Energy Geek Out 2025

Richard Campbell. Good morning, Richard, Hey, Happy New Year, Happy new year to you, Time Traveling, Time Traveling. Yeah, of course, I know we have a lot to cover today, so I want to get started right away with an energy themed better no framework, roll the music awesome?

Interesting that comment about granular solar and wind projects. I don't know if you've countered as in North America, but here in Australia, we have so much solar based generation that we've maxed out the capabilities of our older transmission grid. Another government here wants those with a rooftop solar to pay for their exports to the grid. He considers it a bait and switch to get us to all buy batteries, which,

by the way, has happened. Wow. I don't know that there was so much a bait and switch in that. I don't know that the issue the government realized how quickly Australian citizens would put solar on the roof, because they're the leader in the world in this, and they have literally overwhelmed the great at times, you know, so much power available at noon, Yeah, because there's so many solar panels running all at once that it literally blowed transformers off poles.

Nobody else is yeah really yea, yeah right there. All this buy back was a way to encourage you to do this. The utilization of the power is very poor.

everything else, not flow in multiple directions. And with so many solar and wind projects around our country, the re rebuilding of the transmission network grid is costing gazillions, and it's be having to be rebuilt in the wrong order. In my opinion, refactoring the new grid ideally should have

been commenced first. Since you note that the nuclear based generation here would have had a similar grid shape in that to the old one, almost one to one, And he wonders if this similar issue is happening in the US and Canada. In the answer is yes, absolutely, Actually it's happening everywhere in the world. Power is power right, well,

more importantly, grid is grid right. The real issue here is that now that there's many different sources of power and you're going to flow in multiple directions, things get complicated and the grid was just never built for this, and you could not have built out the grid first. I just don't think it's possible. A you didn't know what was going to happen, and B it's impossible to spend upfront on this. You kind of have to build it as you go, and that may not be the

most cost effective way. But the only way you're going to get it right is in hindsight, and that's not real life. So you know, what's happening is pretty much what had to happen, except that we do have some negative forces. You know, lots of politicians are jumping on the idea that it's solar's faulted, the grids unstable. Phenominally, that's kind of correct. That doesnt mean you shouldn't use solar, it's that the grade needs to be upgraded. So so

those complicated conversations aren't sexy. The easy one is to blame new power on all the problems on the grid, and really, we need to upgrade our grade and we have maintained our grade well enough, and that has been the problem all along, and it's where a lot of money is going right now. People are very frustrated the idea that cost of power continues to go up, and they blame it on new power sources, which makes no sense.

If the new power sources arebot to drive it down, they drave it on new consumers like AI certainly something we're going to talk about today, and that's these are all fragments of truth where the real truth is, Yeah, we're in the midst of a revolution on our way we build our grid, and we're just putting more stress on it. So Richard, thank you so much for your comment, and a copy of music co Buy is on its

way to you. And if you'd like a copy of music, go buy, write a comment on the website at dot netroocks dot com or on the facebooks and helplish every show there and if you comment there in a reading the show, we'll send you copy music Cope.

people for Christmas. So Musicdoco buy dot net if you want to buy the collection in an MP three wave or FLACK versions. All right, So shall we talk about what happened in nineteen eighty three because that's our episode number.

requires TCPIP. All right, thanks sir. Yeah, yeah, launch of mobile phones. You'll probably talk about this, so I'll leave that that. Wasn't going to go too far into it because there's so many other things to do. Okay, the first mobile cellular telephone call was made. Michael Jackson performed the moon Walk for the first time during a televised performance of Billy Jean, which was big. Nobel Prizes were awarded to various individuals, including William Golding for literature and somebody

I can't pronounce, lech Wtesa for peace. Okay, Lequillessa, good polish. Opening of Tokyo Disneyland, the theme park. We'll open its stores to the public on April fifteenth, becoming the first Disney park in Asia. And you know, let's talk about the top ten movies of nineteen eighty three, because there were some good ones. A Christmas Story is number one,

which I watch every Year with My Girls. Great movie and a great story too, Silkwood, Scarface, The Right Stuff, War Games, Star Wars Episode six, Return of the Jedi, The King of Comedy. Yep, that was Robert Tanniro, Jerry Lewis, and Martin Scorsese directed National Lampoon's Vacation, Monty Python's The Meaning of Life and coming in at ten The Outsider Again.

whole race. But you know, awesome. The other gadget that I have to bet you would be the Nintendo Entertainment Centisen, the NASA. You know, this is the first of the Mario. You know, you can play Mario at home like that. It's huge and that Christmas I remember it well, selling ness for a friend of mine at a store as fast as we could possibly go.

But this was sort of Nintendo entering that market, okay, right as Famiccom And yeah, they were course big in Japan, and you know, nominally in Japan it was a third generation system, but this was the first one that they brought to the US. Were they as huge as Stephen Forte in Japan?

happening in space shuttles. So Space Shuttle Challenge there gets its first flight in April that year, and the only thing interesting I can say about that flight, besides the first flight of Challenger, is they launched the first of the TDRS satellites. These are tracking in data relay satellites. We take for granted today that there's NaSTA TV, that there's a continuous transmission of video from the International Space Station and any space flight, and that's because of these

TDRS satellites. There's three of them, but in nineteen a three the very first one had been launched. Up till then you just had voice communication and it was intermittent. You constantly went out of into loss of signals. So having it all the time was a big deal. And this was the beginning of the TDRS. So Challenger put up the first TDRS satellite, and then that's April. In June flies again, like they did fly fairly often, right. The goal was to be able to fly over two weeks.

They'd never got that fast, but they were flying every couple of months. STS seven is a satellite deployment mission, which was the original you know, major missions for the Shuttle was to be able to launch satellites. But it's also the mission where Sally Ride flies, the very first female US female astronaut. That was her first flight.

it to the cab. The cabin in the front and there were six people the first time it flew six people on Shuttle, and these six people worked round the clock in two shifts of twelve hours three and three to do science experiments using space Lab to demonstrate the potential at One of those astrots, by the way, was Richard Garriott, And if you're a gaming fan, Richard Garriott is the guy behind Ultima an Ultima online.

of the Mac. Of course, there was a lot of de beta where the name Lisa came from. Jobs finally admitted it was named for his daughter, although at the time they didn't want that to be true, so they backron named it and called it something like local Integrated Software Architecture, which means nothing. Somebody else said, let's be realistic. It actually means let's invent some acronym. That's great. It was a ten thousand dollars PC in nineteen eighty three.

It was really crazy expensive, but it had a sixty eight thousand processor, had a Mega RAM initially with two five and a quarter drives, then eventually had a five Mega I driving even a seven a three and a half inch drive on it. But it just prices itself out of the market and then back would undermine them. They'll be out, they'll be discontinued by eighty six. Lotus one two three, Yeah, Yeah, so that's the Yeah, this is the you know, and coming after VisiCalc. Although Microsoft's

also shipped a multiplan. The multiplan runs on lots of platforms. That's Charles Simons's implementation. So it's not fast and one two three is designed for the IBM PC and nothing else, and it is fast, and it just swamps the market. It's not defendive product, to the point where when Microsoft is really trying to compete against it, they include a mistake in the date math in Lotus one two three in Excel to make sure it's perfectly compatible.

but that's not enough to get people to move. The big thing here was when word Perfect shipped their version fives, they changed their file format and didn't include They only had an importer, so you had to upgrade everything at once, and that made people mad. And then word came along and says, hey, we read and write four three files and five one files. So suddenly you could use word whatever you got to pick up any old version of word perfect and write to Eddie version of We're perfect too.

And it just, you know, basically stood there, waited until they made a mistake and then took advantage. What else Richard stallman Ship's Ganu. Ganu has the best acronym of all, which is not Unix. That's what can stands for. It's a free it's not a full Borros, but it is the free shell, and it is the catalyst for what will become Linux, which is why Stallmanite still say you should be calling it new Linux, right, But that's all all begins there, and also the free software movement and

so forth come from that. Compact only been formed the year before puts out their version of the Compact Portable, the luggable PC case. It's the suitcase like an Osborne, but built for CP for DAWs. It's an IBM compatible. Yeah.

And Ry Kurtzweel publishes his Age of the Intelligent Machines, incredibly prescient if you read it today, just about some of the insanity of that going on forty years earlier and last, but certainly not least at the cees the Consumer Electronics Show MIDI, right, yeah, yeah, nineteen ay three.

exclusive data. System exclusive data is stuff that's specific to each synthesizer model that comes out so that you could suck down the patches and then use a library application, which is what we had to manage them, and then swap the patches back in so so that Yeah, those

were fun times. Yeah, and it you know, at the time, each vendor had their own standard, right, Roland had one Oberheim and these are the two that originally collaborated, you know, had had their own version, the parallel box and so forth, and it was finally like these leaders of the company kind of got on the phone and said, this is stupid, right, why don't we just agree on a standard, And they gradually drew more and more companies into all agree we're

going to do this, this MIDI standard, so that we can interconnect with each other, so that our customers can use the products they want to use.

the current conflicts, the countries are prioritizing energy security. They're actually creating less efficient energy generation that they can control rather than necessarily buying from wherever they can from. Having the Russians out of the grid has been a big part of that. But it also means that they've driven renewables to an all time high. But it's interesting to point it's not just renewals, as you're not all time high.

Virtually every type of energy generation in twenty twenty five, coal, natural gas, oil, even nuclear power isn't an all time high right now. Old plants are being turned back on, plants that are should have been shut down or being capped because there's so much concern for availability of energy. Oil prices are relatively low. Energy should be cheap right now, and the reality, of course is the energy isn't Anybody who's looking at their power bill is going, Wow, why is my power bill so high?

our usual routine. We'll start with some of the renewables and then we'll go into the more mainstreams. And I've got some questions from listeners, not all includers. We go through this all, right, So by the end of twenty four last year, we were at about two point two tarawatts of solar capacity on the planet. By the end of this year, which is imminent, we should be around

three terra wats. Is a bit of an estimate because it's not quite the end of the year yet and it takes a few months to get all the report again. So you know, about eight hundred megawatts of eight hundred gigawatts of new solar put online. Most of that is from China. Still, China has one point one tarot watts of solar. They're number one by a long way, because the number two is the United States at about two hundred and forty gigawatts or maybe.

you kind of have to build the whole thing. Before you get anything right, you'll have to build a large multi megawatt plant right off the bat where with solar and wind you can build an increments and so you can slowly get connected to get to the grid and slowly expand over time and sort of don't have to get a huge amount of money up front. You can get it over time. The Chinese are doing a lot of the innovation here. They are. I read a great piece about a huge solar and wind farm being built

int bed the Quingha Tatle and Solar projects. This is seventeen gigawatts of solar and that's not even at full capacity. And they're building on the bed.

pumped hydro. So when they're doing excess power production around the stored of batteries, they're pumping water back up hill and storing behind the dams. So these massive demonstrations of power.

those processes are archaic, they haven't been modernized. They are controlled by relatively few entities that are not incented to improve it because it's where they make their money. And in some cases you're seeing a weight to get a grid tie for any kind of power plant of as much as eight years.

You know, there's one of the advantages that having an authoritarian state like China is is that they simply dictate when things are going to happen, and there is no red tape unless they want it. Where I'm not saying that red tape is automatically bad. Often there are procedures. You know, what you don't want is to plug a solar panel array into the grid and have the grid catch fire, like then nobody gets power. But the current processes aren't bad and then need to be made better.

It's an ongoing issue, and it is.

was before. Why don't we have more houses? We've created regulatory regimes that make it impossible and need to be streamlined, and there's lots of effort happening in that, and there needs to be more. There need to be louder noises. The real reason housing and electricity are more expensive is that we've crew made it too hard for them to be less. And this is where you go to your government and demand it, and they'll give you simple answer. It's like it's AI's fault or it's Solar's fault, and

all of that is crap. The reality is the infrastructure needs to be upgraded and the process needs to be upgraded, and those things need to be dealt with, and building more power is not going to solve it until you get the process fixed. Everything else is a waste of time.

as they can get. And there's always been this proposal, this idea that there's other materials, but the perovskites will be able to move more efficient panels, except for the fact that when you put them outside, they fail. They don't last more than a couple of years. It's not enough to make a panel that generates a lot of electricity. It's got to last for twenty years. But in the past couple of years we've had real breakthroughs. Last year I talked about Oxford PV who are making about twenty

five percent efficient panels, and you go twenty percent. Who cares, Like, dude, that's a twenty percent improvement. That adds up. It's a big deal. And so they're now at a point.

silicon absorbs and makeing electricity. Perovskites live in the ultraviolet and blue range, and so when you combine the two, so you have a layer of silicon and a layer of perovskite, the perovskite layer will pass through the reds and infrared down to the silicon and absorb the UV and blue. So this is why they're invariably more expensive because they are a conventional silicon solar panel and the Perovsky panel combined. Wow, right, but you get more energy

from it. No too is about it. So there should be tandem style panels getting into the thirty percent range available in the next year or two now, and yeah, but they'll still be expensive. I'm sure they're going to be more expensive now. One of the main manufacturers of this is a US company called Klux. So Klux has made this transparent perovskuide layers transparency to infrared and red spectrum.

So you replace the upper layer of a regular silicon panel with their quote unquote active glass layer and some additional wiring and you get this increased power production. So they are licensing that to multiple companies to add to existing silicon panels. Okay, back in China, which does a lot of this innovation, a company called Longi has been doing this tandem design, but they've also done a texturization approach to the interface between the silicon and the parovs guide. Basically,

these little pyramid structures which increases light absorption. These are micrometer pyramids, too tiny to even see, but they decrease reefflectivity and increase light absorption between the layers. They've demonstrated in a tandem panel almost a thirty five percent efficiency. Wow. So and again that should have good lifespan So when you talk about going for a twenty percent to a

thirty five percent like these are massive improvements. Now you could play this ROI game where I need a third less panels, almost half as many panels, I can pay twice a bunch for those panels and still be ahead. So solar technology is not holding still. It took a long time for us to get to this capability, but it has happened now, and so the market's going to get interesting over the next couple of years in terms

of what panels to buy. Needless to say, expect conventional multi junctions silicon panels to get even cheaper as these other panels start to move into the market. Now. One of the question areas we've gotten from it was Chad Boyer and also Charles and Blue Sky said our chin any solar panels the only choice, and without a doubt, they are the cheapest choice. But they're not the only choice. There are US manufactured solar panels, although not the entire pipeline.

The way solar panels made, you can sort of break them into five major steps. So first is you've got to make silicon metals. The US pioneered this. A lot of it is still done in the US, but it's how you get all the contaminutes out of silicon to make a pure silicon metal. Then it's typically exported from there because the next steps forming the ingots, actually casting them into the shapes that are going to be needed for silicon, and slicing them into wafers, those are all

done abroad. So step one is very US SEP twos and three not so much, are almost not at all. Making them into cells, so that's actually adding textures, the doping. Some of that's done in the US, but not very much. But the final assembly part, taking those cells and wiring them, putting in the housings, actually building that, that's done at scale in the US these days. So when you buy an American solar panel and you can do that, you're going to pay a ten to twenty percent premium on that.

You're typically getting a module made from parts abroad that is assembled in the US. So if that makes you happy, and you know by US standards that's considered a US solar panel, you can do that. Just understand that cost. I would also point out that much of that is new capability that was brought on by the Inflection Inflation Reduction Act in twenty two that's largely been shut down

by the new administration. The new administration has rolling back all sorts of clean energy tax credits and benefits, and this is one of them. So while they been built out, I don't know how much more growth is going to happen in that area and whether or not people are

willing to pay the premium for that to continue. But that's what's going on as those as a US administration rolled back the clean energy credits, a lot of money gout went into renewable energy ahead of those rollbacks, So the beginning of the year in twenty five, it was

a huge them out. Now it's dying off in the later parts of the year though we don't have all the numbers here, but one case there was a company called clean Capital who ordered twenty five million dollars worth of solar panels ahead of tariffing and credits going away. They're now storing them because it's more than they need to the tune of like one hundred and two thousand dollars a month, but it's worth it for them for

production for the rest of the year. The vast majority of new power being built in the US, like ninety percent in twenty twenty five, is renewable, mostly solar, some win so the impact of the rollbacks has to stop that deployment this year. But a lot of high risk projects like the off shore wind projects, which have been shut down just because of their risk levels and the time they don't know how long things are going to take,

they basically wound down. So we're not going to see the impact of rollbacks on renewables for a few years, possibly not until the end of this administration. So it's going to be confusing for folks because they say, hey, we cut all these things, but yet it's still going, and it's just because people pre bought lots of investments already in place. Businesses aren't perfectly elastic. They can't respond to regulatory changes that quickly, but later there will be

impacts in growth. Just doesn't happened yet. All right back in twenty two on that geek out, I mentioned the thing called Project Nexus. This was so idea of putting solar panels over top of agricultural canals in California. Thought it was a brilliant idea, the idea being brilliant. Yeah, this was done in India first, So it is the

idea of these are not normal water waste. The you're man made water waste for distributing water for agriculture, and they have a problem with algal growth and they have a problem with evaporation and otherwise can't build stuff on there, So why not build solar panels over top of them. The water keeps the panels cooler, so they run more efficiently and they last longer. You decrease the water losses, you battle algae growth and other problems, so it's kind

of a win wind deal. Well, that project actually happened, no kidding. Yeah, in August, it's twenty five. They finished it. It's generating one point six megawatts of electricity, so it's not a huge thing. There's many more that could be built, but they've done it. It took three years. Now there's a big reconciliation of is this worthwhile because it is more complex to install over a waterway. You're not always pointing the solar panels at their optimal angles, so in general

it's more costly to conventional solar installation. So it's going to take a few years to really understand the other benefits of long term utilization. They're harder to clean because they're up higher and over a waterway, like. There's a bunch of problems there, so it's a question of how much more is going to happen. Same to go with what they call floato voltaics. There's been so many papers about this idea of just put solar panels on reservoirs, again,

man made bodies of water, typically because of dams. They're nice and flat. There's not much going on there. You already have electrical wiring, so just checking the put solar panels on it. Yeah. Good. There's been a few projects,

but not very many, so everybody likes it. It's a good idea, but it hasn't happened much, and I think part of the reason is that most of the panel solar panels that are available day are being installed in commercial panel deployments on the ground that lowest costs and the most benefit and so people don't need to innovate in this area yet, same for the canals. Right, it's just a question of is it even necessary. We're not

struggling for land for all these things. And when you're throwing the regulatory problems or even getting stuff connected to the grid, they're like, Okay, we don't need a bottle and more complicated stuff. Will just stick with the simple.

deed deservocation. So where they have problems with too much moisture loss and you're trying to grow cover crops just to keep the sand from encroaching, they're putting solar panels so the show keeps the water in place, it helps protect the plants. They're calling it eco voltaics now, where they think they can start pushing back the desert while making solar power and starting to turn that land into something viable.

done his research. He's got his cup of tea, probably got a kettle of tea on there, and we're going to talk about wind.

the largest deployer, both on and offshore. They did fifty gigawatts in twenty twenty five and they expected to have seven hundred gigawats total, so that is, you know, almost half of all wind capacity in the world now being built built for China. US is number two a one hundred and fifty gigawatts, but almost no new installations coming in on or offshore.

you know, as of this recording, anyway, they halted it again. Well, boy, it's pausing leases for five large scale offshore wind projects under construction on the East Coast due to unspecified national security risks identified by the Pentagon. Pauses effective immediately, and we'll give the Interior Department, which oversees offshore wind, time to work with the Defense Department and other agencies to

assess the possible ways to mitigate any security risks. Anyway, I'm going to share this link with Richard and he will put it on the page. It's from the Connecticut Mirror. But you know, it's just it's hard when you have an administration that just doesn't want any kind of renewable energy projects. To continue and that's really what it's all about.

aging out and they're finding out they're not recyclable. Well, I mean, honestly, the vast majority is recyclable, the turbides itself, even the concrete can be reprocessed. It's the blades. The blades are made of fiberglass, carver fiber. They're almost impossible to recycle and so that's been a big fuss. They are now making new styles of blades specifically for more recyclabilities, but that will take twenty years to play out because

these turbines typically last twenty to thirty years. Interesting AI technologies has started to play a role in or at least machine learning technology in wind turbine are wind site development where they're using machine learning models to figure out alltimal layouts and they're sometimes finding ten to fifteen percent performance increases for the turbine sets by using these complex models to be able to locate them so that they have more wind from with the combined turbines over longer

periods of the time. On shores sort of gone as far as it can. We kind of know what we're doing there. It works very well where you kind good sites, you lay them out, you need steady wind and tall posts. They can't get a whole lot bigger. The real development area is an offshore wind, and offshore wind kind of comes in two categories. You have what they call fixed based wind that's typically up to about fifty meters or one hundred and fifty feet of water where you literally

put a casement down to the bottom. You drill a hole and you pour a bunch of concrete, you lay down the post. It's fixed on the bottom. Yeah, there's only so many places in the world where that water is a shallow like most of the North Sea and around Denmark, so where the ashallow like that's why they have a ton of it, but in a place like here in British Columbia where the water is very deep,

you just can't do that. So now you get into floating based offshore, and we talked about this before difficult. This is using a lot. It is difficult and it's expensive, so you get away from the cost effectiveness. You know, this fixed base offshore, they're hitting the limits of size. They're somewhere between fifteen and twenty five megawats per unit. They're talking about some fifty megawats. But now you're getting into the physics problem. They're just so heavy and so large.

You can only be so big with floating. There's still only really five sites that are being tested, and just with a handful of turbines. There's a couple of sites in the UK with five turbines each. Portugal has one with three, No way as one with eleven. France that's one with three. But that's about it. They're using oil industry platform technology to build these floating platforms to put wind turbines on, and they just have not scaled up

because it's so costly. So they're still a debate whether it's necessary or when they're going to even go down that path where there's still other areas to do less expensive forms. That's all I got for wind, But I actually have some stories for wave power because wavepower has always been the you know, red headed step child, never really worked kind of limited.

the coast than Washington does. Washington's conditions are so rough. There's very little over there. They built these two sides, Packwave North and Packway South. North was purely for testing and South we talked about this last year. They were building up, putting in all the wiring and so forth for four big tests berths, so that different companies could test up to five power collectors in each of the burths with all the wiring and telemetry already put in place.

And there were candidates to be put out there. One of them was a company called Aqua Harmonics, which had back in twenty sixteen won a Department of Energy prize for their innovative boys. These are floating boys anchored to the bottom but under tensions, and so the wave action forces the boy to go up and down, and that actually runs a small electric generator that then is wired

back to shortage general electricity. The cutting of funding for renewable energy projects by the administration has put that project entirely on holds. It's not much happening a pack packwave Styuth this time. But there's another company, an Israeli company called Eco Wave Power, and they do what's called on shore wave power. Now, wait a second, how the heck is that supposed to work?

It was off of an old World War two AMMO jetty and they learned a lot from there, but ultimately they decided to shut that down and move that a bunch of that tech to Los Angeles. So in Los Angeles, on a wharf near the Catalina Ferry, there is seven of these blue floats. They're quite large, connected to this wharf and they generate up to one hundred kilowats of electricity, and the LA District wants to expand that onto all the big breakwaters about eight miles worth a breakwater, think

like sixty megawatts of power. And that same company has also got a pilot project now in Porto, Portugal where the initial build they just broke around this year will be a megalot with the intent to boot up to nineteen more. I get along the big breakwaters in Porto. Porto, you know, on the eastern side of the Atlantic, takes some pretty serious waves. So we'll see if those actually work.

So there is some development a way of power. It's minuscule compared to the other techs, but there is some development. You love us Porta, Okay, I love that place. Porna is such a great man. Let's talk about power storage. This is the most question category Materius. Carlson sent me some questions. Dan Owen asked about solid state batteries, Martin

asked about sodium batteries. Lots of questions, but let me begin with the most important power storage, the number one power storage strategy that we have so far, which is pumped hydro. I mentioned this back in twenty two with the Australian National University paper where they provided an atlas.

They mapped out the world showing all these locations in the world where it may not be a good hydro electric location per se, but it is a high elevation with water available below, where you could put a reservoir above, pump water uphill and then run it down there. About eighty five percent conversion efficient. They last one hundred years. It's really well known technology.

That the advantage of pumped hydro is it's completely known technology. Those turbine has been around for a long time. The pump's been around for a long time. We know how to drill through rock, we know how to reservoirs. It's all known tech right, like, and they last. You know, we expect hydroelectric dams to last one hundred plus years. Like, they're the longest lasting power techs we have. So let's go back to the numbers for a second. You said

there's an eighty five percent conversion rate. Yeah, what does that mean exactly? Can you break that down into English?

on it. So they try and get as much power as possible. And the dynamic between place like Denmark and Norway. Denmark's got a ton of hydro electric power, Denmark's got a ton of wind power, so they put a connection between the two, and the Danes are making too much electricity from wind power, which happens they send that excess electricity in Norway. Norway shuts down their dam, their damn

power generation and uses the wind power. And when the wind power slacks off, they crank up the dams and let the power flow down to Denmark to supply the difference. And when they're really making too much power, they're actually pumping water back up hills. They not only providing power in Norway and Denmark with wind, but also increasing storage on their existing dam system.

burn coal or do it because they have coal. A lot of places that burn natural gas do it because they have natural gas. Like, there's only so many different power sources that are available. And if you've got a lot of sunline, fine solar has some merit to it. Like if you have to mix and match these things, and depends on the regions. But where those regions can colloberate so they can offset each other, everybody benefits.

get the prices down as fast as possible. Wow, And they're just manufacturing at scale with very little control and making very very cheap batteries to the point where it's just now it's pretty much the rule in Australia if you're going to put a solar panel on a roof, you have to put a battery in the good news is the battery's just not that expensive anymore. Prices have

come down a lot. You know, you want twenty yellow lot hours in your house, Well that today is two or three thousand dollars, right Like, that's now not that much more than It's all on the line of the solar prices. So we're getting down to very economical prices. It's going to take a while for it to go through the pipeline.

lithium phosphates are literally coming out of the ground. You pump that water up, that briny water up, You put it in big ponds, let it evaporate off, you scrape it up, and you send it off to production. Wow, there are other lithium stores. There are lithium in clay beds, there are hard rock lithiums. They're just more expensive to extract.

of lithium. They are both alkali metals. Sodium is even more common than lithium by a large degree. That's the stuff in salt, it's everywhere. The problem is it's been difficult to manufacture. You can make it into a battery. By its nature, you presume it would not be as dense as a lithium battery. And then CATL came out with this announcement this year. Now c ATL is a Chinese company that's been making it makes lithium batteries for everybody,

like this is one of the big players. So kind of it's like when Toyota says something like it kind of had to take these guys seriously. They're one of the biggest battery manufacturers in the world. And this is what they said. Yeah, we know we got LFP batteries down to eighty bucks a kilo one hour. We figured out how to make sodium batteries for ten dollars a kilo one hour. What it's crazy. And they announced a

battery called Naxtra. So Naxtra they say this is a sodium based battery is a ten thousand cycle battery with a large temperature into the lithium. Most lithium batteries LFP, especially butt NMC as well. Three thousand cycles is normal. Three thousand cycles is a lot. You got a three thousand cycle battery. That means that's how many times you can recharge it before it does discharge and recharge, right, and then before it starts to really lose potential. Right.

And in a three thousand cycle batteries, this is what you get in like a Tesla, right, which means that after two hundred thousand miles of driving or so, your battery is down ten to fifteen percent in capacity. Right's a pretty good deal. They're talking about ten thousand cycle battery, so now you're talking a million miles before you start losing capacity.

hundred kilowat hours per per kilo. They're just expensive, about one hundred and seventy five. That's feasible for a car.

is what you're talking about, that's really great. They've also announced another battery called a free void battery, where they've got a control. They mix sodium and lithium battery designs and they use a smart controller to figure out what batteries do use under what conditions. Wow, which is very clever. The questions here is why have these why have why are sodium batteries more expensive than lithium batteries until COTL made this announcement, And the biggest thing is just manufacturing

at scale. They just have not matured that the pipeline. There's not as many ingredients as available. The material costs are lower, but it's not as plentiful and the process is not as mature. The lithium process has been worked on so hard in the past twenty years, it's just driven the price down. So the concern here is is everything CTL is saying true? Right? Is this knowing how competitive the Chinese market is in cl is the Chinese company?

Are they saying this to freak out their competitors more than they can actually pull it off? Like I'm really keen If it's true, this is a huge breakthrough. We just need to actually be able to buy the product well in a huge disruption, right yep. It just means there's no excuse not to have batteries, Like how far are we from simply you know, you put the battery on the solar panel and it naturally backs itself up

like that, and that's it if they're that cheap. But today, right now, lithin perophosphate batteries are the cheapest known tech. They've hit it. They've hit a remarkable floor and they're going to continue down.

Hyundai said they had a pilot project this year they're going to make mass producing in twenty thirty. The problem is every time someone says to have a solid state battery, somebody smart takes that battery apart and finds some liquid in it. Yeah, okay, so we're kind of playing with the term, like the solid state itself is like it's more solid or less solid, or it's quasi solid. So it's all about almost there, right. We never really nailed

this completely, and so that that's still going on. Lots of companies making promises but just don't have the real batteries here. Yeah, all right, a couple more battery texts then we will take a break form energy. This is that iron air battery. I check, keep checking it on this was the idea of you know, lithium ion batteries are kind of silly for grid storage. They have a natural like eight hour cycle or their natural discharges about eight hours.

There's not enough for going overnight. It's not actually a good tech for this. And let's face it, their battery designs are about being able to be moved around, right, whether it's in your phone or in your car, stuff like that. In an iron air battery, while much bigger, heavier, and hotter, it's perfect for grid storage because about back then, at least a few years ago, there was ten percent of the price of lithium ion battery, although lithia myon

batteries have gone a lot cheaper. We talked about these last year too, and we are talking about for several years now, and their form Entergy's original projects in Minnesota. It's called the Great River Energy Project. It was supposed to be a one point five megawatt storage with one hundred and fifty megawatt hours because it has a natural one hundred hour discharge time that's pretty potent, not just lasting overnight, but literally lasting for days. They were supposed

to be done in twenty twenty three. They finally started actually installing per batteries in October of twenty five.

But there's all kinds of advantage to having a certain amount of battery, right, right, and normally they've been using lithium my own because they're cheap relatively speaking at scale. Right, this is what Tesla pushed on for all those years and have built out a bunch of facilities for them. They've got their challenges, they overheat, they catch fire, that kind of thing, but they've done this. But the whole

idea is the iron air battery is very inexpensive. Bigger and hotter and heavier, None of that matters when you put a fence around it. And that means how you can feed various power sources into that to keep it charged and then discharge it when you need it. And so they've got they've been building out the Great River Energy Project. Finally, they've also got contracts with in California and Georgia, Maine, but I think everybody's just waiting to

see how Minnesota goes at this point. But they apparently are really installing batteries, so it's great. Now they got to find out if the run times actually play out the way they do, and have they managed to heat properly and you know that all that like, there's still more to learn, but form Energy is making progress. Another one I mentioned last year is polar night Energy. This is that project in Finland where they built a one megawat sand battery, right, that was very interesting. That stored

one hundred megawatt hours of power. So we're going to discharge it a one megawatt for one hundred hours.

another one in Vaski, Finland. They're now building to megawatt two one hundred and fifty megawatt hour. So construction to start next year in twenty six, completion and operation in twenty seven. This is twenty four hundred metric tons of sand in a silo fourteen meters hide and fifteen meters wide. It's just sand that it's one of those things that works at scale, and so that's a great success story. They've got a cheap source of sand. It's just the

ceramic residues. It's not that silicon's hand, but it works for them. And so congrats to Polar Night Energy, new project, even bigger. Okay, let's take a brief break and then we'll come back and talk a hydrogen sounds good.

They're expensive. You know, the battery car has one. Yeah, although these days is a big pushback to go back to hybrids, which you know, and arguably one of the reasons people like hybrids because then you have some gas that they can charge that battery, so you're sort of use you a mix of both for a more mechanically complicated car. But you know who's happy when you have

a more mechanically complicated car your dealer. You know, dealers don't like electric vehicles because there's nothing for them to do, right, and so they don't like selling them. They'd much rather sell you a hybrid because it means you're going to be back every quarter to get some maintenance stuff.

make hydrogen. Then you draw that and then I should off that you have another process to buying the two together.

That stuff will burn.

ammonia is more expensive than regular ammonia. So far, they think they can get to price parity by twenty twenty eight. But there's a whole movement happening. There might even stand to be its own geek out on what you can use ammonia for if you can produce it cleanly enough and it's scalely enough and cheaply enough to operate in engines as well as just making fertilizer.

guys are based in the process. The shock of cold water being deliberately pumped in the system damages it, and then the water disappears and the whole thing stops working. And the expensive part of geothermal power is drilling, is putting those pipes in the first place. And so when the system shifts like that, you've spent a lot of money. You don't get a lot of results. But we know

that the rocks are hot everywhere. You just have to drill a little further, and they tend to be dry rock, so they don't have water in them and they're not permeable to water first place. And this is where fracking comes into play.

water through it. See if you get steamed from that. This technology has been advanced a lot of It's a company called Fervo Energy, and we've talked about them before. They've done pilot projects back in twenty three and they've raised a ton of money. And what they're doing is

horizontal drilling. So they drill in on either side of a dry rock bay where they think they can get enough temperature, and then they go horizontally into it to the fracturing and that way they if they actually have a problem where they have a shock that causes the water to leak away the main drill lines, the expensive ones don't have to rejail. They just redrill the horizontal parts. So far, they're doing what they call an open solution,

where they're not actually making those two pipelines meet. Like there's a whole idea of we could build a seal loop for this, but that really hasn't been done yet. So far, they're still using fracking to pump this through.

The problem is that when you use fracking, you are you have to follow the regulations of oil and gas, which are now these days pretty tightly regulated because of all the problems that have happened, and so there's a whole conversation going on about changing the regulations around all of this. Because they aren't touching waterways, they are going into dry rock, they're going they're not trying to extract oil, they're not in decreasing the density on the soils that

might cause collapse and things. They don't have those same problems. But they now have a power purchase Creaming from California in the megawatt class, so they built a smaller facility a megawa, a single megawat in Utah. Google has been funding them a bunch because they want to use their power for their AI data stators. But in twenty twenty six they expect to be having several hundred megawats of power for California off of this technique. So they've definitely

matured and are scaling up. Most higher geroelectric our most geothermal power plants are only in the tens of megawats the biggest ones. Some of them are much smaller than that, so you need to make a lot of them for them scale, but no emissions right, no consumable The water is reused over and over again.

to keep you warm in freezing cold. So what you do is you run a pipe below the ground, right, and it either heats up or cools down, becomes fifty degrees and then you can blow air over that pipe when it comes out of the ground, and and there you have it. So you have warmer and.

then heat it up to seventy, everybody's pretty happy. Well, and it's sixty degrees, your pipes aren't going to freeze, right, Yeah, nothing's going to freeze.

drilling head to keep the wall stable. Right, Kate, they called casements.

this year they were able to do some real drilling. Admittedly, their test run this year they got down one hundred meters or about three hundred and thirty feet. Their goal next year is to hit a kilometer. To do what Fervo is doing, you need to drill five kilometers turn sideways. Yeah, so they're a long way from production, but they seem to still be in business. So they're still functioning even

if they're not doing particularly well. So I hope for them because if they can improve the drilling process, so much the better. But you know, meantime existing drilling, the downside of the mechanical drilling is the head swear out. Then you have to stop, pull the whole thing back, put a new head on, and go again. So you the deeper your drill and more expensive it gets by a lot, right, But Furrow is making it work. In a five kilometer drill, you know, between three and five,

depending on the rock beds that are working in. Okay, all right, ready to get in the new clear this is gonna be a long part.

than the older reactor designs. Because it has passive cool down, you don't need all the additional pumps and monitoring and so forth for cooling it down in an emergency. It's

less wiring for your pumps, for your pipes. But because it had been decades since anybody built them, they kind of didn't know what they were doing, and the pandemic and money and the financial crisis meant that where they originally estimated it would be fourteen dollars to build and be done in like twenty fifteen, it actually was thirty four billion dollars to build and they didn't finish until twenty twenty four.

the generators that were running those water pumps. What we don't talk about in Fukushima is there was a reactor five and six that do have passive cool down. Passive cool down means that even with that excess heat, enough water flows through convection to cool the reactor on its own. You don't, oh interesting, don't have to do anything to keep the reactor cool.

from here. And so the good news is that Westinghouse has announced that they are working for up to ten more reactors in the US. Now, they weren't very specific about it.

have a license for AP one thousands. They just don't currently have a plan to actually build. So there's actually you know, when we when the west House CEO said this, we're going to be able ten new new Krali reactors, we think or they think that it's based on licenses that are already out there. There's like four in Florida. There's a couple of new in North Carolina and South Carolina.

And so perhaps those negotiations going on with government to move ahead with this production, to get those reactors built and to take advantage of what they've got here. These reactors should last another fifty sixty years. They're very safe. You've already got the hard part. You've got the site all set up with the licensing and the distance controls and so forth. So it makes sense to go forward

with that. So it gives me some hope for conventional nuclear, which is generally more tolerated, the same for the European pressurized reactor. And I've talked about this before in I do this future of energy talks now at conferences, and we talked about the UK Energy site be where they've taken the EPI reactor which was developed in France and they've built them in Finland and China as well. The UK of course had to customize it for their own requirements,

so they've made it more expensive. They're building two at a site called Hinckley Site see, but they also planned on building two more in size well, which another location where they're replacing older reactors with newer ones and same thing. Prices are starting to fall because they're maturing the skill set. So conventional nuclear is doing better and it could do more. We have these safer designs. We know how they were, We have the existing sites. They produce almost one hundred

percent of the time full power. You know, they're running the ninety percent utilization rate, much higher than almost any other kind of power, and they're cleaning efficient, like they're zero emission technologies except for.

It's exactly the issue, all right. You know, we've talked about how the current administration has been pretty negative on renewables. Here's an initiative that the current administration started with the Department Ergy called the Reactor Pilot Program. So it's from a set of executive orders in June this year, the goal of finding three new reactor designs to be tested by July of twenty twenty six, which is crazy fast.

thermal reactor ten megawatts, and they've got fuel. They're starting to do testing. They're trying to make that July twenty, twenty sixth deadline. Ontari's nuclear also started in twenty three. They were working in the military and space areas with tryso fuel. That's those fuel balls, the pebble bed fuel concept. Oh yeah, yeah, but using sodium heat pipes to transfer the heat. So dry reactor, no water involved, using these balls and then heating up sodium and heat pipes. Talking

about a five hundred kilowat reactor. Design is supposed to be able to work even in vacuum, so it could work up in space as well.

Their idea is to build a regular pressurized water reactor, but to only make it thirty inches wide so that they can put it underground a mile by drilling a thirty inch borehole so you don't need a containment vessel and if things go terribly wrong, just pour concrete over top of them. Forget about. Wow, it's kind of nuts, but yeah, put it. Shove the reactor down this big hole on a cable with a mile long water line and a mile long steamline. It's naturally pressurized. Is that

deep underground? And you pump water down to it and then heat it up with the reactor and steam comes back up. Interesting idea.

it's been around since twenty thirteen. It's been a while now, building a sodium cooled fast reactor in the fifty megawatt class. They got a lot of funding from tech billionaires. They're looking for building data center power.

two megawatt. This is a normal sized reactor, really terrestrial energy. And then the lar Atomics another one of the trisos building a two hundred and fifty megawat tryso helium cold. So let's talk to this three there's a couple of pressurized water reactors. We've talked about those before. You know how those work. There is a couple of sodium fast reactors. Actually we can do that later because I'm going to talk about terra power. And there is the molt salt reactors.

So the only one to really mission here that's different are the trisos. So this is the idea of building these sort of baseball size or tennis ball size spheres that are a common donation of both carbon and uranium fuel, so that they're self contained. They're naturally protected fuel. They can't melt down. They expand as the heat up, which actually slows the reaction on the They get really hot six seventy eight hundred degrees.

that's your heat. Most of the time they use helium. Yeah, the most common trisode designs for pebble bed you let superheat the helium. We don't have mature reactor designs for helium. But helium cannot become radioactive. It's also hard to contain. It's hard to contain. Yeah, but it's safe stuff relatively speaking. In the past, we've read into problems with pebble beds heating up their containers so much they cause the containers

to crack and then possibly even catch fire yanks. So you just have to keep moving these pebbles through their store, through the reaction area, and then down into container, and it gradually as they get older, you know they're going to become a stable and then you have to take them out, so you have a continuous refueling process. You just keep replacing the balls as they get old enough. The last few years, So.

They all have their own fund. The main thing that government has done with this new pilot I deal with the DOE has provided them fuel. So up until now, most of these companies have had a tough time actually maturing the designs enough to be even able to get fuel. But the rules have changed. The two other category is pressurized water. In that cateador is a few trisos. There's a couple of molten salts, and I want to talk about salts apperately, and then we'll talk about the sodium fasts.

So back to molten salt reactors. Typically with thorium. The Chinese with their TSMRILF one in WIWI built started construction back in twenty eighteen and went critical in twenty twenty three with a two megawatt thermal test reactor, so not making electricity, just generating heat. They lit that reactor in twenty three with your enriched uranium twenty four. Last year they started adding thorium to the liquid fuel and successfully

brightened into uranium two thirty three. So one of the secrets ofium salt reactors, which we talked about before, is that you turn thorium into uranium to use it as a fuel of uranium two thirty eight, which is the most common kind for uranium two thirty five, the enriched kind are you using uranium two thirty three. So that

plant has been completely successful. They've now proven they can breathe thorium into you two thirty three, and so there's now a one hundred megawatt plant to another test plant for twenty thirty five this year. In September, I got a chance to tour Copenhagen Atomics.

it can be reprocessed and put another reactor in. Is design they call the onion design, so imagine onion sitting on its end. So it's got a set of layers in it that a utter most layer is what they call a thorium breeding layer, where neutrons are hitting that thorium and turning into the uranium two thirty three. The next layer in is heavy water deudized water, and the reason for the deuterium is it reflects neutrons well, so

it's their neutron reflector. Instead of graphite, which a lot of other reactor designs, including the original thorium reactors used, you're using deterium because you can control the reactor by the amount of deuterium available. If the water flows out, the reactor stops, and so you got to keep that water cool. Because the reactor is running in like six hundred degrees, the water's going to stay under one hundred so he doesn't boil, but if it does, it actually

slows the reactor down, so it's safe. So then on the inside you have the fuel layer, and this will be a lifthium fluorine and thorium fluorine and uranium fluorine salts. And then in the centuries this adjustable. The center part of this is an adjustable heavy water level, so the amount of heavy water in there controls your action. You put in more water, reactor goes faster, take out the water reactor goes slower, so they are sufficiently funded to

build their first test reactor. The funny part is they can't run that reactor in Denmark without they don't have they can't get a license for it. Then Denmark has no new reactors, so they're actually going to set up the rig in Switzerland where they're able to get a test in twenty twenty seven. They have the money to do this, they just got to actually do it. They're going to run a reactor for a few months just to prove the behavior and then do all the testing.

One of the biggest things I saw on the tour is that they're building all of these test suites for working with the molten salts. These are very high temperature salts, and they sell these rigs to university, so they're essentially training the next generation of engineers in Bolton Salt.

reactors is the heat exchanger. So you want to flow these radioactive salts through pipes beside other pipes that have non radioactive salts in it, so you transfer the heat from one to the other, keep the radioactive stuff in the container, and then non radioactive hot salts flow back out. Somewhere around six hundred degrees celsius, the metal starts to warp, starts to melt, get soft, and you don't want any of that stuff to leak. Like all of that is bad.

And so even though the fuel itself can go up to one thy twelve hundred degrees, you just can't con pain it well. So the part of the challenge this is running into the temperatures where the materials will hold together. Most of the work I see Copenhagen Atomics doing in those labs is about finding the right materials to just be able to tolerate all last be durable enough. I have several hours of interviews of an interview that spending that

day with Thomas I could make into a show. At some point of one of those radio lab edits sort of summarize a lot of this, but it was very insightful for me just to understand how challenging working these high temperatures are, and they different reactor designs approaches to doing this. Brilliant people. I'm really pleased to have met them. Okay, let's talk about Terra Power. So this is a project going all the way back to two thousand and six that Bill Gates backed along with a bunch of other

people to build a reactor called Natrium. So this is a sodium cooled fast reactor three hundred and fifty megawatts. Their clever innovation is that they're going to use fluorine salts, the lithium berrillium salts for heat exchange transfer and storage. The idea of being they can store off of that fluid that you could actually put out five hundred megawatts of energy for up to five hours because you've got enough hot salts. And again one of the problems you

have with sodium. We've been building sodium cool fast reactors for a long time. So this is using the fast neutron instead of the thermal neutron. When neutrons are split off of your radioactive elements like uranium. They're moving very quickly, and that's great if they hit another nucleus of an atom, but they don't hit as often because they're moving so fast. When they do hit, they tend to split everything, which is great. You don't tend to make higher compounds as often.

But in order to have it work, you have to run into higher reaction rates and so, and you use molten sodium because sodium is transparent to the neutrons as opposed to water. Water tends to absorb neutrons, which generates heat and slows the neutrons down. That's why we work in what we call the thermal range instead of the fast range when you're dealing with a pressurized water reactor. Same for when we use graphite. Graphite slows those neutrons down.

Heavy water in the Copenhagen Thomas design or in the can Do design, same thing slows the neutrons down. But if you keep the neutrons moving fast, you have some advantages in the exchange. For it's risky and they're hard to keep stable, and the main thing is it's hard to power them up and power them down. So what's clever about the natrium design is you run the reactor

at the same speed all the time. You get it to speed and you leave it there because it's just making more hot salt for you, and then you're cooling that salt by making electricity with it. But you don't have to slow it down when the demand goes down. You just store the excess heat. So it's a way to keep the reactor more stable. Very smart, also a great nuclear waste burner. One of the reasons we've always pushed on fast reactors is they're a way to break

higher actinides. Now salt reactors can also do that because they can burn for so long, they can keep the fuel in for far longer. What's the problem with sodium cold reactors. Well, the first off is sodium is opaque, so you can't see anything. If you want to do any work on the reactor, you have to drain all the sodium, and I mean all of the sodium, because that sodium will burn in air and explode in water. So it's very hard to clean out a reactor enough

to do any inspections and so forth with it. But not that you do that very often, but it's part of the challenge of working with sodium gold reactors. It's easy to have fires when you have molten high temperature molten solelyum flowing around. That stuff burns really, really easily.

to get right now. They also just took a six hundred and fifty million dollars investment from in Nvidia. Wow, so there's plenty of money around. These guys aren't started for money. They also have a design they want to build a new reactor called a molten chloride fast reactor sometime in the future. So instead of using chluorine, using chlorine salts, and you're dealing with the same compound. It's in the same part of the periodic table. So they

have new reactory sides. But terror power is probably going to get to heat and they're gonna build a sodium reactor. We'll see how that goes cool. Hey, one last reactor technology is from the University of Illinois. Just found this recently using molten salt systems to for experiments, but now they've actually applied for a license to produce electricity at the university. This is that microreactor that Kirim was asking about, like where I get reactor? So there's about twenty five

microreactors at different university chemists around the US. Right, they're not really for making power, they're for doing nuclear experiments. And so this little reactor is using triso fuel. So back to those pebbles again, right, and they are encased in graphite and use helium to transfer the heat to spin a turbine to general electricity. And so they take these spheres, they stack them up as as raw assemblies and hexagonal as sddily all underground. This is called the

is made by a company called Chronos. This reactor design and the helium loop runs at about six megapascals at about six hundred degrees so plenty hot. Again mentioned that magic number six hundred degrees because that's where you can make the exchange your work and they're heating up that's

fahrenheit or that's celsius celsius. Okay, yeah, so six degrees yeah, six degrees celsius is what eleven hundred fahrenheit, so hot, do not touch touch, bad near And so they want to use that helium loop because it can't become radioactive. Going over those triso fuel to heat up a salt loop of potassium nitrides and sodium nitrides at low pressure so not heavily pressurized, but also very hot five hundred degrees, and then that does heat exchange agains steam to generate electricity.

So nothing too fancy, but they've passed the NRC review, so they expect to get a permit to do this assembly next year and to actually generate electricity for the University of Illinois twenty nine.

was only shut down in twenty nineteen for costs. Still had twenty years of run life in it, but it was cheaper to make power with natural gas, and so they turned it off. It wasn't even worth operating. So Microsoft has basically committed to buying power from it for twenty years. And Constellation's actually certain it's going to cost about two billion dollars to restart, but they should be running in twenty twenty eight.

to these power plants. We have the same issue that happened in Waterford, Connecticut, where Dominion E otherwise known as Millstone Nuclear Power Plant sits at the at the edge of the ocean there or the sound, and there was something on the table for some company to come in and buy up the land next to it and put in a data center, and everybody said no.

from it for twenty five years. Yeah, and so'll they say it'll take for four more years to restart, so somewhere in twenty nine it'll be up and running again. Amazon announced funding They put five million dollars into a new reactor design and called the XE one hundred. This

is another triso helium cooled high temperature gas reactor. The individual reactors eighty megawats electrical two hundred megawats heat their normal configuration, and they've got a license to build one in Washington State with four reactors for three hundred and twenty megawatts. And again Amazon committing to buying all that power. So all the tech companies have been doing this. And then you know, the other category of question I got a ton of coming into this was what is the

impact of AI and power generation? So Jake Fox, friend of Charles on the Blue Sky, Mats Carlson, who's been on the show before, saying, talk to us about what's the impact on AI, and I sort of gave this away at the beginning of the show. Is a AI technologies and the building of data centers responsible for increasing power.

Energy is like, well, yeah, a little, But the bigger issue here is power prices were going up anyway because the cost of improving the industry trastructure to support or the large diversity of power is costing money and taking time. And while it's easy to blame various individual points for why that's happening, it's not the only reason. We have put a lot of power online. In many cases, we have power in that's not even on the grid yet because it's taking so long to get it added to

the grid. They're not used to new power adding to the grid all the time. It destabilizes it. The grid has been built, especially in the US, to increase power production roughly at half a percent per year, and suddenly we're asking it to grow faster than that one or

two percent, and they're just not built for it. So they're struggling to adopt new power sources, to deal with bi directional loads, to deal with intermitt and power, to deal with storage, none of the things that these grids were originally built for, and we have North America has consistently underspent on maintaining infrastructure. The infrastructure wasn't built for

this it hadn't been well maintained. It was built to the minimum necessary for the basic uses, and now it's not being able to cope with what we're asking to do, including the additional demand of data centers.

hide who's building the data centers. They're also ordering up as much stuff as they can anywhere they can get a deal, they will immediately or request power for it, whether they're going to build on there or not off of the same Compani's got half a dozen different contracts at once, but probably only has the ingredients to build in one location. So there's more land being grabbed up,

there's more orders for parts they possibly needed. This is why ram prices and other things are going through the roof, because they're putting out all these outstanding orders to justify the demand for licensing and power in a lot of these locations. We don't know how many of these are even going to be built, right, irrespective of the AI bubble bursting or not. They're deliberately putting in multiple applications,

deliberately putting in multiple orders. It's one of those things where hey, I want to get one of these, but they're scarce, so I order five, right, and if I get one comes through, then I'll cancel the others. Well, that's happening with these data centers, right. They're ordering as much as they can possibly order it, as many places they can, all the chances they get some of what

they think they're going to need. It's all projection, right, Nobody, Their demands aren't that high, and so you're seeing these asymmetrical results where some companies are saying, we have GPUs in storage with know where to plug them in. We've

built on a day center, we can't get power. And the crazy part that's happening lately, we're going to put data centers in space right right, which we talked briefly on the space side, but there's more to that story, right, Like, this is a really complicated had set of problems being exacerbated by this competition to overbuild in many different locations,

and the pressure is showing. The reason the space thing showed up is that every kind of power development now has gone up in price, even the cheapest power like combined cycle natural gas plants. The prices on the stuff is soled. Yeah, there's currently licensing out for one hundred and twenty new gas fower plants by twenty thirty in the US alone for eighty gigawatts of power. Wow. The previous five years they built thirty five gigawatts, and that

was rapid building because it was the cheapest power. Part of the issue you're running into is you can only build these steam turbines so fast. There's three companies that make steam turbines at scale, gee Verona, Siemens, and Missionbishi.

All of them are back ordered hugely. So you know, five years ago, if you wanted to build a gas power plant, you could expect to pay about one thousand dollars a kilowatt, right, and you typically we take you thirty months to build that thing, and you'll be a three hundred to five hundred megawat power plant in about thousand old kill. What Now it's three times that price, right? And there used to be you know a one point two gigawat power plant which would take thirty months to build.

Now they're talking twice that five years. And in many cases, if you're talking about the normal power plant builds, when you're dealing with your normal half percent growth, part of your agreement with your government for building that power plant is that you will build it on time. And so now this shortage of supply is meant that a bunch of normal power plants are going to get canceled because they can't deliver on time because of the supply chain

pressures that have you put on this. It's got to the point where other companies are desperate to build termines. So this is this company I've been paying attention to called Boomer Supersonic. They want to build a supersonic biz jet. Right, we have no supersonic commercial aircraft anymore since Concor was gone. They're gone. So one point five seven mock aircraft. I'll

probably never get a chance to fly in it. But they made in order to get an engine to fly that fast, they did a customer turbine out of a company called Florida Turbine Technologies, and recently they got a three hundred million dollar funding out of the Silicon Valley to build turbines for energy generation. So they're going to hijack the production line at Florida Turbine instead of making the turbides for the aircraft, to make them for electricity generation.

Now they're gonna be able to use that money to fund the aircraft because they were struggling for enough money. Right, They're going to be testing of turbine for general energy generation in twenty twenty six, production in twenty thirty. It's crazy, that's a different world. Well, it's what And we're all veterans of the dot combo right and of the dot com bubble, and we can feel that this is a bubble. And so there's only so much time before this bubble

ends and a lot of these orders go away. In the meantime, you're hurting a lot of people, right, you're disrupting a lot of industry. Don't try and build a PC right now, you're going to play five times the price for RAM. And that's just because of back orders,

not because there's not much ram and needed. But everybody's been protecting these straight lines in demand which are never true, and sending their groups out to order and doing redundant ordering multiple times two, three, four times more what they need.

And if just simply wipe the market out, it is another like we had coming out of the pandemic, a supply chain inflation crisis where the demand you're over demanding the supply chain at the point where prices are just going through the roof for folks who need stuff, and

that just means everything's more expensive. And for what, right you know, if this bubble actually bursts in twenty twenty six, like so much of this is going to go away, and the guy and someone who put their hands on expensive parts because they needed them at the time are going to be in a terrible situation. The joke is these new power generations technologies, especially wind and solar, like they have no consumables. The wind always blows, you know,

intermittent at times. The sun comes up every day, and so they key getting cheaper. Same for batteries. The batteries just keep getting cheaper because really once you build them, they last. Right, We're getting twenty years out of these batteries like that combination is pretty powerful. And so this every other power source has this consumable problem. Right, and here we've got these non consumables. If we weren't being irrational, this would be pretty easy to do. But we've got

we've got problems stacked on a problem. As these new technologies have emerged, it has made the grid more complicated. It's taking time for the grid and the especially the regulators to get into play, to start actually working with it. Right now, we've throw this extra layer on top of it, with this bubble of building out AI technologies excessively, and it's complicated everything largely unnecessarily, and we know it will go away soon. Yeah, and all this disruption will be for naught.

going to be even less. And I mean, on one hand, I'm happy to see money being put into innovating on a bunch of these new power generation technologies. I would like small module reactors to be mature. There's a bunch of advantages to building small reactors. You know those big reactors, the AP one thousands and the EPRs where they last sixty years. It means that you consistently have a problem every few decades, you have to relearn how to make come again, all right, and with new models of it.

And so if we've got into a model where like the Copenhagen model, and many of these are the reactors models, where they're replaced every few years, it means you would have a continuous production of new small reactors. And that allows for more optimization and a more stable market for all of these.

we end up doing it. It's a stupid way, this AI padic and these tech companies dumping money into it, but it's still a way, and so if it comes out that way, we'll be better off as society or as a civilization. I just wish we didn't have to do it quite this dumb. Yeah, that's what I got, brother. Are we going to talk about fusion? It's not a lot of good news on the fusion side. Eider Projects

slowly calling along like all of the company. You know that old story and I said eight years ago when when the scientists are well funded, they don't talk, right, So like Commonwealth, Fusion well funded. A couple of news stories here and there, but we haven't seen anything. They've got enough money. They're building their reactor, right, there's no news to talk about it. Tider keeps inching along, you know, spending billions and billions, but they put out their steady

streaming new stories. But they're not finished, yet no light there like we're not seeing new light. We are seeing is that a bunch of companies are well funded, but all of them, all of those their dollogies, are further away from actually making electricity. Right. One of the biggest issues you have with fusion, and we talked about this last year and it hasn't changed, is you need a lot of deterium and tritium to run them, and that takes a lot of energy to make that stuff. So

we don't have a fuel pipeline for fusion reactors. How do we actually make enough fuel. We make a few tens of grams of tritium a year, and now we're going to need tons of it. Now, first we need to react. You can't you're not going to build a supply line when the machine doesn't exist. So we do have to build the reactor first, which we have not done. But when it does happen, the next problem will be, Okay, how do we get this thing fuel and start to

build it at scale? And it's never going to be power toomb cheap to meter, right, Like the bottom line is just operating a grid costs five to ten cents a kill a one hour, so They're always going to build for something. The cost of the electricity is not the hard part. It's never been the hard part. Distributing it and keeping an infrastructure up there running it. That's the heart.