Latest / Clean Power Hour / Clean Power Hour LIVE | August 24, 2023 | Speeding the Energy Transition

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Clean Power Hour LIVE | August 24, 2023 | Speeding the Energy Transition · Clean Power Hour

• 0:53
  Tim Montague: Welcome to the Clean Power Hour live. I'm Tim Montague, your host today on the Clean Power Hour nuclear power.
• 0:59
  Tim Montague: It's not as effective as some people think it is, and we're going to talk about that effective meaning decarbonizing the grid CTL conveys unveils Evie battery enabling 400 kilometre driving range on a 10 minute charge Holy moly. And NextEra has a 250 gigawatt pipeline with almost 150 gigawatts of secured interconnection. Over 20 gigawatts of capacity and their construction backlog. Yeah.
• 1:28
  Tim Montague: NextEra is the largest solar developer in America. That is a fact. Welcome to the show, by co host and the commercial solar guide, John Weaver. Welcome.
• 1:38
  John Weaver: Hey, Tim, how you doing? I hope the hope the times are going nice. And yeah.
• 1:41
  John Weaver: NextEra has a 250 gigawatt pipeline of projects. And I'm not sure how to emotionally react by that react to that. But I just thought that we should all talk about it. And there's something else interesting about their giant pipeline is that they also own a transmission company, I covered their quarterly earnings recently. And their transmission company says, Hey, sometimes when transmission we can't get our projects built because the grids bad, then we'll just build our own power lines, because we own a power transmission, transmission company. So that just made me feel really jealous. And, you know, envious of next era and the giant pipeline. So that's, you know why that one got on the list. I hope everybody else is doing well this week and building solar, Tim, anything interesting going on for you?
• 2:34
  Tim Montague: Well, I just moderated a panel on energy storage, grid scale energy storage with Duke Energy, ESS NKU, that makes a iron flow battery, and a energy developer called Grid store. So looking forward to bringing more about that, to our audience. And to the readers of PV magazine, I've started to write some articles for PV magazine, noted on LinkedIn this week, John. And it's really fun. I don't know why I stayed on the sidelines so long. But I want to remind our listeners that you can find all of our content at Clean Power hour.com. That's our main website. We're posting two interviews, or this news roundup and an additional interview. So we post two shows a week, the pre recorded interviews drop on Tuesdays, and then we do this live on Thursday. And then the recording is promoted on Friday.
• 3:25
  Tim Montague: But the best place to catch the Live is on YouTube, we promote it also on Facebook and LinkedIn. But just FYI, I think the user experience is best on YouTube. And I want to give a shout out to Joe Scharf, for being here, and also for being on the webinar on energy storage. So that was interesting. You know, the, the, right now, energy storage in North America, John is experiencing a boom. And that's mostly lithium technology. And there's a double edge with lithium, right? There's safety concerns, there's thermal runaway concerns, their supply chain concerns, and then, and that's short duration. And it's very good for what it does, right. But let's face it, 70% of those cells are made overseas.
• 4:16
  Tim Montague: And so from a national security perspective, we might want to consider leaning into some other things. Iron flow, for example, or iron air, I wrote a story about form energy. They released a white paper recently, where they point out that, you know, we can reduce the cost of grid energy for New Yorkers by 29%.
• 4:38
  Tim Montague: If you would adopt our iron air technology now they're biassed they're promoting their certain technology. But that kind of long duration energy storage based on iron, it's a rust battery what what form energy is doing, which is fascinating. I want to I want to see with a microscope inside how it charges and discharges, right? Because it's it's taking iron. It's it's converting interest just by oxidising it and then vice versa. And in that process, electrons either fly on or fly off the materials. It's quite fascinating, but I don't really understand how that works. But anyway, and then on that on the lithium front canarie media published a story this week about fires. There were three fires with with grid scale energy deployments in New York state which left the governor Governor hotel kind of scrambling to assure New Yorkers that batteries are safe. And every fire is the black guy on the industry and we nobody likes thermal runaway in their in their battery project. One of those was owned by NextEra though that was one of the things that reminded me of that story because they There is also doing large scale storage deployments. But what are your perspectives on on battery energy storage, John.
• 5:58
  John Weaver: So right now I'm writing a story for PV mag, reviewing a release by the American clean power society or American ACP American clean power. And I'm covering just some reviews there, best practices by first responders, for energy storage, thermal incidents. And I think, you know, we're going to have to get good at batteries. There's already 1000s and 1000s of systems 10s of 1000s. I don't know if we're in the millions of batteries, individual battery systems deployed across the nation. But we do have a lot.
• 6:36
  John Weaver: And we're going to have incidents, we need to figure out how to minimise them. You know, we often mentioned that lithium.
• 6:46
  John Weaver: So there's different mixes of lithium ion batteries. So lithium with nickel, and Cobalt is more flammable, maybe then, lithium phosphates, because of an oxygen thing. However, some of the batteries in New York were lithium phosphate batteries. So while they have less risk than the lithium ion, they have lithium phosphate, they still do burn. So it's, it's a thing we're gonna have to learn to get good at, and we're gonna have to deal with it and learn how to manage it. You know, I hear that the number of car fires we have per years, so huge, that we just become numb to it. We can't become that way with batteries, it would really upset me if if we became that way with batteries. Because Because we shouldn't. And, you know, it's interesting, this document that I'm covering, it says that one of the there's a there's a evolving strategy right now with how to manage batteries. And I guess I'll go into this next week after I pub, the article, but one of the schools of thought is called the make it burn, let it burn, thought where once the thing starts burning, you need to let it burn to zero. And you need to maybe even if an event occurs, that destroys a chunk of it, you need to make it burn. So it's let it burn, make it burn. And then make it burn out logic is interesting, because there's a discussion about fire suppression systems and lithium ion, whether you should have them or not, or whether you should have the inverse of a fire suppression system. I learned this this morning, Tim.
• 8:20
  John Weaver: So
• 8:20
  Tim Montague: fire accelerator.
• 8:20
  Tim Montague: It's interesting. Yes, sir.
• 8:22
  Tim Montague: Interesting idea. I mean, these some of these fires have burned for several days, right, they are difficult to put out because lithium is so reactive. And it can react with water. In fact, if you take a piece of pure it, my understanding is if you take pure lithium, and drop it into a class of water, it'll burst into flames or explode. And so you think about putting out a lithium fire, it's not a matter of pouring water on it, you got to pour other things on it. And you know, you're you're trying to prevent oxygen from being available, because that is one of the things it's reacting with, at least I think it is.
• 8:54
  Tim Montague: And oxygen is very reactive just as lithium is and and then you get this thermal runaway. But I want to put the story that I wrote on screen. And you know, the title here is multiday energy storage increases grid capacity by a factor of 10. What that's referring to is a comparison that formed in form energy, which has a long duration iron heirs. Read.
• 9:18
  Tim Montague: That's the photo. So cool. It is extremely cool. It looks, this looks like a NASA photograph.
• 9:22
  Tim Montague: Actually, I hope it's not that far out, like I hope this is is more real. I mean, they have announced deployments now in three states, Colorado, Minnesota, and now New York, where they just won a $12 million grant from NYSERDA.
• 9:36
  Tim Montague: Notably, they sopped up 12 million of this $17 million programme. And kudos to NYSERDA.
• 9:44
  Tim Montague: For feeding the market and seeding the market. This is so important for government to do this so that we can get these deployments on the ground and really start trying this technology out and see if it's going to give the grid what it says it can do. But what's interesting about this 100 hour duration storage is they found that when they compare that to the alternative of just doing a bunch more lithium batteries, okay. That, yeah, you can deploy gigawatts of lithium, around 40 gigawatts, right, but I'm sorry, it would be 60. If you wanted to solve the problem with short duration batteries, it would be 60 gigawatts of battery capacity. Okay. But that only gives you 538 gigawatt hours of energy storage versus this iron air technology, which you would only deploy 40 gigawatts, but you get 5000 gigawatt hours out and really, those 5000 gigawatt hours is what really is going to make a difference, right? We've we have an estimate, I think from BNL Berkeley national laboratories that Um, we need six terawatt hours of storage on the grid by 2050. To clean the grid, so we're talking terawatt scale batteries on the grid. So So anyway, this was a compelling white paper. And I look forward to getting feedback from our listeners about what they think about iron era, there was a comment about somebody waiting in the wings to see how iron technology evolves. And this is Rick saying, I'm waiting for full deployment. I'm not sure what that means to develop fully developed, fully developed iron batteries for their cheap common components. You know, iron is super abundant in the Earth's crust. So anyway, it's kind of an apples and oranges situation today, the lion's share batteries going on the grid, whether that's buying the metre, or for grid scale, is lithium.
• 12:37
  Tim Montague: And that's because of the economics. And they're just hard to beat right now. But then there's this longer, bigger picture, you know, where we're replacing peaker plants and coal and natural gas plants, right, with big batteries and solar arrays and wind farms. And we're going to need other technologies. And it just makes sense to me that if we can deploy stuff that we can make easily here in the US, we want to do that.
• 13:04
  John Weaver: Form. I'm starting to warm up to them. You're, as you mentioned, they have projects that seem to be moving forward, and at least three states now. And they have a factory that's being constructed in West Virginia. I, I'm really interested actually reading this paper and understanding the benefit. I mean, I get that they have a greater capacity, 5000 gigawatt hours versus 538 gigawatt hours. But, you know, going from 538 to 5005 terawatt hours, that's a lot of money.
• 13:40
  John Weaver: Because you know, 538 gigawatt hours is $400 per kilowatt hour.
• 13:47
  John Weaver: But for form energy, they're probably in the 1500 to $2,000 per Well, actually, no, they suggest that they'll be down to 10 to $20 per gigawatt hour. So, so if it's a 10x, you know, as we say, as I say it out loud, if it's a 10x price for lithium ion over form, form will give you 10x capacity. Hey, there's
• 14:12
  Tim Montague: a JV. I mean, there is somewhat level playing field there. Yeah,
• 14:17
  John Weaver: and I hope, I hope it works. I was super surprised with the when I saw that image.
• 14:21
  John Weaver: The reason I said it was so cool, I was super surprised that I was expecting some giant vat of liquid or something. But it's really these little slots, and you can just pull one in pulling out, it may not be that easy.
• 14:36
  John Weaver: But I bet you they're gonna manufacture the heck out of these units and slowly get smarter and how they do it. And I bet these individual I guess, blades, which reminds me very much of data centres, I bet you these individual blades can just be pulled out and slid back in and you can just replace him if they need repair. So I'm, I'm getting warmer on form, I liked the idea, I still want to see us better grasp long duration, or because it's going to be we need to figure out how to pay them properly. Right now we bid on like an hourly basis, a minute by minute basis, well, maybe these guys will bid on a minute by minute basis in the same way and take over long chunks of it.
• 15:21
  John Weaver: But I'm just super interested in seeing them on the grid and starting to do stuff and, and one way or another we gotta like Bootstrap them as a nation to help them. Just get stuff out there. So we can run it become trusting of it and seeing what happens. There. Cool, great job form. Cool, cool article. I like reading your articles, Tim?
• 15:44
  Tim Montague: Well, I've been reading yours for three years.
• 15:45
  Tim Montague: So it's, you know, you've got some catching up to do. Well, I guess I have some catching up to do because I have to write them first. Yeah, well, let's talk about nuclear power. It is one of my favourite topics. And as our listeners know, I live in Illinois, which is the most nuclearized state in the United States. And if you say nucular, I consider you to be an ignoramus. I'm sorry, but you have to say nuclear. That is the correct pronunciation. In case you are wondering, John, but there's some research. There's some research that just came out of Sweden, of all place, the Stockholm School of Economics, and the European environmental Bureau did an analysis of nuclear energy. And right now in the United States, there is a movement headed by the doe. And I will note that the DOE gave the Vogel project in Georgia which is our most recent nuke We're a power plant that's come online, that that plant has been running for some years, but then they didn't expansion. And the expansion was a boondoggle economically, but they gave them$5 billion in loans, the DoD did. So that's an example. And then they're also very much pushing next generation, Small Modular nuclear reactors, check out my interview with Dave craft at the Nuclear Energy Information Service on our channel at clean power hour.com, where we talk about the good bad and ugly of SM N RS, and SM N RS have been a thing, right for decades, because we run nuclear submarines and nuclear aircraft carriers, right on those reactors. They're real, they're legitimate Technologies. I'm not questioning that whatsoever. But the rate at which you can deploy it and the cost of the energy is really the deal kicker or the deal breaker here. And they concluded, you know, these Europeans, they're very savvy.
• 17:39
  Tim Montague: They live in the future, John, in case you want to go to the future just go to Northern Europe. It's really cool.
• 17:45
  Tim Montague: Because they've, they've adopted clean energy technologies faster than we have in the US because energy is so frickin expensive.
• 17:52
  Tim Montague: In Europe, it we're talking four to 10 times as much as you and I pay. And that's kind of across the board, whether it's fossil or other technology. So anyway, they concluded that this is not going to be good for decarbonizing the economy.
• 18:06
  Tim Montague: That's kind of the bottom dollar here. And they say that reach it, researchers show that in terms of cost and speed, renewable energy sources have already beaten nuclear, and that each investment in new nuclear plants delays decarbonisation compared to investments in renewable energies. So that's kind of my point of view here is if we're going to make the energy transition as quickly as possible. We don't have time for nuclear. I don't doubt it's gonna be great for Elon Musk's, you know, based on Mars, and I look forward to seeing Elon on Mars. But what do you think about nuclear? John?
• 18:46
  John Weaver: I like nuclear. I think nuclear is cool. The only negative there's two negative things about nuclear one is that it's not getting built. I mean, that's it. That's
• 18:54
  Tim Montague: an American, lost anyway.
• 18:56
  John Weaver: It's yeah, it's not getting built. It's in terms of the global cut of electricity.
• 18:59
  John Weaver: Nuclear used to be at like 18%.
• 19:06
  John Weaver: It's now going down, down, down, and it's under nine under 10%.
• 19:11
  John Weaver: Gaining on 9%. In a time when we need nuclear, it's going the other direction. So I'm sorry, that's that's my number one attack on nuclear my number two attack on nuclear the people that are nuclear proponents, they're absolutely obnoxious.
• 19:27
  John Weaver: But that's, you know, that's not nuclear power plants fault.
• 19:30
  John Weaver: That's just the internet and how we're all a bunch of weirdos sometimes. So the, we got to build nuclear. I mean, if we're going to, I mean, there was this massive celebration at this power plant coming out in Georgia. And it's the first new power plant to start in 30 years. I mean, this is, nukes used to be like 20 to 2425 30% of US electricity. I don't know what they were back in the 80s.
• 19:55
  John Weaver: But now they're under 20.
• 19:58
  John Weaver: They're like 1718, maybe with Vogel turning on their back to 19. Wonderful, but we need the nukes. But I just, I can't believe in them. I can't trust in them in the long term because of where we're at. And, you know, right now, new nuclear in the US is a lower probability than Tim Latimer at first Furbo energy deploying massive geo geothermal. And so if I'm going to have an emotion right now about a new technology, it's Tim and his geothermal at Furbo. And yeah, sure, I want to nuclear, build it, build it, build it, or at minimum, don't shut it off, please don't shut off our nuclear power plants, but quick pounding on the table and telling me how nuclear runs when the sun goes down. Because nobody cares. What's happening when the sun goes down, if there's no nuclear plant, you know, batteries, and solar and wind wouldn't need to exist if nuclear had maxed out the grid, and it didn't. And so now we're here in 2023, and shits happening, and we need to build stuff. So great love nuclear.
• 21:13
  Tim Montague: And to your point, once you build the plant, it makes a lot of sense to keep it running. And that's what we're doing in Illinois. All of our energy legislation fija and Seija. Now, from the last five years, also provides incentives for the nuclear industry because the economics of those plants are bad. The operators want to shut them down. And, and so the state has given them a handout in the form of xex. So just like we have rexon in renewable energy, they have xex In nuclear stands for zero energy, carbon credits, and it keeps the plant running in. That's good because it it is a big plant. We're talking gigawatt scale. Now the other concerns I have about nuclear and then we'll move on are the cost overruns. And this story NPV magazine from today points out that all of the projects I think 97% of the projects in the world that they analysed, have experienced coughed up cost overruns, and the cost overruns are over 100%.
• 22:13
  Tim Montague: So the project for example, they gave an example from Finland, the predicted the first cost was 3 billion and then that real cost was 11 billion more than 3x, almost 4x and Georgians are paying for the cost overruns of Vogel right. Every Georgian has on their power bill, a, a fee to pay for Vogel, because of it was a financial debacle. And then the nuclear waste, we still haven't figured out what to do long term with our nuclear waste.
• 22:43
  John Weaver: I disagree with that. We know what to do with it, we're just a bunch of pansies, and we whine about stuff. And we don't want to deal with it. None of us want it in our backyard. We're smart, we have many places we could put it, we might make mistakes. But I don't know I disagree with that, well, we
• 22:59
  Tim Montague: need to put a deep inside a mountain somewhere. But getting it to that mountain and getting that mountain approved has been has proven to be quite difficult. And so as a result, the nuclear waste is piling up on site. And that's my backyard bro. I live 50 miles from a nuclear power plant called Clinton power station. And the onsite storage is is made to be temporary, not permanent. And so we do need to find a solution for the long term waste, which is radioactive for hundreds of 1000s of years. And while it's definitely radioactive for 1000s of years, is it dangerously radioactive for 1000s of years is the question. I don't know.
• 23:31
  Tim Montague: I'm not a nuclear physicist.
• 23:34
  Tim Montague: Anyway. All right. No new nukes is my mantra today. I love that mantra. No new normal, more wind batteries and watt solar. Of course, we like solar. We like solar. All right, what's next up John?
• 23:51
  John Weaver: Cadle. And their constant battery advancements, which are really pretty interesting story. Now, here, I have a question. And, and this wasn't brought up, I mean, this was brought up by others, but I just want to see your and maybe anybody else's perspective. So so if the car can get from zero to 80%, and you know, at 80 kilowatt hours during that window, it's going to need like a one megawatt charger, are we really going to have one megawatt chargers for our cars, or 500, kW 750 Kw chargers for our cars, we might, because we're going to start building them for big trucks and big things. And they're going to be around like, I hear that the what the mega truck, not the mega the pickup truck cybertruck cybertruck, geez, I hear the cyber trucks gonna have a really fast charge rate, like 750, or something goofy, or at least the ability. So to charge a battery this big in 10 minutes, you're gonna get in a way high charging infrastructure. So maybe the reality is that, we would say that we're reaching the point where batteries are no longer the bottleneck for charging. And the world should start to shift to an energy delivery techniques, which we already talked about a lot. But that's what I really am starting to take from what's happening with the batteries. I think the charge rate will no longer be an issue as we learn. And eventually we'll plug our cars into whatever the heck we want, and it'll just be fallen. So the title
• 25:22
  Tim Montague: of this story by Valerie Thompson, and PV magazine is CTL, and a unveils evey battery enabling a 400 kilometre driving range on a 10 minute charge. That is incredible, right? If you when I owned my Tesla, it would take at least half an hour to get full, you know, 300 miles of range. At least right and now there's they're they're squishing this by a factor of three. That's amazing. What is the technology though, that they're that they're using here? Is this some exotic lithium technology or what is it? This is just the amine phosphate.
• 26:00
  John Weaver: Yeah, this is their standard product. This is like what they do you know, I don't think it's any magic. It doesn't exist yet. But they're this Cadle man, they're there. They are the leading battery company.
• 26:12
  John Weaver: I think in the world. I mean, BYD might be behind them, but and Tesla, but I really, I mean, a lot of the cells, Kato cells are in Tesla vehicles, because Tesla hasn't scaled fast enough to feed all their stuff. So this is standard battery product, like in fact, they think this type of product is close to market, versus a lot of people who announced their headline saying hey, we did this and, you know, just coming from this company. It's much more real than any of the other headlines I see from the cooler from the other companies announcing break things like this. Like, for instance, when Toyota says it, it's not real, because apparently Toyota has been talking about super high charging and all kinds of stuff for like 20 years. So I guess I've been taught not to accept toilet headlines, but these guys and they're and you know, Elon Musk, his headlines are real to in the year 2027, to 2029. And they will be real, but Kadal, they're gonna say, a headline, and then a month later, they're gonna be like, Oh, here's one of the cars with the technology in it. And then a year later, it's going to be in a whole bunch of cars. So I'm just, I like watching this man, where we are in the midst of the early stages of the energy storage, not the early stages, maybe the middle of the energy storage for vehicle evolutions to occur.
• 27:32
  John Weaver: Like, it's happening all around us. The factories are scaling.
• 27:36
  John Weaver: More people that are intelligent are putting their eyes on it.
• 27:40
  John Weaver: More and more is happening surrounding car batteries, with all these factories and all these manufacturers. We're gonna keep seeing this come out, bam, bam, bam. And it's gonna be like, Oh, I didn't think that was possible. All the people from 2016, who are really smart, and who we listen to Tim, because they are the smart people. They're all wrong.
• 27:59
  John Weaver: They're like, they're way behind what turned out to be real.
• 28:04
  John Weaver: Everybody's like, Oh, you'll never charge fast because lithium is so unstable. Well, you're wrong. We figured it out.
• 28:10
  John Weaver: We just need to pour, you know,$50 billion on it, and a whole bunch of human brains just staring at it. And, man, it's common. We're in the midst of it. Appreciate this, Timothy, you're watching a revolution.
• 28:25
  Tim Montague: Yes. And to answer your question, it says the Chinese battery manufacturer produced 37% of the world's electric vehicle batteries, just one manufacturer CaCl they are the largest battery maker in the world. And earlier this year, we reported on their story about this 500 Watt hour per kilogramme technology that they're promoting for electrification of air travel, electric aeroplanes are real. Of course, they're, you know, initially going after short distance and then medium distance. You know, countries like Norway have set a path to having pure electric aeroplanes for regional air travel within country by 2030. That's only seven years away. It's coming.
• 29:03
  Tim Montague: And that'll be massive for decarbonizing transportation.
• 29:08
  Tim Montague: The you know, gosh, good. It's such a weird world that we live in John, because there's so many good things are happening, right. But by the same token, we see the writing on the wall that climate change is gonna be a brutal force for humanity, right? The heat waves the fires, the floods. It's it's gnarly.
• 29:31
  Tim Montague: And c'est la vie though like living 500 years ago was no walk in the park either. I've been listening to Dan Carlin's podcast if you ever want to geek out on ancient history, check out Dan Carlin's podcast, if you just Google it, Dan Carlin with a C. He she, he goes to town on ancient history. And it was a short, brutal life It really was. So climate change is going to be intense. It's going to be tough, but human humanity will survive it. It's just a question of, can we maintain this good, like Cakewalk of a life that we have that fossil fuels gave us right? Fossil fuels have been a dream for humanity. And now we have technologies to supplant them and we need to deploy those as quickly as possible.
• 30:23
  John Weaver: I'm in a big push of history reading these days, I've been recently focusing on my European history, Timothy.
• 30:32
  John Weaver: I'm enjoying seeing various sprigs of the modern political economic structure we're seeing a modern Liberty advanced the ideas of it coming from the Holy Roman Empire, seeing early sparks of capitalism from the Dutch and the English. Anyway, that's enough for that, Tim, but thank you for bringing up history stuff because I'm I'm super excited with my little books that I'm reading. The Holy Roman Empire is a pretty interesting legal structure of sorts that existed so So hey, you know,
• 31:04
  Tim Montague: you wrote a story about Norse on now we reported on Norse on last week. Is this is this the same exact story or just a
• 31:14
  John Weaver: no it must have gotten copied over because I was super excited about it. Okay, if we reported on North Sun Yeah, cuz this is this is the North somewhere. I wrote my article on it. Ubi
• 31:25
  Tim Montague: last week, it is a good story. Five gigawatts of wafer facility coming to the US for Meyer burger. But just go to go to clean power hour check out the live from last week, I think. Yeah, let's go to the NWSL story, or is it may so I want to be right in my pronunciations. Since I made a point about nuclear today, John,
• 31:45
  John Weaver: well, don't worry, the Europeans will make fun of your accent. It's okay.
• 31:50
  Tim Montague: Is it a cell in the cell? Oh, no,
• 31:53
  John Weaver: don't ask me. I say you're the English major, aren't you? Yeah, no political science, political science. Come on. Yes.
• 31:59
  John Weaver: So this is just it's not a story. It's just me driving by, you know, once a week on Wednesdays, I go down to my company's other office. And I'm just driving by the vineyard wind staging ground. And if you look at the image, you can see that there's two gentlemen on a lift while two workers on a lift, and they're right up next to the unit. And you can see their size relative to the unit.
• 32:23
  John Weaver: And the fact that this is like two or three times the size of a school bus. And these guys are right next to it. In fact, they're slightly closer. So they should even be bigger, which means this thing might be a little bit smaller. And I we were just driving by I was in the car with my residential manager, Adam jet. We were just cruising up and down the water wanted to go see it, you can see the monopiles in the back that are stacked. And it was just seeing a human being next to the unit was just cool. And so I
• 32:55
  Tim Montague: like to see if we have to see if we can get you a press pass to that offshore wind conference that's coming to Boston this fall. Isn't there one in there? I think in November, that'd be sweet.
• 33:03
  Tim Montague: October or November, I'll file an application just to see. I don't know. I don't think I can go but maybe you could.
• 33:12
  John Weaver: Yeah, well, if it's in Boston, it's your backyard.
• 33:14
  John Weaver: It's it's it's Yeah, it is. I mean, I can throw rocks at Boston from my apartment. So So yeah, I just thought it was cool. It's just big. There's people there. And, you know, I get to drive by and see it all the time. So. So that's a that's our project. Now there is some complexity ongoing with the offshore wind and mass, there was just a contract that was cancelled for a really big project because the price was bid low. And the manufacturer said, Listen, we can't deliver it we wanted. So the plan is to renegotiate the price. Fingers crossed man. But you know, let's, you know, they cancelled it. And we're moving forward with it, which is good. The state is the Department of Energy, Department of Energy and Resources do we are recommended the cancellation the state accepted the cancellation?
• 34:02
  John Weaver: Hopefully, everybody's agreeable on the new numbers. And we can continue on, because it was like a 1.2 gigawatt wind facility. So we don't want to lose out on 1.2 Gig facilities. I think there were two of them that were requested a renegotiation. So we shall see what's gonna come next from it. So So wind, wind is doing some stuff, a second wind farm, I believe has kicked off construction or given final approval in Rhode Island. And so or maybe it's the first one but the second one in the region. So there's a 704 ish megawatt Connecticut slash Rhode Island wind farm, that's starting construction, which is now cool.
• 34:40
  John Weaver: That means, you know, we have at least two facilities being built at the same time. That's some that's some neatness.
• 34:46
  Tim Montague: So I have a question. I'm working on a story on the long term cost of energy.
• 34:49
  Tim Montague: And, you know, bringing down the cost of of utility solar, for example, unlocks things like large scale green hydrogen. But so I was I was looking at Lazard they did this, you know, annual report on the LCR. We and the 2023 report said that solar is now on par at $24 per gigawatt hour with with onshore wind. Do you know what that figure is for offshore? Because I didn't notice that or it didn't see that? I'm just curious what is the delta offshore is obviously more expensive, but it's trade off because you can get a lot more energy per megawatt because the capacity factor is going to be higher. You know, I think for example, 20 we estimate 25% capacity factor for onshore here in the Midwest onshore wind, whereas offshore it's more like 40 or 50%, isn't it?
• 35:46
  John Weaver: Yeah, it depends Yes, but yes, it can be that big. You know, this these facilities and masks are expected to be upper 40s Maybe even in 50s but offshore wind you know, I just opened up the Lazard thing real quick and utility scale solar storage and offshore winds more expensive okay. So we do have offshore wind in the document and levelized high end low end so offshore wind we're talking 42 Wind plus towards offshore wind offshore $72 per kilowatt hour.
• 36:23
  John Weaver: So pricing for offshore wind is is decently more expensive wind onshore one hour. Yeah, per megawatt hour. Yeah, so wind onshore 24 to 75 Wind offshore.
• 36:33
  John Weaver: That's without PTCS Okay, sensitive Carbon pricing, unsubsidised analysis here we go when to offshore 72 to 140. So 7.2 cents to 14 cents, wind onshore 24 to 75 utility scale solar onshore or utility scale solar 24 to 96 at the high end.
• 37:00
  John Weaver: So, offshore wind starts at 72 goes up to 14 cents per kilowatt hour. So it's it's a chunk more expensive still.
• 37:14
  Tim Montague: Cool. Well, let's talk about this phenomenon. I'm not sure what to call it. You have a story on LinkedIn today we turned on our cellular modem for OPT connect. And were able to remote into our SMA technology inverter for the first time. What a wonderful vision we are blessed with. Yes.
• 37:38
  Tim Montague: You were underwhelmed by the opposite?
• 37:39
  John Weaver: No, no, no. You know what here? You know, we I know I was totally excited about it. And the question mark on the was was a mistake here. You know, I'm going to edit that right now. That's not a question mark, edit post. That's an exclamation point. What a wonderful vision we are blessed with see punctuation matters, Tim, it's been updated.
• 37:59
  Tim Montague: Like pedometer showing you what the, you know, the current capacity of the array is
• 38:06
  John Weaver: that's just a standard SMA login. This is our Tioga Downs product project. So this is the commercial solar guy project of the week. And we have two units there that are turned on to 120 fives, and they were both maxed out. And so I was just excited because this is the first time I got to log in and see it. The on site, people could tell that it was working.
• 38:28
  John Weaver: And so everybody knew it was working. But me logging in remote, this is the first time and I also wanted to say that up Connect has a cool little package. And that's why I wrote on our document, the product slash test slash project of the week, because our Connect has a modem, a cellular modem that comes in an enclosure, and everything is wired. And all you have to do is plug in your cat five cables from your units. And the modem automatically just turns on. Now you have to do you do have to call up connect in order to get into your unit so that you might have to like do this little VPN thing. But I just thought it was really neat that they sent me an enclosure, everything was pre wired, we sent it straight to the electrician who did all the work on the site. And he knew exactly how to instal it was no challenges, the only thing we had to do is learn about the back end walkthrough process, adjust the the internet settings in the modems, and turn off automatic DHCP getting rid of automatic IP addresses one or two very simple clicks. And then boom, I had remote access. Now the reason the remote access was important is because the project is going to have a big battery attached. And the battery is not there yet. The battery has massive monitoring and all kinds of control systems. So it's good to know everything that's going on. But in the interim, we just needed the solar to be running to take care of the customer. We didn't want it wasting its life.
• 39:56
  John Weaver: And I wanted to watch it before we have this like you know, half a million dollar battery showed up from any on. And so just being able to see this and send it to the customer. And it happening so easy and smoothly was just cool. And so I gotta say thank you opt Connect for your cellular modem in a box.
• 40:15
  John Weaver: Oh, and they rent it. They let you rent a modem for you know, X time period while you're getting the rest of your system up. So it was just cool product. I was happy to have experienced it and learned how to use it. And even my electrician was happy about it. He wrote back he goes Hey, that was exciting work to do.
• 40:33
  John Weaver: It's the first time I've ever set one of these up this way.
• 40:36
  John Weaver: Thanks for teaching me something. So that was everybody was you know, feeling cool about it. So so. Yeah.
• 40:43
  Tim Montague: All right. Well, let's talk about ingot manufacturing. I assume this refers to ingots used in solar cells? Yes, sir. Or manufacturing introduces solar ingot processor, the Massachusetts based company developed the RF RBM 600, solar CZ polar to produce high purity poly silicon ingots for solar panels. Cool.
• 41:07
  John Weaver: And the neatest part for me was that it's in Massachusetts, so that means and Framingham, I think which is 30 minutes away. So I'm totally going to ask my girlfriend to go there with me and be a nerd next to me while I try to touch things, their websites and cool they build a lot of stuff. And I just and it doesn't I'm not sure if this unit exists yet because they're so far all the images I've seen are just reproductions. But I just think it's cool that it's right down the street from me. I've never had a solar ingot pulling manufacturer right down the street from me.
• 41:40
  Tim Montague: I think I saw a email about About a webinar that PV magazine is hosting on this topic. Also, the topic is manufacturing. But I saw this photo in the email. So I think apparently already build is going to be featured in that webinar. So look for that. Yeah, it's a funky looking machine, it kind of looks like a furnace, combined with a steam engine.
• 42:05
  John Weaver: All right, nice.
• 42:05
  John Weaver: Nice, nice, nice mix of everything. Oh, go for it. Yeah, I think it's neat. So So what this is doing is that it's a polar. So there's a bunch of melted poly from electric. Well, this is relatively clean poly if it's a New England, but who knows where there'll be installed. But the polar pulls the poly up through the machine.
• 42:28
  John Weaver: And I don't know any of the technicals but it pulls it up through this big tube, and it makes that straight ingot. And so they crystallise as they do that. And the mono product has a bigger crystal, I did write them at the location or on their website and said, Hey, per ingot, how many wafers Do you know of can be cut from it? And then secondly, how many ingots per year might one of these units be able to do? And I just wanted to get a rough feeling four megawatt megawatts solar per machine per year? And if I learned something, I'll bring it up on the show next week. But it looks like they're gonna be already plus, so we can go like touch stuff.
• 43:13
  Tim Montague: Oh, cool. Yeah.
• 43:13
  Tim Montague: And it says here, the ingots are 300 millimetre diameter, you know, I think the industry is using 280 Plus millimetre cells now, are they
• 43:25
  John Weaver: the bigger cells?
• 43:25
  John Weaver: They're squares, though, but they're 212 is for the bigger guys. And the smaller ones are like one ADA. But yeah.
• 43:34
  Tim Montague: And they're three metres long, 3.2 metres or 10 feet long. So long ingot, I had, you know, I was, you know, this is very enlightening. I don't know much about ingot manufacturer. It's definitely the geek end of the spectrum.
• 43:47
  Tim Montague: But very important, right? We need to make ingots here in America on mass. So we can make solar cells and solar panels with American made product.
• 43:54
  Tim Montague: Right now, the vast majority of the wafers are coming from overseas. Like, probably more than 90%.
• 44:08
  John Weaver: I would say really close. I mean, it couldn't be.
• 44:11
  Tim Montague: Yeah, we don't make a lot of wafers in the US.
• 44:14
  Tim Montague: Not today. But it's coming.
• 44:14
  Tim Montague: Right. Yep. That's story about NorSon. That's a way for story.
• 44:19
  Tim Montague: q cells, as we've covered, right is going to have wafer manufacture in Georgia.
• 44:29
  John Weaver: Yep. And, and then we have north on who's exploring it.
• 44:34
  Tim Montague: listeners can tell us how many wafers do you get out of a 3.2 metre ingot? And then how does that translate into megawatts of solar or kilowatts? Question of the day.
• 44:55
  John Weaver: All right. What's next?
• 44:56
  Tim Montague: What is next?
• 44:56
  Tim Montague: That's a damn question.
• 45:00
  John Weaver: We got to hire, we got to start to consult with our, our listeners.
• 45:07
  Tim Montague: Objects detected in the vicinity of ClearSpace.
• 45:09
  Tim Montague: One Debris Removal mission target.
• 45:12
  John Weaver: Okay, this is funny. So it's not funny, but it's fun. Yeah, it's like, Ah, damn it, but that's funny. So, so they're looking at an item, and they're saying, Okay, we're gonna remove this item from space. It's a, we're gonna test it, we're gonna research it, we're gonna figure out how to do it. Because we don't want all this debris around, because all this debris will cause collisions and mess up, you know, humanity. So there's this.
• 45:40
  John Weaver: You know, Tim, you've heard it.
• 45:43
  John Weaver: I think you've even mentioned it. There's this, this Zero Dawn thing where like, if we have a cascading debris event, where we could just circle the Earth with trillions of little tiny pieces of crap, and nobody's going to space and there's no, there's no geosynchronous anything. So, so they're trying to clean it up.
• 46:06
  John Weaver: And while they're trying to clean it up the item that they're saying, Okay, we're going to remove it from space, guess what happens to a Tim gets hit by space debris.
• 46:17
  Tim Montague: So space debris is a really big problem. And this short, this story doesn't show the picture, but maybe that's the picture space to rebuy the numbers. So here's a companion story. This is from the European Space Agency. And I'll put this tab on screen but space debris by the numbers. It's you know, you see that cloud right we have a bunch of satellites, which are not considered debris they're functioning, or many of them are. And then there's debris. I mean, I don't know, do they count active satellites as debris? I don't know. But obviously, when things crash into each other, and break apart, second law of thermodynamics says things are going to just get smaller and more numerous. And that is then a problem for things like the space station or the operating satellites, or in this case, the satellite that's trying to catch the debris is now in jeopardy.
• 47:13
  Tim Montague: It is ironic, but also telling of the scale of the problem.
• 47:18
  Tim Montague: Right? It's big problem. There's a lot of free up there.
• 47:23
  John Weaver: Yes. So, you know, we like to talk about space. And I do think that there's going to be, you know, I wonder how we're going to do it. But I do think there's going to be a space industry where we can, you know, I think we're going to literally make stuff in space. We're going to mine asteroids,
• 47:42
  Tim Montague: weavers knowledge of space. How many rocket launches since the start of the space age in 1957? Have humans made successful rocket launches?
• 47:50
  Tim Montague: This number surprised me.
• 47:54
  John Weaver: 300 you know, 212 6410 Okay, of course, why would I think 300
• 48:01
  Tim Montague: We're getting serious about space. I mean, heck, SpaceX alone is doing a launch a month. Now. I think they're
• 48:08
  John Weaver: doing a lot more than launch a month. We're here.
• 48:10
  John Weaver: There's a whole website, how many launches by space x and 2023.
• 48:16
  Tim Montague: And how many satellites have these rockets placed into Earth orbit? John?
• 48:19
  Tim Montague: That's the following question.
• 48:22
  John Weaver: All right, so So here's the question for you, Tim. How many rockets has SpaceX so far launched in 2023?
• 48:29
  Tim Montague: In 2023? Yes, I'll say
• 48:32
  Unknown: 3058. Wow. 59,003 wasn't bad. Yes.
• 48:39
  John Weaver: 53 Falcon nines, three Falcon heavies and one starship.
• 48:44
  Tim Montague: Nice. Yes. So they're gearing up for starship two? I think.
• 48:48
  John Weaver: I it's getting closer. There's gonna be another launch soon. So
• 48:51
  Tim Montague: so that number, though, of satellites placed in Earth orbit is 15,760. There's 15,000 satellites up there. And Elon is putting 1000s and 1000s more satellites, just for SpaceX. I mean, what is the internet service called?
• 49:10
  John Weaver: Space X internet,
• 49:12
  Tim Montague: I should know, because I'm a subscriber, but I don't, I don't use Starlink Starlink. I don't use it very often. But it's a nice backup to have. Like it space. It's no longer the final frontier. It's just the frontier. I think it's like, we're just we're doing it.
• 49:34
  John Weaver: Alright, I this is a climate change story. And I wanted to bring it up, because I wanted to say the number out loud and start to talk about it.
• 49:44
  John Weaver: Relative to solar incentives. So So the story is that there's a town 150 miles west of Seattle, and it's a native population population native to North America, and they're moving the town 100, about a mile away. and up a hill, that's about 120 feet above sea level. And the reason is that the town, the ocean levels have raised two feet in this region over the last X number of decades, centuries.
• 50:21
  John Weaver: And the people living here, which is a small native village, it's there, they're getting flooded out in the story, they talk about how First Avenue, which is the first street from the ocean, it's no longer viable as a place to live. It floods extensively every year for long periods. And as well, the rivers that are around this are much higher. So they the banks break.
• 50:48
  John Weaver: And, and then at the end of it, it's $460 million to rebuild this city. And if if we start putting that type of number into the price per kilowatt hour of burning gas, yeah, that's what that's where I'm going. This is where I'm going with it. I'm trying to talk about this severe. Yes, sir. That's, that's where I'm aiming is I want us to start saying, all right, every town on the coast, we need to add that cost to our price of gas to our price of coal, because those numbers are what we're actually paying. We're just kicking the can down the street, because we like to do that. So reality is that these numbers, you know, three cents, five cents per kilowatt hour.
• 51:39
  John Weaver: That ain't the price. You know, I have people who constantly Say all solar gets all these incentives. That's because they're just not paying attention to what's happening on Earth, the number of people that are literally just dying in their homes, and that and these people who have to move their homes, like the whole city has to get moved. Because it's in a flood zone. It's just getting destroyed every year from giant waves. So, you know, this is just, this is our reality. And now we're in the mitigation because we have chosen to let it go too long. We are not going to bear consequences. This is consequence, and this will keep happening. So
• 52:18
  Tim Montague: yeah, so this story by CNBC Katie Brigham Brigham. Thank you, Katie. It points out that there's another study that found that by 2050, we're looking at a cost of $100 billion of land being negatively impacted by rising tides. This is 650,000 parcels $108 billion.
• 52:39
  Tim Montague: That's real money. 100 billion dollars is real money.
• 52:47
  John Weaver: Well, that 100 billion, a huge chunk of it's in Florida, and insurance companies are pulling out of Florida.
• 52:57
  John Weaver: happening now dude, the value of people's houses are in very unsteady ground. In Florida.
• 53:01
  John Weaver: There's going to be some massive as a Florida and who's dealt with it, it pains my heart, but seeing the way the insurance and the way the state's being run right now, there's going to be a hurricane that's going to cause some massive damage, and the federal and the state level insurance company, which now covers like half the houses or some obscene number, which would totally not be viable as a business. It's just going to get blasted and there's not going to be any money. And the state of Florida doesn't make money. And it's, it's about to get there's an events going to occur. And again, and we're gonna be like, oh, there goes $3 billion of real estate that's now can't be rebuilt, because no bank will give it a mortgage in order to and take the risk. So that's just gonna get wiped off the books. And I'm wondering how the financial models are going and that report that you're talking about there, Tim, I think that report is mainly focused on the southeast, south east of the US like North Carolina, South Carolina, Myrtle Beach areas, all these low lying areas. We got a nuclear facility, the Norfolk military base, North City in Norfolk, Virginia, which is one of the most important manufacturing hubs in the United States is constantly flooding.
• 54:23
  John Weaver: So you know, big money.
• 54:26
  Tim Montague: What this story reminds me of, too, is is Peter fatalis skis analysis. I have an interview with Peter for kowski, author of climate restoration, okay, coming out in a couple of weeks. He estimates that the solution to sucking the trillion tonnes of carbon out of the atmosphere that are up there is as simple as a billion dollars of investment per year. So we're looking at that versus 100 billion in losses, right. And that's we're just, that's just one little statistic tip of the iceberg thing. When you think about the globe, and all the communities that are going to be disrupted, and the food systems, and then the mass migration, that's the real killer scenario that I have. I mean, it just strikes a lot of fear in my heart. I'm not not generally a very fearful person. But mass migration is a scary thing, because humans running into humans in unexpected ways leads to violence, right? We don't deal well with strangers showing up on our doorstep. We go tribal and and the picks and shovels come out. So yeah, the answer is much cheaper, right? Like let's do the solution. Now. Let's the the other solution that's been floated is nationalising the fossil industry, right? Because the fossil industry when it's a capitalist Endeavour is it is.
• 55:54
  Tim Montague: It is highly incentivized to keep pumping oil and keep burning natural gas, right?
• 56:05
  Tim Montague: That's the that's their raison d'etre is to make money by selling carbon. Right? That's what they do. And so there's no there's it's common sense that they're not going to stop doing it when there's a profit motive involved. But we could just capture that market with with with a thing called the government, right? nationalise it, keep it as a reserve for a rainy day or a day where there's no sun and wind. Very valuable stuff. Keep it for a rainy day.
• 56:32
  Tim Montague: I'm good with that. And then deploy a bunch of wind and solar and storage and decarbonize the economy. That's the easy part.
• 56:40
  Tim Montague: Right? 40 Gig it's Hands. That's nothing. It's actually child's play compared to the 1000 gigatons that are in the sky, a trillion tonnes. So we don't have time for any more stories.
• 56:52
  Tim Montague: Unfortunately, John, we just ran out.
• 56:56
  John Weaver: I mean, there's always more time we ran out of time.
• 56:59
  Tim Montague: We it is our own, if we will, it is our least renewable resource, unfortunately. But this has been really fun. I always enjoy talking to you and bringing our listeners such an interesting news about wind, solar and batteries. And we covered all three. Well, we didn't talk too much about solar. We talked about ingots, I guess. We did talk about your solar project, which is a community solar project, I think, right?
• 57:25
  John Weaver: No, our solar projects is behind the metre.
• 57:27
  John Weaver: This one is in upstate New York, and it's behind the metre for a casino. And maybe I'll do an onsite show from the casino. If one of these days who knows Oh, cool, cuz because it's an awesome project, and I gotta go visit it. So well. Speaking
• 57:41
  Tim Montague: of casinos, we're going to ra plus in Vegas, come visit us at booth 2269. I'm gonna have a booth for the Clean Power Hour, we're gonna be recording in the booth. I think a lot of the slots are taken out, but we're gonna recording all day on Tuesday and Wednesday, and then part of the day on Thursday. So reach out to me if you want to do a recording session on the Clean Power Hour.
• 58:01
  Tim Montague: And check out all of our content at clean power. hour.com, of course, give us a rating and a review. on Apple and Spotify.
• 58:08
  Tim Montague: Those are the only ones that really matter, unfortunately.
• 58:11
  Tim Montague: And then tell a friend about the show. We love hearing from our listeners. We love gaining listeners though, we can't speed the energy transition, which is our mission here, John, if we don't get more listeners, so that's what you could do. Mr.
• 58:23
  Tim Montague: And Mrs. listener, just tell a friend about what a great show we have here and how can our listeners find the commercial solar guy here? It's really hard.
• 58:34
  John Weaver: Yeah, no, I'm all around. commercial solar guy.com. That's it. We have contact page. We have phone numbers, you can call me on my office line. We have a new office automated phone system, which I'm trying to figure out so if it goes to voicemail, I'm sorry. But commercial solar guy.com is the best pay place to find us and, and Tim, what types of things should people reach out to you for if they wanted to do business in the solar industry? What do you do besides these awesome podcasts?
• 59:06
  Tim Montague: I am a professional coach and consultant to solar companies.
• 59:07
  Tim Montague: This includes OEMs these are manufacturers of solar equipment includes installers. It includes individuals and companies. I do coaching and consulting for solar and clean tech companies.
• 59:18
  Tim Montague: Thank you for asking. Reach out to me at Tim at clean power hour.com by email or find me on LinkedIn, I am not hard to find.
• 59:26
  Tim Montague: Unlike John Weaver, I am easy to find. But I want to thank you my co host John Weaver, commercial solar guy for coming on the show and thanks to all our listeners, Rick and Joe and Chris lutman.
• 59:36
  Tim Montague: Good to see you hope to see some of you in Vegas in just a couple of weeks. I'm Tim Montague.
• 59:44
  Tim Montague: Let's grow solar John