The Backward States of America

The Clean Energy Show

The U.S. is finally banning incandescent light bulbs in favor of LEDs--the bulbs the rest of the civilized world uses! California runs on 100% renewables for the first time in history!

Brian updates on his homemade shoelaces.

Saskatchewan finally gets serious about solar.

The boys diss SiriusXM for its crappy sound quality.

We're unsure if our show plays on Pandora, Deezer or TuneIn due to our change from MP3 to ACC file format.

Toyota BZ4X charges terribly.

A million US citizens live in a house with 3 VCRs connected to the grid.

Italy stands up to tiny penised loser Putin with Operation Thermostat.

Ford's home integration systems uses the Ford F150 lightning EV pickup to power your home. The system is pricy but may be less than a generator install. It even has a small battery for the moment before the truck power kicks in.

The U.S. Postal Service faces lawsuites over buying combustion vehicles.

Alberta coal is going away fast. At 75% of the grid in 2001, it'll be gone by 2023.

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

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Leave us an online voicemail at http://speakpipe.com/cleanenergyshow

=Transcript of this Episode=

Hello, and welcome to episode 112 of the Clean Energy Show.

I'm Brian Stockton.

I'm James Whittingham.

This week, Ford has confirmed the price of its home integration system, which enables the F 150 lighting electric pickup truck to power your home in case of an outage.

Turns out it's cheaper than a generator backup, as long as your truck isn't sucked away by the tornado that caused the outage in the first place.

Italy has introduced Operation Thermostat to fight Putin by limiting energy use.

And you thought the pen was mightier than the sword.

The highway rest stops in the future will have EV chargers, except where Brian and I live.

Here, there's just a gravel turn off with a full garbage can and hole in the ground someone dug to desperately go to the bathroom.

The state of California has run on 100% renewable energy for the first time ever.

So it's the perfect time to pitch the Clean Energy Show movie to Hollywood studios.

It's like An Inconvenient Truth meets Anchorman Two.

All that and more on this exciting edition of The Clean Energy Show.

So, James, I feel like you're dying to hear an update about me making my own shoelaces.

Brian, I've lost sleep over it.

You think I slept last week wondering about this? No.

What's going on? Well, it's only been one week, and I've already made my first pair of shoelaces.

You've been retired for a week at your building.

I'm seeing them now.

To the zoom.

Yeah.

Oh, that's nice.

They're metallic and metal, and they look like they're from the future.

And, yes, these are the paracord shoelaces.

So far, so good.

They look like shoelaces.

They don't like to look like parachute cords.

They look like shoelaces.

Well, exactly.

Some shoelaces are round.

These are just round.

They look like shoelaces, but they're fancy paracord.

They're on a pair of runners.

And the ends are these metal grommets that you cremped yourself.

They look rather sturdy.

I noticed you kept the laces fairly long.

Do you like to tie big bows? That seems like the appropriate length for me.

I think that's the normal length, but I will say that they are a little bit slippery, so they've come untied a couple of times.

So I've got to work on my knotting and lacing game.

Do you think that's going to help, or is it hopeless? Well, we'll find out.

So I downloaded an app from Professor Shoelace, who's the world's leading expert on shoelaces and the appeals.

It's not like master shoelace with the guy.

The app is called Enslaces, and I'm hoping to find some more tips on there about different knots I could try.

Then maybe they won't come on dust.

So let me get this straight.

You're a man who just retired from a full body of work and experiences, and they're only now learning about how to tie a shoelace properly.

Look, there's way more ways to tie a shoelace than you probably think, and you got to get the app to find out.

I guess I struggle with the normal way.

My kids used to tie their shoes and soccer games all the time.

It's all they were doing is tie the shoes.

I could never get it right.

And you know what? My shoelaces I finding are always not long enough because I have high arches that you can limbo under.

As you know, that takes up a lot of space in the shoe and sucks the laces back into that.

So I'm waiting on the brown paracord that I ordered.

Brown seems to be a difficult color to get in paracord, so they're not as dark or brown as I want.

But right now on my brown shoes that I want, brown shoe laces on one of them is too long.

The other one is too short.

Now, I can custom make my own these ones.

When I first made them, they were a little bit too long.

So what did I do? I just sniffed them a little shorter, and there you go.

You know what, Brian? I got an idea.

All shoes should come that way.

They should come with really long shoelaces that are, like, five inches too long.

You trimmed them to your life and put on the garment with yourself.

And the grommets will last better than the little plastic things they put on there.

Yeah, and the nice thing about the metal ones is that if they do ever come off well, you just put another one on.

It's very hard to do that with the plastic ones.

And I'm hoping to replace some plastic ones.

I looked them up on the Amazon that you were mentioning last week.

The information you will learn on the show, people, it just goes far beyond anything you imagined or wanted to know.

Yeah, you can get this shrink tube stuff to make your own plastic egglets for shoelaces, but I'm not sure.

I think the metal so far is better.

But if you want me to make you some shoelaces, just let me know what length you want, and I can get you something.

All right, well, let's get to some clean energy stuff, Brian, because I was happy to learn that in our province in Canada, that they're starting a solar farm or developing a solar farm or putting intenders out for a solar farm.

It's 100 MW in size.

We've talked about this.

If you follow the show regularly, we live in a clean energy desert politically, I would say.

And coal is a big generator here, almost 50%.

Hopefully that's going down.

This is 100 megawatt is ten times the size of the solar farm that went online, I think, in December, and another one or two that are coming this year by the end of fall.

And I kept saying, that's a nice start, but you might have done that ten years ago, tested it out, proof of concept and all that.

And then you start building big massive ones.

Well, they're doing that.

Our province next door, Alberta, the oil capital, is going crazy with solar.

They've announcing solar all the time.

In fact, we're going to have to talk about that a little bit later.

In just a few moments, something about their coal reduction is going on, and it's worth pointing out that we are the sunshine capital of Canada.

We get more sunshine than any other place in Canada.

Ironically, specifically down in the south part, where Esteban is, where they dig all the coal and burn it, but that's where they're putting the solar pipeline.

So I have encouraged the coal capital, but it's also the solar capital.

If they put the solar down there, they can use the transmission that exists and turn down the coal.

I keep turning it down until it's gone.

I'm hoping that's the hope, anyway.

In other news, in my Nissan Leaf fully electric car from 2013, I drive it as a city car.

It's the only car I've ever had that had satellite radio on it.

And of course, satellite radio is for rich people.

Oh, yeah.

You don't have it, do you? I mean, you're a rich person, but you don't have it.

No, I'm not that interested.

But on the Hyundai Veloster that I owned, I got a free satellite radio the entire time I owned the car for like, eight or nine years.

Did you listen to it at all? A little bit, not too much.

What channels did you listen to? Well, music.

There was like an NPR and there was like a British news, and CBC Radio Three, that kind of thing.

But like the music channels I was interested in, like CBC Radio Three and The Verge, like the alternative rock things.

The quality was terrible.

Like, it's on the upper band of the there's no bandwidth left on the satellite to get proper audio.

That's what I don't want to talk to you about, because I'm a sound snob.

And this is why we tweaked our show, to sound, as we're constantly tweaking to get it improved and it'll improve some more.

But I thought satellite radio is the end all be all right.

I mean, it's satellite, it's digital.

Yeah, imagine having digital radio from a satellite.

It's going to sound great.

It's going to sound almost like a CD or something.

It sounds so bad.

Yeah.

After all these years.

They seem to give better bandwidth to the lower channels, but the upper channels, there's no bandwidth left, and it sounds like crap.

You know what the lower channel is? The TikTok Channel.

Channel Four is the TikTok Channel.

Now, I don't know if you knew that.

And then I turned it on to show my daughter and she said, yeah, that sounds like Tik Tok.

It's registered right away.

They play the slogs that Tik Tok that has on their app, so I was so disgustipated with it.

So I looked into it and their bandwidth.

If there was an MB three, our MB three is like, mono would be about 96 stereo.

We would put it out.

We used to put out our show in 128 and stereo and MP3, but this is an AC, but they go right down to like 30, 40, I don't know, what is it? Kilowatts per second or pods per second, something like that.

It sounded like the early Internet radio from 1997 or 96.

It sounded so bad and so compressed.

And in our case, we have CBC Radio One and Two, which are on FM, and you switch to them and they sound suddenly way better.

Yeah.

And some of these channels, you can just stream through the Internet on your phone and yeah, if you switch back and forth between the Internet version streaming on your phone and the satellite version, it sounds terrible.

Well, anyway, this is a free trial for three months that I actually signed up for because I was watching a ticktok video from our now friends of the show at the Strait Pipe and they were plugging as a sponsor, as an affiliate.

That so I bet, and I tried it out.

I'm just really disappointed this is how we would sound if we were on a serious XM.

People keep asking me, well, what are you going to do when you're retired? And typically I say nothing.

Because that's my goal, is to do nothing.

Aside from this podcast.

That's really the main thing.

See how terrible that is? Maybe that's a bit of an exaggeration, but it's pretty close.

Yeah, the lower channels are fine.

The upper channel, they are fine.

No, they're better.

They're better, but they're not near what Internet streaming is.

Do you use Spotify or anything? Do you stream music, Apple music, on your Tesla? No, not usually, no.

Are you going to Splurge for the Internet package? Well, I get free data on my Tesla.

Free data? Why aren't you just grooving around to music from the streamers? Well, here's the thing.

So there's no Am radio tuner in my car, but the tune in app, so you can listen to Am stations, but in higher quality because it comes over the Internet in, like, proper data.

So I can listen to CHAB Moose Jaw.

When was it? The early 90s or something? Like late 80s.

That came out with an Am stereo yes format.

And it sounded crappy, but it was stereo.

Yeah, it was a radio sound, but slightly better.

And yeah, we got that at CKRD in Red Deer when I worked there.

Did anyone know that you did? Only me.

I actually got an Am stereo walkman.

Like it didn't play tapes or anything.

It was like a Walkman type thing for radio.

And I specifically got the Am stereo one.

I switched the show last week to AAC MP4 format, which is a format that's been around for 20 years.

It's twice as good as MP3 for the same file size.

It is a podcast format that is available, but there is a small number of places that don't carry it.

Well, it turns out that that number of places is even smaller than I thought, because our show is actually on the places that sometimes they don't allow it.

But they allowed our show.

They didn't allow my other podcast to be an AAC.

They allowed ours because we're big now.

It's funny, Brian.

When we started the podcast, I had the Google podcast app, and I set it to notify me when our show came out.

And it would be like, well, I think the first case was 12 hours.

No, I was 24 hours the first time, and then it became 12 hours, and now it's down to a few minutes.

We're so big.

We're so big now.

That's how you know you're big.

Close.

Diesel is the place in Pandora.

We don't have Pandora in Canada, so I can't check it.

If you guys are listening on Diesel or Pandora, and you can listen to the show and are listening to my voice right now, let us know.

Or if you're in tune in, let us know, because sometimes that doesn't work, but it seems to be working.

So I just wanted to check with the audience to make sure.

O'Brien, I saw a sign.

This is where we update some of our previous shows.

I saw a sign still banning bolts and parking lots on Twitter the other day.

Yeah, the Chevy Bolt, which has occasionally caught on fire because of the battery pack, but they've mostly been replaced 70% and 70%.

Even if it hasn't been replaced, the chances of a fire are still extremely low.

So it's unfortunate for these are outdoor parking lots.

Come on.

No one's going to die.

Hey.

The Toyota Buzz forks, the BZ four X VZ four X or whatever.

All electric SUV, crossover.

One version has a different battery than the other.

And actually, that version, the allwheel drive version, only charges at 100.

Other version of the front wheel drive version uses a different battery and it charges 150.

And I was looking at that.

We look at the rate curves of the charging to see how well it's doing.

It sucks.

It's terrible.

Toyota has not nailed this at all.

They have expertise in batteries more than most people.

Brian, it's time for a pop quiz.

A surprise pop quiz.

Are you ready? No, but go ahead.

This is a pop quiz for you.

The US Department of Energy did a deep dive thorough energy survey of residential use of electricity recently and found that a whopping 320,000 US households still use this product.

Can you guess? And there are three or more of these things in a home in 320,000 US households.

That's probably a million people.

I mean, I'm flabbergasted.

I have no idea.

Throw out some guesses.

A nuclear power plant? No, some real guesses.

Matter? The device, an appliance, anything? Well, like old tube wiring or something, or some kind of old wiring.

This is something that you use as electricity.

So they're testing to see what people are using your electricity on.

I'll tell you what it is.

If you said one, I would be shocked.

But these billion people, these billion people are using three of them.

Their house is plugged in using electricity, possibly playing tapes of, I don't know, home movies or something.

Who knows? I've never had three VCRs in my home.

Do they draw a lot of power or something? Because I know that's a real problem with DVRs or PVRs.

That record from your cable company, like, those are notorious energy hogs because they're on 24 hours a day.

I swear that sucker heats my home.

Brian.

So it's electricity heating.

You're probably five or $10 of electricity every month just to run that thing.

I know.

I actually tested it because I borrowed an electricity tester that shows you the power use.

But then I bought a smart plug, so I found these Vsync plugs.

I use a lot of smart plugs, smart bulbs.

The Vsync smart plug tells you on your app how much electricity you're using now and over time at each cost more than your plug.

It was a bonus feature that I didn't know it even had.

And it's like, yeah, that's cool.

So things like my Subwoofer that get plugged in to have a standby mode, you can see that if it really goes into standby mode or not.

It does, but I've got like a receiver that use power in standby mode and stuff like that.

Anyway, this is a subject that I know is near and dear to your heart.

And the subject is light bulbs, particularly the color of light bulbs and Led light bulbs.

Back in 2019, the Trump administration blocked an energy efficiency rule for light bulbs that was set to go into effect in 2020.

Now, this rule was not part of some super going green liberal agenda.

This rule was passed in 2007 under the Bush administration.

No, this is ridiculous.

I don't want to get into politics, but something horrible happened in the United States overnight, and that makes me think that they're a third world archaic country.

And where most light boulders are, where are most of our cultures are.

We love you.

We do.

Good luck.

But the light bulbs in the United States are not mandatory LEDs.

We've been using them in Canada for how long? Well, I don't know the rules, but I've certainly been using them for decades because you never have to change them.

And they're cheaper.

Yeah, they don't get hot.

So I'm using a light fixture here for my studio set up that I have cardboard wrapped around that would kill me by now through a fire if I was using an incandescent bulb, but I'm using an Led bulb that is not affected whatsoever.

It's the room temperature.

I checked it.

So, yes, these light bulbs, I buy them at dollar stores and they're perfectly good, like 4-3-I don't know why anyone doesn't use them anymore.

It doesn't make any sense to me.

Well, I will say I haven't had 100% success rate with the Led bulbs that I've bought, partly because I was an early adopter.

So when you were buying them ten years ago, it was a bit iffy.

And a bunch of the ones I bought ten years ago did not last.

I had that amazing switch bulb.

It was on the cover of Wired magazine like a dozen years ago because this was the light bulb of the future and it was liquid cooled.

Do you remember this bulb? Yes, I do, because you talked about it.

We had discussions.

I got some of these, and it's a liquid filled light bulb to cool the LEDs in there because they weren't quite sure yet how to cool them.

Anyway, none of them work anymore.

They didn't last.

And I've had other ones, even name brand ones, like Philips Phillips.

Yes, but Philips, they're the problem here.

Don't you get it? They're the problem.

You did the story on our show a few months ago on how the old light bulb people basically in cahoots.

There was a planned obsolescence many years ago so the incandescent bulbs wouldn't last too long.

And now they're finding I'll get into this in a second.

But there's still the problem today.

These bastards.

Whenever industry has effect over government, it's never a good thing.

And only bad things happen to people.

So remember the Phillips one.

I still have them, Brian, because I was looking the other day in my storytelling and came across them just a couple of days ago.

They're really heavy and they're yellow looking.

Yeah.

Those weird yellow pins above me right now.

Right.

I remember that.

I actually remember that from two years ago when we did the podcast in person together and I thought, he still has one of those.

Okay.

Yeah.

They hadn't figured out how to make the bulbs warm, so they basically just put a yellow filter on them.

Well, they were still getting hot.

They were talking 60 watt equivalent bulbs.

I've got one up here that does nothing.

Anyway, it was George Bush who decided to do this a long time ago, before Canada.

Yeah, Australia banned them, too, and backtracked, as Australia is apt to do.

But they're finally on their way out because Trump kyboshed it.

And then Biden is now reversing that.

He used to talk about them and said they made them look orange, these Led bulbs.

No, they're more likely if the early ones made you look blue.

That was the problem with any bulbs, the compact fluorescence because it was harder to make them a good color they're all good colors.

Now, if you're watching on TikTok, I'm being lit entirely by LEDs in all directions, and I am Led here as well.

And you know, I was watching a baseball game the other day at the Rogers Center in Toronto where the Toronto Blue Jay is playing MLB.

I noticed that when their home grown picture from the local town comes on, they cut the lights.

You never used to be to do that in stadiums because it would take 20 minutes back on again.

Yeah.

So now they've upgraded all their lighting to LEDs, and they can flash them and colorize them and do all kinds of effects that they do at hockey games for the last few years.

So, yeah, it's pretty different than what we're used to.

I remember being at a CFL football game and the car went out at night and yes, there was this long delay while the power is out, but then there was another 20 minutes delay for the lights to come back up to power.

They said it will be 20 minutes as the light bulbs warm up.

Yeah.

You know what kind of light bulbs those are? Are they a gas of some sort? Yes.

Sodium vapor or mercury vapor.

Those are the ones.

They're kind of more like fluorescent bulbs that they take a while to.

The one thing that like in stadiums for sports, just one very small caveat about the Led bulbs is very occasionally photographers get strobing in their images when they try and take, like a digital photograph in an arena.

That's all Led lights.

Every once in a while, it causes like a strobing or streaking problem in digital photos.

But that's getting better every year, and it's a super minor problem.

The Obama administration on Tuesday adopted two new rules.

They set stricter energy efficiency standards for light bulbs.

And this is all over the world, Brian.

You see, in our realm of what we talk about, energy efficiency is important.

And the energy use has actually gone down due to energy efficiency.

And the biggest gain has been going from a light bulb that uses 60 watts down to, what, five watts or something.

Typical of that eight or nine.

But there's even better ones coming out.

Like, have you heard about the Dubai bulb? I will now.

The city of Dubai went to Philips again and said, hey, can you get us an even more efficient light bulb? And so Phillips has this 60 watt equivalent, typically is around eight or nine watts now, but these Dubai bulbs go down to like three or four watts.

That's amazing.

Just because Dubai asked, I don't understand why, what's going on? And they're specifically only available in Dubai right now, but it sounds like they are going to start to be available in other places.

And the Led bulbs that have those kind of filaments in them, that looks like an old style old timey Edison bulb.

Yeah.

So they've figured out specifically with these Led filaments, how to so they're selling some bulbs that are only one watt, two watt, and they're putting out 25 watts, 40 watts.

It's amazing.

I was kind of looking around trying to buy some of these, but I don't know.

I'll keep looking and keep you updated, if I can ever get any.

You will.

And you'll be the first person I know to get them, and I'll be the second.

That's usually how it works.

We thought eight or nine watts, seven watts.

Like, that was amazing, but it turns out we can go even lower, down to two or three watts.

It's crazy.

I've said this before in the show, but a lot of people are new to the podcast, so I'll say it again.

The downside of Led bulbs is light pollution.

And as a person who appreciates the stars.

Outer space.

The night sky.

As part of nature.

We lose that when people like my neighbors.

Like.

The school across the street has these powerful my yard is adjacent to a park and then a school yard.

And the school building has these powerful Led.

Blinding powerful Led lights that look like they should be on the front of a helicopter landing that just light up the whole field.

And my house, you can see that on the walls, and it's a long ways away, but they've decided that they need these either using wasting electricity, they probably don't need that much to discourage loiters nerdwells.

Yes, but also, too, it's just bad design, too, because they could put proper shades over those lights so that it's more contained in the area.

So there is the potential for Led lights to be way better in every possible way as street lights.

But we're still in kind of the early stages.

A lot of them are kind of poorly designed, they're overpowered, and they should have timers on all of them, or they should all be computer controlled so that when it's three in the morning, especially, you can dim them down a bit.

You don't need some place that may actually do that.

Another thing is that lights like at that school are very white.

In other words, they're closer on the blue spectrum.

Blue spectrum.

They're on red, the warm spectrum, and then that bounces more up into space, the bluer.

They are.

So cities in Europe used to when they first went to Led bulbs and city streets, they were all blue, like we were talking about.

The early ones were all bluish.

And those are the ones that created the worst light pollution.

A, they made them brighter because they could they were wasting electricity.

They're just throwing it away.

So they made them unnecessarily bright and unnecessarily blue, and they bounced back up, even if they did have safety.

Well, on my house, we've got three exterior lights that we keep on, but they're Phillips hue bulbs and they're 60 watt equivalents.

And so I can program them and time them and everything.

And to have all three of them, like, they're just in the eaves and they point down at the start of the sidewalk in front of our house.

To have all three of them at full 60 watt equivalent, it's just way too bright, especially at 10:00 at night or something.

So, yeah, we keep them at like 40% brightness most of the time and that's plenty bright.

I've got just one of those fixtures and it's over my front door.

And currently we have a salute to Ukraine, so it alternates between sort of a blue and a yellow back and forth as our salute to prank.

Yeah, we change colors, like at Halloween and Christmas and stuff.

Is there like a ceremony when that happens? The changing of the color.

Changing of the color.

So once the new rules are in place, brian in the States for getting rid of incandescent balls or replacing them with LEDs, americans will collectively save $3 billion a year on the utility bills.

I believe I'm reading this.

What's wrong with you? America.

It's a win win worry for you.

The phaseload had been on track to begin earlier in 2019 by the Trump administration.

As I said, bound to pressure from some of the world's biggest incandescent light bulb makers because they have quite the lobby, those incandescent light bulb people.

You know what they're pissed off about? They're pissed off about disruption from the outside, from the sides, from the lateral, which we talked about on the show a lot in our realm of stuff here, because other people started making them the Led bulbs.

They weren't happy about that.

So he said, you have to sell our bulbs, which are made to last a short amount of time.

And by contrast, in the European Union, those same companies, they adhered to the phase out.

You know what? Aside from Trump saying he make him look orange, they've argued too rapidly pivot away from incodescent balls would damage their bottom line and lead to a glut of stranded inventory and boxes and warehouses.

Screw the planet.

We don't want to have our bottom line affected from a 150 year old product that we purposely make die fast.

Big Ball is at it again.

Brian.

They're still at it.

We thought they were done, but they're still added.

So Renew Economy has reported that California has, for the first time, run on 100% renewables.

Now, it was only for a few minutes, sure, and the naysayers will always say something.

It was only for a few minutes.

But it only improves from this point.

So it was only for a 15 minutes period.

But California is a massive state, a massive economy.

It's basically the population of the entire country of Canada and running on 100% renewables.

They have lots of solar, they've got lots of wind, they've got some battery.

So this is just amazing.

Good news.

And the fact that it was only for 15 minutes is not a bad thing.

That is a good thing because it only gets better from here.

The thing is, it could have continued to run.

Nobody blew up people's houses.

They were running, from fires in their houses.

People say the grid can't handle 100% renewables.

Well, that's not true.

That's a myth.

That's a myth that we're going to talk about in future episodes on the show.

It's a myth.

And you know what, it was actually 101%.

I saw the figures for it.

And you know what, somebody, a climate personal energy person pointed out that the natural gas turbine generators for power never turned off.

They kept running at something like 15% of the state's power.

Yeah, well, they sent that electricity elsewhere.

They sent it out of state.

But the theory was they couldn't turn them off because they had to have them as a standby.

But I'm not sure batteries solved.

That problem it's like that old fashioned technology of those ridiculous light bulbs we were just talking about.

It used to take 20 minutes to turn on the lights in a stadium.

This is better technology.

Those gas plants, yeah, they take a while to spin up and spin down.

Batteries do it instantly.

And we got to talk more about batteries on future episodes because Tesla is deploying these massive packs everywhere.

And nobody's talking about it people say, well, we need nuclear, we need other things.

And even hydropower is going to be displaced by other renewables that are cheaper than it.

So, yeah, there's nothing that says you can't have a whole lot of batteries.

There's nothing that says that.

And then you recycle.

The factories are ramping up, battery production is ramping up.

It's just going to take a while.

Brian, I wanted to talk about a Clean Energy Canada design winner for an EV charging station.

It looks like the Apple headquarters on a small scale.

It's a giant ring and it's got a green living roof and a few solar panels on top.

And cars pull up to the outside of that ring and inside there's a park and playground and places like that and the ring itself consists of an indoor space.

I noticed that.

What is it? Electrifying.

America is actually creating some indoor spaces now for their EV charging or at least designing.

Them.

I think that's you actually drive indoors.

It's like one of those indoor car washes and that's interesting.

Maybe good for our country where it gets really cold.

What do you think of that yes.

No.

I remember when I used to drive to work occasionally.

I would usually walk to work but every once in a while and it would sometimes happen when it was like -40.

Out in the winter and I would drive to work.

And I would park.

In the heated underground parking and it was like giving my car a spa day.

It was like the whole thing would unthaw.

It was kind of my car, it would be worth it just to unthaw once in a while.

But yeah.

So this is the Clean Energy Canada Organization and they had this competition to design the EV charging station of the future.

And yeah, this is something we're going to need more of.

And these designs are amazing.

It's just a computer design stuff.

It's nothing too intense that way.

As far as design goes, nothing too detailed.

But I'm wondering though, if in the future is this necessary? Because we can see ten minute charging coming on the horizon for 800 volts batteries.

The 800 volts architecture on the batteries.

And by the way, you really charge faster in the lower half of the battery, don't you? How does it work on a Tesla? Where does the charging speed drop off when you're charging it? Yeah, so it's really great when you first plug in at around 20% capacity of your battery and then yeah, it starts to tail off at 50%, 60% around there.

So the bigger battery, you have these apps, like a better route planner.

If you tell it you want to go fast as possible with lots of stops, it will say, okay, you're going to do better charging more often than actually going past 60% or something.

Just charge to what you need to get to the next one and you'll have a faster charge.

That's especially true if I buy a bolt from Chevy because 55 kilowatt charging speed is so bad.

Yeah, you're going to want to leave as soon as possible because the stop is already too long.

Yes, it's the same thing for that though, you're not getting full charging speed for very long, not even the crappy charging speed that it is.

You still have to maybe take off out of there at 60% or something and just do lots of little charges.

That's no good, that's got to change.

But it will.

And some of the best cars can charge very quickly, like they had 800 volts.

What are the 18 minutes? Not zero, but 20% or something.

Or zero to 80%, something like that.

And all of these times are lower in the winter too, we should mention, right, it's cold or not even just even freezing, I'm finding, with people in the States around plus four, people are complaining about their charging speeds and depends on the car and if you're capable of pre warming that battery.

Some batteries, like room temperature and Tesla batteries like really kind of warm, don't they? Like 120 Fahrenheit or something like that? Yeah, I'm not sure, but certainly 1520 Celsius is nice driving temperature for the car.

This is the clean energy show.

Okay, so this is a story from the Guardian.

We've talked before about, I don't know, sacrifices that people can make.

And as the energy crisis in Europe continues to go on with the conflict in Ukraine, there is obviously huge concerns about having to use Russian oil, Russian natural gas, and the European Union is trying to wean themselves off of that.

But anyway, so yeah, sometimes it's occasionally discussed if the average everyday person can do something in this conflict.

And so Italy has put this into law and basically it's just a thermostat setting.

So you can't set your air conditioning any lower than 25 degrees Celsius in Italy.

This is for schools and public buildings.

This is their new plan to combat.

Is it a plan or a law? Is it actually legislation? It's an initiative.

It's a rationing initiative.

So yeah, I don't know if anybody's going to go to jail if they don't follow this, but yeah, 25 Celsius, which is 77 Fahrenheit.

If everyone keeps their air conditioning at that level over the summer, this will lessen the dependency on these Russian fuels.

I try to do that sometimes I sneak in a 24 a little bit cooler as I get older.

Yeah.

I still don't have air conditioning here, but I am making progress.

We now have a hole dug for the power utility.

We had to cut a hole in our driveway, two foot by two foot hole.

This is bigger updates than the shoelaces.

Why are you just incidentally mentioning it? I buried the lead.

I'm sorry.

I don't know.

Personally, I think the shoelaces are more important.

We now have a hole prepared and the utility can now drill underground with a robot driller.

And they just have to hit this two foot by two foot hole and I'll come up and soon should have 200 amp service instead of 100 amp.

Okay, well, you have to fill that hole in the cement.

We're thinking just gravel.

So we're going to put the dirt back in and then probably just some gravel on the top.

I'm disappointed.

Do you know what I did last summer? I invented something.

Oh yeah.

I tried to encourage my son, who was going off to engineering school, to participate, but he was like, yeah, what's on YouTube? But we tried to do the project together and he has no hands on fixing experience of any sort.

He's just kind of lived his life free and easy like kids do these days.

He doesn't work in the minds like you and I did.

Exactly.

Anyway, I kept having my umbrella because I have a wind problem here.

My house is two and a half stories high.

There's no other houses equivalent around.

There's a field behind me, a boulevard on the other side.

The wind killed my house and it literally did that over the last two years.

Now that we're getting climate change of wind speeds we've never had before in the wintertime of 120 km an hour.

So I bought a big planter bucket.

It's like a wooden crate.

It looks like a wooden crate.

It's plastic, looks like this big half crate.

And I filled it with cement.

Wow.

To hold my umbrella? Yeah.

On the bottom there's this umbrella thing, like it's a tube that the umbrella goes into that came with the umbrella.

No, it was from a different base, had broken my bases keep broken breaking.

So I invented this thing, I put it into the cement and it goes halfway up with cement and the rest I filled with stones.

Put a drain hole in it with a drill and the damn thing works.

It's the first successful umbrella installation I've had in the history of James.

And I'm proud to say that it is an unqualified success.

It will not blow over.

It's heavy.

And my point was, if you do mix concrete, don't inhale it.

It's very unhealthy to inhale cement.

And the other thing I'll add is that they've put in a grounding plate.

My house didn't have a proper grounding plate because it was no, I want to hear about this, Brian.

Tell me everything.

So they put it at the bottom of the hole.

So two ft by two foot hole, they put a grounding plate flat there.

So when I get metal service, I'll have this new grounding plate to ground the house.

So it's just a piece of flat metal sitting at the bottom of that two foot hole and it's connected by wire to your house.

And that's what the ground is.

And that's the ground for the house or will be the ground for the house.

Wow.

And you never had a decent ground before is what you're saying? No, and I think that's why sometimes my electric car charger sometimes flips off, is that we don't have because the house doesn't have a proper ground.

It only works like 99% of the time.

Okay, well, I thought grounds are more involved than just 2ft down in a metal plate and a wire plate in the ground.

Wow.

It was literally a ground.

Okay, let's get on with it.

Because along the same vein, the Ford F 150 home integration system, which is where your electric pickup truck charges or powers your house, well, that requires technology, requires equipment to do that.

Right.

The vehicle to grid or vehicle to home acquires equipment.

And so Ford has chosen Sunrun as its partner to install the home integration system needed to take advantage of the vehicle to home capability of the F 150 lighting, which by the way, is very weak.

They are already producing and can't wait to see one.

And it'll cost $3,895 in the US funds.

So, you know, that's not terrible.

It's a bit of money and you still have to pay to install it, which will be twice that, will double that price.

But somebody was pointing out that actually the auto evolution pointed out that that the home integration system, they had a bit of a story on it and they said that it's actually not a bad deal because you have to pour a concrete.

This is what we're just talking about you have to pour a concrete pad if you want, like a generator as a backup.

And that's really expensive to pour a concrete pad for anything.

Unfortunately, the home integration systems automatically disconnects the house electrical system from the utility line, which is important, so you don't hurt anybody who's fixing a power outage on the lines and switches over to Ford intelligent backup power when the grid goes down.

And in the future, we'll also be able to power the house from the truck's battery when the electricity rates are higher.

You can program it to do that through a software download, and it'll be integrated as your power source because when the grid rates are higher, you power your house with your truck in the driveway and you save money.

You say, well, it's going to deteriorate my battery faster.

Well, it's going to pay for itself, is what I'm saying.

Then some.

So potentially saving money and using pressure on the grid, which is what we got to start doing.

We have to enable this stuff and encourage this stuff and maybe pay for this stuff.

Pay people a premium when they do power the grid during peak times from their truck or their EV or whatever they have so that the grid is more stable.

Like I said, installation could double that price.

Perhaps you could even add like just a home battery, because my only complaint with the system, because this is fantastic, but if your truck isn't at home, then you can't do it.

Okay, so the United States Postal Service is facing several lawsuits over their purchase of numerous gas guzzling trucks.

So this is a report from Electric, and this has been in the news off and on for quite a while now with the Biden administration coming in and having lots of clean energy policies.

This purchase of the next generation of US.

Postal Service trucks, this was looked at as a really excellent green, clean opportunity to replace them with electric vehicles.

And like, a postal van is the perfect kind of vehicle for going electric because it's short distance, lots of stopping and starting.

You don't have to leave your diesel engine running all the time.

But anyway, so it didn't work out.

That great.

And they ended up planning to purchase mostly gas powered delivery trucks from the Oshkosh Defense Corp.

It's just an odd name, but it's the Oshkosh Defense Corp.

And they started out saying, well, 10% of them will be EVs, and then they upped to it.

People were mad.

And so many players are now coming forward to sue them.

And so the Northern District of California, the Southern District of New York, the center for Biological Diversity, the Sierra Club so many organizations are getting together to sue them.

But the thing that I wondered is, well, what is the basis to be able to sue them? Like, can't they just buy whatever trucks they want.

But the reason they can sue is there's a thing called the National Environmental Policy Act that was signed into law in 70 and this makes federal agencies, they must publish environmental impact statements before any change in policy that is likely to have an environmental impact.

So this is the law that allows them to sue and hopefully will win and get this reversed so that they can make EV.

This law is from probably so much about climate change or global warming at the time, but it was really just about pollution.

Like 1970 in particularly, like Los Angeles, the pollution was quite alarming back then.

So that was the start of these kinds of laws to reduce pollution and get cleaner, more pleasant air.

But it turns out the law also works.

Now in the age of climate change and global warming, it's the same kind of law that can be used to hopefully get this reversed.

So coming up is the lightning round.

You can get a hold of us at the Cleanenergy show.

[e-mail] is our email [e-mail] clean Energy Pod on Twitter TikTok, where sometimes you get some exclusive content up there in your YouTube channel.

And Brian, I just want to quickly mention that Tom on Twitter pointed out that cold use in Alberta is set to be next to zero by 2023.

That's quite something considering I think it was very high 20 years ago.

In 2001, it was 75% with production of their annual electricity production.

Now it's going to be zero.

Wow, I didn't know it was ever that high, but that's great.

Now 50% was bad where we live next door, but 75% is crazy.

That's good to see.

They're doing it better than us.

We asked for an extension for shutting down our call at 2030, so it's going to be beyond that because we rely on it.

But it's bullshit.

You know what? It's not like there's not an alternative.

They're installing the alternative, they're just not installing it fast enough.

So I don't know, it's kind of frustrating.

We need to do as much as we can, as fast as we can.

And thanks Tom for pointing that out.

Yeah, he said this will be the biggest greenhouse gas reduction in Alberta's history.

I found it interesting.

The article that I read about, it was on CBC at the end of December and they said that wind production typically falls in Alberta in the wintertime.

It's not because coal equals less wind, it usually means more wind.

And the air is actually denser, so it actually produces more energy.

It's just that the climate happens to be less windy in the wintertime than in the spring and fall and summer.

So yeah, they had to make up for that.

Speaking of not doing things fast enough, we do like to occasionally complain about nuclear, which we are in general favor of because there's no greenhouse gas emissions associated with nuclear.

But the problem is it just can't happen fast enough.

And solar, wind, batteries, that stuff can go out quite quickly.

So we've talked about this before recently on the podcast.

So I just want to give another update.

The most difficult part of the story is trying to pronounce the name of this nuclear power plant in Finland.

And I'm going to try it here.

The OCA Luoto Three.

The three sounded right.

If there's any listeners in Finland, please let me know.

If I was in any way close.

And I'm not going to say it again because it's too hard.

But anyway, this nuclear power plant was initially supposed to come online in 2009, but it's been delayed by a series of setbacks, including faulty components, safety tests, a lawsuit, and there's hopefully one last delay.

It was supposed to start running in July, and they've now pushed that back to September.

So once it's running, and hopefully it's running, it will provide 14% of Finland's electricity with a greenhouse gas free electricity.

So fingers crossed.

Hopefully this actually does come online in September because it's been a long road from 2009 and it's still not running.

I can't imagine the cost overruns involved with that kind of almost generational delay.

It's just a long bloody time.

And, you know, I got into an argument with my damn son again about he's always trying to throw me about nuclear, even when I think I make progress with him.

The issue that I have with nuclear is a nobody's building nuclear, okay? The main plants.

He's into SMRs and thinks that a lot of academic people are as well.

And they would disagree with you, dad, but he's wrong.

They're wrong because these things are not proven and they're not necessary.

If they were necessary, fine, we should start building them.

But nobody's building them.

And you know who's buying them? Governments, because they're not viable.

And we're looking at one in Ontario for the 35.

We have to act now, right freaking now, to get the climate in order.

And my second problem with it is price.

They're not going to compete on price.

And the more renewables we have, the more expensive nuclear becomes.

Because when the renewables, like in California go to 100%, then the cost per unit of electricity from that nuclear plant becomes very expensive if you're not using it to its full potential.

I think your son is just trying to cause you to have a heart attack or not.

I don't have any inheritance coming his way.

He's not going to benefit from it in any way.

So he's just I don't know.

He doesn't know that.

He doesn't know that.

I tell him that every day so he doesn't try to kill me and Brian.

It's time for the lightning round.

The lightning round is the lightning round because it's fast.

We cover a few of the headlines in brief that we didn't get to and want to talk about the US.

Department of Energy announces $3 billion towards EV battery manufacturing and supply chain.

Because, as you know, most of the battery manufacturing is elsewhere.

Right.

It happens in China and places like that.

And they think, well, if there's political instability or they pull a Russia, we're not going to have access to all the batteries that we need, so they're going to invest in some.

Do you think the US can bring that sort of manufacturing back where they don't have it now? Yeah, well, it's important for energy security, right? Like, this is something that has not been thought about enough in the last couple of decades, is that you need to have energy security if you want to have a secure country.

So, yeah, possibly.

I think it's one of Tesla's big victories, is that they've brought that kind of manufacturing back to America.

I think most people would have assumed that they would just keep farming out battery production to China or whatever, but they're going to undertake it themselves, and it's important for America politically to do it, so they should probably do it.

TVs used to be manufactured in the United States.

Remember that? We're old enough to remember that.

Yeah.

And I think it was partly because the old tube TVs were so damn heavy that shipping them from other countries was prohibitively expensive.

But now that they're smaller and lighter, electrify America reports a five fold increase of charging sessions at their charges in the United States in 2021 compared to the year before.

What's it going to be like next year, Brian? That's pretty actually dramatic.

I guess before that, there was mostly just Tesla's around, and now there's a lot of other cars that can use Electrifying America that has something to do with it.

Is that going to keep going? Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if there's another five fold increase for 2022.

According to data provided by Mikhailo Federal, Ukraine's Vice Prime Minister, about 150000 people in Ukraine are using Starlink every day.

Remember, Elon said, I'm going to send a bunch of Starlink from over there so they can have these are the Starlink satellite dishes that can provide Internet.

And, yeah, they've been sent over to Ukraine because a lot of their communications infrastructure has been knocked out.

But if you've got a dish, set it up on the ground and you get Internet right away.

People assume that it was a gift for Milan because he talked that way.

But it's actually the US federal government is paying the money for flipping the bill.

And I think Elon also said that they had to change the actual satellites so that they would work over the Ukraine.

It wasn't currently in operation yet.

There was some hacking things they had to work through as well because the Russians were trying to jam the satellites, and so they had to work some encryption magic to keep them running.

So that's interesting, but this is hopefully the new era of warfare where you can fight wars with heat pumps, with turning your thermostat up, and with sending satellite dishes so people can communicate in a way.

Well, that's easy for us to say, but I wish there's some people who think that this wars and there's been some think pieces written about how this war is actually about the transition away from oil and that this is the last gasp of Russia to actually try and make their money and make their place, because we are transitioning away from it.

GM, who was recently thought to have abandoned the Chevy Spark EV.

There's a Chevy Spark as a tiny little hatchback and there's an EV version.

It's been around for a while, it's a very short range and nobody really likes it, but there's a few around, I've seen them, I consider them.

But people thought that GM said that they were going to stop actually replacing their battery packs and then that made people think, well, should I buy a Chevy Bolt like James is going to do if they're going to just abandon his vehicle in a couple of years? Right? Yeah, it makes them.

But currently they said that this is not the case, that they actually had to come out and say that we're just experiencing a temporary disruption in the supply of new EV packs for the Spark.

And we remain committed to providing replacement packs to Spark EV owners who need them.

Like if their warranty says that they need a new pack as soon as the supply issues was done, lexus says they're going to make fast charging capable EVs with 800 volts architecture.

But Brian only for the ones that have battery packs over 100 kw.

They think, well, if it's got a smaller pack, we don't need to charge you fast.

This is stupid thinking Toyota, am I wrong? Yeah, of course.

Lexus is part of the Toyota brand, so we know that they've been laggards in this.

So yeah, it makes sense if they would make a dumb decision like that.

I'm not just attacking Toyota for the sake of it.

I really think that's a stupid idea because first of all, a lot of cars won't have packs over 100 kilowatt hour.

They don't need them.

How big is your pack? Yours is what, long range is 70, right? Or something like that? Of the Tesla Model Three, those cars are the ones that need the fast charging the fastest.

Right.

You don't want to have 100 kilowatt battery carrying that around, all that weight and size if you don't have to.

The fact is a smaller battery pack that charges faster solves the problem, brings the cost of EVs down, makes them more usable, and that's what we're looking for.

But no, Toyota doesn't get that.

They just stuck in the past.

So Montreal is requiring zero mission new buildings in 2024 in small buildings that's in a couple of years, less than a couple of Years, really, and 2025 For Large Buildings.

And also they will have a building performance standard which they had for 2050.

Buildings are going to have to be carbon neutral existing buildings by 2040.

This is a pretty big step.

We're talking a lot about how cities take steps that outside governments don't.

Like.

Australia.

They have very conservative federal governments.

But the local people do a lot of work in this area.

We've talked recently about how Quebec is run on hydroelectric power, and it's something they're very proud of there.

They have a really clean grid.

So it absolutely makes sense that they would go down this path.

It's the perfect province to be heating their buildings with electricity.

Reuter says the average cost at the battery cell level for EVs rose from 105 last year to $160 in the first quarter of 2022.

Yet EV sales are surging.

My question is, why are they not all going up in price? That Sounds Bad.

Yeah, well, of course the cost of batteries is in general, on the way down.

But it's been a weird year with supply chain challenges and also just the demand for electric vehicles.

It's Not Just Tesla.

Ford is sold out of their electric Mustang for the year.

With such huge demand, it's going to be difficult to keep these prices, the retail prices down.

And there was another story, too.

About there's been a few GM electric Hummers released, and one of them sold for $250000 in an auction aftermarket, like, they're, like, 120 new.

But there's such demand, and there are so few of them.

They're literally selling assets.

It's really Resold.

The only reason I'm keeping my cyber truck reservation is because you can maybe flip it.

Finally this week, Brian from Virginia Public Radio.

We don't have a lot of stories from Virginia Public Radio.

The energy transition appears to be taking hold in Virginia.

In 2021, for the first time, the Commonwealth of Virginia generated more electricity from solar than coal.

And Virginia likes its coal.

That's Great.

That's Fantastic.

And that is our time for this week.

If you're new to the show, be sure to subscribe or follow the podcast or whatever app you're using to listen to us.

So you get new episodes delivered th every week.

And I can't wait to talk to you again next week.

See You Next Week.