The Green Deal is not so green.

0:00 Speaker 1 What is today Steve garm And he’s an author, a researcher on energy and environmental issues and concerned about the power of our country in the future. Steve, you’re also an author. You wrote about your latest book is the Coming Renewable Energy Failure. Tell us about that.

0:25 Speaker 2 Hey, John, great to join you again. Yeah. The book talks about the proposed energy transition to zero energy by twenty fifty and it goes through electrical power and home appliances, electric vehicles, heavy industry, heavy transportation, the recent energy crisis in Europe. But one thing I actually didn’t get in the book is what’s going on with artificial intelligence right now,

0:53 which just popped up in about the last year and a half with the invention of chat GPT. Yeah, and then just this last week or so, we have in Nvidia that became the most valuable company in the world in terms of stock price. They’re selling artificial intelligence cards into data centers and this is going to have a

1:18 tremendous impact on our the electrical power on our grid.

1:23 Speaker 1 And well, there’s one more thing, and I believe you know, I agree with you on solar cells, windmills. They’re never going to power the rest for our country for the next century, it’s going to be what they call SMR small modular reactors, which are nuclear reactors that come from the same nuclear reactors that run our submarines and aircraft carriers.

1:49 They’re being converted, they’re being converted into land reactors, so they’re small and they can power AI warehouses and AI data centers. And that’s the future of energy in America. And all of a sudden, I’m in it, and all of a sudden, everybody else is in it, and and that’s going to be the future of America.

2:16 Speaker 2 Well maybe I think there are about fifty startup companies that are trying to do small modular reactors now, and also molten actors. I’m still waiting to see the cost through though. You know, I’ve looked at these, and the big problem with the nuclear reactors is the cost, of course, much more expensive than natural gas. But if you take

2:36 take a one hundred megawatt reactor, for example, a small nuclear reactor, and you take you add ten of those together, the price seems to be about as expensive as the big ones. So I do think there’s very high potential.

2:48 We need some cost breakthroughs, and we need to get those costs down. But maybe that will be the future.

2:55 Speaker 1 Yes, that will be the future. I believe in it because I’m investing in it. Tell us who is leading the charge of all these electric cars. I mean one of the electric clock companies last week went bankrupt already.

3:16 Speaker 2 Yeah, there are many, and the charging companies also are all going bankrupt. So the push for electric vehicles, it comes from climatism, which is an ideology, and climatism is the fear of man made global warming and the proponents of what is called net zero, which is many of our political leaders, many in the United States, say that

3:39 we need to get rid of coal, oil, and natural gas by twenty to fifty and we also need to get rid of gasoline cars, and we need to switch to wind, solar, biofuels, and electric vehicles. And so there’s a tremendous push to do that. I know the state of New York wants to have about one or two

4:00 let’s see, one hundred zero mission vehicle sales by twenty thirty five, and many many electric vehicles. But you know there are there are some big problems with those, as you know, particularly in cold I think.

4:14 Speaker 1 The consumer is revolting against it.

4:17 Speaker 2 Well they are. EV’s have actually are actually losing share. They lost share in the first of US as small vehicle sales in the first quarter in California, and the fourth quarter EV sales actually declined. UH. And there’s some big issues insurance, the UH problems in cold weather, many many different things. And and the other thing is, I think the the early adopters who have

4:45 you know, who want a cool tesla for a second car UH and the people who have a who can charge at home and might have a heated garage to for their EV while is charging. Those folks have have sort of picked up the evs they needed. But if you’re in an apartment building and you got to run

5:01 a power cable over the public walkway, things aren’t really so good.

5:06 Speaker 1 No, you’re absolutely right, there’s a lot, you know, there’s a long way to go. I think gasoline vehicles are here to stay. And and it’s some of these you know politicians, but one reason or another they think it’s cool to go all electric, but it doesn’t work. And that in Florida when they hit by the hurricane or

5:31 by salt water for some reason, the lithium batteries.

5:34 Speaker 2 Blow up and it’s they do.

5:37 Speaker 1 And and now the insurance companies are very much concerned that if you leave an electric car in your house and it blows up or it catches fire, then the whole house goes down. They’re going to start canceling insurance and homes. They have electric cars.

5:54 Speaker 2 That could be let me get back to this power shortage though. This is very very important. So we have three big drivers of demand. Now, we didn’t have any growth in demand in the US over the last two decades, but now we have the shift to electric vehicles, which is occurring to some extent. We have a big push

6:11 for electric home appliances. The state of New York passed the law in twenty twenty three that says all one to six story buildings by twenty twenty six in new construction have to use electric appliances can’t use gas. The third is a big federal government push for green hydrogen.

6:29 And the way you’d use that is you use electricity to split apart water to produce hydrogen gas. Also very electricity intensive. But the biggest one is artificial intelligence. And what’s going on here is that the data centers of the nation are being upgraded to do artificial intelligence, and they run these behavioral routines that with thousands of processors

6:58 that work for week, signed in twenty four hours a day to solve problems. Now, today there are twenty five hundred data centers in the nation, about one hundred and thirty of those in New York State, and they use four percent of the US electricity. But it’s now being projected by many they’re upgrading these data centers with new

7:18 high speed AI cards and when you do that, they consume six to ten times more power than they did in the past. So it is now projected that data centers are going to use up to twenty percent of US power within the next ten years. And this is going to create a tremendous electrical power shortage, and we’re

7:39 going to need a lot of those small reactors. They’re going to quit plans.

7:45 Speaker 1 A lot of those data centers have signed up with US already.

7:48 Speaker 2 They are many of them. And for example, I’ll give you an example in Texas, Texas. The Texas grid was projecting eighty five megawatts and now they’ve changed it. They say by twenty thirty they’re going to need one hundred and fifty megawatts. They’re going to have to almost double the amount of power that they have in Virginia, which

8:06 is the largest state for data centers. They’ve gone to the grid operator and say said, we need two gigawatts and new power. And these are the big folks. These are Amazon, Meta, Google, Oracle, Microsoft. We’re going to get these contracts.

8:23 Speaker 1 Steve Wick, tight on time. We’ve got about thirty seconds left. Round it up and I want to I want you to push your book one more time.

8:30 Speaker 2 Yeah, they can get my green breakdown the coming renewable Energy Failure for my website. Steve Gorham G O R E H A M dot com. I’ll send them a signed copy. There are ebooks as well on Amazon. But people want to watch for this coming, all this demand for electricity over the next year’s we’ll have many the

8:49 next year, we’re gonna have many, many articles on this. It’s going to be a big impact.

8:53 Speaker 1 Steve Gorham, thank you for your update on energy in America and we’ll catch up with you again. Mels. Thank you. John