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Apr122021

0:00 We'll start just by asking, could you introduce yourself? Hi, my name is full name and title, please. 0:06 Hi, my name is Ryan Franks. I'm the business director with energy safety responsible. 0:10 You know, you must hear so often in the news, it's almost daily about some new smart city initiative. Indeed this morning, that was a another story that the head of Walmart's eecom site is left to go start a new smart city initiative. And part of that is inevitably about sustainable energy. It's without question that's always in that kind of the laundry list of what a smart city can achieve. And when you hear that, you kind of roll your eyes a little bit sometimes about the way that that's so casually tossed around without people fully understanding just how complicated that would be to actually pull off. 0:50 Yeah. You know, the thing about smart cities is that it requires a tremendous amount of bias, because there's so many people that are affected, you have businesses, civic organizations, citizens, and depending upon how it's how it's formed, and where it is, really, there's difference amongst countries and cultures, it can be very difficult, or relatively simple, in some instances, to form them and get it going. 1:17 Yeah, talk to me a little bit more about developing sustainable energy inside of a city, what are the biggest engineering challenges to pulling that off right now as the technology, the off the shelf technology, as it exists right now, one of the biggest challenges to try and get one off of fossil fuel production, for example, 1:36 the challenge with renewable energy, I mean, specifically, is that there are a lot of regulatory barriers. So there's a lot of soft costs that are involved in terms of permitting and terms of interconnection, in terms of getting the right sighting, you're talking about this new energy economy, where you're going from a very centralized plant structure that distributes energy out the transmission lines down to the distribution level, you know, most of the concepts in Smart Cities revolve around having energy produced very close to if not directly adjacent to the point where it's consumed. It's a completely different kind of mindset that has a lot of entrenched interests, that that's hard to overcome that kind of inertia of development. 2:18 Can you talk more about some of those entrenched interests and why they're so difficult to change? I think it's kind of obvious on its face, but maybe you can spell it out a little further. 2:27 Yeah, well, you have all of these sunk costs, really, it comes down to economics for me, and that you have all of these interests that have cost spread out over a certain number of decades to be able to pay for transmission costs to be able to pay for power plant costs. And the vision has kind of dramatically changed. And if you look at any sort of graph, or any sort of forecast for the cost of PV explicitly comes to mind, but a lot of energy sources, it's rapidly decreasing. And it's the only option that makes sense, really, in the long term for most locations around the world now to to develop new new power, new power generation, I should say. So we're just like with anything, I mean, I it's sort of just like another business challenge that has to be figured out and overcome. 3:18 Do you see that on the near horizon? in the near term, we I just was reading a piece last week about how solar production is just starting to pass by like natural gas production. It's just kind of crossed that threshold. And as you point out, it's all about the dollars at the end of the day. I mean, you can't get people to buy in when the product is going to be twice as much as the existing product. It's just never going to win. Do you see this coming? And then in the near term, I've been talking about this as a reporter in various ways for upwards of 20 years. And it's just, it's always just around the corner. You don't I mean, it's always seems to me, like the target keeps getting moved up. What's your sense of that? If you want to gaze into your crystal ball a little bit? Yeah, well, one of the Achilles heels of a lot of distributed energy resources is that they don't always generate electricity. So that's one of the one of the things that has really been a hindrance, I would say, they've needed that connection to the broader electric grid in order to function because, you know, it's cliche to say at this point, but you know, the sun doesn't always shine, the wind doesn't always blow, however, enter energy storage, energy storage, you know, just really fundamentally decouples the use of energy from the generation of electricity. And that plays into smart cities in a whole lot of ways. Yes. Talk to me more about that. I was interviewed Steve Levine a couple of years ago wrote this book called The power house about the kind of battery race that's underway and various nations to try and find a replacement for lithium ion that has an even greater energy density on par with fossil fuels. Is that the ticket Do you think or is it just about scaling up existing technologies or some common For the two, 5:00 well, yeah, I mean, with smart cities, especially, you're looking at usage patterns, right. So you might have people that are, you know, at least pre pandemic times were away from home during the day. But that's when the most the most sunlight is typically available depends on where you live, of course, but that's when the most the most sunshine is available. And you have to have a way to transfer and displace the time when it's generated to the time when it's used. So you know, getting to your question, though, I mean, a little bit more specifically, I don't think anybody really I mean, aside from maybe some battery manufacturers would say that lithium ion, is the perfect battery. In battery talk, there are really two things that come to mind in terms of scaling up. I mean, one is this innovation factor, like you're talking about, where you're constantly on the search for better anodes, better materials, better separators, better construction of the whole module, and also reducing those soft costs for deployment. But the other really important thing is the manufacturability, the costs have really decreased to lithium ion, kind of, for stationary storage, piggybacking off of the mobility and the electric vehicle usage of them, you have these massive plants constructed in a lot of places, you know, primarily China, at this point, are just screaming out batteries, let's say. And there's a lot of momentum behind that that is really hard to change. So when a technical technological innovation comes to light, it's going to take that other component of the manufacturer ability in order to make it successful, truly, 6:39 when you think about that distributed network in a new development, like innisfil is pursuing with this orbit where it's kind of centrally planned, obviously, they're trying to get buy in from other stakeholders, but there's a large degree of ability to kind of plan from the ground up, which, you know, a lot of existing jurisdictions just don't have in developing the kind of smart grid, you know, distributed generation, perhaps using solar batteries, as you say, to kind of shift the actual usage. Is this a workable model? As currently, with the technology on hand right now, do you think? Or do we still have some more work to go to actually make it make it feasible for a development? That's gonna be potentially be breaking ground here, right away? 7:22 No, it's absolutely possible that technologically there, I don't see any sort of barrier whatsoever? Well, let me back up for a second. So there are under construction, massive fields of PV, massive wind turbines, massive standalone battery structures, but also better structures connected to two generation sources. So getting it in the ground, having the product available, that's not a problem. It's figuring out the right way to do it. And figuring out again, the the economics of it, potentially, that are really going to be the crucial point and innisfil really any other smart city. 8:02 That's great. Anything else you'd want to hit on? Before I let you go? 8:05 Yeah, the I would say that, you know, energy is kind of one of these pillars, like we talked about just to kind of come full circle hits with energy is one of these pillars of smart cities. And I think it's really important in the development of a smart city concept to connect to the energy with all of the other aspects. So to connect it with the digitization, to connect it with good governance. And really, you know, there's a lot of wonderful things that people can do with their lives. There's a lot of wonderful things that cities can do with, with with how they're developed. But the most beneficial outcome is when it makes sense for individuals, for groups and for society as a whole. And I think that's kind of a pillar that energy supports in the Smart City world. 8:49 Yeah, you make a good point there about getting buy in and not having just kind of elites make these choices that it actually you get buy in from the people on the ground who are ultimately gonna have to pay the bills. If you can't get them on board. It's just not going to work. Is that right? Okay. I appreciate it. Thanks so much for making time. 9:05 Thank you, Danny.

How to power the smart city with sustainable energy

Innisfil Accelerates Podcast, Smart CitiesApril 12, 2021

Over the last few episodes we’ve been talking a lot about the smart city. And about how to integrate technology into the future city in a way that makes life better for regular people. An emphasis on ubiquitous internet connectivity could allow for easier access to public goods and services. But all of those technologies…

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