Robert Bryce, A Question of Power

There's a way, a way such a better way today Today, a nation-foys tell the world there's a better way Today, there's a better way Ooh, there's a way, such a better way today Today, now region-foys tell the world there's a better way The way is the Adam's way This is Rod Adams, and it's time for another atomic show And yes, the atomic shows are going to be coming a little more frequently now that I can't go anywhere and have the opportunity to line up people from around the world who also can't go anywhere So today with me, I have Robert Bryce, who is a well-published author about energy and specifically has recently released a book called A Question of Power, Electricity and the Wealth of Nations And Robert, I really want to hear what it's like to release a book and have a book tour all set to go when the world decides to shut down You really want to hear about it? Well, how long do you have? I wouldn't want to hear about it, I wouldn't want to do it, but unfortunately that's what I'm doing Yeah, there's been a little other news. All prices crash, the stock market crashes and coronavirus shuts down the entire US economy And much of the rest of the world economy So yeah, I would prefer different timing, but you play the cards your dealt, so that's where I am So tell me what motivated you to put together this rather incredible view of what the history of electricity is like and what you think the future is going to be like Well, yeah, that's the key question, why did I do it? And it's the one that I've really motivated me to spend most of the last four years working on it I've been writing about the energy business now for thirty-some years and after looking at it and thinking about it I saw, I guess the thing that really sparked the process was a news clip I saw, I'm pretty sure it was in New York Times about the electricity woes in Nigeria And this was 2016, I'm pretty sure, and I saw that clip and it reminded me of a news story that was on a segment on 60 minutes And it must have been in the 70s, I remember I was a kid and Morley Safer was in Lagos and he was kind of with this smirk on his face And he was kind of looking at Lagos' electric grid and the fact that they had big banks of lead acid batteries And you could kind of sense in him his incredulity about the whole thing But it made me realize, well, in some forty years, Nigeria hadn't changed at all And that here was a country that was electricity poor then, there are electricity poor today And that it made me really look at electricity and think about it in a different way And the punchline, I guess, is why did I write it? Electricity is the world's most important and fastest growing form of energy And all of the things that are we care about, any quality, women's rights, climate change, the future prosperity, modernity All of them were tied directly to electricity and electricity availability So that's why I wrote the book and I look at the past, present, and future of electricity And I'm really proud of it Well, you won't get any argument from me about electricity as the most important commodity Not only have I grown up in a household run by an electrical engineer who worked for the power company I've always, myself, thought of electricity as a perfect commodity to sell Because your customers buy it without thinking about it They defer the cost to a monthly bill And they complain if they don't have access to it for more than about 10 or 15 minutes at a time Matter of fact, they complain if they have lose access for a minute But it makes the newspapers if they lose access for 30 minutes Oh yeah, pretty cool commodity be selling The only time people notice electricity is when they don't have it And so, you know, we've become so accustomed to a cheap reliable abundant power That it's just a foregone conclusion that well of course we're going to have it Well, no, not necessarily One of the neat things about growing up in the house I did was I learned pretty early in life Exactly how much work goes into making sure that that flow that amazing charge Is delivered at the sockets inside your house at such a reliable with the reliability that has It's not magic. It's a lot of engineering Oh yeah, and this is the world's easily the world's most important form of energy But forget about how difficult it is to make sure that the grid is always up and available It operates in, you know, the comparison is often made between the water grid and the electric grid And people compare the flow of electricity with the flow of water But if the water pressure and the water flow in the electric grid changes a little bit Well, it doesn't really matter that much, right? It takes you another second or two to fill up your coffee pot or to water your lawn But the grid, the electric grid operates on very, very narrow tolerances And so those tolerances, if they're exceeded one way or another, the grid shuts down So the balancing of generation and consumption has to be continuous And it has to happen instantaneously And if it gets too far one way or another, then blackouts occur, you burn out your equipment It's just an incredible business and that was the other part, Rod, that I think, well why did I do it? Well, this is the world's second biggest business, behind only oil and gas Global electricity sales are about $2 trillion a year I mean this is just an enormous industry that is largely invisible to the public But is arguably the single most important industry on the planet? Yeah, again, you won't get any disagreement from me So tell me about some of the growing markets that you identified in your book I was interested to note that you found that indoor growing of marijuana also known as weed Is a rapidly growing consumer of electricity? That was one of the unexpected things that we found, or I found in my research in Denver Colorado was the first state to legalize recreational weed This now is a year or so ago, but they estimated that electricity demand for weed production in Denver was growing at over 30% a year Which means it's doubling every two and a half years or so I mean this is just remarkable amount of growth to put it in power density terms And I know you like talking in technical terms and using the physics terms The power density, I measured I went to a black market grow operation in Denver It was a friend of a friend of mine was growing a lot of weed and his basement selling it on the black market I estimated the power density of his grow operation in the flowering section was about 800 watts per square meter Well, that's roughly half of the power density you'll find inside a data center like those operated by Amazon or Facebook I mean the power density that is needed the amount of watts the energy flows that are required to turn watts into weed is just enormous And that this is one of the in fact some of these grow operations And I've found a bunch of them and looking tracking them online They're being tracked down some of them because of their massive amounts of electricity use others are being found because they're stealing electricity So you know if you're selling black market weed and you want to cut your costs you steal the juice Well, I've noticed that but did you find any legitimate large scale growers of marijuana to determine what kind of comparison their power demands might be? I know that a lot of people want to sell some generators and they probably would prefer to sell them to companies with actual finances and the ability to commit for power demand and stuff So what kind of power demands are the big suppliers starting to show? Well, I mean of course it depends on you know the size of the operation how many square footed square feet they have I can't answer that question directly. I know that if memory serves there was one black market grower in San Bernardino County in San Bernardino, California that in fact they stayed they took over at the old pack bell building in downtown San Bernardino. They were about a block or two blocks away from get this the San Bernardino County Police Department and the building was supposedly empty and there were some suspicions about what was going on inside the building So the cops just pulled their utility bill and found that the supposedly empty building was using $60,000 worth of electricity a month So I mean they got busted the cops got in their cars drove them block which busted this massive grow operation I mean it was pretty as an I even quote one of the cops he said it was pretty brazen but that's one indicator and then the other one that comes to mind is that the for an average grower whether it's a black market grower or a legal operation electricity accounts for about a third of the cost of marijuana production Okay, so you also talk a lot about data centers and you listed the big five Apple Amazon Google Microsoft and Facebook and and and those companies have been locating data centers in areas where they can get cheap electricity and also contracting for renewable electricity Right well and this is part of their what which remarkable to me and and I tracked this over a number of years when you look at those companies Apple alphabet Amazon Facebook and Microsoft Microsoft their their total consumption of electricity I calculate according to latest data about 33 terawatt hours per year that's as much as is consumed by Denmark I mean these are just massive consumers and further that their electricity use is doubling about every two and a half years I mean they're seeing about every three years they're growing at about 25% a year that their consumption levels due to the growth of the cloud due to the growth of video on demand all these other things are forcing are leading to just massive increases in electricity consumption and that's being driven by these massive increases of course in data flows Overall US electricity demand is flat over the last several years so what do you think that these companies growing demand is replacing Well it's interesting you say that because in 2018 demand actually jumped by nearly 4% global electricity demand in 2018 grew at about the same rate about 4% now now that we're seeing this recession and slowdown I'm certain we're going to see a pretty steep reduction in electricity demand which is going to affect the utilities of course But you know these these efficiency gains through LED lights more efficient television more efficient computers they're having an effect so that even though as you point out the electricity demand is flat a relatively flat that's happened even though we've you know we're adding substantial amount of new population in America and really the only states where overall electricity demand has been growing in any consistent way are our southern states texas for instance geoflored uh... et cetera because that's where population demand is and our population growth is and also uh... significant air conditioning demand electricity demand is growing particularly as as countries that are have been electricity poor in the past or trying to to move up the curve what fuels do you see are are going to be able to supply this electricity growth and are we going to be able to do it with all renewable will you have your last question first uh... no there's just simply no way no way that we are going to be able to meet growing global demand with renewables and this is an opinion it's simple facts and basic math uh... i i i've done these calculations since the book came out but i'll give you the the quick rundown okay so wind energy uh... in the united states were producing about a hundred terawatt hours per year from wind globally electricity demand for the last two decades has been growing by about six hundred terawatt hours per year so that's roughly equal to one Brazil of new demand every year so we're adding six hundred terawatt hours if we were just going to meet growing demand just meeting demand not displacing any existing uh... coal oil natural gas nuclear etc hydro that's already on the grid if we're just going to meet growing demand with wind we would have to install globally annually six times as much wind is now exist in the united states every year what about solar i'm pro solar i have solar panels on the roof of my house germany produces more solar energy for than any other country in europe about fifty terawatt hours again the math years is very simple we need six hundred terawatt hours all solar in germany is fifty we have to install twelve times as much solar is now exist in germany and we'd have to do it every year just to meet incremental demand growth so this idea that renewables are going to save is that they're going to solve climate change it's just fundamentally wrong and and and yet this has been the the mantra of the big environmental groups the modest now the mantra of you know major policy makers in europe and united states it's just simply is a it's a fiction and it's not based in any kind of math or or reality and final point what are the fuels that are going to be meeting demand uh... it would one of the key ones is going to be coal of course because cold share of the market over the last thirty years has remained at about thirty eight percent uh... it and but i think natural gas and nuclear those are going to be the fuels that i think if we're serious about co2 emissions we have to be serious about natural gas and nuclear and uh... i think gas market is obviously growing i think nuclear for all of its merits i think it is really facing some serious challenges i believe that china has figured out how to do an all-renewable future i'm sorry say again you think that china has what i think the china has figured out the way to do an all-renewable future of that's really what you want to do you do tell because i'm i don't know where you're getting your information tell me well they they simply have redefined the word renewable to include nuclear all okay well that's interesting and are they including coal and renewable as well because you can reproducing a couple hundred million years is that yeah is not a double no i i was being a little facetious but but i think that if you included red nuclear in the word renewable there is a path forward for producing electricity anyway by by using non-emitting sources and that doesn't solve that doesn't solve all the other energy so supply challenges you have but uh... i think that there's a there's a path i mean certainly france is shown that you can get pretty darn close to an all uh... nuclear electricity grid yeah and so and so that's that's what i'm talking about and i believe that that china has been mass producing steam plants that happened to use coal as a heat source uh... up to now but they have a demonstration plant it should be come be starting operation sometime in a in a very near future uh... it's a little overdue that shows a path to replace coal furnaces with high temperature reactors so you're saying they would leave the uh... effectively the powerhouse in place and replace and replace the heat source from coal with nuclear yet yeah that's a little bit interesting i've heard this before but i don't have anything to back it up and it would be sure to be interesting if that were the case um... that they could somehow just swap it out and and maintain those uh... those uh... though that the some of that infrastructure because of the the saving could be substantial but uh... i don't i don't know anything about that rott it's interesting yeah there well the the idea of changing out a heat source for a particular steam plan is is nothing new because you know we've been repowering powerhouses around the the u.s from colton atro gas and and from oil to coal or from cold to oil and they've also had power plants that have done you know put a uh... gas turbine in front and then use this the heat from the gas turbine to turn it into a combined cycle plan all those kind of repowerings have happened in the past replacing the thermal source for a for a given power plan does not an unknown process and actually it's a fairly common process but with the Chinese have done and they've got this prototype or demonstration plan called the high temperature reactor uh... pebble module htrpm each uh... high temperature reactor is approximately 250 megawatts thermal and they simply put a couple of reactors or several reactors in parallel to supply a turbine generator uh... just like a steamed plant and the the the steamed conditions that the htrpm produces are identical to the steamed conditions in a modern mass produced Chinese steamed plant you think they're going to be able to create a reactor that they could then bolt on yes well they can it's not exactly bolt on but it's it's replacing the furnace section right of the steamed plant the part that has the the the the burners and the boiler and of course then you go from there there's a valve that shuts off the steamed and then you have the steamed turbine and the condenser and all the other the feed pumps and it comes back and and circulates but there's there are two separate systems there's the heat system and the secondary system right in a traditional steamed plant and you simply remove those furnaces or if you've got a couple of these plants and they have several that they've built and not really fired up yet uh... they may very well be waiting for those these reactors to be ready and they'd start with certain key places where pollution is a big problem or where transportation of coal is a big big challenge right and and as they build up their capacity to produce these modules they'll move they'll go back and do some refits on others now i think that the chinese are well suited to do this because they have a fleet of very new steamed plants uh-huh wouldn't be that really uh... a very good path if you've got a fleet of steamed plants are towards the end of life right so anyway that's just uh... i think that when people talk about china as building all these co-plants i think that they miss at least one of the things that china is doing to clean up their air and and not just climate change is motivating them everybody in china gets to breathe the same air even the very rich controlling people in the central committee have to breathe the same air as everybody else right i don't they don't get to to go live someplace different when the air is nasty they get to breathe it too so they're motivated to try to clean it up right so so tell me what had did you i think your book talks a little bit about the uh path that the u.s. followed to electrify everybody by by having the you know the government programs going in and run wires in places where traditional profit-making companies weren't terribly interested because they weren't enough customers yes well this was a key and uh... the new deal really wasn't inflection point for electrification in america and it was uh... and and we're still living today with some of the living remnants the living uh... uh... examples of the of the new deal not the green new deal the real new deal um... so just a quick bit of history so Edison starts the the pearl street plant uh... in lower Manhattan 1882 first central uh... central power plant serves a region around his plant was a d c plant uh... fast forward the eighteen ninety three westing house proves alternating current alternating current becomes kind of the the prototype for all power plants then around the world but then you by the nineteen twenties and nineteen thirties there were big segments of the american population that were lee being left behind they weren't being electrified because the public utility holding companies some of which had their roots including with Edison on pearl street uh... we're not serving rural areas they were only operating in urban areas because that's where the most customers were and they were the most efficient economically to serve the more people you have on a single wire single you know tower single single pole most single generator the more profitable your business make sense but nineteen thirty two comes around the the country's in depression Roosevelt runs in part against Hoover on on uh... against the public utility holding companies he wins in a landslide the worst defeat by an uh... of an incumbent in in in modern american history and uh... Roosevelt spends the first two years of his his presidency focusing on a lot of things nineteen thirty five he's ready to take on the utility holding company act utility holding companies in list three uh... new dealers to help him Sam reyburn burtan wheeler and george north together they help pass the public utility holding company actor nineteen thirty five the rural electrification actor nineteen thirty six and that fundamentally changes the fortunes of of of rural america in nineteen thirty one out of ten farms and and ranches in america had electricity by nineteen fifty nine out of ten had electricity so this creates a real pivot point at a real uh... sets i think the stage for america's economic success after world war two because then uh... factories manufacturers they could set up pretty much anywhere in the country they didn't have to be in big cities they could also locate in rural areas it allows uh... electrification of agriculture and agricultural uh... production so that milk stays cold that she stays cold that you know all these things that food doesn't spoil on its way to the to market so it fundamentally changed america but it required uh... very public minded uh... politicians ready to take on the entrenched interests uh... but it uh... it's a legacy that's still uh... is is relevant today we have some nine hundred electric co-ops around them uh... the country today providing reliable cheap electricity people in rural areas that otherwise might not have had electricity at all for maybe decades that whole story is one of the inspirations for one by dad decided to be in electrical engineer he grew up in one of those rural farms who born in nineteen twenty five and in southern george so he they live in a place without electricity and was always uh... marveled at the at the value that it brought to people's lives and he was very proud of of uh... keeping the lights on even during storms or right after storms and that kind of stuff so right it is a marvelous uh... product and one of the things that i didn't even realize until recently was just how important high energy physics was to the ability for power companies to to grow and start transmitting power on very high voltage lines and building very large power plants and having breakers that could work because there's all kinds of plasma physics involved. I was just reading a story of the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory and found out that that was where a lot of the early physicists were brought into the fold. That's what they were working on before they started working on atomic weapons during World War II. Huh, interesting. So they were working on the kit needed to operate a high voltage grid. Yep. High power. Right. And one of the before dad passed away, one of the things he was bimonion was affected. Almost all electrical engineers at that time, this is in the 1990s, were studying electronics and small power stuff rather than big power stuff. He's most of the big power programs. People sort of were bored with them because they just thought all the problems had been solved. Huh, interesting. Yeah, they haven't. Not yet. So your future grid, tell you what you think the future of the grid is going to be and how that's how we're making progress towards getting there. Sure. I think the, I'm maybe I'm a contrarian and that's not the, you know, I wouldn't be the first time. But I think the grid of the future is going to look a lot like the grid does today. That when you look at fuel efficiency, it's still generally bigger the power plant, the more efficient they are. But at the same time, microgrids, as I saw in Lebanon, can be economic. I think particularly for rural areas that if the cost of solar and storage continues to come down, that we're going to see more deployments of solar and batteries. I saw this myself in Lebanon in the Shuth Mountains, Southeast of Beirut, way up in the mountains. And there was a resort called Kiyarzai. They had a hundred kilowatts of Chinese made solar panels and the Lebanese sunshine was being stored in 300 kilowatt hours of lead acid batteries that were designed in Bulgaria and manufactured in India. So there had, you know, this international supply chain came together in the mountains of Lebanon to provide all the electricity needed by this one resort and all their customers. But it worked there because their competition was diesel-fired gen sets. So if your price of power is 30 or 40 cents a kilowatt hour, then solar and storage get to look pretty attractive. But I think we're also seeing the value equation for solar making it in areas in the United States areas of Europe where it just simply makes more sense than installing wind because of the transmission problems of getting a lot of wind energy into dense urban areas and the difficulty of building high voltage transmission. So I'm more bullish on solar than I am on wind because of the backlash against wind. I have a long chapter in the book about the problems, the conflicts of land use. But I also think that, you know, as I make clear, the point that I've made now for the last 10 years or more, natural gas to nuclear. For serious about large-scale electrification, then natural gas and nuclear are going to provide a logical, low-carbon, relatively affordable, but scalable source that can bring a lot of people out of the dark. And I think that these big discoveries of gas offshore Africa combined with this acceleration, I think, in nuclear technology over the next few decades will likely make a big difference. Right now the world is awash in natural gas capacity and even liquefied natural gas capacity and moving around from place to place. But once you get the LNG delivered or the gas extracted from the ground, how challenging is it that not everybody has the kind of pipeline distribution system that the U.S. has? Well, that's a good question. And that's one of the keys that explains why so many countries have chosen to use coal instead of gas. Coal is easily stored. You don't have to, doesn't even have to be kept dry. You can just make a big pile of it out on the ground and the ground doesn't even have to be level. I mean, as long as you've got a big pile of coal, you can feed it into the burner and it's going to work fine. And into the boiler, when the difference with gas is that you need pipelines, which are expensive, you likely need some way you can store it, which is expensive. All these factors have hindered the growth of gas for a generation fuel. But you can also look at the data and see that particularly in the U.S. gas is displacing coal. You can see gas displacing coal in Europe. And I think that if LNG prices stay relatively low, you're going to see gas competing more head-to-head with coal. But I also, having said that, I think this recession and maybe even depression globally is going to make coal more attractive. In fact, there was an interesting article on rice-style energy in this morning saying that very thing. So, you know, I'm bullish on gas. I just think that the supplies are so big and the fuel is very attractive. It's going to be used for more electric generation and more transportation. And hopefully the U.S. can help lead on nuclear and get more new designs for modular reactors licensed and deployed. Yeah, before we started recording you and I talked a little bit about what I think is a paradigm-shifting development as company out in California named Oklo. And I happen to know that company is rather tiny. There's probably less than two dozen people working there right now. It has completed and filed an application to build a 1.5 megawatt electric, basically nuclear generator on a site at the Idaho National Laboratory and the powerhouse for that generator is a 5,000 square foot building. Looks like a nice residential A-frame, maybe a little bit larger than most residences. But not too much. I mean, my house is half that size. It's still a completely different paradigm. And they believe that their licensed review process will take roughly two years and that constructing their facility from breaking ground to criticality will take somewhere between one and two years. And those kinds of things start to make possibility of a nuclear generator inside a microgrid be a very interesting possibility. I agree. And that's one of the things that I think particularly in developed countries like the U.S., where large increments of new power are not necessarily going to be needed. As you said, we're seeing electricity demand on a per capita basis flat line. And also if you look at what, so that these smaller increments of new power capacity, I think could be attractive if the price is right. But also that designs like that could be very attractive for mining operations areas in the, that are very cold in Alaska, the Arctic, Siberia, et cetera, something, a design like that where you're going to have a lot of process heat could make them very attractive for district heating as well as electrification. Yeah, I also envision them as being maybe a real solution in a place like that resort you were talking about in Lebanon. Notice in a lot of places in the U.S. they're just physically gorgeous and have amazing resources like deep powder snow or something that haven't been developed because there there are no options for supplying them with electricity at anything close to a reasonable cost and a reasonable cleanliness. Right. Since we need these, the areas, anybody interested in going there would be very interested in having it be clean and pristine and not have a diesel generator making noise nearby. Yeah, well, that's an interesting point. In fact, you made it just before I was going to mention it that, yeah, that noise is a concern. I remember years ago I was at a ranch back there was Ted Turner's ranch in New Mexico and it was a big place and they had a little set of cabins and buildings way out in the bush. I mean, it wasn't close to the grid at all and they had set up a micro grid there with a very large diesel gen set and it ran everything and they had propane for heating but that engine was loud. You could hear it if you listen for it and I'm a versed in noise. I'm very noise sensitive. So what you, you know, your last point I think is key and that's one of the things that I think one of the many virtues of of nuclear is that very, very point you just made. Yeah, I had the advantage of learning about nuclear and diesel and batteries up close and personal on board submarines and I sort enjoyed the difference between running on nuclear and running on diesel. And part diesel was a pretty good size machine but it could fill the entire ship was smoking about 30 seconds if the wind wasn't glowing in the right direction. Right. And it's power capacity was very modest compared to our nuclear power capacity. So we could only be on very reduced electrical demand, severe restrictions in order to run on the diesel. Right. It makes a difference. And anyway, the paradigm that nuclear is big and slow may be changing and that's a great thing for the world to have more options to start supplying more electricity to more people. Right. As I'm sure you'll agree, anybody who spends four years running a book about electricity knows how important it is. It will exactly. And I think that this is one of the, I mean, and I think the ochostory really is interesting that this potential to deploy these machines and deploy them by manufacturing them instead of doing best-spoken installations at the site where you have thousands of workers on site every day and you need back-tell or floor or some massive engineering company to come out there and deploy and manufacture this thing on site if you're able to have a central location. And that was one of the things that to me made a lot of sense about the menu, you know, the SMR from the beginning was, well, how do you make improvements in anything? Well, you do it a lot, right? Whether it's your golf swing or your, you know, your jump shot or darts or, you know, ping pong. How do you get good at something you do it a lot? And the more you do it, the better you get. Well, why has the internal combustion engine? Why does the auto-cycle engine and the diesel cycle engine? Why have they persisted so long? Well, it's the small bit of incremental improvements and the fact that they make them by the millions. And when you make something by the millions, you get better at it. And so that's one of the things that I think is really attractive is about the potential for reactors at one and a half megawatts. And potentially, I'm sure they can scale it up if they want to, but that you can do this and you do it a lot and then you get even better at it. And the safety, the processes, all these improve the more you do it. Both the wind and the solar industry offer some real enlightening lessons for how you drive down a cost curve. And they took two different paths between solar and wind in my view. And I think that like you, I'm kind of keen on the path that the solar industry took was getting massive replication of standardized solar panels. And so. Even some of the very largest solar power installations look a lot like the panels on your roof. Right. Right. And they're making them by the, you know, by the millions. And when you make them by the millions, you get better at doing it. And so, you know, just a quick thought about about solar and wind and it's something that I've tracked for a long time. And I have a long, pretty long chapter. I think it's the longest chapter in the book where I talk about land use and land use conflicts. And that this is one of the constraints, not just on the sighting of wind and solar and the plants themselves, but also on the transmission lines. So the idea that we're going to build big wind plants in, say, Oklahoma, Kansas and Texas and then put up long transmission lines and carry that energy to New York or Los Angeles, it's clearly not happening. It hasn't happened. And the failure of clean line energy partners to make it happen is an obvious example of this failure. But land use matters. And that's one of the reasons why to mean nuclear is so important is it's very small footprint. And the friction that wind energy deployment is facing from Vermont to Hawaii. And I write in about the objections to wind and communities all over the country. But something I don't cover in the book because the book had already been moved into editing and getting ready to print was that in November and October there were some 200 people arrested on the island of Oahu protesting a wind project. Now, if this were a pipeline project, it would be front page news in the New York Times. But this was a wind project. And so it barely gets a mention in any of the major media outlets. But the reality is these land use conflicts for renewables are real. And while they've been most pronounced on wind, I think solar is going to face some of these objections as well because even though the power density is 10 times that of wind, 10 watts per square meter versus one roughly for wind, these big solar projects are also facing some resistance. So I'm bullish on solar, but let's be clear, the land use requirements are still significant. Yeah, solar's got that advantage of being able to nicely fit on top of residential roofs. And in that situation, there isn't much of a land use tissue and of course commercial roofs as well. And those projects I think are really viable and are going to continue, although the cost per unit of electricity is unfortunately much higher if you do it, you know, one roof at a time, then if you do it on a massive piece of land that's been cleared and you just, you know, put out the panels. Yeah, they can drive their cost per unit of electricity down simply by mass installation. Yeah, but it is a challenge. You know, I just visited my brother in the Panhandle of Florida and near where he lives. So it was a, what was called a remote landing field used for training for the Pensacola Naval Air Station. And the Navy decided to stop using it. So as part of the renewable push within the federal government, somebody decided that site would be great for solar. Now, it was inconvenient because it was covered with trees, except for the field itself. So what do you you just mowed on all the trees and put it as solar farm, which is really green, right? So the solar system is installed. It is a distraction from the highway because as you drive along the reflections from this bright reflecting solar panels can be distracting. And of course it's not as pretty as the trees and probably not as many birds and wildlife. That's the challenge. And like you said, the land use issues around solar and wind and wind took a different path towards reducing its cost per unit of electricity. Instead of mass producing panels like the solar industry could, the wind industry took the path that nuclear used to take, which is the economy of very big machines. Right. Well, and that's a problem because this is the point that I make in the book as well. And I've been making now for some time is that for, and it's interesting if you compare the oil and gas industry just to be, you know, have a reference. What's happened in oil and gas because of the shale revolution over the last few years is that their land footprints have been actually been shrinking. That is that it makes more sense for them to put multiple wells on a single pad and then drill multiple wells off of that one footprint. So their subsurface footprint is large, but that makes sense for them because they can do directional drilling. So they'll, you know, let's, you know, have a square and they'll maybe make 10 wells off of that one square that may cover, say, a couple of acres, right. But though the reservoir they will touch will be multiple acres all subsurface. So they're getting more power density, more energy flow off of the small footprint. Well, the opposite is true with wind and solar and that is the only way they can increase energy output is to dramatically increase the size of their installations. And for wind in particular, it means bigger and taller turbines. Ones with bigger, bigger wingspans and taller towers will the more you put out there and the taller they are, the more people will see them and the more people are going to get pissed off. So this is what, you know, you look at California today, they have only added since 2013, about 200 megawatts of new wind capacity. This is an estate that says it wants 100% renewable electricity by 2045. You can't build new wind capacity in California. You can't build new solar capacity in large increments in San Bernardino County, California, even though it's the largest area, county by area in the United States. So we're seeing these battles end up state New York. I mean, these land use battles are coming to the fore and they are serious and they are not going to end anytime soon. Yep. And as you mentioned, when you have to, so when the transmission lines, particularly, you know, transmission lines have to get the, the okay of every landowner along the way in one way or another, either through condemnation, which requires just compensation and all those kinds of things. But, you know, transmission line sighting makes sighting a nuclear plant look almost simple. Well, I'll count on the almost there. But what is interesting just to build on your point about transmission and it's a point that I make in my book a question of power by the will tell tell all your readers, you don't have to read it. You just have to buy it. It's on Amazon. It's on BN.com. I did the audio book, by the way, I read it myself. You can buy it on your Kindle. I make a better royalty. So by the book, but about the transmission lines, the state of Iowa in 2017 passed a law that prohibits the private companies from using imminent domain to acquire land for power transmission lines. A similar bill that is almost identical to what happened in Iowa is past the Missouri House in January and is now pending in the Missouri Senate. And the Missouri governor, Mike Parsons said, he will sign it if the Senate, if it passed by the Senate. New Hampshire has blocked high voltage transmission projects that would have carried hydro power from Quebec into New England. Arkansas blocked a wind power, a high voltage transmission project designed to carry wind from Oklahoma to states in the east. So these conflicts are clear and they are nationwide. And the idea that suddenly we're just going to build a lot of new transmission, no, I don't think that's going to be the case. And my punchline is, dense cities need dense sources of power. And that means gas and nuclear. Well, on that note, Robert, thank you very much for your time. Thank you for your book. And I'll back you up on that. I believe that Robert's book is worth every penny you put into it. Because it's a, it talks about an important and timely topic. How do we power the world and how do we grow our economy? Of course, before we start growing our economy, we really have to get out of our houses. But that's another topic. Yeah. All right. Well, Rod, I sure believe the only thing I could do is laugh because otherwise I'd cry, because I just, I just don't think that very many people have a good understanding of what it means to simply stop working for months at a time. So yeah, anyway, we're facing challenging times. There's no question. But Rod, I sure appreciate you having me on. I think thanks very much. Yep. Robert Bryce author of a question of power. Go buy the book on Amazon. And I guess you really want people to buy it on Kindle because you get a better royalty that way. Or, or being dot com. Yeah, but the audiobook is out as well. So yeah, however you want to get out there and snap it up while you're in quarantine. Okay. Thank you, Robert. Thanks.