129. Green Hydrogen Doubts and Invisible Offshore Wind Turbines

The Clean Energy Show

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

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

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

Anti-lock brakes are coming to electric bicycles.

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

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

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

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Your hosts: James Whittingham https://twitter.com/jewhittingham Brian Stockton: https://twitter.com/brianstockton

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==transcript==

Hello, and welcome to episode 129 of the clean Energy show.

I'm Brian Stockton.

I'm James Whittingham.

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

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

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

And even black and white hydrogen.

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

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

That's right, Akia.

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

You're damn straight.

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

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

Antilon brakes are coming to electric bicycles.

That's right.

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

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

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

Dodge? Yes.

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

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

You were off last week due to back injury.

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

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

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

Yeah.

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

It will.

It keeps happening.

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

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

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

I had a lot ready to go with that.

Seemed like distant memories.

Now it's only a week ago.

Wow.

My opening jokes.

I wrote those last week.

Last week.

I thought they seemed dated.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It puts out up to 10 MW into the system.

It's rated at 13, though.

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

The grid can't handle it.

It's near a substation.

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

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

But I was struck at how small it was.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Seems pretty good.

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

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

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

At first I thought the panels weren't working.

So let me describe what this is.

This is a single access solar farm.

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

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

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

And at noon, they're flat.

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

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

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

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

Well, these follow it.

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

They're kind of a bell curve.

Is that fair to say? Yeah.

Shaped like a bell? Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

But that hasn't happened yet.

Maybe eventually it was a bit underwhelming.

I was hoping for something bigger.

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

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

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

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

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

We could do better, it seems like.

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

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

Ironically, that would be cool.

Yeah.

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

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

Yeah, no, it totally, absolutely makes sense.

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

You've got solar.

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

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

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

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

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

Okay, well, that's cool.

Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yeah.

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

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

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

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

What was that called again? Inflation Reduction Act.

That's correct, yes.

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

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

Yeah, it's expensive.

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

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

So yeah, we'll see how it goes.

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

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

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

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

It will be probably more than an extra $100.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sometimes that hurts us and sometimes it helps us.

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

It's like an electric car.

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

So you make the cars lighter.

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

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

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

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

Nice and soft.

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

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

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

So we probably will do that next.

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

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

She's never seen that before.

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

Strangers would talk.

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

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

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

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

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

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

They're always changing rights.

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

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

And they have weird ads on these things, okay.

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

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

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

I'm not North Dakota.

I love it.

There's many aspects of North Dakota I love.

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

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

I don't give a crap about diamonds.

I'm not married.

I don't believe in that stuff.

I'm not an old romantic person.

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

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

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

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

That's a very interesting question.

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

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

But you and I probably not.

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

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

Will it be affected? I don't know.

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

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

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

I think it's a great idea.

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

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

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

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

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

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

They caught me by surprise.

Yeah, there's at least one around.

So they're starting to trickle out.

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

The reviews are still flowing in for the iconic Five.

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

No.

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

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

Aribian R one T electric pickup truck.

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

Moose Jaw on the Trans Canada.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I don't know why.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They're not even factoring in maintenance.

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

Let's get into some updates from past shows.

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

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

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

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

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

It's not in full blown operation.

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

Nothing dangerous, nothing exploded or melted down or anything.

But this reactor was supposed to start production in 2009.

That's how long it's taken.

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

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

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

Yeah.

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

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

Yeah.

And you and I aren't nuclear scientists.

Well, no, technically.

So that will influence our decision around these things.

But solar, wind and batteries are so damn simple.

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

So of course you do.

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

Okay.

And you know what? Hydrogen emits water vapor.

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

Was it ours? And it wasn't ours.

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

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

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

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

And now something for some extremely disappointing news.

We tried to focus on the good news.

Here's some disappointing news.

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

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

They still exist.

They were a big thing in the know.

You had a Pinto and called it a muscle car.

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

Grand.

It's even worse, I think.

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

Literally.

I'm not even kidding.

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

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

And this is what it sounds like.

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

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

And then you go to a muffler shop.

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

Yeah.

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

There you go, kids.

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

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

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

Good for you.

I know.

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

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

I don't know.

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

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

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

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

I've known this.

We've all known this.

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

We'd stop having 20 babies, right.

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

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

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

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

Brian that's my argument.

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

Yeah.

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

But that's just kind of an obvious statement.

But anything he says tends to make the news.

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

It's a slow moving train wreck.

We'll hopefully have time to figure that out.

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

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

To live here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sometimes they can come faster than ever.

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

So they've got a GT version coming out.

This is the all electric Kia EV six.

The GT version is going to be even faster.

And I just like the headline here.

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

This is from the electric website.

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

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

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

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

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

It's basically the same car.

Yeah, I don't know.

And no word on the range either.

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

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

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

A Kia that goes that fast.

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

Or that's not the cyber truck.

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

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

Also be like 1.9.

Yeah, maybe even quicker.

They're talking about putting a SpaceX rocket.

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

Yes, that's always an issue.

Wow.

Tire manufacturers are going to have to keep up.

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

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

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

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

The US.

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

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

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

An ocean view is a beautiful thing.

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

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

It could have been Tom Cruise.

What am I thinking? It was Tom Cruise.

Of course it was Tom Cruise.

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

There's some that are deeper than others.

The smaller ones could do a significant power.

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

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

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

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

So they have ratings for that.

They have ratings for small, medium, and large.

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

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

These are the different categories.

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

E was less distinct, size is reduced.

Then you get down to negligible or no impact anyway.

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

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

So that's the answer.

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

You don't want to have people disrupted.

Like Ted Kennedy Jr.

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

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

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

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

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

So there's great potential there.

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

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

And again, it was the US.

Department of Energy.

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

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

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

The project will utilize 60 213 megawatt heliodx wind turbines.

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

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

I think the wind sweep is like two football fields.

It's just massive.

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

This is the thing that the locals were concerned about.

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

They had to go through town.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, yeah, it's happening.

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

Fantastic.

OK, another story here from Electric.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That's how bad it is.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, yeah, this is a nice step forward.

I'd be curious to try them.

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

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

Duke God knows what in Las Vegas.

Ebikes.

Not e, motorcycles.

Not electric motorcycles.

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

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

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

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

So I don't know.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ammonia production and methanol production as well as steel production.

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

So ammonia is used in fertilizers.

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

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

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

That's not very much.

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

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

That's very energy intense.

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

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

So they're talking about shipping it to Germany.

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

Because it just takes up so much volume.

So you have to make it really cold.

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

You don't have to make it as cold.

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

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

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

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

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

They haven't had time.

And that's all these things take time.

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

And there's a deep shipping channel there.

I think it's like 27 meters or something.

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

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

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

For something like this, that's a lot.

And that means years and years and years.

Yeah.

Well, back to that issue of Complication.

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

And that's my thought.

It's complicated as expensive.

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

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

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

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

It's just a better process.

So it expanded really rapidly once they did that.

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

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

So you have to capture the emissions from that.

And that's not practical.

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

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

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

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

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

Okay.

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

Amazon wants to have green energy.

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

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

Well, that's happening.

And people will want green hydrogen as well.

And green steel made from green hydrogen.

So we'll see.

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

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

So they've got 14 hydrogen powered trains.

These are fuel cell hydrogen vehicles, so emissions free.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Half of them aren't working.

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

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

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

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

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

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

We're going to potentially need this hydrogen.

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

Nova Scotia is very windy.

They don't have good solar resources.

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

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

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

So it's actually just a weather thing.

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

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

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

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

So we've been talking about Germany.

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

This is really part of a political platform.

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

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

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

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

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

And those are now in doubt.

And nobody really wants to talk to Russia anymore.

We don't want their stinky oil and gas.

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

This is a carbon free form of electricity.

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's pretty simple.

But nuclear can be extremely dangerous.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This was created after the Fukushima accident in 2011.

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

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

So they're already three years past.

They were given a sort of a special exemption.

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

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

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

They are also running out of fuel.

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

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

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

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

So the fuel is a huge problem.

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

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

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

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

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

It's just a long nightmare of things.

There's the financial consideration.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yeah, and hopefully punished somehow.

But it's phenomenal.

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

Yeah.

There's been sort of conflicting reports.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Took the Evo DoorDashing this evening.

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

It's a great car for food delivery.

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

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

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

We hear that a lot.

Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It takes a long time.

Mr.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I thought they listened to Fantastic.

And some of the others are Dr.

Volts, which is a paid podcast on substance.

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

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

I use Matt Farrell's undecided for information.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or just the cost of the battery.

That's the starting price.

The supposed starting price.

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

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

I'll add one before you do.

Tesla, for example, wants to sell their vehicles.

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

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

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

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

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

That's one reason.

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

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

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

We don't know for sure.

Well, I'm not really sure if you have any thoughts [e-mail] or on Twitter.

On Facebook.

We're not on Facebook.

It took us off Facebook.

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

We have SpeakPipe.

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

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

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

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

And believe me, there will be cake this year.

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

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

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

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

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

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

And this is the reason.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And it was eventually determined it was just driver error.

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

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

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

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

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

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

To absolutely figure it out.

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

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

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

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

I mean, you have to fire up a plant.

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

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

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

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

They could all be networked.

Yeah.

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

But stabilizing apparently saves money.

I don't understand why, but it is.

Yes.

Oh Brian.

It's time for a clean energy show.

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

Yeah.

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

Absolutely devastating.

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

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

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

The worst one in history, Brian.

But we have to go.

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

See you next week.