When companies lose money they often fire their CEOs, but is that what happened at Snowy Hydro? Rosemary says politics and pet projects probably had something to do with it. Dominion’s CVOW project is the first (and only, so far) to be “paid for by customers of a monopoly who have no choice in their electric supplier.” Those customers want assurances that Dominion isn’t willing to give. Now Dominion is threatening to kill the project. Another project facing fierce public opposition and delays is The Port of Albany in New York.

The EPA and other agencies are withholding permits trying to protect fish and wetlands. And the Australian Securities and Investments Commission is being forced to focus on energy technology as Santos is facing Greenwashing accusations. Is wind in for a rough quarter?

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Uptime 130

Allen Hall: Hi Everyone. We have an amazing show for you this week. 

Rosemary Barnes: We’ve got a couple of Australian stories. The CEO of Snowy Hydro has stepped down and we’ll talk about a couple of the controversial projects that Snowy Hydro is involved with in the moment and how that might have led to that decision. And then also there is a legal case that’s being pushed against Santas oil and gas company for green washing.

Joel Saxum: After that we dive into the dominion win offshore project, again, as we’ve been talking with the last few weeks and some of what the Southern environmental law center is talking about with the capacity factor guarantees and the possibility that dominion may scrap that project 

Allen Hall: and the port of Albany is behind schedule due to a number of environmental concerns.

Allen Hall: I’m Allen Hall and I’m here with my good friends, Rosemary Barnes, and Joel Saxum. And this is the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast,

Allen Hall: big controversy down in Australia at Snowy Hydro. And Snowy Hydro is a, a government owned energy utility, and it’s a very odd name. Rosemary Snowy, Hydro. I guess it is what it is. It’s a hydro storage project, right? 

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. So I mean, there’s a bit of history. It’s an important part of Australia’s history actually.

Rosemary Barnes: After world War II, they decided to build this hydroelectric scheme. It’s, it’s huge, you know, as a nation building project and they brought in a ton of immigrants from. Yeah, all sorts of countries, but a lot of European immigrants after the war. So it was kind of a kickstarted Australian multiculturalism.

Rosemary Barnes: I mean, we’d already had waves of, of immigrants before that. So it wasn’t the very beginning, but definitely lots of, lots of immigrants came and turned the Snowy River in the, the snow mountains. I know a lot of people are surprised to learn that we have snow in Australia, but we. We do and snow mountains, you know, the peaks are over 2000 meters, so that’s high enough to get snowed pretty much anywhere.

Rosemary Barnes: And yeah, they put in a bunch of dams, a bunch of pipes and a bunch of turbines and made a bunch of hydropower. So that’s where the name comes from the snow river. Hydro Hydro-electric scheme. Yeah, snowing 

Allen Hall: Hydro. The CEO was who his name was. Paul Broad was. Quotes. If that’s the proper term in Australia, we would call it fired in America.

Allen Hall: And he was closely tied with the previous government that was just voted out. And it seems to be a lot of controversy regarding him in particular, because there, it seems like that organization company, I guess you call it organization has, is losing money at a, a rapid pace. They’re talking about $5.1 billion.

Allen Hall: Overrun on Snowy 2.0 Hydro project. And I guess there’s some question of whether these projects were actually needed or not. I mean, that’s the biggest question. Rosemary, you wanna explain a little bit more 

Rosemary Barnes: about that? Yeah, so I I’m not sure if I ever saw the actual CEO speak Paul broad, but all of the renewable energy conferences that I’ve been to since I moved back to Australia like a year and a half ago.

Rosemary Barnes: they’ve always got some Snowy Hydro representative there, and it’s always really stuck out as being strange that they, it it’s a renewable energy company predominantly, right. They’re mostly just running Hydro assets that they do have gas peakers as well. But yeah, it’s, you know, it’s it’s essence is, is hydroelectricity, which is renewable, but the company representatives always talk like they’re a fossil fuel company.

Rosemary Barnes: They’re always, you know, like, oh, we’ve gotta slow down the energy transition. We can’t. You know, have a hundred percent renewables because there’s no way to store energy. It’s like, well, what you’ve got this 350 gigawatt hour energy storage project underway. That’s what the snow 2.0 is it’s connecting to existing reservoirs in the, the scheme with a pipe and some generation and pumping capabilities.

Rosemary Barnes: So yeah. Yeah. It’s like, you know, connecting two huge reservoirs. It’s it’s it’s literally 350 kilowatt hours. Huge. But yeah, the, the, the companies really talks a lot, like a, like you would expect a fossil fuel company to talk. So I’m not sure if it’s so controversial that this guy would go because it’s, you know, it’s, it is a government owned company who was really tight with the old energy minister who was really, really tight with the gas industry.

Rosemary Barnes: The previous government had this obsession with a, a gas fired recovery from COVID. We, you know, the idea that this would be a really fast and cheap way to to, you know, get the economy moving again. But obviously gas is not cheap anymore. Not even in Australia, even though we, we have plenty of gas, we export nearly all of it.

Rosemary Barnes: So gas prices in Australia have been just as high as they, they have been elsewhere and causing energy crises here. So, yeah, it’s really interesting there. So there are a couple of big projects that snow Hydro working on that are both controversial is one, the snow 2.0 that I was just talking about to add a bunch of pumped Hydro capability.

Rosemary Barnes: That one was kind of the pet project of an old prime minister. Like. Three prime ministers ago now Malcolm Turnbull, he was conservative politician, but really keen on renewables. And eventually got, you know, kicked out over it. Cuz in Australia we don’t directly elect our prime ministers. We it’s up to the party, you the governing party to choose ’em.

Rosemary Barnes: So his, his colleagues didn’t like his pro renewables stance. And so they, they got rid of him. And that one’s controversial. It’s a big, expensive project. And most people in the energy industry think you could get the same outcomes, more cheaply by you know, a bunch of smaller pump, Hydro projects, batteries and, and other stuff.

Rosemary Barnes: And yeah, the cost is blown out. I think it’s, it’s doubled. It’s, you know, it’s billions and billions over budget. Now timeframe is blowing out as well. And part of the problem is that it’s the project is international park. The Snowy mountains are in cause well, cause you. Cosco national park has is where this, yeah.

Rosemary Barnes: These assets are located. And I went there for a bike ride last year. And it sounds like it should be a low impact project because you’re just connecting to existing reservoirs and, you know, tunnels underground. You shouldn’t see it, but I mean, there’s a lot of stuff being moved around. A lot of, a lot of digging, a lot of boring and all of the stuff that you, that you dig has to go somewhere.

Rosemary Barnes: And. That’s bad for the ecosystem. And then not to mention that I still haven’t heard exactly how it’s, this is gonna be connected to, you know, major transmission lines. So that’s another point of contention is that, you know, like your budget doesn’t include connecting it to the, the grid. Then it’s not really a complete budget.

Rosemary Barnes: So. That’s the issues, basically in a nutshell with that project, but I bely like, you know, I love that national park and I’m sad to see the, the impact on it, but I am glad that we’re gonna get this one big, huge amount of energy storage that will really allow us to, you know, roll out renewables much, much more rapidly because there’s something there to, you know, fill in the, the gaps when you got a day or, or two with low wind.

Allen Hall: Well, it it’s the fact that they’re. Budget is the biggest concern or is that the fact that they’re in a national 

Rosemary Barnes: park? It’s the two, two things. So for environmentalists, it’s the fact that they’re in a national park, I think. And for people in the energy industry, it’s that it’s too expensive for what they’re getting, but it’s not.

Rosemary Barnes: Universally hated by the energy industry. But that I would say is the predominant opinion. You know, maybe it’s a 60, 40 split, 60% against an 40% pro. And I’m kind of like exactly, exactly on the borderline. Like I would prefer to achieve that storage in other ways. And I think you could cheaper, but also practically like politics of energy have been just so shocking in Australia for, I mean, especially the last 10 years, but even before that, I just wanna see something done, you know?

Rosemary Barnes: And so, yeah, it’s not the best project, but right. It’s a project that has support from, because it was a conservative proposed project, you know, that’s that’s gonna happen. whereas if the current government, the progressive government, they, they can’t scrap it now. I mean, the channels are, are well underway and you know, like a lot it’s, it’s not gonna stop now.

Rosemary Barnes: So what’s the, what’s 

Allen Hall: the big 

Rosemary Barnes: issue then. So I think it’s got more to do maybe with the second. Project, which is. More or less a hundred percent. Everyone hates this project. It’s for a new gas, power plant, cur catchy catch your name. And yeah, it’s just, it’s just a new gas power plant that nobody in the energy industry thinks that we need.

Rosemary Barnes: Like that just absolutely no one it’s gonna be expensive. It’s it’s business case only proposes running it with a 2% capacity factor. So it’s not gonna be providing like a lot of energy. A lot of, yeah, power generation. And it’s just a dumb design as well, cuz it’s not, it, it still only has the capability for run to run for six hours at a stretch because it’s got like, there’s something like gas, canisters, huge gas, canisters that are supplying it.

Rosemary Barnes: It’s not, it’s not hooked up to any, you know, pipeline so it can continuously run. So it could fill in, you know, like a weak worth of of low wind speed in Australia, which is, you know, kind of the absolute worst case scenario that we would ever. In Australia. So it kind of doesn’t really do much. It’s gonna cost a lot.

Rosemary Barnes: They’ve changed the design now. So it would have 10 hour storage instead of six. And then that has yeah, blown out the, the cost and the labor government. That’s our current government that, that party has never supported this project. They kind of be gradually said, okay, well, Continue to develop it as long as it’s able to be converted to hydrogen green hydrogen later on.

Rosemary Barnes: So at least it’s not, you know, a fossil fuel project, but that’s gonna, I, I understand that they would have, it’s not easy to just change over the existing design over to hydrogen. So yeah, so that you might as well just scrap it and start again. And I think if you start it again with an honest look at the business case and the need for it.

Rosemary Barnes: you would never put that in. We’ve got, it’s not like we we’ve got no gas generation in Australia and this would be our first gas peaker. There there’s other ones available and you know, what the free market is doing. Cause cuz you know, we do have a pretty, I don’t know, robust electricity market set up in Australia and heaps of private investment and where.

Rosemary Barnes: The private money is going is all renewables and storage unite batteries and smaller pump Hydro projects. So it’s just, yeah, this carry carry thing. It was just because they really wanted to have a gas fired recovery. They wanted a gas project to announce and. it’s just not needed on any, any sense. So yeah, I think most people in the energy industry would be happy to, to see some major, major cultural change happening at snow Hydro cause it’s a important national asset that we’ve got and it’s kind of, yeah, not, not being run in a way that supports the energy transition.

Rosemary Barnes: It’s kind of more being used as a, I don’t know, a, a crowbar in the, in the cogs of change. Joel 

Allen Hall: first off, do any large construction projects go under budget? 

Joel Saxum: Not really, you know, it’s, it’s it’s, it’s tough to see it happens everywhere in the, in the world, right. That these, these big projects gets driven by politics.

Joel Saxum: Right? Well, I’m thinking Keystone pipeline in the us, right. Where you say it’s so far under construction, it can’t be stopped. They stopped that one and it was, it had a thousand miles in the ground. Or plus, you know, so it’s, it’s just as, as, yeah, as energy professionals and engineers and people in the space, it’s so frustrating to see things controlled by politics.

Joel Saxum: And I just would like, like to see some of that stop, but I don’t see that in our 

Allen Hall: future. Right. And it it’s like the money you spent is somehow recover. That money’s gone. Yeah. , it’s gone that money. That money is smoke. And, and so it’s a question of what it’s gonna take to finish it and then do you really need it?

Allen Hall: And I, I think the government tries to take on longer term projects that industry won’t do by itself. The more difficult ones, because no one wants to invest in those projects. So it’s not, it’s not shocking. Rosemary. They’re gonna do something that’s unusual. The government asks them to do something 

Rosemary Barnes: unusual.

Rosemary Barnes: This the Snowy 2.0 pump tie project that fits that definition of something that it’s too big that no, no, no one in private industry would or could ever do that. So, you know, that. It, it has that, that behind it, you can make, you can understand. I think some people are saying that it’s cost is blown up by five times what they originally proposed.

Rosemary Barnes: But I mean, the original costing was obviously wrong to anybody who looked at it. It didn’t include, you know transmission connection and stuff. And the car, car gas, Peka its cost is about dabbled at the moment, but it’s also much for They’re less advanced, so still plenty of time for that one to blow out more.

Rosemary Barnes: But I, I suspect we’ll see that car Gary plant just disappear because it just literally, no one thinks it’s a good idea, except for a, few in the gas industry and the previous government, they, they still like it. mm-hmm . Yeah. The people that are working there and the like, I’m sorry. Hi, he, 

Allen Hall: he likes it.

Allen Hall: Yeah. Well I think most like he’ll most likely likely be fine. Right? people at the top don’t really get hurt. They have a rare set of skills typically, and they’ll find another place to go. It’s yeah. People working and driving the trucks that have the hard time. 

Joel Saxum: Lightning

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Allen Hall: So then now there’s another Australian controversy going on about greenwashing with this energy company called Santos.

Allen Hall: The ATRA a, I can’t even say this word. Austral center for corporate responsibility, OT Australian. Is that right? Rosemary? 

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. OT, Australian that’s OT Australian center for corporate responsibility. Yeah. Like you might say the Americas, we’ve got OT, Australasia. It’s just, you know, like it’s a, it’s a region sometimes called Oceania.

Rosemary Barnes: Just, you know, how do, how do you Australia isn’t Asia, but why didn’t we we’re in it, you know, like or close to it. So. It’s a new word for you. O Australian can practice it saying it at home’s 

Allen Hall: called Oceana. That’s much. That’s a much cooler name by the way. You don’t see a used very often. Oceana is a cool term.

Allen Hall: Come on. 

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, but also it’s less obvious to in those oceans everywhere. So maybe it’s less specific. 

Allen Hall: So we’ll stick with OT, Australian, just because the OST Australian center for a corporate responsibility filed new allegations against gas producer Santos in a federal. Case in Australia, obviously in claiming that the gas producer has breached Australian consumer law by misleading investors about its climate credentials.

Allen Hall: Now, Rosemary, I’m gonna hand it off to you, but I’m gonna, we walk gently on here because I always very careful when a consumer group says a comp a corporation has defrauded or misled investors. Pretty much every corporation can be accused of that. So, yeah. What’s, what’s the background 

Rosemary Barnes: here? Well, I picked this one, cause I know that greenwashing is one of your favorite favorite terms.

Rosemary Barnes: It always excites you every, every time we have a, a topic to talk about that involves greenwashing and. I haven’t seen a case like this, where, you know, in general companies are just free to say whatever they want about you know, their environmental plans for the future. Like maybe you can, you know, hold them to account for stuff that they say that they’re actually doing.

Rosemary Barnes: If they, you know, misled investors on that, that would be one thing. But sands, they’re an oil and gas company and they’ve got, they’ve announced net zero by 2040 plans. And it doesn’t involve getting out of oil and gas, you know? So that, that in itself is just clearly greenwashing because because net zero doesn’t involve business as usual with fossil fuels.

Rosemary Barnes: Like I, no, no interpretation of the term. Is that the case? And so. Yeah. Some people have some lawyers, I guess, have been been through their claims. They’ve got ridiculous claims about how they’re gonna reduce their emissions. Mostly with carbon capture and storage, which You know, in Australia, we’ve never, never successfully implemented a, a CCS project.

Rosemary Barnes: And so, yeah, they’re, they’ve just used nonsensical methods to come up with this you know, net zero by 2040 claim. So it just looks, looks like they’ve just got their normal business plan, which involves just extracting a bunch of oil and, and gas. And obviously there’s a lot of emissions associated with the extraction.

Rosemary Barnes: They’re not, they don’t, they’re not required to count their emissions of whatever their customers do without oil and gas. But yeah, just the extraction itself has a lot of emissions and especially cuz some of their future assets have just, they just have a lot of CO2. In mixed in with the gas. And so they’ve gotta do something with that.

Rosemary Barnes: And then they’ve just said, yeah, well, magically CCS technology is gonna be good enough that we’re gonna be capturing all of this and it’s gonna be at this very low price. And then we’re gonna be using a lot of our gas to make blue hydrogen, which is gonna be somehow cheaper than green hydrogen in 2040, which no serious analyst thinks that it will be.

Rosemary Barnes: I don’t think, especially not these days. so it’s kind of like, to me, it just sounds like, sort of really common greenwashing that every oil and gas company that is pretending to have a net zero commitment, they’re all doing similar things, but yeah, it’s just interesting that in this case, people have actually, you know, filed a lawsuit.

Rosemary Barnes: Like these are just too ridiculous and it’s not, you know, it’s misleading to tell your investors that you’re gonna be net zero. The impact on your bottom line is gonna be, you know nothing basically as a result. So yeah, that’s the, that’s the case, but, 

Allen Hall: but in this case it’s just projections, right? I think every corporation has projections on where it’s gonna be.

Allen Hall: And well, five years out would be really too far, honestly, to project, but they’re saying 20, 40. So you’re talking 18 ish years out in the future. It’s pretty hard to predict what’s gonna happen over the next 18 years, except for debate. I don’t, I don’t think I hold ’em accountable for that so much. Right?

Allen Hall: If you’re thinking you’re gonna get to 2040, this is gonna be monumental changes between now and 2040. That’s not an unreasonable position. Is it? 

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, but think about it from another company, you know, like if I’m a car manufacturer and I’m like, oh, still it’s gonna be free in 2040. So we’re gonna be making just tons of money.

Rosemary Barnes: And you know, we’re gonna be able to make our cars for $2 57 for $2 50. So we’ll have a hundred percent of the market, you know, like that, that you wouldn’t let them get away with that, even though, you know, I mean, I guess it’s possible. You can’t like prove that that won’t happen. But yeah, I mean, it’s just.

Rosemary Barnes: There’s there’s possible and there’s, you know, some sort of plausibility has to be required. Otherwise. Why do you bother to do projections at all? If you can just make up all of the inputs into those calculations, you can get whatever number you want. And I, yeah. So 

Allen Hall: would you imagine that the shareholders of which there must be large institutional investors in a company like Santo?

Allen Hall: Review those numbers and either agreed or disagreed by the way that they either purchase stock or sold stock in that 

Rosemary Barnes: company. Well, CTOs must think that there’s a point there’s a value in their net zero by 2040 goal, because otherwise they wouldn’t have made it yeah. And advertised it everywhere. So I think you’d have to say yes, there is some, some behavior has changed.

Rosemary Barnes: Otherwise I wouldn’t have bothered. 

Joel Saxum: there’s a lack of, and this is something I was just talking to someone about the other day. A large company that I know a friend is involved. They just recently turned their chief marketing officer into their chief sustainability officer . So now that person who is the chief marketing officer is, is because they’re good at communicating.

Joel Saxum: Now. Now the chief sustainability officer, well, the com then it spurred a conversation of you have a case like this with the Santos case where. There might not be. And I have to, I have to kind of agree with this. There’s not really enough people to properly vet this stuff in the marketplace, right?

Joel Saxum: There’s not enough Rosemary Barnes out there in the world that they can be employed by every company. So some of the stuff coming out or employed by the institutionalized investors, whatever, some of the things coming out, some of the things getting due diligence on ’em are not actually being done by experts or people that can really dive into the data or the numbers or have, have the facts.

Joel Saxum: So some of the stuff comes out and it. You know, for a lack of a better term, almost like diarrhea of the mouth kind of blah, here you go. Some data. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. But there’s nobody there to the people putting it out. Don’t properly know the people keep seeing it or vetting it don’t properly know. So I think because sustainability hasn’t been high on the radar for everybody, for, you know, like 50 years.

Joel Saxum: Something else has it’s, you know, it’s more in the last 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10 years that it’s slowly come into place where it’s a big part of corporate, the corporate global economy. And so there isn’t the, the skillset there in some of these companies, 

Allen Hall: but doesn’t ESG force ’em to do that, right. ESG forces them to respond same though this nature.

Joel Saxum: And it’s the same thing, right? Thing he’s there. Who who controls the ESG stuff? It’s not always, like I said now is a Rosemary 

Allen Hall: sponsors. That’s who? Yeah, no, but I mean, mean ESG. Yeah. You’re talking about fluctuations in markets and massive movement of markets. Layman brothers are being around. If everybody understood what the bond market was in the United States for the home bond market there wouldn’t have been a collapse to the start market based on N.

Allen Hall: Those things are like just plain out, in some cases, somewhat obvious. If, if you, for people that were working in those industries up close, they saw that I, I think all these energy companies need oversight. I’m just not sure taking them to court is the right way to do it. I think you could make some claims.

Allen Hall: I mean, obviously you, during the shareholder meetings, you can propose whatever you want. And if you get enough shareholders to agree and you can actually change the board in some of these places, Fire directors or whatever you want to do. I’m not sure the court of law is the place for this to happen. It can say it’s a consumer.

Allen Hall: You’re, you’re mistreating the consumer. I’m not sure that’s a, a, a proper way to do this because I think every company has projections that are very rosy. I saw one today from a from a wind related company and I thought, oh, come on. That’s crazy. There’s no way that the economics are ever gonna play out in that matter.

Allen Hall: And, but they can get, and, and they believe it. Right. So they do believe these things. Isn’t like, they don’t believe ’em. I, I think we’re making an assumption. The leaders of Santos don’t don’t believe this, maybe. Maybe they do. I, I don’t, I don’t know. I just find it getting the information out. There is a better way of going about it than trying to Sue these guys.

Allen Hall: What, what what’s the outcome Santos is gonna pay them. 

Rosemary Barnes: What oh, maybe they have to change their, their claims and you know, companies, because Santos is not the only company that’s doing this. Like I said, I think any, any oil and gas company that has a net zero target is doing exactly the same thing, or maybe not so egregiously, but I would, the outcome I would love to see is that people realize that that net zero or, you know, your emissions.

Rosemary Barnes: Plans, it’s not something that you can just invent out of thin air that you actually have to plan to reduce your emissions and then take steps to do that. That that would be the outcome. So, you know, I think that that would be, would be very good because at the moment it, it is sustainability is for many companies, just a marketing exercise and it’s just a matter of what they can get away with.

Rosemary Barnes: Sure. Yeah, so I don’t know. I think it’s definitely a blurry area. And I was surprised to see an actual legal, actual legal action raised over this because yeah, there’s projections in the future are, are hard and sometimes ridiculous claims are made, but on the other hand, misleading investors.

Rosemary Barnes: Definitely something that needs to be illegal and needs to be you know, followed up on. There’s been plenty of examples of that recently. I mean yeah, Elon Musk was, was fined, right? At least, at least once, maybe several times for just making up ridiculous, ridiculous statements that weren’t really true.

Rosemary Barnes: You know, people make their investment decisions based on these announcements. And if it’s, if it’s legitimately just false misleading, not based on anything, I think that companies should be, should be held to account. I think 

Allen Hall: the leaders of every corporation are, and somewhat dreamers, right? Especially innovative companies.

Allen Hall: They’re dreamers. What the point of the board of directors and the shareholders is, is to dive into the details and make sure this dream. Is not off track and this company’s gonna go into the ditch. 

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. All responsible for that. There’s a differe difference. Like the Elon Musk kind of dreaming, whereas like, you know, people will be living on Mars by, I don’t know, whatever date that he originally said, 20, 25 or something.

Rosemary Barnes: But then, you know, like he’s started a company that. Working towards, towards doing that, trying to implement the dream, whereas an oil and gas company, that’s just like, oh, I have a dream that one day emissions from fossil fuel burning fossil fuels will just totally disappear. And then just continues business as usual.

Rosemary Barnes: I mean, , that’s, that’s a different kind of dreaming. Well that’s, and it’s more like magical thinking rather than like entrepreneurial sure. You know, big, big picture thinking. 

Allen Hall: Well, and you can imagine Rosemary let’s make Rosemary, the, the CEO of an oil gas company in Australia. so Rosemary, you’re now the head of this company and you have to steer this company into 2040.

Allen Hall: Mm. Is that an easy position to be in? No. 

Rosemary Barnes: What are you gonna do? No. Are you gonna lay 

Allen Hall: everybody and tell ’em to go home? you see? You see it’s it’s a lot easier from the outside. If you’re that person. what are you, what are you doing here? 

Rosemary Barnes: How are you gonna do this? I don’t, I don’t feel sympathy for these companies that have been purposely getting in the way of you know, recognizing the challenge of climate change for, for decades now and spending yeah, a lot of effort trying to confuse the public about whether this was a real problem or not.

Rosemary Barnes: They would’ve had a much easier time to move into a sustainable business model if they had done it, where writing was on the wall 30 years ago. Yeah. You know, everyone knew about it. Any oil and gas company that really took it seriously back then could have, could have changed to a sustainable business model by now there other, you know, plenty of other ways to, yeah, we should, 

Allen Hall: we should always do good things earlier.

Allen Hall: Rosemary rose Rosemary. We should always do great things sooner. Right? That’s always the answer. Why didn’t we build, you know, why didn’t we X we should always do it. Okay. I’ll grant you that we always should do it sooner, but we’re, we’re here in 2022 and they’re trying to get to 2040. Yeah. The CEO is under now a lawsuit.

Allen Hall: Yeah. If you’re running that company, what do you do? The answer is just to, just to close up the doors and send everybody home or to create a plan, just get you to 2040, where you still are paying people that you, the shareholders are still involved. And that the doors are 

Rosemary Barnes: open. Just don’t make that zero by 2040 target and announce it everywhere if and advertise yourself as a climate friendly company, if it’s impossible that you could actually do that, that would be the first step.

Rosemary Barnes: And secondly, I, I mean, I, I don’t think that these companies have a right to exist in the future if they can only do it in a, a way that destructs their environment, then they shouldn’t, they shouldn’t exist. The, the 

Allen Hall: fact of the, of an oil company. Or a gas company producing energy that, that created the economy in which we all now existed.

Allen Hall: That’s not evil. If they’re trying to get to a better solution in the future, we should encourage them to do that suing at this point, doesn’t really help that.

Rosemary Barnes: But the point of the suing is that they’re not trying to do that. The point of the lawsuit is you say that you’re trying to do that, but you’re really not.

Rosemary Barnes: And, and if they really were, then they wouldn’t be getting that’s that’s, 

Allen Hall: that’s an opinion. 

Rosemary Barnes: Well, that’s, that’s the whole point of the case that, that that’s not realistic their plans, right? No, I, I agree. Yeah. 

Allen Hall: Yeah. And if you, if I pulled open a a hundred corporate statements, particularly around Silicon valley, 99 of them, 99 of them would just be complete garbage.

Allen Hall: They’re gonna get to a hundred million dollars or a billion dollars in three years. I can. I see those presentations all the time, all the time. And I don’t think an oil and gas is necessary. Company is excluded from being sort of aggressively for looking in the positive sense. Wouldn’t wouldn’t it better T my opinion, wouldn’t it better T be to call them out.

Allen Hall: You write, might the newspaper write articles saying or opinions to, like, if you wrote a letter to the editor, Rosemary, cause you, you do wield some power here. If you wrote a letter to the editor and opinion piece and said, Hey, these numbers don’t make any sense. We should be encouraging them to clean up what they’re doing.

Allen Hall: That’s that’s the future. That’s where they need to go. Here’s some steps that they should be pursuing that I think is much better situation than paying a bunch of lawyers. Cuz what you’re gonna do is pay a bunch of lawyers, disagree consultants. Yeah. A consultants. They 

Joel Saxum: need a consultant consultants.

Joel Saxum: That’s right. Yeah. 

Allen Hall: They need a lot of consultants. . Yeah. That’s what it’s. Yeah, no, you know, I it’s, it’s fine if we disagree. I, I just think there’s, you gotta take both sides of it and realize the other side doesn’t have an easy pathway either and it’s easy and it is actually, it is a little bit easier to stand on the outside and, and I did look up the amount of emissions CO2 emissions.

Allen Hall: This morning. I was looking up CO2 emissions by country. Australia is not in the top 10 Australia con contribution to CO2 in the world about little over 1% you’re equivalent to about Turkey. Yeah, but our population Australia goes to goes to, and if you look at the, oh, no, it 

Rosemary Barnes: to it’s solely true. Yeah. True.

Rosemary Barnes: And if you, if you look per capita, then we’re, we’re near the top. We’re , we’re punching above our weight. But if you also, but if you go to zero. No, but the that’s, you’re gonna make that much of a difference that’s emissions in Australia. Whereas if you counted all of the emissions from the stuff we sell to other countries, then it there’s picture changes.

Rosemary Barnes: So if you, because you know, you don’t count the emissions of our coal industry, cuz the coal’s burnt overseas. Same with, with gas and everything, China, except for the emissions that. Yeah, yeah, a lot of it, a lot of in China, but I mean a lot of other places as well. If you include the best way to do 

Allen Hall: CO2 emissions is to stop selling coal to China, maybe that would help.

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. Yeah. I’m sure they would . 

Allen Hall: Yeah, really? I, yeah, no, I I’m serious. I’m dead serious about that. I think that’s, if you really want to cut down CO2 emissions shutting off Australia. From gas and oil is not gonna make that much difference. Stopping the coal shipments would make a bunch 

Rosemary Barnes: bigger difference.

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. All, all of it. And I mean, there’s plenty of people yeah. That same type of people that are involved in this legal action are definitely involved in trying to, trying to shut down new coal projects and would love, love us to stop exporting all of these things. I. I don’t really engage with that too much because I just think it’s so unlikely to happen that it’s not really, we’re spending a lot of time thinking about, but other people are, and that’s, that’s good for 

Allen Hall: them.

Allen Hall: And speaking as the token American at the moment, you know, we’re, we’re about 15% of emissions or so, so we we’re like 15 times Australia in terms of emissions. I think that’s what the number is. It may be higher, but yeah. Obviously, America’s gotta do something about their, a missions too. And I totally agree that we should be moving towards that.

Allen Hall: And it’s just whether we find a way to do it, that gets us there. Sooner speaking as an engineer, we all have great ideas, but engineers try to hone in on what gets you there, the fastest at the lowest cost, those sort of thing. That’s why we go to school and that’s, we spend so much time thinking about these things.

Allen Hall: Like Rosemary’s constantly thinking about all these renewable ideas and why it impacts the world. That that’s what we should be. People like us, mostly Rosemary are the ones that are gonna help us get us there. And it’s, it’s due time that , you know, we start writing letters to the editor and writing opinion pieces.

Allen Hall: I think those are gonna have more impact than SU and SU and some of these companies for. 

Rosemary Barnes: People read the newspaper anymore. YouTube channels, 

Joel Saxum: Rosemary. Yeah. 

Rosemary Barnes: I have 70 online. Those are my letters to the editor. That’s people do see them as well. Like I know people in people in government have, you know, told me, oh, you know, I looked up CCS is a good example.

Rosemary Barnes: I wanted to know how carbon capture actually works. And when I Googled that your video was the first thing that came up and, you know, that’s exactly why has spent so much effort on the, on the channel is because the information isn’t necessarily out there Yeah. I, I tried really hard for like, yeah, you’re right.

Rosemary Barnes: Six months to figure out how, how carbon capture actually works and whether it will one day, you know, be a reliable and cost effective way to reduce emissions. And I just couldn’t find the answers. And that’s why I had to, I had to get a expert to, you know, spend a few hours explaining it to me and, and then a few tens of hours making the, the video so that you, you know, I could share, share that.

Rosemary Barnes: Cause it’s not, not so easy to get the information that you need to make good decisions. See and 

Allen Hall: Rosemary, I thought about you today because I saw something out of the department of energy where they’re promoting, spending a lot of money on carbon capture systems. And I thought they didn’t watch Rosemary’s video.

Allen Hall: Did they? they totally did not. Because the amount of money they’re spending in the hopes that they’re gonna have a significant carbon capture from the atmosphere seem out of touch with where the engineering is. Right. 

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, I’m not anti CCS. I’m a lot more pro than most people like me. I’m glad that we’re doing research on it.

Rosemary Barnes: And I’m glad that there are projects that are, you know, finding all of the problems with it because in general, the CCS projects are completely unsuccessful if you, you know, and if your goal is to capture CO2 you know, either from a power plant or a, a gas Reservoir or out of the air. They’re not capturing meaningful volumes of CO2 and won’t for, for years and years, but they are learning all the problems with the technology.

Rosemary Barnes: And I think that in 2050, we’re gonna need this technology to be able to do something. My problem with CCS is when people talk about it as an option, instead of decarbonizing, when it can only work in parallel too. And it’s not even in parallel because it’s like decarbonized first and then CCS will be ready to you know, buy 2050 to, to take over that last little bit.

Rosemary Barnes: So I like to see the research. I just don’t like to see the reporting on it that makes people think that they don’t have to do anything else. 

Joel Saxum: The projects I saw Allen that was kind of tied together with that is down in Louisiana. Air products, four and a half billion dollars in a CCS, but it’s tied together.

Joel Saxum: It’s tied together with a chemical facility. So they’re creating. Multiple different chemicals there at the site and whatever is byproduct they’re injecting into the ground. So it’s not like they’re going to the air, we’re gonna capture it and bring it in as the so source of, you know, chemicals. So they’re using it as we’re gonna build this new plant to create hydrogen pneumonia, diesel fuel, whatever it is.

Joel Saxum: And when it’s a byproduct of bad stuff, instead of just letting it go, we’re gonna inject it in the ground. So I think of that, of that four and a half billion dollars that they’re putting into that facility, like The initial phase is a couple, a hundred million are going into carbon capture, you know, seismic, geophysical studies and, and then whatnot there.

Joel Saxum: So they’re trying to figure some of those things 

Allen Hall: that makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. Joel, I think that makes complete sense. If you have a large carbon emitter, the more you capture it there instead of to capture 0.04% of it from the atmosphere. Yeah. Yeah. And they’ve 

Joel Saxum: got the, they’ve got the DOE behind them.

Joel Saxum: They’ve got the state of Louisiana behind them. They’ve got a lot of heavy hitters pulling on. Pulling on this project is very, very visible down there too. 

Allen Hall: Wow. That’s cool. Mm-hmm there you go. Rosemary, you having an impact project didn’t make 

Rosemary Barnes: sense. Yeah, they got their idea from me. a hundred percent you never know.

Rosemary Barnes: They might have, they might have probably it’s effect. Right? It’s possible that project idea came before my YouTube channel, but. I’ll take it. take the wind. I’ll take, I’ll take this and take this wind and feel special. 

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Allen Hall: so offshore off of Virginia Beach, just as the United States, we moving back to the United States where dominion energy is gonna put 176 semen Kamasa wind turbines, offshore to power up just 660,000 homes. There is a problem and the Southern Environmental Law Center pushed for the capacity factor requirements.

Allen Hall: For that project and they they’re, they’re now discussing it openly of why they did it. They’re trying to push towards a you know, a zero carbon grid by 2050. And they think that the, sort of the intro workings of the government and policy boards essentially can set these requirements for capacity factors.

Allen Hall: And the reason that they think they can set them is because, well, it just needs to happen. I think it’s really interesting, they, that they’re pushing for this because I think dominion is very upset about it and realizes that pushes them a huge risk. What the Southern environmental law center is, is basically saying with these capacity factor requirements is that if the project doesn’t reach its performance requirements, then Dominion’s gonna have to buy replacement energy.

Allen Hall: And the rate payer shouldn’t have to pay anything towards that extra energy purchase, but the shareholder should pay. I thought, oh wait, wait a minute. Time out. Joel. Since when have shareholders paid for projects that have gone sideways or for losses, how does that work? Like if I hold stock and Ford and Ford makes a car that explodes, do they come to my house and say, well, you’re a shareholder.

Allen Hall: You need to send us a thousand dollars so we can get these cars fixed. That isn’t how it works. Eventually the people who buy the cars are the ones who are gonna. The rate holders here, or the rate payers in Virginia are gonna pay that 

Joel Saxum: regardless. I think this is a, their, the premise of this lawsuit or what they’re trying to do here with these things could have rippling effects all the way up to our Supreme court because it’s, it’s the government meddling in capitalism.

Joel Saxum: And that doesn’t really fly in the us. I mean, that’s, that’s what we’re based on. 

Allen Hall: Well, I think they can put down requirements for performance. I think they can do that, but as we’re gonna hear by next dominion is saying, well, if you do that, then we’re not gonna make the project. So you can, you can just dream on about 20, 50 being carbon free and you’re grid because we’re not going to, to sign up to a project in which we lose a bunch of money.

Allen Hall: Mm-hmm does I, I, I don’t see the language here. Sounds very political. Well, we don’t want. The rate payers to pay for the extra energy that the wind turbines didn’t create. We went the shareholders to do that. That’s a nice sentiment. That’s a nice statement, but it’s meaningless. The rate payers always pay always it 

Joel Saxum: we’re dialing it back.

Joel Saxum: This, this conversation is the same when we had at the beginning of the show and we talked about large infrastructure projects being politically. right, right. While, but while this is actually not, not funded by the government, right? I mean, there’s, there’s of course the IRA act is gonna help them a little bit.

Joel Saxum: But this is dominion energy and to my knowledge, a private energy corporation, they’re not a government. Entity. I don’t, I don’t believe that’s, you know? 

Allen Hall: Yeah. It’s just like a monopoly sort of thing. You, yeah, they’re in, they’re in corporation. 

Joel Saxum: Yeah. They’re in cold. They’re in natural gas or they’re creating energy for, for the masses.

Joel Saxum: And they’ve decided to take this project on and if it goes O over and they have to charge more, then it, it that’s how it works. That’s how the, the energy markets. 

Allen Hall: Sorry. Right. And part of the, part of the push that the Southern environmental law center has been, been really enacted in terms of, of law back in 2020 in the clean economy act is that they’re going to shut down all coal and all burning power generation from dominion by 2024 

Joel Saxum: by 2020.

Joel Saxum: So they won’t even have this, this, this wind farm won’t even be running by 2024. 

Allen Hall: It won’t now not to keep doing what they’re doing and going back and forth. It doesn’t seem like that makes a, a lot of sense. It seems like they’re gonna put the rate payers at risk, right? It may, it may achieve your, your carbon neutral goals that may occur, but what is the downside cost of that for doing it?

Allen Hall: Shouldn’t they be promoting getting this wind farm up and running along with a number of other renewable projects. If they really want to get the. Clean by 2050 Rosemary. Doesn’t that make 

Rosemary Barnes: sense? Well, I, I, I’m not so familiar with how the whole energy mix works and if it could be, it could be separate issues, you know, it’s not there’s coal power plants closing down all over the world very rapidly in Australia.

Rosemary Barnes: They keep on bringing forward you know, their announced closing dates and it’s. Because they think they have something else to replace it it’s because they’re losing money on it. And so you know, the, if you’ve got an asset that’s losing money every day, then you wanna shut that down as fast as possible.

Rosemary Barnes: So it, it it’s possible that sure. They’re not related to each other. And I would assume that that’s the case. Otherwise it’s a bit silly and for the reasons that you point out yeah, 

Allen Hall: you I’m sure Siemens, GA Mesa is a little. Freaked out about this. It’s 176 wind tur. Miss Joel, if I, if I sold 176 wind, Turbin my sales commission.

Allen Hall: I, I assume I could look forward to buying a new boat or something. 176 wind 

Joel Saxum: tur. I mean, there’s your basic rule is a million megawatt in the us. Right. So, yeah. And that’s just for, that’s just for the turbines that doesn’t count foundations, anything else? Offshore, offshore, right? Gables, all this good jazz.

Joel Saxum: Right. So if you have to replace one onshore, that’s what it costs offshore man, 176. And I would imagine these are what is Siemens SCSA if these gotta be, well they’re eight, eight at a 

Allen Hall: minimum eight to right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Eight times. Oh, sorry. Now we’re gonna do math at our head. Everybody. No I’m doing that.

Joel Saxum: A calculator it’s somewhere 

Rosemary Barnes: around billion, right? Yeah. If it’s a, I mean, 

Joel Saxum: if it, it will be, yeah. If it’s a gigawatt, I mean you’re million, there you’re a billion dollars worth of 

Allen Hall: turbines. Oh, right. Wow. That, that lets you take the sales group out to Arby’s and celebrate. Yeah. And I hope you get a 

Joel Saxum: new boat but yeah, so Siemens’s gonna be, I mean, Siemens now we we’re, as the conversation has gone today, shareholders.

Joel Saxum: Now you have you know, an agency messing with a private company that can affect the shareholders. So does the S does the S E C hold the, hold, those guys accountable? 

Allen Hall: Yeah. You know, and I think Dominion’s response is to, it is this governance board. It can’t set those kind of rules. That’s, that’s what things are left up to the legislature.

Allen Hall: And the legislature did not establish that. So if they want to do this capacity factor, They have to go to the elected representatives and make it, so I think they’re gonna have a hard time doing that. I think in Virginia, they would have a very difficult time doing this is probably why they did it at this, this sort of deep in the governmental system, why they did it way down here instead of at the very exposed legislature, where there would be news about it, and a lot more UFF about it.

Allen Hall: It’s gonna end up there anyway. I, I think what Domin. And this is my prediction. Rosemary, you can call me crazy, but I think Dominion’s just gonna put their hands up in there and say, well, I guess the pro project is off. Yeah. Until we get this capacity factor situation 

Rosemary Barnes: resolved. Now they have to, so 

Joel Saxum: they hold these rights too.

Joel Saxum: Right? 

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. Yeah. They have to in, they have to act in the interest of their shareholders and it, it’s just, it’s weird to even propose it. There’s places that you can buy weather insurance from that that’s the correct, the correct kind of place to go to, you know, to hedge on that risk. Yeah. So I don’t know why they’re trying to make.

Rosemary Barnes: Manufacturer or yeah, development company responsible for the wind. That’s not their core business. And I would also, you know, yeah. A huge deal and I’m sure dominion doesn’t wanna step away from it. But you have to, if, if you are being, you know, told that you have to accept the, you know, consequences of a risk that you can’t, you have no way to control that.

Rosemary Barnes: That is not a sensible business decision to make. I think, 

Joel Saxum: I think some of the, some of the things that we’re starting to see now, you’re seeing weird rules pop up in laws and different things. So you saw this one pop up here. Yeah. You saw in, you see in Louisiana where if they put offshore turbines within the state boundaries of their economic zone, that the state gets a kickback.

Joel Saxum: So you’re seeing something. I don’t know if we’ve seen in the United States in a long time, but it’s an industry popping up. That’s very new, right. Offshore, wind. So peop all these different states and entities and government people are trying to say like, oh, we can put our spin on it. We can put our stamp on it.

Joel Saxum: We can do this. We can get the most out of it. And, and don’t want to get, just run over by it and take it, you know, and take out to the cleaners by, oh man, 20 years down the line, we could have done what Louisiana did and, you know, get some this, but then did it stifle development or whatever. And I, cuz I thinking about.

Joel Saxum: But it used to work in west Africa quite a bit. And a lot of those governments got, got taken like a hand of, because they didn’t think about things beforehand or know to, to not get exploited by people out there doing, you know, oil and gas, offshore onshore. And now they’ve, they’ve gone to the other side of things where they’re making it very difficult to do things there.

Joel Saxum: So I, you can kind of see some of that same, not as extreme of course. Right. But that same play going on here, where you have people trying to stick their head in as far as they can to get what they can out of it, whether it’s a government agency estate or whatever because it’s so new and it’s new things that come along that are worth billions don’t happen every, every decade.

Joel Saxum: So I think you’ll see some more weird stuff pop up. As we continue down this, this train path of offshore wind in the. 

Allen Hall: Right. And I don’t, I don’t think this is the last hurdle for this project, because as we see up in, up in my neck of the woods near Albany, New York, they’re trying to modernize port so they can assemble wind turbine towers.

Allen Hall: And as part of that, they have to do a little bit of drudging and create a, a platform on a place called beacon island. So it sits sort of on the Hudson river. So the army Corps of engineers is up there. Planning out how to get this wind turbine development site set up so they can assemble these towers and send ’em downstream.

Allen Hall: And they’re running into all kinds of environmental problems. So the national Marine fishery service and the environmental protection agency have urge the core of engineers to deny. Or withhold permits or environmental concerns at this site. And they list a couple of reasons. One of them is including fears of the potential destruction of habitats of sturgeon and other fish, as well as wetlands.

Allen Hall: Now we’re talking about a 500 foot Wharf. So 500 feet is a couple of two football fields, roughly length of WARF. That’s gonna be dredged. I think that’s the concern, right? They’re gonna dredge this thing. It’s a very weird situation because Ecuador is trying to work in the bite and get their offshore, wind up and running.

Allen Hall: Then they’re relying upon these what I’ll say, government backed government operated sites to, to have these places ready to go and they’re, they’re not moving. And it’s, it’s, it’s a very odd situation because the, the, the head of the port of. Described it as Megan Daley said it was wrong to assert that the these agencies were Demi denying dredging permits.

Allen Hall: Even though obviously they did request to deny dredging permits. And it, this is sort of a repeat of what happened in the springtime. And so in the springtime, they wanted to do some tree cut and some soil excavation so they can pack the soil so they can put heavy things on it. They started to do that.

Allen Hall: And the core of engineers said, wait, you don’t have all the permits. And they got a waiver at some point, the port of Albany got a waiver, but the, the Corps of engineer said, you don’t have all the paperwork. You’ve got to shut this thing off. So they had been standstill since the spring. So we’re talking about, we’re going into winter.

Allen Hall: It’s gonna start snowing here in, in about 30 days and then it’ll be over and we’re into next. So the project is probably close to a year behind. If we’re really serious about offshore wind in America, then we got to figure out ways to get things done. And it is nice that the department of energy can put on short little videos about how great this renewable future looks like.

Allen Hall: But when you get down to the details like the engineers live in all the time, Rosemary Joel live in all the time in the detail world, those details matter. If, if you overlook those details, these projects go nowhere. We will never get 30 gigawatts by 2030, unless. There is some weight or emphasis or people assigned to, to get these issues resolved.

Allen Hall: I don’t know what the, none of us know. Joel, you have any idea what the final outcome of this will be? I, I 

Joel Saxum: it’ll go. I bet it’ll go forward. But it will just be delayed as most things with the government does, especially our, especially our federal government, right. I’ve dealt with the army Corps of engineers many times in different areas of.

Joel Saxum: Of the us and it they’re a pain. Every time I’ve walked onto projects saying, yeah, we’re gonna start in six weeks. Mobilize spend a million dollars mobilizing, and you don’t have a permit from everybody. Else’s good. But the core of engineers doesn’t give you a permit for six months and it might not be because of something specific.

Joel Saxum: It might just be because it sat on someone’s desk and they didn’t look at. 

Allen Hall: