Speaker 1: Hello, Maine and Greater New England. We're coming to see
Speaker 1: you guys in Portland and we can't wait. We would
Speaker 1: love to see you there. Yep. We'll be at the
Speaker 1: State Theater on August. If you're interested. You can get
Speaker 1: tickets and information at s y s K live dot com.
Speaker 1: There's some lobster at us. Welcome to Stuff you Should Know,
Speaker 1: a production of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey,
Speaker 1: and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, There's Charles W.
Speaker 1: Chuck Bryant, there's Jerry over there. The sun is shining,
Speaker 1: our collars are popped, tongues of our shoes are hanging out,
Speaker 1: and um, it smells really nice in here. That's right,
Speaker 1: which must mean one thing. Chuck, It's time to talk
Speaker 1: some stuff you should know? She is? Can I say that? Sure?
Speaker 1: All right? Good? Well I just did, didn't you did? Uh? So? Uh?
Speaker 1: We are at SLEE talking about solar power today, and
Speaker 1: I'm a little psyched about this one because I was
Speaker 1: putting this thing together over months. Dude, you would think
Speaker 1: solar power is such a hot, sexy topic. You know
Speaker 1: that there would be just reams and reams of just
Speaker 1: stuff to research and there is, but it's all really
Speaker 1: wonky and really technical, and there's a lot of stuff
Speaker 1: that contradicts other stuff. And I get this feeling of
Speaker 1: dread researching this, that the cheerleaders and champions of solar
Speaker 1: power are losing their resolve to an extent. They'll still
Speaker 1: sell you a solar panel, They'll still tell you a
Speaker 1: solar is great, and I know that they truly believe that,
Speaker 1: but I think that they are worried that it's it's
Speaker 1: not taking off like they expected it too. But then
Speaker 1: let me just caveat that with one other thing, and
Speaker 1: then we'll get started and I'll be quiet for the
Speaker 1: rest of the podcast. If you look at the numbers
Speaker 1: and the figures, solar has quietly um made a name
Speaker 1: for itself and established itself, at least in the United States,
Speaker 1: to an astounding degree. So I'm not quite sure what
Speaker 1: I'm picking up on when I get the sense that
Speaker 1: they're worried, because if you look at it, it's actually
Speaker 1: doing really, really well and growing all the time. Let's
Speaker 1: discuss solar power. Yeah, power from the sun converted into electricity, right,
Speaker 1: so you can say screw you power company, yeah, or
Speaker 1: pay me power company. You could say, take this power
Speaker 1: bill and shove it. So the sun. Uh, this is
Speaker 1: pretty neat here at the beginning of this that you
Speaker 1: put together here, Um, the sun ray. The Sun's rays
Speaker 1: give off about a thousand wats of energy per square meter.
Speaker 1: So if you pull the camera back a bit and
Speaker 1: you look at Texas, let's say, a lot of sun
Speaker 1: in Texas, a lot of land in Texas. There's a
Speaker 1: lot of a lot of stuff from Texas. There really
Speaker 1: is some stuff. No, that's true. I was gonna say
Speaker 1: the good thing about Texas. You could completely cover it
Speaker 1: with solar rays and no one but the people who
Speaker 1: live in Texas would have a problem with it. Oh boy,
Speaker 1: oh boy, oh gear Goo Google. All right, Um, So
Speaker 1: if you look at a mass land mass that's as
Speaker 1: big as Texas, they receive a little under seven hundred
Speaker 1: terra wats over the course of one hour on a
Speaker 1: on a at noon on a sunny day. Seven terra wats. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it sounds like a lot, but is it a lot?
Speaker 1: Who knows? Who could possibly know? If you want to
Speaker 1: compare that, you're being coy uh. In that same hour,
Speaker 1: the total amount of human mage energy energy production on
Speaker 1: planet Earth. And this is all energy production that you
Speaker 1: could possibly dream of is seventeen point seven terra watts
Speaker 1: compared to seven hundred terra wats. That's forty times less
Speaker 1: than what the sun delivered to Texas and in just
Speaker 1: that hour. Yeah, right, And the Union of Concerned Scientists
Speaker 1: happen in group who I love. Um, they say that
Speaker 1: eighteen days of sunshine that hits across the entire Earth
Speaker 1: contains the same amount of energy stored in the entirety
Speaker 1: of the planet's reserves of coal, oil and natural gas.
Speaker 1: If you dug up and burned every bit of coal,
Speaker 1: oil and natural gas, it would only produce as much
Speaker 1: energy as eighteen days worth of global sunlight. That's astounding. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And these are you know, these are facts that have
Speaker 1: fifty caveats beneath each of them, which we're going to
Speaker 1: talk about. But it is a prime example, and I
Speaker 1: think just a good way to kind of indicate just
Speaker 1: how much energy potential energy there is coming from the
Speaker 1: sun every day. Yeah, And just I mean to to
Speaker 1: point out the obvious. The great thing about solar is
Speaker 1: there is no greenhouse gas emissions when you use solar electricity.
Speaker 1: It's just clean energy and it's free because it's from
Speaker 1: the sun, that's right. And before you start typing, oh yeah,
Speaker 1: but what about you got a lot to make. These
Speaker 1: things were made it to look on and then before
Speaker 1: you do that, we're going to talk about all that stuff.
Speaker 1: But Josh very clearly said, once you have these things
Speaker 1: set up, that's that's when the real benefit comes. Yes,
Speaker 1: And if I hadn't said it, I was going to
Speaker 1: eventually well no, you basically said it, like you know,
Speaker 1: when they're working, when they're active, they're not using fossil fuels.
Speaker 1: Thank you, Chuck. All right, so let's go back in
Speaker 1: time a bit, because if you think solar power, you think, oh, well,
Speaker 1: this stuff, you know, was invented in the nineteen seventies,
Speaker 1: not so you have to go all the way back
Speaker 1: to eighteen thirty nine, believe it or not. When a
Speaker 1: French physicist name Alexandra Edmond, Uh, Josh says this back
Speaker 1: quere I mean I practiced it a million times. Queriller,
Speaker 1: I think be querillar. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's a tough word.
Speaker 1: Yes it is. There's a couple of extra continants in that.
Speaker 1: It just shouldn't be there, that's right. So, uh, this
Speaker 1: dude He's the one that first demonstrated the photo voltaic effect,
Speaker 1: which is basically the ability of a solar cell to
Speaker 1: turn sun into electricity all the way back in right,
Speaker 1: but no one knew exactly how this work. They just
Speaker 1: knew that at work. He was burned at the stake
Speaker 1: later on for his black magic. Right, So just about
Speaker 1: forty about forty years later, there's a guy named Charles Fritz,
Speaker 1: and he, in the eighteen eighties built the world's first
Speaker 1: rooftop solar array. Coincidentally, just a year after Edison launched
Speaker 1: the world's first coal fire power plant. UM. But this
Speaker 1: early solar array was terribly inefficient. It didn't do very much.
Speaker 1: It could bay basically power um. Jeez, I don't even
Speaker 1: know what it could power a mouse trap? How about that,
Speaker 1: which doesn't even need electricity. That's how little power that
Speaker 1: this thing produced. Um. But it definitely demonstrated that it
Speaker 1: was possible to generate an electrical current um from sunlight
Speaker 1: in a way that it was a proof of concept,
Speaker 1: basically saying just give it like ninety years and we'll
Speaker 1: understand this better. And who was that that was? Fritz? Ye,
Speaker 1: Fritz was a good guy, but he was no, Einstein, Uh, Einstein.
Speaker 1: It would take Einstein, that is, to really explain how
Speaker 1: this all worked in nineteen o five, because he had
Speaker 1: a knack for doing that. I'm not sure if people
Speaker 1: realize that he was a good explainer, maybe the original explainer.
Speaker 1: Well he would put it in terms that you could
Speaker 1: really understand, like like consider the sandwich. Imagine the sandwich
Speaker 1: is the sun, and then it just go from there
Speaker 1: and you'd be like, you understand what he's saying. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And if you think, uh, Einstein, oh yeah, he won
Speaker 1: a bunch of Nobel Prizes for relativity. Not so. He
Speaker 1: won the Nobel Prize in Physics for explaining the photo
Speaker 1: electric effect. He didn't win for relativity. No, I didn't
Speaker 1: know that. Holy cow, what is unless I'm wrong? And
Speaker 1: if i am, I'm gonna have a lot of egg
Speaker 1: on my face. That's all right, Well we'll cook it
Speaker 1: off with some good old solar electricity. Gross. It is gross,
Speaker 1: but also so is the idea of cooked egg in
Speaker 1: your beard. So Bell Labs in nineteen fifty four, if
Speaker 1: you want to talk about the modern PV cell, that
Speaker 1: was the and uh thanks to the US government really
Speaker 1: in the US military, they funded a lot of this
Speaker 1: early research, because if you've ever looked at a picture
Speaker 1: of sky Lab or any of our great satellites, you'll
Speaker 1: notice that they all have these big solar wings. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they're solar powered. And it was because of US government
Speaker 1: research in the fifties that we were able to develop those.
Speaker 1: I think they launched the first solar powered satellite in
Speaker 1: nineteen fifty four, no. Fifty eight, and then just six
Speaker 1: years later they launched the first solar powered satellite whose
Speaker 1: solar panels could track the Sun, which is still a
Speaker 1: pretty whiz bang thing to have for your solar array.
Speaker 1: And this is nine sixty four. So the US government
Speaker 1: invested in the earliest research and everything was going along
Speaker 1: really smoothly. Um. But one of the things that's always
Speaker 1: been a problem for solar is oil in natural gas
Speaker 1: and coal are just so cheap, and our infrastructure is
Speaker 1: set up to burn those things and get electricity for them.
Speaker 1: So solar has always been an upstart. But at one
Speaker 1: point in nineteen seventy three, oil was not very cheap
Speaker 1: all of a sudden because of the OPEC embargo that
Speaker 1: created the energy crisis that made it really un cheap.
Speaker 1: So much so that the United States looked around and said,
Speaker 1: we need to find other sources of energy, and they
Speaker 1: really looked really hard at solar and it actually gave
Speaker 1: solar technology a big old boost. Yeah, and that boost
Speaker 1: came by way of offering tax credits for the first
Speaker 1: time in the United States for businesses and residents. Said hey,
Speaker 1: if you want to put in solar power, and they
Speaker 1: still do this today, we'll give you some tax credits.
Speaker 1: It will make a lot cheaper for you. Um. There
Speaker 1: has been I guess we could call it the the
Speaker 1: solar Battle at the White House since nineteen seventy nine.
Speaker 1: Jimmy Carter had very famously had solar panels installed on
Speaker 1: the roof of the White House, uh to heat water
Speaker 1: for for them and for the pools and for the
Speaker 1: kitchen and stuff like that. And Uh, Reagan had them
Speaker 1: taken down in eighties six. So there are a couple
Speaker 1: of stories about how this went down. Um. The cynic
Speaker 1: will say Reagan as a statement had them taken down
Speaker 1: even though they were working fine, because he was all
Speaker 1: for the fossil fuel industry and it was a very
Speaker 1: symbolic gesture. Other people will say that's not what happened.
Speaker 1: At all. The roof needed repair that the solar panels
Speaker 1: were on, and they took down the solar panels to
Speaker 1: repair the roof, and then the White House officially says
Speaker 1: they did not put them back because it would be
Speaker 1: very unwise based on cost. Is a direct quote. Uh
Speaker 1: so that's you know, that's the party line right now.
Speaker 1: I've never heard that one. That sounds like a new
Speaker 1: gingrich you are And if you ask me, well, that's
Speaker 1: a direct quote. Um, George W. Bush put uh solar
Speaker 1: power back into the White House. Say what what? Yeah?
Speaker 1: I didn't know that. Yeah, he put solar for the
Speaker 1: water heaters for the White House pool and then put
Speaker 1: solar panels on top of the roof of the grounds
Speaker 1: maintenance building to how out there. He did not have
Speaker 1: them on top of the actual White House, but he
Speaker 1: had solar solar power installed at various places around the
Speaker 1: White House. This was w or h W. This is
Speaker 1: w okay, Wow, that's really surprising. Yeah. Um. Carter's for
Speaker 1: his part, one of his he has two on display.
Speaker 1: One of them is at the Smithsonian and one of
Speaker 1: them is right here in Atlanta at the Carter Center.
Speaker 1: You can go look at one of those solar panels.
Speaker 1: There's also like a Museum of Science in China that
Speaker 1: got their hands on one. It's on display in China too.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, which makes sense because after after the U. S.
Speaker 1: Government kind of turned its back on solar, China came
Speaker 1: along and said, oh, we'll take that ball and ran
Speaker 1: with it. Sure, going back to Reagan though he didn't.
Speaker 1: I don't want to let him up too easy with this.
Speaker 1: Um the fact that they just said it was unwise
Speaker 1: based on costs because he gutted the Department of Energies
Speaker 1: Renewable Energy research and Development budgets, like totally gutted him,
Speaker 1: and he eliminated the tax breaks for wind and solar. Um.
Speaker 1: I'm not sure for how long, but for a million years,
Speaker 1: I would guess now, because they're back. Uh. And it
Speaker 1: was Obama who came back and very publicly installed solar
Speaker 1: panels back on the roof of the White House. And
Speaker 1: of course the first thing I thought was that that
Speaker 1: Trump probably went in there and smashed him with a
Speaker 1: sledgehammer on his first day in office. But apparently they're
Speaker 1: still there. They're still there, huh, still there and still working.
Speaker 1: He didn't take them down. Wow, we so one of
Speaker 1: the other things that UM the government did to help
Speaker 1: solar along during the Carter era was to to offer
Speaker 1: tax breaks, like you were saying, but because of the
Speaker 1: really really high cost of installing a solar electric system, UM,
Speaker 1: it was basically viewed as a sweetheart deal, tax break
Speaker 1: for the rich. That's how the first solar tax credits
Speaker 1: were viewed because solar was so expensive, so they were
Speaker 1: a little bit before their time. But over the course
Speaker 1: of those ensuing years from the early eighties on Moor
Speaker 1: to today, a UM, because we've had breakthroughs and technology
Speaker 1: UM of manufacturing, of creating new kinds of semiconductors, of
Speaker 1: making traditional kinds more cheaply, the price of solar has
Speaker 1: dropped eight percent in the past decade. Yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: it's really to the point now where it's I mean
Speaker 1: I looked at some of the prices and I was like,
Speaker 1: you know what, that's that's now I think fairly affordable
Speaker 1: for for most kind of middle class Americans if they
Speaker 1: want to put in solar power, because you know, eventually
Speaker 1: it's going to pay for itself. That's the whole the
Speaker 1: whole idea. Either you're either you're trying to pay this,
Speaker 1: you know, get cheaper bills and have it pay for
Speaker 1: itself over the years, which is going to happen regardless,
Speaker 1: or you're someone with some money that just wants to, um,
Speaker 1: do the right thing by the environment and get off
Speaker 1: the grid as much as possible. Yeah, it's just that
Speaker 1: upfront cost, not the cost over the life of the setup.
Speaker 1: It's the upfront cost. But there are things like you
Speaker 1: can there UM like energy saver, renewable energy, mortgages, home
Speaker 1: loans basically you can take out they have UM really
Speaker 1: special good financing and rates and stuff like that. Um,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of things you can do that we'll
Speaker 1: talk about to get around the upfront cost. But you
Speaker 1: you hit the nail on the head, and it's really
Speaker 1: worth saying again you can expect your solar um electrical
Speaker 1: home system to pay for itself over the lifetime of
Speaker 1: the setup. Yeah, and we'll talk more about price later,
Speaker 1: but just poking around like it's sort of an average
Speaker 1: US household, you can plunk down about fifteen grand to
Speaker 1: cover your electricity needs, which and that's I think after
Speaker 1: the text credit if I'm not mistaken right, And again,
Speaker 1: you know, there are so many factors where you live,
Speaker 1: how much energy use, how big your house is, the
Speaker 1: weather where you are. So this is a big, big
Speaker 1: broad statement. But if you're just looking for a general range,
Speaker 1: it's not like it costs fifty or sixty dollars anymore
Speaker 1: to do this, right, So you want to take a
Speaker 1: you want to take a break and then come back
Speaker 1: and talk about what actually is going on in those
Speaker 1: solar cells. Let's do it, Chuck, okay, dude. So um,
Speaker 1: there are three ways as far as humans are aware
Speaker 1: of right now, that you can get energy from the sun.
Speaker 1: You can get it by converting it into electricity what
Speaker 1: we're gonna talk about. Basically, you can turn it into
Speaker 1: chemical energy, which is it's far out though, it's like
Speaker 1: storing energy in the bonds of molecules, like through artificial photosynthesis.
Speaker 1: That's pretty cool. And then you can also convert it
Speaker 1: into heat. But when you're talking about solar energy, most
Speaker 1: people think of these solar into electricity, which is called
Speaker 1: photovoltaic um energy, and that's basically what we're going to
Speaker 1: be talking about. Yeah, Like when you drive to the
Speaker 1: neighborhood and you see those shiny panels on a roof
Speaker 1: and think, my god, those are ugly. That's true, man,
Speaker 1: it's true. We'll get to that too. Uh So, that's
Speaker 1: what we're talking about. These photo voltaic cells. They are
Speaker 1: made up of semiconductors, materials called semiconductors. And these days,
Speaker 1: and you know, we're talking a second about how this
Speaker 1: might be changing in the future, but about all these
Speaker 1: solar cells these days are using silicon as the semiconductor. Right.
Speaker 1: Silicon is a crystal, which means that it has a
Speaker 1: really tight atomic composition. Right, it's not very it's extraordinarily
Speaker 1: stable um, which is kind of a thing because you
Speaker 1: want a somewhat unstable um arrangement of atoms or else
Speaker 1: you won't get this electricity to work. But no, you can't.
Speaker 1: But that's exactly right. The flow of electricity basically but
Speaker 1: with um. The reason why they use silicon is because
Speaker 1: it is a semiconductor, which means that it gives you
Speaker 1: a large measure of control over where that electricity flows
Speaker 1: and how it flows. So rather than just using pure silicon,
Speaker 1: which um will will allow you to direct the control
Speaker 1: of electricity but won't produce any electricity, they actually dope
Speaker 1: it with other materials to produce two different types of
Speaker 1: silicon film. UM, ND type and P type. That's right. So, uh,
Speaker 1: for the ND type, which is stands for negative, they're
Speaker 1: gonna dope it. And I love that word in this
Speaker 1: case with phosphorus that has five electrons, so it's gonna
Speaker 1: bind to the silicon that has four electrons, and so
Speaker 1: that leaves you I can even do this kind of
Speaker 1: simple math with one free one extra electron leftover, just
Speaker 1: dangling out there like it's wearing shorts that are way
Speaker 1: too short. Yeah, it's looking for a place to go. Basically. Um,
Speaker 1: the way I sort of saw this was like a
Speaker 1: couple of apartments next to each other. One has an
Speaker 1: empty room and one has an extra roommate. Okay, that's
Speaker 1: a great one. So the other type is this P type,
Speaker 1: the positive it's doped with boron has three electrons, and
Speaker 1: so this is the other apartment. This is the one
Speaker 1: it's gonna bind with silicon, and it leaves that unused
Speaker 1: bond open. So that's where you have your extra space
Speaker 1: where the electron can go. Right. So when you take
Speaker 1: ND type silicon film and P type silicon film and
Speaker 1: you put them up against one another, UM, you have
Speaker 1: a situation where that extra electron wants to flow to
Speaker 1: the other side and fill the unused bond, because again,
Speaker 1: the universe is always moving towards homeostasis. Right. Yeah, that
Speaker 1: roommates like, hey, you've got an next room, Can I
Speaker 1: come crash in there? Yeah, And they say, wait, wait,
Speaker 1: we need somebody to get you off of the couch.
Speaker 1: And in this case, that somebody is sunlight, because sunlight
Speaker 1: is made up of photons, which are energy carriers of
Speaker 1: the electromagnetic spectrum. And when they hit this doped silicon,
Speaker 1: they come bursting into the room and they kick that
Speaker 1: that lazy electron into the other apartment where there's an
Speaker 1: open bedroom and everything is filled very nicely. That's right.
Speaker 1: So this electron flow, these electrons moving around and flowing
Speaker 1: in this single direction. I think we said that yet
Speaker 1: it only flows in one direction. Electricity does well, it
Speaker 1: does in this one in this case. Yeah, that's the basis.
Speaker 1: This electron flow is the basis of electricity. And what
Speaker 1: they do is they put these metal contacts on the
Speaker 1: top and the bottom of the cell and then you
Speaker 1: can direct that electron flow out of the cell to
Speaker 1: be used as electricity in your home. Yeah, that's that's
Speaker 1: the soul or cell and in a nutshell. And the
Speaker 1: solar cell is the basic unit of the of what
Speaker 1: you think of when you think of like a solar
Speaker 1: panel or whatever, it's that one little square and that
Speaker 1: square is connected to other squares um and and they
Speaker 1: they form what's called a module. And when you put
Speaker 1: like um a nice little uh frame around it and
Speaker 1: put it on a stand or whatever, you have yourself
Speaker 1: a solar panel. When you have a bunch of solar
Speaker 1: panels together in a group, all working together, that's a
Speaker 1: solar array. So technically, when you point at someone's roof
Speaker 1: and you say, look at that solar panel, you're saying,
Speaker 1: look at that solar array. And now you can correct
Speaker 1: that person from the back seat and they'll make you
Speaker 1: get out of the car. People say that, look at
Speaker 1: that solar array, universe. I would think people would more say,
Speaker 1: look at those solar panels. Well, then that would make sense.
Speaker 1: I had just set it up so it didn't make
Speaker 1: any sense, so someone would swoop in incorrect. So the
Speaker 1: person who knows what it's really called is around with
Speaker 1: complete morons. We say things like look at that solar panel.
Speaker 1: When they see a group of solar panels. All right, now,
Speaker 1: I got you we're talking about right, all right, So
Speaker 1: it's it's it sounds simple, and it is kind of simple,
Speaker 1: and it's um complexity that makes no sense at all.
Speaker 1: But it's a little more complicated because, like we said,
Speaker 1: electricity in this case is only flowing in one direction,
Speaker 1: which means it creates a direct current. And that's a
Speaker 1: problem because uh we you know, if you we talked
Speaker 1: about in the Bone Wars episode about the the uh
Speaker 1: what they called not the power of Wars, the current
Speaker 1: current wars, the War of current. That's right, d C
Speaker 1: did not win. Um, So we have to convert that
Speaker 1: d C current to a C current. So what the
Speaker 1: solar panels need is something called an inverter. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: the inverter is basically like the brains of the whole
Speaker 1: set up. And there used to be a big problem
Speaker 1: with inverters. Um. They were very clunky, and you would
Speaker 1: basically have one inverter for an entire solar array, and um,
Speaker 1: the solar inverter would would kind of modulate the amount
Speaker 1: of electricity that was going through it out to the
Speaker 1: house or the circuit panel, and it would base whatever
Speaker 1: it was doing on whatever the lowest common denominator of
Speaker 1: the whole array was giving it right. So if you
Speaker 1: had one dirty solar cell, or there was a cloud
Speaker 1: going over just one solar panel out of like twenty,
Speaker 1: the inverter was basically delivering electricity based on that one
Speaker 1: that one cloudy panel, or that one dirty cell. That's
Speaker 1: not the case anymore, It really wasn't. The solar industry
Speaker 1: wised up and they said, we can do better than this,
Speaker 1: and they came up with what are called micro inverters.
Speaker 1: And now a micro inverter is responsible for um either
Speaker 1: one panel or just a single cell, and so that
Speaker 1: one cell could could be a dirty or cloudy at
Speaker 1: any given point, but it's not going to drag down
Speaker 1: the whole thing because there's all these other inverters that
Speaker 1: are are running the show on their own too. How
Speaker 1: can you got to clean these things? Did you see that?
Speaker 1: I didn't, but I did see that they were virtually
Speaker 1: maintenance free? Oh really, yeah, that's what I say. Um,
Speaker 1: all right, so let's talk about powering a house. Uh
Speaker 1: And just like four years ago, two thousand fifteen, and
Speaker 1: these are pretty good numbers, eight hundred thousand houses and
Speaker 1: businesses in the United States had solar panels. And that's
Speaker 1: not to say they were um dependent on them, but
Speaker 1: they were at least doing some of the work right,
Speaker 1: which is not bad. Um. And like you said, once,
Speaker 1: once it's up and running, not much maintenance going on,
Speaker 1: and you're looking at probably and the number they often
Speaker 1: throw out is just you know, for twenty years, you
Speaker 1: can expect this thing to work like a charm. Yeah,
Speaker 1: twenty years is the low end. I saw the averages
Speaker 1: about twenty five years. When you buy a solar setup
Speaker 1: that you can just put it up there and be like, oh, um,
Speaker 1: this is great. I don't even need to think about
Speaker 1: this anymore. UM. But if you do want to invest
Speaker 1: in this, if you're like, okay, I can swing this,
Speaker 1: I want to contribute, I'm going to go solar. There
Speaker 1: are some steps you want to take UM to kind
Speaker 1: of wisen yourself up so that when you deal with
Speaker 1: the installer you'll know what you're talking about and when
Speaker 1: the first thing you want to do is to do
Speaker 1: an energy audit on your energy consumption, which is basically
Speaker 1: figuring out how much electricity you use in your house.
Speaker 1: UM at any given time, probably want to figure out
Speaker 1: what your peak is and then just kind of plan
Speaker 1: for for that. Um. See, what I don't get is
Speaker 1: like you can look at your power bill and tell
Speaker 1: that you need to do it a separate audit outside
Speaker 1: of that. Well, the reason why it's good to do
Speaker 1: a separate audit outside of that is you can identify
Speaker 1: areas where you can improve things. It's it's kind of like, no,
Speaker 1: you don't have to do it, but you could do
Speaker 1: an energy audit, and when you do, you can be like, oh,
Speaker 1: I think if I added insulation to the attic, it
Speaker 1: would come consumption by its right. Yeah. Yeah, It's kind
Speaker 1: of like, um, if if taking on the project of
Speaker 1: getting solar installed on your home wasn't a big enough
Speaker 1: headache for you, add this to it, you know what
Speaker 1: I'm saying. But it's a good it will definitely you
Speaker 1: will find some places where you can cut your energy consumption.
Speaker 1: That's the benefit of an energy audit. And this is
Speaker 1: just happens to be a good time to do it. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And you know the other thing you have to decide
Speaker 1: as you're pricing this out, and you can call a
Speaker 1: company they will they will come out these days and
Speaker 1: basically tell you what you need. Um, you know if
Speaker 1: you get a good, highly recommended company, and apparently some
Speaker 1: of the smaller companies are much more highly recommended than
Speaker 1: the larger companies from what I read online. But they
Speaker 1: will come out and say the question they're gonna say is, uh,
Speaker 1: and this is really the most important thing for you
Speaker 1: to decide is how much of what percentage of of
Speaker 1: your household energy do you want to come from solar?
Speaker 1: And if you're like they'll they'll say, okay, well here's
Speaker 1: what you need. If you say, you know what you know,
Speaker 1: if I can cover I don't have much roof space,
Speaker 1: I'm happy with covering my UM power usage, then they'll say,
Speaker 1: all right, well, then let's work within your system. Or
Speaker 1: you may just be you may not have a choice
Speaker 1: unless you uh, you know, it all depends on your
Speaker 1: roof and the way it's sloped and the way it's
Speaker 1: faced and all that stuff. Right. Um, yeah, there's a
Speaker 1: lot of considerations. UM. And again you're you're the person
Speaker 1: you hire to do this is going to be able
Speaker 1: to provide you with all this information and ask all
Speaker 1: the right questions. But if you want to know what
Speaker 1: you're talking about going into it, um, you can find
Speaker 1: out kind of about how much electricity you could expect
Speaker 1: a solar array on your roof to produce um down
Speaker 1: to your actual house. Like there's all sorts of solar
Speaker 1: potential maps online yea, and calculators. It's really They make
Speaker 1: it kind of really easy on you these days. It's easy.
Speaker 1: And let's just be honest, Chuck. It's fun too because
Speaker 1: it'll show you like how much money you will actually
Speaker 1: not only like how much you'll save over the course
Speaker 1: of the lifetime of the solar array. And you'll have
Speaker 1: a do you good idea of how fast the thing
Speaker 1: will pay for itself. It's it's pretty cool to do um.
Speaker 1: But you'll have an idea of, uh, this thing is
Speaker 1: gonna pay for itself in eight years, or this thing
Speaker 1: is gonna pay for itself in twenty five years, and
Speaker 1: that will largely depend on where you live in the country.
Speaker 1: But everything I saw from everywhere, from Union of Concerned
Speaker 1: Scientists to Energy dot Gov is that everywhere in the
Speaker 1: United States you can expect your solar array to pay
Speaker 1: for itself eventually over the life of its over its
Speaker 1: own life. It might take a little longer in Seattle
Speaker 1: than in Phoenix, right, but you know, that's how things go.
Speaker 1: You got better music in Seattle and better food, well
Speaker 1: maybe the food to watch you got the You got
Speaker 1: the music though for sure. Sorry Phoenix, we we love you.
Speaker 1: Yeah sorry uh, last of the meat puppets. So I
Speaker 1: talked about the angle of these panels and the angle
Speaker 1: of your roof. Um, it's called the angle of inclination.
Speaker 1: Is what is how you have to set these If
Speaker 1: you have all all the money in the world and
Speaker 1: in nowhere to spend it, you can actually get systems
Speaker 1: that have motors that will move and follow these panels,
Speaker 1: will follow the sun across the sky, stay in perfect uh,
Speaker 1: stay at the perfect angle of inclination. That is super expensive, though,
Speaker 1: it is. That's the technology I was talking about from
Speaker 1: that they had figured out for saddle. Yeah it is,
Speaker 1: but yeah, it is still kind of expensive. Um. What
Speaker 1: I've seen though, is rather than invest in figuring out
Speaker 1: how to make those kinds of setups cheaper, they figured
Speaker 1: out how to catch more diffuse sunlight, that kind that
Speaker 1: gets scattered by clouds. That makes sense on a solar panel,
Speaker 1: so you don't necessarily have to have it. Um, the
Speaker 1: kind that tracks the sunlight, and you can still get
Speaker 1: as much electricity as you're gonna need to power your
Speaker 1: house basically no matter where you are in the country,
Speaker 1: just from the solar panels that they make these days. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so uh ideally, um, your array is going to be
Speaker 1: pointing true south. That's not to say if your roof
Speaker 1: is set up in such a way that it doesn't
Speaker 1: point to south, you can't have solar because like you said,
Speaker 1: they've come a long long way over the years with
Speaker 1: how they can collect the sunlight. But if you're facing
Speaker 1: true south and you're at a good angle that's as
Speaker 1: close to the area that you're in as close to
Speaker 1: the latitude as possible, you don't have a lot of
Speaker 1: trees around and no big buildings, then you're a really
Speaker 1: good candidate to provide energy for your house. We should
Speaker 1: say also, that's if you're in the northern hemisphere. We
Speaker 1: have listeners in the southern that's true. So I would
Speaker 1: say if you're in Australia, you would want it to
Speaker 1: face true North. But everybody knows that the sun is
Speaker 1: so ridiculously hot in Australia that you don't even need
Speaker 1: solar panels. It just powers everything, just blazing down on everyone.
Speaker 1: You can bury your solar panels underground in Australia, that's
Speaker 1: still work better than here. It's like you can scrape
Speaker 1: me son. So um. The other thing is weather, Like
Speaker 1: it's never weather is never predictable. But what you're gonna
Speaker 1: do is look at the data in your area, look
Speaker 1: at average monthly sunlight and stuff like that, take into
Speaker 1: account rainfall, and in the end you want to design
Speaker 1: for because you want power all the time. If you're
Speaker 1: going you want to design for your worst month. Um
Speaker 1: sort of like now, not really, I was about to say,
Speaker 1: just like those initial inverters, you're only as strong as
Speaker 1: your weakest member. But you want to take into account.
Speaker 1: Let's like, let's say it rains every single day in
Speaker 1: a month, you lose your job, dog dies, just absolute
Speaker 1: worst month, right, So then they might say, all right,
Speaker 1: throw on an extra panel for your dog, right and
Speaker 1: you'll be just fine. So um, if you're all hyped
Speaker 1: up about this, there's we just kind of opened the
Speaker 1: can of worms. There's a lot more to take into account.
Speaker 1: But again, just hire somebody reputable, do your research, and
Speaker 1: they should be able to guide you through process a
Speaker 1: lot more than we can. But I do strongly advise
Speaker 1: going on and figuring out your like you need to
Speaker 1: know what you need to know kind of thing. Does
Speaker 1: that make sense? Yeah, for sure. Um. And you know
Speaker 1: earlier you mentioned that these things were ugly and for
Speaker 1: a long time they were the bane of existence of
Speaker 1: a lot of people in certain neighborhoods. Some homeowners associations
Speaker 1: still won't allow them. Um, but they've gotten better looking
Speaker 1: over time. They've gotten um, closer to the roof line, um,
Speaker 1: a little bit more attractive. And I think, in my
Speaker 1: opinion this is just me speculating. Just the perception is changed.
Speaker 1: And now when you see them, you don't think, oh
Speaker 1: my gosh, I'll get an ugly thing on the roof.
Speaker 1: You think, well, you know, those are solar panels and
Speaker 1: it might not blend in perfectly with the roof, but there,
Speaker 1: you know, there's a big benefit as well. You don't
Speaker 1: even think like hippies live there anymore. Normal people live
Speaker 1: there normal So Um, there's also solar roof tiles that
Speaker 1: are really starting to come along with those versions. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they're nuts, how they're also they're super durable, they're very pretty. Um.
Speaker 1: I don't own any because they're extremely expensive, but they
Speaker 1: if they can get the cost down to anything approaching
Speaker 1: like a normal sized roof. It's just like game over man.
Speaker 1: That's it. It's exactly like the the the each one
Speaker 1: of these tiles is like a solar cell or a
Speaker 1: solar panel, and it's a whole roof's worth of them.
Speaker 1: They're super durable, but they also cost about five to
Speaker 1: ten times the amount of a normal roof these days,
Speaker 1: which is just you're you're never gonna pay for it's
Speaker 1: never gonna pay for itself. Yeah. I mean, if you're
Speaker 1: spending I don't know, twelve to fifteen grand on a
Speaker 1: roof and you have to spend up to a hundred
Speaker 1: and fifty thousand for that roof to be solar, that's
Speaker 1: a lot of dought. I saw like two hundred in
Speaker 1: one case, but yeah, somewhere between a hundred and two
Speaker 1: hundred for a new roof. Yeah. But the people that
Speaker 1: are doing this are you know, the very well healed
Speaker 1: who want to be able to brag about their solar
Speaker 1: roof quite frankly. Yeah. And I mean if they're doing
Speaker 1: that and they're they're you know, generating solar for their house,
Speaker 1: more power to them. That's fine. I mean, it's just
Speaker 1: I Tesla needs to get that that price down quite
Speaker 1: a bit. Come on, Tesla. So we need to talk
Speaker 1: a little bit about efficiency. So, um, you know, how
Speaker 1: much of the Sun's energy we can convert into electricity?
Speaker 1: Is that efficiency? And way back when they first started
Speaker 1: this stuff in the nineteenth century, it was one not
Speaker 1: even one percent, So it was mainly just like, hey,
Speaker 1: look what we can do now a little bit. Um.
Speaker 1: Now it's at not true, it's about now. Um, it's
Speaker 1: not as much as I would have thought when I
Speaker 1: started uh doing this research. And you can't ever get
Speaker 1: to a pent I think they said at the very
Speaker 1: max these days because of energy loss and conversion and
Speaker 1: stuff that the tip top upper limits about eight seven
Speaker 1: percent that we could ever get. That's like the physical
Speaker 1: limit for conversion. I mean it's the sun. It's not
Speaker 1: like you know, the sunlight. You don't use fills up landfills,
Speaker 1: you know for sure for sure, um, But the there
Speaker 1: is a lot of room for improvement between that current
Speaker 1: and right um, and we're actually starting to make those
Speaker 1: those kind of gains. Um. One of the ways to
Speaker 1: do it is to make solar panels cheaper. So even
Speaker 1: if they are just at efficiency if the process of
Speaker 1: making them is cheaper, you can put more solar panels
Speaker 1: up and the average person can afford it. That's one
Speaker 1: way to go. A better way to go is to
Speaker 1: focus on making those materials as ridiculously efficient as possible.
Speaker 1: And what they found a promising new material called parov skite.
Speaker 1: I think that's how you say it. It's kind of
Speaker 1: a clunky word. It really is um and I think
Speaker 1: it was discovered by Russians or Soviets back in the day.
Speaker 1: It really does um. But the one of things about
Speaker 1: parov skite, this mineral, is that it is really really
Speaker 1: efficient when it comes to the blue end of the spectrum,
Speaker 1: the blue to ultraviolet high energy UM photons that comes
Speaker 1: streaming through. Normally, those kinds of photons are too energetic
Speaker 1: to interact with the phosphorus or the boron that's that
Speaker 1: uh silicon is doped with, so it just passes through
Speaker 1: and it's like completely wasted high energy light. The parov
Speaker 1: skite actually interacts with those way more efficiently. The problem
Speaker 1: is it doesn't really interact with the lower energy stuff
Speaker 1: that silicon does. So the highest efficiency solar cells that
Speaker 1: you can get are typically made with silicon and Parov
Speaker 1: Skype put together, so it captures as much stuff as
Speaker 1: you can hope for. And these are starting to creep
Speaker 1: up into the the high twenties low thirties range, and
Speaker 1: as Parov Skype manufacturing gets easier and easier, we should
Speaker 1: be able to expect to see solar panels that are
Speaker 1: you know, thirt efficient, which is a lot you know
Speaker 1: that extra seven percent, that's a huge difference. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: I don't think we mentioned the reason that we're trying
Speaker 1: to make this move to prov skite anyway. It's because
Speaker 1: it's it's cheaper. You can make it cheaper than the
Speaker 1: silicon ones. So you know, one day, hopefully, uh, they
Speaker 1: could be all prop skite because they're developing stuff that's
Speaker 1: going to capture more of what the silicon can capture
Speaker 1: in that right. Yeah, that's yeah, that would be wonderful
Speaker 1: if if they figure out how to tinker with provskite
Speaker 1: so that they don't need the silicon at all, because
Speaker 1: there are a lot of problems with silicon, which we'll
Speaker 1: talk about. Right. So, um I mentioned earlier in the
Speaker 1: show about uh selling your um like pay me power company,
Speaker 1: and that wasn't a joke. In fact, I didn't even
Speaker 1: know this was a thing until like shamefully like five
Speaker 1: years ago, when I learned that if you produce more
Speaker 1: energy with your system then you use you can actually
Speaker 1: not everywhere, but in many many places now you can
Speaker 1: sell that back to the power company and not only
Speaker 1: are you not paying. In fact, we talked about this
Speaker 1: in one of the episodes, might have been the Sun
Speaker 1: or the Bill Gates Renewable Energy episode, that's what it was. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I remember, but I couldn't. I knew. We talked about
Speaker 1: like grids and stuff like that, and now that's where
Speaker 1: it was good call. I think so, But um, they
Speaker 1: will cut you a check, which is pretty amazing. Um,
Speaker 1: and here's the best part, even to me. I was like, well,
Speaker 1: I mean, do I want to check from Georgia Power
Speaker 1: for whatever nineteen dollars a month? I sort of do.
Speaker 1: But what I would really rather do is past that forward,
Speaker 1: pay it forward, like they say. And there are places
Speaker 1: that have programs where if you have excess solar energy,
Speaker 1: you can send that to the power grid and then
Speaker 1: apply the leftover as a credit to the bill of
Speaker 1: a family in need, which is awesome. It is pretty awesome.
Speaker 1: Everybody comes out super great. Yeah, I wonder what the money.
Speaker 1: I mean, that's the one thing I don't know. It's like,
Speaker 1: how much more are you making? Is it a check
Speaker 1: for nineteen dollars or is it like three d bucks
Speaker 1: a month? I don't know, And it would definitely depend
Speaker 1: on a couple of things. How much electricity costs in
Speaker 1: your area, and um, how much your utility company pays
Speaker 1: for buyback electricity, and then also how much you're overproducing
Speaker 1: to you know, Yeah, there's a bunch of factors. But
Speaker 1: I'm just kind of curious. It's like a lot of
Speaker 1: money or is it do I really honestly don't know,
Speaker 1: but every little bit counts if you're a family in need. Right.
Speaker 1: So there's another thing that would be great, Um, if
Speaker 1: you have all this excess solar energy when you know
Speaker 1: it's really really sunny out, Um, if you could somehow
Speaker 1: capture it to use it later during nighttime or on
Speaker 1: a cloudy day or something like that. And so a
Speaker 1: lot of people have said, well, that'd be great. I mean,
Speaker 1: that just makes a solar solar electric home system perfect.
Speaker 1: Let's build batteries that do that, And so there are
Speaker 1: home batteries that are meant to be connected to solar outfits,
Speaker 1: like Tesla makes one of those two, LG makes one,
Speaker 1: Mercedes Benz makes one. It's a home battery. Um. The
Speaker 1: problem is that they are also really expensive, on the
Speaker 1: order of five six seven grand um. And so if
Speaker 1: you're spending twelve grand on your solar array and you
Speaker 1: spend an extra six grand on your home battery, you
Speaker 1: just spent an extra fift of the cost of your
Speaker 1: solar array to back up your your home with solar
Speaker 1: electricity when the sun is not shining as much. That's
Speaker 1: a huge enormous added expense. Yeah. And the one thing
Speaker 1: I was because you know, like you, I think my
Speaker 1: interest got peaked a little bit from my own house.
Speaker 1: It's like, man, this is really appealing to me now
Speaker 1: here my late forties. I could buy a system that
Speaker 1: will see me through till my death. Probably I don't
Speaker 1: know about that. At the time it starts breaking down,
Speaker 1: I'll be long gone. Well, let's hope not. Uh. And
Speaker 1: my first thought was, you know, we get a lot
Speaker 1: of brown outs and blackouts and power outages for some
Speaker 1: reason in my neighborhood. Is just it just happens a lot.
Speaker 1: It seems like every rainstorm. Uh, certainly anytime there's snow
Speaker 1: is a brown out where it's like the powers like
Speaker 1: almost out, but it comes back and then almost out
Speaker 1: or I think it just sort of flickers. I wish
Speaker 1: they'd call it something else. It sounds so gross. The
Speaker 1: brown out sounds gross. Yeah, it does. It sounds gross.
Speaker 1: Gray out. How about a gray out? Let's call it that.
Speaker 1: Are you thinking about like a butt hole? Yeah? Or
Speaker 1: poop or something, you know, like poop just squeezing out
Speaker 1: of your electrical outlets or something like that. Like that
Speaker 1: sounds like a very like archbunker thing to say, like
Speaker 1: I'm gonna go upstairs and have a brown out. Yes,
Speaker 1: yes it does. Dropping the Browns off at the Super
Speaker 1: Bowl or okay, I get you. So the only way
Speaker 1: the Browns could make it to a Super Bowl? Oh man, Yeah,
Speaker 1: Texas and Ohio super happy with you today. Um So
Speaker 1: my first thought was like, oh man, I get on
Speaker 1: Solar and there's a blackout going on because we we
Speaker 1: went out. I think I talked about this on one
Speaker 1: episode when they we had the big snowstorm a couple
Speaker 1: of years ago. We were out for three and a
Speaker 1: half days. That's unconscionable. I mean, it was a long
Speaker 1: time to be without electricity, to the point where it
Speaker 1: was like, all right, I'm a little bit worried about
Speaker 1: my family. Um, so I thought, man, I'll get solar
Speaker 1: and all those suckers will be without power and I'll
Speaker 1: have power. That is not the case, um, unless you're
Speaker 1: if you're storing on a battery, you can do that.
Speaker 1: But during a power outage, UM, there's something called islanding.
Speaker 1: It's very dangerous. It's basically when you're pumping electricity back
Speaker 1: into the power lines that all the that Georgia power
Speaker 1: thinks and the linemen are dead, so they're going to
Speaker 1: work on these and you're still pumping power back into it.
Speaker 1: They can't have that, so the power goes out as well.
Speaker 1: It'll kill it'll kill alignment for sure. Um. But if
Speaker 1: you have a battery back up, you're fine. Like you said,
Speaker 1: like that's where you're getting your juice from. But your
Speaker 1: your solar system is going to disconnect you from the
Speaker 1: grid to keep that from happening. But there's actually that
Speaker 1: happens elsewhere, chuck. If with if people have a generator,
Speaker 1: some people will plug their generator into an outlet in
Speaker 1: their house and reverse the flow of electricity from their
Speaker 1: generator throughout their house, which can create is landing as well.
Speaker 1: That crazy. Yeah, yeah, well, I mean that's a kind
Speaker 1: of a thing. Now. That's a lot of new houses
Speaker 1: have whole house generators built in and as soon as
Speaker 1: the power cuts off, that thing automatically fires up right right,
Speaker 1: But this is like affordable generator that they're plugging in
Speaker 1: reverse into their homewiring. It's not a good idea for
Speaker 1: any any anyone. I mean, there are safe ways to
Speaker 1: do it. That is not one of them. Should we
Speaker 1: take another break? Yeah, let's all right. We'll take one
Speaker 1: final break everyone, and we're going to talk a little
Speaker 1: bit about some of the downsides because there are some
Speaker 1: to solar power. I want to say, there's one other
Speaker 1: type of battery I found. Um it's a mechanical battery
Speaker 1: where you your solar power system uses all that excess
Speaker 1: power to to to power a pump that pumps water
Speaker 1: up to a raised area, and then at night er
Speaker 1: on a cloudy day, when you need the extra electricity,
Speaker 1: it releases that water to spin over a turbine, which
Speaker 1: creates an electrical current in that awesome a little power
Speaker 1: plant in your house. Basically, yeah, you do. And it's
Speaker 1: green too. It's hydroelectric, solar powered hydroelectric batteries. What that
Speaker 1: is pretty amazing. So uh, we mentioned silicon not being great.
Speaker 1: There are it's obvious that UM to create and this
Speaker 1: is an argument a lot of times against electric electric
Speaker 1: cars and hybrid vehicles. UM, we all like to drive
Speaker 1: them and stuff, but is a greenhouse effect when it
Speaker 1: comes to making this stuff. Minding minding these materials, uh,
Speaker 1: is not great. It is very environmentally, it's very harsh
Speaker 1: on the environment. And I don't think anyone makes any
Speaker 1: bones about that. UM. Transporting all this stuff gonna burn
Speaker 1: a lot of fossil fuels. Manufacturing all the stuff burns
Speaker 1: fossil fuels. But like you said earlier, that is true.
Speaker 1: But once that process is finished, that's it. No more
Speaker 1: greenhouse gasses forever, right, And some people will double down
Speaker 1: at this point and be like, well, whoa whoa Like
Speaker 1: creating solar cells is actually really really harmful because it
Speaker 1: requires the production of something called nitrogen trifluoride, which is
Speaker 1: a greenhouse gas that's seventeen thousand times more potent than
Speaker 1: carbon dioxide. Bad stuff. And when you work into the
Speaker 1: idea that you have a whole house battery that's made
Speaker 1: of cadmium, lead, nickel, all all of which have to
Speaker 1: be mined and which has to be replaced everything ten years,
Speaker 1: your solar arrays seems much much less green. And that's
Speaker 1: these are all very legitimate arguments. There's they're not incorrect
Speaker 1: at all, but they're also current limitations, and they're all
Speaker 1: surrounding production and transportation and all that stuff can be
Speaker 1: worked out. And when that stuff gets worked out, you
Speaker 1: still have solar producing clean energy with green or with
Speaker 1: um fossil fuels. Even if you worked all that stuff out,
Speaker 1: when you deploy them and actually create electricity from them,
Speaker 1: they're still going to produce greenhouse gases. So solar will
Speaker 1: always have that advantage. And it just has a bunch
Speaker 1: of kind of front loaded obstacles that need to be
Speaker 1: overcome through breakthroughs in the short term. Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's no contest in the end, especially if
Speaker 1: you're talking about the life of a solar system, considering
Speaker 1: like twenty five years, let's say, over the twenty five
Speaker 1: years of burning coal and natural gas, it's just not
Speaker 1: even close. Yeah, and I mean, like if you start
Speaker 1: getting more and more solar um involved and like transportation,
Speaker 1: then you knock out those greenhouse gases for transporting like
Speaker 1: solar panels from place to place because it's solar powering
Speaker 1: the transportation too. There's a lot of stuff we can
Speaker 1: do that that we just haven't quite figured out how
Speaker 1: to do yet. But it's not physically impossible to overcome them. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and you know, there's also people that say, hey, we
Speaker 1: you know, the entire country could run on solar and wind.
Speaker 1: Some people say maybe not. Other people say no, it
Speaker 1: totally could. But there are a lot of big obstacles.
Speaker 1: When you talk about converting a nationwide system, uh from
Speaker 1: a fossil fuel system two renewables, it's it's not easy
Speaker 1: and frankly, it will probably never happen on that scale. Um,
Speaker 1: maybe I'm cynical. I think I think it's cynical. I
Speaker 1: think if we look a hundred and fifty years in
Speaker 1: the future, maybe even a hundred seventy five, even I
Speaker 1: would say it's entirely possible. I could see it. Well,
Speaker 1: that would require and and if you do the math,
Speaker 1: that's about right. That would require several generations of people
Speaker 1: dying out who would fight this tooth and nail to
Speaker 1: their grad right, certain people who would have to die
Speaker 1: out first. But there are a lot of real obstacles
Speaker 1: to this, um. I mean, our infrastructure just is not
Speaker 1: built for this, Like we would have to completely rewrite
Speaker 1: how we do things. Yeah, So the infrastructure is set
Speaker 1: up in a centralized manner where you have a power
Speaker 1: plant and that power plant is built wherever, and you
Speaker 1: burn coal or whatever and create steam which turns to
Speaker 1: a turbine that creates electricity, and that electricity goes out
Speaker 1: to the area that that that power plant serves. That's
Speaker 1: not how renewables like solar or wind work. They have
Speaker 1: to be built where the wind or the sunlight is,
Speaker 1: and so you have to build a bunch of them
Speaker 1: wherever you can. And then those things all have to
Speaker 1: be connected. So it's a decentralized way, um that you
Speaker 1: have to connect them together to the current grid, which
Speaker 1: means running a lot more transmission lines from these new
Speaker 1: solar arrays that you're going to build wherever to connect
Speaker 1: them to deliver that electricity throughout the country. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: there's also and uh, there are fluctuations in the weather.
Speaker 1: You know, we already talked about your sort of at
Speaker 1: the behest of what your weather is giving you. Uh.
Speaker 1: And we're not saying when the wind doesn't blow, your
Speaker 1: lights go off, believe me. But it does have an effect.
Speaker 1: And so you have to compensate for this stuff. And
Speaker 1: compensating for this stuff, and on a national grid, UM
Speaker 1: is expensive and I don't even think we've quite figured
Speaker 1: out how that's gonna work yet, have we. No, there's
Speaker 1: some proposals. One is to UM basically create batteries, like
Speaker 1: just use the same solution that people have for their houses.
Speaker 1: We just need to take that excess stuff and store
Speaker 1: it for use when the the sun isn't shining. They
Speaker 1: figured out that for a an electrical storage system to
Speaker 1: store twelve hours worth of electricity for the US electrical
Speaker 1: grid would cost more than two point five trillion dollars.
Speaker 1: To that's quite a bit. Other people are saying, no, no,
Speaker 1: we just have to get better at more efficient long
Speaker 1: distance transmission lines. That's what we talked about in that
Speaker 1: Bill Gates episode. One of the things was that smart
Speaker 1: grid where we can easily shuffle UM solar that's generated
Speaker 1: in Scottsdale up to Portland. Oregon, you know, or Portland,
Speaker 1: Maine for that matter. Yeah, I mean they're everywhere in
Speaker 1: the United States at some point. There's a lot of
Speaker 1: sunshine going on at once, and you can send that
Speaker 1: to places. I know we're picking on Portland Seattle again,
Speaker 1: but if you can produce in Phoenix and send it
Speaker 1: to Portland, that's great. And I mean, let's let's be
Speaker 1: honest here. Two point five trillion dollars is a lot
Speaker 1: of cheese. But I saw somewhere someone point out that
Speaker 1: there's a an estimate that to fully convert over the
Speaker 1: US electrical grid to solar only would be about four
Speaker 1: trillion dollars, which, again is a lot of money, but
Speaker 1: in the grand scheme of things, and when you really
Speaker 1: think about what that investment is going towards, it's not
Speaker 1: that much. And frankly, it's kind of doable if there's
Speaker 1: a political will to do it. Yeah, I get you.
Speaker 1: Another solution would be for every house to have its
Speaker 1: own solar ray, every car to have its own solar power.
Speaker 1: That's what I'm banking more on is like more and
Speaker 1: more people doing this to the point where it's you know,
Speaker 1: it's not part of the infrastructure of the grid. But
Speaker 1: it's a you know, still making a big dent. But
Speaker 1: that's going to be the hardest sell because you're just
Speaker 1: completely eliminated all of the power companies and they're not
Speaker 1: exactly known as lightweights when it comes to things like lobbying.
Speaker 1: That's true. And another you know, you look at the
Speaker 1: subsidies going on now, and that's really clear who's better
Speaker 1: at lobbying. Federal subsidies for power companies who produce solar
Speaker 1: are about five and thirty three million bucks compared to
Speaker 1: thirty two billion dollars for natural gas alone in two
Speaker 1: thousand and sixteen. Right, that's just text bricks and subsidies
Speaker 1: for investing in deploying that kind of energy. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: solar still is pretty expensive per megawatt hour compared to
Speaker 1: like you said, fossil fuels are just cheap. Still, they
Speaker 1: really are. And here's here's the problem to Chuck. There's
Speaker 1: there's a conundrum where when you deploy a lot of
Speaker 1: solar electricity um in a utility, it actually tends to
Speaker 1: depress wholesale electrical prices across the board. So a company
Speaker 1: has an incentive to not deploy solar because they can
Speaker 1: charge more for electrical produced from like coal and other
Speaker 1: fossil fuels like they normally do. That's right, But if
Speaker 1: you put one in your house, uh, you're not only
Speaker 1: paying for your own elector or whatever. You're subsidizing your
Speaker 1: own electrical bill. You possibly are getting money back or
Speaker 1: helping a family need um. And it's also an investment
Speaker 1: in your house. It actually increases the value of your
Speaker 1: home because, you know, unless someone just hates them and
Speaker 1: wants to to reak in it up and yank them
Speaker 1: off the roof when they come in there, it's going
Speaker 1: to be a selling point. You know, you're like, hey,
Speaker 1: moving to this house, They've already paid for it, and
Speaker 1: you don't have a power bill. Yeah. There was a
Speaker 1: study from the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab that found that
Speaker 1: a solar setup increase the value of a house in
Speaker 1: America by about fifteen grands. Right. So when I said
Speaker 1: they've already paid for it, what I really mean is
Speaker 1: they're passing that onto you. Exactly, they passed the costs
Speaker 1: onto you. Do you got anything else? I got nothing else, man,
Speaker 1: I'm I'm gonna legit. Look into this, let me know
Speaker 1: how it goes. Man. I I'm really interested I have
Speaker 1: a dude, doubt like we have. I don't think we
Speaker 1: could do our whole house. But we have this one
Speaker 1: roof in particular. Now that's uh, I can't see from
Speaker 1: the street. It's uh, you can only see it from
Speaker 1: one place in the house, and I think it faces
Speaker 1: south and I have to measure the panels, but I
Speaker 1: could probably fit like eight panels up there. That's not
Speaker 1: enough for my whole house. Hey, that whatever little bit works,
Speaker 1: that could power my Frankenstein experiments, right exactly, you're bringing
Speaker 1: inanimate matter back to life. Um. One other thing, Chuck,
Speaker 1: There's a big obstacle that's facing us worldwide, and that
Speaker 1: is that we haven't figured out how to get solar
Speaker 1: energy from the oceans collected over the oceans to the
Speaker 1: rest of the world, which is going to be a
Speaker 1: big challenge. But if we could figure that out, problem solved.
Speaker 1: Just build a solar array the size of Texas, maybe
Speaker 1: over the Great Pacific garbage Patch, and there we go.
Speaker 1: I feel like I've seen research into that, and maybe
Speaker 1: not the oceans, but like solar blankets over water, now
Speaker 1: am I making that up? I mean I'm sure that
Speaker 1: that you could have them in like coastal areas or whatever.
Speaker 1: But that that means like you couldn't swim in those
Speaker 1: coastal areas, you know, which is going to depress the
Speaker 1: value of the real estate there. So I would guess
Speaker 1: we would want them like really far off shore. But
Speaker 1: how do you get that electricity back to you know,
Speaker 1: where it's needed on land? That's the question I think. Yeah,
Speaker 1: just though a big solar uh floating solar blanket over
Speaker 1: an off shoal short oil rig and just plug it
Speaker 1: in and just plug it in. Yeah, there you goblem solved. Uh.
Speaker 1: If you want to know more about solar, go check
Speaker 1: it out, see if you can maybe swing it for
Speaker 1: your house. And if so, let us know about it.
Speaker 1: We want to hear that. And Chuck will keep you
Speaker 1: updated too, won't you sure? Uh? And since I said
Speaker 1: Chuck will keep you updated, friends, that means it's time
Speaker 1: for a listener mail. Oh no, sir, you I know
Speaker 1: you're being coy because to your right and Jerry's chair
Speaker 1: is Alexander Williams and not Jerry. No, Jerry's standing over there.
Speaker 1: This is all getting weird. It is getting a little weird.
Speaker 1: We're playing musical chairs and Jerry's the loser. That's now
Speaker 1: Jerry Snipper, the Loser. What we've done though today is
Speaker 1: asked Alex Williams, one of our colleagues and pals here
Speaker 1: in the office, to come in. And we don't do
Speaker 1: this much, but when we really love a show and
Speaker 1: someone sits fourteen feet from us, well and they do
Speaker 1: something really special. I mean, this is special stuff we're
Speaker 1: talking about. That's why I said, we really love it. Okay,
Speaker 1: we asked him in, and here he is to talk
Speaker 1: about your great show, Ephemeral. What a comfortable chair, Cherry,
Speaker 1: I can see what a great chair is that, Frank.
Speaker 1: This is Frank. Well he's sitting on Frank. That's right.
Speaker 1: So welcome Alex. We wanted to have you here to
Speaker 1: kind of tell everybody about your show because we love
Speaker 1: your show and we could talk about it all day,
Speaker 1: but we thought it would be better if you came
Speaker 1: in and kind of told the folks like the thought
Speaker 1: behind Ephemeral and what what prompted you to do it
Speaker 1: and what they can expect from it. So go, okay, Um, well,
Speaker 1: it's a it's a podcast about artifact, right, the stuff
Speaker 1: that gets left behind and uh, you know, trying to
Speaker 1: illuminate you know, maybe dark or or sort of forgotten
Speaker 1: corners of history by you know, when we have them,
Speaker 1: by playing the artifacts. And it's an audio show, so specifically,
Speaker 1: you know, we started with ideas of like tape and
Speaker 1: you know, film and video, but then you know, sometimes
Speaker 1: you get into areas where there's just really no artifacts
Speaker 1: or artifacts that don't really translate into into the audio medium,
Speaker 1: and then so you experiment a little bit. And so
Speaker 1: the series itself, it's ten ten episodes posted trailer, right,
Speaker 1: and the first season, Yeah, the trailer itself stands on
Speaker 1: its own. I think you've said before, I hope. So, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's an eight minute this little story about um
Speaker 1: we'll call it like my first there was no podcast,
Speaker 1: then my first radio show. It's a show that I
Speaker 1: a loose you know, connection of thoughts that I would
Speaker 1: make on my parents Answering Machine. That was my fully
Speaker 1: produced first show at least that I remember. And so
Speaker 1: in each episode you kind of find a recovered or
Speaker 1: formulaly lost or um uh it just kind of overlooked
Speaker 1: peace and then kind of dissect it and explain it
Speaker 1: and talk about like it's place in the universe, right,
Speaker 1: And I think one of the episodes was about um
Speaker 1: kind of a long lost original TV network, right, the
Speaker 1: Dumont Television Network. Yeah, you guys ever heard of Dumont?
Speaker 1: I had not. Uh. In the Golden Ager television there's
Speaker 1: four TV networks, ABC, CBS, NBC also with US Today,
Speaker 1: all big radio companies beforehand, I mean big, big, huge brands,
Speaker 1: and Dumont was a television manufacturer that got into the
Speaker 1: broadcasting game at the very beginning. They were the fourth
Speaker 1: network when there was only four. They were only around
Speaker 1: for I think just a little over a decade and
Speaker 1: something like twenty thousand broadcasts have been almost completely lost
Speaker 1: because things just weren't recorded then. Uh, there was no
Speaker 1: real way to record life television. What they would do
Speaker 1: is they'd make something called a kinescope, which should take
Speaker 1: a TV screen and you filmed it with your film camera,
Speaker 1: and then you have a real that looks terrible. And
Speaker 1: the only reason they make that is so they could
Speaker 1: send it off to you know, you're in California and
Speaker 1: your affiliates not connected to New York, DC, Philadelphia, etcetera,
Speaker 1: on the coaxial cable and so then they show it
Speaker 1: once in California and then they would trash that thing
Speaker 1: or tape over it or you know, film over it
Speaker 1: because there was no reruns then right early TV was live.
Speaker 1: It was weird because of it. So the little snippets
Speaker 1: that we have of it left that the few kinescopes
Speaker 1: that got saved, it's something like three or you know,
Speaker 1: somewhat complete broadcast. They're mostly held by individual collectors and
Speaker 1: a fewer and institutions like the Museum of TV and
Speaker 1: Radio in New York. That's awesome. You also covered one
Speaker 1: of the topics that we've covered in the Best about
Speaker 1: the Call Your Brothers, which was very cool, And I
Speaker 1: think that's one of my favorite things about the show
Speaker 1: is is so wide ranging. It's like the best episodes
Speaker 1: of this American Life or nine nine percent invisible as
Speaker 1: far as your approach goes, And that's why I think
Speaker 1: I loved it from the beginning. You were in the
Speaker 1: Call your Brother's episode very briefly. I know you did
Speaker 1: a walk by, huh, I did I did a line reading.
Speaker 1: We'll just leave it at that will be an easter
Speaker 1: egg for listeners. So all all ten episodes, plus the
Speaker 1: trailer out they're available now wherever you get your podcasts
Speaker 1: right indeed, you have a second season coming. Second season.
Speaker 1: We did our first recording for yesterday. I nice. Yeah,
Speaker 1: how's it going? So far? So good? I got a
Speaker 1: lot of reading to do. Man right on, we'll get
Speaker 1: to it. We won't keep you any longer, but thank
Speaker 1: you for coming by. And if you want to check
Speaker 1: out a femeral everybody, you can go check it out
Speaker 1: on what, the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, wherever
Speaker 1: you get your podcasts, go check it out now all
Speaker 1: of those things. Someone asked me to put it on
Speaker 1: an old tape for them, but I haven't done that yet.
Speaker 1: That would be a cool way to get it would be.
Speaker 1: Thanks for coming by, Alex, Thanks for having me on. Guys. Well,
Speaker 1: if you want to get in touch with this, like
Speaker 1: Alex did, you can just drop by the studio j K. Instead,
Speaker 1: go on to stuff you Should Know dot com, check
Speaker 1: out our social links, or you can send us an
Speaker 1: email to Stuff Podcast at I heeart radio dot com.
Speaker 1: Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeart Radios.
Speaker 1: How stuff works. For more podcasts for my heart Radio,
Speaker 1: visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
Speaker 1: listen to your favorite shows. H