Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
https://youtu.be/SYFLHrnvtaQ
Matt and Sean talk about whether we have enough room for solar panels to power the world, and alternatives to plastics like mushrooms. It’s a double duty episode that will really grow on you. Sorry … couldn’t resist.
Watch the Undecided with Matt Ferrell episodes;
-5 BEST Alternatives to Finally Replace Plastic https://youtu.be/E-cnoSAaUa8?list=PLnTSM-ORSgi6ObB8Ao0IpRhOgYO27wbSd
-Why Don’t We Put Solar on ALL Rooftops? https://youtu.be/gkUdfU41iUg?list=PLnTSM-ORSgi7uzySCXq8VXhodHB5B5OiQ
YouTube version of the podcast: https://www.youtube.com/stilltbdpodcast
Matt and Sean talk about whether we have enough room for solar panels to power the world, and alternatives to plastics like mushrooms. It’s a double duty episode that will really grow on you. Sorry … couldn’t resist.
Watch the Undecided with Matt Ferrell episodes;
-5 BEST Alternatives to Finally Replace Plastic https://youtu.be/E-cnoSAaUa8?list=PLnTSM-ORSgi6ObB8Ao0IpRhOgYO27wbSd
-Why Don’t We Put Solar on ALL Rooftops? https://youtu.be/gkUdfU41iUg?list=PLnTSM-ORSgi7uzySCXq8VXhodHB5B5OiQ
YouTube version of the podcast: https://www.youtube.com/stilltbdpodcast
Follow us on X: @stilltbdfm @byseanferrell @mattferrell or @undecidedmf
Undecided with Matt Ferrell: https://www.youtube.com/undecidedmf
★ Support this podcast ★
Creators & Guests
What is Still To Be Determined?
Join Matt Ferrell from the YouTube Channel, Undecided, and his brother Sean Ferrell as they discuss electric vehicles, renewable energy, smart technologies, and how they impact our lives. Still TBD continues the conversation from the Undecided YouTube channel.
On today's episode of Still to be Determined, we're talking about plastics, we're talking about solar and how both could be everywhere or are everywhere. And do we want them everywhere? And so on and so on. Welcome everybody to Still to be Determined, which of course is the followup podcast to Undecided with Matt Ferrell.
I am not Matt Ferrell. Don't be confused. I'm Sean Ferrell. I'm his older brother. I write some sci fi. I write some stuff for kids, and I'm just generally curious about technology. And luckily for me, the aforementioned Matt is that Matt and he is my Matt. You can't have him. Matt, how are you doing today?
I'm doing great. It's been an interesting week. The Olympics just started. I don't know if you're watching the Olympics, but I started watching it last night. And my wife walked in the room and said, Why are you watching this?
Uh, in, if any proof of Matt and me being in very similar parallel lives as one another, his wife's response to the Olympics and my partner's response to the Olympics are pretty much identical. I, yesterday, my partner came home, it was in the evening and I said, Oh, the Olympics are on, are you interested in watching that?
And she said, why would I watch that? So. Uncanny. Yep. Normally in this program, we like to start off our conversations about our most recent episode, but this week, because of various shenanigans on my part, I believe, where we weren't able to record. A couple of weeks ago, we skipped one of Matt's episodes, which was discussing plastic alternatives.
So this week we're going to double up and talk about Matt's two most recent episodes. First, the alternatives to plastics, and also the possibilities and the side effects and benefits of trying to saturate our environment with solar. So let's start off now with plastic alternatives. Matt talked about A bunch of alternatives, five best alternatives to finally replace plastic.
This episode dropped on July 9th, 2024. And amongst them was Matt's famous brick, which lurked on the shelf behind him in his studio. It is a brick I had seen before. Matt had told me what it was before. I never questioned it, but here he was now proudly holding up a thing and saying, mycelium, look at this.
Which of course, yes, a fungus brick. And this caused some commotion in the comments, such as this one from Jopo who wrote in the fact that mycelium based products can't be used for food. Leaves mushroom for improvement. Wow. I, that,
that's a slow clap, Sean. Yes, that's a, that's a slow clap. That's wonderful.
I want this comment read at my funeral. Chef's kiss. Absolutely. Your funeral. So. So, yes, mycelium cannot be used for food, but it is biodegradable. And as you said yourself, you have started seeing this being used in various packaging of products. And in the video you show this looks like almost a complete one to one to styrofoam where it's made in a form so that it's like you order a mug, the mug sits snug like a bug in a rug.
I'm a writer after all, and closes up nice and tight and perfectly formed, and I can't help but wonder, with this available, why isn't everybody jumping to it? Like, why is it the occasional product? And is it, is this a case where those people who maybe have run a Kickstarter, started their own business, are looking to be able to promote themselves and market themselves as we're super environmentally friendly.
So our packaging is super safe. Maybe looking for a difference versus. The more mass market products. Is that what this is right now? Kind of a niche form of packaging, which could grow, no pun intended. I'm a writer after all, and
eventually corner more of the market. Like, it just seems like a no brainer for a company like, and not that I'm a fan of any of these companies, but for a company like Amazon or Apple to just say like, starting today, our packaging is biodegradable, it seems like a slam dunk. But it hasn't happened. So what do you think is the reason for that?
It's, it's, it's kind of what you're hitting on. It's, it's about scale. So it's like, if you have a company like Amazon, this, these materials as they're immature, uh, are more expensive per unit. So if you're a company like Amazon that is shipping, like a bazillion things every year, we won't even
guess
how
much shipping Amazon is doing.
They're single handedly keeping UPS afloat.
Right. So imagine you have some kind of plastic alternative bag that you could chuck things in and ship that actually can biodegrade and it costs two cents more a unit or one cent more a unit. For a small company to absorb that price, it's, it's not that big deal.
It's like, you're talking about, you know, you might be shipping a thousand things, but if you're Amazon and shipping millions of things, that's, that could be millions of dollars extra cost per year. And so it's like, I think that's part of the reason why we're not seeing it mass market yet until it gets price
competitive unless it's, if it costs the same amount or less, I think you'll see big companies switch. But I've been noticing that, like I mentioned in the video, there's, uh, furniture companies like Article and other things that are more boutique furniture companies that when you buy stuff from, I've been finding, like, when you get stuff from them, they're using materials just like this.
Um, there's, I can't, I'm blanking on their name. They're in a San Francisco bag company that makes these wonderful backpacks and things like that. They're all about green packaging. It's, it's part of their brand message and their identity. But they're a smaller boutique little thing. So they're doing it as well.
So I think those kinds of companies that can make that their brand identity are helping companies that are making the mycelium products scale up. And as they scale up and the price starts to drop, you're going to start to see bigger and bigger companies do this. But there is a trend of moving away from plastics, even in big companies like Apple has basically moved away from all plastics
in their product packaging. It's a lot of cardboard now, right? It's all paper. It's like all paper. Like you open up your phone and it's just like, it's a, it's, it's incredible engineering. Cause it's like, it's almost like origami. It's like, you take your new thing out of the box and then you pull a pull a tab and it just like opens like a flower.
And then your, your new phone comes out. It's like, it's, it's these crazy, awesome packaging that they're doing with just paper products. So we're starting to see stuff like that from big companies, but um, but yeah, Seeing these kind of classical terms of mycelium, I think is starting small, but that was a couple of years ago and I'm seeing it more and more now in like medium sized companies.
So it's, it's happening. It's it's rolling out. It's starting to take, take root. Pun intended.
Yeah. It's hard to talk about this without using phrasing that sounds like we're intentionally going for the puns, uh, and it happily for us, it's not taking that much work because it just naturally springs up once again.
No pun intended. Yeah. I bought a computer recently. I should rephrase that. You bought me a computer recently and it arrived in 100 percent paper packaging. Um, Oh, that's awesome. You know, a smaller box inside a bigger box, but all the boxes were filled with cardboard framing so that it was all paper. And, um, It's little things like that that do catch my eye.
I'm still accustomed to like, Oh, noticing, like that's not a styrofoam. That's great. Um, and as I'm saying all of that, I'm flashing back to the fact that when Matt and I were trying to help our parents prepare for a move from where they lived in Western New York to moving to Western Massachusetts, they like to live in the West of whatever state they're in.
Uh, Matt and I would go out into the basement and we were unearthing Various things from the 1970s and 1980s that nobody knew existed, but here they were. And amongst the things we found were giant garbage bags filled with styrofoam peanuts. Apparently there was not a styrofoam peanut that came near my parents house without our father or mother taking them and putting them into this unified bag system, which, I mean, it looked a little bit like they were doing some kind of, Crash test dummy work in the basement on their own, just out of their own curiosity.
But it's the kind of thing where they did that because they didn't want to put it in the garbage and occasionally they would ship things. I know, Matt, I experienced this. I'm sure maybe you did. Receiving a package from them that was full of peanuts was frustrating because then we were the ones who had to put it in the garbage.
Exactly. Uh, seeing that less and less and having that experience more infrequently is a pleasure. So, uh, and as you talked about the economies of scale, it's interesting. My knee jerk response to economies of scale is to think in terms of only one direction. The bigger, the better. Like, And here's a case where we're seeing the inverse right now.
This more avant garde packaging is more affordable for the smaller. So economies of scale are literally about scale, not about smaller to bigger. So nice lesson for Sean. Our next comment on that video about plastics was from Kastrick, who wrote in to say there is a commercial hemp manufacturer just down the road from where I live in Canada.
One of the industries they serve is the automotive industry. Their product can be used to help create things like interior panels, package trays, etc. Reducing the amount of plastic needed or placing heavier wood based materials. Hemp is also good for land stabilization. Weed control, etc. They even sell growing mats for starting seeds or even as a dirt alternative for growing microgreens.
So this is, Kastrick is in Canada. Do you know of any movements along this front of incorporating hemp? I know anecdotally that hemp Growth in the U S is increasing. I was going to say growing, but I avoided that pun because, whoa, that would have actually caused pain. Um, are we seeing more of this in the U S the use of hemp in various products, including edible forms that are used to produce CBD oil and stuff like that is definitely on the rise, but are there any trends in this direction toward manufacturing that your team came up with?
I would say this is going to be a, you're
going to roll your eyes, Sean. Yes. Hemp is growing like a weed. It is. That's all the time we have today, folks. Let's turn this off and good night, everybody. This is taking on a life of its own here in the U S finally. It's like, this is something that's been, uh, picking up steam around the world, but in the U S I've brought this up in videos before.
It's like the, the, the laws around. Marijuana prevented hemp production here in the U. S. because it's all kind of related and they got kind of swept up with the anti drug movement. But as marijuana has been legalized in a lot of areas of the United States and some of these laws have been kind of like lessened, hemp production is Picking up.
And so it's kind of like the U. S. is still playing catch up to other places in the world, like Canada and Europe, but it is definitely picking up. Um, there's a lot of hemp producers springing up all over the United States. So this is definitely something we're going to be seeing more and more of.
Finally, this comment from writer Patrick, who jumped in to say another alternative that people forget is glass.
It used to be that drinks were sold in glass containers that were returned to the store. And using biodegradable plastics means they can sometimes break down if stored for a long time, ruining the contents and limiting the shelf life. It would also mean that things like cutlery made from it would have a best before date and could mean lots of it gets thrown out without even being used.
Glass would be a way to avoid some of that. I don't disagree with Writer Patrick at all. I think the use of glass is something that I always wonder. Why it hasn't made a greater comeback, the use of glass and the recyclability of glass seems like it would be an obvious draw, but maybe there's something about glass manufacturing and glass recycling that creates a cost prohibitive state at this point.
Is that something that your team has looked into?
What's funny is my team, uh, my producer Lewis, uh, and I had a conversation about this. He lives in Poland. And he said, this is kind of common. So it's, it has nothing to do with, oh, it's difficult or anything like that. It's just, we're just not doing it here.
I think it was single use plastics just took everything over because it was so cheap and so easy that we just kind of walked away from this. And to date us, cause Sean and I are old. Um, I remember as a little kid, we, we'd sometimes have glass soda, like soda that came in glasses and we would take them to recycling and then you do the, they would literally clean them and just reuse them.
So it's like this radical thought, wait, you can reuse something. You don't have to throw it away after you're done with it.
Well, do you remember, I mean, people, again, people of a certain age, the marketing around the plastic bottles for soda was all about commercials showing somebody accidentally knocking a two liter soda bottle off of a counter.
I'm breaking it. And it would, and the plastic one would bounce and it would just be like, thanks mom. And everybody would have some soda. And it was, you know, you look back on that, what a ridiculous notion. To use that as a marketing tool. Like, do you like soda? Then you're going to love the bottle not breaking.
Like, like how does that connect to enjoying a soda? But that was what the marketing was for a good solid couple of years. I remember that being on TV all the time of. What they didn't show Sean in that
commercial was the second bit, which was them picking up off the floor and opening it up and getting a spray full of sugar on the face.
Spraying the ceiling with sticky sugar water. I had a, uh, this is a complete sidetrack, but I still think it's fun to, to share. About a year ago, my son had a bottle of Dr Pepper that he had bought somewhere and he'd walked home with it. And apparently my son's walk is a vigorous one because he came home, he put the Dr.
Pepper on the counter, he did something and he turned around and he opened the Dr. Pepper and it sprayed everywhere across the counter. And just about a week ago, he was sitting at the kitchen table and I was doing something, cooking something. And I turned on the toaster oven to get it to preheat and I hit the start button and he suddenly, his head, I saw his head pop up and he said, Did it make that sound because of the Dr.
Pepper? And I was like, Oh yeah, because the front of the toaster oven had been doused. And in the crevices between all the buttons, it had filled with Dr. Pepper. And there was no way to get it out of there. So there is sticky sugar syrup. In all of the crevices around all the buttons and knobs on my toaster oven.
And when you turn anything, it takes a little extra effort and you hear it go snap and it, whatever you do with it, because when you use it and it heats up, it then recrystallizes all those little sugary spots. So like kind of like glues everything into place. So doing anything with a toaster oven sounds like you're breaking it.
Some other questions I had for you about the plastic alternatives included. Are there. Incentives outside of the industry itself here in the U. S. to encourage this kind of product. I'm sure a state like California probably is doing something in that regard. But do you know of any other efforts across the country to help nudge this kind of product?
The use of plastics away, like New York City banned plastic bags. That was a huge step in this kind of thing. And the plastic bag alternatives made out of things like the seaweed that could eventually just dissolve would be something that I think would make a resurgence here. Um, but do you see anything else nationally that is happening?
Or are you aware of places globally that have successfully, governmentally, Nudged industry in this direction.
Well, first I don't. And if viewers and listeners do know of specifics, please share them. Um, yeah, jump to the comments. The things that I've seen here at the U S at least is not, there's not a national thing that's doing it.
And there's like, you know, the carrot and the stick. You can kind of punish people to do better or you can incentivize people to do better. The most I've seen here in the US is like what you mentioned, like here, Massachusetts banning plastic bags. They did the same thing in New York. So it's like, those are like the stick, like you're forbidding people to do certain things.
I haven't seen much around like incentivizing. Um, there's, you know, like carbon emissions, taxing carbon emissions is one way that like in the European Union, they're doing things to try to incentivize companies to do better about their carbon output. We're not doing that here in the United States. And so some of that, those incentives in Europe might be what's pushing some companies to do better and use less plastics and less things like that.
Cause then they can claim less CO2 output from their product, like lifespan. So that might be part of the reason why some companies are doing some things, especially global companies, but here in the U S we're not doing much along those lines right now, it might be happening on the state level, which is why I'm saying to all the listeners and viewers, like where you are, do you know of anything that's happening?
It'll be interesting to see if we start seeing more of these things being used. I do hunger for, I mean, I, once again, no pun intended, I am looking forward to the day when things like straws and cutlery in to go bags when you grab food will be seemingly plastic, but we'll know it's not like I'm looking forward to the day when I don't think guiltily about the fact that I just bought a nice coffee and it's really a lot more convenient to have a straw, but I don't like paper ones.
And I'm looking forward to the day where we can not have to think about the fact that these things that look and feel like plastic are biodegradable. And are not going to have these negative impacts. And as I said, New York City's plastic ban, plastic bag ban was immediately impactful because so much trash on the streets here was simply plastic bags.
They would blow around like tumbleweeds. They'd get caught in trees. You would see them everywhere and they were, it was just gross. And you knew that it was a sign of if it's visible on a neighborhood street like this, just imagine what the landfills look like. And having that ban and having those bags immediately disappear was a remarkable and clear sign of a movement in the right direction.
So on now to our discussion about Matt's most recent, this is his episode. Why don't we put solar on all rooftops? This 23rd, 2024. And in your video, Matt, you're looking for the opposite of NIMBY. Well, No, no, no, no, no. 3421 dropped into the comments to point out that the term you're looking for is YIMBY and it's already in use.
So I'm assuming it means yes. In my backyard. Yes. In my backyard. Yeah. There was this comment from old wizard minis old wizard minis. I love the username who points out a lot of the conversation about like, well, if you're Using solar panels, but you're not collecting the energy, then that's energy wasted and, and money wasted.
And old wizard points out a really simple fact. The energy hitting my roof right now is not being collected. All it is doing is making my AC work harder. If all rooftop solar did was offset my AC electrical usage, it would be a net positive. I recently saw a video with someone who was most likely in the pocket of big energy complaining that the excess energy produced from California rooftop solar was just going to waste.
Like what was happening to that energy before rooftop solar? Anyway, excess energy generated by rooftop solar is more an opportunity than a problem. This is It's a form of logical, simple thinking that alludes a lot of these conversations that we have of, okay, you're complaining that this stuff is going to waste because nobody's actively using that electricity.
But currently the sun is beating this planet 24 hours a day on every side and most of that energy is not being used by us. It is not waste. It is simply utilization. So, it's
It's my favorite thing when people say like, uh, solar panels aren't efficient enough. But if you don't have solar panels on your roof or elsewhere, it's like, we're not getting, we're getting 0 percent of that energy.
Wouldn't you like to get at least 20 percent of it?
Yeah.
Can we at least agree that that's a good thing?
Solar panels aren't efficient enough. Well, they're more efficient than not having solar panels. So.
Yes.
Yeah. Old wizard minis, that was a great comment. There was also this one from Platebody who says, here in Australia, we have the highest uptake of domestic solar panels in the world.
One thing that is becoming more evident is that to make the most of domestic solar, they need to be coupled with batteries, whether owned by the household or a local community battery. There is also a lot of work to be done on the regulations around feeding power from the panels and the batteries into the grid.
There's a lot of evidence that agri solar combinations have great benefits in a hot, dry country like Australia. Yeah. Australia is in so many ways regarding environmental impact. Really a, it's like a country sized laboratory, isn't it? Where they're doing all these things that could teach the rest of the world great ways to go about these things.
Because their energy needs, my understanding is it was very, very hard for them to domestically meet their own energy needs anyway.
Mm hmm.
So by utilizing solar, which like I said, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, there's sunshine out there and they're grabbing it and really providing some good guidance for the rest of the world.
And what could the potential be for this?
Yeah, no, it's, they are, it's kind of hysterical to me cause like their government is very conservative and not pro renewables yet the country is like moving so fast into renewables. It comes down to necessity is the mother of invention. It's like, it's kind of hard to argue, let's get rid of coal and let's go to solar.
Or let's go to Wind when the benefits are so obvious there. Um, and then on top of that, they've like streamlined for residential solar. They have streamlined how you get it, uh, to get a permit and to install it. You can literally can on your phone, go out and just like log and do a thing and like, say, I want to get solar.
Here's my house. Here's my location. Just fill out a little form online, hit submit. And then within a day you get an email saying you're good to go. And then you just either install it yourself or you have a local installer come by and put it up. That's it. It's like cheap. Quick, efficient, it reduces a lot of the soft costs of installing solar.
And here in the U. S., we have to jump through like 15 hoops and get permits from the fire department and the local building code. And like there's all these things we have to do from all different facets. Uh, I just went through this and it's, it's, I mean, it's, I didn't have to myself do all this. My installer took care of it all, but it was just one of those The amount of things that have to happen just to get solar on my roof takes months.
It takes months. And here in Australia, just a couple of taps of your button and get approval. And then you can make it up on your roof within a week. That's why it's so cheap and efficient there. And they're leaning into it because it's such a benefit. And yeah, the batteries are the key to making it work, which is again, batteries going to, batteries would help no matter what your energy generation is.
So it's kind of a, as batteries and energy storage gets cheaper, it just gets, makes more and more sense and it's reducing the downsides of intermittent renewables. Right. Yeah. Australia is kind of like a laboratory that anybody that says solar doesn't work. It's like, all you have to do is just point at Australia and say, really?
It's doing great!
I guess it's analogous to like, if you've got a dam and you're pro you're producing electricity from the dam, It's a issue that has always been in existence. The dam is running, the electricity is being produced, but if you're not storing it, just like the argument of like, Oh, you're not utilizing the solar energy, so therefore it's wasted.
That's what would have happened with windmills or water turbines or any of that mode of production and that goes back to storage again is maybe a bigger component of this than anything else because even a place that doesn't want to convert to solar should be storing energy in a battery somewhere.
Well, it's running on a utility grid is so it's, it's an amazing feat that we have it working at all. Yeah. Um, cause they not only have to, they, they basically ramp production to kind of mirror consumption. So, when not a lot of people are using energy, they have to literally spin down turbines, or not produce as much energy, and when the use goes up, they have to crank everything back up again, and they have to maintain a certain voltage, or things can just start to collapse and go haywire.
So, All of that's very complicated. And then we're throwing these renewables onto the grid, which are just like producing gobs of energy. And there's voltage issues to make sure everything's kind of running at the proper voltage consistently. Um, so there's all these things that kind of get complicated.
Energy storage systems help to alleviate a lot of that, no matter what your source is, because if like in the summertime, everybody comes home from work at five o'clock and they kick on their AC and they're cooking their dinners on their stovetops, energy use spikes. Well, if you have energy storage with batteries, it just like instantaneously will provide as much as needed in that exact moment.
There's no spinning up and down generators. It's like the battery systems can kind of alleviate that. Um, so it's like, I would make an argument for we need energy storage devices, period, regardless of what you're doing, because it will make the grid more stable, efficient. And just hopefully cheaper in the long run, and then you would tack, then you can start to tack on things like residential solar and utility scale solar.
So it's, it's, to me, it's a no brainer. But it's shocking to me that so many places are not taking advantage of that yet.
John Barton jumped into the comments to say, I've always thought that every public school in America should be covered in solar panels. The panels would reduce electrical costs to the school.
And when school is not in session, that extra power is fed back into the grid, providing a nice refund back to the school district. Sure, there are upfront costs and can't, you can't do it all at once, but it's a completely win win situation. This goes in line with Some of the models that you talked about in your video.
And I saw a lot of things in the comments from people saying there are lots of places in various municipalities around the world where the municipality itself owns the land. So you got like that strip of land between highways, that's government owned property. Should we just be putting solar panels on all of those spots, I know that as I've driven around in the Eastern States, I do see spots near highways where solar panels have been put up.
But while I appreciate the idea of solar panels on a school, I completely endorse that, I endorse solar panels on tops of most large scale buildings, like hospitals, warehouses, things like that. We have a large shopping center near here that is covered in solar panels. That's great. But you don't necessarily want to put solar panels everywhere.
And I saw some people in the comments saying things like, put them on the highways, put them near airports. Uh, I envisioned things like simply large enough rocks blowing around and kind of peppering solar panels as potentially problematic. So are there some, uh, of these suggestions of let's blanket this area.
Are there some areas that you instinctively or through your research are like, yeah, that's not going to work. That's not the best case.
Solar roads and walkways.
Where the road itself or the walkway has a solar panel.
Yeah. A solar sidewalk, a solar road. Um, these ideas have come up again and again. They've actually been tried.
Um, there's been mixed results. Uh, I'm just going to say it. It's a stupid idea. And the reason I think it's a stupid idea, the amount of damage that happens to side, the beating that they take, you would have to make these panels so robust. It's like the cost benefit of doing that is it's not worth it.
It's just, it's just not worth the energy, the time, the investment into it when you can literally just Put them on top of a school, put them on top of a parking lot, you know, canopy structures over parking lots, because then you get, it keeps the cars cool. And then you're making energy off of space that wasn't used for anything.
That makes way more sense because it's going to not get damaged as easily. It's going to have a long lifespan. It's going to be cheap to put into place. So it's like, it's all about like the, it's not the fact that you can't do it. It's like, well, what's the cost benefit of doing it that way versus doing a car canopy.
So that's why I say it's stupid. It's, it's doable ish. It's just not worth it. It's just not worth
it. It's, and it come, kind of reaches a point where like the car canopy, the, I, there's a supermarket not too far from here. It's a Whole Foods and they have a parking lot that has solar over it. And so it provides shade to the people as they're parked.
The car is not good as hot, but they also have charging stations. And so there's the advantage of having charging stations for electric vehicles that are getting it right off of the solar panels that are above the parking lot. And it reaches a point where it's like, well, how much energy does this store and area need?
And how much can they actually get if even the parking lot itself, it's like, well, if the asphalt itself is the solar panel, then the canopy is no longer useful because it's stopping the sun from getting to that panel. So if you're going to the expense of putting in a panel, why is putting it in the sidewalk better than just putting a panel on the roof of the building that you're walking in front of?
Correct. Exactly.
I mean, the argument is like. A road is going to be like, it's a section of the road is going to have more sun hitting it more times of the day than the shade caused by the cars or people walking on it. But again, you still have people walking on it. You still have cars going on it. So it's the wear and tear and the shade that's going to make the voltage fluctuate constantly.
And like, this is why it's like, just put it 15 feet up higher above the cars and guess what? You get nonstop benefit that way.
I could also imagine there would be very little benefit in large parts of the world embedding solar generation into sidewalks and roads in parts of the country, in parts of the world where large times of the year, there's just not a lot of sun and the weather being what it is.
If you're not only putting in something delicate as your road, but then you have to plow it. That doesn't seem like a good idea.
Well, that's, that's a regional thing. It's like, it's, it's also, there's, you and I have a very U S centric point of view here. Cause here we are a car country. Yeah. That's not Europe. And so it's like here in the U S we have strip malls everywhere. Big box stores everywhere. There's like an immense number of just gigantic flat rooftops.
So if you put solar panels on them from the ground, you're not even going to see them. So it's like, it's not going to make things uglier. They're already ugly and it's not going to get any uglier. And then you have all this extra power. We have huge parking lots that we could put stuff on top of, but that's not the case everywhere.
And then on top of which, as you just pointed out, it's like, imagine doing that in New England. Yep. Those panels would last one season and then they'd be completely wrecked. They would just not work. You'd have
a plow come back to the station and it would just have solar capture cells all over the front plow.
It would be a nightmare. So listeners, viewers, what do you think about all this? We've talked about two big topics, getting rid of solar and incorporating plastics into our lives. No, wait, that's wrong. I have that backwards. Getting rid of plastics and incorporating solar into our lives. What do you think about these two topics?
Jumping into the comments, let us know. Thank you so much, everybody, for taking the time to comment. Don't forget, you can also subscribe and share it with your friends. These are very easy ways for you to support the show. 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 click the Become a Supporter button there. Those both allow you to throw coins at our heads. We appreciate the welts. Then we get down to the business of making the program. Thank you everybody for taking the time to watch or listen. We'll talk to you next time.