The Clean Energy Show

James visits his first solar farm in Saskatchewan: a single axis bifacial 13mW site near Weyburn. A closer look at Green Hydrogen and Canada's new agreements with Germany to produce it.

Brian finally finds an air-source heatpump installer in his home town. 

What’s faster than a Lamborghini and a Ferrari? A Kia. No joke.

Anti-lock brakes are coming to electric bicycles.

Dodge has wrecked the idea that electric vehicles will be quiet because the Dodge Charger EV will make noise. A lot of noise. A V8 amount of noise.

Will Germany balk at shutting down all of its nuclear power by the end of the year?

How far does a wind turbine have to be away from shore before it's not an eye sore: Wind Turbine Visibility and Visual Impact Threshold Distances in Western Landscapes Study link (pdf)

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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 129 of the clean Energy show.

I'm Brian Stockton.

I'm James Whittingham.

This week, I take a closer look at green hydrogen.

Apparently, there is a whole, whole rainbow of hydrogen, Brian.

Gray, blue, purple, turquoise I'm not even kidding.

And even black and white hydrogen.

And that's when you watch old footage of the Hindenburg exploding.

What's faster than a Lamborghini and a Ferrari? Aka.

That's right, Akia.

In other news, up is down, black is white, and James is a handsome son of a bitch.

You're damn straight.

Plus, we asked, and sure enough, there is a study on how far out offshore wind turbines have to be before you can really see them.

It's roughly the same distance that France keeps the United Kingdom away.

Antilon brakes are coming to electric bicycles.

That's right.

The nanny state wants you to stop flying over your front handlebars, all in the name of safety.

All that and more on this edition of the clean energy show.

And also this week, Brian, I visit my first utility solar farm and Dodge.

Dodge? Yes.

They're making an EV, and they've wrecked the idea that electric vehicles will be quiet, and I'm quite angry about that.

And will Germany block it, shutting down all of its nuclear power by the end of the year? I hope you're doing well.

You were off last week due to back injury.

Yeah, I never thought it would be bad enough that I couldn't record a podcast, but I did contemplate, like, lying flat on my back and somehow getting a microphone.

But that would have been so much work to set up.

If I had a servant to kind of set all that up for me, I could have done it.

Yeah.

In the meantime, it's now manageable, I guess, and hopefully it doesn't happen again.

It will.

It keeps happening.

I mean, is this the worst it's ever been? Yeah, I would say so, but I don't know.

I feel like I've got a handle on the right stretching that I need to do, so hopefully it's okay.

Well, glad to hear, because all the preparation I had for last year, I've forgotten it now.

I had a lot ready to go with that.

Seemed like distant memories.

Now it's only a week ago.

Wow.

My opening jokes.

I wrote those last week.

Last week.

I thought they seemed dated.

Yeah, that news is a little bit stale, but I thought they were both worth talking about.

So right after I guess it was Friday, I went to a utility solar farm in Waburn that is an hour and a half south of us.

Now, my son and I just he was feeling I basically said, we can't do the vacation he wanted to do.

So I said, hey, let's just go on a little road trip.

And then I thought, well, maybe I should go look at that solar farm an hour and a half south because it's the direction we haven't gone very often and found it fairly easily.

It's not far from the small city of, what, 10,000 people or something like that.

And it is the first one that I've seen in our own jurisdiction here ever because they just started putting them online.

It puts out up to 10 MW into the system.

It's rated at 13, though.

So basically in the summer when it goes over ten, they waste whatever is over ten.

The grid can't handle it.

It's near a substation.

What struck me disappointingly, though, was how small it was.

Okay, this is run by this is a partnership between, I think, two First Nations, a solar company from Halifax, Nova Scotia, the east coast of Canada that we actually get some information from because I have some questions on the previous show and they're very helpful.

But I was struck at how small it was.

I haven't seen a lot of solar farms in my day.

I've been through California and Arizona, and I probably haven't seen them all down there, but I saw a few, and what I saw were old and big.

And this struck me as 2005 ish like it just seemed like, give it the times, man.

Yeah, you're late to get on the grid, but what do you need to prove? What about solar? I mean, I've had solar for how many years have you had it? Five or six years now? Yeah, five or six years.

We know it works and we're hooked up to the same utility.

Why can't you just, I don't know, triple the size of it? But isn't that also encouraging? Because it kind of looks small, but you're still getting 10.

Seems pretty good.

It's not, though, compared to the size of what they're building now, including in our neighboring province of Alberta, they're building things many times that in one fell swoop.

Well, first of all, when I got there, I heard this noise and I thought, oh, solar panels make noise.

And I looked up and it was a guy in a riding lawn mower.

At first I thought the panels weren't working.

So let me describe what this is.

This is a single access solar farm.

So if you're new to what that is, I'm going to describe it in simple terms.

Imagine a rod going from south to north, hoisted up above the ground by about, let's say six or seven, 8ft up.

And then the panels are placed elongated on there along that tube, and they rotate to the east in the morning when the sun comes up in the east.

And at noon, they're flat.

But I was there at 04:00 in the afternoon and they were flat.

So I think they made them flat for the guy who was mowing, because there was a few off in the distance that were where they should have been, which is facing west.

So they will track the sun from east to west and get more power in the morning than they otherwise would.

Ultimately, normally, a fixed panel faces south at the best angle to get the most sun year round over the course of a year.

Well, these follow it.

So the pattern of that, if you look at the chart that I have there, you know how our charts are.

They're kind of a bell curve.

Is that fair to say? Yeah.

Shaped like a bell? Yes.

This one is kind of like a flattened bell, so instead of gradually going up, it shoots up fairly quickly and then it's flat throughout the most of the day up around where our peak is and then comes back down again.

So I don't see how it can get as much sun midday as a panel that's fixed and facing an optional direction.

Maybe that peak should be a bit lower on that chart that I'm showing you.

But that's basically the idea that you put this money into tracking equipment and extra hardware and it will give you more sun throughout the day from the same panels because it will track.

And then also, Brian, of course, these are bifacial, so they will pick up sun off the ground, so they're spaced out so that there is some unshadowed ground to pick up.

But also when they announced this, they said there was going to be goats and or sheep grazing there, so it could be multi use.

But that hasn't happened yet.

Maybe eventually it was a bit underwhelming.

I was hoping for something bigger.

Basically, they're making another one near the landfill in Regina here, and I drove by that on the way home to see what's up with that.

It's going they're actually marked out where everything's going to go and they're going to have a battery installation project there.

It's just that Brian, we're the sunniest place in Canada.

Come on, man, we could do better than this.

Plus, we've got like half of our grid is coal powered.

We could do better, it seems like.

Oh, we don't trust this, we're scared of this.

Maybe we need to build a big places near the coal plants, which would work out fairly well because that's part of our sunniest belt is down where the coal plants are.

Ironically, that would be cool.

Yeah.

Well, maybe that's how all the coal ended up there was from all the sunshine.

Well, I remember you had a story about coal plants shutting down in the United States and they were putting solar around because the grid ties were already there.

Yeah, no, it totally, absolutely makes sense.

And yeah, like, of course, on my own house, I've got solar.

You've got solar.

But I am trying to electrify everything in my house, so I'm quickly finding out that I should have installed maybe three times as many solar panels when I initially did my project.

How could you do that? No, there's not much room left, but it is what it is.

But I did finally talk to somebody who was willing and HVAC installer, willing to put in an air source heat pump to heat my house.

How did you find this person? Just googling and making an inquiry on the web.

Okay, where did you make the inquiry to the person you Googled? Yeah, the company.

Okay, well, that's cool.

Yeah.

And I think I had maybe contacted them a few months ago and they never got back to me or everybody's super busy in the trade.

But I finally did hear from them and yes, they do air source heat pumps in our ridiculously frigid cold climate.

I was just worried I would not ever find somebody who just wasn't even willing to take out a natural gas furnace.

But anyway, so it is possible it is being done around here.

They also do geothermal, but they don't typically recommend that for urban properties, they prefer to do geothermal.

For rural properties, where you have more space, you can do a horizontal pipe rather than if it's in the city, you've got to do a vertical, and those aren't quite as good and very expensive.

So this is still expensive in our source heat pump, but it's going to be a lot less than geothermal.

And I think this is definitely the way of the future, even around here.

So I think I'm probably going to do it.

My son was asking me about this because I was telling them and he was saying, why is Brian spending so much money to be first to have a zero footprint? And I said, I don't know.

I've just been thinking about it for years and years.

As soon as I went solar, my thought was, okay, excellent, I've got the solar.

Now how do I get rid of my furnace? It just seemed like the logical next step.

It's just you're spending a lot of money on these things and you're not getting the payback for it, you're doing it, and you're not really saving the planet, you're just lowering your own footprint, which is admirable, of course, to everyone listening to the show.

Yeah.

The catch here is, of course, like 30% of our grid is coal fired.

So I think in terms of my carbon footprint, I'll probably end up kind of it'll be a bit of a wash, but of course, eventually the grid here will clean up.

And the other thing is, we do have grants available for this in Canada.

It's not as generous as the ones recently announced in the US with the biden.

What was that called again? Inflation Reduction Act.

That's correct, yes.

I did the first step, which is apply for the Canada Greener Homes grant.

You fill out a thing on the web, so they're going to do an evaluation of my home, and then you get up to five grand for green type renovations, and there's a little bit of a provincial tax rebate, so I might get a couple of grand back there.

Yeah, it's expensive.

But again, the other impetus was we don't have air conditioning here and so I just didn't want to put in normal air conditioning and then 510 years ago from now have to rip it up because everyone's going to have to get rid of their natural gas in five or ten years.

So it's definitely going to cost more than just putting in air conditioning, but it gets rid of my natural gas.

So yeah, we'll see how it goes.

Will it get rid of your natural gas? Will you use resistive heating as a backup? Yeah, this unit has resistive heater backup which is not efficient.

And not cheap to run no, once it hits -20 the heat pump has difficulty so the resistance heat backs up.

Right now my natural gas bill is $110 a month, equalized throughout the year, so I should be able to get that to zero.

So it probably will still end up costing more than that.

It will be probably more than an extra $100.

Are we talking water heating here too? Yeah, so the unit that they showed me, it's a Nordic heat pump.

It doesn't heat your hot water, but apparently it preheats it.

So this is a function of this particular one that they're selling to me.

It does like 30% to 50% of your hot water needs, so it sort of preheats your hot water and then you need a regular hot water heater to kind of finish it off.

But the idea like I have a natural gas water heater too, so switch that out to a heat pump water heater hopefully.

Okay, well, it's tricky where we live because it does get down to -40 it can you have to plan for the worst case scenarios.

Yeah, and certainly minus twenty s and thirty s celsius and minus forty fahrenheit celsius is possible.

Yeah, but this was super encouraging to find that this is actually being done around here, that we are still going to be the last probably to get off natural gas because this is not going to be cheap and there is a subsidy, but it's still going to be kind of expensive.

But yeah, this is totally possible and hopefully I can prove that and report back well, I do expect subsidies to come down in Canada too, eventually because this is planned and we are heavily influenced by what the state does with policy.

Sometimes that hurts us and sometimes it helps us.

But also heat pumps are generally put into highly insulated houses.

It's like an electric car.

When you make an electric car, it can do as much as maybe you want it to with the battery size.

So you make the cars lighter.

You use carbon fiber, you use aluminum, and in the case of a house, you make it the most energy efficient you can.

So are you taking any steps there? Yeah, well, we have over the years like we've upgraded the windows.

And we have spray foam, a bunch of my bomb shelters spray foam here.

As I mentioned last week, it's also patty in case there is a bomb.

Nice and soft.

And we're doing our part of our roof this year as well.

So I was reporting we've got leaks in our roof, so we're going to spray foam that over the next several months so the house will be much better insulated than when we bought it.

And then the only thing left to go would be, like, the bedrooms and the living room could still use some extra insulation.

So we probably will do that next.

But having our vaulted ceiling properly installated will actually help a lot.

Oh, Brian, I want to say a shout out to Matthew Pointer, who pulled up beside me and his Tesla yesterday, and much to my daughter's amusement, had a conversation with me between cars.

She's never seen that before.

I said, Girl, in the old days, people used to stop and talk.

Strangers would talk.

But he's one of the people in the local EV community, and he had roof racks on his Tesla.

I asked him, Why are the roof racks on? And he says, Because I might use them for skiing.

And of course, it's not skiing season, water skiing season.

I guess it just leaves them on and they're cool roof racks.

The Tesla roof racks, they look slick, but he says they're also pretty easy to take off and don't affect his range, to go out of range in his car.

Another thing I wanted to mention is that I saw a commercial because we downloaded this app called Fubo for soccer, because that's where the English Premier League soccer is on this year.

They're always changing rights.

Now it's a different app, by the way.

It's better than The Zone, which it was last time, but more expensive.

And they have weird ads on these things, okay.

Because it's new and they don't know who to sell ads to.

So I saw lots of ads for North Dakota repeated over and over again.

Okay? Apparently, North Dakota is a cool place with one tall building, which I believe we stayed in when we went to the Faracle Film Festival there.

I'm not North Dakota.

I love it.

There's many aspects of North Dakota I love.

And I just saw an ad for lab grown diamonds, and we just talked about that on the show not long ago, and now I'm seeing ads for it.

It's commercialized, but I'm wondering now that it's real, if you were a person who I don't like diamond.

I don't give a crap about diamonds.

I'm not married.

I don't believe in that stuff.

I'm not an old romantic person.

But if you were with a lab grown diamond, be a cop out compared to a real diamond for people.

I'm asking you to speculate here, but do you think that there'd be any difference or would you even tell the person you're giving it to? Hey, it was growing a lab hunting from a Big Mac that was rotting in the corner.

Is it the kind of thing where a guy could put on one of those loops in a diamond shop and look at it and go, oh, this is lab grown, this is crap? That's a good question.

And if you are a listener, we have a lot of smart people listening to the show email as Cleanenergy Show at [email protected] that's a question I'd love to know the answer to.

That's a very interesting question.

Yeah, because I think it's something like cubic zirconia.

That's another one where the professionals can tell the difference between a cubic zirconia and a diamond.

But you and I probably not.

So they'll have less value if they're easier to make.

The question is because Canada's North relies on diamond mining, it's a big industrial economic impact up there.

Will it be affected? I don't know.

However, of course, lab grown diamonds have less environmental impact, which is why we're talking about them in the first place.

Another thing I saw when I was searching for cars, trying to buy one, as I was on the Hyundai Canada website and I noticed something new there.

They said, try an EV before you buy an EV, so you can book a multi day test drive with an EV.

I think it's a great idea.

And they're using the service, what's it called? Turtle, which I guess is in some Canadian cities now, I think Vancouver and Toronto, perhaps we can't do it everywhere.

But that would be one where you could manually just go rent one at Turtle in the States, people have done that and just had one for a few days to see how they like it, because it's hard.

I'd like to drive one and see what they're like, really.

But Hyundai also, they're having a hard time keeping up with demand.

So do they really need a program like this to sell EVs? Because they tend to sell out pretty quickly.

I think I saw somebody on Facebook had an EV six, and where we live are they out already? I didn't know they were coming.

They caught me by surprise.

Yeah, there's at least one around.

So they're starting to trickle out.

The question is, how many will they make? Because I'm hoping the demand is there.

The reviews are still flowing in for the iconic Five.

And we talked last time about Mike having one, a friend of mine, and he really loves it.

No.

And we have an update coming up as well on the EB Six.

But also I wanted to mention I saw Arivian in the wild.

Aribian R one T electric pickup truck.

I didn't know that any had made it up here, anywhere near here, but it was just outside of Moosejaw, my favorite town.

Moose Jaw on the Trans Canada.

The number one that goes coast to coast, east to west.

Yeah, and that's interesting because other people have spotted them previously in the summer.

I wonder if somebody's test driving one back and forth or what's going on with that.

I don't know, but hopefully the charging situation is okay for them since they were on the Trans Canada.

As we've said many times, the Don Tesla charging situation isn't great.

Also, I thought I'd mentioned, because I am looking as a Chevy Bolt EV, that there was a fellow on the Chevy bolt form that had 200,000 miles on his 2020 bolt, and that's 322,000.

These were mostly highway miles because he has a really long commute.

I don't know why.

Maybe he's a drug dealer, who could say? But he's charged to do a run runner, he charges you 100% every day and using it all plus one or two fast charges per day for a very long commute.

And by my calculations on what he showed off the dash, it may have lost 15% of its range, which isn't bad.

I mean, this is no, you don't expect any car to last 322,000 km or 200,000 miles.

And the fact that this isn't just handed off to some teenager to use for local driving at that point, which is how I see EVs going when they lose their range.

But it's still a pretty good range and he's still using it for that purpose.

He's having to fast charge it maybe a bit more often, especially in the wintertime, he says, when it gets cold.

I don't know what his definition of cold is.

And also a shout out to Nestor's Bakery up in Saskatoon, our sister city here in the province, that has an electric transit van, a Ford Transit van electric, which is I didn't think we see any of those around either.

There's a picture of it on Facebook, and they say they save enough in gas by switching discs to make the van payment.

I believe it's free and good for the environment, good for your business brand.

They're not even factoring in maintenance.

So that, Brian, as we know, as we say all the time, is what's going to really move things along when people start to realize because money speaks, money talks, and when money starts making a difference.

Let's get into some updates from past shows.

Finland's new nuclear plant has had to cut power to zero from a failed turbine.

Yeah, we've mentioned this nuclear plant before because it was finally coming online.

And I think I initially reported on this because it was a good news story, because we seem to be sort of bashing nuclear a lot lately because it's so expensive and there's all these delays and cost overruns and it's literally taking decades to get these things up.

But since this one in Finland was coming online, I thought, okay, we better report on this.

But yeah, power dropped to zero on Monday, so they're still in trial operations.

It's not in full blown operation.

And they had a turbine fail, sort of killed the whole thing.

Nothing dangerous, nothing exploded or melted down or anything.

But this reactor was supposed to start production in 2009.

That's how long it's taken.

And it's going to be apparently a few months more because it's not working right now.

Brian, when things are 13 years overdue, money gets spent in that time.

So it's not just time, it's money.

Yeah.

And it's a 1.6 gigawatt reactor that's going to be the fifth reactor in Finland and its biggest reactor, and this is expected to produce 14% of the country's electricity.

You put up a solar farm, can put it up in a few months, and it will work.

Yeah.

And you and I aren't nuclear scientists.

Well, no, technically.

So that will influence our decision around these things.

But solar, wind and batteries are so damn simple.

Why don't we move to that and we'll talk about that a bit more when we get to Germany later on? And I know I bring him up, but my boy says, dad, you know what the world's biggest greenhouse gas is? Do you know the answer to this? That's right there in the script.

So of course you do.

Like the biggest admirer the biggest greenhouse gas that is there in the atmosphere is water vapor.

Okay.

And you know what? Hydrogen emits water vapor.

Is this going to be a problem? Well, I heard about it on a podcast, a good podcast.

Was it ours? And it wasn't ours.

It was actual people who it was really an in the weeds podcast with experts in the field, talking to other only experts who are working in the industry listen to it.

And they said that more study needs to be done because it hasn't been studied.

So if you're looking at airliners flying around and emitting water vapor, is that a good thing? Maybe people have some comments and you know how to get a hold of US clean energy [email protected].

But I just wanted to throw that out there because he was giving me a hard time about that.

And now something for some extremely disappointing news.

We tried to focus on the good news.

Here's some disappointing news.

The Dodge Charger, that is the muscle car that you hear driving down your street at night, eleven at night, waking you up because some teenager has got to feel better about himself.

So he bought a Dodge Charger, a muscle car, as they call them.

They still exist.

They were a big thing in the know.

You had a Pinto and called it a muscle car.

Was it a Pinto or something? No, I had a grand.

Grand.

It's even worse, I think.

I think I had a Pinto like a week before it broke.

Literally.

I'm not even kidding.

Yeah, so they're making an EV, and they're going to make them all EVs, but they have noise, pretend noise.

Brian in fact, the whole back is this pretend exhaust was essentially a dispersion speaker for V eight engine noise.

And this is what it sounds like.

Yeah, I'm going to boo that guy off the road.

The first person to buy one of those, because you'll have the option of turning the stupid thing off.

And then you go to a muffler shop.

Muffler shops will now be like an audio visual place where they'll put in a bigger amp to make the car louder.

Yeah.

You know what? That's probably a really good business to get into.

There you go, kids.

If you're just still in high school, there's a business opportunity for you, and that is just depressing.

We don't want cars to make noise because if you get beat by a Porsche, the Porsche doesn't make any noise.

What are you emulating? You're emulating a slow car.

Good for you.

I know.

People keep telling me on the street, I like the sound of the smell of fumes.

Well, you're going to die early and good luck to you.

I don't know.

Brian and Elon Musk news this week, and I hesitate to even mention his name anymore.

He says, Population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming.

I'll repeat that population collapse due to low birth rates is much bigger risk to civilization than global warming.

This is a guy who's trying to save global warming by advancing, speeding up the electrification of transportation, which he has successfully done, I would argue.

I've known this.

We've all known this.

We all knew that we would solve hunger and the world would become more equitable and we would educate people would get access to education.

We'd stop having 20 babies, right.

The birth rate would go down to what it is in, say, Quebec is like 2.0 per person, and that is a declining birth rate.

So you bring in people from other countries, eventually everyone's going to catch up.

We're all going to have a middle class and maybe not make so many babies.

I mean, it's not like we're all going to go to make babies.

Brian that's my argument.

We're not going to go out and say, oh, I got to save the planet and make 20 kids like he is and name them weird.

Yeah.

No, there was another quote of his in the news this week, too, where he said we got to keep drilling for oil and gas.

But that's just kind of an obvious statement.

But anything he says tends to make the news.

So yeah, I don't know if it's as big a problem as he says, but I don't know.

It's a slow moving train wreck.

We'll hopefully have time to figure that out.

Well, the economies work on expansion, like our right wing government here in this prairie province.

Farming agricultural centric and oil centric brings in immigrants so that the population can expand because nobody wants.

To live here.

Our population is expanding, our economy is moving because we need to build houses, we need to build more restaurants, we need to build more clothing stores and expand roads and construction and all that.

Yeah, we need an equilibrium where maybe we have stable population.

But this is something that rethink X, Tony Siba at all have talked about.

They're starting to talk about deep things like this, like the world in the future, guaranteed incomes might be necessary.

We have to rethink how people will make money when AI takes over a lot of jobs and so forth.

So yeah, it's a big question and I don't think a lot of people are actually thinking about that because sometimes these things sneak up on you.

Sometimes they can come faster than ever.

Back to Kia, we were talking about the EV six not long ago.

So they've got a GT version coming out.

This is the all electric Kia EV six.

The GT version is going to be even faster.

And I just like the headline here.

We'll beat a Ferrari and a Lamborghini in a race.

This is from the electric website.

So yeah, this is faster than a Ferrari Roma, faster than a Lamborghini Hurricane or an Evo spider.

And this is a reasonably priced I don't think they've announced the price yet, but this will be available to customers later this year.

Will this be something similar to your little sports car that you had? Your, what is it? The Hyundai Veloster? Yeah, I would still call it a hatchback, but it's probably called a crossover.

It's the same as the EV six crossover that we've talked about before, which is a nice little car, but the lostr was sold as a sporty vehicle for those that live prices or perhaps young people.

Yes, this is definitely more of a sporty version, but it's got the same body shape.

It's basically the same car.

Yeah, I don't know.

And no word on the range either.

The range on these is just kind of okay, I think.

And you'll probably lose a bit of range with the extra fast version.

But I don't know, I just think that's super fun.

A Kia that goes that fast.

The mythical Tesla Roadster version two, which has been promised forever since the cyber truck.

Or that's not the cyber truck.

The semi would go, what, 2.9 without the rocket? Pass.

No, be under 2 seconds because the plat is already under 2 seconds.

Also be like 1.9.

Yeah, maybe even quicker.

They're talking about putting a SpaceX rocket.

It's going to have to shoot like adhesive down on the roadway so that it can not spin its tires at that speed.

Yes, that's always an issue.

Wow.

Tire manufacturers are going to have to keep up.

At first they were making low rolling resistance, fuel efficient tires vs.

Now they have to make them so they can hug the road and not turn into dust just when you accelerate.

Brian, something I'm very interested in that is the wind turbine visibility.

I asked this question on our last show, and I said, does anybody out there know, is there a study? And sure enough, there is.

The US.

Government, of all people, studied this very thing, and they did studies with get this professional lookers.

I don't know who these people are or what it takes to become one, but I commend you for having that on your business card because that is impressive.

So the concern here is that if we put a bunch of offshore wind turbines off the coast, it's going to be unsightly and people will be upset.

An ocean view is a beautiful thing.

Now you've got your ships out there, and in a lot of places you have warships, I noticed, like down in San Diego, and not only were there warships, there were helicopters doing drills right off the beach.

In fact, there was one that hovered, I swear, for an hour and a half it's probably Tom Cruise just shooting.

It could have been Tom Cruise.

What am I thinking? It was Tom Cruise.

Of course it was Tom Cruise.

Anyway, we talked recently about the Great Lakes because there was a study that said the Great Lakes can do well.

There's some that are deeper than others.

The smaller ones could do a significant power.

But the Great Lakes hold enough potential for wind energy to power the entire United States.

And that's interesting because they're close to population centers, close to grid tieins.

Well, these professional lookers came up with they have different categories, lettered categories, de and so forth.

And you've got your giant wind turbines, which are basically the ones that the extra large ones.

So they have ratings for that.

They have ratings for small, medium, and large.

They've rated them because you can see them in the distance where you can barely notice them, or you can see them right in front of you and say, oh, that's ugly, and see the whole thing spinning.

Or you can barely notice them, or you cannot see them at all.

These are the different categories.

So category D was clearly visible, with moderate impact becoming less distinct.

E was less distinct, size is reduced.

Then you get down to negligible or no impact anyway.

So negligible or no impact at all for a small offshore wind turbine is 20 km or 12.4 miles.

Okay? Now, your biggest turbine, your extra large ones, is up to 40 km or 25 miles.

So that's the answer.

And it's easy because there's always environmental impacts and things like that.

You don't want to have people disrupted.

Like Ted Kennedy Jr.

He was against wind farms off his coast, which are just now finally got approved this week.

Yeah, that's how far it goes back, because he's no longer with us for a long time, somewhere in the middle.

The low impact of movement is noticeable in good light, but not normally.

And so that's about 10 for a small one and 22 to 27 km, or 13.7 miles for the biggest ones.

Yeah, there is a way that's not that far, because on the east coast of North America, there is a large ocean shelf that makes oil drilling and this sort of thing really practical that hasn't been exploited yet.

So there's great potential there.

And we were talking about Japan recently, which only has a 25 kilometer shelf, but floating wind turbines could go further than that if you wanted to.

So, yeah, I'll put this chart in the show notes and you can have a look at it yourself.

And again, it was the US.

Department of Energy.

So the biggest turbines, again, suggest about 40 km away and smaller ones 20 km if you don't want to have any negligible visual impact.

And getting back to what I was just talking about from Clean Techa, the Cape Cod Offshore Wind Project, america's first, believe it or not, is finally, officially moving ahead after years of opposition.

The Vineyard Wind One is described as the nation's first commercial scale offshore wind farm.

The project will utilize 60 213 megawatt heliodx wind turbines.

Those are the big mothers, the big ones, the biggest ones there are.

They're talking about slightly bigger ones now, but those are huge.

I think the wind sweep is like two football fields.

It's just massive.

And they're also going to have an offshore substation out there and that power will be transferred to shore via 220 volts cables.

This is the thing that the locals were concerned about.

They weren't concerned any longer about the offshore visibility, they were more concerned about the cables.

They had to go through town.

So what they did is they made a deal with the town and said that they're going to it's called Covels Beach, and they're going to dig up the roads and put the cable under the roads.

And while those roads are dug up, they're going to fix the infrastructure of sewers and whatnot, and storm drains, and that's going to save them money.

So the 800 megawatt project that is approaching a nuclear reactor in output is located 15 miles off the coast, so it's fairly close.

And these are the big ones, so you will see them and they will generate electricity for more than 40,000 homes and businesses in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and create 3600 full time equivalent job hours.

That's not jobs, that's job hours.

And, of course, what we like to talk about, it's going to save customers of electricity $1.4 billion over the first 20 years of operation.

So clean energy, people, saves the planet and saves your wallet, because energy I saw a study that said people's electricity bills, even by 2030, will be reduced by $9 a month or something like that.

So, yeah, it's happening.

And by the time we get to our climate goals, hopefully at 2040 to 2050, electricity is going to be given away a lot of times.

Fantastic.

OK, another story here from Electric.

They're reporting on Bosch, the Electric motor and appliance company.

They've come up with antilock brakes for electric brakes, which is something I never thought of, never thought was even maybe necessary, but I just liked this story because it's a good example of the progress that we could make once we start taking these kinds of things seriously, like electric bikes.

So, yeah, we've had anti lock brakes in cars for years.

I didn't like them at first because it seemed like kind of unnecessarily complicated and I was worried it was just going to be one of those things that breaks on your car, like quit working doesn't mean brakes.

Yeah, I don't know, they've been great.

Antelope brakes are great where we live in the winter because you can stomp on the brakes and not slide around on the ice.

You can still keep steering your car when you just lock up the wheels in your car.

You can't steer, you just have to slide around like an idiot.

But antilock brakes give you a little bit more control, so it only makes sense to do this on bicycles as well.

So these were shown off at Eurobike 2022, an exhibition recently in Europe, and Electric took these for a ride and it looks fantastic.

Have you ever locked up your front brakes on a bike and flown over the handlebars? I don't even want to talk about it.

That's how bad it is.

We were talking before the show about the evolution of home videos and the cameras.

Well, that little flip camera, guess how it got broken going over your hand on my handlebars down a hill.

It was a mountain biking course and it did go down quicker than I thought and there was just I could have paralyzed myself.

I basically did a somersault as a much lighter man, but it was not pleasant.

And this was only about eight years ago, seven years ago, yes, it was scary and whole body feels like it got hit by a truck and then you start to shake it off.

Is anything broken? So the answer to your query, yes.

One time in my twenty s, I went over my front handlebars.

It's no fun, but yeah, Antelope breaks will absolutely be fantastic.

So hopefully that starts to become and they mentioned here in the article that it's great for things like cargo bikes.

So electric cargo bikes are going to be a huge thing in cities for doing deliveries and stuff, and that's a particular case where you can get a lot of momentum with kind of a heavy cargo bike and you don't want to be locking up those wheels in any way.

So, yeah, this is a nice step forward.

I'd be curious to try them.

And, you know, I remember when I used to go to the bicycle shops a lot, that they used to go away to the bike shows this time of year.

This is the exact time of year when the bike conventions are on and all your greasy bike mechanics from the local shops go out and on vacation.

Duke God knows what in Las Vegas.

Ebikes.

Not e, motorcycles.

Not electric motorcycles.

But bikes are going over highway speeds now because occasionally you will see them with that spec with a new bike announcement on electric or somewhere.

And I'm thinking, okay, that's not good.

But it's all about control, right? So if you do have any lock brakes, then that may change the equation.

I mean, I'm scared going at my peak of my ebikes, 25 miles an hour type of thing.

So I don't know.

Brian we've got many press releases and I got one that I was kind of interested in doing the interview on, and that is because last week the Chancellor of Germany was coming to our country to make various announcements and agreements.

And on his last day on Tuesday, he went out to the east coast of Newfoundland and Labrador and was making an announcement about green hydrogen.

And one of the countries in Canada that is trying to do green hydrogen out there got a hold of me and wanted me to interview the CEO.

Now, our schedule is never hooked up, but I started doing research into it and I started to get ill feelings about the whole thing about A, green hydrogen and how is this viable and B, like, are these companies just sort of jumping on the government teeth at the time when they're desperate to fight climate change? And is this legitimate? I'm starting to feel like I was just getting bad vibes about the whole thing.

So I did some research into green hydrogen and I came to the conclusion that the first thing that we should use green hydrogen for is not Germany's.

Electricity needs to get off Russian fuels, fossil fuels, but to use it for what it's used for now.

And it's used in oil refinery, refinery, refinery oil refinery.

Ammonia production and methanol production as well as steel production.

And I think maybe some cement production is possible as well.

So ammonia is used in fertilizers.

So if we can get off the ungreen hydrogen now, that makes emissions.

When you make that hydrogen, that's where we should first apply.

This 4% of hydrogen in the world is currently green.

That's not very much.

And there's a great expense to how they do it.

What they do with green hydrogen is use process called electrolysis, where you put basically two high electric probes in water and you split the water's atoms and separate the hydrogen from it.

That's very energy intense.

And those electrolysis machines are very expensive now and they're trying to get them down in price like wind and solar.

But there's some debate as to how that's even possible.

So they're talking about shipping it to Germany.

And in order to do that, because hydrogen is not like gasoline, you have to cool it down and make it solid, okay.

Because it just takes up so much volume.

So you have to make it really cold.

Now you can make Ammonium cold, but not as cold, and do that.

You don't have to make it as cold.

You can turn it back into hydrogen again on the other side.

But the person we were going to talk to, he bought this brownfield oil storage facility in Nova Scotia, and he plans on putting up wind turbines, 100 or so wind turbines to power the place phase one and offshore for phase two.

And he's put $100 million of his own money into it because he's a rich guy with lots of investments from prior times and he has expertise in setting something like this up.

But, yeah, I mean, it's 160 wind turbines on Charlotte the locals aren't thrilled about.

And they started getting that shoved down their throats really quickly.

They haven't had time.

And that's all these things take time.

But he's got this brownfield oil storage place, which apparently is great.

And there's a deep shipping channel there.

I think it's like 27 meters or something.

So you can get ships in and out to ship it.

And that's all you that's a big step forward for this particular company.

But there are, critics say, 24 separate government agencies right now that have to provide the stamp for this to go forward.

For something like this, that's a lot.

And that means years and years and years.

Yeah.

Well, back to that issue of Complication.

It's so much more complicated than solar, wind and battery.

And that's my thought.

It's complicated as expensive.

And in Alberta, they streamlined oil exploration and development so that you go to one agency and they take care of everything.

We're going to have to do something like that if things like hydrogen are going to be sped up, because that's a problem with solar.

Like Australia took away the green tape, or the red tape rather, and replaced green tape and makes it cheaper and faster.

Faster means cheaper because you don't have to sit around and all that.

It's just a better process.

So it expanded really rapidly once they did that.

So there's also blue hydrogen, which they're making next door in Alberta and the oil rich profits of Alberta.

But they say they're going to capture that carbon that's from natural gas.

So you have to capture the emissions from that.

And that's not practical.

Yeah, so green hydrogen is made with clean electricity, so it should be 100% emissions free.

Blue hydrogen is made from fossil fuels, but you can capture the carbon and then make it kind of clean.

And there's lots of hydrogen projects going on in the world, lots of them and this will be maybe one of the first in North America.

But the thing is, it's just going to take so much time.

I don't doubt there's going to be an appetite for a market for it.

Okay.

There's going to be an insatiable market to buy green hydrogen, just like there's an insatiable market to buy green energy.

Amazon wants to have green energy.

They put up a million solar farms or whatever, like dozens, and counter do them, I don't know.

And they'll just do that and Microsoft, et cetera, et cetera.

Well, that's happening.

And people will want green hydrogen as well.

And green steel made from green hydrogen.

So we'll see.

Yeah, Germany seems to be definitely on the forefront of this hydrogen.

And there was a story, this was from CNN that the very first hydrogen powered train line has now started running full time in Germany.

So they've got 14 hydrogen powered trains.

These are fuel cell hydrogen vehicles, so emissions free.

And as long as the hydrogen is made in an emissions free way, then this is an emissions free system.

I don't know, it doesn't say how the hydrogen is made.

I'd be surprised if it's fully green hydrogen.

But yeah, this is a thing that is actually working now.

And they still have some diesel trains that they plan to replace, but this project has started.

They have about a 1000 kilometer range on these hydrogen trains.

So they can run basically do their route all day without refilling.

But they just have refilling stations at either end of the line.

And yes, this is the thing that's now working well in California.

California has like, I don't know, maybe 34 hydrogen refilling stations for cars.

There's like six in maybe Vermont or somewhere for Bernie's friends, but they're all in California.

Half of them aren't working.

It's very expensive to fill your car, very expensive.

They're hoping to get the cost of these electrolyzers down where they could fuel a vehicle and be cost competitive with fossil fuels.

And they won't even need blue hydrogen, but you need to be able to commit to that.

Then there needs to be just the difficulty of refueling and transporting is just such a major thing to do.

Yeah, it's almost like you need your green hydrogen plant right next to where the storage is, like for this train line.

If they could actually make the green hydrogen at both ends of the rail line, but it's just probably not practical to do that everywhere.

We're going to potentially need this hydrogen.

The question my partner asked when they were watching the news story on TV is why doesn't Germany make their own dammarine hydrogen? Well, I looked into that and they do have a coastline, they do have places to put wind, but they claim it's just not enough coastline as other people.

Nova Scotia is very windy.

They don't have good solar resources.

And Newfoundland and Labrador also have good very good wind resources.

And ironically, I'm looking at the solar chart for Newfoundland.

You know, where the best solar potential is for Newfoundland, it's way better, the most extreme north as you go.

So it's actually just a weather thing.

I think there's just a lot of clouds in the south, less cloud.

You're getting really close to the Arctic up there in Labrador.

And then this is better solar resources than there is down south.

Okay, so there was a fantastic article this week from Power magazine written by Sony Patel, and I just wanted to talk about this because it's really a follow up to a lot of these things that we're talking about, the complications, these different types of power.

So we've been talking about Germany.

They have been trying to phase out their nuclear power plants.

This is really part of a political platform.

People in Germany don't really want their nuclear power anymore.

So they have so far shut down three of the six nuclear power plants that they have had in Germany.

So just last year, nuclear was supplying about 12% of the electricity needs in Germany.

That's now down to 6%, which is these three nuclear power plants remaining.

But of course, as we know, Europe, and Germany in particular, is in a bit of an energy crisis this year because they've been relying on fossil fuel imports from Russia.

And those are now in doubt.

And nobody really wants to talk to Russia anymore.

We don't want their stinky oil and gas.

So there's been a lot of talk about, well, should they delay the closing of these last three nuclear plants in Germany? And it's like, on the surface, well, that seems like a great idea.

This is a carbon free form of electricity.

Just keep them running a little bit longer, another year or two, then maybe they can find a different plan instead of relying on this Russian oil and gas.

But this article was so great because it really went through the complications in doing that.

That sounds like a simple thing, just keep the plants running for another year or two.

But I'll go through some of the legal and regulatory hurdles that was mentioned in this article, because, of course, solar, wind and batteries, something like that, it's fairly simple.

Like, you and I could literally build a solar wind and battery power plant.

Basically, like, you have one in your camper, you put out the solar panel, you charge it in a battery, boom.

It's pretty simple.

But nuclear can be extremely dangerous.

So over the years, we've created all of these laws and regulations.

So the first hurdle, the reactors cannot be operated beyond 2022.

December under Germany's Atomic Energy Act and prolonging their operation will require an amendment to the law.

They would literally have to change the law, which they can do to keep these plants running beyond 2022.

There would also be an environmental impact assessment that would have to be done.

And this would have to abide by a European Court agreement as well.

There has to be a comprehensive risk and benefit assessment by Germany's legislature that would balance assessments.

This was created after the Fukushima accident in 2011.

Regulations got more severe, so there's a bit more here in terms of regulations.

The reactors would need to address safety and security requirements because they're slated for shutdown in December 20.

So they're already three years past.

They were given a sort of a special exemption.

So continuing beyond that, they're already 13 years past the last major kind of safety inspections.

Continued operation would only make sense if the safety review were significantly reduced in scope and the test depth or extensive retrofitting might be kind of simplified.

You'd have to basically change all of these safety rules and kind of let everything slide for a couple of more years.

They are also running out of fuel.

So the fuel elements in the plant have been largely used up.

They have enough fuel for only about 80 days of extended operation past that December 2022 shutdown point.

Procuring new fuel is a lengthy process that could take between 18 and 24 months.

If you did a super accelerated version, maybe twelve to 15 months.

So the fuel is a huge problem.

There would also have to be testing of this new fuel.

Like, you don't just come up with nuclear fuel.

It's an extremely difficult process, making sure there's enough staff so they could have staffing issues if they continue beyond this date.

I imagine a lot of the staff have already made other plans to go onto other jobs.

So there would have to be extensive human resources coordinated and people trained.

It's just a long nightmare of things.

There's the financial consideration.

So again, doing all of this stuff to extend it beyond its normal date.

This is going to cost even more money than it has been costing.

This is going to be expensive electricity if they keep it running.

Now, there is, of course, a nuclear business and technology association called ChemD.

They disagree with some of these conclusions that in their view, basically it's worth it.

This is a massive crisis facing Europe and Germany, this massive energy shortage.

So they think that all of these extra measures that would be needed are probably worth it, but I'm not so sure.

And the fact that they're down to only 6% of the German electricity generation with these last three plants, hopefully they can come up with another 6% somewhere.

Russia could just go home and get out of Ukraine and be nice.

Yeah, and hopefully punished somehow.

But it's phenomenal.

I understand they are going to try and keep three running, right? They're going to do their best.

Yeah.

There's been sort of conflicting reports.

They had said, no, we're not going to extend them.

But now it sounds like they're considering it, and I guess we'll see.

Well, Brian, we're going way over on the show this week, but I want to mention, coming up in the show is a lightning round where we'll have a skim of the rest of the week's headlines.

Real quick, let's dip into some of our feedback from the web.

We have a DoorDash driver, says he bought a Chevy Bolt EV.

That's a slightly larger version of the Bolt with the crossover styling.

Took the Evo DoorDashing this evening.

This is a person who works as a DoorDash delivery person.

It's a great car for food delivery.

The first order of the day pays for all of the fuel I need.

And again, and I can sit in the AC listening to music between orders without worrying about overheating.

And this is the person who was down in the States, and it's perfect DoorDash car.

We hear that a lot.

Yeah.

And of course, one of my pet peeves we've mentioned on the show is you'll often see people around here sitting in normal weather with the engine running, and I always am confused by that.

It's like, do they really need the AC running? It's not that hot out, et cetera, et cetera, wasting all that fuel.

But I was in my gas powered car the other day just with the engine off and listening to the radio, and after about a minute, a warning comes up on the screen saying, oh, you shouldn't be running your AV system without the engine running, because you're going to run your battery down.

So maybe that's why everyone's running their cars.

Well, they don't have to, because the little no, it's telling me it's life experience.

And I can't believe you've never had this experience.

You've never run your battery down and been stranded from that very thing.

It takes a long time.

Mr.

Stockton, with his good quality batteries, not so much.

He stretches the life of his battery because he's poor.

Well, I've run into that before when I was a kid, and I've learned my lesson, and I think a lot of people have, and that's why they don't turn it off.

You know, what I'm hearing a lot of now is people like pickup trucks automatically shutting off the engine that stop lights.

But really, how much is that saving you? It's a minute or two of idling here and there.

It's a little bit it's something that should have been implemented 20 years ago, and that might have made a difference, but it's a little too long because the engine literally has to start just like you're turning the key over.

It seems like it's wearing air on it a lot.

You need a more robust starter, but I think at the end, it does save a bit of fuel.

All right, I have a question here on Twitter from alternative frequency that's his handle.

He has a trucker who says the trucker in the United States says we are one of his five favorite podcasts.

I thought they listened to Fantastic.

And some of the others are Dr.

Volts, which is a paid podcast on substance.

And inside EVs, of course, is a popular one.

Undecided Matt Farrell, which has been off of his YouTube channel.

I use Matt Farrell's undecided for information.

He is not a professional, but he does research well and has good videos.

So, question for all of us, and we are the only ones that go back to them because we're good and decent people.

Brian, even with your back, it says home batteries seem to cost roughly $1,000 per kilowatt hour.

But the F 150 Lightning pickup truck has 93 kilowatt hours for about $40,000.

And the Silverado announced Silverado EV will be 200 kilowatt hours for about 40 kwh.

And I don't think either of those are actually 40K, by the way.

They're already under prices like Tesla inflation, yes, but that's the whole cost of the vehicle.

Or just the cost of the battery.

That's the starting price.

The supposed starting price.

I mean, this is for the fleet version of those vehicles.

But the question is, is home storage price too high? And are EV trucks price too low? Is it not about the capacity? I think that's a complicated question with a complicated answer with multifaceted.

I'll add one before you do.

Tesla, for example, wants to sell their vehicles.

That's their primary motivation is to keep their company going by selling vehicles.

So they'll put their batteries into the vehicles and they'll overprice the battery storage so that everybody's not buying it.

I'm sure the battery storage could be cheaper for Tesla, maybe half as much.

And we'd all buy got a waiting list for everything.

We use all their batteries, and that would kill their business.

That's one reason.

Do you have other reasons? Not really, but I think it's a little bit of both.

I mean, the home batteries have seemed awfully expensive to me.

Also quite possible that Ford is losing money on these trucks and that Chevy is going to lose money on these trucks.

We don't know for sure.

Well, I'm not really sure if you have any thoughts [email protected] or on Twitter.

On Facebook.

We're not on Facebook.

It took us off Facebook.

We're on TikTok, of course, and you to check us out.

We have SpeakPipe.

Comcleenergyshow to leave us a voicemail message, and we'd love to hear from you anything you have to say on this or any other subject.

Brian it is time for, of course, the Lightning Round.

The Lightning Round is where we skimmed through a few more headlines, really quick to end the show, and it's one of our favorite shows.

It was a new segment almost two years ago, almost celebrating the two year anniversary of the Lightning Round.

And believe me, there will be cake this year.

I hope tesla says autopilot is preventing 40 crashes per day from wrong pedal error driving.

And when this came out, somebody had crashed their car into a building.

No, they crashed it into a wedding on the west coast of Canada and killed two people.

And you occasionally see the elderly doing this in front of a store.

I was teaching my daughter how to drive, and she wanted to use her left foot for the brake.

And I said, no, there's a reason for that.

And this is the reason.

You stick to the right foot and you go back and forth.

So the use of the auto pilot sensor to mitigate torque when it's sure the car is sure that the input was a mistake.

Yeah, well, it's like saving 40 crashes a day means this is a really common, a way more common problem than I might have thought it is.

Because if it's just 40 a day in Tesla, imagine the entire fleet of cars.

But I think when we first talked about this a couple of years ago in the podcast I mentioned, I think it was called the Audi 5000.

So way back in the late 70s or the early 80s, audi had a huge PR problem in North America because of sudden unintended acceleration.

And it was believed that these Audi cars were faulty and they would just suddenly accelerate into a building, they would accelerate into traffic, et cetera, et cetera.

And it was eventually determined it was just driver error.

But there was, I think, like a 60 Minutes report on it that suddenly scared everybody off of buying an Audi.

So this is apparently a very common problem, people pressing the wrong pen.

And there was also something just about Priuses that killed their popularity, that was a big dent on them because toilet was such a reliable vehicle.

It turned out it was just a format sticking on the driver pedal formats now so they can't move.

I've had problems with my floor mats and different cars, too.

Yeah, it took them forever to figure it out, too.

To absolutely figure it out.

A small Vermont utility which uses Tesla power walls from customers, speaking of this very thing, in a virtual grid backup system.

So there's 4000 Tesla power walls hooked up in people's homes to the grid, and they found out that the first thoughts on this is that it's saving them a lot of money.

In fact, $1.5 million in one week this summer.

Now, I don't know what how you save one? I don't understand the nuances of grid.

I mean, you have to fire up a plant.

Maybe you lose some hardware during the situation that you wouldn't have otherwise lost.

But they're sure that they've saved 3 million since in 2021 and just 1.5 million in the heatwave this summer.

So, yeah, again, there's another virtual power plant project happening in Japan right now.

There's a big one happening in California also with Tesla powerwalls.

They could all be networked.

Yeah.

I think eventually it won't really be so much about saving money necessarily, it's just kind of stabilizing the grid.

But stabilizing apparently saves money.

I don't understand why, but it is.

Yes.

Oh Brian.

It's time for a clean energy show.

Fast fact pakistan is responsible for 1% of global emissions, yet it is the 6th most climate vulnerable country in the world, proving that the climate change impacts affect poor countries disproportionately.

Yeah.

And of course there's been massive flooding in Pakistan this last week or so.

Absolutely devastating.

Kind of what was normally once in a hundred year kind of situation is now sadly much more frequent.

Speaking of which, new scientists says that the heatwave in China this summer is the most severe ever recorded in the world.

People in large parts of China have been experienced two months of extreme heat and that's been 40 degrees and terrible things.

The worst one in history, Brian.

But we have to go.

We'll see you again next week for another edition of the clean energy show.

See you next week.

We're off this week due to illness. Sorry about that!

We dig into why Japan is not making use of their abundant wind resources. Tesla will begin shipping their electric semi truck this year. We look at the details for EVs in the new Biden climate bill. Mazda sold only 8 electric vehicles in the month of July. It’s a headline and punchline all in one!

An update to the US sending oil to Germany, F150 lightning towing range for my specific situation of a tent trailer, as big as the Biden climate bill is, it’s still less then Europe and China, it’s not just Volkswagen cheating on emissions.

A chinese automaker is upping what supercharing speed can be and, it turns out backyard chickens lay tainted eggs, which was the name of an all-girl punk band at my high school.

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

Transcript of this episode-----------------------------------

Joe Biden: Progress does come.

Your dad was right.

And when it does, like today, people's lives are made better and the future becomes brighter and the nation can be transformed.

That's what's happening happening now.

Brian: Hello and welcome to episode 128 of the Clean Energy Show.

I'm Brian Stockton.

James: I'm James Whittingham.

This week I dig into why Japan is not making use of their abundant wind resources.

Turns out Godzilla is only partially to blame.

Tesla will begin shipping their electric semi truck this year.

No word yet if they'll be shipping them via Tesla semi truck.

We look at the details for EVs and the new biden climate bill.

Small detail not talked about.

You have to wear aviators while driving any rebated car.

Mazda sold only eight electric vehicles in the month of July.

It's a headline and a punchline all in one.

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

Also this week we're going to talk about an update to the US sending oil to Germany F 150 Lightning towing range for my specific situation of Toyota dent trailer.

As big as the biden climate bill is, it's still less than Europe and China.

It's not just a Volkswagen cheating on emissions.

A Chinese automaker is upping what supercharging speed can be.

And it turns out backyard chickens like tasted eggs and Tatted Eggs was the name of the allgirl punk band in my high school.

Brian, I just wanted to add something to last week.

We were chatting about my new electric bicycle, the ride one up V, two roadster, gravel edition.

It does have a smaller battery, which I was saying is one of the main the downsides of it, but you can buy an extra external battery from the company and it clicks into the kind of water bottle spot there on the bike.

So for $240 you can buy an extra little battery.

What are the stats of that battery, Brian? I do not know the status of the battery.

How do I really care? Well, is it a nine volt that you took out of your smoke detector for $200? Or is it actually do something for you? Yeah, it does something.

It's a battery the size of a water bottle a little bit bigger.

I was talking to you that it was odd because we actually got a press release from Saudi Arabia, from Saudi Arabia arabian energy company boasting about their solar.

We've been speculating for a long time because we keep charging in Saudi Arabia whose listed us in Saudi Arabia and if so, send us a message.

No one has sent us a message, but someone is listening.

By the way, I want to talk to you about shower heads.

Why? It's because I just vacationed at your cottage and you're building a new one.

And I was thinking all the decisions you have to make, it's like being in a film.

What color do you want this car in the background? What color do you want this hat on this extra? Being a director means making countless decisions, actually, until the point where your brain is dead.

But you're going to have to make decisions like that on your house because you're building a brand new house.

You're going to have to say, I want a faucet.

Now.

You use your water from a tank, it's shipped in and probably replenished after my family has been there with our desire for showers and cleanliness.

Yeah, there's no running water.

Everybody has their own cistern, but your tap, when you turn on the tap in your washrooms, it comes out like a fire hydrant.

There's nothing restraining it.

So I'm thinking, well, first of all, you could probably if you were still going to live there, you could probably buy some sort of aerator to put on.

That would be the simple thing to do, just to I mean, we did change the shower head in the guest house to a low flow one because it wasn't before.

The showers are the most important.

And the toilets, of course, because you want them to be efficient.

It's really important.

It's not just environmental.

It's a matter of conserving water because it's hard to get water.

You don't want to run out and keep filling it.

Right? Yeah.

And we think that we can use kind of a gray water system or we can maybe use rain water or something for the sinks in the toilets.

And then I've always wanted I don't know if it's practical for us, but you can get clean drinking water out of the air.

They have these things that run, like off the solar panel that just collects moisture from the air and goes through a filter.

And that's a possible way to get your drinking water.

Yeah.

And you don't drink your water out there because you don't trust your tank, right? Yeah.

We drink it separate from the water that runs through the house.

So that might be a way of getting good drinking water.

Hell, I felt my drinking water here in the house, and it's still not great.

Is that right? It's still not great.

We've got a good filter under the kitchen sink that it's supposed to take out lead.

It's like it's the highest level of kind of home water thing, including lead.

Oh, that's interesting.

I've got an interesting story coming up on lead and chickens buckle up for that one.

It's a good story, though.

Yeah.

So I don't know.

And of course, lighting and a lot of people have exterior lighting on their architecture.

It's nice to have but is it necessary as it causing light pollution in a provincial park? When you want to see the stars, your star gives it yourself.

Are you going to have a driveway? Yeah.

Are you going to like the driveway? Yeah.

No, those are all great questions.

Like, we renovated our kitchen five or six years ago, so we have some taste of what that is like.

It's like, yeah, you got to make a decision about the light above the sink.

You got to make a decision about the pole handles on the cupboards and the finishes for the cabinets and the flooring, like, what pattern for the flooring and all that.

So, yeah, absolutely.

Tons of questions to answer.

So when I arrived at your cottage, it was a very hot day, and I kind of roasted my fat self a bit broiled, I guess, or deep cooked, or I don't know how you want to put it, a pressure cooked, but I was a bit uncomfortable thinking I got there's no overhangs in this house.

The sun is just beating in, but there's no overhangs on my house.

Yeah.

At all.

In fact, there's less overhangs on my house than there is in your cottage.

And I seem to manage fine here.

I think it's better insulated.

I mean, that helps.

The right kind of windows help, but the right reflectivity on modern windows helps keep the sun away in the summertime, lets it through in the winter when it's more lower in the sky and a more of a direct angle through the window.

So, I don't know.

Your architect has come up with a stunning design that is just I really look forward to seeing it like it's just incredibly cool.

Yeah.

Are you still doing a round window for the bedroom, by the way? I have to ask.

No, at the moment it's not round.

How come? Probably just matches better if it's not.

It's also like, floor to ceiling windows and places.

So that's going to be, I mean, in the future, as we said last week with our letter, electricity will be free.

It'll be inconsequential that you could heat whatever you wanted to heat or cool whatever you wanted to cool, rather.

But right now it could be hard to keep that place cool, depending on how it is in the summer.

Yes, I think we're okay because the rest of the walls will be very thick and super insulated, so you kind of allowed a certain amount of glass area before you kind of screw up that envelope.

So I think it'll be fine.

And then you have presumably, in the round earth construction that you're considering or going ahead with.

Is that fair to say? You're going ahead with round earth considering, hopefully.

Okay.

What's it going to look like? There's no ram, dearth.

Then it's going to look like no, that would be a whole different plan.

Yeah, we'll see.

Well, it's very interesting, though, because the rand earth has sort of stored heat energy.

It can take store the cool from the night and let it off slowly.

It can store the heat from the day and sort of moderate the house.

Now, regardless of how you're making it, if you chose, say, a concrete floor, that would be one way of having heat storage in the house.

You might want to go down with a boiler, then that goes through the floor.

That's what a lot of people do these days.

But then boilers are complicated, as you found out for your rental house.

As far as getting heat pumps for them.

Yeah, in floor heating seems the most likely.

But there are many different ways of heating the liquid that's in your in floor heating.

So I don't see that as being a big problem.

And then you got to build a podcast studio out there.

A little sound booth with good airflow.

Well, there's a little kind of home theater room.

So I'm hoping that area will work for a podcast.

Sure, as long as it has a good view of the lake.

Yeah.

Then you could shoot yourself as a backdrop then, if you wanted to.

Maybe the whole house should be designed around that principle.

Brian.

I don't know.

Anyway, I just wanted to mention that.

And another thing I wanted to mention was I was just now looking at the local EV Facebook group as I scrolled through Facebook and I laughed my ass off at something.

Somebody bought a brand new EV and they're asking the question that people often ask, where do I charge? What credit cards do I need? Do I need an account with people from different charges? And this is Western Canada, by the way.

And Cam Roger responded to this person and said that you will likely find the flow card as being the most useful, as well as charge point to experience the reliability of a Petrol Canada charging session, purchase a lottery ticket.

That is to say, your chances of it working are about the same as winning the lottery.

I do like a bit of sarcasm, especially when you're angry at something.

That really makes me feel good to read that.

Some updates to some previously discussed stories.

I wanted to mention to our listeners that Connecticut has a new law that EV chargers have to be repaired properly.

However, I can't find any information on it.

I saw it mentioned on Twitter by someone reliable and I can't find it again.

So if you know about Connecticut having a recent law that ensures that EV chargers are repaired within a certain time frame, send me an email [email protected], because we'll talk about it later.

Yeah, I'm sure we have at least one lesson in Connecticut.

And my friend Mike mike Noblock bought his first EV.

He bought me Ionic Five and I asked him how's it going? He had it for, I think about ten days or so now, and he says it's awesome.

It's everything I hoped for and more.

It's really fun to drive.

Accelerating up to speed so quickly is fun every time you do it.

And Mike is not a race car driver, but he's finding this fun.

He's a reasonable guy.

The ride is really smooth and the seating is very comfy.

It's insanely quiet and love charging at home instead of going to a gas station, which is something that people don't realize.

People worry about where you're going to charge it all the time.

But the fact is you don't take your cellphone to a gas station to charge.

It's really cool to do it at home.

Imagine we didn't do that.

Okay.

An update to the ongoing dispute with Germany and Russia.

There is a pipeline supplying oil from Russia to Germany, and this is kind of important for Germany.

And we've just been keeping tabs on how that's going.

There's a second tanker of crude oil coming from America to help kind of fill in the gaps.

So 570,000 barrels is due in Germany soon.

And this is the second shipment from the US.

To help bridge the gap.

And Germany is hoping to reduce their reliance on Russian oil and gas by about 90% this year.

So let's hope they can manage that.

Well, you know, inflation is starting to slow down, at least here in Canada.

We had the latest numbers.

Yeah.

And the price of gas has come down.

It's amazing how if everyone drove an EV, it wouldn't be affecting inflation as much.

Right.

You still have to pay for goods.

Goods will go up in price because gas with trucking and so on, until we get long haul trucking sorted out with electrification, which is coming.

And Biden is about to sign the inflation reduction as we speak, right? Yes.

We've been talking about this for a couple of episodes now.

This is a massive, massive bill in the US.

I always forget what it's called.

What's it called? The Inflation Reduction Act or the IRA.

Yeah.

And you expect it to be called something like the Carbon Reduction Act.

Biden climate bill for is what some people call it, climate bill.

But there's a nice article on Bloomberg this week, and it's called the Inflation Reduction Act is a Climate bill, just don't call it one.

So it's just a nice little article here about the kind of the vagaries of politics and the importance of naming these bills.

It's like governments can kind of force the conversation in certain directions by calling it something they used to just follow boring naming conventions for these kinds of things.

But they realized some years ago that PR is an important part of this.

It sort of reminded me of do you remember when Walmart was kind of coming into Canada? Like about 30 years ago, walmart came into Canada and really started kind of taking over town to town.

They were building Walmarts and putting kind of our local stores out of business.

And it was obviously a huge change and a huge thing.

A lot of people were upset about it.

And it's like this big, massive corporation moving in to take things over.

And what did they do? They started these TV commercials.

I don't know if you remember this, but it was like they started featuring individuals that worked at Walmart, the Walmart Greeters and the Walmart Cashiers.

And they kind of made it sound like it was a small town store.

Like it was like the people that work at Walmart are just like your neighbors because they are your neighbors.

And there were commercials that focused on exactly the opposite of what Walmart actually is, which is a giant corporation.

And it was kind of annoying and sickening.

But it's like, well, that's the world of PR.

That's kind of how this goes.

So the other aspect of that I wanted to kind of mentioned, which we just touched on briefly is so, yes, it is called the Inflation Reduction Act.

Is that what it's actually going to be or do? And so there was an analysis that suggested that 41% of our current inflation is attributable to fossil fuel prices.

So if this can bring down the price of fossil fuels, bring down the demand of fossil fuels, then, yeah, it actually should reduce inflation.

So as you were talking, I looked up a list of ridiculous US.

Legislation names that have nothing to do with one, and the Zero Tolerance for Barbaric Cultural Practices Act was one.

Okay, well, I think that was one in Canada.

Actually.

That is one in Canada.

Serious time for the most Serious Crime act.

The Unborn Victims of Crime Act.

Yeah.

So that was an abortion related one in the States.

It gets weirder, too.

And ultimately it's just the name of the bill.

Whatever's in the bill obviously, is the important thing.

So the other thing I just wanted to mention, which again comes from Bloomberg, our new best friends over there at BNEF, and they crunch the numbers in terms of this new climate bill in the US.

And it's $374,000,000,000, which is a lot of money.

But their conclusion and these numbers are always kind of difficult to calculate because what's being done by government, what's being done by private.

So it's always a bit fuzzy on the numbers.

But their conclusion was that this is a really good spend, but the EU and China are spending a bit more than the US.

Is with this climate bill.

Is that right? Well, that's interesting.

Yeah.

China being the biggest spender right now on clean energy transition.

Getting back to the naming of this act, though, I think there was a column in the New York Times yesterday about how climate has become part of the culture wars.

If you're woke, you care about the climate.

I don't understand.

A little bit worried about where the world is going.

In fact, I'm a lot worried where the world is going.

Also.

I think just today people were sharing a Global mail article that was a Canadian national newspaper about the F 150 all electric lightning pickup trucks, two of them being owned in the prairies here where we live, including one here nearby, Brian and I, and we've mentioned him on the show before I assume the Globe listens to our show.

I assume everybody does high ups in Saudi Arabia.

Biden's probably listening right now.

I know.

Sure.

So this guy's Lightning says he can this was interesting to me because I've been interested in facts about my own use scenario because I imagined only to pick up traffic and Holly, my tent trailer, my pop up camper, as some people call him, and he says he has one, he's got almost about as big as a Pawpaw trailer as you can have.

He says he got 600 km driving around the city of Range, but 330 on the highway with that large pop up camper.

So that gives me valuable information as a person who may want to do that in the future.

Yeah, that's a good indication of the actual reality of it.

Because towing reduces the range by a lot, apparently.

But, you know, if I just drove our SUV, gas powered SUV, to the lake, if I towed my Camper, it would have half the range.

It would have half the range as well.

So that's not bad.

I was thinking, oh, you'd have to charge every hour and maybe it'd be worth it because it costs so much, but that's every 3 hours.

You don't want to stop that anyway, right? I stopped an hour and a half just to put more oil in my damn engine.

Which you won't have to do in an EV.

Praise the Lord.

My God.

I hate that.

Yes.

No, I had a Nissan Sentra where we had to drive it with a bunch of extra cans of oil, which I put in that movie where we shot at that gas station.

I was thinking of putting a hose with a funnel on it inside the cabin so I could just add while I drive.

That would be great.

Oh, yeah, and one other personal update I forgot about.

So I drove my Tesla up to Saskatoon, to the nearest Tesla service center because I had an issue.

The suspension started squeaking and the steering wheel was squeaking.

So, yeah, they replaced the I should find the exact name of it here.

Just give me a second.

Is duhickey and the wording at all schmengee.

They told me that the left front upper control arm ball joint had seized.

So they replaced that one and proactively replaced the other one as well, which it was still working fine.

But I think this is probably an issue that they've experienced before.

So they went and replaced the upper control arm ball joints, the left and right on the front.

Yeah, it took about 3 hours.

It's a two and a half hour drive to get up there to start with.

But I got there first thing in the morning and they gave me a Tesla Model X as a loaner to drive around town while I was there.

I may go up there this weekend.

Do you think they'll give me one for no reason.

No, I don't think they will.

This is from Drive Tesla, Canada.

And this is just our opportunity to mock Mazda or Mazda, depending on where you live in the world.

Only sold eight of their electric cars in the US in July of 2022.

This is a very sad and pathetic number, but it really is, I don't know, a compliance car.

I don't know who would buy this or why.

It's only got 100 miles, range 160 km.

Somebody who really likes Mazda.

Someone who really likes Mazda.

And I could see it maybe, I don't know, certain business case situations where you're making short little trips or something, but this is not much range than your 25th.

You should buy one just to sell because it's going to be such a rarity if they stop making yeah.

Like the actual numbers.

This is going to be one of the most rare cars you could possibly own.

That's incredible.

Yeah, they've got a very short range.

The reminiscent of the early Leafs, right? Absolutely.

No, this is similar range to your car.

Yeah.

Why would you do that nowadays? My car was made a lifetime ago.

So I'm going to have some details here.

But the inflation Reduction act for EVs, because we didn't get into details about this, consumer Reports broke it down the other day.

So, among other provisions, the new bill will do the following.

It offers a tax credit up to $4,000 on used EVs.

This is new, but they have to be put into service after December 31 of next year.

December 3118 months from now.

The vehicles built and registered 18 months from now will be possible to buy them used with a $4,000 credit.

So that's a ways off.

It takes away the $200,000 vehicle cap on tax credits that made EVs and plug in hybrids from Tesla, GM and Toyota ineligible for tax cuts because they've sold more than 200,000 of those vehicles in the United States and have used up their tax credits.

So, people, that's one reason why GM dropped the bolt price by $6,700, you asked or something to make up for that.

Because Tesla doesn't care.

Because they have way more demand than they can do.

But it does away with tax credits for pricey EVs.

This is something that we see criticized locally here in Canada in the news.

Why are you giving tax credits to 150,000 more cars like the Model X or something? So it doesn't weigh with today's tax credits for price EV such as the Hummer EV, the Lucid Air, Model S and X, and Poll Star, I would imagine, and Porsche and stuff like that, it eliminates tax credits for vehicles not assembled in North America.

This is a critical one here because this is going to eliminate the tax credit for the BMWs, the Hyundai Ionic five, the Kia EV six, the Toyota BZ four, X not assembled here.

Maybe one day they will be because like Nissan with my car.

They did two years in Japan and then they opened up a factory in Tennessee and one in the UK.

Maybe they'll do that and maybe they'll be selling a lot more vehicles.

But most important, the bill also immediately restricts the full tax credit on new EVs to vehicles with battery minerals sourced from countries that the US has a free trade agreement with, or recycled in North America.

So you can buy a car that has recycled batteries if they're recycled in North America, but you can't buy Chinese ones.

So starting in 2024, if any materials, minerals or components are sourced from foreign entities of concern, you know who you are, china and Russia, the vehicle will not qualify for tax credit.

So that is tricky.

We're going to continue to talk about that, Brian, because nobody seems to know how that's going to wash out.

Yeah, because it could be difficult to ramp that up, because I think China in particular is kind of the world leader in sourcing these minerals and processing them.

And so it does make sense that we often talk about energy security.

I mean, if you've got to rely on shipments of oil from places like Russia, you realize suddenly when they go to war, oh, man, that was a really bad idea.

All this stuff impacts the security of your country if you can't source it yourself locally and Russia start going to war.

Stupid idiots.

Yeah.

Please stop that.

The Tesla semi truck is going to ship this year, Elon Musk announced on Twitter, and it's going to have 500 miles of range.

And the Tesla Cyber truck with 500 miles of range is going to start shipping next year.

So this is a fairly definitive statement.

We've been really wondering when electric semi trucks are going to finally start rolling.

There's still not much in terms of semi truck charging infrastructure, so I'm still expecting to hear more about that.

We've only heard of a handful of places that have the new Tesla semi charger infrastructure for charging.

So this will be kind of a slow roll out, I think, because of that, because of the lack of charging infrastructure.

But they can probably, in some cases, charge at the existing Tesla chargers.

But trucking is a huge part of carbon emissions, so once semis all go electric, this is a massive step forward in carbon reduction.

I'm looking forward to the next cyber truck event where they update the preproduction, what's actually going to really happen for real.

And we'll notice back the costs.

The cost might go up.

Yeah.

No, they pulled the prices down off their website several months ago amidst this massive inflation that's happening.

But I wouldn't be surprised if the prices are double what they were originally close to.

That so much for my order.

Yeah.

One day, Brian.

One day.

My son and I have often discussed Japan.

I can't remember the details of why, but we have this long discussion.

I said, well, one day I'm going to look into why Japan has no wind.

He says, Why don't they do wind? Because he thinks they don't have any wind because nuclear is so great.

While they shut down their nuclear, they're bringing it back tepidly a little bit at a time.

But when they had their Fukushima disaster, they shut down a bunch of their nuclear.

It's easy for us to say nuclear is safe, but when you're there and you're experiencing what they did, you're going to probably have a different opinion.

So I looked at the reason.

I finally found an interesting paper and article about this year and a half old.

It says that there's limited understanding of the seabed conditions surrounding Japan, unlike other locations such as the United Kingdom, because they benefited from oil and gas exploration for decades.

Right.

So in that north coast there, off of Europe, lots of oil and gas exploration for decades.

So they understand it.

Now, there's another benefit to oil and gas, is just understanding the seabed for.

So they have a limited understanding of what the seabed even is because they don't go down there looking because there's not oil and gas there.

It is the 7th longest shoreline in the world.

So there's lots of wind opportunity there.

Another reason they've been slow is conservative government policies.

Lots of different departments not working together.

They actually permitted some wind projects that were three years long and kelsey breeze, there was no bitters.

This is a 40 year thing, Brian.

Another problem is their water gets very deep very quickly, down to 200 meters.

It's only 50 meters close to the shore, but after a while it gets down to 200 meters, which is quite too deep for offshore wind.

But there's new technology around that wasn't there ten years ago, including floating.

So there's a huge opportunity for floating wind potential.

And the wind potential, to my surprise, is not great on Japanese land.

Not that great at all.

So the best potential is in the ocean.

Another setback or drawback is that most of the wind potentials in the north with is less population.

So you have to unfortunately send that power.

I wonder if they couldn't do it through the ocean.

If you were in Japan and you had a whole bunch of wind in the north, all these countries are doing undersea DC high power cables, maybe because nothing gets disturbed.

You just drop it on the seabed and you don't have to build towers and bridges and do land studies.

You just drop it down there and nobody gets hurt.

Not even a fish.

Fishing concerns.

They're concerned about fish.

The nuclear disaster, as you said, they temporarily shut down 54 power plants, which is a lot I don't even know.

They began shipping coal and natural gas.

That's no way to go, but that's not good for the planet.

So Fukushima was a turning point.

For the nation's attitude towards nuclear power as the associated risks and costs and costs became apparent.

We always talk about the cost of nuclear.

And even though a limited number of reactors are being restarted, it's unlikely that nuclear power will ever return to such a dominant position in the Japanese energy mix.

So, yeah, the water depth drops to 200 meters, around 20 offshore.

So you have a little bit of space to work with.

And nevertheless, Japan has a large resource potential.

This is a study done with the potential of win of 61 gigawatts in relatively shallow waters.

That's just the shallow water potential.

It's not floating there or anything like that.

And remember, a gigawatt is about a nuclear reactor, so you might say, James, the wind doesn't always blow well on the ocean.

It does in some places.

It does almost around the clock.

And by the way, this is a bit of an aside, but the first North American freshwater offshore wind farm will be in Lake Erie.

Did you hear about that? Yes, I did hear a little something, yeah.

So, Lead Co asserts that the Great Lakes hold enough energy potential in wind to power the entire stinking United States.

The winds of Lake Erie alone could meet over 10% of the electricity needs by 2030.

Just in Lake Erie.

Lake Erie is not a big lake.

Lake Erie is a small lake.

But, yes, Chicago, the Windy City and all these places, there's wind out there and terrible polluted waters that you could stick wind turbines in, and they're not so deep that you can't do it.

That's interesting.

I wondered when that's going to happen.

Well, I would wonder about the I don't know, unsightliness of it.

It makes more sense to me if they're off in the ocean.

People might be annoyed if the Great Lakes are full of wind turbines, but I don't know.

Hard to say.

Now, I'd be interested to know what the distance is.

Maybe one of our listeners can send in an answer to this.

What is the distance where wind turbines start to fade? Not from the curvature of the Earth, but just the atmosphere sort of blurs them out? Because you see ships offshore in the ocean, they're kind of faded.

They're barely visible because even on Toronto, off Toronto, you see them like that.

So how far do you have to go before it's an ISO? I guess it's my basic question.

Yeah.

And farther out would be better.

As long as it doesn't get too deep, I guess.

Okay.

There is a story here.

I got this from CNET, and the story is a couple of weeks old, but I thought it was worth talking about it because we didn't mention it before, but Fiat Chrysler has been ordered to pay $300 million in fines over their diesel emissions fraud case.

So it's not just Volkswagen that was cheating on emissions.

Fiat Chrysler, which is now owned by Stallantis 300 million in fines for lying about the emissions of more than 100,000 Jeep and Ram diesel vehicles.

So this was been going on since 2017.

They were first accused of doing this, and it takes a long time for this kind of stuff to wind its way through the courts, but it has finally come down and they are guilty.

And it's 300 million is the penalty.

The US Department of justice this week announced that FCA has been sentenced in federal court to pay about 300 million in criminal penalties in addition to serving three years of organizational probation.

What do you suppose that is? Organizational probation? Probation for the organization, I guess.

Oh, wait, I think we have a clip.

The time has come for someone to put his foot down, and that foot is me.

Then as of this moment, they're on double secret probation.

Ah, that's what it is.

They're on double secret probation.

What movie is that from? I was wondering if you would recognize it.

Is it a Naked Gun related movie? No, it's Animal House.

Oh.

And it's extra fun because that's the great Vernon Agapsawitch, known to the world as John Vernon, who is from our city of Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada.

Yeah, but yeah, I just always remembered that clip of double secret probation.

He passed away a few years ago.

Yes, not that long ago.

And he ended up making a movie here and late in his career before he died, which was nice.

I forget the name, but it had Molly Parker and Callum Keith Rennie was in it.

It was shot.

I visited the set one day.

I actually took pictures of John Vernon on the set of this kind of western.

That's really cool.

But Brian, it's time.

It's time.

It's time for the clean energy show.

Lightning around.

A fast look of the rest of the week's headlines in clean energy and climate change.

Brian, where has the time gone? China's CATL plans a massive 220 1 battery factory in East Hungary.

Yeah, because why? It's Tuesday or Wednesday or Thursday.

It doesn't matter.

Because there's a new day, there's a new $7.5 million battery factory every week.

The planet will be capable of outputting 100 gigawatt hours of batteries a year.

That is 100 nuclear reactors powering for an hour per year from this battery factory.

And Mercedes Benz has already gone on record stating that it will be its first customer.

You know what the sound is? Time for a clean energy show.

Fast fact.

Charging your electric car at home costs equivalent of or less, which is about a dollar 20 a gallon.

Tesla is reportedly going to build model wise with BYD blade batteries in a gigafactory Berlin.

What do you think, Brian? Because I'm kind of curious.

Yeah, this is interesting.

This is a battery form factor that Tesla has never used before.

But since Tesla's goal is to dominate the Earth, they're really buying and using whatever possible batteries they can get their hands on.

So BYD has been making these blade batteries, which are not exactly blade shaped, but they come in these sort of flat panels and they're all kind of packed together in a battery pack.

So, yeah, I guess Tesla has figured out how to stuff those into their vehicles.

So I don't know.

It should be good.

More supply batteries, the better.

Oh, it's another fast fact.

And this brings us back to backyard hens, which I've been waiting to talk about.

Yeah.

Backyard hens eggs contain 40 times this is backyard hen in cities, okay, not in farms, contained 40 times more lead, on average, than shop eggs.

You think you're growing your own eggs and they're healthier? No, that doesn't sound good.

It depends on the lead levels of your soil, where you live, which vary across various cities and then vary within the city.

In older homes, close to city centers, contaminated soils can greatly increase people's exposure to lead through eating eggs from backyard hens.

And I was thinking, again, a chicken Brian, because they make good pets.

Sorry.

Most lead gets into the hens as they scratch the dirt and peck food from the ground.

Can you imagine the lead levels where I live? I've got a refinery, I've got a smelter over yonder.

I mean, it's not good at all.

It's probably not good.

And if any of our listeners, if you have hands and you're eating the eggs, maybe they're somewhere nearby where you can get them tested, maybe good advice, because I think that there probably is somebody listening to our show or some people, and they're going to be soiling their pants right now and not very happy about that because I know you don't want to talk about it.

It's just that bad.

It's one of those things that I came across that I thought was important from carbon tracker.

The UK government's Oil and Gas Authority has estimated the total bill for Northeast oil decommissioning will be £51 billion.

Now, because of the government's tax policy, the British taxpayer will be responsible for at least 40% of that cost over the coming decades.

This is something we're going to be talking about a lot.

It is.

The reality of gas going away.

We are going to get stuck with the bill, aren't we? Yeah.

And there's been a lot of talk in the UK lately.

There's some sweet tax deals for oil and gas companies in the UK.

They're getting a bit of a free ride, which is unfortunate.

California has adopted 2045 as an offshore wind target plans on installing 25 gigawatts by that time.

That is, again, 25 nuclear reactors worth of almost I mean, not quite, but optimistically, if the wind never stopped, that's what they would be.

And just as a comparison, it's not insignificant.

That is a lot, a lot of power by 2045.

So Xpeng is releasing its S four superchargers.

This is a chinese EV manufacturer.

They've just announced their S Four superchargers on Supercharger Day.

That's not Tesla supercharger day.

That's a Chinese company.

They've opened 1000 superchargers so far in China, and they say, and they demonstrated this with their new model of car, 210 km, or 131 miles of charging in range and five minutes of charging.

And they demonstrated that.

So ten to 80% of a full modern large battery in as little as 20 minutes.

This is an 800 volts class EV charger with a peak power output of 480 kw, which I think is probably around where we're going to stop as around there.

I don't think we're going to go I don't think we need to, really? Yeah.

And you always wonder at a certain point it will maybe degrade the batteries if you end up charging too quickly.

But I think those figures are we probably don't need to go faster than that.

And with new battery chemistries allowing for stronger and stronger charging and things like that, who knows what's going to happen? But that, Ryan, is our time for this week, for the summer show fires an email right now, [email protected].

We're on Twitter, we're on TikTok or even on Instagram.

We're everywhere you want us to be.

We have two YouTube channels now, by the way.

One for audio, one for everything else that has video.

So go there, find us, watch the show, watch our clips, tell your friends.

And if you're new to the show, remember subscribe, subscribe on your podcast app because we put out new shows every week and they'll be delivered right to you.

And we look forward to talking to you.

Bye for now.

Next week.

See you next week.

The U.S. looks to pass the largest climate spending in history, providing incentives for electric vehicles, manufacturing, solar, wind and many surprising home upgrades.

Massive oil fire at a storage facility in Cuba.

James outlines clean energy-related stories from his vacation. 

Chinese cars are invading Japan. Are Chinese cars the new Japanese cars?

Brian describes his new e-bikes.

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***

Okay.

Yeah, sorry I was gone for a bit there, but I'm ready to go for episode 126.

It's 127.

No, I checked.

It's the last episode.

Yeah.

No, it's 126 now.

Brian, I did a show yesterday.

I did an interview show yesterday with B NEF.

That's not possible.

You can't do a show without me.

Well, it went really well.

It's in my contract.

You can't do a show without me.

Well, you were there in spirit.

What? You son of a hello, and welcome to episode 127 of the Clean Energy Show.

I'm Brian Stockton.

I'm James Whittingham.

This week.

I apologize to Joe Mansion.

He's clearly a saint.

After approving the largest climate action in US history, the Inflation Reduction Act, a massive fire has been spreading at an oil storage facility in Cuba.

Our only hope now is that the fire spreads to a Cuban cigar factory so we can all enjoy the sweet, smooth, smoky aroma.

And I outline everything clean energy related for my vacation.

And as Brian predicted in the last episode, I did, in fact, almost die.

Chinese EV maker BYD is entering the Japanese market with three models.

Japanese car makers have stated publicly that they're not worried.

Privately, they stated, oh, yeah, we're totally doomed.

All that and more on this post vacation edition of The Clean Energy Show.

Brian, when I got back from your cottage, I wanted to record a podcast.

I was not ready to put my feet up anymore.

I can't stand it.

I don't know what I'm going to do if you die, if you get run over by a bus.

I'm just not going to be able to expound my clean energy thoughts.

I'm desperate.

I'm booked on this now.

Yeah, well, maybe you could improvise with you could pretend that I'm doing two voices.

Like do a dumb voice for you, like a public voice, something like that.

It seems to work well.

Yeah.

So we got a fat overblooded show for you this week to get everything out of our system.

So listen to it at two times speed if you have to.

Yes.

And of course, we had prerecorded our last full episode because you were taking a week off and with the hope that nothing major happened.

And it did kind of wait until you were back, but lots of major things happened, and so much so that you recorded an episode without me.

And then here we are to do another one.

Yes.

So the episode without you is episode 126.

It is the interview with two analysts from Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

Terrific conversation with those people.

I hope you listen to it.

It's not just about the United States, as we learned throughout the podcast, it is for the world that this is very important, and not just for the reduction of emissions, but because it influences the rest of the world.

The United States taking action is a linchpin for everyone else to do action on climate change.

Yeah, no, I did hear the show.

It was awesome.

And yes, I think it's true.

Lots of symbolic value as well as dollar value.

You have a little bit different sound this week.

Yeah.

Look at this.

I got James a new microphone.

Can you believe it? I'm stunned, Brian.

I'm stunned.

We now have matching microphones.

Did you ever see that documentary Metallica some Kind of Monster? I watched some of it a little bit.

Yeah.

This is the microphone.

They use the microphone in the film, so you know it's got to be good.

Yeah, I saw it on I don't know, my daughter is watching a Taylor Swift document.

You see it all over the place.

It's a very common microphone.

What is it? The A.

Sher SM seven B.

And it's a bit of a cliche as a podcast microphone, but that's probably because it's the best.

You know I've been watching.

Only murders in the building.

You haven't been watching that? No, I have.

I love it.

Really love it.

Yeah, I love it, too.

It's different podcasts people talk about because the storyline is that they're podcasting a true crime podcast as it happens in their building.

Yeah, but only in their building.

Yeah, steve Martin, Martin Shorts, and there's a murder in their building.

And they make a podcast about it while they're doing it.

So, yeah, I'm always kind of looking for the podcast elements, which are semi realistic.

Like they're always kind of pulling out a phone and recording something.

They're sort of doing it just enough to make it believable.

I think it was kind of funny, though.

If you watch the premiere, the initial episode of the series, they start with really bad mics and they constantly go up.

And Martin Shorts character is the one doing the buying because he's the enthusiastic one, but he doesn't have any money because he's an out of work Broadway director and he owes money on his building piece.

So he says he's going to take them back after 30 days, but he keeps getting better equipment and they've got boom mics at the end and different things, and they record it in the closet.

Yeah, my 14 year old daughter is watching it with us and she's just loving it now, too.

And terrific shows.

If we're lucky, they'll be some kind of murder nearby.

And we can include that on the show.

Yes.

Spin off.

Only murders on the podcast.

And did you get your bike yet, your second wife? Yes.

So I did want to update you on that.

We got the second one.

So my partner and I have matching bikes.

This is the ride.

One up roadster, v two gravel edition electric bike.

And we ordered them online from the company.

Ride One Up.

So, yeah, we got the second one.

We've been going out on bike rides.

Absolutely love it.

This bike really so great.

I have nothing but good things to say about it.

It's just super fun to ride.

It's the right kind of size and shape for a bike for me.

Like, this is the kind of bike that I like.

It's very light.

In terms of an electric bike, I think it's £33.

Wow.

That's about as light as they come, I think.

So for electric bikes, the batteries integrated into the frame, so it's not the biggest battery, but we don't go on particularly long trips, so, like 20 miles, 30 km is kind of the max.

But we've come nowhere near to hitting that.

I got it up to 22 miles an hour, the speedometers in miles, and so that's about 35 km an hour, which is about as fast as you can do because it is only one gear.

It's got a belt drive with only one gear and the gearing is not really tall enough to go any faster than that.

But who needs to go faster than 22 miles an hour? That's plenty fast.

Tons of fun.

And my only other sort of maybe quibble about it is that there's not much of a battery management system, so they recommend in the literature not to leave it plugged in.

It's the kind of thing where yeah, mine did the same.

Yes, when you plug it in to charge it, they recommend, like, set a timer on your phone to unplug it after an hour, or whatever you need, because it's not good for the battery if you just leave it plugged in.

So I've been doing that and also trying to keep it they recommend keeping the battery between 30% and 80%.

That's hard to do because there's no precise kind of measurements, but basically go for a bike ride, leave it plugged in for 20 minutes or something like that, and then make sure to unplug it.

But yeah, absolutely love it.

Nothing but good things to say.

Mine says that you may need to run it down all the way and then charge it full in order for the computer, the onboard computer, to understand the range and charge.

Not the range, but the charge percentage.

Mine didn't say that, but even with a laptop, it's sort of recommended that you do that every once in a while, just to kind of recalibrate the battery to get it down to zero.

Having said that, my portable drill and portable weed whacker has battery management of the charger and knows when to stop.

So I'm disappointed that electric bikes don't.

They're smaller batteries, mind you, I'm not sure why.

And also, this is definitely on the low end of price, but again, that's one of the reasons I love the bike.

Like, it's $1250.

Getting it here to Canada was maybe one $800 for each bike, which is definitely on the low end, so you don't expect maybe all the bells and whistles.

But this is the gravel addition, so it's a slight upgrade from the regular roadster, which is that one is like $1,050, so you can even get a slightly cheaper one.

This one has upgraded tires and I think maybe a slightly upgraded belt drive or something like that.

But yeah, it's great.

Did you go for a romantic bike drive ride with us? Definitely, yes.

And this is the kind of electric part of it is like, we went out on our bike path here in town.

We have a nice bike path that goes through the city and long ways.

We started coming back and we realized, okay, well, we'd like to get home now, so maybe we'll go off the bike path and drive through the city streets because that's the shortest route to get home.

And then we realized, oh, no, wait, we'll just put the speed onto number five, take the long route, stay on the bike path.

It's twice as long, but there are five power levels, and so if you want to go quickly or you're feeling lazy, just put it up to number five.

So we were able to take the scenic ride home and arrive in kind of the same amount of time, but power level like one, two, and three is kind of the general range where I put it.

It's a bit like shifting gears.

Like level one is fine for flat terrain and no headwind or anything and a bit more of a workout, but if you've got a headwind or you're heading up a hill or something, you can just pop it up to level two or three.

What happens to your other bike, your folding bike, your first bike Ebike you bought? Yeah, I'm just going to keep that one as a sort of a specialty bike because you can fold it and put it easily in the trunk of the car.

So I think we discussed I'm actually going up to Saskatoon on Friday because I have a Tesla service appointment.

I've got a squeaky steering wheel and a bit of squeaky suspension, and they're going to take care of that there.

So I'm going to throw the folding Ebike into the trunk and be able to sort of ride around Saskatoon when the cars dropped off.

Okay, well, that's good.

Are you going to take the bikes to the lake at all? Yeah, I mean, it's almost the end of the season, and we're not sure when we're going to get out there again, but that's the hope.

We originally kind of bought them for the lake.

Are you going to disassemble them and put them in the back of your three or what? We could definitely fit one in the back of the three.

I don't know.

We sometimes take two cars out to the lake, so that might be the case because I don't have a bike carrier, and I don't really like bike carriers.

I don't want to go through that.

Hassle you got burned by a bike carrier one? Yeah, but it's definitely going to be my main bike because I really like it.

All right, enough of this, Brian.

Let's get to my vacation.

I didn't have much of a vacation.

It was a short vacation.

I went to your cottage, which we were very generous to lend us.

And by the way, I asked you if you're going to keep anything from your cottage for sentimental reasons, for the new cottage that you're going to not really know you didn't want to.

And I told my son this, and he was offended.

He says, oh, my God, I have more emotional attachment to that place than Brian does.

My kids really have, to my shock and surprise, an emotional attachment to your cottage.

Wow.

It's hard for them to leave.

Even when they want to.

They start taking pictures and looking around like it's the last time they'll ever see it.

In this case, it might be true, it might be and just capturing the thing.

And we took two cars out.

My kids went together in the Prius and we of course, my partner packed the kitchen sink and a few other things.

Honestly, you would have been shocked.

And I threatened to show that I was going to show you what all the things, because it's a cottage, it's not camping in the woods.

You have most of what you need.

Why do you have to we literally pack to an SUV in a car full of, like, telegram and then still, I had to come back and get something because I forgot it.

And she did.

And, yeah, we were late, so they got there half hour early and they found we were able to get in and sort of put their feet up on the deck and really just had it as their own.

And you could tell that they were really enjoying the adult experience of having their own place in nature for even if it's just a half an hour.

So, yeah, they had a good time.

And my son went on as he does.

He took the My Ebike, my 55 pound mountain bike.

It was £55 when I got it, but I actually changed a few things, like, the forks were really heavy, so I saved a few pounds, actually, by changing the forks to better ones.

He likes to go off because there's so many paths out there and he just loves exploring.

This is something that goes back to his early childhood.

He still likes doing it.

And he came back and usually when he comes back from these things, he's really happy.

It's like the happiest I ever see him is when he comes back from a trip up there.

And this time he was a bit off.

And I said, what's wrong? And he says, There was a cows.

And I said, well, why? I ran into a herd of cows and they were mean to me.

They moved at him and offended him somehow.

So he says, I don't feel bad about eating meat anymore.

He's come to the conclusion that he doesn't like cows because they were mean to him.

Yeah, well, I think that area around the park is public grazing land that you can if you're a cattle rancher, there's public grazing land that you can use.

He continued on after the cows because the herd eventually fled.

But what if there was an angry bull in that? That might be as dangerous as, like, running into a bear or something you don't really, really expect to run into.

It's a provincial park, by the way.

He wanted to go to the edge of the park, the end of the park, and he did.

And about a kilometer before the end of the park, he ran into oil rigs in the park and took pictures.

So there are oil rigs in Kenosis Provincial Park in San Diego, in Canada.

So you did not know that.

I guess I didn't know that either.

They'd be sort of toward the edge there.

Yeah, but yeah, that's wild.

Yeah.

So he ran into things he didn't expect.

But no, he did have a good time and he probably would have done more, but it really rained that night and then never stopped.

It just kept raining.

And the roads get to be impassable out there after a while because they're made of dirt.

So my partner went kayaking.

When she comes back from kayaking, it is the happiest I ever see her when she goes to the lake.

Right.

This time, not happy.

Was it cows? No, she didn't really tell me because I went into the side of Little Kenosey Lake into the shore, and there's these little picnic areas there and I chose one of them that had a view of the lake and I could see her coming because I was worried.

She actually was gone a long time and I thought, great, she's having a good time or she's dead either way.

And she comes back and she doesn't tell me.

So I get to the shore, to the docking station.

By the way, they got this great thing for loading kayaks now, this wooden thing at Little Kenosis.

It's got little rollers on it and it makes it so easy for novices like us who do it once a year because you could just sit in your kayak and just give it a little touch and it'll just go right into the water.

And if you hit it right, you can come and come on shore.

You just need somebody to smash that bottle of champagne on it and that's enough to have it slide into the anyway, what was wrong was just where I was looking at her at these little picnic areas.

The next picnic area over there was a nude photography shoot.

Okay.

You did not see that coming, did you? No.

Is that kind of thing allowed with the sanctioned I don't know.

I posted on Facebook and I prevented you from seeing it because I wanted to have a natural reaction on the show.

So I spent time waiting around there for a long time, so I knew who was there, who wasn't.

And I did not see this with my own eyes, but I saw the people, like a woman photographer and a woman model of some sort going there.

And the woman was half naked and holding a beer can.

She was posing with an ear can, a beer can.

So keep it classy.

Saskatchewan.

Yeah.

So I had follow up DM's questions on that for my male friends.

Yeah, she got more nature than she bargained for.

So you may see some what is it? Only fans erotica with my partner in the background looking confused in a kayak.

Yes.

I told my son this.

He said, dad, you don't understand.

This is what people do nowadays.

It's instagram accounts.

Yeah, but they seem to know what they are doing.

And they seem to but from the dialogue that she repeated to me, they seemed to be a professional outfit.

But there was a sleazy guy hanging out by the dock and the truck that said Monster on the side.

So I don't know if he was because he was flirting with them earlier.

I don't know if he was sticking around to get a view.

But me without my binoculars on that day, what else did I do? Well, the morning after my kids bike trip, it was raining, so it wasn't much we could do.

It was kind of cool, which was nice because it was hot the first day, by the way.

I preferred the cool.

And we didn't have a breeze.

I hate it when there's no breeze.

It's always windy.

It's always hurricane forest wind where we live.

And then when you need a breeze, it's never there for you.

So there was nothing there.

It was a little warm.

It wasn't as bad as last year, but it was just one day.

So we took off.

We did a little drive through Red versus Catch One, which is home to the Nazi Party of Canada, or at least the Nationalist Something Party.

And he was always talking about it.

The teacher came from that town.

So we went through there and we kept on going into Manitoba.

We saw this incredible infrastructure of oil just across the border in Manitoba.

You don't think of oil in Manitoba, but we saw literally hundreds of pump jacks in a very condensed space.

The most condensed I've ever seen.

So I'm thinking it's fracking because there's like four of them in a row and they're going off in different directions.

And there was practically a refinery there.

Like, it wasn't a refinery, but it looked like a refinery because it all had all these huge storage tanks and there was no cell service, there was no town, there was nothing there.

So it was kind of a weird little drive we had into Manicoba Twilight Zone episode that something weird was going to happen.

Well, believe me, it's crossed my mind.

Yeah.

And then later on, we did a day trip in the Manitoba.

Decided to have some adventure because it was only 4 hours to Winnipeg.

So we took off to Winnipeg for a day.

Nice.

And we stayed in a nice little hotel there in a bad part of town, but it was a nice little trip.

We did a few things.

Should have done more, perhaps.

The drivers are terrible in Manitoba.

If you're listening to Winnipeg, you have terrible drivers.

The speed limit there is a bit faster than most places.

We were down by the Forks where the rivers meet, and we saw a bike accident right in front of us.

This woman was driving, riding a bike and suddenly just went right into the ground for no reason.

She just said she didn't turn sharp enough and just completely fell over and wrecked all of her clothing.

And Jen, who had just taken a first aid course, ran up to her and she said her face was bleeding and all kinds of things.

And the woman was just knowing, get away, I'm fine.

People get embarrassed by these things.

Totally.

God knows I've been there.

But it wasn't good for her.

I have no idea why it happened.

Right.

So it wasn't a collision I was expecting with the terrible windowga drivers.

Collision.

There was a story going around online a couple of weeks ago that police in Toronto were actually giving out speeding tickets to cyclists.

Did you hear that story? Oh, yeah.

I don't there's a speed limit for cyclists.

I believe it was Toronto's High Park.

And they were literally out there with a radar gun giving out tickets to cyclists for going too fast.

And sure, there's probably better things for the police to be doing with their time, but I do know it is oftentimes on those shared paths, the cyclists often do go too fast.

So who knows? It was on a shared path.

I believe so, yeah.

Like a biking trail.

It could have been you.

It could have been me, yeah.

My new bike can go faster than our school zone speed limits.

And that's what my daughter, who took the bike out just before the vacation, was so thrilled when she came back.

Dad, I broke the law because only 30 km an hour.

What is that in miles? Like 22 or 20, something like that.

So it's not very much.

Also, I had a whistle dog as a and W brought back the whistle dog.

It was a perfect vacation.

Hot dog.

It was wonderful.

They're doing it better than they used to for the hot dog aficionado.

Well, it's more like for my childhood memories, Brian, because I used to have the whistle dog platter come with a little close lawn, a plastic tray.

Those were the days.

Simpler times.

Simpler times.

So my hotel room had power lines right outside the window.

So we are on the second floor, and if the window open, you could touch them.

Okay? And like, there was two of them right there, like less than a foot away from the window.

That's where they decided to put them.

And if you were going to rescue me in the fire, it couldn't be done.

So I questioned that and I thought I'd mention that because I've never seen anything like that before.

They have a nice hotel.

I popped into a Chevy dealership, the biggest in Manitoba, in Winnipeg.

Winnipeg is a city of almost a million people, 900,000 or something like that.

And I thought, I keep seeing an auto trader that they're getting Chevy bolts in.

But apparently I went there and didn't go well.

I went to the front desk.

I said, Cockily, is there anyone that knows anything about EVs that I could talk to? And she just went on the intercom and said, Sales to the front.

Sales to the front.

The first yahoo came up.

Young guy said, do you know anything about EVs? And he says, I know a few things.

Good.

But when we drove in, there was a bolt EUV.

This is a little bigger version for about $80 more right where you drove in.

So I said, Great.

We can sit in the seats.

We can try out the seat.

This is really what we want to do in case we want to order one.

And we did, and they were good.

They were firm, but the foam was firm.

But you weren't sitting against hard plastic.

But it was fairly firm.

Probably not that different.

Actually, I think it did have fake leather, so it's kind of leather seats sort of get packed in a bit tighter.

So it was fine.

I don't think there's going to be they're not as nice as my Leaf.

They're not as nice as the Prius, but they're okay.

They'll do fine.

But the guy was like, I know everything.

And he said, no, we've hardly sold anything.

Maybe three of these.

I've seen three come through your thing in the past month, let alone the past, what, five years that they've been selling them? Maybe four in that particular place.

So he's full of crap and discouraging me from Eve.

He didn't try to sell me something else.

He did say at one point, they're great.

They got a low center of gravity.

Lots of people are ordering the Blazer, which is the SUV that's coming next year.

So I think he's starting to come around.

And that sounds like what a lot of the GM employees are starting to do.

But we got into an argument because he said I asked him about the charging, because it's supposed to come with a dual voltage charger.

So you can plug into a normal 110 volts outlet here in North America, or you can plug into a dryer plug.

Maybe you have one in your garage, maybe you can have one installed for it.

You don't have to pay anything, you just have to pay for the electrical work.

And actually, GM is paying for that electrical work to around $1,000 US.

I think he claimed it didn't come with one.

So I was taken through the trunk and I found the charger, and then I found a detached dryer Volt ponytail plug on it.

And I said, well, look, here it is.

He said, wow, they must have paid the extra $800 for that option.

And I said, no, it comes with it.

He said, well, you learn something every day, I guess.

He did say it would be $600 to ship at 550 km over here.

He said, it's no problem for Dubai out of Province, they would write as a check for the extra sales tax because I have to pay sales tax here.

And people are sort of craving all wheel drive, which is coming in the Blazer.

But, yeah, he was just and he didn't want to tell me.

I was thinking, okay, he's going to take my number.

Didn't do it.

I offered it, he didn't take it.

I'm not going to be honest with you.

We're not going to get any he told me three years, which is bull crap, it's a lie.

The local people aren't doing that.

And he said, well, the local people must be getting more.

But we're in a small city.

Compared to them, it's just crap.

I mean, I'm sure there is a somewhat limited supply and they're advertising them.

I can't watch a baseball game without seeing five ads for them.

How could they advertise something that's not available unless they're only going to be seeing the bigger markets like they would in the states that have? Ontario is where I watch my Blue Jays games, and they seem to advertise for Ontario, and Ontario doesn't have any incentives.

Well, they would certainly have more gasoline cars on the lot, so that's probably what they try and sell you.

All right, well, let's get on with some things here.

Brian, I can't take up the whole show with my own life.

You know that Toyota, the wheels are falling off from electric.

You said on a previous episode that it was just the lug nut issue.

Well, it's actually more than that.

They're literally falling off and they can't fix it.

They're telling people not to drive them.

Well, thank you, Toyota, for this great endeavor into electric vehicles.

For the first time in Toyota history, they've made something that they can't literally keep the wheels on and people can't drive them.

This is worse than the Bolt.

The both they made them park outside of the garage and only charged 80%.

Well, you buy this wonderful new car and you can't drive it.

No.

And they're offering to even buy them back from the owners.

Right, right.

Or give them a $5,000 fuel credit.

And it's stupid.

And this is a segment of.

What James learned, because it's interesting.

I learned something I always like to share with the listeners when I learned something.

Something called profit parity.

So EVs may be more expensive than internal combustion engines to buy, but they also make more money for car makers.

And Audi says that that moment is now.

So we talk about sales.

EV parity, like it'll have the same price tag on it as like, Comp.

And they say that it's starting to happen now with the premium vehicles.

Well, Audi is saying that the point where they make profit is at parity now with what they make profit on other vehicles, like gas vehicles.

Interesting.

So that means you know what that means, right? It means they're going to make them.

It means that the onus is now on them.

They want to make money so that they start taking the reins of the EV revolution.

And that is a fantastic thing, although still less to be made in terms of maintenance and for the dealers, like oil changes and stuff like that.

Yeah, that's certainly true.

Gosh.

I hate oil changes.

There's a small town Saskatchewan person who posted on a local Facebook Easy Group page, melville Tesla owner, he said he bought a Tesla and it was showing it off, as people do on these pages.

But he was in Melville, which is a small town in town.

Yes, I've some redneck relatives there.

So I asked him how the townspeople are reacting to his electric car, and I had to laugh at his response.

He says it's like a weird science experiment that's driving around if you ask that.

Also, I just got a YouTube comment that I saw from a couple of episodes ago, and it says, this is from John.

Can you upload just one version of the podcast? Because we have a video live version.

I would prefer the ones with the video.

It's kind of annoying to sport when you watch and listen to one version.

Then you have the live version with the people in it come in the middle of the night.

I don't know.

There's not anything I can do about that except for starting a separate channel for the audio, which some people recommend you do.

I wish you could subscribe to a playlist because it's on different playlists, but do you have any thoughts? Yeah, I mean, I'd be fine with just putting the one version on there, like the video version.

When people tune into YouTube, they prefer to have visuals with it.

So can't we just do that? Well, we do have a fairly good audience of people who just like the audio.

Maybe it's because that comes first.

I don't know.

But when you listen to Lipson and other people who are on the server side, they say that there is a good demand for there are people who listen to audio only podcasts on YouTube.

And that is a good way to get people in because it's a different way of expanding your audience and people finding you, because it is hard for people to find podcasts in this day and age.

This is from Bloomberg on Tuesday.

The UK government is preparing for a winter energy crisis that includes a reasonable worst case scenario.

This is because they have less energy because France isn't exporting.

They've only got half their nuclear.

That's one reason.

There's some other countries that may not be able to export electricity into the UK.

Bloomberg hasn't exclusive on this and they think that they're planning they're planning for a bad case scenario where for four days in January, the peak demand could surpass their capacity.

And this is what we talked about for a summer heat wave, which we haven't really gotten here in our province, where they might have been planning for that as well.

But this would include organized blackouts for industry and even households.

So you could have rolling blackouts in the UK this winter if there's a cold snap.

Yes.

And of course, the dispute continues with Germany and Russia.

There's still not the full amount of gas flowing to Germany, not a huge amount of developments there.

Gas is going through from Russia to Germany, but at a reduced amount.

And there's still a bit of a standoff, a stalemate over how to resolve that.

This is the Clean Energy show with Brian Stockton and James Whittingham.

Brian, the Inflation Reduction Act was passed and it is a consequential, bloody miraculous piece of legislation that we did not see coming.

In fact, there was this computer chip manufacturing in the US bill that the Republicans were going to support, but only if Mansion didn't support the Climate Act.

So he said, there's no way in hell this is mid July that I'm ever going to support the Climate Act.

So they passed the Chip Act and managed it about Face, which shocked the hell out of absolutely everyone, including the EV analysts and energy analysts that we talked to on the last episode of Bloomberg New Energy Finance in New York.

They were flabbergasted as well.

Anyway, Brian, this does a lot for EVs.

It does a lot.

It's a bill that does a lot of different things.

Of course, it's supposed to reduce inflation.

We'll get to that in a moment.

But it also does a lot for the climate.

Close to up to 40% reduction of emissions by 2030 in the Isa, which is groundbreaking.

No, it's remarkable.

And of course, we talked about this extensively, like, I don't know, a year ago or something, when it was called the Build Back Better bill.

And we talked about it then because it seemed like it was likely to pass.

And I felt like a chump for having spent all this energy thinking about it and talking about it, and then to have it just die like that was very disappointing.

And, yeah, complete surprise to have it suddenly brought back under a different name.

It felt like Joe Manchin was stringing people along and saying, junk, no, I'm not going to ever do anything but trying to appease me.

Now, there is some stuff in here for fossil fuels, including a pipeline in his own state, of course.

Yeah.

But the consensus is that that's minor.

The CO2 that adds is minor compared to the biggest spending bill in US history on climate, and it's a huge thing.

So, yes, the $7,500 tax credits that people get for EVs have been used up by Tesla, GM and Toyota, believe it or not, further plug in electric hybrids.

So, yeah, there was a 200,000 vehicle cap on that.

But now that's all gone, they'll be able to do it again as long as the criteria is met by the automakers, which is sourcing a lot of that stuff locally or within their free trade zone.

So there's also a used EV credit of $4,000, both at a point of sale, if you buy it from a dealer, if you don't have to wait for the tax time.

Yeah, I think both these things can be supposedly done at a dealer plugin.

Electric vehicles qualify with batteries of at least 7 kw, which is not much.

Yeah, that's unfortunate.

It's a battery that small where it doesn't cost very much, so it's a rather large subsidy for it's.

A few Ebike batteries.

Yeah, for not doing much.

So that's one of the more unfortunate things, that this will maybe prolong the life of the plug in hybrid, which we need to move away from and from inside EVs.

This pushes US automakers to become more independent from China.

In order for cars to qualify, they have to source materials in North America or a country that has a free trade agreement with North America or with the US.

Rather.

The percentage of these materials increases over the years of this.

This goes to 2032, which I brought up with the Bloomberg people is a bit absurd.

I mean, if we hit price parity for all vehicle segments saying 2028 and they go down from there, and then you're giving a rebate in 2032 might be a little bit weird.

Yeah.

Although a great response on that, which is if this is largely about carbon emissions reduction, then why not keep it out to 2032? And $840 to offset the cost of a heat pump, closed, dryer or electric stove.

So, yeah, that's pretty good.

I mean, I wish I had that.

I'd probably go get one.

Yeah, those are both that'd be great.

$8,000 for a heat pump for your house.

$4,000 for an electrical panel upgrade, which is interesting, isn't it? Because a lot of people need an electric panel upgrades like you do.

No, and as I said, mine costs about 6000 Canadian, which is not much more than that.

That's great.

$2,500 for improving electrical wiring in your home if you need it.

That might qualify for what you did because you had to change your connection to the grid.

Yeah, I think that might have covered the whole thing.

As I said at the time, this is something like, everybody in my neighborhood is going to have to do this in the next ten years or so.

Many neighborhoods are just 100 amp service, and that's just not going to fly in the era where we electrify everything.

So these are the kinds of things that I haven't heard of before, the kind of incentives.

So it's interesting to see how it plays out.

One thing about this is that they're trying to bring solar manufacturing to the United States.

And almost all the chips for solar panels are made in China.

They're made cheaply there.

The United States seems like the last country that can compete with manufacturing on an economic scale, so we'll see how that works.

But the Bloomberg people did point out that wind turbines, which will also be big, so it's good to make them local, even though the blades have to be I don't know about the turbine, the actual generator itself, but we'll see about that.

Anything big and heavy.

So this was originally called build Back Better.

It's now called the Inflation Reduction Act, which is, I guess, the flavor of the moment.

But the question is, and it's really a climate and infrastructure spending bill, and not maybe that it matters, but is this actually an inflation reduction? Well, I've read several pieces on this saying that it is.

I've read a couple of saying that it's not.

I've read a lot more saying that it is.

I think this is still a lot of analysis going on here, but they made some arguments that are above my pay grade.

Just clean energy in general is a reduction of inflation because electricity, for example, costs less.

So that reduces things, right? Yeah.

And the way that fossil fuel prices have spiked recently because of the war in Ukraine, that's a large part of the inflation that we've been having.

So, yeah, in theory, if you cut demand for oil and gas, that should bring down inflation because it'll bring down prices.

If all this goes through 40% reduction in emissions in the US.

By 2030, like, that's a remarkable amount.

And yeah, that should hopefully ease up demand for oil and bring the price down.

Okay, well, Ups is given some money, right? Yeah.

USPS.

Postal Service.

Not us, different organization.

And this is a story we've talked about before.

Many people upset with the US Postal Service for not going fully electric in the new fleet of vans, delivery vans that they've been planning, and they've kind of increased the amount a couple of times, but they were still planning to buy lots and lots of gas powered vehicles for the US.

Postal Service.

But this new bill includes $3 billion for the US.

Postal Service to buy electric trucks specifically, which was kind of the figure that they asked for it's like, oh, we'd need $3 billion to do that.

And yeah, guess what? They've got it.

And hopefully now this means all electric for the US.

Postal Service.

So again, we talk about this extensively with people who are about as expert as you can get from Bloomberg, a new energy finance.

One is Tom Rowlands Reese, who is the head of research for North America, and the other is an EV analyst, Corey Cantor.

This is an episode 126, which we dropped yesterday.

So it's just behind this episode.

It's a good interview and good information from people who absolutely know their stuff.

And we will cover that act more extensively there with those experts.

And I encourage you to listen to it.

I also encourage you to give us feedback if you're interested in interviews.

We did one before, right? We did one with Yuri, Yuri territory from the street pipes.

And we got some good feedback on that.

People seem to enjoy listening to that.

So yeah, we could probably do that from time to time.

And in addition to the show that we normally do.

Okay, so there has been a massive fire in Cuba and an oil storage facility.

And this is from a lightning strike.

Not something you hear about necessarily all that often, but oil is flammable and therefore susceptible to things like lightning strikes.

So this is turning out to be a huge problem there's.

Now a fourth tank has caught on fire at this facility.

So it's a massive fire burning out of control.

And speaking of like brownouts and blackouts and electricity system, cuba was already predicting that they were going to have electricity problems this summer and they actually already have planned blackouts for Havana.

And this is potentially going to be worse because of this because this oil storage facility was supplying oil to be burned at thermoelectric plants for some of the electricity system.

So Cuba already in trouble in terms of their electricity system.

Now it's going to be worse because of this fire, which is still not out yet.

But the other thing that sort of brought to mind to me was just that we're at this inflection point where we're switching to clean energy.

But we're also at this inflection point where just a lot of the infrastructure I think.

Is really aging.

Like all over the world.

Certainly in North America here.

Like our electrical grid and our province.

They put up a zillion power poles 50.

And guess what? 50, 60 years later, they're all kind of starting to fall over.

And I think a lot of the grid structure in North America and really all over the world is kind of on its last legs.

And maybe the clean energy revolution is not going to come fast enough because these are sort of coinciding issues.

But it sounds like Cuba was in a bit of a problem already.

Aging infrastructure was kind of bringing things down and then, boom, a lightning strike.

And now they could be in trouble.

Yes.

And people will go around saying that clean energy will bring down the grid and have rolling blackouts.

No, actually we keep seeing information and studies saying that the clean energy will eventually make the grid more stable, that it'll be more reliable that those batteries than people's EVs working in a two way function.

Everything is going to be more stable once we finally get it figured out.

We're just in this transition period where anytime there's a grid problem, the ProClean energy people are going to say, hey, it's the fossil fuels that are the problem.

And the anti clean energy people are going to say, no, it's the windmills that are the problem.

Windmills? They're not windmills.

Well, that's what they'll say.

That's what they'll say, but they'll be wrong.

Idiots.

Brian, there is one crucial bit of information for my vacation that I overlooked that this reminded me of.

Yeah, you might say, james, what did a Cuban oil refinery or oil storage fire remind you of for your vacation? Good question.

If you had asked that, I was minding my own business, driving to your cottage in beautiful Kenosi, and we went through the town of Kipling, as one does, and we slowed down because there was a lower speed limit in town and there's a few bunched up cars in front of us, so we're going slow.

And then suddenly I see this river of fluid flowing across the road from left to right along gravitational lines.

And I'm thinking, okay, it's a clear liquid and it's just flowing like a river.

Like, what is this water main break or something? And just as I'm about to drive over it with my hot exhaust, I look over and there's these two guys in a pickup truck trying to get this tank desperately back onto the back of a truck.

Oh, no.

And it smelled horrible.

And I'm fairly certain that it was diesel.

And I didn't go too slow, so the guy kind of gave me a dirty look, but what the hell was I to know? And this is this instant frame capture, second moment of time that burns in your mind.

And that's what I saw.

I think some yahoo was taking some diesel, a big tank of it, back to the farm or whatever.

That probably happens.

Other people are doing that during this trip.

And it fell off and spilled everywhere.

Like probably $2,000 worth of it, I would guess, at least.

But the thing is, if you're driving over and it splatters up on your exhaust, your hot exhaust, which I had an SUV, gas powered SUV, which, by the way, $2 a gallon or $2 a liter, and it went down through the trip, the gas prices were falling fast, by the way.

Yeah, but yeah, that could have set me on fire and set him on fire and it was just a dangerous, stupid what the hell? Where did this come? But my car smelled like that the whole trip on the outside.

If you walk near it to get a bike or something off the rack, then it was like, it still smells, and it's like this horrible smell.

And I kept checking Twitter to see if anybody was tweeting about if there was a subsequent explosion, but this is an environmental catastrophe.

What were they going to do, just run away and just leave it into the groundwater, the well water, and it was going to come back in the well water of this town or something? I mean, I don't know where they get their water, but it could be yeah.

So that's the James almost died.

So there's always some way of me almost dying on a trip to your cottage.

But I often say, like, fossil fuels are often the most unpleasant thing about the cottage because even though you're supposed to be commuting in nature, everybody's got these giant SUVs and jet skis and everything, and then your car has to drive through a bunch of diesel and then stink the whole time or maybe burn down and I have to breathe it, too.

So it was a long weekend.

It was the August long weekend in Canada, and I've been there in the July long weekend.

And that's where people party and there's thousands and thousands of boats out in the river or the lake rather, and people blasting music.

So, yeah, I look forward to an electrified future.

I told my son that because of course he wants to buy a cottage now, thanks to you.

So I don't know where he's going to get one, but they're hard to come by now.

Yeah.

And I said, well, maybe it'll be quieter when you have one.

Because of modification.

Forbes magazine says electric car batteries are lasting longer than predicted, and the automakers were ramping up for recycling programs, but they've all been delayed because I'm an example of that because I have one of the earliest EVs that have been mass produced, and it's going strong, and it's also a terrible battery.

So there's only better batteries than what I have, even if I crashed it.

And the modules could be used for various things, they still have a value before the recycled.

So almost all of the electric car batteries, according to Nissan executive Nick Thomas, are still in the cars.

And people this is one of the naysayers things that people say all the time, and he says, we've been selling them for twelve years.

Wow.

I'm just going to leave it at that.

But the deal is the EV batteries will last.

The car people don't get.

Even EV buyers don't get that.

Yeah, but that's the deal.

And there's lots of reasons why.

And there's usually a second step, as you say.

The car gets totaled, you can still take the cells out, you can put them in home storage.

There's a second use before you get to the eventual, which is to crack it all open and take the minerals out and recycle them.

So my car has lost some of its range over the ten years that has existed.

But what some companies do is buy a pack at a record, say from another Nissan Leaf.

We'll take the best modules out of there and replace the worst ones in your car, and then they'll send the rest of the recycling.

But what people don't realize is electric cars have sophisticated battery management systems that guard the long term health of the batteries.

Most manufacturers offer warranties of eight years, or 100,000 miles even.

And there's an industry expectation that EVs will last longer than that.

So they should not live the cars.

Yeah, and they're definitely going to get better.

They're only going to get better.

Like, Tesla is talking about million mile batteries and 1.5 million mile batteries.

So we'll see what happens in the next ten years.

Yeah, you can expect a bit of degradation, but your battery should last for the life of the car.

I mean, right now, people trade in their cars after three years, five years, your EV should be able to go a lot longer than that.

Okay.

A story here from Drive Tesla, Canada.

This is a couple of weeks old, but I thought it was important just because we talked about the Japanese car manufacturers quite a bit, and that is that BYD is planning to enter the Japanese car market.

This just struck me as a really big deal.

I'm a person who grew up on Japanese cars in the that's all I was interested in owning was Japanese cars.

And now here we are.

BYD from China is going into the belly of the beast, as it were.

This is a very interesting development, Mr.

Stockton, isn't it? This is very symbolic in many ways, isn't it? That's what I thought.

They're going into Toyota Nissan's backyard, and they're just going to scoop up market share.

That says so much.

The Japanese automakers I see thriving with their plug in electric hybrids, but people really don't want them anymore.

There's some places that do, but people generally want the full meal deal.

They want a battery electric vehicle.

And you see that with many of the sales reports in most places.

In a lot of places.

What do you think? Brian, it's time for what do you think? And let's breathe through this quickly, please.

This is where I ask you, what do you think of things that I'm not sure what to think about? So Tesla is not going to only add eight new factories, which is entirely possible by 2030, but increase average volume production capacity from the 450,000 average to cross the four current factories to 1.66 million per factory to reach 20 million per year.

What do you think? Yeah, I think this is entirely possible.

They've been saying for a while that 20 million vehicles per year is their goal, and this would be way more than anybody's currently doing.

The Tesla factory in Shanghai is at a run rate approaching a million vehicles a year just at that one factory.

They haven't done that for a full year, but their current run rate, and they just had some more upgrades and they've opened a new line.

So just in the past month after their shutdown, they had a shutdown for Covet, then they had a shutdown to upgrade the factory.

And it's only been a few weeks, but they appear to be producing vehicles at a rate so far unheard of for Tesla.

So they're definitely on track for a million vehicles out of the Beijing factory, and no reason to think that they can't replicate that.

They're looking for maybe a dozen factories to make 20 million a year to take the crown of the world's biggest automaker away from Toyota, which they're already kind of on the verge of doing with the Toyota Corolla.

It seems a bit weird because they really don't have that many models.

They've got the model Y and the model Three Those are the mass market ones.

But the cyber truck is coming.

The Tesla Semi is coming.

They started teasing like some kind of a van or a people mover vehicle.

So there'll be probably some more announcements of different form factors for the car.

So I think that's what the naysayers are mostly questioning.

It's like, well, how are they going to make 20 million? Because they've only got a couple of models and they'll keep it small, they don't need that many models.

But, yeah, it seems entirely possible.

And there should be a new factory announcement soon, possibly Canada, which is the next thing on your list here for things to ask me about.

We don't really know the details other than Tesla had to release that they've been lobbying, I believe it was the Ontario government in Canada, the province of Ontario.

Whenever you do lobbying of the government, it has to be announced.

So they did that.

So it could be a factory in Canada, but they could also just be lobbying for battery materials or mining or something like that, too.

But yeah, I think potentially good news for Canada.

Musk has teased it too.

He has teased Canada.

So we'll have to see.

I wouldn't be surprised because the government is pointing all the stops to get EV manufacturing here, which is good because it is the future and we do need jobs.

Yeah, I think our government would be on board with that.

And there is a history of automotive manufacturing, particularly in Ontario, but also Quebec.

We make a lot of cars here.

A lot of the American branded cars are made here in Canada.

So there is the kind of base of knowledge yeah, to start that here, for sure.

So the California Public Utilities Commission makes california, the first state in the nation to allow EV owners to measure an EV's energy use independently from the owner's main utility meter through submetering.

Any thoughts on that? Yeah, it's an interesting idea.

I mean, we often talk about the coming smart grid.

It hadn't occurred to me that this could be one of the uses of a smart grid, but there could be some useful parts of monitoring your grid use separately.

EVs could then be kind of modeled out in your electricity bill and be somehow treated differently.

Maybe that's where they could put, like, a gasoline tax.

Gasoline tax? Where everyone is wondering why we're not going to be getting our gasoline taxes anymore.

Depends on how they want to treat.

That would be the sort of bad news, is maybe that's where they'd put the gasoline tax, as it were, onto your EV bill.

Yeah, it depends on how they want to treat.

As temperatures rise, shifts and travel patterns are likely to become more common in Europe, with researchers describing as a hotspot for severe summer heat.

So many travelers are setting their sites on Scandinavia or switching to the spring and fall for traveling as a person.

Yeah, we talked about my trip to Europe, which turned out time to be the hottest summer on record for Europe.

It's been surpassed since then, but yeah, it's not very pleasant traveling somewhere when it's blistering hot like that.

So, absolutely, this makes a lot of sense.

We're all going to maybe have to start thinking differently about when and where we travel.

And speaking of tropical vacations, hawaii has received their final shipment of coal, all new at six.

One month to go until Hawaii no longer burns coal for electricity.

Tonight, a closer look at the final shipment from Indonesia arriving in Kalai.

Long a huge milestone as experts believe we have enough renewable resources coming online to meet Oahu's energy needs.

There's no use for coal for electricity anywhere in the world.

Yeah, I just wanted to include this because, especially with an audio clip, it just seemed like a really great good news story of Hawaii has been using coal as part of their electricity generation.

But as they start to move to more renewable sources, they have literally received their last shipment of coal that's going to be burned for electricity.

And this will take a while to get through.

And I suppose there's a danger in the next year or two of maybe, oh, we made a mistake, we did this too quickly and maybe we'll need more coal, but I don't think so.

And as we know, renewables are fairly quick to put up, and as long as they've made all their plans correctly for the grid needs the last shipment of coal, this is just fantastic good news.

That's amazing.

You also want to have kind of energy autonomy.

There should be no reason to ship anything into Hawaii to burn to make electricity.

You've got.

All the sunshine and wind that you need to be independent and you don't have to worry about your shipment of coal getting wiped out by a tsunami or something.

About your shipment of coal getting wiped out by a tsunami or something.

All right, Brian.

The show would normally be over by now, but no, due to vacation.

We've got so much to give, so much to get out.

We have a mail item here.

Reminder, though, the coming up is the lighting headlines briefly, but let's dip into the mail bag from the maggot.

He wrote us a couple of weeks ago.

He says on your show yesterday, there was a discussion about wasteful.

Normally your team, that you and me, Brian, we're the team is super odd point, but I have to disagree this time.

The old wave of environmentalism was miserly moral kind.

The old wave of environmentalism was the miserly moral kind.

I must suffer to save the world.

People are advised to adjust their circumstance.

Drive small cars or slow cars, eat less.

But the new technology environmentalism is a focus on solving problems completely, rather than doing slightly less bad things through efficiency.

So when people see this new view as a threat to their lifestyle, they grow up throughout barriers.

Climate denialism isn't just about science.

People just basically don't want to change.

But he says that this is something we talked about for the future.

Cheap power.

Free power, cheap heat for your home.

This is all about the story leaving the doors open at shops in France with the air conditioning running.

And you don't like wastefulness.

But yeah, we're not there yet, are we? No, that's the only point.

Yeah, this is an absolutely valid point.

I think that is definitely our future.

But for the time being, especially in this era when Europe facing energy shortages, they're having problems with some of their nuclear, there just isn't the kind of excess power on the grid that there used to be.

So particularly for the next couple of years in this transition, they still have to close the doors on those shops in France.

And there was another story, I think, from Italy, where they're regulating the amount of electricity.

You're not supposed to set your AC lower than 27 Celsius or something like that in Italy.

So we're still in a power crunch.

We still need to conserve.

But absolutely, this is our future.

This is going to be an abundant future, particularly what Tony Siba talks about from Rethink X.

He thinks it's going to be a super abundant future with essentially free electricity is kind of where we're headed.

Yeah, we're just not there yet.

He makes a good point, and I take that point because it is hard to get your head wrapped around that.

But that is our future, and it will affect the way I talk about things a little bit as we move forward.

It's just hard for people to wrap their head around it unless you're on the forefront of this.

And that's the thing.

But yeah, I don't think my neighbors would understand anything I was talking about if I said we're going to get free electricity in the future.

You'll be able to leave your door open in winter and just let the fresh air in if you wanted to because don't tell your neighbors they'll call socially.

We'd love to hear from you.

So thanks for leaving us that email.

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Comcleanrgy.

Lightning rounding round five minutes, ten minutes ago.

It's time for the lightning out, but here we go.

Brian, hang on.

Buckle in.

This is a fast look of the rest of the week's headlines and clean energy that I wanted to talk about.

Rainwater everywhere on earth is unsafe to drink due to Forever chemicals.

That was the name of my alt rock pan in the 80s.

Forever Chemical.

There was a movie damn.

And I forget the name of it.

I just watched a movie on the furry of our chemicals lawsuit.

This is like frying pans and nonstick and how they stick around and they are making people sick in some place in the southern states.

So University of Stockholm study finds that this is true for drinking water even in the Antarctic.

These per and poly floral alkal substances are PFAS are large family of human chemicals that don't occur in nature.

They don't go away.

And yes, don't drink the rainwater, people.

Tip from the clean energy show.

A new study by Stanford University says that prices would immediately drop and all of upfront costs for switching to 100% renewable energy will be paid back in six years.

So if we suddenly right now switch to 100% renewable energy, it would pay back itself in six years.

Yeah.

And this is the other thing that your neighbors probably wouldn't understand and they would call you crazy if you said that.

But it is absolutely cheaper to just ditch this stuff as soon as possible.

Go clean energy.

That's the way to go.

So up in Nordic space, the world's first subsidy free offshore wind farm has started to produce power.

Just that I mentioned that because it's kind of a milestone to have subsidy free wind farm start.

They didn't even ask for subsidies when they put in the bid.

That's cool.

So the failure in French nuclear is increasing electricity prices all over Europe, not just in France.

France already had more nuclear than they could use themselves in the past and was a net exporter during nighttime and low French demands.

Now France has a huge electricity import, further increasing the prices have gone out of control in France.

France is an interesting case study right now.

Yeah.

The UK is also in a bit of a power crunch, and it's partly because they've often relied on France to send them some excess power.

So, yeah, lots of potential shortages and brownouts and blackouts coming in the UK and other places.

Brian, it's time for a surprise new feature, the Clean Energy show, Fast Fact.

That's right.

I'm going to randomly insert fast facts into the show now.

From time to time, electric vehicles require fewer workers to assemble than gas or diesel vehicles, according to The New York Times.

Wow, that's pretty cool.

And just one more reason.

Is it maybe just the evolution of these things? I mean, car factories are just getting more automated over the years.

If you look at a combustion vehicle, the hoses and the clamps and the welding and the exhaust pipes yeah, I can see I can see how it would be here's.

Another 175 of the 180 nuclear power projects examined in a study found the final cost exceeded the initial budget by an average of 117%.

I hope you were sitting down for that.

And took an average of 64% longer than projected.

So that is a study that has proven that nuclear never comes in on time or on budget.

Why don't we have another facet? The land requirement for the world to go carbon neutral is less than that of the current energy infrastructure.

That's remarkable.

So putting up people say, my son even says, where are you going to put all the solar panels? How about on the oil wells? Lands.

On the refinery? Land? On the pipeline? Land? Come on.

So we don't often talk about that, but all of this or that oil storage facility in Cuba that we were talking about earlier, it's not just a fire hazard, but it's a massive, massive place that could easily use that land for solar.

And apparently you wouldn't even need that much from our friends at Bloomberg.

I think we can say that now.

Francis EDF utility is lowering its nuclear power output because the temperature of the river it relies on for cooling is getting too hot in a heat wave this summer driven by climate change.

You know, everything fits together, Brian.

Everything we talk about, it all fits together like a perfect puzzle.

It's all connected.

Yeah.

Nuclear, even nuclear.

I mean, this is after Reuters reported that the Rhine in Germany, its main shipping artery was getting too shallow to transport coal to power stations.

It's almost like God is saying, Hurry the hell up.

Nature is acting back.

There's these loops of things that are happening no.

In the Hoover Dam in the US, which I believe it's Lake Mead, which is backed up by the Hoover Dam.

The water level has been dropping for years.

They may not be able to generate electricity there at some point.

This is from Eco Watch, hot off the fresh.

A new study has found that as climate warming increases overnight temperatures these hotter nights could increase mortality risks in heat waves by as much as 60%.

Because remember, we were talking about this a couple of shows ago.

It's not just about the temperature of the day, it's the temperature at night.

Which is why we have heat warnings based on nighttime temperatures in Canada because you don't get any relief from it.

Your house doesn't cool down.

And that was the case last summer here where we live.

It just was not cooling down at night.

So it was definitely the hottest summer that I've had living in this house this year.

Fortunately, it's kind of acting more like the old days and it has been cooling down at night.

We've had maybe one night this summer where it was difficult to sleep.

But yeah, it's been cooling down at night and it's been an absolute dream.

It's been okay not to have air conditioning this summer.

And finally this week on this fat overstuffed show from the journal Nature rapid battery cost declines accelerate the prospects of an all electric inter regional container shipping routes.

So as battery prices of $100 US per kilowatt hour as they approach that, the electrocution of interregional trade routes of less than 1500 km, which if you ask me is still pretty significant, is economical with a battery ship with a minimal impact to the ship carrying capacity.

So that is to say it's not displacing much of the ship's capacity to stuff it with batteries because of the cost and including the environmental costs.

That's not including the environmental, but if you include them, the economical range increases to 5000 batteries achieve a $50 per kilowatt hour price point which we expect them to sometime next decade, maybe earlier than later.

The economical range nearly doubles to up to 10,000 or 3000 without the environmental impact.

So that means that shipping is 14% of pollution in the states of US is coming from shipping.

So yeah, it's not insignificant to electrify some of that.

And that's something we also haven't heard about before.

That's a positive thing to end the show on.

Ryan nice.

That's our time for this week.

If you're new to the show, remember to subscribe on your podcast app to get new episodes delivered weekly.

And we are always here every week, Brian with the latest news and discussions thereof.

So we'll see you next week.

See you next week.

The Democratic-backed bill known as the Inflation Reduction Act would represent the largest climate investment in US history. Interview with Tom Rowlands-Rees, Head of Research, North America for Bloomberg New Energy Finance, and Corey Cantor, E.V. Associate with BNEF.

The July Surprise, E.V. incentives, Japanese automakers and the challenges of brining solar manufacturing to The United States.

How this legislation is meaningful for the world.

We will return with our usual episodes in the near future.

***TRANSCRIPT***

James Whittingham: Hello, and welcome to episode 126 of the Clean Energy Show.

I'm James Whittingham

Brian is on assignment.

That's not to say he's drunk and passed out somewhere just means that he's busy right now, and we hope to have him back for a regular episode very soon because there is so much to talk about.

We had a vacation.

We pretaped our last episode.

And what did Joe mansion do? He shocked everyone, totally blowing our minds, and he's supporting some fossil fuels in the process.

But really, this is big legislation that's happened with the inflation reduction act in the states.

It's going to the house on Friday.

We think it's going to pass probably as is or close to as is.

And it means a lot for EV adoption and for the clean energy and just reducing emissions in the United States by up to 40% by 2030.

So finally, the United States is on board with climate change, and it's something that we're going to talk about today with our guests from Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

We're thrilled to have them on board.

We've been talking a lot about Bloomberg and Bloomberg New Energy Finance and the excellent reporting they've been doing.

Tom Rowlands-Rees is Head of Research, North America, for BNEF.

And Cory Cantor is electric vehicles associate with BNEF.

They both spoke to us from New York.

And yes, a July surprise from Joe Manchin.

TV News Clip: Democratic Senators Joe Manchin and Chuck Schumer announcing a deal on a bill that was all but dead.

You almost never see this in Washington.

You never see Washington surprise like it is this morning.

Tom, what happened when you heard that news? What was your reaction to that? I was pretty caught off guard.

Tom Rowlins-Rees: You know, it happened right at the end of July to spend half the office is on vacation.

It was actually Corey's birthday.

Corey really follows the legislative process more closely than anyone at the NES, so he in particular was sort of a birthday surprise in respect.

My first reaction was like, oh, now we have to do a bunch more analysis.

Everyone is out of the office.

But it's only caught me off guard.

Corey, what was your reaction? Yeah, to Tom's point, I was a former Senate staffer, so I follow the stuff way too much, and I guess I just kind of weird at first.

I managed to put a statement out on a deal he had two weeks earlier, indicated on the healthcare front that he wasn't supportive.

And then seeing that he had energy and tax in there in the statement, I was like, wow, this is not just a small deal.

And as Tom said, they meant a lot of more work for everyone.

So we enjoyed the afternoon activities and waited for more news on the bill, but since then, it's quite busy for all the teams here.

So your colleagues who happen to be on vacation right now are laughing? Absolutely.

Tom, personal question.

I had to look at your LinkedIn page.

How does a physics PhD from Oxford specializing in high power laser plasma end up in your job right now? Well, when I first got involved in the clean tech space, it was 2009.

Wind and solar were maybe I wouldn't say they were nascent, but they weren't mature technologies.

And for people doing a job like ours, which is providing market research on clean tech, particularly as it was then, it really was a lot about new technologies.

So my work with lasers and plasma was all about developing new technologies.

And it was useful to have someone who could look critically with a scientific highlight at new technologies as potential investment opportunities or things worthy of policy support.

For some of my first work, I was looking at Led lighting and I did some work on high temperature superconductors.

And then I had to explain to our clients what a heat pump is and how that works.

So my physics background was kind of relevant to all of that.

I was just explaining what a heat pump is to my nephew who works in the HVAC industry.

He didn't know what a heat pump was.

Corey, what's in this act for EVs and is there anything that surprised you? Well, I think the fact that EVs were in the act was surprising given that there had been a lot of, let's say, back and forth with Senator Mansion's office and others who are kind of pushing the related credits.

So if you kind of step back and you look at the US system, we've had a passenger EV credit for about 1213 years now.

There used to be a hybrid credit and slowly over time, the credit was kind of losing that effectiveness.

The way the system works under the previous policy is you had up to $200,000 cumulative EV sales to use up to $7,500.

The new policy makes a major change that but ensures it will be around through 2032.

And then you also have a used electric vehicle or use clean car tax credit.

Everything is kind of being pulled together as clean car so that's your battery, electric vehicles, your plug in hybrid electric vehicles and your fuel cell vehicles kind of together as a cohesive unit.

So you got your new car tax credit, used car commercial vehicle tax credit, and then finally an extension of the charging infrastructure and the alternative refueling tax credit.

In addition, you've got a bunch of grants and loan programs in there too.

So it's a really massive bill.

And I think even when we were kind of talking with folks around what the package might look like, given that there is so much contentiousness around the transport provisions, I think their inclusion was surprising.

But there are a lot of strings attached.

So it's kind of balancing the fact that you thought they might be left out of a package with the fact that what auto makers are going to have to do in order to have consumers be able to use that, especially that passenger vehicle credit are quite stringent.

It's been speculated that people were keeping this hidden because they wanted to pass the Chip bill and the Republicans said they weren't going to pass the Chip bill if they're going to do anything in climate.

Is there any truth to that or is that blown out of proportion? If you're thinking about the auto industry in the US semiconductor chip shortage has been a major problem.

The lack of EV certainty has been a problem and so with these two bills taken together it's a real boost for the domestic US industry.

So.

Even seen Ford statement today from Jim Farley.

Pleased about the chips act.

There's a lot of industrial policy here, which is what's interesting about these two bills.

For a long time the US wasn't doing that type of work.

Not that they weren't helping the automakers such as back during the 2009 period, but really this is a pretty major infusion of capital to aid them and kind of reorienting towards cleaner vehicles.

I understood that two and three vehicle transportation was included until a few days ago.

Is that true? I think earlier iterations of the bill, for example, there was an ebook credit and a House pass legislation that was removed from the final Senate portion.

So it did become, I'd say, more restrictive in the final negotiations.

That being said, these are elements that are growing quickly.

The passenger vehicle space in the US is one that really, I think that kind of bridge in your term, let's say like mid decades.

But yeah, there are definitely compromises made along the way.

The sentence passed version compared to if you looked at the House built back better version that passed last fall is definitely a lot more, I'd say consolidated in terms of not only the kind of credits lost along the way, but also the credits that remain are a lot more, let's say, difficult to access.

John, can you speak to some of the pushback from automakers claiming that the restrictions of where the minerals come from excludes a lot of EVs and it's going to be really tough to meet their demands? Sure, I mean this is consistent with tax credits across the entire bills for other sectors like wind and solar that in order to get the full credit there has to be some evidence of domestic supply chain.

And actually I would say that with the EVs, the provisions that would allow some of the minerals or the metals to be coming from America's free trade partners is perhaps more of a concession than you are seeing in some of the other areas.

It creates, you could say, a problem, an opportunity.

I was asked in an interview the other day and this is not necessarily about EVs, but just generally these domestic requirements, do those mean higher costs for consumers? And the important thing is this isn't shutting the door on stuff being important from abroad, it's trying to give a competitive edge if companies do want to invest in developing domestic supply chains.

So it's pretty challenging, I would say, and I would defer to Corey's opinion on this, but the US has an established auto industry with the exception of Tesla.

It's perhaps a little bit behind other parts of the world for electric vehicles, but there is enough of both in terms of the minerals available through feed trade partners and also some startings of battery manufacturing capacity for it to be a realistic possibility to scale this.

I would say it's more challenging in, say, a sector like Solar, given the demands there with some of these domestic requirements.

Okay, I'm going to stay with EVs for another minute or two.

Corey, 2032, is this rebate going to be necessary? Is it going to be kind of absurd if, say, we need price parity sometime later in the second half of this decade? Is it going to be kind of ridiculous to have $7500 off vehicles at that point? So, James, I want to jump on Tom's point just for a quick second and I'll answer 2032 questions because I think for the sector, all the advantages Tom points out are definitely true in that there's a domestic auto industry here.

There's that kind of relationship with Canada and Mexico.

And I know that Canada must be really happy with how this all turned out because in an earlier version in the House bill there's that union and are really focusing on the kind of made in America aspect of things.

And now Canada and Mexico both get to join the kind of overall party around the bill of seeing some of the benefits from the increased battery manufacturing here.

So, good deal for Canada, even though they just had to essentially, I guess, Bobby, from the outside, as it pertains to 2032, the credit here would go for quite a bit longer than we're seeing some other countries in the kind of leading auto markets.

Tom's country of UK, they actually phased out their EBC this year.

Their EV share of sale was about 20%.

So it makes a lot more sense for them to kind of phase out.

The US last year was only at about 4.7% in the early quarters.

This year it's about above 6%.

And even moving even higher is what I can say.

And we'll have that data published sometime soon.

It's a long way of saying that you don't necessarily need the credit to go 2032.

Price priority, we expect, will be mid to late 20, 25, 26, depending on where these battery costs go.

That being said, we've had a lot of talk about price parity.

Another way to think about the policy is if you want transport emissions to go beyond the kind of 2030 goal and really drive you towards a net zero scenario, then maybe you want to keep that environmental bonus for a longer period of time than just price parity.

And the bill would definitely have more than enough certainty around that moving to your 2032 period, previous sales would likely have already taken off in a big way.

This is speculation I'm asking you to do here, but Canada last year had 50% more adoption of EVs Corey than the United States.

That seems odd because we didn't have much of a rebate nationally until recently.

The cold environment, large spans of geography between places, and that sort of challenge.

What's taking the United States so long? Is it cultural? I think it's been a lot of a model availability problem.

Right.

Tom mentioned before that Tesla has really been leading the way, and other automakers have been a bit slower to pivot.

So one thing that's cool about our jobs at B is we have access to all this great data.

So I can see quarterly and monthly sales of EVs.

I'm really looking for which models are going to be the next ones to not just break maybe 5000 or 10,000 a year, but really 50,000 and so forth.

The Tesla Model Y and three are the only EVs in the US.

That have gone above 100,000 units sales last year.

And so you're starting to see more and more impressive EV models.

The Ford Maki, what I point out, even the cheap wrangler peehead plugin hybrid is doing quite well.

So kind of just that shift, which wasn't really underway until really 2020 in kind of a mass volume type of way.

But I think it's been the limits.

If you look at California, for example, last quarter, they hit about 15% dev share of sales.

And if you add the plugin hybrids in there, they're close to 18%, which is really just about the level of where the UK has been, maybe slightly below because they have more plug in hybrids there.

But you begin to see California looking like a lot of European countries, and if you can kind of get the other US states there, you'll bring that country level average up.

What's the future of plug in hybrid vehicles? It seems like their sales are flat where EVs are taken off, is that correct? In the US it varies kind of between region, and in North America it's been very much 80 20 on a quarterly basis.

So 80% battery electric, 20% plug in hybrids.

In Europe it's been more of a 50 50 split.

One question coming out of this bill is maybe we will see more plug in hybrid electric vehicles with that kind of domestic battery manufacturing requirement, because you could really get about five PS maybe for one vet battery, depending on how much of a battery size you're talking about.

It remains to be seen though, automakers often like BEVs more just because all the battery improvements that are going in are driving down those battery costs and having a plug in hybrid.

You still have that gasoline engine in there.

So you don't have as much of a kind of maintenance benefit as you do from going purely electric.

I'm curious about the Japanese automakers, Corey, because I don't know what's up with them.

I was a loyal Toyota buyer for some time, and now I find I'm going to Chevy, like the brand that I despise.

Yeah, our Japanese people going to fall.

I mean, they lost me as a customer.

I would love to buy a Toyota that was, say, a Prius EV or a Corolla or something affordable, and I can't.

And now I've lost.

Is it too late for them? Are they going to be in trouble? We have this great report that actually, I feel like I'm working on six reports at once.

We have this report that we do every year where we look at kind of easy scores of how different companies are doing across the automotive space.

My mom was an avid Toyota Land Cruiser driver, terrible gas mileage.

So there's definitely the love of the Toyota brand there.

I'd say that there's been a lot of investment in Japanese automakers towards hydrogen for a long time, and we're seeing hydrogen do well in other segments of the kind of clean energy space.

And Tom could talk about in terms of the bill, there's a lot of hydrogen related investments in the Inflation Reduction Act, but as it pertains to passenger cars, I mean, EVs have so far left the barn.

Besides California and South Korea as markets, fuel cell has really struggled.

And so Toyota and other Japanese automakers have tried to pivot to fully electric.

Now, the beyond forex just came out.

They've been having some recall issues and Nissan has delayed the Ariana for quite a bit.

Often with automakers are releasing that kind of first gen, it does take some time to kind of get it right.

Tesla, for example, was trying to get it right back in 20, 14, 20, 15 GM with the bolts.

I drive a 2013 Leaf, and that's how many years now I thought the IRA would come out with guns blazing, but apparently not.

Tom, 60 billion for solar and wind turbine manufacturing.

I mean, can the United States realistically bring manufacturing to the sector with this investment? Good question.

I think that with wind, which has perhaps a supply chain that is a little bit more global, I mean, the global wind market is sort of basically there are two separate universes.

There's China and the rest of the world, and that is 99% or something to that extent of wind turbines built in China are made by Chinese turbine manufacturers, and then pretty much 99% of what is built elsewhere are made by international players.

The components of wind turbines are big and difficult to ship around, and so manufacturing is a lot more distributed.

And so there's already the seeds in the ground or actually maybe more than seeds in the ground.

There's an industry and a supply chain that includes a lot of the US that can become even more US focused with this tax credit.

I'm really curious to see what can be done on solar is challenging.

In particular, the solar supply chain is largely concentrated in Asia and in particular in China, but the majority of cells and modules imported to the US come from Southeast Asia.

However, they are using poly silicon wafers that have come from China.

If you want to cut out well, basically I think it's something like, and I hate to use the 99% again, but 99% of the global wafer capacity is in China.

This is a very concentrated industry globally, and so this might have been more relevant, say, 1015 years ago, not necessarily have no impact, but it's a lot more of an uphill stroke.

Is this the solar manufacturing just because China is not a friendly country and they want sort of geopolitical security of their supply? Or is it more that is just trying to bring back American manufacturing? I think it's a little bit of both, but I would say it's more the latter because there are already tariffs on solar modules coming in from China and that's why, actually, the bulk of modules coming to the US coming from Southeast Asia, whereas other parts of the world, they're coming directly from China.

And so I still like the main tool in which China is an adversary is the tariffs.

I think that these tax credits are genuinely more to do with wanting to develop American jobs.

In a sense, a tariff can be very targeted at an adversarial country, whereas the emphasis to concentrate an industry in the country is not an effective tool if there's a specific country that you're concerned about.

So I think that it is more to do with the development of US jobs.

The time has gone by really fast, guys.

Tom, I want to ask you one more question about the big picture for someone like me in my audience who is concerned about climate change.

Is this meaningful? How meaningful is it? I think it's really meaningful, actually, and I don't think it's meaningful just because it reduces US emissions.

As you can tell from my accent, and as Corey alluded to, I'm from the UK.

I've been covering the US for a couple of years now, and so I have learned about the complicated legislative process and I get a certain amount of sympathy for Joe Biden when he's or any US president that's taking part in climate negotiations.

The example I use to make my point, if you're lindulg, is almost 100 years ago, or actually sort of slightly more, we think about Woodrow Wilson and the League of nations then instead of climate change, the big issue was world peace.

And he had a great vision on how we could fix this and he basically designed this project with his idea the League of nations, he won the Nobel Prize for the idea the American President and then the Senate voted against the US.

Joining the League of nations and the whole project failed.

I think there are two parallels here.

One is the fact that as a US president, you're kind of negotiating with one hand tied behind your back.

You can have intentions and sincerely mean what you're saying, but the truth is you still have to go through a complicated legislative process that has lots of failure points and to actually get stuff passed in a meaningful way.

So that's one point and that's basically what happened to Woodrow Wilson got vetoed by the Senate despite his leadership.

And then the second point, the second parallel is that the whole kind of global climate negotiation push doesn't really hold together unless the US is really on board and whether other parties genuinely believe the US commitments, because the US historically has more emissions than any other country, the world's biggest country, economically speaking, there's no US.

If the US is not credible in climate negotiations, then those climate negotiations are not credible, full stop.

So the fact that we've seen, even if it's not perfect, the US president or the US government has managed to follow through on some of the ambition that has been articulated is pretty significant because it signals to other countries that the US is not just going to always talk a good game and then get bogged down in politics back up.

That is showing that actually the US is capable of taking action and that has a knock on effects for a lot of the negotiations generally.

Such a pleasure talking to you both.

Tom and Corey, I thank you for your time.

I know you're busy.

Congrats to Bloomberg.

You're doing such excellent reporting.

That's just phenomenal.

No one comes close and every day there are things that you're touching upon that no one else is and I thank you for that and I could talk to you for hours if I ever run into you in airport bar or something like that.

Look out here, talk off.

But thanks very much guys.

Thank you for having us, really appreciate it.

Thanks James.

Take care.

EVs sales are hitting the tipping point of adoption in the United States. Verticle bi-facial solar panels facing West may offer a more steady flow of electricity throughout the day and thus require less storage expense. 

The Oil industry may have developed a rather large war chest to fight climate action.

The U.K. is going ahead with new nuclear reactors.

A large US offshore wind farm project has hit a snag: They’re discovering unexploded munitions!

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!

James wonders why it's cost-effective to install bifacial single axis solar panels on utility solar farms in Canada. The builders of the Weyburn, Saskatchewan solar farm get back to us on why.

GM offers live EV advice online.

France orders air conditioned shops to keep their doors closed when the air conditioning is on.

Major airlines have all backed a plan to capture carbon from the air.

.......................

Letter from NaturalForces renewable energy company on our questions about how bifacial and single axis tracking pays off in Canada:

There are a few factors at play here and obviously these figures are rough;

• • Fixed tilt versus single axis tracker for Pesakastew we got approximately 14% bump in production
  • Bifacial versus monofacial modules gave us approx. 4% increase in production

A key consideration in this is the ground cover ration – i.e. how closely you stack your modules together (row to row) the more they are spread out the less shading there is from one row to another and the more effective the bifacial generation is.

The level of generation in Weyburn during the winter is very low roughly 3 or 4% per month of total annual production November through Jan relative to 12 – 14% per month May to August.

The tracker is a mechanical system which works well in other cold environments including the US on more recent projects the tilt function can be used to shed snow.

The extra cost of the tracker needs to be considered with the foundation requirements but you’re looking roughly at a 30% increase in costs for a tracker relative to a fixed tilt system.

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!

Our prediction has come true: Wind, Solar and Batteries will outcompete Nuclear on cost which, in turn, makes Nuclear even more expensive.

The U.K heat records, Russia/Germany natural gas fight, how Canadian carbon tax rebates work (in the four provinces that did not come out with their own climate plan), who has the best climate reporting, the truck that claims my EV runs on fairy dust and unicorn piss and so much more!

The Onion has a piece entitled Americans Explain why they prefer gas over electric cars.

Is Tesla Model Y already best selling car in the world? An expert, who is a former high school classmate of Brian's thinks so!

The 1973 electric car in Seattle.

Using good news in the climate fight to forget about Joe Manchin.

Brian recalls a heatwave in Europe when he was there in 1994.

The Chevy Blazer EV is announced.

Joe Biden set to declare a climate emergency.

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!

Germany is worried that Russia may cut off their supply of natural gas. Environmentalists are worried Russia WON’T cut off the supply of natural gas. The world's largest sand battery has come online in Finland. 

Gas/diesel cars catch fire 10X more than E.V.s per capita.

Consumer Reports survey shows 14% of U.S. car buyers would definitely buy an EV and 22% would seriously consider it.

Brian loses the Tesla shareholder lottery and has to deal with a kook at the hair salon who doesn't want to see the oil industry bashed.

New Ukrainian immigrants to North America notice the size of our giant automobiles before anything else.

Electrifying the heating in your home continues to be a challenge for Brian and some of our listeners but we delve more into that topic.

A Swift Current, Saskatchewan man puts his Ford F150 Lightning all-electric pickup truck on Plugshare so people desperate for an EV charge can 'hook up' with him.

The European Union clamps down on fake PHEV claims. Turns out plug-in hybrids use their gas engines more than buyers assume.

The Supreme Court rules against the environment but does it really have the power it thinks it has to destroy the world? Cruise robotaxies rebel against humans. Hyundai/Kia may have a dieselgate scandal of their own.

GM will reimburse owners of 2020-2022 Bolt EVs, although it's unclear if all owners will get the full $6,000. And the reimbursement program doesn't apply to Bolt EV leases.

Bloomberg highlighted the plight of an Uber driver who had the option of keeping her extremely common ICE vehicle, the Toyota Camry, or renting a Tesla Model 3.

A new study in the UK shows that 100% of new car buyers in the country are ready to go electric for the right price.

Wildfires from electrocuted birds.

Deleting Your Period Tracker? Don’t Forget That Your EV Tracks You, Too, says Cleantechnica.

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