Energy Tech That Has Us (and You) Talking

A fun, fast-paced, skeptics tour through some of the most talked-about emerging energy technologies.

From enhanced geothermal systems to thermal batteries, balcony solar, flying cars, and yes, even space-based solar power – David, Sara, and Ed dig into what’s real, what’s hype, and what might actually move the needle on decarbonization.

(00:00) - Cold open
(02:08) - Small modular nuclear reactors
(09:14) - E-bikes
(15:46) - Balcony solar
(22:13) - Fusion
(28:33) - Thermal batteries
(34:56) - Enhanced geothermal
(42:04) - Carbon capture and storage capacity
(43:19) - Space solar
(45:07) - Flying cars

A huge thanks to all the listeners who submitted suggestions for this episode!

Show Notes & References

About Your Co-Hosts
David Keith is Professor and Founding Faculty Director, Climate Systems Engineering Initiative at the University of Chicago. He is the founder of Carbon Engineering and was formerly a professor at Harvard University and the University of Calgary. He splits his time between Canmore and Chicago.

Sara Hastings-Simon studies energy transitions at the intersection of policy, business, and technology. She’s a policy wonk, a physicist turned management consultant, and a professor at the University of Calgary and Director of the Master of Science in Sustainable Energy Development.

Ed Whittingham is a clean energy policy/finance professional specializing in renewable electricity generation and transmission, carbon capture, carbon removal and low carbon transportation. He is a Public Policy Forum fellow and formerly the executive director of the Pembina Institute, a national clean energy think tank.

Produced by Amit Tandon & Bespoke Podcasts

___
Energy vs Climate Podcast
www.energyvsclimate.com

Contact us at info@energyvsclimate.com

Bluesky | YouTube | LinkedIn | X/Twitter

Chapters

• 2:08 Small modular nuclear reactors
• 9:14 E-bikes
• 15:45 Balcony solar
• 22:11 Fusion
• 28:33 Thermal batteries
• 34:54 Enhanced Geothermal
• 42:03 Carbon capture and storage capacity
• 43:19 Space solar
• 45:06 Flying cars
• 46:52 Audience Q&A

Transcript

[00:00:00] Ed Whittingham: You want to generate a little bit of your own electricity, you're gonna use your own money. Your balcon is, is pointing in the right direction. What's the downside to that? No downside. Knock yourself out. Cool. Perfect timing. I got David to acquiesce just before the buzzer.

Hi, I'm Ed Whittingham and you're listening to Energy vs Climate, the show where my cohost, David Keith, Sara Hastings-Simon and I debate today's climate and energy challenges.

On September 25th, the three of us took a live webinar audience on a fast-paced skeptics tour through some of the most talked about emerging energy technologies using suggestions provided by you, our dear listeners. From enhanced geothermal systems to thermal batteries, balcony solar flying cars, and yes, even space-based solar power.

We dig into what's real, what's hype, and what might actually move the needle on decarbonization. You can expect EvC style straight talk and what it takes to scale new and not so new. I'm looking at you nuclear fusion energy tech in a world of shifting market dynamics and political constraints. Now, here's a show.

So the format for today is this. David, uh, Sara and I will each run a few short segments on the different technologies. Now, David's gonna cover, uh, SMRs, uh, small, uh, modular reactors, fusion and, uh, carbon capture and storage capacity. Sara's gonna cover e-bikes, thermal batteries, and space solar. And I'm gonna do balcony solar enhanced geothermal systems and flying cars.

And after about 45 minutes or so of us doing that, and we'll be gonged out, uh, you, you, you'll hear this thing that will sound, uh, if we take too long, more than our six minute allotment. Uh, we'll do that and then we'll open it up to questions from you, the audience. So, uh, let's get right to it. David, you're gonna start with SMRs.

So what is it, what might accelerate or slow its adoption and what is its potential impact on energy transition over to you? 

[00:02:08] David Keith: Well, I mean, I think, uh, uh, small module reactors, SMRs in flying cars just have an incredible future and it's likely to change the whole world. So I, I'm really quite confident that it's amazing.

[00:02:19] Sara Hastings-Simon: You had me for a second there. 

[00:02:21] David Keith: Yeah. You mean 

[00:02:21] Ed Whittingham: flying cars powered by SMRs? 

[00:02:24] David Keith: Yeah. That, that actually then carry around heat storage units that can be delivered to e-bikes, uh, uh, while the e-bikes are driving. Well, that sounds as logical as a wind power truck. Exactly. So they are definitely one of the kind of hottest topics in the nuclear power world.

There's an idea that they could really change and fix some of the economics of the work nuclear power world. There's this kind of exciting fact that Canada at Bruce Power appears to be on track to perhaps be the first real, uh, new SMR commercial build in the, in the western world. So there's good reasons for excitement.

Let me step back a little bit and say like, what's the problem? Problem with existing nuclear power is, or many, but the, the central one is that capital costs are way too high, particularly in the Western world, and one of the reasons. Why that happened, maybe particularly in the US was that, uh, there wasn't learning by doing because, uh, each, uh, project was separately a vendor, a utility, and a prime contractor.

There's a reactor vendor, utility and prime contractor. Almost never did the same three play the same game. And, you know, as I think you know, US, prices actually started very reasonable. Most of the US reactor fleet was built to quite reasonable prices, but then they went crazy. One theory is that part of the reason they went crazy was that they're too big.

That, uh, issues of very complex construction onsite were the problem. And so one of the ideas of of of small budget reactors is they could be built, um, uh, much more offsite with much more of the construction, more of the total value construction done, uh, somewhere else in a central facility. They could have better learning by doing a better cost control and then get shipped to site.

Um, I think the core of that idea stands and is potentially important in the long-term future of nuclear power. But I am kind of skeptical about the current set of SMRs, but only kind of skeptical. I think we just don't know. Almost all the SMRs that are actually really close to going are Lightwater reactors that are just a little bit smaller as not obvious that the scaling for Lightwater reactors, making them a little bit smaller really wins.

There are some reasons why it might win, but it, there are a lot of reasons why it might not. Um. It seems to be solving the problems that the nuclear industry wishes it had. Maybe not the ones it actually does have. When I was a grad student in MIT, there were a bunch of people that were working on pebble bed modulars that would've been inherently safe.

And there was a bunch of designs around that that I think could have made sense. And there are companies pursuing this and China has some version, but that's not what most of the current SMRs are. And so I think the answer is, I'm, I'm ex, I'm interested, but skeptical. To step back. Meanwhile, the world is gradually accelerating the build out of large reactors for real at increasingly reasonable prices.

Last year had the highest all time nuclear power generation. So while a renaissance is too strong a word, uh, a React app really is growing and most forecasts suggests we're gonna add 2% a year, the next bunch of years, uh, which is really different than what the last decades have been. So I think there's a way in which the.

Nuclear world is actually starting to restart, but it's mostly in terms of reactors that are under construction now, not restarting with SMRs. I'll be done in one second. It's restarting with reactors that are versions of the Westinghouse AP 1000 or stolen versions of it. I'm looking at you, Korea and China, and.

That thing was meant to have a bunch of modularity, but not by building the whole thing offsite, but by building large pieces offsite. And so it captures some of what SMRs were supposed to capture. So muddy story. 

[00:06:04] Ed Whittingham: Yeah, that reminds me, I, I had a conversation with John Gorman, who was then the head of the Canadian Nuclear Association, uh, a couple years ago.

And this is actually when we did a show on nuclear with Elizabeth May. And so bringing it to the Canadian perspective, I, I, I hear we, it, you don't want to call it nuclear renaissance. Um, however you're seeing, uh, these, these larger, uh, reactors, two to three gigawatt, nuke plans being built in other parts of the world, bringing it here to Canada.

He was saying at the time, the only future, uh, in Canada is SMRs, and this is a few years ago, but since then, the only SMR that really is being built out is the Darlington plant. It's under construction. Everything else is is years like Saskatchewan, where it makes a lot of sense. And you've got a province that understands uranium and, uh, understands nukes, and you're still years away from anything breaking ground there.

I'd say a better word than nuclear. Renaissance is, 

[00:06:58] David Keith: nuclear industry is, I'm not dead yet. That would be a fair thing. Yeah, and I think it's real. There really are reactor builds happening. It's interesting, but Renaissance would be too strong, Sara. 

[00:07:09] Sara Hastings-Simon: Yeah, and I think, I mean, when it comes to this idea of the modularity helping out and the learning curve, I think we have to be a bit cautious in applying the lessons, as we talked about last week or two weeks ago from solar.

In just how modular it is, and as you were saying, just how customizable or not it is. Right. The reason that solar was really able to come down the learning curve so fast is that as we talked about, you print out these solar or you make these solar panels in a factory and they are the same solar panel and they get shipped everywhere around the world and you make many, many, many of them in factories that have gotten bigger and bigger.

And so if you go back, the nuclear industry actually. Whereas the original plan was making the reactors bigger and bigger to essentially try to capture that same kind of economies of scale, which is part of what is driving the price of solar down. Um, and so there's a little bit of a feeling of like, well, this kind of SMR is like the new thing that we're going to say, what we're gonna do to, to make it work.

And so I think we, yeah, just the number of them and we have to be a bit cautious. 

[00:08:12] David Keith: Maybe I'll, I'll grab one more, a few more seconds to say there's a conflict with security with sort of national ambition and security policy, where I think there's a version, a technocratic version of the SMR world that works where if you had one site in the world, there's designs where you make sealed reactors.

There's no refueling except at that site that reactors go by ship, they work off coast, they come back, you have one site just building them. I think there's versions of that that could technically really work and drive down the cost of nuclear power. But nobody's gonna accept it. And in the world with so many competing national designs, we're not likely to get that much learning by 

[00:08:45] Ed Whittingham: doing.

And, and as nuclear and, and sorry, I know we've been gonged out, but has, it really, has it finally shooken, shooken off its negative learning curve and that with each success successive project, you're not getting economies of sale, you're not driving down the cost. It's getting more expensive, worse 

[00:08:59] David Keith: in the western world, but in China and Korea, there really are obvious.

I mean, China is really building their version of the AP 1000 and costs are coming down and it's working. 

[00:09:08] Ed Whittingham: Good. Hey, that's set the, the right template for, uh, these segments. Okay. Sara, over to you for e-bikes. 

[00:09:14] Sara Hastings-Simon: Alright, so obviously I was gonna do e-bikes. Um, I, I liked David's joke, so I'm excluding, uh, e-bikes that run on hydrogen power, which actually there is a model, if you look up, it's probably the most stupid idea way to use hydrogen is in an e-bike.

But anyway. 

[00:09:30] David Keith: I don't know. You know, there's giant dirigible carrying a lot of tourists, uh, who are, who, who like fire, but sorry. No, that's okay. 

[00:09:39] Sara Hastings-Simon: Um, okay. Well may, maybe we come back to the hydrogen E-bike, but, um, but a, the e-bikes I'm talking about, they look a lot like a regular bike. They can be big enough to carry, uh, more things.

They can be a cargo bike, they can be small and look like just a regular bike with a motor. Importantly, we need to have, you know, smart regulations to have them. Speed limited to reasonable levels. We're not gonna have e motorcycles masquerading as E-bikes, but I think that they have a very high likelihood of adoption.

They are very fit for a certain purpose. And I remember in an early episode we had Petra Dilauda a couple years back, uh, Dr. Dilauda, talking about how cars actually didn't have an obvious use case when they were brought in and people had to kind of figure out how to integrate them into their daily life.

And I think that's what Ebanks look like. Um, obviously, you know, you're not gonna. A ride an e-bike across Canada or you're not gonna do that regularly, but there is a lot of ways in a country like Canada or the US or or in Europe, that they can be used. So I pulled some numbers. So in Canada, over 20% of, uh, daily commutes are less than five kilometers and, and by car.

Um, and in fact the people that commute by car only 30%, commute more than 10 kilometers, which is a pretty reasonable distance to go on an e-bike. 46% of Canadian households have two cars. So the idea of replacing one car with a couple of e-bikes, which is much, much cheaper than running a car, um, I think is very possible.

Um, they're also very easy to charge and they kind of get rid of a lot of the challenges with, uh, e vehicles ecar in that it's easy to swap out batteries or you can bring them inside, charge 'em inside off a, a regular battery. And we see this in the global growth. So in 2024 there were about 9 million, uh, two wheel vehicles, uh, two wheel, you know, e-bike, like things sold.

Majority of that over 50% in China. Um, but also, you know, a, a number in other places as well. Um, and that's actually leading to some pretty significant displacement of oil already. So this really can have a big impact in the transportation sector. So in 2023, um, the two and three wheeled E vehiclehis were displacing about a million barrels of oil globally, and that's compared to only, um, about 400,000 barrels of oil displaced by passenger vehicle EVs.

So they're actually making a bigger dent already than passenger EVs. Um, and. There's actually a lot that we can do in terms of design of cities and, and regions to increase cycling. A big part of that is really just providing safe places to cycle. So Paris is a really interesting, um, example of that in 2024, uh, somewhere in the range, depending on what kind of trips you're looking at, of 11 to 14% of trips in Paris were taken by bike after the city had made a.

Big push to make places for cycling, which was a doubling of the number of, um, folks that were cycling only a few years before. So I think this is, you know, it's not gonna be the be all, end all. We're not gonna go everywhere on an e-bike. Um, but I think it has huge potential. 

[00:12:48] David Keith: I'm stoked. I bicycled this morning on my e-bike, although it's, I have a really nice e-bike that I can, uh, is actually nice where the E turned off.

So today I had the E turned off, but on the way home, if I'm tired of the winds against me, I'll turn the E on and I'm, I'm completely sold in these things and I'm also really excited. Just came back for an amazing trip to India where I was talking with some people in the transportation government, transportation department there about.

How to accelerate e-bike penetration. I think it's, uh, real and exciting. My one caveat is not a knock on e-bikes, it's a knock on regulators that there's basically been a kind of trick where people are using things that are basically e motorcycles where you don't have to pedal in ways that are dangerous.

Uh, and I think that needs to get fixed, but that's not a knock on e-bikes. It's just saying we need to have regulations that match the kind of actual spectrum of devices out there. 

[00:13:33] Ed Whittingham: I would agree. I mean, in terms of e-bikes, like what's not to like, they're, they're a huge success story. They're fun, they're practical.

They replace those short car trips for me, uh, maybe getting to your point, you know, I am, I'm seeing them all the time, including on the mountain bike trails that I ride. Or you're going into the backcountry of protected areas and you're seeing e-bikes there. So to your point, it is a regulator question of just trying to draw the line because, you know, there, there are, are lots of climate benefits, but there are some, uh, conservation disbenefits when you allow people to go further and farther and, and, and faster into the backcountry.

And the, the attendant impacts you have on wildlife there. But that's, that's something regulators just have to catch up. But other than that, I mean, it truly is a good news story. 

[00:14:16] David Keith: Yeah, I mean, I was in New York for Climate Week the last few days. I almost got run over by somebody moving very fast at one of these so-called E-bikes, but really an e motorcycle, no pedaling needed on the sidewalk.

And I think I, again, this is what's happening is this wonderful proliferation of cool new technologies and it's gone ahead of regulation and we can have sensible regs, we just don't now. 

[00:14:33] Sara Hastings-Simon: Yeah. Yeah. I think that has to happen and it has to happen in a good way, right? I mean, the risk is always that you put in regulations that end up limiting things.

Um, or, you know, and, and a big part of that is making sure that we're allocating enough space and not taking away space from pedestrians. But, you know, ideally in cities. And I think that's what Paris shows really interestingly. They didn't, you know, kind of do this in a pilot way, you know, dabbling here and there, but really going all in and saying, how do we limit places where cars are going in the middle of cities?

Of course, being careful to make sure that people that have disabilities and and special needs can still get around by car there. Um, but you have to kind of go all in. 

[00:15:13] Ed Whittingham: Well, the one thing you said, Sara, you said you're not gonna see people riding e-bikes across, across Canada. I bet you they already are riding e-bikes.

I've, I've got friends who are doing, you know, bike tours in the Pyrenees, uh, with E-bikes. 

[00:15:27] Sara Hastings-Simon: Yeah, no, totally fair. I think I, what I mean by that is sometimes when you bring up some of these technologies, people say, well, you know, I'm not gonna take my family vacation, uh, you know, every year on an e-bike across the country.

And, and it's this idea that, of course, a given technology is not going to, you know, replace all of the transportation needs we have. 

[00:15:45] Ed Whittingham: Okay, I'll jump in. Thank you. Balcony Solar. So, uh, I would say with Balcony Solar, first off, um, shamelessly imitating a recent what on Earth show? Laura Lynch. We had her on the show years ago.

Uh, I heard it, and then with our listener suggestions, we got a few suggestions about solar and I'm sure it was the, the What On Earth Show is a catalyst. What, what is it? They're small solar panel kits that are designed to hang off a balcony or mount on a building facade. The output ranges from a hundred to 800 watts, and that is tiny.

When you compare it to the average rooftop solar system that people have installed in their homes, like I have on my home here, uh, which is set, uh, six to 10 kilowatts. Um. Each kit though comes with a built-in microinverter. So this, uh, cuts down your electrician bills. Instead of hiring an electrician for complex wiring, you just plug it into a wall outlet and then the power that is generated from that balcony solar unit.

Flows into your home and then it offsets the load that you're using. Um, now that raises issues and we'll get into some of the downsides. Utilities worry about safety and they also worry about, uh, back feed into the grid. Um, they are hugely popular in Europe, in Germany. They're called balcon, Kraft vk Balcony Power Plants, and they're sold in places like ikea.

By the way, Balcon, Kraft VK is not a side project of the members of the great German techno band K vk, but by 2025 now, there are more than a million of these systems have been installed. Uh, and they seem especially like they're spreading like wildfire for renters and apartment dwellers. Who just can't do rooftop solar 'cause they don't have access to, to rooftops.

And why could it catch on or why did it catch on? Europe really streamlined the rules. So in Germany they've, the regulators have made it, you households can plug in systems of up to 800 watts without any kind of major permitting, and most importantly, prices have really dropped. So in Europe you can buy a kit for as low as 200 euros, you know, range 200 900 euros.

And that when you're at IKEA and you see that, that actually puts it into impulse by territory. Now, will it catch on here in North America? Well, our codes are electricity codes, a little patchier. Utilities often restrict or ban plugin systems over safety concerns, and part of that backflow is that if a grid goes down and so on.

This is why solar systems are designed to shut down and you need someone to work on the transmission line in front of your house. You don't want electricity being fed back to the grid. Um, and then condo boards and homeowner associations can block them as well. Uh, and then of course. What's preventing, uh, you know, much wider commercialization here is just the cost.

We haven't been able to shave costs the same way that they have in the Europe. Uh, the an 800 watt unit costs on the order of like two to two and a half grand us. Um, but bottom line is. The benefit, the wattage that, uh, we're gonna provide through, you know, home base renewable electricity is ultimately pretty modest.

So to be clear, it's not gonna move the emissions needle or displace much fossil power and probably much less than what we just talked about with e-bikes. But perhaps the upside is the symbolic. Impact and that, you know, renters and apartment dwellers, that it gives them agency over electric, some electricity generation.

It gets them directly involved in energy transition. And when you see them hanging off all these balconies, it helps to know, uh, normalize solar power, which still isn't that normalized here in North America. So that's, that's the, the, the bottom line. 

[00:19:32] Sara Hastings-Simon: Yeah. I think that equity one is a big one for me. Right.

I agree that it's not gonna hugely move the needle on the amount of solar we produce, but I do think that. There is another important dimension of how do you have ensure that a broader group of people is able to participate in the energy transition. And so, you know, another, another way to do that of course is things like, um, virtual ownership of community solar projects.

So that's kind of another way to get into that. But I think that the equity argument is enough of a reason to say that this is something that we should enable people to do. 

[00:20:05] David Keith: I think my comments will be entirely predictable, but I'll make them anyway. I wanna start a new company that hangs something that looks a lot like a solar panel, but is just really cheap and made of, of, of, of cheap plastic or cardboard or something.

Uh, uh, that says I spent my money on, um, uh, collaborative ownership, virtual ownership, uh, because I believe in efficient use of my money and collaborative, uh, uh. Interested in decarbonization and I'm not wasting my money on a cies holder panel, which is pointing the wrong direction. 

[00:20:35] Sara Hastings-Simon: Okay, well, as long as you can actually do the buying of the collaborative ownership, which is still very hard to do in Alberta, then, then I am, I'm more on the side of that.

[00:20:43] David Keith: Let's start the company. I mean, I think maybe we need to, I mean part of it is offering that option, so that's the point is that option doesn't exist and so I agree. I could see why somebody might buy a balcony unit now 'cause they actually don't have that option. If they really had an option that they understood was buying several times more generation that they really had an honest stake in and some kind of voting power in collectively, I think the answer is people 

[00:21:07] Ed Whittingham: would mostly take 

[00:21:07] David Keith: it.

[00:21:08] Ed Whittingham: So I would love for individuals in places like Alberta where you actually have a decent solar resource to be able to help bridge the economics on solar projects. Now we have a whole, as we talked about on our last show, a whole separate issue of what the province has done in terms of gutting the solar industry here through its moratorium.

But that still isn't easy, so we need to work on it. But I'd say David, like what's the downside if someone, 'cause that doesn't appeal to everyone. Something local generation, and this is to be clear, private capital, it's their own capital. I'm not asking governments to pay for it at some sort of subsidized 300 bucks per ton basis.

Just you want to generate a little bit of your own electricity, you're gonna use your own money. Your balconies is pointing in the right direction. What's the downside to that? No downside. Knock yourself out. Perfect timing. I got David to acquiesce just before the buzzer. 

[00:22:07] David Keith: Oh man. Did I deserve that?

Alright. Yep. Next. Okay. 

[00:22:10] Ed Whittingham: David Fusion. 

[00:22:11] David Keith: Hang around with the Silicon Valley billionaire crowd and a bunch of techies and you'd think Fusion is just booming. Um, Commonwealth Fusion actually based in Boston with a Canadian as part of the core of it. Uh, raised 3 billion in capital, Helion energy raised more than a billion TAE technologies, more than a billion Pacific fusion, almost a billion.

So there's just all this excitement of these new companies driven by startups and there really are truly new ideas out there. Um. I am pretty damn skeptical that it's gonna actually make power. So let me first say the positive. These things are way better ways to spend the money and much more plausible than what governments were doing in this collective thing called Eater, uh, which seemed to be mostly designed to eat a large.

Pile of cash and excrete something that wasn't very useful. It's a international project that is way over budget in time that was following what had appeared to be the most plausible route, which was a uh, uh, so called a toma, a tural system for confining a low density plasma. Uh, in experimental mode.

It's being built in Europe with, uh, conventional superconducting magnets, and it, it's just got terrible, uh, project management by formal reviews. And I think, uh, Commonwealth Energy is basically very similar, uh, talk mock design, but using, um, a completely different class of magnets. These, um, um, low temperature, high temperature superconducting magnets that can make.

Stronger fields kind of twice as strong and a bunch of things go as the cube of that field strength. So there's ways in which it's just clearly a better pathway. Um, and some of the other ones use quite different pathways as well. I think one thing, one reason that I'm skeptical is that. What all these fusion or almost all of these fusion pathways are doing is trying to do fusion between deuterium and tritium.

Two of the heavier and even heavier isotopes of hydrogen. And that's the very easiest thing to fuse. And when you do, you get a neutron out that's has very high energy. 14 MEB, for those of you who are keeping track at home, if I remember the number right, and maybe Sara will correct me 'cause she would know if I was remembering it wrong.

Uh, and. Those neutrons go deep into materials. Uh, when you look at the steel that holds these things, people talk about the DPAs, which is the number of times an individual molecule. The steel or atom gets bounced around over its lifetime and they're in the hundreds and steel swells and things become radioactive.

And that's true even if everything else is working. And the challenge of making this kind of. First wall or generating a power at an economic price from this is intense. One way to say it is I believe that it's right, that if I gave you a free source of 14 MEV neutrons, it might not be as easy you think to make economic power from it.

Uh, there a way that would really compete with nuclear power, other ways to make power. So I think I'm excited. I actually started my career in Canada's, uh, laser and positive physics lab that was working on short pulse laser, uh, fusion. I was working in high school. So I'm, uh, I think it's important, but I think, so the caution is the enormous difficulty of going to actually make power at cost and the fact that fusion doesn't magically get you out of some of the connections or proliferation risks.

[00:25:28] Sara Hastings-Simon: Yeah, I, I, it is funny, David, I actually wrote, I won't say how long ago that was, but I wrote my college entrance essay on what would happen if we had fusion of power. So definitely in that camp of, you know, we've been hearing about it for a while. I do think that there is something to be said that, you know, our ability on this laser control has really increased.

Dramatically. So, you know, the idea that we might get there some days still, I think is not unimaginable to me. But I think the timing mismatch of, you know, even if that is possible to when we really need these massive amounts of low carbon power is just not gonna work out. And in the meantime, we've got a nice fusion source in the sky.

It's hard to compete with that here on Earth. 

[00:26:11] David Keith: One, one, shout out to a Canadian thing. Um, um, there were two basic approaches to fusion. Uh, uh, uh, holding a plasma very hot, but low density gas for a long time, or taking a little pellet and squeezing it very fast with lasers or something else. Those are the two extreme approaches.

There's an intermediate approach where you take some, uh, gas's, kind of magnetized and you crush it, and that's called magnetized target Fusion. And I think there's a lot of innovation there. And a Canadian company and a Canadian person really led that with, with General Fusion, which I think was a wonderful idea.

I think it had very little chats of working commercially and it's, it's basically failed now. But, uh, it may. There are a bunch of other ideas that are related to that and Michelle Lebar who started is, is very open about the fact that that company wasn't that likely to work, but that other things related to it may end up working and there really are new ideas there that are exciting.

[00:26:59] Ed Whittingham: It reminds me, I mean, fusion, it seems that, uh, while the idea is scientifically thrilling, the commercial prospects are always shaky. Reminds me of two jokes, and one is no matter where you are in history, fusion is only 10 years away. And the other one, and I just told this joke at, uh, carbon Capture Conference up in Edmonton this week, why is Fusion like high school students and sex.

Why we talk about it a lot more than we actually do it, and those who are doing it aren't doing it very well. And you can apply that to a range technology. So I think it's pretty after fusion. 

[00:27:31] David Keith: I mean, I guess I, I, I can let it, I mean, just agree with Sara. I think I, I, I do think there will be commercial and useful fusion power at the end of this century.

I think it will be used for some things. I think there really is room for innovation. I just don't think there's gonna be commercial power that plays a lot of decarbonization in the next few decades. 

[00:27:50] Ed Whittingham: I guess used for some things when even if you really crack the physics, it's competing with what we talked about last time.

Dirt cheap solar and wind and batteries that are scaling really fast. And so I think it, it could be used but it's still gonna be niche or or prestige technology, not anything close to like the backbone of our energy system. 

[00:28:09] David Keith: A hundred years from now, we might have a significant off planet economy. 

[00:28:13] Ed Whittingham: Okay, so fusion is not just 10 years away.

It's only just a hundred years away, no matter where you are in history. 

[00:28:20] Sara Hastings-Simon: We'll have to leave that for our, uh, descendants on energy vs climate. 

[00:28:26] Ed Whittingham: Yeah, our energy vs climate, grandkids, our children. They have to take over. Sara. Uh, thermal batteries. 

[00:28:33] Sara Hastings-Simon: Thermal batteries. Okay, so there's a German word for this too, or at least a German startup craft block.

I'm probably not saying that correctly. Not my favorite German heat word, which would be, which is a, uh, heat pump in German. Um, but anyway, thermal batteries. So what are they? Um, they like, they sound like they store energy, but they store it in the form of heat. Um. As a physicist, I think I have a deep appreciation for thermal batteries which use heat rather than chemistry, like a lithium ion battery to store the energy.

I just like inherently believe that. That's cool. Um, but aside from that, why are they, why are they interesting? One thing is that they can. Be very cheap. So you, the idea is that you can make these out of this very basic material. Uh, basically brick, something like bricks and a toaster. You stick them together.

You use the toaster to make heat from electricity. You heat up the bricks. You store that brick in something like a thermos, and then you use the heat from that over time. You can also get a little fancier and use a latent heat or, or phase change so you can use ice that you heat up. Um, you, you create ice when it's, there's a lot of power.

Then you use that ice when you need that energy. I think that they have a real potential, um, to, to become big. There's been some companies that have tried it. Uh, that ICE one, there was a company that did that for air conditioning a few years back that that didn't end up making a go of it. Um, and I think they were just a little bit early.

Really need, I think, uh, very, very cheap renewables. So you need a lot of renewable penetration so that you're getting significant amounts of time where you have essentially zero cost power to make these things make sense. Um, but we are in many places, you know, even here in Alberta, um, getting to that point where that's close, you know, they are going to have to compete with lithium ion batteries, which are getting cheaper and cheaper.

And so I think for some things that people had originally imagined them for, it's actually gonna make more sense to just. To use lithium IAM as that gets cheap. Um, but I think for this very long term, uh, storage or potentially it, I think it can work very well if you're integrating it with industrial heat decarbonization, where you're actually using the heat that you store not to turn back into power, but to use it in the form of heat.

And that is. Sounds niche, but actually about 20% of the energy demand in our global energy system goes to making heat for industry. So this is a relatively big sector that you could go after with these heat batteries. Um, and so I think that. In the coming, you know, years or decade or so, as we're starting to move on to decarbonizing heat in a big way, um, as we're starting to have much more renewable energy on the grid and having these zero power times, I think we're gonna see this become big in a big way, but maybe not for some of this niche, like day-to-day time shifting of air conditioners.

I think their lithium ion's probably gonna end up winning out. 

[00:31:29] Ed Whittingham: So the, that approach using heat for heat rather than turning heat back into electricity, which is inefficient, takes care of the conversion loss issue. What about durability? I mean, one of the knocks that I've heard is the materials that you use, whether ceramics or salts, they expand, they can track, and as a result they degrade after like a, a bunch of, uh, heating and cooling cycles.

[00:31:52] David Keith: I, I've been looking at this a, a, a bunch actually, partly 'cause I'm. Working on some calcination technologies that use these things. Uh, and I had a colleague, George Baker at Harvard who did this amazing thing of actually doing this. It turned out a huge number of British households already had brick, uh, uh, electric heaters.

And, uh, George started a company that figured out how to dispatch these in a smart way to manage grid, uh, variability and, and really had a huge benefit. I, I kind of agree with everything Sara said. I'm, I'm. I'm very excited about the potential for this, uh, friendly amendment of course is not just lithium ion, it's sodium ion other cheaper batteries, but I agree with exactly the way Sara said it.

Um, and I think at least from what we've looked at with people doing these high temperature heat storage, I, I do think some of these are really gonna work for industrial heat as well as for, uh, household heat in some cases where, where it's easy to make a household heater thing that then holds the heat on kind of timescales of a day or so.

And that in some cases will be a pretty cheap way to go. 

[00:32:51] Sara Hastings-Simon: Yeah, that's a great point, David. It's a, in that sense, it's actually a very old technology in some ways, right? So, well, I have a, I have a personal story with, for it. My grandfather built an efficient house back in the, you know, early, I guess nine, mid, mid 19 hundreds and put a big thermal wall inside of it, basically just a, a wall, uh, full of sand because that was at readily available there.

Um, but that, you know, was just emulating things that people have done for centuries in terms of building these, you know, big brick fireplaces that have a lot of thermal mass. Um, so it, I think that's also kind of interesting in the, in how low tech it is in some ways. Um, I think the tech comes in when you're trying to figure out exactly how to best, um, get the heat into and out of these bricks in the most efficient way when it comes to really being able to use it for this industrial heat.

So there is some tech innovation there, but it's inherently this kind of old technology too. 

[00:33:45] Ed Whittingham: So then, Sara, is it fair to say the bottom line is that. Thermal batteries. They make sense when you need clean industrial heat, but they're just far less compelling or convincing as grid storage. 

[00:33:55] Sara Hastings-Simon: I think that's right, but, but I think that.

When you talk about grid storage, the storage for the part of the grid that is going into that industrial heat does make sense. But yeah, this really using it to like store and then turn back into electricity, um, you know, I don't, I don't wanna say never gonna happen, but if I was placing a bet, I would put my bet more on the side of the, um, chemistry batteries.

[00:34:18] Ed Whittingham: Neither you nor David answered my question about materials wearing out from, you know, the heat, the heating and cooling cycles. Is that an issue? 

[00:34:28] David Keith: My, my readers is an issue, but it's an issue, you know, broadly people know how to deal with. It's not a new engineering issue in the companies that are working on this or dealing with it.

And some things have really got cheaper. I had some amazing Italians in my, this office last week, uh, who were doing, uh, lime calcination and they're telling me how you can just buy silicon carbide pretty cheap from China now in a way that you couldn't before. And these, we can do all these high temperature processes you couldn't do before.

So 

[00:34:53] Ed Whittingham: new, new materials are really 

[00:34:54] David Keith: helping. 

[00:34:55] Ed Whittingham: On to me enhanced geothermal systems. So this is not a replacement. We are long rumored geothermal show. What is it? Think it like enhanced geothermal systems. Think of it as geothermal 2.0 instead of relying on kind of rare, natural, underground hot water reservoirs.

EGS is the acronym. It just creates them. And that's 'cause you drill deep into hot rock, you inject water and uh, you crack the rock so that water can flow through it. And then the heated water comes back up to the surface and runs the turbine to make electricity. So in other words, you're circulating water through this fractured network and hot dry rock between an ejector and a producer horizontal well.

Um, and it is moving from theory to reality. So the big. Sort of nameplate project that people tend to know of is Vo Energy's Project Red in Nevada, which became the first commercial enhanced geothermal project in the us. It's now delivering, uh, power to the grid. Um, how likely is it to take off Well, reasons it could succeed.

Include that costs could drop down to 50 bucks per megawatt hour within the next decade, and that's gonna make it competitive with other forms of clean energy like solar and wind. Um, and perhaps the biggest asset for it, and especially with the current US administration, is it really can pick. Piggyback on top of existing oil and gas drilling technology and supply chains, and by one IEA estimate, 80% of the tools and expertise overlap.

And so that's causing the US Department of Energy to invest heavily with big test sites like the Utah Ford site and this, uh, furs, uh, Nevada project. The other thing is because you don't need to go to where, you know, these thermal hot springs are in essence. There's massive, uh, geothermal energy locked in hot rock around the world.

So lots of potential sites if you can reach it and just, you need to be able to drill deep enough in order to to reach it. And last thing, because we care about this, uh, uh, surface footprints, it can have a relatively small surface footprint. For the wells that you drill, but also that can be stacked. So the land impact is minimal compared to say having a big solar farm or having a big wind farm, NOx against it.

Reasons why it could struggle. It's expensive and financially risking on the drilling side and that is 'cause. Drilling a single well deep well can cost, you know, 10 to 15 million in drilling costs alone. And there's no guarantee that you're gonna hit the right rock. You can hit a dry hole and that can wipe out your investment.

There's some micro seismic concerns as well. You're fracturing rock as you're doing with, uh, horizontal drilling and, and for, uh, unconventional oil and gas. That can trigger small seismic events, small quakes, and that can lead to community pushback and uh, big upfront costs and long, it's long lead time technology that can make investors nervous.

But if you can figure all that out, if you scale it, you've got reliable clean power. And unlike solar and wind, intermittent renewables, it will run around the clock. It's got a much broader reach because with this drilling technology, you can go to anywhere where there's hot rock and you can build it, um, not just in places like Iceland and and California.

And if those costs. Do fall and the, and uh, the project scale. Then by some estimates, you could supply say, eight to 20% of US electricity by 2050, and that would make it one of the few firm always available clean energy options capable really, of replacing fossil fuel based load plants. David, Sara, what do you think?

[00:38:45] Sara Hastings-Simon: I am super excited about this one. I got a, I got a, my pet peeve is that renewables are variable, not intermittent. All power sources are intermittent, so, you know, 

[00:38:53] Ed Whittingham: I, I can never remember if it's variable or intermittent. Correct. I always, the name wrong got, I gotta correct you on 

[00:38:57] Sara Hastings-Simon: that one. Uh, but no, I, I'm really excited about this one.

As you say, I think it's a perfect match to renewable, to renewables like wind and solar and the fact that some of the testing from Forge and others showing that you can actually operate it, um, in a dispatchable way is, is super exciting where you basically. Stop the flow when you, when you don't want it.

Um, you know, when I think about like this kind of thing, you always, I always like to ask what, what's changed, right? 'cause people have been trying to do geothermal, uh, for a long time. And I think as you pointed out, there's some key things, right? So there was a ton of learning on the horizontal drilling and fracturing that came from the shale industry.

And then. I'm not a geologist, but I work in a department with lots of geologists and, and they tell me that there have been some real advances in the drilling, which is a, a big challenge here of the, of just how fast you can drill into these rocks that you need to drill quite low down to get into. And so it does seem like we're reaching kind of a critical point on, um, being able to combine that with the, the.

Uh, frac, the fracturing, the better drilling, and then also with the need for this kind of dispatchable power to integrate more renewables. Because again, until recently, you know, you would, if you want more renewables, I would've said just build some more wind and solar. That would be cheaper than the geothermal.

But now you're getting to the point where, you know, you want to start to replace some of those dispatchable fossil plants as well too. So I'm, I'm super gung-ho on this one. 

[00:40:26] David Keith: I think my sense is we just don't know. I think there truly have been these big improvements in drilling and there's prospects of really new drilling technology.

People are trying quite different things. Microwaves, not drilling that could drill into crystalline basement raw, but we don't know how it'll play out. I, I, I, I feel like I've got big uncertainty bands around it. I can imagine it being quite important, but until we've really done those enough of those projects and we see the prices, we don't know.

[00:40:52] Ed Whittingham: Yeah, I think the next five years are key. I mean, we'll see what happens with drilling costs and whether these big demonstrations can actually deliver on what they promised. And 

[00:41:01] David Keith: if, if Sara had a pet peeve, I have one. It's not renewable. It's not renewable. What do you mean? Well, I mean, you're basically mine.

It's heat mining, not, it's not renewable. 

[00:41:10] Sara Hastings-Simon: There's a deep debate about that though. Is the heat in the earth being renewed through its processes or is it renewed? Well, the heat in the earth 

[00:41:17] David Keith: comes from new, from, from right on. And uranium decay, but, but that's a slower process. So I, I think it's, I think. It doesn't matter, but it's not clear.

Traditionally, it's been unclear whether it should be class and renewable. 

[00:41:29] Sara Hastings-Simon: No, there's a, there's a whole debate there though, right? Same. Same with the, you know, our son. Right. Technically that's gonna run out one day too, so 

[00:41:35] Ed Whittingham: That's true. Okay. Yeah. But we digress. Um, we do. And we're loving it. We're loving it.

We're gonna do now kind of something more like a rapid fire. We're going to do three more and we'll have to be quick if we wanna leave any time for questions. Uh, David's gonna talk about CCS Capacitys, space Solar, and then I'll talk about flying cars. Uh, yeah, so a quick blast. Go ahead 

[00:42:03] David Keith: David. Ah, a paper was just published in nature, uh, called a prudent Planetary Limit for geological carbon Storage.

And it basically says that the total amount of storage is about 1500, uh, gigatons, plus or minus, kind of 50% or less. And so we've gotta manage it because that's all we've got. And a friend recently asked me how important, how seriously I took that, and I'm gonna read my answer out loud. Not all that seriously.

The reserve to production ratio for hydrocarbons has bounced around about a third of a century as the reserve production ratio for nearly a century and a half since we started hydrocarbon production. And there's a deep lesson there. There's not much point in innovating to figure out new capacity until there's a market for it.

You have a look at, uh, lectures I've done on ener in, in, in my, uh, en energy course about the Kelley Box as kind of basic economics of hydrocarbon and other mineral production. I think there are a whole bunch of different ways to get larger capacity, including accelerating dissolution by pumping liquids around and seabed storage and a bunch of different ideas.

And so I think this is a classic example of academics, happily talking to each other and getting a paper in nature and it's completely disconnected from what actually might happen. 

[00:43:14] Ed Whittingham: I think we're gonna reserve comments and just go on to Sara to talk about Space Solar. 

[00:43:19] Sara Hastings-Simon: Great. So Space Solar, what is it?

It's what it sounds like you put solar panels up and outer space because actually wait for it. The sun is always shining. It's just not always shining on every point in earth at the same time. So. The idea is you put them up there. It's true, it's true. You'll find the sun. It's always there, David. It doesn't go away even when you can't see it.

I know it's big news. People are gonna be surprised. So you, you get the sun, you get them orbiting so that you can get the sun for more time. You can get the, the sun without the absorption of the atmosphere. You gain a little bit, you have a better orientation, and then you collect that power and you. Beam it down to earth in some form, like microwave or laser or other.

Theoretically it can work. I think a good way to think about it is actually as an alternative to building land-based transmission lines, you're basically transmitting the power, um, you know, sort of you're, you're getting it from one place in the, in the atmosphere and. Beaming it down to somewhere else potentially versus getting it on the ground in solar and passing it through the transmission lines.

I still think the ground-based transmission lines are going to be easier to build out in the long run and, and probably that's how we're going to get solar shared more around the world, plus a bit of batteries and all these other things we've been discussing. Um, but if you want more on it, there's a really excellent book, um, called Astronauts like Cat Astronauts, uh, mission Moon by Drew Brockington.

It's a kid's book for, uh, probably kids like age seven or so. Um, and the cats actually respond to a global energy crisis by developing space solar. So I think it belongs probably in the long run in those kinds of books. But, um, that's a fun one to read. 

[00:45:02] Ed Whittingham: Of course cats. Who else? Who else would be doing that?

Okay, I'm gonna talk about flying cars and think of them as electric helicopters for short trips. Basically they're called EV tolls for electric vehicle takeoff and landing. And they're being developed like as air taxis that can take, uh, a few passengers at the time. How likely are they to take off, if you'll pardon the pun.

It comes down to battery and automation tech. It's improving quickly, which makes them more realistic. And you've actually now have a bunch of companies out there. Uh, Joby is one Archer, Lillian Helicopter. They've got prototypes and they're running pilot flights. Why they might stall and drop.

Precipitously to the ground? Well, just because of aerospace rules and safety, like think as you're a regulator, you're now trying to certify thousands of new aircraft in busy urban skies. It's a, a regulatory nightmare potentially. Um, and then even with quiet rotors, you know, even tos, they're noisier than cars.

So you have the noise and energy use. They burn a lot more energy per passenger mile. And as you can imagine, they're not cheap. They're gonna be, uh, expensive to operate. Bottom line is the climate case is really weak for doing them. It's more energy per passenger than an electric car. So it's kind of really kind of flying bling and, uh, you run the risk of just worsening inequity and sprawl.

It becomes a luxury service for the few those tech billionaires than as any kind of public mobility solution, which is completely unlikely. And of course, like with EVs, you got all those infrastructure challenges. Where are you gonna have your landing pads and where are you gonna have your charging stations and verde points?

Uh, verde ports. So there we go, the case four, but largely against flying cars. We're gonna turn to questions. So we've got one from Mike Hill. We'd love to hear the panel's take on, uh, pyrolytic hydrogen, um, 87. So example of, uh, hydro mite.com. 87% less electricity required to liberate the hydrogen from a natural grass molecule than using water.

Also provides useful forms of solid carbon that could displace Chinese, uh, graphitic carbon imports, provides an endpoint hydrogen conversion that doesn't risk causing issues with traditional natural gas pipeline infrastructure. David, Sara, do you have any comment? 

[00:47:27] David Keith: I, I've heard versions of this pitch for two decades.

I think there's some systematic reasons it doesn't go that far. In the narrow place where you really are making a graphite substitute, graphite's very valuable. Then it'll go commercially and it, there's some versions that already are, but that's a pretty limited market if you're trying to actually supply hydrogen beyond the, the place.

But then, then you're really just making graphite with hydrogen as a byproduct. Uh, if you're trying to go beyond that, then you've got this problem that you're making this huge pile of graphite that you don't want. Uh, you'll saturate the market if, if it was any significant part of global, uh, uh, primary energy.

[00:48:01] Sara Hastings-Simon: And I'll just add a policy kind of thing that bugs me with the hydrogen. I think it, it is well worthwhile pursuing different approaches to making hydrogen, but I think we should work on decarbonizing the hydrogen that we already make because we make a lot of hydrogen and it seems that often when people are proposing particularly new ways to make low carbon hydrogen from natural gas.

The suggestion is then let's do that in addition to the hydrogen that we're already making from natural gas rather than let's start replacing some of that, uh, higher carbon hydrogen with your new approach. And it's really more, not that I'm saying the questioner is, is doing this at all, but I've seen places where it's a very clear that the hydrogen strategy is just that.

How do we sell more natural gas strategy? And I think that's something that we need to be on the lookout for. 

[00:48:50] David Keith: Here, here, the world already is spending about 1% of entire primary energy supply of the whole world making hydrogen. 

[00:48:58] Sara Hastings-Simon: So plenty of room for all the low carbon hydrogen somebody wants to make.

[00:49:02] Ed Whittingham: Steven Ver Mulin asked, what about low cost batteries for the home to grab some excess solar during the day and use it to offset some load during the night? Uh, they should be plugin so there's no large installation cost. 

[00:49:17] Sara Hastings-Simon: I have some. So I think there's some interesting ways that batteries are being used in the home, in devices more than necessarily big, uh, installations, partially because it, it, it's easier and cheaper to do so.

So one thing that people have been doing recently, and I don't have the company names in front of me, but it's to sell an induction stove. So an electric induction stove that comes with a built-in battery. And so what this does is gets around the challenge that if you want to retrofit, you have. Of say, a gas home stove in your home, which you should definitely take out because it creates all kinds of bad indoor air pollution, but they don't have a two 40 outlet easily available to put in the induction stove.

And so instead, you can buy the stove that has a battery in it so that it can be plugged into a regular outlet. And then. It basically, you know, stores the energy it needs so that it can provide this higher power and do what an induction stove does, which is boil water or cook very fast. It's great. Love it.

Um, and so that I think is quite cool to see how batteries are being integrated in that way. You know, I think that. We may well also see batteries in electric vehicles, um, being used as sort of backup and secondary batteries. Um, so I think there's definitely some ways that batteries can get used easily that don't require, uh, complicated installation, but it looks more like that.

[00:50:38] Ed Whittingham: David Katz says, how do we increase the acceptance of ground source heat pumps given the higher and more reliable performance over the whole year than air source? 

[00:50:48] David Keith: As an owner of one that's had a lot of problems, uh, shake the business model out so people can actually do these things cheaper and with more reliability.

And maybe part of that is figuring out how to do it to focus on new build communities, because I think there's places where it really doesn't make so much sense for one house, but for 10 houses it can really make a lot of sense. I think there's, that's obviously there are ways that that could work, but I think that in some ways I think the challenge is not.

People's acceptance. The challenge is the industry doing a good job. Do you wanna expand David on the problems that you've had? Um, everything from the wells being drilled in the wrong orientation to a bunch of piping problems. I mean, you know, with a pretty good contractor who did a bad job. I mean, it's heating our house, but we've had to do some retrofits and work and, um, there are a lot of them being built in Canmore, I know, but there are really quite a lot of problems.

Um, and I think the industry is, feels pretty immature from what I've seen. 

[00:51:47] Sara Hastings-Simon: And I think that is a real challenge, right, in terms of that installation piece. Especially when you're talking about new technology. Not easy to, to stand up a new industry that requires skilled technicians to go into homes all over the place and do something that really is quite a lot different.

And so that's why, to me, I think in places. Where it doesn't get as cold as where we live, uh, here in Alberta, Canada, which is, you know, basically most of the, most of the places where people live who are not crazy like us. Um, I I, I tend to think that the air source heat pumps, even if, you know, you lose some of the efficiency, what they're doing with these, uh, ultra cold temperature, uh, high performance heat pumps is likely to win out.

Not because necessarily the technology is better, but just because the installation doesn't require so much special skin. You know, it kind of goes back to a little bit of that, like customization and learning by doing. Um, and then like you said, David, yeah, I think when you do want to put in the, the ground source ones, you've gotta figure out how to take advantage of doing this.

Not, you know, one for one house, but some kind of district teeing and there's some social challenges with that in North America. I think that's easier in, in European countries where they're more used to this kind of district heating. But as you said, I think. If you certainly looking at building out new communities, that's definitely something that we should be looking at doing in a, in a big way.

[00:53:15] Ed Whittingham: Yeah. I just don't know how that, that works in practice, aside from new build. You, you've got a new housing development going in a new neighborhood. Yes, but existing homeowners, I'm just looking at where I live. It would be incredibly difficult, I think, to convince four to five homeowners on my block that we're all gonna do this.

[00:53:32] David Keith: So just to think a little positively. I mean, Canada is particularly cold and with rapid immigration needs to build a lot of houses. So, so as a place to think seriously about new builds, this would seem to be it. And I think a question for, for my fellow panelists and for listeners is, yeah, can we think of some sensible government policy that doesn't over force this?

'cause I think we really don't know how well it would work, but that somehow makes it more. Possible. If there really, if it really is true that this is cost effective, uh, or could be cost effective for new high-rise buildings or new developments, how do we find a government policy that actually gets to that social benefit, uh, or encourages private entities to get to that social benefit?

'cause I do think there's something real there and there's a gonna be a lot of new construction can or should be. I think there's something 

[00:54:19] Ed Whittingham: there. I think there's something there. I mean, how you look at it and how the, the interaction between the different jurisdictions. You can see the federal government, even this more conservative one under Prime Minister Mark Carney, that's something that they don't want to incentivize and it's, it's very easy to build into this Build Canada mission that they have and creating a bunch of new housing stock.

But to get to that point, you have to work with building codes and it's not just a matter of convincing your local municipality 'cause building codes are set by the province. And and individual provinces. And at my work in BC, you're gonna have much more of a struggle in places like Ontario and Alberta that are run by conservative governments.

[00:55:00] Sara Hastings-Simon: I was just gonna say it highlights the risk reward challenge of these new technologies, right? And why even if, you know, you're pretty sure that it would work, and maybe we have enough experience from other places, a government has a lot of disincentive to try something new that could, you know, backfire somehow.

So not a, not an easy thing to do, but I, I agree. A worthwhile thing to look into. 

[00:55:21] Ed Whittingham: Time for one more question. It's from Jamie McPhail. How did the Icelandic geothermal go awry with energy costs? When it looked like the one guaranteed successful geo, it was going to be the one guaranteed successful geothermal site.

Uh, and would their problems apply elsewhere? I am by no means an Icelandic geothermal expert, uh, David or Sara, do you have any thoughts? 

[00:55:46] David Keith: I wanna go sit in the pool. It's really cool and blue. I don't know anything. 

[00:55:51] Sara Hastings-Simon: Yeah, you've, you've got me as well too. 

[00:55:55] Ed Whittingham: We're, we're ending on a whimper, not on a bang. 

[00:55:58] David Keith: Well, I, I, I, I think one of the things I trust most energy experts is when they honestly say they don't know.

Yeah. 

[00:56:04] Ed Whittingham: Yeah, that's true. That's the sound saying. Time to leave everyone. So David, Sara, thanks. That was fun as always. Thanks for listening to Energy vs Climate. The show is created by David, Keith, Sara Hastings Simon and me, Ed Whittingham, and produced by Amit Tandon. Our title in Show Music is The Windup by Brian Lips.

This season of Energy vs Climate is produced with support from the North Family Foundation, the Consecon Foundation and our generous listeners. Sign up for updates and exclusive webinar access at energyvsclimate.com and review and rate us on your favorite podcast platform. This helps new listeners to find the show.

If you enjoyed this episode, check out our show from season five, episode 11, called Fully Charged Battery Storage and How to Make It Better with Dr. Y Shirley Meng, we'll be back with a new show in October. See you then.