435 Podcast: Southern Utah
Explore the heartbeat of Southern Utah with the 435 Podcast, your go-to source for all things local in Washington County. Stay ahead of the curve with our in-depth coverage, expert analysis, and captivating interviews. Whether you're a resident or visitor, our podcast is your key to unlocking the latest happenings and trends in St. George and the surrounding areas. Tune in now to stay informed and connected with our thriving community!
435 Podcast: Southern Utah
What's Utah's Energy Future: Coal, Nuclear, or Geothermal Solutions?
Government regulation in the energy sector has created significant challenges for local power companies over the past two decades, while clean coal technology developments have been largely overlooked in policy decisions.
• 2005 Energy Policy Act disrupted reliability projects in Washington County for almost 15 years
• Modern coal plants in Utah operate at 90% below EPA emission standards using three-stage filtration technology
• Coal power generates electricity at 2-3 cents per kilowatt-hour compared to 6 cents for natural gas
• China building 1-2 coal plants weekly while US reduces production, effectively outsourcing emissions
• Prosperity enables environmental protection while energy poverty forces dirtier alternatives like wood burning
• Future energy mix likely includes maintained coal plants, natural gas, potential nuclear if licensing hurdles overcome
• Innovative geothermal technology using fracking techniques shows promise as clean energy source
• Small modular nuclear reactors could provide reliable power if regulatory barriers addressed
• Washington County utilities working to build more distributed generation to improve reliability
Guest: Colin Jack
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[00:00:00] Intro.
[00:00:51] Introduction to Energy Policy and Dixie Power.
[00:05:41] The 2005 Energy Policy Act's Impact.
[00:16:12] Coal Power Plants and Emissions Controls.
[00:30:14] The Climate Change Debate.
[00:45:12] Coal vs. Natural Gas Economics.
[00:59:46] The Future of Energy in Southern Utah.
[01:12:12
For Dixie Power and our customers. We're thinking that there's no reason for us to go away from coal as a generating fuel, because we've cleaned up the emissions and CO2 is not an emission controlled by the EPA.
Speaker 2:From the Blue Form Media Studios. This is the 435 Podcast the pulse of Southern Utah. You know this might sound crazy, but I hate real estate agents and after being with myself for the last 10 years, I know the good ones from the bad ones. If you're thinking about buying, selling or investing in real estate here in Southern Utah, we want you to interview us for the job. Selling or investing in real estate here in Southern Utah, we want you to interview us for the job. Go to realestate435.com and give us a call. We promise you're going to love us.
Speaker 2:We want to give information to people outside of the area that are exploring Southern Utah. I want to know more about Southern Utah and then also, for the people living here, local politics. There's no conversation going on with local politics and so, especially during elections, like the one coming up when the mayor's in city council, I want to have an avenue of interviews that gets more of a feel for who that individual is, rather than just the debates Like cause. The debate set up, I think, is it's just so short-sighted. It's fast, people can't really get an idea. You know, and they have the meet and greets, but you could spend two hours and talk to two people and there's 12 candidates for city council. You know what I mean. It just it's really tough to do it.
Speaker 2:So this is this was the idea for the podcast is to to give value to the locals on the local politics side and then also somebody who's thinking about coming to Southern Utah get a feel for what is it all about. We talk about water a lot. This will be the second conversation. We kind of really focus in on energy. Laurie Mangum, like we talked to you about that, was such a fascinating conversation because she's such a tactician. She kind of looks at it from the public and private sector element of it and I think that's kind of your expertise as well. Right With Dixie Power is understanding that public and private relationship with power.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so I mean so with Dixie Power. I'm the chief operating officer, okay, and so I'm an electrical engineer, and I've been an electrical engineer for 40 years and I've been with Dixie for 30 of those, and so I started totally in the technical world and probably spent quite a few years just pitting myself against Mother Nature. You know she brings wind and lightning and snow, all the things to turn off the power and we're doing everything we can to make sure the power lines stay up in the weather and that the lights can come back on after a lightning strike. And then in the 2005 Energy Policy Act, congress kind of co-opted the power business and that kind of got me going now focusing on policy work, because I could see that politicians were going to be the enemy along with mother nature. It's interesting.
Speaker 2:I think about. You know what is what's a utility? Like the definition of the word utility, and I think it's in some sense like a requirement for life, right, it's like it's something that it's water, it's power. The pseudo way shelter falls into this right, where you have these private entities and then you have this public utility, this thing that we need to survive and power up until the 1900ss, early 1900s, when power starts to become, you know, widely used. Right, we didn't have it before, but we did in a weird way, because we still needed fire. Right, we just fire was basically our only utility.
Speaker 3:It was, it was energy it was energy we've always used energy, yeah, when you look at the population of St George in particular, it was, like you know, a few thousand people until the until the invention of air conditioning, right, and then the population down here just explodes, explodes, and it's been exploding since since AC and really so.
Speaker 2:Our whole economy is kind of, you know, surrounded by this ability for power. And when we had Laurie Mangum on, we were, we were kind of talking about her ahead of the before we started rolling. I was, I was really fascinated to talk to her about how do we become more self-sustaining in our power needs rather than relying on you know power generation from up North? What's your take on that self-sustaining element? Do you? Do you think we've, because of that co-option of of the government, has that hindered our ability to keep power local and not be reliant on outside power sources outside of our county?
Speaker 2:well or is that not even connected to the two um?
Speaker 1:So certainly that 2005 Energy Policy Act that I mentioned and we could get way, way into the weeds, and I'm happy to do that. I like getting into the weeds.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:It would be better if we had like a five or six hour session.
Speaker 2:We could do that. Right, guys, you're good, you're good now.
Speaker 1:But uh uh, they, they implemented a lot of a lot of regulation. They, they tried to take control of every generator in the country, including backup generators on hospitals, and of course, they had to let loose a lot of that. And over the first couple of years they started redefining what they were trying to get. They tried to get everything, but they found out their grasp had exceeded their reach. They couldn't hold on to everything.
Speaker 2:Just before we keep rolling on this. Was it a response? Just before we keep rolling on this, do you? Was it a response? Was this a response to the? Um, what was that? Uh, al gore, uh, uh, inconvenient truth. Is it in response to this? Climate change, is that is that kind of the? It was actually before that it was before.
Speaker 1:This was it. So that's an excellent question why? Why did they suddenly? Want to take control of the power 100 years. We've had 100 years of power, and then all of a sudden, and now they want to control it all.
Speaker 3:Yeah, a lot of people would just say the government wants to, or people in the government want to control everything.
Speaker 1:Well, and there may be those folks too. This was the 2005 Energy Policy Act was in response to the 2003 Northeast power outage. Okay, I don't know if you guys remember, in 2003 there was a series of unfortunate events that led to the whole northeast quarter of the united states, including new york and washington dc.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think had a big blackout yeah, buffalo. People were freezing in buffalo for days, right yeah?
Speaker 1:for days. I mean it was the whole northeast and you know it was a line was out of service while they were doing maintenance and they overloaded some nearby lines. And a relay failed in a substation which rerouted some power, which overloaded a line where they hadn't trimmed the trees as much as recently. So it sagged down in to the tree and tripped off and then in in a matter of milliseconds that had tripped off the whole Northeast 50 million people.
Speaker 2:There you go. 50 million people yeah.
Speaker 1:So all of that happened in just a matter of moments. Just one little thing led to the next, and so Congress reacted and said we're going to pass a law that that will never happen again.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, you know not until the next hurricane, but anyway. So they passed the 2005 Energy Policy Act. They said we're going to take control of everything we're going to implement. So take control of everything. What does that mean? Well, nobody knew. And you know, in the 20 years since then they've learned that they still don't know and they can't do it yet, and they've had to give up a lot of the control that they had.
Speaker 1:But when we were under that regime here in Washington County, we were in the middle of doing projects to improve our reliability locally here. Locally we have, if we're talking in the power sector, we have six distribution companies and three transmission companies, so there's nine power companies that serve Washington County. So you talked about Lori Mangum. She was managing the St George Energy Services, and so Dixie Power worked closely with her and with the others in that group, and the nine of us work collectively. We work jointly on a lot of projects. We formed back in the 80s what they call the Southwest Utah Technical Task Force. I'm currently the chair of that group, but that was formed in the 80s. When there was a multi-day power outage here in Washington County, the whole county went dark for like three days. In the summer I was working in Kanab at that time and I remember looking over the fence thinking boy, I'm glad I don't live in St George, that would be awful. What year was this? Oh, 88, 85. I don't know. Somebody who lived here will have it more in their brain.
Speaker 2:That's all right, yeah.
Speaker 1:I was working over in Kanab and looking at it and feeling bad for everybody over here. Yeah, anyway, the Public Service Commission ordered the now the nine of us to work together to make sure that didn't happen again. So we've been working since then and we were working on plans. Well, we had been working since then and we were working on plans. Well, we had been working on plans. We were building projects to interconnect and loop and get things ready so that we would be more reliable.
Speaker 1:When this energy policy plan came out and they came out with a whole raft of new regulations, it was a real mess In the beginning. They didn't know what they wanted or how to do it, and they held a whole bunch of conferences. I went to those conferences because they were threatening us as power companies with million dollar fines and I mean a million dollar per violation, per day. Uh, fines if, if we weren't doing what they wanted us to do and they weren't yet sure what that was, but we'd better be ready.
Speaker 1:So anytime they'd call a conference, they said, well, we're going to talk about this. We'd all go because, all right, well, we need to be there and find out what they want. We need to be there and find out what they want, anyway. Anyway, that's, that's a lot of background noise, but as or it is now it's a long history, but as we worked through those regulations, uh, they were creating hindrances for us to do the projects we were in the middle of, for us to do the projects we were in the middle of. So we actually stopped several projects and just kind of froze them in place for several years.
Speaker 2:So just to reframe this, so in response to the 2005 Energy Policy Act, you were in the process at the time building the reliable electrical grid here in Southern Utah and it actually almost had the opposite effect where it delayed the development of these reliable development projects and then kind of refocus, doing what they're telling you to do rather than what necessarily your original plan was.
Speaker 2:Did it? Did it shift the plan or was it more like no, we're already doing this, so we're going to keep rolling? Did it? Did it really give you? Was it kind of a fork in the road?
Speaker 1:It was a little detour, Okay, yeah. So for a number of years we had to do what they were telling us we had to do. But, the problem was, they didn't know what you wanted them to do. Well, they were retroactively trying to prevent that 2003 outage. Okay, to prevent that 2003 outage Okay, so they were having us install equipment and do things that would have prevented that 2003 outage.
Speaker 2:But they're not. So they were looking backwards. It's like Monday morning quarterback. It's like, well, if we would have stopped this play in this way, then the game would have been a different outcome. When it's like, well, the next game and the next play isn't necessarily going to always be this thing, we still need to to advance forward. So they're exactly, interesting. Interesting, exactly so we had. We had the classic government, by the way. Reactionary not proactive, reactionary not pro.
Speaker 1:Yeah, classic oh, and let me just I'm going to jump ahead from my story back to modern life. I've got a hat that my intern gave me at the end of this last session. He gave me a red hat because I was saying we've got to make energy boring again Because, so you know, you get the play on words. Yeah, we got to make energy boring again because too many politicians and celebrities are interested in energy and they're trying to fix things that they don't understand.
Speaker 3:If it gets boring again, then they'll leave it to the nerds, the engineers, who can actually do something with it, which is funny because, like when we talked to lori I going into it, I was like this might be kind of boring, like I'm interested in it, but it might be kind of boring, but it actually wasn't. It was like the things that we talked about, maybe on a nuanced basis or, you know, leave it to the nerds but I thought it was super interesting. I mean it, it's the thing that literally when you flick the switch or you know, start your dishwasher, that's. You know, it's almost like going to the grocery store and not even thinking about where the food comes from. You know when people flick the switch.
Speaker 2:While I'm thinking about it, mal, will you link? It's episode 19 of the podcast, so you got to go way back to look at this, this episode again. We didn't have very many views because we had just kind of started the podcast, but this I think it was such a good background she does such a good job giving background. So, like if, if this conversation is interesting and not boring as much as you want it to be boring, at least as an educated individual, because, because I think, as a voter, right, we, we want to leave, you know, decisions not to the most charismatic person sometimes. You know you got to have a tactician, you know a technical advisor making decisions to do this. So, uh, understanding it, if you're interested in the energy sector, we'll link it in the podcast below. But so, um, we're going to go back to.
Speaker 1:So back to where we were, yeah, we put, we put a pin in some projects that, by the way, spoil the outcome. We spent, we and I'm saying we as Dixie Power and we as Washington County we spent probably a dozen or so years under that regime before we got to the point where we were just filing. We got all the things built that they wanted built and so we and we spent a lot of money, and that's fine. But, um, we were just filing quarterly reports to saying there's nothing to report. There's nothing to report, nothing to report. And uh, and we had to change all of our passwords every quarter. So every time I went to file a quarterly report, the first thing I had to do was change my password and then I can file the report, log off and then know in three months I was going to have to change my password, file the report and do it again. Anyway, uh, and do it again.
Speaker 1:Anyway, we started applying to be exempted from these regulations. We're saying, look, you've now exempted generators out of hospitals, you've exempted these. You know, they started exempting things as they realized they have regulated everything but they had no capability of understanding everything. So they kind of started narrowing their focus, and this is over a course of 12, 15 years?
Speaker 2:I think of 12 and 15 years, especially when it comes to power. Is that delays? That's really put us into a hole today, because we spent so much time kind of chasing our tail. Is that a good way to describe it, chasing our tail rather than focusing in on production?
Speaker 1:yeah, a little bit of a holding pattern. We, we did all the things they wanted us to do. We did that, okay, but we couldn't do the things we wanted to do. We, you know, we're electrical, I'm an electrical engineer, several people in our group are, and uh, and the folks at in this regulatory structure mostly are not, yeah, and so, uh, anyway, we did finally get exempted, okay, and we got the entire county out of this jurisdiction and then we started our projects. But certain not to get too detailed, but certain projects we wanted to do would have brought us back into this regulation, back into this regulation. So then we started the process of getting an exemption, what we called the local network exclusion, to say we can't cause the Northeast to go out. We are, and we can't even cause the state of Utah to go out. Washington County is at the end of the row, we are far away. If we do everything wrong, the only people who will be out will be us. We can't affect Las Vegas, we can't affect Salt Lake.
Speaker 2:We might as well be Texas.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean we're just so far away we can't affect anybody. We finally succeeded in getting the local network exclusion last year, okay wow and so yeah 20 years later yeah, which is which is why I ended up getting into politics. But but um, we, we got excluded, and so now we're actually in time for this summer, implementing those projects we were on the way to doing, oh, back in 07 when we had to put a pin in it, wow.
Speaker 2:So these projects took us away from producing energy? Is that fair to say no?
Speaker 1:just took us away from making our system more reliable.
Speaker 2:Okay, so it was like the opposite effect we were supposed to be improving our reliability, but in effect it slowed us down from becoming more reliable.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yes, yes, that was the effect, the effect, and I went to many meetings and I was on several panels you know panel discussions in front of the big group, saying that these regulations you have put have prevented us from doing these specific projects, which are designed to make us more reliable, and and I hope you're happy with that, because that's that should be the opposite of what you want. So it was my nagging them for, however, 15 years that finally got us out so, um, that's.
Speaker 2:That's really interesting, because I'm reading the summary here for the Energy Policy Act and this is domestic energy production. The act encouraged domestic energy production by reducing royalties for marginal oil and gas wells on public lands, increasing access to federal lands for drilling activities and promoting clean coal initiatives. I don't think it did that. Did it do that?
Speaker 1:No, not well.
Speaker 2:In some places.
Speaker 1:It may have done those things In some places, those things in some places. Well, it may have done those things, but it didn't do. I mean what it did do, and I and I haven't read the summary of what the act is but what it did do was give control of reliability. So this is Congress giving control of reliability to FERC, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. Now FERC's job is to regulate interstate commerce in energy. Well, so now Congress has given FERC the job to regulate reliability to prevent the 2003 outage from reoccurring. I don't know if it says that in that summary.
Speaker 2:It doesn't really say that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, so there were a lot of details. Also, it may not say that it outlawed incandescent light bulbs.
Speaker 2:Yeah, which is interesting. What's your take on that?
Speaker 1:Oh well, that was a huge overreach and it was especially bad at the beginning and I got us off on a tangent here, but it was especially bad at the beginning. If you remember, before that Energy Policy Act in 2005, you could buy a four-pack of incandescent light bulbs for a dollar. Yeah, 25 cents a light bulb. Yeah, light bulbs for a dollar. Yeah, 25 cents a light bulb. Yeah, you know. And they last about a year, you know. And if you get a 25 watt, it makes burns 25 watts, and you get 100 watt, it burns 100 watts. And so they were, uh, congress or whoever wrote the thing, which I'm sure wasn't congress, but whoever wrote, whoever wrote that piece of it, said you know, know, for the amount of light, these produce a lot of heat, which is true, but I mean, the light bulbs were so cheap and the electricity was negligible. Yeah, it made some heat. So they said, well, you got to go to a more efficient light bulb. And at that time, the only more efficient light bulb that we had was were compact fluorescent bulbs.
Speaker 2:Um, I've changed many of those out. Yeah, the little the little twisty ones, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:And, uh, the, and I refused to put any of those in my house at the time. I went out when I knew that the, that the policy act was taking effect. I went out when I knew that the Policy Act was taking effect. I went out and bought cases of incandescent light bulbs. I'm almost through all of those. I'm not quite, but at some point I'm going to have to buy some new light bulbs. But I wasn't going to put compact fluorescents in my house because another name for them are mercury vapor bulbs and utilities had been required by law to remove all mercury vapor streetlights. We had used mercury vapor bulbs in streetlights but because if you break one and then the mercury goes to the ground, you create a toxic gas. A toxic gas, you create a toxic spill and requires hazmat cleanup. So they outlawed them for light bulbs and outlawed them for street lights. And then it was like a year later they were mandating we were putting them in our homes.
Speaker 2:Which is so interesting.
Speaker 1:And I'm like I'm not putting these in my house, I just took them all down from the streets because they're not safe outside so with the leds?
Speaker 2:uh, not, we're going to stick on this. Just one more second. Everybody just hang with me. My understanding is because the the housing uh voltage isn't set for low voltage, the LEDs don't necessarily save that much more energy than the incandescent light bulbs. Is that accurate? Because my LEDs go out all the time. They say like 25 years. I was like no, I'm changing light bulbs all the time because we're not on a low voltage. My house isn't low voltage, so it's getting compressed from the power of the house into the bulb and the base of the bulb still gets hot yeah, yeah, because, and and it was the same, yeah, so leds right, led means light emitting diode.
Speaker 1:Uh, it's like it. It has then in the base of the bulb an electronic, a little piece of solid state electronics that's converting the voltage. And I remember when they invented those I was actually in college. One of my college professors, I remember, came into our class talking about how he had invented a solid state ballast so they could do light bulbs with fluorescent tubes or LEDs, and of course that was in the early 80. All the converters which don't fit the same sockets that your incandescent bulbs fit right, and so that still makes heat. But also LEDs are little point light sources. So you have to put a whole bunch of LEDs to make something that approximates a light that an incandescent bulb would do. And an incandescent bulb makes a bulb. It's a glow as opposed to just a beam of light. So you have to get a bunch of beams facing different directions to get something approximating. But it doesn't. It's not equivalent at all, and they're so much more expensive. They're more than a quarter each. Yeah, you've probably noticed when you buy those yeah.
Speaker 1:And someday I'm going to have to buy some too.
Speaker 2:So do they. It uses less energy, though it does use less, it does use less energy, yeah. So I mean going forward in thinking less energy, there's saving energy, and then there's the production of energy. And we're coming to this because I do want to keep moving in the direction of where are we headed. So Dixie Power is mainly a coal manufacturing plant. Is that correct?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so Dixie Power is a distribution cooperative. We're a nonprofit. We're owned by our members. Whoever buys power from us is a member and they own one out of 35,000 shares. Every time we add a member right, you have more shares. Today it's about 35,000. And so we are one of five rural electric cooperatives who jointly own a sixth electric cooperative, but this one, instead of it being a distribution, the sixth one is a generation cooperative. Okay, so the five of us own deseret power, and deseret power generates the electricity for the five of us okay and yes, they have.
Speaker 1:they have a big coal power plant in bonanza, at bonanzaanza, which is over by Vernal. They own a share of Hunter Power Plant which is over near Price. They have an allocation out of IPP which is in Delta, and they have some hydro, an allocation of hydro out of Glen Canyon.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:So altogether it's about 800 megawatts, uh, to serve the five of us, and then whatever we don't need we sell on the open market. Got it? And uh, so uh. But if you add up bonanza, hunter and ipp, those are all coal. So we 75, 80% coal.
Speaker 2:So so thinking of, like the the uh push towards, um, clean energy, where there's some debate whether coal is clean or not clean. You know some people say there's clean ways of producing coal energy. Um, but the vast majority. I listened to a documentary about the Kentucky area and how there's all these old coal plants that are just old, antiquated plants that would literally rain ash down onto the cities surrounding areas. So, thinking about that push away from coal. What is Dixie Power doing to push into a more clean energy sector? Is there? Is there plans? One of the things that Lori said is that she felt like by 2030, because these coal power plants are going to get phased out that there's going to be an increase in costs for Dixie Power users. Is that accurate?
Speaker 1:It's not accurate. Um, I it's, it's not accurate. And, uh, she she was. She was telling you what she knew at the time, right, Uh, which is, which is not the direction that I would have taken the conversation. I took it there.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah Well and that's fine.
Speaker 1:Um, let's let's talk a little bit about coal power. Okay, let's talk a little bit about coal power. Okay, so, as we described, the old power plants from Kentucky and some of those states, those there were even some in Emory County too that have been shut down.
Speaker 1:There was the one the carbon-, that one in Helper. Yes, yep, those were from like the 40s. They were World War II power plants and they did not have all of the mission controls on them that the current fleet has here in Utah. I mentioned our share in the power plants. If you look at the four power plants in the state of Utah, there's the Bonanza one that I talked about, that the co-ops own Rocky Mountain Power owns Hunter and Huntington, which are both over by price, and then the municipalities, through the state, own IPP. So those are the four power plants and they're're all coal and they're from the 80s, mm-hmm, so they're post EPA. The old ones were pre EPA. The EPA back in 19,. It was formed in 1970. You guys don't remember that, but I do.
Speaker 1:Where we, where our job was to clean up the air and the water, right In the 60s, we had reached a point where we had a lot of air pollution and a lot of water pollution and a lot of litter too. There was a big pitch. I remember in the 70s it was a nationwide program called Pitch In. It had a real catchy tune. We even played it in my high school band. We played, we played pitch in anyway. We picked up the trash along freeways and america is a better place for it.
Speaker 1:But uh, some of the technology we put in those power plants since the 80s we put what they call bag houses. So you you know, when you make electricity, the most efficient way to make electricity, whether it's through coal or gas or nuclear, is to turn a turbine with steam, because steam is more efficient than turning a turbine with gas, a hot gas. So if you have what they call a simple cycle natural gas generator, you burn the gas, you burn the natural gas and it makes a hot gas which spins a turbine. That's less efficient than if you burn the natural gas or burn the coal or make a nuclear reaction. Burn the natural gas or burn the coal or make a nuclear reaction and you then boil water and you use the steam to turn the turbine.
Speaker 2:The density of the water pushes the turbine. It's better than the gas.
Speaker 1:Right, yes, so once we've burned, we've combusted the coal. Of course, that makes ash and other byproducts that the EPA started to regulate in 1970. There were five of them and on a good day I could tell you what all the five were. There's particulates, mercury, sulfur oxides, nitrogen oxides, and what's the fifth one?
Speaker 2:Carbon, no nitrogen oxides and uh, what's the fifth one?
Speaker 1:carbon? Uh, no, um, so you got four out of five. I'll give you, yeah, yeah, we'll, we'll look the other one up. So the put, put, put your finger on the the other one. You said carbon, and we'll go back to carbon dioxide. That's a later discussion, but in the 70s we were looking at actual things that caused air pollution and so, as we filtered those out, we do that in two stages. Well, we do it in three stages Ozone, ozone. There we go.
Speaker 1:Ozone nitrogen oxide, sulfur dioxide, carbon monoxide and lead. Yeah so, and mercury is one that we do in power plants.
Speaker 2:Oh, okay.
Speaker 1:Got it. Lead was a big deal in gasoline because they were using lead as an additive.
Speaker 2:Lead yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:And I remember I was working at a gas station back when I was a kid and we had leaded. We had regular and premium and then later, when we came out with unleaded after the EPA, as we were transitioning our cars from leaded gasoline to unleaded, then we had to have another gas pump for unleaded, which has been good right. I mean I'm sure all of my kids will have a higher IQ than my generation For sure, because we inhaled a lot of lead in our day.
Speaker 2:So the bag going back to it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so we have three stages of emissions controls in a power plant. The first one is called over fire air. When you, when you spray um the coal dust into the big combustion chamber and and you have, and you have these flames that go in um and you do, and you blow air in and you get this big circulating fireball. The position of where the air goes in versus where the coal goes in affects the nitrogen oxides.
Speaker 2:Okay, okay.
Speaker 1:So we actually had to go back and retrofit our big firebox and move the air inputs down a floor because the things were like 20 stories tall. Wow, we had to move it down a floor so we could blow air here instead of 10 foot higher and that reduced the nitrogen oxides. Interesting to 10 foot higher and that reduced the nitrogen oxides, interesting anyway. Then it goes out after, after it's combusted and made steam. The walls, the walls of the firebox are pipes, tubes, that where you circulate the water which makes it steam. So you're circulating steam and uh, but then the exhaust comes out and it doesn't come out the stack. Yet you capture the exhaust and it goes through these big.
Speaker 1:So stage two are these big bags. It's called a bag house Think about a vacuum cleaner bag Only instead of paper they're big steel mesh bags and they're like 20 stories tall, they're almost as tall as the firebox and so they go through these and they go through like 130 something of them and it captures the particulates, captures mercury and captures several other things that come out of it. And so then, once the last stage you go through, stage three is a scrubber where they grind. We grind limestone and mix it with water and run the, now, the, whatever the exhaust through this scrubber and that limestone latches to the mercury Okay, yeah, through the mercury at the end and that drops it out. So then, when you finally get to the stack at the end, the only thing coming out is steam.
Speaker 2:Okay, and that's been going on since the 80s. That's been going on since the 80s. So this idea that these coal power plants, especially the post-EPA coal power plants, are causing greenhouse emissions the only emission maybe is carbon Is that what their argument is?
Speaker 1:Well, so we've taken out everything that the EPA regulates. In fact, the EPA set standards about what's allowable and we're emitting like a tenth of that.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:Now you go. We mentioned Al Gore earlier.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And he actually came after the 2005 Energy Policy Act right.
Speaker 3:He said we were going to be dead by now.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, global warming was going to kill us all.
Speaker 2:Fear tactics, Everybody they like to play fear tactics.
Speaker 1:Yeah, they like to catastrophize everything. Yeah, because you give more money when it's a catastrophe. Yeah, of course it's a crisis.
Speaker 3:Right, maybe course it's a crisis. Right, maybe we should implement that in real estate. It's a real estate crisis.
Speaker 2:I think that people are already talking about real estate yeah, you're right.
Speaker 3:Yeah, they're already play into that a little bit.
Speaker 1:Yeah, this is a crisis everybody yeah, yeah so, uh, with with him and, you know, before him, I, you know, I started hearing about global warming and things in the 90s. Uh, now remember when I was in high school in the 70s, it was global cooling, it was global cooling I. I remember being scared to death. One evening I was watching on abc. Uh, there was a special, uh, you know, a science special narrated by leonard namoy. Air quote science special, science special. I gave air quotes because I can't say it with a straight face if I don't do the air quotes, because Spock was the one.
Speaker 2:Spock's talking about it, yeah.
Speaker 1:And I had watched him in the 60s on Star Trek so I knew he was the science officer.
Speaker 2:He's the science guy. He's like Bill Nye. Yeah, total science guy. Absolutely Right, yeah, total science guy Absolutely Right.
Speaker 1:So Leonard Nimoy is narrating this about how we were all going to freeze to death and die because of coal-fired power plants.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Elon Musk this is recently has talked about how he's like, if there is something to be actually scared about, it would be another Arctic winter. Like a legitimate you know what's the ice age. It's like a legitimate you know, uh, it's what, what's the uh ice age? It's like a legitimate ice age. So we get to a point where we warm up so much and then all of a sudden it flips over and then we get into a an ice age and it's a lot more difficult to warm somebody up than to cool them off yeah, more people die of cold every year than die already, Still, even today even today.
Speaker 1:So, and in the 70s we had some really severe winters. I remember seeing 30 below on, you know, on our front porch thermostat.
Speaker 2:That's crazy.
Speaker 1:And when they were telling me that we were going into global cooling, that was really scary, yeah, anyway. And then the late 90s. They're saying well, now it's global warming. Yeah, and I'm like wait, wait what just happened here.
Speaker 3:20 years is not that long in the scheme of life.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, no. 20 years, that was the span from. You scared me to death about global cooling, and now you're telling me about global warming. That's less scary now.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:I'm starting to see a pattern. Yeah, I'm not sure what it is, but it's. You know, it's not as scary the second time around, anyway. So it wasn't until, yeah, after Al Gore got his Oscar and his Nobel Peace Prize that we started talking a lot about CO2. Peace Prize that we started talking a lot about CO2. Well, CO2 is in every can of Coke and Pepsi and that's not too scary. So they started shortening the word and instead of saying CO2, they'll just say carbon, because carbon is more evocative of the old industrial revolution in england, where they were just burning coal unfiltered and putting it into the air and and you couldn't see anything because of the smoke and the smog yeah, yeah, I think of like, like, um, like big diesel trucks rolling coal you know what I mean or like like, Chimney sweeps like burning wood and how you get this black ash that comes out of it, yeah.
Speaker 3:Or like on a direct injected engine, the valves will carbon up and you got to go in and walnut blast all the carbon out and it makes your engine run better. That's kind of, I think, of the black gross, kind of yeah, just carbon, just the word carbon right, and that's why they say the word carbon, that's why they don't say co2 yeah, more scary.
Speaker 2:A lot of people get it mixed up with carbon monoxide, which is deadly right. It's like, yeah, carbon monoxide detector in your house, because you could fall asleep and then never wake up again. Where co2, carbon dioxide is different, right, and so they shift this, this conversation, to carbon. Yeah, I think of greenery like a jungle.
Speaker 3:When I think of carbon dioxide, I think of like everything's nice and green.
Speaker 2:You're a nerd well, if you go and you should think of that, though, because that's going- to a greenhouse, a professional greenhouse, you'll find that they pipe co2, yeah into the greenhouse. That makes things more green.
Speaker 3:Yeah, absolutely so correct me if I'm wrong here, but I've I've seen and this might just be propaganda, but I've seen reports that the world, the earth, the globe, is generally greener now than maybe, you know, a couple hundred years ago. I don't know if that's true or not, but I don't know.
Speaker 1:I mean, uh, we earth is certainly on a natural cycle. Yeah, you know.
Speaker 3:and if we look at that humans don't really have a ton of control over Right.
Speaker 1:If you look at the ice core samples from glaciers and they can go back tens of thousands of years and you look at the cycles that the temperatures have done and the CO2 levels have done and they can see the other gases in the atmosphere that are frozen in those ice core samples, you see that it goes through this cycle between ice age and not ice and the glaciers melt, and then we get ice age and then the glaciers melt and then we get ice age and then the glaciers melt and we go back through this cycle and it's been doing that for tens of thousands of years. I think it's awfully presumptuous of us to think that we're now suddenly we're controlling the atmosphere every time we crack a can of Coke.
Speaker 2:We got way off track. Let's go back to Dixie Power. Okay, time we crack a can of coke. We got way off track. Let's go back to uh, dixie power, okay. So if you're looking for a nice cup of coffee and you're in downtown st george, fs coffee co, that's where you're going to want to stop. It's right there on the corner of tabernacle main street downtown st george. So if you got a bicycle, ride it on down there and grab a drip of coffee and tell them the 435 guys sent you.
Speaker 1:So, yes, thank you. So, for Dixie Power and our customers, we're thinking that there's no reason for us to go away from coal as a generating fuel because we've cleaned up the emissions and CO2 is not an emission controlled by the EPA. Now, the last couple of EPA doesn't control CO2. They don't regulate it. Now, the last administration, they came up with an endangerment finding, which was one of those executive orders under the prior administration that said well, okay, we haven't done any studies and we haven't determined that CO2 is in the same category as mercury and sulfur and all of those things, but we have decided that global warming is an endangerment to all mankind and so we're going to, we're going to control CO2 and therefore we're going to shut down the power plants. Well, under the current administration, they've gone back and said well, that was an executive order, we can undo an executive order with another executive order. So they've undone the endangerment finding and so we're no longer in danger of all dying of global warming. That's good news, that's sweet, excellent news. Excellent news, especially if you look at, if you factor out the government regulation, you can.
Speaker 1:We have been making coal power in this state for many years. Well, if you go back to when we built these plants. They were building them at about half. They were making electricity about a half a cent a kilowatt hour. Wow, now it's gone up over the years. Recently it was up to like two or three cents a kilowatt hour Natural gas. With the natural gas prices, they were running at about six cents a kilowatt hour. So if you have coal at two to three cents, you had natural gas at about six cents a kilowatt hour. So if you have coal at two to three cents, you add natural gas at about six cents. Well then we started. You know, we invented fracking. So now we have unlimited natural gas. So we're exporting natural gas to the rest of the world.
Speaker 2:There's places in texas where they just burn it. They just burn it in stacks because they can't send it anywhere.
Speaker 1:They can't in utah too, in utah half half of all natural gas that gets pumped out of the ground gets burnt at the wellhead because there's too much of it to put to clean up and put in a pipe and go somewhere with it.
Speaker 2:I mean, I think I think there's some arguments to be made that the fracking is is, uh, having other ecological impacts on the area around it. I think that's a fair assessment to say what is fracking due to the natural environment, that we're doing that thing, which I think is just a separate conversation. So I don't want to go without saying that there's second and third order consequences with all energy production. Is that fair?
Speaker 2:to say it's like every energy production has some environmental impact. There, nothing including solar panels, including solar or uh uh wind there's not an energy production, uh or generating process that doesn't have an ecological impact of the surrounding area right.
Speaker 1:Every energy production has an ecological impact every single one, every single one, every single one.
Speaker 2:To varying degrees and in different ways.
Speaker 1:To different degrees and mitigated in different ways. Not to get off into the other weeds, but just briefly step on the weeds of those I've also. Before I became a representative, I spent the 30 years prior to that. My side job, my night job, was as a consultant for developing countries overseas they call it moonlighting.
Speaker 2:My moonlighting job. My moonlighting job Consulting other countries out of the area.
Speaker 1:And 30 different developing countries, from Bangladesh to Bolivia, uganda, dominican Republic, list the 30 poorest countries and those are the ones I've worked in Interesting From, you know, afghanistan, tajikistan, nepal, wow, anyway, crazy, anyway, those countries where they are energy impoverished, where they don't have electricity, what they're doing is burning wood, yeah, and that has the biggest ecological impact of anything.
Speaker 3:You're chopping down trees and burning it and putting all that smoke and soot in the air. I watched a video on I go down these rabbit holes of other countries and like vloggers that go to other countries. So I watched a video on Bangladesh and the air pollution in Bangladesh and the trash problem in Bangladesh and it is it's crazy yeah.
Speaker 2:Crazy. It definitely makes you reframe. How good of a job are we doing here? And even if you look at CO2 emissions if you look at just carbon dioxide emissions in the United States we're really the only country that's reduced our CO2 emissions versus every other country in the world. We're actually doing that thing where other countries aren't. Two-stroke engines, like I've seen in India and all these other developed countries. It's crazy Two-stroke engines that put all of these things that the EPA regulates just in every single house, in every single car, every single motorcycle.
Speaker 3:And so it's interesting that you bring that up, because when you look at the math behind that and the percentages, how low we already are and we reduce our emissions by a couple percentage points. You've got countries like bangladesh and india, and you know countries in africa that are don't do this at all that don't do anything at all, and so you know it's like what kind of an if not that what we're doing is bad, but what kind of effect globally are we having? Are we really?
Speaker 1:impacting the global I don't think environment in any way in a positive way well, and and the point you made is is exactly the point, and and it's part of the reason that that I have felt strongly about this. You know, I lived in bangladesh for three years with my family are your lungs okay still?
Speaker 1:I don't know, I might find out. I've got the lungs of a four pack a day smoker. Yeah, maybe, but yeah, no, the air was thick and I could tell stories about that too. But but we bring that back to at what have we accomplished and at what cost, and how much are we willing to spend for nothing? So, and I can show you graphs, and I post these on my Facebook page, which is my replacement now for my blog that I used to have. You know, before Facebook was a thing, I had a blog, yeah, and now it's my political Facebook page, not my personal Facebook page, but I post stuff. But I've shown many graphs about how, if you look at America's CO2 emissions, we have been bringing them down and we've been doing that at great expense to our country and to our economy and by largely shifting our economic production to China who, by the way, is not doing that. They are building new coal plants at the rate of, I don't know, like a one a week.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think it was one to two, it was like 1.5 a week or something like that. That's the number I remember. They're the biggest offender as far as pollution goes, yes, but coal, but back to it is coal, is coal actually.
Speaker 3:but as far as co2, right, how you're burning it, I guess, right well.
Speaker 1:So, um, and, and they're actually getting better as far as pollution goes. Uh, because of their own diplomats who were stationed in America or Europe, and then they went back to China, where they were not filtering their coal emissions and so they just had smog, and they were coming home saying I can't bring my family home from America and put them here. And so they've actually put those filters on their power plants. I was there last year. I took my family over for a few weeks, and the air was smoggy, like in beijing, especially smoggy, like any big city, but uh, but not like it used to be, not like even it was in the beijing olympics yeah, yeah, I remember shut down their power plants for days yeah, and they literally had like fan, they had like turbines, like blowing the smog out of the city to try and and and disperse that, disperse it all out.
Speaker 2:I remember that, yeah, so they've gotten better, but they're also opening nuclear power plants at an insane rate absolutely, and I saw a bunch of them.
Speaker 1:I may have taken a couple of pictures, but, but they're gonna find you, they're gonna find. But if you look at the world co2 levels, the world co, if america's rates are going down a little bit, the world rates are going up a lot. Right, because of the of china and india. We have outsourced our production from us to them To make us feel better. To make us feel better, yes, and at what cost? Right, we're raising our own costs by doing that and we're hampering our own economy. And so the underlying thing is I'm looking at as a power engineer and as a policymaker who focuses a lot on the energy space, because I came to the conclusion 20 years ago, in 2005,.
Speaker 1:The politicians clearly don't understand energy or they wouldn't have done what they did. But but the my driving, my driving, my driving force is to keep energy reliable and affordable. If we keep it reliable and affordable, then we'll help our economy, we'll make everyone prosperous. We'll avoid the pitfalls of, say, a Bangladesh or a Bolivia or Afghanistan or Nepal you know list every country in Africa. All of those countries are poor, largely because they're energy impoverished now, and a lot of that is due to poor policy. Some of it is due to lack of resources, but a lot of it is the fault of their elected leaders or not elected leaders that's a great point?
Speaker 1:yeah, absolutely, and so if we can protect our energy security, we'll protect our. We'll protect our uh prosperity and we'll keep things clean because we produce we produce electricity way cleaner than any of those countries. We produce natural gas cleaner. Our natural gas companies oil and natural gas companies here in Utah have voluntarily implemented some mechanisms on their wells where they block the methane emissions. So if you look at the methane emissions from pumping oil and natural gas, utah has some of the lowest methane emissions and that was something that they did voluntarily because they could afford to.
Speaker 1:When you're prosperous, you can afford to be clean. If you go to the poorest third country, third world countries, they can't afford to be clean. They're busy trying to feed themselves. I mean, russia doesn't take care of their methane emissions when they pump oil and gas and sell it to Europe because they're too fancy to frack. You know Europe banned fracking because you know that's a dirty business. Well, russia doesn't do any of those emissions controls when they pump oil and gas and sell it to Spain and Denmark and England and Germany.
Speaker 3:But it makes those European countries but they feel good.
Speaker 2:So thinking how do we move this forward? So there was a couple of bills that you were a part of in this last legislative session, it seems like, because it was an executive order to shut down these coal power plants. You're saying that now, with the new president, that's not as much of a worry, but who knows what happens again in another four years, right? So? So as a business owner, right, as a operator of a business that produces this utility, that makes money, that makes a lot of money but also provides an essential service, what? What do we do here at the state level? One of the things that Laurie Mangum talked about is the risk of investing in different types of power. Is, if you put all your eggs into just the nuclear basket, right, there's a high risk that that company that says they're going to develop this nuclear power plant goes bankrupt. Or they come in and it's $100 million or $1 dollars more than what they originally set out to, and all of a sudden, you know, cities go bankrupt because we have Dixie Power, but we also have St George Municipal Power, we have Santa Clara Municipal Power, we have all these different organizations where the consumers buy from.
Speaker 2:How do we become less reliant on federal policies that seem to be short-sighted. How do we in the state of Utah be able to fund some of these projects? It seems to me, if we're burning 50% of the natural gas that comes out of these fracking, why couldn't we just build some small natural gas generating power plants? Because if we could increase the supply, the demand's obviously going up and it's going up at a rapid rate. Especially with AI and data centers and all these other things, we need to increase that supply. So what are we doing at the state level, outside of the federal policies that are going to come and go to stabilize that energy grid here in Utah?
Speaker 1:Yes, and you've got to. You've boiled this down to the million-dollar question. What's the next thing? And where do we spend our money? And that has been the discussion around the board table in the power companies for over a decade, as coal was under attack. So well, we can't maybe invest a lot of money safely in coal, oh. But now natural gas is also under attack, so the smart play is not to go to natural gas, oh, and the federal government won't license any nuclear power plants, so we can't go to nuclear. Now we're getting out of options. They were trying to steer us all to wind and solar, which is a whole other hour-long discussion about why those won't work uh, and we're.
Speaker 2:I think the main if I if I let me boil this down is that it doesn't always produce energy, and so when we need it, it doesn't mean it's there. Where, if it's natural gas, you can store it up in a bottle and use it when we need it. Where we can't just store up the wind, except for in a battery, which is probably equally as damaging to the environment and has a cost that is extremely high compared to these other other ways of doing it, and but it's the reliability of solar and wind is only about 20 of the time that you can really reliably hold it. So if you have this steady stream of energy need that we always have we've got the lights on in here. It's not yet summer.
Speaker 2:The increase in energy changes with the seasons. We can't always rely on the sun to be shining, we can't always rely on the wind to be blowing, and so the reliability it just puts it okay, we get a stream and maybe we can store up some, but it's not going to the 80% that we need has to come from other sources. Yep.
Speaker 1:Right, okay, so good. So you did the good summary. You said it a lot shorter than I would have, so that's better. So what can we do? Well, there's several things we can do, and these are the things we've decided to do. One is we push back against the EPA and the administration. We said you can't force us to tear down our coal plants until we have a replacement, and I feel like we've gotten to a really good place with that. It's a continuous fight and of of course, as you mentioned, we have.
Speaker 1:We have now a second term with president trump. He doesn't get a third term. So you know, we have a very narrow window to put things into legislation or what you know. So, all number one, we've got to do the work with the coal plants that we have to keep the lights on in the meantime. Then, okay, what's stage two? What's the next thing?
Speaker 1:Well, I don't know where the future of coal is. Maybe coal has a future, maybe it doesn't. Certainly, natural gas has a future, because it has. I mean, it is co-located with oil and we're always going to need oil. So whenever we go after oil, we get natural gas. That's largely true. It's not exclusively true. So we do have to build more natural gas and natural gas is conducive to building more smaller plants and we're in the process of doing that. St George City has built some natural gas plants here in the city. Dixie Power has built a natural gas plant here in the city. We're trying to get an EPA license to build a larger natural gas plant out next to our coal plant, but under the prior administration they were saying we're not permitting any natural gas Under the current administration. They are now talking to us and I think we will build that natural gas plant. We're building the pipeline, we're getting that all set up and we've got more capacity here in St George. We have more land and we've built gas capacity in when we built our last gas plant to build more gas plants here. So that's going forward. We're working in the nuclear space.
Speaker 1:We talked a lot about the 2005 Energy Policy Act. One of the other things it did is it specifically authorized units three and four at the voltage generating station in Georgia. So Georgia had a nuclear power plant that had units one and two built out of five that were licensed, and then the 2005 Energy Policy Act authorized specifically units three and four which, by the way, came online last year. Wow, 20 years, 20 years. You did that math really quick. Yeah, yeah, 20 years and triple the budget. Surprise, oh, it's shocking Weird. Yeah, quick, yeah, yeah, 20 years and triple the budget surprise, oh, it's shocking weird, yeah, so, um, okay, well, not a lot of us want to sign up for a 20-year project with an unknown cost.
Speaker 1:The municipalities tried to do that. They had their new scale power project. They wanted to build a nuclear plant up in idaho. They spent I don't know a dozen years and millions of dollars trying to get it and they never could get any. Never could get a license. In fact, today there are no licensed designs for nuclear power plants in the entire country. Yeah, so if you, want to get.
Speaker 2:What about that wyoming one?
Speaker 1:yeah also not licensed and not designed. Wow so you. So Hurricane bought into that Right. Bless them so.
Speaker 3:Bless their hearts.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so you have heard that the nuclear plant in Cameroon Wyoming's broken ground. Well, clever them. If you build a nuclear power plant, everything in that campus has to be nuclear rated. Every nut bolt, door I don't know filing cabinet has to be nuclear rated.
Speaker 2:I've got these nuclear rated filing cabinets in here, you guys. Anybody want them on Facebook? Yeah. So what they've done, we'll give you a good discount.
Speaker 1:What they've done is they've broken their design into two campuses, separated by a fence the non-nuclear campus and the nuclear campus. So and then they're just going to pass steam across the thing anyway.
Speaker 2:So they've broken ground on the non-nuclear campus and that's a, that's campus and that's a publicity stunt, that's a publicity stunt To sell it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, look, we broke ground.
Speaker 3:We need more time.
Speaker 1:We broke ground.
Speaker 3:So if you want to, become a billionaire, you would come up with a design for a nuclear power plant that could easily get licensed by the EPA.
Speaker 1:Yeah, by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Different who's not regulated by the EPA, Not by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Speaker 3:Different who's not regulated by the EPA.
Speaker 1:Not by the EPA, by the NRC, so different government entity.
Speaker 3:I just want to put an incandescent light bulb in my house. That's all I want.
Speaker 1:I have those in my house.
Speaker 3:You're going to get people knocking on your door asking for incandescent. Well, I think in the state of utah.
Speaker 2:Didn't they pass that you can use incandescent light bulbs now again I don't think you can get them.
Speaker 3:I mean, you go to walmart to buy incandescent bulbs and they're not there.
Speaker 2:They're only leds in the store now so, so we pass it, we pass the bill, but we can't use it.
Speaker 3:Let's see how much incandescent bulbs are on ebay, I know but did they pass that?
Speaker 2:Was that a bill that was passed?
Speaker 1:I'm not sure, I don't know that bill.
Speaker 2:Okay, okay, I made that up. Everybody just ignores me sometimes.
Speaker 1:But they are working. One of the promising things I know that Tennessee Valley Authority, which is a federal government entity that generates and retails electricity in Tennessee Valley, they are working on a small modular nuclear reactor designed to get it permitted there. I think I don't know there are a dozen years into it. They think they'll have it in the next eight years and if they get it designed, they get an approved design and they get some built and installed, then these will be, instead of being custom designed and custom built, they'll be designed for factory production and then will be shipped to sites and installed. If they get that permit done and they're the federal government, so they ought to if they get that design. And then there's a company who's made a dozen of these and now they have a dozen more on the showroom some of the rest of us will be able to go get those at something less than a gazillion dollars.
Speaker 2:And a gazillion years right, so it'll be. So there's some streamline ahead, so there's some hope ahead for the energy production sector, which we really need, which we really need.
Speaker 1:We really need, which we really need, we really need. And one other technology that I'm a little enthused over is geothermal. Now, geothermal has been negligible in the power production scheme of things Because it's expensive right. It's very expensive and it's very limited in where you can do it.
Speaker 2:We can do it in LaBergen.
Speaker 1:No, no, it's not hot enough and there's not enough?
Speaker 2:Oh, it's not hot enough, Okay so think about Yellowstone. Uh-huh.
Speaker 1:You know you could do it in Yellowstone, but nobody would let you do it in Yellowstone, but they do it in Iceland. Okay, how? And we actually have three geothermal power plants in the state of Utah. They're relatively small though, just I mean, that's why I'm saying it's in the rounding error that if you look at a percentage it's 0%. But but the Department of Energy ran a project through the University of Utah and it's called FORGE, which is an acronym F-O-R-G-E, and I don't remember what it stands for. Probably G-E is geothermal energy, but FORGE, and through FORGE they have invented a new way to do geothermal energy utilizing fracking.
Speaker 1:Geothermal energy utilizing fracking, taking technology from oil fields where you drill a mile down and you go a couple of miles in every direction and you build a pair of wells, which you do in geothermal anyway, in normal geothermal energy.
Speaker 1:You go down into these hot uh aquifers and you get this saline brine and you circulate that hot up, run it through, you flash it to make steam, put it back in and you circulate that brine and then you make steam over here.
Speaker 1:Well, finding a hot aquifer is hard, even in Iceland. I visited Iceland last year and visited their geothermal plants. They have a hard time finding pools of brine, even if you go down, even if you're on a volcano and you go down a mile, you don't always. Sometimes you just find hot rocks, and that's not good enough. Yeah, ah, sometimes you just find hot rocks and that's not good enough. But with this new process you frack between your two wells and you create a little honeycomb and then you circulate your own brine through the frizzers and bring it back out and now you can make steam Got it so that's been invented here in Utah. Make steam Got it, so that's been invented here in Utah. And with that we think we have a much larger potential for geothermal energy than what we had when we were just looking for pools of brine that we could just go tap into, because we have a lot more, just hot rocks.
Speaker 1:Yeah and so by doing this, uh, the private sector has now gone in and built a facility immediately adjacent to forge's field. Work. Forge has this field where they've been developing this technology, and now a private company has come in and built a fence adjacent to their fence and they're drilling wells to actually do that and make energy with it. So will that all pan out? Hopefully and maybe, and so some of us who have a good geology for hot rocks, relatively close to the surface, only a mile deep, we could make a lot of energy with geothermal, if that pans out, and geothermal is really clean.
Speaker 1:Well, yeah, it's absolutely. I mean so, as we pointed out earlier, you pointed out, and I agree, nothing is 100% clean. The brine circulating through a honeycomb that you make that has some traces that are left on the rocks a mile down. Does that affect the quality of life? Maybe not, yeah, um, so, yeah, so relatively very clean. Uh, does it bring up CO2? Yes, it does.
Speaker 1:I mean that's one of the things Iceland felt really bad about, that as they were circulating this brine. What comes up with the brine is also CO2. And so they're saying, well, yeah, we're making electricity, but we are releasing CO2. So they've taken a technology that we developed up in North Dakota and I went to that lab also where they've developed this technology to do capture air, capture of CO2, to filter CO2 out of the air, and they developed that in North Dakota. Well, iceland's imported that and they've put that next to some of their geothermal plants to suck the CO2 out of the air and then they make carbonated water and shoot that down into the rocks and then the carbonation, the carbonated water, crystallizes in the rocks.
Speaker 2:And it just stays in the rocks.
Speaker 1:It stays in the rocks, in the dirt.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so you go down a mile and now you got carbonated dirt.
Speaker 1:yeah, carbonated rocks. Yeah, carbonated rocks. It crystallizes anyway, so, uh, so what's the future? None of us knows. But we're doing several things to keep the lights on and keep it affordable. We're we're we're Maintenancing and upgrading our coal plants. We are adding extra emissions controls. Think about the, the deaf that you put on a diesel truck to to clean up those emissions. We have that. They're called selective catalytic reducers, scrs. We're putting that on our coal plants to reduce even more the emissions, which are already at less than 10% of the EPA levels. But we're putting SCRs on the coal plants. Potentially, we could look at CO2 capture sequestration. It's very expensive and very energy intensive if we all decided that co2 was in fact going to end life as we know it. And we're looking at nuclear. Can can tva get that nuclear license? And we're looking at geothermal. Does forge in fact change the future of geothermal energy? That's really. And we're looking at geothermal Does Forge in fact change the future of geothermal energy? That's really interesting.
Speaker 1:So we're keeping the lights on and looking at what's the next stage. We're building some natural gas power plants.
Speaker 2:And we want to get them down here. We want them here in Washington County.
Speaker 1:We want them distributed right, and so we're making that space available.
Speaker 2:I know We've been talking for about an hour. We're making that space available. I know we've been talking for about an hour.
Speaker 1:It's 1115. And I've and I apologize, but I do have to go- that's okay.
Speaker 2:Okay, I'm going to save this question. I'll save it for another time. I really appreciate you coming in and talking about this. A lot of detailed information here. I think you definitely made me feel better about where we're headed, especially with it. I didn't know that about the nuclear licensing and as much as there's a lot of fear getting pumped into the media about how we're not doing enough and we're going to fall behind and China's going to take over the world and all these other you know fearful things. We got a lot of smart people on a lot of these projects that are that give a bright light, uh, moving forward. And in Southern Utah we're going to hang in there like we always have.
Speaker 1:We're going to hang in there. Absolutely, that's very accurate. Southern Utah, I feel like, is leading the state and I feel like the state is leading the country in keeping the lights on and making it affordable.
Speaker 2:Well, I'm glad you're on the hill, the Salt Lake Hill as it is. Yeah, stay out of the federal government. You just stay here in Utah.
Speaker 3:We don't want to ship.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we need you here. We don't want to ship you out, but uh hope everybody enjoyed this episode. Uh, tune in. Next time We'll have you back in. Uh, thanks for tuning in, guys. We'll see you out there, Thank you. Thanks for listening in no-transcript.