Scott Tinker
speaker
207 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Scott Tinker’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
There's a great experiment going on right now as we've put more intermittent energy, led by solar and wind, onto grids. How much can you push that? When that sun or wind go away, something has to be there immediately to back that up. to make it continue to work. And it's brutal managing a grid that has things coming and going.
If you want to clean up the atmosphere emissions, as well as the land, the air and the water, you have to accelerate economic development.
We're not out of energy options, we're out of ideas.
Thank you.
Right. Well, it's good to be here with you. And that's a tough situation and tragic. It's dangerous for human lives when you have major blackouts like that. So I always go back to some of the underlying principles of all these things, Jordan. And I am not against any form of energy. In fact, I've put solar in an indigenous village in Colombia, our Waco people. Oh, that's all they had.
We put three and a half kilowatt array to put light bulbs in mud huts and ceiling fans in a refrigerator. They didn't have wires. They didn't have roads. They didn't have pipes. Right. First electricity. Get started with it. Scaling things is the great challenge in energy. And so when you, let's just think about the physics of these things a little bit. intermittent source of energy.
The sun sets at night and it's cloudy sometimes and sometimes it's cloudy for a long time. The Germans have a word for it, Dunkelflotte. Sometimes it hails, too. And sometimes the wind, you know, quits blowing. So... When that happens in the modern world anyway, the developed world, we like our electricity 24 seven. We want it on. And when it's not on, systems fail, big systems.
So there's a great experiment going on right now as we've put more intermittent energy, but it's led by solar and wind onto grids. And how much can you push that? Because what has to happen when you increase the percentage of intermittent energy on an electric grid is when the, because we consume electrons in real time, right? You generate them, you use them.
When that sun or wind go away, something has to be there immediately, right then in real time to back that up, to make it continue to work. And it's brutal managing a grid that has things coming and going.
Stable inputs, 60 hertz, you know, bring it to us.
Just like, you know, you could fry a blow dryer in your home, you can fry bigger things on a grid if you get big grid fluctuations.
Right. And let's come back... because it's such a big component of my work and life's passion too. Let's come back to those who don't have much or any in transitioning. So we're kind of starting with the rich world. We're starting here with a modern world, right? The developed world. We have a grid and it's a complicated beast. Grids are not simple. They have multiple different inputs.
Transmitting across, stepping up to big voltages, transmitting across multiple different wire systems. Think of interstate freeways stepping down to state highways, stepping down to county roads, stepping down to the little driveway that goes to your house. Well, that's what your wires do. So you're having to take...
Big voltages coming out of power plants and step them down ever more to little homes and industries and businesses.
And hospitals, and guess what? AI and data centers that want 99.99% reliability.
They have to always be on.
You can't fail. Right. Essentially, you can't fail. Right, right. So you're putting all these inputs in, and the more inputs in some ways is good. Optionality in energy is good, like your stock portfolio, your real estate portfolio. I like options in energy. If you get limited to one or two, you're betting a lot on that thing. I don't buy one stock. So I don't mind a lot of inputs.
But we've got to realize that they're not all created equal. And when we talk about the intermittent forms of energy, the sun and the wind and some others... They come and go, and that's not judgment. That's just physics. That's just the reality of the way the sun and the wind work. So I got to have something there.
Dunkelflaute.
Yeah, you're building two systems. And they're redundant, which makes them expensive. Right, right. I mean, you think poor air traffic controllers, I flew today, have a... you know, pull out your hair job, stressful, try managing a grid. Because I've been inside them. ERCOT is the Electricity Reliability Council of Texas. Texas has its own grid. It's Texas. We can secede someday from the nations.
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