Solar panels also have an efficiency of about 20% at best. And so do internal combustion engines - most of the energy goes into heat and sound - and about 20% into power.
Interesting! I didn't know that. How realistic/difficult is it to break 59.24%+ efficiency with those other forms of energy generation? How, theoretically, could we produce less heat and sound?
Exactly, but solar panels have a 20% efficiency, and get hot, you can and must pump away the heat too, so you have a source for a heat pump. If you have a heat tank, you can probably just pump cooling water through the lowest region of the tank to cool the panels and heat up the cold part of the heat storage.
This is not true for internal combustion engines - it is true for petrol internal combustion engines. Diesel engines realistically reach around 50-55% efficiency, although in consumer cars only around 40-43% is practically reachable. >50% efficiency is mainly reached by large engines such as the RTA96-C, where the 96 stands for the cylinder diameter in centimeters (1 yd = 91 cm). They also run on a multitude of fuels, unlike a petrol engine which is very particular about the properties of the fuel it consumes. This can be realistically improved even in petrol engines by simply increasing the stroke ratio and turbocharging, but fundamental issues with mixture and fuel prevent them from reaching the efficiency of diesel engines. The main issue is that the petrol engine has to always run such that the fuel doesn't autoignite before the spark ignites it at TDC - increasing the compression ratio increases efficiency, but also temperature and pressure in the cylinder, which will lead to the fuel igniting before it should. Diesel engines work around this by injecting the fuel at the moment of ignition, operating well above the autoignition point of the mixture. The downside is that there is no mixture, there is only an extremely rich and extremely lean region and an interaction front between them, and this creates a ton of soot, nitrous oxides and other unwanted byproducts. Petrol engines don't have this issue, as they run on a perfect mixture, though their emissions are still far from ideal due to a travelling flame front. The ideal piston engine would always have a perfect fuel-air mixture autoignite at TDC, which would create a simultaneous and homogenous explosion everywhere through the mixture and result in the least possible pollution. For that to happen, both the temperature and the pressure of the mixture (that is, the temperature of the block, head and piston, the position of the piston and the temperature and pressure of intake air would have to be extremely precisely controlled, far beyond what is practical. The only types of internal combustion engines where this is anywhere close to true are gas turbines and jet engines.
@@christophersfactory The GE 9HA combined-cycle 605 MW combined-cycle gas turbine running on natural gas reaches around 62.2% efficiency. That is an internal combustion engine and certainly has above 20% efficiency. While steam turbines may run at >90% efficiency, steam systems themselves often lose a lot of heat, and therefore systems practically hover around 20-30% efficiency. Olkiluoto NPP Unit 3 (first connected in 2022, 3rd generation EPR) has a nameplate reactor output of 4 300 MW of heat, which is converted into 1 600 MW of electricity, an efficiency of 37%. This is not such an issue for nuclear power plants, as with Olkiluoto 3 NPP it translates to a loss of around 12 tonnes of fuel per year, of 128 tonnes constantly in the reactor. That's a loss of 20 grams of fuel per kilowatt-year, which is nothing at all and nuclear reactors are incredibly powerful for the small amount of fuel they consume. For the GE 9HA the equivalent numbers are 720 kg/kWa for 434 tonnes of fuel lost as heat every year, a far larger logistical and economic additional cost to the running of a power plant. Unlike with other forms of energy, for wind and solar low efficiency is simply about land area, initial capital investment, and service life. Therefore the low efficiency hurts little unless you are constrained in area, capital, or attempting to fit panels onto a vehicle of some kind. Compare that with even nuclear energy where a loss of some tonnes of fuel happens each year as heat, or fossil fuel power generation where hundreds of tonnes are wasted with the most efficient turbines on the market. Land area limitations are economic and environmental, you cannot simply replace a forest or a field with solar panels and expect the local ecology not to collapse, or expect wind farms to cause no ecological disruption, especially to birds but also to other mammals and even insects. The resources required for each are also quite bad globally, though it's not like power plants grow on trees either. For low local environmental impact, you want to go for nuclear energy, since it's efficient and green yet is non-renewable and has an initial construction impact which is rather high. When higher environmental impact is acceptable, solar panels and wind farms can come into the picture and make projects far, far cheaper and truly renewable despite their issues.
One thing to keep in mind for my calculations here - they both use ICE efficiency as a ratio calculated from BSFC and the LHV, which is not the same as true gross energy density. That makes them in reality slightly incomparable with other energy production methods. Using the HHV, the true gross energy density, the real currently-existing diesel upper limits are 47.8-51.1%, the consumer car realistic diesel limits are 37.4-39.9%, petrol engine realistic limits are 18.3-34.5%, and the GE 9HA has an efficiency of 58.3%. That provides a more accurate comparison to things like wind and solar, as well as nuclear. Nuclear has another issue with it in that the heat of fission of nuclear fuel varies a bunch and is super hard to calculate for any one reactor precisely, so we use the nameplate heat power and nameplate electrical power to calculate a heat efficiency for only the steam turbine system instead of the reactor core and steam turbine system together.
I'm here to TELL YOU AT ( 9/19/24 3:40 PM ) There is A Is WIND TURBINE out there that has 12 blade and Exceeds the BETZ LIMIT UP TO 75%. And i'm sure you can GUESS who's building it
The consoling thing is that everything around us is really inefficient. Don’t even start me on combustion engines. Room for smart people like you to improve on age-old designs :)
i would explain it like this: imagine a cave. now the wind comes and all the wind energy gets in this cave. the cave get all the energy and particles inside. its called compressed air. if you now use the energy, you have to release the compression, or your energy is just stored but not used. so if you remove the compression by using the energy, more wind can come in and you can let more energy in yor system. the problem isn't how to stop the wind, the problem is the efficiency of the change of motion energy to electric energy. i hope this makes sense :D
In context of cost... efficiency, is it relevant (capitalism aside)? If it cost me minimally of an investment do I care if I only get 30% conversion? NO. It is only if the cost is high do I really care.
Never heard of this channel but this was really interesting, thanks dude
Solar panels also have an efficiency of about 20% at best. And so do internal combustion engines - most of the energy goes into heat and sound - and about 20% into power.
Interesting! I didn't know that. How realistic/difficult is it to break 59.24%+ efficiency with those other forms of energy generation? How, theoretically, could we produce less heat and sound?
Exactly, but solar panels have a 20% efficiency, and get hot, you can and must pump away the heat too, so you have a source for a heat pump. If you have a heat tank, you can probably just pump cooling water through the lowest region of the tank to cool the panels and heat up the cold part of the heat storage.
This is not true for internal combustion engines - it is true for petrol internal combustion engines.
Diesel engines realistically reach around 50-55% efficiency, although in consumer cars only around 40-43% is practically reachable. >50% efficiency is mainly reached by large engines such as the RTA96-C, where the 96 stands for the cylinder diameter in centimeters (1 yd = 91 cm). They also run on a multitude of fuels, unlike a petrol engine which is very particular about the properties of the fuel it consumes. This can be realistically improved even in petrol engines by simply increasing the stroke ratio and turbocharging, but fundamental issues with mixture and fuel prevent them from reaching the efficiency of diesel engines.
The main issue is that the petrol engine has to always run such that the fuel doesn't autoignite before the spark ignites it at TDC - increasing the compression ratio increases efficiency, but also temperature and pressure in the cylinder, which will lead to the fuel igniting before it should. Diesel engines work around this by injecting the fuel at the moment of ignition, operating well above the autoignition point of the mixture. The downside is that there is no mixture, there is only an extremely rich and extremely lean region and an interaction front between them, and this creates a ton of soot, nitrous oxides and other unwanted byproducts. Petrol engines don't have this issue, as they run on a perfect mixture, though their emissions are still far from ideal due to a travelling flame front.
The ideal piston engine would always have a perfect fuel-air mixture autoignite at TDC, which would create a simultaneous and homogenous explosion everywhere through the mixture and result in the least possible pollution. For that to happen, both the temperature and the pressure of the mixture (that is, the temperature of the block, head and piston, the position of the piston and the temperature and pressure of intake air would have to be extremely precisely controlled, far beyond what is practical. The only types of internal combustion engines where this is anywhere close to true are gas turbines and jet engines.
@@christophersfactory The GE 9HA combined-cycle 605 MW combined-cycle gas turbine running on natural gas reaches around 62.2% efficiency. That is an internal combustion engine and certainly has above 20% efficiency. While steam turbines may run at >90% efficiency, steam systems themselves often lose a lot of heat, and therefore systems practically hover around 20-30% efficiency. Olkiluoto NPP Unit 3 (first connected in 2022, 3rd generation EPR) has a nameplate reactor output of 4 300 MW of heat, which is converted into 1 600 MW of electricity, an efficiency of 37%. This is not such an issue for nuclear power plants, as with Olkiluoto 3 NPP it translates to a loss of around 12 tonnes of fuel per year, of 128 tonnes constantly in the reactor. That's a loss of 20 grams of fuel per kilowatt-year, which is nothing at all and nuclear reactors are incredibly powerful for the small amount of fuel they consume. For the GE 9HA the equivalent numbers are 720 kg/kWa for 434 tonnes of fuel lost as heat every year, a far larger logistical and economic additional cost to the running of a power plant.
Unlike with other forms of energy, for wind and solar low efficiency is simply about land area, initial capital investment, and service life. Therefore the low efficiency hurts little unless you are constrained in area, capital, or attempting to fit panels onto a vehicle of some kind. Compare that with even nuclear energy where a loss of some tonnes of fuel happens each year as heat, or fossil fuel power generation where hundreds of tonnes are wasted with the most efficient turbines on the market. Land area limitations are economic and environmental, you cannot simply replace a forest or a field with solar panels and expect the local ecology not to collapse, or expect wind farms to cause no ecological disruption, especially to birds but also to other mammals and even insects. The resources required for each are also quite bad globally, though it's not like power plants grow on trees either. For low local environmental impact, you want to go for nuclear energy, since it's efficient and green yet is non-renewable and has an initial construction impact which is rather high. When higher environmental impact is acceptable, solar panels and wind farms can come into the picture and make projects far, far cheaper and truly renewable despite their issues.
One thing to keep in mind for my calculations here - they both use ICE efficiency as a ratio calculated from BSFC and the LHV, which is not the same as true gross energy density. That makes them in reality slightly incomparable with other energy production methods. Using the HHV, the true gross energy density, the real currently-existing diesel upper limits are 47.8-51.1%, the consumer car realistic diesel limits are 37.4-39.9%, petrol engine realistic limits are 18.3-34.5%, and the GE 9HA has an efficiency of 58.3%. That provides a more accurate comparison to things like wind and solar, as well as nuclear. Nuclear has another issue with it in that the heat of fission of nuclear fuel varies a bunch and is super hard to calculate for any one reactor precisely, so we use the nameplate heat power and nameplate electrical power to calculate a heat efficiency for only the steam turbine system instead of the reactor core and steam turbine system together.
I'm here to TELL YOU AT
( 9/19/24 3:40 PM ) There is A Is WIND TURBINE out there that has 12 blade and Exceeds the BETZ LIMIT UP TO 75%. And i'm sure you can GUESS who's building it
well dang now im just a bit sad, great video though and very interesting topic :D
The consoling thing is that everything around us is really inefficient. Don’t even start me on combustion engines. Room for smart people like you to improve on age-old designs :)
Fantastic vid, thank you
Maybe you can't create or destroy energy, but I can
Newton fears him!
Love your channel, man. Keep it coming
thank you my friend, I appreciate that and I sure will
Good job, hope a video explain the formula and why 59%.
good to know. now to prove this theory wrong...
Great explanation, thanks.
i would explain it like this:
imagine a cave. now the wind comes and all the wind energy gets in this cave. the cave get all the energy and particles inside. its called compressed air. if you now use the energy, you have to release the compression, or your energy is just stored but not used. so if you remove the compression by using the energy, more wind can come in and you can let more energy in yor system.
the problem isn't how to stop the wind, the problem is the efficiency of the change of motion energy to electric energy.
i hope this makes sense :D
NOT TOO BRIGHT
Great video, thanks!
Thank *you* for watching!
Getting 59% of the free energy in the wind is not bad. It cost no money or resources to produce the wind in the first place.
Your vids are really good man!! Respect from India🇮🇳
Keep hustling
I give my life for India! Thank you
In context of cost... efficiency, is it relevant (capitalism aside)?
If it cost me minimally of an investment do I care if I only get 30% conversion? NO.
It is only if the cost is high do I really care.
Betz limit smashed by the gyro wind turbine regards Graham Flowers MEng
Why are you even arguing about efficiency of free energy, does you pay for the wind to move or something?