237: Wind Farm Woes – China’s Mistake?

On today’s episode of Still to be Determined, we’re talking about China wind farms. We’re also following up on a few of the points that we made about Matt’s trip to Canada for the Everything Electric show. Welcome everybody to Still to be Determined, the program that follows up on Undecided with Matt Ferrell.

I am not Matt Ferrell. I am his older brother, Sean Ferrell. I’m a writer. I write some sci fi, I write some stuff for kids and please go buy my books.

And with me as always is the aforementioned Matt, that Matt of Undecided with Matt Ferrell, which takes a look at emerging tech and its impact on our lives. Matt, how are you this as we’re recording it the first day of fall.

I’m doing pretty well. Leaves are turning. I find your, your, buy my books really funny because if, if anybody knew Sean, he’s not good at self promotion or basically asking people to do things on his behalf.

I think I just proved that. It’s really funny. Oh, I love

you, Sean. Yeah. I have the awkward when it comes to the self promo. Before we get into our conversation about Matt’s most recent episode, which was about China’s largest wind farm, which also happens to be the world’s largest wind farm. We always like to follow up on some of the topics of discussion from our previous episode.

So this is from episode 235 from Matt’s, our discussion about Matt’s trip to Canada for the Everything Electric Show. And Matt mentioned that he had bumped into some people that he’s interested in following up with and, well, they reached out to him as well. This from Sohail who wrote in to say, hi, Matt.

Thanks for remembering Teal. I’m excited to get on a podcast with you. If that is an option, I’m sure that will be fun. I’ve been enjoying the well researched and crisp content, crisp content, Matt, that you bring to your audience. It is a huge education element to which is it essential for such a fast changing and broad tech landscape.

Thank you, Sohail. Uh, Matt, you want to remind us Teal was a charging company and their development was one that caught your eye because of dot, dot, dot. Why?

Oh yeah. They make EV chargers and they’ve designed this really robust, well constructed. It’s one of those, you build it as simple as you can and it will be like, be able to take a beating kind of a thing.

Like they’ve built this very simple, very straightforward, robust EV charger system that can work in extreme cold conditions. Cause if you have an EV and you live in a place that gets really cold, like negative 20 degrees Fahrenheit kind of, or negative 20 Celsius, oftentimes EV chargers just won’t work.

You’ll plug in your car and it’s so cold, the charger can’t even just charge your car. His chargers that he’s designed, I’m not, I’m not going to quote the exact temperature range it works at, but it works in extremely cold conditions. It’s very robust. And if you know anything about EV charger networks, like Electrify America here in the United States, uh, the first generation of their chargers are awful.

They’re, they are running on windows and you’ll walk up, you’ll get up to them and there’ll be like blue screens of death on the screens and they just don’t charge for weird reasons. Their chargers are getting better. But it’s like when you look at like how those chargers work and how complicated and they’re all software and a little mini computers and you see what Teal is doing, it’s like, all right, just do what Teal’s doing.

It’s just like bare bones, just dumb, dumb charger with very simple electronics in there, custom written, like little operating systems to make it work, should just work no matter what. And so it’s like, we need systems like that, that are just as reliable as a gas pump at any you know, gas station.

It’s like, it’s rare when you go into a gas station that the gas pumps are just randomly broken. It happens, but for the most part, it’s very reliable technology that’s well known and understood and how to do it. It’s like EV charging, we’re still kind of getting there. And so I was very impressed with Teal.

I do wanna reach out to ’em. I, I do wanna align a, a line up, a podcast interview with ’em. ’cause I thought what they were doing was very interesting. The way they approached it was very, very, very cool.

I think one of the things that’s on display in a lot of gas stations Mm-Hmm is the over-engineering of the pump in the form of

we can put a screen on this. The screen can be blasting ads at all time and music and talking to people. And then the, the reader could have a screen that gives instructions. So you’re getting blasted with an ad while you’re trying to decipher what the screen is telling you to do with your credit card.

And I agree the technology of the gas coming out of the hose is very straightforward, usually, but the pump itself has all these bells and whistles. Do you see that going on similarly with the e-chargers in the form of the engineering that you’re talking about? Like, Oh, simple, simple, simple is some of the complication of the other chargers, those kinds of bells and whistles that don’t even have anything to do with actually getting energy into the car.

Yes, it’s, it’s getting the energy into the car is a simple technology, but what the problem is, it’s like, I’m going to bash Electrify America a little bit, but their first generation of chargers, they are getting better. I got to kind of point that out. Their newer generations are way better, but their first generation chargers, it was like, literally, it was built on Windows.

It’s like, why are you using an operating system that is incredibly complex when you could just boil it down to the bare basics of what you need? If you opened up a Tesla supercharger, there’s barely a computer inside of it. You’d rip it open and it’s basically just electronic components of just like, it’s the cables,

and the stuff that like makes the electrons flow. And then there’s like essentially like a little raspberry pie, just like in the upper corner of the charging unit. And that’s, it’s got a little cell, you know, signal so that it can like phone home and basically what happens when you plug your car in, the car is doing the negotiation.

The car is basically doing a handshake to the charger saying, Hi, I want to charge. And the charger is saying, Hey, car, do you have, are you authorized to do this? And the car goes, I am. Cause it phones home to Tesla and gets the thumbs up. And it tells the charger to start charging. Bare bones, dumb. It’s so simple, so straightforward.

Electrify America chargers are like these complex, like computers that have to have their own credit card readers. And they’re doing all this, like, negotiation to get the credit cards to be authorized. And it’s built on windows and doing phone homes to Electrify America. And it’s all this kind of stuff.

So there’s all this kind of software where bugs and software issues just cause it to crash, not work right. The negotiation with their car doesn’t work. Um, so it’s like this Teal charger, it’s kind of like somewhere in between what the first gen Electrify America is and what Tesla is. Bare bones inside.

Just the cables and the stuff that make the electrons flow and then a very simplified custom built like PCB and software stack that’s written that’s like, it’s only what it needs to be. Nothing more. And when you do that, there’s less things can go wrong. There’s less things to break down. You gotta go back to, it’s like first principles thinking.

Go back to square one and then work your way up. And unfortunately, a lot of charging networks just like were taking off the shelf components and like what’s cheap and affordable and what they can write software for and do all that kind of stuff. And so they ended up with these systems that were just overly complex, overly thought out, and just like.

You didn’t have to do any of that. Just think of a gas pump. It’s just a gas

pump. I would have concerns too with a system built on windows for security. It seems like that would be a system that could be hackable and invaded by malware. And who knows what implications that could have for the users of that tech. I’m also reminded of an ad I saw recently for a phone, which was described as if you are too often deep diving into doom scrolling, and you want a phone that will not provide you with that experience, but will work as dot, dot, dot a phone, there’s the company, there’s a company that’s making a minimalist phone, which has a screen that is an E Ink screen.

It has a physical keyboard at the bottom. And it still can download apps. So on the screen, it showed a list of apps that it had downloaded, including links to things like Reddit or social media accounts, Facebook, stuff like that. But it was an E ink screen. So it’s not going to be vibrant colors. You’re not going to be scrolling through Instagram.

You’re not going to be just watching videos all the time on this thing. You can probably text, you can email and use it as a phone, and you can probably do some basic, maybe word processing and stuff like that. And there was a part of me that was just like, Ooh, and I decided not to buy it. It’s not super expensive, but there’s something about the bare bones.

Let’s strip away all the stuff. It makes you feel like you are being sucked into the screen, and there’s a certain appeal to that.

There was also this comment regarding the long form interviews that Matt has been doing, and we share them here. Matt will typically take the long form interview, edit it down to a 10 minute video on his main channel, but then we share the longer interview here, which gives everybody an opportunity to see the start to finish conversation.

And those sometimes range from 40 minutes to an hour, so Uh, we have been very interested in people’s thoughts about those, and people have jumped in, like Iglap, who says, Matt, I think the long form interviews in general on a variety of technologies would be helpful to all of us, not just battery technology.

Thanks for all you and your older bald brother do for us thirsty learners.

On behalf of the bald brother,

yes, on behalf of the bald brothers, You’re welcome, Iglap. Yeah, it’s, I think that there’s been a very positive response to, every time we’ve shared a long form interview, it’s gotten a positive response.

So I’m curious, just, uh, without revealing too much, how many interviews do you have coming up in the coming months?

I have four or five that I’m trying to get lined up soonish. Doesn’t mean they’ll be releasing them on rapid fire order. I’m hoping to hit a cadence of doing at least one a month, like for releasing it.

Yeah. Um, if there might be two a months, it might be that kind of cadence one or two a months. That’s kind of where I want to kind of land, um, to give it a little variety. And also, yeah, I’m not going to just be interviewing battery experts and stuff like that. It’s going to be like Teal talking about EV charging and what’s, what’s happening there.

I’ll be talking to just random people in the kind of space of the different technologies I talk about on a regular basis. It should be fun.

It should be fun. Sounds good. A comment about the hybrid truck that Matt and I were talking about in which Matt revealed a comp Company design, and I think it’s, uh, Edison Motors was the company that we were talking about.

Matt and I couldn’t recall the name of the company, but commenters jumped into the comments and said, you’re talking about Edison. So, thank you for that. So, Edison Motors is developing a truck which will have a electric Motor, but will have a diesel power generator in the truck so that when the battery gets too low, the diesel can kick in.

So effectively the diesel is powering the battery, which then powers the motor as opposed to taking over as an engine. So different model. And people jumped in to point out to Matt and me that we were missing a link to the past, which was a car equivalent of this already existed. Like this comment from Callum Curtis, who pointed out that it was the Chevy Volt.

And he adds, I’m bamboozled that no updated version of this

exists. There’s another one, um, to my brother in law actually owned it. I think it was the BMW i3. It no longer is made, I think they discontinued it, but you could get a, um, uh, a range extender. They sold it as a range extender and all it was, was basically a little gas, uh, generator that went in the back of the car and it held like one gallon of gas and that one gallon of gas was enough to like charge the battery up as you’re driving it to give you an extra range of like an extra 50 miles.

So it wasn’t like some huge amount, right? But the B, that BMW, the battery could only get you like a hundred miles on a charge, and then you could get this little range extender that would give you an extra like 50. And because it’s gasoline and it’s only a gallon, it’s like, you could just keep stopping at a gas station, keep filling it up and just keep going for a longer trip.

That one’s not made anymore. It’s like, I don’t, it seems when you think about it, you brought it up with the last episode. It’s like, why aren’t we doing this already? It seems kind of like a, well, duh, I don’t get it. You got the Chevy Volt. I wonder how much of it

is driven by market marketing, which is looking for the shedding of gas in its entirety and thinks that any kind of hybridized approach is not going to meet the marketing goal of saying this is a completely clean vehicle.

And as we sometimes see in the comments. No vehicle using any kind of energy is going to be 100 percent clean because, well, the source of that energy might not be 100 percent clean. You may be charging up your electric vehicle and thinking it’s a clean vehicle, but the energy may have been developed, been generated at a coal plant, for instance.

It’s all about scale. It’s about if your impact is as small as you possibly could make it. And I wonder if some of these car companies are looking at, well, we got to get off of hybrid because hybrid isn’t clean enough and maybe they’re maybe cutting off their nose to spite their face. It seems to me like there would be a certain group in the market that would really appreciate the ability to have that kind of.

You mentioned a gallon tank got you 50 miles. Well, if you put a three gallon tank and that got you 150 miles, now you’re talking about an electric vehicle that could effectively double its range, depending on what its battery could do. That’s a great option for people who are like, I need to be able to drive fairly long distances as opposed to just local.

So I can’t help but wonder what’s the driving force behind.

Especially when you could change, you could change that generator out. It’s like, it doesn’t have to always be gasoline, it could end up being a hydrogen little generator using a fuel cell. Or diesel. Or diesel. Pick, pick your poison and put it in there.

It’s like, there are green technologies that would work in that. So it’s like, it’s, it’s like, it’s a bridging technology. So it’s like, it makes so much sense to me. I just don’t understand why.

There was also this from Octothorpe who jumped on a recurring conversation that Matt and I have about sometimes the market doesn’t always pick the best option.

Sometimes the market, something wins out that from certain angles is a lesser than. And Octothorpe jumps in to remind us that it’s all about a matter of perspective. And I appreciate this comment. Octothorpe points out Betamax was a better product in terms of resolution. But what consumers actually wanted was the ability to record a whole football game, which Betamax couldn’t do.

So better is contextual. That is a very important reminder. Thank you for that, Octothorpe. We, whenever I bring up that comparison, I am inadvertently leaning completely on the resolution aspect as opposed to the home recording aspect, which was of course a huge part of helping VHS win out. On now to our conversation about Matt’s most recent, which is about the world’s largest wind farm and the difficulties it’s having with getting all of the energy it produces into the hands of consumers.

This is in China. And I will not be as brave as Matt in trying to say the names of the territories that we’re talking about. Matt, you actually earned some kudos in the comments. People who pointed out, one person pointed out, I did not grab the comment, but I wish now I had, somebody said, I am from that province and your accent was actually pretty good.

And so which province are we talking about?

Sean, don’t make me say it again. If you could have seen the amount of takes it took me to get it right. I can imagine. I could say it by itself, but I couldn’t say it in a sentence. Right. Because my marble mouth just had trouble saying it. Yeah. Yeah. And some of those takes, it was me just saying it and then my editor like put it in.

So I’m not going to try to butcher it again. I got it right in the video, but I’m not going to say it here because I don’t want to

completely Okay. I won’t hold you to that. Yeah. Instead, we’ll move on to talking about the size of the wind farm created a lot of conversation in the comments. And I think there was a little bit of, I’ll tell you what I understood it to be.

And then we’ll take it from there. There were comments like this from Dami the Mad who said, per quote your, from your video, the surface area of one Belgium. Stares at the country I was born in. Bro, there were a lot of people who were like, wait a minute, you said the acreage was this, and they did the math and the math turned out to be 110 square miles, which is not the same as the area of Belgium.

And I’ll tell you what I understood you to be saying. The raw acreage that is being used is roughly 110 square miles. It is spread out over an area, the size of Belgium.

Bingo.

Bingo. Right. You nailed it. There we go. That was my understanding because somebody pointed out, somebody even went to the trouble of saying like, well, here’s the size of the.

Here’s the size of the wind turbines themselves, and based on the number of wind turbines, it doesn’t even make sense that it would take up that metric range. And I was like, okay, people are like, they’re missing the forest for the trees in this moment. It’s you started off by saying like, it’s this much acreage.

And then you got to the point where you’re like covering an area of the size of Belgium. Which is This Yeah, go ahead.

Can I just Go ahead. Can I just point one out a thing? This That one sentence was meant to be kind of a flip, kind of like light joke, kind of like a just like Because most people aren’t like going to relate to like, well, how big is Belgium?

It’s like, it’s, it was kind of this offhanded remark meant kind of as a humorous thing that my writer put in there and I thought was really, really funny. So I left it and thought it was really good. Um, but again, it causes problems like this because when you get a little light and a little flip with things, uh, people tend to take it literally and I don’t blame them for that.

So it’s like, I kind of put myself in this predicament with a lot of people. So it’s like, I get it. I get the complaint and the misunderstanding. Um, and the crunching, the numbers of like, this doesn’t line up. I totally understand. But Sean, you, you hit it on the head for what it actually is. It’s

yeah.

These are like not one wind farm.

It’s like, it’s like a collection of the fact

you were pointing out. It’s, it’s many wind farms that are collectively a part of the same network, which is called this wind farm. So it was that kind of like. You know, you, you wouldn’t say that the state of Nebraska is one farm. It’s a collection of farms and it’s an agricultural center of the United States, but you wouldn’t say it’s all collectively one farm.

So it was the, it was kind of the Chinese government, I’m sure the way that China operates is fundamentally different than the way the U. S. operates. So these individual things. The government, as I just said, are collectively a part of a single thing. That’s correct, the nature of how their, how their infrastructure works.

So, the conversations that took place in the comments had a lot to do with the motivation behind wind farm technology, if it can’t beat the other existing technologies. There were comments like this from Aaron Starr, who wrote in to say, Okay, so the electricity from wind is already almost twice the cost of that of coal, and now you want to add batteries for storage.

It sounds like a case of how much money do you want to waste? Yes. I do understand Aaron Starr’s perspective on this to say like, that costs more and now you want to spend more money in order to make it useful and out of the gate, that may cost more money up front. But from my perspective, it seems to boil down more to what is your goal?

Not necessarily, and this goes back to the Betamax VHS comparison. If your goal is not pure economics, then building the wind farm and then adding batteries to it, to hold the power that couldn’t be used right away, isn’t in fact wasted money. And you point out at the beginning of your video. China is aware of tremendous health impacts on its citizens from an over dependence on coal.

So despite the fact that coal, even in this province, is the big industry, they are looking at it as, we have to move away from this because our people are sick. Is that the, is that the math that’s going on here?

Yes. So it’s like, I totally get where he’s coming from with the comment of it. The bottom line doesn’t line up here.

What’s the point? It’s like a waste, but that’s ignoring all the other contexts that goes into the decision making of that thing. I hear it a lot when I talk about my solar panels in my house, it’s like, dude, you could have put that money into a, you know, investment fund and earned this much interest and you would have come out ahead.

It’s like, yeah, but it’s not all about the almighty bottom dollar. I was trying to do it in a financially responsible way, but I have this goal and this goal and this goal and this satisfies all those goals collectively. That’s what this is. And so it’s like, coal is a commodity. The price of coal fluctuates and it varies depending on where you are in the world.

So the fact that coal per kilowatt hour of energy generated in China is cheaper than the wind power this is generating right now. That’s not true around the world. Wind and solar are cheaper than coal. Like, when you look at the entire global supply, wind and solar is the cheapest form of electricity generation.

Right. Problem in China is, they produce an absurd amount of coal, and because it’s a commodity, and there’s such a huge supply, the cost is like, through the floor. So that’s why, in China, the coal prices per kilowatt hour are cheaper. It’s, it’s kind of contextual. So the point that he was raising isn’t true in the United States.

It’s not true in Europe. It’s true in China, but not elsewhere. And China is playing the long game. They’re not looking at like, they’re not looking at quarterly numbers. They’re playing the five year game, 10 year game, 20 year game. That’s why they’re like quadrupling down on renewable energy infrastructure because they have some of the most polluted cities in the world.

Yeah. And it kills Hundreds of thousands of people every year from the air pollution. If you don’t believe in climate change, fine. But the air pollution kills people. And so China, just from that point of view, is trying to clean up their air so people stop dying from air pollution. And that is a noble cause.

And what kind of dollar value are you going to put on that? So yes, this wind power is slightly more expensive. You’re talking pennies more expensive than coal power today. But if you look in five years, 10 years. That wind power is going to most likely be cheaper than coal power. So it’s like. You gotta have a longer vision than what it currently is right now.

So there’s an upfront cost and then there’s the long term cost and China is playing the game of the long term cost and there’s all those other factors you have to play into that equation. It’s not just the kilowatt hour price.

It also is The long term cost feels like it’s not even within the ballpark of economics in this case.

It feels like they’re looking at health as paramount. They’re looking at independence as paramount. And I think there’s a, you know, When we talk about geopolitics, and we don’t, that’s not the focus of this channel, but when you think in those terms, somebody pointed out in the comments, I don’t think they’re doing this for anything other than independence.

And that really does seem to fit if you’re saying, well, currently we’re using lots of coal. That’s a dirty tech, which is making citizens sick. And we can’t continue in that path. So what are the other options? Well, we could import other types of fuel. We don’t want to go that route. So let’s take the hard step of Building this wind farm, building the solar farm, building an infrastructure.

The, the, the, I couldn’t help, but think the beautiful vistas in which they are putting power lines, it was really kind of like, part of me was like kind of brokenhearted, there were some beautiful shots of the Gobi desert and these mountain ranges, and it’s just. Now these power lines that are going over it and like, ah, it’s really a shame, but I also get that that is them saying like, no, this is what we have to do to be independent.

And so it really does strike that note of there are so many other reasons other than saving money that are the cause of this. They aren’t building power lines over mountain ranges because it’s costing less, they’re doing it because they’re trying to say, Beijing will have power at the end of the day.

I mean, just geopolitics, look at the Ukraine war and Russia and the gas pipelines into Europe and Europe finding themselves in a situation where it’s like, they’re trying to tell Russia, stop what you’re doing, but they’re dependent on them for their fuel sources.

So, Europe kind of had to do a little bit of a scramble to kind of make up for the loss when they put down the embargoes on things. They had to scramble to find better ways for energy independence and security for themselves. And so it’s like, this is something that’s happening around the world and renewable energy is a key factor in this.

Um, so it’s like, again, you can’t just look at the kilowatt hour price.

Yeah,

this is, you have to look at the context of the entire situation.

Finally, in that same vein, there was this comment from PersonMcPerson. Person I like your username. Transmission is not the limiting factor here, in Australia we are working on sending power from the middle of the country to Singapore

with negligible loss, 950 miles, even across mountains is inconsequential for China. It’s that no one wants more expensive power. So I think in the short term person is hitting the same note that we’ve just talked about. This is not something that’s going to be an impossibility. There are other reasons for why they’re doing it.

No one wants more expensive power today, but 10, 15 years from now, when Beijing has limited the use of coal and Knowing the way that the Chinese government operates, they will eventually reach a point where the edict is just simply made. It is just going to be like, we are closing these coal plants. This is no longer happening, and it will not be a debate.

It will just be, it will just happen. I’m not saying that that’s a better system or a worse system, I’m just saying that will happen. And at that time, all these power lines that they’re building, all these plants that they’re building, any batteries that they’ve built will all be the tool that they will utilize and it will just be their everyday life.

There is one thing in that comment I do take issue with. Transmission is not the limiting factor here. It is, because it is costly and time consuming to build those high power, high tension power lines. Yeah, you can transmit the power and there are ways to do it with limited energy losses and stuff like that, but you have to build them.

So, I mean, that’s the problem with the China stuff is they built out the plants way faster than they had built out any kind of transmission lines. And so then you have half the turbines being turned off because it’s like, we can’t use all this power because there’s no way, literally nowhere to send it.

That is a limiting factor of that technology and how they implemented it. So that is, to me, I think still something that was, I hope was the takeaway of the video of like, we have to look at all of these things together collectively so we can learn from what China’s doing and do it better elsewhere. We can do it better in Europe.

We can do it better in South America. We can do it better in the United States. It’s like we can, if you take all these things into account, we can implement them in a more intelligent way. Not to say China isn’t doing it in an intelligent way. We can do it in our own way to avoid the issues they ran into with the transmission stuff. That was, that was the limiting factor in this. So it’s something to keep in mind, but we, we know how to do it. We just have to do

it. I wonder if there must have been a measurement done of what’s the order of operations here. And it seems to me like it makes sense to me that you build the enormous plant and have power you can’t utilize before you put in transmission lines, because if you spend the time building transmission lines and then something happens.

A new tech comes out and you’re like, well, now we don’t even need those transmission lines. Now you’ve just wasted all that money. But if you build a power generating plant or farm in this case, and then you build the lines. And eventually, no matter what happens to developments in tech, the lines still make sense because, well, we got this farm, so we’re going to connect it.

Like, we know there’s new tech that came out just recently that could change the dynamics, but we got that farm. We’re going to put in these lines and use the, the power that we’re making. That to me seems like an understandable order of operations from a political perspective. If they did it

any other way you could end up with a smaller bar with some transmission lines and then people are like, this isn’t working right when, and you put your eggs, not in all in one basket, but you put your eggs in certain baskets first in order to get to the goal that you’ve decided you want to reach. So I do understand why you’re not building power lines at the exact same time.

So, but it does build this weird dynamic of yeah, they’re shutting down turbines to say like, well, nobody’s turning on a light. So everybody, what do you think about this conversation? Do you think that Matt and I have missed anything? Jump into the comments. Let us know what you’re thinking. We’d love to hear what you have to say.

And as we’ve just demonstrated, your comments do drive the content of this program. They also help shape the mothership, which is Undecided with Matt Ferrell. And I hope you’ll check out Undecided next week when Matt drops a new episode. Matt, any teasers about what you have coming up? It’s my house.

That’s what I’m saying. Mysterious as always. If you’d like to support the show, please don’t forget you can leave a review, you can subscribe, you can share it with your friends. You can like this specific episode. All of those are great, easy ways for you to support the program. And if you’d like to more directly support us, you can click the join button on YouTube, or you can go to stilltbd. fm and And click the become a supporter button there. Both of those ways allow you to throw coins at our heads. We appreciate the welts. Then we get down to the heavy, heavy business talking about power lines. Thank you so much, everybody, for taking the time to watch or listen. We’ll talk to you next time.