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