Dave Walsh - The Change in Energy Geopolitics and the Looming Green Energy Crisis

Energy is not something we have covered before and so it is an honour to have Dave Walsh join us to unpack this huge topic.
Dave is known as the 'Energy Guru', with a lifetime in the industry and his status as Steve Bannon's go to man on 'War Room: Pandemic' for energy makes him so well positioned to explain how this will negatively impact our lives.
We have seen a three fold increase in the cost of energy which has had a knock on effect on food items, manufacturing and household bills.
Dave gives us a better understanding to what lies behind these increases and why we are seeing a geopolitical change in energy control from West to East.
We also unpack the dangerous rise of the green push to renewables which simply does not work and will lead to a dystopian collapse in our societies as energy becomes the preserves of the rich and powerful.

Dave Walsh was appointed President and Chief Executive Officer of Mitsubishi Hitachi Power Systems Americas, Inc. (MHPSA) in April 2014, with responsibility for the Western Hemisphere electric power generation business of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd. and Hitachi Ltd. of Japan. Mr. Walsh was the first non-Japanese corporate officer of MHPSA’s parent company, Mitsubishi Hitachi Power Systems, Ltd., in Japan. He was also the first American Board member of the America’s company, MHPSA. Mr. Walsh retired from Mitsubishi Hitachi Power Systems in 2016, now serving as an advisor to various clients in the energy industry.
Prior to his appointment as President & CEO at MHPSA, Dave had been Executive Vice President of Sales & Marketing, Projects and Services. He joined the company in 2001, and initially established the service and manufacturing business for Mitsubishi Heavy Industries in the Western Hemisphere.
Previously, Dave had been a senior executive at Westinghouse Electric Corporation in both power generation and industrial service roles as General Manager and Chairman of the Westinghouse global industrial and power generation service subsidiaries, with primary operations located in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Poland, Venezuela, Brazil, Mexico, Singapore, Thailand and Australia. He later became the senior executive and Vice Chairman responsible for the Westinghouse Electric power joint ventures in China, in partnership with the Shanghai Municipal Government and with the Chinese Ministry of Electric Power.
Dave received his BS Commerce degree from The University of Virginia, and did Graduate Study in Finance at The University of Pittsburgh and at Northwestern University.
He was an Enterprise Florida Board Member, and has previously been a Board Member of the Seminole County Foundation for Public Education, and served on the Seminole State College of Florida Foundation Board. Dave has also been appointed Honorary Consul Japan, Orlando, by the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In 2016, Governor Scott appointed Mr. Walsh to the University of Central Florida Board of Trustees with a term ending January 2021.
Dave and his wife Terri reside in the Central Florida area.

Follow Dave on social media....
GETTR https://gettr.com/user/davewalshenergy
TRUTH https://truthsocial.com/@davewalshenergy

Interview recorded 17.4.23

*Special thanks to Bosch Fawstin for recording our intro/outro on this podcast.

Check out his art https://theboschfawstinstore.blogspot.com/ and follow him on GETTR https://gettr.com/user/BoschFawstin and Twitter https://twitter.com/TheBoschFawstin?s=20 

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Transcript

(Peter)
Hello, Hearts of Oak, and welcome to another interview coming up with Dave Walsh, who, of course, you will know from The War Room, anyone who is Steve Bannon's go-to man on an issue is well worth having. And we delve into energy. He's an energy consultant, former president of Mitsubishi Power Systems, along with many other accolades, and he has lived and breathed energy all his life. And we delve into this, a topic that we haven't actually touched on before, I was quite surprised, but we start by looking at actually the cost of energy. It's now 30% of GDP up from 4% traditionally, originally over the last 100 years. So massive changes in the cost of energy, why that is happening. Look at some of the anomalies in the States of energy costs, and then we go into looking at renewable energy, green energy, net zero, and the push towards having electric vehicles and the impact that will have on the US. I think the call was to raise it from 5% to 67% in 10 years. Is the world able to charge all these new electric vehicles? So Dave goes into that and talks about the impact on infrastructure, on costs, and whether the world.
Can cope with that. We also discussed the change in the geopolitical change, I guess, from the West, from the US, from Europe, over to China, India, Turkey, Japan, and they're the ones now buying Russian oil and gas. The West have embargoed and we so freeze Europe just so other countries can buy oil and gas at a lower price. So we talk about that change in, I guess, power and whether that leaves the US and Europe actually toothless in regards to energy productivity and energy policies. So Dave Walsh is the person who can go into this and unpack this and I'm sure you'll enjoy his analysis of all of these areas in terms of energy.

Dave Walsh, thank you so much for joining us today on Hearts of Oak.

 

(Dave Walsh)
Good to be with you, Peter.

Good, it was good to bump into you at CPAC. Obviously, the viewers will know you from your many times on War Room as someone who unpacks energy issues and something that we've never gone into before so I'm looking forward to having your wisdom with us unpacking that.
Obviously, people can find you @DaveWalshEnergy is your handle.
That's on GETTR. Anywhere else you're on?

Dave Walsh Energy. Truth Social on the same handle. Same handle on Truth Social.
Dave Walsh Energy on Truth Social as well.

Okay, so people can find you on GETTR or on Truth. And obviously, Dave, you're an energy consultant and former president of Mitsubishi Power Systems, along with many other accolades to your name.
But if we can jump in and look at, as I said, energy is not something we've touched on before, but I've always enjoyed your many pieces on War Room.
And I think I remember reading a headline middle of last year that said global energy spending set to hit 13 trillion in 2022.
I think that was 13% of global GDP. I remember reading another thing talking about traditionally energy has been like over the last 100 years, maybe 4% of GDP, which seems to be it's increased in cost and I guess how important it is. But do you want to just let us know why should those figures are probably out of the ballpark for most people. Do you just want to set the scene on why I guess we should be interested and see energy as an important aspect.

Well, over a hundred year period, the concentrated use of energy, fossil fuels, nuclear power in the main has been endemic to just monstrous reduction in human labour necessary to get through life.
I've got maybe four or five data points in that. You go back already by 1870, the coal burn in Britain replaced caloric intake of nearly nearly 850 million laborers.
And also already by then, the use of coal for steam powered engines displaced 6 million horses.
So it was up to 1870.
But if you look at the global population from the birth of 1750 to 2009.
Global population grew by a factor of eight from 1000 AD to 1750, 750 years, by a factor of only three.
And that largely related to the lack of fossil fuels, nuclear power, and modern means of doing work, human activity.
And in the US, for example, in 1860, half of the population was involved in agricultural endeavours.
Today, it's only 3%.
Western Europe is the same. Actually, Holland leads the world, and well, led the world until we're in this present crisis.
Farming productivity per person, Holland leads the way until we're gonna take farms away from families that were hard at there, unfortunately.
But if you go back like here in 1875, 74% of disposable income was spent on food, shelter and clothing, now it's like 13%.
So the, and if you want less energy concentration value in 1900, per capita income globally was about $1,500. By 2010, about $8,000 had expanded by 5.3 times.
Across the whole time from the birth of Christ to 1900, per capita income grew around the world by a factor of three times.
And that was an entire period with basically wood burning and the beginning of the use of coal for energy.
So the use of fossil fuels, which has emerged really largely since about 1860, has really, really escalated the global population, global wealth, and global food production extensively. And in another area, if you look at places like Ethiopia, the concentration of labour per acre is still like 30 times more than Holland, the UK, or here, because of the lack of fossil fuels in farming machinery and the lack of advanced fertilizers, ammonia-based and nitrogen fertilizers that come from natural gas. So no, energy utilization has propelled mankind massively, in the last 100 years. Now, there are some unusual things happening with cost in the last 10 or 15 years that we should discuss that really aren't good for productivity, human productivity.

And do you want to, because we've seen, I mean, we'll touch on that. And what are my thoughts looking at the US is, having been the US quite a bit in the last year and being on the East Coast and West Coast, and you look at the poor people on the West Coast, California paying probably double what the East Coast are paying over in Florida or Texas. That's an anomaly and that probably feeds into that kind of conversation about maybe some of the issues which are increasing the cost of energy, I guess, more or less exponentially.

Well, yeah, the US a little bit curious. Energy policy here is really a mixed thing. It's more dominated by the states and state policies, state governments, state policies. It's physically a huge place. These states tend to be, most of them, very large physically. So the concentration of electricity generation tends to be a state by state thing, given the size, but given the way the government works, the state public service commission, usually appointed by the governor, maybe approved by the state Senate, mainly directs the energy policy and costs in various states. So, you've pointed out California in extreme, they're typically the fourth or fifth highest, energy cost state in the country when it comes to electricity. Florida's actually about in the middle. But just give you an idea of the disparity that the top 10 cost states in the US have electricity costs of about $0.27 per kilowatt hour. The top 10 cost states, the lowest 10 cost states about 10.5 cents a kilowatt hour. So the top 10 states are 2.6 times more costly, on electricity. And if you look, the two major characteristics of the best 10 or lowest cost are the fact that they tend to be 27% net exporters of electricity to other states.
The states with the highest cost tend to be 16% net importers of electricity because over the years, again, places like California, now increasingly New York, Hawaii, and the high cost states have really become high cost because of abandonment of initially nuclear power, and then coal power, and now even in California, increasingly combined cycle natural gas power, which environmentally is very clean and very efficient.
They've begun to abandon that as well. So they get, what they wind up doing is there really is no near-term displacement for those sources.
So they wind up becoming, Steve Bannon would say, beggars of their neighbours or importers of electricity from neighbouring states.
And the state public service commission in a given state doesn't control the cost of what happens in other states.
So they become victimized by whatever, specifically California, whatever Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona, Oregon, Washington, utilities decide to charge them per year is what they pay.
Because that state, for example, a hideous example, 37% of their electricity is imported.
As over time, they've stopped building nuclear plants, they've closed down coal plants, now they've stopped building advanced combined cycle plants. California imports 37% of its electricity.
So really the state government has virtually no control over the cost of that, nor what it consists of.
So that becomes a huge factor in why the costs are so high.
New York is headed the same way. They just announced a decree there that within 10 years they're going to be 70% renewable.
That's going to cause, by my calculations, they're now about 23% renewable because in the West there, Niagara Falls does produce a fair amount of their electricity.
But all this delta from 23% to 70 is going to be wind and solar.
That's going to mean a 27% electricity shortage in New York.
Because wind and solar only operate respectively, wind about 38% of the time onshore, offshore about 42% of the time that it runs. Solar up there is about a four-hour-a-day thing.
It's getting pretty far north, not quite as far north as you are, but up where New York is, solar is about a four-hour-a-day effective resource, 20 hours a day. You have no value from Therefore, if New York makes that shift in 10 years, it's going to have a 27% shortage of electricity.
They're already an importer of 13% of their electricity already because of these types of policies.
Costs there are already the third highest, fourth highest in the country.
They're going to escalate radically with these kinds of policies.
So it's very unique. It is kind of unique to each state and the politics of each state and whether they're, run by a more conservative government or run by blue democratic governments.
And if I look at the 10 highest cost states, eight of them are consistently run by democratic governments.
So-

 

We obviously have the same issue in Europe, where fuel is taxed horrendously high.
And at the fuel pump in the UK, it's probably around 75% tax, probably, with VAT and then fuel duty.
And I guess that Democrat-controlled states are probably going the same way as Europe.

Well, yeah, I mean the Democrat-controlled ones, the first bizarre set of decisions, many of them made, like California, more lately New York, the states of New England, the abandonment of allowing fossil fuel plants in those states to be there at all.
California went down this road in the late 80s. Nuclear before that, they abandoned.
Now gas-fired plants. New England, New York has been the same. Fracking in this country is basically illegal, New York and North.
So while there are tremendous natural gas resources up there, they've elected not to harvest them.
And you wind up with massive importation of electricity from Canada, a lot of hydro, and now growingly from Pennsylvania and Ohio that do have heavy, heavy natural gas resources.
Well, those states in New England, New York, for example, have elected to not have power plants any longer, excepting for solar and wind, which are very, very low, very low density energy resources.
Again, I'll go to the reciprocal.
Solar in those markets is not there for you 86% of the time.
It doesn't produce electricity. Wind if offshore, 58% of the time, doesn't produce electricity.
And also, by the way, the costs of installing that stuff, far from free, are massively expensive.
Offshore wind, for example, New York's on a big binge for offshore wind, is 11 times more costly than the capex of building a combined cycle plant.
11 times more costly. The cost of the transmission from 20 miles out in the sea to inland, plus the towers, plus the huge wind turbines that are on them now, you're talking 11x the capital cost.
Stuff is far from free, it's actually far more expensive.
And the life cycle cost of offshore wind is about three and a half times more costly than, the whole life cycle cost with fuel of advanced combined cycle natural gas power plants.
So there's a myth that this stuff is free because it's nature based as far from it is far more expensive when you factor in the long time periods that it's not usable it doesn't produce anything.

Let me, I want to get in more on the renewable side but for the us as an entity I think you put a recent post saying that all natural gas related products are fifteen percent of all us exports and then of course you have what the country uses itself. So energy is a massive industry, the US is sitting on so much reserves and yet the US energy plan seems to be a mess. I mean, tell us about that because the US should be the, I guess, one of the big producers and suppliers and yet, well of course, I guess with the Democrats, they're trying to punish themselves and stop that.
But yeah, explain some of that.

Well, the mess is to the extent the federal government controls energy supply, they do it here.
The Democrats have attempted to do it through the Environmental Protection Agency, has been their main weapon to weaponize against fossil fuels and before now against nuclear power.
But now aided and abetted by the Securities and Exchange Commission on all this ESG mantra of, investing in renewables is a great thing, investing in carbon fuel sources should be penalized, and by incentive policies that have only the last 15 years incented investments in renewables and not incented any investment or new investment in nuclear power or in fossil fuels.
So you've had this tremendous skewing of investment to the extent the federal government can be influential.
That's how they've done it, through the EPA, with punitive measures to make emissions of anything fossil fuel enormously punitive, driving the cost way, way up of operating a coal plant or a gas turbine-fired plant.
And then the incentive structure they put in place on taxes to make renewables, you, And I give them a huge advantage financially with massive incentives.
So that's driven policies. And this administration, all of its executive cabinet-level leadership, from the SEC to the Securities Exchange Commission, the Fed, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, all on the same, the Department of Energy head, Jen Granholm, we're going to eliminate the use of fossil fuels in this country, every single one of them. It's in their mantra consistently given, consistently articulated.
So this great energy resource here is, and this, unfortunately, I've got a story about the UK as our model.
We're going to follow the same. If you listen to these guys, we're going to follow the same model.
We're going to abolish the use and production of fossil fuels.
It's a complete disaster.
The US has a huge balance of trade negative. We're a net importer of about a trillion of goods and services.
China leads the way as the exporter here in the balance trade deficit we have.
But it's been helped heavily the last 15 years with the emerged massive growth of natural gas and oil exports from the US. We're now like $315 billion.
We're a net exporter of oil and gas at 15% of our exports.
To the extent we export about $2 trillion a year of goods and services, 15% of it plus is now gas and oil.
So that's a huge, huge thing with respect to the currency being stable and the budget being, it's not being balanced here, but any effort to balance the federal taxation budget.
It's largely dependent on the tax receipts coming from oil and gas, and these folks on the left running the government want to abandon that as rapidly as possible.
And there's no replacement for it, not even on the near term nor intermediate term.
You know, displacing fossil fuels with the nature-based part-time renewables is just, mathematically doesn't work.
And solar, even here in Florida, solar does not work 82% of the time.
If you take a given 8,700 hour power generation year, the sunshine is effective here.
I mean, right now it's noon, it's nearly dark here.
From this time of the year through September, very common thing by about 11 o'clock through four, you've got thunderstorms, you've got dark clouds, you've got no solar resource, not to mention the night.
Night, really it's effective between about nine and four on a good day.
So even here, it's about an 18% of the time thing. In much of the Northeast and up in the Midwest, it's a four-hour a day thing.
So it can't be the solution. When you're talking about that kind of energy deficit, wind, even offshore where it's most productive is not there for you to produce electricity 58% of the time.
So I know in the North Sea and UK, talking about the massive offshore wind, well, I'm going to say in the vernacular here, good luck the other 58% of the time, especially when you factor in the cost of installing that against the minimal energy supply.
You're talking about driving the cost of energy up to human beings by factors of five and six times.
I mean, it sounds great, but it's not free. It's far from it, far more costly.

Well, I'll touch on that. Well, actually, when even driving through parts of the English countryside, you see whole fields covered with solar panels now.
The UK isn't really the brightest or sunniest or warmest country.
And that seems madness, because again, that takes away agricultural land, which is more and more for premium and bigger demand as a population grows. But that's,
it's not something which we discuss back and forth, but it's another part of it, you mentioned in Holland, that I guess clash between energy and agriculture, between feeding people and actually turning on the lights. And it's a curious clash that we're having, not only with fields being covered over, but also with farmers being told they need to farm less and feed people less because it's bad for the environment.

Well, I'll go back to the UK just quickly. My wife and I were there a couple times the last year or so, and we're up by the Stonehenge. Within eight miles of there, eight kilometres, there's a solar farm. It's, the day we were there, it's the winds howling 30 miles per hour, and it's probably, maybe it was 10 C, but there was no sunshine. And I have to know, having been there many, many times, that this must be a three and a half hour day. And I think that is the typical Germany, UK, the same. Solar is about a three and a half hour a day thing, on average, across the year. It's just, I mean, it's utterly, horrendously misspent money.
Now, the Holland thing, this is again, the untold story of fossil fuels. Ammonia fertilizers, nitrogen-based fertilizers in the world have promoted farming productivity across most products, wheat, corn, soybeans, potatoes, by a factor of three to four times per acre over the last 50 to 60 years in the world.
And a couple of things have really pushed that productivity forward, and they are nitrogen and ammonia-based fertilizers, which are now deemed to be sinful because their origin is natural gas.
So that's being used by the left to consciously diminish food supply and make it far more a challenge.
I mean, the other factor has been mechanized farming machinery, which is all diesel and gas powered, has been the second thing, but behind ammonia and nitrogen-based fertilizers.
I mean, just to give an example, the farming productivity, again, I think I might have mentioned, this country, Holland, UK, very high on wheat production per acre, is 30 times more productive in human terms than Ethiopia.
For example, Ethiopia still has 74% of its population involved in farming.
In the UK, in the US, it's about 3%. To give you an idea of the benefit of fossil fuels delivered in fertilizers and in the
production equipment, heavy machinery, tractors, et cetera, harvesters to make farming cost-effective for allow massive food supply for billions of people.
And now we're resisting this through wanting to diminish and end ammonia and nitrogen-based fertilizers.
It's, and the use of gas-powered and diesel-powered farming machinery.
This is insanity.
When you're talking about sustaining 7.2 billion people, This is just not, it is not a sustainable thing, to borrow one of their phrases.
It's the opposite, the polar opposite of that.

And of course when we talk about those solar panels, actually we're talking about wind farms, the UK building all those wind farms and none of it actually built in the UK, so there's no manufacturing benefit, but then the solar panels, that seems to all be Chinese built and it seems as though the world, I guess on the left, the Democrats over there, many parts of Europe are rushing to award their control of their energy system over to China. And that's not a conversation I don't think the public has really had. I guess the same for the states.

Well, our, I'll say collectively, our Western G7 leadership just convened over the weekend in Sapporo, yours and ours, abandoning our shores to have meetings about our sovereign countries in Japan about CO2.
And what they've concluded, they collectively have signed up with each other, again, outside of the realm of where our voters are over in Japan.
They've reached one of these agreements to develop collectively across the G7 a million thousand gigawatts of additional solar by 2030.
This would be $670 billion investment by the G7 nations in added solar resources, of which, based on the current fact that 85% of thin film PV panels come from China, would be about a $580 billion spend in China between now and 2030 by our new G7 government, putting it that way. Having their meetings in, not here at home, nor in the UK, but in other places where these guys fly to convene and make these brilliant decisions.
And then another half a million or 500 gigawatts of offshore wind, which is, again, offshore wind is 11 times more costly in capex than building a conventional combined cycle plant of the type my company built in my day at Damhead, Salt End, in I think Raglan Road in Dublin.
In Spain, we built seven or eight combined cycle plants. The cost of those is one-eleventh of an offshore wind farm when you factor the 58% of the time that that offshore wind farm isn't going to produce anything for you.
And then compounded with the construction cost, which is huge.
That even then, the all-in life cycle cost, that the present cost of natural gas, which has now fallen quite a bit, is still four times more than a combined cycle plan, even accounting for the gas use.
So we're talking about stuff that is way, way not cheaper, but is far more expensive and creates a lack of access of our citizenry in the UK and here to energy, which is way in the interest of the Chinese.
Most of the supply of utility scale batteries, and as I mentioned, the solar panels, comes from there.
So we're taking a dependence. We had a marvellous self-dependence in the UK on North Sea oil, which has declined by 70%, not because it's not there, but because of political pressure to go and get it.
You know Norway has not participated in ceding to that pressure, doing great financially, a heavy importer to the UK.
The oil's still out there, but on our side of that pond, we've decided let's not pursue it.
70% down. The US, since the election of Biden has now been about a million two barrels a day deficit of oil production, because of all the restrictions on federal land. So we've shifted over to this ideation of displacing that with dependence on China, solar panels and batteries. I mean, this is lunacy. I mean
energy strategy is at the core of national defence, whether it's Western Europe or here, at the core of a sustainable lifestyle for our people.
And we're handing self-sufficiency that we enjoyed over to, programmatically over to China, who are an enemy.
They're aligned with Russia on this Ukraine activity that they've been from day one.
There's no secret about that, but our media very reluctant to actually acknowledge that, but they are.
And then this, the boycott that we've got in Western Europe on buying their oil within six weeks was almost entirely displaced with procurement from Turkey, India, and China, from Russia.
So that hasn't worked out well for us. We've actually forced China and Russia together, which strategically is just a horrendous set of decisions pushed by more by this government than the Western European government, but collectively.
We've created an energy disaster in the outcomes of this in a very short time.

Well, that's really interesting watching that and the shift with the West, actually Europe wanting to freeze after building a Nord Stream and Nord Stream 2 into Russia and then wanting to turn that off and wondering why people are angry that the cost of electricity has soared.
And yet, as you said, the other side is China, India, especially and then into Turkey and elsewhere.
And Japan, I think as well, actually they're happy to buy Russian oil and gas, and they've filled that gap.
So it's strange because that's a power shift, I guess, away from Europe and the US.
And it really leaves them toothless in terms of energy control.

No, it does. The West's conscious decision to abdicate self-sufficiency and self-reliance, I would complain about the UK.
We're on exactly the same page here now by the constant outcries of this government to abandon fossil fuels as rapidly as possible, going down the same path, creates a massive dependence now on China.
Years before was the Middle East, before North Sea oil was discovered in abundance and harvested, before the fracking boom here, we were unfortunately heavily dependent on OPEC, which was a disaster.
And now we're making them relevant once again in their alliance, first with Russia, when the kingdom sought out Russia right about the moment of the Biden inauguration,
January of 21, we had the alliance begin building of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia with Russia, on collective decisions on production to drive prices up, very successfully done all through 2021 and early 2022 before the invasion that we've suffered from.
Now we've forced China together with Russia based on the boycott and our handling of that situation and to our horrendous detriment, energy costs here are going through the roof, as we attempt to displace, do something that's not, it's mathematically not doable.
You can't displace fossil fuel use with four hour a day solar.
And if on land, nine hour a day, if on sea, 10 hour a day wind.
You mathematically can't do it because also those resources are regionalized in the large area. it's the same time of day that you have them.
I mean, like, for example, Florida, you could put, you know, everyone thinks it's so sunny here, you could populate every square inch of Florida with solar panels, and you'd still be at 19.6 hours a day, have nothing, because it's the same moments. It's only the same, night is the same.
It's not very big, east to west, night is the same time. So up till nine in the morning, you've got nothing. And after 4.30 in the afternoon, you've got nothing, which is the California issue because their peak in addition to this 38 percent uh importation of energy electricity a lot of what they use is solar even from Arizona, New Mexico, Southern Cal, I think about 35 percent of their power supply imported and made in state is renewable, and it kind of comes to an end at 4.30. Their peak power need begins at 4.30 when everyone gets home, gets off the freeways in LA, San Diego, and turn up the air conditioning, begin to use the appliances, cook, whatever, until 10 at night.
That's the peak demand. Well, that's when the solar ends. That's like 30% of their electricity, at least what they have, which they're in shortage of to begin with.
So you've got an intractable mathematical issue. And now we're talking about mandating EVs out there by 2035, well, now across the country, which would elevate here national electricity supply by 25%.
If you got to 75% EV adoption by 2035, which this government claimed to be the new target just last week, would be about 250,000 megawatt power plants
would need to be built to be running all the time from right now, start building them now, because you'll have them in four to five years.
There's no plan to do that. The energy supply scenario of squashing base load, continuous duty fossil power is not connected to this, let's electrify everything.
The two things aren't even connected together by this government.
It's going to need a huge amount more electricity should these things happen.

That push, because you reposted a story in New York Times and talked about an increase of, I think the current 5% of vehicles sold being electric up to within 10 years, 67%.
The figure was mind-blowing. That's not just a case of whenever everyone plugs their car in that the energy goes up.
That's a case of there is no energy.

That's right, because all of the electricity production measures, these states that are blue, and this government have taken through its rhetoric for two years now, are all about adopting more and more, excuse my plain speaking, of stuff that doesn't work most of the time, solar and wind. So net, net, you've got no increase of energy resources. And I'm looking at one of the dominant business forecast that I would, in the power generation business, would use here between now and ... This
is like the commonly accepted forecast.
Between now and 2030, we'll have 341 more gigawatts of wind installed and 383 more gigawatts of solar installed in this country by 2030.
And also take away another 828 gigawatts of coal, basically make it go away.
That's the consensus business forecast, which is a collection of what utilities are telling OEMs that make power generation equipment, T&D equipment.
This is the forecast.
Well, if this be the case, when you take the deficiency, the time that wind and solar don't work, the net net increase in generation assets, it's about 1% across that time.
When you factor down, you take out the fact that coal operates 24 hours a day, and you're displacing it with massive quantities of a five-hour-a-day thing and a nine-hour-a-day thing, the reciprocal, you've got nothing.
When you take all that into account, the energy electricity plan for the US is to grow electricity production by about 1% across the next 10 years.
And we're going to electrify everything in the meantime.
The mathematics don't even work on this. So a frightening thing happened late last week in California, often a sign of what's to come here, the rest of the country.
For some reason, the three major utilities who were regulated by the state approached the state, and I'm believing they were gigged by the state to do this, with a new billing practice of using a percentage of income, to pay for electricity instead of a per-use basis.
I mean, right now, in most of the, all of the developed world, in the West for sure, your electricity bill is a use-based thing.
You use X kilowatts, you pay a certain rate, that's what you pay based on use, which promotes efficient use of it and penalizes those who use the most.
It's not a penalty, it's use the most, you pay for the most.
California now wants to embrace converting this to an income percentage tax.
That if you make X, you pay X dollars a month. If you make Y, you pay Y plus 10%.
A scale based on income only, delinking utilization of electricity from the cost of it.
They're putting this before the public service commission to get this approved, creating displacing use fees for electricity, which are completely common and make logical common sense with an income tax kind of percentage of income.
So independent of what you use, you pay a percentage of your income for electricity.
Now, what this will do for them is we'll de-link the massive fact of their shortages, and the massive fact of their very, very high cost electricity, it'll hide that.
Because now you can make these comparisons of one state to another, that'll go away.
Because now that they'll have, if this gets passed, they'll have an income tax, that the utilities are able to charge, which that's a whole nother, how do they get to look at your income?
That's not legal here, but according to what California wants to do, that's what the utilities will begin to charge you a fixed fee based on your income, independent of it.
So then you'll have demand go through the roof because efficiency won't matter anymore, but it'll hide the real cost of the electricity. and the fact that once it becomes, incrementally, it becomes free in that sense.
The complaining about the lack of it would tend to diminish.
You get to then the Russian food model of years ago with the bread lines.
Hey, that which is free from the government, don't complain about it when it's not there.
That's where they're headed.
Acknowledging they have no plan whatsoever to displace the huge shortage of electricity that that state has.
They're talking about a way of obfuscating cost to make it seem like incremental use of it is free, Therefore, when the big brownouts and blackouts really kick in, which are going to increase and increase, well, since you're not paying anything for this anyhow, no complaints necessary.
This is frightening. This was announced late last week, Pacific Gas and Electric, Southern Cal Edison, looking at an income percentage fee collection instead of a per use for electricity consumption.

How does this, how does it play out as people go and spend their crazy amount of money on EVs, electric vehicles, and then with not being able to power them?
Is that just a movement towards, I mean, we've seen a movement towards red states simply because of the higher crime rates, higher tax rates, higher cost of living in the Democrat areas.
Will that just continue? Is that just a bigger divide in the US?
I mean, how does it play out?

 

It plays out as a massively increased divide between the haves and the have-nots.
Because the typical EV over here is still $65,000 to $70,000 to buy one.
The typical medium to lower end gas powered vehicles are about $25,000 to $28,000.
The business model is in the EV, about 40% of the cost structure of that thing is the battery.
Essentially, you're prepaying in that high price, 65 to 70 grand, you're prepaying the, 30 grand or so for the fuel equivalent being the battery, you're prepaying for about 150,000 miles of the fuel, if you will, in the model.
Then at 150,000 plus miles, you're also exposed to the liability to replace that again for another prepaid 30, $35,000 for a new battery that can go another 150,000 miles.
Paid up front, we're presently liquid fuel, you're paying on a pre-use basis, and it's domestic.
So now you're prepaying for Tesla's cars. The cost structure is 40% China.
That's where his batteries come from. His lithium ion comes from there.
So you're transferring an obligation that was in the days gone by, the Middle East became domestic, a great thing.
We want to get off domestic oil and gas production, now let's transfer that to a lithium-ion battery supply from China. But the chasm that this develops between the average citizen making $65,000, $68,000, $70,000, the chasm between that person even being able to afford a vehicle and those who can actually afford them, which is maybe then your 15% of the population can actually afford a vehicle, it grows massively. It just grows massively. It's exactly as you pointed out, it grows the chasm between the haves and the have-nots, as do all of these renewable energy sources when electricity bills go through the roof because of them.

And of course, one of the other factors in it, which isn't discussed whenever the Green Lobby are pushing for this. They're not mentioning the finite resources that go into the batteries.
No one mentions cobalt mining in Africa where children are used as slave labour. But that's not a part of the conversation. And that really confused me where a group claim to be environmentally conscious and also concerned of the impact of the individuals in the work market.
And yet they're happy to have children going down mines for them for their latest battery car.

It takes us right back to, okay, we are what we criticize others of being colonialists.
This was the critique of the UK, the Dutch, our own behaviour here with forced labour.
Well, guess what? Total dependence on the developing world for any resources extraction of any kind, be it oil, lithium, cobalt, is another form of colonialism. Or there's another one, yellow cake for uranium supply. This country was 100% self-sufficient on uranium supply as recent as 1992. And now we're 52% dependent on Russia, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan for uranium, which has continued unabated throughout this entire war.
We haven't changed that policy one iota, where we are in Wyoming and Utah still full of uranium, easily mineable, but no, we hate resource extraction.
We don't want to be around that any longer.
We'll throw certain indigenous Native Americans in front of that, who actually like the fact of it happening, but you pay certain groups, they'll step out in front and prevent that, plus various treaties that the Clinton administration made with Russia to arguably stop their conversion of uranium to nuclear weapons.
We could do that by buying it from them.
Unenforceable, unverifiable. So to this moment, we still do that. But this hatred of resource extraction is thrown out there as a rationale to outsource the Biden administration on oil, as opposed to ramping up domestic production. When this OPEC Plus was formed, began crushing cost here, where did they go? First stop was Iran. The second stop was Iraq. And the third stop was Venezuela, Arabia was in between. We go to OPEC to get oil instead of producing our own. When we, hit a Trump administration peak in November of 2019, 13.6 million barrels a day. We're the top producer in the world. And we abdicated that position within months of this administration taking place. And then all of its rhetoric, communicating to OPEC, oh, we're really on board with your production reductions. We're going to have our own here of a million two barrels, reduction. Basically, going along with their, the way they manage prices is not through raising the price. It's through toggling up and down the production level. We joined that. We basically joined that. We cut our production under the blanket of CO2 reasons rationale by 1.2 million barrels a day. And then who do we go to looking for the excess? We go to them. This is,
It's a set of insane policies geared at making the country, as Western Europe has become, totally dependent on others for energy.

 

Well, let me just finish on a piece that just came out in the UK, I think it was The Telegraph, for UK connection with what's happening in the States and it was the UK Chancellor Jeremy Hunt who oversees the Treasury here in the UK has just said that Joe Biden's flagship green energy policy risks plunging the world into the economic dark age. Now that was quite phenomenal because normally Western governments have been falling over themselves to say how wonderful they think Biden is and it was actually the first criticism I've seen of Biden. And this was, I guess, to do with subsidies. That's the concern, I guess, from Europe. But that just intrigued me, that, I guess, change in tone, change in rhetoric from Europe towards America, that Biden is no longer the great one. Actually, there's criticism.
And I guess that's on subsidies. But I don't know if that's the beginning of maybe a wedge between how Europe look at energy and how the States does.

Well, I mean the trouble I mean what he said is really, the net result is plunging the West into economic decline.
Because I'm gonna suggest about a hundred and sixty countries aren't on board with this.
And I'll mention a few that would surprise you Japan, Japan after Fukushima between 2015 and 2019 commissioned 13 count them 13, large coal plants, 10,000 megawatt supercriticals and 300, 400 megawatt coal plants.
Why? They need to industrially compete with China.
It's in their interest to do that. They did the right thing for the Japanese people.
Here we're celebrating this meeting the G7 had in Sapporo.
Well, the Japanese talk about, you know, renewables and all this decarbonization.
Look at what they're doing.
Doing what's necessary to promote their economy. And then their commitment to the renew the Sakhalin Island LNG deal at only 13 bucks a dekatherm that Russians committed prior pricing in this day and time, they had to continue that.
That's about 9% of their gas supply. Half of that comes from here, half quantity, double the amount from Russia.
They continue that. It's in their interest to do that.
So, you're looking at this very weak alliance on this war thing.
The entirety of Western Europe and Japan have not really been aligned with the US on that.
India has doubled down on its, the Indian Oil Corporation has now doubled its consumption of Russian oil in the last three months.
There is no unanimity of actions on this, either one, the CO2 front, which I'm going to suggest 160 countries are not on side with moving in this direction, led by the Chinese, who have double the CO2 emissions of all of the OECD countries combined.
They don't believe in this, by their actions. Now, what they're selling, lithium ion cobalt batteries and PV cells, yeah, they're promoting a Macron visit so Xi Jinping takes, oh, yes, Macron, we're working together on sub-Sahara CO2 abatement.
That's complete nonsense. That's nonsense to pander to the West.
Oh, here, well, yeah, we're going to tell you we agree with you.
Look at what they're doing.
60% of their power generation is coal-based.
He has no plans of changing that. He has a plan to keep his country competitive industrially and have a strong military.
That's what his plan is.
Such as we had in prior days in this part of the world, but we've abandoned.

Dave, I really appreciate you coming on. It's an honour to have anyone that Bannon goes to as his go-to person.
And I've thoroughly enjoyed your many times of War Room over the last two years.
So thank you so much for coming on and sharing your thoughts on energy.

Well, Peter, thanks for having me. And one of these days I'll come back and we can go further into it, but deeply appreciate, it.