The Clean Energy Show

As COP 27 kicks off in Egypt, The UN chief says we're not doing enough to prevent a climate catastrophe. On the bright side, France is mandating all parking lots have solar panels over them resulting in the power of 10 nuclear reactors. An analyst says Tesla may never achieve full self-driving. South Dakota produced more energy from wind than any other source. Why a switch in power in the United States Congress won’t kill Biden’s Inflation Reduction / Climate act.

Brian's PTC cabin heater in his Tesla Model 3 had to be replaced and that meant driving in a parka for two and a half hours to the closes service center.

Clip from the Energy Vs Climate podcast with guest Katherine Hamilton.

Netflix has a documentary on Nissan head and current criminal Carlos Ghosn called 'Fugitive: The Curious Case of Carlos Ghosn." He was accused of stealing millions from Nissan and escaping in a storage chest on a plane.

The eight billionth human being is about to be born.

We disguss the Energi Media YouTube channel where Markham Hislop talked to an analyst from Guidehouse Insights about what's taking level 4 autonomy so long.

Porsche has made 100,000 EVs.

Tesla (TSLA) is now earning eight times more per car than Toyota, and they are starting to notice back in Japan.

Pakistan's utility knows going green means consumers pay less for their electricity bill.

Electrek editor Fred Lambert on Elon Musk's feedback loop of constant praise.

The "hydrogen-is-not-all-that" podcast suggested by one of our listeners can be found here.

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Transcript 

Hello and welcome to Episode 138 of the Clean Energy Show.

I'm Brian Stockton.

I'm James Whittingham.

This week, several companies are throwing to the towel and full selfdriving, but please keep your hands on the wheel and your attention on the road as you listen to this podcast.

The state of South Dakota and now produces more electricity from wind than any other source.

Must be the hot air coming from Mount Rushmore, am I right? No.

UN Chief Antonio Gutierrez says we are on the highway to Climate Hill with our foot still on the accelerator.

Again, please keep your hands on the wheel and your attention on the road as you listen to this podcast.

In France, the government has ordered that all parking lots must be covered by solar panels, all because President Emmanuel Macron can't get the top back up on his convertible Renault.

All that and so much more on this edition of the Clean Energy Show.

And also this week, Brian, why a switch in power in the United States Congress, which is voting as we speak, as we record this won't kill Biden's inflation reduction act, but a change in government in Canada actually would be problem for us north of the border because well, I'll get to that later.

And we also have a bit of an update live from Cop 27, sort of.

And what's new with you? How was your trip to Saskatoon? Because last week you're heading north two and a half hours in the snowy Canadian winter to get your Tesla fixes.

That's the closest Tesla service center to you.

Yeah, that's right.

So the heater has not been working right and didn't seem to be working quite right last winter, but kind of not enough to generate an error message.

But now I had an error message, so they seemed to know what to do to fix it.

So drove up Saskatoon, where the closest service center is, and yes, they replaced the whole heater.

That's what they did.

Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

It's under warranty.

Everything's fine, isn't it? Everything's fine.

When does the warranty end? Let me ask you, because it has, as we pointed out a couple of weeks ago, two and a half years, a quarter decade, getting close to the point where this is going to start killing you in the wallet.

I don't recall when it ends, but I think it might say specs of warrant.

It says in the app somewhere.

Yes, here in the app.

The Tesla app, basic vehicle, limited warranty, expires in March 2024 or 80,000, battery 2028 or 160 and the drive unit 2028 or 160,000 km as well.

So, yeah, a couple more years to go on the basic warranty.

Okay, I see.

This could be a different discussion in the future.

OK, what was it? Was it the PTC heater, the resistive heater? Yeah.

Or you don't have a heat pump, so that's what it was.

No heat pump.

So the resistive heater.

Yeah, for some reason they were sure about that.

They were pretty sure by the time I got there.

Because they have all the data from the car, like everything, the car is digitized and they can see all the data from my car.

So as I dropped it off, they said, yeah, it's probably the whole heater needs to be replaced.

And they were prepared to do that.

And at the same time, too, there's been a recall for the trunk lid harness or something.

I think it's to do with the cables, the wire harness to the camera in the back.

So they did that at the same time.

And it took about like 4 hours for them to do it.

Wasn't too bad.

Is that right? You had an appointment at 08:00 a.m.

And they went right at it and started working on it.

Yes.

Call me around 1130.

And they had the part, which is good again, I assume because they had all the data, they could order the parts ahead of time that they would need.

That's nice.

Yeah.

And they gave me a loaner car, which I drove around Saskatchewan for a while.

And yes, I got back before there was another blizzard.

What was that? A couple of days later, our second blizzard of the year.

Which is not technically a blizzard environment.

Canada doesn't call it a blizzard.

Do not call it a blizzard.

But boy, was it a blizzard.

It was crazy.

Another nasty, nasty one.

And I think we were the epicenter this time.

Last time it was Moose Jaw.

Yes, really nasty.

Tons of snow.

Yes.

Crazy out there.

How was your trip back? Was it okay? And the heater was all hot.

How was it there, though? It was below zero, so I put on my parka.

So you didn't have heat? There was a little bit of heat, not enough.

And the heated seat was still working, but with the parka on, it was fine.

Here's what I'm thinking, and that is the newer cars have a heat pump.

Yeah, that's right.

Newer cars have a heat pump instead of a resistive heater.

So they don't have both then? I don't think so, no.

You'd think that they might need one as a backup.

But maybe the car generates enough heat that it holds.

It's taking heat from the motor, it's taking heat from the from the batteries or something.

There's a loop of different things that heat up here.

But we do know there has been problems with some of the heat pumps as well in extreme cold.

Is it in the heat pump itself or something related to the heat pump? Anyway, that's interesting because you didn't get a price on what that would be.

Didn't show the invoice of what that repair would cost.

No, they didn't.

Just said zero.

I'd be interested.

I guess you could look it up online.

What somebody else did we'll talk more about this sort of thing in future months.

So anything else? You went up? You managed, your feet didn't get cold? Yes.

No.

It was a little bit chilly, but it wasn't too bad.

Was it the most unpleasant trip you've had because you work cold? Yeah, I guess so.

Yeah.

I've got a really warm parka, so it felt almost normal.

With that on, the heat can radiate up from the heated seat and fill the market.

There you go.

And then the other thing that's going on with me is they started shooting a TV show across the street from me here in the neighborhood.

Really? You know, that's happened before, hasn't it? What is it about across the street? Because there used to be somebody of relevant who lived there who was connected to the film industry.

Yes.

They're gone.

Not anymore.

And it's their house that's being rented for this shoot.

That's a weird coincidence, though.

Yeah.

And our good friend Jay is working on the shoot, so I've run into him out there on the street.

Wow.

I bet he doesn't know we're talking about him.

No, probably not.

I assume he doesn't listen to the podcast.

No, he wouldn't.

He's an old man.

I don't think he knows what a podcast oh, he's an angry old man, Brian.

Angry, angry old man who is actually six months younger than me.

So he's working in winter and there's a TV show shooting across the street from you.

I think Jay would prefer to be shooting in a sound stage where there's a lot more room for everybody and it's a lot more comfortable because, of course, it's a blizzard, remember? Why couldn't it be a James Cameron green screen affair? That's what you want to work on.

But yeah, no, there's a lot of traffic on the street, lots of cars parked on our streets.

But it's fine.

Back in the day when I was a kid, I did a couple shows outside.

It's horrible.

Even in the fall when it's warmer than this, to spend 14 hours outside is just not good.

I mean, they're shooting really inside the house, but there's so many crew people that they got to have to spill out into the cars and into the yard and everything.

Is there somebody blocking traffic? No, no one closing off the traffic so far.

Okay, that'd be annoying.

You're coming home, you got to pee.

Some little film student has a stop sign and says, no, you can't.

So it's really weird.

Happened to be on Sunday.

I was biting my own business watching TV.

We were snowed in.

It was a blizzard, as you say, right.

I couldn't do anything.

So my son's home from college, and he took a shower.

And I got to thinking, what is that cable cam on football games called? What is the brand name for that? Because I started thinking about that, and so I googled it, and it's called a Sky Cam.

And then that took me to the Wikipedia page of the sky camp.

And then I found out that the Sky Cam company was bought by this company, then bought by that company, and then it was bought by the person my son hates most of the world, which is Stan Crockey, the owner of the Arsenal Football Club in the Denver Broncos, and a bunch of other things.

He's a bad man, according to people who support the team.

And then I was gravitated towards a section that said incidents, because of course, that's sexy.

I'm going to go there.

There were three incidents, Brian.

One in, like, 1981, when they first invented, and by the way, it was invented by the same person who invented the steadicam.

Yeah.

So that person, I'm assuming, is rich now.

Yeah.

So this is a camera that's on a giant cable that runs across the stage, two cables.

So it's a couple of cables so it can fly over the players during a football game with a camera, I believe it's like a big X of cable, so it can go in three dimensions, back and forth.

And just above the helms of it, you see them, you may not notice them.

I don't think anybody who's paying attention notices them.

Anyway, there was one incident at a small college football game back in the 80s when it was first came out.

There was an incident in like, 25 years ago, and the third incident was an hour before I read it.

An hour before I read it.

It was a game that we didn't have.

Here was the New York Jets game, and apparently the game was delayed by an hour because the Sky Cam fell from the I just thought that was weird.

You're reading three incidents in history and going, this was an hour ago.

The third one was an hour ago.

And somebody had updated the Wikipedia.

And of course they did, Brian, because Wikipedia, it's all about updating quickly.

When we die, our family won't know before Wikipedia knows.

Like, it will be updated instantly.

Well, you know, there's no entry about me on Wikipedia, so if anyone out there well, there will be by then to write one.

Me, too.

I keep begging people to write one for years.

I keep writing it myself, and they rejected, even though I have many awards if you're not allowed to accolades.

And yeah, last night my partner had a grocery store order far away, and we went to the east end of town to pick up groceries because she ordered it in advance before the blizzard without checking the weather.

It was a herring affair.

And we decided to use her coupons for Carl's Jr.

Which she never go to, but we thought that would be exotic someplace.

We have a bit, let's go there and try this coupon out.

And we got there and ordered it all went smoothly.

And we got to the drive through window and there was this car load of teenagers in front of us who had been stuck there for an hour.

And no one at the drivethrough told us anything.

But the car in front of us was stuck right at the window for an hour.

So we had the card that my partner uses and many, many years ago we went to the grocery store chain Superstore and they had clearance, these pieces of rectangular plastic that are grippy that you put under your wheel.

They're like a little tread of plastic that's really pointy.

Yeah.

So it's something you keep in the trunk and if you get stuck in the snow, you put them under your wheels.

Never used them.

Cost about $0.50, like they were discounted from like twelve bucks to fifty cents.

Never used them.

But she had them in the car, put one under the front wheel, cut them out of there in a second.

Wow.

And they threw $20 at me, which I refused, of course, but they were so thankful to get out, they ever would.

And of course it's embarrassing because you're blocking a fat guy from getting his burger behind you and that's no good.

So, yeah, we got them out instantly, which was funny as hell.

Good deed of the week.

Sure.

Now let's get on to some discussions with past stories because I wanted to talk about the Energy Vis Climate podcast.

Okay? This is my name's.

Sake ed.

Woodynham calls himself I call myself Whittingham.

He calls himself Woodynham.

He's from Alberta.

It's 90% chance for cousins.

Okay, I haven't worked it out yet, but two people, there's like six Whittingham in Canada and apparently two of them fell into clean energy somehow.

But whose podcast is more popular, that's what I want to know.

Well, he's a big deal.

He's been in the news for working for governments as a consultant.

So he would have a lot of like this is not the same kind of podcast that people necessarily listen to because it's in the weeds, it's in policy.

There's a lot of policy for people who work in the industry.

That's a huge news.

Well, I do listen to it.

And they had Kathryn Hamilton on, who used to host the Clean Energy or the Energy Gang podcast.

Now she's gone off to other things and I think she worked for the US government for a while.

She's from the States, of course, and she's a clean energy expert and got decades of clean tech and policy in DC.

And she was talking about the US midterms.

And I was worried, I've said before on the show that I'm worried about what's going to happen because it's probably going to change.

Power is going to change in one way or another in Washington, whether it's now or later, it always changes.

How safe is the clean? The big biden thing is not going to be reversed because they're evil, they reverse things.

They don't believe climate change at all.

They're a hoax.

So I just thought she had a really interesting answer that I'll play for you now.

So I don't think that shift will have a direct impact yet on the climate goals.

It will certainly prevent anything additional from happening.

And the US.

Congress holds the purse strings for the federal government.

So just on appropriating funds to keep the government going, that will have an impact.

But the pieces that are in IRA are pretty strong.

I mean, they are tax credit, unless they were to completely rewrite the tax code.

And I'll give you a little secret.

When you give somebody something, don't ever try to take it away.

So you're going to have all of these people taking advantage of credits.

And in fact, manufacturers are already moving into states that are heavily Republican states and the last thing they want is those tax credits to go away.

In fact, during the Trump administration, they never put on the table rolling back solar and wind tax credits.

They just didn't because they knew that was a losing proposition for them.

Yeah, I didn't realize that even during Trump they didn't roll back very much, did they, as far as climate goes, because business people were investing and that's the thing.

Now in Canada, it's a different story.

What they call it, and they refer to it as a runway.

In the states, solar and wind have a ten year runway that it's guaranteed that if you invest, you can keep investing and it will still work out.

You're not wasting your investment.

You need to give assurances and security to people to make these investments because that's what the clean energy transition is.

It's largely investing, but in Canada we don't have that.

So our government is a minority parliamentarian.

Government that may switch to 2025 will probably I mean, the government don't last forever around here either.

And that government hardly wants to get rid of carbon taxes and doesn't seem to legitimately believe in climate change either.

They're not that far off in the Republicans.

But yeah, apparently the Canadian government is working on making that so that it's a guaranteed thing because investors are already threatening.

They might be grandstanding, but they're threatening the one is going to the states because that's where the guarantee is, I don't know.

And there's even definitely companies worried about doing business in places like Alberta because of the sort of backwards looking energy policy that they have there.

If you're a giant business, giant international business, you're going to think twice setting up a business in a place that is denying climate change.

And we were talking about Carlos Gon last week, the former chairman of Nissan who oversaw the implementation of the Nissan Leaf, the first mass produced electric car, which I happen to own a ten year old version of that.

And there's actually a Netflix documentary that just came out a week ago as we were talking about that.

Oh, fantastic.

Well, I don't know that it is fantastic.

I'm not reviewing it.

I'm not endorsing it.

It's called fugitive.

The Curious Case of Carloscone.

And I watched a bit of a lot of talking heads.

It's interesting because it's kind of like a heist movie, right? Because he's accused of stealing millions from the car company he led, he was arrested in Japan and smuggled out of the country by two Americans in a storage chest, who, coincidentally, were also just convicted this week.

As soon as I brought it up, things started happening.

Brian wow.

Okay.

Well, I think I'll check that out.

It was an interesting story just because of that one detail that he had to escape the country in a storage chest.

Yeah.

Oh.

We have some breaking news.

The 8th billionth human being is about to be born in the world.

We go now to Antonio Gutiris, the head of the United Nations.

The 8th billionth member of our human family is born.

How will we answer when baby 8 billion is old enough to ask, what did you do for our world and for our planet when you had the chance? After President Trump announced that America would withdraw from the Paris Climate Change Accord, elon Musk immediately announced he would quit presidential business councils.

We are in the fight of our lives and we are losing.

Greenhouse gas emissions keep growing, global temperatures keep rising, and our planet is fast approaching tipping points that will make climate chaos irreversible.

Twitter owner Elon Musk has told his followers on the platform to vote for a Republican congress.

Tuesday, Musk tweeted, quote to independentminded voters, shared power curbs the worst excesses of both parties.

Global warming, which a lot of people think is a hoax.

The Earth will end only when God declares it's time to be over.

We are on a highway to Climate Hill with our foot still on the accelerator.

This is a clean energy show with Brian Thompson and James Whittingham.

Okay, so a quick start here from South Dakota.

Now, we often talk about North Dakota here on the show because we're just above North Dakota here.

In many ways.

In many ways, I love North Dakota.

Home of the Fargo Film Festival.

Home of the Fargo Theater.

Anyway, South Dakota, which is just below North Dakota, it is now getting most of its electricity from wind they previously had.

Hydroelectric was the biggest source, but now 52% is coming from wind turbines in the province there.

So congratulations to South Dakota.

And what I say to that initially is, why not us? Brian why not us? I wonder what led that to happen.

Like, what was it? Private investment? Because we have a utility owned, government owned utility here.

Was it the private sector that saw cheap electricity that drove the investment in? That what sparked that? Because South Dakota is not in the day and age of accusing everything green as being on one side of the political spectrum and therefore the enemy the other, then I'm surprised that a state like South Dakota was able to do something like that.

Yeah, in South Dakota and North Dakota, both tend to be conservative leaning states.

It is slightly surprising, but as we know, it's a great idea.

So we have very similar wind profile here in our province and a little bit of wind power, but it really needs to be cranked up.

You know, it's interesting politically when I was in Fargo with you, that I was asking, because that was just when Trump was becoming a thing and I was trying to get a Trump sign to bring over, was asking around for one.

They were all lefty apologizing for their country.

But it just goes to show that even in very right wing states, you have pockets of people who are, you know, not everybody is going to be one way or the other.

There's always pockets, even in the most extreme leaning states.

Yeah, fargo is a college town.

They've got, like, I think, three universities in Fargo or Fargo morehead.

And of course, people involved in the film festival, I guess, tend to be people in the arts, more left leaning, but as a whole, pretty conservative places.

And my son always points out that Wyoming has Casper, which is also a small college town, because we've been through Wyoming a few times and I've been shaken by some of the images I've seen there.

And there's lots of bad things to look at and signs and messages.

But, yeah, Casper, which is a town we did go to, it was like a Fargo of Wyoming.

It was kind of like a cool little college town with a nice Taco Bell, I may add.

Nice.

And, you know, I wanted to go there for the eclipse.

The total eclipse of the sun that was the closest to us was Casper, Wyoming.

Oh, interesting.

I think we had just done a six week vacation in the mountains with our camper, and I couldn't convince my partner to do it.

I regret that ever since, because it would have been a one day trip to see something remarkable.

No.

And I thought about driving to Calgary or Winnipeg to see Kate Beaton, author of the Duck's graphic novel, which I was plugging on the show.

But these blizzards prevented these blizzards are bad.

You never know this time of year whether we live in western Canada, where you're going to get bad weather, and certainly any mountain pass, even the Sierra Nevada mountains, are getting killed with a whole whack of snow.

I've got a story I wanted to talk about.

I guess a few companies, at least a couple in the last week or so, that have dropped plans, like, Ford has announced that it has dropped plans for a level three driver assistance, which would lead them to robotaxis.

And they're going to focus on level two just for the consumer rather than as a business.

So that's been a big shift.

Mercedes is kind of doing the same.

They say robotaxis are no longer a goal.

We thought that in 2016 or 17, and that's kind of when the neural net sort of became a thing and they thought, well, everything is going to be solved quickly, but now they're backing off of that and they thought they could solve the robotaxi problem quite quickly.

And so did certain CEOs who now social media magnets, but committing to both a ride hailing solution and a passenger driven assistant solution was expensive.

So they thought they just concentrated on the one that make people because people are demanding it now.

They're demanding basically the different versions of autopilot for different cars just to drive itself on the highway.

How was your autopilot, by the way, in wintertime? How is it doing on actual highways? Yeah, generally really good.

It can kind of sense generally through the snow.

Okay, well, self driving taxis that operate all day, every day and all kinds of weather have been a dream for many for decades, including one of the Google people who started their autonomous program, Waymo.

Yes.

So now he's programming trucks to operate within the confines of industrial sites.

Only one of these guys.

And he says the foreseeable future, that's as much as the complexity as any driverless vehicle will be able to handle, in his opinion.

He says, forget about the profits, the combined revenue of all the robotax the robotruck companies, it's not a lot right now.

It's probably more like zero.

So our friend of the show, Mark Hislamp, who is one province over from us or two provinces over, but from where we live, he's got a YouTube show called Energy Media, and he also has a podcast from time to time, and he has a guest on from Guidehouse Insights.

He's an automotive engineer and EV analyst.

His name is Dulce Meade and he's somebody that I go to for EV information and sort of market knowledge like that.

And boy, he's got some cold water to throw on the robotaxi thing.

I got some clips from him.

This is him talking about that it's going to be a while before someone solves this to be at the point where you can really start to scale it up dramatically and get to a level of number of vehicles on the road where you can start to build a really viable business out of it.

It's probably closer to eight to ten years, closer towards the end of this decade than where we are today.

And again, this is Marks YouTube show energy Media.

I'll have a link to it in the show notes, so we can borrow from him without guilt.

And also he's talking about how AI sort of plateaued.

What I was just talking about, the Neuron net development in early 2010s was something that people thought would move fast but apparently he sees a big plateau happening and slowing down.

We had that big advancement in the middle part of the last decade, and that suddenly moved things forward very quickly.

But then it plateaued and it's been climbing very slowly ever since it hit that plateau.

And so that's why it's hard to predict when we'll get to that stage where these systems are at least consistently as good as or better than humans.

Now, there's been a Department of justice investigation into Musk over full selfdriving claims.

According to Reuters, prosecutors in Washington, San Francisco are examining whether Tesla misled customers.

I hear when you look at sort of on stage discussions from people in this space, they're really bad mouthed Tesla.

Now, you could take that with a grain of salt and say it's envy, or I don't believe in their approach, but Tesla is always proving people wrong.

Anyway, this is his opinion, his contrary opinion on the Tesla approach, and he doesn't think much of it.

There are some fundamental flaws in the Tesla approach relying on cameras only, and particularly because of the way they've configured the cameras, where you don't have any stereoscopic imaging, so you can do parallax imaging to get some accurate distance measurement.

Tesla is relying entirely on AI inference to try to measure distance to objects, which is an inherently flawed approach.

The system that they have devised is not really capable of robust automated driving, and probably never will be.

Between the name and what Elon Musk has consistently said for the last six years, since October of 2016, when they launched autopilot version two.

And he started his presentation with starting today, all vehicles rolling out of the Tesla factory have all the hardware they need to get to level five.

Autonomy.

Which was a lie then and it's a lie today.

He's a pinch angry, I think, which is up to the sort of a toad that I hear of these things.

But yeah, well, we'll see.

But Tesla's future is highly reliant on that's one big aspect of it.

It's not just selling cars.

Yeah, well, I suspect that they probably wouldn't do the same thing now.

So that's back in 2016, and Tesla was not in a profitable position back then, so they started selling full selfdriving, I think partly just as a way to get revenue into the company, a future promise of a future feature.

Since then, they've become very profitable and very stable.

So if they were starting this program now, I don't think they would be selling this feature for the future at ten, $20,000.

But, yeah, I suspect back then they just wanted the cash flow.

And another problem that I've seen come up is people like you who have the full self driving beta but aren't using it.

So apparently that's a bit of an issue because it's kind of annoying.

Right? It turns off and you think, Well, I'll just drive normally for now.

Yeah, I've.

Got better things to do.

Sure.

Even as you're retirement.

But this has become an issue because they're getting less data and they need more data, which is maybe one of the reasons why they're trying to roll it out to even people with bad driving scores.

Yeah, but could they possibly even crunch all the data that they're getting? Almost on the inside observer, I have a friend who owns a Tesla, but you I'm amazed at how the promises keep coming that it's later this year, end of the year, next year, and year after year it's always there.

But watching the progress of Auto full self driving beta, it does seem to be a slow crawl.

Something could happen where everything comes together.

I don't know, everything about it to ComEd and maybe they'll solve something that puts everything together and suddenly it makes a giant leap forward.

But right now and we'll see.

We'll see.

Because we're six months away from testing your car again on the same route, and we'll see how it does.

And we had a rainy day last year, so it wasn't perfect, but yeah.

Anyway, France is doing something quite unusual, even for France.

Yeah.

So there is new legislation that was approved this week that requires all parking lots in France with spaces for at least 80 vehicles.

This is both existing and new parking lots be covered by solar panels.

So this is great.

You think that has an 80 vehicle parking lot? What would that be? A strip mall? A strip mall would have that.

Yeah, I guess so.

We have quite a few kind of small parking lots in our city.

I think that wouldn't qualify.

Or even a big hotel.

Brian would have 80 spots, wouldn't it? I mean, if you have 80 rooms, you'd have 80 spots.

Yeah, it just makes sense.

Like, this is schools, maybe.

Yeah, schools.

This is space that it's just there.

And if we put solar panels on it, it will keep the rain off the cars and produce electricity.

It's a nice incentive.

So you have to do this.

Yeah, this is the law.

So according to the government, the potential of the measure could reach up to eleven gigawatts, or the equivalent of the power of ten nuclear reactors at midday on a Sunday in the summer.

So that's interesting.

That's a lot of power just from parking lots.

No, and we've had stories in the past about covering canals.

Like in California, I might as well cover the canals.

It's just all this space that we have that could have a double use.

And parking lots is one of them.

You know, though, I wonder what the business model is for this, what the payback is, because I don't know what France's tariff system is, or if they have any money for just putting out the panels or the feed in of the electricity to the grid, how they pay and what the payback period is.

But let's say that it's reasonable.

You would have customers that would be pretty happy to be parking under a structure, an outdoor structure that shaded you, perhaps shield you from precipitation.

And you could sit and wait for your spousal unit to shop.

And you wouldn't cook in the sun.

He would be shaded and comfortable.

No, we have a real problem here.

We have very hot sun in the summertime, so always better to get a parking spot with shade.

I thought this was interesting.

So it's the bigger parking lots that are going to have to do this first.

Car parks with 400 spaces or more have about three years to comply, and then the smaller parking lots get about five years to complete.

So this isn't just new construction.

This is existing construction.

Existing parking lots.

That is a big deal.

My goodness.

Yeah.

No, and if you think of some of the like, think of I don't know if they have Walmart in France, but you think of Walmart, the Walmart, the giant parking lots that we have for places like Walmart or shopping malls.

Man, that would be a lot of solar panels.

Yeah.

I've been thinking about what we'll use, because the grocery store that we went to last night of the blizzard actually has a bunch of stuff built on the outside of what used to be a parking lot.

There's actually an office building there with yeah, they've been restaurants used to be a gigantic parking lot, but they keep adding businesses to it.

And that confused me because it's hard to find now it's easy to find a store at the end of a giant parking lot that's 10 miles away.

There are walmarts in China.

Do they? Yeah, they do.

Wow.

There's no French walmart in France, so I just Google that.

Of course, there's a French Disneyland, but there's no French Walmart.

It's basically the same, right? Yeah.

Disney.

When we do go to a robot taxi future, we're going to need less parking spaces.

Right.

So the way I envision it is, say I've got a shopping mall close to me that's got lots of parking spaces.

And I think that what they could say is, well, you know, part of this shopping mall can be designated for Robotaxis because, you know, robotaxis will go mostly at the peak of when people get on and off work and on and off school.

It's just like rush hour.

But for the rest of the day, they'll have to sit somewhere.

They'll need somewhere to have they'll need to go somewhere where they can charge and where they can somewhere nearby, different areas of town.

I don't know where that's going to be.

Yeah.

Plus, I imagine it will be like the movie Cars, and they'll want to hang around together at a party, have social issues and things like that.

Of course it will be like that.

But at the same time, I'm wondering if we'll need less.

Well, I mean, that's what Tony Seba says.

We'll need less parking lots.

And there's a significant amount of Los Angeles that has nothing but parking lots.

And that's also a heat gainer for it increases the urban island, t island of cities as parking lots.

Yeah.

Well, hopefully we can densify all of our cities and just start building more building and housing on all these parking lots we're not going to.

Right? And that'll be an exciting future.

Plus like a driven right to the door.

And hopefully some sort of device will lift me up and put me on an automated cart that will drive me around.

Because walking is just too much for sure in the future, I think.

So Porsche has made 100,000 cars.

What does it mean? 100,000 of Brian? This is the Porsche Taycan electric car.

They've now produced 1000 of this car.

So it's been a pretty big success for Porsche.

These are in demand.

They are selling more of these than the 911, which is kind of the marquee car for Porsche.

What I didn't know is it's not a huge company.

This is really a niche player.

So they delivered just over 300,000 vehicles last year.

So they're a small car company niche and of course, very expensive.

Tesla deliver like, one and a half million.

Yeah, and they're just getting going.

This is with two new factories that just went up.

This is just with one.

Yeah.

So they delivered just over 300,000 vehicles total, and 41,000 of them were the all electric Ticans.

So they have plans to electrify more of their lineup.

But like a lot of things, it's been a little bit delayed.

The Macan was the next one that they were going to electrify, and so far they haven't managed to do that.

They've been surprised by that, haven't they? I mean, I think they've been overwhelmed by demand, but they've also stepped up to meet that demand, which is great, too.

Yeah, but it really does make sense if you're someone who's interested in a Porsche, you're interested in performance driving.

And as we know, Electric makes for fantastic performance driving.

And if you're wealthy, then you want to impress your wealthy green friends.

Well, there's nothing more luxurious, though, than driving quiet, so I love that.

I don't know.

Would that impress your green friends to a Porsche can? Some of them seems a little excessive.

I've impressed myself.

Maybe that's really what counts in the car world.

Yeah.

I don't know.

It's a lot of money and you could probably solve the world hunger in a small nation somewhere for the purchase of that car.

But Electric says that Tesla is now earning eight times more per car than Toyota.

And Toyota is basically one of the world's largest automakers, and they're starting to apparently notice.

Back in Japan, according to Electric, for example, tesla reported $3.3 billion in net profit last quarter, compared to Toyota earning just roughly 3 billion.

So.

Yeah, Tesla.

This is despite Toyota delivering eight times more cars than Tesla in the same time period, and Tesla beat them on profits.

That's kind of wild.

It is.

So they made the same money, same profits.

But wow, I mean, the demand for Tesla is high.

There's this whole inflation thing going on.

There's the supply problem, the chip shortages.

So they have eat up their prices a little bit.

Thousand here, thousand there, as a lot of people are.

What do you think it is? It's like a third of profit per car or something like that.

It's really high.

It's higher than most people.

Yeah, I don't know.

But the traditional automakers make more money on things like service and part of stuff.

So this milestone of Tesla beating Toyota and earnings during a quarter is especially impressive when you consider that just a decade ago, toyota owned 3% of Tesla with just a $50 million investment.

Think of how they get rid of that.

So now Tesla generates $50 million in free cash flow almost every day, which is why the CEO can do cookie things and do whatever they want.

So it's now time for the Tweet of the Week.

This is where I highlight a tweet that I like.

There's a couple of good ones.

Maybe I'll do two.

This week from Jenny Chase, solar analyst with Bloomberg NEF New Energy Finance.

It's a casual line from those hippies at Pakistan's National Electric Power Regulatory Authority.

And this is basically what they said in their report.

They said the existing average cost of supply electricity to consumers is high, way too high.

And one way to reduce this high cost is to procure cheap electricity from indigenous resources like wind and solar.

Now, if we heard that from our utility in Canada, that would be remarkable.

But this is coming from Pakistan, a very conservative place, who is not known, especially in governmental terms, to talk like this.

But they see the value of this.

No utility talks this way, actually.

But Pakistan is and because she lives in the solar space, she knows nobody else is saying that but Pakistan Solar, or pardon me, the electricity utility is saying that one way that we're going to lower prices is by buying wind and solar.

So good for them.

Yeah.

As we've said before, the fuel costs for wind and solar are zero.

And now a secondary Tweet of the week.

Just because I wanted to do too, and I hate deciding, brian, it's a lot of work to decide.

Why should I have to decide? Fred lambert lambert.

Lambert.

Lambert.

Fred Lambert, editor in chief at Electric.

He says his personal account he says when I talk about Elon's feedback loop being hijacked by superfans, this is what I mean.

And he has a story from the Mercury News in San Jose, California.

And before I go on, I just want to say that Fred owns like, five teslas has been the biggest fan of Tesla and he's a journalist, but he's been reporting on Tesla forever.

He is an enthusiast.

He's cheering them on in every way.

But Elon Musk blocked him once a long time ago because he had something mildly critical to say and Elon couldn't just take that.

So what Fred thinks is that Elon like Michael Jackson and other people, they have this feedback loop of everybody who's constantly praising them.

And this is a story from the San Jose newspaper that says that this one guy who's like a dad was tweeting him like 19 times a day or something.

And Elon was often responding to him because it's such praise.

And the softspoken superfan dad praised him for being fit, ripped and healthy and asked, hey Elon Musk, what's your secret? It sounds like almost a joke, like a comedian might do that because it's the opposite of true.

He's not fit, he's not ripped, he's not healthy.

You look at him and you see a guy who doesn't he's like an It guy who never gets an hour of sleep.

It looks like he hasn't had sleep in years.

And certainly not the healthy lifestyle and certainly no son.

And the world's richest man's response was how do I keep fit and healthy? Fasting and diabetic drug that promotes weight loss.

So good for you.

When you're rich, you get to have the diagnosis.

Drugs that promote weight loss and fasting is not good.

Sumo wrestlers fast.

They don't eat until 01:00 p.m.

In the afternoon.

Yeah.

Wow.

Not to 01:00 p.m.

In the afternoon.

That is a CES fast fact for you.

That's because they store more weight if they don't eat all day.

They train their body to fast.

See, in human history, back when we were in caves and such, ten years ago, if you didn't eat, your body would think it was a famine and it would store extra weight.

It would just change.

So like fat people like me would survive in a zombie apocalypse.

So my nutritionist tells me because we would need 20% less calories because we're that more efficient.

Anyway, so we get a little bit of feedback here from the Twitter says clean energy fraud.

You guys are talking about the future of hydrogen.

So check out this podcast and what was it? It says this guy's super anti hydrogen and has some great points.

And this is from Nelson.

The podcast was our friend Mark Mslop at Energy Talk Show.

He has a podcast as well.

Occasionally puts out a guest, Paul Martin, a chemical engineer with a 30 year history of working with hydrogen and a member of the Hydrogen Science Coalition.

And I'll put a link to that in the show notes if you want to hear some smack talk on hydrogen.

And coming up in the show is the lightning round zoom through the rest of the week's headlines in a fast fashion.

We like to hear from you.

It's really what we live on.

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That sound means it is time for the lightning round, where we'll end the show this way.

A fast paced look of the week in clean energy and climate news.

Canada is putting the break on China's $4 billion lithium acquisition free.

China is here buying up all the lithium they can, and Canada has finally said no.

So Chinese companies have been the biggest financers of overseas lithium projects globally in recent years, including purchases of Canadian listed assets.

And that's a new development, Brian.

Yeah.

So this is new legislation that limits the foreign ownership of some of these critical minerals that we're going to need for the electric revolution.

Call it the biden approach, saying no more China.

The Charging Interface Initiative, a global industry association focused on the electrification of transportation, has launched its new megawatt charging system.

MCs is going to be called.

We have CCS, the non Tesla standard for charging connectors.

This is going to be MCs.

So memorize that term.

Brian.

MCs is the new megawatt charging system standard for North America.

So this will be some specific kind of plug and protocol for how to charge at even higher speeds.

Megawatt speeds for trucks, basically for trucks, big trucks.

Not necessarily all semitransport trucks, but medium trucks as well.

This is interesting.

The 2023 Kia EV six base trim has been dropped.

And the starting price that means has dropped to an unfortunate $50,000 US.

That means brian, I can't afford it.

Yes, that's too bad.

I mean, we sometimes do get different trim levels here in Canada, so we'll see.

But 50,000 is a lot.

Another CS fast fact, the golden toad is the first species to go extinct to climate change.

Put that in your toaster and smoke it.

It's too warm for them.

And I guess the towed has had enough.

Panasonic has broken ground on their EV battery factory in Kansas.

This is what we refer to early red states getting a lot of this EV manufacturing, green tech manufacturing and jobs.

And they'll be making 2070 cylindrical cells.

A Viking bus orders 31 Mercedes Benz E Cetera buses as long distance runners in the country known as Denmark.

Hello, Denmark.

The reason I bring that up is because we've mentioned this before.

When will long distance city to city buses electrify? Well, the answer is, I guess it's starting.

That's great.

The market share of zero mission light duty vehicle registrations in Canada hit 9.4% in the third quarter of this year.

And that's a new record.

It's up from any previous record which shows that the EV adoption is accelerating in Canada.

Yeah, we're definitely past some sort of a tipping point, which is often said to be around 5% of the market.

So, yeah.

Canada at 9.4% EVs.

That's fantastic.

How many Ford Mustang electrics do you see around? I see them almost every day now.

Maybe it's the same neighborhood, I don't know, but I see them everywhere.

The North End, one of 600 EV sold in Europe will be made by Chinese makers of EVs by 2025.

Fitch solution says, according to the China EV Post, So that's interesting.

Something we've been following since the early days of this podcast is when will Chinese EV makers start to make gains in Western markets? Yeah, and I guess you're at first, because it's always Europe first, isn't it? Because they need their EVs over there.

It's physically closer and they have tougher regulations to kind of phase out combustion.

A slight majority of California voters favor the recently announced ban on new sales of gasoline powered vehicles by 2035.

Only 52% and 43% disapprove, but hopefully they'll come around when prices do.

I don't think anyone's going to complain about the range and prices there and charging infrastructure.

Another fast fact air conditioners and heating elements consume 50% of electricity in America.

Did you know that? That's a lot.

No, that's a lot.

Analysis as seen by the BBC shows that the production and transport of LNG causes up to ten times the carbon emissions compared to pipeline gas.

So build more pipeline.

I'm kidding.

This around here, liquid natural gas as opposed to actual gas that goes through pipes.

The greater than 8% electricity from a solar club in Europe for 2021.

Here's the countries that have 8% or more just from solar germany, Spain, Greece, Italy, Netherlands not bad.

And there's a whole bunch of 5%.

A whole whack at 5%.

Good for you.

Greece, by the way.

I always think of Greece as a leader in clean energy, but these things, they sneak up on you.

Amazon is meeting holiday demand this year with a fleet of over 1000 Livian electric vehicle delivery vans.

So we are talking about those for a long time now.

And I guess there's a thousand on the roads for Christmas this year.

Yeah, that's not bad.

But 10,000 next year and 50,000 a year after that or something.

Yeah, they've definitely ordered more than that.

Amazon is a big investor in Rivian and they're desperately trying to scale up their production of these vans and their pickup trucks.

So hopefully things speed up nicely.

And finally this week, Tony Sieve says in a post that speaking of Amazon, amazon created a vast information technology infrastructure, but the use of just five weeks of the year, the holiday shopping season, which is Christmas in November and December where we live, they overbuilt capacity for the rest of the year.

And he says, well, let's call that super data center.

And thus the Amazon AWS cloud was born, which you see advertised on TV.

It's now a trillion dollar business because they overbuilt something.

So the reason he mentions that, Brian, is why? Because this is what's going to happen to solar, wind and batteries.

Because solar is intermittent.

Wind is intermittent.

We need to overbuild it.

But because these technologies are so cheap and getting cheaper, we can easily overbuild it.

So Amazon, of course, a large amount of shopping happens in November and December, the Christmas shopping season here in Canada and the US.

So they had to really beef up their online system to handle all these transactions in December.

And what did they end up with? Amazon Web Services, which is now a trillion dollar business, apparently.

Yes, it's a lot of money just for overbuilding something, because that's what's going to happen with the energy markets, because we're going to have extra solar, extra wind around.

That is our show for this week.

You know what? Next year we're going to have a Patreon.

If you have any ideas for the patreon, let us know what kind of perks you might be interested in.

And by God, write us right now.

[email protected] or clean energy pond everywhere on social media.

If you're new to the show, remember to subscribe to our show on your podcast app to get new shows, new episodes delivered every week.

We'll see you next time.

See you next week!

 

Twit Elon Musk may be tarnishing the Tesla Brand as we navigates his way through Twitter ownership. The European Union bans the sale of new combustion vehicles by 2035. Small modular nuclear reactors largely rely on highly enriched urnanium that only comes from Russia. So that's a problem since Russia invaded Ukraine.

A large bank is getting scolded for greenwashing during last year's COP climate conference. Turns out they're really into financing fossil fuels.

The IEA says carbon emissions will peak in 2025, sooner than previously thought. Why? Thanks to Russia invading Ukraine. 

British PM Sunak may attend COP 27 afterall. King Charles would like to join him but the government won't let him.

Cruise ships are way worse than travelling by airliner for carbon emissions per person, per mile.

James gets angry at a Nissan ad starring Brie Larson telling people to buy a gas guzzler and not wait for 'furturistic' EVs.

Beyond Catastrophe A New Climate Reality Is Coming Into View By David Wallace-Wells

Here's a gift link to the article discussed in this week's episode (no paywall): https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/10/26/magazine/climate-change-warming-world.html?unlocked_article_code=00s0e3fyPujeR6ZZPUmwythO-8EhSgezVhODl8kPm8RXKmxbQukf9ee3Hcyz34OSNFIlx_wXLHnIAbMr3aG5ahMgZRr6zucMwAKyLgCGIuYs2KUa8oicAdA8QzdXJq-8Fs549_949iEdGZggYwjrJ8ZC_eCqz69i5w2sB6YaBtzpBxTBCvKtqDF_VXY0UX0wpOj3jgMywSImQs7H9N3Zgt4tHB0bvqWkQZEmhxvReOE0aeg5QH-soag4aQXaWlDLeE3eR2wi35ecfN3tClOHfo6s-_gGy8226ulDDtGrzdRXOLu6DSz6YiaavnDBPvYZsMNpYUzizeei992Es3rv1AUMLc_9dCsM57OnlSkd8R93De1uRcwl&smid=share-url

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Transcript

Hello, and welcome to episode 137 of the Clean Energy Show.

I'm Brian Stockton.

I'm James Whittingham.

This week, it's not just natural gas that comes from Russia.

So that's the specialized uranium used in small modular nuclear reactors.

Whoopsy.

The European Union has officially banned new combustion and cars in 2035.

Now.

If only they could ban the Eurovision song contest.

A large multinational bank is getting scolded for greenwashing.

Brian I'm old enough to remember what a multinational bank greenwashed.

It meant laundering money for criminals.

According to the IEA, carbon emissions will peak in 2025.

They also said our podcast peaked in 2020, which I thought was kind of me.

Why do they keep studying us? Anyway? All that and more on this edition of the Clean Energy Show.

And welcome, everyone, to our weekly podcast on climate and clean energy.

If you're new, be sure to subscribe to get all of our episodes delivered to you weekly.

More on the show.

Brian we have is Twitter owner Elon Musk damaging Tesla's brand? Answer is yes.

Will British PM Sunak attend Cop 27? And will King Charles be jealous? Answer is also yes.

Well, I'm spoiling everything.

SMRs have a geopolitical problem thanks to Russia invading Ukraine, poland bosched its nuclear ambitions and is now letting foreigners run the show.

And how Africa can benefit even more than the rest of the world by installing renewables.

And that's just the tip of the iceberg.

All kinds of stuff we're talking about this week.

So much stuff to do.

So one thing I wanted to catch up on, which I just sort of mentioned off the cuff last week, we somehow started talking about a transatlantic cruise.

Something I've always wanted to do is take a cruise across the Atlantic rather than airplane because it would be sort of old fashioned and fun and less stressful than plane travel.

I've always wanted to do it, but I've done some googling and it turns out, in terms of a carbon footprint, taking a ship across the Atlantic is worse than flying.

But, yeah, I just wanted to follow up because I didn't sort of cite any sources last week because I just kind of mentioned it off the cuff.

But if anyone wants to Google that, there's sort of a few articles here, but there's one from the Guardian that's way back from 2006, and it quotes Climate Care, which is a carbon offsetting company, and they calculated it at 00:40 3 passenger mile on a cruise ship and only .25 for a long haul flight.

So point 43 versus point 25 for airplane travel.

So, yeah, it does appear that taking a ship, one of those big cruise ships anyway, like, maybe you could still away on, like, a cargo ship that's going anyway.

I mean, that'd probably be well, they put swimming pools on those ships, multiple swimming pools, ads on my social media.

They've got a go kart track on the top of one of these cruise ships.

Really? Wow.

Jeez.

I'd like that.

Hopefully there's a barrier so you don't fly off into the ocean.

Yeah, cruise ship.

It's like you're moving basically a small city across the ocean.

So I guess we shouldn't be surprised that it's worse in terms of carbon emissions.

And then also possible, like, they sometimes do things like burn their waste because they've got so much waste on a ship and things like that are not good.

We should have done something on a sustainable Halloween because it was Halloween last night.

And what's your favorite Halloween candy? You're not known for your sweet tooth, I'll say that.

Yeah.

What did you steal from the kids, Brian? Come on, be honest.

Well, we had some, like, Swedish Berries that were pretty good.

Those are good, aren't they? They do really ring the bell in the old brain, don't they? They're nice.

There are a lot of things.

My least favorite is smarties.

I have a box right here.

Oh, I like smarties.

You're the guy who likes smarties.

Smarties.

I looked this up yesterday, is at the bottom of the preferred candy lists all over the Internet.

At the bottom.

Wow.

I like smarties.

You like smarties.

And I'm going to eat them right now out of not spite, but because I have to.

And also, I will point out, you know, the candy that we call rockets, a little sugar candy, in America, those are known as smarties.

What? Yeah.

They don't have smarties like we have smarties.

Really? Yes.

Smarties here in Canada are kind of vaguely like an eminent M.

It's a chocolate covered candy covered chocolate in different colors, but they're not very good, the M and Ms.

I will tell you, this is a knowledge that I have deep knowledge of candy have ground up peanuts in the shell, which is why you cannot, if you have a peanut allergy, eat M and M's chocolates.

These do not.

And I really noticed the flavor difference.

Like, they have a flavor to their shell in M and Ms.

But do you see M amp M very much? No.

We had a lot of help.

Do you have trick or feeders? Did you do that? Yeah, just maybe a couple of dozen.

Well, that's pretty good.

My son was texting me all night from his great uncle's house in town where he goes to university.

And his uncle, who's 83, and his twin lives in Regina, is very close to us, his sister, and he was giving out he didn't give out anything last year, so when my son was there so my son was kind of wondering what Uncle Gary gives out christmas oranges.

He gives out oranges.

Interesting.

And my son was very upset by this, but then it got worse because then Uncle Gary made him hand out the oranges and accept the wrath from the kids.

How embarrassing.

Apparently, there was a meme to give out potatoes, so people were giving up potatoes this year.

We did that as a joke.

We had some potatoes lying around and we said we should give those out.

The thing is, Brian, people are paranoid, even when we were kids about Halloween, catty rather, and those oranges are going to the landfill.

Yeah, probably.

Maybe one in 20 will be eaten.

I bet you most of them will be thrown out, especially when they're handed to a long haired teenager.

There are already reports of marijuana gummies getting into the Halloween supply in Winnipeg.

I'm sure it's possible, although they're kind of expensive.

That's kind of an expensive maybe you get high, you make mistakes, Brian.

I don't know.

The other thing I want to mention is I've got another Tesla appointment in Saskatoon on Friday.

I'm starting to have troubles with the heat again.

Something like that kind of happened last winter where it seemed like it was not blowing enough heat, but it never put up an error warning or anything, so I was never able to kind of get it fixed.

But now there's a little error warning, so I got to make the drive up to Saskatoon on Friday to see what's up with that.

Did you Google the error warning? Nope.

No, I didn't.

It just said, Climate keeper not available due to system fault.

So there's some kind of system fault and they're going to see me on Friday.

Well, we've had above normal weather, but it's going to cool down and good luck.

It's going to be very cold very soon.

It works for a little while, and then you're driving around and then suddenly it's blowing cold air.

That's going to be an unpleasant 5 hours of driving then potentially, yeah, the temperatures got to dropping a bit by Friday, so we'll see.

It kind of comes and goes.

So hopefully I'll just warm, I should say.

So let's see what's the Friday forecast here.

Checking the weather here and to see if Brian is going to be available for next show.

So this is a scheduling issue here that we're looking at.

Will Brian be dead Friday? Five plus five plus five.

Celsius and sunny.

So the sun really makes a difference.

Is the middle of the day you're going or I haven't decided if I'm going to go the day before or not.

Oh, because you're going to make a trip out of it.

Hit the restaurants, the museums, everything in your retirement is a tourist activity.

It's just totally even with your snowden, it's like, oh, this is great.

I got nowhere to be.

It must be good.

The big discussion topic this week is Elon Musk, because he is the head of Twitter, and he was the head is the head of Tesla.

Now, Tesla is an important company in the energy transition, and we've been following every eye glitch of Musk for 20 years, and now he's gone off the rails.

I think the discourse in America is about to get way worse, thanks to new Twitter CEO Elon Musk.

Musk took over the Twitter on Friday, and immediately there was an explosion of hate speech, including use of the N word on the platform, which jumped 500%, leading Twitter to change the landing page from what's happening to Me.

Because yesterday Musk replied to a tweet from Hillary Clinton about the attack on Paul Pelosi that condemned the violence and conspiracy theories with a link to a homophobic conspiracy theory blaming the victim of the violence.

That's not just awful, that is beyond the pale.

And so is Elon Musk bathing picture of Elon on the beach.

But anyway, very pissed.

My point is, as you can hear from the audience, he's becoming not a happy, popular guy anymore.

Used to be no one knew who he was, right? I bet when you bought your first Tesla stock, 99 out of 100 people wouldn't know who he was, practically.

Or maybe not that extreme, but a lot of people didn't know who he was, and now he's a villain.

It's almost like, Let Trump on Twitter so that Musk is not the biggest villain.

So my question to you is, as a loyal fan who has not broken down yet and has total faith in Elon, when's your faith going to crumble? What's it going to take? Is he going to have to invade Poland? What's going to happen? Say, I have faith in Elon.

I have faith in Tesla.

Like, the mission of the company is solidly on track.

They're doing great.

I don't know.

It's not like this is going to derail what Tesla is doing.

What happens if he starts doing crazy things? I know he mentioned in the last conference call for shareholders that he said something about, in case I go crazy.

This is like the backup.

Like, they can take over and do things.

So it's almost like he was seeing it coming, but he's getting kind of Kanye.

I'm just waiting for antisemitic tweets and then anticlimate tweets.

I've predicted this for a while.

I can see it coming.

And it was like five years ago, I saw an interview with him where he was interviewing okay.

An attractive woman was interviewing him for a network, and he started flirting with her.

And I thought, this is kind of unhinged, especially since he just ended one marriage.

He was about to get his next.

He said, you do know anyone I could date in the middle of an interview for a business channel? And it was just so bizarre that I started to lose faith in him and started to question.

It just makes me nervous.

It makes me nervous.

And now he's trying to make people with blue ticks on their Twitter account pay $20 a month to have your verified account.

Well, as we said many times, clean energy is going to win because it's better and it's cheaper.

So whether he charges people on Twitter, I don't really see how that affects Climate Change.

I see it as he's making stupid decisions.

And I'm worried that those stupid decisions could make it into Tesla.

And I asked myself, like I've said this before, what does it mean for Tesla to have a person, like, go off the rails? Who's running the company.

Are they stable enough now? Does it matter anymore? Is his ingenuity, the things that he's developed, like solving problems.

Like it costs too much.

So we'll make one giant piece out of one casting machine.

We'll build the machine that makes the machine.

If that goes away, is Tesla still I mean, if he's wrapped up in cellophane somewhere, talking to himself, can the clean revolution go ahead? That's my question to you.

And you say it's probably okay, but I worry about it.

Yeah, because clean energy is better and cheaper.

So, you know, all this just seems like a distraction.

And, you know, here's another thing, Brian, and this is going to be a tough one for you.

I have less of a desire to own a tesla than I did two weeks ago.

And I think that's true for a lot of people.

Yeah.

And I think that could continue and it could get worse, because he's gathering up all this storm of disdain for him that people could be ashamed to drive a Tesla one day instead of proud of it.

And that I worry about because of the company's bottom line is not good if it slows down.

The fact is, that's not going to be an issue for a long time because there's just so much demand, which we talk about every week on our show.

Now I'm blocking anyone who serves me an ad on Twitter because GM said that they were going to stop temporarily serving ads.

That didn't last long because I started getting GM ads again.

Really? Yeah.

So maybe it's a Canada US.

Thing.

Maybe they're still doing it in Canada.

Well, it's true.

I didn't get any ads at all when he took over Twitter for about two days, and then GM came back on, so I blocked them.

And that's the one thing I might actually buy, is a GM car.

Right.

So they know that.

And it's just kind of weird, because if everybody who has a blue check mark pay the $20 a month, it would be like $75 million, which is a drop in the bucket compared to the 5 billion in advertising.

Right.

So it doesn't matter.

So if you drive people like Stephen King off there was a funny joke, one of the late night shows that I think maybe it was Saturday Night Live.

The joke was.

Why is everyone so upset that Elon Musk could ruin Twitter? I honestly don't understand why people are so worried that Elon is going to ruin Twitter.

As if it's this beloved American institution.

It's not like he bought Disney World.

It's like he bought the rest of Orlando.

It's already bad.

It's a cesspool.

Who cares if you think it all it is now is slightly better than Facebook.

Like, that's all you can say about it? Well, I felt less guilty about it since I don't know.

I mean, I will give him the benefit of the doubt for a while and maybe he can clean it up.

But so far so far his steps are not indicating that that will happen.

But if he could get rid of Bots, that would be a good thing.

Bots drive the discourse, apparently.

Some people think.

Yeah, I don't know, I just think maybe you're getting sucked into the Clickbait news cycle.

Like, everything to do with this is fantastic.

Clickbait.

So whether it's positive or negative, this stuff just generates tons of publicity.

I mean, he's only been running it for like, three days.

Why do we all fired everybody? He's appointed himself king.

He's like there's a skyscraper by himself in his underwear doing God knows what, and it's still better than Face.

All you have to do is look at Mark Zuckerberg, who would win in a nude wrestley match? Zuckerberg musk.

I think Zuckerberg worked because he's studying martial arts.

But anyway, I'd like to see that.

A tan off.

They should do a tan off.

They should.

And see who burns the most.

Get outside of your basement, people.

I got mad.

I saw an ad the other day, which apparently was I researched it.

It's been around since June and I think that you've seen it before and I just didn't pay attention.

And it's a Nissan ad from the company that makes my EV that I love.

And it was the first EV mass produced, but they haven't made one until now.

OK, this is important.

Context.

They started in 2010 making the Nissan Leaf the first mass produced all electric vehicle.

And just now you can order not yet a Nissan area, which is a small SUV.

Right.

So then the guy who came up with that program, initially he's in jail and sought to be in jail.

I can't remember Carlos, so we'll see about that.

Yeah, Carlos going, I think he escaped.

I think he's fine.

So this is an ad, and I'm going to play right now with Brie Larson doing an ad that I don't care for.

In the future, we'll travel to incredible places with the help of magical technology.

But what about today? I want my magical future now I have places to go.

I can't wait for what? Tomorrow we'll bring.

But in the meantime, let's enjoy the ride, because you don't have any EVs to sell.

You more on Japanese company who are guest EVs.

So I can't see the pictures for that ad, but presumably it's an ad for combustion cars.

You don't need to see it.

You can hear the car going, Vroom.

And in the beginning there's flying cars, but that's fantasy electric future, that's going to be wonderful.

I can't wait for it.

But until then, well, the thing is, you and I and our listeners know that then is now.

Go and buy an electric car.

You can find one if you try hard enough.

And God knows people do try hard.

We retreated something from dawn the other day that a writer for, I believe, the Toronto Star or a photographer went to great lengths.

He went to James like lengths to get an electric car.

He went up to campus gasing a long way and there wasn't even a bus service.

He had to catch a ride to get to a small town to buy Chevrolet Bolt EV because they had one in stock.

So it was one of those crazy things, still a short supply.

If you only kind of want an EV, you're probably not going to get one because it's too much work.

The Financial Times says that Rishi Sunak has opened the door to a possible uturn over his decision not to attend next or this month's UN Cop 27 climate conference in Egypt.

This is growing criticism from Tory MPs about him not going.

He said he was pressing business and can't go.

And we have a story about fossil fuels paying him money as well later in the show.

So I just thought he pointed that out.

I also thought I'd throw out that Prince King Charles wanted to go and the government wouldn't let him.

It's like, wasn't a king get to do whatever he wants? Yes.

Isn't that the whole point of being a king? He says no, your first thing should be a big thing, like a trip to Canada.

Screw this.

Why? You live in Canada.

We don't want you here.

Go to the conference, make an impact.

He is going to host something, though.

I think we'll cover that later in the show, too.

And Brian, I wanted to talk about a big feature that I read and listened to in the New York Times from David Wallace Wells.

It was a feature in the New York Times Magazine on the weekend.

I don't know if you caught it or not, but it was about our climate future and how our climate future is coming into view.

We are starting to know what things will look like based on global warming and based on what we have to fight global warming.

So it says, just ahead of top 27, the climate future looks both better and worse than it did a few years ago.

Related action has made worst case scenarios much less likely, but delay has made best case outcomes impossible too.

So where are we headed? And this is a big, big article.

The audiobook highs it.

They hired an audiobook type reader to read it.

Wow.

Among energy nerds, the story is well known, but almost no one outside the insular world appreciates just how drastic and rapid the cost declines of renewable technologies have been.

That's us.

That's us and our listeners.

Yeah, we're the insular world.

We know what's going on, don't we? We should hire that guy to read our podcast.

That was great.

Since 2010, the cost of solar power and lithium battery technology has fallen by more than 85%, the cost of wind power by more than 55%.

The International Energy Agency recently predicted that solar power would become the cheapest source of electricity in history.

And a report by Carbon Tracker found that the global population lives in places where new renewable power would be cheaper than new dirty power.

The price of gas was under $3 per gallon in 2010, which means these decreases are the equivalent of seeing gas station signs today advertising prices of under fifty cents a gallon.

The markets have taken notice.

This year investment in green energy surpassed that in fossil fuels, despite the scramble for gas and the return to coal prompted by Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

After a decade of declines, supply chain issues have nudged up the cost of renewable manufacturing.

But overall, the trends are clear enough that you can read them without glasses.

Globally, there are enough solar panel factories being built to produce the necessary energy to limit warming to below two degrees.

And in the United States, planned solar farms now exceed today's total worldwide operating capacity.

Librike has taken to speculating about a renewable singularity beyond which the future of energy is utterly transformed.

So there you have a big long clip from there, and I recommend reading or listening to it on The New York Times.

And you know what I can do? I have a subscription.

So you know I'm cheap, my listeners know I'm cheap.

But I do have a subscription to The New York Times, and I tried to cancel it because I was saving up my money for other things and they said, well how about fifty cents a month? And I said okay.

So yeah, I got it down to month.

Not bad for a while.

A few years ago I subscribed to the physical copy of the Sunday New York Times.

You can actually get that delivered in our city in the middle of nowhere in Canada.

It wouldn't come until like Tuesday or Wednesday.

And I think you still can get the physical Sunday New York Times delivered to your house.

Well, that's pretty cool.

It must have been pretty big as well.

I had a magic.

Oh yeah, huge and thick.

It was super fun.

It's kind of expensive, so I only did it for a few months, but it was super fun.

Our newspaper here used to be big and then it got smaller and smaller.

Now it's like a leaflet that's just kind of a story for local news everywhere these days in the internet era.

Anyway, since I have a subscription, they let me put out ten gift links per month.

So I will put a gift link in our show notes, which as many people as possible or would like, can use it all tweeted out as well.

And if you don't go to the Times on a regular basis, I think we give you five articles a month, so won't even matter.

But anyway, I'll do that.

So let's get on with the show.

Okay, so the European Union has now officially banned combustion vehicles from the year 2035 onwards.

Wait, I have to get the oil band thing going.

Oil band? We don't get to use that every day.

Brian we should get it.

We always have that.

We got to use the oil.

Okay, so, yeah, 2035 onward, no more new combustion vehicles can be sold in the EU, which is great.

There's another oil band, but it makes me think of so I knew we were going to talk about Tony Siba later on in the show.

Prognosticator tony Siba, who has been predicting the end of fossil fuels for quite some time now, and he's got a couple of new videos out on his YouTube page, if you want to look for them.

Tony Seba but one of the stats that struck me was because of what's going to happen with transportation as a service, which is like robotaxis or even just electric cars, one of his charts on the new video, and he's had similar charts to this before, but he thinks by 2030, it's 90 or 95% of miles driven, will be electric just by 2030.

So, as I've often wondered, it's like, is 2035 even going to do anything? I mean, it may be essentially already banned by 2030 anyway, just because once electric cars exist, and especially if they're autonomous, you're just going to start driving more miles electric.

Just like in our house, we have a gas car and an electric car, while we use the electric car way more often, like once that option is available to people, you know, the use of combustion cars to get around is going to absolutely plummet by 2030.

There's an interesting stat that I saw in one of those videos that I hadn't seen before, and it was that with transportation as a service now, we should explain that maybe that's like Uber without a driver, and you might subscribe like you do to Spotify or to Netflix, you might pay $20 a month.

You might pay $100 a month at first, you might pay an annual fee, but you'll get access to that car service whenever you need it to get to the subway station, to get to work, to whatever you want to do.

And it should be roughly one 10th of the cost of owning a car.

And he pointed out that it would be less than just the price of gas to travel that distance without the car, without the payment on the car or the charging of the car.

All that is less than just the gas for the same car.

So, yeah, it's quite a disruption.

And I know that many listeners don't believe it, and it is hard to believe that it's coming, but it will come, and it's a question of when.

And you can argue about that all day.

But I have a story from China later.

On that talks about what they are doing, and they're kind of following what Tesla is doing, but with more sensors.

We'll get to that later.

It's very interesting.

And the idea is, I don't know what you pay for your car, but you pay, you have to pay.

Well, I'm not going to get into your personal life, but a lot of people go, and they would have a car payment, okay? And they would pay four, five, six, $700 a month, depending on what kind of a car you buy.

And then you put gas in it, and you buy insurance and you do maintenance and all that over the course of however you decide to own that, whether you lease it for three years or own it for ten, it is going to cost you X amount of money per month.

And that disruption is it's going to be a lot cheaper to just say, okay, forget it.

I'm in Canada.

It's -1000 out the car is going to pull up in 30 seconds or two minutes after I punch it in on my app.

And it's going to be warm.

I don't have to warm it up.

It takes me somewhere.

I'm not going to get into an accident because it's going to drive perfectly and I'm going to do work.

I'm going to surf the web and check out what Elon is doing on Twitter, because that's very important or whatever.

That's the way the future is, and it's bound to happen by 2030.

And I was reading today, people think that a lot of different companies will probably reach that threshold at the same time, and it would be a question of who can deploy it the quickest.

And Tesla may or may not have an advantage.

We'll see on how that works out.

You know what we should do, Brian, next spring, a year after we did our automation test in your car? It's easy for me to say now because I'm committing to something six months from now, we should do it again, same trip, and see how it does then.

Hopefully the construction is gone.

It's funny because the car almost if we didn't intervene, the car would have gone into a construction site with an open pit.

Well, somebody actually did that the other day in our city and went into a pit.

Yeah, it was very unpleasant for them.

They're okay, although not an autonomous not an autonomous car, but they might have been driving pretty stupidly autonomous from their mind, perhaps.

Possibly.

Texting SMR fuel is mostly coming from malaria.

I saw this on our local newspaper, speaking of our local newspaper or pamphlet, and that is because three provinces in Canada have invested millions, committed millions of federal governments, committed a lot of millions stupidly.

To small modular reactors, which don't exist except on paper for the most part.

And the thing about these that this pointed out is there's a lot of different reactors, okay? But some of them, most of them require specialized uranium that is high in content.

It says natural or uranium is about zero 7% uranium 235.

And hellyu is a lot of these reactors are way up at 20%.

So that's many times more.

And only Russia has that.

And guess what? Russia's at war with the world, essentially.

Yeah.

Well, what about us? We have uranium here in our province.

Not that kind of stuff.

No, it's no good.

It's common blue collar uranium.

It's not the good stuff.

Right.

But guess what? Our premier here in our jurisdiction said, hey, we want the reactor that uses our uranium.

So that's a different kind of reactor.

And the fact that there are all kinds of different kinds of reactors on paper using different fuels just prevents it from ever being close to cost competitive, which is what we argue on the show.

And it's just so sanctions against Russia's cut off the supply.

So that's delaying this.

And the thing about SMRs is that they're going to take a long time, and the carbon in the atmosphere filling up like water in a glass.

And we have to fight that drip as fast as possible and get it down as fast as possible.

So, Canadian uranium mines, we do mine uranium here, but we've never built an enrichment capacity because can do reactors the reactors in Canada used to build in the run on fuel that doesn't need enriching.

So that's why we don't have it.

But Russia does.

Anyway, I just want to point that out.

It's one more check against SMRs overall that would delay and possibly make them less cost competitive.

Well, and that leads us into the next story, which also involves Russia.

And this is from the Guardian and the International Energy Agency has released new statistics that say that 2025 will be the peak year for carbon emissions.

And basically what they say in the report is this is accelerated from what it was because of Russia's invasion of Ukraine that everybody has kind of accelerated in a good way.

You want to point out that this has moved up.

Yeah, that's right, because no one really wants Russia's dirty oil.

Everyone's plans to accelerate the clean energy.

It's all accelerated.

And so 2025 is looking like the peak in terms of emissions.

Every year when the climate conference comes, we get inundated with all these studies and reports and it all drops at once and we should hire more people next year.

That's all I'm saying.

It's just a lot of stuff to COVID anyway.

The UK's Advertising Standards Authority has banned two HSBC advertisements, advertisements for misleading the public about its efforts to tackle climate change.

This is a bank.

What is HSBC stand for? Well, it was the Hong kong bank or something, but I don't know, I think they changed their name.

Anyway, they're one of the major banks in the world.

And during the climate conference, cop 26 in the UK last year, they were advertising things.

I've got a picture of it here.

It says, Climate change doesn't do borders and we're great.

So they're misleading the public, is what they are accused of, about its efforts to tackle climate change, marking the first time this is the first time ever the regulator has taken action against a bank for green washing.

And banks, as you know, Brian, are very important in this, but they can't be green washing.

And basically, this was seen at a bus stop in London and Bristol and other places like that, and two ads presented as a force for climate good, while making no reference to the climate's ongoing commitment to underwriting fossil fuel projects.

That's the issue.

Yeah.

Well, that's great.

I mean, we got to hold people to account when they're just green washing.

It sucks.

It does.

And banks, people are putting pressure on banks, shareholders and customers, and corporations are putting pressure on banks to stop this.

And I hate to say it, but fossil fuels are just they're fighting a big fight against losing their power and they have to lose it, they have to go away as fast as possible.

And it's just so much of this is going on that I'm glad people are fighting back against it.

Yeah.

And of course, in the midst of all this, we sometimes talk about hydrogen, which is, of course, one of the potential fuels of the future, especially green hydrogen.

And we reported a few weeks ago on the first hydrogen trains that are now operating in Germany.

Anyway, I've come across a new website I've started to read only recently.

The website is called Hydrogen Insight and it's a news site to do with news about hydrogen, but I'm still kind of assessing it.

I'm a little confused by this website because I know a lot of the stories seem to be negative about hydrogen, really, so I'm not quite sure what's going on there, if anyone knows what Hydrogen Insight is all about.

And not to say that it's not like fake news or anything, like it's a hit piece kind of website or anything, but I just assumed that a website called Hydrogen Insight would be kind of promoting the hydrogen industry.

But anyway, the German government has kind of released a report about the cost of this and basically decided that they wouldn't do any more hydrogen powered trains because it's not cost effective.

So the different types of trains so they're saying €849,000,000 for a hydrogen version of a specific train, compared to only 506,000,000 for a battery hybrid, or only €588,000,000 for a conventional electric train.

And a lot of trains in Europe run with overhead wires electrically, and it turns out that's the cheapest way, which is, again, one of the things we've always kind of wondered about hydrogen.

It is a potential part of the solution, but is it cost effective? And it turns out, in terms of trains, it's not.

And like other new technologies that we may or may not need, it's going to take a while to become cost effective if it does, if it ever has even a chance to.

But right now what we have to do is replace bad hydrogen with green hydrogen and work on that for the next ten years and get green hydrogen to replace anywhere where we use regular hydrogen or fossil fuel generated hydrogen, such as cement plants and fertilizer production and stuff like that.

Yeah.

And presumably these costs will improve over time and the hydrogen will get cleaner over time.

But if you can just build an electric train, maybe just do that.

So Poland is looking elsewhere for nuclear plants.

This is from the German news agency DW.

After years of shelves plans to build a civil nuclear capacity in Poland from scratch, the energy crunch caused by the war in Ukraine and lower gas supplies from Russia and lack of intermediate immediate renewable substitutes have kicked the issue back up to the political agenda.

So Poland is likely to choose the United States engineering firm Westinghouse Electric to build its first nuclear power plant and provide 49% equity financing for the project.

Stateowned Korea hydro nuclear power may also be involved.

So Korea in the United States in a separate and parallel private nuclear project.

However, Brian Greenpeace has been speaking out against this and says the issue of costs piled on unrealistic expectations, on issues of financing, based on unrealistic expectations of market changes delivers, in the end, an unfinanceable project.

So they don't think that this will be financed without government paying for it.

That's kind of the issue of nuclear these days is private financing.

Private investment is not there for it, and then nobody wants to do it.

So it's incumbent upon governments to do it or you and I taxpayers.

And that's not, in our view, a good thing.

So Greenpeace goes on, but at a certain moment, it will hit a wall, and there is less than a 1% chance that nuclear power plants in Poland will be added to the grid before 2050.

Well, I mean, I'm not sure where they get that precise figure of 1%.

It's an opinion, but still.

You know what? It bothers me, though, if it was private companies doing it, that's one thing.

But it's always going to be governments.

I mean, here in Canada, these SMRs that may or may not from the fossil fuel conservative governments that are driven by hanging on to fossil fuels with their buddies are going to waste all of our money and bankrupt us if we let them keep doing this.

Anyway, aside for the tweet of the week.

So Tony Seba, as you mentioned, is active.

They've wakened him up and dusted him off.

He is sort of a guru to us.

He's that guy who has been doing it for ten years, twelve years even, and it's ridiculous.

His targets are still lining up, his predictions are still there.

And it's not hugely innovative stuff he's doing.

It's a cost curve.

If a new technology comes and you make enough of it, the cost of it goes down and the adoption of it goes up.

Yeah.

And I think the best statistic from all of his presentations, and he repeated this again in the ones that he just released on YouTube, is the transition from using the horse to using the car in North America in the early 20th century.

And the bulk of it, from something like 10% penetration to 80% penetration, happened in only ten years.

And that's in spite of the fact of there being basically no roads and no gas stations.

And you know what? They asked people? What do you want? Do you want a car? They said, no, I want a faster horse.

They didn't realize that a car was not only a faster horse.

It wasn't a one to one comparison.

It kept you dry and safe and warm, and it didn't poop on you and things like that.

Well, I had an AMC Gramline that did that, but that's another story.

So there's a thing in his presentation where he showed newspaper highlines headlines advocating for eating horse meat after the transition started because there was too many horses, which is exactly what happened.

Yeah, there was all these horses that we no longer needed because everyone was driving cars and literally people ate.

Oh, sounds stringy to me.

I apologize for the horses up there.

I know we have a few listing.

So Victor wrote to Tony on Tony Seba on Twitter.

He says, Will smaller economies in Far East or Africa benefit more with this phase of the transfer information to solar? And Tony says, absolutely.

When we convert to solar power and green the grid in Africa, they're basically leapfrogging from nothing right, to solar.

They don't have to build a bunch of power lines or a grid.

They're just going to have localized solar wind and battery and a superpower system without having to build an outdated grid.

And because they're in Africa and close to the equator, they're going to have the cheapest the more sun you have, the more lower the cost of the solar per unit of electricity.

So they'll have the cheapest electricity in the world in Africa, and with that, you can get investment.

You can get industry investment.

Where do you want to go where the cheapest electricity is if you're using electricity for your company or corporation or factory or whatever.

So just like many countries leaf frog to a cell phone infrastructure without having to build a landline telephony system.

So, yeah, there's a lot of places in Africa that don't have landlines.

They never did.

And they have cell phones now and they didn't need them and it was good to just leave frogs.

And he says also Sunnier countries will have much lower cost of energy and that does attract and improve the quality of life and solve many issues such as transportation, food and water.

So all that and desalination and the treatment of water will help those countries, even if they're poor and don't have access to a lot of water.

Hey everyone, we like to hear from you.

We like to hear from you all the time.

Contact us at our Gmail address cleanenergy [email protected].

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That means it's time for the lightning round.

Brian a fastpaced look of the week in clean energy and climate news.

Beyond meat is getting into plant based steak.

What do you think? You could eat that? Well, I mean, you know, I'll try it.

Sure.

The new product, meant to mimic an expensive cut of beef, arrives in over 50 Kroger and Walmart locations across the United States soon and is also available at some Elderson's locations as well as other retailers.

Each ten ounce package contains seared plantbased steak tips in bitesized pieces and is priced at 799.

And the product is made of ingredients including fava beans and wheat gluten.

So if you've got a gluten problem, look elsewhere for your fake beef fake steaks.

I'm curious.

You are fake steak curious.

Officially.

Get that printed on the Tshirt someone some of the models emphasized in GM's EVs for Everyone ad campaign, which I keep seeing bryan everywhere.

Like the blazer.

EV.

The Equinox EV might not be widely available as soon as anticipated.

Even though they're advertising the hell out of them, they're pushing that back six months.

So already we have a delay and I'm not happy about that.

Yeah, it sounds like battery supply issues.

Brazil's election is a major victory in the fight against climate change, according to many under Bolasnaro Yup.

I don't even like saying his name.

It's like saying Satan.

Deforestation of the Amazon sword to a 15 year high, with scientists warning that the world's largest rainforest was nearing a tipping point beyond which there would be irreversible consequences to the entire planet.

So this is good.

It was a tight election.

He has not conceded yet.

Do you think you'll concede? Yeah, it doesn't sound good.

We'll see how that plays out as the future of other elections in 2024 happen.

GMC Hummer EVs are sold out for two years or more.

By the time you get one, they'll be old news.

It will be like oh that old thing? I mean, that's a long time.

It's true.

There's a certain cool factor for these things and cool factor doesn't last forever.

It's time for a cesfest fact a 2019 study found that oceans had sucked up 90% of the heat gained by the planet between 1971 and 2010.

Another found that has absorbed 20 sixtillion joules of heat in 2020.

And that is equivalent to two Hiroshima bombs per second.

That doesn't sound good.

It does not sound good.

Carbon tracker donors with fossil fuel links helped fund Rishi tunax race for PM.

Yay for them.

Brian.

Yeah.

So this is a new UK Prime Minister, super rich guy, as you pointed out last week.

And yeah, I mean, lots of politicians are funded by fossil fuels, so we probably shouldn't be too surprised.

Why didn't he fund his own damn thing so he's not beholden to anybody? You know, if you're that exactly King Charles to host a reception ahead of cop 27 despite not going himself because the government won't allow him.

It will bring together 200 international business leaders, decision makers and NGOs.

And Brian, we still have not been invited.

And I keep refreshing the inbox, but nothing.

I can't believe it.

From utility dive, texas solar and wind resources saved consumers nearly $28 billion over the last twelve years.

That means that the electricity consumed by Texans was $28 billion cheaper over twelve years because of renewables being in the grid.

And that is growing rapidly.

Yeah, Texas has more renewables, I think, than most people realize.

Clean technica Mercedes is going all in on electric in general.

The average lifespan for an automotive model is seven years.

A Mercedes EClass is due for an update next year.

But Brian, it's going to be its last.

Mercedes plans to put out only battery electric new vehicles on the road by 2030 and will introduce only new electric platforms.

Of course, you and I know that's too late.

You should cancel everything now.

But it is a signal to the investment world and to the world.

The Ram all electric pickup truck is going to debut at this year's Consumer Electronics Show.

I guess that's everyone except for Toyota, Brian, that's all the pickup trucks now are going electric.

And Toyota will be bankrupt by the time they make that announcement from BBC News.

Switching to renewable energy could save trillions, an Oxford University study says.

Our central conclusion is that we should go full speed ahead with the green transition because it's going to save us money.

And there's lots of studies on that coming out now and, you know, it's only going to get cheaper, so we're going to save even more money as we go along with the cost.

Prices are dropping rapidly.

Audio is cutting production of its flagship AA luxury sedan.

That's his main car.

They're cutting production because everyone's buying the electric Audi Etron battery electric vehicle, so they're increasing production of that one electric.

Gping Motors has announced its latest EV has received a permit for autonomous driving tests on public roads.

According to Chinese automaker, the G Nine is the first unmodified massproduced commercial vehicle to qualify for such tests.

So this is like Waymo doing tests in San Francisco and La.

But they've got a million dollars worth of equipment rotating and radar and things on the roof, and you can see them from a mile away coming.

Whereas the Japanese Motors G Nine is like a Tesla, an SUV for a small SUV.

It's got all the sensors built in, and yet they've got permission to do these robotaxi testing in streets of China, which I'm told are very hard to drive in at times.

And I saw a test kind of like an FSD autopilot version, did pretty well.

There were arguments in the comments about whether it was better or equal to Tesla, but it was kind of doing the same thing.

But they do have more sensors than Tesla does.

Yeah, that's exciting.

That is our show for this week.

We'd like to hear from you once again.

I'm going to throw my email address out.

There it is.

Clean energy [email protected].

Drop everything.

Write us a note.

Now we'd like to hear from you and everywhere else.

Don't forget to check out our YouTube channel because that's going strong.

If you're new to So, remember to subscribe on your podcast app to get new episodes delivered every week.

And we leave you this week with the last paragraph of the New York Times Magazine article Beyond Catastrophe with a quote from renowned Canadian climate scientist Catherine Hage on the future.

We've come a long way and we've still got a long way to go, says Haijo, the Canadian scientist, comparing the world's progress to a long hike.

We're halfway there.

Look at the great view behind you.

We actually made it up halfway and it was a hard slog.

So take a breather.

Pat yourself on the back, but then look up.

That's where we have to go.

So let's keep on going.

I look forward to talking to you next week.

you.

Toyota may finally be waking up to Electric Car Reality. New U.K. PM Sunak gets a 3 out of 5 on climate. Our city gets an elecric truck and loves the savings. Brian nearly dies in his Tesla Model 3 in a snowstorm but he thinks it should have been called a blizzard. A wind turbine gets hit by lighting off the coast of Ireland and blows up. We have the exclusive footage! 

The Fully Charged Live show is coming to Australia and we've yet to be invited. 

Canada will need 10x more wind and solar energy, supported by energy storage, to reach net-zero GHG emissions by 2050. That seems surprisingly small. 

Grid adaptation for EV adoption in Calgary, Canada. James is sceptical of the threat to grids by EVs.

Ola Air 1 electric scooter is unveiled at a low price for India.

Biggest component of the fossil fuel system is energy loss.

Thanks for listening to our show! Consider rating The Clean Energy Show on iTunes, Spotify or wherever you listen to our show.

Follow us on TikTok! Check out our YouTube Channel!

Follow us on Twitter!

Your hosts: James Whittingham https://twitter.com/jewhittingham Brian Stockton: https://twitter.com/brianstockton

Email us at [email protected]

Leave us an online voicemail at http://speakpipe.com/cleanenergyshow

Tell your friends about us on social media!

Transcript

Hello, and welcome to episode 136 of the Clean Energy Show.

I'm Brian Stockton.

I'm James Whittingham.

This week, Toyota may finally be waking up to electric car reality.

Turns out they just slept through their alarm, which wet off five years ago.

Fully charged live show is coming to Australia.

James and I are still waiting for our invite to the Canadian show, but we would love to go to Australia and hang out with our two listeners there.

Liz Truss, the UK's solar hating Prime Minister, has resigned.

The new PM is Rishi Sunak, who I think is ahead of Lettuce.

I don't know, I just wasn't really paying attention.

All that is so much more on this edition of the Clean Energy Show.

I was going to list all the other things that we had to talk about this week.

I apologize to Australia again for my Southern hemisphere ignorance.

Our city buys an electric truck and we hear why they think it's a good idea.

And, yeah, all kinds of wonderful things that we're going to have to speed through, because I got a big fat show for you this week.

I have a big fat story for you this week.

I was on a lovely electric car road trip to Saskatoon, our city to the north, on the way home, decided to stop in Moosejaw, which, as we've said before, is a real place.

Yes.

And, man, I got caught in the worst blizzard I have ever been in in my entire life.

Really? Yeah, because I'm only 48 minutes away from there.

I don't understand.

Why was it so bad? Yeah, well, this was a weird spring storm.

Oh, sorry, fall storm.

We've had really warm weather here, like it was plus 20 Celsius just a few days ago.

And they had some warnings out.

They called it a snowfall warning, but I have a bone to pick with Environment Canada, because it really should have been a blizzard warning.

They have criteria for blizzard warnings, Brian.

It has to be windy and zero visibility in a certain temperature, depending on the region.

It actually varies by region.

This is our Canadian weather service.

That's right.

And I think the one thing we may not have had was temperature, because it was only around zero, but we had all the other things.

So we wanted to stop in Moose Jaw on the way home.

Pictures.

What? It was for work.

My partner had a bit of work to do and it involved taking pictures in Moose Jaw.

So, yeah, the snow starts to fall and we start driving in Moosejaw.

In about 30 minutes out of Moosejaw, the snow was just getting super heavy and thick and cars were going in the ditch.

This is a fairly small highway, just like a twolane highway.

And, yes, we had to slow down to, like, 40 just about lost control of the car.

At one point it started to slide around.

I managed to regain control, but it was a serious white knuckle drive those last 20 km into Moose Jaw.

We were worried we weren't going to make it.

There were cars in the ditch, people slept overnight.

Man, that could have been used.

Exactly how much of a charge did you have at that point? I have to ask.

We rolled into Moose Jaw with a 20% charge, which is not great.

That's not great for spending the night.

Well, I don't understand why you thought that was a good idea.

Because I'm going to flash back to Friday night in the weather forecast here.

Do know that there is a special weather statement in place through much of southern and eastern Saskatchewan and there will be major impacts along with this Natasha, including possibly some treacherous conditions on the road.

So people should prepare for that and maybe some power outages.

So it'd be good to have an emergency kit as well.

I'll full update coming up a little bit later.

It's almost like they saw it coming.

I heard that same report and they said, yeah, some snow and it probably won't stay around.

It'll probably melt.

I don't know.

I don't think we were sufficiently warned.

What do they have to do? Come at you with a Taser? A blizzard warning.

It should have been a blizzard.

Oh, you stupid old man.

A blizzard warning is there for a reason.

It means it's a blizzard.

It means the highways are not going to be possible.

It could be a light freezing rain and a beautiful day.

The sun could be shining.

It could be just treacherous.

A blizzard warning is a blizzard warning.

It was a blizzard.

It was definitely the worst snow storm, whatever you want to call it, the worst one I've ever driven through.

And we just barely made it.

And then we had to stay two nights.

We had to stay two nights in Mousse.

That's absurd because the road was just not did you get your picture? Did you take it at least? No, we did not.

Oh my God.

Yeah, we'll have to go back.

But yeah, we could have maybe driven back on the second day.

Only stayed one night, but the road was still moose Jaw was the epicenter for this storm that it got around a foot of snow in Moussehow.

Yeah, but we got to stay at the lovely Grant Hall Hotel in Moosejaw, which is this historic hotel on Main Street.

And we had power the whole time.

But on the other side of Main Street, no power for about 8 hours.

Half the town was without power, but we were relaxing comfortably in the Grand Hall hotels.

Quite lovely.

All right.

I have here the blizzard threshold criteria for Canada.

The national.

Except for north of the tree line.

Which is while it varies in various parts.

I guess where suddenly it becomes forced and it's not prairie and whatnot when winds of 40.

That's a calm day around here or greater are expected to cause widespread reductions in visibility to 400 meters or less due to blowing snow or blowing snow in combination with falling snow for at least 4 hours.

You're right, I think it should have been a blizzard if that's all it is.

More information on how renewable use less land that fossil fuels and aren't destroyed permanently in the process. Nikola Motors CEO found guilty of 3 of 4 charges. Some thing EV charging at night won't always be cheap. Greece runs on 100% renewables for five hours. VW has hired Ewan McGregor to help them sell EVs.

Brian expolores a graphic novel that illustrates life in the Canadian Oil Sands. “A masterpiece, a heartbreak, a nightlight shining in the dark.”—Patricia Lockwood Here's a link! 

UK PM Truss not doing well after I called her dumb last week for not wanting to see solar panels on farmland. Scrapped her whole economic reform plan.

Tesla might remove downtown Toronto geofence with FSD Beta 10.69.3.

Kia EV6 Wholesale GLOBAL Shipments In September 2022 Amounted To 6,109. Worse than last year. What's up with Kia and EVs? They make great cars, advertise the hell out of them but never make enough.

Carbon Capture Projects Hit Record but still only 1% of global carbon emissions when built.

Tweet of the Week responds to criticism of climate protesters in recent days.

Offshore Construction Starts on Japan’s First Floating Wind Farm.

JinkoSolar achieves 26.1% efficiency in panels.

Rewewable energy workforce as more female representation than fossil fuels.

Researchers develop a 10 minute EV charging method by adding a thin strip of nickel to batteries for cooling.

Thanks for listening to our show! Consider rating The Clean Energy Show on iTunes, Spotify or wherever you listen to our show.

Follow us on TikTok! Check out our YouTube Channel!

Follow us on Twitter!

Your hosts: James Whittingham https://twitter.com/jewhittingham Brian Stockton: https://twitter.com/brianstockton

Email us at [email protected]

Leave us an online voicemail at http://speakpipe.com/cleanenergyshow

Transcript

Hello, and welcome to episode 135 of the Clean Energy Show.

I'm Brian Stockton.

I'm James Woodingham.

This week, some facts to compare fossil fuel and land use with renewables.

Your racist cycle is not going to be happy.

The founder and former CEO of Nicola Motors has been found guilty of fraud.

Turns out rolling a truck down a hill and pretending it works can get you in trouble.

It may get more expensive to charge an EV overnight.

And it has nothing to do with the fact that I now get up to pee six times a night.

The country of Greece runs on 100% renewable energy.

For the first time, the Olympic torch is lit by the sun.

So why not all the lights in the country, too? Oh, that is so much more on this edition of The Clean Energy Show.

Well, welcome to the podcast, everyone.

Also this week, VW has hired you and a Gregor to help them sell EVs.

Brian has his first ever book report.

Looking forward to that.

And a corporation based where Brian and I live is betting big on nuclear revival thanks to the war in Ukraine and other factors.

You sound funny this week, Brian.

Are you under the weather? Yeah, I got a cold.

How do you know? I thought colds were eradicated.

Yeah, this is my second cold since the start of the pandemic.

Are you looking telephone poles? What's going on here? Yeah, well, we took a plane trip, as you know, last weekend, to Whistler.

I knew you would get diseased.

Yeah, I mean, I was kind of worried we'd get coveted.

Didn't get coveted, but we caught a cold.

My partner got it first.

I was a few days behind.

I thought I may have escaped it, but it's starting kind of yesterday and my head is slowly filling up with fluid.

It's rather unpleasant.

Oh, no.

You remember before COVID when you used to fly? No.

It always seemed like I would always get a cold whenever I flew somewhere.

I don't know.

I mean, everybody trapped on an airplane like that and not wearing that.

They say that air is recirculated and filtered, but I don't think it's just too close to quarters.

Do you put on an air in your face? Because I'm always a bit warm on planes.

Like I make sure I get the air going on my face.

Do you do that? Yes.

And we discussed that as we got on the plane because I said to my partner, well, wait a minute.

Is this like, COVID filled air that I'm putting in my face or is this fresh, clean air? And it has just gone through the filter.

So presumably that is the fresh, clean air.

It always smells fresher to me.

It always smells like it's mixed like a car vent, like it's mixed in with outdoor air.

I don't know that it is.

It'd be nice if it was, but there's not enough oxygen up there at 35 0ft to do that mixed in with new plain smelling.

I think I would just wear the oxygen mask.

Just drop the oxygen mask and put that on for the trip.

Well, that would be fantastic.

They should just let us have those.

It should be enhanced air with nice, relaxing demerol vaporized or something that just puts you at ease and wake up wherever you're going.

Guess what? The pipeline plane flew over the other day.

I walked up my front door and there it was looking at me.

Well, so it's mac, which is a relief.

Perhaps why I haven't noticed it is I noticed because I went to my app and it's fine a few hundred feet higher than it was before.

It's fine at 200ft before.

Yeah.

Now it's up to 500ft.

I don't know if that has anything to do with the crash that was fatal.

Yeah.

To recap, James has a pipeline behind his house and there's a plane that inspects it pretty much every day.

But, yeah, there was a crash of one of these planes not that long ago and so it disappeared for a while.

And you say now that it's back, it's actually flying higher? Yeah.

I mean, it could be the same plane.

I don't know that it's the one that crashed or if they were grounded or if they re looked at how they did these things, but it seemed like it was gone for a few weeks because I noticed it.

It's hard to say how often it came.

It seemed to vary, but it was multiple times a week, I would say, and I do live in a city, it doesn't inspect it that often outside the city? Just inside the city.

It has frequent flights and that goes right back to the airport 10 minutes later.

Well, you always hear about these pipelines and I don't know, sometimes they're leaking for probably hours or even days before anybody notices.

Well, let's get to some updates to some of the stories that we've talked about over the past.

There's a few.

This week we were talking about PM Trust.

Yeah.

The new UK prime Minister.

And I called her dumb dumb dumb last week.

Yeah, she's really dumb.

And that's because she doesn't like the site of solar panels on farms and she was going to kibash solar everywhere.

How dumb can you be? I ask.

And, well, turns out the country is in agreement.

Not for that reason, but mostly for other reasons.

In fact, how is this Trust doing? 83% say badly, 15% say, well, should she resign? 55% say yes, and I'm in that 55%.

Although who knows who they're going to get in their place.

But come on.

There's so much data for renewables being a good thing in this energy crisis, like saving billions over the summer, reducing the amount of Russian gas imports by 13% from the growth of it.

It's just crazy.

I mean, there's all kinds of numbers you can look at.

We talked about Tesla not having their full selfdriving beta software, which you use, being applicable in downtown Toronto.

You mentioned that before, but now it sounds like it will be.

Yeah, this is a while ago.

So Toronto has streetcars, one of the few, maybe only city in Canada that has streetcars.

Yeah.

The full self driving software thus far has not known how to deal with streetcars.

And so, just to be safe, Tesla has basically geofenced the software.

So anywhere downtown Toronto, where there is streetcars, you can't use full selfdriving beta until they figure out how to program in streetcars.

And yeah, apparently they're getting close because rumors that the geofence will be removed soon.

Yeah.

I was watching one of these informational videos on YouTube about how Toronto is a car city.

And these streetcars everywhere, these have them in Mount Pleasant, where my friend Dan lives up north and all kinds of different places, and they had a vote to get whether they keep them or not.

Everybody resoundingly wanted them.

So what they do, they get rid of them.

They wanted to make room for more cars.

They built the subway to make room for more cars.

That's what I was thinking.

Was it's too bad, because out here in the west, canada is kind of sparsely populated, and our cities are kind of spread out.

But in the central or eastern part of Canada, like Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, that's the densest population that we have in Canada.

So Toronto, particularly, there's several million people that live in Toronto, a lot of them in the concentrated in the downtown core.

So public transit is a no brainer.

Subways and streetcars are a no brainer, and, you know, they've done fairly well at that.

But yes, surprisingly, it is still kind of a car city.

But I have been watching a YouTube channel, can't think of the name of it right now, but there is a guy, a transit nerd in Toronto, who's reporting on all of the transit projects.

So things actually do look bright.

I think things are improving.

There are subway expansions planned and streetcar light rail expansions planned.

They have lots of stuff in the works.

And they've added a lot of bike lanes, too.

That's really a positive sign.

Definitely.

You and I lived there ten or 15 years ago, and there wasn't that many bike lanes 20 years ago.

I guess more than 20 years ago for me.

Jesus.

Oh, my God.

Wow.

Yeah.

I mean, it was still kind of fun to bike in Toronto.

I remember you and I biked there's a nice path down by the waterfront.

You and I bike down and watch the fireworks one night.

That was a lot of fun.

The only thing is that it borders the Dawn Valley Parkway, which is a freeway, and you get all the exhaust and all the pollution.

Yeah.

As a prairie boy, it was very disconcerting to see the distant trees obscured by smog, which just sort of gathered in the valley like that and Stunky.

There's a smell to it always.

But a lot of people die.

Cyclists die in Toronto, so it's not a safe place.

But I remember cycling downtown.

I lived adjacent to downtown, and East York used to take a half hour to get to the heart of downtown by bike, which was more enjoyable in the summertime than taking the subway and waiting and getting stuff like Sardines somewhere and whole noise of everything.

But, yeah, bike lanes are tough in cities like that.

But it's also got the busiest freeway in North America, too.

The 401 is national.

Yeah, massive, massive freeway.

Dozens of lanes.

It seems like the Kia EV six.

Now, I was shocked to learn that that came out almost 18 months ago now, on the spring of 21.

I thought it was in the last three quarters of a year for some reason.

Maybe it's because I heard about it and I didn't pay much attention to it because it was a similar vehicle to the Onik Five.

Although it's not a direct comparison, necessarily, in aesthetics and appeal.

They sold only 6100 units of that worldwide in September.

And if that isn't shocking enough, that's actually down from the year before.

Down? Yeah.

Well, I assume it's just because it's production, not sales.

I mean, I'm sure they can sell everyone that they make.

They just need to make more of them.

Yeah, they're not but that's a major problem.

Brian, that gets my trombone of the Week.

Yes, thank you for the emphasis.

I'm very disgusted by this.

So the narrow EVs sold 4500.

The sole EVs outside of this is outside of South Korea.

The sole EV sold a whopping.

Are you sitting down? Yes, you are.

The Sole EV.

Tell me something.

You can't sit there and your pompous Kia asked and tell me that they're not Asianizing EVs, that they're not taking the same sort of ideas Japan and saying, we don't believe in them because they're making great avs and pisses me off so bad.

I watched a football game and NFL game, and there was nothing but EV ads, including the Onik Five.

Great ad, great car.

Can I buy it? Nope, you can't buy it.

Why are you advertising it? There's lots of other stories like that, too.

Why are they selling them? Why are they pretending that they can sell them? Are they trying to get people into the dealership to sell combustion engines? I mean, what's going on? Are they just trying to look like they're advanced or do they just not give a crap? And I think they're probably trying to stop people from going to EVs that are available.

So if you're a loyal Kia or Hyundai owner, then you can think to yourself, okay, well, there's Kias on the horizon.

There's some reviews out lately on the web of the Ionic Six, which is the upcoming Hyundai.

But it's not coming till next year.

But they've let out some sort of review models and there's lots of YouTube reviews and yeah, it looks like a great car, but again, it's not going to be available for at least a year.

It's premature to even do that.

I'm going to forget about it by the time I could actually order one.

I mean, it's going to be ancient history.

But it also looks like a great car.

Well, yeah, of course it is.

That's the frustrating part.

If they weren't great cars, it wouldn't be so frustrating.

Wouldn't it? But they're making great cars.

They seem to know what they're doing.

But have they secured the batteries? Do they want to make them? Doesn't seem that way.

Yeah.

Well, we have an update coming up later on from VW that addresses some some of these issues.

And when you can buy them, you certainly can't buy them where Brian and I live because we're not in a Zev zero emission vehicle jurisdiction or anything like that, and we're not in Europe, so that kind of sucks.

Yeah.

You have one here.

Greece was powered by renewables.

Yeah, I just always like good news stories like this.

It's going to become more prevalent.

So at a certain point, we will have to stop reporting on these because it's just too common an event.

But yeah.

Greece, for around 5 hours ran on 100% renewables on October 7.

Yeah, I just love stories like that because it's a sign of things to come.

It shows us that this stuff is working.

I assume the people who are against clean energy take it the opposite way, like, well, it only ran for 5 hours.

That doesn't count.

We get the 2050 people.

I tell you, when our jurisdiction runs on 100% renewables for 10 seconds.

I'll soil my dance on the podcast.

No, that'll be a day for celebration.

We'll have some championships.

Tell you what, dig up my corpse and put a birthday cake on it when that happens because it's going to be something from Bloomberg.

Carbon capture projects hit a record.

So the pipeline of carbon capture projects rises to 153.

Pardon me, 30 are operational right now, including one in our jurisdiction, which is at a coal plant, one of the first in the world.

And it's not performing up the specs at all.

Planned projects that are planned, remember, not existing, but planned, would mitigate less than 1% of CO2 emissions.

And the problem, in addition to just being 100%, is that it continues investments in fossil fuels.

It's another way of prolonging fossil fuels, which, as anyone who listens to the show on a regular basis knows, makes James angry.

James doesn't want to be angry.

Takes days off my life.

Brian well, as I've said before, I was kind of in favor of this because we are a coal burning place where we live.

And they started talking about this 2025 years ago, and back then, it's like, oh, that kind of makes sense because we just didn't know enough back then.

It was exciting.

I was excited.

It was very exciting at the time.

But also, bureaucracies are lumbering and slow, so it took them forever to get it off the ground.

And now that these things are running, we know that they're just too expensive and they don't produce the results.

So let's just buy solar panels with the money instead.

I remember when they opened it, they invited dignitaries from around the world into a tent.

But it has a weird vibe.

It's like there was no one commenting on it, no one's had anything to say.

And they were hoping to export the technology.

Not only did they invest billions of dollars, but they wanted to export that technology, which I'm sure they've learned a couple of things that they can export and maybe patent.

But critics argue that it's expensive, ineffective technology that just prolongs the life of fossil fuels, which I'm sure our local governments here would love to do.

Yeah.

And I guess there was a possibility that they could take what they learned and refine the technology and make it cheaper and make it more viable, but so far, that has not been the case.

Well, I'm excited, Brian, because it's time for a brand new segment on the show.

the first time you've sang on a sink and probably the last.

Hey, I harmonize with myself.

Yeah, I watched my friend Who Can Sing do that for video projects that I used to work on.

So I tried it and it kind of worked.

But, you know, next time you got multiple tracks there if you want to let's play that again.

Yeah, because we may never hear it again.

So yeah, I have to play it twice.

Well, it seems unlikely.

Yeah.

It's not often that it's going to be appropriate to talk about a book.

I mean, how many can you read? You're just retired.

Yeah, and I certainly don't typically read books about climate or clean energy or climate change or whatever, but this one is an exception because it's a picture book, which barely even counts as a book.

It's a graphic novel, really.

It's a graphic memoir.

So this is a book called Ducks my memoir.

Two Years in the Oil Sands.

Yeah.

Ducks.

Two years in the oil sands.

And it's by Kate Beaton, and it is published by my favorite publisher, which is Drawn in Quarterly.

They publish graphic novels of all different kinds.

That's a good name for a publishing company that publishes Drawn In Quarterly.

They're the best.

But yeah, this book is really great.

So Kate Beaton is an artist from Cape Breton, Nova Scotia.

From here in Canada.

The east coast of Canada.

And she graduated from university with a history degree around 15 years ago or so.

And graduated with a mountain of student debt.

And so she was kind of looking at the jobs that were available to her with a history degree, like working in museums and stuff, and she was like, oh my God, I'm going to be 90 years old by the time I pay off my student debt.

So she like a lot of people from Cape Breton, from Newfoundland, from the east coast of Canada, took a job in the oil sands of Canada, which is here in Alberta, next door to us in Alberta.

This is kind of based around the city of Fort McMurray, kind of northern Alberta.

That's the kind of base for many of these oil sands operations, which are, as we discussed before, the dirtiest oil on the planet comes from there.

The amount of energy you have to expend to extract this oil because it's all mucked up with sand and everything.

So it's a very, you know, carbon intensive, energy intensive way to get oil out of the ground.

But, you know, with the price of oil, it's been a lucrative place for many years.

So, yeah, she spent two years in the oil sands, paid off her student debt, which is the happiest part of the book, like she did completely after two years.

Wow.

Yeah, you make a lot of money.

You're often provided housing.

Sometimes you live in the town of Fort McMurray, which is a fairly big town, so that's kind of civilized.

But quite often you work on site or you work in these work camps where the oil rigs are and all this stuff.

So it's kind of isolated work, and you'll often work like twelve days on and have two days off, that kind of thing.

And yeah, with your housing kind of paid for, you can just bank a lot of money or spend it on cocaine, which is apparently a thing that also happens a lot.

I never said that again.

Yeah, it's a really beautiful book.

There are many things about it that are heartbreaking, but yeah, it's just awesome.

Highly recommended.

It's a real honest portrait of what goes on in the oil sands.

So there's sad parts about it, but also funny parts and fun parts, and there's a real humanity to it.

Highly recommend.

Well, send me a link and I'll put it in the show notes for Gosh.

Thanks.

So check your show notes, people.

I assume that there will be a link close to the top of the notes there.

Okay.

Because my son's got a buddy who was in psychology at our local university.

He switched over to history and I just, my God, that's worse than film.

You and I did, I felt chills come over me.

It was kind of bad, like, you poor bastard.

Psychology.

We need lots of people in psychology more than ever.

History, not so much.

Yeah.

And the author, Kate Bean, she's most known for a book and a website called heart of Vagrant, which is history based.

She sort of did these humorous cartoons about history, which she knows a lot about because she has a history degree.

But if you've ever wondered what life is like in the oil sands, this is probably your best chance to find out what that's like.

Well, there's a new Stanford University study that Forbes had a piece about.

It about EV charging at night may not stay cheap through the EV adoption curve.

Now, the thinking is that with everybody having EVs, they're all going to charge at night.

So the power, they're not going to have excess power at night.

They're going to have enough or they're going to have to keep up even.

I don't know how much you drive, but I might charge like an hour or two a day.

You know, a lot of things that I'll just charge an hour or two.

I'm not talking to people with long commutes or buying EVs to save money, and that's obviously a different story.

And highway travel and vacations.

But typically, I mean, statistically people travel 2030, 40 miles a day, and that's an hour or two of charging, essentially.

And, you know, we come home and we turn on our clothes dryers and our ovens every night and the grid doesn't go down.

So we've gained a lot of efficiencies in those things too, right? Yeah, I guess the only issue would be that they're used to having very low usage overnight.

So a lot of the systems within the grid are planned for that.

But they should be able to tweak those plans and make more power available overnight.

Well, here's what they said.

They said that the researchers estimate the impact of rising EV ownership in the western United States could boost power demand by as much as 25% by 2035.

That's the year when California has banned the sale of new gasoline vehicles.

Doesn't mean they're all going to be EVs by then, of course.

It just means that you can't go out and buy one.

So charging after eleven will get more expensive, they figure, and push utility operators to boost their power generation.

They say that more EV charging should be done during midday hours, ideally at work or public stations.

Now this is when maybe this is not necessarily every day, right, but when the solar.

There's days when they have access.

Solar.

It's already happening in California.

We talked about it.

Lots of news stories talk about it.

So when wind and solar power suppliers are at their peak, sometimes producing more energy than the grid can even handle.

So California is set to have 5 million EVs by 2030.

That's about 30% market share level.

It's coming.

And at that point, the electrical grid will experience significant stress, they think, according to that, unless there's increased capacity or behavioral changes.

But this gets me to thinking, Brian, that we're going to just need a smarter grid, we're going to have to start thinking and being incentivized to charge when there is excess solar, when there is, because if I had a normal EV that you could buy for 4500 range, I would probably charge it once a week in the summertime, right? I mean, I wouldn't charge it very often.

Well, maybe I wait until I get a note on my app saying power is free for the next 2 hours.

So I take up my other app and my EV starts charging.

Maybe something like that, maybe that's a little too cute and easy, maybe, but we're going to have to maybe in order to accommodate renewables start because we're always doing it.

They're already experiments, like you had a story a week or two ago about government's utility controlling thermostats as an experiment, right.

So when they have access, when they don't have enough power, they adjust your thermostat a little bit and they did that voluntarily in California.

So I know by having electric vehicles capable of charging to the grid, discharging to the grid, that's another thing, right.

I mean, that would maybe even offset a lot of the problems when you have those little peaks because these that are charged might be able to backfire and if they make it worth your while financially and I think they would, that could help flatten the curve.

Yeah, downsides to having all those EVs on the grid, but also potential upsides.

Yeah.

And then there's school buses on city buses and things like that that will be sitting around and able to pick up because a lot of times you build a grid for the worst case scenario.

Now if you got a million EVs out there that can cover that, worst case, 10 minutes or something like that, then it really changes the game.

So, yeah, I'm just starting to think like that.

The average mileage per day, by the way, is 20 miles in the UK, 37 miles in the United States, and EVs won't be charging more than once or twice every week or two.

So looking forward to that.

Plus your battery doesn't get messed with as much if you're not charged as much.

Certainly a lot more charging for us in the winter when it's deadly cold.

So Nikola is back in the news now.

We used to talk about Nicola all the time when we started our podcast two and a half years ago.

Anyway, I mean, it was an exciting potential good thing.

It was the rivian of, let's say long distance semi trucks.

But no.

Yeah, so this has been going through the courts for quite a while, but Trevor Milton was the founder of Nikola Motors and one of the founders and was the CEO.

And yeah, he's now guilty of fraud, three of four counts, guilty on three or four counts, basically guilty of pumping the stock.

So Nicola was working on like a hydrogen semitruck and this is the most fun story is that they just rolled it down a hill and shot video of it and sort of tricked everyone into believing that they had a working prototype, which they did not.

And then at other things, like they would show these trucks and vehicles at shows, and people with an eagle eye would spot that there would hey, wait, this is plugged into an electrical cord underneath there.

So they were just fudging the truth.

But when you're a publicly traded company, you're not really allowed to fudge the truth like that, and it ends up with fraud charges and guilty.

But Nicola still exists.

This is a real company.

They still have hundreds or perhaps even thousands of employees working on, I think, less hydrogen and more battery electric now, but they are do you think they'll try to dig themselves out of this hole? You think they'll come up with an electric pickup truck anytime soon? I'm not picking up truck with a truck long distance.

Yeah, I think there's a good chance.

Like, even when all this controversy was happening, I sort of thought to myself, well, wait a minute, I mean, there's still a giant headquarters here and there's still hundreds of people working there.

They have to be working on something.

It's not like they're all just sitting around drinking coffee all day.

I still hope for the best for Nikola, because the more players we have in this space, the better.

Yeah, especially with long distance trucking.

But they were hoping to have hydrogen powered trucks and build out their own hydrogen network of not just seem like a daunting prospect financially and logistically, and they would get an awful lot of people backing them in order to do that because it's tough.

Just like Tesla, they could start with pre prescribed routes between bottlers and distribution centers and stuff like that.

Grocery stores and distribution centers that are unknown length and maybe not even too long, but it's just even had places that were going to fix them on the road, too.

We even had a series of shops that were ready to fix them.

Yeah, and also at the time, like, it really wasn't clear that even though this is just a few years ago, that battery electric semis, people weren't sure how viable that would be.

So as we reported last week, the first deliveries of the Tesla semi are going to be on December 1.

I think there are other big trucks out there, so we'll know soon that battery electric should work for semi truck.

Now, last week, I touched on sort of this myth that goes around that land use of renewables is a bad thing.

How can we possibly power grid? What are we going to do, cover every square inch of solar and wind turbines? And then I pointed out the fact, and this is the fact that there is more land use by oil and gas right now than what it would take to.

Have a renewable energy in the world.

So there's no recent studies.

But I came across, and this is actually when I was making the TikTok video for that segment, I came across a study which I found interesting, and now it's already seven years old.

It was published in 2015.

It was peer reviewed and published in the scientific journal Science.

And it estimated that 30 0 km² have been lost to oil and gas well pads, storage tanks and associated roads just in the period from 2000 to 2015, just in that 15 year period, 30,000 km² just for oil and gas.

So the amount that that is the equivalent of lost range lands is equivalent of approximately 5 million animal units per month.

I don't want to think about what that is.

I think I know.

And the amount of biomass lost in croplands is equivalent of 122,000,000 bushes of wheat, something we have here where we live.

Lots of wheat.

So the thing is, the 3 million land lost is likely, unlike renewables, long lasting and potentially permanent.

Permanent, yes.

Because this is toxic.

What's left is toxic.

Yeah.

We mentioned a hydrogen plant that's trying to build on an old oil and gas, I don't know, what do they call it? A gray site or there's a brown site.

Brownfield.

They call it brown field.

It's like a gas station, a corner gas station type of house.

Where there was a corner gas station, that land is contaminated forever.

Yeah, but if you put in an EV charging supercharger there, you take it out, it's fine.

You take a wind turbine out, fine.

Solar farm.

You can not only have agriculture taking place under the solar panels, you take them out and it becomes a farm again or whatever you want.

Disneyland.

So the gas power plants themselves occupy a rather small landscape footprint.

It says you must take into account that those power plants also require significant infrastructure to operate well pad, storage tanks, pipelines access roads and refineries, just to name a few.

The pipeline behind my house goes on for many hundreds of kilometers and I can't imagine the hectares that it in itself takes up.

But you cannot do anything on it.

I know, because I get a pamphlet in the mail every ten days telling me I can't so much fart on it because they don't want me to.

I can't bring in a back loader because I don't have an alleyway here.

I can't bring in a small tractor, I can't bring in anything at all they don't want because I talked to them on the phone, because I get, you know how you dial before you dig while I do that.

And guess who calls? The pipeline companies actually call when I do that, put out that request to put in my above ground swimming pool and yeah, they tell me you can't do anything like that.

Nothing at all.

So they kill the gopher.

So the ledge is pointless.

They mow it.

They do go over with a tractor and mow it once a month.

But other than that so the Department of Energy estimates the amount of land used by wind turbines would require 3200 square kilometers, or 790,000 acres by 2050 when we met our Paris climate targets.

And that's roughly a 10th of the land used by oil and gas, which is yes, electricity could be coming from wind for a 10th of the land used by oil and gas.

And that's just in the States, right? So the National Renewable Energy Lab, 1 Ha or two five acres is what you need per gigawatt hour of solar generation, if you want to talk solar now.

So for 3 million Ha lost oil and gas in that 15 year period, you could put up solar power that would generate 75% of America's total annual electricity generation output.

You can put it anywhere.

You don't put on farmland.

You can put on rooftops.

You can run schools, factories, and you should be and I don't know why they're not.

Remember, this is just oil and gas.

This doesn't even talk about other fossil fuels like coal or entire mountaintops are removed.

So that's my story on that.

This is a clean energy show with Brian Stockton and James Winningham.

All right, so Volkswagen this week.

So we were talking before about Hyundai and Kia maybe not making that many battery electric vehicles, even though they're quite great.

But I thought this was worth mentioning.

We've mentioned Volkswagen's output before, but, yeah, Volkswagen is on track to make 500,000 EVs by the end of this year.

So 500,000 output in a year, that's behind Tesla, which is going to be around 1.4 million.

So just between those two companies, that's around 2 million battery electric vehicles.

So this is starting to ramp up.

Volkswagen is taking this seriously, and they're taking it so seriously, they've hired you and McGregor as their next spokesperson.

And of course, we talked about that show that was on Apple TV called The Long Way Down.

A long way up.

Yeah.

Great show.

Excellent show.

If anyone's interested, you and McGregor likes to do these tours on motorcycles.

So that's the newest iteration of that show.

I think there's been three seasons, and it's on Apple TV Plus.

And they started at the tip of South America and drove up to California, I think it was, on electric motorcycles and with prototype rivian electric pickup trucks just for the scenery, but also to see if it could be done electric.

And it turned out to be an awesome show.

So, yes, clearly, Ewan McGregor is an EV enthusiast.

He's a big Volkswagen enthusiast.

He owns several Volkswagens that he's restored, including one that is a 1954 Beetle that he had converted to electric.

So he drives a 54 electric Beetle around Los Angeles.

And so, yeah, I think that's kind of fun.

Yes.

I will point out that there are three iterations of this series, but they started like 20 years ago.

So when they flash back, he's very young and Same has a buddy that he takes with him.

And they both like motorcycles and racing and stuff and live it on the edge.

And it was very much a struggle with electricity in South America to charge a prototype Harley Davidson livewire before they became the earlier previous seasons are just like shot on kind of old standard definition video, so they don't look that great.

But the newest season that's on Apple TV, it's all in HD, looks fantastic because it is essentially a travel log show.

And I became fascinated with South America.

What a beautiful continent, if I may.

And they were able to shoot it in glorious HD with lots of drones and different things and the technology that is compact and fits in the motorcycle operated and unoperated.

And then the first few episodes were the struggle to charge, and then it became more like logistics and things.

And the Inexplicably went through Mexico on a school bus that they want to find.

Don't think it was too dangerous.

There was a nasty tourist murder going.

Yeah, Ewan McGregor is a great guy.

He's one of the few Hollywood stars I would like to have a beer with.

You know, like, he just seems like a great guy, and most people aren't.

I'm not.

I wouldn't want to have a beer with me.

I'm a terrible human being.

Somebody flaws.

But he seems to have everything worked out.

Volkswagen promised such lofty things, right, that they were going to do this, and we were hoping they would cause in dieselgate.

They've sort of abandoned everything and said, okay, we're going all into EVs.

But are they really? And a lot of people were skeptical, but it seems like are you fairly comfortable that they are? Oh, yeah.

I think 500,000 is an amazing figure to hit this year.

It's not an easy thing to ramp up all those batteries and new platforms because it's better to start with a new platform than to convert a gas car to electric.

So, yeah, Volkswagen is well on their way.

When I saw you doing the story, I watched the Star Wars commercial with him, and it sort of he drives off in a Volkswagen ID buzz the Volkswagen EV version of their minibus van, which is by all accounts, horrendously overpriced, but also very cool.

And if I was on a money tree, I would certainly have one of the driveway for the cool factor going to be available in Europe very soon, from what I recall.

Yeah.

Well, the Financial Times has a story on nuclear revival in that Westinghouse Electric, which is a US.

Nuclear power company.

It's being bought by a private equityback consortium in an almost $8 billion deal for four years.

That's four years after it emerged from bankruptcy.

So it was nuclear is bad going bankruptcy, not making money because of the war in Ukraine is, in their mind and their view, spurring fresh interest in an industry that had fallen out of investor favor.

So we've seen how important energy is and nuclear is available now, but also they're partnering with a company that right here in our own province that doesn't have a lot of companies.

We have a big multinational corporation called Chemical which mine uranium in the far north of our province province, you know, hours and hours and hours and hours away that we're into the wilderness where there's a weird little city called Uranium City.

You wanted to make a film there once because it was like this abandoned mining town in the middle of nowhere.

No, it's a fascinating story, if you want to kind of Google it.

Uranium City.

It was a whole city that was built around mining uranium, and thousands of people were living there at one point, but it's now been more or less abandoned.

So there's a whole abandoned city up there that I don't know, I'd like to just go hang around.

It's very interesting to look at it from the air because you see the aerial photos and there are what don't seem like dilapidated houses that are completely caved in because some little water thing got in there and then one thing led to another with an unoccupied house and then they all sort of collapsed and looks like it has 30 years left on the shingles.

Kind of a weird image, actually.

Yeah.

So Chemical is apparently big on nuclear and which is why they are lobbying a few provincial governments in Canada like ours to go with small modular nuclear reactors as the solution and as a way to waste our money and prolong fossil fuels.

So the purchasing of Westinghouse, I guess they make 440 nuclear reactors in the world, about half of them.

So I don't know, they say it's the best market fundamentals we've seen in a while.

I'm skeptical.

I would not advance, I would not invest in that.

I would not invest in a billion dollars because by the time you put a brick in the ground, I mean, forget about it.

It's going to be over.

So well, I'm pleased to bring back the tweet of the week.

I've had a hard time finding one this week, so I had to go with a thread, I'm afraid.

Usually I find an inspiring tweet, something that I really like, but this one, there's been a lot of climate protesters in the news that has made people uncomfortable throwing supine paintings and things like that, and it's become a part of the discussion.

So aside, rezook somebody I follow on Twitter, energy Insider, clean Energy Insider, in support of the malign of these climate protesters, he says, we have triggered a once in a hundred million years climate change event.

Government falls here on the world, doesn't appear to give a hoot about it or our future.

Why? Well, let's read between the lines of what climate science is saying.

The probability of 1.5 degrees heating compared to preindustrial times by 2100 is today about 99%.

The probability of two degrees is 90%.

The probability of four degrees or higher is 10%.

And that, of course, is absolutely catastrophic.

So it's like playing Russian roulette with a ten chamber gun and one bullet in it.

And it's the future of humanity and life on Earth is at least temporarily going to be disrupted if that happens.

So three degrees is unadaptable for most people and will result in tens or hundreds of millions of climate refugees.

Four degrees or more implies in exile to high latitudes north Canada, Siberia, north New Zealand for millennia.

That is the most depressing thing I've read in a long time.

Remember that the probability four degrees is actually 10%.

So now, if you are faced with these not unlikely outcomes, would you not throw soup at a goddamn painting or stop traffic or strike or block an interest to BP or Shell or Exxon oil terminals? That is his thoughts we like to hear from you on the Clean Energy show.

Coming up next is what is it, Brian? It's the lightning round roll.

Zoom through a bunch of headlines and get through the show real quick.

Contact us right now.

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lighting round, fast paced look of the weekend clean energy news.

Brian, the show's gone by fast.

They all go by fast.

That's how we're at 135 of them already.

I don't know what's going on.

Maybe the cocaine from the oil industry has gotten into my coffee in the morning or something.

But offshore construction starts on Japan's first floating wind farm.

It is, in total pretty small.

Now, the biggest wind turbines that we often mention are 14, though, that those are not floating.

So I don't think the floating works for turbines quite that big.

But it's nice to see Japan is finally getting going with because, remember, they've got a deeper offshore, so they need to do the floating in a lot of cases there.

Yeah.

Jinko Solar has achieved 26.1% efficiency in their solar panels.

This is not Perk solar panels, which we're used to, but NType top con solar panels.

So the new record was confirmed by China's National Institute of Metrology.

Is it Metrology? Metrology? Sure.

Let's say that it's the science of measurement, Brian.

And a word that I didn't previously know, because I don't measure things.

So Perk adds a passivated film to the back of ordinary solar panels to absorb more light than may have passed the initial cell surface.

This is how they get this higher efficiency.

Now, the panels on our houses might be, what, 89% efficient or something? Maybe 20%, something like this is significantly higher for the same panel.

And they seem to say that the cost will be very close to they're basically adding this ultra thin oxide layer on top as another barrier to contain a absorbed light.

They're just trapping more light.

And when you talk about bifacial panels picking up stuff on the bottom as well well, normal panels only pick up 70% of light in the bottom direction, but these pick up 80%.

So that's a 10% gain, which is nothing to sneeze at if you are making a bifatial solar family farm, which sometimes apparently, can be vertical just to smooth out the curve of the power generation during the day.

Yeah, I'm always excited about these advancements in solar panels.

Female workforce share in the renewable energy sector, 32%.

Oil and gas, 22%.

So we're spreading out the jobs a bit better as we transition to renewable.

Something to think about.

Few markets are electrifying, quite like China, Brian, where EVs have gone from less than 1% of light commercial vehicle sales to 10% in the last ten years.

At last, two years.

Okay, that's fine.

Two years, basically nothing, 10%.

And this is like commercial vehicles are not like you and I.

They're driving all day and they're bigger.

The vehicles use more energy, so they're bigger and they drive all day.

So this is a big impact on oil.

And I expect very much that this is going to happen soon, because we see it every day in the headlines.

New small commercial vehicles and trucks coming online that are electric.

Oh, it's time for a CES fast fact.

Yes, it costs about $1,300 to install a public EV charger on a lamp post.

$1,300.

You know, we talk about how we're going to deal with apartment owners and stuff like that.

Yeah, that's not much.

This is the whole kit and the bootle and the fact that it charges you, too.

The whole billing system is built into it.

$1,300 us.

No.

We have tons of cars that park on the street all day long, so why not give them an option to charge? And keep in mind, you use your own cord for stuff like this.

It's basically a socket.

In Europe, they bring their own cord.

Audi wants its EVs to clean the air while they charge or drive.

If I had a segment, the weird story of the week, this would be it.

Brian this is weird.

And by the way, I once saw a thing where they had a train that was going to carbon capture as it drove, but I lost the story.

But instead of talking about the show about six months ago so audio wants to do this with their cars.

The vehicles will be equipped with the systems of filters particles out of the air.

This is a test as an experiment.

They'll do it passively when they're driving it and actively with a fan when they're charging.

And they're just going to take particles out of the air through I don't know.

It's not going to make a difference.

It's going to add cost to the car.

Why are they doing this, Brian? Why? It seems like the dumbest thing ever.

Pennsylvania State University researchers develop ten minute charging method.

Now, we hear about this stuff all the time, and we don't mention it on the show.

Why? Because we don't know if it's real or not.

However, this was published in the journal nature, which is the journal.

It's a tough journal.

This is no bigger journal than nature.

As far as I love it.

It's my favorite journal.

Absolutely.

They have that written on the cover.

Brian Starship's favorite journal.

And it's only when I mention it because adding a thin layer of nickel to the battery, which is also why I mention it, because it's not a huge, weird thing that may or may not work right.

It's a minor thing that is actually helping it cool the battery.

Something like Tesla might develop something like that while they're adding a thin layer of nickel in the spooling to help with the cooling.

And that means that they can charge in 10 minutes.

So that might be a thing.

Okay, it might be a thing, yeah.

I mean, it might potentially add too much cost because nickel is one of the more expensive materials for batteries, but we'll see.

Oh, it's another CAS.

Fast fact.

All of the lithium mine last year would last just one month.

In 2041 month, all the lithium mine last year would last one month.

And in 2050, that magical year where we have to get to zero, it would last two weeks.

So this is based on, I guess, current projections of how much lithium we're going to need to put into batteries and such in 20 years.

It could be wrong.

We could be on to batteries that don't require any lithium by then.

I'm hoping it's possible, especially for grid and stuff like that.

Electric miners are cutting CO2 emissions in half by switching to electric vehicles.

So I know that mining was ripe for electric vehicles because you have to clean the air as you go down to the mines.

That's an issue to have a diesel truck running or equipment.

So if you electrify it and you throw out a solar farm, even better.

No.

There was a story this week about a hockey rank somewhere switching to electric powered zambonies to clean the ice.

If you've ever been in a hockey rink, it's ridiculous.

Like, they have these gas powered Zambonies driving around, especially in a smaller community size rink.

The fumes are ridiculous.

We shouldn't be breathing in those fumes.

And it's the same thing with mining.

Like, you don't want to be burning fossil fuels down in a mine.

You want clean battery, electric.

And like every decent Canadian, Brine was born on the blue line of a hi suki rank, weren't you, back in the day, many years ago? Many, many years ago, yeah.

But you know what surprises me, though, is it's half the emissions from mining can come from electric fine.

The vehicles.

That's really good.

I didn't know that it would be that great because that's easy.

And by the way, we've seen even years ago, early in the podcast, giant super sized trucks that are electrified, that are going up and down, coal mines that just completely recharge on the way down.

And they don't even have to charge during the day.

They just regenerate.

Going down with the regenerative.

Branking by dad, three scored five stars in the Euro NCAP safety test.

Now, the reason why I bring this up is because I've often pondered with you on the show, what are the Chinese cars going to be like when they come? Are they going to be safe? Now, that's a bit of maybe an unwanted, undeserved prejudice that is coming from bad Chinese manufacturing equality from past decades in the eighties and 90s.

But then a lot of people said that about the Koreans.

And actually the Korean cars weren't great at first, but they became quite they're among the top reliable cars now.

They're great.

So this is the first sort of indication that I've seen that the Chinese cars can do and will strive to have high safety ratings because we're all in North America here going to be craving good, safe cars.

That affected my buying decision last time.

Oh, another fast fact.

US.

Wind power currently generates enough electricity to serve the equivalent of 43 million American homes.

That's right.

Now, already just with wind power.

Just with wind power.

That's what it's capable of.

At its best case scenario from carbon tracker, new findings from Rised Energy show that 2022 capital spending on wind and solar could hit almost half a trillion dollars, and that would eclipse the 446,000,000,000 for upstream oil and gas production.

So this is kind of the first time that the capital spending has switched from bad to good.

And they say it's not going back, that this trend will continue quite rapidly going forward.

Absolutely.

One last story for you, Brian, the World Meleeurological Organization, rather, is that occurrences of severe weather disrupting the operation of nuclear power plants increased fivefold in the last three decades between 19 92,019, with a notable acceleration since 2009, something that we've been mentioning on the show that I found quite surprising.

And yes, climate change screwing things up already.

Yeah, extreme weather is not great for nuclear power plants.

And that is our time for this week.

I mean, we could go on forever, but my throat will start to bleed very shortly.

Brian will pass out.

I've got a cold.

He's got to be barely alive, man.

He's probably got some sort of new version of COVID that can't be detected.

That's what I think.

It's not a cold.

We'll hope you're here for next week's show, so we'd love to hear from you.

Remember, clean energy [email protected], twitter, TikTok, yada yada, yada.

Leave us a voicemail.

And if you're new to the show, remember subscribe on your podcast app, because we have new shows every week and you wouldn't want to miss that.

So we'll see you next time.

See you next week.

 

It's getting to be easier to find an EV charger in Manhattan than a gas station. Nissan's second EV is pricey! This Old House talks EV chargers in your home. Ford is actually making EVs you can and should buy.

Tesla semi has finally entered production, first deliveries to Pepsi Dec 1. Porsche is going public And how much space would solar panels take up to power the entire world? The Straight Pipes review an F150 Lightning and Out of Spec Reviews buys the cheapest EV in North America.

James gets soaked by the repair shop for a bearing job on his Nissan LEAF.

Tweet of the week!

From Carbon Tracker -- "With talk of solar panels & farmland - a reminder the land req'd for solar panels alone to provide *all global energy is 450,000 km2 or 0.3% of the global land area – less than the current land footprint of FossilFuel infrastructure."

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Transcript

 

Hello, and welcome to episode 134 of the Clean Energy Show.

I'm Brian Stockton.

I'm James Woodingham.

This week, EV chargers outnumber gas stations ten to one in Manhattan.

Same ratios, rats to people.

Interesting, nissan has finally released pricing information for their Aria EV.

Said a Nissan spokesperson, we know James Winningham has a Nissan lease, so we wanted to make sure the Aria was out of his price range.

Canadian doctors exposed blatant green washing by the Canada Gas Association.

This after they turned to the left and coughed without being asked.

A former coal power plant has been selected as the site for a fusion energy project in the UK.

The power source of the past meets the power source of the never.

All that and more on this edition of the Clean Energy Show.

And also this week, Brian, we have the Tesla semi is finally entered into production, if you can believe it.

Pepsi, december 1.

So that's interesting.

Porsche is going public.

I didn't know they weren't.

And how much space would solar panels take up to power the entire world? How was your trip to BC? Yes, it was great.

So this is my first time on an airplane in about six years.

Yeah, the planes were all full.

Pretty much full.

Really? Massed or unmasked? I would say five to 10% mass.

That's it.

On a plane? Oh, God, yes.

So the restrictions in Canada just were lifted just at the start of the month, I think.

And, yeah, everyone's pretty much given up on it already, but so far I'm not sick, so we'll see how that goes.

But, yeah, first time on an airplane, it was weird to go back on a plane.

But, yeah, I went to BC, went to Whistler for a family function.

So we flew into Vancouver and a couple of things.

First of all, the Vancouver airport has these giant signs up about how they're going to be carbon neutral by 2030.

At the Vancouver Airport.

They have a specific plan, I guess, to do that.

I assume that doesn't include the airplane.

I assume not.

Maybe the toilets.

Yeah, a shuttle picked us up at the airport and drives us up to Whistler, which takes a couple of hours, but so you have to drive through Vancouver on the way to Whistler.

Yeah.

I just wanted to give an update because the last time I was in Vancouver was about two years ago when we talked about it then on the podcast.

And back then, two years ago, there were quite a few Teslas on the road in Vancouver.

The number now is insane.

Like, there are so many Teslas on the street in Vancouver.

I couldn't believe it.

Within two minutes of driving out of the airport, I'd seen a dozen Teslas.

end of excerpt

It's getting to be easier to find an EV charger in Manhattan than a gas station. Nissan's second EV is pricey! This Old House talks EV chargers in your home. Ford is actually making EVs you can and should buy.

• Tesla semi has finally entered production, first deliveries to Pepsi Dec 1.
• Porsche is going public
• And how much space would solar panels take up to power the entire world?

The Straight Pipes review an F150 Lightning and Out of Spec Reviews buys the cheapest EV in North America.

James gets soaked by the repair shop for a bearing job on his Nissan LEAF.

Tweet of the week!

From Carbon Tracker -- "With talk of solar panels & farmland - a reminder the land req'd for solar panels alone to provide *all global energy is 450,000 km2 or 0.3% of the global land area – less than the current land footprint of FossilFuel infrastructure."

Thanks for listening to our show! Consider rating The Clean Energy Show on iTunes, Spotify or wherever you listen to our show.

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Transcript

Hello, and welcome to episode 134 of the Clean Energy Show.

I'm Brian Stockton.

I'm James Woodingham.

This week, EV chargers outnumber gas stations ten to one in Manhattan.

Same ratios, rats to people.

Interesting, nissan has finally released pricing information for their Aria EV.

Said a Nissan spokesperson, we know James Winningham has a Nissan lease, so we wanted to make sure the Aria was out of his price range.

Canadian doctors exposed blatant green washing by the Canada Gas Association.

This after they turned to the left and coughed without being asked.

A former coal power plant has been selected as the site for a fusion energy project in the UK.

The power source of the past meets the power source of the never.

All that and more on this edition of the Clean Energy Show.

And also this week, Brian, we have the Tesla semi is finally entered into production, if you can believe it.

Pepsi, december 1.

So that's interesting.

Porsche is going public.

I didn't know they weren't.

And how much space would solar panels take up to power the entire world? How was your trip to BC? Yes, it was great.

So this is my first time on an airplane in about six years.

Yeah, the planes were all full.

Pretty much full.

Really? Massed or unmasked? I would say five to 10% mass.

That's it.

On a plane? Oh, God, yes.

So the restrictions in Canada just were lifted just at the start of the month, I think.

And, yeah, everyone's pretty much given up on it already, but so far I'm not sick, so we'll see how that goes.

But, yeah, first time on an airplane, it was weird to go back on a plane.

But, yeah, I went to BC, went to Whistler for a family function.

So we flew into Vancouver and a couple of things.

First of all, the Vancouver airport has these giant signs up about how they're going to be carbon neutral by 2030.

At the Vancouver Airport.

They have a specific plan, I guess, to do that.

I assume that doesn't include the airplane.

I assume not.

Maybe the toilets.

Yeah, a shuttle picked us up at the airport and drives us up to Whistler, which takes a couple of hours, but so you have to drive through Vancouver on the way to Whistler.

Yeah.

I just wanted to give an update because the last time I was in Vancouver was about two years ago when we talked about it then on the podcast.

And back then, two years ago, there were quite a few Teslas on the road in Vancouver.

The number now is insane.

Like, there are so many Teslas on the street in Vancouver.

I couldn't believe it.

Within two minutes of driving out of the airport, I'd seen a dozen Teslas.

Wow.

And then it just continued the whole time.

And including up to Whistler, because it's mostly people from Vancouver.

But yeah, it was shocking.

Like, there were so many I stopped counting almost immediately because it was too many.

And I thought, Well, I need some kind of comparison, so maybe I'll start counting BMWs to get some sort of a sense.

So this is not scientific or anything, and I didn't write down the numbers or anything, but I would guess there's two to three times more Tesla in Vancouver than there is BMW's.

Wow.

Yeah, it was a lot harder to spot a BMW.

And then I thought, okay, well, I've got more time to drive through.

So I started counting Toyotas because that's obviously a very popular brand and it looked kind of equal to me like the same number of Toyotas as Tesla's in Vancouver.

Look out Toyota.

Yeah.

So again, that's not scientific.

I didn't keep track if anybody knows the actual numbers, but it's certainly going to be high in Vancouver, which is this is the west coast of Canada.

It's near Seattle.

It's got a similar vibe to Seattle, the whole west coast of North America, as I assume, where there is the highest concentration of Tesla.

But still, it was pretty darn shocking to see so many and quite a few Mustang mache I saw as well.

Yeah, I want to get to that in a minute, but there's actually seems to be fairly good supply of those.

I know you're always saying, well, how many of these things are you going to make and when are you going to make them? Ford seems to be coming through, so we'll go back to that in just a second.

I can't believe it's been two years since you drove out in your Tesla.

That's crazy, isn't it? Yeah.

I don't know.

Time is meaningless in the pandemic.

I wish I wasn't aging because I know it hasn't forgotten my body.

It's aging quite well.

Thank you.

And then, so once we're in Whistler, this is a mountain town, like a ski town, and it's not ski season yet, but they have these tramways.

You can take up the mountain, what do you call it? Gondola.

Yes.

And so they have one now that's called the peak to peak gondola.

So you take the first one up the mountain and then you switch to the peak to peak gondola, which takes you from the peak of one mountain to the peak of another.

And it was absolutely insane.

This is apparently the longest span in the world of one of these gondolas.

The gondolas are held up by these polls split up against the thing.

So there's a handful of support polls at each end, but then there's a massive span in the middle, which is you just spend five minutes on this one span of the cable.

It was crazy.

It seemed like it shouldn't exist.

Is that the one that was cut by Vandals twice? Yeah, I'm not sure.

There was a news story in Canada a year or two ago about that.

I'm not sure which one it was, but it was in Whistler.

I think it was in Whistler.

I couldn't remember where it was.

Yeah.

So I went up in Banff National Park on one, which was kind of the one right near the town of Bam, which was nice view, but then you go back down.

I went to the other one at Sunshine, and they had just started doing it.

I guess the number of people doing it doubles every year.

And I was on year three, so it wasn't too crowded, but I imagine it is now.

But it was a summertime thing to do where they just decided, hey, let's make some money in the summertime.

And you go up in these mountain vistas, which are just full of wildflowers and just so peaceful and so stunning, to just walk to go for a hike for an hour or an hour.

Yeah.

I mean, there was a ton of tourists kind of spoiling it all, but aside from that, just absolutely.

If you could just poison them or something.

Yeah, but the engineering feat of this gondola, like the peak to peak, it was just crazy.

How much did it cost? Because that'll tell you how much engineering went into it.

It's about $70 a person.

Well, that's not bad.

That seems like a typical gondola ride, actually.

Yeah.

I got my Nissan Leaf fixed, and, you know, we were talking about this last week, and it wasn't going well for James.

Not well at all.

It's going to be expensive.

They wanted one $400 for something that was supposed to be what I thought would be $500.

Basically, I determined that it was a bearing in my front wheel, and in this case, it's a hub of bearings that needs to be replaced, but you got to take quite a few things apart and use torque wrenches.

And I watched a guy do it on YouTube.

Thought about doing it myself.

It cost me $2100.

They said that the speed sensor and the ABS brakes on the wheel was seized, and you need to take that out.

Now.

When I watch the video, the guy said, don't forget to take out the ABS sensor or you'll break it.

So I'm thinking, Those mother assholes broke it and charged me $600.

And I couldn't find one for $600.

Brian as hard as I tried, the most expensive one I found was 250 American, which would be a little over $300 in our currency in Canada.

And I found some for $25.

I found a whole bunch for $25.

So do you think you should have attempted this yourself? No, but I really hate auto mechanic shops.

Really hate them.

Well, it's just so difficult to know.

I mean, they can tell you, really almost any price, and you got to have to pay it.

So what do you know? I was losing sleep over it, and I was so anxious, I just said, I'm putting it on my credit card.

I'll pay it off as I go and I'll be interested in this sucks, but, yeah, that's what I have to do.

Our government our local government sending us $500 at the end of November or something like that, for inflation.

And I'll put that on it.

But I also have this kid going on this trip, and it was a bad time.

However, as you were saying last week about your ceiling you spent a lot of money on, you don't get anything for that.

No.

And they're back today, working on the other half.

So again, you might hear some construction noise in the background.

Well, I am really thrilled because I forgot what my car was like before this problem slowly emerged like a frog in hot water.

I've fallen in love with my car again.

And I just love electric cars so much.

And it's so quiet.

You get up to, like, city speed and you start to hear the wind.

And I don't hear anything else.

I expect to hear something else, but I'm hearing is a slight breeze.

And this car does a really good job in sort of mitigating the air noise.

So one of the channels I watch on YouTube is out of spec reviews.

I've been talking to our R and D department of the Clean Energy.

So possibly looking at a YouTube related segment.

What James saw on YouTube, we're talking about it.

They're crunching the numbers and then running some algorithms.

Oh, I can tell you what I saw on YouTube when I was in Vancouver.

Sure.

The ads were a lot of them were from BC Hydro, their electric utility.

I kept getting BC Hydro ads on my YouTube, and it was things like, hey, everybody, did you know BC Hydro is all, like, 98% carbon free and free, you know, hydroelectric power, everybody.

But it's a government monopoly, so I'm not really sure why they're advertising.

But it was still interesting to see.

And, of course, the algorithm knew that that was, I guess, an ad that I might be interested in.

You were.

And you've talked to a BC hydra on the show before.

Yeah.

Anyway, there's an automotive review channel I watched.

Now, when I watch automotive review channels, I still watch about EVs because that's what I'm interested in.

I'm interested in buying them.

I'm interested in learning about them.

And out of Spec Reviews is a guy in just outside of Denver.

He does all these reviews.

I like him.

I've grown accustomed to him.

I trust him.

He does a fairly honest review.

So he decided he's been having all these cars come out of his orbit, right? Lots of different cars.

And he's always interested in cars, combustion, otherwise.

But he decided to buy a Nissan Leaf.

And he bought one, the cheapest one he could find in America.

And it was 4000, $3700, something like that.

And it had a dent in it, and the battery was bad, and the level two charger didn't work.

Like the normal charger that you would charge at home didn't work.

So only the faster, only the fast charger works.

And it was an essential version, so it's the higher trim level.

So it's got all the solar panels that charges the battery and not the battery battery, but the twelve volt battery, which is good to keep topped up and chart in cars like that, that use batteries for connectivity and stuff like that.

And he's driven for a couple of weeks, and here's a clip, because he really likes it.

We spend a lot of our time evaluating cars on the bleeding edge of technology.

For example, this week I've been driving the Model S plaid, the Lucid Air grand touring, doing range testing and things like that.

The Rivian R one T, the Mercedes EQE, that's all great, but I think also, I'm just a fan of transportation in general.

It doesn't need to be expensive, bleeding edge transportation.

Things like this can get the job done for most people, or for at least many use cases.

I just wanted to tell you that for $3,750, I got reliable electric transportation that is actually really fun to drive.

So I'm pretty pleased with this whole thing.

Yeah, he doesn't have to buy this crappy old car, which is now ancient in EV terms.

It's two years older than mine.

It's a 2011.

He towed it in a Rivian, who got a hold of a Rivian.

So he went to Seattle, to Denver, towing this thing, and he's going to make a video about that as well, and he's just quite happy with it.

And you can see him driving around on this channel.

So, yeah, I just really love the car.

Brian no, and as we said, though, it is a city car.

You can't really expect to do a road trip on it, but of course, 99% of the time you're just driving around town.

And obviously it works for you and for lots of people, because we're a two car family.

Actually three, if you count a vacation vehicle that remains parked most of the year.

We have the car that we can use for vacations.

We are longer term, we just went to two and a half hours, the kids in college type of thing, and we can make that trip several times a year and any vacations we want to, and we don't have to worry, all our cars don't have to be highway worthy.

And this car is doing such a great job in saving us a ton of money.

And coming up on its 10th birthday, by the way, in January, we'll be celebrating that on the show.

Yeah, so I wanted to mention the Nissan Aria then, which really is the follow up to the Leaf.

Like, Nissan had a huge head start in EVs with the Leaf over ten years ago, but it's taken them this long.

Twelve years.

Brian twelve.

That's ridiculous.

And so they finally have a follow up.

It's the Aria, and pricing has been announced.

So you, as a Nissan Leaf driver, this might be the natural car for you to upgrade to, but I don't know, might be out of your price range.

And in the US, that's around 43 or 42, I think, as a starting price.

Yeah, well, it's almost 18,000 more than what I want to spend.

So that's a lot large percentage.

And it's not worth it.

I don't think it's worth it.

I've read the reviews, including house back reviews, by the way, and it just doesn't seem like the best value out there because it's pretty close in price to, say, a Hyundai onik five, which charges very fast, like ridiculously faster than anything but a Tesla, really.

And, you know, Porsches and some things like that.

But for most of the cars out there, like the Fords, don't charge very fast.

They've got this 800 volts architecture, and it charges fast.

Mike, my friend Mike, he's going to give me a test drive one of these days, aren't you, Mike? And he's got one in town.

But I also saw other people talking about, you can't get one of those anymore for two or three years.

Like that's what they're being told.

I don't know if it's a lie, right? Because I don't trust dealers to tell the truth.

I don't trust anyone.

And by the way, did you used to watch this Old House on PBS ever? Oh, I love this old house.

I don't know why I did, but I did.

And we used to have just a handful of channels, and one was that, and maybe there was nothing on, and I just fell into it and I've picked up some things and done my own it probably got me started on my own DIY projects and just that path in life.

Yeah.

And they occasionally do cover things like energy efficiency, like insulation and heat pumps and stuff like that.

So I still check them out on YouTube occasionally when they have stories about that, because they'll be upgrading an old house.

And it's like, well, how do we bring it into the 21st century and make it energy efficient? But I started watching with Bob Villa.

Villa.

Bob Villa.

I forgot his name.

It's been 20 years since he's been on the air.

Yes, he hasn't been on Verdict, but he started in the very late seventy s.

And all through the eighty s and a Saturday afternoon, you were bored, James.

You kind of just turned on the TV and sort of fall into something and well, they after all these years, they're doing EV chargers.

I mean, I was dreaming about EVs when the show went on the air, and now they're talking about EV chargers.

Hey, guys.

Electric vehicle charging.

In terms of safety, obviously, this is the port where it goes when the 17 year old was chasing the 14 year old.

Is that possible? No.

So this part is energized.

When it comes out of here, it goes into the unit.

Just this cord here.

Just that cord.

This piece.

Nothing really.

Nothing at all until you plug it in.

So it has two little pins inside that it wants to see.

Contact the car.

The car needs to know that it's made connection.

Then this will send power through.

Yeah, you can stick your tongue on the end of my EV charger.

The driveway, it's not turned on.

It's got to communicate with the car.

It's got to shake hands with the car and then throw a switch to send the power.

Okay, so they're advocating that people should lick their unique? No, I'm not saying that.

Do not do this at home, kids.

I'm just saying there's so much ridiculous speculation out there about charging cars in the rain and things.

Come on.

It's not like I'm taking a high voltage wire off of a transmission line and sticking it to my car with rubber gloves.

It's all sealed and safe otherwise.

And of course, ground fault interrupted and all that.

So that's the way EV chargers are.

That's the way it has to be.

And the straight pipes are friends over the straight pipes.

We interviewed one of the straight pipers, favorite channel of yours.

They did the F 150 lightning.

Did you see that they put up? I did, yeah.

That was a great review.

I'm glad they finally got their hands on one.

Yes, they did.

But my point of this is that they got their hands on one.

It wasn't given to them for review.

I was talking last week that I keep seeing these at dealerships, or at least listed a dealership, it seems like to your point about how many are you making and when are you making them that, you know, Ford is sticking up and they're doing their thing.

They're putting out these mockes.

They're putting out the F 150 is actually making them, making them available.

Yeah, I've seen them listed on dealerships too.

It tends to be the more expensive ones.

So maybe they are having trouble selling those super high priced ones.

But we do expect EV prices to eventually come down.

But unfortunately they are still pretty crazy expensive.

We just talked about the Aria.

It seems like it's really priced higher than it should be.

But I think we're a year or two away from prices actually finally starting to come down.

But it should happen once supply increases.

All the street pipes are really happy to find one.

And where did we get this F 150 lightning from? Meadow vale ford.

Thank you guys so much for providing the car because we couldn't get one through Ford Canada.

If you're in Mississauga and you're looking for a Ford, only go there.

They're going to have a bunch of lightnings for you guys to buy.

Mrs.

Ontario with a bunch of lightnings to go buy.

Now these are longer range stuff.

So it should be popular.

People can afford them.

Yeah.

And last week, of course, you made a commercial for the Riverbend Co op because they've been so nice about charging infrastructure.

So I guess this week it's the commercial for Meadowvale Ford.

Yeah.

We're constantly giving you free commercials here at the Clean Energy Show.

Last night, I got a DM from a friend, a mutual friend.

We'll call him Trevor Aceman, that's his code name.

A smart, thoughtful fellow fell into the flood.

He fell into somebody telling him, don't buy EVs because he's thinking about it.

He was told by a friend not to because of the batteries.

Because the batteries are not an environmental terrorism.

And I don't know how to address that.

I mean, people listen to the show, have already seen the studies.

There's been many.

Some of them have been less kind than others.

But if you see a study that says batteries are bad or EVs are worse than gas cars, usually that study is not well to wheel.

It's just the gas magically shows up in the car.

And they tell you how the coal was made for the electricity, but they don't tell you how the gas was mined, shipped, transformed in a truck, and more energy than it takes to drive just to turn that into gasoline at the refinery and then ship to you as well.

And there is, to be fair, a carbon footprint for making an electric car.

So you can't discount that argument entirely.

But compared to a gasoline car, it's night and day.

It's not even a discussion.

EVs are just way better.

I mean, the best thing to do is to walk, to ride a bicycle, to take public transport.

I always like to throw that in there.

But if you're going to buy a car, EV way better.

Yeah, I've said this a million times, and I'll say it again.

If there was no climate problem, I'd still be jonesing for an EV.

Because they're better.

Yeah, they're better.

They're way better.

They're even better in cold weather.

My Nissan Leaf is better in cold weather.

I don't know what all cars, but my Nissan Leaf is just toasty, warm and just a delight to drive in 40, believe it or not.

Then there's videos on our channel, on our YouTube channel to see that.

So Clean Technica was talking about how Tesla is using approaches from other self driving players that basically they haven't come up with everything themselves.

They're using certain bits and pieces of technology from other people that have already been developed.

Sometimes they say people think Tesla is doing much more original work than it may be doing, and what these other selfdriving companies are doing is often underrated and under acknowledged.

And I tried to sort of balance that out on the show, that we don't hear a lot of talk about what the other people are doing, but they are doing, and they are driving around, including that the trucks in Toronto to the grocery stores that you're talking about.

Yeah.

No, Tesla tends to get the lion's share of publicity for this kind of stuff because anything to do with Tesla or Elon Musk seems to work well as a clickbait title headline, so it's true.

And all kinds of things like battery storage as well.

They're not the only ones doing that.

There was a story about CATL recently that their profits are starting to go through the roof at CATL.

I have that somewhere in the script.

Brian.

It's ridiculous.

Yes, it's crazy.

You think batteries are going places where they're already making profits like that? Come on.

Yes, batteries are the new oil, so the Clinton can give you an example of third party City visualizations.

This is just a slightly modified Houdini City generator developed by Epic Games for the Matrix Awaken demo, available for free, by the way, Tesla just integrated their auto labeled HD map.

There's nothing proprietary other than the 3D assets catching up to where others were years ago in that regard.

Yeah, well, this is always the exciting thing about technology, is that, I don't know, it just seems to get faster and faster because all these tools get developed.

It's just going to speed up from here.

Okay, so we got a story here about fusion energy, which we don't talk about very often, but fusion is kind of the opposite of fusion, which is what most nuclear power plants work on.

Now, fusion is potentially a much safer energy source, but I don't know, so far as no one has been able to make it work.

Yeah, so this is happening in the UK.

They've chosen a site for this fusion energy prototype, and the UK government is backing it to the tune of £220,000,000.

And they're hoping to have a concept design ready by 2024, followed by a phase two that has detailed engineering design, I don't know, phase three, and I don't know, not targeting operations until the early twenty, forty s.

So this is a ways away.

I'm always fascinated by fusion because it is like the potential is incredible, but I don't know, as we like to say on the show here, that £220,000,000 from the UK government just bought some solar panels for that and some batteries.

Yeah.

And those are available.

They're picking a coal power plant as a site.

Is that true for this fusion? Yeah.

So I assume it's for the same reasons that they often do.

That kind of thing, is that all of the grid infrastructure would already be there on the site.

So this is a coal plant that's no longer in use, and so they figured this would be a great place to put this fusion system.

That may never work at all.

Yeah, it's certainly not going to save the planet if the best case scenario is Bloomberg.

Good old people at Bloomberg, they're always on top of all the stories that we are interested in have stated that they've studied it.

And EV chargers outnumbered, gas stations tend to wander in Manhattan, that is the island of Manhattan in New York City, where real estate is tough.

So it's not easy to put up a gas station, but it's actually not that hard to put up a charger.

You get the one in the parking garage and God knows there's enough of those.

So New York's most densely populated borough has 320 charging stations and just 29 gas stations.

The ChargePoint CEO was telling Bloomberg that the growing popularity of EVs will kill off the remaining gas stations fairly quickly.

I don't think you need to go far up the electric vehicle adoption curve to see gas stations deforested in, that is to say, wiped out of Manhattan.

It's a question of when.

So yeah, crippling property prices have a lot to do with that.

But like I've said on the show, Brian, many times I predict it's going to be hard to buy gas.

We're going to switch from it's been hard to charge an EV to.

It's hard to buy gas because they're not terribly profitable.

And it's going to happen in a place like Manhattan first, because, of course, everything is so dense and the property is so valuable.

It's going to be just too expensive to spend all that money just for a gas station.

No one's going to want to do it.

And already it's not great if there's only 29 gas stations in Manhattan.

Well, New Yorkers as a whole shouldn't worry, they say, because there are still more gas stations and EV chargers across the five boroughs.

There are 697 gas stations dodged across the city, but there's 520 electric vehicle charging stations.

So they're going to surpass them pretty quick, I would think.

Yeah.

And I assume that probably includes some level two kind of charging sites as well.

Not necessarily all faster.

It does.

And most of the boroughs gas stations are located north of Central Park.

Did you know that? I didn't.

I guess that's the place to go if you're looking for gas.

If you find yourself looking for gas.

It's the word Central Park.

There are very few chargers above 110th street for some reason, so most of these registrations are found in parking garages.

Cabs will be going and have started to go EV in New York City, and that trend will continue.

So the cab stations or parking lots or headquarters or whatever you want to call them, are going to have lots of potentially fast, like the $200,000.50 kilowatt type of EV chargers going in.

So we'll see how that goes.

They're set to grow these numbers in the coming years, they say, especially as the government plans to deploy more charges across the country.

Buying this charger program, it's crazy.

But, you know, I read people on Facebook saying all the things that people say to them, like the federal government.

Is paying for you to charge your EV for free, things like that.

There's so much crap out there, I don't know what to do about it.

Brian.

I mean, not everybody's going to listen to our show.

They should, obviously.

Yeah.

So you're thinking the podcast just isn't enough? It's not enough.

We have to have T shirts, Skyriding, I don't know, something big.

You can run for Prime Minister.

What? We need to educate people.

You know, I've never had the indication that our Prime Minister knows what an EV is, and I don't think he's ever driven one.

Yeah.

Okay.

Well, speaking of chargers, the one thing we're still kind of waiting to hear more about are the kind of like the Tesla Mega chargers for their Tesla Semi truck.

And of course, there'll be an equivalent for other brands as well.

But there was some news on that front.

So finally, production has officially started on the Tesla Semi truck.

Pepsi is going to get delivery of the first trucks on December 1 of this year.

So they're very close.

But yeah, I'm really interested in the charging infrastructure part of this story because we've only heard about a couple of Tesla Mega chargers, which is their brand name for the charging stations that will charge these trucks, which presumably need a lot more power than a car.

So these megachargers can supply more power.

But I assume we'll hear more on December 1.

I'm assuming Pepsi is going to maybe use them at first on some specific route, and they must already be building chargers for either end or something like that.

But we'll just keep an eye on the story because there's massive potential in transporting the trucking industry to electric.

It's going to be a big, big deal.

The trucking industry creates a lot of our pollution.

What is your Spec prediction for the Tesla semi supercharger mega charger? Rather well.

I can't recall the numbers, but it's going to have to be two or three times faster than the car charges, I would assume.

I think that it will come in under 350 kw, which is existing technology, and they'll have three of them.

The battery pack will be split into three or four, and you put on three.

You're a trucker, you're on the job.

You're not a guy on vacation going to the bathroom or the gas station washer.

You're just going to plug in three things and then walk away, which is you can do that with diesel, but it's not that easy.

It's a little scary.

You can't light a cigarette.

You can't make sure everything's going okay.

No, we should get more information soon.

And I also just quickly want to mention another story that was on electric this week written by Jameson Dow.

And the headline of the story is, I took a 2200 miles electric road trip with no preparation.

What's the big deal? So this is a Tesla that he took on a 2200 miles road trip, kind of at the spur of the moment.

And I just wanted to mention it because he sort of came up with a new way of talking about the charging time, because on this big trip, 2200 miles, he said they only spent 25 minutes waiting for the car to charge.

And what he means by that is anytime they stopped and they were having a meal, for instance, and the car is charging, they didn't count that time.

He only counted the time where all they were doing was waiting for the car to charge.

And I thought that was a really clever way to do it.

So, obviously, it would have been two or 3 hours worth of charging.

But only 25 minutes of that was them actually waiting for the car to finish charging, because the rest of it is kind of like free time.

It's like, well, you have to eat anyway.

You have to go to the washroom anyway.

Why would you count that as charging time? So only 25 minutes of waiting for a 2200 miles road trip? Yeah, that's an interesting way of looking at it.

Another way I would do it is because I make a certain trip, say, to Calgary, which is a day long trip, I know where I stop and how long I take.

And I just add time onto that.

How much more time is it? And 25 minutes for money and convenience of an electric car is not that bad.

Plus, smell the flowers once in a while.

Plus, it's only going to get better.

I mean, that 25 minutes is going to be eradicated with technology that will be on the street less than five years from now, I'm sure, if not even now.

Yeah, for sure.

All right, so some more automotive news here.

So, just a couple of weeks ago, porsche Group split itself off from the Volkswagen Group as a separate IPO and is on the stock market.

It took a bit of a dip right after the IPO, but it sort of climbed back up again.

So Porsche is now valued at €84 billion, making it technically worth more than Volkswagen itself.

So I don't know if that trend is going to continue or not, but I think there's some excitement around this because of the Porsche Taycan.

It's not a perfect car by any means, but people love driving Porsche.

For me, I take one.

I wouldn't kick it out of bed.

No, it's a good looking car.

It's a great looking car.

Performance is excellent.

So I think the high valuation is indicative of the hopes for that.

I think that the electrification of Porsche is going to go well.

Ferrari is also another kind of example to look at.

Ferrari went public a few years ago as a way to kind of raise money for the brand.

And that's done really well for Ferrari.

It's obviously a smaller player and they make fewer things, but they make good profits, like Ferrari makes money on every car.

And so I think that's the hope is that the electrification there's maybe some synergies with a brand like Ferrari.

This worked for Ferrari.

This is what's going on with Porsche, making it one of the most valuable companies in Europe at this point.

As an investor, have you considered it? No, I'd have to do a little bit more research and kind of see how this shakes out.

But the Clean Energy Show does not provide investment device advice.

Gambling advice? Yes.

Sports gambling, that sort of thing come right to us.

Sure.

You must play.

I feel, Brian, like, we lose listeners when I criticize Yvonne Musk, but you have to talk about him because he's running the world now.

He's left Tesla, which is your retirement depends on, I'll remind you.

And he's doing all these stupid things, like supposedly talking to Putin about world peace, although he denied it today.

But there was someone who came to a news organization that said that he was and the whole Kanye thing and antisemitism.

Well, not directly, but I'm counting the days until Elon Musk has something really, really bad that's going to be hard for even you to take.

Yeah, well, there's a list on Wikipedia of, like, the top 50 Twitter accounts.

Like the top Twitter accounts and the many followers.

Of course, Musk is getting up there, very close to the top 50 million followers or something, but there's I don't know, he's like the only one on the list that's a troll.

And a certain US president is still on the list even though his Twitter account is no longer active.

And so if he was still on Twitter, then there'd be two trolls on that list.

But I don't know, sometimes you just can't feed the trolls, James.

No, and maybe we are now, but I predict bad things that he's going to on Twitter, and it's going to be he's going to put unpleasant people on there that I don't want to be back on.

There's going to be some terrible things said that I don't want to be said.

And large swathes of human beings are being targeted, and I don't know how they feel.

As a white male, I get to a free ride on most of this stuff.

But I mean, come on.

It's a very weird thing because, of course, yeah, a lot of people think of it as a free speech issue, that you shouldn't kick anyone off Twitter because everyone's deserving free speech.

But, like, you have free speech on the street in your hometown, everybody's kind of allowed to do what they want, but not in a shopping mall.

Like, a shopping mall is a private enterprise.

It's a private business.

You don't have free speech when you're in a shopping mall.

And really, you know, Twitter, Facebook, all these things, they're more like a shopping mall than they are like the actual public square.

So I've always found that debate kind of weird, because, of course, yeah, you can't have people saying anything you want on Twitter because it's nauseating and you'll revolt your customers.

Yeah.

I don't know.

I'm not looking forward to the future.

I should be, but I'm not, you know? So let's get to a segment of what James learned.

The intro to this segment was lost at a computer crash of six months ago.

Oh, no.

What you have to imagine in your mind I learned this week, Brian, that power lines, during outage events, where one thing goes down and power lines, more power has to go through the lines that exist.

That when they reach 80% of their capacity and above, which happens in these events, then they get warm, and when they get warm, they don't start on fire, but they expand, and then that allows them to SAG down the longer they are and hit a tree and sure, it out, and it causes more power outages.

Wow.

So I was looking into the power outage of 2003.

Were you in Toronto for that? I was.

That was crazy, with the whole East Coast went up.

Yeah.

Did you have a night of darkness in Toronto? Yeah, I think so.

I can't remember how long it lasted, but I was working on a film at the time.

We were making an animated film in this studio down the street from me, and we'd done a power tap into the sometimes when you make a film, you can tap into the power lines and bypass the power box in the house if you need more power.

So we thought we had cost a blackout.

Oh, how would you possibly do that? I don't understand.

Well, we had just done it, and the power went out and stopped speaking.

Right now, breaking news.

Brian Stockton causes the great power outage.

You don't cost them $10 billion.

How do you go to a power line and bypass things like well, power comes from the power line into the house, and then it goes into your, like, the power meter and your breaker.

So when you're a film production, you can bypass all that when you need more.

Wouldn't that kill you? You're not climbing a pole for your animated film.

Well, you have to have, like, a registered electrician do it, but it is possible.

And did you need more power for your animated film? It's an animated film.

This is the old days when we had big movie lights and yeah, we did.

We needed.

There's no LEDs.

No, this was 2003.

This was forever.

New lights are now Led for the most part.

You could change the color and do things like that you don't have to worry about, because even in film school, you're worrying about killing breakers.

You'd blow breakers all the time, and the fridge will go out, and people be mad when you're shooting at their house.

Yeah, because you certainly like most of the breakers in houses in North America, like 2000 watts is about the biggest that you can power off your breaker box.

But the movie lights are typically going to be more than 2000 watts, so you got to bypass the breaker box.

So you were too busy.

You don't remember being outside? Well, yeah, we were in I just wondered what it was like because Toronto, you never get to see the stars, right? Yeah, I mean, we probably could see the stars.

I don't quite recall.

But, you know, the news footage is people were on the streets because it was a hot night and they were just talking to each other and socializing the ways and they didn't know Facebook was coming and all that stuff.

So it was before those days.

But even then we were starting to sort of not talk to each other anymore.

It was mostly kind of fun.

From what I remember.

There wasn't any widespread looting or anything, so it was just kind of a cool event that everyone I'm not sure I wouldn't lose right now just to make up for my car expenses.

Anyway, we debuted a new segment last week called The Tweet of the Week.

Yes, I like certain tweets that really stand out to me during my week on Twitter, which may come to an end.

We'll see.

So this is from carbon tracker, which I highly recommend with taco solar panels and farmland.

Because Brian, as you know, the new Prime Minister of the UK says that she doesn't like all the solar panels on farmland taking away from farmland.

So that's raised an issue with the right.

It's because she's dumb.

Dum dum dum dum dum dum dum with talk of solar panels and farmland, a reminder, the land required for solar panels alone to provide all the global energy, like everything, cars, trucks, heat, everything with just solar panels and nothing else is zero 3% of the global land area or 450,000 solar panels.

With current technology, by the way, they're getting better.

They'll need less land in the future, we figure, so that's but here's the thing, that sounds like a lot, not a lot to save the planet, but it's less than the current land footprint of fossil fuel infrastructure.

So all these oil people who will come up to you and say, because I heard this from my son, because he heard it from other people, so he repeated it to me.

How much loan is solar going to take up? How much does a pipeline by my house goes on for? Hundreds of kilometers? Hundreds? No, there's a huge field behind your house and nothing can be built.

No, because the golfers can't even live there because they poison them.

The golfers would much prefer solar panels, I guarantee you.

They live in a shade, eat the grass, they have a fence around them.

They'd love a solar farm.

In fact, if I came back as a gopher, that's what I'm going to do.

I'm going to find me a solar farm and go live there.

Beautiful.

So we like to hear from you.

Contact us at the clean energy show.

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We had a speak voicemail last week and I said that we would read the guy's birthday.

Sean and Ireland.

Was it Dublin? Or Belfast? I can't remember.

Dublin, Belfast, damage.

Ireland.

It's probably a huge difference.

He's getting mad at us right now, but I'm thinking, of course he doesn't want his birthday on the show.

I mean, what are we going to do? His mother's maiden name, too? We're just going to give a personal information to the masses.

Of course not.

Yes.

So, yeah.

Well, happy birthday whenever it is.

So, Brian's, the second anniversary of the lightning round.

So let's get retro.

The clean Energy show.

Lightning round.

The lightning round hits James against Brian in a flurry of headlines from this week's news.

Let's begin here now, jane Greenham, you remember this used to be a contest to be buzzers if you did respond with some sort of a reply.

Remember the good old days, Brian? Remember them? Yeah, the good old days.

So, here we go.

We mentioned this earlier.

CATL expects a net profit of $1.37 billion in the third quarter.

That's a net.

So just in net profit.

Net, yeah, profit.

Batteries.

No, they're going to shriek away and not build 10 million more gigafactories.

Come on, people.

Carbon tracker says that UK gas imports will be 13% lower if successive Conservative led governments had not, quote, unquote, cut the green crap over the past decade.

So, yeah, we praised Boris for doing a few good things and supporting Wind, but ultimately we did cut a lot of green crap, as they called it.

But now, if they hadn't done that 13% lower imports of gas from Russia and just overall, 13% less if they hadn't done that, but they did.

So you're wrong to do that.

Just wrong.

Inside EVs, the Nissan Leaf sales noted the worst third quarter ever.

You know why? I want to guess why.

The Nissan Leaf doesn't compete anymore.

For one thing, it doesn't doesn't have liquid cooling.

You can't charge the battery three times on the highway consecutively.

You can't use it in Arizona without worry of degradation.

And people who are loyal to the Nissan brand have the area to buy.

So they're buying that.

They're not buying the leaf.

So there was only 1276 Leaf sales.

That's almost 46% less than in Q, three of last year and the lowest third quarter results ever.

Remember when Carlos gong.

Scottish gong.

Carlos is now in jail in Spain or somewhere.

Yeah, I've lost track of that story.

But he was corrupt.

Didn't he have to get out of Japan in a crazy yeah, it was interesting.

He stuck himself out of Japan, but he started the program and said, we're going to sell millions of them.

This is in the documentary.

Who killed the electric car? The Revenge of Electric Car.

The follow up documentary.

He said that, but then he also said that, well, we'll be ready if EVs take off.

Well, they're kind of not.

With two offerings that are not huge value proposals, how is the area going to compare to the Chevrolet Equinox, which is 300 US? How is it going to compare? Now? It's a pretty strict barebones unit.

Probably you're getting for 300, but that's a big price difference.

The size is complementary.

It's pretty much the same.

So the Leaf shares of Nissan's total volume has decreased to all Nissan sold, which is not good at all.

Yeah, for all time sake.

That's for not saying anything.

For Reuters, nuclear power is looking extremely expensive compared to renewable energy.

And the cost of generating solar ranges from well onshore.

Wind power comes in at $29, a little bit less to $56 per megawatt hour.

Nuclear, 112 to 189.

It's ridiculous.

Yeah.

That's not competitive at all.

Greta Tunberg was on a show getting interviewed today, saying, asking about nuclear, and she said, no, if it exists, that's a good idea.

Don't shut it down.

Shutting down is bad idea, especially if you replaced it with coal, which they are.

But the wisdom of the youth, yes, that is a big it's four times as much right now and the difference is going to widen.

From Eco Watch, the growth in wind and solar in the first half of 2022 prevented a 4% increase in fossil fuel generation.

Yeah.

So we tend to need more power every year, but this year it was completely offset by the renewables that were created.

So that's fantastic.

It is fantastic, isn't it? Fast Fact.

It's time for a clean energy show.

Fast fact.

Solar energy and wind energy generated more than 10% of Ontario's total electricity supply in 2021.

 

That's solar and wind.

We're not talking hydro here.

Solar and wind, 10%.

Ontario grid is pretty clean.

It's getting there.

It's getting there.

The world's largest offs.

Our wind farm is going to get even larger and will provide enough electricity to power of all UK homes with a five gigawatt output, that's like five nuclear reactors.

So, yeah, the wind farm, the biggest one in the world, is off this course of the UK and it's going to get even bigger.

And one in five, more than one in five homes will be powered can be powered by wind, just like that.

And we're not talking.

It's amazing.

This is crazy.

Shell is the new official partner for the next eight years for British cycling.

A lot of people, Brian, are not happy about it.

They are sponsoring the well, they just call the British Cycling was the Cycling Association for Sports Cycling, and they don't see it as a good brand.

Fit and everybody else who might want to sponsor Brady Cycling is running away, so that's not good.

Canadian doctors are exposing a blatant green washing attempt by Canada Gas Association.

This is the commercials that we have to watch on cable news in Canada.

They are filing a $10 million complaint against an ad campaign promoting natural gas as clean, affordable, sustainable energy.

How is it sustainable? Sorry to wake you up there, but what the hell? Where do they get these things from? How is natural gas cleaner than coal? That's coal? Sure.

We're not living in 18 hundreds london, come on.

When gas is worse than coal and it pollutes the air, the water, the lungs, those carcinogens, why are they doing this? Why? Yes.

That's from the energy mix.

To reach net zero emissions by 2050 and limit global warming to one five degrees Celsius, investment in renewable energy sources must surpass finance flows to fossil fuels by a factor of four over the next decade.

Says BNF Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

Well, I can see it happening naturally anyway.

Do you have any argument with that, that it's going to happen that way? No.

That sounds about right.

From Professor Peter Stretchen.

Solar energy saved Europeans $29 billion this summer.

Solar alone.

$29 billion through all of Europe because of cheaper electricity.

Yes.

And of course, there's been very high energy prices in Europe this summer, so without the solar, it would have cost everybody 29 billion more.

And, Brian, that's a lot of money.

I don't care how much Tesla stock you have, you have to admit, $29 billion is a lot of money, and it's about 29 times what I need.

So we found out from the floods in Florida that Tesla's automatically opened their windows and doors if there's water detected inside the car.

Did you see that story? No, I didn't.

Apparently, cars that got flooded popped up the doors and windows, but apparently they've rumored to have this feature for ten years.

Audience porsche are also rumored to have had the safety feature for a while now.

Here's a sketch.

When we drive along farm roads and then we look at our cell phone, roll the car and end up in a dugout, which is a pond made for the farm of water, and people drown.

Happens every year.

And some people, in fact, some people carry special tools for breaking the window because you can't open the door to the car.

That's the problem.

The door won't open because of the difference in pressure until your car is filled completely with water.

And by then, it's like, if this doesn't work, you're dead.

So there's even been a story of somebody who carried one of those tools and actually ended up using it a couple of years ago and got out that way.

My wife bought something at Costco with these flashlights because our sons on the highway a lot bought him that and has one of those tools built in for the breaks down or something like that.

He's already used it once.

Yeah, that's interesting that they would do that.

And it seems like all cars, that's a great safety feature because that's something that I actually think about and we thought about with our kids.

So it reduces the pressure so that you should be able to even though there's going to be water rushing in, you should be able to then open the door.

And sometimes it's different if you have well, nobody has a manual window anymore, the ones that you crank.

But the idea is that these will do that and the water is detected inside the car, not outside the car.

By the way, Siemens has set a record with their SG 14 offshore wind turbine prototype.

So I'm assuming that's 14 SG 14 has 14 in it.

The turbine has produced 359 megawatt hours within a 24 hours time period.

That is the most power one turbine has ever produced over this duration.

And that is enough energy to drive in an EV 1.8 million km made from one turbine in 124 hours period.

That's a lot.

And finally this week, we are all amazed by the prospect of Tesla owners waking up to a better car thanks to over the air updates.

Remember that there is a thing where you get over the air updates on a Tesla.

It hooks to your WiFi in your home and update the software.

Like, say your phone operating system would update overnight.

And sometimes you have better cars, sometimes you have better performance.

Like the unleash more of the battery to you or more of the zero to 60 time has got a point shaved off of it, or something like that while they're doing it.

I get them all the time.

And it's great.

They're doing this with an Ebike.

Okay.

Has released an over the air performance update for their Ranger Ebike.

So that must be an expensive Ebike if it's got over the air updates.

But apparently it is a 50% performance boost thanks to over the air updates.

It's just amazing.

Well, maybe they can get around regulations that way.

Because there are regulations in certain places about the amount of power.

So you could sell it at one particular power level and then you just crank it up.

Yeah, maybe, I don't know.

That's our time for this week.

We're going to leave you now, but we'll be back again next week.

We'd love to hear from you again.

[email protected].

Send us an email right now.

Let us know what you're thinking.

Twitter, TikTok, clean Energy Pod don't forget to check out our YouTube channel, et cetera, et cetera.

If you're new to the show, and I know you are, some of you subscribe to the podcast, get our show every week because we're here every day a week.

Brian we're there.

We're there for our people.

So subscribe to the podcast app and get them every week.

We'll see you next time.

Yeah, see you next week.

A small town in Alberta thinks solar panels give off radiation and won't allow an important fast charger be built. But a small Saskatchewan Co-op embraces electrifcation and kindness!

Link to video version of the commercial we made for the Riverbend Co-op in Davidson, Saskatchewan to thank them for support electric vehicles.

Small modular nuclear reactors will not solve climate change. Loblaws has deployed fully driverless trucks on city streets in Toronto. The upcoming Tesla Cybertruck will work as a boat for short periods of time.

• My first repair to my 10 year old Nissan LEAF
• The green community that survived Hurricane Ian and kept the lights on
• India’s home-grown ten thousand dollar EV
• And in spite of supply chain constraints, EV sales are on track to where they need to by by their 2030 benchmark for global warming
• Brian and I welcome the long-awaited 3rd party charging to a much needed location where we live. And it has soft serve ice cream!

Thanks for listening to our show! Consider rating The Clean Energy Show on iTunes, Spotify or wherever you listen to our show.

Follow us on TikTok! Check out our YouTube Channel!

Follow us on Twitter!

Your hosts: James Whittingham https://twitter.com/jewhittingham Brian Stockton: https://twitter.com/brianstockton

Email us at [email protected]

Leave us an online voicemail at http://speakpipe.com/cleanenergyshow

Transcript

Yesterday, the governor announced that all new cars purchased in New York State will be zero emission cars, which is what lawmakers in California mandated in our state last month.

This will take effect starting in 2035, if we make it to 2035.

And while it's never going to be the same when a cabbie's yelling you to go F yourself from a Nissan Leaf, it's definitely for the best.

Hello, and welcome to episode 133 of the Clean Energy Show.

I'm Brian Stockton.

I'm James Woodtingham.

This week, small modular nuclear reactors will not solve climate change.

This in spite of the fact one powers Brian's $1700 expression machine.

It was only 1400.

Loblaws has deployed fully driverless trucks on city streets.

In Toronto, there is still a human in the passenger seat.

Just as a courtesy so other drivers have someone to give the finger to.

We reveal the stupidest place in North America, and it's not wherever Donald Trump is.

The upcoming Tesla Cyber truck will work as a boat for short periods of time.

If it floats, maybe it can toss a lifeline to the Tesla stock price.

Oh, all that admora this edition of the a Clean Energy Show.

Brian, we also have this week my first repair.

My knees are leaf.

It's ten years old.

And in spite of supply chain constraints, EV sales are back on track where they need to be by their 2030 benchmark for global warming targets.

And Brian and I welcomed the long awaited third party charging to a much needed location where we live.

And it has soft serve ice cream.

Wow.

I can give it the charging long charging sessions with lots of ice cream.

All right, so update on my house.

We spray foam the ceiling in our kitchen, and it was, like, super messy and dusty for about a week, but the drywallers have finished, so that's now all sealed up, well, drywallers.

They have to keep coming back and back over and over again, don't they? Yeah.

They don't have to spend a whole day.

They come, they do some mudding, they have to let it dry, and they come back and sand do a bit more mudding.

So the whole thing took about eight days, which wasn't too bad, but the kitchen was kind of closed off with sheets of plastic, and so we had kind of limited access to our kitchen, which was annoying, but that's now all done.

And then next week, they're going to do the other half where the living room is, and so it continues.

So we'll have a very wellinsulated ceiling, which is great.

Did you eat out a lot? We did a lot of door dashing and that kind of thing.

What's your favorite during that time period? Bar burrito.

I'm a big fan of bar burrito.

What kind of food is that? Mexican burritos and tacos.

So what specifically did you eat? I need to know.

Ground beef burrito.

Ground beef burrito.

Classic.

Nothing too fancy.

Nothing too unusual.

But you're Taco Time fan, but you like that.

Tell me about that.

Yeah, I think, Barbara, it's a little bit more like real food, really.

TacoTime is very fast foody kind of thing.

But how much more expensive would you say it was? Not 20%.

Maybe I should try it.

They have multiple locations or just one? No, multiple locations.

Let's do it.

Barbaros well, we could use a sponsorship on the show, too.

Please reach out.

Barbarito.

Oh, I have another one.

Milu.

Vietnamese place.

It's been here a while, but I just discovered it.

Fantastic.

Vietnamese vermicelli, noodle bowls.

Love it.

Amazing.

I guess we both got the Bivalent vaccine.

Is that what's yeah, I had a lot of side effects.

I might still be feeling that after a week.

It was mainly one day, but I kind of felt good the second day.

But then when I actually did something and then when I mean did something, I mean, go to the fridge or something, I didn't have a lot of stamina.

Like, it wore down fairly quickly.

It's a good thing I wasn't employed or something.

Yeah.

So yesterday we had wonderful news because we've talked about the two cities in the province where we live is Regina and Saskatoon.

They're two and a half hours away.

My son is up there now, coming back on Friday, and he's going to school there.

We make lots of trips.

You make lots of trips.

You make more trips than most people do out there.

And it's a great, stupidly great city.

It's just I don't know if I've told this story before, but the ones I was doing a madly off in All Directions, a CBC radio comedy series, a one off where I was guesting on stage at the Broadway Theater in front of 500 people with my comedy partner.

And we naively.

We both grew up in Regina, the sister city kind of, to that city.

And we said, we're from Regina, and the whole place booed us.

Why? Why would they do that? I had no idea that they hated us just because we have the center of government here.

I mean, they have everything else.

And my assessment of the situation is the people in Saskatoon have a rivalry with Vagina, but the Regina people don't care.

I've always considered them superior.

Why would they care? Why would they not just pity us now? They're much bigger.

When I was a kid, they were smaller than us.

That's right.

So the halfway point is a town called Davidson, Saskatchewan, and it got a Tesla V, three supercharger stalls a few years ago, right? Two or three years ago.

Yeah, about three years ago, which changed life for Tesla's.

People like you could easily go to Saskatoon and top up for the hell of it, or use it in very cold weather when your range is reduced and give you security.

It was one of the reasons I bought my Tesla.

Was it made that trip by there was no third party charger there for three years.

And we've been begging everyone online.

I've been Tweeting A and W who says there's these cluster of different businesses.

There Tim Hortons, the Esso station, which is one thing at a Dairy Queen, and then there's a across the street there's an ANW, which I sometimes go to.

You've gone to the and w, sure you've gone.

You've probably done everything there.

But up the road there's a Coop gas station, and that's where the supercharger is.

That's kind of the Prairie Gas Station, one of the brands that also run grocery stores.

So they have that.

But they just announced yesterday that they're getting the flow charges, which are 100 kilowatt.

Before, these gas stations had different branded chargers, which are 50 kilowatt.

And they were always broken, like always.

Yeah, the Coop branded ones, yeah.

So apparently these flow chargers are, I'm told by the EV Association, a lot more rock solid because it's something we talk about on the show all the time, is the reliability of charging non Teslas like non Tesla charging networks are terrible.

And I hear that all the time, especially in the States.

It's no different.

So I naively expressed regret online yesterday that I wished it was at the place where I go, which is the AEW, and I don't go to the Tim Hortons, but it seems like I might because I enjoy the Tim Hortons donut shop in return.

And I found out that the EV people have been trying really hard for years behind the scenes to do something, and I'm not supposed to talk about what went on, but I'm very happy that the co op is in charge.

Right, but I also made a joke online when I said that.

Why isn't that this other place? They said, Are you disappointed? I said, I'm not disappointed.

The Coop responded to me and said, Are you disappointed? I said, no, but I will be reviewing your pizza.

Clearly they said they welcomed it.

Then they offered to give me free pizza.

But is it a review if they give you a free pizza? I mean, is it an honest review if you get something for free? I mean, as a clean energy food critic, I should be going in there in disguise or something.

That's just the way it is.

Yeah.

Okay, well, this is great.

I should add, too.

So Tesla has finally made the CCS adapter available for tesla vehicles in north America.

So 99% of the time, if you've got a Tesla, you're going to charge.

It a Tesla station, and there's lots of them, but other cars use the CCS connector, and the adapter is finally available in North America.

So if I were stuck some time and the Tesla supercharger wasn't working, I could get this adapter and charge at the flow or charge at the co op or whatever.

Anyway, I went to order one online and it said, oh, sorry, your car can't use this yet.

We're going to do a retrofit next year.

So cars built before a certain date are missing something that the CCS adapter doesn't work.

So my car was built just before that date.

So sometime next year there'll be a retrofit available and then I'll be able to buy one.

So they didn't sell it to me.

They're probably trying to control the number of these that go out, and since they know that my car can't use it, they wouldn't sell it.

How old is your model? Three? It's about two and a half years old.

Two and a half years.

Wow.

Time flies.

It's a quarter of a decade, Brian.

Yeah, it really has.

Yeah, I guess we had just started the podcast, I think.

Oh, right, that's true.

There was a couple of months into the pandemic and they did a touchless delivery to you.

But I'm not done with the Riverband co op in Davidson because I asked them.

I was in a discussion with my son who's going through there on Friday.

As I said, if they have fresh donuts, because the co ops are known for great donuts at grocery stores, especially in small towns, they're somehow better in small towns like that.

Yeah, for sure.

My wife's not right is maybe the best owner sake one outside of the gourmet shop.

So anyway, I asked them if they did and they said no.

But for you, though, I can say we are discussing it.

We are discussing it at the highest levels in the boardroom of the Davidson coop, whether to bring in fresh baking from the grocery store inside town.

And I said, well, give us a heads up when you're passing through.

At least we could do is get some donors to the grass bar for you.

And everyone is just so happy that because without the co op, we would not have charging in Davidson, there was no other possibility to do it.

No one willing to do it.

So this is incredibly important to EV adoption for people who not only live near there, but live anywhere else, or you're traveling through the province in that direction.

And so I'm incredibly grateful to them.

And Matthew Pointer from the Sask EV association says this is arguably one of the most important charging locations in the province.

So, Brian, what I did, I made them a commercial.

Okay? I made the Riverband coop in Davidson a commercial because they deserve it.

And here it is.

Come to the Riverband Coop gas bar in beautiful Davidson, Saskatchewan, conveniently located on scenic highway eleven.

Enjoy our pristine citrus, citrus washrooms as you stop to charge your Tesla, one of our lightning fast superchargers.

And for our nontech industry friends, we are pleased to announce 100 kilowatt flow chargers coming in January.

If you're still driving a gasguzzler, be assure that we here at coop sell only talk to your gasoline made to the highest Canadian standards.

While you're here, satisfy your cravings with fresh cut veggies and sandwiches lovingly made at our grocery store just for you.

Or twist it up with a smoothie by mixing a slushy soft drink of your choice with ice cream.

Why pee anywhere else? The River Band.

Coop in Davidson.

More than a gas bar to heavenly oasis on a long road home.

This commercials have improved by riverbank Coop flow charges 23 no responsible price screen trips on your floor of the seats.

Very nice.

So there you go.

Free commercial for the Riverband Coop.

Put that online, too, in video form.

Thank you, Riverband Coop, for being good people.

Yeah.

And Davidson, Saskatchewan, they still have a newspaper as of a couple of years ago, and they were having a contest to give away the newspaper.

I don't know if you remember that I considered, yeah, and you're supposed to write a letter and whoever writes the best letter would get the newspaper.

I don't know what ever happened with that.

Maybe somebody knows.

We'll have to Google.

We have a lot of local people listening.

Okay, another personal news.

The Leaf I had to take in to get fixed because I determined for a long time now, almost a year, that I had this tire noise.

And I thought it was because my original tires were wearing out, they were becoming bald, and I thought, okay, no trad, they're becoming noisy, bought new tires, but they were cheap.

They were half the price of the tires that you're supposed to buy.

And so I thought, okay, well, it's a bit better, but it's still pretty noisy, and then I get noisier noiser.

So I determined through online sleuthing that it's my bearings, my wheel bearings on my front left wheel, and because it gets noisier when you steer in one direction than the other.

So I did that.

But there's no place my Nissan dealership doesn't service EVs.

And I looked up on how to do this repair, and you do have to kind of take one of the EV motor drive components out of the wheel hub, because it's a whole not just the actual little tiny bearing, but whole hub of bearings that has to be replaced, any specialized torque tools in order to do this.

And I considered it, but then I thought, no.

And anyway, I got the price from a place called okay Tire on Park Street in Regina.

Because they are certified, they actually sent their people away to the United States to get training in servicing EVs and hybrids.

Whereas the one Nissan dealership we have here and even several around us don't do they're not certified to do TVs.

Even though Nissan sells the Leaf for well, minecar is ten years old, and twelve years ago they started selling them.

So it was frustrating, but I took it there on the advice of others, and I wasn't happy with how it went because it's $1,400 for the front two hubs.

And I thought it was just one hub, but they say, oh, no, the other one's going to be making noise as well.

And also they charge you, like, $200 just to diagnose things.

Okay.

Right.

It could be $200 to diagnose it.

But then they diagnose everything on your car and get a big print out to make sure that everything else is okay.

And they don't need to spend money fixing it out of your money.

So that's complimentary.

But the diagnose the problem is up to $200.

So it's just BS.

And I hate dealerships, and I can't afford it.

So I'm in a pickle because my kid, my youngest, is going on a trip, a school trip to Quebec because we sent the first one.

And as soon as we send the first one somewhere and my wife, by the way, wanted to set up the Uruguay was it Ecuador or Ecuador? To the ecological things out there.

And I said, we do this.

It's twice as much as you think it is because we have to send the other kid.

There's no way of not sending the other kid.

It doesn't work that way.

So whatever you do for one, you do for the other.

And so we're doing that for her now, and we have to get her to raise money.

But they don't raise very much.

And it's got to be a hard, economical year.

Bad timing.

That's too bad.

And I'm giving away free commercials to cooperate anyhow that's that the car is supposed to be done.

The beautiful thing is I've lost the EV joy because it's noisy.

It's not giving me the luxury.

And I can't wait.

I can't wait, Brian, to get that back.

But I also have to get more work done on the later.

It's all related to tie rods and ball joints and stuff like that.

And they send you a little video clips, part of their app to do that, to show you the wiggle.

It's always great when you can spend money and really notice a difference.

Like, that at least makes you feel better about it.

Like our ceiling in the kitchen, it costs a fortune to do that.

And all it does is look like it's supposed to.

All it does is look like a ceiling.

You don't get any satisfaction of it suddenly somehow being better.

Right.

It just doesn't lease.

Now, this is hopefully something that I will just fall in love with again.

But I started to fall out of love with car ownership because it's been a long time since I had to deal with car repairs because we've bought new cars.

And the Leaf I've had for five years, and I haven't done anything to it.

Like, it's just there's no oil to change.

There's nothing to break down.

I did buy the new tires a year ago, but other than that, I haven't done anything.

How many kilometers on it? About 115 or something like that.

It doesn't have fast charging.

It was a rock bottom price.

So it's only been a city car for anyone.

But my family has been asking me, how long do I think it's going to go? And I don't see it not going indefinitely.

Like I said, I don't have any reason to believe it won't go indefinitely.

But if you don't do the tie rods or something, then maybe the tires are going to wear out.

Well, the car could crash, things like that.

One of the wheels could go.

I've seen people do this on the roads.

The wheel just goes all the way to one way and you get it towed.

I won't be using it on the highway, let's put it that way.

So, yeah, it's frustrating.

And I can see the joy of maybe a subscription service to a robot taxi one day where you pay $20 a month and you never have to worry about car repairs because that is the biggest pain in the butt.

That's why people buy newer cars.

No, that's the future for sure.

I mean, yeah, that's so much simpler.

I've been talking about the pipeline plane that flies over my house.

And then we got into it and I mentioned that there was a crash 13, 2013.

And then there was one between our last two episodes of our podcast.

Well, curiously, there's been no pipeline plane since that crash.

So I got to feel weird about that because I feel like I have a connection with them because I'm in the mespeedo floating in the pool.

God knows we've had some intimate contact.

You've never seen me in my Speedo.

These people have, and now they're gone.

They're perished.

So I just feel or maybe they've rounded pipeline planes or I don't know.

But on the other hand, on the flip side, who's looking at my pipeline to see if it's not being inspected? Yeah.

So that's kind of concerning for me as well.

So here's a bit of trivia for you.

In the year my Leaf was made, 2013, 130,000 EVs were sold globally that whole year.

Brian yeah.

Now more than that are being sold every week in the world.

And that road, of course, is expanding rapidly.

That's fantastic.

That's great to hear.

So my Leaf is like almost I've seen it referred to in videos on YouTube now by car reviewers as kind of like the Model T of EVs because it was the first mass produced it was produced even before Tesla's Model S.

It was really the first mass produced EV in the world.

So it's iconic, maybe worse, something someday.

And I wanted to get to some updates to some stories that we've covered in the past.

And we were talking about hurricanes in Florida and Will Walker in Florida.

He was happily charging his allelectric Chevy bolt at a gas station charger while all the gas pumps were roped off, not because of electricity.

The gas station was on a gas? Yes.

And you can't just snap your fingers and get more gas in when there's a hurricane.

So these places and we found this in the maritimes of Canada when Hurricane Fiona went through a couple of weeks ago.

Gas stations are out of gas because everybody wants their generator running and everything.

Right.

Well, this is another reason gas stations don't operate with electricity during these situations, but they often don't operate when they do have electricity because they are out of gas.

But he had electricity there and he was happily charging away.

So he says, I can't count all the times that people ask me about what do you do when the power goes out? So it's just a joke to people who own TVs.

Yeah.

The New York Times, Florida, the post hurricane here, Jerry Jewelsk waited for about 6 hours to fill up for cans of gas.

He was frustrated.

Where is all the fuel? He asked.

Every gas station or filling station was supposed to, under Florida law, have a generator prepared to go at all times.

But that did not happen.

Wow.

In a news conference a couple of Saturdays ago, mr.

DeSantis, or Satan, as I like to call him, said 1.6 million gallons of fuel had been removed pardon me? Had been moved to southwest Florida.

But he acknowledged that some stations may not have had the electricity to operate their pumps.

I'm laughing if you're in Florida, I'm not laughing at you.

I'm laughing at the whole freaking idea and stupid things that happen.

You need both.

You need the fuel and you need the electricity.

And on the electric car side, you just need the electricity.

We've been talking about India a lot over the course of our podcast episodes, and we have concerns over the air quality and how great it would be for EVs to move in there.

Well, Tata Motors, one of India's largest vehicle manufacturers, has announced a new Made in China pardon me, a new Made in India electric five door hatchback starting around $10,000 US.

And it only has a 19.2 kilowatt hour battery with only 3.2 charging.

That's kind of what my car is now.

Started at 24.

That's kind of your leaf range and charging speed.

Look at this.

It's supposed to have a range of 250 km.

Yeah, well, I've made improvements since your car was made.

Well, I'm thinking A is pretty darn light and it may not have an airbag and seatbelts or high tension steel or anything to protect the person.

I don't know.

I'm being kind of cynical about it.

Yeah, but as we talked about, there's a lot of, like, two stroke engine vehicles in India.

Small mopeds and motorcycles and stuff like that.

And those things cause extra pollution.

So if those kind of small vehicles, which is what this is going to sort of replace, can go electric, this will go a long way to improving the air quality in India.

So for around 14, 500, US.

Drivers can upgrade to a 24 kilowatt hour battery.

That is what my car wasn't doing.

But 315 range and 7.2 kilowatt charging, which is twice my car now.

So that's I don't know, man.

Maybe I should go to Indian, buy a car.

Parts will be hard to get.

Yeah.

So driverless trucks in Toronto, we have reported on this before, but there's sort of more updates for it.

So there are level four autonomous trucks, which began in August after the Ministry of Transportation approved them after a big audit.

So this is Lablaws, the grocery chain from Canada, and they've got five routes going between Labs retail stores and a micro fulfillment center.

So you can order your groceries online, go to this place, and pick them up.

And this appears to be moving the groceries from the stores to this pickup center.

So they've got five routes and five trucks.

They are now driving fully autonomously.

They do still have a human driver in the passenger seat.

I'm not sure why he doesn't just sit in the driver's seat just in case they're showing off, but they say they have a safety record so far.

This has been going on for quite a while now.

And the person in the passenger seat is just there kind of as a courtesy.

And also from feedback from the police department and the fire department, who said in case they need to pull the truck over, they wanted a human to interact with.

And that does make sense.

And of course, these are electric, and they can charge at sort of both ends of their trip, and that's what they do.

And they're planning to expand this to something like 15 trucks in the near future.

So, yeah, level four autonomous trucks.

So this is Geofenced.

They can only go on these specific routes.

They couldn't just snap their fingers and expand this to other markets or other cities.

They've carefully mapped out these routes.

And the trucks take the same routes every day, but still quite remarkable that it is totally working.

And they've driven tons of miles with these things, and 100% safe so far.

Teller me surprised.

I'm actually quite surprised by that, especially if you told me it was Los Angeles docks or something, I would believe you.

But I'm surprised it's Toronto.

Yes, Toronto streets can be kind of busy and crazy.

That's an understatement.

And some of the worst streets, worst traffic in North America.

But you just start thinking about the math for this in terms of business.

So not only are you saving on fuel because it's electric instead of gasoline or diesel, and then saving on the driver.

And just imagine, as this slowly rolls out and expands, the amount of money that can be saved by so many businesses.

Expect your grocery prices to go down, thanks to freedom of energy in the world like that.

And I do use their service in our city.

It's PC Express.

How's that work? It works well.

You order online, you pick up.

We have had it delivered one time.

All right.

I have an update from the International Energy Agency and EVs are now at 13% of all new car sales globally this year.

That's world market share.

That's fantastic.

I didn't know we were there yet.

That is an inflection point, Mr.

Stockton.

We are toying with inflection rates here.

It's doubled since last year, so that has not been happening.

It's taken more than two years to double.

A little bit more than two years.

But now doubling in a year is not two years.

So it's like 1718 months or something.

Something weird like that.

Like a year and a half.

But now it's a year and we are on track.

According to the IEA of reaching when they did the Paris Climate Accord, we need to do this, this and this to reach our climate targets.

While the number of EVs on the road by 2030 was a checkpoint goal and they have saying that we are on track for it, in fact, we're better than on track.

Areas not on track include improving the energy efficiency of building designs, developing clean and efficient district heating.

That's when you hit like a heat.

A neighborhood with one heating system phasing out coal powered generation.

That's a little behind.

Eliminating methane flaring, shifting aviation and shipping to cleaner fuels and making cement, chemical and steel production cleaner.

That's from CNBC.

Yes.

So the transportation sector doing well.

These other sectors, not so well.

Yeah, but it's encouraging because we live in a place where there's so much cynicism about EVs that it's always good to see these stories.

Yeah, that's great.

All right, we have several Tesla stories this week.

The first was, of course, they had AI day 2022, where they had a big presentation, basically a recruitment event.

They're trying to convince people to come work for Tesla and work on their artificial intelligence stuff.

They demonstrated the prototype of the Tesla bot.

I didn't watch the whole thing because it was like three or 4 hours long.

I watched a condensed 20 minutes version.

So the robot doesn't do that much.

So the stock market and casual observers were not for you.

Was the robot more human than Elon Musk? Yes, it was okay.

But I don't know if you had any thoughts about the Tesla bought.

I do, and I did watch a lot of it.

And I came away feeling pretty negative about Tesla and Musk and AI because there was nothing major announced.

The robots didn't impress a lot of people because who's the company? I can't remember.

The Boston Dynamics.

Boston Dynamics.

Who's been making those robots that flip and dance and they seem like years ahead.

They're not humanoid, but do we need what is the need of having a humanoid robot rather than.

Being creepy.

I don't care what the thing looks like that does my dishes.

It can look like a scorpion for all I care.

Just do my dishes, you stupid robot, and answer my door and brush my teeth.

Well, I think it's the same principle behind, like, what they're doing with selfdriving in the car.

Like, the idea behind the Tesla selfdriving car is to replicate the humans.

So humans drive with eyes in a brain.

So Tesla's taking that approach with their car cameras and a computer eyes and a brain in the car.

So my feeling would be that since the world is designed for humanoid form, that that's the most useful form for somebody who's going to do work.

Well, are you going to test an FSD Beta Tesla robot in your home and hope it doesn't break your dishwasher handle? Sure, if they want to send me one, I'll take the interesting thing is they think that one day they'll sell them for $20,000.

Seems low.

I don't know.

Does it? Brian, does the $35,000 model three seem low to you? That never happened.

It was sold for, like, a couple of weeks, I think.

Yeah, and very frustrating.

Why announce these things? You have to have faith in their AI software for cars.

We're not at that point yet.

We're having a lot of faith because things are dragging on so slowly.

It's just a super long process.

So this stuff is potentially decades away.

So what bothered me about the event was they invited all their Internet fanboys to it, so it became like a Tesla event.

Oh, you're God, present your genitals.

I wish to photograph them.

This is stupid.

I just hate that stuff.

But the whole point of the event was to recruit because they want to bring on people to recruit.

They need the best and AI people to develop this product.

It's a recruiting day, so why invite all the fanboys? I guess you get some free advertising that way.

But it just seemed I don't know, I'm pretty cynical about this, and I'm pretty cynical about Mr.

Musk, who has decided, apparently, to buy Twitter.

Yeah, it sounds like that's going through.

Yeah, and I'm not happy about that.

I'm not.

I'm not happy at all.

I mean, Twitter's not golden, but I need somewhere to go, Brian.

I can't go on Facebook.

It's not safe.

It's killing the world.

And now he's got to put what's his name back on there, the former POTUS.

And why am I going to hurricane have killed him? Why is it killing his people? See him floating away on a piece of rock anyway? I don't understand.

I'm worried.

I'm worried about the world.

And the world was quieter.

It was quieter without him on it, and now he's going to be on it and all these horrible voices of conspiracy and BS.

I don't know.

I'm not happy with Musk.

I mean, Musk is the guy I doubt for saving the world because he puts a cyber truck on stage, smashes the window, and suddenly Ford is releasing electric trucks a couple of years later.

Right.

I mean, they're in dealerships say they're at dealerships around our province, even a lot of them have moved here, I'm told.

But kudos to Ford for actually making some vehicles because the Amaqui is like, I think, the number two selling electric vehicle in North America.

No, there's actually some EVs in stock around us, and it's mostly like the Mustang and the F 150.

So, yeah, the needle has moved.

And I guess we're at 13%.

We're at a near time where they say they have the stock and they don't actually have it.

It's coming in.

It's like it's coming into somebody who's ordered it.

So unless somebody canceled their order and somebody did cancel their order for Chevy Bolt, but it was an older one and I didn't want to take it, people were pointing me towards that.

But yeah, I'm told there's a year wait list, but I mean, even that's not bad for a truck.

But I don't know.

Megapack is arriving in Hawaii, and I just wanted to mention this, mostly because we had reported on the final shipment of coal going to Hawaii a few weeks ago.

The last shipment of coal for their coal fired electricity plant, which they're going to close down.

Well, it turns out at pretty much the same time, a whole whack of Tesla Megapack batteries were delivered to Hawaii.

Hawaii's got an aggressive goal to get off fossil fuels.

I think they've got some time.

I think it was like 2045.

They're going to be 100% green.

I have a feeling they might be able to do it sooner than that.

But they have tons of solar.

Hawaii has the highest amount of solar deployed per capita, and they just need more batteries.

And they are on their way to 100% clean energy, which is great.

Yeah.

You don't hear about non Tesla companies making power packs.

I know they exist because they do exist.

Yeah, they're putting some up around us.

I don't know who's making them, though.

We don't hear about who's making them.

I don't know.

I mean, the main battery makers are probably making them, like LG and what's the other one? Panasonic? Yeah.

Or CATL.

Yeah.

I have heard other brands and their storage solutions, I just don't know off the top of my head.

Well, that's something to look forward to.

It's pretty cool that Hawaii can do that.

And most people disregard batteries.

I say this all the time.

They poopoo them like you can't power.

I know it seems far fetched because there's like thousands and tens of thousands and millions of little AA sized almost batteries, right? That power a grid.

Come on.

That's science fiction.

But they are doing it and it works.

And it meets the power fluctuations and saves them money.

Instantly saves the money.

If you're a casual observer, it probably seems absurd, but to the casual observer, I often hear hydrogen as the solution.

But solar wind and batteries, as we often say, that's all you need.

It is all you need.

Not for maybe airliners and stuff like that, but for a lot of things.

And the cybertruck musk has been talking about the cyber truck as well.

Yeah, I guess, prompted by the recent hurricanes and flooding in Florida, that the cyber truck will travel temporarily as a boat for approximately 1100ft.

Really? Yeah, it'll operate as a boat tweeted that's enough to get through a flooded underpass.

Yeah.

So we have seen this before, like with regular teslas and flooded underpasses that they can do fairly well getting through.

We did a guy in the EV association who flooded his car in saskatoon and other claims, big fat insurance claim, battery gone, ruined his battery.

So it's certainly and it's not an advertised feature, but this is now technically an advertised feature of the cyber truck that it can operate as a boat for a short period of time.

So presumably they're just thinking about this more.

I don't imagine they were thinking about it too much with the cars.

But now that they know that the cars are fairly waterproof, they've, I guess, done a little bit of extra work and, you know, cyber truck will float for a while.

Well, the rivian r 150 pickup truck, the all electric pickup truck from them, it was supposed to do a meter and a half of water, and they didn't say for how long, but they said anymore, and it floats.

So they didn't want it to float floating back.

Yeah, because then you lose control there.

Yeah.

Well, what do you do in the cyber truck? Do you take out a paddle? I mean, what do you do? I'm not sure, but they often show it with those big knobby tires.

So it's possible the big knobby tires would give you a little bit of traction and steering.

Give me the aqua tread when you're ordering tires, like summer all season and water.

Well, there was that water aqua car.

Somebody in town owns one from, like, in the 50s.

Somebody made a car that works in the car? Yes.

It's a convertible, right? Yeah, it's a convertible.

Somebody in town owns one and every once in a while drives it in our local lake, which is saying a lot.

You go down there, you're a dead person.

Because it's nasty water.

Yeah.

So it has technically been done before.

I don't know.

Maybe they could add a little propeller on the back of that because that's what the aqua car has, like the one from the 50s.

It has a little propeller at the back for one.

Floating in the car.

That would be an option, I suppose.

Maybe you could outboard it to your trailer hitch or something and just sort of put a propeller on back there.

Yeah, that would be great.

Well, I wanted to talk about it over small nuclear reactors because CBC had an article on it and there's been well, there's always lots of stuff, and I'm always reading from people.

I'm not against it.

It's just not realistic.

People love the new solutions.

We'll solve climate change with this.

This is great.

I saw a video on it.

I saw six videos on it.

It's great.

It's not great because they don't exist.

You can't go to Walmart and buy one.

You can go to Walmart and buy a solar panel.

You can go to Walmart and buy a battery.

You can go to Walmart and even buy a wind turbine in some stores.

Come on.

What we have is all we need.

And I'm not saying other things aren't good, but if they cost ten times as much for one unit of electricity, and if you don't need them, then why are you wasting your time on it? Because our government, another government, and the Ontario government as well, are investing, and they're going to waste all our money in these damn things, putting money into it, and it's also just delaying climate action.

Yeah.

So here's something.

This is Suzanne O'Donnell.

She is an adjunct professor at the University of New Brunswick and St.

Thomas University also works with a coalition for responsible energy development.

And she has been researching SMR specifically during the last two years.

And she was asked, what do you think of Saskatchewan and your province looking at building a small modular nuclear reactor? She says there's a huge leap she says diplomatically, there's a huge leap between having a design for an SMR and then getting to the point of having an engineer design where you can actually apply for a license to build one.

The most advanced design for an SMR in the US is called New Scale, and they've spent almost a billion dollars on the engineered design, and they just got a license to build it.

It's another huge leap between building a prototype that might actually work in a laboratory to getting one that actually commercially works in the real world.

Why then, she was asked, with four provinces be looking at them? And she says, I'd have to say that the decisions around SMRs, at the federal level and certainly at the provincial level, where they're all conservative provinces, are political decisions rather than based on science.

From reading peerreviewed science in three different countries, canada, the US.

And the UK.

It really doesn't make any economic sense.

However, what we have happening here is very, very powerful industry, the nuclear industry, that has a long history in Canada, and they have been lobbying like crazy to get these things off the ground, because unfortunately, nuclear power hasn't been very successful financially, especially lately.

So in New Brunswick, the Point La Puerto reactor has been a financial disaster for the province, has put US $3.6 billion in debt.

And that's what we have to look forward to in our province because of idiots.

I don't want any more debt.

I don't want to know we got enough debt.

My God.

But making stupid decisions because you want to put off the climate action and not make the woke left happy, then you gotta do what you gotta do and waste all taxpayers money and then you drive the provinces of the ground.

So I'm mad about that.

Mad, mad, mad.

So it's just bad.

I don't like it.

Okay, so I've got a story here from CP 24, which is a news outlet in the Toronto area of Canada.

I thought this, it reminded me of the Apple story that we mentioned a couple of days ago that Apple is working on software for their phones that will sort of calculate the cleanest time of the day to charge your phones.

I don't know, there's just a lot of activity around smartening up the grid.

And so what they're going to do in Ontario is pay some customers to run their air conditioning less as part of an investment in energy efficiency program.

So they're going to have networked smart thermostats in people's homes that can literally be controlled remotely by the power utility.

So when they have these days when the grid is strained and everybody's air conditioning is cranked up, if you've agreed to be part of this program, you have one of these smart meters, they're going to creep up the temperature in your house, take away some of your nice cooling airflow from your air conditioner.

And if you've got enough homes in this program and enough people willing to do it, and they will pay you to do it, like there's an incentive to do it, they'll give you some money for this.

They will just turn up your thermostat a couple of degrees and you'll use less electricity for your air conditioning.

And the more of these kind of smart grid strategies we can come up with, the more we can weather these coming storms of power supply as we kind of transition over into all clean energy.

Well, again, I'm surprised.

I'm surprised that Ontario is doing that.

And it's very interesting.

It would be interesting to see how it goes, what they learned from that.

It reminds me of the summer heat wave in California where they texted people or an emergency alert and they responded, and they responded in times when they turned down the power because they said, if you don't, then we're going to have a power outage.

I would rather have some power and maybe a couple of degrees warmer in my house than no power at all.

And that's another great tool to have.

But just imagine if somebody at the California Power Commission just has a switch where they can just turn up everybody's air conditioning.

Like just imagine how that would drop the power going to the grid, like instantly.

I'm not sure what some people would like the government coming to their homes.

But you get paid for it.

But you get paid for it, so you're compensated for it, that's the thing.

But this is kind of the future that when we talk about smart grids, we are also talking about homes where we can suck a little bit of juice out of your EV for ten minutes just to balance the grid.

And you get paid for that more than what it costs you to put it in.

So, yeah, there's all kinds of different things and if this is one of those methods, then cool.

No, and there was some progress on that in the US.

They introduced the Bidirectional Act, it was introduced in the US Senate to promote electric school buses feeding into the grid.

So I don't think this is all kind of fully plat passed or anything, but as they expand to electric school busses, they're trying to work this into the infrastructure where all of these school buses can feed into the grid.

So it's nice to have some actual legislation to support that.

Coming up in the show is the lightning Round, where we speed through the week's headlines in fast format.

Brian, I've got a surprise new segment for you this week.

What it's called? The Tweet of the week.

Oftentimes I see a great tweet that I'd like to highlight on the show.

Yeah.

This is until I leave Twitter next week, so it could be a very shortlived segment.

Here it is.

It says, you know, who isn't in denial about climate change? The entire insurance industry.

There will be entirely uninsurable areas of the populous places near coast sooner than you think.

This is from MMA, who works in the real estate industry and was reteeded by many of my climate follows on Twitter.

It's something I think about a lot in Florida, of course, top of mind because of the recent hurricane, but Florida, so many low lying areas in Florida and you just got to wonder when the real estate prices are going to hit the wall and people are going to have to retreat it.

That hasn't happened yet, as far as I know.

But, yeah, certainly I think there is already some places that are uninsurable in flood prone areas and the insurance industry doesn't mess around.

I know because my life insurance just went up last week, tripled for some reason, because they saw you eating a box of donuts and they're like, damn it, they heard me talking about Davidson Gas Station donuts and just bingo.

So my other tweet that I was considering has something to do with a politician down there saying, well, we will rebuild.

And the other person said, Why? Yeah, why would you rebuild a place that's destroyed by a hurricane? You think it's not going to happen again? I mean, these happening, they're happening more frequently and more importantly, more powerfully and slower moving and more damaging.

The same hurricanes because of climate change.

Brian, we got a whole host of feedback this week.

Sometimes the mailbag empty, dust bunnies fall out, nothing there, you know? And then sometimes it just rains, rains feedback.

So I wanted to dip into it.

Here's an email, says, hey, guys, big fan of the show from Martinsburg, West Virginia, USA.

Not all of us in mumf, Egypt, are as narrow minded as our former commander in Cheeto when it comes to the environment.

I can't swear on the show.

You see, if I swear on the show, I have to change it to explicit.

That's a whole lot of paperwork.

I can't do that.

So I just got an email from my power company asking if I was interested in enrolling in a new program they are starting up, which seems to be a solar collective.

Do you think these types of programs the page is very vague.

Have a place in the future for those who can't afford or non solar friendly areas like us? Cheers to here in Mendez.

Now, I looked at it and basically, if your household uses X amount of kilowatts per month, you pay extra to have solar, to have clean power.

Now, this is something that we did here 1215 years ago in my old house.

Yeah, I would pay for extra money for clean energy credits.

And we had wind back then and only when basically still do for the most part, and a small amount of wind.

And of course, they sold out.

So they stopped the program.

They couldn't do it anymore, or that was their excuse.

But you could pay a little bit extra on your power bill every month and know that you were getting clean power.

Right, but here's my point.

Clean power is cheaper than regular power.

Yeah, right.

And they want to charge you.

Shitloads, sir, I swore crap loads of money more.

It's like $40 a month extra just to have clean power, which is cheaper to them than it is the coal power or whatever.

Like in West Virginia, solar is going to be incredibly cheaper than coal.

It's displaced coal as the cheapest form of electricity by far.

So my question is, where will the solar facilities be located? So they plan to build, own and operate five solar facilities located within West Virginia on property owned by the power company or its affiliates.

They include a 26 acre reclaimed ash disposal site, a 51 acre adjacent to the power substation, 27 acres of retired ash disposal site.

This is all coal terminology that I'm not familiar with, even though we do have coal mines here.

So, yeah, they're reclaiming all this land from coal and putting solar panels on it and then charging people extra.

Do you have any thoughts on this? My thought is the typical.

It says for little $2 a month, but nobody uses 50 month.

And my garden shed used more than that.

You're more likely to spend over $40 a month to have clean electricity for that money.

I think there's places that will.

Sometimes if they let you put solar on your roof, you can lease solar for your roof and for like the same price as electricity, you're not paying anything extra.

And then eventually, I think you make extra money.

Yeah, it's going to be different.

In every province, state, every city, it's going to be different.

I know around here there is one or two solar cooperatives, and that's mainly for people who live in apartment buildings.

So you don't necessarily have access to a roof that you can put solar panels on.

So a bunch of people can get together and spend like, $100,000 on a solar farm somewhere.

And basically, you live in an apartment.

You can buy a share in that, and just everybody owns a piece of the action, and it feeds into the grid, and you get your benefit from your share of the thing.

Whether this particular one makes any sense, I don't know.

But certainly people should look into this wherever they live.

Well, shout out to Mornsburg, West Virginia.

And Mr.

Mendez.

Thanks for writing us.

We really appreciate it.

So here's another one.

Good evening, gentlemen.

My name is Landon Yereski, and I discovered your show earlier this year as listening material while taking our newborn for walks to fall asleep, which is interesting, Brian, because I always wonder what people do when they listen to our shows.

I remember my first podcast in the very early days of podcasting in the early 2000s.

Somebody said that they listened to me on the subway in Australia, and it blew my mind.

It's like, wow, there's somebody doing that to my little show.

Like, wow.

Yeah.

Community and of course is a popular thing, but taking your newborn out for walks to fall asleep, hadn't thought of that one, you know? By the way, I listen to podcasts to fall asleep when I want to have a nap sometimes.

Ours, it's not that they're boring.

The more interesting they are, the more I can focus my mind on something and then drift off.

Right.

They can't be too boring.

That works for me, too.

Yeah, it's got to be something to focus my mind.

So I have been listening weekly ever since.

He says the content is fantastic.

And given I also live in the same city you do, I find all the commentary very relatable.

Now he says I'm a business owner, and that piqued my interest, Brian.

So I Googled his name, and it came up with his LinkedIn page and found out that he owns my favorite pot shop, Wid w I ID it's actually on the other end of the city from me.

They have a great online portal, okay.

And they have a whole craft load of inventory of all kinds of different things.

And you can order it and pick it up in your leaf you're cartastic.

And little did I know that the pot shop that I've been supporting supports green energy.

That's great.

And we're always looking for sponsors.

Remember, everyone got free beer.

The first plug is free.

Brian made a joke.

Okay, so he's also a board member of the Saskatchewan Electric Vehicle Association, something I reference here a lot.

And he says, I love to use the insight on your show to help align my business with sustainable goals and get insight for the association.

A fellow board member recently sent me this article I thought would be a great discussion point on your show, and it is, from Airdry today.

Now, Airdri is a little city north of Calgary, the big mega city of Calgary, Alberta.

I wouldn't call it a mega city, but it's a big city.

Millions of people, he says a Rocky Mountain.

I think it's a great discussion that could be had regarding NIMBYism, which is I had to look that up.

Not in my backyard ism and fudd.

You want to explain what fudd is again? Fear, uncertainty and doubt.

That is things that people put around misinformation and bad information about new technologies to discourage either investment or adoption.

And especially in this changing world that people are uncomfortable with how fast things are changing.

The fact that that municipality rejected tens of millions in investment and permanent jobs due to false information is astounding.

Keep up the good work.

Now, the story is about somebody who wanted to pull up a charging station, much like we were talking about, because it's between two major cities, calgary and Emmetton.

Just like that corridor needs lots of charging with people going back and forth.

Ours does between Regina and Saskatoon.

And this town also ran into problems because they didn't want anything to do with the charging station.

Now they claim the problem with the charging station.

I'll read you an excerpt.

Okay, this is from the story objections raised because they wanted to put a solar installation with it, which is a business decision for them, because you supply electricity for someone, you want the cheapest electricity wholesale, right? That is what it is.

So you build a little solar farm for your charging station, for your highway supercharging station.

But the objections raised were more to do with the solar than the EV chargers.

Apparently.

He says objections raised included potential noise concerns with the cooling plant associated with the proposed solar farm, which is absurd.

A person's air conditioner in their home is less noisy than that, and it's certainly closer to people than that would be increased vehicular traffic on highway 72.

The solar farm would have increased traffic.

I guess people going to see the solar farm or people going to charge their EVs next one taking farmland out of production.

This is something that is coming up a lot lately, which is of course, crap.

If the farmer wants to take his damn farmland out of production, he can, or she can.

But you could also do mixed use.

Farmers don't use every square inch of their land.

Sometimes they have little bits of land that they mold with garden tractors that they could put up a huge installation on.

And some more speculative complaints about the potential radiation hazards of building such a facility in close proximity to people living in the area.

Rocky View, County Alberta you are officially the stupidest place on earth.

So is that like solar radiation? Like everyone's going to get a suntan? Is that what they're saying? If I knew, I'd be in pain.

You think you've heard it all? You think you've heard all the stupidest things that were people get passed around on Facebook.

It's just utter BS.

And by the way, whenever there's somebody like this, whenever there's people like this, they're always racist.

You know, if you're stupid in one way, you're probably a racist too.

So screw you.

Rocky View, County Alberta.

Get off the planet.

Go somewhere else.

Elon's, got a place for you on Mars.

Lots of radiation up there.

And Brian, I hope you're sitting down because we've got a rare voicemail click from our speak pipe page.

Can you believe it? What? I cannot believe it.

I thought that we should stop doing the speak pipe because nobody was calling.

Well, I crossed my mind too, but this is Sean in Ireland.

Hi.

It's Sean from Ireland.

Dublin, Ireland.

Just want to say we love the show, love listening to it every Wednesday when it comes out.

There is two big announcements in Ireland in the last few weeks regarding solar.

Is no planning permission needed.

Now, if you have solar panels on your roof before, if you wanted solar panels on your roof, you have to get planning permission.

And there's been houses where people put up solar panels didn't get planned permission.

The government made them take them down.

So now you don't need plan permission.

And also they've announced that they are going to give schools free solar panels so school supplies, and if they're suitable, they will get the price of the solar panels covered 100% by the government.

Thanks, that's fantastic.

I mean, that's crazy, right? Why isn't everybody doing that? We often ask questions like that.

Schools, perfect place for solar panels, but giving them to them and then what do they do with the savings? They can put more money to music programs and educating your damn children.

Yeah.

I will say the high school right next to me where I went to high school, they've actually had solar panels on their roof for about 20 years now.

And it was because I think some students and maybe a teacher or two were interested in the technology and they realized it was a good learning experience.

So it was about 20 years ago, so they would have been much lower powered solar panels.

But still, they've been generating power over there for 20 years and educating kids, and they could probably.

Look up the doohickies to see what the sun is doing and probably be aware that solar panels generate electricity and cloudy days, for example.

Yeah.

And so also, the other thing Sean brought up is we got to get rid of the red tape involved in installing solar clean energy of all kinds.

This is a climate emergency.

We got to move fast.

We got to make all this stuff as easy as possible.

Now, Sean, we're so thankful that we said that.

We would wish you a happy birthday on your birthday.

So let us know when your birthday is, and if not, happy birthday in advance.

Thank you, Sean.

Yeah.

I appreciate it.

It's lovely to hear your voice and we'd love to hear from you.

Contact us at cleanenergy [email protected] or on Twitter.

We're on TikTok for now.

Clean energy pod.

Is our handle there? Don't forget to check out our YouTube channel for special features.

Leave us a voicemail like Sean [email protected].

Cleanenergyshow.

It's time for the lightning round, Brian.

We have to whizz through this one quickly and it's a fat one, so it's going to be a challenge to get through.

This is a fast paced look at the week and clean energy news.

California becomes the first state to commit to ending the sale of polluting heaters.

All fossil fuel heaters are gone by 2030, not far from now.

Right, that's fantastic.

And California often sets the tone for the rest of the US on clean energy things, so hopefully other states follow suit.

Clean Energy canada predicts 1840 people will be employed in the Canadian EV industry by 20, 30, 26 times what there was in 2020.

And, you know, I think that number is more than the number of people in oil and gas.

So that's just EVs.

That's not clean energy in total.

Yeah, that's just EVs.

Time for a fast fact.

According to the IEA, the International Energy Agency the International Energy Agency, only 50% of the worldwide market is now using Led bulbs.

Outraged, are you? Wow.

Yeah, I mean, I guess that makes sense.

It does take a hell of a long time to change all the how many humans does it take to change all the light bulbs in the water? I could do them all.

I'll start tonight.

Come on, people.

Unscrew those stupid incandescent bulbs and put in an Led from your local dollar store because they're cheap.

And imagine how much energy will be saved once we do that.

Well, you know, those old bulbs don't last very long, so it's not going to take that long.

Would it last a year at best or something like that? It's not good.

The Nordstream Pipeline, which is the one that they claimed was bombed or sabotaged, it stopped leaking, but not before emitting the equivalent of what UK cars consume in a year.

And there are 1.8 million oil pipelines in the world, some of them apparently leak.

Yeah.

So this is the pipeline between Russia and Germany, which has been the site of much discussion and problems in the UK world.

But, yeah, this is a leaking and even just in your home, right? Like if you have a gas cooktop that can leak and release pollutants and ruin the air quality in your house and contribute to all these problems.

From Bloomberg.

The United States utility scale solar is now about one third cheaper than gas fired power.

Wow.

Well, onshore wind is 44% less expensive than gas fired.

This is onshore wind, which is notoriously more expensive than offshore wind.

So solar and wind now present a deflationary opportunity for electric supply costs.

Deflation something I like to hear.

Let's hope the inflation rates come down.

You know, I watched this video by an engineer, a wind engineer, talking about how big can wind turbines get offline? I love that topic.

It's very in depth, but apparently there's a cost of the machine returns.

But I might get to that in a bit.

We'll see.

Another fast fact in 2022 and 600 million people in Africa still don't have access to electricity.

And I can go to the hardware store and buy a solar panel and power my camper and lights and stuff and phones.

Much of those without power are in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

The DRC, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Tanzania and Uganda.

Research suggests that covering all of California's canals, which span roughly 4000 miles with solar panels could save up to 63 billion gallons of water.

That's just putting them people say there's no place to put solar panels.

You take up farmland, put them on the damn canals, safe water, billions of gallons of water.

And I believe they have started at least one pilot project.

So that's what it would look like if they did it all.

That's amazing.

Yes.

And there's even some going on in Europe.

And they said if you did that, you'd have like 13 nuclear reactors worth of peak output.

So that's pretty cool.

The two Chevy bulk variants set a quarterly sales record at 14, 700.

GM says it will increase global production.

This is interesting to me.

So I'm following it to more than 70,000 units for the 2023 calendar year, which is almost double if it's 44,000 this year.

So they're selling all the damn things and they've got to make more.

Yeah, and presumably they've ramped up their battery supply, which is the other thing.

So they presumably have enough batteries to do that, which is great.

And for the regional leader, Post, our local newspaper, we have an oil ban.

New York follows California in banning the sale of gas cars by 2035.

That legislation is moving forward.

So good to hear.

World's largest wind solar hybrid complex.

This is wind and solar in one piece of land is now 600.

It goes online in India.

It's the largest hybrid complex.

Fairly big.

Toyota president calls meeting California zero mission requirements difficult, even though in 2035, you can still have 20% of your new car sales from your company be long range PHEVs plug in hybrids.

Yeah, well, it's not like Toyota is like a world leader in making cars or anything.

No, I don't know how they could possibly do it.

They don't want to.

Tesla Giga, Nevada to receive recycled battery materials from Redwoods closed loop campus.

That means, Brian, you could buy a Tesla and people say, oh, where did that battery come from? It was mine.

While some of it might be recycled now already, and that's going to weigh go up in the future as more that's great.

Yes, redwood is one of the big players in battery recycling started by one of the founders of Tesla.

But, yeah, we were always worried about not having enough supply of batteries to recycle.

But it's slow, but sure it'll come.

It'll be a closed loop system one day.

The Harris Ranch Tesla supercharger in California, that is the big one, the first one actually ever, and it's between San Francisco and Los Angeles, will have a 25 megawatt of solar installed.

That is two, five times the solar farms they're putting in Saskatchewan.

Okay, just for reference, at a very rural part of the I 500 stalls, that's 100 stalls, including some for towing.

They're going to have some stalls.

People are calling for that now that the trucks are out.

So it's a halfway mark between La.

And the Bay Area.

So, yeah, cool.

The EPA is doubling money for electric school buses, which you mentioned earlier due to overwhelming demand from all 50 states.

Yeah, so the 50 states asked for money, and it was way more than they expected them to ask for.

The state, the people, the school boards, the people, they want electric school buses, and they should because diesel bad for kids.

Currently, only 1% of the country school buses are at electric.

And you know what? I'm a little surprised that it's even 1% more than maybe I would have thought.

And Brian, finally this week I'm going to end on good news from Asad Razuk, which I sometimes do, and good news on the climate fight that we could all use this week, ireland to put solar panels on every school.

Okay, our caller already covered that.

James, you didn't need to put that there, but we broke that news.

India to go 50% renewables by 2030.

Some more Indian news.

We have listeners in India, so they're going to go 50% renewables.

That's not bad for a country that said that maybe we can't because we want the middle class to expand and you guys have already had for 100 years, and we're a huge country, but, you know, things may be starting to move along there.

That's great.

That's our time for this week.

Remember, clean energy [email protected].

We really appreciate you listening.

Please subscribe to the show.

So you get our shows every week.

And we'll see you again next time.

Next week.

See you next week.

Close Video.

 

Al Gore correctly calls the World Bank president a climate denier. California the latest state to allow human composting. Ford is moving to a direct sales model for EVs that will eliminate dealer markups. The Fully Charged Live event is coming to Canada. Reducing costs in massive solar farms goes beyond the cost of the panels themselves.

We get a letter from Denmark and here is the link we talk about: https://dk.karnfull.com/ General Motors Co (GM.N) said on Tuesday it backed establishing tougher federal emissions standards to help ensure at least 50% of new vehicles sold by 2030 are zero-emission. This may be meant to harm Japanese auto companies who are way behind.

The founder and owner of the outdoor apparel brand Patagonia, Yvon Chouinard, has given his US$3-billion company away to a specially-designed trust, ensuring all profits—in perpetuity—are used to fight climate change and preserve wild spaces.

Gas stoves can release hazardous air pollutants while they’re operating, and even when they’re turned off, according to a new study.

Thanks for listening to our show! Consider rating The Clean Energy Show on iTunes, Spotify or wherever you listen to our show.

Follow us on TikTok! Check out our YouTube Channel!

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Your hosts: James Whittingham https://twitter.com/jewhittingham Brian Stockton: https://twitter.com/brianstockton

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Transcript

Hello, and welcome to episode 132 of the Clean Energy Show.

I'm Brian Stockton.

I'm James Whittingham.

This week, Tesla's boring AI team members from its autopilot program to work on the humanoid robot.

I predict a lot of broken dishes.

Ford is moving to a direct sales model for EVs that will eliminate dealer markups.

But dealers are skeptical and are rapidly researching alternative ways to antagonize and anger their customers.

GM is pushing electric vehicles and American football fans.

What's next? Low fat nacho cheese? The fully charged live event is coming to Canada.

As Canada's foremost clean energy podcast, I propose that James and I be invited to participate.

I could hook the panel while James could do crowd control and some light housekeeping.

What all that? More this edition of the Clean Energy show.

And also Brian on this week's show.

Reducing costs and massive solar farms goes beyond the panels.

And California will allow human composting in 2027.

I'm way ahead of you, California.

I'm studying a compost myself internally.

I had a bad week.

Feeling sick.

Yeah, well, I know you told me you had some type of terrible stomach flu, and you're definitely looking better, and I hope that you're better.

I just don't want to hear too much about this.

okay.

Let's just say I said to my ask this morning, can you do me a solid? And it did.

That's all.

Everything worked out.

Yes.

I don't know where it came from because you know, I never leave home.

You never leave the house and no one brought it home, no one else was sick.

So where the hell did this come from? But it just goes to show you how you could have gotten covered under the same situation too.

From what, though? The neighborhood cat.

Do I pet thing in the yard? Other people come in and out of your house.

You know them as your family.

Well, I do, but it's an awful thing.

And I'm one of these people who has a phobia of being sick, as you know.

I don't know if it's a terrible phobia, but I really hate being sick and I don't do it.

Ask any of my family members.

Like, I'm the worst patient in the house.

I'm just kill me.

Yeah.

So my wife is of course, as a rock, she burst children.

Something I couldn't do if I wanted to.

It's just aying I can't handle being sick.

I'm just not good at it.

I'm sorry.

I'm just glad it's over.

And I don't want Covent.

Yeah.

I really don't want coven.

So far, so good.

So far so good.

What's new with you around this house here? It seems like this often happens when we're recording the podcast, but you may hear some banging and crashing in the background because you're like working brown.

You're always getting your house renovated constantly.

That's right, yeah.

What was the name of that guy? I can't remember.

Is that like Sheldon? Or something? No, I don't think Oswald or he had a good name, but he was Peter Albert.

I don't know.

Yes.

So the kitchen half of my vaulted ceiling has now been spray foam, and the drywall guys are there already to fill it in.

So we're half done, and once that's done, we open up the other half and do that.

So I'm going to have a freshly spray foam ceiling, and I'm real excited about that.

Well, I don't know why you don't have a live microphone in your kitchen.

That's what I would do.

Yeah, I know that's what you would do, but I prefer podcasts to have that studio sound without well, I just want to check in on them to hear if there's any sound.

It's interesting.

Something like that weird sounds would be nice.

And then the other thing was so I bought a brace for my back.

I was having back troubles.

You bought a back brace? Yeah, it's a shocking news.

It's like a belt thing that sort of just tightens up and supports your spine when your spine is feeling weak.

And then I know you had this horrible stomach flu this week.

So my new idea for the podcast is these are our sponsorship possibilities, James, like all of our old man health problems.

So this brace is from a company called Braceability, and they're not a sponsor? They are now.

But hey, if they want to sponsor us, I could be a spokesperson for this product.

I thought it was really great.

Does it work? Yeah, it totally works.

This is your future commercials on Fox News.

And it's better to have on hand now.

Like, I needed it sooner than I got it, but for the next time this happens to my back, I'll be able to I think when it happens yeah, it'll be able to move around sooner if I have this brace.

And what does it do exactly? You put it in your lower spine, and it's like having a lumbar support.

Like, I realized that when I drive a car, I have an extra lumbar support pillow in the car, like the one in the built into the seat is not enough.

So when I'm sitting in a chair, I need a lumbar support.

And I just thought to myself, hey, well, I need a lumbar support while I'm standing up.

Surely there's a product like that.

And I just started researching it and yeah, you get these lower back braces, and it's like an artificial spine on the outside of your body.

Now you're endorsing it.

And if you're not from North America or younger than us, which most people are, by the way, shit.

Murphy Brown was a TV show in the 80s, early 90s, maybe 80s.

National news anchor.

Was it Elden? Eldon.

Eldon.

Very good.

That was the guy's name.

Give it some time and those old brain cells, with the help of a back brace, will kick in and you can help your brain cells with this new product.

See, that's how it works.

Oh, my gosh, you're such a good spokesperson.

I would have you endure.

I would listen to that old man sitting in front of a couch in the fireplace recommending something to me.

The car hunt continues on my end.

A couple of interesting developments on Front when I found out the Prius is coming out with a new plugin prime that is through spy websites and rumor websites.

Could be 100 kilometer range, which would be interesting.

However, it's too little, too late, right? I mean, I want a freaking EV.

My partner wants an EV.

I don't want to get an oil change again.

That would do me, and I wouldn't have to worry about charging infrastructure for the next few years.

Not that that's a terrible issue, but the infrastructure is there.

It's just not working, essentially, and just the inconvenience of it taking slow speeds.

But the Equinox, as we mentioned last week, from Chevy, which is a small SUV, they have the gas version of it with a very popular vehicle, and now they're having an electric version of it, as well as the what is it? The Blazer.

Chevy Blazer, as well as silverado pickup truck.

Anyway, the Canadian, where we live of pricing is $34,400 for the Equinox.

For the Equinox, which is a small that's really good SUV.

The bolt is a hatchback, which I'm shopping for, maybe would have probably bought if there was one on the lawn, but I can't because there's not one on the lawn, and it's a lottery shoot to try and get one crap shoot.

But the bolt sells for 38 for something like that.

Yeah, and it's not the Equinox.

It's a small car.

They should be marking those down, but they're not.

And they have in the States that would explain the $6,000 reduction in the States, something like that.

So they said, Canada, we're not going to do it because we don't need to, because we don't sell any there because the demand is too high.

There's no competition.

So screw you, Canada.

This tells me not to buy a bolt.

I'd be stupid to buy a bolt, especially at the current price, because let's say I buy one, and a year from now, people are starting to buy a $34,000 car that's less and better, and they're going to have to lower the price of the bolt.

Absolutely.

They're going to have to 8000 less.

It's going to probably have to be $8,000.

It's a real conundrum.

And ideally, you would like to buy a car now, not a year from now or two years from now.

Ideally, yes.

The Prius is still fine, but right now, the Prius has an incredible resale value, and that's what I was hoping to take advantage of and get into the game.

But you know what? At the price of $34,000, it doesn't matter so much what my resale value of the Prius is I could go and buy that car.

Yeah, that's because it's about the same price as the Prius if you factor in the gas savings over four or five years at most.

And that's normal gas prices, by the way, not the ones that we have now or had had recently.

There was a thing going around the Internet that everybody was sharing saying the Saskatchewan, our province in Canada, which is a prairie province with oil and lots of mineral resources and potash and stuff like that, and farming would be a perfect place for battery minerals for manufacture, bringing it to Canada, because there was an article about that and everybody's talking about it.

And I have this contention that is a problem with our province, that is that our grid is very dirty.

It's 45% coal, and they're cleaning up very slowly with very small solar projects and small wind projects.

My thinking is that a lot of these companies who want to buy minerals and build batteries want them clean.

Why do it with a dirty grid? So our province, in being backwards and trying to cling onto fossil fuels, a jurisdiction there's many of around the world, including the United States, in parts of the United States that you're not going to be competitive.

Why would we go to A, the dirty one that has a larger carbon footprint for a battery that we make in your place, then B, that has a clean grid, and 80% of the Canadian electrical grid is clean because of all the hydro, especially in Quebec and BC.

Right? Yeah.

So I think it's a competitive disadvantage for us to drag our feet and few people talk about that stuff.

It makes me mad.

Yeah.

And if you're sourcing minerals for batteries and you have a choice between a place that can source them more cleanly, you're obviously going to go for the more clean source.

And speaking of our province, which I vow that I'm going to do less of because nobody knows what we are, our power utility, South Power, which is a government owned utility, has identified two places to put small modular nuclear reactors.

Now, small modular nuclear reactors is something that you claim to study if you want to put off fighting climate change.

You claim that now we can only use these technologies and they're not ready yet.

So they'll decide on this in 2029.

But right now to warm us up and claim that they're doing something so they can continue mining fossil fuels and grease up their buddies on the golf course.

Estevan and Elbow, there's two predominant winds where we live in our city, and it's both downwind from those two places.

For what it's worth, I'm just putting it out there.

Radiation travels, Brian.

And I just want to point out that there is a town in our province called Elbow.

There's a town called Climax.

Name me some weird Saskatchewan towns.

Virginia rhymes with fun.

As Mick Jagger once said, there's one called Kipling, which is the only town in the world named after Rudyard Kipling, the famous author of The Jungle Book.

Oh, really? That's what he's named after? That's what they named him after.

How does that happen? The town of Kipling? I don't know.

I like this book.

So we're going to name it Kipling? Yeah.

There you go.

That's the town where the paperclip story went.

Yeah, the red paperclip story.

Look it up if you want a boring story about the Internet.

And Corbin Bernstein made a movie there, too.

Why? Because it was famous for a day.

It's a long story, but I don't know.

I was once in a movie with Corbin Bernsen.

We were eating services together.

Yeah.

Did you have any lines in that movie? I had lots of lines.

I was quite nervous about the amount of lines I had.

Like acting with carbon.

Bernson no, but I was acting with someone else and I can't remember his name.

I'm sick.

Okay.

I've got a bit of a fever.

Yes, somebody famous.

It was somebody famous.

It is somebody famous.

So probably know you know who Corbin Bernstein is.

We have to stop making old man references.

Brian it's just Murphy Brown and now all that was a TV show called La Law.

Yeah.

See, this is all going to be in the transcript and people are going to search this and they're going to be linked to us.

This podcast talks about Ally Long, corbin Burns, corbin of your'listing if you looked up your own name because you're unemployed between shoots.

Hello.

What's? The podcast? Yeah.

Ate a lot of that rice pudding.

That's all I'm going to say.

You went to town on it.

Let's get on with some updates to surpass stories that I want to start with this because I have a clip about.

We've talked a lot about Beyond Meat, the fake meat, and how it's going to clean up the world.

And I'll tell you why later, because regular beef has a lot of carbon emissions, which I'll get to later.

But in Arkansas, plant based company Beyond Meat COO.

Was arrested for biting a man's nose.

Well, of course he did give the guy a Slim Jim before he kills again.

Apparently it was a road rage confrontation in a parking garage.

And when police arrived, they found two males with bloody faces at the scenes, which Ramsay said, actually, it's beet juice.

It tricks your brain.

You're just thinking you're eating real nose.

Yeah.

So that has taken a dark turn.

The view on meat story, brian well, I mean, how could you not make jokes about that? It writes itself.

Because I mentioned it last week and it's kind of weird that I mentioned it last week.

And then this happened in real life.

I was talking about pipeline inspection planes and I happened to reference a 2013 fatality crash and it actually happened between the last week's show and this week's show, it actually happened right here in Saskatchewan.

Like another crash? Another crash with two fatalities, two people on board.

It was near Swift current.

The federal agency, the transportation agency in Canada confirmed that a pipeline inspection flight crashed 11 km southwest of Sean of in Saskatchewan, the town of 1700 people, 350 km southwest of Virginia, where Brian and I are podcasting from.

And that took off from South Korea on Sunday morning, headed to Esteban, which is about 400 drive away by car.

I don't know how much that is in miles exactly.

So nobody knows why, but that actually it's just weird that I would talk about it and then the freaking happened.

Now I can't talk about anything.

I don't want to talk about anything.

Vladimir Putin died by apple choking.

Why doesn't that happen? You heard it here first.

Why doesn't that happen? Jeez.

It's an unfortunate thing and I was really pumped last week to talk about Bloomberg opinion piece on how the supply chain for solar to reach in that zero world.

What we determine, the amount of solar we need for a net zero world is already being built.

Because I thought it was surprising and so did they.

The people at Bloomberg think it was surprising and inspiring piece.

So if you look at the current prices of volatile commodities, they say you won't understand the direction of investment, which is the important thing, is what people are investing in, where the action is, what's actually happening.

People talk about, well, gas is up, so oil is good, solar is up, so that's bad because there's a big demand and supply chain shortages for different things in clean energy as well.

But the direction of investment is insane.

We talk about battery factories, gigafactories almost daily, maybe even daily.

Such spending is a forecast made flesh.

They write a bet on the direction of future demand, taking the physical form of property, plant and equipment.

But anyway, I just thought it was interesting that solar as a whole generates like 20% of the time.

So if you have the equivalent of a nuclear power plant, it's only actually going to be 20% if you look at the rating of those two things.

But the nuclear power plant generates like 80, 90% capacity because they have downtime.

So yeah, it's not an entire comparison like that, but 940 gigs of connected panels would be sufficient to supply about 5.8% of the world's current electricity demand and then another 5.8% every year.

But this is what they're going to be manufacturing soon, is that 5.8% and that amount of gigawatts.

But what I didn't mention was the equivalent of adding the generation of all the world's nuclear power plants every 20 months, which is incredible.

In solar, I'm not talking about the maximum output, I'm talking about the actual output of 20% of the solar max.

And keeping in mind, if you did have to double the number of nuclear power plants that exist in the world.

It would take like, 20 years at least.

Yeah, that's optimistic even.

That's if we started today.

Right.

I mean, it's crazy.

Yes.

I was listening to the Energy media podcast from Mark and Hispan.

They were talking about these kinds of issues and an important point that people aren't quite wrapping their brains around, because we're used to energy scarcity, and as we use up the oil reserves around the world, the price goes up because these things get harder to get and it gets more scarce and the prices go up.

But the exact opposite thing is happening in clean energy.

Abundance is every time we build a solar panel, we're creating more abundance, and so the price trends down and not up.

And it's just something that people are just not used to.

They're not used to it, and they just can't wrap their heads around it.

I wanted to start this week with a bit of breaking news, if there is such a thing in the podcast world.

By the way, I've never listened to a true crime podcast before.

Have you? Yeah.

Yes, a couple.

Well, I listened to Cereal because it was in the news, because they exonerated the person or person that got released.

So I listened to it and it's exactly the same as the Hulu show.

The music is almost identical.

It's almost like a ripoff of the actual theme of Cereal.

They didn't even try not to exactly duplicate it.

You're talking about only murders in the building.

Only murders in the building, yeah, only murders in the building.

They drew heavily from cereal.

Yes.

And the woman does sound exactly like Tina Fey, which is kind of like the replacement for Cereal, the big podcast.

If I told you she was Tina Fey, you would believe me.

You didn't know better.

Right? It's just kind of hilarious.

Anyway, today at an event hosted by The New York Times, al Gore claimed the World Bank president is a climate denier.

Later, on the same stage, the World Bank president, David Malpass, was asked by The New York Times climate reporter David Gals if he believed in the scientific consensus that the man made burning of fossil fuels is rapidly and dangerously warming the planet.

Here is the painful clip of that.

I also want to give you one more chance to directly address former Vice President Gore's claim that he made on this stage that you were a climate denier.

His words so very odd.

I've never met him.

He's not involved in the efforts that we're doing.

He may present as a climate person.

I don't know what impact that's having.

Okay, let me just be as clear as I can.

Do you accept the scientific consensus that the manmade burning of fossil fuels is rapidly and dangerously warming the planet? I don't know if everyone wants to comment on that.

What we are doing is having impactful projects that reduce will you answer the question? We have a mission of a World Bank that's powerful.

Will you answer the question? I don't even know.

I'm not a scientist.

What a douchebag, if I may say so.

Yeah, well, I mean, he's not a scientist, but that's hardly I can't comment on it.

I'm not a scientist.

You're not a scientist.

So we should erase all the episodes of our podcast because we're not scientists.

I guess so.

I'll get out the magnetizer for our younger listeners.

Audio used to be recorded on magnetic tape, which you could erase with a magnet.

What? That's crazy talk.

I don't know what you're talking about.

How do you erase audio with a magnet? Brian? You truly are not a scientist.

I have a bulk tape eraser in this room.

Well, it's a good thing you didn't turn it on with my magnetic head, because my head is mostly metal now.

So yeah, I guess the answer to that is yes.

The World Bank president is a climate change denier.

This is a clean energy show with Brian Stockton and James Whittingham.

GM is looking to football to capture a broad consumer base and bring all of its nearly 30 US dealerships on board to sell EVs for the Equinox.

Chevy is banking on a 300 miles full charge as the pivot point for consumer appeal and for football's fascination with commercials to open the door so EV cynics might take a second look.

And I was actually watching football on the weekend and saw these commercials and said, Dang, I want one of those.

The GM estimated up to 300 miles range on full charge and a starting price around $30,000.

It's everything you want in an electric SUV.

Chevy equinox.

EV.

Finally, an EV for everyone.

I mean, that's true.

It is an EV for everyone.

Yeah, because it is the form factor that people buy the most after trucks, I guess.

It is a very popular size.

You can't say it's small, you can't say it's expensive.

EVs are too expensive because it's only 30 grand in the States.

And they're telling you that in the commercial.

That's 35 grand less than the model one.

How many are they going to make and when is it for sale? It's for sale starting in a year.

Production as any EV will ramp up slowly, perhaps faster than Tesla.

Because they are a more established manufacturer.

They know what they're doing.

These are going to be made in Mexico.

They say they have enough batteries for a while.

For a long time, actually, for 30 grand, though it's hard to argue that it's half the car of the Tesla.

Tesla's going to have to, once they do make these, and it'll be two years from now before they're up to full, let's face it.

But once that happens, they're making the Blazer, they're making the Equinox, they're selling them at prices that people can afford.

EV.

Adoption acceptance has moved a bit further down the road.

A year from now, Tesla is going to have to lower their prices.

I mean, they're a bit high now.

Oh, yeah, they're definitely high.

But they still have a backlog of orders, so they don't have to lower prices anytime soon.

But this is what we've been waiting for.

This is all good news.

I mean more available.

This is what the world needs.

And Hurt is going to buy a bunch of them.

Yeah, this is sort of an addendum to that story.

Hertz had previously ordered 100,000 teslas.

That was supposed to be by the end of 2022.

I'm not sure if they're on track for that, but they are now going to add 175,000 EVs from General Motors.

This is from different brands of General Motors.

So this would include Chevy, Buick, GMC, Cadillac Bright Drop, which I think are those vans? So this will take a while.

But this will also impact you again, because if you want one of these yeah, I was thinking about Chevy Equinoxes.

It could be that Hurts is in line in front of you.

We're still going to have these supply and demand problems for a long time to come.

We learned a bit about on a previous episode a few months back about how this works.

Usually an automaker gives a huge discount to these types of rental car companies for buying huge volumes of cars.

And then the point where it becomes profitable to resell it is actually very quick.

It's under six months, sometimes three months.

So they very quickly resell these cars because they got them at a price that makes a profit to sell them already because of the discount.

Right.

And then they always have new cars in stock to rent.

Right.

So they find the sweet spot where it's the most profitable and you're selling a practically brand new car that's three months old or whatever.

Lots of kilometers, perhaps.

Perhaps not depending on how it's used, but yeah.

And then they make profit off it.

Now.

Tesla notoriously did not give one penny discount.

Elon Musk said yes because they didn't need to and they couldn't make the cars any faster than they're making them.

So why give a discount if you have too many orders to fill? Anyway another thing is fully charged is coming to Canada.

If you don't know, this is primarily a YouTube channel hosted by Robert Lueellan.

Probably the premiere clean energy and electric car channel on YouTube.

Fully charged.

And they've done live events in the UK.

Before.

And they've done two live events in the US.

In Austin, Texas.

And then the most recent one was San Diego, which just finished.

I'd kind of been hoping that you and I might get down there for that one.

But we didn't.

But now it's coming to Canada a year from now, in 2023, the fully charged live show So I thought that was a super fun announcement.

They cited several reasons for coming to Canada.

I think the main one, though, is that BC Hydro, the electric utility, seemed to have offered them a large sponsorship.

So they seem to be the primary entity that's inviting Fully Charged to come and do this live show in BC.

So BC Hydro, the province of British Columbia, 98%, clean grid, mostly from hydroelectricity.

And so they're very interested in clean energy.

And they, I guess, are fans of the Fully Charged channel.

So they decided to invite them to Vancouver.

So this is September 2023, and if anyone from Fully Charged his listing, please invite James and I to come.

We'd love to come.

I think we should get our fans to lobby for us to be there.

Yes.

So, yeah, send emails.

Both knock on Robert Lola's door if you know where he lives.

Three in the morning, you want to make sure you got his attention.

So don't do it during daylight hours.

Yeah.

Sorry, Robert.

So, yeah, I think that's going to be a lot of fun.

So this is kind of a large sort of trade show and gathering of clean energy enthusiasts and electric car enthusiasts.

So there'll be lots of panels and discussions and places where you can go and look at electric cars and presumably, like home heating stuff.

They're very big on heat pumps in British Columbia.

They're somewhat milder climate for Canada.

So heat pumps makes perfect sense for British Columbia.

And BC Hydro has sort of subsidies and programs to help people buy heat pumps.

So, yeah, I think that's going to be a lot of fun.

So you anticipate us being there, don't you? Yeah, I think we should totally go.

Well, I'm going to have to start a go.

Fund me then, like right now.

Well, I can drive you in the Tesla.

I can pay for the charging.

That'll be the place where I get covert.

But if I got covert somewhere you got covert at a conference.

Yeah.

So maybe I would too.

Well, this will be at the Vancouver Convention Center, which is a big, nice open area kind of place.

We should also say that it's Canada in the Pacific Northwest, that they're kind of making it kind of for the whole region up there because it is a long way to go down to San Diego and Austin for us.

Yes.

But this is very close to Seattle is the American city just across the border.

So this is definitely the Seattle Vancouver area.

And I think that's going to be great.

You can buy tickets now.

They're about $75 for the weekend for the three day thing.

You can also get sponsorships and you could sponsor the event.

You can set up a stand there as well.

So we should do that, I don't know, just a tiny little 1 m² booth.

We have a little table and we can sell podcasts on cassette tapes or something.

Sure, get your podcast.

Here, 50 USB drives or something.

Okay.

And sticking to EV news for a second here, ford is looking to change up their dealer model going forward under EV.

So they're trying to split their business into kind of three sections at Ford.

And Model E is going to be the electric division.

Then there's going to be Ford Pro that handles commercial vehicles, and Ford Blue Oval, which will be their legacy internal combustion thing.

But anyway, so they're trying to revamp the model for their dealerships.

They want to keep the dealerships, but they need to change things up in order to be competitive in the 21st century.

So it's going to go to more of a direct selling model, like with Tesla.

And so the dealers are going to have to choose, much like General Motors is doing this as well.

You got to choose to be into the program with Model E, and it will cost the dealer some money to kind of set themselves up for that.

But it seems like a good strategy.

There needs to be a rethinking of the dealership model, especially if you're trying to compete in the new world of EVs.

But also, nobody really likes haggling for prices at dealerships.

It's the worst thing in the world.

So this would set a set price for their cars going forward.

Everybody pays the same price.

Haggling at a dealership is the worst thing in the world.

It is for everyone because we have one Toyota dealership here, so I couldn't walk elsewhere.

I'd have to go quite a ways, actually.

I'd have to go hours away.

Well, 1 hour away.

But that dealership was owned by the same company.

But with Chevy, there's one on every street corner.

There's a Chevy dealership in every 200 person town, pretty much.

And it's weird how it sort of developed this way because we are not a haggling culture.

Like, we don't typically haggle for prices in Canada.

You just walk into a store and you pay the price.

It's a common thing in other places sometimes to haggle, but for some reason, it's only cars, and it's an expensive thing.

So if you do it badly, it costs you a lot of money.

Yeah.

And culturally in North America, the man of the household goes and does the dirty deed and then brags to his friends.

Right? Yeah.

And if you don't, then you're not a man.

You're a terrible human being.

A failure.

Yeah.

I hated it.

I did enjoy the experience of buying a Tesla online, which you do online.

You put the deposit down with the credit card.

I will say there was more human interaction than I expected, because when you're exchanging a large amount of money like that, you still need to talk to a human.

So I had to talk to the Tesla place in Calgary, which was the closest at the time.

And then we had to do a wire transfer for the final payment for the car, which was kind of nerve racking because it's a large amount of money.

And somebody at the bank said this is really important that you get every digit right or anything.

Like your money could just go off into the ether, I think a lot of money.

I spent ten grand to Montreal for my leaf.

I felt that experience and I was like I didn't hear back.

I was like, yeah.

And then the bank people spent an hour and a half walking in the back room trying to complete it.

And the manager came out, the janitor came in and was offering his two bits and it was like tense.

It was terrible.

And then ultimately the other thing this is weird about this, and I know this through just sort of online banking transfers and stuff, for some reason these take a couple of days.

Even though it's electronic, it takes a couple of days.

So I had to send a screenshot of the wire transfer to the Tesla people in Calgary because they wanted to release the car.

Like they had a truck leaving to deliver it.

And they're like, we got to release the car, so send us a screenshot to prove that you sent the wire transfer because they hadn't gotten it yet and they had to send the car.

I mean, they didn't have to, but they sent the car on its way before they actually got the money.

I wouldn't even think it would haggle me, I don't think, if I didn't read online that the average haggle price down for this particular model in your region is this much money.

One $700.

And I thought to leave $1700 table.

Who am I? And there's more resources now on the internet for us for that kind of information.

But it doesn't really make it easier.

It just makes it more because now you feel the pressure.

You know what you have to do.

And they know that, you know you have to do it anyway.

San Rafael, California based ojo.

This is a company that makes solar mounting hardware for solar farms.

They have a new way to mount solar panels.

And the reason why I mentioned this is because we always talk about the reduction of costs and the efficiency increases of the panels themselves.

Well, there's other stuff involved.

There's hardware.

And if you can get that down in price over and you're putting on literally millions of panels and then you reduce the cost of the things that hold those panels up, that's a lot of money.

So they're talking about using 50% less steel and labor, because labor is an issue too here, than the conventional pile system, which is what we saw at the solar farm here.

So the Earth trash combines it's patented hardware with a drilling machine.

They have their own drilling machine, specialized drilling machine.

And basically they have two piles that go in and form a a shape.

And at the top of that, a shape mounts onto the pivot of the solar array that holds up panels, and neither tilts or is steady, so it's just 50% less steel.

They're always coming up with new things to bring down those costs.

And when you bring them down, then the cost of solar electricity, period, becomes less.

Yeah, it's crazy.

And they're doing that.

They're also improving panels, too.

So that's happening.

Yeah.

All those efficiencies in whatever business make a huge like, I'm staring at a box of Apple MacBook Pro boxes that I've bought over the years.

And even though the laptops often get bigger, the packaging gets smaller.

And it's because, like, every millimeter that they can decrease the size of the boxes the more they save money.

First of all, people want less packaging, but the smaller the package, the more you can put in a truck or on a ship.

Every little bit counts.

All right, coming up with the show so Lady Randall breeze through the latest of the week's clean energy Headline news, and we have some feedback this week.

Let's dip into the mail bag.

It says, Hi, I'm a big fan from Denmark, embracing green energy, driving to Tesla.

They have solar panels on the roof and an air to air heat pump to keep the house warm.

So going all electric.

I enjoy listening to your program.

I think it is great what you do to enlighten people on the progress on clean energy and also in a fun way.

Thanks a lot.

He says, thank you, God.

It always boosts our wind in ourselves when we hear nice letters like that.

And he says, I just wanted to share with you how far we are here in Denmark and Europe.

The electricity prices are going up and down like crazy.

Here in Europe, the price varies from hour to hour, but the price is determined by the most expensive source, which is usually gas and coal.

Interesting.

I won't read you the whole letter, but I'll read you parts of it.

Many homes have variable price contracts with their provider, which you could choose freely.

You can even choose Swedish nuclear if you want.

And in Denmark, we have no nuclear power, but a lot of wind turbines that produce around 45% of our electricity on average.

And on windy days like today, when he was writing this letter, it was 120% was coming from wind.

So that means that they exported their energy to the neighbors, and the price goes down.

And sometimes it's negative.

Already we're seeing negative prices.

I can't get over that.

So green energy is the only source that can bring the price down in this crazy time.

And he has some other information and some things that he has done.

He's got a 6.6 kilowatt peak power solar system with a 6.5 kilowatt hour battery, able to charge the battery at night when the power is really cheap and use it in the morning, sell it back to the grid.

Yada, yadda, yadda.

You know how it goes.

So the battery can also be used in the winter where there is little sunshine in denmark is as far north as La.

Lash is in Saskatchewan.

And what a great guy for looking up our local town to give us an idea where Denmark is.

That's very sweet.

And Lash is quite a bit farther north from where we are.

Yes, hours and hours and hours.

So we live on a massive everything in Canada is massive.

Ontario is like I think it's the size of some planets it takes days to cross.

But Saskatchewan is very tall and most of us have never been anywhere near the top third, let alone it's just insanely big and becomes wilderness up there as well.

So the future is here now, and I think the future looks bright for clean energy.

And thanks again for a great show.

Best regards from Sven the Green Viking in Denmark.

Yes, and then there was a link to a website where you can look at a graphic that kind of shows you where the energy is being generated there in northern Europe and Scandinavia and which direction the power is going.

Sometimes it's going from Norway to Sweden and sometimes from Sweden to Norway and Denmark and so forth.

So, yeah, I thought that was really interesting.

So.

Thanks, Ben.

We got another note from someone who said that my son's university profit, like my son Jameson, my son, he said there's not enough lithium in the world.

I was mentioning in the show last week, and he gave us a link to a YouTube video.

But it's just some dude.

You can't rely on everything from some dude.

I know it's true, but maybe that's not the best link.

Yeah, so we love to hear from you, as you could tell, especially when you send us praise.

Contact us at [email protected] on Twitter or TikTok or Handle as Clean Energy Pod.

Don't forget to check out our YouTube channel for visualizations of this podcast and other things and special features.

And Brian, it's time for the world famous Lightning round.

It's time for the Lighting Round, a fast paced look at the weekend clean energy news.

General Motors said on Tuesday it is backing Aestablishing tougher federal emissions standards to help ensure at least 50% of new vehicles sold by 2030 or zero emission.

Now, you'll recall that the Cafe standards that California and other states set before were opposed by some car companies.

Yeah, and Toyota was one of them.

Just got to mention that.

But now General Motors, who are all in an EVs, say, bring it on, hell, speed it up.

And you know why? Because their competition in Japan are going to be screwed.

Yeah, they're ahead of Japan.

Way ahead of Japan.

And then arguably ahead of a lot of people who are not Tesla or Rivian or other people who are fully EV, the founder and owner of the outdoor apparel brand Patagonia Yvonned, we'll call him yvonne has given his US $3 billion company away to especially design trust, ensuring all profits in perpetuity are used to fight climate change and preserve wild spaces, which is unusual.

He gave his whole company worth $3 billion.

That's amazing.

Powerful statement from Antonio Guters yesterday at the UN general assembly.

He is calling on nations to tax fossil fuel companies.

It's high time to put fossil fuel producers, investors and enablers on notice.

Polluters must pay.

And today I'm calling on all developed economies to tax the windfall profits of fossil fuel companies.

Those funds should be redirected in two ways.

Two countries suffering loss and damage caused by the climate crisis, and to people struggling with rising food and energy prices.

I hope people do that.

I hope developed countries do do that, because I've had it with fossil fuel companies.

Yeah.

And as we know, wealthy countries tend to do better in these sorts of things.

And the poorer countries are the ones that are getting the short end of the stick.

As usual, it's time for a clean energy.

So fast fact beef has the worst average kilograms of Co 2 food at nearly 100.

That is to say 1 beef.

That seems insane.

Can you guess? Brian Stockton, what major food group that James loves comes in second in terms of CO2 for us in terms of CO2, and I won't tease you any longer, it's dark chocolate, which is what at half? Oh, no.

Can we not have good things? Oh, man.

Do we have to stop eating dark chocolate? I love dark chocolate.

No one's talking about stop eating to eat dark chocolate, but we're talking about stopping eating beef.

We eat a lot more beef and kilograms of dark chocolate, except for possibly meat.

For every kilogram of beef, there's a kilogram of dark chocolate in meat.

That's basically the two things I eat.

A little bit of beef, a little bit of dark chocolate.

Washing it down from Auris Technica.

We talked about gas stoves releasing hazardous air pollutants before while they're operating, but even while they're turned off, according to a new study, some of these leaks can go undetected.

And although gas distributors adding odorant to the natural gas to ensure that people smell the leaks before there's an explosion risk the smell may not be strong enough for residents to know.

Smell leaks.

Some people have a much stronger sense of smell than others.

My daughter was telling me this the other day and I thought she was crazy.

No, they're super smellers.

There are people with insanely sensitive noses, and you have to think the guy at the supermarket who smells with terrible bo is one of these people who can't smell.

Like, what happens with those people? They just get used to it or what? Yeah, but people have different senses of smells.

I just want to know if my deal isn't working, if you people would tell me.

I hope you would.

In particular, those who have lost their sense of smell, whether from culvert or other causes, may not smell large leaks.

Even so, one study found that 5% of homes had leaks.

That's terrible.

Do you still have natural gas in your stove? I do the cooktop, but I've been shopping around for induction cooktops and hope to put one in soon.

And they'll probably put it in during the podcast.

Yes, I've been hearing drills and saws I don't know.

Hopefully it doesn't make the microphone here.

I think I color up the podcast.

Wonderfully.

Add some texture to it.

Beyond my illness.

This week, the same study showed that leaking natural gas contain multiple hazardous air pollutants, including benzene and cancer causing agents.

So boo to that.

From clean technica Pan African resources.

Ten megawatt solar plant in South Africa saves $170,000 a month on the gold mines electric bill.

That takes about five years to pay off, but after that brian, it's gravy.

Gravy.

It's like having a gold mine.

Totally.

I'm laughing at myself.

Uber has announced its Comfort Electric program is expanding to Canada and rolling out to more cities in the United States.

The Comfort Electric program launched back in May, allowing customers to specifically request a ride in an electric vehicle, like a Tesla Poll Star, Ford Mustang mocky.

What do you think of that? Yeah, that's interesting.

And I don't normally take Uber because I have a car, but when I had my back problem, I needed to take it to an appointment I had.

So I took an Uber.

And you could choose an eco.

Uber was one of the options, so I thought I better try that.

And gives me something to talk about on the podcast.

So the car that came and got me, it must have been like a Corolla hybrid or something.

I was hoping for a Tesla, but now it seemed like a normal Corolla.

But I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and assume it was.

It was a four cylinder, which qualifies as a new car around here.

But then on the way home from the appointment, I thought, well, I'm in a hurry.

I'll just pick whatever.

And I got picked up by the largest SUV I have ever seen in my life.

Is that right? Why use that as an Uber? Why? It seems an odd choice to use as an Uber vehicle.

Oh, my God.

Especially nowadays.

Yeah.

From wind power monthly.

Update your subscription, people.

NorDx boosts a six megawatt onshore wind turbine rotor, and it's going to be 175 meters off the ground.

That is taller than the Washington Monument.

This is almost half that, and it is onshore.

Interesting.

Oh, it's time for another CES fast fact.

How many of the giant GE Halead X offshore wind turbines, which I just mentioned, which are 14 MW, would you need to power all of Great Britain? Brian? 60 00 60 00 60 00 to power all of Great Britain? Did I say the US? At first? I don't remember.

Check the tape.

Don't listen to the show.

Get the magnetizer out.

Erase the tape.

These old men on this podcast we're talking about magnetizers.

Ram promises electric pickup lineup that will challenge Ford and Rivian in range and beyond.

So, finally, Ram is the last people you're wondering what's coming.

There we are.

It's all coming.

Bring it on.

Dimeler has unveiled their long range transport truck.

This is a semi for the highway.

Has a 600 kilowatt hour battery and a 500 kilowatt meter range.

There's about 300 miles.

We use LFP batteries, which is the cheaper batteries, less energy dense, resulting in shorter range for the same weight.

But Mercedes says it is gaining in longevity because the company says it expects the vehicle to last for ten years, which is a lot for a semi truck and 1.2 million.

Then you can probably just put a new battery because the other components are probably in pretty good shape, I'm guessing.

Yeah, I'd be a little surprised if LFP batteries are kind of energy dense enough to work for a semi, because a semi has also got to carry a big load.

So if the batteries are too heavy, it kind of takes away from your payload.

But obviously they think it'll work.

Oh, look at this.

A bonus.

CES fast fact.

Brian, the boldest solar park in India is the largest solar farm in the world, about $1 billion per gigawatt.

That's a nuclear reactor is about a gigawatt, right? Okay.

So it produces 2.5 gigawatts of power, or about 2.25 nuclear reactors.

Given solar is 20% of its peak overall PowerPoint, that means about $5 billion per equivalent nuclear reactor without any storage considerations.

So you wonder what it's just another case of what the cost of solar is.

Nuclear is without storage, and it's about $5 billion per reactor right now, but that's getting cheaper, and we expect that it's going to half in the 2030s.

So that's incredible.

And from The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, we have not cited them as a source before.

California is planning legislation to allow human composting starting in 2027, californians will be able to choose human composting as an alternative burial option.

Great.

Oh, sure, you clap now, but it's one more recyclable to keep track of.

I know eggshells and coffee grounds are okay, but what about Uncle Rick? Is he compost or disposal? The first state to allow human composting was Washington in 2019.

Other states that have legalized the practice include Oregon, Colorado and Vermont.

It is a problem because we cremate a lot of bodies and we probably don't need all those carbon emissions.

And finally, this week, tesla loses its infamous most shorted stock title to Apple.

Your thoughts? Brian Stockton wow, that's a man.

I had not heard that.

I mean, Apple is probably a bad choice to short as well.

I don't know why people would short Apple.

These are two things that you love, tesla and Apple.

Yeah, you just cited all the Apple boxes you have, and they're not for apples, they're for MacBook.

Yeah, no, it's true.

Certainly the growth days of Apple are behind them.

So they're maybe not the powerhouse stock that they once were, but they seem on very solid ground.

So shorting Apple is probably a bad idea, just like shorting Tesla is a bad idea.

Well, that is our show for this week.

We'd love to hear from you again.

Our contact email address is cleanenergy [email protected].

Pick up your pen right now.

Send us a message because we love to hear from you.

Clean energy bot on Twitter and TikTok YouTube channel.

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So if you're new to the show or to subscribe on your podcast app to get new episodes delivered every week, reading review when possible, and we'll see you next week.

Yeah, see you next week.

The IEA has a number for the required solar to halt climate change and it's being built right now! Heat waves make people angry, Californians respond to text alert to save power and blackouts were averted.

• Link to Bloomberg article: The Solar Supply Chain needed to Halt Global Warming is Already Being Built

Tesla’s production cost per vehicle is 42% of what it was just five years ago and it’s not due to falling battery prices. Some grids in the US have so much excess power, prices are often going negative. They pay you to use power. This is going to become common as we move forward with decarbonization.

The specs for the Chevy Equinox have been announced and it's clearly going to make the Chevy Bolt EUV obselete instantly. 

James's son's geology professor says there's not enough lithium for 100% electric car sales. He's wrong.

Thanks for listening to our show! Consider rating The Clean Energy Show on iTunes, Spotify or wherever you listen to our show.

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Your hosts: James Whittingham https://twitter.com/jewhittingham Brian Stockton: https://twitter.com/brianstockton

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Transcript of this Episode

Brian: Hello, and welcome to episode 131 of the Clean Energy Show.

I'm Brian Stockton.

BBC News Anchor: We're interrupting our schedules for the following announcement.

Buckingham palace has announced the death of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.

Brian: What is this, the London Bridge protocol?

James: Yes.

We've been waiting decades for this, and it's finally happened.

Brian: No.

Podcasts do not have to follow the London Bridge protocol.

Come on.

They don't it's fine.

But I will say the Queen is dead.

Long lived the king.

James:I'm James Whittingham.

This week, my son's geology prof says there's not enough lithium to go 100% electric anytime soon.

I promptly advised my son to quit university and educate himself on Facebook.

This week.

California didn't have enough power.

While other grids in the US.

Have so much excess power, prices are often going negative.

If I can get the grid to pay me to use my fancy coffee machine, I'll be rich.

Tesla's production cost per vehicle is 42% of what it was just five years ago.

And it's not due to falling battery prices.

It's actually Elon Musk not having to buy horses anymore due to the woke mob.

Okay, I don't understand that, Joe.

Really? No, I don't.

He got a massage and promised a woman a horse.

I got it.

The California power grid avoided severe blackouts after sending a text alert to citizens.

The text said, you up, followed by turn off your lights.

All that and more on this edition of the Clean Energy Show.

And Brian, this week we also have something from Bloomberg opinion that says the energy transition and its supply chain are at what we need to beat climate change.

Already.

It's already being constructed.

It's quite remarkable.

Even apparently, lithium.

Yes, high temperatures are making people angrier online.

And how are you this week? I'm good.

So here's my two updates.

I got the latest full self driving update on my Tesla, which is it a big one.

Yeah, it's a big 110.69.2.

This is the first update I've had since actually getting the full self.

Oh, I didn't know that.

Yeah, it's the only one I've had since getting the full self driving software.

Only had it a day, only used it once, and it still did that.

Same thing where a lot of our streets don't have a line painted down the middle, and it's two lanes, and it started to drift to one side, so I canceled it and just kept driving.

Well, Joy? Yeah.

And he says they're going to be out by the end of the year.

Come on.

Yeah, well, a lot of the testing miles have been done in California, so it sounds like the software works way better in California.

And we are, sadly, many miles from California, so it's going to be a bit of a struggle here for a while, I think.

Do they paint the streets of California? Is that the issue? We don't paint them here.

Yeah.

Well, I'm assuming all the roads are better in California, but the grass is always greener, as they say, although not during a drought.

But anyway, my other updates so I think I said last week, I've applied for the Greener Homes grant, which is Canada's subsidy for retrofitting your home to put in clean energy stuff, insulation.

And I'm still hoping to do a heat pump, an air source heat pump for my house, get rid of my furnace.

So the process is moving.

I've been approved.

I'm in the program.

They can't do the blower test.

So what they do is a blower test on your house to test the tightness of the house, and then you do the upgrades, and they do another one.

But because our ceiling, the drywalls opened up in the ceiling in the kitchen, because we were trying to fix those leaks, they can't do the blower test right away.

But anyway, I just wanted to mention that I am hoping to go through this process.

This is what it's available in Canada, and as we've covered on the show before, the new Inflation Reduction Act in the US.

If you're in the US.

There's lots of kind of similar subsidies for home improvements and upgrades and energy efficient appliances and vehicles and everything.

And of course, different states and different provinces all have incentives, too.

And like, our natural gas utility has a little bit of incentive to go to higher efficiency furnaces, gas furnaces and stuff.

So anybody listening, always check your local area, your local state, your local province to see what the possible subsidies are.

Okay, well, the Chevy Equinox, they finally announced the specs on it.

Yeah.

So this is the next big electric vehicle from General Motors, which is an SUV that's going to be at a reasonable price.

They said this is a small SUV under $30,000 US.

Is that cheaper than the Bolt? It's not cheaper than the Bolt now because they lower the Bolt in the US.

But the equivalent Canadian pricing would put it lower, I think, than the Canadian pricing, current Canadian pricing of the bolt and worldwide as well.

Yeah, and if that's the price for the Equinox, one would think they would eventually drop the bolt below that because that's a smaller car.

The Equinox is actually making it hard for me to buy a Bolt because of two reasons.

One, it'll render the Bolt obsolete.

Even if it's really close in price, it's a bigger vehicle, seems like a better vehicle.

It's not as well fitted.

Maybe they have some bare bones stuff with the base model.

You get a power driver's seat on the base model of the boat and a few other nice things.

In Canada, you get ten years of connectivity, or eight years of connectivity.

A long time of connectivity.

Maybe it's five, but it's a few years.

That cover most of your ownership, usually.

So I'm just worried about it.

Plus, they got the LTM battery pack with that.

So that should be approved to charge faster, three times as fast.

Peak charging doesn't mean that it's going to charge three times as fast, but the peak charging is three times as fast.

So that's what the big drawback of the Bolt is.

Well, it's size and it's charging speed on the highway.

Well, and I think we're still in a situation where if you decide you want one, you're going to have to head down to GM as soon as you can and kind of put down a deposit because the supplies are going to be limited, especially where we live.

So I think that's going to be the situation for the next couple of years, no matter which electric vehicle you decide to buy.

And it's going to be at least two years before I get a base model of the Equinox.

But let's say I have a four year loan or four year lease of a Bolt.

Maybe leasing is the way to go because the Bolt could be under severe price pressure.

Right.

If the price does go down and I bought the vehicle, then I've got like a dud on it when I'm trying to sell it in three or four years to get an equal option, but at least would give you a sort of a guaranteed buyout price or something.

Yeah, but at least they're not too sexy with their offers on the leasing right now.

So I really don't know what to do.

So I got a message from my son at his geology class.

It's not basic geology, it's engineering related.

Geology is something that requisite that he's taking.

And he says the prof was going on about not having enough lithium.

Like this was the day that California solidified their 100% electric vehicles by 2035.

Well, he says there's no way, no way in hell, because there's not enough lithium.

He's a geologist.

He knows there's not enough lithium.

That's not true, though.

No.

From what I understand, and I'm not a lithium expert, but apparently you are, it's not so much that there's plenty of lithium.

It's the processing of the lithium that's the difficult part to make it usable for batteries.

Yeah.

So I looked it up, and I found some sources in the journal Nature, and lithium itself is not scarce, as you said.

But a June report by Bloomberg New Energy Finance estimated that the current reserves of the metal are around 20 million tons.

And that's not enough to carry the conversion EVs through to mid century.

So the actual amount there, it's the refinery of it, the mining of it.

He said it takes ten years to mind to get well.

Do your math.

It's more than ten years away, and we're going to have a story later about the solar supply chain going gangbusters enough to actually beat climate change.

And where there's a will, there's a way.

And this is what's happening.

Solar is ahead of everybody else.

But batteries are coming now and there's money to be made.

So presumably if there's money to be made, it seems possible that there will possibly be some lithium bottlenecks where we won't have all that we need.

There was an announcement from Tesla recently that they are trying to get a lithium mine or processing plant going in Texas.

So the fact that Tesla is getting into it indicates that, you know, maybe they are worried there's not quite enough lithium, but it's all part of the ramp, so I'm not worried.

But, hey, I'm not a geology professor, and we're also going to talk about Tesla having an advantage because five, seven years ago, musk was talking about lithium and he was on top of this, wasn't he? No, I mean, this is the advantage of Tesla, is they've been working on all of these things for at least a dozen years now.

They've got a nice head start in figuring this stuff out.

We were just before we went to record, there was a threat in California of power blackouts, wasn't there? Yes.

So they've got a crazy heat wave going on there and they were predicted just at the time that we were recording.

They had managed to stave off blackouts for the previous couple of days, but it was all coming to a head just as we were recording our show last week.

And they saved the grid.

And how did they do it, James? They sent out a text message alert.

Yeah.

And Brian? It worked.

It totally works.

It's a crazy thing.

It worked.

People said, okay, I will turn off my draw up for a couple of hours, or whatever they do in California.

And it worked.

Yeah.

No, I thought that was quite remarkable.

There was some graphs posted online of, like, exactly when the text went out and how power dipped.

Obviously not everybody's going to listen to that, but that is one of the advantages of everybody having a cell phone here in our province.

We had a bunch of emergency alerts for safety reasons a couple of weeks ago, and they were quite alarming to get.

Definitely necessary for everybody's safety.

Certainly I want to be informed and stuff like that.

So if you and I were living in California, we would absolutely have gone and turned off some lights, turned off some power hungry things, and clearly enough people think like us and did that as well.

So I've got a pool pump running, right? Yeah, it's about 1000 watts.

Wow.

Yeah, it's not fun.

Swimming pools are not the most environmental thing there, but heating, although you do run yours with thermal solar panels.

I heated with solar, yeah, but there's chemicals and water.

I should probably do an assessment of that and compare it to having a hot tub, because maybe a hot tub is more my thing.

I like the freedom from gravity, Brian.

That's what I've been really enjoying the last couple of years is the freedom from gravity.

The fatter you are, the lighter you are in water.

So I figure I wave it as much as I would on the moon.

And can you put a bunch of salt in the water and be even more buoyant? You could, but I wouldn't be able to touch the ground and I don't think I would be walking around floating like a bob, bobbing up and down like a buoy.

That's a horrible sight, especially in my speedo.

I just bought a bunch of chemicals even after I closed the pool, because I had to.

I have to keep it treated until it freezes.

And then in the spring, I have to treat it again and kill all the LG.

You have to do that with a hot tub, but it's less.

But then you heat it.

And I can't heat it with heat, with solar panels, but I can't heat it with my thermal heating.

Anyway, the pool is closed in winter is here.

And that emergency alert that we had, a Saskatchewan resolved itself.

The person was caught and died in custody, for what it's worth, but I won't dwell on that.

The fact is, Brian, 500,000 homes in California and businesses have been warned that they might lose service.

And within five minutes it was all but over.

That's all tough.

It's five minutes.

Maybe people are more conscious of energy demands these days.

We never used to think about it before, but maybe now it's not such a crazy thing to send in a text.

Yeah, I mean, I think maybe they'd run into problems if they were sending out one of these alerts every couple of days.

Eventually people would get tired of it.

But if they can limit themselves to once or twice a year, then they can keep people's attention and they'll do it.

Maybe we'll have smarter homes.

Like my pool pump runs on a smart timer, a smart switch.

Maybe if I connected that to the power utility and allowed it to turn off, things like that, I don't know what else it would be.

My air conditioner thermostat goes up a degree.

Yeah, something like that.

Well, actually, Apple has announced a new feature coming, I think with the next update of their iOS, their mobile software is apple is actually going to have a thing where your phone will only charge when there's the maximum amount of green electricity on the grid.

They're going to figure out that's cool.

Why don't we have a story about that? What's wrong with you? You're the apple guy here.

This is it right now.

Sorry about it.

Tell me everything.

Presumably it will figure this out for each jurisdiction because the grid is different every place.

But yeah, it'll figure out when there's the most green power on the grid, and it will only charge your phone during that time.

See, phones take a lot of power now.

They take 20, 40, 50 watts, some tablets take 100 watts.

Yeah, that's getting a little bit more serious, especially since we don't have 100 watt light bulbs anymore.

We have Led light bulbs.

No.

And when you think about pretty much every single human being in North America has a smartphone.

That's a few hundred million smartphones just in North America.

So, yeah, that's a lot of juice when you add them all together.

But I've said this before on the show, that I wanted to know when is the greenest time to charge my car? Because we live on a power grid that has 45% coal, something like that.

And I want to know, is there more hydro in the mix at three in the morning than, say, if I plugged it in and charged it at seven in the night or something, or even during the day, the business day, and I couldn't get a response from the utility source power.

I want to know that.

I don't know if they know that.

I hope they know that.

But yeah, that's a very interesting question.

So we'll have to see if Apple figures out our jurisdiction.

Yeah, I'd be curious.

Maybe they'd listen to Apple and not you.

Well, maybe Apple figures it out and then I'll learn from that.

And you will know when to charge our cars, because all electric cars have preset timers on them that you can do.

A lot of them you can do from an app.

And I don't have an app for mine because I bought the base model, but I do set a timer on it every time.

Millions of Californians, though, received these alerts that the grid was apparel.

Millions of them.

Right, interesting.

I just wonder, though, if we can integrate our homes into the power grid better, because we're getting smart meters on our house.

So that tells the utility what's going on faster in real time.

And maybe they can say, well, Joe Schmo at 205th Avenue uses a lot of electricity between five and seven, and he's crashing the grid.

Maybe he could find something to cut down on, and maybe they wouldn't send an alert to somebody who has a trickle of electricity because they're gone during that time.

Well, that makes me want to skip ahead to one of the stories we were going to have this week again from Bloomberg.

And this is about negative power prices.

And I've heard about this in the UK and in other jurisdictions, but I didn't realize it was happening quite so much in the US.

And so this definitely relates to what we're talking about now.

I think basically what you're just asking about here is basically the grid just isn't smart enough yet.

It will eventually get there, and it's also not interconnected enough.

So in the US, there is seven different utility grids and they're not all connected.

It's basically seven regions of seven grids in certain places at certain times.

There's excess wind and excess solar.

So much so that they have too much power at certain times of the day.

This results in negative pricing and encouraging people to just use extra power.

And if the grid was further developed, was smarter, there's more home batteries connected to the grid, there's more EVs connected to the grid, and all of those can go either into the grid or out of the grid.

That's going to eliminate these problems.

So once you start hitting negative prices, boom, that's when your car charges.

That's when your home battery charges.

And it's coming, it's just going to take a long time.

I thought we'd talk a little bit about Tesla this week because there's a lot going on and it's kind of interesting.

One thing that I'll start with is a bit of information I learned on Twitter, and that is, you know how supercharger pricing is creeping up, right? It's getting more and more expensive all the time that Tesla sets the price for the superchargers.

Yeah, it was super cheap.

When I got my car two and a half years ago, it was almost nothing, just a few bucks a charge.

And now it's more like 15, $20 a charge, which is annoying, but it's still way better than gas.

And it is what it is.

Well, now they're saying that it's now the equivalent of a 30 to 40 miles per gallon gas car, which isn't even that great because the Prius is 50 miles per gallon.

So it's saying it's like that.

Yeah, that's supercharging.

By the way, November, you don't always supercharge.

You mostly charge at home if you can.

Yeah.

So that's the caveat there.

Yeah.

So, yeah, it sucks to pay that much when you're on the road, but still way cheaper than gas.

Yeah.

And electricity is usually a lot cheaper at home.

Plus, if you're like us, you have the option of making it even cheaper by if you can invest in some solar panels and you have a good enough situation with your local utility.

Yeah.

Martin Avisa, the vice president of investor relations at Tesla, said Monday during the presentation at the Goldman Sachs tech conference in San Francisco, tesla currently has all the supply it needs.

This is courtesy of Business Insider.

This is an interesting statement.

This is a shift from Tesla is always supply constraints with their batteries.

Now they have all they need.

What happened? Well, it's just all that groundwork that they laid is starting to pay off, which is they basically just saw this coming before everybody else.

And it's an obvious thing to you and me, it's like, okay, well, the world needs to get off oil.

So what do you do? You do the math and it's like, well, guess what? We need an insane number of batteries.

And Tesla figured this out ten or possibly as much as 20 years ago.

And so they've been working on this problem for ten or 20 years, and they're just far ahead of the game because that's always been their ethos.

It's like, well, no one else is doing it, so we have to do it ourselves.

Since they were the first ones up to bat, as it were.

So they've just got a big head start, and the other players are figuring it out too.

And as we always say, there are announcements every week of new battery factories and such.

So as a Tesla investor, it's great news that they are not constrained by battery supply.

They're buying them from everybody that will sell them CATL and panasonic.

And as well as starting to ramp up their own batteries, we're hitting the S curve of EV adoption, and it is constrained by supply.

Yeah.

If I want to order the bolt, I have to wait months and stuff like that.

It's not just a chip shortage, right? Yeah.

And I think there is still a bit of a chip shortage.

So they didn't say, like the last I heard was that the chip shortage was the limiting factor for Tesla.

They had enough batteries, but they were still a bit iffy on the number of chips.

But this more recent statement suggests, okay, well, maybe they've got enough chips now.

Well, the statement says, for the first time I can remember, we can access all the supply we need for both businesses.

This is something startling as well.

The price of manufacturing is only 42% of what it was five short years ago.

And it's not due to battery prices falling as expected.

It's due to factory design and large castings, like making one large piece of the car instead of a whole bunch of little ones.

Efficiencies.

Like that.

Yeah.

All the stuff they set up ten or 20 years ago is starting to pay off.

That also makes me think they're making a killing on the markup.

So the cars that they make in California at Fremont are a lot more expensive than China.

Obviously, Santa Monroe thought they'd be 20% less than China, but they say also in Germany, they're cheaper to make in Germany as well.

Yeah, just because it's the new factory with the new design.

Their original factory in Fremont was something that they bought from somebody else and kind of had to repurpose it, and that kind of gave them the knowledge to, okay, if we're going to build this stuff from scratch, what's the better design, the more efficient design? And that's what they've got in Texas and Berlin and wherever else they might be building in the future.

Yeah.

So we have Tesla factories in China, in California, in Austin, Texas, and in Berlin, Germany, and who knows where else down the line.

But those are the main ones that are coming online and starting to hit their stride in production, right? Yeah.

And really, I think that would be the case if any Automaker was kind of starting up.

Now, the problem that the legacy Automakers have is they've been in business for 100 years and they've been doing things a particular way.

The businesses have grown in a particular way, and they don't have the luxury of just blowing everything up and starting over again and building new factories.

They've kind of got a jerry rigged as they go along.

So that turned out to be Tesla's big advantage, was the ability to start from scratch like that.

Of course, it meant they nearly went bankrupt several times, but once they passed, once they got over the hump, it's all gravy from this point.

Well, I thought it was interesting to know that 10% of the batteries are going into storage, because we had an email about that last week.

I think there's an insatiable demand for storage as well.

Obviously, it's just a matter of price.

When the price hits a certain point, it's going to go crazy because the grid is greening and we need that storage.

For yes, and from what I understand, they would maybe do more than 10% of the batteries to storage, but the profits are just way better in the cars.

So 10% is all they can manage right now, but eventually more batteries, more grid stores, etc.

For so you're basically just selling the batteries with a little bit of equipment, whereas the car is the batteries with a lot of equipment.

And so the mark up comes from the bigger spend.

So, yeah, it's quite remarkable.

And it makes me think that the other manufacturers might be further behind than I thought, which is good if you're a Tesla investor like yourself, because the demand for electric car, man, I tell you, I see so many Teslas, I keep thinking it's you.

And it's never you.

It's never you.

No.

I was driving with my partner the other day and I said, look, I have an announcement to make.

I'm now going to stop pointing out every Tesla that I see because it's just become too annoying.

I used to do that.

Hey, there's a Tesla.

Hey, there's a Tesla.

No more.

So, yeah, if you're new to the podcast, full disclosure, I am a Tesla investor.

Yeah.

Wow.

That's actually a big announcement, Brian, because I haven't stopped doing that, and my daughter hasn't stopped doing that.

And sometimes she'll text me Tesla.

That's what she'll say in the text.

It's the punch buggy of our time, really.

Exactly.

So the supercharger, version four is apparently being set up in Arizona with a mega pack.

That's the grid size, truck, container size, storage of batteries, and solar, which is something that Elon has been promising for years, that all superchargers would have a solar installation either adjacent to them or right on top or around them.

No, that makes sense.

We always see those renderings of the car park of the future where there are solar panels.

You park underneath to protect your car from rain, but you also get some free solar charging.

So eventually I think most car charging spots will include some solar.

It's probably never enough to actually fully supply the cars, but that's fine.

So we don't know the speed, the maximum charge rate of these new chargers.

In fact, has there even been an announcement on it? I mean, what do we know? No, we don't know too much other than these are going to be prepared for cars other than Tesla's.

More so than the other ones.

There was going to be maybe a second cable, but now it's sounding more like it would be an adapter.

There will be an adapter included with each one.

So we think every Tesla charger can be adapted to charge non Teslas, but these ones are going to be designed that way.

I wonder how they'll do that with the adapters so people don't steal them because they're worth hundreds of dollars.

Yeah, hooked on with a wire or something.

I don't know.

Maybe lots of video cameras, too.

We don't know the charge speed, but what's the maximum charge fees of the version three? It's currently 250, but we believe that even on the version three chargers, they can probably up it to 300, 350, but they haven't done it yet.

So most of the third party chargers that are out now, let's call them non Tesla chargers, do 350 like the Electrify America or they are capable of they don't do 350, but they're capable of it.

That 1350 is not too difficult to get to that's based on the voltage, I think.

So supercharger V four is out and I guess they'll start testing them and maybe announcing what exactly they do.

Everybody sort of expects that they'll bump it up a little bit, maybe perhaps for the cyber truck.

What do you think? Yeah, like up to just 350 kw or something.

Yeah.

My car is limited to 170.

Have not found that to be a real problem on the highway trips.

So I think 250 is fine, 350 is fine, whatever they can do.

So they're cranking out tesla's cranking out 6500 power walls.

This is the battery packs for home storage a week and 9000 battery packs a week in Nevada.

The battery packs are 9000 in Nevada for vehicles per week and 6500 power walls.

That's pretty good.

People are going to start buying these suckers and battery prices have to go down at some point if we don't run out of lithium.

Geology professor they're testing new side repeater cameras with a wider field of view.

What do you think of that? What's the deal with that? Is it anything to do with self driving improvements? Or is it just a feature for coolness, for having a better surround view of.

The car? I would think it's probably both.

I mean, there's always going to be upgrades, there's always going to be new camera modules available, so why not move to the new ones? This is the Clean Energy Show with Brian Stafford and James Whittingham.

Every now and again, Brian a Twitter thread.

Blows my mind, blows my little head.

And this is one of those Twitter threads.

It was from David Fickling, a Bloomberg New Energy opinion writer for Bloomberg.

He says that solar is on an unstoppable path to solve climate change.

And this is something that he didn't know.

He's not telling us that.

He said he looked into it, he talked to all the analysis and found out that solar is going gangbusters.

And not only that, but it's enough to solve climate change on paper and then some by 2050.

This is where we have to get to by 2050.

He says there's more than enough being built now, basically, to be easily on that path.

He says the energy supply to solve the climate is already under construction right now, and it's enough even if the current factories only run at 70%.

So it's not like everybody's going to 100% and steam is coming out of the buildings and people are running around.

It's like casual 70% is nothing.

Anybody who runs less than 70% is not profitable.

So he says, I was absolutely astonished to discover this.

The solar supply chain we need to reach net zero is already under construction.

Current planned and under construction capacity for solar poly silicon industry would be sufficient to support a solar sector producing nearly one terawatt of PV panels every year.

That's 1 TB every year.

So new solar only generates about 20% of the time.

Okay, this is for reference.

Nuclear does about 90%, 50% for coal and gas and offshore wind, which surprised me.

I thought offshore wind was a bit better than 50%, and it's 35% for hydro.

And onshore wind, 35% for hydro.

I always grew up with the belief that hydro was a constant.

They always say hydro is like a base power, but we're finding out with climate change and droughts that it's not and also seasonal.

So it's not.

So if hydro is only producing 35% of the time, of course pumped hydro works as battery storage because you just pump it back upstream.

You lose 20% of your energy doing that, but batteries lose something in the hand off, too.

So, yeah, it makes sense.

Pumped hydro is hydro that doesn't depend on nature.

This is one terawatt.

It's equivalent to 5.8% of annual global electricity consumption.

That's right now, right now, every year we are going to make 5.8%, almost 6% of global energy production in solar alone, starting very soon.

Not in the 20, fourties very soon.

That's amazing.

To give it in a bit more context, he said the IEA last year worked out what you need to do to get to net zero this is the International Energy Agency.

We worked out last year what you need to get to net zero by 2050, which is our target for climate change, to keep it at 1.5 degrees of warming and start to bring global warming to a halt.

Instead you would need an average of 63 year installed between 2000 and 32,050.

And he says one of solar alone is getting output now very soon.

Under the construction is there to have one terawatt every year.

So current polysilicone capacity construction is about $20 billion more than the current production at factories and constantly underestimating growth.

Five years ago, the IEA estimated what the solar capacity production would be right now and they are 40% low.

And it's the big underestimate of everything we do talk about on this show.

So regulatory roadblocks, though this is caveat, are likely to be bigger bottleneck than the supply chain because wind has a lot of regulatory roadblocks and bottlenecks, I guess things like that.

Mining too, like we were talking about lithium.

Part of it is the permitting process for processing lithium and most panel construction production rather is in China.

So political issues could arise.

But the gold rush on poly silicon will likely cause prices to crash even further.

So this is very positive for the world and it's hard for us to say that the technology and prices are going to solve climate change because the people who are at the forefront of that are hopeful.

But it's just hard to say that.

But it seems like there is a lot of positive news and this is basically the thesis of our podcast that prices of the technology we talked about is going to change the world and perhaps save it.

Yeah, clean energy will win because it's better and cheaper.

High temperatures are making people angrier online.

So this is another article from Bloomberg.

Somebody did a study about when temperatures rise above 30 degrees Celsius or 86 Fahrenheit, hate speech increases on social media when the temperatures go above 30 Celsius.

You're kidding.

This is maybe not too surprising.

I mean, people get hot and they get angry.

Actually makes me think of you remember do the Right Thing, the great Spike Lee film from 25 years ago or so.

That film takes place on the hottest day of the summer in Brooklyn, right? Yeah.

Tempers start to flare because it's so damn hot.

And so I don't know, it's maybe just common sense, but somebody did a study and this is a thing that you can measure.

You go on social media and you can evaluate the posts and absolutely more hate speech and bad behavior when the temperatures rise.

And with climate change, the temperatures are going to be rising more often.

You know, whenever there's the first hot day of a season or a hot day after a cold snap, I find that people have road rage around here a lot.

Yeah, the speeding and I think the police should model on forecast and other traffic enforcement.

Brian, it's time for what do you think? What do you think? This is where I asked Brian what he thinks about topics that I am unsure of.

BMW confirms it will adopt Tesla's four six, eight cell format pledging billions of dollars for six global factories.

What do you think? Yeah, it sounds like a smart idea.

I wasn't sure everybody was going to adopt up the Tesla 46 80 sell.

I mean, it'll still be one of many, I guess, but it's a very new form factor.

So interesting that other people are adopting it.

Electrify America is rebranding it's 350 kilowatt and 150 kilowatt fast chargers and the one will be hyper fast and the other will be ultra fast.

Do you know which one is which? I don't know.

I think those names are useless because who knows what's faster, hyper or ultra.

Tesla solar now has to come with powerwall.

So if you buy solar from Tesla, you have to get a powerwall with it, which aren't cheap, by the way.

There are thousands and thousands of dollars.

I don't know why.

What do you think about that? What's the point of that? Well, I mentioned it has to do with their limited ability to they've had some difficulty expanding their solar, so I don't know, they've crunched the numbers and they can only serve a limited number of people anyway, so they might as well do it the way they want to.

Elon Musk still says that 6 billion Tesla FSD full self driving beta miles driven by consumers like yourself are necessary for global regulatory approval.

Do you know where they're at now? What does that mean? Yeah, it just means there's a lot of miles before it's going to work or what? Yes, I'm surprised that there's any kind of a number attached to it.

I mean, the main thing is the software has got to work, so who knows how many billions of miles they're going to need.

And they can't process all the data from all those miles, so yeah, I'm not sure what that means.

All right, let's briefly dip into the mail bag, Brian.

And also the lighting round is coming up later in the show where we'll skip through the rest of the week's headlines.

Dear Clean Energy Show, I am an autistic boy named Name withheld to talk about ammonia and hydrogen vehicles in your podcast.

Here are some videos about it.

And he gave us about 90 links to YouTube videos.

And I'm not even exaggerating, there is dozens and dozens of links that he gave, which is great.

And he says, credit me under the alias Clasol Blano for giving you the suggestion and the research, please.

Fame isn't for me.

Have a nice day, gentlemen.

That's one of the problems when people write into the podcast, Brian, is fame, instant fame that you have to deal with.

And fame is not something for everyone.

We understand that it's very fleeting.

Very fleeting, yeah.

But I definitely want to know more about ammonia and hydrogen.

Those are both interesting possible things that can be done green in the future.

Absolutely.

And we will use some of your research and look at it.

And we are hoping to know more and talk more and have some interviews coming up as well, perhaps.

So we like to hear from you.

Contact us [email protected].

We're on Twitter and TikTok.

Hello.

We're everywhere.

Brian, don't forget our YouTube channel and our Speak Pipe Cleanenergy Show is our handle on Speedpipe.com Cleanenergy Show.

And now, of course, it's time for the lightning round.

It's time for the lightning round.

A fast paced look at the week in clean energy news.

And Brian, this week, this year, rather, germany moved to a goal of 100% renewables by 2035.

They doubled the goal for onshore wind, tripled solar goals, quadrupled offshore wind guards, all in the space of a few weeks.

Thank you, Russia.

Thank you, Putin.

Yeah, that's working out great.

Under the climate change file, unprecedented floods killed 1400, injured 13,000, and damaged 1.17 million homes and destroyed another half million more and washed away livestock and crops in Pakistan, something we haven't mentioned on the show and is under reported in the news.

Perhaps we did mention it briefly a couple of weeks ago.

I know, but it's true.

This is a massive story and all of our thoughts to people in Pakistan dealing with that horrible tragedy.

And it's time for clean energy.

Class Fact.

Brian, a single Tesla megapack.

That is the semi truck size utility megapack and hold enough energy to charge how many Tesla vehicles? 40.

That's not bad.

I mean, the battery packs and cars are pretty big, so, yeah, that's good to know.

From Electric Autonomy, Canada.

Toronto Fire Services, Canada's largest municipal fire department, is buying his first electric pumper truck.

Unfortunately, it'll cost twice as much as a standard one, $2 million.

What do you think of that? Wow.

I mean, more upfront, but probably cheaper in the long run.

That's usually how these things work.

They told electric Autonomy, Canada.

North American firefighters prefer something bigger and more traditional looking in the fire truck department.

So we decided that we were going to build a truck that looked and felt like a North American fire truck, which sounds like it's overbuilt and it's just going to run an electric instead of diesel.

Well, time for another clean energy show.

Fast fact.

In 2020, 70% to 80% of lithiumion battery costs were raw materials this year, but in 2010, it was only 20% to 30%.

So, yes, the rest of the battery has come down the raw materials, not as much.

But that just goes to show you that making a lot of batteries reduces the prices.

Interesting.

From Bloomberg, the United States is estimated to host about a third of global crypto asset operations.

And get this, it currently consumes about zero 9% to 1.7% of total US electricity usage.

Yeah, turn off your crypto in California when the power might go out.

Guys, that's the first thing you should start in a clean energy future.

Not a big deal, but right now, we don't need that.

Panasonic scoped two potential sites in the United States, kansas and Oklahoma for a $4 billion investment in a new lithium ion battery assembly plant likely to support Tesla EV assembly in Texas.

They initially selected Kansas, but after the big biden bill, the IRA, the Inflation Reduction Act passed.

They said, what the heck, why not both they doubled it.

They doubled just like that.

There you go.

Sign of the time.

It's not the future, it's now.

No more coal ruling.

The EPA recently announced the living of millions of dollars in fines against companies for selling equipment designed to circumvent pollution controls illegal under the Clean Air Act.

And I say, God bless you.

About time.

We don't want any more damn coal.

Related that is our time for this week.

We like to hear from you.

Contact us.

As I said, our email is Cleanenergy [email protected].

Get out your typewriter now and send us a message.

We're on Twitter.

TikTok clean Energy Pod.

Don't forget to check out our YouTube channel because we are there in visual form and you can leave us a [email protected] cleanenergyshow.

And we will mention your birthday on your birthday.

And if you're new to the show, remember to subscribe to our podcast us, because every week you get more of this great content.

And God save the king.

See you next week.

 

The U.K. Conservatives have elected a new PM, Lizz Truss, who doesn't like to look at solar panels. Battery fires get E-Bikes banned in New York City public housing. California pays poorer people not to own cars. General Motors offers to buy out Buick dealers who don't want to get with the electric future. A word for all the awefull people who fear a green future. California suffers its worst drought in twelve hundred years and you can't put gas in a gas car without electricity.

Also this week:

• Pipeline patrol planes
• Russia cuts off the gas yet again
• American Top 40 used to get sent to radio stations on vinyl LPs says Brian
• Germany offers cheap train passes to offset high energy prices
• France is looking to cut energy use by 10% which means lowering the thermostat to 19 degrees/66 F.
• Ethanol plants can give off terrible pollution that is harmful.
• Tesla Canadian factory rumors.
• All about Metathesiophobia from a Chevy Bolt owner
• Feedback on our light pollution episode from May
• End-of-life batteries from electric vehicles are not likely to be the primary source of recyclable material until the mid-2030s, according to Benchmark Mineral Intelligence
• Trump goes on nonsensical rant about electric cars: 'We need to rid of them'
• Four years of Boston Consulting Group’s US electric vehicle sales forecasts, compiled by RecurrentAuto show how bad EV adoption predictions are. 
• Electric school buses in Massachusetts provided energy back to the grid for more than 80 hours this summer, helping to reinforce the grid during some of the hottest summer days when electricity was most in demand.
• 10 of 13 ‘Flagship’ CCS Projects Failed to Deliver, IEEFA Analysis Concludes.

Thanks for listening to our show! Consider rating The Clean Energy Show on iTunes, Spotify or wherever you listen to our show.

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Your hosts: James Whittingham https://twitter.com/jewhittingham Brian Stockton: https://twitter.com/brianstockton

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Transcript of this episode  (done by A.I.) News anchor: The United Kingdom Conservative Party announced Monday that Liz Trust was selected as its new leader.

Lizz Truss: It's an honor to be elected as leader of the Conservative and Unionist Party.

And I think one of the most depressing when you're driving through England is seeing fields that should be full of crops or livestock, full of solar panels.

Various people: You got to be kidding me.

You got to be kidding me.

You're kidding me.

You're kidding me.

You're kidding me, right? Are you kidding me? Are you kidding me? Are you kidding me? Are you kidding me? Are you kidding me? Are you kidding me? Yeah.

Nope.

Hell, no.

Brian: Hello, and welcome to episode 130 of the Clean Energy Show.

I'm Brian Stockton,

James: And that must be I'm James Whittingham, and this week, British conservatives have indeed elected their new PM, and she doesn't like the site of solar panels.

Oh, Boris.

Who would have thought I'd ever miss your puffy ass? And you know, that thing on your head?

In a shocking announcement, General Motors offers to buy out any Buick dealers that don't want to sell electric vehicles. It's shocking because I had no idea Buick still existed.

I learned a new word that describes everyone you hate on Twitter.

And it's not donkey knobbler.

Nobler California suffers an unprecedented heat wave and the worst drought in 1200 years.

Worst of all, it's become unfashionable to say, but it's a dry heat.

All that and more on this edition of the Clean Energy Show.

Also on this edition of I hope you're not wearing white, because it's after Labor Day.

Brian, the pipeline plane that flies over my house is flying lower than expected.

Much lower.

Californians are asked not to charge their electric cars.

Russia has a clog in their oil pipes again.

And a wildfire warning in Alberta reminds people you can't run a gas pump without electricity.

First of all, how's your back this week? Yeah, definitely better.

I am walking without a cane for the first time.

You literally walk with a cane.

I was really walking with a cane.

You were literally a hobbled old man for a while.

Absolutely.

But yeah, I think I'm doing okay.

Although I will have to probably switch my seating position halfway through the show.

All right.

As we record this, our whole province of Saskatchewan in Canada is in international news.

And I thought it would be weird if we didn't talk about that.

Yeah, we've been having all kinds of emergency alerts on our phones night and day of a terrible tragedy that has taken place on the First Nation and around and for a while, the mass killer has been believed to be hiding in the city that we live in.

If you listen to the show and you hear us talking about it while you've heard it in the news, and here we are.

We're both here.

Brian safe and his farm shelter.

Our thoughts go to all the victims.

And, yeah, it's not too often we make international news, and sometimes it's for good reasons and sometimes not so good.

Let's hope for a good outcome and better things in the future.

Yeah.

So speaking of our hometown, it came up on a podcast this week.

So remember when I retired, I said my retirement project was going to be making my own shoelaces? Yeah.

So I learned that from a TV show called Going Deep with David Reese, one of the greatest TV shows of all time.

I absolutely loved it.

It covered things like how to tie your shoes.

Fantastic show, right? Anyway, David Reese and John Kimball have a podcast called Election Profit Makers, and it's a humorous podcast about political commentary, American politics.

But they go off on a lot of tangents on the show, which is why I like it.

And they started talking recently about the old American Top 40 show with Casey Cases.

And so I decided to write them a letter.

And they read my letter on the show this week, which was a lot of fun for me.

And it mentions our hometown, and we have a clip.

Clip of another podcast: Brian writes in: Dear Kidmitas and Long John Silver.

As a teenager in the early 1980s, my first real job was as the overnight DJ on CK CK, the Top 40 radio station in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada.

In addition to overnights, I would often operate the American Top 40 show on Saturday afternoons, and it would come in on four vinyl LPs every week.

Incredibles per side.

I can't believe they used to do the radio shows on records.

Yes.

Now he says, I managed to keep a souvenir from my time at this station, and that's the complete vinyl set of the 1983 Top 100 Countdown from American Top 40.

And he attached pictures along with a picture of the skyline for Regina, Saskatchewan.

It's pretty sweet.

I'm telling you.

Canada, pretty much every city in Canada has a great skyline.

James: That one guy sounds like me.

And going off on tangent sounds like us.

Brian: Yeah, there's a very similar dynamic on the show there, I would say.

And perhaps I'm the straight man, you're the funny man.

But, yeah, they like to talk about skylines.

That's one of the tangents, the aesthetic qualities of city skylines.

And so they appreciated the skyline of our city.

And, yeah, in their opinion, most Canadian cities have a fantastic looking skyline.

And I don't know, I would have to kind of agree.

Yeah, sure.

They're not bad.

I remember somebody from going through town once, I told the story in the show before.

I was going to a newspaper conference, a student newspaper conference in Winnipeg.

And he went through Johnny, he said, hey, your town looks brand new, because he just drove by to look at the skyline.

And it's all glassy towers.

At least it was 30 years ago when I was in university.

And apparently wherever they were from didn't have that.

And the other nice thing about our skyline, it rises out of a completely flat prairie.

It's very unusual to have a city built on a completely flat thing.

But then the other part of the call so, yeah, it makes me sound super old to be relating this story, but I used to operate the American Top 40 show.

It came in on records.

They would make a record every week, four LPs.

And that's how we would play the show on the radio.

That is amazing.

In the mail, I guess.

I don't remember, but so I have the complete Top 100 countdown from 1983.

It was usually meant to be played, like, on New Year's Eve.

You start at 04:00 p.m..

The show wraps up at midnight top 100 hits of the year.

So next year it'll be the 40th anniversary of this 19 8100.

So I've always been ready to have like a New Year's Eve party or something where we play the 1983 Top 100 countdown.

But I don't know.

Then I'd have to stay up till midnight, which I don't think I would.

Oh, that's tough for you.

That's tough for you.

You'd need an injection of some sort.

Yeah.

So huge.

Thanks to David and John and the election profit makers show.

That was a lot of fun.

And you can go on ebay and discogs and you can find them for sale.

You can buy them.

Sometimes I think the one I've got is probably worth a couple of something.

Was it like the Casey case I'm talking was on vinyl too? Oh, yeah, everything.

So you didn't have to do anything.

I would have to insert the commercial break so he would say, and coming up next, right after this and then you'd have to pause the turntable, play the commercials and then start the turntable back up again.

Have you ever paused a turntable while it was playing someplace? And I went, don't remember doing that.

No.

But we used to play songs on carts.

They were sort of like eight tracks.

That's how all the songs were played on the station.

So sometimes there's a few songs that have pauses in them.

Like the music stops for a second.

So sometimes for fun, we would pause the pause for a little extra.

You dirty bastards.

On late night radio, screwing is a lot of fun.

You rebel.

That's funny and weird.

So that's our broadcasting heritage here at the Clean Energy Show.

Well, that is so weird.

Like, you've never mentioned that to me before.

That's such a weird thing.

I wonder if it was just practical because they could stamp them out at the time.

Like nowadays they could stamp a CD, I suppose.

Yeah.

There were enough stations to play the show.

There must have been a lot they would have had to make.

Yeah, like 1000 or 2000, maybe, who knows? Well, I was driving into my North Regina subdivision, I guess, made in the late 70s so it's still at the edge of the city.

And I saw a plane flying over the subdivision here.

From a different perspective, it was the pipeline plane, from a different perspective, wasn't flying over here.

I thought the damn thing was landing like it was so low.

So I was kind of curious.

And I used a flight Tracker 24 software online than in my app to track it sometimes to see where it's going.

And it says Calibrated 2100ft, but I thought that was 2100ft because that's where the air ambulance, helicopters fly.

It's not, though.

It's not above terrain.

It's above sea level.

And we're 1900ft above sea level.

So that sucker is 200ft above the ground.

Yeah.

And this is the plane.

I've got a toy drone, Brian, that almost goes that high.

And if I hacked it, it would like it's a very serious subject, but it's not out of the question that anybody could be flying a drone at a couple of hundred feet and run into this airplane, which, by the way, inspects the pipeline for leaks.

Yeah.

So I did some research on pipeline inspection planes.

They call them pipeline patrol pilots.

And apparently in the old days, not that long ago, they would fly 50 to 100ft off the ground.

Now, I'm sure they wouldn't do that over a city because there would be cell towers and things like that.

And by the way, a cell tower is probably that high in some cases, so that's interesting.

But somebody died in Edmonton in 2013 doing it because they were taking pictures.

Their job is to take photographs and fly the damn plane by themselves.

Wow.

Well, I remember I made a film one time where we rented a helicopter and we filmed some stuff from a helicopter.

And my recollection back then was a thousand feet was as low as the helicopter was allowed to go over the city when we were flying over the city to take some shots.

So the pipeline planes must have their own special kind of regulation.

It gives us PTSD here, it sounds like World War II because they sound like they're flying right over your head.

Incoming.

Always yell incoming when it comes to my family, just as a joke.

Nobody gets it, but I am using myself.

And that's how it goes.

That's all that matters.

Yeah, this plane just does the pipeline through the small city we live in of 200,000 people or so.

Just does that stretch.

So it takes off and lands in about less than 15 minutes and it's done its whole work.

Wow.

The other day, though, I tracked it and it took off and did it twice, and then it took off down the pipeline, which also splits our bedroom community of Emerald Parkwite City diagonally.

Just splits it in half.

You're on the wrong side of the pipeline.

I know, but, well, it's still fun.

And there's lots of golfers out there.

And I heard on the radio that they're going to stop poisoning the little bastards.

They can be annoying, the Richardson ground squirrel, which we have here in abundance, and they will reproduce.

They will come into my yard and eat my strawberries and assert themselves and get cocky.

I've spent lots of time staring at them and they chirp.

They make this high pitched chirp and it's just really irritating after hours.

It's kind of bad, like having a really nasty crow around or something.

By the way, the crows disappeared.

I mentioned that.

We started the summer, lost the crows, they're gone.

I don't know who shot them or ate them or whatever.

So they're gone? Yes, they're moving on.

CBC had a new story that perhaps my ears up on California.

I guess the government down there asked them to not charge your EVs.

Try not to use too much electricity in those key hours.

And the key hours are between 04:00 p.m.

And 09:00 p.m..

Even electric cars, supposedly a long term solution to fossil fuel usage, are part of this problem.

Owners of Tesla's and other Ecars are being asked not to charge their vehicles during that five hour period, prompting some to ask questions about an eventual complete conversion to electric cars.

Severn.

Vormstein is with the University of California.

There's no way we could keep up right now if we suddenly went to 100% clean cars.

What do you think of that? Yeah, well, it's annoying because of course we can't immediately switch to 100% electric cars.

It's a gradual thing, but there's certainly a number of factors being stacked on top of one another that is turning this into a much more difficult year for energy grids than I think we ever expected.

So with California, it's this massive heat wave.

They're well over 100 degrees Fahrenheit in California and the worst drought in 1200 years.

Did you see that? No.

This is the worst drought in 1200 years in the western United States.

Well, it's been a weird pattern.

And I heard somebody say that it was El Ninja.

The ocean current was sticking around for a second and possibly third winter.

Wow.

And that has done weird things.

And one of the things is bunched up the systems in North America.

So we got this big ridge going way up to Alaska, and that gets hot.

And we get hot here in central western Canada.

And yesterday was the hottest day on record for Regina for this day.

Yeah, it was the second hottest day of the summer.

The hottest day of the summer was also in September, where it got to 36 deg.

It's crazy.

I mean, that's never happened before, ever.

I've lived here almost all my life, and I was at a weather geek when I was a kid.

I paid attention to these things and yeah, it's weird.

So I heat my pool with solar panels, like thermal solar panels, and it's the first time I've ever been in the pool in September without a gas heater in my pool.

And it's weird because it doesn't work as well as it does in June.

The sun goes down early, and it goes behind trees, my neighbors trees.

So the pool itself gets shaded.

And it's unpleasant to be in there when you're not in the sun.

So it takes a longer time to heat up anyway.

It's just weird.

Yeah.

And of course, the other thing that's happening with a massive drought and this is not just California, but places in Europe is happening, too, is the hydroelectric cannot run at full capacity because they just don't have the water behind the dams that they normally do.

So the Hoover Dam, lake Mead.

There was another mob body found the other day in Lake Mead.

So Lake Mead is the reservoir for the Hoover Dam.

Produces lots of hydroelectric power, but it's down to something like 30% of its maximum level now.

And so they can't generate as much electricity as normal.

And, yeah, they're finding bodies now.

The water is so low, they're finding bodies in there that have been there for decades.

And the rivers are low in Germany, so you can't transport coal.

And the water is too hot to cool some of the nuclear plants in, I believe, France.

And now, this isn't a hundred years from now, this isn't 50 years from now.

All this weird stuff is happening now.

Posing problems for non solar and wind.

I would say yes.

And the only thing I would mention here is I think we talked about it, but there's a Tesla virtual Power plant pilot project going on in California.

So they've run it three times now, and they're probably running it again today.

So today is expected to be perhaps the biggest peak of this energy crisis in California.

They may have to go to blackouts today in California as we record this because they may not be able to produce enough energy.

But anyway, it's not enough to save the grid.

But these virtual power plants in California can output up to 50 MW, which is a promising start.

Imagine eventually when every home has a backup battery that would be enough to kind of stabilize these problems with the grid.

But I thought that was super encouraging.

And when called upon, they can all shoot power to the grid at up to 50 MW, apparently.

And 50 MW is five times the peak capacity of the solar plant that I visited in Saskatchewan.

What are the first ones that came on? The only ones that they're allowing now is 10 MW.

So 10 is five times what that is.

And that just further illustrates how puny that solar farm from SAS power is.

Yeah.

So they're expecting rolling blackouts is expected to be 115 deg today in Sacramento.

That's 46 Celsius.

That would be a record.

And people are going to turn on the air conditioners.

They're telling people not to charge their electric cars, especially during peak hours.

I don't think people do because in California there's like peak energy demand, right? Yeah.

I was posting this on Twitter.

If you have an EV, you can get a special plan on the grid.

There the utility and they'll charge you less overnight.

So if you have an EV plan, you pay, I don't know, it's a third or something like that of what the demand is during the day, in the early evening, and then you can charge all you want from eleven on or something.

Yeah, and that's a good example of how we are going to adapt and we're not going to switch to 100% electric cars overnight.

But that's one of the strategies going forward as we slowly transition to electric.

And I should say I think it's like $0.25 overnight.

So that's almost twice what we're paying.

I guess ours are creeping up too, but twenty five cents per kilowatt hour per kilowatt hour.

That's still kind of pricey.

It's not like the $0.03 that some places are talking about charging EV owners to charge overnight.

But that is one way your neighbors will say, well, the grid can't handle it because they write it out a meme on Facebook, that's BS.

If we charged overnight, we have the capacity to meet what the peak demand is and it falls off overnight.

And there's lots of buffer there between what overnight use is and what the peak is that you could charge in some grids right now.

You could just charge all the electric.

If everybody had an electric car, you could charge them all and it'd be fine because they're only charging for a couple of hours too, like at most usually.

Yeah.

And it's an example of how these grids just need to plan and manage.

And just the extreme weather that we're having this year is kind of revealing, maybe, who has done the best planning and who has not.

I mean, the governor could have easily said don't cook supper in your oven or don't do a load of laundry.

But they went after electric cars and said don't charge them.

And very few people are charging them anyway.

What they need to do is say turn up your thermostat by a degree or two and just take it easy because the peak we don't want to rolling black.

And do your thing if you can, if you want to, and then the industry can help with that as well.

They can slow down their shifts at factories or whatever, but yeah, so we'll see what happens if there are in fact, I guess there are 5000 MW short of its power supply, peak demand, that's forecasted by the computers.

And that will hit at 05:30 P.m.

Pacific, which is a couple of hours after we're recording this.

Yeah, we'll see how that goes.

Russia has again stopped supplying gas to Germany through the pipeline that we've been talking about over the past few weeks on the show.

So again, Russia has said, no more gas for you.

Germany, they were trying to build up gas reserves in Germany.

And Germany has said finally, that they are still planning to close those three nuclear power plants that are scheduled to close by the end of the year.

They're going to go ahead with it, but the kind of compromise is they're going to keep two of them on standby, whatever that means.

I guess if they completely mothballed everything, they couldn't start it up again.

But they're going to not completely mothball everything and have two of the three on standby until April so that they possibly could be restarted if they need to.

There's a remarkable thing that you talked about last week.

If you missed last week's show, you might want to go listen to that because there's a lot of stipulations going on with those plants that they have to fix or not fix.

And it's a challenge.

Yeah.

No, I often think about Mad Max.

The Mad Max movies, which I love.

And it's all based around gasoline because it's the wasteland in Australia and gasoline is the precious resource after society has collapsed.

But if we were to have this Mad Max future now, it'd really be solar panels and batteries would be the precious resource.

And it's a much, much simpler thing than having to make gasoline and store gasoline or process it or whatever you have to do.

And the same thing with nuclear power plants.

Like, a nuclear power plant is not going to be much use in a post apocalyptic world because it's too complicated to run.

And yeah, so I did enjoy that segment on last week's show.

It's not as simple as just deciding to keep a plant open or close it.

Nuclear power plants have so many rules and regulations and laws, they would literally have to change the laws in Germany to keep those power plants open.

And hats off to the employees of the nuclear power plants in the Ukraine, which are essentially prisoners of the Russians and who have decided, because speaking of not being used in an apocalypse, well, you have to have the expertise there, and they're basically forcing them to be there.

It's just a horrible situation.

And Brian, speaking of emergency alerts, we've gotten a whole bunch of alerts, but Alberta has some emergency alerts that I'm going to make fun of or at least make light of because Jasper National Park in Alberta straddling the Alberta BC border.

It is arguably one of our national park's best areas.

It's amazing.

So beautiful and less touristy than bank because it's a bit more out of the way.

It is experiencing, unfortunately, a wildfire due to the heat wave that we've been talking about.

And it was started by lightning.

But here's what the CBC news story said about it said before Jasper lost power Sunday evening, the Alberta Emergency Alert System advised residents to prepare for a possible power outage in the town of Jasper, including advising people to fill up their vehicles fuel tank as gas stations rely on electricity.

And people come to us and say what do you do with the power comes out? They come up with those parking lots with their EVs and they say what do you do if the power goes out? As if they run out of extension cords.

The fact is you charge them and you have hundreds of kilometers of range if the power goes out.

And then you drive like you would.

And if the gas station has no power, if you had no power, you could drive to where there is power and charge it up if you needed to.

Yeah.

And Jasper has always had kind of an isolated electricity system because it's in kind of a remote place and I think there's only kind of one power line going in and out.

So they have frequent blackouts in Jasper.

So perhaps the residents are used to this.

But I remember being in Jasper a few years ago and the power was out.

It was out for hours.

But where did we go? We went to the one restaurant or there was a couple that had generators like this happens frequently enough that this restaurant had a big enough generator to keep themselves running.

Well, it's wilderness.

It's mountain wilderness.

You have power lines that are hard to get to.

You have to helicopter people in there.

That's a perfect place for a battery backup system when they become available.

Yeah, and I think they are working on that.

They're running generators to do the well, I think the power is out right now.

So if anybody in Jasper is listening to us.

Hello.

Yeah.

So General Motors is going to offer buyouts to their Buick dealers.

So this is very similar to a story we had last year where they were offering buyouts to Cadillac dealers.

So these are sub brands within General Motors.

When they offered it to Cadillac dealers, about 320 out of the 880 retailers accepted the offer.

And apparently the buyouts for the Cadillac dealers was in the range of $300,000 to a million dollars a payout to get them to stop selling Buicks or stop selling Cadillacs.

And this is because General Motors realizes they have too many dealerships.

They cannot go forward with this many dealerships in an electric vehicle future.

So this is a sign of the times and good on General Motors for planning for the future like that and we'll see how it goes.

So there's about 2000 Buick dealers and they're all going to be offered this deal and some of them will have to go away.

And of course switching to an EV dealership is going to be perhaps an expensive proposition.

There'd be money involved and so I think this is a buyout, really, for the kind of the smaller dealerships that don't think that they can make enough money off of EVs.

As we've discussed many times, they don't need oil changes, they need much less maintenance.

It's for those dealerships that just think they don't want to make the effort or spend the money to go to EVs because they don't think it's going to be worth it.

My elderly neighbors will be disappointed because they bought a Buick recently.

Oh, really? That's what I said to myself.

Oh.

I didn't know Buicks existed anymore.

Yes.

I don't know why they don't just shut out the brand.

Because the average age of the buyers got to be in their seventy s.

Seventy s? How about one hundred eighty s? One hundred.

I'm thinking old people who are living in the don't want to buy a Cadillac or a Buick.

But you know, the Cadillac lyric is pretty.

It checks all the checkboxes.

It takes off a lot of things, fast charging range.

But maybe I'll end up with just one of those one of these days.

Some more news from Germany.

So over the summer, they introduced this really interesting deal for cheap rail in Germany.

And they did this because of the high fuel prices in Germany.

This is really part of the whole strategy energy crisis in Europe.

Fuel is just too expensive.

And of course, also the more people drive, the more it contributes to greenhouse gasses.

So over the three months of the summer, germany offered for $9, which is about €9 a month, a train ticket to go anywhere in Germany.

And this has worked really well.

It has saved about one 8 million tons of CO2 from the atmosphere.

And yes, people took advantage of this.

It makes a lot of sense.

And of course, it's not necessarily as possible where we live in the isolated prairies, but when you have a proper rail system, like they do in pretty much all the countries in Europe, why not offer incentives and get people to use it? And it benefits everyone.

I wonder if that will spread through Europe just because there's a big crunch coming on energy and maybe that idea will spread and that will also maybe change some people's habits.

Yeah, I hope so.

And of course, it's also just a bit of a help because gasoline is just so expensive.

So it's a way to help out your population and give them a break on the high fuel prices.

This is a clean energy show with Brian Stockton and James Whittingham.

Brian.

The UK finally has a new Prime Minister to replace Mr.

Boris Johnson.

Right.

So, Liz Truss, I haven't seen a picture.

What's her hair like? It's more organized, I would say.

Definitely more organized.

Okay, that's a good sign.

It doesn't seem to have a life of its own.

It seems fine as every other person in England has normal hair.

But not Boris.

Yeah, so she's weird.

She doesn't like the sight of solar panels.

And I think one of the most depressing sights when you're driving through England is seeing fields that should be full of crops or livestock, full of solar panels.

The hell is wrong with her? She started as a Social Democrat and she was an anti nuclear activist when she was young, but at some point at university, a switch went off and she became hard.

Right.

And she's vowed to be a very Conservative Conservative because that's what she campaigned on.

I always think it's fantastic when I see a field of solar panels, but also Agravoltaics, which you talk about frequently.

You can have both.

You can have crops and solar panels.

You can have sheep grazing, you can have goats grazing.

It's a win win.

It's sad that she's insane.

It's sad that she's dumb about this, as many people in her party are, but, you know, there's only 14% of Brits are against the net zero plan for us.

Johnson 14% of people are against sunny days.

That's unheard of.

Like, there's a very strong support for clean energy in that zero.

Yeah.

So that's a weird stand for her to she's making it a sort of culture war, using the climate as a culture war thing.

She doubled down on her comments during the leadership campaign that farmers feel shouldn't be full of solar panels, and several Conservative MPs have raised it.

And solar farms in the UK currently account for 0.8% of total land use.

That's very little land use right now under the government's net zero plan.

Solar farms.

This is getting rid of climate change, right? Addressing climate change, Paris Accord targets and all that over the next 30 years would be .6% of all land use.

About half of 1% of land use would be solar in the UK.

And that's not accounting for efficiency improvements as we move forward.

We'll need less panels, and maybe there'll be different ways to deploy them.

Yeah, it's a strange thing to plant a flag on.

Anyway, Brian, I just want to add one thing.

Solar energy.

UK says that this amount of land use will be less than the amount of land currently used for golf courses.

That is the .6% of UK land.

And saving the freaking planet is less than golf courses.

No.

And golf courses are kind of notoriously bad for the environment because they take up so much space for the enjoyment of so few people and they take so many resources to water and maintain those lawns that apologize to golfers.

Let's take all the golf courses in the world and just put solar panels on them.

That would be great.

All right, so, staying in Europe again, European energy crisis.

France is looking to cut their energy use by about 10% this year.

So, again, energy crunch.

France is having problems with their nuclear plants.

They aren't able to share as much energy back and forth with other countries like Germany who's having their problems.

So coming into the winter, they have said that they want to cut energy use by about 10%.

So in the winter, this is going to mean setting your thermostat in your house at about 19 Celsius or 66 Fahrenheit, which is a genuine sacrifice.

I would not want to do that.

We've been very spoiled of just being able to kind of set the temperature.

So 19 would be freezing for me.

Yeah.

Where am I? I'm around 21, I think.

Winter has been so far behind us and yet so close to tennis.

But that's up.

It's up.

When I first moved to this house, I was a 20 degree man.

Brian.

Yes.

Now that I'm old, I'm not making energy anymore in my body.

I'm just getting old.

I'm supposed to eat less.

That's why the seniors menu 55 plus is cheaper at Denny's, because I'm supposed to eat less.

Yeah, I don't feel like you feel like you do the same thing I did when I was 20.

There's going to be a lot of sweaters sold in France.

That's all I got to say about that.

Yeah, get into the sweater business and Brian from the Nebraska examiner and I know you have subscription, Brian.

Do you have a subscription to that one? No, but next time I'm on the PressReader app, I will look for the Nebraska shout out to the Nebraska examiner staff.

A southwest Iowa ethanol plant has been ordered to pay $10,000 fine for its repeated air emissions of excessive cancer causing compounds in the last five years.

I live near an oil refinery, heavy oil operator refinery.

And I complained about the smell and I told you that there's an author and a team of journalists looking at that over four years and they're looking to go to ethanol and stuff like that and biofuel fuel for planes and stuff like that.

They're trying to diversify and there's even canola crushing plants going up around it.

But this proves to me the reason why I mentioned it is that even these plants can have horrible emissions like formaldehyde.

This plant was spewing out formaldehyde and other byproducts of its fermentation process that are known to have adverse health risk like cancer.

So actual harm to the environment and public health may have occurred since this order from the Iowa Department of Natural Resources and due to the amount of pollutants that were and are being admitted.

So, yeah, it's just something to keep in mind when you think that, oh, good, your refinery is going bio.

It can be bad for you as well if you live near one.

Yeah, no, I've never been a fan of the bio fuels.

It's a stop gap that we probably don't need.

Okay.

So rumors are heating up about a possible Tesla factory here in Canada.

Public companies have to disclose their lobbying efforts.

So Electric and others have reported on this.

Apparently Tesla is looking at Quebec and Ontario for some type of factory.

I mean, it could be a car factory, could be a battery factory, could be both, who knows? What's your bet? Where's your bet going right now? I'm thinking it will be a car factory, and I'm thinking Quebec.

There is a long history of not only automobile production in Ontario and Quebec, but also mining a lot of the minerals.

And of course, Tesla is trying to local source as many of the minerals and metals and stuff needed for electric cars for the batteries.

So, yeah, best case scenario, a battery and car plant.

And I'm leaning towards Quebec, but that's really just a guess.

I'm leaning towards not being a normal car plant.

Like not XYZ three, not a full blown thing.

No, it could be batteries or it could be something weird like cyber trucks and semis.

That's my guess.

Yes.

Because they both take up a lot of batteries.

So maybe they'll just make the batteries for those two things and I don't know, they'll be able to transport them to the east coast because that's kind of one of the challenges of the Texas plant, is having to transport all that stuff to the other half of the country and the eastern half.

Yeah, and like I say, there's a huge history of doing this.

Like all the major car brands have factories or have had factories in Ontario and Quebec, in Canada.

So clearly there's a decent reason to do it.

If others have done it, then probably it'd be a work for Tesla.

And on the Great Lakes, that's a port.

That's access to a port.

So if you wanted to ship to Europe, that's another option.

Yeah, it's not just the eastern part of North America is a shorter shipping route to Europe where a lot of these things are going to be bought over the next little while.

So, once again, I know I mentioned this a lot, but I was on the Chevy Bolt user group that is largely the United States.

There's so many people there compared to Canada.

That is a post every couple of minutes and it eats up my Facebook feed, but I always find it interesting.

Brian there's a guy named Randy Moffatt, which is interesting because I went to high school with the person with that name and the fear of change.

This is something that he pointed out in a Facebook post talking about all the hate that EV owners were getting.

And so he came into this and he said, the fear of change has a word, it's called oh God.

Meta the SEO phobia.

No.

You do.

Finland pronunciations.

Why can't you do this? No, I think you did it slowly, but you did it above.

So it is the fear of change.

And I hadn't heard of this one before.

Have you heard of that? One.

I've heard lots of phobias.

Yeah, this is basically what's going on in the world.

If you were looking at Facebook hate and people uncomfortable with DVS.

So why do they give a crap? I mean, you could say, well, they're forced to in 2035 or in California and other places, but that's not really a pressing issue right now.

It's not here before us.

Why do people hate on EV so much? And it is a fear that people are going through, a fear of change.

And the fear of change is evolutionary in humans.

Our internal predispositions teach us to resist change, mainly to always feel in control.

So these people are feeling out of control on these people who like to feel in control the most in our comfort zone.

Yeah.

And of course, it isn't just a hatred of EVs.

It's just a reaction to people are scared about getting off fossil fuels, which seems like a weird thing to us because it's a whole new dawn of a fantastic new day.

It's nothing but good news getting off fossil fuels.

But yeah, people are just scared about change.

And you see it a lot in Alberta, our neighboring oil province, where people are just absolutely dead set on sticking with what they know, which is oil and gas.

Here's a quip from YouTube.

We are all afraid of the uncertainty that comes with change.

We would rather things be not so great then go through the risk and process of change.

This specific phobia can reduce one's will to live.

So this is pretty extreme.

Wow.

The phobes who have this often feel like they have no control over their lives on the cost and changes.

She tends to live in the past and may also be depressed.

So there you go.

Therefore, you make them unwilling to move.

So Randy says on this Facebook post, I became interested in computers in the early 1970s and learned a program so that's very early, like, very few people were doing it back then.

I was always on the cutting edge of technology.

The amount of hate was palatable with people accusing me of being a Satanist.

Randy S from the States, where there's lots of, you know, Baptists and religion and stuff, people said they would never own one.

This is a computer.

Okay, yeah.

So we are going through this again.

He says.

However, now the government is issuing mandates for this transition to EV is making the fear even worse.

When I got my first EV almost nine years ago, I had neighbors calling me crazy.

My next door neighbor said he would never own one.

Last weekend he told me he just ordered his third.

So be patient, be nonconfrontational, just set a quiet example and someday, just like computers, they will figure it out.

And I thought that was a great post.

I wanted to share with their listeners.

This happens all the time.

Like, I follow photography and cameras and stuff.

And there's a move now from optical viewfinders to electronic viewfinders and cameras, and it's progressed enough that people have accepted it.

But two or three years ago, you had people just hatred for electronic viewfinders on cameras.

Like, people just hated the idea of it, and one by one, they're all moving to it.

It happened too quickly for them to comprehend.

I don't know.

As soon as I found out about it, I thought it was fantastic, and I couldn't wait to switch.

So, yeah, this is definitely a mindset.

Conservatives versus progressive.

I had one on a point and shoot camera 15 long time ago, a lot of years ago in the digital camera age.

Didn't care for it, of course.

They weren't focused.

You couldn't do anything.

I'm sure they're getting a lot better, and I've not actually used one myself.

It was very clear to me early on it was the way of the future.

But, yeah, people just take much longer, generally speaking, to catch on.

All right, let's stick it to the mail bag.

The user feedback this week comes from Doug in Colorado, who wrote about our May 2 show.

Doug, you're behind.

You put a lot of catching up to do.

Take some time off work if you have to.

Binge listen our show.

So he says to us, thank you for highlighting the problem of light trespass from harsh, glaring Led street light fixtures.

And he says an excellent resource is the International Dark Sky Association.

They have everything people need to know about light pollution, including model lighting ordinance.

And also, thanks for coming to Ups.

Replacement gasoline, mail delivery, van, contract debacle.

Hoping canada learns from the United States.

US is making big mistakes and hopefully pushes Canada to do much better.

Yeah, so I vaguely remember talking about Led lighting back in May.

That was a long time ago.

Led lighting, I think what we said at the time, it's a fantastic opportunity to upgrade things and make it better and reduce light pollution.

But since Led lights are still kind of new technology, a lot of the designs aren't great.

Cities don't quite know how to implement them yet.

And yeah, a lot of the times they're just too harsh.

But, yeah, my pet peeve is the brightness.

We have the ability now to put them on timers and control the brightness.

So street lights could come on at full power, kind of in the dusk times, and then you could eventually back those off at three in the morning, just turn all the street lights down.

And if you've ever been out in the middle of the night, you don't need a whole lot of light to see once your eyes are adjusted.

I'm surrounded by a ridiculous amount of light pollution.

I'm thankful that they changed the street lights in our neighborhood here to Led that have a slight warmth to them, and they're less bright than the previous, I would say overall they disperse them better, and they even that out, and that's fine.

However, my neighbor across the street, across the boulevard, he's the person with the police stickers all over his house, he's scared of getting killed.

And he's got this bright white LEDs just glaring on his property like a landing strip for an airport.

And then across the Pipeline Field, which is, I don't know, 50 meters across, 50 yards across, there's another guy who has a giant white light in his backyard, and it shines, and I can see the gophers and anything going around in the night.

And then there's a school there as well, which is further away from me, but they have this anti never do well lighting to keep people from doing things there, because people do do things.

But it's blindingly bright, and it shines in my drapes, and it's a long ways away, and it's light pollution.

And all these lights that I speak of are not on the spectrum of warmth.

So they're the bluer side, and they bounce, and those are the wavelengths that bounce up into the sky the most.

And I think I talked about this on the show, but I've got a street light just right outside of my house.

And a couple of years ago, the ball went out, and it was the greatest, because I don't want that giant street lamp shining in my windows at night.

It was so great.

I was very disappointed when they should have rented a bucket truck and went up there and put some tape over it just a little put in a low wattage bulb.

And also yesterday I was coming home from Home Depot and I saw two pickup or two trucks with Amazon delivery vehicles on them, like there was four Amazon Delivery Prime trucks, the kinds that look like the EVs that they're coming out in the States.

So, of course, I went and checked them out and saw the giant tailpipes on them.

Was very disappointed.

But they looked those four transit vans converted, and they should look they should be EVs, and they're not.

We don't have those around here.

We have a third party delivery service, don't we, in Virginia? No, it hasn't been great for electric sort of trans advance around here.

Yeah, but there was one place remember last week we talked about a place in Saskatoon? They got one for delivering at a bakery, and it's just and they're saving money, handover it's free.

They said there's paying for the payments to save money.

They save for the payments for the new vehicle.

So how great is that? And of course, we'd love to hear from you.

So right now, get out your pen.

Get out your typewriter.

[email protected].

Write us with an angry letter.

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Tell us when you agree or disagree with us.

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And don't forget to check out our YouTube channel for all kinds of things going on.

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Leave us a [email protected] cleanenergyshow.

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So mention your birthday.

We'll mention your birthday.

Here we go.

Brian.

The Clean Energy Show Lightning Round, where we breeze through the headlines and end the show on a fast pace.

End of life batteries from electric vehicles are not likely to be the primary source of recyclable material until the mid 2030, according to Benchmark Mineral Intelligence.

Yeah, I think we talked about that last week of the week before that.

It's going to be a very slow ramp up because electric vehicle batteries are just lasting way longer than people thought.

Our friend Donald Trump has gone on a nonsense, cynical rant about electric cars the other day at a rally.

He says we need to get rid of them.

The story was on electric and we have a clip, but I'm not going to play the man, okay? I said to myself, how can we cover this and not hear his stupid freaking voice? You already said his name.

Which gives me I'm sorry.

I like how Steven Colbert does it.

They have Twitter.

People come up with nicknames, which always makes for him every.

But this is very similar to the British PM with the rant about solar panels is kind of the same thing.

This is trying to make it into a culture war type of issue.

Well, speaking of Britain, I had a computer read his text in a posh British accent.

So here it is.

A friend of mine wanted to do something for the environment.

He went out and bought an electric car and he made a certain trip, I won't say from where, kentucky.

And he is a good person.

He wants to do what's well, and now he understands, hey, not so good.

He bought an electric car and he made the trip often from Kentucky to Washington.

And he made it.

He would drive down, put the car away and drive back.

He was getting like 38 miles per gallon.

It took me more time to charge in the damn car than I could spend in a drive in.

It took me two and half times.

My name is Donald J.

Trump, and I'm an idiot.

A complete and total idiot.

Please enjoy listening to the Clean Energy Show.

Hopefully Brian isn't drunk this week.

Okay, well, that was a bit added on at the end there, but you get the idea.

It makes no sense at all.

Yeah, and we all know electric cars work great for road trips.

They do.

And the author of that electric piece, Freslinber, pointed out that he went from New Orleans up to Quebec, didn't have to stop for more than 30 minutes and he had to dine anyway.

I had to eat something and go to the bathroom and stretch his leg.

Yeah, it wasn't an inconvenience at all for him and his Tesla.

Yeah.

With the caveat that the Tesla charging network is definitely the best and the third party charger is maybe not as good and you might still have some issues there.

Have you heard of Boston Consulting Group before? Often it is quoted in the news on different things.

It is a major consulting group.

So four years.

This is four years of Boston Consulting groups.

US.

Electric vehicle sales forecasts.

This is something that Wall Street relies on, consulting groups like this.

And this is an evolution of how their forecasts have changed.

We talked about this type of thing on the show, that people are always revising their forecast and we could have told them differently.

So in 2018, they said 21% of sales will be EVs in 2030.

This is the United States.

Two years later, they said, Oops, 26.

Year after that, 42.

That's a big jump.

And then this year, they're now saying 53%, which is a lot more common.

And even that is like, we doubt that.

We think it's going to be more than that.

Things are going to tip.

This is an S Curve adoption, and we're at the steep part of the S Curve.

This is going to go up way faster than people think.

Just think back to when smartphones were first introduced and everyone's like, that's kind of a weird thing.

And then you blink and a couple of years later, everybody had a smartphone.

And that's how fast it goes.

You're looking at the chart now on our script.

Look at where it levels off.

It levels off between 55 and 75%.

Yeah, they're still kind of doing it wrong.

They're still underestimate.

Curves of adoption don't level off until around 90%.

Like color TVs, cell phones, stuff like that, when the last 10% is the hard to get.

Yeah.

And I will say, like, manufacturing cars, electric cars, is a lot more difficult, probably, than manufacturing something like a smartphone.

So it maybe won't go as quickly as the smartphone, but it is going to go fast.

From carbon tracker.

Just over 30 solar installations are being carried out every week in Britain, and that is up from 1000 a week just two years ago.

So it's tripled the home.

That's a lot.

The home solar installations have tripled in two years.

That's crazy time for CS.

Fast fact hawaii produces more renewable energy than all of Canada.

Were you sitting down for that? Oh, yes.

Your posture is excellent this week, by the way.

I'm happy to see your back is better.

Yeah, I haven't had to change position, but yeah, we reported a couple of weeks ago they got their last shipment of coal for their last coal fired electricity plant.

And that plant did close down just the other day.

So that's great.

So, yeah, the regulatory consequences are clear.

If utilities fail to meet their renewable targets, they are forced to pay penalties, which must be covered by company, the shareholders, and rather than the taxpayers.

And that's the way it should be.

That should be the lesson for everybody.

The shareholders should have to cover it, not the ratepayers.

Electric school busses in Massachusetts provided energy back to the grid for more than 8 hours this summer.

That is a lot of hours of emergency heat wave protection from buses that weren't doing anything because they are electric.

They were sitting around all summer.

And this is a great use case in the United States where they have less severe winters, but summer heat waves need that grid backup.

And those electric buses which are just starting to trickle in, really, for schools, are there and useful.

So that's awesome.

Fantastic.

Ten of 13 flagship CCS that is carbon capture and Sequestration Rhine SEQUEST projects failed to deliver, according to IEFA analysis, and that's 50% of goals haven't even been reached.

And that's what our boundary dam they mentioned.

The boundary dam is the first thing they mentioned right here in this catch one.

Yeah, we had one of the first carbon capture on a coal plant, and they have captured some carbon, but nowhere near what they thought they were.

Mars Technica ebike battery fires are pushing New York City towards a ban in public housing.

That is, public housing is banning ebikes.

This is quite disturbing, but so is the reason why so poorly made cells, tough work and lack of space, I guess, in these places, are causing deadly rise of fires.

A deadly rise of fires in the New York City.

That was a lot.

I mean, laptops can do that, too.

Ebike battery is made up of dozens of individual AA sized batteries wired together and managed by a battery management system.

And you were talking last week how you were told that you have to unplug.

You can't just keep charging us.

Maybe that's the reason.

Yes.

My ebike doesn't have a battery management system, so you're not supposed to leave it plugged in.

But yeah, I could see where this could turn out to be a huge problem.

By the way, my partner shops at Shoppers Druckmart, and they had an ebike in there for $250 for the weekend, but it was just this tiny little thing that didn't have pedals, it just had spikes to put your feet on.

Yes.

Anyway, that's interesting.

Sometimes those things are mismanaged.

The charging is mismanaged, the faulty, they are damaged, they're waterlogged.

But a five year old was killed in a fire, and it's very tragic.

And just be careful.

If you have an ebike battery, don't read the manual and be aware that you're not supposed to leave it.

In many cases, you're not supposed to leave them charging indefinitely, but they're not inherently dangerous either.

But anything that is a battery that charges I mean my charge and lead to acid battery in my house for my RV.

So you got to be careful.

Washington Post amid a bonanza of measures passed to cut the state's carbon emissions in California as fast as possible, the legislature in California approved $1,000 refundable tax credit to poor Californians who don't own vehicles.

So it's paying people not to own vehicles if you are poorish.

I might even qualify.

It will head to the desk of Newton soon and he's going to sign it.

He's expected to sign it.

The bill offers the tax credit to single filers earning up to $40,000 in joint filers up to $60,000 who live without personal cars.

And you can get it whether you make a lot of tax money or not.

And you can just get that $1,000 regardless.

Yeah, that sounds great.

And maybe that's something we'll start to see other places.

I've heard the concept before, but this is the first time I've seen it getting passed.

Another CS fast Fact from Nat bullard from Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

There are 148,026 convenience stores in the United States.

OK, 148,000.

 

What he's saying is look out.

Change is coming.

And Brian, that is our time for this week.

It's been fun as always.

Glad you're feeling better.

We'd like to hear from you.

Remember, contact us at [email protected] and all the rest of the places.

And if you're new to the show, remember to subscribe to get our podcast cast every week, and we'll see you next time.

See you next week.