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00:00:01
Nuclear Power’s Comeback: Energizing Data Centers with SMRs
48 Plays10 days ago
Sam returns to cohost with Jason & Carlos this week on the podcast.
The trio start off discussing Nialli, a construction planning software looking to modernise the last planner system. They tackle the resurgence of nuclear power off the back of Microsoft's Three Mile Island announcement, before finishing on some of the lesser-known underground metro construction projects happening worldwide.
Transcript
00:00:01
Speaker
Just to to double down on what you were saying, Carlos, I was quickly while you were talking just doing some back of the napkin math. If this is right, just to put into context how much energy production comes out of a ah full size um Power Station like 3 mile an hour. I think last year of its production in 2018, it generated about 7,000 gigawatt hours um of power. So it's about 10 times bigger than an SMR.
00:00:32
Speaker
And the average daily output of a solar panel is 1.8 kilowatt hours according to the two sources I quickly googled. Yeah. Which I think is like 11 million solar panels. Yeah. Wow. Okay.
00:00:55
Speaker
Welcome back to the podcast. Today, I'm joined by the regular Carlos Cavallo, and by popular demand, back again from his beach filler in Bali is Sam from Aphex, Sam Hanish. G'day guys, how are we going? I should put that in my LinkedIn by bio by a That's lovely. I definitely shouldn't put Sam from his Bali filler in my LinkedIn bio. Thanks for having me back.
00:01:24
Speaker
There's a very specific type of person that would put Sam from his Bali Villa in his LinkedIn bar. I don't know if you're the very specific person. Someone that's selling, that has like a YouTube channel selling something on on a Shopify store.
00:01:39
Speaker
yeah Pretty much half the people I see riding around. Yeah, every one of your neighbours in your bar. Yeah, the contrast between your LinkedIn and Instagram accounts must be pretty wild.
00:01:54
Speaker
No comment. No comment. I thought so. Moving on. All right, Carlos. Latest news topic last week was like 100% on on the money. What do you got this week? So yeah, no, I think the biggest one that stood out this week was they've actually now ah manufactured hydrogen trains, um which they're going to be launching in California. There's like four that they've built initially for like $80 million. dollars So obviously expensive, but they're obviously not being manufactured in mass, but they're going to be rolled out in a couple of years time. Oh, hydrogen power. I spent the last, I spent the last 20 seconds trying to decide if you miss hydrogen.
00:02:37
Speaker
no no No, not that. But you know, in like a gas plant, like an LNG plant, the production lines are called trains. You'll be able to train one, train two. I thought for a second, you're like, did he misread an article about a gas plant? like Okay, so the hydrogen power. Hydrogen fuels, trains. Yes, yes, yes. So, yeah. In where was it? I think ah California. So was it one of the big manufacturers, like Austin or? Oh, you're calling it.
00:03:07
Speaker
We're very thinly researched, Sam. If you if you're not careful about your follow-up questions, you could you could poke into a you could poke into an area lacking research. There's a company called Caltrans building them, not heard them. I think that's the local transit authority, I think. That's like saying transport for London. Okay, so the contract is between Caltrans and Stadler Rail, so it must be Stadler Rail. Okay.
00:03:31
Speaker
And so the, is that part of the, that's, is that literally the California high-speed rail or some other part of California, some other rail line? No, it is not high speeds. I should have done the follow up. I did too follow up.
00:03:47
Speaker
it' No, it's not, it's not high speed. So they do maximum 80 mile an hour. um So they're kind of replacing regular trains, but it's part of the, California's got some 10 billion, sort of 10 billion funds to help get to zero emissions across infrastructure or transport. Okay. Presumably like diesel trains, not electric trains. So I've begun the wrong direction.
00:04:08
Speaker
Yeah, I think so. Yeah. go Yeah. i move it on No more. No more questions. Right. Today, what we're going to use three topics on the docket. So we're going to start off talking about Niali. So a construction last planet tool that's kind of trying to bring together, I guess, an interactive real world twist to the last Planner system, something that's I guess we've seen discussed or advertised recently. Then move on to the topic that Carlos you raised last week, this resurgence of nuclear power off the back of a whole bunch of news around Oracle and then Microsoft's recent news around Three Mile Island in the US.
00:04:55
Speaker
Finally, we're going to do a little double click on ah some of the lesser known underground Metro projects that are happening all around the world. It's something that we talk about a lot, something that we as a team interact with a lot, and there's a whole bunch of them that most people wouldn't be tracking.
00:05:17
Speaker
So off the top, Niali. It is a software company with some like hardware element tackling construction planning. So I guess we know something about that. Their main product is a visual planning system attempting to make a sort of more interactive approach to last-planner system using a post-it note-like visual interface. I guess the Question is, that I think a lot of people are wondering is, does it move the needle on projects? Is it kind of a look into the future? Or maybe is it like a step back into the path? and We've all had a bit of a look around. We've talked to some folks that have used it or tried it. And for those that don't know or want to pause and do a little Googling, if you imagine a company that's selling last planner style software,
00:06:12
Speaker
we ah bundled with these kind of large touch screens. And they come in all sorts of different configurations. They've got the dual 75, the triple 75, the dual 81, the double Nureva wall, the triple Nureva wall, and those are just like increasingly large.
00:06:29
Speaker
Cast is laughing. These are increasingly large ah basically screens that you just stick on the wall. So the software itself is an almost exact replica of literally what teams would be doing with whiteboards and sticky notes. They're literally sticky notes on a kind of whiteboard interface and very much like a one-for-one replica for what folks would do running the kind of let's say manual last-planner system but digital and having some
00:07:02
Speaker
ah ability for people to kind of share that through Microsoft Teams calls. Anyway, that's enough prelude prep. I guess this is ah one in a and ah couple of companies doing a similar thing. I'm interested in in Sam, your take on the company specifically or or the kind of class of company, which is Last Planner specific.
00:07:26
Speaker
I'm trying to be very positive to start with. I'll just say that I, I think it's hard to sort of imagine using this tool, but I come from, you know, my construction background in Australia. It's pretty rare that teams are like companies are not very far in with last plan assistance, pool planning. It's pretty foreign concept. Um, so starting there, I'm sitting there trying to imagine sitting in a meeting room with a bunch of engineers and supervisors planning work in this way. And I can't imagine the supervisors.
00:07:54
Speaker
bandwidth is going to last more than five minutes of engineers up there trying to like put in post-it notes of what they're planning to do. But having said that, now we're speaking to a lot of the companies over in New Zealand where they're using these. They are literally doing pool planning as part of their sort of week-to-week operations. I can see that there's a place for it, but the limitations they've already identified to us is it's good for looking at maybe looking at a complex task with a team. But how how do you manage a whole project?
00:08:22
Speaker
with this sort of post-it note pullback system. I just can't see it. um There's that interesting litmus test for any software, which is like stick a project manager, an engineer, and a supervisor in a room, and then just see what the reaction is. ah There's the like um i know there was ah a work superintendent on ah a previous project where the second he had to watch someone struggle with P6 or some other tool, he would immediately be like, Sam, I want the fucking cake, not the recipe, mate.
00:08:52
Speaker
Yeah. Come and get me when you've got it done. Get to the point. Yeah, I can imagine you just sinking hours into this thing, like sitting there pulling these, pulling these nodes back. The, the, I guess as a side away from the topic and talking generally about Last Planner, like it's, it's a,
00:09:13
Speaker
It's interesting to see the variance of penetration of it into different markets. I would say Australia's very limited, you get New Zealand, which seems very strongly adopted. And then the UK, there's kind of like pockets in there. Europe seems like there's pockets in there. And then obviously, like North America, it's like the stronghold or the the origin. Yeah, what are your, I don't know Carlos, have you got any thoughts about why or how that comes to be?
00:09:44
Speaker
I'm going to try and be as positive as I can. It doesn't help if you both preface everything that you say about. So like if we think about a typical project, teams will run like collaborative planning with sticky notes on boards. And if you think about why they do that, it's a great forum to get people around a board to discuss surface ideas, surface issues, and sort of work through that as a team.
00:10:10
Speaker
So there's a clear advantage to doing that because it's super simple. Everyone can see what's going on and get involved. So they kind of literally put that into a system, which is suddenly too small to see anything. If you look at like the images, you you can't see much other than like shapes. So suddenly the detail is not there and it's just standing next to it. And then every team that I know that runs sticky notes either they've got a very detailed master plan or they've got a short term plan as well but they use the sticky notes as the forum to discuss. So sticky notes really go down to like package level or like grouping level, it's not a detailed plan and this tool claims to be able to manage complex schemes and I just don't know how that's possible because you still need a plan off the back of it. You've got this like highly complicated view
00:11:01
Speaker
To replace something which its superpower was simplicity and the ability to like run a forum of team members to contribute to a session. And now it's a really complex thing which still isn't a plan that you can actually take and communicate every day and get the team behind. So I don't get how you could actually run a job on it.
00:11:20
Speaker
I think from watching a few of the videos on ah the way they do it is you've got to spend this ridiculous amount of time in their planning. I think there was a video from like PCL doing a case study. And I don't know whether it was the project manager was up there saying that, you know, all the teams were coming in throughout the week, the various trades to plan on the board. She said they spend 16 hours a week in their planning. And I thought, I don't know if that's a flex.
00:11:48
Speaker
16 hours a week. It's like three hours a day standing around the board. Like what the fucks actually happening on site? We're just standing there moving boxes around and spinning them. ah's it Yeah. I can't see it. Like how do you link up a complex project with it? I agree. um I'm going to take the opposite side. Uh, I guess starting with a ah double triple 5,000.
00:12:09
Speaker
let hit Let me show you this triple screen setup. I'm going to take the opposite side. I guess starting with Last Planner, I guess I asked the question about ah its adoption in different countries. I am a i'm a big fan of the idea of Last Planner and the process that it drives.
00:12:31
Speaker
And I'm also a big fan of the idea that the most important thing about planning is the process itself and the conversation and the discussion rather than the artifact or what it looks like at the end. And so I like the the ah cadences or the ceremonies of Last Planner that draw that conversation out.
00:12:51
Speaker
What I struggle to see is that that system was invented many, many years ago when the only, it was built upon and the that sort of ceremonies and the discussions of it are built on top of the technology that was available on projects, on every project at that time, which was whiteboards and sticky notes.
00:13:13
Speaker
Even if you believe in the last planar process, which I think most of it I have a strong affinity for, even though I don't wouldn't implement it exactly the same way, even if you believe in that, I find it super hard to believe that the optimal best possible interface that could be imagined to do the communication discussion forum ah in a digital environment when you don't have any of the constraints of do we have sticky notes or whiteboards or whatever. I find it super hard to believe that the best possible interface for that is a exact replica of the sticky note and the whiteboard that we that we would have used in the physical world. And that reliance by and I guess a lot of people, a lot of companies
00:13:59
Speaker
do this in in addition to these and and some of them are quite popular like a touch plan or a v plan or or whatever there's a lot of like direct replica of the the kind of sticky note discussion it does end up limiting the capacity to handle lots of work because it's just very hard to understand and navigate and move around and I think the real breakthrough is from rethinking the entire experience or the interface or the user experience of doing it, even if you're a big fan of, of last platter at all. And I think the big question is like, surely that's, that can't be the best that we can do as like, as like an industry, as software vendors ah and construction industry.
00:14:40
Speaker
I totally agree. like The fact that the principles of Last Planner is something that we all know and get behind. They've gone so literal in that, as you say, sort of here's a digital thing of version of the thing you've been doing for 40 years. But it's just it's as you say, it's basically just laziness. it's like If you were going to start a car company today, you wouldn't make a petrol engine. like What's the point in that? You're just doing the thing that everyone else has done, and it's going to be dead. and Like a year. So yeah, complex. Don't understand how that works. Simple projects. Why would you do that? You could just use a normal plan on a simple project. You don't need that sort of method if it was a really simple set of activities. so
00:15:20
Speaker
It's really and so hard to understand where it fits. I know you said like New Zealand, like big into Last Planner. We've got lots of projects that we work with that like the Last Planner system, but understand it's kind of a set of components and it's a methodology and a routine with interactions and communication. It's not a board with sticky notes on it, which yeah the old school consultants think that's still what it is.
00:15:42
Speaker
The New Zealand teams are definitely just, they realise it's just looking at an aspect. They'll look at one, you know, let's look at an upcoming milestone and do a session because it's critical. And I think really the design, like it really says that the design of this sticky note system has limitations to the complexity you can go to. Like it's really limited to what you can get on a board. yeah And then when you look at the product, it's like, you know, for this and, you know, let's say it's worthwhile doing for the same way we do last plan, a pool planning currently.
00:16:11
Speaker
you know what's What's the worthwhile? How worthwhile is the investment when really you're doing the same thing you are going to do on a whiteboard? It doesn't really give you much more than that. so It comes from like a flawed underlying logic. like I can see how people get to the state of we need to mimic what the team are currently doing. I think people go and draw this logical connection between construction is allegedly slow to adopt technology. Allegedly, I don't particularly agree.
00:16:35
Speaker
Some people then draw the connection to there are a lot of people in construction that are not technologically savvy. That's literally in a bunch of case studies for this company and others. And because construction people are not tech savvy, we need to make the dumbest down most like the sticky note thing that they can possibly wrap their heads around. I just think it's bullshit because like those same people are using an iPhone with a bunch of modern apps and stuff on there.
00:17:00
Speaker
And I think it's just it comes down to build better products that people can actually use and understand and do the hard job of trying to reinvent ah the right interface, even if you believe in the process. Yeah, 100%. Anyway, we all tried to be very nice. At least we started positively.
00:17:19
Speaker
All right, topic two. ah Right. Last week, Carlos, at the start of the episode, i this these episodes are going to drop after the news drops. So I'm going to look like the person that tried to claim victory after the fact. But last week, you kicked off Carlos by raising a really interesting news article about Oracle's plans to use SMRs, small nuclear reactors, to power a bunch of data centers for AI, hyperscale um data center product. Then I kind of made the statement. This is like the biggest victory lap from me ever. I made the statement that I wouldn't be surprised if more people did that. like other hyperscalers, so the big data center providers. and Then in the week just gone, there was a big news article that Microsoft have announced their plan to reopen the Three Mile Island a nuclear power plant to supply ah data centers for Azure. I think it's this we're seeing definitely in the news this big resurgence of nuclear power happening across the world, but not across all of the world.
00:18:28
Speaker
And so we wanted to look at it from the the lens of from the construction side, what that means for folks in construction, what types of projects might be upcoming. So now that I've taken my ah victory lap, Carlos, can you just can you just quickly agree that I predicted the future?
00:18:48
Speaker
Yes. And then 72. Cool. Good. Ollie, that's not a clip for LinkedIn, just to clarify that. That's the that's the whole episode, folks. We'll see you next week.
00:19:02
Speaker
um Yes, there's been a there's been like this flurry of news recently. So I think Amazon Web Services acquired a data center next to a nuclear power station in the US. Oracle made this announcement to power a bunch of gigawatt scale data centers with ah small nuclear reactors. And then Microsoft ah are doing a similar type of push. And obviously, nuclear is a very, very, very attractive
00:19:33
Speaker
power source for data centers with the massive boom in ah data center and driven by this AI wave investment wave at least the power sources are consistent you get stable 24-7 energy source which is crucial for the data center to operate It's a green in inverted commas power source. um So it helps the data center providers meet and maintain their carbon neutral positions and obligations. That's ah a thing that a lot of them aspire to to hold. And they can generate a ton of energy from a small amount of of land.
00:20:12
Speaker
So I don't know, guys, what do you think about the what this means for construction folks listening? Are we all going to be building nuclear power stations? God, I hope not. I wouldn't trust half the teams that I've worked with to build these stations, but I think... i think do That's the clip, Olu, that baistic clear yeah ever start tower is tagging for these.
00:20:37
Speaker
That's pretty unfair. I wouldn't hire me to do it. That's for sure. But I think there's a That same superintendent that I was telling you about before that had the analogy about the cake. His saying would be, you know, you said you wouldn't hire someone to do the job. You wouldn't hire yourself. He would say I wouldn't feed him. I wouldn't effing feed him if they were starving.
00:20:59
Speaker
Well, I think you've but we've all been there. I can just imagine, out literally our job is to pull the footings for these like SMRs to get dropped in and then they'll come in to land them and hold down bolts. The bolts will be in the wrong spot and we'll have the grinder on the base plate of the SMR China. Make it all fit. No. That's what I'm imagining. Yes. Get the podger. look Yeah, good there's, um, I mean, for sure, like there's, there's definitely gotta be a place for it. I wonder how specialized you really have to get with it because reading out, there's really only, was there three companies that are sort of leading the way as building these sort of turnkey nuclear facilities? I imagine with these SMRs, you suddenly open the doors to, you know, pretty much every, you know, every contractor out there to build like up to a point and then hand it over.
00:21:52
Speaker
I think you're right in terms of there's going to be very much every civil engineering contractor will be able to do like the shell, the infrastructure, everything around it. And then there'll be the specialist companies that do the stuff in the middle ah to over simplify that. The fact that there's now a lot of them, you'd expect them to be able to like have a repeatable design. Because I think one of the reasons why current nuclear power stations are so expensive is all of them are like totally unique. These small reactors, hopefully it's repeatable.
00:22:17
Speaker
and then they should become cheaper and and all the other benefits from doing things at scale. And there's loads of them being built at the moment, like a whole ton of them like right now are under construction. So ah any of the truth? Like is this a real thing that they're getting built now to go get installed in places and used or is it like? Yeah, yeah, there's a whole bunch in the UK. They're everywhere. US, Canada, UK, Russia, China. They're all going for them. I think Russia were the first to actually launch or open them.
00:22:45
Speaker
um Yeah, not not specifically. What's interesting to and to see is like the where they're happening and there's a big dichotomy happening. So not specifically with SMRs, but just taking nuclear projects globally. China currently has 25 plus 12 plus 28, so 40, 56, 65 nuclear power stations either under construction, planned or proposed.
00:23:14
Speaker
which is a lot. They currently have maybe half of that already operating, I think. um South Korea has a bunch of them. They have 26 operational reactors now and a bunch of them under construction.
00:23:30
Speaker
The US doesn't have any significant ones planned outside the ones that we've talked about, I don't think. ah But the yeah, the flip side and then in Europe, ah France has a whole bunch of operational reactors with one under construction and maybe another six in the pipeline. But the flip side is Germany, which has gone and shut down all of its nuclear power plants and has no plans to build any in the future that have effectively phased out nuclear power.
00:24:02
Speaker
So there's the like idea of being ahead <unk>s the idea of being ahead of the curve and then there's the idea of going the opposite way. March into the beat of your own drum. So it's all stacked on top of each other, right? Like massive AI investment into the like hundreds of billions slash trillions of dollars driving data center construction, data center construction, driving the need for power, driving power generation and transmission.
00:24:28
Speaker
And so on the assumption that the AI thing keeps being like a real investment and therefore the data center thing becomes a continues to be a real investment, I can't see how the idea of co-locating, it's the perfect power source for- Yeah. So I actually ran the numbers after the chat the other week. I say I run the numbers, I had some help, but I took like a day, one of Google's- Which one of the team had to take hours out of the data on the numbers for you?
00:24:58
Speaker
Like Chachi PT may have helped me run this, but so I took like a data center, one of Google's ones in America. So I could, like a run of the mill, normal sized data center. Cause I was trying to work out like why the hide the idea that they're actually going to build their own nuclear power stations for this.
00:25:13
Speaker
If you take a data center, the annual energy consumption works out to about $90 million dollars a year in an energy bill. So over 25 years, which let's just take assume that's the lifecycle of a nuclear power station, that's $2.2 billion. dollars The nuclear power station, the SMRs, averages are about 1.5 billion. When you throw in operating and maintenance costs, you're at about 2.2 billion. One nuclear power plant equals to build and run equals the 25-year energy demands of one of these data centers.
00:25:49
Speaker
But that is only one third of the capacity of the SMR. So you can do three. So you're saving $4.4 billion per nuclear power station as each one powers three data centers. Whereas the cost is the equivalent of the energy demand of one. So it's actually a massive no brainer. And that doesn't even account for the rise in energy costs. So the 90 million in a year is today's prices in 25 years. You could triple that, presumably.
00:26:15
Speaker
So you can see why they're doing it. It's a massive investment, but it really does give you certainty and control over the cost of energy. Sounds like the start of a screenplay for another round of Terminator movies though, doesn't it? Like building these nuclear facilities next to these AI data centers.
00:26:34
Speaker
yeah Yeah, if you really want to like shut down a country, you just take out the power, right? And then, yeah. yeah it's um That's a good time. When you put the numbers like that though, like how, you know, anyone, you put that on a piece, like it's the back of the napkin. Like that's an absolute no-brainer. Like what else would you do?
00:26:52
Speaker
and what those estimates have like a 60, 60 something year life on them as well don't they? Is it that long? I think so. I was reading though like 60 to 80 years depending on the couple of companies I was looking at so. Oh wow so your margin goes up massively then because the upfront cost is sunk so.
00:27:08
Speaker
yeah Yeah, I mean, they're going to make if they if they'll either they'll either use the power for more data centers or they'll sell it back to the grid. But either way, they're going to make a ton of money um through this. So they're basically investing in nuclear energy production.
00:27:22
Speaker
Just but just to to double down on what you were saying, Carlos, I was quickly while you were talking just doing some back of the napkin math. If this is right, just to put into context how much energy production comes out of a ah full-size um power station like three mile an hour. I think last year of its production in 2018, it generated about 7,000 gigawatt hours um of power. So it's about 10 times bigger than an SMR.
00:27:54
Speaker
And the average daily output of a solar panel is 1.8 kilowatt hours according to the two sources I quickly googled. Yeah. Which I think is like 11 million solar panels. Yeah. wow okay yeah i read that one of these data centers the equivalent in wind was uh 100 wind turbines okay you'll comment earlier around like solar panels look pretty good as well yeah yeah but isn't a panel like uh like a yeah yeah so it's what size yeah yeah is it a panel like a panel yeah it is a panel is exactly yeah if it's not like ah a row or ah a rack i don't know what the technical term is but yeah but back to your point earlier the land space like it's
00:28:37
Speaker
It's a fraction of any other method. Yeah. 100%. I just look behind me. I realized my skis were way back there were so far over them. Let's jump topic. um Let's go. right Final topic. Underground. Underground Metro is being built. This is something we have at least some in-depth knowledge of.
00:29:02
Speaker
So I guess we've had the pleasure of working with and supporting a whole bunch of contractors around the world building um new metro infrastructure and underground rail infrastructure. And a lot of them we've talked about before. There's a lot of publicity in the news about ah a lot of them. However, we started ah digging into and looking at a whole bunch of other ones happening in different parts of the world that maybe are not talked about as much.
00:29:32
Speaker
As the highly researched group that we are, we did some hunting. Everyone split up and kind of looked at maybe a top 10 list. And was gonna we're going to come back with their number one coolest, most interesting favorite. We'd love to work on a Metro project happening somewhere in the world right now. And we're going to maybe dive into and hear about it. Carlos, you want to go first? Or you want to swing straight to Samuel?
00:30:00
Speaker
Yeah, I'll go first. But when you said like schemes that people might not know about, the first one I looked at was Paris Metro. So not exactly under the radar. Where would that be? that's But no, it's huge. I didn't actually realize the extent of it. So um it's a $37 billion dollars scheme, absolutely massive. And it includes 200 kilometers of new track and 68 stations. That's huge. Whoa. um So comparing that to like a crossrail, which was what, 100 kilometres and like 10 stations, like it's a lot more for about double the cost. So yeah, it's ah it's being built largely by Vinci Ifaj in weeks. The full completion is actually 2030, so not too far away. So yeah, huge amount of stations, a load of extra track ah through the city. Did you say 60 new stations? 68, yeah.
00:30:54
Speaker
Holy shit. In 15 years, that's incredible. Like 15 years to knock over all that work. Yeah, it's the largest transport projects in Europe. Bearing in mind what we spoke about the other day, some of the size of those transport projects. This is all in Paris. It's absolutely mad. um So yeah, I really underappreciated the size of that scheme.
00:31:15
Speaker
ah previously. It's pretty good, like classic French fashion to look over at you UK boys doing crossrail and go, Oh, that's cute. And then just get projected Europe and knock it out in the park.
00:31:28
Speaker
I couldn't, to be honest, i didn't I hadn't heard of this project really. And it's, I was pretty shocked that I had not really, yeah like they're doing, so so the outer ring that they're doing just reminded me of suburban rail loop. And I jet sleep, they, what they built was 76 kilometers. SRL is going to be 90, but they've done this whole thing in 15 years with 60, what was it? How many 68 stations?
00:31:51
Speaker
That sounds like so is same metro line. Is that line 15? Is that that line 15, Sam, the loop one? I'm not sure. I can't remember. like We builded doing some of it as well. I saw they picked up part of a small section of it, but are yeah, incredible.
00:32:09
Speaker
And um with a lot of the sections finishing between like 2026, 2027, 2030, it'll be interesting to see if they do the ah classic Crossrail thing of like one year before we're all supposed to open, push the gate out for five years.
00:32:28
Speaker
Yeah, we'll see. They'll be riding on the street. Oh, yeah. Oh, cut that off. Yeah, so that's how it's met you.
00:32:39
Speaker
Yeah, i told that was a good chat. I had heard of Paris, hadn't heard of the project. so yeah yeah Well done, mate. That was cool. I'm supposed to be talking, but I'm now Googling the project. It looks super interesting.
00:32:52
Speaker
Cool, Sam, what what one jumped out to you? Yeah, look, outside of that one, I had a look at the work happening over at Los Angeles. I went through, like I started with, I love these Metro maps. Like I started with the Beijing one because the numbers were just mind boggling. I'm like, how big is this map going to be? And it's nuts, but I found like a website and just started scrolling through, seeing all the maps. And I remember I went to l LA in 2020 and I don't know if you guys have been there, but it's like the worst connected city in the world. to get from terrible. like it It's so bad. They've got this sort of like X, like these crossing rail lines and you have to get pretty much an Uber that gets in some way to get the train.
00:33:31
Speaker
And at the time, there's like a car park that was getting demoed in the middle. And I remember the guy who picked us up and you were saying, oh, that's part of like the 2028 Olympics. like they're They're building like a rail connection, which made sense. But it's not even that. i'm just So outside of they're doing all these big metro upgrades, they're not actually bringing the metro to the airport. So they had to do this separate project to get this like automated train system that goes from the airport to the nearest station. And so this project, like,
00:34:00
Speaker
You know, this happens a lot of places around the world. It's a $5 billion US dollar project to get people to the nearest station. It's being run by this consortium of it's like floor, Balfour Beatty, Flat-eye, and Dragodos, like all these big players. And what blew me away? Because it's not that far. I think, you know, you're talking you know a few kilometers, but everything's above ground. Like the cost comparison to build these like above ground you know, getting to the airport schemes compared to like a separate section of the metro. It's like near double the cost. It's gone way over time.
00:34:36
Speaker
What the the above ground is more expensive? Yeah, like per like cost for like, you know, maybe for me to the above ground section looks to have been, I don't know whether it was cost for hours or like the trickiness getting in there, but you know, the traffic getting in and out of that airport is crazy. I could just imagine how would you build that job? It would have been a nightmare. Yeah, I think there's a similar back and forth happening at the moment between the airport and the government in Melbourne with the rail line there that underground or overground and i thought I thought the underground option was more expensive in that case, but but i might have I could easily have my facts upside down. I don't know. I'm not saying comparatively. I don't know if underground was an option for this, but compared to other areas of the Metro they're building at the moment, and like super expensive.
00:35:24
Speaker
Um, but when it's done, like it's really, you can imagine how much better I think the numbers were, you know, they were in the sort of like hundreds of thousands of people a day taking this like automated trains that are going to run every two minutes between the nearest Metro station and the airport. I think they've engaged Austin to provide like 300, like 300 car, I don't know what you call it, like card sections of the train that'll be running 24 seven. So it is pretty incredible project once it's done.
00:35:53
Speaker
And that's just a tiny piece of all this other work that they've got going over there. um But you can imagine like the demand there would be so high. The traffic there is just terrible. You see, the the motorways have like eight or nine lanes each side. And they were always good luck as well.
00:36:08
Speaker
like they got a real big car issue in LA and they've got like shared like lanes where you have to have like carpool and you have to have three or more people in the lane or you get a ticket and you know you see these people online they're like they get dummies and the passengers speak so they don't get caught by the camera saying you're solo driving. I think there's people that like advertise to get picked up so that people in the rush out tape the but take the express lane. Crazy.
00:36:35
Speaker
did Did either of you see the Tel Aviv project? I didn't dig into that one. This one locked my socks off. I didn't i didn't do as deep a research as as as you folks, but this project, which is I think supposed to start next year,
00:36:53
Speaker
Starts next year. Wow. Yeah. Is expected to cost between 40 and 50 billion USD. What? There are three new Metro lines consisting of 109 stations across the network. but I'll just pause there. What's the population? ah Don't come back with more. It was it wasn't it was it it was an open, it's a I'll go do the read. Half a million.
00:37:21
Speaker
Half a million? No, you're crazy. It's millions. You mean the Tel Aviv? Yeah. Half a million back in 2019. I just Googled it. There's no way it's half a million. You better take that with Google. Oh, that is a 2016 estimate. But I mean, it's not. Oh, no way. Tel Aviv. That's the city. Tel Aviv. Metro Populations for a million. There's no way. Half a million is like no one. There's no way. That is, if you do the cost of the project divided by half a million people, it's the most expensive.
00:37:50
Speaker
So Moses invented for a private train job you've ever had? Yeah. I'm going to have a hand up there. Google didn't, they caveated that pretty heavily with city centre.
00:38:05
Speaker
still things That's one station for every 4,000 people. is there no um Is there no metro there currently? Is it like a brand spanking you? ah think it's a grab split I think it's a brand spanker. 100 stations. 109 stations. It's totally driverless as well. yeah yeah well Serves 300,000 people a day. Three and four people will use this every day. um That's a good go.
00:38:38
Speaker
a You have the pleasure of living in London, Carlos, where it's like taken for a grant taken for granted. But the way a city transforms when you have a highly available and well-connected metro, you just totally forget about cars. And the way you get around is just totally transformed so it's I know uh about to run out of time but just one last shout out so Shanghai metro they're building another line and this line is 34 stations 46 kilometers quite substantial there are 508 metro stations in Shanghai
00:39:14
Speaker
across the network. That is absolutely mad. 800 kilometers. You know my next question. What's the population of Shanghai? Carlos gets the guess. It must be like 800,000 people. I reckon that's over a million.
00:39:31
Speaker
ah Sweet, nice one. It's going to be like 20, right? I was going to wrap, but we're going to sit here and do the math. All right, let's do some. Oh, 24. There we go. I'm back in the game.
00:39:43
Speaker
those Nice. Awesome. That was cool. Sam, thanks again for joining me. ah Really entertaining and fun as usual. Carlos, you want to read us out? Yeah, thank you very much everyone for tuning into today's show. If you did enjoy today's episode, please do think about liking the video while following us on your chosen podcast platform. We appreciate your support and we'll catch you all next week. Bye bye.