130. Don't Charge Your Electric Vehicles and Definitely Don't Charge Your E-Bikes

The Clean Energy Show

The U.K. Conservatives have elected a new PM, Lizz Truss, who doesn't like to look at solar panels. Battery fires get E-Bikes banned in New York City public housing. California pays poorer people not to own cars. General Motors offers to buy out Buick dealers who don't want to get with the electric future. A word for all the awefull people who fear a green future. California suffers its worst drought in twelve hundred years and you can't put gas in a gas car without electricity.

Also this week:

• Pipeline patrol planes
• Russia cuts off the gas yet again
• American Top 40 used to get sent to radio stations on vinyl LPs says Brian
• Germany offers cheap train passes to offset high energy prices
• France is looking to cut energy use by 10% which means lowering the thermostat to 19 degrees/66 F.
• Ethanol plants can give off terrible pollution that is harmful.
• Tesla Canadian factory rumors.
• All about Metathesiophobia from a Chevy Bolt owner
• Feedback on our light pollution episode from May
• End-of-life batteries from electric vehicles are not likely to be the primary source of recyclable material until the mid-2030s, according to Benchmark Mineral Intelligence
• Trump goes on nonsensical rant about electric cars: 'We need to rid of them'
• Four years of Boston Consulting Group’s US electric vehicle sales forecasts, compiled by RecurrentAuto show how bad EV adoption predictions are.
• Electric school buses in Massachusetts provided energy back to the grid for more than 80 hours this summer, helping to reinforce the grid during some of the hottest summer days when electricity was most in demand.
• 10 of 13 ‘Flagship’ CCS Projects Failed to Deliver, IEEFA Analysis Concludes.

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Transcript of this episode (done by A.I.) News anchor: The United Kingdom Conservative Party announced Monday that Liz Trust was selected as its new leader.

Lizz Truss: It's an honor to be elected as leader of the Conservative and Unionist Party.

And I think one of the most depressing when you're driving through England is seeing fields that should be full of crops or livestock, full of solar panels.

Various people: You got to be kidding me.

You got to be kidding me.

You're kidding me.

You're kidding me.

You're kidding me, right? Are you kidding me? Are you kidding me? Are you kidding me? Are you kidding me? Are you kidding me? Are you kidding me? Yeah.

Nope.

Hell, no.

Brian: Hello, and welcome to episode 130 of the Clean Energy Show.

I'm Brian Stockton,

James: And that must be I'm James Whittingham, and this week, British conservatives have indeed elected their new PM, and she doesn't like the site of solar panels.

Oh, Boris.

Who would have thought I'd ever miss your puffy ass? And you know, that thing on your head?

In a shocking announcement, General Motors offers to buy out any Buick dealers that don't want to sell electric vehicles. It's shocking because I had no idea Buick still existed.

I learned a new word that describes everyone you hate on Twitter.

And it's not donkey knobbler.

Nobler California suffers an unprecedented heat wave and the worst drought in 1200 years.

Worst of all, it's become unfashionable to say, but it's a dry heat.

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

Also on this edition of I hope you're not wearing white, because it's after Labor Day.

Brian, the pipeline plane that flies over my house is flying lower than expected.

Much lower.

Californians are asked not to charge their electric cars.

Russia has a clog in their oil pipes again.

And a wildfire warning in Alberta reminds people you can't run a gas pump without electricity.

First of all, how's your back this week? Yeah, definitely better.

I am walking without a cane for the first time.

You literally walk with a cane.

I was really walking with a cane.

You were literally a hobbled old man for a while.

Absolutely.

But yeah, I think I'm doing okay.

Although I will have to probably switch my seating position halfway through the show.

All right.

As we record this, our whole province of Saskatchewan in Canada is in international news.

And I thought it would be weird if we didn't talk about that.

Yeah, we've been having all kinds of emergency alerts on our phones night and day of a terrible tragedy that has taken place on the First Nation and around and for a while, the mass killer has been believed to be hiding in the city that we live in.

If you listen to the show and you hear us talking about it while you've heard it in the news, and here we are.

We're both here.

Brian safe and his farm shelter.

Our thoughts go to all the victims.

And, yeah, it's not too often we make international news, and sometimes it's for good reasons and sometimes not so good.

Let's hope for a good outcome and better things in the future.

Yeah.

So speaking of our hometown, it came up on a podcast this week.

So remember when I retired, I said my retirement project was going to be making my own shoelaces? Yeah.

So I learned that from a TV show called Going Deep with David Reese, one of the greatest TV shows of all time.

I absolutely loved it.

It covered things like how to tie your shoes.

Fantastic show, right? Anyway, David Reese and John Kimball have a podcast called Election Profit Makers, and it's a humorous podcast about political commentary, American politics.

But they go off on a lot of tangents on the show, which is why I like it.

And they started talking recently about the old American Top 40 show with Casey Cases.

And so I decided to write them a letter.

And they read my letter on the show this week, which was a lot of fun for me.

And it mentions our hometown, and we have a clip.

Clip of another podcast: Brian writes in: Dear Kidmitas and Long John Silver.

As a teenager in the early 1980s, my first real job was as the overnight DJ on CK CK, the Top 40 radio station in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada.

In addition to overnights, I would often operate the American Top 40 show on Saturday afternoons, and it would come in on four vinyl LPs every week.

Incredibles per side.

I can't believe they used to do the radio shows on records.

Yes.

Now he says, I managed to keep a souvenir from my time at this station, and that's the complete vinyl set of the 1983 Top 100 Countdown from American Top 40.

And he attached pictures along with a picture of the skyline for Regina, Saskatchewan.

It's pretty sweet.

I'm telling you.

Canada, pretty much every city in Canada has a great skyline.

James: That one guy sounds like me.

And going off on tangent sounds like us.

Brian: Yeah, there's a very similar dynamic on the show there, I would say.

And perhaps I'm the straight man, you're the funny man.

But, yeah, they like to talk about skylines.

That's one of the tangents, the aesthetic qualities of city skylines.

And so they appreciated the skyline of our city.

And, yeah, in their opinion, most Canadian cities have a fantastic looking skyline.

And I don't know, I would have to kind of agree.

Yeah, sure.

They're not bad.

I remember somebody from going through town once, I told the story in the show before.

I was going to a newspaper conference, a student newspaper conference in Winnipeg.

And he went through Johnny, he said, hey, your town looks brand new, because he just drove by to look at the skyline.

And it's all glassy towers.

At least it was 30 years ago when I was in university.

And apparently wherever they were from didn't have that.

And the other nice thing about our skyline, it rises out of a completely flat prairie.

It's very unusual to have a city built on a completely flat thing.

But then the other part of the call so, yeah, it makes me sound super old to be relating this story, but I used to operate the American Top 40 show.

It came in on records.

They would make a record every week, four LPs.

And that's how we would play the show on the radio.

That is amazing.

In the mail, I guess.

I don't remember, but so I have the complete Top 100 countdown from 1983.

It was usually meant to be played, like, on New Year's Eve.

You start at 04:00 p.m..

The show wraps up at midnight top 100 hits of the year.

So next year it'll be the 40th anniversary of this 19 8100.

So I've always been ready to have like a New Year's Eve party or something where we play the 1983 Top 100 countdown.

But I don't know.

Then I'd have to stay up till midnight, which I don't think I would.

Oh, that's tough for you.

That's tough for you.

You'd need an injection of some sort.

Yeah.

So huge.

Thanks to David and John and the election profit makers show.

That was a lot of fun.

And you can go on ebay and discogs and you can find them for sale.

You can buy them.

Sometimes I think the one I've got is probably worth a couple of something.

Was it like the Casey case I'm talking was on vinyl too? Oh, yeah, everything.

So you didn't have to do anything.

I would have to insert the commercial break so he would say, and coming up next, right after this and then you'd have to pause the turntable, play the commercials and then start the turntable back up again.

Have you ever paused a turntable while it was playing someplace? And I went, don't remember doing that.

No.

But we used to play songs on carts.

They were sort of like eight tracks.

That's how all the songs were played on the station.

So sometimes there's a few songs that have pauses in them.

Like the music stops for a second.

So sometimes for fun, we would pause the pause for a little extra.

You dirty bastards.

On late night radio, screwing is a lot of fun.

You rebel.

That's funny and weird.

So that's our broadcasting heritage here at the Clean Energy Show.

Well, that is so weird.

Like, you've never mentioned that to me before.

That's such a weird thing.

I wonder if it was just practical because they could stamp them out at the time.

Like nowadays they could stamp a CD, I suppose.

Yeah.

There were enough stations to play the show.

There must have been a lot they would have had to make.

Yeah, like 1000 or 2000, maybe, who knows? Well, I was driving into my North Regina subdivision, I guess, made in the late 70s so it's still at the edge of the city.

And I saw a plane flying over the subdivision here.

From a different perspective, it was the pipeline plane, from a different perspective, wasn't flying over here.

I thought the damn thing was landing like it was so low.

So I was kind of curious.

And I used a flight Tracker 24 software online than in my app to track it sometimes to see where it's going.

And it says Calibrated 2100ft, but I thought that was 2100ft because that's where the air ambulance, helicopters fly.

It's not, though.

It's not above terrain.

It's above sea level.

And we're 1900ft above sea level.

So that sucker is 200ft above the ground.

Yeah.

And this is the plane.

I've got a toy drone, Brian, that almost goes that high.

And if I hacked it, it would like it's a very serious subject, but it's not out of the question that anybody could be flying a drone at a couple of hundred feet and run into this airplane, which, by the way, inspects the pipeline for leaks.

Yeah.

So I did some research on pipeline inspection planes.

They call them pipeline patrol pilots.

And apparently in the old days, not that long ago, they would fly 50 to 100ft off the ground.

Now, I'm sure they wouldn't do that over a city because there would be cell towers and things like that.

And by the way, a cell tower is probably that high in some cases, so that's interesting.

But somebody died in Edmonton in 2013 doing it because they were taking pictures.

Their job is to take photographs and fly the damn plane by themselves.

Wow.

Well, I remember I made a film one time where we rented a helicopter and we filmed some stuff from a helicopter.

And my recollection back then was a thousand feet was as low as the helicopter was allowed to go over the city when we were flying over the city to take some shots.

So the pipeline planes must have their own special kind of regulation.

It gives us PTSD here, it sounds like World War II because they sound like they're flying right over your head.

Incoming.

Always yell incoming when it comes to my family, just as a joke.

Nobody gets it, but I am using myself.

And that's how it goes.

That's all that matters.

Yeah, this plane just does the pipeline through the small city we live in of 200,000 people or so.

Just does that stretch.

So it takes off and lands in about less than 15 minutes and it's done its whole work.

Wow.

The other day, though, I tracked it and it took off and did it twice, and then it took off down the pipeline, which also splits our bedroom community of Emerald Parkwite City diagonally.

Just splits it in half.

You're on the wrong side of the pipeline.

I know, but, well, it's still fun.

And there's lots of golfers out there.

And I heard on the radio that they're going to stop poisoning the little bastards.

They can be annoying, the Richardson ground squirrel, which we have here in abundance, and they will reproduce.

They will come into my yard and eat my strawberries and assert themselves and get cocky.

I've spent lots of time staring at them and they chirp.

They make this high pitched chirp and it's just really irritating after hours.

It's kind of bad, like having a really nasty crow around or something.

By the way, the crows disappeared.

I mentioned that.

We started the summer, lost the crows, they're gone.

I don't know who shot them or ate them or whatever.

So they're gone? Yes, they're moving on.

CBC had a new story that perhaps my ears up on California.

I guess the government down there asked them to not charge your EVs.

Try not to use too much electricity in those key hours.

And the key hours are between 04:00 p.m.

And 09:00 p.m..

Even electric cars, supposedly a long term solution to fossil fuel usage, are part of this problem.

Owners of Tesla's and other Ecars are being asked not to charge their vehicles during that five hour period, prompting some to ask questions about an eventual complete conversion to electric cars.

Severn.

Vormstein is with the University of California.

There's no way we could keep up right now if we suddenly went to 100% clean cars.

What do you think of that? Yeah, well, it's annoying because of course we can't immediately switch to 100% electric cars.

It's a gradual thing, but there's certainly a number of factors being stacked on top of one another that is turning this into a much more difficult year for energy grids than I think we ever expected.

So with California, it's this massive heat wave.

They're well over 100 degrees Fahrenheit in California and the worst drought in 1200 years.

Did you see that? No.

This is the worst drought in 1200 years in the western United States.

Well, it's been a weird pattern.

And I heard somebody say that it was El Ninja.

The ocean current was sticking around for a second and possibly third winter.

Wow.

And that has done weird things.

And one of the things is bunched up the systems in North America.

So we got this big ridge going way up to Alaska, and that gets hot.

And we get hot here in central western Canada.

And yesterday was the hottest day on record for Regina for this day.

Yeah, it was the second hottest day of the summer.

The hottest day of the summer was also in September, where it got to 36 deg.

It's crazy.

I mean, that's never happened before, ever.

I've lived here almost all my life, and I was at a weather geek when I was a kid.

I paid attention to these things and yeah, it's weird.

So I heat my pool with solar panels, like thermal solar panels, and it's the first time I've ever been in the pool in September without a gas heater in my pool.

And it's weird because it doesn't work as well as it does in June.

The sun goes down early, and it goes behind trees, my neighbors trees.

So the pool itself gets shaded.

And it's unpleasant to be in there when you're not in the sun.

So it takes a longer time to heat up anyway.

It's just weird.

Yeah.

And of course, the other thing that's happening with a massive drought and this is not just California, but places in Europe is happening, too, is the hydroelectric cannot run at full capacity because they just don't have the water behind the dams that they normally do.

So the Hoover Dam, lake Mead.

There was another mob body found the other day in Lake Mead.

So Lake Mead is the reservoir for the Hoover Dam.

Produces lots of hydroelectric power, but it's down to something like 30% of its maximum level now.

And so they can't generate as much electricity as normal.

And, yeah, they're finding bodies now.

The water is so low, they're finding bodies in there that have been there for decades.

And the rivers are low in Germany, so you can't transport coal.

And the water is too hot to cool some of the nuclear plants in, I believe, France.

And now, this isn't a hundred years from now, this isn't 50 years from now.

All this weird stuff is happening now.

Posing problems for non solar and wind.

I would say yes.

And the only thing I would mention here is I think we talked about it, but there's a Tesla virtual Power plant pilot project going on in California.

So they've run it three times now, and they're probably running it again today.

So today is expected to be perhaps the biggest peak of this energy crisis in California.

They may have to go to blackouts today in California as we record this because they may not be able to produce enough energy.

But anyway, it's not enough to save the grid.

But these virtual power plants in California can output up to 50 MW, which is a promising start.

Imagine eventually when every home has a backup battery that would be enough to kind of stabilize these problems with the grid.

But I thought that was super encouraging.

And when called upon, they can all shoot power to the grid at up to 50 MW, apparently.

And 50 MW is five times the peak capacity of the solar plant that I visited in Saskatchewan.

What are the first ones that came on? The only ones that they're allowing now is 10 MW.

So 10 is five times what that is.

And that just further illustrates how puny that solar farm from SAS power is.

Yeah.

So they're expecting rolling blackouts is expected to be 115 deg today in Sacramento.

That's 46 Celsius.

That would be a record.

And people are going to turn on the air conditioners.

They're telling people not to charge their electric cars, especially during peak hours.

I don't think people do because in California there's like peak energy demand, right? Yeah.

I was posting this on Twitter.

If you have an EV, you can get a special plan on the grid.

There the utility and they'll charge you less overnight.

So if you have an EV plan, you pay, I don't know, it's a third or something like that of what the demand is during the day, in the early evening, and then you can charge all you want from eleven on or something.

Yeah, and that's a good example of how we are going to adapt and we're not going to switch to 100% electric cars overnight.

But that's one of the strategies going forward as we slowly transition to electric.

And I should say I think it's like $0.25 overnight.

So that's almost twice what we're paying.

I guess ours are creeping up too, but twenty five cents per kilowatt hour per kilowatt hour.

That's still kind of pricey.

It's not like the $0.03 that some places are talking about charging EV owners to charge overnight.

But that is one way your neighbors will say, well, the grid can't handle it because they write it out a meme on Facebook, that's BS.

If we charged overnight, we have the capacity to meet what the peak demand is and it falls off overnight.

And there's lots of buffer there between what overnight use is and what the peak is that you could charge in some grids right now.

You could just charge all the electric.

If everybody had an electric car, you could charge them all and it'd be fine because they're only charging for a couple of hours too, like at most usually.

Yeah.

And it's an example of how these grids just need to plan and manage.

And just the extreme weather that we're having this year is kind of revealing, maybe, who has done the best planning and who has not.

I mean, the governor could have easily said don't cook supper in your oven or don't do a load of laundry.

But they went after electric cars and said don't charge them.

And very few people are charging them anyway.

What they need to do is say turn up your thermostat by a degree or two and just take it easy because the peak we don't want to rolling black.

And do your thing if you can, if you want to, and then the industry can help with that as well.

They can slow down their shifts at factories or whatever, but yeah, so we'll see what happens if there are in fact, I guess there are 5000 MW short of its power supply, peak demand, that's forecasted by the computers.

And that will hit at 05:30 P.m.

Pacific, which is a couple of hours after we're recording this.

Yeah, we'll see how that goes.

Russia has again stopped supplying gas to Germany through the pipeline that we've been talking about over the past few weeks on the show.

So again, Russia has said, no more gas for you.

Germany, they were trying to build up gas reserves in Germany.

And Germany has said finally, that they are still planning to close those three nuclear power plants that are scheduled to close by the end of the year.

They're going to go ahead with it, but the kind of compromise is they're going to keep two of them on standby, whatever that means.

I guess if they completely mothballed everything, they couldn't start it up again.

But they're going to not completely mothball everything and have two of the three on standby until April so that they possibly could be restarted if they need to.

There's a remarkable thing that you talked about last week.

If you missed last week's show, you might want to go listen to that because there's a lot of stipulations going on with those plants that they have to fix or not fix.

And it's a challenge.

Yeah.

No, I often think about Mad Max.

The Mad Max movies, which I love.

And it's all based around gasoline because it's the wasteland in Australia and gasoline is the precious resource after society has collapsed.

But if we were to have this Mad Max future now, it'd really be solar panels and batteries would be the precious resource.

And it's a much, much simpler thing than having to make gasoline and store gasoline or process it or whatever you have to do.

And the same thing with nuclear power plants.

Like, a nuclear power plant is not going to be much use in a post apocalyptic world because it's too complicated to run.

And yeah, so I did enjoy that segment on last week's show.

It's not as simple as just deciding to keep a plant open or close it.

Nuclear power plants have so many rules and regulations and laws, they would literally have to change the laws in Germany to keep those power plants open.

And hats off to the employees of the nuclear power plants in the Ukraine, which are essentially prisoners of the Russians and who have decided, because speaking of not being used in an apocalypse, well, you have to have the expertise there, and they're basically forcing them to be there.

It's just a horrible situation.

And Brian, speaking of emergency alerts, we've gotten a whole bunch of alerts, but Alberta has some emergency alerts that I'm going to make fun of or at least make light of because Jasper National Park in Alberta straddling the Alberta BC border.

It is arguably one of our national park's best areas.

It's amazing.

So beautiful and less touristy than bank because it's a bit more out of the way.

It is experiencing, unfortunately, a wildfire due to the heat wave that we've been talking about.

And it was started by lightning.

But here's what the CBC news story said about it said before Jasper lost power Sunday evening, the Alberta Emergency Alert System advised residents to prepare for a possible power outage in the town of Jasper, including advising people to fill up their vehicles fuel tank as gas stations rely on electricity.

And people come to us and say what do you do with the power comes out? They come up with those parking lots with their EVs and they say what do you do if the power goes out? As if they run out of extension cords.

The fact is you charge them and you have hundreds of kilometers of range if the power goes out.

And then you drive like you would.

And if the gas station has no power, if you had no power, you could drive to where there is power and charge it up if you needed to.

Yeah.

And Jasper has always had kind of an isolated electricity system because it's in kind of a remote place and I think there's only kind of one power line going in and out.

So they have frequent blackouts in Jasper.

So perhaps the residents are used to this.

But I remember being in Jasper a few years ago and the power was out.

It was out for hours.

But where did we go? We went to the one restaurant or there was a couple that had generators like this happens frequently enough that this restaurant had a big enough generator to keep themselves running.

Well, it's wilderness.

It's mountain wilderness.

You have power lines that are hard to get to.

You have to helicopter people in there.

That's a perfect place for a battery backup system when they become available.

Yeah, and I think they are working on that.

They're running generators to do the well, I think the power is out right now.

So if anybody in Jasper is listening to us.

Hello.

Yeah.

So General Motors is going to offer buyouts to their Buick dealers.

So this is very similar to a story we had last year where they were offering buyouts to Cadillac dealers.

So these are sub brands within General Motors.

When they offered it to Cadillac dealers, about 320 out of the 880 retailers accepted the offer.

And apparently the buyouts for the Cadillac dealers was in the range of $300,000 to a million dollars a payout to get them to stop selling Buicks or stop selling Cadillacs.

And this is because General Motors realizes they have too many dealerships.

They cannot go forward with this many dealerships in an electric vehicle future.

So this is a sign of the times and good on General Motors for planning for the future like that and we'll see how it goes.

So there's about 2000 Buick dealers and they're all going to be offered this deal and some of them will have to go away.

And of course switching to an EV dealership is going to be perhaps an expensive proposition.

There'd be money involved and so I think this is a buyout, really, for the kind of the smaller dealerships that don't think that they can make enough money off of EVs.

As we've discussed many times, they don't need oil changes, they need much less maintenance.

It's for those dealerships that just think they don't want to make the effort or spend the money to go to EVs because they don't think it's going to be worth it.

My elderly neighbors will be disappointed because they bought a Buick recently.

Oh, really? That's what I said to myself.

Oh.

I didn't know Buicks existed anymore.

Yes.

I don't know why they don't just shut out the brand.

Because the average age of the buyers got to be in their seventy s.

Seventy s? How about one hundred eighty s? One hundred.

I'm thinking old people who are living in the don't want to buy a Cadillac or a Buick.

But you know, the Cadillac lyric is pretty.

It checks all the checkboxes.

It takes off a lot of things, fast charging range.

But maybe I'll end up with just one of those one of these days.

Some more news from Germany.

So over the summer, they introduced this really interesting deal for cheap rail in Germany.

And they did this because of the high fuel prices in Germany.

This is really part of the whole strategy energy crisis in Europe.

Fuel is just too expensive.

And of course, also the more people drive, the more it contributes to greenhouse gasses.

So over the three months of the summer, germany offered for $9, which is about €9 a month, a train ticket to go anywhere in Germany.

And this has worked really well.

It has saved about one 8 million tons of CO2 from the atmosphere.

And yes, people took advantage of this.

It makes a lot of sense.

And of course, it's not necessarily as possible where we live in the isolated prairies, but when you have a proper rail system, like they do in pretty much all the countries in Europe, why not offer incentives and get people to use it? And it benefits everyone.

I wonder if that will spread through Europe just because there's a big crunch coming on energy and maybe that idea will spread and that will also maybe change some people's habits.

Yeah, I hope so.

And of course, it's also just a bit of a help because gasoline is just so expensive.

So it's a way to help out your population and give them a break on the high fuel prices.

This is a clean energy show with Brian Stockton and James Whittingham.

Brian.

The UK finally has a new Prime Minister to replace Mr.

Boris Johnson.

Right.

So, Liz Truss, I haven't seen a picture.

What's her hair like? It's more organized, I would say.

Definitely more organized.

Okay, that's a good sign.

It doesn't seem to have a life of its own.

It seems fine as every other person in England has normal hair.

But not Boris.

Yeah, so she's weird.

She doesn't like the sight of solar panels.

And I think one of the most depressing sights when you're driving through England is seeing fields that should be full of crops or livestock, full of solar panels.

The hell is wrong with her? She started as a Social Democrat and she was an anti nuclear activist when she was young, but at some point at university, a switch went off and she became hard.

Right.

And she's vowed to be a very Conservative Conservative because that's what she campaigned on.

I always think it's fantastic when I see a field of solar panels, but also Agravoltaics, which you talk about frequently.

You can have both.

You can have crops and solar panels.

You can have sheep grazing, you can have goats grazing.

It's a win win.

It's sad that she's insane.

It's sad that she's dumb about this, as many people in her party are, but, you know, there's only 14% of Brits are against the net zero plan for us.

Johnson 14% of people are against sunny days.

That's unheard of.

Like, there's a very strong support for clean energy in that zero.

Yeah.

So that's a weird stand for her to she's making it a sort of culture war, using the climate as a culture war thing.

She doubled down on her comments during the leadership campaign that farmers feel shouldn't be full of solar panels, and several Conservative MPs have raised it.

And solar farms in the UK currently account for 0.8% of total land use.

That's very little land use right now under the government's net zero plan.

Solar farms.

This is getting rid of climate change, right? Addressing climate change, Paris Accord targets and all that over the next 30 years would be .6% of all land use.

About half of 1% of land use would be solar in the UK.

And that's not accounting for efficiency improvements as we move forward.

We'll need less panels, and maybe there'll be different ways to deploy them.

Yeah, it's a strange thing to plant a flag on.

Anyway, Brian, I just want to add one thing.

Solar energy.

UK says that this amount of land use will be less than the amount of land currently used for golf courses.

That is the .6% of UK land.

And saving the freaking planet is less than golf courses.

No.

And golf courses are kind of notoriously bad for the environment because they take up so much space for the enjoyment of so few people and they take so many resources to water and maintain those lawns that apologize to golfers.

Let's take all the golf courses in the world and just put solar panels on them.

That would be great.

All right, so, staying in Europe again, European energy crisis.

France is looking to cut their energy use by about 10% this year.

So, again, energy crunch.

France is having problems with their nuclear plants.

They aren't able to share as much energy back and forth with other countries like Germany who's having their problems.

So coming into the winter, they have said that they want to cut energy use by about 10%.

So in the winter, this is going to mean setting your thermostat in your house at about 19 Celsius or 66 Fahrenheit, which is a genuine sacrifice.

I would not want to do that.

We've been very spoiled of just being able to kind of set the temperature.

So 19 would be freezing for me.

Yeah.

Where am I? I'm around 21, I think.

Winter has been so far behind us and yet so close to tennis.

But that's up.

It's up.

When I first moved to this house, I was a 20 degree man.

Brian.

Yes.

Now that I'm old, I'm not making energy anymore in my body.

I'm just getting old.

I'm supposed to eat less.

That's why the seniors menu 55 plus is cheaper at Denny's, because I'm supposed to eat less.

Yeah, I don't feel like you feel like you do the same thing I did when I was 20.

There's going to be a lot of sweaters sold in France.

That's all I got to say about that.

Yeah, get into the sweater business and Brian from the Nebraska examiner and I know you have subscription, Brian.

Do you have a subscription to that one? No, but next time I'm on the PressReader app, I will look for the Nebraska shout out to the Nebraska examiner staff.

A southwest Iowa ethanol plant has been ordered to pay $10,000 fine for its repeated air emissions of excessive cancer causing compounds in the last five years.

I live near an oil refinery, heavy oil operator refinery.

And I complained about the smell and I told you that there's an author and a team of journalists looking at that over four years and they're looking to go to ethanol and stuff like that and biofuel fuel for planes and stuff like that.

They're trying to diversify and there's even canola crushing plants going up around it.

But this proves to me the reason why I mentioned it is that even these plants can have horrible emissions like formaldehyde.

This plant was spewing out formaldehyde and other byproducts of its fermentation process that are known to have adverse health risk like cancer.

So actual harm to the environment and public health may have occurred since this order from the Iowa Department of Natural Resources and due to the amount of pollutants that were and are being admitted.

So, yeah, it's just something to keep in mind when you think that, oh, good, your refinery is going bio.

It can be bad for you as well if you live near one.

Yeah, no, I've never been a fan of the bio fuels.

It's a stop gap that we probably don't need.

Okay.

So rumors are heating up about a possible Tesla factory here in Canada.

Public companies have to disclose their lobbying efforts.

So Electric and others have reported on this.

Apparently Tesla is looking at Quebec and Ontario for some type of factory.

I mean, it could be a car factory, could be a battery factory, could be both, who knows? What's your bet? Where's your bet going right now? I'm thinking it will be a car factory, and I'm thinking Quebec.

There is a long history of not only automobile production in Ontario and Quebec, but also mining a lot of the minerals.

And of course, Tesla is trying to local source as many of the minerals and metals and stuff needed for electric cars for the batteries.

So, yeah, best case scenario, a battery and car plant.

And I'm leaning towards Quebec, but that's really just a guess.

I'm leaning towards not being a normal car plant.

Like not XYZ three, not a full blown thing.

No, it could be batteries or it could be something weird like cyber trucks and semis.

That's my guess.

Yes.

Because they both take up a lot of batteries.

So maybe they'll just make the batteries for those two things and I don't know, they'll be able to transport them to the east coast because that's kind of one of the challenges of the Texas plant, is having to transport all that stuff to the other half of the country and the eastern half.

Yeah, and like I say, there's a huge history of doing this.

Like all the major car brands have factories or have had factories in Ontario and Quebec, in Canada.

So clearly there's a decent reason to do it.

If others have done it, then probably it'd be a work for Tesla.

And on the Great Lakes, that's a port.

That's access to a port.

So if you wanted to ship to Europe, that's another option.

Yeah, it's not just the eastern part of North America is a shorter shipping route to Europe where a lot of these things are going to be bought over the next little while.

So, once again, I know I mentioned this a lot, but I was on the Chevy Bolt user group that is largely the United States.

There's so many people there compared to Canada.

That is a post every couple of minutes and it eats up my Facebook feed, but I always find it interesting.

Brian there's a guy named Randy Moffatt, which is interesting because I went to high school with the person with that name and the fear of change.

This is something that he pointed out in a Facebook post talking about all the hate that EV owners were getting.

And so he came into this and he said, the fear of change has a word, it's called oh God.

Meta the SEO phobia.

No.

You do.

Finland pronunciations.

Why can't you do this? No, I think you did it slowly, but you did it above.

So it is the fear of change.

And I hadn't heard of this one before.

Have you heard of that? One.

I've heard lots of phobias.

Yeah, this is basically what's going on in the world.

If you were looking at Facebook hate and people uncomfortable with DVS.

So why do they give a crap? I mean, you could say, well, they're forced to in 2035 or in California and other places, but that's not really a pressing issue right now.

It's not here before us.

Why do people hate on EV so much? And it is a fear that people are going through, a fear of change.

And the fear of change is evolutionary in humans.

Our internal predispositions teach us to resist change, mainly to always feel in control.

So these people are feeling out of control on these people who like to feel in control the most in our comfort zone.

Yeah.

And of course, it isn't just a hatred of EVs.

It's just a reaction to people are scared about getting off fossil fuels, which seems like a weird thing to us because it's a whole new dawn of a fantastic new day.

It's nothing but good news getting off fossil fuels.

But yeah, people are just scared about change.

And you see it a lot in Alberta, our neighboring oil province, where people are just absolutely dead set on sticking with what they know, which is oil and gas.

Here's a quip from YouTube.

We are all afraid of the uncertainty that comes with change.

We would rather things be not so great then go through the risk and process of change.

This specific phobia can reduce one's will to live.

So this is pretty extreme.

Wow.

The phobes who have this often feel like they have no control over their lives on the cost and changes.

She tends to live in the past and may also be depressed.

So there you go.

Therefore, you make them unwilling to move.

So Randy says on this Facebook post, I became interested in computers in the early 1970s and learned a program so that's very early, like, very few people were doing it back then.

I was always on the cutting edge of technology.

The amount of hate was palatable with people accusing me of being a Satanist.

Randy S from the States, where there's lots of, you know, Baptists and religion and stuff, people said they would never own one.

This is a computer.

Okay, yeah.

So we are going through this again.

He says.

However, now the government is issuing mandates for this transition to EV is making the fear even worse.

When I got my first EV almost nine years ago, I had neighbors calling me crazy.

My next door neighbor said he would never own one.

Last weekend he told me he just ordered his third.

So be patient, be nonconfrontational, just set a quiet example and someday, just like computers, they will figure it out.

And I thought that was a great post.

I wanted to share with their listeners.

This happens all the time.

Like, I follow photography and cameras and stuff.

And there's a move now from optical viewfinders to electronic viewfinders and cameras, and it's progressed enough that people have accepted it.

But two or three years ago, you had people just hatred for electronic viewfinders on cameras.

Like, people just hated the idea of it, and one by one, they're all moving to it.

It happened too quickly for them to comprehend.

I don't know.

As soon as I found out about it, I thought it was fantastic, and I couldn't wait to switch.

So, yeah, this is definitely a mindset.

Conservatives versus progressive.

I had one on a point and shoot camera 15 long time ago, a lot of years ago in the digital camera age.

Didn't care for it, of course.

They weren't focused.

You couldn't do anything.

I'm sure they're getting a lot better, and I've not actually used one myself.

It was very clear to me early on it was the way of the future.

But, yeah, people just take much longer, generally speaking, to catch on.

All right, let's stick it to the mail bag.

The user feedback this week comes from Doug in Colorado, who wrote about our May 2 show.

Doug, you're behind.

You put a lot of catching up to do.

Take some time off work if you have to.

Binge listen our show.

So he says to us, thank you for highlighting the problem of light trespass from harsh, glaring Led street light fixtures.

And he says an excellent resource is the International Dark Sky Association.

They have everything people need to know about light pollution, including model lighting ordinance.

And also, thanks for coming to Ups.

Replacement gasoline, mail delivery, van, contract debacle.

Hoping canada learns from the United States.

US is making big mistakes and hopefully pushes Canada to do much better.

Yeah, so I vaguely remember talking about Led lighting back in May.

That was a long time ago.

Led lighting, I think what we said at the time, it's a fantastic opportunity to upgrade things and make it better and reduce light pollution.

But since Led lights are still kind of new technology, a lot of the designs aren't great.

Cities don't quite know how to implement them yet.

And yeah, a lot of the times they're just too harsh.

But, yeah, my pet peeve is the brightness.

We have the ability now to put them on timers and control the brightness.

So street lights could come on at full power, kind of in the dusk times, and then you could eventually back those off at three in the morning, just turn all the street lights down.

And if you've ever been out in the middle of the night, you don't need a whole lot of light to see once your eyes are adjusted.

I'm surrounded by a ridiculous amount of light pollution.

I'm thankful that they changed the street lights in our neighborhood here to Led that have a slight warmth to them, and they're less bright than the previous, I would say overall they disperse them better, and they even that out, and that's fine.

However, my neighbor across the street, across the boulevard, he's the person with the police stickers all over his house, he's scared of getting killed.

And he's got this bright white LEDs just glaring on his property like a landing strip for an airport.

And then across the Pipeline Field, which is, I don't know, 50 meters across, 50 yards across, there's another guy who has a giant white light in his backyard, and it shines, and I can see the gophers and anything going around in the night.

And then there's a school there as well, which is further away from me, but they have this anti never do well lighting to keep people from doing things there, because people do do things.

But it's blindingly bright, and it shines in my drapes, and it's a long ways away, and it's light pollution.

And all these lights that I speak of are not on the spectrum of warmth.

So they're the bluer side, and they bounce, and those are the wavelengths that bounce up into the sky the most.

And I think I talked about this on the show, but I've got a street light just right outside of my house.

And a couple of years ago, the ball went out, and it was the greatest, because I don't want that giant street lamp shining in my windows at night.

It was so great.

I was very disappointed when they should have rented a bucket truck and went up there and put some tape over it just a little put in a low wattage bulb.

And also yesterday I was coming home from Home Depot and I saw two pickup or two trucks with Amazon delivery vehicles on them, like there was four Amazon Delivery Prime trucks, the kinds that look like the EVs that they're coming out in the States.

So, of course, I went and checked them out and saw the giant tailpipes on them.

Was very disappointed.

But they looked those four transit vans converted, and they should look they should be EVs, and they're not.

We don't have those around here.

We have a third party delivery service, don't we, in Virginia? No, it hasn't been great for electric sort of trans advance around here.

Yeah, but there was one place remember last week we talked about a place in Saskatoon? They got one for delivering at a bakery, and it's just and they're saving money, handover it's free.

They said there's paying for the payments to save money.

They save for the payments for the new vehicle.

So how great is that? And of course, we'd love to hear from you.

So right now, get out your pen.

Get out your typewriter.

[e-mail].

Write us with an angry letter.

Tell us when we're wrong.

Tell us when you agree or disagree with us.

We're on Twitter.

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And don't forget to check out our YouTube channel for all kinds of things going on.

We got two YouTube channels.

I dare you to find the second one that has the audio on the podcast.

Probably can't do it.

Leave us a [e-mail] cleanenergyshow.

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Yes, we'll mention your name and your birthday.

So mention your birthday.

We'll mention your birthday.

Here we go.

Brian.

The Clean Energy Show Lightning Round, where we breeze through the headlines and end the show on a fast pace.

End of life batteries from electric vehicles are not likely to be the primary source of recyclable material until the mid 2030, according to Benchmark Mineral Intelligence.

Yeah, I think we talked about that last week of the week before that.

It's going to be a very slow ramp up because electric vehicle batteries are just lasting way longer than people thought.

Our friend Donald Trump has gone on a nonsense, cynical rant about electric cars the other day at a rally.

He says we need to get rid of them.

The story was on electric and we have a clip, but I'm not going to play the man, okay? I said to myself, how can we cover this and not hear his stupid freaking voice? You already said his name.

Which gives me I'm sorry.

I like how Steven Colbert does it.

They have Twitter.

People come up with nicknames, which always makes for him every.

But this is very similar to the British PM with the rant about solar panels is kind of the same thing.

This is trying to make it into a culture war type of issue.

Well, speaking of Britain, I had a computer read his text in a posh British accent.

So here it is.

A friend of mine wanted to do something for the environment.

He went out and bought an electric car and he made a certain trip, I won't say from where, kentucky.

And he is a good person.

He wants to do what's well, and now he understands, hey, not so good.

He bought an electric car and he made the trip often from Kentucky to Washington.

And he made it.

He would drive down, put the car away and drive back.

He was getting like 38 miles per gallon.

It took me more time to charge in the damn car than I could spend in a drive in.

It took me two and half times.

My name is Donald J.

Trump, and I'm an idiot.

A complete and total idiot.

Please enjoy listening to the Clean Energy Show.

Hopefully Brian isn't drunk this week.

Okay, well, that was a bit added on at the end there, but you get the idea.

It makes no sense at all.

Yeah, and we all know electric cars work great for road trips.

They do.

And the author of that electric piece, Freslinber, pointed out that he went from New Orleans up to Quebec, didn't have to stop for more than 30 minutes and he had to dine anyway.

I had to eat something and go to the bathroom and stretch his leg.

Yeah, it wasn't an inconvenience at all for him and his Tesla.

Yeah.

With the caveat that the Tesla charging network is definitely the best and the third party charger is maybe not as good and you might still have some issues there.

Have you heard of Boston Consulting Group before? Often it is quoted in the news on different things.

It is a major consulting group.

So four years.

This is four years of Boston Consulting groups.

US.

Electric vehicle sales forecasts.

This is something that Wall Street relies on, consulting groups like this.

And this is an evolution of how their forecasts have changed.

We talked about this type of thing on the show, that people are always revising their forecast and we could have told them differently.

So in 2018, they said 21% of sales will be EVs in 2030.

This is the United States.

Two years later, they said, Oops, 26.

Year after that, 42.

That's a big jump.

And then this year, they're now saying 53%, which is a lot more common.

And even that is like, we doubt that.

We think it's going to be more than that.

Things are going to tip.

This is an S Curve adoption, and we're at the steep part of the S Curve.

This is going to go up way faster than people think.

Just think back to when smartphones were first introduced and everyone's like, that's kind of a weird thing.

And then you blink and a couple of years later, everybody had a smartphone.

And that's how fast it goes.

You're looking at the chart now on our script.

Look at where it levels off.

It levels off between 55 and 75%.

Yeah, they're still kind of doing it wrong.

They're still underestimate.

Curves of adoption don't level off until around 90%.

Like color TVs, cell phones, stuff like that, when the last 10% is the hard to get.

Yeah.

And I will say, like, manufacturing cars, electric cars, is a lot more difficult, probably, than manufacturing something like a smartphone.

So it maybe won't go as quickly as the smartphone, but it is going to go fast.

From carbon tracker.

Just over 30 solar installations are being carried out every week in Britain, and that is up from 1000 a week just two years ago.

So it's tripled the home.

That's a lot.

The home solar installations have tripled in two years.

That's crazy time for CS.

Fast fact hawaii produces more renewable energy than all of Canada.

Were you sitting down for that? Oh, yes.

Your posture is excellent this week, by the way.

I'm happy to see your back is better.

Yeah, I haven't had to change position, but yeah, we reported a couple of weeks ago they got their last shipment of coal for their last coal fired electricity plant.

And that plant did close down just the other day.

So that's great.

So, yeah, the regulatory consequences are clear.

If utilities fail to meet their renewable targets, they are forced to pay penalties, which must be covered by company, the shareholders, and rather than the taxpayers.

And that's the way it should be.

That should be the lesson for everybody.

The shareholders should have to cover it, not the ratepayers.

Electric school busses in Massachusetts provided energy back to the grid for more than 8 hours this summer.

That is a lot of hours of emergency heat wave protection from buses that weren't doing anything because they are electric.

They were sitting around all summer.

And this is a great use case in the United States where they have less severe winters, but summer heat waves need that grid backup.

And those electric buses which are just starting to trickle in, really, for schools, are there and useful.

So that's awesome.

Fantastic.

Ten of 13 flagship CCS that is carbon capture and Sequestration Rhine SEQUEST projects failed to deliver, according to IEFA analysis, and that's 50% of goals haven't even been reached.

And that's what our boundary dam they mentioned.

The boundary dam is the first thing they mentioned right here in this catch one.

Yeah, we had one of the first carbon capture on a coal plant, and they have captured some carbon, but nowhere near what they thought they were.

Mars Technica ebike battery fires are pushing New York City towards a ban in public housing.

That is, public housing is banning ebikes.

This is quite disturbing, but so is the reason why so poorly made cells, tough work and lack of space, I guess, in these places, are causing deadly rise of fires.

A deadly rise of fires in the New York City.

That was a lot.

I mean, laptops can do that, too.

Ebike battery is made up of dozens of individual AA sized batteries wired together and managed by a battery management system.

And you were talking last week how you were told that you have to unplug.

You can't just keep charging us.

Maybe that's the reason.

Yes.

My ebike doesn't have a battery management system, so you're not supposed to leave it plugged in.

But yeah, I could see where this could turn out to be a huge problem.

By the way, my partner shops at Shoppers Druckmart, and they had an ebike in there for $250 for the weekend, but it was just this tiny little thing that didn't have pedals, it just had spikes to put your feet on.

Yes.

Anyway, that's interesting.

Sometimes those things are mismanaged.

The charging is mismanaged, the faulty, they are damaged, they're waterlogged.

But a five year old was killed in a fire, and it's very tragic.

And just be careful.

If you have an ebike battery, don't read the manual and be aware that you're not supposed to leave it.

In many cases, you're not supposed to leave them charging indefinitely, but they're not inherently dangerous either.

But anything that is a battery that charges I mean my charge and lead to acid battery in my house for my RV.

So you got to be careful.

Washington Post amid a bonanza of measures passed to cut the state's carbon emissions in California as fast as possible, the legislature in California approved $1,000 refundable tax credit to poor Californians who don't own vehicles.

So it's paying people not to own vehicles if you are poorish.

I might even qualify.

It will head to the desk of Newton soon and he's going to sign it.

He's expected to sign it.

The bill offers the tax credit to single filers earning up to $40,000 in joint filers up to $60,000 who live without personal cars.

And you can get it whether you make a lot of tax money or not.

And you can just get that $1,000 regardless.

Yeah, that sounds great.

And maybe that's something we'll start to see other places.

I've heard the concept before, but this is the first time I've seen it getting passed.

Another CS fast Fact from Nat bullard from Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

There are 148,026 convenience stores in the United States.

OK, 148,000.

What he's saying is look out.

Change is coming.

And Brian, that is our time for this week.

It's been fun as always.

Glad you're feeling better.

We'd like to hear from you.

Remember, contact us at [e-mail] and all the rest of the places.

And if you're new to the show, remember to subscribe to get our podcast cast every week, and we'll see you next time.

See you next week.