135. Cameco bets on nuclear revival; The unstoppable march of solar and wind

The Clean Energy Show

More information on how renewable use less land that fossil fuels and aren't destroyed permanently in the process. Nikola Motors CEO found guilty of 3 of 4 charges. Some thing EV charging at night won't always be cheap. Greece runs on 100% renewables for five hours. VW has hired Ewan McGregor to help them sell EVs.

Brian expolores a graphic novel that illustrates life in the Canadian Oil Sands. “A masterpiece, a heartbreak, a nightlight shining in the dark.”—Patricia Lockwood Here's a link!

UK PM Truss not doing well after I called her dumb last week for not wanting to see solar panels on farmland. Scrapped her whole economic reform plan.

Tesla might remove downtown Toronto geofence with FSD Beta 10.69.3.

Kia EV6 Wholesale GLOBAL Shipments In September 2022 Amounted To 6,109. Worse than last year. What's up with Kia and EVs? They make great cars, advertise the hell out of them but never make enough.

Carbon Capture Projects Hit Record but still only 1% of global carbon emissions when built.

Tweet of the Week responds to criticism of climate protesters in recent days.

Offshore Construction Starts on Japan’s First Floating Wind Farm.

JinkoSolar achieves 26.1% efficiency in panels.

Rewewable energy workforce as more female representation than fossil fuels.

Researchers develop a 10 minute EV charging method by adding a thin strip of nickel to batteries for cooling.

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Transcript

Hello, and welcome to episode 135 of the Clean Energy Show.

I'm Brian Stockton.

I'm James Woodingham.

This week, some facts to compare fossil fuel and land use with renewables.

Your racist cycle is not going to be happy.

The founder and former CEO of Nicola Motors has been found guilty of fraud.

Turns out rolling a truck down a hill and pretending it works can get you in trouble.

It may get more expensive to charge an EV overnight.

And it has nothing to do with the fact that I now get up to pee six times a night.

The country of Greece runs on 100% renewable energy.

For the first time, the Olympic torch is lit by the sun.

So why not all the lights in the country, too? Oh, that is so much more on this edition of The Clean Energy Show.

Well, welcome to the podcast, everyone.

Also this week, VW has hired you and a Gregor to help them sell EVs.

Brian has his first ever book report.

Looking forward to that.

And a corporation based where Brian and I live is betting big on nuclear revival thanks to the war in Ukraine and other factors.

You sound funny this week, Brian.

Are you under the weather? Yeah, I got a cold.

How do you know? I thought colds were eradicated.

Yeah, this is my second cold since the start of the pandemic.

Are you looking telephone poles? What's going on here? Yeah, well, we took a plane trip, as you know, last weekend, to Whistler.

I knew you would get diseased.

Yeah, I mean, I was kind of worried we'd get coveted.

Didn't get coveted, but we caught a cold.

My partner got it first.

I was a few days behind.

I thought I may have escaped it, but it's starting kind of yesterday and my head is slowly filling up with fluid.

It's rather unpleasant.

Oh, no.

You remember before COVID when you used to fly? No.

It always seemed like I would always get a cold whenever I flew somewhere.

I don't know.

I mean, everybody trapped on an airplane like that and not wearing that.

They say that air is recirculated and filtered, but I don't think it's just too close to quarters.

Do you put on an air in your face? Because I'm always a bit warm on planes.

Like I make sure I get the air going on my face.

Do you do that? Yes.

And we discussed that as we got on the plane because I said to my partner, well, wait a minute.

Is this like, COVID filled air that I'm putting in my face or is this fresh, clean air? And it has just gone through the filter.

So presumably that is the fresh, clean air.

It always smells fresher to me.

It always smells like it's mixed like a car vent, like it's mixed in with outdoor air.

I don't know that it is.

It'd be nice if it was, but there's not enough oxygen up there at 35 0ft to do that mixed in with new plain smelling.

I think I would just wear the oxygen mask.

Just drop the oxygen mask and put that on for the trip.

Well, that would be fantastic.

They should just let us have those.

It should be enhanced air with nice, relaxing demerol vaporized or something that just puts you at ease and wake up wherever you're going.

Guess what? The pipeline plane flew over the other day.

I walked up my front door and there it was looking at me.

Well, so it's mac, which is a relief.

Perhaps why I haven't noticed it is I noticed because I went to my app and it's fine a few hundred feet higher than it was before.

It's fine at 200ft before.

Yeah.

Now it's up to 500ft.

I don't know if that has anything to do with the crash that was fatal.

Yeah.

To recap, James has a pipeline behind his house and there's a plane that inspects it pretty much every day.

But, yeah, there was a crash of one of these planes not that long ago and so it disappeared for a while.

And you say now that it's back, it's actually flying higher? Yeah.

I mean, it could be the same plane.

I don't know that it's the one that crashed or if they were grounded or if they re looked at how they did these things, but it seemed like it was gone for a few weeks because I noticed it.

It's hard to say how often it came.

It seemed to vary, but it was multiple times a week, I would say, and I do live in a city, it doesn't inspect it that often outside the city? Just inside the city.

It has frequent flights and that goes right back to the airport 10 minutes later.

Well, you always hear about these pipelines and I don't know, sometimes they're leaking for probably hours or even days before anybody notices.

Well, let's get to some updates to some of the stories that we've talked about over the past.

There's a few.

This week we were talking about PM Trust.

Yeah.

The new UK prime Minister.

And I called her dumb dumb dumb last week.

Yeah, she's really dumb.

And that's because she doesn't like the site of solar panels on farms and she was going to kibash solar everywhere.

How dumb can you be? I ask.

And, well, turns out the country is in agreement.

Not for that reason, but mostly for other reasons.

In fact, how is this Trust doing? 83% say badly, 15% say, well, should she resign? 55% say yes, and I'm in that 55%.

Although who knows who they're going to get in their place.

But come on.

There's so much data for renewables being a good thing in this energy crisis, like saving billions over the summer, reducing the amount of Russian gas imports by 13% from the growth of it.

It's just crazy.

I mean, there's all kinds of numbers you can look at.

We talked about Tesla not having their full selfdriving beta software, which you use, being applicable in downtown Toronto.

You mentioned that before, but now it sounds like it will be.

Yeah, this is a while ago.

So Toronto has streetcars, one of the few, maybe only city in Canada that has streetcars.

Yeah.

The full self driving software thus far has not known how to deal with streetcars.

And so, just to be safe, Tesla has basically geofenced the software.

So anywhere downtown Toronto, where there is streetcars, you can't use full selfdriving beta until they figure out how to program in streetcars.

And yeah, apparently they're getting close because rumors that the geofence will be removed soon.

Yeah.

I was watching one of these informational videos on YouTube about how Toronto is a car city.

And these streetcars everywhere, these have them in Mount Pleasant, where my friend Dan lives up north and all kinds of different places, and they had a vote to get whether they keep them or not.

Everybody resoundingly wanted them.

So what they do, they get rid of them.

They wanted to make room for more cars.

They built the subway to make room for more cars.

That's what I was thinking.

Was it's too bad, because out here in the west, canada is kind of sparsely populated, and our cities are kind of spread out.

But in the central or eastern part of Canada, like Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, that's the densest population that we have in Canada.

So Toronto, particularly, there's several million people that live in Toronto, a lot of them in the concentrated in the downtown core.

So public transit is a no brainer.

Subways and streetcars are a no brainer, and, you know, they've done fairly well at that.

But yes, surprisingly, it is still kind of a car city.

But I have been watching a YouTube channel, can't think of the name of it right now, but there is a guy, a transit nerd in Toronto, who's reporting on all of the transit projects.

So things actually do look bright.

I think things are improving.

There are subway expansions planned and streetcar light rail expansions planned.

They have lots of stuff in the works.

And they've added a lot of bike lanes, too.

That's really a positive sign.

Definitely.

You and I lived there ten or 15 years ago, and there wasn't that many bike lanes 20 years ago.

I guess more than 20 years ago for me.

Jesus.

Oh, my God.

Wow.

Yeah.

I mean, it was still kind of fun to bike in Toronto.

I remember you and I biked there's a nice path down by the waterfront.

You and I bike down and watch the fireworks one night.

That was a lot of fun.

The only thing is that it borders the Dawn Valley Parkway, which is a freeway, and you get all the exhaust and all the pollution.

Yeah.

As a prairie boy, it was very disconcerting to see the distant trees obscured by smog, which just sort of gathered in the valley like that and Stunky.

There's a smell to it always.

But a lot of people die.

Cyclists die in Toronto, so it's not a safe place.

But I remember cycling downtown.

I lived adjacent to downtown, and East York used to take a half hour to get to the heart of downtown by bike, which was more enjoyable in the summertime than taking the subway and waiting and getting stuff like Sardines somewhere and whole noise of everything.

But, yeah, bike lanes are tough in cities like that.

But it's also got the busiest freeway in North America, too.

The 401 is national.

Yeah, massive, massive freeway.

Dozens of lanes.

It seems like the Kia EV six.

Now, I was shocked to learn that that came out almost 18 months ago now, on the spring of 21.

I thought it was in the last three quarters of a year for some reason.

Maybe it's because I heard about it and I didn't pay much attention to it because it was a similar vehicle to the Onik Five.

Although it's not a direct comparison, necessarily, in aesthetics and appeal.

They sold only 6100 units of that worldwide in September.

And if that isn't shocking enough, that's actually down from the year before.

Down? Yeah.

Well, I assume it's just because it's production, not sales.

I mean, I'm sure they can sell everyone that they make.

They just need to make more of them.

Yeah, they're not but that's a major problem.

Brian, that gets my trombone of the Week.

Yes, thank you for the emphasis.

I'm very disgusted by this.

So the narrow EVs sold 4500.

The sole EVs outside of this is outside of South Korea.

The sole EV sold a whopping.

Are you sitting down? Yes, you are.

The Sole EV.

Tell me something.

You can't sit there and your pompous Kia asked and tell me that they're not Asianizing EVs, that they're not taking the same sort of ideas Japan and saying, we don't believe in them because they're making great avs and pisses me off so bad.

I watched a football game and NFL game, and there was nothing but EV ads, including the Onik Five.

Great ad, great car.

Can I buy it? Nope, you can't buy it.

Why are you advertising it? There's lots of other stories like that, too.

Why are they selling them? Why are they pretending that they can sell them? Are they trying to get people into the dealership to sell combustion engines? I mean, what's going on? Are they just trying to look like they're advanced or do they just not give a crap? And I think they're probably trying to stop people from going to EVs that are available.

So if you're a loyal Kia or Hyundai owner, then you can think to yourself, okay, well, there's Kias on the horizon.

There's some reviews out lately on the web of the Ionic Six, which is the upcoming Hyundai.

But it's not coming till next year.

But they've let out some sort of review models and there's lots of YouTube reviews and yeah, it looks like a great car, but again, it's not going to be available for at least a year.

It's premature to even do that.

I'm going to forget about it by the time I could actually order one.

I mean, it's going to be ancient history.

But it also looks like a great car.

Well, yeah, of course it is.

That's the frustrating part.

If they weren't great cars, it wouldn't be so frustrating.

Wouldn't it? But they're making great cars.

They seem to know what they're doing.

But have they secured the batteries? Do they want to make them? Doesn't seem that way.

Yeah.

Well, we have an update coming up later on from VW that addresses some some of these issues.

And when you can buy them, you certainly can't buy them where Brian and I live because we're not in a Zev zero emission vehicle jurisdiction or anything like that, and we're not in Europe, so that kind of sucks.

Yeah.

You have one here.

Greece was powered by renewables.

Yeah, I just always like good news stories like this.

It's going to become more prevalent.

So at a certain point, we will have to stop reporting on these because it's just too common an event.

But yeah.

Greece, for around 5 hours ran on 100% renewables on October 7.

Yeah, I just love stories like that because it's a sign of things to come.

It shows us that this stuff is working.

I assume the people who are against clean energy take it the opposite way, like, well, it only ran for 5 hours.

That doesn't count.

We get the 2050 people.

I tell you, when our jurisdiction runs on 100% renewables for 10 seconds.

I'll soil my dance on the podcast.

No, that'll be a day for celebration.

We'll have some championships.

Tell you what, dig up my corpse and put a birthday cake on it when that happens because it's going to be something from Bloomberg.

Carbon capture projects hit a record.

So the pipeline of carbon capture projects rises to 153.

Pardon me, 30 are operational right now, including one in our jurisdiction, which is at a coal plant, one of the first in the world.

And it's not performing up the specs at all.

Planned projects that are planned, remember, not existing, but planned, would mitigate less than 1% of CO2 emissions.

And the problem, in addition to just being 100%, is that it continues investments in fossil fuels.

It's another way of prolonging fossil fuels, which, as anyone who listens to the show on a regular basis knows, makes James angry.

James doesn't want to be angry.

Takes days off my life.

Brian well, as I've said before, I was kind of in favor of this because we are a coal burning place where we live.

And they started talking about this 2025 years ago, and back then, it's like, oh, that kind of makes sense because we just didn't know enough back then.

It was exciting.

I was excited.

It was very exciting at the time.

But also, bureaucracies are lumbering and slow, so it took them forever to get it off the ground.

And now that these things are running, we know that they're just too expensive and they don't produce the results.

So let's just buy solar panels with the money instead.

I remember when they opened it, they invited dignitaries from around the world into a tent.

But it has a weird vibe.

It's like there was no one commenting on it, no one's had anything to say.

And they were hoping to export the technology.

Not only did they invest billions of dollars, but they wanted to export that technology, which I'm sure they've learned a couple of things that they can export and maybe patent.

But critics argue that it's expensive, ineffective technology that just prolongs the life of fossil fuels, which I'm sure our local governments here would love to do.

Yeah.

And I guess there was a possibility that they could take what they learned and refine the technology and make it cheaper and make it more viable, but so far, that has not been the case.

Well, I'm excited, Brian, because it's time for a brand new segment on the show.

the first time you've sang on a sink and probably the last.

Hey, I harmonize with myself.

Yeah, I watched my friend Who Can Sing do that for video projects that I used to work on.

So I tried it and it kind of worked.

But, you know, next time you got multiple tracks there if you want to let's play that again.

Yeah, because we may never hear it again.

So yeah, I have to play it twice.

Well, it seems unlikely.

Yeah.

It's not often that it's going to be appropriate to talk about a book.

I mean, how many can you read? You're just retired.

Yeah, and I certainly don't typically read books about climate or clean energy or climate change or whatever, but this one is an exception because it's a picture book, which barely even counts as a book.

It's a graphic novel, really.

It's a graphic memoir.

So this is a book called Ducks my memoir.

Two Years in the Oil Sands.

Yeah.

Ducks.

Two years in the oil sands.

And it's by Kate Beaton, and it is published by my favorite publisher, which is Drawn in Quarterly.

They publish graphic novels of all different kinds.

That's a good name for a publishing company that publishes Drawn In Quarterly.

They're the best.

But yeah, this book is really great.

So Kate Beaton is an artist from Cape Breton, Nova Scotia.

From here in Canada.

The east coast of Canada.

And she graduated from university with a history degree around 15 years ago or so.

And graduated with a mountain of student debt.

And so she was kind of looking at the jobs that were available to her with a history degree, like working in museums and stuff, and she was like, oh my God, I'm going to be 90 years old by the time I pay off my student debt.

So she like a lot of people from Cape Breton, from Newfoundland, from the east coast of Canada, took a job in the oil sands of Canada, which is here in Alberta, next door to us in Alberta.

This is kind of based around the city of Fort McMurray, kind of northern Alberta.

That's the kind of base for many of these oil sands operations, which are, as we discussed before, the dirtiest oil on the planet comes from there.

The amount of energy you have to expend to extract this oil because it's all mucked up with sand and everything.

So it's a very, you know, carbon intensive, energy intensive way to get oil out of the ground.

But, you know, with the price of oil, it's been a lucrative place for many years.

So, yeah, she spent two years in the oil sands, paid off her student debt, which is the happiest part of the book, like she did completely after two years.

Wow.

Yeah, you make a lot of money.

You're often provided housing.

Sometimes you live in the town of Fort McMurray, which is a fairly big town, so that's kind of civilized.

But quite often you work on site or you work in these work camps where the oil rigs are and all this stuff.

So it's kind of isolated work, and you'll often work like twelve days on and have two days off, that kind of thing.

And yeah, with your housing kind of paid for, you can just bank a lot of money or spend it on cocaine, which is apparently a thing that also happens a lot.

I never said that again.

Yeah, it's a really beautiful book.

There are many things about it that are heartbreaking, but yeah, it's just awesome.

Highly recommended.

It's a real honest portrait of what goes on in the oil sands.

So there's sad parts about it, but also funny parts and fun parts, and there's a real humanity to it.

Highly recommend.

Well, send me a link and I'll put it in the show notes for Gosh.

Thanks.

So check your show notes, people.

I assume that there will be a link close to the top of the notes there.

Okay.

Because my son's got a buddy who was in psychology at our local university.

He switched over to history and I just, my God, that's worse than film.

You and I did, I felt chills come over me.

It was kind of bad, like, you poor bastard.

Psychology.

We need lots of people in psychology more than ever.

History, not so much.

Yeah.

And the author, Kate Bean, she's most known for a book and a website called heart of Vagrant, which is history based.

She sort of did these humorous cartoons about history, which she knows a lot about because she has a history degree.

But if you've ever wondered what life is like in the oil sands, this is probably your best chance to find out what that's like.

Well, there's a new Stanford University study that Forbes had a piece about.

It about EV charging at night may not stay cheap through the EV adoption curve.

Now, the thinking is that with everybody having EVs, they're all going to charge at night.

So the power, they're not going to have excess power at night.

They're going to have enough or they're going to have to keep up even.

I don't know how much you drive, but I might charge like an hour or two a day.

You know, a lot of things that I'll just charge an hour or two.

I'm not talking to people with long commutes or buying EVs to save money, and that's obviously a different story.

And highway travel and vacations.

But typically, I mean, statistically people travel 2030, 40 miles a day, and that's an hour or two of charging, essentially.

And, you know, we come home and we turn on our clothes dryers and our ovens every night and the grid doesn't go down.

So we've gained a lot of efficiencies in those things too, right? Yeah, I guess the only issue would be that they're used to having very low usage overnight.

So a lot of the systems within the grid are planned for that.

But they should be able to tweak those plans and make more power available overnight.

Well, here's what they said.

They said that the researchers estimate the impact of rising EV ownership in the western United States could boost power demand by as much as 25% by 2035.

That's the year when California has banned the sale of new gasoline vehicles.

Doesn't mean they're all going to be EVs by then, of course.

It just means that you can't go out and buy one.

So charging after eleven will get more expensive, they figure, and push utility operators to boost their power generation.

They say that more EV charging should be done during midday hours, ideally at work or public stations.

Now this is when maybe this is not necessarily every day, right, but when the solar.

There's days when they have access.

Solar.

It's already happening in California.

We talked about it.

Lots of news stories talk about it.

So when wind and solar power suppliers are at their peak, sometimes producing more energy than the grid can even handle.

So California is set to have 5 million EVs by 2030.

That's about 30% market share level.

It's coming.

And at that point, the electrical grid will experience significant stress, they think, according to that, unless there's increased capacity or behavioral changes.

But this gets me to thinking, Brian, that we're going to just need a smarter grid, we're going to have to start thinking and being incentivized to charge when there is excess solar, when there is, because if I had a normal EV that you could buy for 4500 range, I would probably charge it once a week in the summertime, right? I mean, I wouldn't charge it very often.

Well, maybe I wait until I get a note on my app saying power is free for the next 2 hours.

So I take up my other app and my EV starts charging.

Maybe something like that, maybe that's a little too cute and easy, maybe, but we're going to have to maybe in order to accommodate renewables start because we're always doing it.

They're already experiments, like you had a story a week or two ago about government's utility controlling thermostats as an experiment, right.

So when they have access, when they don't have enough power, they adjust your thermostat a little bit and they did that voluntarily in California.

So I know by having electric vehicles capable of charging to the grid, discharging to the grid, that's another thing, right.

I mean, that would maybe even offset a lot of the problems when you have those little peaks because these that are charged might be able to backfire and if they make it worth your while financially and I think they would, that could help flatten the curve.

Yeah, downsides to having all those EVs on the grid, but also potential upsides.

Yeah.

And then there's school buses on city buses and things like that that will be sitting around and able to pick up because a lot of times you build a grid for the worst case scenario.

Now if you got a million EVs out there that can cover that, worst case, 10 minutes or something like that, then it really changes the game.

So, yeah, I'm just starting to think like that.

The average mileage per day, by the way, is 20 miles in the UK, 37 miles in the United States, and EVs won't be charging more than once or twice every week or two.

So looking forward to that.

Plus your battery doesn't get messed with as much if you're not charged as much.

Certainly a lot more charging for us in the winter when it's deadly cold.

So Nikola is back in the news now.

We used to talk about Nicola all the time when we started our podcast two and a half years ago.

Anyway, I mean, it was an exciting potential good thing.

It was the rivian of, let's say long distance semi trucks.

But no.

Yeah, so this has been going through the courts for quite a while, but Trevor Milton was the founder of Nikola Motors and one of the founders and was the CEO.

And yeah, he's now guilty of fraud, three of four counts, guilty on three or four counts, basically guilty of pumping the stock.

So Nicola was working on like a hydrogen semitruck and this is the most fun story is that they just rolled it down a hill and shot video of it and sort of tricked everyone into believing that they had a working prototype, which they did not.

And then at other things, like they would show these trucks and vehicles at shows, and people with an eagle eye would spot that there would hey, wait, this is plugged into an electrical cord underneath there.

So they were just fudging the truth.

But when you're a publicly traded company, you're not really allowed to fudge the truth like that, and it ends up with fraud charges and guilty.

But Nicola still exists.

This is a real company.

They still have hundreds or perhaps even thousands of employees working on, I think, less hydrogen and more battery electric now, but they are do you think they'll try to dig themselves out of this hole? You think they'll come up with an electric pickup truck anytime soon? I'm not picking up truck with a truck long distance.

Yeah, I think there's a good chance.

Like, even when all this controversy was happening, I sort of thought to myself, well, wait a minute, I mean, there's still a giant headquarters here and there's still hundreds of people working there.

They have to be working on something.

It's not like they're all just sitting around drinking coffee all day.

I still hope for the best for Nikola, because the more players we have in this space, the better.

Yeah, especially with long distance trucking.

But they were hoping to have hydrogen powered trucks and build out their own hydrogen network of not just seem like a daunting prospect financially and logistically, and they would get an awful lot of people backing them in order to do that because it's tough.

Just like Tesla, they could start with pre prescribed routes between bottlers and distribution centers and stuff like that.

Grocery stores and distribution centers that are unknown length and maybe not even too long, but it's just even had places that were going to fix them on the road, too.

We even had a series of shops that were ready to fix them.

Yeah, and also at the time, like, it really wasn't clear that even though this is just a few years ago, that battery electric semis, people weren't sure how viable that would be.

So as we reported last week, the first deliveries of the Tesla semi are going to be on December 1.

I think there are other big trucks out there, so we'll know soon that battery electric should work for semi truck.

Now, last week, I touched on sort of this myth that goes around that land use of renewables is a bad thing.

How can we possibly power grid? What are we going to do, cover every square inch of solar and wind turbines? And then I pointed out the fact, and this is the fact that there is more land use by oil and gas right now than what it would take to.

Have a renewable energy in the world.

So there's no recent studies.

But I came across, and this is actually when I was making the TikTok video for that segment, I came across a study which I found interesting, and now it's already seven years old.

It was published in 2015.

It was peer reviewed and published in the scientific journal Science.

And it estimated that 30 0 km² have been lost to oil and gas well pads, storage tanks and associated roads just in the period from 2000 to 2015, just in that 15 year period, 30,000 km² just for oil and gas.

So the amount that that is the equivalent of lost range lands is equivalent of approximately 5 million animal units per month.

I don't want to think about what that is.

I think I know.

And the amount of biomass lost in croplands is equivalent of 122,000,000 bushes of wheat, something we have here where we live.

Lots of wheat.

So the thing is, the 3 million land lost is likely, unlike renewables, long lasting and potentially permanent.

Permanent, yes.

Because this is toxic.

What's left is toxic.

Yeah.

We mentioned a hydrogen plant that's trying to build on an old oil and gas, I don't know, what do they call it? A gray site or there's a brown site.

Brownfield.

They call it brown field.

It's like a gas station, a corner gas station type of house.

Where there was a corner gas station, that land is contaminated forever.

Yeah, but if you put in an EV charging supercharger there, you take it out, it's fine.

You take a wind turbine out, fine.

Solar farm.

You can not only have agriculture taking place under the solar panels, you take them out and it becomes a farm again or whatever you want.

Disneyland.

So the gas power plants themselves occupy a rather small landscape footprint.

It says you must take into account that those power plants also require significant infrastructure to operate well pad, storage tanks, pipelines access roads and refineries, just to name a few.

The pipeline behind my house goes on for many hundreds of kilometers and I can't imagine the hectares that it in itself takes up.

But you cannot do anything on it.

I know, because I get a pamphlet in the mail every ten days telling me I can't so much fart on it because they don't want me to.

I can't bring in a back loader because I don't have an alleyway here.

I can't bring in a small tractor, I can't bring in anything at all they don't want because I talked to them on the phone, because I get, you know how you dial before you dig while I do that.

And guess who calls? The pipeline companies actually call when I do that, put out that request to put in my above ground swimming pool and yeah, they tell me you can't do anything like that.

Nothing at all.

So they kill the gopher.

So the ledge is pointless.

They mow it.

They do go over with a tractor and mow it once a month.

But other than that so the Department of Energy estimates the amount of land used by wind turbines would require 3200 square kilometers, or 790,000 acres by 2050 when we met our Paris climate targets.

And that's roughly a 10th of the land used by oil and gas, which is yes, electricity could be coming from wind for a 10th of the land used by oil and gas.

And that's just in the States, right? So the National Renewable Energy Lab, 1 Ha or two five acres is what you need per gigawatt hour of solar generation, if you want to talk solar now.

So for 3 million Ha lost oil and gas in that 15 year period, you could put up solar power that would generate 75% of America's total annual electricity generation output.

You can put it anywhere.

You don't put on farmland.

You can put on rooftops.

You can run schools, factories, and you should be and I don't know why they're not.

Remember, this is just oil and gas.

This doesn't even talk about other fossil fuels like coal or entire mountaintops are removed.

So that's my story on that.

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

All right, so Volkswagen this week.

So we were talking before about Hyundai and Kia maybe not making that many battery electric vehicles, even though they're quite great.

But I thought this was worth mentioning.

We've mentioned Volkswagen's output before, but, yeah, Volkswagen is on track to make 500,000 EVs by the end of this year.

So 500,000 output in a year, that's behind Tesla, which is going to be around 1.4 million.

So just between those two companies, that's around 2 million battery electric vehicles.

So this is starting to ramp up.

Volkswagen is taking this seriously, and they're taking it so seriously, they've hired you and McGregor as their next spokesperson.

And of course, we talked about that show that was on Apple TV called The Long Way Down.

A long way up.

Yeah.

Great show.

Excellent show.

If anyone's interested, you and McGregor likes to do these tours on motorcycles.

So that's the newest iteration of that show.

I think there's been three seasons, and it's on Apple TV Plus.

And they started at the tip of South America and drove up to California, I think it was, on electric motorcycles and with prototype rivian electric pickup trucks just for the scenery, but also to see if it could be done electric.

And it turned out to be an awesome show.

So, yes, clearly, Ewan McGregor is an EV enthusiast.

He's a big Volkswagen enthusiast.

He owns several Volkswagens that he's restored, including one that is a 1954 Beetle that he had converted to electric.

So he drives a 54 electric Beetle around Los Angeles.

And so, yeah, I think that's kind of fun.

Yes.

I will point out that there are three iterations of this series, but they started like 20 years ago.

So when they flash back, he's very young and Same has a buddy that he takes with him.

And they both like motorcycles and racing and stuff and live it on the edge.

And it was very much a struggle with electricity in South America to charge a prototype Harley Davidson livewire before they became the earlier previous seasons are just like shot on kind of old standard definition video, so they don't look that great.

But the newest season that's on Apple TV, it's all in HD, looks fantastic because it is essentially a travel log show.

And I became fascinated with South America.

What a beautiful continent, if I may.

And they were able to shoot it in glorious HD with lots of drones and different things and the technology that is compact and fits in the motorcycle operated and unoperated.

And then the first few episodes were the struggle to charge, and then it became more like logistics and things.

And the Inexplicably went through Mexico on a school bus that they want to find.

Don't think it was too dangerous.

There was a nasty tourist murder going.

Yeah, Ewan McGregor is a great guy.

He's one of the few Hollywood stars I would like to have a beer with.

You know, like, he just seems like a great guy, and most people aren't.

I'm not.

I wouldn't want to have a beer with me.

I'm a terrible human being.

Somebody flaws.

But he seems to have everything worked out.

Volkswagen promised such lofty things, right, that they were going to do this, and we were hoping they would cause in dieselgate.

They've sort of abandoned everything and said, okay, we're going all into EVs.

But are they really? And a lot of people were skeptical, but it seems like are you fairly comfortable that they are? Oh, yeah.

I think 500,000 is an amazing figure to hit this year.

It's not an easy thing to ramp up all those batteries and new platforms because it's better to start with a new platform than to convert a gas car to electric.

So, yeah, Volkswagen is well on their way.

When I saw you doing the story, I watched the Star Wars commercial with him, and it sort of he drives off in a Volkswagen ID buzz the Volkswagen EV version of their minibus van, which is by all accounts, horrendously overpriced, but also very cool.

And if I was on a money tree, I would certainly have one of the driveway for the cool factor going to be available in Europe very soon, from what I recall.

Yeah.

Well, the Financial Times has a story on nuclear revival in that Westinghouse Electric, which is a US.

Nuclear power company.

It's being bought by a private equityback consortium in an almost $8 billion deal for four years.

That's four years after it emerged from bankruptcy.

So it was nuclear is bad going bankruptcy, not making money because of the war in Ukraine is, in their mind and their view, spurring fresh interest in an industry that had fallen out of investor favor.

So we've seen how important energy is and nuclear is available now, but also they're partnering with a company that right here in our own province that doesn't have a lot of companies.

We have a big multinational corporation called Chemical which mine uranium in the far north of our province province, you know, hours and hours and hours and hours away that we're into the wilderness where there's a weird little city called Uranium City.

You wanted to make a film there once because it was like this abandoned mining town in the middle of nowhere.

No, it's a fascinating story, if you want to kind of Google it.

Uranium City.

It was a whole city that was built around mining uranium, and thousands of people were living there at one point, but it's now been more or less abandoned.

So there's a whole abandoned city up there that I don't know, I'd like to just go hang around.

It's very interesting to look at it from the air because you see the aerial photos and there are what don't seem like dilapidated houses that are completely caved in because some little water thing got in there and then one thing led to another with an unoccupied house and then they all sort of collapsed and looks like it has 30 years left on the shingles.

Kind of a weird image, actually.

Yeah.

So Chemical is apparently big on nuclear and which is why they are lobbying a few provincial governments in Canada like ours to go with small modular nuclear reactors as the solution and as a way to waste our money and prolong fossil fuels.

So the purchasing of Westinghouse, I guess they make 440 nuclear reactors in the world, about half of them.

So I don't know, they say it's the best market fundamentals we've seen in a while.

I'm skeptical.

I would not advance, I would not invest in that.

I would not invest in a billion dollars because by the time you put a brick in the ground, I mean, forget about it.

It's going to be over.

So well, I'm pleased to bring back the tweet of the week.

I've had a hard time finding one this week, so I had to go with a thread, I'm afraid.

Usually I find an inspiring tweet, something that I really like, but this one, there's been a lot of climate protesters in the news that has made people uncomfortable throwing supine paintings and things like that, and it's become a part of the discussion.

So aside, rezook somebody I follow on Twitter, energy Insider, clean Energy Insider, in support of the malign of these climate protesters, he says, we have triggered a once in a hundred million years climate change event.

Government falls here on the world, doesn't appear to give a hoot about it or our future.

Why? Well, let's read between the lines of what climate science is saying.

The probability of 1.5 degrees heating compared to preindustrial times by 2100 is today about 99%.

The probability of two degrees is 90%.

The probability of four degrees or higher is 10%.

And that, of course, is absolutely catastrophic.

So it's like playing Russian roulette with a ten chamber gun and one bullet in it.

And it's the future of humanity and life on Earth is at least temporarily going to be disrupted if that happens.

So three degrees is unadaptable for most people and will result in tens or hundreds of millions of climate refugees.

Four degrees or more implies in exile to high latitudes north Canada, Siberia, north New Zealand for millennia.

That is the most depressing thing I've read in a long time.

Remember that the probability four degrees is actually 10%.

So now, if you are faced with these not unlikely outcomes, would you not throw soup at a goddamn painting or stop traffic or strike or block an interest to BP or Shell or Exxon oil terminals? That is his thoughts we like to hear from you on the Clean Energy show.

Coming up next is what is it, Brian? It's the lightning round roll.

Zoom through a bunch of headlines and get through the show real quick.

Contact us right now.

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lighting round, fast paced look of the weekend clean energy news.

Brian, the show's gone by fast.

They all go by fast.

That's how we're at 135 of them already.

I don't know what's going on.

Maybe the cocaine from the oil industry has gotten into my coffee in the morning or something.

But offshore construction starts on Japan's first floating wind farm.

It is, in total pretty small.

Now, the biggest wind turbines that we often mention are 14, though, that those are not floating.

So I don't think the floating works for turbines quite that big.

But it's nice to see Japan is finally getting going with because, remember, they've got a deeper offshore, so they need to do the floating in a lot of cases there.

Yeah.

Jinko Solar has achieved 26.1% efficiency in their solar panels.

This is not Perk solar panels, which we're used to, but NType top con solar panels.

So the new record was confirmed by China's National Institute of Metrology.

Is it Metrology? Metrology? Sure.

Let's say that it's the science of measurement, Brian.

And a word that I didn't previously know, because I don't measure things.

So Perk adds a passivated film to the back of ordinary solar panels to absorb more light than may have passed the initial cell surface.

This is how they get this higher efficiency.

Now, the panels on our houses might be, what, 89% efficient or something? Maybe 20%, something like this is significantly higher for the same panel.

And they seem to say that the cost will be very close to they're basically adding this ultra thin oxide layer on top as another barrier to contain a absorbed light.

They're just trapping more light.

And when you talk about bifacial panels picking up stuff on the bottom as well well, normal panels only pick up 70% of light in the bottom direction, but these pick up 80%.

So that's a 10% gain, which is nothing to sneeze at if you are making a bifatial solar family farm, which sometimes apparently, can be vertical just to smooth out the curve of the power generation during the day.

Yeah, I'm always excited about these advancements in solar panels.

Female workforce share in the renewable energy sector, 32%.

Oil and gas, 22%.

So we're spreading out the jobs a bit better as we transition to renewable.

Something to think about.

Few markets are electrifying, quite like China, Brian, where EVs have gone from less than 1% of light commercial vehicle sales to 10% in the last ten years.

At last, two years.

Okay, that's fine.

Two years, basically nothing, 10%.

And this is like commercial vehicles are not like you and I.

They're driving all day and they're bigger.

The vehicles use more energy, so they're bigger and they drive all day.

So this is a big impact on oil.

And I expect very much that this is going to happen soon, because we see it every day in the headlines.

New small commercial vehicles and trucks coming online that are electric.

Oh, it's time for a CES fast fact.

Yes, it costs about $1,300 to install a public EV charger on a lamp post.

$1,300.

You know, we talk about how we're going to deal with apartment owners and stuff like that.

Yeah, that's not much.

This is the whole kit and the bootle and the fact that it charges you, too.

The whole billing system is built into it.

$1,300 us.

No.

We have tons of cars that park on the street all day long, so why not give them an option to charge? And keep in mind, you use your own cord for stuff like this.

It's basically a socket.

In Europe, they bring their own cord.

Audi wants its EVs to clean the air while they charge or drive.

If I had a segment, the weird story of the week, this would be it.

Brian this is weird.

And by the way, I once saw a thing where they had a train that was going to carbon capture as it drove, but I lost the story.

But instead of talking about the show about six months ago so audio wants to do this with their cars.

The vehicles will be equipped with the systems of filters particles out of the air.

This is a test as an experiment.

They'll do it passively when they're driving it and actively with a fan when they're charging.

And they're just going to take particles out of the air through I don't know.

It's not going to make a difference.

It's going to add cost to the car.

Why are they doing this, Brian? Why? It seems like the dumbest thing ever.

Pennsylvania State University researchers develop ten minute charging method.

Now, we hear about this stuff all the time, and we don't mention it on the show.

Why? Because we don't know if it's real or not.

However, this was published in the journal nature, which is the journal.

It's a tough journal.

This is no bigger journal than nature.

As far as I love it.

It's my favorite journal.

Absolutely.

They have that written on the cover.

Brian Starship's favorite journal.

And it's only when I mention it because adding a thin layer of nickel to the battery, which is also why I mention it, because it's not a huge, weird thing that may or may not work right.

It's a minor thing that is actually helping it cool the battery.

Something like Tesla might develop something like that while they're adding a thin layer of nickel in the spooling to help with the cooling.

And that means that they can charge in 10 minutes.

So that might be a thing.

Okay, it might be a thing, yeah.

I mean, it might potentially add too much cost because nickel is one of the more expensive materials for batteries, but we'll see.

Oh, it's another CAS.

Fast fact.

All of the lithium mine last year would last just one month.

In 2041 month, all the lithium mine last year would last one month.

And in 2050, that magical year where we have to get to zero, it would last two weeks.

So this is based on, I guess, current projections of how much lithium we're going to need to put into batteries and such in 20 years.

It could be wrong.

We could be on to batteries that don't require any lithium by then.

I'm hoping it's possible, especially for grid and stuff like that.

Electric miners are cutting CO2 emissions in half by switching to electric vehicles.

So I know that mining was ripe for electric vehicles because you have to clean the air as you go down to the mines.

That's an issue to have a diesel truck running or equipment.

So if you electrify it and you throw out a solar farm, even better.

No.

There was a story this week about a hockey rank somewhere switching to electric powered zambonies to clean the ice.

If you've ever been in a hockey rink, it's ridiculous.

Like, they have these gas powered Zambonies driving around, especially in a smaller community size rink.

The fumes are ridiculous.

We shouldn't be breathing in those fumes.

And it's the same thing with mining.

Like, you don't want to be burning fossil fuels down in a mine.

You want clean battery, electric.

And like every decent Canadian, Brine was born on the blue line of a hi suki rank, weren't you, back in the day, many years ago? Many, many years ago, yeah.

But you know what surprises me, though, is it's half the emissions from mining can come from electric fine.

The vehicles.

That's really good.

I didn't know that it would be that great because that's easy.

And by the way, we've seen even years ago, early in the podcast, giant super sized trucks that are electrified, that are going up and down, coal mines that just completely recharge on the way down.

And they don't even have to charge during the day.

They just regenerate.

Going down with the regenerative.

Branking by dad, three scored five stars in the Euro NCAP safety test.

Now, the reason why I bring this up is because I've often pondered with you on the show, what are the Chinese cars going to be like when they come? Are they going to be safe? Now, that's a bit of maybe an unwanted, undeserved prejudice that is coming from bad Chinese manufacturing equality from past decades in the eighties and 90s.

But then a lot of people said that about the Koreans.

And actually the Korean cars weren't great at first, but they became quite they're among the top reliable cars now.

They're great.

So this is the first sort of indication that I've seen that the Chinese cars can do and will strive to have high safety ratings because we're all in North America here going to be craving good, safe cars.

That affected my buying decision last time.

Oh, another fast fact.

US.

Wind power currently generates enough electricity to serve the equivalent of 43 million American homes.

That's right.

Now, already just with wind power.

Just with wind power.

That's what it's capable of.

At its best case scenario from carbon tracker, new findings from Rised Energy show that 2022 capital spending on wind and solar could hit almost half a trillion dollars, and that would eclipse the 446,000,000,000 for upstream oil and gas production.

So this is kind of the first time that the capital spending has switched from bad to good.

And they say it's not going back, that this trend will continue quite rapidly going forward.

Absolutely.

One last story for you, Brian, the World Meleeurological Organization, rather, is that occurrences of severe weather disrupting the operation of nuclear power plants increased fivefold in the last three decades between 19 92,019, with a notable acceleration since 2009, something that we've been mentioning on the show that I found quite surprising.

And yes, climate change screwing things up already.

Yeah, extreme weather is not great for nuclear power plants.

And that is our time for this week.

I mean, we could go on forever, but my throat will start to bleed very shortly.

Brian will pass out.

I've got a cold.

He's got to be barely alive, man.

He's probably got some sort of new version of COVID that can't be detected.

That's what I think.

It's not a cold.

We'll hope you're here for next week's show, so we'd love to hear from you.

Remember, clean energy [e-mail], twitter, TikTok, yada yada, yada.

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And if you're new to the show, remember subscribe on your podcast app, because we have new shows every week and you wouldn't want to miss that.

So we'll see you next time.

See you next week.