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Speaker 1: How'd you like to listen to dot NetRocks with no ads? Easy?

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Become a patron for just five dollars a month. You

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shows have no ads. Twenty dollars a month, we'll get

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you that and a special dot NetRocks patron mug. Sign

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up now at Patreon dot dot NetRocks dot com. Hey,

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welcome back to dot NetRocks. It's geek out again for

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twenty twenty five. At this time we're focused on energy.

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I'm Carl Franklin and that is the star of the show.

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Richard Campbell. Good morning, Richard, Hey, Happy New Year, Happy

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new year to you, Time Traveling, Time Traveling. Yeah, of course,

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I know we have a lot to cover today, so

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I want to get started right away with an energy

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themed better no framework, roll the music awesome?

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Speaker 2: What do you got?

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Speaker 1: So? I've found this video on YouTube and while I

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was doing it, I was thinking to myself, boy, this

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would be a great thing to share with the kids,

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and then I thought maybe the grand kids.

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Speaker 2: Kids aren't kids anymore more than.

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Speaker 1: My Yeah, back when we started this show, I would

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do things like you know, good for the kids and

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everybody who's listening, Yeah, the kids, maybe the grand kids.

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All right, So this is a YouTube video how to

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make a potato clock?

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Speaker 2: Cool? So using the electric potential in a potato.

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Speaker 1: Absolutely, it's a great little experiment that you can do

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with your kids. You you know, put a die out

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in one side, an electrode in the other, and you

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get energy that powers a clock. Isn't that fun? That's

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what I meant to say. You science guys, you know

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you feel details. Copper and zinc, baby copper and zinc.

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So that's what I got. Richard. You want to read

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a comment?

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Speaker 2: Yeah, sure, grabbed a coamooff last year's Energy Geek Outs.

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This is from episode nineteen thirty one around this time

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last year. We're oddly enough, we talked about energy and it's,

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you know that funny. I'm always big on making sure

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things I referenced last year get mentioned in the next

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year and so forth. So certainly I've been reading through

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all of that for a great deal. And this comment

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comes from Richard Another Richard. He says, great chat, Thanks guys.

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Interesting that comment about granular solar and wind projects. I

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don't know if you've countered as in North America, but

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here in Australia, we have so much solar based generation

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that we've maxed out the capabilities of our older transmission grid.

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Another government here wants those with a rooftop solar to

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pay for their exports to the grid. He considers it

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a bait and switch to get us to all buy batteries, which,

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by the way, has happened. Wow. I don't know that

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there was so much a bait and switch in that.

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I don't know that the issue the government realized how

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quickly Australian citizens would put solar on the roof, because

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they're the leader in the world in this, and they

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have literally overwhelmed the great at times, you know, so

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much power available at noon, Yeah, because there's so many

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solar panels running all at once that it literally blowed

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transformers off poles.

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Speaker 1: But it's amazing that they actually did that. They have

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full capacity of their grid from solar. That's amazing to me.

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Speaker 2: Yeah. At times, of course it's not you know, again,

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the power doesn't flow uphill particularly well, it doesn't step

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back through transformers. Like there's all those kinds of problems

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they're getting big on because battery prices have fallen so

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much and we're going to talk about that they've gotten

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very big on batteries now, because the main thing that

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you want on rooftop solar is to run your house.

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Nobody else is yeah really yea, yeah right there. All

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this buy back was a way to encourage you to

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do this. The utilization of the power is very poor.

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Speaker 1: As we learned in the very first geek out, which

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was on electricity, right.

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Speaker 2: Man, not very first, but you know, way back there

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we talked about this and lots of controversy on it

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one way or.

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Speaker 1: The other, one of the first Yeah.

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Speaker 2: But Richard also goes on to say our older style,

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greatest more Hubbins spoke that works well with a small

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number of chunky, high capacity cold based generators and their

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associated consection points exactly right. You know, we've built a

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grid designed to have those big power points push down

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everything else, not flow in multiple directions. And with so

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many solar and wind projects around our country, the re

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rebuilding of the transmission network grid is costing gazillions, and

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it's be having to be rebuilt in the wrong order.

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In my opinion, refactoring the new grid ideally should have

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been commenced first. Since you note that the nuclear based

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generation here would have had a similar grid shape in

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that to the old one, almost one to one, And

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he wonders if this similar issue is happening in the

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US and Canada. In the answer is yes, absolutely, Actually

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it's happening everywhere in the world. Power is power right, well,

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more importantly, grid is grid right. The real issue here

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is that now that there's many different sources of power

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and you're going to flow in multiple directions, things get

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complicated and the grid was just never built for this,

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and you could not have built out the grid first.

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I just don't think it's possible. A you didn't know

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what was going to happen, and B it's impossible to

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spend upfront on this. You kind of have to build

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it as you go, and that may not be the

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most cost effective way. But the only way you're going

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to get it right is in hindsight, and that's not

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real life. So you know, what's happening is pretty much

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what had to happen, except that we do have some

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negative forces. You know, lots of politicians are jumping on

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the idea that it's solar's faulted, the grids unstable. Phenominally,

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that's kind of correct. That doesnt mean you shouldn't use solar,

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it's that the grade needs to be upgraded. So so

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those complicated conversations aren't sexy. The easy one is to

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blame new power on all the problems on the grid,

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and really, we need to upgrade our grade and we

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have maintained our grade well enough, and that has been

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the problem all along, and it's where a lot of

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money is going right now. People are very frustrated the

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idea that cost of power continues to go up, and

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they blame it on new power sources, which makes no sense.

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If the new power sources arebot to drive it down,

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they drave it on new consumers like AI certainly something

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we're going to talk about today, and that's these are

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all fragments of truth where the real truth is, Yeah,

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we're in the midst of a revolution on our way

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we build our grid, and we're just putting more stress

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on it. So Richard, thank you so much for your comment,

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and a copy of music co Buy is on its

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way to you. And if you'd like a copy of music,

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go buy, write a comment on the website at dot

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netroocks dot com or on the facebooks and helplish every

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show there and if you comment there in a reading

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the show, we'll send you copy music Cope.

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Speaker 1: And what he's talking about is music to Code Buy,

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which is something that I built a long time ago

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and keep adding tracks too. We're up to twenty two

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tracks now. They're twenty five minutes long to coincide with

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the Pomodoro technique, and they're designed to keep you in

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a state of flow while you're writing code. I'm halfway

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done with episode twenty three as of this writing, but

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I think I'm going to knock it out in the

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next day or so so we can get it to

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people for Christmas. So Musicdoco buy dot net if you

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want to buy the collection in an MP three wave

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or FLACK versions. All right, So shall we talk about

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what happened in nineteen eighty three because that's our episode number.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, all right, there's some favorites for you in my list,

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but I'm sure we'll see what you've got.

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Speaker 1: Well, the big one, Richard, kind of crosses into your realm.

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It's the beginning of the Internet. The migration of arpinet

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to TCPIP was completed, marking the official start of the Internet.

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According to some sources, the depending on who you asked, right, yeah,

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but I mean TCPIP is what powers the Internet. It's

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the protcol stack that we all use today. So before

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it was arpinet, and there were other protocols that connected

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universities and things like that, but the true Internet really

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requires TCPIP. All right, thanks sir. Yeah, yeah, launch of

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mobile phones. You'll probably talk about this, so I'll leave

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that that. Wasn't going to go too far into it

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because there's so many other things to do. Okay, the first

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mobile cellular telephone call was made. Michael Jackson performed the

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moon Walk for the first time during a televised performance

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of Billy Jean, which was big. Nobel Prizes were awarded

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to various individuals, including William Golding for literature and somebody

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I can't pronounce, lech Wtesa for peace. Okay, Lequillessa, good polish.

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Opening of Tokyo Disneyland, the theme park. We'll open its

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stores to the public on April fifteenth, becoming the first

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Disney park in Asia. And you know, let's talk about

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the top ten movies of nineteen eighty three, because there

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were some good ones. A Christmas Story is number one,

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which I watch every Year with My Girls. Great movie

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and a great story too, Silkwood, Scarface, The Right Stuff,

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War Games, Star Wars Episode six, Return of the Jedi,

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The King of Comedy. Yep, that was Robert Tanniro, Jerry Lewis,

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and Martin Scorsese directed National Lampoon's Vacation, Monty Python's The

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Meaning of Life and coming in at ten The Outsider Again.

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Speaker 2: Another ridiculously good movie here, like ridiculously good.

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Speaker 1: Great, yeah, great movies coming out in eighty three. So

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what you got in tech in space? Well, okay, let's

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give to Dine Attack a little bit of love.

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Speaker 2: Right. That's the first cellular mobile phone. And there were

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mobile phones before this. This was the first cellular phone.

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Famously made a call to his competitor in New York

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to say I've done it, you know, communicating on the

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first cell node the phone had. It was kind of

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brick shaped, but it had antenna and it definitely worked.

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It's called din Attack and it's the beginning of that

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whole race. But you know, awesome. The other gadget that

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I have to bet you would be the Nintendo Entertainment Centisen,

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the NASA. You know, this is the first of the Mario.

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You know, you can play Mario at home like that.

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It's huge and that Christmas I remember it well, selling

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ness for a friend of mine at a store as

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fast as we could possibly go.

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Speaker 1: Previous episodes of dot NetRocks we talked about Pong, right yep,

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which and I can't remember what year it was, but

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it was in the seventies somewhere seventy eight, seventy seven,

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seventy six. But was this the real first graphic home

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system or was the Atari the first one? Yeah, the

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Atari's earlier in that and the in television so forth.

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But this was sort of Nintendo entering that market, okay,

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right as Famiccom And yeah, they were course big in Japan,

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and you know, nominally in Japan it was a third

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generation system, but this was the first one that they

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brought to the US. Were they as huge as Stephen

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Forte in Japan?

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Speaker 2: Nobody's a huge a Steve. Let's not get crazy now,

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come on. But you know this is when you get

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Super Mario Brothers. Legend of Zelda Metroid, like those classics

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begin at least in North America, you know, well, I

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mean it starts in Japan in eighty three and then

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gets released in North America in eighty five. Yeah, nice,

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so big on the space side, there's not all that's

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happening in space shuttles. So Space Shuttle Challenge there gets

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its first flight in April that year, and the only

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thing interesting I can say about that flight, besides the

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first flight of Challenger, is they launched the first of

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the TDRS satellites. These are tracking in data relay satellites.

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We take for granted today that there's NaSTA TV, that

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there's a continuous transmission of video from the International Space

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Station and any space flight, and that's because of these

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TDRS satellites. There's three of them, but in nineteen a

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three the very first one had been launched. Up till

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then you just had voice communication and it was intermittent.

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You constantly went out of into loss of signals. So

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having it all the time was a big deal. And

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this was the beginning of the TDRS. So Challenger put

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up the first TDRS satellite, and then that's April. In

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June flies again, like they did fly fairly often, right.

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The goal was to be able to fly over two weeks.

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They'd never got that fast, but they were flying every

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couple of months. STS seven is a satellite deployment mission,

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which was the original you know, major missions for the

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Shuttle was to be able to launch satellites. But it's

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also the mission where Sally Ride flies, the very first

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female US female astronaut. That was her first flight.

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Speaker 1: And it's really funny that they wrote that song about

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her Mustang Sally way before that.

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Speaker 2: Pretty sure for sure that's not true. Pretty sure for

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sure that's not what we're talking about. And then the

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end August, Challenger flies to fly to launch a couple

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more satellites, but not a TDR.

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Speaker 1: Follow me for more fun facts, kids.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, there you go. So, and then to round out

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the shuttles in eighty three, the last flight in a

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three so Challenger flowed three times and then Columbia flies

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once STS nine and takes up space Lab. This was

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a collaboration which was with the Europeans before even the

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Europeans based aged was well defined and really in a

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lot of way space Lab easier precursor to ISS modules. Yeah.

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So this was basically a laboratory twenty four feet long

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in the back of the payload bay with a tunneling

250
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it to the cab. The cabin in the front and

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there were six people the first time it flew six

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people on Shuttle, and these six people worked round the

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clock in two shifts of twelve hours three and three

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to do science experiments using space Lab to demonstrate the

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potential at One of those astrots, by the way, was

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Richard Garriott, And if you're a gaming fan, Richard Garriott

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is the guy behind Ultima an Ultima online.

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Speaker 1: Wow.

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Speaker 2: That mission for Columbia was the last one for two years.

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After that flight, it'll come down and do a major refit.

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They'll take the ejection seats out and trying to reduce

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the weight on Columbia, though I'll never be able to

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get all the way down. It'll fly again in nineteen

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eighty six.

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Speaker 1: I'll have some problems with the O rings, foreshadowing that'll be.

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Speaker 2: Called the Challenger. But yes, of course I won't say

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the Soviets did nothing that year. They have Salute seven

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up and they'll do like some major spacewalks to upgrade

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the solar panels on it. Like they were doing good

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science then too, so, but that not a you know,

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its shuttle is sort of overwhelming all the messages at

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the time. On the computer side, it's nineteen eighty three,

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what comes out. Apple's Lisa. Lisa arguably the first of

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the PC computers with a guy just a year ahead

275
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of the Mac. Of course, there was a lot of

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de beta where the name Lisa came from. Jobs finally

277
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admitted it was named for his daughter, although at the

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time they didn't want that to be true, so they

279
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backron named it and called it something like local Integrated

280
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Software Architecture, which means nothing. Somebody else said, let's be realistic.

281
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It actually means let's invent some acronym. That's great. It

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was a ten thousand dollars PC in nineteen eighty three.

283
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It was really crazy expensive, but it had a sixty

284
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eight thousand processor, had a Mega RAM initially with two

285
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five and a quarter drives, then eventually had a five

286
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Mega I driving even a seven a three and a

287
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half inch drive on it. But it just prices itself

288
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out of the market and then back would undermine them.

289
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They'll be out, they'll be discontinued by eighty six. Lotus

290
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one two three, Yeah, Yeah, so that's the Yeah, this

291
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is the you know, and coming after VisiCalc. Although Microsoft's

292
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also shipped a multiplan. The multiplan runs on lots of platforms.

293
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That's Charles Simons's implementation. So it's not fast and one

294
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two three is designed for the IBM PC and nothing else,

295
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and it is fast, and it just swamps the market.

296
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It's not defendive product, to the point where when Microsoft

297
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is really trying to compete against it, they include a

298
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mistake in the date math in Lotus one two three

299
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in Excel to make sure it's perfectly compatible.

300
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Speaker 1: Oh not as an accident, to let everybody know that

301
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they copied the code.

302
00:15:37,360 --> 00:15:40,120
Speaker 2: They they may realize it was making an error on

303
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leap ears because the leap ears don't happen on the

304
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on the four hundredth year, but Lotus one two three

305
00:15:46,759 --> 00:15:48,039
made that mistake, and they didn't want it to be

306
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different from Lotus one too three, so they made it

307
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exactly the same mistake.

308
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Speaker 1: Was there some brew haha over the inventor of VisiCalc

309
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and some loss circles and stuff like that.

310
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Speaker 2: Oh yes, I mean this is still in lawsuit area.

311
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Don't worry, We're still coming into like the look and

312
00:16:02,120 --> 00:16:04,840
feel lawsuits, Like none of that has happened yet, and

313
00:16:04,840 --> 00:16:06,519
we were all sort of passed that all now, but

314
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the time, no they're still figuring all that out.

315
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Speaker 1: Yeah.

316
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Speaker 2: Eighty three is also the year they shipped Microsoft word Word.

317
00:16:13,799 --> 00:16:16,559
The original version is actually for Xenix. It's called multi

318
00:16:16,559 --> 00:16:19,399
toool Word And they also put out the PC version

319
00:16:19,440 --> 00:16:22,840
for on Dos in eighty three, and then they'body subsequent versions.

320
00:16:22,919 --> 00:16:24,960
Speaker 1: And if you're a fan of dot net rocks, you

321
00:16:25,039 --> 00:16:28,039
know that we interviewed the guy Les Pinter who wrote

322
00:16:28,080 --> 00:16:30,519
word and sold it to Microsoft, So that was around

323
00:16:30,519 --> 00:16:30,879
this time.

324
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Speaker 2: It was in that same era, And of course they

325
00:16:33,720 --> 00:16:35,799
also made versions of the Mac and the Atarist and

326
00:16:35,879 --> 00:16:39,559
Unix and OS two Windows in eighty nine. It'll ultimately

327
00:16:39,559 --> 00:16:41,960
become the dominant word processor, and it'll do it by

328
00:16:41,960 --> 00:16:45,240
beating word Perfect. And the way it'll beat word perfect

329
00:16:45,279 --> 00:16:48,039
is by reading and writing word perfect files. Yeah. Plus

330
00:16:48,039 --> 00:16:50,480
it was easier to use, I mean, let's face it, Yeah,

331
00:16:50,519 --> 00:16:52,159
but that's not enough to get people to move. The

332
00:16:52,159 --> 00:16:56,039
big thing here was when word Perfect shipped their version fives,

333
00:16:56,200 --> 00:16:59,759
they changed their file format and didn't include They only

334
00:16:59,759 --> 00:17:02,840
had an importer, so you had to upgrade everything at once,

335
00:17:02,960 --> 00:17:05,519
and that made people mad. And then word came along

336
00:17:05,559 --> 00:17:07,920
and says, hey, we read and write four three files

337
00:17:07,960 --> 00:17:11,000
and five one files. So suddenly you could use word

338
00:17:11,079 --> 00:17:13,400
whatever you got to pick up any old version of

339
00:17:13,400 --> 00:17:15,640
word perfect and write to Eddie version of We're perfect too.

340
00:17:15,640 --> 00:17:18,559
And it just, you know, basically stood there, waited until

341
00:17:18,559 --> 00:17:21,559
they made a mistake and then took advantage. What else

342
00:17:22,359 --> 00:17:26,240
Richard stallman Ship's Ganu. Ganu has the best acronym of all,

343
00:17:26,279 --> 00:17:32,039
which is not Unix. That's what can stands for. It's

344
00:17:32,079 --> 00:17:35,200
a free it's not a full Borros, but it is

345
00:17:35,240 --> 00:17:38,880
the free shell, and it is the catalyst for what

346
00:17:38,920 --> 00:17:41,359
will become Linux, which is why Stallmanite still say you

347
00:17:41,400 --> 00:17:44,279
should be calling it new Linux, right, But that's all

348
00:17:44,319 --> 00:17:46,319
all begins there, and also the free software movement and

349
00:17:46,359 --> 00:17:49,839
so forth come from that. Compact only been formed the

350
00:17:49,920 --> 00:17:53,839
year before puts out their version of the Compact Portable,

351
00:17:53,880 --> 00:17:58,599
the luggable PC case. It's the suitcase like an Osborne,

352
00:17:58,599 --> 00:18:02,880
but built for CP for DAWs. It's an IBM compatible. Yeah.

353
00:18:02,920 --> 00:18:07,480
And Ry Kurtzweel publishes his Age of the Intelligent Machines,

354
00:18:07,480 --> 00:18:10,799
incredibly prescient if you read it today, just about some

355
00:18:10,880 --> 00:18:14,279
of the insanity of that going on forty years earlier

356
00:18:15,240 --> 00:18:18,640
and last, but certainly not least at the cees the

357
00:18:18,680 --> 00:18:24,559
Consumer Electronics Show MIDI, right, yeah, yeah, nineteen ay three.

358
00:18:24,119 --> 00:18:29,279
Speaker 1: MIDI changed electronic music for everybody. Yeah, ushered in the

359
00:18:29,319 --> 00:18:32,960
era of the synthesizers and the sequencers and all that stuff.

360
00:18:32,880 --> 00:18:36,240
Speaker 2: And brilliantly they came at it. It was a serial standard,

361
00:18:36,240 --> 00:18:37,680
but they came at it as a public standard, so

362
00:18:37,680 --> 00:18:40,319
anybody could implement against it, right, and that was good,

363
00:18:40,599 --> 00:18:42,920
And so it just spread like wildfire. And I had

364
00:18:43,480 --> 00:18:45,559
a little bit of a hand in the history of that,

365
00:18:45,720 --> 00:18:48,559
not really, but I kind of jumped on to the

366
00:18:48,559 --> 00:18:51,839
MIDI bandwagon working for a company that made Doss sequencers

367
00:18:52,319 --> 00:18:56,519
in the late eighties, and a lot of that stuff

368
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that I was doing was creating c structures or system

369
00:19:00,960 --> 00:19:06,920
exclusive data. System exclusive data is stuff that's specific to

370
00:19:07,000 --> 00:19:10,960
each synthesizer model that comes out so that you could

371
00:19:11,559 --> 00:19:15,519
suck down the patches and then use a library application,

372
00:19:15,599 --> 00:19:17,960
which is what we had to manage them, and then

373
00:19:18,480 --> 00:19:22,720
swap the patches back in so so that Yeah, those

374
00:19:22,720 --> 00:19:26,440
were fun times. Yeah, and it you know, at the time,

375
00:19:26,839 --> 00:19:29,599
each vendor had their own standard, right, Roland had one

376
00:19:30,359 --> 00:19:33,000
Oberheim and these are the two that originally collaborated, you know,

377
00:19:33,160 --> 00:19:35,720
had had their own version, the parallel box and so forth,

378
00:19:36,200 --> 00:19:38,759
and it was finally like these leaders of the company

379
00:19:38,839 --> 00:19:41,759
kind of got on the phone and said, this is stupid, right,

380
00:19:41,920 --> 00:19:43,839
why don't we just agree on a standard, And they

381
00:19:43,839 --> 00:19:46,920
gradually drew more and more companies into all agree we're

382
00:19:46,920 --> 00:19:49,279
going to do this, this MIDI standard, so that we

383
00:19:49,319 --> 00:19:51,680
can interconnect with each other, so that our customers can

384
00:19:51,759 --> 00:19:52,960
use the products they want to use.

385
00:19:53,319 --> 00:19:56,400
Speaker 1: What's interesting, Richard, is that standard still holds. I think

386
00:19:56,440 --> 00:19:59,559
they went to METI two point zero, but they're midy two. Yeah,

387
00:19:59,599 --> 00:20:02,880
but that's standard still holds. And compare that to something like, oh,

388
00:20:02,920 --> 00:20:06,440
I don't know, scuzzy Small Computer Systems Interface, which was

389
00:20:06,480 --> 00:20:09,640
supposed to be a standard which changed every year because

390
00:20:09,680 --> 00:20:11,759
everybody wanted to own the standard.

391
00:20:11,880 --> 00:20:14,240
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's all which is kind of pointless. Yeah, those

392
00:20:14,240 --> 00:20:15,480
guys have done a good job. But they kind of

393
00:20:15,519 --> 00:20:18,200
got it right off the bat. Yep, and it worked. Yeah,

394
00:20:18,240 --> 00:20:19,920
so that's what I got. That's good. Yeah.

395
00:20:19,960 --> 00:20:21,640
Speaker 1: So I hear you want to talk about energy?

396
00:20:21,720 --> 00:20:22,359
Speaker 2: What the heck?

397
00:20:22,480 --> 00:20:23,960
Speaker 1: Huh in twenty twenty five?

398
00:20:24,279 --> 00:20:27,319
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, When we do this every year, it's interesting

399
00:20:27,319 --> 00:20:31,359
to look at the larger geopolitical landscape. Energy has always

400
00:20:31,359 --> 00:20:34,519
been an important factor. It's really quite a potent ay

401
00:20:34,640 --> 00:20:39,000
right now. The International Energy Agency, which I often retort to,

402
00:20:39,079 --> 00:20:42,759
the IA, sort of does a lot of overview. It's

403
00:20:42,799 --> 00:20:44,680
a great phrase for me to do some reading, sort

404
00:20:44,680 --> 00:20:46,640
of see where we actually had. And they talk about

405
00:20:46,640 --> 00:20:48,960
the fact that coming out of the pandemic and with

406
00:20:49,039 --> 00:20:53,440
the current conflicts, the countries are prioritizing energy security. They're

407
00:20:53,480 --> 00:20:57,640
actually creating less efficient energy generation that they can control

408
00:20:58,000 --> 00:21:00,920
rather than necessarily buying from wherever they can from. Having

409
00:21:01,279 --> 00:21:03,960
the Russians out of the grid has been a big

410
00:21:04,000 --> 00:21:06,440
part of that. But it also means that they've driven

411
00:21:07,160 --> 00:21:10,759
renewables to an all time high. But it's interesting to

412
00:21:10,839 --> 00:21:13,200
point it's not just renewals, as you're not all time high.

413
00:21:13,440 --> 00:21:18,200
Virtually every type of energy generation in twenty twenty five, coal,

414
00:21:18,720 --> 00:21:22,839
natural gas, oil, even nuclear power isn't an all time

415
00:21:22,920 --> 00:21:25,680
high right now. Old plants are being turned back on,

416
00:21:26,839 --> 00:21:28,599
plants that are should have been shut down or being

417
00:21:28,640 --> 00:21:31,640
capped because there's so much concern for availability of energy.

418
00:21:32,160 --> 00:21:36,000
Oil prices are relatively low. Energy should be cheap right now,

419
00:21:36,079 --> 00:21:38,119
and the reality, of course is the energy isn't Anybody

420
00:21:38,160 --> 00:21:40,480
who's looking at their power bill is going, Wow, why

421
00:21:40,559 --> 00:21:41,880
is my power bill so high?

422
00:21:41,960 --> 00:21:42,599
Speaker 1: Except for me?

423
00:21:42,720 --> 00:21:43,440
Speaker 2: It's true.

424
00:21:43,680 --> 00:21:47,279
Speaker 1: I got solar panels everywhere, and you know, my energy

425
00:21:47,319 --> 00:21:50,680
bill has been flatlined for the last year. I've been

426
00:21:50,720 --> 00:21:54,240
only paying my lease for for my panels.

427
00:21:54,279 --> 00:21:57,640
Speaker 2: But that's yeah. So you got in before even panel

428
00:21:57,640 --> 00:21:58,279
prices are up.

429
00:21:58,240 --> 00:22:01,759
Speaker 1: Right now, good time fifty bucks a month plus whatever

430
00:22:02,319 --> 00:22:04,480
Pizzley charge we get from the power company.

431
00:22:04,640 --> 00:22:09,440
Speaker 2: Right. So, the planet's consuming roughly about twenty tarowatt hours

432
00:22:09,440 --> 00:22:12,799
of electricity per year right now. The IA says that

433
00:22:13,880 --> 00:22:16,319
we're almost forty percent of that energy now is renewable

434
00:22:16,680 --> 00:22:19,759
and expected to be over fifty percent ahead of twenty thirty,

435
00:22:19,799 --> 00:22:22,960
which was the original goal. So some things are going well.

436
00:22:23,720 --> 00:22:26,920
But at the same time, everybody's frantic about energy costs

437
00:22:26,920 --> 00:22:28,759
and we're going to that's going to keep coming up

438
00:22:28,839 --> 00:22:31,160
as we talk through the various forms. So let's do

439
00:22:31,200 --> 00:22:33,559
our usual routine. We'll start with some of the renewables

440
00:22:33,559 --> 00:22:35,400
and then we'll go into the more mainstreams. And I've

441
00:22:35,400 --> 00:22:38,519
got some questions from listeners, not all includers. We go

442
00:22:38,559 --> 00:22:40,680
through this all, right, So by the end of twenty

443
00:22:40,680 --> 00:22:43,000
four last year, we were at about two point two

444
00:22:43,119 --> 00:22:46,960
tarawatts of solar capacity on the planet. By the end

445
00:22:46,960 --> 00:22:49,039
of this year, which is imminent, we should be around

446
00:22:49,079 --> 00:22:50,880
three terra wats. Is a bit of an estimate because

447
00:22:50,880 --> 00:22:52,359
it's not quite the end of the year yet and

448
00:22:52,440 --> 00:22:54,200
it takes a few months to get all the report again.

449
00:22:54,920 --> 00:22:57,960
So you know, about eight hundred megawatts of eight hundred

450
00:22:57,960 --> 00:23:00,240
gigawatts of new solar put online. Most of that is

451
00:23:00,240 --> 00:23:04,319
from China. Still, China has one point one tarot watts

452
00:23:04,720 --> 00:23:07,200
of solar. They're number one by a long way, because

453
00:23:07,200 --> 00:23:10,279
the number two is the United States at about two

454
00:23:10,519 --> 00:23:12,920
hundred and forty gigawatts or maybe.

455
00:23:12,720 --> 00:23:15,200
Speaker 1: Not, you know, with all those Chinese solar panels.

456
00:23:14,839 --> 00:23:17,839
Speaker 2: Barely a quarter. Yeah, although solar panels are also made

457
00:23:17,839 --> 00:23:20,680
in the USA is more expensive. So we're roughly around

458
00:23:20,680 --> 00:23:23,880
ten percent of global interesting now is solar, and seventy

459
00:23:23,880 --> 00:23:27,440
five percent of the new capacity being added in renewables

460
00:23:28,160 --> 00:23:31,880
is solar. Solar is very cheap, and it's the bigger

461
00:23:31,920 --> 00:23:33,960
thing is it's easy to deploy. You get a square

462
00:23:34,119 --> 00:23:38,079
flat piece of land, you can gradually grow out solar.

463
00:23:38,119 --> 00:23:41,559
You know, ortually every other power plant besides wind and solar,

464
00:23:41,960 --> 00:23:43,400
you kind of have to build the whole thing. Before

465
00:23:43,400 --> 00:23:46,400
you get anything right, you'll have to build a large

466
00:23:46,519 --> 00:23:48,960
multi megawatt plant right off the bat where with solar

467
00:23:49,039 --> 00:23:51,720
and wind you can build an increments and so you

468
00:23:51,759 --> 00:23:54,599
can slowly get connected to get to the grid and

469
00:23:54,640 --> 00:23:58,160
slowly expand over time and sort of don't have to

470
00:23:58,160 --> 00:24:00,400
get a huge amount of money up front. You can

471
00:24:00,400 --> 00:24:03,160
get it over time. The Chinese are doing a lot

472
00:24:03,200 --> 00:24:06,400
of the innovation here. They are. I read a great

473
00:24:06,440 --> 00:24:10,440
piece about a huge solar and wind farm being built

474
00:24:10,559 --> 00:24:14,799
int bed the Quingha Tatle and Solar projects. This is

475
00:24:14,960 --> 00:24:19,759
seventeen gigawatts of solar and that's not even at full capacity.

476
00:24:19,920 --> 00:24:20,799
And they're building on the bed.

477
00:24:20,839 --> 00:24:22,079
Speaker 1: How do they get them all up the mountain?

478
00:24:22,200 --> 00:24:24,759
Speaker 2: They carry them? This is not a trivial piece of

479
00:24:24,799 --> 00:24:25,759
problem either, right.

480
00:24:25,599 --> 00:24:27,640
Speaker 1: Hey, Joe SHARPA have another panel?

481
00:24:27,759 --> 00:24:29,960
Speaker 2: That's it? You know? I think it's I think they

482
00:24:29,960 --> 00:24:32,039
have a train line up there. But either way, the

483
00:24:32,119 --> 00:24:36,240
high altitude means it's cold, good for the panels. The

484
00:24:36,279 --> 00:24:38,799
air is thin, so sunlight is very clear, so they

485
00:24:38,839 --> 00:24:42,680
actually get more generation, and then they use these high

486
00:24:42,720 --> 00:24:46,160
performance DC connectors to bring it back down where it's needed.

487
00:24:46,400 --> 00:24:48,519
They're also combining it with hydro electric power, because if

488
00:24:48,519 --> 00:24:51,160
you've got mountains, you've got dams and a lot of

489
00:24:51,160 --> 00:24:53,799
pumped hydro. So when they're doing excess power production around

490
00:24:53,839 --> 00:24:56,599
the stored of batteries, they're pumping water back up hill

491
00:24:56,680 --> 00:25:01,319
and storing behind the dams. So these massive demonstrations of power.

492
00:25:01,359 --> 00:25:03,720
Speaker 1: So I think we talked about this before, but I

493
00:25:03,759 --> 00:25:06,279
don't know about in Canada. But in the United States,

494
00:25:06,359 --> 00:25:08,240
I don't think like, if you have a house on

495
00:25:08,279 --> 00:25:11,559
an acre and you have an adjacent acre that's flat, yeah,

496
00:25:11,599 --> 00:25:13,640
I don't think you can. Can you or can you

497
00:25:13,720 --> 00:25:18,200
not put up you know, solar panels on there and

498
00:25:18,759 --> 00:25:22,240
to power your house or your for your local electricity

499
00:25:22,359 --> 00:25:23,519
or sell it or whatever.

500
00:25:23,759 --> 00:25:26,480
Speaker 2: You can power your house fairly easily. Like you're hitting

501
00:25:26,480 --> 00:25:28,480
on a veryly key point here, which is no, you

502
00:25:28,480 --> 00:25:30,119
can't just go. You can put up panels and put

503
00:25:30,119 --> 00:25:31,400
it in your own battery and do what you want

504
00:25:31,400 --> 00:25:35,799
with it. That's fine. The regulations and these are even

505
00:25:35,839 --> 00:25:37,920
down to the county level, not even state level, much

506
00:25:38,000 --> 00:25:41,720
less federal. It's usually fairly easy to generate power for

507
00:25:41,799 --> 00:25:44,519
your home. But as soon as you want a grid tie,

508
00:25:45,079 --> 00:25:48,519
you have to go through grid tie policy. Processes, and

509
00:25:48,559 --> 00:25:52,559
those processes are archaic, they haven't been modernized. They are

510
00:25:52,559 --> 00:25:55,200
controlled by relatively few entities that are not incented to

511
00:25:55,240 --> 00:25:58,240
improve it because it's where they make their money. And

512
00:25:58,920 --> 00:26:02,000
in some cases you're seeing a weight to get a

513
00:26:02,000 --> 00:26:05,119
grid tie for any kind of power plant of as

514
00:26:05,160 --> 00:26:06,440
much as eight years.

515
00:26:06,680 --> 00:26:08,799
Speaker 1: Wow. On top of that, I imagine you have to be

516
00:26:08,920 --> 00:26:10,839
zoned commercial for that because.

517
00:26:10,640 --> 00:26:15,039
Speaker 2: Well, that's selling power, but that's whole you know, that's

518
00:26:15,039 --> 00:26:17,400
at the front end. Imagine the back end where you

519
00:26:17,440 --> 00:26:19,279
actually build this. And now when you go to get

520
00:26:19,319 --> 00:26:21,079
your grid tie, it's like it's going to be eight

521
00:26:21,160 --> 00:26:23,960
years before you can actually start selling that power. Like,

522
00:26:24,000 --> 00:26:27,640
if you've got a loan, you're big trouble. So yeah,

523
00:26:28,400 --> 00:26:30,720
don't think too much unless you really have a lot

524
00:26:30,720 --> 00:26:32,799
of money and you want to build a large scale

525
00:26:32,960 --> 00:26:36,400
commercial power is expensive and complicated and depending on the region.

526
00:26:36,519 --> 00:26:39,160
You know, there's one of the advantages that having an

527
00:26:39,160 --> 00:26:42,319
authoritarian state like China is is that they simply dictate

528
00:26:42,359 --> 00:26:44,480
when things are going to happen, and there is no

529
00:26:44,599 --> 00:26:48,000
red tape unless they want it. Where I'm not saying

530
00:26:48,000 --> 00:26:50,839
that red tape is automatically bad. Often there are procedures.

531
00:26:50,880 --> 00:26:52,319
You know, what you don't want is to plug a

532
00:26:52,359 --> 00:26:54,720
solar panel array into the grid and have the grid

533
00:26:54,720 --> 00:26:58,279
catch fire, like then nobody gets power. But the current

534
00:26:58,319 --> 00:27:01,000
processes aren't bad and then need to be made better.

535
00:27:01,559 --> 00:27:02,880
It's an ongoing issue, and it is.

536
00:27:02,880 --> 00:27:06,200
Speaker 1: This both Canada and the United States everywhere.

537
00:27:05,920 --> 00:27:09,079
Speaker 2: And it's all of the western world. Right. The same

538
00:27:09,119 --> 00:27:11,799
problems that we're having the grid power are also the

539
00:27:11,799 --> 00:27:15,359
same problems we're having with housing, which is we created

540
00:27:15,400 --> 00:27:18,960
regulatory regimes that are blocking to the point where there

541
00:27:19,039 --> 00:27:22,599
is no incentive to build. Yeah, right, And so you know,

542
00:27:22,920 --> 00:27:25,720
if you go read as reclines abundance, it's like, listen,

543
00:27:26,039 --> 00:27:28,079
all it's actually cheap to build a house than ever

544
00:27:28,200 --> 00:27:31,119
was before. Why don't we have more houses? We've created

545
00:27:31,160 --> 00:27:34,160
regulatory regimes that make it impossible and need to be streamlined,

546
00:27:34,480 --> 00:27:36,759
and there's lots of effort happening in that, and there

547
00:27:36,799 --> 00:27:38,960
needs to be more. There need to be louder noises.

548
00:27:39,359 --> 00:27:43,880
The real reason housing and electricity are more expensive is

549
00:27:43,920 --> 00:27:46,079
that we've crew made it too hard for them to

550
00:27:46,079 --> 00:27:48,519
be less. And this is where you go to your

551
00:27:48,519 --> 00:27:50,960
government and demand it, and they'll give you simple answer.

552
00:27:50,960 --> 00:27:54,799
It's like it's AI's fault or it's Solar's fault, and

553
00:27:54,880 --> 00:27:58,160
all of that is crap. The reality is the infrastructure

554
00:27:58,200 --> 00:28:00,680
needs to be upgraded and the process needs to be upgraded,

555
00:28:01,000 --> 00:28:03,359
and those things need to be dealt with, and building

556
00:28:03,359 --> 00:28:05,359
more power is not going to solve it until you

557
00:28:05,359 --> 00:28:07,839
get the process fixed. Everything else is a waste of time.

558
00:28:08,000 --> 00:28:08,559
Speaker 1: Good points.

559
00:28:08,720 --> 00:28:10,519
Speaker 2: There has been some you know, for a long time

560
00:28:10,599 --> 00:28:11,839
when we were talking about solar We've done this for

561
00:28:11,880 --> 00:28:14,279
a number of years. I've talked about perovs skites. You've

562
00:28:14,279 --> 00:28:17,200
heard the term before, right, We've been living happily with

563
00:28:17,680 --> 00:28:20,960
multijunction soloka and solar panels manufactured largely by the Chinese,

564
00:28:20,960 --> 00:28:24,319
who drove the price down that are about twenty percent efficient.

565
00:28:24,720 --> 00:28:26,559
If you got the good ones, it's about as good

566
00:28:26,559 --> 00:28:30,680
as they can get. And there's always been this proposal,

567
00:28:30,759 --> 00:28:33,599
this idea that there's other materials, but the perovskites will

568
00:28:33,599 --> 00:28:35,200
be able to move more efficient panels, except for the

569
00:28:35,240 --> 00:28:37,680
fact that when you put them outside, they fail. They

570
00:28:37,720 --> 00:28:40,000
don't last more than a couple of years. It's not

571
00:28:40,160 --> 00:28:42,440
enough to make a panel that generates a lot of electricity.

572
00:28:42,440 --> 00:28:45,880
It's got to last for twenty years. But in the

573
00:28:45,920 --> 00:28:50,000
past couple of years we've had real breakthroughs. Last year

574
00:28:50,000 --> 00:28:53,720
I talked about Oxford PV who are making about twenty

575
00:28:53,720 --> 00:28:57,960
five percent efficient panels, and you go twenty percent. Who cares, Like, dude,

576
00:28:58,160 --> 00:29:01,119
that's a twenty percent improvement. That adds up. It's a

577
00:29:01,160 --> 00:29:05,000
big deal. And so they're now at a point.

578
00:29:04,720 --> 00:29:08,799
Speaker 1: Where they have licensed to Trina Solar, which is a

579
00:29:08,880 --> 00:29:13,960
Chinese company, to manufacture those twenty five percent panels at scale.

580
00:29:14,079 --> 00:29:15,599
Speaker 2: So those should be coming on the market.

581
00:29:15,720 --> 00:29:18,359
Speaker 1: And did you say those panels are also silicon based?

582
00:29:18,640 --> 00:29:22,039
Speaker 2: They're using provskites. Oh, they are using perovskites. Yeah, So

583
00:29:22,079 --> 00:29:24,079
what's the big deal about parovskites? Why do we like?

584
00:29:24,319 --> 00:29:28,880
What's the potential in provskites? Perovskites absorb a different frequency

585
00:29:28,920 --> 00:29:32,880
of light than the silicon. Silicon tends to absorb long light,

586
00:29:33,000 --> 00:29:36,960
So the reds and the infrared is what is what

587
00:29:37,039 --> 00:29:41,480
silicon absorbs and makeing electricity. Perovskites live in the ultraviolet

588
00:29:41,519 --> 00:29:45,119
and blue range, and so when you combine the two,

589
00:29:45,720 --> 00:29:47,400
so you have a layer of silicon and a layer

590
00:29:47,400 --> 00:29:50,480
of perovskite, the perovskite layer will pass through the reds

591
00:29:50,480 --> 00:29:52,960
and infrared down to the silicon and absorb the UV

592
00:29:53,079 --> 00:29:56,279
and blue. So this is why they're invariably more expensive

593
00:29:56,319 --> 00:29:59,400
because they are a conventional silicon solar panel and the

594
00:29:59,440 --> 00:30:03,640
Perovsky panel combined. Wow, right, but you get more energy

595
00:30:03,640 --> 00:30:05,880
from it. No too is about it. So there should

596
00:30:05,920 --> 00:30:10,359
be tandem style panels getting into the thirty percent range

597
00:30:10,400 --> 00:30:13,799
available in the next year or two now, and yeah,

598
00:30:13,839 --> 00:30:16,000
but they'll still be expensive. I'm sure they're going to

599
00:30:16,000 --> 00:30:18,440
be more expensive now. One of the main manufacturers of

600
00:30:18,480 --> 00:30:21,920
this is a US company called Klux. So Klux has

601
00:30:21,960 --> 00:30:27,240
made this transparent perovskuide layers transparency to infrared and red spectrum.

602
00:30:27,279 --> 00:30:30,400
So you replace the upper layer of a regular silicon

603
00:30:30,440 --> 00:30:34,119
panel with their quote unquote active glass layer and some

604
00:30:34,160 --> 00:30:37,359
additional wiring and you get this increased power production. So

605
00:30:37,359 --> 00:30:40,720
they are licensing that to multiple companies to add to

606
00:30:40,920 --> 00:30:45,359
existing silicon panels. Okay, back in China, which does a

607
00:30:45,400 --> 00:30:48,759
lot of this innovation, a company called Longi has been

608
00:30:48,799 --> 00:30:52,480
doing this tandem design, but they've also done a texturization

609
00:30:52,640 --> 00:30:56,880
approach to the interface between the silicon and the parovs guide. Basically,

610
00:30:56,880 --> 00:31:00,799
these little pyramid structures which increases light absorption. These are

611
00:31:00,799 --> 00:31:05,039
micrometer pyramids, too tiny to even see, but they decrease

612
00:31:05,079 --> 00:31:09,440
reefflectivity and increase light absorption between the layers. They've demonstrated

613
00:31:09,519 --> 00:31:12,880
in a tandem panel almost a thirty five percent efficiency. Wow.

614
00:31:13,079 --> 00:31:16,559
So and again that should have good lifespan So when

615
00:31:16,559 --> 00:31:18,119
you talk about going for a twenty percent to a

616
00:31:18,200 --> 00:31:21,279
thirty five percent like these are massive improvements. Now you

617
00:31:21,279 --> 00:31:24,359
could play this ROI game where I need a third

618
00:31:24,519 --> 00:31:27,680
less panels, almost half as many panels, I can pay

619
00:31:27,720 --> 00:31:30,039
twice a bunch for those panels and still be ahead.

620
00:31:30,920 --> 00:31:34,599
So solar technology is not holding still. It took a

621
00:31:34,640 --> 00:31:37,480
long time for us to get to this capability, but

622
00:31:37,599 --> 00:31:40,440
it has happened now, and so the market's going to

623
00:31:40,440 --> 00:31:42,440
get interesting over the next couple of years in terms

624
00:31:42,440 --> 00:31:47,559
of what panels to buy. Needless to say, expect conventional

625
00:31:47,880 --> 00:31:51,119
multi junctions silicon panels to get even cheaper as these

626
00:31:51,119 --> 00:31:53,839
other panels start to move into the market. Now. One

627
00:31:53,839 --> 00:31:56,720
of the question areas we've gotten from it was Chad

628
00:31:56,759 --> 00:31:59,880
Boyer and also Charles and Blue Sky said our chin

629
00:32:00,000 --> 00:32:02,440
any solar panels the only choice, and without a doubt,

630
00:32:02,519 --> 00:32:04,720
they are the cheapest choice. But they're not the only choice.

631
00:32:04,759 --> 00:32:10,039
There are US manufactured solar panels, although not the entire pipeline.

632
00:32:11,039 --> 00:32:12,880
The way solar panels made, you can sort of break

633
00:32:12,920 --> 00:32:16,839
them into five major steps. So first is you've got

634
00:32:16,839 --> 00:32:20,680
to make silicon metals. The US pioneered this. A lot

635
00:32:20,680 --> 00:32:22,359
of it is still done in the US, but it's

636
00:32:22,400 --> 00:32:25,839
how you get all the contaminutes out of silicon to

637
00:32:25,839 --> 00:32:28,880
make a pure silicon metal. Then it's typically exported from

638
00:32:28,920 --> 00:32:32,400
there because the next steps forming the ingots, actually casting

639
00:32:32,440 --> 00:32:34,039
them into the shapes that are going to be needed

640
00:32:34,039 --> 00:32:37,359
for silicon, and slicing them into wafers, those are all

641
00:32:37,359 --> 00:32:41,319
done abroad. So step one is very US SEP twos

642
00:32:41,319 --> 00:32:44,279
and three not so much, are almost not at all.

643
00:32:44,400 --> 00:32:48,319
Making them into cells, so that's actually adding textures, the doping.

644
00:32:49,319 --> 00:32:51,079
Some of that's done in the US, but not very much.

645
00:32:51,880 --> 00:32:54,960
But the final assembly part, taking those cells and wiring them,

646
00:32:55,000 --> 00:32:57,480
putting in the housings, actually building that, that's done at

647
00:32:57,480 --> 00:32:59,799
scale in the US these days. So when you buy

648
00:32:59,839 --> 00:33:02,200
an American solar panel and you can do that, you're

649
00:33:02,200 --> 00:33:04,440
going to pay a ten to twenty percent premium on that.

650
00:33:05,400 --> 00:33:08,960
You're typically getting a module made from parts abroad that

651
00:33:09,079 --> 00:33:12,119
is assembled in the US. So if that makes you happy,

652
00:33:12,480 --> 00:33:15,000
and you know by US standards that's considered a US

653
00:33:15,000 --> 00:33:17,920
solar panel, you can do that. Just understand that cost.

654
00:33:18,319 --> 00:33:21,079
I would also point out that much of that is

655
00:33:21,279 --> 00:33:25,519
new capability that was brought on by the Inflection Inflation

656
00:33:25,559 --> 00:33:29,000
Reduction Act in twenty two that's largely been shut down

657
00:33:29,000 --> 00:33:33,039
by the new administration. The new administration has rolling back

658
00:33:33,079 --> 00:33:36,960
all sorts of clean energy tax credits and benefits, and

659
00:33:36,960 --> 00:33:39,880
this is one of them. So while they been built out,

660
00:33:39,880 --> 00:33:41,359
I don't know how much more growth is going to

661
00:33:41,359 --> 00:33:42,720
happen in that area and whether or not people are

662
00:33:42,759 --> 00:33:44,720
willing to pay the premium for that to continue. But

663
00:33:44,799 --> 00:33:50,960
that's what's going on as those as a US administration

664
00:33:51,079 --> 00:33:53,920
rolled back the clean energy credits, a lot of money

665
00:33:53,960 --> 00:33:57,200
gout went into renewable energy ahead of those rollbacks, So

666
00:33:57,279 --> 00:33:59,440
the beginning of the year in twenty five, it was

667
00:33:59,440 --> 00:34:01,559
a huge them out. Now it's dying off in the

668
00:34:01,599 --> 00:34:03,000
later parts of the year though we don't have all

669
00:34:03,000 --> 00:34:05,119
the numbers here, but one case there was a company

670
00:34:05,119 --> 00:34:08,159
called clean Capital who ordered twenty five million dollars worth

671
00:34:08,199 --> 00:34:11,559
of solar panels ahead of tariffing and credits going away.

672
00:34:11,840 --> 00:34:13,880
They're now storing them because it's more than they need

673
00:34:14,199 --> 00:34:15,719
to the tune of like one hundred and two thousand

674
00:34:15,760 --> 00:34:17,719
dollars a month, but it's worth it for them for

675
00:34:17,800 --> 00:34:20,760
production for the rest of the year. The vast majority

676
00:34:20,800 --> 00:34:22,920
of new power being built in the US, like ninety

677
00:34:23,079 --> 00:34:26,400
percent in twenty twenty five, is renewable, mostly solar, some

678
00:34:26,559 --> 00:34:29,320
win so the impact of the rollbacks has to stop

679
00:34:29,360 --> 00:34:33,199
that deployment this year. But a lot of high risk

680
00:34:33,239 --> 00:34:36,800
projects like the off shore wind projects, which have been

681
00:34:36,840 --> 00:34:38,760
shut down just because of their risk levels and the

682
00:34:38,800 --> 00:34:40,559
time they don't know how long things are going to take,

683
00:34:40,760 --> 00:34:43,320
they basically wound down. So we're not going to see

684
00:34:43,360 --> 00:34:46,199
the impact of rollbacks on renewables for a few years,

685
00:34:46,280 --> 00:34:50,360
possibly not until the end of this administration. So it's

686
00:34:50,400 --> 00:34:52,199
going to be confusing for folks because they say, hey,

687
00:34:52,239 --> 00:34:54,079
we cut all these things, but yet it's still going,

688
00:34:54,119 --> 00:34:57,000
and it's just because people pre bought lots of investments

689
00:34:57,000 --> 00:34:59,840
already in place. Businesses aren't perfectly elastic. They can't respond

690
00:34:59,840 --> 00:35:03,679
to regulatory changes that quickly, but later there will be

691
00:35:03,760 --> 00:35:07,880
impacts in growth. Just doesn't happened yet. All right back

692
00:35:07,920 --> 00:35:10,039
in twenty two on that geek out, I mentioned the

693
00:35:10,039 --> 00:35:12,719
thing called Project Nexus. This was so idea of putting

694
00:35:12,719 --> 00:35:16,599
solar panels over top of agricultural canals in California. Thought

695
00:35:16,679 --> 00:35:20,079
it was a brilliant idea, the idea being brilliant. Yeah,

696
00:35:21,840 --> 00:35:23,360
this was done in India first, So it is the

697
00:35:23,400 --> 00:35:25,599
idea of these are not normal water waste. The you're

698
00:35:25,639 --> 00:35:28,320
man made water waste for distributing water for agriculture, and

699
00:35:28,360 --> 00:35:30,079
they have a problem with algal growth and they have

700
00:35:30,079 --> 00:35:33,039
a problem with evaporation and otherwise can't build stuff on there,

701
00:35:33,079 --> 00:35:35,639
So why not build solar panels over top of them.

702
00:35:35,920 --> 00:35:37,880
The water keeps the panels cooler, so they run more

703
00:35:37,920 --> 00:35:41,440
efficiently and they last longer. You decrease the water losses,

704
00:35:41,480 --> 00:35:44,440
you battle algae growth and other problems, so it's kind

705
00:35:44,480 --> 00:35:47,679
of a win wind deal. Well, that project actually happened,

706
00:35:48,079 --> 00:35:51,840
no kidding. Yeah, in August, it's twenty five. They finished it.

707
00:35:51,199 --> 00:35:54,519
It's generating one point six megawatts of electricity, so it's

708
00:35:54,519 --> 00:35:57,719
not a huge thing. There's many more that could be built,

709
00:35:57,920 --> 00:36:01,719
but they've done it. It took three years. Now there's a

710
00:36:01,760 --> 00:36:05,320
big reconciliation of is this worthwhile because it is more

711
00:36:05,360 --> 00:36:08,440
complex to install over a waterway. You're not always pointing

712
00:36:08,440 --> 00:36:11,800
the solar panels at their optimal angles, so in general

713
00:36:11,840 --> 00:36:16,159
it's more costly to conventional solar installation. So it's going

714
00:36:16,159 --> 00:36:18,400
to take a few years to really understand the other

715
00:36:18,480 --> 00:36:22,519
benefits of long term utilization. They're harder to clean because

716
00:36:22,559 --> 00:36:25,760
they're up higher and over a waterway, like. There's a

717
00:36:25,840 --> 00:36:28,920
bunch of problems there, so it's a question of how

718
00:36:29,000 --> 00:36:31,039
much more is going to happen. Same to go with

719
00:36:31,079 --> 00:36:33,960
what they call floato voltaics. There's been so many papers

720
00:36:34,000 --> 00:36:37,199
about this idea of just put solar panels on reservoirs, again,

721
00:36:37,320 --> 00:36:40,679
man made bodies of water, typically because of dams. They're

722
00:36:40,800 --> 00:36:43,800
nice and flat. There's not much going on there. You

723
00:36:43,840 --> 00:36:46,920
already have electrical wiring, so just checking the put solar

724
00:36:46,920 --> 00:36:49,039
panels on it. Yeah. Good. There's been a few projects,

725
00:36:49,039 --> 00:36:51,119
but not very many, so everybody likes it. It's a

726
00:36:51,159 --> 00:36:52,639
good idea, but it hasn't happened much, and I think

727
00:36:52,679 --> 00:36:55,199
part of the reason is that most of the panel

728
00:36:55,239 --> 00:36:57,480
solar panels that are available day are being installed in

729
00:36:57,480 --> 00:37:01,280
commercial panel deployments on the ground that lowest costs and

730
00:37:01,360 --> 00:37:04,280
the most benefit and so people don't need to innovate

731
00:37:04,280 --> 00:37:07,159
in this area yet, same for the canals. Right, it's

732
00:37:07,159 --> 00:37:08,679
just a question of is it even necessary. We're not

733
00:37:08,679 --> 00:37:11,239
struggling for land for all these things. And when you're

734
00:37:11,280 --> 00:37:14,079
throwing the regulatory problems or even getting stuff connected to

735
00:37:14,119 --> 00:37:16,599
the grid, they're like, Okay, we don't need a bottle

736
00:37:16,599 --> 00:37:18,360
and more complicated stuff. Will just stick with the simple.

737
00:37:18,440 --> 00:37:21,360
Speaker 1: Yeah, it is more complicated and it requires more infrastructure

738
00:37:21,360 --> 00:37:21,840
and all that.

739
00:37:22,519 --> 00:37:26,840
Speaker 2: Now, one area of innovation in solar that is seeming

740
00:37:27,000 --> 00:37:30,039
to grow because it's not that complicated is this area

741
00:37:30,159 --> 00:37:36,480
called agro voltaics. So this is combining farming and solar panels.

742
00:37:36,920 --> 00:37:39,320
So this year in September in the Philippines, they opened

743
00:37:39,320 --> 00:37:42,920
the City Corps Solar Petangus one. This is two hundred

744
00:37:43,119 --> 00:37:46,599
megawatts of solar with a three hundred and twenty megawatt

745
00:37:46,639 --> 00:37:50,000
hour battery storage system. So it's considered base low power.

746
00:37:50,039 --> 00:37:51,320
It can run round the clock.

747
00:37:51,719 --> 00:37:51,960
Speaker 1: Wow.

748
00:37:52,000 --> 00:37:54,880
Speaker 2: But they built them tall enough that there's rooms to

749
00:37:54,920 --> 00:37:58,599
grow crops underneath the solar panels. Now, the crops haven't

750
00:37:58,639 --> 00:38:00,440
been the priority, but they built them that way because

751
00:38:00,440 --> 00:38:04,440
it is good land for farming, and now you're talking

752
00:38:04,440 --> 00:38:07,360
about crops that need some shade that make more sense

753
00:38:07,360 --> 00:38:09,119
to be growing in the under those conditions.

754
00:38:09,159 --> 00:38:11,199
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's kind of say, I mean, don't crops usually

755
00:38:11,639 --> 00:38:14,679
thrive in sunlight but some need shade.

756
00:38:14,679 --> 00:38:16,880
Speaker 2: Well, the problem is with climate change going on, there's

757
00:38:16,880 --> 00:38:18,960
almost too much sun in a lot of places, so

758
00:38:19,280 --> 00:38:22,360
we have different crops that benefit from shade, and so

759
00:38:22,599 --> 00:38:25,360
it is possible to optimize crops in those conditions. So

760
00:38:25,400 --> 00:38:27,719
you're making power as well as providing shade for other

761
00:38:27,760 --> 00:38:31,559
crops and utilizing the land twice. They're not the only project.

762
00:38:31,639 --> 00:38:35,599
China's now built one a two gigawat project just absolutely

763
00:38:35,639 --> 00:38:37,920
massive out in inner Mongolia, and they're using it for

764
00:38:38,039 --> 00:38:42,280
deed deservocation. So where they have problems with too much

765
00:38:42,320 --> 00:38:45,280
moisture loss and you're trying to grow cover crops just

766
00:38:45,320 --> 00:38:48,280
to keep the sand from encroaching, they're putting solar panels

767
00:38:48,320 --> 00:38:50,400
so the show keeps the water in place, it helps

768
00:38:50,440 --> 00:38:53,519
protect the plants. They're calling it eco voltaics now, where

769
00:38:53,519 --> 00:38:56,199
they think they can start pushing back the desert while

770
00:38:56,239 --> 00:38:59,159
making solar power and starting to turn that land into

771
00:38:59,159 --> 00:38:59,760
something viable.

772
00:39:00,079 --> 00:39:03,360
Speaker 1: Can go further Richard, we under the crops, let's put

773
00:39:03,400 --> 00:39:08,679
fish farms, so the fish poop, you know, the nitrogen

774
00:39:08,719 --> 00:39:12,239
from the fish poop fertilizes the crops. And now you've

775
00:39:12,239 --> 00:39:14,440
got you know, three things going on.

776
00:39:14,719 --> 00:39:16,079
Speaker 2: Yep, you know you're not wrong.

777
00:39:16,159 --> 00:39:19,039
Speaker 1: I mean, that's a thing more ecosysm, that's a thing already.

778
00:39:19,239 --> 00:39:23,599
Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, we certainly used aquaponics in combination of other

779
00:39:23,599 --> 00:39:28,840
farming because it does create useful water, that is that

780
00:39:28,920 --> 00:39:31,719
has fertilizer in it. Already, I thought the US is

781
00:39:32,199 --> 00:39:34,519
doing this in Colorado. They have one hundred and fifty

782
00:39:34,519 --> 00:39:38,599
megawatt solar farm now again stood on a higher posts,

783
00:39:38,599 --> 00:39:41,079
so they can grow prairie grasses underneath that. We'll be

784
00:39:41,199 --> 00:39:45,039
using sheep to graze that grass to keep it under control.

785
00:39:45,159 --> 00:39:45,440
Speaker 1: Nice.

786
00:39:45,639 --> 00:39:48,119
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's that's beautiful. I love to hear stuff like that.

787
00:39:48,159 --> 00:39:49,639
Should we take a break and then we'll talk about

788
00:39:49,639 --> 00:39:50,119
wind power.

789
00:39:50,159 --> 00:39:53,239
Speaker 1: That sounds good. Okay, We'll be right back after this

790
00:39:53,280 --> 00:39:59,199
break for more wind break wind. You're funny. Did you

791
00:39:59,320 --> 00:40:02,159
know you can lift and shift your dot Net framework

792
00:40:02,239 --> 00:40:06,239
apps to virtual machines in the cloud. Use the elastic

793
00:40:06,320 --> 00:40:10,840
beanstalk service to easily migrate to Amazon ec two with

794
00:40:11,000 --> 00:40:15,119
little or no changes. Find out more at aws dot

795
00:40:15,199 --> 00:40:24,599
Amazon dot com, slash elasticbeanstock, and we're back. It's the

796
00:40:24,760 --> 00:40:28,079
Energy Geek out of twenty twenty five. Mister Campbell has

797
00:40:28,119 --> 00:40:30,480
done his research. He's got his cup of tea, probably

798
00:40:30,480 --> 00:40:33,639
got a kettle of tea on there, and we're going

799
00:40:33,679 --> 00:40:34,679
to talk about wind.

800
00:40:34,679 --> 00:40:39,159
Speaker 2: All right, So about the data is only up to

801
00:40:39,239 --> 00:40:41,039
date as the first half of twenty twenty five. There's

802
00:40:41,039 --> 00:40:44,559
about seventy two gigawatts worldwide added in wind power, up

803
00:40:44,599 --> 00:40:47,440
sixty five percent for twenty twenty four, so definitely expanding.

804
00:40:48,119 --> 00:40:51,119
Expecting one hundred and fifty gigs of new wind online

805
00:40:51,159 --> 00:40:55,239
in twenty twenty five for a total capacity of about

806
00:40:55,239 --> 00:40:59,320
one point three tarawatts of wind worldwide. China course is

807
00:40:59,360 --> 00:41:02,039
the largest deployer, both on and offshore. They did fifty

808
00:41:02,079 --> 00:41:04,639
gigawatts in twenty twenty five and they expected to have

809
00:41:04,679 --> 00:41:08,159
seven hundred gigawats total, so that is, you know, almost

810
00:41:08,199 --> 00:41:11,239
half of all wind capacity in the world now being

811
00:41:11,280 --> 00:41:15,039
built built for China. US is number two a one

812
00:41:15,119 --> 00:41:18,519
hundred and fifty gigawatts, but almost no new installations coming

813
00:41:18,519 --> 00:41:19,599
in on or offshore.

814
00:41:19,719 --> 00:41:22,800
Speaker 1: So you remember I told you we talked about this

815
00:41:22,920 --> 00:41:25,760
last year that in New London at the State Pier

816
00:41:26,719 --> 00:41:30,599
they're doing this Revolution Wind project, which is a seven

817
00:41:30,679 --> 00:41:34,719
hundred and four megawatt project. It's being stage at the

818
00:41:34,800 --> 00:41:41,079
State Pier. Project is eighty five percent completed. About three

819
00:41:41,119 --> 00:41:44,159
months ago, Trump put the kaibash on it and said

820
00:41:44,199 --> 00:41:48,159
we're not funding this anymore. And then he was ordered

821
00:41:48,199 --> 00:41:52,119
to refund it, and so it got refunded. People went

822
00:41:52,159 --> 00:41:55,079
back to work, and just three days ago after this,

823
00:41:56,719 --> 00:42:01,800
you know, as of this recording, anyway, they halted it again. Well, boy,

824
00:42:01,960 --> 00:42:05,840
it's pausing leases for five large scale offshore wind projects

825
00:42:06,320 --> 00:42:09,800
under construction on the East Coast due to unspecified national

826
00:42:09,840 --> 00:42:15,760
security risks identified by the Pentagon. Pauses effective immediately, and

827
00:42:15,800 --> 00:42:19,800
we'll give the Interior Department, which oversees offshore wind, time

828
00:42:19,880 --> 00:42:22,199
to work with the Defense Department and other agencies to

829
00:42:22,280 --> 00:42:26,119
assess the possible ways to mitigate any security risks. Anyway,

830
00:42:26,519 --> 00:42:29,719
I'm going to share this link with Richard and he

831
00:42:29,840 --> 00:42:33,280
will put it on the page. It's from the Connecticut Mirror.

832
00:42:33,519 --> 00:42:36,760
But you know, it's just it's hard when you have

833
00:42:36,800 --> 00:42:41,360
an administration that just doesn't want any kind of renewable

834
00:42:41,480 --> 00:42:44,800
energy projects. To continue and that's really what it's all about.

835
00:42:44,920 --> 00:42:47,199
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, no science on the basis of that. Now

836
00:42:47,719 --> 00:42:49,679
that being said, there has been you know, there are

837
00:42:49,719 --> 00:42:53,519
complaints about the noise from wind farms and there has

838
00:42:53,559 --> 00:42:56,199
been some innovation there. So they're doing the same sort

839
00:42:56,239 --> 00:42:58,519
of thing that the airline industry's done. So they're doing

840
00:42:58,559 --> 00:43:01,199
things like serrations on the trailing edge trying to reduce

841
00:43:01,440 --> 00:43:06,119
noise impact. There is a big effort to try and

842
00:43:06,519 --> 00:43:08,800
what's happening in Europe, which really led a lot of

843
00:43:08,800 --> 00:43:11,679
the wind technology, is the oldest wind turbines are now

844
00:43:11,679 --> 00:43:16,159
aging out and they're finding out they're not recyclable. Well,

845
00:43:16,320 --> 00:43:20,920
I mean, honestly, the vast majority is recyclable, the turbides itself,

846
00:43:21,519 --> 00:43:25,719
even the concrete can be reprocessed. It's the blades. The

847
00:43:25,719 --> 00:43:29,639
blades are made of fiberglass, carver fiber. They're almost impossible

848
00:43:29,639 --> 00:43:33,800
to recycle and so that's been a big fuss. They

849
00:43:33,880 --> 00:43:40,239
are now making new styles of blades specifically for more recyclabilities,

850
00:43:40,280 --> 00:43:42,719
but that will take twenty years to play out because

851
00:43:42,519 --> 00:43:47,679
these turbines typically last twenty to thirty years. Interesting AI

852
00:43:47,800 --> 00:43:52,440
technologies has started to play a role in or at

853
00:43:52,519 --> 00:43:56,360
least machine learning technology in wind turbine are wind site

854
00:43:56,400 --> 00:43:59,800
development where they're using machine learning models to figure out

855
00:43:59,840 --> 00:44:03,719
alltimal layouts and they're sometimes finding ten to fifteen percent

856
00:44:03,760 --> 00:44:07,719
performance increases for the turbine sets by using these complex

857
00:44:07,800 --> 00:44:10,320
models to be able to locate them so that they

858
00:44:10,360 --> 00:44:13,440
have more wind from with the combined turbines over longer

859
00:44:13,440 --> 00:44:17,000
periods of the time. On shores sort of gone as

860
00:44:17,000 --> 00:44:18,519
far as it can. We kind of know what we're

861
00:44:18,559 --> 00:44:21,079
doing there. It works very well where you kind good sites,

862
00:44:21,119 --> 00:44:24,000
you lay them out, you need steady wind and tall posts.

863
00:44:24,000 --> 00:44:26,400
They can't get a whole lot bigger. The real development

864
00:44:26,440 --> 00:44:28,400
area is an offshore wind, and offshore wind kind of

865
00:44:28,400 --> 00:44:31,239
comes in two categories. You have what they call fixed

866
00:44:31,239 --> 00:44:33,400
based wind that's typically up to about fifty meters or

867
00:44:33,400 --> 00:44:36,119
one hundred and fifty feet of water where you literally

868
00:44:36,119 --> 00:44:38,280
put a casement down to the bottom. You drill a

869
00:44:38,280 --> 00:44:40,199
hole and you pour a bunch of concrete, you lay

870
00:44:40,199 --> 00:44:42,079
down the post. It's fixed on the bottom. Yeah, there's

871
00:44:42,119 --> 00:44:43,760
only so many places in the world where that water

872
00:44:43,840 --> 00:44:47,199
is a shallow like most of the North Sea and

873
00:44:47,239 --> 00:44:49,199
around Denmark, so where the ashallow like that's why they

874
00:44:49,239 --> 00:44:50,400
have a ton of it, but in a place like

875
00:44:50,440 --> 00:44:52,320
here in British Columbia where the water is very deep,

876
00:44:52,480 --> 00:44:54,880
you just can't do that. So now you get into

877
00:44:55,760 --> 00:45:01,360
floating based offshore, and we talked about this before difficult.

878
00:45:01,400 --> 00:45:03,960
This is using a lot. It is difficult and it's expensive,

879
00:45:04,280 --> 00:45:06,480
so you get away from the cost effectiveness. You know,

880
00:45:06,559 --> 00:45:10,400
this fixed base offshore, they're hitting the limits of size.

881
00:45:10,400 --> 00:45:13,280
They're somewhere between fifteen and twenty five megawats per unit.

882
00:45:13,320 --> 00:45:15,400
They're talking about some fifty megawats. But now you're getting

883
00:45:15,400 --> 00:45:17,760
into the physics problem. They're just so heavy and so large.

884
00:45:17,800 --> 00:45:21,039
You can only be so big with floating. There's still

885
00:45:21,079 --> 00:45:23,480
only really five sites that are being tested, and just

886
00:45:23,480 --> 00:45:25,519
with a handful of turbines. There's a couple of sites

887
00:45:25,519 --> 00:45:27,840
in the UK with five turbines each. Portugal has one

888
00:45:27,880 --> 00:45:30,000
with three, No way as one with eleven. France that's

889
00:45:30,039 --> 00:45:33,199
one with three. But that's about it. They're using oil

890
00:45:33,239 --> 00:45:36,880
industry platform technology to build these floating platforms to put

891
00:45:36,880 --> 00:45:39,840
wind turbines on, and they just have not scaled up

892
00:45:39,880 --> 00:45:42,840
because it's so costly. So they're still a debate whether

893
00:45:42,880 --> 00:45:45,639
it's necessary or when they're going to even go down

894
00:45:45,679 --> 00:45:47,519
that path where there's still other areas to do less

895
00:45:47,519 --> 00:45:50,039
expensive forms. That's all I got for wind, But I

896
00:45:50,039 --> 00:45:52,880
actually have some stories for wave power because wavepower has

897
00:45:52,920 --> 00:45:55,519
always been the you know, red headed step child, never

898
00:45:55,599 --> 00:45:57,559
really worked kind of limited.

899
00:45:57,800 --> 00:46:00,280
Speaker 1: Yeah, from what I remember, it's kind of dirty, right.

900
00:46:00,320 --> 00:46:04,280
You have these turbines that are underwater that are capturing

901
00:46:04,480 --> 00:46:08,440
you know, tidal currents and things and stuff gets stuck

902
00:46:08,440 --> 00:46:10,360
in there. You know, turbine is a fan.

903
00:46:10,679 --> 00:46:13,000
Speaker 2: Yeah, and the ocean tends to destroy them.

904
00:46:13,079 --> 00:46:14,599
Speaker 1: Yeah, if it's one thing, if it's in the air,

905
00:46:14,599 --> 00:46:17,760
but if it's underwater exactly, corrosion and stuff.

906
00:46:17,840 --> 00:46:19,480
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a tough time. And so really that's not

907
00:46:19,559 --> 00:46:21,320
been the area development and instead they're looking at more

908
00:46:21,320 --> 00:46:25,320
pumping technologies, so sitting more on the surface. Now. Last

909
00:46:25,360 --> 00:46:28,079
year I talked about the Packwave Energy Project. So this

910
00:46:28,239 --> 00:46:31,039
is a laboratory site largely off the coast of Oregon.

911
00:46:32,039 --> 00:46:36,840
Oregon and Washington State have ideal conditions for wave power

912
00:46:36,880 --> 00:46:40,960
technologies rather than tidle technologies. Wave power and so off

913
00:46:40,960 --> 00:46:44,079
the coast of Oregon, because Oregon has more development on

914
00:46:44,119 --> 00:46:47,159
the coast than Washington does. Washington's conditions are so rough.

915
00:46:47,159 --> 00:46:49,840
There's very little over there. They built these two sides,

916
00:46:49,840 --> 00:46:52,760
Packwave North and Packway South. North was purely for testing

917
00:46:53,079 --> 00:46:56,840
and South we talked about this last year. They were

918
00:46:56,840 --> 00:46:58,679
building up, putting in all the wiring and so forth

919
00:46:58,719 --> 00:47:02,519
for four big tests berths, so that different companies could

920
00:47:02,559 --> 00:47:04,679
test up to five power collectors in each of the

921
00:47:04,679 --> 00:47:06,920
burths with all the wiring and telemetry already put in place.

922
00:47:07,280 --> 00:47:10,159
And there were candidates to be put out there. One

923
00:47:10,159 --> 00:47:13,400
of them was a company called Aqua Harmonics, which had

924
00:47:13,679 --> 00:47:16,360
back in twenty sixteen won a Department of Energy prize

925
00:47:16,760 --> 00:47:20,559
for their innovative boys. These are floating boys anchored to

926
00:47:20,599 --> 00:47:23,400
the bottom but under tensions, and so the wave action

927
00:47:23,639 --> 00:47:25,880
forces the boy to go up and down, and that

928
00:47:25,960 --> 00:47:29,039
actually runs a small electric generator that then is wired

929
00:47:29,079 --> 00:47:33,760
back to shortage general electricity. The cutting of funding for

930
00:47:34,039 --> 00:47:37,480
renewable energy projects by the administration has put that project

931
00:47:37,559 --> 00:47:41,320
entirely on holds. It's not much happening a pack packwave

932
00:47:41,360 --> 00:47:45,320
Styuth this time. But there's another company, an Israeli company

933
00:47:45,320 --> 00:47:47,559
called Eco Wave Power, and they do what's called on

934
00:47:47,880 --> 00:47:50,760
shore wave power. Now, wait a second, how the heck

935
00:47:50,840 --> 00:47:52,280
is that supposed to work?

936
00:47:52,440 --> 00:47:52,960
Speaker 1: Yeah, right.

937
00:47:53,039 --> 00:47:57,559
Speaker 2: So what this is is floats that can move anchored

938
00:47:57,559 --> 00:47:59,920
to a war for a breakwater. So as the waves

939
00:48:00,079 --> 00:48:02,360
come up to that breakwater or wharf, they push them

940
00:48:02,440 --> 00:48:06,159
up and down and they're connected to hydraulic fluid arms

941
00:48:06,400 --> 00:48:08,639
and that builds up pressure and that pressure then turns

942
00:48:08,639 --> 00:48:12,719
a generator. Now, Eco Wave Powers had a site in

943
00:48:12,840 --> 00:48:17,599
Gibraltar in the Mediterranean from twenty sixteen until twenty twenty two.

944
00:48:17,719 --> 00:48:19,760
It was off of an old World War two AMMO

945
00:48:19,840 --> 00:48:23,400
jetty and they learned a lot from there, but ultimately

946
00:48:23,440 --> 00:48:25,679
they decided to shut that down and move that a

947
00:48:25,719 --> 00:48:29,480
bunch of that tech to Los Angeles. So in Los Angeles,

948
00:48:29,519 --> 00:48:32,239
on a wharf near the Catalina Ferry, there is seven

949
00:48:32,320 --> 00:48:35,840
of these blue floats. They're quite large, connected to this

950
00:48:35,920 --> 00:48:38,719
wharf and they generate up to one hundred kilowats of electricity,

951
00:48:39,840 --> 00:48:42,880
and the LA District wants to expand that onto all

952
00:48:42,920 --> 00:48:45,280
the big breakwaters about eight miles worth a breakwater, think

953
00:48:45,400 --> 00:48:47,840
like sixty megawatts of power. And that same company has

954
00:48:47,880 --> 00:48:51,719
also got a pilot project now in Porto, Portugal where

955
00:48:51,719 --> 00:48:54,039
the initial build they just broke around this year will

956
00:48:54,079 --> 00:48:56,480
be a megalot with the intent to boot up to

957
00:48:56,559 --> 00:48:59,480
nineteen more. I get along the big breakwaters in Porto. Porto,

958
00:48:59,519 --> 00:49:01,719
you know, on the eastern side of the Atlantic, takes

959
00:49:01,760 --> 00:49:04,119
some pretty serious waves. So we'll see if those actually work.

960
00:49:04,199 --> 00:49:06,639
So there is some development a way of power. It's

961
00:49:06,719 --> 00:49:10,119
minuscule compared to the other techs, but there is some development.

962
00:49:10,119 --> 00:49:12,840
You love us Porta, Okay, I love that place. Porna

963
00:49:12,880 --> 00:49:14,960
is such a great man. Let's talk about power storage.

964
00:49:15,000 --> 00:49:18,760
This is the most question category Materius. Carlson sent me

965
00:49:18,760 --> 00:49:21,679
some questions. Dan Owen asked about solid state batteries, Martin

966
00:49:21,719 --> 00:49:24,840
asked about sodium batteries. Lots of questions, but let me

967
00:49:24,880 --> 00:49:27,960
begin with the most important power storage, the number one

968
00:49:27,960 --> 00:49:31,440
power storage strategy that we have so far, which is

969
00:49:31,559 --> 00:49:35,599
pumped hydro. I mentioned this back in twenty two with

970
00:49:35,679 --> 00:49:38,639
the Australian National University paper where they provided an atlas.

971
00:49:38,639 --> 00:49:40,960
They mapped out the world showing all these locations in

972
00:49:41,039 --> 00:49:43,440
the world where it may not be a good hydro

973
00:49:43,480 --> 00:49:47,000
electric location per se, but it is a high elevation

974
00:49:47,480 --> 00:49:50,599
with water available below, where you could put a reservoir above,

975
00:49:50,639 --> 00:49:53,039
pump water uphill and then run it down there. About

976
00:49:53,079 --> 00:49:56,599
eighty five percent conversion efficient. They last one hundred years.

977
00:49:56,639 --> 00:49:58,199
It's really well known technology.

978
00:49:58,199 --> 00:50:00,840
Speaker 1: So you basically use the power that's generator from the

979
00:50:00,880 --> 00:50:03,960
water flowing down to power a pump that pumps it

980
00:50:04,039 --> 00:50:05,400
back up to the reservoir.

981
00:50:05,599 --> 00:50:07,119
Speaker 2: Is that what you're saying now? That I mean that

982
00:50:07,159 --> 00:50:10,039
won't net out. What it is is you have excess power, right,

983
00:50:10,119 --> 00:50:12,159
Pump hydro is about I have too much shoulder, I

984
00:50:12,159 --> 00:50:14,920
have too much wind, so I use it to pump

985
00:50:14,960 --> 00:50:18,320
water uphill to store in a reservoir like a battery.

986
00:50:18,360 --> 00:50:18,880
Speaker 1: I see.

987
00:50:19,000 --> 00:50:22,639
Speaker 2: So today there are eighty seven pumped hydro sites facility

988
00:50:22,760 --> 00:50:26,119
over a gigawat of storage on the planet right like

989
00:50:26,199 --> 00:50:28,239
this is not They've been around for a while. There's

990
00:50:28,280 --> 00:50:31,400
lots of small ones, but there are eighty seven gigawap

991
00:50:31,400 --> 00:50:33,880
plus ones now wow, forty of those are in China.

992
00:50:35,320 --> 00:50:37,800
Japan again, a very mountainous country, has fourteen o and

993
00:50:37,840 --> 00:50:42,639
the US has ten. China has plans for another hundred.

994
00:50:43,199 --> 00:50:45,559
So they're taking advantage of the terrain and again just

995
00:50:45,719 --> 00:50:49,400
the easy regulatory regime mean they can move very quickly.

996
00:50:50,079 --> 00:50:55,119
That the advantage of pumped hydro is it's completely known technology.

997
00:50:55,119 --> 00:50:56,559
Those turbine has been around for a long time. The

998
00:50:56,599 --> 00:50:58,159
pump's been around for a long time. We know how

999
00:50:58,159 --> 00:51:01,280
to drill through rock, we know how to reservoirs. It's

1000
00:51:01,360 --> 00:51:05,000
all known tech right, like, and they last. You know,

1001
00:51:05,079 --> 00:51:08,320
we expect hydroelectric dams to last one hundred plus years. Like,

1002
00:51:08,320 --> 00:51:12,559
they're the longest lasting power techs we have. So let's

1003
00:51:12,599 --> 00:51:14,239
go back to the numbers for a second. You said

1004
00:51:14,280 --> 00:51:17,280
there's an eighty five percent conversion rate. Yeah, what does

1005
00:51:17,280 --> 00:51:19,440
that mean exactly? Can you break that down into English?

1006
00:51:19,559 --> 00:51:21,280
Speaker 1: So if I pump one hundred, if I spend one

1007
00:51:21,320 --> 00:51:24,679
hundred megawats pumping water uphill, I can expect eighty five

1008
00:51:24,719 --> 00:51:25,880
megawats back when I let.

1009
00:51:25,840 --> 00:51:29,559
Speaker 2: It flow back downhill. Okay, right, So they're losses, but

1010
00:51:29,599 --> 00:51:34,239
they're not huge losses. It's efficient enough and the water

1011
00:51:34,360 --> 00:51:38,119
storage itself doesn't leak very very badly. Right, you have

1012
00:51:38,159 --> 00:51:39,760
some ev operation so forth. This is when you get

1013
00:51:39,760 --> 00:51:41,320
into put more solar panels on like this.

1014
00:51:41,360 --> 00:51:43,960
Speaker 1: And as long as you have water yeah and height, yes,

1015
00:51:44,079 --> 00:51:44,880
you can make it work.

1016
00:51:45,000 --> 00:51:48,039
Speaker 2: Yeah. And generally we've been you know, our original water

1017
00:51:48,159 --> 00:51:52,199
management projects, we're for managing flooding. Right. A lot of

1018
00:51:52,280 --> 00:51:55,000
dams were built to stop seasonal flooding, right, and then

1019
00:51:55,079 --> 00:51:56,960
we also learned to make electricity from it, so we

1020
00:51:57,079 --> 00:52:00,079
ran them a little differently, and now we're learning to

1021
00:52:00,360 --> 00:52:02,840
store with them as well, and to build multiple tiers. Right.

1022
00:52:02,840 --> 00:52:06,519
And there's locations in Norway where a given water flow

1023
00:52:06,719 --> 00:52:09,239
has like four different dams on it, four different restores

1024
00:52:09,239 --> 00:52:10,559
on it. So they try and get as much power

1025
00:52:10,599 --> 00:52:16,360
as possible. And the dynamic between place like Denmark and Norway.

1026
00:52:16,840 --> 00:52:19,880
Denmark's got a ton of hydro electric power, Denmark's got

1027
00:52:19,880 --> 00:52:22,000
a ton of wind power, so they put a connection

1028
00:52:22,079 --> 00:52:23,800
between the two, and the Danes are making too much

1029
00:52:23,840 --> 00:52:26,880
electricity from wind power, which happens they send that excess

1030
00:52:26,880 --> 00:52:29,880
electricity in Norway. Norway shuts down their dam, their damn

1031
00:52:29,880 --> 00:52:32,400
power generation and uses the wind power. And when the

1032
00:52:32,440 --> 00:52:36,679
wind power slacks off, they crank up the dams and

1033
00:52:36,760 --> 00:52:39,079
let the power flow down to Denmark to supply the difference.

1034
00:52:39,119 --> 00:52:41,519
And when they're really making too much power, they're actually

1035
00:52:41,559 --> 00:52:44,000
pumping water back up hills. They not only providing power

1036
00:52:44,039 --> 00:52:47,239
in Norway and Denmark with wind, but also increasing storage

1037
00:52:47,360 --> 00:52:48,519
on their existing dam system.

1038
00:52:48,559 --> 00:52:50,239
Speaker 1: You know, I know they watched Sesame Street when they

1039
00:52:50,239 --> 00:52:52,840
were kids because cooperation was a big deal for that.

1040
00:52:54,119 --> 00:52:55,320
It's kind of important.

1041
00:52:55,840 --> 00:52:59,159
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, you know, some of a lot of power

1042
00:52:59,199 --> 00:53:02,239
generation has to do with geography. What have you got,

1043
00:53:02,760 --> 00:53:05,000
you know, do you have mountains with water on the top, okay,

1044
00:53:05,079 --> 00:53:07,039
hydro electric you know, not a lot of places to

1045
00:53:07,079 --> 00:53:08,800
light them, but some of them are. You've got a

1046
00:53:08,800 --> 00:53:11,800
lot of shallow water with good windflow Okay, you know,

1047
00:53:11,880 --> 00:53:15,920
offshore fixed based wind awesome, right, and on and on

1048
00:53:15,960 --> 00:53:17,599
and on. Let's face it, most of the places that

1049
00:53:17,679 --> 00:53:19,960
burn coal or do it because they have coal. A

1050
00:53:19,960 --> 00:53:21,880
lot of places that burn natural gas do it because

1051
00:53:21,920 --> 00:53:24,199
they have natural gas. Like, there's only so many different

1052
00:53:24,199 --> 00:53:27,039
power sources that are available. And if you've got a

1053
00:53:27,079 --> 00:53:29,079
lot of sunline, fine solar has some merit to it.

1054
00:53:29,119 --> 00:53:31,000
Like if you have to mix and match these things,

1055
00:53:31,039 --> 00:53:35,360
and depends on the regions. But where those regions can

1056
00:53:35,400 --> 00:53:38,400
colloberate so they can offset each other, everybody benefits.

1057
00:53:38,559 --> 00:53:38,840
Speaker 1: Yep.

1058
00:53:38,920 --> 00:53:41,880
Speaker 2: Okay, let's move onto the other sides of storage, and

1059
00:53:41,960 --> 00:53:44,440
of course we need to focus on batteries to some degree.

1060
00:53:44,679 --> 00:53:47,639
So twenty twenty five is a breakthrough year, the year

1061
00:53:47,760 --> 00:53:50,599
that lithium ion battery packs fall below one hundred dollars

1062
00:53:50,639 --> 00:53:55,079
per kilo wat hour. So today, at scale an LFP battery,

1063
00:53:55,079 --> 00:53:59,880
a lithium ferris phosphate pheraophosphate, these are the eighty bucks

1064
00:54:00,159 --> 00:54:03,960
a kilowat ho Wow. In twenty ten, fifteen years ago,

1065
00:54:04,079 --> 00:54:07,480
that was fifteen hundred dollars. Like, the impact of this

1066
00:54:07,760 --> 00:54:09,320
is hard to get your head around.

1067
00:54:09,719 --> 00:54:13,599
Speaker 1: Is that mostly because of demand from car manufacturers and

1068
00:54:13,639 --> 00:54:18,199
things like that in phone manufacturers or was it in

1069
00:54:18,480 --> 00:54:20,920
uptick and supply that came before demand.

1070
00:54:21,039 --> 00:54:24,519
Speaker 2: It's mostly demand, and demand has caused manufacturing to scale

1071
00:54:24,559 --> 00:54:26,920
the same way that solar prices were driven down by

1072
00:54:27,039 --> 00:54:30,199
China scaling up their production to meet demand. This is

1073
00:54:30,239 --> 00:54:32,440
a price warring China over battery. So the point where

1074
00:54:32,440 --> 00:54:34,559
Sherman g is actually telling the companies you need to

1075
00:54:34,599 --> 00:54:36,920
cool it because they're hurting each other and trying to

1076
00:54:36,920 --> 00:54:39,360
get the prices down as fast as possible. Wow, And

1077
00:54:40,039 --> 00:54:43,840
they're just manufacturing at scale with very little control and

1078
00:54:43,920 --> 00:54:48,239
making very very cheap batteries to the point where it's

1079
00:54:48,320 --> 00:54:50,920
just now it's pretty much the rule in Australia if

1080
00:54:50,960 --> 00:54:52,199
you're going to put a solar panel on a roof,

1081
00:54:52,239 --> 00:54:53,599
you have to put a battery in the good news

1082
00:54:53,639 --> 00:54:56,320
is the battery's just not that expensive anymore. Prices have

1083
00:54:56,360 --> 00:55:00,280
come down a lot. You know, you want twenty yellow

1084
00:55:00,320 --> 00:55:03,639
lot hours in your house, Well that today is two

1085
00:55:03,760 --> 00:55:07,440
or three thousand dollars, right Like, that's now not that

1086
00:55:07,519 --> 00:55:09,280
much more than It's all on the line of the

1087
00:55:09,320 --> 00:55:12,199
solar prices. So we're getting down to very economical prices.

1088
00:55:12,239 --> 00:55:13,239
It's going to take a while for it to go

1089
00:55:13,239 --> 00:55:13,800
through the pipeline.

1090
00:55:13,800 --> 00:55:16,920
Speaker 1: I thought those Tesla batteries were still really expensive, though.

1091
00:55:16,760 --> 00:55:19,519
Speaker 2: They are, but they need their prices need to fall

1092
00:55:19,599 --> 00:55:23,599
and their competitors are coming at them. And again, these

1093
00:55:23,639 --> 00:55:25,800
batteries only hit this price of this year. It's going

1094
00:55:25,800 --> 00:55:26,960
to take a couple of years for you to see

1095
00:55:26,960 --> 00:55:29,559
them in the pipeline. Okay, but the reality is battery

1096
00:55:29,559 --> 00:55:30,840
prices are tanking.

1097
00:55:31,079 --> 00:55:34,519
Speaker 1: Is there enough natural resource lithium in all of those

1098
00:55:34,559 --> 00:55:38,480
things that make those to sustain this kind of growth.

1099
00:55:38,519 --> 00:55:42,039
Speaker 2: There is lots of lithium. What there isn't a lot

1100
00:55:42,079 --> 00:55:46,639
of is cheap lithium. So for many years, because we

1101
00:55:46,679 --> 00:55:49,320
don't use that much lithium, because the batteries tended to

1102
00:55:49,320 --> 00:55:53,320
be small, we were able to sustain the industry on

1103
00:55:53,360 --> 00:55:57,119
the back of some extremely cheap lithium. Lithium salts essentially

1104
00:55:57,199 --> 00:55:58,840
boiling out of the ground in places like the Atta

1105
00:55:58,920 --> 00:56:01,760
Kama Desert in Chili. So this is a place where

1106
00:56:01,880 --> 00:56:05,199
lithium phosphates are literally coming out of the ground. You

1107
00:56:05,239 --> 00:56:07,840
pump that water up, that briny water up, You put

1108
00:56:07,840 --> 00:56:11,119
it in big ponds, let it evaporate off, you scrape

1109
00:56:11,159 --> 00:56:13,679
it up, and you send it off to production. Wow,

1110
00:56:13,760 --> 00:56:16,480
there are other lithium stores. There are lithium in clay beds,

1111
00:56:16,480 --> 00:56:19,679
there are hard rock lithiums. They're just more expensive to extract.

1112
00:56:19,719 --> 00:56:24,960
Speaker 1: Are we taking lithium away from the psychology field where

1113
00:56:25,000 --> 00:56:28,000
it's prescribed as a medication.

1114
00:56:28,400 --> 00:56:32,119
Speaker 2: That's grams of lithium versus tons of lithium.

1115
00:56:32,480 --> 00:56:35,119
Speaker 1: I know that's just a stupid sit on it, Sorry,

1116
00:56:35,119 --> 00:56:36,119
but I would make the point.

1117
00:56:36,280 --> 00:56:39,599
Speaker 2: We got down to eighty dollars at kilowatt hour while

1118
00:56:39,840 --> 00:56:44,039
materials and manufacturing costs have been rising, right, Like, the

1119
00:56:44,079 --> 00:56:47,159
cost of making things is definitely up, the cost of

1120
00:56:47,199 --> 00:56:51,199
the ingredients is definitely up, and yet the prices have

1121
00:56:51,239 --> 00:56:54,920
still fallen. Now now we get into some of the

1122
00:56:54,920 --> 00:56:57,119
other battery technologies are being developed, and one of them

1123
00:56:57,239 --> 00:56:59,760
is a sodium battery. Now, sodium batteries have been around

1124
00:56:59,760 --> 00:57:04,599
for really long time. Sodium is a slightly heavier version

1125
00:57:04,639 --> 00:57:07,559
of lithium. They are both alkali metals. Sodium is even

1126
00:57:07,559 --> 00:57:09,639
more common than lithium by a large degree. That's the

1127
00:57:09,679 --> 00:57:14,159
stuff in salt, it's everywhere. The problem is it's been

1128
00:57:14,199 --> 00:57:18,000
difficult to manufacture. You can make it into a battery.

1129
00:57:18,320 --> 00:57:20,119
By its nature, you presume it would not be as

1130
00:57:20,119 --> 00:57:23,360
dense as a lithium battery. And then CATL came out

1131
00:57:23,360 --> 00:57:25,599
with this announcement this year. Now c ATL is a

1132
00:57:25,679 --> 00:57:29,159
Chinese company that's been making it makes lithium batteries for everybody,

1133
00:57:29,239 --> 00:57:31,320
like this is one of the big players. So kind

1134
00:57:31,360 --> 00:57:33,360
of it's like when Toyota says something like it kind

1135
00:57:33,360 --> 00:57:35,360
of had to take these guys seriously. They're one of

1136
00:57:35,400 --> 00:57:37,960
the biggest battery manufacturers in the world. And this is

1137
00:57:37,960 --> 00:57:41,320
what they said. Yeah, we know we got LFP batteries

1138
00:57:41,320 --> 00:57:43,079
down to eighty bucks a kilo one hour. We figured

1139
00:57:43,119 --> 00:57:46,239
out how to make sodium batteries for ten dollars a

1140
00:57:46,320 --> 00:57:50,320
kilo one hour. What it's crazy. And they announced a

1141
00:57:50,360 --> 00:57:56,000
battery called Naxtra. So Naxtra they say this is a

1142
00:57:56,000 --> 00:57:59,480
sodium based battery is a ten thousand cycle battery with

1143
00:57:59,559 --> 00:58:03,519
a large temperature into the lithium. Most lithium batteries LFP,

1144
00:58:03,800 --> 00:58:07,199
especially butt NMC as well. Three thousand cycles is normal.

1145
00:58:07,320 --> 00:58:08,880
Three thousand cycles is a lot. You got a three

1146
00:58:08,920 --> 00:58:11,239
thousand cycle battery. That means that's how many times you

1147
00:58:11,280 --> 00:58:14,000
can recharge it before it does discharge and recharge, right,

1148
00:58:14,039 --> 00:58:16,280
and then before it starts to really lose potential. Right.

1149
00:58:16,320 --> 00:58:17,920
And in a three thousand cycle batteries, this is what

1150
00:58:18,000 --> 00:58:20,039
you get in like a Tesla, right, which means that

1151
00:58:20,199 --> 00:58:22,960
after two hundred thousand miles of driving or so, your

1152
00:58:22,960 --> 00:58:25,599
battery is down ten to fifteen percent in capacity. Right's

1153
00:58:25,599 --> 00:58:28,239
a pretty good deal. They're talking about ten thousand cycle battery,

1154
00:58:28,280 --> 00:58:30,440
so now you're talking a million miles before you start

1155
00:58:30,480 --> 00:58:31,159
losing capacity.

1156
00:58:31,239 --> 00:58:32,239
Speaker 1: Wow, that's amazing.

1157
00:58:32,480 --> 00:58:35,800
Speaker 2: And because of the structure of sodium, it's more tolerant

1158
00:58:35,800 --> 00:58:38,599
to colder and higher temperatures. So one of the key

1159
00:58:38,800 --> 00:58:42,519
things to making lithium batteries successful in cars has been

1160
00:58:42,679 --> 00:58:46,920
the temperature management system. We pump fluid around these batteries

1161
00:58:47,159 --> 00:58:49,400
to keep them so they don't get too cold and

1162
00:58:49,440 --> 00:58:51,800
they don't get too warm. It's expensive. It's part of

1163
00:58:51,800 --> 00:58:54,119
what makes an electric car expensive, but it makes sure

1164
00:58:54,159 --> 00:58:55,280
those batteries last.

1165
00:58:55,480 --> 00:58:58,599
Speaker 1: Doesn't sodium nut like water, Well, lithium doesn't like water.

1166
00:58:58,760 --> 00:59:02,039
All alkali one metals do not like water. Right, Okay,

1167
00:59:02,239 --> 00:59:04,719
that's just a normal part of the problem. So sodium

1168
00:59:04,840 --> 00:59:07,239
is no more dangerous if it gets wet than lithium.

1169
00:59:07,280 --> 00:59:10,119
Speaker 2: Sure, okay, now it's always problematic. They can both burn,

1170
00:59:10,480 --> 00:59:12,800
but we've built systems to deal with that. The bigger

1171
00:59:12,840 --> 00:59:14,639
issue is sodium is not going to be as dense

1172
00:59:14,639 --> 00:59:19,599
as lithium. However, they say, again we haven't seen this

1173
00:59:19,679 --> 00:59:22,400
the extra battery yet, that they're getting one hundred and

1174
00:59:22,400 --> 00:59:25,639
seventy five kilo wat hours per kilogram. That's comparable to

1175
00:59:25,719 --> 00:59:28,320
lithium phosphate batteries. It's not as good as NMC batteries

1176
00:59:28,360 --> 00:59:30,679
like your top of the line batteries today are three

1177
00:59:30,800 --> 00:59:34,119
hundred kilowat hours per per kilo. They're just expensive, about

1178
00:59:34,119 --> 00:59:37,360
one hundred and seventy five. That's feasible for a car.

1179
00:59:37,559 --> 00:59:39,840
Speaker 1: So it's going to be a little bigger. Nominally, it

1180
00:59:39,880 --> 00:59:42,440
would be probably not. You're probably not going to see

1181
00:59:42,440 --> 00:59:43,960
it in a phone any day soon.

1182
00:59:44,400 --> 00:59:46,519
Speaker 2: No, you probably wouldn't, but then again, the battery is

1183
00:59:46,519 --> 00:59:48,800
not that expensive in a phone. We're talking about battery

1184
00:59:48,800 --> 00:59:52,840
storage for grid, battery storage for houses, batteries and batteries

1185
00:59:52,840 --> 00:59:55,760
and cars. Yeah, this is in the league. And if

1186
00:59:55,760 --> 00:59:57,679
it's a ten dollars a kilo wat hour, like, sign

1187
00:59:57,760 --> 01:00:00,519
me up, I'll give you more space in my garage exactly.

1188
01:00:00,559 --> 01:00:04,320
If you can drop by household battery price tenfold, which

1189
01:00:04,360 --> 01:00:07,159
is what you're talking about, that's really great. They've also

1190
01:00:07,199 --> 01:00:10,360
announced another battery called a free void battery, where they've

1191
01:00:10,360 --> 01:00:14,199
got a control. They mix sodium and lithium battery designs

1192
01:00:14,440 --> 01:00:16,280
and they use a smart controller to figure out what

1193
01:00:16,320 --> 01:00:19,719
batteries do use under what conditions. Wow, which is very clever.

1194
01:00:20,480 --> 01:00:24,159
The questions here is why have these why have why

1195
01:00:24,199 --> 01:00:27,199
are sodium batteries more expensive than lithium batteries until COTL

1196
01:00:27,239 --> 01:00:30,079
made this announcement, And the biggest thing is just manufacturing

1197
01:00:30,079 --> 01:00:32,599
at scale. They just have not matured that the pipeline.

1198
01:00:32,639 --> 01:00:35,320
There's not as many ingredients as available. The material costs

1199
01:00:35,320 --> 01:00:38,400
are lower, but it's not as plentiful and the process

1200
01:00:38,440 --> 01:00:41,519
is not as mature. The lithium process has been worked

1201
01:00:41,559 --> 01:00:44,480
on so hard in the past twenty years, it's just

1202
01:00:44,719 --> 01:00:48,239
driven the price down. So the concern here is is

1203
01:00:48,280 --> 01:00:53,039
everything CTL is saying true? Right? Is this knowing how

1204
01:00:53,079 --> 01:00:56,199
competitive the Chinese market is in cl is the Chinese company?

1205
01:00:56,760 --> 01:00:59,800
Are they saying this to freak out their competitors more

1206
01:00:59,800 --> 01:01:01,880
than they can actually pull it off? Like I'm really

1207
01:01:02,599 --> 01:01:05,000
keen If it's true, this is a huge breakthrough. We

1208
01:01:05,199 --> 01:01:06,960
just need to actually be able to buy the product

1209
01:01:07,079 --> 01:01:10,239
well in a huge disruption, right yep. It just means

1210
01:01:10,400 --> 01:01:13,400
there's no excuse not to have batteries, Like how far

1211
01:01:13,440 --> 01:01:15,360
are we from simply you know, you put the battery

1212
01:01:15,400 --> 01:01:17,840
on the solar panel and it naturally backs itself up

1213
01:01:17,880 --> 01:01:20,880
like that, and that's it if they're that cheap. But today,

1214
01:01:21,000 --> 01:01:24,119
right now, lithin perophosphate batteries are the cheapest known tech.

1215
01:01:24,239 --> 01:01:26,639
They've hit it. They've hit a remarkable floor and they're

1216
01:01:26,639 --> 01:01:27,480
going to continue down.

1217
01:01:27,519 --> 01:01:27,760
Speaker 1: Wow.

1218
01:01:28,000 --> 01:01:30,320
Speaker 2: All right, there was a question about solid state batteries.

1219
01:01:30,320 --> 01:01:34,519
This is an ongoing debate. This is you know, sol

1220
01:01:34,599 --> 01:01:36,920
state batteri is one of those voodoo terms right.

1221
01:01:36,800 --> 01:01:38,199
Speaker 1: Where Yeah, what does that even mean?

1222
01:01:38,360 --> 01:01:41,440
Speaker 2: I thought, if we just do this, everything will be better, right,

1223
01:01:41,519 --> 01:01:44,440
The battery will last forever. That's the idea that the

1224
01:01:44,480 --> 01:01:47,480
electrolyte in the battery, which is normally a liquid or gel,

1225
01:01:47,920 --> 01:01:50,480
is a solid, So they should be denser, should be safer,

1226
01:01:50,599 --> 01:01:53,280
they should last longer, they should charge faster. It's just

1227
01:01:53,360 --> 01:01:57,320
like it's the holy grail. Okay. And lots of companies

1228
01:01:57,559 --> 01:02:00,719
have constantly said, oh, yeah, we've got solid estate batteries

1229
01:02:00,719 --> 01:02:02,960
coming soon, and our cars are going to be amazing.

1230
01:02:03,039 --> 01:02:05,360
Hyundai said they had a pilot project this year they're

1231
01:02:05,400 --> 01:02:08,239
going to make mass producing in twenty thirty. The problem

1232
01:02:08,280 --> 01:02:10,280
is every time someone says to have a solid state battery,

1233
01:02:10,400 --> 01:02:12,840
somebody smart takes that battery apart and finds some liquid

1234
01:02:12,840 --> 01:02:15,480
in it. Yeah, okay, so we're kind of playing with

1235
01:02:15,559 --> 01:02:17,960
the term, like the solid state itself is like it's

1236
01:02:18,360 --> 01:02:22,679
more solid or less solid, or it's quasi solid. So

1237
01:02:23,199 --> 01:02:26,440
it's all about almost there, right. We never really nailed

1238
01:02:26,440 --> 01:02:29,519
this completely, and so that that's still going on. Lots

1239
01:02:29,519 --> 01:02:32,639
of companies making promises but just don't have the real

1240
01:02:32,639 --> 01:02:35,360
batteries here. Yeah, all right, a couple more battery texts

1241
01:02:35,360 --> 01:02:38,800
then we will take a break form energy. This is that

1242
01:02:38,960 --> 01:02:41,800
iron air battery. I check, keep checking it on this

1243
01:02:41,960 --> 01:02:45,719
was the idea of you know, lithium ion batteries are

1244
01:02:45,760 --> 01:02:47,880
kind of silly for grid storage. They have a natural

1245
01:02:47,920 --> 01:02:51,639
like eight hour cycle or their natural discharges about eight hours.

1246
01:02:51,679 --> 01:02:54,039
There's not enough for going overnight. It's not actually a

1247
01:02:54,039 --> 01:02:56,199
good tech for this. And let's face it, their battery

1248
01:02:56,199 --> 01:02:58,360
designs are about being able to be moved around, right,

1249
01:02:58,400 --> 01:02:59,920
whether it's in your phone or in your car, stuff

1250
01:02:59,920 --> 01:03:02,559
like that. In an iron air battery, while much bigger, heavier,

1251
01:03:02,599 --> 01:03:06,000
and hotter, it's perfect for grid storage because about back then,

1252
01:03:06,079 --> 01:03:07,719
at least a few years ago, there was ten percent

1253
01:03:07,719 --> 01:03:10,400
of the price of lithium ion battery, although lithia myon

1254
01:03:10,480 --> 01:03:12,760
batteries have gone a lot cheaper. We talked about these

1255
01:03:12,800 --> 01:03:15,000
last year too, and we are talking about for several

1256
01:03:15,079 --> 01:03:18,239
years now, and their form Entergy's original projects in Minnesota.

1257
01:03:18,239 --> 01:03:20,199
It's called the Great River Energy Project. It was supposed

1258
01:03:20,199 --> 01:03:22,039
to be a one point five megawatt storage with one

1259
01:03:22,079 --> 01:03:25,440
hundred and fifty megawatt hours because it has a natural

1260
01:03:25,719 --> 01:03:30,480
one hundred hour discharge time that's pretty potent, not just

1261
01:03:30,559 --> 01:03:34,559
lasting overnight, but literally lasting for days. They were supposed

1262
01:03:34,599 --> 01:03:37,960
to be done in twenty twenty three. They finally started

1263
01:03:38,039 --> 01:03:41,599
actually installing per batteries in October of twenty five.

1264
01:03:41,840 --> 01:03:42,280
Speaker 1: Wow.

1265
01:03:42,519 --> 01:03:45,559
Speaker 2: So, and I've read the press releases of they're just saying, hey,

1266
01:03:45,599 --> 01:03:48,440
you know what, manufacturing at scale is hard. And so

1267
01:03:48,559 --> 01:03:51,639
they built out this factory in Virginia when they raised

1268
01:03:51,679 --> 01:03:53,960
more money back in twenty four and they finally said

1269
01:03:53,960 --> 01:03:57,760
they're producing their grid scale capable batteries. They've started to

1270
01:03:57,800 --> 01:04:01,840
populate the Minnesota the Great Energy Facility finally.

1271
01:04:01,880 --> 01:04:06,119
Speaker 1: All right, So the idea here if I'm correct, me

1272
01:04:06,119 --> 01:04:09,239
if I'm wrong, but is that the grid itself is

1273
01:04:09,280 --> 01:04:11,840
backed up, so you're going to have less brownouts and

1274
01:04:11,920 --> 01:04:13,400
things like that. Is that true?

1275
01:04:13,519 --> 01:04:17,639
Speaker 2: Well, well, the idea is runs have a huge amount

1276
01:04:17,679 --> 01:04:20,800
of solar, it charges up that battery and then overnight

1277
01:04:20,800 --> 01:04:24,320
you run on the battery. Oh right, okay, simplest thing, right,

1278
01:04:24,360 --> 01:04:26,360
if we have enough story we have a certain amount

1279
01:04:26,400 --> 01:04:28,000
of storage like that so that we can run the

1280
01:04:28,039 --> 01:04:30,519
low loads at night, then we don't have to have

1281
01:04:30,559 --> 01:04:33,880
as much base low power. But you're right, these battery

1282
01:04:33,920 --> 01:04:36,639
storage facilities are about stabilizing grids when you're switching sources.

1283
01:04:36,679 --> 01:04:38,559
But there's all kinds of advantage to having a certain

1284
01:04:38,599 --> 01:04:42,400
amount of battery, right, right, and normally they've been using

1285
01:04:42,400 --> 01:04:47,519
lithium my own because they're cheap relatively speaking at scale. Right,

1286
01:04:47,519 --> 01:04:49,679
this is what Tesla pushed on for all those years

1287
01:04:49,719 --> 01:04:51,480
and have built out a bunch of facilities for them.

1288
01:04:51,480 --> 01:04:54,159
They've got their challenges, they overheat, they catch fire, that

1289
01:04:54,239 --> 01:04:56,400
kind of thing, but they've done this. But the whole

1290
01:04:56,719 --> 01:05:00,559
idea is the iron air battery is very inexpensive. Bigger

1291
01:05:00,599 --> 01:05:03,000
and hotter and heavier, None of that matters when you

1292
01:05:03,000 --> 01:05:05,159
put a fence around it. And that means how you

1293
01:05:05,199 --> 01:05:07,880
can feed various power sources into that to keep it

1294
01:05:07,960 --> 01:05:10,039
charged and then discharge it when you need it. And

1295
01:05:10,119 --> 01:05:13,199
so they've got they've been building out the Great River

1296
01:05:13,360 --> 01:05:17,480
Energy Project. Finally, they've also got contracts with in California

1297
01:05:17,519 --> 01:05:19,840
and Georgia, Maine, but I think everybody's just waiting to

1298
01:05:19,840 --> 01:05:22,480
see how Minnesota goes at this point. But they apparently

1299
01:05:22,519 --> 01:05:24,719
are really installing batteries, so it's great. Now they got

1300
01:05:24,719 --> 01:05:26,559
to find out if the run times actually play out

1301
01:05:26,559 --> 01:05:28,199
the way they do, and have they managed to heat

1302
01:05:28,239 --> 01:05:30,519
properly and you know that all that like, there's still

1303
01:05:30,559 --> 01:05:34,320
more to learn, but form Energy is making progress. Another

1304
01:05:34,320 --> 01:05:37,320
one I mentioned last year is polar night Energy. This

1305
01:05:37,360 --> 01:05:39,840
is that project in Finland where they built a one

1306
01:05:39,920 --> 01:05:44,840
megawat sand battery, right, that was very interesting. That stored

1307
01:05:44,840 --> 01:05:47,000
one hundred megawatt hours of power. So we're going to

1308
01:05:47,079 --> 01:05:49,519
discharge it a one megawatt for one hundred hours.

1309
01:05:49,639 --> 01:05:52,039
Speaker 1: The whole idea is that sand holds heat, right, Yeah,

1310
01:05:52,039 --> 01:05:52,440
that's right.

1311
01:05:52,480 --> 01:05:55,400
Speaker 2: So you use the excess solar to heat up the

1312
01:05:55,440 --> 01:05:57,559
sand about six hundred degree cent a grade. You have

1313
01:05:57,679 --> 01:06:01,480
US ninety conversion efficiency. They blow air through it which

1314
01:06:01,519 --> 01:06:04,280
superheats that air and then it can flash steam or

1315
01:06:04,360 --> 01:06:07,239
they can use the air directly in commercial process so forth.

1316
01:06:07,239 --> 01:06:10,119
This thing went live in June this year, in twenty

1317
01:06:10,159 --> 01:06:13,960
twenty five. A megawatt with one hundred megawat hours of storage. Wow,

1318
01:06:14,000 --> 01:06:17,039
And the result has been successful, and so they're building

1319
01:06:17,039 --> 01:06:20,679
another one in Vaski, Finland. They're now building to megawatt

1320
01:06:20,719 --> 01:06:24,119
two one hundred and fifty megawatt hour. So construction to

1321
01:06:24,159 --> 01:06:26,880
start next year in twenty six, completion and operation in

1322
01:06:26,920 --> 01:06:31,440
twenty seven. This is twenty four hundred metric tons of

1323
01:06:31,519 --> 01:06:35,880
sand in a silo fourteen meters hide and fifteen meters wide.

1324
01:06:35,960 --> 01:06:38,719
It's just sand that it's one of those things that

1325
01:06:38,840 --> 01:06:42,159
works at scale, and so that's a great success story.

1326
01:06:42,760 --> 01:06:44,880
They've got a cheap source of sand. It's just the

1327
01:06:44,920 --> 01:06:49,159
ceramic residues. It's not that silicon's hand, but it works

1328
01:06:49,159 --> 01:06:52,159
for them. And so congrats to Polar Night Energy, new project,

1329
01:06:52,159 --> 01:06:56,480
even bigger. Okay, let's take a brief break and then

1330
01:06:56,480 --> 01:06:58,679
we'll come back and talk a hydrogen sounds good.

1331
01:06:59,079 --> 01:07:04,800
Speaker 1: We'll be right back, and we're back, gets the dot

1332
01:07:04,840 --> 01:07:09,079
net Rocks twenty twenty five Energy geek out. Mister Campbell

1333
01:07:09,440 --> 01:07:12,960
is about to talk to us about some hydrogen stuff.

1334
01:07:12,639 --> 01:07:14,199
Speaker 2: Because we're on the back half and.

1335
01:07:14,119 --> 01:07:16,440
Speaker 1: This kind of what happened to hydrogen?

1336
01:07:16,760 --> 01:07:19,639
Speaker 2: Oh what happened to hydrogen? And Kiaran landing online.

1337
01:07:19,320 --> 01:07:20,599
Speaker 1: Where's my hydrogen car?

1338
01:07:20,679 --> 01:07:23,320
Speaker 2: Anyway, that is exactly what Kiaren said, he gets where's

1339
01:07:23,320 --> 01:07:27,960
my hydrogen car? It's like, look, I mean, Toyota's got

1340
01:07:28,039 --> 01:07:31,320
their hydrogen car, right. Both guys who got one thought

1341
01:07:31,320 --> 01:07:34,760
it was great. These are very you know, the problem

1342
01:07:34,800 --> 01:07:37,559
with the mirror is a cool little hydrogen cell car.

1343
01:07:37,599 --> 01:07:40,920
But hydrogen cells are hot, they need a lot of maintenance.

1344
01:07:40,960 --> 01:07:44,480
They're expensive. You know, the battery car has one. Yeah,

1345
01:07:44,519 --> 01:07:46,880
although these days is a big pushback to go back

1346
01:07:46,880 --> 01:07:50,920
to hybrids, which you know, and arguably one of the

1347
01:07:50,920 --> 01:07:53,559
reasons people like hybrids because then you have some gas

1348
01:07:54,199 --> 01:07:57,159
that they can charge that battery, so you're sort of

1349
01:07:57,199 --> 01:07:58,960
use you a mix of both for a more mechanically

1350
01:07:58,960 --> 01:08:01,360
complicated car. But you know who's happy when you have

1351
01:08:01,400 --> 01:08:05,239
a more mechanically complicated car your dealer. You know, dealers

1352
01:08:05,280 --> 01:08:08,159
don't like electric vehicles because there's nothing for them to do, right,

1353
01:08:08,199 --> 01:08:10,039
and so they don't like selling them. They'd much rather

1354
01:08:10,039 --> 01:08:11,679
sell you a hybrid because it means you're going to

1355
01:08:11,719 --> 01:08:13,559
be back every quarter to get some maintenance stuff.

1356
01:08:13,599 --> 01:08:15,760
Speaker 1: Well, the dealers have to ship from being mechanics to

1357
01:08:15,800 --> 01:08:20,239
being electric electrical engineers and computer technicians, right, I mean, but.

1358
01:08:20,239 --> 01:08:22,000
Speaker 2: Even then, there's just not that much for you to do. Look,

1359
01:08:22,000 --> 01:08:24,960
I own a Rivian. I take it in once a year,

1360
01:08:25,640 --> 01:08:27,640
and even then that's just to change like air filters

1361
01:08:27,640 --> 01:08:29,720
and theory. I could do that myself, you know, other

1362
01:08:29,760 --> 01:08:32,039
than occasional warranty where it's it's just nothing to do

1363
01:08:32,159 --> 01:08:34,600
on electric cars, and that the dealers are very unhappy

1364
01:08:34,640 --> 01:08:34,960
about them.

1365
01:08:35,479 --> 01:08:38,279
Speaker 1: But the oil and gas. She love hydrogen because they

1366
01:08:38,399 --> 01:08:40,840
are the sources of hydrogen. Most hydrogen is made from

1367
01:08:40,920 --> 01:08:43,680
natural gas, and so it means their pipelines are still

1368
01:08:43,680 --> 01:08:46,640
important all this stuff they've invested in. Hydrogen prices have

1369
01:08:46,720 --> 01:08:48,960
not fallen at all. Last year there are about five

1370
01:08:49,000 --> 01:08:50,000
thousand dollars e metric ton.

1371
01:08:50,119 --> 01:08:52,319
Speaker 2: This year they're about five thousand dollars a metric ton,

1372
01:08:52,399 --> 01:08:55,920
so they're just not going anywhere. We make the vast

1373
01:08:55,920 --> 01:08:59,479
majority of hydrogen using steam reformation, which is where you

1374
01:08:59,520 --> 01:09:02,479
take uh methane gas and you pump a bunch of

1375
01:09:02,600 --> 01:09:05,319
about six megawat hours of electricity into it to make

1376
01:09:05,359 --> 01:09:07,880
a ton of hydrogen. You'll also spin out ninety twelve

1377
01:09:07,920 --> 01:09:11,319
tons of carbon dioxide in the process. Most hydrogen today,

1378
01:09:11,319 --> 01:09:13,560
which is used in industrial processes primarily.

1379
01:09:13,600 --> 01:09:16,720
Speaker 1: That's how it's made. It's not all that clean, is it. No, Well,

1380
01:09:16,720 --> 01:09:18,399
it's a lot. It's a lot of carbon dioxide for

1381
01:09:18,399 --> 01:09:21,199
the amount of hydrogen to make. Now you can up

1382
01:09:21,239 --> 01:09:24,680
the power consumption threefold, go to about twenty five megawat hours.

1383
01:09:25,000 --> 01:09:29,079
Speaker 2: It's almost fourfold really, and you can do methane pyroalysis.

1384
01:09:29,079 --> 01:09:31,159
Now you'll make it. You'll make a ton of hydrogen

1385
01:09:31,479 --> 01:09:34,479
and three tons of solid carbon which you can bury

1386
01:09:34,880 --> 01:09:37,359
or at least contains you're not emitting carbon dioxide. It

1387
01:09:37,439 --> 01:09:40,479
just costs moreau's a lot more energy. But most people

1388
01:09:40,520 --> 01:09:42,359
think about making a hydrogen what the way you did

1389
01:09:42,359 --> 01:09:45,800
in the lab at school, with electrolysis.

1390
01:09:44,960 --> 01:09:46,119
Speaker 1: Of electricity and water.

1391
01:09:46,439 --> 01:09:49,479
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yes, So if you want to make a ton

1392
01:09:49,520 --> 01:09:54,359
of hydrogen with electrolysis, that's sixty megawat hours, So ten

1393
01:09:54,399 --> 01:09:57,399
times would it costs in electricity from steam reformation.

1394
01:09:57,520 --> 01:09:59,479
Speaker 1: But it's a good use for solar energy, isn't it

1395
01:09:59,560 --> 01:10:01,079
if it's excess power. Yeah.

1396
01:10:01,159 --> 01:10:03,279
Speaker 2: So one of the ideas is switching access power. But

1397
01:10:03,319 --> 01:10:06,600
the problem is that to do electrolysis at scale, you

1398
01:10:06,680 --> 01:10:09,119
can't just turn it on quickly, right. It takes about

1399
01:10:09,159 --> 01:10:11,039
an hour or two hours for those systems to get

1400
01:10:11,079 --> 01:10:13,199
up and running, sometimes like five or six hours, So

1401
01:10:13,479 --> 01:10:15,720
you can't always take advantage of power that way. It's hard.

1402
01:10:15,800 --> 01:10:20,600
Speaker 1: You have to have big and or numerous membranes right right, Well,

1403
01:10:20,680 --> 01:10:22,199
the electrolysis is more.

1404
01:10:22,079 --> 01:10:25,199
Speaker 2: Gas capture, so they don't have make of a problem. Okay,

1405
01:10:25,239 --> 01:10:26,960
And just to be clear, you know we're talking about

1406
01:10:26,960 --> 01:10:28,640
the problem with fuel cells, is your typical way to

1407
01:10:28,680 --> 01:10:31,359
turn a hydrogen back into electricity. So if you take

1408
01:10:31,399 --> 01:10:33,840
a ton of hydrogen and you run it through a

1409
01:10:33,880 --> 01:10:37,960
fuel cell, you'll get about three point three megawatt hours

1410
01:10:37,960 --> 01:10:39,720
of electricity from it in a bunch of whiters. So

1411
01:10:39,760 --> 01:10:44,159
you just spent sixty megawat hours to make that ton

1412
01:10:44,159 --> 01:10:47,920
of hydrogen to get three megawaan hours back. Yeah, it's

1413
01:10:47,920 --> 01:10:49,039
a twentyfold loss.

1414
01:10:49,199 --> 01:10:52,640
Speaker 1: It's a lot more efficient to use electricity in batteries

1415
01:10:52,760 --> 01:10:54,039
in a car than hydrogen.

1416
01:10:54,159 --> 01:10:58,159
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's just you know, and fuel cells are pricey

1417
01:10:58,159 --> 01:11:01,960
and unreliable, and it's just a problem. Right, And let's

1418
01:11:01,960 --> 01:11:04,079
face it, hydrogen is it makes more sense to move

1419
01:11:04,119 --> 01:11:06,000
methane around that does to move natural gas around. The

1420
01:11:06,079 --> 01:11:09,279
hydrogen Hydrogen leaks out of everything, right, right, it's such

1421
01:11:09,319 --> 01:11:11,640
a fine it's such a thin gas. It'll escape constantly.

1422
01:11:11,720 --> 01:11:13,279
Speaker 1: And aren't they engines loud to.

1423
01:11:13,520 --> 01:11:15,920
Speaker 2: Well, it can be, but there's solutions to all of that.

1424
01:11:16,039 --> 01:11:17,920
But you just need so much more of it. Right,

1425
01:11:18,239 --> 01:11:21,439
to move the same amount of energy in as hydrogen

1426
01:11:21,439 --> 01:11:23,920
gas and methane, you need to move three times more volume.

1427
01:11:24,479 --> 01:11:25,960
So that costs more energy.

1428
01:11:26,000 --> 01:11:26,319
Speaker 1: Again.

1429
01:11:26,560 --> 01:11:27,920
Speaker 2: So one of the ideas if you're going to make

1430
01:11:28,000 --> 01:11:31,199
hydrogen at scale is actually making into meth into ammonia.

1431
01:11:31,399 --> 01:11:33,920
Oh so that's a you know, because an ammonia atom

1432
01:11:34,159 --> 01:11:36,960
is a nitrogen atom with four hydrogens attached to it. Now,

1433
01:11:37,000 --> 01:11:41,239
traditionally we make ammonia for fertilizer or fertilizers using the

1434
01:11:41,279 --> 01:11:44,119
haber Bosch process. Right, and this is another, you know,

1435
01:11:44,800 --> 01:11:48,479
very dirty process because you do that steam reformation to

1436
01:11:48,520 --> 01:11:50,720
make hydrogen. Then you draw that and then I should

1437
01:11:50,760 --> 01:11:52,640
off that you have another process to buying the two together.

1438
01:11:52,680 --> 01:11:53,920
Speaker 1: You also use it to make bombs.

1439
01:11:54,039 --> 01:11:57,000
Speaker 2: Well it's the same stuff, right ye, And you know fertilizer,

1440
01:11:57,439 --> 01:12:01,079
that's whatever. You know, that big deal. So there's this

1441
01:12:01,199 --> 01:12:07,319
idea of green ammonia. So now building out excess clean

1442
01:12:07,439 --> 01:12:12,680
energy sources to do your hydrogen extraction with electrolysis and

1443
01:12:12,720 --> 01:12:15,960
then combine it with nitrogen to make ammonia, which much

1444
01:12:16,000 --> 01:12:19,039
easier store. It's an easy liquid to work with. We

1445
01:12:19,079 --> 01:12:21,119
already have a system for doing all of this. I

1446
01:12:21,199 --> 01:12:26,800
think it's interesting about ammonia is you can use it

1447
01:12:26,840 --> 01:12:29,800
in a rocket, you can use it in an engine.

1448
01:12:30,000 --> 01:12:30,840
That stuff will burn.

1449
01:12:31,279 --> 01:12:31,880
Speaker 1: I didn't know that.

1450
01:12:32,119 --> 01:12:35,720
Speaker 2: And it's emissions are nitrogen and water. Huh, two things

1451
01:12:35,760 --> 01:12:37,439
that we need. It's just a yeah, it's just an

1452
01:12:37,439 --> 01:12:39,880
ammonia's expensive to make. It is normally a very dirty

1453
01:12:39,880 --> 01:12:42,159
process to make it. So once again, the Chinese step

1454
01:12:42,199 --> 01:12:45,840
in with a huge solar plant out in Chief and

1455
01:12:45,880 --> 01:12:49,800
they're making three hundred and twenty thousand metric tons of

1456
01:12:49,840 --> 01:12:54,119
green ammonia using wind, solar and battery systems. Now their

1457
01:12:54,159 --> 01:12:56,479
ammonia is more expensive than regular ammonia. So far, they

1458
01:12:56,520 --> 01:12:58,560
think they can get to price parity by twenty twenty eight.

1459
01:12:59,079 --> 01:13:02,000
But there's a whole movement happening. There might even stand

1460
01:13:02,000 --> 01:13:04,319
to be its own geek out on what you can

1461
01:13:04,399 --> 01:13:06,600
use ammonia for if you can produce it cleanly enough

1462
01:13:06,640 --> 01:13:09,920
and it's scalely enough and cheaply enough to operate in

1463
01:13:10,039 --> 01:13:12,239
engines as well as just making fertilizer.

1464
01:13:12,840 --> 01:13:14,000
Speaker 1: All right, that's interesting.

1465
01:13:14,159 --> 01:13:17,520
Speaker 2: Yeah, talk a little about geothermal. We've talked about it before, obviously,

1466
01:13:17,680 --> 01:13:20,840
we talk about it every year. Traditional geothermal, you're looking

1467
01:13:20,880 --> 01:13:23,159
for guysers, so you're looking for a place where water

1468
01:13:23,319 --> 01:13:27,239
is interfacing with high temperature rocks, typically in volcanic areas,

1469
01:13:27,279 --> 01:13:31,359
so think New Zealand, Iceland. But every time those guys

1470
01:13:31,399 --> 01:13:33,640
try and build germal thermal power, often they destroy the

1471
01:13:33,640 --> 01:13:35,840
guys are based in the process. The shock of cold

1472
01:13:35,920 --> 01:13:39,359
water being deliberately pumped in the system damages it, and

1473
01:13:39,359 --> 01:13:41,399
then the water disappears and the whole thing stops working. And

1474
01:13:41,439 --> 01:13:44,039
the expensive part of geothermal power is drilling, is putting

1475
01:13:44,079 --> 01:13:46,199
those pipes in the first place. And so when the

1476
01:13:46,199 --> 01:13:48,199
system shifts like that, you've spent a lot of money.

1477
01:13:48,199 --> 01:13:50,119
You don't get a lot of results. But we know

1478
01:13:50,199 --> 01:13:53,319
that the rocks are hot everywhere. You just have to

1479
01:13:53,399 --> 01:13:56,880
drill a little further, and they tend to be dry rock,

1480
01:13:57,079 --> 01:13:59,000
so they don't have water in them and they're not

1481
01:13:59,039 --> 01:14:03,000
permeable to water first place. And this is where fracking

1482
01:14:03,079 --> 01:14:03,920
comes into play.

1483
01:14:04,159 --> 01:14:06,439
Speaker 1: Yeah, I knew we were going to talk about fracking,

1484
01:14:06,960 --> 01:14:08,199
the fracking stuff.

1485
01:14:08,399 --> 01:14:11,920
Speaker 2: Yeah, So fracking was developed to extract methane and oil

1486
01:14:12,079 --> 01:14:17,279
from shale beds, which sometimes contaminates waterways. So, but if

1487
01:14:17,279 --> 01:14:19,560
you drill away from the waterways and the different layers

1488
01:14:19,560 --> 01:14:22,560
of rock down deeper, where the rocks are hotter, you

1489
01:14:22,680 --> 01:14:26,560
can fracture that rock and pump water in it to superheated.

1490
01:14:26,640 --> 01:14:29,479
So you drill in at least two holes the original designs,

1491
01:14:29,520 --> 01:14:32,920
that's what they do, and then pump in the fracking,

1492
01:14:32,920 --> 01:14:35,640
fluid shatter the rock and then you try and pump

1493
01:14:35,720 --> 01:14:37,159
water through it. See if you get steamed from that.

1494
01:14:37,680 --> 01:14:39,479
This technology has been advanced a lot of It's a

1495
01:14:39,479 --> 01:14:41,800
company called Fervo Energy, and we've talked about them before.

1496
01:14:41,800 --> 01:14:44,039
They've done pilot projects back in twenty three and they've

1497
01:14:44,079 --> 01:14:46,840
raised a ton of money. And what they're doing is

1498
01:14:46,880 --> 01:14:50,239
horizontal drilling. So they drill in on either side of

1499
01:14:50,279 --> 01:14:53,439
a dry rock bay where they think they can get

1500
01:14:53,479 --> 01:14:56,840
enough temperature, and then they go horizontally into it to

1501
01:14:57,000 --> 01:15:00,720
the fracturing and that way they if they actually have

1502
01:15:00,760 --> 01:15:02,960
a problem where they have a shock that causes the

1503
01:15:03,000 --> 01:15:05,880
water to leak away the main drill lines, the expensive

1504
01:15:05,920 --> 01:15:09,479
ones don't have to rejail. They just redrill the horizontal parts.

1505
01:15:10,119 --> 01:15:12,119
So far, they're doing what they call an open solution,

1506
01:15:12,560 --> 01:15:16,119
where they're not actually making those two pipelines meet. Like

1507
01:15:16,159 --> 01:15:17,800
there's a whole idea of we could build a seal

1508
01:15:17,960 --> 01:15:20,560
loop for this, but that really hasn't been done yet.

1509
01:15:20,640 --> 01:15:23,640
So far, they're still using fracking to pump this through.

1510
01:15:24,439 --> 01:15:26,800
The problem is that when you use fracking, you are

1511
01:15:28,319 --> 01:15:30,279
you have to follow the regulations of oil and gas,

1512
01:15:30,279 --> 01:15:32,600
which are now these days pretty tightly regulated because of

1513
01:15:32,600 --> 01:15:34,880
all the problems that have happened, and so there's a

1514
01:15:34,880 --> 01:15:38,560
whole conversation going on about changing the regulations around all

1515
01:15:38,600 --> 01:15:41,880
of this. Because they aren't touching waterways, they are going

1516
01:15:41,880 --> 01:15:44,760
into dry rock, they're going they're not trying to extract oil,

1517
01:15:45,039 --> 01:15:47,359
they're not in decreasing the density on the soils that

1518
01:15:47,439 --> 01:15:49,600
might cause collapse and things. They don't have those same problems.

1519
01:15:50,079 --> 01:15:53,720
But they now have a power purchase Creaming from California

1520
01:15:53,760 --> 01:15:56,720
in the megawatt class, so they built a smaller facility

1521
01:15:56,720 --> 01:16:00,279
a megawa, a single megawat in Utah. Google has been

1522
01:16:00,279 --> 01:16:01,600
funding them a bunch because they want to use their

1523
01:16:01,640 --> 01:16:04,520
power for their AI data stators. But in twenty twenty

1524
01:16:04,600 --> 01:16:08,479
six they expect to be having several hundred megawats of

1525
01:16:08,479 --> 01:16:12,319
power for California off of this technique. So they've definitely

1526
01:16:12,399 --> 01:16:16,800
matured and are scaling up. Most higher geroelectric our most

1527
01:16:16,920 --> 01:16:19,920
geothermal power plants are only in the tens of megawats

1528
01:16:19,920 --> 01:16:21,920
the biggest ones. Some of them are much smaller than that,

1529
01:16:22,319 --> 01:16:23,720
so you need to make a lot of them for

1530
01:16:23,760 --> 01:16:28,359
them scale, but no emissions right, no consumable The water

1531
01:16:28,520 --> 01:16:30,079
is reused over and over again.

1532
01:16:30,319 --> 01:16:30,520
Speaker 1: Yeah.

1533
01:16:30,560 --> 01:16:33,520
Speaker 2: I mean, this is really a good power system that

1534
01:16:33,600 --> 01:16:35,680
can last for a long time if we can get

1535
01:16:35,680 --> 01:16:38,359
it right. So what Fervro's doing is compelling and important.

1536
01:16:38,439 --> 01:16:38,640
You know.

1537
01:16:38,720 --> 01:16:41,920
Speaker 1: I always when we talk about geothermal, I talk about

1538
01:16:42,279 --> 01:16:46,560
using a geothermal system for home heating and cooling. Yeah,

1539
01:16:46,600 --> 01:16:50,159
and so the idea there is and my uncle did this,

1540
01:16:50,880 --> 01:16:54,840
talk about this every year. But the idea there is

1541
01:16:54,880 --> 01:16:57,960
that you know, twenty thirty feet below the ground.

1542
01:16:57,840 --> 01:16:59,560
Speaker 2: And even six six doesn't have to be that.

1543
01:17:00,000 --> 01:17:03,960
Speaker 1: Oh okay, yeah, well there's the temperature is consistent, and

1544
01:17:04,000 --> 01:17:07,560
it's usually depending on where you are in North America anyway,

1545
01:17:07,600 --> 01:17:11,680
between fifty and seventy five degrees right hotter places, it's

1546
01:17:11,680 --> 01:17:14,720
going to be hotter, obviously, But let's say it's fifty degrees.

1547
01:17:15,840 --> 01:17:18,800
So that is cool enough to cool you when the

1548
01:17:18,800 --> 01:17:23,439
temperature is when it's very hot outside and warm enough

1549
01:17:23,479 --> 01:17:27,680
to keep you warm in freezing cold. So what you

1550
01:17:27,720 --> 01:17:30,319
do is you run a pipe below the ground, right,

1551
01:17:30,479 --> 01:17:32,800
and it either heats up or cools down, becomes fifty

1552
01:17:32,800 --> 01:17:35,960
degrees and then you can blow air over that pipe

1553
01:17:36,000 --> 01:17:39,399
when it comes out of the ground, and and there

1554
01:17:39,439 --> 01:17:41,680
you have it. So you have warmer and.

1555
01:17:41,680 --> 01:17:44,520
Speaker 2: Cool air, typically a pup fluid through the loop, and

1556
01:17:44,560 --> 01:17:46,920
so the fluid it's you know, it's normally around sixty

1557
01:17:46,920 --> 01:17:49,520
degrees fahrenheit. Yeah, it's what you're going to get ten

1558
01:17:49,640 --> 01:17:52,720
fifteen feet underground all the time. And sixty degrees is

1559
01:17:52,720 --> 01:17:55,760
great for cooling. It's plenty cool. Yeah, but it's also

1560
01:17:55,800 --> 01:17:58,479
a great start for warming up. Right. You know, if

1561
01:17:58,520 --> 01:18:00,840
you could start at sixty instead of zero zero and

1562
01:18:00,880 --> 01:18:03,039
then heat it up to seventy, everybody's pretty happy. Well,

1563
01:18:03,079 --> 01:18:05,600
and it's sixty degrees, your pipes aren't going to freeze, right, Yeah,

1564
01:18:05,640 --> 01:18:06,479
nothing's going to freeze.

1565
01:18:06,479 --> 01:18:07,439
Speaker 1: Nothing's going to freeze.

1566
01:18:07,520 --> 01:18:10,439
Speaker 2: Yeah. So the advantage here is just a good starting

1567
01:18:10,439 --> 01:18:13,119
point of everything. The downside is it depends on the ground.

1568
01:18:13,600 --> 01:18:16,000
You know, I can't have geo thermal power here for

1569
01:18:16,159 --> 01:18:19,319
my house because it's all rock. The cost of drilling

1570
01:18:19,359 --> 01:18:21,880
that would be crazy, right. You need ground that you

1571
01:18:21,960 --> 01:18:24,680
can put those pipes down into, but if you've got it,

1572
01:18:24,680 --> 01:18:26,359
it's expensive to install.

1573
01:18:26,439 --> 01:18:28,199
Speaker 1: Also, if you're going to run that in lieu of

1574
01:18:28,239 --> 01:18:30,800
an air conditioner, you're going to need a dehumidifier. Because

1575
01:18:30,840 --> 01:18:33,439
I did notice this at my uncle's house that it

1576
01:18:33,479 --> 01:18:36,119
was very wet in the house when it was cool,

1577
01:18:36,720 --> 01:18:39,880
which is the opposite of what you get with air conditioning,

1578
01:18:39,960 --> 01:18:43,600
right with regular yeah, where you dry everything out. One

1579
01:18:43,640 --> 01:18:47,119
last aspect on geothermal we mentioned them before, quas energy.

1580
01:18:47,159 --> 01:18:49,159
These are the guys that instead of using conventional drills,

1581
01:18:49,159 --> 01:18:51,279
are using microwaves to do drilling.

1582
01:18:51,520 --> 01:18:51,600
Speaker 3: What.

1583
01:18:52,640 --> 01:18:54,960
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's pretty cool. It's a lot of energy. But

1584
01:18:55,239 --> 01:18:58,520
the interesting thing about this is you're literally vaporizing the

1585
01:18:58,600 --> 01:19:02,159
rock with microwaves, and so you need a lot of

1586
01:19:02,199 --> 01:19:04,560
pressurized air to make that happen more deeper, go on

1587
01:19:04,640 --> 01:19:07,439
where you need. But it also automatically builds the casement.

1588
01:19:07,479 --> 01:19:11,199
Like normal drilling. As you're drilling with your grinding head,

1589
01:19:11,319 --> 01:19:14,840
you're pumping mud around it to bring the debris back up.

1590
01:19:15,000 --> 01:19:17,800
You're also sliding these pipes down behind it, behind the

1591
01:19:17,840 --> 01:19:20,279
drilling head to keep the wall stable. Right, Kate, they

1592
01:19:20,279 --> 01:19:21,039
called casements.

1593
01:19:21,079 --> 01:19:23,239
Speaker 1: Don't stand too close to the hole, boys.

1594
01:19:23,159 --> 01:19:26,439
Speaker 2: It's all dangerous stuff, right. Those drillers are brave. It's

1595
01:19:26,560 --> 01:19:29,960
very tricky to do route and so this vaporization of rock,

1596
01:19:30,000 --> 01:19:32,439
it's very star trek. You're vaporize and a rock to rock.

1597
01:19:32,479 --> 01:19:35,159
It's actually building the walls they didn't raise any money

1598
01:19:35,319 --> 01:19:37,359
in twenty twenty five. I couldn't find any statement. So

1599
01:19:37,399 --> 01:19:39,720
it's like, I wonder how much money they've got. They're

1600
01:19:39,720 --> 01:19:42,279
still functional. I was worried they were last year. I said,

1601
01:19:42,279 --> 01:19:43,960
I think these guys aren't going to make it. But

1602
01:19:44,439 --> 01:19:48,199
this year they were able to do some real drilling. Admittedly,

1603
01:19:48,640 --> 01:19:50,680
their test run this year they got down one hundred

1604
01:19:50,760 --> 01:19:53,840
meters or about three hundred and thirty feet. Their goal

1605
01:19:54,000 --> 01:19:56,960
next year is to hit a kilometer. To do what

1606
01:19:57,079 --> 01:20:01,520
Fervo is doing, you need to drill five kilometers turn sideways. Yeah,

1607
01:20:01,560 --> 01:20:04,479
so they're a long way from production, but they seem

1608
01:20:04,600 --> 01:20:08,640
to still be in business. So they're still functioning even

1609
01:20:08,680 --> 01:20:11,560
if they're not doing particularly well. So I hope for

1610
01:20:11,640 --> 01:20:13,399
them because if they can improve the drilling process, so

1611
01:20:13,479 --> 01:20:17,640
much the better. But you know, meantime existing drilling, the

1612
01:20:17,640 --> 01:20:20,159
downside of the mechanical drilling is the head swear out.

1613
01:20:20,159 --> 01:20:21,840
Then you have to stop, pull the whole thing back,

1614
01:20:22,319 --> 01:20:24,119
put a new head on, and go again. So you

1615
01:20:24,159 --> 01:20:25,920
the deeper your drill and more expensive it gets by

1616
01:20:25,920 --> 01:20:28,000
a lot, right, But Furrow is making it work. In

1617
01:20:28,079 --> 01:20:30,479
a five kilometer drill, you know, between three and five,

1618
01:20:30,520 --> 01:20:32,760
depending on the rock beds that are working in. Okay,

1619
01:20:32,880 --> 01:20:34,560
all right, ready to get in the new clear this

1620
01:20:34,600 --> 01:20:35,399
is gonna be a long part.

1621
01:20:35,520 --> 01:20:37,079
Speaker 1: Let's do it. My friend all.

1622
01:20:37,119 --> 01:20:39,079
Speaker 2: Right again the kiaren Land and the guy, where's my car?

1623
01:20:39,199 --> 01:20:39,960
Speaker 1: My car?

1624
01:20:40,000 --> 01:20:42,039
Speaker 2: He says, where's my mini nuke for my house? Right?

1625
01:20:42,239 --> 01:20:45,159
Speaker 1: Same same thing, or at least my town. You know

1626
01:20:45,640 --> 01:20:46,439
that would be nice.

1627
01:20:46,520 --> 01:20:49,439
Speaker 2: So let's talk a little bit about conventional nuclear. Last

1628
01:20:49,520 --> 01:20:52,239
year I mentioned this is the Vaugetall facility. This is

1629
01:20:52,279 --> 01:20:55,039
in Georgia where they build reactors three and four. So

1630
01:20:55,199 --> 01:20:57,319
normally in America there's only ever been two reactors. This

1631
01:20:57,319 --> 01:20:59,039
is the first time we've had a four reactors set,

1632
01:20:59,479 --> 01:21:03,920
the first new reactors in decades. These are Westinghouse eight

1633
01:21:03,960 --> 01:21:07,119
P one thousand Gen three pluses, so passive cool down.

1634
01:21:07,159 --> 01:21:10,359
The funny thing about this reactor design is actually simpler

1635
01:21:10,399 --> 01:21:14,920
than the older reactor designs. Because it has passive cool down,

1636
01:21:14,960 --> 01:21:17,279
you don't need all the additional pumps and monitoring and

1637
01:21:17,319 --> 01:21:20,520
so forth for cooling it down in an emergency. It's

1638
01:21:20,640 --> 01:21:24,000
less wiring for your pumps, for your pipes. But because

1639
01:21:24,279 --> 01:21:26,279
it had been decades since anybody built them, they kind

1640
01:21:26,279 --> 01:21:29,039
of didn't know what they were doing, and the pandemic

1641
01:21:29,159 --> 01:21:32,199
and money and the financial crisis meant that where they

1642
01:21:32,239 --> 01:21:35,239
originally estimated it would be fourteen dollars to build and

1643
01:21:35,399 --> 01:21:39,239
be done in like twenty fifteen, it actually was thirty

1644
01:21:39,239 --> 01:21:41,439
four billion dollars to build and they didn't finish until

1645
01:21:41,439 --> 01:21:42,079
twenty twenty four.

1646
01:21:42,520 --> 01:21:44,319
Speaker 1: How does it did cool work?

1647
01:21:44,960 --> 01:21:47,760
Speaker 2: So passive cool down is that you know, if I

1648
01:21:47,840 --> 01:21:50,000
scram the reactor so there's an emergency and I brought

1649
01:21:50,079 --> 01:21:52,960
the control runs to stop the reaction, the reactor core

1650
01:21:53,000 --> 01:21:55,960
itself is still very hot and it will take days

1651
01:21:56,039 --> 01:21:58,840
to cool down, and you're no longer running the pumps

1652
01:21:58,880 --> 01:22:01,319
to move the water through. Right. So this is what

1653
01:22:01,359 --> 01:22:04,079
happened to Fukushima. They SCRAMed those reactors in twenty eleven

1654
01:22:04,119 --> 01:22:06,159
after the earthquake, and then they needed to keep pumping

1655
01:22:06,159 --> 01:22:09,479
the water, and then the tsunami came in and destroyed

1656
01:22:09,479 --> 01:22:12,159
the generators that were running those water pumps. What we

1657
01:22:12,199 --> 01:22:14,000
don't talk about in Fukushima is there was a reactor

1658
01:22:14,039 --> 01:22:16,840
five and six that do have passive cool down. Passive

1659
01:22:16,840 --> 01:22:19,520
cool down means that even with that excess heat, enough

1660
01:22:19,600 --> 01:22:24,159
water flows through convection to cool the reactor on its own.

1661
01:22:24,199 --> 01:22:27,119
You don't, oh interesting, don't have to do anything to

1662
01:22:27,199 --> 01:22:28,560
keep the reactor cool.

1663
01:22:28,680 --> 01:22:29,079
Speaker 1: Wow.

1664
01:22:29,239 --> 01:22:32,479
Speaker 2: So these were the first of these passive cool down

1665
01:22:32,520 --> 01:22:34,359
reactors in the US. There's a few in other parts

1666
01:22:34,359 --> 01:22:36,560
of the world. Brits are building more of them. And

1667
01:22:36,600 --> 01:22:39,960
this is Westinghouse's design. And I lamented at the time

1668
01:22:40,079 --> 01:22:42,840
last year that we only built you only built two

1669
01:22:42,840 --> 01:22:45,640
of them. You've now built up the supply pipeline and

1670
01:22:45,680 --> 01:22:47,359
trained a group of people for the first time in

1671
01:22:47,399 --> 01:22:50,800
decades to build a reactor. You should build more. You've

1672
01:22:50,840 --> 01:22:53,039
done the expensive part. They're only going to get cheaper

1673
01:22:53,079 --> 01:22:57,279
from here. And so the good news is that Westinghouse

1674
01:22:57,279 --> 01:23:00,920
has announced that they are working for up to ten

1675
01:23:00,960 --> 01:23:04,119
more reactors in the US. Now, they weren't very specific

1676
01:23:04,319 --> 01:23:04,800
about it.

1677
01:23:05,199 --> 01:23:09,439
Speaker 1: Would they be able to replace existing non passive cool

1678
01:23:09,520 --> 01:23:10,920
down reactors.

1679
01:23:10,520 --> 01:23:12,560
Speaker 2: Yes, well, that's one of the things that's happening is

1680
01:23:12,560 --> 01:23:14,159
that a lot of the reactors that were built in

1681
01:23:14,199 --> 01:23:17,279
the seventies and eighties are now starting to age out.

1682
01:23:17,319 --> 01:23:19,560
They've had their license extended up to fifty years in

1683
01:23:19,600 --> 01:23:21,920
some cases, but there are aging out and they need

1684
01:23:21,960 --> 01:23:24,640
to be replaced. One of the examples would be near Homestead,

1685
01:23:24,640 --> 01:23:27,880
Florida area called Turkey Point that has a pair of Westinghouse.

1686
01:23:27,920 --> 01:23:30,600
They had a Marguarte reactors from the seventies and they

1687
01:23:30,720 --> 01:23:34,039
have a license for AP one thousands. They just don't

1688
01:23:34,079 --> 01:23:37,840
currently have a plan to actually build. So there's actually

1689
01:23:37,920 --> 01:23:40,920
you know, when we when the west House CEO said this,

1690
01:23:40,960 --> 01:23:42,960
we're going to be able ten new new Krali reactors,

1691
01:23:43,079 --> 01:23:46,279
we think or they think that it's based on licenses

1692
01:23:46,279 --> 01:23:48,479
that are already out there. There's like four in Florida.

1693
01:23:48,520 --> 01:23:51,680
There's a couple of new in North Carolina and South Carolina.

1694
01:23:52,079 --> 01:23:54,800
And so perhaps those negotiations going on with government to

1695
01:23:54,880 --> 01:23:57,880
move ahead with this production, to get those reactors built

1696
01:23:57,880 --> 01:24:00,479
and to take advantage of what they've got here. These

1697
01:24:00,520 --> 01:24:04,079
reactors should last another fifty sixty years. They're very safe.

1698
01:24:04,479 --> 01:24:06,560
You've already got the hard part. You've got the site

1699
01:24:06,600 --> 01:24:08,800
all set up with the licensing and the distance controls

1700
01:24:08,800 --> 01:24:10,960
and so forth. So it makes sense to go forward

1701
01:24:11,000 --> 01:24:13,840
with that. So it gives me some hope for conventional nuclear,

1702
01:24:14,239 --> 01:24:17,760
which is generally more tolerated, the same for the European

1703
01:24:17,800 --> 01:24:21,159
pressurized reactor. And I've talked about this before in I

1704
01:24:21,199 --> 01:24:25,199
do this future of energy talks now at conferences, and

1705
01:24:25,239 --> 01:24:27,560
we talked about the UK Energy site be where they've

1706
01:24:27,560 --> 01:24:30,319
taken the EPI reactor which was developed in France and

1707
01:24:30,359 --> 01:24:33,199
they've built them in Finland and China as well. The

1708
01:24:33,279 --> 01:24:35,640
UK of course had to customize it for their own requirements,

1709
01:24:35,680 --> 01:24:38,039
so they've made it more expensive. They're building two at

1710
01:24:38,039 --> 01:24:40,199
a site called Hinckley Site see, but they also planned

1711
01:24:40,199 --> 01:24:43,039
on building two more in size well, which another location

1712
01:24:43,359 --> 01:24:46,880
where they're replacing older reactors with newer ones and same thing.

1713
01:24:47,000 --> 01:24:50,239
Prices are starting to fall because they're maturing the skill set.

1714
01:24:51,680 --> 01:24:56,800
So conventional nuclear is doing better and it could do more.

1715
01:24:57,119 --> 01:24:59,880
We have these safer designs. We know how they were,

1716
01:25:00,199 --> 01:25:03,239
We have the existing sites. They produce almost one hundred

1717
01:25:03,239 --> 01:25:07,159
percent of the time full power. You know, they're running

1718
01:25:07,199 --> 01:25:09,680
the ninety percent utilization rate, much higher than almost any

1719
01:25:09,720 --> 01:25:12,760
other kind of power, and they're cleaning efficient, like they're

1720
01:25:13,119 --> 01:25:15,840
zero emission technologies except for.

1721
01:25:15,800 --> 01:25:19,319
Speaker 1: That spent fuel. Yes, but there has never been a

1722
01:25:19,439 --> 01:25:23,119
single death or anything caused by this stuff. But it

1723
01:25:23,159 --> 01:25:23,640
is a problem.

1724
01:25:23,720 --> 01:25:26,119
Speaker 2: I spent fuel, but it is a problem, and it's

1725
01:25:26,159 --> 01:25:28,880
a problem that you know, depending on where, Like the

1726
01:25:28,880 --> 01:25:31,479
fins didn't screw around. They've just built a proper storage

1727
01:25:31,479 --> 01:25:34,039
site for their reactors and that's the end of that. Right.

1728
01:25:34,199 --> 01:25:36,000
America has gone around in circles on this for a

1729
01:25:36,079 --> 01:25:38,039
long time, and it's where you get into this problem

1730
01:25:38,039 --> 01:25:40,399
of why should one state take the waste of another state?

1731
01:25:40,640 --> 01:25:43,239
You know, D D that's right, not in my backyard.

1732
01:25:43,399 --> 01:25:48,119
It's exactly the issue, all right. You know, we've talked

1733
01:25:48,119 --> 01:25:52,239
about how the current administration has been pretty negative on renewables.

1734
01:25:52,520 --> 01:25:55,640
Here's an initiative that the current administration started with the

1735
01:25:55,640 --> 01:25:58,000
Department Ergy called the Reactor Pilot Program. So it's from

1736
01:25:58,000 --> 01:26:00,800
a set of executive orders in June this year, the

1737
01:26:00,840 --> 01:26:03,680
goal of finding three new reactor designs to be tested

1738
01:26:03,680 --> 01:26:05,840
by July of twenty twenty six, which is crazy fast.

1739
01:26:05,960 --> 01:26:06,840
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's crazy.

1740
01:26:07,039 --> 01:26:11,359
Speaker 2: So they like a dozen candidates were announced in August,

1741
01:26:11,800 --> 01:26:13,359
and I can go through a few of them. All

1742
01:26:13,439 --> 01:26:16,520
these companies existed before these announcements, but some of them,

1743
01:26:17,279 --> 01:26:19,560
what's happened is the government has just made it easier

1744
01:26:19,600 --> 01:26:22,199
to get fuel and to move forward. So I'll rattle

1745
01:26:22,199 --> 01:26:25,000
off a few of them. Alo Atomics, they wish the

1746
01:26:25,039 --> 01:26:27,600
company started twenty twenty three. They're trying to spill, build

1747
01:26:27,640 --> 01:26:31,920
small module reactors for data centers. Doing a sodium cooled

1748
01:26:31,920 --> 01:26:35,560
thermal reactor ten megawatts, and they've got fuel. They're starting

1749
01:26:35,560 --> 01:26:37,720
to do testing. They're trying to make that July twenty,

1750
01:26:37,720 --> 01:26:40,800
twenty sixth deadline. Ontari's nuclear also started in twenty three.

1751
01:26:40,840 --> 01:26:43,239
They were working in the military and space areas with

1752
01:26:43,680 --> 01:26:47,520
tryso fuel. That's those fuel balls, the pebble bed fuel concept.

1753
01:26:47,560 --> 01:26:50,439
Oh yeah, yeah, but using sodium heat pipes to transfer

1754
01:26:50,479 --> 01:26:54,600
the heat. So dry reactor, no water involved, using these

1755
01:26:54,640 --> 01:26:57,199
balls and then heating up sodium and heat pipes. Talking

1756
01:26:57,199 --> 01:27:01,439
about a five hundred kilowat reactor. Design is supposed to

1757
01:27:01,439 --> 01:27:03,720
be able to work even in vacuum, so it could

1758
01:27:03,720 --> 01:27:04,840
work up in space as well.

1759
01:27:04,960 --> 01:27:07,359
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, So you're going to go into each of

1760
01:27:07,359 --> 01:27:08,520
these in detail after right.

1761
01:27:08,600 --> 01:27:11,039
Speaker 2: I don't want to now because it's too many of them, right.

1762
01:27:10,960 --> 01:27:13,840
Speaker 1: Oh okay, I just wanted to know if these were

1763
01:27:14,119 --> 01:27:17,680
safer or as safe as conventional nuclear.

1764
01:27:18,199 --> 01:27:20,079
Speaker 2: Well, let's go through them, and then I'll talk about

1765
01:27:20,079 --> 01:27:22,039
the categories because it's basically they only come down to

1766
01:27:22,039 --> 01:27:23,680
three or four categories. So once the plus is a

1767
01:27:23,720 --> 01:27:28,199
mind of this, our friend Steve Smith asked me about

1768
01:27:28,239 --> 01:27:31,399
deep fission. It's also one of these companies in this competition.

1769
01:27:32,039 --> 01:27:34,840
Their idea is to build a regular pressurized water reactor,

1770
01:27:35,079 --> 01:27:37,680
but to only make it thirty inches wide so that

1771
01:27:37,720 --> 01:27:40,680
they can put it underground a mile by drilling a

1772
01:27:40,720 --> 01:27:43,760
thirty inch borehole so you don't need a containment vessel

1773
01:27:43,760 --> 01:27:46,199
and if things go terribly wrong, just pour concrete over

1774
01:27:46,239 --> 01:27:49,000
top of them. Forget about. Wow, it's kind of nuts,

1775
01:27:49,279 --> 01:27:51,359
but yeah, put it. Shove the reactor down this big

1776
01:27:51,399 --> 01:27:53,680
hole on a cable with a mile long water line

1777
01:27:53,680 --> 01:27:57,439
and a mile long steamline. It's naturally pressurized. Is that

1778
01:27:57,520 --> 01:28:00,600
deep underground? And you pump water down to it and

1779
01:28:00,640 --> 01:28:02,760
then heat it up with the reactor and steam comes

1780
01:28:02,800 --> 01:28:04,359
back up. Interesting idea.

1781
01:28:04,399 --> 01:28:07,359
Speaker 1: Interesting seems a little dangerous.

1782
01:28:06,920 --> 01:28:10,439
Speaker 2: Though, Yeah, but you know if it's in hard.

1783
01:28:10,279 --> 01:28:13,720
Speaker 1: Rock earthquakes, you know, and a good earthquake and that

1784
01:28:13,760 --> 01:28:14,159
thing is.

1785
01:28:14,199 --> 01:28:17,359
Speaker 2: Getting crushed and might might be problematic, Bye bye, right,

1786
01:28:17,439 --> 01:28:21,399
and only make a reactor thirty inches wide. That's really tiny,

1787
01:28:21,560 --> 01:28:25,640
and a pressurized road reactor at that. It's interesting. Last Energy,

1788
01:28:25,760 --> 01:28:27,960
established back in twenty nineteen, is a spin off of

1789
01:28:28,000 --> 01:28:30,359
a group called the Energy Impact Center, building a twenty

1790
01:28:30,399 --> 01:28:36,720
megawatt pressurized water air cooled small rad Sholi reactor Okola,

1791
01:28:37,239 --> 01:28:40,079
it's been around since twenty thirteen. It's been a while now,

1792
01:28:40,159 --> 01:28:43,479
building a sodium cooled fast reactor in the fifty megawatt class.

1793
01:28:43,640 --> 01:28:45,920
They got a lot of funding from tech billionaires. They're

1794
01:28:45,920 --> 01:28:49,239
looking for building data center power.

1795
01:28:49,279 --> 01:28:54,880
Speaker 1: Okay, you're going to need it. Natural resources, bolten salt reactors, Yeah,

1796
01:28:55,000 --> 01:28:55,760
hunter megawatts.

1797
01:28:55,800 --> 01:28:59,479
Speaker 2: We'll talk more about the darling of dot net rocks. Yeah.

1798
01:29:00,159 --> 01:29:03,159
Radiant Industries back from twenty twenty eight a one megawatt

1799
01:29:03,159 --> 01:29:07,159
reactor called Klidos, which is together that tryso fuel helium cold.

1800
01:29:07,319 --> 01:29:09,159
That's supposed to be able to fit and container, so

1801
01:29:09,399 --> 01:29:13,199
pretty small terrestrial energy. It's actually a Canadian company, although

1802
01:29:13,199 --> 01:29:16,039
they also have a US group building an integral molten

1803
01:29:16,119 --> 01:29:20,119
salt reactor, so that is graphite moderated molten fluorine just

1804
01:29:20,239 --> 01:29:23,640
using regular uranium as a fuel. Three hundred and ninety

1805
01:29:23,680 --> 01:29:27,760
two megawatt. This is a normal sized reactor, really terrestrial energy.

1806
01:29:28,079 --> 01:29:31,520
And then the lar Atomics another one of the trisos

1807
01:29:31,520 --> 01:29:34,199
building a two hundred and fifty megawat tryso helium cold.

1808
01:29:34,359 --> 01:29:36,319
So let's talk to this three there's a couple of

1809
01:29:36,319 --> 01:29:38,600
pressurized water reactors. We've talked about those before. You know

1810
01:29:38,640 --> 01:29:43,279
how those work. There is a couple of sodium fast reactors.

1811
01:29:43,319 --> 01:29:44,600
Actually we can do that later because I'm going to

1812
01:29:44,640 --> 01:29:46,960
talk about terra power. And there is the molt salt reactors.

1813
01:29:46,960 --> 01:29:49,119
So the only one to really mission here that's different

1814
01:29:49,239 --> 01:29:52,720
are the trisos. So this is the idea of building

1815
01:29:52,760 --> 01:29:57,840
these sort of baseball size or tennis ball size spheres

1816
01:29:58,520 --> 01:30:03,279
that are a common donation of both carbon and uranium fuel,

1817
01:30:03,520 --> 01:30:06,479
so that they're self contained. They're naturally protected fuel. They

1818
01:30:06,520 --> 01:30:08,800
can't melt down. They expand as the heat up, which

1819
01:30:08,800 --> 01:30:10,800
actually slows the reaction on the They get really hot

1820
01:30:11,079 --> 01:30:12,359
six seventy eight hundred degrees.

1821
01:30:12,399 --> 01:30:14,479
Speaker 1: So is uranium on the inside, carbon on the outside

1822
01:30:14,520 --> 01:30:15,479
or is it all mixed together?

1823
01:30:15,560 --> 01:30:19,479
Speaker 2: Yeah, and silicon carbide is the protective layer. Okay, So

1824
01:30:20,399 --> 01:30:22,720
they're very hard, it's hard to manufacture. They appear to

1825
01:30:22,720 --> 01:30:25,800
be unrecyclable. Nobody's really figured out how to recycle these things. Okay,

1826
01:30:25,880 --> 01:30:28,199
but you get a bunch of them together and they

1827
01:30:28,279 --> 01:30:30,840
naturally heat up a lot. They get to hundreds of

1828
01:30:30,880 --> 01:30:32,600
degrees and then you just have to pump up fuel

1829
01:30:32,640 --> 01:30:35,560
over it. So one of the reactor designs used sodium

1830
01:30:35,560 --> 01:30:38,039
heat pipes, So just make the heat pipes hot, sodium

1831
01:30:38,079 --> 01:30:41,479
flows by, it doesn't even get contaminated by it, and

1832
01:30:41,600 --> 01:30:44,000
that's your heat. Most of the time they use helium. Yeah,

1833
01:30:44,039 --> 01:30:46,800
the most common trisode designs for pebble bed you let

1834
01:30:46,880 --> 01:30:50,079
superheat the helium. We don't have mature reactor designs for helium.

1835
01:30:50,119 --> 01:30:52,760
But helium cannot become radioactive. It's also hard to contain.

1836
01:30:52,880 --> 01:30:56,720
It's hard to contain. Yeah, but it's safe stuff relatively speaking.

1837
01:30:57,119 --> 01:30:58,880
In the past, we've read into problems with pebble beds

1838
01:30:58,880 --> 01:31:00,800
heating up their containers so much they cause the containers

1839
01:31:00,840 --> 01:31:05,560
to crack and then possibly even catch fire yanks. So

1840
01:31:06,640 --> 01:31:09,600
you just have to keep moving these pebbles through their store,

1841
01:31:10,079 --> 01:31:13,119
through the reaction area, and then down into container, and

1842
01:31:13,159 --> 01:31:16,640
it gradually as they get older, you know they're going

1843
01:31:16,720 --> 01:31:18,960
to become a stable and then you have to take

1844
01:31:19,000 --> 01:31:21,880
them out, so you have a continuous refueling process. You

1845
01:31:21,920 --> 01:31:24,119
just keep replacing the balls as they get old enough.

1846
01:31:24,159 --> 01:31:25,760
The last few years, So.

1847
01:31:25,720 --> 01:31:27,880
Speaker 1: Are these things designed by the same guys who designed

1848
01:31:27,880 --> 01:31:31,039
the McDonald's play Place ballpit Basically, it's kind of what,

1849
01:31:31,520 --> 01:31:34,359
don't go jumping in there, little hot It's kind of

1850
01:31:34,359 --> 01:31:35,479
what I envision in my head.

1851
01:31:35,600 --> 01:31:38,680
Speaker 2: Yeah, but imagine a column with these spheres just sort

1852
01:31:38,720 --> 01:31:40,760
of trickling down and then they get to the bottom,

1853
01:31:40,840 --> 01:31:43,079
they come out and they're sort of assessed for what

1854
01:31:43,119 --> 01:31:44,960
their relative energy is, and so that they go into

1855
01:31:44,960 --> 01:31:46,479
a storage, you know, or do they go back in

1856
01:31:46,520 --> 01:31:50,159
and come back around again. But yeah, it's are relatively

1857
01:31:50,159 --> 01:31:53,800
immature technologies, but it's possible, and this might be just

1858
01:31:53,840 --> 01:31:55,439
the thing to catalyze it. I would point out that

1859
01:31:55,439 --> 01:31:58,079
the US government is not funding any of these so far.

1860
01:31:58,680 --> 01:32:00,800
They all have their own fund. The main thing that

1861
01:32:00,840 --> 01:32:03,000
government has done with this new pilot I deal with

1862
01:32:03,000 --> 01:32:06,520
the DOE has provided them fuel. So up until now,

1863
01:32:06,600 --> 01:32:09,039
most of these companies have had a tough time actually

1864
01:32:09,039 --> 01:32:11,560
maturing the designs enough to be even able to get fuel.

1865
01:32:11,560 --> 01:32:14,640
But the rules have changed. The two other category is

1866
01:32:14,680 --> 01:32:17,079
pressurized water. In that cateador is a few trisos. There's

1867
01:32:17,079 --> 01:32:18,319
a couple of molten salts, and I want to talk

1868
01:32:18,319 --> 01:32:20,600
about salts apperately, and then we'll talk about the sodium fasts.

1869
01:32:21,239 --> 01:32:25,640
So back to molten salt reactors. Typically with thorium. The

1870
01:32:25,760 --> 01:32:30,960
Chinese with their TSMRILF one in WIWI built started construction

1871
01:32:31,039 --> 01:32:33,279
back in twenty eighteen and went critical in twenty twenty

1872
01:32:33,279 --> 01:32:36,600
three with a two megawatt thermal test reactor, so not

1873
01:32:36,640 --> 01:32:40,079
making electricity, just generating heat. They lit that reactor in

1874
01:32:40,119 --> 01:32:45,640
twenty three with your enriched uranium twenty four. Last year

1875
01:32:45,760 --> 01:32:49,880
they started adding thorium to the liquid fuel and successfully

1876
01:32:49,880 --> 01:32:52,039
brightened into uranium two thirty three. So one of the

1877
01:32:52,039 --> 01:32:55,560
secrets ofium salt reactors, which we talked about before, is

1878
01:32:55,600 --> 01:32:58,640
that you turn thorium into uranium to use it as

1879
01:32:58,640 --> 01:33:01,640
a fuel of uranium two thirty eight, which is the

1880
01:33:01,680 --> 01:33:04,520
most common kind for uranium two thirty five, the enriched

1881
01:33:04,560 --> 01:33:08,359
kind are you using uranium two thirty three. So that

1882
01:33:08,399 --> 01:33:11,319
plant has been completely successful. They've now proven they can

1883
01:33:11,359 --> 01:33:14,319
breathe thorium into you two thirty three, and so there's

1884
01:33:14,359 --> 01:33:17,760
now a one hundred megawatt plant to another test plant

1885
01:33:18,199 --> 01:33:21,840
for twenty thirty five this year. In September, I got

1886
01:33:21,840 --> 01:33:24,159
a chance to tour Copenhagen Atomics.

1887
01:33:24,239 --> 01:33:24,439
Speaker 1: Nice.

1888
01:33:24,600 --> 01:33:26,960
Speaker 2: They reached out to me and they liked their shows

1889
01:33:26,960 --> 01:33:29,199
that we've done, and they offered to take us for

1890
01:33:29,239 --> 01:33:31,359
a walk around. So I spent time with Thomas the CEO.

1891
01:33:31,399 --> 01:33:33,399
Spend a whole day with them. Actually, as he said,

1892
01:33:33,399 --> 01:33:34,800
it's the first time. It took him three hours to

1893
01:33:34,840 --> 01:33:39,239
do the one hour tour. I had a lot of questions.

1894
01:33:39,800 --> 01:33:41,760
Would you want a tour with me? It's a lot

1895
01:33:41,760 --> 01:33:44,039
of work, right. Well, we had a good time. You know,

1896
01:33:44,119 --> 01:33:45,399
he loves what he's talking about.

1897
01:33:45,479 --> 01:33:48,600
Speaker 1: I would want to tour with you for a distillery again, Yeah,

1898
01:33:48,640 --> 01:33:50,520
because the questions.

1899
01:33:50,079 --> 01:33:52,279
Speaker 2: The same thing, right, And that's we went deep into

1900
01:33:52,359 --> 01:33:55,760
the into the questions. So his concept is a container

1901
01:33:55,840 --> 01:33:59,960
size reactor really for industry. That's about forty mega WA.

1902
01:34:00,039 --> 01:34:05,000
It's electrical in one hundred megawatts of heat using thorium,

1903
01:34:05,039 --> 01:34:08,119
with a reactor designed to be replaced on a routine basis,

1904
01:34:08,439 --> 01:34:10,079
so you kind of fuel it. Once you run it

1905
01:34:10,119 --> 01:34:12,399
for a few years, you drain the fuel out of it.

1906
01:34:12,479 --> 01:34:16,119
You take the entire reactor, simply out store it until

1907
01:34:16,159 --> 01:34:19,000
it can be reprocessed and put another reactor in. Is

1908
01:34:19,079 --> 01:34:22,520
design they call the onion design, so imagine onion sitting

1909
01:34:22,520 --> 01:34:23,960
on its end. So it's got a set of layers

1910
01:34:24,000 --> 01:34:25,960
in it that a utter most layer is what they

1911
01:34:26,000 --> 01:34:29,840
call a thorium breeding layer, where neutrons are hitting that

1912
01:34:29,920 --> 01:34:32,680
thorium and turning into the uranium two thirty three. The

1913
01:34:32,720 --> 01:34:37,760
next layer in is heavy water deudized water, and the

1914
01:34:37,840 --> 01:34:41,680
reason for the deuterium is it reflects neutrons well, so

1915
01:34:41,720 --> 01:34:44,960
it's their neutron reflector. Instead of graphite, which a lot

1916
01:34:44,960 --> 01:34:48,640
of other reactor designs, including the original thorium reactors used,

1917
01:34:49,159 --> 01:34:54,479
you're using deterium because you can control the reactor by

1918
01:34:54,479 --> 01:34:57,479
the amount of deuterium available. If the water flows out,

1919
01:34:57,560 --> 01:35:00,159
the reactor stops, and so you got to keep that

1920
01:35:00,199 --> 01:35:02,000
water cool. Because the reactor is running in like six

1921
01:35:02,119 --> 01:35:04,439
hundred degrees, the water's going to stay under one hundred

1922
01:35:04,439 --> 01:35:06,119
so he doesn't boil, but if it does, it actually

1923
01:35:06,159 --> 01:35:09,119
slows the reactor down, so it's safe. So then on

1924
01:35:09,159 --> 01:35:10,840
the inside you have the fuel layer, and this will

1925
01:35:10,880 --> 01:35:15,520
be a lifthium fluorine and thorium fluorine and uranium fluorine salts.

1926
01:35:16,039 --> 01:35:19,039
And then in the centuries this adjustable. The center part

1927
01:35:19,039 --> 01:35:21,960
of this is an adjustable heavy water level, so the

1928
01:35:22,000 --> 01:35:24,000
amount of heavy water in there controls your action. You

1929
01:35:24,000 --> 01:35:26,279
put in more water, reactor goes faster, take out the

1930
01:35:26,319 --> 01:35:31,159
water reactor goes slower, so they are sufficiently funded to

1931
01:35:31,239 --> 01:35:33,640
build their first test reactor. The funny part is they

1932
01:35:33,640 --> 01:35:35,840
can't run that reactor in Denmark without they don't have

1933
01:35:36,000 --> 01:35:38,159
they can't get a license for it. Then Denmark has

1934
01:35:38,159 --> 01:35:40,119
no new reactors, so they're actually going to set up

1935
01:35:40,159 --> 01:35:42,079
the rig in Switzerland where they're able to get a

1936
01:35:42,159 --> 01:35:44,319
test in twenty twenty seven. They have the money to

1937
01:35:44,359 --> 01:35:46,079
do this, they just got to actually do it. They're

1938
01:35:46,079 --> 01:35:47,720
going to run a reactor for a few months just

1939
01:35:47,760 --> 01:35:49,840
to prove the behavior and then do all the testing.

1940
01:35:50,319 --> 01:35:51,880
One of the biggest things I saw on the tour

1941
01:35:52,479 --> 01:35:54,640
is that they're building all of these test suites for

1942
01:35:54,760 --> 01:35:57,560
working with the molten salts. These are very high temperature salts,

1943
01:35:58,119 --> 01:36:01,640
and they sell these rigs to university, so they're essentially

1944
01:36:01,720 --> 01:36:04,399
training the next generation of engineers in Bolton Salt.

1945
01:36:04,600 --> 01:36:05,119
Speaker 1: Wow.

1946
01:36:05,399 --> 01:36:07,159
Speaker 2: And one of the things that Thomas showed me that

1947
01:36:07,319 --> 01:36:10,800
was really a deep insight for me was, you know,

1948
01:36:10,840 --> 01:36:13,600
fluorine salts are very corrosive. They'll destroy a lot of

1949
01:36:13,640 --> 01:36:17,840
They showed me some things that fluorine salt had eaten,

1950
01:36:17,560 --> 01:36:20,600
and so they've got these metals that can tolerate it.

1951
01:36:20,600 --> 01:36:22,920
But those metals can only take so much heat. So

1952
01:36:22,960 --> 01:36:24,920
one of the most complicated parts in any of these

1953
01:36:24,920 --> 01:36:28,199
reactors is the heat exchanger. So you want to flow

1954
01:36:28,279 --> 01:36:33,680
these radioactive salts through pipes beside other pipes that have

1955
01:36:33,800 --> 01:36:36,000
non radioactive salts in it, so you transfer the heat

1956
01:36:36,000 --> 01:36:38,880
from one to the other, keep the radioactive stuff in

1957
01:36:38,920 --> 01:36:42,399
the container, and then non radioactive hot salts flow back out.

1958
01:36:43,199 --> 01:36:47,439
Somewhere around six hundred degrees celsius, the metal starts to warp,

1959
01:36:48,279 --> 01:36:51,159
starts to melt, get soft, and you don't want any

1960
01:36:51,159 --> 01:36:52,920
of that stuff to leak. Like all of that is bad.

1961
01:36:53,800 --> 01:36:57,640
And so even though the fuel itself can go up

1962
01:36:57,640 --> 01:36:59,840
to one thy twelve hundred degrees, you just can't con

1963
01:37:00,039 --> 01:37:02,199
pain it well. So the part of the challenge this

1964
01:37:02,279 --> 01:37:04,840
is running into the temperatures where the materials will hold together.

1965
01:37:05,359 --> 01:37:07,680
Most of the work I see Copenhagen Atomics doing in

1966
01:37:07,720 --> 01:37:10,760
those labs is about finding the right materials to just

1967
01:37:10,840 --> 01:37:15,520
be able to tolerate all last be durable enough. I have

1968
01:37:15,600 --> 01:37:18,399
several hours of interviews of an interview that spending that

1969
01:37:18,479 --> 01:37:20,119
day with Thomas I could make into a show. At

1970
01:37:20,119 --> 01:37:22,720
some point of one of those radio lab edits sort

1971
01:37:22,760 --> 01:37:24,479
of summarize a lot of this, but it was very

1972
01:37:24,520 --> 01:37:27,800
insightful for me just to understand how challenging working these

1973
01:37:27,840 --> 01:37:31,199
high temperatures are, and they different reactor designs approaches to

1974
01:37:31,199 --> 01:37:35,239
doing this. Brilliant people. I'm really pleased to have met them. Okay,

1975
01:37:35,319 --> 01:37:37,680
let's talk about Terra Power. So this is a project

1976
01:37:37,680 --> 01:37:39,239
going all the way back to two thousand and six

1977
01:37:40,159 --> 01:37:41,880
that Bill Gates backed along with a bunch of other

1978
01:37:41,880 --> 01:37:44,239
people to build a reactor called Natrium. So this is

1979
01:37:44,279 --> 01:37:48,920
a sodium cooled fast reactor three hundred and fifty megawatts.

1980
01:37:49,640 --> 01:37:53,920
Their clever innovation is that they're going to use fluorine salts,

1981
01:37:54,000 --> 01:37:58,399
the lithium berrillium salts for heat exchange transfer and storage.

1982
01:37:58,840 --> 01:38:00,439
The idea of being they can store off of that

1983
01:38:00,479 --> 01:38:03,479
fluid that you could actually put out five hundred megawatts

1984
01:38:03,479 --> 01:38:05,600
of energy for up to five hours because you've got

1985
01:38:05,720 --> 01:38:09,720
enough hot salts. And again one of the problems you

1986
01:38:09,720 --> 01:38:11,960
have with sodium. We've been building sodium cool fast reactors

1987
01:38:11,960 --> 01:38:13,479
for a long time. So this is using the fast

1988
01:38:13,520 --> 01:38:18,039
neutron instead of the thermal neutron. When neutrons are split

1989
01:38:18,199 --> 01:38:23,039
off of your radioactive elements like uranium. They're moving very quickly,

1990
01:38:23,560 --> 01:38:27,600
and that's great if they hit another nucleus of an atom,

1991
01:38:27,720 --> 01:38:29,720
but they don't hit as often because they're moving so fast.

1992
01:38:30,079 --> 01:38:32,119
When they do hit, they tend to split everything, which

1993
01:38:32,159 --> 01:38:35,439
is great. You don't tend to make higher compounds as often.

1994
01:38:35,880 --> 01:38:37,479
But in order to have it work, you have to

1995
01:38:37,560 --> 01:38:41,000
run into higher reaction rates and so, and you use

1996
01:38:41,479 --> 01:38:44,199
molten sodium because sodium is transparent to the neutrons as

1997
01:38:44,239 --> 01:38:47,159
opposed to water. Water tends to absorb neutrons, which generates

1998
01:38:47,199 --> 01:38:50,039
heat and slows the neutrons down. That's why we work

1999
01:38:50,039 --> 01:38:52,199
in what we call the thermal range instead of the

2000
01:38:52,239 --> 01:38:54,920
fast range when you're dealing with a pressurized water reactor.

2001
01:38:56,119 --> 01:38:59,840
Same for when we use graphite. Graphite slows those neutrons down.

2002
01:39:01,079 --> 01:39:05,560
Heavy water in the Copenhagen Thomas design or in the

2003
01:39:05,600 --> 01:39:08,000
can Do design, same thing slows the neutrons down. But

2004
01:39:08,039 --> 01:39:10,520
if you keep the neutrons moving fast, you have some

2005
01:39:10,600 --> 01:39:13,439
advantages in the exchange. For it's risky and they're hard

2006
01:39:13,479 --> 01:39:15,560
to keep stable, and the main thing is it's hard

2007
01:39:15,560 --> 01:39:17,159
to power them up and power them down. So what's

2008
01:39:17,159 --> 01:39:19,680
clever about the natrium design is you run the reactor

2009
01:39:19,720 --> 01:39:21,359
at the same speed all the time. You get it

2010
01:39:21,359 --> 01:39:23,760
to speed and you leave it there because it's just

2011
01:39:23,920 --> 01:39:26,560
making more hot salt for you, and then you're cooling

2012
01:39:26,560 --> 01:39:29,199
that salt by making electricity with it. But you don't

2013
01:39:29,199 --> 01:39:31,119
have to slow it down when the demand goes down.

2014
01:39:31,159 --> 01:39:33,680
You just store the excess heat. So it's a way

2015
01:39:33,720 --> 01:39:36,720
to keep the reactor more stable. Very smart, also a

2016
01:39:36,760 --> 01:39:40,319
great nuclear waste burner. One of the reasons we've always

2017
01:39:40,319 --> 01:39:42,680
pushed on fast reactors is they're a way to break

2018
01:39:42,760 --> 01:39:47,119
higher actinides. Now salt reactors can also do that because

2019
01:39:47,119 --> 01:39:49,279
they can burn for so long, they can keep the

2020
01:39:49,279 --> 01:39:53,359
fuel in for far longer. What's the problem with sodium

2021
01:39:53,399 --> 01:39:55,840
cold reactors. Well, the first off is sodium is opaque,

2022
01:39:55,840 --> 01:39:57,960
so you can't see anything. If you want to do

2023
01:39:58,000 --> 01:39:59,560
any work on the reactor, you have to drain all

2024
01:39:59,560 --> 01:40:02,800
the sodium, and I mean all of the sodium, because

2025
01:40:02,840 --> 01:40:06,359
that sodium will burn in air and explode in water.

2026
01:40:06,479 --> 01:40:08,920
So it's very hard to clean out a reactor enough

2027
01:40:08,920 --> 01:40:10,720
to do any inspections and so forth with it. But

2028
01:40:10,760 --> 01:40:12,600
not that you do that very often, but it's part

2029
01:40:12,640 --> 01:40:15,239
of the challenge of working with sodium gold reactors. It's

2030
01:40:15,279 --> 01:40:17,840
easy to have fires when you have molten high temperature

2031
01:40:17,920 --> 01:40:21,520
molten solelyum flowing around. That stuff burns really, really easily.

2032
01:40:21,600 --> 01:40:25,520
Speaker 1: I heard a cool science thing that because sodium is

2033
01:40:25,560 --> 01:40:29,560
so opaque, that light travels through it slower than the

2034
01:40:29,600 --> 01:40:32,800
speed of light. And they did an experiment where I

2035
01:40:32,800 --> 01:40:34,960
don't know as you could actually see the light moving

2036
01:40:35,000 --> 01:40:39,039
through it, but it was measurable that it was very

2037
01:40:39,079 --> 01:40:40,039
slow getting through.

2038
01:40:40,199 --> 01:40:43,079
Speaker 2: Eventually, Yeah, I mean light speed of light is always

2039
01:40:43,079 --> 01:40:46,800
slower through every medium, right, but yeah, very slow through that.

2040
01:40:47,319 --> 01:40:49,920
So there is They actually have a sight in camera

2041
01:40:50,279 --> 01:40:54,520
Wyoming where they've built the salt side, so the storage

2042
01:40:54,560 --> 01:40:56,880
and the heating system. They don't actually have the final

2043
01:40:56,960 --> 01:41:00,399
license to run nukes through it yet. They're to build

2044
01:41:00,399 --> 01:41:03,880
the radioactive side, but they are close, and again with

2045
01:41:03,920 --> 01:41:08,199
the current regime and Washington, it's probably easier for them

2046
01:41:08,199 --> 01:41:09,840
to get right now. They also just took a six

2047
01:41:09,880 --> 01:41:13,319
hundred and fifty million dollars investment from in Nvidia. Wow,

2048
01:41:13,880 --> 01:41:18,680
so there's plenty of money around. These guys aren't started

2049
01:41:18,720 --> 01:41:21,399
for money. They also have a design they want to

2050
01:41:21,439 --> 01:41:24,520
build a new reactor called a molten chloride fast reactor

2051
01:41:24,560 --> 01:41:27,119
sometime in the future. So instead of using chluorine, using

2052
01:41:27,159 --> 01:41:30,399
chlorine salts, and you're dealing with the same compound. It's

2053
01:41:30,399 --> 01:41:32,720
in the same part of the periodic table. So they

2054
01:41:32,720 --> 01:41:35,880
have new reactory sides. But terror power is probably going

2055
01:41:35,960 --> 01:41:38,560
to get to heat and they're gonna build a sodium reactor.

2056
01:41:38,600 --> 01:41:42,479
We'll see how that goes cool. Hey, one last reactor

2057
01:41:42,479 --> 01:41:44,600
technology is from the University of Illinois. Just found this

2058
01:41:44,640 --> 01:41:50,159
recently using molten salt systems to for experiments, but now

2059
01:41:50,159 --> 01:41:53,000
they've actually applied for a license to produce electricity at

2060
01:41:53,039 --> 01:41:58,840
the university. This is that microreactor that Kirim was asking about,

2061
01:41:58,880 --> 01:42:01,920
like where I get reactor? So there's about twenty five

2062
01:42:01,960 --> 01:42:05,000
microreactors at different university chemists around the US. Right, they're

2063
01:42:05,000 --> 01:42:08,039
not really for making power, they're for doing nuclear experiments.

2064
01:42:08,479 --> 01:42:12,119
And so this little reactor is using triso fuel. So

2065
01:42:12,159 --> 01:42:17,640
back to those pebbles again, right, and they are encased

2066
01:42:17,680 --> 01:42:20,479
in graphite and use helium to transfer the heat to

2067
01:42:20,479 --> 01:42:26,239
spin a turbine to general electricity. And so they take

2068
01:42:26,279 --> 01:42:28,920
these spheres, they stack them up as as raw assemblies

2069
01:42:28,920 --> 01:42:31,479
and hexagonal as sddily all underground. This is called the

2070
01:42:31,680 --> 01:42:34,319
is made by a company called Chronos. This reactor design

2071
01:42:34,399 --> 01:42:37,439
and the helium loop runs at about six megapascals at

2072
01:42:37,479 --> 01:42:40,239
about six hundred degrees so plenty hot. Again mentioned that

2073
01:42:40,279 --> 01:42:42,319
magic number six hundred degrees because that's where you can

2074
01:42:42,359 --> 01:42:44,800
make the exchange your work and they're heating up that's

2075
01:42:44,800 --> 01:42:50,239
fahrenheit or that's celsius celsius. Okay, yeah, so six degrees yeah,

2076
01:42:50,600 --> 01:42:57,319
six degrees celsius is what eleven hundred fahrenheit, so hot,

2077
01:42:56,439 --> 01:43:01,800
do not touch touch, bad near And so they want

2078
01:43:01,800 --> 01:43:04,720
to use that helium loop because it can't become radioactive.

2079
01:43:04,800 --> 01:43:08,039
Going over those triso fuel to heat up a salt

2080
01:43:08,079 --> 01:43:15,720
loop of potassium nitrides and sodium nitrides at low pressure

2081
01:43:16,119 --> 01:43:20,319
so not heavily pressurized, but also very hot five hundred degrees,

2082
01:43:20,319 --> 01:43:23,319
and then that does heat exchange agains steam to generate electricity.

2083
01:43:23,479 --> 01:43:26,840
So nothing too fancy, but they've passed the NRC review,

2084
01:43:26,960 --> 01:43:29,000
so they expect to get a permit to do this

2085
01:43:29,039 --> 01:43:31,920
assembly next year and to actually generate electricity for the

2086
01:43:32,000 --> 01:43:33,960
University of Illinois twenty nine.

2087
01:43:34,000 --> 01:43:34,279
Speaker 1: Wow.

2088
01:43:34,439 --> 01:43:37,680
Speaker 2: Yeah, interesting, isn't it. That is interesting. Now, to be clear,

2089
01:43:37,880 --> 01:43:39,039
this is not something for your.

2090
01:43:38,880 --> 01:43:43,079
Speaker 1: Home, No, right, Sorry, Kiaren, this is yeah, it's it's

2091
01:43:43,079 --> 01:43:46,199
still a whole building. Right, It's a microreactor, but it's

2092
01:43:46,199 --> 01:43:51,079
not like it's not a generator. It's big, all right.

2093
01:43:51,079 --> 01:43:52,640
Speaker 2: We got to talk about the AI side of this

2094
01:43:52,720 --> 01:43:55,199
equation because all of the tech companies have been funding

2095
01:43:55,640 --> 01:43:58,399
different nuclear projects that most people have heard about Microsoft

2096
01:43:58,399 --> 01:44:00,600
and Three Mile Island right in the news for the

2097
01:44:00,640 --> 01:44:03,600
past couple of years. Here where Microsoft went to Constellation,

2098
01:44:03,640 --> 01:44:05,520
who the current owners of the Three Mile Island site.

2099
01:44:05,520 --> 01:44:07,399
Three Mile Island had the meltdown in seventy seven on

2100
01:44:07,479 --> 01:44:11,000
Reactor one two, but Reactor one continue to operate and

2101
01:44:11,239 --> 01:44:14,560
was only shut down in twenty nineteen for costs. Still

2102
01:44:14,560 --> 01:44:16,479
had twenty years of run life in it, but it

2103
01:44:16,520 --> 01:44:18,680
was cheaper to make power with natural gas, and so

2104
01:44:18,720 --> 01:44:21,720
they turned it off. It wasn't even worth operating. So

2105
01:44:21,840 --> 01:44:25,439
Microsoft has basically committed to buying power from it for

2106
01:44:25,439 --> 01:44:29,119
twenty years. And Constellation's actually certain it's going to cost

2107
01:44:29,119 --> 01:44:31,560
about two billion dollars to restart, but they should be

2108
01:44:31,600 --> 01:44:32,520
running in twenty twenty eight.

2109
01:44:32,600 --> 01:44:35,279
Speaker 1: Are they going to run with the new the new

2110
01:44:35,359 --> 01:44:36,920
style of reactor or they don't.

2111
01:44:37,239 --> 01:44:39,359
Speaker 2: This is just restarting the old reactor, which again it's

2112
01:44:39,399 --> 01:44:42,720
expensive to operate, but it's been running for decades. Just fine,

2113
01:44:42,760 --> 01:44:44,119
It's just they turned it off because it was too

2114
01:44:44,159 --> 01:44:46,680
expensive to run compared to the cheap natural gas, which,

2115
01:44:46,720 --> 01:44:48,600
by the way, natural gas is not that cheap these days.

2116
01:44:48,720 --> 01:44:52,039
Speaker 1: Right, It's pretty obvious why the AI companies want to,

2117
01:44:53,520 --> 01:44:55,720
you know, are interested in nuclear power because they need

2118
01:44:55,840 --> 01:44:58,359
a lot of energy for their data centers, which, right,

2119
01:44:58,399 --> 01:45:01,880
that's why they want to locate the in close proximity

2120
01:45:01,920 --> 01:45:05,319
to these power plants. We have the same issue that

2121
01:45:06,039 --> 01:45:12,680
happened in Waterford, Connecticut, where Dominion E otherwise known as

2122
01:45:12,720 --> 01:45:16,479
Millstone Nuclear Power Plant sits at the at the edge

2123
01:45:16,479 --> 01:45:20,560
of the ocean there or the sound, and there was

2124
01:45:21,079 --> 01:45:23,760
something on the table for some company to come in

2125
01:45:23,800 --> 01:45:25,439
and buy up the land next to it and put

2126
01:45:25,439 --> 01:45:28,159
in a data center, and everybody said no.

2127
01:45:28,760 --> 01:45:32,159
Speaker 2: So yeah, well, let's talk about the AI side in

2128
01:45:32,159 --> 01:45:33,560
just a minute, because I would just want to say,

2129
01:45:33,560 --> 01:45:37,239
Microsoft's not unique. Google just announced they're restarting the Cedar

2130
01:45:37,319 --> 01:45:39,880
Rapids Idaho reactor has been shut down for five years.

2131
01:45:39,920 --> 01:45:42,479
This six hundred megawaute reactor that was built and operated

2132
01:45:42,479 --> 01:45:45,199
in originally nineteen seventy five, shut down in twenty twenty

2133
01:45:45,239 --> 01:45:48,880
again for cost, and Google's basically said we'll buy power

2134
01:45:48,880 --> 01:45:51,600
from it for twenty five years. Yeah, and so'll they

2135
01:45:51,640 --> 01:45:53,640
say it'll take for four more years to restart, so

2136
01:45:53,680 --> 01:45:56,039
somewhere in twenty nine it'll be up and running again.

2137
01:45:57,439 --> 01:46:01,399
Amazon announced funding They put five million dollars into a

2138
01:46:01,439 --> 01:46:04,760
new reactor design and called the XE one hundred. This

2139
01:46:04,840 --> 01:46:10,479
is another triso helium cooled high temperature gas reactor. The

2140
01:46:10,520 --> 01:46:15,000
individual reactors eighty megawats electrical two hundred megawats heat their

2141
01:46:15,039 --> 01:46:17,720
normal configuration, and they've got a license to build one

2142
01:46:17,720 --> 01:46:20,199
in Washington State with four reactors for three hundred and

2143
01:46:20,239 --> 01:46:24,279
twenty megawatts. And again Amazon committing to buying all that power.

2144
01:46:24,800 --> 01:46:26,680
So all the tech companies have been doing this. And

2145
01:46:26,720 --> 01:46:29,520
then you know, the other category of question I got

2146
01:46:29,520 --> 01:46:31,760
a ton of coming into this was what is the

2147
01:46:31,800 --> 01:46:35,479
impact of AI and power generation? So Jake Fox, friend

2148
01:46:35,479 --> 01:46:38,720
of Charles on the Blue Sky, Mats Carlson, who's been

2149
01:46:38,760 --> 01:46:41,199
on the show before, saying, talk to us about what's

2150
01:46:41,239 --> 01:46:43,880
the impact on AI, and I sort of gave this

2151
01:46:43,920 --> 01:46:47,319
away at the beginning of the show. Is a AI

2152
01:46:47,399 --> 01:46:50,600
technologies and the building of data centers responsible for increasing power.

2153
01:46:50,720 --> 01:46:53,920
Energy is like, well, yeah, a little, But the bigger

2154
01:46:53,960 --> 01:46:56,960
issue here is power prices were going up anyway because

2155
01:46:57,000 --> 01:47:00,199
the cost of improving the industry trastructure to support or

2156
01:47:00,319 --> 01:47:04,079
the large diversity of power is costing money and taking time.

2157
01:47:04,279 --> 01:47:07,520
And while it's easy to blame various individual points for

2158
01:47:07,600 --> 01:47:11,319
why that's happening, it's not the only reason. We have

2159
01:47:11,399 --> 01:47:13,600
put a lot of power online. In many cases, we

2160
01:47:13,640 --> 01:47:15,520
have power in that's not even on the grid yet

2161
01:47:15,520 --> 01:47:17,359
because it's taking so long to get it added to

2162
01:47:17,439 --> 01:47:20,319
the grid. They're not used to new power adding to

2163
01:47:20,319 --> 01:47:23,239
the grid all the time. It destabilizes it. The grid

2164
01:47:23,279 --> 01:47:26,479
has been built, especially in the US, to increase power

2165
01:47:26,520 --> 01:47:30,239
production roughly at half a percent per year, and suddenly

2166
01:47:30,239 --> 01:47:32,399
we're asking it to grow faster than that one or

2167
01:47:32,439 --> 01:47:35,640
two percent, and they're just not built for it. So

2168
01:47:35,720 --> 01:47:39,159
they're struggling to adopt new power sources, to deal with

2169
01:47:39,199 --> 01:47:41,800
bi directional loads, to deal with intermitt and power, to

2170
01:47:41,840 --> 01:47:44,439
deal with storage, none of the things that these grids

2171
01:47:44,479 --> 01:47:49,000
were originally built for, and we have North America has

2172
01:47:49,039 --> 01:47:53,920
consistently underspent on maintaining infrastructure. The infrastructure wasn't built for

2173
01:47:54,000 --> 01:47:57,119
this it hadn't been well maintained. It was built to

2174
01:47:57,199 --> 01:48:01,079
the minimum necessary for the basic uses, and now it's

2175
01:48:01,119 --> 01:48:04,039
not being able to cope with what we're asking to do,

2176
01:48:04,319 --> 01:48:07,760
including the additional demand of data centers.

2177
01:48:07,479 --> 01:48:10,439
Speaker 1: And the politicians have historically kicked the can down the

2178
01:48:10,520 --> 01:48:11,960
road for everybody else to deal with.

2179
01:48:12,319 --> 01:48:15,279
Speaker 2: Sure, because it's maintenance, right, and maintenance isn't sexy.

2180
01:48:15,560 --> 01:48:15,960
Speaker 1: Nope.

2181
01:48:17,279 --> 01:48:20,520
Speaker 2: I would also say that the perception of the amount

2182
01:48:20,560 --> 01:48:26,079
of power that AI needs is distorted. These companies, these

2183
01:48:26,119 --> 01:48:30,640
tech companies are using shell companies. They're creating entities to

2184
01:48:30,760 --> 01:48:35,479
hide who's building the data centers. They're also ordering up

2185
01:48:35,520 --> 01:48:37,199
as much stuff as they can anywhere they can get

2186
01:48:37,239 --> 01:48:40,840
a deal, they will immediately or request power for it,

2187
01:48:40,880 --> 01:48:43,199
whether they're going to build on there or not off

2188
01:48:43,239 --> 01:48:45,960
of the same Compani's got half a dozen different contracts

2189
01:48:45,960 --> 01:48:48,079
at once, but probably only has the ingredients to build

2190
01:48:48,079 --> 01:48:51,800
in one location. So there's more land being grabbed up,

2191
01:48:51,840 --> 01:48:54,760
there's more orders for parts they possibly needed. This is

2192
01:48:54,760 --> 01:48:57,319
why ram prices and other things are going through the roof,

2193
01:48:57,680 --> 01:49:01,000
because they're putting out all these outstanding orders to justify

2194
01:49:01,039 --> 01:49:03,920
the demand for licensing and power in a lot of

2195
01:49:03,920 --> 01:49:06,119
these locations. We don't know how many of these are

2196
01:49:06,159 --> 01:49:08,840
even going to be built, right, irrespective of the AI

2197
01:49:08,880 --> 01:49:12,800
bubble bursting or not. They're deliberately putting in multiple applications,

2198
01:49:13,279 --> 01:49:15,800
deliberately putting in multiple orders. It's one of those things

2199
01:49:15,800 --> 01:49:18,399
where hey, I want to get one of these, but

2200
01:49:18,439 --> 01:49:21,159
they're scarce, so I order five, right, and if I

2201
01:49:21,199 --> 01:49:23,560
get one comes through, then I'll cancel the others. Well,

2202
01:49:23,600 --> 01:49:27,239
that's happening with these data centers, right. They're ordering as

2203
01:49:27,319 --> 01:49:29,359
much as they can possibly order it, as many places

2204
01:49:29,399 --> 01:49:31,880
they can, all the chances they get some of what

2205
01:49:31,960 --> 01:49:35,720
they think they're going to need. It's all projection, right, Nobody,

2206
01:49:35,880 --> 01:49:38,479
Their demands aren't that high, and so you're seeing these

2207
01:49:38,479 --> 01:49:41,880
asymmetrical results where some companies are saying, we have GPUs

2208
01:49:41,920 --> 01:49:43,640
in storage with know where to plug them in. We've

2209
01:49:43,640 --> 01:49:46,000
built on a day center, we can't get power. And

2210
01:49:46,520 --> 01:49:49,119
the crazy part that's happening lately, we're going to put

2211
01:49:49,279 --> 01:49:53,399
data centers in space right right, which we talked briefly

2212
01:49:53,439 --> 01:49:56,640
on the space side, but there's more to that story, right, Like,

2213
01:49:58,199 --> 01:50:01,359
this is a really complicated had set of problems being

2214
01:50:01,520 --> 01:50:06,560
exacerbated by this competition to overbuild in many different locations,

2215
01:50:06,600 --> 01:50:09,640
and the pressure is showing. The reason the space thing

2216
01:50:09,720 --> 01:50:13,119
showed up is that every kind of power development now

2217
01:50:13,199 --> 01:50:15,760
has gone up in price, even the cheapest power like

2218
01:50:16,079 --> 01:50:19,319
combined cycle natural gas plants. The prices on the stuff

2219
01:50:19,359 --> 01:50:23,720
is soled. Yeah, there's currently licensing out for one hundred

2220
01:50:23,720 --> 01:50:26,920
and twenty new gas fower plants by twenty thirty in

2221
01:50:26,960 --> 01:50:30,039
the US alone for eighty gigawatts of power. Wow. The

2222
01:50:30,119 --> 01:50:33,840
previous five years they built thirty five gigawatts, and that

2223
01:50:34,000 --> 01:50:37,039
was rapid building because it was the cheapest power. Part

2224
01:50:37,079 --> 01:50:38,760
of the issue you're running into is you can only

2225
01:50:38,760 --> 01:50:41,800
build these steam turbines so fast. There's three companies that

2226
01:50:41,880 --> 01:50:45,520
make steam turbines at scale, gee Verona, Siemens, and Missionbishi.

2227
01:50:46,199 --> 01:50:50,640
All of them are back ordered hugely. So you know,

2228
01:50:52,039 --> 01:50:54,159
five years ago, if you wanted to build a gas

2229
01:50:54,159 --> 01:50:56,800
power plant, you could expect to pay about one thousand

2230
01:50:56,880 --> 01:51:00,840
dollars a kilowatt, right, and you typically we take you

2231
01:51:00,880 --> 01:51:03,279
thirty months to build that thing, and you'll be a

2232
01:51:03,439 --> 01:51:05,880
three hundred to five hundred megawat power plant in about

2233
01:51:05,880 --> 01:51:10,439
thousand old kill. What Now it's three times that price, right?

2234
01:51:10,520 --> 01:51:13,359
And there used to be you know a one point

2235
01:51:13,399 --> 01:51:16,159
two gigawat power plant which would take thirty months to build.

2236
01:51:16,199 --> 01:51:19,520
Now they're talking twice that five years. And in many cases,

2237
01:51:19,520 --> 01:51:22,279
if you're talking about the normal power plant builds, when

2238
01:51:22,279 --> 01:51:25,720
you're dealing with your normal half percent growth, part of

2239
01:51:25,760 --> 01:51:28,439
your agreement with your government for building that power plant

2240
01:51:28,520 --> 01:51:30,119
is that you will build it on time. And so

2241
01:51:30,199 --> 01:51:32,199
now this shortage of supply is meant that a bunch

2242
01:51:32,239 --> 01:51:35,119
of normal power plants are going to get canceled because

2243
01:51:35,119 --> 01:51:37,399
they can't deliver on time because of the supply chain

2244
01:51:37,439 --> 01:51:39,600
pressures that have you put on this. It's got to

2245
01:51:39,600 --> 01:51:42,520
the point where other companies are desperate to build termines.

2246
01:51:42,560 --> 01:51:44,279
So this is this company I've been paying attention to

2247
01:51:44,319 --> 01:51:48,640
called Boomer Supersonic. They want to build a supersonic biz jet. Right,

2248
01:51:48,680 --> 01:51:51,680
we have no supersonic commercial aircraft anymore since Concor was gone.

2249
01:51:51,680 --> 01:51:55,000
They're gone. So one point five seven mock aircraft. I'll

2250
01:51:55,039 --> 01:51:56,600
probably never get a chance to fly in it. But

2251
01:51:56,640 --> 01:51:58,640
they made in order to get an engine to fly

2252
01:51:58,760 --> 01:52:01,079
that fast, they did a customer turbine out of a

2253
01:52:01,079 --> 01:52:06,359
company called Florida Turbine Technologies, and recently they got a

2254
01:52:06,439 --> 01:52:09,920
three hundred million dollar funding out of the Silicon Valley

2255
01:52:10,560 --> 01:52:13,920
to build turbines for energy generation. So they're going to

2256
01:52:14,079 --> 01:52:17,720
hijack the production line at Florida Turbine instead of making

2257
01:52:17,720 --> 01:52:22,039
the turbides for the aircraft, to make them for electricity generation.

2258
01:52:23,000 --> 01:52:24,199
Now they're gonna be able to use that money to

2259
01:52:24,199 --> 01:52:26,760
fund the aircraft because they were struggling for enough money. Right,

2260
01:52:26,800 --> 01:52:29,199
They're going to be testing of turbine for general energy

2261
01:52:29,239 --> 01:52:32,720
generation in twenty twenty six, production in twenty thirty. It's crazy,

2262
01:52:32,800 --> 01:52:37,720
that's a different world. Well, it's what And we're all

2263
01:52:39,000 --> 01:52:42,319
veterans of the dot combo right and of the dot

2264
01:52:42,359 --> 01:52:45,720
com bubble, and we can feel that this is a bubble.

2265
01:52:46,119 --> 01:52:49,119
And so there's only so much time before this bubble

2266
01:52:49,199 --> 01:52:50,920
ends and a lot of these orders go away. In

2267
01:52:50,960 --> 01:52:53,640
the meantime, you're hurting a lot of people, right, you're

2268
01:52:53,640 --> 01:52:55,880
disrupting a lot of industry. Don't try and build a

2269
01:52:55,920 --> 01:52:57,680
PC right now, you're going to play five times the

2270
01:52:57,760 --> 01:53:00,439
price for RAM. And that's just because of back orders,

2271
01:53:00,479 --> 01:53:03,520
not because there's not much ram and needed. But everybody's

2272
01:53:03,520 --> 01:53:07,359
been protecting these straight lines in demand which are never true,

2273
01:53:08,000 --> 01:53:12,159
and sending their groups out to order and doing redundant

2274
01:53:12,239 --> 01:53:15,279
ordering multiple times two, three, four times more what they need.

2275
01:53:15,600 --> 01:53:17,560
And if just simply wipe the market out, it is

2276
01:53:17,600 --> 01:53:21,319
another like we had coming out of the pandemic, a

2277
01:53:21,520 --> 01:53:26,479
supply chain inflation crisis where the demand you're over demanding

2278
01:53:26,520 --> 01:53:28,479
the supply chain at the point where prices are just

2279
01:53:28,520 --> 01:53:30,600
going through the roof for folks who need stuff, and

2280
01:53:30,640 --> 01:53:35,159
that just means everything's more expensive. And for what, right

2281
01:53:35,359 --> 01:53:37,479
you know, if this bubble actually bursts in twenty twenty six,

2282
01:53:37,600 --> 01:53:39,079
like so much of this is going to go away,

2283
01:53:39,399 --> 01:53:42,520
and the guy and someone who put their hands on

2284
01:53:42,680 --> 01:53:44,800
expensive parts because they needed them at the time are

2285
01:53:44,840 --> 01:53:47,960
going to be in a terrible situation. The joke is

2286
01:53:48,560 --> 01:53:51,880
these new power generations technologies, especially wind and solar, like

2287
01:53:51,880 --> 01:53:56,079
they have no consumables. The wind always blows, you know,

2288
01:53:56,439 --> 01:53:59,479
intermittent at times. The sun comes up every day, and

2289
01:53:59,520 --> 01:54:02,039
so they key getting cheaper. Same for batteries. The batteries

2290
01:54:02,039 --> 01:54:04,720
just keep getting cheaper because really once you build them,

2291
01:54:04,720 --> 01:54:06,840
they last. Right, We're getting twenty years out of these

2292
01:54:06,880 --> 01:54:09,680
batteries like that combination is pretty powerful. And so this

2293
01:54:10,119 --> 01:54:12,880
every other power source has this consumable problem. Right, and

2294
01:54:12,960 --> 01:54:16,079
here we've got these non consumables. If we weren't being irrational,

2295
01:54:16,159 --> 01:54:19,000
this would be pretty easy to do. But we've got

2296
01:54:19,439 --> 01:54:22,560
we've got problems stacked on a problem. As these new

2297
01:54:22,560 --> 01:54:25,359
technologies have emerged, it has made the grid more complicated.

2298
01:54:25,560 --> 01:54:27,439
It's taking time for the grid and the especially the

2299
01:54:27,520 --> 01:54:30,159
regulators to get into play, to start actually working with it.

2300
01:54:30,239 --> 01:54:32,840
Right now, we've throw this extra layer on top of it,

2301
01:54:32,880 --> 01:54:37,159
with this bubble of building out AI technologies excessively, and

2302
01:54:37,199 --> 01:54:41,720
it's complicated everything largely unnecessarily, and we know it will

2303
01:54:41,760 --> 01:54:45,720
go away soon. Yeah, and all this disruption will be

2304
01:54:45,720 --> 01:54:46,079
for naught.

2305
01:54:46,359 --> 01:54:50,079
Speaker 1: Maybe we should just shift a little bit to economics

2306
01:54:50,119 --> 01:54:55,399
because the certainly the United States stock market is being

2307
01:54:55,439 --> 01:54:58,119
propped up by all these AI stocks. Oh sure, and

2308
01:54:58,159 --> 01:55:01,159
the rest of them are family I mean, they're not failing,

2309
01:55:01,199 --> 01:55:01,760
but they're.

2310
01:55:01,800 --> 01:55:03,399
Speaker 2: They're not doing particularly well.

2311
01:55:03,479 --> 01:55:06,359
Speaker 1: You know, they're they're not doing any Yeah, they're not

2312
01:55:06,439 --> 01:55:11,680
doing well. And so all it takes is one default

2313
01:55:12,039 --> 01:55:16,920
on a loan by one of these AI companies and

2314
01:55:17,199 --> 01:55:19,880
you know, you're pulling at the thread and it's going

2315
01:55:19,920 --> 01:55:22,319
to unravel. And we know it's going to unravel next year.

2316
01:55:22,479 --> 01:55:24,520
So but it's going to have an effect on the

2317
01:55:24,720 --> 01:55:27,079
entire economy, the world economy.

2318
01:55:27,239 --> 01:55:29,319
Speaker 2: Yep, Well, the S and P five hundred for better

2319
01:55:29,399 --> 01:55:32,920
or worse, represents about fifty percent of the equity value

2320
01:55:32,960 --> 01:55:35,239
of the planet. Yeah, eighty percent of the value in

2321
01:55:35,239 --> 01:55:39,319
the US. So when it takes a twenty thirty percent haircut,

2322
01:55:39,319 --> 01:55:43,199
which is what this insanity ending, looks like everybody's.

2323
01:55:42,720 --> 01:55:44,600
Speaker 1: Going to fall. So just in the last few weeks,

2324
01:55:44,600 --> 01:55:47,880
silver has gone from like twenty three or thirty to

2325
01:55:48,239 --> 01:55:51,880
sixty eight dollars an ounce. It's just shooting up. And

2326
01:55:51,880 --> 01:55:53,960
that tells you that people are protecting their money. The

2327
01:55:54,000 --> 01:55:55,840
smart money is taking it out of the market and

2328
01:55:55,880 --> 01:56:00,239
putting it into precious metals, and silver is rising highigher

2329
01:56:00,319 --> 01:56:01,359
than even gold is.

2330
01:56:01,520 --> 01:56:05,359
Speaker 2: Yeah, so what you're seeing, you know, to answer the question,

2331
01:56:05,560 --> 01:56:08,159
is they are responsible when you're seeing an amplification of

2332
01:56:08,159 --> 01:56:11,000
a set of problems that we're going to raise prices anyway,

2333
01:56:12,399 --> 01:56:14,800
and they're raising them faster. And it's amazing to hear

2334
01:56:14,840 --> 01:56:17,039
the good news stories like and yet batteries are still

2335
01:56:17,079 --> 01:56:19,119
cheaper with all of this pressure, right, So it makes

2336
01:56:19,119 --> 01:56:21,199
you wonder when the crazy is over, like, how cheap

2337
01:56:21,199 --> 01:56:23,479
our battery is going to be? Because I suspect they're

2338
01:56:23,479 --> 01:56:26,680
going to be even less. And I mean, on one hand,

2339
01:56:26,720 --> 01:56:29,439
I'm happy to see money being put into innovating on

2340
01:56:29,479 --> 01:56:32,039
a bunch of these new power generation technologies. I would

2341
01:56:32,079 --> 01:56:34,520
like small module reactors to be mature. There's a bunch

2342
01:56:34,560 --> 01:56:38,840
of advantages to building small reactors. You know those big reactors,

2343
01:56:38,840 --> 01:56:41,960
the AP one thousands and the EPRs where they last

2344
01:56:41,960 --> 01:56:44,840
sixty years. It means that you consistently have a problem

2345
01:56:44,960 --> 01:56:47,560
every few decades, you have to relearn how to make

2346
01:56:47,600 --> 01:56:50,720
come again, all right, and with new models of it.

2347
01:56:50,800 --> 01:56:53,560
And so if we've got into a model where like

2348
01:56:53,600 --> 01:56:56,279
the Copenhagen model, and many of these are the reactors models,

2349
01:56:56,279 --> 01:56:58,359
where they're replaced every few years, it means you would

2350
01:56:58,359 --> 01:57:02,039
have a continuous production of new small reactors. And that

2351
01:57:02,319 --> 01:57:05,479
allows for more optimization and a more stable market for

2352
01:57:05,520 --> 01:57:05,880
all of these.

2353
01:57:06,199 --> 01:57:09,039
Speaker 1: So a smarter workforce, right, I mean, you don't have

2354
01:57:09,119 --> 01:57:12,359
to people who built those reactors don't have to worry

2355
01:57:12,399 --> 01:57:14,239
about it for sixty years. So in the meantime, another

2356
01:57:14,279 --> 01:57:17,279
generation has to come up and learn all over again.

2357
01:57:17,479 --> 01:57:20,319
Speaker 2: Right. But if we had a continuous supply line so

2358
01:57:20,359 --> 01:57:23,079
that you're building reactors every day and you have factories

2359
01:57:23,119 --> 01:57:26,199
that do that, and you're replacing reactors that last to

2360
01:57:26,880 --> 01:57:32,399
five years, then that also means more intivations, better reactors.

2361
01:57:32,399 --> 01:57:34,520
We don't it's hard to build a better reactors on

2362
01:57:34,560 --> 01:57:36,520
it if you only do it once every fifty years.

2363
01:57:36,600 --> 01:57:39,720
Speaker 1: Now would you say that they're the trend? And I

2364
01:57:39,760 --> 01:57:41,159
don't know if you know this or not or what

2365
01:57:41,199 --> 01:57:42,840
you think, but what do you think about the trend

2366
01:57:42,880 --> 01:57:45,840
of having reactors not at the building level, but maybe

2367
01:57:45,880 --> 01:57:49,680
at the town level or the ten thousand people level

2368
01:57:49,720 --> 01:57:51,920
of the ten thousand home service level.

2369
01:57:52,000 --> 01:57:54,239
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that's we're going to see that emerge.

2370
01:57:54,439 --> 01:57:57,560
That's what small modular really speaks to. And again, if

2371
01:57:57,560 --> 01:57:59,600
you're not doing fuel handling. It's one of the things

2372
01:57:59,600 --> 01:58:02,479
about these small reactors is they run for two or

2373
01:58:02,520 --> 01:58:04,680
five years without any fuel handling at Also, the most

2374
01:58:04,720 --> 01:58:08,319
dangerous exercise doesn't happen in that site, so they can

2375
01:58:08,399 --> 01:58:11,640
be closer to people than regular reactors are. Fuel handling

2376
01:58:11,680 --> 01:58:13,520
is a dangerous part. That's where trouble happens.

2377
01:58:13,560 --> 01:58:13,680
Speaker 1: Right.

2378
01:58:13,720 --> 01:58:15,920
Speaker 2: But this idea that you drop a reactor into some

2379
01:58:16,000 --> 01:58:18,600
kind of containment, even underground, and it runs for two

2380
01:58:18,720 --> 01:58:20,960
years with nothing being done to it. At the end

2381
01:58:20,960 --> 01:58:22,960
of two years, they show back up, take the whole

2382
01:58:22,960 --> 01:58:26,399
assembly away and put another one in. It's safer, it's

2383
01:58:26,399 --> 01:58:29,119
more reliable, and it maintains a skill set to allow

2384
01:58:29,159 --> 01:58:31,720
them to continuously improve. And maybe this is the way

2385
01:58:31,720 --> 01:58:34,279
we end up doing it. It's a stupid way, this

2386
01:58:34,439 --> 01:58:37,079
AI padic and these tech companies dumping money into it,

2387
01:58:37,399 --> 01:58:40,560
but it's still a way, and so if it comes

2388
01:58:40,560 --> 01:58:43,119
out that way, we'll be better off as society or

2389
01:58:43,159 --> 01:58:45,520
as a civilization. I just wish we didn't have to

2390
01:58:45,520 --> 01:58:48,159
do it quite this dumb. Yeah, that's what I got, brother.

2391
01:58:48,239 --> 01:58:51,479
Are we going to talk about fusion? It's not a

2392
01:58:51,520 --> 01:58:54,560
lot of good news on the fusion side. Eider Projects

2393
01:58:54,560 --> 01:58:56,800
slowly calling along like all of the company. You know

2394
01:58:56,920 --> 01:58:59,439
that old story and I said eight years ago when

2395
01:59:00,079 --> 01:59:02,680
when the scientists are well funded, they don't talk, right,

2396
01:59:02,800 --> 01:59:06,039
So like Commonwealth, Fusion well funded. A couple of news

2397
01:59:06,039 --> 01:59:08,239
stories here and there, but we haven't seen anything. They've

2398
01:59:08,239 --> 01:59:11,239
got enough money. They're building their reactor, right, there's no

2399
01:59:11,399 --> 01:59:14,880
news to talk about it. Tider keeps inching along, you know,

2400
01:59:15,119 --> 01:59:17,960
spending billions and billions, but they put out their steady

2401
01:59:17,960 --> 01:59:19,880
streaming new stories. But they're not finished, yet no light

2402
01:59:19,960 --> 01:59:23,159
there like we're not seeing new light. We are seeing

2403
01:59:23,279 --> 01:59:25,600
is that a bunch of companies are well funded, but

2404
01:59:25,840 --> 01:59:28,720
all of them, all of those their dollogies, are further

2405
01:59:28,840 --> 01:59:33,319
away from actually making electricity. Right. One of the biggest

2406
01:59:33,319 --> 01:59:34,840
issues you have with fusion, and we talked about this

2407
01:59:34,880 --> 01:59:37,000
last year and it hasn't changed, is you need a

2408
01:59:37,000 --> 01:59:39,439
lot of deterium and tritium to run them, and that

2409
01:59:39,479 --> 01:59:41,920
takes a lot of energy to make that stuff. So

2410
01:59:41,960 --> 01:59:46,199
we don't have a fuel pipeline for fusion reactors. How

2411
01:59:46,239 --> 01:59:48,880
do we actually make enough fuel. We make a few

2412
01:59:49,319 --> 01:59:52,239
tens of grams of tritium a year, and now we're

2413
01:59:52,239 --> 01:59:55,039
going to need tons of it. Now, first we need

2414
01:59:55,079 --> 01:59:57,039
to react. You can't you're not going to build a

2415
01:59:57,039 --> 01:59:59,880
supply line when the machine doesn't exist. So we do

2416
02:00:00,119 --> 02:00:02,399
have to build the reactor first, which we have not done.

2417
02:00:02,840 --> 02:00:05,239
But when it does happen, the next problem will be, Okay,

2418
02:00:05,279 --> 02:00:06,840
how do we get this thing fuel and start to

2419
02:00:06,840 --> 02:00:09,039
build it at scale? And it's never going to be

2420
02:00:09,319 --> 02:00:12,159
power toomb cheap to meter, right, Like the bottom line

2421
02:00:12,199 --> 02:00:15,720
is just operating a grid costs five to ten cents

2422
02:00:15,720 --> 02:00:17,239
a kill a one hour, so They're always going to

2423
02:00:17,239 --> 02:00:20,199
build for something. The cost of the electricity is not

2424
02:00:20,479 --> 02:00:23,760
the hard part. It's never been the hard part. Distributing

2425
02:00:23,800 --> 02:00:26,079
it and keeping an infrastructure up there running it. That's

2426
02:00:26,119 --> 02:00:26,399
the heart.

2427
02:00:26,520 --> 02:00:28,079
Speaker 1: The name of my next band is going to be

2428
02:00:28,159 --> 02:00:29,520
Magnetic Donut.

2429
02:00:30,760 --> 02:00:32,439
Speaker 2: Took am Max a good name. I like took him

2430
02:00:33,680 --> 02:00:34,279
took him Max.

2431
02:00:34,479 --> 02:00:36,760
Speaker 1: Well, that certainly wasn't I don't put.

2432
02:00:36,760 --> 02:00:38,840
Speaker 2: I didn't talk about fusion on this show because there

2433
02:00:38,920 --> 02:00:40,119
just wasn't a lot to talk about.

2434
02:00:40,199 --> 02:00:42,640
Speaker 1: Yeah, Okay, they're funded, they're working on it. We'll get

2435
02:00:42,640 --> 02:00:45,600
back to you in a few thousand years, hopefully sooner. Richard.

2436
02:00:45,920 --> 02:00:49,840
What can I say? Man, you're amazing. Thank you, long show,

2437
02:00:49,920 --> 02:00:50,359
my friends.

2438
02:00:50,399 --> 02:00:52,760
Speaker 2: Sorry, but so much to talk about, and I hope

2439
02:00:52,800 --> 02:00:55,199
I address people's questions. Of course, you can always send

2440
02:00:55,239 --> 02:00:58,239
me more. I'm happy to talk further and put some comments. Yeah,

2441
02:00:58,279 --> 02:00:59,880
I'll send you a copy of music Coba.

2442
02:01:00,159 --> 02:01:02,479
Speaker 1: You got it. We'll see what happens, all right, We'll

2443
02:01:02,520 --> 02:01:25,960
see you next time on dot net Rocks. Dot net

2444
02:01:26,039 --> 02:01:29,000
Rocks is brought to you by Franklin's Net and produced

2445
02:01:29,000 --> 02:01:32,760
by Pop Studios, a full service audio, video and post

2446
02:01:32,800 --> 02:01:37,000
production facility located physically in New London, Connecticut, and of

2447
02:01:37,039 --> 02:01:41,479
course in the cloud online at pwop dot com.

2448
02:01:41,720 --> 02:01:43,840
Speaker 3: Visit our website at d O T N E t

2449
02:01:44,079 --> 02:01:48,079
R O c k S dot com for RSS feeds, downloads,

2450
02:01:48,239 --> 02:01:51,920
mobile apps, comments, and access to the full archives going

2451
02:01:51,960 --> 02:01:55,119
back to show number one, recorded in September two.

2452
02:01:55,039 --> 02:01:58,039
Speaker 1: Thousand and two. And make sure you check out our sponsors.

2453
02:01:58,199 --> 02:02:01,000
They keep us in business. Now, go write some code,

2454
02:02:01,560 --> 02:02:02,319
see you next time.

2455
02:02:03,359 --> 02:02:03,880
Speaker 2: Got trade.

2456
02:02:03,960 --> 02:02:11,920
Speaker 1: Middle vands do the summer time that means home than

2457
02:02:12,039 --> 02:02:19,359
my Texas in line