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at Patreon dot dot NetRocks dot com. Happy New Year, and welcome back
to dot net rocks. Starting the year right with a geek out on energy.
I'm Carl Franklin. That's Richard Campbell. Howdy, how was your Christmas?
Excellent? You know, we're now living up on the coast, so
we went into town to spend days with our girls, you know, one
hosting a dinner or the other one hosting at breakfast, that kind of thing.
So and a brown bear and pine tree something like that. Yeah.
Yeah, we're all about the offshore wildlife these days, when you know,
lots of dolphins and sea lions and the occasional whale and the bloody river otters.
Nobody told them they were river otters. They go out in the ocean,
everything's fine, but they're not sea otters. That's a different creature.
So cool, So what kind of animal did you cook for Christmas dinner?
I wasn't doing the cook it either. I know. We did the traditional
turkey. They did a fine job of it too. Wow. So yeah
that was really great, excellent. Yeah, how was yours? Mine was
great as well? Family got your family together? Philet Mignon can't complain?
Went beef? Huh? Yeah? Did you do like the whole loin or
did you just just you do the steak? Nope? I did individual philet's
and I did them. I cooked them souvd at one hundred and twenty nine
degrees for two hours and then seared them. Yeah, edge to edge medium
rare, right, like perfect edge to edge medium rare. But my daughters,
who are used to a good medium rare, thought it was too pink,
right, even though they're used to that gray transition. They're used to
the gray transition, and it was kind of weird like they had never had
it before, although it was absolutely delicious. Yeah nice. So yeah,
there was all clean plates in the house. Yeah that's what you're looking for,
right, I can't go wrong with that, all right, So I
guess before we get started with the energy geek out, let's do better.
No, framework. Awesome, All right, what do you got? Well,
I saw this Kickstarter and Brian McKay sent me this in slack in the
fp nex slack. It's a Monogram keyboard. And the reason I think Brian
sent it to me is because I had bought the Monogram modular dials and buttons
and switches. They're Creative console. Creative console. Yeah, yeah, and
I had one and I just couldn't really I didn't really have space for it
on my desk and I didn't really use it all that much. So he's
like, well, I'll buy it off you. So yeah, nice.
So you experimented with it and then you've got your own ways of working,
right, Like, it's very personal, it is, yeah, the work
workflows. But if you go to MONOGRAMCC dot com you can see what they've
done the Monogram Creative console. Right now. I saw this kickstarter for the
keyboard that they're putting out that's designed for modern creators and it's got it's got
a modular number pad or something on the side, and it's got a little
display and you've got some customizable function keys and a knob and buttons and stuff.
There's no slider per se, but it does look very very cool.
Yeah, and I caught them in this weird time because the Kickstarter for this
keyboard ended on December fifteenth, and they're not selling it as a product yet,
right, they're fulfilling their you know, kickstarters, kickstarters, and the
kickstarter obviously went well, they went three times their goal, so that's yeah.
You know, this is I like this approach that companies that know how
to make product use Kickstarter to especially test the market and get their pre orders
nailed. Right, you know, so now they know, okay, well
we've got a lot size this big, like we can get the run up,
tune the thing up. But yeah, presumably it's just going to be
a regular product for him going forward. Yeah, presumably. And I hope
so because I want to buy one. Yeah, yeah, this looks really
cool. Yeah, and I liked it they you know, because you've seen
like the all O lead keyboards, which I think is too much. This
is that O lead around the edges, normal keys in the middle, right,
I wouldn't surprise. It almost makes sense that they might be able to
stick a couple of console items onto it too, you know, depending on
what you were doing. I mean, there's nothing worse than you know,
having you know your fingers, remember you know where the keys are, and
then they all change from from under you. Oh I didn't press this button
or change this setting, and now I'm using a divorce act key word layout.
Yeah, but you know, and the exceparate keep adds great because sometimes
you want to keep out on the left, not just automatically on the right.
Different people, different things. Yes, good one man, nice find.
Yeah, So let's hope it becomes product and we can talk about it
later. I'm pretty sure it will. So what's on your mind today,
mister Campbell? Well, I grabbed a comment off of the last Energy geek
Out that was eighteen twenty five, lot a year ago. Oddly enough,
it seems to be the Cadence are doing things these days, and lots of
comments on that show, as is normal for geek outs, there's lots of
conversation around them. And then so this comments a year old is from Jasper
Sigmund, who's a regular and I believe already has a dot at rock Smug
might even have music Cobe. I don't know, but if you don't,
Jasper, you know I'm going to hook you up. He says, it
baffles me that with all this cutting edge technology, because you remember last year's
energy eout there was I talked a lot about the new fusion stuff because there's
been a bunch of new fundraises and stuff like that. With all those cutting
edge technology, enormous reactors like tacamac and gigantic lasers, that we still rely
on good old water and steam to produce electricity. Isn't there any research being
done on how we might not need water anymore. I'd like to think that
maybe in one hundred one thousand years we'll have actual spaceships with warp cores like
reactors, and we don't have a steam turbine attach them to make electricity.
Okay, Clearly he's either joking or he hasn't been paying attention to the geekouts,
because there's lots of things that don't involve water. Well, almost everything
does, right, I mean, the basic concept of we boil water to
make steams, just a question of how we do it. It's a very
very obviously solar doesn't solar and wind doesn't. And I think but his real
reference was this idea to things like a lot of the fusion reactors just don't
have any plans ron make electricity, although I did in my response to him
at the time, bring up the fact that the trialpha actually is capturing energy
from their fusion reactions using the same coils that can create the fusion reactions.
So they have a pulse reactor and as that as they create enough magnetic tension
to actually cause the pulse to occur, that pressure back is actually energy they
can capture off their coils, which is very science fiction, like, that's
the kind of thing you might use in space going forward, different ways to
capture energy. But yeah, you know the other part of this is that
we use a lot of steam turbines for a reason because we know how rightly
what we want from electricity is reliability, not innovation really, and steam turbines
are a known technology that you can get decades from that you can price out
today for a price twenty five years from now, and so that's hard to
compete. With that being said, steam's only good into certain temperature range,
and most traditional combustion strategies like burning coal or wood or oil, even some
nuclear fall of the temperature range where water is well suited as your power.
Fluid is the thing that takes in the energy and then distributes it out through
turbines. But as you get to higher temperature stuff like the molten salt reactors
that run much higher temperatures, or even so the heliocentric collectors where they'll use
fluorine salts as the fluid, then you need to take the heat out a
different way, and that's when things like supercritical carbon dioxide and ultra high temperature
helium become a better mechanism for generating energy. So I mean, we're sticking
with water because let's remember we've only been making electricity industrially for a little over
one hundred years, not much more, and so it's all been about reliability
and technique. It's only in the past couple of decades that we've really had
an option for alternatives, and so those technologies are still maturing. There you
go, but Jasper as usual, great comment. Thank you so much for
your participation in the show, and a copy of music. Cobi is on
his way to you, and if you'd like to copy of music, go
by write a comment on the website at don at Rocks dot com or on
the facebooks. We publish every show there and if you comment there and I'm
reading the show. We'll send you a copy of music go by and you
can follow us on Twitter if you like. That's fine, But the cool
kids are hanging out on Masdon these days. I'm Carl Franklin at Tech,
I'm dot social, and I'm Rich Campbell at Macedon not social. Send us
a two. You might get some music to code by that way as well.
Yeah for sure. Okay, So where to begin with energy? I
mean, one of the things that we talk about is we talked about this
in the Space show last week that we did some of the geek outs that
I ended up we did. I did that thing with NASA and that turned
into some talks, and I've been doing space talks ever since. Not that
I've talked to NASA about energy, although NASA will come up today, but
I've also started doing energy geek out talks. And the rate of the evolution
of these technologies necessarily slow, so it gets pretty boring for me. Like
I'm doing space talks right now because it's super fun because every week Elon's done
something right, like it's always some nutty thing next. But the energy technologies
are moving a little slower. But one of the ways it's become really fun
for me is that I've been tailoring each of these talks to the country that
I'm in. So you know, the basic conversation about the state of wind,
state of solar, state of nuclear, all of those kinds of things,
they're all the same for the most part until you talk about it in
the context of the country. So at NDC Porto, I talked about the
way the Portuguese makee electricity. So there wasn't much talk about nukes just because
they don't have any. But they got great wind, and they got an
interesting solar, and they got some pumped hydro and it's fun to watch the
folks from the country hear the stories of their own power. You know,
most of times folks don't know. And I've been keeping all those notes,
so I'm building up a repertoire. I've done in Norway, obviously, Canada,
Australia, although depending on the country, Like if you're going to talk
about the US, the US has one most complicated grids in the world,
arguably the most complicated rid in the world. A you were first and be
bloody big country and it's very fragmented, like there's there's something like nine power
grids in the US, so it's got to be kind of a state by
state thing. When I did a Canadian version, i was doing it for
British Columbia, which is a lot of hydro electric. So it doesn't make
sense in this context really go into the individual countries. But I've got a
lot of notes around those different parts and have dove into areas, so you
might hear me reference particular country and it is probably one where I've read all
of the paperwork for that country because they give me inside, Like I'm reading
about the Portuguese pump storage solution in the Far North, which is an eight
hundred megawatt pumped hydro It's massive. It's incredible, it's largest in the world.
It's incredible. Anyway, let's start this time around with wind. Okay,
because winds had an interesting year. Actually, yeah, certainly my neck
of the woods. It's picked up the pace. Yeah, certainly, when
you know it's relevant in different areas. Twenty twenty three will be a record
year. They're expecting over one hundred gigawatts worldwide to be installed. Wind power
installations slowed down during the pandemic. They are a very large scale physical thing
to be done, and so they were well behind in terms of the rate
of the expected installs, and so they're catching off in the bypart of that
will be some banger years going forward. The other big trend in wind has
been progressively larger and larger and larger turbines megawat, two megawat, five megawatt,
ten megawatt, wow, fifteen mega. Like, when you're getting up
to fifteen megawatts, you're talking one rotation of those blades is enough power for
a half a dozen houses for a year, right, Like, it's crazy,
these massive amounts of electricity to reinproduce, and there's a question of why,
like why gets so big and the reality of courses. The taller the
mast is and the larger the blades span is, the more consistent the power
is, and you need fewer of them. The huge number of turbines creates
problems for power alignment. You have to adjust all the sine waves to match
up. It's complicated to make all these things work well. Also, you
know very well that taking a little whirlybird out out in the wind, you
know it's going to go yeah, well most likely, yeah, Most wind
turbines have a minimum power and a maximum power that they can take, and
they'll actually turn them off if it gets too windy, which seems crazy,
but think of the stresses. You know, when you're talking about those fifteen
megawatts seem to be the big ones. That's five hundred foot tall mast from
the surface typically of the water to the hub. I would imagine that the
bigger they are, the more momentum the blades have, right, so they
can take more wind gusts and lulls and still kind of rotate at an evening
exactly right, and they tend to be consistent. And by the end of
blades are I mean, they're even bigger. That's just the hub right,
each the diameter of the road or seven hundred and seventy five feet, So
imagine a rotating structure tip to tip that's as large as the height of the
Golden Gate Bridge from the water to the top of the tower. That's how
big these things are. And so in the past couple of years, all
of the major turbine producers have been making larger and larger turbines and they're all
having problems, the structural problems. They're starting to come apart. Wow,
and they've all had effectively recalls. So, and I hate to say this,
but like I feel like that's good news because as long as you were
racing for size, you weren't really racing for other innovations. If they correct
answer to a bet, Tribron was always a bigger turbine than you were,
just trying to make it bigger. But as they got much above these fifteen
megawat ones, the structural stresses in the blades got so high that the braids
are breaking. So they're finding a sweet spot. Yeah, and so you've
hit that curve where now you're going to have to make the blade stronger,
aka more expensive to get any bigger and in the reducing the cost per megawatt,
now you're on the other side of the curve. You're going to have
to spend more to produce more to make a bigger turbine, and that's not
worth it. And so if that size sweet spot makes sense, then now
you can start to pour your R and D energy into the other things you
could improve with it. And in terms of increasing reliability, better motor controls,
better resistances, So there's lots of ways to continue to prove it.
So it speaks to them maturing industry. But when it's just not like it's
just General Electric that's having this problem. Siemens has the same problem, Vessus
has the same problem. Like all of them seemed to hit this wall at
once, and so it just seems to be a point in the industry where
that's about as far as we're going to go on there innovation wise. Yeah,
it's for innovation. On the size side, we've kind of nailed on
shore wind. It works. You can't go that big there, just doesn't
make sense. Then you have different classes of offshore and the near shore approach,
which the Danes have done the most of, but it's all over the
world without a doubt, are also pretty mature. So now we're talking about
real offshore, and the difference being the amount of water you're in. So
up to about fifty meters of water, roughly one hundred and fifty feet or
so, you can slam a casement down through the water to the bottom,
pump the water out, then drill a big hole into the bottom, pour
concrete and mount of masts and that's your offshore wind. Right it's anchored to
the bottom. But it's basically the same as onshore wind just out in the
water a little further away from people. The airflow is cleaner there, so
you can go larger. And a lot of these titans, these fifteen megawatt
that's the installation they're doing. The problem is that lots of places water and
deeper than that. You know, here we are in British Columbia with latch
of wind blowing in, we don't have we have barely any wind turbines at
all. I mean a we have a lot of hydroelectric power banks, mountains,
very useful, but b our water is really deep, right, Like
this is fjord country, and fifty meters of water is you know, one
hundred meters away. It's just there's nowhere to put a wind turbine. So
the technology has been maturing. And again I'm going to reference Portugal here because
I did that Portuguese talk where they have one of the experimental floating wind turbine
test sites floating. Yes, because once the water gets much deeper than fifty
meters, the pressure is involved to drill into the bottom are just too high.
So I'm trying to think of the physics of how that would work.
I'm kind of thinking like and this is the first I've heard of it.
But I'm kind of thinking, like, you know, how a sailboat has
a big keel that, as you know, the bottom is very heavy and
it sort of floats down. It goes down into the water exactly right and
keeps it balanced. So would you have the turbine mast mounted to some great,
big, giant structure with a big weight on the bottom not that big.
Now we're directly boring from oil rake technology, and so you have to
do it. You have maybe one hundred and fifty meters tall mask, but
below you have another one hundred meters of lower structure, especially in the same
shape, and then it's cable stayed to the bottom. Okay, so you
have a set of anchors with a set of lines running to it that keeps
it more or less in the same area. But it is floating, so
it's going to move. It's just not going to move very far. But
it's also going to twist. Yeah, right, But it's all in some
ways it's going to be more survivable in rough seas because it has some give
where the fixed mass have no give. That's right, they're gonna get pummeled,
right and further offshore you get more so give me a weather, but
you also get better wind yep, and it's right. Depending on the nature
of your bottom, you're further out of you may be completely out of site,
which makes people happier. You can get away from the migration paths of
seabirds, so the incidence of encounters or seabirds goes down. So there's a
bunch of advantages. Now, it's not indefinite depth. We're now we're talking
about three hundred and fifty meters of water, but that's a lot more continental
shelf that you can be placing these on. Where I live, we have
Long Island Sound, So Long Island chuts out from New York City out east,
and then there's this little you could think of it as a big pond,
but it's a it's a sound. And inside the sound, the wind
is okay, but it's not as in the you know, certainly the waves,
but it's not as good as outside the sound when you're right on the
Atlantic. Yeah, but there's plenty, you know, there's a reason for
the fishing is so great in the Northeast. The water's relatively shallow, so
it's easy to fish to the bottom and to to that's you know, when
you think about lobster and cod, and like all of those great fisheries,
it's a relatively shallow water. There's still hundreds of meters, but not thousands
of meters, right, and so that opens a door to this is all
great wind power territory. The challenge of now you can immediately think of the
challenges this now is a mixed use thing. Generally speaking, wind turbine operators
don't want boats around their wind turns. Right, not in my backyard,
not in my front yard. And forget about what it does to the lobsters
in the cod right, I mean, and it's a good question of what
does it do? Mean, they're just anchors, So it's just more stuff
on the bottom, which you know in some ways that's artificial reef. That's
true. I would also argue that if you make areas with wind turbines in
place, and you make them exclusion zones, that's a place for those animals
to grow. Right. If people stay out of them, then that's a
non fish area. And what comes out of that fish out of those zones
can then be fished, and so you might actually be strengthening the stocks in
that area. But it bears study. Right. It is a mixed use
problem. Although most of the time you will see fairly let's say, dramatic
conversations about this stuff. Oh, I know a lot about that. There's
a lot of talk going on in my town right now. Yeah, because
of wind turbines that are being assembled at the State Pier in New London,
Connecticut. Little old New London, right, is in the news, and
there's there's a lot of stuff going on here. And they've been arguing about
it and going over budget and all this stuff for a few years now,
but it looks like some good stuff is finally coming out of it. So
they're using the state here as the staging ground for building wind turbine projects.
That's right around the northeast. Yeah, and so I think of it like
the developer tool company of software. Right. You know, they're not building
the turbines. They're not or they're not having them built. They're not putting
them out there and benefiting from their you know what they produce. They're not
making electricity. Yeah, they're not making electricity exactly. They're putting them together.
Yeah, They're the place everybody has to go to if you actually want
to build them out right, that's cool, and it's just building the infrastructure
to make it easier to make more wind power in that part of the world.
Yeah, they I mean, all in all, it's good news.
They're progressing. The cost per watt is really low. Some of the cheapest
electricity in the world, between wind and solar are both the lowest costs,
and that's one of the reasons for the increasing size, and we're learning to
do better to move it further away. Of course, further offshore still means
you've got in cables running two shorts electricities for the folks on the land,
So there is some complex infrastructure as you get further and further offshore, and
there's plenty of water deeper than three hundred and fifty meters. So but we've
also again can tap the oil rig industry because they've dealt with oil rings at
much deeper doubts than that. If we want to go deeper still, but
at this point the three to fifty meter range seems to be there's a bunch
of test projects in place today, half dozen them in the world. They
are working well, learnings are occurring, so I think you're going to see
a big expansion there, and depending on the nature of your water, that
might be fully offshore, not visible at all from land, or maybe just
further away, but certainly titanically large massive turbines, but in variosteudy winds of
the general electricity a long period of time. Yeah, show, Shall we
move on to solar? Sure? I know, let's talk a little bit
of solar. So can I tell you a solar story before we start?
Yeah, tell me your solar story. So, a couple of years ago,
so I have this huge house that my wife and I bought this house
when we both had kids living with us, and so she has two and
I have two, and we needed a place that had a lot of bedrooms
and a lot of size and you know whatever. So we bought this house.
Of course, now they're all moved out and we're like, we don't
like this house anymore. It's too big right from the Yeah, but it
was built in nineteen eighty nine. The roof was, you know, twenty
years old or something like that. It needed a new roof. It was
the roof was getting angry. It was throwing shingles at us. You know.
It's like, hey, it's like, you know, Grandma's teeth are
falling out kind of thing. Right. So we put on a new roof
a couple of years ago, and now that we have this this new roof,
we're like, well, you know, let's see about our solar panel
options because you know, we we have a pretty high carbon footprint here.
We have you know, HVAC systems and you know, lots of computers,
and but your power bill is substantial. The power bill in the summer gets
ridiculous, especially the hotter it gets. Yeah, so we looked into it
and the what we went with was this company called Trinity Solar, their Connecticut
company, and the way we wanted to structure it was it was perfect.
They basically for no money down, no money down. No no money down,
they heard that one. Yeah, So for no money down, they
come out, they do an inspection. They're also a roofing company, so
if there's any structural things that need reinforced, you have to go together really
well yeah, yeah, they do that for you, and they you know,
they make any repairs. Plus you may need a new like it makes
sense to do it when you're putting a new roof on. Yeah. Yeah,
Well we already had had the roof okay. So there was a few
things that needed some more support in the attic, and they did that free
of charge, and then they put on the panels. And so there's a
tax incentive if you buy panels. Right, if I go out and buy
my own solar panels and hire an independent contractor to put them up, I
get a tax discount on that, I get a rebate. But these guys
are like different. They're saying, all right, we're going to own the
panels, we're going to put up the panels, and they're hours we're going
to give you a lease at a fixed rate per month that's lower than your
electricity bill. And by the way, they told us that you're getting a
full inverter's worth of panels. Whatever it was, thirty six panels. I
think it was right. And you know, if you add just one more,
you'd need another inverter. So it was like, you're going to be
covered your bills. Based on what our bills were in the past, this
is enough to cover the bill. So we're basically trading. The way I
looked at it is we're trading a bill that can go from one hundred dollars
a month to eight hundred dollars a month nine hundred dollars a month, right,
depending on the you know, depending on the season, to you know,
two hundred and fifty dollars a month every month for twenty years, right,
And so there was a bit of discussion and all that stuff, and
it just kind of occurred to me that you know, having a known amount
is better, especially today with the power companies upping their their delivery charge,
which boggles my mind. Why you have an electricity charge. Oh and by
the way, we're going to even charge you more to get that power to
you. Oh and by the way, we can just change that whenever we
feel like, right, well, that's why they invented that charge. Because
the charge, the charge, the power rate was fixed by the by the
government right there, and so they came up with new charges that aren't part
of that that agree. And so in December there was some word rumors going
around that they were going to this is Connecticut Light and Power ever source it's
called now, they're going to double their rates, and they did in January
this year. The rate went doubled. So what was a two hundred dollars
monthly bill is now a four hundred dollars monthly bill, and we got turned
on in June and since then are you know, it's it's all coming back.
So they and then there was also the question of well, what happens
if you want to sell your house and the new owners don't want the solar
and I'm like, well, they won't buy the house to go, you
know, go away. It's part of the deal. It's part like,
oh, I want the house, but I don't want the garage. Yeah,
like that garage off, will you? You can have it? It's
fine. So and the Trinity was basically like, yep, whoever buys the
house, the goes over into their name, We transfer it and Bob's your
uncle. So it seemed like a no brainer to me, especially because you
know, it's not like we're aging. But you know, retirement is ten,
fifteen, twenty years away. I don't know whatever it is, and
I don't know. Yeah, what is this thing you called retirement? I
don't know. But you know, at that point we could sell the house
and you know, add the however many thousands of dollars onto the value by
having those solar panels. Yeah, weird, you're selling a house. You're
selling your house with a fixed a known cost of electricity, right, which
is useful. It's a good thing. Yeah, so I'm glad we did
that. Yeah, it's cool. Anyway, that's my story. The first
time a whole gigawatt of solar cells was installed in the world was only in
two thousand and four. I mean, solar power has been around since the
seventies. It's just really expensive. Wow, right, But only twenty years
ago did we start We started having buildouts like that, like a gigawatt of
electricity, but that wasn't even one side. That was all over the world.
Twenty twenty three, it's a gigawatt a day. Over three hundred and
sixty gigawatts of solar was added worldwide in twenty twenty three, and I just
give that as a sense of scale that what's happened. Solar panels have gotten
substantially less expensive. Yeah, and you largely can thank the Chinese for that.
They're the ones who really did mass manufacture. They didn't invent them.
They're very much an American design. They're about twenty two percent efficient, but
they're very cost controlled. They work really reliably. Of those three hundred and
sixty five gigawatts of electricity capacity and added last year, twenty five percent of
that is, like you, residential solar. Most of it is commercial,
so that is large scale farms essentially fields of solar panels. And they're very,
very inexpensive. It's the least expensive power to deploy in this day and
age. And I could do they am costs and all those other calculations,
but it's not that important, right, Like we can leave off the math
today we'd have to go that far into that particular thing. Uh. And
it's but it's an interesting point to see that solar is not being installed because
of that because it's the right thing to do. It's like zero carbon energy.
It's being done because it's the least expensive energy, right, and so
you know, the straight motivations are there. That being said, it's it's
getting more innovative. They are doing fun things with solar in the sense they're
doing things we talked about this last year, floatov voltaics, solar panels on
reservoirs. You know, I've I see applications for this in my own town,
and I wonder, hey, is anybody paying attention. You know,
I know they don't listen to Dot and rocks, but This isn't something that
we invented or you invented. This is being done and especially on channels and
uh you know, waterways, waterways that aren't usually used by people. Well,
where you're seeing this push towards float of voltaics is on water ways where
they're currently managing problems caused by sunlight hitting the water. Right, because one
of the challenges float of votakes is you're going to darken the water, so
you will modify an ecosystem. But if it's an irrigation canal, right now,
you're trying to scrape alogie out of it. So covering it by putting
covering with solar panels actually decreases that work. And by now you probably figured
out if you don't know what floatovertex is is putting solar panels on floating structures,
rafts, barges, whatever you want to call it, or at least
over water and over water it prevents rapid evaporation and it does a few things
and you obviously get the solar energy from it. Yeah, so I mean
you're generating solar power, you're decreasing the amount of sunlight hitting the water,
which helps with algae management and other inappropriate growth when you're talking about canals and
irrigation and you're keeping the solar panels cool. Solar panels don't actually like too
much heat, and they actually get less finished and wear out. So the
side effect of we're slowing down the rate of evaporation is also keeping the panels
cooler, so it is mutually beneficial in a lot of respects. That being
said, it's not as cheap as conventional commercial because conventional commercials row on row,
very symmetrical wiring is trivial maintenance, disease is the easy as possible,
and you're always optimizing pointing directions. Although in the northern hemisphere we're not pointing
as much solar to the south anymore. We're pointing at more east and west
because we're trying to we generate too much power at midday, so we'd rather
use our panels less efficiently per panel to distribute the power over a larger rage
of time, collect more light in the morning on the east panels and more
light in the later part of the day on the west. Face panels don't
need as many panels facing south. It's funny, and it's funny, but
that's kind of kind of where we're at now because the panels are as cheap
they are. And it once was a time when it made sense to have
helio tracking solar panels, so solar panels on mass with motors, because the
panels were so expensive that optimizing their collection at all times was worth it in
exchange for motors that need constant maintenance, right, that need repairs and those
sorts of things. And now largely that's gone away because the panels have gotten
so cheap. It's cheaper just put in more panels aimed in all the directions
you need to aim them in. And that's one of the challenges when you
talk about float of voltaics is often the panels are not pointed in the ideal
directions. They're following the path of the irrigation canal, or they're just wherever
it'll fit in the in the reservoir. But that's okay because it's power you
it still makes net power. It's power you wouldn't otherwise have. It has
benefits to the reservoir that it's on. Another area, specialized area in solar
related to this is agra voltaics or solar panels on farms. Farms that are
still working, so this is nothing magical. Imagine and instead of them being
down low to the ground, they're ten feet up so that they're on po
posts essentially that have lifted them up. So's the ground below it is accessible.
Oh, I see, I was wondering. You know, you said
these are working farms, So yeah, I was staying at a you know,
fallow farms or those that aren't working as much anymore. That's a good
use for them. But I guess see you you're right. I mean,
you could put them on poles and posts and lift them up and raise them
up. Now what you are shading that area, but that's not necessarily a
bad thing. There are many agricultural plants that prefer more shade. Many of
the animal feed grasses prefer more shade. So a mixed use where you have
agricultural animals who prefer their shade also under those panels being able to eat and
maintain that grass. So you're making electricity above, feeding your animals below.
And if you're spacing them ount correctly, you will have sunlight. You'll have
some yeah, when the as the sun moves. Plus we've all the increasing
amount of environmental change means that many of these fields are too hot as it
is, Yeah, and so increasing amount of shade on them is useful.
It's a good idea. So yeah, it's an easy one, and it's
a way for the same way of farmers and more farmers are throwing a few
wind turbines around as well. Is another source of income for agriculture. And
then it also can benefit the ground that it's covering. So what if you
have, let's say a four acre plot and you're not farming your land,
does it make sense to put a solar farm on those three acres? Quite
possibly, yes. But you and now you're a commercial producer, what are
you going to do with all that power? You have to negotiate with power
grid, right, so you now becoming a provider to the power grid,
and so it's all in the agreement you're going to make with them about buying
the power and what they're expecting from you. So I remember in our very
first geek out, the electricity Geekout? Was it the electricity Geekout? The
first one? No, it wasn't. No, the first ones were space
but yeah, space Shuttle. Okay, but I remember in that electricity geek
out that you did that you dispelled the myth that the meter doesn't run backwards
when you overproduce, right, if you produce more than your well, we
were talking about the meter does run backwards, but does it? Is that
power actually but the electricity doesn't flow backwards? Yeah? Is the power actually
usable most of the time? No? Yeah, okay, And that's when
we're talking about residential solar, where we're talking about a couple of kilowatts and
uh and and it's already been stepped all the way down to retail power to
one hundred and twenty bolts they see. Yeah, when you talk about commercial
power plants like that commercial solar, they're delivering the power to the grid at
a much higher level. Okay, right, there's just the because they you
have to protect people from that. You can't have that on the side of
someone's house, right right, So right now, the way that residential solar
is set up, it's designed for you to consume, and when you produce
more than needed, it's metered by the power company largely as a credit to
you, so that when you do need to poy power from them when the
solar isn't running, it doesn't cost you anything, right, right, And
that's no power company willingly enters into that as very much a political conversation.
But it's to encourage more solar to be installed. And it's worth it for
the most part because it does turn off older power plants. Like it works
out, Is that power actually usable most of the time. No, it's
very hard to take stepped down power and distribute it to other homes. It's
not water and it doesn't flow easily uphill. But when you're gonna if you're
talking about your farm scenario three acres, you're gonna lay down a bunch of
panels. Now you're going you're going to be a small producer, but you're
going they're not going to put residential power to that. They're going to bring
commercial power in for that. They're going to ask you for three phase power.
They're going to ask for it at four hundred and eighty right, a
form that is more easily added to the grid for other places to use,
right. Right. And that's the distinction is that's not how houses are set
up. Right. And so, as you said, this isn't something that
you can just go online and choose. Hey, how many incors do you
have? Okay, here's how much money you're going to make every month.
You have to negotiate that with the power company. Yeah, you know,
it depends on the power company. Some power companies are well set up for
so you want to be on micro producer, Like here's the deal, but
it depends on you. It's a case by case basis, right and site,
and the site matters too, Right, when are you going to make
power? How much is it going to be? They may even say,
hey, we're going to pay far less for power at noon when we have
way too much. Right, we'd rather you set up your panels facing east
and west and generate less power mid day, more power early, and we'll
pay you more for that. Like, you're going to have to look at
the deal for your area for it to make sense. Interesting, it's really
interest and it's something that I would never even have thought of. Yeah,
you know, even last year, we are evolving, aren't we, Like
we're understanding more about this, and so are the power companies. So power
companies are pretty basic. You know, most people listening to the show,
and he certainly you and I are. We are Internet children, Like we've
been around the Internet our whole lives, and we think peer to peer is
not a big deal, but outside of our industry it's bizarre and so and
power companies are like that. They have spent a long time to come to
a place to be able to deal with a large number of power producers right.
For a long time, the grid was built around a handful of very
large power plants distributed over a wide area, and that has evolved with our
need to change the way we produce power into many more smaller producers and being
able to integrate and modify that power efficiently. Very good. When I put
out the word about writing the Geek Cuts, of course I got questions from
our regular listeners. Martin Twaite's asked about solar efficiencies like why are we still
stuck at twenty two percent? And the reason it really is cost We are
developing. There's certainly experiments with more efficient panels, Perovskitde panels being one of
the most obvious examples. They get up into the thirties. The downside is
reliability and costs. So when you start you're starting to experiment with these more
higher density panels, they have heat problems, they wear out quickly, and
so you know the power. The advantage of of that twenty two of these
classic silicon dioxide panels is that they are reliable and they last, and we
are learning to recycle them. So in the past couple of years we've seen
some good breakthroughs. I read through a bunch of paperwork from a company called
Solar Cycle in Texas who are building the machinery to automate the processing of classic
aluminum solar panels. So they stripped the illuminum housings off and then they actually
have Because these different layers that go into making a solar panel are all glued
together, they're very tricky to separate, and recycling of each one of them
is af of each layer is a different process, and you don't want to
cross contaminate. So they've been developing the machines that neatly cut the glass off
the top so that that glass can be recycled and neatly separate each of the
different layers in the panel into the constituent ingredients so they can be resold.
Richard, whatever happened to graphene? Remember we were so excited about graphene,
and particularly about solar panels. Well, we're anything electrical was interesting. What
happened to graphene? Is that all of that hype that we were talking about
a few years ago led to funding. And when scientists are funding, what
do they talk about? Nothing? Because they have money, they're at work.
Okay, so graphie technologies are being developed. It's just that it's hard.
Scientists only talk about stuff when they're trying to raise money to work on
it. But have there been any products? I mean I have seen.
Yeah, it's a couple of big graphine batteries and things like that. Well,
I've seen graphine solar panels that claim to have raised the efficiency by twenty
to forty percent. Yeah, never got out of lab Okay, right,
Like they test them and then they have problems, right, They're too expensive
to manufacture. It's like this thing's twice twice as power fission but costs ten
times as much. Oh boy, right, oh and it lasts only two
years. Like these are the problems. There's a difference between the science of
a new material and turning it into an engineer product that people can use.
So then the benefits of converacy of recycled solar panels is that we're making tons
of them and they do wear out and over time you get about twenty years
twenty five years, they lose about a third to a half a percent per
year inefficiency. So at some point it's just worth it to replace them.
And you can't just keep throwing them in the dump. You want those materials
back. There's an expectation that by twenty thirty we're going to have to decommission
something. We're in a neighborhood of eight million tons of solar panels and so
recycling is going to be a big deal, and you know a few decades
on it's going to be tens of millions, hundreds of millions of tons.
So and right now it's cheap to dump them throw them away, it's expensive
to recycle them, and so maturing recycling technology is important. That's where a
company like solar Cycle comes into plays. They're learning to recycle solar panels.
It's very cool, and make the tools to make it easier for other people
to do it. So we're big on this closed cycle system where you build
things to make electricity and then you're able to reprocess and to make more things,
and the metals they can extract from that can be turned back into new
solar panels again. So it's good news. It certainly improvements. Cool,
all right, let's take a break. All right, we will do that
and we'll be back after these important messages. Stick around and we're back.
It's dot net rocks geek Out. Addition. First of twenty twenty four.
I'm Carl Franklin's Richard Campbell. We're talking energy. We started with wind,
we did solar, and now we're on two. Well, I feel like
we got to talk about power stora because we just talked about the two intermitted
power sources. Yeah, and so you know there's a reason they're cheap.
They don't run all the time, right, and you have to do something
with all that energy, use it or lose it. Well, and that's
always the case with anything. But we talk about baseload power generation and that
could run. We could control exactly how much it makes at any given time,
whether that be hydroelectric or oil gas, you name it. With wind
and solar, yeah, you know you could stop wind just by locking the
turbines, but why would you. But when you so, when you're making
more energy than necessary, you got to do something with it. It's storing.
It's useful because there's lots of time when it's not working, right,
for better or worse. Tesla, you know, broke a lot of ground
here. They're reducing the cost of making high density batteries and their battery innovation
led to them doing a lot of their original some original grid scale power places
that I've talked about this on previous shows. Going to go back in the
stom I'm trying to cover new ground here. Last year I was talking about
form Energy. So these are ex Tesla guys who recognize that the lithium ion
battery is not a good battery for grid. Lithium ion batteries are good batteries
for cars. They pack a lot of power in low weight because you need
to move in good laptops too, but pack a lot of power in a
low weight environment. They charge its quickly and also can discharge quickly. You
think about how quickly an electric car can discharge its battery, and that's that
whole effect, and that's not what the grid needs. The grid wants lots
of power. It doesn't need to move it around physically like it can stay
stuck to the ground and lasts a long time. And so what form Air
was focused on was a type of battery called the iron air battery. This
battery has been around a long time. NASA had a bunch of experiment with
a bunch of them for space related technologies back in the time. But the
big difference with the iron air battery is that it's got a long discharge cycle.
So sort of natural discharge rates for the lithium I filscium phosphate batteries are
in the six to eight hour range, so you know, if you try
and draw them fasterout the battery overheats. If you try and dro them real
slowly, they leak energy anyway, and so you can't get much outside of
that time range. The natural discharge time for a iron air battery is one
hundred hours. Wow. So it's good for storage for grid, yeah,
yeah, for grid. So they are bigger, they are heavier, and
they are hotter than lithium iron batteries, none of which is a problem when
you're on the grid. What they also are is cheap because the materials are
less expensive. So a less expensive, bigger, heavier, hotter battery that
you can stick behind a fence and cantually dischange charge over many days. Hmmm.
So in terms of filling in the grid, it's great. The work
that Elon did, and Tesla did down in Australia with their big lithiumum the
Mega packs in Victoria. Yeah, those were bridging power, so they weren't
designed to last a long time. What they were designed to do is provide
when they needed to switch between solar and wind sources. They needed power in
between those twos. It just lasted for a few minutes, and without it
they were having brown up problems where one would one power sources starting to fade,
they'd have instabilities and electricity which made people sad. Then they get the
other systems back up and it'd be fine. So these battery packs sat in
between those two to take care of that problem. Not a bad use for
lithium ion battery. So back to my story of solar panels. These guys
Trinity, which is a Connecticut company. And by the way, if anybody
isn't listening in Connecticut and wants to get Trinity to come and look at you,
contact me because I get a kickback. Okay. Anyway, So they
do offer a battery option, but we have a propane generator right and a
five hundred gallon propane tank in the backyard, and it doesn't make any sense
for us to have that now that and some people when I mentioned it on
Facebook, some people said, I want the battery pack so I can be
completely off the grid. Right. They just want to They don't want to
deal with a power company. Don't want the power company. You benefit from
my generated power, and you know, so there is that, but I
don't care about that. I care about a low monthly bill, and I
don't want to you know, if the power goes out, I got you
have power two weeks worth of power in that propane tank. Yeah, that's
compelling, right, and just you got to keep you got to take You
have to store that fuel, right, and it does gauge like you have
to use it up eventually, and it cost a certain amount to refill.
Uh, and the machine takes maintenance. You know, batteries are pretty stable,
although they do wear out. They don't have any maintenance. And also
they these guys told us they wouldn't last that long, like you wouldn't get
no, you know, you wouldn't get days and days no out of well
it takes and again it's the natural discharge cycle. You have to have a
lot more packs if you want to increase duration, right, and that you
know, that's the claim to thing for form Air. When we talked about
them a year ago, they were in the prototype stage. They were they
were putting their initial project in. It was supposed to be finished this year.
One megawatt project in Minnesota. That has been completed. So they actually
delivered on time and it worked, and Minnesota's response to that was to buy
a bigger one. Wow. Great. So yeah, you know so many
times to say, oh, we were going to have our first touch bribuy
at twenty twenty three and is just never done. In fact, I'll bring
up a few of these along the way of other technologies because that's where that's
what's happened to them. Now. This is the lithium ion batteries. No,
these are iron air batteri. These are iron air batteries. Oh wow.
Form Energy when we talked about a year ago, they said next year
we're going to have this first prototype project in Minnesota. They did it.
It worked. That was a one megawatt pack, so one hundred and fifty
megawatt hours. Again remember that one hundred what discharge thing, so a much
higher megawat hour than the actual power can only put out one megawat but it
could do it for one hundred and fifty hours. Wow. So yeah,
Minnesota is now asked for a ten megawat thousand megawatt hour implementation, and so
is Colorado, and the next one to be finished or the next and then
after that is Georgia's asked for an even bigger one, a fifteen megawatt fifteen
hundred megawatt hour. Now what's the reason that they want these? Is it
because they want to avoid brownouts or something or they thereon lies the question like
what are you using it for? And so it is exactly that they have
intermittent power sources like wind and solar, and they want need to provide power
all the time. So what's the alternative wind and solar? What's the normal?
What do you light up when the sun goes down? The normal thing
is a natural gas peaker plant. Natural gas paper plants are very efficient power
plants. They're great because they take the natural gas, they burn it in
a turbine which spins a generator, and then the output heat boils water to
spend a steam turbine as well, so they extract energy multiple times from that
prope Pretty cool or that natural gas. They're compact they're quick to build,
and they're efficient and they and they're called peaker plant, the Piker plant model,
which is a particular figure figuration, can be lit up in minutes,
so as the solars, you know, the sun's starting to go down,
you light up this power plant and they but they are carbon emitting, although
they are the lowest carbon per megawatt our electricity of the petrochemo. Now that's
just like you know, I'm the least poisonous of these apples. But that's
what normally happens, right, is you would use a gas peaker plant,
and these look to be that replacement. So they don't that they have more
more the enough power to last a couple of days until there's enough solar you
know, so that's the trend there and form energy, you know, more
power to them. These are one hundred million dollar projects. They're not incredibly
costly in the in the world of energy technologies. So they're having some success.
It's just going to take time to scale the government. There are other
countries that there are other places that are ordering these things. They run roughly
ten percent the price of the equivalent lithium ion. Wow. Cheap, yeah,
but improvement that being said, I don't think that's the best news and
power storage this year. Oh really Yeah, My favorite story in twenty twenty
three actually comes out of the Australian National University. So they did a pumped
hydro storage study worldwide. Wait, I heard about this and it might have
been something that we even talked about. Well, I certainly was excited about
it. I saw it on TV or son. I don't know what I
said, but but yeah, go ahead. Well what they did they started
in Australia and they ended up going all over the world because we have such
good maps now. But the essential idea was this pump storage. There's a
bunch of it. It exists today. In fact, many existing hydro electric
dams are also adding pump storage tom as well, which means there's at times
when they have excess electricity, which you never used to have. Right,
And until grid scale, solar and wind came along, extra electricity was not
a thing. If you were making more power you need, you turned down,
you turned off the plant, right. But as more access of power
has been peering on the grid, ways to store to become more relevant,
and so the idea that hey, we're making too much power from solar right
now, So pump the water back into the dam as a way to store
that energy, knowing that when you need it you can now let it back
down through a turbine to general electricity. Okay, that wasn't the thing that
I heard about. I heard about hot sand, heating up sand and using
that to store energy because the sand holds on to heat longer, and then
using that when you have you know, when you need yeah, yeah,
yeah, alternative energy storage. Yeah. And there's lots of experiments in there.
There's the crane system and so forth. Here's the advantage of pump hydro.
Totally known technology, right, hundreds of years of use, right like,
this is one of the very first ways to general electricity, the Niagara
Electric Project. Waterfalls capture it, right, Niagara Falls Westinghouse. You know,
this is the westing House Edison dual back in the eighteen hundreds. And
in fact, it's not just that it was a good thing to make electricity
from it, it also decreased erosion at the falls. By cutting diverting a
bunch of that water down these tunnels to make electricity, they stop the they
cut back the erosion rate of the falls, right like, We always think
about power generation as destructive to the environment, but often and if we do
it well, we're benefiting our environment too, controlling damage. And so pump
hydro is a very known technology. We know how to do it. The
challenge, of course, is that if you always connected with hydro electric,
you need something rare. And what's rare is a water source at altitude that
then has a location substantially lower to it nearby, a place with a waterfall,
essentially that has enough water to make it worthwhile to fill up that area
behind it as a reservoir and then let it out under control to general electricity.
And pump hydro doesn't require that. The only thing you need to make
pump hydro work is a water source at the bottom of the hill. So
a big enough river is enough something right, and so then you need a
hill and at the top of the hill you can construct a reservoir. So
you're going to alter the environment to build that reservoir, but there might not
be anything there and that's important, and you'll throw some solar panels on top
of it. When you're done. It's a dedicated reservoir, so it doesn't
have to be a major ecology and then you drill a couple of pipes between
the water at the bottom and the reservo at the top, and when you
have access energy, you pump that water up and when you need that energy,
let the waterfall back down. So what the Australian research study showed is
that there are almost six hundred thousand sites worldwide where this would work. Wow,
there's in most parts of the world. There is more than enough locations
for pumped hydro for world demand. Different parts of the world have more.
The Canadians and the Melanesians are off the scale. We have so much.
We have a lot of water down below and lots of hills. But all
of the western world has plenty. Northern Europe has the least. The mountain
ranges are relatively small relative to where their water is. Most of Africa plenty,
certainly Australia plenty, most of Asia plenty. Wow. That's good news.
And so their point was, here's a technology we know can last for
a century with proper maintenance, we know the costs of implementing it, and
it will store electricity for you efficiently in very known form, which is really
what the energy energy wants. My problem with any of these battery technologies is
nobody knows what to look like in twenty years. Really, we just haven't
run them that long, but we've run pomp hydro that long and longer.
So the point we're saying was the amount of altitude difference available in most of
these countries with water is sufficient for the power storage needed for those countries.
Wow, that's great, that's such good news. We've always argued about this
idea that it's always going to be this huge area of mixed use, and
it's like you know, in a lot of cases, wind, solar and
pumped hydro can solve the problem. Yeah. I'll include the links to the
to the papers for folks who want to read it. It was just stunning
how effective it is, and just just recognition of as long as you've got
a bottle of water below and a hill above, you make this work.
And back in Portugal that eight hundred megawatt pumped hydro facility was just astonishing.
I mean that is grid scale power just by storing water. Yeah, and
it's and it fills that reservoir with solar and wind amazing and land based wind.
All right, you want to talk a little hydrogen, let's talk hydrogen.
Okay, I mean people always my hydrogen car, MANA, fuel cells
are too expensive. Thanks for playing, thanks for coming to my ted talk.
It's just like listen, fuel cells can only get so cheap hydrogen.
It while a very quote unquote clean energy, is very difficult to store and
it's expensive to make. So right now, commercial price for hydrogen is roughly
five bucks a kilo or five thousand dollars per metric ton. Now, how
do you make hydrogen? Because hydrogen doesn't like being on its own, It
doesn't like being lonely. It always finds some friends. You have to use
electricity to split water, don't you, Well, you don't have you have
to do some electricity. But the main that today, if you want to
buy commercial hydrogen, you're not going to get it from water. You're going
to get it from methane. Okay, You're going to use steam reformation,
which is high temperature steam that blows the hydrogen off and then it produces a
ton of a bunch of carbon dioxide. So if you steam reformation, the
number one way to make hydrogen to day is for every ton of hydrogen,
you make nine to twelve tons of carbon dioxide and consume about six megawat hours
of electricity. Well, so that's not good. No, you don't want
to make more carbon dioxide, Dad, We exactly so. But it's the
cheapest way to make hydrogen right now, that's your five thousand dollars. A
ton costs you about five grand, but you're going to make ten tons of
carbon in the process and consume six megawatts of electricity for your flat. The
Germans developed a system called methane pyrolysis now that turns the temperature up much higher.
So instead of six megawatt hours of electricity, you're talking twenty five megawade
hours of electricity, about four times more than steam reformation. But the byproduct
of that is solid carbon graphite, so no CO two. You've blown the
oxygen off as well, and you can store that carbon or resell it.
But the bottom line is it's not going into the environment. It just costs
more until you burn it. Well, I don't know how you you know,
carbon you don't normally burn, You make it, put in it.
It's a lot of pencils, but you know, yeah, yah, it's
a lot of pencils. You make it any things. At the minimum,
you bury it. The electrolysis approach, the one you mention off the bat
with electricity you take. Now you're just taking pure air or pure water.
You're making a ton of hydrogen. You're gonna also make ten eight tons of
oxygen for sixty megawat hours of electricity, so ten times more energy than what
it took to do with steam prioralysis. But it's expensive. Isn't just a
lot of electricity? Right? And really a lot like that's a lot of
electricity. And by the way, what can you do with that one ton
of hydrogen? The most efficient mechanism we have to use that hydrogen to make
electricity is the fuel cell model. Right. So now you're going to recombine
it with hot oxygen to make it back into water, and you're going to
get about three point three megawatt hours of electricity out of that one ton of
hydrogen, So about half the amount of energy that it costs to make that
hydrogen from steam, or seven or thirteen percent the amount of energy it took
to make it with pyrolysis, or five percent of what it would take to
make it with electrolysis. But that's fine. We always have an overhead,
you know it takes energy to find oil, It takes energy to mine oil,
It takes energy to move oil, It takes energy to refine oil.
It takes energy to get that refined product into your vehicle for you to use
it. Right, Yes, there are always overheads and energy to producing other
energy sources. The question is can you store the hydrogen well, can you
take it where you need to go, which, by the way, all
of those things is that's very hard, right, The math is not on
hydrogen side unless we're making electricity very very cheaply. You don't use hydrogen to
make electricity necessarily. You use it when you want to move it around,
right, You put it in a vehicle, or you take things that are
normal that would normally be polluting and make them non What about making the hydrogen
on site so it doesn't have to move But that's a great point, and
also making it with electricity that would otherwise be wasted like solar panels. So
back to our modern energy economy. Our modern energy e commomy has access energy
available and that's where these strategies can occasionally be useful and it is happening.
So in the Netherlands there is a hospital called the Rienjet Iced or the Eastern
State Hospital, and they have a hydrogen electrolysis facility built into the hospital.
So they have a bunch of solar panels and wind and so when they have
access energy, which they often do, they electoralize water into hydrogen ouxygen and
they use both. I remember the hospitals need oxygen, so rather than using
energy to bring oxygen to the hospital, they're producing that eight parts oxygen to
one part hydrogen and using that oxygen in the hospital. And then when they
build up enough hydrogen, they run a fuel still to provide electricity into the
hospital. So expensive, yes, relatively speaking, non emitting, right,
Like you think of all the carbon emissions that are taking off the table by
producing their run off for the hospital and by taking that access energy they don't
need. It's being produced during the day and then you're burning it at and
you're using it as hydrogen to make electricity at night. So to me,
this is very appealing. It's the in between part. It's not grid scale
and it's not residential scale. It's institution scale. But we kind of like
that, especially when we talk about nuclear which I believe is the last thing
you want to talk about. But I'm want to just maybe well, we'll
get there talk about those little little plants. I mean, I can sort
of see where this is going, a distributed grid kind of thing rather than
a centralized grid. Yes, you're exactly right. As the energy industry has
learned to deal with more distribution, these opportunities open up, and so the
idea that a hospital plant, when hospitals have an infrastructure plant, they're feeding
a bunch of needs for the hospital out of using access energy to supply all
of that as well as power. Yeap, it's good stuff. We have
maybe on an hour left, i'd you you're probably right, So let's take
a second break here. Yeah, it's going to be a long one,
folks, so buckle up and we'll be right back. After these important messages
and we're back again. It's dot net rocks geek out. Addition, you're
not happy it's long, right, I mean, and I'm talking to you
as much I'm talking to the listener. It's like, no, this is
great. I missed this. I totally miss this. And you know,
everybody's down for vacation for a little bit in the wintertime, and what better
way to spend it than with Carlin Richard geeking out over some energy. We
got to talk about geothermal. Okay, so last year's big story on geothermal
was the microwave drilling technique. Do you remember it? Yeah? I remember
that. Yeah. It's energy intensive. But rather than remind us using a
bit to grind the rock and then you have to put steel sleeves in to
support the rock, and you need and you need pump mud and all this
technology all from the oil industry, they came up with this high powered microwave
magnetron that literally vaporized the rock into gas and then that gas adheres to the
walls to reinforce it. It's totally space age and it's still in development.
I'm not going to talk about it any more than that. The break the
new innovations in geothermal aren't that sci fi. They're actually adopting shale extraction technology
like fracking. The reason that, yes, the reason that the US is
now a leader in oil production in the world, is these innovations in shale
extraction or what mostly horizontal drilling. So the trick with shale extraction, if
you ever get into it, I don't recommend you do, is that they
don't do the traditional drill down to the oil pad. They've already done that
most of the time. The beds have already been drilled. Now you're trying
to get more oil from it. So instead, what you do is you
drill beside the bed and you turn the drill bed horrorzon onto and come into
it from the side, and then you frack it. You put an expansion
material into it to break loose more typically lots of natural gas and some oil
back up the old linescure fracking is fracturing rock. But that set of techniques
work very well for generating geothermal power. So geothermal power is based on this
idea that the deeper you drill down, the hotter the rock gets. The
problem is that the drilling is the expensive part. The plant is awesome.
It's small, right. You're basically pumping water down that pipe where it gets
superheated by the rock down there. It comes flying back up another pipe and
spins the turbine, and then you cool the water back down and you pump
it again. Almost no emissions at all. It's a complete closed loop system
like you want this everywhere. It's one of the tidiest plants you can possibly
make. It's just The problem with geothermal is the drilling is expensive, and
the far longer you have to drill, the more costs. And the drill
sites don't always keep working. Every time you're slamming water down there, you're
shocking the rock, right, and sometimes the water doesn't come back up.
And I think I talked about this on one of the at least one of
the energy geek outs. But my uncle has a geothermal system. But it's
not really to heat as much as it is to equalize. Yeah. Yeah,
the average temperature some just blows the surface. Yeah, six feet is
constant and it's something like what fifty five sixty degrees generally, And so when
it's above that, you're going to get cooler air, and you blow a
fan across the pipe and you can cool your house with it without air conditioning,
and when it's cold, you can warm up your house. Right.
And I mean, this is not what we're talking about. We're talking about
drilling down miles right, so that we get to four hundred degree rock.
Yeah, I'm just talking about a heat pump. Yeah, you're talking about
heat. I'm talking about making electricity. By making electricity, you know,
superheated steam that spins turbines and so need a lot of heat, and that's
why it's violent. Right When that water hits that rock, it's shocking.
But the fracking industry knows a lot about shocking rock because they were doing it
deliberately to do oil extraction. And that's one of the reasons for these horizontal
drilling effects is that it gives them an ability to poke into a hot body
in an efficient way and be able to slam water into there in a less
destructive form and still use the existing vertical pipes to take to generate pick up
the steam. So they've been experimenting with these combinations in Nevada and in Utah.
Wow and from scratch, get with moment from a bare piece of land
with a permit to build a plant six to twelve weeks. And again this
is all out of the fracking because fracking is quick, right, that was
what it was about. They've matured these technologies for fracking and now they can
make geothermal power with them. So the initial pilot plant in Nevada, just
over the past couple of years, he's now producing three and a half megawatts
of electricity twenty four hours a day. Dude, this is base load power.
So wait a minute now, so you're saying that once they get down
to where the heat is, then they go sideways, and yes, so
they drilled down eight thousand feet in Nevadah. Then they turn sideways for three
thousand feet tay into the body on the side. So now you have a
three thousand foot heat coil basically basically right. Then they have other holes on
the other side of the body where the steam's gonna come out, and they
fire the water down there and it comes up cheez. Yeah, And it'll
work almost anywhere. So what is the benefit over of having that long horizontal
pipe over just having a pipe at one place. Well, you always have
multiple pipes because you want to go down one side and up the other side.
The horizontal pipe picks up the heat more efficiently and slower. I see,
so you have less shock effects. Ah. Yeah, I wasn't crocking
that. I get it now, because you know when you go down and
then immediately back up, it's only that little bubble on the bottom that heats
up exactly right. Yeah, And so this ability to come in low on
the hot body with the other pipes above it, it's just more efficient.
It makes total sense now, and I just want you to get the idea.
There's a bunch of different techniques they've learned from fracking they're incorporating together to
make power anywhere they can get to the hot rock. It's just a question
of how far you have to drill down. The deeper it gets, the
more expensive it gets. Sure, but eight thousand feet is not that shallow.
So then VATA plant works. So there's a plant being developed in Utah
for four hundred megawatts, supposed to be online by twenty twenty six. And
guess who's funding it? Oh? No, Google, Oh I didn't expect
that. Alphabet like Microsoft and most tech companies need a lot of electricity.
They're building cloud data centers and they've made a commitment one would call it greenwashing
to zero emission energy. And this is an approach to solve a particular problem.
Demitria Philieve, one of our listeners, asked me about the energy being
consumed by artificial intelligence technologies, the large language models and the like, and
those are all running in these cloud data centers, and in some ways I
would say, yeah, it's a lot of energy. I mean, at
least it's going to a better purpose. Than NFTs, but the fact that
it's a handful of companies that are hosting these things, and we can put
pressure on those companies to have zero emission energy doing it. And geothermal is
one of these base load energy sources. But if this is what matures this
technology enough that we can start looking all over the world anywhere where we have
enough heat relatively close to the surface, that we can use these daily techniques
to build reliable geothermal. And that's always been the problem, not that geothermal
was hard to do, that it wasn't reliable. That in many cases with
new plants, within a year or two the subterranean surface would shift and the
plant would stopped working and you had to drill again, the most expensive thing
you had to keep doing it, got it. But shale technologies now helped
us understand enough about rock bodies and drilling technique to be able to make more
reliable wells fantastic and so we could actually make power that way. Now,
let me do a little blast of the past for you. Okay, do
you ever the super volcano episode back in twenty eighteen, Oh yeah, episode
fifteen sixty four, And that came from a paper I read from NASA planetary
defense. Now, normally we think about NASA planetary events around asteroid protesteroids,
the Dart mission, that kind of thing. But this was a paper about
how could humanity manage a super volcano eruption? And then arguably the most important
supervolcano, not the only one, but the important one is Yellowstone. And
so one of the things they proposed was that you put geothermal power plants around
the supervolcano Culterra, because every time you take heat out of it, you
decrease the risk of eruption. What is that fancy word you use, what's
that caldera? Caldera? Yeah, that's the rim edge. So one of
the things that super volcano. You know, in traditional volcano, especially say
a pyroclastic volcano, you have that cinder cone, the big cone that gets
built up as it's erupting. In more lava flow types like Monochia, you
have a very liquid lava, so you create a shield dome different shapes.
Supervolcanoes are so big they can't make domes. As the bulge of magma builds
up under the ground, what eventually happens is the ground collapses into it and
then blasts outward. And that caldera, the hole that it will make is
many miles across. Okay, most of the Yellowstone Park sit, all of
the thermal events, all that sort of stuff is sitting in the Yellowstone Volcano
super volcano called Erara. So imagine we try not to think about it.
Look, vulcanology is pretty advanced these days. We are good at predicting volcanoes.
We know when a volcano is coming. We can measure the small changes
in the ground that show us that there's a possibility of an eruption coming.
So imagine we're seeing an eruption, possible eruption coming of the Yellowstone Volcano.
And this is what NASA Planetary Events was writing about. Is the trick is
to get the heat out. If we can take the heat out so the
rock stay stronger, it doesn't get too plasticized, we can stop the eruption.
So you take these fracking techniques. You drill all around the caldera and
you pump water down to cool it, and while you're out it, you
make electricity. So it sounds like poking the bees nest to me. Well,
without a doubt, it has to be done right. Yeah, the
alternative was we just wait for the thing to go off and destroy the United
States, Like, well, that's not good. You've got that is a
known outcome, and probably to strike Vancouver as well, wouldn't it. Well
it'll go east, right, like, that's largely what would happen in that
that eruption. And we talked about this in the Super Bowl Kino show.
Is you take a multi hundred mile swath due east all the way to the
to the cboard right like, it would be bad, bad the I ninety
You're gonna need one hell of a shut of snowplow for that anyway. All
right, So, so getting back to this idea of putting fracking vents all
around the caldera, yeah, I mean, is a good one. Well,
it's an interesting idea. It speaks to again skill sets we're developing as
a civilization. And I'm also I'm equating it back to like the way that
the erosion of the Niagara Valley was controlled by generating electricity with hydro electric.
We've just had a couple of very serious eruptions in Iceland, YEP. And
it's been it's maybe happening over months like and there by the way, there
is a small hydro electric plant nearby. This current set of eruptions in isolated,
what if there were more? Too small? No, I think it's
very feasible. Like that plant by itself was already running. It had enough
heat as it is, right, But could we get to a reaction time
around this where we're started to see ground disturbances and potential magnabila. It's like,
let's drop a few more drills in here and we'll make some more electricity
and maybe we can cool us down. I'd want to experiment a lot with
it. But just geothermal is not just a good power a low emission based
load power source, it also has the potential significant benefits for us directing volcanic
behavior. So, now that you've scared our audience into thinking that the the
United States is going to blow up, what is the thought on when the
big one will happen? Well, that particular super volcano, as we talked
about back in that show in July of twenty eighteen, has we have your
evidence of eruptions roughly every six hundred thousand years. There's been three different ones
spaced about six hundred thousand years apart. Wow, And the last one was
about six hundred thousand years ago. Oh jeez, I remember, now,
don't worry about it. Yeah, so we're due. No, No,
it doesn't really work that way, do you know? No, you know,
Okay, let's go plus or minus one hundred thousand years. Yeah,
yeah, yeah, right, it's not that precise, all right, But
yes, if you do the math that way, if you take a three
point trend line and just straw it straight out, you're there. Is that
actually a good way to do things? No? Yeah? Yeah? Have
has the US Geological Service instrumitted the crap out of the Yellowstone Cold? You're
damn right the half right, so you're all paying attention. Wow, it's
not going to happen anytime soon. There's no evidence of it at this particular
point. But it is an interesting aspect of geothermal power. And I'm glad
that we're advancing this way. Yeah, because you know, the ability to
take more power offline quickly. What if instead of building a natural gas speaker
plant, you built a thermal a geothermal plant instead, right, like,
because it was the least expensive way to quickly build power. You know,
in three months, four months, you know, a lot of these power
plants, we're still talking years, many years, decades in some cases,
and now you're talking weeks. Yeah, that's a big deal. The number
would be if we built all these plants and then got used to that steady
stream of power and then the whole thing blew up, not only are we
like completely buried, but and probably the end of it, but now we
lost our power sources as well. If we don't do it. Weeah,
except that volcanoes come over time, so as it was coming, you could
move things. Yeah, and you'll have time to react. This hasn't come
out of the blue. This isn't a tornado. And then you get some
warning. This isn't even a hurricane. This is a volcano. It takes
a while, and we can measure, we can see things coming. It's
not like one day food. Yeah, exactly. Now, generally speaking,
the reason we know so much about volcanic eruptions is that we get enough warning
that we're able to see them coming and watch closely as they happen and then
learn more. Very good, let's move on. Yeah, the nuclear segment,
as you expected, is large. And Carolyn McKay asked me on the
social media's it's like, hey, you got anything new to say in the
space, and I'm like, yeah, not going to talk much about the
old stuff, but we'll talk about the new stuff. Cool. So we've
been talking about small modular reactors for many, many years, and as of
today, right now, at this moment, there's still exactly none, but
progress is being made. So there were two projects that I was talking about
last year, or they even the year before. One of them was the
New Scale Project, largely based in around Idaho, but totally an American project,
and that was to build six seventy seven megawat modular reactors, really quite
small, so six together, it'd be four hundred and sixty two megawats,
where you know traditional light water reactors run in the three hundred to six hundred
per right, really six hundred even up to gigawatt per so this was going
to be quite small. And they made a deal in twenty nineteen for five
billion dollars that would start making power in twenty twenty six. Then the pandemic
hit, and then by twenty twenty three this year, that was now priced
at nine point six, from five point three to nine point six and now
no start until twenty twenty nine. And so where it was supposed to be
about fifty five per dollars per megawat hour, which is reasonable. Now was
closer to eighty nine dollars per megawad hour, which is unreasonable. And the
project's been fully canceled, and one of the arguments against it said it was
a bit too small, that the seven seven maywatt reactors are a little too
small. Now, I mean, in general, what's great about small modular
nuke is a couple of things. The first is the most dangerous thing about
nuclear power is fuel handling, right and traditionally, in fact exclusively, every
reactor site handles its own fuel. So uranium's mined in Australia are Canada's a
fuel locations. It's refined there into yellow cake, and then it is shipped
to a factory, typically what a Westinghouse would be the main ones. General
Electric does this to where they make it into fuel rods. Those fuel rods
are then shipped to the power plant. The power plant handles its own fuel
assembly, so it now takes those they're little little cylinders, maybe a couple
of two or three inches long inch across, and they stack them into bundles,
and these are highly radioactive. They open up their reactors. They take
a fuel rod assembly out, put it in a into a cooling pond,
and then take a new assembly, put it into the reactor, button it
all back up, pressurize it, go back to work. It's very standalone
approach to doing things. It means that every site, because it has to
handles fuels, has to qualify for all those complex work in handling radioactive materials.
It's very difficult, it's costly, and it's what it's One of the
things that makes this kind of power so expensive is that each site is bespoke
unique in its ability to handle fuel for its reactors. The concept behind modular
reactors is that you have a common sight for manufacturing the reactor assemblies. It's
the only thing that handles fuel. The production sites where you're actually going to
make the electricity, they receive assembled reactors ready to run, but that are
then placed with a crane into a container, typically a big concrete pool filled
with water, hooked up to cooling and to the electrical grid and powered up
and they'll run two to three years. And at the end of those two
to three years you unhook them. You take the whole reactor back out,
put it back on a truck and ship it away. Now is that a
dangerous thing to do? Less dangerous than shipping fuel assemblies? That's right,
because it's self contained exactly. Another thing I like about that is your every
two or three years, you get a chance to inspect everything and make sure
that it's ready to accept another reactor. Dude upgrades, Yeah, right,
Instead of running a reactor for thirty years, every couple of years when you
go to replace it, why would you replace it the same one? Put
a better one in yep, So you're on a much better upgrade cycle.
If you have a problem with a griven reactor, because it's a small reactor
with modern designs. Even if somehow it failed, it's still contained, so
your site's not ruined. You can take that react that damage reactor, simply
out ship it away and continue to use the production site. There's one.
Then you have a central place away from people. Like you generally want to
make your power close to people because they're the ones who want to use it.
But you want to handle fuel away from people. And so you reprocess
those reactors, you re make and make new fueled ones, and then you
send them back in to be used and you can constantly rotate them and you
can improve them. Yeah, that's pretty cool, right. That is the
idea behind small modular is to make the reactors routinely replaceable and to centralized fuel
handling, so we can put in a place where the risks are low,
tectonically safe, doesn't need to be near water, you know, doesn't need
to be near populations like these are the advantages. It's a good idea and
it has been maturing. So I told you the bad news first, that's
the American Project newScale. Here's the good news. Geh Attachee has a reactor
they called the bwr X three hundred. We talked about it last year.
It's a three hundred megawatt modular reactor in Canada to locate in Ontario, where
Ontario makes eighty percent of their electricity with nuclear power. But they and they
largely do it with Canadian designed can do deuteriized water reactors. They are a
heavy water reactor instead of a light water reactor, so they use deuterium and
the main reason for that is that they don't need enriched uranium. A uranium
I richment is expensive and it was originally developed in the Manhattan Project to make
weapons, make bombs, and light water reactors use that technology because one of
the by products of fuel reprocessing was plutonium to make more bombs. Now we
don't need more bombs. We've not ever needed more bombs. And in France,
who also largely makes all of their electricity from nuclear power, they now
use that plutonium in their fuel rods and they burn it. That's not happened
with American light water reactors for a variety of reasons. We talked about that.
Yeah, we've got that before in Canada, because we have no weapons
programs, we did not want to arriture aium and so we developed reactors that
didn't need to. But that being said, they still have all the same
problems. They're a little bit more efficient than the light water reactors, but
they are expensive, and they are bespoke, and they do their own fuel
handling, and they need large exclusion zones. And while we've never had a
major accident knock on wood, there's an easy way to go about it.
So the Darlington reactor site is a retired can Do reactor site and they were
trying to decide what to do with it. They still need to make electricity.
They talked about putting in solar. They've tried a lot of different things,
but they've come around to the modular reactor design. So the handling fuel
site is going to be away from that. Darlington is right on the on
the lake. They committed to a year ago putting in putting in one of
these reactors. They've now are through their second stage of certification. Is one
more left to go. It's gone well enough now that they've now committed to
putting in four reactors instead of one. Wow, so on track for power
in the next by twenty twenty nine. And I know we talked about this
before, but just remind us, like what did you say that? How
many megawatts is this little power plant? So these are three hundred megawatt reactors,
so four together three hundred megawatts. Yeah, so how many homes could
that power? I mean, now you're back to you know, it depends
on the home like a small town. When you're talking about American homes and
Canadian homes, very power consumptive homes, you get about one thousand homes per
megawatt, right, So these are three hundred megawatt reactors. You know,
So you were talking about homes times four, So yeah, you're going to
need more. But this is the experimentation, right is if this works,
there's many more. In fact, because Ontario has been so successful, Saskatchewan
is now identifying sites for the same reactor design. They wouldn't be online til
twenty thirties, but they're on that same path. Poland is going through the
certification process with the same reactor as well. So there is now this sense
of a race of who's got the most mature technology, who's the furthest down
the path you're not going to. There's lots of small reactor designs out there.
Yeah, yeah, but Gee for better or words, ghe Attachie,
who make conventional reactors too, now have matured this design to a point where
we've now got holes in the ground where they're supposed to go, and we
should and we're going to actually make electricity for it, and they may get
to win this one. That's very cool. It's good news, and it
is. It's good news. Progress in size matters, Like when the argument
here was that what was wrong with new Scale with seventy seven megaots is too
small, g Attache, it's still truck portable at three hundred megawatts. And
now there's a company called ISMR that's talking about in that same form factor being
able to make a thorium reactor. So we talk about that modular design that's
sort of the holy grail. Yeah, and Bob Archer, one of my
regularistors, pinged me about can you talk about thorium? Is there anything to
talk about it? And again, I don't want to talk about old news.
I want to talk about new news. But there is new news in
Thoria, okay, but primarily out of China. So this year twenty twenty
three, the Shanghai Institute has now certified for operation a thorium reactor in China.
So in the Gobi Desert in the northwest part of China there is a
experimental reactor site. Not a lot of water around, by the way.
It's a tiny reactor to megawatts, so really just a lab reactor. This
is like no, the Oakridge Laboratory mould salt reactor of the nineteen sixties was
a five megawatts, so you get a sense. This is really a small
reactor. But according to the Shanghai Institute, it works well enough in tests
that they said, let's just make electricity with it. Here's a ten year
permit. So there I'm going to be making two megawatts of electricity and getting
operational practice with it. China is incentivized somewhat. While they have some uranium
reserves, they have far more thorium reserves. So with the holy grail for
Richard Campbell be modular thorium reactors. There's a distinct some interesting advantages. Now
it depends on how the assembly. You remember this from our thorium shows.
Apparently there were three different things in motion there. I remember the molten salts.
Yes, so one of them is molten salts. And understand, thorium
when used in a reactor becomes uranium. Anyway, it's a different isotope of
uranium, but it does become uranium, right. It's actually it has a
decay product into uranium that actually generates the heat, so in the end it's
all uranium. The difference is the ore bodies. And in China, because
they do a lot of rare earth extraction, there is a mineral called monzonite,
which is where you get a lot of presidonium and other rare earths,
but its primary element in it is thorium. So the Chinese have a bunch
of thorium in tailing piles from extracting rare earths, and they could process in
pure thorium and then combine it with lithium and beryllium and fluorine to make a
salt that then can be run in a thermal blanket as part of a reactor
assembly where it'll get bombarded from neutrons to then become uranium two thirty three,
which then gets pumped through the main fuel through the main graphite assembly and generates
electricity. The other things to remember about molten salts is that because they're a
fluid and they are only a liquid at four hundred degree centigrade plus, if
anything ever go, you have this containment mechanism where as soon as they as
soon as you have a problem, you can drop them into a storage tank
and and they cool down into a solid. They operate at one atmosphere of
pressure. You don't need to pressurize them to get enough heat. In fact,
most of the time you're dealing with two damn much heat. They're a
liquid from four hundregree centigrade to fifteen hundred degree centigrade as opposed to water,
which is only zero to one hundred, so you have this huge liquid temperature
operating range to you can work in, and so the trick then is efficient
ways to extract heat from that. Why it's too hot for water, you
need other extraction techniques. But molten salt reactors can run on regular uranium as
well as on thorium. It doesn't really matter, so you can pick your
fuel. This is mostly a technique, but it's a technique has a lot
of inherent safety in it, and even more importantly, you can incorporate into
its operation a fuel reprocessing process. So when you're dealing with liquefied uranium,
you can gasify it and separate it from the lower elements that it has,
and then degasify, dehydrogenate it back into a liquid again. And so there's
an ability as you break uranium is constituate components. So you remember you're bombarding
these uranium atoms with neutrons. Most common reaction, not the only reaction.
The most common reaction is you break them into caesium and iodide. They're radioactive
flavors of cesium and iodide, but that's okay. They decay over and so
if you can extract that seasymaniodine out of the fluid, you can after a
couple of months, have a non radioactive sellable version of those elements, and
so unlike in solid reactors where those same reactions damage the core, when you're
operating in a fluid, you can keep processing the fuel until there's no fuel
left, and so you can pretty much burn up all of the high actinides,
all the radioactive components, and be left over with elements. So yeah,
I like molten salt reactors because they get rid of the dangerous stuff in
the process of making electricity with it. Maybe the route to making those is
through modular reactors, but the really complex form with its own integrated breeder and
fuel reprocessing is probably gonna be its own form factor. But if we were
going to build it, we probably would have buy now, it's just too
much risk, and we could manage a bunch of risk around thorium by maturing
it in small reactor designs. And in fact, there's a group in Copenhagen
named Copenhagen Atomics that has been developing a container size multi reactor. So this
is the TEU. The industrial shipping container eight foot by eight foot by twenty
foot, typically double the length to a forty foot container. So they've been
trying to make a reactor that fits into that that would work basically as a
small modular reactor that you could drop off somewhere, power up, run it
for a couple of years, and then replace it. And so they're using
a containerized model to make a demonstration one megawatt reactor by twenty twenty five.
So still a bit speculative. They have a customer that customers Indonesia. Indonesia
is a resource distraction country. They have a lot of mining projects that need
electricity. Typically those electricities now delivered by diesel generators. Expensive way to go.
You got to keep shipping diesel up to it. So the idea you
could drop a container containing one megawatt electrical power plant in it to operate in
a mine for a couple of years at a time are not a real product
yet that's certainly on a path. All Right, we're gonna talk a little
bit about fusion because there has not been much news about fusion. And why
hasn't there been much news about fusion, Carl, because it's freaking hard.
Because they've got money. Oh, because they've got money, Okay, and
they don't talk when they have money, that's right. So the two of
the fusion projects I've talked about a fair bit last year, Commonwealth Fusion,
which raised a couple of billion dollars off of gates at all back in the
day, have enough money literally to get to a pilot project they called Spark.
They are still building that now. That reactor excites me a lot for
a couple of reasons. The most important reason is that they are using rebco
superconductors. So this is the rare earth burium cubric oxide semiconductors that you cool
with liquid nitrogen instead of liquid helium. Oh okay, so they're a lot
less expensive and they make far more powerful fields than niobium ten liquid helium cooled
supercroductive fields that are being used in eider It the giant reactor in France that
is soaked up tens of billions of dollars and still hasn't produced energy. Right,
is an online to even laid up based on calculations will never be net
power positive. To just learn a little more. It's a perfect system for
building another reactor. It's a perfect system for job security for hand four people.
And then the other one that we walked about last year was Helion,
who raised a five hundred million plus in twenty twenty one, one of their
investors being We didn't talk about this before, but Misasaka now because one of
his their investors was Sam Altman, no kidding, nobody knew his name a
year ago, but they sure know it now. Yep. The most interesting
piece of new Helion's reactors I mentioned this earlier was the pulse reactor using magnetic
coils not only to make the fusion detonation, but it also de collected his
energy. And Microsoft recently signed a memorim of understanding because they're based out of
Western Washington, that they will buy electricity from Helio for their data centers as
zero emission electricity. Whatever happened to that crazy mcat guy, that Italian guy,
Oh god, yeah, you know, extraordinary claims, the extraordinary proof
and the extraordinary failed. Yeah he's gone, but he tried to pull the
wool over some people's eyes a couple of times. You know, he's not
alone, lots, it goes on all the time. Our friend Martina Grahm
very I almost emotionally wrote on Twitter to me about this. It's like,
how can we be saved? I think she was feeling a little grim that
day. Cheer up, Martina. It's bad, but it's not as bad
as it could be, and it is getting better. We happen to be
recording it shortly after COP twenty eight, so it's the UNS Climate Change meeting
ended in Dubai. Backtrack to COP three. COP three was in nineteen ninety
seven. That was the one in Kyoto, Japan, and that led to
the Kyoto Courts, the first set of international documents which many countries excluding the
United States, signed into starting to restrict emissions. And at that time,
the projections were that we would raise the average temperature of the planet by four
and a half degrees by twenty one hundred and that would be catastrophic. And
I just want to make a point to folks that, well, we're certainly
not out of the woods. Like that projection is now over. If we
did nothing more in terms of changing our power generation and emissions around the world,
then we've done up till this point. We wouldn't hit four and a
half degrees. That's good news. I guess we've lowered the number. Like
the argument is, were about a third of the way there in that twenty
years between or twenty five years between COP three and COP twenty eight. We
have made substantial strides. It's not enough, but it's not like it's futile.
We're making some progress. I know that I've just heard something recently,
and I'm sorry I don't have the numbers and figures in my head because I
don't remember things like you do. But there was some promise that the United
States made to cut emissions by fifty percent by the year twenty forty thinking.
And this was back in the early two thousands, and we've already gotten halfway
there. We've cut by twenty five percent, and a lot of that is
things like electric cars and retiring coal power plants, even just switching to natural
gas because a became super cheap because of tracking. We got so much of
it, and it is and is very the process of getting a mationable electricity
from it, reducing amount of carbon dioxide permega watt substantially. Progress has been
made. We just have to make more. And I would argue that that
a lot came out of COP twenty eight. I mean the crazy part.
It was at Dubai. Yeah, right, right, like you're in in
the oil making and by the way, if you don't think it's a big
deal, look at how many people, how many lobbyists, how many interested
parties descended on that two weeks in Dubai, like everybody was engaged and no
two ways about it. And the current climate forecast, you know, in
twenty twenty three we hit a record. We had one day this past year
where the implanet on average was two degrees above the baseline. It was a
peak, and it's the largest ever recorded. The average is more like one
point four in the United States anyway, This July was the hottest July on
record ever. Yeah, ever, and I think when we get the numbers
together, it'll be true for the whole year. And that of course keeps
happening. In cop twenty eight weeks, they talked about if we stick to
our agreement by twenty fifteen, we sure it looks like we won't. We're
going to get to one point seven as the average temperature, which is bad.
It's got serious consequences. But the more important part was to just do
that. To get to that point, we would decrease our average oil and
gas consumption overall by about forty five percent. And so there was an argument
that we've already peaked in consuming oil and gas, about one hundred and five
million barrels of oil used in a day, and we already know that the
industry is avoiding putting on more refining, yeah, because it takes a decade.
It takes twenty five years to get break even on a refinery. So
they're not incented, adam, because they see the writing on the wall.
They certainly were there and fighting vociferously against it. If we were actually going
to do the one point five degree increase from the cares of cords for twenty
fifty, we need seventy five percent less consumption than where we're at right now,
which on one hand seems impossible. On the other hand, of just
talk through a whole bunch of things we're doing that really open the door to
more of that going on. The production, transport, and processing of oil
and gas produces about five billion tons of CO two just last year, about
fifteen percent of all of the emissions. So one of the things that happens
when you consume less oil is you decrease the amount of missions necessary to get
that oil to you to actually create it. So there's quite a positive role
there, and so one of the things came out of COP twenty eight was
society that there is enough known oil sites on this planet right now to provide
all of the oil and gas needed based on those projections for where we're supposed
to be by twenty fifty, and so there is no need for governments to
subsidize long lead time extraction, which is the reality, of course, is
that oil and gas industries extract trillions of dollars with the subsidies to look for
oil. And so the argument you know at COP was, you know,
you could take that money and put it towards more zero emission energy generation,
right because you're just not going to need if we achieve these goals, you're
just not going to need that long lead time stuff. This not please the
industry much, yeah, because it's not like the industry's ever going to go
away. If we're going to get to the one point five scenario in twenty
fifty, we go from meeting one hundred and two million barrels a day to
needing about twenty four and then most of that isn't burned, Most of that
is lubricants, right, Like, we're always going to need a certain amount
of oil and gas that's never going to go away, right, right,
it's just what do you make plastics from, although hopefully you have recyclable plastic,
what do you make lubricants from? Like all of those things to go
into that. So you know, at twenty four million barrels a day,
only seventy five percent will be used for something other than combustion. Yeah,
and that was pretty exciting, right, a great combination. And here and
lies the problem is that there's a reason why governments subsidized oil and gas extraction
because it's corrupting. And I would use the example of Petroblast in Brazil.
I don't know if you remember the story, but back in two thousand and
seven, there was big blast of news about they'd find huge oil reserves off
the coast of Brazil. It's in pretty deep water, it's going to be
a tricky extraction, but it was a huge amount of oil. And you
know, Brazil was destined to be the new Saudi Arabia. And Petro Brass
which is the national oil company of course, is working with believe it was
BP on this particular project. And over the next decade, Petro Blast got
billions and billions in subsidized financing and by twenty fifteen, it became a parent
that everybody was on the take that so much money was flowing around because it
was going to be worth decades of oil income that they were paying off everybody,
all the way to Lula DeSilva himself, the president of Brazil, and
that led to the collapse of the government and a big crisis in Petroblasts and
Balasaro came out of that. Like, the side effect of this much money
is some bad behavior, and one can only look to Russia to see an
ongoing example of that, right, I mean it's the oil, it's a
petro state. Yeah, well they're primarily a petro state, for better or
worse. Yeah, So we know the effects of when this much money comes
into play around these kinds of technology. So it's one of the reasons that
they're continuing as well as they have. And at the same time, we
have these options, these new projections, these new ability to build other energy
sources that can give us options. So how can we be saved? Keep
doing what you're doing. I really want to pass the message on it's like
it's not for not like we are making success. You can work at the
guy if you're the kind of person who can handle government level. If you
want to protest, do it right? Do you want to keep to yourself
on it more? Just emitting less? No, it makes a difference.
It's worth is that being getting electric vehicle or switching to transit? Sure right,
putting solar on your roof, getting going to heat pump heat insta instead
of a gas turnurse. Yeah, all of those things are making a difference.
They are making progress. More needs to be done. Can we be
saved. We're probably gonna make it. It's just a question of how many
people die unnecessarily. Yeah, that's only really the question we're tackling. Millions
have already died. You look at most of the conflicts around the world right
now, they generally start with a crop failure. The Syrian Civil War started
with a crop failure and a tripling of the price of bread. That makes
people angry when they can't feed their family, that they're willing to do really
dangerous, life threatening things like fighting against their government with violence. Libya too,
that government then survive. Now you've got a bailed state. Heck,
all of Arab springs started with food prices. Really wow. In me and
mar there was a week there was a rice crop failure and then a group
of people blamed minority group called the Rahindra and persecuted them. And now it's
a genocide. And they've had that and that Jorhindra I have had to flee
mermar into other countries. The environmental disasters that are killing people, they're going
on now, and they're only going to get worse. We get to choose
how much worse it gets. We can work on this. The side effect
of reducing emissions and reducing these impacts, decreasing the overall heat on the planet
will mean more reliable food, and reliable food makes for happy people. Happy
people don't fight. Frighten people fight, well said, we are going to
reduce fear if we can reduce emissions. Well said mister Cambon. Sounds like
parting words. Okay, it's gonna be good year. Yeah. I appreciate.
I appreciate the research that you do and especially the human touch that you
brought there at the end. That's a very important message. So everybody,
happy New Year, and we'll see you next time on dot net rocks.
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