Episode 137 – Mike Nelson
Can America’s farmers grow something more valuable alongside their traditional crops: electricity? In this episode of The Covert Code, Anna Covert welcomes award-winning meteorologist, author, and American Energy Initiative communications director Mike Nelson for a conversation that connects changing weather, affordable solar energy, rural economic opportunity, and an ambitious new vision for America’s electricity infrastructure.
For Mike, the stakes are personal. After nearly five decades in weather broadcasting, he has watched climate science become more urgent—and the birth of his grandchildren gave that urgency a name and a face. Yet this is not simply a conversation about climate risk. It is about the practical possibilities of producing clean power, earning revenue from farmland, storing energy, and moving electricity from where it is plentiful to where it is needed.
From a Childhood Thunderstorm to a Lifetime of Weather
Mike’s fascination began in Madison, Wisconsin, when a severe thunderstorm captured his attention as a young boy. He built a backyard weather station, tracked temperatures, and studied weather reports long before the internet made forecasting tools available to everyone. A chance connection with a television meteorologist at a Baskin-Robbins ice cream store led him to ask for a job at a local TV station. That request started an extraordinary career.
Mike went on to help bring early weather-computer graphics into broadcast studios, including training other meteorologists. He spent decades explaining weather to television audiences and earned recognition as a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society. In this interview, Anna asks what changed his focus from weather forecasting to climate advocacy. His answer: his grandchildren, and the future they will inherit.
Why Carbon Emissions Matter Beyond Our Own Lifetimes
Mike explains that carbon dioxide can remain influential in the climate system over very long periods, creating consequences that extend beyond a single generation. Anna shares how conversations with her daughter helped turn abstract climate concerns into a personal commitment to change.
The two discuss melting ice, changing weather patterns, wildfires, and the importance of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Some numerical statements in the conversation are estimates or projections, and should be checked against current scientific sources before being used independently in policy or investment materials. The broader point of the discussion is clear: decisions about energy infrastructure today will shape opportunities for decades.
The Opportunity to Harvest Sunshine
The conversation changes direction when Anna turns to small farmers. For many agricultural families, land carries both personal history and financial pressure. Crop prices, input costs, weather, and debt can make the future uncertain. Mike asks listeners to consider a new type of crop: electricity produced by sunlight.
Mike presents an illustrative comparison between the potential gross value of electricity generated on an acre of solar panels and traditional agricultural crops. He argues that solar development on a suitable portion of farmland could create a new source of income while allowing families to retain their land. Those figures are not a guaranteed payment to a landowner or a net-income forecast. Actual economics depend on system production, land and construction costs, financing, power prices, interconnection, contracts, taxation, and how revenue is divided between developers and property owners.
Anna adds that solar projects may support surrounding communities through jobs, local spending, and tax revenue. A project that strengthens a farm’s finances could also support schools, emergency services, or other community needs, depending on local arrangements.
Agrivoltaics: Farming and Solar Together
Solar does not always have to replace agriculture. Mike discusses agrivoltaics, the practice of combining agricultural production with solar energy generation. He describes grazing sheep beneath panels, adapting structures for cattle, and planting appropriate forage or pollinator habitat near arrays.
Project design matters: equipment height, spacing, water access, soil conditions, and the type of crop or livestock determine which combinations make sense. Anna and Mike see the potential for more choices—not a one-size-fits-all requirement for farmers.
Why America’s Transmission Network Is the Missing Piece
Even an abundant energy crop has little value if there is no practical route to market. Mike compares electricity to wheat: farmers need roads or rail to deliver grain, and energy producers need transmission to deliver power. This leads to the proposal at the center of his current work: a nationwide American SuperGrid.
The proposed network would use high-voltage direct current (HVDC) transmission to move electricity efficiently over long distances, complementing rather than replacing existing regional grids. Mike compares it with the Interstate Highway System—an infrastructure overlay that could help electricity travel among regions while leaving local networks in place.
Explore the initiative at American Energy Initiative. Additional background on the concept is available at American SuperGrid.
A Potential Texas Demonstration
Mike describes Texas as a promising place to demonstrate the concept because of its substantial renewable and conventional energy resources, large electricity demand, and distinctive grid structure. He discusses a proposed transmission route that could connect resources in West Texas with consumption centers farther east.
He also points to the severe Texas winter power crisis as a reminder that energy security depends on much more than generation capacity alone. Weatherization, grid connections, resilience, and a diverse mix of resources are all part of the challenge. The Texas SuperGrid example in the interview is a proposal, not a funded or completed project.
How Underground HVDC Could Change the Equation
Transmission lines often face opposition because people worry about appearance, land impacts, and potential disruption. Mike argues that underground routes—potentially alongside existing transportation rights-of-way—could avoid some visual conflicts and reduce exposure to certain weather hazards.
Underground transmission also has substantial costs, engineering requirements, construction impacts, and operational considerations. The episode explores its promise; it does not establish that undergrounding every route would be cheaper or technically preferable.
Solar, Storage, and America’s Growing Electricity Needs
Anna and Mike also examine demand from AI and data centers, the growth of electric vehicles, and the need for dependable power. Mike discusses the role of battery storage and other technologies, including compressed-air and iron-air approaches, in making clean electricity more flexible.
Their shared vision is not limited to solar alone. The proposed grid could transmit electricity generated by different sources, allowing regions to make use of resources that are available and affordable. As Mike notes, electricity itself does not come labeled by the fuel that produced it.
National Security, Rural Prosperity, and a Shared Future
For Mike, a stronger national electricity system could deliver multiple benefits: more reliable power, additional income opportunities for landowners, expanded energy production, and lower emissions. Anna emphasizes the human side of that picture—the families, small communities, and children who might benefit from better infrastructure and new economic opportunities.
Throughout the episode, Mike urges people to learn about the SuperGrid concept and ask informed questions about energy infrastructure. Whether listeners agree with every assumption or not, the conversation challenges us to think beyond the electricity system inherited from a century ago.
Connect With Mike Nelson
- Mike Nelson’s official link hub (social profiles, videos and books)
- Mike Nelson on Facebook
- Mike Nelson on Instagram
- American Energy Initiative
Mike also mentions nelsonwx@gmail.com as a contact for questions about his work and potential land-investment opportunities. Consider using a publicly listed contact method rather than publishing the email if he has not approved its inclusion.
Follow The Covert Code
Discover more conversations with energy innovators and business leaders at The Covert Code. Follow the podcast on Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Meet host Anna Covert at annacovert.com.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, iHeartRadio, or YouTube Music.
Editorial note: Energy and investment figures discussed are the guest’s statements during the interview, not independently verified forecasts or personalized financial advice.
Full Episode Transcript — Mike Nelson | The Covert Code
Automatically generated source transcript. Speaker labels follow the transcript’s diarization and may contain errors. This text has not been verified against the recording.
[00:00:03] Anna Covert: Aloha. My name is Anna Covert, and I'm coming to you from my battle of Shapiro in the beautiful island of Oahu. This week on the covert code, the topic is changing weather, small farmers, and the opportunity to harvest sunshine. My special guest is Mike Nelson, award winning meteorologist, inventor, author, and director of communication for America Energy Initiative. Mike brings 48 years of weather broadcasting, including 20 as Denver Seven's lead meteorologist. He's a 20 time award winner and fellow of the American Meteorological Society. He's also the author of the Colorado Weather Book and The Colorado Weather Almanac, as well as co-author of the free book The World's Littlest Book on Climate. Ten facts in ten minutes, which, if you are listening right now, you can see on the QR code we're popping up on the screen, you can download the book. I definitely encourage you to do so. I just read it before jumping on this podcast and it was wonderful. Thank you so much for being here today, Mike,
[00:01:08] Mike Nelson: and it's my pleasure to be with you.
[00:01:11] Anna Covert: So you have such an interesting background. I think, too, since we know so much about you already as a public figure. I want to ask for the Cliff notes version, but tell us the story of how you became so passionate about climate change.
[00:01:23] Mike Nelson: Okay. I've been a weather nut since I was six years old in Madison, Wisconsin in the early 1960s. We had a big thunderstorm that came in. We had tornado warnings and flash flood warnings and large hail and trees down. A lot of people would have been afraid. I was absolutely captivated. I thought it was a very exciting thing. And so at that point, as a first grader, I began to be interested in weather and I read all little weather books at the school library. I built a handmade weather station in my backyard. I'd have spare pieces of wood and dime store thermometers, kept track of the temperatures and the barometric pressure every single day. Well, back then, a weather nut didn't have any resources except the local newspaper and the local TV. There was none of the stuff we have now. So you gravitate to watching the TV. Weather forecasters and I did that for years. As a teenager, I was working at a Baskin-Robbins ice cream store, and lo and behold, the chief meteorologist, Terry Kelly from the ABC affiliate, liked ice cream, and he used to come into my store to get ice cream. For me, this is like a football star coming in, and I'd ask him weather questions. And this went on for about a year. And my father said to me one night at dinner, he said, Mike, this guy comes in the ice cream shop all the time. Why don't you ask him for a job at the TV station? You can empty his wastebasket and answer his phone. You don't have to get paid. Just do it for the experience. So based on my father's sage advice, I worked up the courage to ask Mr. Kelly if I could work for him at the TV station 50 years ago. This coming November 4th is when he said yes. Wow. Began my career as an 18 year old, a freshman in college at the University of Wisconsin, enrolled in meteorology, began working at a TV station. So by the time I graduated college, I was already the weekend weather forecaster on TV. But Mr. Kelly was also an entrepreneur, and in the late 1970s, he teamed up with some very smart computer scientists at the University of Wisconsin and developed the very first television weather computer system based on an Apple two personal computer. I began to use that on TV, and my job was to travel around the country and install the weather computers at other TV stations that were just beginning to buy computers at that point. So I actually trained, um, some of the top meteorologists in the country, including Al Roker, on the Today show. I trained him on the very first weather computer system he ever had. That's the short story of that part of my career. So I was on TV. I'm selling weather computer systems. But even back then, in the 1970s and early 80s, at least at the university level, we knew the impact of carbon dioxide at trapping heat and warming up the planet. Now, you might recall that there's been some controversy back and forth where people said, you know, back in the 70s, you guys were all saying, we're going to have another ice age. How can we believe you now? Well, even back in the 70s, there was talk that the amount of air pollution, the aerosols, the smoke and the dust was blocking out sunshine that would cool the planet like a volcanic
[00:04:54] Anna Covert: eruption. But
[00:04:56] Mike Nelson: even then, the preponderance of evidence was the CO2 is going to vastly outperform at warming the planet compared to the dust and smoke in the atmosphere for cooling the planet. So we knew then. But you asked, when did I really become passionate about it? It was upon the birth of my first grandchild. He's now 14. So for the last 14 years now I have three grandchildren. It's been more of an urgency for me to get the word out that we gotta stop lighting fossil carbon on fire because it's heating up the planet, and that is going to have tremendous impact on future generations,
[00:05:40] Anna Covert: indeed. And I think one thing that was really interesting in the book that you wrote, that I was just reading, that I think a lot of people don't understand is how long it takes. Like when you burn fossil fuel today, how long it takes and how much it's up there before it gets even hotter and hotter. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?
[00:05:57] Mike Nelson: Oh, yeah. If we have now raised the CO2 level 50% from what it was at pre-industrial revolution levels, so it's now up at about 450 parts per million for 78, I think it is right now. And at that level where we are now, um. That is going to be baked in there for a thousand years or more, because the natural ways for that carbon to be taken out of the atmosphere, rock weathering, soil dragging back in takes centuries. And so we have done basically in my lifetime is we have baked in a warming of the planet that's going to be somewhere around 5 to 6°F. Now it's never too late to stop making things worse. And so the faster we stop adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, the better it will be. And we are still in this window of opportunity where if we can by say, 20, 50, 2060, really cut our carbon emissions down to much lower than they are now. Uh, your generation and the generation of your children and grandchildren will fare much, much better. Well, it's good to hear because I had a similar feeling. I have my daughter's 12, and it was about 7 or 8 years ago when she started telling me, you know, she came up, mommy, look, you know, when I grew up, I want to be a singer. I want to be a, you know, interior designer. And at the time, I was very involved in the solar. And I kept thinking to myself, is she going to get the chance to be anything right? And it was it was heartbreaking. And I realized that we had to do whatever we could. And I wanted to do everything that I possibly could to make sure that she did get a chance to choose. Absolutely.
[00:07:40] Anna Covert: Glad to hear that. We do have time still. And I think a lot of people are saying, oh yeah, well, it's getting hotter, but we it doesn't it's not that hot. But the proof is that the polar ice caps are melting. So how can we reach. I mean, I know we can fix things, but can we ever get the ice to remote?
[00:07:56] Mike Nelson: Uh, we will not see that. Uh, in. Essentially the in our upcoming history, because the warming is baked in, we're going to see the Arctic continue to melt away. We're going to see the equatorial glaciers, Mount Kilimanjaro, etc. melt away. I just was in Europe looking down at the Alps, and those glaciers are melting very rapidly, but we still are in this window of opportunity in the next 50 years or so, that if we make substantial changes, we can adapt to what we are going to see. Rising sea level. We're still have stronger storms as far as tropical systems. I mean, just in your home state of Hawaii, what have we had? Three. We have that never used to happen. Uh, here in Colorado, more wildfires. We still have fires burning today in Colorado. Uh, we've had a terrible fire season. We have just gone through, uh, 11 straight days of 80 degree temperatures in October here in the Denver area. But we can still adapt to a lot of that. But the most important thing is as quickly as possible, we need to stop burning fossil fuels and we can do it. And this is the part that I get excited about, is we really have the solution in front of us. Uh, 15 years ago, the cost for solar energy. I know you've got a lovely set of solar panels on your house, as I do on mine. Uh, was over $300 per megawatt hour today. The cost of solar is down to about 50 or $60 per megawatt hour. And ten years from now, it's going to be down to around $10 per megawatt hour. Solar is becoming the cheapest form of energy by far because at the same time, in the 2030s, the cost of uh, gas peaker plants and nuclear energy is going to be about $120 per megawatt hour. So ten times more expensive than what it would be for solar in the next ten years.
[00:10:08] Anna Covert: And how much foster put up. We know that, right? I mean, now we're looking at what in in ten years or even by next year, or how much more power are we going to need here in America that we're predicting?
[00:10:19] Mike Nelson: Experts are saying it could be as much as 100GW. And to visualize a gigawatt, it is a large nuclear reactor. We're not going to build a hundred nuke plants in the next ten years. We're lucky if we can build 1 in 10 years. And
[00:10:37] Anna Covert: I think, you know, I think like 20 years to they take a long time to build. I mean, what is the average time it even takes from permitting to, you know, in the mining of the uranium, all those things,
[00:10:46] Mike Nelson: the plant that they just have put online recently in Georgia, I think it's called Vogel took 15 years and it was vastly over budget. And the talk about the small modular reactors, there's still not really anything out there that's working on a commercial electricity scale. I mean, obviously they're an aircraft carriers and submarines, but that is still a long ways away. And there is still the issue of security and disposal of nuclear waste. Yes. What I like to say and I talk about fusion energy. It's always 25 years away. That's always been the joke. 50 years ago. 25 years ago. Right now, they're making great strides and perhaps there'll be a breakthrough. But people say fusion's always just 25 years away. Actually, fusion is eight minutes away. It's shining through my window behind me right now. That's the sun. It's big, it's quiet, and it's gonna run efficiently for the next 5 billion years. All we have to do is capture it. And, Anna, uh, one of the greatest, uh, miracles, if you will, in the Industrial Revolution, was the invention of the steam engine and then the internal combustion engine. But I would say that the biggest miracle was that Bell Labs in the 1950s, when they came up with the fact that you can point a piece of glass at the sun and generate electricity, that is the miracle of mankind, and it's going to be the thing that saves us and saves our children and our grandchildren.
[00:12:18] Anna Covert: I agree. I definitely agree, and I think another thing that people need to realize is we need fossil fuels for other things that we haven't been able to replace yet, like this clothing that we're wearing. And I mean, it's in almost every everything there's a plant.
[00:12:32] Mike Nelson: It seems kind of silly to dig it up, light it on fire, just so we know we're
[00:12:36] Anna Covert: going to run out. And it's like, well, why are we burning it? Well, this is a precious commodity
[00:12:40] Mike Nelson: and I love my electric cars. I'm an early adapter. I bought the first line of the Chevy Volt back in 2012, and it got 35 miles on a charge, and my most recent one gets ten times
[00:12:52] Anna Covert: that. Yes, I'm also a big fan. I don't miss going to the gas pump at all and it's so convenient. Just plug it into your house and it's wonderful. So that brings us to another important topic here about, you know, how we can use this. People are afraid of change because they're afraid it's going to impact the economy. But we both know we talked about the other day together, small farmers. Let's talk about them. You know, they're the backbone of America. And really, most of them live in debt. The suicide rates of small farmers is out of this chart. And the reason is it's because they're relying on pesticides. The single grain, the multi. What is it? Um, single grain cropping and and it's what, $100 an acre is what they can. Usually USB-C. Let's think about electricity as a crop. Yes, we go back to that. Current levels cost solar energy at $60 per megawatt hour. According to the National Renewable Energy Lab here in Golden, Colorado, I live in, uh, in the Denver area. Um, it takes about five acres of solar panels and batteries and fencing and everything else, five acres per megawatt of electricity produced. So if you do the math, uh, in a year, there are 8760 hours. You do the math. An acre of solar panels will produce about $50,000 worth of electricity every single year. Now, if you compare that to the value of other crops, corn and soybeans are worth about $1,000 an acre. Um, in California, almonds or $6,000 an acre and oranges are $10,000 an acre. An acre of solar panels produces $50,000 worth of electricity. If you can get that electricity to market, an acre of wheat if you don't have a truck or a train to get it to market, doesn't do you much good, because if you're in Kansas, you can't get it to the markets on the East Coast and the West Coast, an acre of solar panels, if you have the ability to get it to market. Farmers and ranchers can save the farm by having a portion of their cropland, maybe part that is not very fertile compared to other parts of the land, and put it into solar panels, not mandated.
[00:15:23] Mike Nelson: They can choose to do this as an economic solution to their problems. And it's happening. There's a lot of solar in California. That's where I do some work. We can talk about that a little bit, but Texas deep red Texas has as much solar and wind going in out there because as farmers and ranchers in West Texas know that they can sell it to save their farm or their ranch.
[00:15:48] Anna Covert: And it's creating generational wealth for their families as well. I mean, right, it's it's because it's lower costs. You don't have to purchase these other, you know, seeds and asides and all these other water. They don't have to water it. You know, it's all these things kind of add up and make it even more of a way to save the farm.
[00:16:07] Mike Nelson: And the crops grow just as nicely around the base of a wind turbine, and the crops can grow underneath solar panels. Now, we found that, um, sheep do really well if you're if you're a sheep rancher, they graze underneath solar panels briefly. If it's cattle, you gotta move the panel up a little bit higher, and you have to build a little stronger because they're bigger. The one thing we found that doesn't work very well is goats, because, uh, we experience has shown that the goats jump up on the solar panels and they eat the wiring. So great for sheep, pretty good for cows, not so great for growth goats. But also you can grow all kinds of forage crops underneath. and pollinators. Agar voltaic is a big thing. What we're facing against the headwinds against all this is, um, I think the fear from the fossil fuel industry that, oh, no, we can't. You got to keep still using our product. And, you know, they are very well heeled. And so they will put out their stuff like, you know, uh, if the panel breaks, it's going to leak toxic things into the soil. Untrue. Uh, you can't recycle the panels. Untrue. What if there's a hailstorm and you all the panels break? Well, here in Colorado, we get a lot of hail. And I will tell you, every one of those wheat farmers on the high plains after a hailstorm goes through, they don't stop farming. They plant a new crop next year. If the solar panels get broken by a hailstorm, you fix the solar panels. Just like when hurricanes occur in the Gulf of Mexico. And they have to evacuate all those oil wells out there, all those rigs. They don't just abandon them. As soon as the storms over, they go fix the damage and go back to what they're doing. We can solve any of those problems. The one thing we need, though, Anna, is we need transmission. We need to be able to get the electricity from the farm to the market.
[00:18:03] Anna Covert: Right. And so, yes. And so we've we've taught we've had Chip on we've had Sandy on to talk about the super grid. And so that is the exact. Best way. We all agree. Right. So tell us, you know, I was watching some of your videos and for everyone who's listening, I'm going to provide the links to some of this great content that Mike has been creating to share more about how the super grid can work and and the benefits there beyond what we're going to discuss now. But we need a test case, and it looks like Texas might be that. Tell me more about what you're thinking.
[00:18:35] Mike Nelson: I'll give you two test cases. Um, the first one is already done in California, and I do a lot of work out there, and I'll explain some of that as well. So back in 2006, Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican governor, signs Assembly Bill 32, in California mandating a 60% reduction in greenhouse gases by the year 2030. Now, why did he do that? Well, he was the Terminator. He came from the future and he knew what needed to happen. Uh, actually, um, he was quite a good environmentalist, along with the businessman. And so, uh, the signing of that law prompted the development of renewable energy. In the Antelope Valley, which is 60 miles north of la. Up by Edwards Air Force Base. There was nothing in that valley at that time back in 2006. In the next five years, they built two transmission lines at a cost of $3.5 billion. That could bring the solar energy and the wind energy down from the Antelope Valley to LA and up to San Francisco. And that $3.5 billion investment in transmission all above ground for the most part, just a little bit of an underground, prompted $200 billion worth of private investment on that flat, hot desert land up in the Antelope Valley. And those investors put in solar, and the investors were first solar that's owned by a guy named Warren Buffett. Amazon. Google. Duke energy, a coal company building solar energy and a company called Masdar, which in Arabic means source, like the sun. Masdar is from the United Arab Emirates. Imagine that a Petro state investing in California to build solar panels. Wow. That's what the impact of infrastructure was. It's transformed the valley. And one of the things that I do is I help people invest in vacant land ahead of utility scale solar farms, and the return on investment is 5 to 10 times what they bought the land for, because this flat, hot land that you can't grow anything on suddenly can produce $50,000 worth of electricity per acre per year for the next 5 billion years. So suddenly. This. It's like discovering oil underneath or gold in that soil. The new, uh, element there is sunshine. And now that we can capture it. And because we can move it thanks to those transmission lines. So this could happen anywhere. And I know that Chip and Sandy have already talked about the super grid. And what it is, is an underground, high voltage direct current transmission system. It's a mesh all across the country. And the best analogy is the Interstate highway system. The interstates did not replace state and county roads. It's an overlay that allowed us to move everything more efficiently. The transcontinental railroad a century earlier did the same thing, opening up the entire central part of the country. If we had the super grid, it would open up the entire Midwest and the South so that farmers and ranchers could take some of their land. Not all of it. Again, maybe the less fertile stuff and grow electricity that supplies AI, that supplies the data centers we were that are exploding all over the place, and it lowers everybody's electric bill because, again, solar is the cheapest form. Electricity. And what we found from Sandy's study on this super grid that he ran through the third most powerful computer in the world when he ran this study at the NOAA laboratories here in the Boulder, Denver area. Is that on a nationwide basis, it's always sunny or windy somewhere. And if you can produce that electricity and move it efficiently and direct, current is much more efficient at longer distances, we can actually power everything for our economy, decarbonize the economy as well, not for this year, but for the year 2050. So all the data centers, all the electric cars, the electrification of everything can be done if we have the super grid to move it around. The Texas example is interesting and let me go to that. And that is that for about I think there is 4 or $5 billion. So it's a big amount of money. But I mean there are people that certainly have that we could build an example of a super grid along railroad and interstate highway rights of way and move west Texas natural gas energy, wind energy, solar energy all the way across the state of Texas to supply the data centers in Dallas and Houston and all the needs to electrify everything. It would be a great demonstration project because Texas is not somewhere you'd say, oh, that's just woke energy, you know, and it's pretty red state, but it could do this and show if we can build it in Texas, we could build this type of a grid anywhere, and it will be a public private project. But I will go back to the analogy of the railroads and the interstate highway systems. That's the same way those were all built government mandate. We got to do this and then a public private partnership to get it done,
[00:24:11] Anna Covert: just like regular utility companies. I mean, they were. That's why we had the monopoly in some place. Well,
[00:24:17] Mike Nelson: and, you know, you got to think that a hundred years ago, when the energy model that we're still living in was developed. You had to have a coal fired power plant somewhere near a city, and it would serve that city. And if you needed more electricity, you built another coal fired power plant. That model can be completely changed with today's technology. We don't need to go back to the same way we were doing something a hundred years ago.
[00:24:46] Anna Covert: Indeed. And Texas is interesting because it's kind of got, you know, it's a HubSpot of the different grids that are coming in. Right. Tell us a little bit more about
[00:24:54] Mike Nelson: that. There's there's three big grid systems in the country, the Western interconnect the eastern, and then Ercot, the Texas Energy. And if you might remember, about four winters ago, they had this big cold wave down there in Texas, and they lost their power. And that was not just because wind turbines froze, gas plants couldn't run, coal plants couldn't run, etc. they weren't winterized well enough. Well, because we have these three different interconnects, they don't talk nicely to each other. They don't connect real well. It's very complex. And so you couldn't just send energy to Texas. They were kind of cut off. The fact that Texas is the only state that has all three of these inside of their state lines show that if we can connect across those interconnects with this grid, uh, that the super grid example in Texas, we could do this anywhere else.
[00:25:49] Anna Covert: And it really has to happen to me. I'm really glad you brought up that weather crisis because, you know, what are they called, the great cold? Or they had a name for it,
[00:25:56] Mike Nelson: and a lot of people died in that. It was a very bad, bad situation. And this is another and I know that Chip and Sandy talked about this, but the fact is, our grid system is terribly vulnerable, not only to say a drone attack, uh, but weather as well. Severe storms cause power outages all the time. Undergrounding our super grid would take away a lot of that. And that threat is, uh, a nuclear explosion, an EMP or a solar flare or severe weather. We can safeguard us. So this should be a bipartisan, uh, issue that we could come together and really agree on because it's national security, it's lower cost electricity for everybody. And it's an environmentally sound thing to do because we can stop burning as much fossil carbon. It's a win win win. But what's it going to take to get it done? Well, Ana, there is an election coming up in a few weeks. It's probably a little bit late for us to really spread the word about the super grid, but I give you great kudos that you're helping us. And, uh, and it's just a matter of getting that information in front of political leadership in the future. But the fact of the matter is, you can do your part, Mr. and Mrs. America. All the voters out there and vote for candidates that are going to be looking at the energy and environmental issues and saying, we can't keep doing what we're doing. Again, I'll come back. We have to stop lighting fossil carbon on fire. The super grid is a way that we can power our economy, still have our computers, our flat screens, our electric cars and everything else and the data centers and all that, but do it in a much more safe and responsible manner. So I will give you this. Uh, it it takes leadership. Republican President Abraham Lincoln said we need the railroad. His leadership is what got that done. Republican President Dwight Eisenhower said we need the interstate highway system. Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger said we need to stop burning as much fossil fuel. We need these transmission lines. Leadership matters. When John F Kennedy said, we need to get to the moon not because it's easy, but because it's hard and said, no problem of human endeavors beyond human beings. We can do this if we get the leadership in place to say the super grid is the next great American infrastructure project. Vote for me and I will bring your electric cars cost down. Vote for me and will secure your energy. Future vote for me and the planet will be cleaner and not as hot for your children and your grandchildren. I could run for office, but you know, I was a teenager. I would vote for urologist for 48 years and people say, who would believe him? He's been lying to you for half a century.
[00:29:06] Anna Covert: What? I think that, you know, the the oil and gas. They've already made a case for this. There are. What? How many miles of pipe are there buried right now all over the United States carrying natural gas.
[00:29:17] Mike Nelson: Because of the Interstate Gas Act, which was passed, I believe, in 1939, that allowed the gas and oil companies to move their product, mostly from Texas to the coasts to the big cities. And they passed that to say, we're going to bury all of these gas and oil pipelines. You see it in the 48 states. I imagine you see some of it in Hawaii as well. See that little sign that says buried gas pipeline? Please don't dig here. Well, there are 2.5 million miles of buried gas and oil pipelines across the United States. Imagine if those two foot wide steel pipes were all six feet above the ground, crisscrossing neighborhoods and communities, people would have a fit. But because they're underground. Out of sight, out of mind. What we are proposing with the super grid is less than 40,000 miles of buried cable. About that big around. That's all that would run. That's all. Yeah.
[00:30:25] Anna Covert: Oh, and that's incredible that it can move so much. Yeah. I love your analogy of, like, a phone call. We can direct it where we needs to go. And that is really
[00:30:33] Mike Nelson: special. Yeah. Alternating current, which is what has our lights on right now is very good at short distances. And, uh, for stepping it up and down because you can take up to, you know, 500V and down to 120V for home usage, etc.. Uh, direct current can just slam a whole lot of power, but you can send it anywhere you want. Alternating current only runs from high voltage to low voltage, so it always goes downhill no matter where you want it to go. If we had, uh, sunshine at, say, $0.10 a kilowatt hour in California and Arizona and you wanted to ship it to cloudy, cold Chicago where they're trying to run on coal or fuel oil or whatever. Uh, it's very easy with the direct current super grid to say, go, and it's there in a millisecond.
[00:31:27] Anna Covert: It's amazing, actually. Yeah. Hello. Can you send us some solar energy? Yeah, we'll get it right there. It's incredible. I mean, even then in the fossil fuels, I mean, I'm back to that like that. They're still going to be part of it. They can still send they can be part of the super grid to somebody.
[00:31:45] Mike Nelson: They think about electricity. It's not stick to how it's created. It doesn't matter if it's a gas turbine, a nuclear power plant, a coal fired power plant, geothermal, wind, solar. The electrons don't care. We're talking about building the grid that will more efficiently and safely move it and dependably move it all across the country.
[00:32:08] Anna Covert: Do you think that everyone would want to be on board for this? I think eventually everybody's going to be on board for it because it is. Once people understand what we're talking about and you say, well, how much will it cost? It'll be paid for like a toll road. So if you have a $0.02 per kilowatt hour toll to use the super grid and you have ten cent solar energy that you can send. That means your solar energy costs $0.12, which is way better than spending $1 for your nuclear energy or your gas turbine energy. One of the problems we have with these data centers and the they want to use gas turbines, that's a jet engine on the ground. Oh, okay. And it's burning jet fuel. Uh, and they're very complex. I mean, they're wonderfully engineered pieces of machinery, but they're very complicated right now. Uh, GE Ivanovo, which is one of the jet turbine manufacturers, is talking about. Well, we can get you your jet turbine in 2032. That's a long time away. We can build a a thousand acre solar farm in 12 to 18 months. They can't build a nuclear power plant in 12 to 18 years. And we're talking about six years of a backlog for jet turbine engines. So, um, the combination. Of of a utility scale solar. The big solar farms that I'm placing investors in front of in California are home solar, like you and I both have on our houses. Um, wind power, geothermal. Maybe we'll get some, uh, thing going with, uh, fusion energy. I don't know if. I don't think I'll live long enough to see it, but, uh, the fact of the matter is, if we have the ability to move the electricity around all across the country, we can solve the problem we face. And I'll put the, um, one note of urgency. China is already doing this, and, uh, they don't have the same political system. And so if somebody says, hey, I don't want to see that power line in front of my land, they don't really have much of a means of stopping it. But again, if you put it underground, you get way less of the NIMBYism. We know that one. I don't know if you've heard of banana.
[00:34:30] Mike Nelson: Banana is an acronym for build absolutely nothing anywhere near anything. Mhm mhm. And there's a lot of that out there. I don't. Transmission lines are ugly. There's no doubt about it. Nobody wants to see them crisscrossing their land or their neighborhood. But if you put it underground you won't see it. And there's advantages to doing it from severe weather and the other issues that we talked about.
[00:34:54] Anna Covert: Absolutely. I mean, I live in a beautiful diamond head and all the lines have been buried on my mountain. Before this, I lived a couple hills over and all the lines were exposed, and every time there was a storm, we would see them. Tipped over and fires were started. And I mean, it's everyone is used to that. I mean when seen those, those experiences. So I think that it does. It does should seem easy to communicate this value. What do we think the government needs to do. I mean, are they going to have to issue tax credits because this is going to be privately funded? What do we think that the government needs to do to expedite this?
[00:35:33] Mike Nelson: Well, first, I think it has to get in front of all of our leaders from the local level to the state level to the national level, to say, what do you think about the super grid? And most likely they'll say, I don't know what you're talking about. And that's where our group, the American Energy Initiative net and you'll have all the links and all that. We're trying to get the word out. That's why having our discussions between Chip and Sandy and myself with you is so great. We just need to get the word out there that this is something that needs to be done. This should be a national priority. For all the reasons I've already stated national security, the cost of energy, the availability of energy, the environmental issues, weather, safety issues. There's so many positives on both sides of the aisle.
[00:36:17] Anna Covert: And I think this is a positive, This is a huge economic impact. There's going to be jobs created from these wires. It's going to incentivize farmers. It's going to change lives all across
[00:36:29] Mike Nelson: America, all across America. Think of that, that if we have the transmission available, if we have this highway for electricity, that a farmer or rancher can just say, you know, nobody's making me do this, but if I can make $50,000 an acre growing electricity, that would really help myself and my family. But you got to have the route. You've got to have the ability to move it. And that's what we really need to get done. So I'm not going to run for office. But, you know, young people, uh, get the get educated on the need for the super grid. And we have town hall meetings and we have meetings with any of the politicians. Ask them, tell me about what your thoughts are on the super grid. Tell me why you think we can get it done. And they'll learn. Because if more people start asking about it, suddenly it becomes a priority.
[00:37:23] Anna Covert: Yeah. And I think that what it brought up for me is something even really. The town hall idea. If someone decides to and invest in solar, or there's people who will come in and lease your land, even small farmers, and put the panels on there and you can still generate income. But what does that do? Not just for your family, but for the entire community, because now there's more taxes that are going to be invested. That's it could be a big solar farm could equate to a new ambulance for a small community. It could help the school system. It can help so many other facets of a small community that's going under and getting all this revenue now and all these taxes. It's a it's a game changer, right. And I will come back to. It's all recyclable. I mean, every bit of that solar panel can be torn down and reused, just like battery storage. That can all be gone down to its basic elements and rebuilt. And you know what? If you have ten acres of solar panels and the panels wear out in 20 years, the next generation of those solar panels is going to be so much more efficient and produce so much more electricity. You know, it's, uh, it's eight minutes away, and that's the beauty of it. I. I'm almost 70 years old. I've been studying climate and weather for my whole life. And, uh, sometimes you get a little depressed about things because, you know, there's a lot of bad things going on. But the fact that solar has gotten to be so inexpensive and battery storage is coming on so fast in California, they didn't have any of the brownouts during this past hot summer. Same thing in Texas, because the battery storage has changed the entire electricity equation, and the battery storage is getting better and better. They're building now in the Antelope Valley north of Los Angeles, right by Edwards Air Force Base, a um, advanced compressed air storage system. If you want to look it up, look up hydro store. No E on the N, just STOR and they'll, during the sunny afternoon, use that sunlight energy to compress air down underground in a cavern. And then at night they will release that compressed air to spin turbines to generate electricity. We can have electricity that will last 12 to 24 hours. There are some other companies out there that are working with ion air batteries, essentially the rust cycle to create electricity, electricity and then produce electricity and iron and air are certainly not rare. And they're talking about possibly having storage for 3 to 4 days. So all of this, you know, what happens if it's cloudy kind of thing doesn't really play it. Just to give you an idea, a visual, uh, just the size of the Texas Panhandle. If we had that much solar across the United States, just that much to cover the Texas Panhandle, we could electrify the entire country for the year 2050. Speaker 2 [00.40.33] Now, we do not, at the American Energy Initiative, advocate paving the Panhandle with panels, because the folks in Lubbock and Amarillo might not like that that. Well, and if it gets cloudy in the Texas Panhandle for a couple of days, that might not be a great thing. But if you distribute that all across the country, just that amount of size, 20,000
[00:40:54] Anna Covert: acres.
[00:40:56] Mike Nelson: All across. Uh, we could power the country.
[00:41:01] Anna Covert: We've got to do it. We've got to know
[00:41:04] Mike Nelson: we're gonna do it well. And it takes leadership. And, uh, uh, ask that of your elected officials. And, uh, you know, we've got a big one coming up in a few weeks. There'll be another big one coming up in a couple of years. And, uh, we just need to change the change the vision. We need the leadership, uh, because it takes that to get it started. And then let American ingenuity do what it's always done.
[00:41:33] Anna Covert: And I really think, I know you've done a lot of work with education as well, and this is part of it. And I think that the children really they are it's their life that they're they're the ones who are going to inherit this earth. And yes, they can be bitter that, you know, what are their ancestors do or didn't do. But I think when your child comes to you and says that they want to live or that you know what, what are you doing, mommy or daddy? To help make sure that I have a life. That's the stuff that you you the tear jerking. Right. And so the more we can educate our children on what it is and how they can impact and that they do have a voice, I think the easier is going to be to educate everyone else.
[00:42:13] Mike Nelson: Uh, Ana, there is a great environmental writer and, you know, Bill McKibben, and he has a fabulous book out right now that I read, uh, maybe about six months ago, maybe a year called Here Comes the Sun. And in that book, it really describes the fact that for the first time since we identified the environmental crisis, and that goes back to the 70s and 80s, when James Hansen testified before Congress, but for the first time, because of low cost solar energy, the answer is right there in our hands. And all we have to do is be able to move that energy around. And the answer for that is build the super grid.
[00:42:54] Anna Covert: That's it. We all got. I'll put a bumper sticker on my car. Thank you so much for being here, Mike. So how can people get Ahold of you and learn
[00:43:01] Mike Nelson: more? Okay. Um, American Energy initiative.net. Spell it all out. Um, my website is very simple. W x is the abbreviation for weather and mine is Nelson W, and it has all of my videos from my TV career and a whole bunch of other stuff. And if you want to reach me to learn more about what you can do as far as investing in land ahead of solar development, uh, that's just Nelson w x at gmail.com.
[00:43:31] Anna Covert: Great. And we will be including all of these links and more into this episode. And if you are listening right now and not watching on YouTube or another video streaming solution you can go to on a covert comm or the covert code com and within the episode will be a full transcription, as well as all the links that we're talking about today. Thanks so much for being here, Mike. And to all my listeners, if you have not done so, please subscribe to this channel. We just reached 270,000 subscribers on YouTube, and that is because of you and your Aloha. So if you love this content as much as I know you do, please share it with your friends and family so I can get more great guests like Mike to come on and share their passion and wisdom to help you succeed on and offline. I can't wait to see you next week in the pixels. Aloha!