Speaker 1: How'd you like to listen to dot NetRocks with no ads? Easy?
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you that and a special dot NetRocks patron mug. Sign
up now at Patreon dot dot NetRocks dot com. Hey,
welcome back to dot NetRocks. It's geek out again for
twenty twenty five. At this time we're focused on energy.
I'm Carl Franklin and that is the star of the show.
Richard Campbell. Good morning, Richard, Hey, Happy New Year, Happy
new year to you, Time Traveling, Time Traveling. Yeah, of course,
I know we have a lot to cover today, so
I want to get started right away with an energy
themed better no framework, roll the music awesome?
Speaker 2: What do you got?
Speaker 1: So? I've found this video on YouTube and while I
was doing it, I was thinking to myself, boy, this
would be a great thing to share with the kids,
and then I thought maybe the grand kids.
Speaker 2: Kids aren't kids anymore more than.
Speaker 1: My Yeah, back when we started this show, I would
do things like you know, good for the kids and
everybody who's listening, Yeah, the kids, maybe the grand kids.
All right, So this is a YouTube video how to
make a potato clock?
Speaker 2: Cool? So using the electric potential in a potato.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, it's a great little experiment that you can do
with your kids. You you know, put a die out
in one side, an electrode in the other, and you
get energy that powers a clock. Isn't that fun? That's
what I meant to say. You science guys, you know
you feel details. Copper and zinc, baby copper and zinc.
So that's what I got. Richard. You want to read
a comment?
Speaker 2: Yeah, sure, grabbed a coamooff last year's Energy Geek Outs.
This is from episode nineteen thirty one around this time
last year. We're oddly enough, we talked about energy and it's,
you know that funny. I'm always big on making sure
things I referenced last year get mentioned in the next
year and so forth. So certainly I've been reading through
all of that for a great deal. And this comment
comes from Richard Another Richard. He says, great chat, Thanks guys.
Interesting that comment about granular solar and wind projects. I
don't know if you've countered as in North America, but
here in Australia, we have so much solar based generation
that we've maxed out the capabilities of our older transmission grid.
Another government here wants those with a rooftop solar to
pay for their exports to the grid. He considers it
a bait and switch to get us to all buy batteries, which,
by the way, has happened. Wow. I don't know that
there was so much a bait and switch in that.
I don't know that the issue the government realized how
quickly Australian citizens would put solar on the roof, because
they're the leader in the world in this, and they
have literally overwhelmed the great at times, you know, so
much power available at noon, Yeah, because there's so many
solar panels running all at once that it literally blowed
transformers off poles.
Speaker 1: But it's amazing that they actually did that. They have
full capacity of their grid from solar. That's amazing to me.
Speaker 2: Yeah. At times, of course it's not you know, again,
the power doesn't flow uphill particularly well, it doesn't step
back through transformers. Like there's all those kinds of problems
they're getting big on because battery prices have fallen so
much and we're going to talk about that they've gotten
very big on batteries now, because the main thing that
you want on rooftop solar is to run your house.
Nobody else is yeah really yea, yeah right there. All
this buy back was a way to encourage you to
do this. The utilization of the power is very poor.
Speaker 1: As we learned in the very first geek out, which
was on electricity, right.
Speaker 2: Man, not very first, but you know, way back there
we talked about this and lots of controversy on it
one way or.
Speaker 1: The other, one of the first Yeah.
Speaker 2: But Richard also goes on to say our older style,
greatest more Hubbins spoke that works well with a small
number of chunky, high capacity cold based generators and their
associated consection points exactly right. You know, we've built a
grid designed to have those big power points push down
everything else, not flow in multiple directions. And with so
many solar and wind projects around our country, the re
rebuilding of the transmission network grid is costing gazillions, and
it's be having to be rebuilt in the wrong order.
In my opinion, refactoring the new grid ideally should have
been commenced first. Since you note that the nuclear based
generation here would have had a similar grid shape in
that to the old one, almost one to one, And
he wonders if this similar issue is happening in the
US and Canada. In the answer is yes, absolutely, Actually
it's happening everywhere in the world. Power is power right, well,
more importantly, grid is grid right. The real issue here
is that now that there's many different sources of power
and you're going to flow in multiple directions, things get
complicated and the grid was just never built for this,
and you could not have built out the grid first.
I just don't think it's possible. A you didn't know
what was going to happen, and B it's impossible to
spend upfront on this. You kind of have to build
it as you go, and that may not be the
most cost effective way. But the only way you're going
to get it right is in hindsight, and that's not
real life. So you know, what's happening is pretty much
what had to happen, except that we do have some
negative forces. You know, lots of politicians are jumping on
the idea that it's solar's faulted, the grids unstable. Phenominally,
that's kind of correct. That doesnt mean you shouldn't use solar,
it's that the grade needs to be upgraded. So so
those complicated conversations aren't sexy. The easy one is to
blame new power on all the problems on the grid,
and really, we need to upgrade our grade and we
have maintained our grade well enough, and that has been
the problem all along, and it's where a lot of
money is going right now. People are very frustrated the
idea that cost of power continues to go up, and
they blame it on new power sources, which makes no sense.
If the new power sources arebot to drive it down,
they drave it on new consumers like AI certainly something
we're going to talk about today, and that's these are
all fragments of truth where the real truth is, Yeah,
we're in the midst of a revolution on our way
we build our grid, and we're just putting more stress
on it. So Richard, thank you so much for your comment,
and a copy of music co Buy is on its
way to you. And if you'd like a copy of music,
go buy, write a comment on the website at dot
netroocks dot com or on the facebooks and helplish every
show there and if you comment there in a reading
the show, we'll send you copy music Cope.
Speaker 1: And what he's talking about is music to Code Buy,
which is something that I built a long time ago
and keep adding tracks too. We're up to twenty two
tracks now. They're twenty five minutes long to coincide with
the Pomodoro technique, and they're designed to keep you in
a state of flow while you're writing code. I'm halfway
done with episode twenty three as of this writing, but
I think I'm going to knock it out in the
next day or so so we can get it to
people for Christmas. So Musicdoco buy dot net if you
want to buy the collection in an MP three wave
or FLACK versions. All right, So shall we talk about
what happened in nineteen eighty three because that's our episode number.
Speaker 2: Yeah, all right, there's some favorites for you in my list,
but I'm sure we'll see what you've got.
Speaker 1: Well, the big one, Richard, kind of crosses into your realm.
It's the beginning of the Internet. The migration of arpinet
to TCPIP was completed, marking the official start of the Internet.
According to some sources, the depending on who you asked, right, yeah,
but I mean TCPIP is what powers the Internet. It's
the protcol stack that we all use today. So before
it was arpinet, and there were other protocols that connected
universities and things like that, but the true Internet really
requires TCPIP. All right, thanks sir. Yeah, yeah, launch of
mobile phones. You'll probably talk about this, so I'll leave
that that. Wasn't going to go too far into it
because there's so many other things to do. Okay, the first
mobile cellular telephone call was made. Michael Jackson performed the
moon Walk for the first time during a televised performance
of Billy Jean, which was big. Nobel Prizes were awarded
to various individuals, including William Golding for literature and somebody
I can't pronounce, lech Wtesa for peace. Okay, Lequillessa, good polish.
Opening of Tokyo Disneyland, the theme park. We'll open its
stores to the public on April fifteenth, becoming the first
Disney park in Asia. And you know, let's talk about
the top ten movies of nineteen eighty three, because there
were some good ones. A Christmas Story is number one,
which I watch every Year with My Girls. Great movie
and a great story too, Silkwood, Scarface, The Right Stuff,
War Games, Star Wars Episode six, Return of the Jedi,
The King of Comedy. Yep, that was Robert Tanniro, Jerry Lewis,
and Martin Scorsese directed National Lampoon's Vacation, Monty Python's The
Meaning of Life and coming in at ten The Outsider Again.
Speaker 2: Another ridiculously good movie here, like ridiculously good.
Speaker 1: Great, yeah, great movies coming out in eighty three. So
what you got in tech in space? Well, okay, let's
give to Dine Attack a little bit of love.
Speaker 2: Right. That's the first cellular mobile phone. And there were
mobile phones before this. This was the first cellular phone.
Famously made a call to his competitor in New York
to say I've done it, you know, communicating on the
first cell node the phone had. It was kind of
brick shaped, but it had antenna and it definitely worked.
It's called din Attack and it's the beginning of that
whole race. But you know, awesome. The other gadget that
I have to bet you would be the Nintendo Entertainment Centisen,
the NASA. You know, this is the first of the Mario.
You know, you can play Mario at home like that.
It's huge and that Christmas I remember it well, selling
ness for a friend of mine at a store as
fast as we could possibly go.
Speaker 1: Previous episodes of dot NetRocks we talked about Pong, right yep,
which and I can't remember what year it was, but
it was in the seventies somewhere seventy eight, seventy seven,
seventy six. But was this the real first graphic home
system or was the Atari the first one? Yeah, the
Atari's earlier in that and the in television so forth.
But this was sort of Nintendo entering that market, okay,
right as Famiccom And yeah, they were course big in Japan,
and you know, nominally in Japan it was a third
generation system, but this was the first one that they
brought to the US. Were they as huge as Stephen
Forte in Japan?
Speaker 2: Nobody's a huge a Steve. Let's not get crazy now,
come on. But you know this is when you get
Super Mario Brothers. Legend of Zelda Metroid, like those classics
begin at least in North America, you know, well, I
mean it starts in Japan in eighty three and then
gets released in North America in eighty five. Yeah, nice,
so big on the space side, there's not all that's
happening in space shuttles. So Space Shuttle Challenge there gets
its first flight in April that year, and the only
thing interesting I can say about that flight, besides the
first flight of Challenger, is they launched the first of
the TDRS satellites. These are tracking in data relay satellites.
We take for granted today that there's NaSTA TV, that
there's a continuous transmission of video from the International Space
Station and any space flight, and that's because of these
TDRS satellites. There's three of them, but in nineteen a
three the very first one had been launched. Up till
then you just had voice communication and it was intermittent.
You constantly went out of into loss of signals. So
having it all the time was a big deal. And
this was the beginning of the TDRS. So Challenger put
up the first TDRS satellite, and then that's April. In
June flies again, like they did fly fairly often, right.
The goal was to be able to fly over two weeks.
They'd never got that fast, but they were flying every
couple of months. STS seven is a satellite deployment mission,
which was the original you know, major missions for the
Shuttle was to be able to launch satellites. But it's
also the mission where Sally Ride flies, the very first
female US female astronaut. That was her first flight.
Speaker 1: And it's really funny that they wrote that song about
her Mustang Sally way before that.
Speaker 2: Pretty sure for sure that's not true. Pretty sure for
sure that's not what we're talking about. And then the
end August, Challenger flies to fly to launch a couple
more satellites, but not a TDR.
Speaker 1: Follow me for more fun facts, kids.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there you go. So, and then to round out
the shuttles in eighty three, the last flight in a
three so Challenger flowed three times and then Columbia flies
once STS nine and takes up space Lab. This was
a collaboration which was with the Europeans before even the
Europeans based aged was well defined and really in a
lot of way space Lab easier precursor to ISS modules. Yeah.
So this was basically a laboratory twenty four feet long
in the back of the payload bay with a tunneling
it to the cab. The cabin in the front and
there were six people the first time it flew six
people on Shuttle, and these six people worked round the
clock in two shifts of twelve hours three and three
to do science experiments using space Lab to demonstrate the
potential at One of those astrots, by the way, was
Richard Garriott, And if you're a gaming fan, Richard Garriott
is the guy behind Ultima an Ultima online.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 2: That mission for Columbia was the last one for two years.
After that flight, it'll come down and do a major refit.
They'll take the ejection seats out and trying to reduce
the weight on Columbia, though I'll never be able to
get all the way down. It'll fly again in nineteen
eighty six.
Speaker 1: I'll have some problems with the O rings, foreshadowing that'll be.
Speaker 2: Called the Challenger. But yes, of course I won't say
the Soviets did nothing that year. They have Salute seven
up and they'll do like some major spacewalks to upgrade
the solar panels on it. Like they were doing good
science then too, so, but that not a you know,
its shuttle is sort of overwhelming all the messages at
the time. On the computer side, it's nineteen eighty three,
what comes out. Apple's Lisa. Lisa arguably the first of
the PC computers with a guy just a year ahead
of the Mac. Of course, there was a lot of
de beta where the name Lisa came from. Jobs finally
admitted it was named for his daughter, although at the
time they didn't want that to be true, so they
backron named it and called it something like local Integrated
Software Architecture, which means nothing. Somebody else said, let's be realistic.
It actually means let's invent some acronym. That's great. It
was a ten thousand dollars PC in nineteen eighty three.
It was really crazy expensive, but it had a sixty
eight thousand processor, had a Mega RAM initially with two
five and a quarter drives, then eventually had a five
Mega I driving even a seven a three and a
half inch drive on it. But it just prices itself
out of the market and then back would undermine them.
They'll be out, they'll be discontinued by eighty six. Lotus
one two three, Yeah, Yeah, so that's the Yeah, this
is the you know, and coming after VisiCalc. Although Microsoft's
also shipped a multiplan. The multiplan runs on lots of platforms.
That's Charles Simons's implementation. So it's not fast and one
two three is designed for the IBM PC and nothing else,
and it is fast, and it just swamps the market.
It's not defendive product, to the point where when Microsoft
is really trying to compete against it, they include a
mistake in the date math in Lotus one two three
in Excel to make sure it's perfectly compatible.
Speaker 1: Oh not as an accident, to let everybody know that
they copied the code.
Speaker 2: They they may realize it was making an error on
leap ears because the leap ears don't happen on the
on the four hundredth year, but Lotus one two three
made that mistake, and they didn't want it to be
different from Lotus one too three, so they made it
exactly the same mistake.
Speaker 1: Was there some brew haha over the inventor of VisiCalc
and some loss circles and stuff like that.
Speaker 2: Oh yes, I mean this is still in lawsuit area.
Don't worry, We're still coming into like the look and
feel lawsuits, Like none of that has happened yet, and
we were all sort of passed that all now, but
the time, no they're still figuring all that out.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Eighty three is also the year they shipped Microsoft word Word.
The original version is actually for Xenix. It's called multi
toool Word And they also put out the PC version
for on Dos in eighty three, and then they'body subsequent versions.
Speaker 1: And if you're a fan of dot net rocks, you
know that we interviewed the guy Les Pinter who wrote
word and sold it to Microsoft, So that was around
this time.
Speaker 2: It was in that same era, And of course they
also made versions of the Mac and the Atarist and
Unix and OS two Windows in eighty nine. It'll ultimately
become the dominant word processor, and it'll do it by
beating word Perfect. And the way it'll beat word perfect
is by reading and writing word perfect files. Yeah. Plus
it was easier to use, I mean, let's face it, Yeah,
but that's not enough to get people to move. The
big thing here was when word Perfect shipped their version fives,
they changed their file format and didn't include They only
had an importer, so you had to upgrade everything at once,
and that made people mad. And then word came along
and says, hey, we read and write four three files
and five one files. So suddenly you could use word
whatever you got to pick up any old version of
word perfect and write to Eddie version of We're perfect too.
And it just, you know, basically stood there, waited until
they made a mistake and then took advantage. What else
Richard stallman Ship's Ganu. Ganu has the best acronym of all,
which is not Unix. That's what can stands for. It's
a free it's not a full Borros, but it is
the free shell, and it is the catalyst for what
will become Linux, which is why Stallmanite still say you
should be calling it new Linux, right, But that's all
all begins there, and also the free software movement and
so forth come from that. Compact only been formed the
year before puts out their version of the Compact Portable,
the luggable PC case. It's the suitcase like an Osborne,
but built for CP for DAWs. It's an IBM compatible. Yeah.
And Ry Kurtzweel publishes his Age of the Intelligent Machines,
incredibly prescient if you read it today, just about some
of the insanity of that going on forty years earlier
and last, but certainly not least at the cees the
Consumer Electronics Show MIDI, right, yeah, yeah, nineteen ay three.
Speaker 1: MIDI changed electronic music for everybody. Yeah, ushered in the
era of the synthesizers and the sequencers and all that stuff.
Speaker 2: And brilliantly they came at it. It was a serial standard,
but they came at it as a public standard, so
anybody could implement against it, right, and that was good,
And so it just spread like wildfire. And I had
a little bit of a hand in the history of that,
not really, but I kind of jumped on to the
MIDI bandwagon working for a company that made Doss sequencers
in the late eighties, and a lot of that stuff
that I was doing was creating c structures or system
exclusive data. System exclusive data is stuff that's specific to
each synthesizer model that comes out so that you could
suck down the patches and then use a library application,
which is what we had to manage them, and then
swap the patches back in so so that Yeah, those
were fun times. Yeah, and it you know, at the time,
each vendor had their own standard, right, Roland had one
Oberheim and these are the two that originally collaborated, you know,
had had their own version, the parallel box and so forth,
and it was finally like these leaders of the company
kind of got on the phone and said, this is stupid, right,
why don't we just agree on a standard, And they
gradually drew more and more companies into all agree we're
going to do this, this MIDI standard, so that we
can interconnect with each other, so that our customers can
use the products they want to use.
Speaker 1: What's interesting, Richard, is that standard still holds. I think
they went to METI two point zero, but they're midy two. Yeah,
but that's standard still holds. And compare that to something like, oh,
I don't know, scuzzy Small Computer Systems Interface, which was
supposed to be a standard which changed every year because
everybody wanted to own the standard.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's all which is kind of pointless. Yeah, those
guys have done a good job. But they kind of
got it right off the bat. Yep, and it worked. Yeah,
so that's what I got. That's good. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So I hear you want to talk about energy?
Speaker 2: What the heck?
Speaker 1: Huh in twenty twenty five?
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, When we do this every year, it's interesting
to look at the larger geopolitical landscape. Energy has always
been an important factor. It's really quite a potent ay
right now. The International Energy Agency, which I often retort to,
the IA, sort of does a lot of overview. It's
a great phrase for me to do some reading, sort
of see where we actually had. And they talk about
the fact that coming out of the pandemic and with
the current conflicts, the countries are prioritizing energy security. They're
actually creating less efficient energy generation that they can control
rather than necessarily buying from wherever they can from. Having
the Russians out of the grid has been a big
part of that. But it also means that they've driven
renewables to an all time high. But it's interesting to
point it's not just renewals, as you're not all time high.
Virtually every type of energy generation in twenty twenty five, coal,
natural gas, oil, even nuclear power isn't an all time
high right now. Old plants are being turned back on,
plants that are should have been shut down or being
capped because there's so much concern for availability of energy.
Oil prices are relatively low. Energy should be cheap right now,
and the reality, of course is the energy isn't Anybody
who's looking at their power bill is going, Wow, why
is my power bill so high?
Speaker 1: Except for me?
Speaker 2: It's true.
Speaker 1: I got solar panels everywhere, and you know, my energy
bill has been flatlined for the last year. I've been
only paying my lease for for my panels.
Speaker 2: But that's yeah. So you got in before even panel
prices are up.
Speaker 1: Right now, good time fifty bucks a month plus whatever
Pizzley charge we get from the power company.
Speaker 2: Right. So, the planet's consuming roughly about twenty tarowatt hours
of electricity per year right now. The IA says that
we're almost forty percent of that energy now is renewable
and expected to be over fifty percent ahead of twenty thirty,
which was the original goal. So some things are going well.
But at the same time, everybody's frantic about energy costs
and we're going to that's going to keep coming up
as we talk through the various forms. So let's do
our usual routine. We'll start with some of the renewables
and then we'll go into the more mainstreams. And I've
got some questions from listeners, not all includers. We go
through this all, right, So by the end of twenty
four last year, we were at about two point two
tarawatts of solar capacity on the planet. By the end
of this year, which is imminent, we should be around
three terra wats. Is a bit of an estimate because
it's not quite the end of the year yet and
it takes a few months to get all the report again.
So you know, about eight hundred megawatts of eight hundred
gigawatts of new solar put online. Most of that is
from China. Still, China has one point one tarot watts
of solar. They're number one by a long way, because
the number two is the United States at about two
hundred and forty gigawatts or maybe.
Speaker 1: Not, you know, with all those Chinese solar panels.
Speaker 2: Barely a quarter. Yeah, although solar panels are also made
in the USA is more expensive. So we're roughly around
ten percent of global interesting now is solar, and seventy
five percent of the new capacity being added in renewables
is solar. Solar is very cheap, and it's the bigger
thing is it's easy to deploy. You get a square
flat piece of land, you can gradually grow out solar.
You know, ortually every other power plant besides wind and solar,
you kind of have to build the whole thing. Before
you get anything right, you'll have to build a large
multi megawatt plant right off the bat where with solar
and wind you can build an increments and so you
can slowly get connected to get to the grid and
slowly expand over time and sort of don't have to
get a huge amount of money up front. You can
get it over time. The Chinese are doing a lot
of the innovation here. They are. I read a great
piece about a huge solar and wind farm being built
int bed the Quingha Tatle and Solar projects. This is
seventeen gigawatts of solar and that's not even at full capacity.
And they're building on the bed.
Speaker 1: How do they get them all up the mountain?
Speaker 2: They carry them? This is not a trivial piece of
problem either, right.
Speaker 1: Hey, Joe SHARPA have another panel?
Speaker 2: That's it? You know? I think it's I think they
have a train line up there. But either way, the
high altitude means it's cold, good for the panels. The
air is thin, so sunlight is very clear, so they
actually get more generation, and then they use these high
performance DC connectors to bring it back down where it's needed.
They're also combining it with hydro electric power, because if
you've got mountains, you've got dams and a lot of
pumped hydro. So when they're doing excess power production around
the stored of batteries, they're pumping water back up hill
and storing behind the dams. So these massive demonstrations of power.
Speaker 1: So I think we talked about this before, but I
don't know about in Canada. But in the United States,
I don't think like, if you have a house on
an acre and you have an adjacent acre that's flat, yeah,
I don't think you can. Can you or can you
not put up you know, solar panels on there and
to power your house or your for your local electricity
or sell it or whatever.
Speaker 2: You can power your house fairly easily. Like you're hitting
on a veryly key point here, which is no, you
can't just go. You can put up panels and put
it in your own battery and do what you want
with it. That's fine. The regulations and these are even
down to the county level, not even state level, much
less federal. It's usually fairly easy to generate power for
your home. But as soon as you want a grid tie,
you have to go through grid tie policy. Processes, and
those processes are archaic, they haven't been modernized. They are
controlled by relatively few entities that are not incented to
improve it because it's where they make their money. And
in some cases you're seeing a weight to get a
grid tie for any kind of power plant of as
much as eight years.
Speaker 1: Wow. On top of that, I imagine you have to be
zoned commercial for that because.
Speaker 2: Well, that's selling power, but that's whole you know, that's
at the front end. Imagine the back end where you
actually build this. And now when you go to get
your grid tie, it's like it's going to be eight
years before you can actually start selling that power. Like,
if you've got a loan, you're big trouble. So yeah,
don't think too much unless you really have a lot
of money and you want to build a large scale
commercial power is expensive and complicated and depending on the region.
You know, there's one of the advantages that having an
authoritarian state like China is is that they simply dictate
when things are going to happen, and there is no
red tape unless they want it. Where I'm not saying
that red tape is automatically bad. Often there are procedures.
You know, what you don't want is to plug a
solar panel array into the grid and have the grid
catch fire, like then nobody gets power. But the current
processes aren't bad and then need to be made better.
It's an ongoing issue, and it is.
Speaker 1: This both Canada and the United States everywhere.
Speaker 2: And it's all of the western world. Right. The same
problems that we're having the grid power are also the
same problems we're having with housing, which is we created
regulatory regimes that are blocking to the point where there
is no incentive to build. Yeah, right, And so you know,
if you go read as reclines abundance, it's like, listen,
all it's actually cheap to build a house than ever
was before. Why don't we have more houses? We've created
regulatory regimes that make it impossible and need to be streamlined,
and there's lots of effort happening in that, and there
needs to be more. There need to be louder noises.
The real reason housing and electricity are more expensive is
that we've crew made it too hard for them to
be less. And this is where you go to your
government and demand it, and they'll give you simple answer.
It's like it's AI's fault or it's Solar's fault, and
all of that is crap. The reality is the infrastructure
needs to be upgraded and the process needs to be upgraded,
and those things need to be dealt with, and building
more power is not going to solve it until you
get the process fixed. Everything else is a waste of time.
Speaker 1: Good points.
Speaker 2: There has been some you know, for a long time
when we were talking about solar We've done this for
a number of years. I've talked about perovs skites. You've
heard the term before, right, We've been living happily with
multijunction soloka and solar panels manufactured largely by the Chinese,
who drove the price down that are about twenty percent efficient.
If you got the good ones, it's about as good
as they can get. And there's always been this proposal,
this idea that there's other materials, but the perovskites will
be able to move more efficient panels, except for the
fact that when you put them outside, they fail. They
don't last more than a couple of years. It's not
enough to make a panel that generates a lot of electricity.
It's got to last for twenty years. But in the
past couple of years we've had real breakthroughs. Last year
I talked about Oxford PV who are making about twenty
five percent efficient panels, and you go twenty percent. Who cares, Like, dude,
that's a twenty percent improvement. That adds up. It's a
big deal. And so they're now at a point.
Speaker 1: Where they have licensed to Trina Solar, which is a
Chinese company, to manufacture those twenty five percent panels at scale.
Speaker 2: So those should be coming on the market.
Speaker 1: And did you say those panels are also silicon based?
Speaker 2: They're using provskites. Oh, they are using perovskites. Yeah, So
what's the big deal about parovskites? Why do we like?
What's the potential in provskites? Perovskites absorb a different frequency
of light than the silicon. Silicon tends to absorb long light,
So the reds and the infrared is what is what
silicon absorbs and makeing electricity. Perovskites live in the ultraviolet
and blue range, and so when you combine the two,
so you have a layer of silicon and a layer
of perovskite, the perovskite layer will pass through the reds
and infrared down to the silicon and absorb the UV
and blue. So this is why they're invariably more expensive
because they are a conventional silicon solar panel and the
Perovsky panel combined. Wow, right, but you get more energy
from it. No too is about it. So there should
be tandem style panels getting into the thirty percent range
available in the next year or two now, and yeah,
but they'll still be expensive. I'm sure they're going to
be more expensive now. One of the main manufacturers of
this is a US company called Klux. So Klux has
made this transparent perovskuide layers transparency to infrared and red spectrum.
So you replace the upper layer of a regular silicon
panel with their quote unquote active glass layer and some
additional wiring and you get this increased power production. So
they are licensing that to multiple companies to add to
existing silicon panels. Okay, back in China, which does a
lot of this innovation, a company called Longi has been
doing this tandem design, but they've also done a texturization
approach to the interface between the silicon and the parovs guide. Basically,
these little pyramid structures which increases light absorption. These are
micrometer pyramids, too tiny to even see, but they decrease
reefflectivity and increase light absorption between the layers. They've demonstrated
in a tandem panel almost a thirty five percent efficiency. Wow.
So and again that should have good lifespan So when
you talk about going for a twenty percent to a
thirty five percent like these are massive improvements. Now you
could play this ROI game where I need a third
less panels, almost half as many panels, I can pay
twice a bunch for those panels and still be ahead.
So solar technology is not holding still. It took a
long time for us to get to this capability, but
it has happened now, and so the market's going to
get interesting over the next couple of years in terms
of what panels to buy. Needless to say, expect conventional
multi junctions silicon panels to get even cheaper as these
other panels start to move into the market. Now. One
of the question areas we've gotten from it was Chad
Boyer and also Charles and Blue Sky said our chin
any solar panels the only choice, and without a doubt,
they are the cheapest choice. But they're not the only choice.
There are US manufactured solar panels, although not the entire pipeline.
The way solar panels made, you can sort of break
them into five major steps. So first is you've got
to make silicon metals. The US pioneered this. A lot
of it is still done in the US, but it's
how you get all the contaminutes out of silicon to
make a pure silicon metal. Then it's typically exported from
there because the next steps forming the ingots, actually casting
them into the shapes that are going to be needed
for silicon, and slicing them into wafers, those are all
done abroad. So step one is very US SEP twos
and three not so much, are almost not at all.
Making them into cells, so that's actually adding textures, the doping.
Some of that's done in the US, but not very much.
But the final assembly part, taking those cells and wiring them,
putting in the housings, actually building that, that's done at
scale in the US these days. So when you buy
an American solar panel and you can do that, you're
going to pay a ten to twenty percent premium on that.
You're typically getting a module made from parts abroad that
is assembled in the US. So if that makes you happy,
and you know by US standards that's considered a US
solar panel, you can do that. Just understand that cost.
I would also point out that much of that is
new capability that was brought on by the Inflection Inflation
Reduction Act in twenty two that's largely been shut down
by the new administration. The new administration has rolling back
all sorts of clean energy tax credits and benefits, and
this is one of them. So while they been built out,
I don't know how much more growth is going to
happen in that area and whether or not people are
willing to pay the premium for that to continue. But
that's what's going on as those as a US administration
rolled back the clean energy credits, a lot of money
gout went into renewable energy ahead of those rollbacks, So
the beginning of the year in twenty five, it was
a huge them out. Now it's dying off in the
later parts of the year though we don't have all
the numbers here, but one case there was a company
called clean Capital who ordered twenty five million dollars worth
of solar panels ahead of tariffing and credits going away.
They're now storing them because it's more than they need
to the tune of like one hundred and two thousand
dollars a month, but it's worth it for them for
production for the rest of the year. The vast majority
of new power being built in the US, like ninety
percent in twenty twenty five, is renewable, mostly solar, some
win so the impact of the rollbacks has to stop
that deployment this year. But a lot of high risk
projects like the off shore wind projects, which have been
shut down just because of their risk levels and the
time they don't know how long things are going to take,
they basically wound down. So we're not going to see
the impact of rollbacks on renewables for a few years,
possibly not until the end of this administration. So it's
going to be confusing for folks because they say, hey,
we cut all these things, but yet it's still going,
and it's just because people pre bought lots of investments
already in place. Businesses aren't perfectly elastic. They can't respond
to regulatory changes that quickly, but later there will be
impacts in growth. Just doesn't happened yet. All right back
in twenty two on that geek out, I mentioned the
thing called Project Nexus. This was so idea of putting
solar panels over top of agricultural canals in California. Thought
it was a brilliant idea, the idea being brilliant. Yeah,
this was done in India first, So it is the
idea of these are not normal water waste. The you're
man made water waste for distributing water for agriculture, and
they have a problem with algal growth and they have
a problem with evaporation and otherwise can't build stuff on there,
So why not build solar panels over top of them.
The water keeps the panels cooler, so they run more
efficiently and they last longer. You decrease the water losses,
you battle algae growth and other problems, so it's kind
of a win wind deal. Well, that project actually happened,
no kidding. Yeah, in August, it's twenty five. They finished it.
It's generating one point six megawatts of electricity, so it's
not a huge thing. There's many more that could be built,
but they've done it. It took three years. Now there's a
big reconciliation of is this worthwhile because it is more
complex to install over a waterway. You're not always pointing
the solar panels at their optimal angles, so in general
it's more costly to conventional solar installation. So it's going
to take a few years to really understand the other
benefits of long term utilization. They're harder to clean because
they're up higher and over a waterway, like. There's a
bunch of problems there, so it's a question of how
much more is going to happen. Same to go with
what they call floato voltaics. There's been so many papers
about this idea of just put solar panels on reservoirs, again,
man made bodies of water, typically because of dams. They're
nice and flat. There's not much going on there. You
already have electrical wiring, so just checking the put solar
panels on it. Yeah. Good. There's been a few projects,
but not very many, so everybody likes it. It's a
good idea, but it hasn't happened much, and I think
part of the reason is that most of the panel
solar panels that are available day are being installed in
commercial panel deployments on the ground that lowest costs and
the most benefit and so people don't need to innovate
in this area yet, same for the canals. Right, it's
just a question of is it even necessary. We're not
struggling for land for all these things. And when you're
throwing the regulatory problems or even getting stuff connected to
the grid, they're like, Okay, we don't need a bottle
and more complicated stuff. Will just stick with the simple.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it is more complicated and it requires more infrastructure
and all that.
Speaker 2: Now, one area of innovation in solar that is seeming
to grow because it's not that complicated is this area
called agro voltaics. So this is combining farming and solar panels.
So this year in September in the Philippines, they opened
the City Corps Solar Petangus one. This is two hundred
megawatts of solar with a three hundred and twenty megawatt
hour battery storage system. So it's considered base low power.
It can run round the clock.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 2: But they built them tall enough that there's rooms to
grow crops underneath the solar panels. Now, the crops haven't
been the priority, but they built them that way because
it is good land for farming, and now you're talking
about crops that need some shade that make more sense
to be growing in the under those conditions.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's kind of say, I mean, don't crops usually
thrive in sunlight but some need shade.
Speaker 2: Well, the problem is with climate change going on, there's
almost too much sun in a lot of places, so
we have different crops that benefit from shade, and so
it is possible to optimize crops in those conditions. So
you're making power as well as providing shade for other
crops and utilizing the land twice. They're not the only project.
China's now built one a two gigawat project just absolutely
massive out in inner Mongolia, and they're using it for
deed deservocation. So where they have problems with too much
moisture loss and you're trying to grow cover crops just
to keep the sand from encroaching, they're putting solar panels
so the show keeps the water in place, it helps
protect the plants. They're calling it eco voltaics now, where
they think they can start pushing back the desert while
making solar power and starting to turn that land into
something viable.
Speaker 1: Can go further Richard, we under the crops, let's put
fish farms, so the fish poop, you know, the nitrogen
from the fish poop fertilizes the crops. And now you've
got you know, three things going on.
Speaker 2: Yep, you know you're not wrong.
Speaker 1: I mean, that's a thing more ecosysm, that's a thing already.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, we certainly used aquaponics in combination of other
farming because it does create useful water, that is that
has fertilizer in it. Already, I thought the US is
doing this in Colorado. They have one hundred and fifty
megawatt solar farm now again stood on a higher posts,
so they can grow prairie grasses underneath that. We'll be
using sheep to graze that grass to keep it under control.
Speaker 1: Nice.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's that's beautiful. I love to hear stuff like that.
Should we take a break and then we'll talk about
wind power.
Speaker 1: That sounds good. Okay, We'll be right back after this
break for more wind break wind. You're funny. Did you
know you can lift and shift your dot Net framework
apps to virtual machines in the cloud. Use the elastic
beanstalk service to easily migrate to Amazon ec two with
little or no changes. Find out more at aws dot
Amazon dot com, slash elasticbeanstock, and we're back. It's the
Energy Geek out of twenty twenty five. Mister Campbell has
done his research. He's got his cup of tea, probably
got a kettle of tea on there, and we're going
to talk about wind.
Speaker 2: All right, So about the data is only up to
date as the first half of twenty twenty five. There's
about seventy two gigawatts worldwide added in wind power, up
sixty five percent for twenty twenty four, so definitely expanding.
Expecting one hundred and fifty gigs of new wind online
in twenty twenty five for a total capacity of about
one point three tarawatts of wind worldwide. China course is
the largest deployer, both on and offshore. They did fifty
gigawatts in twenty twenty five and they expected to have
seven hundred gigawats total, so that is, you know, almost
half of all wind capacity in the world now being
built built for China. US is number two a one
hundred and fifty gigawatts, but almost no new installations coming
in on or offshore.
Speaker 1: So you remember I told you we talked about this
last year that in New London at the State Pier
they're doing this Revolution Wind project, which is a seven
hundred and four megawatt project. It's being stage at the
State Pier. Project is eighty five percent completed. About three
months ago, Trump put the kaibash on it and said
we're not funding this anymore. And then he was ordered
to refund it, and so it got refunded. People went
back to work, and just three days ago after this,
you know, as of this recording, anyway, they halted it again. Well, boy,
it's pausing leases for five large scale offshore wind projects
under construction on the East Coast due to unspecified national
security risks identified by the Pentagon. Pauses effective immediately, and
we'll give the Interior Department, which oversees offshore wind, time
to work with the Defense Department and other agencies to
assess the possible ways to mitigate any security risks. Anyway,
I'm going to share this link with Richard and he
will put it on the page. It's from the Connecticut Mirror.
But you know, it's just it's hard when you have
an administration that just doesn't want any kind of renewable
energy projects. To continue and that's really what it's all about.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, no science on the basis of that. Now
that being said, there has been you know, there are
complaints about the noise from wind farms and there has
been some innovation there. So they're doing the same sort
of thing that the airline industry's done. So they're doing
things like serrations on the trailing edge trying to reduce
noise impact. There is a big effort to try and
what's happening in Europe, which really led a lot of
the wind technology, is the oldest wind turbines are now
aging out and they're finding out they're not recyclable. Well,
I mean, honestly, the vast majority is recyclable, the turbides itself,
even the concrete can be reprocessed. It's the blades. The
blades are made of fiberglass, carver fiber. They're almost impossible
to recycle and so that's been a big fuss. They
are now making new styles of blades specifically for more recyclabilities,
but that will take twenty years to play out because
these turbines typically last twenty to thirty years. Interesting AI
technologies has started to play a role in or at
least machine learning technology in wind turbine are wind site
development where they're using machine learning models to figure out
alltimal layouts and they're sometimes finding ten to fifteen percent
performance increases for the turbine sets by using these complex
models to be able to locate them so that they
have more wind from with the combined turbines over longer
periods of the time. On shores sort of gone as
far as it can. We kind of know what we're
doing there. It works very well where you kind good sites,
you lay them out, you need steady wind and tall posts.
They can't get a whole lot bigger. The real development
area is an offshore wind, and offshore wind kind of
comes in two categories. You have what they call fixed
based wind that's typically up to about fifty meters or
one hundred and fifty feet of water where you literally
put a casement down to the bottom. You drill a
hole and you pour a bunch of concrete, you lay
down the post. It's fixed on the bottom. Yeah, there's
only so many places in the world where that water
is a shallow like most of the North Sea and
around Denmark, so where the ashallow like that's why they
have a ton of it, but in a place like
here in British Columbia where the water is very deep,
you just can't do that. So now you get into
floating based offshore, and we talked about this before difficult.
This is using a lot. It is difficult and it's expensive,
so you get away from the cost effectiveness. You know,
this fixed base offshore, they're hitting the limits of size.
They're somewhere between fifteen and twenty five megawats per unit.
They're talking about some fifty megawats. But now you're getting
into the physics problem. They're just so heavy and so large.
You can only be so big with floating. There's still
only really five sites that are being tested, and just
with a handful of turbines. There's a couple of sites
in the UK with five turbines each. Portugal has one
with three, No way as one with eleven. France that's
one with three. But that's about it. They're using oil
industry platform technology to build these floating platforms to put
wind turbines on, and they just have not scaled up
because it's so costly. So they're still a debate whether
it's necessary or when they're going to even go down
that path where there's still other areas to do less
expensive forms. That's all I got for wind, But I
actually have some stories for wave power because wavepower has
always been the you know, red headed step child, never
really worked kind of limited.
Speaker 1: Yeah, from what I remember, it's kind of dirty, right.
You have these turbines that are underwater that are capturing
you know, tidal currents and things and stuff gets stuck
in there. You know, turbine is a fan.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and the ocean tends to destroy them.
Speaker 1: Yeah, if it's one thing, if it's in the air,
but if it's underwater exactly, corrosion and stuff.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a tough time. And so really that's not
been the area development and instead they're looking at more
pumping technologies, so sitting more on the surface. Now. Last
year I talked about the Packwave Energy Project. So this
is a laboratory site largely off the coast of Oregon.
Oregon and Washington State have ideal conditions for wave power
technologies rather than tidle technologies. Wave power and so off
the coast of Oregon, because Oregon has more development on
the coast than Washington does. Washington's conditions are so rough.
There's very little over there. They built these two sides,
Packwave North and Packway South. North was purely for testing
and South we talked about this last year. They were
building up, putting in all the wiring and so forth
for four big tests berths, so that different companies could
test up to five power collectors in each of the
burths with all the wiring and telemetry already put in place.
And there were candidates to be put out there. One
of them was a company called Aqua Harmonics, which had
back in twenty sixteen won a Department of Energy prize
for their innovative boys. These are floating boys anchored to
the bottom but under tensions, and so the wave action
forces the boy to go up and down, and that
actually runs a small electric generator that then is wired
back to shortage general electricity. The cutting of funding for
renewable energy projects by the administration has put that project
entirely on holds. It's not much happening a pack packwave
Styuth this time. But there's another company, an Israeli company
called Eco Wave Power, and they do what's called on
shore wave power. Now, wait a second, how the heck
is that supposed to work?
Speaker 1: Yeah, right.
Speaker 2: So what this is is floats that can move anchored
to a war for a breakwater. So as the waves
come up to that breakwater or wharf, they push them
up and down and they're connected to hydraulic fluid arms
and that builds up pressure and that pressure then turns
a generator. Now, Eco Wave Powers had a site in
Gibraltar in the Mediterranean from twenty sixteen until twenty twenty two.
It was off of an old World War two AMMO
jetty and they learned a lot from there, but ultimately
they decided to shut that down and move that a
bunch of that tech to Los Angeles. So in Los Angeles,
on a wharf near the Catalina Ferry, there is seven
of these blue floats. They're quite large, connected to this
wharf and they generate up to one hundred kilowats of electricity,
and the LA District wants to expand that onto all
the big breakwaters about eight miles worth a breakwater, think
like sixty megawatts of power. And that same company has
also got a pilot project now in Porto, Portugal where
the initial build they just broke around this year will
be a megalot with the intent to boot up to
nineteen more. I get along the big breakwaters in Porto. Porto,
you know, on the eastern side of the Atlantic, takes
some pretty serious waves. So we'll see if those actually work.
So there is some development a way of power. It's
minuscule compared to the other techs, but there is some development.
You love us Porta, Okay, I love that place. Porna
is such a great man. Let's talk about power storage.
This is the most question category Materius. Carlson sent me
some questions. Dan Owen asked about solid state batteries, Martin
asked about sodium batteries. Lots of questions, but let me
begin with the most important power storage, the number one
power storage strategy that we have so far, which is
pumped hydro. I mentioned this back in twenty two with
the Australian National University paper where they provided an atlas.
They mapped out the world showing all these locations in
the world where it may not be a good hydro
electric location per se, but it is a high elevation
with water available below, where you could put a reservoir above,
pump water uphill and then run it down there. About
eighty five percent conversion efficient. They last one hundred years.
It's really well known technology.
Speaker 1: So you basically use the power that's generator from the
water flowing down to power a pump that pumps it
back up to the reservoir.
Speaker 2: Is that what you're saying now? That I mean that
won't net out. What it is is you have excess power, right,
Pump hydro is about I have too much shoulder, I
have too much wind, so I use it to pump
water uphill to store in a reservoir like a battery.
Speaker 1: I see.
Speaker 2: So today there are eighty seven pumped hydro sites facility
over a gigawat of storage on the planet right like
this is not They've been around for a while. There's
lots of small ones, but there are eighty seven gigawap
plus ones now wow, forty of those are in China.
Japan again, a very mountainous country, has fourteen o and
the US has ten. China has plans for another hundred.
So they're taking advantage of the terrain and again just
the easy regulatory regime mean they can move very quickly.
That the advantage of pumped hydro is it's completely known technology.
Those turbine has been around for a long time. The
pump's been around for a long time. We know how
to drill through rock, we know how to reservoirs. It's
all known tech right, like, and they last. You know,
we expect hydroelectric dams to last one hundred plus years. Like,
they're the longest lasting power techs we have. So let's
go back to the numbers for a second. You said
there's an eighty five percent conversion rate. Yeah, what does
that mean exactly? Can you break that down into English?
Speaker 1: So if I pump one hundred, if I spend one
hundred megawats pumping water uphill, I can expect eighty five
megawats back when I let.
Speaker 2: It flow back downhill. Okay, right, So they're losses, but
they're not huge losses. It's efficient enough and the water
storage itself doesn't leak very very badly. Right, you have
some ev operation so forth. This is when you get
into put more solar panels on like this.
Speaker 1: And as long as you have water yeah and height, yes,
you can make it work.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And generally we've been you know, our original water
management projects, we're for managing flooding. Right. A lot of
dams were built to stop seasonal flooding, right, and then
we also learned to make electricity from it, so we
ran them a little differently, and now we're learning to
store with them as well, and to build multiple tiers. Right.
And there's locations in Norway where a given water flow
has like four different dams on it, four different restores
on it. So they try and get as much power
as possible. And the dynamic between place like Denmark and Norway.
Denmark's got a ton of hydro electric power, Denmark's got
a ton of wind power, so they put a connection
between the two, and the Danes are making too much
electricity from wind power, which happens they send that excess
electricity in Norway. Norway shuts down their dam, their damn
power generation and uses the wind power. And when the
wind power slacks off, they crank up the dams and
let the power flow down to Denmark to supply the difference.
And when they're really making too much power, they're actually
pumping water back up hills. They not only providing power
in Norway and Denmark with wind, but also increasing storage
on their existing dam system.
Speaker 1: You know, I know they watched Sesame Street when they
were kids because cooperation was a big deal for that.
It's kind of important.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, you know, some of a lot of power
generation has to do with geography. What have you got,
you know, do you have mountains with water on the top, okay,
hydro electric you know, not a lot of places to
light them, but some of them are. You've got a
lot of shallow water with good windflow Okay, you know,
offshore fixed based wind awesome, right, and on and on
and on. Let's face it, most of the places that
burn coal or do it because they have coal. A
lot of places that burn natural gas do it because
they have natural gas. Like, there's only so many different
power sources that are available. And if you've got a
lot of sunline, fine solar has some merit to it.
Like if you have to mix and match these things,
and depends on the regions. But where those regions can
colloberate so they can offset each other, everybody benefits.
Speaker 1: Yep.
Speaker 2: Okay, let's move onto the other sides of storage, and
of course we need to focus on batteries to some degree.
So twenty twenty five is a breakthrough year, the year
that lithium ion battery packs fall below one hundred dollars
per kilo wat hour. So today, at scale an LFP battery,
a lithium ferris phosphate pheraophosphate, these are the eighty bucks
a kilowat ho Wow. In twenty ten, fifteen years ago,
that was fifteen hundred dollars. Like, the impact of this
is hard to get your head around.
Speaker 1: Is that mostly because of demand from car manufacturers and
things like that in phone manufacturers or was it in
uptick and supply that came before demand.
Speaker 2: It's mostly demand, and demand has caused manufacturing to scale
the same way that solar prices were driven down by
China scaling up their production to meet demand. This is
a price warring China over battery. So the point where
Sherman g is actually telling the companies you need to
cool it because they're hurting each other and trying to
get the prices down as fast as possible. Wow, And
they're just manufacturing at scale with very little control and
making very very cheap batteries to the point where it's
just now it's pretty much the rule in Australia if
you're going to put a solar panel on a roof,
you have to put a battery in the good news
is the battery's just not that expensive anymore. Prices have
come down a lot. You know, you want twenty yellow
lot hours in your house, Well that today is two
or three thousand dollars, right Like, that's now not that
much more than It's all on the line of the
solar prices. So we're getting down to very economical prices.
It's going to take a while for it to go
through the pipeline.
Speaker 1: I thought those Tesla batteries were still really expensive, though.
Speaker 2: They are, but they need their prices need to fall
and their competitors are coming at them. And again, these
batteries only hit this price of this year. It's going
to take a couple of years for you to see
them in the pipeline. Okay, but the reality is battery
prices are tanking.
Speaker 1: Is there enough natural resource lithium in all of those
things that make those to sustain this kind of growth.
Speaker 2: There is lots of lithium. What there isn't a lot
of is cheap lithium. So for many years, because we
don't use that much lithium, because the batteries tended to
be small, we were able to sustain the industry on
the back of some extremely cheap lithium. Lithium salts essentially
boiling out of the ground in places like the Atta
Kama Desert in Chili. So this is a place where
lithium phosphates are literally coming out of the ground. You
pump that water up, that briny water up, You put
it in big ponds, let it evaporate off, you scrape
it up, and you send it off to production. Wow,
there are other lithium stores. There are lithium in clay beds,
there are hard rock lithiums. They're just more expensive to extract.
Speaker 1: Are we taking lithium away from the psychology field where
it's prescribed as a medication.
Speaker 2: That's grams of lithium versus tons of lithium.
Speaker 1: I know that's just a stupid sit on it, Sorry,
but I would make the point.
Speaker 2: We got down to eighty dollars at kilowatt hour while
materials and manufacturing costs have been rising, right, Like, the
cost of making things is definitely up, the cost of
the ingredients is definitely up, and yet the prices have
still fallen. Now now we get into some of the
other battery technologies are being developed, and one of them
is a sodium battery. Now, sodium batteries have been around
for really long time. Sodium is a slightly heavier version
of lithium. They are both alkali metals. Sodium is even
more common than lithium by a large degree. That's the
stuff in salt, it's everywhere. The problem is it's been
difficult to manufacture. You can make it into a battery.
By its nature, you presume it would not be as
dense as a lithium battery. And then CATL came out
with this announcement this year. Now c ATL is a
Chinese company that's been making it makes lithium batteries for everybody,
like this is one of the big players. So kind
of it's like when Toyota says something like it kind
of had to take these guys seriously. They're one of
the biggest battery manufacturers in the world. And this is
what they said. Yeah, we know we got LFP batteries
down to eighty bucks a kilo one hour. We figured
out how to make sodium batteries for ten dollars a
kilo one hour. What it's crazy. And they announced a
battery called Naxtra. So Naxtra they say this is a
sodium based battery is a ten thousand cycle battery with
a large temperature into the lithium. Most lithium batteries LFP,
especially butt NMC as well. Three thousand cycles is normal.
Three thousand cycles is a lot. You got a three
thousand cycle battery. That means that's how many times you
can recharge it before it does discharge and recharge, right,
and then before it starts to really lose potential. Right.
And in a three thousand cycle batteries, this is what
you get in like a Tesla, right, which means that
after two hundred thousand miles of driving or so, your
battery is down ten to fifteen percent in capacity. Right's
a pretty good deal. They're talking about ten thousand cycle battery,
so now you're talking a million miles before you start
losing capacity.
Speaker 1: Wow, that's amazing.
Speaker 2: And because of the structure of sodium, it's more tolerant
to colder and higher temperatures. So one of the key
things to making lithium batteries successful in cars has been
the temperature management system. We pump fluid around these batteries
to keep them so they don't get too cold and
they don't get too warm. It's expensive. It's part of
what makes an electric car expensive, but it makes sure
those batteries last.
Speaker 1: Doesn't sodium nut like water, Well, lithium doesn't like water.
All alkali one metals do not like water. Right, Okay,
that's just a normal part of the problem. So sodium
is no more dangerous if it gets wet than lithium.
Speaker 2: Sure, okay, now it's always problematic. They can both burn,
but we've built systems to deal with that. The bigger
issue is sodium is not going to be as dense
as lithium. However, they say, again we haven't seen this
the extra battery yet, that they're getting one hundred and
seventy five kilo wat hours per kilogram. That's comparable to
lithium phosphate batteries. It's not as good as NMC batteries
like your top of the line batteries today are three
hundred kilowat hours per per kilo. They're just expensive, about
one hundred and seventy five. That's feasible for a car.
Speaker 1: So it's going to be a little bigger. Nominally, it
would be probably not. You're probably not going to see
it in a phone any day soon.
Speaker 2: No, you probably wouldn't, but then again, the battery is
not that expensive in a phone. We're talking about battery
storage for grid, battery storage for houses, batteries and batteries
and cars. Yeah, this is in the league. And if
it's a ten dollars a kilo wat hour, like, sign
me up, I'll give you more space in my garage exactly.
If you can drop by household battery price tenfold, which
is what you're talking about, that's really great. They've also
announced another battery called a free void battery, where they've
got a control. They mix sodium and lithium battery designs
and they use a smart controller to figure out what
batteries do use under what conditions. Wow, which is very clever.
The questions here is why have these why have why
are sodium batteries more expensive than lithium batteries until COTL
made this announcement, And the biggest thing is just manufacturing
at scale. They just have not matured that the pipeline.
There's not as many ingredients as available. The material costs
are lower, but it's not as plentiful and the process
is not as mature. The lithium process has been worked
on so hard in the past twenty years, it's just
driven the price down. So the concern here is is
everything CTL is saying true? Right? Is this knowing how
competitive the Chinese market is in cl is the Chinese company?
Are they saying this to freak out their competitors more
than they can actually pull it off? Like I'm really
keen If it's true, this is a huge breakthrough. We
just need to actually be able to buy the product
well in a huge disruption, right yep. It just means
there's no excuse not to have batteries, Like how far
are we from simply you know, you put the battery
on the solar panel and it naturally backs itself up
like that, and that's it if they're that cheap. But today,
right now, lithin perophosphate batteries are the cheapest known tech.
They've hit it. They've hit a remarkable floor and they're
going to continue down.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 2: All right, there was a question about solid state batteries.
This is an ongoing debate. This is you know, sol
state batteri is one of those voodoo terms right.
Speaker 1: Where Yeah, what does that even mean?
Speaker 2: I thought, if we just do this, everything will be better, right,
The battery will last forever. That's the idea that the
electrolyte in the battery, which is normally a liquid or gel,
is a solid, So they should be denser, should be safer,
they should last longer, they should charge faster. It's just
like it's the holy grail. Okay. And lots of companies
have constantly said, oh, yeah, we've got solid estate batteries
coming soon, and our cars are going to be amazing.
Hyundai said they had a pilot project this year they're
going to make mass producing in twenty thirty. The problem
is every time someone says to have a solid state battery,
somebody smart takes that battery apart and finds some liquid
in it. Yeah, okay, so we're kind of playing with
the term, like the solid state itself is like it's
more solid or less solid, or it's quasi solid. So
it's all about almost there, right. We never really nailed
this completely, and so that that's still going on. Lots
of companies making promises but just don't have the real
batteries here. Yeah, all right, a couple more battery texts
then we will take a break form energy. This is that
iron air battery. I check, keep checking it on this
was the idea of you know, lithium ion batteries are
kind of silly for grid storage. They have a natural
like eight hour cycle or their natural discharges about eight hours.
There's not enough for going overnight. It's not actually a
good tech for this. And let's face it, their battery
designs are about being able to be moved around, right,
whether it's in your phone or in your car, stuff
like that. In an iron air battery, while much bigger, heavier,
and hotter, it's perfect for grid storage because about back then,
at least a few years ago, there was ten percent
of the price of lithium ion battery, although lithia myon
batteries have gone a lot cheaper. We talked about these
last year too, and we are talking about for several
years now, and their form Entergy's original projects in Minnesota.
It's called the Great River Energy Project. It was supposed
to be a one point five megawatt storage with one
hundred and fifty megawatt hours because it has a natural
one hundred hour discharge time that's pretty potent, not just
lasting overnight, but literally lasting for days. They were supposed
to be done in twenty twenty three. They finally started
actually installing per batteries in October of twenty five.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 2: So, and I've read the press releases of they're just saying, hey,
you know what, manufacturing at scale is hard. And so
they built out this factory in Virginia when they raised
more money back in twenty four and they finally said
they're producing their grid scale capable batteries. They've started to
populate the Minnesota the Great Energy Facility finally.
Speaker 1: All right, So the idea here if I'm correct, me
if I'm wrong, but is that the grid itself is
backed up, so you're going to have less brownouts and
things like that. Is that true?
Speaker 2: Well, well, the idea is runs have a huge amount
of solar, it charges up that battery and then overnight
you run on the battery. Oh right, okay, simplest thing, right,
if we have enough story we have a certain amount
of storage like that so that we can run the
low loads at night, then we don't have to have
as much base low power. But you're right, these battery
storage facilities are about stabilizing grids when you're switching sources.
But there's all kinds of advantage to having a certain
amount of battery, right, right, and normally they've been using
lithium my own because they're cheap relatively speaking at scale. Right,
this is what Tesla pushed on for all those years
and have built out a bunch of facilities for them.
They've got their challenges, they overheat, they catch fire, that
kind of thing, but they've done this. But the whole
idea is the iron air battery is very inexpensive. Bigger
and hotter and heavier, None of that matters when you
put a fence around it. And that means how you
can feed various power sources into that to keep it
charged and then discharge it when you need it. And
so they've got they've been building out the Great River
Energy Project. Finally, they've also got contracts with in California
and Georgia, Maine, but I think everybody's just waiting to
see how Minnesota goes at this point. But they apparently
are really installing batteries, so it's great. Now they got
to find out if the run times actually play out
the way they do, and have they managed to heat
properly and you know that all that like, there's still
more to learn, but form Energy is making progress. Another
one I mentioned last year is polar night Energy. This
is that project in Finland where they built a one
megawat sand battery, right, that was very interesting. That stored
one hundred megawatt hours of power. So we're going to
discharge it a one megawatt for one hundred hours.
Speaker 1: The whole idea is that sand holds heat, right, Yeah,
that's right.
Speaker 2: So you use the excess solar to heat up the
sand about six hundred degree cent a grade. You have
US ninety conversion efficiency. They blow air through it which
superheats that air and then it can flash steam or
they can use the air directly in commercial process so forth.
This thing went live in June this year, in twenty
twenty five. A megawatt with one hundred megawat hours of storage. Wow,
And the result has been successful, and so they're building
another one in Vaski, Finland. They're now building to megawatt
two one hundred and fifty megawatt hour. So construction to
start next year in twenty six, completion and operation in
twenty seven. This is twenty four hundred metric tons of
sand in a silo fourteen meters hide and fifteen meters wide.
It's just sand that it's one of those things that
works at scale, and so that's a great success story.
They've got a cheap source of sand. It's just the
ceramic residues. It's not that silicon's hand, but it works
for them. And so congrats to Polar Night Energy, new project,
even bigger. Okay, let's take a brief break and then
we'll come back and talk a hydrogen sounds good.
Speaker 1: We'll be right back, and we're back, gets the dot
net Rocks twenty twenty five Energy geek out. Mister Campbell
is about to talk to us about some hydrogen stuff.
Speaker 2: Because we're on the back half and.
Speaker 1: This kind of what happened to hydrogen?
Speaker 2: Oh what happened to hydrogen? And Kiaran landing online.
Speaker 1: Where's my hydrogen car?
Speaker 2: Anyway, that is exactly what Kiaren said, he gets where's
my hydrogen car? It's like, look, I mean, Toyota's got
their hydrogen car, right. Both guys who got one thought
it was great. These are very you know, the problem
with the mirror is a cool little hydrogen cell car.
But hydrogen cells are hot, they need a lot of maintenance.
They're expensive. You know, the battery car has one. Yeah,
although these days is a big pushback to go back
to hybrids, which you know, and arguably one of the
reasons people like hybrids because then you have some gas
that they can charge that battery, so you're sort of
use you a mix of both for a more mechanically
complicated car. But you know who's happy when you have
a more mechanically complicated car your dealer. You know, dealers
don't like electric vehicles because there's nothing for them to do, right,
and so they don't like selling them. They'd much rather
sell you a hybrid because it means you're going to
be back every quarter to get some maintenance stuff.
Speaker 1: Well, the dealers have to ship from being mechanics to
being electric electrical engineers and computer technicians, right, I mean, but.
Speaker 2: Even then, there's just not that much for you to do. Look,
I own a Rivian. I take it in once a year,
and even then that's just to change like air filters
and theory. I could do that myself, you know, other
than occasional warranty where it's it's just nothing to do
on electric cars, and that the dealers are very unhappy
about them.
Speaker 1: But the oil and gas. She love hydrogen because they
are the sources of hydrogen. Most hydrogen is made from
natural gas, and so it means their pipelines are still
important all this stuff they've invested in. Hydrogen prices have
not fallen at all. Last year there are about five
thousand dollars e metric ton.
Speaker 2: This year they're about five thousand dollars a metric ton,
so they're just not going anywhere. We make the vast
majority of hydrogen using steam reformation, which is where you
take uh methane gas and you pump a bunch of
about six megawat hours of electricity into it to make
a ton of hydrogen. You'll also spin out ninety twelve
tons of carbon dioxide in the process. Most hydrogen today,
which is used in industrial processes primarily.
Speaker 1: That's how it's made. It's not all that clean, is it. No, Well,
it's a lot. It's a lot of carbon dioxide for
the amount of hydrogen to make. Now you can up
the power consumption threefold, go to about twenty five megawat hours.
Speaker 2: It's almost fourfold really, and you can do methane pyroalysis.
Now you'll make it. You'll make a ton of hydrogen
and three tons of solid carbon which you can bury
or at least contains you're not emitting carbon dioxide. It
just costs moreau's a lot more energy. But most people
think about making a hydrogen what the way you did
in the lab at school, with electrolysis.
Speaker 1: Of electricity and water.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yes, So if you want to make a ton
of hydrogen with electrolysis, that's sixty megawat hours, So ten
times would it costs in electricity from steam reformation.
Speaker 1: But it's a good use for solar energy, isn't it
if it's excess power. Yeah.
Speaker 2: So one of the ideas is switching access power. But
the problem is that to do electrolysis at scale, you
can't just turn it on quickly, right. It takes about
an hour or two hours for those systems to get
up and running, sometimes like five or six hours, So
you can't always take advantage of power that way. It's hard.
Speaker 1: You have to have big and or numerous membranes right right, Well,
the electrolysis is more.
Speaker 2: Gas capture, so they don't have make of a problem. Okay,
And just to be clear, you know we're talking about
the problem with fuel cells, is your typical way to
turn a hydrogen back into electricity. So if you take
a ton of hydrogen and you run it through a
fuel cell, you'll get about three point three megawatt hours
of electricity from it in a bunch of whiters. So
you just spent sixty megawat hours to make that ton
of hydrogen to get three megawaan hours back. Yeah, it's
a twentyfold loss.
Speaker 1: It's a lot more efficient to use electricity in batteries
in a car than hydrogen.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's just you know, and fuel cells are pricey
and unreliable, and it's just a problem. Right, And let's
face it, hydrogen is it makes more sense to move
methane around that does to move natural gas around. The
hydrogen Hydrogen leaks out of everything, right, right, it's such
a fine it's such a thin gas. It'll escape constantly.
Speaker 1: And aren't they engines loud to.
Speaker 2: Well, it can be, but there's solutions to all of that.
But you just need so much more of it. Right,
to move the same amount of energy in as hydrogen
gas and methane, you need to move three times more volume.
So that costs more energy.
Speaker 1: Again.
Speaker 2: So one of the ideas if you're going to make
hydrogen at scale is actually making into meth into ammonia.
Oh so that's a you know, because an ammonia atom
is a nitrogen atom with four hydrogens attached to it. Now,
traditionally we make ammonia for fertilizer or fertilizers using the
haber Bosch process. Right, and this is another, you know,
very dirty process because you do that steam reformation to
make hydrogen. Then you draw that and then I should
off that you have another process to buying the two together.
Speaker 1: You also use it to make bombs.
Speaker 2: Well it's the same stuff, right ye, And you know fertilizer,
that's whatever. You know, that big deal. So there's this
idea of green ammonia. So now building out excess clean
energy sources to do your hydrogen extraction with electrolysis and
then combine it with nitrogen to make ammonia, which much
easier store. It's an easy liquid to work with. We
already have a system for doing all of this. I
think it's interesting about ammonia is you can use it
in a rocket, you can use it in an engine.
That stuff will burn.
Speaker 1: I didn't know that.
Speaker 2: And it's emissions are nitrogen and water. Huh, two things
that we need. It's just a yeah, it's just an
ammonia's expensive to make. It is normally a very dirty
process to make it. So once again, the Chinese step
in with a huge solar plant out in Chief and
they're making three hundred and twenty thousand metric tons of
green ammonia using wind, solar and battery systems. Now their
ammonia is more expensive than regular ammonia. So far, they
think they can get to price parity by twenty twenty eight.
But there's a whole movement happening. There might even stand
to be its own geek out on what you can
use ammonia for if you can produce it cleanly enough
and it's scalely enough and cheaply enough to operate in
engines as well as just making fertilizer.
Speaker 1: All right, that's interesting.
Speaker 2: Yeah, talk a little about geothermal. We've talked about it before, obviously,
we talk about it every year. Traditional geothermal, you're looking
for guysers, so you're looking for a place where water
is interfacing with high temperature rocks, typically in volcanic areas,
so think New Zealand, Iceland. But every time those guys
try and build germal thermal power, often they destroy the
guys are based in the process. The shock of cold
water being deliberately pumped in the system damages it, and
then the water disappears and the whole thing stops working. And
the expensive part of geothermal power is drilling, is putting
those pipes in the first place. And so when the
system shifts like that, you've spent a lot of money.
You don't get a lot of results. But we know
that the rocks are hot everywhere. You just have to
drill a little further, and they tend to be dry rock,
so they don't have water in them and they're not
permeable to water first place. And this is where fracking
comes into play.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I knew we were going to talk about fracking,
the fracking stuff.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So fracking was developed to extract methane and oil
from shale beds, which sometimes contaminates waterways. So, but if
you drill away from the waterways and the different layers
of rock down deeper, where the rocks are hotter, you
can fracture that rock and pump water in it to superheated.
So you drill in at least two holes the original designs,
that's what they do, and then pump in the fracking,
fluid shatter the rock and then you try and pump
water through it. See if you get steamed from that.
This technology has been advanced a lot of It's a
company called Fervo Energy, and we've talked about them before.
They've done pilot projects back in twenty three and they've
raised a ton of money. And what they're doing is
horizontal drilling. So they drill in on either side of
a dry rock bay where they think they can get
enough temperature, and then they go horizontally into it to
the fracturing and that way they if they actually have
a problem where they have a shock that causes the
water to leak away the main drill lines, the expensive
ones don't have to rejail. They just redrill the horizontal parts.
So far, they're doing what they call an open solution,
where they're not actually making those two pipelines meet. Like
there's a whole idea of we could build a seal
loop for this, but that really hasn't been done yet.
So far, they're still using fracking to pump this through.
The problem is that when you use fracking, you are
you have to follow the regulations of oil and gas,
which are now these days pretty tightly regulated because of
all the problems that have happened, and so there's a
whole conversation going on about changing the regulations around all
of this. Because they aren't touching waterways, they are going
into dry rock, they're going they're not trying to extract oil,
they're not in decreasing the density on the soils that
might cause collapse and things. They don't have those same problems.
But they now have a power purchase Creaming from California
in the megawatt class, so they built a smaller facility
a megawa, a single megawat in Utah. Google has been
funding them a bunch because they want to use their
power for their AI data stators. But in twenty twenty
six they expect to be having several hundred megawats of
power for California off of this technique. So they've definitely
matured and are scaling up. Most higher geroelectric our most
geothermal power plants are only in the tens of megawats
the biggest ones. Some of them are much smaller than that,
so you need to make a lot of them for
them scale, but no emissions right, no consumable The water
is reused over and over again.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I mean, this is really a good power system that
can last for a long time if we can get
it right. So what Fervro's doing is compelling and important.
You know.
Speaker 1: I always when we talk about geothermal, I talk about
using a geothermal system for home heating and cooling. Yeah,
and so the idea there is and my uncle did this,
talk about this every year. But the idea there is
that you know, twenty thirty feet below the ground.
Speaker 2: And even six six doesn't have to be that.
Speaker 1: Oh okay, yeah, well there's the temperature is consistent, and
it's usually depending on where you are in North America anyway,
between fifty and seventy five degrees right hotter places, it's
going to be hotter, obviously, But let's say it's fifty degrees.
So that is cool enough to cool you when the
temperature is when it's very hot outside and warm enough
to keep you warm in freezing cold. So what you
do is you run a pipe below the ground, right,
and it either heats up or cools down, becomes fifty
degrees and then you can blow air over that pipe
when it comes out of the ground, and and there
you have it. So you have warmer and.
Speaker 2: Cool air, typically a pup fluid through the loop, and
so the fluid it's you know, it's normally around sixty
degrees fahrenheit. Yeah, it's what you're going to get ten
fifteen feet underground all the time. And sixty degrees is
great for cooling. It's plenty cool. Yeah, but it's also
a great start for warming up. Right. You know, if
you could start at sixty instead of zero zero and
then heat it up to seventy, everybody's pretty happy. Well,
and it's sixty degrees, your pipes aren't going to freeze, right, Yeah,
nothing's going to freeze.
Speaker 1: Nothing's going to freeze.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So the advantage here is just a good starting
point of everything. The downside is it depends on the ground.
You know, I can't have geo thermal power here for
my house because it's all rock. The cost of drilling
that would be crazy, right. You need ground that you
can put those pipes down into, but if you've got it,
it's expensive to install.
Speaker 1: Also, if you're going to run that in lieu of
an air conditioner, you're going to need a dehumidifier. Because
I did notice this at my uncle's house that it
was very wet in the house when it was cool,
which is the opposite of what you get with air conditioning,
right with regular yeah, where you dry everything out. One
last aspect on geothermal we mentioned them before, quas energy.
These are the guys that instead of using conventional drills,
are using microwaves to do drilling.
Speaker 3: What.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's pretty cool. It's a lot of energy. But
the interesting thing about this is you're literally vaporizing the
rock with microwaves, and so you need a lot of
pressurized air to make that happen more deeper, go on
where you need. But it also automatically builds the casement.
Like normal drilling. As you're drilling with your grinding head,
you're pumping mud around it to bring the debris back up.
You're also sliding these pipes down behind it, behind the
drilling head to keep the wall stable. Right, Kate, they
called casements.
Speaker 1: Don't stand too close to the hole, boys.
Speaker 2: It's all dangerous stuff, right. Those drillers are brave. It's
very tricky to do route and so this vaporization of rock,
it's very star trek. You're vaporize and a rock to rock.
It's actually building the walls they didn't raise any money
in twenty twenty five. I couldn't find any statement. So
it's like, I wonder how much money they've got. They're
still functional. I was worried they were last year. I said,
I think these guys aren't going to make it. But
this year they were able to do some real drilling. Admittedly,
their test run this year they got down one hundred
meters or about three hundred and thirty feet. Their goal
next year is to hit a kilometer. To do what
Fervo is doing, you need to drill five kilometers turn sideways. Yeah,
so they're a long way from production, but they seem
to still be in business. So they're still functioning even
if they're not doing particularly well. So I hope for
them because if they can improve the drilling process, so
much the better. But you know, meantime existing drilling, the
downside of the mechanical drilling is the head swear out.
Then you have to stop, pull the whole thing back,
put a new head on, and go again. So you
the deeper your drill and more expensive it gets by
a lot, right, But Furrow is making it work. In
a five kilometer drill, you know, between three and five,
depending on the rock beds that are working in. Okay,
all right, ready to get in the new clear this
is gonna be a long part.
Speaker 1: Let's do it. My friend all.
Speaker 2: Right again the kiaren Land and the guy, where's my car?
Speaker 1: My car?
Speaker 2: He says, where's my mini nuke for my house? Right?
Speaker 1: Same same thing, or at least my town. You know
that would be nice.
Speaker 2: So let's talk a little bit about conventional nuclear. Last
year I mentioned this is the Vaugetall facility. This is
in Georgia where they build reactors three and four. So
normally in America there's only ever been two reactors. This
is the first time we've had a four reactors set,
the first new reactors in decades. These are Westinghouse eight
P one thousand Gen three pluses, so passive cool down.
The funny thing about this reactor design is actually simpler
than the older reactor designs. Because it has passive cool down,
you don't need all the additional pumps and monitoring and
so forth for cooling it down in an emergency. It's
less wiring for your pumps, for your pipes. But because
it had been decades since anybody built them, they kind
of didn't know what they were doing, and the pandemic
and money and the financial crisis meant that where they
originally estimated it would be fourteen dollars to build and
be done in like twenty fifteen, it actually was thirty
four billion dollars to build and they didn't finish until
twenty twenty four.
Speaker 1: How does it did cool work?
Speaker 2: So passive cool down is that you know, if I
scram the reactor so there's an emergency and I brought
the control runs to stop the reaction, the reactor core
itself is still very hot and it will take days
to cool down, and you're no longer running the pumps
to move the water through. Right. So this is what
happened to Fukushima. They SCRAMed those reactors in twenty eleven
after the earthquake, and then they needed to keep pumping
the water, and then the tsunami came in and destroyed
the generators that were running those water pumps. What we
don't talk about in Fukushima is there was a reactor
five and six that do have passive cool down. Passive
cool down means that even with that excess heat, enough
water flows through convection to cool the reactor on its own.
You don't, oh interesting, don't have to do anything to
keep the reactor cool.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 2: So these were the first of these passive cool down
reactors in the US. There's a few in other parts
of the world. Brits are building more of them. And
this is Westinghouse's design. And I lamented at the time
last year that we only built you only built two
of them. You've now built up the supply pipeline and
trained a group of people for the first time in
decades to build a reactor. You should build more. You've
done the expensive part. They're only going to get cheaper
from here. And so the good news is that Westinghouse
has announced that they are working for up to ten
more reactors in the US. Now, they weren't very specific
about it.
Speaker 1: Would they be able to replace existing non passive cool
down reactors.
Speaker 2: Yes, well, that's one of the things that's happening is
that a lot of the reactors that were built in
the seventies and eighties are now starting to age out.
They've had their license extended up to fifty years in
some cases, but there are aging out and they need
to be replaced. One of the examples would be near Homestead,
Florida area called Turkey Point that has a pair of Westinghouse.
They had a Marguarte reactors from the seventies and they
have a license for AP one thousands. They just don't
currently have a plan to actually build. So there's actually
you know, when we when the west House CEO said this,
we're going to be able ten new new Krali reactors,
we think or they think that it's based on licenses
that are already out there. There's like four in Florida.
There's a couple of new in North Carolina and South Carolina.
And so perhaps those negotiations going on with government to
move ahead with this production, to get those reactors built
and to take advantage of what they've got here. These
reactors should last another fifty sixty years. They're very safe.
You've already got the hard part. You've got the site
all set up with the licensing and the distance controls
and so forth. So it makes sense to go forward
with that. So it gives me some hope for conventional nuclear,
which is generally more tolerated, the same for the European
pressurized reactor. And I've talked about this before in I
do this future of energy talks now at conferences, and
we talked about the UK Energy site be where they've
taken the EPI reactor which was developed in France and
they've built them in Finland and China as well. The
UK of course had to customize it for their own requirements,
so they've made it more expensive. They're building two at
a site called Hinckley Site see, but they also planned
on building two more in size well, which another location
where they're replacing older reactors with newer ones and same thing.
Prices are starting to fall because they're maturing the skill set.
So conventional nuclear is doing better and it could do more.
We have these safer designs. We know how they were,
We have the existing sites. They produce almost one hundred
percent of the time full power. You know, they're running
the ninety percent utilization rate, much higher than almost any
other kind of power, and they're cleaning efficient, like they're
zero emission technologies except for.
Speaker 1: That spent fuel. Yes, but there has never been a
single death or anything caused by this stuff. But it
is a problem.
Speaker 2: I spent fuel, but it is a problem, and it's
a problem that you know, depending on where, Like the
fins didn't screw around. They've just built a proper storage
site for their reactors and that's the end of that. Right.
America has gone around in circles on this for a
long time, and it's where you get into this problem
of why should one state take the waste of another state?
You know, D D that's right, not in my backyard.
It's exactly the issue, all right. You know, we've talked
about how the current administration has been pretty negative on renewables.
Here's an initiative that the current administration started with the
Department Ergy called the Reactor Pilot Program. So it's from
a set of executive orders in June this year, the
goal of finding three new reactor designs to be tested
by July of twenty twenty six, which is crazy fast.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's crazy.
Speaker 2: So they like a dozen candidates were announced in August,
and I can go through a few of them. All
these companies existed before these announcements, but some of them,
what's happened is the government has just made it easier
to get fuel and to move forward. So I'll rattle
off a few of them. Alo Atomics, they wish the
company started twenty twenty three. They're trying to spill, build
small module reactors for data centers. Doing a sodium cooled
thermal reactor ten megawatts, and they've got fuel. They're starting
to do testing. They're trying to make that July twenty,
twenty sixth deadline. Ontari's nuclear also started in twenty three.
They were working in the military and space areas with
tryso fuel. That's those fuel balls, the pebble bed fuel concept.
Oh yeah, yeah, but using sodium heat pipes to transfer
the heat. So dry reactor, no water involved, using these
balls and then heating up sodium and heat pipes. Talking
about a five hundred kilowat reactor. Design is supposed to
be able to work even in vacuum, so it could
work up in space as well.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, So you're going to go into each of
these in detail after right.
Speaker 2: I don't want to now because it's too many of them, right.
Speaker 1: Oh okay, I just wanted to know if these were
safer or as safe as conventional nuclear.
Speaker 2: Well, let's go through them, and then I'll talk about
the categories because it's basically they only come down to
three or four categories. So once the plus is a
mind of this, our friend Steve Smith asked me about
deep fission. It's also one of these companies in this competition.
Their idea is to build a regular pressurized water reactor,
but to only make it thirty inches wide so that
they can put it underground a mile by drilling a
thirty inch borehole so you don't need a containment vessel
and if things go terribly wrong, just pour concrete over
top of them. Forget about. Wow, it's kind of nuts,
but yeah, put it. Shove the reactor down this big
hole on a cable with a mile long water line
and a mile long steamline. It's naturally pressurized. Is that
deep underground? And you pump water down to it and
then heat it up with the reactor and steam comes
back up. Interesting idea.
Speaker 1: Interesting seems a little dangerous.
Speaker 2: Though, Yeah, but you know if it's in hard.
Speaker 1: Rock earthquakes, you know, and a good earthquake and that
thing is.
Speaker 2: Getting crushed and might might be problematic, Bye bye, right,
and only make a reactor thirty inches wide. That's really tiny,
and a pressurized road reactor at that. It's interesting. Last Energy,
established back in twenty nineteen, is a spin off of
a group called the Energy Impact Center, building a twenty
megawatt pressurized water air cooled small rad Sholi reactor Okola,
it's been around since twenty thirteen. It's been a while now,
building a sodium cooled fast reactor in the fifty megawatt class.
They got a lot of funding from tech billionaires. They're
looking for building data center power.
Speaker 1: Okay, you're going to need it. Natural resources, bolten salt reactors, Yeah,
hunter megawatts.
Speaker 2: We'll talk more about the darling of dot net rocks. Yeah.
Radiant Industries back from twenty twenty eight a one megawatt
reactor called Klidos, which is together that tryso fuel helium cold.
That's supposed to be able to fit and container, so
pretty small terrestrial energy. It's actually a Canadian company, although
they also have a US group building an integral molten
salt reactor, so that is graphite moderated molten fluorine just
using regular uranium as a fuel. Three hundred and ninety
two megawatt. This is a normal sized reactor, really terrestrial energy.
And then the lar Atomics another one of the trisos
building a two hundred and fifty megawat tryso helium cold.
So let's talk to this three there's a couple of
pressurized water reactors. We've talked about those before. You know
how those work. There is a couple of sodium fast reactors.
Actually we can do that later because I'm going to
talk about terra power. And there is the molt salt reactors.
So the only one to really mission here that's different
are the trisos. So this is the idea of building
these sort of baseball size or tennis ball size spheres
that are a common donation of both carbon and uranium fuel,
so that they're self contained. They're naturally protected fuel. They
can't melt down. They expand as the heat up, which
actually slows the reaction on the They get really hot
six seventy eight hundred degrees.
Speaker 1: So is uranium on the inside, carbon on the outside
or is it all mixed together?
Speaker 2: Yeah, and silicon carbide is the protective layer. Okay, So
they're very hard, it's hard to manufacture. They appear to
be unrecyclable. Nobody's really figured out how to recycle these things. Okay,
but you get a bunch of them together and they
naturally heat up a lot. They get to hundreds of
degrees and then you just have to pump up fuel
over it. So one of the reactor designs used sodium
heat pipes, So just make the heat pipes hot, sodium
flows by, it doesn't even get contaminated by it, and
that's your heat. Most of the time they use helium. Yeah,
the most common trisode designs for pebble bed you let
superheat the helium. We don't have mature reactor designs for helium.
But helium cannot become radioactive. It's also hard to contain.
It's hard to contain. Yeah, but it's safe stuff relatively speaking.
In the past, we've read into problems with pebble beds
heating up their containers so much they cause the containers
to crack and then possibly even catch fire yanks. So
you just have to keep moving these pebbles through their store,
through the reaction area, and then down into container, and
it gradually as they get older, you know they're going
to become a stable and then you have to take
them out, so you have a continuous refueling process. You
just keep replacing the balls as they get old enough.
The last few years, So.
Speaker 1: Are these things designed by the same guys who designed
the McDonald's play Place ballpit Basically, it's kind of what,
don't go jumping in there, little hot It's kind of
what I envision in my head.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but imagine a column with these spheres just sort
of trickling down and then they get to the bottom,
they come out and they're sort of assessed for what
their relative energy is, and so that they go into
a storage, you know, or do they go back in
and come back around again. But yeah, it's are relatively
immature technologies, but it's possible, and this might be just
the thing to catalyze it. I would point out that
the US government is not funding any of these so far.
They all have their own fund. The main thing that
government has done with this new pilot I deal with
the DOE has provided them fuel. So up until now,
most of these companies have had a tough time actually
maturing the designs enough to be even able to get fuel.
But the rules have changed. The two other category is
pressurized water. In that cateador is a few trisos. There's
a couple of molten salts, and I want to talk
about salts apperately, and then we'll talk about the sodium fasts.
So back to molten salt reactors. Typically with thorium. The
Chinese with their TSMRILF one in WIWI built started construction
back in twenty eighteen and went critical in twenty twenty
three with a two megawatt thermal test reactor, so not
making electricity, just generating heat. They lit that reactor in
twenty three with your enriched uranium twenty four. Last year
they started adding thorium to the liquid fuel and successfully
brightened into uranium two thirty three. So one of the
secrets ofium salt reactors, which we talked about before, is
that you turn thorium into uranium to use it as
a fuel of uranium two thirty eight, which is the
most common kind for uranium two thirty five, the enriched
kind are you using uranium two thirty three. So that
plant has been completely successful. They've now proven they can
breathe thorium into you two thirty three, and so there's
now a one hundred megawatt plant to another test plant
for twenty thirty five this year. In September, I got
a chance to tour Copenhagen Atomics.
Speaker 1: Nice.
Speaker 2: They reached out to me and they liked their shows
that we've done, and they offered to take us for
a walk around. So I spent time with Thomas the CEO.
Spend a whole day with them. Actually, as he said,
it's the first time. It took him three hours to
do the one hour tour. I had a lot of questions.
Would you want a tour with me? It's a lot
of work, right. Well, we had a good time. You know,
he loves what he's talking about.
Speaker 1: I would want to tour with you for a distillery again, Yeah,
because the questions.
Speaker 2: The same thing, right, And that's we went deep into
the into the questions. So his concept is a container
size reactor really for industry. That's about forty mega WA.
It's electrical in one hundred megawatts of heat using thorium,
with a reactor designed to be replaced on a routine basis,
so you kind of fuel it. Once you run it
for a few years, you drain the fuel out of it.
You take the entire reactor, simply out store it until
it can be reprocessed and put another reactor in. Is
design they call the onion design, so imagine onion sitting
on its end. So it's got a set of layers
in it that a utter most layer is what they
call a thorium breeding layer, where neutrons are hitting that
thorium and turning into the uranium two thirty three. The
next layer in is heavy water deudized water, and the
reason for the deuterium is it reflects neutrons well, so
it's their neutron reflector. Instead of graphite, which a lot
of other reactor designs, including the original thorium reactors used,
you're using deterium because you can control the reactor by
the amount of deuterium available. If the water flows out,
the reactor stops, and so you got to keep that
water cool. Because the reactor is running in like six
hundred degrees, the water's going to stay under one hundred
so he doesn't boil, but if it does, it actually
slows the reactor down, so it's safe. So then on
the inside you have the fuel layer, and this will
be a lifthium fluorine and thorium fluorine and uranium fluorine salts.
And then in the centuries this adjustable. The center part
of this is an adjustable heavy water level, so the
amount of heavy water in there controls your action. You
put in more water, reactor goes faster, take out the
water reactor goes slower, so they are sufficiently funded to
build their first test reactor. The funny part is they
can't run that reactor in Denmark without they don't have
they can't get a license for it. Then Denmark has
no new reactors, so they're actually going to set up
the rig in Switzerland where they're able to get a
test in twenty twenty seven. They have the money to
do this, they just got to actually do it. They're
going to run a reactor for a few months just
to prove the behavior and then do all the testing.
One of the biggest things I saw on the tour
is that they're building all of these test suites for
working with the molten salts. These are very high temperature salts,
and they sell these rigs to university, so they're essentially
training the next generation of engineers in Bolton Salt.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 2: And one of the things that Thomas showed me that
was really a deep insight for me was, you know,
fluorine salts are very corrosive. They'll destroy a lot of
They showed me some things that fluorine salt had eaten,
and so they've got these metals that can tolerate it.
But those metals can only take so much heat. So
one of the most complicated parts in any of these
reactors is the heat exchanger. So you want to flow
these radioactive salts through pipes beside other pipes that have
non radioactive salts in it, so you transfer the heat
from one to the other, keep the radioactive stuff in
the container, and then non radioactive hot salts flow back out.
Somewhere around six hundred degrees celsius, the metal starts to warp,
starts to melt, get soft, and you don't want any
of that stuff to leak. Like all of that is bad.
And so even though the fuel itself can go up
to one thy twelve hundred degrees, you just can't con
pain it well. So the part of the challenge this
is running into the temperatures where the materials will hold together.
Most of the work I see Copenhagen Atomics doing in
those labs is about finding the right materials to just
be able to tolerate all last be durable enough. I have
several hours of interviews of an interview that spending that
day with Thomas I could make into a show. At
some point of one of those radio lab edits sort
of summarize a lot of this, but it was very
insightful for me just to understand how challenging working these
high temperatures are, and they different reactor designs approaches to
doing this. Brilliant people. I'm really pleased to have met them. Okay,
let's talk about Terra Power. So this is a project
going all the way back to two thousand and six
that Bill Gates backed along with a bunch of other
people to build a reactor called Natrium. So this is
a sodium cooled fast reactor three hundred and fifty megawatts.
Their clever innovation is that they're going to use fluorine salts,
the lithium berrillium salts for heat exchange transfer and storage.
The idea of being they can store off of that
fluid that you could actually put out five hundred megawatts
of energy for up to five hours because you've got
enough hot salts. And again one of the problems you
have with sodium. We've been building sodium cool fast reactors
for a long time. So this is using the fast
neutron instead of the thermal neutron. When neutrons are split
off of your radioactive elements like uranium. They're moving very quickly,
and that's great if they hit another nucleus of an atom,
but they don't hit as often because they're moving so fast.
When they do hit, they tend to split everything, which
is great. You don't tend to make higher compounds as often.
But in order to have it work, you have to
run into higher reaction rates and so, and you use
molten sodium because sodium is transparent to the neutrons as
opposed to water. Water tends to absorb neutrons, which generates
heat and slows the neutrons down. That's why we work
in what we call the thermal range instead of the
fast range when you're dealing with a pressurized water reactor.
Same for when we use graphite. Graphite slows those neutrons down.
Heavy water in the Copenhagen Thomas design or in the
can Do design, same thing slows the neutrons down. But
if you keep the neutrons moving fast, you have some
advantages in the exchange. For it's risky and they're hard
to keep stable, and the main thing is it's hard
to power them up and power them down. So what's
clever about the natrium design is you run the reactor
at the same speed all the time. You get it
to speed and you leave it there because it's just
making more hot salt for you, and then you're cooling
that salt by making electricity with it. But you don't
have to slow it down when the demand goes down.
You just store the excess heat. So it's a way
to keep the reactor more stable. Very smart, also a
great nuclear waste burner. One of the reasons we've always
pushed on fast reactors is they're a way to break
higher actinides. Now salt reactors can also do that because
they can burn for so long, they can keep the
fuel in for far longer. What's the problem with sodium
cold reactors. Well, the first off is sodium is opaque,
so you can't see anything. If you want to do
any work on the reactor, you have to drain all
the sodium, and I mean all of the sodium, because
that sodium will burn in air and explode in water.
So it's very hard to clean out a reactor enough
to do any inspections and so forth with it. But
not that you do that very often, but it's part
of the challenge of working with sodium gold reactors. It's
easy to have fires when you have molten high temperature
molten solelyum flowing around. That stuff burns really, really easily.
Speaker 1: I heard a cool science thing that because sodium is
so opaque, that light travels through it slower than the
speed of light. And they did an experiment where I
don't know as you could actually see the light moving
through it, but it was measurable that it was very
slow getting through.
Speaker 2: Eventually, Yeah, I mean light speed of light is always
slower through every medium, right, but yeah, very slow through that.
So there is They actually have a sight in camera
Wyoming where they've built the salt side, so the storage
and the heating system. They don't actually have the final
license to run nukes through it yet. They're to build
the radioactive side, but they are close, and again with
the current regime and Washington, it's probably easier for them
to get right now. They also just took a six
hundred and fifty million dollars investment from in Nvidia. Wow,
so there's plenty of money around. These guys aren't started
for money. They also have a design they want to
build a new reactor called a molten chloride fast reactor
sometime in the future. So instead of using chluorine, using
chlorine salts, and you're dealing with the same compound. It's
in the same part of the periodic table. So they
have new reactory sides. But terror power is probably going
to get to heat and they're gonna build a sodium reactor.
We'll see how that goes cool. Hey, one last reactor
technology is from the University of Illinois. Just found this
recently using molten salt systems to for experiments, but now
they've actually applied for a license to produce electricity at
the university. This is that microreactor that Kirim was asking about,
like where I get reactor? So there's about twenty five
microreactors at different university chemists around the US. Right, they're
not really for making power, they're for doing nuclear experiments.
And so this little reactor is using triso fuel. So
back to those pebbles again, right, and they are encased
in graphite and use helium to transfer the heat to
spin a turbine to general electricity. And so they take
these spheres, they stack them up as as raw assemblies
and hexagonal as sddily all underground. This is called the
is made by a company called Chronos. This reactor design
and the helium loop runs at about six megapascals at
about six hundred degrees so plenty hot. Again mentioned that
magic number six hundred degrees because that's where you can
make the exchange your work and they're heating up that's
fahrenheit or that's celsius celsius. Okay, yeah, so six degrees yeah,
six degrees celsius is what eleven hundred fahrenheit, so hot,
do not touch touch, bad near And so they want
to use that helium loop because it can't become radioactive.
Going over those triso fuel to heat up a salt
loop of potassium nitrides and sodium nitrides at low pressure
so not heavily pressurized, but also very hot five hundred degrees,
and then that does heat exchange agains steam to generate electricity.
So nothing too fancy, but they've passed the NRC review,
so they expect to get a permit to do this
assembly next year and to actually generate electricity for the
University of Illinois twenty nine.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 2: Yeah, interesting, isn't it. That is interesting. Now, to be clear,
this is not something for your.
Speaker 1: Home, No, right, Sorry, Kiaren, this is yeah, it's it's
still a whole building. Right, It's a microreactor, but it's
not like it's not a generator. It's big, all right.
Speaker 2: We got to talk about the AI side of this
equation because all of the tech companies have been funding
different nuclear projects that most people have heard about Microsoft
and Three Mile Island right in the news for the
past couple of years. Here where Microsoft went to Constellation,
who the current owners of the Three Mile Island site.
Three Mile Island had the meltdown in seventy seven on
Reactor one two, but Reactor one continue to operate and
was only shut down in twenty nineteen for costs. Still
had twenty years of run life in it, but it
was cheaper to make power with natural gas, and so
they turned it off. It wasn't even worth operating. So
Microsoft has basically committed to buying power from it for
twenty years. And Constellation's actually certain it's going to cost
about two billion dollars to restart, but they should be
running in twenty twenty eight.
Speaker 1: Are they going to run with the new the new
style of reactor or they don't.
Speaker 2: This is just restarting the old reactor, which again it's
expensive to operate, but it's been running for decades. Just fine,
It's just they turned it off because it was too
expensive to run compared to the cheap natural gas, which,
by the way, natural gas is not that cheap these days.
Speaker 1: Right, It's pretty obvious why the AI companies want to,
you know, are interested in nuclear power because they need
a lot of energy for their data centers, which, right,
that's why they want to locate the in close proximity
to these power plants. We have the same issue that
happened in Waterford, Connecticut, where Dominion E otherwise known as
Millstone Nuclear Power Plant sits at the at the edge
of the ocean there or the sound, and there was
something on the table for some company to come in
and buy up the land next to it and put
in a data center, and everybody said no.
Speaker 2: So yeah, well, let's talk about the AI side in
just a minute, because I would just want to say,
Microsoft's not unique. Google just announced they're restarting the Cedar
Rapids Idaho reactor has been shut down for five years.
This six hundred megawaute reactor that was built and operated
in originally nineteen seventy five, shut down in twenty twenty
again for cost, and Google's basically said we'll buy power
from it for twenty five years. Yeah, and so'll they
say it'll take for four more years to restart, so
somewhere in twenty nine it'll be up and running again.
Amazon announced funding They put five million dollars into a
new reactor design and called the XE one hundred. This
is another triso helium cooled high temperature gas reactor. The
individual reactors eighty megawats electrical two hundred megawats heat their
normal configuration, and they've got a license to build one
in Washington State with four reactors for three hundred and
twenty megawatts. And again Amazon committing to buying all that power.
So all the tech companies have been doing this. And
then you know, the other category of question I got
a ton of coming into this was what is the
impact of AI and power generation? So Jake Fox, friend
of Charles on the Blue Sky, Mats Carlson, who's been
on the show before, saying, talk to us about what's
the impact on AI, and I sort of gave this
away at the beginning of the show. Is a AI
technologies and the building of data centers responsible for increasing power.
Energy is like, well, yeah, a little, But the bigger
issue here is power prices were going up anyway because
the cost of improving the industry trastructure to support or
the large diversity of power is costing money and taking time.
And while it's easy to blame various individual points for
why that's happening, it's not the only reason. We have
put a lot of power online. In many cases, we
have power in that's not even on the grid yet
because it's taking so long to get it added to
the grid. They're not used to new power adding to
the grid all the time. It destabilizes it. The grid
has been built, especially in the US, to increase power
production roughly at half a percent per year, and suddenly
we're asking it to grow faster than that one or
two percent, and they're just not built for it. So
they're struggling to adopt new power sources, to deal with
bi directional loads, to deal with intermitt and power, to
deal with storage, none of the things that these grids
were originally built for, and we have North America has
consistently underspent on maintaining infrastructure. The infrastructure wasn't built for
this it hadn't been well maintained. It was built to
the minimum necessary for the basic uses, and now it's
not being able to cope with what we're asking to do,
including the additional demand of data centers.
Speaker 1: And the politicians have historically kicked the can down the
road for everybody else to deal with.
Speaker 2: Sure, because it's maintenance, right, and maintenance isn't sexy.
Speaker 1: Nope.
Speaker 2: I would also say that the perception of the amount
of power that AI needs is distorted. These companies, these
tech companies are using shell companies. They're creating entities to
hide who's building the data centers. They're also ordering up
as much stuff as they can anywhere they can get
a deal, they will immediately or request power for it,
whether they're going to build on there or not off
of the same Compani's got half a dozen different contracts
at once, but probably only has the ingredients to build
in one location. So there's more land being grabbed up,
there's more orders for parts they possibly needed. This is
why ram prices and other things are going through the roof,
because they're putting out all these outstanding orders to justify
the demand for licensing and power in a lot of
these locations. We don't know how many of these are
even going to be built, right, irrespective of the AI
bubble bursting or not. They're deliberately putting in multiple applications,
deliberately putting in multiple orders. It's one of those things
where hey, I want to get one of these, but
they're scarce, so I order five, right, and if I
get one comes through, then I'll cancel the others. Well,
that's happening with these data centers, right. They're ordering as
much as they can possibly order it, as many places
they can, all the chances they get some of what
they think they're going to need. It's all projection, right, Nobody,
Their demands aren't that high, and so you're seeing these
asymmetrical results where some companies are saying, we have GPUs
in storage with know where to plug them in. We've
built on a day center, we can't get power. And
the crazy part that's happening lately, we're going to put
data centers in space right right, which we talked briefly
on the space side, but there's more to that story, right, Like,
this is a really complicated had set of problems being
exacerbated by this competition to overbuild in many different locations,
and the pressure is showing. The reason the space thing
showed up is that every kind of power development now
has gone up in price, even the cheapest power like
combined cycle natural gas plants. The prices on the stuff
is soled. Yeah, there's currently licensing out for one hundred
and twenty new gas fower plants by twenty thirty in
the US alone for eighty gigawatts of power. Wow. The
previous five years they built thirty five gigawatts, and that
was rapid building because it was the cheapest power. Part
of the issue you're running into is you can only
build these steam turbines so fast. There's three companies that
make steam turbines at scale, gee Verona, Siemens, and Missionbishi.
All of them are back ordered hugely. So you know,
five years ago, if you wanted to build a gas
power plant, you could expect to pay about one thousand
dollars a kilowatt, right, and you typically we take you
thirty months to build that thing, and you'll be a
three hundred to five hundred megawat power plant in about
thousand old kill. What Now it's three times that price, right?
And there used to be you know a one point
two gigawat power plant which would take thirty months to build.
Now they're talking twice that five years. And in many cases,
if you're talking about the normal power plant builds, when
you're dealing with your normal half percent growth, part of
your agreement with your government for building that power plant
is that you will build it on time. And so
now this shortage of supply is meant that a bunch
of normal power plants are going to get canceled because
they can't deliver on time because of the supply chain
pressures that have you put on this. It's got to
the point where other companies are desperate to build termines.
So this is this company I've been paying attention to
called Boomer Supersonic. They want to build a supersonic biz jet. Right,
we have no supersonic commercial aircraft anymore since Concor was gone.
They're gone. So one point five seven mock aircraft. I'll
probably never get a chance to fly in it. But
they made in order to get an engine to fly
that fast, they did a customer turbine out of a
company called Florida Turbine Technologies, and recently they got a
three hundred million dollar funding out of the Silicon Valley
to build turbines for energy generation. So they're going to
hijack the production line at Florida Turbine instead of making
the turbides for the aircraft, to make them for electricity generation.
Now they're gonna be able to use that money to
fund the aircraft because they were struggling for enough money. Right,
They're going to be testing of turbine for general energy
generation in twenty twenty six, production in twenty thirty. It's crazy,
that's a different world. Well, it's what And we're all
veterans of the dot combo right and of the dot
com bubble, and we can feel that this is a bubble.
And so there's only so much time before this bubble
ends and a lot of these orders go away. In
the meantime, you're hurting a lot of people, right, you're
disrupting a lot of industry. Don't try and build a
PC right now, you're going to play five times the
price for RAM. And that's just because of back orders,
not because there's not much ram and needed. But everybody's
been protecting these straight lines in demand which are never true,
and sending their groups out to order and doing redundant
ordering multiple times two, three, four times more what they need.
And if just simply wipe the market out, it is
another like we had coming out of the pandemic, a
supply chain inflation crisis where the demand you're over demanding
the supply chain at the point where prices are just
going through the roof for folks who need stuff, and
that just means everything's more expensive. And for what, right
you know, if this bubble actually bursts in twenty twenty six,
like so much of this is going to go away,
and the guy and someone who put their hands on
expensive parts because they needed them at the time are
going to be in a terrible situation. The joke is
these new power generations technologies, especially wind and solar, like
they have no consumables. The wind always blows, you know,
intermittent at times. The sun comes up every day, and
so they key getting cheaper. Same for batteries. The batteries
just keep getting cheaper because really once you build them,
they last. Right, We're getting twenty years out of these
batteries like that combination is pretty powerful. And so this
every other power source has this consumable problem. Right, and
here we've got these non consumables. If we weren't being irrational,
this would be pretty easy to do. But we've got
we've got problems stacked on a problem. As these new
technologies have emerged, it has made the grid more complicated.
It's taking time for the grid and the especially the
regulators to get into play, to start actually working with it.
Right now, we've throw this extra layer on top of it,
with this bubble of building out AI technologies excessively, and
it's complicated everything largely unnecessarily, and we know it will
go away soon. Yeah, and all this disruption will be
for naught.
Speaker 1: Maybe we should just shift a little bit to economics
because the certainly the United States stock market is being
propped up by all these AI stocks. Oh sure, and
the rest of them are family I mean, they're not failing,
but they're.
Speaker 2: They're not doing particularly well.
Speaker 1: You know, they're they're not doing any Yeah, they're not
doing well. And so all it takes is one default
on a loan by one of these AI companies and
you know, you're pulling at the thread and it's going
to unravel. And we know it's going to unravel next year.
So but it's going to have an effect on the
entire economy, the world economy.
Speaker 2: Yep, Well, the S and P five hundred for better
or worse, represents about fifty percent of the equity value
of the planet. Yeah, eighty percent of the value in
the US. So when it takes a twenty thirty percent haircut,
which is what this insanity ending, looks like everybody's.
Speaker 1: Going to fall. So just in the last few weeks,
silver has gone from like twenty three or thirty to
sixty eight dollars an ounce. It's just shooting up. And
that tells you that people are protecting their money. The
smart money is taking it out of the market and
putting it into precious metals, and silver is rising highigher
than even gold is.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so what you're seeing, you know, to answer the question,
is they are responsible when you're seeing an amplification of
a set of problems that we're going to raise prices anyway,
and they're raising them faster. And it's amazing to hear
the good news stories like and yet batteries are still
cheaper with all of this pressure, right, So it makes
you wonder when the crazy is over, like, how cheap
our battery is going to be? Because I suspect they're
going to be even less. And I mean, on one hand,
I'm happy to see money being put into innovating on
a bunch of these new power generation technologies. I would
like small module reactors to be mature. There's a bunch
of advantages to building small reactors. You know those big reactors,
the AP one thousands and the EPRs where they last
sixty years. It means that you consistently have a problem
every few decades, you have to relearn how to make
come again, all right, and with new models of it.
And so if we've got into a model where like
the Copenhagen model, and many of these are the reactors models,
where they're replaced every few years, it means you would
have a continuous production of new small reactors. And that
allows for more optimization and a more stable market for
all of these.
Speaker 1: So a smarter workforce, right, I mean, you don't have
to people who built those reactors don't have to worry
about it for sixty years. So in the meantime, another
generation has to come up and learn all over again.
Speaker 2: Right. But if we had a continuous supply line so
that you're building reactors every day and you have factories
that do that, and you're replacing reactors that last to
five years, then that also means more intivations, better reactors.
We don't it's hard to build a better reactors on
it if you only do it once every fifty years.
Speaker 1: Now would you say that they're the trend? And I
don't know if you know this or not or what
you think, but what do you think about the trend
of having reactors not at the building level, but maybe
at the town level or the ten thousand people level
of the ten thousand home service level.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that's we're going to see that emerge.
That's what small modular really speaks to. And again, if
you're not doing fuel handling. It's one of the things
about these small reactors is they run for two or
five years without any fuel handling at Also, the most
dangerous exercise doesn't happen in that site, so they can
be closer to people than regular reactors are. Fuel handling
is a dangerous part. That's where trouble happens.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: But this idea that you drop a reactor into some
kind of containment, even underground, and it runs for two
years with nothing being done to it. At the end
of two years, they show back up, take the whole
assembly away and put another one in. It's safer, it's
more reliable, and it maintains a skill set to allow
them to continuously improve. And maybe this is the way
we end up doing it. It's a stupid way, this
AI padic and these tech companies dumping money into it,
but it's still a way, and so if it comes
out that way, we'll be better off as society or
as a civilization. I just wish we didn't have to
do it quite this dumb. Yeah, that's what I got, brother.
Are we going to talk about fusion? It's not a
lot of good news on the fusion side. Eider Projects
slowly calling along like all of the company. You know
that old story and I said eight years ago when
when the scientists are well funded, they don't talk, right,
So like Commonwealth, Fusion well funded. A couple of news
stories here and there, but we haven't seen anything. They've
got enough money. They're building their reactor, right, there's no
news to talk about it. Tider keeps inching along, you know,
spending billions and billions, but they put out their steady
streaming new stories. But they're not finished, yet no light
there like we're not seeing new light. We are seeing
is that a bunch of companies are well funded, but
all of them, all of those their dollogies, are further
away from actually making electricity. Right. One of the biggest
issues you have with fusion, and we talked about this
last year and it hasn't changed, is you need a
lot of deterium and tritium to run them, and that
takes a lot of energy to make that stuff. So
we don't have a fuel pipeline for fusion reactors. How
do we actually make enough fuel. We make a few
tens of grams of tritium a year, and now we're
going to need tons of it. Now, first we need
to react. You can't you're not going to build a
supply line when the machine doesn't exist. So we do
have to build the reactor first, which we have not done.
But when it does happen, the next problem will be, Okay,
how do we get this thing fuel and start to
build it at scale? And it's never going to be
power toomb cheap to meter, right, Like the bottom line
is just operating a grid costs five to ten cents
a kill a one hour, so They're always going to
build for something. The cost of the electricity is not
the hard part. It's never been the hard part. Distributing
it and keeping an infrastructure up there running it. That's
the heart.
Speaker 1: The name of my next band is going to be
Magnetic Donut.
Speaker 2: Took am Max a good name. I like took him
took him Max.
Speaker 1: Well, that certainly wasn't I don't put.
Speaker 2: I didn't talk about fusion on this show because there
just wasn't a lot to talk about.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Okay, they're funded, they're working on it. We'll get
back to you in a few thousand years, hopefully sooner. Richard.
What can I say? Man, you're amazing. Thank you, long show,
my friends.
Speaker 2: Sorry, but so much to talk about, and I hope
I address people's questions. Of course, you can always send
me more. I'm happy to talk further and put some comments. Yeah,
I'll send you a copy of music Coba.
Speaker 1: You got it. We'll see what happens, all right, We'll
see you next time on dot net Rocks. Dot net
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back to show number one, recorded in September two.
Speaker 1: Thousand and two. And make sure you check out our sponsors.
They keep us in business. Now, go write some code,
see you next time.
Speaker 2: Got trade.
Speaker 1: Middle vands do the summer time that means home than
my Texas in line