141. When Electric Cars Aren't Reliable; The Benefits of Processed Foods

Brian talks about Wired.com's story on the benefits of processed foods. James is depressed because his beloved Nissan LEAF needs a new PTC cabin heater with a hefty price tag. The city of Houston has a boil water advisory because of a blip in their power grid. The Tesla Semi seems to be for real. Musk says it completed a 500 mile journey pulling an 81,000 pound load. The upcoming Sizewell C nuclear power plant in the UK was in need of public funding.

Why the Saudis have electric buses.

There's a new record size for off-shore wind turbines and it's 16 megawatts.

Ebike subsidies expand across the United States.

GM dealerships are repairing Teslas. Will they also fix James's LEAF?

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Transcript

Hello, and welcome to episode 141 of the Clean Energy Show.

I'm Brian Stockton.

I'm James Whittingham.

I finally come clean this week about a secret I've been keeping for two months.

And, no, I'm not pregnant.

And, yes, I would make an excellent mother.

The city of Houston is under a boil water advisory.

Because of power outages.

Everything is bigger in Texas, including grid problems.

The Tesla semi completed a 500 miles journey with a load weighing 81 £0, or roughly half the weight of Elon Musk's eagle.

The upcoming Sewell Sea nuclear power plant in the UK was in need of funding.

Ultrawealthy prime Minister Rishi Sunak has stepped in with a cash infusion.

Oh, wait, I'm being told it's taxpayer money.

He's not an idiot.

All that and hopefully borrow this edition of the Clean Energy Show.

Brian I'm sweating like a hog and I'll tell you why.

Yes, I'm not a sick.

I was shoveling the driveway because it blew in.

And before the show, I frantically tracked down a plug in electric snow blower.

My partner was coming home for lunch and I said, can you swing by the Walmart because there's one left.

It was like $100 less than if I made this decision a few days ago.

I would have had all the Cyber Monday Friday deals, but I missed out on that.

But I found one with specs that was really good.

Now, I've got a battery operated snow shovel.

Not cutting it.

What's going to happen now is we're going to get trace amounts of snow for the next five years, but I say, fine, it's worth spending the money for that to happen, because it's worth it.

We've been snowed in and my partner had to park on the street and the driveway was daunting.

So I quickly assembled it at lunchtime.

While you were having your happy nap.

Yeah.

And I went out there with a short extension cord and did what I could.

And now I'm sweating like a crazy.

I'm soaked in sweat because my heart was going maximum, which doesn't take much these days, but when you're doing anything clearing snow, it gets the heart rate going, unfortunately.

So, like a plug in kind rather than battery operated, I guess, is a lot cheaper.

It is cheaper.

I did splurge, though, and get pretty much the most powerful one you can get.

It's about 14 amps.

You can get a 15 amp one, but then you have problems with your extension cords overheating and blowing breakers and things.

It's kind of the maximum that it will handle on an ongoing basis.

But I went out there with, I would say, a 15 inch drift and went right through it like it does a foot of snow.

But it will go under the drift and it will still keep going under the drift and you just go over it a second time.

So, yeah, I'm happy with it.

Those are a pain in the ass.

I've had them before because the extension cord but I knew that I wanted power, and this was a bigger unit, and it was a couple of couldn't really afford it, but I said, man, because we got to clean the sidewalks this year by city by law.

By city by law.

Yeah.

Well, just a quick update.

Last week I was complaining about GoComics.com, this website I go to every day to read daily comic strip.

It was down for a full five days and finally came back online.

They offered no explanation of exactly what happened.

It was supposedly a cyber security issue, which I had read on another website.

But anyway, our long nightmare is over.

It's back.

And coincidentally, this week on Saturday, it was Charles Schultz's, what would have been his 100th birthday, the creator of the Peanuts comic strip, the legend of newspaper comic strips.

It was his 100th birthday, so a lot of the comic strips had special tributes to him on Saturday.

So that was a lot of fun to read.

All the cartoonists got together and decided to do that.

And then the last thing, comic strips do you remember the soap opera comic strips when you were a kid? There were only a couple of comic strips that were not funny.

Yeah.

Give me an example of one, can you? Well, there's two main ones.

Mary worth.

Okay.

And Rex Morgan, MD.

And these trips have both been around for, like, 100 years by this point.

Anyway, I started reading them a couple of months ago because I was looking for new, exciting things to follow, and I'd always avoided them like the plague when I was a kid because it's like, this is ridiculous.

There's no joke here.

What's the point of this anyway? I've been reading for a couple of months now, and I'm starting to get into it.

It's kind of fun.

A bit speechless here.

You're reading soap opera comic strips after resisting them your whole life.

My whole life.

I mean, I thought, is it a gossipy? Pleasure, man, what's going on here? Yes.

I don't know.

I just like comic strips, and there's not enough good ones, so I just been looking to expand my horizons.

What happened to the creators? Did their kids take over? I mean, if these are 100 years old yeah, often that is the case.

I don't think that's the case with Mary.

We are Rex Morgan, but yeah, often it's passed on to a son or a daughter or a nephew or a niece or something.

I don't know.

They've all been around now, a lot of them, for 100 years.

I don't know.

It's a weird thing.

All right, Brian, I've got an announcement to make.

I've been hiding something from you for two months.

Wow.

You and the listeners.

Wow.

And it is regarding my leaf.

Oh, yeah.

My leaf has major problems.

It happened just before we recorded a show about two months ago, and I was so distraught, I couldn't bring it up, and I co