139. Fossil Fuel Assets Worthless by 2036; Hydroponic Wheat; Electric Truck Stops

The Clean Energy Show

Electric truck stops will need as much power as a small town. Heat pumps mandatory in new homes in Washington State. Indoor hydroponic wheat produces 6 crops per year on the same land. LaGuardia Airport will host a pilot project that uses a flywheel to speed up EV charging. SpaceX buys ads on Twitter. Could Tesla be next? Battery espionage in Canada by China.

Tesla proposes a North American charging standard. Should ICE trucks pay highway tolls? New study could show how batteries can have 20% more life cycles (and therefore lower prices).

Half the world's fossil fuel assets could become worthless by 2036.

The price of hydrogen at the pump in California has risen 33%. We compare gas and electric alternatives.

Tony Seba has our Tweet of the Week: Percision fermentation land area to replace all the cows.

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Transcript

Hello, and welcome to Episode 139 of the Clean Energy Show.

I'm Brian Stockton.

I'm James Whittingham.

This week, an indoor wheat experiment is a big success.

A new crop is harvested six times a year.

Wish my hair did that.

Heat pumps are now mandatory in new homes in Washington state.

Also mandatory cheering for the Seattle Kraken electric truck stops will need more power than a small town.

What about the same amount of meth? LaGuardia Airport will host a pilot project that uses a flywheel to speed up EV charging.

This partnership makes perfect sense, because if there's one thing LaGuardia is known for, its speed.

All that and more on this week's edition of The Clean Energy Show.

Welcome, everyone, to what I think is the best podcast on the Internet everywhere.

It's objectively true.

Objectively true.

I think so.

Right now, this is a particular moment.

And also on this week's show, Brian, we also have stuff about SpaceX.

It's buying ads on Twitter because it's CEO bought Twitter.

And we wonder if Tesla could be next, because Tesla has never advertised near her SpaceX.

So maybe this could break ground for that.

We'll see.

The first case of battery espionage has been discovered in Canada.

Hydrogen pump prices are going up 33% in California, half the world's fossil fuel assets could become worthless by 2036.

So keep that in mind when investing today.

How are you? I'm good.

So just an update on my house.

So I applied for the Greener Homes grant here in Canada to do energy upgrades to my house.

All right.

Hoping to put in an air source heat pump, get rid of my natural gas.

And so the first step of that is the blower door test and kind of home energy evaluation.

And that all happened today.

So that was fun.

They put the big blower in the door.

They test the air tightness of the house.

So they got this doorshaped mass that goes all over the door with a hole for the blower.

And the blower only, right? Yeah.

And it blows air in or out, I can't remember.

And then they could also go around the house with the sort of infrared camera thing and with the blower on, kind of show you where the leaks are in the house.

It's wintertime now.

It's super cold out.

Oh, well, then it will be sucking.

It will be sucking it.

And the air will be coming in through the window cracks and things like that.

Yeah.

So did they go around with a smoker? No smoker.

Just this infrared thing.

Maybe they use a smoker more in the summer.

Okay, well, they didn't use a smoker on mine, and they didn't do that on mine.

They didn't go around.

So what did you find out? Not too much yet.

They have to sort of crunch all the numbers because they do a volumetric assessment of the house where they calculate the interior volume of the house.

So then they have to go and take the measurements that they got from the blower door, do some calculations, figure it out, and you get kind of like an Energy Star rating for your home.

And we did this about ten years ago when we did some upgrades.

It was a similar program.

So they give you a number, I think it's out of 100 of what your energy efficiency is, and then as you make improvements, you hope to they do the blower door test again when you're all done, and you hope to increase the sort of Energy Star rating of your house.

This is mostly for air ceiling, right? Yeah, and we could see that a little bit with the infrared camera.

But we will hopefully do some more upgrades.

It's the main thing we want to do is the air source heat pump, and we should get the grant for that kind of regardless of what the blower door result is.

I told you last week there's a TV series shooting across the street from me, and they were actually outdoors shooting today, so I was worried the blower would they come knock on our door.

Because you're a film, you know, the film community.

Old man stalked and wanting money to shut down his blowers so we could continue our production, because people do that on the streets.

They'll run their muscle cars and have to get paid off get paid off to shut it down because the film crew needs quiet.

And I watched The Godfather yesterday, which I hadn't seen in many, many years.

Let me guess.

Blue Ray, 4k? Exactly.

It's this restored version.

It's quite cool.

They did extensive restoration, but a lot of that movie is ADR.

I sort of didn't remember that, but ADR being dialogue replacement, where a lot of the dialogue was replaced in post production.

Like, a lot of it, like, way more than half, I think.

Wow.

So it was a low budget film, more or less, wasn't it? Yeah, I guess that would be the reason.

Like, lots of location shooting and lots of extraneous noises.

But yeah, that was sort of the surprise on that one for me.

Did you just notice it more this time, or what? Yes, I haven't seen it in 2030 years.

You were just a child then, really.

I mean, you naive.

You accepted everything as reality.

Yes.

I wish I was that.

It's a fascinating if you're interested, on the Bluray, and there's these special features about how they had to restore it because the film, when it came out in 72, was just wildly more popular than anybody expected.

And whenever that happens, they have to run more prints so that they have to make more prints of the film.

So the original negative, even though it's only 50 years old, I ended up getting totally ruined.

And the restoration that they had to do was to the point where they were going and taking outtakes they were taking outtakes and cutting them back into the film because certain shots were damaged.

And with the approval of the director, you can do that kind of weird thing.

Oh, wow.

I don't know how I feel about that.

You get used to a film that would stand out to you.

It shouldn't be in any way that you notice it's like literally like just a shot of somebody walking down the hallway or okay, that's different.

It's nothing important.

You know, my childhood home has been destroyed.

There was an explosion in Regina.

That was your childhood home.

No, it wasn't, but it was built next to my childhood home.

And when I say childhood home, I mean I lived there for three months with great eight.

My brother lived there, and I left home in grade eight and went and lived with him and found out he had a girlfriend who became his wife, who eventually became his ex wife.

That building, which is a brick, three story apartment building with, I think, you know, twelve suites, and it was, has to be demolished now because the house next door blew out.

Well, it was kind of like an apartment building that they were building right when I was living there, I think.

And it's like a four suite housing, but nobody was living there.

The whole thing blew up, rain off the ground, boom.

And the only person who was injured was somebody who didn't live there, who lived somewhere.

That window broke.

But this is a story.

Kids at Natural Gas caused this explosion with solar and wind have never caused an explosion.

You know, I had my first clean energy show dream the other night, and it was a paraphrase in the first one.

Brian, I was in the backseat of your Tesla.

You got out and I was concerned.

Did he hit the brake? You got in front of the car and the car ran over you.

And I think I was watching Breaking Bad because I'm just now watching Breaking Bad, and there was a scene of a car running over somebody.

So the same crunch for Breaking Bad was there, and I didn't think it went well for you.

There's another part of the dream.

For some reason, I was in this giant mansion with all kinds of celebrities around people, and I was ready to record my end of the podcast.

And we couldn't find you.

It was just not to be found.

Like I said earlier, SpaceX, as a guest, has bought a package to advertise its Starlink Internet service on Twitter.

Now, SpaceX has never advertised before.

Starlink has never advertised before.

Tesla famously does not advertise because its CEO has always said that the car sells itself.

Until this point, it continues to do so.

But I wonder, Brian, I wonder if either to prop up the company he bought, or could this be the first time that Tesla actually buys advertising on Twitter? Could that happen one of these days.

Well, the explanation I heard was that he wanted to test the efficacy of advertising on Twitter.

So they also bought ads on, like, Facebook and Instagram at the same time to kind of see how the Twitter kind of advertising scheme works.

But it is a sort of demand lever that Tesla could employ.

They still have a big backlog of orders, so demand is super strong.

But if demand ever starts to slip, once they start producing more and more vehicles, they could start advertising to if the demand ever does start to slip, I guess the first thing they would probably do is lower prices because they've been raising prices because the demand has been too high.

The first thing they would do is back off in those price increases and maybe go even a bit further if they had to.

I imagine they're going to I mean, they've got three factories around the world which are going to hit their stride pretty soon, right? Or is it more than 03:00 a.m.

I counting wrong, I guess technically four, if you count three months.

Yeah.

And there was an Arranium, what people think is an Iranians report that Tesla was going to sell the Chinese made cars in the United States.

Some of them.

I've long predicted that ever since I saw what's his name? Sandy Monroe.

Sandy Monroe live his channel.

Yeah, he said that from what he understood and he has expertise in Chinese manufacturing and has consulted with automakers over there that 20% less is what the Tesla can make in China.

Like, they'll save 20% on the price of the car.

And it turns out that the Chinese manufacturing is really good because they're bringing the Chinese manufacturing people over to the States to say, why can't we be as productive as you? Did you ever see that documentary called what was it called? I don't know.

It was a factory.

It was produced by Obama, and it was about Chinese companies that decided to take advantage of tax breaks in Ohio or somewhere to bring back an automotive factory or a factory that was in an automotive town in, I don't want to say Ohio, somewhere like that.

And they just could not get the productivity.

They couldn't understand it, but they couldn't no matter what they did, they finally threw in the towel, I think, and went home, and they visited the factory in China and man, what a different culture.

What a different work culture.

Everything is like calisthenics and unanimity and one team.

I don't like that.

I wouldn't want to work there.

But as a manufacturer, it seems like quite an advantage, and it seems to be effective.

Yeah.

Well, the Tesla Shanghai factory is now operating at a run rate of about a million vehicles a year, so it is likely the largest car factory in the world.

And they've gotten there in pretty short time.

It's only been a couple of years that they've been producing cars.

And it's true that demand in China is down a little bit, and they did cut the prices in Japan a little bit, or sorry, in China a little bit too, because the demand is slipping.

But yeah, and they export those cars currently to Europe, but the Germany factory is going to start filling those orders.

So those Chinese cars, if there's too many of them for the Chinese market, will have to go somewhere.

I don't think it would be North America, because the Texas factory will start filling that in, but more cars to go to Australia or Japan or wherever.

But on the other hand, Brian, you've got the Cyber truck coming and the Tesla semi.

So maybe you could take one of those lines and start spitting out Model YS or something from China.

Or maybe you make the X and the S, which are lower volume.

It's more likely, like the next model that's coming, like they'll eventually be a lower cost model.

So I assume they're planning for that in China, and they could start making more variants, too, like longer range variants as well.

Sure.

So, from Bloomberg, a 35 year old Hydro Quebec employee who worked on battery materials research has been charged with espionage for allegedly obtaining trade secrets for China.

Well, he's in Kandiac, Quebec.

He has a Chinese sounding name.

So I don't know if he was originally from China or if he's an immigrant worker or what his nationality is for sure, but he was arrested following an investigation that they get in August.

I'm concerned about the Chinese government.

They have no shame when it comes to these things.

There's some car companies in China accused of duplicating Tesla's, blatantly copying them, and a lot, even down to the software, this is the first time this happened.

But it seems like they'll do anything to be competitive.

And as we've mentioned before so Hydro Quebec, that's the electricity utility in Quebec, the provincially owned utility, but they've done a lot of research into batteries and battery materials, and they own a lot of patents in that.

So I guess whatever they own there at Hydro Quebec was valuable enough to be espionaged.

And it's a highly competitive batteries are highly competitive.

But if they have, who knows what hasn't been caught? Because it seems like there's been more and more instances of this.

And of course there's computer espionage and all that sort of thing.

That's a concern for all countries, it seems like you have to put a lot of money into that.

What do you think? This is why I asked, Brian.

What do you think about things that I don't know what to think about? So, Brian Tesla has proposed a North American charging standard.

Now, those of you who are new to the game, there is basically two charging ports in North America, CCS and Tesla.

Tesla has its own charging network, which is the largest and most consistent, but it's got a different connector, so that's a problem.

But it's amazing how great that connector is, right? Because it's small.

If you compare it side by side to what everybody else is using for all the other cars, my car included, it's like half the size, but it's basically when you charge your car, you can do DC Direct, fast current fast charging at public charging stations, or you can AC charge at home.

But what I didn't realize until today is they only have two pins on there that does both.

So that's why it's lighter and smaller.

They've figured out a way to do both now and the connector, it's more like a quarter the size of the CCS connector.

So I think it'd be a fantastic idea.

It's definitely the better standard of the two.

So if North America were to standardize on the Tesla charging socket, I think that would be fantastic.

Question is it might be a bit too late.

Like Tesla could have maybe released this a couple of years ago, a couple of years ago, five years ago.

A better chance at this.

Yeah.

So disappointing.

Too little, too late, because it's probably not going to happen now.

Probably not.

But what Tesla said in their press release was that some of the, they've been talking already to the companies that make the charging networks, the chargers for the third party networks that normally are CCS.

And it sounds like they have some plans already to incorporate the Tesla connector onto those.

So, I don't know, there is some hope, but it's probably too late.

And CCS will likely be two standards in North America, CCS and Tesla.

Part of this is the federal government in the United States is giving a lot of money to expand the charging networks.

But when you do that, you have to have more than one charging standard, more than one car company that uses it.

So if just one car company, any car company that sells maybe ten cars a year adopted Tesla's in the clear, they don't have to make the GCs ones, and they could get all the government subsidies for just making their charges that they already make.

Now the government could go and tweak that fine print.

Okay, so here's another one for you.

This is a clean technical op ed.

It says Tolling the highway to green trucking.

Should tolls be implemented on combustion semi trailers once EVs are on the road.

Do you think that would be an effective way to do it? Well, I don't think you'll have to.

It's kind of like the cost of running a combustion truck will already be more expensive, so there's already a kind of a penalty just for using one.

So an extra toll probably not needed.

I mean, what's needed is faster production of the electric trucks and get those on the road.

That's the thing.

This is assuming price parity, that the cost of ownership is going to be the same, right? Well, charging lithium ion cells at different rates boost the lifetime of battery packs for electric vehicles.

So says yet another Stanford study.

We have so many Stanford studies on the show.

According to the study, batteries managed with this new technology could handle at least 20% more charge discharge cycles, even with frequent fast charging, which puts an extra strain on the battery.

So basically they're saying don't charge each of the individual cells at the same rate all the time.

And that actually gives you 20% longer life.

And 20% longer life if you're talking about a fleet of cars of a million cars and a robotxis, or storage for the electrical grid that lasts twelve years instead of ten, the costs on those greatly changes with doing this basically a software tweak.

So that seems quite to me, it seems like it's got a lot of potential if it works, yes.

That's exciting.

There's a lot that can be done with software.

It isn't just the hardware components of a battery or the chemistry's, or the chemistry is where you can improve the life.

Yeah, the software can have a big benefit.

So Ford is officially the number two electric vehicle seller in the United States.

And if you extrapolate out the twelve months of a year, based on what they had in October, ford would achieve 75,000 EV sales.

Which is what's, Tesla right now? Close to a million.

Close to a million.

So that's not much, but that's what your number two is.

A lot of people wouldn't have picked for it to be number two right now.

They would have took GM or more likely Volkswagen.

And that points back to our previous conversations about the connectors.

Standardizing on the Tesla connector has a fighting chance just because Tesla vehicles are so ubiquitous in North America in terms of EVs.

Another thing I wanted to talk about is electric truck stops will need as much power as a small town.

So as Tesla rose out, it's semi next month, hopefully, I think December 1 is when they're having the release.

Are you looking forward to that one? Yeah.

Do you think something special could roll out of the back of that truck? I hadn't thought of that.

The tesla ebike.

The robotic musk.

I don't know.

I do.

Social media platform and we'll roll out the back of the truck.

Yeah.

So it's adding pressure on the truck industry to go green.

But the grid upgrades must start now if the new era is to last.

This is from Bloomberg, and sometimes these stories make me wonder if that is all accurate.

But a sweeping new study.

This is another study of highway charging requirements conducted by utility company National Grid Plc.

Researchers found that by 2030 electrifying, a typical highway gas station will require as much power as a professional sports stadium.

And I would think sports stadiums use less now with all the Led lighting, but it's probably better.

But I know our city built a new football stadium a few years ago, and I don't know if you noticed, but they're all kinds of electrical transformer boxes outside the stadium.

They hid them in the park.

There's a park next to the stadium and they had to try and hide all of these electrical transformer boxes.

And there's a lot of them.

And the power used to go out on the old stadium we had here.

This is a stadium we have for the Canadian Football League, by the way.

Okay, so this is just for electrified passenger vehicles.

As more electric trucks hit the road, the projected power needs for a big truck stop by 2035 will equal that of a small town.

And they think that lots of wiring will have to be done.

Nobody really knows how this is going to play out with trucks.

Like, is there going to be specialized newly built truck stops? Because truck stops are a thing.

You have a shower, you park the truck for a while.

It's a truck resting stop as well.

So I don't know.

How do you think that will play out, if you had to guess? Well, there's usually a decent amount of space at existing truck stops, so I assume there's enough room at the existing truck stops to kind of transform them and have both fuel and electric.

Hopefully they have started working on that already.

Now, just to tag onto that, I want to skip ahead to the story about LaGuardia Airport.

Sure.

Because I think it sort of makes me think of the same issue.

So there's a story here from Electrac about zoo's power that's got this machine with a flywheel.

And this is being installed at LaGuardia Airport to facilitate fast charging of cars, rental cars particularly.

And yeah, I bring it up because the reason this machine exists is that the power available in certain locations can be limited.

Right.

Like if these truck stops are going to need all the power of a small town, well, you don't necessarily have the grid infrastructure where you need it.

I don't think this does an enormous amount.

Like, it's not going to triple or quadruple the amount of power available.

But the idea behind this zoos flywheel machine is that it literally uses flywheels.

And we talked about this before.

Some power plants use flywheels as well.

It's literally just the momentum of a spinning wheel to help kind of even the power output of your hydroelectric dam or whatever.

Anyway, so I guess the idea being that you take a limited amount of power that might be available in a parking lot at an airport, and then you use this flywheel machine.

And some by spinning up the flywheels, you can increase the amount of power available.

It's sort of similar to having batteries on site.

I would think that's going to be the more normal solution.

Like at these truck stops, would be to put a big battery pack, a grid storage battery pack at a truck stop.

But this is a kind of a smaller and cheaper way to add just a bit more power to what's available for your fast chargers.

So with hertz ordering a couple of hundred thousand electric vehicles from Tesla and GM, I wonder how the infrastructure at airports is going to go.

I mean, nobody is panicking about that, but I mean that's going to have to be built up presumably, and larger airports will have a lot of cars sitting there with batteries.

You would have the chance in the low demand because most flights happen 06:00 a.m.

To midnight or whatever.

You could have 6 hours to when people aren't taking those cars, maybe to charge off the batteries for the next day.

And that would yeah, I can see that being an important thing unless they have some off site, like just off the airport type of parking spaces for charging.

Yeah, and like our parking spaces here in Canada at our airports, a lot of them are probably already electrified where we live because it's super cold in the winter and so you have plugins for block heaters.

So at least there's power running to these parking lots.

Whereas of course, in many places there would be no power running there at all.

Half the world's fossil fuel assets could become worthless by 2036 in a net zero transition.

So says an article in the Guardian that I read.

$11 Trillion in Fossil Fuel Asset Crash could Cause a 2008 financial crisis, warrants a new study.

I don't care.

Yeah, that's my hot.

Take it.

Yeah.

It's something I really wonder about and think about.

Like, obviously these assets are going to become stranded and worthless at some point or at least the value start crashing at some point.

But what point does that start to happen? Is it two years from now? Is it six years from now? Is it 20 years from now? It's hard to say, but I wouldn't want to be holding a lot of fossil fuel investments longer than the next couple of years, that's for sure.

I think the big question is when will EVs really take off where there's not a battery constraint? And it sure seems like it's going to be within five years.

It could be two years, it could be five years, but somewhere in that period I think it's really going to grab momentum.

Yeah, but also too, like, as we've discussed, like last week and other weeks, there's not a lot of new money being spent on new oil exploration because they can kind of foresee, okay, there's not really going to be the demand.

It's not worth it to spend this money building.

So that does mean that the supply of oil will be kind of naturally constrained if the system doesn't expand.

So it could be that as the oil industry shrinks, the production shrinks and if the production shrinks enough, then the price stays up.

So countries that are slow to decarbonise will suffer, but early movers will profit.

This is something we say on the show all the time.

You have to move now.

And our jurisdiction is not great where we live.

We live in fossil fuel country with a mentality thereof and our country as a whole starting to make some moves.

But we're basically a fossil fuel country in Canada and even the United States to some extent.

But it finds that renewables that are freed up investment will more than make up for the losses of the global economy.

You're freeing up a whole lack of investment that was going into fossil fuels that can go into other things and expand the economy that way.

And just the renewables themselves will save money, of course.

So it highlights the risk of producing far more oil and gas than required for future demand, which is estimated to leave 11 trillion to 14 trillion in stranded assets, which is a lot of stranded assets.

Brian.

Also, as we always say, we predict that governments are going to have to, and therefore you and I are going to have to pay for the clean up of some of these wells as well.

So the most vulnerable assets are those in remote regions are technically challenging environments.

Most exposed are Canadian tar sands in northern Alberta, us shale and the Russian Arctic, followed by deep offshore wells in Brazil and elsewhere.

And North Sea oil is also relatively expensive to extract and it's going to be hit when demand falls.

I'm worried about this because it could affect us as being an oil part of the world, it says.

In contrast, current oil, gas and coal importers such as the EU, japan, India and South Korea will reap hefty economic dividends from the transition because they will be able to use the money they save on spending those places, spending gobs of money.

We get our gas cheap here in North America, but they're spending gobs of money on fuel purchases and they'll be able to use that money to invest in their own economies.

The lead author of the report said in the worst case scenario, people will keep investing in fossil fuels until suddenly the man they expected does not materialize and they realize that what they own is worthless.

And we could see a financial crisis on the scale of 2008.

Houston Detroit could have the same phase detroit did in the car industry collapsed earlier in this century.

So yeah, it's got to be carefully managed.

If you don't accept that all this is going to happen like people around here, yeah, it's going to be a problem.

That's what I have to say about that.

Yeah.

And when your oil is expensive to extract like it is in the Alberta oil sands, that stuff will be the first to go because you won't be able to sell it at.

A profit.

So you've got another heat pump story.

Heat pumps are the item of the year.

I say yes, absolutely.

No, it's amazing how even when this podcast started a couple of years ago, it was barely in our vernacular.

It was barely in the vernacular.

Yes.

And now it's everywhere.

So yes, electric is reporting heat pumps are now mandatory in Washington State for new homes and apartments as well from July 2023 onward.

But the thing that I think is interesting about this, and it's not really mentioned in the story, we talked about the incredible heatwave that happened last summer on the west coast of North America.

So Seattle area, Vancouver area, they're just an unprecedented heatwave because of climate change.

And so many of those homes and places and businesses and apartments are not cooled.

So this is the other benefit of this.

So not only do you start heating your homes with electricity, but you also in Washington State now are adding essentially mandatory air conditioning, which, especially if it's low income apartments or something, would be a godsend for people who are hopefully won't.

I mean, there was literally thousands of people died from the heat stroke on the west coast last summer.

Well, that's an interesting take in a region that doesn't have air conditioning.

And yet with climate change, we can see this happening a lot more often and now they'll be prepared.

That's an interesting aspect of the story and I have to wonder if it was even part of the planning.

No, I'm not sure.

I mean, it depends on when they started talking about this.

But one of the great benefits is of a heat pump heating and cooling.

You get both in the same machine.

So why just put in an air conditioner when you can put in an air conditioner that also runs in reverse and can heat your home as well? And for people who are new to the podcast or this type of thing, heat pumps are reverse air conditioners, essentially that transfer heat from one place to another, like inside the house to outside.

And air conditioning or outside, even if there's a little bit of energy in that area, it takes it out.

And the idea is to use electricity, which instead of natural gas, right, if you're heating, you want to use electricity and this is the most efficient way to do it.

Yes, and in a place like Washington State, a lot of homes are already heated with electricity.

Like it's not a frigid cold place like here.

So there are more like 99% of homes where we live are heated by natural gas because it's so ridiculously cold.

But in a milder climate, you might have electric baseboards in a lot of homes.

So it is something like 50% already are heated with electricity in Washington state and this will eventually get it up to 100%.

Yeah, that's very interesting.

And a very interesting side effect of going green using solar and wind and so forth for your heating, that you will actually probably save lives from a government policy in future heatwaves.

Who knows when those heat waves will come, but they're going to come more often, those once in a century type heat waves, or once in a thousand years or 500 years, whatever it was.

I want to talk about indoor wheat because we live in a heart of wheat country.

You can't swing a cat with a wheat chief.

It's on symbols for everything.

Where we live, we're the breadbasket of Canada.

And what was the name of your first feature film? I made a film called Wheat Soup.

There you go.

It had to be in the title.

It had to be.

So this is interesting to us because you know how there's hydroponics like indoor gardening, which I'm fascinated with.

They do it in containers, they do it in buildings where they're basically using fertilized water and no soil to grow tomatoes or whatever in greenhouse like conditions.

And I find that very interesting, especially when they can do it up north.

And by the way, I saw another article in Blueberg about the Yukon.

The climate changing, and the people are up there growing potatoes and things that they never used to grow before, and wheat as well, which required a lot of cabbage.

And things like that require a lot of sunlight when they have 20 hours sunlight days in June.

But, you know, it costs a lot to transport fresh food up there.

So it's very expensive and very not fresh.

Carrots is another thing that they're growing a lot of potatoes and carrots.

So that's great.

It's great in one sense because there's an advantage to them.

But in this case, indoor wheat.

Amsterdam based startup In Farm grew wheat without using soil or chemical pesticides, which is nice, and with far less water than conventional farming, which is also nice.

So the first indoor farming company to grow a stable staple crop in a milestone for an Asian industry that has attracted venture capital funding on its promise that its technology can help feed the planet if delivered at scale.

Growing a staple crop indoors has the potential to become a game changer.

Supplies have increasingly been challenged by climate change and logistical issues.

So you could grow well, you could grow wheat in Antarctica if you wanted to, right? If you got this technology down.

And Infarm says that its first trial shows that projected annual wheat yields of 117 tons a hectare, okay? Now, that compares to the average 2022 yields of 5.6.

So let me give you that again.

Indoors, 117 tons hectare annually.

Outdoors, 5.6.

And in the European Union, it's 3.1.

So that's in the European Union, it's actually less than the United States, which surprises me.

It's only 3.1.

Now, part of that reason of the higher yields is they have six crops a year.

Okay? But if you times 3.1 times six, you still don't get 117 tons.

So it's just a lot more dense and efficient to do it that way.

I mean, it's not easy.

We're probably decades away from this being a regular thing and getting the efficiencies and the cost down maybe a couple of decades, it's hard to tell.

But, you know, it depends on what the need is, too.

But this is interesting.

It's going to be perfect, right? You don't spread pesticides on it.

You're not going to have to worry about weeds.

It's just going to be pure indoor stuff and locally delivered.

No.

And the more things, of course, you can do locally, then the more transportation that you can eliminate.

You know, so many things now that, you know, our produce at the grocery stores just shipped in from incredible distances here.

But if all that stuff could be grown locally, it would just be so much more efficient and just kind of save all that energy.

I mean, theoretically, you could, in the middle of a desert in Africa, start up an operation like this and make flour or make proteins for food.

Basically, you would need water, but you wouldn't need as much of it.

So if you could use solar to desalinate water, you could put it anywhere.

You could put it in there because we transport all of our grain by ship, which goes by train from the center of the continent out to the coasts and then onto ships.

I don't think that this is going to completely replace green farming, but it could augment it.

Maybe 100 years from now, it could replace it, but in the near term, this is basically saying that it could just fit in, reduce the challenges of supply, and in certain situations, a lot of land will be required to produce this.

Wheat cultivation takes more than 216,000,000 land, more than any other crop.

So, yeah, wheat takes a lot of land, which we have a lot of land here.

A lot of land.

Most of our province is filled with wheat fields.

It's kind of insane.

So, yeah, they would require very large indoor farms exceeding the area of all the wheat in France, I think.

But they said it could potentially increase its yield by another 50% in the coming years, thanks to better technology.

So it could even be 200 times or 200 tons instead of three tons.

So that's interesting.

Yeah.

Once they learn what they're doing and tweak it and software can play a part, perhaps.

Yeah, it could be amazing.

Okay, so starting here from Hydrogen Insight, and this is about hydrogen pump prices in California.

So this was something I just had never thought about before now.

Hydrogen fuel cell vehicles do exist.

James, take a guess.

How many hydrogen fuel cell vehicles do you think there are in California, which is currently one of the main markets for them? 410.

There's $10,000.

Okay.

Which is not bad.

It's kind of more than I expected.

And there's a series of hydra.

They're not all the Toyota Mariah.

What are these vehicles? There's a Toyota Mirai there's a Hyundai.

That's really nice.

I forget the name of it, but there's a big Hyundai SUV.

That's a hydrogen vehicle.

They've sold a few of those for sure.

Okay.

But yeah.

So there's hydrogen fueling stations in California, not in too many other places.

But I just was interested in this because, yes, recently they had to hike up the price at the pump of these hydrogen, up 33% in California.

This is a fairly big price jump.

So just in terms of the price per mile, I thought this was really interesting.

So right now is basically what it costs you to drive a hydrogen vehicle in California, roughly in a gasoline vehicle down to California has the most expensive gasoline in North America.

Yeah, well, no, it's probably more expensive here in Canada.

Is it? Because I went there, it was pretty damn expensive.

That was a few years ago.

So $0.22 for gas per mile and for hydrogen.

Plus, you spend a whole bunch more money on your hydrogen car than you do a gas car.

It's a serious technology.

And then if you're driving an EV and you charge it off the grid, you're down to if you have to use a fast charger like a Tesla Supercharger, then you're up to but that's compared to for driving a hydrogen car.

So I just wasn't totally clear on that until now.

The actual cost of driving a hydrogen vehicle is more than gas, way more than electricity.

Now, theoretically, if we were to SuperBuild out the hydrogen infrastructure and kind of get that all pumping again, locality is a key to that.

Like, if each city had its own hydrogen plant or whatever, you had even smaller ones at the filling stations, making the hydrogen there, that would reduce costs a lot.

But for right now, it's super expensive to fill up with hydrogen.

And I don't see that coming down anytime soon.

And the days of hydrogen fuel cell vehicles is probably numbered.

If we had no other option, we would be going full steam ahead with hydrogen and trying to get that that still take a while, but we would be trying to get green hydrogen, and then we'll be trying to get that green hydrogen price down so that it would be cost effective.

But since we have an alternative to that called battery electric vehicles, electricity is also expensive in California.

So if you compare it to other places, it would be even a larger variation there.

And as we said, so obviously the electricity for charging your electric car comes from the grid.

And there are certain shortfalls at places, perhaps like truck stops that don't have enough grid infrastructure.

So it's far from perfect.

But any electrical outlet anywhere in the world can charge an electric vehicle.

So that's just an insane advantage over these very rare hydrogen stations.

Yeah, they're expensive.

And transportation and processing of hydrogen is also an issue.

So Amazon is getting heat.

We get heat for not talking about ebikes sometimes.

Well, Amazon is getting heat for selling kits to override speed limits of ebikes.

Now, this is mostly happening in Europe, right? Because there's more restrictions in Europe.

Europe has strict electric bike laws that limit electric bicycles to a sluggish 25 km an hour or 15.5 mph.

Even an old man like me can go well, I can't go 25, actually.

It takes the work to go 25.

Yeah, that is kind of cool.

But solutions range from an electromagnetic modifications or chipping, quote unquote, that can remove digital speed limits.

So people do that with cars sometimes, to hardware hacks to trick the bike speed sensors into thinking it's going slower than it truly is.

And I haven't been able to find out exactly how that works.

So I'm kind of curious.

Yeah, I thought maybe you had done that on your bike where it's like you change the setting and it messes up the speedometer, so it ends up sending you faster than it's what you do is you change the wheel size on your bike.

Didn't work for mine.

It was supposed to, but my bike manufacturer has been kind of savvy to all the tricks, so by the time I get to them, they've figured it out and have eliminated that.

But yeah, if you have like a 29 inch wheel and then you tell that it's a kid's wheel of half that size, then it thinks that one rotation is actually going a shorter distance and yes, and then you won't have a proper speed.

And I have that FETO electric folding bike and I looked on the Internet and apparently there is a hack that you can do by pressing a certain combination of buttons on the little kind of remote screen there where you can hack it to go faster.

But I haven't tried it.

And with mine it was a code.

It was like an eight digit code that you could type in at a certain place.

And that one also did not work.

I was curious, but I think the longevity of James is more important than the thrill of maybe trying out a 50 kilometer an hour.

That's probably all my bike could do if it really wanted to.

It would take a while to get there too.

The important thing to remember in all this is you probably don't need your bike to go any faster.

No, but what does my bike do? My bike does 32 instead of 25.

So that's the next level.

I think that's about what mine does.

And that's pretty fast.

And like I've said before in the show, I get kind of uncomfortable at that speed, and yet some other bastard on an ebike passes me and I think, I wish I had more speed.

I start pedaling, which you can do.

Apparently you can pedal and use the Ebike part.

Well, anyway, I guess Ebike hot rodding as it's called, is much less common in the United States, where E bikes are permitted to go up to 45 km an hour.

That's the United States.

You can have guns and fast Ebikes or whatever you want.

Tanks, cruise missiles, no.

And modifying your car.

Take out the pollution controls, although they have been cracking down on that lately.

Oh, it's time for the Tweet of the week.

This is where we pick a Tweet.

And this last week was for Tony Siba.

It's going to be for Tony Siba again.

Okay, I'm sorry.

Tony Siba is kind of one of our main people that we follow on the show here.

Now, this was a person who was responding to how 5 million, what Tony calls precision fermentation.

This is the future of food.

He believes that will be disruptive based on price.

This is one of the ways that is like beyond meat, that's one aspect.

And then there's cellular meat, which will actually resemble steak and the texture of steak in the future, maybe ten years from now, that will be viable financially.

But dairy is the first one that's going to be disrupted because glass of milk is 90% water and 3% of that is protein from the milk.

So that's really all you're dealing with is that protein because the rest is fat and sugars, which you can get from other places.

It doesn't have to be from a cow.

So as they make these things in like brewery like buildings and disrupt milk.

He says there are 5 million dairy cows in New Zealand.

And so that would require 100 precision fermentation factories to replace all the cows.

Less if they're bigger, which they will be.

So it's just a matter of time and probably less time than most people expect.

And Tony.

Steve assisted that tweet.

Correct.

The total land needed to replace all the cows in New Zealand, 5 million of them, which is more than Canada, by the way.

I believe we only have a million cows in Canada.

I haven't counted lately, but I'm told that it's around a million.

The total land needed would be around 1700 acres.

But you compare that with the Auckland airport, it's 3700 acres.

So basically half the Auckland airport could replace all the dairy cows the land wise.

And then you have all that land.

You can put solar on and do other things.

This is a huge disruption of the world.

Yes.

If you think of a cow as basically a type of food technology, well, it can be delicious.

It's the least efficient food technology.

In fact, I think Tony said that the cow in particular is the least efficient of all of the kind of animal food technologies.

So we get a lot of things from a cow, but the resources and the land and everything needed to get that is kind of insane and is ripe for disruption.

So, as Tony points out, the first disruption will happen in just a few years.

And he thinks that dairy will be bankrupt by 2030.

And the reason is 30% of his business is business to business.

So if you buy a protein shake, you're buying protein powder.

Okay? And if it's cheaper to come from this fake stuff, if you can call it that, fermentation than it is from a real dairy cow, and you're greener people are just going to go, where the cheapest? If you want to buy bulk for a protein bar or a protein shake or whatever, all these things that have chocolate bars and everything and all kinds of foods that are processed will have first that will go and then 30% of dairy's gone.

Yeah.

No.

And he mentioned, too, in his latest video, just the switch, like Coke and Pepsi switched from cane sugar to corn sugar back in the 80s.

Basically, their entire product lines switching over to corn as the source for sugar.

And while there is probably some taste difference, they was definitely not enough taste difference to stop what they were doing, because they completely four years.

Four years.

They did it in just both yeah.

In four years.

Complete switch over.

And this is the main ingredient in their products? Yes.

That means it's time for the lightning round.

A quick look at fast paced energy news and climate news from this past week.

Growing EV dem demand helps Volkswagen reach half a million ID deliveries one year early.

Brian, that is a good news story, isn't it? Yeah, we talked about that a few weeks ago.

They're on track for 500,000 deliveries.

That's Volkswagen this year of EVs, and that's a huge number.

Volvo debuts its first electric trucks made with fossil free steel.

That is steel made with green electricity, and it is also 90% recyclable.

So that's cool.

Yeah.

So Volvo was trying to green their whole lineup of vehicles, and they're doing it partly by switching over to electric, but they're also doing it by going with fossil free steel in their cars, which increasingly more and more manufacturers are going to do.

Cough 27 news, 41 signatories have joined the pledge to stop funding fossil fuels by the end of year.

But problematically.

Brian, four large signatories are not signing.

Germany, Italy, the United States and your favorite country in the world, canada.

No, I'm sorry.

Damn, it just sad.

Can't overuse that, can I? Okay, it's time for a CS festival.

Toyota has sold 4.7 million Priuses to date.

That's no easy feat.

Tesla did 3 million.

But total yeah, that's to date, over the last ten plus years, 4.7 million Priuses are on the road, but nobody buys them anymore.

No.

Did you see the stat of, like, at one time they were selling 500,000 Priuses a year and it's down to 86,000? Yeah.

People who bought them initially wanted an environmentally friendly car or to save money.

Best way to be environmentally friendly or to save money is to buy electric now.

Or at least electric hybrid.

But anyway, solar power already saved China, India, Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, the Philippines and Thailand.

$34 billion American in potential fossil fuel costs went in the first half of this year.

First half of 2022.

We're just getting started.

That's astonishing.

Yeah.

I mean, spend your money on solar and then you won't have to spend it on fossil fuels.

The US will finance about a third of the $9 billion rooms romania needs to build two nuclear reactors.

That's a lot of money.

They're getting it from the United States, which seems like a bad investment.

I thought I would mention this.

Globally up 13%.

Okay.

That's everywhere in the world.

Europe is up 35%.

I wonder why.

Vladimir, the US is up 15% and China 13%.

So this heat pump thing is, whoever makes the most of the best heat pumps, put your money in them because they're going to pay back.

No, and I assume that I haven't seen announcements, but I assume that there are heat pump factories being built as we speak.

And I don't know, we always hear battery factory announcements and things like that.

I don't hear heat pump factory announcements, but presumably it's going on.

The demand is huge.

Inflation Reduction Act had money for developing better heat pumps, too, so there's going to be some R and D in there.

Friend of the show, Greta Thuneburg thoonberg rather.

I'm kidding.

She's not a friend of the show, but we're working on it slowly.

Global Witness found that more than 600 people are at the talks in Egypt at Cop 27.

They're linked to fossil fuels.

And, Brian, that is more than the combined delegations from the ten most climate impacted countries.

Barf, we're at a critical stage now where we got to say no to fossil fuels.

Just say no.

And we got to stop the green washer, we got to stop the BS right now.

Right now.

No time left.

From Tennessee Valley Authority, that is one of the grids in the southern US.

The three giant cooling towers at the retired paradise coal plant in Kentucky came down this morning, was a few mornings ago now as demolition efforts continued at the site.

And they say we are striving for a cleaner and more efficient energy future as we are building the energy system of the future.

And by God, Brian, we have a clip.

Fantastic.

Here's the initial charge.

The towers are collapsing.

They're coming down completely now.

And they're gone by the doctor.

Goodbye, coal plants.

Three cooling towers in Kentucky, a grave risk of winter blackout speaking of nuclear, is happening in France because electricity prices have surged past $1,000 or, pardon me, €1000 per megawatt hour as more nuclear reactors, more are closing in France, as if enough hadn't closed already.

What this means, Brian, is, on a cold January day, france needs around 45 gigawatts of nuclear energy, and one day last week, there was only 25 available.

Yeah, and there was a lot of reactors down, or at least down partially for repairs.

So the amount of electricity from nuclear in France dropped 34% year over year in October.

Just less power available from nuclear, which everyone always says it's like reliable base load power.

That's one of the reasons it's promoting this is not reliable here.

But it's not exactly that.

You know, it's the pipes, the cooling pipes that are structurally problematic and cracked, and they realize that they're all bad.

So they have this, and it apparently takes a while.

They've hired like, 100 contractors to go in and fix this, but it's not that easy.

Finally this week, Brian japan's government wants to remotely control private air conditioners to avoid power outages.

The Japan Time points out that the government committee is currently working under the concept that the government would only be able to turn down AC units if individual owners have agreed in advance to grant them that authority.

This is something we've seen, or, what, the third time now on the show? Yeah.

And in Ontario, they're working on this.

Here in Canada where remote control california, they do it with text messages where they just tell everybody to stop using so much AC.

But this works.

And no one really suffers if you shave a degree or two off your air conditioning for an hour and say it's much better than a blackout where you have no air conditioning.

So that's not so bad.

That is our show for this week.

Next week I'll be talking about the new Toyota Prius lineup that will be announced between now and then and what excitement that will be.

Because I need a car badly, Brian.

Mine's starting to fall apart.

My FUS is getting long on the tooth.

How disappointed will I be? Tune in to find out.

Maybe I should sell you my car.

Would you buy my Tesla? Well, the street price for that Tesla, unless there's a murder in it, is not going to be good for me.

What if I gave you a really good deal? I'll take two.

Why would you want to? It's not the form factor you want, I guess, but I don't care.

I would take a Tesla.

What would you do for a new car? Buy a why? Yeah, something like that.

You think I want to start? What's interesting, what are your interest rates? How quickly do you break legs? We'll sign over.

Like making a 20 year loan? Pretty much what it would have to be, I think.

Anyway, everyone out there, we thank you for listening.

We do appreciate you and we'd love to hear from you.

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And, Brian, I look forward to next week.

you.