One of the most underrated teachers on you tube. Love listening to this man's teachings as he has a magical way of involving the listener to a point that one lecture is cemented to memory.
Hands down... THE BEST transfer of scientific information, tuned for non sicentists, on web. I would watch him fry eggs if we're to use it to explain thermodynamics.
People forget that it takes a lot of time to increase or decrease power output with most systems of energy. With coal i believe it is a couple hours, with gas several minutes. Nuclear doesn't turn up and down very easily at all. Wind and solar being somewhat random introduces a massive headache into the system. Hydro is great. We can more or less predict demand, and there are ways to burn oversupplies of power. The issue is when some portion of you baseline power demand is wind, and the wind stops. Without an immense battery or hydro dam nearby, it can cause brownouts/ blackouts. Actually a huge dealbreaker if you are trying to run large, complicated, and expensive machinery (which is where most of our wealth and health comes from). There are ways around this, like solar power based on molten salt, which acts as a huge thermal battery, allowing solar to provide baseline power supply. There are also caverns in germany where wind is stored with excess power, and then the pressure is released in times of demand. Sort of like the hydro damns which have secondary uphill reservoirs to store power in the form of elevated water. Still though, the reason the states is largely coal and gas has more to do with practicality than anything else. Coal is a good baseline, and gas is easy to scale up and down quickly. The US could more or less replace its coal infrastructure with nuclear without changing peoples habits or the grid. Funnily enough that would lower the radiation exposure of people as mining and burning rock releases the bits of radioactive material that are ubiquitous in the earth. Or, we could clean up existing coal infrastructure and sequester. I have read that about doubles the cost of electricity, but with how cheap coal is, that is still cheaper than most alternatives.
Nuclear is certainly more expensive in the short term but as the Prof illustrated far more economic on the 40 year timescale due to low cost of fuel. However is not popular with private concerns because of high investment creating uncertainty. The benefits of nuclear are compounded in its increasing application. Continually building reactors with a core group of skilled personnel slashes costs, complications and time, economies of scale as seen in France and recently China. Furthermore the more expansive your nuclear power the more robust your grid can become, allowing for fuel repossessing and breeding. This expands the fuel cycle and minimizes waste while centralizing storage and decommissioning. A renewed focus on nuclear would also massively advance research in the field. yadayada
@@sednabold859 Agreed. I can see why investors are scared of nuclear. One of my hats is as a developer, and I have found that in some jurisdictions we lose massive amounts of money because government is extremely pernicious and has a habit of inventing new costs and delays after the project has already been started. And that is just with houses and offices. I can only imagine the resistance met with any sort of industrial project, especially nuclear. Imagine 40 years of having your money out there, waiting for an idiot to get in office and render it all useless.
thisisn'tmyrealname Actually, hydroelectric is the only one that might be switched on and off in a matter of minutes. However, with safety protocols, this stretches into hours. Coal and gas plants use superheated steam and take several days to heat up to full tilt. Likewise, if shut down suddenly, it takes days for them to cool off. Nuclear also takes several days to get up and running, or to be switched off. What we really need is some sort of storage mechanism. There are a lot of ideas, but nothing large scale and reliable as yet.
@@hosmerhomeboy Nuclear runs at more that 90% capacity. Most of the time at >95%. That means if the nuclear plant have 1000MW nameplate capacity. It will give you 995MW all day. It's the core of industry calls base-load. A city may need a minimum of 2000mw every hour of the day. And during peak time they need 6000mw. The Nuclear plant will provide you one half of the minimum load you need, with no worries.
As someone who is a native Texan I’ve actually known this for a very long time as a personal factoid. I’ve talked here and there to people and told them about how if we had a catastrophic failure we would all probably lose power just like what happened in the most recent winter storm in 2021. It’s funny that you watch this video and you can almost predict him saying this exact same thing.
You may want to look into the affect deregulation has had on the power grid. In the northeast it has resulted in lower peak prices but conversely also higher off peak prices. This has lead to a reduction of pumped storage because it is locked into the price zone it is located in and is becoming less economically viable. It is true that cheap off peak price zones do exist but they are usually in transmission limited pockets of renewable energy sources that are competing against other renewables for the opportunity to run.
I don't get the sin wave thing. All power plants already have their phases synchonized by atomic clocks (i believe they actually use gps satellites), so saying the grids can't be synched makes no sense. Is it an information lag thing due to the speed of light?
Plants are actually synced initially by ensuring they connect when they are in phase, then it remains in sync due to electrical coupling. You can find videos on here of generating stations being initially synced to the grid (it’s pretty cool). To stay in sync, if a generator “wants” to run a little fast, that manifests as increased load on the unit (i.e. it is pushing more power into the grid) which tends to slow it down, and if the generator “wants” to run a little slow, that manifests as decreased load (pushing less power into the grid). If a generator is being so severely over- or under-driven that it would fall completely out of phase, breakers will disconnect it from the larger grid to prevent a potential catastrophic failure. The distance across the US is about 1/60 of a light-second, or one cycle. I *think* that is not a problem because of the fact that electricity does not typically have to travel that far between production and usage (i.e. everything is in close sync with its neighbors and power need not travel all the way across the country to be used). I would speculate that if there were one grid, and all the power plants were in NY and LA, that would be a problem: the power coming from each would be either in or out of phase depending upon where you were in between. (I am not an expert so please take this last paragraph with a grain of salt.)
Phasing isn't a big deal. Its having the east/west transmission system to handle the power flow. Phasing is simply a matter of syncing the different systems. This is done everytime a generator is placed online, and after separation occurs between large segments of a large grid.
@Joe Milosch I agree with HVDC being a great solution for transmitting large amounts of power great distance, for instance an east /west coast transmission line. I do not agree that it offers any benefit to syncing thousands of dispersed generation. There are thousands of generators synced now, adding more is no problem. It would be a major problem to try and connect thousands of generation sources to a HVDC line. Logistics being a major one. Additionally, HVDC offers no advantage to managing shifting loads, certainly no more than AC. Storage is the only solution for that.
As of 2020, hydro is 7.3%, wind is up to about 8.4%, solar at 2.3%, biomass at 1.4%, and geothermal is 0.5%, per the eia. So, as you might guess, wind has doubled and solar has more than tripled since 2015.
To conserve electricity, my state (Victoria) use to have all weekend off peak rate for residential, it encouraged people to hold off doing high electricity demand on weekdays in return for cheaper electricity on weekends. Many would hold off and do heaps of load of clothes washing, clothes drying and other energy consuming activities at home such as all electric hot water showers, freeing up the weekday supply for power hungry businesses. Now I can spend more on daily service charge on a 3 month bill than I can on actual electricity consumption which sucks big time. Australia, where we frigged up our electricity market in the name of privatization.
The Blenheim- Gilboa Power project in NY has an interesting way of using hydro power. Not sure how efficient, however it addresses the peak usage issue.
Evening out surge requires a power source, Not necessarily a “fuel source”. Including advanced battery and other modern storage technology, including liquid air.
If I'm not mistaken, solar has gone up about 7 times or possibly 10 times in size (it's now 2021). Thank goodness, I belive solar should be 10% with some kind of battery system.
The drop in coal continues, wind up to 7% and some reports have coal down to 24%. In Georgia, where I live, Georgia Power is looking to close 5 coal plants next year.
Doc you forgot to mention Elon Musk's concept of increasing storage such as new design batteries that would provide power at night and windless/solarless days....
2:40 "Solar is a tiny fraction of energy produced in large part because it's dark" What do you mean by that? The US is just 1 Country away from the equator. I've been to California in the Summer recently and it's crazy how intense the sun is. Granted, I'm no solar energy researcher, and you'd probably know more about it. But that's why I would like to know, what do you mean by it's dark?
Also he means it's dark, because on average... It's literally 100% dark half the time. And when it's not 100% dark, it's only barely bright... Infact you're only at optimal solar efficiency, for maybe 3-4 hours a day.... And thats only if it doesn't rain, or just clouds.....
TheDarkToes obviously The equator doesn’t go through Mexico and there are several other countries in between. But those several other countries have a combined surface area of 2 and 1/2 km2. If you’re going to work and you’re 10 meters from the office front door and someone texts you to ask you where you are, you say “I’m at the office.”
TheDarkToes idk, if it is true that solar is just sooo impotent, why do we see so many solar farms then? Obviously they are making it work somehow and being competitive with the other energy providers.
@@g07denslicer first off, I assure you that those countries are much bigger than a square mile... Considering the country that it goes through is Brazil and is quite huge... Also, solar itself is fairly okay, while it's sunny. Sure. Infact you can generate alot of power. However, you'll need to store power with the potential to run on DAYS if not a full weeks worth of power, to actually have a solor power plant... Those batteries alone will cost you an arm and a leg, generate alot of heat, take of alot of space, and need to be replaced and maintenanced very regularly as they will be drained and filled repeatedly, every day. Also solar panels have a life span, and need to be replaced after a short 15 to 25 years, meaning, your constant investment is likely to be high. As these prices are lowered and $/watt is reduced slowly over time due to better technologies, and more people investing (mass production being cheaper) this will help that... But actually as a whole... Solar is probably one of the most expensive and least reliable source available... Sadly. Sure it's possible, to make and power the world ONLY on solar... But as for now it's a little unpractical still. Maybe in another decade, as things continue to get better.
Great info (and presentation as always). Minor correction, US has 4 time zones (not 3) East, Central, Mtn & Pacific... But that does not diminish the great lectures.
Interesting point on overnight low demand period. Could easily be used to charge EV's, as was mentioned without need for a huge increase in capacity. Also, if you had enough electric cars, and vehicle to grid capability, you maybe able to smooth demand, or cover short power outages with combined capacity of EV's attached to the grid. Would likely need batteries that can survive more charge discharge cycles before this would be viable.
I agree, the potential to turn the entire country into a giant submarine battery with the e.v market rising to have it's turn in the spotlight would be a great way to utilize all the harmful battery's to better potential over their life to help reduce their toxic footprint when. At end of useful life.
I don't think I buy phasing as a reason we can't connect the grids. Bringing two sources into phase is done on a small scale every time you start any kind of grid-connected plant. If we varried one of these grids from exactly 60Hz to 60.0001 Hz, we'd see them meet up with each other within 3 hours. It would just take a well-synchronized elaborate monitoring system to track that phasing and adjust the timing of the smaller of the systems you are joining together. Far from a "can't" situation; just a non-trivial one.
you seriously underestimate the difficulty involved in this for little benefit without an existing massive investment in infrastructure. frankly you don't know what you're talking about.
Great videos! You are a fantastic lecturer. How about performing a theoretical scenario illustrating the amount of land, raw materials and carbon footprint to build a 100% solar/battery US grid? Then the resulting carbon reduction as well as return on investment. This would put everything into perspective.
Perspective: Eastern USA/Canada grid for pumped hydro storage requires The Great lake of Erie to be dumped down to sea level every day and a half to meet its energy demands..... Notice, there are no mountains worth talking about for pumped hydro storage in Eastern USA etc. Need upper/lower dams to make this work. Technically one could do it. Essentially every single valley in the entire Eastern USA would have to be dammed up and turned into pumped hydro storage when the wind does not blow and sun does not shine for a week at a time during a giant snow storm which covers most of the Eastern USA all at the same time.
@@w8stral There are several pump storage projects in the Eastern US, ie Bad Creek, Smith Mt. Fairfield. They are located near nukes and do a great job making the nukes run efficiently at constant load. With that said, pump storage and hydro in general are done. No one is going to build new ones given the environmental concerns and economics. Actually solar is so cheap it and battery storage are all the utilities in the US are looking at these days. If grid batteries can be made in mass, all rotating turbo machinery generation will be eliminated. Nothing can compete with solid state solar and battery storage. Even wind is no longer viable.
@@andyfeimsternfei8408 economically, solar is actually a pretty horrible option is his point. You saying it's cheap doesn't actually make it cheap, solar is the worst of any current option, economically, but has some of the highest potential in the future. Only time will tell, they need to make solar more efficient and cheaper
Base load is important but there are ways to store power other than using peaker plants. Electric cars apart from being loads on the grid could be used to balance the grid by using them as distributed storage. Consider a car with a 40 kWh battery. The average house in the US uses 914 kWh/month, so 30.46 kWh/day roughly. Thus even if the power grid went off completely at night you'd have enough power in a car to run a house easily if the power could flow either way. Is this the best storage solution? Perhaps not but a diversity of energy storage is possible to smooth out renewable sources as long as the generation cost is low enough. Transmission losses are important too, but DC transmission at high voltages is possible too and that doesn't have any phase problems to connect anywhere to anywhere, so a point to point backbone across the US is also possible. Renewable have problems but I don't think the ones here are the big ones.
I don't want taking power from my car battery reducing the battery lifespan and leaving the car with 10% or 20% less charge affecting the range I expect cat to have. Nor do I want to plug it in other than essentially to charge it overnight or top up.
Please see Prof. Tufte’s rules for proper, honest data representation. Read “The Visual Display of Quantitative Information”. This is the “Pravda school” of data presentation. You have the base set at 70, not zero. The low vs high values appear to be from 85 to 120, not 10 to 100.
Fossil fuels are certainly one option for responding to load variations, but why not discuss the option of energy storage? It certainly needs some development, but seems to be the only way to transition away from fossil fuels.... with the caveat that nuclear is an option, but has known issues that make it unpopular or uneconomical.
@Fornax Yup: Scotland has some of the foulest weather on earth not in Antarctica and also has decent valleys for pumped hydro storage should it choose to do so. It hasn't. Of course its stability comes from hydropower from Norway and Coal fired power plants throughout the UK wasting quite a bit of said wind power as said coal fired plants keep operating even while claiming to use said wind power. It is all about energy storage. It has been the problem since the beginning of time.
Do we have good energy storage today then? As from what i understand it what we got today is very expensive and not very environmentally friendly to make. I don't think we globally are even able to build enough batteries to meet the demands to power a huge country like the US... Tesla had to build like several Gigafactories that make most of the batteries in the world.. just to meet the demands for electric cars. Long term 100% solar sounds great. But it's a very long road to get there. In the meantime we should focus on more reasonable solutions. Solid state batteries could potentially revolutionize this if it gets fully developed.
There are other ways to store energy then batteries, those store electricity chemicaly. But you could use pumped storage power plants to store energy in a potential difference of hight, or use compulsators, those store energy by spinning up heavy masses. Ofc it would be a huge effort to build storage systems that can supply an entire country for some time, but i believe it would be easyier then to make fusion work, and would make 100% renewable possible. At least i cant see why not :)
Flywheel energy storage is probably a better term for what i mean by compulsator, but its basicaly the same :) there is a video about them on this channel too
@@hernerweisenberg7052 Interesting. But i do wonder how expensive that would be to build to cover all power needs? And i also recently read this article that raises a lot of concerns of what to do with all the solar panels when they reach end of life. As they don't seem to be very easy to recycle. www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2018/05/23/if-solar-panels-are-so-clean-why-do-they-produce-so-much-toxic-waste/#d67e6e7121cc In comparison the waste from nuclear plants can be safely stored. Not to mention in the future it can be recycled as fuel. Leaving even less waste.
Wind is most definitely not a wonderful energy source. It's intermittent, low energy density, resource heavy, maintenance heavy, causes environmental fragmentation and branching in the electric grid. On top of all that it requires large amountd of load balancing power to back it up which is typically either coal or gasfired powerplant. Because of that, the total cost of wind power is actually higher than nuclear. People often make the mistake on only looking at the direct costs, that is very misleading and lobbyists abuse the living daylight out of them with that. The only way to know the total costs is to perform a systems analysis which takes everything from raw materials to decommissioning into account. Germany is a good example of what happens with renewablemania. They have the first or second most expensive electricity among EU member states, 30 eurocents/KWh. Denmark is at the same level, both have invested heavily on wind power. German electric grid is so unstable that it has caused problems in neighbouring countries as well.
@Matthew Huszarik Sufficient battery technology has not been demonstrated, nuclear power plants have. Even if sufficient battery technology comes along, it won't solve many of the other problems inherent with wind or solar so it's unlikely to make wind or solar viable. There's no denying that large capacity nuclear power plants have serious problems, and that's why significant effort is being put into R&D of small modular reactors world wide, it remains to be seen what comes out of that. In any case fossil fuels will likely continue to provide the bulk of electricity production in United States. Coal will be reduced and gas will be increased.
First off, this is old data. Wind passed hydro. Look at 1.1 and 1.1.A www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/ Second, I don't like his can't do, no point in even trying attitude. First off, you absolutely can connect the grids together, just not with AC. You rectify it into DC, move the power, then through an inverter, which syncs to the local grid. Now I don't know the economics, but look for all the HVDC here. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-high-voltage_electricity_transmission_in_China clearly, it is being done. Hawaii is going 100% renewables. Here is one example. www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/hawaiian-electric-industries-announces-mind-blowing-solar-plus-storage-cont Battery storage is getting cheaper every year, and quickly, and it is being used to smooth renewables. The bigger your grid, the more renewables smooth themselves. The wind is always blowing somewhere. The professor did touch on demand management with charging electric cars. We need electric meters that can measure not just how much electricity we use, but when, so we can implement time of use pricing, so we can incentivize people to use more electricity when there is plenty, and it's cheap, and less when it's expensive. If we do that, somebody will think to build computers into high draw devices that can be configured with bluetooth, and download prices, and price forecasts from the internet with a wifi connection. www.microcenter.com/product/502843/raspberry-pi-zero-wh---with-pre-soldered-headers You can also overbuild wind and solar, if it's cheap enough. Flexible generation is the other lever. You can keep a few gas plants around that can burn biogas for 1 week a year if you get particularly bad weather. So why would you do all this horsing around? Cause wind and solar deals are being made at under 2 cents a kwh. www.forbes.com/sites/energyinnovation/2020/01/21/renewable-energy-prices-hit-record-lows-how-can-utilities-benefit-from-unstoppable-solar-and-wind/#22dca25e2c84 www.savannahnow.com/news/20181006/georgia-power-ratepayers-not-protected-in-new-plant-vogtle-owners-deal www.utilitydive.com/news/los-angeles-solicits-record-solar-storage-deal-at-199713-cents-kwh/558018/ www.lazard.com/perspective/lcoe2019
sorry, but just not true. "grid scale" batteries are not remotely grid scale, it's a marketing term at best, outright lying at worst. the battery capacity does not exist, and will not exist for a decade or more (probably much more). multiple system cost studies from different sources in different countries have confirmed, in most cases the most efficient clean grid is one with a large amount of advanced nuclear and some renewables where extensive hydro or geothermal aren't an option.
@@afgor1088 I am sure you are aware of the massive implementational of solar and wind capacity. Add to that an equal number BESS. Your "Grid" is changing and leaving nuclear in the dust. Below please find a clip from the Economist. Thanks for the response. By Vijay Vaitheeswaran, Global energy and climate innovation editor, The Economist Energy storage for the electrical grid is about to hit the big time. By the reckoning of the International Energy Agency (iea), a forecaster, grid-scale storage is now the fastest-growing of all the energy technologies. In 2025, some 80 gigawatts (gw) of new grid-scale energy storage will be added globally, an eight-fold increase from 2021.
Even if we had the storage technology (batteries and other mechanical means) to cover the dropouts in renewables, the amount of real estate needed for solar farms and wind turbines (also known as bird death traps) would destroy the environment, which we are supposed to be saving. Don't misunderstand me, solar has its place, and wind turbines do as well (hopefully not near any bird flight paths), but it is not a total solution as the instructor pointed out. I think the future is in Thorium Reactors. For some reason the NRC is very reluctant to allow full scale roll out of them out of fear and lobbyists for the existing nuclear industry that uses enriched Uranium who know how to do things and don't want any change. So instead, other countries such as India, China, and France will become leaders in a technology leaving us in the dust. I won't go into the details here, but you can Google it. Thorium reactors can withstand a complete outage of power (no pumps running) and automatically by design unload their fuel into holding tanks. Just my 2 cents.
Solar is actually more of a solution than wind technically speaking as roof area solves that problem. But, solar is a piss poor energy collector compared to wind and wind is piss poor compared to hydro and hydro is actually superior to everything actually.
@@AndrewBrowner No, I am not a bird-watcher. My views are based on watching and reading much about renewable energy. I may be wrong in my assumptions about the real estate issue - since that was based on other people's research, but I do agree solar and wind should be part of the solution. I do care about birds, and no one can dispute what the "bird blenders" do. As I pointed out earlier, I think nuclear power - specifically Thorium based would be the best solution. As far as "power supply on a country sized scale," I can certainly say I am not an expert, but I quite familiar with the 3 main power grids here in the US. Solar power and wind turbines require DC to AC converters (AKA "inverters") that will be quite large and the output of which needs to be 3 phase and synchronized and in phase with the power grid it will be feeding. It is much easier and less expensive to use steam driven turbines that can be speed and phase aligned to the power grid by adjusting the amount of steam driving them. Continued...
@@AndrewBrowner I am not sure how the solar farms that use the curved mirrors to beam reflected sunlight to the top of a tower to super-heat molten salts generate the power, but I assume a heat exchanger is used to boil water run a steam turbine. That would work well, and be relatively cheaper than using all these IBGT based inverters all over the place.
@Matthew Huszarik You are probably spot on about the money part of it all. Do you glow in the dark form all those years? LOL !! I agree that solar is great, but a few things need to happen to make me a "believer." Electric Jesus (AKA Elon Musk) needs to come up with a safer storage solution than lithium ion batteries. Several people have died already from when those batteries go wrong. There was a Tesla that was in an accident right in my city a few months back, and it took forever to put the fire out. www.sun-sentinel.com/local/broward/fort-lauderdale/fl-ne-tesla-lawsuit-barrett-riley-20191010-pkjlepjs2za5bhlziwthtjnhpu-story.html I have seen first hand what happens when you short circuit a battery, and there are plenty of UA-cam videos on that. What do you think about using some of the desert we have say, in New Mexico and Utah? Is there enough real estate there to generate the needed power? I am not joking, but seriously asking. Then we are back to storage, and I don't think batteries are the answer. They are the answer for individuals like yourself for you own solar solution, but I believe they are still too costly for widespread use on the grid, not to mention converting DC to AC on such a large scale.
Cats can take chicks of almost any bird if the parent looks away. Communication towers kills millions of birds, power lines kills 10s of millions (and risk of electrocution by power lines is greater for bigger birds that can reach two conductors), vehicle collisions kills 100s of millions, window collisions kills 100s of millions, cats kills billions and wind turbines kill a few 100 000. www.fws.gov/birds/bird-enthusiasts/threats-to-birds.php
I ride dirt bikes and ATVs out near a huge wildlife refuge on the snake River and it has a few hundred huge windmills I have yet to a single dead bird. I think windmills are silly due to only being viable with major tax payers help but killing birds is not a real reason. I see more dead road kill from the road leading up to them.
Maybe in the third world but modern power lines in the US are designed to not kill birds and the 10s of millions you claim is an egregious exaggeration.
One of the most underrated science channels on UA-cam
One of the most underrated teachers on you tube. Love listening to this man's teachings as he has a magical way of involving the listener to a point that one lecture is cemented to memory.
Hands down... THE BEST transfer of scientific information, tuned for non sicentists, on web. I would watch him fry eggs if we're to use it to explain thermodynamics.
People forget that it takes a lot of time to increase or decrease power output with most systems of energy. With coal i believe it is a couple hours, with gas several minutes. Nuclear doesn't turn up and down very easily at all. Wind and solar being somewhat random introduces a massive headache into the system. Hydro is great.
We can more or less predict demand, and there are ways to burn oversupplies of power. The issue is when some portion of you baseline power demand is wind, and the wind stops. Without an immense battery or hydro dam nearby, it can cause brownouts/ blackouts. Actually a huge dealbreaker if you are trying to run large, complicated, and expensive machinery (which is where most of our wealth and health comes from).
There are ways around this, like solar power based on molten salt, which acts as a huge thermal battery, allowing solar to provide baseline power supply. There are also caverns in germany where wind is stored with excess power, and then the pressure is released in times of demand. Sort of like the hydro damns which have secondary uphill reservoirs to store power in the form of elevated water.
Still though, the reason the states is largely coal and gas has more to do with practicality than anything else. Coal is a good baseline, and gas is easy to scale up and down quickly.
The US could more or less replace its coal infrastructure with nuclear without changing peoples habits or the grid. Funnily enough that would lower the radiation exposure of people as mining and burning rock releases the bits of radioactive material that are ubiquitous in the earth. Or, we could clean up existing coal infrastructure and sequester. I have read that about doubles the cost of electricity, but with how cheap coal is, that is still cheaper than most alternatives.
Nuclear is certainly more expensive in the short term but as the Prof illustrated far more economic on the 40 year timescale due to low cost of fuel. However is not popular with private concerns because of high investment creating uncertainty. The benefits of nuclear are compounded in its increasing application. Continually building reactors with a core group of skilled personnel slashes costs, complications and time, economies of scale as seen in France and recently China. Furthermore the more expansive your nuclear power the more robust your grid can become, allowing for fuel repossessing and breeding. This expands the fuel cycle and minimizes waste while centralizing storage and decommissioning. A renewed focus on nuclear would also massively advance research in the field. yadayada
@@sednabold859 Agreed. I can see why investors are scared of nuclear. One of my hats is as a developer, and I have found that in some jurisdictions we lose massive amounts of money because government is extremely pernicious and has a habit of inventing new costs and delays after the project has already been started. And that is just with houses and offices. I can only imagine the resistance met with any sort of industrial project, especially nuclear. Imagine 40 years of having your money out there, waiting for an idiot to get in office and render it all useless.
thisisn'tmyrealname
Actually, hydroelectric is the only one that might be switched on and off in a matter of minutes. However, with safety protocols, this stretches into hours.
Coal and gas plants use superheated steam and take several days to heat up to full tilt. Likewise, if shut down suddenly, it takes days for them to cool off. Nuclear also takes several days to get up and running, or to be switched off.
What we really need is some sort of storage mechanism. There are a lot of ideas, but nothing large scale and reliable as yet.
@@ChrisSmith-ux2xj I didn't mean to turn them on and off, i meant to adjust power output. I may be wrong in any case.
@@hosmerhomeboy Nuclear runs at more that 90% capacity. Most of the time at >95%. That means if the nuclear plant have 1000MW nameplate capacity. It will give you 995MW all day. It's the core of industry calls base-load. A city may need a minimum of 2000mw every hour of the day. And during peak time they need 6000mw. The Nuclear plant will provide you one half of the minimum load you need, with no worries.
As someone who is a native Texan I’ve actually known this for a very long time as a personal factoid. I’ve talked here and there to people and told them about how if we had a catastrophic failure we would all probably lose power just like what happened in the most recent winter storm in 2021. It’s funny that you watch this video and you can almost predict him saying this exact same thing.
Incredible Channel, Thank you from Palestine 🇵🇸
The professor does such a wonderful job explaining the topic of energy. I've watched a few and enjoyed them all. And I'm smarter now for it.
You are great at energy explanation. PLEASE GO INTO MORE DETAIL. And do longer videos...
What about storing renewables by pumping water, large batteries etc?
You may want to look into the affect deregulation has had on the power grid. In the northeast it has resulted in lower peak prices but conversely also higher off peak prices. This has lead to a reduction of pumped storage because it is locked into the price zone it is located in and is becoming less economically viable. It is true that cheap off peak price zones do exist but they are usually in transmission limited pockets of renewable energy sources that are competing against other renewables for the opportunity to run.
I don't get the sin wave thing. All power plants already have their phases synchonized by atomic clocks (i believe they actually use gps satellites), so saying the grids can't be synched makes no sense. Is it an information lag thing due to the speed of light?
Plants are actually synced initially by ensuring they connect when they are in phase, then it remains in sync due to electrical coupling. You can find videos on here of generating stations being initially synced to the grid (it’s pretty cool). To stay in sync, if a generator “wants” to run a little fast, that manifests as increased load on the unit (i.e. it is pushing more power into the grid) which tends to slow it down, and if the generator “wants” to run a little slow, that manifests as decreased load (pushing less power into the grid). If a generator is being so severely over- or under-driven that it would fall completely out of phase, breakers will disconnect it from the larger grid to prevent a potential catastrophic failure.
The distance across the US is about 1/60 of a light-second, or one cycle. I *think* that is not a problem because of the fact that electricity does not typically have to travel that far between production and usage (i.e. everything is in close sync with its neighbors and power need not travel all the way across the country to be used). I would speculate that if there were one grid, and all the power plants were in NY and LA, that would be a problem: the power coming from each would be either in or out of phase depending upon where you were in between. (I am not an expert so please take this last paragraph with a grain of salt.)
Have you seen the electric mountain in Wales which is used for the British national grid
The US has pumped storage too. There is some facility in Virginia with 24 GWh capacity.
Phase Sync? So use HVDC 500KV lines to connect them together, and sync the inverter side with whatever grid's phasing.
Phasing isn't a big deal. Its having the east/west transmission system to handle the power flow. Phasing is simply a matter of syncing the different systems. This is done everytime a generator is placed online, and after separation occurs between large segments of a large grid.
@Joe Milosch I agree with HVDC being a great solution for transmitting large amounts of power great distance, for instance an east /west coast transmission line.
I do not agree that it offers any benefit to syncing thousands of dispersed generation. There are thousands of generators synced now, adding more is no problem. It would be a major problem to try and connect thousands of generation sources to a HVDC line. Logistics being a major one.
Additionally, HVDC offers no advantage to managing shifting loads, certainly no more than AC. Storage is the only solution for that.
As of 2020, hydro is 7.3%, wind is up to about 8.4%, solar at 2.3%, biomass at 1.4%, and geothermal is 0.5%, per the eia. So, as you might guess, wind has doubled and solar has more than tripled since 2015.
To conserve electricity, my state (Victoria) use to have all weekend off peak rate for residential, it encouraged people to hold off doing high electricity demand on weekdays in return for cheaper electricity on weekends. Many would hold off and do heaps of load of clothes washing, clothes drying and other energy consuming activities at home such as all electric hot water showers, freeing up the weekday supply for power hungry businesses. Now I can spend more on daily service charge on a 3 month bill than I can on actual electricity consumption which sucks big time. Australia, where we frigged up our electricity market in the name of privatization.
The Blenheim- Gilboa Power project in NY has an interesting way of using hydro power. Not sure how efficient, however it addresses the peak usage issue.
Evening out surge requires a power source, Not necessarily a “fuel source”. Including advanced battery and other modern storage technology, including liquid air.
these are epic thanks professor
What about concentrated solar power wherein molten salt stores energy? Doesn't it have a lot of potential?
If I'm not mistaken, solar has gone up about 7 times or possibly 10 times in size (it's now 2021). Thank goodness, I belive solar should be 10% with some kind of battery system.
Spain, Greece and Italy for example have passed the 10% line of electricity from solar.
You’re incredible
Just for perspective, In 2018 Solar was 1.5% & wind was 6.5 % Coal went to 28% and natural gas went to 35% All others nearly unchanged.
The drop in coal continues, wind up to 7% and some reports have coal down to 24%. In Georgia, where I live, Georgia Power is looking to close 5 coal plants next year.
So the biggest increase is in Natural gas, a rise of 7% from 2014
Doc you forgot to mention Elon Musk's concept of increasing storage such as new design batteries that would provide power at night and windless/solarless days....
that's not a concept, that's just wishing for batteries to get better.
elon is not an engineer, at best he's a marketer, at worst a car salesman.
so why is Texas uniquely out-of-phase with the East? why isn't Oklahoma or Louisiana?
2:40 "Solar is a tiny fraction of energy produced in large part because it's dark"
What do you mean by that? The US is just 1 Country away from the equator. I've been to California in the Summer recently and it's crazy how intense the sun is. Granted, I'm no solar energy researcher, and you'd probably know more about it. But that's why I would like to know, what do you mean by it's dark?
The equator doesn't go through Mexico at all... Infact you're like 7 countries away. XD
Also he means it's dark, because on average... It's literally 100% dark half the time. And when it's not 100% dark, it's only barely bright... Infact you're only at optimal solar efficiency, for maybe 3-4 hours a day.... And thats only if it doesn't rain, or just clouds.....
TheDarkToes obviously The equator doesn’t go through Mexico and there are several other countries in between. But those several other countries have a combined surface area of 2 and 1/2 km2.
If you’re going to work and you’re 10 meters from the office front door and someone texts you to ask you where you are, you say “I’m at the office.”
TheDarkToes idk, if it is true that solar is just sooo impotent, why do we see so many solar farms then?
Obviously they are making it work somehow and being competitive with the other energy providers.
@@g07denslicer first off, I assure you that those countries are much bigger than a square mile... Considering the country that it goes through is Brazil and is quite huge... Also, solar itself is fairly okay, while it's sunny. Sure. Infact you can generate alot of power. However, you'll need to store power with the potential to run on DAYS if not a full weeks worth of power, to actually have a solor power plant... Those batteries alone will cost you an arm and a leg, generate alot of heat, take of alot of space, and need to be replaced and maintenanced very regularly as they will be drained and filled repeatedly, every day.
Also solar panels have a life span, and need to be replaced after a short 15 to 25 years, meaning, your constant investment is likely to be high.
As these prices are lowered and $/watt is reduced slowly over time due to better technologies, and more people investing (mass production being cheaper) this will help that... But actually as a whole... Solar is probably one of the most expensive and least reliable source available... Sadly.
Sure it's possible, to make and power the world ONLY on solar... But as for now it's a little unpractical still. Maybe in another decade, as things continue to get better.
Great info (and presentation as always). Minor correction, US has 4 time zones (not 3) East, Central, Mtn & Pacific... But that does not diminish the great lectures.
Uhh... Are you sure? You might want to double check that.
@@MatthewHolevinski continental US has 4.
@@nannite why are you telling me
New long distance HVDC power lines being built proposed.
Power is changed back to AC inverter at local substation s to regional grid.
For thé Wind unt Turban 👳 Powér.
If could invent liké a reservoir to storing the powér
Interesting point on overnight low demand period. Could easily be used to charge EV's, as was mentioned without need for a huge increase in capacity. Also, if you had enough electric cars, and vehicle to grid capability, you maybe able to smooth demand, or cover short power outages with combined capacity of EV's attached to the grid. Would likely need batteries that can survive more charge discharge cycles before this would be viable.
I agree, the potential to turn the entire country into a giant submarine battery with the e.v market rising to have it's turn in the spotlight would be a great way to utilize all the harmful battery's to better potential over their life to help reduce their toxic footprint when. At end of useful life.
I don't think I buy phasing as a reason we can't connect the grids. Bringing two sources into phase is done on a small scale every time you start any kind of grid-connected plant. If we varried one of these grids from exactly 60Hz to 60.0001 Hz, we'd see them meet up with each other within 3 hours. It would just take a well-synchronized elaborate monitoring system to track that phasing and adjust the timing of the smaller of the systems you are joining together. Far from a "can't" situation; just a non-trivial one.
you seriously underestimate the difficulty involved in this for little benefit without an existing massive investment in infrastructure. frankly you don't know what you're talking about.
Great videos! You are a fantastic lecturer. How about performing a theoretical scenario illustrating the amount of land, raw materials and carbon footprint to build a 100% solar/battery US grid? Then the resulting carbon reduction as well as return on investment. This would put everything into perspective.
Perspective: Eastern USA/Canada grid for pumped hydro storage requires The Great lake of Erie to be dumped down to sea level every day and a half to meet its energy demands..... Notice, there are no mountains worth talking about for pumped hydro storage in Eastern USA etc. Need upper/lower dams to make this work. Technically one could do it. Essentially every single valley in the entire Eastern USA would have to be dammed up and turned into pumped hydro storage when the wind does not blow and sun does not shine for a week at a time during a giant snow storm which covers most of the Eastern USA all at the same time.
@@w8stral There are several pump storage projects in the Eastern US, ie Bad Creek, Smith Mt. Fairfield. They are located near nukes and do a great job making the nukes run efficiently at constant load. With that said, pump storage and hydro in general are done. No one is going to build new ones given the environmental concerns and economics. Actually solar is so cheap it and battery storage are all the utilities in the US are looking at these days. If grid batteries can be made in mass, all rotating turbo machinery generation will be eliminated. Nothing can compete with solid state solar and battery storage. Even wind is no longer viable.
@@andyfeimsternfei8408 blah blah, inconsequential BS Blah. Try a thing called MATH/economics.
@@w8stral I have no idea what your point is.
@@andyfeimsternfei8408 economically, solar is actually a pretty horrible option is his point.
You saying it's cheap doesn't actually make it cheap, solar is the worst of any current option, economically, but has some of the highest potential in the future.
Only time will tell, they need to make solar more efficient and cheaper
Base load is important but there are ways to store power other than using peaker plants.
Electric cars apart from being loads on the grid could be used to balance the grid by using them as distributed storage. Consider a car with a 40 kWh battery.
The average house in the US uses 914 kWh/month, so 30.46 kWh/day roughly. Thus even if the power grid went off completely at night you'd have enough power in a car to run a house easily if the power could flow either way. Is this the best storage solution? Perhaps not but a diversity of energy storage is possible to smooth out renewable sources as long as the generation cost is low enough.
Transmission losses are important too, but DC transmission at high voltages is possible too and that doesn't have any phase problems to connect anywhere to anywhere, so a point to point backbone across the US is also possible. Renewable have problems but I don't think the ones here are the big ones.
I don't want taking power from my car battery reducing the battery lifespan and leaving the car with 10% or 20% less charge affecting the range I expect cat to have. Nor do I want to plug it in other than essentially to charge it overnight or top up.
Please see Prof. Tufte’s rules for proper, honest data representation. Read “The Visual Display of Quantitative Information”. This is the “Pravda school” of data presentation. You have the base set at 70, not zero. The low vs high values appear to be from 85 to 120, not 10 to 100.
Fossil fuels are certainly one option for responding to load variations, but why not discuss the option of energy storage? It certainly needs some development, but seems to be the only way to transition away from fossil fuels.... with the caveat that nuclear is an option, but has known issues that make it unpopular or uneconomical.
poor mountain timezone, always left out of discussions.
Who's watching this while Texas is having their energy woes?
lol yeah i am
I would urge you to look at Scotland’s electricity supply. You might change your mind on a couple of your statements...
You may wish to actually look at Scotland's electricity supply yourself first... and then evaluate your statement
@Fornax Yup: Scotland has some of the foulest weather on earth not in Antarctica and also has decent valleys for pumped hydro storage should it choose to do so. It hasn't. Of course its stability comes from hydropower from Norway and Coal fired power plants throughout the UK wasting quite a bit of said wind power as said coal fired plants keep operating even while claiming to use said wind power.
It is all about energy storage. It has been the problem since the beginning of time.
you can have 100% solar and wind if you got good energy storage systems
Do we have good energy storage today then? As from what i understand it what we got today is very expensive and not very environmentally friendly to make. I don't think we globally are even able to build enough batteries to meet the demands to power a huge country like the US...
Tesla had to build like several Gigafactories that make most of the batteries in the world.. just to meet the demands for electric cars.
Long term 100% solar sounds great. But it's a very long road to get there. In the meantime we should focus on more reasonable solutions.
Solid state batteries could potentially revolutionize this if it gets fully developed.
There are other ways to store energy then batteries, those store electricity chemicaly. But you could use pumped storage power plants to store energy in a potential difference of hight, or use compulsators, those store energy by spinning up heavy masses. Ofc it would be a huge effort to build storage systems that can supply an entire country for some time, but i believe it would be easyier then to make fusion work, and would make 100% renewable possible. At least i cant see why not :)
Flywheel energy storage is probably a better term for what i mean by compulsator, but its basicaly the same :)
there is a video about them on this channel too
@@hernerweisenberg7052 Interesting. But i do wonder how expensive that would be to build to cover all power needs?
And i also recently read this article that raises a lot of concerns of what to do with all the solar panels when they reach end of life. As they don't seem to be very easy to recycle. www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2018/05/23/if-solar-panels-are-so-clean-why-do-they-produce-so-much-toxic-waste/#d67e6e7121cc
In comparison the waste from nuclear plants can be safely stored. Not to mention in the future it can be recycled as fuel. Leaving even less waste.
I produce reliable wind 24/7
Wind is most definitely not a wonderful energy source. It's intermittent, low energy density, resource heavy, maintenance heavy, causes environmental fragmentation and branching in the electric grid. On top of all that it requires large amountd of load balancing power to back it up which is typically either coal or gasfired powerplant. Because of that, the total cost of wind power is actually higher than nuclear. People often make the mistake on only looking at the direct costs, that is very misleading and lobbyists abuse the living daylight out of them with that. The only way to know the total costs is to perform a systems analysis which takes everything from raw materials to decommissioning into account. Germany is a good example of what happens with renewablemania. They have the first or second most expensive electricity among EU member states, 30 eurocents/KWh. Denmark is at the same level, both have invested heavily on wind power. German electric grid is so unstable that it has caused problems in neighbouring countries as well.
@Matthew Huszarik Sufficient battery technology has not been demonstrated, nuclear power plants have. Even if sufficient battery technology comes along, it won't solve many of the other problems inherent with wind or solar so it's unlikely to make wind or solar viable. There's no denying that large capacity nuclear power plants have serious problems, and that's why significant effort is being put into R&D of small modular reactors world wide, it remains to be seen what comes out of that. In any case fossil fuels will likely continue to provide the bulk of electricity production in United States. Coal will be reduced and gas will be increased.
First off, this is old data. Wind passed hydro. Look at 1.1 and 1.1.A www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/
Second, I don't like his can't do, no point in even trying attitude.
First off, you absolutely can connect the grids together, just not with AC. You rectify it into DC, move the power, then through an inverter, which syncs to the local grid. Now I don't know the economics, but look for all the HVDC here. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-high-voltage_electricity_transmission_in_China clearly, it is being done.
Hawaii is going 100% renewables. Here is one example. www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/hawaiian-electric-industries-announces-mind-blowing-solar-plus-storage-cont
Battery storage is getting cheaper every year, and quickly, and it is being used to smooth renewables. The bigger your grid, the more renewables smooth themselves. The wind is always blowing somewhere. The professor did touch on demand management with charging electric cars. We need electric meters that can measure not just how much electricity we use, but when, so we can implement time of use pricing, so we can incentivize people to use more electricity when there is plenty, and it's cheap, and less when it's expensive. If we do that, somebody will think to build computers into high draw devices that can be configured with bluetooth, and download prices, and price forecasts from the internet with a wifi connection. www.microcenter.com/product/502843/raspberry-pi-zero-wh---with-pre-soldered-headers
You can also overbuild wind and solar, if it's cheap enough.
Flexible generation is the other lever. You can keep a few gas plants around that can burn biogas for 1 week a year if you get particularly bad weather.
So why would you do all this horsing around? Cause wind and solar deals are being made at under 2 cents a kwh.
www.forbes.com/sites/energyinnovation/2020/01/21/renewable-energy-prices-hit-record-lows-how-can-utilities-benefit-from-unstoppable-solar-and-wind/#22dca25e2c84
www.savannahnow.com/news/20181006/georgia-power-ratepayers-not-protected-in-new-plant-vogtle-owners-deal
www.utilitydive.com/news/los-angeles-solicits-record-solar-storage-deal-at-199713-cents-kwh/558018/
www.lazard.com/perspective/lcoe2019
This video is old and obsolete. Solar and Wind energy has made great progress. Grid scale batteries and other locations are balancing usage.
sorry, but just not true.
"grid scale" batteries are not remotely grid scale, it's a marketing term at best, outright lying at worst.
the battery capacity does not exist, and will not exist for a decade or more (probably much more).
multiple system cost studies from different sources in different countries have confirmed, in most cases the most efficient clean grid is one with a large amount of advanced nuclear and some renewables where extensive hydro or geothermal aren't an option.
@@afgor1088 I am sure you are aware of the massive implementational of solar and wind capacity. Add to that an equal number BESS. Your "Grid" is changing and leaving nuclear in the dust. Below please find a clip from the Economist. Thanks for the response.
By Vijay Vaitheeswaran, Global energy and climate innovation editor, The Economist
Energy storage for the electrical grid is about to hit the big time. By the reckoning of the International Energy Agency (iea), a forecaster, grid-scale storage is now the fastest-growing of all the energy technologies. In 2025, some 80 gigawatts (gw) of new grid-scale energy storage will be added globally, an eight-fold increase from 2021.
My alarm clock is my hair and geothermal; and hospitals/manufacturing
imagine if this guy was the president...
Isn't it four hours of time zones.
In my country hydro is closer to 75% of our total power production
finland?
Costa Rica? Finland is more like 20% hydro.
Even if we had the storage technology (batteries and other mechanical means) to cover the dropouts in renewables, the amount of real estate needed for solar farms and wind turbines (also known as bird death traps) would destroy the environment, which we are supposed to be saving. Don't misunderstand me, solar has its place, and wind turbines do as well (hopefully not near any bird flight paths), but it is not a total solution as the instructor pointed out. I think the future is in Thorium Reactors. For some reason the NRC is very reluctant to allow full scale roll out of them out of fear and lobbyists for the existing nuclear industry that uses enriched Uranium who know how to do things and don't want any change. So instead, other countries such as India, China, and France will become leaders in a technology leaving us in the dust. I won't go into the details here, but you can Google it. Thorium reactors can withstand a complete outage of power (no pumps running) and automatically by design unload their fuel into holding tanks. Just my 2 cents.
Solar is actually more of a solution than wind technically speaking as roof area solves that problem. But, solar is a piss poor energy collector compared to wind and wind is piss poor compared to hydro and hydro is actually superior to everything actually.
i have this weird feeling youre a bird watcher that knows nothing about power supply on a country sized scale
@@AndrewBrowner No, I am not a bird-watcher. My views are based on watching and reading much about renewable energy. I may be wrong in my assumptions about the real estate issue - since that was based on other people's research, but I do agree solar and wind should be part of the solution. I do care about birds, and no one can dispute what the "bird blenders" do. As I pointed out earlier, I think nuclear power - specifically Thorium based would be the best solution.
As far as "power supply on a country sized scale," I can certainly say I am not an expert, but I quite familiar with the 3 main power grids here in the US. Solar power and wind turbines require DC to AC converters (AKA "inverters") that will be quite large and the output of which needs to be 3 phase and synchronized and in phase with the power grid it will be feeding. It is much easier and less expensive to use steam driven turbines that can be speed and phase aligned to the power grid by adjusting the amount of steam driving them. Continued...
@@AndrewBrowner I am not sure how the solar farms that use the curved mirrors to beam reflected sunlight to the top of a tower to super-heat molten salts generate the power, but I assume a heat exchanger is used to boil water run a steam turbine. That would work well, and be relatively cheaper than using all these IBGT based inverters all over the place.
@Matthew Huszarik You are probably spot on about the money part of it all. Do you glow in the dark form all those years? LOL !! I agree that solar is great, but a few things need to happen to make me a "believer." Electric Jesus (AKA Elon Musk) needs to come up with a safer storage solution than lithium ion batteries. Several people have died already from when those batteries go wrong. There was a Tesla that was in an accident right in my city a few months back, and it took forever to put the fire out. www.sun-sentinel.com/local/broward/fort-lauderdale/fl-ne-tesla-lawsuit-barrett-riley-20191010-pkjlepjs2za5bhlziwthtjnhpu-story.html I have seen first hand what happens when you short circuit a battery, and there are plenty of UA-cam videos on that. What do you think about using some of the desert we have say, in New Mexico and Utah? Is there enough real estate there to generate the needed power? I am not joking, but seriously asking. Then we are back to storage, and I don't think batteries are the answer. They are the answer for individuals like yourself for you own solar solution, but I believe they are still too costly for widespread use on the grid, not to mention converting DC to AC on such a large scale.
Please analyze how batteries can help!
God almighty why did the US create 3 different grids
Considere as plantas nucleares
Yeah, wind is a great renewable unless youre a bird. Each windmill can kill several hundred birds a year.
Then you must really dislike cats...
Do cats kill eagles, hawks, geese, ducks, swans? No, they do not.
Cats can take chicks of almost any bird if the parent looks away.
Communication towers kills millions of birds, power lines kills 10s of millions (and risk of electrocution by power lines is greater for bigger birds that can reach two conductors), vehicle collisions kills 100s of millions, window collisions kills 100s of millions, cats kills billions and wind turbines kill a few 100 000.
www.fws.gov/birds/bird-enthusiasts/threats-to-birds.php
I ride dirt bikes and ATVs out near a huge wildlife refuge on the snake River and it has a few hundred huge windmills I have yet to a single dead bird. I think windmills are silly due to only being viable with major tax payers help but killing birds is not a real reason. I see more dead road kill from the road leading up to them.
Maybe in the third world but modern power lines in the US are designed to not kill birds and the 10s of millions you claim is an egregious exaggeration.
Millions of electric vehicles will kill the power grid
eh, we'll just burn more coal :P