Hello, and welcome to Episode 221 of The Clean Energy Show. I'm Brian Stockton. And you know what? I'm James Woodingham, this week the new UK government has announced plans for a rooftop revolution. Finally, a government starting a revolution, Brian, not the people oppressed by it. Fantastic. Cycling in Chicago has surged as the city continues to hand out free bicycles. The city said the program was necessary since Oprah stopped giving out free cars in 2004. Yes, 2004. That reference is now celebrating its 20th anniversary. You get a car! You get a car! You get a car! You get a car! Everybody gets a car! I wish I had a car. China's battery prices are at a point where the whole world is going to start to change. And you know what? I would like a battery to power me, Brian. I would like a battery to power me, just screw my head on a robot, and let's get on with it, you know? I'm done with this biological digesting and stuff. It's the worst. And speaking of China, they are now taking steps to green their steel making industry. All new steel plants, permitted so far this year, will be run by electric arc furnaces rather than coal. Of course, this is nothing new. It's basically like an easy bake oven only slightly bigger. All that and more are this edition of the Clean Energy Show. And before you get started, Brian, I just wanted to mention that last week's show in the middle of the show, I got pink eye, and my eyes started watering continuously. If I was wondering what the hell was going on? If people go and watch the video, will they be able to tell? They pretty sure they will, yes, yeah, absolutely. And the video was posted late this week, but if you're watching it on TikTok, the video version of our podcast is on TikTok and YouTube. And yeah, it still hasn't gone away. So in case my eyes are a little bit pink and you're watching a video clip or video version of this week's show, then I'm not high, I'm just, yeah, went through my family and got to me during the show, the stress of the show, just my immune system just went down the toilet and everything came in. So I know you're posting the full episode on TikTok. Is anyone watching a full episode? Not really. Not on TikTok, but I'm going to persist to see because they are allowing us to post what our videos and they seem to think it's a thing. So yeah, a few people are, but you know, it's a different audience. And sometimes, you know, our YouTube channel does okay, but it's mostly our audio podcast that people listen to and we're thankful for that too, but we're trying to get around. Yeah, it's very social media. About a week ago, I went on a real jag of trying to mute words from my social media feed because, you know, just a minute, a real jag, this is a new expression to me. I'm a fairly aged person and I don't understand that that expression, that's me. I mean, it's an old one. It's an old one. Is it an oldie? Okay. I went on a real jag. I should refrain from old person talk on the show because our average listener is not quite our age. You know, what's weird is I wasn't planning to say that. I just couldn't think of any other word at the time, but anyway, and stop talking about your onion on your belt because it was a style when you were younger, but there's a big election going on now that James and I cannot vote in because we're here in Canada. And so I started about a week ago to try and start muting words to kind of reduce the amount of news I was getting about this super depressing election that's going on. And you know what? It really kind of worked for a while. If you just get aggressive about muting certain words and certain accounts, you can really start to, you know, filter some of this stuff out. But you know, at a certain point when the news goes crazy, it just doesn't work anymore. I think in the future, you can't avoid reality. You can use words, but you're not going to avoid reality. I think in the future, that's one of the things that AI will be useful for. You'll be able to just tell your AI to filter your news in a way that's not super depressing. Yeah. I don't know if I like that, though. I mean, I've been trying to avoid the news too because I kind of guessing that it's going to get ultra depressing, but if a dictator emerges south of the border, it comes after me and invades Canada. I don't know. I mean, do I want to be surprised by, you know, World War three or something? No, I probably don't. Neither do you. Yeah. I'll tell you about it on the podcast. You can't mute me, Brian. You can mute the news that you can use me in the morning. It's just so much more pleasant. You can just get it over with and then, you know, get on with your day. It's like a bowel movement. Just get it over with and get on with your day. But anyway, the good news is I've been out cycling a lot. Oh, really? No. It's lately it's been either too hot, too cold, too rainy, too smoky. Oh, what are you? What are the three pairs? Come on. I'm definitely a fair weather cyclist. But anyway, I finally have gotten out and done some cycling and feels great. Well, that's good. Do you? I love cycling. It's one of my favorite things in the world. Yeah. Anyway, I was just seeing this morning that the Tom Milani's Chathamo adaptor on the on his channel has been reviewed. So Chathamos is weird, you know, um, there's Tesla adapters, there's Tesla ports for cars, right? Tesla has their own proprietary port. It's also called the Nax port for North American, um, let charger standard. And that's been adapted by everybody now. So eventually when new cars coming out next year, we'll all have this and we'll all have the same standard. But there's also CCS, which is what I use for my non-tesals and most non-tesals use. But then the Leaf has this weird Chathamo adaptor that never went away that should have went away. It should have been changed to CCS many years ago, but they didn't. And so Leafs sometimes have a hard time charging. Now if we go to a non-tesal charger on the highway, a supercharger, a fast charger, it's probably going to have a Chathamo port on it and a CCS port, but not all cases are like that. So you can now buy one. But the thing is the size of a two year old toddler, Brian, it's huge. When you connected to the CCS thing, plug or, you know, gun handle, mount that in. It's like this mask. It's unbelievable. I mean, the Tesla thing is like a pencil by comparison, you know, it's just really, but yeah, I'm sure there's a lot of leaf owners out there who will be very, we'll be clamoring for this anyway. So it's been the summer of soccer. You may not know that. My son is a soccer fan and he's dragged me into it. There's the COPA America, the, which is now the Western Hemisphere, basically, it used to be just South America. They've brought in us and Canada did really well unexpectedly, it made it to the semi-finals, which is weird. The United States, I'm sorry, you did very poorly. And then there's the Euros, which is the European, you know, soccer, which was a big deal too. But both were sponsored mostly by BYD. So if you watched any game, you would see the sideline markers talking about BYD. So my son, my wife, everyone was talking about it. It's very much in their consciousness now. And I think judging from my own family that they've done that. So BYD, if you don't know, is the Chinese automaker who is mostly making EVs, they're making them very good quality cars that are cheaper, but are facing tariffs in the United States of 100%. So they're doubling the price so that they're not threatened by them. They are taking over the world and some people analysts think that they'll get to be the world's largest automaker by 2030. So we'll see about that. Brian, you criticized me rightfully for never leaving the house. Well, I actually had a party this weekend for a group of people. It's kind of a union for a short film we did about 12 years ago or so. And it's my friend, Lowell, who is a film director, he now directs feature films. He's got two feature films coming out this year. And his life after that film became serious. So this is kind of the last thing we just did for fun as a group of friends and everyone's friends in that group. And I made a lot of friends when I came on that film. They also made a bunch of these films. It's called Juice Pig. She can't find it because he's embarrassed by it now. He's erased all all traces of it from the end of that is not even I think if you you searched Facebook, you might might find a teaser trailer, but that might only be for people who are involved in the film. Anyway, I decided to throw it here. And I had spent a week around the clock cleaning the damn house. My wife has an unexplained illness, so she's not doing well for some reason. Some sort of virus that that is testing negative for COVID. So I don't know what's going on with that, but she hasn't been well. And our house was a pigsty because we just had this garage show. So we uprooted everything and you know, what can we get rid of? And her and I have both been sick on and off for like four months now. So the house has got not a control. So that was a big job and we had the party. And to my surprise, our podcast, The Clean Energy Show, came up in conversation a lot. That was rather shocking to me. I didn't expect that. And one person said, you know, can I come see the studio where it all happens? And I said, no. That's my bedroom. You don't want to see my bedroom. It took me a week to clean the downstairs and get the upstairs done. And it would disappoint you anyway. But I said, it was up in that window and he was pleased to see the lights on up there. But that was Mike. Mike has a ionic five. And I've been a he was, you know, an early order of that car, that electric car. So I went to see it after the party, it was like a block away. There were so many people here that that all the parking spots could take it up. So I went, walked down there in the light rain and had a look at it. I was sat on the back seat. It's got a roomy back seat, but it doesn't have a place where your feet can go under the front seats. Like some cars have. Like I know the the Equinox EV that's just coming out has lots of room that way. So I felt it wasn't great for the back seat, but yeah, no, no, maybe they'll change that. Little car though, inside and out. He has a high spec version of it with a full glass roof and a white interior. I like I like the white interior. It's not a white dash because that sort of reflects off your window. And that's a bad thing. But I do like the white interior is very roomy. You know, it just it's very much is a small SUV and enough room for anybody's needs. I would imagine unless you have a lot of kids, actually one of the cast members from that film has a lot of kids has five kids, two sets of twins, so she couldn't make it. Yeah, so I yeah, there was another story where somebody was camping and they said they talked clean energy while they were camping and the other guy said, you know, I keep up with clean energy. This is a clean energy show podcast. So there was kind of a surprise there that somebody we didn't know was listening to the podcast, a friend of a friend. And that was cool. Oh, shout out to you if you're camping this summer and listening, Mike says he's behind on the podcast. I say, you can skip one if you have to. I mean, I don't recommend it. You might miss something, but it's not imperative to listen to all of our shows if you're busy. Yeah, that's just very cool. And this is really weird. Like Lowell, the director of this film and a good friend of mine for 25 years now. He is he was an American. I said, why are you in America having meetings with Scorsese? What's going on? And one of her brothers? What's going on? He said, no, I went to my sister's wedding and his sister is an academic. She did some things was women's studies and I think she was teaching in BC Canada at the university and she took a sabbatical and she was in California, but he didn't know why. She should know why, but he didn't know why she was there, but she maybe she was researching a book or something. I don't know. But she had met somebody at kickboxing. She went to a kickboxing thing. She decided she she's totally non physical person, non athletic. She took up kickboxing. She got punched in the face and loved it and she was hooked apparently. So she went into kickboxing and then she met this other guy in kickboxing and you won't believe who this guy is. He's the CEO of LimeWire Motorcycle Company. Wow. So practically a family member of mine, this company that we've talked about on the show many times, probably one of the leader North American electric motorcycle makers and that's all they do. Harley makes electric motorcycles, but that's not all they do. So yeah, I thought that was very interesting that I said, well, maybe I get them on the show and I said, of course you can, but that's very close to home. It's such a small world that my friend's sister married the CEO of one of the companies. We've talked about many times on the show. It's just, and who's not even in this country who's in a much larger country farther away. So yeah, just a small world and very cool, very cool. All right. So Chicago, this is a great story. This is from the next city website and the city of Chicago is giving away bicycles. The Chicago Department of Transportation. They launched this in 2022 and the goal is to hand out 5,000 bicycles by 2026. They've now done 2,000 of them. And these are single speed pedal bicycles. So we've talked before about some cities are doing rebates and stuff for e-bikes. Denver is one of the ones that we've talked about. So they have a voucher program to get you an e-bike and you get, you know, $400 or $1,200. It just kind of depends and then the owner typically has to kind of top that up because, you know, e-bikes are still quite expensive, but Chicago has decided to go with just normal pedal bicycle, single speed, simple pedal bicycles. You get a basic kind of safety workshop and you get a helmet, you get a lock with this. And it's costing the city about $652 per bicycle and they can't keep up with the demand. I've had 19,000 applications, they are only going to eventually give out 5,000. But it sounds like a big hit and cycling in Chicago has really increased. They say up 119% since around 2020 or 2022, something like that. And yeah, it, you know, I wouldn't want to ride a pedal bicycle because I'm old, but, you know, for able-bodied people, maybe not probably. I think you could do it, Brian. You could do it. You could do it a little bit more than electric bike. Technically. Did you do some pedaling today? Oh, yeah. For sure. You know, I get a good workout on the e-bike. That's good. Yeah. So I'm not sure, you know, which is the better option e-bikes or regular bikes, but, you know, according to their data, it sounds like this program is definitely working in Chicago. So I saw Micah from Electric, who does ebikeschool.com. I watched a very fascinating video that he had. It was about 15 minutes long. We're going to China to see all the e-bike, a couple of a few e-bike factories. They were all sort of tied together, but you can see a motor factory and he spent eight days there. I learned a lot, and my family was kind of, I could tell that there was some bias about China in my family about what they expected to find. It's not, I imagine most Americans think have a very improper opinion of what Chinese society is. It is much, much more advanced than I think a lot of people think. But yeah, for instance, there was robots that went to people to take room service and every hotel had a robot. Every hotel. Wow. But the reason why I brought this up was I was worried about, you know, have, you know, bicycle theft. If you're a poor person, you finally got a bike and it's changed in your life. And then what happens if it was still, I always have that fear because it's happened to me when I was a kid. But they said that no one locks their bikes there, their e-bikes, even, are e-scooters because there's so many cameras everywhere and they all know your face, which is a bad thing. Don't get me wrong. But the upside is that you cannot have to lock your bike or your e-bike or your charger or anything like that. They had bicycle charging stations. We were just a plug. So you had to bring your own charger. The chargers were pretty cheap there. So even if you lost one, you know, you could get another one pretty cheap and no one's bothering to steal them because the cameras are on you. I thought that was, I, I recommend people watch that video. I found it very interesting from a travel log perspective and, you know, it was very interesting to see. And you won't believe how they serve McDonald's fries there. It's in a completely sealed box. And I see your cat is back on a show. Give me a glance. Hello. What's the cat's name again? What's the cat? Yeah. The clean energy show cat is back. Yeah. Cleaning up probably dusting off things as she, as she walks by. So she. Yeah. Just if something crashes and falls, I may have to stop, but so far it's all right. All right. Well, curiosity killed the cat. I'm, I'm a big fan of accessibility to bikes. I've known people who are financially challenged who would have greatly benefited from a bike like that. But then I would have worried about it being stolen as well, especially if it's a new shiny new bike, but. Yeah. And of course, you know, there's European cities where people don't lock their bikes because they're all kind of plentiful and they, they tend to all have the same bike. One of the problems here in Canada, North America, we tend to get these super expensive bikes. People, you know, a cheap bike around here is a couple thousand dollars. And, you know, the price of e-bikes is not coming down in North America, much like the price of electric cars is not really coming down as quickly as we would like. You know, e-bikes are still kind of crazy expensive, but I assume much more reasonable in China. Yeah. At the beginning of the pandemic, there is this sort of year where you could buy a $900 bike at Walmart that we're getting good reviews. I mean, as far as e-bikes go, they, they're not great, but people really loved them. And, you know, that was a, but they have moved. They haven't gone anywhere in the last four years. One of that has been the pandemic caused a huge demand for them. I got on that early and got one, and then I haven't seen my bike available very often since then, like it's actually very rare that it even shows up on Amazon again. Quite happy with mine. You can watch reviews on our YouTube channel if you'd like to anyway, Brian. The new UK government, the labor party, the left center, left party is now in power and they are going to go big on renewables, the Keir Starmer, the labor government's new prime minister, announced plans for a rooftop revolution to fit millions more homes with solar panels on their roofs of those homes, lowering energy bills and tackling climate change. And the energy secretary now Ed Miliband approved three solar farms this weekend. At the end of his first full week on the job, I guess the, those solar farms were proposed and denied by the previous government, and he just went in and improved them, I guess. A lot of it is not in my backyard, nimbi-ism, and he said to hell with that, we're going to have to fight that, that, you know, misconception on there. And the farms are in East England. The two first farms will generate 500 megawatts of power. The latter will generate 350. Biggest one we have around here is being constructed as a hundred, so that's five times that pretty significant. It's two thirds of the solar that was installed in the UK last year has been announced in one week, Brian, or one day, one announcement. So two thirds of all the solar last year. The farms had been blocked by the previous Tory administration, and they worked quickly to remedy that. There's a story in electric, and there's a story on the Guardian. Ed Miliband, who has promised to triple the amount of solar in the UK by 2030, as well as double onshore wind and quadruple offshore wind. He said on Saturday night, "I want to start a solar rooftop revolution in the UK. We'll help builders and homeowners as much as we can to use this awesome technology so millions of homes can make their own electricity, lower their bills, and fight climate change." And I'm really coming around on a rooftop solar. It's such a powerful thing we're seeing it in China. We're seeing it on balconies in Europe have a significant effect, like just go to the store and buy a couple hundred dollar solar system, and it actually has an effect on things. And of course, Australia, parts of the South Australia grid has been 100% powered by rooftops at certain points. So his team said that new government is ready to stand up to people who oppose new developments to help combat the climate crisis. I like to see that because I don't think that wind farms are one thing, but solar, I don't know how you can complain about that so much. The big complaint is it's taken away from agricultural land, but it's really not taking that much. It's like around 1% at most just to get to our 2050 completely decarbonized goals. So one of Energy Secretary Milaban's first actions last week was to lift the party's ban of building new onshore wind farms. There was a ban on onshore wind farms for a while, and he's also made the bold move this weekend by approving three large solar farms. As I mentioned, the government is considering new solar standards for newly built homes starting next year. So potentially, a newly built home may have to include solar. And I think they've done that in certain jurisdictions in North America on the West Coast. Yeah, or at the very least, we've talked about this many times, just mandate it so that there's a south facing roof. Yes. So that it's available in the future for solar. I'm a huge believer in that living in a past solar house or a solar tempered house, whatever you want to call it here in Canada, because even at minus 40, if it's sunny, the furnace does not come on all day. And with modern insulation standards, it's probably as good as my house, a new house is probably as good as my house, even though it may not have, you know, ridiculously thick walls and stuff. It's probably very airtight. Why not, you know, mandate East West roads? And because I'm assured, even if people did nothing, that that would lower the consumption costs and cold weather for the heating costs. When we first talked about this years ago, I remember the stat was that in Canada, our homes in Canada are heated in the winter, approximately 8% by the sun. And that's without planning anything. It's just, you know, the sun gets super low, it shines into your house in the winter and we get 8% of our heating. And just imagine if we actually optimized for that, you know, you can go way above 8%. Yeah. Being at a Northern latitude, the sun in the winter is very low in the sky. So it has a more perpendicular angle that your windows and gets through, the thermal gets through your windows come late February. I would say it starts to reduce around then. And then by the summer, it's not a problem. I actually start to feel that again in later mid late September, the sun starts hitting the house even more than it does in the summer. So yeah, that's just one of those things. This is the single set of decisions in the United Kingdom will boost UK solar, voltaic capacity by 10%, just one decision, boom, 10% more. It's enough for 400,000 homes. The Clean Energy Show wants to hear from you. Contact us by email at cleanenergyshow@gmail.com or by online voicemail at speakpipe.com/cleanenergyshow. All right. Another story from China. This is from Bloomberg. They have now in the first half of this year in approving new steel making projects, all of them are going to be electric arc furnaces. So steel making is one of those things like concrete building materials can create a lot of carbon emissions. So the steel industry in China is the second largest source of carbon emissions at 15%. So greening up the steel industry is a big, big deal, and this is part of the country's plan in China to get to carbon neutral by 2060, and they've been making huge progress in this. So in the first half of the year, they didn't permit any coal-based steel making projects. So what they approved was a capacity of 7.1 million tons a year of steel making, and this is all from electric arc furnaces. So traditionally steel is made by burning something like coal or natural gas, but you don't have to do that. You can use electricity, and of course, the country's grid in China is getting cleaner every year. So this is just one of those industries that we're going to have to clean up and congrats to China for making some big progress. Yeah, we have electric furnace, electric arc furnace just down the road for me. It does scrap, but I was reading that there's two ways to make steel. One is to use coal, and one is to use scrap metal. I don't quite understand how that works, but it's like you're using the scrap metal to create heat and to create some sort of molten thing that the steel can be made of. And I guess that's what they're doing here with electric arc furnace. Yeah. They're powering it with a dirty grid, unfortunately, where we are, but that's not necessarily the same company has a steel mill electric arc furnace steam mill in the Denver area, and they've put up solar farms near there to offset, not completely cover, but to offset some of their emissions, which seems like a good idea. If you're using electricity, why not invest in solar to save money, because the payback period would probably be quite fast for an industrial operation like that. That's one thing that I always like to see. Yeah. And lots of big tech companies are investing in their own power generation. So, yeah, coal is one of the biggest emitters in China, and yeah, they're getting off of it basically quickly, even though they're building new coal, they're not going to necessarily even use them. China battery prices equals a huge shift in the way the world is going to work. They've reached the point over the last year that the price for lithium iron phosphate battery is LFP. That's one type of lithium battery that's cheaper and uses less critical minerals. Those battery cells in China have dropped 51% year over year to $53 per kilowatt hour. So that's storing a thousand watts for an hour a battery. That's the measurement that they use for batteries, $53 and $100 was kind of the place where you wanted it to be to be competitive with combustion cars. So last year, the average global price of those batteries was $95, which was also pretty good, but then it took a sudden dip because there's oversupply in the all across the supply chain. There's oversupply because they sort of build up for an undersupply for a while there and the prices were really high. So last year, $95 and several factories are making prices even lower. Several factors are making prices even lower. First, the cost of raw materials has decreased a lot over the past 18 months because there's an oversupply of that. Most of the raw material costs for a battery come from the cathode. In China, the cathode share of total costs for a battery cell has gone down from 50% of the start of last year to 30% this year. That's pretty significant because a fairly big part of the cost of that battery has gone down. These are so important, they're going to power the grid, they're going to power transportation, they're going to power all kinds of things. The fact that they're getting so much better and so much cheaper is so, so important to the energy transition and to decarbonizing electric, all kinds of different places, including the grids. So when there is too much capacity or overcapacity, the most efficient plants with the newest technology get more business while others close down. So yeah, what's happening, Brian, with his battery revolution is that some less efficient battery plants are going out of business. It's a ruthless, ruthless business making battery. So if you're the most efficient, you stay in business, right? This is true with a lot of things and that's what's happening. So because they're efficient, lower prices. Yeah, and it's a tricky thing, same thing going on with solar is that the prices get so low that the companies making them can go out of business. But one of the things about grid storage batteries, as I understand it, the prices right now are kind of low enough for four-hour capacity for grid storage batteries. That's typically, as I understand it, what gets built is a big battery farm that can supply four hours of power. But as the prices keep going lower, then suddenly you can have eight-hour batteries and 12-hour batteries. And I think I've read that that we're kind of approaching the eight-hour thing now where it's an economic goal to build an eight-hour and that changes everything. That can be powering the grid at night, for instance. So the average use of battery implants in China get this dropped from 51% to 43%. That's their capacity. People have been talking about, "Oh, they'll never make enough batteries." Well, holy crap, is that wrong, so wrong. And they're building all kinds of gigafactories for batteries, as we speak. They don't go up overnight, they take years to build, and that capacity is going to even grow. So our capacity to build batteries is almost infinite at this point, and it's going to stay that way for years. Lower raw material costs, too much capacity, and manufacturers making less profit are the main reasons for the price drop. However, there are big improvements in technology and manufacturing processes. So people think that, well, they can't get any cheaper, but yeah, China is finding ways to improve, because it's such a cut-throat business. They find the improvements in the technology and manufacturing process, and they're improving their batteries, and making manufacturing even cheaper. China's top battery company, CATL, and BYD keep investing a lot in research, development and automation, and in new factories, they are also launching new products very quickly, as we've talked about on the show. Because of all these reasons, Bloomberg, any F's battery team expects low prices to continue for at least the next several years, with battery cells at $50 per kilowatt-hour, the technology to reduce carbon emissions from most road transport, is already available. So we're there. We don't need more battery improvements or battery price reductions. We're there. We're at the 2030 mark today, and let me check my calendar. It's 2024, halfway through. In China, prices for the most popular battery types have been below the often mentioned 100 kilowatt, $100 per kilowatt-hour benchmark since October 2023, and they're now at 75 for the pack price. That's not just the batteries, but the whole pack. So at this price, electric vehicles can be priced the same as or cheaper than gas cars in most vehicle types, which is a big change, according to Bloomberg. And I'll read from this story here, almost two-thirds of EVs available in China are already cheaper than their internal combustion engine equivalents. And many cheaper electric models are planned for launch outside China in 2025 and 2026. Toyota was among the most prominent companies to voice this view, claiming our voice, the view that this was not going to happen. And last year, there was not enough batteries to go around. Toyota was going around saying that BS, I say, boy, were you wrong. And that's sharing between the hybrids. They said, you know, everybody buy a hybrid so we can share the batteries. And I've seen that point of view on YouTube videos too, not not batteries to go around. So let's decarbonize the planet by making hybrids. That's not necessarily necessary. There might be other arguments for that. I'm not sure. But really, there are enough batteries, Brian. And those claims, they look very outdated now as battery prices continue to plunge. Now, Sandy Monroe, the consultant that is often revered by Tesla people now, he was on Robert Llewellyn's podcast talking about why China EVs are cheaper. He gave a few sort of points as to why that is. And a lot of people think it's slave labor. You know, that's kind of your common person view, not the case. The factories that I saw that maybe they're not representative of all factories, but holy cow, you know, people went to sleep in their offices. They have a CS step for an hour in China. It's not an uncommon thing to just lay at your desk and just crash through this whole pools of desks with everyone sleeping after they had lunch. And of course, there's recreation areas. There was a library and I asked my wife, you know, would you take the siesta or read a book? And my guess is she would have went to read a book, even if she needed siesta, she really liked reading. This is Sandy on fully charged. Actually, here's the thing. The amount of labor inside of a vehicle is somewhere between five and 15%. That's it. That's amazing. Everything has to do with the cost of goods. Suppliers are less expensive in China simply because they can get raw materials cheaper, much, much cheaper. And they don't require as much profit. They don't see, they don't have shareholders in most cases. It's usually family kind of thing for the tier ones and tier twos and so consequently, you can get it the job done for a lot less money. But it's mostly material costs, material is expensive in the states and in Europe. It's expensive and it is what it is. So that part is what really makes it cheaper. Yeah, that's quite amazing. Yeah, so it's not the labor costs that are driving it. It's really the whole supply chain. And even if it were the labor costs, it would be, it's such a small part of it that five to 15% that it's not going to account for their vehicles being sometimes the fraction of the cost of our vehicle for good quality EVs with long range. All right. So every once in a while, we like to do a nuclear power update for Finland. This comes up every year or two on the podcast. No, and I need another clip standing by. So there is a nuclear power station in Finland that we've talked about on the podcast before. And I don't know how to speak Finnish. I don't know how to pronounce Finnish words, but one time successfully on the podcast, I successfully pronounced the name of this Finnish nuclear power plant. But I retired. I have a perfect record. We had somebody wrote from Finland and said I pronounced it perfectly. So I refused to try again because I don't want to make the mistake. So if you've got the clip standing by, this is the name of the Finnish nuclear power plant. I'll kill you. I'll go. There you go. Yes. Okay. I'll kill you. Number three is the other name of it. And we talked about, okay, I can pronounce that number three. Yeah, I can you pronounce it in Finnish? I don't know. That probably not. But anyway, this reactor was 14 years behind schedule. And that was one of the reasons we ended up talking about it on the show. And it did finally come online, but this latest story, this is from YLE, where we get all of our Finnish nuclear power news from. They recently had to crank down the power on this power plant, the number three, what's it called again? I'll kill you. I'll kill you. I'll kill you. I'll kill you. So typically nuclear is often thought of as base load power. And that is one of the better uses for it. But I think we're going to run into a situation where, you know, this was 14 years late coming online. And what happened in that time is other solar got built, other wind got built. And there's a lot of nuclear projects all over the world in various stages of, you know, the pipeline that might be finished if they go ahead with them, might be finished 10 years from now, that kind of thing. But you know, if this plant had come online 14 years ago, you know, it would have been a different story. We wouldn't maybe run into these problems. But what happened is they've had a lot of rain in Finland. And it's often the hydro power that they can turn down. Like if there's too much power supply, what do you do? You just shut off your hydropower. You just let the water build up in your hydroelectric dam. And then when you need the power, you let it go again. But basically all their hydro was full and they couldn't turn it down. They had to turn down the nuclear power plant instead because power prices dropped to zero for a while and then just slightly above zero for a while. And you know, it is not economical to operate really any power plant when the prices get that low. And because of the specific situation of having to release the water from the hydro, it was the nuclear that had to crank down. But I thought the main lesson from this was really just that idea of, you know, a lot of people still think that the nuclear is the savior. But you know, the delay in building them, it's just, it's going to be a problem because you might plant a nuclear power plant for today and for today's power grid, but every power grid in the world is going to be vastly different 10 years from now when that nuclear power plant finally comes online. And you know, you could maybe make an argument that it's economically viable right now, but economically viable 10 years from now seems highly unlikely. And you know, just the whole nature of the grid is changing and it's just going to have to be smarter and more flexible. And nuclear isn't known for being flexible, you know, in a certainly in a future power grid. Again, that is called the power plant in Finland. And you know, I find it kind of interesting that data companies like Microsoft and Google are talking about building nuclear power plants just for their data centers. So they'll be, I guess, behind the fence, they call it in the grid world. They won't be connected to the grid. It'll just be them. And they know how much they'll use around the clock and the nuclear power plant will provide that around the clock. So we'll see if they do that. And if it's truly economical by the time they get those built, I am seriously don't follow it. Yeah. I mean, maybe there's a scenario, but you know, how much power are they going to need for AI like AI data centers are now the big talking point they're going to need so much power? Well, can they accurately predict how much power they're going to need in 10 years from now when their nuclear power plant is is finally finished? Yeah. I mean, 10 years ago, what do they have even guessed that AI was going to be the nature of it and how sort of ubiquitous it and how is and how the training of those models takes so much power. And chances are they're going to need something more flexible like everyone needs something more flexible, which is definitely going to be more like solar wind and the super cheap batteries we were just talking about. It's time for the lightning round. The lightning round is a fast paced look at the latest headlines in climate, clean energy and transportation. In any tech change over, there's new tech, there's new tech entry in old tech exits vehicle fleet age on the rise since 2019, Brian, the average age of vehicles has actually gone up. Viewer vehicles are being retired as supply faltered because you know, they couldn't make new cars for a while or very quickly. So it's now up to 13 years, which is interesting. My old Nissan Leaf is 11 years old right now. Okay. So from SAP Global, if all clean electricity projects in Canada currently planned or under construction are successfully implemented, clean electricity capacity will grow by an additional 32% most of our electricity is hydro coast to coast, not here, but yeah. So we've got actually the point of the story is there's actually a fair bit in the pipeline coming. Yeah, we just have a few percent to go to fully clean the Canadian grid. China's a thermal coal and gas power generation fell seven percent year on year in June, accelerating from a four percent drop. This is something we were talking about earlier, solar power continued to deliver most of the power generation growth and the recovery of hydro power from earlier droughts also helped push fossil fuels down sharply. But yeah, China doing pretty well with the way ahead of their targets. New research out of the University of Calgary shows plugging into a standard 120 volt level one charger meets the daily needs of 29% of electric vehicle drivers. So you got, you know, level one is like a normal plug in in North America. Level two is like your dryer plug in or your range plug in, it's 240 volts and gets more amps out there. I've got one of each in my driveway. I've got the leaf running on just level one and it's doing well, although I'm not preheating it because the heater doesn't work. So that's not an issue that would be an issue. But yeah, yesterday I plugged it in because I didn't plug it in for a while. It was dead. So I plugged it into the level two, but generally level one's been doing me. And you know, for a lot of people who are just committing to work probably works for them, we have a, you know, a really silly use of cars here in Canada, where often people own a car, only drive it, you know, 10 miles a day. It's a bit of a waste, but it does mean that a regular level one plug will do you. Oh, it's time for a fast fact. Brazil is the leader in renewable electricity among the G 20. I bet a lot of people didn't guess that in 2023, 89% of Brazil's electricity came for renewables, the highest among the G 20 and three times higher than the global average of just 30%. So Brazil has some cookie government sometimes, but they are forging ahead with renewables. The EPA reaches $241 million settlement with marathon oil. The company was illegally polluting the air at nearly 90 facilities in North Dakota, just south of us. Yeah. So that's not pleasant. No, and we talked about this when I drove through North Dakota, and I was noticing how many gas flaring wells there were burning, you know, flaring oil, gas into the air. And so maybe maybe this suit is because of our podcast. Perhaps you never know, a Hancock tire has developed EV specific snow tires that increase range while not sacrificing their grip and cold weather. Now this is a big deal because when you buy an EV, it comes with very efficient tires, you know, and maybe they don't last long, they're quiet and they have low rolling resistance. So they, you know, they give you that fuel economy when the EPA tests the vehicle. And then when you go to replace them, like when I replaced my leaf tires, I think I took a 10% hit on my, because they're just cheap run of the mill tires. I couldn't afford good ones and EV tires were probably twice as expensive as the cheapest tires there were. That's what I went with. But it was like a 10% hit because, you know, that has less rolling resistance and all cars can have more fuel efficient tires. There are ratings for that. So you can do that if you pay attention to that and it's probably worthwhile. But when it comes to winter tires, Brian, as you know, well, winter tire person that you are, you take a big hit and now they're saying, well, we've developed some that's not going to take a hit. So that's kind of cool for those people living with snow. Yeah, as long as you don't go slip sliding away on them, that's great. Heat and power outages after Hurricane barrel have been a dangerous combo for senior citizens in Houston at one senior living center in operable elevators, left people stranded on the upper floors, the hottest floors of the facility without any AC. Well, others took to sleeping in their cars to get some relief. Yeah. So that's one of the things that we think is not going to happen because there's going to be batteries in every building as backup. And maybe if you're smart, solar and, you know, if I lived in Houston, our hurricane prone regions, my gosh, I'd be all over that. You know, wouldn't you? You'd be buying or using your vehicle. If you lived in a home with a vehicle that happened to be an EV, but certainly building should get on board with this, especially on batteries because the grid is, of course, more vulnerable as the climate changes and we get more extreme weather events and not just from storms, but from heat too. That's causing a lot of problems with the grids. I've read stories on that this week. Exciting news for Colombian Reiner is good girl. The company we talk about a lot on the show with swappled batteries for their scooters is coming to Bogota, Colombia. And good luck. Columbia came in second in the Copa America soccer. If you want some sporting news here in the podcast, JD Vance and now we're into political news. What a shift. JD Vance has picked to be Trump's VP. He got to delete that word from your internet. He is behind the drive America act, which not only would remove the incentives to buy battery electric vehicles that they now have the United States of $7,500, but he would give incentives to buy a fossil fuel car instead. I don't know what to say about that other than he's wrong, wrong, wrong. Tesla's California virtual power plant delivers 100 megawatts to help the grid. Now a virtual power plant. That is when a whole bunch of people have batteries in their homes and have signed up to the grid to use that battery whenever possible. You could do that with cars, but that's not really happening yet. So the power grid needs power. It sucks it out of your batteries, not the whole battery, but maybe a little bit just to keep the grid going when there's a dip or a failure or something, and you get paid for that. So that's, and you can charge it up cheap at night or charge it with your solar panels. So 100 megawatts Tesla announced that was going in and that has reduced the need for gas peaker plants, which basically fire up during peak times of the day and whether they used or not. It's peaker plant season in California, Brian heat waves are hitting the region. People are cranking up their AC's and it's putting quite a load on the electrical grid in 2021. Tesla launched this virtual power plant pilot program, boy, that's hard to say. AI should just do our podcast for us. I think we can't speak anymore in that's a California where powerwall owners would join voluntarily without compensation to let the VP powerwall from the battery packs where the grid needed it. This is announced that it had had one of those emergency load events a couple of days ago, and it's VPP is provided quite a bit of electricity. 100 megawatts is a lot of electricity during that event BP first unveiled their highly curtailed oil demand growth forecast back in 2019, which projected that after 2025 any growth in oil and fossil fuels would be scant at best. While in this year's outlook, the trajectory is maintained and they think that they will see a peak in fossil fuel, oil and gas demand next year next year. Temperatures in Europe are getting close to levels at which some oil refineries would have to actually start making less fuel. Greece is battling wildfires and a nation's capital could see temperatures above 40 Celsius 104 Fahrenheit in the coming weeks in Poland, heat may soon exceed the point at which the country's top fuel supplier can run its refineries normally. I didn't know that. Gets too hot. You have to shut down your refineries, scale them back at least. One group estimates that the heat related disruption at European plants reached about 1 million barrels a day last year, that's a lot, that's 10% of what they normally handle. That's how much they had to go down due to heat. And finally, this way, this is from Bloomberg, China is the world's top polluter, but its emissions are shrinking and its peak emissions may have already be behind us. China's carbon dioxide emissions are on track for the first annual decline since 2016. A signal the world's top polluter may have already peaked its output of greenhouse gases coal use for power generation plunge last month, while oil consumption contracted in the second quarter as renewable energy output and the adoption of electric vehicles increased strengthening expectations. The nation's emissions will contract this year. That's amazing news. A shift in China's economy away from emissions in intensive sectors and a tentative retreat of fossil fuels raises the prospect that any decline could be sustained permanently. The Mean Carbon pollution topped out last year, well ahead of Xi's 2030 target, Brian. And that is great news to end the show on, and you can contact us cleanenergyshow@gmail.com around social media, Clean Energy Pod, and there are videos on TikTok and YouTube featuring special content not on the podcast. The video version of our podcast is usually released the weekend following the audio version if you want to check that out. Ready to review us on Spotify and pushing Spotify this week, Brian, you're listening to us on Spotify. Give us a rating and review over there. If you're new to the show, we ask that you subscribe to the podcast. It's free. And every time we release a show, you get it delivered to you. We'll see you next week. [Music] [Music] (upbeat music) (upbeat music)
