Why Oil Country is Turning to Wind Power | Overview
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- Опубліковано 13 чер 2024
- If Texas were a country it would be fifth in the world for wind energy generation. Take a trip through wind country with host Joe Hanson as he looks into why oil country is turning into wind country.
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Hosted by Joe Hanson from It's Okay to be Smart, Overview uses incredible 4k drone footage to reveal the natural phenomena shaping our planet from a 10,000-foot view-literally.
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Hi!! Texas gal here - I grew up in Midland, out in the west part of the state - and to say oil is important to that city is a vast understatement. There's a fairly sizable museum specifically to do with the petroleum industry and the geology of the Permian Basin, and it's a museum that public schools in Midland take entire grades to, every year. I went three times while still in elementary school!! Oil derricks are as much a part of the cultural landscape as cowboys.
This whole episode was wonderful, and I am SO proud of my home state for making such great strides. I really hope wind power continues to - ah - blow up! (heh)
I would also like to say, y'all got some great shots of Austin and it made me SO nostalgic. My father still lives in Austin and seeing the city skyline was just really, really great emotionally for me. I'm stunned by the cinematography in this series, every video is just so gorgeous. Looking forward to more!
An yet we can covert all of those jobs into geothermal drillers because EGS basically the same method as fracking except you use the water to turn a turbine.
I cannot stress enough just how amazing and informative this channel is and just how happy I am that I stumbled upon it. I hope it gains more recognition and traction and continues to grow because I'm obsessed with it! Probably my favorite thing PBS has ever done, omg.
CRAP! BLACKOUT==$$22 BILLION!! == After the Texas Blackouts, Follow the Wind and Solar Money - All $66 Billion of It. $66 billion was spent building wind and solar infrastructure in Texas in the years before the blackouts, yet all that spending was worth next to nothing when the grid was teetering on the edge of collapse during the early morning hours of February 15. For several hours, there was no solar production, and of the 31,000 megawatts of wind capacity installed in ERCOT, only about 5,400 megawatts, or roughly 17% of that capacity, was available when the grid operator was shedding load to prevent the state’s grid from going dark.
That $66 billion figure is based on numbers published by the Solar Energy Industries Association and the American Wind Energy Association, which recently changed its name to the American Clean Power Association.
Kinetic energy with western music
Texas, Go Big on green energy.
Big. Texas Sized BIG
Yeeah...death by darkness. Not a great look.
@@billcichoke2534 my dude. You know places like Iowa and the Netherlands use these right? Coming from someone in the south panhandle area, it’s an easy fix if the powers that be weren’t quite so greedy.
@@ericgillette7711 Yes, it is. Just like Iowa and the Netherlands, which use nuclear and coal for their baseline, stop shutting down coal plants. ESPECIALLY if you aren't going to replace them with NUKE plants.
Like Germany and Spain, everywhere the wind snd solar only approach is tried, carbon emissions and importation of non 'green' power INCREASES. And the price and reliability of grid power goes in the wrong directions...up and down, respectively.
@@billcichoke2534 You seem to be choosing your poison.
TX would do well to winterize their green energy sources and think seriously about connecting their grid to adjacent states unless they want a repeat of the winter of 2021. The Great Plains has a lot of potential for wind energy if we had the grid to get the power where it is needed.
CRAP! BLACKOUT==$$22 BILLION!! == After the Texas Blackouts, Follow the Wind and Solar Money - All $66 Billion of It. $66 billion was spent building wind and solar infrastructure in Texas in the years before the blackouts, yet all that spending was worth next to nothing when the grid was teetering on the edge of collapse during the early morning hours of February 15. For several hours, there was no solar production, and of the 31,000 megawatts of wind capacity installed in ERCOT, only about 5,400 megawatts, or roughly 17% of that capacity, was available when the grid operator was shedding load to prevent the state’s grid from going dark.
That $66 billion figure is based on numbers published by the Solar Energy Industries Association and the American Wind Energy Association, which recently changed its name to the American Clean Power Association.
ERCOT cannot integrate into the rest of the country. It provides a wholesale opportunity for Petrochemical companies to sell back excess energy for profit. This is generally not allowed - or is prohibitively expensive on other grids. This is why almost all new refineries and synthesis plants are built in Texas.
@@bronzearmy2645 Yup. And the only thing stopping the great state of Texas from investing in externalpower sources for its state as a backup are the fossil fuel lobbyists and corrupt politicians who lick their boots. Investing in outside power sources is going to be their best bet since ERCOT is garbage.
The problem was the nuclear and gas plant that weren't winterized though.
The coal power stations might represent a certain percentage of the power in the Texas, but because of lack of environmental laws, they are throwing out a lot more C02 than coal power stations in other States and around the world!
It's never good enough, is it?
@@pb2959 coal needs to be phased out.
@@pb2959 isn't that the whole point of innovation?
Can I suggest White River State Park in Oregon (just North West of Maupin) for a look at one of the nations oldest (although no longer operational) hydroelectric plants, which opted to sciphon water away from the river and run it through turbines, rather then simply dam up the whole river and force it through. An episode on dams, the good, the bad, and the very ugly, would be really cool, and there may be no better river to look at for it then that mighty Columbia.
Assuming you can get the permits of course. The USACE are usually pretty fickle about that.....
That sounds like a cool episode, I'd want to watch it
Oh boy, Joe's from Its ok to be smart
It's amazing what you can do with mid-end drone these days
I am encouraged at the comments are all constructive and positive. An inquisitive minds opens new opportunities.
Projects like this give us hope for our collective future.
Thanks for the excellent video and commentary.
Their lawmakers are gonna use wind energy as a scapegoat when their electricity grid inevitably fails.
They already did last February lmao. Abott blamed wind energy for the lack of power during the polar vortex rather than the obvious cause of the grid not being regulated.
Hey PBS, you should've covered ERCOT and our incompetent governor and how they bungled this past winter's freeze..
I recently watched Tom Scott use the emergency escape of a wind turbine.
Me too
I appreciate the name drops of the farms and host companies, makes job searches a little easier with reference.
Before the pandemic, I was making fairly regular trips between Austin and west Texas, driving through vast landscapes of these wind farms. I found myself confused by something I noticed on nearly every trip -- that over half of the myriad turbines visible from the highway would be completely motionless. In the middle of the day with plenty of wind (indeed a few turbines would be spinning), just endless vast arrays of stationary turbine blades. My data set is not large (monthly trips for around a year), but the almost perfect consistency of this experience was bizarre and unsettling. Seems like such an enormous infrastructure investment to be sitting idle so much of the time.
Wind turbines seemingly never spin and I imagine it has to do with the lack of storage. Just because the wind blows doesn’t mean that it’s a good time to be sending energy into the grid.
If too much power is put into the grid a lot of things can get messed up, for example the frequency gets to high which could damage electronics. Wind turbines can be turned off instantly. Large steam turbines can not, they may take hours to get off and days to get on the grid. Thus the wind turbines get pulled out first before the coal plant has to go offline.
@@ingoseiler I thought the grid was a queue not a stack.
Just like you don’t leave your lights on all the time, there are also times when some generators are not needed. A key advantage is adding electrical capacity. It is added in small increments rather than huge ones like a coal fired, natural gas or nuclear plant. Daves the tax payers money as the excess capacity does not have to sit idle waiting for additional demand to utilize it.
Too much available power drives the rates low.
You can even end up with excess generation where the utilities have to go to a negative price, like oil did for a day or two a year ago.
But electricity is not the same kind of commodity as oil.
We don't have the grid storage to hold on to it, and we don't have enough infrastructure like pumped hydro or hydrogen electrolysis to make use of it at scale.
Ideally it would be banked somehow, or put to use in an energy hungry process like desalination.
But there are no oceans in west Texas, and as we have seen Texas chose to isolate it's grid and freeze over this past winter.
Anytime I meet a Texan who acts like Joe i'll just assume he's from Austin
That's Windourful
😫😆
Would be great to have a series on all types of power generation and transmission/distribution.
What kind of music do you like? I'm a huge metal fan.
progress would be faster if a certain ted isn't in the way
Start a Patreon! We LOVE your videos
Great video! Take your drones to the dutch waterworks or hydropaunic farms :)
Easy answer: oil is finite,will run out,wind will be windy forever
been a while since i heard that iconic texas voice
Texas truly is full of hot air.
"Wind energy just makes sense" as they show footage of a windmill that literally is so inefficiently designed that it doesn't make sense.
Source of that claim?
@@Jake-zk3eb just have a look. The blade surface area of the total swept area is less than 25%, more like 10-15%. It's a joke. Try to design a sail boat with toothpicks for sails and see how far you get. How about this, design a water turbine with only 3 blades and
Come to Tasmania and check out our grid.
Water dams works better in Tasmania than in desserts like Texas...
Dunno. Does Texas even connect to the grid where some of these companies are purchasing?
Green is king.
I am undeniably supportive of the changes, e.g., implementing automation and moving away from fossil fuels, that are happening, yet deeply concerned that people are becoming the victims of our progress. This cannot continue. The necessary reality of shutting down the harmful components of the natural resource industries and the rolling out of automation requires our governments to rethink how they are to serve our populaces. Care before profits. Or, care and profit. Either or. 🌸
I was hoping this video would discuss geography and how it affects wind power. Wind power isn’t universal. You can’t just put up a 1 MW wind turbine anywhere and expect it to generate power. There needs be winds so fast so high off the ground to make it happen. The American midwest is phenomenal place for wind power because of the great planes. There is the Arctic Ocean to the North and Gulf of Mexico to the South and virtually nothing stopping the massive winds blasting from one to the other. This is the main reason why wind power is so popular in the midwest. Conversely a state like California is just horrible for wind unless its off shore.
Well because they have a favourable geography and climate structure that allows it.
Not a word about storage. Disappointing.
Moar of this. plz & thx
5:22 can't see a *single* tree anywhere, just shrubs. No surprise it's pretty windy. I'm trying to remember if I've seen any wind turbine anywhere near where I live and I can't say I have. It's just a city surrounded by forests and lakes. Also it's not a solar friendly area since we're so far up north that during the autumn/winter we barely see the sun for months at a time and it's generally quite dark days. I think we get most our power from nuclear power, natural gas and water. I read we have a bunch of turbines here too but I'm guessing they're far, far south. The conflict in Ukraine/Russia showed the weakness of turning off our nuclear plants. We used to have a few more. The prices skyrocketed...
Why not discuss the unreliability of wind power and necessity to store that power?
I’d like to directly donate to PBS Terra to support this content, but I can’t find a way to do so. Is your team open to using Patreon or some other donation platform?
I'm not sure if there's a way to donate to PBS Terra specifically but if there is you'll find it on the PBS site:
www.pbs.org/about/about-pbs/support-pbs/
You'd be better off sending your cash to BLM....
I am concerned about the abuse of ppa's in the power companies' distribution system. It strikes me that when anything gets tight the little guy gets the shaft.
"robots *who* track the wind"
personification of wind turbines got me shook
Where does your electricity come from when there is neither wind nor sun when you need it, where are your batteries as a buffer
i wonder how california compares to texas in terms of the transition from petroleum to green power. we're transitioning away too, to the point where our state government has pledged to end oil refining and production (which is still a major industry for us)
So 1/33 of all the US windpower is comming from this one Windfarm ... :o
Mother Nature: "The power of wind"
SpongeBob: The power within.... The power within..... The power within
Fossil fuel industry is killing our planet. It is horrible that even having warning as early as 1970s we let our planet into current state. But I have a question regarding wind energy -- can't we harvest it all? Like, can we set up so much wind turbines that they produce a noticeable change in wind patterns? If it does, then we are trading one vice for the other, aren't we?
Wait Joe ???
This is good news! I wish my government in Australia would get tf on board with renewables
Makes cents
With Texas working to secede from the union very actively, at least partially in opposition to the drive for renewable energy, how does the state government of Texas plan to deal with these wind farms? Will they allow these facilities to be purchased by the United States and/or sell their energy to the US? Seems to me this is contradictory to the drive for an independent conservative Texas. Is the state government opposing the creation of these wind farms or considering the role the state of Texas will take after the secession?
#vermont
So Texas waited for customers to get informed before change ..way to go ...Were all going tyo die horribly if we wait for Americans to inform themselves .
because they're "Slow" to catch on
Texas's Governer is not fan of these windmill
Is he ?
Meanwhile other channels are talking about the failure of wind energy, why it doesn't work & why they're being dismantled.
They already run worldwide and are very good
My Texan friend wasted no time blaming liberals in California for the recent Texas power outages. I guess it takes one to know one.
Algorithmic cookie
🍪
Now theyneed towinterize it
Wait, Joe Hanson is daddy!
Deep look send me😉
Texas, my home state, found out last winter that de-emphasizing natural gas in favor of bogus renewables was NOT a good idea. Wind power wouldn't exist without the Federal tax breaks because the fancy equipment requires maintenance and it doesn't last forever. Recovering the investment is quite unlikely unless the prices of other forms of energy are driven way too high, by any of a number of reasons including political machination and cronyism.
As a one-time "true believer" in wind energy, I was brokenhearted to find the hard way how bogus it was while living on a hillltop in upstate NY. I am a licensed engineer and have good reason to believe my calculations were correct and the measurements on my equipment valid. You CAN make it work, kinda sorta, but you CAN'T make it pay.
Solar is the same - it's really excellent for hot water but for electricity, not so much. Without the subsidy, only the greenest of greenies would ever put up with the high costs, and even that would be a political statement, not a practical choice.
So now all my wind power stuff is gone, and I say, with confidence and enthusiasm "Drill, baby, drill!" and "Yay, fusion! " Renewables are a great idea, but making them pay their own way isn't easy. For those who clutch their pearls, saying "CO2? Oh, no! The sky is falling", you should remember that CO2 is what crops, gardens, trees and forests eat.
I believed you, until I read the last sentence. As an engineer, you should realise that if excess CO2 is entirely consumed by plants and trees, than there wouldn't be any global warming. There are numerous studies showing renewables like solar and wind are already cheaper, though I cannot confirm if it is bound by location (I image solar power in the Sahara desert would be far more productive than in the Arctic region).
"29,407mW of *installed wind power capacity*" just means that take 29k and divide it by 5 to get your actual electricity generated. Either dishonest or ignorant, it's hard to tell what.
I associate "Texas" with slavery, Louie Gohmert, Enron, and Lee Harvey Oswald.
Imagine if Florida could harness the energy from hurricanes
Can we talk about shifting to small scale VAWT. Currently wind farms are just another way to have to pour more concrete and burn a lot of diesel. Watch out for the greenwashing! Large scale corporate energy is never going to be the solution. Think small scale micro grids and most importantly REDUCE CONSUMPTION!
hm - but i've to juckle by the idea of the cold wave you Texans had this winter… And failed to install simple heat elements in the wind mills…
Cn these windmills adversely affect weather if there are to many of them ?
Locally maybe. Globally no, just a tiny drop in the ocean.
They shouldn’t - the shape of the blades and the density of the turbines is tightly controlled so as not to slow down the wind. Putting the windmills closer together could actually do that, but then they’d adversely affect the power output, so they don’t do it. It’s in their own best interest to not affect the wind flow from its natural pattern.
The only negative ecological impact I have read is birds getting killed by them, especially migratory ones and raptors for some reason. More research is being, and needs to be done, but even with that, the negatives of current energy sources outweigh these
@@james4thedoctor482 This is more of a design issue, the blades also get serious damage over time. Many research teams are looking into solution and different designs that are not cost prohibitive.
@@M69392 wind is a major factor in the water cycle and has potential to have severe impact in precipitation. We have seen to many time where some genius get so intent on one aspect of a problems that they end up causing severe impact.
Let's put solar panels on every home, business and covered parking rooftop and switch to electric vehicles making nearly everything we do solar powered while completely decentralizing our power supply and empowering everyone as power generation owners.
Solar power is CHEAPER and electric vehicles are soon to be CHEAPER to make and already are considerably CHEAPER to maintain and operate, especially if charged from your own solar power.
A 3-5 year ROI (return on investment) for a solar array that will generate power for decades is a no-brainer and the panels can even be made locally too.
#EndFossilFuels #SwitchToSolar #SwitchToElectric #GreenNewDeal #EmpowerEveryone
It's now year 2023 and still there are no country what product totally clean energy,not even close..!! And those who are make most work to product clean energy are only make so much that it's stop to fossile energy use groving in those countrys.. World population grove up about 100 000 000 ewery year and that's huge problem..
Every time I drink beer and eat pickled eggs I create a forceful man wind...
Where my nuclear proponents at?!?
This is a good production but it seems to be at a 4th grade level.
Go green, Go nuclear !
When I moved to the Columbia Hills in Washington State in 2000, there was an abundant population of eagles and hawks. Any time of the day, one would see raptors circling in the sky; raptors perched on every telephone pole. Then they built the wind farms. Within a few years, the raptors vanished, slaughtered by the wind turbines. Wind farms are located where there are rivers of wind; birds follows these rivers of wind when they migrate. Wind farms are walls of death for migrating birds. Since 1970, bid population in North America have plummeted by 30%, with an appalling acceleration in the decline since the advent of wind farms. These slaughtered birds were critically important to ecological systems. WIND POWER IS NOT BENIGN.
Bruh, haven't you heard? Birds aren't real.
Sir,we can produce energy without wind, water,fuel,solar and necular....
With the help of camel, oxen by
24*7 hours..at any
Where
Pl. contact me, I will help you at any time. Thank you
This is why the power went out in Texas last year during that freeze. All the wind generators froze. Some valid studies have shown that wind power cost more money than just using fossil fuels. When you consider the cost of building the wind generators and repair expenses, they are not cost effective.
Most didn't actually freeze the wind just stopped blowing. By the way it has been much warmer in the past and life did just fine. In fact mankind has done better during warm times than cold times.
A little too late. Now it's time to pay for the enormous pollution already caused.
No. I associate TX with bigotry, not oil.
As a resident of the coldest country in the world I'd like to see more global warming actually
If you in effect steal people's farmland just dont be surprised when they try to get it back. Alternatively, you yourself could just move if the cold bothers you.
@Ankit Meher I'm pretty sure it will improve livelihood here
@@maxwellvandenberg2977 Stealing people's farmland? I've got no idea what it should mean, seriously. I just want to see my freaking cold country getting warmer
@@neutralevil1917 CLIMATE REFUGEES!! check the CIA report!!!
@@MK-fk4kp But what it has to do with me and my cold country? We ain't stealing nobody's farmland
The only things I don’t like about wind turbines are: cluttered landscape, noise pollution, and bird fatalities; Although it wouldn’t be easy painting wind turbines black it would reduce bird fatalities. Climate change will be solved with having a puzzle of solutions (not just 1 2 big solutions, like wind/solar) like having more modern nuclear power plants and having carbon capture plants around oil refineries/coal plants, not too mention natural gas is a lot cleaner than gasoline/coal power plants.
Despite the negative drawbacks of wind turbines I still think there really cool feats of engineering, power production, and are very interesting too look at. I just wish wind turbines when the wind is really harsh that they could harness all that energy - I’m talking about hurricane wind speeds but yeah. I wonder how much energy could be harnessed on the Great Lakes, then again they can only handle so much and the wind turbines require maintenance just like everything else does but yeah.
More nuclear please
Geothermal is superior.
Perhaps. I don't know enough about what makes one source "better" than the other to really say. What I HAVE understood, is that not any single energy source will be "best" for every single location and need. Geothermal, for example, is not realistically, reliably, or safely available in every geographic region. That's been my understanding, anyway.
To get to our next developmental "plateau" as humans, we're going to need to think a bit locally again, while learning to cooperate (and CARE) globally. We've a ways to go still, but.... we can only keep working towards it.🤞🏾
Not really.
It's location specific; more so than hydro, solar and wind -it's why if you want to shutdown fossil fuel plants in the next couple of decades; you either need nuclear or an obscene amount batteries (in addition to magnitudes more wind and solar).
Geography/geology restricted
@Ankit Meher not quite true. Check Iceland
@@KOKO-uu7yd I would say what constitutes as "better" is something that takes up less space, generates more energy, and is consistently more reliable. The deeper you dig the hotter it gets. I dont believe that heat will stop in the sense the wind can or Sun could go down.
Sorry to tell you but these wind farms do not last long. In the end they cost more by far than gas. Look at all of the dead wind farms around. They are huge areas of danger.
*To satisfy 100% of New York City's electricity needs with wind power would require impossible around-the-clock winds within a limited speed range, and a wind farm the size of the entire state of Connecticut.* How much wind and solar energy can we collect on a still, windless night? Solar and wind are inherently intermittent and unreliable energy sources. Would you hire a drunken employee who only showed up for work part of the time, and on his own erratic schedule, not yours? On top of that, the sloppy drunk demands a far higher salary than do reliable workers.
Because of their extremely low power to weight ratio, windmills require the use of huge amounts of steel and other materials in their construction. Wind turbines are being sold to the public as a carbon neutral product, but manufacturing windmill components is not a carbon neutral process. Windmills are mainly made from power generated by burning coal and other fossil fuels. Because of the enormous amount of resources required for windmill construction, and their intermittent and unreliable performance, windmills do not reduce CO2 emissions. Building wind turbine farms covering vast areas of land will kill large numbers of birds and bats, and torture animals and humans living nearby with audible sounds as well as infrasound. Infrasounds are very low frequencies below 20Hz that travel long distances and can cause headaches, insomnia, and other serious negative health effects.
Two totally independent groups of scientists have discovered conclusive proof that there is no greenhouse gas effect on any planet or moon in our solar system. For the fascinating details, please Google *The Renewable Energy Disaster + Christopher Calder + 50webs*
Oh good grief!
you sound smart but because of people like you who loves using fossil oil and not believing on greenhouse effect is the reason the earth is doomed. i bet you're a flat earther as well but can't find the edge eh? i don't know why people like you still exist.
How much more concrete, steel, and emmisions in general are produced to build a coal or petrol powered station? I reckon its probably fairly similer to what is required for a wind farm of equal output, especielly when you remember that one of those keeps producing CO2, and one doesnt.
Plus your house cat is gonna kill significantly more birds then any intelligently produced and located windturbine.
Beyond such, even if we pretended for a second that your right and Global Warming is a myth, renewable energies just make logical and economic sense regardless, since they work inherently off of inputs that do not require: widespread destruction of landscapes (ok, Solar sure, but only in massive poorly thought out farms), releasing other harmful pollutants and toxins into the air, does not require the same strenuous manual labour as most fossil fuels that wares down the livelyhood of the lowerclass, is usually cheaper to maintain, and sure in the case of solar it may not always be on... cus the sun isnt always shinning but in the case of geothermal and wind and dare I say even hydroelectric (hate dams by the way) do generally run or at least can run 24/7 if we need and want them too.
Im gad you have 2 independent groups of nimrods who have proven that the largest threat to our wellbeing is actually a myth (without actually citing anything) but regardless, the transfer from fossil fuels just makes logical sense. Plus its kinda a lot cooler to see wind turbines in the distance while on a road trip then it is to see some big block of steel and concrete pumping out a London's worth of smoke ery day
This is a bad faith take and you damn well know it.
@@santoast24 You are living in a dream world. Windmills and solar schemes are not new. They have cost Europeans and Americans huge amounts of money, but have not lowered carbon dioxide emissions at all, and have only raised the cost of electricity, food, housing, everything. Europe has gone on building coal power plants to provide the electricity that wind and solar cannot deliver, and China has stopped erecting Godzilla sized windmills because they just do not work. China is building coal and nuclear power plants, not Al Gore's charmed devices that are supposed to control the weather for us. You need education and a dose on honesty. Biden is heading us to economic collapse with his ridiculous ideas about energy policy and climate.