Chuck Yates Needs A Job

0:20 Hey everybody welcome to Chuck Yates needs a job from London welcome to London to what's the vibes like this is so cool we've had a great time in London it's awesome all that I have to start here

0:36 though the accent yeah where in London is it because Laura the girlfriend sitting off-screen tells me I have to learn how to know the regional accent so it's not just good enough for me to say outside

0:51 America that was the accent so my accent yes I'm not from London I'm from a place called Essex which I think Timothy Chamalae said on TikTok a few days ago that it was a really sexy accent yes accent

1:06 but he also said Hull was a sexy accent and so maybe it was just rolling but yes I'm Essex I'm East of London so how far from here it's about half an hour right riding on a train because we have some

1:18 good public transit Yeah, about 40 miles. This is one of my favorite things. So you guys built 90 of your train tracks back in the

1:28 1850s. Victorian times. Yeah, you had this railroad bubble. And one of the Rothschilds is reported as saying there are three paths to ruin, wine, women, and engineers. The first two are more

1:42 fun, but the last one, most certain. So yeah. Yeah, a lot more longevity in the last one. Yeah, exactly So, all right, so you're from Essex. This is what I don't understand. This is where

1:53 we need to start. Let's level set here. You are doing fashion, and now all of a sudden you're saving the world by generating electricity. Walk me through that. So fashion is just one of the areas

2:11 I found myself working in. I've also gone door-to-door selling double glazing I've worked in McDonald's. I've been in the Home Depot equivalent. I think there was no linear trajectory of career

2:28 with me. It's been very much just making a buck throughout those kind of teen, formative years. And I sort of fell into fashion. And as I said to you, I don't tend to know how to dress myself

2:44 very well. So I definitely wasn't in fashion. I obviously don't do that well I can't take it off, go on, go on, just. We're not doing a shortlist podcast. I would set the ratings back, yeah.

2:54 That's who's waiting to come in next again. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, so I didn't, I've not known what I wanted to do for most of my life. And I think that's something a lot of people can relate to.

3:04 You kind of come through a very archaic education system and you kind of take jobs that come up. And that's certainly what I did. I never wanted to work in fashion But after university, I couldn't

3:18 fathom anything other than. finding some full-time work. I wasn't interested in getting more degrees or masters. I wasn't strictly academic. So I just got into digital marketing 'cause it was the

3:31 hot thing at the time. Thought, oh, I'm quite good at marketing. So keep on going with that. And I got headhunted for urban outfitters. So that at the time, being in like your early 20s,

3:45 getting a job at urban outfitters, that's pretty cool. That's pretty cool, right? In the head office, and as I said earlier, I have a face for radio. So they weren't sticking me like

3:55 Abercrombie. You weren't a model. No, not a model. Just caveat, we're talking nerdy marketing stuff here. So I was doing that for a while, and then a big luxury fashion company came along, and

4:08 they wanted me, and I was kind of pretty stunned. I mean, like my mid 20s, and I've got these companies I never thought would have an appetite for my skills,

4:19 work for them. And I think that started to build some confidence that just because I didn't know what I wanted to do didn't mean that I wasn't good at stuff.

4:31 And then the big life change happened in that luxury fashion company. And that's where I decided, wow, I think I can do anything. And that's what led me onto this path.

4:49 What is that moment? I mean, did you read something about it, meet somebody? Yeah, I mean, there was one book that was very formative. It was Abundance by Peter H. D. Amandis and Stephen

5:01 Kotler. And I think it's because at the time, and still today, you have so much negativities thrown at you in the media of how the world is going to hell in a hand basket. And there's, you know,

5:17 what is there to be? If you just going to look at BBC every day or CNN or whatever. It's not a huge amount to really feel that positive about. So I started reading to

5:30 find a tonic in technology. And I must have read abundance three or four times cover to cover. And then I downloaded it onto, I had these really nerdy headphones that I could go swimming with that

5:48 kind of wrapped around your the back of your head. And I kind of put the book on there. And I must have listened to it probably 20, 30 times. And, you know, they're probably, if you started a

6:00 section of the book, I could probably finish the sentence of the rest of it. Hey, what was the book you gave me to read that had all the facts about the world on it?

6:13 Factfulness. Have you read factfulness yet? I haven't read it. It's the same kind of promise it's a doc. he worked in various third world countries, and he basically just laid out a bunch of

6:26 facts about the world that you get from the UN, I mean, so not anything controversial. But his whole point is, you know, 90 of the world now lives above the poverty line, as opposed to 150 years

6:40 ago, it was 10, and what he's done, his twist on it is he created 13 questions. And he goes out and he gives everybody these 13 questions and sees how often they get it right. And routinely,

6:57 he's a room full of investment bankers, he's a, you know, parliament, things like that. And people are getting 10 and 15 of the questions right. And it's stuff like, you know, how many,

7:11 what's the average number, years of education, Do women get worldwide? and he'll give A, B, and C. So I mean, just random selection means you should get three or four of the questions, right?

7:26 And notoriously, people don't. And one of his things is the media makes the world seem so bad and just so horrible. But factfulness is great. It sounds a lot like Steven Pinkner's work, The

7:39 Better Angels of Our Nature. I think he has a TED talk for anyone who wants just a 20 minute kind of slide-by-slide. We're in a much better place than we were, but we also have to recognize that

7:53 there are a sub-sector of the world's population who things aren't great for. And the tropical islands being one of them who are fighting against petro-states in negotiation halls as we speak in

8:08 Dubai right now about they feel like they're negotiating their survival So, um. they don't have the same abundance that a lot of us kind of come to enjoy as just part of life in the developed world.

8:27 Well, and I never really thought of that, you know, because I mean, you get a tropical island. It's a nice resort. I mean, that's the American way of experiencing it. And so until I started

8:35 flipping through, reading about your company, I'd never really thought of it that way,

8:44 but you're right. I mean, you're out there on an island That makes sense. And from Texas, you enjoy really some of the best energy costs in the world, right? You truly have energy abundance.

8:56 Now, these islands, because they're so dependent on fossil fuel imports, they're paying anywhere between four and 10 times the unit cost per kilowatt hour that you are in Texas. But they sit in

9:11 this untapped battery of solar heat energy, which is the ocean. And if they just had the equipment to extract that solar heat energy to provide base load power, they're gonna half their energy

9:26 costs overnight and it's gonna create a very different future for those islands. Give me from that, reading the book of abundance to tapping the potential of the ocean. How did you make that leap?

9:43 Because at the end of the day, until you liked to tweet of mine the other day and I just looked at your bio and I think I paint you on Twitter and said, Dude, come on the podcast, talk about it.

9:55 I had no idea there was geothermal in the ocean. I thought you and I were gonna be talking about wave energy. Yeah, no, I mean, so where to start? So abundance, it was like having, 'cause I

10:10 was listing, I was like putting this on my headphones every single day as I walked to and from the. the office in West London, I'm living in Maida Vale, I'm in my mid 20s, I'm earning really well,

10:23 but I'm finding it kind of soul destroying. I'm working these crazy black Friday's in the office sometimes 'til like 4 am. because we've just got to sell more Victoria Beckham dresses. And at the

10:37 same time, I've kind of got this book which I've started reading as a hobby, telling me the greatest opportunity to develop technology for the rising billion in the world is right now. So I'm

10:53 started pulling a thread, researching in my spare time, what? Yeah. There we go. Oh good, the power that you just had to shut them up was amazing. I am so appreciative. I walked past a free

11:10 Palestine march up the road and I was like, I hope they're not coming this way. Oh, there's a tool. Yeah. So I'll start from the. Yeah, just keep going. Yeah, cool. So. I doubt we even edit

11:23 that out. Okay. It's wild. I mean, people will actually find the behind the scenes stuff kind of interesting. Yeah, I guess in New York, you probably can't record anywhere without a siren

11:33 passing. That's probably true. Yeah. So, abundance is kind of. I've started reading it as a hobby, and it's planting this seed in my head that there's this rising billion coming online, and

11:47 some of the greatest innovators and technologists, they don't always have the purely academic backgrounds to become who they are. And there's a great story about Stone Soup, and I'm really worried

12:02 that if I try to tell it right now, that I'll butcher it to pieces, and someone who actually knows the story of Stone Soup will be very angry in the comments. Do you know what Stone Soup means? I

12:13 don't know. No, I'm far away. Stone Subs, this idea or anecdote of, can you got these two guys stumbling upon a medieval village and they're super hungry, right? But they haven't got anything

12:30 to really offer. So they start going door to door and they're just asking the community if they can, if they start at the first door and they're like, Hey, we're making a Okay, I've realized

12:45 where it is now. They don't have anything, but they pick up these stones off the floor and they go door to door and they say, Hey, we're making stone soup. Do you want some? And people are like,

12:56 What the fuck is this stone soup? They're like, Well, look, we just need a cauldron. If you've got a cauldron and come with us, we're gonna make some stone soup. And then they go to the next

13:07 door and they're like, We're making stone soup We've got this cauldron, we've got our stones. Could you lend us some potatoes? And then to the next door, they get some carrots. And then to the

13:18 next door, they get some stock or cabbage or whatever. And then at the end, they're creating this stone soup and everyone, all the village people are, you know, like really excited about the

13:33 stone soup. But they just started with a bunch of stones. And I found that a quite an inspiring story it made me realize that with a commercial where sales and marketing background, that if you can

13:47 just bring together a kind of a coalition of the willing, you can actually sort of do anything. And that was one of the big lessons that made me realize I didn't need to go and get a PhD in

14:00 something to do something really cool. Yeah, no, I mean, it's amazing how many, when you actually look back at all these great entrepreneurs and stuff, yes, Bill Gates could write code,

14:14 But at the end of the day, he made all his money because his dad said, Oh, you're talking to IBM? Give it to him for free. Just say you have to be in every IBM machine. I mean, that's why he's

14:24 rich, not because he's a great kid. Yeah, and I have

14:31 a privileged background in the sense that my parents are kind of together and worked all of their lives, but I don't come from any rich years or there's an nepotism to call it My dad ran a, it was a

14:43 manager of a stationary shop growing up, my mum worked at the electronic store part time. So I didn't have any favors to call in building this and maybe it would be a bit further ahead if I had that.

14:57 So take me this. All right, so good career, marketing, also realize, okay, I can pull this together. I don't have to be the ultimate expert. Again, I'm an energy guy I'm a 30 some a year

15:12 energy guy. I didn't even know geothermal in the ocean existed. Where'd you find that? Did you read about it? See a story on, do you tell me or? Back to abundance. It's all about energy, food

15:24 and water. These are places that you want to focus if you want to make change in the next kind of decades. So I was initially really captivated by water and desalination. Okay.

15:41 I joined a water charity from Arizona called Water Is Life We headed down to Ghana, I fundraised giving out these

15:47 nano bucket filters that would for five, the equivalent of like five cents per bucket would give these guys clean water for five years which they wouldn't have otherwise had. So that was a super

16:01 insightful experience about the power of water. So at the same time I ran a blog called future desalinationcom and I just kind of stayed with my finger on the pulse what's happening in the, you know,

16:15 how can I make my stone soup in the, in the water space? So who's doing cool stuff? And there were actually some students from Harvard who had a electro dialysis solar unit,

16:32 the, you know, there were postgrads and they had some properties about that. The suggested it was going to be more promising than the traditional reverse osmosis, which would be fossil fuel power.

16:46 So I thought, okay, how can we, where's the, where's the commercial application there? So I started calling up places in Africa where there were businesses and I started with a Zanzibar. And I

17:01 think the only reason I started with Zanzibar is that there was a world tourism conference at the Expo Center down in East London. And I just basically walked around and trying to find someone who.

17:13 ran a business in Africa, and I found a guy who ran a resort, and I said to him, Jeff water problems. And he said, yeah, I do. It's, it's dirty. It's expensive. I have to run this really

17:25 energy intensive system. And I pitched this idea that the Harvard guys were working on. And he was like, well, that sounds awesome. Do you want some land? And I was like, yeah, yeah, that

17:36 would be, that would be pretty good. And then I went back to the Harvard guys. And I was like, I've got some land in Zanzibar to do, to do a pilot. And they were like, who the fuck are you?

17:50 Why are you talking to us? Hey, mom, dad said it was all right. But I guess, you know, I'm just being quite bold and just trying to figure stuff out. And so, so I'm doing this water research.

17:54 And then I hear about as a method of desalination, something called ocean thermal energy conversion.

18:13 And I'm like, what the hell is that?

18:18 And sure, it's OTEC. And so I started putting the thread on that. And I was like, Lockheed Martin are doing ocean energy. And I was pulling further and further. And I was like, there's a plant

18:35 in Hawaii that is using that temperature difference and they're grid connected. This is pretty cool So I had learned from my experience with the de-salination guys, not to ring them up and say, Hey,

18:50 I've got some land in Zanzibar. Do you want to do a pilot? Instead, I contacted some of the engineers at this Hawaii plant and was like, this looks pretty cool. You know, can we have a chat?

19:04 And I was part off to one of the Brits that worked for the company who happened to be coming back to London for another expedition actually at the same place the tourism one was. This was oceanology

19:20 international in London. So I met up with one of the guys from this

19:26 OTEC plan. And we started to nerd out. And I kind of put to him, Lockheed and everyone's going about

19:38 OTEC in this sort of massive way that is going to be a 50 or 100 megawatt plant. And does that figure? And he was like, no, it doesn't really figure. But they hoover up DOE grants

19:57 so they can spend millions on research and development. It doesn't have to deliver anything practical. And I thought, oh, that's

20:07 pretty bad, isn't it? What if we actually had a business plan? could use this technology, building on what's already been demonstrated, and actually, you know, solve some real-world problems.

20:21 And that was where GlobalOtech was born. So tell me actually what this process is, because I was trying to read about it. You made actually a cool little clip that's on YouTube that people can go

20:34 look up, and I'll tell you what, we'll scrape it and throw it at the end of this podcast. But how does the process actually work? It's an organic mankind cycle. So it's essentially, it's the

20:49 same fundamental heat engine cycle that we are producing steam and turning a mechanical shaft. The way that it works in the ocean is that we're pumping warm surface sea water into a heat exchanger.

21:03 That first heat exchanger is evaporating a working fluid in a closed-loop system. So that could be ammonia, it could be refrigerant, it could be propane, whatever. So that at 27 degrees

21:16 centigrade, which is, I don't know what that is in Fahrenheit, if you already is, but that's that warm surface sea water is pretty consistent around the tropics at that temperature all year round.

21:27 So great, we can, if we have access to that warm surface sea water, we can evaporate a working fluid. If we can evaporate, if we can create vapor, we can run a turbine. What we, the next thing

21:43 we need is cold, deep water, which we have in abundance in the tropical parts of the ocean. And if we can get water that's around four degrees centigrade and lift that up into a second heat

21:58 exchanger, we can then condense that vapor back into a liquid So we have a cycle that's being run by the natural environment energy 24 hours a day, all year round, solving a lot of the challenges,

22:15 I think, conventional renewables face with scaling. Yeah. So I googled it while you were talking at 27 degrees Celsius is about 80 degrees Fahrenheit. And so making the steam and steam terms

22:32 turban, we've been doing that for a long time Yeah, so that's fascinating. So, and I read someplace that the Cubans built one of these in like 1930. So yeah, let's do a history lesson. So the

22:46 first time the world hears about the theory of OTEC is in Jules Verne's 20, 000 leagues under the sea. So Captain Nemo is theorizing that that delta T, that temperature differential could generate

23:02 energy. And this is like 1881 A

23:06 few years later, a French. physicist named Jack Dassenfall comes up with the first practical system of how that would actually work. And I think it was in a paper called White Coal. I don't know

23:22 the story behind that. So one of his students in 1930, a guy called George Claude, he's in Cuba and he's putting one of these deep ocean water pipes into the ocean there. And for the first time,

23:37 an actual physical OTEC plant in the ocean produces a kilowatt, a kilowatt hour. So we're, that's 1930, right? That's a hundred years ago. Unfortunately, that system gets destroyed by a storm

23:56 and then OTEC development is sort of quiet for a while. It's not until Jimmy Carter, 1979

24:05 passes the Ocean Thermal Energy Act. It's like 60 years ago, the US is passing an act, the ocean thermal energy. And really the center of excellence is Keohole point of

24:25 Kona in Hawaii. And this is where you've got a mini-OTEC barge and then a larger heat exchanger test facility called the OTEC one And these guys are in their Hawaiian shirts, hitting hammers on

24:43 barges. It's refreshing compared to some of the health and safety you see today. And they're deploying these cold water pipes. They're connecting them to platforms and they're generating power.

24:55 Well, fortunately in 1981, Ronald Reagan comes in and pulls all of the renewable energy funding. I think there's some story that people like to say Jimmy Carter put some. So the panels on the roof

25:09 of the White House and then Reagan comes in and rips them off. I don't know, there's credibility in that story. Sounds like something we would do. Well, also, the history of the energy business

25:20 tracks when energy's cheap, all these type of technologies just get dumped to the side, right? 'Cause if oil prices are really, really low, we don't need renewables. We don't need solar and all

25:35 And it's taken really kind of the external pressure of climate change to put it on a path to have some real research development dollars. That's exactly what happened. So Carter was responding to

25:50 expensive oil and Reagan was reacting to, we've got cheap oil now. And so one of the inflection points for OTEC today is that cheap oil is pretty much history, right? Especially for these islands,

26:04 they're looking at a pretty flat.

26:09 or an increasing trajectory for oil prices there. I don't think there's any belief now that they're gonna be going back to be generating, I don't know, 10 cents per kilowatt hour. They're in

26:21 firmly baked into the 40 cents now. And you also have energy security being priced in because the growth - Or at least thought about. Or at least, or at least, which, you know, different,

26:35 depending where you are in the world, depends how much you have to think about energy security all the time. You know, having some solar power in California versus the natural gas in Texas. And

26:48 then there's an island in the Maldives, whose owner called me up the other day. He's paying138 per

26:57 kilowatt hour at the moment. His small results, energy bills, are a quarter of a million dollars every month Holy cow. Yeah, that's crazy. One of the things we did, the other podcast I do is

27:12 big digital energy and the girlfriend used to gently rattle our cage when we would say things like, Well, Europe does this. Europe does that. Her point, which she was correct, is we're not a

27:27 Uniblock. We're 30 different countries. We have different energy needs. We have different energy resources. And so we started deep diving each country each week on the podcast, and we'd go

27:41 through England. We'd go through France. We'd go through various places. And the thing I found fascinating that I'd never put together, and you're going to say, Well, no shit Sherlock. But

27:54 France went all nuclear in the '70s, and believe it or not, did it in the right way. They kind of chose one design. Let's just just going to replicate that design. I think the cost of building

28:06 multiple. plants in France, you know, fell kind of two-thirds, three-quarters, whatever you want to say over time. And they generate electricity that's slightly below average for all of Europe.

28:22 And it's a battery. I mean, they export it to Germany, they export it underneath the channel. And so what's been interesting about the European experiment with renewables and the like is you all

28:36 had that battery, if you will, in France that had dispatchable power that kind of allowed the Germans to get away with what they did, etc. And so, you know, the other thing that's popping up

28:54 these days is just the need to have dispatchable power versus versus intermittent power, because I mean for years I've always said the most saying the environmentalist did, is they convinced the

29:09 world that there was no difference between dispatchable and intermittent power. Yeah. Right. And a lot of people are calling, I say a lot of people, sorry, a very kind of insane sub-sector of

29:23 society is calling for the heads of oil and gas executives. But no one's weighing in the damage that environmentalists have done by blocking the advancement of nuclear energy. Oh, yeah, totally

29:35 Yeah, I think, you know, it's funny, have you ever heard Joe Rogan's take on nuclear energy? I have to know. His take is something to the effect of it's not nuclear, that's the problem. It's

29:48 the fact it was built in the 70s, and just everything man produced in the 70s suck. 70s vintage cars suck to me, just take on devilish. The problem was we couldn't build stuff in the 70s, and so

30:02 you would think that's behind us So, okay. So geothermal, oceanary, what do we call it? We call it OTEC, but maybe it's got a bit of a branding issue because when people type in OTEC to Google

30:16 now, they see a lot of what was true in the 1930s or the 1970s. It almost sounds like you need an ointment to cure it too. Oh, I've got some OTEC. All right, you're the marketing guy. What's

30:29 our brand name? Well, there's lots of different, I think it's different strokes for different folks, right? Just for some engineering guys, the moment we start describing OTEC, they're like,

30:38 is he pumping the ocean? Okay. For other guys, it's ocean geothermal or geothermal without the drilling. But if you say that to a geothermal guy, he's like, well, that's not strictly, you're

30:51 not actually using the Earth's kind of crust you're just using the ocean, so that's lame. So yeah, I don't know, I think the urban outfitter Dude, that can sell victorious. That kind of dresses

31:05 to the world. Come on, man. We need to hear it. I'll tell you what, we'll keep going on this. But by the end of the podcast, I want a cool name. Okay. So, OTEC. So we know this works 'cause

31:18 the Cubans did it. We know it works because they did it in Hawaii. Where's the state of the science these days and are other people doing it besides you? Yeah, I would caveat that we know it works

31:31 because of what's happened in Hawaii We missed a chapter in the development, the post-Ragan in kind of 2010 onwards. There was an Otek Renaissance. This is where Lockheed Martin are involved now.

31:46 You've got Macai Ocean Engineering developing the Otek Tower, but if you type in Otek into Google today, that's probably what most people are gonna see. You've got the

31:57 Okinawa government in one of the seven prefectures of Japan Kumajima Island.

32:03 developing a quite similar looking OTEC power plant. These systems being grid connected in 2013 and 2015 respectively, these are the milestones kind of signaling that net power is possible using

32:19 OTEC. Now, it's also highlighted some challenges. It's highlighted some advancements that's needed in heat exchanger technology with biofouling and sea water corrosion That was something that

32:33 needed to be solved in 2015 when these plants came online. That's something that solved today. There's also the

32:44 two different paths of whether you're going for OTEC on land, whether you're going for OTEC offshore. And that's something that we should perhaps just quickly dive into. Yeah, later on me. So if

32:57 we're doing OTEC on land, I've got to run these cold and warm water pipes. down the seabed all the way until I can get my delta T, my temperature difference. Oh, I got you, we like, so this,

33:11 so where you're going with this is Houston, Texas, not gonna be a great place 'cause the Gulf of Mexico goes forever and you go out miles and it's 10 feet deep. Got it. That's right, so that pipe

33:24 is the most expensive and technically challenging component of an OTEC system. So to be a fit, to be cost effective, you really need to be with today's, with where the technology is at now, about

33:36 four kilometers offshore. That's really the max of where your, of the distance your pipe can be to have an economic project. But kind of the pill that we're taking is going offshore. Because

33:50 instead of having that four kilometer pipe, we only need a pipe that goes down to one kilometer. So we're reducing the most expensive, technically challenging component of the system, by around 75

34:04 and instead of running all that water back to shore, we're using the same offshore cable, the floating wind and offshore energy has been de-risking for some time now. Gotcha. So that makes sense

34:21 to me. So

34:26 in effect, we have a floating platform of some sort that you're doing Have you built one of these yet? Have you drawn sketches for one of these? Where do you stand on? So we're kind of between the

34:37 preliminary and detailed design phase at the moment. So whilst we haven't built one, there have been no tech demonstrations on barges that have happened in Hawaii and in South Korea. But no one's

34:52 approached this with a commercial view of how am I going to recoup my investment in the platform We're the first, really, to. be taking this on. So it involves having a power purchase agreement or

35:07 a PPA with an off taker. It involves having a design that insurers will look at and going to give you the necessary cover of a multi-million dollar platform that's sitting in the ocean generating

35:24 power. Give me some sort of, and you can say this is where we're going to be when we build our 15th one or you can just say our original one, we have planned, but just some idea how much does one

35:39 of these cost? How much in the way of power can you make? Any idea of what it's going to cost to generate power? Just some sort of scaling here. Yeah, of course. Yeah, I got no clue So after

35:51 our first one, which is going to be, you know, over-engineered and have some blow of engineering time, when we're then cookie-cuttering that first one. We're around

36:04 the early20 million per platform. Now, people are hearing that number and seeing that it's a one and a half megawatt system. And they're thinking, are you crazy? That is so expensive. But when

36:17 you consider that this is base load power generating of like uptime an with

36:24 97. Actually, when you compare it to solar and wind, it's sort of actually the equivalent of five megawatts of solar or 10 megawatts of wind based on the output, the energy output. Oh, gotcha,

36:37 'cause we can put solar or wind there, but we're gonna have to have a hydrocarbon backup system of some sort. Yeah, so you've got each barge giving you 12, 000 megawatt hours a year. And

36:51 these barges are designed thanks to oil and gas to last a lot longer than other renewables and they're not requiring any.

37:01 Precious minerals are going to have kids diving into mines in Congo, so I think there's a lot of attributes this technology has that solves the challenges that does what we need to do with renewable

37:17 energy but uses the huge base of offshore engineering skills that we've bought up because it seems like a lot of technologies, they're obsessed with land and I understand that using terrestrial land

37:31 takes out a huge amount of risk on your renewable energy project. But if you're somewhere that's very limited on land, whether that's a city, a coastal city, or a tropical island, then you're

37:43 really hamstrung by only having the option to deploy onshore renewables and this is a solution for that So, okay, so 20 million bucks be cost competitive because it's base load power.

38:02 What happens when a storm shows up? Do you just take the platform away and the island sits there without power? How does that work? So we do the same things that offshore energy does. We design

38:20 our platforms based on the 100 or even 1, 000 year return period. So these are the, you look at the meteorological conditions of your location, wave heights, wind speeds, current speeds. And

38:37 those are kind of relevant inputs into your design criteria. So this barge design that we're starting with isn't the design that we would use to say a Caribbean island. The Caribbean island, we can

38:51 need a bigger system. We're gonna be experiencing 20, maybe even 30 meter wave heights going to be experiencing some intense. wind speeds. Thankfully, oil and gas has been dealing with a lot of

39:06 these already, whether it's in the Gulf of Mexico or

39:13 Excuse me. Oil and gas have been dealing with a lot of these things already, whether it's in the Gulf of Mexico or out in Norway. It may not be a hurricane, but they get some insane wind speeds up

39:25 in that part of the. The North Sea's nasty. I mean, in terms of an environment to operate in. So we're building on all of this, and we have a Horizon Europe grant. We've designed a cylindrical

39:40 hull for the more extreme weather conditions, and we're validating this to really a 30-meter wave height. So we've done all the simulations. Our engineering team, actually, in the Canary Islands

39:52 right now in Tenerife. We've just signed the contract for our first steel order. We bought steel. That's cool, right? I am selling Victoria Beckham dresses and now burning tons of steel So, so

40:10 you've now that you've bought steel. When do we get to go tour it with a camera and see it actually producing electricity? So the first step is to do a structural test. There is much lower risk to

40:24 do this in the water without energy generating equipment. So this is gonna be a one to five scale system. It's gonna still, it's gonna be still about nine meters in diameter, the hull. And we're

40:38 going to build that with a model riser or cold water pipe connection. Because of the rules of grants, we had to do this in EU waters. But it's not really an ideal place around the Mediterranean or

40:54 North Sea that we wanted to do this. But then we realized, hey, there's the Canary Islands and they're repairing oil and gas assets all the time. So if you wanna do something offshore, follow

41:05 where oil and gas is. So we had it out there. We found some partners. And yeah, we put this consortium together. We got three and a half million euros from Horizon Europe to de-risk a tropical

41:17 stormproof, Otech structure, and that'll be installed in April. Oh cool. Of the show. Of next year, sorry. Cool, so what does that test kind of tell us and then how far are we from actually

41:35 powering the Jacuzzi at a resort? Yeah, so we have two projects going in parallel. As I mentioned, we have the cylindrical haluivre reduced to girth down to round one to five scale system. That's

41:51 proving out how we deal with tropical storms. But at the same time, we know we can get electrons in the grid without needing to be in a tropical storm zone. So in parallel, we're developing our

42:03 first project in Sartome and Prince of Bay, which is the most beautiful. tropical island that you've only just heard of, or the origin. Yeah, I would just say I'm typical American, huh? Where

42:11 is

42:14 that? Do you want to point to it on a map? Yeah, exactly. So it's in the Gulf of Guinea, which is, I guess, some people call it the armpit of Africa, I think, so where you've got this bulge.

42:25 You follow the coast round to kind of Nigeria or Cameroon, and you go about 1, 000 kilometers out into the ocean, you've got the highest concentration of endemic species found anywhere in the world,

42:38 and a quarter of a million Sarto Mayans living. They're mostly diesel powered. They have around 30 megawatts of installed capacity. There's a bit of hydro, but I think 18 megawatts of diesel is

42:54 what's powering their islands. And they can only recover the cost of about half of the tariff rate.

43:03 Our angle here is using climate finance and grants and subsidies to get the first one off of the ground and solvers as many problems as possible with this first system and then electrons in the grid

43:19 in Sartome, the structural system in the Canary Islands is validating

43:38 our hypotheses and then we can go and address the Caribbean, which is the really exciting project pipeline Yeah, exactly. I think one of the things we get spoiled with in America, and I'm sure you

43:39 get spoiled with here in London, is the grid's 999 reliable, right? I mean, you get a bad storm every once in a while, it glitches here and there. You talk to someone from Costa Rica, pick any

43:55 up Panama, and their electricity is down like half the time and so I think You know, one, being able to deliver electricity to people is really cool. Being able to give them electricity that runs

44:09 97 of the time, holy cow. And that's what also differentiates OTEC is the grid stability aspects. They're really attractive. There's not a small island developing state that doesn't have rolling

44:23 blackouts. Maybe, maybe Cabo Verde,

44:28 but for the most part, if you go out to one of these islands, they're load shedding around 530, everything's off, resort diesel generator kicks in. And

44:38 it's just, it's just not, not economical. And it really hinders the, you know, the development of businesses, the ability to keep fish cool. So they, they've been a lot of developers or

44:53 development agencies come into these islands with an agenda that we wanted to carbonize you, but it's got to be solar. And these projects just don't get off. ground, because when they look at the

45:04 practicality of putting as much solar as someone sitting in, you know, Austria thinks is what these islands need, it just doesn't go anywhere. And I've said, if our message to the folks in energy

45:25 poverty in the world is, you know, in effect, let them eat cake, because that's kind of what it is, if solar panels, let them eat solar panels. Yeah, let them eat wind. To the extent we're

45:37 doing that, that's going to have a really bad effect on the world. And I mean, shots could be fired over that. I don't mean to say that be macabre or anything, but it's true. Absolutely.

45:49 Absolutely. The fuck, you know, if there's energy is governments providing energy for the people is one of the number one, the number one things that keep stability, especially. especially on

46:03 these islands. And it's interesting, the reference you made there, I was in Fiji a couple of months ago on a mission. And I was just hearing some people talk about the cheap solar they're getting

46:16 from China. And on the surface, great. We've got cheap solar

46:24 from China and batteries. And these things aren't lasting a couple of years. You're having a credible, a bankable renewable energy project, you need consistency for at the minimum 10, but 15, 20

46:37 years, you need to be aiming for that to have reliable infrastructure. You're giving people these kind of pieces of shit that are going to conk out after three years, then it's just a PR exercise.

46:48 It's not, there's no intent to actually solve problems. Yeah, I mean, they talk about projects put in and you show up two years later and they're just not working. Yeah, that's not gonna be good

46:60 either. You heard about this in water, actually. And I think I may have read about this in abundance that there's these really, you often get white Americans or Europeans parachuting in for a

47:16 photo shoot to install a water pump. And then you kind of check back there in a couple of bumps and no spare parts were left for repairs to be made No one knows how to repair it. Yeah, exactly, so

47:31 what we're finding very helpful is working with the United Nations, particularly the United Nations Industrial Development Organization, or UNIDO, and SIDSTOC, which is the only UN-recognized

47:44 organization for small islands, energy security and climate resiliency challenges. So any time that we're having conversations about solutions for islands, There's always an island person in the

47:58 room. in the conversation, when we're going out to these markets, we're running workshops with marginalized groups, with the civil service, 'cause when a government changes, you get new

48:11 politicians, but those people running, keeping the lights on, keeping the water running, actually doing the work, those guys don't tend to change. So we're really lucky to have these people

48:23 around us. All right, real quick, 'cause we're doing it, we're recording this podcast, I believe, December 12th, 'cause you just got back into town. Where were you and tell me what happened

48:37 there? So I was at COP28 in Dubai, in the UAE. Which private plane did you take over? I was on Al Gore's, yeah. Yeah, perfect, I love that. Did you see the photos of the private planes? I

48:53 think they were in Germany frozen to the tarmac. I did. They were all lined up together. Yeah, that's brilliant. Go to Dubai. So anyway, yeah, I mean, it's like, you know, whenever there's

49:02 a doubt for a world economic forum, it smacks of hypocrisy. Just a little. Yeah. So no, I was, I went to Dubai on my, in my economy class seat on the British Airways flight 107 for me. I had a

49:17 week there and

49:19 there's kind of, I've got positive and negatives to take away both on a, you know, a selfish, self-interested level and also a macro one. Firstly, the scale of everything there was insane. It

49:35 made the UK hosting COP26 look a bit like a school science project. Really? Yeah. The scale, the scale was something, really something else It was incredible for us. It was an engagement with

49:51 island ministers and we had an event

49:55 Tuvalu, Dominica, Sartome and Principe. I'm

49:60 forgetting a couple of islands, some Vincent and the

50:05 Grenadines, and we had Grenada and Tigger and Barbuda. We had a full suite almost of Caribbean islands in a room, all recognizing that ocean energy is the frontier for them to be able to get

50:19 renewable and reliable energy So that was really great. And shout out to Dr. Vince Henderson, the Minister of.

50:34 You're gonna have to cut that bit because I'm not gonna be out of here. Because I'm gonna butcher his title, but yeah. So shout out to Minister Dr. Vince Henderson of Dominica because he was on

50:47 stage in one of the main halls not only is he saying our our islands. need ocean energy and OTEC. He's saying, you need to go out there and support Global OTEC and help them on their mission. So

51:04 it was really cool to get name checked there. Nice, that's a shout out. That's a strong celebrity shout out too. It's pretty good. It's close to nimble fatty, but on

51:15 the negative side, I mean, we have, I'm following the negotiations today

51:23 You know, there's, I think there's a bit of

51:27 bad faith going on with the

51:32 involvement of the oil and gas majors, but also OPEC infrastrating what a lot of the world wants to see in this text. And I'm not in the detail. I have no background as a negotiator So I have, I'm

51:52 speaking from a very limited. experience pool on that. But certainly where we are today, it's looking pretty daunting. And now Azerbaijan is lined up to host COP 29. It probably feels a bit the

52:10 same of what the world can expect next year, but we'll see. Yeah, I mean, it's tough because the issue I really have, and look, I'll say it, I'm a homer for the oil and gas business. And I

52:26 think literally you start talking top three to five inventions that have advanced mankind.

52:34 Where do you start talking? I mean, wheel, fire, hydrocarbons, absolutely, in terms of pushing it. The problem I always have with the response back is you need to be intellectually honest and

52:46 say, hey, if we make energy more expensive today, people die. You know, if we make energy more expensive. There's not cheap fertilizer to grow crops, et cetera, but that's okay 'cause we don't

52:55 want deaths from climate change in a hundred years. Frame the debate more intellectually honest, just other than, oh, these bad guys in the majors, we'd all have clean energy if it weren't for

52:55 those guys. 'Cause - And

53:13 that's why I love being in the room with a lot of island people because they're hugely practical and they're talking about natural gas as a transition piece So, you know, there isn't this, you know,

53:26 oh God, everyone in oil and gas is the energy in those rooms, far from it. But we have the technology today for these countries that don't have their own resources traditionally, ie. hydrocarbons,

53:43 to be able to use their environment what they've been given or what God's given them to actually not need to pay a massive premium to take something from one side of the world to another. So I think

53:55 where my, you know, I know we're going to need oil and gas for the rest of my life to have all of the things that

54:05 we enjoy and that we used to. And there are going to be some innovations to your point that the billion that don't have it are entitled to. Absolutely. And they should get that. Yeah. So, yeah.

54:17 I just don't want to hear from someone in, you know, in a nylon jacket holding a placard saying, Just stop oil, honestly. We're always sitting around going, Who's going to to going Who's? them

54:28 tell tell them?

54:31 Dude, this was cool to come on. Now, when we have a plant up and running, can I show up with camera crew? We can, you'll tour us around the platform and all that. Yeah, 2025. We see you in

54:45 Sartome and Princepei, probably around this time. That sounds awesome. Cool. Awesome Appreciate it again, you're doing this. Thank you very much, let's go for a beer. do it. Okay. Anything

54:55 we should have covered? That was a little cheesy at the end, but whatever. Anything we should have covered that we didn't? I didn't really come in with an agenda of things to cover. I was just

55:05 kind of like interested asking questions. Yeah, I know. And I really liked how you kept on, kept on track at the beginning when, you know, I can deviate quite a lot on the origin story. I was

55:17 actually flat out interested in it. It's like, you know, as a dude at urban, fitters decide they want to go save the world, you know, that stuff's interesting to me.