141. When Electric Cars Aren't Reliable; The Benefits of Processed Foods

Brian talks about Wired.com's story on the benefits of processed foods. James is depressed because his beloved Nissan LEAF needs a new PTC cabin heater with a hefty price tag. The city of Houston has a boil water advisory because of a blip in their power grid. The Tesla Semi seems to be for real. Musk says it completed a 500 mile journey pulling an 81,000 pound load. The upcoming Sizewell C nuclear power plant in the UK was in need of public funding.

Why the Saudis have electric buses. 

There's a new record size for off-shore wind turbines and it's 16 megawatts.

Ebike subsidies expand across the United States.

GM dealerships are repairing Teslas. Will they also fix James's LEAF?

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Transcript

Hello, and welcome to episode 141 of the Clean Energy Show.

I'm Brian Stockton.

I'm James Whittingham.

I finally come clean this week about a secret I've been keeping for two months.

And, no, I'm not pregnant.

And, yes, I would make an excellent mother.

The city of Houston is under a boil water advisory.

Because of power outages.

Everything is bigger in Texas, including grid problems.

The Tesla semi completed a 500 miles journey with a load weighing 81 £0, or roughly half the weight of Elon Musk's eagle.

The upcoming Sewell Sea nuclear power plant in the UK was in need of funding.

Ultrawealthy prime Minister Rishi Sunak has stepped in with a cash infusion.

Oh, wait, I'm being told it's taxpayer money.

He's not an idiot.

All that and hopefully borrow this edition of the Clean Energy Show.

Brian I'm sweating like a hog and I'll tell you why.

Yes, I'm not a sick.

I was shoveling the driveway because it blew in.

And before the show, I frantically tracked down a plug in electric snow blower.

My partner was coming home for lunch and I said, can you swing by the Walmart because there's one left.

It was like $100 less than if I made this decision a few days ago.

I would have had all the Cyber Monday Friday deals, but I missed out on that.

But I found one with specs that was really good.

Now, I've got a battery operated snow shovel.

Not cutting it.

What's going to happen now is we're going to get trace amounts of snow for the next five years, but I say, fine, it's worth spending the money for that to happen, because it's worth it.

We've been snowed in and my partner had to park on the street and the driveway was daunting.

So I quickly assembled it at lunchtime.

While you were having your happy nap.

Yeah.

And I went out there with a short extension cord and did what I could.

And now I'm sweating like a crazy.

I'm soaked in sweat because my heart was going maximum, which doesn't take much these days, but when you're doing anything clearing snow, it gets the heart rate going, unfortunately.

So, like a plug in kind rather than battery operated, I guess, is a lot cheaper.

It is cheaper.

I did splurge, though, and get pretty much the most powerful one you can get.

It's about 14 amps.

You can get a 15 amp one, but then you have problems with your extension cords overheating and blowing breakers and things.

It's kind of the maximum that it will handle on an ongoing basis.

But I went out there with, I would say, a 15 inch drift and went right through it like it does a foot of snow.

But it will go under the drift and it will still keep going under the drift and you just go over it a second time.

So, yeah, I'm happy with it.

Those are a pain in the ass.

I've had them before because the extension cord but I knew that I wanted power, and this was a bigger unit, and it was a couple of couldn't really afford it, but I said, man, because we got to clean the sidewalks this year by city by law.

By city by law.

Yeah.

Well, just a quick update.

Last week I was complaining about GoComics.com, this website I go to every day to read daily comic strip.

It was down for a full five days and finally came back online.

They offered no explanation of exactly what happened.

It was supposedly a cyber security issue, which I had read on another website.

But anyway, our long nightmare is over.

It's back.

And coincidentally, this week on Saturday, it was Charles Schultz's, what would have been his 100th birthday, the creator of the Peanuts comic strip, the legend of newspaper comic strips.

It was his 100th birthday, so a lot of the comic strips had special tributes to him on Saturday.

So that was a lot of fun to read.

All the cartoonists got together and decided to do that.

And then the last thing, comic strips do you remember the soap opera comic strips when you were a kid? There were only a couple of comic strips that were not funny.

Yeah.

Give me an example of one, can you? Well, there's two main ones.

Mary worth.

Okay.

And Rex Morgan, MD.

And these trips have both been around for, like, 100 years by this point.

Anyway, I started reading them a couple of months ago because I was looking for new, exciting things to follow, and I'd always avoided them like the plague when I was a kid because it's like, this is ridiculous.

There's no joke here.

What's the point of this anyway? I've been reading for a couple of months now, and I'm starting to get into it.

It's kind of fun.

A bit speechless here.

You're reading soap opera comic strips after resisting them your whole life.

My whole life.

I mean, I thought, is it a gossipy? Pleasure, man, what's going on here? Yes.

I don't know.

I just like comic strips, and there's not enough good ones, so I just been looking to expand my horizons.

What happened to the creators? Did their kids take over? I mean, if these are 100 years old yeah, often that is the case.

I don't think that's the case with Mary.

We are Rex Morgan, but yeah, often it's passed on to a son or a daughter or a nephew or a niece or something.

I don't know.

They've all been around now, a lot of them, for 100 years.

I don't know.

It's a weird thing.

All right, Brian, I've got an announcement to make.

I've been hiding something from you for two months.

Wow.

You and the listeners.

Wow.

And it is regarding my leaf.

Oh, yeah.

My leaf has major problems.

It happened just before we recorded a show about two months ago, and I was so distraught, I couldn't bring it up, and I couldn't bring it up for two months.

I was just so unhappy about it.

That's terrible.

I don't know how the hell I made it through that episode.

But if you could find a very glum James about two months ago trying to struggle through an episode, I guess it's all muscle memory.

That's how we've done so many of these shows already.

Yeah.

And also, it doesn't have to be that good.

No, I mean, well, we try.

We do try for our listeners, don't we? Every week a good show.

Come on.

Okay.

Now, I know that we have a lot of long time listeners, but we also have a lot of new listeners.

And I wanted to just talk about electric cars with you for a little while, about the reliability.

And I don't want to just jump into it without talking about what model I have, because it's going to probably be different than what you are considering.

Although a friend of ours texted me the other night and was asking me about the Leaf, wanting to buy one.

And I said, well, here's what happened, and you can make up your own mind.

What had happened is my 2013 Nissan Leaf.

Now, remember, this is the first mass produced allelectric car by a car company.

They started making them at the end of 2010, and they made them for a couple of years in Japan, and then they opened up a Tennessee factory, and one in the UK as well.

Mine comes from Tennessee, and it comes from the United States and was imported into Canada.

So there's a few little things like daytime running lights that had to be added, and a bigger washer tank for some reason.

It's just one of those weird things just to get up to Canadian standards.

So it was imported already.

And Quebec, the problems with Quebec, they had just terminated at that time, but they had incentives for used vehicles that lowered the used market for Leafs.

And that's how I got one as cheap as I did.

It was about $10,000 in change, and that was a pretty good price at the time.

But it was a base model, so it was the base model S.

It had no cruise control.

And just when I started making those models, they put a heat pump in them in the upper trim levels.

They had three trim levels.

I had the low one, so I didn't even have a fast charger on mine, or a reverse camera.

Or there was some things I gave up to get a really cheap one, because everyone was designing the other ones.

Had I gotten one that was one of the other trim levels, I would have had a heat pump and a PTC heater.

PTC heater is basically like a toaster.

Now, these suckers and electric cars heat up fast.

They connect rate to the high voltage battery, and it's a heater that gets red hot and air blows through it.

So you have instant heat in your car, which is wonderful.

And when I preheat my car in the winter time even -40 I'll get into it and it feels like a toaster oven.

It just feels hot and dry and completely warm and habitable in there.

It's wonderful feeling.

If you leave it long enough, it'll melt all the snow that's on the car.

Right.

And that's what I do.

So in the leaf it will preprogram itself.

You just give it a departure time and based on the weather and how long it took to get to temperature and previous days, it will add more time.

I think up to 2 hours.

I'm not sure about that.

So I probably abused it and I lost my PTC heater.

So I have no heater in the car for two months now.

A month ago you were talking about getting your heater replaced under warranty, which I did.

Went up to Saskatoon and yeah, they replaced that under warranty and it was the same thing.

Your car and I and mine are the same in that sense.

That they just have a PTC heater.

Later models may have had both or at least a heat pump and yours for more efficiency.

Heat pump is like reverse air conditioner if you're new to the show.

And it works a lot more because a great deal of power goes into these.

I think 5000 watts goes into mine.

That's more than the car driving.

So your range goes down.

So since my heater broke, my winter range is excellent, by the way.

It only goes down based on denser or cold air.

Do you have a little bonfire going in there or something? No, I eat some beans sometimes before.

It's not a great experience.

And what I've done, we have an SUV that I thought initially I thought I would just place the SUV for the winter and it's going to be expensive and it'll heat up and it will be, you know, but then even without the damn heater, Brian, I just love that bloody car.

Like, I just love it.

I just love driving it.

I hate getting into the Prius, which is a combustion engine in the wintertime, it's cold anyway, unless your destination is a long ways away or you've warmed it up.

That thing takes a while to warm up too.

And it's not like an electric car and it just doesn't feel the same as an electric car.

And I finally got the wheel bearings fixed, so it was nice and quiet.

And I've decided that one of the great things about electric cars is after I had my wheel bearing fixed, because they were very loud, is when you get up to speed in the city, it's almost like you can feel the wind in your hair.

Like you could just feel and hear the wind and nothing else.

And it's just such an exhilarating feeling to just hear that.

And there's something I don't know, just beyond anything a gas car can do.

When I looked at yours, was covered under warranty.

I found somebody who spent $1200 in Canada, basically, to do it.

And the part was about six or $700, $700 for the part.

And then they did some labor.

Now, in the Leaf, I looked at doing it myself, but it's very complicated.

Basically, the whole inside of the car has to be taken apart.

And it's a $4,000 job in most cases.

Oh, no.

I spent ten on the car.

I just spent 2100 that I didn't have, fixing the front wheel hubs, which cost way more than they should have because I got screwed by a local shop because there's no Nissan dealer here to fix it.

I also need some front suspension work.

Now, the car is one month short of ten years old.

This is something important because we're talking about electric cars not needing maintenance.

And that is true for the most part.

And people say, well, it's electric car.

Something weird can go wrong in it.

Well, I guess this is it.

Aside from the battery, which are covered under eight year warranties.

Always.

Always.

You know, there's the charger, I suppose, could go in the car, that there's a built in charger that can wear out over time.

I would have to worry about that.

I could have some bad battery cells, so you might have to replace some modules at some point.

But the cars would have been great.

But some people put in diesel heaters.

Like, there's a guy in Swift Current who bought a brand new F 150 pickup truck, and he put in a diesel heater so that he wouldn't lose any range.

Like, you have a diesel heater in an electric truck? That's right.

It's basically this unit that you have to exhaust, and it just kind of burns away.

It is crazy.

And it's got electronic controls.

This is what people are doing.

And I don't know, did you ever know somebody who had a really old Volkswagen Beetle? Because I think, like, some of those had a propane heater because the Volkswagen Beetles were air cooled.

So you don't get that circulating fluid that you normally use for your heater in your car.

So old Beetles had a propane heater, which often apparently also did not work.

So, yeah, I knew a guy who had to drive around in the winter and a Beetle scraping the inside of the window because there was no heat.

Well, here's what I've done.

Okay, first of all, the part, it wouldn't be so bad if I was a Tesla out of warranty.

Twelve hundred dollars to go from an unusable car to a usable car.

Great.

I actually put in a space heater, like the one you have with a cottage into my car on a timer.

Like it's a plug into the lighter? No, it plugs into an extension cord.

Okay, so you just run an extension cord in there because when I was a kid, my parents had in their car a block heater.

A lot of people listening don't know what a block heater is.

That is a heater that heats the oil in a car in a very cold climate so that it will turn over, that it's viscous enough to turn over.

And we have them in all of our cars here.

But yes, my parents also had an interior warmer as well.

And you plugged it in with the block heater.

Yes, that's what my parents did.

Yeah.

And so same thing like, you can have your car warm in the morning.

I seem to remember it running overnight.

Do you remember my parents did that too? Just left both the heater and the interior one plugged in overnight.

Yeah, different times.

Because it would have been like a thousand watts, probably.

Yes, it would have been extremely wasteful.

And for what? I don't remember the snow being melted on the windows.

That's not something that I remember.

Yeah, no, I know somebody who used to do that, lived in an apartment building where the plugins in the parking lot were free.

Like you didn't have to pay for the electricity.

So I know somebody who did that kept it plugged in all night and all the snow melted on the car just because he didn't have to pay for the electricity.

It is warming up to the interior and at least getting it usable.

The problem is you have to run some air on the window to defog it at the lowest setting.

And if it's cold out, that feels really bad because we're talking what temperatures have we had here? Minus ten celsius -20, and it's going to get colder.

It's going to be high -20 in a few days.

I was hoping for a naturally warm winter and a lottery ticket win.

A couple of things that I was hoping for.

And if I got it fixed, I would have to ship the car all the way up to a city called Prince Albert, which is the closest Nissan dealer that is certified to do electrical work.

So basically when people do these fixes, they take out the front car seats and all the dash and they have to unplug the high voltage system underneath the car.

And there's also this fuse that is hard to get at, that always blows.

I confirmed it because I have sort of the computer connection to my phone app and it has the right error codes on there so that the heater is seen on the phone.

Now, I knew this was something that I worried about because I've seen it with other people.

I've seen it online a few times, but now that I'm really looking, I haven't seen it that much at all.

Like, there's a few references to it and there's people saying, well, it was bad welding and there should be a class action suit but there really isn't that many people.

I think a lot of people actually had them done under warranty because I'm only a couple of years off the warranty actually.

Well that's not true.

I don't know if this would have qualified for that, but a lot of the high voltage stuff did and the battery and stuff like that.

So I'm very depressed Brian, because and I haven't even told my partner yet.

My kids know, my partner does not.

She just thinks I spilled something in the car and I've got a heater going in there.

I'm just so ashamed of myself because I'm an electric car advocate.

I've been telling everybody they don't break down and I put my family at risk of this and now we don't have a car that's working.

So I drive my kid to school, it's a ten minute drive.

She doesn't complain.

Well, I don't know if this makes you feel any better and you've certainly told me this as well, like you crunched the numbers when you bought that car and it's basically probably already paid for itself.

If you think of all the fuel that you've saved, that was on all numbers, that was before gas went up.

Before gas went up.

So first of all, the car has been free so far? Basically, yes.

Another way I could look at it is that these things are selling for 6000 more than I paid for it.

Yeah, prices are up since when you bought it, so there's that incentive to fix it and not feel so bad about it or sell it to somebody in the summer.

No, well, I would never do that.

Never.

That would be awful.

Well, now that the evidence is out there by the way, you can't here's a tip for your kids out there.

If you buy an electric car in the summer that's used check the heater just because you want to make sure it works.

Now, if I had one of those models that wasn't the base model I would have had in my case a heat pump and a PTC heater.

Yeah.

So the heat pump, I don't know what they work efficiently at in a leaf.

It might only be -15, or something like that.

And it gets much colder where we are.

But I would have had some heat and I could've preheated it for a couple of hours and it would have got somewhat comfortable in there, you know, and that would have been fine.

Maybe not on every day, but most of our winter days aren't necessarily brutal.

Hopefully it would work out, I don't know.

Warm days are only five months away.

Shut up, shut up, shut up.

It can't be that long.

There's heated seats and front and back in the Prius or in the Prius and the leaf that helps.

There's a heated steering wheel.

That's great.

Now I've ordered off of Amazon for $30 a dinky little electric cigarette lighter, heated defroster.

So I will see how that works.

Is going to come in a couple of days.

I'll tell you next week if it does anything.

I had one many years ago when I was a teenager because my rear defrost didn't work my $300 car.

So I bought one at the hardware store, and I think it sort of did something.

So it's a little portable heater, like just 100 watts or something.

Just a cheap yes, about 100 watts.

But hopefully it will be better than just blowing cold air as far as the feeling of it.

But we'll see how I survive.

Actual really cold temperatures that are coming up this week, I may not you know how teenage girls dress for school? My daughter doesn't dress very warm to get her into school and even with the car, not have producing heat and try to convince her to put things on so she doesn't get hypothermia.

But on the bright side, Brian, I'm feeling better.

Yeah, well, like we were talking about last week, we sometimes don't dress for the climate anymore because we're just used to going from one warm environment to another warm environment.

I don't have a lot of stuff this week because Twitter has gone haywire, and I get a lot of my information from climate people and various activists on Twitter.

They've all left for mastodon and other places.

Like, they're all completely gone, and I hope they come back.

But there's talk of Tesla shareholders getting upset with Musk doing what he's doing because that seems to be affecting the Tesla stock.

Just the fact that he had to sell a bunch to buy that social media platform is a little crazy.

Anyway, I'm on the Chevy Voltage group.

I thought it was interesting.

Every now and again I see an interesting story that really talks about the economics of electric cars.

We talked about how mine for $10,000 covered the gas and my SUV.

That would have been five years of gas.

And that's just incredible.

And plus, you're saving the environment a little bit too.

Obviously, it's a lot more pleasurable too, but so somebody's paying $520 for a Chevy bolt.

This is one of the cheapest EVs.

You can buy the monthly payment for five years with no money down or anything like that.

And he's saying that he saved 175 gallons of gas, and at $4 a gallon, minus $60 a month increase in electricity, he's saving $580 a month.

Both has over two months.

Over two months.

It's like getting a car for very little money, and it will basically pay for itself in eight to ten years.

So in his case, he's buying a brand new car and getting it free after eight to ten years.

The more you drive, the better deal it is.

Yeah, that's for sure.

And as they come down in price, this is going to be more and more things especially if you're dealing with fleets that do a lot of driving.

And free is one thing, but you're still saving you're still saving over a gas car.

So that's something.

The New York Times had an interesting piece about how the Saudis are trying to keep gas alive.

And one of the ways that they're doing it is they're buying a whole bunch of EVs and Ebuses for Saudi Arabia so that they can get this burn less gas.

They want to sell the gas to other people.

They don't want to waste any of it using it themselves.

That's a really good point, doing that.

That just struck my craw, like it's stuck in there.

Well, there's going to be sort of EV have countries and EV have not countries and yeah, that's keep selling them your oil, I guess.

So the Texas grid, what's going on there? Yeah, we talked about that occasionally.

Texas in the US.

Has its own electricity grid that tends to be cut off from the rest of the country.

And they've had problems lately and I just thought this was an interesting problem there's currently, and it should be ending today, but a boil watery advisory in the city of Houston, which is a massive city for the whole city.

For the whole city.

And so school has been canceled.

Yeah, that's first nation reserve up north kind of territory, or small town at least.

And it's because they had power outages at their water filtration system when the power goes out and they were supposed to have power backup and for some reason it didn't work.

But the water pressure drops within the filtration plant and once the water pressure drops down past a certain amount, they basically have to put out a boil water advisory so it's entirely possible the water is still safe to drink.

It's a precautionary thing.

It's a precautionary thing.

And they need to let it go for a couple of days, test the water again.

And they will probably lift the boil water advisory today.

But I just thought it was interesting because it's just one of those things where we don't think about necessarily in terms of the grid, why it's important to have a reliable grid.

And this is just one of those instances where a bad grid with frequent power outages can lead to things like a boil water advisory for a massive city like Houston.

These are things that I worry about with armageddon scenarios.

If there's some sort of war or something, we really need to have our water because we don't have a well in our backyard.

And I'm not currently collecting rainwater.

You're talking about doing that at the new cottage.

But I guess we could melt some snow during the winter.

Oh, yeah, not the yellow.

I'll just blow it into a big pile of my new snow blower and melt it.

Melt it with what, though, right? I have to collect firewood on the prairies.

That's no fun.

Burned gopher carcasses or something like that, I thought.

I would also mention these two Chinese companies announced that the production of the largest offshore wind turbine to date has been announced.

Because this is something we talked about before, so I thought I'd bring it up again.

You love a big turbine.

I do love my turbines to be setting records, Brian.

And we knew that this would be broken because there was rumors of it.

The previous record is 14 MW.

This is something that can power a house for two days with one rotation of the blade.

One little rotation can power your home and your family for two days, and now they've gone up to 16.

There's two companies in China that have developed 16 MW.

It's interesting to watch when professionals have discussions online about what the theoretical limit is.

But a lot of times in the clean energy space, people think that nothing can go any further, and it does.

There's always some sort of development or some sort of technique.

Some of it is just a placement where you place it.

They have better modeling now than they used to 20 years ago.

The groups on November 24 showed off the turbine factory in Fujian Province.

And the turbine has a 252 meters rotor diameter with 50,000 meters sweep area.

That is a large sweep area.

If you want to compare sweep areas, it's a large 146 meters.

The hub of it, the middle, the turning point, 146 meters.

One and a half football fields off the ground.

And I saw another wind turbine blade on the highway the other day, which is always an amazing sight to see.

Those checks right here.

Blades? Yeah, it was heading towards Moose Jaw.

That's interesting.

I wonder where from, because that's kind of where it was going.

Not sure.

That is actually the biggest restriction on this wind turbine size, is that you physically can't turn corners on any sort of roads with those wind turbines.

It was right here you saw when I saw one of Colorado was amazing.

It was just blocks long, and it's just, you know, the largest man made item I think I've ever seen up close.

It was like looking at a massive rocket or something.

Okay, so I've got a great story here from Hannah Ritchie, who is the head of research at Our World in Data.

And she is still on Twitter, and I would recommend following her.

She's a great follow on Twitter, amazing information.

So she's the head of research at Our World in Data.

Fabulous website that just collects all kinds of data and presents it in website form.

A lot of people have been going there through the COVID pandemic because it's a great place to go for sort of COVID statistics and stuff like that.

So she wrote this amazing article at Wired magazine, and it's about processed foods.

Every once in a while, people stop me on the street.

And they say, hey, are you the guy from the Clean energy show? Why are you promoting processed foods all the time? Go on.

The idea of processed food, it just has a really bad rap.

We all know, I think, that we should eat raw vegetables from the garden or whatever, and processed foods can be bad.

It turns out that there's sort of two categories.

There's processed foods and then there's ultraprocessed foods.

There's literally two categories to describe them based on how much processing.

It's just a massive oversimplification.

And this fantastic article summarizes everything, and it's things that we basically kind of talked about on the show before, but I just thought the article was great because it really explains it really nicely.

One example of a good instance of processed food would be iodised salt.

So iodine is a thing that we all need in our bodies.

And iodine deficiencies used to be a really common problem around the world, and increased risk of stillbirth and miscarriages reductions in IQ from lack of iodine.

That's why I'm so smart.

All the processed foods I've been eating, all that.

Yeah.

So reduce cognitive development.

But many years ago, we started adding iodine to salt.

So most salt is iodized, and this kind of fixes that problem.

But it's really the ultra processed foods that tend to be the problems, like, you know, snack foods like Twinkies and stuff like that.

So where would we get iodised salt in nature to keep us healthy before? I'm not sure where that even comes from.

Yeah, presumably our meat paleolithic cells were eating the right roots and vegetables or whatever.

I'm not sure it's the ultra processed foods that we really should be railing against.

Technically, something like Beyond Meat is ultra processed, but it's not that simple.

It's just an oversimplification to say it's bad because it's processed well.

So when I think of processed foods, Brian, I think of losing the nutritional value because of the way it's processed.

I think of added salts, and I think of added sugars.

That's a very common thing, too.

And spaghetti sauce.

And practically everything has sugar that doesn't need it.

No.

And as you said on the show many times before, it's not intended to be health food.

Like Beyond Meat is not intended to be health food.

It's intended to be a substitute for meat.

So ground beef.

So what you really need to compare it against is ground beef.

So when you do that, meat substitutes tend to be lower in calories, lower in saturated fat, and higher fat fiber.

Yes.

Really? Because I thought some of the criticism of these Beyond Meat and what's the other one called? What's the other one called? Yes.

Impossible Burger.

Impossible Burger.

That they were worse than regular meat.

Or maybe that's the beef industry saying that it could all be tweaked.

I mean, it can be whatever you want it to be.

We're still early stages here, right? I mean, we're still developing stages.

If people are saying, oh, this tastes like crap, well, then they can add in more fat.

They can add in more sugar or whatever.

So meat substitutes lower in calories and saturated fat and higher in fiber, which is good to their detriment.

Some are lower in protein and often contain lower quality protein, meaning they contain less of the essential amino acids that we need.

I didn't know there were different levels of protein.

That's something new for me.

Yeah.

When it comes to sodium, it's sort of a mixed bag substitute.

Burgers tend to be comparable to meat.

When it comes to sodium, the substitute sausages have less salt than their pork equivalents.

A lot of these substitute products are now fortified with B Twelve, iron and calcium, which is something you're not necessarily going to get from the meat.

The Impossible burger has more B Twelve and iron than beef does.

Really many plant based milks are fortified as well.

So on balance, they're probably a bit better for your health than the meat equivalent.

And I see this as just the beginning because we talk about the concept of food software that you can program the food that you're going to be making with precision.

Fermentation in the future will be inventing new foods that have protein in them and different tastes and different flavors that don't necessarily come from an animal or plant.

Or we can just tweak the things that are mimicking what we already eat, but to our taste, to what we like.

And chefs, I think a chef 20 years from now could be a bit of a computer programmer and just experimenting with different things, and it could be an interesting world.

Well, I've always been fascinated by that.

I think I saw, like, a documentary one time about somebody who was a chef at a fast food restaurant, and it's just the idea of that I find interesting.

Like somebody has to do, even if it's just regular meat, and somebody has to design that stuff to be then replicated literally billions of times.

It's a fascinating sort of thing.

It is.

And you go to the McDonald's campus and you see they've got all these chefs making a lot of money there.

And every time they come up with a new product, I always think of them and I think, you stupid buggers, you really screwed up.

You know, I'm very disappointed in this rap that you made.

This rap so that teenagers can put it together when they're hungover and use basic ingredients, and it's just crap.

All these chefs are making these things that are disappointing and everything that you eat.

I was talking to my family about Tim Hortons.

What a compromise of a restaurant that is.

Yes, everything is bad.

Even the donut.

It's a donut shop, and they can't even make a decent donut.

I don't want to be the old man here, but when I was a kid donuts were pretty damn good.

They're a lot better than they are.

There no.

And even Tim Hortons.

It was about 20 years ago, they switched, and they forced all of their franchises to buy basically frozen dough or frozen donuts.

Well, they make them in a factory.

I've seen the news stories on them.

They make them in a centralized factory, and they have baked them.

They just finished the baking process and specialized ovens here, which make them somewhat fresh.

But they're not a good product, which is not.

No, but up until that point, they were made in the restaurants, and they were slightly better.

So there's a couple more issues raised from this article.

First, the idea that food processing could alleviate malnutrition for billions of people.

So meat substitutes are mostly targeted at wealthy consumers.

But the implications of a backlash to process food are just as harmful for people with less money.

More food processing, not less, could improve health and nutrition in developing countries.

So there's a lot of countries that can't afford to eat a lot of meat, and in some ways, that's good.

In other ways, it's bad.

There are certain things that you lack in your diet, perhaps if you're not eating meat.

And some of those things could be added, like iodine to salt could be added into the thing.

And plus, there's an appetite for people that they may want to eat more meat in countries where they can't afford it, and this gives them an option that is like that that's similar to meat.

If you're new to the podcast, I should tell you that we talk about food on the show because it affects the climate.

The new technologies and food are lower.

Carbon, like, Impossible Burger is 25 times less carbon per gram than the hamburger.

No, the final point from the article is the carbon footprint.

I mean, it's absolutely insane how much lower the carbon footprint is from the substitute food than regular meat.

The environmental toll can be ten to 100 times lower than beef or lamb, beef being the most carbon intensive.

I came across another one the other day.

People often complain about almond milk.

Milk substitute made of almond because it uses a lot of water, you need tons of water.

It's growing in places that doesn't have water.

It doesn't have a lot of water.

And this is true of the milk substitutes.

Almond is the one that uses the most water, but it's like a 10th or 100th of the water needed if you get the milk from a cow.

Like, the water needed for the beef industry is insane.

So I would have assumed the opposite.

Wow.

It's not even close.

You're saying it's not even close? Well, because I've driven by those almond farms, and you see all the irrigation, and you see the outside the border, it's a desert.

So to join them in the desert and you think, wow, this is not a good idea.

No, but you see the chart for the carbon footprints, and beef is the most carbon intensive of all of the meats.

And one last thing here and again, it's from our World in Data.

There was a really nice graph of meat consumption per person around the world.

And so, quick quiz.

What country do you think eats the most meat per person? My initial response would be the United Kingdom or the United States.

It is the United States.

Yeah, that's kind of almost a stereotype.

It's a stereotype that appears to be true.

Argentina eats a lot of meat.

Australia eats a lot of meat.

So in the US.

It's 124 year per person, which is a lot.

Canada is now at 82.

Lot less in Canada.

That was surprising to me.

Now, why would that be? We have a lot of agriculture here.

We have a lot of land.

Why would we I don't know, except I know that anytime I've been to the States and you go to a restaurant and you order a meal in a restaurant, it always seems to be a very large portion of meat.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But there's a wonderful graph there on our World in Data, meats applied per person.

This is 2017, so the data is a bit out of date, perhaps.

Well, the article is on wired.com and it's called The World Needs Processed Food.

I'll put a link to it in our show notes, and you can check it out there.

So the Tesla semi, according to a tweet by the CEO of Tesla, did its 500 miles trip with a full load.

Now, Tesla a few years ago announced that it was making a semi allelectric semitruck.

The CEO of Nicola, who is now, like, in prison, I remember reading his tweets.

He was really upset that this was against the law of physics.

There's no way you could carry an 18,000 pound load, which is kind of like the load that you want to carry.

The Tesla semi carry this 18,000 pound load 81,000 pardon me, 81,000 for 500 miles, which is, Bill Gates said, not possible.

I don't know why these people say these things, Brian.

Why do they doubt us? Why do they put themselves on the record saying it's not possible? Now, lots of people said that at the time that the Tesla announcement was suspicious because people didn't think it was possible.

But it's been so long since they made that announcement that battery density, the energy density, the more you can get more energy in the same weight of battery and volume than you could back then, it tends to improve by something like 18% a year.

But we're kind of there now, and it sounds well, we'll know in a couple of days, right? Because on December 1 of having an event.

Yeah, but apparently they've done it, and they've decided that he's invited Bill Gates to come have a ride.

And, you know, I was thinking that would be a fun thing to own.

And I know a lot of Tesla fanatics are actually got orders in for the semi just to have other driveway, some YouTube channels, which will be fun.

Yeah, definitely fun if they buy one and drive it around because they're fast without a load.

They're just really fast and quiet and tall and just such a weird thing for somebody to own.

And probably not that much more expensive than some of the highly spec pickup trucks that are out there for $120,000, be a couple of hundred thousand dollars, it sounds like.

But yeah, we'll learn more on December 1.

And looking to learn more about the charging speeds and the infrastructure and stuff.

Yeah, we'll learn how they plan to do it.

But it sounds like this is for real now.

If it is for real, this is a big deal because there's lots of people making electric semis, but they're making them for shorter scenarios, okay? They don't have the battery technology or the efficiency that Tesla has with their motors, their inverters, and the way that they have their batteries.

And plus they've just done pretty serious design with the aerodynamics and everything and maximize everything they can get and wait.

So we'll see.

But this is a game changer.

A lot of people are saying the cost per mile is going to be significantly lower enough that it will pull triggers on a lot of people will pull triggers on it right away once they see the difference in the cost per mile.

So it's very interesting.

Just as your Nissan Leaf basically paid for itself with the gasoline savings, these will pay for themselves with the diesel savings.

I'd love to have one to pull.

You could pull an RV right? There's people talking about that.

And I'm sure somebody will make an RV based off the platform.

That will probably take a while, but they'll turn one of these units into just a kickass RV, which will it'll have a massive battery, which you can power off the grid and do all kinds of amazing things.

Plaster the RV part with the solar panels and charge it up as well.

It just seems like a great way to RV because towing is such a pain in the butt.

And a Tesla semi or pickup truck, I guess, would do a great job too.

Yeah, so from Power Magazine, the UK government steps up as a 50% owner of the 3.2 gigawatt sizewell C nuclear reactors.

So they've been building this nuclear reactor for a while, planning it, and guess what? It turned out to be more expensive than they expected.

So they really needed the government to step in.

And the government has stepped in with a 679,000,000 pound investment that's $815,000,000.

So yeah, they're going to own half of it from that.

But as we've discussed many times, government really has to own these because they are not profitable for any private industry there, especially by the time these get built.

And I hate to go on about nuclear.

We tend to bash nuclear every episode or so, but especially by the time this is finished, it will be years from now.

Years, as we all know, the cost of solar and batteries, my cars will be cold and dust like so it's already a bad monetary investment now, but that's just going to get worse as time goes on.

And we have a story coming up in the lightning round that says that the cost of uranium is really going up.

So that's making the economics of all this very it's getting worse, I'm afraid.

But yeah, private ownership and investment pardon me, in nuclear, it's not happening because governments have to do it.

Then when governments do it, that makes you and I the investor.

We're suffering.

We're going to waste money because they don't listen to our podcast.

If they only listen to our podcast, everyone would be the world would be a better place.

And there was a story from Japan, too, on Bloomberg.

They're looking to extend the life of their 60 year old nuclear plants, which they were planning to phase out at age 60.

And keeping nuclear running that we already have is probably a good idea, but 60 seems a bit pushy.

It's kind of pushing it, but they're studying it now to see if it's going to be worthwhile.

Okay, well, I have no problem, as long as it's safe of extending nuclear, if that's what it takes.

So Electric says that there are more electric bike subsidies coming to the United States.

I guess it was in the Inflation Reduction Act, but then it got taken out like there was going to be a killer ebike subsidy that everyone would have got in the states, but that's not there anymore.

So individual cities and states have since picked up the slack.

They say.

Vermont launched the first state incentive program in the US.

Denver, Colorado, also launched the very popular ebike rebate program that repeatedly sold out and they had to renew it.

New York is now considering its own ebike rebate, and now we can add Oregon to the list.

It could become the latest date.

They're talking about $200 off an ebike that costs, well, at least $950.

But Brian, that would be free.

I mean, my math isn't so good, but if all you have to spend is 950 and you get up to 1200 off, I assume if you spent 950, they'd give you 950.

Yes, I know, but still, that's a free.

That's free.

That's what I'm saying.

It goes to zero.

Free bike.

That's crazy.

I mean, who wouldn't buy one? I mean, even if you didn't want one, it would be sitting around the house and then the bikes are going to be sold.

I don't know.

They have to do something about that.

They can't do 100% of the purchase, but maybe it's prorated.

Maybe somebody in Colorado can tell me the details.

But also they would go right up to $700 if it's an electric cargo bike.

I think I forgot a friend in Vancouver has an electric cargo bike.

Yeah, basically, it's a cargo bike not because you're a courier, but because you're living your life off the thing.

So you're getting all your groceries and your snow blowers from Walmart.

And by the way, it's going to snow in Vancouver.

If you're in Vancouver look good for the snow.

It doesn't usually snow there.

Electric cargo bikes are going to be huge.

Okay, so Ireland and France are going to connect their electricity grids.

How is that possible, Brian? Physically, it's with a giant extension cord.

Really? Does it go underwater? It goes underwater.

So it is a massive cable that is 575 km long.

And so this is the first time that France has been connected to a grid in the UK.

And it's for sharing power back and forth between Ireland and France.

They're just beginning it now, so it will be operational by 2026.

It'll be 700.

MW can go through the cable, which is enough to power 450,000 households.

So, yeah, I'm just always interested in these kind of stories.

We need to make our grids smarter and more interconnected to share the power.

Ireland and France seems like an odd combination.

How did these two hook up? What's going on there? What would their accent be like? No, I'm not sure, but I'm just glad to hear it.

Well, it's time for the Tweet of the Week.

Well, the Tweet of the week comes from Said Razuk this week, and he says building new solar is three to ten times cheaper than operating existing gas fired power.

So you have a gas fired power in a lot of places in the world.

It is cheaper, like the United States, southern United States, three to ten times cheaper to build new solar than just to operate the gas.

Yes.

We're not talking gas this building solar, we're talking building a whole new thing is three to ten times cheaper just than existing gas.

So if gas funds were invested in renewables like they're not right at the moment, europe would get rid of gas by 2028.

And this is via PV magazine that he quotes data from.

Well, it is time for the lighting round.

Short one for you this week, Brian.

General Motors dealerships have repaired thousands of Tesla electric cars, says GM, and it's annual Investor Day presentation.

I have not heard this before, but apparently people are taking their Teslas to GM dealership.

Maybe I could take my Leaf to the GM because they fixed.

Screw you, Nissan.

I'll just take it to the GM dealership.

Yeah, that might work.

I mean, if you could take a Tesla, why couldn't you take a Nissan? Yeah, no, that's the first time I've heard of this.

First booked on Barons.

A slide in the presentation simply reads eleven 180 repairs and Teslas, but they did not elaborate.

So GM Volvo say that EVs won't cost more than gas vehicles by 2025.

Both automakers see the Inflation Reduction Act as a key for achieving price parity by middecade, despite recent supply chain challenges.

So that's good news.

If true, the UK government will bolster a proposed OK, that's something we already talked about, so I'm going to skip that.

It's time for what is it time for? A CES, a clean energy show.

Fast fact.

The International Atomic Energy Agency said 437 nuclear power reactors were operational throughout the world at the end of 2021.

And that has a total net capacity of 389 gigawatts.

So it's less than a gigawatt per reactor on average.

The agency said 56 additional units were under construction.

Some of those are in China, most of those are not other places.

And as I said before, uranium prices are on the rise, thus making nuclear even less competitive.

And Russia is partially the thing for that.

They're raising the prices of gas and oil and also uranium.

So we screwed everything up.

The Department of Energy is to test rapidly deployable portable wind turbines for military use.

I remember once we had on the show a story about the military with rapid deployment of solar panels that would sort of be like a transformer and unfold on a portable truck that would give energy into the field.

Well, this is good for disaster relief and military use.

So disaster relief and military use.

A team of three labs will use remote communities to study the efficacy of turbines designed to fit into 20 foot shipping containers, perhaps towed by a Tesla.

Semi clean energy jobs now outnumber jobs in fossil fuels, according to a new IEA report.

Now, I'm going to continue to keep my eye open for reports like this and studies, because it seems like we are at the point now where the transition is happening, where the clean energy jobs are way overtaking fossil fuel jobs.

So, by the way, France's first offshore wind farm, which is about half a gigawatt, is now fully online.

So France has never had an offshore wind farm before.

And speaking of offshore wind, our final story this week, before we go, is Denmark is helping India identify 15 offshore wind zones.

And apparently India has some sweet wind zones, Brian, and they need electricity.

We talked about huge solar developments in India, while offshore wind is next up on the list, and that will be a huge boon for them.

Nice.

That is our time for this week.

It's more than our time.

We'd like to hear from you.

Please, for God's sake, contact us.

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That is our email address.

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you.