(upbeat music) It's just an incredible, incredible, incredible hurricane. It has dropped, it has dropped 50 millibars in 10 hours. I apologize, this is just horrific. When the maximum sustained winds are 160 miles per hour and it is just gaining strength in the Gulf of Mexico where you can imagine the winds, I mean, the seas are just so incredibly, incredibly hot, a record hot, as you might imagine. You know what's driving that. I don't need to tell you, global warming, climate change, leading to this and becoming an increasing threat. (upbeat music) Global ocean temperatures took this dramatic step change where the records were non-overlapping with any previous years. We're having these heat waves and floods and hurricanes and becoming more frequent and more intense and leaving trails of devastation worldwide, people having to pay for these. We have to experience them. And if you're not the one that's experiencing them, you are part of who is paying for them. (upbeat music) Meanwhile, for radians, having not a state can be facing any number of obstacles. Some gas stations are running out of fuel. An official say to expect owls worth a traffic. And this morning, Tampa International Airport suspended all operations. (upbeat music) - Hello and welcome to episode 232 of The Clean Energy Show. I'm Brian Stockton. - I'm Jay Swittingham. This week with the Tesla Robotax event coming up on October 10th, Brian and I took the opportunity to test out full self-driving beta on his Tesla. It's okay, the software now comes with next of kin a notification. - Great Britain has a lower chance of winter blackouts despite closing all their coal power plants. Meanwhile, the chances of James having a winter blackout is rapidly rising. - Hurricane Milton is bearing down on Florida and is likely made worse by climate change. Time to put water wings on grandma, Brian. - A coal power plant in Australia is having difficulty securing bank loans. But don't worry, Jerry Lewis has pledged to hold a telethon for them. He's still alive, right? - I'm sure that'll work out great. - All that and more are this edition of The Clean Energy Show. - The race between climate change and the deployment of clean technology is on. The Clean Energy Show gives you a front row seat to the latest developments. And we are, let's go to people in Florida and those who are evacuating. And we are gonna have some information on that later talking about the difficulties of having a gas car and what people with electric cars do and are doing should do and will be able to do in the future make it a lot better. And of course we have a lot more stuff on the show that we haven't even been able to preview but stick around, we'll be getting to it. - Yeah, so last week I teased a little bit our Rambed Earth Pilot Project. So we started talking about this more than two years ago, I think, but I have a cottage property. It's something my parents bought back in the 1960s and it's a lovely, lovely property. And the cottage itself is just a seasonal cottage, a bit of a shack. So eventually, we were always planning to kind of tear it down and build something. - You always said your dad really didn't put any money into it, like he just let go mostly. He did expand with it initially, but yeah. And that's kind of how people really dealt with cottage properties back then. The goal was to have like a cheap vacation property, like to spend as little money as possible, but you'd have somewhere nice to go in the summers. - It's the place, it's the setting that is the nice part of it. So just have a shelter over your head basically and fine. - But the place is really falling apart. There's carpenter ants, the windows are all cracked because the building is settling and you know, it's really no good for winter. There was a furnace, but it stopped working. My dad paid $25 for that furnace about 50 years ago. - New or used? - It was used. - Okay. - And you know, he had some of his relatives install it. He said that they checked the gas lines for leaks by lighting a match and following it along the gas lines. - Oh boy. - Yep. - Oh boy. - So I mean, we're lucky the cottage hasn't killed us yet, but so the plan is to do a rammed earth cottage. And we went over this a couple of years ago. Maybe you can edit in the clip that we used a couple of years ago to explain this, but it's a method of constructing that is largely dirt and you use a little bit of Portland cement powder and you use kind of sand and clay and you build these plywood forms and then you basically just pound it down and you end up with something that's similar to a concrete wall. It's got the strength of concrete, but it's more natural and sort of more breathable. Rammed earth is a traditional building technique still used today. Its name says it all. The main ingredient is simply highly compressed dirt. The material allows for the creation of buildings with an organic look and feel. One of the most stunning rammed earth houses is home to rock icon Randy Bachmann of the Guess Who and of Bachmann Turner Overdrive. The Bachmann's house was constructed by builder and designer, Mira Kranoff. Rammed earth is an ancient technology that has recently undergone a revival and has become very popular and accessible in a lot of regions where it wasn't available before. It used to be that rammed earth was only in the hot dry arid areas of the world and now it's become available almost everywhere. I was excited about doing rammed earth, but it needs to be insulated. So we thought insulation, let's hide it in the middle because the beauty of the rammed earth on both sides is a good attribute. We use a little bit of cement, five to 10% cement and we use some steel reinforcing. These kinds of buildings weren't typically made in a cold climate like ours, but somebody figured out that you could put insulation in the middle of the walls and you end up with something that's also very good thermal properties. These walls can stand potentially for hundreds of years. It seems like a really great way to construct buildings fairly eco-friendly. The only thing that's maybe not eco-friendly is it does include some Portland cement and as we've discussed before, Facebook just invested in a company that's trying to decarbonize the making of Portland cement because it's a very carbon intensive thing. - Yeah, there are companies doing that and then some of them have some encouraging results so far. Facebook got one of them yet, but I'm hearing we'll cover them, of course. - So I think it's definitely possible. And then the other thing, of course, is that the building itself will have to be built on a concrete pad. That's typically how you do it. So again, concrete, not the most-- - Don't get around that at this point. - At this point, there doesn't seem to be a way around that. Of course, eventually you'll be able to make that concrete with the sort of carbon free or low carbon cement. So anyway, our architect that we're working with, he's a good friend of ours, we wanted to do a ramp at the front of our house. We've always had this problem at the front of our house because it faces north. And in our terrible northern climate, what happens is snow melts off the roof in the wintertime when it gets a little bit warm, it drips onto our front steps. But because it's all in shade, it always just freezes and we just end up with these terrible ice patches on the front of our house. It's super deadly. We end up using lots of salt and lots of sand to stop people from killing themselves. So we've been mulling this over for years on how to solve this problem. And we thought about doing things like heated cement, right? Like you can pour a new sidewalk, you can pour new front steps that literally have heating coils in them and you can have them heated and you can melt the snow and the ice that way. But what we've eventually decided with the help of our architect friend is to put in our ramp and the ramp will be right next to the front of the house. So it'll be mostly covered by the eaves, the overhang of the roof. - Why are we at ramp? - It's gonna cover the ramp. - Are you gonna be at a wheelchair soon? - What's with the ramp and not stairs? - It's, I think if you're gonna do something, a ramp is always better because yes, like when I'm 80 years old and I need a wheelchair to get into the house. - One trick of course. - Yeah, then this is the way to go. - As opposed to those combustion wheelchairs, which are really annoying. - So yeah, I suppose we could have just put a sidewalk at the front of the house and then had steps again that are covered by the eaves. But anyway, we decided to do a ramp and we're gonna do it with rammed earth. So we're gonna build a wall of rammed earth that's gonna be about 12 or 15 feet long. It'll be run parallel to the front of the house and then the ramp is gonna be behind that covered by the overhang. So our friend who's the architect, he's doing the cottage plans for us. He's never done a rammed earth building before. - So he was out there himself in the overalls. I've seen the pictures, opposed to the few on Twitter and the rest on Patreon for our members on there. - Yeah. - And he's doing it himself. Like, that's impressive. - Yeah. And it's one of the nice things about rammed earth. In many ways, it's a very simple technology. Like you get these materials together of the sand, the dirt and the cement and you just pound the crap out of it. - You make a wooden farm first, which you did wonderfully well. I would hire him as a carpenter any day. - Yeah. - And it just looks perfect and it's just-- - But we use that to hold up the material and you create a pattern in it, right? You use it for materials to create a pattern? - Yeah, you do it in layers. So each layer tends to be a slightly different color and you gotta make sure the form is really strong. Like the danger could be that it bows outwards, but he took the first one off. It only bode like by a millimeter or something. So he was super happy with that. But yeah, the problem is there's only two or three rammed earth buildings in the entire province of Saskatchewan where we live. So there's not a lot of experienced people to do it. So what, he went out to the west coast and studied with the masters. - This guy is going the extra mile literally for you. - Well, we gave him other options. We said, well, look, this rammed earth thing, it might be too difficult. Do you wanna build the house out of something else? And no, he was set on doing rammed earth. I did a documentary. - He must think though that he's going to do this again, right? Not just for you, but this could be a thing now. - Yeah, that absolutely, if this turns out well, but I did it. - Maybe in a public building or something large, could do that and you could call it sustainable and show it off. - Yeah, but I made a documentary a few years ago, a short five minute film about Joseph Pettig who's like a famous local architect from around here and I was able to interview him and, you know, I talked to him about, he did some really outrageous buildings early in his career in the '50s and '60s. And I just always remember a thing that he says in that documentary, which is like I asked him, do you ever have, did you get opposition to these unusual building designs that you're doing? And he said, well, things were different for architects back then, people listened to us. So I think, you know, we need to listen to architects more and he, you know, he wants to do the Ramd Earth so I think that's the way to go. So yeah, it seemed like it was going to be too expensive to bring out the guys from the West Coast to build it. - So basically that's how far you have to go because the West Coast is at least a two day drive, right? It's a long ways away. - And that's where the experts are, that's where, that's where most of the Ramd Earth buildings are on the West Coast of Canada. So the plan is, yeah, he took the workshop. And so this wall that's gonna have a ramp behind it, it's about a three foot wall. And yeah, that's kind of the pilot project. So yeah, he's doing it in four sections. The first section is complete. He took the forms off and it looked perfect. Everything was great. The second section has now been pounded and he's still got the forms on it. He's probably gonna take those off today, check that out. And then it's gonna have a slight L shape at the end of it. So he's doing a curve, like it'll be a right angle on part of it. And then, but the inside of the small L is gonna have a little curve on it. So I'm not sure how he's gonna- - Oh, bending some. - He's gonna have to bend some plywood or something like that. I'm, we're gonna find out. But so he's doing the wall in four sections. He's doing all the work himself. He's pounding the crap out of it. He doesn't even have an electric, he can get electric pounders that are kind of like- - Pounders or vibrators. - It's like a vibrator. Yeah, I don't know what they call them. But he's just using a cast iron pipe with a little flat part on the end of it. And he's just, he's pounding it all himself. And each section takes him about like six hours to do the pounding for. - Wow, he is really dedicated. - Yeah. - So I'm curious, do you know anything about the other rammed hearth buildings? Like who'd made them in this province if nobody's making them? Was it like- - Yeah, I mean, I remember, I googled them a couple of years ago. They're sort of like a farm property. I think there's one house in Saskatoon. So, you know, you can find out who made them, but they're not necessarily people that are doing this full-time. So- - What you would prefer is people who were had experience doing this. And yours is gonna be the guinea pig project, but at least you started on your front step project. - Yeah, and that's why this wall seemed like a really good idea because, you know, it's, so far it's going great. So that will, you know, presumably give us the confidence to go ahead with the whole cottage thing. - And when does he think he might do that? Do you have any updated timelines for us? - Yeah, the hope is next summer. We'll start building it next summer, summer of 2025. - So you gotta get a demo crew in there? - Yeah, you know, we have to get plans in that have to be approved. It's in a provincial park. So there's specific rules about building. So we haven't submitted the plans yet, but you have to submit the plans, get them approved, and they won't even let you tear down your current cottage until those plans are approved. - Okay, have you talked to your neighbors about how long that process is? 'Cause they both rebuilt there. - No, I'm not sure. But, you know, the other thing about it, of course, is forest fires because we were speaking of that just a few weeks ago, it's in a forest. So with the increase in forest fires, the place could burn down. So I would think that rammed earth would be a good fire-resistant material. - Well, hopefully they're not ignorant about anything, but yeah, I would drop an email to your neighbors and say, "How long did it take to go through that process?" And by the way, during your whole explanation, I just noticed you shaved. Do you have an explanation for that? Just decided to do something different. - Okay, okay. - Well, it threw me. I couldn't figure out what it was. (laughing) There was something different. All right, well, that's very interesting. We're gonna keep tabs on that and maybe put some behind the scenes stuff up from time to time. My son has been riding an electric bus and he's been complaining about it. This is up in Saskatoon, where he goes to school. He's been taking the bus to school and he says the electric bus seats are plastic and he just slides around like a crazy person because they're untextured plastic and he thinks it's a design choice and not a choice for weight, but who knows? Because you want electric vehicles to be light, but-- - To be light, yeah. - And maybe that's just the way they're making buses nowadays 'cause they're easy to clean, maybe in a couple of holes and no leather, but yeah, he says they're uncomfortable and he slides around and he's getting really annoyed by it. Couple of days ago, we had a wind warning here where we lived, 100 kilometer an hour winds, we had 97 kilometer here and up to 107, which is, is on hurricane force. If you're listening in Florida or evacuating and listening to our show, that's not really gonna be anything comparable to that, but it does get strong here and when it does get that strong thing break. Like we had a light pull down the street break. - Yeah, yeah. - And that wasn't that long ago. Like it just, it bent over and hit a pine tree and if the pine tree wasn't there, it would have hit the house. So I had my wife call my son because he's an engineer, he worked for the city. Like, what's the process? I didn't know what the process was. And yeah, but apparently they had my wife on the city and they had a lot of complaints about it and they didn't do anything for a couple of days. That, you know, people die from light posts like that when it falls on them. - No, I heard that actually some cars got crushed by a light pull in our city. - Is that right? Well, this was lucky that it was, the wind was blowing it into the tree 'cause it would have come over and, you know, we live in a fairly open area here part of the city anyway. I wondered what, because I just went to Saskatoon, the city, you know, a bit major city that we go to, that's about two and a half hours away. I plugged it into a better route planner to see, since I still have a subscription with live weather inputs to see what it would be like going to the wind. It wasn't bad. I had to stop and charge for 10 minutes halfway, but it wasn't like, you know, undoable into the wind. It was just like a-- - And it wasn't like a headwind? - It was a headwind. Mostly a headwind, yeah. It was from the Northwest when we get nasty weather and Saskatoon is the Northwest direction from here. So, but on the way back, it was the same. It wouldn't have been any different, basically. The wind affects you a little bit, but it doesn't do much to boost you because of, I don't know, there's reasons for it, but-- - Yeah, well, we discussed it a couple of years ago. - There's basically about 30% area, 30 degree area behind the back of your car, where if you're getting that tailwind, it helps you. - Yeah. - But only if it's gotta be kind of directly behind you or it doesn't help you. - Yeah, but it wasn't hurting, so that was good. I just thought I'd do that. And I was watching the DW documentary. The DW is the German public broadcaster, so they've put in a lot of content on YouTube on a city called Chanchang in China, and it was just focused on the nightlife. Now, Chanchang is one of the biggest cities in China that nobody's heard of. We don't talk about that, do we? 'Cause it's not a binary fashioning center. It's kind of in the central part of the country on the river, but it's away from the political power, so the LGBTQ community is thriving there, but they weren't allowed to video that or interview people 'cause they don't want anyone outside of China to think that anything's less than perfect and what they think is perfect. So yeah, and there was a rock band that couldn't be recorded because they criticized the government, but they could exist. Both things could exist just fine. That's not the point. I thought it was quite interesting because the city is layers deep. Maybe some of our listeners know about it, but it is layers deep. So a delivery person delivering food, which is common there, even the locals get lost because there's like six, there can be six layers before you get to another ground floor. There can be a road down here, and then you gotta go up six stories, and then there's the first floor of something. It's hard to explain, but there are different layers to it, and in a way that's a good thing because you can thrive there, but there's a vibrant nightlife, and a lot of the people there, and this is a Chinese cultural thing, are live streaming on the street. They're hawking beauty tips, and they have to do it on the street. I don't know why, but it's a thing to, so if you look at the street, there was a guy who owned a German, he was a German immigrant, and he had a sausage shop, and a sausage restaurant, and he spent four to six hours a day live streaming about his sausage just to make money, because that's how he made money. So yeah, and there was a bunch of other people doing the same thing on that street, so I thought that was certainly unusual. And he also, you know, we don't think about it, but there's very few foreigners in China, and I can't imagine a society with just, you know, us, people who look like us, like we live in a very multicultural society, and that's a good thing, I think. But in there, it's like if you're a German, you stand out like a sore thumb, and you're a novelty, and people wanna touch you, like it's just like that happened to you in China, right? You went to Beijing. - That's right, our film that James and I made played at the Beijing Film Festival, and I went with my partner, and yeah, people wanted to take their pictures with us just because they had never seen. - Yeah, there must have been a lot of Western tourists of the places that you were. You were, you got historic sites of those. - Yeah, not that many. Yeah, not a lot of white people there, no. - Wow, so you were a novelty. Just like you are in this show in some ways. Wow, yeah, but the reason why I mentioned it is because there was this interesting economy of people who have e-bikes, those folding e-bikes like you have, they're small and they grow to larger size when you pull up the seat and handle bars. - Yeah. - But you can fold them down and then fold them in half and put them in a trunk. There is that whole business of people riding those e-bikes to where somebody drunk is, putting that e-bike in their trunk and driving them home in their car from an event or from a restaurant or wherever they're driving. At three in the morning, the nightlife goes to dawn, pretty much in that city, it's a vibrant nightlife city. And that's a thing, so. - Right, did they take the bike out? - They take the bike out and go back to the next client or they go back to the waiting station. - Well, that's what I did when I got my car cleaned by the detail geek a few years ago. - Was that right? - You took a deep bike with you. - I put my folding bike in the trunk, I dropped off the car, hopped on the bike and rode her home. - Well, if you had to have your car in for servicing or what else does a person have to do where you have to wait, it looks like that. - And we still have a problem around here of people drinking and driving. I don't know how people have not gotten the memo in the year 2024, but more options to stop people from drinking and driving, that sounds great. - Yeah, we have electric scooters here, which seem to be used, although one person was killed up in Saskatoon by potentially a drunk driver or in the time of the day. But you're not, you know, the fact that you're driving a scooter drunk is not a good thing either because of the motorized vehicle, but that's beside the flight. - Okay, so we've talked about this before on the show, quite a bit, New York City. And that's had a problem with bike battery fires. So lithium-ion batteries that you would find in cars or bicycles can catch on fire. And we spend a lot of time saying, okay, look, the risk way lower than like a gasoline car burning. But it is a real problem, especially in a place like New York City where everything is so densely populated. So if there is a bike fire, it could be in an apartment building that has hundreds or even thousands of people living in it. So people have died from fire started by electric bicycle batteries. And this tends to happen with the cheaper products. - Right, from China. - With the cheaper batteries. - Yeah. - That are not there. You can get a lot of e-bikes and e-bike parts when China at a quite a lower rate, but, you know, I just wanna remind people, if you do have any bike battery, they often don't have expensive chargers for them that shut off, that you have to shut them off. Once they are charging, you have to shut them off. - You gotta unplug it. - I can set a reminder for you so that you can unplug the charger 'cause that is what were the problem-wise in defective batteries that are charged constantly. And then, yeah, you actually can't do that if your manual tells you to unplug, please unplug. - Yeah, so in New York City, they've been trying to solve this problem and it sounds like they've made a lot of progress. What they're doing, so they've implemented a ban on mobility devices sold with batteries that are not UL compliant. This is a safety standard. - And they can be quite expensive to get certified by UL. - Yeah, so they implemented this ban, but then they have to enforce it. So they've actually had city inspectors that are going into e-bike stores and battery repair shops, and they're helping to enforce this ban on batteries that are not UL compliant. The ones that are still out there are still out there, but they've done a very good job of stopping any new sales or certainly reduce the availability and so the new ones being sold are better. So the other thing they did, major educational programs that have encouraged city residents to charge their batteries safely, meaning either outdoors or in fire protected areas, such as specially designed charging boxes instead of in the living room of their apartments. They've partnered with multiple third party battery cabinet companies. So this is a thing, cabinets to store bikes and to charge them and or offer battery swapping kind of things. If it's in a cabinet, a locking cabinet, you can take a battery out. A lot of electric bikes have batteries that are replaceable, removal. - Yeah, but I wouldn't want to do that. I mean, it's making it sound pretty bad here, but I wouldn't do that. I have occasionally charged my battery on the stove, which is a glass cooktop, a flat glass cooktop with a range hood over top. So if there was any flames that would go to the range hood, like a cooking fire would and hopefully, but I'm not worried about it. Like it's, I've had it for years and I've never, it's been over four years, four and a half years now and I've never, never heated up, never worried about it. And it's not UL listed, but I can see how that would be important. - Yeah. And, you know, people have died. So this is not, you know, they're not fooling around. So, so far in 2024, they have reduced the number of fatalities from these bicycle battery fires and hopefully soon they can get those down to zero. - And that's just by being more strict about what people buy. Maybe meet people are more conscious because it was in the news that people were dying from bicycle fires, but then these things are really taking off. There's all kinds of them now. - Yeah. - I see them here even like you can't, you can't go for a drive with a scene one or two of them. - No, especially in a place like New York City, where car ownership is less likely and people take more public transit and bicycles, et cetera. - Right. Well, that's good to hear. So you and I, we made a bonus video for the our Patreon, which we kicked off last week. And I want to thank everyone who joined our Patreon. We are quite touched that few people jumped on board right away and are helping us out. Membership and Patreon gets you free stuff and we had to come up with what would we give back to people who supported the show? And we decided we would give a monthly bonus podcast and you had the idea of testing out your full self-driving beta software in your model, Tesla Model Y. We haven't, we did a test once before, but it was two and a half years ago now, I think. - Yeah, about that. - So we wanted to see, it didn't do very well. It was a rainy day in the spring and it tried to drive us into a construction hall, as I recall, and didn't deal with lines on the roads, but it will play a short clip from that. It got to a rough start taking off going down my street 'cause you came over to where I lived, picked me up. And I live in a four lane boulevard and with not too much on there, but it still did some weird things. You have to actually hit it while you're driving. - Yeah. - So we're now engaged. And it's going very slowly at first. Oh, now it's deciding it's going too fast now. Okay. - Okay, and the camera kind of tilted back a bit there. - Yeah, it, we're now going under the speed limit, but it did accelerate kind of quick. - Why do you think it went under the speed limit? - I don't know, it's very now, it's weird. I don't like that. - It has more human-like characteristics. So now we approach the speed limit and we're slowing down fairly abruptly. And where is it taking us? - It wants us to take us on a different route. - Okay. - I assumed it was going to, that's kind of concerning. - Yeah, and it's really taking off. That's holy fuck. - So we can hold on to the camera so it doesn't tilt backwards anymore. - Now what? It's slowing down to 23. We're on a four lane sort of boulevard. And now it's speeding up, why is it doing this? - Yeah, it was actually a bit erratic, just because there were some recycling bins on the side of the road. They weren't, you know, impeding the road, I didn't think. - Yeah, I'm not sure what it is, but it is a human-like behavior. Like if you're a human and you're driving a car, you don't immediately accelerate to the speed limit and then stay at the speed limit and slow down, which is how it used to behave more, but now it's more human-like. And sometimes humans drive slower and sometimes they drive faster. So that's what it seems to be doing. - Well, we didn't understand the decision of why it was driving slower, but it was. And you can adjust the acceleration. I had it on maximum. - Yeah, which is very disconcerting as a passenger to sort of get thrown back and the cameras getting thrown back. And you brought out your fancy, fancy camera equipment and lenses for this project, which you can find on Patreon and our Patreon members of the Clean Club and above have been able to see this great video that we made. And I must say we made two trips that day and have it all on video. And there was no disengagements, none. - Yeah. - So did you at any time as the driver think that we were close to a disengagement at any point? 'Cause somebody actually, we came across some unusual things, right? A person, a pedestrian was trying to cross a busy street and came out of nowhere and the car sawed, right? - Yeah, that was the closest. There was two pedestrian incidents and that's where I was closest to hitting the brake. Like I had my foot ready to hit the brake. That's where I was closest, but in both cases, I never had to. - So it was pretty impressive in a situation where the roads weren't marked with delineating, marking where the parking lane was. So it looked like it was a big wide lane too at the first time we did it and it was driving in the middle of the parking lane, half of the parking lane, half of the first lane. This time, in the same situation, it knew to stay to the left. So, and aside from unusual slowdowns at first, it drove pretty well through most of our tests. We went to 7-Eleven, the same place we went to last time and then we went to the university and it took us right into the 7-Eleven parking lot, I should point out, which was surprising to you, right? - Yeah, I wasn't sure what it was gonna do and I don't typically use it. So if I was using it more often, I would probably know that. But yeah, big improvement over two and a half years ago. - Well, apparently this has a research firm that Electric reported on has a intervention every 13 miles. Now, that's about 21 kilometers and both of our trips are probably under that for what it's worth. - It'd be combined, it might've been around that. - Yeah, Waymo can intervene with human operators and a Tesla fanboys are often pointing out that Waymo has remote control operators, but I think that Tesla's gonna need those too if it's gonna operate robo-taxis. 'Cause whatever reasons that Waymo's gonna get stuck somewhere in a weird situation and a dead end or something, I don't see why the Teslas aren't going to react better than that, like they're gonna need some sort of remote control operation or some guy's gonna have to run out there at an e-bike and fix it because-- - Now, we talked about that it was a couple of years ago that was a story working on self-driving semi-trucks and yeah, they had worked out this extensive remote control operation center where they could have a room full of people monitoring each truck and trained like a simulator, like a driving simulator, but with real trucks. Because the Tesla software, they're already connected to the internet all the time. It seems like something they might be able to implement with the software that exists. - So it has to be live and it has to be on 5G, I think, and sometimes 5G goes down and that causes Waymo problems when that happens, when the 5G is interfered with. - Well, I do think that's possible, but I think in California too, like it's a law that if you're in a test self-driving vehicles, you have to have remote control intervention. And you know, I don't know what it is in other places, but I know that's the law in California. So once they do actually get regulatory approval to start testing Robotaxes, and that could be a while, we'll see Forbes says, there's one big problem, Tesla doesn't have a Robotaxes system. So if you wanna have a Robotaxes system, you need an app like Uber and Uber has been refined over what, you know, almost 15 years now. And it works very well. Waymo, that is the Google affiliated company or sub company that is doing the biggest progress in North America on self-driving and has 100,000 passengers per week driving in vehicles without a driver. He says, this commentator in Forbes says, "It's not even close, while some reviewers have infused their amoration for Tesla's ability to complete entire trips without needing an intervention. It can only do this a few times in a row." And that's where Waymo was around 2014. And now in 2024, Waymo is just starting to scale up and is not yet in production with a commercial service. Yeah, it's kind of a beta service. And yeah, the Waymo app, you can just, there's several cities where you can go in the United States to try that out. Some advocates would have mistakenly think that they are further along because their driver assist FSD supervised, runs supervised on most roads, but a taxi service inherently has a service area. Waymo's cars could almost certainly drive much better than a Tesla's on all roads if Waymo wanted to make them do that, but they have no reason to do that. So they have geo-limited, geo-fenced the area where the Waymo's go. Tesla has done impressive things, but they are still very far from the target. And we talk about this because on Thursday, it's Tuesday when we're recording this, Thursday there's the big RoboTaxi reveal event. So we don't know what's going to happen there if it's just a vehicle or if they're going to talk about their service, their software, what's going on with it or what their timelines are, maybe forgetting regulatory applications and to actually test this without a driver. A working RoboTaxi has to travel with no supervision and do Tesla's complete drive 50,000 times in a row, as Waymo does, not just a few times in a row. Waymo, like I said, is doing 100,000 paid driverless rides per week now, and they are getting stuck. There's been instances of it blocking a fire station, that's bad, but at least the Waymo operators can overtake the car. Uber users in Austin and Atlanta will be able to hail Waymo RoboTaxi through the app in early 2025. So Waymo's partnering with Uber to use their excellent app that has been developed over 15 years in the way that riders like to use it. And it's sort of been updated to what the riders' preferences are. Let's dip it to the mailbag. Chucks on us a note again about the European Union moving towards increasing tariffs on Chinese-made EVs. Bloomberg writes that EU countries voted on Friday to impose the tariffs with 10 member states and favor, favor, five against and 12 abstaining. So that's actually-- They didn't have abstaining. So they didn't want us-- Annoy the Chinese? Annoy the Chinese because they had big deals with them. And yeah. So the Chinese Ministry of Commerce said the tariffs will rattle the confidence of Chinese enterprises investing in Europe that proposed duties on EVs built in China are up to 45%, but it's still a lot less than 100% we have in North America and Canada and the United States. They would cost car makers billions of dollars to bring cars into the block, the European block. And I said, imposed next month for five years, the commission, which oversees the block's trade policy, has said the tariffs would counter what it sees as unfair Chinese subsidies after a year-long anti-subsidy investigation. And I've got a story in the lightning round about how much the United States is subsidizing electric car manufacturing. So it's pretty shocking. We'll get to that later. It said on Friday, however, that it would bring-- it would continue talks with Beijing, and that story was from the Guardian. And the link will be there for you. We do love to hear from our listeners. Brian, please contact us by email cleanenergeshowgmail.com or listen, leave us a voicemail at speakpipe.com/cleannergeshow. And you know, you could become a clean club member, and the links are in your show notes and get special material and early access. OK, so this is from Energy News Network. Good news for heat pumps in Massachusetts. The public utility regulators in Massachusetts have ordered utilities to adopt a special electricity rate for people who heat their homes with a heat pump. So this is going to be a seasonal rate. One of the barriers to adoption of heat pumps is that if you're in a place where the electricity is kind of expensive and the natural gas is kind of cheap, well, guess what? It will cost you more to heat your home with a heat pump, and that's what I'm experiencing here. But I was expecting that in a frigid place like this. It would be difficult to make it cheaper than natural gas at least right now. Because the heat pump probably works to a certain temperature, and then it becomes inefficient electric heating. Yeah, and a backup resistive heaters. So what they considered was just a lower rate on everything, including like there are people that have just regular resistive electric heaters in their homes to heat them, and those are very inefficient. But it's like 20% even around here, I heard, like a stat, which doesn't make sense because I guess sort of mine is 40 here, and that would be very expensive. Like our cottage has the $25 furnace that my dad bought, but then we also have electric baseboard heaters in a couple of the rooms to try and, you know, 'cause there's basically no insulation to try and help that out. So that's one thing, some people have them as kind of supplemental heat like if a certain room gets cold. So they had thought about including everybody, but instead they made it specifically to do with heat pumps. People with heat pumps get this rate because they want to encourage heat pumps. They don't want to encourage people using resistive heat because that's so inefficient. So this is similar to a plan approved for the utility unitil. That's a smaller utility that serves 100,000 people. They got a similar plan approved. So this one is for a larger utility, 1.3 million households in Massachusetts, and they're gonna get a lower seasonal rate if they use a heat pump. So this is only gonna be for the winter. The rates will return to normal in the summer. So if you're using that same heat pump to cool your house, you won't get the same break. - Well, that's the first time I've heard of something like this. It seems like a good idea. - Yeah, and it is a big mental barrier to realize, oh crap, if I do the clean energy thing and move to a heat pump instead of natural gas, it's gonna be expensive upfront and it's actually gonna cost me more on a monthly basis. That's a hard pill to swallow and it's gonna just depend on where you are in many, many places. The monthly bill is just gonna be lower with a heat pump anyway, like natural gas isn't always cheaper on the West Coast particularly, like Washington State and British Columbia here in Canada. I think heat pumps are a great idea. It doesn't get super cold and it will be cheaper than already then heating your home in natural gas. - Yeah, and most of the population of Canada lives in a place where heat pumps are perfectly good to use in that area, right? But I wonder about the prairies of Canada where we live where you realize that your heat pump can't keep up and it becomes the electric furnace kicks in and it's inefficient, but yet there's gonna be a change in government, but we do want heat pumps to come in and have clean electricity, which we're not doing where we live stupidly, but the option is there to do it and to heat with heat pump technology. And that would be one way to get people to do it as heat pumps improved. They are now working at colder and colder temperatures. I worry that they're not going to work on too much development because not too many people live where we live, but I'm hopeful. - So my best estimate, I think it's gonna cost me $600 more per year to heat my house than with natural gas, about $600, like each sort of cold month, another kind of $50 a month. So I decided to go ahead and do that, but if there was some kind of a break on my electricity bill that saved me about $600, then yeah, that would be great. - So you live in a, what, a 60 year old house or so and it's had not great insulation. You've tried to upgrade it the best you can. Are you still working on that? You still-- - Yeah, we've done lots of upgrades, particularly in the ceiling. We should do more and could do more, but it seems to be enough for now. - Okay, well, there is a hurricane heading towards Florida. Hurricane Milton was briefly a category five, but as we record this, it is a category four. It is, I think going to hit Florida as a four or even a three, but it is a massive hurricane and it is pointed itself right at the Tampa area, at last we heard. Mass evacuations are occurring on Tuesday morning gas stations. Brian, we're already running out of gas and you have basically another 24 hours before you have to definitely get out and already they're out of gas as people wanted, they're hoarding the gas, even the people who are not leaving. So you live in a high rise. You just wanna make sure you have gas, just like the toilet paper thing. Everybody's hoarding it and it doesn't even need it necessarily. So yeah, a thousand gas stations had run out of gas as of 11 a.m. Eastern. That's what CNN was reporting. A thousand Florida gas stations have run out of gas and I'm guessing that they're all in the same area. They're not down to Miami where there's not much of a fear of anything happening. So I have a clip here and I gotta play it. It includes a Uber driver talking about it and a bit of a news report. - In addition to those evacuations, folks are also dealing with stocking up on things like gasoline and supplies that they need. And this is what folks in areas there along the Gulf and your Fort Myers are dealing with. You're seeing those long lines at the gas stations and look at the shelves inside this Walmart. - All right guys, there's no gas in Lakewood Ranch. This is scary. All right guys, so I'm looking on the Uber app and there's like really high paying rate right now. You could probably make, I don't know, $100 and two hours on Uber easily. How am I, if I don't have gas, how am I gonna be able to drive Uber's? - Well, if you had an electric Uber, sir, you would be able to go ahead because the power is not out until the hurricane actually arrives and when it does, you know, no one's gonna want to go anywhere, hopefully, you're not gonna want to take them. - And electric goobers are becoming a lot more common than there's programs from Uber to actually electrify their fleet, right? - Yeah, as an Uber driver, you're gonna, you know, usually make more money with an electric Uber 'cause you don't have to pay for gas. - Right, and I think there's even an upcharge for an electric Uber or at least there was this green option in Lyft and Uber. Yeah, I've considered doing it, I might have to, one day. Some of that are be a Walmart greeter and I don't think I can stand in my feet now, so. Yeah, they'll be able to operate right up until the storm hits, hopefully they'll keep their electric vehicles away from flood waters, if you can, as you would attempt with any car. I mean, while electric car owners woke up with a full tank this morning, if you had plugged in and if you lived in a home or at a condo where you could plug in, you would have woken up with a full tank. You have not been thinking about going to a gas station at all, so that's good, that's an advantage for an electric car owners, but what about when the power goes out and for two weeks, that could happen, that's what they're warning. Well, you can't pump gas when the power is out. A lot of people don't realize that and then there's still shortages and there's still lineups 'cause then they have to ship the gas there. And now some gas stations have been told to put in generators, backup generators, so they'll need gasoline for that and then they run out and that could be a problem. In terms of fuel, now I know there's been a lot of lines at gas stations, you obviously have an inordinate demand for fuel much more than what typically happened. What's happening is there's long lines, the gas stations run out of fuel, but the fuel supply is available, so then they ask for more fuel to be brought and so what we're doing is we've authorized Florida highway patrols to escort with the sirens and they get their quicker major fuel trucks. So we've had 43 fuel trucks that have already been escorted by Florida Highway Patrol to deliver fuel to stations, particularly in the anticipated impact area. We're also working with companies like Circle K Gate, Racetrack, Wawa Shell and Walmart to ensure fuel trucks are working 24/7 to keep fuel delivered as it climbs into our ports. - In the future, I believe that you'll be able to power your home with your EV. I mean, that's already starting with programs from Ford and others, basically vehicle to home, or you can plug in your electric vehicle, say a pickup truck and power your home for a week or two, if you are efficient at it. And even if you run out, you could possibly be able to drive to a location that you've determined has power and charge up and bring that power back home to your house and run your refrigerator again when that happens. Tesla charging, this is the X slash Twitter account of Tesla charging, they've put out a post on the hurricane, Milton, it says if charging at home charged to 100%, the live status and availability of superchargers are in the vehicle's touchscreen or the Tesla app. So if, you know, chargers are gonna fill up, that's gonna be a problem, especially for people evacuating. So you can see that and see where the, maybe the slower or more free Tesla chargers are. Access types for other EVs are on the Find us map. So if you're, you know, driving a non Tesla, you can now charge up at a Tesla charger if you afford a Rivian or GM. Pre hurricane, we are focused on uptime of superchargers. Post hurricane, we will be focused on restoration and are prepared to deploy mobile superchargers powered by mega packs, where access to charging is most impacted. So they on a massive scale can bring the power to where there's blackouts. - Yeah, they have superchargers that are basically like a semi truck with a giant battery on it. And those can be deployed and have been deployed in certain situations. And I would point out some of the same things that apply to electric cars apply to electric bicycles as well. If you have the opportunity before the hurricane to charge your electric bike to 100%, that's a great idea as well. You wanna try and keep them on higher ground if you can, like you don't want your car or your electric bike submerged in water for too long, that is a danger for battery fires. But even if you just are able to maybe use your electric bike battery to charge your phone or something, like it. - Which I can and I could do for a month, I think. - Yeah, probably. - The whole family, I could charge up their phones from my electric bike battery, which is just an average electric bike battery. Yeah, it's got a USB port on it. So that's, we've done that. We haven't had really long power outages, but we have done that. And it's been nice to have, 'cause it's always there, right? It's always got some charge at at least 60, 80%. - Yeah, no, and I've charged my phone from my laptop as well. Like just, like if there's a power outage for too long, it's like, oh, my phone's getting a little low. Well, my laptop has a pretty big battery, and I can just charge my phone from that. All right, so from the guardian risk of winter blackouts in Great Britain, the lowest in four years, even after closing their coal power plants. So we've reported on that super big deal. There are no longer any coal power plants in the UK. - Now this makes me mad because the Petro provinces where we live, say the power's good to go out if we don't use our fossil fuels, and your house will freeze and the water will break it, and this is what's gonna happen when you go out for lunch. - But of course, this is not true, and they always do seasonal forecasting for power utilities, and the seasonal forecasting for Great Britain says the winter blackout risk for this winter is the lowest in four years, and this is because of all the other things that have been added to the grid. And of course, they wouldn't have shut down these coal power plants if there wasn't other power coming in to fill the gap. And guess what, that power has come, and they expect the grid to be more reliable this winter in Great Britain rather than less. - In other words, the opposite of what you hear on Facebook is the actual truth. And from Renew Economy, another quick story here, one of Australia's oldest coal generators has been refused bank loans. And so this is a power plant called the Vales Point B in New South Wales. This is a coal power plant that was scheduled to close in 2029, but last year they announced that they're gonna extend that out to 2033 when it's gonna be a 50 year old plant. But guess what, I don't know, they can't get any bank loans because nobody wants to loan to them because they're burning coal. And we all know that that's not the best. And it's a thing that is complained about a lot that fossil fuel companies are often being enabled by banks. And so I thought I would report on this story where it seems to be coming to an end, at least for coal, which is a fairly low hanging fruit as far as the fossil fuel industry goes. (soft music) - It's time for the lightning round. - The lightning round is a fast paced look at the latest headlines in climate, mean energy and transportation. - A newly published study examining property values near dozens of large Midwest solar farms has found no significant negative impact and even a slight positive effect from the projects according to the data. That is prices of property. That's another thing, that's a myth that if you live near a solar farm, your prices will go down. Opposite is true, slightly true. Academic paper says the IRA EV tax credit costs tax payers in the United States an extra 32,000 for every V sold. EVs are costing the taxpayers money because they're throwing all kinds of money into battery plants and subsidies. So, yeah, I don't know, that's a subsidy. That's a big subsidy, 32,000. - Well, it was always a huge thing when the IRA was announced that it was always gonna be a massive, massive spin. - And it was to compete with China so that they didn't have all of the power and all of the economic benefits from this transition. - And hopefully it'll turn out to be money well spent. - The battery infrastructure is currently growing at three times faster than the solar industry is growing. And that is in a way not surprising because it needs to catch up. It's got a lot of catching up to do and battery prices have hit a certain inflection point where that can happen. And also it's proven, it's been around long enough that grid batteries are now proven. Records are being beaten daily in August 2024 for the first time, Chinese battery factories passed the 100 gigawatt hour production mark in August. That's incredible. - From ourstechnica.com, neighbors of a Bitcoin mining operation are suing over noise. Humb from a 300 megawatt facility. That is a third of a nuclear reactor. Just for Bitcoin mining in one location. As allegedly causing stress and lack of sleep, Grand Valley, Texas is where this is happening. Red incidents can hear the sound of money being made at all hours of the day. Paris planted 150,000 trees in this CS fast fact in the last 10 years and created 45 hectares of parks in that timeframe, good for them. Indonesia has plenty to develop five gigawatts of wind by 2030. That's not double their current plan, Brian. But it's 10 times their current plan. Yes, we predicted from day one that things like this would happen because of the economics of that situation that people would smarten up, perhaps even listen to our show. Renewables have reached a new peak in Australia delivering 74% of electricity nationwide. Wow, no coal, the coal's not ruling anymore. The International Agency, Energy Agency in 2010 said this, solar will become competitive at utility scale in the sunniest regions of the world by 2030 and provide 5% of global electricity by then. Well, last year, not this year, last year, the world was at 5.5%. It had shot beyond their 2030 predictions seven years in advance and is already growing more than 23 prediction and growing rapidly, rapidly, rapidly. A referendum in Kazakhstan was held on Sunday and an exit poll showed that 72% of respondents are in favor of building a nuclear power plant. According to the state run a newswire, a Kazakh form, you can find that on Bloomberg, battery energy storage market in India is on the cusp of unprecedented growth the next five years will witness a transformative shift. In India's energy, there's a story on that in PV magazine. In the last 20 years, 44 hectares of Paris car parking has been transformed, making room for wider sidewalks, bikes, buses, and bike racks, EV spots, accessible space and 2.2,000, 2.2,000, 2,200 will call it, new patios, terraces for outdoor dining, 90% of trips to the city are via walking, biking, and transit that is in central Paris, the old part. Heating oil, use dropped 6% in Maine in 2023 as 100,000 oil fired home heaters were replaced with electric heat pumps. Another 170,000 heat pumps are planned for installation in Maine by as early as 2027. Nearly 3.5 million people in the United States now work in the clean energy sector. According to a new report and with more than 1 million of those jobs in states across the South, will they appreciate it? I don't know. And finally this week, a major new report on what the authors describes the world's vital signs are being published in the journal Bioscience and presents a grim picture of where the planet is headed. The assessment was prepared by some of the world's top climate scientists and builds on a previous analysis backed by more than 15,000 scientists. I entitled the 2024 State of the Climate Report perilous times, the assessment found that 25 out of 35 of the measurements used to track the planet's climate risk from ocean temperatures to tree cover loss or at record levels. Quote, "We are in the brink "of an irreversible climate disaster the authors wrote. "This is a global emergency beyond any doubt. "But Brian, at the same time, the report also found "surprising signs of progress "that experts say point to a path forward." Glimbers of hope, there are signs of progress. What did you see there? Well, they're talking about things that are going up and things that are going down. And what's going down is the forest loss and the Brazilian forest. So that is some progress according to the authors of this report. They're also saying that there is an increase in solar and wind energy consumption. Here's more on why that's a positive sign right now. You're absolutely moving in the right direction. It is so heartening. We are certainly in progress. We are undergoing the energy transition. I believe that it will happen. I believe that it will help. And people just need to know that what they're doing is helping. Yeah, so positive signs there in that climate report in spite of the doom. And it's all because of everything we talk about on this show, Brian. Sure, I mean, I won't take responsibility for it personally, but there are a lot of good things happening. And I love ending the show on a positive note like that. So that's it for this week. You can contact us cleanenergyshow@gmail.com around social media or clean energy pod. And there are videos of the show on TikTok and YouTube, including sometimes special content not featured on the podcast. And special thanks to our Patreon supporters, our members of Clean Club and Clean Club Plus and Clean Club Executive. Get their names mentioned on the show from time to time. We'll start that next week. If you're listening, we will do a shout out to the Clean Club executive members frequently and the club plus every month. So we also put a special material including that beta test of the software for Tesla's self-driving. That's up there in spectacular Brian Vision technology. Shot with real, cinemascope, anamorphic lenses. It's just crazy, it's just crazy. It's too good, it's too good is what it is. Yeah, so write and review this on Apple Podcast or Spotify. Thanks to the Clean Club executive mentor, Green Bastard for supporting us on Patreon. And give you this money every month. We're gonna do a shout out to you this week. And all the other members will have a credit in our YouTube podcast. If you're watching on YouTube, there it is right now. Yeah, so thanks everyone for supporting us on Patreon and we'll see you next week. See you next week. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music)
