Episode 170 Transcript

AI Transcript

Hello, and welcome to episode 170 of The Clean Energy Show. I'm Brian Stockton. And I'm James Whittingham. This week, instead of addressing climate change, why not just hand out free air conditioners to everyone? That's what one government is actually doing. A research team at the University of Massachusetts has been able to pull electricity out of nothing but humid air. Nace airs everywhere reiterated their position that you can't make power appear out of thin air. To which the scientists replied, yes, we can. And then the naysayers said, no, you can't. And then the scientists said, yes, we can. JD Power says Canadians are less likely to buy an EV this year, but more likely to get their sciency news on Facebook. After blanketing large swaths of the American Midwest, smoke from Canada's wildfires has now reached as far as Europe. As Canada's premier clean energy podcast, we will soon be embarking on a worldwide apology tour. As Canadians, we just love to apologize. I'm sorry, all that and so much more. I make no apologies for the big fat show. We have a hit this week on the Clean Energy Show. I bought a tether, a swimming tether the other day. What's that? What's that, you ask? You have no idea, do you? No, I don't. I'm not a pool guy. It's a tether that you attach to your waist and it's a big bungee that attaches to something high on the side of the pool and you swim. Now it sounds like an incredibly stupid idea, which is why I didn't buy my partner one for the last 20 years that we've had a pool. So the idea, it's like you're swimming laps, but you're not moving. It's like a swimming treadmill. It seemed like it would be frustrating and stupid, but people love them. And my wife loves them. We finally bought one after, well, I guess 22 years of owning a pool, we've finally bought one because my daughter used one at a party and said it was hilarious and fun yeah and if that was the case and I figure well yeah and we we had one installed and the temperature was quite cold yesterday in the pool compared to our hot tub like temperatures we've been getting for the solar panels on the pool lately but yeah she loved it and she did it till exhausted Wow just thought it was great and thinks this is how she's gonna exercise from now on is just swimming in place in the pool yeah why I know they make these pools where it just, it's got gigantic pumps and it just pumps the water continuously from one end to the other. And you can kind of swim against the tide, but that's obviously way more expensive than a bungee cord. Yeah. I've been looking at those for a long time because it's a small little pool, which just shoots water at you. I'm sure that's more enjoyable, but it also, I mean, it's a lot easier to just stop and stand on your feet and catch your breath. That would just shoot you into the back wall if you got lazy. So you'd have to really use it or you'd be in trouble. But anyway, it's vastly different than it was before. But it's not exactly pool weather. You asked me last week if I had turned on my heat pump to try it on the heating setting, because it's obviously the summertime and you know, I had tried the cooling, cooling works. And, uh, so yeah, it got super chilly last night. It was down to like six degrees Celsius this morning. So I turned it on, on the heat setting. It wasn't particularly cold in the house, but I tried it out and it worked. And then, uh, some time passed and I thought, okay, well it's time to, you know, open up the windows, let, let some air into the house. And I kind of went out for a while and I came back and the house was freezing cold, like it just had not warmed up. I shouldn't have opened all those windows. So then I had to turn the heat pump on for real and, uh, you know, get the temperature up a couple of degrees. How long did it take? Cause usually they're slow. I guess it's maybe a little slower. It's just, I just ran it for an hour and it went up a couple of degrees. I don't think that'll happen at minus 30. Yeah. You know, I think that you'd better maybe, you know, how people set back to thermostat at night. Do you do that in winter time? How many degrees? Well, like down to 17 at night. Well, that's interesting to work to whether they make any less noise. Cause you're talking about the noise last week. Yeah, it's still loud. Like the fan is just loud for some reason. So the installer guy hasn't come back yet. So I'm going to ask him about that. We'll find out. Yeah, I don't know. It's just awfully loud. Is it the velocity of the wind that's loud, or the actual fan on the furnace that's coming through the vents? It seems to be blowing the same amount of air that the furnace would, but just much louder. Interesting. Well, it must just be the particular unit that's transferring the heat from the heat pump to the house. Now that has a backup resistive heater, right, when it gets really cold and it'll kick in and give you some electricity. Inefficient way of heating, but a backup from freezing to death in the winter. Yeah. And that's good, because I don't want to freeze to death. No, it's never good. Unless you're cryogenically frozen, then that'll work out perfectly fine for you, I'm sure. OK, so I have an update on the induction cooktop. So I'm getting rid of the natural gas appliances in my house. So last week, had an electrician come in, take out the gas cooktop, and went to put in the induction, and it wouldn't fit. So, we have this quartz countertop, and it had been cut for the previous cooktop, and we needed like about a half an inch on each side. You don't have a lot of luck lately. You don't have luck. You've used it up. Yeah, it was not much luck. And at the same time he was putting in, we bought a Tesla car charger for the car port, so we have a Tesla brand charger in the driveway, and he couldn't finish that one either because he didn't bring the right drill bit because he needed a longer drill bit, like the guy putting in the heat pump, I guess, but anyway, so we had to call a like a granite countertop company to come and shave off a couple, like an inch, half an inch. Oh, that's not so bad. That's not so bad. They were able to come the next day, which how did they shave it? Was it like grinded it or yeah, it was like more like a saw. Like they were like a circular saw. They were putting into it and they had, there was two people that had one person there with a vacuum cleaner, pick up the dust. Cause it was, they basically just turned it into dust as they, as they went along. Oh, okay. So did they do that on both sides of the range? Like a little from me. Yeah, exactly. And, and it just barely fit. Like it was really, uh, but they, they managed to get it in there. So the electrician is coming. I would be concerned about that. Well, maybe not with granite, but I would be concerned about that with say a wooden arborite, you know, laminated cooktop right against the cooking surface. But because it's induction, the surface doesn't get hot, right? You don't have to worry about that. I do here, but the tight fit is good because you won't spill crumbs in between, which is a really good thing actually. Yeah, no, I think the tight fit is good. And the electrician is going to come back today at about two o'clock. So about 45 minutes from now, he's going to come back and finish the job. And while we're at it, had an update from the Guardian. And we've talked about this before about how natural gas appliances can emit some nasty pollution basically into your house. So there's another new article from The Guardian this week, gas stoves emit benzene levels above secondhand smoke. So this is a new study and it's specifically looking at benzene, which is one of the things you get when you burn natural gas. And it says here, leaving a single gas hob on for 45 minutes, raise the benzene levels above that found in second-hand tobacco smoking, or at the boundary of oil and gas plants. Oh, shit. That's not good. Yeah, because you're at the boundary of a... Well, I don't know how close I am even to the boundary, but it's, yeah, oh God, oh God. So, you know, maybe there's benzene in your air. But anyway, this is, it's 10 to 25 times higher than the emissions of that kind from an electric coil stove. So even an electric coil stove, for some reason, emits some benzene, but induction does not. Is it, is it, it didn't explain it, but for whatever reason, you get a little bit of benzene from electric coils, but for induction, you don't get that. So, well, that's a plus. Yeah. No, we, we, there's so many bad things in the indoor air of us, middle-class North Americans with all our crap. Yeah. And so benzene is one of them. It's, it's a carcinogen and you just, you know, we, we care obviously about secondhand smoke to the point where we passed all kinds of laws to protect people from secondhand smoke. We're getting it from all these other sources. It's crazy. Yeah. So, uh, it makes sense to also, uh, regulate this kind of thing. So yeah, this, they, they had some kind of new type of sensors to sense the benzene and that was the sort of impetus for this study is that they have a better way now to measure benzene levels. And yeah, with your gas cooktops, not good. Well, that's discouraging, and yet encouraging. Hopefully we can, I don't know. Poor people aren't gonna be able to afford to increase the air quality in their home. So this is gonna be a socioeconomic thing again, with other people suffering more diseases because they can't do what's necessary to have a healthy lifestyle at home. And you know, around the world, this will eventually shift, obviously away from these kinds of appliances, but yeah, it's going to take a long time. All right. And speaking of air quality, just a quick story here. This is from NPR and apparently the smoke from Canada's wildfires has reached as far as Europe. So obviously not as bad as we're getting it here, but still that's quite surprising. It's now just the beginning of July. This is already the worst forest fire season we've ever had in Canada. And the season is basically only, what, half over? Yeah, well, yeah. Actually, I mean, technically it's probably not like forest fire season. Probably not even half. Forest fire season usually doesn't officially start until July in Canada, because it's, you know, not this year, not this year. Speaking of not mining gas in Canada, I took my first EV road trip. Yeah. One where I required charging or I will not make it home. One has a bit of anxiety. Do you remember your first EV road trip? Yes. And I mean, I'm looking at you. You're in your house. So, you know, suspense is gone. You did make it home. You don't know if I've lost a leg. It's possible. That's a common problem when you run out of power on a road trip. Well, I could have to fight for it. Who knows for my survival. So you had to go to Wadena, the home of Pamela Wallen. That's what it says. I'm only one of their signs now because of the controversy of her Senator in Canada. She's also the home of my partner Janice, who's lives there, who grew up there and has a lot of attachments there. And we've only been there for funerals for the past 20 years. So we finally went there for fun and she was when she, she bought the bolt EV three months ago, she wanted to know, can I make it to my hometown? And I said, no, but soon. And then I looked and sure enough, there was actually a charger on the way already open, just not officially open. It wasn't working and people were using it, but it wasn't officially on the apps yet, a flow charger. It's only 50 kilowatts. Unfortunately, some of the newer flow charges around here are a hundred kilowatts. Of course, it doesn't matter with me because I can't, you know, go beyond that anyway. It's right beside six Tesla chargers. So it's kind of funny. I just want to go over the whole story. okay, because this was, everything was thought out and everything was planned and I was nervous. What was your first EV road trip? Do you remember it? No, it was probably the trip to Saskatoon. So going through Davidson, which is a, yeah, the standard route. And the charges were working for Teslas for there. You have a Model 3. They were working, they were up and running at that time, right? Yeah, no problem, yeah. Well, I've learned a lot from this and I just want to share it with, most of our listeners don't have EVs yet, but are considering it. So the Wadena trip is 130 miles or 210 kilometers to this small town, and it was 175 kilometers to the first charger in the town called Winyard, which is on the way. That's 110 miles, and that is the only charging anywhere. I mean, there's not even any level twos that I know of. This is the supercharging, fast charging speed of the highway. And, of course, after seemingly a month of calm weather, it was a windy day. Yeah. And when we get wind here, we get a lot of wind. It was 31 mile per hour gusts, that's 30 to 50 kilometers is when it gets windy. That's what it is. And it was going against me. So I was a bit nervous, tried not to show it to my family. All my family went, by the way, all four people. So weight-wise, we were all in the car and that cuts down on fuel economy. I tried to put that into the app accurately, but the good thing is it was only a day trip and we couldn't pack the kitchen sink, so that was nice because we usually over pack a lot of stuff. Had a lot of beverages and things though. So I charged the full the night before. What I did is I set, you don't want to leave your EV at a hundred percent. So I set a timer on it to charge, have it charged to a hundred percent by 9 a.m. or 8 a.m. So I had a little bit of leeway in case it wasn't fully charged, but then I wanted every electron in there I could fit you know just just to make sure the dash indicated 501 kilometers and it's you know an EPA range of 417 well that means that we've been driving only in the city where it's more efficient so my wife has been driving in the city not letting the car run the air conditioner while not moving or anything like that and that's real world I mean I've been looking at it and we've been getting 501 and some people get a lot more we're not driving we're not you know pushing it anything. The bolt battery, by the way, contrary to what you said last week, is a full 65 kilowatt hours of usable. I triple checked that. And a better route punter, the app you use to see where you're going to charge along a given road trip said that I would arrive at the charger 175 kilometers away at 55%. But you have to pay money to get the real world weather from that day. And I wasn't about to do that. But I mean, if it's got 417 kilometers of EPA range, I knew that 175, I wasn't worried about that. Okay. I was, it was confident, but I was curious and keeping an eye on things still, and it was a hundred kilometer an hour road. It wasn't one of the bigger roads where we can go 110 here. So that's, um, not terribly fast. I drove at about 105, most of the way I did tests at different speeds, just to make sure. Uh, so I arrived there 172 kilometers from my house and it was 21.3 kilowatt hours per kilometers it said on the dash so my 65 kilowatt hour battery divided by 21.3 equals 3.05 so I figured I would have had a hundred three hundred and five kilometers or 190 miles of worst-case summer highway range into the wind I mean there's worse winds but let's yeah let's call it that and it wasn't warm wasn't bad at all and it means I could make Saskatoon but I probably wouldn't I would probably charge for that extra Yeah, even if it's five kilometers. Yeah, so like you really want to stop and rest anyway Like an idiot my kids don't God, they're impatient. You know how these generation of people are they're so screwed like an idiot I didn't know what to do with the charger when I got there Brian. I had no idea I forgot my flow card at home I ordered a $20 flow card which is like a credit card that you can tap Just tap on the front of the charger where it has a little indicator and it will bill your account and start working didn't have that so I opened the flow app which I should have also been able to use and you have an app for different charging networks I had one for this one and I had some money in my account in my wallet as they call it just you know put some credit card money in there and so you can use it on the road but it didn't show that charger it's it is a quite a new charger but it wasn't showing it on my app my wife's app it has the identical flow charger app and it did indicate it was there so I don't know what the hell is that. But I was determined to, to carry on with my own. I got a little flustered and a little worried because there I am 175 kilometers away from home and I don't know what's going on. So I immediately phoned the number on indicated the one-inch number. It was a holiday. It was a stat holiday in Canada, which is a bit earlier for our July 4th, if you will. And someone immediately answered a very nice woman who all can't say enough about her. She was knowledgeable, communicated excellently and concisely and didn't omit anything for an idiot. Like she went over everything that I could, you know, in my fluster state. I said this is my first time charging, you know, I'm sorry, but I don't know what the hell to do. So she said credit she didn't mock you. She talked me down from the cliff and calmed me down and said, okay, just enter the number of the charger. there's a code number on the front of the charger there right by the phone number you enter that not you go to your app you click on this in your app and then you enter that number and then you say start charging so I did that and I heard a bunch of clicks little clicky clickety sounds in the charger but it still said processing or something and she said that's fine just plug it in so I plugged her in to the car and it started said on the charger communicating and doing pre-charge tests with the car. So what they do, these chargers, they talk to the car and get information and say, how much juice would you like today? And what's your, is everything working okay? And you know, is there any leaks of electricity? No. It's like what it used to be at a gas station in the 50s when you talk to your gas pump jockey. Sure, but it's all computers now talking to one another. So it started charging, much to my delight. And I thanked her and hung up And, you know, she was so nice. She just wouldn't let me go. She wanted to make sure everything was fine. She told me how to disconnect it, which I didn't know. You had to press the unlock button, the lock and unlock button in your car so that it would let go of the charger. Cause it's locked on there. Didn't know that was also when you're charging on my main screen in the car, it'll say, stop charge and unlock. There's a button that says that in my particular car. Um, but I might've sat there trying to get the thing out. Yeah, and it always locks in the charger because you don't want it to pull out when the charge is live because you could get an arc of electricity. Right. And so they won't do that. No charger will let you pull it out. I like a gas pump where you could just pull out the... Some people do. Just spray gas everywhere and somebody's smoking a cigarette and you go up on flames. Like in Zoolander. Sure. Exactly like Zoolander. But it pissed me off because right beside me, a guy in a Model 3 Tesla pulls up of the Tesla charger, plugs in, walks saunters off. You know, no problem for him. He's got plug and charge where you just plug in the car. It identifies who your car is, knows who to bill and bills you. Bills your Tesla account. And I'm, we're hoping that that's what we'll get for everybody when we use the Tesla. Yeah. And obviously it works amazing, but actually the last time I drove to Saskatoon, we stopped at Davidson to charge and there was a two guys there finishing a transaction, one guy was selling a Tesla to the other guy. And because they had transferred the ownership of the car, it wouldn't charge because it had now switched accounts to the new guy or something and the new guy hadn't put in his credit card or whatever. So it was the first time I've ever seen that kind of a problem. So I thought it was sort of interesting. You just have to be careful when you're transferring ownership. So the guy, he was, I told him he could go in town, there's a level two charger in town. So I told him, well, if you're desperate, you can just go to this. There's a garage in town that has a level two charger. So I think that's what he was going to end up doing. Oh, really? Well, you'd think it'd be, well, maybe he could just do that and talk to the Tesla people and get it set up or something. Yeah. And, and actually that happened too. On our last trip from Calgary, we charged in Maple Creek. And then as we were driving to the next charger, the app said, Oh, sorry, your payment didn't process. So what had happened was the credit card had expired really before we could charge at the next charger But all we had to do is open up the app and you know Just adjust the expiry date on the credit card and then boom we were fine But oh I see so it was a new credit card same number type of thing different expiry date. Okay Yeah, well Davidson's in between the two biggest cities in Saskatchewan So I'm presuming that one Tesla owner sold it to a guy in another city and they met halfway Yeah, well, I think yeah, I think they were coming one from Regina one from Saskatoon meeting halfway to finish the transaction Yeah, I see. Anyway, it was cool to charge my car and see the range tick up You know how you could the the kilometers range ticked up fairly fast I only got about 47 or 46 or 45 kilowatts going in there Yeah out of the 54 max and I was around 50% range The app said I'd get there at 55 and I got there about 46% or so. So it was, you know, it was close. Usually a better road planner actually gives you a little bit extra to, you know, but I've learned that I don't like to get somewhere with 10% range. I mean, 10% range would be okay with a larger range of car, but with my car, I think 40 kilometers is, I'd like a little bit larger buffer than that. Yeah, it can make you nervous. Yeah, because you never know. And as my son pointed out, like what happens if there's an accident and the road is closed, and then you have to like take a grid for a while because my family's had to do that once or twice. No, the power sort of goes down, the charging curve goes down in the bolt. Not great. So after it gets to 50, 60 percent, it starts to go down. So it went down into the low 30s. And so I just stopped a three quarter full of battery power and said, you know, The town that we were going to was 40 kilometres away, so that's 80 kilometres of range right there. And I had, I don't know, 284. But we used most of that up. Did a lot of driving around actually and went out to a lake. It cost me 10 bucks a charge for half an hour and left with 284 kilometres range and made a trip out to the lake. That was about 50 kilometres off. And after our day of frivolity, we arrived back at the charger and spent 36 minutes getting enough range to get home plus a 50 kilometer buffer and it seemed like we were going against the wind there and going against it back because it was a side wind it was a west wind going against us so it was really was pushing us around and making it hard. Yeah well we talked about this a year or two ago that a better route planner actually did a study about the wind and the wind direction and they found that basically the wind is you about 70% of the time, like it really, the wind has to be pretty much exactly behind you to get an actual boost from it. And, you know, it's like about a 30, 30% range, something like that. And 70% of the time it's against you. So I had a bit of range anxiety on the way home. The sun was going down, uh, traffic after the long weekend was getting heavier. And yeah, well, we monitored the range on Google Maps. So I programmed in my house. So it counted down the kilometers to my house accurately via GPS on my phone. And then we compared that to the minimum, the bolt has a estimated and minimum range. So we were checking the minimum range that it would get against the actual distance. And we were down to about seven or eight different, which we were nervous, but then we got up to like 20 because the wind started to die And then my son who was driving home went up to 109 kilometers an hour, the maximum speed without getting a ticket, 68 miles an hour, and a little less efficient than a hundred or something. And I mean, if we had trouble, we could have just driven slower too. That's always the option to do. I really like the Chevy Bolt display because it's got this estimated range and a minimum range and it has this little yellow line that ticks down towards the minimum range. So you actually know where you're at. And that was ticking down, down, down. But then it slowed down and then it went back up again. So we knew once that happened, we just increased our speed and it really made the range anxiety doable once you understand that little technical detail. So back at home, the total distance we put on at that day was 530 kilometers or 330 miles. The overall efficiency was 19.4 kilowatt hours per 100 kilometers. I found that in my experience that the charging time actually goes pretty fast. I can't say that for my kids, but the nice thing about that charger, I thought it was at the Co-op gas station that has a really nice grocery store in the small town that's newly built by Co-op. And so it's got a really nice deli and it's got a nice bathroom. It's got a nice everything. It's just brand new. It's just nice. And up the service road, there was a subway and an A&W. So my kid, sorry, my kid went to A&W and my on the way home. The only thing is everything closes in small towns early on a Sunday or a holiday. So everything was closed on her way back at seven o'clock, which we knew from Google, but my partner did manage to get a sub on the way home, but we'd had so much crap that day. No one was hungry. So yeah, it was nice. You could just walk. I know I probably wouldn't do that in the cold of winter, but I would go into the grocery store, deli and get a sandwich or something or a sub or whatever. I fancied maybe get a coffee, you know, anything you want. It makes a huge difference what's near the charger, you know, especially when it's a minus 40 and you don't want to go out at all. Yeah, so we wouldn't, like I said, we wouldn't have been able to make this trip if they didn't install that charger. And my partner, I have to say, was pretty giddy. It's her car, you know, she was pretty giddy. She went into the store and thanked the, um, the staff member at the till for having an EV charger. And the staff member had questions about EVs, like, how long does it take to charge? My wife said, I'll let you know. Anyway, uh, it was fine. And you know, Brian, the bolt is not most cars. Most cars can charge faster than that, uh, at least at twice as fast, and if not three, four times as fast. So, you know, one of the Korean made Hyundai or Kia cars under the 800 volt system are supposed to charge from 10 to 80% in 18 minutes. And by all accounts, they are doing that in good weather, good summer weather. And you know, that's fantastic. That was nothing. I couldn't, I myself would, you know, by the time you get it plugged in and sit and stretch your legs and contemplate life for a second, it's done, let alone going to the bathroom going in and grabbing a sandwich or a coffee or something. I mean, come on. It's pleasant. Like you say, it's pleasant to stop and take your time. In the summertime, the charging is often done before I'm ready because I want to go into the grocery store and get a sandwich or whatever. And it's like, oh, it's already done. We got to go. In the winter, of course, it's slower because batteries charge slower in the winter. And that's just the way it is. Okay, so an update on the NACS charging standard, which we've been talking about the last few episodes here. This is Tesla's connector for charging cars, and it's suddenly taking over in North America with basically everybody getting on board. And we think that this is now going to become the standard in North America. So that's a lot of fun. So the new additions this week, Polestar is now on board. They're of course, a part of the Volvo Group and Volvo announced the week before. So that makes sense. The Polestar would get on board with this as well. VW says they're in talks with Tesla. They haven't committed yet. Well, that's a commitment to me. That's just, they're working things out and they'll do it. They've made that move. And it is now an open standard. So, you know, really anybody can use it. You don't necessarily need Tesla's permission, but it sounds like Tesla is making their API available, like to Ford and to GM. So they'll be able to better integrate it into the car's computer to do trip planning and, and stuff like that. So, yeah, presumably, you know what the big thing is. The big thing with that might be plug and charge. I'm hoping, because if that's integrated with the car's computer, then you can do the billing. You can get the VIN number from the car's computer and charge that would be wonderful. That's, I think that's where we're headed and, uh, you know, it won't be till about 2025 with these other car makers to have it actually integrated, but, um, it's on the way. So the state of Kentucky is now requiring that you have the NACS charger if you're getting government support to put chargers in the state of Kentucky. Texas said something similar. They haven't finalized it yet, but then there's a group of charging companies that are kind of pushing back against that flow and ChargePoint are saying, no, no, don't make that a rule just yet. So Texas is trying to do that. Washington state is trying to do that as well. But so far, Kentucky is the only one that has actually solidified that. Also Electrify America, the charging network initially started by Volkswagen is now on board Electrify America and Electrify Canada. And as well as Blink, another charging company that makes chargers. And the first motorcycle company, so Verge Motorcycles. This is a Finnish electric motorcycle maker. They're expected to begin selling their motorcycles in the US later this year, and they are getting on board with the Tesla charging connector, which makes so much sense for motorcycles, which are obviously much smaller vehicles. So to have that much smaller charging port makes so much sense. Brian, I just wanted to point out that we ran a Twitter poll on who was going to be the last to adapt to the NAACS standard. I thought it could be Volkswagen, but it's not. Yeah. They're coming on board. and we had approximately 13 million votes, no, pardon me, 13 votes, and 50% said Hyundai, Kia, most people, 77% said Toyota, nobody said Honda, and Nissan was 7.7% because you know, they're still hanging on to the Chattomo standard. Yeah, I think it's cool, I'm surprised that I'm very happy that VW is getting on board because they have their own charging network, we were concerned about that. Yeah. That they wouldn't, but they're selling, you know, a lot of EVs, which we'll talk about later in the show. Yeah. And like about six months ago when Tesla said, oh, okay, we're setting this up as an open standard. We talked about it on the show and both of us doubted that it would actually go anywhere. And yet here we are. Well, this is, this is such a shiny, happy thing because it's a big moment in the electrification of transportation because that charger is heavy. You've probably never manhandled one. I should let you come manhandle one because it's ridiculous. CCS charger is gigantic. At a fast charging station is like you need three hands, not two even so. Or imagine plugging one of those into a motorcycle. I mean that would be ridiculous. Yeah, it's absurd when there's such a better standard that is a fraction of that size. British Columbia, Canada, the province on the west coast. Uh, CBC says that British Columbia is actually going to spend $10 million. You remember they had a heat wave a couple of years ago, or I think 800 people died once they tallied up the numbers. Yeah. In both, you know, Vancouver and Seattle, uh, just because it's normally not that hot there in the summer. So a lot of people don't have air conditioning. Huge heat wave was just a massive, massive problem. So, you know, this is a reality of climate change that what are you going to do? So they've decided what we're gonna do is spend $10 million to provide 8,000 free air conditioners to elderly, vulnerable, and low-income residents because those are the people who are dying. Those are the people, the vulnerable population that dies in heatwaves, people who are alone especially. It's a terrible, terrible thing. And there's nothing we can do about it. We can't turn climate change around no matter what. It's still gonna get worse for a while under the best case scenarios and this is going to be an increasing occurrence and it's going to be administered to this program by the BC power company, BC Hydro, starting this year and lasting three years. The health minister said extreme weather is the reality now for British Columbians thanks to the effects of climate change with extreme heat events expected to occur more frequently. Vulnerable people are more likely to experience effects of extreme heat and that's why this program targets low-income, vulnerable individuals who are at higher risk. People applying for a free air conditioner will undergo a means assessment or they can be referred to the program by community home health care providers and health authorities. Actually, I'm happy about this. It's kind of a Jesus, how did we get here moment, but we're here, but we're doing something about it so that we don't wanna see 100 people die next time. Yeah, and the electricity in BC is provided by BC Hydro, the provincial utility, which is something like 98% hydroelectric. So it's clean energy. It's cheap energy. It's some of the cheapest electricity in the world, around $0.06 Canadian per kilowatt hour for most cases. Which is like half, less than half. Half of what we pay here with our coal-burning power supply. Which is a very common price we pay. So it's very cheap. It's nice to see that it's not gonna hurt anything, at least. Yeah, and even if the vulnerable population still has to pay a power bill for this, it won't be outrageous because it's, they have such cheap electricity. And of course, BC Hydro is the sponsor for the fully charged live show that's happening in Vancouver in September. I was gonna ask you, Brian, you just got your heat pump, so you have air conditioning in your house for the first time. We've just been through a heat wave. How do you feel about it? What's your impressions? Mostly because yesterday there was a bit of forest fire smoke in the air. And so what did we do? We just kept all the windows closed and left the air conditioner on. It wasn't super hot, but you know, I was glad that that was better air to breathe. Right. Yeah. Although, you know, I think we've been mostly lucky. I don't know. I think, you know, the air in New York and Chicago has been worse even though we're closer to the fires. We've had one bad day. Yeah. And you were during that time. You were experiencing that over in Calgary, which was getting also bad. But there was one where ours was off the charts, way off the charts, and it was the worst era I've ever experienced in my life, and my kids were of asthma, were not doing as great as they should be. So. Okay, so moving on to a story from The Guardian, and this is the kind of story I don't often like to talk about, because it's very much research that is at the very beginning, and this is not really going to become practical for a very long time or maybe never. I just thought it was a fun story because it kind of builds on something that Nikola Tesla, the Serbian inventor who the Tesla car company is named for, famous electricity pioneer, this was something that he had talked about in his life was to try and get electricity from the air, to use the air as a battery. So you have an upper atmosphere, and the Earth is sort of like having two ends of an enormous battery. So this concept is called high-grow electricity. And nobody had ever really tried it before, but there were these researchers doing something completely different at the University of Massachusetts. And it's just a fun story. Here's the quote here. To be frank, it was an accident, said the study's lead author. We were actually interested in making a simple sensor for humidity in the air. But for whatever reason, the student who was working on that forgot to plug in the power. And now they're rich. And now they're rich. And they found that the machine still worked. The sensor still worked, even though it wasn't plugged in. Oh, that's cool. So that's just kind of wild. So it's an array of microscopic tubes or nanowires that are producing an electrical signal. Each nanowire was less than one one-thousandth the diameter of a human hair, wide enough that an airborne water molecule could enter but so narrow it would bump around inside the tube. Each bump, the team realized, lent the material a small charge. And as the frequency of the bumps increased, one end of the tube became charged differently than the other. So yeah, you can get electricity just out of the air. I mean, I guess this is like, you know, when you're a science experiment in elementary school, where you get electricity out of a potato or something like that. It's a similar idea. What's the potential for this though? There is huge potential. They have some funding to further develop this. So the idea is that, you know, one of these little modules just barely produces anything, but they figure that they may be able to put, you know, a few thousand of them into a machine, like the size of like a washer or a dryer and have that in home and possibly creating electricity continuously out of just out of what's in the air. Who knows? Who knows what could be happening in 30 or 40 years from now? And when we had decades and decades of cheap oil, none of this was a concern. We got rid of the electric car which predated the combustion car because it was just easier and then everything was cheap and easy and free but we were wrecking the planet as we were doing it. Yeah. So, you know, all these years have gone by where we could have been looking at solutions like this, but it just wasn't really necessary or practical until we realized that we're just destroying the planet. Well, you were talking about air quality in Spain being bad from wildfires. Well, it was bad in Chicago and Detroit a few days ago, like really bad, like it was in New York. And I was listening on the radio and it said they had a second and third worst quality in the world, and the worst was Dubai. And I thought, did they say Mumbai or Delhi? No, it was Dubai. And this shiny city that I keep seeing on my Apple TV screensaver, which I don't care for. I don't care for the shots of that city. But it looks amazing. It's amazing and weird, but it's all fake. It's all fake. And it's made with slave labor. You know, that's a major issue, and we might think that Dubai gets all of its money for all this crap from oil, but it's only 20% of the UAE's revenue is coming from oil and gas. But what they did is they used that money in the 70s and 80s to spur an economy to put it, you know, ignite an economy and it worked on this desert, coastal desert. And they've got so much growth and construction that I was wondering why their air quality is bad, but it is mostly from trucks and buses and motorcycles to the particulate matter that is there, and industrial areas such as desalination plants. You know, they're taking the ocean water and making it drinkable by taking the salt out. That uses a lot of energy. apparently fueled by fossil fuels, because why else would you have the stink? You should be powering that with your solar and wind, which just seems like a perfect opportunity to do that. And it's also driven by the city's population, which is one of the fastest growing cities in the world, and as well as the occasional dust storm, because it is surrounded by desert. So that, you know, the sawdust and the from the sign and the construction and the cement and everything like that adds to it. But largely, it is from trucks, buses, and motorcycles, which can be easily addressed. It's what we talk about mostly on this show. And the Dubai Road and Transport Authority, the RTA, has been working on implementing stricter regulations for vehicles to reduce emissions. And they are promoting the use of electric and hybrid vehicles and also provides incentives for using environmentally friendly vehicles. I was looking at the list of the top 20, 30 typically polluted cities in the world. Saudi Arabia, Damaam has the worst, is usually at the top of the list. There is seven or eight cities in India that are on that list as well. And then Cameroon comes in there with a city and then a bunch more from India, a couple from Pakistan, another from India and Uganda, and a couple more from India. And then by the time you get down to 19, you get to the Chinese cities, which occupy a lot of the 20 places. So yeah, I feel bad when I see these cities on the news, Beijing covered in smog and breathing and indoor air pollution in India, where it's deadly indoors as it is outdoors, I feel bad. And I especially feel bad when I know there's solutions. But unlike India, which a lot of their pollution comes from burning crops in a valley that's sort of trapped by the mountains, this is easily addressable. Two-wheel transportation, for example, could easily go electric very quickly and should. Okay. So I want to move on to talk about wind turbines. So whenever I'm talking to people about clean energy, I tell them I have a podcast. Most people roll their eyes. They often bring up the negative things about clean energy. And one of the things that frequently gets mentioned is things like wind turbine blades. That gets mentioned? That comes up? Oh, that's crap. People are worried about all that. People around here are worried about wind turbine blades. Come on. They read that crap on Facebook. I'm mad. I'm very, wind turbine, they don't even know what a wind turbine is. getting the defibrillator. I'm okay. Continue. I mean, similar complaints are sometimes lodged about solar panels too, because they claim, oh, you got to dig up coal to make solar panels or whatever. Piss off! Yes. Who are these people? It is ridiculous, but it is still an issue of, okay, well, wind turbine blades don't last forever. So what do you do with them at the end of life, rather than just throwing them in a garbage pile? What last forever? Does the giant tankers down the road from me last from ever that holds billions of gallons of oil? Yes. Do they last forever? Are we questioning that? Are we concerned about that? No. I don't understand. Because the people working on clean energy care about the environment and these concerns, there's actually some solutions in the works for this. So there is a Swiss startup called turn to sun and they're taking used wind turbine blades and these blades last for I don't know 10 or 20 years or something out in the field and they're using to mount solar panels onto so the idea being that okay well you've got to put solar panels onto something if you've got a ground mounted solar system and wind turbine blades are sturdy like they're meant to have a long span. So without too many support posts you could put up a wind turbine blade and attach a whole bunch of solar panels to it and disturb the ground less. So one of your favorite things, agrivoltaics, say you're growing crops underneath your solar panels or you're grazing sheep underneath your solar panels, there's less you know thing to do with these. And it says in Europe alone, around 25,000 wind turbines will each reach their end of life in the next few years. So there's going to be 25,000 wind turbines and these blades becoming available in the next few years. And you know, I mean, we're such at the beginning of this, it's like, what are we going to do? What recycling batteries? Well, my car is one of the first ever made. It's still running. Yeah, the year old leaf. Right and there's you know, you can use those batteries for a long time before you can have to worry about recycling. So why are we worried about it? It's a problem for 25 years from now essentially the big you know when it's really going to become an issue but they are doing it and doing it well. No and I have another story here from Electrek. So Denmark's largest offshore wind farm will feature recyclable wind turbine blades for the first time. So they have figured out a way, so this is Siemens Gamesa, they've figured out to make the blades that make them more recyclable. They're currently installing these at an offshore wind farm in Germany, and about half of the wind turbines are going to feature these recyclable blades. So the idea is that at the end of their lifespan, the resin, fiberglass, and wood can be separated using a mild acid solution, and then all of those components recycled. So this is just the beginning of this, but, um, you know, they're figuring out how to do it. Yeah. So we've just, for whatever reason, been talking about John Deere a lot lately on the show, and, uh, this is a story from Electrek as well. Um, they're now in a partnership with, uh, Ego, which is a company that makes electric lawnmowers, basically her electric lawn equipment of, of all kinds, John Deere has one just out now, like a zero turn riding mower that is electric, but as they have been working hard to transition themselves to fully electric, John Deere realized, eh, we're a little bit more behind than we want to be. So they've come up with a partnership with EGO. They've got 70 different battery-powered lawn projects for our products, and they're now going to be available at John Deere dealers and locations. So they realized that they couldn't ramp up fast enough, so they've created this partnership. I wouldn't be surprised if they end up just buying Ego. John Deere seems like a much bigger company, you know, we'll see what happens with that. But in the meantime, at John Deere now, you can get a wide variety of electric lawn stuff. Guess who is Ego's parent company? Do you know? No, I don't know. It is Chevron. Oh, really? Yeah. How did you find that out? I Read the article. I read a similar article somewhere else about this partnership and they mentioned that Ego's parent company was Chevron the oil national and not one of the good ones if you can say there's a good one It's one of them. They they trend towards the evil side of the spectrum Well, if everyone may not want to sell ego then because that's you know, they're gonna need something to balance their you know Or maybe well, it's just another example of oil companies trying to get into green things tepidly Oh Time for the tweet of the week brian The tweet of the week comes from our friends at cagoro scooters the scooter with the battery swappable power source Taking over the world literally and their tweet is powering a four-wheeler is difficult. That is an electric car, right? four wheels. They're used to two and three, mostly two. You have to carry a sofa, the windshield, and an air conditioner just to go to the grocery store. Two wheelers, however, are different, five times more efficient per kilometer on energy, and that makes the transition to EVs easier, says Horace Luke, the founder of Gagoro. Time for the lightning round. The lightning round is a fast-paced look at the latest headlines in climate. clean energy and transportation. Italian state agency publishes Agrivoltaic Location Map. That is a map to show Italians where the best place to practice agriculture and solar power generation is. This online map will identify suitable sites for agrivoltaics based on landscape indicators. it will provide qualitative and quantitative information to facilitate the selection of appropriate locations for the integration of agriculture. Thought that was interesting, and I can presume and hope more countries will follow suit. From Bloomberg, high inflation and rising interest rates are driving up the cost of new generation of miniature atomic reactors. In other words, small modular nuclear is becoming more expensive than they thought because high interest rates, actually high interest rates is affecting everything in the clean transition, but inflation as well, I suppose. In a revision of the country's energy and climate plan, the Ministry of Italy said it aimed to get 65% of electricity from renewables by 2030, and that is up from 55%. I like highlighting stories like that because people are increasing their targets. Why? Because, as we know, Cheaper, cleaner, fast. From the Guardian, low emission zones are improving health. You know what a low emission zone is, Brian? You had one in London. The center of London is a low emission zone. You can't drive. You got to pay money if you want to drive a fossil vehicle in there. Yeah, and the air quality in London did seem quite good. So low emission zones are improving health, the study in the Lancet finds, particularly clear evidence that low emission zones in cities reduce heart and circulatory problems, which is good for me. It's time for a CS fast fact. Nuclear energy costs the United States currently level out to an average of three hundred and seventy three dollars per megawatt hour. According to the latest estimates by Bloomberg New Energy Finance, that is significantly higher than solar or onshore wind, which are sixty and fifty dollars per megawatt hour, respectively, a six times cheaper than nuclear energy and getting cheaper. whereas nuclear can be more expensive. Safety, stuff like that. Lack of people with the skills to build it. Wind and solar have generated more US electricity than coal for a record five months. As wind and solar grow and coal plants continue to close, experts expect to see more and more of these records set. Ooh, it's another CES Fast fact. Why does the smoke smell like plastic this year? You know, it's not normal forest fire smoke when it gets really bad, it's just terrible stuff. And it's because, according to the Weather Network in Canada, more dense and more potent this year because the VOCs, the, what is it, volatile organic compounds from the wildfire smoke, interact with UV radiation to create benzene and formaldehyde compounds in the atmosphere. Neither are good, which is why you run your air conditioner when it was smoky out, and I did not. These are toxic, Brian. Toxic air pollutants, and they happen to smell like burning plastic, and that's never good. Yeah, and we were talking about benzene earlier with emissions from gas stoves, so apparently it's just in the air as well. We have sad news this week. It is from JD Power. They have a survey in Canada and they say Canadians are less likely to buy an IV this year Less likely not more likely less likely Obviously these jack wagons in Canada are not listening to our show You know, yeah, come on people give it the program Literally, so only 34 percent said they would consider an EV and that is down from 47 percent It's very significant Brian could be the economic issues or like interest rates like we were just talking about by comparison though So in a similar survey in the United States, 61% of consumers said they are very likely or somewhat likely to consider purchasing an EV this year. What the heck? That is almost twice as much, you know, in the United States, and the United States is full of disinformation. Our listener Mike reports the soft-serve machine at the Davidson Co-op Chargers was out of order over the long weekend, and we plan to stay on top of this story, people. Oh, that's breaking news. That's, uh, that's some sad news there. Another CES Fast Fact. Norway has a high proportion of climate skeptics compared to other countries. Something I wouldn't have guessed. Uh, every fourth Norwegian does not believe that human activities affects the climate. What the hell's wrong with you, Norway? Are you not listening to our show? Only one in 10 Italians say the same thing according to a study from 2022. So that's bizarre, isn't it? Yeah, that's surprising. I don't know. I've been to Norway. It's a gorgeous country. It's full of mountains, lakes, and rivers. Maybe it all just seems so lovely there that they don't believe it. And a good education system. And we've talked about Italy several times this week. Shout out to Italy. Send us a letter. Send us an email. Rooftop solar in New England has grown sufficiently, up to 5.1 gigawatts, or 5.1 nuclear reactors, to cause retirement of one of its dirtiest power plants. The 1.41 gigawatt Mystic Generating Station, which was a natural gas peaker plant, shut it down. Fairly big plant, you know, the size of 1.4 nuclear reactors. Shut it down, didn't need it, because everybody's got rooftop solar. How about that? That's- That's fantastic. LGBTQ plus supporters of Just Stop Oil have disrupted the Pride parade in London, blocking Coca-Cola's float and spraying black and pink paint over the road. Cell phone traffic in downtown San Francisco, I found this interesting, is now only 29% of what it was pre-pandemic levels. This is implying that there are less people working downtown and less people working from, more people working from home. Chicago, it's at 56%, New York City is 71% of pre-pandemic levels. But Salt Lake City, it's up, it's 139%. More people are downtown. It's like, we wanna get the COVID. Or we don't like working from home. Home is bad. For the Climate Change Institute, the Earth's average temperature July 2nd was the hottest single day thus far measured by humans. Okay, that's not good. But finally this week, massive underground deposit of high-grade phosphorus, rock was discovered in Norway, phosphorus, basically doubling the known phosphorus in the world just like that overnight. And phosphorus is used for fertilizers, yes, but also solar panels and electric car batteries. And that deposit alone, alone, Brian, has enough of that critical mineral to power all those things for the next hundred years. So, we worry about these things sometimes, but one giant rock found in Norway will have enough phosphorus for the next hundred years alone, which is fantastic. And that is our show for this week. Please take the time to contact us. We love, we live, we thrive, we live on hearing from our listeners. CleanEnergyShow at gmail.com is the easiest way to get ahold of us. Send us emails, send us your thoughts, your concerns, your anger, whatever is on your mind. Don't forget to check out our YouTube channel for the video podcast and special features and our merch link is in your show notes. As always, if you're new to the show, subscribe on your podcast app to get new episodes delivered every week and the race between climate change and renewables is on. If you've got a front row seat here on the Clean Energy Show, we'll see you next week. See you next week.