#329: Geekout: Renewable Energy Transcript

00:00 We're back with another Geek Out episode. Richard Campbell, a developer and podcaster who dives

00:04 deep into science and tech topics, is back for our third Geek Out episode. This time around,

00:09 we're diving deep into renewable energy, energy storage, and just what do we do to keep the lights

00:14 on without frying our beloved Earth? I think you're really going to enjoy this deep dive into

00:19 the science of renewable energy and energy storage. This is Talk Python to Me, episode 329,

00:24 recorded August 4th, 2021.

00:27 Welcome to Talk Python to Me, a weekly podcast on Python, the language, the libraries, the

00:45 ecosystem, and the personalities. This is your host, Michael Kennedy. Follow me on Twitter where I'm

00:50 at mkennedy, and keep up with the show and listen to past episodes at talkpython.fm, and follow the

00:55 show on Twitter via at talkpython. This episode is brought to you by us over at Talk Python Training,

01:01 and the transcripts are brought to you by Assembly AI. Richard, welcome back to Talk Python to Me.

01:07 Hey, great to be back, man. It's been a year, quite a year, as I recall.

01:12 We're living in like dog years or something like that, right? Every year is like seven years. I don't

01:17 know if we spoke about it, but I definitely joke that historians, when they come back and study this

01:23 time frame, they won't be able to say, you know, what decade or what era they study. It'll be like,

01:27 well, what part of 2020 did you study? What part of 2021 did you study? Did you study the summer or was

01:33 it the spring? Because that's a different specialty.

01:34 Oh, yeah. No, and it is how much it's changed, and that we're still living with a certain level of

01:40 uncertainty, you know? At the time that we're recording this, the Delta variant's having an impact,

01:46 and I think everyone's sort of leaning back again going, uh-oh, how bad is this going to get?

01:51 Yeah.

01:51 So, yeah, I don't know. A month from now, things could be very different either way.

01:55 Yeah, it could go either way. That's absolutely right. Yeah, so I'm cautiously optimistic,

02:00 trying to, you know, live life, be safe, but not be huddled in a corner for too badly, you know?

02:07 And for your own sanity. I mean, one nice thing about being up on the coast is, like,

02:11 the view is impeccable. We're right on the ocean. You'll probably even hear it a bit in the recording.

02:16 Like, it keeps you sane to be able to be out here and breathe the air and just try and connect with

02:22 folks, even if it's, it has to be remote, that's all.

02:25 Yeah, yeah. Well, for the audio podcast listeners, tell us how you were speaking to us.

02:31 Via Starlink through, I got on the beta for Starlink right at the very beginning,

02:35 and because we're in this relatively remote location, we were opted in very early on.

02:40 There is cable modem service up here, but it's broken at the moment. And so there's repairs

02:45 trying to be done this morning, which is one of the reasons we delayed recording,

02:48 but they have not been successful so far. So we're counting on Elon's magic as one of,

02:54 as now the largest satellite operator in the world. And soon he'll be more satellites than

02:59 everybody else combined at the rate he's going. And it's been pretty good, but, you know,

03:04 there are dropouts. It's never flawless. And this, what we're asking it to do, this real-time

03:09 thing is, of course, the hardest thing.

03:10 Right, right. We're going real-time to space, which is pretty amazing, but it's kind of cool.

03:14 I haven't had a chance to speak with anyone who's had real experience with Starlink.

03:18 It's neat to have it.

03:21 Yeah, you're part of the experiment now, friend.

03:23 That's right.

03:23 Here we are.

03:24 Exactly. We were planning on using high-speed wired internet, but it broke. And so it's a really cool

03:31 fallback to have. And I think it's actually going to be really empowering for people in places where

03:37 that's not an option.

03:38 Yeah. And certainly I've talked to a bunch of friends who are all very interested in it.

03:42 Because I'm right on the ocean, I have a very clear view of the sky. And that's the real problem

03:46 with Starlink is you need an absolutely clear view of the sky. And often when you're in remote

03:51 locations, you're surrounded by trees. And trees and Starlink are not friends.

03:55 No. And satellites definitely don't mix.

03:58 Yeah. It just doesn't work.

04:00 Well, I'm really glad that we're able to make this happen. And I say that with fingers crossed

04:04 for another 45 minutes or whatever it's going to be.

04:07 What a time we got. Yeah.

04:09 Absolutely.

04:09 Well, let's hope the satellites are well aligned for this next period and we'll have a good call.

04:14 Yeah, absolutely.

04:15 So this episode is going to be like some of the previous ones that you've been on before

04:20 in that it's going to be one of these Geek Out episodes. And the Geek Out episodes I learned

04:26 about, which mostly, I guess, premiered on .NET Rocks. Is that right?

04:30 Right. Yeah. It's totally my friend Carl's idea. I did not want to do these. I thought it was

04:35 a bad idea and I was wrong. So the first Geek Out was back in 2011 and it was about the shuttle

04:41 ending and just my thoughts on what went right and what went wrong with the space shuttle.

04:46 And it continued from there. It became a pleasure for me. I'm a researcher by nature

04:52 and I've always been organizing my thoughts around different technologies just because I like to read

04:58 and research. And the shows basically drove me to finish. Now make an hour long conversation about

05:05 that technology. Isn't that interesting about being able to present something?

05:09 Yeah.

05:10 You have to close those loops that you're like, oh, that's interesting, but I'm not going to dig into

05:14 that corner or that corner of this thing. And then when you've got to stand up and present it,

05:18 I feel like that's a great way to learn stuff in general as people in technology, not just for the

05:23 Geek Out thing.

05:23 You definitely end up better at it. One of the series that I'm very proud of that absolutely the

05:28 process of making this show has transformed it was the fusion series. Because I originally thought I'd do

05:33 a show on fusion. But as I started really organizing all the materials, I realized there was three

05:38 different shows there. There was a show about national fusion, like the ITER and JET and the National

05:45 Ignition Laboratories, all of these big government projects. And then there was the tech billionaire pet

05:52 fusion projects because you're not a cool tech billionaire if you don't have one. And so there's

05:56 a moment where I realized, geez, every one of them has one and they're all wacky. And then I ran across

06:02 a set of papers out of Mitsubishi Labs about low energy fusion reactions. And that actually walked us into

06:09 a real conversation about cold fusion, which surprised me. It's like pseudoscience for a long time. But the

06:18 Mitsubishi Labs experiments in the late 2000-aughts were very real and repeatable. Mitsubishi was smart

06:24 enough that when they realized they had something consistent, they handed it over to Toyota, their

06:28 arch rival, and said, "Here, you reproduce this." Because if anybody was going to punch holes in it,

06:34 it was their arch rival. And they repeated the experiment successfully. And if you listen to that

06:38 show, I'll give away the ending. Yes, you can do lower energy nuclear reactions. They are a kind of

06:44 fusion. It's a part of science that's not well understood. And it takes more energy to do it than

06:49 it produces. Just the sort of thing you don't want from a power plant. We can make it happen, but it

06:53 doesn't produce net energy. Yeah. It's the fun part of that show is I'm walking Carl through the process. And

06:58 Carl's always a great everyman for those kinds of things. And I actually talked about muon catalyzed

07:04 fusion, which is a different kind of low energy fusion and very repeatable, workable, and so forth. It's

07:11 just that it takes more energy to make muons than the fusion reaction produces. Which it turns out

07:15 is every kind of fusion except stellar fusion, that's how it's always worked. It takes more energy

07:22 to fuse than it emits. Yeah, well, if you got that much gravity, it definitely is an unfair advantage.

07:28 So yeah, so this is going to be another one of these geek out episodes. And we're mostly going to just

07:32 focus on the energy side. So it's sort of relevant that you're talking about fusion here. The other thing,

07:38 I guess that's worth just giving a quick shout out to is you're organizing the Dev Intersection

07:44 Conference, right? Yeah. So we did a show back in June as a full hybrid show. So some attendees in

07:50 person, some attendees remote, and some speakers in person, some speakers remote. So we know how to do

07:57 that. We're hoping to do a more in-person show in Vegas, but we're prepared to do hybrid again if necessary,

08:04 because we've pulled it off. But this is a developer show. I mean, we have a close relationship with

08:09 Microsoft. So there's lots of .NET content, but also web content across the board, plenty of Azure,

08:15 artificial intelligence technologies. And it's a very big, broad show and a ton of fun. And the MGM

08:21 Grand is a great location for it. Yeah, that's really cool. I feel like,

08:24 you know, last time we spoke, this was the pre-Delta, pre-large scale vaccine. And like,

08:29 oh, look, we're sort of crossing over the hump. And this is going to be like, you'll be able to sort

08:34 of put this back on no problem. And then Delta and all that kind of stuff.

08:39 And again, ask me in a month and maybe it'll be fine. But at the moment, we're all sort of holding

08:44 our breath. It's like, we know what to do if we have to. Yeah.

08:47 I hope I don't have to. Absolutely. All right. So let's dive into our main topic since we are on a

08:55 bit of a time crunch since we're going to space. So on this one, I wanted to talk to you about energy.

09:02 And I think there's a lot of things happening around energy that's both optimistic and amazing,

09:08 as well as there's setbacks and other things. So, you know, let's talk about sort of the story of

09:15 energy, specifically mostly renewable energy these days. Like, how are we doing?

09:19 We're doing pretty well. I mean, obviously the pandemic changed things. Power consumption overall,

09:26 especially electricity, did decline, especially in the West during the pandemic. Closing of malls and

09:33 commercial spaces and so forth, because those spaces tend to be very efficient in the sense that

09:39 you do shut them down, they reduced a lot of power consumption. Now, everybody went home

09:44 and consumed more power at home. But if you think about the normal work cycle where people

09:49 are at home, then they go to work and then they come back again, the home is not typically not as

09:56 diligently shut down as office spaces. So homes have a sort of always on certain amount of power

10:02 consumption going on. And you can do better than that, be a little more efficient.

10:05 Yeah. I bet a bunch of people just leave their AC set to whatever.

10:08 Exactly. And you know, the real sin I've come, as I've been studying my house,

10:13 heated floors, those electrically heated floors consume a lot more power than you realize.

10:17 Interesting.

10:18 And if you learn how long it takes to get them to temperature and so forth, so that you can

10:22 shut them down when you're not home during the day and heat them up when you need them,

10:25 that's a lot of power. That's a kilowatt per floor per day. Easy.

10:29 Oh, how interesting. Yeah, that is a lot of energy. Yeah. And air conditioners too. And I suspect a lot

10:34 of people don't shut them down. So I saw an article recently that talked about, oh, we're actually being

10:41 set back by people working from home because we all now have our computers on and our lights on and our

10:47 AC or our heater, depending on the time of the year, at everybody's house instead of one giant office.

10:54 But what I don't believe that took into account was the person who lives 45 minutes away from the

11:00 office and commutes with an old suburban SUV that is burning extra gas, right? Like, I think it just

11:07 looked at the energy of the office and the energy of the homes and said, oh, there's more at the homes,

11:11 right? But it eliminated the commute. Well, but I don't think that's true either. In some respects,

11:16 you have the same computer, if not a less efficient computer at the office. And so that those things were

11:22 turned off. I think the move to the cloud actually ends up being energy efficient because

11:27 business owned servers tend to be less utilized than cloud servers. So you're actually gaining

11:34 efficiency in terms of power consumption by shifting those workloads into the cloud. Those machines run at

11:38 a much higher constant utilization rate. So there's fewer CPU serving far more workloads that way.

11:44 Right, right. How many VPC servers run on top of, you know, one piece of hardware? A lot.

11:50 Exactly. I mean, a lot. And of course, they're paid by the, for that, their margin is in that

11:56 optimization where typically your owned servers just don't have that same level of utilization.

12:02 But I think that the biggest thing that created in the West, the huge power drops was that

12:07 folks shut down those buildings. They turned as much off as they could, far more reliably than anything

12:12 else. The drop in oil, recognizing that, that oil consumption in the form of gasoline and kerosene,

12:17 50% of all oil is going into road transport and air. And so that drop was tremendous during the peak of the pandemic.

12:27 In April of 2020, the oil industry calls that black April, because it was, if in the West, it was like 30% reduction.

12:35 You know, on a typical day in 2019, the world consumed about 80 million barrels of oil. And in

12:44 April of 2020, it was like 45 million.

12:47 Yeah, that's amazing.

12:48 And this thing is like that oil moves all the time. And so if you recall, there was a crisis where

12:54 oil actually went to negative pricing because nobody had anywhere to store it.

12:58 I remember that. And there was all these people investing in sort of indirectly in oil.

13:04 And what I think there were some of them, they didn't realize that they were on the hook to store

13:07 that oil. Exactly.

13:09 And then they got seriously hammered.

13:09 And so there were oil tankers arriving at refineries with nowhere to offload because the

13:14 tanks were all full. And now the ship was effectively a storage machine. Like that's

13:18 how bad it got for a month. And it hasn't fully recovered. Like oil consumption is still down.

13:25 They don't expect road transport consumption. And I'm referencing the IEA report. This is the

13:31 International Energy Association. It's very challenging to get good energy data, quality

13:37 energy data. This is a group that are operated out of Paris there, but they're worldwide and they're

13:41 very agnostic. They're not owned by any energy companies. You know, typically when you go looking

13:47 for data like this, you will find energy companies telling you about how their energy is great.

13:51 This is sort of the most reasonable report you can get in terms of levelizing all of those numbers.

13:57 You've heard the clean natural gas.

13:58 Yeah. Well, cleaner than coal.

14:02 It's a relative statement, isn't it?

14:03 Give them that. It's about half the emission level of coal, but it's still with significant emissions.

14:09 And it's cheap. And that's why natural gas is done so well. So the IEA, I mean, they break down a lot

14:14 of these pandemic details. And one of the points they made is like road transport consumption will

14:18 probably reach 2019 levels by the end of 2021. But air transport won't. And air transport is going to take

14:25 longer to come back of people aren't flying. And that's a, it's had a huge impact. Yes, we move a

14:30 lot of stuff by cargo, but we move far more people by air. And so the number of airplanes that are still

14:36 parked and the decrease in consumption all around is, it's not small. And so in that sense, our emissions

14:42 have dropped a non-trivial amount in the process. And the good news is when that power consumption drop

14:48 happened, the power plants that got turned off were the dirtiest ones. So coal consumption went

14:55 drowned dramatically in 2020 because power consumption went down.

14:59 That's really good.

14:59 I mean, it makes sense that that was the plants that they turned off, except in China.

15:03 China actually added coal consumption because China could increase their power consumption

15:10 throughout the pandemic. They also, I mean, he gave fair credit to China. While there may have been 50%

15:16 of the increase in coal consumption in 2020, there were also 50% of the increase in renewables over 2020.

15:21 So I mean, China is growing very rapidly. They are building out a lot of infrastructure

15:26 and they did not stop through the pandemic.

15:28 They did a better job of containing the pandemic as well.

15:32 I don't know if that's true. What they certainly did was did a good job of containing any data about

15:37 their pandemic.

15:38 Yeah. Okay. Fair.

15:39 They also have the freedom. That's not the right word. They have the flexibility to impose rules

15:46 differently than the suggestions that we have like in North America and Europe.

15:50 Well, and one of the big cases is like the whole world has benefited from the fact that the Chinese

15:54 government chose to simply build gigantic solar power plants to manufacture solar at a massive scale

16:00 and drove the price down with solar. Yeah.

16:02 It probably wasn't the most economically efficient way to go about it, but it's the advantage of having

16:08 you know, the sort of strict single party rule system that says thou shalt build big

16:13 solar factories and they did. Yeah.

16:15 Yeah. And again, sent the price of solar to the floor to the, to the point where we now in the West use solar differently.

16:22 You know, once upon a time, solar panels were so precious, you put them on articulated arms to aim

16:28 them perfectly at the sun throughout the day to maximize utilization. These days, you don't do that

16:34 because those arms are fragile. They break and they're expensive. Yeah.

16:37 And for a lot. And so when Germany did this huge push towards solar, as they started to try and wind

16:42 down their nuclear power, they were putting all of these solar panels in all aimed south because they're

16:48 in the north, you know, fairly far north and they get the most light if they're physically aimed south

16:53 until they were generating so much power at the middle of the day when they didn't need it,

16:57 that it was actually a problem for their grid. And they don't do that anymore. They now point their

17:01 panels east and west, which seems foolish because it means you get less utilization per panel. But what

17:07 you're actually doing is smoothing out your power generation. You don't need as much power at noon.

17:11 What you need is more power in the morning and more power in the evening and moving those panels,

17:16 using each panel less efficiently actually makes a more efficient grid.

17:20 How interesting. So I think the area I really want to focus on with our conversation is that storage

17:26 side, because I think that's the magic of unlocking things.

17:29 Sure.

17:29 Before we do, have you seen Project Sunroof?

17:32 I have. It doesn't work in Canada, unfortunately.

17:34 That is unfortunate. The sun is totally different there or no, just kidding.

17:37 Well, you know, it has a U in his name. So, you know, what are you going to do?

17:42 Yeah, yeah. So this thing lets you go to your address or anyone's address and click on it and say,

17:49 it gives you a heat map of the roof of your house for the amount of energy it's going to receive.

17:54 And unfortunately here, you know, I'm also in the Pacific Northwest. And one of the things that I think

17:59 is glorious about here is, you know, right in my yard, I have 150 year old trees that are super high,

18:06 right? Which are amazing. Unless you want solar radiation on your house.

18:12 Unless you want sunlight to hit places.

18:14 Yes.

18:14 Exactly. There's like a little sliver.

18:16 Or Starlink for that matter.

18:17 Yeah, both are out for me. Like, I actually had some solar people come out and estimate,

18:22 and I said, does it make any sense to, I mean, like, put the money aside. Does it even make sense

18:26 just from a climate perspective? And they're like, you know what? It's going to take five years to

18:30 pay off the carbon and manufacturing just the panels. And I go, right.

18:35 It's like too inefficient to justify it, unfortunately.

18:38 But yeah, yields are just too low. And it's like, if you really wanted to reduce your carbon footprint,

18:44 spending that money on the best appliance, the most efficient appliances you could have.

18:47 Right. Or redoing your installation or something like that.

18:50 Yeah. Or even using things like Tesla Powerwall to run on battery during peak power consumption times.

18:58 Those things represent the problem with most grid power is that it pretty much generates the same

19:03 amount of power all the time. Grid is not that flexible. It takes a while to spin up those big power

19:07 power plants. And so they produce for peak. And if so, if most people, you know, the concept of

19:13 Powerwall was, hey, if I can take you off the grid during peak, if I can store power at the cheap times,

19:19 and then use that power at the peak times, we can turn off a peak power plant.

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20:09 Power Pack that Tesla does.

20:11 Yeah, I mean, it's not a lot of success. There's been a few. I mean, Australia being the famous.

20:15 Yeah, that's the one I was thinking of, for sure.

20:17 Yeah, they just had a big fire at one of them in terms of, you know, lithium-ion, ion burns prolifically.

20:23 Yeah, I was going to call that one. Where was that one? That was, yeah, that one was definitely, I guess I can't pull it up.

20:29 The biggest advantage of battery over all storage methods, period, is recovery.

20:34 That it comes about 90% efficient. So put 100 kilowatts in, you'll get 90 kilowatts out in exchange for expensive.

20:43 That's the issue, is that they're expensive installations. They do have fire risks. The availability of lithium is constrained.

20:50 Although we're starting to see some other battery technologies come down the pipe. The famous, the big news stories at the moment are around iron-based batteries.

21:01 So liquid iron, it's not, the iron's not liquid, but it's a liquid electrolyte iron battery. Essentially rust batteries.

21:08 So you, when you oxidize the iron, you can move, you can store electricity and then you deoxidize to release the electricity.

21:15 Oh, interesting. It's almost like electrolysis, but applied to iron.

21:18 Yeah, and it's the same. And fundamentally that's what all batteries are, right? It's doing a chemical reaction that creates new compounds.

21:24 You're not going to find iron batteries in your phone anytime soon. They are big, they are heavy, but they are very grid scale.

21:31 The most advanced batteries that I've seen that seem to have the best backing right now are a company called Form Energy.

21:37 Okay.

21:38 So they've raised about $125 million, which seems like a lot. And it is in this space, but grid scale power is hundreds of millions of dollars. So they haven't got a deal yet.

21:49 But it had some breakthroughs in their battery. Their typical battery unit is about the size of a dishwasher. So again, that's, it wouldn't be good for a car, wouldn't be good for a phone.

22:00 It's also because it has a liquid in it. Its orientation really matters. So these are meant to be held in place, mounted on the ground. They run pretty hot. Not a sort of thing you want to be around, but they're cheap.

22:14 Like typically with lithium ion batteries today, we're coming in around a hundred, it may be as low as $80 a kilowatt. And believe me, like when a hundred dollars a kilowatt was reached for vehicle class batteries, that was considered the point where now we are price competitive with internal combustion cars.

22:30 Right.

22:31 And that breakthrough was like in the past couple of years, these iron batteries are coming in at like $20 a kilowatt.

22:36 Wow.

22:37 So.

22:37 Are they more stable than the lithium ones as well?

22:39 Yeah. They're far less fire risk and slow, steady discharging. So one of the claims to fame for the form energy battery is full discharge took a hundred hours. So the idea that, again, if you think about what is a grid want, it's that ability to have stable power all of the time.

22:58 And so being able to count on a long duration battery makes a lot of sense. So this is not the kind of battery you'd want in your home. Like we have this home based, Hey, we're going to spend less on the grid. We're going to put some solar panels in. We're going to put some power walls in and we'll use the grid as backup and take less pressure off of that. But grid scale power storage, you're starting to see different kinds of storage system. And this is the first battery technology I've seen. It's really based on grid style storage and has that really high efficiency rating, but it's not the only way to store power.

23:28 Yeah. Yeah. Before we move off to the, just the battery side, I do want to ask you, if you use your crystal ball and look into the future, do you see a world where we've got renewable energy locally generated, like on roofs in California and maybe a power wall on a house? Like I could see California mandating every house comes with some sort of local battery.

23:49 Yeah. And they have mandated solar. You now have to apply for a permit to not put solar on your house.

23:54 Which is perfect.

23:55 It's cool. You know, I mean, California has often done these kinds of things. The battery technology is a little trickier. They are expensive. They are relatively fragile. But yeah, it's possible, but it's easier solved with grid.

24:07 Yeah. I was going to say, do you see that future or do you see a future where we've got, you know, massive grid scale type of generation and storage?

24:15 Yeah. I think it's going to be lots of both because there's good reasons for both. Now, and one of the challenges here, when you start thinking about this micro grid behavior of having homes able to be on the grid is the grid needs to get much smarter.

24:26 We need internet technology applied to electrical generation and utilization because it's a peer to peer kind of problem. And I mean, we're in computing, so we get that. But if you go talk to people who've worked in power grids all their life, peer is bizarre to them, right?

24:41 They're very much a fewest number of power plants necessary to supply the load and a single set of wires to feed it out. Redundancy is an expensive, often unnecessary thing.

24:51 And so, but that is clearly changing is where we are creating more automation. So I think people will have a choice on how they want to consume in that respect.

24:59 But we're starting to perfect grid power storage and mostly because our renewables don't deliver a levelized load. They deliver when they deliver. And we need to levelize with other strategies. And that's where storage comes into play.

25:14 All right. Two other things really quick, maybe one altogether. So we had a lot of resistance in the US to putting up windmills, wind farms off the East Coast, because the people with their yachts, when they went a little farther out, they would see the windmills and they really hated it.

25:32 And then out in the desert in Nevada, though, what would have been a tremendously large solar grid scale solar is canceled because the electric, the article headline is the US largest solar farm is canceled because Nevada locals don't want to look at it while they're out on their all train vehicles, which I love riding all train vehicles.

25:53 I'm not against that. But, you know, it seems like some trade offs that are necessary.

25:57 Yeah. I mean, people, there is always an NIMBY effect. What's interesting about a place like Nevada and New Mexico is that they could be, they're doing heliosolar. So rather than using photovoltaic, they're using reflectors to heat molten salt.

26:09 And what's interesting about that at that scale is the salt gets so hot that it still generates power through the night. You know, I mean, there's a bunch of ways to use molten salt. It's used in nuclear reactors. It's used in power storage systems. It's used in heliosystems.

26:23 The thing that's powerful about salts, whatever they may be, sodium-based salts, fluorine-based salts, doesn't really matter, is that their operating liquid temperature, the temperature that they turn from a solid into a liquid is around 400 degrees Celsius. It varies from material to mineral. But their boiling point when they'll turn into a gas is past 1500 degrees.

26:43 Yeah.

26:43 So you have this huge operating range of liquid, right, as opposed to water, which only has a hundred degree range. And I'm using Celsius, because I'm a civilized human, for the liquid range. And that's not a lot of range. So the advantage being, I can do flash steam turbines against 500 degree Celsius salts just as easily as I can do against 800 degree salts and so forth.

27:05 And so they carry heat long enough that you can bridge nighttime with it.

27:08 Right. So that's even a form of storage, in a sense. But in the coast, yeah.

27:12 There is a mechanism, like, if we have more solar than we know what to do with, why don't we switch it to heaters to heat the salt up?

27:19 Because after it gets past a certain temperature threshold, it'll generate a lot of electricity.

27:23 Now, it's not, because of that floor, that minimum temperature, molten salt storage is not as efficient as battery storage.

27:30 Battery storage comes in at 90%. Molten salts come in at 70%. On the other hand, they're very persistent. They are less, you know, they've got a lot fewer risks. They're a well-known technology. So if you have the materials, it's a good solution.

27:44 But there are more, right? Like, for years, we've been using pumped hydro storage, where you use that excess electricity to pump water up a hill. And then when you need it, you let the water come back down.

27:53 Right. So, yeah. So let's talk about some of the ones that are not straight of battery, right? So, like you said, that one's been pretty popular.

28:00 Been around a long time.

28:01 Yeah. I was really blown away when I first heard about that. So the idea is you might be at the face of a mountain, and there might be a mountain lake up right there. So you could have a lake at the bottom and a lake at the top.

28:13 And as you generate the energy, all the extra just pumps the water to the top. And then when you let it out, you run it through some kind of hydroelectric thing on the way to...

28:21 Put it through a turbine on the way back down, you get the power. And that's got about an 80% return. So more efficient than molten salt, not as efficient as battery. It's terrain specific. You need to have a handy mountain.

28:32 Now, there's another gravity solution that doesn't need a mountain. It's called crane-based storage, where they use a very tall crane, and they use the electric power to lift concrete blocks and stack them higher and higher and higher.

28:44 And then when you want to discharge the power, you pick the block up and let it come down and spin a turbine, spin a generator to generate electricity from it.

28:51 That's kind of nouveau. The current efficient...

28:54 Yeah.

28:54 Nobody's built one to scale yet, but the experimental ones, again, coming in in the 80% range.

28:59 So there's challenges with the water one, right? You're moving water up high, and what if the dam or the pipes were to break and to flood the city that it was near?

29:09 Yeah.

29:09 Or there's a drought, all sorts of things.

29:11 It's also, there's only so much water you can pump up. Like, what happens when you run out of water? What happens when you run out of room? Like, now it's going to over...

29:17 Typically, they're dammed water storage. Like, the dam can only hold so much, too. So it has limits.

29:22 Where the crane-based ones, as long as the crane can reach the blocks and doesn't get past its leverage moments, you can put a lot of blocks in place. You can build the crane larger. You can put its arm out longer. So that's interesting. Although they're going to be more expensive and have more maintenance than your typical hydro pump solution.

29:39 Yeah. You can build more cranes. You could dig a hole in the ground and have this giant block of concrete or whatever go up and down, you know, hundreds of meters underground, right?

29:49 Yeah. Well, lots of blocks, right? So when you have excess power, your lifting blocks is stacking them high and then, and more and more and more of them. And then when you need the power, you're letting them come back down one after the other. You have to levelize the power. Like, there's some tricks to it. It's not a simple solution, but it works anywhere that you've got some flat land.

30:05 Yeah. Which, with a bulldozer, is almost anywhere.

30:08 Yeah. With some enthusiasm and some dynamite, you can make anything flat.

30:11 That's right. So that seems like a really good solution. And so this is the thing that I really am excited to talk to you about.

30:19 Because I get so frustrated when I hear things like, well, it would be great if this pipe dream you had could come true and you could run stuff on solar and wind, but it's never going to work because I want to watch TV at night and not be cold at night.

30:36 Right.

30:36 So it doesn't work. It's never, it's unstable. And there's all this creative stuff going on like pumped hydro, like molten salt, like we could just dig a hole in the ground and use some really complicated, like transmission. Yeah.

30:51 You know, you take the mixture of the iron-based batteries, the $20 per kilowatt hour battery with winded solar, which are now so cheap and have grown a lot through the pandemic too.

31:04 They're now the second largest source of power.

31:07 And, you know, they've had the biggest growth.

31:10 Admittedly, the largest renewable is still hydroelectric, but solar and wind are growing rapidly and had been very, very successful.

31:17 Yeah.

31:17 That the offshore wind power movement is an interesting one where they're getting not just in the water.

31:23 Right now, when they go in the water with wind power, they're doing nearshore, not too deep, 100 feet, 200 feet, stuff they can anchor to the bottom on.

31:31 But they've now hit a point where they're ready to start using more of the oil rig technologies to do floating turbines.

31:37 So now you can go a couple of hundred miles offshore or more off the continental shelf and run the turbines out there.

31:43 Yeah. Two of the challenges that I saw when I was thinking about that was one, you've got to dig down into the ground and you're disturbing the ecosystem of oysters and whatever, right, that like might be there if you're going to mount these things to the ground.

31:59 The other is with these giant windmills.

32:02 And when I was in Germany, we were around these huge windmills all over and just the sense of being near them is really crazy.

32:10 Oh, yeah.

32:10 They're ominous.

32:11 And believe me, the offshore ones, I mean, twice the wingspan of 747, like these 10 megawatt turbines, they're so big, you can't even get your head around how big they are.

32:22 Yeah.

32:22 They're just titans.

32:24 They're just incredibly large.

32:26 But to have them on a floating platform away from everyone where the noise isn't, where the sea life is not as plentiful, where the seabirds are not as plentiful.

32:34 Yeah.

32:34 That's what I was going to say is the other one is people would say, look, these are harmful to all the birds because there's so many bird strikes.

32:41 But, you know, 10 miles offshore, there's not that much bird traffic.

32:44 Well, now we're talking 200 miles offshore.

32:46 Okay.

32:46 Even further.

32:47 You're well, you're off the end of the continental shelf.

32:50 So you're way out there.

32:51 The bird traffic is substantially lower.

32:54 And that's a far less disruptive technology all around.

32:58 It increases costs.

33:00 But the equipment's getting cheaper.

33:02 And the power generation is valuable.

33:04 And it's, you know, minimally disruptive.

33:06 They're smart enough to survive severe weather.

33:09 So, you know, that's continuing to grow dramatically.

33:12 Yeah.

33:13 For a reason.

33:13 And taking the known technology for working offshore and turning it into automated platforms for wind makes a lot of sense.

33:21 Yeah.

33:21 Absolutely.

33:22 So when I, circling back around, when I hear people in the news or whatever say, oh, we can't have this renewable future because there is so much fluctuation and uncertainty.

33:32 I feel like it's just a lack of creativity.

33:36 These are old arguments.

33:37 We've been solving them steadily.

33:39 Exactly.

33:39 Like, we put people on the moon with, like, wristwatch level computing.

33:44 Surely.

33:44 Yeah.

33:45 We can build some cranes or build some batteries and put.

33:49 Yeah.

33:49 Well, and we also did it in a very dangerous way.

33:52 The way we sent people to the moon was extremely risky.

33:54 That's why we stopped.

33:54 Yeah.

33:55 We want power that's safe and reliable.

33:57 And that's fairly hard.

33:59 And we'd be remiss not to talk a little bit about nuclear.

34:01 Because nuclear can be safe.

34:04 Yeah.

34:04 It just hasn't been.

34:06 We stopped spending money on it.

34:08 We stopped spending money almost at the moment that we were moving beyond.

34:13 Yeah.

34:14 Like, water-based nuclear, where stuff would fail safer rather than Fukushima-type fail.

34:19 Sure.

34:20 Well, here's the funny thing about Fukushima.

34:22 There was actually six reactors in Fukushima.

34:24 We only, and people only talk about one to four.

34:27 Four was offline, and one through three melted down.

34:30 Nobody talks about five and six.

34:32 Five and six were exactly the same design.

34:34 But they had been modernized to have passive cooldown.

34:37 And so when they were scrammed the same way one through four were, and then they lost their generators, just like one through four were, they cooled down on their own without events.

34:47 Oh, interesting.

34:48 I didn't realize that.

34:49 That's cool.

34:49 Yeah.

34:50 And they're undamaged, right?

34:52 Now, the question is, why didn't one through four have passive cooldown?

34:55 Because one through four were several years older, and the upgrade kits to make them passively cool down were expensive and took two years to install.

35:06 And since the plants only had about five, six years of lifespan with them, it was a financial decision not to install the passive cooldowns by TEPCO.

35:13 Probably something they want to take back if they could.

35:16 Yeah.

35:16 But, you know, that's true of a lot of things.

35:18 You know, I'm pretty sure in Three Mile Island, the operators had asked for an indicator of light for the pressure relief valve to show it was open or closed.

35:27 And they put the light in, but they wired it to the switch, not to the valve.

35:30 So when you push the button, the light turned on.

35:31 You push the button, the light turned off.

35:33 Nobody knew what the valve was doing.

35:34 Yeah.

35:34 The valve sat open and allowed water to escape from the vessel until the point where the core was exposed and partially melted down.

35:41 Yeah.

35:42 You know, people make mistakes.

35:43 But part of this is reactor size.

35:46 The push to make reactors in the 300 megawatt class because that's the size of the coal power plants.

35:53 They knew how to operate that size.

35:55 They knew how the turbines worked.

35:56 So they made these bigger nuclear reactors.

35:59 And that's problematic because they are hard to cool down.

36:02 Now, we've learned to cool them down with more modern versions.

36:04 But as soon as you shrink them down to a more natural size, to the 60 megawatt class, you just don't have that problem.

36:10 Yeah.

36:10 And those are the reactors you find in aircraft carriers and in submarines, those kinds of places.

36:16 And that's what you're seeing in small modular nuclear reactors are the 60 megawatt class.

36:22 And these are the kind of reactors that you build in a factory rather than build on site.

36:27 So they're not bespoke.

36:28 They're standardized.

36:29 They're built with machines.

36:31 They're consistent.

36:31 They're easy to test and validate.

36:34 And so they're very reliable.

36:35 You fuel them once.

36:37 They run for 20 years on the fuel.

36:39 So no refueling every year.

36:41 You run them solid for 20 years.

36:43 They are passively shut down because they're small enough.

36:45 If you put the control rods in place, they will simply go cold.

36:48 And so the folks, I think, are furthest along in the modular nuclear.

36:52 They actually got their clearance contracts.

36:54 They got certified by the Atomic Energy Association last year is new scale.

36:59 And they actually have a contract in Utah to build out the first modular plant.

37:04 And their plan is to actually put 12 of these together on the site so that you get that same kind of 300, 400 megawatt power generation that is normal in grid.

37:15 But they just have multiple small redundant reactors that they can swap them out as they need to be replaced.

37:20 And when you at the end of 20 years, you don't refuel it.

37:23 You remove it.

37:24 You lift it back out of the ground.

37:25 You take it back to a factory where it is reprocessed.

37:29 And you put a new one in place.

37:30 Yeah.

37:31 This is a very different approach to nuclear.

37:32 Yeah.

37:33 Going to have to break a lot of stereotypes and fears.

37:36 Yes.

37:37 Right.

37:37 But, you know, the Atomic Energy Association has now signed on with that one.

37:42 So because it has passed.

37:43 And so the Utah project, by the way, is struggling now for new scale for the simple reason that costs have gone up.

37:52 And so some of the municipalities that signed on to buy power for them are now finding out the new power price is higher.

37:57 And they're like, hey, I can get a natural gas plant for less than that.

38:01 Like, why am I paying for this?

38:03 And that's part of the challenge here.

38:04 Price is everything.

38:05 And solar is getting cheaper.

38:07 Wind is getting cheaper.

38:08 Natural gas has always been cheap.

38:10 So these guys are always struggling with, as they develop these new technologies, they're trying to get those costs absorbed by their early sales.

38:18 And people don't want to pay for it.

38:19 Yeah.

38:19 It's a tough chicken and egg, right?

38:22 So let's talk about some more storage.

38:23 I do think the nuclear side is really interesting because it's been shunned so badly since the 70s.

38:29 But it is carbon.

38:31 It's zero carbon, right?

38:33 Yeah.

38:34 I mean, you've got to mine.

38:34 It does not emit carbon.

38:35 Yeah.

38:36 Yeah.

38:36 Exactly.

38:37 You know, it consumes carbon to if you're going to mine uranium, refine uranium, ship uranium.

38:41 Like, those are issues.

38:43 It still has a consumable.

38:44 Although the efficiency of that consumable, it's hard to get your head around how efficient it is in comparison.

38:50 Yeah.

38:50 How little you refine uranium it takes to run a power plant compared to the amount of coal or natural gas it takes to run a power plant.

38:57 And the problem is that the reactor design that's most mature that most people are familiar with.

39:01 So pressurized water designs, light water designs, were really meant to produce plutonium.

39:07 Like, the reason that the United States matured that technology was to make bombs.

39:12 They make electricity.

39:13 While they're making electricity, they get plutonium out of their cores.

39:16 And so it was designed to be disassembled every six months, have the cores reprocessed, get the plutonium out, make new cores, and load them back in again.

39:24 And then they stopped reprocessing cores.

39:26 During the Ford administration, when Carter was running against them with anti-nuclear proliferation, Ford's attempt to get reelected, he said,

39:34 I'll do what Jimmy wants us to do and stop reprocessing cores.

39:37 And America has never reprocessed a fuel core since.

39:39 They just store them at the plant.

39:41 And it was just a political game.

39:43 No.

39:43 The French, who 80% of their power comes from pressurized water and nuclear, have continued to modernize their plants.

39:51 They always have reprocessed their cores.

39:52 In fact, they now reprocess plutonium into their cores.

39:55 It's called a MOX core.

39:56 And so they're actually burning plutonium.

39:59 And so they don't have the radiation storage problems.

40:02 They're not because they're reprocessing their fuel.

40:04 And, you know, by the way, when Germany decided to stop using their nuclear plants after Fukushima, to have enough power, they bought nuclear power from France.

40:12 Like, that's how that worked.

40:14 Yeah.

40:15 Modernizing.

40:16 Not that, you know, nuclear plants have their problems.

40:18 And they need to be modernized.

40:20 And they need to be more efficient than they are.

40:22 And there are better technologies that still should be matured.

40:25 But these small modulars deal with most of that and with relatively little new research needed to be done.

40:32 And still it's a struggle.

40:33 Yeah.

40:33 Super interesting.

40:34 So we only have about five minutes left.

40:37 But I do want to talk about some more energy storage stuff that's really interesting that people maybe don't think about is, what if I just got a giant, really balanced piece of steel and spun it really fast?

40:50 Or something like that.

40:52 The flywheel solution.

40:53 Exactly.

40:53 Well, and modern flywheels are better than ever.

40:56 These days they use air bearings.

40:59 Some of them have even seen versions that have superconductive bearings.

41:02 So that they, and then they're in vacuum.

41:04 So the whole trick with a flywheel is minimizing friction.

41:09 Like, how fast can we get it spinning and stay in shape?

41:12 And how long do we extract it?

41:14 Now, they're not as efficient as batteries.

41:15 They're close.

41:16 80, 85.

41:17 They have their own mechanicals, like the stuff that needs to be taken care of.

41:21 But essentially they're a part of a motor.

41:23 Like, you only have to put a field coil around that flywheel to extract power from it.

41:27 So they're expensive to manufacture.

41:30 And they take specialized operators to run.

41:32 Batteries in some respects, while expensive also, are easier.

41:35 But these are, flywheels have been around a long time.

41:38 When I was a kid and trying to get computer time in the university, that computer's backup system was a flywheel for power.

41:45 Oh, wow.

41:46 Really?

41:46 200 kilowatt set of flywheels.

41:48 Yeah.

41:48 We went down to the flywheel room one time.

41:49 And you talk about that threatening hum.

41:53 Flywheels hum in a way that lets you know, if something goes wrong here, you're not even going to feel it.

41:58 When flywheels disintegrate, that's a lot of mass moving in a hurry.

42:02 Yeah.

42:02 So they are interesting machines.

42:05 And they're an interesting approach to storing power.

42:07 I think each of these power storage solutions, you know, has merit depending on where you are and what materials are expensive at the time.

42:14 You know, flywheels count on heavy ferrous metals being inexpensive.

42:18 And those sophisticated bearing systems to allow them to spin well and good field coil control so that they can spin them up and spin them down.

42:24 Yeah.

42:24 They're absolutely viable.

42:26 I feel like they've gotten modernized quite a bit recently.

42:28 Mm-hmm.

42:28 Well, everybody, it is the Rebco superconductive bearings that made a huge difference.

42:35 Because you're floating on a baron with no friction because it's not touching anything.

42:38 It's in evacuated space.

42:40 That basically means you get up to speed.

42:42 And the way you, like you said, you extract energy is through magnetic stuff.

42:45 Yeah.

42:46 So there's no physical contact.

42:48 Yeah.

42:48 Yeah.

42:49 That's fantastic.

42:49 Yeah.

42:50 It's a very modern way to think.

42:51 But they make sense at a grid level.

42:53 They need to be large.

42:55 They need to be professionally operated and professionally maintained.

42:58 Yeah.

42:58 The other one, I'm not sure if I have a picture of it here, actually.

43:01 I don't think I do.

43:02 The other one has to do with not storing water, but storing compressed air.

43:09 Yeah.

43:10 So where we see these are where they have airtight, large spaces, like old salt mines,

43:18 for example, where they've done mining the salt, but effectively the space is airtight

43:22 and so they can pump pressure into them.

43:23 They have efficiency problems because you have sort of have a minimum pressure.

43:27 So you've got to pump for a while before you get to a pressure that would spin a turbine.

43:31 They come in in the 70% range, a little bit lower.

43:35 But if you have the space, like the expensive part would be making the tank, right?

43:40 Right.

43:40 Pumps are not that expensive and not that difficult.

43:42 You know, but if you've got a huge volume of airtight space, it's worth utilizing that.

43:48 Let me throw one other idea at you.

43:50 Okay.

43:50 You know, there's one hand, there's the idea of we're generating electricity and we need

43:54 to store it for when we can't generate it.

43:56 Then there's also the we're generating more electricity we need.

43:59 Where do we put this?

44:00 Yeah.

44:00 But if you didn't need it for electricity, like why would you bother storing it into battery?

44:04 Can you turn excess electricity into something valuable?

44:09 And so one of the areas of research going on right now is water desalinization.

44:13 We have a freshwater problem.

44:15 Yeah.

44:15 So why not, when you have excess electricity available, use electricity to salinate water.

44:21 If you're turning that excess power into something valuable, freshwater.

44:27 There's a version of this, it's actually a kind of pump storage solution.

44:31 So we pump seawater up to a high level and then the drain system for that to lower it back

44:38 down again actually has a reverse osmosis filter on it and just uses gravity to extract the fresh

44:43 water.

44:43 Yeah.

44:43 How interesting.

44:44 So taking existing designs of pumped power storage and instead of using a turbine without

44:50 water coming down, using it to extract fresh water from salt.

44:53 Well, that's a lot of options.

44:55 A lot of different flexibilities for where you're located.

44:59 Are you by a mountain lake?

45:01 Do you have an old mine?

45:03 Yeah.

45:03 Or do you do a standard pumped reverse osmosis is another solution.

45:07 It just consumes more energy.

45:08 Yeah.

45:08 But if you have the excess energy, why not?

45:10 And if you need the water.

45:11 Yeah.

45:11 Water desalinization is getting more popular all the time.

45:13 You think about the drought that's going on in Southern California.

45:16 The Israelis are leading the world in water desalinization.

45:20 It's a desert climate.

45:21 It has water problems, but they don't have a water problem anymore.

45:24 About 25% of their water is now desalinized water.

45:27 They use the reverse osmosis systems for it.

45:30 The challenge is that most of these mechanisms take a while to get a lot of energy.

45:33 get up to speed.

45:34 So, you know, it can take a day to get a reverse osmosis system stabilized and pumping well.

45:40 And if you're trying to use like the three-hour window where you're making too much solar,

45:45 you don't have, the system's not efficient for that, for making water.

45:48 Yeah.

45:49 It doesn't respond fast enough, right?

45:50 So there's a push to modernize, to update these systems so that you have a 20-minute uptime.

45:56 Within 20 minutes, we can be making water with this.

45:58 So that three-hour window in midday where we have more solar we don't do with,

46:01 we can put it over to the reverse osmosis plant and make fresh water with it.

46:04 Awesome.

46:05 Yeah.

46:05 Well, Richard, thank you so much for being here and sharing all these ideas and doing the research

46:10 for us.

46:10 Yeah.

46:11 You said it's a pleasure when you ask me because these are all notes I'm keeping,

46:14 but then I spend a few days sorting them out into a set of narratives.

46:18 Like, what are the important bits of all that?

46:20 So it's a pleasure for me too.

46:21 And really fun to talk to you.

46:22 Yeah.

46:22 Yeah.

46:23 It's always great to have you here.

46:24 And who knows what we'll talk about next time, but it's great.

46:27 Well, since Coke says there's a subject at me, you know, I'm interested in everything.

46:30 I do know that for sure.

46:31 All right.

46:32 So thank you for being here as always.

46:35 And yeah, have a good day.

46:36 And hey, we actually made this work from space.

46:39 Yeah.

46:39 Yeah.

46:40 It was a little cranky at the beginning and it seemed to held out after that.

46:42 That's right.

46:44 All right.

46:45 Bye, Richard.

46:45 See ya.

46:47 This has been another episode of Talk Python to Me.

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