 I'm your environmental, physical scientist, and on this episode, we're going to cover cold ironing, what it is, what it does, and why it's important for the community. Wow, look at all these big cables. Hi. Hi. Nice to meet you. I'm Victoria. Nice to meet you. I'm Janice. Hi, Janice. What do you do? I am the utilities manager here at Naval Base San Diego, so I get to work on these things. Wow. What do these things do? Let's give shore power to the ship. It's called cold ironing. Cold ironing is a word that's from way back in the day when they used to run these ships on coal. The engines would get super hot because the coal is super hot when it burns. And then when they'd come back into port, all the sailors would want to go home, so they'd turn the engines off. And then when they'd turn the engines off, they'd get cold, so they'd become cold iron, and then the sailors would get to go home. So this way we can provide power to the ships while the sailors get to go home and see their families. What are the other benefits of cold ironing? It saves us from polluting the atmosphere with all the smoke and emissions that comes out of the engines. We like to be good neighbors, and we all like to breathe good air. Why are the wires so big? The wires are so big because each ship uses as much power as 3,000 houses. Each ship can use all of these plugs at the same time. You can think of these plugs as being the same as the ones in your house when you need to plug something into the wall, like a tablet, that the ship plugs into these, and then it powers the ship up. So what makes this different than any other shipyard? Well, the Navy has spent a lot of time and money to put these here so we can actually power our ships from the electric grid, just like your house is powered. But a lot of other shipplaces, they just have the ships run their engines all the time, so they create a lot of pollution. But the Navy plugs in as often as possible. When you pull in, you plug in. And normally you don't unplug until you leave to go back out to sea. Awesome. Thank you so much for sharing with me today, Janice. You're welcome. Thank you.