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

06-09-2022 • 57 mins

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

Also this week:

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

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Transcript of this episode (done by A.I.)

News anchor: The United Kingdom Conservative Party announced Monday that Liz Trust was selected as its new leader.

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

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

Various people: You got to be kidding me.

You got to be kidding me.

You're kidding me.

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

Nope.

Hell, no.

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

I'm Brian Stockton,

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

Oh, Boris.

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

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

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

And it's not donkey knobbler.

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

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

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

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

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

Much lower.

Californians are asked not to charge their electric cars.

Russia has a clog in their oil pipes again.

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

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

I am walking without a cane for the first time.

You literally walk with a cane.

I was really walking with a cane.

You were literally a hobbled old man for a while.

Absolutely.

But yeah, I think I'm doing okay.

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

All right.

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

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

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

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

We're both here.

Brian safe and his farm shelter.

Our thoughts go to all the victims.

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

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

Yeah.

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

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

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

I absolutely loved it.

It covered things like how to tie your shoes.

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

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

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

And so I decided to write them a letter.

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

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

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

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

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

Incredibles per side.

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

Yes.

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

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

It's pretty sweet.

I'm telling you.

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

James: That one guy sounds like me.

And going off on tangent sounds like us.

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

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

But, yeah, they like to talk about skylines.

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

And so they appreciated the skyline of our city.

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

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

Yeah, sure.

They're not bad.

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

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

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

And it's all glassy towers.

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

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

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

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

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

It came in on records.

They would make a record every week, four LPs.

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

That is amazing.

In the mail, I guess.

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

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

You start at 04:00 p.m..

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

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

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

But I don't know.

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

Oh, that's tough for you.

That's tough for you.

You'd need an injection of some sort.

Yeah.

So huge.

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

That was a lot of fun.

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

You can buy them.

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

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

So you didn't have to do anything.

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

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

No.

But we used to play songs on carts.

They were sort of like eight tracks.

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

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

Like the music stops for a second.

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

You dirty bastards.

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

You rebel.

That's funny and weird.

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

Well, that is so weird.

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

That's such a weird thing.

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

Like nowadays they could stamp a CD, I suppose.

Yeah.

There were enough stations to play the show.

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

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

And I saw a plane flying over the subdivision here.

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

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

So I was kind of curious.

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

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

It's not, though.

It's not above terrain.

It's above sea level.

And we're 1900ft above sea level.

So that sucker is 200ft above the ground.

Yeah.

And this is the plane.

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

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

Yeah.

So I did some research on pipeline inspection planes.

They call them pipeline patrol pilots.

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

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

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

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

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

Wow.

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

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

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

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

Incoming.

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

Nobody gets it, but I am using myself.

And that's how it goes.

That's all that matters.

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

Just does that stretch.

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

Wow.

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

Just splits it in half.

You're on the wrong side of the pipeline.

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

And there's lots of golfers out there.

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

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

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

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

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

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

By the way, the crows disappeared.

I mentioned that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And 09:00 p.m..

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

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

Severn.

Vormstein is with the University of California.

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

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

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

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

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

Did you see that? No.

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

Well, it's been a weird pattern.

And I heard somebody say that it was El Ninja.

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

Wow.

And that has done weird things.

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

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

And we get hot here in central western Canada.

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

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

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

It's crazy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

So the pool itself gets shaded.

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

So it takes a longer time to heat up anyway.

It's just weird.

Yeah.

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

So the Hoover Dam, lake Mead.

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

So Lake Mead is the reservoir for the Hoover Dam.

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

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

And, yeah, they're finding bodies now.

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

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

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

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

All this weird stuff is happening now.

Posing problems for non solar and wind.

I would say yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But I thought that was super encouraging.

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

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

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

So 10 is five times what that is.

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

Yeah.

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

That's 46 Celsius.

That would be a record.

And people are going to turn on the air conditioners.

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

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

I was posting this on Twitter.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That's still kind of pricey.

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

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

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

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

You could just charge all the electric.

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

Yeah.

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

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

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

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

And very few people are charging them anyway.

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

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

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

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

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

Yeah, we'll see how that goes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And it's a challenge.

Yeah.

No, I often think about Mad Max.

The Mad Max movies, which I love.

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

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

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

And the same thing with nuclear power plants.

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

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

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

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

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

It's just a horrible situation.

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

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

It's amazing.

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

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

And it was started by lightning.

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

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

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

And then you drive like you would.

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

Yeah.

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

So they have frequent blackouts in Jasper.

So perhaps the residents are used to this.

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

It was out for hours.

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

Well, it's wilderness.

It's mountain wilderness.

You have power lines that are hard to get to.

You have to helicopter people in there.

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

Yeah, and I think they are working on that.

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

So if anybody in Jasper is listening to us.

Hello.

Yeah.

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

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

So these are sub brands within General Motors.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh.

I didn't know Buicks existed anymore.

Yes.

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

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

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

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

But you know, the Cadillac lyric is pretty.

It checks all the checkboxes.

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

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

Some more news from Germany.

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

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

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

Fuel is just too expensive.

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

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

And this has worked really well.

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

And yes, people took advantage of this.

It makes a lot of sense.

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

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

Yeah, I hope so.

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

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

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

Brian.

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

Boris Johnson.

Right.

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

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

Definitely more organized.

Okay, that's a good sign.

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

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

But not Boris.

Yeah, so she's weird.

She doesn't like the sight of solar panels.

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

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

Right.

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

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

You can have both.

You can have crops and solar panels.

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

It's a win win.

It's sad that she's insane.

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

Johnson 14% of people are against sunny days.

That's unheard of.

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

Yeah.

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

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

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

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

Solar farms.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Solar energy.

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

That is the .6% of UK land.

And saving the freaking planet is less than golf courses.

No.

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

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

That would be great.

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

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

So, again, energy crunch.

France is having problems with their nuclear plants.

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

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

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

I would not want to do that.

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

So 19 would be freezing for me.

Yeah.

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

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

But that's up.

It's up.

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

Brian.

Yes.

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

I'm just getting old.

I'm supposed to eat less.

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

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

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

That's all I got to say about that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Okay.

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

Public companies have to disclose their lobbying efforts.

So Electric and others have reported on this.

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

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

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

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

So, yeah, best case scenario, a battery