in the cost per mile.
So it's very interesting.
Just as your Nissan Leaf basically paid for itself with the gasoline savings, these will pay for themselves with the diesel savings.
I'd love to have one to pull.
You could pull an RV right? There's people talking about that.
And I'm sure somebody will make an RV based off the platform.
That will probably take a while, but they'll turn one of these units into just a kickass RV, which will it'll have a massive battery, which you can power off the grid and do all kinds of amazing things.
Plaster the RV part with the solar panels and charge it up as well.
It just seems like a great way to RV because towing is such a pain in the butt.
And a Tesla semi or pickup truck, I guess, would do a great job too.
Yeah, so from Power Magazine, the UK government steps up as a 50% owner of the 3.2 gigawatt sizewell C nuclear reactors.
So they've been building this nuclear reactor for a while, planning it, and guess what? It turned out to be more expensive than they expected.
So they really needed the government to step in.
And the government has stepped in with a 679,000,000 pound investment that's $815,000,000.
So yeah, they're going to own half of it from that.
But as we've discussed many times, government really has to own these because they are not profitable for any private industry there, especially by the time these get built.
And I hate to go on about nuclear.
We tend to bash nuclear every episode or so, but especially by the time this is finished, it will be years from now.
Years, as we all know, the cost of solar and batteries, my cars will be cold and dust like so it's already a bad monetary investment now, but that's just going to get worse as time goes on.
And we have a story coming up in the lightning round that says that the cost of uranium is really going up.
So that's making the economics of all this very it's getting worse, I'm afraid.
But yeah, private ownership and investment pardon me, in nuclear, it's not happening because governments have to do it.
Then when governments do it, that makes you and I the investor.
We're suffering.
We're going to waste money because they don't listen to our podcast.
If they only listen to our podcast, everyone would be the world would be a better place.
And there was a story from Japan, too, on Bloomberg.
They're looking to extend the life of their 60 year old nuclear plants, which they were planning to phase out at age 60.
And keeping nuclear running that we already have is probably a good idea, but 60 seems a bit pushy.
It's kind of pushing it, but they're studying it now to see if it's going to be worthwhile.
Okay, well, I have no problem, as long as it's safe of extending nuclear, if that's what it takes.
So Electric says that there are more electric bike subsidies coming to the United States.
I guess it was in the Inflation Reduction Act, but then it got taken out like there was going to be a killer ebike subsidy that everyone would have got in the states, but that's not there anymore.
So individual cities and states have since picked up the slack.
They say.
Vermont launched the first state incentive program in the US.
Denver, Colorado, also launched the very popular ebike rebate program that repeatedly sold out and they had to renew it.
New York is now considering its own ebike rebate, and now we can add Oregon to the list.
It could become the latest date.
They're talking about $200 off an ebike that costs, well, at least $950.
But Brian, that would be free.
I mean, my math isn't so good, but if all you have to spend is 950 and you get up to 1200 off, I assume if you spent 950, they'd give you 950.
Yes, I know, but still, that's a free.
That's free.
That's what I'm saying.
It goes to zero.
Free bike.
That's crazy.
I mean, who wouldn't buy one? I mean, even if you didn't want one, it would be sitting around the house and then the bikes are going to be sold.
I don't know.
They have to do something about that.
They can't do 100% of the purchase, but maybe it's prorated.
Maybe somebody in Colorado can tell me the details.
But also they would go right up to $700 if it's an electric cargo bike.
I think I forgot a friend in Vancouver has an electric cargo bike.
Yeah, basically, it's a cargo bike not because you're a courier, but because you're living your life off the thing.
So you're getting all your groceries and your snow blowers from Walmart.
And by the way, it's going to snow in Vancouver.
If you're in Vancouver look good for the snow.
It doesn't usually snow there.
Electric cargo bikes are going to be huge.
Okay, so Ireland and France are going to connect their electricity grids.
How is that possible, Brian? Physically, it's with a giant extension cord.
Really? Does it go underwater? It goes underwater.
So it is a massive cable that is 575 km long.
And so this is the first time that France has been connected to a grid in the UK.
And it's for sharing power back and forth between Ireland and France.
They're just beginning it now, so it will be operational by 2026.
It'll be 700.
MW can go through the cable, which is enough to power 450,000 households.
So, yeah, I'm just always interested in these kind of stories.
We need to make our grids smarter and more interconnected to share the power.
Ireland and France seems like an odd combination.
How did these two hook up? What's going on there? What would their accent be like? No, I'm not sure, but I'm just glad to hear it.
Well, it's time for the Tweet of the Week.
Well, the Tweet of the week comes from Said Razuk this week, and he says building new solar is three to ten times cheaper than operating existing gas fired power.
So you have a gas fired power in a lot of places in the world.
It is cheaper, like the United States, southern United States, three to ten times cheaper to build new solar than just to operate the gas.
Yes.
We're not talking gas this building solar, we're talking building a whole new thing is three to ten times cheaper just than existing gas.
So if gas funds were invested in renewables like they're not right at the moment, europe would get rid of gas by 2028.
And this is via PV magazine that he quotes data from.
Well, it is time for the lighting round.
Short one for you this week, Brian.
General Motors dealerships have repaired thousands of Tesla electric cars, says GM, and it's annual Investor Day presentation.
I have not heard this before, but apparently people are taking their Teslas to GM dealership.
Maybe I could take my Leaf to the GM because they fixed.
Screw you, Nissan.
I'll just take it to the GM dealership.
Yeah, that might work.
I mean, if you could take a Tesla, why couldn't you take a Nissan? Yeah, no, that's the first time I've heard of this.
First booked on Barons.
A slide in the presentation simply reads eleven 180 repairs and Teslas, but they did not elaborate.
So GM Volvo say that EVs won't cost more than gas vehicles by 2025.
Both automakers see the Inflation Reduction Act as a key for achieving price parity by middecade, despite recent supply chain challenges.
So that's good news.
If true, the UK government will bolster a proposed OK, that's something we already talked about, so I'm going to skip that.
It's time for what is it time for? A CES, a clean energy show.
Fast fact.
The International Atomic Energy Agency said 437 nuclear power reactors were operational throughout the world at the end of 2021.
And that has a total net capacity of 389 gigawatts.So it's less than a gigawatt per reactor on average.
The agency said 56 additional units were under construction.
Some of those are in China, most of those are not other places.
And as I said before, uranium prices are on the rise, thus making nuclear even less competitive.
And Russia is partially the thing for that.
They're raising the prices of gas and oil and also uranium.
So we screwed everything up.
The Department of Energy is to test rapidly deployable portable wind turbines for military use.
I remember once we had on the show a story about the military with rapid deployment of solar panels that would sort of be like a transformer and unfold on a portable truck that would give energy into the field.
Well, this is good for disaster relief and military use.
So disaster relief and military use.
A team of three labs will use remote communities to study the efficacy of turbines designed to fit into 20 foot shipping containers, perhaps towed by a Tesla.
Semi clean energy jobs now outnumber jobs in fossil fuels, according to a new IEA report.
Now, I'm going to continue to keep my eye open for reports like this and studies, because it seems like we are at the point now where the transition is happening, where the clean energy jobs are way overtaking fossil fuel jobs.
So, by the way, France's first offshore wind farm, which is about half a gigawatt, is now fully online.
So France has never had an offshore wind farm before.
And speaking of offshore wind, our final story this week, before we go, is Denmark is helping India identify 15 offshore wind zones.
And apparently India has some sweet wind zones, Brian, and they need electricity.
We talked about huge solar developments in India, while offshore wind is next up on the list, and that will be a huge boon for them.
Nice.
That is our time for this week.
It's more than our time.
We'd like to hear from you.
Please, for God's sake, contact us.
Cleanenergy [email protected].
That is our email address.
Anything that's on your mind.
Some criticism, some doubts, some things you like, some things that you're doing.
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Let us know.
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And we have a YouTube channel which we have special features on.
You can see me looking a bit more sweaty than usual this week.
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Because our new shows, they come every week.
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We'll see you next time, Brian.
you.
-
Two hundred billion dollars of oil and gas money to through The World Cup in Qatar. Turns out Qatar is 'new money' and yet has a huge sovereign fund of $300B. Even they know the transition is coming. The governor of Tokyo suggests turtleneck sweaters for saving on energy. Will the trend take off? Donate to The Clean Energy Show via PayPal! COP27 was a big, fat compromise and we need to do better but it does seem the world is slowly coming together to oppose fossil fuels. The sexy new Prius is fast and sporty. Too bad it isn't an electric vehicle. We predict continued bad sales for Toyota. Biden pours billions into aiding the U.S. power grid to transition to renewable energy. Canada begins a program to replace oil furnaces on the East coast with heat pumps.
Other topics: GoComics, Carlos Ghosn, Unilever to make precision fermented ice cream could be the blow to dairy we've been predicting, Mazda might be the only Japanese auto company to get serious about EVs and Volkswagen may be dropping the ball. A listener bought his first EV and is worried his reduced winter range won't come back. Don't worry, it will!
Thanks for listening to our show! Consider rating The Clean Energy Show on iTunes, Spotify or wherever you listen to our show. Follow us on TikTok! @cleanenergypod
Transcript------------
Hello, and welcome to episode 140 of the Clean Energy Show.I'm Brian Stockton.
I'm James Whittingham.
This week, with the World Cup underway in Qatar, we look at what might be the peak of petrol state decadence.
I mean, what does $200 billion even get? Dennis a soccer tournament without beer.
Hell, even my kids pee wee soccer tournaments had beer.
The governor of Tokyo has solved the energy crisis.
The solution? Turtleneck sweaters.
Speaking as a Canadian, wait until they hear about Tukes and woolly socks.
Well, the Cop 27 climate summit was a bit of a wash.
You know, like standing in the middle of Miami.
Domino's Pizza is moving to Chevy Bolt electric delivery vehicles.
They've ordered 800 bolts from GM, and if they don't receive the cars in 30 minutes, they're free.
All that and more of this edition of the Clean Energy Show.
Holy brian we're back with another show, another week.
We're nonstop robotic machines here.
Yeah, a lot is going on.
And also this week, will I fit into the surprisingly sexy new Prius? The answer will sadden you, I think.
Biden gives billions to the US power grid, and Canada follows the US.
And installing heat pumps in regions where oil furnaces are popular.
And I still can't figure out why oil furnaces are popular.
They just didn't want to run the they just became popular, I think.
Rural areas where it's hard to get them on the grid, I guess.
And how are you this week? I'm going to tell you right now that I'm not well.
I've been sick.
You sound terrible, James.
No, I'm not possessed.
That is, my lungs.
I've had illness.
I flu since last we met.
Brian pretty much okay, but it's not going well.
Here's what I did.
I tested my family because they're all sick.
They gave it to me.
My daughter brought it home from high school, and I knew I was going to get sick, so I just tested they tested.
My wife and my daughter tested, and they're negative.
So I thought I'm like I was singing at my nose.
It's not like I have something different.
I don't go anywhere, as you know.
Anyway, I've had a hellish number of days, so I am barely able to be here today.
And by the end of the show, I will be soaked in sweat.
Oh, dear.
Because I'm still doing anything is like a chore.
I skipped lunch yesterday because I couldn't go downstairs.
Oh, no.
That maybe answers my question, because the pet peeve of mine.
People often say they have the flu when what they really mean is that they have a cold.
So you said you have a flu.
Do you really believe it's, the damage, or is it a bad cold? I was going to jokingly bring the CDC chart on this to the show, and I thought, no, I'm not going to.
But now I wish I did.
Yeah, well, people say that all the time.
Oh, I had the flu.
And no, you just had a bad cold.
If you've got the flu, it typically means you cannot go to work or go downstairs for lunch.
Yeah, well, there's overlaps, okay? But having fever and severe aches is very uncommon for colds.
You can have a mild fever.
You can have a brief fever.
But to have a long fever and severe aches, which I did, even with pills, I've been thrown down pills left and right until yesterday when I decided I've had enough.
But I took one for the show, so maybe it'll kick in halfway through.
We'll see.
Anyway, I had to do some harrowing things, like go drive my family home from the gray cop, the super bowl of Canada, because they were volunteering there, because my daughter is going on a school trip, and that was one way to fundraise.
Well, it killed my wife.
She was a little bit sick still, and she had to work 10 hours one day serving rich people, which is always fun.
Then my daughter asks, dad, is it legal to quit high school and go get a job? And I said, look, young lady, you want to be the people getting served, not the servers, okay? You want to stay in school.
You want to be those rich bastards getting horse Durham served to them by people like you raising money for school trips.
You don't want to be the person who's 30 years old, has six kids, and is trying to serve.
I mean, we need those people.
Those people will exist school and becomes an entrepreneur and starts a million dollar web company.
Well, sure.
I think she's more likely to start a bakery or something.
Yeah.
Not a huge amount of money in that.
No, but people do do that.
There's a lot of people who do that.
In fact, there's a number of successful local businesses which are at least popular with people who rave about their goods.
Yeah, there's some great bakeries.
Finally, there's great bakeries here.
There never used to be.
It was always ironic because we're surrounded by fields of wheat.
There's just nothing but wheat around here.
But 20 years ago, you could not get a decent loaf of bread in the city.
It was crazy.
But now there's some really great places.
Okay, so breaking news.
I think we're probably the first podcast to deal with this important topic.
There is an important website on the internet that has been down for four days now.
It's not Twitter.
It's not Twitter.
It's more important than twitter.
It's GoComics.com.
GoComics.com.
Yes.
This is a website I go to every single day to get my daily comic strips.
You know, I was always a newspaper guy, and one of the reasons I like newspapers was reading the daily comics.
Now, many years ago, I switched to reading the comics online because you can get whatever comics you want.
You don't have to just settle for the ones that are in your newspaper.
So I go to this website every single day, GoComics.com to read a handful of comic strips, and it's been down for four days.
When was the last time you had a website you visited and it was down for four days? People don't have patience for that anymore.
No, 4 hours would be pushing the limits for most people.
Four days.
And you can get a lot of the comic strips in other places, but there's a handful that are only on GoComics.com.
It drives me crazy.
I've been looking into it, and cyber security apparently is the issue.
And there's not a huge amount of information on the web, which is why we're an important news source now for this story.
But getting the word out there.
Yeah.
Anyway, it's driving me crazy.
Go to homes.com.
Do you want to explain what a comic strip is to people under 45? Briefly, a few panels in a newspaper, usually with a punchline.
The one I'm really missing is Nancy and Nancy classics.
And this was a comic strip I didn't know about really much in my youth, but Nancy by Ernie Buschmiller, which ran like in the they do reprints of this on Go comics as well as the new strip, which is quite good.
So I don't know.
I'm having withdrawals.
Another problem I have is I don't have enough fluids to get through the show.
Okay.
I was about to start the show and I have this giant water bottle from Costco that I've got.
Electric pump on the top with a lithium battery.
And it shows now to quit.
What? It's got a pump on it? No, I bought the pump on Amazon.
You could basically use these things in water coolers, although they're not quite water cooler size bottles.
They're a little below that, but they're still as much as a human can carry and maybe beyond.
I had my son happened to be home for Thanksgiving, canadian Thanksgiving in the head.
So we decided we're only going to buy it when our kid is home from college to lift it upstairs because it's crazy heavy.
Like one of those giant water bottles with a pump on it.
Yeah, I put the pump on it.
You can buy these pumps on Amazon for like $18.
And mine just went dead right when I needed it most.
Before that, I was going to help a water bottle before the show.
And now I'm like, I'm going to have to be careful, very careful.
Any coffee fits and I'm done.
The show's going to come to an abrupt end.
Well, if you have to pause, let me know.
I certainly can't go downstairs for water.
I'm not, you know, that strong.
No.
Well, at least I mean, it sounds like you're in better shape than you were yesterday.
What have you been watching on TV? Well, I've been sick.
Yes.
Well, it's time for Brian's movie corner.
Brian's movie corner.
You mentioned this last week.
There's a documentary on Netflix called Fugitive the Curious Case of Carlos Gon.
And have you watched it yet? No, I skimmed it a bit because I was trying to see if they talked about the leaf in his history.
Okay.
Sadly, there's no real information about electric cars, but it was a nice refresher in who Carlos Gon is.
I'd kind of forgotten what a superstar he was in the automotive world.
He was originally the CEO of Renault, like 20 years ago or something.
Turned around, renew.And then he became the CEO of Nissan at the same time.
Turned around Nissan? They were heading into bankruptcy as well, that he made both companies very profitable.
And then he got arrested for allegedly embezzling funds from Nissan and then very famously, escaped the country in a giant case on a private jet.
He literally snuck out of the country after he was released on bail.
So.
Yeah, it's a pretty good dock.
It was interesting.
Yeah.
Unfortunately, there was really nothing about electric cars.
He was one of the proponents of the original Nissan Leaf.
So maybe they're lagging in electric cars because he's no longer there.
I'm not sure.
You know, in the documentary.
Well, first of all, there was a documentary.
Who killed the electric car? This is about the EV One program.
The first attempted car company making EVs.
Yes.
General Motors EV.
One like 99 2000 in that area.
Then they destroyed them all.
They didn't let anyone buy them.
Legendary.
And that was a good documentary.
And then there was the revenge electric car, which came at the point where Tesla was getting launched and starting to get the S off the ground.
Their first mass produced car, I believe.
And there was Carlos talking to Elon at the auto show and they were kind of awkward.
It was very cool encounter because it was awkward to Egomaniacs who didn't want to give anything away.
Carlos had said at that time that we're doing this just to hedge our bets.
If Latter Eagles take off, we'll be prepared.
But he didn't really get behind them.
He didn't make them compelling enough.
He basically looked at the car for the first time without approving it.
He just looked at it at the auto show.
Oh.
This is what it looks like.
Okay.
And it was not a great looking car.
It was divisive.
I don't hate it.
There's a lot of you know, it's iconic in a way because it's designed with big buggy headlights to deflect the wind so that you don't hear them on the mirrors because you would in an electric car because they're so quiet.
And then who else was there with Chevrolet? There was what's his name? With GM.
The cigar smoking what's his name? I can't remember.
Bob Lutz, the legendary Bob Lutz, who always said that EVs would fail and the Tesla would fail.
But then he was the guy sort of behind the Volt, which was coming out.
So there were three things.
There was a trifecta, this is history now.
This used to be just my daily life, but it was the Volt with a V, which was a plugin hybrid.
Essentially.
It was an EV with a backup engine.
And then there was Tesla getting off the ground.
This was all happening in 2010, and this is when this documentary was made.
And the first model years were eleven.
By the way, there is a Cadillac ELR, I think it's called, for sale in Vagina, which was based on the Volt platform.
They only made a couple thousand of these things, so they're kind of rare.
But it's a really good kind of plug in hybrid Cadillac with all the luxurious Cadillac.
What's it going for? I'm not sure.
It was still kind of incoming.
I saw a little thing on the web.
But anyway, so Carlos Gon, a controversial figure, and there's no particular conclusion in the documentary because he managed to escape Japan and go to Lebanon, where he is originally from.
And he has, I guess, not been extradited or anything, so he's never gone on trial.
So no one really knows what the full story is.
But there was another executive at Nissan that was sentenced to, for helping to COVID up his salary.
They were trying to keep his salary quiet because it was quite high.
So somebody at Nissan did do time for that.
And then the pilot, like the guy who was like a US special forces guy who got him out of the country, he ended up doing a couple of years of time.
I hope it was worth it, buddy.
Yeah, I hope it was worth it.
I don't know.
I mean, I assume he was well paid.
Carlos has got a lot of money.
When you're that rich, you're going to throw it to millions really quickly.
Just take them, just get into freedom.
Quite clear on why he ended up back in Japan and in jail when Carlos Gonz has managed to not go back.
Well, I think the pilot, he probably had a business there.
He probably had a relationship with Japan if he was able to.
I mean he could be, but he was an American.
But they didn't really explain that.
But yeah, so they made the point a couple of times that in Japan the conviction rate is 99%.
Wow.
If you are arrested in Japan, there is a 99% chance that you will be convicted.
So the documentary sort of implies that there's something kind of hinky with the Japanese justice system.
Well, that's why you flee.
You don't wait for your trial and that's why you flee.
Basically the charge is the yes.
Like as soon as you're arrested, it's game over.
And Carlos Gon, in an interview after he got out, he barely did 150 days in solitary confinement when they first arrested him, what he says were inhumane conditions.
No butler.
It's inhumane.
No butler.
But, like, his hands were cuffed in solitary confinement for, like, 150 days.
Yeah, I probably would have done the same thing.
Guilty or not guilty? Yes.
He felt like he wasn't going to get a fair trial and very luckily managed to escape.
So he was in a case that they said was an instrument case.
They pretended that they were musicians and it was a big square case, but they said it was some type of an instrument and it couldn't go through the scanner because it was sensitively tuned, like it had just been tuned or something.
And you can't put it through the scanner.
I can just picture them putting it through the scanner and seeing the Carlos Scone in there, all curled up.
All curled up.
So? Yeah.
I don't know.
It's only about 90 minutes.
It's an interesting little dog.
Well, he is guilty, Brian.
I've looked at the evidence and it seemed pretty over.
Pretty compelling case.
I don't know what the punishment would have been for him, but why was he in solitary confinement? I don't understand that if he was, but also, why would he need to embezzle money? Like, his salary was nine, he was making €9 million a year.
Why would he need to embezzle money? I don't know.
Maybe a gambling dance.
Maybe he was paying for the Leaf program.
I don't know.
Who does? I don't know.
Well, let's get out of the show.
Cop 27, wrapped up in Egypt, and that's been a mixed bag of stuff for them.
I'm not going to talk about it too much, but what did you think about how that went? Well, it's how these things usually go is that there's lots of optimism and then it's ultimately a compromise.
There's always a compromise at the end of it, because this is a UN climate summit with hundreds of countries and getting everybody to agree.
I don't know, sounds like it was not the best, but also not the worst.
I see this as a very crucial time because there's a lot of fossil fuel bad things going on.
They're trying to claw at what they can to make as much money as they can, and they would be happy to throw the climate down and our targets with it.
So Bloomberg had a story on it.
They said the United Nations climate summit just barely avoided ending in a deadlock.
They went into extra a day or so afterwards.
And the final compromise left big doubts over the prospect for new efforts to curb emissions.
I quote, despite attempts by big powers like the United States, India and the European Union, the agreement failed to raise ambitions on reducing emissions.
That could mean the world misses the one five degree Celsius warming target that enshrined the 2015 Paris agreement calls to phase out all fossil fuels, not just coal.
Which is all they could come up with.
They couldn't touch fossil fuels and to peak global emissions by 2025, which is likely to happen anyway according to the IEA.
We're shot down by many nations who export oil, and I'm proud to say we have a bad record, Canada on this, but we didn't oppose it.
Even though we are a big oil exporter.
I'm sure it had a different government been in power.
That would have been the case, probably.
So while the phase down of all fossil fuels didn't make it to the final text, momentum grew around the idea that wasn't even in the cars before the summit.
As many as 80 countries now support it.
So we're moving towards banning fossil fuels, basically.
We're getting closer to that.
There was like a damage fund as well, right? That was a big part.
I agreed to put in money to a fund for the countries most affected by climate change.
Yeah.
And that's all I'll talk about on that.
But we'll update some more stories as we go.
Here what's happening with $250,000,000 in Canada, right? Yeah.
So I think we mentioned this before.
There's a few more details.
So there is a Greener Homes grant here in Canada that I've applied for, and they have now expanded the program with another component to it, which is to switch people from heating oil to a heat pump.
So there's an extra $250,000,000 now in Canada.
It's a separate stream in the Greener Homes grant, and it won't technically be available until early 2023.
But this is mostly for people in Atlantic Canada, where heating oil is apparently a fairly common thing, rural properties, and everybody gets heating oil delivered.
It's not a thing around here at all.
We don't have this here.
No, even though we have lots of rural properties.
We have natural gas.
We have the government who did that.
Right.
We have a government utility.
That's kind of why we have government utilities here.
But if you're in a rural property, I think it's mostly propane here.
You can get your propane tank filled up.
But anyway, this is up to $5,000.
It's only for middle and lower income Canadians.
And the twist on this, too, is you can get the money upfront, usually with this program.
Wow.
You apply and you spend all the money and then you get a reimbursement.
But just because it's meant for middle income and lower income Canadians, you can actually get the money up to $5,000 upfront to switch you.
And the potential is to save, like, according to them, as much as $4,700 a year on your heating costs.
So what would a heat pump cost? Have you done any looking into it for your own house? As much as like 2025 grand.
But I think for a heat pump, it depends.
We need, of course, these super frigid cold heat pumps.
I think in Atlantic Canada it's not as cold, and hopefully it wouldn't cost as much, maybe 10,000 or $15,000.
But yeah, you get the money up front.
And I checked in on the this is sort of similar and in line with what's happening in America with the biden.
What's that called? The IRA.
The Era.
The IRA.
The inflation Reduction act that starts on January 1, 2023.
If you want to get a rebate on your heat pump in the US.
It's anything installed after January 1 so you can get after the factory bait for yourself.
Not going from an oil furnace.
Right? Yeah, I'm going to go through the normal program, and I think I'll get up to 5000 as well for myself.
It's too bad, though, because that would be hard for somebody low middle to finance ten grand if they weren't pressing.
Yeah, and I guess that's why this program is that way.
In Atlantic Canada, rural properties are probably fairly inexpensive, so you can have lower income people that own houses and they're going to be in trouble.
But yeah, you can get the money upfront, which is very cool.
And yeah, very much in line with what's happening in the US with the Inflation Reduction Act.
So I encourage everybody to check your local jurisdiction, your local state, your local province to see what rebates are available.
And things are really going to get rolling in 2023.
So basically, they're starting with the biggest bang for the buck is so the biggest savings would be for people with oil furnaces, so they would be most compelled to make that switch.
Right.
And heating oil is one of the things that's really gone up in price with the recent inflation that we've been having.
I was doing some research on this this morning, and I said that heating oil heats up twice as fast as you get more bang for your BTU, basically that it really heats up fast anyway, but probably causes more pollution than natural gas.
Yes, natural gas is relatively clean as far as fossil fuels go, although there's a lot of methane in there.
The new priest finally was announced on Wednesday in Tokyo and in the La auto Show, and there's been lots of speculation about it, so I've been kind of curious.
Ultimately, though, there are actually Prius fans out there who are saying, wow, it's great, look at this.
And what do you think? I've got a picture of it up.
Well, I love the styling.
Like the design road that Toyota has been going down the last few years, I just do not like.
And they reached a kind of an apex with that excessively angular design of the Prius.
So I think they had kind of no choice but to go in the opposite direction.
But it almost looks to me like they designed it to be an EV.
Like, EVs are often designed for aerodynamics.
That's right.
That's right.
Yeah, they did.
They cut down the roof line for that very reason, because there was no other way to gain efficiency.
So it's just a huge shame it's not a full EV, because it looks like it could be.
It looks a lot like the original Hyundai Ionic, which was a very aerodynamic shape.
So I love the direction they're going.
This is a huge improvement in terms of the style, I think, of the Prius.
But just a shame it's not fully electric.
It just feels like that would have been the correct move on it.
Yeah.
Obviously, you refresh the models every few years and it's totally time for a full EV refresh.
And that's not what this is.
Now, some people make the argument that at the moment in time that we're in right now, that a plug in hybrid, which there's a version of that right? There's a plug in version of the Prius.
Some people think they all plug in.
They don't.
They're basically just a hybrid power train, which utilizes an electric motor to be more efficient.
But it's all gas during the energy.
So the plug in version has gone up in range from pretty significantly.
Basically, the energy density of the batteries have gone up.
It's taking up the same space to go from, I think it was, 40 range, which is a lot more usable.
And in Canada, we would get the full $5,000 off.
So that means you've heard it here first, because no one else has said this.
The plugin.
Prius prime PSE e v will be cheaper than the normal prius So why would anyone buy a Prius rebate? This is the situation that was like that in California when the Prius Prime first, there was no point.
I mean, even if you don't care about plugging it in, why would you buy it? Because you have to resell it.
You have to have a residual value.
You might as well have the one that costs more.
So it makes no sense for them to sell anything but the Prius Prime in Canada, and they also went with more horsepower, which I thought was a bit weird.
Yeah, they really bumped up the horsepower.
Finally, after 20 years of being mocked by truckers, by bumper stickers on truckers.
Yeah.
So it's quite a lot faster now.
But of course, that cuts into the miles per gallon a little bit, but not too bad.
Yes.
Overall, though, I think it could be more efficient than it is.
But the zero to 60 is a lot faster.
Way faster.
Yeah, that's fun.
But here's my big problem with it, and that is that it sits lower.
And then my wife has a Prius if you're new to the show.
And that's her work car that she has to have inspected constantly because it's used for work.
She takes social work clients around in it.
They're not going to even talk about pricing or announcing it until sometime in the first half of next year as far as the prime is concerned.
So that doesn't do me I need a car now.
Brian should go buy that.
Buy that Caddy.
Yeah, you should actually look into it.
It could be fun.
You'll ever may launch ice cream from cow free dairy in a year.
This is an update to a previous store because we've been talking about precision fermentation.
And here it is, Brian.
Here's the headline.
You wait for things to happen and then there it is in front of you.
Yeah.
And the dairy industry likely to be the very first of the animal based products to be severely disrupted.
Here's a clip from the robot who reads the Bloomberg stories.
The company is working on a process called precision fermentation that uses substances like yeast and fungi to produce milk proteins in a VAT.
A product could be available in about a year.
If successful, unilever could be the first major food company to create an ice cream made from cow free dairy, dubbed lab grown milk.
In a burgeoning industry dominated by smaller startups, a consumer giant like Unilever developing a precision fermentation version of one of its major brands raises hopes that the technology can scale up and be cost effective.
The idea is that it's going to be cheaper and then also cleaner.
Much cleaner.
Yeah.
I think a version of this ice cream already exists because there was a picture of Tony Siba eating some of it in that last YouTube video that he put up.
So I think this does exist, but it's probably kind of expensive and only in health food stores.
Whereas Unilever would make it a mass market product.
It would probably be quite expensive.
Yeah.
So right now, the ideas he says by 2030 that the proteins in milk is going to be replaced by fake stuff, precision fermentation, and it's going to be cheaper and dairy is going to go bankrupt.
And this is the first sign of that happening.
They're doing it.
Maybe they'll advertise it as an expensive but greener option, I'm guessing.
At first, yeah.
And more expensive at first, but I think eventually, ultimately cheaper.
And unlike beyond meat, there really will not be a difference.
It will be identical.
It'll be very identical.
Yeah.
Because you're mostly tasting the fat and the sugar.
The milk protein is a minor part.
I think most of it is water.It's 10%.
That's not water.
That's the part you replace.
The others are fats and sugars, which are easily replaced, obviously.
Yeah.
Anyway, speaking of Japanese automakers, Mazda looks like it could be, and I'm not convinced of this, but it could be doing something significant.
They could be the first of the Japanese automakers to actually set a target.
That is reasonable.
Mazda is raising its EV sales target to 40% by 2030 and they're investing $11 billion to accelerate this transition.
Sounds like they got the memo.
Yeah, well, we were making fun of them for their MX 30, which is.
A very low range electric car.
They are down to selling, like, only a handful of them.
So they've been a real laggard.
And so this is their first step up to the plate.
I mean, it's not maybe what it should be, but it sounds like they're getting the idea.Right.
That's something.
It's probably too late.
I don't want to be a naysayer, but at least they have a target.
Hopefully they survive.
Brian 505.I've sold more brownies at bake sales than they have in these cars.
It's 100 miles of range, 160 range, which is in today's market, no good unless it's a cheap car.
But it's 33,000 us.
Yeah, that's a lot of money.
You expect something for that.
I mean, you can get a Leaf, you can get a Chevy Bolt that does way more mileage than that and probably is a more capable car.
Yeah, for maybe only slightly more money.
And they even said this EV has been sold out, so you can't find one.
So there was a demand there.
There's going to be some Mazda fans who want to go EV.
But anyway, this is a story about VW maybe delaying their EV plans.
Like, VW was maybe one of the great hopes of the EV transition.
And now the CEO's been replaced, right? Yeah.
As we reported, they're on track to deliver 500,000 EVs this year, which is a significant amount.
That's way ahead of everybody else except for Tesla.
Herbert Dies was their CEO that put all this in motion.
He really had a radical vision for VW and really felt like it had to be a radical remaking of the company or, you know, they were going to run into problems.
And so yeah, so he started a lot of ambitious programs that have gotten them to 5000 EVs a year, which is significant.
But he was sort of moved out recently as CEO, and the new CEO is definitely scaling back these plans to be much less ambitious.
I don't like that.
No, I think Herbert Dees was on the right track.
And you what, like with Mazda? So Mazda wants to sell 40% EVs by 2030, but that means there's going to be people to buy the 60% of EVs that are gas in 2030.
No, it doesn't work that way.
Doesn't work that way.
When EVs are available, people are not going to want the gas cars.
So I don't know.
The new CEO of VW seems to be betting that such things are possible.
And every car commercial on television is electric.
Can you buy the cars? Not so much.
Not so much.
But for some reason, we're in this weird time where, yeah, all the car companies are vying to look like.
Then there's Toyota, who says, we're electrified.
That's enough.
Right? Electrified.
So, VW, they've got the second generation platform that they were planning to come out in 2026.
They call this their trinity.
EV.
And now it's going to be more like 2030.
Under the new CEO, 26 might have been difficult to actually achieve, but if you're moving the goal post down to 2030, even 2030 may not be moving it up to 2024.
And hey, you may not make the deadline, but the commission should be moving up anyway.
So that's a three year delay, basically.
Or worse.
Let's hope not.
And that's no good.
We can't deal with that.
And it was already a kind of a target that wasn't even as gracious as it should be.
They've got a lot.
It takes a lot to turn a giant ship like VW around.
I don't know.
They're the best at it.
The biggest car company in the world are the best at it.
They are manufacturing in and out well.
They do really well to get up to 5000.
That's impressive.
I think what they're not getting is what you said, that once the pendulum sort of swings towards EVs and that the weight starts to get on the teeter totter on the EV side, look out, it's not going anywhere else.
It's going to chip way over and then you're going to be caught with your pants down.
So who's going to be able to provide those cars? Hopefully? Well, Tesla, you and I are already at the point where we would never in a million years consider buying another gasoline car.
But we're still kind of the outliers.
But every year the percentage of people who won't consider a gas car just goes up.
Yeah, and it is regular people are considering EVs.
And there's people around here with pickup trucks.
I'm reading about them all the time.
Their neighbors are, their business associates are, their clients are.
This becomes normalized very quickly now.
It's really going to pick up.
Yeah.
So, moving on to Tokyo, the governor of Tokyo, this is Eureka Koiki, has suggested everybody wear turtlenecks to help reduce their energy bills.
Okay.
It's sort of a funny thing and a fun thing to make a joke about off the top of the show, but I'm in favor of this.
There's an energy crisis going on.
Everybody's going to be struggling to make enough power, make enough heat.
Can I make a turtleneck work? I mean, not everybody can.
Yeah, I don't think I own any turtlenecks, but everybody.
The idea is that dress warm and you can save money on your electricity bills, which are going up in Tokyo, just like they're kind of tending to go up everywhere is in my neck.
That's the coldest thing, though.
I mean, really.
Well, the idea is here's the quote, warming the neck has a thermal effect.
I'm wearing a turtleneck myself.
And wearing a scarf also keeps you warm.
This will save electricity.
This is what the governor of Tokyo said around the house is true.
He wants people around their tiny little Tokyo apartments to wear a scarf.
I mean, it sounds radical, but why not? We have a problem here.
I don't know what it's like in other places, but we often have this problem in North America where like, office buildings particularly often have very poor heating or cooling that can't be controlled very well.
So there's often a problem around here where people have to wear sweaters in the summer because the air conditioning is ranked too high and nobody can seem to turn it down.
Or I've actually heard of people who have electric space heaters under their roof.
Yeah, I've seen that it's really bad in the summer.
I've seen that it's too cold because the air conditioning is too high.
That's not good.
Yeah, so you're overusing the air conditioning and then some poor employee has to use UTC heater to sort of gain back the energy.
So I think this in many ways, used to be like a common sense thing where people just dressed warmer in the winter because it was kind of common sense.
But then you go to work in an office building where the heat is all wonky, so maybe it's too hot in your office in the wintertime and then you just end up wearing a Tshirt instead in the winter.
It's all messed up.
I wear fleeces and sweaters inside the house now, but that's because I'm getting old, right? Yeah.
I'm still turning up the temperature tin more than it should be.
And then I'm also wearing those things.
That's not good.
I do the same thing.
Yeah, it's not good at all.
I can't laugh, by the way.
Otherwise I'll go into a coffee and fits.
I don't sound anything funny.
Well, Brian, as you know, the World Cup has started.
And I know you don't have world cup fever, but I do.
Is that what you're suffering from? Sure.
I took a title for my World Cup fever this morning.
Argentina lost to Saudi Arabia and the biggest upset in World Cup history.
Some people say, wow, I'm sorry, Argentina, if you're listening.
In fact, this is probably way too soon for me to even bring it up, but I apologize anyway.
Of course, all the coverage, it's been announced like ten years ago that they were getting this.
So a Qatar, which is a small nation state with oil, was accused of using their oil money to spend on the World Cup and bribe.
And there's been some people who've actually been, you know, charges and so forth.
There's a new Netflix documentary.
I won't make you watch it, but it's there.
OK on FIFA.
This is a tiny Middle Eastern autocracy with a population of barely 3 million people.
How do they get the world's biggest sporting event? You know, like, this is by far the world's biggest sporting event.
It happens only every four years, but the temperatures there in the summer are 50 degrees Celsius or 122 Fahrenheit.
And that's when the World Cup you normally played during that time and I, as you know, was in Death Valley when it was that temperature.
And I could only get out of my healthier, man then, and I could only get out of my car for ten minutes at a time.
My kids could do 1213.
But then you're like facing the Grim Reaper.
He starts to encroach on your area, looking for you, to kill you, because you can't play soccer in that, I guess.
They spent $200 billion of their petrol money on this games.
They've built eight stadiums.
One of them I'll talk about in a minute.
That's a little bit different than the other ones.
It's recyclable, we'll just put it that way.
But yeah, they've got air conditioning.
The temperature is only 24 degrees with like 64% humidity.
These games have been checking on them.
So, yeah, it's perfectly reasonable for soccer.
But I read you a bit from the Atlantic here.
It says Qatar might now be home to about 3 million people, but the proportion of actual Qatari citizens who lived there is a little more than 10%.
So there's hardly any.
The rest compromised some very rich expatriates of other nations and a huge army of poor migrants up to 6000.
And some may have died, by the way.
This is a whole separate issue which is not part of our show.
But my God.
My point is that this is the pinnacle of oil decadence.
And to think that thousands of lives were not cared about and lost from other countries to make this destruction of everything and we'll never have this again.
This is peak oil.
I don't think we'll see crap like this ever again.
This is the moment in time where it's all going to fall apart.
They did not have any infrastructure, they're not a sporting nation, they didn't have a fan base, they had nothing.
But they were very rich with their oil money.
But Brian, their new money, they haven't had this money for very long at all.
Guitar has had huge reserves of natural gas, which was discovered, I think, quite a while ago, maybe the by Shell, but they just left it there because they couldn't do anything with it.
They had all this natural gas and nowhere to get it anywhere.
So in the was this coup, I think the leader of the country, the King or whatever the term they use for it, left to go on vacation to England and his son took over.
Which is why if I'm ever in that situation, I'm never leaving because my son would take over in a second.
He was just sorry, Dan.
But he did a good thing for the country in a way, because he invested in liquefied natural gas tank so that it could be transported on a ship.
So when you cool it natural gas.
It's like transporting oil on a tanker.
But it's ridiculous how much -165 degrees celsius or something like that they are now the third richest country in the world.
And they learned how to extract natural gas from the ground much more cheaply.
So even after they cool it and put it on a ship, a tanker full of natural gas is four times cheaper from Qatar than if it originated in the United States through their normal channels.
That's why they are so rich, is because their gas is cheap, even though they have to do that.
So they started a sovereign wealth fund, though this is the shocking part that I didn't know about.
Even though they blew 200 billion on these Games to make them a respectable country, which is not working out, by the way, because all we're doing is talking about how crappy they are, the LGBTQ rights and everything like that, and the fact that they can't serve beer at the games.
And they yanked that privilege two days before.
So they started a sovereign wealth fund like Norway did, and they have $300 billion in it because they saw the writing on the wall.
They knew that our Canadian jurisdictions here who have oil in the provinces don't think that way at all.
They think spend, spend oil forever.
But when you had something they didn't always used to have this.
So they've only had it since the 90s.
So in that short time, they've got a 300 billion dollar sovereign wealth fund and they're building up infrastructure.
Part of the game spending is that to make it for an investment possible.
And I don't know that that's going to work, especially with their human rights problems, that a whole lot of people are going to go there, but they are planning for the end of oil by diversifying their investments around the world.
So, yeah, that fund is going to do all kinds of things around the world.
So there's been of course, it's supposed to be a carbon neutral World Cup.
And it's a joke.
It's a bloody joke.
Here's a clip from Bloomberg.
Organizers estimate that the World Cup will emit three six megatons of carbon dioxide.
International flights in and out of Doha will account for the majority of emissions.
However, organizers argue that this World Cup will be more energy efficient than others, since fans won't have to fly to different venues and can instead just take public transit.
The sticking point is always the flights.
Most Olympics and World Cups, it accounts to more than 85% of total emissions.
So that surprised me.
I guess it makes perfect sense when you hear it, but it's not the building of these eight giant stadiums and you know, all the infrastructure around it, it's the flights and during the actual Games.
And it's the same with the Olympics.
It's a very carbon intense thing when all these people do that.
Yeah, when you got to travel so many people around the world, that's what you do, you fly.
Now, the game today was in stadium nine seven four, which is built with shipping containers it's not entirely shipping containers.
It's like steel girders and shipping containers.
But the 400 seat stadium can be disassembled and rebuilt elsewhere.
So this is the world's first tear down build a back stadium, supposedly, and apparently, if everything goes on shipping containers, it can be shipped anywhere.
Yes.
So this will be available for my Ikea soon.
Quite the price, but yes, it was designed by a French architectural firm.
Other things they're trying to do is they have built solar farms to offset the emissions from the games.
They're using electric buses, an electric mass transit.
So that's good.
They're not burning their own product, and they are supposedly buying carbon offsets, but they're way behind on that.
Brian yeah.
So Domino's Pizza has announced, and this sort of falls into that category of story that we're going to have to stop reporting soon, because this is just going to be business as usual very soon and maybe is already.
But Domino's Pizza in the US.
Has ordered 800 Chevy bolts, and they're kind of custom painted with the Domino's logo and everything.
And they've got about 100 of them so far.
And these are going out to Domino's Pizza locations in the US.
So they will eventually have 800 fully electric delivery vehicles for the fleet of pizza delivery vehicles.
And of course, they're doing this because it just makes sense.
And the bolt is not a particularly expensive car.
So imagine all the money they'll save on gas.
This is just the EV calculation that every business in the world is going to be making when it comes to fleet vehicles.
I wish on your Domino's app, if you could select an EV to have it delivered like you can on other apps for a ride sharing, that would be nice.
Do you ever eat domino's? Never.
I would think he would hate Domino's.
That would be an anti Brian pizza right there.
No, when we have excellent pizza to choose from in our city, I don't see a reason to use donald okay, well, I agree.
The pizza shows up in advance a lot of times where people have some there.
Okay, so Joe Biden has promised $13 billion for the US.
Power grid.
So this is part of the green spending from the US.
And as we talk about frequently on the show, the grid all over the world is going to need some upgrades.
And so this is a decent amount of money, $13 billion to upgrade the grid.
And as we go greener in the next couple of decades, it's important to get the foundation correct first before we do that.
So this is a nice, like, really forward looking thing.
I think that the US government is doing $13 billion available to do grid upgrades around the country.
So I think that's great.
It is subsidizing what they could probably do themselves, though.
How do you feel about that? Yeah, well, I mean, it's a weird thing about all of this spending.
Right.
Because companies like Tesla don't even need subsidies, really.
Their cars are profitable already and yet they're going to benefit from these subsidies.
So it's always a bit weird and taxing fossil fuels.
A carbon tax, it would probably have been the better way to go with all of this.
But however it gets done, there are certain things politically that are difficult to do.
Like a carbon tax.
Yes.
It wouldn't necessarily be my first choice for how to deal with it, but at least they're dealing with it.
Let's dip into the mailbag.
Brian.
This is a message from Nick.
Hello, Brian and James.
I live in New England, and recently got a 2022 Ford Mac E.
That is an electric vehicle, small crossover.
Right.
My battery life, as he calls it, was originally at 230 miles.
He means range.
So the range of that car when he first got it was 230 miles or 370 colder out.
It is 170 miles and 274.
So it's a lot.
About 100, roughly of range.
So I know about range decreasing in colder weather.
My question is, does the range come back when the weather gets warmer? With the cost of new EVs, a range of 170 miles is not acceptable.
Fan of the show since day one.
Thanks.
Wow.
Thanks.
How many episodes? 140.
Congratulations, Nick.
Thank you for sticking with us.
So, yes, I would be bold.
Enough to say that I think, James, you and I are the two leading experts in the world on EVs and cold weather.
Yes.
You've come to the right place, Nick, because Alaska has nothing on us.
We're in the Southern Canadian prairies where it gets to -40 and it has recently not this year, but it has and -40 celsius is the same as -40 fahrenheit that's where the two scales cross over.
Yeah, it does get that cold here.
So I don't know everything about how the mach e battery meter works, but yeah, usually the range on any car is calculated on your recent trips.
So if your recent trips have been in the cold then your car is going to be smart enough to figure, okay, well, the next trip is going to be so I assume that range will come back in the summer.
Of course it will.
But in a way, Brian, this is a stupid question for us, to us, for people like us.
But that concerns me that the people buying EVs, really, that there are things that this would be scary to somebody nick's, obviously an EV enthusiast, but a regular person who doesn't care, who just goes out and buys their next car, might be very concerned about this if they don't know about it.
That's right.
You're going to look at the range thing.
Now, the one thing I can recommend is I don't know if you can do this in your car, but in a Tesla you can change the battery to percentage rather than miles.
Or kilometers.
So when I first bought my car, it would give me the range in kilometers and started around 400 km.
But then you tend to get obsessed about that range and every time you plug it in, it's like, oh, it's 5 km less than it was last time I charged it.
So I just switched it to percentage.
And so then you don't end up obsessing about that mileage.
But then if you're going on a trip, you use the trip calculator.
And the trip calculator will tell you in a Tesla that gives you a graph that says, okay, you'll get at your destination and your battery will be 20%.
And that's what you monitor.
And sometimes it's a little bit off in a Tesla.
Now these days, about 5% error.
Is that's pretty good though? Actually for this they are getting better.
It used to be about a 10% error where it would tell you, oh, your battery will be 20% at your destination and then you'd get there and it would be more like 10%.
Yeah, is way worse though.
So we're slowing down that's one tip.
Yeah, it's switching it to percentage and not worrying about it.
Now when you get to the summer and it is not giving you the same range, it is always possible that your battery has cells that have deteriorated or something.
So it is something you have to keep an eye on, but presumably that will come back.
Yeah.
And the way we do it on the Leaf is you put in the little data reader you buy on Amazon.
It's a bluetooth device.
For $20.
It hooks up to an app for your car that's made by a third party.
Mine is called Leaf Spy.
Tesla is a little different because they have a different connector.
I don't know how you guys do it or even if you need to, but there would be if you got into this, you can see how your battery is doing and know the state of health of it, but this means nothing.
Okay, so let's say you lived in Hawaii where it's the same temperature every day.
If you drove like a mad person for a day or two, it would show that you have a lesser battery, right.
Because you're driving with a heavy lead foot.
But if you're driving like a nun, then you're going very slow and gentle and that's going to show a higher range.
It's not really showing what your battery is capable of, it's just what it's capable of based on your recent driving.
And that is a weird concept to get around to people.
And also I mentioned too, it is typical for batteries to lose range like battery degradation.
And the typical formula seems to be you are going to lose about 5% of your battery in the first couple of years and then it kind of slows out.
So I assume my battery has lost about 5% of its capacity but I don't know exactly how I would confirm that.
Yeah, and it's not something you should obsess about.
You should know that when you buy the evidence, buy bigger than you think you need, and then you don't worry about that.
Right.
That's always a good thing.
But there's lots we can talk about here very quickly.
Okay.
Now, the first thing is that in winter, a gas car loses range.
You just don't notice it.
You're not thinking about that.
Right.
There's many factors.
There is the dense winter air, so your aerodynamics are off.
This affects EVs a little bit more because they're more efficient.
And they're also usually more dependent on the aerodynamics of the vehicle for efficiency.
So if you put winter tires on, that's going to be less efficient, for sure.
That could lose you 10%.
It could lose even more depending on what your tires there's the snow on the ground or ice on the ground.
The fact that it's just not a smooth, rolling surface.
It's like if you're pedaling a bike through snow, it's going to be harder to pedal that bike.
There are different factors like that the battery becomes less strong in cold weather.
When the battery is cold, it's chemically not capable of holding as much of a charge.
It can't hold as much of a charge, the battery, in colder weather.
And don't forget that you're using your battery to heat your cabin.
That is a lot of heat.
Even if it's a heat pump, even if it's just not that cold, but a little bit cold, you're still using a lot of energy.
In fact, it's different in every car.
Your car is a PTC heater.
Mine is, too.
So it's just like a toaster.
It's like red hot elements heating up.
That's the least efficient.
And then the heat pumps.
Sometimes there's both a heat pump and a PTC heater.
Sometimes there's just a heat pump that uses less energy, but it's still using energy.
Brian yeah.
When I checked in, the Mustang Machoe does not have a heat pump heater.
So it has a normal oh, really? Heater, which is not as energy efficient.
So you're definitely going to lose range with that.
Yeah, you're definitely going to use range.
Unless you're using it to make these long trips on the highway, then that's when the only time you really need to concern yourself.
Unless you have a long commute, for the most part.
If you can charge every night at home, just don't think about it.
Nick.
Don't think about it.
Enjoy your fast heating car and your efficiency and how wonderful it is.
And, you know, keep us up to date, too, as you drive it through the winter, because we're not in the worst part of winter yet.
Drop us a line again and how you like the car and how it made it through the winter.
Yeah.
And it's really only on road trips that you ever need to think About It.
If you're just driving around the city like you said, you charge at home, you're always going to have enough.
With Tesla, they spaced the superchargers about 150 km apart.
Roughly.
It varies a bit.
So that's about 100 miles apart.
If you're going to go nick on a road trip.
You want to make sure that there is a charging station.
Roughly every 100 miles and you should be fine like around here when it does get -40 I don't think it's going to get to -40 where nick is so he's probably not going to have to worry about it.
But they based on about right.
So mine.
I've got the standard range.
Tesla model.
Three and it can just barely make it between chargers when it's -40.
If it's only -20.
-15 celsius.
I mean it's not constantly -40 but we call that the worst case scenario around here.
Okay.
EV drivers call that you want to be prepared for the worst case scenario.
We've gone years without it getting that cold.
Yeah.
And then the last couple of years, it's gotten a few days.
That cold.
So you want to be prepared for those days.
And it's usually only that cold overnight.
But last winter, and this was covered on the podcast, I drove up to Saskatoon and The Daytime Temperatures was -36 Celsius, which is about -32 Fahrenheit daytime Temperatures.
This was at Noon, and that's what I had to drive through and just kind of barely made it in my Standard Range car.
Yeah.
So that's an issue.
And another thing to keep in mind is if you are doing highway trips so that in winter it charges slower, the battery can't take the charge as fast because it's like regenerative braking too.
You can't put your brakes back into the battery pack as well when it's cold.
No, that's kind of the biggest thing for me because summer road trips, I'm only spending about 20 minutes at the charger.
But the winter road trips in these cold conditions, it's more like you're spending an hour at the charger.
And at that point, it gets annoying.
And I'm at the point now where if this winter, I have to drive up to Saskatoon and it's -40, I'm going to take a gas car because I just don't want that.
I have to wait an hour at the charging station.
The worst case scenario in the worst place in the world is what we're talking about.
And we tell people around here that you could lose up to 50%.
It varies from car to car.
I've heard somebody talking to about 17% in his ionic five when it wasn't too cold.
Okay, but that's, like, the worst worst case scenario.
Now, if you're driving around the city and you do 60 miles in a day, at the very worst, and you have 170 miles, who cares? You plug in at night, it's going to charge the same way as it always does.
If.
You're on the highway and it takes you a half hour to charge, it might take you an hour to charge.
And that's a major change, too, in habits to be aware of.
Yeah.
And of course, electric cars, they're not as efficient on the highway as they are in the city.
Higher speeds are tougher for electric cars.
You drain the battery a lot faster.
And I really wish that when they publicized the range for electric cars, that they did a highway figure and a city figure.
I think that's the way it should be done.
But they don't do that.
They pick a number kind of somewhere in between the two.
Yeah, but you'll get used to this, Nick.
There's a lot of weird little things that people fret about when they try something new.
I did it.
Brian did it.
It's normal.
We EV owners tend to think too much, but just enjoy the car.
You'll get used to it.
And tell your friends about it.
Time for the lightning round of fast paced look at the rest of the news.
And Brian, we've overstayed her welcome, which is good because I don't have a lot of stories.
This week.
Rivian starts international deliveries of the R one T, rather, and the R one S in Canada.
So you've seen one here, right? Yeah.
It must have been an American one that drove up over the border, because I saw one on the road.
But yeah, officially, deliveries of the Ribbean just started in Canada.
Now, post the IRA, the inflation reduction at next era expects wind with storage will cost $14 per megawatt hour United States later this decade.
This is only because this act was passed.
And solar with batteries, $17 per mega, 1 hour.
This is down because of this act.
This is how much the IRA is going to affect everything and speed things up, if I may say.Yeah, for sure.
This is a Brian story.
I can't believe you didn't see this one, Brian.
There's a induction oven maker who has added a battery to their stoves.
Lithium battery.
This is because, I guess some of these induction stoves use a lot of draw, right? Yeah.
And some places aren't wired for it.
And you'd have to get an extra panel if your panels full.
So they've solved that problem.
Interestingly with putting a battery in a stove.
That makes a lot of sense.
Yeah.
So the big draw when you need it comes from the batteries.
Well, we talked about this before in terms of heat pump, water heaters, because that's a similar problem with those, because you tend to need a few thousand watts to run those, I think up to 7000 watts to run an induction cooktop.
So that's a lot of juice.
It's one of the reasons I did a panel upgrade on my house.
But it cost a few thousand dollars to go from 100 amp to 200 amp.
So I guess the idea is you can charge up this battery and so it can draw more power.
You can sort of just plug it into in a regular outlet, as it was, but with the battery have much bigger output.
Right.
So that solves that problem.
But it's just weird, that sort of appliance with a battery in it.
And I imagine it adds to the price, but it's cheaper than maybe rewiring your house, if you want to do that.
So I thought I thought it was quite interesting BYD the Chinese, mostly EV maker and bus maker has sold as 3,000,000th, Bee, V or PHEV.
I thought that was an interesting milestone.
Some are plug in hybrids, but that's still an impressive number.Oh, it's time for a CS.
Past 636 fossil fuel lobbyists were preying on government delegations at Cock.
Oily bastards.
That's a lot.
Scotland approves a 38 megawatt solar plant next door to a closed nuclear plant.
And guess how much the objections were in the community? Zero.
No objects were their objections.
Will they put up a nuclear plant? Probably.
Probably.
Some concern solar.
Not so harmful, not so scary.
A village in the French Alps this is from CNN demolishes its ski lift because there's no snow left.
It hasn't snowed in years.
lack of snow meant that the last time it ran was about 15 years ago, and just for one weekend.
And since then, it has not been.
This is sad.
Sad.
This is why the Winter Olympics will now be held in Qatar with fake snow and perhaps potato flakes.
Finally, this week, India is looking to produce its own solar modules to meet all of its demand and then some.
That's right.
India requires a lot of solar, and they want to make it themselves.
You know, it makes sense.
Perfectly capable country of ramping up something like this.
I'm looking for takers for a $2.4 billion in government aid to offer stimulation to domestic manufacturing of solar equipment.
They want to do all of their solar and export all as well.
That's great news.
That is our time for this week and a bunch more.
I apologize to myself more than anything.
My body wasn't ready to go long.
It was ready to go short this week, and I went long.\
So see you next week.
See you next week.
Bye.
-
Debunking the myths that say we can't live without carbon. Plus, plug-in hybrids and wooden sky scrapers. James and Brian attend Drive Electric Week events and talk to a local organizer. James test drives the Chevy Bolt EV he wants to buy.
Filling your tires in winter and having them blow up in summer.
Electric Corvette.
EV pricing confustion due to rebates.
PBS Frontline series on Big Oil disinformation.
Changing the podcast to AAC from MP3. Email us if you have problems!
Giant undersea cables carry sunshine to cloudy United Kingdom
Follow up to last week’s story about Quebec banning new hydrocarbon projects. Markham Hislop interviewed Hugo Seguin, Montreal Centre for International Studies on Energi Media.
Tallest Timber Framed Building.
All the plug-in hybrids available for sale in North America and how they compare on EV range, price and even towing!
Elon and Twitter.
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