257: Let’s Talk About Tech - Battery “Breakthroughs”
[Music] on today's episode of still to be determined we're talking Tech and I know that sounds like well don't you do that all the time every week yes but this week we're going to talk about Matt's most recent episode and we're going to talk about why Matt talks about these things in his most recent episodes so buckle up anyway here we are still to be determined as always the podcast that follows up on undecided with Matt frell I am not Matt frell I am Sean frell I'm a writer I write some sci-fi I write some stuff for kids and I'm just generally curious about technology luckily for me my brother is that matap behind undecided with Matt frell which takes a look at emerging Tech and its impact on our lives and Matt what is impacting your life today uh she's call me off guard with a question that you ask me every week I was just going to say I'm buying a new EV but other than that everything's good so that's a little sneak peek perhaps into a video that might be in Matt's future maybe a new a new EV and the bells and whistles that accompany it we'll see but as for now let's dive into the comments from our most recent episode this would be from episode 256 in which we were discussing wind turbines in Canada and there was a bit of a discussion in that episode where Matt shared the anecdote of he got out on the open road and then was on that open road for a really long time a long time Y and I believe Matt at some point said I don't know what I would have done if I'd broken down well clean energy show showed up in the comments to share this hello from the city you flew into Regina Saskatchewan Regina in does in fact Ry with vagina Latin for Queen hence we are the Queen City had you broken down on the highway they say you would have been helped within a few minutes rural people are very friendly and helpful here it was interesting to hear your Outsider take on our home a worker at the power utility here told my wife that wind turbines are shut down at -30 degrees C yet during a 30s ne3s cold snap recently don't come here at any of those times the grid mix had a lot of wind on it according to the utilities website I'm eager to know if these wind turbines operate below -30c but the companies involved haven't responded to our requests for info great show so thank you clean energy for jumping into the comments Matt first of all does it make you feel any better knowing that had you broken down some kind stranger would have shown up eventually no but yes I mean it's like it's it every person I talk to there and met locals everybody was just absolutely like the friendliest people on the planet and it was a gorgeous area it was just very remote um to answer the question I don't know if these turbines operate below 30C I think they might but I would have to reach out to my contacts at the company that are running right now to find out if that's the case or not but I could actually look into that might be interesting to check in on because that's a yeah we always talk about environmental factors in locating these structures from a construction perspective but part of it's interesting to think about from a maintenance and a utility perspective yeah these are in a part of the world where temperatures get I mean there's cold and then there's 30 Celsius that's H boy so it would be interesting to find out from the company if there is something in the makeup of these turbines particular that would help them run there are heating there are heating mechanisms and weather proofing that they do in certain regions It's Kind like if you remember the big power outage and that happened in Texas when they had that cold snap that basically knocked out their power yeah and there was a lot of accusations for the wind turbines were all shut down like you know only fossil fuels were working which was actually all misinformation because even the gas lines froze up like there was nothing down there they don't they didn't weatherproof the the wind turbines to work in super cold temperatures CU why would you why would you do that extra cost in conditioning when you don't have to and then something like that happened yeah so it is absolutely possible to make things things work in extremely cold temperatures and extremely hot temperatures it's just you you just have to do it um but there's an extra cost associated with those kind of systems yeah I've shared this story before you know the difference between Northern you know outside the equator band in inside the equator van construction what's available what's used what's normal is wild and I lived at one point in a new construction building that I am absolutely convinced used warmer environment windows in the construction because they would bleed cold air in the winter they would develop uh they would actually if it got cold enough they would have Frost Frozen on the inside because they were they were made out of a the metal the aluminum framing was conducting the the cold so well that it would actually freeze up like a in a freezer unit and it was terrible and I'm convinced that somebody you know sneakily cut a corner in construction cost because an uninsulated window would cost I can't even imagine how much less than the ones that should have been put in for the Northeastern United States this comment from Toby he points out something that might be an interesting video for you to look at he questions have you heard about the wood laminate turbine blades might be a good video have you heard about these oh yeah it's been bubbling up on my uh possible video idea List It bubbles up and then we kind of falls down the the list because other things take priority and then it bubbles back up again so it's been there for a while and in fact the company that I like Rez the company I talk to about going to CES gatchan they've worked on projects and the company that runs these has worked on projects that have when like wooden tures out there so it's like I have a a path in to actually go visit one of these things and see them in person if I wanted to so it's like it's definitely on the possible video agenda it's just a matter of if there's other things that keep knocking it down the list or not well count me in for being interested in that because I love when new tech looks like old Tech I love it old ideas resurface and I love it when I mean just the idea that making something out of wood laminate that can produce sustainable renewable energy and the wood itself is of course a sustainable resource I love that series of closed Loops the more it looks like a vend diagram with all these closed Loops covering each other I like perfect Kevin jumped into the comments to talk about one of the offshoots of of our conversation about building these massive wind turbines and you had mentioned that blimps are beginning to resurface as a possible construction vehicle allowing for delivery of the massive Parts there is the comical shot in your video of the blade on the back of a rather large truck as the truck is making a leftand turn that can only be made by basically you know traveling a massive portion of the globe to be able to make that left-hand term yeah um and you mentioned that blimps would be one possible solution to that because they could move in over a location and then slowly lower the the parts down to the ground without having to worry about highways and rough terrain and mountainous regions and Kevin jumps in to say the idea of blimps to transport the blades blades is an okay idea but blimps don't do that too well in windy conditions either I know that from previous conversations we've had about blimp technology they they're not surprised it's windy like no they're aware that it's windy and this isn't to dismiss Kevin's comment it is like it's an appropriate thing to bring up like how does that solve a problem if you're trying to lower a blade and suddenly you're like no no no Bob no Bob no bobob you're drifting yeah the other the other thing about blimps that I find interesting that's a challenge is the ballast it's like if you're carrying heavy wind turbine blades and then you drop those wind turbine turbine blades off then the blimp goes whoop because it's lost all that weight so you have to basically do this tradeoffs and like I know some of these blimp companies are doing things where potentially you're carrying water and then you can dump the water when you pick something up and then vice versa you could pick up giant things of water if you're dropping something off so like they have to come up with systems yeah for palast which I find really funny the idea of like we got your turbine blades oh no disappearing way up into the atmosphere it would be I don't know there's a part of me that thinks like that would be kind of cool like ascending very quickly just because of the gases in your balloon uh by Bob yeah you just hear tell my wife I love her [Music] on now to our discussion about Matt's most recent this is his episode why this Ultra cheap battery breakthrough matters so conversations on this one kind of fell into two camps the one Camp being like this is cool technology the other Camp being why are you talking about something that I can't buy so I wanted to have a conversation not just about the tech but about why you talk about tech why why your Channel why this conversation all of it kind of big picture before we get into that though I wanted to share a couple of these comments like this one from Simon who says maybe it would be time to create an update video where you guys show what has happened to the dozens of battery technologies you showed over the past years I at least would appreciate to see actual progress in the real world instead of the latest lab breakthrough so great opportunity there to say like we have talked about a number of different battery types everything from Salt to there paper batteries out there like all the different things that we that we've talked about can we expect you to do a kind of summation video along those lines of saying like I've talked about these 10 now we're going to look at these five and see how they've evolved over time I've never done it as a summation video but I do revisit these on I've been doing this for now for years and so it's like when there's of a like when there's a kind of a milestone that it hits I'll make an update video and I've done this with flow batteries zinc batteries just various other even other Technologies I've talked about I've Revisited them like it might be 18 months or 30 months after I talked about it last time because it takes time to bring these things to Market so there might be like a year and a half of nothing because there's nothing newsworthy to kind of update you on but I'm I am keeping tabs on these but I've never thought about doing them as a summation video where in one video I talk about here's five updates on these five different Technologies it's an interesting idea yeah but again it might be tough because these updates don't come synchronized to anything so it might be like there's only one thing I can really talk about right now so do I make it one video on that or do I wait till there's enough bundled up where I could do something um because some of them it's going to be the update would be still in the lab or like they're open this up to the commenters and ask the commenters to jump in would you be interested in seeing a video in which Matt may take let's say he he selects five battery technologies that he's talked about in the past and we've talked about this before the idea of you talking about like real world application ready like at a scale of one to five that kind of like and if you did a summation video of five battery techs and you said when I first talked about this it was at a 1 and now it's at a three like right kind of quick shot rapid style of like maybe even linking up the previous videos and saying when I talked about this in 2022 I said this and now in 2024 I said that which means it moved from a two to a three right viewers listeners jump into the comments let us know would you be interested in that kind of summation video where it would give Matt an opportunity to say here's what I said then here's what I did on the followup that means this and kind of put it all into one place as opposed to having the multiple videos do all the Talking for him I mean just kind of like not to defend myself a little bit but like when I say I've done this before a great example is parkite solar panels I have done numerous videos on Prof skites if you go back four years and watch one of my first ones it was still very much in the research lab talking about the stuff at the current state but nobody was making them I had a video about like this is taking way longer than people expected I another you know like I I've done numerous videos on updates and now we actually have one on the market so the last one time I talked about it was about Oxford PV has finally done it there's now a perovsky tandem solar cell on the market that people can actually buy so well people companies at this point can buy so it's like gotta clarify that you're not getting this for your home just yet but it's it is on the market so it's kind of like to me that's a perfect example of I am revisiting these but that's like a peac meal individual approach of I only talked about Prof skites I wasn't doing a summation I think the summation ideas interesting so I'm I am looking into it like I talked about before I have my video idea list I actually because of comments like this I did create a thing for my team and I to talk about like maybe we try this let's see if we can kind of like zero it on something like this this comment from jar caught my eye where jar pointed out many commenters seem to think that none of the battery technologies ever get implemented my lithium ion phosphate battery is 10 times cheaper than it was five years ago it has almost four times the power weighs 25% of a lead acid and costs the same patience my nerdy Brothers it's a matter of time that's the best comment yeah I that really stuck out to me because it's it kind of is the underlining beneath the mission statement of your channel and this channel which is we're not talking we're not marketing product for you to go out and buy we are not saying like oh here's a thing and if you go buy it we get a commission like that's not how this is working we're literally just talking about things that we think are interesting so following up on that there were some other comments that caught my eye in the same vein and I wanted to share those before we move on to having a conversation about this topic Paul jumped in to say I'm unclear why some commenters are so negative I view this channel as a mouthpiece for developing Technologies yes true the tech could be years from production does that diminish the value of this information how about viewing objectively presented information as just that and then that was followed up separately by this comment from Trenton who said as someone who works in research and development I appreciate the work that goes into these videos I enjoy learning what is on the bleeding edge even if it might not ever leave the lab so with those comments in mind Matt I wanted to kind of take a step back from this topic of this cheap battery and take a step back toward what is the overriding the overriding thought process behind what you're trying to do I just mentioned that we're not here selling products we're not getting commissions off of talking about a thing we're talking about things we find interesting there may be people in your audience and your audience at this point you've you've got a lot of subscribers and so there are probably people who' joined your audience and maybe are commenting on some of your more recent videos who weren't there at the very beginning of what you were doing when you talked about this what brought you to doing this channel in the first place uh one Sean you know this I'm a tech obsessed guy like I love bleeding edge Tech when the newest latest greatest thing comes out I gotta get my hands on it and try it out and see what it's like that's always that's been me since I was a teenager all the way to now so Decades of me being like this second side of it is not to get political but like I am concerned about sustainability and the environment and climate and things like that and so for me that it was like when I started this channel it was kind of like looking at the VIN diagram of like what are where where are those things kind of over overlap and looking more broadly like how does technology impact our lives from Smart Homes to EVS to solar to all this kind of stuff um so where this kind of evolved for me was back in the early days when I was doing a lot of videos about my e my first EV I bought and my experiences living with it and the solar panels I got installed in my house uh there was a lot of pushback and comments I was seeing about like Eevees will never be a thing because of XY or Z the solar panels in your home is a hobby it'll never pay itself back blah blah blah blah and all of the reasons people gave me for why the thing I was currently living with and enjoying and experiencing in a very positive way why it couldn't exist why couldn't why it was never going to be a thing was like telling me Oh my life experience with this thing completely contradicts what you're saying but what you're saying must be the truth because you have no experience with it but you're just projecting it was I've looked at as it's like looking at the world with blinders on it's kind of like um tunnel vision where you're so focused on the way things are now it's like the way they are today is the way they will have always been and it's the way it will always be and so I started drifting into the more research stuff and the early phases of things and trying to explain like how these things evolve over time because it's like if you want to understand where the stuff is going we have to look at all the dots along that path and it's that famous wing quote you know like the skate to where the puck is going not where it currently is yeah so a lot of the comments I was seeing was talking about like skating to where the puck is and it's like I'm talking about stuff like where's the puck going like what is the trend line for this stuff and so to understand that you have to look at the research phase you have to look at the lab stuff you have to look at the stuff that's going to Pilot's production you have to look at all that stuff not just the stuff that's ending up on our shelves because that thing they got on the Shelf there was 20 years of research before that got on the Shelf yeah and so for me it's like like that one comment from uh from jar yeah like the thing about the lithium phate battery that's 10 times cheaper and all this stuff that's 20 plus years of development that got it to that place and then then perfecting the manufacturing and getting it super cheap to produce it's like there's so much stuff that had to happen before that to make it possible and so my videos are trying to show you what's happening right now that if you project It Out imagine years from now 10 years now 20 years from now the batteries we're going to have are going to be so much better than they are today the solar panels are going to be dramatically better than they are today but it might be 15 years from now and some of the things I talk about may never materialize but there may be learnings from those things that change the course of a completely different thing like lateral thinking it's kind of like you know like well this didn't work but we learned this one aspect here what if we took that idea and applied it to this thing over we here holy crap it just unlocked a whole new thing we didn't think we could do that happens all the time in this research that's the whole joy and geekery I get out of this whole thing so it's like that's what I'm trying to do with these videos right so when I see people comment wake me up when this thing's available to buy it's like you're you're you're missing the point you're kind of missing the whole thread um and oftentimes I see comments like that on videos of mine that tend to go more broad um with the algorithm puts in front of a lot more people than normal right so it's like when my videos do more of my core audience I see less of that and when it goes broader I see more of that and so my my assumption is a lot of these people may only see these videos like when I talk about like this is the whole algorithm social media thing of like this changes everything Battery Technology it pulls in a different audience that comes in and the only videos of mine they ever get served are these videos and so they think this is all I talk about I think that this is all it is but if you click my video Tab and you go to my videos and you scroll through my list of everything I've talked about you'll quickly see this is not everything I talk about I talk about way more but the problem is some people are not seeing those other videos because the algorithm doesn't serve it to them so it's like there's double-edged sword here but that's kind of why for me I evolve the channel to where it is right now and the topics I talk about because it's I want to skate to where the puck is going I want to understand where things are heading and then on top of which just there's some crazy cool science fiction stuff happening Sean like you and I are Star Trek Geeks and it's like there's stuff happening now that in the 60s when Star Trek started nobody would thought would be possible like even back then you know like they had the data pads on Star Trek next Generation doing trips and data pads and communicators and now we all just have phones in our pockets yeah have it all and so it's like this stuff takes time to come together so yes I'm talking about stuff at the early phases but it's like let your imagination and curiosity take you to places of where this stuff could eventually yeah yeah I also I also personally I have a response to sometimes the comments it's a little bit like showing up on a video on a science channel that's talking about black holes and saying wake me when I can go there like that's not that's not the point of the video it is about research it's about interesting discoveries it's about where is the line between what we knew and what we now know and I think that that angle on all of this is something that I know is built into the structures of our conversations but I think that this video I wanted to make it explicit and say to the viewers and the listeners um we hope you're interested in hearing about things that we think are interesting most importantly yeah and and to open it up as always to say to all of you if you are aware of something that you think fits within that conversation jump into the comments and let us know about it like we talked about the wooden laminate energy production uh model where you've got wind turbines built out of a sustainable product and I think that's super cool I like the idea of the future looking like Old Dutch paintings that's there's something really sweet about that something like that really kind of like connects to a a paradigm shift in thinking around what does it mean to be Advanced what does it mean to be high-tech and that I think is really exciting and so if you in the audience are aware about something and you haven't heard us talk about it jump to the comments and drop it in there we'd love to hear about it wanted to share this last comment from JM who kind of wrapped it all up for me in this comment which was I write training courses on DC fast charges for a major Class 8 electric truck manufacturer when students ask me why we make a tractor that costs three times as much as it's diesel equivalent and has a quarter of the range I point out that Battery Technology is evolving explosively our Drive Motors produce 10 times the starting torque if we allowed them to they're limited it's silent a joy to drive no oil changes no diesel no def in 10 years that same tractor will be driving full shifts and have a sleeper cab because the batteries will catch up science doesn't care about policy and the political climate at Innovation doesn't wait for Spin Doctors and Talking Heads I stubbornly maintain my own private sense of optimism I thought that was a lovely comment and a note that was worth ending on a sense of optimism and moving forward and finding things that will help the future be better and make it work better and make it feel in some ways like we're pushing the world back to where it used to be before we showed up and started taking things out of the ground and turning into stuff that we could use so listeners comments let us know how you felt about this conversation is there anything you think we missed is there anything that you know that we don't and you think we should jump to the comments and let us know as always if you'd like to support the program jump to the comments like subscribe share it with your friends those are very easy ways for you to support the podcast and if you'd like to more directly support us you can go to still TBD FM or you can click the join button on YouTube both of those locations have a way for you to throw coins at our heads we appreciate the wels and then we get down to the heavy heavy business of talking about wood laminates wait what anyway thank you everybody for taking the time to watch or listen and we'll talk to you next time [Music]
2025-03-07 19:11
