138. Highway to Climate Hell; Autonomous Driving Delayed

The Clean Energy Show

As COP 27 kicks off in Egypt, The UN chief says we're not doing enough to prevent a climate catastrophe. On the bright side, France is mandating all parking lots have solar panels over them resulting in the power of 10 nuclear reactors. An analyst says Tesla may never achieve full self-driving. South Dakota produced more energy from wind than any other source. Why a switch in power in the United States Congress won’t kill Biden’s Inflation Reduction / Climate act.

Brian's PTC cabin heater in his Tesla Model 3 had to be replaced and that meant driving in a parka for two and a half hours to the closes service center.

Clip from the Energy Vs Climate podcast with guest Katherine Hamilton.

Netflix has a documentary on Nissan head and current criminal Carlos Ghosn called 'Fugitive: The Curious Case of Carlos Ghosn." He was accused of stealing millions from Nissan and escaping in a storage chest on a plane.

The eight billionth human being is about to be born.

We disguss the Energi Media YouTube channel where Markham Hislop talked to an analyst from Guidehouse Insights about what's taking level 4 autonomy so long.

Porsche has made 100,000 EVs.

Tesla (TSLA) is now earning eight times more per car than Toyota, and they are starting to notice back in Japan.

Pakistan's utility knows going green means consumers pay less for their electricity bill.

Electrek editor Fred Lambert on Elon Musk's feedback loop of constant praise.

The "hydrogen-is-not-all-that" podcast suggested by one of our listeners can be found here.

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Transcript

Hello and welcome to Episode 138 of the Clean Energy Show.

I'm Brian Stockton.

I'm James Whittingham.

This week, several companies are throwing to the towel and full selfdriving, but please keep your hands on the wheel and your attention on the road as you listen to this podcast.

The state of South Dakota and now produces more electricity from wind than any other source.

Must be the hot air coming from Mount Rushmore, am I right? No.

UN Chief Antonio Gutierrez says we are on the highway to Climate Hill with our foot still on the accelerator.

Again, please keep your hands on the wheel and your attention on the road as you listen to this podcast.

In France, the government has ordered that all parking lots must be covered by solar panels, all because President Emmanuel Macron can't get the top back up on his convertible Renault.

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

And also this week, Brian, why a switch in power in the United States Congress, which is voting as we speak, as we record this won't kill Biden's inflation reduction act, but a change in government in Canada actually would be problem for us north of the border because well, I'll get to that later.

And we also have a bit of an update live from Cop 27, sort of.

And what's new with you? How was your trip to Saskatoon? Because last week you're heading north two and a half hours in the snowy Canadian winter to get your Tesla fixes.

That's the closest Tesla service center to you.

Yeah, that's right.

So the heater has not been working right and didn't seem to be working quite right last winter, but kind of not enough to generate an error message.

But now I had an error message, so they seemed to know what to do to fix it.

So drove up Saskatoon, where the closest service center is, and yes, they replaced the whole heater.

That's what they did.

Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

It's under warranty.

Everything's fine, isn't it? Everything's fine.

When does the warranty end? Let me ask you, because it has, as we pointed out a couple of weeks ago, two and a half years, a quarter decade, getting close to the point where this is going to start killing you in the wallet.

I don't recall when it ends, but I think it might say specs of warrant.

It says in the app somewhere.

Yes, here in the app.

The Tesla app, basic vehicle, limited warranty, expires in March 2024 or 80,000, battery 2028 or 160 and the drive unit 2028 or 160,000 km as well.

So, yeah, a couple more years to go on the basic warranty.

Okay, I see.

This could be a different discussion in the future.

OK, what was it? Was it the PTC heater, the resistive heater? Yeah.

Or you don't have a heat pump, so that's what it was.

No heat pump.

So the resistive heater.

Yeah, for some reason they were sure about that.

They were pretty sure by the time I got there.

Because they have all the data from the car, like everything, the car is digitized and they can see all the data from my car.

So as I dropped it off, they said, yeah, it's probably the whole heater needs to be replaced.

And they were prepared to do that.

And at the same time, too, there's been a recall for the trunk lid harness or something.

I think it's to do with the cables, the wire harness to the camera in the back.

So they did that at the same time.

And it took about like 4 hours for them to do it.

Wasn't too bad.

Is that right? You had an appointment at 08:00 a.m.

And they went right at it and started working on it.

Yes.

Call me around 1130.

And they had the part, which is good again, I assume because they had all the data, they could order the parts ahead of time that they would need.

That's nice.

Yeah.

And they gave me a loaner car, which I drove around Saskatchewan for a while.

And yes, I got back before there was another blizzard.

What was that? A couple of days later, our second blizzard of the year.

Which is not technically a blizzard environment.

Canada doesn't call it a blizzard.

Do not call it a blizzard.

But boy, was it a blizzard.

It was crazy.

Another nasty, nasty one.

And I think we were the epicenter this time.

Last time it was Moose Jaw.

Yes, really nasty.

Tons of snow.

Yes.

Crazy out there.

How was your trip back? Was it okay? And the heater was all hot.

How was it there, though? It was below zero, so I put on my parka.

So you didn't have heat? There was a little bit of heat, not enough.

And the heated seat was still working, but with the parka on, it was fine.

Here's what I'm thinking, and that is the newer cars have a heat pump.

Yeah, that's right.

Newer cars have a heat pump instead of a resistive heater.

So they don't have both then? I don't think so, no.

You'd think that they might need one as a backup.

But maybe the car generates enough heat that it holds.

It's taking heat from the motor, it's taking heat from the from the batteries or something.

There's a loop of different things that heat up here.

But we do know there has been problems with some of the heat pumps as well in extreme cold.

Is it in the heat pump itself or something related to the heat pump? Anyway, that's interesting because you didn't get a price on what that would be.

Didn't show the invoice of what that repair would cost.

No, they didn't.

Just said zero.

I'd be interested.

I guess you could look it up online.

What somebody else did we'll talk more about this sort of thing in future months.

So anything else? You went up? You managed, your feet didn't get cold? Yes.

No.

It was a little bit chilly, but it wasn't too bad.

Was it the most unpleasant trip you've had because you work cold? Yeah, I guess so.

Yeah.

I've got a really warm parka, so it felt almost normal.

With that on, the heat can radiate up from the heated seat and fill the market.

There you go.

And then the other thing that's going on with me is they started shooting a TV show across the street from me here in the neighborhood.

Really? You know, that's happened before, hasn't it? What is it about across the street? Because there used to be somebody of relevant who lived there who was connected to the film industry.

Yes.

They're gone.

Not anymore.

And it's their house that's being rented for this shoot.

That's a weird coincidence, though.

Yeah.

And our good friend Jay is working on the shoot, so I've run into him out there on the street.

Wow.

I bet he doesn't know we're talking about him.

No, probably not.

I assume he doesn't listen to the podcast.

No, he wouldn't.

He's an old man.

I don't think he knows what a podcast oh, he's an angry old man, Brian.

Angry, angry old man who is actually six months younger than me.

So he's working in winter and there's a TV show shooting across the street from you.

I think Jay would prefer to be shooting in a sound stage where there's a lot more room for everybody and it's a lot more comfortable because, of course, it's a blizzard, remember? Why couldn't it be a James Cameron green screen affair? That's what you want to work on.

But yeah, no, there's a lot of traffic on the street, lots of cars parked on our streets.

But it's fine.

Back in the day when I was a kid, I did a couple shows outside.

It's horrible.

Even in the fall when it's warmer than this, to spend 14 hours outside is just not good.

I mean, they're shooting really inside the house, but there's so many crew people that they got to have to spill out into the cars and into the yard and everything.

Is there somebody blocking traffic? No, no one closing off the traffic so far.

Okay, that'd be annoying.

You're coming home, you got to pee.

Some little film student has a stop sign and says, no, you can't.

So it's really weird.

Happened to be on Sunday.

I was biting my own business watching TV.

We were snowed in.

It was a blizzard, as you say, right.

I couldn't do anything.

So my son's home from college, and he took a shower.

And I got to thinking, what is that cable cam on football games called? What is the brand name for that? Because I started thinking about that, and so I googled it, and it's called a Sky Cam.

And then that took me to the Wikipedia page of the sky camp.

And then I found out that the Sky Cam company was bought by this company, then bought by that company, and then it was bought by the person my son hates most of the world, which is Stan Crockey, the owner of the Arsenal Football Club in the Denver Broncos, and a bunch of other things.

He's a bad man, according to people who support the team.

And then I was gravitated towards a section that said incidents, because of course, that's sexy.

I'm going to go there.

There were three incidents, Brian.

One in, like, 1981, when they first invented, and by the way, it was invented by the same person who invented the steadicam.

Yeah.

So that person, I'm assuming, is rich now.

Yeah.

So this is a camera that's on a giant cable that runs across the stage, two cables.

So it's a couple of cables so it can fly over the players during a football game with a camera, I believe it's like a big X of cable, so it can go in three dimensions, back and forth.

And just above the helms of it, you see them, you may not notice them.

I don't think anybody who's paying attention notices them.

Anyway, there was one incident at a small college football game back in the 80s when it was first came out.

There was an incident in like, 25 years ago, and the third incident was an hour before I read it.

An hour before I read it.

It was a game that we didn't have.

Here was the New York Jets game, and apparently the game was delayed by an hour because the Sky Cam fell from the I just thought that was weird.

You're reading three incidents in history and going, this was an hour ago.

The third one was an hour ago.

And somebody had updated the Wikipedia.

And of course they did, Brian, because Wikipedia, it's all about updating quickly.

When we die, our family won't know before Wikipedia knows.

Like, it will be updated instantly.

Well, you know, there's no entry about me on Wikipedia, so if anyone out there well, there will be by then to write one.

Me, too.

I keep begging people to write one for years.

I keep writing it myself, and they rejected, even though I have many awards if you're not allowed to accolades.

And yeah, last night my partner had a grocery store order far away, and we went to the east end of town to pick up groceries because she ordered it in advance before the blizzard without checking the weather.

It was a herring affair.

And we decided to use her coupons for Carl's Jr.

Which she never go to, but we thought that would be exotic someplace.

We have a bit, let's go there and try this coupon out.

And we got there and ordered it all went smoothly.

And we got to the drive through window and there was this car load of teenagers in front of us who had been stuck there for an hour.

And no one at the drivethrough told us anything.

But the car in front of us was stuck right at the window for an hour.

So we had the card that my partner uses and many, many years ago we went to the grocery store chain Superstore and they had clearance, these pieces of rectangular plastic that are grippy that you put under your wheel.

They're like a little tread of plastic that's really pointy.

Yeah.

So it's something you keep in the trunk and if you get stuck in the snow, you put them under your wheels.

Never used them.

Cost about $0.50, like they were discounted from like twelve bucks to fifty cents.

Never used them.

But she had them in the car, put one under the front wheel, cut them out of there in a second.

Wow.

And they threw $20 at me, which I refused, of course, but they were so thankful to get out, they ever would.

And of course it's embarrassing because you're blocking a fat guy from getting his burger behind you and that's no good.

So, yeah, we got them out instantly, which was funny as hell.

Good deed of the week.

Sure.

Now let's get on to some discussions with past stories because I wanted to talk about the Energy Vis Climate podcast.

Okay? This is my name's.

Sake ed.

Woodynham calls himself I call myself Whittingham.

He calls himself Woodynham.

He's from Alberta.

It's 90% chance for cousins.

Okay, I haven't worked it out yet, but two people, there's like six Whittingham in Canada and apparently two of them fell into clean energy somehow.

But whose podcast is more popular, that's what I want to know.

Well, he's a big deal.

He's been in the news for working for governments as a consultant.

So he would have a lot of like this is not the same kind of podcast that people necessarily listen to because it's in the weeds, it's in policy.

There's a lot of policy for people who work in the industry.

That's a huge news.

Well, I do listen to it.

And they had Kathryn Hamilton on, who used to host the Clean Energy or the Energy Gang podcast.

Now she's gone off to other things and I think she worked for the US government for a while.

She's from the States, of course, and she's a clean energy expert and got decades of clean tech and policy in DC.

And she was talking about the US midterms.

And I was worried, I've said before on the show that I'm worried about what's going to happen because it's probably going to change.

Power is going to change in one way or another in Washington, whether it's now or later, it always changes.

How safe is the clean? The big biden thing is not going to be reversed because they're evil, they reverse things.

They don't believe climate change at all.

They're a hoax.

So I just thought she had a really interesting answer that I'll play for you now.

So I don't think that shift will have a direct impact yet on the climate goals.

It will certainly prevent anything additional from happening.

And the US.

Congress holds the purse strings for the federal government.

So just on appropriating funds to keep the government going, that will have an impact.

But the pieces that are in IRA are pretty strong.

I mean, they are tax credit, unless they were to completely rewrite the tax code.

And I'll give you a little secret.

When you give somebody something, don't ever try to take it away.

So you're going to have all of these people taking advantage of credits.

And in fact, manufacturers are already moving into states that are heavily Republican states and the last thing they want is those tax credits to go away.

In fact, during the Trump administration, they never put on the table rolling back solar and wind tax credits.

They just didn't because they knew that was a losing proposition for them.

Yeah, I didn't realize that even during Trump they didn't roll back very much, did they, as far as climate goes, because business people were investing and that's the thing.

Now in Canada, it's a different story.

What they call it, and they refer to it as a runway.

In the states, solar and wind have a ten year runway that it's guaranteed that if you invest, you can keep investing and it will still work out.

You're not wasting your investment.

You need to give assurances and security to people to make these investments because that's what the clean energy transition is.

It's largely investing, but in Canada we don't have that.

So our government is a minority parliamentarian.

Government that may switch to 2025 will probably I mean, the government don't last forever around here either.

And that government hardly wants to get rid of carbon taxes and doesn't seem to legitimately believe in climate change either.

They're not that far off in the Republicans.

But yeah, apparently the Canadian government is working on making that so that it's a guaranteed thing because investors are already threatening.

They might be grandstanding, but they're threatening the one is going to the states because that's where the guarantee is, I don't know.

And there's even definitely companies worried about doing business in places like Alberta because of the sort of backwards looking energy policy that they have there.

If you're a giant business, giant international business, you're going to think twice setting up a business in a place that is denying climate change.

And we were talking about Carlos Gon last week, the former chairman of Nissan who oversaw the implementation of the Nissan Leaf, the first mass produced electric car, which I happen to own a ten year old version of that.

And there's actually a Netflix documentary that just came out a week ago as we were talking about that.

Oh, fantastic.

Well, I don't know that it is fantastic.

I'm not reviewing it.

I'm not endorsing it.

It's called fugitive.

The Curious Case of Carloscone.

And I watched a bit of a lot of talking heads.

It's interesting because it's kind of like a heist movie, right? Because he's accused of stealing millions from the car company he led, he was arrested in Japan and smuggled out of the country by two Americans in a storage chest, who, coincidentally, were also just convicted this week.

As soon as I brought it up, things started happening.

Brian wow.

Okay.

Well, I think I'll check that out.

It was an interesting story just because of that one detail that he had to escape the country in a storage chest.

Yeah.

Oh.

We have some breaking news.

The 8th billionth human being is about to be born in the world.

We go now to Antonio Gutiris, the head of the United Nations.

The 8th billionth member of our human family is born.

How will we answer when baby 8 billion is old enough to ask, what did you do for our world and for our planet when you had the chance? After President Trump announced that America would withdraw from the Paris Climate Change Accord, elon Musk immediately announced he would quit presidential business councils.

We are in the fight of our lives and we are losing.

Greenhouse gas emissions keep growing, global temperatures keep rising, and our planet is fast approaching tipping points that will make climate chaos irreversible.

Twitter owner Elon Musk has told his followers on the platform to vote for a Republican congress.

Tuesday, Musk tweeted, quote to independentminded voters, shared power curbs the worst excesses of both parties.

Global warming, which a lot of people think is a hoax.

The Earth will end only when God declares it's time to be over.

We are on a highway to Climate Hill with our foot still on the accelerator.

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

Okay, so a quick start here from South Dakota.

Now, we often talk about North Dakota here on the show because we're just above North Dakota here.

In many ways.

In many ways, I love North Dakota.

Home of the Fargo Film Festival.

Home of the Fargo Theater.

Anyway, South Dakota, which is just below North Dakota, it is now getting most of its electricity from wind they previously had.

Hydroelectric was the biggest source, but now 52% is coming from wind turbines in the province there.

So congratulations to South Dakota.

And what I say to that initially is, why not us? Brian why not us? I wonder what led that to happen.

Like, what was it? Private investment? Because we have a utility owned, government owned utility here.

Was it the private sector that saw cheap electricity that drove the investment in? That what sparked that? Because South Dakota is not in the day and age of accusing everything green as being on one side of the political spectrum and therefore the enemy the other, then I'm surprised that a state like South Dakota was able to do something like that.

Yeah, in South Dakota and North Dakota, both tend to be conservative leaning states.

It is slightly surprising, but as we know, it's a great idea.

So we have very similar wind profile here in our province and a little bit of wind power, but it really needs to be cranked up.

You know, it's interesting politically when I was in Fargo with you, that I was asking, because that was just when Trump was becoming a thing and I was trying to get a Trump sign to bring over, was asking around for one.

They were all lefty apologizing for their country.

But it just goes to show that even in very right wing states, you have pockets of people who are, you know, not everybody is going to be one way or the other.

There's always pockets, even in the most extreme leaning states.

Yeah, fargo is a college town.

They've got, like, I think, three universities in Fargo or Fargo morehead.

And of course, people involved in the film festival, I guess, tend to be people in the arts, more left leaning, but as a whole, pretty conservative places.

And my son always points out that Wyoming has Casper, which is also a small college town, because we've been through Wyoming a few times and I've been shaken by some of the images I've seen there.

And there's lots of bad things to look at and signs and messages.

But, yeah, Casper, which is a town we did go to, it was like a Fargo of Wyoming.

It was kind of like a cool little college town with a nice Taco Bell, I may add.

Nice.

And, you know, I wanted to go there for the eclipse.

The total eclipse of the sun that was the closest to us was Casper, Wyoming.

Oh, interesting.

I think we had just done a six week vacation in the mountains with our camper, and I couldn't convince my partner to do it.

I regret that ever since, because it would have been a one day trip to see something remarkable.

No.

And I thought about driving to Calgary or Winnipeg to see Kate Beaton, author of the Duck's graphic novel, which I was plugging on the show.

But these blizzards prevented these blizzards are bad.

You never know this time of year whether we live in western Canada, where you're going to get bad weather, and certainly any mountain pass, even the Sierra Nevada mountains, are getting killed with a whole whack of snow.

I've got a story I wanted to talk about.

I guess a few companies, at least a couple in the last week or so, that have dropped plans, like, Ford has announced that it has dropped plans for a level three driver assistance, which would lead them to robotaxis.

And they're going to focus on level two just for the consumer rather than as a business.

So that's been a big shift.

Mercedes is kind of doing the same.

They say robotaxis are no longer a goal.

We thought that in 2016 or 17, and that's kind of when the neural net sort of became a thing and they thought, well, everything is going to be solved quickly, but now they're backing off of that and they thought they could solve the robotaxi problem quite quickly.

And so did certain CEOs who now social media magnets, but committing to both a ride hailing solution and a passenger driven assistant solution was expensive.

So they thought they just concentrated on the one that make people because people are demanding it now.

They're demanding basically the different versions of autopilot for different cars just to drive itself on the highway.

How was your autopilot, by the way, in wintertime? How is it doing on actual highways? Yeah, generally really good.

It can kind of sense generally through the snow.

Okay, well, self driving taxis that operate all day, every day and all kinds of weather have been a dream for many for decades, including one of the Google people who started their autonomous program, Waymo.

Yes.

So now he's programming trucks to operate within the confines of industrial sites.

Only one of these guys.

And he says the foreseeable future, that's as much as the complexity as any driverless vehicle will be able to handle, in his opinion.

He says, forget about the profits, the combined revenue of all the robotax the robotruck companies, it's not a lot right now.

It's probably more like zero.

So our friend of the show, Mark Hislamp, who is one province over from us or two provinces over, but from where we live, he's got a YouTube show called Energy Media, and he also has a podcast from time to time, and he has a guest on from Guidehouse Insights.

He's an automotive engineer and EV analyst.

His name is Dulce Meade and he's somebody that I go to for EV information and sort of market knowledge like that.

And boy, he's got some cold water to throw on the robotaxi thing.

I got some clips from him.

This is him talking about that it's going to be a while before someone solves this to be at the point where you can really start to scale it up dramatically and get to a level of number of vehicles on the road where you can start to build a really viable business out of it.

It's probably closer to eight to ten years, closer towards the end of this decade than where we are today.

And again, this is Marks YouTube show energy Media.

I'll have a link to it in the show notes, so we can borrow from him without guilt.

And also he's talking about how AI sort of plateaued.

What I was just talking about, the Neuron net development in early 2010s was something that people thought would move fast but apparently he sees a big plateau happening and slowing down.

We had that big advancement in the middle part of the last decade, and that suddenly moved things forward very quickly.

But then it plateaued and it's been climbing very slowly ever since it hit that plateau.

And so that's why it's hard to predict when we'll get to that stage where these systems are at least consistently as good as or better than humans.

Now, there's been a Department of justice investigation into Musk over full selfdriving claims.

According to Reuters, prosecutors in Washington, San Francisco are examining whether Tesla misled customers.

I hear when you look at sort of on stage discussions from people in this space, they're really bad mouthed Tesla.

Now, you could take that with a grain of salt and say it's envy, or I don't believe in their approach, but Tesla is always proving people wrong.

Anyway, this is his opinion, his contrary opinion on the Tesla approach, and he doesn't think much of it.

There are some fundamental flaws in the Tesla approach relying on cameras only, and particularly because of the way they've configured the cameras, where you don't have any stereoscopic imaging, so you can do parallax imaging to get some accurate distance measurement.

Tesla is relying entirely on AI inference to try to measure distance to objects, which is an inherently flawed approach.

The system that they have devised is not really capable of robust automated driving, and probably never will be.

Between the name and what Elon Musk has consistently said for the last six years, since October of 2016, when they launched autopilot version two.

And he started his presentation with starting today, all vehicles rolling out of the Tesla factory have all the hardware they need to get to level five.

Autonomy.

Which was a lie then and it's a lie today.

He's a pinch angry, I think, which is up to the sort of a toad that I hear of these things.

But yeah, well, we'll see.

But Tesla's future is highly reliant on that's one big aspect of it.

It's not just selling cars.

Yeah, well, I suspect that they probably wouldn't do the same thing now.

So that's back in 2016, and Tesla was not in a profitable position back then, so they started selling full selfdriving, I think partly just as a way to get revenue into the company, a future promise of a future feature.

Since then, they've become very profitable and very stable.

So if they were starting this program now, I don't think they would be selling this feature for the future at ten, $20,000.

But, yeah, I suspect back then they just wanted the cash flow.

And another problem that I've seen come up is people like you who have the full self driving beta but aren't using it.

So apparently that's a bit of an issue because it's kind of annoying.

Right? It turns off and you think, Well, I'll just drive normally for now.

Yeah, I've.

Got better things to do.

Sure.

Even as you're retirement.

But this has become an issue because they're getting less data and they need more data, which is maybe one of the reasons why they're trying to roll it out to even people with bad driving scores.

Yeah, but could they possibly even crunch all the data that they're getting? Almost on the inside observer, I have a friend who owns a Tesla, but you I'm amazed at how the promises keep coming that it's later this year, end of the year, next year, and year after year it's always there.

But watching the progress of Auto full self driving beta, it does seem to be a slow crawl.

Something could happen where everything comes together.

I don't know, everything about it to ComEd and maybe they'll solve something that puts everything together and suddenly it makes a giant leap forward.

But right now and we'll see.

We'll see.

Because we're six months away from testing your car again on the same route, and we'll see how it does.

And we had a rainy day last year, so it wasn't perfect, but yeah.

Anyway, France is doing something quite unusual, even for France.

Yeah.

So there is new legislation that was approved this week that requires all parking lots in France with spaces for at least 80 vehicles.

This is both existing and new parking lots be covered by solar panels.

So this is great.

You think that has an 80 vehicle parking lot? What would that be? A strip mall? A strip mall would have that.

Yeah, I guess so.

We have quite a few kind of small parking lots in our city.

I think that wouldn't qualify.

Or even a big hotel.

Brian would have 80 spots, wouldn't it? I mean, if you have 80 rooms, you'd have 80 spots.

Yeah, it just makes sense.

Like, this is schools, maybe.

Yeah, schools.

This is space that it's just there.

And if we put solar panels on it, it will keep the rain off the cars and produce electricity.

It's a nice incentive.

So you have to do this.

Yeah, this is the law.

So according to the government, the potential of the measure could reach up to eleven gigawatts, or the equivalent of the power of ten nuclear reactors at midday on a Sunday in the summer.

So that's interesting.

That's a lot of power just from parking lots.

No, and we've had stories in the past about covering canals.

Like in California, I might as well cover the canals.

It's just all this space that we have that could have a double use.

And parking lots is one of them.

You know, though, I wonder what the business model is for this, what the payback is, because I don't know what France's tariff system is, or if they have any money for just putting out the panels or the feed in of the electricity to the grid, how they pay and what the payback period is.

But let's say that it's reasonable.

You would have customers that would be pretty happy to be parking under a structure, an outdoor structure that shaded you, perhaps shield you from precipitation.

And you could sit and wait for your spousal unit to shop.

And you wouldn't cook in the sun.

He would be shaded and comfortable.

No, we have a real problem here.

We have very hot sun in the summertime, so always better to get a parking spot with shade.

I thought this was interesting.

So it's the bigger parking lots that are going to have to do this first.

Car parks with 400 spaces or more have about three years to comply, and then the smaller parking lots get about five years to complete.

So this isn't just new construction.

This is existing construction.

Existing parking lots.

That is a big deal.

My goodness.

Yeah.

No, and if you think of some of the like, think of I don't know if they have Walmart in France, but you think of Walmart, the Walmart, the giant parking lots that we have for places like Walmart or shopping malls.

Man, that would be a lot of solar panels.

Yeah.

I've been thinking about what we'll use, because the grocery store that we went to last night of the blizzard actually has a bunch of stuff built on the outside of what used to be a parking lot.

There's actually an office building there with yeah, they've been restaurants used to be a gigantic parking lot, but they keep adding businesses to it.

And that confused me because it's hard to find now it's easy to find a store at the end of a giant parking lot that's 10 miles away.

There are walmarts in China.

Do they? Yeah, they do.

Wow.

There's no French walmart in France, so I just Google that.

Of course, there's a French Disneyland, but there's no French Walmart.

It's basically the same, right? Yeah.

Disney.

When we do go to a robot taxi future, we're going to need less parking spaces.

Right.

So the way I envision it is, say I've got a shopping mall close to me that's got lots of parking spaces.

And I think that what they could say is, well, you know, part of this shopping mall can be designated for Robotaxis because, you know, robotaxis will go mostly at the peak of when people get on and off work and on and off school.

It's just like rush hour.

But for the rest of the day, they'll have to sit somewhere.

They'll need somewhere to have they'll need to go somewhere where they can charge and where they can somewhere nearby, different areas of town.

I don't know where that's going to be.

Yeah.

Plus, I imagine it will be like the movie Cars, and they'll want to hang around together at a party, have social issues and things like that.

Of course it will be like that.

But at the same time, I'm wondering if we'll need less.

Well, I mean, that's what Tony Seba says.

We'll need less parking lots.

And there's a significant amount of Los Angeles that has nothing but parking lots.

And that's also a heat gainer for it increases the urban island, t island of cities as parking lots.

Yeah.

Well, hopefully we can densify all of our cities and just start building more building and housing on all these parking lots we're not going to.

Right? And that'll be an exciting future.

Plus like a driven right to the door.

And hopefully some sort of device will lift me up and put me on an automated cart that will drive me around.

Because walking is just too much for sure in the future, I think.

So Porsche has made 100,000 cars.

What does it mean? 100,000 of Brian? This is the Porsche Taycan electric car.

They've now produced 1000 of this car.

So it's been a pretty big success for Porsche.

These are in demand.

They are selling more of these than the 911, which is kind of the marquee car for Porsche.

What I didn't know is it's not a huge company.

This is really a niche player.

So they delivered just over 300,000 vehicles last year.

So they're a small car company niche and of course, very expensive.

Tesla deliver like, one and a half million.

Yeah, and they're just getting going.

This is with two new factories that just went up.

This is just with one.

Yeah.

So they delivered just over 300,000 vehicles total, and 41,000 of them were the all electric Ticans.

So they have plans to electrify more of their lineup.

But like a lot of things, it's been a little bit delayed.

The Macan was the next one that they were going to electrify, and so far they haven't managed to do that.

They've been surprised by that, haven't they? I mean, I think they've been overwhelmed by demand, but they've also stepped up to meet that demand, which is great, too.

Yeah, but it really does make sense if you're someone who's interested in a Porsche, you're interested in performance driving.

And as we know, Electric makes for fantastic performance driving.

And if you're wealthy, then you want to impress your wealthy green friends.

Well, there's nothing more luxurious, though, than driving quiet, so I love that.

I don't know.

Would that impress your green friends to a Porsche can? Some of them seems a little excessive.

I've impressed myself.

Maybe that's really what counts in the car world.

Yeah.

I don't know.

It's a lot of money and you could probably solve the world hunger in a small nation somewhere for the purchase of that car.

But Electric says that Tesla is now earning eight times more per car than Toyota.

And Toyota is basically one of the world's largest automakers, and they're starting to apparently notice.

Back in Japan, according to Electric, for example, tesla reported $3.3 billion in net profit last quarter, compared to Toyota earning just roughly 3 billion.

So.

Yeah, Tesla.

This is despite Toyota delivering eight times more cars than Tesla in the same time period, and Tesla beat them on profits.

That's kind of wild.

It is.

So they made the same money, same profits.

But wow, I mean, the demand for Tesla is high.

There's this whole inflation thing going on.

There's the supply problem, the chip shortages.

So they have eat up their prices a little bit.

Thousand here, thousand there, as a lot of people are.

What do you think it is? It's like a third of profit per car or something like that.

It's really high.

It's higher than most people.

Yeah, I don't know.

But the traditional automakers make more money on things like service and part of stuff.

So this milestone of Tesla beating Toyota and earnings during a quarter is especially impressive when you consider that just a decade ago, toyota owned 3% of Tesla with just a $50 million investment.

Think of how they get rid of that.

So now Tesla generates $50 million in free cash flow almost every day, which is why the CEO can do cookie things and do whatever they want.

So it's now time for the Tweet of the Week.

This is where I highlight a tweet that I like.

There's a couple of good ones.

Maybe I'll do two.

This week from Jenny Chase, solar analyst with Bloomberg NEF New Energy Finance.

It's a casual line from those hippies at Pakistan's National Electric Power Regulatory Authority.

And this is basically what they said in their report.

They said the existing average cost of supply electricity to consumers is high, way too high.

And one way to reduce this high cost is to procure cheap electricity from indigenous resources like wind and solar.

Now, if we heard that from our utility in Canada, that would be remarkable.

But this is coming from Pakistan, a very conservative place, who is not known, especially in governmental terms, to talk like this.

But they see the value of this.

No utility talks this way, actually.

But Pakistan is and because she lives in the solar space, she knows nobody else is saying that but Pakistan Solar, or pardon me, the electricity utility is saying that one way that we're going to lower prices is by buying wind and solar.

So good for them.

Yeah.

As we've said before, the fuel costs for wind and solar are zero.

And now a secondary Tweet of the week.

Just because I wanted to do too, and I hate deciding, brian, it's a lot of work to decide.

Why should I have to decide? Fred lambert lambert.

Lambert.

Lambert.

Fred Lambert, editor in chief at Electric.

He says his personal account he says when I talk about Elon's feedback loop being hijacked by superfans, this is what I mean.

And he has a story from the Mercury News in San Jose, California.

And before I go on, I just want to say that Fred owns like, five teslas has been the biggest fan of Tesla and he's a journalist, but he's been reporting on Tesla forever.

He is an enthusiast.

He's cheering them on in every way.

But Elon Musk blocked him once a long time ago because he had something mildly critical to say and Elon couldn't just take that.

So what Fred thinks is that Elon like Michael Jackson and other people, they have this feedback loop of everybody who's constantly praising them.

And this is a story from the San Jose newspaper that says that this one guy who's like a dad was tweeting him like 19 times a day or something.

And Elon was often responding to him because it's such praise.

And the softspoken superfan dad praised him for being fit, ripped and healthy and asked, hey Elon Musk, what's your secret? It sounds like almost a joke, like a comedian might do that because it's the opposite of true.

He's not fit, he's not ripped, he's not healthy.

You look at him and you see a guy who doesn't he's like an It guy who never gets an hour of sleep.

It looks like he hasn't had sleep in years.

And certainly not the healthy lifestyle and certainly no son.

And the world's richest man's response was how do I keep fit and healthy? Fasting and diabetic drug that promotes weight loss.

So good for you.

When you're rich, you get to have the diagnosis.

Drugs that promote weight loss and fasting is not good.

Sumo wrestlers fast.

They don't eat until 01:00 p.m.

In the afternoon.

Yeah.

Wow.

Not to 01:00 p.m.

In the afternoon.

That is a CES fast fact for you.

That's because they store more weight if they don't eat all day.

They train their body to fast.

See, in human history, back when we were in caves and such, ten years ago, if you didn't eat, your body would think it was a famine and it would store extra weight.

It would just change.

So like fat people like me would survive in a zombie apocalypse.

So my nutritionist tells me because we would need 20% less calories because we're that more efficient.

Anyway, so we get a little bit of feedback here from the Twitter says clean energy fraud.

You guys are talking about the future of hydrogen.

So check out this podcast and what was it? It says this guy's super anti hydrogen and has some great points.

And this is from Nelson.

The podcast was our friend Mark Mslop at Energy Talk Show.

He has a podcast as well.

Occasionally puts out a guest, Paul Martin, a chemical engineer with a 30 year history of working with hydrogen and a member of the Hydrogen Science Coalition.

And I'll put a link to that in the show notes if you want to hear some smack talk on hydrogen.

And coming up in the show is the lightning round zoom through the rest of the week's headlines in a fast fashion.

We like to hear from you.

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That sound means it is time for the lightning round, where we'll end the show this way.

A fast paced look of the week in clean energy and climate news.

Canada is putting the break on China's $4 billion lithium acquisition free.

China is here buying up all the lithium they can, and Canada has finally said no.

So Chinese companies have been the biggest financers of overseas lithium projects globally in recent years, including purchases of Canadian listed assets.

And that's a new development, Brian.

Yeah.

So this is new legislation that limits the foreign ownership of some of these critical minerals that we're going to need for the electric revolution.

Call it the biden approach, saying no more China.

The Charging Interface Initiative, a global industry association focused on the electrification of transportation, has launched its new megawatt charging system.

MCs is going to be called.

We have CCS, the non Tesla standard for charging connectors.

This is going to be MCs.

So memorize that term.

Brian.

MCs is the new megawatt charging system standard for North America.

So this will be some specific kind of plug and protocol for how to charge at even higher speeds.

Megawatt speeds for trucks, basically for trucks, big trucks.

Not necessarily all semitransport trucks, but medium trucks as well.

This is interesting.

The 2023 Kia EV six base trim has been dropped.

And the starting price that means has dropped to an unfortunate $50,000 US.

That means brian, I can't afford it.

Yes, that's too bad.

I mean, we sometimes do get different trim levels here in Canada, so we'll see.

But 50,000 is a lot.

Another CS fast fact, the golden toad is the first species to go extinct to climate change.

Put that in your toaster and smoke it.

It's too warm for them.

And I guess the towed has had enough.

Panasonic has broken ground on their EV battery factory in Kansas.

This is what we refer to early red states getting a lot of this EV manufacturing, green tech manufacturing and jobs.

And they'll be making 2070 cylindrical cells.

A Viking bus orders 31 Mercedes Benz E Cetera buses as long distance runners in the country known as Denmark.

Hello, Denmark.

The reason I bring that up is because we've mentioned this before.

When will long distance city to city buses electrify? Well, the answer is, I guess it's starting.

That's great.

The market share of zero mission light duty vehicle registrations in Canada hit 9.4% in the third quarter of this year.

And that's a new record.

It's up from any previous record which shows that the EV adoption is accelerating in Canada.

Yeah, we're definitely past some sort of a tipping point, which is often said to be around 5% of the market.

So, yeah.

Canada at 9.4% EVs.

That's fantastic.

How many Ford Mustang electrics do you see around? I see them almost every day now.

Maybe it's the same neighborhood, I don't know, but I see them everywhere.

The North End, one of 600 EV sold in Europe will be made by Chinese makers of EVs by 2025.

Fitch solution says, according to the China EV Post, So that's interesting.

Something we've been following since the early days of this podcast is when will Chinese EV makers start to make gains in Western markets? Yeah, and I guess you're at first, because it's always Europe first, isn't it? Because they need their EVs over there.

It's physically closer and they have tougher regulations to kind of phase out combustion.

A slight majority of California voters favor the recently announced ban on new sales of gasoline powered vehicles by 2035.

Only 52% and 43% disapprove, but hopefully they'll come around when prices do.

I don't think anyone's going to complain about the range and prices there and charging infrastructure.

Another fast fact air conditioners and heating elements consume 50% of electricity in America.

Did you know that? That's a lot.

No, that's a lot.

Analysis as seen by the BBC shows that the production and transport of LNG causes up to ten times the carbon emissions compared to pipeline gas.

So build more pipeline.

I'm kidding.

This around here, liquid natural gas as opposed to actual gas that goes through pipes.

The greater than 8% electricity from a solar club in Europe for 2021.

Here's the countries that have 8% or more just from solar germany, Spain, Greece, Italy, Netherlands not bad.

And there's a whole bunch of 5%.

A whole whack at 5%.

Good for you.

Greece, by the way.

I always think of Greece as a leader in clean energy, but these things, they sneak up on you.

Amazon is meeting holiday demand this year with a fleet of over 1000 Livian electric vehicle delivery vans.

So we are talking about those for a long time now.

And I guess there's a thousand on the roads for Christmas this year.

Yeah, that's not bad.

But 10,000 next year and 50,000 a year after that or something.

Yeah, they've definitely ordered more than that.

Amazon is a big investor in Rivian and they're desperately trying to scale up their production of these vans and their pickup trucks.

So hopefully things speed up nicely.

And finally this week, Tony Sieve says in a post that speaking of Amazon, amazon created a vast information technology infrastructure, but the use of just five weeks of the year, the holiday shopping season, which is Christmas in November and December where we live, they overbuilt capacity for the rest of the year.

And he says, well, let's call that super data center.

And thus the Amazon AWS cloud was born, which you see advertised on TV.

It's now a trillion dollar business because they overbuilt something.

So the reason he mentions that, Brian, is why? Because this is what's going to happen to solar, wind and batteries.

Because solar is intermittent.

Wind is intermittent.

We need to overbuild it.

But because these technologies are so cheap and getting cheaper, we can easily overbuild it.

So Amazon, of course, a large amount of shopping happens in November and December, the Christmas shopping season here in Canada and the US.

So they had to really beef up their online system to handle all these transactions in December.

And what did they end up with? Amazon Web Services, which is now a trillion dollar business, apparently.

Yes, it's a lot of money just for overbuilding something, because that's what's going to happen with the energy markets, because we're going to have extra solar, extra wind around.

That is our show for this week.

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