Hello, and welcome to episode 219 of The Clean Energy Show. I'm Brian Stockton. And I'm James Woodingham this week. Chinese battery giant CATL is testing out a long-distance, electric aircraft flight with its state-of-the-art batteries. It boasts an unbelievable 500-watt hours per kilogram. But even at that light weight, you'll still endure a hefty baggage fee from Southwest Airlines. France has given up on their plan for a small modular nuclear reactor, because it's too expensive. Said other governments around the world backing nuclear, "Shh, don't tell anyone." Britain's last coal-holly train has made its final journey. That's right, Thomas the Tank Engine is heading for a retirement home for trains where he'll be fed tapioca pudding and jello. Money managers around the world are divesting from fossil fuels. Said an anonymous pension fund manager, "Don't get me wrong, I love destroying the planet, but if I can't make a profit off it, I'm out." All that and more are this edition of The Clean Energy Show. So, as you know, I took a road trip a couple of weeks ago and I remembered something that happened on the trip. So, back in the days when I used to take gasoline-powered road trips, part of the deal is you always have to gas up the car before you leave, right? And typically, I would do that the night before, so you don't have to worry about it the day of the trip. You go out, you gas up. So, on my road trip from a couple of weeks ago, we were getting some landscaping done, and so we had a bunch of cedar mulch that had been dumped in our driveway that needed to be kind of spread around the yard for landscaping purposes. And so, we couldn't park the cars in the driveway for a couple of days around the time of our trip. So, I had to go out with the electric car the night before to the supercharger and charge it up, so we were ready to go. And I was very annoyed at all this. It's like, "Oh, this is so stupid. I should have planned this better. I have to go charge up the car before we leave." And then I remembered, "Oh, right. I used to have to do this every single time on a gasoline road trip." It's just one of those things you start taking. That's not something you appreciate, because you're in a hurry to get going and you're probably late because you're grabbing something and forgetting something. And then, "Oh, yeah, we've got to go to the gas station." And it takes a while. I mean, sometimes you don't get a pump right away, and by the time you go through the payment process or stand in line to pay inside, it's not as fast as some people will have you to believe, because... No. Yeah. You know, I was having this discussion with my son, because he asked me, I saw a Silverado commercial for the pickup truck that's popular. He said, "Is there an electric version of that?" And I said, "I'm glad you asked." Yes, there is. I just read on a Facebook post, because there's this guy in SwiftKurtz, a sketch one who's on our local Facebook page. I think he has a stock-o business, and he's got a Ford F-150, put a carascent... No, a diesel heater for winter to keep his range up, I guess. All right. You do take a range hit in very cold Arctic weather that we have. Anyway, the Silverado has a lot longer range, a lot more expensive, but it's got a killer range on it. And he said he went on an 800 kilometer trip without towing anything, and he only charged for 20 minutes. And that wasn't good enough for my son. He said, "Well, people aren't going to want to do that." I said, "How?" He says his boss goes to Calgary like a full-day trip, but doesn't stop to pee. I don't understand that. It doesn't seem possible to me. And, you know, when you are stopping, you're just plucking it in and going. You're not doing any ordeal. You just pluck it in and walk off to the bathroom and get a coffee. Why wouldn't you want to stop? You know, two, ten minute stops would be fine, but I guess people don't like doing that. But if that's your excuse, I mean, even that's going to be resolved by improving battery tech one of these days soon is already in the pipeline, really. But yeah, I had completely forgotten about that. The hassle of gassing up for a road trip because you're always anxious to get going, right? Yeah. And it's always this annoying thing you have to do. But, you know, when you drive electric, most of the time you can charge it home. You know, sometimes I used to remember to do it the night before, but even then I was busy getting ready for the trip and that was a hassle. So, you know, that's... Yeah. But it's nice to just leave your driveway. It's never fun. Of course, you got to drive there. You got to drive back, et cetera. But speaking of my road trip, we've started to follow Cummins a little bit because I went to their headquarters in Indianapolis and they're a maker of diesel engines. And then I was kind of wondering, well, you know, what are they doing in the energy transition? Are they just going to go bankrupt because they may diesel engines? Well, two fresh news stories came out just in the last couple of days. Wow. Really? About what Cummins is up to. Yeah. It's kind of a nice thing. I think they must be feeding off your criticism, Brian. Not surprising. That must be it. Yeah. So, first story here is from Electriev and they're starting construction of a large battery plant in Mississippi. So, it's a new battery cell manufacturing plant. They're going to make 21 gigawatt hours of batteries. And this is a big, big plant. It's going to open in 2027. They're going to have 2,000 jobs. No doubt this has been spurred on by the Inflation Reduction Act from the Biden administration. So, it's a partnership. Cummins owns about 30% of this. It's Cummins and Daimler and Packar. And they've all gotten together on this joint venture. They're going to make LFP battery cells. So, yeah. It should be online in 2027. But this is Mississippi. This isn't doing anything for the jobs in the place that you visited in Indiana, right? This is where they're headed for. No, that's right. Cummins, they've got operations all over the world. And we were talking about, if you missed the show, we were talking about what a large percentage of the population is dependent on them. Yeah. And at the time you thought there was no progress in moving forward that they were going to rely on diesel. And that could put rather quickly in a transition. Yeah. There wasn't anything particularly clear. But yeah, it's the small town of Columbus, Indiana. They very much relies on Cummins. But they have operations all over the world. It's very large. And so, this one is going to be in Guadalajara, Spain. And they have already begun production of electrolyzers. And this is a Cummins plant. And they're making hydrogen electrolyzers. Proton exchange membrane electrolyzers. And this is in Guadalajara in Spain. And it has just come online. So this is a very large factory, 500 megawatt hydrogen electrolyzer factory in Spain. So they're taking their money and investing it in some things that they don't seem to quite know what's going on. Maybe if they did, they would be investing in, you know, electrified moduses hauling, perhaps, or something like that. Yeah. I mean, any large organization, you know, it's like trying to turn up giant ship around. It's very difficult to change direction. So, you know, I certainly have sympathy. But, you know, are they going to end up like Kodak? Are they going to end up like Nokia? You know, are they going to be able to write that ship? Yeah. And I think that if you don't really know what's going on with hydrogen, it could be a loss, you know? Like, not all hydrogen is necessarily going to pay off. It doesn't look like. And it's even questionable how well it's going to do. I know it's some people think of it as a savior and some people think of it as not necessary, depending on which end of the spectrum you are on. Last night, I went to the fireworks in Regina for Canada Day. Canada celebrates its birthday on July 1st. And I made it in record time, Brian. My dysfunctional family didn't leave until 15 minutes -- 14 minutes before the fireworks started. And I casually didn't care, but I still got to the other end of the city. And, yeah, in time that we opened our door, the fireworks started. I found a space with a quick exit. That's the key, Brian. A quick exit because I've spent hours getting out of fireworks displays. Yeah. And now I've got it down to a science set. At record time, I think it was about 40 minutes we were there. Took in the fireworks display. 20 minutes came home. I'm a champ, man. I should write a book on this. But then everybody else would do that. Yeah. I don't want them to figure it out. I want them to stay in line. But, yeah, nailed it. Of course, the best way to do it is on a bicycle. I used to do that when I lived in that part of town. If you'd get in and out of, you know, anywhere on a bicycle. It's usually nice. Boy, the weather is crappy, though. It is July and I have not opened my pool. I used to have this reoccurring dream where the pool would just open and then fall would come. And it's happening. My reoccurring nightmare is happening. I have to take care of all this water, put expensive chemicals into it, circulate it. But it's not heating because it's so bloody cold here. It's an unusually cold summer. Because you have solar heaters. Solar heaters for it. Yeah. And then, I mean, a gas heater would really work hard in this weather, in this climate. To do that, we had another letter from our listener in Tasmania giving us some more info in real vehicle to grid delays in Australia. He sent us some newspaper articles. That's where you use your vehicle, your electric vehicle to charge back into the grid and get paid for it. Or you can use this as a backup to your house. But a lot of grids are not allowing that because it's tricky. And it does involve expensive equipment. You might see ads for Ford advertising that with their truck that you can power your home. But it costs, you know, $10, $20,000 to install the necessary inverter and everything to turn it back into electricity and to not electrocute people working on the grid when the grid goes down. That's a problem. So it's not easy, but in mainland Australia they are doing that. And he sent us some clips from southern Australia. But I thought it was interesting because he sent his email from work and he works for a company. We were talking about how far away Tasmania is and how we'd love to go there. But it's, you know, a day and two hours of flying at 26 hours. Well he works for a company in our stupid little province, tiny little province that's headquartered here. We don't have too many companies world headquartered here, but he's actually works for one of those companies. I won't mention what it is because I don't want to out him, but I just thought that was cool. I don't want to mention their, you know, and that company sponsors everything in the city where my kid goes to school, like everything is sponsored by that company. You see their signs everywhere. Yeah. And I wanted to mention one of our local Tesla owners who was, this is about the longevity of electric cars. He writes on Facebook, another milestone for this 2016 Tesla, although it's now refurbished battery that was replaced free of charge due to a water ingress. So he probably went through a puddle during a flood or something. After 587,000 kilometers, which, yeah, that's what 350,000 miles or something like that. In other words, it's probably twice of what a normal car lasts or 50% more right there of what a normal car. Yeah. The most miles I've ever put on a car. I think it was 212,000 kilometers, which would be maybe 150,000 miles. Oh, I've got an SUV that we park for towing. That's beyond that. It's way beyond that. Oh, it's way beyond that. But yeah, it doesn't work very well anymore either. The engine probably needs a rebuild or something other than eating a new driver's seat from being worn out cushion wise, this car is nearly in like a new condition. It's been a taxi slash ride share car. It's entire life and has had more than 35,000 people inside many for their first Tesla ride. This is from Daryl Kowalski. Daryl Kowalski repairs out of warranty, not including tires slash windshield, which is $13,000 Canadian. Yeah, it's not much. He hasn't spent much for a car that is lasted basically two lifetimes, at least under optimistic scenarios. Yeah. And he's ready for more. He thinks he can go twice as far. He's still even got two more months of battery warranty left because of the timeline on the warranty. That was interesting. I like to bring up examples of people using electric cars because so many people fear them thinking that the actual opposite is true, reliability-wide. People assume they're not going to last, but they absolutely do. Okay. Okay. So from Renew Economy, the French nuclear giant EDF has scrapped their plans for a small modular nuclear reactor. They've been working on it for four years, their own SMR design. Now they're not giving it up entirely. They're sort of planning to work with other people's designs or something like this, but they worked on it for four years and they realized it would just simply be too expensive that it just wouldn't be practical. So they're essentially hoping somebody else is going to solve the problem and get this worked out for them. So it's been a lot of problems with SMRs. A lot of people think it's the magic bullet solution. There's maybe been one come online in China, one or two. Something like that. Of course, the first one is very, very expensive. That's an issue. You have to make a lot of them for it to make any sort of economic sense. And they're in a race with renewables, which are becoming vastly deployed and cheaper every year. Yeah. So to be fair, it's not every nuclear project that has huge cost overruns. But this is a very common thing we've talked about in the past, often going billions of dollars over budget, but in France, which it's owned by the government now. This is a nuclear company that was headed toward bankruptcy, so the French government took it over. And the only way that nuclear seems like it's going to work is basically with massive government subsidies, it just does not make economic sense. But they haven't thrown in the towel. They're still hoping to put some in, but they gave up on their own design. Yeah. It seems like governments have to back nuclear because of the risk. I'm not saying that it's risky, but the investors are. They don't want the enormous expense of something never did happen, even if it was minor. It could be a terrible thing for investors, and they're scared from that risk. And so governments have to back them up. They always have, at least in North America. And yeah, I'm just not sure because we've got stories every week, we've got stories this week about the massive deployment of solar and the improvement of batteries coming up later in the lightning round. And all kinds of things are happening that I would not be comfortable investing in a nuclear company, especially by the time they get going, our government here, our provincial government wants to examine them in what 2029 at the end of the decade and see where they are at. Well, by then, right now it's not looking good, but by then I can't see the economic benefit of it. And we talked previously a few months ago about new scale, which is the US company that was working on an SMR, and they also abandoned their plans for the same reason. So it's not to say it isn't doable, maybe somebody can do it, but it does not look good. I was reading a story on CBC, the Canada broadcaster site today, and they had a story about Netherlands having a lot more solar than us. And yeah, we've got like 1.1% of our electricity comes from solar. We've got a lot of hydro that has established that has been built, and most of our country runs off of hydro, but for some reason, it's just not happening, and it should be. But they're calling it a political problem here because we're a petrostate, so that sucks. We should be an electrostate, which is a term that we introduced last week. And promising nuclear 10 years from now is a good way to keep all of your fossil fuels back. Yeah. New Atlas. This is from New Atlas. Battery giant CATL says it is successfully flown a four ton plane using its ultra high density, quote unquote, condensed batteries. In April 2023, you remember from the show, CATL announced its condensed battery pack over twice the energy density of nearly anything else on the market at an incredible 500 watts hours per kilogram, the same amount of energy as stores per weight and volume is important too, and as that improves and, you know, then electric flight becomes more and more possible. I mean, it's possible now for what single engine plane, but it's getting more likely that mid-haul flights will be electrified quite easily. For reference, a typical lead acid car battery, and that's the ones you have in your car to start your car, your gas car is 50 watt hours per kilogram, if you can imagine. This is 10 times greater than that. Now, while lithium-ion EV batteries like those in Tesla Model 3s can pack up to around 265 watt hours per kilogram, in other words, they're half as energy dense as these new batteries. And Z8 tail did say that they are going to work with aircraft makers. So it sounds like they're going ahead with this themselves. If you've got the key technology to enable electrified flight, you might as well not just hand it over to people, you might as well get in on the ground floor. And that seems to be what they're doing. So it now expects to have an 8 ton electric aircraft with a range up to get this 3000 kilometers. That's 1,865 miles operating in just three to four years time. And you know, the economics of this, Brian, a major cost of flying is the fuel. And airlines really need to decarbonize, and there isn't very many ways to do that. If they can get their shorter flights on electric planes as quick as possible, and then I know this is going to take a long time, but as quick as possible, if they can start doing it in three to four years, you get started, then that may not be such a terrible future for that. So they've had success. Chinese battery company is flying this four time plane successfully. They plan to have an 8 ton plane going in a couple of years or so. The mass production is ready to produce these high energy batteries on a large scale right away. And they're partnering with CMAC, a Chinese aviation company to advance the electric aircraft. This technology could significantly improve range of electric passenger planes. And yeah, that's the concern is the range because you have to have extra range. You can't just have just enough range to get somewhere. You have to have a plan B and that's, you know, basically the little aircraft that they're using for flight training because it's very cheap, you know, getting flight less expensive because of the fuel. I think you have to have, if there are like a half hour training flight, but then you have to have a half hour reserve. So it's like 30, 40, 45 minutes of reserve, no matter what you're doing, just in case, which of course, yeah, all the way, though, this higher energy density increases the risk of thermal runaway. So the safety testing is critical. This particular high energy battery is, you got to be careful. Yeah. And of course, there's always tons of regulations to do with airplanes because everyone obviously wants to avoid any air disasters. So this will be a tough thing. I mean, we often talk about what's going to happen by 2030 in the clean energy space and electric aircraft is pretty iffy to be, you know, viable by 2030. But this sounds like a huge, huge step forward. So there might be some, you know, medium electric flights by 2030, it sounds like. Okay, so from Bloomberg, the list of money managers, axing oil stocks just got longer. So this is mostly about European money managers. So PFA, this is Denmark's largest commercial pension fund. They've got about 110 billion in assets under management. And they have now offloaded their $170 million stake in shell based on an assessment that the company's capital expenditure on renewables is worryingly low. A lot of companies like that, they sort of talked a big game a year or two ago about, you know, clean energy investments, but lately have sort of, you know, backtracked a lot on those plans. And well, you're not going to have much of a business if you, you know, keep backtracking on your plans to get out of fossil fuels. So there's a really nice chart here in this story that oil stocks since the Paris agreement that was struck in 2015. This is a global agreement where countries around the world agreed to cut back on their carbon emissions. So if you look at oil stocks since the Paris agreement in 2015, so almost 10 years, oil stocks have been almost flat. There's only been a slight increase in the value of oil stocks in the last 10 years, whereas the greater stock market, the S&P 500 has, you know, basically doubled since then in the last in the last 10 years. So, you know, it's not a good investment. And you know, it's too bad that it took that for, you know, fund managers should have been getting out of oil years ago for other reasons. It should have been if they were smart, you know, but now it's becoming obvious that it's a bad investment. And that's what's going to get people out of it. So there's another pension fund here, Sticting, Pensonfold, Europe's biggest pension fund with $550 billion in assets. They have exited their liquid assets in oil, gas, and coal. That was worth about $11 billion. And it says it has plans to divest another further $5 billion of less liquid fossil fuel assets. In France, new sustainable investing requirements mean asset managers using that label. So I guess you can call yourself in France, sustainable investing company. They're going to have to purge an estimated $7.5 billion in combined fossil fuel assets from places like Total Energy and Shell. You know, just to comply with, you know, a lot of people want to call themselves sustainable. But, you know, there's a rule now that backs it up. Sweden, the AP7 fund, they've got $100 billion in assets. And so they've got a big program now to get rid of things like Saudi Aramco, India's Oil and Natural Gas Corp, also Exxon, they've dumped Exxon. And then a Danish pension fund, they've asked the last of their remaining oil and gas holdings in their $20 billion portfolio. And they're now in the process of offloading companies that provide equipment and services to fossil fuel providers. So, you know, it's not just the oil companies themselves, but of course, there's a huge ecosystem of companies supporting the oil industry. And that is probably also a bad investment in time to get out. Yeah, you got to think, though, that eventually they're going to hit a point where they're going to flee like rats from a sinking ship. Like, at some point, it's going to become obvious to these people that it's not obvious to right now. And I know people are going to make money off of fossil fuels in the next few years or so. If you're in the right places, there's people making money despite their teaching and in schools here in high schools, like it's going to be the future. Yeah, I don't know. I think that at some point, the bottom is going to drop out when the writing is on the wall. So on the wall for us, we've got 2020 vision, but some of these people, governments and investors don't. Well, it takes a long time for these kinds of sentiments to change because, you know, oil and gas have had an amazing run. Like, basically, the last 100 years, it's been a great investment if you just want to make money. Sure. Let's keep it going. Why not? Why not? Let's keep the party going. And of course, they tend to pay high dividends. Oil and gas companies tend to pay high dividends and they're keeping them high so that people don't flee the stock. So not every stock pays a dividend, but the oil and gas ones tend to and they tend to be very good dividends. They're not lowering them. But again, it's going to hit the wall at some point. That's not sustainable in the long run. And that's what oil and gas companies are doing right now. When the oil prices are up, they're paying dividends to their stock holders because instead of investing in new exploration as much as they used to. Brian, let's dip into the old clean energy show mailbag, shall we? I don't have a lot this week, but I thought I mentioned a couple things. Andy on Spotify says another great show. Thank you. Thank you for listening on Spotify, Andy. Thank you for commenting. Be sure to rate and review us on Spotify. If you do listen on Spotify, the number two platform for listening to podcasts, I'm told Michael on Spotify says, thanks again, guys. Baby laugh made me cry doing a great job. Appreciate that, Michael. It's great that everybody took the time to write. And from the Twitter-like social media site, Blue Sky, which we have a little bit of presence on, I like it, but everybody needs to go over there. Then I need to find the people once they go over there. I signed up, but then I never went back. It's nice. It's like a douche-free Twitter. It's very much like Twitter. It's just it's pleasant. This is from Sundance. He says, I used to follow your podcast. I'll pick it back up in the future. Can you try to cover a bit more that isn't car-focused? We really need to be focused on getting out of cars and in to clean trains, buses, and bikes. Thanks. He's an avid cyclist. Now, this is a problem we run into with this podcast is that everybody has their thing, and we can't please everybody. So if we did, we would have a billion listeners every month, but everybody's got their own thing. We are car-focused because we're car-city. We've always wanted EVs. We've finally got those EVs, and now we're ecstatic, but maybe one day will not be. And there's just no transportation in the city where we live, so we're biased against that. We're not living like Europe does, but I know that my kid's generation is very much different. My son, he loves his car. He's going to buy a car. It's going to be his life. But he wants to design cities that don't use cars, ironically. That's what his career wants to be. I don't know if he'll be able to do that or not because it's hard to get into, but that's what his generation is saying. That cars are stupid, and we should be getting into it. We'd love to. I mean, it's just not happening, though. It's just not happening here, and we need to just focus on government policy to make that happen. Of course, it gets down to -40 here. I'll throw it in as well. So we're a little bit biased. Yeah. And even if we do have better transit in the future, which I think will probably happen, we will still need vehicles of some kind. I mean, independent vehicles that can go anywhere are always going to be a thing. So those have to be elected. They do. If they're going to be vehicles, may they be electric. And we also come from petrol province and a petrol country, petrol state. And we would like to see that we're very cognizant of the use of oil, and we like to get people off that. I guess we're focused on getting people off of it now, and hoping for the best of the future that everybody uses a more sustainable mode of transportation. We'd love to hear from you, our listeners. This is our favorite thing. Contact us by email. CleanEnergyShow@gmail.com. That's CleanEnergyShow, all one word at gmail.com. Of course, everything is there in your show notes, or if you're watching on YouTube, it's there. If you're watching on YouTube, smash that like button. I don't think it does anything, but get into an argument in the comments. That's probably the one thing that people are always saying. Smash the like and subscribe button. What they should be saying is get into a political argument in the comments that really helps the algorithm. Yeah. And of course, I hate that. You can also leave us a voicemail at speakpipe.com/cleanenergyshow. And our podcast runs in support for listeners, you can donate. And thanks to those people who have used our PayPal link, especially those people who contribute a little bit every month. It is very helpful. Another story here from Bloomberg. The market for carbon credits faces a fresh blow as offsets are slammed. This is a topic that we cover every once in a while in the show. There are certain things like aviation that is still many, many years away from decarbonizing. Large companies are often using carbon offsets, which is essentially putting money into planting a forest somewhere or something in lieu of actually reducing their emissions. But it's always been criticized. It's never been an ideal solution. I think there are certain cases where aviation, we're still a long way away. So if the aviation industry is also putting money into planting trees or something, that's probably a good thing. But we don't want anyone to delay reducing their actual carbon emissions, which is what can happen when you're buying carbon offsets, then maybe you don't have an incentive to actually lower your emissions. So there's a group of 80 nonprofits that have now released a statement. The groups include client earth, share action, Oxfam, Amnesty International, and Greenpeace. And they're calling on companies to focus on the outright reduction of greenhouse gas emissions without the use of offsetting. So yeah, this is a thing that always kind of goes back and forth. Carbon offsets, they tend to make some progress in financial markets and certain countries treat them differently. The US has started to talk more about using carbon offsets, while other countries are talking about using them less. So it's one of those things where there's, I don't know, there's no real right answer for it. But the outright reduction of emissions is what we're all looking for. It's just a hard thing to do as the world still does run on oil. So do you still do carbon offsets when you travel? Yeah, when you buy a plane ticket, at least here in Canada, there's always a box that you can check, "Hey, I want to offset my emissions," but it's ridiculously small amount of money, five or ten bucks to offset the carbon divisions. So I always check it, I always pay for it. But I've always wanted to find some better solution. But I don't know. If all the fees that get put onto an airline flight, that's nothing. Maybe they should have that mandatory that, I don't know. But then if it doesn't work, and a lot of people are against carbon credits now, because it's very kind of a dubious industry, how well it's doing. I don't know. I don't have the answer, but I personally am still responsible for emissions. I mean, as clean as I can be, I've got solar panels, I drive electric, but we get power from a grid that's not fully clean, and I still like to fly. We live in a massive country without great train service, so flying is kind of the only practical way to get around the country. It's, in many ways, the only option for most people. So I would love a way to offset my emissions, but I don't know what that is. Yeah, my kid was telling me he's a soccer fan, a European soccer, and the euros are going on, and he was saying you can go on this 700 kilometer trip by train five minutes longer than it takes you to fly. And I was thinking, yeah, but wow, there'd be no stress involved. You just get to the train station, get on the train, sit down, less security, it would be a lovely experience, and you can stretch your legs, you can walk around freely and easily and have lunch and snacks and drink, go to the bar, whatever. It just seems like a beautiful experience. One that is extremely foreign to where Brian and I live. There is a national train service, but it's not much. It's mostly for tourists. It's never been great, and they actually don't even stop in our city. We have a massive country, and Regina and Calgary have been excluded from passenger rail service. In fact, they make sure they go through here at night. That's pretty sad. So we have to drive at least a couple of hours to even catch a train. Yeah, which is unpleasant, but it is now. 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. Starting at just 70,820 US dollars that is on Versa is America's cheapest car. But with massive incentives, the 2024 Hyundai Ionic 5 is even more affordable to lace Brian. And let me tell you, the difference between those cars is night and day. One is a piece of garbage, and the other is one of the best cars on the road, and a lot cheaper and beautiful to drive, and even more spacious. And why would you? Why would you? Because you're dumb. You are dumb. You people are dumb out there buying new cars. You just you're too scared of electric. Once you realize it, you'll never go back unless you go buy a bicycle. Wendy's restaurants. I go to Wendy's. I sometimes after the gym, I get a grilled chicken wrap and a baked potato with sour cream and chives. Nice. Yeah, not really, but I do go there. And yeah, now they have 130 plus US restaurants running on community solar. Community solar is when you have you sort of buy into a solar project and you get the rewards from it. The Appian Plus product. This is what they're teaming with. It's a brand name. We'll account for track and a sign ownership of each kilowatt hour to a specific restaurant location. This is something that community solar does it accounts for. You can buy your your generation or your potential generation of it. And if you can't put solar on your roof, which I guess Wendy's restaurants, or maybe not a great candidate for that. Just take a put up a few panels. A 250 kilogram, WW2 bomb was found at a Tesla gigafactory in Berlin. If that factory has enough problems, they're finding very heavy bombs. I've named it Elon, by the way. Belgian energy company Perpetum is a solar large solar carport designed in Para Daza, a privately owned zoo and botanical garden in Belgium. But I thought this was interesting, Brian, because the structure for these carports, usually these are big metal things, steel structures. This is made out of wood. So you have an unusual, it's also renewable when you do that, because you know, when you make these structures, a lot of emissions come from the manufacturing is steel and concrete. So yeah, they made this one. It's private for this particular zoo company, the botanical garden, which is a tourist spot, but it is made out of wood instead of metal. I thought that was interesting. For a CS fast act, SUVs and trucks now represent 86% of vehicle sales in Canada. And if you're listening from somewhere else in the world, you may find that mysterious and weird, perhaps even outrageous, but that's what's going on. Yeah, nothing but gigantic trucks and SUVs where James and I live, and they somehow get bigger every year. Blue energy is developing a 1.1 megawatt photovoltaic solar system in Udeney's Colicios football stadium in Italy. This is, I've been washing football, as we, you know, soccer, we call it in North America. It didn't help me with the pronunciation, but that's good. Terrible pronunciation of Italian terms. The cup, I forgot that was in Italy, maybe that would have helped my pronunciation preparation. The company said the project might include a 300 kilowatt battery. So that's a stadium with a pretty significant solar array, 1.1 megawatts. I mean, some of our solar farms here are only 10. So that's pretty good. This is some China news coming now. Again, China hits its 2030 1200 gigawatt renewables target six years ahead of schedule. It looks like they've already hit that now. I mean, that's amazing. China offshore wind prices to undercut coal this year. So the price of electricity units from wind turbines installed in the ocean, which is offshore, is now cheaper than coal, which they have an abundance of and lots of. Yeah. And the only reason we're still burning coal anywhere in the world is it's generally been pretty cheap. And we have the, you know, infrastructure has all been built for years and years, but this is slowly not becoming the case anymore. Coal is becoming no longer financially viable. Now, of course, we should have just shut down the coal because it's smelly and polluting, but once it becomes economically unviable, then the last of it's going to go. The consulting firm Alex Partners projects that Chinese automakers were gobbled up 30% of the global car market by 2030, only 3% in the United States. That's what the Chinese market is like 1% now, which is actually surprising to me in the United States. And they protected to be 3% of 2030. But globally, it'll be 33% of global car market. But I think that's, I think that's low. But yeah, I don't have data to back that up. Just my gut feeling half of business owners in this Toronto street estimated that more than 25% of the customers arrived by car. This is getting to back to our car bike transit story. In fact, it was only 4% who arrived at the restaurant. So they misunderstood that. This is a Forbes survey. We have the link here for Forbes and the percent who walked or cycled were 72%. So yeah, they had no idea. Yeah. And businesses always get upset when parking spots are being taken away or things are being changed into a pedestrian street instead of a car street. They all get mad because all we're going to lose customers because there's no parking. Turns out, not really a big deal. Clean tech investment in the world is set to reach $2 trillion this year. And that, Brian, is a lot of money. Finally this week, the UK's last remaining coal-fired power station is entering its final days. The plant at Ratcliffe on Sore, Nottingham Shire is a prominent landmark for real passengers on the Midland's main line. And M1 traffic passing close by on the freeway began generating electricity. 57 years ago, which is when I began generating electricity or living capacity of 2,000 megawatts, that's like two nuclear reactors, average-sized nuclear reactors, this coal plant. It's a big one. Enough to power 2 million homes. However, it will close on September 30th as part of government plans to end coal production in the UK. BBC has an article on this as well. History was made. They said of the real freight made its final plan called delivery by rail. It's done. No more coal deliveries. It's kind of a big deal. The railway was touting this that they realized that this is a big moment in history, really. And we talked a few months ago about the final coal shipment to Hawaii. That's all done now, too. Yeah. So it's all gone. Coal in the United States. And the UK is gone. Coal is still going to the United States. But it's getting out competed by gas and now renewables as well. Yeah. And of course, there was a local story here, Alberta, our next door, Petro State Province. They closed their last coal plant as well. The bad news is they mostly replaced it with natural gas, but they were something like 80% coal on their grid, like just 20 years ago or 30 years ago. It was really bad, but even they managed to get out of coal. All right. Well, that's our show for this week who can contact us at cleanenergyshow@gmail.com and around social media clean energy pod. There's also videos of the show on TikTok and YouTube with sometimes special content not featured on the podcast. The video version of our podcast is released the weekend following the audio version. So you might want to look for that. Except this past weekend, when I screwed up Ryan, I had a technical mistake I made in our new workflow and lost a file that was required to have my audio for the video podcast. So it didn't happen. So I'm sorry if you're one of those people who watches us on video. The links to most of our stories. This is new is now available in your podcast show notes or YouTube description. We might miss a link or two, but a lot of our links are now there. If you're interested in reading more about the stories we talked about and the same links that we have used to bring you those stories. Our store, we've got a store with hats and mugs and t-shirts show your clean energy colors and buy some of our stuff. Rate and review us on Apple podcasts or Spotify as I've said and donate with PayPal to help us keep podcasting. If you're due to the show, all we ask is that you will subscribe because we keep putting this out every week. Probably take a couple weeks off for the summer. Shows might be a little bit shorter in the summer like this one, but we'll see you every week and see you next time. Yeah, see you next week. [Music]
