August 13, 2019 • 61 mins
We’ve been promised solar energy for a while now – where is it? Turns out, it’s been quietly and steadily growing across the world. And with a few breakthroughs, we just may be able to say goodbye to fossil fuels. Learn about sun-based energy in this episode.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hello, Maine and Greater New England. We're coming to see
you guys in Portland and we can't wait. We would
love to see you there. Yep. We'll be at the
State Theater on August. If you're interested. You can get
tickets and information at s y s K live dot com.
There's some lobster at us. Welcome to Stuff you Should Know,
a production of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey,
(00:28):
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, There's Charles W.
Chuck Bryant, there's Jerry over there. The sun is shining,
our collars are popped, tongues of our shoes are hanging out,
and um, it smells really nice in here. That's right,
which must mean one thing. Chuck, It's time to talk
some stuff you should know? She is? Can I say that? Sure?
(00:53):
All right? Good? Well I just did, didn't you did? Uh? So? Uh?
We are at SLEE talking about solar power today, and
I'm a little psyched about this one because I was
putting this thing together over months. Dude, you would think
solar power is such a hot, sexy topic. You know
that there would be just reams and reams of just
(01:15):
stuff to research and there is, but it's all really
wonky and really technical, and there's a lot of stuff
that contradicts other stuff. And I get this feeling of
dread researching this, that the cheerleaders and champions of solar
power are losing their resolve to an extent. They'll still
(01:39):
sell you a solar panel, They'll still tell you a
solar is great, and I know that they truly believe that,
but I think that they are worried that it's it's
not taking off like they expected it too. But then
let me just caveat that with one other thing, and
then we'll get started and I'll be quiet for the
rest of the podcast. If you look at the numbers
and the figures, solar has quietly um made a name
(02:05):
for itself and established itself, at least in the United States,
to an astounding degree. So I'm not quite sure what
I'm picking up on when I get the sense that
they're worried, because if you look at it, it's actually
doing really, really well and growing all the time. Let's
discuss solar power. Yeah, power from the sun converted into electricity, right,
(02:28):
so you can say screw you power company, yeah, or
pay me power company. You could say, take this power
bill and shove it. So the sun. Uh, this is
pretty neat here at the beginning of this that you
put together here, Um, the sun ray. The Sun's rays
give off about a thousand wats of energy per square meter.
(02:50):
So if you pull the camera back a bit and
you look at Texas, let's say, a lot of sun
in Texas, a lot of land in Texas. There's a
lot of a lot of stuff from Texas. There really
is some stuff. No, that's true. I was gonna say
the good thing about Texas. You could completely cover it
with solar rays and no one but the people who
live in Texas would have a problem with it. Oh boy,
(03:13):
oh boy, oh gear Goo Google. All right, Um, So
if you look at a mass land mass that's as
big as Texas, they receive a little under seven hundred
terra wats over the course of one hour on a
on a at noon on a sunny day. Seven terra wats. Yeah,
it sounds like a lot, but is it a lot?
(03:34):
Who knows? Who could possibly know? If you want to
compare that, you're being coy uh. In that same hour,
the total amount of human mage energy energy production on
planet Earth. And this is all energy production that you
could possibly dream of is seventeen point seven terra watts
compared to seven hundred terra wats. That's forty times less
(03:57):
than what the sun delivered to Texas and in just
that hour. Yeah, right, And the Union of Concerned Scientists
happen in group who I love. Um, they say that
eighteen days of sunshine that hits across the entire Earth
contains the same amount of energy stored in the entirety
of the planet's reserves of coal, oil and natural gas.
(04:21):
If you dug up and burned every bit of coal,
oil and natural gas, it would only produce as much
energy as eighteen days worth of global sunlight. That's astounding. Yeah,
And these are you know, these are facts that have
fifty caveats beneath each of them, which we're going to
(04:41):
talk about. But it is a prime example, and I
think just a good way to kind of indicate just
how much energy potential energy there is coming from the
sun every day. Yeah, And just I mean to to
point out the obvious. The great thing about solar is
there is no greenhouse gas emissions when you use solar electricity.
(05:02):
It's just clean energy and it's free because it's from
the sun, that's right. And before you start typing, oh yeah,
but what about you got a lot to make. These
things were made it to look on and then before
you do that, we're going to talk about all that stuff.
But Josh very clearly said, once you have these things
set up, that's that's when the real benefit comes. Yes,
(05:27):
And if I hadn't said it, I was going to
eventually well no, you basically said it, like you know,
when they're working, when they're active, they're not using fossil fuels.
Thank you, Chuck. All right, so let's go back in
time a bit, because if you think solar power, you think, oh, well,
this stuff, you know, was invented in the nineteen seventies,
not so you have to go all the way back
(05:48):
to eighteen thirty nine, believe it or not. When a
French physicist name Alexandra Edmond, Uh, Josh says this back
quere I mean I practiced it a million times. Queriller,
I think be querillar. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's a tough word.
Yes it is. There's a couple of extra continants in that.
(06:10):
It just shouldn't be there, that's right. So, uh, this
dude He's the one that first demonstrated the photo voltaic effect,
which is basically the ability of a solar cell to
turn sun into electricity all the way back in right,
but no one knew exactly how this work. They just
knew that at work. He was burned at the stake
later on for his black magic. Right, So just about
(06:35):
forty about forty years later, there's a guy named Charles Fritz,
and he, in the eighteen eighties built the world's first
rooftop solar array. Coincidentally, just a year after Edison launched
the world's first coal fire power plant. UM. But this
early solar array was terribly inefficient. It didn't do very much.
(06:59):
It could bay basically power um. Jeez, I don't even
know what it could power a mouse trap? How about that,
which doesn't even need electricity. That's how little power that
this thing produced. Um. But it definitely demonstrated that it
was possible to generate an electrical current um from sunlight
(07:20):
in a way that it was a proof of concept,
basically saying just give it like ninety years and we'll
understand this better. And who was that that was? Fritz? Ye,
Fritz was a good guy, but he was no, Einstein, Uh, Einstein.
It would take Einstein, that is, to really explain how
(07:40):
this all worked in nineteen o five, because he had
a knack for doing that. I'm not sure if people
realize that he was a good explainer, maybe the original explainer.
Well he would put it in terms that you could
really understand, like like consider the sandwich. Imagine the sandwich
is the sun, and then it just go from there
and you'd be like, you understand what he's saying. Yeah,
(08:01):
And if you think, uh, Einstein, oh yeah, he won
a bunch of Nobel Prizes for relativity. Not so. He
won the Nobel Prize in Physics for explaining the photo
electric effect. He didn't win for relativity. No, I didn't
know that. Holy cow, what is unless I'm wrong? And
if i am, I'm gonna have a lot of egg
(08:22):
on my face. That's all right, Well we'll cook it
off with some good old solar electricity. Gross. It is gross,
but also so is the idea of cooked egg in
your beard. So Bell Labs in nineteen fifty four, if
you want to talk about the modern PV cell, that
(08:42):
was the and uh thanks to the US government really
in the US military, they funded a lot of this
early research, because if you've ever looked at a picture
of sky Lab or any of our great satellites, you'll
notice that they all have these big solar wings. Yeah. Yeah,
they're solar powered. And it was because of US government
(09:05):
research in the fifties that we were able to develop those.
I think they launched the first solar powered satellite in
nineteen fifty four, no. Fifty eight, and then just six
years later they launched the first solar powered satellite whose
solar panels could track the Sun, which is still a
(09:26):
pretty whiz bang thing to have for your solar array.
And this is nine sixty four. So the US government
invested in the earliest research and everything was going along
really smoothly. Um. But one of the things that's always
been a problem for solar is oil in natural gas
and coal are just so cheap, and our infrastructure is
(09:49):
set up to burn those things and get electricity for them.
So solar has always been an upstart. But at one
point in nineteen seventy three, oil was not very cheap
all of a sudden because of the OPEC embargo that
created the energy crisis that made it really un cheap.
So much so that the United States looked around and said,
(10:10):
we need to find other sources of energy, and they
really looked really hard at solar and it actually gave
solar technology a big old boost. Yeah, and that boost
came by way of offering tax credits for the first
time in the United States for businesses and residents. Said hey,
if you want to put in solar power, and they
still do this today, we'll give you some tax credits.
It will make a lot cheaper for you. Um. There
(10:33):
has been I guess we could call it the the
solar Battle at the White House since nineteen seventy nine.
Jimmy Carter had very famously had solar panels installed on
the roof of the White House, uh to heat water
for for them and for the pools and for the
kitchen and stuff like that. And Uh, Reagan had them
taken down in eighties six. So there are a couple
(10:57):
of stories about how this went down. Um. The cynic
will say Reagan as a statement had them taken down
even though they were working fine, because he was all
for the fossil fuel industry and it was a very
symbolic gesture. Other people will say that's not what happened.
At all. The roof needed repair that the solar panels
(11:18):
were on, and they took down the solar panels to
repair the roof, and then the White House officially says
they did not put them back because it would be
very unwise based on cost. Is a direct quote. Uh
so that's you know, that's the party line right now.
I've never heard that one. That sounds like a new
gingrich you are And if you ask me, well, that's
(11:39):
a direct quote. Um, George W. Bush put uh solar
power back into the White House. Say what what? Yeah?
I didn't know that. Yeah, he put solar for the
water heaters for the White House pool and then put
solar panels on top of the roof of the grounds
maintenance building to how out there. He did not have
(12:01):
them on top of the actual White House, but he
had solar solar power installed at various places around the
White House. This was w or h W. This is
w okay, Wow, that's really surprising. Yeah. Um. Carter's for
his part, one of his he has two on display.
One of them is at the Smithsonian and one of
them is right here in Atlanta at the Carter Center.
(12:21):
You can go look at one of those solar panels.
There's also like a Museum of Science in China that
got their hands on one. It's on display in China too.
Oh yeah, which makes sense because after after the U. S.
Government kind of turned its back on solar, China came
along and said, oh, we'll take that ball and ran
with it. Sure, going back to Reagan though he didn't.
(12:42):
I don't want to let him up too easy with this.
Um the fact that they just said it was unwise
based on costs because he gutted the Department of Energies
Renewable Energy research and Development budgets, like totally gutted him,
and he eliminated the tax breaks for wind and solar. Um.
I'm not sure for how long, but for a million years,
I would guess now, because they're back. Uh. And it
(13:04):
was Obama who came back and very publicly installed solar
panels back on the roof of the White House. And
of course the first thing I thought was that that
Trump probably went in there and smashed him with a
sledgehammer on his first day in office. But apparently they're
still there. They're still there, huh, still there and still working.
He didn't take them down. Wow, we so one of
the other things that UM the government did to help
(13:26):
solar along during the Carter era was to to offer
tax breaks, like you were saying, but because of the
really really high cost of installing a solar electric system, UM,
it was basically viewed as a sweetheart deal, tax break
for the rich. That's how the first solar tax credits
(13:48):
were viewed because solar was so expensive, so they were
a little bit before their time. But over the course
of those ensuing years from the early eighties on Moor
to today, a UM, because we've had breakthroughs and technology
UM of manufacturing, of creating new kinds of semiconductors, of
(14:09):
making traditional kinds more cheaply, the price of solar has
dropped eight percent in the past decade. Yeah, I mean
it's really to the point now where it's I mean
I looked at some of the prices and I was like,
you know what, that's that's now I think fairly affordable
for for most kind of middle class Americans if they
(14:30):
want to put in solar power, because you know, eventually
it's going to pay for itself. That's the whole the
whole idea. Either you're either you're trying to pay this,
you know, get cheaper bills and have it pay for
itself over the years, which is going to happen regardless,
or you're someone with some money that just wants to, um,
do the right thing by the environment and get off
the grid as much as possible. Yeah, it's just that
(14:51):
upfront cost, not the cost over the life of the setup.
It's the upfront cost. But there are things like you
can there UM like energy saver, renewable energy, mortgages, home
loans basically you can take out they have UM really
special good financing and rates and stuff like that. Um,
there's a lot of things you can do that we'll
(15:12):
talk about to get around the upfront cost. But you
you hit the nail on the head, and it's really
worth saying again you can expect your solar um electrical
home system to pay for itself over the lifetime of
the setup. Yeah, and we'll talk more about price later,
but just poking around like it's sort of an average
(15:33):
US household, you can plunk down about fifteen grand to
cover your electricity needs, which and that's I think after
the text credit if I'm not mistaken right, And again,
you know, there are so many factors where you live,
how much energy use, how big your house is, the
weather where you are. So this is a big, big
(15:55):
broad statement. But if you're just looking for a general range,
it's not like it costs fifty or sixty dollars anymore
to do this, right, So you want to take a
you want to take a break and then come back
and talk about what actually is going on in those
solar cells. Let's do it, Chuck, okay, dude. So um,
(16:40):
there are three ways as far as humans are aware
of right now, that you can get energy from the sun.
You can get it by converting it into electricity what
we're gonna talk about. Basically, you can turn it into
chemical energy, which is it's far out though, it's like
storing energy in the bonds of molecules, like through artificial photosynthesis.
(17:01):
That's pretty cool. And then you can also convert it
into heat. But when you're talking about solar energy, most
people think of these solar into electricity, which is called
photovoltaic um energy, and that's basically what we're going to
be talking about. Yeah, Like when you drive to the
neighborhood and you see those shiny panels on a roof
(17:23):
and think, my god, those are ugly. That's true, man,
it's true. We'll get to that too. Uh So, that's
what we're talking about. These photo voltaic cells. They are
made up of semiconductors, materials called semiconductors. And these days,
and you know, we're talking a second about how this
might be changing in the future, but about all these
(17:44):
solar cells these days are using silicon as the semiconductor. Right.
Silicon is a crystal, which means that it has a
really tight atomic composition. Right, it's not very it's extraordinarily
stable um, which is kind of a thing because you
want a somewhat unstable um arrangement of atoms or else
(18:08):
you won't get this electricity to work. But no, you can't.
But that's exactly right. The flow of electricity basically but
with um. The reason why they use silicon is because
it is a semiconductor, which means that it gives you
a large measure of control over where that electricity flows
(18:29):
and how it flows. So rather than just using pure silicon,
which um will will allow you to direct the control
of electricity but won't produce any electricity, they actually dope
it with other materials to produce two different types of
silicon film. UM, ND type and P type. That's right. So, uh,
(18:51):
for the ND type, which is stands for negative, they're
gonna dope it. And I love that word in this
case with phosphorus that has five electrons, so it's gonna
bind to the silicon that has four electrons, and so
that leaves you I can even do this kind of
simple math with one free one extra electron leftover, just
dangling out there like it's wearing shorts that are way
(19:14):
too short. Yeah, it's looking for a place to go. Basically. Um,
the way I sort of saw this was like a
couple of apartments next to each other. One has an
empty room and one has an extra roommate. Okay, that's
a great one. So the other type is this P type,
the positive it's doped with boron has three electrons, and
so this is the other apartment. This is the one
(19:34):
it's gonna bind with silicon, and it leaves that unused
bond open. So that's where you have your extra space
where the electron can go. Right. So when you take
ND type silicon film and P type silicon film and
you put them up against one another, UM, you have
a situation where that extra electron wants to flow to
(19:56):
the other side and fill the unused bond, because again,
the universe is always moving towards homeostasis. Right. Yeah, that
roommates like, hey, you've got an next room, Can I
come crash in there? Yeah, And they say, wait, wait,
we need somebody to get you off of the couch.
And in this case, that somebody is sunlight, because sunlight
is made up of photons, which are energy carriers of
(20:16):
the electromagnetic spectrum. And when they hit this doped silicon,
they come bursting into the room and they kick that
that lazy electron into the other apartment where there's an
open bedroom and everything is filled very nicely. That's right.
So this electron flow, these electrons moving around and flowing
in this single direction. I think we said that yet
(20:37):
it only flows in one direction. Electricity does well, it
does in this one in this case. Yeah, that's the basis.
This electron flow is the basis of electricity. And what
they do is they put these metal contacts on the
top and the bottom of the cell and then you
can direct that electron flow out of the cell to
be used as electricity in your home. Yeah, that's that's
(20:59):
the soul or cell and in a nutshell. And the
solar cell is the basic unit of the of what
you think of when you think of like a solar
panel or whatever, it's that one little square and that
square is connected to other squares um and and they
they form what's called a module. And when you put
like um a nice little uh frame around it and
(21:20):
put it on a stand or whatever, you have yourself
a solar panel. When you have a bunch of solar
panels together in a group, all working together, that's a
solar array. So technically, when you point at someone's roof
and you say, look at that solar panel, you're saying,
look at that solar array. And now you can correct
that person from the back seat and they'll make you
get out of the car. People say that, look at
(21:41):
that solar array, universe. I would think people would more say,
look at those solar panels. Well, then that would make sense.
I had just set it up so it didn't make
any sense, so someone would swoop in incorrect. So the
person who knows what it's really called is around with
complete morons. We say things like look at that solar panel.
(22:04):
When they see a group of solar panels. All right, now,
I got you we're talking about right, all right, So
it's it's it sounds simple, and it is kind of simple,
and it's um complexity that makes no sense at all.
But it's a little more complicated because, like we said,
electricity in this case is only flowing in one direction,
which means it creates a direct current. And that's a
(22:27):
problem because uh we you know, if you we talked
about in the Bone Wars episode about the the uh
what they called not the power of Wars, the current
current wars, the War of current. That's right, d C
did not win. Um, So we have to convert that
d C current to a C current. So what the
solar panels need is something called an inverter. Yeah, and
(22:48):
the inverter is basically like the brains of the whole
set up. And there used to be a big problem
with inverters. Um. They were very clunky, and you would
basically have one inverter for an entire solar array, and um,
the solar inverter would would kind of modulate the amount
of electricity that was going through it out to the
house or the circuit panel, and it would base whatever
(23:12):
it was doing on whatever the lowest common denominator of
the whole array was giving it right. So if you
had one dirty solar cell, or there was a cloud
going over just one solar panel out of like twenty,
the inverter was basically delivering electricity based on that one
(23:33):
that one cloudy panel, or that one dirty cell. That's
not the case anymore, It really wasn't. The solar industry
wised up and they said, we can do better than this,
and they came up with what are called micro inverters.
And now a micro inverter is responsible for um either
one panel or just a single cell, and so that
(23:54):
one cell could could be a dirty or cloudy at
any given point, but it's not going to drag down
the whole thing because there's all these other inverters that
are are running the show on their own too. How
can you got to clean these things? Did you see that?
I didn't, but I did see that they were virtually
maintenance free? Oh really, yeah, that's what I say. Um,
(24:15):
all right, so let's talk about powering a house. Uh
And just like four years ago, two thousand fifteen, and
these are pretty good numbers, eight hundred thousand houses and
businesses in the United States had solar panels. And that's
not to say they were um dependent on them, but
they were at least doing some of the work right,
which is not bad. Um. And like you said, once,
(24:37):
once it's up and running, not much maintenance going on,
and you're looking at probably and the number they often
throw out is just you know, for twenty years, you
can expect this thing to work like a charm. Yeah,
twenty years is the low end. I saw the averages
about twenty five years. When you buy a solar setup
that you can just put it up there and be like, oh, um,
(24:57):
this is great. I don't even need to think about
this anymore. UM. But if you do want to invest
in this, if you're like, okay, I can swing this,
I want to contribute, I'm going to go solar. There
are some steps you want to take UM to kind
of wisen yourself up so that when you deal with
the installer you'll know what you're talking about and when
the first thing you want to do is to do
(25:17):
an energy audit on your energy consumption, which is basically
figuring out how much electricity you use in your house.
UM at any given time, probably want to figure out
what your peak is and then just kind of plan
for for that. Um. See, what I don't get is
like you can look at your power bill and tell
that you need to do it a separate audit outside
(25:38):
of that. Well, the reason why it's good to do
a separate audit outside of that is you can identify
areas where you can improve things. It's it's kind of like, no,
you don't have to do it, but you could do
an energy audit, and when you do, you can be like, oh,
I think if I added insulation to the attic, it
would come consumption by its right. Yeah. Yeah, It's kind
(26:01):
of like, um, if if taking on the project of
getting solar installed on your home wasn't a big enough
headache for you, add this to it, you know what
I'm saying. But it's a good it will definitely you
will find some places where you can cut your energy consumption.
That's the benefit of an energy audit. And this is
just happens to be a good time to do it. Yeah.
And you know the other thing you have to decide
(26:22):
as you're pricing this out, and you can call a
company they will they will come out these days and
basically tell you what you need. Um, you know if
you get a good, highly recommended company, and apparently some
of the smaller companies are much more highly recommended than
the larger companies from what I read online. But they
will come out and say the question they're gonna say is, uh,
(26:44):
and this is really the most important thing for you
to decide is how much of what percentage of of
your household energy do you want to come from solar?
And if you're like they'll they'll say, okay, well here's
what you need. If you say, you know what you know,
if I can cover I don't have much roof space,
I'm happy with covering my UM power usage, then they'll say,
(27:05):
all right, well, then let's work within your system. Or
you may just be you may not have a choice
unless you uh, you know, it all depends on your
roof and the way it's sloped and the way it's
faced and all that stuff. Right. Um, yeah, there's a
lot of considerations. UM. And again you're you're the person
you hire to do this is going to be able
to provide you with all this information and ask all
the right questions. But if you want to know what
(27:27):
you're talking about going into it, um, you can find
out kind of about how much electricity you could expect
a solar array on your roof to produce um down
to your actual house. Like there's all sorts of solar
potential maps online yea, and calculators. It's really They make
it kind of really easy on you these days. It's easy.
And let's just be honest, Chuck. It's fun too because
(27:49):
it'll show you like how much money you will actually
not only like how much you'll save over the course
of the lifetime of the solar array. And you'll have
a do you good idea of how fast the thing
will pay for itself. It's it's pretty cool to do um.
But you'll have an idea of, uh, this thing is
gonna pay for itself in eight years, or this thing
is gonna pay for itself in twenty five years, and
(28:11):
that will largely depend on where you live in the country.
But everything I saw from everywhere, from Union of Concerned
Scientists to Energy dot Gov is that everywhere in the
United States you can expect your solar array to pay
for itself eventually over the life of its over its
own life. It might take a little longer in Seattle
(28:31):
than in Phoenix, right, but you know, that's how things go.
You got better music in Seattle and better food, well
maybe the food to watch you got the You got
the music though for sure. Sorry Phoenix, we we love you.
Yeah sorry uh, last of the meat puppets. So I
talked about the angle of these panels and the angle
(28:52):
of your roof. Um, it's called the angle of inclination.
Is what is how you have to set these If
you have all all the money in the world and
in nowhere to spend it, you can actually get systems
that have motors that will move and follow these panels,
will follow the sun across the sky, stay in perfect uh,
stay at the perfect angle of inclination. That is super expensive, though,
(29:17):
it is. That's the technology I was talking about from
that they had figured out for saddle. Yeah it is,
but yeah, it is still kind of expensive. Um. What
I've seen though, is rather than invest in figuring out
how to make those kinds of setups cheaper, they figured
out how to catch more diffuse sunlight, that kind that
gets scattered by clouds. That makes sense on a solar panel,
(29:39):
so you don't necessarily have to have it. Um, the
kind that tracks the sunlight, and you can still get
as much electricity as you're gonna need to power your
house basically no matter where you are in the country,
just from the solar panels that they make these days. Yeah,
so uh ideally, um, your array is going to be
pointing true south. That's not to say if your roof
(30:02):
is set up in such a way that it doesn't
point to south, you can't have solar because like you said,
they've come a long long way over the years with
how they can collect the sunlight. But if you're facing
true south and you're at a good angle that's as
close to the area that you're in as close to
the latitude as possible, you don't have a lot of
trees around and no big buildings, then you're a really
good candidate to provide energy for your house. We should
(30:25):
say also, that's if you're in the northern hemisphere. We
have listeners in the southern that's true. So I would
say if you're in Australia, you would want it to
face true North. But everybody knows that the sun is
so ridiculously hot in Australia that you don't even need
solar panels. It just powers everything, just blazing down on everyone.
You can bury your solar panels underground in Australia, that's
(30:46):
still work better than here. It's like you can scrape
me son. So um. The other thing is weather, Like
it's never weather is never predictable. But what you're gonna
do is look at the data in your area, look
at average monthly sunlight and stuff like that, take into
account rainfall, and in the end you want to design
(31:08):
for because you want power all the time. If you're
going you want to design for your worst month. Um
sort of like now, not really, I was about to say,
just like those initial inverters, you're only as strong as
your weakest member. But you want to take into account.
Let's like, let's say it rains every single day in
a month, you lose your job, dog dies, just absolute
(31:31):
worst month, right, So then they might say, all right,
throw on an extra panel for your dog, right and
you'll be just fine. So um, if you're all hyped
up about this, there's we just kind of opened the
can of worms. There's a lot more to take into account.
But again, just hire somebody reputable, do your research, and
(31:51):
they should be able to guide you through process a
lot more than we can. But I do strongly advise
going on and figuring out your like you need to
know what you need to know kind of thing. Does
that make sense? Yeah, for sure. Um. And you know
earlier you mentioned that these things were ugly and for
a long time they were the bane of existence of
(32:11):
a lot of people in certain neighborhoods. Some homeowners associations
still won't allow them. Um, but they've gotten better looking
over time. They've gotten um, closer to the roof line, um,
a little bit more attractive. And I think, in my
opinion this is just me speculating. Just the perception is changed.
(32:32):
And now when you see them, you don't think, oh
my gosh, I'll get an ugly thing on the roof.
You think, well, you know, those are solar panels and
it might not blend in perfectly with the roof, but there,
you know, there's a big benefit as well. You don't
even think like hippies live there anymore. Normal people live
there normal So Um, there's also solar roof tiles that
(32:55):
are really starting to come along with those versions. Yeah,
they're nuts, how they're also they're super durable, they're very pretty. Um.
I don't own any because they're extremely expensive, but they
if they can get the cost down to anything approaching
like a normal sized roof. It's just like game over man.
That's it. It's exactly like the the the each one
(33:20):
of these tiles is like a solar cell or a
solar panel, and it's a whole roof's worth of them.
They're super durable, but they also cost about five to
ten times the amount of a normal roof these days,
which is just you're you're never gonna pay for it's
never gonna pay for itself. Yeah. I mean, if you're
spending I don't know, twelve to fifteen grand on a
(33:41):
roof and you have to spend up to a hundred
and fifty thousand for that roof to be solar, that's
a lot of dought. I saw like two hundred in
one case, but yeah, somewhere between a hundred and two
hundred for a new roof. Yeah. But the people that
are doing this are you know, the very well healed
who want to be able to brag about their solar
roof quite frankly. Yeah. And I mean if they're doing
that and they're they're you know, generating solar for their house,
(34:04):
more power to them. That's fine. I mean, it's just
I Tesla needs to get that that price down quite
a bit. Come on, Tesla. So we need to talk
a little bit about efficiency. So, um, you know, how
much of the Sun's energy we can convert into electricity?
Is that efficiency? And way back when they first started
(34:25):
this stuff in the nineteenth century, it was one not
even one percent, So it was mainly just like, hey,
look what we can do now a little bit. Um.
Now it's at not true, it's about now. Um, it's
not as much as I would have thought when I
started uh doing this research. And you can't ever get
(34:46):
to a pent I think they said at the very
max these days because of energy loss and conversion and
stuff that the tip top upper limits about eight seven
percent that we could ever get. That's like the physical
limit for conversion. I mean it's the sun. It's not
like you know, the sunlight. You don't use fills up landfills,
(35:08):
you know for sure for sure, um, But the there
is a lot of room for improvement between that current
and right um, and we're actually starting to make those
those kind of gains. Um. One of the ways to
do it is to make solar panels cheaper. So even
if they are just at efficiency if the process of
(35:32):
making them is cheaper, you can put more solar panels
up and the average person can afford it. That's one
way to go. A better way to go is to
focus on making those materials as ridiculously efficient as possible.
And what they found a promising new material called parov skite.
I think that's how you say it. It's kind of
a clunky word. It really is um and I think
(35:53):
it was discovered by Russians or Soviets back in the day.
It really does um. But the one of things about
parov skite, this mineral, is that it is really really
efficient when it comes to the blue end of the spectrum,
the blue to ultraviolet high energy UM photons that comes
streaming through. Normally, those kinds of photons are too energetic
(36:16):
to interact with the phosphorus or the boron that's that
uh silicon is doped with, so it just passes through
and it's like completely wasted high energy light. The parov
skite actually interacts with those way more efficiently. The problem
is it doesn't really interact with the lower energy stuff
that silicon does. So the highest efficiency solar cells that
(36:38):
you can get are typically made with silicon and Parov
Skype put together, so it captures as much stuff as
you can hope for. And these are starting to creep
up into the the high twenties low thirties range, and
as Parov Skype manufacturing gets easier and easier, we should
be able to expect to see solar panels that are
(36:59):
you know, thirt efficient, which is a lot you know
that extra seven percent, that's a huge difference. Yeah, and
I don't think we mentioned the reason that we're trying
to make this move to prov skite anyway. It's because
it's it's cheaper. You can make it cheaper than the
silicon ones. So you know, one day, hopefully, uh, they
could be all prop skite because they're developing stuff that's
(37:20):
going to capture more of what the silicon can capture
in that right. Yeah, that's yeah, that would be wonderful
if if they figure out how to tinker with provskite
so that they don't need the silicon at all, because
there are a lot of problems with silicon, which we'll
talk about. Right. So, um I mentioned earlier in the
show about uh selling your um like pay me power company,
(37:41):
and that wasn't a joke. In fact, I didn't even
know this was a thing until like shamefully like five
years ago, when I learned that if you produce more
energy with your system then you use you can actually
not everywhere, but in many many places now you can
sell that back to the power company and not only
are you not paying. In fact, we talked about this
(38:02):
in one of the episodes, might have been the Sun
or the Bill Gates Renewable Energy episode, that's what it was. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
I remember, but I couldn't. I knew. We talked about
like grids and stuff like that, and now that's where
it was good call. I think so, But um, they
will cut you a check, which is pretty amazing. Um,
and here's the best part, even to me. I was like, well,
(38:23):
I mean, do I want to check from Georgia Power
for whatever nineteen dollars a month? I sort of do.
But what I would really rather do is past that forward,
pay it forward, like they say. And there are places
that have programs where if you have excess solar energy,
you can send that to the power grid and then
apply the leftover as a credit to the bill of
(38:45):
a family in need, which is awesome. It is pretty awesome.
Everybody comes out super great. Yeah, I wonder what the money.
I mean, that's the one thing I don't know. It's like,
how much more are you making? Is it a check
for nineteen dollars or is it like three d bucks
a month? I don't know, And it would definitely depend
on a couple of things. How much electricity costs in
your area, and um, how much your utility company pays
(39:08):
for buyback electricity, and then also how much you're overproducing
to you know, Yeah, there's a bunch of factors. But
I'm just kind of curious. It's like a lot of
money or is it do I really honestly don't know,
but every little bit counts if you're a family in need. Right.
So there's another thing that would be great, Um, if
you have all this excess solar energy when you know
(39:29):
it's really really sunny out, Um, if you could somehow
capture it to use it later during nighttime or on
a cloudy day or something like that. And so a
lot of people have said, well, that'd be great. I mean,
that just makes a solar solar electric home system perfect.
Let's build batteries that do that, And so there are
home batteries that are meant to be connected to solar outfits,
(39:52):
like Tesla makes one of those two, LG makes one,
Mercedes Benz makes one. It's a home battery. Um. The
problem is that they are also really expensive, on the
order of five six seven grand um. And so if
you're spending twelve grand on your solar array and you
(40:14):
spend an extra six grand on your home battery, you
just spent an extra fift of the cost of your
solar array to back up your your home with solar
electricity when the sun is not shining as much. That's
a huge enormous added expense. Yeah. And the one thing
I was because you know, like you, I think my
(40:34):
interest got peaked a little bit from my own house.
It's like, man, this is really appealing to me now
here my late forties. I could buy a system that
will see me through till my death. Probably I don't
know about that. At the time it starts breaking down,
I'll be long gone. Well, let's hope not. Uh. And
my first thought was, you know, we get a lot
of brown outs and blackouts and power outages for some
(40:55):
reason in my neighborhood. Is just it just happens a lot.
It seems like every rainstorm. Uh, certainly anytime there's snow
is a brown out where it's like the powers like
almost out, but it comes back and then almost out
or I think it just sort of flickers. I wish
they'd call it something else. It sounds so gross. The
(41:15):
brown out sounds gross. Yeah, it does. It sounds gross.
Gray out. How about a gray out? Let's call it that.
Are you thinking about like a butt hole? Yeah? Or
poop or something, you know, like poop just squeezing out
of your electrical outlets or something like that. Like that
sounds like a very like archbunker thing to say, like
I'm gonna go upstairs and have a brown out. Yes,
(41:37):
yes it does. Dropping the Browns off at the Super
Bowl or okay, I get you. So the only way
the Browns could make it to a Super Bowl? Oh man, Yeah,
Texas and Ohio super happy with you today. Um So
my first thought was like, oh man, I get on
Solar and there's a blackout going on because we we
(42:00):
went out. I think I talked about this on one
episode when they we had the big snowstorm a couple
of years ago. We were out for three and a
half days. That's unconscionable. I mean, it was a long
time to be without electricity, to the point where it
was like, all right, I'm a little bit worried about
my family. Um, so I thought, man, I'll get solar
and all those suckers will be without power and I'll
have power. That is not the case, um, unless you're
(42:22):
if you're storing on a battery, you can do that.
But during a power outage, UM, there's something called islanding.
It's very dangerous. It's basically when you're pumping electricity back
into the power lines that all the that Georgia power
thinks and the linemen are dead, so they're going to
work on these and you're still pumping power back into it.
They can't have that, so the power goes out as well.
(42:43):
It'll kill it'll kill alignment for sure. Um. But if
you have a battery back up, you're fine. Like you said,
like that's where you're getting your juice from. But your
your solar system is going to disconnect you from the
grid to keep that from happening. But there's actually that
happens elsewhere, chuck. If with if people have a generator,
some people will plug their generator into an outlet in
(43:05):
their house and reverse the flow of electricity from their
generator throughout their house, which can create is landing as well.
That crazy. Yeah, yeah, well, I mean that's a kind
of a thing. Now. That's a lot of new houses
have whole house generators built in and as soon as
the power cuts off, that thing automatically fires up right right,
But this is like affordable generator that they're plugging in
(43:27):
reverse into their homewiring. It's not a good idea for
any any anyone. I mean, there are safe ways to
do it. That is not one of them. Should we
take another break? Yeah, let's all right. We'll take one
final break everyone, and we're going to talk a little
bit about some of the downsides because there are some
to solar power. I want to say, there's one other
(44:13):
type of battery I found. Um it's a mechanical battery
where you your solar power system uses all that excess
power to to to power a pump that pumps water
up to a raised area, and then at night er
on a cloudy day, when you need the extra electricity,
it releases that water to spin over a turbine, which
creates an electrical current in that awesome a little power
(44:36):
plant in your house. Basically, yeah, you do. And it's
green too. It's hydroelectric, solar powered hydroelectric batteries. What that
is pretty amazing. So uh, we mentioned silicon not being great.
There are it's obvious that UM to create and this
is an argument a lot of times against electric electric
cars and hybrid vehicles. UM, we all like to drive
(44:58):
them and stuff, but is a greenhouse effect when it
comes to making this stuff. Minding minding these materials, uh,
is not great. It is very environmentally, it's very harsh
on the environment. And I don't think anyone makes any
bones about that. UM. Transporting all this stuff gonna burn
a lot of fossil fuels. Manufacturing all the stuff burns
(45:19):
fossil fuels. But like you said earlier, that is true.
But once that process is finished, that's it. No more
greenhouse gasses forever, right, And some people will double down
at this point and be like, well, whoa whoa Like
creating solar cells is actually really really harmful because it
requires the production of something called nitrogen trifluoride, which is
(45:41):
a greenhouse gas that's seventeen thousand times more potent than
carbon dioxide. Bad stuff. And when you work into the
idea that you have a whole house battery that's made
of cadmium, lead, nickel, all all of which have to
be mined and which has to be replaced everything ten years,
your solar arrays seems much much less green. And that's
(46:04):
these are all very legitimate arguments. There's they're not incorrect
at all, but they're also current limitations, and they're all
surrounding production and transportation and all that stuff can be
worked out. And when that stuff gets worked out, you
still have solar producing clean energy with green or with
(46:24):
um fossil fuels. Even if you worked all that stuff out,
when you deploy them and actually create electricity from them,
they're still going to produce greenhouse gases. So solar will
always have that advantage. And it just has a bunch
of kind of front loaded obstacles that need to be
overcome through breakthroughs in the short term. Yeah, for sure.
I mean, it's no contest in the end, especially if
(46:46):
you're talking about the life of a solar system, considering
like twenty five years, let's say, over the twenty five
years of burning coal and natural gas, it's just not
even close. Yeah, and I mean, like if you start
getting more and more solar um involved and like transportation,
then you knock out those greenhouse gases for transporting like
solar panels from place to place because it's solar powering
(47:07):
the transportation too. There's a lot of stuff we can
do that that we just haven't quite figured out how
to do yet. But it's not physically impossible to overcome them. Yeah,
and you know, there's also people that say, hey, we
you know, the entire country could run on solar and wind.
Some people say maybe not. Other people say no, it
totally could. But there are a lot of big obstacles.
(47:28):
When you talk about converting a nationwide system, uh from
a fossil fuel system two renewables, it's it's not easy
and frankly, it will probably never happen on that scale. Um,
maybe I'm cynical. I think I think it's cynical. I
think if we look a hundred and fifty years in
the future, maybe even a hundred seventy five, even I
(47:51):
would say it's entirely possible. I could see it. Well,
that would require and and if you do the math,
that's about right. That would require several generations of people
dying out who would fight this tooth and nail to
their grad right, certain people who would have to die
out first. But there are a lot of real obstacles
to this, um. I mean, our infrastructure just is not
(48:12):
built for this, Like we would have to completely rewrite
how we do things. Yeah, So the infrastructure is set
up in a centralized manner where you have a power
plant and that power plant is built wherever, and you
burn coal or whatever and create steam which turns to
a turbine that creates electricity, and that electricity goes out
(48:32):
to the area that that that power plant serves. That's
not how renewables like solar or wind work. They have
to be built where the wind or the sunlight is,
and so you have to build a bunch of them
wherever you can. And then those things all have to
be connected. So it's a decentralized way, um that you
have to connect them together to the current grid, which
(48:55):
means running a lot more transmission lines from these new
solar arrays that you're going to build wherever to connect
them to deliver that electricity throughout the country. Yeah, and
there's also and uh, there are fluctuations in the weather.
You know, we already talked about your sort of at
the behest of what your weather is giving you. Uh.
And we're not saying when the wind doesn't blow, your
(49:17):
lights go off, believe me. But it does have an effect.
And so you have to compensate for this stuff. And
compensating for this stuff, and on a national grid, UM
is expensive and I don't even think we've quite figured
out how that's gonna work yet, have we. No, there's
some proposals. One is to UM basically create batteries, like
just use the same solution that people have for their houses.
(49:40):
We just need to take that excess stuff and store
it for use when the the sun isn't shining. They
figured out that for a an electrical storage system to
store twelve hours worth of electricity for the US electrical
grid would cost more than two point five trillion dollars.
To that's quite a bit. Other people are saying, no, no,
(50:01):
we just have to get better at more efficient long
distance transmission lines. That's what we talked about in that
Bill Gates episode. One of the things was that smart
grid where we can easily shuffle UM solar that's generated
in Scottsdale up to Portland. Oregon, you know, or Portland,
Maine for that matter. Yeah, I mean they're everywhere in
(50:22):
the United States at some point. There's a lot of
sunshine going on at once, and you can send that
to places. I know we're picking on Portland Seattle again,
but if you can produce in Phoenix and send it
to Portland, that's great. And I mean, let's let's be
honest here. Two point five trillion dollars is a lot
of cheese. But I saw somewhere someone point out that
(50:42):
there's a an estimate that to fully convert over the
US electrical grid to solar only would be about four
trillion dollars, which, again is a lot of money, but
in the grand scheme of things, and when you really
think about what that investment is going towards, it's not
that much. And frankly, it's kind of doable if there's
(51:02):
a political will to do it. Yeah, I get you.
Another solution would be for every house to have its
own solar ray, every car to have its own solar power.
That's what I'm banking more on is like more and
more people doing this to the point where it's you know,
it's not part of the infrastructure of the grid. But
it's a you know, still making a big dent. But
(51:23):
that's going to be the hardest sell because you're just
completely eliminated all of the power companies and they're not
exactly known as lightweights when it comes to things like lobbying.
That's true. And another you know, you look at the
subsidies going on now, and that's really clear who's better
at lobbying. Federal subsidies for power companies who produce solar
(51:44):
are about five and thirty three million bucks compared to
thirty two billion dollars for natural gas alone in two
thousand and sixteen. Right, that's just text bricks and subsidies
for investing in deploying that kind of energy. Yeah, and
solar still is pretty expensive per megawatt hour compared to
(52:04):
like you said, fossil fuels are just cheap. Still, they
really are. And here's here's the problem to Chuck. There's
there's a conundrum where when you deploy a lot of
solar electricity um in a utility, it actually tends to
depress wholesale electrical prices across the board. So a company
(52:25):
has an incentive to not deploy solar because they can
charge more for electrical produced from like coal and other
fossil fuels like they normally do. That's right, But if
you put one in your house, uh, you're not only
paying for your own elector or whatever. You're subsidizing your
own electrical bill. You possibly are getting money back or
helping a family need um. And it's also an investment
(52:47):
in your house. It actually increases the value of your
home because, you know, unless someone just hates them and
wants to to reak in it up and yank them
off the roof when they come in there, it's going
to be a selling point. You know, you're like, hey,
moving to this house, They've already paid for it, and
you don't have a power bill. Yeah. There was a
study from the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab that found that
(53:08):
a solar setup increase the value of a house in
America by about fifteen grands. Right. So when I said
they've already paid for it, what I really mean is
they're passing that onto you. Exactly, they passed the costs
onto you. Do you got anything else? I got nothing else, man,
I'm I'm gonna legit. Look into this, let me know
(53:28):
how it goes. Man. I I'm really interested I have
a dude, doubt like we have. I don't think we
could do our whole house. But we have this one
roof in particular. Now that's uh, I can't see from
the street. It's uh, you can only see it from
one place in the house, and I think it faces
south and I have to measure the panels, but I
could probably fit like eight panels up there. That's not
(53:51):
enough for my whole house. Hey, that whatever little bit works,
that could power my Frankenstein experiments, right exactly, you're bringing
inanimate matter back to life. Um. One other thing, Chuck,
There's a big obstacle that's facing us worldwide, and that
(54:11):
is that we haven't figured out how to get solar
energy from the oceans collected over the oceans to the
rest of the world, which is going to be a
big challenge. But if we could figure that out, problem solved.
Just build a solar array the size of Texas, maybe
over the Great Pacific garbage Patch, and there we go.
I feel like I've seen research into that, and maybe
(54:32):
not the oceans, but like solar blankets over water, now
am I making that up? I mean I'm sure that
that you could have them in like coastal areas or whatever.
But that that means like you couldn't swim in those
coastal areas, you know, which is going to depress the
value of the real estate there. So I would guess
we would want them like really far off shore. But
how do you get that electricity back to you know,
(54:54):
where it's needed on land? That's the question I think. Yeah,
just though a big solar uh floating solar blanket over
an off shoal short oil rig and just plug it
in and just plug it in. Yeah, there you goblem solved. Uh.
If you want to know more about solar, go check
it out, see if you can maybe swing it for
(55:16):
your house. And if so, let us know about it.
We want to hear that. And Chuck will keep you
updated too, won't you sure? Uh? And since I said
Chuck will keep you updated, friends, that means it's time
for a listener mail. Oh no, sir, you I know
you're being coy because to your right and Jerry's chair
is Alexander Williams and not Jerry. No, Jerry's standing over there.
(55:38):
This is all getting weird. It is getting a little weird.
We're playing musical chairs and Jerry's the loser. That's now
Jerry Snipper, the Loser. What we've done though today is
asked Alex Williams, one of our colleagues and pals here
in the office, to come in. And we don't do
this much, but when we really love a show and
someone sits fourteen feet from us, well and they do
(56:00):
something really special. I mean, this is special stuff we're
talking about. That's why I said, we really love it. Okay,
we asked him in, and here he is to talk
about your great show, Ephemeral. What a comfortable chair, Cherry,
I can see what a great chair is that, Frank.
This is Frank. Well he's sitting on Frank. That's right.
So welcome Alex. We wanted to have you here to
(56:22):
kind of tell everybody about your show because we love
your show and we could talk about it all day,
but we thought it would be better if you came
in and kind of told the folks like the thought
behind Ephemeral and what what prompted you to do it
and what they can expect from it. So go, okay, Um, well,
it's a it's a podcast about artifact, right, the stuff
(56:44):
that gets left behind and uh, you know, trying to
illuminate you know, maybe dark or or sort of forgotten
corners of history by you know, when we have them,
by playing the artifacts. And it's an audio show, so specifically,
you know, we started with ideas of like tape and
you know, film and video, but then you know, sometimes
(57:08):
you get into areas where there's just really no artifacts
or artifacts that don't really translate into into the audio medium,
and then so you experiment a little bit. And so
the series itself, it's ten ten episodes posted trailer, right,
and the first season, Yeah, the trailer itself stands on
its own. I think you've said before, I hope. So, yeah,
(57:30):
it's it's an eight minute this little story about um
we'll call it like my first there was no podcast,
then my first radio show. It's a show that I
a loose you know, connection of thoughts that I would
make on my parents Answering Machine. That was my fully
produced first show at least that I remember. And so
(57:53):
in each episode you kind of find a recovered or
formulaly lost or um uh it just kind of overlooked
peace and then kind of dissect it and explain it
and talk about like it's place in the universe, right,
And I think one of the episodes was about um
kind of a long lost original TV network, right, the
(58:14):
Dumont Television Network. Yeah, you guys ever heard of Dumont?
I had not. Uh. In the Golden Ager television there's
four TV networks, ABC, CBS, NBC also with US Today,
all big radio companies beforehand, I mean big, big, huge brands,
and Dumont was a television manufacturer that got into the
broadcasting game at the very beginning. They were the fourth
(58:37):
network when there was only four. They were only around
for I think just a little over a decade and
something like twenty thousand broadcasts have been almost completely lost
because things just weren't recorded then. Uh, there was no
real way to record life television. What they would do
is they'd make something called a kinescope, which should take
a TV screen and you filmed it with your film camera,
(58:57):
and then you have a real that looks terrible. And
the only reason they make that is so they could
send it off to you know, you're in California and
your affiliates not connected to New York, DC, Philadelphia, etcetera,
on the coaxial cable and so then they show it
once in California and then they would trash that thing
or tape over it or you know, film over it
because there was no reruns then right early TV was live.
(59:20):
It was weird because of it. So the little snippets
that we have of it left that the few kinescopes
that got saved, it's something like three or you know,
somewhat complete broadcast. They're mostly held by individual collectors and
a fewer and institutions like the Museum of TV and
Radio in New York. That's awesome. You also covered one
(59:42):
of the topics that we've covered in the Best about
the Call Your Brothers, which was very cool, And I
think that's one of my favorite things about the show
is is so wide ranging. It's like the best episodes
of this American Life or nine nine percent invisible as
far as your approach goes, And that's why I think
I loved it from the beginning. You were in the
Call your Brother's episode very briefly. I know you did
(01:00:03):
a walk by, huh, I did I did a line reading.
We'll just leave it at that will be an easter
egg for listeners. So all all ten episodes, plus the
trailer out they're available now wherever you get your podcasts
right indeed, you have a second season coming. Second season.
We did our first recording for yesterday. I nice. Yeah,
(01:00:25):
how's it going? So far? So good? I got a
lot of reading to do. Man right on, we'll get
to it. We won't keep you any longer, but thank
you for coming by. And if you want to check
out a femeral everybody, you can go check it out
on what, the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, wherever
you get your podcasts, go check it out now all
of those things. Someone asked me to put it on
(01:00:46):
an old tape for them, but I haven't done that yet.
That would be a cool way to get it would be.
Thanks for coming by, Alex, Thanks for having me on. Guys. Well,
if you want to get in touch with this, like
Alex did, you can just drop by the studio j K. Instead,
go on to stuff you Should Know dot com, check
out our social links, or you can send us an
email to Stuff Podcast at I heeart radio dot com.
(01:01:11):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeart Radios.
How stuff works. For more podcasts for my heart Radio,
visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows. H
Hello, Maine and Greater New England. We're coming to see
you guys in Portland and we can't wait. We would
love to see you there. Yep. We'll be at the
State Theater on August. If you're interested. You can get
tickets and information at s y s K live dot com.
There's some lobster at us. Welcome to Stuff you Should Know,
a production of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey,
(00:28):
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, There's Charles W.
Chuck Bryant, there's Jerry over there. The sun is shining,
our collars are popped, tongues of our shoes are hanging out,
and um, it smells really nice in here. That's right,
which must mean one thing. Chuck, It's time to talk
some stuff you should know? She is? Can I say that? Sure?
(00:53):
All right? Good? Well I just did, didn't you did? Uh? So? Uh?
We are at SLEE talking about solar power today, and
I'm a little psyched about this one because I was
putting this thing together over months. Dude, you would think
solar power is such a hot, sexy topic. You know
that there would be just reams and reams of just
(01:15):
stuff to research and there is, but it's all really
wonky and really technical, and there's a lot of stuff
that contradicts other stuff. And I get this feeling of
dread researching this, that the cheerleaders and champions of solar
power are losing their resolve to an extent. They'll still
(01:39):
sell you a solar panel, They'll still tell you a
solar is great, and I know that they truly believe that,
but I think that they are worried that it's it's
not taking off like they expected it too. But then
let me just caveat that with one other thing, and
then we'll get started and I'll be quiet for the
rest of the podcast. If you look at the numbers
and the figures, solar has quietly um made a name
(02:05):
for itself and established itself, at least in the United States,
to an astounding degree. So I'm not quite sure what
I'm picking up on when I get the sense that
they're worried, because if you look at it, it's actually
doing really, really well and growing all the time. Let's
discuss solar power. Yeah, power from the sun converted into electricity, right,
(02:28):
so you can say screw you power company, yeah, or
pay me power company. You could say, take this power
bill and shove it. So the sun. Uh, this is
pretty neat here at the beginning of this that you
put together here, Um, the sun ray. The Sun's rays
give off about a thousand wats of energy per square meter.
(02:50):
So if you pull the camera back a bit and
you look at Texas, let's say, a lot of sun
in Texas, a lot of land in Texas. There's a
lot of a lot of stuff from Texas. There really
is some stuff. No, that's true. I was gonna say
the good thing about Texas. You could completely cover it
with solar rays and no one but the people who
live in Texas would have a problem with it. Oh boy,
(03:13):
oh boy, oh gear Goo Google. All right, Um, So
if you look at a mass land mass that's as
big as Texas, they receive a little under seven hundred
terra wats over the course of one hour on a
on a at noon on a sunny day. Seven terra wats. Yeah,
it sounds like a lot, but is it a lot?
(03:34):
Who knows? Who could possibly know? If you want to
compare that, you're being coy uh. In that same hour,
the total amount of human mage energy energy production on
planet Earth. And this is all energy production that you
could possibly dream of is seventeen point seven terra watts
compared to seven hundred terra wats. That's forty times less
(03:57):
than what the sun delivered to Texas and in just
that hour. Yeah, right, And the Union of Concerned Scientists
happen in group who I love. Um, they say that
eighteen days of sunshine that hits across the entire Earth
contains the same amount of energy stored in the entirety
of the planet's reserves of coal, oil and natural gas.
(04:21):
If you dug up and burned every bit of coal,
oil and natural gas, it would only produce as much
energy as eighteen days worth of global sunlight. That's astounding. Yeah,
And these are you know, these are facts that have
fifty caveats beneath each of them, which we're going to
(04:41):
talk about. But it is a prime example, and I
think just a good way to kind of indicate just
how much energy potential energy there is coming from the
sun every day. Yeah, And just I mean to to
point out the obvious. The great thing about solar is
there is no greenhouse gas emissions when you use solar electricity.
(05:02):
It's just clean energy and it's free because it's from
the sun, that's right. And before you start typing, oh yeah,
but what about you got a lot to make. These
things were made it to look on and then before
you do that, we're going to talk about all that stuff.
But Josh very clearly said, once you have these things
set up, that's that's when the real benefit comes. Yes,
(05:27):
And if I hadn't said it, I was going to
eventually well no, you basically said it, like you know,
when they're working, when they're active, they're not using fossil fuels.
Thank you, Chuck. All right, so let's go back in
time a bit, because if you think solar power, you think, oh, well,
this stuff, you know, was invented in the nineteen seventies,
not so you have to go all the way back
(05:48):
to eighteen thirty nine, believe it or not. When a
French physicist name Alexandra Edmond, Uh, Josh says this back
quere I mean I practiced it a million times. Queriller,
I think be querillar. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's a tough word.
Yes it is. There's a couple of extra continants in that.
(06:10):
It just shouldn't be there, that's right. So, uh, this
dude He's the one that first demonstrated the photo voltaic effect,
which is basically the ability of a solar cell to
turn sun into electricity all the way back in right,
but no one knew exactly how this work. They just
knew that at work. He was burned at the stake
later on for his black magic. Right, So just about
(06:35):
forty about forty years later, there's a guy named Charles Fritz,
and he, in the eighteen eighties built the world's first
rooftop solar array. Coincidentally, just a year after Edison launched
the world's first coal fire power plant. UM. But this
early solar array was terribly inefficient. It didn't do very much.
(06:59):
It could bay basically power um. Jeez, I don't even
know what it could power a mouse trap? How about that,
which doesn't even need electricity. That's how little power that
this thing produced. Um. But it definitely demonstrated that it
was possible to generate an electrical current um from sunlight
(07:20):
in a way that it was a proof of concept,
basically saying just give it like ninety years and we'll
understand this better. And who was that that was? Fritz? Ye,
Fritz was a good guy, but he was no, Einstein, Uh, Einstein.
It would take Einstein, that is, to really explain how
(07:40):
this all worked in nineteen o five, because he had
a knack for doing that. I'm not sure if people
realize that he was a good explainer, maybe the original explainer.
Well he would put it in terms that you could
really understand, like like consider the sandwich. Imagine the sandwich
is the sun, and then it just go from there
and you'd be like, you understand what he's saying. Yeah,
(08:01):
And if you think, uh, Einstein, oh yeah, he won
a bunch of Nobel Prizes for relativity. Not so. He
won the Nobel Prize in Physics for explaining the photo
electric effect. He didn't win for relativity. No, I didn't
know that. Holy cow, what is unless I'm wrong? And
if i am, I'm gonna have a lot of egg
(08:22):
on my face. That's all right, Well we'll cook it
off with some good old solar electricity. Gross. It is gross,
but also so is the idea of cooked egg in
your beard. So Bell Labs in nineteen fifty four, if
you want to talk about the modern PV cell, that
(08:42):
was the and uh thanks to the US government really
in the US military, they funded a lot of this
early research, because if you've ever looked at a picture
of sky Lab or any of our great satellites, you'll
notice that they all have these big solar wings. Yeah. Yeah,
they're solar powered. And it was because of US government
(09:05):
research in the fifties that we were able to develop those.
I think they launched the first solar powered satellite in
nineteen fifty four, no. Fifty eight, and then just six
years later they launched the first solar powered satellite whose
solar panels could track the Sun, which is still a
(09:26):
pretty whiz bang thing to have for your solar array.
And this is nine sixty four. So the US government
invested in the earliest research and everything was going along
really smoothly. Um. But one of the things that's always
been a problem for solar is oil in natural gas
and coal are just so cheap, and our infrastructure is
(09:49):
set up to burn those things and get electricity for them.
So solar has always been an upstart. But at one
point in nineteen seventy three, oil was not very cheap
all of a sudden because of the OPEC embargo that
created the energy crisis that made it really un cheap.
So much so that the United States looked around and said,
(10:10):
we need to find other sources of energy, and they
really looked really hard at solar and it actually gave
solar technology a big old boost. Yeah, and that boost
came by way of offering tax credits for the first
time in the United States for businesses and residents. Said hey,
if you want to put in solar power, and they
still do this today, we'll give you some tax credits.
It will make a lot cheaper for you. Um. There
(10:33):
has been I guess we could call it the the
solar Battle at the White House since nineteen seventy nine.
Jimmy Carter had very famously had solar panels installed on
the roof of the White House, uh to heat water
for for them and for the pools and for the
kitchen and stuff like that. And Uh, Reagan had them
taken down in eighties six. So there are a couple
(10:57):
of stories about how this went down. Um. The cynic
will say Reagan as a statement had them taken down
even though they were working fine, because he was all
for the fossil fuel industry and it was a very
symbolic gesture. Other people will say that's not what happened.
At all. The roof needed repair that the solar panels
(11:18):
were on, and they took down the solar panels to
repair the roof, and then the White House officially says
they did not put them back because it would be
very unwise based on cost. Is a direct quote. Uh
so that's you know, that's the party line right now.
I've never heard that one. That sounds like a new
gingrich you are And if you ask me, well, that's
(11:39):
a direct quote. Um, George W. Bush put uh solar
power back into the White House. Say what what? Yeah?
I didn't know that. Yeah, he put solar for the
water heaters for the White House pool and then put
solar panels on top of the roof of the grounds
maintenance building to how out there. He did not have
(12:01):
them on top of the actual White House, but he
had solar solar power installed at various places around the
White House. This was w or h W. This is
w okay, Wow, that's really surprising. Yeah. Um. Carter's for
his part, one of his he has two on display.
One of them is at the Smithsonian and one of
them is right here in Atlanta at the Carter Center.
(12:21):
You can go look at one of those solar panels.
There's also like a Museum of Science in China that
got their hands on one. It's on display in China too.
Oh yeah, which makes sense because after after the U. S.
Government kind of turned its back on solar, China came
along and said, oh, we'll take that ball and ran
with it. Sure, going back to Reagan though he didn't.
(12:42):
I don't want to let him up too easy with this.
Um the fact that they just said it was unwise
based on costs because he gutted the Department of Energies
Renewable Energy research and Development budgets, like totally gutted him,
and he eliminated the tax breaks for wind and solar. Um.
I'm not sure for how long, but for a million years,
I would guess now, because they're back. Uh. And it
(13:04):
was Obama who came back and very publicly installed solar
panels back on the roof of the White House. And
of course the first thing I thought was that that
Trump probably went in there and smashed him with a
sledgehammer on his first day in office. But apparently they're
still there. They're still there, huh, still there and still working.
He didn't take them down. Wow, we so one of
the other things that UM the government did to help
(13:26):
solar along during the Carter era was to to offer
tax breaks, like you were saying, but because of the
really really high cost of installing a solar electric system, UM,
it was basically viewed as a sweetheart deal, tax break
for the rich. That's how the first solar tax credits
(13:48):
were viewed because solar was so expensive, so they were
a little bit before their time. But over the course
of those ensuing years from the early eighties on Moor
to today, a UM, because we've had breakthroughs and technology
UM of manufacturing, of creating new kinds of semiconductors, of
(14:09):
making traditional kinds more cheaply, the price of solar has
dropped eight percent in the past decade. Yeah, I mean
it's really to the point now where it's I mean
I looked at some of the prices and I was like,
you know what, that's that's now I think fairly affordable
for for most kind of middle class Americans if they
(14:30):
want to put in solar power, because you know, eventually
it's going to pay for itself. That's the whole the
whole idea. Either you're either you're trying to pay this,
you know, get cheaper bills and have it pay for
itself over the years, which is going to happen regardless,
or you're someone with some money that just wants to, um,
do the right thing by the environment and get off
the grid as much as possible. Yeah, it's just that
(14:51):
upfront cost, not the cost over the life of the setup.
It's the upfront cost. But there are things like you
can there UM like energy saver, renewable energy, mortgages, home
loans basically you can take out they have UM really
special good financing and rates and stuff like that. Um,
there's a lot of things you can do that we'll
(15:12):
talk about to get around the upfront cost. But you
you hit the nail on the head, and it's really
worth saying again you can expect your solar um electrical
home system to pay for itself over the lifetime of
the setup. Yeah, and we'll talk more about price later,
but just poking around like it's sort of an average
(15:33):
US household, you can plunk down about fifteen grand to
cover your electricity needs, which and that's I think after
the text credit if I'm not mistaken right, And again,
you know, there are so many factors where you live,
how much energy use, how big your house is, the
weather where you are. So this is a big, big
(15:55):
broad statement. But if you're just looking for a general range,
it's not like it costs fifty or sixty dollars anymore
to do this, right, So you want to take a
you want to take a break and then come back
and talk about what actually is going on in those
solar cells. Let's do it, Chuck, okay, dude. So um,
(16:40):
there are three ways as far as humans are aware
of right now, that you can get energy from the sun.
You can get it by converting it into electricity what
we're gonna talk about. Basically, you can turn it into
chemical energy, which is it's far out though, it's like
storing energy in the bonds of molecules, like through artificial photosynthesis.
(17:01):
That's pretty cool. And then you can also convert it
into heat. But when you're talking about solar energy, most
people think of these solar into electricity, which is called
photovoltaic um energy, and that's basically what we're going to
be talking about. Yeah, Like when you drive to the
neighborhood and you see those shiny panels on a roof
(17:23):
and think, my god, those are ugly. That's true, man,
it's true. We'll get to that too. Uh So, that's
what we're talking about. These photo voltaic cells. They are
made up of semiconductors, materials called semiconductors. And these days,
and you know, we're talking a second about how this
might be changing in the future, but about all these
(17:44):
solar cells these days are using silicon as the semiconductor. Right.
Silicon is a crystal, which means that it has a
really tight atomic composition. Right, it's not very it's extraordinarily
stable um, which is kind of a thing because you
want a somewhat unstable um arrangement of atoms or else
(18:08):
you won't get this electricity to work. But no, you can't.
But that's exactly right. The flow of electricity basically but
with um. The reason why they use silicon is because
it is a semiconductor, which means that it gives you
a large measure of control over where that electricity flows
(18:29):
and how it flows. So rather than just using pure silicon,
which um will will allow you to direct the control
of electricity but won't produce any electricity, they actually dope
it with other materials to produce two different types of
silicon film. UM, ND type and P type. That's right. So, uh,
(18:51):
for the ND type, which is stands for negative, they're
gonna dope it. And I love that word in this
case with phosphorus that has five electrons, so it's gonna
bind to the silicon that has four electrons, and so
that leaves you I can even do this kind of
simple math with one free one extra electron leftover, just
dangling out there like it's wearing shorts that are way
(19:14):
too short. Yeah, it's looking for a place to go. Basically. Um,
the way I sort of saw this was like a
couple of apartments next to each other. One has an
empty room and one has an extra roommate. Okay, that's
a great one. So the other type is this P type,
the positive it's doped with boron has three electrons, and
so this is the other apartment. This is the one
(19:34):
it's gonna bind with silicon, and it leaves that unused
bond open. So that's where you have your extra space
where the electron can go. Right. So when you take
ND type silicon film and P type silicon film and
you put them up against one another, UM, you have
a situation where that extra electron wants to flow to
(19:56):
the other side and fill the unused bond, because again,
the universe is always moving towards homeostasis. Right. Yeah, that
roommates like, hey, you've got an next room, Can I
come crash in there? Yeah, And they say, wait, wait,
we need somebody to get you off of the couch.
And in this case, that somebody is sunlight, because sunlight
is made up of photons, which are energy carriers of
(20:16):
the electromagnetic spectrum. And when they hit this doped silicon,
they come bursting into the room and they kick that
that lazy electron into the other apartment where there's an
open bedroom and everything is filled very nicely. That's right.
So this electron flow, these electrons moving around and flowing
in this single direction. I think we said that yet
(20:37):
it only flows in one direction. Electricity does well, it
does in this one in this case. Yeah, that's the basis.
This electron flow is the basis of electricity. And what
they do is they put these metal contacts on the
top and the bottom of the cell and then you
can direct that electron flow out of the cell to
be used as electricity in your home. Yeah, that's that's
(20:59):
the soul or cell and in a nutshell. And the
solar cell is the basic unit of the of what
you think of when you think of like a solar
panel or whatever, it's that one little square and that
square is connected to other squares um and and they
they form what's called a module. And when you put
like um a nice little uh frame around it and
(21:20):
put it on a stand or whatever, you have yourself
a solar panel. When you have a bunch of solar
panels together in a group, all working together, that's a
solar array. So technically, when you point at someone's roof
and you say, look at that solar panel, you're saying,
look at that solar array. And now you can correct
that person from the back seat and they'll make you
get out of the car. People say that, look at
(21:41):
that solar array, universe. I would think people would more say,
look at those solar panels. Well, then that would make sense.
I had just set it up so it didn't make
any sense, so someone would swoop in incorrect. So the
person who knows what it's really called is around with
complete morons. We say things like look at that solar panel.
(22:04):
When they see a group of solar panels. All right, now,
I got you we're talking about right, all right, So
it's it's it sounds simple, and it is kind of simple,
and it's um complexity that makes no sense at all.
But it's a little more complicated because, like we said,
electricity in this case is only flowing in one direction,
which means it creates a direct current. And that's a
(22:27):
problem because uh we you know, if you we talked
about in the Bone Wars episode about the the uh
what they called not the power of Wars, the current
current wars, the War of current. That's right, d C
did not win. Um, So we have to convert that
d C current to a C current. So what the
solar panels need is something called an inverter. Yeah, and
(22:48):
the inverter is basically like the brains of the whole
set up. And there used to be a big problem
with inverters. Um. They were very clunky, and you would
basically have one inverter for an entire solar array, and um,
the solar inverter would would kind of modulate the amount
of electricity that was going through it out to the
house or the circuit panel, and it would base whatever
(23:12):
it was doing on whatever the lowest common denominator of
the whole array was giving it right. So if you
had one dirty solar cell, or there was a cloud
going over just one solar panel out of like twenty,
the inverter was basically delivering electricity based on that one
(23:33):
that one cloudy panel, or that one dirty cell. That's
not the case anymore, It really wasn't. The solar industry
wised up and they said, we can do better than this,
and they came up with what are called micro inverters.
And now a micro inverter is responsible for um either
one panel or just a single cell, and so that
(23:54):
one cell could could be a dirty or cloudy at
any given point, but it's not going to drag down
the whole thing because there's all these other inverters that
are are running the show on their own too. How
can you got to clean these things? Did you see that?
I didn't, but I did see that they were virtually
maintenance free? Oh really, yeah, that's what I say. Um,
(24:15):
all right, so let's talk about powering a house. Uh
And just like four years ago, two thousand fifteen, and
these are pretty good numbers, eight hundred thousand houses and
businesses in the United States had solar panels. And that's
not to say they were um dependent on them, but
they were at least doing some of the work right,
which is not bad. Um. And like you said, once,
(24:37):
once it's up and running, not much maintenance going on,
and you're looking at probably and the number they often
throw out is just you know, for twenty years, you
can expect this thing to work like a charm. Yeah,
twenty years is the low end. I saw the averages
about twenty five years. When you buy a solar setup
that you can just put it up there and be like, oh, um,
(24:57):
this is great. I don't even need to think about
this anymore. UM. But if you do want to invest
in this, if you're like, okay, I can swing this,
I want to contribute, I'm going to go solar. There
are some steps you want to take UM to kind
of wisen yourself up so that when you deal with
the installer you'll know what you're talking about and when
the first thing you want to do is to do
(25:17):
an energy audit on your energy consumption, which is basically
figuring out how much electricity you use in your house.
UM at any given time, probably want to figure out
what your peak is and then just kind of plan
for for that. Um. See, what I don't get is
like you can look at your power bill and tell
that you need to do it a separate audit outside
(25:38):
of that. Well, the reason why it's good to do
a separate audit outside of that is you can identify
areas where you can improve things. It's it's kind of like, no,
you don't have to do it, but you could do
an energy audit, and when you do, you can be like, oh,
I think if I added insulation to the attic, it
would come consumption by its right. Yeah. Yeah, It's kind
(26:01):
of like, um, if if taking on the project of
getting solar installed on your home wasn't a big enough
headache for you, add this to it, you know what
I'm saying. But it's a good it will definitely you
will find some places where you can cut your energy consumption.
That's the benefit of an energy audit. And this is
just happens to be a good time to do it. Yeah.
And you know the other thing you have to decide
(26:22):
as you're pricing this out, and you can call a
company they will they will come out these days and
basically tell you what you need. Um, you know if
you get a good, highly recommended company, and apparently some
of the smaller companies are much more highly recommended than
the larger companies from what I read online. But they
will come out and say the question they're gonna say is, uh,
(26:44):
and this is really the most important thing for you
to decide is how much of what percentage of of
your household energy do you want to come from solar?
And if you're like they'll they'll say, okay, well here's
what you need. If you say, you know what you know,
if I can cover I don't have much roof space,
I'm happy with covering my UM power usage, then they'll say,
(27:05):
all right, well, then let's work within your system. Or
you may just be you may not have a choice
unless you uh, you know, it all depends on your
roof and the way it's sloped and the way it's
faced and all that stuff. Right. Um, yeah, there's a
lot of considerations. UM. And again you're you're the person
you hire to do this is going to be able
to provide you with all this information and ask all
the right questions. But if you want to know what
(27:27):
you're talking about going into it, um, you can find
out kind of about how much electricity you could expect
a solar array on your roof to produce um down
to your actual house. Like there's all sorts of solar
potential maps online yea, and calculators. It's really They make
it kind of really easy on you these days. It's easy.
And let's just be honest, Chuck. It's fun too because
(27:49):
it'll show you like how much money you will actually
not only like how much you'll save over the course
of the lifetime of the solar array. And you'll have
a do you good idea of how fast the thing
will pay for itself. It's it's pretty cool to do um.
But you'll have an idea of, uh, this thing is
gonna pay for itself in eight years, or this thing
is gonna pay for itself in twenty five years, and
(28:11):
that will largely depend on where you live in the country.
But everything I saw from everywhere, from Union of Concerned
Scientists to Energy dot Gov is that everywhere in the
United States you can expect your solar array to pay
for itself eventually over the life of its over its
own life. It might take a little longer in Seattle
(28:31):
than in Phoenix, right, but you know, that's how things go.
You got better music in Seattle and better food, well
maybe the food to watch you got the You got
the music though for sure. Sorry Phoenix, we we love you.
Yeah sorry uh, last of the meat puppets. So I
talked about the angle of these panels and the angle
(28:52):
of your roof. Um, it's called the angle of inclination.
Is what is how you have to set these If
you have all all the money in the world and
in nowhere to spend it, you can actually get systems
that have motors that will move and follow these panels,
will follow the sun across the sky, stay in perfect uh,
stay at the perfect angle of inclination. That is super expensive, though,
(29:17):
it is. That's the technology I was talking about from
that they had figured out for saddle. Yeah it is,
but yeah, it is still kind of expensive. Um. What
I've seen though, is rather than invest in figuring out
how to make those kinds of setups cheaper, they figured
out how to catch more diffuse sunlight, that kind that
gets scattered by clouds. That makes sense on a solar panel,
(29:39):
so you don't necessarily have to have it. Um, the
kind that tracks the sunlight, and you can still get
as much electricity as you're gonna need to power your
house basically no matter where you are in the country,
just from the solar panels that they make these days. Yeah,
so uh ideally, um, your array is going to be
pointing true south. That's not to say if your roof
(30:02):
is set up in such a way that it doesn't
point to south, you can't have solar because like you said,
they've come a long long way over the years with
how they can collect the sunlight. But if you're facing
true south and you're at a good angle that's as
close to the area that you're in as close to
the latitude as possible, you don't have a lot of
trees around and no big buildings, then you're a really
good candidate to provide energy for your house. We should
(30:25):
say also, that's if you're in the northern hemisphere. We
have listeners in the southern that's true. So I would
say if you're in Australia, you would want it to
face true North. But everybody knows that the sun is
so ridiculously hot in Australia that you don't even need
solar panels. It just powers everything, just blazing down on everyone.
You can bury your solar panels underground in Australia, that's
(30:46):
still work better than here. It's like you can scrape
me son. So um. The other thing is weather, Like
it's never weather is never predictable. But what you're gonna
do is look at the data in your area, look
at average monthly sunlight and stuff like that, take into
account rainfall, and in the end you want to design
(31:08):
for because you want power all the time. If you're
going you want to design for your worst month. Um
sort of like now, not really, I was about to say,
just like those initial inverters, you're only as strong as
your weakest member. But you want to take into account.
Let's like, let's say it rains every single day in
a month, you lose your job, dog dies, just absolute
(31:31):
worst month, right, So then they might say, all right,
throw on an extra panel for your dog, right and
you'll be just fine. So um, if you're all hyped
up about this, there's we just kind of opened the
can of worms. There's a lot more to take into account.
But again, just hire somebody reputable, do your research, and
(31:51):
they should be able to guide you through process a
lot more than we can. But I do strongly advise
going on and figuring out your like you need to
know what you need to know kind of thing. Does
that make sense? Yeah, for sure. Um. And you know
earlier you mentioned that these things were ugly and for
a long time they were the bane of existence of
(32:11):
a lot of people in certain neighborhoods. Some homeowners associations
still won't allow them. Um, but they've gotten better looking
over time. They've gotten um, closer to the roof line, um,
a little bit more attractive. And I think, in my
opinion this is just me speculating. Just the perception is changed.
(32:32):
And now when you see them, you don't think, oh
my gosh, I'll get an ugly thing on the roof.
You think, well, you know, those are solar panels and
it might not blend in perfectly with the roof, but there,
you know, there's a big benefit as well. You don't
even think like hippies live there anymore. Normal people live
there normal So Um, there's also solar roof tiles that
(32:55):
are really starting to come along with those versions. Yeah,
they're nuts, how they're also they're super durable, they're very pretty. Um.
I don't own any because they're extremely expensive, but they
if they can get the cost down to anything approaching
like a normal sized roof. It's just like game over man.
That's it. It's exactly like the the the each one
(33:20):
of these tiles is like a solar cell or a
solar panel, and it's a whole roof's worth of them.
They're super durable, but they also cost about five to
ten times the amount of a normal roof these days,
which is just you're you're never gonna pay for it's
never gonna pay for itself. Yeah. I mean, if you're
spending I don't know, twelve to fifteen grand on a
(33:41):
roof and you have to spend up to a hundred
and fifty thousand for that roof to be solar, that's
a lot of dought. I saw like two hundred in
one case, but yeah, somewhere between a hundred and two
hundred for a new roof. Yeah. But the people that
are doing this are you know, the very well healed
who want to be able to brag about their solar
roof quite frankly. Yeah. And I mean if they're doing
that and they're they're you know, generating solar for their house,
(34:04):
more power to them. That's fine. I mean, it's just
I Tesla needs to get that that price down quite
a bit. Come on, Tesla. So we need to talk
a little bit about efficiency. So, um, you know, how
much of the Sun's energy we can convert into electricity?
Is that efficiency? And way back when they first started
(34:25):
this stuff in the nineteenth century, it was one not
even one percent, So it was mainly just like, hey,
look what we can do now a little bit. Um.
Now it's at not true, it's about now. Um, it's
not as much as I would have thought when I
started uh doing this research. And you can't ever get
(34:46):
to a pent I think they said at the very
max these days because of energy loss and conversion and
stuff that the tip top upper limits about eight seven
percent that we could ever get. That's like the physical
limit for conversion. I mean it's the sun. It's not
like you know, the sunlight. You don't use fills up landfills,
(35:08):
you know for sure for sure, um, But the there
is a lot of room for improvement between that current
and right um, and we're actually starting to make those
those kind of gains. Um. One of the ways to
do it is to make solar panels cheaper. So even
if they are just at efficiency if the process of
(35:32):
making them is cheaper, you can put more solar panels
up and the average person can afford it. That's one
way to go. A better way to go is to
focus on making those materials as ridiculously efficient as possible.
And what they found a promising new material called parov skite.
I think that's how you say it. It's kind of
a clunky word. It really is um and I think
(35:53):
it was discovered by Russians or Soviets back in the day.
It really does um. But the one of things about
parov skite, this mineral, is that it is really really
efficient when it comes to the blue end of the spectrum,
the blue to ultraviolet high energy UM photons that comes
streaming through. Normally, those kinds of photons are too energetic
(36:16):
to interact with the phosphorus or the boron that's that
uh silicon is doped with, so it just passes through
and it's like completely wasted high energy light. The parov
skite actually interacts with those way more efficiently. The problem
is it doesn't really interact with the lower energy stuff
that silicon does. So the highest efficiency solar cells that
(36:38):
you can get are typically made with silicon and Parov
Skype put together, so it captures as much stuff as
you can hope for. And these are starting to creep
up into the the high twenties low thirties range, and
as Parov Skype manufacturing gets easier and easier, we should
be able to expect to see solar panels that are
(36:59):
you know, thirt efficient, which is a lot you know
that extra seven percent, that's a huge difference. Yeah, and
I don't think we mentioned the reason that we're trying
to make this move to prov skite anyway. It's because
it's it's cheaper. You can make it cheaper than the
silicon ones. So you know, one day, hopefully, uh, they
could be all prop skite because they're developing stuff that's
(37:20):
going to capture more of what the silicon can capture
in that right. Yeah, that's yeah, that would be wonderful
if if they figure out how to tinker with provskite
so that they don't need the silicon at all, because
there are a lot of problems with silicon, which we'll
talk about. Right. So, um I mentioned earlier in the
show about uh selling your um like pay me power company,
(37:41):
and that wasn't a joke. In fact, I didn't even
know this was a thing until like shamefully like five
years ago, when I learned that if you produce more
energy with your system then you use you can actually
not everywhere, but in many many places now you can
sell that back to the power company and not only
are you not paying. In fact, we talked about this
(38:02):
in one of the episodes, might have been the Sun
or the Bill Gates Renewable Energy episode, that's what it was. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
I remember, but I couldn't. I knew. We talked about
like grids and stuff like that, and now that's where
it was good call. I think so, But um, they
will cut you a check, which is pretty amazing. Um,
and here's the best part, even to me. I was like, well,
(38:23):
I mean, do I want to check from Georgia Power
for whatever nineteen dollars a month? I sort of do.
But what I would really rather do is past that forward,
pay it forward, like they say. And there are places
that have programs where if you have excess solar energy,
you can send that to the power grid and then
apply the leftover as a credit to the bill of
(38:45):
a family in need, which is awesome. It is pretty awesome.
Everybody comes out super great. Yeah, I wonder what the money.
I mean, that's the one thing I don't know. It's like,
how much more are you making? Is it a check
for nineteen dollars or is it like three d bucks
a month? I don't know, And it would definitely depend
on a couple of things. How much electricity costs in
your area, and um, how much your utility company pays
(39:08):
for buyback electricity, and then also how much you're overproducing
to you know, Yeah, there's a bunch of factors. But
I'm just kind of curious. It's like a lot of
money or is it do I really honestly don't know,
but every little bit counts if you're a family in need. Right.
So there's another thing that would be great, Um, if
you have all this excess solar energy when you know
(39:29):
it's really really sunny out, Um, if you could somehow
capture it to use it later during nighttime or on
a cloudy day or something like that. And so a
lot of people have said, well, that'd be great. I mean,
that just makes a solar solar electric home system perfect.
Let's build batteries that do that, And so there are
home batteries that are meant to be connected to solar outfits,
(39:52):
like Tesla makes one of those two, LG makes one,
Mercedes Benz makes one. It's a home battery. Um. The
problem is that they are also really expensive, on the
order of five six seven grand um. And so if
you're spending twelve grand on your solar array and you
(40:14):
spend an extra six grand on your home battery, you
just spent an extra fift of the cost of your
solar array to back up your your home with solar
electricity when the sun is not shining as much. That's
a huge enormous added expense. Yeah. And the one thing
I was because you know, like you, I think my
(40:34):
interest got peaked a little bit from my own house.
It's like, man, this is really appealing to me now
here my late forties. I could buy a system that
will see me through till my death. Probably I don't
know about that. At the time it starts breaking down,
I'll be long gone. Well, let's hope not. Uh. And
my first thought was, you know, we get a lot
of brown outs and blackouts and power outages for some
(40:55):
reason in my neighborhood. Is just it just happens a lot.
It seems like every rainstorm. Uh, certainly anytime there's snow
is a brown out where it's like the powers like
almost out, but it comes back and then almost out
or I think it just sort of flickers. I wish
they'd call it something else. It sounds so gross. The
(41:15):
brown out sounds gross. Yeah, it does. It sounds gross.
Gray out. How about a gray out? Let's call it that.
Are you thinking about like a butt hole? Yeah? Or
poop or something, you know, like poop just squeezing out
of your electrical outlets or something like that. Like that
sounds like a very like archbunker thing to say, like
I'm gonna go upstairs and have a brown out. Yes,
(41:37):
yes it does. Dropping the Browns off at the Super
Bowl or okay, I get you. So the only way
the Browns could make it to a Super Bowl? Oh man, Yeah,
Texas and Ohio super happy with you today. Um So
my first thought was like, oh man, I get on
Solar and there's a blackout going on because we we
(42:00):
went out. I think I talked about this on one
episode when they we had the big snowstorm a couple
of years ago. We were out for three and a
half days. That's unconscionable. I mean, it was a long
time to be without electricity, to the point where it
was like, all right, I'm a little bit worried about
my family. Um, so I thought, man, I'll get solar
and all those suckers will be without power and I'll
have power. That is not the case, um, unless you're
(42:22):
if you're storing on a battery, you can do that.
But during a power outage, UM, there's something called islanding.
It's very dangerous. It's basically when you're pumping electricity back
into the power lines that all the that Georgia power
thinks and the linemen are dead, so they're going to
work on these and you're still pumping power back into it.
They can't have that, so the power goes out as well.
(42:43):
It'll kill it'll kill alignment for sure. Um. But if
you have a battery back up, you're fine. Like you said,
like that's where you're getting your juice from. But your
your solar system is going to disconnect you from the
grid to keep that from happening. But there's actually that
happens elsewhere, chuck. If with if people have a generator,
some people will plug their generator into an outlet in
(43:05):
their house and reverse the flow of electricity from their
generator throughout their house, which can create is landing as well.
That crazy. Yeah, yeah, well, I mean that's a kind
of a thing. Now. That's a lot of new houses
have whole house generators built in and as soon as
the power cuts off, that thing automatically fires up right right,
But this is like affordable generator that they're plugging in
(43:27):
reverse into their homewiring. It's not a good idea for
any any anyone. I mean, there are safe ways to
do it. That is not one of them. Should we
take another break? Yeah, let's all right. We'll take one
final break everyone, and we're going to talk a little
bit about some of the downsides because there are some
to solar power. I want to say, there's one other
(44:13):
type of battery I found. Um it's a mechanical battery
where you your solar power system uses all that excess
power to to to power a pump that pumps water
up to a raised area, and then at night er
on a cloudy day, when you need the extra electricity,
it releases that water to spin over a turbine, which
creates an electrical current in that awesome a little power
(44:36):
plant in your house. Basically, yeah, you do. And it's
green too. It's hydroelectric, solar powered hydroelectric batteries. What that
is pretty amazing. So uh, we mentioned silicon not being great.
There are it's obvious that UM to create and this
is an argument a lot of times against electric electric
cars and hybrid vehicles. UM, we all like to drive
(44:58):
them and stuff, but is a greenhouse effect when it
comes to making this stuff. Minding minding these materials, uh,
is not great. It is very environmentally, it's very harsh
on the environment. And I don't think anyone makes any
bones about that. UM. Transporting all this stuff gonna burn
a lot of fossil fuels. Manufacturing all the stuff burns
(45:19):
fossil fuels. But like you said earlier, that is true.
But once that process is finished, that's it. No more
greenhouse gasses forever, right, And some people will double down
at this point and be like, well, whoa whoa Like
creating solar cells is actually really really harmful because it
requires the production of something called nitrogen trifluoride, which is
(45:41):
a greenhouse gas that's seventeen thousand times more potent than
carbon dioxide. Bad stuff. And when you work into the
idea that you have a whole house battery that's made
of cadmium, lead, nickel, all all of which have to
be mined and which has to be replaced everything ten years,
your solar arrays seems much much less green. And that's
(46:04):
these are all very legitimate arguments. There's they're not incorrect
at all, but they're also current limitations, and they're all
surrounding production and transportation and all that stuff can be
worked out. And when that stuff gets worked out, you
still have solar producing clean energy with green or with
(46:24):
um fossil fuels. Even if you worked all that stuff out,
when you deploy them and actually create electricity from them,
they're still going to produce greenhouse gases. So solar will
always have that advantage. And it just has a bunch
of kind of front loaded obstacles that need to be
overcome through breakthroughs in the short term. Yeah, for sure.
I mean, it's no contest in the end, especially if
(46:46):
you're talking about the life of a solar system, considering
like twenty five years, let's say, over the twenty five
years of burning coal and natural gas, it's just not
even close. Yeah, and I mean, like if you start
getting more and more solar um involved and like transportation,
then you knock out those greenhouse gases for transporting like
solar panels from place to place because it's solar powering
(47:07):
the transportation too. There's a lot of stuff we can
do that that we just haven't quite figured out how
to do yet. But it's not physically impossible to overcome them. Yeah,
and you know, there's also people that say, hey, we
you know, the entire country could run on solar and wind.
Some people say maybe not. Other people say no, it
totally could. But there are a lot of big obstacles.
(47:28):
When you talk about converting a nationwide system, uh from
a fossil fuel system two renewables, it's it's not easy
and frankly, it will probably never happen on that scale. Um,
maybe I'm cynical. I think I think it's cynical. I
think if we look a hundred and fifty years in
the future, maybe even a hundred seventy five, even I
(47:51):
would say it's entirely possible. I could see it. Well,
that would require and and if you do the math,
that's about right. That would require several generations of people
dying out who would fight this tooth and nail to
their grad right, certain people who would have to die
out first. But there are a lot of real obstacles
to this, um. I mean, our infrastructure just is not
(48:12):
built for this, Like we would have to completely rewrite
how we do things. Yeah, So the infrastructure is set
up in a centralized manner where you have a power
plant and that power plant is built wherever, and you
burn coal or whatever and create steam which turns to
a turbine that creates electricity, and that electricity goes out
(48:32):
to the area that that that power plant serves. That's
not how renewables like solar or wind work. They have
to be built where the wind or the sunlight is,
and so you have to build a bunch of them
wherever you can. And then those things all have to
be connected. So it's a decentralized way, um that you
have to connect them together to the current grid, which
(48:55):
means running a lot more transmission lines from these new
solar arrays that you're going to build wherever to connect
them to deliver that electricity throughout the country. Yeah, and
there's also and uh, there are fluctuations in the weather.
You know, we already talked about your sort of at
the behest of what your weather is giving you. Uh.
And we're not saying when the wind doesn't blow, your
(49:17):
lights go off, believe me. But it does have an effect.
And so you have to compensate for this stuff. And
compensating for this stuff, and on a national grid, UM
is expensive and I don't even think we've quite figured
out how that's gonna work yet, have we. No, there's
some proposals. One is to UM basically create batteries, like
just use the same solution that people have for their houses.
(49:40):
We just need to take that excess stuff and store
it for use when the the sun isn't shining. They
figured out that for a an electrical storage system to
store twelve hours worth of electricity for the US electrical
grid would cost more than two point five trillion dollars.
To that's quite a bit. Other people are saying, no, no,
(50:01):
we just have to get better at more efficient long
distance transmission lines. That's what we talked about in that
Bill Gates episode. One of the things was that smart
grid where we can easily shuffle UM solar that's generated
in Scottsdale up to Portland. Oregon, you know, or Portland,
Maine for that matter. Yeah, I mean they're everywhere in
(50:22):
the United States at some point. There's a lot of
sunshine going on at once, and you can send that
to places. I know we're picking on Portland Seattle again,
but if you can produce in Phoenix and send it
to Portland, that's great. And I mean, let's let's be
honest here. Two point five trillion dollars is a lot
of cheese. But I saw somewhere someone point out that
(50:42):
there's a an estimate that to fully convert over the
US electrical grid to solar only would be about four
trillion dollars, which, again is a lot of money, but
in the grand scheme of things, and when you really
think about what that investment is going towards, it's not
that much. And frankly, it's kind of doable if there's
(51:02):
a political will to do it. Yeah, I get you.
Another solution would be for every house to have its
own solar ray, every car to have its own solar power.
That's what I'm banking more on is like more and
more people doing this to the point where it's you know,
it's not part of the infrastructure of the grid. But
it's a you know, still making a big dent. But
(51:23):
that's going to be the hardest sell because you're just
completely eliminated all of the power companies and they're not
exactly known as lightweights when it comes to things like lobbying.
That's true. And another you know, you look at the
subsidies going on now, and that's really clear who's better
at lobbying. Federal subsidies for power companies who produce solar
(51:44):
are about five and thirty three million bucks compared to
thirty two billion dollars for natural gas alone in two
thousand and sixteen. Right, that's just text bricks and subsidies
for investing in deploying that kind of energy. Yeah, and
solar still is pretty expensive per megawatt hour compared to
(52:04):
like you said, fossil fuels are just cheap. Still, they
really are. And here's here's the problem to Chuck. There's
there's a conundrum where when you deploy a lot of
solar electricity um in a utility, it actually tends to
depress wholesale electrical prices across the board. So a company
(52:25):
has an incentive to not deploy solar because they can
charge more for electrical produced from like coal and other
fossil fuels like they normally do. That's right, But if
you put one in your house, uh, you're not only
paying for your own elector or whatever. You're subsidizing your
own electrical bill. You possibly are getting money back or
helping a family need um. And it's also an investment
(52:47):
in your house. It actually increases the value of your
home because, you know, unless someone just hates them and
wants to to reak in it up and yank them
off the roof when they come in there, it's going
to be a selling point. You know, you're like, hey,
moving to this house, They've already paid for it, and
you don't have a power bill. Yeah. There was a
study from the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab that found that
(53:08):
a solar setup increase the value of a house in
America by about fifteen grands. Right. So when I said
they've already paid for it, what I really mean is
they're passing that onto you. Exactly, they passed the costs
onto you. Do you got anything else? I got nothing else, man,
I'm I'm gonna legit. Look into this, let me know
(53:28):
how it goes. Man. I I'm really interested I have
a dude, doubt like we have. I don't think we
could do our whole house. But we have this one
roof in particular. Now that's uh, I can't see from
the street. It's uh, you can only see it from
one place in the house, and I think it faces
south and I have to measure the panels, but I
could probably fit like eight panels up there. That's not
(53:51):
enough for my whole house. Hey, that whatever little bit works,
that could power my Frankenstein experiments, right exactly, you're bringing
inanimate matter back to life. Um. One other thing, Chuck,
There's a big obstacle that's facing us worldwide, and that
(54:11):
is that we haven't figured out how to get solar
energy from the oceans collected over the oceans to the
rest of the world, which is going to be a
big challenge. But if we could figure that out, problem solved.
Just build a solar array the size of Texas, maybe
over the Great Pacific garbage Patch, and there we go.
I feel like I've seen research into that, and maybe
(54:32):
not the oceans, but like solar blankets over water, now
am I making that up? I mean I'm sure that
that you could have them in like coastal areas or whatever.
But that that means like you couldn't swim in those
coastal areas, you know, which is going to depress the
value of the real estate there. So I would guess
we would want them like really far off shore. But
how do you get that electricity back to you know,
(54:54):
where it's needed on land? That's the question I think. Yeah,
just though a big solar uh floating solar blanket over
an off shoal short oil rig and just plug it
in and just plug it in. Yeah, there you goblem solved. Uh.
If you want to know more about solar, go check
it out, see if you can maybe swing it for
(55:16):
your house. And if so, let us know about it.
We want to hear that. And Chuck will keep you
updated too, won't you sure? Uh? And since I said
Chuck will keep you updated, friends, that means it's time
for a listener mail. Oh no, sir, you I know
you're being coy because to your right and Jerry's chair
is Alexander Williams and not Jerry. No, Jerry's standing over there.
(55:38):
This is all getting weird. It is getting a little weird.
We're playing musical chairs and Jerry's the loser. That's now
Jerry Snipper, the Loser. What we've done though today is
asked Alex Williams, one of our colleagues and pals here
in the office, to come in. And we don't do
this much, but when we really love a show and
someone sits fourteen feet from us, well and they do
(56:00):
something really special. I mean, this is special stuff we're
talking about. That's why I said, we really love it. Okay,
we asked him in, and here he is to talk
about your great show, Ephemeral. What a comfortable chair, Cherry,
I can see what a great chair is that, Frank.
This is Frank. Well he's sitting on Frank. That's right.
So welcome Alex. We wanted to have you here to
(56:22):
kind of tell everybody about your show because we love
your show and we could talk about it all day,
but we thought it would be better if you came
in and kind of told the folks like the thought
behind Ephemeral and what what prompted you to do it
and what they can expect from it. So go, okay, Um, well,
it's a it's a podcast about artifact, right, the stuff
(56:44):
that gets left behind and uh, you know, trying to
illuminate you know, maybe dark or or sort of forgotten
corners of history by you know, when we have them,
by playing the artifacts. And it's an audio show, so specifically,
you know, we started with ideas of like tape and
you know, film and video, but then you know, sometimes
(57:08):
you get into areas where there's just really no artifacts
or artifacts that don't really translate into into the audio medium,
and then so you experiment a little bit. And so
the series itself, it's ten ten episodes posted trailer, right,
and the first season, Yeah, the trailer itself stands on
its own. I think you've said before, I hope. So, yeah,
(57:30):
it's it's an eight minute this little story about um
we'll call it like my first there was no podcast,
then my first radio show. It's a show that I
a loose you know, connection of thoughts that I would
make on my parents Answering Machine. That was my fully
produced first show at least that I remember. And so
(57:53):
in each episode you kind of find a recovered or
formulaly lost or um uh it just kind of overlooked
peace and then kind of dissect it and explain it
and talk about like it's place in the universe, right,
And I think one of the episodes was about um
kind of a long lost original TV network, right, the
(58:14):
Dumont Television Network. Yeah, you guys ever heard of Dumont?
I had not. Uh. In the Golden Ager television there's
four TV networks, ABC, CBS, NBC also with US Today,
all big radio companies beforehand, I mean big, big, huge brands,
and Dumont was a television manufacturer that got into the
broadcasting game at the very beginning. They were the fourth
(58:37):
network when there was only four. They were only around
for I think just a little over a decade and
something like twenty thousand broadcasts have been almost completely lost
because things just weren't recorded then. Uh, there was no
real way to record life television. What they would do
is they'd make something called a kinescope, which should take
a TV screen and you filmed it with your film camera,
(58:57):
and then you have a real that looks terrible. And
the only reason they make that is so they could
send it off to you know, you're in California and
your affiliates not connected to New York, DC, Philadelphia, etcetera,
on the coaxial cable and so then they show it
once in California and then they would trash that thing
or tape over it or you know, film over it
because there was no reruns then right early TV was live.
(59:20):
It was weird because of it. So the little snippets
that we have of it left that the few kinescopes
that got saved, it's something like three or you know,
somewhat complete broadcast. They're mostly held by individual collectors and
a fewer and institutions like the Museum of TV and
Radio in New York. That's awesome. You also covered one
(59:42):
of the topics that we've covered in the Best about
the Call Your Brothers, which was very cool, And I
think that's one of my favorite things about the show
is is so wide ranging. It's like the best episodes
of this American Life or nine nine percent invisible as
far as your approach goes, And that's why I think
I loved it from the beginning. You were in the
Call your Brother's episode very briefly. I know you did
(01:00:03):
a walk by, huh, I did I did a line reading.
We'll just leave it at that will be an easter
egg for listeners. So all all ten episodes, plus the
trailer out they're available now wherever you get your podcasts
right indeed, you have a second season coming. Second season.
We did our first recording for yesterday. I nice. Yeah,
(01:00:25):
how's it going? So far? So good? I got a
lot of reading to do. Man right on, we'll get
to it. We won't keep you any longer, but thank
you for coming by. And if you want to check
out a femeral everybody, you can go check it out
on what, the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, wherever
you get your podcasts, go check it out now all
of those things. Someone asked me to put it on
(01:00:46):
an old tape for them, but I haven't done that yet.
That would be a cool way to get it would be.
Thanks for coming by, Alex, Thanks for having me on. Guys. Well,
if you want to get in touch with this, like
Alex did, you can just drop by the studio j K. Instead,
go on to stuff you Should Know dot com, check
out our social links, or you can send us an
email to Stuff Podcast at I heeart radio dot com.
(01:01:11):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeart Radios.
How stuff works. For more podcasts for my heart Radio,
visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows. H
Stuff You Should Know News
Hosts And Creators
Chuck Bryant
Josh Clark
Show Links
AboutOrder Our BookStoreSYSK ArmyRSSPopular Podcasts
Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang
Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.
40s and Free Agents: NFL Draft Season
Daniel Jeremiah of Move the Sticks and Gregg Rosenthal of NFL Daily join forces to break down every team's needs this offseason.
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.