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