Stuff You Should Know - Solar Power: The Future or What?

Episode Date: August 13, 2019

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.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

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Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hello, Maine and Greater New England. Hello. 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 30th,

and if you're interested, you can get tickets and information at sysklive.com. There's some lobster at us. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart radios, How Stuff Works. Here we go. Hey, 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 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, shiz. Some shizat. Can I say that? Sure. All right, good. Well, I just did, didn't I? You did. So we are actually 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, that there would be just reams and reams of just 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 got this feeling of dread researching this, that the cheerleaders and champions of solar power are losing their resolve to an extent. They'll still 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 not taking off like they expected it to.

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 made a name 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. So you can say, screw you power company. Yeah. Or pay me power company. Yep. You can say take this power bill and shove it. So the sun, this is pretty neat here at the beginning of this that you put together here.

The sun rays give off about 1,000 watts of energy per square meter. 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 stuff in Texas. There really is. And not much of some stuff.

No, that's true. I was gonna say the good thing about Texas is 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. Oh boy. Oh, gear, gear, gear, gear.

All right, so if you look at a mass, land mass that's as big as Texas, they receive a little under 700 terawatts over the course of one hour at noon on a sunny day. 700 terawatts. Yeah, it sounds like a lot but is it a lot? Who knows? Who could possibly know?

If you wanna compare that, you're being coy. In that same hour, the total amount of human-mage energy production on planet Earth, and this is all energy production that you could possibly dream of, is 17.7 terawatts compared to 700 terawatts. That's 40 times less than what the sun delivered to Texas in just that hour.

Yeah, right, and the Union of Concerned Scientists happen in group who I love. They say that 18 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. If you dug up and burned every bit

of coal, oil, and natural gas, it would only produce as much energy as 18 days worth of global sunlight. That's astounding. Yeah, and these are facts that have 50 caveats beneath each of them, which we're gonna 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 point out the obvious, the great thing about solar is there is no greenhouse gas emissions when you use solar electricity. 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 cost a lot to make these things for me to silicon, and then meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh. Before you do that, we were gonna talk about all that stuff, but Josh very clearly said, once you have these things set up, that's when the real benefit comes.

Yes, and if I hadn't said it, I was going to eventually. Well, no, you basically said it, like 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, well, this stuff was invented in the 1970s.

Not so. You have to go all the way back to 1839, believe it or not, when a French physicist named Alexandre Edmond, Josh says this. Becquerelar. Man, I practiced it a million times. Becquerelar, I think. Becquerelar, yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's a tough word. Yes, it is. There's a couple extra continents in there that just shouldn't be there. That's right. So this dude, he's the one that first demonstrated the photovoltaic effect, which is basically the ability of a solar cell to turn sun into electricity

all the way back in 1839. Right, but no one knew exactly how this worked. They just knew that it worked. He was burned at the stake later on for his black magic. Right, so just about 40 years later, there's a guy named Charles Fritz. And he, in the 1880s,

built the world's first rooftop solar array. Coincidentally, just a year after Edison launched the world's first coal fire power plant. But this early solar array was terribly inefficient. It didn't do very much. We could basically power, jeez, I don't even know what it, it could power a mousetrap. How about that?

Sure. Which doesn't even need electricity. That's how little power that this thing produced. But it definitely demonstrated that it was possible to generate an electrical current from sunlight in a way that it was a proof of concept, basically, saying just give it like 90 years and we'll understand this better.

Yeah, and who was that? That was Fritz. Charlie Fritz? Yep. Fritz was a good guy, but he was no Einstein. No. Einstein, it would take Einstein, that is, to really explain how this all worked in 1905.

Cause he had a knack for doing that. I'm not sure if people realized that. He was a good explainer, maybe the original explainer. Well, he would put it in terms that you could really understand. Like to be like, consider the sandwich. Imagine the sandwich is the sun and then it just go from there

and you'd be like, I understand what he's saying. Yeah, and if you think Einstein, oh yeah, he won a bunch of Nobel Prizes for relativity, not so. He won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1921 for explaining the photoelectric effect. He didn't win for relativity? No. I didn't know that, holy cow, what a snow.

Unless I'm wrong and if I am, I'm gonna have a lot of egg on my face. That's all right. We'll cook it off with some good old solar electricity. Gross. It is gross, but also shows the idea of cooked egg in your beard. So Bell Labs in 1954,

if you want to talk about the modern PV cell, that was in 1954. And 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 Skylab or any of our great satellites, you'll notice that they all have these big solar wings. Yeah, yeah, they're solar powered.

It was because of US government research in the 50s that we were able to develop those. I think they launched the first solar powered satellite in 1954, no, 58. And then just six years later, they launched the first solar powered satellite whose solar panels could track the sun, which is still a pretty whiz bang thing

to have for your solar array. And this was 1964. Yeah, amazing. So the US government invested in the earliest research and everything was going along really smoothly. But one of the things that's always been a problem for solar is oil and natural gas and coal are just so cheap and our infrastructure is set up to burn those things

and get electricity for them. So solar has always been an upstart. But at one point in 1973, oil was not very cheap all of a sudden because of the OPEC embargo that created the energy crisis that made it really uncheap. So much so that the United States looked around and said, 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 wanna put in solar power and they still do this today, we'll give you some tax credits. It'll make it a lot cheaper for you.

There has been, I guess we could call it the solar battle at the White House since 1979. Jimmy Carter had very famously had solar panels installed on the roof of the White House to heat water for them and for the pools and for the kitchen and stuff like that. Sure. And Reagan had them taken down in 86.

So there are a couple of stories about how this went down. The cynic will say Reagan as a statement had them taken down even though they're 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 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. So that's the party line right now. I've never heard that one. That sounds like a new gingrich yarn if you ask me. Well, that's the direct quote.

George W. Bush put solar power back into the White House. What? Say what? What? Yeah. I didn't know that, okay. 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 help out there. He did not have them on top of the actual White House but he had solar power installed at various places around the White House. This was W or HW? This was W. Okay, wow, that's really surprising.

Yeah, Carter's for his part, one of his, he has two on display, one of them's at the Smithsonian and one of them is right here in Atlanta at the Carter Center. You can go look at one of those solar panels. There was 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 the US 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, I don't want to let him up too easy with this, the fact that they just said it was unwise based on cost

because he gutted the Department of Energy's renewable energy research and development budgets, like totally gutted them and he eliminated the tax breaks for wind and solar. I'm not sure for how long. But for a million years, I would guess. No, because they're back. And it 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 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 the government did to help solar along during the Carter era was to offer tax breaks like you were saying. But because of the really, really high cost of installing a solar electric system, it was basically viewed as a sweetheart deal

tax break for the rich. That's how the first solar tax credits 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 onward to today, because we've had breakthroughs in technology, of manufacturing, of creating new kinds of semiconductors,

of making traditional kinds more cheaply, the price of solar has dropped 88% 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 now, I think, fairly affordable for most kind of middle class Americans if they wanna put in solar power because eventually it's gonna pay for itself.

That's the whole idea. Either you're trying to pay this, get cheaper bills and have it pay for itself over the years, which it's gonna happen regardless. Or you're someone with some money that just wants to do the right thing by the environment and get off the grid as much as possible. Yeah, it's just that upfront cost.

Not the cost over the life of the setup, it's the upfront cost. But there are things like energy saver, renewable energy, mortgage home loans basically you can take out that have really special good financing and rates and stuff like that. There's a lot of things you can do that we'll talk about to get around that upfront cost.

But you hit the nail on the head and it's really worth saying again, you can expect your solar 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 US household, you can plunk down about 15 grand

to cover 100% of your electricity needs. Which, and that's I think after the tax credit, if I'm not mistaken. Oh, is that right? And again, there are so many factors, where you live, how much energy you use, how big your house is, the weather where you are.

So this is a big, big broad statement. But if you're just looking for a general range, it's not like it costs 50 or $60,000 anymore to do this. Right. So you wanna take a break and then come back and talk about what actually is going on in those solar cells? Heck yeah.

Let's do it Chuck. Let's do it, let's do it, let's do it, let's do it. And dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever.

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Okay, dude, so 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. Hooray. What we're going to talk about, basically. You can turn it into chemical energy. Boring. It's far out, though.

It's like storing energy in the bonds of molecules, like through artificial photosynthesis. That's pretty cool. It's news. And then you can also convert it into heat. But when you're talking about solar energy, most people think of the solar into electricity, which is called photovoltaic energy.

And that's basically what we're going to be talking about. Yeah, like when you drive through a neighborhood and you see those shiny panels on a roof, and think, my god, those are ugly. That's true. Man, it's true. We'll get to that, too. So that's what we're talking about.

These photovoltaic cells, they are made up of semiconductors, materials called semiconductors. And these days, and we'll talk in a sec about how this might be changing in the future. But about 90% of all these 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. It's not very, it's extraordinarily stable, which is kind of a thing because you'd want a somewhat unstable arrangement of atoms, or else you won't get this electricity to work. But. Can't be too stiff.

No, you can't. You've got to go with the flow. That's exactly right. The flow of electricity, basically. But with 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 and how it flows.

So rather than just using pure silicon, which 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. N-type and P-type. That's right. So for the N-type, which stands for negative,

they're going to dope it, and I love that word in this case, with phosphorus that has five electrons. So it's going to 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 left over. Just dangling out there like it's wearing shorts that are way too short.

Yeah, it's looking for a place to go, basically. Sure. 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. OK, 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. It's going to 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 N-type silicon film and P-type silicon film

and you put them up against one another, you have a situation where that extra electron wants to flow to the other side and fill that unused bond. Because again, the universe is always moving toward homeostasis, right? Yeah, that roommate's like, hey, you got an extra 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 the electromagnetic spectrum. And when they hit this doped silicon, they come bursting into the room, and they kick 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 don't think we said that yet. 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 a solar cell in a nutshell. And the solar cell is the basic unit

of what you think of when you think of a solar panel or whatever. It's that one little square. And that square is connected to other squares. And they form what's called the module. And when you put a nice little frame around it and put it on a stand or whatever, you have yourself a solar panel.

And 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. Do people say that?

Look at that solar array in my universe. I would think people would more say, look at those solar panels. Well, then that would make sense. I had to set it up so it didn't make any sense. So someone would swoop in and correct. So the person who knows what it's really called hangs around with complete morons who

say things like, look at that solar panel when they see a group of solar panels. All right, now I got you. We're talking about morons here. Right. All right, so it sounds simple, and it is kind of simple. And it's 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 problem, because we talked about in the Bone Wars episode about the, what were they called? Not the power wars. The current wars.

Current wars. A war of current. That's right, DC did not win. So we have to convert that DC current to AC current. So what these solar panels need is something called an inverter. Yeah, and the inverter is basically like the brains of the whole setup.

And there used to be a big problem with inverters. They were very clunky, and you would basically have one inverter for an entire solar array. And the solar inverter 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 it was doing on whatever the lowest common denominator of the whole array

was giving it. So if you had one dirty solar cell or there was a cloud going over just one solar panel out of like 20, the inverter was basically delivering electricity based on that one cloudy panel or that one dirty cell. That's not the case anymore. Yeah, not very smart, was it?

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 microinverters. And now a microinverter is responsible for either one panel or just a single cell. And so that one cell could be 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 running the show on their own too. How can you go 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 saw.

All right. All right, so let's talk about powering a house. And just like four years ago, 2015, and these are pretty good numbers, 800,000 houses and businesses in the United States had solar panels. And that's not to say they were 100% dependent on them, but they were at least doing some of the work, which is not bad.

And like you said, 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 for 20 years, you can expect this thing to work like a charm. Yeah, 20 years is the low end. I saw the averages about 25 years when you buy a solar setup that you can just put it up there

and be like, oh, this is great. I don't even need to think about this anymore. But if you do want to invest in this, if you're like, OK, I can swing this, I want to contribute, I'm going to go solar, there are some steps you want to take to kind of wisen yourself up so that when you deal with the installer, you'll know what you're talking about.

And one of the first things you want to do is to do an energy audit on your energy consumption, which is basically figuring out how much electricity you use in your house at any given time. Probably want to figure out where your peak is and then just kind of plan for that. See, what I don't get is you can look at your power bill and tell that you need to do a separate audit

outside 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 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 out of the consumption by like 30%. I've heard of these. This is a much larger thing. Right, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's kind of like, 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 just happens to be a good time to do it. Yeah, and the other thing you have to decide as you're pricing this out, and you can call a company, they will come out these days

and basically tell you what you need. 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, and this is really the most important thing for you to decide is how much, what percentage

of your household energy do you want to come from solar? And if you're like 100%, they'll not say, okay, well, here's what you need. If you say, you know what, if I can cover, I don't have much roof space, I'm happy with covering 50% of my power usage, then they'll say, all right, well, then let's work within your system.

Or you may just be, you may not have a choice unless you, it all depends on your roof and the way it's sloped and the way it's faced and all that stuff. Right, yeah, there's a lot of considerations. And again, 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 you're talking about going into it, you can find out kind of about how much electricity you could expect a solar array on your roof to produce down to your actual house. Like there's all sorts of solar potential maps online. Yeah, 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. Cause 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 pretty good idea

of how fast the thing will pay for itself. It's pretty cool to do. But you'll have an idea of, this thing's gonna pay for itself in eight years or this thing's gonna pay for itself in 25 years. And that will largely depend on where you live in the country. But everything I saw from everywhere

from Union of Concerned Scientists to Energy.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. Yeah, it might take a little longer in Seattle than in Phoenix. Right.

But you know, that's how things go. You got better music in Seattle and better food. Well, sure. Maybe the food's a wash. You got the music though for sure. Sorry, Phoenix, we love you. Yeah, sorry, last of the meat puppets. So I talked about the angle of these panels

and the angle of your roof. It's called the angle of inclination is how you have to set these. If you have all the money in the world and 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, stay at the perfect angle of inclination. That is super expensive though. It is, that's the technology I was talking about from 1964 that they had figured out for satellites. Yeah, it is. But yeah, it is still kind of expensive. 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 diffused sunlight, the kind that gets scattered by clouds on a solar panel. So you don't necessarily have to have it, 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 ideally your array is gonna be pointing true south. That's not to say if your roof is set up in such a way that it doesn't point true 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 say also, that's if you're in the Northern Hemisphere, we have listeners in the Southern Hemisphere.

Yeah, 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.

It'll still work better than here. It's like, you couldn't scrape me the sun. So 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 wanna design for,

cause you want power all the time if you're going 100%. Sure. You wanna design for your worst month, sort of like, well, not really. I was about to say just like those initial inverters, you're only as strong as your weakest member. Right. But you wanna take into account,

let's say it rains every single day in a month. You lose your job, dog dies, just your absolute worst month. Right. So then they might say, all right, throw on an extra panel for your dog. You're right. And you'll be just fine.

Right. So if you're all hyped up about this, there's, we just kinda open the can of worms. There's a lot more to take into account. But again, just hire somebody reputable, do your research, and they should be able to guide you through this 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. And you know, earlier you mentioned that these things were ugly. And for a long time, they were the bane of existence of a lot of people in certain neighborhoods. Some homeowners associations still won't allow them.

But they've gotten better looking over time. They've gotten closer to the roof line, a little bit more attractive. And I think, in my opinion, this is just me speculating, just the perception has changed. And now when you see them, you don't think, oh my gosh, look at that 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. No. Normal people live there. Normals. So there's also solar roof tiles that are really starting to come along.

Yeah, those are pretty cool. Have you seen the Tesla versions? Yeah. They're nuts. How they're also, they're super durable. They're very pretty. I don't own any because they're extremely expensive. But if they can get the cost down to anything approaching

like a normal size roof, it's just like game over, man. That's it. Game over, man. Exactly. Like each one 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. It's pretty cool.

But they also cost about five to 10 times the amount of a normal roof these days, which is just, you're never gonna pay for, it's never gonna pay for itself. Yeah, I mean, if you're spending, I don't know, 12 to 15 grand on a roof and you have to spend up to 150,000 for that roof to be solar. That's a lot of dough.

I saw like 200 in one case, but yeah, somewhere between 100 to 200 for a new roof. Yeah, but the people that are doing this are, the very well-heeled who want to be able to brag about their solar roof, quite frankly. Sure, yeah. And I mean, if they're doing that and they're generating solar for their house, more power to them.

That's fine. Sure. It's just, Tesla needs to get that price down quite a bit. Come on, Tesla. Hurry up, Tesla. So we need to talk a little bit about efficiency. So, how much of the sun's energy we can convert into electricity is that efficiency?

And way back when they first started this stuff in the 19th century, it was not even 1%. So it was mainly just like, hey, look what we can do now a little bit. Now, it's at 98%, not true. It's about 25% now. It's not as much as I would have thought when I started doing this research.

And you can't ever get to 100%. I think they said at the very max these days because of energy loss and conversion and stuff, the tip-top upper limit's about 87% that we could ever get. That's like the physical limit for conversion. Yeah, but 25%, I mean, it's the sun. It's not like the sunlight you don't use fills up landfills. You know what I'm saying?

For sure, for sure. But there is a lot of room for improvement between that current 25% and that 87% limit, right? And we're actually starting to make those kinds of gains. One of the ways to do it is to make solar panels cheaper. So even if they are just at 25% efficiency, if the process of 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 they found a promising new material called perovskite. I think that's how you say it. Yeah, it's kind of a clunky word. It really is.

And I think it was discovered by Russians or Soviets back in the day. It really does. But one of the things about perovskite, 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 photons that come streaming through.

Normally those kinds of photons are too energetic to interact with the phosphorus or the boron that silicon is doped with. So it just passes through and it's like completely wasted high energy light. The perovskite actually interacts with those way more efficiently. The problem is is it doesn't really interact

with the lower energy stuff that silicon does. So the highest efficiency solar cells that you can get are typically made with silicon and perovskite put together. So it captures as much stuff as you can hope for. And these are starting to creep up into the high 20s, low 30s range. And as perovskite manufacturing gets easier and easier,

we should be able to expect to see solar panels that are 30, 32% efficient, which is a lot. That extra 7%, that's a huge difference. Yeah, and I don't think we mentioned the reason that we're trying to make this move to perovskite anyway is because it's cheaper. You can make it cheaper than the silicon ones. Right, that's true.

So one day, hopefully, they could be all perovskite because they're developing stuff that's gonna capture more of what the silicon can capture, isn't that right? Yeah, that would be wonderful if they figure out how to tinker with perovskite so that they don't need the silicon at all. Cause there are a lot of problems with silicon,

which we'll talk about. Right, so I mentioned earlier in the show about selling your, like pay me power company. 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 than 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 in one of the episodes, might've been the Sun or the Bill Gates renewable energy episode. Mm-hmm, I thought that's what it was, yes.

Yeah, yeah, I remember. But I knew we talked about like grids and stuff like that and now that's where it was, man, good call. I think so. But they will cut you a check, which is pretty amazing. And here's the best part even. To me, I was like, well, I mean, do I wanna check from Georgia Power

for whatever, $19 a month? Yes. I sorta do, but what I would really rather do is pass 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 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 $19 or is it like 300 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 how much your utility company pays for buyback electricity and then also how much you're overproducing too, you know? Yeah, there's a bunch of factors, but I'm just kinda curious if it's like a lot of money or is it literally?

I really honestly don't know. But every little bit counts if you're a family in need, right? Absolutely. So there's another thing that would be great if you have all this excess solar energy when it's really, really sunny out. 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'd just make a 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, like Tesla makes one of those too, LG makes one, Mercedes-Benz makes one, it's a home battery.

The problem is that they are also really expensive on the order of five, six, seven grand. And so if you're spending 12 grand on your solar array and you spend an extra six grand on your home battery, you just spent an extra 50% of the cost of your solar array to back up your home with solar electricity when the sun's not shining as much. That's a huge, enormous added expense.

Yeah, and the one thing I was, cause like you, I think my interest got peaked a little bit for my own house. It's like, man, this is really appealing to me now. Here in my late 40s, I could buy a system that'll see me through to my death probably. I don't know about that. By the time it starts breaking down, I'll be long gone.

Let's hope not. And my first thought was, you know, we get a lot of brownouts and blackouts and power outages for some reason in my neighborhood, it's just, it just happens a lot. It seems like every rainstorm, certainly anytime there's snow. Is it brown out where it's like, the power's like almost out, but it comes back

and then almost out? Yeah, I think it just sort of flickers. I wish they'd call it something else. It sounds so gross. The 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 butthole? Yeah, or poop or something, you know? Like poop's just squeezing out of your electrical outlets or something like that. Oh, like that sounds like a very archibunker thing to say, like, I'm going to go upstairs and have a brown out.

Yes, yes it does. Dropping the browns off at the Super Bowl or something like that. Right, okay, I get you. So the only way the Browns could make it to a Super Bowl. Oh man, Texas and Ohio, super happy with you today. That's right. So my first thought was like, oh man, I get on solar and there's a blackout going on.

Because we went out, I think I talked about this on one episode when we had the big snowstorm a couple of years ago. We were out for three and a half days. That's unconscionable. Yeah, 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, right? 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. Unless you're, if you're storing on a battery, you can do that, but during a power outage, there's something called islanding. It's very dangerous. It's basically when you're pumping electricity

back into the power lines 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 power goes out as well. It'll kill a lineman for sure. But if you have a battery backup, you're fine.

Like you said, that's where you're getting your juice from. But 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 people have a generator, some people will plug the generator into an outlet in their house and reverse the flow of electricity from their generator throughout their house,

which can create islanding as well. Isn't that crazy? Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, that's kind of a thing now is a lot of new houses have whole house generators built in. Sure. And as soon as the power cuts off,

that thing automatically fires up. Right, right. But this is like a portable generator that they're plugging in reverse into their home wiring. It's not a good idea for anyone. I mean, there are safe ways to do it. That is not one of them. 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. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker

necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever.

Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper

because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. OK, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation?

If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, god. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man.

And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yeah, we know that, Michael, and a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general, can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life.

Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I want to say there's one other type of battery I found. It's a mechanical battery, where your solar power system

uses all that excess power to power a pump that pumps water up to a raised area. And then at night or on a cloudy day when you need the extra electricity, it releases that water to spin over a turbine, which creates an electrical current. Isn't that awesome? You got a little power 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 we mentioned silicon not being great. There are, it's obvious that to create, and this is an argument a lot of times against electric cars

and hybrid vehicles, we all like to drive them and stuff. But there is a greenhouse effect when it comes to making the stuff. Mining these materials 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. Transporting all this stuff, going to burn a lot of fossil fuels, manufacturing all the stuff,

burns fossil fuels. But like you said earlier, that is true. But once that process is finished, that's it. No more greenhouse gases forever. Right, and some people will double down at this point and be like, whoa, whoa, whoa. Like creating solar cells is actually really, really harmful because it requires the production of something

called nitrogen trifluoride, which is a greenhouse gas that's 17,000 times more potent than carbon dioxide. That's a lot. Bad stuff. And when you work into the idea that you have a whole house battery that's made of cadmium, lead, nickel, all of which have to be mined,

and which has to be replaced every, say, 10 years, your solar array seems much, much less green. And these are all very legitimate arguments. 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 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 you're talking about the life of a solar system considering, like, 25 years, let's say, over the 25 years of burning coal and natural gas, it's just not even close. Yeah, and I mean, if you start getting more and more solar involved in transportation, then you

knock out those greenhouse gases for transporting solar panels from place to place. Because it's solar powering the transportation, too. There's a lot of stuff we can do that we just haven't quite figured out how to do yet. But it's not physically impossible to overcome them. Yeah, and there's also people that say, hey, 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 when you talk about converting a nationwide system from a fossil fuel system to renewables. It's not easy. And frankly, it will probably never happen on that scale. Maybe I'm cynical.

I think it's cynical. I think if we look 150 years in the future, maybe even 175, even, I would say, it's entirely possible. I could see it. Well, that would require, 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 grave.

Right, certain people would have to die out first, yes. But there are a lot of real obstacles to this. I mean, our infrastructure just is not 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 it to a turbine that creates electricity. And that electricity goes out to the area 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 that you

have to connect them together to the current grid, which 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 there are fluctuations in the weather. We already talked about you're sort of at the behest

of what your weather is giving you. And we're not saying when the wind doesn't blow, your 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 on a national grid is expensive. And I don't even think we've quite figured out

how that's going to work yet, have we? No, there's some proposals. One is to basically create batteries, like just use the same solution that people have for their houses. We just need to take that excess stuff and store it for use when the sun isn't shining. They figured out that for an electrical storage system,

to store 12 hours worth of electricity for the US electrical grid would cost more than $2.5 trillion to the world. That's quite a bit. Other people are saying, no, no, 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 solar that's generated in Scottsdale up to Portland, Oregon, or Portland, Maine, for that matter. Yeah, I mean, everywhere in 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 and Seattle again,

but if you can produce in Phoenix and send it to Portland, that's great. And I mean, let's be honest here, $2.5 trillion is a lot of cheese. But I saw somewhere, someone point out that there is an estimate that to fully convert over the US electrical grid to solar only would be about $4 trillion, 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 toward, it's not that much. And frankly, it's kind of doable if there's a political will to do it. Yeah, I get you. Another solution would be for every house to have its own solar array, every car

to have its own solar power. That's what I'm thinking more on is more and more people doing this to the point where it's not part of the infrastructure of the grid, but it's still making a big dent. But that's going to be the hardest sell because you've 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 you look at the subsidies going on now, and that's really clear who's better at lobbying. The federal subsidies for power companies who produce solar are about $533 million bucks compared to $32 billion for natural gas alone in 2016.

Right. That's just tax breaks and subsidies for investing in deploying that kind of energy. Yeah, and solar still is pretty expensive per megawatt hour compared to, like you said, fossil fuels are just cheap still. They really are. And here's the problem, too, Chuck. There's a conundrum where when you deploy a lot of solar

electricity in a utility, it actually tends to depress wholesale electrical prices across the board. So a company has an incentive to not deploy solar because they can charge more for electrical produce from coal and other fossil fuels like they normally do. That's right. But if you put one in your house,

you're not only paying for your own electric or whatever. You're subsidizing your own electrical bill. You possibly are getting money back or helping a family in need. And it's also an investment in your house. It actually increases the value of your home because unless someone just hates them and wants to Reagan it up and yank them off the roof

when they come in there, it's going to be a selling point. You're like, hey, move into 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 the solar setup increased the value of a house in America by about $15,000. All right. So when I said they've already paid for it,

what I really mean is they're passing that on to you. Exactly. They passed the cost on to you. True. You got anything else? I got nothing else, man. I'm going to legit look into this. Let me know how it goes, man.

I'm really interested. I have a dude out. I don't think we could do our whole house, but we have this one roof in particular now that you can't see from the street. 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 eight panels up there. That's not enough for my whole house. Hey, whatever little bit works. It could power my Frankenstein experiments. Right, exactly. You're bringing inanimate matter back to life. That's right. One other thing, Chuck, there's a big obstacle

that's facing us worldwide, and that 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 not the oceans, but solar blankets over water, no? Am I making that up? I mean, I'm sure that you could have them in coastal areas or whatever, but that means you couldn't swim in those coastal areas,

which is going to depress the value of the real estate there. So I would guess we would want them really far offshore, but how do you get that electricity back to where it's needed on land? That's the question, I think. Yeah, just though a big floating solar blanket over an offshore oil rig. And just plug it in.

Just plug it in. Yep, there you go. Solving problem. Problem solved. If you want to know more about solar, go check it out. See if you can maybe swing it for 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. And since I said Chuck will keep you updated, friends, that means it's time for Listener Mail. Oh, no, sir, I know you're being coy, because to your right in Jerry's chair is Alexander Williams and not Jerry. No, Jerry's standing over there. This is all getting weird.

It is getting a little weird. We're playing musical chairs and Jerry's the loser. That's, no, Jerry's not for the loser. What we've done though today is ask Alex Williams, one of our colleagues in Powell's here in the office to come in, and we don't do this much, but when we really love a show, and someone sits 14 feet from us.

Well, and they do something really special. I mean, this is special stuff we're talking about here. Well, that's why I said we really love it. Okay. We ask him in, and here he is, to talk about your great show, Ephemeral. What a comfortable chair. Jerry, I can see, what a great chair.

Is that Frank? That is Frank. Oh, wow. He's sitting on Frank. That's right. So welcome, Alex. We wanted to have you here to kind of tell everybody about your show,

because we love your show, and we could talk about it all day, but we thought it'd be better if you came in and kind of told the folks like the thought behind Ephemeral and what prompted you to do it and what they can expect from it, so go. Okay. Well, it's a podcast about artifacts, right?

The stuff that gets left behind, and trying to illuminate, maybe dark or sort of forgotten corners of history by, you know, when we have them, by playing the artifacts, I mean, 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 you get into areas where there's just really no artifacts or artifacts that don't really translate into the audio medium, and then so you experiment a little bit. And so the series itself, it's 10 episodes, plus a trailer, right? That was the first season, yeah.

The trailer itself stands on its own, I think you've said before. I hope so, yeah, it's an eight minute little story about, we'll call it like my first, there was no podcast then, my first radio show, 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 in each episode, you kind of find a recovered or formerly lost or just kind of overlooked piece and then kind of dissect it and explain it and talk about like its place in the universe, right? And I think one of the episodes was about

of kind of a long lost original TV network, right? The Dumont television network, yeah. You guys ever heard of Dumont? I had not, no. In the golden age of television, there's four TV networks, ABC, CBS, NBC, all still 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 network when there was only four. They were only around for, I think, just a little over a decade and something like 20,000 broadcasts have been almost completely lost

because things just weren't recorded then. There was no real way to record live television. What they would do is they'd make something called a kinescope, which you take a TV screen and you film it with your film camera. And then you have a reel 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, D.C., Philadelphia, et cetera, on the coaxial cable. And so then they'd 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. Early TV was live and it was weird because of it.

So the little snippets that we have of it left the few kinescopes that got saved. It's something like 300, you know, somewhat complete broadcasts that are mostly held by individual collectors and a fewer in institutions like the Museum of TV and Radio in New York. Nice.

That's awesome. You also covered one of the topics that we have covered in the past about the Collier Brothers, which was very cool. And I think that's one of my favorite things about the show is it's so wide ranging. It's like the best episodes of this American life or 99% invisible as far as your approach goes.

And that's why I think I loved it from the beginning. You were in the Collier Brothers episode very briefly. I know. You did a walk-by, huh? I did a line reading. Nice. We'll just leave it at that. It'll be an Easter egg for listeners.

So all 10 episodes plus the trailer out, they're available now, wherever you get your podcasts, right? Indeed. Is the second season coming? Second season, we did our first recording for yesterday. Nice. Yeah. 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 ephemeral, everybody, you can go check it out on what? The iHeart 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 an old tape for him, but I haven't done that yet. That would be a cool way to get it. It would be. Thanks for coming by, Alex. Thanks for having me on, guys.

Well, if you want to get in touch with us like Alex did, you can just drop by the studio. J.K., instead, go on to StuffYouShouldKnow.com, check out our social links, or you can send us an email to stuffpodcast at iHeartRadio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from iHeart Radio,

visit the iHeart Radio app. Apple Podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces.

We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to, Hey Dude, the 90s called, on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.