Speaker 1: How'd you like to listen to dot NetRocks with no ads? Easy?
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you that and a special dot NetRocks patron mug. Sign
up now at Patreon dot dot NetRocks dot com. Welcome back,
welcome back, Happy holidays to you, Happy New Year, and
it's time for another amazing geek out first of the year,
with yours truly and Richard Campbell. Mister Campbell, Hello, been
working on this script for days and I am happy
to be done.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, let's create a record of it, shall we? Yeah,
why don't we.
Speaker 2: The Energy geek Out of twenty twenty four. But before
we get started, I'm not going to do a better
NO framework. But I am going to roll the music,
So do that.
Speaker 1: All right too.
Speaker 2: Let's not a better NO framework, all right, And we're
going to talk about the historical events for the year
nineteen thirty one. Because one this is episode nineteen hundred
and thirty one. So on January sixth Thomas Edison submitted
his last patent application.
Speaker 1: I wonder how old he was.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't know. What do you think of Thomas Edison?
Was he really like a kind of a thief and
a jerk? You know, he also created a lot of stuff. Yeah,
so you get into a situation there, right, like, yes,
all of those things are true. Yeah, the whole battle
between him and Tesla. Yeah, yeah, where he'd solved so
much in DC power, he'd figured out metering and billing
systems and all this stuff, except for that part where
you couldn' actually distributed very well, that was a minor detaility.
So I mean he literally orchestrated killing an elephant with
AC power to meet people a frame. Remember, Like, that's
not a nice guy, No, that's not no. And I
also hear he stole a lot of patents and was
kind of a jerk.
Speaker 1: So but well, and that's sort of a running in
the act, Like who knows if he did or not?
Oh maybe to eighty four. So he died in nineteen
thirty one, all right.
Speaker 2: Continuing on February thirteenth, nineteen thirty one, New Delhi becomes
the capital of India. February twentieth, the Congress of the
United States approved the construction of the San Francisco Oakland
Bay Bridge by the state of California. On March third,
the United States adopts the Star Spangled Banner as its
national anthem. And you thought it was all about the
Revolutionary War, there you go. March nineteenth, gambling is legalized
in Nevada, because why not?
Speaker 1: What else am I to do?
Speaker 2: Sit around and glow with the aliens. March twenty fifth,
the Scottsboro Boys are arrested in Alabama in charge with rape.
In March twenty sixth. On March twenty six Ho Chi
Minh Communist Youth Union is founded in Vietnam. March thirty first,
an earthquake destroyed Managua, Nicaragua, killing two thousand people. Also
on that same day, twa flight five ninety nine crashes
near Bazaar, Kansas, killing eight, including University of Notre Dame
head football coach Knute Rockney. There's a name for you. Canute.
Wasn't Canute like one of the leaders of Sweden one
of the Kings?
Speaker 1: Probably Norway? Yeah.
Speaker 2: April fourteenth, first edition of the Highway Code is published
in Great Britain. May first, the Empire State Building is
dedicated in New York City. May twenty ninth, Michelle's Scuru,
a citizen of the United States, is executed by an
Italian military firing squad for intent to kill Benito Mussolini.
June twenty third, Wiley Post and Harold Gaddy take off
from Roosevelt Field, Long Island in an attempt to circumnavigate
the world in a single engine plane. And the reason
why you haven't heard their names more pronounced than history
is because they make it that happens. You know the
keyword there is attempt attempt. July sixteenth, the Emperor of
Ethiopia called Emperor Hile Silassie signs the nineteen thirty one
Constitution of Ethiopia called First Constitution of Ethiopia. July thirty first,
New York City experimental television station w two XAB now
known as WCBSTV, begins broadcasts. August twenty fourth, France and
the Soviet Union side a Neutrality no Attack treaty. August
twenty eighth, France and the Soviet Union sign a treaty
of non aggression. September eighteenth, the mukten incident gives Japan
the pretext to invade and occupy Manchuria. October first, The
George Washington Bridge, linking New Jersey in New York opens
October seventeenth. Al Capone's convictive income tax evasion. October twenty fourth,
George Washington Bridge opens to public traffic. November seventh, Chinese
Soviet Republic is proclaimed on the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution.
December ninth, the Constituent Cortes approves a Spanish Constitution of
nineteen thirty one, which establishes the Second Spanish Republic. And finally,
and I mean that, December eleventh, the Statue of Westminster
Parliament of the United Kingdom British Parliament establishes legislative a
quality between the UK and the dominions of the Commonwealth
of the Nation's Commonwealth, Australia, Canada, Dominion of newfound Newfoundland.
I think that's what that means.
Speaker 1: That's it. That's all I got. You have anything to add? Yeah? Sure,
how about in nineteen thirty one, the very first commercial
electric guitar went on sale or Rick and Baker A
twenty two. Wow. You know we're in between Paul barth
At African Baker and JOJ Bokche You know, there you go.
That's another.
Speaker 2: Another example of things that we thought we being United
States citizens, we thought we invented. You know, Les Paul
invented the electric guitar blah blah blah. He just kind
of perfected it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and this is the A twenty two was a
lap steel guitar, right like the Yeah, a different, different
style before you get into that, you know, semi hollow
body designs, those kinds of things like this is their
early days nineteen thirty one. Yeah, very cool. As the
first ballpoint pen, no kidding. Yeah, it wasn't Bick, was it. Nope? No,
it was in the Auto Buddhapest See there you go. Yeah,
all this time we thought Bick invented a ballpoint pen.
I think they may have scaled it substantially into everybody
can have a ballpoint pen. They were not rare.
Speaker 2: And by the way, Bick is right down the street
from me. There you go, about an hour away. Okay,
all right, shall we get started.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I got a comment from last year's Energy geek out, Okay,
just around this time of year earlier. This comment comes
from Pascal, who says, great show. I really enjoy the
geek outs. I work for a virtual power plant company.
In Canada, and i'd really like can know what Richard
thinks about them. Do you think they're helpful to reduce
the usage of peeker plants and do you think they're
useful in general in the future. Thanks for all the
years of great content. I have a question, yes, sir,
what is a virtual power plant? It's where you get
virtual power, man, I guess so it's kind of like
so here's the issue. The power industry is used to
having a handful of very large power plants that they
keep in synchronization and gear up and down to supply
power is needed, and of course they're struggling in the
modern day with more and more power demands and more
and more variability, and so the business of virtual power
plants grew up around being able to provide power to
the utility based on resources that are small. So this
is mostly a software problem, right. This is the ability
to do things like run backup generator plants or little
run of the river hydro electric like all these little
power generations, small scale wind, that kind of thing that
isn't necessarily directly controlled by the big utilities and may
distribute power in a bunch of different ways, and has
this ability to provide this sort of flexible load.
Speaker 2: So it's kind kind of like a proxy or a collection.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you're right, it's an entity. You know, this is software,
mostly software to be able to in okay, turn those
things on, connect them to the grid, let the utility
know here they are. It's even more interesting when you
talk about things like maybe vehicle to grid. You got
an electric car, we make you a deal where you
leave it plugged in, we charge your lower rate, but
once in a while we're going to take power from
the car because the grid's in trouble. I've even seen
versions of this with just being able to turn down
thermostats for heat or turn them up for cooling, because
if you're able to do that on mass you can
actually make a dent in power consumption. So, like I said,
it's mostly a software problem. It's these distributed energy resources
and being able to coordinate them. Now some energy companies
are getting more savvy to this and being able to
do it. So, you know, to Pascal's question like what
do you think they're going to look like in the future,
it says, I think this is an interim stage where
the power companies are sort of catching up with essentially
Internet technology distributed peer to peer mindsets and what their
consumers are actually using them, what they're able to produce.
So in theory this should all consolidate someday. But you know,
the VPP appeared because it served serves a problem that
exists today. Okay, So, Pascal, thank you so much your commentating.
A copy of music code by It is on its
way to you, and iview'd like a copy of music
code by. I write a comment on the website at
don at Rocks dot com or on the Facebook. We
publish every show there, and if you comment there and
every reading on the show, we'll send you a copy
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Speaker 2: And you can also get yourself a copy of music
to code By by getting us on the social media
as we've been on ex Twitter forever at Carl Franklin
at Rich Campbell, and we're on blue Sky at those
same handles, and also Masidon. I'm at Carl Franklin at
tech dot Social.
Speaker 1: And am Rich Campbell at masson social. There you go.
So where did we start this long journey? Oh my goodness, friend,
let me tell you. I A few things have happened
this past year that were interesting for me. You know,
I've been doing versions of this geek out at conferences
in an hour, and I tend to tune it to
the local country that I'm in, sure, right, So I've
talked about Portugal, and I've talked about the UK and
talked about Norway and New South Wales and so on,
which is really fun, you know. I get to read
government documents about power generation all the different places, like
I have a weird version of fun. But I also
ended up writing this year or in by the first
time I did it was in August, was strictly an
hour on nuclear power alone, just because it was it
was only getting a few minutes in the general energy conversation, right,
and folks wanted to know more. And my timing was
right because suddenly all the tech giants jumped on to
being interested in nuclear power too. Oh sure for cloud
based AI stuff. Yeah, they want to build more data
centers in the grid can support and so they're looking
for more power availability, and so my knowledge jumped and
digging into that. But I work, you know, a lot
of the work that I do on these end of
year geek outs ends up showing throughout the year and
other content, and so this is My deepest dive is
really reading up on all the latest and going over
the IA's documentation and a number of other sources and
onclude the links to where my readings for all of this.
And there's a few things that are really important, and
one of the most that impacts energy across the board
is that the cost of money went up in the
past year or so. The side effect of inflation was
raising of interest rates to counter that, and so suddenly
lending policies have shifted.
Speaker 2: You're not talking about just the United States because that
was my experience here, but it's worldwide.
Speaker 1: Did interest rates go up worldwide everywhere? Yes? Absolutely? And
would you say.
Speaker 2: America was the cause of that or were they just
a victim of globalization.
Speaker 1: It is normal economic policy, at least in the West,
to counter inflating prices with an increase in interest rate
and slow that down, which appears to have worked. Inflation
rates have dropped. Admittedly prices haven't dropped and won't like
that's not generally a thing. In fact, it's dangerous to
try and reduce prices. That creates a thing called stagflation,
which this is not the economic s geek outside you know, yeah, yeah, Yeah.
Speaker 2: Stagflation is what happens when people have money but don't spend.
Speaker 1: It right, Because if you think prices are going to
go down, why wouldn't you wait right? Right? And that's
just it's too dangerous to do that, right, So it
makes more sense to have incomes rise to meet the
current cost of them. Okay, again, this isn't it not
an economic This is an energy show. Yes, but it
had a big impact on energy because energy projects use
a lot of money. They do a lot of borrowing
based on future returns. You spend a lot to build
out infrastructure to generate electricity, and then you make it
back over time. And these are expensive projects that can
easily go into cost overruns, and so the cost of
borrowing is a sensitive thing, which is interesting. The interesting
part of this is also that you have the bank behavior.
There's one of those things where it's like, if you
owe the bank one thousand dollars, you have a problem,
but if you own the bank a million dollars, the
bank has a problem. Yeah. So, where when cost of
lending was low and you could had rapid turnover, building
small power projects made a lot of sense. It was
cheap to borrow of the money, the returns were quick,
you could pay it down off you go right, and
big projects struggled more. But now with the cost of
lending being higher, big projects in some ways are protected
because once you've borrowed a billion dollars for a project,
you're kind of not willing to walk away from it.
The bank's days in there's more money lens. In some ways,
big projects are because they have these huge budgets are
harder to cancel.
Speaker 2: You know, we we can't talk about the economics of
energy without talking about what's expected to happen with the
next American presidency in America anyway, we anticipate that the
cost of goods, you know, at your local best buy,
you know, Chinese made goods for example, is going to
go up. And so what do we do today? Just today,
Kelly and I placed in order for a brand new
stacked washer and dryer because we needed a new one
and we aren't going to wait. So the kind of
the time is now.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's an interesting question of is that things are
things going to get cost more, costs less? It's hard
to know, and so yeah.
Speaker 2: It's true, and it really is only going to be
a problem if the tariffs go into effect because he's
kind of using them as a threat right now.
Speaker 1: It seems like bullying to me, certainly from the Canadian
side of things. But the issue here is project A
lot of projects have shuffled, and it's not that unusual
for power projects to have problems because they're expensive and
they're large and so. And the one of the things
I think that now that money has started to cost more,
we're seeing that the small that new generation technologies like
solar and wind, which are very granular you don't have
to build the whole thing all at once. You can
build just a portion of it, start generating money, and
then add more to it over time, really benefited from
low cost money, and the bigger projects didn't near as much.
You know, you kind of have to build a whole
nuclear power plant before it makes any power at all,
and it's very difficult to build those. And the other
part of this, it's become really interesting. And why these
bigger plants are becoming more interesting when money costs more
is that bigger plants tend to be more efficient. Sure,
so this idea in power generation called capacity factor, which
essentially is like you're at one hundred percent capacity factor
if you're running full power all over the time, right,
and traditional power plants still need maintenance, So they talk
about like what's the relative you know, utilization of it.
A coal power plant back in the day when fifty
to sixty percent of capacity factor that was considered good.
The funny thing is has to become less popular and antiquated,
their efficiency goes down and so their utilization is getting lower.
That top of the line combined cycle natural gas plant
sort of you're sort of go to plant if you
want to make electricity quickly today is just under sixty
percent efficient. Even a hydro electric dam. You're sort of
the largest class of non carbon producing electricity thirty to
fifty percent efficient. And this the want to I'm going
to go back to this capacity factor issue as we
talk about different methods, like I'm not going to talk
a lot about hydro and coal and things. I'm going
to talk about more of the newer stuff because these
capacity factors come into play. So, I mean, let's start
with solar, because solar had an unbelievably good year in
twenty twenty four. It is staggering how much dolar soolar
are installed, Almost six hundred gigawatts of new solar this
this past year. I was I was one of them.
Yeah you're not alone, right, which was like a twenty
percent increase. Again, it was four hundred and sixty and
twenty three. It was two hundred and fifty and twenty two.
More than half of what installed in twenty four was
just in China. China was like an inexcessive half. And
then the next four that represent about a third. Again
where the US, India, Germany and Brazil and the IA
talks about there's more than seven million people working in
photovoltaics now, so that's between the manufacturing, distribution, all the
production elements, and then the installations. This is both commercial
as well as residential. It's a huge, huge business and
it attracts a lot of talent. Australia has the highest
amount of photovoltaic per capita. A. It's a low populated country. B,
it has huge power demands and limited options, and it
has a lot of sunlight, so they have one of
the highest levels of residential solar anyway, you know, the
number two is would be unexpended by kapita the Netherlands.
Oh and again these like dense country windmills, right, and
not a lot of area to cover and so forth.
It was easy to put some solaring very quickly, and
they did. But the capacity factors on solar are not
that great. You know. You know that a given panel
can generate a certain number of watts, but it doesn't
all of the time. You know, depending on where you live,
you're going to only get a ten to twenty five
percent capacity factors. Yes, why we tend to overbuild solar
just when we have it, we have lots of it.
It's what makes variability. I think I told you Richard
last year.
Speaker 2: We had just put our solar panels on when we
did the energy geek out, and we went with a
company that had a very interesting deal. So the government
will give you subsidies if you want to buy solar
panels and install them. You get some tax breaks and
all that kind of stuff. We went with a company
that says, no, we're going to take those benefits and
we're going to lease the panels to you at a
flat rate, which is going to come in under your
average electricity bill, way under it, right, and you basically
you're the whole goal is that your bills will go
down to practically nothing. But you will have this fixed
you know, monthly fee for twenty five years, and.
Speaker 1: It basically replaces your power bill.
Speaker 2: It replaces the power bill. And the thing I like
about I don't know what happens in Canada, but down here,
our power company can just make up whatever fees they want.
You know, when you look at the bill. They raised
the rates, they doubled the rates last year, last January,
and they also add other fees as they want, and
so you could end up with you know, one thousand,
two thousand dollars monthly power bills and there's nothing you
can do about it.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Generally, with regulated sources, they have to apply to
the regulator to add fees where the regulator to proves
them there they are. And you said there's not machine doo.
So this was a good deal for us. Yeah, and
it seems to be a fairly common model. Again, it's
just playing games with how you lend money. Right. There's
an upfront cost then dispersed over time based on the yield.
And it shows the confidence in this system now that
lenders are willing to put money into that system knowing
they're going to get a return over decades. Literally decade,
and the solar panel business actually got really interesting this
year because we're starting to finally have some breakthroughs in
improving panel efficiency. So we've been living on monocrystaline panels
are the most popular kind by far. They're they're relatively expensive.
There are thin film and pol crystalines that are cheaper,
but they're slightly more efficient. The best thin films coming
at about twenty percent efficiency and the monocrystals are as
high as twenty two. And then you get into some
weird options, right, there's some focus and so forth, but
they all have questionable yields. But we've been talking about
Proov's guide solar panels for years and years and year
robs and the problem with perovskites, this is a particular
kind of crystal growth is they are efficient, like they
absorb more of the energy from the sunlight, but they
don't last. They're fragile. The only way you make a
deal for twenty five years in your solar panels is
if you have a fairly good expectation at twenty five
years and now those panels will still work. That being said,
Oxford PV has built a hybrid cell that is now
actually for sale they're starting to install them into commercial
solar sites that are running about twenty seven percent efficient,
which that's not a good way to describe how much
better these are. The better way you say, is twenty
percent more efficient than monocrystaline panels. They say they've perfected
a manufacturing technique to protect them from wear and decay,
so they don't wear any faster than the monocrystaline, which
all of these things do wear. They lose about one
or two percent per year. They think we'll only know
twenty five years from now for sure if these proscuts
are really going to last that long. But they they're
pretty confident enough that they're actually putting it on the market,
and they say they can improve efficiency further, they can
get over thirty percent and what did what did you say?
Speaker 2: How that did they improve their durability or something?
Speaker 1: That's they they're confident that they've got they've solved the
durability problem. Okay, they've come up with new ways to
seal the material to stop it from decaying, so it
should last enough that they have made it into commercial products.
So and they're selling it not in residential sites so far,
just to commercial Okay, Well, there's the red well. I mean,
commercial states tend to be on the ground standard layout,
like very conventional and good to selling into the grid
as opposed to residential, which is get figured more for
just replying power to your house right right. Solar panel
recycling has continued to expand. Last year I talked about
a company called solar Cycle in Texas who was able
to take existing solar and use solar panels, take the
metals off of them, cut the glass away, grind down
the substrates so forth, pretty much be able to reuse
the whole thing. They've opened additional facilities. Now they've got
another facility in Georgia. They're also signing agreements with solar
power companies both to take used panels and recycle them
and to sell out materials those recycled materials back to
the solar panel companies to make new panels with it.
So we're heading towards this idea of a circular economy
with solar panels. It's not a bad thing where a
certain percentage of the material in a solar panel came
from a previous generation solar.
Speaker 2: Yeah, are there any minerals or rare earth things that
need to be mined to go into your typical solar.
Speaker 1: Panel, not very much. It's mostly silicon, which is the
main substrate that they use, the monocrystal. It's mostly how
you make the crystal that matters it. It really sets
the quality of a certain amount of titanium, certain amount
of aluminium. The glass is important, and it's got certain
doping elements into it. But it's not like an electronics
device that has a lot of the rare earths in it.
Even the inverters are pretty straightforward electronics, so they don't
need a lot of exotics here. We're not trying to
make screens or CPUs or anything like that. Cool. I
did put out the word when I was working on
the street, which a minutedly. I put out the word
a couple of weeks ago that I was working on
the script and got some questions, and one of them
came from Michael Zelenski, who asked, what are the options
for excess residential solar power? Excess? You mean, what do
you do with what you don't use? H yeah, okay, yeah,
So you're generating more power than your house needs. The
typical mechanism is the grid tie or the buy back,
so you have a deal with your utility that when
you produce to at a certain level, you're going to
get a certain amount back as a credit for that
power and depending on the setup it but we already
know that that power is of questionable utility because it's
already stepped down to residential level. It doesn't necessarily flow
the other way. This isn't water and so the the
utilities don't really want to do this, which is why
they never set these deals up. It's always governments mandating it. Right. Sure,
you know the utility, that's the thing they want, right,
which is reduced to love.
Speaker 2: You don't get the energy, They just they sort of
pay you for not taking it from them. That's right,
You basically got it, so they can sell it to
someone else.
Speaker 1: But it's happening enough now that it's actually putting stress
on the grid because it does. You know, that power
does get as far as a transformer, it can create
loads of the transformer. In places like Sydney, Australia, where
residential solar is so common, they've actually had to put
in mechanisms to disconnect you from the grid wow, to
try it to stop from destabilizing the grid. Again. It
does because it doesn't flow evenly back upwards with what
it's doing is overheating transformers. Yeah, sure, And so there's
a big discussion about is there a better way to
use your excess residential solar power? Now at the simplest level,
if you've at least got some kind of monitoring going
on and your house says, hey, you know we're making
more power than we need, you can shift the load.
Now is the time to wash the dishes or fire
up the washing machine? Sure, run the dry like, just
burn you more power if you.
Speaker 2: Know how to do that, right, if you have appliances
that are smart enough to do that, yeah.
Speaker 1: Or you're present to do so. Yeah. Electric vehicle is
a good one for this, Like, it's not that these
days we have smart chargers that can actually say, hey,
the power's free right now, it's coming from solar. Let's
charge the car again. This is like, are you home
during the day when you be able to do right? No,
you get in. There are more expensive options, like there
are smart hot water tanks and heating systems HVAC systems
that we'll say, oh it's solar now, let's cool the
house more or warm the house more, or yeah.
Speaker 2: Or store the energy as heat as hot water, right,
it's hot water.
Speaker 1: Yeah. And then finally the most expensive option, which is batteries. Yeah, right,
your power walls, although there's a bunch of better battery systems.
And I'll talk about energy storage as we get further
down the path, and that gets into you doing even
more power shifting, that you can store enough power from
your free solar at your excess solar so that in
the evening you don't have to consume any power from
the grid.
Speaker 2: So we have a propane generator and like a five
hundred gallon propane tank. And the salesman when they were
talking to us about the solar panels, said, now you know,
we also do sell a battery system. I think it
was the Tesla wall probably, he says, But to tell
you the truth, you have a generator, and you know
you're you're going to get two weeks of power off
a full tank twenty four to seven, right, whereas you're
only going to get maybe a day or a day
and a half out of the battery.
Speaker 1: And it's very expensive, as you said, and I mean
addutedly pro paying costs money. Sure, So if you were
charging that battery off of excess solar effectively free and
then discharging it each night. You know you're saving a
certain amount of electricity. The question is is does the
earnout work. Those batteries are expensive, Like it could be
longer than the battery lifespan before you actually pay for
the battery for those few hours a day that you
would use. Right, there's a difference between it being a
power shifting tool where it's like my evening power consumption
comes from my battery versus a backup tool where the
mains are out and I need electricity. Right. Power shifting
is really what those power walls were for, is to
get you off the grid when the solar when it's
nighttime and you're you know, cooking food and doing all
the things in your house or a high consumption. I
also have in our house a pellet stove which we
put in in the basement. There was one here when
the house was originally built, but the owners when they left,
took it with them, So we got a pellet stove
and in the wintertime it's always on. It's either on
low at night or when it's warm, or you know,
when it's really cold. They crack it up and we
leave the door to the basement open and we get
radiant fl heating because it heats the floor right and
also comes through the through the door, So that's it's
really nice. It's just good to have options. Yeah, that's
the way I look. We burn wood for heat here
by the ocean, not that we also have electric heat,
but one of the reasons to do that is aar
wood comes from our property, so that's effectively free. But
the other one I've noticed is the heat from that
cast iron stove is very dry and in especially in
the wintertime here, it's damp, and as soon as you
light the fire up, the house dries out, like you
feel better. Yeah, it makes a huge difference, especially in
the winter, to have that heat, and there's something special
about a fire. I love fire. I read on Reddit
when I was looking on other options for excess as
solo there is a guy who's set up home assistant
to crank up the temperature in his hot tub during
the day when there's excess solar too hot to get in,
but he's just I'm not going to get in until night.
But normally I have to run the thing for an
hour to make it warm enough to sit in, So
if there's excess solar, I just overheat my hot tub
and then by night time when we want to get
in it, it's nice and warm. And it was for free.
Speaker 2: So we have a whirlpool tub. I'm talking all about
my house here. Yeah, we have a whirlpool tub and
it's it's it's big. You've seen it, and it's big,
so big in fact, and it's indoors that the water
heater doesn't have enough hot water in it to fill
it with hot water. Right, how about that that's problem,
isn't that? I mean, so we don't use it because
what's the point.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Yeah, it's not hot, it's not fun. Yeah, it's
not okay. I think it's also going to say about
solar this year other than again, it's the banner year
in terms of the non carmonymitting energy source, more solar
than anything else, mostly because of Chila. Yeah. So moving
on to wind power. So we expected to put in
about one hundred gigawatts of wind in twenty three. We
actually got one hundred and twenty and we're looking at
about one hundred and thirty for twenty four. So the
growth is consistent, it's going up slightly. Wind is a
bit more efficient, and solar you get about twenty five
to forty percent capacity factor, so still well behind traditional
power plants, but you know, we're getting better doing more
offshore wind. Yeah, the onshore seems to be kind of
built out in a lot of ways. I feel like
the wind industry is matured now. We're not seeing bigger
wind turbines. They got bigger and bigger every year for
quite a while, and they've seem to have topped out
of somewhere around the fifteen megawatt range. It's a couple
of fourteens and a couple of sixteens. But they're getting
to a point now where they're so large that the
weight of the equipment is a problem and they're not lasting.
We're starting to see gearbox issues where a gearbox system
that was supposed to last for twenty years broke down
in seven and needed major repairs. So these really big
wind turbines are problematic. Yeah. I've talked about this before too.
Speaker 2: And if you come to my town, New London, Connecticut,
you look out on the state here, there's just fuselage
after fuselage, just these big white tubes because they assemble
windmills here and they're they're doing an offshore project in
Long Island Sound, and yeah.
Speaker 1: It makes and these those projects are primarily what we
call near shore or fixed bottom systems, where they literally
the works up to about fifty meters or water about
one hundred and fifty feet. They put a casement into
the water, down into the bottom. Then they pump the
water out of the casement. Then they drill a big hole,
fill it with concrete, and then put the post down.
Speaker 2: You know, it's it's kind of ironic that a hurricane
could come through and really crank up those windmills.
Speaker 1: They'd be generating a lot of power.
Speaker 2: However, the hurricane could also knock the power lines down
going to your house.
Speaker 1: And windmills run in a particular range of winds, so
they actually shut them all off for extreme wind events
like that. Yeah, they'll destroy themselves. I didn't know that
they can't move that. Not far from you, there was
a big wind project in New Jersey's waters and ended
up being canceled this year, all.
Speaker 2: Them New Jersey. I just don't want to see them
ugly windmills out there. Maybe this was more about financing.
It was taking longer to build. Costs went up substantially.
It was actually being built by a company called Orstev,
which is a Danish company, like the Danes, being one
of the most experienced groups for wind power anywhere in
the world. One of the issues they ran into, and
this is this one surprised me. I'd heard about it,
but I didn't realize it would impact wind But the
thing called.
Speaker 1: The Jones Law, I don't know about it. So the
Jones Law almost goes back to the Revolution, and it
was really about a ship that's servicing ports in the US.
Going from one US port to another has to be
registered in the US. Okay, that's the law, Okay. And
so the fact that they needed a ship that went
back and forth for maintenance from New Jersey out to
the windmills and back again meant it had to be
licensed in the US, which is very expensive. In fact,
it is so expensive that the situations like shipping a
liquefied natural gas from Louisiana up to New England, the
US doesn't do it. It is cheaper for them to
sell the gas from Louisiana to another country and then
buy natural gas from another country to bring to New England. Okay,
that's really strange. Because of the costs of licensing and
operating ships in license in the US. Wow, so it's
like a two hundred year old law. It probably needs
some updating. I would think, Yeah, weird little impediments. I've
a little highlights on wind before we get into the
nitty gritty details. This year, for a few hours, Ireland,
a very windy place, operated entirely on wind power. What
the whole country, the whole country for a while for
a few hours during a particularly windy time that all
of the electrical generation was win. That's impressive. Yeah, it
just shows how much when they've got the UK Land,
they've gone big on wind. They've got lots of shallow
water that they can put these wind turbines up on,
and they build them big. The big business now for
wind turbines. A lot of that easy area, those fifty
meters or less waters largely are allocated and being built out.
So wind growth is going to slow until we can
really mature floating wind turbines. Right. They have their own
problems in British Columbia. Here, our water's all too deep.
I get past fifty meters inside of my house. The
water is very deep here, and so you need to
have floating wind turbines, and generally these rigs are good
up to but at least three hundred and fifty meters
of water and theory more. This is all oil rig technology,
but it is more expensive, is more complicated to install,
and it tends to be further away from land, and
you kind of need electricity on land, and so the
wiring going back gets costly.
Speaker 2: I'm just thinking about a floating wind turbine and the
challenges that it would take. You would have to have
some sort of ballast, their keel, something holding it down,
otherwise it'll flop around in the wind and become really unefficient. Well,
one of the benefits of a turbine is that it's rigid, Yeah,
so when the wind blows across it, it doesn't fall over.
Speaker 1: So there's a bunch of different platform approaches, right. There's
the barge approach, which is the simplest. Just imagine a
barge that you anchor it to. It's easy to toe
to get into place. It gives you working area when
you want to work on it. But it has the
most motion, right, and we talk about six degrees of
freedom when you're in the water. Heave yaw sway, surge,
pitch and roll. So heave is going up and down,
yaw is rotating side to side, sway is sliding back
and forth. Surge is moving front to back, so the
wind blows and it pushes it back. And then pitch
and roll are both rotations and two different axises. So
the anchoring process is important. And this is also a
solved problem when you think about oil rigs. Right, So
the bar just kind of the most primitive way to go.
If you get into the oilry designs, you start talking
about different spar and semi submersible designs. So one of
the ones that's being tested thoroughly is is called a
semi submersible spar so. This is three to five spars
that can be filled with water. They actually are ballasting.
One of those spars has the wind turbine on it,
and then the others are ballasted to stabilize it. And
then you have cables running onto the bottom, either in
catenary or tension, that keep it essentially stay. And what's
a spar so? Just imagine a cylinder, okay, right that,
So take a bunch of cylinders, connect them with pipes,
three to five of them, and so one of them
has the wind turbines, so I has the most load
on it, and the other ones at least two maybe
more use water ballast to offset that mass and keep
it alive. So there's a vertical yeah, verticaltical cylinder. Okay,
there's single spar approaches where you literally you just put
a floatation spar with the mast on it. They have
more tipping problems, but they're very easy to build. And
then the most complex one, the one that again comes
to the oilery industry, is the one called tension leg
where you're actually putting anchors into the bottom under tension
to hold the mouths in place, so they're quite rigid.
The problem is that it's not good with tides because
it's kind of set to its depth, so you think
kind of a minimal range of tide. They'll limit cinemarias
you can put it in and they don't fail well.
If one of those tension lines gives out for whatever reason,
you're going to tip over. So part of this is
start of figuring out what is the movement causes problems
with generation. Right serge, especially when you lean into the wind,
might actually speed up the turbine, but there there's dozens
of test projects out there. They're not past the test phase,
but they're real turbines generating real power, and they're learning
how these things work. They're still relatively expensive comparative, about
four times the price of near shore or fixed bottom. Okay,
but the price. You know, the only reason that nearshore
is as cheap as it is today is because we've
built so much of it and we know exactly what
we're doing. While we're in the experimental phase, is going
to stay expensive, but as it matures, it should cut
the price substantially. No.
Speaker 2: Last year, getting back to solar here for a minute,
last year we talked about floating solar panel rafts out
on reservoirs in places where has have there been any
new projects in that regard because I have seen nothing
over here Yea, where I live.
Speaker 1: It's it's more common, and it seems to be more
common in Europe, but it's it's totally viable. It's just
a question of can you get your grid tie. You've
got to build all the infrastructure to actually use the power.
Speaker 2: What we're talking about, if you'd missed it, is that
when you have evaporation in canals, let's say, or in reservoirs.
Evaporation is money, right, I mean, when you lose water,
that's water you can't drink if it's from a reservoir.
So some of these countries and cities are making floating
barges with solar panels on them that cover the area
of the top of the you know, of the water,
and they solve the evaporation problem and they generate energy. Yeah,
and I just thought it was a brilliant idea.
Speaker 1: It is. I mean, in California, they started covering reservoirs
with black plastic balls because they were primarily concerned about
the evaporation. And that's a lot cheaper than putting in
solar panels. True, but the solar panel approach has the
additional advantage of generating electricity. You just got to be
able to use that electricity. Yeah, so how do you
tie it in? You know, this is where the reservoir
model came in, where the excess solar then was used
to pump water back into the reservoir, presuming you have
a setup that works out. Yeah. So it's sort of
a site by side situation.
Speaker 2: That idea doesn't seem to be taking off like we
wish it would.
Speaker 1: I think it's very much. You've got to do the
calculations in each location, and there's only so many folks
who know how to figure these things out, so it's
really you know, when those folks get to the project. Okay,
but wrapping up on the floating wind project. So where
are these pilot projects happening? Norway's big on this for
two reasons. The first is their water's very deep, so
they can't do nearshore. They're going to do wind at all,
They need to do floating. They're also big on the
oil platform stuff, right they know their way around it.
They've done a lot of it. That's all that north
sea work, and in fact one of their biggest projects
right now is actually only providing power too deep sea
oil rigs nearby as they develop and perfect the technology
before they spend the money to send power all the
way back home, because when you get that far off shore,
transmitting the power back to the shore gets expensive and
they have to experiment. They're switching from using AC transmission
back to shore to DC transmission factor shore, which is
not really proven as well in deep water like this.
The UK is also doing a lot, mostly because they've
used They've filled up most of their places for fixed
bottom development, they've allocated them out, so they're starting to
do more in deeper water. You also see this happening
in France, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Japan, China, Korea. The US
does have a project called the Floating Offshore Wind Energy Shot,
which is basically recognizing that that wind power is too
expensive right now and they're trying to reduce the costs
on it as part of the inflation production. Okay, all right.
A section I hadn't talked about, you know, a couple
of years, but sort of had a little resurgence, not big.
Mostly experimental is wave power. Yeah, so wave power is
an immature technology. It's been experimented in many ways. The
ocean is remarkedly good at destroying things. This is trying
to utilize the motion from waves and tides. Sure, their
capacity factors are terrible, well, single digits, like less than temper.
That's mostly because they barely function. But there's a group
off the coast of Oregon called the Pack Wave Energy
Project that is repurposing some older wiring already in place,
part of a deal with Oregon State University to create
sites to do experiments with wavepower. So part of the
challenge if you want to build a wave power system
is getting the onshore cabling in place and the instrumentation
so forth. And so a couple of nautical miles off
the coast of Newport, Oregon, they built out the site
with the university to allow for prototype experimentation. So multiple
bays essentially areas a few one hundred yards across that
have both power wiring and control wiring, so that different
groups can come in and test one of their wave
systems without having to do all that infrastructure. It's kind
of brilliant. And these are typically turbines, right, They sometimes
turbines sometimes just like a boy that pumps oil, right,
or even compresses air. So you fationed this boy is
going up and down. Yeah, and it can build up pressure. Right.
There's a couple of different techniques and the most common
one in these days it is called a point observer absorber.
So it's a sort of a linear process. The boy
goes up, so it pull it creates some pressure and
then as it comes down it pushes that pressure in
and that you can turn into rotating motion to create power. Wow,
there's been a you know, a zero was one of
the ones I looked at that. They built a test
unit on Hawaii making about twenty kilowatts of energy. But
you know the problem here is, yes, it could make power,
but it costs more than what the power's worth. Very
really hard to make these things cost effective, and they
don't last. The Life Skill Project in Sweden they built
out eleven of these point observers with the generations they
got to put about two undred and sixty kilowats and
then a huge storm came through and destroyed them all.
Speaker 2: I imagine corrosion is a problem too.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the ocean always seems to win, right, just keeps
pounding away. So the big news this year was that
the Packwave South is going to open up a larger
facility than the original Packwave North one in about seventy
meters of water, so a little deeper that is already
connected to the grid, so you can actually try selling
power back if you want to do the experiments. If
you read up on this, you'll hear that it's wired
for twenty megawatts of power, which is true. They've got
four five megawat conduits going to four bays, four tests berths.
Nobody's making a mega wat of power with wave like
that's just a ridiculously huge number. But I hope they
get to that point five. But it's nice to see
some experimentation going on here. It's just to recognize it.
These are far away from commercial products. It's very difficult
to operate in the ocean, and it's hard to get
efficient utilization, and it's not consistent. Right. Sure, the waves
are bigger, they're smaller. You know, there's high tides, there's
low tides, so you can learn how to do them,
but it's hard to make advantages. When we talked about
this before, I talked about most of the tidal power
systems we know of are actually flood management tools right
that on the side also make electricity. I recently did
a version of the Future of Energy talk in the
Netherlands and we talk with who are flood management masters,
and they're in the process of converting an existing flood
management gait to install these little turbines one after the next.
Be able to put forty of them in. But when
they're done, it'll be ten megawats of power, like compared
to a they're one, you know, the Netherlands one nuclear
power print that produces a thousand megawats of power. Right,
It's just wave power is small and incremental, even harder
than wind in that respect. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Well, maybe next year we'll have some news about breakthrough.
Speaker 1: Well, you know, we will be fairly far along before
we release you the news. Okay, let's take a break
and then we'll talk about stories. Sounds good. We'll be
right back after these important messages.
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dot Net Rocks twenty twenty four Energy geek out with
Richard Campbell. And as a reminder, how about this as
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and that list of patrons is growing. So what's next?
Mister Campbell got a question from Kyle Nunnery on the twitters.
I believe it was when he's asking about solid state batteries,
and that just ties into power storage in general. Now
we've heard about solid state batteries and then use for forever.
It helps to try and to find what does it
mean to be a solid state battery. This is the
idea of having a solid electrolyte as opposed to a
liquid or a gel or a lead acid battery uses
lead as the cathode an anode, and the electrolyte is
actually sulfuric acid. Right, don't get that stuff on your
skin like it's bad.
Speaker 1: When they get corroded, you don't want to just put
them in the garbage. And then when you get into
more of the gel based batteries, like a lithium ion batteries,
a gel based battery, one of the problems with the
electrolytes they grow dendrites. They throw these little crystal instructures
that will eventually damage the battery and decreasely use. Can
it cause a fire? You hear about a companies constantly
talking about they got solid state batteries soon. Hyundai says
they've got a pilot production for a solid state battery
and a car for twenty twenty five. So that's supposed
to be next year, but when you dig further, you go, oh,
it's actually just a pilot. The mass p actually would
be till twenty thirty. RUSSI finding companies that sort of
manipulate the term solid state. There was recently you could
buy on Amazon a little battery charger unit, you know,
the size of a toaster. It was supposedly a solid
state battery, although it turned out yes, the electrolyte was solid,
but there were other liquids that were in it. So, okay, how.
Speaker 2: Does the what is it the catalyst and the electrolyte,
how do they How are they supposed to interact with
each other? If they're both solid, it's supposed to be
the electrons moving happily through a Rigis structure.
Speaker 1: If you know, there's a reason they still have a
release and it's got all the snake oil features, right
Like when they talk about they talk about solvecyse batteries,
they say it's going to be safer, and it's going
to be denser, and it's going to last longer, and
it's going to charge faster. It's going to julien your
fries and washing toilets, Like.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I remember graphine, Remember the promise of graphene that
had a loss in that was going to be Yeah.
Speaker 1: But again, all of the people that we're talking about
that were the researchers who were looking for money, right, Sure,
and maybe they got some money and now they're actually
building things. We're seeing products here and there. But it's
just not that simple, right turning something from something you
can build in a lab is something you can buy
on Amazon. It's a long difficult path, especially when it's new. Yes.
So on the storage side, residential power storage just ties
back into the question of what to do with access
solar is about the batteries. The good news is if
you don't want to buy power wall, you don't want
to buy Tesla, you don't have to. Lots of companies
now are making very good whole house battery systems. I
would look at Anchor and Ecoflow, but try Phase. There's
a bunch like Get and Face pick one like. They've
all got merit and they're compatible. They're comparable to what
Tesla's doing.
Speaker 2: I remember talking about liquid methane and I remember hearing
somebody on the radio a couple of years ago, now
many two years ago now talking about how some sort
of liquid. It might have been ethanol. It might have
been methanol that can be generated by electricity and then
used as a storage.
Speaker 1: Mechanism. Am I well, am I hearing things? No, there's
lots of different storage strategies out there. I mean, methane
is remarkably simple to make because it's just carbon and hydrogen,
But then you take certain amount of energy to make that,
and you're only going to get a certain amount back,
Like when you get into power storage, returns are really challenging.
Just wait, I'm going to talk about hydrogen and then
returns on their shock.
Speaker 2: I think it was methanol that I was. Yeah, turn
your excess energy into metha.
Speaker 1: So yeah, if you think about power storage for your home,
think about batteries. I'm going to talk about it at
other storage techniques, but they need size to work, and
so it doesn't make sense to really. They wouldn't work
at a home scale. They work at a grid scale. Okay,
because you know, Elon did us all a favor when
they did that bet with Australia and put a whole
bunch of power walls down in Victoria Province. This help
stabilize power which worked, which is that he proved that
grid scale batteries even possible. It's just that lithium I
own batteries are exceptionally bad at that job. You know.
Those Those batteries were designed to be light and power
dense and quick acting, which is all features you want
in a car, but isn't important for the grid. They
also have a habit of exploding sometimes and they're costly. Right.
So a spin off of some folks left Tesla to
make grid scale batteries in a company called Form Energy.
Their battery uses an iron air to which is resually
pioneered by NASA. Yes, you are storing energy in rust.
They are about the tenth the price of lithium ion batteries.
They are much heavier, they run hot, and they are large,
all things that aren't a big deal if you're just
building grid power. They also have a natural discharge cycle
of one hundred hours, as opposed to lithium ions six
hour discharge cycle. Wow, so you're talking running for days.
I've talked about them before off of Rust on Trust. Yeah,
it's hilarious, isn't it. So I brought them up a
couple of times this twenty twenty four They actually broke
ground on a power storage facility in Minnesota for Great
River Energy. This will be a one and a half
megawat storage system and because it runs for one hundred hours,
that means one hundred and fifty megawatt hours. That's real power, man,
that's not trivial. And it is expected to be operational
in twenty twenty five. It was supposed to be done
in twenty twenty three, but you know, everything takes longer. Sure,
they are raising hundreds of millions, so they're not a
little bit of money. They're making the kind of money
that allows them to build bigger factory. So they've been
built a larger factory in Virginia. They've got a new
project going into Maine that is supposed to be eighty
five megawatts, So from one point five in Minnesota to
eighty five that is much one of the largest power
storage systems ever built. Very exciting.
Speaker 2: So I suppose you just need the space, right and
Maine's got some space some degree. It's they're not that big, right,
This is not as large as like a solar array.
It takes up a lot of area to make a
gig amount of power. These do days take a certain
amount of space. But this is a question of do
you have the offsets, do you need to store that
power then use it? How long do they last in
terms of years before they start failing.
Speaker 1: Well, everything needs maintenance. But the lifespan on these iron
air browders is very good. But we don't really know
because we've never built them at this size before. We'll
not really know if they last twenty years. The last
twenty years, but the expectations are x iron air battery
is okay. There's also a concept called thermal power storage,
and this is one of these things that works at scale.
So the idea is when you have excess energy right
your solar or your wind or whatever power source you're
using that's that you can't just shut off on demand
is doing this thing. Then you heat up a substrate
sand sand, graphite. I've also seen etwos thermal storage unit.
So these just you literally have a box full of
sand with electrical heating elements in it and it'll get
up to hundreds of degrees centigrade and then you have
a set of pipes running through it that you either
pump air or water through to heat that up, make
steam to spin a turbine, or even just to provide heat.
The big one that's being built right now is in
Finland Polar Night Energy, and it is a megawatt storing
one hundred megawatt hour, so comparable to what we're talking
about a Minnesota with form energy, Except this thing is
just a silo right now. Admittedly it weighs a lot
to store a mega wat they're actually using crushed soapstone,
which is a byproduct of a factory nearby. So they're
taking waste, grinding it down into smaller pieces and piling
it into a silo that's thirteen meters high and fifteen
meters wide. Wow, that's the size of a house. But
it stores a mega want of energy and can discharge
you know, over days and days and days with about
a ninety percent efficiency. So you know, especially in some
in Finland's place that far north, bright sunny winters, but
they only you know, the days are short, so in
those days you collect a lot of sort of power.
You heat up this sand, and then you have power
available to you in storage with you know, minimal moving parts,
nothing being burned. It's just a big container of powdered soapstone.
Speaker 2: Now, I haven't seen your notes, and I don't know
if you're going to talk about this or not, but
there's always seems to be people talking about using landfill
mass to burn and clean burn. That's the key, maybe
at such a high temperature that smoke doesn't get out
and pollute. I seem to hear about this, you know,
every once in a while, But I have no idea
what the state of this potential energy sources.
Speaker 1: I hadn't planned on talking about biomass burning. I do
talk about it in the Future of energy talking. You
can find that on YouTube. Biomass tends to be an
opportunistic power generation source. So you have waste biomass like
you are a wheat pool, and so as you clean,
remove the wheat from the chaff, and so forth, you
get the wheat packaged up to be shipped. You have
all of this agro waste that comes out of it.
You can take that agro waste and burn it to
boil water and spend a turbine and make a little
with electricity. They're small and they're localized. The technique you're
talking about that has the minimum emissions is called pyrolysis.
Typically there's two weight approaches to it. You either use
a digestion process where you use bacteria to change the
material so it doesn't mean as much carbon dioxide, or
you burn it a very high temperature so that the
carbon is blown off the oxygen and you end up
with graphic individuals they're not Pyrolysis is hot, and so
it tends to use more energy than it emits. So
it's it's one of the reasons these things haven't taken off.
They're just not that easy. The fuel matters and biomass
tends to be irregular.
Speaker 2: I have a fire pit. It's a Solo brand, a
solo stove, it's called, and it has just a mechanical design.
There's I mean, it's just a it's just the shape
of it works in such a way that once the
fire gets going, the smoke is like sucked in through
holes either in the bottom or the top or something,
and it gets it's burned again, and it literally is
smokeless when it starts. Of course you have all sorts
of smoke, but when that thing gets going, you don't
see smell anything.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's still emissions, they're just not particulate, right,
So yeah, hot fires burn cleaner. Yeah, all right, let's
finish up.
Speaker 2: So the idea is, you know, landfills are full of
crap that isn't going to biod grade, and you know,
people talk about burning that stuff in some sort of
really high hot, high heat manner so as to not
be as polluting.
Speaker 1: But anyway, it's going to cost a lot of energy.
It's all. If we had access energy, it's possibility. It's
a way to clean up the mass, but it's not
a way to make power. Okay, all right, finishing up storage.
China put online the largest flywheel energy storage system in
the world in ding Lundon. It's one hundred and twenty
flywheels able to generate about thirty megawatts of energy. So
what are we talking about? Yeah, what does that imagine
is cylinder about two meters across and six meters long,
buried in the ground with a large metallic cylinder inside
of it that you spin up with electricity and it
has so much momentum that you can then tap that
electricity back off of it again. Okay, just a spinning flywheel.
This is one hundred and twenty of them. They're buried
in the ground for a reason. When they come apart,
they fly, so you keep them in the ground to
keep them safe. They don't start power for very long.
They're good for stabilizing the grid, so if you're switching,
you know solars coming down because it's night and you're
powering up your other plants. As the power gets a
little unstable, these flywheels really come into play. It's the
largest in the world. The second largest, the one that
it beat out was actually in Stevens Style in New
York Beacon Power. It's a twenty megawat system. So these
are not that weird. They but they don't scale particularly
well and they don't start power for long. They're great
for the several minutes where you need to stabilize the grid.
They're not designed to run for days. Got it. Power
storage The largest in the world is pump tydro right,
that's pumping water uphills so you can let it flow
back downhill. Has about an eighty ninety percent efficiency ratio.
Today there's about one hundred and twenty five gigawatts of
pumped hydro in the world. There was a great study
I talked about last year from the Australian University about
how how many pumped hydro sites exist in the world
that could be built is the place different from a
hydro electric site where you need to have flowing water
at the top of a hill and you control it
going down to the bottom of a hill, and that
makes power. This is I have flowing water at the
bottom of a hill, right, so I put the reservoir
at the top of the hill, pump the water up there,
and bring it back down when I need it. There's
lots more sites for that. There are about two hundred
gigawatts of pump hydro indevelopment, so almost double what already exists. Wow.
So we're catching on to different ways to store power.
It's not just about batteries. There's thermal, there's gravity, lots
of choices for stormpower. Nice. All right, Let you wanted
to talk about poweralysis, It is probably a good time
to talk about hydrogen because hydrogen involves paralysis. Now, all right.
You get a lot of noise about hydrogen these days,
and there's a very good reason for it. It's good for
the oil and gas industry. Why why does the oil
and gas industry like hydrogen. I see the writing on
the wall that the pressure's on to burn less hydrocarbons,
But they own all these pipelines and things, and hydrogen
can be piped too, so instead of pumping natural gas
through those pipes, you could be piping through hydrogen. Not
that it's easy, hydrogen is remarkably good at escaping and
it's not particularly efficient, but they still it's an option
for them to keep running the infrastructure. So when you
hear about hydrogen economies, just remember that's because the oil
and gas industry likes it the most, because it's got
lots of problems. Now, it's not like we don't use
hydrogen today. It's used in industrial processes. We don't use
it for energy generation, we use it for industrial processes.
It's how you hydrogenate soybean oil. You need hydrogen, and
so the mechanism that's used to make the majority of
hydrogen today is called steam reformation, which is typically you
take methane and you blast it to blow the carbon
off the hydrogen. You store the hydrogen, you let the
carbon go as carbon dioxides. So for every ton of
hydrogen gas you make, it takes about six megawatt hours
of electricity, and you produce a ton of hydrogen at
about nine to twelve tons of carbon dioxide. It's a
messy process, but it works. And so again we will
only make a certain amount of hydrogen today for industrial processes.
But if we want to scale it up for the
so called hydrogen economy, we need to get more efficient.
That one is to get rid of the carbon dioxide.
So if you up the power consumption four times to
about twenty five megawatt hours, you can do methane pyrolysis.
So now you're blowing the oxygen, the hydrogen and carbon apart,
but you're not allowing oxygen to bind to it because
the energy levels are too high. So you get out
a ton of hydrogen and about three tons of graphite,
carbon powder and barry. If you want to secure the
carbon that way, it's questioning or use the graphite like
it's up to you. It just takes a lot of energy. Right.
The one that everybody wants, the one everybody loves, the
so called green hydrogen. The other steam reformation being gray
and making it water. It's making from water electrolysis, electronity.
So this is you've seen these experiments in your in
your science labs. Pretty easy. You can take a battery
and put two leads in water and you'll get bubbles out.
One of the bubbles will be hydrogen, the other one
will be oxygen. Beautiful. To do electrolysis at scale to
make a ton of hydrogen gas, you need about sixty
megawatts megawatt hours of energy. Okay, so ten times what
it costs to make an energy what it takes to
make a ton of hydrogen with steam reformation. You'll also
make eight tons of auction. But nobody minds that, right,
and so it's just too costly. Like here's the here's
the other equation. So I have this hydrogen gas and
I want to make electricity from it. So the most
efficient way to make energy from hydrogen right now is
in a fuel cell R right. We use these on
the Space Shuttle. They're pretty expensive and finicky machines.
Speaker 2: Reverse osmosis, I think, right, what's that reverse osmosis machine? Yeah,
kind of thing.
Speaker 1: It's a little more. Yeah, there's a protein exchange membrane.
You're basically forcing the hydrogen and auction back together. You
make water, you get electricity from it for a Typically
from a fuel cell, you'll get three point three six
megawat hours of electricity for one ton of hydrogen. You
pull the oxygen from the atmosphere. So that's about fifty
percent of the energy that it costs to break out
that hydrogen with steam reformation. It's five percent of the
energy that it costs to get it from electrolysis. So
this is a loser.
Speaker 2: It's a loser, especially when you consider electric cars are
already here and they're already efficient, and why would you
just add all these extra steps to put hydrogen in
a car. It's such a loss. Yeah, and it's hard
to store, all right, Hydrogen wants to escape. It goes
through most metals. It's the smallest atom, so it's very tough. Also,
it's tough to pump because it's a low density gas.
You've got to pump a lot more of it to
move the same amount of energy. Like methane is way
more efficient in every respect. Oh, there's another problem with hydrogen.
It goes boom.
Speaker 1: Well, so does methane. Right, we can cope with that,
but it's.
Speaker 2: Not that Yeah, Well, trying to trying to contain it
and keep it safe. You know, if you get into
an accident in a gasoline powered car, Yeah, you have
the gasoline kind of burns slow, right, so it doesn't
necessarily explode.
Speaker 1: But if you.
Speaker 2: Puncture a hydrogen tank, game over, man.
Speaker 1: Well it'll it depends. Yeah, it's not that. It's not
a fast explosive. So right now it costs about five
thousand dollars to make a mega to make a ton
of hydrogen about five bucks a kilo. They Department of
Energy is working has an initiative none of these shot
things called the hydrogen shot where they're trying to get
it down to a dollar keel or about a thousand
dollars and stuff. They don't have any way of actually
doing that. They're just trying, so it's a challenging project.
One of the areas where electrolysis kind of gets interesting
here is when you get back to that excess solar
thing or even excess wind, I mean, any of these
power generation methods where they we can't control when they generate.
They just generate. If you have access power, you could
be doing electrollsy essentially for free, but you do have
to store the hydrogen and move it and none of
that is free. Mm so, but it's still understanding that
the electrolysis is the most expensive part. It just consumes
a lot of energy. It's one of the possibilities.
Speaker 2: Well, and also given the fact that you know that
electricity could be just going right to the grid to
power electric vehicles and other things that require electricity.
Speaker 1: Yeah, or stored in batteries or thermal like strain batteries. Yeah, exactly,
it's just why do the hydrogen conversion? Exactly? That's my position.
All right, let's move on from hydrogen to geothermal cool
We're now getting into the area where geothermal power plants.
The ones that work traditional they're really efficient, like stunning
the capacity factors ninety percent. Wow, they're not big. There's
not a lot of geothermal in the world for a reason.
Most geothermal power comes from geysers Iceland, for example. So
you're looking for interface points in the earth where you
have a wet system being heated by the rock underneath it. Yea.
So places like Iceland, Indonesia, New Zealand, where they have
quite a lot of volcanic activity, they've got these geyser
basins think Yellowstone, Yeah right, so weird colored pools, occasional
spouting guysers, that kind of thing. This stuff, by the way,
all over New Zealand too. But they realize the energy
potential of it. Years ago, and so they drill into it,
put pipes down to bring that hot water up, spin
a turbine and then pump back down. It does destroy
the guys are bed in the process. These systems are
very fragile, and so as soon as you mess with
them in any way, they go away. Like one would argue,
they're more valuable as amazing tourist destinations than they are.
New Zealand destroyed a bunch of them. It's one of
the reasons that Yellowstone is so heavily protected because the
experience of any country trying to tap that power that
way is it's an industrial site after that, and they
do fail. Like you disrupt that water flow, sometimes that
water goes away. I just go right into a volcano.
You know, well, yeah, he's coming to Mount Saint Helens.
So there's the traditional geothermal is what call a wet
rock model. So you already have voids in the rock
that build up steam so that you can take that
power and so forth. But we know there's lots of
dry rock right that's very hot. It just doesn't have
water in it right, right, And you can't really pump
water into it because it's essentially in perma. So what's
happened in the past few years, and again I've talked
about this before. The companies have gotten together using fracking techniques,
so horizontal drilling combined with vertical drilling to make wet
rock structures. So they use horizontal drilling and fracking to
go into a dry rock bed. The fracking actually creates
the voids to give you a place to water. Then
you have vertical pipes coming down on one side of
that void to pump the water in, and vertical pipes
on the other side to take that hot water back
out and spinder and this we talked about this last year.
Fervo in Nevada and Utah built test plants, megawatt sized
power plants using this technique, and the big thing they
pointed out was that they even had one of them
break right then. One of the things happens when you
slam cold water down on hot rocks is those rocks
move and the water stop flowing. But they were able
to use the horizontal drilling method to re establish the bed.
So it's got possibilities and they've raised a ton of money.
In fact, Utah has now got this new project could
call Operation gigawatt where they want to start scaling out
geothermal and nuclear power to provide a farm or energy.
So they've licensed Fervo to build out a two gigawatt
geothermal power plant in Utah that would be as much
geothermal has has ever been built in the US. Wow.
Like you're really talking about doubling it. Wow, And they
are bringing the kind of money that's supposed to work.
On a previous show, I mentioned microwave drilling. So traditional
drilling uses diamond headed tips and casements and mud. So
you drill down in the ground and you're grinding up
the rock and that rock gets in the ways you
grind it up right, so you pump down a slurry
mud that helps lift that rock out of the pipe
so that you can keep drilling down. Eventually headwear is out.
You got to back all the way out, use casements
to stop the hole from classes. Like, drilling is a
complicated set of technologies. And don't even get me started
on horizontal drilling where they actually turn corners and things
with these casements. It's astonishing technology which the US leads
the world. Well, we should talk about fracking before we
wrap up here. I don't know if now it's the
right time, but we should talk about it. Sure, I
know that based on what I've learned in the last
few years, mostly from talking to you, fracking kind of
reinvented the energy boom of the United States. The US
is now export back one of the largest in the world.
Speaker 2: Yeah, also has its critics, I believe it or not.
My family is intimately involved in my bigger family. One
of my cousins out in Pennsylvania was the guy in
Bradford County who has that YouTube video of famously lighting
his tap on fire.
Speaker 1: Right, his methane was coming through his water's block, correct. Yeah.
And the oil industry did fracking very sneaky, right. Instead
of the big companies doing it, they had little groups
develop it so there was nobody to sue and they
experimented on people essentially. Yeah, they've now learned not to
drill into a water table. Yeah, but you know the
essence of this technology is to drill into non permeable
oil bearing rock, frack it to loosen the oil and extract, yeah, which.
Speaker 2: Means fracture, fracture it, and then extract the gas. And
there's also critics who say that it causes earthquakes.
Speaker 1: What do you say about that. I think it absolutely does.
But they're small and they're not fault line earthquakes. They're
not going to continue. But the bottom line is, when
you move rock to free oil, that's an earthquake. By definition,
you equaked the earth. Yeah, I guess you're right there.
Speaker 2: And so do you see fracking in the United States
continuing and expanding and perhaps being exported elsewhere.
Speaker 1: Well, other countries have rejected it, other countries have embraced it.
The US is a net oil exporter for a reason
that technology works. You've noticed this not in the news
much so they've largely resolved the issues. But I don't
know an administration in recent history that didn't say drill, baby, drill.
And it's certainly changed the geopolitics of the world to
have the USB and net petrochemical exporter, so it doesn't
seem like it's going away. Last year I mentioned microwave drilling.
The company is called Quay's Energy, where they had this
high frequency microwave that would drill into the ground by
melting the rock. Very cool, very science fiction, very demoable,
not particularly practical. It's a tremendous amount of energy The
idea here was that you vaporized the rock with microwaves
and that rock would embed itself to become its own casement,
which is a cool idea. It just doesn't work at depth.
Then you need to pump more and more pressurized air
in as you're doing that, which takes more energy. It's problematic.
So it's and then looking at their funding and what's
been currently going on, I think everybody's figured out it's
not going to go anywhere, So okay, it's not a thing.
Matt Furder asked on one of the social media's about
volcanic geo thermal, which hearkens back to the super Volcano
show we did fifteen sixty four back in July twenty eighteen. Yeah,
and I just said, why not just stick a pipe
into Mount Saint Helens to see what happened. This wouldn't
be my first choice. It's kind of a messy place.
Look all of the geo thermal it exists in the US,
which is in California, Nevada, Utah is volcanic geothermal. Right,
there's called errors is young immature volcano. Magma buds all over.
That's what's heating up the water on the rock in
the first place, relatively close to the surface. There was
the reason I did that super volcano show is that
I had read the paper from NASA about how to
defeat the Yellowstone supervolcano. Right that the Yellowstone super volcano
has erupted every six hundred thousand years for the past
two point four million years, and the last eruption was
six hundred thousand years ago, which is yeah, twice the
duration that humans have existed on the planet. What would
we do if we knew it was going to happen.
We're pretty good at understanding volcanic behavior now, So if
they Yellowstone Caldera was to start rising, aka magma pressure
is building up, what could we do about that? Because
that a volcano erupting a super volcano is hard to
conceive of it's several kilometers across. Would literally drop ash
in a swath going east all the way to the
Atlantic Ocean, several hundred kilometers across, Like it would be bad. Yeah,
And so the idea was put a series of pipes
down around the cult ara, not in it, but near
the hot rock, and pump the heat away by making
electricity with it so that it never melts its way
through the crust. You just extract enough heat. Now would
we win that battle? That's a good question, because the
other side of this is you're going to make that
plug stronger and stronger as you're stucking that heat away
until it does blow even bigger. But you're also and
you'd also destroy the park in the process. But if
the choice is between destroying the country and destroying a park,
I think the park's going to lose.
Speaker 2: And when you say destroy the country, it probably would
be a little bit bigger circumference than just the country.
Speaker 1: Well, you know, you think depending on the scope of
the eruption. Yeah, I mean you remember Mount Pinituba rupted
in ninety one. It lowered the average temperature on the
planet by half a degree for a year. It sent
ash all the way around the world. When Krakatoa erupted
in the eighteen hundreds, they called that the year without
a summer, So a super volcanic eruption. The last one
was more than sixty thousand years ago. Mount Taupo could
easily create the equivalent of a nuclear winter, several years
of darkness, plant death all over the world. But the
ash fall even from a smaller version of that eruption
would be several feet deep, a few hundred miles across,
running from Wyoming to Boston right through Connecticut. That's a
lot of economic destruction. And you know, who knows how
wide that band would be. So there's a case for
could we do this now? A minutely, this was the
Planetary Defense Group. The guys were also dealing with how
did we stop asteroids the planet? So forth? So this
was another project and very speculative, but not out of realms.
You know, the old joke is the dinosaurs died out
because they didn't have a space program, right, yes, right, right.
If we knew that there was a possibility of that volcano,
that super volcano erupting, would we want to try and
stop it? Is that feasible? I wouldn't say anybody other
than Americans would even consider it and take it seriously,
but it would be possible. Yeah, all right, what's next?
I've talked about all that because it was the easy stuff.
Because now we get to talk about the hard stuff. Okay,
it's time to talk about nuclear. Nuclear. So again I've
been doing talks on nuclear I've gotten a lot of
feedback from a lot of people. I've read deeper than
ever I come to appreciate how complex the industry actually is,
or at least understand more about it. You know, we
talk about the nuclear industry being stagnant, but at the
same time it kept improving in subtle ways like that
are not that obvious. Three Mile Island really stopped nuclear
development in the US, and in Chernobyl that was seventy nine,
and in Chernobyl, you know, arguably one of the large,
one of a significant cause of the fall of the
Soviet Union, and then Fukushima and twenty eleven, you know,
that being said, this year a new nuclear power plant
went online in Georgia and Waynesboro at the Vaugdeal site.
Speaker 2: Was it a traditional nuclear power plant or it is
absolutely Did it have any modern upgrades. It's an AP
one thousand, which is a Gen three plus. So the
Vaugdeal site had its original reactors, which are all both
Westinghouse reactors built in the eighties. They went online in
eighty seven and eighty nine, one point two gigawatts each.
They just got their license extended. They're in good shape,
so they expect to run them till twenty forty seven
and twenty forty nine, respectively. So in two thousand and nine,
the Volacteal group applied to add two more reactors, which
is unusual in the US. It's always just been a
pair of reactors in each site. Other parts of the
world have more. They'll do four or eight. Chernobyl was four.
It was a reactor for that blew up.
Speaker 1: So they applied for two more in two thousand and nine,
reactors three and four. They were the first, well they
applied earlier. Now they started construction in two thousand and nine.
Was the first new reactor since three Mile Island. So
they and this was this what they call the EP
one thousand designs. So this is also Westinghouse like the
reactors already there, but this is a newer generation. One
of these is a Gen where they called Gen three plus,
certified in two thousand and five. And the whole point
here was that reactors had gotten really expensive to build,
and so the eight one thousand design was to reduce costs.
The big one was passive shutdown. The thing that caused
all the problems in Fukushima when they lost the generators
that the reactors needed water pumped through them all the
time to stop from overheating. There were actually six reactors
in Fukushima. We never hear about five and six because
they did have this passive shutdown capability, so it didn't
matter y had no power to them. They cool down
on their own. So the eight one thousands are about
not only that they passively cool down so they're safe,
but it means you don't need a lot of the
complexity in the reactor. They're talking about half as many
safety valves and eighty percent less piping on the safety systems,
a third fewer pumps, eighty five percent less control wiring
and sensors, a smaller reactor building that reduces the amount
of concrete used.
Speaker 2: Like there's all about reducing Why didn't anybody think of
this in the seventies, Well.
Speaker 1: They did, That's why they had the design. They worked
on design for ages and they finally got it certified
in two thousand and five. So, I mean it's been
twenty years since this design was improved to again to
reduce the price of building a nuclear reactor. I remember
build the safety It sounds like two thousand and nine, right.
This design was actually lie to the Chinese in two
thousand and eight, and within ten years they built four
reactors with it. Okay, I hope you see the setup
that I'm getting to here. They only paid for one.
Oh no, they've paid for all four of them, and
they've actually improved on design. They're mailing one point five
and one point seven giga wat reck Wow Cool under license.
So two thousand and nine, the estimate is fourteen billion
to build Unit three and four. By twenty twenty three,
it was up to thirty four billion when the first
Then when we unit three was done, we haven't got
the budget yet for Unit four because it got it
went up and it came online in April of this year,
twenty twenty four. So bankrupted the construction company bankrupted Westinghouse
geez right, like wow, they went into bankruptcy and recovered, right,
they got additional financing and so forth. But I want
just to understand these this is quite a disaster, and
the story of Ougdall is long. It has a lot
to do with the fact that they're hadn't been any
construction for twenty years, so a lot of the most
knowledgeable people about how to build reactors and how to
certify them. Those people didn't exist anymore, and so everything
took longer, cost more. There were foolish mistakes and it
just cost a fortune, and it doesn't have to be
that way. I would also now compare this to the
Kashizaki Krawa reactors in Japan. These were advanced boiling water reactors,
also generate three designs, where they started construction in nineteen
ninety two and finished in ninety six, operational in four years,
Like it is possible to build full size reactors in
a reasonable length at time comparable to any other kind
of large scale power plant. Wow, the Chinese didn't let
in ten the first time they ever built AP one thousands,
and they still got it done. Now admitutedly the Chinese
will cut corners, but that the Japanese can do it
in four years, admittedly on a site that already had
reactors on a design that they understood pretty well. Like,
it's doable. It just has gotten little nuts out there.
So that brings us to small modular reactors, which is
the most common question. Andrew Clark, jen Artowski Peter Luiz piqued,
all these folks are like, hey, tell us where we
are at small reactors? So why why do we want
small reactors at all? And in fact, it's got to
the point now where in some jurisdictions in Illinois they
actually vetoed a pro nuclear bill because there's pro nuclear
bills coming out these days. They vetoed the bill because
it allowed for large reactors to be built, not just small,
which is silly, like why do you care about the design?
Like just you know, nuclear has got is having a
renaissance right now in a lot of ways. And I'll
talk about more of the stuff that's going on, but yeah,
it's California plast If you want to build a nuclear
power plant in California has to be small, modular, even
though none exists. Right, So why first question is the
first reactors that we built back in the fifties and
sixties were small. They were two hundred and three hundred megawatts.
Why did we scale them up in the first place.
Why didn't we just stay Well, the reason is that
it made them better. They were more thermally efficient, for
you needed fewer people and machines per megawak produced. They
were the same size as existing power plants generation. And
so you get into the situation now where SMRs would
become a nuclear engineering solution to a political and pr problem. Well,
last time we talked about them.
Speaker 2: You talked about some of the benefits being that they're
less dangerous because there's less waste and the waste is
more manageable or something like that. And also having distributed
power is just better for the grid than having everything
in one central location.
Speaker 1: And those things are true. I mean, first off, once
you get to a Gen three reactor, you have all
the safety systems, right, they are passively cool down. They
don't need any of that complexity. We've matured that. In fact,
the small modulars are utilizing the same technology. They are
also passive shutdown, and so okay. The the problem is
that when you have twelve reactors, you need twelve monitoring systems. Yeah, right,
and you need people to watch them all, so that
increases costs. Actually, now, the idea of having a central
place to build the reactors and move them around is
a good one because it simply separate the operation of
reactors from the refueling process. But that hasn't been built
out yet, right, We're still doing testing on this. The
point being the battle here is that small modular is
going to cost more than per megawatt than conventional reactors
of the other day, and insights where you need less power.
Not everybody needs a giga want of power. You couldn't
put one of these plants anywhere in Africa, for example,
because you can't use the power. Smaller reactors would make
a lot of sense, but in a place where you
need a lot of power, fewer, larger units do make
sense if you manage them well and it takes fewer
people to do so. So there's a case for if
the main goal was to get as much nuclear online
as quickly as possible, why wouldn't you go with the
known design. The modularity parts important, but couldn't we do
more of that modularity with a conventional reactor design? Stop
building them so Bespoke build more of them in components
and factories, build and build them at scale. The fact
that you you know, part of the problem with VAUG
TELL three and four is there's only two of them, right,
If you were building twenty, then there's then that you
have a bigger team. Folks kind of know what they're doing.
They move from site to site like you can start
to work at larger scale. Now that being said, I
don't just want to poopoo on SMRs because they're definitely
being built right China has has had the Linglong one,
which is an ACP one hundred small reactor abou one
hundred twenty five megawatts, started construction in twenty one. Their
pressure vessel went in in twenty three. They expect to
be in operation in twenty six, so they're the furthest
Along with this smaller design, the US has a demonstration
reactor that technically qualifies as an SMR, but it's a
little different than this is an oak Ridge. This is
the Keros Hermes Low Power Demonstrator. It's not for making electricity.
It's actually what they consider a generation for reactor as
opposed to the EIGHTP one thousand, most the s martial
Generation three. This is next generation and this is fluorine salts. Ah.
So I knew we were going to get to since
the Oak Ridge experiments of the sixties, right, the thorium
reactors in Staffe. Nobody in the US has built a
thorium reactor or molten salt reactor of any kind. This
is a molten salt reactor. So it's a small modular
and molten salt and molten salt. Yeah, but again it's
a demonstration reactor. It's just for testing. It's been licensed,
so it's under construction. It's going to become a thing
that's exciting.
Speaker 2: That's cool, and so if that goes well, do you
see molten salt moving into larger scale reactors nuclear plants.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and let me get there, because we're used doing
more stuff of malt salt all the time. Cool, but
most mall modulars are stuck with light water because it's known,
right we've got a knife variables. They're trying to stay
simple and that fits with what Canada is doing with
the SMR which is in the Darlington site. So they
have now prepared for four reactors on that site. This
year they got the preparation on the site, so construction
starts next year. They expect to They expect to be
up and running in twenty twenty eight. They will probably
miss that date because it is a first of a
kind and so of course they're going to be problems.
But yeah, SMRs are coming, but the problem here is
they shouldn't be coming strictly the exclusion of everything else. Sure,
you know there's a case for the Ape one thousand
and that you could build those at scale and get
a lot more power. You know, as we're starting to
have governments have these missions where it's like we need
to bring thirty gigawatts of nuclear online in the US
one of their mandates. Well, do you want to do
that three hundred megawatts at a time or one point
two gigawatts at a time? Right, right, depending on the location.
So there's cases for both. Right, let's talk about thorium. Yeah,
Peter Lewis asked about those. Folks are always interested At
Shanghai Institute had a test reactor put together in twenty
twenty one. It's a two megawatt reactor, and last year
they got the license a permit to build a ten
megawatt tests reactor. That site got identified this year. Construction
starts next year. So thorium reactors are on their way
in China. Very cool, and again tell us what the
benefit of thorium is over lightwater. So we talked about
this on the Thorium molt Salt Reactor Show because it's
a combination of three things. It's using thorium instead of uranium,
it's using molten salt instead of solid fuel, and it
was supercritical carbon dioxide. I believe for the turbine technology
because when you go molten salt your temperatures go way
way out. They're much hotter, and so thorium is safer
than uranium. Is that the idea or not really? What
thorium is five times more plentiful than uranium. Okay, but
to use thorium in a reactor, you actually have to
breed it into uranium. So you bombard it with a neutron,
and that neutron sticks and then has a beta decay,
so it becomes protectium. And then you which is AUM. Yes,
it's a real thing. So thorium is atomic weight ninety
so that means that has ninety protons and the number
of protons tells you what element it is, right, So
you hit it with a neutron. Neutron gets bored, turns
into a proton. I know, it's weird, but it's the
thing baited again. So now it's protectinium atomic weight ninety one.
Then it happens again, another pro neutron flips and it
becomes ninety two, and that's your UM two thirty three. Okay,
that's what you're running the reactor. Now you combine it
with fluorine to make uranium and a fluoride and you've
got you've got a liquid that is only it only
becomes liquid at four degree centigrade, so it's hot, but
it doesn't boil until fifteen hundred degrecentigrade. So you have
a huge working range, right, almost one thousand degrees. You
work it as supposed to water, which is one hundred right, right, Sure,
that big working range means you can deal with heat,
and as it gets hotter, it expands, so it tends
to slow down the reaction. It's moderated by graphite, so
you don't there's no water involved any of this. Now. Admittedly,
urinium fluorides are dangerous, like this stuff is corrosive. It's toxic,
but it turns to a solid as soon as it
cools down. And it sounds like you can control it more,
can you not? Well, it has some It definitely has
some advantages. Okay, it's not. Nothing is simple, or we'd
all be doing it for sure. Right, while it's in
the while it's in the graphite moderator, fission going on, right,
So this is uranium atoms are being broken apart into
different elements, and if it leaves the graphite, it cools down.
So one of the passive safety systems is you have
a salt plug at the bottom of the containment vessel,
and if it gives two hot say have over a
thousand degrees or so, that's all plug melts and the
fluid runs out into containment vessels that aren't graphite, and
the reaction just stops. They had this system at Oakridge
in the sixties when they're experimenting to do this, and
they do that on the wheat so they didn't have
to work on the weekends. They just melt the salt plug,
let the fluid run out, the whole thing would cool down,
and on Monday they would electrically heat the fluid back
up till the material uptil was a fluid again and
then pump it back in the reactor with a replaced
salt plug and continue running. Yeah, that's pretty cool, pretty safe,
and it's got some strengths. It also you can run
the reactor. You can keep the reactor running and add
new fuel to it as opposed to having to shut
a reactor down to change fuel rods. And it's there
are chemical processes you can run in line to remove
by products. So one of the issues you have with
solid fuels is that gases are made from some of
the transmutations like xenon and krypton, and they cracked the rods,
and so eventually I have to stop using those rods.
You don't want to crumble. That would be bad, and
so you take them out and you reprocess them, or
in the case of the United States, you store them
in polls them for decades because you stopped fuel reprocessing
in the nineteen seventies. It's really kind to turn around. Well,
that was the believe it or not, and it's relevant
the day we're recording this. That was the Carter versus
Ford election, a Carter one on nuclear nonprofilation, and it
was Ford that shut down fuel reprocessing in because it's
how we got plutonium and they've never restarted it. Rest
in peace Hunters yesterday, extraordinary man from this recording. So
the gases on naturally bubble out of the fluorium the
fluorine salts. Now that's a plus and a minus. One
is they're not in the way. The other is you've
got to keep it contained, right, So your containment vessel
is now accumulating these radioactive gases in the top of
the vessel. But fluorine salts also don't need to be
under pressure, so you're not running a high pressure vessel
like you do are with water reactors, where they're pressurized
to have enough heat the heat exchanging. We're getting better
at using these kinds of molten salts non radioactive versions
because they store a lot of heat, so it's really
a good way to move heat, make steam shpin turbines
or even try other turbine technologies like supercritical cover docs afterly,
so there's a lot we're getting some value out of
salts even without getting into the react radioactive versions. Relating
to this is Copenhagen Atomics, which are out of Denmark,
who are building a molten salt reactor that fits in
a set of containers so it could be shipped by truck. Again,
this sounds like science fiction, an unfundable and so forth,
but they've actually raised enough money that they are now
building a non They've built a pair of non fissionable
reactor prototypes, so they've got no radioactive materials because Denmark
doesn't allow it. But they are using both nitrate in
florian salts and they're heating up their reactor with electricity
to show that their fluid systems work right to the
point now where They expect the next year to scale
up to a one megawatt thermal a non fisional prototype.
Then they have to find a way to make it
legal to start working with fissional materials, which is a
problem in Denmark, or they'll get a license in another
country to do this. But they're basically proving out their models,
so they are bending metal and building things around this.
So again I'm combining two different technologies. Thorium is interesting
in certain places because it's more plentiful in uranium, but
there's lots of uranium were do not have any shortage uranium.
But India is very interested in thorium for the reactors
that are developing their own because India has thorium in
the ground there, they don't have uranium, so rather have
to buy uranium from another country like Russia or Australia.
If they can mature the thorium technology enough for themselves,
that's their own indigenous power system. Yeah, the US has
that would be good for them. The US has lots
of thorium, doesn't have an uranium, but Canada's got uranium
and we're buddies, you know, at least for now for now,
so that works out just fine. So, but the maturing
the thorium fuel chain is not a trivial problem, and
in the end you're only just the important thing to
understand about armies. You make it into uranium. Making molten
salt reactors is a different thing, and it's also valuable.
You could run out any kind of uranium you want.
Two thirty three to thirty five, thirty eight is fine.
You just got to mature all of the fuel processes.
There's some material challenges for the toxicity of the fluorines,
and you've got to do the extraction systems. But one
of the things that Copenhagen Comics bushes on is this
is a fuel wave burner. But the nature of molten
salt reactors is that you can leave the actinides in
the loop until they all break down and you run
a solid fuel and a light water reactor. Typically a
given rod is going to be the reactor for six years,
so it'll every two years you'll move it around, but
after six years it's run as far as it can.
But the vast majority of the uranium that went in
that rod is still in there right, It's just contaminated
with other things. And so if you're the French. You
reprocess that fuel and take the uranium back out of
it and make new fuel runs. Right. This is also
where you get the plutonium, and they've also learned to
put the plcunium back in the fuel rod and burn
that as well. In a molten salt reactor, you don't
need to take them out and reprocess them. You reprocess
them in line. This is the technology. It isn't mature,
but this is one of the things you'd learned to
do with the molten salt reactor. So the whole time
you're making electricity, you're also removing materials, and you're breaking
down the actinides, the radioactives until there's virtually none left.
And so the promise is we don't have all this
nuclear waste, that we have less nuclear waste, and we
have short life a few hundred years versus tens of
thousands of years, right, So I would see arguably we'd
end up as soon as we get a molten salt
reactor mature, we'll probably put it down beside our light
water reactors and take it's their old fuel and use
it up to make electricity and clean up they waste
from the light water reactors.
Speaker 2: Is there any chance of taking the spent rods out
of the ground wherever they are and using those in
a molten salt reactor.
Speaker 1: Probably, devatrication is not a trivial problem, and it's going
to be cheaper materials, but you know that's one of
the options.
Speaker 2: Well, also, most importantly, just to get rid of the
waste million year price tag on it or whatever it is.
Speaker 1: Let's move on to another reactor design that actually broke
ground in the US this year, and it is based
on a liquid sodium reactors. The company is Terror Power.
The reactor is called Natrium, Natrium being the Greek word
for sodium. That's why the atomic name is na. It's
for Natuah. Okay, Now, there's liquid sodium reactors around since
the beginning of the atomic age. The Russians run a
few of them. What are we doing here, Well, it's
a very different kind of reactor when you use water
with solid fuel. The water serves a few different purposes.
One is that it is the moderator. It slows the
neutrons down. Neutrons coming off of uranium are moving very
giving a fraction of the speed of light, and when
they're going that quick, they're hard to collide with, so
having them run through water it slows them down to
what they call thermal neutrons, so they have a higher
impact rate. Although the upside about being fastest when you
do hit things, you break them, and so more atoms
fission quicker. So the light rotter reactor fuel process. When
uranium two thirty eight is hit with a thermal neutron,
it keeps that neutron and it becomes a proton and
that's how you make plutonium, right, Okay, But if you
hit it with a fast neutron, you'll break it. You'll
pull it apart of thecom variant and krypton or something.
There's a bunch of different combinations it'll turn into. And
so the using fast neutrons in a reactor has been
a key thing for a long time. And sodium is
transparent to neutrons, so it's your ability to move heat
around with liquid sodium, but it doesn't stole the neutrons around.
So you have a very fast, running, very hot reactor
using liquid sodium. Again, they have been around for a
long time. The problem is it's liquid sodium. Yeah, And
the problem with liquid sodium is that it volatile. It
burns in the air and it explodes in water. Yeah okay,
and it's not transparent, so when you want to look
in the reactor, you can't see anything. And so the
process of actually cleaning out a reactor do maintenance on it,
you have to get every bit of sodium up. It's
not that easy to do. The fire problem is so
prevalent that in Russia, where they still operate a couple
of these sodium reactors, they just plan for the fires.
It just happens. Yeah, it's a thing, regular sodium fires.
Don't worry too much about that smoke. Don't breathe that
it's bad. Yeah, it's bad. Meantime, Natrium has gotten a license,
so they've broke around in twenty twenty four. The reactor
design is not approved, but the salt parts. So what
they've done is they've separated the design into the radioactive
parts the reactor parts, and they are going to use
that molten sodium that's gotten hot from the reaction to
heat up fluorine salts, which are then pumped to a
tank that it then has the separate area with all
the power generation and so forth. So they have a
license for that now. This is similar to what Copenhangan
Atomics doing with their non fissioning reactor design. These guys
are building all the non fission parts first. Because they're
actually going to store a lot of that molten salt,
it allows them to have surge power. So the initial
reactor design is only about three hundred and fifty megawatts,
but they should be able to bump up to five
hundred megawats for a few hours because they have enough
hot molten salt stored that they can run that use
that salt to flash steam more than the reactor can
actually generate, so you can you now have a sort
of power dynamic. This is an interesting thing to add
to almost any power source.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it seems complex, but it sure solves the problem
it does.
Speaker 1: It stabilizes power. It's recognizing that power is heat, right,
and so it's just if you're using these molten salts,
which you need to use anyway, you to build out
high temperature steam and possibly better generator designs because you
have so much heat. This opens the door to that.
This is how the newer Helio Stat power plant in Morocco,
which is just reflecting mirrors onto a post. Yeah right,
runs twenty four hours a day even when the sun's down,
because they heat up so much molten salt. The salt
keeps the generators running through the night. So admittedly nuclear
actors run twenty fours a day. That's their advantage. But
this actually gives you some surge ability anyway. They've actually
they've got enough money. Gates is kicked in over a billion.
The Department Energy skicked in some more. The site's been selected.
It's in Camera, which is in Wyoming, a place that
has a uranium mines is actually an old coal mine
site that they're using. So it already has the power
cables and stuff pulled in and it's already a space. Wow.
The challenge with used making liquid sodium reactors is you
need a different fuel. It's still uranium, but it's more
highly enriched. It's what they call halo HALO fuel for
high SA low enriched uranium, high enriched uranium, meaning stuff
you use in bombs, normal solid fuel reactors and light
water reactors. They the fuel rods about three percent enriched,
so it has three percent you two thirty five in
it along with mostly you two thirty eight pitch blend.
The raw uraniumy dig out of the ground is about
zero point seven percent thirty five need more to thirty
five because it's the fissionable product, right, It makes everything
else work, and so you enrich it to get it
up to three percent or up to five percent. Right,
And what's the percentage for a bomb, one hundred percent? Okay,
So the halou can go up to about nineteen percent.
And there's only so much enrichment capability in the world, right,
It's part of the challenge. And we talk about enrichment.
They talk about this thing called a separative work unit
or how much it takes, how much uranium? How much?
How many times can you take one hundred kilos uranium
and make ten kilos of enriched uranium from it? Okay?
That a work unit is that basically measure take a
hunred kilos making in ten kilos of five percent enrich
the stuff you use in nuclear reactors. The largest sites
would be from Russia. Rossotom makes about twenty seven million
swus China's got about ten million. Irana, which is a
conglomerate of the US, UK, Germany, France, Netherlands makes about
seven point five million. Rangco, which is also a conglomerate
of the UK US Germany is eighteen million, so the
West can make about twenty five million, SWU use Russia
to a twenty seven million China ten million. In fact,
when it comes to HALU, which is this highly enriched
they want to use for natrium, only rostotom makes it right.
So one of the challenges with them actually building the
reactor side of this thing is you're supposed to buy
fuel from Russia. Yeah, so they're kind of going to
need to mature HALU production in America if they're actually
going to make a go of this. But you know,
they've got the money, so they're going in with them. Sure.
One more other kind of reactor design being built in
the US is a company called x Energy in Texas
and they are building a pebble bed reactor. Pebble bed. Yeah,
we talked about these two case we did. So this
depends on a fuel called Triso. So here's the interesting
idea behind a Triso fuel. Instead of building a rod
coded in the zircanadum of enriched uranium. And when I
build those rods, I have to put them into assemblies
that then go inside of a pressurized tank with a
big structure around it and so forth, they got to
manage the radiation. Right, But the trisop fuel, I make
spheres that have granules uranium in them, but the moderator
graphite is embedded in the fuel and then it's coated
in silicon carbide, so it's essentially indestructible and on its own.
You could hold one of these in your hand, right,
you won't do anything. But if you get a bunch
of them together, they neutron start to paying between them,
and they heat up and they get really hot. And
when they get too hot, they start to expand and
they slow themselves down. The reaction slows down because they
get bigger, so they can't burn. They're structurally sound, they're
self contained. It's pretty cool, right, it's interesting. They're safe.
And so the idea would be you basically have a
high temperature hopper that you put a bunch of these in.
It gets really hot, You pump helium through that. It
superheats the helium. You pump that helium out, flash steam,
run a turbine, right, right, I remember this.
Speaker 2: Then the problem with helium is it's hard to manage them,
hard to contain and hard to manage.
Speaker 1: Now that's trivial and it's not mature. These spheres eventually age,
so you do need to get them out and rotate
them and put newines in, so they're sort of rotating
through there. Sometimes they jam. There was one case in
experimental pebble bed where the casement cracked and they got
wedged in there, and that's a problem. The fuel is
expensive to make and it's very hard to reprocess. Now
the reason X Energy is doing this project is actually
working closely with now Chemical because now has a big
industrial plant in Texas right beside where they're going to
build this reactor, and they want the heat for their
industrial process, so not just electricity being generated, but it's
a huge byproduct of a lot of heat. And right
now the Dow plant they have to burn natural gas
to make that heat. So having a reactor that you
can take both the heat and the energy off of
is interesting. So they're helping to fund a bunch of that.
But the Triso fuel needs to be matured. The fuel
production is being built in Oakridge, Tennessee, so that's back
the same location again.
Speaker 2: So after hearing about all these different types of reactors,
I fully remember coming to the same conclusion on all
of these nuclear talks that you've done. Yeah, Now, the
thorium salt reactor seems to be the favorite. The thorium
has all certain benefits supposed to be clear. Light water
reactors are the way to go because they're mature. Right,
there's sort of a known technology.
Speaker 1: If your goal is to decarbonized power generation by twenty
to fifty, knowing it takes at least five years, ten years,
maybe as much as ten years to build these reactors,
building what you know at scales, so you can actually
get them done on time. As the important party researching
is research. Reactors are a problem, right because you don't know,
you don't know when you're going to be done. You
don't know if it's going rite. Like at least you
look at those EIGHTP one thousands, they're certified for fifty years. Yeah, right,
Like you could get them done and know you have
power for quite some time. Right. The salt is worth
maturing because it can deal with the waste and it's efficient. Yeah,
So that's a research project separate from you dealing with
the I need the power and I need it now, right, Okay,
I meantime. Now you've got the Microsofts and the Amazons
and the Googles all wanted to build these data centers.
So Microsoft now licensed three mile Island reactor one. Yep,
hearn about that, right, And they're starting to fund more
SMR development because the small reactor would actually make sense
for data centers. Data centers don't want to giggle out
of power. They want a few megawatts, so so Dominion
smaller reactors would actually make sense for them.
Speaker 2: So Dominion that owns Millstone Nuclear power plant, which is
at the opposite end of my town on the water,
they well, a company wants to build a data center
adjacent to Millstone. I don't know what it is, but
but yeah, and so the local people, I think most
of them don't want it, of course.
Speaker 1: But I don't see that as a bad thing. DWE
centers an't particularly obnoxious, you know. They right now they
want to build more data centers and is power available? Right?
The next problem will be water available, because they use
a fair about of water to keep data centers cool.
So yeah, you know, Nimby is a thing. They do
provide jobs. Like there's there's a whole question around whether
this makes sense. You just got to press all the details.
Don't just say no, make sure you get the things
you need to make it make sense. Yeah, but you're right.
I've talked about a lot of different techniques. You know,
the sodium reactor has the advantage of being a good
fuel burner too, much like molten salt. It has more
it's been built more times than molten salt reactors have,
but also had had way more problems. But that's also
you know, it's just they've never found a real nobody's
run them for very long except the Russians who don't
care about the consequences. So, you know, fluorine salts. Because
of the ability of reprocess fuel and you're actually talking
about taking the waste products and using them, like turning
them into using the product. That's a lot of straight
to them, alt attractive to me. There's another tryso reactor
in development for the US military. It's a product. It's
called Project Pelee Pelea. I think it was a character
from Hawaiian mythology. It was like the god of the volcano. Yeah, yeah,
volcano god or something. Yeah. Yeah. They got it's the military,
So they got the funding. It's a half They got
a half a billion dollars to build out a reactor
that fits in four twenty foot containers, so shipable. One
of those containers would actually be the reactor. The rest
is like pumps and generations and all that sort of stuff,
using highly enriched fuel triso fuel, which the military is
allowed to do so rich to nineteen percent I presume
because it's the US military, they're going to figure how
to make that fuel themselves and not buy it from
the Russians. But it would be a high temperature gas reactor.
You think about we talked about this before, the amount
of money that the US spent in Afghanistan shipping fuel
from Pakistan and a continuous convoy of trucks to burn
in generators to operate their bases. Small reactors like this
would make a huge difference. I mean, so with space
based power, but that would be more than half a
billion dollops And so, I mean the upside to the
US bringing PLA too into existence is it will make
a market for triso fuel, which then opens the door
to more pebble by discussions as a reactor design. The
fuel already exists, that makes it a little bit easier
to deal with. That being said, you know, nineteen percent
enriched geranium is got a proliferation risk. It's fine if
the military control of it. I don't know if you
allow commercial entities to control that fuel, right where five
percent really doesn't have the same risks at all. Yeah,
all right, a little bit on fusion. You know, I
don't spend a lot of time on fusion these days
because I've really come to appreciate their research projects. They're
a long way away from being real. That being said,
my favorite fusion project of them all is Commonwealth Fusion. Okay,
that's the one that's the one in Mit that they're
trying to build a they're trying to build a Takamat
reactor based on reb Co semiconductors. So these are the
high temperature cooled liquiditrogen superconductors. They've got enough funding, Like
they went real quiet, and I said years ago when
they went real quiet, its because they got enough money.
They're just trying to build a thing. That's basically what's happened.
They've scaled up their factory. They've had eight hundred people
working on it. They react to their building. It's called Spark,
which is their test reactor. They're supposed to have first
plasma in twenty twenty six, so they're well, they're reactor
buildings in full assembly right now. There's been a little
bit of an update. They're pretty quiet, they don't need
to talk, but the destruction and I bring up because
this year they also announced the site of their full
scale reactor, the ARC Reactor, being in Virginia. Wow. So
I think it's a bit speculative. I don't like it
when they say, hey, we know we're going to build
a full scale reactor before you built the prototype, Like,
you don't. You're so confident it's going to work, you're
already picking sites. But I think that might be partially
a funding thing.
Speaker 2: So are the other ones, like Iter just dead in
the water.
Speaker 1: No, they're so iders going along. They've spent enough money
out they're going to finish it. But they've also admitted
that EIDER is just and you know, that's the NIOBM
ten superconductor, so it's only got so much field strength.
The REBCO has five times the field strength, which makes
it a lot more viasible and smaller. Yeah, they they're
hoping to get to a queue of one with Ider
or just about so get as much energy out as
energy in. But they've already described the fact that that's
as far as that's going to go. But it'll give
us the education to build the next one.
Speaker 2: Right, And how much money has itear?
Speaker 1: Costs? Sixty billion? Good god? Maybe more? And how many years? Twenty? Wow?
But again when you build a containment, when you build
the Tacomac in eight pieces in eight countries, like, what
did you think was going to happen? Right? This is
not about efficiency. This is about a mega project run
by governments with international treaties involved. So it's really hard
to I just think of other uses for sixty billion dollars.
I can think of many. Yeah, well that's that's at
least two or three commercial light water reactors and several
gigawatts of power that could be working in right now. Yeah,
you know, there's a lot of things that can be
done with that. So, I mean, I'm excited to see
if Commonwealth Fusion gets there. They're getting closer, like the
they are well funded, so they're not scrounging for money.
That's why I don't hear from so.
Speaker 2: Not this coming year, but maybe the year after that.
So in two years when you do the energy geek cut,
we might have more to talk about.
Speaker 1: Yeah, first light plaster. Now, there are a few other
fusion projects going out there, but as I poke at
each of them, it's like the same new stories from
last year some of them. And then they're maybe they're
raising money, but it's like five million dollars. That's enough
to keep people paid to put up pr at press releases,
not to build things. Yeah, when I see one hundred
million dollars going into it company, I was like, okay,
you can build things with that. So a lot of
these others are now really in stasis. They've got just
enough money to keep limping along trying to find a
bigger funder to go further. Okay, a few more questions.
J Michaud asked about the aid of the art and
residential lighting. Now, in some ways, I feel like LED lighting.
Everybody's got it now, it's in home depot. It's not
a big deal. It's normal put LED lights. And although
they're AC based LED, and as you know, and we
did a whole several shows on it, there's DC based LED,
which is much rarer and more efficient. It is more efficient,
it's about it's about thirty, you know, sixty percent more
efficient than AC based, but you have fewer products so
I found two stacks. Lumin Cash is the one I
used in Coquitlam back in the day and sold with
the house. And they have a new generation of their
product and I would use it again in a second.
When we tear this place apart and do upgrades, I
will put lumin Cash in. It's been nice. And there's
another company called clean Life with their ATX system spin
on native led DC lighting is solar because solar naturally
comes off at about forty eight bolts DC, and so
all both lumin Cash and clean Life now makes systems
where you can basically plug your solar directly into your
lighting system. So that's interesting. No battery storage, no conversion,
you're making DC power. You use it for your lights.
That's really interesting.
Speaker 2: So along with the AC cables in your house, if
you're building a new house, let's say, or you feel
like ripping your walls off, you could have just a
whole DC circuit.
Speaker 1: That's right, Yeah, and you know, can't really cause a fire.
The power levels too low. A lot less copper, so
it'll cost you less. You know, wiring's not cheap these days.
Copper costs money, so you know, the the net they
come up to about the same price, except the lights
never burn out, the dimming is super smooth. They run
on battery brilliantly because they're DC natives, so they don't
waste as near as much power. Don't eversion or thing.
They're just a really efficient way to make client cool.
Martina gram our friend and fellow RD always asks me
hard questions for the geek outs, and her question this
year is how what our energy consumption trends like for
country to country, so are we getting better? And the answer, Martina,
is that in the Western world, so US, Canada, EU,
Australia and New Zealand, you're seeing that power consumption per
capita going down, which is good because we have the
highest power consumption per capita in the world, but our
total consumption per person is decreasing. In the developing world,
it is still increasing. That's the nanatary nature of industrialization.
China has the most growth. They're still less than US
by half, but they are increasing. So when you say US,
China as one country is less than the whole West.
Their power consumption per capita is half the US is
power presumption or the US which is the highest. But
all you know, I don't think the spread between the US, Canada,
Europe is that large. It's there, but it's not.
Speaker 2: They are burning a lot of coal over there, however,
And our coal consumption has gone down, hasn't it.
Speaker 1: And when I say our, I mean cole consumption. China
has gone down too. Yeah, it's like everybody's decreasing coal
to a degree. Okay, last one, Yeah, from our friend
Laurent Laurent Vignon. So he asked me about the land
Man Rant land Man is so what is this? Okay?
Land Man is a television show and the character involved
was played by Billy Bob Thorne, and he went on
this huge rant about there's nothing clean about alternative energy, right,
you need all these trucks running diesel, and you need
lubricants and so forth, like there's nothing clean about it.
It's important to remember this is a television show. He
was playing a character, and none of my set was
actually true. You know. His argument was that it you know,
I'm sure you put up a wind turbine, but that
you used made more carbon putting that up than it's
ever going to save, which is patently untrue. The typical
carbon payback, even for all the concrete castings and everything
for a wind turbine is less than a year. The
larger the turbine, the faster the payback, the big big
ones three months so and then after that your net
negative on carbon production. And I'm not even accounting for
the amount of say, concrete, you would pour to build
a coal power plant. Right.
Speaker 2: But it is useful to have fiction like that because
it just helps us keep on our toes in terms
of you know what is greenwashing versus yes, you know real,
you know it. It forces us to do the science,
and it was.
Speaker 1: Good to have the real experts come out and show
the matheh, Right. But it also I think that Billy
Bob Thornton did a really good job of portraying your
classically misinformed worker who feels threatened by all these technologies. Right. Sure.
The fact that a certain group of the population jumped
on it as factuals that everybody should watch this, that's
the disturbing part. It was a television show. Television shows
aren't real. But it is worthwhile to do the math
for the payback in carbon. In fact, when is the
fastest payback almost always less than a year. A few months.
Commercial solar is one to two years, from a carbon
footprint perspective of payback, it does create a certain amount
of CO two to make those panels and to put
them up and to put them down on the ground
is commercial solar, but it does pay back.
Speaker 2: I hate to ask this, like right at the end
of the energy geekeout, but is there any hope for
replacing your classic jet fuel for flying?
Speaker 1: That's a tough one. You know, aircraft depend on losing
the mass of the fuel for their flight distances, and
when you carry batteries around, you don't lose any weight,
so it's not going to work for batteries. That being set,
we are making we are able to produce carbon neutral
jet fuel. Well that's interesting. So if I take carbon
that's already in the system, like take it out of
the atmosphere is carbon dioxide, or take it from algae
already in the system and make jet fuel from it,
I'm not adding new carbon to the system as opposed
to socking it from underground and refining into fuel adding
new to the system. The problem is that today those
zero carbon fuels are five times the price, right, and
so we're going to have long range jet flight because
we are starting to see electric and commuter ranges. We're
going to see long range jet flight. We're going to
have to raise the price and reduce the cost of
that fuel and meet it somewhere in the middle to
get to carbon neutral in that it's a great question,
and it's a it's a common one, but you know,
you've got to understand the payload fraction of a large
airliner in fuel, right, and airliners get more efficient as
to get the higher altube. But they're carrying so much
fuel when they start, they can only fly so high.
But today to increase efficiency, as they lose weight from
burning net fuel, they actually raise their health to increase
their efficiency. It's that significant, more than half of the
mass of an aircraft when it takes off on all
over reason I get that is fuel. Yeah. Is that
a show? You know? I feel it. You'd be two hours. Yeah,
feel better now that it's out of your brain. Yeah,
much better. Thank you, We all do as well. Thank
you for sharing, Richard. It's always a pleasure. Awesome. All right,
We'll see you next time on dot net Rocks.
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Speaker 1: You got javan
Speaker 2: And