[MUSIC PLAYING] After investing billions to light up our network, T-Mobile is America's largest 5G network. Plus, right now, you can switch, keep your phone, and we'll pay it off up to $800. See how you can save on every plan versus Verizon AT&T at tmobile.com/keepandswitch. Up to four lines via virtual prepaid card, a left 15 days qualifying unlocked device, credit, service, poured in 90-plus days with device ineligible carrier and timely redemption required. Card has no cash access and expires in six months. Hello, and welcome to episode 231 of The Clean Energy Show. I'm Brian Stockton. I'm James Woodingham. This week, public officials have warned EV owners in the path of Hurricane Helene to drive their vehicles to higher ground. We'll dig into the fire risk of electric vehicles and floods because nothing ruins a good hurricane like you're car going up in flames, Brian. California signs a new law that will make the grid smarter. Next up, massive changes to education. Once government officials realize they can just pass a law that makes everyone smarter. The world's most prominent solar analyst Jenny Chase has come out with her annual tweet storm on the state of solar. When you're in the solar business, throwing shade is part of the job. Meta, Facebook's parent company, is looking to clean up concrete. Concrete traditionally creates a lot of CO2 emissions and Facebook wants their AI data centers to be more green. As an added bonus, cement overshoes in the murder industry will also get cleaner. All that and more, this edition of The Clean Energy Show. And also this week's show, Ford will now give you a home charger with your vehicle and pay to have it installed in your home and they're doing it a little bit better than everyone else who does that or has done it. The Governor of California, Kiboshes is solar on schools program, and we will watch our Patreon membership program and announce the perks that our supporters will receive. - Well, that's fantastic. I can't wait to see what happens with that. - Yeah, it should be interesting. And I'm already feeling a community vibe from it, you know? The Patreon page might be the place to hang out in the future, we'll see. - Yeah. Okay, so I got back from Milwaukee. The show is a day late, and I said last week, I was a little worried. - We had a, I warned everybody, we had a tight connection in Minneapolis to catch our connecting flight. It was only an hour and a bit. And I thought, yeah, if anything goes a little bit wrong, we're gonna miss that flight. So, turns out, we got to our flight in plenty of time, and then WestJet canceled our flight. - Boom, WestJet. - And WestJet Air Canada, I complain about them a lot because they're terrible. But, you know, they're also fairly small airlines compared to some of the big ones around the world. So, the problem is, if they cancel your flight, the soon as they can get you home is two days because they just don't have enough flights to put everybody on. So, they wanted us to fly the next day through Edmonton in the evening, stay overnight in Edmonton, and then fly to Regina the next evening, coming home at about midnight Wednesday. So, if we had actually gone with that plan, I still wouldn't be home yet. We'd be in Edmonton right now, killing 24 hours. - Would the hotel be at your expense? - They have hotel vouchers and stuff, you know, that they said they were gonna do. But, anyway, we just canceled it, and we managed to get a flight on Air Canada through Toronto. So, we still had to fly two flights instead of one. Like, normally it would just be Minneapolis straight home to Regina. But, you know, there was one available, and it got us home yesterday afternoon in plenty of time. - Did you get a refund, or will you get a refund on your plane or how's that gonna work? - Well, you're supposed to get a refund? Like it says, you know, I don't know, sometimes they'll just give you credit. - Credit's not still good. - Yeah, given that it's all their fault, I'm hoping we get 100% refund, but it's in a way you're up to their mercy, and if they don't do what you want, you file a complaint. We did that once we filed a complaint about one of our canceled flights, and we never heard anything. We weren't on the ball enough to follow up. - Well, how was your trip overall, though? You had mental Milwaukee sounds exciting. Exactly, surprisingly exciting. You know, it's a swing state. Oh, isn't it? I didn't know that. - Wisconsin is a swing state. Well, you really are tuned out from the election. - Oh, yeah, no, I completely am, yeah. And I like it that way. - You know, the guy from the apprentice is running for president? The guy from the apprentice is running for president. I kid you not. - We're Canadian, we can't vote. And if we could vote, we would have decided to vote for roughly 10 years ago. So I am not interested in any of the debate that's going on, but yeah, Milwaukee is fabulous. I have tons to say about it. So much so, I think I'm going to save most of it for a bonus episode, which we're going to start doing now that we're launching our Patreon, because a lot of it's pretty far off topic of clean energy. So I'm going to just stick to the stuff right now that we saw in Milwaukee that relates to clean energy. - Sure. - First of all, not many EVs in Wisconsin, and I'm pretty sure I said that previously when we drove through there on our way to Indiana. It's just, I don't know, there's just way fewer than there are even here in the middle of the Canadian prairies. You just don't see a lot of EVs? - Well, it is an Northern state, so it's cold. - On our road trip, it was kind of south of Wisconsin where we started to see more EVs, but they do have some electric buses in Wisconsin in Milwaukee, which we saw driving around, which were nice and quiet, and that was great. They do have a bit of a streetcar system with electric streetcars, trolley cars. That was kind of interesting, but I don't think it's that big or that extensive. And they had public electric bike rentals, like they do in big cities where you can, they have a series of like 10 bikes parked, and you can, I don't know how it works, you get a membership or you put in a credit card or something, and you can rent bicycles, and these ones were also electric, which was cool. - That's nice, that's fairly progressive from the government's part, or the local government's part, maybe the city council is more progressive than the state government, I don't know. - Yeah. - Right as, right as tell us, if we're wrong. - Oh, and if we have any listeners from Milwaukee, let us know, but, so the Milwaukee Documentary Film Festival just happened to be on, it was the first annual, it's run by the people who run the regular Milwaukee Film Festival, which seems like a fairly big event that's been going on for a long time. So this was the first one, and we went to see one movie, it was called Free Money, it was at their Oriental Theater. They have a lot of great theaters in Milwaukee, like four or five or six massive old 100 year old theaters that have all been kept and restored. A lot of historic buildings, which was cool. But, so yeah, we went to see one movie at the Milwaukee Documentary Film Festival, it's called Free Money, and it's documentary about universal basic income. And that kind of relates to clean energy, because as we know, we're moving to a world with more robots and more robo-taxis and self-driving cars and stuff like that. So, you know, there could be an issue in the future of people not having enough jobs for humans, they're all gonna be taken by robots. But, yeah, it was a really great documentary. It followed the organization Give Directly, which apparently is the largest growing nonprofit in the world right now. And they got their initial funding from Google to do this universal basic income experiment in Africa. And they chose three villages in Africa, and they gave each person in the village $22 a month, which, you know, doesn't sound like very much for us here in North America, but, you know, in extremely poor villages in Africa, this is a real game changer. So, they followed the participants in this for about five years. So, this was a series undertaking this documentary. And it's mostly good news, but, you know, it still remains to be seen, what'll happen. It's a 12-year project, so they followed these people for the first five years. It's supposed to end at the end of 12 years, unless perhaps they can get more funding or something. But the basic gist is it does seem to be a pretty good idea, but since you can't give that to everybody in any, even in a country that, you know, then the village next door doesn't get any funding, and, you know, it creates rifts and divisions. And, you know, they really, the documentary questioned the idea of, you're essentially using human beings as test subjects, 'cause they're trying to get data on this to see if it works. But, you know, using human beings as test subjects is maybe never such a great idea. But, yeah, overall, really, really interesting documentary highly, highly recommended. It's free money, it's called, right? So, we'll probably see it show up somewhere. You know, I'm streaming. - That was about it. - Okay, well, that sounds good. We'll hear more on a bonus podcast that'll come out completely, because we're not just gonna talk about clean energy, who knows what we'll talk about, in our bonus podcast. I'm actually looking forward to it, and I'm a little bit worried that they're gonna be better than this podcast, like, without any restrictions, like, suddenly this'll become the bonus podcast. (laughs) Can we swear on the bonus podcast? - Yeah, I guess we can. We'll get that out of my system. I went to Saskatoon, the Milwaukee of Saskatchewan, as it's known, to see my son on his birthday. We decided to make a day trip out of it. And, yeah, I don't do that enough. I really wish I'd do that more. I'm fully capable of making day trips now that I've got my health a little bit more in check, and I've got a daughter who can drive as well. So, I used a better road planner again. It was an interesting situation because fall was coming, which is why we chose to go a day earlier than we did before, because it was this nice 80-degree Fahrenheit, 30-degree Celsius type of day. It was sunny and warm. And then this cold front was coming in, it was gonna turn windy and cold and ugly, and it seemed like, okay, that's, we're literally watching fall approach now. And that, so yeah, I used a better road planner as an app for planning a trip in my EV, my Bolt EV, and it was amazingly rock solid again, exactly right to the percentage point. And I just can't, you know, if forecast, it knew the weather was changing, it knew that everything was like that, and it just knew. And because of the proversion, it actually uses live weather as well as forecast, as well as the temperature of your battery, the temperature of-- Yeah, 'cause it's got a dongle that connects to your car, right, to get that. And I did a video about that, if you wanna check out our YouTube channel, it's there for everyone to see. Goes in depth, maybe too much in depth, but it's all there, and I think it's great for somebody who doesn't drive a Tesla, and who doesn't wanna have, you know, ranging side, 'cause it's completely gone, and it's unbelievable how different it is and how totally worth the $7 a month, it's five-year-olds, and it works out to $7 Canadian or something like that. I, you know, I pause in the wintertime when I'm not traveling in the subscriptions, 'cause I don't use it for anything else, but I have a dongle for the power company in there because we get paid by the power company to see if we'll charge at night, so I make a few bucks off of that every month, and that's nice, it makes my EV driving even cheaper. And now I use the Chevy app, which claims it does the same thing, because I have a Chevy vehicle, comes with a Chevy app, which you can check the battery from remote and change if you're setting, you can't start it from the app, but it claims to use live weather and weather forecasting and terrain, and it claims to know the vehicle. - Well, it was wrong. I did test on it and said I would have 40%, and I think that's about what you would get in ideal conditions, right? Absolutely ideal conditions. By the way, we were late, 'cause my daughter was late getting out, and I had to drive fast faster than I normally drive, because our uncle was waiting for us and he's old, doesn't want to put off his meal. So, and didn't understand when we told we were coming late, so yeah, we rushed and so, yeah, it even came in to 25%. So, the Chevy app, do not use it, and I imagine it might be the same for other apps. A better route planner is the way to go, but you do need to buy the pro version. The version that's free, that doesn't connect to your car, it's pretty good, but there's a big difference. It can be a big difference in bad weather like this. So if you're traveling to bad weather, and that's where you need it. So, yeah, we traveled there, and we plugged it in to charge while we went for supper. So, we had lunch with the family, the one that did our own thing, my son was showing us around his town where he goes to school, and I stopped to charge. I wanted the two fast charging locations there, and we went off and looked at the town, and by the time, my family stopped for a bathroom break at Dairy Queen and decided to buy ice cream. By the time that all that happened, I ended up spending $10 extra on my charge, which we're pretty cheap here in thrifty, and poor, and that was a big mistake. So we had to drive all the way back to where the fast charger was. It just charged too fast, and yeah, I only needed 80% of the battery, and it went to 100. I had never fast charged to 100%. I was actually surprised that at the indication of 100%, it was still coming in at like five kilowatts, 'cause it slows down towards the end. That seemed fast to me. - Yeah, and it might be actually like 99.5 or something, but it reads as 100%. It still has a little bit to fill there. - Yeah, so it's hard to know exactly because the battery hides the top end and the bottom end from you of the charge because they don't want to use that. So I'm used to seeing daily pictures of EVs that are totaled. Like I belonged to, for instance, a Bolt EV group, 'cause I have a Bolt and I still have a Leaf group, 'cause I have a Nissan Leaf, and you all see people posting. Now I'm my beloved car. I loved it was the best car I ever had. She's gone. I don't know what I'm gonna do. This happens daily right now. - Wow, but this time I saw one that was riddled with bullets and totaled. Somebody took it out of Joyride, and they didn't explain why it was riddled with bullets from a Joyride, was it a gangster thing where people were shooting at people in the street and getting shot back, or did the police shoot them because he stole a car? Either way, the poor Bolt is riddled with bullets after a evident Joyride. And I also wanted to say happy 100th birthday to solar pioneer Jimmy Carter, a former president of the United States, who turned 100 earlier this week. And he put solar panels famously on the White House. As you've pointed out, they were thermal solar and for heating hot water. And then Reagan, of course, took them down, isn't that just the way things go to this day? - Yeah, 'cause it was a very long time ago and solar thermal was more of a thing. But yeah, we were eating dinner at a restaurant in Milwaukee and there was a TV in the background and Jimmy Carter's face was popping up on the TV and I thought, oh no, we must have died. I poured Jimmy Carter and then, of course, I found out, no, he turned 100, that's amazing. - It is amazing. He is very, very old and probably not in great cognitive shape at this point or physical shape, that's for sure. Chuck sent us a note on this. Ford is now offering to install your home charger for you. And there's no cost ceiling, which is interesting. The limits they place on this is that the charger has to be within 80 feet of your electrical panel and no trenching to your garage if you have to run higher voltage to your garage where you want the charger. They're not going to change for you. And Tom from the state of charge suggests hiring teenagers or slave labor, you and the teenagers yourself, they live in your house. You would have to pay that extra expense. So yeah, he points out, Tom points out that automakers have been giving out free charging for two years, like that was an option with my bolt to have free charging for years. I would have never used it. All of it wouldn't have got you $1,500 worth that I got for my charger installation. I actually upgraded by charger installation rather than having a completely new installation. - Yeah, so you could choose between two years of free charging or? - Yeah, but he points out that all the chargers are full of those people who have free charging, like your Volkswagen people are electrify America and they're charging there 'cause it's free. But it's also not giving them the experience that they should have. They should have that experience of charging at home of waking up to a full charge. This is worse than a gas station, having to go. By the way, I was making video content when I went to Saskatoon 'cause I have to do that now for reasons I'll get into later. And I was making a video of my son pumping gas. It took him forever, which he just happened to take forever. Like the payment system didn't work and he picked up the diesel thing by mistake and that was reset everything, he had to start again. But the whole thing only took four minutes. Seemed like forever, but he was full of his little car was full of gas in four minutes. But still, all I had to do was plug in and walk away. So yeah, charging makes people at home happier and it's a better option to make people happy because I would not want to go. As much as I'd like to save the money, I would not like to go spend an hour or something, charging my vehicle every time I charge it. I would just want to plug it at home a couple times a week and that would be great. Also, I'm so pissed off at the local government or opposition party here that may form government that they're not climate friendly. The people think of them as center left and they're really being populist center. Now I would think and they're reducing the gasoline tax, trying to take, promising to take away the gas, the road tax on vehicles to save people money, $350 a year. It's not going to save you and I anything because we already did the right thing. We moved to EVs and we're going to get punished for it. We pay $150 a year for a road tax on our EV. They haven't mentioned what they're going to do about that. They better reverse that. I'm getting mad and I got so mad that I looked up what it would take to run for the green party and the whole application is what skeletons do you have in your closet? I have way too many, way too many. Yeah. I have some good things. I can say that's some bad things. Just the things that I have on video could sink your campaign. That's very much correct. So that's all that's new with me. So they have passed a new law. This is from Electric, a new law to do with the grid. So as we know that grids are going to have to get smarter as we get more solar, more wind, more variable renewables on the grid. So the California Governor Gavin Newsom has signed a new law directing the state to upgrade its electrical transmission system through the use of smart grid technologies. And the simplest thing, which is replacing old wires with newer high tech ones in order to get better throughput as well as putting things like monitors in the cable. Everything can just get smarter and kind of needs to get smarter. And this law basically just sort of forces the state to go that way. Advanced power flow control systems that can help channel the power to where it's needed. Dynamic line rating systems, those things like they monitor weather. And a lot of it is just optimization software. But it says that according to the article, these technologies can reduce the grid concession by congestion by about 40% or more, reducing the need for curtailment, which is when there's too many renewables on the grid. Yeah, I don't know. The simplest thing though is replacing the old wires. The old wires are very heavy and thick, but they can use new materials like carbon fiber and end up with transmission lines that can have better throughput for power as well as, like I said, including sensors. You can just include sensors now on the wires to sort of monitor these things. I've heard that you can put as much as three times the power through some grids if you do this sort of approach. Because a lot of it has to do with the lines expanding as they get hot, as the more they get used. And it's hot weather that that's happening because air conditioning demand is up. When the wires expand and they fall, then they hit a tree, then there's a power outage. So you've got to control that. You don't want too much sag. You don't want them to get certain equipment to get too hot. But these monitors, but it actually cost a lot of money from the ones that I saw written about. We'll help that, but it's worth it. Because grids are expensive things. And we talked about how batteries cost a lot of money to put on the grid, but they save so much money just from stabilizing it that that is effective. So yeah, that's interesting replacing the wires because the hard part is getting that land approved. That takes up to 10 years in the United States. And if you can put more power on the same system, then you don't have to worry about that. You don't have to build the pylons or anything like that. And you just replace the wires. It used the wires better, you know, monitor the temperature and the weather and hopefully less forest fires caused by power lines. Yeah, that sag that we always see in power transmission lines is something that is very much calculated, you know, like it, and the weight of the cables has to do with, you want them to sag in a certain way, but not have them sag too much. And, you know, it can be somewhat complicated to figure out the right formula, but, you know, new things like carbon fiber, apparently are a big help for that. So that's the good news from California. The bad news is that pretty much at the same time, the avenues and past, that bill also vetoed the school solar bill. So there was a bill that was going to make solar, rooftop solar on schools better, essentially making it a, you know, a net metering program for schools where you would get the same money back from your power that you have to pay for it, which is a net metering system, which is-- So it would cost the government money to do that. They'd have to subsidize it, but at the same time, the schools would be able to do it and then ultimately save money. - Yeah, and, you know, the reason given for not doing this is usually that, I don't know, it's like there's a sense that it's not fair, then, that people who have solar panels are in a way getting a better deal. And then the other people that don't have solar panels are having to pay for it, but, you know, it's really kind of flawed thinking because first of all, like, we're in a climate emergency. So, you know, if a school wants to save a bit of money on their power bill and help the planet, we should allow them to do that. I mean, really the only reason to stop it is if they're worried about too much rooftop solar getting on the grid, but, you know, we talk about that in Australia all the time and there's another story coming up about that later in the show, you know, there is ways to deal with that and mitigate that. Same thing happened around here. You and I signed up for solar where we live five, six years ago now, and it's a net metering system, so we pay the same amount that the grid pays us for the power and they use that same reasoning to get rid of that program. So, you know, around here, you only get paid half of the rate. It's like a whole, you get a wholesale rate while paying a retail rate. But yeah, it's, you know, it's all based on this notion that, you know, for a hundred years, we've had to buy our power from utilities. There was no other choice. Well, now we have a choice and we should be given that choice. There's no law that says that we have to get all of our power for the rest of eternity from a big power utility. - Yeah, the fact that we use the, you know, the utilities as a battery to put our other excess electricity, like right now, it's, the sun has peaked out here in North Regina and my panels are probably putting out more than I'm using. - Yeah, and, you know, in the future home batteries will get cheaper, so, you know, if you're annoyed at your power utility for not giving you the full rate for your power in the future, you can just buy a battery and skip the utility altogether, which would be too bad. It's better if we're all connected to the grid. - Yeah, and a lot of people do have batteries, and especially in the UK, I was reading a statistic the other day, and I think we'll get to that in the show. A lot of people are getting batteries with their solar in some parts of the world now, especially in places like the UK. - And places where the power is traditionally kind of expensive, a battery makes more sense. - Well, I want to talk about flooded EVs, 'cause this has been a headline. It started with the governor of Florida. I won't mention his name because I made burst into flames. He was warning people to drive their electric vehicles to higher ground, and I thought, well, that's crazy, but I guess flooding does affect electric vehicles, but it'll kill what they were worried about is them bursting into flames if they're flooded, and the saltwater that comes in from the ocean surge in a hurricane could cause an electrical arc inside the battery if it corrodes things, it gets inside the battery. That could happen, but I have statistics for you that will set your mind at ease, but the worry was that they would catch fire, and then a house would catch fire, and then the emergency responders would be even busier and they didn't want that, which is understandable, but they say not to drive a car that's been underwater until it's been checked out by professionals. So if your car is one of those people who've been flooded in the United States, I'm sorry, but you should probably not park it near your house, not park it in your house, consider it a possibility. Although small, it's like one in a hundred, or something like that, I'll get to that at moment, but it is possible. Yeah, there's been other floods and statistics from that which I'll get to. It's a good idea to park a flooded vehicle at least 50 feet away from buildings or higher ground, which makes sense if you don't want to lose your car, but you would lose your normal car to being flooded in water as well, as you know. - Yeah, well, you know, often anti-EV people, they'll say, oh, EVs, they catch on fire all the time, which of course is not true, gas, a lean car's catch fire way more often, but in a flood, a gas car wouldn't catch fire, whereas with an EV, it is a slight possibility. - So it can create a connection between the batteries, positive and negative size, causing it to short out and possibly, possibly catch fires. They are designed to be safe and subversion, however. So most have seals to prevent any moisture from getting in, which is true. But apparently, salt water is extraordinarily corrosive, so those seals can fail. Now, we know a guy in the Saskatchewan EV community who boldly drove his Tesla through a flooded street a couple of years ago after a thunderstorm with heavy rain and to show off, and he totaled his car, because water got in and he had an insurance claim on that. Yeah, avoid water if you can as far as flooded water because you just don't know. There's a good chance that won't happen, but if your car's been, you know, is old and the seals can be broken and maybe you didn't get that checked out. So after Hurricane Ian, which was two years ago now, it flooded approximately 4,000 electric vehicles in the States, it's between three and 5,000, so it took 4,000 as the figure, okay? 600 were declared total losses, which is 15%. 36 of those caught fire or less than 1% of the vehicles that were flooded. So now, 1% doesn't seem like a lot, but if it's going to burn down your house, that is an extremely high 1%, and you don't want to fool around. You want to keep it away from your structures, parking on the street or the end of the driveway, and then get it checked out to make sure it's okay, which you can do with your local dealership very quickly. So they will-- Yeah, 36 out of 4,000, that's a real number. That is cars catching fire. But there's still a very dangerous risk of your parking near a home or garage, but CATL, which is, as we know, the world's biggest battery maker, some of the vehicles made in North America have those batteries from China, and they put out a video about their batteries and water just yesterday, so I thought I would play that clip. First of all, you can be assured that, under most circumstances, electric vehicles are able to wade through water, because the weighting capacity of a vehicle is higher than that of a fuel car due to its absence of intake, exhaust port and engine. In addition, the battery pack is also designed to be extremely waterproof. We have increased the waterproof rating of our battery packs from the industry standard IPX7 to the higher IPX8 degree. During testing, we subjected our battery system to 36 hours of comprehensive vibration conditions followed by 48 hours of sub-mersion. In conclusion, electric vehicles have safety measures in place that guarantee you need not to worry about driving through moderate deep water, in case you get caught in extreme conditions. - So they are designing these packs to be hermetically sealed and hydraulically sealed so that dust and air and water don't get in. But if it happens, you can actually drive through water technically more than a gas car can because you don't have to worry about the air intake and the tailpipe. And some vehicles like the Rivian and I think maybe the Tesla Cybertruck, they were initially promising that they could go through one and a half meters of water or something like that, which is like four feet or something, four and a half feet. - So you can actually pressurize the battery as well as sealing it. You can pressurize it so that it helps keep water out. - And I imagine, and I hope, it seems possible if they would have a sensor on that pressure so that you would know if you should not go through water or if you have to worry about your vehicle being flooded. - So it sounds like the biggest danger would be seawater and sitting in seawater for a very long time, especially if your car is older, but just getting it wet and having it dry off again, probably not a big deal. - Yeah, and it's no problem to go to a car wascious. People on the street ask me about or plugging it into the rain. You're not holding a high voltage line in your hand. It is not doing anything until it communicates to the car and then the system powers up from there. So I'm not a problem. (upbeat music) - Brian, we're very, very excited this week. We've been talking about this for literally years and the day has finally arrived. We are announcing our Patreon program and YouTube memberships. If you're watching on YouTube, you can get a membership option down below and get some perks. Basically, people have been supporting our show with PayPal, but they've gotten nothing in return other than our love, which is silent and hard to feel, especially across continents. So yes, with this, you'll actually get perks and things that if you contribute to the show, you'll get stuff back and we're not taking anything away from our current listeners. If you don't wanna and you can't contribute, that's fine. Nothing will change, but we do want to sort of reward the people who support us and give them a reason to support us because they'll get some stuff back. So, Patreon and YouTube memberships are coming and we've got a Discord server up and running and I've spent a lot of hours on it because it hasn't been working, hasn't been hooking up with YouTube and Patreon the way it was supposed to and it was my daughter's been working on it for a lot. I'm going to have to pay her. She's an expert and she knows too much and she listened to our podcast last week because I didn't think she would have while she did because I'd said I'd mentioned her and as you went and listened to it and then put some sarcastic things in the Discord server, she's a teenager about what I had said about her. This is a clip, Brian, of the Patreon creators a few years ago explaining what Patreon is. Maybe you don't know what it is. Maybe you support some other podcasts or creators or artists or other things through Patreon, but maybe you've never heard of it and this is for you. (upbeat music) - We're using the idea of patronage, which is actually a really old idea. Exactly, Jack. If it weren't for patrons, we wouldn't have Romy and Juliet or Mona Lisa. Mozart, Shakespeare, DaVinci, they all have patrons, mostly aristocrats who paid them to create so they could enjoy their works and brag their friends about how cool they are for supporting creators. Yeah, so it's kind of like that, but better. Creators of every kind allow their fans to become patrons or members. Patrons set a monthly subscription style payment for the level of membership they want, like for five bucks a month you get early access to content, 10 bucks a month, extra videos, 20 bucks a month behind the scenes stuff. You name it. (upbeat music) - Join the Clean Energy Show's Clean Club with a YouTube channel membership or on Patreon and support climate programming. On Patreon, you can be a supporter of our work for just $2.50 a month. Not only will you receive the unlimited love of Brian and James, you will gain access to our members Discord server and your podcast listening will always be ad-free. But the boy's favorite tier is the Clean Club, which costs only $5 per month. For a Finsky, you get everything from the supporter tier, slightly more love from Brian and James and members only bonus content, early access to the weekly podcast, whether it's audio or video behind the scenes content and a very special monthly bonus podcast from Brian and James. This special podcast episode is made to reward those who support the show with memberships. - So, we have the supporter tier. This is the tier that is low priced. If you just want to support the show, you don't care about perks or maybe you can't afford anything more. This helps support the show and our cause, which is spreading climate information, how the climate can proceed to be fixed by technology. And it's always going to be ad-free. You know, if we have ads one day and we probably will, then it'll be in, you'll get ad-free podcasts and you'll get access to our Discord community. - Occasional posts are behind the scenes content and lots of love from us, lots of appreciation and thanks. - So, if I understand that clip correctly from the Patreon creators that were like DaVinci and Shakespeare, is that what they're saying? - There's no difference, Brian. There's no difference. There's no distinction. - Yeah. - Then there's the clean club, our favorite tier. That is the five dollar tier. This is all in US funds, I'm afraid. If you're from another currency, Patreon does their things in US funds, the tiers and then it gets translated to wherever you are. That's our main tier. This is when you start getting lots of stuff. You get everything from the supporter tier plus a written text credit on our weekly video podcasts, thanking you for your support. And early access to the main video or audio podcast, whichever you like or both, you'll get early access several, like at least, as soon as it's the audio podcast, as soon as it's out of the oven, you'll get it. And a monthly bonus podcast, which we're already brainstorming and will do very soon. Once a month, you'll get the bonus podcast. I have no idea what's gonna happen with that, but I'm kind of excited about it. - No, it's fun. We already have a couple of ideas there. And yeah, looking forward to doing that. - So what else do we have, Brian, with the higher tiers? - So clean club executive is $20 a month. And with that, you get a verbal shout out on every weekly audio and video podcast in your name in the credits. And this is the best thing. You get to name all future illegitimate children that James has. - That's a privilege. I mean, if you have a business, you could name it Chevron. The people at Chevron should be donating to our show. - Yeah. And I'll point out too, that really on any of those tiers, you can actually change the dollar amount as long as it's more than the one that's listed. So if you don't care about perks, you can actually, you know, the $2.50 a month. You could change that to $20, $30 or whatever, if you don't need the perks. And really all of those levels, the $20 a month, if you love the podcast so much that you want to give more, you can give more to the show, just as long as you write in an amount that's more than $20, but that's possible at every tier. - So we have the $2.50 tier. That's the supporter tier. Then there is the Clean Club, which is the main tier that has most of the perks, but then if you keep going, there's the Clean Club Plus, which gives you a bit more that gives you a once a month shout out on our podcast and video podcast, Verbal Shoutout, and you're in the credits of the videos as well. So yeah, thanks to everyone who has supported the show in the past, you can keep doing that if you prefer. Some people have set up monthly PayPal things, but you can also stop that and switch it over to either YouTube memberships or Patreon, the show notes will always have your links to get to those things. And we do hope and pray that people will support the show because I need supporting. (laughs) By the way, if you want to contact us, cleanairishow@gmail.com to let us know what you think about our perks or if they should be tweaked or if you're having any problems. We could have some growing pains at first, especially with a Discord server getting up and running, but everything else should be okay. It'll be a learning curve. But yeah, we're giving out extra stuff now and rewarding the people who support our show. - Yeah, it's a lot of work to do the show every week, especially for James who does all the editing for all the different platforms and everything. But we've been doing it basically almost for free for the last four years because we love doing the show. We love spreading good news about climate technology. And we're gonna keep doing it. If you can't afford to support us, that's fine. But if you can, that's even better. You have more love from Brian and James. (laughs) - We have an unlimited supply, at least as far as I know. Yeah, you can also leave us a speak-pike message online voicemail at speak-pike.com/cleanenergyshow. And yeah. - All right, from Canary Media, tech firms are getting together to try and build concrete that is less carbon intensive. So we talk about this every once in a while on the show. Carbon content in concrete can be quite extreme. The United States makes 90 million metric tons of cement every year to build buildings and bridges and other infrastructure. And in the process, the US cement plants generate huge amounts of CO2 gases. It's equivalent to about 16 million gas-powered cars. That's the carbon footprint of just the US plants that make cement. So it is something that probably can be fixed and needs to be fixed. Globally constructing and operating buildings accounts are more than a third of greenhouse gas emissions. So if we can manage to make the cement part of it carbon neutral, then it'll be the operating costs are gonna be the thing that we're gonna have to worry about. So this is one of those big kind of tech spaces that a lot of money is going into this, trying to solve this problem. More than $750 million in venture capital funding for clean concrete companies has happened in recent years. And Metaph, the parent company of Facebook. So we talk a lot about, unfortunately all these AI data centers are gonna be using a lot of energy and electricity. And they're trying to figure out ways to mitigate that. Microsoft was talking about buying a nuclear power plant for God's sakes and getting it restarted. But it isn't just the power consumption. It's the building themselves. So Metaph as the parent company of Facebook, they've invested in carbon built, which is one of these companies that's trying to figure out how to make cleaner concrete. So a big part of the problem is replacing the industry standard Portland cement. This is the powder that's made from limestone and other things. And that has a huge carbon footprint into creating it. - You gotta heat it, right? I believe there's a lot of heat that goes into it. - Heat at high temperatures. So if we can replace Portland cement as a powder, as a binding agent, this will go a long way to solving these things. And I have a bit of an update. So, we've been talking, we're hoping to build a rammed earth cottage at our lake property. And rammed earth is kind of similar to concrete. In that it uses things like Portland cement. It is, there is some cement powder in there, that you also use dirt and clay and sand and all that. And so we're doing a little bit of a pilot project here. We're building a ramp now in front of our house. It's a long story, but we have a bad ice problem in the winter. We're always getting ice on our front steps. And so we figured out a way to fix it is to build a ramp. So our architect that is hoping to build our cottage is doing us a rammed earth wall right now in front of our house. - What? - And what? - We're doing a small rammed earth wall and then the ramp will be behind that. - This is in practicing? - Yes, it's a bit of a pilot project. - Well, there's some bonus content for us to put on our channel there. - Yeah, we could talk more about it, but it comes to mind because he's been showing us samples of what the wall could look like and you can mix in different colors and everything. - I don't understand why you're building a wall in front of your house to build a ramp. - Well, we wanted a ramp in front of our house instead of stairs to solve the ice problem because we can put the ramp next to the house and it's gonna be covered by the overhang of the roof. - Oh, okay. - So it's not, you know. - Where does the wall come in? - Well, there's many different ways to build a ramp, but one of the ways is to build a small wall. It's only gonna be about three feet tall and that will be what supports the ramp. - And will it look like your house color? I mean, how's that gonna work? - It is related to house color, but it'll look like rammed earth, which it'll have different kind of stripes of different colors in it. So, you know, with rammed earth, you can change the color of it depending on what kind. - That's part of the art of making rammed earth houses and why, you know, experience people use different materials to create a pattern, a different layer. So say, you know, they make this form and then they put down clay and cement powder and sort of water and then they sort of tamp it down. - You pound it. - Yeah, you just ram it. That's the ramming part. You gotta wall at the end. - And you get a wall at the end and it's very much related to the story about lower carbon concrete because he's been showing us these samples and they're very much like concrete. They do have Portland cement, so they're not exactly carbon free, but you can vary the amount of cement and often you put more cement in the top layer, like if it's load bearing, you want it like a harder layer on the top. But, you know, even without that, the normal rammed earth is very hard. It very much feels like concrete. - So this architect of yours is really getting into this rammed earth thing. And he's, I'm assuming after he does your cottage that other people will come forward and want a rammed earth. I mean, I would if I could afford it. I mean, that would be a, I've always dreamed of something like that. It'd be a great way to go. And there's a happiness to living in the structure like that. It's very earthy and quiet and just the opposite of my house. My house actually is well-insulated, but it uses rigid foam insulation and it's noisy. I can hear things outside. - The hope is that a rammed earth house is just going to be very nice to live in. It's like concrete, but it kind of breathes more. It has a softness to it because it's not just cement. It's, there's dirt and clay and whatnot. So I'll probably get some more updates next week about our rammed earth wall that we're building for our ramp in front of the house, but it's part of the whole process. - There's no detail too small for me, Brian. I want to know all about that. Bloomberg New Energy Finance Solar Analyst, Jennie Chase, that is pretty much the most esteemed solar analyst there is. She's been working on this for 20 years for Bloomberg New Energy Finance. Or B-N-E-F is out with her annual mega tweet storm that has her latest opinions on the state of solar. And these are like 30 tweets long, but I want to talk about what stood out to me, what was unusual or something that I learned. There is enough land for lots of solar. Most of these suggest one to 2% of land would be required to generate all the solar most countries can even use. There's also loads and loads of roofs. So let's see those who oppose ground mounted solar support higher cost roof mounted solar. Yeah, because you're doing it on a roof and it costs more per watt because, you know, large huge fields of it are a lot cheaper than mounting it to your roof and getting permits and things like that. Solar thermal tower and heliostat designs, especially with molten salt storage, are still not working very well. These are the experimental things in the desert. There was one even up in medicine hat that shut down. It was too cold and snowy up here. These are where mirrors shine on a tower or sometimes on a horizontal pipe that have horizontal mirrors around those pipes. We might even end up using molten salt for multi-day and seasonal storage, but heat it with PV. So what she's saying is the molten salt might be a pretty good idea because you can store that with those types of things. But maybe we should heat it with electricity from a PV panel, not using a mirror to heat something with the sun, but use the electrons to create electric heat. Yeah, well, given how well solar PV works and given how the cost of those solar panels is dropping every year, this concentrated mirror thing made more sense, maybe 20 years ago when solar PV was a lot more expensive. But yeah, molten salt can still be a storage medium, a heat storage medium. The thing is that these things are storing it, which makes it last longer or even around the clock, which is, I've never heard that before. That's a good idea, do that, but with PV. So number 42 of her tweet says floating solar is a thing. She's mentioned that last year as well, but it's not a new tech, it's solar on a boat. And it's mostly about having a place to put the modules. And when it's on a hydro dam reservoir, a grid connection is right there. Grid connections are like gold dust to the power industry. So hadn't thought about that. My son, like I said last week, went to on a tour of the Deaf and Baker Dam. There's got a, I've looked at the pictures when I went up to see him in Saskatoon and he showed me the pamphlets and I had a lot of questions. But there's this large area that's all reservoir and you could float solar on it and connect it to the grid because there is a big grid connection right there. And that's, there's less and less water. So yeah, because that hydro dam may not even be, putting out as much as it should. Sounds like this year is a particularly bad year. He said it was like a quarter of what they expected for this month and yeah, that happens with droughts. - Yeah, and the floating solar can also prevent some of the evaporation as well. So you're going to lose less water. - That's correct. Nigeria is another market to observe closely in 2023. The government briefly removed subsidies on gasoline for the country's fleet of private generators, which is much larger than a central power grid. There's more gas generators in people's homes and businesses than there is in the power grid. So that is ripe, ripe for solar. Although gasoline subsidies were reinstated, PV sales continues steadily because people realized it was such a good idea. So those, those, yeah, they were moving the subsidies for gasoline was a big deal, but now, you know, people realize solar works and they're still doing it. It's not slowed down. Number 32 originally, ordinary people have no idea how much progress we've made. Tell people of parties at the UK carbon emissions from 2023 were at their lowest level since 1879. For example, they won't believe you. Most developed economies are now reducing carbon emissions without lowering the quality of life. Decarbonizing aviation is hard. She says the CEO of Lufthansa said in 2023 that running its fleet on sustainable aviation fuel made from electricity would take half Germany's current electricity demand. BNEF thinks it's even more than that. They think that's an underestimate. Electrification of transportation is far better than biofuels, she says. For example, it takes about 300 acres of farmland to run a petrol car on corn ethanol. There's an electric car running on about one acre of PV. I figured out what my solar output's in a year and it was like 14,000 kilometers or something worth of, you know, I drive small cars. I don't drive pickup trucks that are electric, but yeah. So BNEF's new energy outlook modeling doesn't want to just solve the intermittency problem with loads of batteries. This is because the batteries get lower utilization rates the more you build. Batteries cannibalize batteries, just like solar is cannibalizing solar, long before you get to 100% clean power. Now I would say, why is that a problem because the batteries will only last longer if you utilize them, you may not make your money back. That's kind of the issue. If you're an investor, you want to sell your battery power and make that money back at a certain time, but the batteries will last longer if less you use them. Yeah, and that kind of brings us on to our next story here from Australia. It's just going to be a challenge, as we know, to balance all of these new things on the grid. And one of the issues we've talked about before is when you have something like coal power or nuclear power, it's always talked about as very good base load power. And that's always stated as one of their benefits. Now there's issues to that because they often have to go down for maintenance and things like that. So there's not as good as base load powers. People suggest, but there's an interesting story here from your new economy. Australia's biggest coal generator, AGL, has reported success with a groundbreaking initiative that will allow it to shut down coal units in the middle of the day, making way for rooftop solar, large scale solar to dominate the grid during the day. So this has been one of the problems you can have too much power on the grid. Well, guess what? I figured out you can actually just turn off these coal power plants. Now, I imagine it's not that easy. It's a process called two shifting, meaning it takes a unit offline and when it brings it back online within a 12 hour period. So this is just something they were not used to doing and basically kind of had to learn how to do it. They usually just keep these things running 24 hours a day. So this milestone of a successful trial of this was reported by the AGL operations at Bayes Water, who said the team had learned from a visit last year to Ratcliffe coal power station in the UK, sorry, which switched off at the last time on Tuesday morning. As we talked about before, there is now no coal power in the UK. They're basically, we're the home of coal power after 143 years. So this Australian team was able to visit this last coal power station in the UK to get some of their data from this or learn something from it. So it says here our team de-synchronized 20 seconds ahead of the 10 a.m. target and re-synchronized within 50 seconds of the 3 p.m. target. This level of precision on our first attempt is extraordinary and sets a new benchmark for our operations. So yeah, this seems like a bit of a real sea change where coal plants can actually be shut down during the day and may have to be. We talked about they may have to shut down rooftop solar in Australia because there's too much of it. Well, this is another option. - Right, and China is talking about paying coal companies, coal power plants for shutting down, just to keep them on standby, droughts were an issue where they needed more power last year. Now that's not an issue anymore. But yeah, they were paid, they were subsidized by the government to shut down. So it is possible and they're sort of using it as a backup like we use natural gas as a backup in North America to a high renewable system. Anyway, I did happen to watch or listen to a bit of the energy transition show with Chris Nedler this morning at the gym and he's got a paid podcast. He had the host of The Driven or the creator of The Driven, which is Australia's electric, if you will, and very into the history of renewables in Australia knew a lot about it. And he said that turbines at coal plants are they're looking at, because of this problem that you spoke of, they're looking at using the turbines to consume the power. So instead of generating the power, they would take power from the grid and run in reverse and just eat up that excess power. We're gonna have to do a lot of things like that, a lot of creative things. And it's all a mix. It's not, there's no easy solution. It's a balancing act and tweaking all kinds of different things. - Yeah, and every grid, of course, is gonna be different. One grid is gonna have 20% coal, and another one's gonna have 40%. Another one's gonna have lots of solar, another one. ♪ He's been up on heels ♪ - After investing billions to light up our network, T-Mobile is America's largest 5G network. Plus, right now, you can switch, keep your phone, and we'll pay it off up to $800. We'll see how you can save on every plan versus Verizon AT&T at tmobile.com/keepandswitch. (upbeat music) - Up to four lines via virtual prepaid card, a left 15 days qualifying unlocked device, credit, service, board, and 90-post days with device and eligible carrier and timely redemption required. Card has no cash access and expires in six months. - One's gonna have no solar, so it's, yeah, there's no one solution for everybody, but it is definitely a solvable problem. (upbeat music) - 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. - The fully charged show in conjunction with stop-burning stuff did a survey about EV ownership, 99% would recommend a battery electric vehicle if asked, 93% would not switch back to the internal combustion engine. Nine out of 10 are satisfied with their current vehicle. - Yeah, so everybody buys an EV, loves it, and doesn't wanna go back, even if it's ridden with bullets, because whatever reason, the America. - Yeah, once you go electric, you never go back. - Cruise's failure to disclose the fact that a pedestrian was seriously injured when one of its driverless vehicles in San Francisco last year, that's cruise owned by GM, has now resulted in a $1.5 million fine from the federal government. Last October, cruise vehicle hit a pedestrian and dragged her 20 feet as she was initially struck by a human driver in a hit-and-run incident. So she was hit and then put in front of the cruise vehicle, the cruise vehicle that don't respond as it safely would. If it was one of those weird, weird situations that they have to figure out. In recent weeks and didn't predict an advance, cruises made the first tentative steps towards resuming operations in the Bay Area. This has been quite some time since they've stopped, and the company has deployed manually driven mapping vehicles in Sunnyvale and Mountain View, with the goal of progressing to supervise testing later this fall. And it has also restarted in a number of other cities, including Phoenix, Houston, and Dallas. This is from Canary Media. The US has never restarted a decommissioned nuclear reactor until now. Earlier this week, Holton International closed a $1.5 billion loan from the US Department of Energy's loans program office to do just that. That's the office that's trying to get nuclear going. The money will help finance the reopening of the 805 megawatt Palisades Nuclear Generating Station in Covert Township, Michigan. So I'm OK with that. My daughter said I came out too harsh against nuclear when she listened to one episode of our show. I get that, people. I can't be-- I got to tell them like it is. You got to know the facts. GM has confirmed the Equinox EVLT. That's the low priced one that's supposed to start at $35,000 US. Has begun arriving at US dealerships. Something I'm interested in, because it would be a nice step up. Not going to get it, but I like the way it looks. It looks pretty good, I think, for a GM vehicle. So now the cheapest EV in America with 300 miles of range or more. And with tax credits, that can be had for under $30,000. We'll see what it comes with, maybe nothing. I don't know, it's $8,500 cheaper than the next model level up. This is a CS pass-back solar power capacity installed around the world every three days is roughly equivalent to all the world solar that existed at the end of 2005. So all the solar in the world in 2005 is now installed in the world every three days. Coal power is officially off for good in the UK, as you've mentioned. This is from Carbon Brief, replacing a gas boiler with a heat pump in the UK, cuts emissions by 77% to 86%. And that includes the embodied emissions from manufacturing the heat pump. And it would only take 13 months to get rid of those embodied carbon emissions to offset them. From Bloomberg, California Governor Gavin Newsom has vetoed a bill that would require gas stole sold by the states to come with a warning labels about air pollution emissions and health risks. He's vetoed it. What's going on with him? It was a lot of announcements about California this week. And California has always been at the cutting edge of warning labels. You will sometimes see warning labels on products from California that you don't see warning you of some question. I think people need to be warned about gas stoves because they may not realize it. And it's a real thing. We talked about a listener writing about asthma in the last couple of weeks ago now. Germany added 200 megawatts of balcony solar in the first half of 2024. Regulations limit those systems to just 800 watts, enough to power a small fridge. But the cumulative effect is nudging the country towards clean energy goals because so many people have gone out to the store and bought these systems and attached them to their balconies and their apartments and their condos. And it's making a difference. TheGuardian.com, this is from them. Recycling rate is falling under the United Kingdom. It's just 44% of households waste is recycled. Come on, United Kingdom, you can do better than that. Chinese startup WeRide is going to offer robo-taxis on Uber, on Uber, the Uber system, starting in the United Arab Emirates. Curious that they're starting there. Sounds like a sneaky way to get into the world and maybe spread from there. Chinese startup says that they will be offering WeRides robo-taxis first in Abu Dhabi by the end of this year. The partnership does not involve the US and Chinese markets so far. And finally this week, the year we started this podcast, Brian, in 2020. A lot has happened since then. If you've listened to the show, you know that. We can't barely cover it in one week. We don't, we cover only part of it. That year, 2020 Chinese government industrial plan estimated that around 20% of car sales would be EVs in 2025. That's includes plug-in hybrid. So they had this ambitious plan that people poo-pooed. I remember the Alberta government pooing it saying they're not going to do that in July. Of this year, Brian, over 50% of cars sold in China were new energy vehicles like EVs and plug-in hybrids and a handful of hydrogen vehicles, low non-emitting vehicles and 50%, two and a half times what their bold estimate was going to be. - Yeah, bold estimate. - And it's still growing. Yeah, it's still growing, growing quickly, but yeah, 20% estimate and turned out to be already over 50%. And it's not even 2025 yet. This is a year early. It's already gone from 20% to a 50% reality. That's amazing. All right, and on that happy note, that's our show for this week. Couldn't contact us. CleanEnergyShow@gmail.com around social media. It's Clean EnergyPod. And there are videos of the show on TikTok and YouTube, including special content not featured on the podcast. - Yeah, we're even on Instagram now with the full podcast. The full podcast is on all those platforms. It's restricted to an hour though, so sometimes that content will be trimmed down. We have the Clean Energy Store, which is another way you can support our show. It is now not selling the products at cost, Brian, but selling it with a profit. So if you want to support the show and get something in return that is not one of those perks, maybe you want a shirt, maybe you want a pullover or a hat or a mug or a sticker, you can get something in return that is actual merchandise. And a few bucks goes to us and supports the show. And some of those tiers on our memberships will actually give you a significant discount on that merchandise. So you can get the merchandise without, 'cause you're already supporting the show. You don't have to support us again. You just pay the cost of the merchandise. Ready to review us on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, if you don't mind. You can still donate on PayPal, but please, please people, check out our Patreon page. It's like there in your show notes, or if you're watching on YouTube, you can get a YouTube membership if you're a YouTube person and support us that way. The tiers are almost identical to the Patreon tiers, not quite the same. And I think there might even be a little bit cheaper starting a tier there, but you might get a bit less. So that is an option for you as well, to get shows early, to get our bonus content and stuff. We do appreciate you listening, and we will see you again next week on the podcast. See you next week. (upbeat music) You have a great first day of school. Oh, this must be your teacher. No, I'm the person who makes a referral to see the teacher. I need to have him fill out this little evaluation form. But he's five years old. Okay, I can see he's struggling with reading and writing. I recommend we start him in kindergarten. That's a bold analysis. Don't most referrals seem pointless? Get the care you need when you need it with a Pacific Source health plan. No referrals required to see a specialist. Find a plan at pacificsourcemembersfirst.com.
