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hey everybody Peter Zion and coming to you from the ever increasingly foggy document Trail uh this is the next in our ask Peter series that was born out of my Airline delay uh today the question is about Joe manchin the Republican excuse me the Democrat from West Virginia uh who has managed to insert a couple of Clauses into the deal with the White House to extend the debt ceiling uh specifically it's something that Mansion has been after a while which is uh permitting and federal approval to get a new pipeline built through West Virginia to ship natural gas um environmentalists hate it because it's natural gas Pro fossil fuel folks obviously think it's okay the truth is that everyone's right over and everyone's wrong so let me kind of light out what it means um let's start with the green side for those of you who think that solar and wind is the future of energy and that any sort of fossil fuel is just antithema to that future uh you're clearly very bad at math just think of every day in your life when the Sun goes down solar no longer works and while you can use batteries a little bit uh the United States right now has less than a couple minutes of battery storage and there is not enough lithium on the planet for the United States to get to four hours of battery storage and we don't have a battery chemistry that would allow us to go not just through the night but through the winter and through periods where there's usually not a lot of sun which if you live in the American Northeast is the vast majority of the year uh so you need a complementary power source that can work with solar and wind and the best way to do that is with natural gas you basically use solar when it's available and you have a combined cycle natural gas it can plant they can spin up in 10 to 15 minutes whenever it gets cloudy or whenever the sun goes down you know every day uh for the foreseeable future until we have a better better technology or better solar or probably better wind is what would get there first uh this is just where we're going to go so if you want to build solar and wind without a complementary system you're then basically forcing anyone who needs emergency power to use a diesel generator and as we've seen in the case of Germany they have used lignite coals the back up and you can't spin that up and down in 10-15 minutes you have to leave that on the whole time so despite two trillion dollars in Green Tech build out uh Germany's uh carbon emissions have actually gone up so you know there's a problem now for those of you on the fossil fuel side who say that intermittency of solar and wind means that it's not a viable power source and it can only exist with subsidies you're not very good with math either uh solar and win in the right geographies are now the cheapest way of generating power on an hour-by-hour basis now hour by hour being the key word there there's something that some folks like to use called the levelized cost of operation meaning that you average the cost out over the 24 hour 300 it's 24 hour day 365 day a year period that's really not a great measure because when the sun stops shining the power goes down to zero you still need it and that's not reflected in the levelized cost or at least not sufficiently in my opinion uh because you know when you don't have power and you need power you will pay whatever you have to do to get power uh there are parts of the country uh that can do more of one or the other so if you're in the American Northeast which is neither Sunny nor windy you know fossil fuels are going to be a much bigger part of your power mix going forward than it can be in the rest of the world however if you're in the southwest uh you're in a place that has great sun and if you were the Southwest overlaps with the Great Plains you great great sun and wind and that means ultimately more and more and more things like what Mansion is after keep in mind the pipeline he was in so much in love with the way he wants to get this done is not just a one-off approval for a pipeline across a state line he wants that for all energy infrastructure and obviously the green zealots think this only means pipes but it also means power Alliance because if we're going to move to a cleaner Greener future we have to be able to move electrons from where they can be generated with solar and wind to where we actually live and since the singest largest concentration of population is on the American northeast coast and that's where none of the green power comes from we're off to definitely going to have to run this in by wire from other places so we need more and more transmission more than we need something like batteries right now or at least with today's technology so the future of American electricity isn't green but it's also not fossil fuels it's both I'm okay with that