Green Energy - Best of Coast to Coast AM - 1/29/25

Published Jan 30, 2025, 10:45 AM

George Noory and author Steve Goreham discuss changes to America's renewable energy policies with the new administration, the dangers of batteries in electric vehicles, and efforts to protect the nation's power grid.

Now here's a highlight from coast to coast AM on iHeartRadio.

Welcome back, George Nore you with you, Steve Gorham with us, Steve. Microsoft is going to spend the billions of dollars on data centers to run artificial intelligence. Is there going to be a tie in with green energy?

Yeah, tremendous impact, George. In addition to what mister Trump is doing, there are a number of other factors in the markets that are going to impact green energy in a big way. And one is the rising demand for electric power. In the United States, electric power has been pretty flat for the last two decades, about four point one million gigawatt hours. But now we have a number of forces just driving a huge new demand. A couple of those are green. There's a push to switch to electric vehicles, and there's also as a push to get away from death to appliances and adopt heat pumps. But much bigger than all of those is this drive for artificial intelligence. And we have. What's going on is that all the big guys Microsoft and Meta and Google and Amazon are now building new data centers and upgrading data centers to run to run AI. And we used to data centers usually have been just for a cloud storage and running the Internet, but now they're upgrading these servers, and these servers run weeks on end, twenty four hours a day to try and make machines THINGQI like humans solve these AI problems. And so at the start of twenty twenty four, data centers are using about four percent of US electricity. It's now estimated within ten years that data centers are going to use twenty percent of all electrical power in the country. Just a massive change, and the grid operators were just taken by surprise by this thing. For example, Texas last year had a record load of of about eighty five gigawatts. It's now projected that within five years they're going to need one hundred and fifty gigawatts of power, almost at doubling. And here's a quote from Texas Lieutenant Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick. We want data centers, but it can't be the wild wild West of data centers and crypto miners crashing our grid and turning the lights off. And what this is going to do is this is going to impact green energy because the green movement wants to retire coal and gas power plants, on. No way we're going to be able to retire anymore plants. Instead, we have to have them for AI. And we're already seeing coal plants being extended in a number of states. There are headlines about nuclear plants being restarted to get enough power, and so this is just a tremendous thing that's going to stop the green movement in its tracks. And we're already seeing a lot of whaling and gnashing of teeth from the environmental movement about this demand for artificial intelligence.

Are we building any more nuke plants?

Well, the thing about new plants, I don't think there are any new ones being built. The light had We just built a couple in Georgia that went online last year. But they're restarting a nuclear plant in Michigan, the Palisades that was shut down in twenty twenty two. They've extended the Diablo Canyon plant, the last nuclear plant in California, to twenty thirty that was supposed to shut down this year. And Microsoft has contracted to restart one of the three Mile Island plants in West Pennsylvania. That's not the one that had the problem with the meltdown, but it's the other plants. But these have been big headlines and they need this power to run artificial intelligence.

California has mandated by twenty thirty five to have no more new gasoline powered cars on the road. What's that going to do?

Right?

We don't have enough power plants for plug in centers. What's going to And electric car sales Tesla sales are plummeting right now.

Yeah, that's right.

That's the third big factor. We have Trump, We have the demand for electricity, and then electric car sales are having troubles. They had allows a year in twenty twenty four. US share was up a little bit but not much. EB pickup trucks have been a failure. They only have one percent share of the US auto market. In Europe, we had EV sales that fell and the share declined fifteen percent. And as you say, Tesla sales fell for the first time since twenty twelve. Also this month in January, EV sales in China are down about fifty percent. China has been holding up the world markets, so we is problem with EV's And then mister Trump has said he's going to try and get rid of the seventy five hundred tax credit for new electric vehicle sales. He's also stopped funding for the charging and fueling infrastructure, the discretionary Grant program, there was two and a half billion dollars there, and he stopped funding for the five billion National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Formula program. These were all going to build EV charging stations, which don't make any money. There isn't an EV charging company that's breaking even. They're all relying on government and state money, and mister Trump's going to shut that off. So the EV market is facing a real tough time going forward. And that's another big impact to green energy.

You wrote an article for the Wall Street Joureral on let them battery fires. Tell us about that.

Yeah. A corollary to this green movement is we have governments pushing everybody use lithium batteries for cars and for grid scale and for all sorts of issues. And now we have a worldwide lithium fire epidemic. Many many examples. A Mercedes Benz car that was produced in China a few months ago was sitting, wasn't even charging, sitting in a parking garage in Korea. It exploded and it burned up one hundred and forty vehicles. We just had a fire three weeks ago in Wilbraham, Massachusetts. They got five new ev buses. These things hadn't even been put into service yet. They were just sitting outside. One of them exploded and it burned up. For those buses never in service.

What would make it explode like that.

Well, these electric batteries have very high energy density, and if they get wet or they have some other problem, they can self ignite and you can't put them out. They produce their own oxygen when they're burning, so they just let these things. In Massachusetts, for example, they just let them burn out. They didn't even try to put water on them. But a question for your audience, what's the biggest source of fires in New York City right now? And the answer is e bike battery fires? Lithium batteries from e bikes. They had two hundred and sixteen fires last year and they've become the biggest source of fires in New York City and Toronto they had more than fifty fires. In Australia last year they had ten thousand lithium battery fires. They're getting over ten thousand fires a year, So this is a worldwide epidemic. And again it's part of the thing is the governments are pushing everybody use these battery cars and other applications, and it is just causing big problems.

They ignite that easily.

Well, they do, and and you know, if they get wet, they will ignite, or if there's some sort of a problem with how they were designed, or in the case of an a bike battery, even if you have a very good quality battery, if it's damaged at all, if you bump something when you're when you're you're riding it, or if you put it on a lousy charger, it can also ignite. And when these things ignite, they explode. And they've had many apartments in New York now where they've had an e bike in a storage or in the basement and the thing exploded and burned up the building. So I've we have a condo in Virginia Beach and I told my property manager, we don't want e bikes. No e bikes at our at our when we're running to people.

Steve, what's your take on the spate of fires in California over the past month.

Yeah, there was just a well you know, there were there were a bunch of fres that were caused by the Santa Ana winds coming out of Nevada, and well what started the fire, Well, it's really a test. Well, it could be many, many things that started the fire. Some have said, you know, it's it's even homeless people with flames. But once there's a fire and these tremendous winds get a hold of it, it can get very very big. And the other problem with California is for years they have not taken care of their forests. They have and a study called the Little Hoover Commission did a study in twenty eighteen and said there had been one hundred years of fire suppression in California and it pointed out that fires there's something that forests need to stay healthy. That same year in twenty eighteen, the US Forest Service, so there were one hundred and forty seven million dead trees in California. And so there's so much brush and there's so much fuel in these forests, and then if you add the Santa Ana winds, once get started, it's very difficult to put out. So they really need and governition has complained about climate change all the time starting fires, but he really should be working on forest management. That's the key, not stopping climate change.

Steve, what would you grade our energy policy right now on all.

It's a mix. You know, We've had a lot of people have said that we lost our energy when during the Biden administration, but actually both our natural gas output and our petroleum output grew. We're the biggest producer in the world of natural gas and petroleum. We have been for a number of years, despite the Biden administration efforts to restrict licenses those sorts of things. We have the lowest cost energy in the world. Really, our electricity prices are half or a third of Europe's price, and we're shipping natural gas all over the world. We kept the lights on in Europe when Russia cut off the supplies by shipping natural gas to Europe. So we're very strong. But mister Trump wants to make it stronger, and you know, drill, baby drill, and all those sorts of things which are part of his executive orders.

I've been an advocate for more than twenty years to protecting our power grid from solar flares or EMP attacks. Yeah, we haven't gotten anybody to fix them yet.

Well, you know, we've been putting an intermittent wind and solar, and we're getting very close to the edge and many of these places the margins are going down. And then we've got this tremendous ai demand. I mean, it really is astonishing what's going on. And a bunch of cities, Atlanta, for example, it has banned new data centers within the city limits.

Why but so.

They're building them in the counties all around Atlanta.

That's where the jobs are going.

Yeah, they are in many ways. So there's a tremendous demand for electricity. Hopefully we won't have a big EMP thing or a big solar thing that knocks out some of the some of the power.

If you had a magic wand Steven and you could waive it to fix our energy policy, what would you do well.

I think mister Trump is doing a pretty good job. And by the way, he has done some things like he's closed he canceled five Biden executive orders. He's closed the Climate Change Support Office, and these are what his executive orders say. He's closed the American Climate Core, He's closed the Working Group on the Social Cost of greenhouse Gases. He has stopped funding coming from the Inflation Reduction Act, and from the Infrastructure Investment in Jobs Act. He's doing a thing they're called impoundment.

And he's done it all in a week.

He's done it all in a week. Now he's going to get some pushback in the courts, and I think eventually he's going to have to go to Congress to get a bunch of these things to try and reduce some of those acts. But we have whole industries that are getting money that really shouldn't exist. Even vehicle charging, nobody can make money on that. We have all these carbon dioxide capture programs, green hydrogen programs, carbon dioxide pipelines. There are just many of these things that would not exist without all this federal money. There's no economic basis for them. So he's going to remove a bunch of that. We're going to see a lot of companies that are going to go out of business.

Steve Gorm's website is his name. His books, as he mentioned, are available through his website, which we have linked up for you at coastocostam dot com. Do you see electric power gaining any ground at all?

Well? I think so. As I said, they're going to stop closing these plants and maybe a big winner is going to be natural gas. You know, the thing about the nuclear is it takes about ten years to build a nuclear plant, and it's four or five times as expensive as a natural gas plant.

And by that time it's outmodeled. Right, So you can.

Build a gas plant in three years and it's cheaper. And there are two hundred natural gas plants that are being planned or constructed in the United States right now. It doesn't get much headlined, but that's that's really the thing that is going to fill in a lot of the need.

Two hundred yep, what's the investment on something.

Like that, Well, it's very very high. I don't have a number for that, but we actually closed in the last two decades, we closed two hundred coal fired power plants, so we still have about two hundred remaining, but those are going to be extended. But the other thing is mister Trump called an energy emergency, which a lot of people are reacting to in kind of a crazy way. But I think what he really wants to do is eliminate a lot of the roadblocks to constructing a pipeline or constructing a new power plant. That's what he wants to do. He wants to be able to construct those faster, and that's the purpose for his executive order on an energy emergency, not some other factor.

Do you still see the gasoline powered car to stick around?

Yeah, I think there's going to be a mix in the future. And hey, I'm not against electric cars. You know, if you want to cool tesla, or if you're going a short distance or you live in the South where the cold weather doesn't affect them, that's great. The problem is that we have twenty two states now that are trying to force all sales of gasoline cars to be over by twenty thirty five, and mister Trump his executive orders are attacking those rules. He's going to push back on those. Let's give people a choice to choose the car that they want and quit thinking that. You know, we can make the storms less severe if we all drive an electric car.

And what would you do with all the gasoline stations shut them down?

Well, that's that's the thing.

You know.

One of the things about electric cars is people like to charge at home, So eighty percent of charging is done at home, which means there isn't much business for all these these ev charging area stations. They want to put in you could imagine with gasoline, if you if you took away eighty percent of a gas station's business, could they Could they still exist? Probably not. So, you know, we've got to get back into a balance with energy policy and let the market roll out things that it wants that people want to buy.

Listen to more Coast to Coast AM every weeknight at one a m. Eastern and go to Coast to coastam dot com for more

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