How'd you like to listen to dot NetRocks with no ads? Easy? Become a patron for just five dollars a month. You get access to a private RSS feed where all the shows have no ads. Twenty dollars a month, we'll get you that and a special dot NetRocks patron mug. Sign up now at Patreon dot dot NetRocks dot com. Happy New Year, and welcome back to dot net rocks. Starting the year right with a geek out on energy. I'm Carl Franklin. That's Richard Campbell. Howdy, how was your Christmas?
Excellent? You know, we're now living up on the coast, so we went into town to spend days with our girls, you know, one hosting a dinner or the other one hosting at breakfast, that kind of thing. So and a brown bear and pine tree something like that. Yeah. Yeah, we're all about the offshore wildlife these days, when you know, lots of dolphins and sea lions and the occasional whale and the bloody river otters. Nobody told them they were river otters. They go out in the ocean,
everything's fine, but they're not sea otters. That's a different creature. So cool, So what kind of animal did you cook for Christmas dinner? I wasn't doing the cook it either. I know. We did the traditional turkey. They did a fine job of it too. Wow. So yeah that was really great, excellent. Yeah, how was yours? Mine was great as well? Family got your family together? Philet Mignon can't complain? Went beef? Huh? Yeah? Did you do like the whole loin or
did you just just you do the steak? Nope? I did individual philet's and I did them. I cooked them souvd at one hundred and twenty nine degrees for two hours and then seared them. Yeah, edge to edge medium rare, right, like perfect edge to edge medium rare. But my daughters, who are used to a good medium rare, thought it was too pink, right, even though they're used to that gray transition. They're used to the gray transition, and it was kind of weird like they had never had
it before, although it was absolutely delicious. Yeah nice. So yeah, there was all clean plates in the house. Yeah that's what you're looking for, right, I can't go wrong with that, all right, So I guess before we get started with the energy geek out, let's do better. No, framework. Awesome, All right, what do you got? Well, I saw this Kickstarter and Brian McKay sent me this in slack in the
fp nex slack. It's a Monogram keyboard. And the reason I think Brian sent it to me is because I had bought the Monogram modular dials and buttons and switches. They're Creative console. Creative console. Yeah, yeah, and I had one and I just couldn't really I didn't really have space for it on my desk and I didn't really use it all that much. So he's like, well, I'll buy it off you. So yeah, nice.
So you experimented with it and then you've got your own ways of working, right, Like, it's very personal, it is, yeah, the work workflows. But if you go to MONOGRAMCC dot com you can see what they've
done the Monogram Creative console. Right now. I saw this kickstarter for the keyboard that they're putting out that's designed for modern creators and it's got it's got a modular number pad or something on the side, and it's got a little display and you've got some customizable function keys and a knob and buttons and stuff. There's no slider per se, but it does look very very cool.
Yeah, and I caught them in this weird time because the Kickstarter for this keyboard ended on December fifteenth, and they're not selling it as a product yet, right, they're fulfilling their you know, kickstarters, kickstarters, and the kickstarter obviously went well, they went three times their goal, so that's yeah. You know, this is I like this approach that companies that know how to make product use Kickstarter to especially test the market and get their pre orders
nailed. Right, you know, so now they know, okay, well we've got a lot size this big, like we can get the run up, tune the thing up. But yeah, presumably it's just going to be a regular product for him going forward. Yeah, presumably. And I hope so because I want to buy one. Yeah, yeah, this looks really cool. Yeah, and I liked it they you know, because you've seen like the all O lead keyboards, which I think is too much. This is that O lead around the edges, normal keys in the middle, right,
I wouldn't surprise. It almost makes sense that they might be able to stick a couple of console items onto it too, you know, depending on what you were doing. I mean, there's nothing worse than you know, having you know your fingers, remember you know where the keys are, and then they all change from from under you. Oh I didn't press this button or change this setting, and now I'm using a divorce act key word layout.
Yeah, but you know, and the exceparate keep adds great because sometimes you want to keep out on the left, not just automatically on the right. Different people, different things. Yes, good one man, nice find. Yeah, So let's hope it becomes product and we can talk about it later. I'm pretty sure it will. So what's on your mind today, mister Campbell? Well, I grabbed a comment off of the last Energy geek
Out that was eighteen twenty five, lot a year ago. Oddly enough, it seems to be the Cadence are doing things these days, and lots of comments on that show, as is normal for geek outs, there's lots of conversation around them. And then so this comments a year old is from Jasper Sigmund, who's a regular and I believe already has a dot at rock Smug might even have music Cobe. I don't know, but if you don't,
Jasper, you know I'm going to hook you up. He says, it baffles me that with all this cutting edge technology, because you remember last year's energy eout there was I talked a lot about the new fusion stuff because there's been a bunch of new fundraises and stuff like that. With all those cutting edge technology, enormous reactors like tacamac and gigantic lasers, that we still rely on good old water and steam to produce electricity. Isn't there any research being
done on how we might not need water anymore. I'd like to think that maybe in one hundred one thousand years we'll have actual spaceships with warp cores like reactors, and we don't have a steam turbine attach them to make electricity. Okay, Clearly he's either joking or he hasn't been paying attention to the geekouts, because there's lots of things that don't involve water. Well, almost everything does, right, I mean, the basic concept of we boil water to
make steams, just a question of how we do it. It's a very very obviously solar doesn't solar and wind doesn't. And I think but his real reference was this idea to things like a lot of the fusion reactors just don't have any plans ron make electricity, although I did in my response to him at the time, bring up the fact that the trialpha actually is capturing energy from their fusion reactions using the same coils that can create the fusion reactions.
So they have a pulse reactor and as that as they create enough magnetic tension to actually cause the pulse to occur, that pressure back is actually energy they can capture off their coils, which is very science fiction, like, that's the kind of thing you might use in space going forward, different ways to
capture energy. But yeah, you know the other part of this is that we use a lot of steam turbines for a reason because we know how rightly what we want from electricity is reliability, not innovation really, and steam turbines are a known technology that you can get decades from that you can price out today for a price twenty five years from now, and so that's hard to
compete. With that being said, steam's only good into certain temperature range, and most traditional combustion strategies like burning coal or wood or oil, even some nuclear fall of the temperature range where water is well suited as your power. Fluid is the thing that takes in the energy and then distributes it out through
turbines. But as you get to higher temperature stuff like the molten salt reactors that run much higher temperatures, or even so the heliocentric collectors where they'll use fluorine salts as the fluid, then you need to take the heat out a different way, and that's when things like supercritical carbon dioxide and ultra high temperature
helium become a better mechanism for generating energy. So I mean, we're sticking with water because let's remember we've only been making electricity industrially for a little over one hundred years, not much more, and so it's all been about reliability and technique. It's only in the past couple of decades that we've really had an option for alternatives, and so those technologies are still maturing. There you go, but Jasper as usual, great comment. Thank you so much for
your participation in the show, and a copy of music. Cobi is on his way to you, and if you'd like to copy of music, go by write a comment on the website at don at Rocks dot com or on the facebooks. We publish every show there and if you comment there and I'm reading the show. We'll send you a copy of music go by and you can follow us on Twitter if you like. That's fine, But the cool kids are hanging out on Masdon these days. I'm Carl Franklin at Tech,
I'm dot social, and I'm Rich Campbell at Macedon not social. Send us a two. You might get some music to code by that way as well. Yeah for sure. Okay, So where to begin with energy? I mean, one of the things that we talk about is we talked about this in the Space show last week that we did some of the geek outs that I ended up we did. I did that thing with NASA and that turned
into some talks, and I've been doing space talks ever since. Not that I've talked to NASA about energy, although NASA will come up today, but I've also started doing energy geek out talks. And the rate of the evolution of these technologies necessarily slow, so it gets pretty boring for me. Like I'm doing space talks right now because it's super fun because every week Elon's done something right, like it's always some nutty thing next. But the energy technologies
are moving a little slower. But one of the ways it's become really fun for me is that I've been tailoring each of these talks to the country that I'm in. So you know, the basic conversation about the state of wind, state of solar, state of nuclear, all of those kinds of things, they're all the same for the most part until you talk about it in the context of the country. So at NDC Porto, I talked about the way the Portuguese makee electricity. So there wasn't much talk about nukes just because
they don't have any. But they got great wind, and they got an interesting solar, and they got some pumped hydro and it's fun to watch the folks from the country hear the stories of their own power. You know, most of times folks don't know. And I've been keeping all those notes, so I'm building up a repertoire. I've done in Norway, obviously, Canada, Australia, although depending on the country, Like if you're going to talk about the US, the US has one most complicated grids in the world,
arguably the most complicated rid in the world. A you were first and be bloody big country and it's very fragmented, like there's there's something like nine power grids in the US, so it's got to be kind of a state by state thing. When I did a Canadian version, i was doing it for British Columbia, which is a lot of hydro electric. So it doesn't make
sense in this context really go into the individual countries. But I've got a lot of notes around those different parts and have dove into areas, so you might hear me reference particular country and it is probably one where I've read all of the paperwork for that country because they give me inside, Like I'm reading about the Portuguese pump storage solution in the Far North, which is an eight hundred megawatt pumped hydro It's massive. It's incredible, it's largest in the world.
It's incredible. Anyway, let's start this time around with wind. Okay, because winds had an interesting year. Actually, yeah, certainly my neck of the woods. It's picked up the pace. Yeah, certainly, when you know it's relevant in different areas. Twenty twenty three will be a record year. They're expecting over one hundred gigawatts worldwide to be installed. Wind power
installations slowed down during the pandemic. They are a very large scale physical thing to be done, and so they were well behind in terms of the rate of the expected installs, and so they're catching off in the bypart of that will be some banger years going forward. The other big trend in wind has been progressively larger and larger and larger turbines megawat, two megawat, five megawatt,
ten megawatt, wow, fifteen mega. Like, when you're getting up to fifteen megawatts, you're talking one rotation of those blades is enough power for a half a dozen houses for a year, right, Like, it's crazy, these massive amounts of electricity to reinproduce, and there's a question of why, like why gets so big and the reality of courses. The taller the mast is and the larger the blades span is, the more consistent the power is, and you need fewer of them. The huge number of turbines creates
problems for power alignment. You have to adjust all the sine waves to match up. It's complicated to make all these things work well. Also, you know very well that taking a little whirlybird out out in the wind, you know it's going to go yeah, well most likely, yeah, Most wind turbines have a minimum power and a maximum power that they can take, and they'll actually turn them off if it gets too windy, which seems crazy, but think of the stresses. You know, when you're talking about those fifteen
megawatts seem to be the big ones. That's five hundred foot tall mast from the surface typically of the water to the hub. I would imagine that the bigger they are, the more momentum the blades have, right, so they can take more wind gusts and lulls and still kind of rotate at an evening exactly right, and they tend to be consistent. And by the end of
blades are I mean, they're even bigger. That's just the hub right, each the diameter of the road or seven hundred and seventy five feet, So imagine a rotating structure tip to tip that's as large as the height of the Golden Gate Bridge from the water to the top of the tower. That's how big these things are. And so in the past couple of years, all of the major turbine producers have been making larger and larger turbines and they're all
having problems, the structural problems. They're starting to come apart. Wow, and they've all had effectively recalls. So, and I hate to say this, but like I feel like that's good news because as long as you were racing for size, you weren't really racing for other innovations. If they correct answer to a bet, Tribron was always a bigger turbine than you were,
just trying to make it bigger. But as they got much above these fifteen megawat ones, the structural stresses in the blades got so high that the braids are breaking. So they're finding a sweet spot. Yeah, and so you've hit that curve where now you're going to have to make the blade stronger, aka more expensive to get any bigger and in the reducing the cost per megawatt,
now you're on the other side of the curve. You're going to have to spend more to produce more to make a bigger turbine, and that's not worth it. And so if that size sweet spot makes sense, then now you can start to pour your R and D energy into the other things you could improve with it. And in terms of increasing reliability, better motor controls, better resistances, So there's lots of ways to continue to prove it. So it speaks to them maturing industry. But when it's just not like it's
just General Electric that's having this problem. Siemens has the same problem, Vessus has the same problem. Like all of them seemed to hit this wall at once, and so it just seems to be a point in the industry where that's about as far as we're going to go on there innovation wise. Yeah, it's for innovation. On the size side, we've kind of nailed on shore wind. It works. You can't go that big there, just doesn't
make sense. Then you have different classes of offshore and the near shore approach, which the Danes have done the most of, but it's all over the world without a doubt, are also pretty mature. So now we're talking about real offshore, and the difference being the amount of water you're in. So up to about fifty meters of water, roughly one hundred and fifty feet or so, you can slam a casement down through the water to the bottom, pump the water out, then drill a big hole into the bottom, pour
concrete and mount of masts and that's your offshore wind. Right it's anchored to the bottom. But it's basically the same as onshore wind just out in the water a little further away from people. The airflow is cleaner there, so you can go larger. And a lot of these titans, these fifteen megawatt that's the installation they're doing. The problem is that lots of places water and
deeper than that. You know, here we are in British Columbia with latch of wind blowing in, we don't have we have barely any wind turbines at all. I mean a we have a lot of hydroelectric power banks, mountains, very useful, but b our water is really deep, right, Like this is fjord country, and fifty meters of water is you know, one hundred meters away. It's just there's nowhere to put a wind turbine. So
the technology has been maturing. And again I'm going to reference Portugal here because I did that Portuguese talk where they have one of the experimental floating wind turbine test sites floating. Yes, because once the water gets much deeper than fifty meters, the pressure is involved to drill into the bottom are just too high. So I'm trying to think of the physics of how that would work. I'm kind of thinking like and this is the first I've heard of it.
But I'm kind of thinking, like, you know, how a sailboat has a big keel that, as you know, the bottom is very heavy and it sort of floats down. It goes down into the water exactly right and keeps it balanced. So would you have the turbine mast mounted to some great, big, giant structure with a big weight on the bottom not that big. Now we're directly boring from oil rake technology, and so you have to
do it. You have maybe one hundred and fifty meters tall mask, but below you have another one hundred meters of lower structure, especially in the same shape, and then it's cable stayed to the bottom. Okay, so you have a set of anchors with a set of lines running to it that keeps it more or less in the same area. But it is floating, so it's going to move. It's just not going to move very far. But
it's also going to twist. Yeah, right, But it's all in some ways it's going to be more survivable in rough seas because it has some give where the fixed mass have no give. That's right, they're gonna get pummeled, right and further offshore you get more so give me a weather, but you also get better wind yep, and it's right. Depending on the nature of your bottom, you're further out of you may be completely out of site, which makes people happier. You can get away from the migration paths of
seabirds, so the incidence of encounters or seabirds goes down. So there's a bunch of advantages. Now, it's not indefinite depth. We're now we're talking about three hundred and fifty meters of water, but that's a lot more continental shelf that you can be placing these on. Where I live, we have Long Island Sound, So Long Island chuts out from New York City out east, and then there's this little you could think of it as a big pond,
but it's a it's a sound. And inside the sound, the wind is okay, but it's not as in the you know, certainly the waves, but it's not as good as outside the sound when you're right on the Atlantic. Yeah, but there's plenty, you know, there's a reason for the fishing is so great in the Northeast. The water's relatively shallow, so it's easy to fish to the bottom and to to that's you know, when you think about lobster and cod, and like all of those great fisheries,
it's a relatively shallow water. There's still hundreds of meters, but not thousands of meters, right, and so that opens a door to this is all great wind power territory. The challenge of now you can immediately think of the challenges this now is a mixed use thing. Generally speaking, wind turbine operators don't want boats around their wind turns. Right, not in my backyard,
not in my front yard. And forget about what it does to the lobsters in the cod right, I mean, and it's a good question of what does it do? Mean, they're just anchors, So it's just more stuff on the bottom, which you know in some ways that's artificial reef. That's true. I would also argue that if you make areas with wind turbines in place, and you make them exclusion zones, that's a place for those animals to grow. Right. If people stay out of them, then that's a
non fish area. And what comes out of that fish out of those zones can then be fished, and so you might actually be strengthening the stocks in that area. But it bears study. Right. It is a mixed use problem. Although most of the time you will see fairly let's say, dramatic conversations about this stuff. Oh, I know a lot about that. There's a lot of talk going on in my town right now. Yeah, because of wind turbines that are being assembled at the State Pier in New London,
Connecticut. Little old New London, right, is in the news, and there's there's a lot of stuff going on here. And they've been arguing about it and going over budget and all this stuff for a few years now, but it looks like some good stuff is finally coming out of it. So they're using the state here as the staging ground for building wind turbine projects. That's right around the northeast. Yeah, and so I think of it like
the developer tool company of software. Right. You know, they're not building the turbines. They're not or they're not having them built. They're not putting them out there and benefiting from their you know what they produce. They're not making electricity. Yeah, they're not making electricity exactly. They're putting them together.
Yeah, They're the place everybody has to go to if you actually want to build them out right, that's cool, and it's just building the infrastructure to make it easier to make more wind power in that part of the world. Yeah, they I mean, all in all, it's good news. They're progressing. The cost per watt is really low. Some of the cheapest electricity in the world, between wind and solar are both the lowest costs, and that's one of the reasons for the increasing size, and we're learning to
do better to move it further away. Of course, further offshore still means you've got in cables running two shorts electricities for the folks on the land, So there is some complex infrastructure as you get further and further offshore, and there's plenty of water deeper than three hundred and fifty meters. So but we've also again can tap the oil rig industry because they've dealt with oil rings at
much deeper doubts than that. If we want to go deeper still, but at this point the three to fifty meter range seems to be there's a bunch
of test projects in place today, half dozen them in the world. They are working well, learnings are occurring, so I think you're going to see a big expansion there, and depending on the nature of your water, that might be fully offshore, not visible at all from land, or maybe just further away, but certainly titanically large massive turbines, but in variosteudy winds of the general electricity a long period of time. Yeah, show, Shall we move on to solar? Sure? I know, let's talk a little bit
of solar. So can I tell you a solar story before we start? Yeah, tell me your solar story. So, a couple of years ago, so I have this huge house that my wife and I bought this house when we both had kids living with us, and so she has two and I have two, and we needed a place that had a lot of bedrooms and a lot of size and you know whatever. So we bought this house. Of course, now they're all moved out and we're like, we don't like this house anymore. It's too big right from the Yeah, but it
was built in nineteen eighty nine. The roof was, you know, twenty years old or something like that. It needed a new roof. It was the roof was getting angry. It was throwing shingles at us. You know. It's like, hey, it's like, you know, Grandma's teeth are
falling out kind of thing. Right. So we put on a new roof a couple of years ago, and now that we have this this new roof, we're like, well, you know, let's see about our solar panel options because you know, we we have a pretty high carbon footprint here. We have you know, HVAC systems and you know, lots of computers, and but your power bill is substantial. The power bill in the summer gets
ridiculous, especially the hotter it gets. Yeah, so we looked into it and the what we went with was this company called Trinity Solar, their Connecticut company, and the way we wanted to structure it was it was perfect. They basically for no money down, no money down. No no money down, they heard that one. Yeah, So for no money down, they
come out, they do an inspection. They're also a roofing company, so if there's any structural things that need reinforced, you have to go together really well yeah, yeah, they do that for you, and they you know, they make any repairs. Plus you may need a new like it makes sense to do it when you're putting a new roof on. Yeah. Yeah, Well we already had had the roof okay. So there was a few things that needed some more support in the attic, and they did that free
of charge, and then they put on the panels. And so there's a tax incentive if you buy panels. Right, if I go out and buy my own solar panels and hire an independent contractor to put them up, I get a tax discount on that, I get a rebate. But these guys are like different. They're saying, all right, we're going to own the panels, we're going to put up the panels, and they're hours we're going to give you a lease at a fixed rate per month that's lower than your
electricity bill. And by the way, they told us that you're getting a full inverter's worth of panels. Whatever it was, thirty six panels. I think it was right. And you know, if you add just one more, you'd need another inverter. So it was like, you're going to be covered your bills. Based on what our bills were in the past, this
is enough to cover the bill. So we're basically trading. The way I looked at it is we're trading a bill that can go from one hundred dollars a month to eight hundred dollars a month nine hundred dollars a month, right, depending on the you know, depending on the season, to you know, two hundred and fifty dollars a month every month for twenty years, right, And so there was a bit of discussion and all that stuff, and it just kind of occurred to me that you know, having a known amount
is better, especially today with the power companies upping their their delivery charge, which boggles my mind. Why you have an electricity charge. Oh and by the way, we're going to even charge you more to get that power to you. Oh and by the way, we can just change that whenever we feel like, right, well, that's why they invented that charge. Because the charge, the charge, the power rate was fixed by the by the government right there, and so they came up with new charges that aren't part
of that that agree. And so in December there was some word rumors going around that they were going to this is Connecticut Light and Power ever source it's called now, they're going to double their rates, and they did in January this year. The rate went doubled. So what was a two hundred dollars monthly bill is now a four hundred dollars monthly bill, and we got turned on in June and since then are you know, it's it's all coming back.
So they and then there was also the question of well, what happens if you want to sell your house and the new owners don't want the solar and I'm like, well, they won't buy the house to go, you know, go away. It's part of the deal. It's part like, oh, I want the house, but I don't want the garage. Yeah, like that garage off, will you? You can have it? It's fine. So and the Trinity was basically like, yep, whoever buys the house, the goes over into their name, We transfer it and Bob's your
uncle. So it seemed like a no brainer to me, especially because you know, it's not like we're aging. But you know, retirement is ten, fifteen, twenty years away. I don't know whatever it is, and I don't know. Yeah, what is this thing you called retirement? I don't know. But you know, at that point we could sell the house and you know, add the however many thousands of dollars onto the value by
having those solar panels. Yeah, weird, you're selling a house. You're selling your house with a fixed a known cost of electricity, right, which is useful. It's a good thing. Yeah, so I'm glad we did that. Yeah, it's cool. Anyway, that's my story. The first time a whole gigawatt of solar cells was installed in the world was only in two thousand and four. I mean, solar power has been around since the
seventies. It's just really expensive. Wow, right, But only twenty years ago did we start We started having buildouts like that, like a gigawatt of electricity, but that wasn't even one side. That was all over the world. Twenty twenty three, it's a gigawatt a day. Over three hundred and sixty gigawatts of solar was added worldwide in twenty twenty three, and I just give that as a sense of scale that what's happened. Solar panels have gotten
substantially less expensive. Yeah, and you largely can thank the Chinese for that. They're the ones who really did mass manufacture. They didn't invent them. They're very much an American design. They're about twenty two percent efficient, but they're very cost controlled. They work really reliably. Of those three hundred and sixty five gigawatts of electricity capacity and added last year, twenty five percent of that is, like you, residential solar. Most of it is commercial,
so that is large scale farms essentially fields of solar panels. And they're very, very inexpensive. It's the least expensive power to deploy in this day and age. And I could do they am costs and all those other calculations, but it's not that important, right, Like we can leave off the math today we'd have to go that far into that particular thing. Uh. And it's but it's an interesting point to see that solar is not being installed because
of that because it's the right thing to do. It's like zero carbon energy. It's being done because it's the least expensive energy, right, and so you know, the straight motivations are there. That being said, it's it's getting more innovative. They are doing fun things with solar in the sense they're doing things we talked about this last year, floatov voltaics, solar panels on reservoirs. You know, I've I see applications for this in my own town,
and I wonder, hey, is anybody paying attention. You know, I know they don't listen to Dot and rocks, but This isn't something that we invented or you invented. This is being done and especially on channels and uh you know, waterways, waterways that aren't usually used by people. Well, where you're seeing this push towards float of voltaics is on water ways where
they're currently managing problems caused by sunlight hitting the water. Right, because one of the challenges float of votakes is you're going to darken the water, so you will modify an ecosystem. But if it's an irrigation canal, right now, you're trying to scrape alogie out of it. So covering it by putting
covering with solar panels actually decreases that work. And by now you probably figured out if you don't know what floatovertex is is putting solar panels on floating structures, rafts, barges, whatever you want to call it, or at least over water and over water it prevents rapid evaporation and it does a few things
and you obviously get the solar energy from it. Yeah, so I mean you're generating solar power, you're decreasing the amount of sunlight hitting the water, which helps with algae management and other inappropriate growth when you're talking about canals and irrigation and you're keeping the solar panels cool. Solar panels don't actually like too much heat, and they actually get less finished and wear out. So the side effect of we're slowing down the rate of evaporation is also keeping the panels
cooler, so it is mutually beneficial in a lot of respects. That being said, it's not as cheap as conventional commercial because conventional commercials row on row, very symmetrical wiring is trivial maintenance, disease is the easy as possible, and you're always optimizing pointing directions. Although in the northern hemisphere we're not pointing
as much solar to the south anymore. We're pointing at more east and west because we're trying to we generate too much power at midday, so we'd rather use our panels less efficiently per panel to distribute the power over a larger rage of time, collect more light in the morning on the east panels and more light in the later part of the day on the west. Face panels don't
need as many panels facing south. It's funny, and it's funny, but that's kind of kind of where we're at now because the panels are as cheap they are. And it once was a time when it made sense to have helio tracking solar panels, so solar panels on mass with motors, because the panels were so expensive that optimizing their collection at all times was worth it in exchange for motors that need constant maintenance, right, that need repairs and those
sorts of things. And now largely that's gone away because the panels have gotten so cheap. It's cheaper just put in more panels aimed in all the directions you need to aim them in. And that's one of the challenges when you talk about float of voltaics is often the panels are not pointed in the ideal directions. They're following the path of the irrigation canal, or they're just wherever it'll fit in the in the reservoir. But that's okay because it's power you
it still makes net power. It's power you wouldn't otherwise have. It has benefits to the reservoir that it's on. Another area, specialized area in solar related to this is agra voltaics or solar panels on farms. Farms that are still working, so this is nothing magical. Imagine and instead of them being down low to the ground, they're ten feet up so that they're on po posts essentially that have lifted them up. So's the ground below it is accessible.
Oh, I see, I was wondering. You know, you said these are working farms, So yeah, I was staying at a you know, fallow farms or those that aren't working as much anymore. That's a good use for them. But I guess see you you're right. I mean, you could put them on poles and posts and lift them up and raise them up. Now what you are shading that area, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. There are many agricultural plants that prefer more shade. Many of
the animal feed grasses prefer more shade. So a mixed use where you have agricultural animals who prefer their shade also under those panels being able to eat and maintain that grass. So you're making electricity above, feeding your animals below. And if you're spacing them ount correctly, you will have sunlight. You'll have
some yeah, when the as the sun moves. Plus we've all the increasing amount of environmental change means that many of these fields are too hot as it is, Yeah, and so increasing amount of shade on them is useful. It's a good idea. So yeah, it's an easy one, and it's a way for the same way of farmers and more farmers are throwing a few wind turbines around as well. Is another source of income for agriculture. And
then it also can benefit the ground that it's covering. So what if you have, let's say a four acre plot and you're not farming your land, does it make sense to put a solar farm on those three acres? Quite possibly, yes. But you and now you're a commercial producer, what are you going to do with all that power? You have to negotiate with power grid, right, so you now becoming a provider to the power grid, and so it's all in the agreement you're going to make with them about buying
the power and what they're expecting from you. So I remember in our very first geek out, the electricity Geekout? Was it the electricity Geekout? The first one? No, it wasn't. No, the first ones were space but yeah, space Shuttle. Okay, but I remember in that electricity geek out that you did that you dispelled the myth that the meter doesn't run backwards when you overproduce, right, if you produce more than your well, we were talking about the meter does run backwards, but does it? Is that
power actually but the electricity doesn't flow backwards? Yeah? Is the power actually usable most of the time? No? Yeah, okay, And that's when we're talking about residential solar, where we're talking about a couple of kilowatts and uh and and it's already been stepped all the way down to retail power to one hundred and twenty bolts they see. Yeah, when you talk about commercial power plants like that commercial solar, they're delivering the power to the grid at
a much higher level. Okay, right, there's just the because they you have to protect people from that. You can't have that on the side of someone's house, right right, So right now, the way that residential solar is set up, it's designed for you to consume, and when you produce more than needed, it's metered by the power company largely as a credit to you, so that when you do need to poy power from them when the solar isn't running, it doesn't cost you anything, right, right, And
that's no power company willingly enters into that as very much a political conversation. But it's to encourage more solar to be installed. And it's worth it for the most part because it does turn off older power plants. Like it works out, Is that power actually usable most of the time. No, it's very hard to take stepped down power and distribute it to other homes. It's
not water and it doesn't flow easily uphill. But when you're gonna if you're talking about your farm scenario three acres, you're gonna lay down a bunch of panels. Now you're going you're going to be a small producer, but you're going they're not going to put residential power to that. They're going to bring commercial power in for that. They're going to ask you for three phase power.
They're going to ask for it at four hundred and eighty right, a form that is more easily added to the grid for other places to use, right. Right. And that's the distinction is that's not how houses are set up. Right. And so, as you said, this isn't something that you can just go online and choose. Hey, how many incors do you have? Okay, here's how much money you're going to make every month. You have to negotiate that with the power company. Yeah, you know,
it depends on the power company. Some power companies are well set up for so you want to be on micro producer, Like here's the deal, but it depends on you. It's a case by case basis, right and site, and the site matters too, Right, when are you going to make power? How much is it going to be? They may even say, hey, we're going to pay far less for power at noon when we have
way too much. Right, we'd rather you set up your panels facing east and west and generate less power mid day, more power early, and we'll pay you more for that. Like, you're going to have to look at the deal for your area for it to make sense. Interesting, it's really interest and it's something that I would never even have thought of. Yeah, you know, even last year, we are evolving, aren't we, Like we're understanding more about this, and so are the power companies. So power
companies are pretty basic. You know, most people listening to the show, and he certainly you and I are. We are Internet children, Like we've been around the Internet our whole lives, and we think peer to peer is not a big deal, but outside of our industry it's bizarre and so and power companies are like that. They have spent a long time to come to a place to be able to deal with a large number of power producers right.
For a long time, the grid was built around a handful of very large power plants distributed over a wide area, and that has evolved with our need to change the way we produce power into many more smaller producers and being able to integrate and modify that power efficiently. Very good. When I put out the word about writing the Geek Cuts, of course I got questions from our regular listeners. Martin Twaite's asked about solar efficiencies like why are we still
stuck at twenty two percent? And the reason it really is cost We are developing. There's certainly experiments with more efficient panels, Perovskitde panels being one of the most obvious examples. They get up into the thirties. The downside is reliability and costs. So when you start you're starting to experiment with these more higher density panels, they have heat problems, they wear out quickly, and
so you know the power. The advantage of of that twenty two of these classic silicon dioxide panels is that they are reliable and they last, and we are learning to recycle them. So in the past couple of years we've seen some good breakthroughs. I read through a bunch of paperwork from a company called Solar Cycle in Texas who are building the machinery to automate the processing of classic
aluminum solar panels. So they stripped the illuminum housings off and then they actually have Because these different layers that go into making a solar panel are all glued together, they're very tricky to separate, and recycling of each one of them is af of each layer is a different process, and you don't want to
cross contaminate. So they've been developing the machines that neatly cut the glass off the top so that that glass can be recycled and neatly separate each of the different layers in the panel into the constituent ingredients so they can be resold. Richard, whatever happened to graphene? Remember we were so excited about graphene, and particularly about solar panels. Well, we're anything electrical was interesting. What happened to graphene? Is that all of that hype that we were talking about
a few years ago led to funding. And when scientists are funding, what do they talk about? Nothing? Because they have money, they're at work. Okay, so graphie technologies are being developed. It's just that it's hard. Scientists only talk about stuff when they're trying to raise money to work on it. But have there been any products? I mean I have seen.
Yeah, it's a couple of big graphine batteries and things like that. Well, I've seen graphine solar panels that claim to have raised the efficiency by twenty to forty percent. Yeah, never got out of lab Okay, right, Like they test them and then they have problems, right, They're too expensive to manufacture. It's like this thing's twice twice as power fission but costs ten times as much. Oh boy, right, oh and it lasts only two
years. Like these are the problems. There's a difference between the science of a new material and turning it into an engineer product that people can use. So then the benefits of converacy of recycled solar panels is that we're making tons of them and they do wear out and over time you get about twenty years twenty five years, they lose about a third to a half a percent per year inefficiency. So at some point it's just worth it to replace them.
And you can't just keep throwing them in the dump. You want those materials back. There's an expectation that by twenty thirty we're going to have to decommission something. We're in a neighborhood of eight million tons of solar panels and so recycling is going to be a big deal, and you know a few decades on it's going to be tens of millions, hundreds of millions of tons. So and right now it's cheap to dump them throw them away, it's expensive
to recycle them, and so maturing recycling technology is important. That's where a company like solar Cycle comes into plays. They're learning to recycle solar panels. It's very cool, and make the tools to make it easier for other people to do it. So we're big on this closed cycle system where you build things to make electricity and then you're able to reprocess and to make more things, and the metals they can extract from that can be turned back into new
solar panels again. So it's good news. It certainly improvements. Cool, all right, let's take a break. All right, we will do that and we'll be back after these important messages. Stick around and we're back. It's dot net rocks geek Out. Addition. First of twenty twenty four. I'm Carl Franklin's Richard Campbell. We're talking energy. We started with wind, we did solar, and now we're on two. Well, I feel like we got to talk about power stora because we just talked about the two intermitted
power sources. Yeah, and so you know there's a reason they're cheap. They don't run all the time, right, and you have to do something with all that energy, use it or lose it. Well, and that's always the case with anything. But we talk about baseload power generation and that could run. We could control exactly how much it makes at any given time, whether that be hydroelectric or oil gas, you name it. With wind and solar, yeah, you know you could stop wind just by locking the
turbines, but why would you. But when you so, when you're making more energy than necessary, you got to do something with it. It's storing. It's useful because there's lots of time when it's not working, right, for better or worse. Tesla, you know, broke a lot of ground here. They're reducing the cost of making high density batteries and their battery innovation led to them doing a lot of their original some original grid scale power places
that I've talked about this on previous shows. Going to go back in the stom I'm trying to cover new ground here. Last year I was talking about form Energy. So these are ex Tesla guys who recognize that the lithium ion battery is not a good battery for grid. Lithium ion batteries are good batteries for cars. They pack a lot of power in low weight because you need to move in good laptops too, but pack a lot of power in a
low weight environment. They charge its quickly and also can discharge quickly. You think about how quickly an electric car can discharge its battery, and that's that whole effect, and that's not what the grid needs. The grid wants lots of power. It doesn't need to move it around physically like it can stay stuck to the ground and lasts a long time. And so what form Air was focused on was a type of battery called the iron air battery. This
battery has been around a long time. NASA had a bunch of experiment with a bunch of them for space related technologies back in the time. But the big difference with the iron air battery is that it's got a long discharge cycle. So sort of natural discharge rates for the lithium I filscium phosphate batteries are in the six to eight hour range, so you know, if you try
and draw them fasterout the battery overheats. If you try and dro them real slowly, they leak energy anyway, and so you can't get much outside of that time range. The natural discharge time for a iron air battery is one hundred hours. Wow. So it's good for storage for grid, yeah, yeah, for grid. So they are bigger, they are heavier, and they are hotter than lithium iron batteries, none of which is a problem when you're on the grid. What they also are is cheap because the materials are
less expensive. So a less expensive, bigger, heavier, hotter battery that you can stick behind a fence and cantually dischange charge over many days. Hmmm. So in terms of filling in the grid, it's great. The work that Elon did, and Tesla did down in Australia with their big lithiumum the Mega packs in Victoria. Yeah, those were bridging power, so they weren't designed to last a long time. What they were designed to do is provide
when they needed to switch between solar and wind sources. They needed power in between those twos. It just lasted for a few minutes, and without it they were having brown up problems where one would one power sources starting to fade, they'd have instabilities and electricity which made people sad. Then they get the other systems back up and it'd be fine. So these battery packs sat in between those two to take care of that problem. Not a bad use for
lithium ion battery. So back to my story of solar panels. These guys Trinity, which is a Connecticut company. And by the way, if anybody isn't listening in Connecticut and wants to get Trinity to come and look at you,
contact me because I get a kickback. Okay. Anyway, So they do offer a battery option, but we have a propane generator right and a five hundred gallon propane tank in the backyard, and it doesn't make any sense for us to have that now that and some people when I mentioned it on Facebook, some people said, I want the battery pack so I can be completely off the grid. Right. They just want to They don't want to
deal with a power company. Don't want the power company. You benefit from my generated power, and you know, so there is that, but I don't care about that. I care about a low monthly bill, and I don't want to you know, if the power goes out, I got you
have power two weeks worth of power in that propane tank. Yeah, that's compelling, right, and just you got to keep you got to take You have to store that fuel, right, and it does gauge like you have to use it up eventually, and it cost a certain amount to refill. Uh, and the machine takes maintenance. You know, batteries are pretty stable,
although they do wear out. They don't have any maintenance. And also they these guys told us they wouldn't last that long, like you wouldn't get no, you know, you wouldn't get days and days no out of well it takes and again it's the natural discharge cycle. You have to have a lot more packs if you want to increase duration, right, and that you know, that's the claim to thing for form Air. When we talked about
them a year ago, they were in the prototype stage. They were they were putting their initial project in. It was supposed to be finished this year. One megawatt project in Minnesota. That has been completed. So they actually delivered on time and it worked, and Minnesota's response to that was to buy a bigger one. Wow. Great. So yeah, you know so many times to say, oh, we were going to have our first touch bribuy
at twenty twenty three and is just never done. In fact, I'll bring up a few of these along the way of other technologies because that's where that's what's happened to them. Now. This is the lithium ion batteries. No, these are iron air batteri. These are iron air batteries. Oh wow. Form Energy when we talked about a year ago, they said next year we're going to have this first prototype project in Minnesota. They did it. It worked. That was a one megawatt pack, so one hundred and fifty
megawatt hours. Again remember that one hundred what discharge thing, so a much higher megawat hour than the actual power can only put out one megawat but it could do it for one hundred and fifty hours. Wow. So yeah, Minnesota is now asked for a ten megawat thousand megawatt hour implementation, and so is Colorado, and the next one to be finished or the next and then after that is Georgia's asked for an even bigger one, a fifteen megawatt fifteen
hundred megawatt hour. Now what's the reason that they want these? Is it because they want to avoid brownouts or something or they thereon lies the question like what are you using it for? And so it is exactly that they have intermittent power sources like wind and solar, and they want need to provide power all the time. So what's the alternative wind and solar? What's the normal? What do you light up when the sun goes down? The normal thing
is a natural gas peaker plant. Natural gas paper plants are very efficient power plants. They're great because they take the natural gas, they burn it in a turbine which spins a generator, and then the output heat boils water to spend a steam turbine as well, so they extract energy multiple times from that
prope Pretty cool or that natural gas. They're compact they're quick to build, and they're efficient and they and they're called peaker plant, the Piker plant model, which is a particular figure figuration, can be lit up in minutes, so as the solars, you know, the sun's starting to go down, you light up this power plant and they but they are carbon emitting, although they are the lowest carbon per megawatt our electricity of the petrochemo. Now that's
just like you know, I'm the least poisonous of these apples. But that's what normally happens, right, is you would use a gas peaker plant, and these look to be that replacement. So they don't that they have more more the enough power to last a couple of days until there's enough solar you know, so that's the trend there and form energy, you know, more power to them. These are one hundred million dollar projects. They're not incredibly
costly in the in the world of energy technologies. So they're having some success. It's just going to take time to scale the government. There are other countries that there are other places that are ordering these things. They run roughly ten percent the price of the equivalent lithium ion. Wow. Cheap, yeah, but improvement that being said, I don't think that's the best news and power storage this year. Oh really Yeah, My favorite story in twenty twenty
three actually comes out of the Australian National University. So they did a pumped hydro storage study worldwide. Wait, I heard about this and it might have been something that we even talked about. Well, I certainly was excited about it. I saw it on TV or son. I don't know what I said, but but yeah, go ahead. Well what they did they started in Australia and they ended up going all over the world because we have such good maps now. But the essential idea was this pump storage. There's a
bunch of it. It exists today. In fact, many existing hydro electric dams are also adding pump storage tom as well, which means there's at times when they have excess electricity, which you never used to have. Right, And until grid scale, solar and wind came along, extra electricity was not a thing. If you were making more power you need, you turned down,
you turned off the plant, right. But as more access of power has been peering on the grid, ways to store to become more relevant, and so the idea that hey, we're making too much power from solar right now, So pump the water back into the dam as a way to store that energy, knowing that when you need it you can now let it back down through a turbine to general electricity. Okay, that wasn't the thing that
I heard about. I heard about hot sand, heating up sand and using that to store energy because the sand holds on to heat longer, and then using that when you have you know, when you need yeah, yeah, yeah, alternative energy storage. Yeah. And there's lots of experiments in there. There's the crane system and so forth. Here's the advantage of pump hydro. Totally known technology, right, hundreds of years of use, right like, this is one of the very first ways to general electricity, the Niagara
Electric Project. Waterfalls capture it, right, Niagara Falls Westinghouse. You know, this is the westing House Edison dual back in the eighteen hundreds. And in fact, it's not just that it was a good thing to make electricity
from it, it also decreased erosion at the falls. By cutting diverting a bunch of that water down these tunnels to make electricity, they stop the they cut back the erosion rate of the falls, right like, We always think about power generation as destructive to the environment, but often and if we do it well, we're benefiting our environment too, controlling damage. And so pump
hydro is a very known technology. We know how to do it. The challenge, of course, is that if you always connected with hydro electric, you need something rare. And what's rare is a water source at altitude that then has a location substantially lower to it nearby, a place with a waterfall, essentially that has enough water to make it worthwhile to fill up that area behind it as a reservoir and then let it out under control to general electricity.
And pump hydro doesn't require that. The only thing you need to make pump hydro work is a water source at the bottom of the hill. So a big enough river is enough something right, and so then you need a hill and at the top of the hill you can construct a reservoir. So you're going to alter the environment to build that reservoir, but there might not be anything there and that's important, and you'll throw some solar panels on top
of it. When you're done. It's a dedicated reservoir, so it doesn't have to be a major ecology and then you drill a couple of pipes between the water at the bottom and the reservo at the top, and when you have access energy, you pump that water up and when you need that energy, let the waterfall back down. So what the Australian research study showed is that there are almost six hundred thousand sites worldwide where this would work. Wow,
there's in most parts of the world. There is more than enough locations for pumped hydro for world demand. Different parts of the world have more. The Canadians and the Melanesians are off the scale. We have so much. We have a lot of water down below and lots of hills. But all of the western world has plenty. Northern Europe has the least. The mountain ranges are relatively small relative to where their water is. Most of Africa plenty,
certainly Australia plenty, most of Asia plenty. Wow. That's good news. And so their point was, here's a technology we know can last for a century with proper maintenance, we know the costs of implementing it, and it will store electricity for you efficiently in very known form, which is really what the energy energy wants. My problem with any of these battery technologies is
nobody knows what to look like in twenty years. Really, we just haven't run them that long, but we've run pomp hydro that long and longer. So the point we're saying was the amount of altitude difference available in most of these countries with water is sufficient for the power storage needed for those countries.
Wow, that's great, that's such good news. We've always argued about this idea that it's always going to be this huge area of mixed use, and it's like you know, in a lot of cases, wind, solar and pumped hydro can solve the problem. Yeah. I'll include the links to the to the papers for folks who want to read it. It was just stunning how effective it is, and just just recognition of as long as you've got a bottle of water below and a hill above, you make this work.
And back in Portugal that eight hundred megawatt pumped hydro facility was just astonishing. I mean that is grid scale power just by storing water. Yeah, and it's and it fills that reservoir with solar and wind amazing and land based wind. All right, you want to talk a little hydrogen, let's talk hydrogen. Okay, I mean people always my hydrogen car, MANA, fuel cells are too expensive. Thanks for playing, thanks for coming to my ted talk.
It's just like listen, fuel cells can only get so cheap hydrogen. It while a very quote unquote clean energy, is very difficult to store and it's expensive to make. So right now, commercial price for hydrogen is roughly five bucks a kilo or five thousand dollars per metric ton. Now, how do you make hydrogen? Because hydrogen doesn't like being on its own, It
doesn't like being lonely. It always finds some friends. You have to use electricity to split water, don't you, Well, you don't have you have to do some electricity. But the main that today, if you want to buy commercial hydrogen, you're not going to get it from water. You're going to get it from methane. Okay, You're going to use steam reformation, which is high temperature steam that blows the hydrogen off and then it produces a
ton of a bunch of carbon dioxide. So if you steam reformation, the number one way to make hydrogen to day is for every ton of hydrogen, you make nine to twelve tons of carbon dioxide and consume about six megawat hours of electricity. Well, so that's not good. No, you don't want to make more carbon dioxide, Dad, We exactly so. But it's the cheapest way to make hydrogen right now, that's your five thousand dollars. A ton costs you about five grand, but you're going to make ten tons of
carbon in the process and consume six megawatts of electricity for your flat. The Germans developed a system called methane pyrolysis now that turns the temperature up much higher. So instead of six megawatt hours of electricity, you're talking twenty five megawade hours of electricity, about four times more than steam reformation. But the byproduct of that is solid carbon graphite, so no CO two. You've blown the oxygen off as well, and you can store that carbon or resell it.
But the bottom line is it's not going into the environment. It just costs more until you burn it. Well, I don't know how you you know, carbon you don't normally burn, You make it, put in it. It's a lot of pencils, but you know, yeah, yah, it's a lot of pencils. You make it any things. At the minimum, you bury it. The electrolysis approach, the one you mention off the bat with electricity you take. Now you're just taking pure air or pure water.
You're making a ton of hydrogen. You're gonna also make ten eight tons of oxygen for sixty megawat hours of electricity, so ten times more energy than what it took to do with steam prioralysis. But it's expensive. Isn't just a lot of electricity? Right? And really a lot like that's a lot of electricity. And by the way, what can you do with that one ton of hydrogen? The most efficient mechanism we have to use that hydrogen to make
electricity is the fuel cell model. Right. So now you're going to recombine it with hot oxygen to make it back into water, and you're going to get about three point three megawatt hours of electricity out of that one ton of hydrogen, So about half the amount of energy that it costs to make that hydrogen from steam, or seven or thirteen percent the amount of energy it took to make it with pyrolysis, or five percent of what it would take to
make it with electrolysis. But that's fine. We always have an overhead, you know it takes energy to find oil, It takes energy to mine oil, It takes energy to move oil, It takes energy to refine oil. It takes energy to get that refined product into your vehicle for you to use it. Right, Yes, there are always overheads and energy to producing other
energy sources. The question is can you store the hydrogen well, can you take it where you need to go, which, by the way, all of those things is that's very hard, right, The math is not on hydrogen side unless we're making electricity very very cheaply. You don't use hydrogen to
make electricity necessarily. You use it when you want to move it around, right, You put it in a vehicle, or you take things that are normal that would normally be polluting and make them non What about making the hydrogen on site so it doesn't have to move But that's a great point, and also making it with electricity that would otherwise be wasted like solar panels. So
back to our modern energy economy. Our modern energy e commomy has access energy available and that's where these strategies can occasionally be useful and it is happening. So in the Netherlands there is a hospital called the Rienjet Iced or the Eastern State Hospital, and they have a hydrogen electrolysis facility built into the hospital. So they have a bunch of solar panels and wind and so when they have access energy, which they often do, they electoralize water into hydrogen ouxygen and
they use both. I remember the hospitals need oxygen, so rather than using energy to bring oxygen to the hospital, they're producing that eight parts oxygen to one part hydrogen and using that oxygen in the hospital. And then when they build up enough hydrogen, they run a fuel still to provide electricity into the
hospital. So expensive, yes, relatively speaking, non emitting, right, Like you think of all the carbon emissions that are taking off the table by producing their run off for the hospital and by taking that access energy they don't need. It's being produced during the day and then you're burning it at and you're using it as hydrogen to make electricity at night. So to me, this is very appealing. It's the in between part. It's not grid scale
and it's not residential scale. It's institution scale. But we kind of like that, especially when we talk about nuclear which I believe is the last thing you want to talk about. But I'm want to just maybe well, we'll get there talk about those little little plants. I mean, I can sort of see where this is going, a distributed grid kind of thing rather than
a centralized grid. Yes, you're exactly right. As the energy industry has learned to deal with more distribution, these opportunities open up, and so the idea that a hospital plant, when hospitals have an infrastructure plant, they're feeding a bunch of needs for the hospital out of using access energy to supply all of that as well as power. Yeap, it's good stuff. We have maybe on an hour left, i'd you you're probably right, So let's take a second break here. Yeah, it's going to be a long one,
folks, so buckle up and we'll be right back. After these important messages and we're back again. It's dot net rocks geek out. Addition, you're not happy it's long, right, I mean, and I'm talking to you as much I'm talking to the listener. It's like, no, this is great. I missed this. I totally miss this. And you know, everybody's down for vacation for a little bit in the wintertime, and what better way to spend it than with Carlin Richard geeking out over some energy. We
got to talk about geothermal. Okay, so last year's big story on geothermal was the microwave drilling technique. Do you remember it? Yeah? I remember
that. Yeah. It's energy intensive. But rather than remind us using a bit to grind the rock and then you have to put steel sleeves in to support the rock, and you need and you need pump mud and all this technology all from the oil industry, they came up with this high powered microwave magnetron that literally vaporized the rock into gas and then that gas adheres to the walls to reinforce it. It's totally space age and it's still in development.
I'm not going to talk about it any more than that. The break the new innovations in geothermal aren't that sci fi. They're actually adopting shale extraction technology like fracking. The reason that, yes, the reason that the US is now a leader in oil production in the world, is these innovations in shale extraction or what mostly horizontal drilling. So the trick with shale extraction, if you ever get into it, I don't recommend you do, is that they
don't do the traditional drill down to the oil pad. They've already done that most of the time. The beds have already been drilled. Now you're trying to get more oil from it. So instead, what you do is you drill beside the bed and you turn the drill bed horrorzon onto and come into it from the side, and then you frack it. You put an expansion material into it to break loose more typically lots of natural gas and some oil
back up the old linescure fracking is fracturing rock. But that set of techniques work very well for generating geothermal power. So geothermal power is based on this idea that the deeper you drill down, the hotter the rock gets. The problem is that the drilling is the expensive part. The plant is awesome. It's small, right. You're basically pumping water down that pipe where it gets
superheated by the rock down there. It comes flying back up another pipe and spins the turbine, and then you cool the water back down and you pump it again. Almost no emissions at all. It's a complete closed loop system like you want this everywhere. It's one of the tidiest plants you can possibly make. It's just The problem with geothermal is the drilling is expensive, and the far longer you have to drill, the more costs. And the drill
sites don't always keep working. Every time you're slamming water down there, you're shocking the rock, right, and sometimes the water doesn't come back up. And I think I talked about this on one of the at least one of the energy geek outs. But my uncle has a geothermal system. But it's not really to heat as much as it is to equalize. Yeah. Yeah,
the average temperature some just blows the surface. Yeah, six feet is constant and it's something like what fifty five sixty degrees generally, And so when it's above that, you're going to get cooler air, and you blow a fan across the pipe and you can cool your house with it without air conditioning, and when it's cold, you can warm up your house. Right. And I mean, this is not what we're talking about. We're talking about drilling down miles right, so that we get to four hundred degree rock.
Yeah, I'm just talking about a heat pump. Yeah, you're talking about heat. I'm talking about making electricity. By making electricity, you know, superheated steam that spins turbines and so need a lot of heat, and that's why it's violent. Right When that water hits that rock, it's shocking. But the fracking industry knows a lot about shocking rock because they were doing it
deliberately to do oil extraction. And that's one of the reasons for these horizontal drilling effects is that it gives them an ability to poke into a hot body in an efficient way and be able to slam water into there in a less destructive form and still use the existing vertical pipes to take to generate pick up the steam. So they've been experimenting with these combinations in Nevada and in Utah. Wow and from scratch, get with moment from a bare piece of land
with a permit to build a plant six to twelve weeks. And again this is all out of the fracking because fracking is quick, right, that was what it was about. They've matured these technologies for fracking and now they can make geothermal power with them. So the initial pilot plant in Nevada, just over the past couple of years, he's now producing three and a half megawatts of electricity twenty four hours a day. Dude, this is base load power.
So wait a minute now, so you're saying that once they get down to where the heat is, then they go sideways, and yes, so they drilled down eight thousand feet in Nevadah. Then they turn sideways for three thousand feet tay into the body on the side. So now you have a three thousand foot heat coil basically basically right. Then they have other holes on the other side of the body where the steam's gonna come out, and they fire the water down there and it comes up cheez. Yeah, And it'll
work almost anywhere. So what is the benefit over of having that long horizontal pipe over just having a pipe at one place. Well, you always have multiple pipes because you want to go down one side and up the other side. The horizontal pipe picks up the heat more efficiently and slower. I see, so you have less shock effects. Ah. Yeah, I wasn't crocking that. I get it now, because you know when you go down and then immediately back up, it's only that little bubble on the bottom that heats
up exactly right. Yeah, And so this ability to come in low on the hot body with the other pipes above it, it's just more efficient. It makes total sense now, and I just want you to get the idea. There's a bunch of different techniques they've learned from fracking they're incorporating together to make power anywhere they can get to the hot rock. It's just a question of how far you have to drill down. The deeper it gets, the
more expensive it gets. Sure, but eight thousand feet is not that shallow. So then VATA plant works. So there's a plant being developed in Utah for four hundred megawatts, supposed to be online by twenty twenty six. And guess who's funding it? Oh? No, Google, Oh I didn't expect that. Alphabet like Microsoft and most tech companies need a lot of electricity. They're building cloud data centers and they've made a commitment one would call it greenwashing
to zero emission energy. And this is an approach to solve a particular problem. Demitria Philieve, one of our listeners, asked me about the energy being consumed by artificial intelligence technologies, the large language models and the like, and those are all running in these cloud data centers, and in some ways I would say, yeah, it's a lot of energy. I mean, at
least it's going to a better purpose. Than NFTs, but the fact that it's a handful of companies that are hosting these things, and we can put pressure on those companies to have zero emission energy doing it. And geothermal is one of these base load energy sources. But if this is what matures this technology enough that we can start looking all over the world anywhere where we have enough heat relatively close to the surface, that we can use these daily techniques
to build reliable geothermal. And that's always been the problem, not that geothermal was hard to do, that it wasn't reliable. That in many cases with new plants, within a year or two the subterranean surface would shift and the plant would stopped working and you had to drill again, the most expensive thing you had to keep doing it, got it. But shale technologies now helped us understand enough about rock bodies and drilling technique to be able to make more
reliable wells fantastic and so we could actually make power that way. Now, let me do a little blast of the past for you. Okay, do you ever the super volcano episode back in twenty eighteen, Oh yeah, episode fifteen sixty four, And that came from a paper I read from NASA planetary defense. Now, normally we think about NASA planetary events around asteroid protesteroids, the Dart mission, that kind of thing. But this was a paper about
how could humanity manage a super volcano eruption? And then arguably the most important supervolcano, not the only one, but the important one is Yellowstone. And so one of the things they proposed was that you put geothermal power plants around the supervolcano Culterra, because every time you take heat out of it, you decrease the risk of eruption. What is that fancy word you use, what's that caldera? Caldera? Yeah, that's the rim edge. So one of
the things that super volcano. You know, in traditional volcano, especially say a pyroclastic volcano, you have that cinder cone, the big cone that gets built up as it's erupting. In more lava flow types like Monochia, you have a very liquid lava, so you create a shield dome different shapes. Supervolcanoes are so big they can't make domes. As the bulge of magma builds up under the ground, what eventually happens is the ground collapses into it and
then blasts outward. And that caldera, the hole that it will make is many miles across. Okay, most of the Yellowstone Park sit, all of the thermal events, all that sort of stuff is sitting in the Yellowstone Volcano super volcano called Erara. So imagine we try not to think about it. Look, vulcanology is pretty advanced these days. We are good at predicting volcanoes.
We know when a volcano is coming. We can measure the small changes in the ground that show us that there's a possibility of an eruption coming. So imagine we're seeing an eruption, possible eruption coming of the Yellowstone Volcano. And this is what NASA Planetary Events was writing about. Is the trick is to get the heat out. If we can take the heat out so the rock stay stronger, it doesn't get too plasticized, we can stop the eruption.
So you take these fracking techniques. You drill all around the caldera and you pump water down to cool it, and while you're out it, you make electricity. So it sounds like poking the bees nest to me. Well, without a doubt, it has to be done right. Yeah, the alternative was we just wait for the thing to go off and destroy the United States, Like, well, that's not good. You've got that is a
known outcome, and probably to strike Vancouver as well, wouldn't it. Well it'll go east, right, like, that's largely what would happen in that that eruption. And we talked about this in the Super Bowl Kino show. Is you take a multi hundred mile swath due east all the way to the to the cboard right like, it would be bad, bad the I ninety You're gonna need one hell of a shut of snowplow for that anyway. All right, So, so getting back to this idea of putting fracking vents all
around the caldera, yeah, I mean, is a good one. Well, it's an interesting idea. It speaks to again skill sets we're developing as a civilization. And I'm also I'm equating it back to like the way that the erosion of the Niagara Valley was controlled by generating electricity with hydro electric. We've just had a couple of very serious eruptions in Iceland, YEP. And it's been it's maybe happening over months like and there by the way, there
is a small hydro electric plant nearby. This current set of eruptions in isolated, what if there were more? Too small? No, I think it's very feasible. Like that plant by itself was already running. It had enough heat as it is, right, But could we get to a reaction time around this where we're started to see ground disturbances and potential magnabila. It's like, let's drop a few more drills in here and we'll make some more electricity
and maybe we can cool us down. I'd want to experiment a lot with it. But just geothermal is not just a good power a low emission based load power source, it also has the potential significant benefits for us directing volcanic behavior. So, now that you've scared our audience into thinking that the the United States is going to blow up, what is the thought on when the
big one will happen? Well, that particular super volcano, as we talked about back in that show in July of twenty eighteen, has we have your evidence of eruptions roughly every six hundred thousand years. There's been three different ones spaced about six hundred thousand years apart. Wow, And the last one was about six hundred thousand years ago. Oh jeez, I remember, now, don't worry about it. Yeah, so we're due. No, No, it doesn't really work that way, do you know? No, you know,
Okay, let's go plus or minus one hundred thousand years. Yeah, yeah, yeah, right, it's not that precise, all right, But yes, if you do the math that way, if you take a three point trend line and just straw it straight out, you're there. Is that actually a good way to do things? No? Yeah? Yeah? Have has the US Geological Service instrumitted the crap out of the Yellowstone Cold? You're damn right the half right, so you're all paying attention. Wow, it's
not going to happen anytime soon. There's no evidence of it at this particular point. But it is an interesting aspect of geothermal power. And I'm glad that we're advancing this way. Yeah, because you know, the ability to take more power offline quickly. What if instead of building a natural gas speaker plant, you built a thermal a geothermal plant instead, right, like,
because it was the least expensive way to quickly build power. You know, in three months, four months, you know, a lot of these power plants, we're still talking years, many years, decades in some cases, and now you're talking weeks. Yeah, that's a big deal. The number would be if we built all these plants and then got used to that steady stream of power and then the whole thing blew up, not only are we like completely buried, but and probably the end of it, but now we
lost our power sources as well. If we don't do it. Weeah, except that volcanoes come over time, so as it was coming, you could move things. Yeah, and you'll have time to react. This hasn't come out of the blue. This isn't a tornado. And then you get some warning. This isn't even a hurricane. This is a volcano. It takes a while, and we can measure, we can see things coming. It's
not like one day food. Yeah, exactly. Now, generally speaking, the reason we know so much about volcanic eruptions is that we get enough warning that we're able to see them coming and watch closely as they happen and then learn more. Very good, let's move on. Yeah, the nuclear segment, as you expected, is large. And Carolyn McKay asked me on the social media's it's like, hey, you got anything new to say in the space, and I'm like, yeah, not going to talk much about the
old stuff, but we'll talk about the new stuff. Cool. So we've been talking about small modular reactors for many, many years, and as of today, right now, at this moment, there's still exactly none, but progress is being made. So there were two projects that I was talking about
last year, or they even the year before. One of them was the New Scale Project, largely based in around Idaho, but totally an American project, and that was to build six seventy seven megawat modular reactors, really quite small, so six together, it'd be four hundred and sixty two megawats, where you know traditional light water reactors run in the three hundred to six hundred per right, really six hundred even up to gigawatt per so this was going
to be quite small. And they made a deal in twenty nineteen for five billion dollars that would start making power in twenty twenty six. Then the pandemic hit, and then by twenty twenty three this year, that was now priced at nine point six, from five point three to nine point six and now no start until twenty twenty nine. And so where it was supposed to be about fifty five per dollars per megawat hour, which is reasonable. Now was
closer to eighty nine dollars per megawad hour, which is unreasonable. And the project's been fully canceled, and one of the arguments against it said it was a bit too small, that the seven seven maywatt reactors are a little too small. Now, I mean, in general, what's great about small modular nuke is a couple of things. The first is the most dangerous thing about nuclear power is fuel handling, right and traditionally, in fact exclusively, every
reactor site handles its own fuel. So uranium's mined in Australia are Canada's a fuel locations. It's refined there into yellow cake, and then it is shipped to a factory, typically what a Westinghouse would be the main ones. General Electric does this to where they make it into fuel rods. Those fuel rods
are then shipped to the power plant. The power plant handles its own fuel assembly, so it now takes those they're little little cylinders, maybe a couple of two or three inches long inch across, and they stack them into bundles, and these are highly radioactive. They open up their reactors. They take a fuel rod assembly out, put it in a into a cooling pond, and then take a new assembly, put it into the reactor, button it all back up, pressurize it, go back to work. It's very standalone
approach to doing things. It means that every site, because it has to handles fuels, has to qualify for all those complex work in handling radioactive materials. It's very difficult, it's costly, and it's what it's One of the things that makes this kind of power so expensive is that each site is bespoke unique in its ability to handle fuel for its reactors. The concept behind modular reactors is that you have a common sight for manufacturing the reactor assemblies. It's
the only thing that handles fuel. The production sites where you're actually going to make the electricity, they receive assembled reactors ready to run, but that are then placed with a crane into a container, typically a big concrete pool filled with water, hooked up to cooling and to the electrical grid and powered up and they'll run two to three years. And at the end of those two to three years you unhook them. You take the whole reactor back out,
put it back on a truck and ship it away. Now is that a dangerous thing to do? Less dangerous than shipping fuel assemblies? That's right, because it's self contained exactly. Another thing I like about that is your every two or three years, you get a chance to inspect everything and make sure that it's ready to accept another reactor. Dude upgrades, Yeah, right, Instead of running a reactor for thirty years, every couple of years when you
go to replace it, why would you replace it the same one? Put a better one in yep, So you're on a much better upgrade cycle. If you have a problem with a griven reactor, because it's a small reactor with modern designs. Even if somehow it failed, it's still contained, so your site's not ruined. You can take that react that damage reactor, simply out ship it away and continue to use the production site. There's one.
Then you have a central place away from people. Like you generally want to make your power close to people because they're the ones who want to use it. But you want to handle fuel away from people. And so you reprocess those reactors, you re make and make new fueled ones, and then you send them back in to be used and you can constantly rotate them and you
can improve them. Yeah, that's pretty cool, right. That is the idea behind small modular is to make the reactors routinely replaceable and to centralized fuel handling, so we can put in a place where the risks are low, tectonically safe, doesn't need to be near water, you know, doesn't need to be near populations like these are the advantages. It's a good idea and it has been maturing. So I told you the bad news first, that's
the American Project newScale. Here's the good news. Geh Attachee has a reactor they called the bwr X three hundred. We talked about it last year. It's a three hundred megawatt modular reactor in Canada to locate in Ontario, where Ontario makes eighty percent of their electricity with nuclear power. But they and they largely do it with Canadian designed can do deuteriized water reactors. They are a heavy water reactor instead of a light water reactor, so they use deuterium and
the main reason for that is that they don't need enriched uranium. A uranium I richment is expensive and it was originally developed in the Manhattan Project to make weapons, make bombs, and light water reactors use that technology because one of the by products of fuel reprocessing was plutonium to make more bombs. Now we don't need more bombs. We've not ever needed more bombs. And in France, who also largely makes all of their electricity from nuclear power, they now
use that plutonium in their fuel rods and they burn it. That's not happened with American light water reactors for a variety of reasons. We talked about that. Yeah, we've got that before in Canada, because we have no weapons programs, we did not want to arriture aium and so we developed reactors that didn't need to. But that being said, they still have all the same
problems. They're a little bit more efficient than the light water reactors, but they are expensive, and they are bespoke, and they do their own fuel handling, and they need large exclusion zones. And while we've never had a major accident knock on wood, there's an easy way to go about it. So the Darlington reactor site is a retired can Do reactor site and they were trying to decide what to do with it. They still need to make electricity.
They talked about putting in solar. They've tried a lot of different things, but they've come around to the modular reactor design. So the handling fuel site is going to be away from that. Darlington is right on the on the lake. They committed to a year ago putting in putting in one of these reactors. They've now are through their second stage of certification. Is one more left to go. It's gone well enough now that they've now committed to
putting in four reactors instead of one. Wow, so on track for power in the next by twenty twenty nine. And I know we talked about this before, but just remind us, like what did you say that? How many megawatts is this little power plant? So these are three hundred megawatt reactors, so four together three hundred megawatts. Yeah, so how many homes could that power? I mean, now you're back to you know, it depends
on the home like a small town. When you're talking about American homes and Canadian homes, very power consumptive homes, you get about one thousand homes per megawatt, right, So these are three hundred megawatt reactors. You know, So you were talking about homes times four, So yeah, you're going to need more. But this is the experimentation, right is if this works, there's many more. In fact, because Ontario has been so successful, Saskatchewan
is now identifying sites for the same reactor design. They wouldn't be online til twenty thirties, but they're on that same path. Poland is going through the certification process with the same reactor as well. So there is now this sense of a race of who's got the most mature technology, who's the furthest down the path you're not going to. There's lots of small reactor designs out there.
Yeah, yeah, but Gee for better or words, ghe Attachie, who make conventional reactors too, now have matured this design to a point where we've now got holes in the ground where they're supposed to go, and we should and we're going to actually make electricity for it, and they may get to win this one. That's very cool. It's good news, and it is. It's good news. Progress in size matters, Like when the argument here was that what was wrong with new Scale with seventy seven megaots is too
small, g Attache, it's still truck portable at three hundred megawatts. And now there's a company called ISMR that's talking about in that same form factor being able to make a thorium reactor. So we talk about that modular design that's sort of the holy grail. Yeah, and Bob Archer, one of my regularistors, pinged me about can you talk about thorium? Is there anything to talk about it? And again, I don't want to talk about old news. I want to talk about new news. But there is new news in
Thoria, okay, but primarily out of China. So this year twenty twenty three, the Shanghai Institute has now certified for operation a thorium reactor in China. So in the Gobi Desert in the northwest part of China there is a experimental reactor site. Not a lot of water around, by the way. It's a tiny reactor to megawatts, so really just a lab reactor. This is like no, the Oakridge Laboratory mould salt reactor of the nineteen sixties was
a five megawatts, so you get a sense. This is really a small reactor. But according to the Shanghai Institute, it works well enough in tests that they said, let's just make electricity with it. Here's a ten year permit. So there I'm going to be making two megawatts of electricity and getting operational practice with it. China is incentivized somewhat. While they have some uranium reserves, they have far more thorium reserves. So with the holy grail for
Richard Campbell be modular thorium reactors. There's a distinct some interesting advantages. Now it depends on how the assembly. You remember this from our thorium shows. Apparently there were three different things in motion there. I remember the molten salts. Yes, so one of them is molten salts. And understand, thorium when used in a reactor becomes uranium. Anyway, it's a different isotope of
uranium, but it does become uranium, right. It's actually it has a decay product into uranium that actually generates the heat, so in the end it's all uranium. The difference is the ore bodies. And in China, because they do a lot of rare earth extraction, there is a mineral called monzonite, which is where you get a lot of presidonium and other rare earths,
but its primary element in it is thorium. So the Chinese have a bunch of thorium in tailing piles from extracting rare earths, and they could process in pure thorium and then combine it with lithium and beryllium and fluorine to make a salt that then can be run in a thermal blanket as part of a reactor assembly where it'll get bombarded from neutrons to then become uranium two thirty three, which then gets pumped through the main fuel through the main graphite assembly and generates
electricity. The other things to remember about molten salts is that because they're a fluid and they are only a liquid at four hundred degree centigrade plus, if anything ever go, you have this containment mechanism where as soon as they as soon as you have a problem, you can drop them into a storage tank and and they cool down into a solid. They operate at one atmosphere of pressure. You don't need to pressurize them to get enough heat. In fact,
most of the time you're dealing with two damn much heat. They're a liquid from four hundregree centigrade to fifteen hundred degree centigrade as opposed to water, which is only zero to one hundred, so you have this huge liquid temperature operating range to you can work in, and so the trick then is efficient ways to extract heat from that. Why it's too hot for water, you need other extraction techniques. But molten salt reactors can run on regular uranium as
well as on thorium. It doesn't really matter, so you can pick your fuel. This is mostly a technique, but it's a technique has a lot of inherent safety in it, and even more importantly, you can incorporate into its operation a fuel reprocessing process. So when you're dealing with liquefied uranium, you can gasify it and separate it from the lower elements that it has, and then degasify, dehydrogenate it back into a liquid again. And so there's
an ability as you break uranium is constituate components. So you remember you're bombarding these uranium atoms with neutrons. Most common reaction, not the only reaction. The most common reaction is you break them into caesium and iodide. They're radioactive
flavors of cesium and iodide, but that's okay. They decay over and so if you can extract that seasymaniodine out of the fluid, you can after a couple of months, have a non radioactive sellable version of those elements, and so unlike in solid reactors where those same reactions damage the core, when you're operating in a fluid, you can keep processing the fuel until there's no fuel left, and so you can pretty much burn up all of the high actinides,
all the radioactive components, and be left over with elements. So yeah, I like molten salt reactors because they get rid of the dangerous stuff in the process of making electricity with it. Maybe the route to making those is through modular reactors, but the really complex form with its own integrated breeder and
fuel reprocessing is probably gonna be its own form factor. But if we were going to build it, we probably would have buy now, it's just too much risk, and we could manage a bunch of risk around thorium by maturing it in small reactor designs. And in fact, there's a group in Copenhagen named Copenhagen Atomics that has been developing a container size multi reactor. So this is the TEU. The industrial shipping container eight foot by eight foot by twenty
foot, typically double the length to a forty foot container. So they've been trying to make a reactor that fits into that that would work basically as a small modular reactor that you could drop off somewhere, power up, run it for a couple of years, and then replace it. And so they're using a containerized model to make a demonstration one megawatt reactor by twenty twenty five. So still a bit speculative. They have a customer that customers Indonesia. Indonesia
is a resource distraction country. They have a lot of mining projects that need electricity. Typically those electricities now delivered by diesel generators. Expensive way to go. You got to keep shipping diesel up to it. So the idea you could drop a container containing one megawatt electrical power plant in it to operate in a mine for a couple of years at a time are not a real product yet that's certainly on a path. All Right, we're gonna talk a little
bit about fusion because there has not been much news about fusion. And why hasn't there been much news about fusion, Carl, because it's freaking hard. Because they've got money. Oh, because they've got money, Okay, and
they don't talk when they have money, that's right. So the two of the fusion projects I've talked about a fair bit last year, Commonwealth Fusion, which raised a couple of billion dollars off of gates at all back in the day, have enough money literally to get to a pilot project they called Spark. They are still building that now. That reactor excites me a lot for a couple of reasons. The most important reason is that they are using rebco
superconductors. So this is the rare earth burium cubric oxide semiconductors that you cool with liquid nitrogen instead of liquid helium. Oh okay, so they're a lot less expensive and they make far more powerful fields than niobium ten liquid helium cooled supercroductive fields that are being used in eider It the giant reactor in France that is soaked up tens of billions of dollars and still hasn't produced energy. Right, is an online to even laid up based on calculations will never be net
power positive. To just learn a little more. It's a perfect system for building another reactor. It's a perfect system for job security for hand four people. And then the other one that we walked about last year was Helion, who raised a five hundred million plus in twenty twenty one, one of their investors being We didn't talk about this before, but Misasaka now because one of his their investors was Sam Altman, no kidding, nobody knew his name a
year ago, but they sure know it now. Yep. The most interesting piece of new Helion's reactors I mentioned this earlier was the pulse reactor using magnetic coils not only to make the fusion detonation, but it also de collected his energy. And Microsoft recently signed a memorim of understanding because they're based out of Western Washington, that they will buy electricity from Helio for their data centers as
zero emission electricity. Whatever happened to that crazy mcat guy, that Italian guy, Oh god, yeah, you know, extraordinary claims, the extraordinary proof and the extraordinary failed. Yeah he's gone, but he tried to pull the wool over some people's eyes a couple of times. You know, he's not alone, lots, it goes on all the time. Our friend Martina Grahm very I almost emotionally wrote on Twitter to me about this. It's like, how can we be saved? I think she was feeling a little grim that
day. Cheer up, Martina. It's bad, but it's not as bad as it could be, and it is getting better. We happen to be recording it shortly after COP twenty eight, so it's the UNS Climate Change meeting ended in Dubai. Backtrack to COP three. COP three was in nineteen ninety seven. That was the one in Kyoto, Japan, and that led to the Kyoto Courts, the first set of international documents which many countries excluding the
United States, signed into starting to restrict emissions. And at that time, the projections were that we would raise the average temperature of the planet by four and a half degrees by twenty one hundred and that would be catastrophic. And I just want to make a point to folks that, well, we're certainly not out of the woods. Like that projection is now over. If we did nothing more in terms of changing our power generation and emissions around the world,
then we've done up till this point. We wouldn't hit four and a half degrees. That's good news. I guess we've lowered the number. Like the argument is, were about a third of the way there in that twenty years between or twenty five years between COP three and COP twenty eight. We have made substantial strides. It's not enough, but it's not like it's futile.
We're making some progress. I know that I've just heard something recently, and I'm sorry I don't have the numbers and figures in my head because I don't remember things like you do. But there was some promise that the United States made to cut emissions by fifty percent by the year twenty forty thinking. And this was back in the early two thousands, and we've already gotten halfway
there. We've cut by twenty five percent, and a lot of that is things like electric cars and retiring coal power plants, even just switching to natural gas because a became super cheap because of tracking. We got so much of it, and it is and is very the process of getting a mationable electricity from it, reducing amount of carbon dioxide permega watt substantially. Progress has been made. We just have to make more. And I would argue that that
a lot came out of COP twenty eight. I mean the crazy part. It was at Dubai. Yeah, right, right, like you're in in the oil making and by the way, if you don't think it's a big deal, look at how many people, how many lobbyists, how many interested parties descended on that two weeks in Dubai, like everybody was engaged and no two ways about it. And the current climate forecast, you know, in twenty twenty three we hit a record. We had one day this past year
where the implanet on average was two degrees above the baseline. It was a peak, and it's the largest ever recorded. The average is more like one point four in the United States anyway, This July was the hottest July on record ever. Yeah, ever, and I think when we get the numbers together, it'll be true for the whole year. And that of course keeps happening. In cop twenty eight weeks, they talked about if we stick to
our agreement by twenty fifteen, we sure it looks like we won't. We're going to get to one point seven as the average temperature, which is bad. It's got serious consequences. But the more important part was to just do that. To get to that point, we would decrease our average oil and
gas consumption overall by about forty five percent. And so there was an argument that we've already peaked in consuming oil and gas, about one hundred and five million barrels of oil used in a day, and we already know that the industry is avoiding putting on more refining, yeah, because it takes a decade. It takes twenty five years to get break even on a refinery. So they're not incented, adam, because they see the writing on the wall.
They certainly were there and fighting vociferously against it. If we were actually going to do the one point five degree increase from the cares of cords for twenty fifty, we need seventy five percent less consumption than where we're at right now, which on one hand seems impossible. On the other hand, of just talk through a whole bunch of things we're doing that really open the door to
more of that going on. The production, transport, and processing of oil and gas produces about five billion tons of CO two just last year, about fifteen percent of all of the emissions. So one of the things that happens when you consume less oil is you decrease the amount of missions necessary to get
that oil to you to actually create it. So there's quite a positive role there, and so one of the things came out of COP twenty eight was society that there is enough known oil sites on this planet right now to provide all of the oil and gas needed based on those projections for where we're supposed to be by twenty fifty, and so there is no need for governments to subsidize long lead time extraction, which is the reality, of course, is
that oil and gas industries extract trillions of dollars with the subsidies to look for oil. And so the argument you know at COP was, you know, you could take that money and put it towards more zero emission energy generation, right because you're just not going to need if we achieve these goals, you're just not going to need that long lead time stuff. This not please the industry much, yeah, because it's not like the industry's ever going to go
away. If we're going to get to the one point five scenario in twenty fifty, we go from meeting one hundred and two million barrels a day to needing about twenty four and then most of that isn't burned, Most of that is lubricants, right, Like, we're always going to need a certain amount of oil and gas that's never going to go away, right, right, it's just what do you make plastics from, although hopefully you have recyclable plastic,
what do you make lubricants from? Like all of those things to go into that. So you know, at twenty four million barrels a day, only seventy five percent will be used for something other than combustion. Yeah, and that was pretty exciting, right, a great combination. And here and lies the problem is that there's a reason why governments subsidized oil and gas extraction because it's corrupting. And I would use the example of Petroblast in Brazil.
I don't know if you remember the story, but back in two thousand and seven, there was big blast of news about they'd find huge oil reserves off the coast of Brazil. It's in pretty deep water, it's going to be a tricky extraction, but it was a huge amount of oil. And you know, Brazil was destined to be the new Saudi Arabia. And Petro Brass which is the national oil company of course, is working with believe it was
BP on this particular project. And over the next decade, Petro Blast got billions and billions in subsidized financing and by twenty fifteen, it became a parent that everybody was on the take that so much money was flowing around because it was going to be worth decades of oil income that they were paying off everybody, all the way to Lula DeSilva himself, the president of Brazil, and that led to the collapse of the government and a big crisis in Petroblasts and
Balasaro came out of that. Like, the side effect of this much money is some bad behavior, and one can only look to Russia to see an ongoing example of that, right, I mean it's the oil, it's a petro state. Yeah, well they're primarily a petro state, for better or worse. Yeah, So we know the effects of when this much money comes into play around these kinds of technology. So it's one of the reasons that
they're continuing as well as they have. And at the same time, we have these options, these new projections, these new ability to build other energy sources that can give us options. So how can we be saved? Keep doing what you're doing. I really want to pass the message on it's like it's not for not like we are making success. You can work at the guy if you're the kind of person who can handle government level. If you want to protest, do it right? Do you want to keep to yourself
on it more? Just emitting less? No, it makes a difference. It's worth is that being getting electric vehicle or switching to transit? Sure right, putting solar on your roof, getting going to heat pump heat insta instead of a gas turnurse. Yeah, all of those things are making a difference. They are making progress. More needs to be done. Can we be saved. We're probably gonna make it. It's just a question of how many
people die unnecessarily. Yeah, that's only really the question we're tackling. Millions have already died. You look at most of the conflicts around the world right now, they generally start with a crop failure. The Syrian Civil War started with a crop failure and a tripling of the price of bread. That makes people angry when they can't feed their family, that they're willing to do really dangerous, life threatening things like fighting against their government with violence. Libya too,
that government then survive. Now you've got a bailed state. Heck, all of Arab springs started with food prices. Really wow. In me and mar there was a week there was a rice crop failure and then a group of people blamed minority group called the Rahindra and persecuted them. And now it's a genocide. And they've had that and that Jorhindra I have had to flee mermar into other countries. The environmental disasters that are killing people, they're going
on now, and they're only going to get worse. We get to choose how much worse it gets. We can work on this. The side effect of reducing emissions and reducing these impacts, decreasing the overall heat on the planet will mean more reliable food, and reliable food makes for happy people. Happy people don't fight. Frighten people fight, well said, we are going to reduce fear if we can reduce emissions. Well said mister Cambon. Sounds like
parting words. Okay, it's gonna be good year. Yeah. I appreciate. I appreciate the research that you do and especially the human touch that you brought there at the end. That's a very important message. So everybody, happy New Year, and we'll see you next time on dot net rocks.
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