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at Patreon dot dot NetRocks dot com. Happy New Year, and welcome back

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to dot net rocks. Starting the
year right with a geek out on energy.

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I'm Carl Franklin. That's Richard Campbell. Howdy, how was your Christmas?

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Excellent? You know, we're now
living up on the coast, so

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we went into town to spend days
with our girls, you know, one

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hosting a dinner or the other one
hosting at breakfast, that kind of thing.

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So and a brown bear and pine
tree something like that. Yeah.

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Yeah, we're all about the offshore
wildlife these days, when you know,

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lots of dolphins and sea lions and
the occasional whale and the bloody river otters.

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Nobody told them they were river otters. They go out in the ocean,

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everything's fine, but they're not sea
otters. That's a different creature.

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So cool, So what kind of
animal did you cook for Christmas dinner?

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I wasn't doing the cook it either. I know. We did the traditional

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turkey. They did a fine job
of it too. Wow. So yeah

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that was really great, excellent.
Yeah, how was yours? Mine was

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great as well? Family got your
family together? Philet Mignon can't complain?

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Went beef? Huh? Yeah?
Did you do like the whole loin or

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did you just just you do the
steak? Nope? I did individual philet's

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and I did them. I cooked
them souvd at one hundred and twenty nine

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degrees for two hours and then seared
them. Yeah, edge to edge medium

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rare, right, like perfect edge
to edge medium rare. But my daughters,

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who are used to a good medium
rare, thought it was too pink,

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right, even though they're used to
that gray transition. They're used to

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the gray transition, and it was
kind of weird like they had never had

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it before, although it was absolutely
delicious. Yeah nice. So yeah,

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there was all clean plates in the
house. Yeah that's what you're looking for,

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right, I can't go wrong with
that, all right, So I

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guess before we get started with the
energy geek out, let's do better.

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No, framework. Awesome, All
right, what do you got? Well,

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I saw this Kickstarter and Brian McKay
sent me this in slack in the

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fp nex slack. It's a Monogram
keyboard. And the reason I think Brian

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sent it to me is because I
had bought the Monogram modular dials and buttons

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and switches. They're Creative console.
Creative console. Yeah, yeah, and

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I had one and I just couldn't
really I didn't really have space for it

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on my desk and I didn't really
use it all that much. So he's

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like, well, I'll buy it
off you. So yeah, nice.

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So you experimented with it and then
you've got your own ways of working,

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right, Like, it's very personal, it is, yeah, the work

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workflows. But if you go to
MONOGRAMCC dot com you can see what they've

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done the Monogram Creative console. Right
now. I saw this kickstarter for the

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keyboard that they're putting out that's designed
for modern creators and it's got it's got

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a modular number pad or something on
the side, and it's got a little

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display and you've got some customizable function
keys and a knob and buttons and stuff.

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There's no slider per se, but
it does look very very cool.

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Yeah, and I caught them in
this weird time because the Kickstarter for this

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keyboard ended on December fifteenth, and
they're not selling it as a product yet,

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right, they're fulfilling their you know, kickstarters, kickstarters, and the

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kickstarter obviously went well, they went
three times their goal, so that's yeah.

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You know, this is I like
this approach that companies that know how

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to make product use Kickstarter to especially
test the market and get their pre orders

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nailed. Right, you know,
so now they know, okay, well

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we've got a lot size this big, like we can get the run up,

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tune the thing up. But yeah, presumably it's just going to be

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a regular product for him going forward. Yeah, presumably. And I hope

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so because I want to buy one. Yeah, yeah, this looks really

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cool. Yeah, and I liked
it they you know, because you've seen

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like the all O lead keyboards,
which I think is too much. This

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is that O lead around the edges, normal keys in the middle, right,

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I wouldn't surprise. It almost makes
sense that they might be able to

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stick a couple of console items onto
it too, you know, depending on

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what you were doing. I mean, there's nothing worse than you know,

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having you know your fingers, remember
you know where the keys are, and

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then they all change from from under
you. Oh I didn't press this button

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or change this setting, and now
I'm using a divorce act key word layout.

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Yeah, but you know, and
the exceparate keep adds great because sometimes

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you want to keep out on the
left, not just automatically on the right.

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Different people, different things. Yes, good one man, nice find.

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Yeah, So let's hope it becomes
product and we can talk about it

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later. I'm pretty sure it will. So what's on your mind today,

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mister Campbell? Well, I grabbed
a comment off of the last Energy geek

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Out that was eighteen twenty five,
lot a year ago. Oddly enough,

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it seems to be the Cadence are
doing things these days, and lots of

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comments on that show, as is
normal for geek outs, there's lots of

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conversation around them. And then so
this comments a year old is from Jasper

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Sigmund, who's a regular and I
believe already has a dot at rock Smug

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might even have music Cobe. I
don't know, but if you don't,

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Jasper, you know I'm going to
hook you up. He says, it

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baffles me that with all this cutting
edge technology, because you remember last year's

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energy eout there was I talked a
lot about the new fusion stuff because there's

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been a bunch of new fundraises and
stuff like that. With all those cutting

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edge technology, enormous reactors like tacamac
and gigantic lasers, that we still rely

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on good old water and steam to
produce electricity. Isn't there any research being

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done on how we might not need
water anymore. I'd like to think that

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maybe in one hundred one thousand years
we'll have actual spaceships with warp cores like

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reactors, and we don't have a
steam turbine attach them to make electricity.

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Okay, Clearly he's either joking or
he hasn't been paying attention to the geekouts,

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because there's lots of things that don't
involve water. Well, almost everything

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does, right, I mean,
the basic concept of we boil water to

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make steams, just a question of
how we do it. It's a very

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very obviously solar doesn't solar and wind
doesn't. And I think but his real

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reference was this idea to things like
a lot of the fusion reactors just don't

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have any plans ron make electricity,
although I did in my response to him

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at the time, bring up the
fact that the trialpha actually is capturing energy

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from their fusion reactions using the same
coils that can create the fusion reactions.

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So they have a pulse reactor and
as that as they create enough magnetic tension

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to actually cause the pulse to occur, that pressure back is actually energy they

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can capture off their coils, which
is very science fiction, like, that's

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the kind of thing you might use
in space going forward, different ways to

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capture energy. But yeah, you
know the other part of this is that

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we use a lot of steam turbines
for a reason because we know how rightly

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what we want from electricity is reliability, not innovation really, and steam turbines

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are a known technology that you can
get decades from that you can price out

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today for a price twenty five years
from now, and so that's hard to

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compete. With that being said,
steam's only good into certain temperature range,

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and most traditional combustion strategies like burning
coal or wood or oil, even some

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nuclear fall of the temperature range where
water is well suited as your power.

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Fluid is the thing that takes in
the energy and then distributes it out through

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turbines. But as you get to
higher temperature stuff like the molten salt reactors

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that run much higher temperatures, or
even so the heliocentric collectors where they'll use

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fluorine salts as the fluid, then
you need to take the heat out a

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different way, and that's when things
like supercritical carbon dioxide and ultra high temperature

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helium become a better mechanism for generating
energy. So I mean, we're sticking

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with water because let's remember we've only
been making electricity industrially for a little over

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one hundred years, not much more, and so it's all been about reliability

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and technique. It's only in the
past couple of decades that we've really had

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an option for alternatives, and so
those technologies are still maturing. There you

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go, but Jasper as usual,
great comment. Thank you so much for

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your participation in the show, and
a copy of music. Cobi is on

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00:09:00.159 --> 00:09:01.960
his way to you, and if
you'd like to copy of music, go

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00:09:01.080 --> 00:09:05.360
by write a comment on the website
at don at Rocks dot com or on

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00:09:05.360 --> 00:09:07.240
the facebooks. We publish every show
there and if you comment there and I'm

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00:09:07.240 --> 00:09:09.720
reading the show. We'll send you
a copy of music go by and you

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00:09:09.759 --> 00:09:13.240
can follow us on Twitter if you
like. That's fine, But the cool

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00:09:13.320 --> 00:09:16.840
kids are hanging out on Masdon these
days. I'm Carl Franklin at Tech,

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I'm dot social, and I'm Rich
Campbell at Macedon not social. Send us

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00:09:20.519 --> 00:09:24.879
a two. You might get some
music to code by that way as well.

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00:09:24.000 --> 00:09:28.279
Yeah for sure. Okay, So
where to begin with energy? I

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mean, one of the things that
we talk about is we talked about this

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in the Space show last week that
we did some of the geek outs that

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I ended up we did. I
did that thing with NASA and that turned

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into some talks, and I've been
doing space talks ever since. Not that

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I've talked to NASA about energy,
although NASA will come up today, but

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I've also started doing energy geek out
talks. And the rate of the evolution

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of these technologies necessarily slow, so
it gets pretty boring for me. Like

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I'm doing space talks right now because
it's super fun because every week Elon's done

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something right, like it's always some
nutty thing next. But the energy technologies

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are moving a little slower. But
one of the ways it's become really fun

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for me is that I've been tailoring
each of these talks to the country that

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I'm in. So you know,
the basic conversation about the state of wind,

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state of solar, state of nuclear, all of those kinds of things,

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they're all the same for the most
part until you talk about it in

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the context of the country. So
at NDC Porto, I talked about the

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way the Portuguese makee electricity. So
there wasn't much talk about nukes just because

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they don't have any. But they
got great wind, and they got an

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interesting solar, and they got some
pumped hydro and it's fun to watch the

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folks from the country hear the stories
of their own power. You know,

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most of times folks don't know.
And I've been keeping all those notes,

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so I'm building up a repertoire.
I've done in Norway, obviously, Canada,

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Australia, although depending on the country, Like if you're going to talk

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about the US, the US has
one most complicated grids in the world,

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arguably the most complicated rid in the
world. A you were first and be

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bloody big country and it's very fragmented, like there's there's something like nine power

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grids in the US, so it's
got to be kind of a state by

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state thing. When I did a
Canadian version, i was doing it for

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British Columbia, which is a lot
of hydro electric. So it doesn't make

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sense in this context really go into
the individual countries. But I've got a

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lot of notes around those different parts
and have dove into areas, so you

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might hear me reference particular country and
it is probably one where I've read all

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of the paperwork for that country because
they give me inside, Like I'm reading

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about the Portuguese pump storage solution in
the Far North, which is an eight

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hundred megawatt pumped hydro It's massive.
It's incredible, it's largest in the world.

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It's incredible. Anyway, let's start
this time around with wind. Okay,

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because winds had an interesting year.
Actually, yeah, certainly my neck

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of the woods. It's picked up
the pace. Yeah, certainly, when

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you know it's relevant in different areas. Twenty twenty three will be a record

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year. They're expecting over one hundred
gigawatts worldwide to be installed. Wind power

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installations slowed down during the pandemic.
They are a very large scale physical thing

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to be done, and so they
were well behind in terms of the rate

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of the expected installs, and so
they're catching off in the bypart of that

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will be some banger years going forward. The other big trend in wind has

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been progressively larger and larger and larger
turbines megawat, two megawat, five megawatt,

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ten megawatt, wow, fifteen mega. Like, when you're getting up

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to fifteen megawatts, you're talking one
rotation of those blades is enough power for

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a half a dozen houses for a
year, right, Like, it's crazy,

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these massive amounts of electricity to reinproduce, and there's a question of why,

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like why gets so big and the
reality of courses. The taller the

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mast is and the larger the blades
span is, the more consistent the power

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is, and you need fewer of
them. The huge number of turbines creates

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problems for power alignment. You have
to adjust all the sine waves to match

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up. It's complicated to make all
these things work well. Also, you

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know very well that taking a little
whirlybird out out in the wind, you

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know it's going to go yeah,
well most likely, yeah, Most wind

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turbines have a minimum power and a
maximum power that they can take, and

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they'll actually turn them off if it
gets too windy, which seems crazy,

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but think of the stresses. You
know, when you're talking about those fifteen

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megawatts seem to be the big ones. That's five hundred foot tall mast from

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the surface typically of the water to
the hub. I would imagine that the

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bigger they are, the more momentum
the blades have, right, so they

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can take more wind gusts and lulls
and still kind of rotate at an evening

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exactly right, and they tend to
be consistent. And by the end of

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blades are I mean, they're even
bigger. That's just the hub right,

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each the diameter of the road or
seven hundred and seventy five feet, So

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imagine a rotating structure tip to tip
that's as large as the height of the

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Golden Gate Bridge from the water to
the top of the tower. That's how

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big these things are. And so
in the past couple of years, all

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of the major turbine producers have been
making larger and larger turbines and they're all

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having problems, the structural problems.
They're starting to come apart. Wow,

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and they've all had effectively recalls.
So, and I hate to say this,

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but like I feel like that's good
news because as long as you were

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racing for size, you weren't really
racing for other innovations. If they correct

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answer to a bet, Tribron was
always a bigger turbine than you were,

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just trying to make it bigger.
But as they got much above these fifteen

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megawat ones, the structural stresses in
the blades got so high that the braids

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are breaking. So they're finding a
sweet spot. Yeah, and so you've

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hit that curve where now you're going
to have to make the blade stronger,

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aka more expensive to get any bigger
and in the reducing the cost per megawatt,

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now you're on the other side of
the curve. You're going to have

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to spend more to produce more to
make a bigger turbine, and that's not

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worth it. And so if that
size sweet spot makes sense, then now

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you can start to pour your R
and D energy into the other things you

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could improve with it. And in
terms of increasing reliability, better motor controls,

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better resistances, So there's lots of
ways to continue to prove it.

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So it speaks to them maturing industry. But when it's just not like it's

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just General Electric that's having this problem. Siemens has the same problem, Vessus

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has the same problem. Like all
of them seemed to hit this wall at

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once, and so it just seems
to be a point in the industry where

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that's about as far as we're going
to go on there innovation wise. Yeah,

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it's for innovation. On the size
side, we've kind of nailed on

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shore wind. It works. You
can't go that big there, just doesn't

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make sense. Then you have different
classes of offshore and the near shore approach,

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which the Danes have done the most
of, but it's all over the

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world without a doubt, are also
pretty mature. So now we're talking about

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real offshore, and the difference being
the amount of water you're in. So

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up to about fifty meters of water, roughly one hundred and fifty feet or

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so, you can slam a casement
down through the water to the bottom,

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pump the water out, then drill
a big hole into the bottom, pour

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concrete and mount of masts and that's
your offshore wind. Right it's anchored to

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the bottom. But it's basically the
same as onshore wind just out in the

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water a little further away from people. The airflow is cleaner there, so

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you can go larger. And a
lot of these titans, these fifteen megawatt

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that's the installation they're doing. The
problem is that lots of places water and

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deeper than that. You know,
here we are in British Columbia with latch

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of wind blowing in, we don't
have we have barely any wind turbines at

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all. I mean a we have
a lot of hydroelectric power banks, mountains,

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very useful, but b our water
is really deep, right, Like

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this is fjord country, and fifty
meters of water is you know, one

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hundred meters away. It's just there's
nowhere to put a wind turbine. So

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the technology has been maturing. And
again I'm going to reference Portugal here because

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I did that Portuguese talk where they
have one of the experimental floating wind turbine

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test sites floating. Yes, because
once the water gets much deeper than fifty

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meters, the pressure is involved to
drill into the bottom are just too high.

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So I'm trying to think of the
physics of how that would work.

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I'm kind of thinking like and this
is the first I've heard of it.

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But I'm kind of thinking, like, you know, how a sailboat has

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a big keel that, as you
know, the bottom is very heavy and

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it sort of floats down. It
goes down into the water exactly right and

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keeps it balanced. So would you
have the turbine mast mounted to some great,

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big, giant structure with a big
weight on the bottom not that big.

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Now we're directly boring from oil rake
technology, and so you have to

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do it. You have maybe one
hundred and fifty meters tall mask, but

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below you have another one hundred meters
of lower structure, especially in the same

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shape, and then it's cable stayed
to the bottom. Okay, so you

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have a set of anchors with a
set of lines running to it that keeps

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it more or less in the same
area. But it is floating, so

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it's going to move. It's just
not going to move very far. But

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it's also going to twist. Yeah, right, But it's all in some

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ways it's going to be more survivable
in rough seas because it has some give

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where the fixed mass have no give. That's right, they're gonna get pummeled,

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right and further offshore you get more
so give me a weather, but

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you also get better wind yep,
and it's right. Depending on the nature

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of your bottom, you're further out
of you may be completely out of site,

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which makes people happier. You can
get away from the migration paths of

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seabirds, so the incidence of encounters
or seabirds goes down. So there's a

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bunch of advantages. Now, it's
not indefinite depth. We're now we're talking

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about three hundred and fifty meters of
water, but that's a lot more continental

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shelf that you can be placing these
on. Where I live, we have

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Long Island Sound, So Long Island
chuts out from New York City out east,

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and then there's this little you could
think of it as a big pond,

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but it's a it's a sound.
And inside the sound, the wind

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is okay, but it's not as
in the you know, certainly the waves,

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but it's not as good as outside
the sound when you're right on the

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Atlantic. Yeah, but there's plenty, you know, there's a reason for

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the fishing is so great in the
Northeast. The water's relatively shallow, so

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it's easy to fish to the bottom
and to to that's you know, when

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you think about lobster and cod,
and like all of those great fisheries,

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it's a relatively shallow water. There's
still hundreds of meters, but not thousands

281
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of meters, right, and so
that opens a door to this is all

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great wind power territory. The challenge
of now you can immediately think of the

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challenges this now is a mixed use
thing. Generally speaking, wind turbine operators

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don't want boats around their wind turns. Right, not in my backyard,

285
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not in my front yard. And
forget about what it does to the lobsters

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in the cod right, I mean, and it's a good question of what

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does it do? Mean, they're
just anchors, So it's just more stuff

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on the bottom, which you know
in some ways that's artificial reef. That's

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true. I would also argue that
if you make areas with wind turbines in

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place, and you make them exclusion
zones, that's a place for those animals

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to grow. Right. If people
stay out of them, then that's a

292
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non fish area. And what comes
out of that fish out of those zones

293
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can then be fished, and so
you might actually be strengthening the stocks in

294
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that area. But it bears study. Right. It is a mixed use

295
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problem. Although most of the time
you will see fairly let's say, dramatic

296
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conversations about this stuff. Oh,
I know a lot about that. There's

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a lot of talk going on in
my town right now. Yeah, because

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of wind turbines that are being assembled
at the State Pier in New London,

299
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Connecticut. Little old New London,
right, is in the news, and

300
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there's there's a lot of stuff going
on here. And they've been arguing about

301
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it and going over budget and all
this stuff for a few years now,

302
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but it looks like some good stuff
is finally coming out of it. So

303
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they're using the state here as the
staging ground for building wind turbine projects.

304
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That's right around the northeast. Yeah, and so I think of it like

305
00:22:21.000 --> 00:22:26.200
the developer tool company of software.
Right. You know, they're not building

306
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the turbines. They're not or they're
not having them built. They're not putting

307
00:22:30.480 --> 00:22:36.119
them out there and benefiting from their
you know what they produce. They're not

308
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making electricity. Yeah, they're not
making electricity exactly. They're putting them together.

309
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Yeah, They're the place everybody has
to go to if you actually want

310
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to build them out right, that's
cool, and it's just building the infrastructure

311
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to make it easier to make more
wind power in that part of the world.

312
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Yeah, they I mean, all
in all, it's good news.

313
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They're progressing. The cost per watt
is really low. Some of the cheapest

314
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electricity in the world, between wind
and solar are both the lowest costs,

315
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and that's one of the reasons for
the increasing size, and we're learning to

316
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do better to move it further away. Of course, further offshore still means

317
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you've got in cables running two shorts
electricities for the folks on the land,

318
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So there is some complex infrastructure as
you get further and further offshore, and

319
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there's plenty of water deeper than three
hundred and fifty meters. So but we've

320
00:23:26.359 --> 00:23:30.119
also again can tap the oil rig
industry because they've dealt with oil rings at

321
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much deeper doubts than that. If
we want to go deeper still, but

322
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at this point the three to fifty
meter range seems to be there's a bunch

323
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of test projects in place today,
half dozen them in the world. They

324
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are working well, learnings are occurring, so I think you're going to see

325
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a big expansion there, and depending
on the nature of your water, that

326
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might be fully offshore, not visible
at all from land, or maybe just

327
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further away, but certainly titanically large
massive turbines, but in variosteudy winds of

328
00:23:59.000 --> 00:24:03.400
the general electricity a long period of
time. Yeah, show, Shall we

329
00:24:03.440 --> 00:24:07.960
move on to solar? Sure?
I know, let's talk a little bit

330
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of solar. So can I tell
you a solar story before we start?

331
00:24:12.359 --> 00:24:17.000
Yeah, tell me your solar story. So, a couple of years ago,

332
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so I have this huge house that
my wife and I bought this house

333
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when we both had kids living with
us, and so she has two and

334
00:24:25.960 --> 00:24:27.680
I have two, and we needed
a place that had a lot of bedrooms

335
00:24:27.720 --> 00:24:32.119
and a lot of size and you
know whatever. So we bought this house.

336
00:24:32.160 --> 00:24:33.960
Of course, now they're all moved
out and we're like, we don't

337
00:24:33.039 --> 00:24:37.519
like this house anymore. It's too
big right from the Yeah, but it

338
00:24:37.559 --> 00:24:41.480
was built in nineteen eighty nine.
The roof was, you know, twenty

339
00:24:41.559 --> 00:24:45.160
years old or something like that.
It needed a new roof. It was

340
00:24:45.440 --> 00:24:48.079
the roof was getting angry. It
was throwing shingles at us. You know.

341
00:24:49.599 --> 00:24:52.920
It's like, hey, it's like, you know, Grandma's teeth are

342
00:24:52.920 --> 00:24:56.599
falling out kind of thing. Right. So we put on a new roof

343
00:24:56.640 --> 00:25:00.559
a couple of years ago, and
now that we have this this new roof,

344
00:25:00.599 --> 00:25:03.119
we're like, well, you know, let's see about our solar panel

345
00:25:03.160 --> 00:25:07.960
options because you know, we we
have a pretty high carbon footprint here.

346
00:25:08.000 --> 00:25:15.359
We have you know, HVAC systems
and you know, lots of computers,

347
00:25:15.440 --> 00:25:21.640
and but your power bill is substantial. The power bill in the summer gets

348
00:25:21.799 --> 00:25:26.240
ridiculous, especially the hotter it gets. Yeah, so we looked into it

349
00:25:26.359 --> 00:25:30.960
and the what we went with was
this company called Trinity Solar, their Connecticut

350
00:25:30.960 --> 00:25:36.839
company, and the way we wanted
to structure it was it was perfect.

351
00:25:37.160 --> 00:25:41.319
They basically for no money down,
no money down. No no money down,

352
00:25:41.680 --> 00:25:45.200
they heard that one. Yeah,
So for no money down, they

353
00:25:45.200 --> 00:25:48.839
come out, they do an inspection. They're also a roofing company, so

354
00:25:48.839 --> 00:25:52.480
if there's any structural things that need
reinforced, you have to go together really

355
00:25:52.519 --> 00:25:53.960
well yeah, yeah, they do
that for you, and they you know,

356
00:25:55.000 --> 00:25:56.599
they make any repairs. Plus you
may need a new like it makes

357
00:25:56.599 --> 00:26:00.519
sense to do it when you're putting
a new roof on. Yeah. Yeah,

358
00:26:00.880 --> 00:26:03.759
Well we already had had the roof
okay. So there was a few

359
00:26:03.799 --> 00:26:07.759
things that needed some more support in
the attic, and they did that free

360
00:26:07.759 --> 00:26:11.519
of charge, and then they put
on the panels. And so there's a

361
00:26:11.599 --> 00:26:15.079
tax incentive if you buy panels.
Right, if I go out and buy

362
00:26:15.119 --> 00:26:18.880
my own solar panels and hire an
independent contractor to put them up, I

363
00:26:18.960 --> 00:26:23.799
get a tax discount on that,
I get a rebate. But these guys

364
00:26:23.839 --> 00:26:29.359
are like different. They're saying,
all right, we're going to own the

365
00:26:29.400 --> 00:26:33.119
panels, we're going to put up
the panels, and they're hours we're going

366
00:26:33.200 --> 00:26:38.400
to give you a lease at a
fixed rate per month that's lower than your

367
00:26:38.759 --> 00:26:42.400
electricity bill. And by the way, they told us that you're getting a

368
00:26:42.440 --> 00:26:47.880
full inverter's worth of panels. Whatever
it was, thirty six panels. I

369
00:26:47.880 --> 00:26:51.400
think it was right. And you
know, if you add just one more,

370
00:26:51.519 --> 00:26:53.880
you'd need another inverter. So it
was like, you're going to be

371
00:26:53.960 --> 00:26:59.039
covered your bills. Based on what
our bills were in the past, this

372
00:26:59.079 --> 00:27:02.720
is enough to cover the bill.
So we're basically trading. The way I

373
00:27:02.759 --> 00:27:07.920
looked at it is we're trading a
bill that can go from one hundred dollars

374
00:27:07.920 --> 00:27:11.519
a month to eight hundred dollars a
month nine hundred dollars a month, right,

375
00:27:11.920 --> 00:27:17.359
depending on the you know, depending
on the season, to you know,

376
00:27:17.440 --> 00:27:21.640
two hundred and fifty dollars a month
every month for twenty years, right,

377
00:27:21.680 --> 00:27:25.440
And so there was a bit of
discussion and all that stuff, and

378
00:27:25.480 --> 00:27:30.640
it just kind of occurred to me
that you know, having a known amount

379
00:27:30.880 --> 00:27:37.440
is better, especially today with the
power companies upping their their delivery charge,

380
00:27:37.480 --> 00:27:41.960
which boggles my mind. Why you
have an electricity charge. Oh and by

381
00:27:41.000 --> 00:27:45.119
the way, we're going to even
charge you more to get that power to

382
00:27:45.200 --> 00:27:48.160
you. Oh and by the way, we can just change that whenever we

383
00:27:48.200 --> 00:27:52.000
feel like, right, well,
that's why they invented that charge. Because

384
00:27:52.400 --> 00:27:55.680
the charge, the charge, the
power rate was fixed by the by the

385
00:27:55.720 --> 00:27:59.119
government right there, and so they
came up with new charges that aren't part

386
00:27:59.160 --> 00:28:03.400
of that that agree. And so
in December there was some word rumors going

387
00:28:03.440 --> 00:28:07.920
around that they were going to this
is Connecticut Light and Power ever source it's

388
00:28:07.920 --> 00:28:14.000
called now, they're going to double
their rates, and they did in January

389
00:28:14.319 --> 00:28:18.440
this year. The rate went doubled. So what was a two hundred dollars

390
00:28:18.480 --> 00:28:23.039
monthly bill is now a four hundred
dollars monthly bill, and we got turned

391
00:28:23.039 --> 00:28:29.079
on in June and since then are
you know, it's it's all coming back.

392
00:28:29.960 --> 00:28:33.720
So they and then there was also
the question of well, what happens

393
00:28:33.759 --> 00:28:36.279
if you want to sell your house
and the new owners don't want the solar

394
00:28:36.319 --> 00:28:40.160
and I'm like, well, they
won't buy the house to go, you

395
00:28:40.200 --> 00:28:42.279
know, go away. It's part
of the deal. It's part like,

396
00:28:42.359 --> 00:28:45.240
oh, I want the house,
but I don't want the garage. Yeah,

397
00:28:45.359 --> 00:28:49.000
like that garage off, will you? You can have it? It's

398
00:28:49.039 --> 00:28:55.079
fine. So and the Trinity was
basically like, yep, whoever buys the

399
00:28:55.119 --> 00:28:59.599
house, the goes over into their
name, We transfer it and Bob's your

400
00:28:59.640 --> 00:29:03.319
uncle. So it seemed like a
no brainer to me, especially because you

401
00:29:03.359 --> 00:29:08.559
know, it's not like we're aging. But you know, retirement is ten,

402
00:29:08.720 --> 00:29:11.160
fifteen, twenty years away. I
don't know whatever it is, and

403
00:29:11.400 --> 00:29:14.640
I don't know. Yeah, what
is this thing you called retirement? I

404
00:29:14.640 --> 00:29:18.880
don't know. But you know,
at that point we could sell the house

405
00:29:18.200 --> 00:29:23.440
and you know, add the however
many thousands of dollars onto the value by

406
00:29:23.480 --> 00:29:27.359
having those solar panels. Yeah,
weird, you're selling a house. You're

407
00:29:27.400 --> 00:29:32.319
selling your house with a fixed a
known cost of electricity, right, which

408
00:29:32.400 --> 00:29:36.440
is useful. It's a good thing. Yeah, so I'm glad we did

409
00:29:36.440 --> 00:29:38.599
that. Yeah, it's cool.
Anyway, that's my story. The first

410
00:29:38.680 --> 00:29:41.920
time a whole gigawatt of solar cells
was installed in the world was only in

411
00:29:41.920 --> 00:29:45.920
two thousand and four. I mean, solar power has been around since the

412
00:29:45.039 --> 00:29:48.920
seventies. It's just really expensive.
Wow, right, But only twenty years

413
00:29:48.960 --> 00:29:52.759
ago did we start We started having
buildouts like that, like a gigawatt of

414
00:29:52.799 --> 00:29:56.680
electricity, but that wasn't even one
side. That was all over the world.

415
00:29:56.119 --> 00:30:00.839
Twenty twenty three, it's a gigawatt
a day. Over three hundred and

416
00:30:00.880 --> 00:30:04.200
sixty gigawatts of solar was added worldwide
in twenty twenty three, and I just

417
00:30:04.240 --> 00:30:08.759
give that as a sense of scale
that what's happened. Solar panels have gotten

418
00:30:08.799 --> 00:30:12.759
substantially less expensive. Yeah, and
you largely can thank the Chinese for that.

419
00:30:12.759 --> 00:30:17.359
They're the ones who really did mass
manufacture. They didn't invent them.

420
00:30:17.440 --> 00:30:22.319
They're very much an American design.
They're about twenty two percent efficient, but

421
00:30:22.440 --> 00:30:27.599
they're very cost controlled. They work
really reliably. Of those three hundred and

422
00:30:27.640 --> 00:30:33.160
sixty five gigawatts of electricity capacity and
added last year, twenty five percent of

423
00:30:33.160 --> 00:30:37.759
that is, like you, residential
solar. Most of it is commercial,

424
00:30:38.640 --> 00:30:45.680
so that is large scale farms essentially
fields of solar panels. And they're very,

425
00:30:45.759 --> 00:30:48.400
very inexpensive. It's the least expensive
power to deploy in this day and

426
00:30:48.440 --> 00:30:53.720
age. And I could do they
am costs and all those other calculations,

427
00:30:53.720 --> 00:30:56.599
but it's not that important, right, Like we can leave off the math

428
00:30:56.640 --> 00:31:02.680
today we'd have to go that far
into that particular thing. Uh. And

429
00:31:02.720 --> 00:31:07.839
it's but it's an interesting point to
see that solar is not being installed because

430
00:31:07.920 --> 00:31:12.920
of that because it's the right thing
to do. It's like zero carbon energy.

431
00:31:12.960 --> 00:31:18.039
It's being done because it's the least
expensive energy, right, and so

432
00:31:18.400 --> 00:31:22.160
you know, the straight motivations are
there. That being said, it's it's

433
00:31:22.200 --> 00:31:25.759
getting more innovative. They are doing
fun things with solar in the sense they're

434
00:31:25.759 --> 00:31:29.440
doing things we talked about this last
year, floatov voltaics, solar panels on

435
00:31:29.480 --> 00:31:34.119
reservoirs. You know, I've I
see applications for this in my own town,

436
00:31:34.759 --> 00:31:37.839
and I wonder, hey, is
anybody paying attention. You know,

437
00:31:37.880 --> 00:31:41.519
I know they don't listen to Dot
and rocks, but This isn't something that

438
00:31:41.720 --> 00:31:47.839
we invented or you invented. This
is being done and especially on channels and

439
00:31:48.480 --> 00:31:55.079
uh you know, waterways, waterways
that aren't usually used by people. Well,

440
00:31:55.920 --> 00:32:00.400
where you're seeing this push towards float
of voltaics is on water ways where

441
00:32:00.839 --> 00:32:06.759
they're currently managing problems caused by sunlight
hitting the water. Right, because one

442
00:32:06.799 --> 00:32:08.920
of the challenges float of votakes is
you're going to darken the water, so

443
00:32:09.000 --> 00:32:13.799
you will modify an ecosystem. But
if it's an irrigation canal, right now,

444
00:32:13.839 --> 00:32:16.359
you're trying to scrape alogie out of
it. So covering it by putting

445
00:32:16.359 --> 00:32:20.880
covering with solar panels actually decreases that
work. And by now you probably figured

446
00:32:20.920 --> 00:32:27.519
out if you don't know what floatovertex
is is putting solar panels on floating structures,

447
00:32:27.880 --> 00:32:29.839
rafts, barges, whatever you want
to call it, or at least

448
00:32:29.839 --> 00:32:36.119
over water and over water it prevents
rapid evaporation and it does a few things

449
00:32:36.200 --> 00:32:38.160
and you obviously get the solar energy
from it. Yeah, so I mean

450
00:32:38.200 --> 00:32:42.400
you're generating solar power, you're decreasing
the amount of sunlight hitting the water,

451
00:32:42.559 --> 00:32:46.079
which helps with algae management and other
inappropriate growth when you're talking about canals and

452
00:32:46.079 --> 00:32:53.359
irrigation and you're keeping the solar panels
cool. Solar panels don't actually like too

453
00:32:53.400 --> 00:32:58.759
much heat, and they actually get
less finished and wear out. So the

454
00:32:58.920 --> 00:33:02.519
side effect of we're slowing down the
rate of evaporation is also keeping the panels

455
00:33:02.559 --> 00:33:06.880
cooler, so it is mutually beneficial
in a lot of respects. That being

456
00:33:06.960 --> 00:33:12.640
said, it's not as cheap as
conventional commercial because conventional commercials row on row,

457
00:33:13.240 --> 00:33:16.519
very symmetrical wiring is trivial maintenance,
disease is the easy as possible,

458
00:33:16.720 --> 00:33:22.319
and you're always optimizing pointing directions.
Although in the northern hemisphere we're not pointing

459
00:33:22.319 --> 00:33:25.880
as much solar to the south anymore. We're pointing at more east and west

460
00:33:25.880 --> 00:33:30.279
because we're trying to we generate too
much power at midday, so we'd rather

461
00:33:30.400 --> 00:33:35.920
use our panels less efficiently per panel
to distribute the power over a larger rage

462
00:33:35.920 --> 00:33:39.359
of time, collect more light in
the morning on the east panels and more

463
00:33:39.519 --> 00:33:44.079
light in the later part of the
day on the west. Face panels don't

464
00:33:44.079 --> 00:33:45.799
need as many panels facing south.
It's funny, and it's funny, but

465
00:33:46.039 --> 00:33:49.960
that's kind of kind of where we're
at now because the panels are as cheap

466
00:33:50.039 --> 00:33:52.160
they are. And it once was
a time when it made sense to have

467
00:33:52.319 --> 00:33:59.160
helio tracking solar panels, so solar
panels on mass with motors, because the

468
00:33:59.200 --> 00:34:04.119
panels were so expensive that optimizing their
collection at all times was worth it in

469
00:34:04.200 --> 00:34:08.719
exchange for motors that need constant maintenance, right, that need repairs and those

470
00:34:08.719 --> 00:34:13.199
sorts of things. And now largely
that's gone away because the panels have gotten

471
00:34:13.239 --> 00:34:15.920
so cheap. It's cheaper just put
in more panels aimed in all the directions

472
00:34:15.920 --> 00:34:19.119
you need to aim them in.
And that's one of the challenges when you

473
00:34:19.119 --> 00:34:22.039
talk about float of voltaics is often
the panels are not pointed in the ideal

474
00:34:22.119 --> 00:34:28.360
directions. They're following the path of
the irrigation canal, or they're just wherever

475
00:34:28.400 --> 00:34:32.119
it'll fit in the in the reservoir. But that's okay because it's power you

476
00:34:32.719 --> 00:34:37.679
it still makes net power. It's
power you wouldn't otherwise have. It has

477
00:34:37.719 --> 00:34:43.320
benefits to the reservoir that it's on. Another area, specialized area in solar

478
00:34:43.480 --> 00:34:50.159
related to this is agra voltaics or
solar panels on farms. Farms that are

479
00:34:50.239 --> 00:34:53.559
still working, so this is nothing
magical. Imagine and instead of them being

480
00:34:53.599 --> 00:34:59.880
down low to the ground, they're
ten feet up so that they're on po

481
00:35:00.000 --> 00:35:02.880
posts essentially that have lifted them up. So's the ground below it is accessible.

482
00:35:04.159 --> 00:35:06.760
Oh, I see, I was
wondering. You know, you said

483
00:35:06.800 --> 00:35:08.960
these are working farms, So yeah, I was staying at a you know,

484
00:35:09.719 --> 00:35:14.960
fallow farms or those that aren't working
as much anymore. That's a good

485
00:35:15.039 --> 00:35:15.960
use for them. But I guess
see you you're right. I mean,

486
00:35:16.000 --> 00:35:20.400
you could put them on poles and
posts and lift them up and raise them

487
00:35:20.440 --> 00:35:22.679
up. Now what you are shading
that area, but that's not necessarily a

488
00:35:22.679 --> 00:35:30.320
bad thing. There are many agricultural
plants that prefer more shade. Many of

489
00:35:30.360 --> 00:35:36.800
the animal feed grasses prefer more shade. So a mixed use where you have

490
00:35:37.440 --> 00:35:43.719
agricultural animals who prefer their shade also
under those panels being able to eat and

491
00:35:43.760 --> 00:35:47.039
maintain that grass. So you're making
electricity above, feeding your animals below.

492
00:35:47.320 --> 00:35:51.840
And if you're spacing them ount correctly, you will have sunlight. You'll have

493
00:35:51.920 --> 00:35:57.199
some yeah, when the as the
sun moves. Plus we've all the increasing

494
00:35:57.239 --> 00:36:00.719
amount of environmental change means that many
of these fields are too hot as it

495
00:36:00.800 --> 00:36:05.159
is, Yeah, and so increasing
amount of shade on them is useful.

496
00:36:05.400 --> 00:36:07.599
It's a good idea. So yeah, it's an easy one, and it's

497
00:36:07.639 --> 00:36:12.039
a way for the same way of
farmers and more farmers are throwing a few

498
00:36:12.039 --> 00:36:19.079
wind turbines around as well. Is
another source of income for agriculture. And

499
00:36:19.119 --> 00:36:22.519
then it also can benefit the ground
that it's covering. So what if you

500
00:36:22.639 --> 00:36:25.840
have, let's say a four acre
plot and you're not farming your land,

501
00:36:27.800 --> 00:36:32.039
does it make sense to put a
solar farm on those three acres? Quite

502
00:36:32.039 --> 00:36:37.559
possibly, yes. But you and
now you're a commercial producer, what are

503
00:36:37.559 --> 00:36:39.440
you going to do with all that
power? You have to negotiate with power

504
00:36:39.480 --> 00:36:44.519
grid, right, so you now
becoming a provider to the power grid,

505
00:36:44.559 --> 00:36:47.079
and so it's all in the agreement
you're going to make with them about buying

506
00:36:47.119 --> 00:36:52.079
the power and what they're expecting from
you. So I remember in our very

507
00:36:52.159 --> 00:36:55.039
first geek out, the electricity Geekout? Was it the electricity Geekout? The

508
00:36:55.079 --> 00:36:58.639
first one? No, it wasn't. No, the first ones were space

509
00:36:58.679 --> 00:37:02.400
but yeah, space Shuttle. Okay, but I remember in that electricity geek

510
00:37:02.400 --> 00:37:07.440
out that you did that you dispelled
the myth that the meter doesn't run backwards

511
00:37:07.480 --> 00:37:10.800
when you overproduce, right, if
you produce more than your well, we

512
00:37:10.840 --> 00:37:15.480
were talking about the meter does run
backwards, but does it? Is that

513
00:37:15.519 --> 00:37:21.039
power actually but the electricity doesn't flow
backwards? Yeah? Is the power actually

514
00:37:21.199 --> 00:37:24.079
usable most of the time? No? Yeah, okay, And that's when

515
00:37:24.119 --> 00:37:30.320
we're talking about residential solar, where
we're talking about a couple of kilowatts and

516
00:37:30.079 --> 00:37:36.039
uh and and it's already been stepped
all the way down to retail power to

517
00:37:36.119 --> 00:37:39.320
one hundred and twenty bolts they see. Yeah, when you talk about commercial

518
00:37:39.360 --> 00:37:45.880
power plants like that commercial solar,
they're delivering the power to the grid at

519
00:37:45.920 --> 00:37:51.400
a much higher level. Okay,
right, there's just the because they you

520
00:37:51.440 --> 00:37:53.039
have to protect people from that.
You can't have that on the side of

521
00:37:53.039 --> 00:37:58.320
someone's house, right right, So
right now, the way that residential solar

522
00:37:58.360 --> 00:38:01.760
is set up, it's designed for
you to consume, and when you produce

523
00:38:02.000 --> 00:38:07.880
more than needed, it's metered by
the power company largely as a credit to

524
00:38:07.960 --> 00:38:10.440
you, so that when you do
need to poy power from them when the

525
00:38:10.480 --> 00:38:15.280
solar isn't running, it doesn't cost
you anything, right, right, And

526
00:38:15.280 --> 00:38:19.800
that's no power company willingly enters into
that as very much a political conversation.

527
00:38:20.440 --> 00:38:23.599
But it's to encourage more solar to
be installed. And it's worth it for

528
00:38:23.639 --> 00:38:28.599
the most part because it does turn
off older power plants. Like it works

529
00:38:28.639 --> 00:38:31.360
out, Is that power actually usable
most of the time. No, it's

530
00:38:31.599 --> 00:38:37.039
very hard to take stepped down power
and distribute it to other homes. It's

531
00:38:37.119 --> 00:38:42.199
not water and it doesn't flow easily
uphill. But when you're gonna if you're

532
00:38:42.199 --> 00:38:45.920
talking about your farm scenario three acres, you're gonna lay down a bunch of

533
00:38:45.960 --> 00:38:49.239
panels. Now you're going you're going
to be a small producer, but you're

534
00:38:49.280 --> 00:38:52.639
going they're not going to put residential
power to that. They're going to bring

535
00:38:52.679 --> 00:38:57.000
commercial power in for that. They're
going to ask you for three phase power.

536
00:38:57.199 --> 00:39:00.199
They're going to ask for it at
four hundred and eighty right, a

537
00:39:00.280 --> 00:39:04.400
form that is more easily added to
the grid for other places to use,

538
00:39:04.800 --> 00:39:08.599
right. Right. And that's the
distinction is that's not how houses are set

539
00:39:08.679 --> 00:39:12.679
up. Right. And so,
as you said, this isn't something that

540
00:39:12.760 --> 00:39:15.199
you can just go online and choose. Hey, how many incors do you

541
00:39:15.239 --> 00:39:17.719
have? Okay, here's how much
money you're going to make every month.

542
00:39:19.719 --> 00:39:22.559
You have to negotiate that with the
power company. Yeah, you know,

543
00:39:22.559 --> 00:39:27.119
it depends on the power company.
Some power companies are well set up for

544
00:39:27.320 --> 00:39:30.360
so you want to be on micro
producer, Like here's the deal, but

545
00:39:30.800 --> 00:39:35.599
it depends on you. It's a
case by case basis, right and site,

546
00:39:35.639 --> 00:39:37.440
and the site matters too, Right, when are you going to make

547
00:39:37.480 --> 00:39:40.079
power? How much is it going
to be? They may even say,

548
00:39:40.119 --> 00:39:44.320
hey, we're going to pay far
less for power at noon when we have

549
00:39:44.440 --> 00:39:47.840
way too much. Right, we'd
rather you set up your panels facing east

550
00:39:47.880 --> 00:39:52.280
and west and generate less power mid
day, more power early, and we'll

551
00:39:52.280 --> 00:39:54.199
pay you more for that. Like, you're going to have to look at

552
00:39:54.199 --> 00:39:59.760
the deal for your area for it
to make sense. Interesting, it's really

553
00:39:59.760 --> 00:40:01.920
interest and it's something that I would
never even have thought of. Yeah,

554
00:40:01.960 --> 00:40:06.719
you know, even last year,
we are evolving, aren't we, Like

555
00:40:06.760 --> 00:40:08.840
we're understanding more about this, and
so are the power companies. So power

556
00:40:08.840 --> 00:40:14.320
companies are pretty basic. You know, most people listening to the show,

557
00:40:14.400 --> 00:40:17.239
and he certainly you and I are. We are Internet children, Like we've

558
00:40:17.639 --> 00:40:21.199
been around the Internet our whole lives, and we think peer to peer is

559
00:40:21.239 --> 00:40:25.199
not a big deal, but outside
of our industry it's bizarre and so and

560
00:40:25.280 --> 00:40:29.960
power companies are like that. They
have spent a long time to come to

561
00:40:30.039 --> 00:40:35.400
a place to be able to deal
with a large number of power producers right.

562
00:40:35.760 --> 00:40:38.039
For a long time, the grid
was built around a handful of very

563
00:40:38.119 --> 00:40:44.679
large power plants distributed over a wide
area, and that has evolved with our

564
00:40:44.800 --> 00:40:50.639
need to change the way we produce
power into many more smaller producers and being

565
00:40:50.639 --> 00:40:53.159
able to integrate and modify that power
efficiently. Very good. When I put

566
00:40:53.199 --> 00:40:55.559
out the word about writing the Geek
Cuts, of course I got questions from

567
00:40:55.559 --> 00:41:01.320
our regular listeners. Martin Twaite's asked
about solar efficiencies like why are we still

568
00:41:01.360 --> 00:41:07.199
stuck at twenty two percent? And
the reason it really is cost We are

569
00:41:07.599 --> 00:41:12.960
developing. There's certainly experiments with more
efficient panels, Perovskitde panels being one of

570
00:41:13.000 --> 00:41:17.400
the most obvious examples. They get
up into the thirties. The downside is

571
00:41:17.400 --> 00:41:23.039
reliability and costs. So when you
start you're starting to experiment with these more

572
00:41:23.559 --> 00:41:28.719
higher density panels, they have heat
problems, they wear out quickly, and

573
00:41:28.800 --> 00:41:31.920
so you know the power. The
advantage of of that twenty two of these

574
00:41:31.960 --> 00:41:37.840
classic silicon dioxide panels is that they
are reliable and they last, and we

575
00:41:37.880 --> 00:41:43.280
are learning to recycle them. So
in the past couple of years we've seen

576
00:41:43.280 --> 00:41:47.760
some good breakthroughs. I read through
a bunch of paperwork from a company called

577
00:41:47.800 --> 00:41:58.280
Solar Cycle in Texas who are building
the machinery to automate the processing of classic

578
00:41:58.519 --> 00:42:05.199
aluminum solar panels. So they stripped
the illuminum housings off and then they actually

579
00:42:05.239 --> 00:42:08.400
have Because these different layers that go
into making a solar panel are all glued

580
00:42:08.440 --> 00:42:14.760
together, they're very tricky to separate, and recycling of each one of them

581
00:42:14.800 --> 00:42:16.719
is af of each layer is a
different process, and you don't want to

582
00:42:16.719 --> 00:42:22.760
cross contaminate. So they've been developing
the machines that neatly cut the glass off

583
00:42:22.760 --> 00:42:27.639
the top so that that glass can
be recycled and neatly separate each of the

584
00:42:27.639 --> 00:42:31.360
different layers in the panel into the
constituent ingredients so they can be resold.

585
00:42:31.639 --> 00:42:37.719
Richard, whatever happened to graphene?
Remember we were so excited about graphene,

586
00:42:37.719 --> 00:42:42.159
and particularly about solar panels. Well, we're anything electrical was interesting. What

587
00:42:42.239 --> 00:42:45.000
happened to graphene? Is that all
of that hype that we were talking about

588
00:42:45.000 --> 00:42:51.360
a few years ago led to funding. And when scientists are funding, what

589
00:42:51.480 --> 00:42:55.599
do they talk about? Nothing?
Because they have money, they're at work.

590
00:42:55.960 --> 00:43:00.840
Okay, so graphie technologies are being
developed. It's just that it's hard.

591
00:43:01.480 --> 00:43:06.559
Scientists only talk about stuff when they're
trying to raise money to work on

592
00:43:06.639 --> 00:43:09.320
it. But have there been any
products? I mean I have seen.

593
00:43:09.880 --> 00:43:14.079
Yeah, it's a couple of big
graphine batteries and things like that. Well,

594
00:43:14.280 --> 00:43:19.239
I've seen graphine solar panels that claim
to have raised the efficiency by twenty

595
00:43:19.239 --> 00:43:22.840
to forty percent. Yeah, never
got out of lab Okay, right,

596
00:43:22.000 --> 00:43:25.480
Like they test them and then they
have problems, right, They're too expensive

597
00:43:25.519 --> 00:43:30.239
to manufacture. It's like this thing's
twice twice as power fission but costs ten

598
00:43:30.280 --> 00:43:34.079
times as much. Oh boy,
right, oh and it lasts only two

599
00:43:34.159 --> 00:43:37.280
years. Like these are the problems. There's a difference between the science of

600
00:43:37.320 --> 00:43:42.159
a new material and turning it into
an engineer product that people can use.

601
00:43:43.119 --> 00:43:45.920
So then the benefits of converacy of
recycled solar panels is that we're making tons

602
00:43:45.920 --> 00:43:52.079
of them and they do wear out
and over time you get about twenty years

603
00:43:52.079 --> 00:43:54.679
twenty five years, they lose about
a third to a half a percent per

604
00:43:54.719 --> 00:43:59.599
year inefficiency. So at some point
it's just worth it to replace them.

605
00:43:59.679 --> 00:44:04.679
And you can't just keep throwing them
in the dump. You want those materials

606
00:44:04.719 --> 00:44:08.159
back. There's an expectation that by
twenty thirty we're going to have to decommission

607
00:44:08.199 --> 00:44:14.000
something. We're in a neighborhood of
eight million tons of solar panels and so

608
00:44:14.079 --> 00:44:15.840
recycling is going to be a big
deal, and you know a few decades

609
00:44:15.880 --> 00:44:19.480
on it's going to be tens of
millions, hundreds of millions of tons.

610
00:44:20.280 --> 00:44:24.119
So and right now it's cheap to
dump them throw them away, it's expensive

611
00:44:24.119 --> 00:44:28.320
to recycle them, and so maturing
recycling technology is important. That's where a

612
00:44:28.320 --> 00:44:31.280
company like solar Cycle comes into plays. They're learning to recycle solar panels.

613
00:44:31.360 --> 00:44:35.280
It's very cool, and make the
tools to make it easier for other people

614
00:44:35.280 --> 00:44:42.960
to do it. So we're big
on this closed cycle system where you build

615
00:44:42.960 --> 00:44:45.400
things to make electricity and then you're
able to reprocess and to make more things,

616
00:44:45.400 --> 00:44:49.440
and the metals they can extract from
that can be turned back into new

617
00:44:49.440 --> 00:44:52.840
solar panels again. So it's good
news. It certainly improvements. Cool,

618
00:44:53.039 --> 00:44:55.400
all right, let's take a break. All right, we will do that

619
00:44:55.559 --> 00:45:04.480
and we'll be back after these important
messages. Stick around and we're back.

620
00:45:04.519 --> 00:45:07.519
It's dot net rocks geek Out.
Addition. First of twenty twenty four.

621
00:45:07.679 --> 00:45:12.400
I'm Carl Franklin's Richard Campbell. We're
talking energy. We started with wind,

622
00:45:12.679 --> 00:45:15.800
we did solar, and now we're
on two. Well, I feel like

623
00:45:15.800 --> 00:45:17.360
we got to talk about power stora
because we just talked about the two intermitted

624
00:45:17.400 --> 00:45:21.920
power sources. Yeah, and so
you know there's a reason they're cheap.

625
00:45:22.280 --> 00:45:24.639
They don't run all the time,
right, and you have to do something

626
00:45:24.679 --> 00:45:28.199
with all that energy, use it
or lose it. Well, and that's

627
00:45:28.239 --> 00:45:31.639
always the case with anything. But
we talk about baseload power generation and that

628
00:45:31.719 --> 00:45:35.440
could run. We could control exactly
how much it makes at any given time,

629
00:45:35.480 --> 00:45:40.960
whether that be hydroelectric or oil gas, you name it. With wind

630
00:45:42.000 --> 00:45:45.239
and solar, yeah, you know
you could stop wind just by locking the

631
00:45:45.280 --> 00:45:47.000
turbines, but why would you.
But when you so, when you're making

632
00:45:47.000 --> 00:45:50.320
more energy than necessary, you got
to do something with it. It's storing.

633
00:45:50.360 --> 00:45:52.320
It's useful because there's lots of time
when it's not working, right,

634
00:45:52.599 --> 00:45:55.159
for better or worse. Tesla,
you know, broke a lot of ground

635
00:45:55.199 --> 00:46:01.119
here. They're reducing the cost of
making high density batteries and their battery innovation

636
00:46:01.639 --> 00:46:07.960
led to them doing a lot of
their original some original grid scale power places

637
00:46:07.960 --> 00:46:09.239
that I've talked about this on previous
shows. Going to go back in the

638
00:46:09.280 --> 00:46:14.320
stom I'm trying to cover new ground
here. Last year I was talking about

639
00:46:14.480 --> 00:46:20.719
form Energy. So these are ex
Tesla guys who recognize that the lithium ion

640
00:46:20.800 --> 00:46:24.599
battery is not a good battery for
grid. Lithium ion batteries are good batteries

641
00:46:24.639 --> 00:46:30.000
for cars. They pack a lot
of power in low weight because you need

642
00:46:30.039 --> 00:46:32.679
to move in good laptops too,
but pack a lot of power in a

643
00:46:32.719 --> 00:46:37.760
low weight environment. They charge its
quickly and also can discharge quickly. You

644
00:46:37.760 --> 00:46:40.840
think about how quickly an electric car
can discharge its battery, and that's that

645
00:46:40.920 --> 00:46:46.599
whole effect, and that's not what
the grid needs. The grid wants lots

646
00:46:46.599 --> 00:46:52.079
of power. It doesn't need to
move it around physically like it can stay

647
00:46:52.079 --> 00:46:55.760
stuck to the ground and lasts a
long time. And so what form Air

648
00:46:55.880 --> 00:47:00.840
was focused on was a type of
battery called the iron air battery. This

649
00:47:00.880 --> 00:47:02.960
battery has been around a long time. NASA had a bunch of experiment with

650
00:47:02.960 --> 00:47:06.760
a bunch of them for space related
technologies back in the time. But the

651
00:47:06.760 --> 00:47:10.840
big difference with the iron air battery
is that it's got a long discharge cycle.

652
00:47:12.280 --> 00:47:15.159
So sort of natural discharge rates for
the lithium I filscium phosphate batteries are

653
00:47:15.159 --> 00:47:20.280
in the six to eight hour range, so you know, if you try

654
00:47:20.320 --> 00:47:22.760
and draw them fasterout the battery overheats. If you try and dro them real

655
00:47:22.800 --> 00:47:27.840
slowly, they leak energy anyway,
and so you can't get much outside of

656
00:47:27.840 --> 00:47:31.239
that time range. The natural discharge
time for a iron air battery is one

657
00:47:31.320 --> 00:47:37.000
hundred hours. Wow. So it's
good for storage for grid, yeah,

658
00:47:37.039 --> 00:47:40.119
yeah, for grid. So they
are bigger, they are heavier, and

659
00:47:40.159 --> 00:47:45.599
they are hotter than lithium iron batteries, none of which is a problem when

660
00:47:45.599 --> 00:47:50.400
you're on the grid. What they
also are is cheap because the materials are

661
00:47:50.480 --> 00:47:53.519
less expensive. So a less expensive, bigger, heavier, hotter battery that

662
00:47:53.559 --> 00:48:00.559
you can stick behind a fence and
cantually dischange charge over many days. Hmmm.

663
00:48:00.840 --> 00:48:02.599
So in terms of filling in the
grid, it's great. The work

664
00:48:02.639 --> 00:48:08.400
that Elon did, and Tesla did
down in Australia with their big lithiumum the

665
00:48:08.440 --> 00:48:14.239
Mega packs in Victoria. Yeah,
those were bridging power, so they weren't

666
00:48:14.280 --> 00:48:16.280
designed to last a long time.
What they were designed to do is provide

667
00:48:16.320 --> 00:48:22.159
when they needed to switch between solar
and wind sources. They needed power in

668
00:48:22.199 --> 00:48:24.599
between those twos. It just lasted
for a few minutes, and without it

669
00:48:24.599 --> 00:48:29.440
they were having brown up problems where
one would one power sources starting to fade,

670
00:48:29.679 --> 00:48:31.599
they'd have instabilities and electricity which made
people sad. Then they get the

671
00:48:31.639 --> 00:48:35.599
other systems back up and it'd be
fine. So these battery packs sat in

672
00:48:35.639 --> 00:48:37.519
between those two to take care of
that problem. Not a bad use for

673
00:48:37.559 --> 00:48:43.639
lithium ion battery. So back to
my story of solar panels. These guys

674
00:48:43.760 --> 00:48:45.639
Trinity, which is a Connecticut company. And by the way, if anybody

675
00:48:45.679 --> 00:48:52.519
isn't listening in Connecticut and wants to
get Trinity to come and look at you,

676
00:48:52.960 --> 00:48:58.519
contact me because I get a kickback. Okay. Anyway, So they

677
00:48:58.559 --> 00:49:04.360
do offer a battery option, but
we have a propane generator right and a

678
00:49:04.400 --> 00:49:09.679
five hundred gallon propane tank in the
backyard, and it doesn't make any sense

679
00:49:09.960 --> 00:49:15.239
for us to have that now that
and some people when I mentioned it on

680
00:49:15.280 --> 00:49:19.599
Facebook, some people said, I
want the battery pack so I can be

681
00:49:19.679 --> 00:49:22.880
completely off the grid. Right.
They just want to They don't want to

682
00:49:22.880 --> 00:49:27.199
deal with a power company. Don't
want the power company. You benefit from

683
00:49:27.199 --> 00:49:32.199
my generated power, and you know, so there is that, but I

684
00:49:32.239 --> 00:49:37.800
don't care about that. I care
about a low monthly bill, and I

685
00:49:37.960 --> 00:49:40.159
don't want to you know, if
the power goes out, I got you

686
00:49:40.239 --> 00:49:45.800
have power two weeks worth of power
in that propane tank. Yeah, that's

687
00:49:45.840 --> 00:49:47.719
compelling, right, and just you
got to keep you got to take You

688
00:49:47.719 --> 00:49:52.840
have to store that fuel, right, and it does gauge like you have

689
00:49:52.880 --> 00:49:55.440
to use it up eventually, and
it cost a certain amount to refill.

690
00:49:55.760 --> 00:50:00.840
Uh, and the machine takes maintenance. You know, batteries are pretty stable,

691
00:50:00.880 --> 00:50:04.039
although they do wear out. They
don't have any maintenance. And also

692
00:50:04.199 --> 00:50:07.079
they these guys told us they wouldn't
last that long, like you wouldn't get

693
00:50:07.199 --> 00:50:12.280
no, you know, you wouldn't
get days and days no out of well

694
00:50:12.360 --> 00:50:15.760
it takes and again it's the natural
discharge cycle. You have to have a

695
00:50:15.760 --> 00:50:17.679
lot more packs if you want to
increase duration, right, and that you

696
00:50:17.679 --> 00:50:22.079
know, that's the claim to thing
for form Air. When we talked about

697
00:50:22.119 --> 00:50:27.079
them a year ago, they were
in the prototype stage. They were they

698
00:50:27.119 --> 00:50:29.840
were putting their initial project in.
It was supposed to be finished this year.

699
00:50:30.280 --> 00:50:34.880
One megawatt project in Minnesota. That
has been completed. So they actually

700
00:50:34.880 --> 00:50:37.440
delivered on time and it worked,
and Minnesota's response to that was to buy

701
00:50:37.480 --> 00:50:40.119
a bigger one. Wow. Great. So yeah, you know so many

702
00:50:40.119 --> 00:50:43.360
times to say, oh, we
were going to have our first touch bribuy

703
00:50:43.400 --> 00:50:45.599
at twenty twenty three and is just
never done. In fact, I'll bring

704
00:50:45.679 --> 00:50:47.400
up a few of these along the
way of other technologies because that's where that's

705
00:50:47.400 --> 00:50:51.199
what's happened to them. Now.
This is the lithium ion batteries. No,

706
00:50:51.320 --> 00:50:53.519
these are iron air batteri. These
are iron air batteries. Oh wow.

707
00:50:53.679 --> 00:50:57.800
Form Energy when we talked about a
year ago, they said next year

708
00:50:57.800 --> 00:51:00.559
we're going to have this first prototype
project in Minnesota. They did it.

709
00:51:00.559 --> 00:51:06.679
It worked. That was a one
megawatt pack, so one hundred and fifty

710
00:51:06.760 --> 00:51:10.239
megawatt hours. Again remember that one
hundred what discharge thing, so a much

711
00:51:10.360 --> 00:51:15.159
higher megawat hour than the actual power
can only put out one megawat but it

712
00:51:15.199 --> 00:51:20.760
could do it for one hundred and
fifty hours. Wow. So yeah,

713
00:51:20.800 --> 00:51:27.039
Minnesota is now asked for a ten
megawat thousand megawatt hour implementation, and so

714
00:51:27.239 --> 00:51:30.679
is Colorado, and the next one
to be finished or the next and then

715
00:51:30.719 --> 00:51:35.880
after that is Georgia's asked for an
even bigger one, a fifteen megawatt fifteen

716
00:51:35.960 --> 00:51:38.119
hundred megawatt hour. Now what's the
reason that they want these? Is it

717
00:51:38.159 --> 00:51:43.679
because they want to avoid brownouts or
something or they thereon lies the question like

718
00:51:43.679 --> 00:51:45.559
what are you using it for?
And so it is exactly that they have

719
00:51:45.639 --> 00:51:51.159
intermittent power sources like wind and solar, and they want need to provide power

720
00:51:51.199 --> 00:51:53.199
all the time. So what's the
alternative wind and solar? What's the normal?

721
00:51:54.079 --> 00:51:58.440
What do you light up when the
sun goes down? The normal thing

722
00:51:58.760 --> 00:52:04.559
is a natural gas peaker plant.
Natural gas paper plants are very efficient power

723
00:52:04.559 --> 00:52:08.559
plants. They're great because they take
the natural gas, they burn it in

724
00:52:08.599 --> 00:52:15.039
a turbine which spins a generator,
and then the output heat boils water to

725
00:52:15.079 --> 00:52:19.239
spend a steam turbine as well,
so they extract energy multiple times from that

726
00:52:19.320 --> 00:52:22.599
prope Pretty cool or that natural gas. They're compact they're quick to build,

727
00:52:23.320 --> 00:52:27.840
and they're efficient and they and they're
called peaker plant, the Piker plant model,

728
00:52:27.840 --> 00:52:30.119
which is a particular figure figuration,
can be lit up in minutes,

729
00:52:30.679 --> 00:52:34.000
so as the solars, you know, the sun's starting to go down,

730
00:52:34.039 --> 00:52:37.480
you light up this power plant and
they but they are carbon emitting, although

731
00:52:38.079 --> 00:52:45.280
they are the lowest carbon per megawatt
our electricity of the petrochemo. Now that's

732
00:52:45.360 --> 00:52:52.239
just like you know, I'm the
least poisonous of these apples. But that's

733
00:52:52.280 --> 00:52:54.679
what normally happens, right, is
you would use a gas peaker plant,

734
00:52:54.760 --> 00:53:00.000
and these look to be that replacement. So they don't that they have more

735
00:53:00.000 --> 00:53:04.199
more the enough power to last a
couple of days until there's enough solar you

736
00:53:04.280 --> 00:53:07.559
know, so that's the trend there
and form energy, you know, more

737
00:53:07.559 --> 00:53:13.239
power to them. These are one
hundred million dollar projects. They're not incredibly

738
00:53:13.280 --> 00:53:19.280
costly in the in the world of
energy technologies. So they're having some success.

739
00:53:19.320 --> 00:53:23.880
It's just going to take time to
scale the government. There are other

740
00:53:23.920 --> 00:53:28.800
countries that there are other places that
are ordering these things. They run roughly

741
00:53:29.639 --> 00:53:35.320
ten percent the price of the equivalent
lithium ion. Wow. Cheap, yeah,

742
00:53:35.400 --> 00:53:37.360
but improvement that being said, I
don't think that's the best news and

743
00:53:37.400 --> 00:53:43.199
power storage this year. Oh really
Yeah, My favorite story in twenty twenty

744
00:53:43.199 --> 00:53:47.719
three actually comes out of the Australian
National University. So they did a pumped

745
00:53:49.000 --> 00:53:54.800
hydro storage study worldwide. Wait,
I heard about this and it might have

746
00:53:54.880 --> 00:53:59.360
been something that we even talked about. Well, I certainly was excited about

747
00:53:59.360 --> 00:54:00.840
it. I saw it on TV
or son. I don't know what I

748
00:54:00.880 --> 00:54:05.519
said, but but yeah, go
ahead. Well what they did they started

749
00:54:05.519 --> 00:54:07.719
in Australia and they ended up going
all over the world because we have such

750
00:54:07.760 --> 00:54:12.760
good maps now. But the essential
idea was this pump storage. There's a

751
00:54:12.760 --> 00:54:15.320
bunch of it. It exists today. In fact, many existing hydro electric

752
00:54:15.360 --> 00:54:19.760
dams are also adding pump storage tom
as well, which means there's at times

753
00:54:20.239 --> 00:54:23.360
when they have excess electricity, which
you never used to have. Right,

754
00:54:23.440 --> 00:54:29.320
And until grid scale, solar and
wind came along, extra electricity was not

755
00:54:29.440 --> 00:54:32.119
a thing. If you were making
more power you need, you turned down,

756
00:54:32.360 --> 00:54:37.440
you turned off the plant, right. But as more access of power

757
00:54:37.440 --> 00:54:39.559
has been peering on the grid,
ways to store to become more relevant,

758
00:54:39.559 --> 00:54:44.320
and so the idea that hey,
we're making too much power from solar right

759
00:54:44.360 --> 00:54:49.480
now, So pump the water back
into the dam as a way to store

760
00:54:49.519 --> 00:54:52.599
that energy, knowing that when you
need it you can now let it back

761
00:54:52.639 --> 00:54:55.639
down through a turbine to general electricity. Okay, that wasn't the thing that

762
00:54:55.679 --> 00:55:01.280
I heard about. I heard about
hot sand, heating up sand and using

763
00:55:01.320 --> 00:55:08.480
that to store energy because the sand
holds on to heat longer, and then

764
00:55:08.599 --> 00:55:14.880
using that when you have you know, when you need yeah, yeah,

765
00:55:14.679 --> 00:55:17.400
yeah, alternative energy storage. Yeah. And there's lots of experiments in there.

766
00:55:17.360 --> 00:55:21.519
There's the crane system and so forth. Here's the advantage of pump hydro.

767
00:55:22.280 --> 00:55:25.719
Totally known technology, right, hundreds
of years of use, right like,

768
00:55:25.800 --> 00:55:30.880
this is one of the very first
ways to general electricity, the Niagara

769
00:55:30.960 --> 00:55:37.119
Electric Project. Waterfalls capture it,
right, Niagara Falls Westinghouse. You know,

770
00:55:37.119 --> 00:55:39.800
this is the westing House Edison dual
back in the eighteen hundreds. And

771
00:55:39.840 --> 00:55:44.000
in fact, it's not just that
it was a good thing to make electricity

772
00:55:44.000 --> 00:55:47.280
from it, it also decreased erosion
at the falls. By cutting diverting a

773
00:55:47.280 --> 00:55:52.960
bunch of that water down these tunnels
to make electricity, they stop the they

774
00:55:52.960 --> 00:55:55.880
cut back the erosion rate of the
falls, right like, We always think

775
00:55:55.880 --> 00:56:00.719
about power generation as destructive to the
environment, but often and if we do

776
00:56:00.760 --> 00:56:07.280
it well, we're benefiting our environment
too, controlling damage. And so pump

777
00:56:07.400 --> 00:56:12.039
hydro is a very known technology.
We know how to do it. The

778
00:56:12.440 --> 00:56:14.800
challenge, of course, is that
if you always connected with hydro electric,

779
00:56:14.880 --> 00:56:20.480
you need something rare. And what's
rare is a water source at altitude that

780
00:56:20.559 --> 00:56:25.320
then has a location substantially lower to
it nearby, a place with a waterfall,

781
00:56:25.440 --> 00:56:30.000
essentially that has enough water to make
it worthwhile to fill up that area

782
00:56:30.039 --> 00:56:36.000
behind it as a reservoir and then
let it out under control to general electricity.

783
00:56:36.440 --> 00:56:39.880
And pump hydro doesn't require that.
The only thing you need to make

784
00:56:39.920 --> 00:56:45.920
pump hydro work is a water source
at the bottom of the hill. So

785
00:56:45.119 --> 00:56:51.239
a big enough river is enough something
right, and so then you need a

786
00:56:51.320 --> 00:56:54.599
hill and at the top of the
hill you can construct a reservoir. So

787
00:56:54.639 --> 00:57:00.639
you're going to alter the environment to
build that reservoir, but there might not

788
00:57:00.679 --> 00:57:02.440
be anything there and that's important,
and you'll throw some solar panels on top

789
00:57:02.480 --> 00:57:08.119
of it. When you're done.
It's a dedicated reservoir, so it doesn't

790
00:57:08.119 --> 00:57:12.440
have to be a major ecology and
then you drill a couple of pipes between

791
00:57:12.480 --> 00:57:15.400
the water at the bottom and the
reservo at the top, and when you

792
00:57:15.400 --> 00:57:19.400
have access energy, you pump that
water up and when you need that energy,

793
00:57:19.519 --> 00:57:24.079
let the waterfall back down. So
what the Australian research study showed is

794
00:57:24.159 --> 00:57:31.440
that there are almost six hundred thousand
sites worldwide where this would work. Wow,

795
00:57:31.800 --> 00:57:37.079
there's in most parts of the world. There is more than enough locations

796
00:57:37.119 --> 00:57:43.400
for pumped hydro for world demand.
Different parts of the world have more.

797
00:57:43.960 --> 00:57:46.719
The Canadians and the Melanesians are off
the scale. We have so much.

798
00:57:46.760 --> 00:57:52.639
We have a lot of water down
below and lots of hills. But all

799
00:57:52.679 --> 00:57:58.800
of the western world has plenty.
Northern Europe has the least. The mountain

800
00:57:58.880 --> 00:58:04.320
ranges are relatively small relative to where
their water is. Most of Africa plenty,

801
00:58:04.519 --> 00:58:07.880
certainly Australia plenty, most of Asia
plenty. Wow. That's good news.

802
00:58:08.039 --> 00:58:14.840
And so their point was, here's
a technology we know can last for

803
00:58:14.920 --> 00:58:21.199
a century with proper maintenance, we
know the costs of implementing it, and

804
00:58:21.280 --> 00:58:25.960
it will store electricity for you efficiently
in very known form, which is really

805
00:58:25.960 --> 00:58:31.719
what the energy energy wants. My
problem with any of these battery technologies is

806
00:58:31.840 --> 00:58:36.360
nobody knows what to look like in
twenty years. Really, we just haven't

807
00:58:36.400 --> 00:58:38.880
run them that long, but we've
run pomp hydro that long and longer.

808
00:58:39.519 --> 00:58:45.639
So the point we're saying was the
amount of altitude difference available in most of

809
00:58:45.679 --> 00:58:50.880
these countries with water is sufficient for
the power storage needed for those countries.

810
00:58:51.239 --> 00:58:54.039
Wow, that's great, that's such
good news. We've always argued about this

811
00:58:54.119 --> 00:58:57.679
idea that it's always going to be
this huge area of mixed use, and

812
00:58:57.760 --> 00:59:00.480
it's like you know, in a
lot of cases, wind, solar and

813
00:59:00.519 --> 00:59:06.440
pumped hydro can solve the problem.
Yeah. I'll include the links to the

814
00:59:06.519 --> 00:59:09.360
to the papers for folks who want
to read it. It was just stunning

815
00:59:09.440 --> 00:59:14.039
how effective it is, and just
just recognition of as long as you've got

816
00:59:14.039 --> 00:59:16.159
a bottle of water below and a
hill above, you make this work.

817
00:59:16.639 --> 00:59:23.079
And back in Portugal that eight hundred
megawatt pumped hydro facility was just astonishing.

818
00:59:23.119 --> 00:59:29.079
I mean that is grid scale power
just by storing water. Yeah, and

819
00:59:29.199 --> 00:59:32.400
it's and it fills that reservoir with
solar and wind amazing and land based wind.

820
00:59:32.480 --> 00:59:36.320
All right, you want to talk
a little hydrogen, let's talk hydrogen.

821
00:59:36.920 --> 00:59:43.519
Okay, I mean people always my
hydrogen car, MANA, fuel cells

822
00:59:43.519 --> 00:59:45.800
are too expensive. Thanks for playing, thanks for coming to my ted talk.

823
00:59:45.800 --> 00:59:50.119
It's just like listen, fuel cells
can only get so cheap hydrogen.

824
00:59:50.960 --> 00:59:53.960
It while a very quote unquote clean
energy, is very difficult to store and

825
00:59:54.000 --> 01:00:00.920
it's expensive to make. So right
now, commercial price for hydrogen is roughly

826
01:00:00.000 --> 01:00:06.239
five bucks a kilo or five thousand
dollars per metric ton. Now, how

827
01:00:06.239 --> 01:00:08.639
do you make hydrogen? Because hydrogen
doesn't like being on its own, It

828
01:00:08.639 --> 01:00:13.079
doesn't like being lonely. It always
finds some friends. You have to use

829
01:00:13.119 --> 01:00:16.039
electricity to split water, don't you, Well, you don't have you have

830
01:00:16.079 --> 01:00:20.840
to do some electricity. But the
main that today, if you want to

831
01:00:20.840 --> 01:00:23.199
buy commercial hydrogen, you're not going
to get it from water. You're going

832
01:00:23.199 --> 01:00:29.119
to get it from methane. Okay, You're going to use steam reformation,

833
01:00:29.280 --> 01:00:32.800
which is high temperature steam that blows
the hydrogen off and then it produces a

834
01:00:32.840 --> 01:00:37.719
ton of a bunch of carbon dioxide. So if you steam reformation, the

835
01:00:37.800 --> 01:00:40.960
number one way to make hydrogen to
day is for every ton of hydrogen,

836
01:00:42.199 --> 01:00:45.760
you make nine to twelve tons of
carbon dioxide and consume about six megawat hours

837
01:00:45.760 --> 01:00:49.400
of electricity. Well, so that's
not good. No, you don't want

838
01:00:49.400 --> 01:00:52.840
to make more carbon dioxide, Dad, We exactly so. But it's the

839
01:00:52.880 --> 01:00:55.079
cheapest way to make hydrogen right now, that's your five thousand dollars. A

840
01:00:55.119 --> 01:00:59.599
ton costs you about five grand,
but you're going to make ten tons of

841
01:00:59.599 --> 01:01:04.599
carbon in the process and consume six
megawatts of electricity for your flat. The

842
01:01:04.719 --> 01:01:12.360
Germans developed a system called methane pyrolysis
now that turns the temperature up much higher.

843
01:01:13.360 --> 01:01:16.559
So instead of six megawatt hours of
electricity, you're talking twenty five megawade

844
01:01:16.559 --> 01:01:21.480
hours of electricity, about four times
more than steam reformation. But the byproduct

845
01:01:21.519 --> 01:01:27.719
of that is solid carbon graphite,
so no CO two. You've blown the

846
01:01:28.159 --> 01:01:31.519
oxygen off as well, and you
can store that carbon or resell it.

847
01:01:31.559 --> 01:01:36.599
But the bottom line is it's not
going into the environment. It just costs

848
01:01:36.840 --> 01:01:39.599
more until you burn it. Well, I don't know how you you know,

849
01:01:40.119 --> 01:01:43.079
carbon you don't normally burn, You
make it, put in it.

850
01:01:43.320 --> 01:01:45.239
It's a lot of pencils, but
you know, yeah, yah, it's

851
01:01:45.239 --> 01:01:46.480
a lot of pencils. You make
it any things. At the minimum,

852
01:01:46.480 --> 01:01:51.119
you bury it. The electrolysis approach, the one you mention off the bat

853
01:01:51.119 --> 01:01:55.519
with electricity you take. Now you're
just taking pure air or pure water.

854
01:01:57.079 --> 01:02:00.519
You're making a ton of hydrogen.
You're gonna also make ten eight tons of

855
01:02:00.559 --> 01:02:07.199
oxygen for sixty megawat hours of electricity, so ten times more energy than what

856
01:02:07.280 --> 01:02:10.400
it took to do with steam prioralysis. But it's expensive. Isn't just a

857
01:02:10.400 --> 01:02:15.280
lot of electricity? Right? And
really a lot like that's a lot of

858
01:02:15.320 --> 01:02:20.039
electricity. And by the way,
what can you do with that one ton

859
01:02:20.079 --> 01:02:23.320
of hydrogen? The most efficient mechanism
we have to use that hydrogen to make

860
01:02:23.360 --> 01:02:28.280
electricity is the fuel cell model.
Right. So now you're going to recombine

861
01:02:28.320 --> 01:02:31.159
it with hot oxygen to make it
back into water, and you're going to

862
01:02:31.199 --> 01:02:37.000
get about three point three megawatt hours
of electricity out of that one ton of

863
01:02:37.039 --> 01:02:40.840
hydrogen, So about half the amount
of energy that it costs to make that

864
01:02:40.960 --> 01:02:47.159
hydrogen from steam, or seven or
thirteen percent the amount of energy it took

865
01:02:47.199 --> 01:02:52.199
to make it with pyrolysis, or
five percent of what it would take to

866
01:02:52.199 --> 01:02:59.199
make it with electrolysis. But that's
fine. We always have an overhead,

867
01:02:59.400 --> 01:03:04.719
you know it takes energy to find
oil, It takes energy to mine oil,

868
01:03:04.800 --> 01:03:07.000
It takes energy to move oil,
It takes energy to refine oil.

869
01:03:07.360 --> 01:03:10.960
It takes energy to get that refined
product into your vehicle for you to use

870
01:03:12.000 --> 01:03:15.480
it. Right, Yes, there
are always overheads and energy to producing other

871
01:03:15.599 --> 01:03:21.039
energy sources. The question is can
you store the hydrogen well, can you

872
01:03:21.079 --> 01:03:22.159
take it where you need to go, which, by the way, all

873
01:03:22.199 --> 01:03:27.840
of those things is that's very hard, right, The math is not on

874
01:03:28.039 --> 01:03:34.679
hydrogen side unless we're making electricity very
very cheaply. You don't use hydrogen to

875
01:03:34.719 --> 01:03:39.079
make electricity necessarily. You use it
when you want to move it around,

876
01:03:39.719 --> 01:03:43.320
right, You put it in a
vehicle, or you take things that are

877
01:03:43.320 --> 01:03:46.519
normal that would normally be polluting and
make them non What about making the hydrogen

878
01:03:46.679 --> 01:03:51.480
on site so it doesn't have to
move But that's a great point, and

879
01:03:51.519 --> 01:03:57.840
also making it with electricity that would
otherwise be wasted like solar panels. So

880
01:03:58.079 --> 01:04:02.519
back to our modern energy economy.
Our modern energy e commomy has access energy

881
01:04:02.559 --> 01:04:09.679
available and that's where these strategies can
occasionally be useful and it is happening.

882
01:04:10.559 --> 01:04:14.280
So in the Netherlands there is a
hospital called the Rienjet Iced or the Eastern

883
01:04:14.400 --> 01:04:18.679
State Hospital, and they have a
hydrogen electrolysis facility built into the hospital.

884
01:04:18.840 --> 01:04:21.800
So they have a bunch of solar
panels and wind and so when they have

885
01:04:21.840 --> 01:04:29.199
access energy, which they often do, they electoralize water into hydrogen ouxygen and

886
01:04:29.280 --> 01:04:34.800
they use both. I remember the
hospitals need oxygen, so rather than using

887
01:04:34.920 --> 01:04:40.199
energy to bring oxygen to the hospital, they're producing that eight parts oxygen to

888
01:04:40.280 --> 01:04:45.800
one part hydrogen and using that oxygen
in the hospital. And then when they

889
01:04:45.800 --> 01:04:49.440
build up enough hydrogen, they run
a fuel still to provide electricity into the

890
01:04:49.480 --> 01:04:56.239
hospital. So expensive, yes,
relatively speaking, non emitting, right,

891
01:04:56.440 --> 01:04:59.199
Like you think of all the carbon
emissions that are taking off the table by

892
01:04:59.199 --> 01:05:02.440
producing their run off for the hospital
and by taking that access energy they don't

893
01:05:02.519 --> 01:05:06.239
need. It's being produced during the
day and then you're burning it at and

894
01:05:06.239 --> 01:05:11.800
you're using it as hydrogen to make
electricity at night. So to me,

895
01:05:11.880 --> 01:05:15.199
this is very appealing. It's the
in between part. It's not grid scale

896
01:05:15.639 --> 01:05:20.199
and it's not residential scale. It's
institution scale. But we kind of like

897
01:05:20.280 --> 01:05:25.280
that, especially when we talk about
nuclear which I believe is the last thing

898
01:05:25.320 --> 01:05:28.360
you want to talk about. But
I'm want to just maybe well, we'll

899
01:05:28.360 --> 01:05:32.039
get there talk about those little little
plants. I mean, I can sort

900
01:05:32.079 --> 01:05:35.679
of see where this is going,
a distributed grid kind of thing rather than

901
01:05:35.719 --> 01:05:41.679
a centralized grid. Yes, you're
exactly right. As the energy industry has

902
01:05:41.800 --> 01:05:45.840
learned to deal with more distribution,
these opportunities open up, and so the

903
01:05:45.880 --> 01:05:50.280
idea that a hospital plant, when
hospitals have an infrastructure plant, they're feeding

904
01:05:50.320 --> 01:05:56.760
a bunch of needs for the hospital
out of using access energy to supply all

905
01:05:56.800 --> 01:05:59.159
of that as well as power.
Yeap, it's good stuff. We have

906
01:05:59.599 --> 01:06:03.599
maybe on an hour left, i'd
you you're probably right, So let's take

907
01:06:03.639 --> 01:06:06.800
a second break here. Yeah,
it's going to be a long one,

908
01:06:06.840 --> 01:06:10.960
folks, so buckle up and we'll
be right back. After these important messages

909
01:06:15.719 --> 01:06:18.400
and we're back again. It's dot
net rocks geek out. Addition, you're

910
01:06:18.440 --> 01:06:21.119
not happy it's long, right,
I mean, and I'm talking to you

911
01:06:21.280 --> 01:06:24.800
as much I'm talking to the listener. It's like, no, this is

912
01:06:24.840 --> 01:06:28.000
great. I missed this. I
totally miss this. And you know,

913
01:06:28.039 --> 01:06:31.800
everybody's down for vacation for a little
bit in the wintertime, and what better

914
01:06:31.840 --> 01:06:34.719
way to spend it than with Carlin
Richard geeking out over some energy. We

915
01:06:34.719 --> 01:06:39.559
got to talk about geothermal. Okay, so last year's big story on geothermal

916
01:06:39.760 --> 01:06:43.199
was the microwave drilling technique. Do
you remember it? Yeah? I remember

917
01:06:43.239 --> 01:06:46.840
that. Yeah. It's energy intensive. But rather than remind us using a

918
01:06:46.920 --> 01:06:50.719
bit to grind the rock and then
you have to put steel sleeves in to

919
01:06:50.920 --> 01:06:57.239
support the rock, and you need
and you need pump mud and all this

920
01:06:57.400 --> 01:07:02.000
technology all from the oil industry,
they came up with this high powered microwave

921
01:07:03.119 --> 01:07:09.719
magnetron that literally vaporized the rock into
gas and then that gas adheres to the

922
01:07:09.760 --> 01:07:14.480
walls to reinforce it. It's totally
space age and it's still in development.

923
01:07:14.519 --> 01:07:16.440
I'm not going to talk about it
any more than that. The break the

924
01:07:16.559 --> 01:07:28.519
new innovations in geothermal aren't that sci
fi. They're actually adopting shale extraction technology

925
01:07:28.880 --> 01:07:33.000
like fracking. The reason that,
yes, the reason that the US is

926
01:07:33.000 --> 01:07:38.159
now a leader in oil production in
the world, is these innovations in shale

927
01:07:38.199 --> 01:07:43.320
extraction or what mostly horizontal drilling.
So the trick with shale extraction, if

928
01:07:43.320 --> 01:07:45.639
you ever get into it, I
don't recommend you do, is that they

929
01:07:45.760 --> 01:07:49.719
don't do the traditional drill down to
the oil pad. They've already done that

930
01:07:49.760 --> 01:07:53.920
most of the time. The beds
have already been drilled. Now you're trying

931
01:07:53.920 --> 01:07:55.920
to get more oil from it.
So instead, what you do is you

932
01:07:56.000 --> 01:08:00.360
drill beside the bed and you turn
the drill bed horrorzon onto and come into

933
01:08:00.360 --> 01:08:03.559
it from the side, and then
you frack it. You put an expansion

934
01:08:03.599 --> 01:08:10.159
material into it to break loose more
typically lots of natural gas and some oil

935
01:08:10.519 --> 01:08:18.000
back up the old linescure fracking is
fracturing rock. But that set of techniques

936
01:08:18.199 --> 01:08:25.359
work very well for generating geothermal power. So geothermal power is based on this

937
01:08:25.439 --> 01:08:28.960
idea that the deeper you drill down, the hotter the rock gets. The

938
01:08:29.079 --> 01:08:32.800
problem is that the drilling is the
expensive part. The plant is awesome.

939
01:08:32.880 --> 01:08:38.520
It's small, right. You're basically
pumping water down that pipe where it gets

940
01:08:38.520 --> 01:08:42.680
superheated by the rock down there.
It comes flying back up another pipe and

941
01:08:42.960 --> 01:08:45.239
spins the turbine, and then you
cool the water back down and you pump

942
01:08:45.239 --> 01:08:48.520
it again. Almost no emissions at
all. It's a complete closed loop system

943
01:08:48.640 --> 01:08:53.680
like you want this everywhere. It's
one of the tidiest plants you can possibly

944
01:08:53.720 --> 01:08:58.600
make. It's just The problem with
geothermal is the drilling is expensive, and

945
01:08:58.640 --> 01:09:01.960
the far longer you have to drill, the more costs. And the drill

946
01:09:02.199 --> 01:09:06.079
sites don't always keep working. Every
time you're slamming water down there, you're

947
01:09:06.119 --> 01:09:11.279
shocking the rock, right, and
sometimes the water doesn't come back up.

948
01:09:11.439 --> 01:09:15.600
And I think I talked about this
on one of the at least one of

949
01:09:15.640 --> 01:09:18.960
the energy geek outs. But my
uncle has a geothermal system. But it's

950
01:09:19.039 --> 01:09:25.520
not really to heat as much as
it is to equalize. Yeah. Yeah,

951
01:09:25.560 --> 01:09:30.479
the average temperature some just blows the
surface. Yeah, six feet is

952
01:09:31.239 --> 01:09:38.720
constant and it's something like what fifty
five sixty degrees generally, And so when

953
01:09:38.720 --> 01:09:43.439
it's above that, you're going to
get cooler air, and you blow a

954
01:09:43.439 --> 01:09:46.199
fan across the pipe and you can
cool your house with it without air conditioning,

955
01:09:46.239 --> 01:09:49.960
and when it's cold, you can
warm up your house. Right.

956
01:09:50.039 --> 01:09:53.239
And I mean, this is not
what we're talking about. We're talking about

957
01:09:53.279 --> 01:09:57.279
drilling down miles right, so that
we get to four hundred degree rock.

958
01:09:57.479 --> 01:10:00.399
Yeah, I'm just talking about a
heat pump. Yeah, you're talking about

959
01:10:00.520 --> 01:10:03.399
heat. I'm talking about making electricity. By making electricity, you know,

960
01:10:03.520 --> 01:10:08.479
superheated steam that spins turbines and so
need a lot of heat, and that's

961
01:10:08.520 --> 01:10:13.079
why it's violent. Right When that
water hits that rock, it's shocking.

962
01:10:13.319 --> 01:10:17.279
But the fracking industry knows a lot
about shocking rock because they were doing it

963
01:10:17.319 --> 01:10:20.920
deliberately to do oil extraction. And
that's one of the reasons for these horizontal

964
01:10:20.960 --> 01:10:26.800
drilling effects is that it gives them
an ability to poke into a hot body

965
01:10:27.319 --> 01:10:30.800
in an efficient way and be able
to slam water into there in a less

966
01:10:30.800 --> 01:10:36.479
destructive form and still use the existing
vertical pipes to take to generate pick up

967
01:10:36.479 --> 01:10:44.039
the steam. So they've been experimenting
with these combinations in Nevada and in Utah.

968
01:10:44.199 --> 01:10:47.399
Wow and from scratch, get with
moment from a bare piece of land

969
01:10:48.159 --> 01:10:54.359
with a permit to build a plant
six to twelve weeks. And again this

970
01:10:54.520 --> 01:10:58.279
is all out of the fracking because
fracking is quick, right, that was

971
01:10:58.359 --> 01:11:01.000
what it was about. They've matured
these technologies for fracking and now they can

972
01:11:01.039 --> 01:11:05.239
make geothermal power with them. So
the initial pilot plant in Nevada, just

973
01:11:05.279 --> 01:11:09.520
over the past couple of years,
he's now producing three and a half megawatts

974
01:11:09.560 --> 01:11:13.680
of electricity twenty four hours a day. Dude, this is base load power.

975
01:11:13.760 --> 01:11:16.000
So wait a minute now, so
you're saying that once they get down

976
01:11:16.119 --> 01:11:20.520
to where the heat is, then
they go sideways, and yes, so

977
01:11:20.560 --> 01:11:26.840
they drilled down eight thousand feet in
Nevadah. Then they turn sideways for three

978
01:11:26.920 --> 01:11:30.600
thousand feet tay into the body on
the side. So now you have a

979
01:11:30.680 --> 01:11:35.119
three thousand foot heat coil basically basically
right. Then they have other holes on

980
01:11:35.159 --> 01:11:39.520
the other side of the body where
the steam's gonna come out, and they

981
01:11:39.560 --> 01:11:44.199
fire the water down there and it
comes up cheez. Yeah, And it'll

982
01:11:44.279 --> 01:11:49.119
work almost anywhere. So what is
the benefit over of having that long horizontal

983
01:11:49.199 --> 01:11:56.079
pipe over just having a pipe at
one place. Well, you always have

984
01:11:56.159 --> 01:11:59.079
multiple pipes because you want to go
down one side and up the other side.

985
01:11:59.279 --> 01:12:03.079
The horizontal pipe picks up the heat
more efficiently and slower. I see,

986
01:12:03.159 --> 01:12:06.600
so you have less shock effects.
Ah. Yeah, I wasn't crocking

987
01:12:06.680 --> 01:12:10.319
that. I get it now,
because you know when you go down and

988
01:12:10.319 --> 01:12:13.960
then immediately back up, it's only
that little bubble on the bottom that heats

989
01:12:14.000 --> 01:12:16.800
up exactly right. Yeah, And
so this ability to come in low on

990
01:12:16.880 --> 01:12:20.760
the hot body with the other pipes
above it, it's just more efficient.

991
01:12:20.960 --> 01:12:24.640
It makes total sense now, and
I just want you to get the idea.

992
01:12:24.640 --> 01:12:29.279
There's a bunch of different techniques they've
learned from fracking they're incorporating together to

993
01:12:29.359 --> 01:12:31.880
make power anywhere they can get to
the hot rock. It's just a question

994
01:12:31.920 --> 01:12:33.760
of how far you have to drill
down. The deeper it gets, the

995
01:12:33.800 --> 01:12:38.439
more expensive it gets. Sure,
but eight thousand feet is not that shallow.

996
01:12:39.199 --> 01:12:44.640
So then VATA plant works. So
there's a plant being developed in Utah

997
01:12:44.720 --> 01:12:47.279
for four hundred megawatts, supposed to
be online by twenty twenty six. And

998
01:12:47.359 --> 01:12:53.119
guess who's funding it? Oh?
No, Google, Oh I didn't expect

999
01:12:53.119 --> 01:12:59.000
that. Alphabet like Microsoft and most
tech companies need a lot of electricity.

1000
01:12:59.159 --> 01:13:03.920
They're building cloud data centers and they've
made a commitment one would call it greenwashing

1001
01:13:04.399 --> 01:13:10.359
to zero emission energy. And this
is an approach to solve a particular problem.

1002
01:13:11.680 --> 01:13:15.119
Demitria Philieve, one of our listeners, asked me about the energy being

1003
01:13:15.159 --> 01:13:20.159
consumed by artificial intelligence technologies, the
large language models and the like, and

1004
01:13:20.239 --> 01:13:23.880
those are all running in these cloud
data centers, and in some ways I

1005
01:13:23.920 --> 01:13:26.479
would say, yeah, it's a
lot of energy. I mean, at

1006
01:13:26.560 --> 01:13:30.880
least it's going to a better purpose. Than NFTs, but the fact that

1007
01:13:30.920 --> 01:13:34.279
it's a handful of companies that are
hosting these things, and we can put

1008
01:13:34.319 --> 01:13:41.000
pressure on those companies to have zero
emission energy doing it. And geothermal is

1009
01:13:41.000 --> 01:13:45.399
one of these base load energy sources. But if this is what matures this

1010
01:13:45.560 --> 01:13:49.880
technology enough that we can start looking
all over the world anywhere where we have

1011
01:13:50.039 --> 01:13:56.279
enough heat relatively close to the surface, that we can use these daily techniques

1012
01:13:56.319 --> 01:13:59.720
to build reliable geothermal. And that's
always been the problem, not that geothermal

1013
01:13:59.840 --> 01:14:03.199
was hard to do, that it
wasn't reliable. That in many cases with

1014
01:14:03.319 --> 01:14:09.359
new plants, within a year or
two the subterranean surface would shift and the

1015
01:14:09.439 --> 01:14:12.960
plant would stopped working and you had
to drill again, the most expensive thing

1016
01:14:13.319 --> 01:14:15.640
you had to keep doing it,
got it. But shale technologies now helped

1017
01:14:15.720 --> 01:14:20.760
us understand enough about rock bodies and
drilling technique to be able to make more

1018
01:14:20.880 --> 01:14:26.760
reliable wells fantastic and so we could
actually make power that way. Now,

1019
01:14:26.920 --> 01:14:29.319
let me do a little blast of
the past for you. Okay, do

1020
01:14:29.359 --> 01:14:32.640
you ever the super volcano episode back
in twenty eighteen, Oh yeah, episode

1021
01:14:32.680 --> 01:14:39.479
fifteen sixty four, And that came
from a paper I read from NASA planetary

1022
01:14:39.560 --> 01:14:45.159
defense. Now, normally we think
about NASA planetary events around asteroid protesteroids,

1023
01:14:45.760 --> 01:14:48.000
the Dart mission, that kind of
thing. But this was a paper about

1024
01:14:48.720 --> 01:14:56.039
how could humanity manage a super volcano
eruption? And then arguably the most important

1025
01:14:56.079 --> 01:14:59.319
supervolcano, not the only one,
but the important one is Yellowstone. And

1026
01:14:59.359 --> 01:15:04.399
so one of the things they proposed
was that you put geothermal power plants around

1027
01:15:04.479 --> 01:15:09.880
the supervolcano Culterra, because every time
you take heat out of it, you

1028
01:15:10.079 --> 01:15:13.359
decrease the risk of eruption. What
is that fancy word you use, what's

1029
01:15:13.399 --> 01:15:17.119
that caldera? Caldera? Yeah,
that's the rim edge. So one of

1030
01:15:17.159 --> 01:15:20.439
the things that super volcano. You
know, in traditional volcano, especially say

1031
01:15:20.479 --> 01:15:25.479
a pyroclastic volcano, you have that
cinder cone, the big cone that gets

1032
01:15:25.479 --> 01:15:31.840
built up as it's erupting. In
more lava flow types like Monochia, you

1033
01:15:31.920 --> 01:15:35.880
have a very liquid lava, so
you create a shield dome different shapes.

1034
01:15:36.520 --> 01:15:44.359
Supervolcanoes are so big they can't make
domes. As the bulge of magma builds

1035
01:15:44.439 --> 01:15:47.840
up under the ground, what eventually
happens is the ground collapses into it and

1036
01:15:47.880 --> 01:15:54.479
then blasts outward. And that caldera, the hole that it will make is

1037
01:15:55.079 --> 01:16:00.439
many miles across. Okay, most
of the Yellowstone Park sit, all of

1038
01:16:00.439 --> 01:16:04.920
the thermal events, all that sort
of stuff is sitting in the Yellowstone Volcano

1039
01:16:04.439 --> 01:16:10.720
super volcano called Erara. So imagine
we try not to think about it.

1040
01:16:10.880 --> 01:16:14.840
Look, vulcanology is pretty advanced these
days. We are good at predicting volcanoes.

1041
01:16:14.960 --> 01:16:17.960
We know when a volcano is coming. We can measure the small changes

1042
01:16:18.000 --> 01:16:21.439
in the ground that show us that
there's a possibility of an eruption coming.

1043
01:16:21.840 --> 01:16:28.760
So imagine we're seeing an eruption,
possible eruption coming of the Yellowstone Volcano.

1044
01:16:28.840 --> 01:16:31.800
And this is what NASA Planetary Events
was writing about. Is the trick is

1045
01:16:31.840 --> 01:16:34.199
to get the heat out. If
we can take the heat out so the

1046
01:16:34.279 --> 01:16:39.079
rock stay stronger, it doesn't get
too plasticized, we can stop the eruption.

1047
01:16:39.800 --> 01:16:44.880
So you take these fracking techniques.
You drill all around the caldera and

1048
01:16:45.119 --> 01:16:46.920
you pump water down to cool it, and while you're out it, you

1049
01:16:46.960 --> 01:16:50.920
make electricity. So it sounds like
poking the bees nest to me. Well,

1050
01:16:51.199 --> 01:16:54.920
without a doubt, it has to
be done right. Yeah, the

1051
01:16:55.359 --> 01:16:58.199
alternative was we just wait for the
thing to go off and destroy the United

1052
01:16:58.239 --> 01:17:00.840
States, Like, well, that's
not good. You've got that is a

1053
01:17:00.920 --> 01:17:04.279
known outcome, and probably to strike
Vancouver as well, wouldn't it. Well

1054
01:17:04.359 --> 01:17:08.720
it'll go east, right, like, that's largely what would happen in that

1055
01:17:09.119 --> 01:17:11.600
that eruption. And we talked about
this in the Super Bowl Kino show.

1056
01:17:12.000 --> 01:17:15.880
Is you take a multi hundred mile
swath due east all the way to the

1057
01:17:16.119 --> 01:17:21.960
to the cboard right like, it
would be bad, bad the I ninety

1058
01:17:23.159 --> 01:17:27.920
You're gonna need one hell of a
shut of snowplow for that anyway. All

1059
01:17:27.960 --> 01:17:32.279
right, So, so getting back
to this idea of putting fracking vents all

1060
01:17:32.319 --> 01:17:36.520
around the caldera, yeah, I
mean, is a good one. Well,

1061
01:17:36.560 --> 01:17:42.399
it's an interesting idea. It speaks
to again skill sets we're developing as

1062
01:17:42.439 --> 01:17:45.760
a civilization. And I'm also I'm
equating it back to like the way that

1063
01:17:46.279 --> 01:17:50.920
the erosion of the Niagara Valley was
controlled by generating electricity with hydro electric.

1064
01:17:51.479 --> 01:17:55.640
We've just had a couple of very
serious eruptions in Iceland, YEP. And

1065
01:17:55.680 --> 01:17:59.479
it's been it's maybe happening over months
like and there by the way, there

1066
01:17:59.520 --> 01:18:03.560
is a small hydro electric plant nearby. This current set of eruptions in isolated,

1067
01:18:04.279 --> 01:18:08.239
what if there were more? Too
small? No, I think it's

1068
01:18:08.279 --> 01:18:13.159
very feasible. Like that plant by
itself was already running. It had enough

1069
01:18:13.199 --> 01:18:15.680
heat as it is, right,
But could we get to a reaction time

1070
01:18:15.720 --> 01:18:19.600
around this where we're started to see
ground disturbances and potential magnabila. It's like,

1071
01:18:20.079 --> 01:18:24.199
let's drop a few more drills in
here and we'll make some more electricity

1072
01:18:24.199 --> 01:18:28.359
and maybe we can cool us down. I'd want to experiment a lot with

1073
01:18:28.439 --> 01:18:33.319
it. But just geothermal is not
just a good power a low emission based

1074
01:18:33.359 --> 01:18:39.640
load power source, it also has
the potential significant benefits for us directing volcanic

1075
01:18:39.680 --> 01:18:44.600
behavior. So, now that you've
scared our audience into thinking that the the

1076
01:18:44.720 --> 01:18:49.800
United States is going to blow up, what is the thought on when the

1077
01:18:50.000 --> 01:18:55.840
big one will happen? Well,
that particular super volcano, as we talked

1078
01:18:55.840 --> 01:19:00.279
about back in that show in July
of twenty eighteen, has we have your

1079
01:19:00.319 --> 01:19:08.880
evidence of eruptions roughly every six hundred
thousand years. There's been three different ones

1080
01:19:09.239 --> 01:19:14.840
spaced about six hundred thousand years apart. Wow, And the last one was

1081
01:19:14.840 --> 01:19:17.119
about six hundred thousand years ago.
Oh jeez, I remember, now,

1082
01:19:17.199 --> 01:19:20.239
don't worry about it. Yeah,
so we're due. No, No,

1083
01:19:20.600 --> 01:19:25.319
it doesn't really work that way,
do you know? No, you know,

1084
01:19:25.760 --> 01:19:29.319
Okay, let's go plus or minus
one hundred thousand years. Yeah,

1085
01:19:29.439 --> 01:19:31.159
yeah, yeah, right, it's
not that precise, all right, But

1086
01:19:31.279 --> 01:19:33.880
yes, if you do the math
that way, if you take a three

1087
01:19:33.920 --> 01:19:38.399
point trend line and just straw it
straight out, you're there. Is that

1088
01:19:38.439 --> 01:19:41.439
actually a good way to do things? No? Yeah? Yeah? Have

1089
01:19:42.239 --> 01:19:47.359
has the US Geological Service instrumitted the
crap out of the Yellowstone Cold? You're

1090
01:19:47.439 --> 01:19:53.640
damn right the half right, so
you're all paying attention. Wow, it's

1091
01:19:53.640 --> 01:19:56.760
not going to happen anytime soon.
There's no evidence of it at this particular

1092
01:19:56.800 --> 01:20:01.079
point. But it is an interesting
aspect of geothermal power. And I'm glad

1093
01:20:01.319 --> 01:20:05.960
that we're advancing this way. Yeah, because you know, the ability to

1094
01:20:06.000 --> 01:20:11.760
take more power offline quickly. What
if instead of building a natural gas speaker

1095
01:20:11.800 --> 01:20:15.239
plant, you built a thermal a
geothermal plant instead, right, like,

1096
01:20:15.560 --> 01:20:18.760
because it was the least expensive way
to quickly build power. You know,

1097
01:20:19.479 --> 01:20:21.760
in three months, four months,
you know, a lot of these power

1098
01:20:21.760 --> 01:20:26.800
plants, we're still talking years,
many years, decades in some cases,

1099
01:20:26.840 --> 01:20:30.359
and now you're talking weeks. Yeah, that's a big deal. The number

1100
01:20:30.399 --> 01:20:34.680
would be if we built all these
plants and then got used to that steady

1101
01:20:34.680 --> 01:20:39.279
stream of power and then the whole
thing blew up, not only are we

1102
01:20:39.560 --> 01:20:45.079
like completely buried, but and probably
the end of it, but now we

1103
01:20:45.680 --> 01:20:49.199
lost our power sources as well.
If we don't do it. Weeah,

1104
01:20:49.560 --> 01:20:54.079
except that volcanoes come over time,
so as it was coming, you could

1105
01:20:54.199 --> 01:20:57.439
move things. Yeah, and you'll
have time to react. This hasn't come

1106
01:20:57.479 --> 01:21:00.600
out of the blue. This isn't
a tornado. And then you get some

1107
01:21:00.720 --> 01:21:02.680
warning. This isn't even a hurricane. This is a volcano. It takes

1108
01:21:02.720 --> 01:21:05.840
a while, and we can measure, we can see things coming. It's

1109
01:21:05.880 --> 01:21:10.840
not like one day food. Yeah, exactly. Now, generally speaking,

1110
01:21:10.880 --> 01:21:15.000
the reason we know so much about
volcanic eruptions is that we get enough warning

1111
01:21:15.000 --> 01:21:17.439
that we're able to see them coming
and watch closely as they happen and then

1112
01:21:17.520 --> 01:21:24.720
learn more. Very good, let's
move on. Yeah, the nuclear segment,

1113
01:21:24.840 --> 01:21:29.479
as you expected, is large.
And Carolyn McKay asked me on the

1114
01:21:29.600 --> 01:21:32.039
social media's it's like, hey,
you got anything new to say in the

1115
01:21:32.079 --> 01:21:34.760
space, and I'm like, yeah, not going to talk much about the

1116
01:21:34.800 --> 01:21:39.359
old stuff, but we'll talk about
the new stuff. Cool. So we've

1117
01:21:39.399 --> 01:21:45.119
been talking about small modular reactors for
many, many years, and as of

1118
01:21:45.199 --> 01:21:50.800
today, right now, at this
moment, there's still exactly none, but

1119
01:21:51.960 --> 01:21:57.920
progress is being made. So there
were two projects that I was talking about

1120
01:21:58.000 --> 01:22:01.039
last year, or they even the
year before. One of them was the

1121
01:22:01.880 --> 01:22:06.159
New Scale Project, largely based in
around Idaho, but totally an American project,

1122
01:22:06.479 --> 01:22:13.800
and that was to build six seventy
seven megawat modular reactors, really quite

1123
01:22:13.880 --> 01:22:15.680
small, so six together, it'd
be four hundred and sixty two megawats,

1124
01:22:15.680 --> 01:22:20.840
where you know traditional light water reactors
run in the three hundred to six hundred

1125
01:22:21.119 --> 01:22:27.119
per right, really six hundred even
up to gigawatt per so this was going

1126
01:22:27.199 --> 01:22:30.279
to be quite small. And they
made a deal in twenty nineteen for five

1127
01:22:30.319 --> 01:22:34.760
billion dollars that would start making power
in twenty twenty six. Then the pandemic

1128
01:22:34.880 --> 01:22:40.079
hit, and then by twenty twenty
three this year, that was now priced

1129
01:22:40.119 --> 01:22:43.720
at nine point six, from five
point three to nine point six and now

1130
01:22:43.920 --> 01:22:47.520
no start until twenty twenty nine.
And so where it was supposed to be

1131
01:22:47.560 --> 01:22:51.520
about fifty five per dollars per megawat
hour, which is reasonable. Now was

1132
01:22:51.520 --> 01:22:56.600
closer to eighty nine dollars per megawad
hour, which is unreasonable. And the

1133
01:22:56.600 --> 01:23:00.399
project's been fully canceled, and one
of the arguments against it said it was

1134
01:23:00.399 --> 01:23:03.479
a bit too small, that the
seven seven maywatt reactors are a little too

1135
01:23:03.520 --> 01:23:08.560
small. Now, I mean,
in general, what's great about small modular

1136
01:23:08.680 --> 01:23:13.920
nuke is a couple of things.
The first is the most dangerous thing about

1137
01:23:14.600 --> 01:23:21.399
nuclear power is fuel handling, right
and traditionally, in fact exclusively, every

1138
01:23:21.560 --> 01:23:30.720
reactor site handles its own fuel.
So uranium's mined in Australia are Canada's a

1139
01:23:30.760 --> 01:23:35.560
fuel locations. It's refined there into
yellow cake, and then it is shipped

1140
01:23:35.600 --> 01:23:40.079
to a factory, typically what a
Westinghouse would be the main ones. General

1141
01:23:40.079 --> 01:23:44.880
Electric does this to where they make
it into fuel rods. Those fuel rods

1142
01:23:44.920 --> 01:23:49.000
are then shipped to the power plant. The power plant handles its own fuel

1143
01:23:49.039 --> 01:23:54.600
assembly, so it now takes those
they're little little cylinders, maybe a couple

1144
01:23:54.600 --> 01:23:58.680
of two or three inches long inch
across, and they stack them into bundles,

1145
01:23:59.359 --> 01:24:03.039
and these are highly radioactive. They
open up their reactors. They take

1146
01:24:03.079 --> 01:24:06.279
a fuel rod assembly out, put
it in a into a cooling pond,

1147
01:24:06.760 --> 01:24:10.880
and then take a new assembly,
put it into the reactor, button it

1148
01:24:10.920 --> 01:24:15.840
all back up, pressurize it,
go back to work. It's very standalone

1149
01:24:15.960 --> 01:24:19.800
approach to doing things. It means
that every site, because it has to

1150
01:24:19.840 --> 01:24:25.760
handles fuels, has to qualify for
all those complex work in handling radioactive materials.

1151
01:24:25.800 --> 01:24:28.560
It's very difficult, it's costly,
and it's what it's One of the

1152
01:24:28.600 --> 01:24:32.680
things that makes this kind of power
so expensive is that each site is bespoke

1153
01:24:33.159 --> 01:24:40.279
unique in its ability to handle fuel
for its reactors. The concept behind modular

1154
01:24:40.319 --> 01:24:45.159
reactors is that you have a common
sight for manufacturing the reactor assemblies. It's

1155
01:24:45.239 --> 01:24:49.800
the only thing that handles fuel.
The production sites where you're actually going to

1156
01:24:49.840 --> 01:24:57.479
make the electricity, they receive assembled
reactors ready to run, but that are

1157
01:24:57.479 --> 01:25:02.920
then placed with a crane into a
container, typically a big concrete pool filled

1158
01:25:02.920 --> 01:25:10.399
with water, hooked up to cooling
and to the electrical grid and powered up

1159
01:25:10.760 --> 01:25:14.760
and they'll run two to three years. And at the end of those two

1160
01:25:14.800 --> 01:25:17.680
to three years you unhook them.
You take the whole reactor back out,

1161
01:25:17.680 --> 01:25:21.000
put it back on a truck and
ship it away. Now is that a

1162
01:25:21.079 --> 01:25:27.000
dangerous thing to do? Less dangerous
than shipping fuel assemblies? That's right,

1163
01:25:27.119 --> 01:25:30.520
because it's self contained exactly. Another
thing I like about that is your every

1164
01:25:30.600 --> 01:25:33.840
two or three years, you get
a chance to inspect everything and make sure

1165
01:25:33.880 --> 01:25:40.119
that it's ready to accept another reactor. Dude upgrades, Yeah, right,

1166
01:25:40.479 --> 01:25:45.079
Instead of running a reactor for thirty
years, every couple of years when you

1167
01:25:45.119 --> 01:25:46.279
go to replace it, why would
you replace it the same one? Put

1168
01:25:46.319 --> 01:25:49.600
a better one in yep, So
you're on a much better upgrade cycle.

1169
01:25:49.960 --> 01:25:54.760
If you have a problem with a
griven reactor, because it's a small reactor

1170
01:25:54.760 --> 01:25:58.760
with modern designs. Even if somehow
it failed, it's still contained, so

1171
01:25:58.840 --> 01:26:01.520
your site's not ruined. You can
take that react that damage reactor, simply

1172
01:26:01.520 --> 01:26:05.880
out ship it away and continue to
use the production site. There's one.

1173
01:26:05.960 --> 01:26:10.600
Then you have a central place away
from people. Like you generally want to

1174
01:26:10.600 --> 01:26:13.119
make your power close to people because
they're the ones who want to use it.

1175
01:26:13.680 --> 01:26:17.439
But you want to handle fuel away
from people. And so you reprocess

1176
01:26:17.520 --> 01:26:21.760
those reactors, you re make and
make new fueled ones, and then you

1177
01:26:21.800 --> 01:26:25.800
send them back in to be used
and you can constantly rotate them and you

1178
01:26:25.840 --> 01:26:28.920
can improve them. Yeah, that's
pretty cool, right. That is the

1179
01:26:29.000 --> 01:26:34.760
idea behind small modular is to make
the reactors routinely replaceable and to centralized fuel

1180
01:26:34.760 --> 01:26:39.119
handling, so we can put in
a place where the risks are low,

1181
01:26:39.600 --> 01:26:44.239
tectonically safe, doesn't need to be
near water, you know, doesn't need

1182
01:26:44.279 --> 01:26:47.800
to be near populations like these are
the advantages. It's a good idea and

1183
01:26:47.840 --> 01:26:50.840
it has been maturing. So I
told you the bad news first, that's

1184
01:26:50.880 --> 01:26:56.720
the American Project newScale. Here's the
good news. Geh Attachee has a reactor

1185
01:26:56.720 --> 01:26:59.800
they called the bwr X three hundred. We talked about it last year.

1186
01:26:59.840 --> 01:27:04.359
It's a three hundred megawatt modular reactor
in Canada to locate in Ontario, where

1187
01:27:04.439 --> 01:27:10.800
Ontario makes eighty percent of their electricity
with nuclear power. But they and they

1188
01:27:10.880 --> 01:27:15.199
largely do it with Canadian designed can
do deuteriized water reactors. They are a

1189
01:27:15.199 --> 01:27:20.039
heavy water reactor instead of a light
water reactor, so they use deuterium and

1190
01:27:20.119 --> 01:27:26.680
the main reason for that is that
they don't need enriched uranium. A uranium

1191
01:27:26.680 --> 01:27:30.600
I richment is expensive and it was
originally developed in the Manhattan Project to make

1192
01:27:30.640 --> 01:27:35.520
weapons, make bombs, and light
water reactors use that technology because one of

1193
01:27:35.560 --> 01:27:41.920
the by products of fuel reprocessing was
plutonium to make more bombs. Now we

1194
01:27:41.960 --> 01:27:46.800
don't need more bombs. We've not
ever needed more bombs. And in France,

1195
01:27:46.800 --> 01:27:51.279
who also largely makes all of their
electricity from nuclear power, they now

1196
01:27:51.399 --> 01:27:56.840
use that plutonium in their fuel rods
and they burn it. That's not happened

1197
01:27:56.880 --> 01:28:00.960
with American light water reactors for a
variety of reasons. We talked about that.

1198
01:28:00.079 --> 01:28:04.000
Yeah, we've got that before in
Canada, because we have no weapons

1199
01:28:04.039 --> 01:28:08.600
programs, we did not want to
arriture aium and so we developed reactors that

1200
01:28:08.640 --> 01:28:12.560
didn't need to. But that being
said, they still have all the same

1201
01:28:12.680 --> 01:28:15.399
problems. They're a little bit more
efficient than the light water reactors, but

1202
01:28:15.439 --> 01:28:18.560
they are expensive, and they are
bespoke, and they do their own fuel

1203
01:28:18.560 --> 01:28:23.319
handling, and they need large exclusion
zones. And while we've never had a

1204
01:28:23.359 --> 01:28:28.840
major accident knock on wood, there's
an easy way to go about it.

1205
01:28:28.880 --> 01:28:35.199
So the Darlington reactor site is a
retired can Do reactor site and they were

1206
01:28:35.199 --> 01:28:39.079
trying to decide what to do with
it. They still need to make electricity.

1207
01:28:39.119 --> 01:28:41.720
They talked about putting in solar.
They've tried a lot of different things,

1208
01:28:41.880 --> 01:28:45.039
but they've come around to the modular
reactor design. So the handling fuel

1209
01:28:45.079 --> 01:28:47.600
site is going to be away from
that. Darlington is right on the on

1210
01:28:47.640 --> 01:28:54.079
the lake. They committed to a
year ago putting in putting in one of

1211
01:28:54.119 --> 01:28:58.600
these reactors. They've now are through
their second stage of certification. Is one

1212
01:28:58.640 --> 01:29:01.880
more left to go. It's gone
well enough now that they've now committed to

1213
01:29:01.960 --> 01:29:08.479
putting in four reactors instead of one. Wow, so on track for power

1214
01:29:08.560 --> 01:29:11.800
in the next by twenty twenty nine. And I know we talked about this

1215
01:29:11.880 --> 01:29:14.840
before, but just remind us,
like what did you say that? How

1216
01:29:14.840 --> 01:29:18.399
many megawatts is this little power plant? So these are three hundred megawatt reactors,

1217
01:29:18.479 --> 01:29:23.279
so four together three hundred megawatts.
Yeah, so how many homes could

1218
01:29:23.359 --> 01:29:28.039
that power? I mean, now
you're back to you know, it depends

1219
01:29:28.079 --> 01:29:31.800
on the home like a small town. When you're talking about American homes and

1220
01:29:31.840 --> 01:29:36.760
Canadian homes, very power consumptive homes, you get about one thousand homes per

1221
01:29:36.840 --> 01:29:43.439
megawatt, right, So these are
three hundred megawatt reactors. You know,

1222
01:29:43.800 --> 01:29:48.000
So you were talking about homes times
four, So yeah, you're going to

1223
01:29:48.079 --> 01:29:53.840
need more. But this is the
experimentation, right is if this works,

1224
01:29:54.239 --> 01:29:58.840
there's many more. In fact,
because Ontario has been so successful, Saskatchewan

1225
01:29:58.920 --> 01:30:03.319
is now identifying sites for the same
reactor design. They wouldn't be online til

1226
01:30:03.359 --> 01:30:06.359
twenty thirties, but they're on that
same path. Poland is going through the

1227
01:30:06.359 --> 01:30:11.359
certification process with the same reactor as
well. So there is now this sense

1228
01:30:11.399 --> 01:30:14.960
of a race of who's got the
most mature technology, who's the furthest down

1229
01:30:14.960 --> 01:30:17.920
the path you're not going to.
There's lots of small reactor designs out there.

1230
01:30:18.000 --> 01:30:21.039
Yeah, yeah, but Gee for
better or words, ghe Attachie,

1231
01:30:21.039 --> 01:30:27.840
who make conventional reactors too, now
have matured this design to a point where

1232
01:30:28.319 --> 01:30:31.479
we've now got holes in the ground
where they're supposed to go, and we

1233
01:30:31.479 --> 01:30:33.960
should and we're going to actually make
electricity for it, and they may get

1234
01:30:33.960 --> 01:30:36.840
to win this one. That's very
cool. It's good news, and it

1235
01:30:36.880 --> 01:30:41.079
is. It's good news. Progress
in size matters, Like when the argument

1236
01:30:41.159 --> 01:30:43.880
here was that what was wrong with
new Scale with seventy seven megaots is too

1237
01:30:43.880 --> 01:30:49.359
small, g Attache, it's still
truck portable at three hundred megawatts. And

1238
01:30:49.439 --> 01:30:54.399
now there's a company called ISMR that's
talking about in that same form factor being

1239
01:30:54.439 --> 01:30:58.560
able to make a thorium reactor.
So we talk about that modular design that's

1240
01:30:58.560 --> 01:31:01.239
sort of the holy grail. Yeah, and Bob Archer, one of my

1241
01:31:01.319 --> 01:31:06.119
regularistors, pinged me about can you
talk about thorium? Is there anything to

1242
01:31:06.119 --> 01:31:09.079
talk about it? And again,
I don't want to talk about old news.

1243
01:31:09.079 --> 01:31:12.359
I want to talk about new news. But there is new news in

1244
01:31:12.399 --> 01:31:16.880
Thoria, okay, but primarily out
of China. So this year twenty twenty

1245
01:31:16.920 --> 01:31:24.640
three, the Shanghai Institute has now
certified for operation a thorium reactor in China.

1246
01:31:25.359 --> 01:31:29.479
So in the Gobi Desert in the
northwest part of China there is a

1247
01:31:29.640 --> 01:31:31.359
experimental reactor site. Not a lot
of water around, by the way.

1248
01:31:32.239 --> 01:31:38.039
It's a tiny reactor to megawatts,
so really just a lab reactor. This

1249
01:31:38.199 --> 01:31:44.840
is like no, the Oakridge Laboratory
mould salt reactor of the nineteen sixties was

1250
01:31:44.880 --> 01:31:46.439
a five megawatts, so you get
a sense. This is really a small

1251
01:31:46.479 --> 01:31:50.720
reactor. But according to the Shanghai
Institute, it works well enough in tests

1252
01:31:50.720 --> 01:31:54.279
that they said, let's just make
electricity with it. Here's a ten year

1253
01:31:54.319 --> 01:31:58.399
permit. So there I'm going to
be making two megawatts of electricity and getting

1254
01:31:58.800 --> 01:32:04.199
operational practice with it. China is
incentivized somewhat. While they have some uranium

1255
01:32:04.239 --> 01:32:09.439
reserves, they have far more thorium
reserves. So with the holy grail for

1256
01:32:09.520 --> 01:32:15.880
Richard Campbell be modular thorium reactors.
There's a distinct some interesting advantages. Now

1257
01:32:15.359 --> 01:32:19.199
it depends on how the assembly.
You remember this from our thorium shows.

1258
01:32:19.239 --> 01:32:24.439
Apparently there were three different things in
motion there. I remember the molten salts.

1259
01:32:24.560 --> 01:32:29.319
Yes, so one of them is
molten salts. And understand, thorium

1260
01:32:30.520 --> 01:32:35.399
when used in a reactor becomes uranium. Anyway, it's a different isotope of

1261
01:32:35.520 --> 01:32:40.880
uranium, but it does become uranium, right. It's actually it has a

1262
01:32:40.920 --> 01:32:45.279
decay product into uranium that actually generates
the heat, so in the end it's

1263
01:32:45.319 --> 01:32:48.279
all uranium. The difference is the
ore bodies. And in China, because

1264
01:32:48.319 --> 01:32:53.920
they do a lot of rare earth
extraction, there is a mineral called monzonite,

1265
01:32:54.000 --> 01:32:56.920
which is where you get a lot
of presidonium and other rare earths,

1266
01:32:57.319 --> 01:33:01.079
but its primary element in it is
thorium. So the Chinese have a bunch

1267
01:33:01.159 --> 01:33:05.000
of thorium in tailing piles from extracting
rare earths, and they could process in

1268
01:33:05.279 --> 01:33:11.840
pure thorium and then combine it with
lithium and beryllium and fluorine to make a

1269
01:33:11.920 --> 01:33:15.520
salt that then can be run in
a thermal blanket as part of a reactor

1270
01:33:15.520 --> 01:33:21.319
assembly where it'll get bombarded from neutrons
to then become uranium two thirty three,

1271
01:33:21.359 --> 01:33:26.359
which then gets pumped through the main
fuel through the main graphite assembly and generates

1272
01:33:26.359 --> 01:33:30.479
electricity. The other things to remember
about molten salts is that because they're a

1273
01:33:30.560 --> 01:33:34.960
fluid and they are only a liquid
at four hundred degree centigrade plus, if

1274
01:33:34.960 --> 01:33:40.439
anything ever go, you have this
containment mechanism where as soon as they as

1275
01:33:40.479 --> 01:33:42.920
soon as you have a problem,
you can drop them into a storage tank

1276
01:33:42.960 --> 01:33:46.119
and and they cool down into a
solid. They operate at one atmosphere of

1277
01:33:46.119 --> 01:33:49.039
pressure. You don't need to pressurize
them to get enough heat. In fact,

1278
01:33:49.279 --> 01:33:53.000
most of the time you're dealing with
two damn much heat. They're a

1279
01:33:53.079 --> 01:33:58.199
liquid from four hundregree centigrade to fifteen
hundred degree centigrade as opposed to water,

1280
01:33:58.239 --> 01:34:00.600
which is only zero to one hundred, so you have this huge liquid temperature

1281
01:34:00.680 --> 01:34:04.680
operating range to you can work in, and so the trick then is efficient

1282
01:34:04.720 --> 01:34:08.760
ways to extract heat from that.
Why it's too hot for water, you

1283
01:34:08.840 --> 01:34:14.119
need other extraction techniques. But molten
salt reactors can run on regular uranium as

1284
01:34:14.159 --> 01:34:15.760
well as on thorium. It doesn't
really matter, so you can pick your

1285
01:34:15.760 --> 01:34:20.800
fuel. This is mostly a technique, but it's a technique has a lot

1286
01:34:20.800 --> 01:34:26.439
of inherent safety in it, and
even more importantly, you can incorporate into

1287
01:34:26.479 --> 01:34:32.560
its operation a fuel reprocessing process.
So when you're dealing with liquefied uranium,

1288
01:34:33.000 --> 01:34:38.279
you can gasify it and separate it
from the lower elements that it has,

1289
01:34:38.560 --> 01:34:43.119
and then degasify, dehydrogenate it back
into a liquid again. And so there's

1290
01:34:43.119 --> 01:34:47.399
an ability as you break uranium is
constituate components. So you remember you're bombarding

1291
01:34:47.399 --> 01:34:51.119
these uranium atoms with neutrons. Most
common reaction, not the only reaction.

1292
01:34:51.159 --> 01:34:56.600
The most common reaction is you break
them into caesium and iodide. They're radioactive

1293
01:34:56.600 --> 01:35:00.279
flavors of cesium and iodide, but
that's okay. They decay over and so

1294
01:35:00.359 --> 01:35:05.680
if you can extract that seasymaniodine out
of the fluid, you can after a

1295
01:35:05.680 --> 01:35:11.319
couple of months, have a non
radioactive sellable version of those elements, and

1296
01:35:11.359 --> 01:35:16.520
so unlike in solid reactors where those
same reactions damage the core, when you're

1297
01:35:16.520 --> 01:35:20.680
operating in a fluid, you can
keep processing the fuel until there's no fuel

1298
01:35:20.800 --> 01:35:26.720
left, and so you can pretty
much burn up all of the high actinides,

1299
01:35:26.760 --> 01:35:30.760
all the radioactive components, and be
left over with elements. So yeah,

1300
01:35:30.880 --> 01:35:34.920
I like molten salt reactors because they
get rid of the dangerous stuff in

1301
01:35:34.960 --> 01:35:40.720
the process of making electricity with it. Maybe the route to making those is

1302
01:35:40.840 --> 01:35:45.760
through modular reactors, but the really
complex form with its own integrated breeder and

1303
01:35:45.800 --> 01:35:49.159
fuel reprocessing is probably gonna be its
own form factor. But if we were

1304
01:35:49.159 --> 01:35:53.039
going to build it, we probably
would have buy now, it's just too

1305
01:35:53.079 --> 01:35:57.840
much risk, and we could manage
a bunch of risk around thorium by maturing

1306
01:35:57.880 --> 01:36:01.119
it in small reactor designs. And
in fact, there's a group in Copenhagen

1307
01:36:01.880 --> 01:36:09.720
named Copenhagen Atomics that has been developing
a container size multi reactor. So this

1308
01:36:09.800 --> 01:36:14.359
is the TEU. The industrial shipping
container eight foot by eight foot by twenty

1309
01:36:14.359 --> 01:36:17.840
foot, typically double the length to
a forty foot container. So they've been

1310
01:36:17.840 --> 01:36:21.920
trying to make a reactor that fits
into that that would work basically as a

1311
01:36:21.920 --> 01:36:26.359
small modular reactor that you could drop
off somewhere, power up, run it

1312
01:36:26.399 --> 01:36:29.960
for a couple of years, and
then replace it. And so they're using

1313
01:36:29.960 --> 01:36:33.880
a containerized model to make a demonstration
one megawatt reactor by twenty twenty five.

1314
01:36:33.960 --> 01:36:39.720
So still a bit speculative. They
have a customer that customers Indonesia. Indonesia

1315
01:36:39.960 --> 01:36:44.319
is a resource distraction country. They
have a lot of mining projects that need

1316
01:36:44.359 --> 01:36:49.720
electricity. Typically those electricities now delivered
by diesel generators. Expensive way to go.

1317
01:36:49.760 --> 01:36:51.920
You got to keep shipping diesel up
to it. So the idea you

1318
01:36:51.920 --> 01:36:57.840
could drop a container containing one megawatt
electrical power plant in it to operate in

1319
01:36:57.840 --> 01:37:01.039
a mine for a couple of years
at a time are not a real product

1320
01:37:01.079 --> 01:37:04.680
yet that's certainly on a path.
All Right, we're gonna talk a little

1321
01:37:04.720 --> 01:37:09.760
bit about fusion because there has not
been much news about fusion. And why

1322
01:37:09.880 --> 01:37:13.439
hasn't there been much news about fusion, Carl, because it's freaking hard.

1323
01:37:13.680 --> 01:37:16.119
Because they've got money. Oh,
because they've got money, Okay, and

1324
01:37:16.159 --> 01:37:20.840
they don't talk when they have money, that's right. So the two of

1325
01:37:20.880 --> 01:37:25.319
the fusion projects I've talked about a
fair bit last year, Commonwealth Fusion,

1326
01:37:25.960 --> 01:37:30.760
which raised a couple of billion dollars
off of gates at all back in the

1327
01:37:30.840 --> 01:37:34.039
day, have enough money literally to
get to a pilot project they called Spark.

1328
01:37:34.600 --> 01:37:39.279
They are still building that now.
That reactor excites me a lot for

1329
01:37:39.359 --> 01:37:43.439
a couple of reasons. The most
important reason is that they are using rebco

1330
01:37:43.640 --> 01:37:48.359
superconductors. So this is the rare
earth burium cubric oxide semiconductors that you cool

1331
01:37:48.399 --> 01:37:54.279
with liquid nitrogen instead of liquid helium. Oh okay, so they're a lot

1332
01:37:54.560 --> 01:38:01.079
less expensive and they make far more
powerful fields than niobium ten liquid helium cooled

1333
01:38:01.119 --> 01:38:08.199
supercroductive fields that are being used in
eider It the giant reactor in France that

1334
01:38:08.319 --> 01:38:13.119
is soaked up tens of billions of
dollars and still hasn't produced energy. Right,

1335
01:38:13.800 --> 01:38:16.520
is an online to even laid up
based on calculations will never be net

1336
01:38:16.520 --> 01:38:20.439
power positive. To just learn a
little more. It's a perfect system for

1337
01:38:20.479 --> 01:38:28.520
building another reactor. It's a perfect
system for job security for hand four people.

1338
01:38:29.600 --> 01:38:31.439
And then the other one that we
walked about last year was Helion,

1339
01:38:31.680 --> 01:38:36.199
who raised a five hundred million plus
in twenty twenty one, one of their

1340
01:38:36.199 --> 01:38:41.039
investors being We didn't talk about this
before, but Misasaka now because one of

1341
01:38:41.079 --> 01:38:44.920
his their investors was Sam Altman,
no kidding, nobody knew his name a

1342
01:38:44.960 --> 01:38:48.199
year ago, but they sure know
it now. Yep. The most interesting

1343
01:38:48.239 --> 01:38:55.039
piece of new Helion's reactors I mentioned
this earlier was the pulse reactor using magnetic

1344
01:38:55.039 --> 01:39:00.840
coils not only to make the fusion
detonation, but it also de collected his

1345
01:39:00.920 --> 01:39:05.119
energy. And Microsoft recently signed a
memorim of understanding because they're based out of

1346
01:39:05.159 --> 01:39:11.319
Western Washington, that they will buy
electricity from Helio for their data centers as

1347
01:39:11.399 --> 01:39:15.279
zero emission electricity. Whatever happened to
that crazy mcat guy, that Italian guy,

1348
01:39:15.520 --> 01:39:21.000
Oh god, yeah, you know, extraordinary claims, the extraordinary proof

1349
01:39:21.039 --> 01:39:27.760
and the extraordinary failed. Yeah he's
gone, but he tried to pull the

1350
01:39:27.800 --> 01:39:30.399
wool over some people's eyes a couple
of times. You know, he's not

1351
01:39:30.560 --> 01:39:35.159
alone, lots, it goes on
all the time. Our friend Martina Grahm

1352
01:39:36.039 --> 01:39:42.079
very I almost emotionally wrote on Twitter
to me about this. It's like,

1353
01:39:42.840 --> 01:39:45.479
how can we be saved? I
think she was feeling a little grim that

1354
01:39:45.560 --> 01:39:48.920
day. Cheer up, Martina.
It's bad, but it's not as bad

1355
01:39:48.920 --> 01:39:55.159
as it could be, and it
is getting better. We happen to be

1356
01:39:55.159 --> 01:40:00.600
recording it shortly after COP twenty eight, so it's the UNS Climate Change meeting

1357
01:40:00.199 --> 01:40:08.039
ended in Dubai. Backtrack to COP
three. COP three was in nineteen ninety

1358
01:40:08.039 --> 01:40:12.720
seven. That was the one in
Kyoto, Japan, and that led to

1359
01:40:12.720 --> 01:40:17.720
the Kyoto Courts, the first set
of international documents which many countries excluding the

1360
01:40:17.800 --> 01:40:23.239
United States, signed into starting to
restrict emissions. And at that time,

1361
01:40:23.359 --> 01:40:28.800
the projections were that we would raise
the average temperature of the planet by four

1362
01:40:28.800 --> 01:40:34.520
and a half degrees by twenty one
hundred and that would be catastrophic. And

1363
01:40:34.560 --> 01:40:39.359
I just want to make a point
to folks that, well, we're certainly

1364
01:40:39.399 --> 01:40:44.399
not out of the woods. Like
that projection is now over. If we

1365
01:40:44.520 --> 01:40:48.800
did nothing more in terms of changing
our power generation and emissions around the world,

1366
01:40:48.840 --> 01:40:51.680
then we've done up till this point. We wouldn't hit four and a

1367
01:40:51.720 --> 01:40:56.680
half degrees. That's good news.
I guess we've lowered the number. Like

1368
01:40:57.119 --> 01:41:00.920
the argument is, were about a
third of the way there in that twenty

1369
01:41:01.000 --> 01:41:04.840
years between or twenty five years between
COP three and COP twenty eight. We

1370
01:41:04.960 --> 01:41:12.399
have made substantial strides. It's not
enough, but it's not like it's futile.

1371
01:41:12.840 --> 01:41:16.000
We're making some progress. I know
that I've just heard something recently,

1372
01:41:16.079 --> 01:41:19.000
and I'm sorry I don't have the
numbers and figures in my head because I

1373
01:41:19.000 --> 01:41:25.720
don't remember things like you do.
But there was some promise that the United

1374
01:41:25.760 --> 01:41:31.760
States made to cut emissions by fifty
percent by the year twenty forty thinking.

1375
01:41:32.560 --> 01:41:36.000
And this was back in the early
two thousands, and we've already gotten halfway

1376
01:41:36.000 --> 01:41:40.159
there. We've cut by twenty five
percent, and a lot of that is

1377
01:41:40.279 --> 01:41:45.479
things like electric cars and retiring coal
power plants, even just switching to natural

1378
01:41:45.520 --> 01:41:49.960
gas because a became super cheap because
of tracking. We got so much of

1379
01:41:49.960 --> 01:41:54.920
it, and it is and is
very the process of getting a mationable electricity

1380
01:41:55.000 --> 01:41:59.520
from it, reducing amount of carbon
dioxide permega watt substantially. Progress has been

1381
01:41:59.560 --> 01:42:04.920
made. We just have to make
more. And I would argue that that

1382
01:42:05.119 --> 01:42:08.359
a lot came out of COP twenty
eight. I mean the crazy part.

1383
01:42:08.399 --> 01:42:10.399
It was at Dubai. Yeah,
right, right, like you're in in

1384
01:42:10.439 --> 01:42:13.920
the oil making and by the way, if you don't think it's a big

1385
01:42:13.960 --> 01:42:18.560
deal, look at how many people, how many lobbyists, how many interested

1386
01:42:18.640 --> 01:42:26.399
parties descended on that two weeks in
Dubai, like everybody was engaged and no

1387
01:42:26.479 --> 01:42:30.600
two ways about it. And the
current climate forecast, you know, in

1388
01:42:30.640 --> 01:42:35.359
twenty twenty three we hit a record. We had one day this past year

1389
01:42:35.960 --> 01:42:40.479
where the implanet on average was two
degrees above the baseline. It was a

1390
01:42:40.520 --> 01:42:45.319
peak, and it's the largest ever
recorded. The average is more like one

1391
01:42:45.319 --> 01:42:48.600
point four in the United States anyway, This July was the hottest July on

1392
01:42:48.720 --> 01:42:53.039
record ever. Yeah, ever,
and I think when we get the numbers

1393
01:42:53.039 --> 01:42:56.600
together, it'll be true for the
whole year. And that of course keeps

1394
01:42:56.600 --> 01:43:01.479
happening. In cop twenty eight weeks, they talked about if we stick to

1395
01:43:01.560 --> 01:43:04.199
our agreement by twenty fifteen, we
sure it looks like we won't. We're

1396
01:43:04.199 --> 01:43:09.960
going to get to one point seven
as the average temperature, which is bad.

1397
01:43:10.239 --> 01:43:14.720
It's got serious consequences. But the
more important part was to just do

1398
01:43:14.960 --> 01:43:18.000
that. To get to that point, we would decrease our average oil and

1399
01:43:18.000 --> 01:43:23.680
gas consumption overall by about forty five
percent. And so there was an argument

1400
01:43:23.720 --> 01:43:30.159
that we've already peaked in consuming oil
and gas, about one hundred and five

1401
01:43:30.199 --> 01:43:34.039
million barrels of oil used in a
day, and we already know that the

1402
01:43:34.039 --> 01:43:40.880
industry is avoiding putting on more refining, yeah, because it takes a decade.

1403
01:43:40.880 --> 01:43:45.279
It takes twenty five years to get
break even on a refinery. So

1404
01:43:45.439 --> 01:43:47.119
they're not incented, adam, because
they see the writing on the wall.

1405
01:43:47.399 --> 01:43:53.359
They certainly were there and fighting vociferously
against it. If we were actually going

1406
01:43:53.399 --> 01:43:57.800
to do the one point five degree
increase from the cares of cords for twenty

1407
01:43:57.840 --> 01:44:00.800
fifty, we need seventy five percent
less consumption than where we're at right now,

1408
01:44:01.640 --> 01:44:03.720
which on one hand seems impossible.
On the other hand, of just

1409
01:44:03.760 --> 01:44:06.520
talk through a whole bunch of things
we're doing that really open the door to

1410
01:44:06.640 --> 01:44:13.680
more of that going on. The
production, transport, and processing of oil

1411
01:44:13.720 --> 01:44:18.239
and gas produces about five billion tons
of CO two just last year, about

1412
01:44:18.239 --> 01:44:21.439
fifteen percent of all of the emissions. So one of the things that happens

1413
01:44:21.439 --> 01:44:26.399
when you consume less oil is you
decrease the amount of missions necessary to get

1414
01:44:26.399 --> 01:44:30.960
that oil to you to actually create
it. So there's quite a positive role

1415
01:44:30.000 --> 01:44:32.199
there, and so one of the
things came out of COP twenty eight was

1416
01:44:32.239 --> 01:44:42.760
society that there is enough known oil
sites on this planet right now to provide

1417
01:44:42.840 --> 01:44:46.760
all of the oil and gas needed
based on those projections for where we're supposed

1418
01:44:46.760 --> 01:44:53.119
to be by twenty fifty, and
so there is no need for governments to

1419
01:44:53.279 --> 01:44:57.640
subsidize long lead time extraction, which
is the reality, of course, is

1420
01:44:57.680 --> 01:45:02.319
that oil and gas industries extract trillions
of dollars with the subsidies to look for

1421
01:45:02.359 --> 01:45:05.960
oil. And so the argument you
know at COP was, you know,

1422
01:45:06.000 --> 01:45:11.199
you could take that money and put
it towards more zero emission energy generation,

1423
01:45:12.039 --> 01:45:15.319
right because you're just not going to
need if we achieve these goals, you're

1424
01:45:15.359 --> 01:45:17.279
just not going to need that long
lead time stuff. This not please the

1425
01:45:17.279 --> 01:45:21.159
industry much, yeah, because it's
not like the industry's ever going to go

1426
01:45:21.239 --> 01:45:25.479
away. If we're going to get
to the one point five scenario in twenty

1427
01:45:25.560 --> 01:45:28.640
fifty, we go from meeting one
hundred and two million barrels a day to

1428
01:45:28.720 --> 01:45:31.319
needing about twenty four and then most
of that isn't burned, Most of that

1429
01:45:31.439 --> 01:45:34.600
is lubricants, right, Like,
we're always going to need a certain amount

1430
01:45:34.600 --> 01:45:38.159
of oil and gas that's never going
to go away, right, right,

1431
01:45:38.239 --> 01:45:42.399
it's just what do you make plastics
from, although hopefully you have recyclable plastic,

1432
01:45:42.720 --> 01:45:44.920
what do you make lubricants from?
Like all of those things to go

1433
01:45:44.960 --> 01:45:47.920
into that. So you know,
at twenty four million barrels a day,

1434
01:45:49.239 --> 01:45:54.399
only seventy five percent will be used
for something other than combustion. Yeah,

1435
01:45:54.439 --> 01:45:58.479
and that was pretty exciting, right, a great combination. And here and

1436
01:45:58.520 --> 01:46:03.800
lies the problem is that there's a
reason why governments subsidized oil and gas extraction

1437
01:46:04.119 --> 01:46:10.560
because it's corrupting. And I would
use the example of Petroblast in Brazil.

1438
01:46:11.399 --> 01:46:13.640
I don't know if you remember the
story, but back in two thousand and

1439
01:46:13.640 --> 01:46:17.560
seven, there was big blast of
news about they'd find huge oil reserves off

1440
01:46:17.600 --> 01:46:19.920
the coast of Brazil. It's in
pretty deep water, it's going to be

1441
01:46:19.960 --> 01:46:24.680
a tricky extraction, but it was
a huge amount of oil. And you

1442
01:46:24.720 --> 01:46:30.279
know, Brazil was destined to be
the new Saudi Arabia. And Petro Brass

1443
01:46:30.279 --> 01:46:33.039
which is the national oil company of
course, is working with believe it was

1444
01:46:33.680 --> 01:46:41.880
BP on this particular project. And
over the next decade, Petro Blast got

1445
01:46:41.920 --> 01:46:45.680
billions and billions in subsidized financing and
by twenty fifteen, it became a parent

1446
01:46:45.760 --> 01:46:51.560
that everybody was on the take that
so much money was flowing around because it

1447
01:46:51.600 --> 01:46:57.920
was going to be worth decades of
oil income that they were paying off everybody,

1448
01:46:57.960 --> 01:47:01.039
all the way to Lula DeSilva himself, the president of Brazil, and

1449
01:47:01.079 --> 01:47:05.560
that led to the collapse of the
government and a big crisis in Petroblasts and

1450
01:47:05.960 --> 01:47:10.840
Balasaro came out of that. Like, the side effect of this much money

1451
01:47:11.119 --> 01:47:15.439
is some bad behavior, and one
can only look to Russia to see an

1452
01:47:15.479 --> 01:47:17.880
ongoing example of that, right,
I mean it's the oil, it's a

1453
01:47:17.920 --> 01:47:21.600
petro state. Yeah, well they're
primarily a petro state, for better or

1454
01:47:21.600 --> 01:47:30.119
worse. Yeah, So we know
the effects of when this much money comes

1455
01:47:30.119 --> 01:47:32.800
into play around these kinds of technology. So it's one of the reasons that

1456
01:47:32.800 --> 01:47:38.000
they're continuing as well as they have. And at the same time, we

1457
01:47:38.119 --> 01:47:42.319
have these options, these new projections, these new ability to build other energy

1458
01:47:42.359 --> 01:47:45.359
sources that can give us options.
So how can we be saved? Keep

1459
01:47:45.399 --> 01:47:48.640
doing what you're doing. I really
want to pass the message on it's like

1460
01:47:48.720 --> 01:47:54.920
it's not for not like we are
making success. You can work at the

1461
01:47:54.920 --> 01:47:57.119
guy if you're the kind of person
who can handle government level. If you

1462
01:47:57.199 --> 01:48:00.159
want to protest, do it right? Do you want to keep to yourself

1463
01:48:00.159 --> 01:48:02.920
on it more? Just emitting less? No, it makes a difference.

1464
01:48:03.239 --> 01:48:09.920
It's worth is that being getting electric
vehicle or switching to transit? Sure right,

1465
01:48:10.199 --> 01:48:15.319
putting solar on your roof, getting
going to heat pump heat insta instead

1466
01:48:15.319 --> 01:48:18.840
of a gas turnurse. Yeah,
all of those things are making a difference.

1467
01:48:18.920 --> 01:48:25.800
They are making progress. More needs
to be done. Can we be

1468
01:48:25.880 --> 01:48:29.319
saved. We're probably gonna make it. It's just a question of how many

1469
01:48:29.319 --> 01:48:33.960
people die unnecessarily. Yeah, that's
only really the question we're tackling. Millions

1470
01:48:33.960 --> 01:48:39.239
have already died. You look at
most of the conflicts around the world right

1471
01:48:39.279 --> 01:48:45.520
now, they generally start with a
crop failure. The Syrian Civil War started

1472
01:48:45.560 --> 01:48:48.119
with a crop failure and a tripling
of the price of bread. That makes

1473
01:48:48.159 --> 01:48:53.680
people angry when they can't feed their
family, that they're willing to do really

1474
01:48:53.840 --> 01:48:59.880
dangerous, life threatening things like fighting
against their government with violence. Libya too,

1475
01:49:00.159 --> 01:49:03.439
that government then survive. Now you've
got a bailed state. Heck,

1476
01:49:03.479 --> 01:49:08.479
all of Arab springs started with food
prices. Really wow. In me and

1477
01:49:08.560 --> 01:49:13.560
mar there was a week there was
a rice crop failure and then a group

1478
01:49:13.600 --> 01:49:18.319
of people blamed minority group called the
Rahindra and persecuted them. And now it's

1479
01:49:18.319 --> 01:49:21.159
a genocide. And they've had that
and that Jorhindra I have had to flee

1480
01:49:21.279 --> 01:49:30.399
mermar into other countries. The environmental
disasters that are killing people, they're going

1481
01:49:30.439 --> 01:49:33.600
on now, and they're only going
to get worse. We get to choose

1482
01:49:33.640 --> 01:49:38.880
how much worse it gets. We
can work on this. The side effect

1483
01:49:38.920 --> 01:49:43.640
of reducing emissions and reducing these impacts, decreasing the overall heat on the planet

1484
01:49:43.800 --> 01:49:47.760
will mean more reliable food, and
reliable food makes for happy people. Happy

1485
01:49:47.760 --> 01:49:53.359
people don't fight. Frighten people fight, well said, we are going to

1486
01:49:53.399 --> 01:50:00.199
reduce fear if we can reduce emissions. Well said mister Cambon. Sounds like

1487
01:50:00.319 --> 01:50:03.479
parting words. Okay, it's gonna
be good year. Yeah. I appreciate.

1488
01:50:03.880 --> 01:50:08.640
I appreciate the research that you do
and especially the human touch that you

1489
01:50:08.720 --> 01:50:14.439
brought there at the end. That's
a very important message. So everybody,

1490
01:50:14.520 --> 01:50:34.199
happy New Year, and we'll see
you next time on dot net rocks.

1491
01:50:30.680 --> 01:50:44.119
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1492
01:50:44.479 --> 01:50:48.399
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1493
01:50:48.439 --> 01:50:55.439
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1494
01:50:55.600 --> 01:50:58.520
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1495
01:50:58.760 --> 01:51:02.960
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1496
01:51:03.039 --> 01:51:08.680
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1497
01:51:08.720 --> 01:51:12.239
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1498
01:51:12.319 --> 01:51:15.239
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1499
01:51:16.119 --> 01:51:25.880
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