How Clean Energy can save you Money and the Planet at the Same Time with Ron Kamen

Hey, welcome back to the show. I’m here with Ron Cayman. How are you today?

Travis, you’re doing fantastic. Thanks so much for having me on the show.

Yeah, glad to have you. Ron is the founder and principal of Earth Kind Energy Consulting, which deals with clean energy. Down with dirty energy, up with clean energy, and you’ve got a lot of different solutions out there for the nonprofit that will help save them some money while being environmentally friendly. Tell us a little bit about how and why you got into this business.

It had been a long, long ride. You know, I’ve been doing this for almost 4 decades, so it’s been quite the experience. And let me think about how I started getting into it, you know because I went to college for accounting and management. After all, I liked It was good with numbers. I like the balancing, the debits and credit balancing, and the other stuff he did. He graduated in System Science, and we could talk about that some other time, but at that point, I was the last generation at that point that had to register for the draft when there was still a drawing draft, and then there was no draft for a while, and there was no registration for a while. And while I was finishing up my undergraduate and starting my graduate work, there was this little fence going on over in the Middle East, one of the other wars that started.

And at that point, it was I who ran before Iraq and all the rest of it. And I had four younger brothers. And all of a sudden, they had the register for this draft, and I started to scratch my head and say, “Wait for a second, where are they going to go? What are we going to be fighting? And they didn’t seem to be about defending democracy, they seemed to be about grabbing that oil and that energy stuff. And that kind of opened up a crack in my brain, and I started finding out more and more about energy. Not too long after that, I was lucky enough to get a pay cut to take a job working as a community organizer, helping to serve the public.

And the issue was energy. And at that point, the phasing in of the nuclear power plants started. We’re going to create energy too cheap to meter if you can believe such a thing. I mean, I was a big supporter of nuclear power growing up. I was a big sci-fi fan. I felt like the nukes would take us to the stars. Then I worked at the Shoreham Nuclear Power Plant. We have a whole little insight into how that all didn’t work too well.

However, when I began my organizing career, energy prices were rising at a rate of 25% to 18% per year. I started working with people on fixed incomes who were shutting down their homes because they couldn’t afford to heat and eat.

I chose between one or the other and realized that you know what energy makes the world go around. It’s everything that we do. Civilization as we know it, it’s everything from turning the lights on and heating and cooling our buildings, keeping ourselves comfortable and safe, to moving ourselves around, and transportation and energy are at the core of it And I realized that energy and the environment were my mission, and I started working on energy and environmental issues.

First, a policy guy is looking at different policies that could help make things work. And then, after some time, they set up a nonprofit to take the message out that clean energy was a way for people. Save money as well as have a positive environmental impact. I’ve spun that off into a for-profit company for a variety of reasons, and I’ve had my consulting practice for about 22 years now. So, it’s been quite the ride and an interesting experience, but yeah, energy is central to everything we do in civilization, and you’ve got to get energy from somewhere and, you know, and you’ve got to use it as efficiently as possible, because who can afford to just keep paying these high prices, right?

Yeah, I fully agree.

When you can have a win-win situation, you can save money and save the environment at the same time. That’s kind of what grabs me I don’t know if I’m like every other person out there, but I’m kind of lazy. And unless it’s delivered to me and easy to use, whatever it is, I just can’t get the time. I’ve got so many other things to do like run the family, do the career, try to get podcasting off the ground, and everything else we have to do, and they’re like, “Well, we need to do this. I’m like, I’m not one of those early adopters. Like when iPhones came out, I was not interested. You guys go through all the pain and then when it’s economical for me and makes sense.

I’ll hop on, but not till that point, right? So, I’m glad that there are people like yourself that take the leading edge in some of these industries and the way we’re changing as people to take and lead the way on that stuff. I’ve never been that kind of guy. I’m an outside-the-box thinker, but I’m not an early adopter.

And you know, most people aren’t. There is just a few percent that, you know, helped lead the way with things and, you know, thankfully they do, but the great part about clean energy from my perspective now is, as I’ve watched it evolve, is that you know, it’s becoming kind of embedded in a lot of different things and you don’t think about it so much.

But for instance, you know, the computers that we use right now are a lot more energy efficient than they ever were, which is why, you know, the batteries in our smartphones last us a heck of a lot longer than they used to. And the batteries in our laptops and the energy that we’re using are so much more efficient. And by doing it more efficiently, we’re reducing energy consumption. And as a guy named Marie Lovins out of Colorado once said, the cheapest form of energy is the energy you don’t use.

Right?

For instance, when you become more efficient, you know, I started my projects when I started doing energy projects with light bulbs. And why, well, because it was easy to explain to somebody that you know when you have a 100-watt light bulb, right?

And you go and you touch a light bulb After it’s been on for that 100-watt light bulb, you burn your hands. That’s because 90% of the energy in those incandescent light bulbs is producing heat, not light. So, when you get to more advanced technologies, there’s fluorescence and now light-emitting diodes, or leads. Most of the energy it creates is visible light and just a little bit of heat.

So, most of the energy now is creating the light that we are using it for, and it’s more efficient. Instead of 100 watts, we can now get the same amount of light for less than 20 watts. So, you’re down like 80-90%.

But we’re still getting the same quality of lighting and the same quality of products, and that’s happening across the board efficiency-wise, and then it’s also happening incredibly on the generation side, and we’ll talk about that in a little bit.

Yeah, absolutely. To be honest, I was hesitant to invite you. I was looking at your bio on this stuff. I’m like, this is going to be a pitch fest. It’s like there’s going to be value in this stuff. And then we started chatting, and I couldn’t help but hit the record button. It seems that there are a lot of ways I know nonprofits struggle. You know, keeping the lights on because of money flow for cash flow. For fundraising for all these reasons, why not try it? Want to talk about how they can meet their energy needs and also save money at the same time?

What does something like that look like? Like, what have you seen with the others? nonprofits you’ve worked with?

Yes, I have worked with a lot of nonprofits over the years. everything from churches and religious-based ones through educational organizations, schools, high schools, colleges, catechesis through 12, and all different kinds of nonprofits. And, you know, the first question is, how much do you spend on energy, which the majority of people do? Pretty familiar Hey, you know, I just got an electricity bill. OK, that’s part of it We’ve got electricity Oh, I just got a heating bill.

OK, that’s another part of it. heating and hot water. You’ve got a multi-family building, an affordable housing complex, and nonprofits. I work with affordable housing organizations. The key component is the energy piece because it’s very variable and it has a major impact on people’s budgets.

And then also, how You’re getting around right. How about your people? Moving from here to there, what kind of trip does that cost you in fuel? And now with gas prices doing everything, people are much more aware of the fact that a lot of their budgets are getting eaten up by gasoline or diesel or whatever they’re using for transportation. So, the first question is, how much are you spending on energy? And when you look at energy, it’s not just electricity, it’s electricity. It’s for heating, cooling, hot water, and transportation. So, the first question is, how much money are you putting towards your first goal? The second question is, “OK, great.”

So how efficient are you in using that energy? How old are your systems? Do you have any, for instance, in lighting, do you still have incandescent light bulbs or old fluorescent light bulbs? Can you change those out to a more efficient technology? You will consume less energy. Reduce your spending. Reduce your workload because the LED light bulbs last like 10 times longer than incandescent, so you don’t have to change them as often. What sort of payback do you get on those efficiency measures?

So, the first wave is always taking a look at what you do and how much you spend on where your pain points are and then figuring out what you can do to hit those with efficiency. First of all, conserve energy by reducing your energy consumption without compromising your mission or your quad. Your life and so you look at electricity. What are you doing? There are sensors, for instance, on your lighting equipment when you have big spaces. And everything is lit 24/7. That’s not good.

People turning off lights, for example. Is that the culture? First of all, what sort of technology is in there that you can switch out? Does that make it a no-brainer? So, you don’t even have to change the culture; you can just change the technology. That’s sometimes easier and then look at your heating and cooling systems.

And similarly, you know, depending upon your building infrastructure, heating and cooling could be in hot water and could be a significant chunk of your budget. If you’re doing a housing complex, obviously your heating, cooling, and hot water are much bigger things than in a commercial space if you’re just a commercial building. But in all your buildings, you’ve got heating, cooling, and some amount of hot water. There is also a cost, and there are things you can do with the efficient technologies there.

And then similarly with your vehicles, right? I mean, you know, it used to be when I was growing up, you know, 20 miles to the gallon was pretty good, you know, and

Yeah, yeah.

Still, today, some vehicles don’t even get 20 miles to the gallon. But, you know, can you switch to something that, if you’re still going to use fossil fuels, at least uses them more efficiently? Do things like tune-ups and change filters both in vehicles and then, as well as under heating and air conditioning systems.

So here are some ideas for you to consider. Look at where your dollars are being spent and what your pain points are How can you address those systematically to make yourself more efficient? Use less, save more, and then you can get into looking at different technologies that take you to the next level.

So, before we jump into that, he talked about a lot of stuff, so we’ve got to give him a chance to get some back and forth there, right? So, I remember the Navy. It’s like 2000. I want to talk about 2008. I’m sure it’s not the right exact year, but they went to every space in the military that has light sensors.

For just that specific reason, they looked at their energy costs. Look at how the Navy is You know, if you were in the military fighting wars, you would get turned into just like a company, Davies. An enormous company, right? An enormous and nervous company. They have ships, planes, submarines, and satellites. They, I mean they, I mean a ridiculous amount of equipment, buildings, and everything else in 2008, they’re all going to be hot and cold.

Sticking with it, say in 2008, they went to all of these light sensors in the rooms to turn on and off, on and off lights. And I don’t remember the numbers, but I know what the projected numbers were. It’s this massive amount of savings, obviously across a huge swath of everything that they do.

And they converted that, made the change, decided to go with it, and saved millions upon millions of dollars by switching that. I don’t know if your company or nonprofit will or will not save $1,000,000. I have no idea, but they saved an enormous amount of money by switching to those light centers.

They did the analysis, went through it, and made the decision, “Yes, there are upfront costs. I’m thinking about switching some of these things over, but the long-term benefits I always get from nonprofits. They’re like, ” Well, do you? How much of that stuff? In the US, do you plan on shutting down your business next year, or do you plan on having the nonprofit up and running?

running for the next 20 to 50 years. Do you plan on hanging up? Will it cost you now and then maybe have a little bit of savings over time? That saving adds up. Every year that you’re still in operation, so look at what changes you might be able to implement and how that might affect you. In the long term, not just in the short term, but in the long term, you can make some big strides with small changes.

And the thing is, is that you can do it in a bunch of ways, right? So, one way to do it is just every time you’re getting some new light bulb or whatever it is that you’re replacing anyway, now just take that incremental step up to get something more efficient, right? So that’s one way to do it Another way is to do it all at once, right? And there’s always a payback with that because efficiency pays for itself in some period There are often incentives that you can get from the utility or the state government, or there are federal incentives. So, take a look at those incentives.

But then, if you don’t have the capital, there are third parties that often put up the entire capital.

and then you just pay them back out of the savings. And those energy-saving performance contracts where you’re paying somebody based upon the performance of them delivering that energy savings can be another way that you can do that in a way that doesn’t impact your capital budget. So, you don’t have to worry about coming up with the cash upfront; you’re just going to take it out of the savings from your operational budget later, which is a great way to do it.

I’ve done a lot of projects that way with nonprofits over the years, especially nonprofits and government entities. And that goes true not just for efficiency, but then when you take a look at, for instance, solar electricity, solar electricity has a similar model with something called a power purchase.

I have nonprofits that I’ve negotiated with marks that I negotiated for and worked with, where we put out a bid to for-profit companies. They take those tax benefits that nonprofits can’t access as they don’t pay taxes, right? Then the four profits will take the tax benefits and then deliver electricity.

The utility puts in a price that’s lower than the utility and saves the nonprofit money from day one, but they don’t put in any capital costs if a third party puts that in, takes tax benefits, and then only maintains that equipment. So, the nonprofit doesn’t even have to own and maintain the equipment; they just get the energy savings within the power purchase agreement. So, a bunch of different ways of making stuff happen, whether you have the capital or don’t have the capital. A lot of the time, if you do have some capital, it does make a lot of economic sense. They just invest it into your physical plant and do the things like the Navy did with occupancy sensors. They’ve also done similar things with LEDs. Light-emitting diodes have also done stuff. I did LED lighting on a hospital ship for the Military Sealift Command.

One of my first efficiency projects was because those little lights on the indicator boards would keep burning out those little indicator lights. So not only were they inefficient, but they kept burning out, and they were paying because people wanted to know Is it because the lights are out or because we have a problem? We don’t have a problem, but the LEDs are lasting so much longer now.

And it made so much sense economically that it was a great thing to do so. Yes indeed.

So, what are some of the upcoming technologies or something It’s maybe been around for a couple of years. It’s finally starting to gain traction. And I know like podcasting, we’re still kind of on the leading edge of podcasting. Not everyone is familiar with it, and everyone’s about what is in an energy world right now that may have been around, but not everyone has adopted it yet. What are some of those things that already exist? that more and more companies and more and more nonprofits are implementing what they do right.

Yeah, so three things are different again. Different energy sources, different technologies, some similarities, but just to take it apart, electricity. Solar power prices have come down over 99% since full solar first came out, so across the planet, it is now the cheapest source of new energy generation.

Compared to anything, it blows out every source. It even blows out existing power plants because prices have come down for solid-state technology and now the cost is so tremendously lower that it makes sense almost anywhere you are. Some places still have cheap electricity. It’s hard to get those numbers to work, but almost anywhere you can see solar systems going up. big ones like those in the Midwest and elsewhere. huge solar fields, but then even down to smaller ones. Everything from the residents’ people, probably. Seeing them on people’s homes and then nonprofits including them either on top of the routes or their buildings or over their parking lots or having one nonprofit that had a fallow shallow field that they had dumped.

When they had cleared out their soccer field, they had this area that they had just stumped everything on. They weren’t using it; it was just sitting there. And those three acres supply 100% of their electricity needs with solar power, right?

They did it without laying out a dime by having a third party come in and put up the capital, and they just saved money from day one. That saving is paying for an extra teacher for that particular nonprofit. So, a lot of ways, solar in particular, are worth taking a look at. If you haven’t installed LED lighting or indoor occupancy sensors in your building, you should take a look at it because the savings are dramatic and very impactful on the electricity side. Now let’s get into the heat. And the cooling side, which is an interesting thing. So, you know, we’re all familiar with air conditioners, right? And air conditioners have gotten much more efficient than they ever were, but an air conditioner is a heat pump. And what is a heat pump?

Well, a heat pump is an air conditioner. It compresses and expands the gas, then. It takes the heat out of one space and dumps it outside into another. Our refrigerators and freezers are heat pumps. Compression and expansion take the heat out of the box, dumping off those little coils out the back.

So, heat pumps have come a long way, and it used to be that heat pumps were most effective in the South, where the heat pump is in an air conditioner or refrigerator. Or the freezer, but with the opposite heat. The pump that takes it in the air is an air-source heat pump, which is an air conditioner that cools your building during the summer. But during the winter, it takes heat out of the air.

This gas compresses and expands this gas and then dumps that heat into your building, so it heats your building. It used to be that the technology was only good down to freezing or a little bit below. Now the technology with air source heat pumps has gotten so good that even down to minus 15 degrees, you can have an air source heat pump cold. Climate air source heat pumps provide heat from the air as either a primary or secondary source of heat down to minus 15 degrees Celsius. That’s an air-source heat source.

Are you talking about freon units, or are you talking about something else?

They’re not free on, but they’re like free on, right? So, it’s a question of the expansion of various gases. There’s an evolution going on in terms of those types of gases, refrigeration gases, and which one you use, which one impacts the ozone and balance. They’re evolving at different levels.

So, there are a bunch of different ones that are out there in terms of refrigerants, it is worth taking a look at And you know how much refrigerant you’re going to use and what the impact of that is. But air source heat pumps, to give you a sense, when you have fossil fuel and you’re burning gas, oil, or any fossil fuel to create heat, it’s always less than 100% efficient.

But even the most efficient natural gas boiler is 99% efficient, let’s say, but there’s always some percent that’s just going up the stack when you have an oil-fired heater. It’s much less efficient than going down to 80%, and then sometimes you have oil-fired hot water or a burner that comes off the main furnace, right?

And when the furnace is shut off during the summer or spring and fall and it’s just doing hot water? Those efficiencies can be as low as 30 or 40%, which means that 2/3 of your oil budget is just going up. The stack is just waste heat. Right now, any fossil fuel is always less than 100%.

So, do you want to throw away money or do you want to throw away money? You don’t have a teenage daughter and you’re throwing money out the window, or you have these old heating units and you’re just throwing them outside.

Just throw it in the chimney, burn it up You know who needs it, right? So yeah, exactly. With an air source heat pump, because you’re taking that heat out of the air. … that whatever latent heat is still there, even down to minus 15 or lower, is still heat in the air.

Otherwise, we wouldn’t survive, right Because you’re taking that heat out of the air, you’re putting electricity into this heat pump, but every unit of electricity you’re putting in. With the heat pump, you’re getting two to three units of heating and cooling out of it. So, where fossil fuels are less than 100% efficient, air source heat pumps are 250% efficient. Every unit you put in, you get two or three out because you’re using that latent energy that’s in the air at the next level, which is the level of heating and cooling. It uses that heat beneath our feet, which comes out of a There’s a bunch of different companies, but one of them is Climate Master, out there in Oklahoma City.

Not too far from you, Travis, where in 1957, when the whole world was looking up at Sputnik, they were looking down at the ground and realizing that energy in the ground for billions of years has been absorbing half the energy from the sun and it’s letting it right down there on that earth. So that’s why when you dig down below the frost line, or five feet in most parts of the country, you get this constant temperature. In most parts of the country, it’s about 50 degrees. It can be a little bit higher or lower depending upon where you are, but you go down below the frost line. You wind up with this constant temperature. So, with geothermal heating and cooling. What you do is put fluid down into a pipe and now It’s a closed loop. So basically, it just goes down into a pipe, comes back up, and is put in a field.

You can put it in a pond or just drill straight down and place that pot, that pipe, under the frost line. You send the water out, and the water comes back. It’s a constant 50-degree temperature. You can now apply that 50-degree angle to either of the Cooley buildings. You don’t need much more to cool the building if you’re starting with a 50-degree temperature, and you also use it to heat and cool.

a heat pump, but now instead of whatever the ambient temperature is outside. Instead of 100 degrees, 90 degrees, whatever on the hot days or down in the minuses on the cold days, you’ve got this constant 50-degree temperature that you’re starting with. And so now you have efficiencies of 400 and 500%. Every unit of electricity you put in gets you 4 to 500%. Energy efficiency comes from using that heat beneath our feet with geothermal heating and cooling. Pumps. This is unique. By the way, just left from geothermal electricity. By the way, that’s a different conversation for another day.

So on the heating and cooling side, go from fossil fuels to air source heat pumps, which help you provide air heating and cooling by using the ambient temperature of the air Increase your efficiency to 250%, plus or minus, and then if you want to go to the next round, which a lot of schools, nonprofits, and others are doing, especially with new construction, sometimes it even makes economic sense.

But new construction and no-brainer use of the heat beneath your feet by putting geothermal wells either in fields or in a pond or right underneath your building, and just to give you a sense of digging holes under your building going down just 500 feet, which is most parts of the country, that’s the easiest non-permittable. You don’t need extra permits to just roll a hold down 500.

Even though the closed loop geothermal wells send the water down, putting it back up and under the footprint of the building, you can carry the heating, cooling, and hot water load. It’s up to 25 stories, and it’s happening even as far north as Toronto. It’s happening all across the country. Heat, cool, hot water, all from the heat beneath our feet. There’s drilling underneath the footprint of any new book, any new building, and, if you don’t have a new building, you’ve got an existing building. There are other ways of doing retrofits, and that’s a little bit longer timeline for the recovery of your asset and your investment, but it still usually has a payback, especially with different incentives out there. First and foremost, electricity, solar energy, and efficiency. Always look at efficiency first.

The next wave of electricity generation looks at solar wherever you put it on your roof. Carport in a field and then look at your heating and cooling loads with air source heat pumps or ground source heat pumps. If you have a central air conditioner and it’s getting older, don’t think about putting in another central air conditioner, at least. Swap it out for an air source heat pump and get a supplemental heat source, if not all your heat from that same unit, and do so more efficiently. And then ground source heat pumps, geothermal being the most efficient there Now let’s take a look. on transportation, just for a second.

And, well, if you want to get to the next level of nonprofits who do a lot of home deliveries and other ways of driving around or transporting people around and everything else, right? So, the fascinating thing about this is that electric vehicles have now really taken off, right? And you’re just seeing this exponential growth every year in these technologies? It used to be that Tesla was leading the way.

There’s no doubt everybody knows the Tesla story. great story. They did a wonderful thing. Help build the mark. However, every major manufacturer—every manufacturer is now an automaker—has an electric vehicle. No matter what brand you like, or what manufacturer you’re most exposed to in the light, you can find an electric vehicle that they’re making or soon will be making.

So, what we’ve seen is exponential. Growth in the electric vehicle markets, Matt, the least of which is now being driven by the fact that gasoline is so expensive, and when you compare the cost per mile of gasoline to the cost per mile of electricity, even in the most expensive electricity utility territories in the country,

Con Edison, Hawaii. Otherwise, you’re still looking at a comparable cost of less than or about a baller gallon, right? So, think about that. Think about what you’re paying for gasoline today. If you were paying a dollar a gallon, imagine what you would save in terms of dollars in your fuel costs.

And then realize that, in addition to fuel, you’re also saving on maintenance because you don’t have any oil changes, you don’t have any transmission fluids, you’ve got 20 moving parts instead of 2000 to breakdown. And now you take a look at your total cost of ownership with an electric vehicle and it’s like, wow, huh? And all the costs are coming down, and all the incentives are out there, and with the new federal legislation that just passed, there are going to be even more incentives for nonprofits out there.

And there are ways of taking advantage of various things. So, fuel costs are another way to save money with clean energy technologies.

It’s getting out of hand. Some of the big car companies are getting into a little bit of fun with all the different new electric car companies that are just on their own. I don’t know if you saw this Uh, Julia Louis Dreyfus from, you know, Seinfeld, does a commercial for the Mercedes AA class, and it’s a spoof. It’s a spoof, but it’s hilarious like they said.

That was great. That was hilarious.

If you guys, if y’all haven’t seen this and you want a good chuckle, a good old-fashioned clean. Not like the other show that I’m producing, which is not clean humor. They’re the Oh yeah, yeah, I have a show. She lifts the hood and there’s something like 9648 AA batteries. It’s the AA class.

It’s like when they put this thing together, it’s like every Mercedes, it’s very well done, very classy and you have the on-board system that tells you how to replace your batteries and it’s the bud and like 270 things light up for like AA’s that need replacing. And if you want to do it all at once, there’s an eject button. This car is ejecting approximately 9000 batteries.

It’s hilarious. The AA class, it’s all good fun, of course, but I am not an early adopter, so I want to It is fun.

All right, so here you go So let me just say, no, you’re not an early adopter, so let’s go with, let’s say, a Ford, right? I mean, I wouldn’t say that Ford is kind of an early adopter type of manufacturer, right?

Not anymore.

I mean, you’ve got any more or not? Not a lawyer now They came up with the Model T, so that was one of the first, right? Okay, but 4. You know, they have the Ford Mustang E, which is a very cool vehicle if you’ve ever seen it and own it. And actually, you can even get it with different sounds so that you can make that room. This was exactly what many Mustang owners wanted. But now it’s all-electric, right? which is incredible. But the thing I think that’s almost most exciting about Ford these days is the F-150. It’s just the best-selling truck in the whole country, right? And they now have an F-150 Lightning, which is all-electric, right?

I got to ride in it  

Oh, you’ve got to write on it. Yeah, yeah. How was it?

They went through it’s they commandeered this tiny parking lot, they took you through a little experience, they turned on this thing, and then they backed you up to the wall and gave you, like, the launch. I like one of my likes. I love driving a car. I love being on the road and like it when I

They had high rides and stuff back then, like the launch is what gets you in with all that torque. I mean, you can launch those suckers. Not until it feels like you’re, you know, ripping the drivetrain apart. I love the feeling that it was pretty exciting, but I am. I am a huge road trip guy.

And I travel, you know, 900 miles in a day. I can’t yet do that on electricity. Yes, that’s where technology is evolving, right? So here are a couple of things, so guys. Frank, are you going?

You’ve got to make sure you plan out your trip well and understand where you’re going to get those charges from. And you know, the good part about charging technologies is that they are evolving, right?

Tesla again led the way. Play with charging rates that are, you know, unbelievable. Right: 100 kW per station. So, you’re looking at these power stations for Tesla, and they’ve got 88 little power stations. That’s an MW of power those guys have got sitting there, right? So, this Tesla is leading the way. We had an amplifier on our airplane that had 200 kW in our airplane.

Oh yeah, oh.

So, we can talk about the submarines that are submerged on the other side of the world that you need. Yeah, that kind of 200 kilowatts of power, yeah.

You have to be that power, then. And for a guy like you, you have to look for those fast charges. Can you stop every four or five hours to get up, use the restroom, eat something, plugin, complete 80% of your challenge in 20 or 30 minutes, and then move on to the next one? So, for you, it’s been a long time. Distance travel is still challenging.

Although now with a bunch of different programs that have come out, both from the VW settlement, if you remember that there’s been a charging normal setup.

Oh, when they were lying. everything just like that. Yeah, well, so the lightning guy, he showed me on the little oh, everyone’s got like an iPad in their car now, right?

So, he showed me an iPad that you pull up and it maps your route, and it maps you the charging stations out along the way. The cool route It’s a cool feature. But again, I’m a lazy guy and not interested in the news. I was like, so for lazy guys, not for say, lazy guys that don’t travel quite as much as you. But I will ask you a question, which is how often you travel. To give you a sense, the statistic is that 98% of American trips are less than 30 days.

In a day, there are usually less than 100 miles. So, I don’t know about you. You’re the exception. You go 800 miles in a day. I sometimes do. I know a lot myself. But for most people, most of the time we’re going from here to the store, headed to school, here to work, or whatever you tally up your trip.

I was in San Diego this past weekend, which is more than a day’s drive, so I flew back this weekend. So, we’re going to be in Mobile, and Mobile is an 11-and-a-half-hour drive. That’s easy.

Yeah, that’s it for that one.

Yeah, absolutely.

Right. So, for most people, most of the time, and this is a part, if you happen to be a homeowner, you’ve got a single-family residence and you’ve got an electric car. Yeah, plug it into your garage and overnight, even with a regular 110 socket, if you’ve got the same 220 volts that you use for your electricity. So, for your electric dryer, and you’ve got that in your garage, you plug it into a 220 volt.

It’ll go a lot faster, and you’ll get a lot more out of it. But the reality is, for most people, most of the time you plug it in overnight, you forget about it, and you come out. That’s it, 98% of the time.

Then you don’t have to think about it. You go out, you come back, you do your thing, you plug it in, you forget about it, and it’s again 50% to 90% cheaper than paying for gasoline. And no oil changes, no transmission fluid, and how convenient is that? You don’t even have to stop to get gas, so

Talk about being sluggish. I love it, man. I plug it in and soon forget about it. I don’t have to worry about it.

I go out and do my stuff, then I come back. A lazy guy too. And it’s a wonderful thing. So, for most people, most of the time.

Then get those prices down and I’ll be happy.

And those prices are coming down, which is a great thing, right? So, you know, like our little smartphones, which were multiple millions of dollars ten years ago, they take up a whole room or a floor of office space. The same computer power is now in this little silly iPhone or silly smartphone that we have in our pockets. It now costs a few hundred bucks.

That’s the same thing that’s happening with all these clean energy technologies. Prices for solid-state solar panels, heating, and cooling systems, and electric vehicles are all decreasing. So you know, you’re right, prices have got to come down and they are And the great part, though, is that you know, in addition to the prices coming down, they’re close now.

So, with the tax credits that are out there and the utility and state incentives that are there depending upon where you live, you can often get the incentives to the point where you’re paying less for an electric car than you would be paying for a comparable fossil fuel gas vehicle.

So, take a look at the incentives, take a look at that, and then the other part is to take a look at your budget, right? And it’s like, “Look, I’m spending three grand a year on gas features. 

Do you mean I could spend less than a guy? I could save two hundred dollars a year just by switching to electricity and plugging it into my house instead of going to a gas station. Okay, I understand.

We’re thinking about, you know, I’ll pay.

Yeah, totally.

A couple of bucks extra.

because I own a big deal.

Right, exactly.

It’s doing the math and doing the numbers. And you know what? I have got to be honest; I haven’t done the math. I have the numbers from my usage. I’ve had vehicles that have been paid off for a couple of years, and obviously, no car payment is way better than any car payment.

So, I wonder what it looks like and what the actual math would be by the time it comes up that I’m looking for my next vehicle.

Yeah, depending upon how much you drive in and what your driving patterns are and if you’ve got more than one vehicle, which I do two ways, same thing. So, I’ve got one all-electric car.

I got another that’s a Chevy Volt that switches 50 miles. My wife’s car goes 50 miles on a charge.

It’s just all she mostly needs during the day, but if we go a distance, we just take the Chevy Volt. It’s got gas as the secondary fuel. And now we get 100 miles per gallon, which isn’t bad, you know.

We’d got gas, so we’d have to worry about it. We can go to a gas station wherever we are, right? So I don’t have to do any planning. So, you know, there are different, different ways, but yeah, definitely take a look at the numbers and if you’re a non-profit struggling with budget, it’s the man.

It pays to take a look at your transportation budget and see how you might be able to improve it. The total cost of ownership, fuel costs, maintenance costs, and take look. The numbers are pretty incredible.

I tell you what, I tell you what, Ron, you make a pretty compelling argument for not only taking care of the planet but also taking care of your budget at the same time.

So here I’ve got about a profit, right? It’s a great little school. It’s one of my favorite clients, right? So, they’re the ones that I mentioned that did this They had three acres and we were just sitting there. They would fall, and the kids used to play in there a little bit, but basically, it was that they weren’t using it at all. It’s just a dumping ground, right? So, they put this solar field there and gave it to him. 100% of their electricity usage, which is great, right? But they also had Extra now, so they were like, “Oh, we got it all. 

Our energy comes from this solar field. You know, at some point, they want to just buy it because they did this power purchase agreement. They didn’t have capital, but they’ve been building up their capital supply. So, they’re going to buy it outright. When they buy it outright, they will own it and they won’t have to pay anything, which is great These things are very low maintenance. There is almost nothing to do in terms of maintenance. So, it’s free energy for electricity. Oh, you mean if we did heat pumps also?

And oh, you mean if we took off 4 buses and we made those electric, we could have our solar system powered back up in a second? That’s a significant impact on my budget every year, and now I’ve got it covered and I’m having a positive environmental impact all at the same time. And I’m using it as an educational tool for my kids, for them to learn about how solar works, electricity works, heating, cooling, and transportation work, and I do lessons within math. There was a pretty great win, win, win, win, win, win, win, win, win situation, which is why I love my job for others.

There’s no denying that. I don’t think anyone can argue with you and say that you don’t love your job. So, I’m happy you’re in that space, and I’m happy you can be my guest today. If people listening want to get a hold of you and find out more, what’s the one place you want them to go?

Yeah, just go to Earth Kind Energy.

It is the simplest place to find lots of videos. There are lots of educational materials and a bunch of different things, and if they have any questions or if I can help them in any way,

And this is why I’m here. I enjoy assisting men. But nonprofits in particular have a very soft space in my heart because you guys will do God’s work and God knows you can use all the

You can get help saving money with clean energy. That’s winning, win, win down the line. If I can assist you, in any case, I do. I loved it, so thanks so much. Thanks for having me on the show, Travis.