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March 29, 2021 - Epoch Times
39:35
The Truth Behind California’s Clean Energy - Jim Phelps
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100% carbon free by 2045, but they want to be 60% renewable.
If we wanted to do it today, is the technology not viable, right?
The technology is there, theoretically, in some areas.
In other areas, it's not.
And those other areas are the limits on making the renewables or clean energy more prevalent.
You're mentioning that the process might not be green.
It would require a lot of mining.
How do we create these batteries?
You see, a lot of that's done by people who are very poor and by children.
It's a dirty narrative and nobody wants that out in the open.
If I wanted to get energy at night that's renewable, tell me about the linchpin.
You're only able to exist as a solar community for as long as those batteries are serving you.
So after four hours or five or six hours, then what?
Then what happens?
The number one thing that Californians want at the end of the day is they want the electricity to work.
Then they want to see how green it is.
But if it's not working, nobody cares about how green it is.
Over the next 25 years, you think the policies will cause us to have more blackouts?
Yes, I do.
California legislatures are proposing to use 100% carbon-free energy by 2045.
My guest today is Jim Phelps.
He's an energy consultant, power contractor, and designer with over 35 years of experience.
Today he discusses the challenges within renewable energy and what it will take to achieve 100% clean energy.
Welcome to California Inside.
Jim, welcome.
It's great to have you on.
Thank you.
Pleasure to be here.
California has this initiative to go 100% renewable energy by 2045, right?
100% carbon-free by 2045, but they want to be 60% renewable.
So the carbon-free and renewable are two different categories of clean energy.
Now, why not now?
Why not now go 100% now?
It's impossible.
In fact, just to highlight that, California now has this thing called the Renewable Portfolio Standard, the RPS. I'll refer to it henceforth as RPS. And that program is tiered so that every year, a certain percent or a certain portion of a load-serving entity, Southern California Edison or a community choice aggregator, those would be examples of a load-serving entity.
And every year, the percentage of the load-serving entity's total retail sales steps up to become more renewable.
And the RPS, the Renewable Portfolio Standard, that California law, is what is setting that standard.
And the reason that it's ratcheting up is because you can't do it right now.
If you wanted to do it today, is the technology not viable, right?
That's a really good question.
And it's a little bit like saying, you know, let's go to the Library of Congress and then open the door and then just tell me what it's about in there.
That's an enormously complex question.
The technology is there theoretically in some areas.
In other areas, it's not.
And those other areas are the limits on making the renewables or clean energy more prevalent.
For instance, Electricity is a use it or lose it commodity item.
When it shows up, you better use it or it's gone.
It doesn't hang around and wait for you.
So when wind or solar, for instance, produce and deliver electric power, they do it based upon when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing, not when Californians collectively say, okay, we're ready for our power.
So the technology for wind and solar to produce an electron is there, but the infrastructure to be able to incorporate it and integrate it is not.
And that infrastructure, in the case of solar and wind, that infrastructure is batteries.
Batteries are a huge issue.
But before we get into batteries, though, I just got to say, the renewables are, there's a whole classification, whole categories of renewables, and they all have different attributes and different strengths and weaknesses.
One of the strengths and weaknesses for wind and solar is they're the most prevalent.
Solar, especially, is the most prevalent and, I would say, the most available because of the sun.
But they're intermittent.
They only show up when they're going to show, not when we need them.
So if they're intermittent, what do you do?
How do you handle that?
And the linchpin to making renewables really work because the largest component in the renewable pie is wind and solar.
And the linchpin to making that work is being able to store power and then use it when or as you need it.
And so they want to do that.
The thinking is we're going to do that with batteries.
The batteries are just, there's huge issues that aren't talked about.
So to answer your question, why don't we do it right now?
Batteries.
And so you mentioned they're intermittent.
So like solar.
So at night it doesn't work, right?
It does not work.
It doesn't work.
And there are programs you can sign up for that says, hey, you are 100% solar.
And the accounting and the way that that is handled behind the scenes is different than most people think.
So let's say that you sign up and you go, hey, you know what, I really want to be green, I want 100% solar, and I want to feel like I'm doing my part for the Earth.
Okay, good for you.
So you sign up, you pay a premium for it, and you probably, like most well-intentioned people, you don't look back.
But if you do look back, you've got to stop and ask yourself, tonight at 11 o'clock, sun's not shining.
Where's my power coming from?
It's not coming from solar.
And, you know, this gets into this whole packaging.
And I remember, so CMAC, I remember years ago, a friend told me when I first started venturing into, I didn't think I'd be looking at, I always liked the electrons and the actual production from a steam or a fossil-fired plant.
That was where I was from.
And going down and looking at the marketing and the flow of electrons, I never thought I'd do that.
And I realized, and a friend told me, she said, you know, Jim, you get into clean energy, there is no dirtier business.
And I remember I thought, Juliet, Juliet Anthony, I thought...
No.
You're sweet, but that's not right.
And she was.
It really is.
It really is.
There's just a lot of misdirection and things behind the scenes that people don't understand.
So, for instance, you buy 100% green power.
You sign up for that.
You're a good guy and you're doing your deal for the earth.
But nobody explains to you That you're not getting 100% solar, even though you paid for it.
Nobody explains that to you.
And in fact, at the end of the year, they produce these things.
Every load-serving entity, every community choice aggregator, every Southern California Edison or PG&E, at the end of the year for their energy programs, they publish these things called a power content label.
Very much like the content label on the back of a can of soup.
A little more technical, but much without thinking.
And you look at your power content label for your 100% Solar power.
And it says 100% solar.
You go, wow, that's great.
But it's not.
It's not even close to 100% solar.
The 100% solar, is it because they are purchasing credits from other people that have solar?
Or how are they able to say your power is solar in the middle of the night?
Okay, great, great question.
In the renewable energy industry, when you buy power that's truly delivered renewable, and that delivered renewable is referred to as bundled power, you buy the electrons, and then you buy a certificate that is like a receipt.
Just think of it as a receipt.
And on that receipt, it says the name of the resource, the name of the solar farm, the day that your energy was produced, and how much power was produced.
And that receipt, with that power, is purchased as a bundled contract, as a resource.
And the power goes off to you, off to your meter.
And this receipt, certificate, it gets sent off to regulators.
And it's a proof of purchase and a proof of, usually, delivery.
Well, what happens?
So if you kind of get an idea now of when you buy the power, you've got to buy the solar.
You get the accompanying receipt.
They go together.
On their way into the system, the power goes to you and the receipt goes off to the regulators because the regulators are tracking.
Sacramento is tracking to make sure who's buying and delivering what and how green are they.
At the end of the year, that all has to be reconciled.
So what happens is The way that you are getting 100% solar is they'll over-purchase.
They'll over-procure.
So they get a whole bunch of solar that's delivered in the middle of the day, you know, when the sun is shining, and there's a big hump in production, and they get a lot of extra production that comes.
They take that with the electrons and the certificates, They split them.
The people who are telling you that you're 100% green today, they split those.
They hang on to the receipt.
And they sell off.
Now it's called null power.
It's just kind of a fatherless or parentless child.
Those electrons go out and they get sold back into the market.
There's a market for that.
And they hang on to that receipt.
Then, holding on to that receipt, the people who are telling you are 100% green, they go into another market and they buy fossil-fired power.
And they deliver fossil-fired power to you at 9 or 10 or 11 o'clock or the middle of the night, whenever it is.
At the end of the year, When it comes time to reconciling everything, they don't report that because they still have this receipt.
And they report that and they say, well, there you go.
And if you have enough of these receipts, they're able to tell everybody, CMAX is 100% green.
And they don't tell anybody about that fossil-fired power that they delivered to you in the middle of the night or after the sun went down.
So when you're doing that, you're not really getting 100% renewable.
You're getting the power at night.
You're actually still getting fossil fuels, but it's just they're using credits from what they bought.
Exactly right.
They buy for you during the day because it's not possible to do that at night.
Am I, or you as a consumer, am I actually, talking about you now, am I you, getting this clean energy at my home, or am I paying for clean energy that I'm not getting at my home?
And that's the distinction that a lot of people have got to make.
Most people think they're getting it at their homes, and they aren't.
And so if we wanted to do, so you mentioned batteries, right?
If we wanted to do, if I wanted to get energy at night, that's green, that's renewable.
Tell me about the linchpin, which is the battery you mentioned.
Okay, and so I'm going to back up five seconds when you said that's green.
Because as soon as you introduce a battery, you've taken green out of the equation.
The batteries have got their own dirty secrets going on with those.
Predominantly now, there's really one battery type that's available.
It's called lithium ion.
And lithium ion batteries are very much like you have in your computers.
They're like you have in an electric car.
A Tesla has a big lithium ion battery in the base of the chassis.
And lithium-ion batteries are the predominant, they are the battery of choice because they're around and they're established.
Lithium-ion batteries have a limitation on their discharge and on their life.
So if you have a big battery and you store it up for electricity, it'll discharge to you maybe over the course of four, five, or maybe six hours if you're lucky.
And then it's dead.
It's done.
It's discharged.
So if you get into a long-term outage, And you say, I'm going to build a solar community based on solar, and I'm going to have batteries that are going to be getting me over a hump.
You're only able to exist as a solar community, or rather using solar, for as long as those batteries are serving you.
So after four hours, or five or six hours, then what?
Then what happens?
So the batteries, they have an inherent limitation on them.
Let me tell you, there's a big battery farm in Florida.
It's the biggest in the United States.
It's at the Manatee Station.
And it's a combined solar plus battery integrated.
And the battery in Florida is 409 megawatts.
That's just huge.
It's just a giant, ginormous, I'll say, battery.
But to put it in perspective, and there are other little batteries that are spread throughout Florida, but to put it in perspective, if the entire state of Florida goes into a blackout, and that battery is called on, the biggest in the United States, is called on solely to power the state of Florida, it'll do so For less than two minutes.
So even if we get everything renewable, we store within the battery technologies we have, for the state of California, we probably won't be able to do more than five minutes, right?
Is that we won't be able to get the power.
Well, so hang on.
So there's two things that go on there.
I want to bring this point up.
One of the other issues is availability.
So it's not easy.
Lithium-ion batteries just aren't.
It takes a lot to get them built.
And it takes a long time to build them.
And it takes a long time to get the resources out of the ground.
And then that's human rights issues going on with Africa because they use cobalt in lithium-ion batteries.
So you have this supply chain that you have to deal with.
To put that in perspective, a really smart physicist, a guy named Mark Mills out of Northwestern University, really smart guy.
He did a study and he said, if you took the Gigafactory from Tesla, Outside of Reno, the country's, maybe the world's biggest battery factory, for lithium-ion batteries.
And you retasked or redirected that so that it was batteries for electric grids, for energy, for electricity.
According to his scale, or his study, it'd take about 500 years To produce enough batteries out of that Tesla Gigafactory to run the United States for one day.
So that kind of puts into perspective this whole thing about, well, we'll just go out and buy batteries.
If we think that we're going to go to your original question about why don't we just do it now, Okay, where are the batteries?
In 500 years, we better get started.
I don't mean to be facetious, but I'm hearing from some people that the world is going to explode into a fireball of global warming in about, what, 9 or 10 years?
I mean, we better get started.
So tell me about the process of this battery.
So it seems like the linchpin is the battery.
And you're mentioning that the process might not be green.
It would require a lot of mining.
How do we create these batteries?
Okay, can I answer that?
But I've got to bring this up or I'm going to lose it.
And we've got to keep some...
So there's another battery that's out that's being...
It's called a flow battery.
And it is not commercially viable, available.
There are people who are saying, oh yes, we're having breakthroughs.
But I hear about that in the electric power industry.
Every week somebody has a breakthrough and then it never comes to fruition.
I hope it does on a flow battery.
A flow battery has the capability of storing power and then discharging it over a much longer period of time than four or six hours.
So that would take care of some of the battery limitations.
But the problem is flow batteries, as I say, they're not out, they're not available.
And yet Sacramento and a lot of the academia is issuing papers as if Lithium-ion and flow batteries are the answer.
It's like, well, wait a minute.
We don't have that.
Where's the footnote that says, by the way, this half of our thinking doesn't exist yet?
Anyway, I just want to check that box.
Thank you.
But your question about batteries and the environmental, the dirty side.
And I'm going to talk about lithium-ion because those are the batteries that are here, that exist, that we can count on.
The lithium-ion batteries, one of the components in that is cobalt.
And one of the biggest suppliers in cobalt is the Republic of the Congo in Africa.
Well, if you go and you start looking at what's going on with the cobalt mining in Africa, you see a lot of that's done By people who are very poor and by children.
And most of those people, they don't have tools.
I mean, the kids are digging with their hands.
CNN put out, you can go Google, but CNN put a reasonably good pictorial documentary, pretty short, and it showed You know, some of these mines and there was one,
their film crew showed up and in one case, this poor young guy, poor little boy, he had a bag of cobalt with him and he got clocked in the head by one of the managers who didn't want the film crew Filming him, you know, I mean, it's a dirty narrative and nobody wants that out in the open.
So you have these human rights issues with cobalt, with lithium ion batteries.
That raw material that's mined from the Congo, it gets sent to China.
And then China refines it, and then they send it back, and then we put it into these...
I don't know if you've ever seen a lithium-ion battery.
You can kind of think of it in the size of a, oh, a semi-box car.
A flow battery, which has not been commercially brought to market yet.
Flow batteries are enormous.
They're huge.
They have piping on them and they're flowing fluid through them.
Different technology than lithium ion.
But lithium ion is a very small or relatively small container.
And you look at it and go, wow, it's nicely painted and it's nicely engineered and everything about it looks great and it sits right over there and if I want more I'll just stack them up and, you know, we're good to go.
But they've got their own limitations.
The biggest, as I say, is the environmental.
And then you have to get rid of the toxins.
Those things don't last.
A lithium-ion battery, about 10 years.
And then you have to do something with it.
What are you going to do with it?
Hey, how are you going to get rid of all of the toxicity?
That's part of the clean energy equation.
And you can't ignore it and say the energy is clean if stuff that's supporting you to say that you're clean isn't.
So, is this going to happen?
Like, what happened to nuclear?
It seems like nuclear is a good source, but people are afraid of the consequences after the plant is done, right?
You mean nuclear?
You mean the spent fuel rods?
Yeah.
Okay, so...
Okay, that's a good point.
And for nuclear, that's the only thing that I would point at that would say, you know, not so great.
Nuclear has spent fuel rods, and those either go into a pool or they go into dry casks, and they get stored.
So, I mean, that's an issue for nuclear.
It just is.
There's no free lunches for any of this stuff.
But let me put this in...
Let's bring nuclear into the focus.
Diablo Canyon is about 2,200 megawatts.
It's a giant, baseload, reliable power plant.
And it's supposed to close down.
Unit 1 is supposed to close down in 2024.
And then Unit 2 is going to close down in 2025.
When you...
Shut that plant down and you replace that with renewables.
Let's just say you replace it with a wind farm.
That wind farm would be anywhere from 250 to 400,000 acres.
So, you know, when you...
And then each of those windmills is...
The industry knows them.
They refer to them as a bird cuisinart.
I mean, they're wonderful bird killers.
They chop them up.
The fan blades on those windmills, they only last for 10 to 20 years.
They're about 150 feet long, the big ones.
And then they end up in a landfill in Wyoming.
They're made of fiberglass.
They're never going to decompose.
And there are thousands of those that are coming off of windmills that are getting stuck in the ground.
So I get it.
Nuclear has its own waste, and you have to kind of address that.
It's a relatively small amount that's contained, that you can keep in a geographically small area.
Wind?
400,000 acres?
So let's just say, by the way, let's just say that you go, yep, we did it.
We got it through.
Got that wind farm in.
It's going to go.
Okay.
Where are you going to put it?
And by the way, when Diablo Canyon closes, you're going to need 200,000 to 400,000 acres for the wind farm, theoretically, to replace Diablo Canyon, but the wind farm isn't going to give you power year-round, or rather 24 hours a day.
It's going to cycle up and down.
Based on the wind?
Based on the wind, so you better have batteries for it.
You got the batteries for that?
And you go, well, Jim, we've got batteries that'll last.
You said that they'll last for four or six hours.
Okay.
Okay.
So what if we get into an extended outage?
What if we have bad weather?
What if we have no wind and we have cloud cover?
Your windmills aren't spinning out there.
So, we shut down Diablo.
We build a wind farm.
Okay.
Theoretically, you've just taken care of that problem.
Okay.
Diablo is, we're good.
Now, what are you going to do for your next Diablo?
Where are you going to come up with your next two, three, four hundred thousand acres?
You...
They're talking, you know, I mean, the last thing I read out of Sacramento just a few days ago is, well, offshore.
I'm sorry to laugh, but it's just all these thoughts go through my mind that are just offshore.
So we're going to put them out in shipping lanes.
Okay, well, I hope we don't have any tankers that run into the offshore.
And then offshore California, it's not all windy.
It's not all viable.
So where offshore are you going to put these?
You can go up to northern California, okay, and then also off of Santa Barbara.
The wind is just, you could justify putting windmills offshore off of Santa Barbara.
Do you know how deep the floor is off of Santa Barbara?
A thousand feet.
So you have to go a thousand feet.
So you're going to go a thousand feet down.
The cost of that it would be.
Then you've got to get your footing into the floor.
And the environment also.
That's another thing.
Of course.
And then you're going to go how tall above the water?
Are you going to go 400 feet above?
I mean, you're going to put a, let's just say, a 1,500-foot pole into the ground.
I mean, it's...
It's only money and pragmatics, but it's renewable and it's going to save the planet.
Just got to figure out how to make it work.
And if you can do that with wind, let me know.
Now, wind is the backbone.
Wind and solar are the backbones for renewables.
There are other renewables that I consider to be a higher quality.
But they're not as available.
And they have their own Achilles heel.
And the Achilles on those is water.
And they all are reliant on water.
My favorite is small hydro.
Small hydro is anything that's rated where the water goes through a generator that's 30 megawatts or smaller.
That's considered or classified as small hydro.
And small hydro is classified as renewable.
So if you have a 31 megawatt generator on a hydroelectric dam, it's not classified as renewable.
30 it is, 31 it's not.
Why not?
When you find out, let me know.
That's just Sacramento at your service.
There seems to be a preference over certain type of green energy over another type.
Where does this preference come from?
So the preference is, you know, Sacramento does not mandate, they don't say, you have to, we prefer that you're using geothermal or we prefer that you're biomass or whatever.
They'll put out Certain little policy adjustments.
And those policy adjustments may signal to the market, okay, well, let's try to be a little bit heavier in biomass.
They just had something come out where they've asked people who are in biomass contracts to try to extend those another five years.
But there is no preference out of Sacramento for a specific kind of renewables.
They're looking, and I think they expect, and they are getting a balance, and the market is balancing it.
But the other part of this equation is the carbon-free.
All renewables are not carbon-free.
For instance, geothermal, it emits a little bit of carbon dioxide, CO2. Biomass is wood-burning, and when it burns, it emits a little bit of CO2. Now,
carbon-free doesn't technically, in the production of electric power, does not emit CO2. And the carbon-free would be large hydro, And nuclear.
Those are the two biggest sources.
And they're going to have to be, I don't care what anybody says, if they're not looking down the road, they're going to have to be, especially nuclear, if they think we're going to be 100% carbon-free by 2045, they aren't going to do it with renewables.
And there isn't enough large hydro.
So what do we, you know, with that train coming at us, what are we doing?
Oh, we're going to close down Diablo Canyon, one of the biggest sources of carbon-free power.
And we've already shut down San Onofre, which was, I mean, if they were smart, they would...
If I had my hands on the controls in Sacramento, I'd get together with some good nuclear engineers, and I would repurpose and restart that plant at a lower, at a smaller throughput, output, than what it was designed for.
And you can cut the pressures way down on it, and I think that would be viable, but We're going to need nuclear.
We're going to have to have nuclear power if we think we're going to be 100% carbon free.
There's just no way around it.
It isn't going to happen.
If not, do you think we would have blackouts?
Is that what could happen?
Well, I think we're going to have blackouts anyway.
And I think that we've already seen that this last summer when the grid operators, the California Independent System Operator, CAISO, is the C-A-I-S-O, CAISO, and they're out of Folsom.
And they're the guys who manage all of the wires, all the big transmission lines that you see all up and down California, going off into the distance on the big transmission poles, towers.
Those are not the wires that you see in your neighborhood.
That's different.
That's distribution, and I'm talking transmission.
So Kaizo is responsible for trying to keep California balanced.
And this past summer, Kaizo had blackouts.
We had a lot of heat.
We didn't have a lot of wind, so we didn't have any wind power.
We've been shutting down fossil-fired power, which is the backbone of California's energy, that plus nuclear.
And, you know, the grid operators, bless those guys, I know they are just going crazy trying to keep the grid in balance and operating, but You know, when you don't have the backup power there that you need and you have to,
Sacramento has taken California and really put it on this road toward this heavy renewables, which essentially locks the Kaizo engineers into saying, hey, look, you know, you can fix, you can operate this system any way you want during the day, but you can only use these pieces that we're giving to you, all of this renewable stuff, make it work.
And a big component of that is wind.
And the wind isn't blowing.
You've got a blackout.
And we had that this past summer.
So with this drive to get to those percentages over the next 20 years, 25 years, you think the policies will cause us to have more blackouts?
Yes, I do.
I do.
I think the policies are well-intentioned.
But I don't think they have the technical background or capability to really understand how electricity works and what the limitations are.
So let me do this.
Let me just say, we have a triangle.
Just imagine you have a triangle here.
And that triangle represents, at the bottom of it, is your base load power.
And the top is, that triangle is your electric picture.
It's your production facilities.
And so the bottom of that triangle is coal-fired, gas-fired, fossil, nuclear.
Those are your baseload, reliable, need them, turn on the switch.
I mean, they're good to go.
And then as you go on up, you get into your, toward the top of your triangle, your pyramid, you get into renewables.
And the way that we have been set up in California for the last 30 or 40 years is pretty much like I said.
We've had those baseload Fossil, nuclear, at the bottom of the triangle, and then as you go up, you know, the last kind of fun, I'll call them, and I don't mean to be disrespectful, but kind of the last, those renewables, the wind and the solar, those can kind of make up the top, you know, then they can contribute as they want.
And what Sacramento is doing is they're inverting that pyramid.
And they're saying, well, we're going to take all the Renewables, all the fun, I'll call.
Again, I'm not trying to be disrespectful.
And we're going to put that down as the base load.
And we're going to throw batteries in there, you know, and a little concrete and some tape and mud and chewing gum and try to hold it all together.
And that's the base of the triangle.
And then, you know, the top is, you know, maybe we'll turn on a gas generator or a gas-fired power plant when we need.
But they're inverting it.
And...
The primary thing that we should be doing is, in my opinion, is delivering reliable electric power first and then cleaning it up.
And Sacramento is saying, no, we're going to deliver clean power first and then we're going to try to figure out how to make it work.
And we got a preview of that this past summer with the outages.
And what's going to happen is, unfortunately, it seems to be this way, whenever government gets involved in a program, costs are going to go up and service and quality is going to go down.
And that's the road we're on.
And it's not good.
You're getting ready, as I say, to shut down Diablo Canyon.
Biggest mistake in the world, but what do I know?
I just want my lights to come on when I switch.
Now, do you have any recommendations for the policymakers?
Well, I think that there's already discussion about including nuclear.
But honestly, and in fact, some of the green or clean energy companies, some of the CCAs, are already including nuclear in their portfolios.
But let's consider this for a second.
You want to shut down Diablo Canyon.
Because they say it's once through cooling.
It pulls ocean water through It runs it through the steam condenser, which is part of the non-nuclear side of the plant.
It doesn't get any radioactivity.
But they pull ocean water through, they run it through the steam condenser, and then they discharge it back into the ocean.
Now, the reason that they want that shut down is because they say, well, that's creating a warm water plume in the ocean, and that's having an effect on marine life.
But if you're going to replace that, or try to replace that with Wind, bird cuisinarts, and hundreds of thousands of acres of land that you need for unreliable intermittent power that you need batteries.
It's all tied into, you know, children in the Congo who are digging with their hands and you've got the toxins.
I mean, there's a dirty...
And let's also look at solar panels.
Solar panels, we are going to have literally...
Not quite this big, but just about a Mount Everest-sized pile of wasted solar panels, because they only last about 20 or 25 years, and then they're done.
They're dead.
They're end of their life.
And we've been putting solar panels on like they're going out of style in California and throughout the country, throughout the world.
What are we going to do with those?
Where are those going to go?
There's going to be an environmental problem with all that e-waste because they're not getting recycled.
The only state in the United States that has any kind of a recycling program is the state of Washington.
California does not.
So I've talked to a couple of people who recycle, trying to recycle, and they say, Jim, there's two things that we're seeing.
One is it costs more to recycle these things than we thought it would.
And the other is, given that, we think what's going to happen is All those panels, they're just going to end up on a boat and get sent off to some poor country who will take them for us.
And, you know, we get to tell everybody how clean and green we are.
So my point is, to a policymaker who is considering or might consider this, Shutting down Diablo Canyon.
Don't like the warm water plume on the marine life.
Okay.
You've got to consider all of the other stuff that's going on with your...
And I don't think they are.
But you've got to consider all the other downside to the renewables.
And once you do, you have a different equation.
And then you can start to balance and go like, okay.
Okay, but the way it is right now, it's like, Diablo Canyon, bad.
It's weighted down with just bad stuff.
And, oh, we've got all this wonderful, you know, and no problems with these renewables.
Yeah, you do.
Yes, you do.
So, the policymakers, I would just say, you really need to consider this.
And when you're considering that, consider the number one thing that Californians want at the end of the day is they want the electricity to work.
And then they want to see how green it is.
But if it's not working, nobody cares about how green it is.
Well, thank you.
My pleasure.
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