Richard Flentge: 0:03

You could simply take a train and you could transport 150 batteries to a municipality, and fuel them. And you wouldn't have to have the solar built right next to it. You could have the solar in another geographical location and the solar train and the batteries could move electricity.

Tom Raftery: 0:29

Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you are in the world. This is the Climate Confident podcast. The number one podcast, showcasing best practices in climate emission, reductions and removals. And I'm your host, Tom Raftery. Don't forget to click follow on this podcast in your podcast app of choice, to be sure you don't miss any episodes. Hi everyone, and welcome to episode 126 of the Climate Confident Podcast. My name is Tom Raftery, and before we kick off today's show, I want to take a moment to welcome a new supporter of the podcast Devaang Bhatt. Devaang, thanks a million for signing up to support the podcast. I know Devaang from, Twitter, uh, never met him in person, but I know him from Twitter. We, we regularly, interact on Twitter, so it was fantastic to see him come and become a supporter of this podcast. Devaang, I hope I'm pronouncing your name correctly. Apologies if I'm not. If you are not already a supporter to the podcast, I'd like to encourage you to consider joining our community of like-minded individuals who are passionate about climate. Supporting the podcast is easy and affordable with options starting as low as just three euros, which is less than the cost of a cup of coffee, and your support will make a huge difference in keeping this show going strong. To become a supporter, you simply click on the support link in the show notes of this episode or any of the episodes, or visit tiny url.com/climate pod. Now, without further ado with me on the show today, I have my special guest, Richard. Richard, welcome to the pod. Would you like to introduce yourself?

Richard Flentge: 2:11

Yes. This is Richard Flentge. I'm the former co-host US based webcast YouTube show, Electric Vehicle Television. It was known around the world as E V T V and we produced about 500 different webcasts talking about converting old gasoline cars to electric drive and then also applying batteries to the solar technology.

Tom Raftery: 2:38

Okay, fantastic. And you've recently written a book too. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Richard Flentge: 2:43

I wrote a book, it is Verities of an Electric Mule. And you know, there's all people have all different roles to play in. I think this mission of solving some of our renewable energy needs. I look at it as sort of a cultural bridge. I'm trying to really reach the, the, the mainstream. You know, I have some humor in it. I have a lot of technical tips. Lot of anecdotal stories, but really the mission of the book is to try to sort of bridge the gap between the, the, the people that really don't understand about this technology and the people that are really into it. So that's sort of the mission of the book.

Tom Raftery: 3:30

Okay, fantastic. And you, you talk a lot about going off grid with solar and battery microsystems a. Why, and B, how, I mean, a why, why, why do you, why do you care about people going off grid? What's, what's the, the, the purpose of that and, and B, how, how do you do that? Because there's not a lot of people still today, despite the advances in the technology who managed to do that.

Richard Flentge: 4:01

It is, it is a technical challenge. The reason you go off grid, there's one is that it reduces the power load required from normal power generation plants. So as on a micro scale, a lot of us that reduce the amount of electricity that is needed through micro grids, through developing their own power plant will actually in a a seedling sort of way began to reduce the, the need for the carbon based fuel. So the micro grid and the individual user of electricity, I believe is really the key to reducing greenhouse gases, reducing emissions. And it is the challenge for a lot of people to mm-hmm sever themselves from the utility system and it's very freeing and that's, I guess, one of the main arguments that I will tell you that I've gotten from feedback is that owners of electric cars and owners of micro grids, if they make one comment, it's that they don't have to go to the gas station and they don't get a utility bill. Yeah. So those are the big reasons. Now, on the technical side it is not, it is not a you, you gotta have some smarts. You gotta have a really good tool set and you have to have some risk taking abilities. So it is and money at this point, I suppose. Yeah, it requires cash and now there are systems here in the US. That are turnkey except they are a high dollar, you know,

Tom Raftery: 5:53

Eye-wateringly expensive?

Richard Flentge: 5:55

Right, right. And I'm, you know, we were, and one thing that's interesting about us, we were kind of like outlaws. We were like American hot rodders. We bought an inverter from China. We half wired up our controllers. We soldered and crimped our cabling and hodge podged together basically a micro grid. And that's what I operated for a long time and that's how I got my experience in it.

Tom Raftery: 6:28

Okay. But I mean, I have an electric vehicle. I have solar panels on my roof, but I'm not off grid. I don't have storage. So on cloudy days here, for example I don't produce enough electricity to power the home overnight. I don't have any electricity generation because it's solar power. Even. On sunny days when I'm producing at full, there are times when my electricity requirements are greater than that, that's produced by my solar panels. So how do you overcome those kind of challenges and go truly off grid?

Richard Flentge: 7:10

Okay. The first thing would be a very big battery and, and the obstacle to that is basically the price per kilowatt. So if you would say your home overnight would use 18 kilowatts. Okay. That means you have to have an 18 kilowatt or bigger battery. The current price of, of a kilowatt of battery storage is about a thousand dollars. Right? And it's even come down a little bit. Now we repurpose salvaged batteries that were out of wrecked Teslas, and the price was still $500. So, As batteries get on scale, and if the price gets down to a hundred dollars a kilowatt, or at least under 200 kilowatts, and that's what I really write in the book, when it gets on scale to where a pragmatic person, a person that makes decisions based on what's in their wallet, when the pragmatic buyer can get into it, that's when the big change is gonna happen. And I believe that is gonna happen on scale. If you look at the complexity of some of the machinery that we built, when this gets to a battery scale, the price per kilowatt will come down. Now the second answer to your question, which will, is you have to have very smart controls in your home. Right? And that, and that would be, you know, if I wanna, if you want to hear sort of the anecdotal story, We decided to make the move to go to off grid and develop a micro grid. So being country boy and hot rodders, we put together this giant battery. It was a hundred kilowatts. Wow. And we had the parts to do it. So it was a huge battery. And by golly, that thing still ran outta juice and we still had problems. And the big battery alone didn't fix it. So we ended up having to get different switching put into our utility panels so we could switch on and off things. And then we also had to get a current sensor that started determining what our loads were and when they were happening. And until we knew that information, just having a big battery or having solar fell short. And the way it fell short is, we'd come in in the morning and flip the light switch and nothing would happen. We would be in the dark. And we were like, why did this happen? Because all our math did not add up. The loads did not add up to what we thought would pull the capacity out of the battery. But it did. That'd be the other lesson, I suppose I would share with you, the righted, the calculations. In the real world, there's a gap in between that.

Tom Raftery: 10:14

And you also, I mean, to fill a 100 kilowatt hour battery, you need a big solar array as well, because, I mean, I've got 18 panels on the roof producing five kilowatt hours. Sorry, five kilowatts. So to get that up to producing enough to fill a 100 kilowatt hour battery, I, I, I don't know how many panels you'd need, but you'd be, you'd be talking, you know, 30, 40, 50 probably.

Richard Flentge: 10:43

We had it was 16 kilowatt array right above. Okay. Directly above it. And then we put in a secondary 14 kilowatt array. So the facility we had 30 kilowatts total. And we had a monitor system, and that was actually one of the things that I contributed and had a lot of input on. We had a monitor and a dial, so you were always watching your, your solar output, your state of charge, of your battery, and what those numbers were. So you would watch and you would see how much kilowatts. You know, you were producing what was going into the battery and what was this voltage, what was the state of charge? So yes, you and I, I write a little bit about it in the book, but you, you kind of, it, it's, it's sort of a little bit of entertainment and it's also mm-hmm a bit of utility, but you, you pay attention to your numbers and your, your output and what your battery's at and another, a group of people that we sold product to were also the sailboats. All right. People on, on big sailboats do the same thing basically. They have solar panels, they have a lithium battery battery bank system. They have inverters and they really pay attention to what's going on because running out of electricity or, the, the real danger is actually drawing your batteries down too low, right? So you have to have pretty, pretty stringent discharge, cutoff and controls because you can completely discharge your lithium ion battery, and then it becomes a brick. So you're watching, you're watching what's going on.

Tom Raftery: 13:44

Okay. It reminds me very much, I gotta say Richard of the stories of the early days of Silicon Valley when people were putting computers together from baseboards. Yeah. And hacking everything together. And you had clubs doing it. And you know, when you compare that to what we have now with, you know, smartphones, with, I don't know how many orders of magnitude more compute power in your smartphone now than these extremely primitive computers that people were building in clubs together back in like the seventies and eighties, you know? So is, is that the kind of evolution you expect to see in this space as well?

Richard Flentge: 14:27

Yeah, absolutely. Exactly. That is it Ed? The microprocessor gets on scale. It can, it, it, it will develop What circuits need to be on? What circuits need to be off? What devices need to be on? What devices need to be off? Do you need to connect to the grid for a while? Do you, can you stay off the grid as well as even a larger scale when to use your car, when it's, it's, yes. That is basically when the technology comes, that can make all the switches. Can make decisions, turn devices on and off. Yeah. This, this will be very similar to operating your smartphone and you look at the scale of what, what they've done once they've started to produce it.

Tom Raftery: 15:19

I mean, I have a 64 kilowatt hour battery. It just happens to be in my car. Should I have to buy a second battery to stick on the side of the wall of the house or do you think there'll be people have been talking about vehicle to everything. Vehicle to grid, vehicle to home for the longest time. And we still are not producing cars on mass that are bidirectional in terms of their charging. Yep. There are a few. The I think the Ionic ev five or six not ionic. The, the, the Hyundai EV six I think are, or five. I can't remember to be honest. I think there were one, one or two out there. I know the F-150 Lightning, for example, is bidirectional. I don't know if it has enough juice going back out to power a house. I know you can do things like plugin chillers and things like that, but Yeah. Yeah. Are we gonna get there in terms of, yeah. Using your car to do it, or? Yeah. Will you have a separate one from your home or would it depend?

Richard Flentge: 16:33

First off, the big answer is your car battery. The, when you, when you really scale the pragmatic buyer the car and the battery has the, has the purpose. You get transportation, they're already making that big investment, and it is a very simple fix to go to your, to your house. Some of the the, the obstacles in some ways have been the, the anti-island team and the pushback from utility companies? Mm. Because when you hook up a power source to a home it can backfeed into the utility grid. So the, the, the one piece of technology that will be needed is a very smart utility box that as you trans if you would come in with your bidirectional and you, you switch in your battery, you would shut off your utility grid. There are some companies in the US that are really coming up with this. One of 'em that I'm, I'm big on is called span. He's, he's an offshoot of Tesla and they have smart utility boxes or breaker boxes is what we call 'em in the US. But one of the obstacles really has been the safety and the pushback from utility companies.

Tom Raftery: 17:59

Okay. And is that, is that them just trying to protect their income or is it a valid concern or is it a mixture or, you know, where does it lie there?

Richard Flentge: 18:10

It's all of the above. They know it's common. I follow, you know, some of the grid, you know, little internet stuff and the utility companies is, they're trying to get their hand in the middle of this. And there has not been that, that I'm aware of anyone electrocuted by a solar system that back feeds into the grid. Now, an example would be there, there, it's highly regulated in our market. We had to put an outside switch that was available to the utility worker. So if they came into that area, they could. They could physically switch off our solar system from their access point. So it's a concern and not a trivial one, I'm sure, but, but the answer will be in, in a way that you can switch off and isolate yourself from the grid

Tom Raftery: 19:13

And in a, I, I know in most of the regions of the US that the utilities are often regional monopolies as, as opposed to here in Europe where most of the markets are liberalized. And so you have healthy competition between utility companies. I would have to suspect that. In a situation where you have healthy competition, it would probably be in the utilities interest to say to the customers, you want to go off grid. Here's a whole system for you. We'll rent it to you and maintain it for you over the next 20 years at X euro per year. And we'll do the installation, we'll manage it for you, et cetera, et cetera. And I, I know for example, if I go on some of the utility companies here in Spain, they actually offer that service. Are any of the US companies doing anything like that?

Richard Flentge: 20:06

They offer big tax rebates, right? So you can get, and they started that here in our state. We did take advantage of it. I was a part of the application process and then it sort of dried up. A lot of people used it. But in, in America, we offer tax rebates. But you know, they they are regulated. They have, you know, and, and going into the utility business, it is, it is a mess. You'd really. Nobody really knows exactly what's going on in the utility grid. It is a a very complex system. They pump a lot of electricity into it. It has a lot of power loss transmission. It's, it's just a difficult thing to get a hold of. And I would say the attitude here in America is they're kind of like, listen, we got this thing working. Do not touch it, please. They don't, they don't want. But the, the, the real truth is there's a tremendous amount of energy loss in that grid and breaking apart the grid with microgrids and large stable battery banks as reservoirs is going to gain efficiency into the grid system. So, That's kind of what's coming.

Tom Raftery: 21:32

Okay. And what do you think of instead, or as well, maybe depending on the area of individual, unit based microgrids that you maybe have community microgrids. You see

Richard Flentge: 21:48

that as, that's exactly right. Yeah. That's two different things. And that would be, again, one of the conclusions. I don't see just a whole lot of people putting a mini power plant in their house. And if you don't have the right sun and the angle, if you're at the wrong latitude. So, a solar community, basically you would put up three or 400 kilowatts, maybe even 1500 feet from your home or, or a mile away. You could simply take your portable battery on a wheel on wheels, your car. You could go to an isolated solar battery bank. You could refill your car, you could go home, plug into your bidirectional system, go through an inverter and power your home. So yes, the, the probably in reality a solar hub, a solar small solar community is, is a much more realistic answer to get, getting a whole lot of people off of it. Yeah.

Tom Raftery: 23:22

Mm. Right. Yeah. And, and similarly as well, here in Europe the, one of the energy companies in Austria, for example runs community solar plants where they sell panels to individuals. So they say, give us a thousand euro. You'll have a panel of your own. We'll do a revenue share with you from the production of that panel over the next 20 years, and you will. If you put that thousand euros in a bank, you would earn X amount over that 20 years. But from the production of this panel, you'll actually earn y, which is greater than X. And so you're better off giving us the thousand euros and owning your own solar panel, and we'll give you all the stats and all the money coming from that solar panel. And they've, they've done that and they've sold, they've, they've sold out 25 solar parks in less than 24 hours each by, by offering that kind of service and. It, it seems, for me, it seems crazy that the US market hasn't liberalized and become innovative in the same kind of way that we're seeing here in Europe.

Richard Flentge: 24:29

Well, first of all, that's a very good idea, and I'm gonna remember that suggestion and and next time I get ahold of somebody that knows anything, I, I will bring that up and. Yes. Getting those things out and help subsidizing the grid is the direction to go And the solar hub is, is it? So that's a good idea. I'm remember that Tom? That's actually a pretty good one. I hadn't heard that. So I learned something here today. And that's, that's really part of my communication mission. How do I make this stuff sensible? How do I make it pragmatic? Because people dropping $30,000 on the battery and $40,000 on solar panels, and I just don't see that happening a whole lot. No. They will spend that on a car. Sure. Well, the car's got the battery, they can go and plug it up.

Tom Raftery: 25:25

And what about the, the software and the, the various technical bits and pieces, the inverters, the switches, all that. You, you mentioned that there's one or two companies that do full Keystone solutions, but they are, how far, how far away are we from a, I don't know, an, an Apple, for example, of energy, you know, where you just as go, go to your nearest, in this case, Apple Store. It's not gonna be any, it's not gonna be Apple, but you know what I mean? Yeah. The equivalent and say, I want a, I want a grid. And they say, sure, here's the box. We'll send an installer. It'll be done tomorrow, you know, whatever.

Richard Flentge: 26:08

I would say the technology is here, but it, right now it is priced for the cream of the crop. So you are looking at the company that I follow and I like their system. It's called Span, and they have the smart box. That turns on and off your circuits. It may, for example, it can if, if you've got enough solar panel, it can switch off everything else and your solar panel energy can flow directly through, there's no, and it makes all the switches automatically. It keeps history. And then there are several wall hanging. You know the Tesla wall, they have two or three competitors. They make modulated. Usually it's around 10 kilowatts. A battery that you can just hang on your garage wall. The bidirectional charging has not really moved very far. You don't, you, I have seen some of it advertised. But I would say again, the technology, at least in the broad scope is here, but it's not appealing to. The everyday person and the pragmatic buyer. It's the elites right now that are getting it. Yeah. It

Tom Raftery: 27:28

is work. And then, and, and you do still have to kind of buy it piecemeal and cobble together or get an installer to cobble together for you. We, we we're still quite a bit away from just getting a box delivered Exactly. And containing everything. And you're good to go now.

Richard Flentge: 27:46

Exactly right. And that's kind of the humorous line I say is you can't go to the hardware store and buy something like a refrigerator and come home and plug it in. And you can't really, the same thing with solar panels. You still kind of gotta fiddle with solar panels and you have to, you have to string 'em together. You have to get 'em combined. You have to get them into a inverter that matches the voltage, and then you have to get from the inverter. To your, to your fuse box. And one of the things that I describe and one of the concepts we really came up with was a solar panel that was all integrated. So you would just have the panel, the framing structure, your inverter and your battery just all in there, and two wires coming out the other side. So that's one advance that I would like to see would be a, a much more usable, just as you described, and off the shelf system at least in a solar panel. And why, why aren't we seeing that? You know, I think they're barely keeping up. It is complex. And it has, and there was a, there was a saying in the computer industry and it was called the Osborne Effect. The Osborne computer kept saying how great their next computer was going to be, so people didn't bother the computer that was out there. And I think some of the solar stuff gets wrapped up in that and people think the future is gonna be so much better, but if we don't provide them with oxygen, if they cannot have funds to develop we're gonna sort of spin our wheels a little bit. The, the, the, it, it's, it's close. I'll tell you that. It's close. Yeah.

Tom Raftery: 29:42

Yeah. What about for businesses? I mean, sure. It's challenging for homeowners in terms of cost and piecemealing it together. Businesses surely have a greater incentive in, in that there's greater demands now in businesses to be carbon neutral, and generally they have deeper pockets too. Yeah. So do you see them rolling these things out? More likely to go off grid? Yeah. Or at least have resilience and security of supply.

Richard Flentge: 30:12

Yeah. I, yeah. Now we are having those, the micro grids are popping up in the US. They're really few and far between. I mean, it is they, a large factory roof is ideal. Mm-hmm. For the solar array, they have a lot of space for large batteries. They can cover their parking lot with solar panels and provide shade. And then a employees could come in and park their car, and charge their batteries while they're working. There's a tremendous potential there. There are companies, and I, again, I follow a little bit of it and, and you read about 'em. But they're the few and far between. I mean, there's just not, and that's, I suppose, the way it's gonna progress. It's gonna be oney, twosy,

Tom Raftery: 30:58

you, you gotta think. Retail outlets are an obvious one. Because a lot of them have large car parks. I know that in France they recently passed legislation requiring retail outlets to put solar panels on their, on their car parks. So that, as I say that, that is an obvious one. There's nothing happening other that in the US yet. No?

Richard Flentge: 31:18

Yeah, a little bit. Again, it's they've done one large parking lot here at a university close to me. Okay. And if it's reached, if it's reached the middle of the US that should be your signal that, that it's, it's probably penetrated a lot of the world because we are as far away from the coast and it's far away from that. You know, the West Coast certainly is sort of the technology hub. The East coast, it's kind of the government hub and we're out here in the, the, he lands the boondocks or whatever, but if it's reached us, Yes. The, the, the concept is certainly catching on.

Tom Raftery: 31:57

Okay. You talk a lot about batteries as well. What are, what are some other interesting applications of, of batteries do you think?

Richard Flentge: 32:04

Well, in, in terms of concept, I'm very hip on a distal battery, so, something that I talk about is that you could change over some of your appliances. Okay. And you could have a battery at the appliance, and then you would have, instead having one large battery, you would have a very focused battery on just one particular circuit. Or you may just have a battery just for your light system. And then you would have batteries for your lawnmower, batteries for other devices that are very easily charged. They don't, they don't have the, the mass capacity of a a big battery. So, I call them distal batteries in the book. Mm-hmm. But I think a distal or isolated circuit batteries, there's probably another huge application and a huge future concept that just hasn't settled in people's minds. I, I mean, we see it in lawnmowers. Yeah. You know? Yeah. Yeah. But you're just That thing. Same thing that happens in a lawnmower can happen for every single electrical device there is. So yeah,

Tom Raftery: 33:19

I see it locally here with leaf blowers. So yeah, leaf blowers are nasty. Smelly loud, yeah. Devices and our local municipality is now giving its workers electric leaf blowers with battery packs. So they have a little battery backpack and they're going out blowing the leaves with these electric blowers, which are quiet and not smelly, and still do the same job. It's, it's a joy to see. So that, that, that's pretty awesome.

Richard Flentge: 33:49

And that, that, again, that's pragmatic. It works. And those batteries could easily be recharged at a small solar hub and be completely free, not require any fossil fuels, but that same application has a thousand more uses. You could have all your lights and your computers on a circuit with a recharge battery or your television, or your refrigerator, your washing machine. So, I, I, I would predict or prognosticate that, that that will be the next trend here. And it may take a while cuz the world is, is. They're doing all they can to keep up right now. But I, I would say distal batteries as a whole is gonna be a huge application.

Tom Raftery: 34:36

Interesting, interesting. Cool. Okay, Richard, we're coming towards the end of the podcast now. Is there any question I didn't ask that you wish I had or any aspect of this we haven't touched on that you think it's important for people to be aware of?

Richard Flentge: 34:50

I think the, the big one that I do want to talk about is solar trains and the coal train. And that is an issue that I lived with here. I lived very close to a rail line, so I get the here and see coal trains, which are about a mile long traverse my landscape.

Tom Raftery: 35:11

Wait, what? Just, just to clarify, Richard, when you say coal trains, you mean these are big diesel trains carrying long carriages of coal, not that they're coal powered. Yeah,

Richard Flentge: 35:20

they are flat snakes that are about a mile long. A hundred thirty five, a hundred fifty cars. Right. Packed to the rim with coal. Now also in the US we run the coal trains from Wyoming all the way to the East coast. So my, my, the big takeaway is if we built battery cars mm-hmm. If we built cars, you could fill up with electricity, say in the southern portions of the states in the lower latitudes, where you had great solar. You could simply take a train and you could transport 150 batteries to a municipality, right? And fuel them. And you wouldn't have to have the solar, built right next to it. You could have the solar in another geographical location and the solar train and the batteries could move electricity. And that is It's already being done, you know, in a way. And, and they just roll a train one direction. They switch the, the locomotive to the other end, and they go right back to where they came. They fill it back up and they go right back out. And that concept of moving energy is just a perfect application for a solar train. You know, we could get big batteries on a, on a rail car, I think pretty simply.

Tom Raftery: 36:52

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yep. I had a guy called Michael Barnard on the podcast a few weeks back, and he was proposing that the US train system should go electric and saying he wasn't quite saying 150 cars of, of, of, of batteries, but he was saying you could at least have one car be a giant battery. And so when times when the trains were going through tunnels or things like that where you couldn't have overhead wires, You could then just use the battery if it was a long tunnel to go through that and it would be completely seamless, which is, you know, stuff which is happening already in other jurisdictions. So, fascinating. Cool. Richard, if people would like to know more about yourself or any of the things we discussed in the podcast today, where would you have me direct them?

Richard Flentge: 37:38

Okay. I have my, I have a basic website. I show some of the technology, richard flentge.com. And I have the book for sale on there. I'm on Twitter, so. I do blog a little bit and I have fun with it. I am retired. I'm not a, a part of a company. I'm just a individual advocate. I'm very passionate about it. Any support, any following I can get there's always appreciated, but just go to my website and they look at some of the stuff. Some of the more interesting things I've done is I, I, we, we had to shop, we repurpose the Tesla batteries. So we took apart model threes and I have a couple little inventions and designs with repurposed Model three batteries kind of shows that you can take this stuff and you can repurpose it so they can just follow me and I'll, I'll keep on being out there. It's not, I really enjoy it and I'm very passionate and I certainly believe it's the direction that's gonna save, save the future for us.

Tom Raftery: 38:45

Sure, sure. Shoot me those links in an email, Richard. I'll put them in the show notes and that way everyone will have access to them.

Richard Flentge: 38:52

Absolutely. I'll get 'em right over to you.

Tom Raftery: 38:54

Fantastic, Richard, that's been great. Thanks a million for coming on the podcast today.

Richard Flentge: 38:59

Well, I certainly enjoyed being here

Tom Raftery: 39:02

Okay, we've come to the end of the show. Thanks everyone for listening. If you'd like to know more about the Climate Confident podcast, feel free to drop me an email to Tom raftery@outlook.com. Or message me on LinkedIn or Twitter. If you like the show, please, don't forget to click follow on it in your podcast application of choice to get new episodes as soon as they're published. Also, please don't forget to rate and review the podcast. It really does help new people to find the show. Thanks, catch you all next time.