Speaker 1: What's going on. Thank you so much for listening to
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smartphone or tablet, and again, thank you so much for
your support. They're talking about power generation. I'm not an
expert in power generation. However, I feel like I know
enough to know that we need power that like our
entire civilization operates because we have power. If you don't,
we're here. If you wanted to get an idea of
what life would be like if all of the power
got shut off without a moment's notice, read a book
called One Second After by our friend doctor Bill Forston.
Like that is a it's sort of a gaming out
of one town, Black Mountain, North Carolina, of what that
town goes through when an AMP goes off over the
Eastern Seaboard and all communications, all anything that operates with
the chip is fried. Everything that you know is gone.
Everything like you're back into like you're finding. You have
to like go back and find things of any kind
of mechanical purpose, you know, pre nineteen eighties, before chip
started getting put in everything. If a chip is required
to run it, it's dead. And so power is the
life source of the civilization. And when we are you know,
self imposing this depowering approach, we are hamstringing ourselves. We're
killing ourselves. And for this was the biggest mistake that
the lefties made, the Greenies made on the environmentalist movement
side of things, where they rejected nuclear while at the
same time demanding that CO two levels be sort of
our guiding north star for all types of industrial and
energy policy, because you cannot say that you want all
of this power to be generated with no CO two
additional gases released, and then exclude nuclear because all of
the processes required to make the quote renewables burn CO
two create CO two. You cannot make the solar panels
without mining for the materials. And just because you know,
you get the rare earth minerals from some impoverished country
halfway around the world using slave labor, do you think
that they're using, you know, electric vehicles to mine that
material of course not. You're using fossil fuels to extract
this stuff, and so the net is more CO two
because you are requiring more and more solar panels and
more and more turbines and stuff like. Do you know
how much hydraulic oil is used in the in the windmills?
Like to keep them spinning. You gotta lube those things.
It's crazy. You got to keep them cool. These are systems,
These are mechanical systems. And what do you think they're
made out of? How do you think you make the
material of the windmill that's steel? Do you think there's
no CO two being emitted in steel production? Give me
a break. The more you can power with CO two,
the more you can reduce, or sorry, the more you
can power with nuclear, the more you reduce the CO two.
And now you've got this race to get to AI first,
because if we don't, China does, and then I suspect
we're going to be in a world of hurt because
AI is. It's well, it has the ability, just like
old tools, to be really beneficial and also very dangerous,
and in the hands of a tyrannical communist regime. I
can't even imagine what kind of AI, the are going
to deploy against not only their own people, but also
their adversaries. So let me get to a couple of
messages that I had. We were talking in the last
hour about the Spanish blackouts, and we were talking about
nuclear generation, these small modular reactors that they're trying to
you know, to get greenlit and built in America. So
this way, like once people see and companies see this
technology being utilized, the way it works, how it's safe,
then this is called a like the preference cascade, right
where you have the early adopters. Well, you have the pioneers. First,
they go in and they you know, they blaze the trail.
They're the first ones in. Then you get the early
adopters who see where things are going and they can
sort of what they say, you know, see around corners.
These these pioneers like, oh, I see where this is going.
They then become the early adopters, and then it becomes acceptance.
And once that happens, then you get this cascading effect
where it just builds and bids and goes faster and
faster more and more. That's where we have to get to,
and I think we have to get there faster than
twenty thirty on an optimistic timeline. I got a message here.
Don't use my name, please, okay. I am a financial person.
I have been watching SMRs, the reactors and other green
energy as investment. Yes, Tesla two three Mile Island is
now with Terra Power. Bill Gates Tara says they will
not plan to share their energy. They need it all.
China is leading with thorium, which we abandoned in the forties.
They are said to be the most advanced. Now big
tech will put a herding on Duke Energy and others
if they don't beat them. Permitting is the problem. For reference.
Look at the lithium deal in Cheryville area. The whole
not in my backyard. There's a guy on YouTube that
explains nukes very well. I can send you his name.
Google just pulled out of Cat County. I don't know
where cat not Chatham, Cat County. Was it power or water?
SMRs could help with water too. Permitting dams are as
hard to get approvals. I hope this will change with
Trump's openness. We also need refineries anyway, I enjoy the show.
I did a year in Weaverville and listened to you
when you were up there. Oh thanks, okay, when I
was working up in Nashville in western North Carolina. Yeah,
so the permitting, I have no doubt that is correct.
It's the permit approval process that allows opponents to block
and delay every project until it's dead, right. That's like,
if you're going into a permitting process and the if
the goal of the permitting process is designed to thwart
projects from being built, right, then you will have a
system that looks like ours. If you have a permitting
process that is built to award the permits to fast
track to help build new power generation sources, then I
think the regulatory regime looks different than what we have.
Scott wants to know, why does it have to be
a metric poop ton of energy? Why can't it be
an imperial poop ton of energy? Now that's a fair point.
I don't know why it's imperial metric is better. Look,
I'm sorry. I know, I'm American. I'm supposed to, you know,
reject the metric system in favor of the imperial system.
But I don't. I feel like we should have gone.
I feel like if we had just gone to the
metric system before I was born, this would have been
much easier for me personally, you know. But like the
metric system just makes more sense. It really does. Now,
I'm not saying that for the temperature stuff, stay with
the fahrenheit. You can use celsius for the experiments and
all that stuff, but fahrenheit works way better just to
know like how hot is it, how warm is it outside?
Because celsius is not. It's not precise enough for me,
you know, because the difference between seventy and seventy five
that's pretty big. That's you know, whether I'm wearing you know,
cargo shorts. I'm just kidding. I wouldn't wear cargo shorts,
but like shorts or pants, like that's a huge difference.
So I need to know that that I would not
go celsius. But I do feel like metric it makes
more sense, you know, Like how many yards are in
a mile? Do you know that? Do you know how
many yards are in People don't even know feet in
a mile. I don't even remember how many feet are
in a mile. It's like five thousand something, right, Yeah,
So like these are like why why? Luckily for me,
I do have a size twelve foot so I'm able
to navigate the world pretty well just by you know,
measuring stuff with my feet. But not everybody's got a
twelve inch foot, So why they called inches? And then
you break them down into these weird fractions of inches
that are difficult to to do the math on. You know, Oh,
I have a seven eighths and I got to add
it to a one in three quarters like ah, and
that's an easy one. So metric is it's a superior system.
I'm sorry, That's why I go metric poop load all right?
So spring is here a time of renewal and celebrations.
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Video dot com. John says in an email to Pete
at vpteklenarshow dot com. Any nuclear facilities built by Trump
or the administration, and we'll need some serious security. Those
tesla loving liberals would have a field day keying the reactors.
That is a security Uh yeah, that is a consideration.
We're going to have to maybe some fencing and cameras.
This story from the AP earlier this year, Big tech
wants to plug data centers right into power plants. Big
tech wants to bypass all of the transmission lines everything else.
They want to direct feed right to the power plant.
The utility companies are pushing back, saying that's not fair,
not fair, looking for a quick fix for their fast
growing electricity diets. Tech giants are increasingly looking to strike
deals with power plant owners to plug in directly, avoiding
a potentially longer and more expensive process of hooking into
a fraying electric grid that serves the little people. It's
raising questions over whether diverting power to higher paying customers
will leave enough for others, and whether it's fair to
excuse big power users from paying for the grid. Federal
regulators are trying to figure out what to do about it,
and quickly. So this is interesting because I told I've
said this before. I put solar panels on the house.
I did it for prepper purposes. I want to be
able to generate some electricity during daylight hours if you know,
everything goes to pot so that was why I did it. Now,
obviously in an EMP would fry my system also, and
I'm not permitted by my HOA to put a Faraday
cage over my entire house, so I do recognize the
limitations here, however, like I don't use as much power.
My power bill is like eleven dollars a month, and
I sell back or I push back energy into the
Duke system. They haven't paid me for that, actually, so
they're supposed to. There was like a lottery system and
you could get paid back. Like I should be able
to pay back to sell my energy that I'm sending
back down the line. I should be able to do that.
If they're going to use the power that I'm generating
that I'm not using during the daylight hours then and
it's going to go back down the line for other
people to use that they are that Duke is now
selling to other customers. I should be able to get
some money back for that. That being said, I do
recognize that I am using their transmission lines, and so
this is part of the that's part of the deal.
Like I'm plugged into your grid, and when you know
it's nighttime and I'm using power, I'm drawing off that grid.
So I have to pay to utilize the grid. I
get that. I think that's completely fair for these big
tech companies they want to plug directly into the power
system or into the power plant, they want to have
their own dedicated line or something. I don't think they
should have to pay for the grid. If they're not
on the grid, then they should just be charged a
different rate to pay for the generation of the power.
Right to pay for maintenance costs and all of that
they should pay for their power in a separate thing.
That's fine if the plant can make enough power. See
here's the key. If you're going to allow big tech
to bypass the grid plug directly into the power generators,
and now you're going to be causing brownouts for all
the rest of us while you get a constant supply
of power. Okay, now that's not fair either. Front End Center,
according to the AP, is a data center that Amazon's
cloud computing subsidiary called Amazon Web Services, is building next
to the Susquehanna Nuclear plant in eastern Pennsylvania. The arrangement
between the plant's owners and AWS Amazon Web Services called
a behind the meter connection. It is the first such
deal to come before the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. Up
until now, the FERK has rejected a deal that would
send nine hundred and sixty megawatts to the data center.
Nine hundred and sixty megawats, by the way, is forty
percent of the plant's capacity. That's enough to power half
a million homes or more. That leaves the deal and
others that likely would follow in limbo. It's not clear
when FURK, which blocked the deal on procedural grounds would
take up the matter again. Maybe they have by now
the companies that they're very frustrated because they're delayed, like
five years in the queue. And I get that. The
rapid growth of cloud computing and artificial intelligence as fueled
demand for data centers that need power to run servers,
storage systems, networking equipment, and cooling systems. That has spurred
proposals to bring nuclear power plants out of retirement, develop
small modular reactors the SMRs we talked about last hour,
and build utility scale renewable installations or new natural gas plants.
Back in December, California based Aklow announced an agreement to
provide twelve gigawatts to data center developer Switch from small
nuclear reactors powered by nuclear waste. This is where I
read it last Hour. I was talking to a caller
named Matt. We said, one of the challenges is what
do you do at the nuclear waste. Apparently this company
Acklow may have figured out a way to generate power
from the nuclear waste. That would be fantastic. Here's a
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memories that'll last a lifetime. David, Welcome to the program.
Hello David, David yo oh hello, hello, hello, oh hello, Sorry, No,
it's okay, let's gone on.
Speaker 2: I just want to make a comment about the sharing
of the power beginning at the point of distribution. Yeah,
it seems to me that the people who are paying
for the power and the distribution and the tax on
top of it, ought to get the first, the first
of the distribution, that the remaining that doesn't meet the
peak level necessary to support the area, the remaining leftovers
can go to those who want those. But to get
in front of us and take the prime stuff. It's
like saying, here, you get the best wine, I get
the lousy wine. I don't think that works well.
Speaker 1: So well, it's not a matter of the quality of
the power, right, and but it isn't right, And they
would be well, they would be and they would be
paying I would imagine, right, they would be paying for
you know, the full cost of the power generation, whatever
infrastructure they have to build in order to get the
direct line they want to what they don't want to
do is to tap into the existing infrastructure grid. They
want a direct feed, but to the point then that
they would be sort of jumping the line and consuming
forty percent of you know, a power plant's production, right.
I think that's the problem. It creates this scarcity among
all of the consumers that don't have the ability to
build their own energy infrastructure.
Speaker 2: And it's also as true that when a lot of
people are trying to get the same power output, the
cost for kill a lot hour goes up.
Speaker 1: The cost we say that again, the more people the
cost goes up.
Speaker 2: Well, what happens what I think happens, and that could
be wrong about this. I think what goes on is
when you have a high demand at a low availability
to kill a lot hour, costs goes up.
Speaker 1: Yeah, if you've got like peak usage times of you know,
like in the mornings, everybody's taking showers and you know,
all the AC is running and all of that stuff.
Same thing with like water. Yeah, so yeah, during peak
demand times then some yeah, sometimes you can have like
peak pricing and that sort of thing, and then they
are like, oh, please conserve energy and all of that.
So yeah, if they're doing those types of energy reduction
programs against you know, residential users. Would they also demand
that the you know, the these big tech companies would
have to reduce their usage too.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: It raises a lot of It raises a lot of
questions as to, you know, will they play favorites for
the bigger customers.
Speaker 2: You know, money talks type thing.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, right, yeah, sos.
Speaker 2: The capacity is the capacity is in a given amount.
So as soon as we start using the capacity at
a higher level than we can produce it, the cost
of it goes up.
Speaker 1: Yeah, now I understand. So I think the answer is
that these big tech companies need to build their own
power generation systems if they don't want to be on
the grid, and that means they need to do more
of the SMRs one. Yeah, all right, David, I appreciate
the call, sir. You're welcome, all right, take care of you. Yeah,
the SMRs are small modular reactors, these nuclear reactors, they
build them themselves. You want this kind of power, this
amount of power. Big tech also wants to stand up
their centers quickly. But tech's appetite for energy comes at
a time when the power supply is already strained by
efforts to shift away from planet warming fossil fuels. This
is according to Mark Levy at the AP. So what
is he admitting there? That we're moving away from power
generation that can actually satisfy demand, but we're moving away
from it for purely policy reasons. In theory, the Amazon
Center in Pennsylvania would let Susquehanna sell power for more
than they get by selling it into the grid. The
profit potential is one that other nuclear plant operators in
particular are embracing after years of financial distress and frustration
with how they are paid in the broader electricity markets.
Many say they have been forced to compete in some
markets against a flood of cheap natural gas, as well
as state subsidized solar and wind energy. Power Plant owners
also say the arrangement benefits the wider public by bypas
asking the costly build out of long power lines and
leaving more transmission capacity on the grid for everybody else.
The worry energy prices would increase significantly, and there's no
explanation for how rising demand for power will be met,
even before big power plants drop out of the supply mix. Separately,
to electric utility owners, which make money in deregulated states
from building out the grid and delivering power have protested
that the Susquehanna AWS arrangement amounts to free loading off
a grid that ordinary customers paid to build and maintain.
Chicago based Exelon and Columbus Sorry, that's one company. Chicago
based Excelon and Columbus and Ohio based American Electric Power
say that this Amazon deal would allow Amazon to avoid
one hundred and forty million dollars a year that it
would otherwise owe. Susquehanna's owners say the data center won't
be on the grid, and then question why it should
have to pay to maintain the grid if they're not
on it. But critics say that the power plant itself
is benefiting from taxpayer subsidies and ratepayer subsidies subsidized services
and should not be able to strike deals with private
customers that could increase costs for others. Either way, this
government decision could have massive repercussions for the entire country
because it will set a precedent for how the FERK,
the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, as well as grid operators
are going to handle an avalanche of similar requests that
are waiting in the wings from data center companies and
nuclear power plants. John Locke Foundation how to write up
about this. They've got a new report looking at two
differ diferent paths to carbon neutrality. This is a big thing,
you know. We want to be carbon neutral by twenty
fifty in North Carolina. We can use renewables or nuclear,
and the report took a look at both. Nuclear is
not only a zero emission resource capable of base load
power generation, but it's also the best option for meeting
future increases in energy demand. Nuclear would be the more
cost effective solution. All right, If you're listening to this show,
you know I try to keep up with all sorts
of current events, and I know you do too, And
you've probably heard me say get your news from multiple sources. Why. Well,
because it's how you detect media bias, which is why
I've been so impressed with ground News. It's an app
and it's a website, and it combines news from around
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So John Locke Foundation put out a recent report on
oh as a comparison on renewables versus nuclear, the two
different paths to get to carbon neutrality in electricity by
twenty fifty. That's the state's carbon plan or non carbon plan,
I guess. So they looked at it and they determined
nuclear is the more cost effective solution to meet the
required power generation capacity for twenty fifty projected. Obviously, the
renewable scenario requires approximately twelve thousand, five hundred miles of
transmission infrastructure twelve five hundred miles, and it requires almost
eight million acres of North Carolina land for power generation.
That is about twenty percent of our land miss for
the Yeah for wind and solar, So yeah, twenty percent
of the entire state's land would have to be covered
in solar panels and windmills. In comparison, the newnuclear scenario
requires about ninety percent less in the miles of transmission,
so twelve five hundred for renewables, thirteen hundred for nuclear,
a tenth of the transmission lines required. Also, rather than
seven point seven million acres of land, nuclear would need
just fifteen thousand acres. So not only would the nuclear
scenario require significantly less new capacity and infrastructure, it would
also be more reliable. It would be more efficient and
more cost effective. You can read the whole report at
the John Locke Foundation. The Hellion says, this show has
such a great comedic pool. Thank you. I appreciate it,
although I don't even try to be funny. That's one
of those it's a gift. We were talking earlier about
the Spanish blackouts. They still don't know what caused the
massive blackout across like the entire country and into Portugal
and France, and their explanations were like indecipherable. Russ said
that a few years ago I was with a group
of people in the neighborhood level nuclear plants came up
and oh, hang on a second, he has two messages.
Here's the uh all right. So the first one was
that on the nuclear front, he says, a college age
girl suggested that we should just make everything rechargeable like phones.
That way, you could just plug into the wall of
your into the wall or your car, and then you
wouldn't have to worry about electricity. Yeah, oh child. And
then he says the very verbose scientific explanation for the
Spanish power outage reminds me have a saying that if
you cannot explain something without using jargon or technical terms,
you either don't really understand it or you're trying to
hide something. Joseph says, so is the Iberian blackout another
test run? After surviving Helene and seeing how critical Mark
Starling was, Mark is the morning guy up at my
old alma mater up in Ashville on the Morning Show. Yeah,
I mean they stayed on the air solid for like
three weeks straight. Was the question, Can other places do
that too? You mean, can other radio stations do that? Sure?
I'm pretty confident we could. We've got way more people
than the station Mark's at Mark had like him and
his producer. Those are the only employees left after the
the blood letting that claimed my tenure. So yeah, I
have no doubt we here with a live local lineup
from five am all the way through eight pm. I'm
pretty sure we'd be able to staff it. And we
got massive generators that do not run on solar panels.
And John says, why can't we build faster? Answer local
state and federal regulations. That is true. Let me get
Joan on real quick here.
Speaker 3: Hello Joan, Yes, sir, I have a very simple question, okay,
if China's building all these cold plants, yeah, and cold
is so bad for the environment and so babil, why
anti Chinese people dying? Wise, if cold is the natural
fossil fuel, and the United States they'll burn coal forever
in a day until people came up with all these
cot missions and things. But I'd just like to know
why anti Chinese people dying at at a high rate
because of cold plants.
Speaker 1: So well, I mean a couple of reasons I could
cite here is first off, you would be relying on
communists to give you accurate data, but you're not chilling.
That's that right, that's one possibility.
Speaker 3: A cheret got you.
Speaker 1: No, it's not an eighth. Wait wait, Joan hang on,
I detect I detected dismissiveness in your joke. It's not
an ancient Chinese you know, you know, I know it's
not ancient Chinese. Joan joon joone, stop stop Joan stop.
For the love of God, jon't okay okay. So to
a listener, Joan, when you're huffing and puffing and laughing
through the phone that you can't hear anything except just noise,
it's not an ancient Chinese secret. It is a modern
communist cover up. The Communist Party controls the Chinese government.
So number one, and that indicated that I would give
you other numbers for potential explanations for why Chinese people
aren't dying in the streets so dropping dead like you said,
which I think is a bit hyperbolic, because I think
it probably takes a long time for like the lung
disease and all of that stuff to manifest. But the
number one is that you're trusting the Chinese communists to
tell you. Number two is that the wind blows the pollutants, right,
So stuff in Tennessee blows over here. That's always been
a big problem. Their pollution will blow across our state
and so over in China. I suspect a lot of
that will blow off out into the ocean. It'll make
its way someplace. I don't know. Number three on the
pollution front, have you seen pictures of China's air quality,
because I have. You have cities that are perpetually covered
in smog. You can't see the sun. Now, if you
think that's a healthy way to live, I encourage you
to go live in the communist country of China. Now,
I don't know what the purpose of the call was.
I don't because she has now dropped off because I
put her on hold. I was going to bring her back,
but I wanted to outline those three things, and I
couldn't get the word in edgewise because I don't know
what she was doing there. But anyway, the if the
argument is that we should be building more coal fired plants,
that is a perfectly fine argument to make. It relies
on you denying any kind of negative consequence, you know,
for emissions and that sort of thing, and you could
have that argument. I prefer to advocate for nuclear because
it's a cleaner argument and tech it's it doesn't emit
any emissions. And so if you're going up against people
who are arguing that CO two is killing everybody and
it's an existential threat, why not take that argument off
the table and win the argument. All right, that'll do
it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening.
I could not do the show without your support and
the support of the businesses that advertise on the podcast,
so if you'd like, please support them too and tell
them you're heard it here. You can also become a
patron at my Patreon page or go to dpetecleanershow dot com. Again,
thank you so much for listening, and don't break anything
while I'm gone.