239: Last Year’s Wind Energy Blows

https://youtu.be/ikukEEHTkeY

Matt and Sean talk about a slow year for wind, and what might be a better future, as well as more feedback on Matt’s net zero home build motivations and results. Does wind energy really blow?

Watch the Undecided with Matt Ferrell episode, The Real Story Behind US Wind's HUGE Losses https://youtu.be/77dZGh34aX8?list=PLnTSM-ORSgi7uzySCXq8VXhodHB5B5OiQ

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Creators & Guests

Host

Matt Ferrell

Host of Undecided with Matt Ferrell, Still TBD, and Trek in Time podcasts

Host

Sean Ferrell

Co-host of Still TBD and Trek in Time Podcasts

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 going to be talking about Matt's Forever Home. We're also going to be talking about wind power production. Yes, again, I know it's been a couple of weeks nonstop. We're almost done. Welcome everybody to Still to be Determined, where we talk about technology as a follow up to Undecided with Matt Ferrell, which takes a look at emerging tech and its impact on our lives.

I'm 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. And luckily for me, my brother is that Matt from Undecided with Matt Ferrell, the aforementioned podcast. And look, here he is now. Matt, how are you today? Surprise

appearance.

Special guest.

That's right. You having a good week? Oh, this, the past couple of days have been kind of interesting because, I've I've mentioned this before, I used to be a user interface, user experience designer for like 20 years working in the software industry and I would occasionally, the nerd I am, because for user experience design you do your user experience testing, and you're trying to figure out what users are doing, and what they want to do. It's the design helping them achieve that goal, so you're doing like, user flows and doing analysis of where the drop-offs are happening and where people are getting stuck and all the kind of stuff. So I used to fall down rabbit holes of like, crunching numbers and looking at percentages and doing calculations, figure out where people are struggling and all that kind of stuff using analytic data. The past couple of days, Sean, I went into my happy place because I was doing that again. But with my home, like I've been grabbing all the data for my solar generation, how my battery's been used, uh, where all that energy's going. So I've been working on that second part of my house one year later stuff.

And so for doing that, I just was going into the numbers of like, well, how's it been working? Have I been achieving these goals? Where's the money going? How much, how much money am I saving by doing this? How long is it going to take to get the return on the investment on that use and all this kind of stuff?

And I've just been, Geeking out, and that's when I realized I am such, such a nerd. I've just been looking at this spreadsheet and having a blast.

I've been doing something similar, but it's from the perspective of Dungeons and Dragons adventure writing. So I've been doing things where I'm just like, Ooh, if I use 2d6 instead of 1d6. The probability is a bell curve as opposed to just a flat line.

What can we do with that? I keep going to my wife, I keep going to Sue and going, Hey, Sue, oh my gosh, it'll pay back in 7.6 years. Look at the data. And she's like, uh huh. Okay. That's interesting. Okay. And then she

pats you on the head and goes back into her room. Yeah, exactly. Yes. It's a special breed of nerd. As for me, I've been busy this week. It's been a very busy week for me at work. And then I thought I would celebrate this weekend by getting the COVID and flu vaccines.

Oh boy. I spent 36 hours with a fever, but it was a special type of fever. I was feverish. I was lethargic. I couldn't keep my eyes open. I was achy. So I was popping Tylenol. And I was just lying in bed, watching TV, falling in and out of sleep while watching TV. And my partner said to me something to the effect of, I'm really sorry that that was your experience.

And I was like, no, it was actually great.

I knew I wasn't really sick. When you get sick, the big, one of the big things for me of being sick is you feel ill with symptoms. As opposed to like discomfort in your throat or your head is super congested or you can't, you know, do things, your stomach is swirling, you can't eat. This was none of that.

This was just, I was really tired, achy, but Tylenol would take care of it and a fever. And I also knew it was not real illness and I knew it was finite. I knew like, Oh, I feel like this now 24 hours from now I'll probably be fine. As opposed to being sick when you're like, this might last for the rest of my life.

So, sitting around, watching TV, falling in and out of sleep, I was like, I think I've been pushing myself too hard. If I'm enjoying this, this much, I think I, I think I need to take a day off. So consider that a wake up call. On now to our discussion about our recent episodes before we get into Matt's most recent from Undecided.

We always like to take a look at our most recent episode from Still to be Determined. So we're talking about episode 238. No regrets from Matt on his one year in his forever home. And I've now called it the forever home twice. That was not really the focal point of your video, but like me, there were people who are interested in you taking a look at it from that perspective, like Andrew Hoover, who jumped into the comments to say, I'm interested in the forever home idea and what makes it different.

And that's a vote in the column for looking at the same structure from a different angle because you talked about all the sustainability aspects, but as somebody in their 50s looking to stay here well into your 70s and beyond. I think it's an interesting conversation to have, especially as somebody who is currently living in an apartment that they rent and I'm in my fifties and I'm looking at these stairs and I'm looking at the stuff I have to deal with in a New York City apartment and I'm like, Hmm, forever home?

I don't think so. Yeah.

Yeah. It's, it's typically referred to as age in place. And that conversation about aging in place. When we were, Unity Homes was the factory built portion of the home, but then we had a local builder. And when we were talking about the local builder, we talked a lot about age and place.

Like you can make the foundation of your house higher or lower. And like, if you don't want to have a lot of steps leading up into your house, you'd build your foundation a little lower. So there's these things that you can do for making sure that your house isn't just awesome for today, but it'll be awesome for you when you're in your seventies,

and your knees are bad and you don't like doing stairs or can't do stairs. Um, yeah, there's a whole, there's a whole aspect to the design of my house that I have not really dealt, delved into. And that is something I do want to touch on in the followup video.

And it was something that came to the forefront for both Matthew and I, as we were helping our parents get ready to move from a house that they had built when they were about our age.

And boy, did they make a bunch of bad decisions.

The reason they couldn't stay in that house was because they didn't think about that stuff. Yeah. Yeah. They built a house that was On a hill. On

a hill with a long driveway that in the winter in the part of the country where they lived was guaranteed to be icy.

Yeah. And A house where if you wanted to be in the living area, you had to be downstairs. If you wanted to be in the sleeping area, you had to be upstairs. And with a very large basement that they also used for not only storage, but also a private office. So, you know, stairs, stairs, everywhere are there stairs.

There

was also this comment from Ray Johnson who wrote this question about the cost of your home. Matt, taking out the supply and demand issue of the chain, adding extra dollars to the building cost. If you were to build now, how much cheaper do you think it would be? Also could you measure how much NOx and health related particles make it into the home versus a similar home in the area?

I know of a webinar near me in Australia. It talks about the hidden cost of cheaply built homes versus high standard, passive standard homes, and not just talking running costs. So a multitude of questions here. We could unpack them one at a time. First, do you know roughly what supply and demand chain issues added to the overall expense of your house.

Uh, well, like I talked in the video, we probably spent 25 to 30 percent more building this house than a typical house, and that is including what we were currently paying versus what a standard house would have been built for. It does include the, holy crap. And I haven't calculated how much it would be

like today, if we did it today, but in, I've seen graphs of the house prices and building prices, and you could see that they kind of, you know, going up and they spiked and they've kind of come back down a little bit, but I don't know the percentage off the top of my head. It is not 25 percent drop. It's probably like a five or 10 percent drop at most at this point.

Um, so we would have saved money. But it may not have been like a, you know, oh, yay, celebrate amount of money, it would have been a smaller amount. Yeah, it

comes down to a conversation that you and I have fairly frequently, which is when is the right time to pull the trigger? And the right time to pull the trigger is when you're ready to pull the trigger.

And that's not, that's not an equation that's helpful, but it is an honest answer. You've talked before about, do you wait until the next generation of solar panels comes out to put them on your house? Well, no, because by the time you put those on your house, there's yet another generation beyond them. And when it comes to the calculations into home purchase or home building, the number of parameters outside of your control are so vast.

Like, you know, for you, you built, you bought the land and built at a time when interest rates were here. And then they went up because of inflation control. And now they're going to be going down again. Like, well, did people who built a house during the past couple of years make a mistake? Not if they were ready to build a house, buy a house at that time.

Like it's just. You jump into the pool when you're ready to be swimming.

Yeah. One way to look at it is like, how much are you willing to pay? What's the value of that thing to you at that moment in time? And can you afford it? Is it worth it to you? Do you think you're worth the benefits of that price at that time?

And for my wife and I, when we were looking at this house, it ticked those boxes. So it's like, it's one of those woulda, coulda, shoulda in hindsight of like, if we had just waited a couple of years or if we'd pulled the trigger a couple of years before, man, that would have been great, but that's not the situation we were in.

And we do not regret building the house when we did it. Uh, we don't regret any of it, but I was just looking at the solar prices, solar prices for installing solar. Now the prices have dropped to basically where they were before the pandemic. And I bought solar right at the peak. So it's like, that's kind of like a, it's like, I could have saved thousands of dollars if I just waited, you know, a year and a half to install the panels.

But it's like, at the time I was like, I'm willing to pay the price to get this on my house now. So it's like. Yeah, it's fine. And depending on your

circumstance, something like that isn't even necessarily, and you're proving it, you're proving my point for me. If it's not cost prohibitive, it's not cost prohibitive, prohibitive.

It's just like, it is what you are ready to do in that moment.

Well, Going back to my, it's gonna be in the next video, but my spreadsheets of data, I, it doesn't matter in the long run. It really doesn't. I'm, I'm gonna be coming out ahead. So, uh, I'm, I'm all good. I'm fine.

What about the particulate matter?

And Ray uses the term NOx. I assume that means noxious. Um, yeah. So particulate matter and potentially noxious gases and other things that might come into the home. In your home versus your neighbors, I know you live in a neighborhood where this was not a developed area from start to finish by a single builder.

You've got a neighborhood that is made up of homes that are built in different places, probably over the span of a century. You probably got incredibly old hundred year old homes and then you've got homes like yours and they're all in the same neighborhood. So this is a wide array of building. Do you have a sense of it?

In some way of homes in your part of the country and the improvements over time of this kind of question, the bring in the, the ability for your home to stop noxious and particulate matter from getting into the home versus homes a hundred years ago, 50 years ago, 20 years ago, 10 years ago.

What does that look like?

I don't have the data, I have more, it's more of an anecdotal experience I can talk about right now, cause like my old house, which was built in the 1950s, we had it re insulated, and we, and the re insulation helped to make it a little more airtight, but it was still an old leaky house, um, nothing close to what we have now, I have bad allergies, And so it's like I had to get, I got, um, HEPA filters that were in different key rooms of the house that were just running 24 7 at different rates during the day, depending on if somebody was in the room or not, and it made the house very comfortable,

helped my allergies. If I didn't have those running, I would have been in a bad place and it wasn't just from the stuff that we slough off from ourselves over the course of the day. It was also pollination coming in, fumes from car exhaust coming in, all that kind of stuff getting into the house. This house, I've been shocked.

I have the same exact HEPA filters and I put brand new filters in them when we moved into the house. Now in the old house, I would have to change those filters easily every six months, and you'd pull them out, you'd see them gray, like, totally, like, caked and stuff. This house, six months came, I looked at the filters, they look brand new.

Okay, I'll just let them run, put them in.

Nice.

Yeah. We're here for a year, I pull them out, they're still white, they're still, like, there's some dog hair and, like, stuff like that stuck to it. Good. Good. A little bit of dust, but they still look really good. Okay. Put it back in . Wanna keep going? So even without any, if I, I, if I wasn't running the HEPA filters, which I do 'cause I have pets, I have allergies, I wouldn't have any concerns about the pollination and the stuff coming in the house.

And I've been changing the filters on my ERV, which is what filters the outside air before it comes in. And this is the benefit of having airtight house. Because in a regular house, it's leaking in through cracks and crevices all around the home and you cannot control the air that's coming into your home.

I can, because my house is very airtight. So it's like the air that's coming in, I have to change that filter on, it's a Merv 14 filter I've got on the ERV for the air intake. I've changed it every three months. And when I pull that sucker out, Sean, to say it's disgusting would be an understatement. One time I changed it, it was before summer.

It was like, I've been changing it at like the equinox, like the, you know, like when we changed in the spring, when we changed in the summer, and I changed it in September, March,

December 21st. Yeah.

Right. So before the summer, I changed it and it was almost black. Like it was, I was like, what the hell is in the air in my area that it made it black?

There's a roadway not too far from my backyard. I'm assuming it's like fumes and stuff coming off of traffic. Truck exhaust. Yeah. I just changed it. Yeah. I just changed it like a week and a half ago or something like that. And it wasn't black, but it was an incredibly dark gray. And so it's like, That's all getting trapped.

That's all in the outside air coming into my home, and I can control it because of the ERV and the air tightness. And if you don't have that, that stuff's coming to your home. Uh, so you have to do stuff inside your house to try to take care of it. So for me, my HEPA filters, I think, are Not pulling their weight in my new house because they kind of don't have to.

So it's like, they're almost, there's a placebo, I think for me at this point. Well, I think you're,

I think you also hit the nail on the head when you said that they are taking care of the pet dander, which I know I would be in the same boat you are. Um, if I was inside and knew that the outside filter was doing such a great job, I would still be running HEPAs because of pet dander.

Um, also I find your anecdote very funny because, you know, I mean, Matt and I, we think a lot alike, we act a lot alike, but we've made certain choices in life that have put us in different positions. And of course, I live here in Brooklyn, New York. Uh, I live on a very busy avenue and, very, the kind of black dust that Matt just described, uh, that's a daily occurrence here.

I wipe it off of my kitchen counter. It's everywhere. So, uh, somebody I knew years and years ago told me once that her father was a doctor and that according to studies, living in a city like this with this much traffic is the equivalent of smoking six cigarettes a day. So. Yep. Yep. She took that as a reason to say, like, so therefore, if I smoke one cigarette a day, it's not going to hurt me.

I'm like, you sound like an idiot. Um, on now to our next question, this one from Lowlander, who wrote in to ask Matt a question about his Attic. I wonder if Matt could cover why he didn't make his attic a part of the overall envelope of the house. I understand that he didn't put a basement in for several reasons, but by insulating at the roofline and not the attic deck, he could have prevented a bunch of problems he had with running things through the attic that would have been exposed to the elements.

Matt, do you want to talk a little bit about the thinking around there's the living space and then there's the attic space and let's not treat that like living space.

Yeah, this is, I had a facepalm because this was a theme of questions I saw in that video and I should have talked about it because I only talked about the basement.

I did a Unity Homes house, which is a factory built home. They have like five or six different base models that you can do, uh, and within the model that you choose, there's a lot of configuration you can do, a lot of, because it's like Lego blocks. You know, I don't want to like, I want to have an extra section off of this side.

I want to put the bedroom over here. You can do a lot of customization within their system, but it's still a system. So I wasn't just building this from scratch. So in their system, you could do a basement or not do a basement. You could do insulated attic or you could not do an insulated attic. And the main reason we didn't was money.

I mean, that comes down to money. The reason we didn't do a basement was we save money and we could put it elsewhere. The reason we didn't do the, uh, insulated, uh, roof panels, they basically build the roof panels just like they build the walls. So it's like in the factory. They build all your wall panels, inject the insulation, construct it in the air, you know, weather, you know, it's an insulated factory.

So it's like, you don't have to worry about water, and they can do it perfectly. Everything is perfectly square. It's great. They do the same thing for the roof panels. And then you'd have your thermal envelope would be the entire, even roof area. So like my entire attic would have been, you know, insulated.

Uh, it was going to add something like $60,000 to the cost of the house, and I don't know about you, it's like, the basement was gonna add like 30 or 40 thousand, and the router was gonna add like 60, and it was like, you know, it's like a hundred thousand, what? No, we don't, we don't need that, we don't need that, we can, we can figure out how to store things, Not in a basement to become a hoarder.

And yeah, well, it would be great to have the insulated attic space. It's like, it's gonna save all this money and we're gonna, I'm gonna get a geothermal system. And it's like, that money can go to that instead of this. And so it was like, yeah, all these trade offs. So for me, it was just a trade off. And do I regret it?

No. Um, would it have helped some things? Yes. It would have also complicated some other things, like the way that solar panels had to get their stuff fed through the home, the way my electrical line from the utility had to get fed into the home, actually went up into the attic and through the attic, And if that's part of your insulated, like, roof panel system, it's gonna make that way more complicated.

So it's like, there's a whole bunch of reasons why I'm glad I didn't do that because it actually made it easier for some aspects of the home while not doing it also then made it more difficult for other areas of the home. So again, it's a, it's just trade offs. You just have to make the call of what's right for you.

Right. Um, if it was being built from scratch, like not through a factory built system and it was just a local builder that designed it, all of that would have been taken into account. But because I was doing kind of a, this kind of hybrid, it's built in a factory, but it's also kind of built on site, kind of hybrid model.

I was kind of like having to work within some constraints that you might not have otherwise. Right.

Finally, I wanted to visit a couple of comments that were about the AI podcast that Matt shared with me and to be clear, if anybody listening to this now didn't listen to last week's episode, I invite you to go back and listen to it.

It was not us talking about AI. It was us listening to a podcast that had been created by somebody using AI so that the AI hosts were having a conversation about realizing that they were AI and what the implications of that would mean when the podcast was over. Matt and I listened to it. I had an existential nightmare while being awake.

And then we went on and recorded the rest of the program. This spurred on a couple of comments like this one from Mark Loveless. Mark, good to see you in this podcast. We see you all the time in the Trek podcast, but this is the first time I can recall seeing you over here. And Mark wrote in to say, holy shit.

Oh my God. I was laughing so hard at the beginning with the AI podcast bit. Good Lord, Matt. Sean is a philosophy major and you hit him with that. Sean, what was the worst thing about all that AI stuff? Was it the fact that it caused you to question humanity and existence, or was it Matt Cackling while basically referencing the end of humankind?

For what it's worth, Sean, despite the fact that you've only appeared on my computer, I think you're real. Hugs. Thank you, Mark. Hugs back. Uh, I would say that for me, which was worse, Matt Cackling or the Questioning of humanity existence. I would say the questioning of humanity, humanity, existence, because if I was in Matt's shoes, I would also cackle.

That's one thing about the sense of humor in our family is if something is funny, you laugh, you don't, you don't not laugh. Thank you, Mark, for that comment. And there was also this from Justin, who wrote in to say, so the first six minutes of the show, I blew my really good coffee out of my nose and all over my laptop and my cat.

I now need a new laptop and a whole lot of band aids. Thanks a lot, guys. Pain, lots of pain. Wow. No mention from Justin about the state of the cat. I assume the cat did not stay around for the rest of the podcast. I hope we didn't lose a listener. Thank you, Justin, for jumping into the comments. On now to our discussion about Matt's most recent.

This is the real story behind the US wind's huge losses. And it's an analysis of the state of wind power generation in the United States and why there seems to be a one step forward, one and a half steps back. In the past few years, and right away, we knew where this conversation on today's episode would head out when we see comments like Jopo, who jumps in to say, you won't find much support for wind turbines unless you're already a big fan.

Just a Jopo. Oh, yes. Kudos to you, sir. Well, well done. Yes. Lots of comments on this seem to be from people who actually are in the industry of energy production. I found that fascinating. The conversation was a very high level conversation with people weighing in with comments like this. Mutt to Jeff, Who jumped in to say, good video, Matt.

I have worked in the wind industry for going on 12 years now in multiple roles. A major factor in the struggle of manufacturers is about six years ago, we all got into a race to the bottom. Who could sell the cheapest turbines? Most kilowatts per dollar. Who could sell at a loss and make it up on the back end with service contracts?

Who could underbid and take service contracts from other offers? GE, Vestas, and Siemens all went to war and pretty much destroyed themselves. In the process, the new models onshore turbines lost all the quality and reliability that had been built into them over the preceding decades. There are utilities out there that want to, and have the ability to, build new onshore wind farms.

They can't because no one has a turbine to sell them that isn't utter garbage. Fascinating insight from somebody who says that they're in the industry. And yeah, I can't help but think this is a trend we see across industries, even into consumer products that we bring into our homes all the time, built in, uh, inefficiencies,

simply in the name of cost cutting that I remember, uh, Matt and I not at the same period of time, but we both worked at a video store in Boston when we were in grad school. I was in grad school. I worked there. I left grad school, Matt started grad school. He took over my position at the same place. One of the services that was offered at this video store is they would do VCR repair.

And eventually, the guy who was doing the VCR repair was getting VCRs that were more recent models. And he would come back with estimates on repair costs. And people were stunned to find out that the repair costs on these would be as high. As they were, we're talking hundreds and hundreds of dollars for repair cost.

He had one gentleman come in with a VCR that was probably from the mid eighties. And this guy paid, I think, 250 to repair his VCR at a time when VCRs, you could buy a new one for probably close to a hundred dollars at that point. And the reason he did it is because the VCRs today aren't built the same way.

The guy who was doing the repairs was actually getting custom made pieces. Gears were being made custom made by a tool and dye shop. So a lion's share of the cost was actually the custom pieces because he was having them made out of metal. And he said to me once, yeah, when you buy a VCR today, it's all plastic.

They know it will wear out and it is too cheap for anybody to make money making these pieces. So nobody does. There's no reason to repair it. You're spending a hundred dollars on a thing. Use it for a couple of years and you throw it away. You buy a new one. That's their goal. I find it incredibly frustrating that something similar to that mindset is taking place at the wind turbine level, where the idea of, well, we'll build something that's not as good as we could build it, but then we'll have service contracts and make up the money later.

Well, I appreciate, I appreciate much to Jeff's point on how he says they're all utter garbage and there's been a race to the bottom. And from me and my team's research, we've seen similar sentiments elsewhere, uh, but I would also say to temper that just a little bit, um, I've been to wind turbine farm places where they're being built.

I've talked to people who do it and I've, I'm not going to name names, about who said what? But I was sitting there in a conversation among several guys at the foot of a turbine that was being built. And these guys were all talking about the different models they had worked on. Oh yeah. Vestas and GE, they were naming all the different big brands.

And they were talking about like how some of them were so poorly thought out. Like they were fine once they were built, but to build them was exceptionally difficult. Like how you attach the blade to the hub was so complicated, took so much work and it was prone to error where you could do what you thought was a good job and then it would fail because there was like problems with it.

Where other models that were coming out were like, You could put a blade onto the hub in like 30 minutes with no problem. And it was super easy and rock solid when you were finished. So it varied manufacturer to manufacturer, model to model. And it was kind of like you could, they were kind of laughing about how some of these companies were designing turbines, not thinking about how much effort it was going to take to assemble that turbine in the field.

It was just, they're just designing the turbine. Where others were really doing like streamlining it to make it super quick and easy to put together, super easy to take apart. And it kind of ties back to what you're saying about the VCRs. It's like, there was this kind of mentality of like almost brute forcing it or taking the cheapest path.

And then there's some that are kind of thinking through the whole lifespan of the turbine and trying to design it in a way that's not only easy to put together, but it's easy to retrofit or fix down the road. So I wouldn't say what, what, what Mutt brought up, which was, they're all utter garbage. I would say, That's kind of, I get where he's coming from, but from the people I've talked to, it's a mixed bag.

It's definitely correct. It sounds

like what you're saying is that the better framing might be there is garbage in the system as opposed to it's all garbage. Oh yeah.

Yes.

Correct. Yes. I'm reminded as you talked about that of the Challenger disaster in the form of the cause of the Challenger disaster was the O Ring.

On the booster rockets, and the reason the booster rockets had an O-ring, a ring that was meant to seal two components together, and that ring broke and caused a leak, which then led to the explosion. And the reason that the booster rockets had an O ring is because where they were manufactured was, am I remembering it correctly, Minnesota.

It was

somewhat, I thought it was down south. Was it south? I thought it was somewhere. Yeah, I thought it was down south. It was not where,

it was not where the shuttles were launched. And the reason for that was because the government was spreading the wealth, so the jobs project of developing the booster rockets was in a state where they wanted to get the vote of those senators.

So, like, oh, if you vote for this package, That will lead to funding for NASA will give jobs to your state in the form of you guys will build these booster rockets, but the rockets were too big to put on a truck or a train and get to Florida for launching. So they had to be built in two sections, which created an O ring.

So effectively politics led to the disaster and I, it feels similar in this way, not that anybody is going to, there's not going to be a catastrophe in the form of one of these wind turbines blowing up or doing something like that, but the kind of weird thinking in the name of, well, let's figure out how Not how to build a really great thing, but build it in such a way that we can do X, Y, and Z a year from now.

Whether that's make profit or have a service contract or whatever that goal is, feels like you're maybe putting the wrong carrot in front of the wrong mule. There was this comment from Draken Blasen who jumped into the comments with some information about Italy, that kind of puts, uh, interesting framing around the idea of why or how people will double down on things that aren't long term great for them and push back against change.

This is something that Matt and I have talked about in the podcast before, and we talked about it last week when we were talking about wind power in China and how there is political pressure there because the region where they are building their wind farms is also the one of the greatest producers of coal.

And so there's like, well, how do you move away from coal if the entire industry here is based upon coal? Well, Drakken jumps in to say in Italy, Sardinia, there's a prime example of a community or local government opposing transition to something new. 75 percent of their energy production is still thermoelectric production with gas at 34 percent,

coal at 33. People are protesting and antagonizing solar farms and wind farms, both onshore or offshore. They are even vandalizing some construction sites. The local government disbanded most of the project and refused to accept any further applications. It's a pity being a big island in the middle of the sea offshore wind farms would be an amazing ideal in order to reduce the impact and have cheap energy production.

It really does seem like, well, you're talking about an island. Well, why wouldn't that Island want to use all that surrounding water and figure out ways of doing this as Matt has pointed out in previous videos about wind farms. Being located near the ocean is usually a reliable source of constant wind that can be used in this way.

This is why water based wind farming is so appealing. And. Yeah, here in New York City, we have now a wind farm offshore, which is very slowly like you can see these things on the horizon and it's a nice change for us here. I think it's fascinating though, when you talk about change in this way, where you're talking about sustainable energy for a community, but their antagonism to it is so great as to actually lead to vandalizing of sites, what do you think is one of the pathways to changing that mindset in a community?

Is it public education in, in advocating for, um, the reasons Behind the change, or is it as I interpret this, largely economy based, do you think people are seeing a threat to their personal income and their jobs? It's entirely possible that in a community that is looking at like power production may be a large employer in the region.

What do you do to convince people that there will be opportunities for them? And how do you, how do you communicate these things? What do you think you see when you look at this?

I think it largely comes down to economics. I think it comes down to I work in the natural gas industry. I work in coal. This is going to take my job.

I think that a lot of it does come from that. And then there's also, of course, misinformation that probably Loops other people into the hatred of it. I think the biggest thing would be some kind of policies, either government or from the companies that are building these things out to do outreach, to try to recruit people from the natural gas industry, from the coal industry.

We got jobs for you. We can train you. Here's, you know, we'll cover the training costs. Come on board and you can help build this stuff. Like I mentioned how I've, I've been at wind farms that were being built. Every person I talk to I'm like, so what did you do before this? I cannot tell you the number of people, Sean, that worked in the energy industry in one shape or another for decades.

So they were working. Oh, I worked in natural gas. I worked in, you know, whatever, coal, you know, these people came from all sectors of the energy industry and this is transitioning and it was awesome to talk to all these people that are still in the energy industry, but now they're just building wind farms or they're working on solar power plants or whatever it is.

So I think there's an outreach that needs to happen. I think part of that could be policies from local governments to help try to retrain people Or, the utilities doing that themselves, the companies that are building the stuff out doing that themselves. Because, I think if you can get buy in from the people who are doing it, I think you'd probably see

that outcry drop, but then there's also the outcry of people that just don't want to see a wind farm on the horizon because they think it's ugly and they don't want it. So there's a aspect of nimbyism that is going to be hard to combat. I'm always fascinated

by that because from a certain perspective, building anything Impacts your view, whether it's a building, a dam, a wind tower, like anything you build, anything, it changes the view.

And I'm always amazed at the arguments by people to say, um, Oh, that thing on the horizon that I can't hear, and it is actually kind of graceful is an eyesore. I don't, I don't get that. I find it interesting when I drive. Beauty is in the beholder. Yeah, I guess so. It's, I always find it interesting when I'm driving on a long trip and I'm on a highway somewhere and I see a wind farm, I find it kind of peaceful.

It's almost like a reminder of like the constants of wind. And that is just somehow like calming. I look at like, there'll be some hills and there'll be some wind towers in the distance. And I'll just be like, Hmm. And it like kind of calms me in a moment of like, there's something graceful about that, that I just find aesthetically pleasing.

And to think that somebody is like, I don't want to be golfing and have to look at that nightmare. Really?

That's your nightmare? I think they're beautiful. I think they're, I think they're beautiful. I have lots of pictures from planes, Sean, whenever I'm on a plane and we're kind of coming in for a landing.

I can't tell you how many times like I've been on a plane and I'm like, we're flying over Texas and I'm looking out the window. I'm like, oh, that's so cool. And you see these like little itty bitty little wind turbines on the ground, and I snap pictures of them. From above they look tiny.

There was also this comment from BoredGuy who said cars put billions of tons of gas into our atmosphere and nobody cares, but one turbine blade breaks some fiberglass into our oceans and people get up in arms.

Insanity. Uh, BoredGuy, you're not wrong. I think there's a big aspect here that you don't worry about what you can't see. And I think that a lot of people drive around and they don't think in terms of like, what is this putting into the air? So there's that. Um, I also think that there's a certain amount of when you're on a beach, if stuff starts washing ashore, it seems like a bigger problem than what you put into the air when you drove to the beach.

So there's, you can actually physically pick it up and hold it in your hand. And it's a thing that's like, Oh, this is, this is not great. Um, I remember Matt, when we were,

there's also an element of there's better and there's best. And a lot of people get stuck on looking for the best solution. There is no best solution.

There's just a better solution. And so it's like, yeah, wind turbines have their problems, but it's way better than what we're doing now. Yeah. So you gotta look at it from that perspective too.

Yeah, I remember when Matt and I were, I want to say you were maybe high school, I was probably in college, our parents wanted to treat the family to a lovely cruise vacation.

So we went on a cruise and one evening we were all walking on deck and spotted that the ship was dumping bags of garbage out the back of the ship. And this I guess is a regular practice on these cruise ships that they are like, we're making all this garbage and we're not going to carry it back to shore to do what with it.

We'll just dump it out here. And so they're dumping all this garbage into the ocean. At the time, I remember being disgusted by this. This was like, just an, a sign of such absolute human, negative human impact on the environment. And I was just like, this is awful. And now all these years later, I'm like, The fuel the ship was burning was worse for the environment than any of that garbage that was going in.

Because the garbage going in was probably largely food. And so what was being dumped into the ocean was probably largely like going to go into the ocean and then just be biomass that would break down. Whereas what we were chugging around the ocean on was probably diesel and cleaner than other forms of energy, but

yeah, all in the eye of the beholder. If you're interested in when I started to get, become an environmentalist and get concerned about this stuff, it was that trip, Sean. It was, I was outraged. I was so angry. I was like 14 or something like that. I remember videotaping it and I was like, they're doing it in the middle of the night, which is the worst part. It's like, they know what they're doing is not going to be received well from their passengers.

So they did it at 11 o'clock at night. So you couldn't really see it, but you could hear it. It was like, what is that? You look over the ship and you see this trail of garbage going off to the horizon. I was like, yeah, carnival cruises.

Just, yeah. I wasn't, I wasn't going to call them out, but no, I'm calling them out.

Apparently they're not going to be a sponsor of Undecided. Um, Nope. So listeners, viewers, what do you think? What have you, what have you thought about this conversation? Let us know in the comments, commenting, liking, subscribing, sharing with your friends, these are all super easy ways for you to support the podcast.

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Don't worry about the welts. They do heal. Matt and I both have freezers full of ice. We sit calmly watching some TV while we wait for the welts to go down. And then we get down to the hard work of having a conversation about cruise lines and what they do with their garbage. Thank you everybody for taking the time to watch or listen, and we will look forward to talking to you next time.