A reality check on renewables - David MacKay
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- Опубліковано 4 жов 2024
- How much land mass would renewables need to power a nation like the UK? An entire country's worth. In this pragmatic talk, David MacKay tours the basic mathematics that show worrying limitations on our sustainable energy options and explains why we should pursue them anyway. (Filmed at TEDxWarwick.)
Lesson by David MacKay.
This is still one of the best TED talks I have ever watched. Thank you kindly, Sir David McKay. May you rest in peace
A great loss for humanity. So sad to discover Sir David MacKay passed away recently. I think Davids book 'without hot air' is a truly inspirational piece of work and such an important read. The work of a true 'Hero'.
DaztheDuke Oh my gosh, I have just found this video clip which is amazing to me. Wish professor David rest in peace and his spirit will always remain in young generation
Daz - Thank you for the alert regarding Sir David MacKay. A very relevant person for today. Can't promise the read but I can promise to look into it. I will. K; bought it: $8 used w shipping from that ama zin book store.
Aye
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_J._C._MacKay#Illness_and_death
He made his book available for free online
www.withouthotair.com
He and his team designed a set of software tools so that politicians could experiment with different energy policies. The public could use them too, with a bit of searching for the website.
He really did his best to provide, in a straightforward way, the numbers needed to build a strategy.
Wow - a sane person, talking sense without an agenda. Amazing.
Are you sure? What do you base that on?His motive? my back of envelope calculated by some margin he is wrong with the assumptions he males and if he's a physicist his motivation following this script is not the same as he claimed at the beginning. The emphasis on the words used within the parameter of generalised message is intended for the particular manipulation of a certain audience.i.e.- This is today's talk ..so lets say UK?▶=.where's the next talk? What is the contended idea promoted or is intended to be first step to. planted sub consciously? Tavistock institute?..!
Everyone comes from somewhere; everyone has a bias or an "agenda." This fella...I couldn't quite tell... Was he British...?
Our environmental movement in my opinion has been a sham funded by foreign special interest groups that is destroying many economies. I am all for reducing pollution but carbon dioxide is not pollution. Also regardless of what side of the fence you are on do your own research on the facts. If you look at today’s solar panels they are substantially higher then 4watts per square meter. Now on today’s panels you can get up to 500 watts per panel. That is about 4000 percent more then your claim. Again, thank you so much for this information but also be a critical listener on all sides
So, in your example, Peter the solar panels produce 100% of rated output power at night and in winter when the sun is low in the sky. What is he talking about is averages, night and day, over the whole year.
@@PeterTaylorEdmonton "Carbon dioxide is not pollution" Well, that is just ignorance speaking. By itself, it is not, but we are producing so much more that... Well, at this point, I don't even know if it's worth explaining.
Finally a discussion about renewables production and not their capacity. The talk was an honest look at the nature of the technology. Renewables do have their place but too many people are selling a myth behind them when they use the word capacity to describe their installation.
The truth is they need tax dollars to prop them up and they still can't operate efficiently.
I am from Germany, so please buy some windturbines from Siemens which has the monopoly!
Nuclear Energy > everything else
@@rafay8516
Nuclear is way to expensive.
The UK government told investors that they would finance new nuclear power plants and guarantee that they would buy the power for more than double the market price and still investors didn't want to build nuclear power as it was to risky.
The cost of new nuclear is currently over 120 $/MWh, 29$ of that is pure operatin cost.
Wind and solar are around 30 to 50$/MWh and are expected to hit 20 in the next couple of years (So cheaper than the operation cost of nuclear).
Even if you factor in storage you end up with solar being cheaper than nuclear.
Oh and the guy in the video missed something else on nuclear. The exclusion zone of a nuclear power plant is 8km², so nuclear isn't 1000W per m², but 125.
Although, all of the maths from this presentation is now irrelevant because of technological advances
I've seen a lot of videos on the subject this by far is the clearest projection of ideas by a humble human being. May he rest in peace
@kcotte59 THere is something worse than being dead AND cold - being dead AND Wrong, which he is
@@shandcunt9455 and how did you work that out exactly?
@@shandcunt9455 Go on then, what exactly is he wrong about?
@@bestbits2345 He's wrong about how much space you would need for solar and wind - how much land does an offshore wind farm use (You know, the places where there are lots of wind like in the north sea in england) - he act's like "Ohhh noes, the precious land, leave brittany/the land alone..."
@@willbaker1472 Logically, thats how I worked it out - how on earth do you work things out? Illogically? that seems like a silly idea
7 years later, and the shouting has gotten louder, more insane, and even less grown up.
WHAT'S THAT YOU'RE ON ABOUT ? SPEAK UP FOR CRYING OUT LOUD.
Now the latest trend is "We can run the country on solar and batteries!" - which is of course just utter nonsense... But there lies the real signs of a lacking education system in maths and science.
Steven Haigh within a decade the cheapest source of energy is solar combined with energy storage, be it batteries, hydrogen or other means of storage. Dont listen to me, listen to the chinese that is preparing for this reality.
@@grindupBaker 😊
@@oystla We'll see.
11:15 "People are Anti-everything!" 100% true. i dont want to comment about the consequences - every person capable of doing is encouraged to try
I'm anti smacking yer chops every time you finish a sentence.
* Eating bugs & insects, and getting rid of dairy and meat subsidies
* Using a shower timer
* Using personal temperature regulation instead of air conditioning
@BillyBob How about NRA ? Biggest fund raisers for Potus ?
@BillyBob , and you are pro propaganda?
@@aoeu256 Sounds great. Start by doing it yourself for 1 year while having a job. Let's see where drained willpower & anxioussness will get you. Then we can make a study by applying it big time in north corea. Although lab grown meat & wearables have a future, but the technology isn't here yet. So apply it yourself or start a company and then enlighten the rest of us. I'm sure we will come around.
Amazing. A man who is both a fan of the environment *and* math+common sense.
Apparently he is not a fan of economics though, how much is that Hinkley Point C costing again? you want cheap power or "math+common sense." power - which apparently, is expensive
@@shandcunt9455 Moltex Energy might be the future.
When talking about producing energy for the UK in other countries, he forgot to do a back of the envelope calculation of transmission losses. There is a reason why electricity is produced close to where it is consumed. For the biomass calculation, I'm going to guess he forgot to consider how a reduced level of CO2 would impair plant growth. Further, less land would be available for biomass farms because reduced plant growth would require more land be devoted to food production. Growing biomass for the purpose of burning it also depletes the land. That is a massive increase in the amount of fertilizer and irrigation water required (irrigation water may not be that hard to come by in the UK but it is a very big deal in other places). Finally, he neglected to do a back of the envelope calculation of the energy bill for the average person if it all came from renewable sources. In summary, interesting info. for a conversation at the pub but useless for a serious discussion of real solutions.
@@donaldtrimmer7611 reduced CO2 levels wouldn't affect plant growth much, since its relatively small amounts of CO2 that are critical to climate breakdown. Actually increased CO2 levels at low temperatures can reduce growth.
@@PruneHub Don't ask hard questions. It might hurt someone's feelings.
I'd like to see someone making a similar speech today, seeing that this presentation is very old
Agreed.
It is ONE of the best and almost timeless. Most importantly, it is "agenda less" and no ulterior motive. There are no job killing, no fear mongering doomsday predictions with dying consequences; no NGOs, business killing/oriented, tax/regulatory cult like religion with complex agreements etc...
@@kkhinson4913 Agree timeless
@@kkhinson4913 Huh??? Ya I'll watch this then; is he really not selling anything? Or maybe just selling everything and anything? I'll get back to you on this. I may be wrong and I have zero pride and will swallow that zero of my pride. LOL I'll be back after hearing what he's to have had said. Or had shared what not of some of his claiming.
@@MichelJosephCardin Huh? WTF are you trying to say? Nobody can tell, dude. Sleep it off and try to get back to us with a sensible comment.
honestly my money's on nuclear power, it just seems far more practical than everything else, especially the newer types being developed, but we're too scared to really try them because of all the fear-mongering.
Yeah! I’ve applied to study nuclear engineering in college, but don’t get word until December at the earliest. I’ve spent hours satisfying my fascination via research though
@@jacksonreasoner1408 Much safer, cleaner and practical than all renewables combined.
ua-cam.com/video/N-yALPEpV4w/v-deo.html
The future is nuclear, period. It's powerfully, clean, safe, if somebody find the tech to extract uranium from seawater it's almost limitless and as we'll get less scared from it, we'll get even better nuclear tech such as fusion, even cleaner and safer
Chernobyl, Fukushima, three mile island...
The list is pretty extensive if you actually look into this stuff.
The speaker failed to mention the elephants in the room, the intermittently of solar and wind and destruction of the landscape .
1.) When the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow, we need to fire up the fossil fuel power plants to cover the shortfall, as we greatly lack battery backups to store the energy from wind and solar generation.
2.). When I first saw massive wind mills on a hillside and a long stretch of solar panels in the countryside, I remarked, look at that. How cool! However, with the projections of future required land use, for renewables, to end fossil fuel reliance, the amount of the natural landscape swallowed up and wild creatures made homeless and killed is, to say the least unacceptable.
Hydro and nuclear power, whatever their problems, are currently the best solutions for non-fossil fuel solutions to meeting our energy needs.
Yes, to be fair I think that's a second level problem that he didn't want to get into. It makes sense to ask "does it make enough power" first, if the answer is "not really" there then it being intermittant or not doesn't matter.
Yeah he glossed over the obvious best solution that his talk was going towards - nuclear power, and immediately switched over to, "nothing works!".
Nuclear is the best option imo. We just need public perception about it to get better.
@@jajajinks1569 the problem isn't just perception, it's also waste. Radioactive waste products are a major issue and there isn't really a great solution besides dumping it somewhere it hopefully won't have to much of an effect.
@@SapientGalaxy True, but compared to "covering half the UK in windfarms", it's an infinitely better solution.
Every energy source has its impact on the environment in one way or another. If you need to build dams, hydro energy is one of the most invasive. For fossil fuel power plants you have to dig out fossil fuels, of course, and for solar panels you have to dig out rare earth materials. And with nuclear power you have to find a way to get rid of the leftovers - a way that is assured to work for 10.000 of years to come.
Also: have you ever seen a wind farm, not down for maintenance or so, where not a single turbine rotates? Especially in the UK? Me neither.
This was really cool. He put practical numbers and ideas out there rather than just whinging about stuff everyone already knows is bad.
His numbers were out of date even for 2012 and they are even more wrong now - he literally was just whinging about stuff
Honest, scientific, practical, wide range, fearless, fail safe, problem solving, realistic, commonsense, and trustworthy approach to necessary energy consumption.
After all, plants, trees, food etc. rely on Carbon Dioxide and give off Oxygen which we need. Oxygen to Carbon Dioxide back to Oxygen is PURPOSEFUL and unbreakable Cycle of Life!!!
Also imagine the quantity of *rare metals* we'd have to dig out of the earth, to cover most of a desert in solar panels 😕
Some of the materials are bi-products of certain processes too.
It would be cheaper and easier to create a solar convection tower using mostly conventional materials.
This is a good point & shows the foolishness of politicians. They think solar panels are lego pieces. They don't understand that elements like gallium, germanium, gold, palladium, prosmythium are rare elements & don't measure footballs fields. Rarity implies high cost.
Most of a solar cell's weight is silicon, the most common mineral in the earth's crust. There are already several semiconductor technologies that don't use rare metals so don't sweat it. [Now to the people that honestly think we can take all our energy needs from solar: U mad? stop wasting]
Imagine cleaning sand off those things every day. Imagine hills of sand covering those things.
Also solar panels are not biodegradable and in fact have toxic elements
And a more severe problem with wind and solar is that they produce power when they feel like it, rather than when you need it.
Between, wind, solar, wave, tidal, geothermal, hydro-electric ect... there is always more than enough energy...you just have to harness it. By the way. Electricity travels 1000's of km at the speed of light so where ever there is a shortage in one area there's a surplus in another.
@@motoarzan791, that's simply not true. Transmission losses and expenses mean you cannot economically ship electricity many thousands of kilometers.
Solar is unavailable at night, and at high latitudes it produces greatly reduced electricity in the winter, and even less when covered with snow.
Wind may be unavailable for days at a time.
Wave & tidal energy are experimental, and have not proven practical. Even if they are made to work it will only be at the coasts.
Geothermal is practical in some places, but not many. (Iceland, mainly.)
Of your entire list, hydro is the only one that is practical on a large scale, and it's already employed to near maximum capacity. There's no way to greatly increase hydroelectric production. It's also the most dangerous way to generate electricity: abcnews.go.com/2020/story?id=2918360&page=1
^
@@ncdave4life I didn't literally mean moving electricity form coast to coast just making a point that moving electricity is way, way, way more efficient than moving fossil fuels in tiny little batches (relatively speaking) on tanker trucks to every nook and cranny of the country.
This isn't that difficult- nuclear is and always has been the solution. Conservation and lifestyle changes will just mitigate the amount of nuclear necessary- but that's the long and short of it- moralizing about the solution only delays its implementation - we wait long enough waiting for unicorns to solve the problem and it won't matter.
Solar power isn't a unicorn. In California we already have the "problem" that solar is generating so much power in the middle of the day that energy costs go to zero - or even below. %^) That's the problem we need to solve: what to do with that free energy?
Nukes used to talk about being "too cheap to meter". That never happened - except with solar and wind. Now it happens a lot - but not with nukes.
@@geroldfirl Exactly!! you can't store spare electricity, except in batteries. You need it all the time.
@@davidtuer5825 Actually there are lots of ways to store energy. Pumped hydro is good, but we don't have enough reservoir capacity for that to be the total solution. Molten salt works well for concentrated solar, but it's not as cheap as PV.
Well its similar to fossil fuels, it's not sustainable amd will run out, if we were to completely swap its estimated we'd only have 150 to 200 years of it.
Nuclear isn't economical and much more financially risky.
It's so true about everyone being anti something.
Not including you though right? They're all blind fools, but not you. You're a genius aren't you?
@@bestbits2345 Even anti-commenter, wow!
Yeah especially when talking about environmental stuff. So many anti- GMOs, chemicals, nuclear energy, etc. It's not backed by evidence, people just like being anti
I'm anti-waste, anti-pollution, anti-greed..but mostly, I'm anti-extinction.
Selfish of me, I know, but...
I'm an advocate of having grown up conversations that are based on numbers and facts!
Watching this video is good because it will teach you to audit data presented and be more prudent when you hear other presentors whichever side of the fence they are. That way, fake news spreads less.
he should have talked to a specialist in the field. His numbers for solar are not even correct for 2012. And no one in their right mind (so not the EU) that is working in the field thinks that bio fuels are the solution. He is setting up a straw man. - he conveniently neglects that heat pumps using large bodies of water (ocean, lakes) could be well used in the U.K. he correctly says that heating uses a lot of energy. - the situation is not ideal for solar (not sure though if it is better in Germany).
A densely populated country can have well insulated houses and can have excellent public transportation. (See Switzerland, and they have these expensive tunnels through the mountains). That would mean people can easily make do w/o car, so they save on the costs.
If the kites ever get some traction (small decentral wind harvesting) that would be splendid - an ideal solution for foggy, windy, rainy U.K.
@@xyzsame4081 Also his numbers act as if A) Wind Turbines aren't better out at sea and B) Solar on rooftops and covering car parks make sense as it's closet to the source of use.....all this fear about the land area needed is misleading
I reduced my heating/AC bill by over 60% by moving from Illinois to Florida. not why I moved but it was a nice side effect. so where people live matters greatly in this equation.
This is why most migrate to warmer climates. Warm good for life, cold, not so much.
Is it a reduction in consumption or a reduction in per kWh cost? Florida has low electricity cost.
@@danatcanyonlake583 - both.
@@hopeyoung5482 Warmer climates and more sun actually correlates with increased risk of poor cardiovascular health.
Thank you David MacKay! for your relevant Facts!
A great presentation -- discussing a real issue like grown-ups
Except he isn't, we literally ran his experiment and let the free market decide and hinkley point C is expensive, over budget and delayed whilst renewables continue to drop in price - he was 100% wrong
You mean 50 times the cost of clean coal is cheep? OMG let's buy all our energy from China and Russia and usher in Hitler's new world order!
I was thinking about David's biofuels "verge" calculation at the beginning of the video, and thought I would finish his thought. If each car required a verge 80 meters by 8000 meters, that's 64 hectares per vehicle. So how many vehicles would this biofuel system support even if everyone lived underground and the entire land area of the UK were turned over to biofuel production (a complete physical impossibility, but a useful point of perspective)?
Google says the UK is comprised of 94,058 sq miles which my conversion calculator transforms into 24,360,910 hectares of land area. Divide by 64 hectares per car, and you end up at 380,639 cars in total for all of the UK. Except the UK has over 34 million at present.
There is a two orders of magnitude disconnect between the two.
We have to move away from the off the cuff wishful thinking about energy transitions and move towards sensible plans built on real math and plausible expectations.
Realistically, especially cost-wise, nuclear seems the #1 option.
Wind is good, has but limited sites and is irregular.
Geothermal has huge potential for home heating.
Biofuels of today are a bad joke. But in the future if made from waste biomass it becomes significant, and if made from algae cultures in desert or oceans it might well solve everything.
Love how he basically points out that we have this solution that's been around for decades that will solve this "problem" *today* (nuclear) and then totally writes it off with barely a mention because...it's unpopular...(sentence trails off into inaudible mumbling)? And doesn't address the obvious follow up question, "Well, why is it unpopular?"
And then doesn't for one second consider what the average person can actually afford, nor does he factor in the final cost-of-productivity to final value-of-productivity ratio (the same ratio you would use to prove you can't power a solar panel with a light source powered by said solar panel).
If nuclear power replaced fossil fuels and supplied every BTU and watt to the global population there would need to be about 5000 nuclear power plants. Now there's about 440 of them globally.
@@musaran2 Heat pumps are a better idea (for heating) than geothermal... though technically, for ground source heat pumps, they are geothermal, but on a much smaller scale and with a much lower temperature differential. I've always liked heat pumps for many reasons, but the best is simply that they run completely on electricity. Anything that runs on electricity is agnostic with regards to where that electricity comes from, and that's a good thing. If everyone switched to electric heaters, this might seem like a really bad idea, because we'd need so much more electricity, and most of the electricity comes from fossil fuels. But imagine we decommission all the fossil fuelled power stations, we'd still be left with millions of homes still burning fossil fuels. Gas should no longer be allowed into peoples' homes, certainly not new houses, so that as we transition away from fossil fuelled power stations, the benefits will be felt immediately, and we won't have to wait for every home owner to have to catch up. If we don't, you can replace all the power stations you like, but a good proportion of the pollution will remain. The same goes for cars, electric all the way.
Nuclear is the answer but there is so much prejudice I don't see it happening. I live in an area that is closing it's nuclear plant. They have been protesting, signing petitions, etc for years and our !! "##!! Governor announced it is closing, Yeah. Our bills will now double, Yeah! And he wonders why people are leaving, hmm?? High income tax, high fees, high local tax, high sales tax, high property tax and now double the cost of electricity which was already high. Doesn't it sound appealing?
So many people allow their ignorance to create irrational fear. Modern nuke power is safer and greener, than any other form of power today.
Instead of prejudice - I would say it is a 'moralization' issue- moralizing the answer instead of using scientific answers leads you to an impractical solution- problem created instead of problem solved.
That sounds a lot like Illinois... at least to someone living in Illinois it does! lol
It's all Monty Burns' fault.
thorium is the answer
One big undiscussed issue with the "other people's backyards" approach:
Transmission losses. X kilowatts produced does not magically appear as X kilowatts where it is used. When you transmit power from point of generation to consumers 10 miles away, transformer substations are used to raise the voltage to thousands of volts with proportionately lower amps to reduce losses in the wires. There will still be SOME LOSSES even in that short distance. It will then be stepped down by local distribution transformers close to the building, the voltage goes to typically 240, and you get most of the amps back.
If the distance increases to 100 miles away, the transformers must raise the voltage to perhaps 128,000 volts or more and drop the amps further to get MOST of the power to the big substation which steps it down to maybe 10% of the voltage for distribution to the streetside transformer that makes it 240 volts of usually a single phase of the power and your breaker box handles typically 200 amps and the electrical installer splits the circuits to be either 240 or 120. And every step-up and step-down and every mile of transmission wire uses up part of the power.
Increase that to a thousand miles, and the hundred-mile losses increase 10 times, or you will have to raise the voltage to a horrifically dangerous 1,280,000 volts radiating electromagnetic energy the whole way, which will help efficiency and make it possible to get it there, but it absolutely WILL LOSE POWER IN TRANSMISSION OVER DISTANCE.
Remember this whenever someone says, "Oh, we can just produce it over there." That is the LEAST efficient way to get power to the user.
True.
The talk about UK getting energy from Oz or Canada is just theoretical. Transporting the energy from one end of the planet to the other DOES have its costs...in energy. Clearly, not a sensible/pragmatic option.
What a man, a great loss for humanity. If our politicians would reason like he did, we would actually be making efficient change.
Then explain to me why many countries in EU such as UK, Germany ran totally on renewable much of the 2016?
Perhaps the technology was much backward in 2013 or the numbers he present are not correct. First of all people dont use 200 bulb worth of energy 24/7. Second a square m of solar panel can produce easily 80W (have you seen a solar panel?) and if you have enough wind, a wind turbine produce much more than a solar panel for the same area.
Peraj Karbaschi they didn't run on renewables for most of the year. when they did rarely power most of the country it makes the news. Germany runs on coal. this guy isn't dumb, he was the chief uk science advisor.
Germany did not run "totally on renewable" for even a single day in 2016. Not since the early 18th century. Midday, on a slack day (Sunday), on a sunny day, in summer: Germany may reach 80% or more renewable electricity output. That's the best they can do. Back in 2013, 2/3 of Germany renewable energy was bio-energy. The same bio-energy David MacKay trashes in this talk.
Some local areas within Germany has been able to produce enough renewable energy to supply their needs.
ua-cam.com/video/AJ38SiVOD78/v-deo.html
RIP David MacKay
What is always, deliberately, missing out of these "national conversations" we have on future fuel generation is how renewables can be installed small scale to the direct financial benefit of the individual house hold, either at a household, local or regional scale, win win. Meanwhile we pay subsidies to power companies and landowners for large scale projects. Why is this? Because big business will not profit from energy self sufficient people.
Also intentional in this case is a) beginning with biofuel...the most inefficient of the renewables, and b) the perpetual, ubiquitous pretense of the limited-source mechanism.
Wind and solar and tidal generation do NOT have to cover land area. Tidal, of course, doesn't even work on land, but wind and solar also work, and work BETTER, offshore.
This presentation is biased in favor of fossil-fuel industries. It's a for-profit bias.
Hey this english bloke shares my understanding of the situation, I feel very sensible now.
Add to that that energy consumption increases at ~2 - 3% each year. In 25 years, the energy consumption will double. In 50 years, it will be 4x bigger. It looks like the UK will run out of space.
@Mr Brightside The explosion happens in countries where people live off 2 or 5 USD per day. Wealthy families and nations do not have that many children. It will cause tragedies - but the squandering of energy happens in the rich nations.
This lecture is the best demonstration of the fact that renewables, weather and Climate change go hand-in-hand.
Maybe one of us could start putting the current data together and make an updated video? The way sir MacKay did it isn't too bad: not too much bias in his way of speech. Just entering the data of 2017-2018 would help to restart the discussion. Pretty sure our volunteer would make it to TED as well...
I've been looking at this a while now, my summary is the numbers don't really need updating (yet). E.g. he assumed 20% efficient solar panels and that is still roughly the best on the market.
We can probably expect solar and wind to power 30% of our needs without storage. Much higher if we have storage. Fossil fuels will always have a place in modern society.
very informative about what is realistically achievable with renewable energy
A bit of a heads up info for everyone or some ammo for your gun so to speak - Where I work we just installed $900Ks worth of solar panels. I worked closely with the project manager. I asked him how they work out how many panels and how to space them to achieve the required output. He answered that there is a world industry wide/universal set of calculations. So we worked out how many panels and how much area would be required to replace a standard 4 x 2000 megawatt generator power station. The answer is 20 million panels which will need 14,800+ square acres of land or wildlife habitat or farmland ( The aquisition of farmland which is currently happening in North Victoria and Southern NSW in Australia. Places like Corowa or Jindera for example).
As for those bloody hideous windfarms, 24 were recently installed in a forest in Germany (yep thats right, a forest). 28,000 acres of trees were mowed down. When these things come to the end of their 10 year lives they are so incredibly expensive to pull down they leave them there instead. Oh dear what to do? Oh ok I know lets bulldoze more trees/farmland/wildlife habitat.
About those solar panels, the VAST majority are made in China. If you buy the Tier 1 panels they may often last their 10 years of life. If you buy the Tier 2 and 3 you can expect around 2 years. However if you are smart you'll purchase the 10 year warranty. But wait - the chinese government which owns most of the companies making them are refusing to honour the warranties. Theres one minor (minor?) problem with the old solar panels - there are literally hundreds of thousands of them that they simply dont know how to dispose of.
On another note - a question or two for the Extinction Rebellion people. If you're so concerned about animals being killed, why do we NEVER EVER see you lot protesting outside an halal slaughterhouse? AND..... whats your solution to introduced species like foxes and ESPECIALLY, cats killing of our native animals?
Hey kids if you really care about the planet - protest on a weekend or holiday.
Why are the smart people, who are trying to make a positive, practical difference, the ones dying????
While I loved his book "sustainable energy without the hot air" when it came out, all the numbers in this talk are now really outdated. We know how to use a lot less energy than those 125 kWh/day, solar PV has become more efficient (and much cheaper), and offshore wind has become a real option.
Not really.
We are using more energy than we were a decade ago. The efficiency of solar hasn't increased significantly, he assume 20% for commercial panels in the book, still around there. Cost he doesn't consider, so not contradicted there.
I'm impressed with how much he got right. Predicted the rise of electric cars and heat pumps before those were a big thing.
Vehicles cover a huge part of our land mass, and consume much of our energy and often sit outside in the sun baking all day.
Houses have walls, windows and roofs which do the same.
Oceans cover most of our planet and do the same..
Not arguing with his math however he's left a lot of possibilities out of the equation.
here's the problem with solar roofs in houses,
1/ its small scale, making it much more expensive than large solar panel fields.
2/ they need to be maintained and replaced, can homeowners afford to maintain and replace their panels every 10-15 years
@@nafiulshelim6194 Not long ago a Pentium 75 MHz PC went for $2,000. Imagine if they said forget this no one will ever buy a computer let alone a smartphone.
Consider as well most people never make or save money from them.
@@Virtual-Media well solar panels do not scale like micro-processor nodes, and we already have superior alternatives with lower carbon emissions. so your example doesnt fit.
@@Virtual-Media ok I hope you are able to power a city and industry with your solar power..
@@nafiulshelim6194 I would be content powering my home with them. Why are you so against them?
Really sad to hear about his passing. It'd be very interesting to see a revision/update to this talk with the acceleration of EV adoption -- courtesy of cars such as _any_ Tesla, the Leaf, e-Tron (I think they're shipping those now), i-Pace, and the larger array of PHEVs and their functionality as EVs for some commuters. It's been a short while since this talk and things are already looking far brighter.
E-tron and I-pace don't seem to be doing that well, but ya Tesla seems to be doing pretty well
RIP Prof MacKay. Thank you.
"n 2009 the UK consumed 351.8 billion kWh of electricity. The Eco Experts calculate that in order to produce that much electricity, the UK would need 102,458,062 well-positioned 4kWp solar arrays - an incredible 409GW of capacity.
The installations would take up roughly 2,635 km2; the UK is 244,820km2. Therefore, only one percent of the UK’s total land area would be required to install enough solar to cover our entire electricity needs."
In fact, you don't need even that much as homes and businesses should put solar installations of their roofs to power both their homes, businesses, and electric vehicles. Since solar pays for itself inh 5 years and gives 20 years of free clean energy, the savings, not even accounting for the fact that energy bills are going up, would be over $75,000 in 20 years.
If the US doesn't act fast, in the future we will not be captives of foreign oil but of Chinese solar technology.
It''s not magic; it's physics and all life on earth is based on solar energy , and solar can be a 24/7 source with molten salt technology, and of course, the wind generally blows more robustly at night.
It's a no brainer.
The problem is Dale that those numbers unfortunately do not add up.
Two issues:
1) Solar does not generate that much power per unit area (~10 times less)
2) Electricity is 10-20% of energy use. Cars (petrol), home heating (gas) etc we will need to convert.
Between those things you need ~50 times more area, or about half the UK! Those are just the facts, not saying we shouldn't do it. Personally I think we still should, just it will in fact need a country-sized bit of the Sahara.
Let me show you that's correct:
The power density you are quoting:
409GW in 2635km^2 = 155W/m^2
That might be the _capacity_ of that much solar farm (peak power during the daytime on a sunny day) but not the average generation.
Here's an example for a solar farm in california:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topaz_Solar_Farm
270 MWhr/acre/year = 8W/m^2
(you can google "270 MWhr/acre/year in W/m^2" to confirm)
No mention of THORIUM reactors built to scale. Low internal pressure and the size of a van produces enough for 30-50k people.
We should revisit this with the latest numbers in each of the tech
Why would you adults bring FACTS to the global warming debate? HOW DARE YOU!!!!
This wasn't addressed in the lecture but you cannot simply move electricity from one country to another. We could cover 100% of Australia with solar panels but would have no way of distributing it to any other part of the world. The maximum effective range of a power plant is something like a few hundred (maybe thousand?) miles before the voltage drops too much.
+weirdyoda04 High Voltage Direct Current (HVDC) solves it. Already in use.
HVDC doesnt "solve" it , it just a technique with its own set of issues.
Wasnt the whole point of solar to pretend we could do away with the distrubution network. Isnt that the renewable fantasy?
You can move synthetic fuel from one country to another, a tanker carrying ammonia would represent a lot of power.
@@yarpos Kind of. Solar does away with the distribution network in as much as the fuel for it is free and falls from the sky. But you still need to be near a power grid if you'd like your free fuel to actually do anything.
HVDC would also require running huge amounts of new infrastructure. It may pay for itself in new installations where there is no existing AC power, but I doubt you'll find many power utilities willing to foot the bill to rip out working AC equipment on both ends of a line, to switch to HVDC.
You could use high powered lasers and highly polished reflector satellites to get power from one part of the globe to another, but due to the transformation from electrical power to radiation, and two trips through the atmosphere, and then the transformation of thermal power back to electrical power, you lose a huge chunk of your energy. Nuclear is really the only viable solution which doesn't require re-imagining the way energy infrastructure works or using authoritarian means to force lifestyle changes on people.
2021 and the grown up conversations still aren’t happening, everybody thinks they’re going to buy a Tesla and electricity is going to be super cheap and nothing is a problem
Why is hydro never included as a renewable?
He includes it in his book. The short answer is it doesn't make much difference.
www.withouthotair.com
Bill Kong or nuclear
Well going by classical definitions nuclear isn't renewable. You can in principle use it up. To be fair, renewable is often used as a metonym for carbon neutral and nuclear is certainly carbon neutral. I love nuclear. Especially fast neutron reactors.
@@appa609
Hi Bill,
Nuclear is more renewable than several other sources that are called renewable. Hydro electric dams will silt up in 200 years and turn into dangerous liabilities which are expensive to remove. Geothermal is considered renewable, but it is based on nuclear decay in the ground, (so if it is renewable, nukes are). Solar power panels have to be replaced every 50 years.
Where as uranium oxide in ocean water is constantly replaced from ocean floor spreading. If we exhausted the land based uranium mines (pretty darn unlikely in the next few generations), and we chose not to recover the 99.5% of the unused uranium 235 in 'spent fuel' (several modern reactors are designed to burn this waste), and we chose to not go to a Thorium economy (400 times more common than U235), then we could power the world until plate tectonics stops, with uranium from sea water.
I'm not concerned about running out of nuclear power anytime in the next 500 million years.
Warm regards, Rick.
Rick Smith this is true but that recovery is not economically viable. If we apply the same criteria natural gas might be considered a renewable resource since we can in principle sabatier
Ancients had mineral oil spilling from tar pits, but it was olive oil they held sacred, as it was hard won from the earth.
Mineral oil also weren't edible, nor did they had a need for its consumption.
People need to realise land used to produce renewables generally can't be used to grow food. Not sure which you consider more important?
Co2 emissions are nothing to do with global warming,so what is the problem?
'We need to stop shouting and start talking.' - And start thinking!
But if I yell loudest and everyone else goes somewhere else to talk, I win, right? (Sadly, that's a culture among the usual suspects)
Every 50 years or so the renewable infrastructure will need need to be renewed. This takes energy and has not been factored in.
Elon Musk - master plan
What would be the point indeed, and of course I mean this from a purely economic view point. I mean real game changer is among us with a technological revolution occurring right now involving orbital space launch vehicles and steep reduction per launch costings and per tonne of equipment costs to send into orbit those necessary assets to start utilizing that space just above our heads where the sun always shining. Plus all the necessary technology actually already exists to make all this work... Voltaic energy converted to microwaves.
Brain child Elon Musk - master plan
.....voltaic cells built by Solar-City - Elon Musk
.....delivered by Space-X - Elon Musk
..... Energy created used to fueling his massive of electrical Cars, Trucks, etc. - Elon Musk
Back by the DOD ‘Department of Defence ‘
NOTE: solar city - sim city; where this technology is featured …. And obviously inspired Elon Musk no doubt
Scotland got 70% of it’s electricity from wind in 2018, up from 27% in 2009. McKay’s numbers don’t reflect the realities of the renewables as technologies improve and costs drop. Renewables with grid tied storage and natural gas combined cycle turbines for backup are currently the cheapest and lowest carbon foot print method of producing electricity. Gas turbines have half the carbon footprint of coal per KWH.
Well that's good for scotland, but:
1) Scotland is very sparsely populated and with a relatively large wind resource
2) Electricity is only 15% of energy use. So 70% of electricity is around 10% of energy. So scotland is still 90% fossil fuel.
Contrary to what you claim, MacKay's numbers are still correct. Check the W/m^2.
Yes, coal is only 2x worse than natural gas.
And natural gas is only 40x worse than wind or nuclear.
Of course, wind backed by gas doesn't quite make that 11g anymore.
wind ~11g CO2/kWh
nuclear ~12g CO2/kWh
solar ~48g CO2/kWh
gas-combined ~490
g CO2/kWh
coal ~820g CO2/kWh
www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ipcc_wg3_ar5_annex-iii.pdf
pp 1335, Table A.III.2 | Emissions of selected electricity supply technologies (gCO 2 eq / kWh)
A problem... My house was built in 1910...
I have no cavity wall, external wall insulation is fugly and will certainly ruin the Victorian charm of my home and its not cheap.
I have looked into roof solar. The smallest part of my roof gets 80% of the sun, the large part only gets late afternoon sun at an oblique angle.
The building inspector says I need more insulation to bring it upto current standards, but that will make the roof space unusable for storage, the roof will need strengthening to take the additional weight of the panels so theres £6000 - £7000 to find.
Plus I may need to be robbed by and electrician to bring the electrics into the circuit breaker age rather than ceramic fuse holders and fuse wire.
I dont have a great job, we live very much on the breadline and all this stuff requires a huge amount of money that we simply dont have.
Invest in fleece bathrobes, I bought one for every family member and now set my thermostat on 62 degrees (Fahrenheit) degrees all winter! Everyone got used to the cooler temperatures. My natural gas bill for the whole year was about $600.00 give or take. We have a forced hot air furnace fueled by natural gas. Natural gas is fairly cheap right now. My house is roughly 1900 square feet which is average sized for an American house. I thought about getting solar panels but decided against it. They are too costly right now, around $20,000 or more. It would take forever to recoup the price of them. We had our roof re-shingled about 2 years ago and that cost about $10,000.00 and I think we spent enough on the roof already.
www.amazon.co.uk/Plain-Supersoft-Fleece-Dressing-Medium/dp/B01GS9QZEG/ref=sr_1_13?ie=UTF8&qid=1552469272&sr=8-13&keywords=fleece+bathrobe+men
Reality check!!!!
Your electrical is the biggest issue: its a life safety thing to replace the old circuits and wires where they appear to be frayed or otherwise seriously obsolete. I live in a city where houses still regularly have knob and tube, ceramic wire-fittings- my recommendation is to replace the wiring as you go, one project at a time. If you don't have the funds to update your electrical systems for life safety, then considering solar should be the LAST thing on your mind. Wall insulation is nice to have, but, again, I live in a city where most buildings have hollow cavity walls. Its OK. The hollow itself is an insulation. The codes will always be more and more stringent. If you go broke to 'meet code' this year, then five years from now I guarantee it wont meet code anyway. As an Architect in the States, Permitting authorities/ building officials usually only care about making old buildings meet codes when there is substantial repair work being done and/or the repair (say, upgrading your insulation), is incidental to the work, meaning that If you're opening up the wall anyway, they might require you to add insulation to *that wall*. If energy savings are your aim, either to save your wallet or 'save the planet' (I view the alarmist case with enormous skepticism), then you're best off rocking back your HVAC usage, and wear cloths to suit the season. IE: Wear a sweater inside if its cold, so your thermostat doesn't need to be so warm, etc etc. Solar Power is a red herring for you: In your latitude, you don't get proper sunlight to make it efficient at your scale anyway. They'll take your money and you'll still have your bills. Just IMO. Good luck.
"Renewable" is just a term to talk about zero carbon energy while excluding (the best choice) nuclear.
@kcotte59 Economics says NO to nuclear
@@shandcunt9455 Incorrect. Nuclear actually requires a lot less materials, the only reason it's so expensive is because the government isn't handing out hundred of billions of public funds to build them. If the government shifted that subsidy to the nuclear power industry, it would lead to safer, cleaner, and more efficient power.
@kcotte59 Renewable refers to the "fuel" that creates the energy, not the machine that turns the fuel into energy.
Carbon fossil fuels like oil and coal that those "carbon fueled generators" run on are a finite supply, they're being used up faster than they can be naturally replenished so eventually they will run out. Light from the sun that powers solar panels won't run out no matter how much of it we use.
Besides, everything requires maintenance. You might see 50 year old coal plants, but they've all continuously had their parts serviced and replaced
@@pickclawraider4206 Economics says NO to Nuclear - Hinkley Point C is government funded - You're a liar
“We could reduce population, I’m not sure how we could do that”
Thanos: Hold my beer
Malthusian claptrap when will "smart" people actually pay attention to history when it comes to resources and population size? every time humans solve the problem and how it is done is by having more people to think about solutions, not by self neutering and mass murder.
Elon Musk - master plan
What would be the point indeed, and of course I mean this from a purely economic view point. I mean real game changer is among us with a technological revolution occurring right now involving orbital space launch vehicles and steep reduction per launch costings and per tonne of equipment costs to send into orbit those necessary assets to start utilizing that space just above our heads where the sun always shining. Plus all the necessary technology actually already exists to make all this work... Voltaic energy converted to microwaves.
Brain child Elon Musk - master plan
.....voltaic cells built by Solar-City - Elon Musk
.....delivered by Space-X - Elon Musk
..... Energy created used to fueling his massive of electrical Cars, Trucks, etc. - Elon Musk
Back by the DOD ‘Department of Defence ‘
NOTE: solar city - sim city; where this technology is featured …. And obviously inspired Elon Musk no doubt
West was reducing but now we’ve invited millions in which will greatly expand foot print. Makes no sense but whatever
All the people who want to reduce population should kill themselves. All problems solved....
@phuc ewe Are you over 120? If so then we need to make that number higher than whatever you're at since leaving a comment like this is pretty low IQ lol
#LTR Liquid Thorium Reactors.
Firewood is a great answer that most people don't seem to understand.
My land grows trees much faster than I can burn them. People obviously are not planting enough trees.
Donald J - "People" would not refer to my land.
What have you done to combat the issue?
If two identical trees fell in the woods and one was left to emit carbon over time and the other was turned into energy, the treehuggers are up in arms about the one displacing fossil fuels, because they see smoke! They are crazy.
It's obviously way over your head as well. That's fine, I'm not surprised...
Wow, great explanation of what the reality with renewables is. I am going with solar roofs, electric cars, and energy efficiency and CNG or Nuclear for the rest. Great video.
He did an error with nuclear.
The exclusion zone around a nuclear power plant is a radius of 1.6km or 8km² and nuclear power plants normally have a run time of 80%.
So nuclear isn't producing 1000W /m² but closer to 100W/m².
@@TBFSJjunior Yes, not including that exclusion zone is a significant error. Similarly, (but in reverse) you can find parts of South Western Ontario, in Canada with scores of very large wind turbines on land, yet from Google Maps satellite pictures you can barely see them. When you go there, the reason is obvious: the corn, canola, and cows do not care. The *land use* costs of wind turbines (here) amount to a short dirt road from the farmer's driveway and the very tiny footprint of the pylon foundation. We are not about to cut down forests or take cropland out of production for energy. I'd also give some credit for putting new nuclear facilities inside the buffer zone of existing nuclear plants, which again we have right here in key places. For that matter, some of the retired coal plants have pretty big buffer areas too, and we're already not using that land -- let's make it count for something with storage, wind, or Small Modular Nuclear.
Bill Kong. By the same principle neither are wind turbines or solar. Expensive and the leftovers are not biodegradable. Solar panels are very toxic
this guy knows his onions..hope there are more like him
All of the debate on this is fine and dandy, but everyone seems to be missing an important point. His calculations are for an energy usage that is 36 percent LESS than the current usage in the video, and allows for NO increases in demand. In addition, for someone who is supposedly so involved in the math he left a big part out. All he talks about is reducing personal usage w/o talking about what percentage of the Kwh/person is for business, government, and industry. Something that has a smaller percentage that it can be reduced by and cannot be controlled by the individual adjusting a thermostat.
Funny how people, in their effort to seem "reasonable" about renewables always tend to present the facts and math in a manner slanted to their agenda, not to the realities involved. This "reality check" needs a reality check of it's own.
People like us, with the experience of reality and commercial consequence, are a nuisance to those that squander their whole existence in self-praising academia.
I completely agree with you. Perhaps energy demands will decline from innovative efficiency... But until we can find evidentiary models that give us this reasonable expectation, I think the assumption of similar usage per population growth is the fairest take.
Thanks, good arithmetic. Needs wider understanding. And dont forget, covering 20% of the country with any option will introduce massive transmission losses. Roll on ITER.
I'd like to see some figures about the insect and bird and bat deaths from Wind turbines. As if insecticide hasn't killed enough insects to affect bird numbers, Turbines kill them both.
Very small compared to cars, cats and windows
www.withouthotair.com/c10/page_64.shtml
Options for reducing the heat differential: warm the climate.
Thank you David
It's beyond the scope of this talk, but a better focus on reducing our energy needs will help. Planning our cities so that everyone can live closer to work and shopping is a key point here; it seems that our civic planners have a fetish for clustering everything so that everyone has to live twenty miles from work. Insulating our houses better will help reduce our heating requirements, too.
Thanks be to God for you and Science doing the heavy lifting for me when I tried to explain to a recently "WOKE" Social Justice Warrior of 50 years old living in a 3 story modified log cabin with external insulation of stucco from the last 50 years. Who has 2 people in it and one of them drives much more than the other, that one drives an econobox. My friend drives a Porsche Cayman and thinks that just caring about climate change is everything! They're of the opinion that "Clean Coal" is OK due to scrubber's. I tried to bring up the jetstream and how much coal China, Australia and many other places burn that offset what we do in the local area. May you have the greatest desire of your heart that your video can explain and I don't have to!
Shawn Jenkins hit the gym?
Renewable uses to much land mass and endanger wildlife and people. Also cost to much and only supply so much. And it produces less energies in colder countries that don't get as much sun/wind during the cold season so U still have to use fuels or batteries as back up.
Nuclear power or Geo Thermal are the cheapest and consistent.
if we have to make physical efforts to get everywhere (bicycle, walking or whatever) we will discover that we don't really need to go to 80% of the palaces we visit. The same for heating or lighting our homes we will recognize that we don't need such big homes either.
*places
If we're going to advocate only doing what is needed then that would also include working close to where you live, eating local food as well as eating and drinking the bare minimum to stay alive, no television or internet and so on.
Not going to happen.. people don't understand how energy is produced, delivered and consumed.
He's forget the most important factor of the solar/wind - the unreliability, and the storage problem. So that's why you just need fossil power to work this systems on grid - the whole system is more wastefull than before. Nuclear is the only working solution even for saving the enviroment. Most safe, most enviroment friendly, most energy dense.
Nuclear is great. But we may need to consider the fact that nuclear energy system can not be used in terrorist prone zone for security reasons. Hence, location of nuclear power plant depends on the country..
@@therealist9853 Than it's a terrorist problem....btw Thorium powerplants are still in development -that type cant use for wrong purpose.
@@rigorm42 Awesome, Thorium final development would be great. Perhaps policies to ensure security challenged zone may have to use the Thorium technology while the rest of the safe zone have options to choose from...
Great talk but it seems that we are almost afraid to even talk seriously about the dreaded lifestyle change required by wasteful countries. He touched on it a few times as a mention, but it is the elephant in this particular room. Everyone seems to equate lifestyle change with a drop in living standards. that is a fallacy. We need to do all the simple things he talked about with energy efficiency at the individual level. but those things are not negative lifestyle changes unless you see "paying attention and being responsible as a negative - but then you are probably teaching your kids to be irresponsible too and we can see where that leads. However, it is not just responsibility at the personal level we need. We need to be responsible about who we elect, what we buy and from who and what we sue as a bar to elevate people in the social sphere.....Gaining status through accumulating money? or accumulating social status through generosity and good will, etc. That is what will really change your lifestyle and I can guarantee it will not be seen as negative by anyone...including you.
you need to do a ted talk my friend.
Thanks for video. David JC MacKay's book, " Sustainable energy without the hot air " is can be read for free from his website withouthotair. Really interesting.
Has anyone considered what they are going to do with the solar panels when they lose their efficiency in 15 to 25 years? Many millions worldwide existing and many more being manufactured and installed. The known fact is in the landfill and attempts to recycle have a leaching effect of Cadmium, lead etc.into the atmosphere or underground water supply. When the metal fatigue in the blades and towers render the wind generators inoperable where is all the waste have to be placed safely? A present and a future problem that I have not yet heard a solution.
Exactly the toxic materials will always be toxic and solar panels aren't really recycled very well. For all the bragging that solar propents say about the panels being cheap that means there's less of an incentive to recycle them and instead just throw them away and buy new ones which is what happens in real life.
_Has anyone considered what they are going to do with the solar panels when they lose their efficiency in 15 to 25 years?_
The answer is yes, they have. The first solar recycling plants are just coming in and they have projections of the expected waste streams.
uk.reuters.com/article/uk-solar-recycling/europes-first-solar-panel-recycling-plant-opens-in-france-idUKKBN1JL297
Solar panels don't fail at 20 years. They just become weaker. You could just add a few panels and be back to full capacity. You could sell them as used panels for use in another location. So, the lugubrious malaise is misplaced.
789mark789 One 'thumbs up' for your comment and another one for 'iugubrious malaise'
has anyone ever considered there might not even be enough minerals to make enough renewables and increasing amounts of energy is being used to find and extract energy.
Phenomenal eye opener! sad to read below Sir David MacKay is no longer around to contribute; a great loss indeed.
Using plants as renewable energy sources is basically depleting fertile soil, which will eventually lead to hunger.
Agreed, but concentrated solar seems pretty small in comparison.
Finally I've listened to Age of Reason representative.
Thx for posting
28 years ago I showed up at a talk where I was the guest speaker along with 6 Phd's. On my transparencies I showed a home proximate 50% reductions in power consumption done by exercising personal responsibility. He did the same and then did not note the offsets then possible in the supply side. We have a choice actually choices. To be responsible and clean up our mess, including decarbonizing.
He only had 20 minutes, there was plenty he couldn't cover!
His energy plans for the UK involved substantial reductions in consumption:
www.withouthotair.com/c27/page_203.shtml
The problem is that renewables and taking action at all has popularity issues.
It's not about what's popular. It's about what's right.
And in his description of calculations I didn't hear anything about line loss which makes those gigantic farms of wind and sun need to be even bigger because moving the electricity from point A to point b is not free.
Then you have the problem that type use power is erratic I'm easily disrupted in very hard to ramp up for instance a hurricane would cause all solar to be greatly reduced all wind to come to zero production or very near it then there's of course the damage to the system, Coal, natural gas ,nuclear power plants are all fairly Stout and are fairly resistannt to damage. solar panels and windmills *are*not.
Biofuels have all the attendant problems of any other crop watch the commodities market 4 wheat or oranges what's the weather going to do there.
There's also that renewables basically aren't viable on their own without an energy storage solution. Which would probably double the estimated territory required to make them work, while adding more energy loss.
@@isn0t42 so your happy to run power station 24/7 generating clouds? time to move into the future....This man thinks the world will stay as it is.It will not it will get more efficient doing more with less and rightly so....
Indonesia and peat being replaced with palm trees...
@@mottthehoople693 We have to be practical in the meantime. We need power while we build your Utopian future. Accusing people of being happy with the status quo for pointing out real problems with proposed ideas never moved the world anywhere. You'd contribute more by finding real solutions.
@@mottthehoople693 Yeah, and you've got a population growing at what? a billion a year? all needing more and more power. Try to be realistic.
As an student of electrical engineer, there is a fundamental problem with this. The solar, wind or wave power plants are a regulators not a consistent source of energy. WHY? because for a main source you need a constant input, lets say 100 GW/h and they can't change that must always be 100 GW/h but from all renewable you have drastic changes so they will be used like Dams, yes dams mostly are used for regulating the input in the system not as a main source.
The storage problem is a problem in addition to this analysis, not instead of.
If you don't make enough average power to begin with, then whether you can store it so you have it right time is a moot point.
If you are comfortable with logic terms, then he is talking about a necessary but not sufficient condition- power density.
Brilliant. The authors of “The Green New Deal” need to understand these numbers.
Phew!! It's a good thing GW isn't real.
Well, excellent Ted-talk back in 2013 already! So rich in knowledge, compact and understanding. Look forward to an update of the talk, to see what has changed since 2013. Well done and thanks!
Theres more than enuf energy availabke from the Sun. Keep working on renewables and use Nuclear until renewable tech handles the load.
Nuclear and conservation it is then.... Yet we already knew that.
Or correctly aligned innovation incentives, that make it more economical to invent, say, a more efficient type of battery. The market wont do it on its own, we need a politician with balls to campaign on pushing incentives away from extracting natural gas and toward alternative energy sources.
@@Thisisahandle701 No we don't.. Subsidy is a corrupting force. If green alternatives were viable they would need no helping hand. We have plenty of carbon based fuel to sustain us for 100's of years to come especially if we learn how to conserve better. Let green alternatives stay in the laboratory till they have gained economic and productive efficiency such they can compete on a level playing field else it is counter productive and not even green. The rewards for greater energy density batteries are massive and does not need politics to play a part as capitalism will take care of it..
@@PaulAnthonyDuttonUk yeah I think that your "Chicago school of economics' " over-weighting of the free market belongs in the 1980s. Anyone who thinks, in 2019, that 100% markets lead to desirable outcomes is living in a fantasy land, I think it is as simple as that.
@@PaulAnthonyDuttonUk Subsidies CAN indeed be a corrupting force which is why it is so galling that much of the fossil fuel industry have enjoyed so much government subsidy throughout history. The current costs of fossil fuels do not reflect its current price, the likes of Exton-mobile are able to charge such a low price because much of the cost is borne by the environment and by wider society, and not borne by the companies in question.That these companies can get away with this, is testament to the importance of regulation. This is a classic negative externality. The 'tradegy of the commons' is the entry level economic principle that should be remembered any time you feel like tooting on the free-market flute.
@@Thisisahandle701Mate.... One word, Venezuela! The Chicago school of economics was more about politics and influence. Don't meddle in the free market other than to stop monopoly, cartels and price fixing and you will be served well.
It's a shame that most people don't have the intelligence of this gentleman. If we did, all of the world's problems will be solved.
RIP Sir David MacKay
Ideology dressed up as pseudo science is a lethal weapon. He has much to answer for.
@@fatherjack2300 Are you a scientist?
@@fatherjack2300 His book was not pseudo-science. It was plain arithmetic.
@@fatherjack2300 are you a certified scientist? answer the question
Yes, he died of cancer just short of his 49th birthday.
See the Kirk Sorenson videos about Thorium for energy abundance and wealth.
Even in Australia, the ideal place suggested solar/wind it causes a major problem. This is because Solar and Wind are not reliable energy sources by themselves they need some form of storage or they rely on other reliable energy plants like Natural gas to cope with massive fluctuations.
Didn't he pretty much say nuclear power is the solution about 1/2 way into the video?
Nuclear certainly comes out of the analysis well.
Something to remember though is electricity is currently around 10-20% of energy use for most countries. The rest is direct use of fossil fuels in cars, home heating, etc. So if we want nuclear to do the job we need to support electric cars and that kind of thing also.
@@redo348 Also, electric planes and ships. Private cars use a lot, but they could potentially be sacrificed in favor of trains and self-driving communal electric cars. The transport of goods on the other and, nobody would be willing to make that sacrifice because that would mean that we'd be stuck only with what can be sourced locally, so factories can't make complicated things like cell phones anymore that requires raw materials from around the globe, let alone get them from the factories to the consumers. So we'll need to replace the entire transportation fleet worldwide with electric versions. Norway recently made the first electric cargo ship, and NASA has promised us electric planes, but these seem more like novelty publicity stunts rather than an actual effort to replace anything. And we don't have much time.
@@daniel4647
Frankly I think rather than trying to micromanage all of this what we need is a carbon tax, set at the environmental cost of polluting. We can drop income tax so that no-one actually pays more.
Then the market will do its thing and figure out how to make it work (probably planes will end up much more expensive than fast trains for example).
@@redo348 Yes, hinkley point C isn't exactly an economic slam dunk and despite what everyone thinks, the UK isn't running out of space - just look at a supermarket - you put solar on the roof and then over the parking lot.....does anyone really give a toss that this area is now covered in solar? wouldn't that be an incredibly efficient use of that space? wind turbines work better out at sea - again, does anyone give a toss that this area is now covered in wind turbines? his approach is dubious at best
He said nukes are very good in terms of area, but have "other problems". Some people get downright testy about radioactive contamination.
No where is discussed maintenance of these systems. Solar and Windmills are visual air pollution and require maintenance. Isn’t it better to have a power plant tucked away out of sight, where all maintenance is at a single location? Solar panels will undoubtedly become more efficient due to the the semiconductor revolution. Isn’t it possible that nuclear systems will evolve also? Like in Star Trek.
Australia would have a much lower consumption per person if they built their homes to polar countries standards, I'm a Canadian who has lived in Brisbane and Melbourne and 99% of homes have single pane windows with little or no insulation and weather stripping, the most common argument is "but it doesn't get that cold", many places get down close to 0c during the night in the winter, but almost everywhere in the country has summers that are in the high 30's. If they had better building standards they could have the air conditioning and heat on with near zero loss to the outside so it wouldn't have to be on all day. A coworker in Melbourne kept his house at 18c during the 3 cold winter months with outside temps averaging 10c and his gas bill was over $400 a month (normal summer bill was about $50) compared to Canada where we keep our house at 22c with outside temps averaging -20c and heating costs might get up to $150 a month.
It's only a problem if the government tries to do it. Let the free market decide.
As long as the obsession of the day is pursuing exponential growth, there is no solution, just acceptance that human civilisation is a temporary blip on the continuum.
tHE FREE MARKET CARES NOTHING FOR THE FUTURE OF OUR CIVILSATION
It absolutely does. As each better solution arrives the obsolete solutions fall away. Gov't regulation stifles innovation that permits those obsolete technologies to hang on waaaaay longer than they would in a truly free market.
Ah. An adherent of the myth of the invisible hand guiding us to mechanistic nirvana. There is no such thing as a "truly free market". That road leads to one entity owning everything and making the rules to suit itself!
Energysaving is the way into poverty. The universe is full of energy. There’s enough energy. We just need to use it. Go nuclear. Go for Thorium and molten salt reactor technology! Forget about low density (renewable) power.
@me no You're probably right.
@@hiroobidoo no he's not and he's crazy for saying that
@me no you're crazy for saying that
@@ni.ko3869 that's probably why his comment was removed ;)
Why does everyone say it must be this way or that way. It would be great if we had a mix of renewables and Thorium / Fission. Why Not?
Great speech.
Be careful about somebody who starts an equation in imperial, and ends it in metric.
That's something people in the UK have to deal with on a regular basis, it seems. They used to use Imperial (in fact, they created it... that's why it's called Imperial). They recently (began the conversion in 1965) switched to Metric, so there are still some "remnants" of Imperial. I have seen people use "pounds" (weight, not money), "stones" (I still can't wrap my head around that one) and "kilograms" pretty much interchangeably, even in the same conversation. Personally, I wish we (the USA) would convert as well. We use decimal numbers, but none of our measurements are in decimal, and it's very confusing. In fact, at my previous job (a machine shop) we would use decimals of inches (down to the thousandth, aka .001 inch) when checking a part, and a lot of new employees had to try to convert it to fractions to understand what we were talking about. I think my favorite conversation was something along the lines of "This part is 1.123 inches" "So it's 1 1/8?" "No, 1 1/8 is 1.125" "So, what is 1.123 in fractions?" "1 123/1000" "What? Fractions don't go that high." "They go as high as you want them to, that's why we use decimals." "I'm not very good at converting fractions to decimals". "We don't use fractions."
Richard got a point. I've checked his data. It checks out. Sometimes he misses the data I find by 2 times, but mostly less (I calculated the plantation to be 7km wide). If the calculation checks out then there is no point in being suspicious about that person. And it's true that in the UK they mixes imperial and metric together, like they would calculate milage using miles per hour, while filling their tanks with liters. It's just weird that way.
tl;dr --- just go nuclear and also do all the common sense stuff like cycle and don't waste energy which everyone has known about for decades. Enough of the green tech hype.
Elon Musk - master plan
What would be the point indeed, and of course I mean this from a purely economic view point. I mean real game changer is among us with a technological revolution occurring right now involving orbital space launch vehicles and steep reduction per launch costings and per tonne of equipment costs to send into orbit those necessary assets to start utilizing that space just above our heads where the sun always shining. Plus all the necessary technology actually already exists to make all this work... Voltaic energy converted to microwaves.
Brain child Elon Musk - master plan
.....voltaic cells built by Solar-City - Elon Musk
.....delivered by Space-X - Elon Musk
..... Energy created used to fueling his massive of electrical Cars, Trucks, etc. - Elon Musk
Back by the DOD ‘Department of Defence ‘
NOTE: solar city - sim city; where this technology is featured …. And obviously inspired Elon Musk no doubt
@@shanereinholdt1526 I don't get your point here?
Nuclear is de-facto a fossil fuel as it's still a dug up resource that will end soon enough. Current consumption rates are projected to drain uranium in 200 years, divide that by 10 if you want to use nuclear for everything. Then comes the question: what you will do when it finishes?
@@HadzabadZa Well isn't that convenient? I feel those reserves will multiply magically as most of it isn't worth digging up at the moment. Just like any other reserve.
@@sirmoke9646 Maybe, but "multiply" (implying at least doubling, I don't count fractional in this case) definitely is a stretch. We might have orders of magnitudes more of resources deep in the crust, but we ain't getting that any time soon. Most of my generation can't afford their own house in their lifetime, despite the GDP steadily rising (really makes you think). Do you think they'll be able to afford super-expensive energy?
In November 2019, China had 121 gigawatts of coal power plants under construction. This is more than all the electricity needed for the UK. This is what they are adding. Now. All those windmills will make us feel like we are living in the blade runner movie or some other dystopian place. I am in Canada- I hope we never destroy our green spaces with Wind and solar like this.
Dwindling coal & oil exploitation in and around the UK doesn't mean that a global peak in production is in sight!
Let’s give up all our land to produce energy, yay!
Good talk, if a bit dated now. 5 years is a long time when it comes to technology these days. Maybe I missed it but the thing I didn't see is factoring in rates of improvement and lowering of costs. Most of these technologies become more effective, efficient and cheaper over time. Simultaneously, energy improvements are happening all over the place (TVs, computers, light bulbs etc.) saving us an incredible amount of energy needed. Another awesome talk is from the legendary Avery Lovins' "Disruptive Oil Futures" (search on UA-cam) A super solid must-watch talk if you're into this kind of stuff.