257: Let’s Talk About Tech – Battery “Breakthroughs”

 On today’s episode of still to be determined, we’re talking tech, and I know that sounds like, well, don’t you do that all the time, every week? And yes, but this week we’re going to talk about Matt’s most recent episode. And we’re going to talk about why Matt talks about these things in his most recent episodes.

So buckle up. Anyway, here we are Still To Be Determined as always the podcast that follows up on Undecided with Matt Ferrell. I am not Matt Ferrell. I am Sean Ferrell. I’m a writer. I write some sci fi. I write some stuff for kids. And I’m just generally curious about technology. Luckily for me, my brother is that Matt behind Undecided with Matt Ferrell, which takes a look at emerging tech and its impact on our lives.

And Matt, what is impacting your life today?

Uh, just caught me off guard with a question that you ask me every week. I was just going to say, I’m buying a new EV, but other than that, everything’s good.

So that’s a little sneak peek perhaps into a video that might be in Matt’s future. Maybe a new, a new EV and the bells and whistles that accompany it.

We’ll see. But as for now, let’s dive into the comments from our most recent episode. This would be from episode 256 in which we were discussing wind turbines in Canada. And there was a bit of a discussion in that episode where Matt shared the anecdote of he got out on the open road and then was on that open road for a really long time.

A long time,

yep. And I believe Matt at some point said, I don’t know what I would have done if I’d broken down. Well, Clean Energy Show showed up in the comments to share this. Hello from the city you flew into. Regina, Saskatchewan. Regina does in fact rhyme with vagina. Latin for queen.

Hence we are the queen city. Had you broken down on the highway, they say you would have been helped within a few minutes. Rural people are very friendly and helpful here. It was interesting to hear your outsider take on our home. A worker at the power utility here told my wife that wind turbines are shut down at negative 30 degrees Celsius.

Yet during a thirties, negative thirties cold snap recently. Don’t come here at any of those times, the grid mix had a lot of wind on it according to the utilities website. I’m eager to know if these wind turbines operate below negative 30 C, but the companies involved haven’t responded to our requests for info.

Great show. So thank you clean energy for jumping into the comments, Matt. First of all, does it make you feel any better knowing that had you broken down some kind stranger would have shown up eventually?

No,

but yes, I mean, it’s like, it’s every person I talked to there, I met locals. Everybody was just absolutely like the friendliest people on the planet. And it was a gorgeous area. It was very remote. To answer the question. I don’t know if these turbines operate below 30 C, I think they might, but I would have to reach out to my contacts at the company that are running it right now to find out if that’s the case or not.

I can actually look into that.

Might be interesting to check in on because that’s a,

yeah,

we always talk about environmental factors in locating these structures from a construction perspective. But part of, yeah, it’s interesting to think about from a maintenance and a utility perspective. Yeah. These are in a part of the world where temperatures get, I mean, there’s cold and then there’s negative 30 Celsius that’s, Oh boy.

So it’d be interesting to find out from the company if there is something in the makeup of these turbines in particular that would help them run.

There are heating, there are heating mechanisms and weather proofing that they do in certain regions. It’s kind of like if you remember the big power outage and that happened in Texas when they had that cold snap that basically knocked out their power.

Yeah. And there was a lot of accusations for the wind turbines were all shut down. Like you know, only fossil fuels were working, which was actually all misinformation because even the gas lines froze up like there was nothing. Down there they don’t, they didn’t weatherproof the, the wind turbines to work in super cold temperatures.

Why would you, why would you do that extra cost and conditioning when you don’t have to? And then something like that happened. So it is absolutely possible to make these things work in extremely cold temperatures and extremely hot temperatures. It’s just, you just have to do it. Um, but there’s an extra cost associated with those kinds of systems.

Yeah. I’ve shared this story before, you know, the difference between Northern, you know, outside the equator band, inside the equator band construction, what’s available, what’s used, what’s normal is wild. And I lived at one point in a new construction building that I am absolutely convinced used warmer environment windows in the construction because they would bleed cold air in the winter.

They would develop, uh, they would actually, if it got cold enough, they would have frost frozen on the inside because they were, they were made out of the metal, the aluminum framing was conducting the cold so well that it would actually freeze up like a F in a freezer unit and it was terrible and I’m convinced that somebody, you know, sneakily cut a corner in construction costs because an uninsulated window would cost I can’t even imagine how much less than the ones that should have been put in for the northeastern United States. This comment from Toby. He points out something that might be an interesting video for you to look at. He questions, have you heard about the wood laminate turbine blades, might be a good video.

Have you heard about these?

Oh yeah. It’s been bubbling up on my, uh, possible video idea list. It bubbles up and then we kind of, it falls down on the list cause other things take priority and then it bubbles back up again. So it’s been there for a while. And in fact the company that I like RES, the company I talked to about going to Saskatchewan, they’ve worked on projects.

And the company that runs these turbines has worked on projects that have wind like, wooden turbines it’s out there. So it’s like, I have a, a path in to actually go visit one of these things and see them in person if I wanted to. So it’s like, it’s definitely on the possible video agenda. It’s just a matter of if there’s other things that keep knocking it down the list or not.

Well, count me in for being interested in that because I love when new tech looks like old tech. I love it when old ideas resurface and I love it when. I mean, just the idea that making something out of wood laminate that can produce sustainable renewable energy and the wood itself is of course a sustainable resource.

I love that series of closed loops. The more it looks like a Venn diagram with all these closed loops covering each other. I like perfect. Kevin jumped into the comments to talk about. One of the offshoots of our conversation about building these massive wind turbines. And you had mentioned that blimps are beginning to resurface as a possible construction vehicle, allowing for delivery of the massive parts.

There is the comical shot in your video of the blade on the back of a rather large truck, as the truck is making a left hand turn, that can only be made by basically traveling a massive portion of the globe to be able to make that left hand turn. Yeah. Um, And you mentioned that blimps would be one possible solution to that because they could move in over a location and then slowly lower the, the parts down to the ground without having to worry about highways and rough terrain and mountainous regions.

And Kevin jumps in to say the idea of blimps to transport the blades, blades is an okay idea, but blimps don’t do that too well in windy conditions either. I know that from previous conversations we’ve had about blimp technology. They, they’re not surprised it’s windy. Like, you know, they’re aware that it’s windy and this isn’t to dismiss Kevin’s comment.

It is like, it’s an appropriate thing to bring up. Like, how does that solve a problem if you’re trying to lower a blade and suddenly you’re like, no, no, no, Bob, no, Bob, no, Bob, where are you going, Bob?

You’re drifting. The other, the other thing about blimps that I find interesting, that’s a challenge is the ballast.

It’s like. If you’re carrying heavy wind turbine blades, then you drop those wind turbine blades off, then the blimp goes, whoop, because it’s lost all that weight. So you have to basically do this trade offs. And like, I know some of these blimp companies are doing things where potentially you’re carrying water and then you can dump the water when you pick something up and then vice versa, you could pick up things of water if you’re dropping something off. So like they have to come up with systems for ballast, which I find really funny. The idea of like, we got your turbine blades. Oh no. Disappearing way up in the atmosphere.

It would be, I don’t know.

There’s a part of me that thinks like that would be kind of cool. Like ascending very quickly, just because of the gases in your balloon. Uh, yeah, you just hear tell my wife, I love her.

On now to our discussion about Matt’s most recent, this is his episode, why this ultra cheap battery breakthrough matters. So conversations around this one kind of fell into two camps. The one camp being like, this is cool technology. The other camp being, why are you talking about something that I can’t buy?

So I wanted to have a conversation, not just about the tech, but about why you talk about tech. Why, why your channel? Why this conversation? All of it kind of big picture. Before we get into that, though, I wanted to share a couple of these comments like this one from Simon, who says, maybe it would be time to create an update video where you guys show what has happened to the dozens of battery technologies you showed over the past years, I at least would appreciate to see actual progress in the real world instead of the latest lab breakthrough.

So great opportunity there to say. Like we have talked about a number of different battery types, everything from salt to there are paper batteries out there, this, like all the different things that we, that we’ve talked about. Can we expect you to do a kind of summation video along those lines of saying, like, I’ve talked about these 10, now we’re going to look at these five and see how they’ve evolved over time.

I’ve never done it as a summation video, but I do revisit these. I’ve been doing this for now for years, and so it’s like. When there’s enough of a, like when there’s a kind of a milestone that it hits, I’ll make an update video. And I’ve done this with flow batteries, zinc batteries, just various other, even other technologies I’ve talked about.

I’ve revisited them. Like it might be 18 months or 30 months after I talked about it last time, because it takes time to bring these things to market. So there might be like a year and a half of nothing because there’s nothing newsworthy to kind of update you on, but I’m, I am keeping tabs on these, but I’ve never thought about doing them as a summation video or in one video I talk about.

Here’s five updates on these five different technologies. It’s an interesting idea, but again, it might be tough because these updates don’t come synchronized to anything. So it might be like, there’s only one thing I can really talk about right now. So do I make it one video on that or do I wait until there’s enough bundled up where I can do something?

Um, but some of them, it’s going to be, the update would be. Still in the lab or like they’re still in the pilot phase.

Going to open this up to the commenters and ask the commenters to jump in. Would you be interested in seeing a video in which Matt may take, let’s say he, he selects five battery technologies that he’s talked about in the past.

And we’ve talked about this before, the idea of you talking about like real world application ready, like a scale of one to five, that kind of like, and if you did a summation video of five battery techs. And you said, when I first talked about this, it was at a one and now it’s at a three. Like kind of quick shot, rapid style of like, maybe even linking up the previous videos and saying, when I talked about this in 2022, I said this, and now in 2024, I said that, which means it moved from a two to a three viewers, listeners jump into the comments.

Let us know, would you be interested in that kind of summation video where it would give Matt an opportunity to say, here’s what I said then here’s what I did on the follow up. That means this and kind of put it all into one place as opposed to having the multiple videos do all the talking for him.

I mean, just kind of like, not to defend myself a little bit, but like when I say I’ve done this before, a great example is perovskite solar panels.

I have done numerous videos on perovskites. If you go back four years and watch one of my first ones, it was still very much in the research lab talking about the stuff at the current state, but nobody was making them. I had a video about like, this is taking way longer than people expected. And another, you know, like I I’ve done numerous videos on updates and now we actually have one on the market.

So the last one time I talked about it was about Oxford PV has finally done it. There’s now a perovskite tandem solar cell on the market that people can actually buy. So what people companies at this point can buy. So it’s like, gotta clarify that you’re not getting this home just yet, but it’s, it is on the market.

So it’s kind of like, to me, that’s a perfect example of, I am revisiting these, but that’s. Like a piecemeal individual approach of, I only talked about perovskites. I wasn’t doing a summation. I think the summation idea is interesting. I, so I’m, I’m, I am looking into it. Like I talked about before I have my video idea list.

I actually, because of comments like this, I did create a thing for my team and I had to talk about, like, maybe we try this. Let’s see if we can kind of like zero in on something like this.

This comment from jar caught my eye where jar pointed out many commenters seem to think that none of the battery technologies ever get implemented.

My lithium ion phosphate battery is 10 times cheaper than it was five years ago. It has almost four times the power, weighs 25 percent of a lead acid and costs the same. Patience my nerdy brothers. It’s a matter of time. So

best comment. Yeah, I,

I, that really stuck out to me because it’s. It kind of is the underlining beneath the mission statement of your channel and this channel, which is we’re not talking, we’re not marketing product for you to go out and buy.

We are not saying like, Oh, here’s a thing. And if you go buy it, we get a commission. Like that’s not how this is working. We’re literally just talking about things that we think are interesting. So following up on that, there was some other comments that caught my eye in the same vein. I don’t want to share those before we move on to having a conversation about this topic.

Paul jumped in to say, I’m unclear why some commenters are so negative. I view this channel as a mouthpiece for developing technologies. Yes, true. The tech could be years from production. Does that diminish the value of this information? How about viewing objectively presented information as just that?

And then that was followed up separately by this comment from Trenton, who said, as someone who works in research and development, I appreciate the work that goes into these videos. I enjoy learning what is on the bleeding edge, even if it might not ever leave the lab. So with those comments in mind, Matt, I wanted to kind of take a step back from this topic of this cheap battery and take a step back toward what is the overriding, the overriding thought process behind what you’re trying to do.

I just mentioned that we’re not here selling products. We’re not getting commissions off of talking about a thing, we’re talking about things we find interesting. There may be people in your audience and your audience at this point, you’ve, you’ve got a lot of subscribers. And so there are probably people who’ve joined your audience and maybe are commenting on some of your more recent videos who weren’t there at the very beginning of what you were doing when you talked about this.

What brought you to doing this channel in the first place?

Uh, one, Sean, you know this, I’m a tech obsessed guy. Like I love bleeding edge tech. When the newest, latest, greatest thing comes out, I gotta get my hands on it and try it out and see what it’s like. That’s always, that’s been me since I was a teenager all the way to now, so decades of me being like this.

Second side of it is not to get political, but like, I am concerned about sustainability and environment and climate and things like that. And so for me that it was like, when I started this channel, it was kind of like looking at the Venn diagram of like, what are the, where’s the, where are those things kind of overlap and looking more broadly, like how does technology impact our lives?

From smart homes to EVs to solar to all this kind of stuff. Um, so where this kind of evolved for me was back in the early days when I was doing a lot of videos about my EV, my first EV I’d bought and my experiences living with it and the solar panels I got installed on my house. Uh, there was a lot of pushback and comments I was seeing about like EVs will never be a thing because of X, Y, or Z.

The solar panels in your home is a hobby. You’ll never pay itself back, blah, blah, blah, blah. And all of the reasons people gave me for why the thing I was currently living with and enjoying, and experiencing in a very positive way, why it couldn’t exist. Why couldn’t, why it was never gonna be a thing was like telling me.

Oh my life experience with this thing completely contradicts what you’re saying, but what you’re saying must be the truth because you have no experience with it. But you’re just projecting. It was I’ve always looked at as it’s like looking at the world with blinders on it’s kind of like tunnel vision where, you’re so focused on the way things are now.

It’s like the way they are today is the way they will have always been. And it’s the way it will always be. And so I started drifting into the more research stuff and the early phases of things and trying to explain like how these things evolve over time, because it’s like, if you want to understand where this stuff is going, we have to look at all the dots along that path.

And it’s that famous Wayne Gretzky quote. Like the skate to where the puck is going, not where it currently is.

Yeah,

so a lot of the comments I was seeing was talking about like skating to where the puck is, and it’s like I’m talking about stuff like, where’s the puck going? Like what is the trend line for this stuff?

And so to understand that you have to look at the research phase, you have to look at the lab stuff, you have to look at the stuff that’s going to pilots production. You have to look at all that stuff, not just the stuff that’s ending up on our shelves because that thing that got onto the shelf. There was 20 years of research before that got on the shelf.

And so for me, it’s like, like that one comment from, uh, from jar, like the thing about the lithium iron phosphate battery, that’s 10 times cheaper and all this stuff. That’s 20 plus years of development that got it to that place. And then the perfecting the manufacturing and getting it super cheap to produce.

It’s like, there’s so much stuff that had to happen before that to make it possible. And so my videos are trying to show you what’s happening right now, that if you project it out, imagine five years from now, 10 years now, 20 years from now. The batteries we’re going to have are going to be so much better than they are today.

The solar panels are going to be dramatically better than they are today, but it might be 15 years from now. And some of the things I talk about may never materialize, but there may be learnings from those things that change the course of a completely different thing, like lateral thinking. It’s kinda like, you know, like, well this didn’t work, but we learned this one aspect here, right?

What if we took that idea and applied it to this thing over here? Holy crap, it has unlocked a whole new thing we didn’t think we could do. That happens all the time in this research. That’s the whole joy and geekery I get out of this whole thing. So it’s like, that’s what I’m trying to do with these videos, right?

So when I see people comment, wake me up when this thing’s available to buy, it’s like you’re, you’re, you’re missing the point. You’re kind of missing, right? The whole thread, um, and oftentimes I see comments like that on videos of mine tend to go more broad, um, where the algorithm puts it in front of a lot more people than normal.

Right. So it’s like when my videos do more of my core audience, I see less of that. And when it goes broader, I see more of that. And so my, my assumption is a lot of these people may only see these videos. Like when I talk about, this is the whole algorithm social media thing of like this changes everything.

Yeah. It pulls in a different audience that comes in and the only videos of mine they ever get served are these videos. And so they think this is all I talk about. I think that this is all it is. But if you click my video tab and you go to my videos and you scroll through my list of everything I’ve talked about, you’ll quickly see this is not everything I talk about.

I talk about way more, but the problem is some people are not seeing those other videos because the algorithm doesn’t serve it to them. So it’s like, there’s double edged sword here, but that’s kind of why for me, I evolved the channel to where it is right now and the topics I talk about, because it’s, I want to skate to where the puck is going.

I want to understand where things are heading. And then on top of which just, there’s some crazy cool science fiction stuff happening, Sean, like you and I are Star Trek geeks. And it’s like, there’s stuff happening now that in the sixties when Star Trek started, nobody would thought it would be possible.

Even back then, you know, like they had the data pads on Star Trek, next generation, they’re doing trico

and data pads and communicators, and now we all just have phones in our pockets. Yeah.

And we have it all. And so it’s like this stuff takes time to come together. So yes, I’m talking about stuff at the early phases, but it’s like, let your imagination and curiosity take you to places of where this stuff could eventually lead.

Yeah,

yeah. I also, I also personally, I have a response to sometimes the comments. It’s a little bit like showing up on a video on a science channel, that’s talking about black holes and saying, wake me up when I can go there. Like that’s not, that’s not the point of the video. It is about research. It’s about interesting discoveries.

It’s about where is the line between what we knew and what we now know. And I think that that angle on all of this is something that I know is built into the structures of our conversations, but I think that this video, I wanted to make it explicit and say to the viewers and listeners, um, we hope you’re interested in hearing about things that we think are interesting, most importantly, and, and to open it up as always to say to all of you, if you are aware of something, that you think fits within that conversation, jump into the comments and let us know about it.

Like we talked about the wooden laminate energy production model where you’ve got wind turbines built out of a sustainable product. And I think that’s super cool. I like the idea of the future looking like old Dutch paintings. That’s . There’s something really sweet about that. Something like that really kind of like connects to a, a paradigm shift in thinking around what does it mean to be advanced?

What does it mean to be high tech? And that I think is really exciting. And so if you in the audience are aware about something and you haven’t heard us talk about it, jump to the comments. And drop it in there. We’d love to hear about it. I wanted to share this last comment from JM who kind of wrapped it all up for me in this comment, which was, I write training courses on DC fast chargers for a major class eight electric truck manufacturer.

When students ask me why we make a tractor that costs three times as much as its diesel equivalent and has a quarter of the range. I point out that battery technology is evolving explosively. Our drive mortars produce 10 times the starting torque. If we allowed them to, they’re limited. It’s silent, a joy to drive, no oil changes, no diesel, no DEF.

In 10 years, that same tractor will be driving full shifts and have a sleeper cab because the batteries will catch up. Science doesn’t care about policy and the political climate. Innovation doesn’t wait for spin doctors and talking heads. I stubbornly maintain my own private sense of optimism. I thought that was a lovely comment.

And a note that was worth ending on a sense of optimism and moving forward and finding things that will help the future be better and make it work better and make it feel in some ways like we’re pushing the world back to where it used to be before we showed up and started taking things out of the ground and turning it into stuff that we could use.

So listeners comments, let us know how you felt about this conversation. Is there anything you think we missed? Is there anything that you know that we don’t, and you think we should? Jump to the comments and let us know. As always, if you’d like to support the program, jump to the comments, like subscribe, share it with your friends.

Those are very easy ways for you to support the podcast. And if you’d like to more directly support us, you can go to still tbd. fm, or you can click the join button on YouTube. Both of those locations have a way for you to throw coins at our heads. We appreciate the welts and then we get down to the heavy, heavy business of talking about wood laminates.

Wait, what? Anyway. Thank you everybody for taking the time to watch or listen, and we’ll talk to you next time.