Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Ron, welcome to the program today. So let me start with a very simple question.
When you look over your career, what is your proudest moment?
[00:00:12] Speaker B: Well, my personal favorite, and I do this because I think it's important to share with folks.
My wife, my second wife, we were blended family. I had married into a child, had two kids, biologically got divorced, remarried into a woman who had four kids. And probably my proudest moment is when she became sick, because in her first child, her placenta had broken. They had given her an emergency transfusion. This was in the 1970s. It was before they were testing the blood supply, and she came down with hepatitis C. And what many people don't realize is that until the sixties or so, doctors were using the same needles on multiple people. And so 5 million Americans are walking around with hepatitis C. It's a hidden, insidious disease that slowly eats away your liver, some people faster than others. She had an emergency transfusion, saved her life. But when she had her fourth child, some years later, she found she had hepatitis C, and it was starting to eat at her liver. When I came along, some number of years later, we married, and I knew she had some disease, and she was treated for it at various points in time. It almost killed the treatment itself, almost killed her. But then eventually what happened was she went into the third wave of treatment some years in 2007, and it really did a number on her. Was nocturnal to sepsis and pneumonia, peritonitis and gastritis and colitis and C. Diff and wash, rinse, repeat. Some 30 emergency hospitalizations later, I wheeled her into a Cornell Columbia doctor who said, look, you're going to need a liver. If you don't have a liver, you're going to die, probably along the way. If you wait for someone to give you a liver until someone dies who can give you a liver that's a match, you're probably going to die from one of these opportunistic diseases. But, and this was the thing that really blew me away. If you know someone who give you half their liver, both parts will grow back. And I was astonished.
I was completely blown away. And, you know, 98% of the people I meet have never heard that the liver is a renewable organ.
And I was a pretty bright guy, undergraduate, graduate work, had a master's degree, been some experience. But I was completely shocked that that was the case, to give you a story that goes with it. So the daughter that it had all started with, who was the one who the placenta had broken with, she was willing to give her mother the half of her liver, but she had the biological father's blood type, and that was incompatible with the mothers. So a woman can grow a kid from the inside you. The kid comes out and can't even give you back any organs if they have the biological father's blood type instead.
So that was pretty mind blowing to me as well. Luckily, the other kids were too young, but I was a match. I gave her half my liver and both parts grew back. She's doing great.
And it was grown back in three months. So in three months, she was great, I was great. And here we are.
[00:03:16] Speaker A: That is absolutely amazing. I would have guessed that this would have been like years, that you would somehow be disadvantage from giving half your liver. But you're saying three months was great.
[00:03:28] Speaker B: Three months, man, I was out of the hospital in a week. I was pretty much back with work within two weeks. She was out in a couple of weeks. We had some challenges along the way, but overall it was pretty amazing experience. And I just want everybody to know, if you're having liver challenges, take a look, because there are centers around the country that do these live liver transplants. They're tremendously successful. You can plan for them as opposed to waiting for someone to die and then scrambling for an emergency basis to get to the hospital. So they're really successful. And it's an amazing thing. And yeah, it's kind of, it falls into my belly weight because I've been in clean and renewable energy for all my career. So having a renewable liver and a renewable body part was pretty funny.
[00:04:10] Speaker A: I love that. I absolutely love that. And I learned something new today, so I appreciate that. And I love your segue to renewable energy.
You've been doing, honestly, renewable energy forever.
You're on a mission. This is a passion for you. What started this passion for you? What is the moment in time? What were you doing? Who were you talking to where you decided, this is what I'm going to do in life?
[00:04:38] Speaker B: So I came out of college, and I had decided in college that part of the work that I wanted to do was to work with people. I had an accounting and management degree. That was great numbers. But I came out after my graduate degree deciding that there's really a lot more to meet the life to life than meets the eye in that we have to each find our passion, what makes life worth living, what makes us feel excited and happy. I started that working with people was it, and I lucked out. Becoming, getting a job. I took a cut and pay to take it, actually, with a community organization called Citizen Action. And in that work, I was working with people who were literally, they were phasing in the nuclear power plants at the time, and rate increases for electricity were going up 18%, 25%, three years in a row, forcing particular senior citizens on fixed incomes. They have to choose between heating their homes or eating. And a lot of.
[00:05:32] Speaker A: Where was this physically bring us?
[00:05:34] Speaker B: This was in upstate New York, in the Binghamton, New York, central New York area. So, yeah, someone gets called, and these are people on fixed incomes, right, who were, you know, basically, they don't have the ability to go out and get more money at the time. So that was a real eye opening piece to me. That energy was a key component of people's lives. The more I found out about it, the more I found that it was not just energy in terms of an economic issue, which is very serious, but it was also an environmental issue, and it was a jobs issue, and it was a pollution and air pollution issue, and it had real significant impacts on the world climate. So along the way, I decided that energy and the environment was my thing, and that was what made me decide to be and do what I am doing.
[00:06:21] Speaker A: So you said so many interesting things. Let's break it down. You said economics, jobs, and then environment and pollution.
Let's start from economics. The prices of energy were going up. This was infecting senior citizens. Why was that?
[00:06:38] Speaker B: So it affects everybody, right? But in particular, the electricity and every aspect of energy. And there's really three aspects of energy, right? There is the energy we use for electricity, which powers everything that we do, including this podcast and interview.
Then there's heating and cooling, which are tremendously important, especially the heating part, and wherever it gets cold, surviving that, but more and more cooling in extremely high, hot temperatures. And then there's also transportation, the energy associated with that. So over the years, I've managed to incorporate my work into all three aspects of energy. But at the time, it was really electricity. And electricity, when you take a look at that cost, electricity is both a solution and somewhat of a challenge. But at the time, more than half the country's electricity was coming from the burning of coal fired power plants. And that's a really polluting way of doing it. It's polluting up front. You have to go down into the mines. There's miners whose lives every day are endangered by going down into those mines to grab the coal or strip mining and making whole communities basically devastated. Then there's the pollution and the fact that in burning coal, you have a lot of air pollution. Plus, you have mercury pollution, which I actually, years later, found when I was eating too much fish that it was affecting my bloodstream, and that when I was tested for having been somewhat tired, I found that part of the cause was because I had mercury in my bloodstream, because I was eating fish every day, which was not a good situation.
Cut back, don't eat too much fish. Eat some fish, but don't eat too much because otherwise you may get mercury poisoning as well.
So energy really is key to our whole society, right? It's how we move around, it's how we heat and cool, it's how we communicate via electricity. So it's all different aspects of life. And to me, it's become a central core of what I do. One piece that came out during my initial piece of my career was I realized that in this country in particular, we waste half the energy we use, and that's because of the inefficiencies of generation, of transmission, of distribution, of how we use our energy. But that's a big economic piece. It's hundreds of billions of dollars a year of just waste. That doesn't make a lot of sense. So, yep.
[00:09:03] Speaker A: Is this specifically us compared to other countries or in general, this is an unsolved problem where we're wasting a lot of the energy we produce?
[00:09:11] Speaker B: Well, there's always some efficiency loss, no matter what type of generation you're doing, whether it's from solar or wind or other renewable sources or from burning fossil fuels. But burning fossil fuels always has a tremendous loss. And, yeah, in this country, the type of fossil development that we've done and how we set up our whole system has resulted in half the energy we use being wasted.
[00:09:38] Speaker A: We talk about the different types of energy is coal versus natural gas versus oil versus. So, well, let's put the clean energies aside for a second. But of the dirty energy sources, are they as dirty as they were before, or. We've done so much technological innovation that they're great sources of energy today.
[00:10:02] Speaker B: So we've done a lot of innovation, which is great. So we've improved the efficiency, we've reduced the amount of pollution coming out of these energy sources through various different technologies that capture and keep some of that pollution from getting into the air or the water or the ground. But nonetheless, every fossil fuel has significant inefficiencies. And to just give you one example of a heating source, which is kind of fabulous and interesting to me that I now work on, if you're burning any type of fossil fuel, and so if you're burning oil, you're somewhere deficiencies are of definitely less than 90%, maybe 80%. As a matter of fact, if you have a big oil burner in your home and you're also using it to heat your hot water during the summer and during the swing seasons, that has efficiencies down as low as 30% we've seen in certain buildings. So the efficiencies of burning with oil are really poor.
Then you go to natural gas, which can be a cleaner burning fuel in terms of the amount of energy you're getting out of it versus the amount of waste that's going up into your chimney. But the most efficient natural gas burners are still, and the 90% efficiency, which is better than, you know, than oil, and then other ways, if you have an efficient burner and if you have it cleaned and it's working properly. But then you take a look at a thing like an air source heat pump, and an air source heat pump compresses and expands a gas, and it creates energy by taking some of that energy out of the air. And an air conditioner or a refrigerator or a freezer is an air source heat pump. It compresses and expands this gas, and it takes energy out of the air surrounding it. And those have efficiencies of 200% to 300%, which means that any unit of electricity put in, you get two to three units of heating or cooling out of that same resource.
[00:11:55] Speaker A: I have asked myself many times, how does my fridge or air conditioning work? I know that electricity goes into it, but I don't understand how that works. For those of our audience who are curious, tell us a little bit more about how that process even works.
[00:12:10] Speaker B: Yeah. So when you compress or expand the gas in a particular, certain types of gases, what happens is it releases heat or it grabs heat. And that's really what an air conditioner does. And that's what a heat pump does. That's what your freezer and your refrigerator do, is they compress and expand the gas. And in that process of compressing and expanding a gas, it releases or it captures heat. Every unit of energy you put into an aerosols heat pump, you get. You get two to three units of heating and cooling out of it. However, you then go to the next step of technology, which is the heat beneath our feet in the geothermal sense. And in this part of the northeast part of the United States, in most part of the United States, if you drove down below the frost line about four or 5 miles, four or 5ft, what you find is that these are constant temperature of the earth. And in the northeast United States, it's a 55 degree temperature. Different parts of the country, it's different temperatures, but nonetheless, you go down below the frost line, there's a constant temperature. If you send the fluid down, and in many cases, it's just water. As water goes down, water comes back. Now the water is at 55 degrees. So if you're trying to heat a building and you're starting with 55 degrees, and then you then put the 55 degrees water into a heat pump, you don't have to go far to get a heating temperature. The same is true with cooling. If you have a 55 degree temperature water that you're starting with, you don't have to do much to it to start cooling up space. So geothermal efficiencies are four to 600% efficient. Oh, wow, we need that. Yeah, every unit of energy.
[00:13:42] Speaker A: So really what you're saying is that you have extreme heat or extreme cold temperature. It doesn't matter. Let's first get to a temperature which is close to what we want to be at the 70 degrees, let's say. So let's bring it up to something, or bring it down to something that's close. Then we spend the energy only on the delta. So that's a huge efficiency gain, basically.
[00:14:03] Speaker B: Exactly. And that's what the air source heat pumps do with the outside air, but they do struggle when it gets really hot or really cold, so they're really optimized. But even in air source heat pump can go down now to -20 minus ten or 20 degrees fahrenheit. So even those are very efficient in terms of capturing that energy. But then if you use geothermal, which to me is the solution to a lot of our heating and cooling issues, you're starting with a baseline temperature, and you don't have to do much. And you're right, it's just a delta.
[00:14:31] Speaker A: So who is using geothermal technologies today? Is it just big buildings that are cooling or heating massive amounts, or are there kind of commercial home solutions as well?
[00:14:42] Speaker B: It ranges across the board, so there's everything from single family homes and the best time to geothermals. If you're ever building a new home, I highly encourage you to look at the geothermal, because you're already mobilizing people, you're already mobilizing capital, you're doing groundwork already to deal the foundation, et cetera, et cetera. So if you're moving, building any new building, it's kind of ideal. Yeah, it's a really good time, and there's a lot of incentives there to do it. And then you're only looking at the delta between the cost of doing a traditional fossil fuel solution versus doing geothermal. You wind up heating and cooling. It's a much more constant and much more comfortable temperature, and you can put all that additional, that total cost into a mortgage. So now you're in the black from day one with a positive cash flow. So any new construction, and if you take a look around, there's everything from single family homes doing geothermal through all different sizes of other buildings. There's whole campuses that are doing it in New York City. The Cornell, Cornell University has a campus in the New York City which they did with geothermal technologies, really innovative, but it's a whole range and across the world that's what people are discovering, is that it makes a lot of sense to tap into the heat beneath our feet. With geothermal.
[00:15:58] Speaker A: There's an interesting conflict in incentives when it comes to the homeowner versus the organization building the houses. They don't necessarily care about what your energy expenditure is going to be over the years, but on the other hand, you might have a certain amount of cash that you can put into building the house. So there's an issue for you in regards to how much time it's going to take for you to get that cash back. So it's a complex environment.
What does that look like today? Are there government incentives which are helping putting in these programs for free?
What does it look like? How do we solve that conflict and what's happening today versus what might happen in the future?
[00:16:40] Speaker B: Great. Yeah, so really great perspective of the difference between operating costs and your ability to pay on a monthly basis for the cost of energy to heat and cool and do all the things you want to do versus the upfront capital cost. And that's traditionally where many projects fall apart because people don't necessarily have the capital for that. However, there are a number of government programs, everything from a few years ago, the federal government pass the Inflation Reduction act, the IRA, which has dramatic multi billions dollars worth of incentives. So every homeowner and every building owner that goes to geothermal can grab a 30% federal tax credit. So that's across the board, across the country. It's really great, innovative program, helps you reduce that cost. Same is true also for solar electricity, by the way, you get that same 30% tax credit, it can go even be more in certain areas.
And then depending on the state that you live in, and depending on the utility territory and the state regulations of those utility territories. There are state incentives and local utility incentives, and sometimes there's other municipal incentives as well. So depending upon where you are in the country, there are various levels of incentives, everything from cash grants through tax credits, through low cost financing to help you afford for these technologies and put them in and save over the long term.
[00:18:01] Speaker A: So, I mean, this is kind of, if anything, the government should do or shouldn't do, this is the kind of thing that they should be doing, I would argue, because it's really helping individuals, companies to bridge that gap and create a huge positive externality to. Sorry for the finance terminology.
Has that moved the needle? What are we seeing? Are we seeing your everyday Joe, stop at the Costco thing and think about more renewable energy, or is it really just for big projects? How far are we on this journey towards renewable energy?
[00:18:37] Speaker B: So you have to take apart each different pieces of the equation.
I like to say, and I do a podcast on clean energy where we talk about the renewable energies that are out there. Power of the air from wind power, the power of the water from hydropower. The power of the earth from earth power, the power of the sun, the solar power, that little ball in the sky upon which we depend. All life on this planet depends. So the air, water, earth and sun, the awesome, awesome, awesome power of renewable energy that's all around us. And one of the things that we discovered is that there's thousands of times more power around us. We live at a sea of energy. And the interesting thing that has happened over the past number of years is that the cost of accessing that energy has come down dramatically. So, for instance, the cost of solar electricity has come down over 99% since it first came out in the 1960s. And many people think that solar electricity is expensive. But actually, around the world, more than half the new energy that's coming online is from solar. And it's come about not just because of the environmental impact, but because it's the cheapest source of electricity around now, because the price has come down, because we figured out ways of capitalizing on the growing industry and reducing those price with more people buying.
[00:19:56] Speaker A: Let's bring the audience with us and just explain that process a little bit, because it's non trivial. Microwaves, when they came out, cost tens of thousands of dollars and they were size of a room.
Nowadays you get a microwave for $150 anywhere.
That process is a process of technology maturing. That same process is happening to solar power. And what you're describing is really the crossing of a threshold where a certain technology becomes mature and becomes affordable once it becomes affordable. And that scale has tipped, it explodes. That is an incredible number. You said 50% of all new, and keep me honest here, 50% of all new construction is solar. Tell me more about that.
[00:20:40] Speaker B: Did I quote generation? All new electricity generation across the world these days.
[00:20:44] Speaker A: Is this big plants or is this small houses?
[00:20:48] Speaker B: What is that? It's everything. And depending upon where you are in the world, it can be some of the larger ones, can be some of the smaller ones. But across the board, what everyone is finding is that when it comes to creating new electricity sources, solar is by far the least cost option. Going forward. Depending upon where you are in the world and the resources that you have, there may be other technologies that you bring into that. But across the planet, solar is now becoming the most cost competitive source of new electricity generation on a dollar and a kilowatt hour basis.
[00:21:19] Speaker A: And this is what is driving that acceleration of solar. Are the solar panels better? Is it other stuff?
[00:21:26] Speaker B: Yeah, there's a lot of different parts. So part of it is technology evolution. Part of it is the economies of scale. So part of it, like you said, is the technologies are improving and becoming more mature. So we figured out ways of doing them better, faster, making them more effective and efficient. And simultaneously, it's adoption. And the fact that as we get cheaper and cheaper, everybody wants more of it. More of it means that there's more economies of scale. So the price keeps coming down. So, yeah, it's a. It's a very positive viral circle.
[00:21:58] Speaker A: So I. You know, I keep having this discussion, which always surprises me, and people are like, well, let's just go nuclear. Like, that seems to be such a wonderful, such a powerful solution. And then there's discussion about, oh, well, you know, nuclear plants have had issues in the past which have been catastrophic.
What's the situation of nuclear power? Are we building new nuclear power plants today? Are they safe?
Are they driving enough electricity? Is nuclear even a solution?
[00:22:30] Speaker B: When I was in college, in between my undergraduate and graduate, I was saving up to go to Europe with my college girlfriend, and I worked at a nuclear power plant. It was the Shoreham nuclear power plant on Long island, and I was a security guard. I was working there at nights. I was working a day job as a beach guard. I didn't get a lot of sleep that summer, but I saved a lot of money, enough to go to Europe the year after.
I was astonished at the level. Misspending, overspending, just incompetence, basically, in the nuclear industry at the time. And it was really kind of scary because up until that point, I had believed in nuclear power as a way of a source of energy that was going to take us to the stars. That was a big science fiction buff, and I thought that was going to happen. After that experience of seeing a power plant that went from hundreds of millions of dollars to billions of dollars that eventually bankrupted the Long Island Lighting Company, it was clear that those nuclear power plants were not a good investment in terms of financing. And actually, that was why, for many, many years, we didn't build another nuclear power plant in this country. Up until recently. Recently, the administration may have a mixed view on some different things. The current administration is starting to look at some new nuclear technologies that are more cost effective, smaller, more modular, to be built faster. To me, the main concern still becomes the potential of having an accident, which can be devastating, versus the long term effects of dealing with the waste, which, you know, you're having hundreds of thousands of years worth of waste, which I don't, I don't count on any government being able to manage that for hundreds of thousands of years. So there's a lot of, a lot of impacts there that have resulted in much less nuclear power being built. There's the potential for the fuel to be used in nuclear bombs, obviously. So that's a, that's a challenge. Even a dirty bomb where you take stuff that wouldn't be potentially fissionable, but simultaneously, you don't want to breathe it. You don't want it in a bomb that's spread around someplace. So there's a lot of issues with nuclear. The interesting thing to me, and I think you touched upon it, is that, you know, not too long ago, this little thing that we all carry around in our pockets, this amount of computer power on the planet, did not exist 50 years ago.
[00:24:55] Speaker A: For those of us not watching but listening, you're waving your phone around.
[00:24:58] Speaker B: I'm waving that little device in our pocket, right? Which now in my little device in my pocket, I have more computer power than existed on the planet. It's more computer power that took people to the moon in the 1960s. And up until a short time ago, it was tens of millions of dollars in a room full of computers to get that amount of computer technology. And now the cost have come down. So we all have these little things in our pocket that cost a couple hundred bucks. And, hey, you know, we're much happier than we were, and that's the same thing that's happening with energy. So to me, what I think the biggest thing in energy that's going to happen is that we're going to go from centralized power sources, like we used to have with centralized computers, where there were mainframes that were distributing the power out, distributing the information out to. And that's why we have our, this current electricity and energy system is it's all central power plants that then go through transmission, that get distributed to various buildings, etcetera. We're going to become a much more interactive, decentralized. So just like we have our personal computers in a pocket, we're going to have personal little power plants in our homes and our offices and other buildings.
[00:26:00] Speaker A: So let's linger on that point for a moment because it's not clear.
I have a solar panel on my roof. If I'm manufacturing, I'm giving energy back to the network. Is that a thing?
[00:26:13] Speaker B: So depending upon where you are in the country, there's something called net metering. And if you're in a net metering community, which most communities, most utilities are participating in some way, shape or fashion, and that net metering, what happens is that solar, the sunlight's hitting that solar panel, it's turning that into electricity. It's actually a conversation we could have about the type of electricity and how it gets changed into alternating current and put into your house. But the first thing it does is it reduces the amount of energy that you're using, electricity that you're using in your space. So first thing is you're becoming more independent and you're getting that. But of course, every night, don't have the sun shining, so you don't have electricity. So unless you have battery storage built into your house at night, you need to take off the grid. And the way that we've overcome that as a society in a current system is that when you're generating more electricity than you're using inside your building, that's putting electricity back into the grid so that you're now net metering. You're getting credit for that energy that you're putting into the grid. As more and more of us do that, we're getting distributed energy systems, distributed energy resources. And that's meaning that the whole utility system is going to have to change and adopt and evolve so that we become not just consumers of energy, but also prosumers. And with that solar panel on your roof, you're a prosumer. You're producing electricity as much as you're using it and consuming it.
[00:27:35] Speaker A: And that's also more effective comparatively, because you don't have as much distribution issues, right?
[00:27:41] Speaker B: So what happens is that when you have a traditional power plant, you're generating at the power plant, there's an efficiency there from a fossil fuel that's less than 100% efficient, that's burning the fossils to get that electricity, then that transmission is then that electricity being transmitted over long distance on high temperature, high voltage power lines. So there's an inefficiency there. You lose efficiency from going from the generator to the transmission over those lines, you're losing more efficiency. Then you're distributing that through the network. And so, yeah, by the time you're done, you're getting less than half the electricity that was generated into your home or into your building. So by having it at the source, you're dramatically improving your efficiency and increasing your efficiency and cost effectiveness.
[00:28:28] Speaker A: Okay, so there's a really interesting question here.
Electric cars is a growing industry.
We're consuming less fossil fuels, less coal fuel.
We're potentially, if we have solar on our house, we're potentially charging our cars for free. But it's changing the economic supply and demand of electric, and we're seeing charging stations that think that, oh, we're going to charge, you know, we're going to give charging for free or for a small price, suddenly go bankrupt because they went for these incredibly high surcharges. It's getting complicated.
What is happening? Share with us a little bit about what's happening when it comes to electric cars. How is that impacting the ecosystem? Is there a future here? What are the problems that we have to overcome?
[00:29:20] Speaker B: Yeah, great question. So one. Yep. Electric vehicles are growing exponentially, just like we're seeing solar grow exponentially, just like we saw smartphones grow exponentially. So that technology evolution is happening. And it's happening because with an electric vehicle, what happens instead of 2000 moving parts, which is what you have in an internal combustion engine, you know, you're exploding basically gasoline under your hood hundreds of times a second. Really? Right? I mean, revolutions per minute, etcetera, etcetera. You have all these moving parts, 2000 moving parts in an internal combustion engine. In an electric vehicle, you have about 20. So dramatically less parts and pieces.
The cost of the batteries were high, are coming down dramatically now too. So what we're seeing is that electric vehicles are becoming a very cost competitive to traditional fossil fuel vehicles. And with the incentives that are out there, in almost all cases, you can have a comparable electric vehicle in capital cost to a comparable internal combustion engine. So first, on a capital basis, we're seeing a reduction in cost as battery prices come down, as people start realizing that, hey, I don't have a transmission fluid, I don't have oil, I don't have to change my oil. I have moved less moving parts, I have less maintenance issues. So on a capital basis and on an operating basis, we have electric vehicles that are taking off. In addition, anywhere you are in the country, electricity per mile with an electric vehicle is dramatically cheaper than running a gasoline or diesel powered vehicle. So in my part of the world, even with Con Edison, which is one of the highest electricity rates in the country, the cost to run an electric vehicle, the same mileage on electric fuel versus gasoline fuel is about half the price per mile. So you have, in some cases, 80% reduction by moving per mile with electric versus versus gasoline, then you're right about the charging infrastructure. The interesting thing to me is if you live in a single family home like I do, and you have a garage, as I happen to be lucky enough to have, my wife and I come in, we plug in our car into our garage, we go out, we come back, plug it in overnight. I haven't been to a gas station in years of my electric car, so, you know, I don't think about it when we go distance. Yeah, we have to think about it. And you got to, like, you know, pay attention. And there's some charging stations, and there's a growing infrastructure, but there's a lot of investment. We can talk about that. That's happening in that. But the first thing that I want to say to anybody that has a single family resident in a garage, but in a charging station in your garage. My wife has a. Has just a slow charger, so it's a trickle charger, but she doesn't go more than 20 or 30 miles in a day. 90, 95% of Americans go less than 100 miles in a day on their average, commute back and forth to the stores, to work, to whatever. If you're one of those people that does less than 100 miles a day, you can plug it into a regular electric socket, and overnight, you'll have enough charge to take you back the next day. You don't have to go to a gas station. You don't have to worry about a charging station. The only time you have to worry about it is if you're going long distance, and then you can do various different things. So the other interesting thing to me, though, and this is where I think you're touching on Ari, is, okay, so now I've got. I've got my electric car, I've got all these people that are using more electricity on their electric cars. They're using it in their homes, they're using in their workplaces. They're using it wherever they go. How is the griddenne going to support that? And I think that's a really important consideration, because it really is impactful. But one of the neatest things, I think, is that those electric vehicles are actually mobile power stations. So the technology is evolving. Nissan just came out and announced that they're ready for it. The Ford F 150 electric is already able to do it. And what that means is that you can plug in a Ford F 150 or a Nissan Leaf, and you can use it as a power station. So when the power goes out, you can plug your home into it and can carry all the energy, the electricity needs of your home, for three to five days or longer, depending upon how much energy your home is using. So now, instead of just consuming electricity for electric vehicles, we have them as a power source that we can use to export electricity into our homes to provide backup power. In White Plains, one of the Westchester communities work with, they're actually doing with school buses, and they realize that school buses, you know, most of the year, they're going out, they're coming back. They don't have that long a run. But then during the summers, they're just sitting there. Right? So what they're doing with the school buses, they're a megawatt of power on wheels. And at night, they charge up the school buses off the grid. During the day, they discharge it when the grid needs it. And now they have the ability to provide a power source in a region that is gridden constrained and provide electricity. And their school district is making money off of the electric school buses. People, consumers will be able to do that as well with our electric vehicles going forward in the future, or we can use it to reduce our electricity costs. So as we get this distributed energy system, it opens up new possibilities, new business models, new ways of doing things, so that these vehicles become not just a consumer and a demand on the grid, but actually a support of the grid.
[00:34:27] Speaker A: So that's pretty complicated. Let's break it down to the fundamentals.
[00:34:31] Speaker B: Sorry.
[00:34:31] Speaker A: Electricity costs more when there is huge demand for that electricity, correct? That is true.
These cars and buses have batteries in them. Yep. They are charging when electricity does not cost much, meaning at night.
[00:34:47] Speaker B: That's the best time. If you could do that. Absolutely.
[00:34:50] Speaker A: And then during the day, where the buses or cars might not be used, they're still connected to the grid. However, now they're giving the cheap electricity from the night. And they're giving basically where electricity is high, it's creating a supply of that cheap electricity from the night, during the day. So really what we're doing is we're creating a better distributed infrastructure to support high stress times. That's the idea. It's not a power plant in terms of that. The car is making electricity, really. It's transferring cheap electricity to where you only have a small amount of electricity. You're creating a huge amount of electricity offset. That's really the trick that's going on here.
[00:35:30] Speaker B: That is the vision for the future. You're exactly right, Ari.
[00:35:34] Speaker A: That's really interesting. What about the batteries? To me, it seemed like that's a huge impediment for cars becoming successful electric cars. That is, if I want to go on a road trip and I'm going to be traveling for 30 minutes an hour, sure, you know, that's 60 miles. But what if I'm going on a longer one, two or three hour trip?
Are electric cars able to do that today? And are we seeing the same kind of innovations in the batteries in the Cars?
[00:36:06] Speaker B: First, more than 90% of Americans, when you drive on your daily basis, you're less than 100 miles. If you're going less than 100 miles a day, a battery electric car is totally cost effective. It makes sense. It saves you money, it saves you energy. It has positive environmental impact. It just is a no Brainer. I happen when I do a lot of work, a couple hours, an hour and a half away from me. So I need a vehicle that can go 200 miles round trip to go and do my daily trip. And I have that now because most many new electric vehicles go 300 miles to the charge and mine actually does. So if you doing an hour, hour and a half commute each way, you know, the reality is, is that technology is there now. And then the fascinating thing is that, yeah, the technology is increasing dramatically. It's exponentially growing as more and more people become interested in it, as the prices keep coming down, as the government puts incentives behind it, we're seeing these dramatic increases in technology evolution that is just making everything much, much better. In some of the new vehicles are coming out, they get 400, 500 miles to the charge. So yeah, it's all there. I have friends who have done cross country trips because people have gone a 1000, 2000 miles using an electric vehicle. They had to plan a little bit. They had to figure out where they were going to stop for a half hour here, use the restroom, grab a bite to eat, etcetera. But it's becoming more and more manageable, no matter where you are, to be able to use these technologies.
[00:37:34] Speaker A: And the batteries, they're getting better.
[00:37:36] Speaker B: Batteries are getting better. They're lasting longer. Pretty much every battery sold in this country has at least an eight year, 100,000 miles warranty on it. So. And they just came out, actually, the, there was a study about electric vehicles being used by taxis where there were 400,000 miles put on these vehicles from these taxi drivers, and there was virtually 400,000 miles. I mean, any vehicle that goes 400,000 miles is pretty incredible. But the fact that an electric vehicle goes 400,000 miles and there was very little degradation of the batteries. It's kind of.
[00:38:09] Speaker A: Oh, so this is with a single set of batteries, basically.
[00:38:11] Speaker B: Yep. It was a number of studies done on taxis that were using electric vehicles and.
Yeah, pretty amazing, right?
[00:38:19] Speaker A: Yeah. When it just came out, I was like, oh, you can drive with this for an hour. I was like, well, but I mean, 400 miles, right? 500 miles.
What that means is you can drive for four or 5 hours, and the lifetime of this car is going to last you for years. Three or four years or more, maybe even ten. That's really competitive with other technologies. It's starting to, or maybe for a while now, it's been crossing that threshold to just make sense. That's so, so interesting.
I want to do a very sharp pivot. We're seeing some unpleasantness when it comes to artificial intelligence. People are losing their jobs. What's interesting in renewable energy seems to be creating jobs potentially, right? There's new things that need to be done. What is this looking like? Should we expect any kind of huge, great news from renewable energy that lots of new kinds of jobs are going to be generated, or is this going to be a slow process over the years?
[00:39:21] Speaker B: No, it's happening. It's definitely happening. It's happening across the board. I mean, there's hundreds of thousands of, of new jobs that could create it just from the inflation Reduction act alone so far, hundreds of billions of dollars worth of investment. And when you take a look at the industry, I mean, you have definitely, you have the higher, more sophisticated types of science and engineering jobs that are there, right? And those are growing dramatically. But then, in addition, you got laborer jobs, right? Because, you know, you can't outsource the installation of a solar panel. You can't outsource and overseas the installation of a new heating system in your home or other building. You can outsource the construction and the maintenance of an electric vehicle charging station. So there's a lot of jobs that are being created. And it's everything from the science and the engineering and the research and development through the actual installation and all those jobs that are there for hands on, blue collar types of workers. And then there's all the support stuff, all the marketing, all the sales, all the accounting and, and the administrative work that goes into any business. So you have this range of opportunities that are there in these industries that are expanding dramatically.
[00:40:28] Speaker A: That's so interesting. What about the dark side? What is the criticism to renewable energy? One thing that I heard is that these batteries require, keep me honest here, that I'm saying this correctly, rare earth minerals that are now being mined and negatively impacting communities. I think I heard in South America, creating devastation in the land. Are we still figuring this out or is there other disadvantages to the batteries that are a derivative of these quote unquote clean technologies?
[00:41:00] Speaker B: Yeah. So first, none of us is without sin. You know, every technology has its pros and it definitely has its downside. And in battery technology right now, absolutely the rare earth elements are problematic and we need to deal with that. And there's a bunch of policy things we can do. There's a bunch of corporate things we can do. There's a bunch of labor things we can do. But ultimately, what it's going to come down to is getting the right technology so we can move off of drilling into the earth and digging miles into the earth to grab these, these things. I will just say this though. We are drilling miles into the earth for oil every day. We drill miles into the earth for coal and for gas and everything else. So this is a step beyond that significantly less impact on the earth, both the air and the water and the ground.
However, you're right. I mean, there's nothing that's perfect. And if there's anyone that says that they aren't perfect, you know, they definitely should be closely examined because there is no perfect solution right now. All we can do is keep improving. And we are, we're improving with our research, we're improving with our development, we're improving with the type of materials we're using, how we're getting those materials and what we need to do to be able to create a sustainable society.
[00:42:15] Speaker A: I think that's incredibly interesting because this concept that we've touched upon, coincidentally throughout this talk of commoditization, which really what it means is we're taking technologies, we're making them better and we're making them cheaper, more effective and more efficient that's something that's happening nowadays of all of these renewable technologies, and we don't know where it's going to lead us. We've been doing fossil fuels for, I don't know, would it be fair to say 100 years? And we've probably progressed as much as we can, but there's a huge green field of possibility and we just don't know where it might lead. So I tend to agree with you. We need to let that develop. We need to see if we can solve these new problems that we're creating. It isn't necessarily the end of the world.
I had this really interesting conversation where the question came up. Well, you know, there's been a few innovations in fusion recently.
You know, if somebody asked me, oh, when we were going to have Fusion, I always say, you know, oh, it's at least 20 years out, so nobody really knows. But these innovations have been interesting. And I found myself talking to a friend and say, well, what if there was free energy tomorrow? And I said to him, I've never thought about that question, but I think that would either be world War three or a utopia.
[00:43:36] Speaker B: When I started my career, what I remember hearing was that fusion energy was 50 years away.
Unfortunately, it's now 50 years later, and it still seems that most.
[00:43:48] Speaker A: 50 years away.
[00:43:49] Speaker B: 50 years away. Although you're right, there have been recent breakthroughs where it seems like it might be 20 years away, which would be fantastic. I don't think that in our lifetime we're going to see the back of the future, where you take your little can of whatever and put it into your fusion engine and you can drive around with your flying electric vehicle as they did in back to the future. But who knows? That would be wonderful in terms of free energy.
You know, there's always going to be some amount of capital cost, right? So the fascinating thing to me is we already got free energy, and every day you look outside, the sun is there, it's free. It's producing thousands of times more energy than we need and that we use. And so what we need is the capital to put into the infrastructure that will create, then capture that energy and turn it into something usable. And we do that now with wind energy. We do that with, we've been doing it for over 100 years with water energy and the heat beneath our feet in terms of geothermal heating and cooling. And then in certain parts of the world, we can do heating and cooling and electricity with geothermal as well, and go down.
[00:44:53] Speaker A: So let me rephrase. Free, unlimited energy.
[00:44:58] Speaker B: There we go.
[00:44:59] Speaker A: So I should have said that. So here's the thing, right? I was listening to, I can't remember his name, a very public speaking physicist, and he was saying, oh, we can have as much clean water as we want, right, through desalination, but it has a cost. So really what that kind of brought me to understand is that the ratio between the cost of making clean water from the ocean versus the cost of getting a bottle of water from Fiji, that ratio actually is incredibly important. So then my brain goes on to think, well, isn't that the same thing with energy? So if we had unlimited energy, we could have unlimited clean water everywhere.
[00:45:36] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:45:37] Speaker A: All we need to do is put down the facility, but then that unit cost goes down to zero because the energy cost is zero. So it just changes the world dramatically.
[00:45:46] Speaker B: Yeah, it really does. And I think that's one of the promise and the hope that we have out there now is that there are all these advances in technologies to capture these energies that are all around us and transform them into usable and affordable opportunities. And I think that's really what we can hope, is that the future will bring for us and our children and grandchildren a world that has clean, cheap, sustainable energy that can then be used for all the purposes that we need it to be done for.
[00:46:15] Speaker A: It's just so amazing because, you know, you start with water, right? Unlimited energy or very cheap energy, or that ratio between the cost of energy, it can give you clean water. But I would argue, you know, how many wars were started because of energy? Just. Just to think about that.
Such an interesting topic.
Ron, this has been so delightful. You're the first guest we've had on to talk about energy, and I have had so many questions over the years that I wanted to ask somebody. So I appreciate you sharing your knowledge with our guests. I'm going to ask the question that if you saw our shows, you know, I always ask at the end, if you had to go and give advice to 20 year old Ron, what would that be?
[00:47:01] Speaker B: First, find your passion.
Because if you're living and working in your passion, you're never really working. You know, it's always, you get up and every day is a new adventure. Right? So first, find your passion.
Second, don't worry, things will work out.
It's amazing. You know, I've seen a lot of gyrations, a lot of up and downs in industries, a lot of up and downs in my life. But somehow or another, things always work out. So don't be quite so worried and fearful of what the future is going to bring. Live in the moment, enjoy every opportunity that presents itself and know that you'll be okay. So first, find your passion. Second, don't worry so much.
[00:47:46] Speaker A: Ron, thank you so much for joining us today. I really appreciate you.
[00:47:49] Speaker B: Thank you so much. Ari, this is great.
