I Heart podcast update this week on your free I Heart Radio app. Fodor's Guide to Espionage, a '60s-era spy story of the world's first and greatest travel writer, Eugene Fodor, as he jet-sets around the globe. Tongue Unbroken Season 2. This podcast explores complex concepts of identity, resilience, erasure, and genocide. Table for Two, Season 2. Think of the show as a deconstructed Oscar party in podcast form. Each episode takes place over the romance of a meal and feels like you're seated next to a different guest at that dinner. Hear these podcasts and more on your free I Heart Radio app or wherever you get your podcast.

Oh, hi. I'm Rachael Zoh, and my podcast Climbing in Heels is back and better than ever. You might know me from the Rachael Zoh Project, or perhaps from my work as a celebrity stylist. And guess what? I'm still just as obsessed with all things fashion, beauty, and business. Climbing in Heels is all about celebrating the stories of extraordinary women, and this season is here to bring you a weekly dose of glamor, inspiration, and fun. Listen to Climbing in Heels every Friday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.

Hey, everybody. We are coming to a town ostensibly near you, so putatively see us.

That's right. May 29th, we'll be in Boston, really Medford, Massachusetts. The next night, we're going to go down to Washington, DC, and then scooch back up to New York City at town hall on May 31st.

Yeah. If you're one of those people who likes to plan way far in advance, then you can go ahead and get tickets for our shows in August. We're going to start out where, Chuck?

We're going to be in Chicago, August seventh, Minneapolis, august eighth, then Indianapolis, for the very first time on August ninth. Then we're going to wrap it up in Durham, North Carolina, and right here in Atlanta on September fifth and September seventh.

Yeah. You can get all the info you need and all the ticket links you need by going to stuffyoushouldknow. Com and hitting that tour button Or you can also go to linktree/sysk Live. We'll see you guys this year.

Welcome to stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.

Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Ben's here, too. And this is stuff you should know.

Wind Edition, because it's blowing my microphone all over the place. What is going on here?

I feel like you should handle this one, and I'll just do wind sound effects in the background the whole time, okay?

That'll be good. My studio is haunted today. I don't know what's happening.

Is it eerie?

No, just That thing is right. Sometimes I feel like Ruby comes in here and messes with stuff.

Oh, no.

I think that's the ghost.

Oh, my goodness. That's hilarious. What happens when I do this?

Yeah, the lights are down. Everything's different. Okay. All right, I'm fine. I'm back to normal.

Well, I'm back to normal, too. I'm going to go ahead and presume Ben's back to normal. So you, listener, if you're back to normal, great. We can get started then. If not, we'll wait. Just email us.

Yeah, so we're talking about wind power, and I guess a good starting point would be history and not to get too in the weeds with sailing ships and stuff like that, because people have long been using wind for different things. But I think as far as generating power, early on, water was the thing. Obviously, coal was the thing. But there was a guy, a very intelligent Scot, and we love our Scottish people. In 1887, 2007, it was an engineer who designed the first wind turbine to do what we're talking about today.

Yeah, and it's not like he was the first person to come up with a wind turbine. I mean, everybody knows the Dutch had windmills for centuries and centuries before, but this guy was the first one to try to genuinely harness wind power to generate electricity. His name was James Blyth, and he had a second home, apparently, in the town of Marykirke in Scotland, which has great scotch, I assume. And he had so much power from his wind turbine, Chuck, that he offered the excess of it to the town of Marykirke. And this guy was so advanced. He had 12 batteries storing the electrical power that his wind turbine was generating. He just invented it like lock, stock, and barrel the first time out.

Great Scott, literally.

He really was a great Scott. Correct.

On small scales, people came behind him and were doing it, but it wasn't really until a Danish gentleman, a meteorologist named... I've never seen that, P-O-U-L.

Paul?

I guess Polakor. He is the one who really gets a lot of the credit, rightfully so, for getting wind-generated power going in a serious way, because in the 1890s, he's like, You know what? I can produce a steady stream of power. This thing isn't as intermittent as they were before. And I'm actually going to create enough power for my village, for the village of Ascoff. And I'm going to found something that sounds like a sorcery. I'm going to found the Society of Wind Electricians, even.

Yeah, and he did. He was very successful out of the gate. That was 1895, he started. 1908, there were 72 different systems running in Denmark, and each of them had a capacity between five and 25 kilowatts, which is peanuts.

Peanuts now.

But at the time, remember in our Love Canal episode where electricity for a while, no matter how you generated it, had to be generated right next to where you were distributing the power. So it would make sense that you'd have a windmill right at the village that was being powered, because if you were getting it from a coal fire plant, you had to have it right there, too. So that That made wind competitive for a while. And even until the into the 20th century, it was still fairly competitive, even as coal and gas fired electrical plants started to take over, because in rural areas, they didn't have access to the grid. So they were using wind turbines. And then finally, FDR comes along and said, Nuts to that, we're electrifying this whole darn Tootin country. And the wind turbines fell over in surprise, and coal fired electrical grids took over.

Yeah, and they pretty much held the high ground until the '90s, when there was a renewed interest in wind. Things got a little windy in the '90s. In '92, Congress passed a tax credit. Clinton came along after that, started to fund more basically federal projects toward wind. And then states got on board individually, especially states like Texas and Iowa. If you're out and you have lots lots of wind, lots of open planes, you can generate more wind energy. Texas, for their part, has really, up until recent years, been super supportive of wind energy and are far and away the leader in US wind energy. But just far as raw numbers, from 1990 to 2010, we went from almost 2.8 billion kilowatt-hours to to 5.6 billion. And then 2010, that jumped to 95 billion, which is just a huge jump over that span of time. And then now in 2022, we are at 434 billion kilowatt-hours.

So in 32 years, we went from 2.79 billion to 434 billion. That is right. That's pretty rapid progress. I mean, that's amazing. That's just in the United States, too. As we'll see around the world, there are countries countries who are like, Yeah, why don't you catch up? Lamos. And then other countries like China are just jumping ahead of the curve even more impressively. But wind is definitely... I'm sorry for this, but wind is picking up around the world.

Yeah, so we should probably talk a little bit about how the actual machine works. We're going to concentrate on the hot systems. That is the horizontal axis, H-A-W-T. Just a little bit about the vertical axis, the vaults. They're in that you don't have to point it at the wind, but they're smaller, they're slower, they're not as efficient, they're for small-scale generation. Those aren't the big daddies, the big players in the field. It's really the hot rotors that are hot.

They're hella hot.

They are.

So, yeah, if you have a small, what's called a distributed system, which is like that thing that, say, James Blyth or Paul Lecourt came up with that just powers a very small area, say your house, you're probably going to do a vertical axis type. It's like a merry-go-around with sails around it. But the sails are actually wind turbines, and it looks cool. Cooler than a horizontal axis one, if you ask me. But the horizontal ones are most ubiquitous because they can generate power in aces compared to the vertical types. They're way more efficient. You can make them way bigger because if you're making something with a vertical axis, it takes up ground space because it's basically on the the ground. The horizontal ones, they're way up in the air, catching generally steady streams of air that have very little turbulence that are moving fairly fast compared to the stuff on the ground, and they can convert it very efficiently, at least as far as wind turbines are concerned, into electricity.

Yeah, you mentioned the size. If you're traveling out West in the plains or something and you see a wind farm, these are the big daddies that we're talking about. The little guys are about 8 feet in diameter. These are the rotors. But if you go offshore, and we'll talk a little bit more about what's going on in the ocean, but those can be 800 feet, generate up to 18 megawatt Watts, which is just a lot of power being generated. And I mean, those things are just absolutely enormous. I can't even picture what an 800-foot turbine might look like.

So take three football fields, cut off just a little bit of the third one, and then that's the turbine diameter. I mean, it's so massive. It boggles the mind, even though we're talking about a few hundred feet. I just can't imagine what that looks like up close.

Yeah, same. Connecting to the US power grid, the size of these things have basically increased over time. They've just gotten bigger and bigger and bigger. These days, if you're talking not those gargantchuans offshore, but a regular terrestrial turbine on a wind farm is generally about 400 to 450 feet in diameter. They're about 30 to 35 feet off the ground, and they generate each one about 3.2 megawatts.

Yeah, and this is actually a case where bigger is better from what I've seen. The bigger they are means that they can generate more electricity, which means that you need fewer of them on site. So I saw the average is expected to go down next year from 222 turbines in a good size average wind turbine farm to 89. So you got far fewer. They're bigger, but they also are figuring out how to make them quieter, too. So by going bigger, you're actually getting a lot more out of it. It's like one of those things where the economy is scaling just exceeds the sum of its parts, which is two different things, but I put them together expertly, if you ask me.

Yeah, and these things, they got to be spaced apart. You can't put them, obviously, right on each other. So that makes a difference. If you have fewer of them, they're not spread out as far, obviously, geographically. And we'll talk about it a little bit more, but it's not like you can't do anything with the land. A lot of times, you'll just see them out in the middle of nowhere. But that can be cattle land and stuff like that.

Yes. So usually the horizontal axis wind turbines, which are just the wind turbines you've seen pictures of or video of, or maybe even seen off in the distance, depending on where you're driving around, they I have three blades, and three is this magic number because the more blades you have, the more drag it produces. Each blade experiences drag from the air as it moves through the air. The air is like, No, stop doing that, and tries to stop it. Even though it's individual for each blade, they accumulate and combine and transfer that to the rotor, so it experiences five blades worth of drag. So three blades is sweet because you can generate quite a bit of electricity. You can capture a bunch of wind, but you're also reducing drag dramatically. So that's why basically every single horizontal axis turbine has three blades.

What's your ceiling fan, pref?

Definitely more than... I don't know. I'm trying to think now. I've got such a strange variety of ceiling fans, and I'm thinking about it. I'm going to say I'll go with three. Sure.

Three?

What's yours?

I typically like a five blader.

Okay.

Four is okay. I've got one three, and I've realized that I don't really like it. And boy, do I hate those two bladers.

Those should not exist. I think that That's broken is what you're describing.

I know people like them, so I don't want to yuck someone's yum, but esthetically, I don't care for the two-blade propeller-style ceiling fan.

Just me. Okay. Here's the big question, though. Do you like those fans that look like hand fans that they might have used in Casablanca in the 1930s.

Oh, that are ceiling fans? Yes.

That's what the blades look like.

No, I don't like to get too weird.

Okay.

Well, here's the real question, though. You thought you had the real question. Do you get up and change the direction of that thing every year?

Sometimes, yes, depending on whether I'm chilly-Thinking about it?and motivated. Okay, yeah. Those are the two factors that I have to combine.

I think that's That's the factor for almost everyone, except for the real fastidious person who just has it on their calendar.

Even I don't have that on my calendar, and I'm suddenly impressed with myself and relieved.

No good. The hots, we said that the vertical winds don't need to be pointed at the wind. The hots do face into the wind, but you might think, Well, the wind changes. Chuck and Josh, how is that possible? Well, they do it by moving the turbine to face the wind. It's got a Yaw system, so it's not too hard to do. They also have pitch systems that can change the actual angle of the blades to help control that rotor speed to really maximize efficiency, A, and B, protect it, because what you don't want during a really big windstorm is for those, you might think like, Oh, man, those things get really cooking. That's awesome. They don't need to get too cooking. It's like a motor spinning too fast. It's just never good.

Yeah, it can break pretty easy. If they change If you change the angle of the blade relative to the direction of the wind, the wind is going to push on it rather than making it spin. And so if it pushes on it, it's going to go much slower. So you still want them to move, but not too fast. And that's pretty cool that they've got that figured out. Yeah, so you got jaw control, pitch control, and the whole thing is connected to a rotator that is connected to a generator. And sometimes you've got a Gearbox in the middle. Because here's the thing, one of the reasons why wind didn't catch on or didn't continue to spread as coal did is because it's really difficult to get a windmill rotor to spin fast enough to generate electricity using traditional electromagnetic. You need something like 1800 RPMs to really get a good electrical buzz cooking. And windmill rotors, especially the big ones these days, they're at 5, 10, 18, 60, I think is about the top that I saw. So about one rotation a second, which is still a third of what it needs to be to generate electricity.

Although, by the way, I've got that figured out. But for one that's using a traditional dynamo, not dynamo, I guess generator, right? Where you've got magnets spinning through coils to generate electricity. They have a Gearbox, and somehow through some black magic, I just genuinely don't understand gears, Chuck. We have to do an episode on it, I guess.

Oh, no, no, no, no, I know that it's really basic stuff that even like, Archimedeus used to mess with.

I just can't wrap my head around how that happens.

Well, I definitely don't want to do something on gears because many years ago, I'm pretty sure I updated the old HowStuffWorks article on gears. Okay. It's pretty mind-numming and boring. Okay. But just think about the size of gears and a gears with tons and tons of teeth, hooking up and making love to a gear with fewer teeth is going to... Like that top one is going to be spinning really fast and the other one is going to be spinning less.

Don't. Still doesn't make sense to me.

Really? Well, have you ever seen a gear, like a gif or something of gears at work?

Yeah, I looked it up for this to just try to see if I could wrap my head around it this time, and it still just wouldn't work.

Well, fewer teeth just means slower.

But that doesn't make sense. I understand that more teeth means faster. How? That's where I get stuck.

It's catching fewer teeth, which is like the go button, basically.

I'll chew on this. We'll move on. I don't think it's going to work.

No, no. Here I'm the one like, loving to not do this, and I'm trying to explain it.

Just sticking a short stuff in the middle of this episode.

Yeah. Here's another fun fact, and this is not super consequential, but I just thought it was interesting, is the the Gearbox and all that stuff is up tall in the tower in something called a nestle, and that is an aviation term. That's like planes have nestles. So just like you have a spinning propeller on a plane.

Okay.

Yeah, so it's an aviation term. Kind of cool.

Okay, so that whole thing that it looks like the turbines are mounted to, that whole thing is basically the nestle, and that's where the Gearbox and the rotor and the generator are all tucked in, right?

Yeah, I think it's off of the blades, just like it would be on a plane.

So the thing with the Gearbox, it really works. You can get some pretty good electricity out of a relatively small set of moving parts, but they are moving parts, and they're way up high, usually dozens of feet in the air, and they can be loud, too, and they can get dirty and break down like any gears can. So there's another kind called a direct drive system, and basically, they figured out, and I couldn't get to the bottom of this, they can use that regular rotation of a wind turbine to generate electricity. I think it just requires much larger parts, I think is generally what the trade-off is. So There's pros and cons to both kinds, and they've come up with some new stuff that's on the horizon or happening now that seem to supersede both of those two, as we'll talk about.

Yeah, and no matter how efficient you can build, really, any power generation system, there are limits. At a certain point, you can increase efficiency and increase efficiency, but then the laws of physics step in and say, You can't be 100% efficient. You're never going to capture every bit of the wind. It's just not possible. There was a German physicist in 1919 named Albert Benz, who calculated the theoretical maximum of kinetic energy that you can zap into electricity, and it basically caps off at close to 60%, 59.3%. Wind is about 35 to 45% efficient, which may not sound great, but Olivia helped us out with this. She points out, wind is free, so it's not... You've got these things sitting out there, so it's not like you're paying to generate that wind.

Right. Plus, also, if you look into the other types of fuels used to generate electricity, it's perfectly in line. Nuclear is between 30 to 45% efficient. Coals, 38 to 45. Natural gas is only 25% efficient, so it's way better than natural gas as far as efficiency goes. If you're wondering why can it be 100% efficient, the explanation that I found that I'm still having trouble adjusting, too. I think the gears thing really threw me off first. Then I went into this and it was just hopeless. To transfer 100% of the power from wind to a turbine, that means the wind has to come to a stop and transfer all of its energy to the turbine when it comes in contact with it. I understand that means the wind stops, but as long as there's a stream of wind coming at you, why would that matter? That's my big question.

I don't know. I'm not going to hazard a guess on this one.

All right, well, how about this? We'll take a break. To everybody else, it'll just be a couple of ads, but you and I will spend the next 45 minutes or so hashing this out.

Can we have lunch?

We can have lunch. We'll order it. Okay.

Ihard podcast update this week on your free IHard radio app. Fodor's Guide to Espionage, a '60s-era spy story of the world's first and greatest travel writer, Eugene Fodor, as he jet-sets around the globe. Tongue Unbroken Season 2. This podcast explores complex concepts of identity, resilience, erasure, and genocide. Table for Two Season Two. Think of the show as a deconstructed Oscar party in podcast form. Each episode takes place over the romance of a meal and feels like you're seated next to a different guest at that dinner. Hear these podcasts and more on your free iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcast.

Oh, hi. I'm Rachael Zoh, and I'm back for another season of my podcast, Climbing in Heels. You might know me from the Rachael Zoh Project or perhaps from my work as a celebrity stylist. And guess what? I'm still just as fully obsessed with all things fashion, beauty, and business. My podcast, Climbing in Heels, is all about celebrating the stories of extraordinary women. And this season, we're taking things up a notch. I'll be talking to some incredible women across so many industries, from models and beauty industry stars to doctors, entrepreneurs, and TV personalities. Climbing in Heels is here to bring you weekly dose of glamor, inspiration, and fun. Every week, listeners will be able to ask me any questions I'm answering at all. My life is absolutely crazy with so much going on, and I'm so beyond excited to bring you along for the ride. Whether we're talking red carpet looks, current trends, or products I'm obsessed with, I'm here to be your fashion fairy godmother. Listen to Climbing in Heels every Friday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.

Who hasn't heard names like Achilles or Odius, Cassandra, Medusa. But how much do you know about them from the ancient world? Let's Talk About Myths, Baby is the podcast bringing the ancient sources to life. Greek myth and history is timeless, and unless you've been living under a rock, you have seen just how true that is today. But there is so much more to these characters and stories than what pop culture can do justice. I'm Liv Albert, the host of Let's Talk About Myths, Baby. And every week I bring you stories from the ancient world, both mythological and historical, to breathe new life into these thousands of years old stories. I'm also regularly joined by some of the most brilliant names in the field of archeology and ancient history, authors of your favorite retellings from today and everyone in between. Join me as I dive into the wild world of the ancient Greeks and their stories. Listen to Let's Talk About Myths, Baby on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

All right, we're going to talk a little bit about where we stand today here in the United States. We'll get to elsewhere in the world later on. Don't you worry. We're looking at you, Denmark. Right now, the United States has about 70,000 wind turbines going with a capacity, a total potential capacity of about 146 gigawatts, which should make Doc Brown shake in his whatever shoes he wore.

I looked up what that is relative to what we use. I think we use something like 1,300 gigawatts. So it's like a 10th of that, but that's still pretty good. I mean, think about it. We went from basically zero wind power in the '80s to a 10th of our capacity is in the form of wind Turbine's.

Nothing on Doc Brown, huh?

No, I just think it was so perfectly that it'd be like me pointing out that we've been using the word turbine. You know what I mean?

Do you know who Doc Brown is? Sure. Who?

He's like Christopher Lloyd from Back to the Future. What person do you think I am? Do you know me at all?

I guess the person who refuses to comment on a great Doc Brown joke.

I was commenting on it. I was saying that it was such a perfect joke, and was inserted so perfectly that there was no need to comment.

It bear no comment? Yes. I'm going to have to remember that. Your joke was so good. Oh, no. You know what that you basically just said? Is that so funny? I forgot to laugh. Last year, 2023, about 10% of our electricity came from wind. Not too bad. I mentioned Texas as the leader. They're generating about 25% of that, a little more even.

That's just mind boggling to I think, considering Texas.

Well, let's talk about Texas for a second. Sure. They have been far and away the leader. They got a lot of wide open land there in West Texas. They had their own power grid. They're the only state with their own power grid. So that makes it a lot easier for them with interstate projects to not have to... They can rely on themselves like Texans like to do. But here's the thing. In recent years, I don't think it's a stretch to say that there has been some... I mean, Olivia calls it ideological warfare, and she's basically right. And that's unfortunate because now there are Conservatives in Texas that are making it harder to do something they're really good at, and that's to generate wind for power. And that's a real shame because it seems like ideology... I mean, I know there are, and we'll talk about downsides of wind production, and there are gripes that there might be inconsistent supply. But it really seems to come down to like, no, we are an oil state, and even though we're great at making wind, we, I guess, can't do both.

I don't know. But I mean, even though they are an oil state, they've been an oil state for decades and decades, like a century, basically, and they still spend all this time and money and effort into creating this wind infrastructure. Yeah, keep it going, Texas. I I don't think it has anything to do with oil. I think a certain vein of conservativism equates anything Earth friendly to to liberals. I know. And because everything's so divisive and the sides are just so divided that you just can't possibly be into something that liberal's favor. That's just crazy. And vice versa. I don't mean to just say this is all Conservatives. The divisiveness, definitely, it can be found on both sides of the equation. It's just sad that there's two sides. Let's just get past the sides, everybody.

Well, it's sad that it's affecting something like this, which, like I said, Texas is really good at. They have a lot of it figured out. They're the leader in the United States. Keep it going, Texas.

The thing is this, Chuck, they're trying, they're not necessarily succeeding. In the 2022, 2023 session, a whole raft of bills that were trying to basically make wind power investment harder, none of them passed. And I think the reason why, and this is the thing, yes, you can oppose wind power, but I think the giant gears are already in motion, massive corporations. But you don't know how those work. I know, I don't. But I can tell when they're moving, I guess. So just giant multinational corporations have sunk so many tens and hundreds of billions of dollars into this investment and are starting now to actually reap benefit from it. It's not going back. Like, sorry, it's just not. So it's still moving forward. It just sucks that it has to move forward in this... Slower pace. It's just a negative... But with a negative vibe.

Yeah. No, totally. I mean, hopefully, Americans are capitalists, and hopefully money, what went out in the end, because like you said, a lot of money invested and a lot of money to be made.

The thing is, though, that's not to say that people who oppose, especially locally, oppose wind projects don't have a point. There's a lot to be said about not wanting to live near a wind turbine, in particular, a wind farm, because It's just one of those things that this is going to impact your life. It can impact your real estate values. It can impact what's called the view shed, just simply your view. There's actual legitimate reasons for people to push back on stuff. But that doesn't mean that there can't be a compromise, a way forward to find legitimate places where win can be generated well and efficiently without ruining some nearby community.

Yeah. I mean, there's definitely a lot of what's called NIMBI going on.

Yeah.

On both sides.

Well, yeah, for sure. And again, I don't blame anybody for that. It sucks because that whole idea means that usually poor communities who can't represent themselves and don't have the means to really have the political clout to push back on that thing end up with this stuff. But it seems like with things like wind turbines wind farms in particular, the decision making is being decentralized. So more and more local communities are being able to step in and be like, no, this is not happening here. Sorry. Our city council voted against it. It's not happening. And I think that that's I think that's legitimate. I think that... I don't know what the way forward is, but I know that there's a way forward. But I don't think it's shoving a wind farm down a local community's throat, whether they like it or not.

Yeah. And by the way, NIMby, if people are like, What the heck is Chuck talking about? That's just the acronym, the not in my backyard thing. You're like, No, wind energy is great. We should totally do it, but I don't want one of those in my backyard. Over there. Go do it over there. Much, much better. Exactly. But Moving on, we promise to talk about offshore. Most of what's going on right now is on land in terms of wind collection. I guess they're not collecting it, but in a way, they are. Sure. But if you think about a lot of wind out on the open an ocean that seems like a no-brainer in some ways, and we will get to the environmental aspects of all this stuff later. People out there screaming like, How can you put more things in the ocean? We'll get to it. But it is a promising idea stronger wins. There's a lot of permitting issues. Obviously, what we just talked about with the NIMBI thing, a lot of communities, beachfront property or generally people who either, if you're lucky enough to have owned it forever, you may not be super wealthy, but most people who live on the beach are wealthy, and they don't want to see that stuff.

There's been a lot of complaints about looking at that thing, but we may be headed toward I mean, they're building more and more of them in the coming years, it seems like.

Well, this is what I was talking about. There was a big push against the Vineyard Wind project. Yeah. I should say there was a vocal push against it, and it's still happening. They're doing, I think 62 turbines. They've already got five installed, and it's moving forward. But at the same time, a bunch of local people who make their money off of fishing, they were affected by this. Their fishing grounds were now a wind turbine farm. They couldn't fish there anymore, so they're being compensated for that.

So they're paying commercial fishermen to not fish?

Essentially, to stay out of this area, at least, or to accept a buffer zone. That's what I'm saying. There's compromises to be made here. Other people are like, this view shed thing, what are you talking about? If you hold your hand up, the windmill that you see on the horizon is smaller than your fingernail. Right. That's what you're seeing. And other people are like, I don't want to see it.

You're not swimming into it.

I don't feel like it's 15 miles out. I don't want to see it. But those people seem to have... I guess they're outnumbered or outgunned by the people who are like, No, this project is going forward. And again, it's tough to argue about it because right now, the 68 megawatts that that Vineyard Wind project is putting out with just the five turbines, that's enough to power 30,000 homes, and their goal is something like 800 megawatts. So there's going to be a lot of people getting a lot of clean energy from the wind project.

Yeah, and there are more... People are looking to the ocean. The Gulf of Mexico, They may have one at some point. The Mid-Atlantic is being targeted. Joe Biden and his administration have a target of 30,000 megawatt offshore hours. By 2030, it seems like we're going to mention a lot of goals and things. It doesn't seem like any of these will be reached, but those are the goals, at least. We're explaining why as we're going. But California is trying to get 25,000 megawatts. By 2045, these are going to be floating because the Pacific is so deep. In Cal Berkeley, they did a study and they said that offshore wind by 2050 could potentially supply between 10 and 25% of all US energy, not just wind energy.

And offshore is the smallest one, so it's the smallest segment. And the fact that the offshore wind farms are so small right now, that's significant growth. And I get the impression that one of the reasons they're growing is, one, it's not up on anybody's real estate. It's way out in the ocean, even though you can see them. But secondly, 50 % of Americans live within 50 miles of a Coast. And transmission lines are a real thing, a real issue for wind power. So if you can get a 50-mile length of transmission wire to 50% of Americans, that's a pretty significant number of people.

Yeah. I wonder if some of these, like the younger generation is, generally, I mean, this is a broad stroke, but generally a little more into trying to go toward renewable energy. So I wonder if they're, if the rich kids are even fighting back against their parents about stuff like I wonder how... You said it was like a pinkie nail.

Right.

Dad's complaining, he's on the beach, and the kids are like, Dad, just hold up your pinkie nail and block it out. Boomer.

Exactly. The thing is, I was very interested to find this out. There's a lot of environmentalists who are opposed to these wind projects, too. They're making strange bedfellows with people who don't like renewable at all. They're like, You're an environmentalist. How can you be opposed to this? They're like, look at those giant turbines. That's just one of them. And they're putting more and more offshore. They're ruining habitats. They're ruining communities. This is not the way to go. And they're like, well, what way do you want to go, hippie? What's wrong now? We're finally doing the stuff you wanted to do. And the thread that seems to be emerging among younger environmentalists or among environmentalists in general is degrowth. It's like, no, we don't need to create more and more wind farms to meet electrical demand that's going to increase over the next two decades. We need to decrease the electrical demand. And yeah, we need to supply it with wind and stuff like that. But we're going in the wrong direction here. We're building, building, building to meet growth, growth, growth. They're like, we need to stop growing. So that's actually made them opposed to a lot of these projects, especially the biggest ones.

Yeah. I think those people look out and see a big wind farm, and it doesn't look any different to them than a nuclear power plant or a huge coal plant. All they see is some giant monstrosity of capitalism at work.

That's exactly right.

Yeah. And there's a point.

So I say we take a break and we'll jump back into more the nuts and bolts of this. All right.

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That's right.

Okay, Chuck, in addition to a lot of the pushback that we just covered for a while, there's a lot of practical issues and challenges to making wind, what was it, up to 25% of US demand by 2050, I think. That's crazy. One of them is transmission, like I said.

You had the wind is out in the middle of nowhere. That's the problem.

That's exactly right. Yeah. The places where it blows the most, they're the least number of people. And that means you have to build an infrastructure to get it from those less populated areas to the populated areas that want to use it. That's a big one. And apparently, there was a Princeton study that found that transmission infrastructure is growing at just like 1% a year. And that if we keep that pace up, the reduction in fossil fuel emissions that the Inflation Reduction Act envisioned, with a lot of its green stuff that was associated with it, we'll lose 80% of that, that reduction. So we need to definitely expand transmission lines. It's a big, big step.

Yeah, for sure. Getting the power there is a big deal. One idea that has a lot of promise, but it all has its downsides, of course. There is no perfect system is storing the energy. There's a lot of work being done toward storage capacity, because right now, if the sun isn't shining, if it's super cloudy a lot, if the wind isn't blowing very much, then solar and wind are going to take a hit. And then that means that the fossil fuel plants just make up for that. But if we're leaning more and more on solar and wind and other renewables, we're going to have to figure out a way to store that stuff.

Yeah. So just real quick for people who aren't in the United States or who are in the United States and don't pay attention to Congressional packages, the Inflation Reduction Act was a bill, was a law that was passed in 2022 It was just a huge spending package. But one of the things that it really focused on was the US infrastructure, which needs updating big time. But it also looked forward down the future and was like, how can we invest in energy and renewables. And basically, it said the government's even more open for business for renewable investment than before. And as a result, it already had huge impacts. That was passed in 2022. In 2023, the investment in renewable storage, so basically, giant batteries that can store solar and wind power for use later, has increased by 300 %. They predicted that in 2040, there was going to be 50 gigawatts of storage capacity, and now they're predicting it'll be more like 200 gigawatts of storage capacity by 2040, just because of the Inflation Reduction Act.

Yeah. But again, these batteries are not Not environmentally friendly to create the batteries like that. I don't even think we mentioned really the rare earth metals and things that are used for the magnets, for the turbines. That stuff isn't great either. So like we said, there There's no perfect system. I think early on, the pie in the sky stuff with renewables was just like, use wind and use sun, which is great, but you can't just talk about the blue sky stuff without talking about the downsides.

Yeah, and we need to listen to the downsides, too, and then go back to the drawing board and not be like, No, this is the way we're doing it. Totally. We need to say, Okay, great. We're all on board with moving forward with this. How can we figure out... Or enough of us are on board with moving forward. How can we figure out how to do it so that it impacts the fewest people possible in the least amount possible? I mean, we're smart. The humans are fairly smart animals, and we can figure that stuff out. We just have to go out of our way to take that into account. I feel like that's going to happen.

I think so, too. I say with trepidation. We talked about, or we promised to talk about what's going on around the world, and we mentioned Denmark, of course, because just like those windmills back in the day. They were leader then, and they're the leader now. They create 54.3% of their power supply from wind in Denmark as of a couple of years ago in 2022. Other European countries, Spain, Germany, Portugal, and then the UK, they're over 20 %, so they're doing pretty good. If you're talking, and that's percentage-wise, if you're talking just total wind generation, the US is number two with 430 Watt terawatt-hours annually right now. But you mentioned China. We're at 434 in second place. China is generating 763 terawatt-hours per year and running away with it.

Yeah. Actually, the world is extraordinarily fortunate that China has decided to do that rather than just rely on fossil fuels, because the pollution that would be even worse than it is now if they use fossil instead of wind and solar as they're planning on doing, the impact would be nuts, essentially.

Yeah. I think their goal in China is full carbon neutrality by 2060, and wind is a very, very big part of Also, we should point out China is not doing that because of their magnanimus benevolence towards humanity and the planet.

They're doing it because they recognize that there's a lot of money coming down the pike for whoever is prepared for this revolution. And it's actually happening right now. That figure from how much just the US alone improved as far as wind generation goes from the '90s is just astounding. I knew it was going on in In the background, I had no idea that we were this far along already, which I found very heartening.

Yeah, same. We talked a lot about the downsides here and there. We haven't talked about animals yet. Obviously, anytime you're screwing up a habitat for animals in nature, that's going to have a real bad effect. There's no way around it. Just those spinning blades are going to kill birds and bats and things that fly into them. But the wind pressure around these farms can affect the habitats. The terrestrial animals are affected. I think they did a study in Europe about their roe deer and the European hare. They're just not here anymore because of these wind farms. In Norway, they're obviously got a lot of wind going there, but they're shutting things down because it's affecting rainforest, which is a very big deal in Norway. The indigenous Sami people who heard the Deer. So they can't mess with the Indigenous cultures there. So they're shutting some of those down.

Right. It's impacting local communities, no matter how small the community, they're responding to it. That's a big deal. There's also, I think you said earlier, a lot of impact with ocean-based wind because these things are huge. They're like giant oil derricks, but there's a bunch of them, and they have to be mounted to the continental shelves so they don't blow over. So it's a huge, massive project, and the sound that it generates can rupture whales eardrums. It can completely disturb breeding grounds. It can do a lot of stuff. But again, it's been pointed out, if you do this right and you do the right studies, if you look around and say, who is this going to impact? And then how can we mitigate those impacts? There's stuff you can do to make the impact that much less or as low as possible. If you're impacting whales, then plan the construction phase of it for a time when the whales are off migrating on another part of the ocean. So it's not going to blow out their eardrums when you pile drive the pylons into the continental shelf. Or move it over a little bit. Keep it out of the whales breeding ground I'll put it somewhere else.

There's just little things you can do that will decrease the impact tremendously.

Yeah, for sure. One thing we haven't talked about that... I mean, I never really considered this, which is really short short-sighted of me, but these are big, massive machines. And when big, massive machines reach the end of their life, it's not like they'll go forever. These are physical materials that wear out, including those huge turbines and blades. So when that stuff, the ones that came on early in the '90s and 2000, some of those are nearing the end of their life, and all of a sudden, you're stuck with these blades that are just gargantuan, and they're not made of bamboo or banana fiber. They're fiber glass and epoxy resin, and they're an environmental nightmare. And so what do you do with those? You can't just fill landfills with these giant bees.

No, I don't know. There's a company in Tennessee called Carbon Rivers that says that they recycled about a thousand of the blades in 2023, which I'm guessing is probably significant, but still maybe a drop in the bucket. But they figured out how to extract the carbon fibers from the epoxy resin, and then you can reuse the carbon fibers because it's a very strong stuff. So that's great. That's good to have that online. But the better solution, at least in the future, is to start manufacturing the turbine blades in ways that they can be much more easily recycled. So I think they're using the same material still. They're just using processes that can, later on down the road, be reversed more easily, and you can separate the fiber glass from the the epoxy more easily.

And what you've been saying about, why don't you change the way you're doing things as we go instead of being locked in, that is happening with those blades. And there's a company in Germany, oh, actually, it's Siemens, big company. Sure. Is that the same company, Siemens, Gamesa, as regular Siemens?

Sure.

Okay. I just never heard the full name, I guess. I didn't know Siemens had a last name. But they're basically saying, Well, why don't we make a better blade that uses a different resin that is much more easily separated from that fiber glass. Things like that, like you're talking about, make the parts more easily recyclable or reusable. I know they're using them on playgrounds and stuff, trying to repurpose them. I guess it makes a heck of a slide or something like that, but there are limits to how much you can... I mean, it all helps, How much? Because there's a lot of blades out there that are going to be coming offline.

Right, and they're big. Also, by the way, I think I was using carbon fiber and fiber glass interchangeably, and I'm not quite sure that's right. They're fiber glass, right?

Yeah, I think so.

There's a couple of other things that are drawbacks to turbines that need to be addressed. One is called shadow flicker. When the sun is lowish on the horizon and it's just beaming through the wind turbine, as the turbine spins, it makes a flickering shadow. And if you live in range of that shadow, it can drive you crazy. As a matter of fact, they did a study to make sure that it wasn't rapid enough to trigger seizures Seizures. And apparently, the max is, again, 60 RPMs. So I think it's like 100... It takes double that to start to trigger photosensitive seizures. So it's not going to trigger a seizure, but yes, it's extremely annoying when it happens. But they're like, it only happens certain times of the year. For a couple of hours out of a day, can you just get used to it? And some people are like, no. And then other people are like, yeah, it's not. They did another study of people who lived in proximity of wind turbines. They're like, I don't even really notice anymore. And then noise, too. It makes a noise. But again, the fewer parts that you have, the less noise it's going to make.

If you don't have a Gearbox, those gears aren't there make a bunch of noise. If you do have a Gearbox, you need to soundproof your... What do you call that package that the airplane has, too?

A nestle.

A nestle. And then also, they're making, I think, those giant turbines are also going to be quieter. They're like 18% quieter or something like that. There's a lot of stuff that needs to be addressed, but I feel like I just think it's going to get addressed if I can share my opinion.

Yeah, it's a sunny opinion.

You got anything else?

I got nothing else.

All right. Well, that's it for Wind Turbine. For now, we'll have to revisit it in year 35 of stuff you should know. And since I said that, it's time for a listen to me.

Yeah, I'm going to call this Marcy is Definitely Asian. We heard from quite a few Asian listeners for our peanuts episode who were very kind, but they were like, Guys, you seemed a little hesitant to go there. But go there, because Marcy was clearly Asian to every kid that was Asian in reading peanuts. This one is from Hugh Nguyen. Hey, guys, I'm a 43-year-old Vietnamese-American who grew up reading and watching peanuts. My friend's family and I assumed without question that Charles Schultz intended Marcy to be Asian-American by drawing and writing her with so many shortcuts to signal Asian-American identity. First, her haircut. Marcy's hair is short, black bob with bang. Many Asian-American girls had this fuss-free, homemade haircut exacted upon them by their frugal mothers. Number two, her glasses. Asians and Asian-Americans do have a higher rate of myopia in developed countries, so eyewear is just more common with us. She's awkward because she is so busy. I quote an article by Kevin Wong, which resonates with me, and so many children raised by overly protective immigrant parents who carried the trauma of war and/or forced immigration. Marcy couldn't come out to play because she had to practice her organ.

She had to study. She had to read. This was our experience. Number four, she is othered by everyone. Asian language, food, religion, and culture in general were and might still be considered foreign and weird in many parts of the US. I just assume Marcy was depicted as a strange little girl because that's how the peanuts gang and the rest of America would perceive a an unathletic, bookish Asian child. Then finally, she calls Peppermint Patty, Sir, because English is her second language, guys. In many East and Southeast Asian languages, children address adults and people in positions of power and respect with courtesy titles that have no gender. That's why Peppermint Patty was called Sir.

Wow. Who is this?

This is from... I got a pronunciation guide. It's spelled H-I-E-U. Pronounced Hugh, N-G-U-Y-E-N. Hugh said, I pronounced that Hugh Nuen, but different people even pronounced my last name differently within my own country.

Yeah, I've always seen it pronounced or heard it pronounced as when.

Yeah. That was a great email, and we appreciate all our Asian and Asian-American listeners who wrote in about that saying, Guys, we thought she was Asian, so it's okay to say that.

That's awesome. Thanks for sharing. If you want to get in touch with us like you did and everybody else, you can send us an email. Send it off to stuffpodcast@iheartradio. Com.

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