144. 2022 Year End Spectacular! The Year in Clean Energy and Electrified Transportation

Why 2022 was a good year for clean energy (thanks Putin!), our EV of the year, solar on an abandoned nuclear power plant site, Brian gets stranded by the weather, James's Prius has troubles, and more evidence that the Tesla Supercharger network is the one to beat.

The sound of driving next to the Tesla Semi will amaze you. EU emissions are down despite cold weather and a partial return to coal. 

Why American's should buy an EV in the first two months of 2023.

The U.S. Postal Service is finally big on electric vehicles and will go full electric soon.

The city of Tokyo mandates solar on the roofs of new homes and buildings.

Lyft is giving insentives to electric vehicle drivers basically covering the lease price of their vehicle, then they can save huge on gas and earn significanly more than than their coworkers driving gas vehicles.

Hydrogen and chip shortages are also covered.

And we wrap of the year that was 2022!

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Transcript

Hello, and welcome to episode 144 of the Clean Energy Show.

I'm Brian Stockton.

And I'm James William.

Welcome.

This week Lyft will incentivize drivers who drive EVs by paying them extra weekly fees.

And they're also considering throwing in a free vomit shield for late night rides.

Turns out the laser used in last week's Fusion Energy Breakthrough was also used as a set in Star Trek Trek.

I'm glad to see the scientific community helping out Star Trek, but where they really need help is with the script writing.

Tokyo mandates solar at all new buildings.

Unfortunately for their tiny hotel suites, this only requires a solar panel the size of the ones you find on Calculators.

The US postal Service commits to 100% electric vehicles.

Now, your package will arrive with a lower carbon footprint.

However, it'll still be late.

Plus, we'll have stories on the chip shortage not going away and why Americans should buy an EV in the next two months, and solar on an abandoned nuclear power plant site.

All that and more on this special year end edition of The Clean Energy Show.

Yes.

I would like to call this the year end spectacular.

That's how it's going to be.

Okay.

The year end spectacular of the clean energy show.

Yeah.

Which basically means we're going to go along this week.

Okay, Brian, we're late this week.

Why are we late, Brian? Why are we many days late? Why are our fans craving our show and unable to get their fix of the Clean Energy Show until now? Yes, well, I have a long story to tell about travel, winter travel here in the wilds of western Canada.

We were going to be one day late for the podcast because I was traveling, but it ended up to be several days late.

But, yeah, we had a lovely trip to Jasper, Alberta, Canada, which is in the Rocky Mountains of Canada.

It's an absolutely beautiful place.

Have you been to Jasper? I've camped at Jasper at Pocahontas Campground in the north, and I've been through there.

It is probably well, the locals like it better than BAMF because it's just less touristy.

But it's also known for its highway in the winter being shut down due to dynamiting avalanches.

They call it the icefields highway, or parkway, rather.

Yeah, well, that's the thing.

It is less touristy because it's harder to get to.

Like, BAMF is quite close to Calgary, but Jasper is an almost a four hour drive from Edmonton, which is the closest major city.

So we were talking recently in France, they have sort of banned some short haul flights because those can be covered by trains and we need to all be flying less.

But, yeah, we had to make this calculation of how to get there because it's like an eight hour drive to Edmonton and then a four hour drive to Jasper.

So if we drove it, that's 12 hours.

It's a bit too long.

I'm everyone else in my family has things to do, like exams, and they're not retired, old man, you can do whatever the hell you want.

Yeah, but we thought, well, we better fly, and that'll save us a couple of days because people have things to do.

So you fly to Edmonton, you rent a car, you drive that to Jasper.

So that worked fairly well on the way there, although it was starting to get cold and our flight was delayed a couple of hours out of Vagina, so it was kind of slow to get there.

But we picked up the rental car and I wanted to talk a bit about that too, because obviously we talk about EVs a lot on the show and we love EVs, and you and I were in it, though a bit of an EV bubble, like that tends to be all we think about and talk about.

But I just wanted to say, sometimes you forget the niceties of just a really nice car.

So there was four of us.

So we got this large Kia sorento SUV.

It's a seven cedar SUV, this very big vehicle, and it was great.

It made me think, like, obviously EVs are the way to go and we're obviously transitioning to EVs, but you can kind of understand why somebody would get into a Kia Sorrento and think, yeah, this is fine, we don't need an EV.

This works great.

It's a brand new car, only took half a tank of gas on all the way to Jasper.

Really? Even though it was like this large SUV? Yeah, everything worked great on it.

I mean, contrast, a couple of months ago, we rented a Toyota Corolla for something and that was less good.

I don't know.

Toyota Corolla, it's an inexpensive car, so you get what you pay for.

But I was kind of surprised how crappy it was.

I used to admire Corollas all my life.

I used to admire the car my son has, which is a Honda, honda City, like 20 years old.

I would have admired that because I've had these really crappy cars in my life.

But I did rent one, I did rent a Corolla when we hit a deer a number of years ago.

And I was thinking, this isn't no, because the Corolla and the Prius, the cost of ownership is equal or better for the Prius.

So if you just spend the extra money and get the Prius, you get so much more, and then you pay that much less in gas and everything.

So, yeah, I recommend you think about the cost of ownership when you buy a car.

Yeah, and more upfront for the Prius, but probably cheaper in the long run.

And then we ended up renting a Toyota Rav Four for the drive home, which I'll explain that in a bit.

So then we had another experience with another car, a brand new Rav Four, and that was decent, although I could never hook up the do Toyotas even have Apple CarPlay? That's a good question because they've avoided that.

I will say, though, that the ones that got into it do have the Apple and not the Android, but now they have both.

But that surprises me because I would have thought all new Toyotas have both now.

But was it older? No, it's brand new.

But on the Kia Sorento, the apple CarPlay hooked up right away.

It was great.

So we were able to use Google Maps on the navigation.

The Toyota, it said something about, you got to download the Toyota app to connect with your car.

And I was like, what? Toyota I did that.

And then it was like, it shows you what they're like, man, with the EVs, this is indicative of everything they do, and they've just got to slow to change.

The other thing we noticed was, like, we were driving away from the rental place in the Rav Four and we were like, oh, wait, did we forget the keys? Where are the keys? Where's the key? Fob maybe we drove away without the key fob and then after five minutes of looking, we realized it was in the ignition.

You have to put it in the ignition and turn the key to they started for you and you just got in.

They did.

They started for the way that used to work.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Which is actually kind of nice.

It's kind of nice to actually have a place to put the key.

But also my knee was bumping against it.

It just seemed super old timey.

So I did download this app that Toyota wanted me to download, and then it was like, okay, set up your account with Toyota in order to connect.

And I'm like, what? And then you needed like a Vin number, or it said you could like a QR code.

DNA profile.

DNA profile.

And it said that you can shoot, like, there's a VR code or a QR code on the screen, but I couldn't get the QR code.

And then they were like, okay, enter the Vin number.

And at that point, I gave up.

So anyway, the Kia Sorrento really loved it.

It was great.

But you still got those gasoline car negatives, which is by the time we got to Jasper.

And so, by the way, the weather the day before the wedding, so we were there for my my sister in law was getting married.

She got she got married to an F 18 fighter pilot guy.

Oh, no, I mean, he doesn't do that anymore, but oh, okay.

That's good.

We only have like, six F 18s in the Canadian military, and they may go out somewhere.

Why? It's kind of a big deal.

Yeah, it is a big deal.

They're the elite of the elite.

There's only six of them or something like that.

So congratulations to Alex and Dan.

Lovely wedding.

And the day before the wedding.

So this was going to be an outdoor wedding.

This was their plan.

An outdoor wedding in Jasper in the middle of the winter? Because it's cool.

It's Beautiful.

Was there an F 18 flying over? No Smoke.

But the day before the wedding, it was minus five celsius and sunny like it was perfect.

The day before the wedding.

Really? And then the day of the wedding.

It dropped to -20.

And Windy.

So the wedding.

Could not be held outdoors.

We had to go to the backup location in the Jasper Park Lodge and have it indoors.

So yeah.

It got super frigid midway through the trip.

So starting up the Kia sorento.

It started fine and everything, but it just took so long to warm up.

Like gas cars.

Just takes so long to warm up.

We went into Jasper to fill it up with gas.

It's like people say, one of the advantages of gas cars is they're so quick to fill up.

But I got to tell you when it's -40, it does not feel quick.

Nothing feels quick.

At -40 when you're filling up an SUV with the Tesla.

If we'd had the Tesla And by the way, there's Tesla superchargers on Main Street.

And Jasper.

There wasn't before.

But there isn't.

It wasn't before.

You would hop out of the car, plug it in, get back in your car.

That's all.

You know.

By the way, people, when you own a Test, it knows your car.

Knows your account.

Yeah, it's all connected, but you just have to plug it in and you can get back in your car.

But filling it up with gas it's -40 out.

I mean, it was like -30 something in windy and you're fumbling with the credit card and the gas pump.

Yeah.

The Shell that I go to, and then I haven't done this in a long time.

Thank Jesus.

Is I used to fill up the car at a Shell station, and it was so slow.

Every step.

Would you like a car wash? Yes.

No.

Would you like to enter your air miles? Yes.

No.

And it didn't come up quickly.

And then with the colder it was the logger took for the LCT screen to display.

Yeah, the displays on the pump are always kind of half frozen.

No.

And then, God forbid, something goes wrong with your credit card and you have to do it again or whatever.

So basically, you couldn't get a flight back for what is it, 45 an hour flight from away from us.

It's a 1 hour flight.

And so then on the way back, we drove the Kia sorento back to Edmonton.

We went to the airport.

The cold weather was starting to set in and on the west coast there's been blizzards and stuff.

So Vancouver had it worse.

Probably Seattle as well.

Where massive blizzards in Vancouver? And so we're nearby to Vancouver, and a lot of planes are coming from Vancouver, so the delays start to happen.

The cancellations start to happen.

We got to the airport and we thought we were good because we were there like a couple of hours before the flight and it was still on the board, it was still on time.

Oh, dear.

We went through the check in process and we got to our gate and then it was just a sort of a series of announcements about delay, delay, delay.

We were there for 4 hours and then after announcing all these delays.

Are your flights canceled by sealing.

So question though about is it hard to get a one way rental because you're not taking the car back? So how does that work? Is it more expensive? Do they let you do it? Does it depend where you're going? Yeah, well, I'll get to that.

Just a couple more things about the airport I thought were interesting.

So we're standing there waiting at the gate and there's all these announcements for all these flights and they're saying things like, oh, well, the pilot is here, but the crew is not here, they're coming in on a flight from somewhere and so that's delayed, et cetera, et cetera.

And there was a flight supposed to be leaving for Saskatoon.

It was -35.

And so they're like, okay, well, we can't board yet because the plane is too cold.

Oh, no.

I don't know if the heater on the plane was broken or something or I'm not sure what, but they said, oh, we got to hook up a heat cart to the plane and warm it up before people can get on.

And so there's some kind of external heater that they hook up to these planes.

And so they kept giving these announcements.

It's like, okay, well, we can't board until it's ten Celsius inside the plane and it's four Celsius now.

My guess is they would have to run the engines on the tarmac at great expense to heat up the plane.

And my guess.

Is also that it would be a slow process to get it from -30 or whatever it was to room.

Temperature.

So they probably be like warming up a car.

They'd have to use all this jet fuel to warm it up.

So they use these external heaters.

I guess.

But it was like, okay, well, it's now six degrees inside the plane, we could almost board.

I assume that flight was eventually canceled.

Six degrees.

Celsius, which is room temperatures, is about 20 degree.

Wow.

And you know what Brian, a lot of people across the continent are having these problems, moved from west to east and went on after you.

And lots of people listening, I'm sure, are dealing with this.

Yeah, and it speaks to clean energy again, because the same things that apply to electric cars versus gas cars apply to gasoline airplanes.

There are advantages in the cold weather to gasoline type fuel, and there's also disadvantages, well, I imagine if they were electric.

They would have got out the combustion heater as well.

To heat it quickly.

Yeah.

Or who knows.

But anyway, so they cancelled our flight and didn't tell us anything about what to do.

So we're like, okay, well we got to scramble and get a hotel nearby.

So we ended up spending two days stuck for two days at the hotel, the Radisson Airport Hotel in Edmonton.

And we had booked the flights through a travel agent.

So one of the benefits of that is that they have to deal with these problems.

Really? You booked through a travel agent? Yeah, it's just like an online travel agent.

It's not like you're traveling around the world, you're hopping to the next city.

Pretty much.

Why would you use a travel agent? It's a perk we have with a points card that we've got.

Okay, so you decided to drive instead.

Yeah, well, we tried to get them to rebook the flight and the best they could do was December 24.

Really? Which is tomorrow.

They're not paying for your hotel, are they? I don't think so.

I mean, we're going to get a refund and maybe we'll get a hotel credit or something like that.

We have this passenger rights thing in Canada now, so they're not supposed to totally be able to screw you over anymore.

But I don't know if we'll see how that goes.

When we were finally leaving the hotel on the morning that we left, this lady came into the hotel with her luggage and she said, I'm back.

I was at the airport and they canceled my flight again.

So I got to check in again.

That's not good.

Then it's Christmas.

It's the worst time of year.

Yeah.

So we were going to have to spend like four more days to waiting for the rebooked flight.

So you start looking into rental cars and we quickly discovered that everybody was basically outlawing one way rentals because they would have had no more rental cars left in Edmonton.

Right after the flights are canceled, they're going to be out of cars.

I see.

Everybody starts calling the car rental places because these are drivable distances for us here in the west.

So nobody would give us a one way car rental either.

And you try and book online and same thing, one way rental, no, not allowed.

So what we ended up doing was we went online to Enterprise and booked a two week rental for the car and the idea being that I would drive it back to Edmonton in two weeks.

Are you insane? Well, again, I'm the retired guy.

I've got nothing better to do.

Jesus, Brian.

Really? And there was four of us.

Like everybody wanted to get back for Christmas and everything.

So I thought, well, what the heck, two weeks from now I could drive the car back to Edmonton if I had to, hoping that we could work something out where I wouldn't have to do that.

But anyway, so, yeah, we went to pick up the car at Enterprise.

We had a book for 08:00 A.m.

And we said, okay, well, this is our plan.

We're going to drive it back in two weeks, but we'd rather just drop it in Vagina.

Is it possible you could do that? And so they fiddled around with the computer and they found a car that they were going to allow that for.

There's a bit of an extra charge because apparently they replate the car like they put Saskatchewan plates on it once it arrives.

So I think we still kind of lucked out that they found a car that they were willing to let go on the one way journey.

But maybe there's other people stuck in Vagina that need to get to Edmonton.

So maybe there's a massive yeah, I think I saw some of the news, actually.

Yeah, that's what we did at the airport.

Shout out to Enterprise Car Rental.

They saved Christmas for us.

It was a Christmas miracle.

I don't have to drive back to Edmonton two weeks from now.

They let us do this one way rental.

We did an eight hour drive yesterday and made it.

There was one other thing I wanted to mention about the car rental.

When you rent the car on the website it says, do you want to offset the carbon from your car rental? And it's basically an extra charge.

How much do you think they charge to offset the carbon on your rental? Is it a one time fee or a kilometer fee? It's just a one time fee.

$50? No, it was a dollar $25.

That's one seedling maybe.

I guess one seedling is better than nothing.

But that seemed unusually low.

Well, why wouldn't it if it made you if you believed that, if you if you bought into that, then yeah, that's great.

Buck 25 to not have any emissions.

But it is something I want to look into further because I do want to take some flights in the next few years now that I'm retired and I would like to offset that carbon in some kind of way.

But yeah, that's my long wow, that is something.

I wanted you to take a train for part of it so you'd have a trains plane as an automobile story for the rest of your life.

You could tell at the parties, but apparently, like, Vancouver was so much worse.

There was one airplane that the people were stuck for 13 hours on the tarmac.

Man, that is first nightmare.

It's tortured.

That should not be allowed.

No, it shouldn't.

I don't think it is allowed.

I think they passed laws against it, haven't they? Isn't it like 2 hours, 3 hours or something? That's the max.

Yeah, there's a law, they don't follow it.

I heard the passengers had to resort to cannibalism.

Well, you start to think, that guy looks pretty tasty over there after 13 hours you've been eyeing them up.

Yeah, well, they went through all the nuts and pretzels airplane.

That sucks.

That sucks.

The pilots you'd think would be like, I can't fly now.

I've just sat here for 13 hours.

I can't fly across the country for 5 hours.

Come on.

That doesn't seem to work out either.

After a couple of hours you got to just call it and go back.

Yeah, just even if you have to board off one of those little ladder trucks.

Just get off and walk on the tarmac into the airport.

Yeah.

I'm thinking if that ever happens to me, I'll just fake a heart attack or something and then I'll have to let you heart attack Stockton and his retirement strategies tips so you can begin book one day.

Fake a heart attack on a plane.

Let's talk about my worries and woes.

I have a Prius as our main car right now.

I've been trying to replace it with an EV.

Right.

The Prius is now, like I said, almost six years old.

Our five year lease ran out last spring and I was thinking five years, man, that's too long.

When we leased it, EVs will be I'll be wanting to get an EV.

Didn't work out because there's just not enough stock around and tells us that the Model three was in fact not $35,000 and they've gone up ever since in price.

So that wasn't doable.

And the other people didn't follow the suit too well anyway, so I'm still looking for an EV and that's my situation.

However, we had a scare with the Prius, a mechanical scare, which I've never had before.

Now, we've never had the Prius for more than five years before, but nothing has gone wrong.

Nothing rock solid like every little knob and everything, every hook, every cup holder, everything is perfect on those vehicles and that's why I like them.

However, my wife heard a gurgling sound in the cabin a couple of months ago.

And so the way the combustion engine works is you have antifreeze that circulates through the engine with a water pump.

Otherwise the friction from the way a combustion engine works with pistons rubbing against metal up and down that it gets too hot.

But they use that in the cabin to heat it.

So there's a little radiator in the cabin and a fan that blows so that's your waste heat from gasoline being only up to 20% to 27%.

Efficient electric cars, of course, are 90% efficient, but you get to use that waste heat.

And an electric car, you need to use 5000 watts to heat the sucker.

So I checked the antifreeze reservoir and it was empty, or empty ish and that's a bad thing because that goes into the engine as well.

So it was a problem.

We had to fill it with antifreeze and it kept leaking and there was nothing on the ground.

So I looked it up and of course, the first thing I find is head gasket gone, and it's beyond the five year warranty.

Yeah, that happened to me once on my dadson.

Well, that's a very old car from very old times.

But did you get it fixed, or did you blow it up for your phone? It wasn't crazy expensive.

What I remember.

Well, it's thousands of dollars.

I looked at $4,000, and the only thing that let me sleep at night was the fact that the car is worth so ridiculously much used that we could finally sell it and just turn it over, and we wouldn't really lose money on it or anything at all.

We'd still gain money for a down payment on a new car, even if it was another prius, however it turns out and this is a fluke.

So in the prius, there's a catalytic converter.

I want to get two into the woods here, into the weeds here, rather.

But the fluid actually goes through the catalytic converter on a prius.

And the reason is, this is an engineering play to increase the fuel economy.

So, because the catalytic converter is full of precious metals, a people are stealing them, by the way, off of priuses because they're oversized.

So stealing off a priuses, I've seen lots of videos on YouTube of people doing it really quickly.

They pump it up in the middle of the night, and it's gone.

And it's a lot of money, so hopefully they don't steal mine.

My son said it wouldn't be ironic if they sold it just before you got it fixed or just after you got it fixed.

Anyway.

So, basically, they have to replace the catalytic converter because there's a fluid loop that goes through it.

The antifreeze actually runs a fluid loop through the catalytic converter to keep it cool.

And without getting too technical, it's because combustion cars have to change the mixture of gasoline.

They have to over mix the gasoline with the air to cool down the catalytic converter.

So there's sensors in your catalytic converter.

O, two sensors that keep it temperature sensors to keep it within a certain range.

So they have to reduce the fuel economy by increasing the mixture.

While the prius doesn't have to do that, it can keep a pretty fine mixture most of the time because it's cooling it in the fluid loop.

Another advantage of that is it heats the cabin quicker.

Because the catalytic converter heats up instantly.

You don't have to wait for the engine block to heat, which is a big thing.

The catalytic converter, the smoke, the exhaust that goes out of those things heats them up quickly.

So then your cabin ostensibly heats up quicker.

So that's what's leaking, and it's leaking into the gas.

The mechanic, apparently, after long searches, actually sniffed the gas, sniffed the exhaust, and said that it was in there.

But my wife and if I was there, I would have said, what are you doing? But she said, Is it covered under warranty? Because they gave her a price of $2,000.

And I've got problems with the other car that I don't need this.

We've got a kid going on a trip, and we were just strapped, but they said it might be and one guy went to another guy and another guy went to another guy and eventually talked to the manager.

The manager said, yeah, it definitely is.

We we've had these before because it's part of the hybrid system, I guess, which is guaranteed for eight years.

On most cars that have hybrid systems they consider this part of the hybrid system.

So it's guaranteed.

I hope so, anyway.

I hope they don't change their mind.

What a relief.

But yeah, it's a huge relief.

It's like a Christmas miracle because we almost took back the kids Christmas presents.

Not literally, but it would have been a lean Christmas, that's for sure.

So that's great.

And speaking of which, I had had it on Twitter with you know who and I canceled my Cybertruck reservation.

Let's face it, Brian, there's no chance.

I don't care how long he takes to get the Cybertruck out.

There's no chance I could afford one.

But I've also lost faith in just the fact that the Cybertruck isn't a stupid idea.

Like I don't have faith in him anymore.

And Mr.

Musk maybe it is, but I kind of relied on him to say that, yeah, this is a good idea, but it could be a complete bust for all I know.

It doesn't matter.

I have no money to buy the Cybertruck.

So it was just wishful thinking that I took my $150 Canadian back and I bought a gift for my wife, which I will be talking about because it has to do with I wanted gardening.

Okay, so growing weed then.

Sure.

Exactly what you could do in Canada.

Also, we talked a lot about you going to the next city over Saskatoon a lot and there being a Tesla supercharger there for what it is really cold and by the way in Denver.

It went from plus five celsius to -15 so 20 degrees celsius in 1 hour.

I mean the homeless people were caught off guard and the infrastructure must have frozen.

They call it a flash freeze.

And that yesterday and the day before I think has been happening all across.

But anyway, the superchargers in the one city that we have between our two major cities where we live went kaput except for one stall with two cables.

But yeah this is an issue across all the third party chargers as well.

But what happened here is that someone made a call and they got fixed in a day they're all working now for Christmas because people were anxious because a lot of people going back and forth for Christmas and they need these things to work or they can't make the.

Trip.

Well, I would be worried about that, too.

It's tesla being headquartered in California.

You would be worried that they may not have enough people here to be able to do that.

Well, they must have had either people who are floating around because there's so many superchargers or their own texts.

I don't know if the text at the Shop in Saskatoon can actually do it, but they fix them instantly.

And that's great, because everywhere else says, well, we've got to order it parts for two months or six weeks.

And all these other kinds of chargers.

Speaking of Denver out of spec reviews the YouTube channel that I like because it went down to -30 I think last night he's testing all kinds of things.

He's got Teslas, he's got Kias, he's got old Leafs that he's let get cold.

And he's testing the charging speed and the range because they don't get to do that.

We get this all the time where we live, but Denver doesn't always get such an extreme So he's, like, using the opportunity.

He stayed up all night to do this so that he can do all these tests.

Now, he's going to make a fortune of the YouTube content, but, yeah, he'll be able to test it out and we'll see how that goes.

He did say that a cold Tesla that's just been sitting there in -30 well, it wasn't always -30, but just sitting there without any heater plugged in.

Said it wouldn't charge right away.

So it took an hour to sort of get the system going, to heat up the battery enough that it would even start charging.

And, of course, batteries charge slower in the winter because they're cold.

They can't accept the charge that fast.

And you can leave your electric car for a few days unplugged if you have to, but you shouldn't.

So as we went to Jasper I left my Tesla plugged into our house.

Our home charger.

I just sort of set the charge level at 50% so it didn't need to charge while we were gone.

But it could always draw from the juice from the house to keep the battery warm as it dropped to minus.

Well, this is kind of sad, Bride, because we've always advertised ourselves as the experts on cold weather because it gets down to -40 here.

So the cold weather EV experts of the worldwide ones.

Better than Norway? Better.

Than Alaska.

Well, Denver's got some testing to do, too.

But he said that all the electrify America Chargers.

Were not working all of them because they're only good to a certain temperature it's like -16 -20 or something I might have it later in the show I'll check my notes.

That doesn't make sense.

No.

They said they didn't work.

They only rated to that.

So he knew that it's -32 or something here today as well and doesn't, including the wind, which is making it ungodly uninhabitable.

We should not be here.

We should be in Hawaii right now.

We should be.

This is terrible.

Let's see here.

I think my Leaf is unplugged my Nissan Leaf, my electric car is unplugged because for some reason it charges when it heats the battery.

So the battery heater.

Comes on at -17 celsius to -20 Celsius, which is quite cold.

So it comes on and it cycles off at minus twelve, once it heats up to minus twelve, but for some reason it can't operate it unless the car is charging.

And it's not just my car, it's the lease.

I even assume that the new lease, because they act pretty much the same way, that way.

So if you're just leaving your car, then it charges up to 100%, regardless of what you set it to charge to.

And of course, you don't want to leave an electric car at 100% because that stresses the battery for any length of time.

So what I've been doing, Brian, is I've been unplugging it and plugging it back in because I'm not using it because the heater isn't working.

So if another car is around, I'll just use the Prius or whatever to make shopping trips.

So I have been unplugging.

It could go for, I think, three days, eating the battery, and then I just plug it back in and let it go up again to 100% and then unplug it.

And yeah, that's what I have to do.

Unfortunately, other cars are not like that, but the Leaf is kind of wonky in that way.

Speaking of it, and it's still cold in the Leaf because your heater no heater, cabin heater is no heater.

Still looking at the diesel heater, it's a sad thing, okay, it's a sad thing, but I've been managing.

I did have a hard time the other day because it was frost on the inside of the window.

It was like -28 or something celsius and I had frost on the inside, because whenever you scrape the frost off it just falls under the dash as snow, essentially, and then that just evaporates in the sun or whatever, goes right back on the window again, if you don't have any heat blowing on it.

My scraper, for some reason, the inside of the window doesn't scrape very well, so it's like little lines scratching little lines in there trying to see and get my daughter at school.

But the school is over for now, for a while anyway.

I made it.

My son tempered house.

My house built as a passive solar house.

Though the other day was -32 and the furnace did not have to come on.

It was heated above the temperature, thanks to the sun just shining in the south windows and the fact that the house is decently insulated.

Modern houses, I always say when I bring this up, are much more insulated than my passive solar house.

And if you're new to the show, james lives in a two storey house that was designed as paso, lots of windows facing south super thick walls based on a design from I guess the 1970s here in Saskatchewan.

And there was a handful of these houses built and James was lucky enough.

Yeah, thanks to the 70s oil crisis, they decided to study it in a house called Saskatchewan House.

And this was sort of built after that.

It skipped out a bit on some of the installation, but they did things like double two x four offset stick construction so that there would be no thermal bridging.

You wouldn't have a direct contact between the indoors and outdoors.

And add things and they came up with the heat exchanger there for that house.

They invented a heat exchanger which is now used around the world in your house as well.

So some updates to past stories.

Yeah, the guy in Denver, the Autospec reviews YouTube channel guy says the new electrify America BTC charging stations do not work below zero fahrenheit which is -17 he said make sure you're not relying on one of these new stations for the next few days.

And these are brand new.

Brian.

These are brand new and they're not working below that so that's BS.

You got to give us a Tesla, Brian.

If Tesla went completely bonkers, they could be the world's ubiquitous charging network because they got that right, didn't they? No, the charging network is like the uptime is kind of amazing and they are starting to open that up to other people and apparently when they are broken, someone can get to them and fix them.

Like apparently which is not always the case with everyone else.

So they got to figure that out.

Okay, so another update.

So we were talking last episode about the fusion energy breakthrough, which we went quite deep into, but there was a little detail that showed up here on Bloomberg that I just thought was interesting.

The laser that they used for this experiment was in the movie Star Trek into Darkness.

They needed a location for that movie and it was at this national Ignition Facility lab where this laser is that they used for this fusion reaction.

Yeah, it's in the movie Star Trek into Darkness.

I thought that was kind of wild.

What year was that? Was that like ten years ago? That one is about ten years ago, I think.

Yeah, it's one of the modern Star Trek movies, but the laser was around then.

It's a military operation.

I'm surprised they got in and used it.

Yeah.

And possibly my favorite thing about this fusion stuff is that it always does look kind of cool.

Like these giant they really look like movie props.

They look like movie sets.

They look like science fiction.

It's maybe not practical as an energy source, but damn cool.

Not yet.

Anyway, it seems like it's going to be a while.

So if you are in the United States and most of you are.

We know that who listen to our show, as most shows have a largest audience in the United States.

Go buy an EV now if you're thinking about buying one.

Because not right now, but in January 1 or February, the first two months or so will get you a tax credit for all brands because you're going to have to look into this yourself.

But some American built EVs, we just found out that aren't eligible for the tax credit.

Now, like the Bolt EV may be able to claim half that credit, perhaps because the new tax credit says that your EV has to have its minerals sourced in the United States or countries that it has free trade with, which is Canada and a bunch of other countries.

And I don't think China counts, but it doesn't.

And that's a problem.

So if your batteries are built in China, as a lot of them often are, that can be a problem.

So, yeah, check about the EVs that you want to buy, the brand you want to buy and look into that because apparently the government just said that we'll figure it out in March.

We're going to need until March to figure this out to see which EVs, because it's hard to figure out how much of your car comes from the United States and how much of it comes from outside a free trade zone or something like that.

So is this like an interim ruling then, ruling that they don't even have an exact date? But if you are looking to buy a car, know that you're probably going to get a better tax credit than you might otherwise get.

Now, it might be the same depending on which brand you buy.

But the US.

Automakers are struggling to keep to get up to speed on this because they're going to have to shift their supply chains in order to make sure that some of them may not even try entirely.

But in order to get the full tax credit, which they're going to want to have, they're going to have to change things around.

That's not going to happen overnight.

It could be a year or so or longer before you're able to get that same tax break again.

So if you're thinking about if you're on defense, look into that.

Yeah.

So story here from the Guardian.

There's been some concern that emissions in the EU might go up this year because of all the problems with Russia and trying to get off Russian gas.

And so there have been some coal plants that have been kind of fired up again or increased their output because of the energy concerns going on in Europe.

So there was some concern that the emissions for Europe this year were going to go up, but it turns out they did not.

So there was some coal brought online that they weren't expecting to.

But the EU has been doing apparently enough other things with their regulations that overall, the emissions still did go down this year, which is great news.

That is great news.

And this is the Russian invasion of Ukraine changed things around, and still they were able to manage an emissions reduction, which is very interesting.

I don't think we know exactly why that is.

They probably are still looking into that.

These things take time.

But that's interesting.

Well, we know that the EU has been more strict on things like vehicle emissions.

So presumably all the kind of legislation that they've been working on for the last few years is starting to pay off.

Well, that's incredible.

If it is, Brian, that's because we look for that to happen down the road.

And if we start to see that, then that's pretty exciting stuff.

And it can be frustrating as those of us who watch this closely and watch it every day, because these kinds of agreements get made all the time, of agreements made, rules made to reduce emissions.

But overall, you still kind of see oil use creeping up a lot of the time, and it can be discouraging.

But we're trying to get the entire planet to move on all of this, and unfortunately, it just takes time.

Okay, well, I have something that tickles my fancy.

Here it is.

Somebody who drove past a Tesla semi truck and opened his window and recorded it.

So I have the recording for you.

But you know what it's like to drive by a semi with your window up, right? It's a noisy experience.

And this is, I would say, a little above city speed, not quite freeway speed, sort of expressway speed or something like that in the city.

The start of the recording is the window is down and he opens it immediately so it gets a bit louder.

But this is what it sounds like.

I mean, that's it.

Yes, that's freaking it sounds like now.

Yeah.

There's so many advantages to EVs that are just side advantages.

Imagine a world where it's not frighteningly noisy.

We forget how.

We just get used to it, right? Like, I grew up in a house right near a highway, and you just get used to that awful sound of semi trucks all day and all night.

And we don't have to live with that in the future.

I live near a highway that comes to the end because I live at the edge of the city.

So the highway comes to the end and the semi slow down, and they use their engine brakes, even though the signs tell them there's a fine if you do well, guess what? They don't give an F.

And those engine brakes are expensive.

What they do is they use the engine instead of the brake pads to slow the truck down, making the truck the engine sort of fight the wheels.

It's connected to the wheels, and then the engine is working in reverse or whatever, and it's just fighting the and it's just noisy as heck if the wind is coming from that and it's hell.

But you know what? Electric trucks like the Tesla Semi don't have engines to do that.

They have regenerative braking, the same things you and I have in our electric cars, which is great for them.

It's great for going down steep grades and not wearing out your brake pads or your engine because you don't have to gear down when you're going down those grades and make a mistake because that's apparently something that happens.

That's why you see run offs for brake run offs for semis.

Well, the regenerative braking just makes more electricity.

It makes the motors work in reverse and charges your battery up with your heavy load and is relatively quiet.

Well, I drove to Vancouver about two years ago in the early days of the podcast in my Tesla and I drove through the Rocky Mountains and I would always watch the regenerative breaking when I was going down a mountain and I had it set to range on the thing.

And the range one time going down a mountain jumped up 5 km.

Well, that's cool.

Yeah, because Herald wasn't 5 km up the next mountain or something similar.

Even in the Prius you could do that.

You can watch the regenerative breaking work too.

So that's cool.

Now, we used to do that in the mountains all the time.

So the US Postal Services is sort of reversing their course on electrification.

Yeah, this is a story we've covered every few months here on the show.

Of course, advocates for clean energy have been arguing that the US Postal Service should go hard on electric vehicles.

They came out with a very wishy washy, started out as maybe 20% electric vehicles as they're looking to replace their fleet.

They have a gigantic fleet of vehicles in the US Postal Service which are coming due for replacement anyway.

So they have increased the amount of electric vehicles a little bit over time and now they have finally given in and gone to 100% electrical purchases for vehicles starting in 2026.

So 75% of vehicles in the next few years and then by 2026 it's going to have to be 100% electric.

That's good.

It's a perfect it's it'd be stupid, let's put it this way, it'd be stupid not to because, you know, that sort of sector is they have it now, they have the trucks, they have the technology, it's shorter range and you're wasting money if you don't go EV.

That's the situation we're in with small local short haul trucking, let's call it.

So yeah, it'd be stupid not to.

No.

And the only issue might be supply of them.

But of course, everybody's ramping up and with the Inflation Reduction Act in the US that is encouraging all industry to ramp up production of all kinds of electric vehicles.

So this should be doable.

I noticed one of the suppliers might be oshkosh defense, like a defense contractor.

It's kind of weird.

So they're building electric vehicles for the post office.

Why not like Ford or somebody else? I mean, if someone gives them a billion dollars, why not? So they recently pledged to go 40% EV and the new purchase plan gets them to 75% by 2026.

You know, Brian, the year changes a couple of days to 2023 and then 2026 is going to look awfully close, isn't it? It's going to look pretty close, yeah, that's right.

Also change the number on your checks when you're signing checks at the grocery store.

Right? Because if you do the checks that I write was the last time you wrote a check? You probably have I haven't 2 hours.

Really? Long story.

Okay, we won't get into it.

So we've been talking about solar farms on formal coal plants, which is cool because what they do is they use the infrastructure that's there.

Because you have a coal power plant, you need to build a whole bunch of power transformers and power lines to connect to the rest of the grid.

So it's kind of convenient to do that.

Well, I found an example of where they're doing it.

On an abandoned nuclear power plant.

The site of the project is the Rancho Seaco, a former SMUD nuclear facility that was taken offline in 1989 after a series of troublesome incidents and a vote of no confidence from the public.

So the public basically had enough and said no, they shut the sucker down, which seems inconceivable now.

Well, 1989, that was the year The Simpsons started, so maybe that had something to do with it.

I've seen videos where they talk about the Simpsons has not helped the nuclear industry.

People actually think about that.

I didn't, but three eyed fish and all that.

So the 2000 acre site was eventually repurposed for the consumes natural gas power plant, which is still there, but they also now have added 1000 solar in addition to the 1000 natural gas.

So yeah, very interesting.

And why not? You have the property and apparently there was some property there to put all this stuff up.

So why not, why not add solar and make use of the utility? No, we need grid connections for all this clean energy and they often already exist.

Well, let's get into some of our main stories of the show before the new year happens.

We may have a new year's countdown if we keep going long on the show, but let's go.

Hey, it's the year end spectacular.

We're going long.

So this is a story from Electric Autonomy Canada study shows EV's potential to increase utility revenues but reduce customer costs.

So this is a study that happened in California and basically the gist of this is that particularly in California, there are lots of electric vehicles now.

So basically electricity consumption has gone up.

Like this is a natural thing, but utilities in California and here in Canada, most places are heavily regulated.

Like they operate often as a monopoly.

So since they're a monopoly, you don't want to let them just charge whatever rates they want.

If it was a true monopoly, they could just charge $5 a kilowatt hour and just make all the money in the world.

Because they're a regulated monopoly.

They're the only ones licensed to sell power.

But because of that, regulations exist so that they can't just take all the money they want from the customers.

They have to play fair as a monopoly.

So basically, as consumption goes up, the prices have to come down because the utilities are only allowed to make so much profit.

So it's really the first glimpse of the future that we are eventually going to see of really abundant clean energy and the prices starting to come down.

This is a somewhat artificial price is starting to come down because it's more from the regulations than from anything.

But it's a glimpse of the future.

The more electricity is made, the more money the utilities make and the less they have to charge people.

Well, that's an interesting study per kilowatt.

Where was that study? Electric Autonomy Canada.

Electric autonomy Canada is the website and the report is called electric vehicles are driving rates down.

And it's a study that looked at three California utilities.

Very interesting stuff.

So Google that if you want to know more.

Toyota or pardon me, toyota tokyo mandates rooftop solar.

This is interesting because Japan has kind of poopooed solar and wind.

They should have been on top of this a long time ago and they're only now doing it.

And you know, nuclear has been shut down for many years now since the Fukushima disaster.

And they shut down a lot of the nuclear.

You think they would have just hopped on the renewables right away, but they haven't.

But now they're really starting to come on board.

The Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly has approved new provisions to make solar installations mandatory for new homes.

The rules apply to homes with total rooftop areas of more than 20 buildings with rooftops smaller than 2000 m².

So some other buildings too, that aren't homes.

They will also require businesses to install solar arrays on 30% of the rooftop surfaces.

Some parts of the city could face requirements for 85% of all rooftops to be covered by PV.

That's pretty significant.

The new rules will require developers and installers to use solar panels from manufacturers that respect human rights too.

So there's some rules in there that you can't just buy any solar panels.

And Japan is not a solar panel manufacturer to my knowledge.

So I'm not sure if that means not China or or what that means exactly because I haven't heard about solar panels coming from a place that doesn't respect human rights aside from China, which is quite obvious.

And arguable, we seem to put up with it because half our stuff comes from China and three quarters of our stuff.

Yeah.

No, we've got all these rooftops all over the world.

They eventually will have all kinds of solar on them, and that will lead to the kind of abundance that we are planning for and hoping for that will make electricity even cheaper in the future.

This is for new homes.

Okay.

Not existing homes.

But we're kind of at a threshold now where if you're building something, you might as well include the solar because it's probably a bit cheaper to the factor the solar in.

When you're building a home, the wiring and everything is already pre done and accommodating for the solar.

And why not? I mean, yeah, you're outlaying a bit more money.

It's kind of like adding 5% to super insulate, but then you save that 5% in a short period of time that pays for that.

And it could be a few years, it could be less.

Yeah.

No, building codes have to change and plan for the future, for sure.

Okay.

So we often talk about wind turbines on the show, often gigantic wind turbines.

And I find this stuff super fascinating, just almost based on the size alone.

As we've discussed, these things are incredibly huge and long and difficult to transport.

So there's a story here this week on Electric World's.

Most powerful wind turbine blades arrive for installation.

So this is in Denmark.

These are 15 megawatt wind turbines.

These are, if not the biggest ones, the big ones.

Yeah, this is 15.

MW is around the biggest in the world right now.

But I wanted to mention offshore, we should point out that's, right, these are offshore wind turbines, which are the biggest ones.

But, yeah, they sent me down a bit of a YouTube rabbit hole, which I thought was really interesting.

Vestas is the company that makes these in Denmark, and they've got a really interesting YouTube channel where they show you some of the process of how they make these things.

And so step number one is a gigantic long factory.

Like, the factory is just super, super long.

And everything in it, all the equipment is all super, super long.

They make some of these things in molds, so they have to have these giant molds that are like, my God, like football fields long that then they have to then open up and somehow get these things out and transport them.

But, yeah, the YouTube channel gets a promotion for the company.

So it's a little bit of, like, slick promotion.

But you also get to see, actually how these things are kind of built, which I found totally fascinating.

Yeah.

And they are building these factories sometimes.

Now, if you have a really large offshore wind installation, they'll build them right at the shore because, as we said before, the hard part is transporting on roads because, well, it's very hard, especially the offshore ones.

That was one thing I was wondering about.

Yeah, it would make sense to but these factories are not cheap or easy to build, so they'd have to kind of think twice about where they're going to put them.

But it makes sense to build a new factory right by the shore.

Maybe they can make the factories modular like the World Cup Stadium that they're taking apart and putting somewhere else.

But we talked about that a couple of shows ago.

Yeah.

So that's, you know, it's the blades that can't be modular.

Like you can put little tubes on top like they're building.

Yeah.

Unfortunately, they're building a cell phone tower half a block away from me now.

A big one, probably 5G.

So the tube that is the structure in the middle is modular.

You put one little tube on top of another until it gets up there.

But the blade can't be I don't think anyone's invented a blade that is not one piece yet.

Right.

Yeah.

These blades is one of those football field size, literally like and beyond.

Yeah.

There's one of those cell towers going up near me and I was surprised how big around it is.

Yeah, me too.

Mine is not up yet, so we'll see how big it gets.

Maybe it's to give us faster communication for the clean energy show.

I don't know.

Yeah.

So Lyft is going to incentivize EV owners.

Lyft is the what do you call it? Ride sharing.

Ride sharing.

App based ride sharing.

Uber and Lyft are two different companies.

The main ones, I think, in the United States and Canada and many other parts of the world.

Drivers in California this is California only who own EVs can earn an extra $150 a week.

So if this is your job and you're not making a killing doing this, an extra 150 a week or 600 a month ain't bad for owning an EV.

I mean, Brian, in the States, with the incentives and the things and this and that, you could probably use half that just for the lease of an EV.

So if you're not driving an EV in California, you work for Lyft, you're crazy.

Go buy an EV, sell your beater or whatever you're driving and get a brand new EV with full warranty coverage and that will cover the cost plus your gas.

My goodness.

This is a great incentive, actually.

It caps out at $8,100, apparently.

I guess you get $150 for each week.

You complete at least 50 lift ride.

So it's not for your casual person, but that's not crazy either.

So the bonus caps out at $8100 and that's a fifth of the cost of a $40,000 new electric vehicle.

So yeah, a five year lease.

Basically it's covering the cost of a vehicle.

Right.

I mean, that's essentially what this is doing.

And then you save a crap load on gas.

A crap load, like crap load, especially if you can charge at home for a part of that time.

No, that's amazing.

There's another advantage here, Brian.

A DV go fast charging stations that receive a percentage discount up to 45% off if the EV go fast charging stations are working.

And if it's chilly, or if there's a bit of humidity in the air, or if the moon is full, they will not be working.

So that's up to 45% off if you have gold and platinum rewards status on the platform.

Because ostensibly you would charge at home and probably have to top up at some point during the day if you're doing it full time or just a long shift.

So boom.

Or I don't know what the charges are compared to home, but you might actually be competitive with home and just do a fast charge on the road.

And a non EV go public charging stations.

Lyft drivers can use Lyft's debit card.

Lyft Direct, it's called, to get 1% to 7% cash back.

And at home, the company has provided a discount of $140 off level two chargers from Wallbox, which is about 20% off.

That's decent.

That's one great way a company can decarbonize.

And it makes perfect sense.

No, it's great.

Okay, so we've got a story here from Hydrogen Inside, which is a website that covers the hydrogen industry.

And I just thought it was interesting because it reminded me of what we were talking about a few weeks ago with the Apple iPhone.

So Apple has introduced a clean charging feature on your phones.

I look for it on mine.

It's only available in the US.

So I couldn't see it.

It wasn't available in Canada yet.

But I think with the latest operating system on your iPhone, if you go into the battery section and you choose the sort of battery charging section under the settings, you can set your iPhone so that it will charge when the grid is cleanest.

So in the US, apparently, they have figured out when the grid is cleanest.

And so if everybody follows that with their iPhones, it can actually make a difference in terms of carbon intensity.

But this is sort of vaguely I mean, it's a much simplified explanation, but they're looking to do something similar in the hydrogen industry because one of the issues with a hydrogen is it's best to make it from clean energy sources.

Right? If you make hydrogen from purely solar and wind, it's a very clean green technology.

But if you're getting your power from the grid to make hydrogen, it can be varying degrees of dirty.

And so true, green hydrogen is made from clean, reliable sources.

But the article here on Hydrogen Insight is hourly electricity matching is the only reliable way to reduce emissions from green hydrogen.

And it's basically a similar kind of thing of we really have to keep track of where the energy is coming from if we're going to make proper, clean green hydrogen.

That's good, because there's going to be a lot of companies that are going to be saying that ours is blue, purple, gray, and you don't know what that means.

You don't really know how good their hydrogen is, how clean it is.

So this will be one way to keep track of that.

Now, one of the problems I have in looking for electric car is the ship shortages, which have screwed up everything.

They've made my Prius extremely expensive on the used market, which is a good thing, but it's been kind of weird.

So chip shortages are going to continue through 2023, says an article in Ours Technica.

We expect continued disruption to the global semiconductor industry and therefore continued supply chain shortages in the automotive industry through 2023, according to a new report in the Financial Times.

So that report was originally in the Financial Times.

The head of Ansemi said there is nothing you can do now to change 2023.

It's set in stone.

Basically, we'll be adding capacity every quarter, every month in 2023 to meet our demand, but still not going to happen.

The problem began during the Pandemic and is associated with shutdowns around the world.

So what happened is the Pandemic shutdowns way back in 2020 in March, and afterwards the automakers shut down temporarily.

So the chipmaker said, okay, you don't want our chips, we're going to start filling orders for other people who do want them.

And now that the automakers want them again, they can't get them.

It's as simple as that.

So as vaccines became available in production rest