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In episode 8 of Uptime, we discussed some local U.S. news – the Trump administration is considering extending deadlines for construction to keep wind energy projects eligible for tax incentives. We discussed the 634m tall Tokyo Skytree and how it changes electrical activity in the atmosphere, as well as new technology from Challenergy who is building Typhoon-Proof wind turbines with a unique design. This episode is brought to you by Weather Guard Lightning Tech.
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Show Transcript – Uptime Podcast EP8
Welcome back. This is the uptime podcast. I’m your cohost Dan Blewett. Allen. How are you doing today?
Hey Dan, I’m doing well. Boy, it’s been crazy up here in Massachusetts. Uh, earlier today we had, it wasn’t rain. It wasn’t snow. It was like snowing snowballs. I’ve never seen it before. It was like maybe like a quarter inch wide snowballs.
It wasn’t hail, but it’s light. Uh, it was just the weirdest thing. We’ve had the weirdest weather. I don’t know if it’s part of this Corona virus thing. It’s making the atmosphere.
It’s like raining coronavirus like snow meatballs or was
like, yeah, it’s like raining meatballs, but little white meatballs.
It’s kind of what it look like. So we’re outside. We’re start getting pelted by these snowballs from the sky. And it was the most bizarre. You got? I’ve seen it a long time. I’ve been in hailstorms, I’ve been in big hailstorms, I’ve been in sleet, you name it. But that was the first time I’ve been in like a snowball storm.
So these like, they seem like you, you send me a quick clip of it, but it seemed like they were falling faster. I mean, were they icy? Like did you catch any in your hand? Like what, what, what was the consistency here?
They were soft and fluffy, like, like a little meat, like a little soft.
So they’re just big.
They’re just big snowflakes. Then. Yeah.
Well, no, Nope, Nope. You know what? Snowflake has those crystal line edges, so it has this definitive shape, right? So it looks like it’s, it looks like a snowflake, but this has been balled up.
So it looked like,
yeah. Well, it looked like a snowflake that had kind of melt with other snowflakes, but didn’t get hard.
Like hail. What are you in a hailstorm like you, Kansas? Those hailstones could be quarter inch, half inch, one inch or larger diameter. Uh, this is even a much smaller and fluffy.
Well. Speaking of hail, when you were living in Wichita, did you ever have your car get just like destroyed by hail is damaged by it?
Well, everybody in your car, right? Just covered in like little dents. I’ve just like ruined it.
Not little dance. Big dense. They had big Hills. Yeah. Breaking windshield, kind of hailstorms in Kansas. When we knew hailstone for coming, we would everybody scramble and get the heck out of work wherever and get the cars inside.
Uh, I’ve, I’ve seen cars nearly destroyed and it’s sort of a badge of honor a little bit, so people would keep the car. Sometimes the guys where I used to work used to keep the beat up trucks like that to show all the stores that have been through it. It’s crazy how big the hailstones can get there because of the way the thunderstorms are huge and it just recycles the ice up and down, up and down.
It just gets bigger and bigger and bigger, and the storm that eventually falls out of the sky and hits your car. Oh yeah. It’s crazy. Well, you don’t, you don’t have that kind of where to live there in Maryland, did ya? You’re not like that. Uh,
I’ve seen hail a handful of times in my life, I think more in Maryland than I did in, uh, in, in Illinois, my decade in Illinois.
But, so I’ve seen hail a couple of times, but it’s been very few and far between. Yeah.
Wow. Okay. I didn’t think of all your road travels. Uh. Playing baseball. If you ever come across some, did you play in the Midwest at all? Do you ever get in your head, were you play in the Midwest at some
point? I played, I played the majority, well, and I guess not the majority, but I played three of my six years in, uh, in the Midwest.
Yeah. So, but I don’t know that we ever, I mean, hailstorms typically come, what time of year? It’s like transition time, right? Like. Maybe cause he gets, he gets, it comes down and then it gets pushed back up and then it like melts and then it comes back down and then that’s like the cycle of hail, right.
Until it’s too heavy and then it could break through. It keeps fabrics
through. Yeah. Yeah. It kind of gets outside the cycle and that’s inside the cloud. Yeah.
Yeah. Although the craziest atmospheric thing I ever witnessed, which. You like the, obviously this has to happen somewhere, but you know, like in, in like, uh, the peanuts comics where it’s just raining on one person, right?
Like the storm clouds just over Charlie Brown. I was in a, I was in a baseball game, I think I was 13 or 14. I was playing right and I was playing left field and like, we knew it was probably going to rain that day, but we were like, we were like, Oh, we’ve got like three or four innings in or something. And I turned around.
And it’s just absolutely pouring like thunder storm 20 feet behind me, like a literal sheets, wall of rain, and I was just like, Whoa. But no, it is fascinating because from one foot to the next, it just wasn’t raining. And it was just like a sheet. Yeah, but well, yeah, but you just never see that. Like you never had that point.
Like the exact edge of a thought of a thunderstorm. And I was literally like Charlie Brown. I’m like, I could stick my arm in and it’s raining and I could pull my arm out and it’s not raining. It’s like, it was trippy. It was so weird. And I’d never seen anything like that since I’d never been on the edge.
I mean, Oh, it has to have an edge, but you probably think it probably has like a more like feathery, soft edge. Like it’s not like direct, like. Thunderstorming here and then not thunderstorming one foot, but that’s how it was in that particular instance, and it was like mind blowing. It was so strange. Well
in the Midwest, that happens quite often.
Where it, because of the storms are bigger, right. To be gathering up for hundreds of miles where they get to you. But yeah, I mean, you can, you could feel the, the cold water, you can actually feel the cold front coming through. Like the weather is changing right now. It’s hot on this side of the sidewalk.
It’s cold on that side of the sidewalk. A lot of times, particularly the summertime. You’ll see that. Yeah. Well, have you ever been in a tornado? You ever spin around a tornado? You ever seen a tornado?
No. No. My, my dad grew up in Oklahoma and he. Saw like debris flying through the air, but he was never in the middle of a tornado either, even though he spent, you didn’t see one off the list 25 years there.
Yeah. No, I’ve never have no normal all he’s seen it. But you’ve seen a bunch.
Yeah. Oh yeah. Uh, just cause we grew up in Nebraska, lived in Wichita, Kansas for a number of years, have family down in Oklahoma. So we were back and forth, Oklahoma quite a bit. We’re right in tornado alley. So we, I, I’ve seen a number of tornadoes.
I mean, there’s been many times where we’ve had a, even with my wife and I, we’ve had to pull off the road to get it out of the way of tornado. And then that’s, that’s a normal thing. Yeah. Sirens going off the whole thing.
Well, and the thing about tornadoes is, I mean, they have to like basically run you over to, like, you see these house, like one house to destroy the one right next to, it’s not destroyed.
So you could, I mean, it seems like it’s a very narrow path aside from getting picked up and thrown by it. Even then, you have to be pretty close. Right. So it almost seems like the odds are pretty low that you get steamrolled by it by a tornado. Right.
Yeah, well, when I worked at beach there, if you remember, if you ever watched the weather channel, they always show the Andover tornado, I forget when that was early nineties, I think.
And I knew people whose houses got destroyed who were in the middle of that in Andover. They had just the one engineer in particular, uh, Frank, Hey, Frank, if you’re listening, uh, he had a head just about him and his wife had just built a house at NAND over, and it was. Just, it’s right next to Wichita. So it’s kinda like a suburb of Wichita.
And they got caught up in that tornado, so it came across the air force base and headed up their way, and they were in the basement, thank goodness. And it just took the whole top of their house off, gone. The wa, it’s like a freight train coming. How’s this gone? Why you could smoke ass? Is it the, all the water lines are busted.
There’s water spraying everywhere. You climbed out of the basement and you start looking for other people. Make sure everybody else is okay. But I’ve known people being in tornadoes like that. It’s, that’s not uncommon in Kansas.
Yeah. Not uncommon. That’s scary. No, there was one tornado that went through central Illinois when I lived there, and, uh.
It destroyed a small town. I can’t, I want to say it was like Washington, Illinois. I, that doesn’t sound completely right, but it completely wiped a small town, Illinois off the map. But it didn’t hit our town, but we were, Aaron was like, it was like a major tornado warning, major wins. And I was living in a townhouse at the time, so there was no basement, and it was like.
70 mile per hour winds or something like crazy, like, like really, really crazy winds. And I was like, well, I don’t really have anywhere to go to shelter, so I guess I’m just going to wait here until this house either collapses on me or it doesn’t. And like that wasn’t a great feeling like I was. We were all pretty sure we weren’t going to get hit, but we didn’t know.
And I had no recourse. So there’s a, well, here we are so well, it’s a. Let’s see what
you bet. You bet it. Hurricanes, right? I mean, there, there’s
no why do you, why do you assume I’ve been through all these natural disasters?
Well, because you live in Maryland. I’ve been in a hurricane and in Massachusetts we had a hurricane come through about 2011 and it dumped a bunch of water.
It flooded everything in the area, uh, wiped out anything in near the river. It got wiped out. It flooded people’s homes, destroyed people’s homes here. And we’re, we’re in Western Massachusetts. We’re not anywhere close to the water, but it came up the coastline and then banged us. So I’ve been tornadoes.
Hurricanes, horrible hailstorm, arms, and you haven’t been in any of it.
Yeah, but I feel like that doesn’t count as being in a hurricane. I mean, you didn’t, you weren’t like in Miami, like your house,
you were in the middle of a hurricane. Oh, no. We had trees down. Yeah, it rained. It was like, well, we wasn’t a level five.
When it hit us right in front,
you got like a trout. You got like a tropical depression or something.
Uh, I think they
actually could get an app. You get an asterisk, you get an asterisk. At best, he didn’t ask asterisk.
There was, uh, there were, there, there was an Ida that storm. Oh, I will tell you there was an Ida that storm.
We, we were in the, I came by as we hit the wall, we were in the eye and we got the other wall as it went by.
I don’t buy it.
Well, it is true because I was Bailey water.
So
it definitely happened.
Yeah. Alright, fair enough.
Which brings up the thing that you were bringing up, which is this new, uh, typhoon winter, but thing you’re trying to tell me about, which you got to explain that a little bit.
Well. So I guess on a lot of these islands, like the Philippines being a notable one, so that will all back up. There’s a Japanese startup called, um, challah energy, so like challenge plus energy. Um, and they have this typhoon turbine, which instead of the blades rotating on a, uh, with it, they’re, they’re rotating on the rotating on the transverse axis instead of the frontal plane AXA at frontal plane.
That’s, I mean, that’s like anatomical terminology. So, but anyway, this is like a horizontal rotating, that’s probably not the way to describe it. It is for me. But, um, so these typhoons or turbines can withstand like the sand that sounds like sustained 90 90 mile per hour gusts or winds and then up to 150 mile per hour gusts.
So I guess on a small Island like the, like the Philippines, a regular wind turbine is just going to get destroyed if a typhoon comes through with its a hundred plus mile per hour winds. So this small startup is trying to. Harness that wind power because it’s, I mean, that’s way faster. I mean, a wind turbine, it has to get shut down at 55 miles per hour.
So like, Hey, we have all this crazy wind. But the regular design won’t work, so let’s design something that can withstand these, these typhoons and harness that crazy amount of energy. So it’s an interesting concept. They’ve been around since 2014 and I think they’re just now trying to get some of their prototypes out actually out there functioning, which is an interesting, interesting concept.
I mean, it makes sense, like that’s an underserved market for sure. And some of these small islands can probably be that. I mean, that that’s probably a noticeable, meaningful amount of energy that they could, they could get from just a couple of those on a small Island. Oh
yeah. Obviously, being able to handle the worst weather, you have to be able to do that.
Wherever wind turbines go, they got to be able to handle the worst weather plus some so that you don’t have to fail. But in this particular wind turbine, it’s like a vertical wind turbine, and from what I can see, they got, it’s basically a rotating cylinder to create a Magnus effect, which then creates quasi lift or force.
So that the thing spins. It was like three of these rotating cylinders. Is that
how it looks? He has a fan on one side too. Yeah. Like it looks like there’s a little fin attached to this, each cylinder, so it’s like a
flap. So it was like a rotating cylinder and like a flap on the backside. Wow. Okay. Wow.
Well, Hey, if they could introduce a clean energy to places where the weather is extreme, great. Why not? Right? I mean, I guess it sounds like, you know, the. The word on the street where what the, the world organizations are saying that that the weather is going to get more extreme than we better be prepared for it.
Maybe this is a good idea. Check
it out and get it. We can get some, uh, renewable energy from all the volcanoes that’ll start cropping up and we need a heart. We need to be ready to harvest all the asteroids that hit the planet, and just like all the disasters that we’re causing from, um, all the greenhouse gases that we could just use them to our advantage.
Yeah. Right.
Put them to work. Right.
Yeah. But these are a lot shorter also then than the regular wind turbines. I mean, they’re like, they look like they’re only maybe 20, 30 feet high, which makes sense because these, these islands. Yeah, that’s what I was like,
okay,
okay. It’s all one installed and it didn’t look very tall because I guess the winds are pretty severe probably at close to ground level anyway.
Sure. So that’s interesting. Interesting technology. You have to check it out some more.
Yeah. So Challenergy is the startup behind those. And, uh, we’ll put a link in the description in the show notes for there typhoon turbine, which is w it’s, it’s interesting. So the other thing, uh, we have two more things.
Two more big topics. Number one. Uh, so the Trump administration, we talked about this earlier, I think in like episode one, two, or three about, um, some of these tax incentives. So what’s, it sounds like the Trump administration is going to find a way to allow some of these solar and wind projects to. Keep these tax incentives, even if their construction gets behind me.
Cause that’s the big, um, the big worry right now. Right,
right, right. Everybody’s trying to get people to work and whatever the term you hear in the United States, a lot is essential, right? So everybody wants to be defined as a central by the state government typically, so they can continue to work and get projects done.
But at some point. These projects are getting slowed down, no matter how they essentially define themselves at and they’re going to, a lot of these taxes centers are going to expire. Aye. Aye. Aye. I projected a couple of weeks ago that the Trump administration was just going to look the other way and let people submit those tax plus tax rebates.
That’s going to happen. I don’t see any way that they’re not going to do that because they’ve done it for so many other industries right now. That’s going to be reality. You just, I think the problem, the problem we’re having right now is there’s so many things, uh, in the queue that it’s hard for the federal government and the state governments to try to keep up and keep pumping out all the things that they got going on.
Yeah, that makes sense.
Crazy. That’s crazy. It’s just so crazy right now.
Well, and it sounds like things are going to get back to work pretty quick. I don’t know. Elon Musk is now suing, uh, Alameda County, California, to allow his factory to allow his factory to get back to work. Yeah, I see that. Yeah. And it’s, it’s interesting timing.
Well, it’s coincidence timing for me because I listened to his podcast today while I was out, uh, wandering around and getting some, some sunlight. And he, he and Joe Rogan talked for probably about half hour about the lockdown and all that stuff. And, uh, yeah. And he’s pretty unhappy about it. He’s, you know, I think everyone, it’s an, it’s an, it’s a silly rabbit hole to go down when you start comparing it to like auto accident deaths and like all these other types of deaths because auto accidents are not contagious.
Right. Um, we get that, but you know. He says, and I’m starting to just sway to the side, which is that things are probably not as bad as we thought they would be. And that’s probably in part because we did a good job, social distancing, right. So we’d like it words essentially, but, but now as I, like, I was having a conversation with my parents today because my sister’s having her second child, either today or tomorrow.
Oh my God. Great. Yeah. Yeah. I’m excited for him. I’m excited for, for the, for the family to see my, my little niece. Um, but, and, and with that, you know, is like, she wants us kinda quarantined so we can come and see them. They’re nervous about picking something up from the hospital. So like, my parents can’t, like, they’re gonna watch the, my, my, my nephew.
Um, but then they’re, they have like on a scoot out of there, right. As my sister and brother-in-law get home so that they don’t give that my parents anything from the hospital. Yeah. That’s kind of our like worry at the moment. And so then. But then it’s like, all right, all right, my sister wants us quarantined and we’re, you know, just cause obviously two new parents with a second new new child, it’s a really stressful time.
No one’s sleeping, all that stuff and understandable. But then you’re like, all right, well, life is starting to get a little bit more back to normal. Like my mom said, she’s, she’s going to a dentist appointment, um, and you know, in a week and a week or so. And she’s like, how do you feel about that? And I’m like, I feel fine about it.
I mean, what are the odds that. The three people you come in contact with, getting your teeth cleaned, who are going to have masks on, who are going to be doing a good job with gloves. Yeah. They’re going to be like, what are the odds that those three people have it. Very, very slim, you know, it’s still the big, high risk, like, you know, big group of people going grocery shopping three times a week, that kind of stuff.
Um, and so, yeah, and even then, I feel, I feel less, less, less nervous about it. Yeah. So I, and, and Musk obviously has that same, uh, point of view. He thinks it’s, it’s overblown at this point, and he just wants to be able to get back to work and put in measures in place and let people choose more for themselves.
Which I think is somewhat reasonable. I think people have done a good job, but, but so, anyway. Yeah. I mean, where do you think it’s going to go to this point? I mean, is it going to be quick? Is it going to be slow? Oh,
we had some meetings this week with local businesses and just trying to figure out locally what was going on and where we’re headed.
I don’t know. Like I’m on our local chamber of commerce, which is a very valuable resource because they’re working their tails off to get information. Everybody. But I think there’s two pieces of this, the engineering part of me, which is. Uh, there’s a lot of information coming out now about different kinds of diseases and viruses we’ve had over time that seemed to expire on their own.
And th the, the thing about that is that we don’t know why they’ve done that. Why have they gone away over time? Why have MERS and SARS and bird flu and all these other things, uh, in a similar fashion where they’ve had pandemics and we’ve been very concerned about them just seem to fade away. We don’t have any data on it.
Isn’t that, I think that’s extremely odd. So in this particular case, we’ve gone to the other extreme, which is to shut everything down and try to, uh, you know, figure it out, what’s happening before everybody gets exposed. Uh, and now we have an understanding of what parts of society are particularly vulnerable.
And then we’re like, with your parents and my parents, same thing. Everybody’s being particularly careful, and I think that makes sense. So I don’t necessarily agree with Ilan on, you know. Screw it. Let’s just go back to work. I think we gotta be smart about it, but I do. I do think things are gonna start opening pretty quickly here, at least to the United States because we have somewhat of a handle on it and we’re getting more and more statistics.
The, like I said, the engineering in me is sticking out. Show me some data. Let’s use data, let’s get some data. And there hasn’t been a lot of data, but the data I’ve seen scenes. Positive. So hopefully we get moving again. It, we got to get moving and your sister’s got to have this baby. Like things happen.
Life does not stop. Right. She’s going to have this baby. Your parents are going to see the baby. All that stuff’s going to happen. We just gotta to do it. Smart,
right? Yeah. Yeah. And like, you know, like with my parents, we’re talking, cause they’re going to be just down the, you know, they’re 30 minutes away.
So I said, Hey, I’ve seen you guys in over two months. Like after the baby’s born, do you just want to stop by here? We’ll have lunch. And they’re like. Do you feel like this is a good time? I’m like, we’ve been court, like very like disciplined and quarantined like everyone has for a while now. It’s not going to be more safe in two months when everyone’s running around and doing normal stuff again.
It’s like this is this as safe as it’s going to be at the moment it seems like, like I don’t have any reservations about, yeah. About having most of my parents even though know my, my dad’s a little more elderly than my mom, but, um. It’s just a, it’s like now if, if now is not safe, then never is safe essentially.
And like, so it’s like, yeah, let’s really just to do it. Yeah.
He’s smart, right? Yeah.
Yeah. So I mean, we’re not going to go the movies together. We’re not going to go to a concert, so should be fine.
Let’s just get that out there. Movies are essentially, movie theaters are probably dead.
It’s, uh, yeah, it’s, uh, there’s a bunch of businesses like that and I think the events are going to be slow.
Obviously movies. You’re right. I think that’s going to be a real, I don’t know, real Panhale industry.
If the rolling stones have a tour, went through the rolling stones is supposed to have a tour of this summer at the rolling stones hold a tourer, that arena will be full, so I have to limit it, but I don’t see any way that people are not going to concerts.
Do you? I don’t see it. I think everybody’s going to go,
first of all. First of all, we need to talk about. Your pronunciation of the word tour because this is fascinating. Well, you said to her, and I have to bring this up because when I lived in Illinois for 10 years, every I say tournament, which is the East coast way of saying it, whatever.
Everyone out there says tournament, which is a much more easy way to say it, like tournament flows out of your mouth a lot better than tournament that you can have to chew through. But when they’re all right there is. But I said, everyone’s so ever made fun of me for years saying tournament where they all say tournament.
And I’m like, how do you say the PGA tour? They say, Oh, tour. I’m like, well then, well, that’s the root word of tournament. And they’re like, okay, fine, Dan. And you just said tour, which is actually, I appreciate that it’s consistent with the way that you say like turbine. Like you say,
it’s what’s spelled
way you say turf now you say turbine, I say turbine, but you said you were consistent with terror versus, yeah.
I think, I think regional dialect is fascinating. It’s just a, it’s interesting. Just the different pronunciate. Like I say, why I don’t say I say orange or I say orange instead of orange. My mom says Warsh, she’s from Baltimore.
Oh.
Oh. People in Illinois say milk. M E L. K instead of milk.
Yup. Okay. Let me ask you a Marilyn question because this came up to the day.
Okay. Harvey to gray.
Harvey grass.
That’s a town that’s actually near my, near where I grew up. Having the grace.
Yeah. Havre
de grace,
is that the French pronunciation of that, of that town name, or is that the Americanized French version of that town name?
Cause I don’t think that’s
okay because the first time I, it’s clearly a French town name, right?
Clear. It is.
Yeah. Yeah. It sounds that way. Yeah. It’s, it’s awkward to look at it and then, yeah. Have it be grace. Well,
it’s like in Wichita, Kansas, where the, our Kansas river runs through the center of Wichita, but the, our Kansas river turns into the Arkansas river when it gets into Arkansas.
And that’s, that’s ridiculous.
It’s just nonsense. Nonsensical. Get out of here with that.
Hey, welcome to America. Right.
While the other weird thing about Illinois is there’s a ton of little towns. So when I lived there, I lived in central Illinois and Bloomington, and. South. There’s Charleston, Illinois, Atlanta, Illinois. There’s a bunch of other ones and everyone references these towns and I’m like, Oh, you went to Charleston for the weekend?
Like South Carolina is beautiful. Like, no idiot. I went. An hour, hour South to this crappy, small town. I’m like, Oh, Oh, that like kept happening for so many years. I like never got, I never got used to it. Charleston, Atlanta, like they have all these big, big city names and we’re very small towns in Illinois.
So anyway, I digress. So our last topic today, we want to talk about the Tokyo Skytree. So Alan, what is the Tokyo Skytree. So the
Tokyo Skytree is as big a radar, not radar tower,
600 tower, 634 meters high. The thing is intense.
It’s huge, right? It’s so big that it changes the electrical activity in the sky around it.
Uh, there’s a, there’s a, they have instrumented that tower a number of years ago, and there’s been a set of researchers that have, uh. Monitor the tire for lightning strikes and they get struck by lightning quite often. But the latest paper I saw, which was this past week, pop out, and I haven’t read it in depth, so don’t go too deep on this one me, but essentially it goes like this.
They know how often lightning strikes in the area before they put the tower up and they know how often lightning strikes. In that area once the tower went up. So there’s a, there’s a Delta that happened there, and you would say, well, the Delta occurs because there’s more lightening strikes happening to the tower itself.
But that’s not the case. It’s actually causing more lightning strikes around the tower. It’s not to the tower. So the lightning flash density. Uh, which like in Florida, the lightning flash density is really high. So it’s like how many, how many lightning flashes happening in this square mile or this area.
So in that area of Tokyo, the lightning flash density has increased because the tower is there, which tells you something weird is going on, where. The tower itself is actually changing the elect flow activity in the sky. Uh, very similar. I think I showed you that video from the sort of video photographer in the Midwest where they had the lightning strike occurred and he’s on a wind turbine farm and all of a sudden all these lightning strikes appear on these wind turbines.
It’s like simultaneous, like one electrical activity chain reaction to another set of electrical. Activity. I wonder if that’s the case with this tower where the tower is putting the energy up into the sky and changing electric activity and causing a lightning strikes to happen in other places. It’s, it’s a chaos.
Thunderstorms are very chaotic and the charge of them is not well understood. It wouldn’t surprise me that the tower is actually changing the way lightning strikes in the area. That’s, that is amazing. It’s sort of, it’s confusing and a little bit scary,
but it’s still cool.
Right? Isn’t that weird? Like you’re, you’re, you’re, you’ve got a business like three blocks over in this high rise apartment and you’re getting wallet from lightning strikes because that tower three blocks away is there.
That’s odd. I went, I don’t think anybody would necessarily predict that and that’s what the paper was trying to get to. Like. That’s data we haven’t seen before.
So what was the primary purpose of, they’d built the, uh, the Skytree tower four. Is it, it’s radio? It’s radio
communication tower? Yeah.
Yeah. They have like a restaurant up top and they have some, I mean, it’s like a cool, like little destination, but why do they need such a big tiredest just for radio?
Well,
because it’s line of sight, you gotta be looking down and everything. So the higher you go, the more distance you can cover until you basically get to the curvature of the earth. And even then you can transmit. Further. So, and most radio towers, are you going to any radio tower? You see the antennas are way up at the top cause they’re sort of looking down on you all the time.
So as far as far as you can visually see, like if you were to climb up the tower, when I look out, as far as you can see is kind of how far the radio wave will travel to. So you want to get them up as high as you possibly can. But the problem is obviously in Japan and Tokyo is earthquakes. Right? So as you build these big huge towers, you got to deal with the fact that the kind of gets shake, rattle, and roll.
Then can you keep them up, keep cutting, keep them up, and not have things fall down and hit people.
Yeah. So the design is really fascinating. Um, so they, they designed it off of the, uh, the, the pagodas, which, you know, are those, uh, the square, really cool buildings that they built up in the Hills that, you know, a traditional building.
Um, and within the center of those pagodas, especially when they stack them up as this flexible column called a Schumer Shira. And so they, the basically the architect, and there’s a really interesting YouTube video about this, the architect, you know, showing you into the center column of this, of the sky.
Skytree. So the, the scent, this concrete center column, uh, is sitting on these rubber discs, number one. So that has a little bit of like, uh, uh, you know, vibration dampening at the bottom. But then it also has these oil dampening arms. These just like, basically like the big hydraulic, uh, hydraulic arms. Well, that’s what they are.
And then, so the, the center column is connected to these outer wall. So if you just met him, imagine that. You know, a big, a big tube that this column is within, but not actually touching the edges. And so it’s connected to that outer tube with these oil dampening arms. So when the, um, if there’s an earthquake as the center column moves one way or the other, it’ll be dampened by these.
Oil dampers and then sort of counteract the sway of the entire building one direction or for the other. So it’s, it’s really interesting technology just to see how they can, uh, build that tall and keep it safe from collapsing. So
that whole thing is like built on oil dampers as soon as it’s sitting in fluid, essentially.
Is that set the thought process there is just sitting in fluid to sit in there. The fluid lets a translation happen between the earth and the. Building, right? Is that kinda what you’re
doing? So it’s sitting on rubber discs, but then again that this center, the center column is within a cylinder, and then these, these, uh, hydraulic arms are connecting the column to the, the outer cylinder of it.
And that’s all within the center of the building. Yeah, it’s, it’s pretty cool. So. Because I guess that’s the only way they could have a, maybe, maybe not the only solution, but that was their solution and it seems pretty elegant and pretty, uh, at school that it’s kind of like tied into their, their cultural history as well.
So, yeah. No, that’s cool.
Yeah, for sure. And then the last thing I wanted to wanted to mention was, we were talking a little bit about batteries. So you said there was maybe an advance on battery. Um, maybe give me a, some storage for a turbine engine energy.
Well, there, there’s a paper that came out recently, uh, by clean energy consortium.
That looked at? No, I think it may have been Emory actually. It may have been. No, no, no, no. Everybody was at a different thing. And we should talk about the upper thing on another day cause it had to do with blade recycling. But uh, in this particular case they had to do with batteries and that the costs and the energy storage cost of batteries was approaching that of running a gas turbine.
And I needed a Dell dive into a little bit deeper, but that sounded interesting that you could actually have mass storage, battery storage capability. That was as efficient or inefficient as case may be, uh, is running a gas turbine. So if you’re storing up energy, excess energy from, uh, from whatever source from wind turbines, from solar, uh, and when you don’t really need it, and then use it, obviously you can store it in batteries.
And then when you have peak demand, you just kind of dump those batteries onto the power grid and then away you go. Yeah. It was surprising to me that the, that the, the gas turbine and, uh, battery storage were getting close to one another in, in costs. Boy, at that, at that threshold over happens, the world will change overnight.
That’s huge because we’ve been trying to get to that point forever, uh, that, that obviously makes wind turbines and solar, solar energy, uh, situations much more
beneficial. Well, and so is it a major breakthrough in like the technology of the battery itself? Cause you said lithium ion has been kind of, you know, stable as like the front runner for a long time.
Yeah, it’s, it w there were two different battery technologies. Lithium was one of them. Uh, there was another one in there that I was not as familiar with, but, uh, I, I think. Obviously, as we build more of these things and we start building a lot of electric vehicles and Tesla’s building these, these batteries go on the wall at your house.
It’s going to drive the cost down. So maybe the Gigafactory at Elon Musk’s Gigafactory is coming into play because as you produce more, that drives the cost down. You’ve got a manufacturing base all set up. It just drives the cost down further. Maybe you can cross that threshold. Maybe we’re getting close.
Yeah, it could be there. I mean, that’s, that’s pretty interesting. Speaking of, speaking of Tesla, as we wrap up here, he was mentioning on his podcast a. Their new Roadster is going to go zero to 60 in 1.9 seconds. Like I said, no, no one place your insides
when you do that because you know, have you been in a car?
Have you ever been at a car that’s like accelerated at anywhere near those speeds
now her now
you can feel it. You can feel it. Your internal organs are getting shifted around. When that’s going on, like why is
my liver hurt? Yeah.
Yeah. Why? Why is that something you look for? Like why would I want to take my stomach and shove it through my spine?
I think let’s, let’s this. It’s okay if I have a five seconds, zero to 60 it’s totally cool with me
while I’m five seconds is pretty fast too. I mean, that’s, it is not slow. Yeah. 1.9. Insane.
1.9 is insane, but you know, batteries have infinite torque, not batteries, but electric motors have infinite torque when you kick them on.
So yeah, you can, a motor gets up to electric motor, gets up to speed very quickly. Now you have to bump, you have to pound it with a bunch of current to do that. But man, alive, that’s, that’s a, is it a guarantee that it’s this one of those Elon Mustangs? Like, you know,
he said on the podcast, whether it’s true or not, I dunno, but.
I don’t think he would of smoke about it. He said there was a, that was the base model and that there was, the higher models would be faster than that.
So did he, did he, he just had it, well, I’ll put this in perspective. He just had it. Child, him and his wife, I think.
Right? Maybe. Maybe, I don’t know. Yeah,
right.
But the child’s name was like a bunch of symbols.
Yeah, I did. I rolled my eyes at it. Yeah.
Okay. So the 1.9 kind of falls into the child being named a bunch of symbols. I’m not sure how that all plays out, right. Just maybe it’s, maybe it’s getting overworked. There’s a lot of stress. I’m sure that there is right now is fighting with Alameda.
Who knows?
Yeah. He’s tweeting about a stock price being too high. That was not a good move. No, it makes sense not to do that. Yeah. He’s probably gonna be in trouble for the sec for that, but. Yeah. Yeah. Well, we’re going to wrap up for today. Um, thanks Alan for another great episode. Appreciate it. And, uh, for you listening out there, be sure to subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, anywhere you listen to podcasts.
Check us out on YouTube for full length episodes on video and clips of the show as well. And, uh, we will see here here next week on the uptime podcast.
But dupe. Alright. It’s almost done.
Okay. I hear, I hear cell phone,
my cell phones, nowhere. Nowhere near. What do you hear? Like
like that.
That’s not my cell phone. It could be my
power adapter
sitting on my
table. It was there when we started and it kind of came on as we got going. How? I
didn’t move anything.
There was nothing. The only thing that’s on my table besides my laptop and coffee and just other random stuff that’s not electronic is my power adapter was near it. Maybe it was that. Um, let’s turn these off.
