We have a similar device here in Czech Republic. It's called Dlouhé Stráně and it's an absolute technological marvel, built right into a natural reservation with esthetics and ecology in mind. I've been to multiple hikes there and an excursion. Some people hate it, because they cut a hill top flat, but I try to see the bigger picture. It's amazing.
For 33 years I worked as an electrical engineer for a place that had pump storage facilities in California (the largest one) that was built in the 60's. We were no longer able to use it as pump storage because the pump and generators (synchronous motors, transformers, auxiliary equipment, and etc.) were old and cost of repair and maintenance were exceeding the benefits. There is a cost for everything. You can’t get something for nothing. One rewind would cost $5M and one transformer refurbishment would cost $1.5M……..
Our alternative is letting go of the struggle to keep California from burning down, drying up, and blowing away. We are going to have to prioritize the money.
@@aluisious California power problem is man made. They have not had new power plant, hydro, nuclear, etc.. in past 40 years despite the population doubled.
Just like solar panels installed on the rooftop of residential and commercial properties (i.e. there are long-term costs for repairs and maintenance). 🌞🏠🏣
Yes because nobody was able to do it and the one person who could was in so much demand that he could charge what he wanted. But what did it cost to build it, in today's dollars? And what part costs the most? And what's the cheapest it could cost? There are many people looking for work... what is missing? The initiative. New facilities are built daily... how can they make it? SpaceX exists because they did not accept what things cost, and started from the raw ore costs and worked their way up and eliminated all the bottlenecks.
@@Mindcroscope thats the catch, Solar panel in general doesn't require maintenance or negligible amount of maintenance cause there is no moving parts 🙂(just clean the panel with a hose pipe)
Switzerland has many pumped hydro powerplants already and we build even more. In my valley is a project with 1350m head and 1050 MW installed electric power. It is a very neat form of energy storage.
@@jimvj5897 Switzerland can export electricity. Switzerland exported over 30,000,000 megawatt (MW) hours in 2020. Long-distance electricity transmission is significantly more efficient than most people realize.
One overlooked pump storage option is the Salton Sea and Pacific Ocean in California. Pump water out of the Salton Sea at night using geothermal energy and produce hydroelectric power during the day by adding Pacific ocean water to the Salton Sea. The surface area of the Salton sea is 343 square miles. There is a 225 feet of elevation difference between the Salton Sea and Pacific Ocean. They have already bored a hole in the mountain between the imperial valley and San Diego to transport fresh water. They could drill another one for this battery storage idea. Another advantage is you effectively reduce the high salinity of the Salton Sea while improving air quality of the imperial valley by covering the entire dry lake bed.
You should do a series on all these alternatives. There are about 20 contenders, including Sodium batteries, Redox flow, gravity, liquid air, H2, heat capacitors, etc. All of these could be scaled to GWh.
great but energy storage will depend on a steady production of excess energy from green sources (mainly solar and wind...) it also comes with an additional energy cost/waste.
@@rimshot6444 Not steady excess, but at least regular excess. Or even nuclear, as that delivers a very constant power, but demand is fluctuating over the day. That's what France does with hydro storage.
No he shouldn't cuz it's b*******. The vast majority of climate change is driven by all the erupting volcanoes around the world. Humans have very little to do with climate change. Don't believe me do some real research. Stop listening to people that are paid to tell you.
Small modular reactors, specifically designed to replace the existing coal, oil and gas boilers in existing power stations have a great future: all of the downstream power generation facilities: the turbines, generators, power conditioning, control and reticulation is already in place. So a major target to retro fit existing power stations nuclear units in the micro 50MW, small to 300MW and full sized with multi unit up to 1GW is still the best way to go, for quick CO2 reduction. We just have to get over the bad press that nuclear has had for decades.
SMR is going to be a huge part. Every time people start talking about nuclear and climate change they start getting all excited about fusion, which has never been demonstrated to yield excess energy outside of a bomb. We've got to get real honest about what we have the tech to do in 5 years.
All of the companies developing liquid molten sodium thorium small salt modular reactor blah blah blah designs are 10 years and 10 billion dollars away from demonstrating that their small reactors actually will be cheaper per MWh and quicker to build than current nuclear generation. It's definitely worth researching, and I hope some of them actually deliver, but they're all irrelevant to the rapid decarbonization we need to achieve in the next decade. The absurd delays and enormous cost overruns of the few nuclear plants under construction aren't "bad press," they're facts.
@@skierpage Who is mentioning small modular reactors except Gates and others who are dangerous with their explosive coolant. Your knowledge is very shallow, when writing about renewables infrastructure cost has to be mentioned, otherwise it makes no sense. Nothing about this make much sense. Get your facts straight; USA had molten salt reactor running in 60's, results were great but funds cut because of oil lobby. As i'm writing this another plant MSR with Th fuel is running in China, their plan is to make all ele. this way by 2050. They will succeed. Russia has lots of knowledge about MSR too, unfortunately they don't get the same chances as other, despite urgency to move on! South Korea just made several reactors for UAE for 7 billions in 7 years, since there are several at the same site other will be put online later. Chins is also capable of doing it but they rather focus on their needs. Things in UAE are going according to plans because they don't allow corruption we have here in EU and US. SMRs (not MSRs, very different) are similar to those battery plants, very expensive and make no sense when we can resolve the problem with normal nuclear fission reactors of 3rd+ Gen. You are right in saying it is worth researching this things, although burning fossil fuels and using batteries make no sense. They only do it because government pays for it. I hope rest of the world doesn't need the same lection Germany just had, here ya go again: "Germany's overdose of renewable energy" article.
Pumped hydro is great, it allows for massive energy storage at *reasonable* costs there needs to be more initiative globally to support more projects like this though so that more significant energy storage is available
"reasonable" if you don't insider the construction time (during which the "dirty" generation remains) the construction cost ("billion dollar projects") and the declining number of sites available.
Except the guy literally said that the geography is the problem, unless you are thinking in transporting thousands of tons of water and literally creating artificial mountains. Then I don't think its economically viable anymore.
Ambri's new liquid metal battery, in my mind, takes the lead in this. Low cost and the fact they are shipped already built is going to change everything. I think they are releasing the first ones this year. I think each "battery" is a shipping container that can store 1MW (or something like that). Also easily scalable to GWh levels. They stack, no parts to replace, and are easily and quickly swappable. Super excited for them to take it mainstream.
@Daniel Meyers Nobody wants a battery that has to be kept heated at that temperature. It's an absurd idea that would be rejected within a minute in any board room.
You don't need a salt to split water with electricity to produce hydrogen and oxygen. There are processes and catalysts that claim to accelerate electrolysis like alkaline hydrolysis, but it takes energy to maintain the high temperatures these require, which in China comes from burning coal. Example: "This article concerns the low-cost and green electrolytic production of hydrogen operating at such a low voltage performed by the dissolution of steam in high temperature molten salt electrolytes"
Their company is called "Form energy," specifically leaving the "e" in energy as lowercase, because that makes their initials "Fe," which is the chemical symbol for iron. Brilliant.
I personally think they should layer sheets of iron instead, inserted between sheets of graphene. Graphene is made of Carbon which is also very abundant. The lattices of graphene shouldn't interact with the Iron oxidation and would help to provide a gap between iron sheets increasing its exposed surface per weight.
@@Supremax67 I think it is a goal of theirs to remove all carbon sources from the process though, which may have influenced their decision to steer away from the graphene solution. I may be mistaken on their wishes though. The video talked about a couple different companies.
Again and again the most reliable source of 24/7 source of power with sustainable fuel sourcing is being neglected- Splitting Uranium, Thorium and Plutonium in well tested nuclear reactors. Only "wind and solar" mantra of something that performs so poorly (and with high material and environmental cost). Nuclear power could have been ideal partner for storage technologies to- enabling even higher utilisation of its cheap fuel for peak day usage to. Most sustainable in long run.
@@tbhbananas9922 Biggest problem with nuclear is starting costs, then tear down costs. Nobody ants to deal with the teardown and getting rid of the waste . It has to be a government driven thing, private industry sees it as too many hurdles for what they make for profits
Hey, I remember going to visit the Northfield Mountain pumped storage facility as a teen. My grandparents lived in Amherst (also where I ended up going to college) so one summer when I was visiting my grandfather took me there for one of their public tours. It's so large that I couldn't really get a grasp of the scale while visiting.
Hopefully we can get these ginormous batteries in service ASAP to help with the energy crisis especially during the summers and to help rebuild after floods
The Huge, Weird Batteries of the Future 0733am 5.8.22 how carcinogenic is the clean energy working environment for those working in such an environment...?
We started using the mobile from about 15 to 20 years ago. Though battery tech has improved hugely, we still need to charge the phone atleast once a day. Nothing really revolutionary has happened beyond incremental improvements which happen in any other field.
@@danielvilliers612 true, that is more due to miniaturization of chips based on Moore's law. Also has it improved or radically changed people's lives like the refrigerator did? How many normal people can really afford such a computer and have use for it. We had heard of some battery development that had been done in MIT or some such institution that would radically improve battery life of small devices. Mobiles would need to be charged just once a week or so. But, years later nothing is in production.
That's because the better batteries were used in another way: To make the phones smaller and lighter. You could easily have a phone that would last a week, but no-one is going to buy that because it would be the size of a 90s phone - and uncomfortable bulge in the pocket. Customers demanded their phones be smaller, lighter, and thinner - and that is what they got, by reducing the size of the battery while maintaining the target of a once-per-day charge.
There has been one of these systems in Wales for many, many years. Never been been able to find out the running costs, maintenance costs and efficiency - odd that.
@@itsourlife it's not a scam, it just faces engineering challenges to scale up (like every novel process). Those cost $millions in R&D to overcome, and the company may run out of money before it demonstrates it can solve them affordably.
@@skierpage There's an art of making money without having to ever sell anything really. This is what it really is. Come back few years later when the company has shut down.
There are always practical matters. The rust takes up a larger volume than the iron, so there's a terrible problem with the electrodes growing and shrinking, and gradually falling apart. The same problem is one of the limits on lifespan for lead-acid batteries.
Volcano has molten (or melted) iron. May be battery researchers should look into the possibility of making a series of giant "Iron-air Batteries" of a dormant volcano (i.e. a volcano that has erupted in the past but is unlikely to erupt soon). 👀🌋
We should talk about "energy matrix transformation" instead of "energy transition"....the system has to include broader elements i.e. Water Management.
When talking pumped storage, one has to keep two things in mind: Capacity and means of recharging. Northfield Mountain can produce about 1000 MW for 8 hours at full blast, then it needs to recharge. Meaning, it cannot run a city for any meaningfull amount of time. It is at best a giant emergency generator. A peaker plant, if you will. If you wanted to use facilities like this to supply a large city like New York with electricity during a time of, say, low wind and / or solar energy production for a week, you would need a dozen or more of these. And THEN you need to recharge them. Meaning, after the time of energy scarcity, if you want to have them ready again as quickly as possible, you need not only produce the energy you need right now, you also need to produce the energy needed to recharge these things. If we want to do the latter in the same time we used to discharge them, that means we need TWICE the amount of power production to run the country during charging time. An enormous amount of excess capacity, all of which of course will then lie dormant once the reservoirs are fully charged, because we do not actually NEED that much power. If on the other hand, you want to charge it with the occasional overproduction which wind and solar tend to produce, then you risk them not being full enough when you DO need them, whcih you cannot predict, because weather. On a side note, Northfield was build to balance the nearby Vermont Yankee Nuclear powerplant. It uses Nuclear power to recharge its battery, not wind or solar.
The main strategy for a grid with high amount of renewable energy is to create better grid connections over a larger area. There's never zero wind and solar over a large area. Yes, overproducing is what we'll have to do, so that the minimum output satisfies our baseload need. But in a future where we've solved climate change we are going to have a LOT of flexible load to accept the "excess". That's almost true by definition. We're electrifying all the things that used fuels, i.e. the thing where we needed flexible, portable energy. Battery electric cars and hydrogen or ammonia trucks/ships/planes will represent a massive amount of flexible load. Hydrogen production in particular, which we also need for steel and fertilizers. Electrolysis plants are relatively cheap, and hydrogen can be stored. We can even feed hydrogen back to the grid if we really need to. Batteries will mainly serve to smooth things out more, stabilize the frequency and maximize the value we get out of renewable energy. Seasonal variations up north is best handled by burning trash. Yes. Reuse, reduce, recycle first. But eventually everything turns into low grade trash, and it's best in the end to burn it and filter out all the pollutants we've injected into so much of what we make. Could be combined with CCS to make it net carbon negative too.
@@auspiciouslywild If I understand this correctly your argument rests on a statement/assumption you made at the beginning: "There's never zero wind and solar over a large area" Two things about that. One, it is factually incorrect. Large power generation deficits can occur over large areas over extended periods of time. To name two examples, Europe as a whole experienced significantly reduced Wind energy production during the last year, and during hurricane seasons, significantly large portions of countries like the united states will be cut of from both wind and solar energy production for weeks at a time. If situations like the above should coincide with significant temporary loss of power generation in other parts of the country, which is bound to happen frequently, then the country in question would have a problem. Two, your premise would require flexible long distance transportation of electricty. That is not really something we want to do, either because of the losses in energy it will result in, or the need for specialized infrastructure to prevent these losses. To achieve the latter across a country like the US, you would need a secondary power grid in addition to the existing one, simply for the long range lossless transport of electricity. Both of these options are enormously expensive, thus making electricity generation more expensive. Not that you seem to have a problem with expensive energy, or you would not have mentioned Hydrogen. 30 Percent efficiency in the hydrogen cycle means three times the energy production, and thus three times the energy price.
@@Alexander_Kale very true look how droughts have disabled hydropower over large areas, not to mention loss of cooling water limits all other forms of thermal electric power generation (steam turbines), so that affects the obvious carbon oxidation but also the less obvious nuclear as is currently affecting France. Grids over large areas, especially east- west orientation extends the solar day, many countries like Australia China USA and Europe can gain from this about 3 hours. Grids like this are built in China over 3000kms running at a million volts DC. It’s just the West hasn’t got the same long term planning ability, with their short popularity elected government terms.
@@williamgoode9114 Cooling cycles do not absolutely require water to function. True, a lot of them NOWADAYS are build that way, but you can absolutely create air coolers for steam turbine coolant. Matter of fact, in places with water scarcity, this is already being done. The reason we normally don't is because we so far didn't have to content with water scarcity of any meaningful severity. Second, the same issue of long distance high volume electricity transfer applies no matter were you do it, be that in the US or in CHina. if the chinese really want to shuffle large amounts of electricity around their country like this, then this would be just as moronic there as if done in the West. Finnaly, if given the choice between living in a struggling democracy and a totalitarian state like China, I would choose the democracy ten times out of ten. At least in the former, I don't suddenly disappear when I point out the problems...
@@auspiciouslywild I agree with you, I don’t think the OP recognizes this will be part of a varsity of sources and stores of energy, not just this. Also we still need to continue developing this type of sustainable technology, we’ve barely started! we wasted a lot of time, while giving oil companies endless handouts and passes after making the ocean light on fire and destroying ecosystems.
No it's not. The majority of new generation is wind and solar because they're cheap and quick. No private utility will build a current-generation nuclear plant that takes 15 years and $15 billion. And it will take 15 years and $15 billion for each of the next-generation liquid sodium molten fluoride small thorium modular blah blah nuclear reactor designs to prove whether it actually will be cheaper per MWh and quicker; they're worth R&D for future decarbonization, but they're irrelevant to achieving the rapid reduction in fossil fuel burning we need this decade. The economic case for nuclear is even worse now than it was a decade ago, in the face of renewable electricity that is intermittently dirt cheap.
It would be very, very tiny. A fraction of a percent, insignificant compared to other inefficiencies in the process. Water evaporation rate depends mostly on the surface area of the water, and will be a certain depth per day depending on air humidity, temperature, etc. Apparently pools lose about 1/4 inch of water per day. A useful pumped storage facility would probably see turnover thousands of times higher than this. You'd be more worried about the cost of building it, the cost of the turbines and pumps and the cost of maintaining them, and also the efficiency of the turbines.
Due to the cycles typically being Daily 24hrs pump up and down. Water evaporation during that time is very tiny. But yes if you left it up there for a few months just leaking and evap would waste a large fraction of your water/ energy potential.
Evaporative losses depend on surface area as you say but also on the weather. Wind velocity, temperature (a big one), and humidity. I agree that such losses would be minuscule though.
How much power is needed to pump the water up relative to how much is produced when it's going down? What about water evaporation loss? I'm very interested in this.
Well, the thing to notice is that he said this was originally used in conjunction with a nuclear power plant. In a nuclear power application it makes sense since the nuclear plant is always generating power so you just use some it. However, to use this system as is being suggested, a lot of power would have to be spent and the claim is that wind and solar will provide it. I think that is a bit of a stretch. That is also considering that this place already existed and is being repurposed. To build such a facility from scratch would take an enormous amount of energy and all of that cost would have to be recovered before it could claim to be self-sufficient. No word on the environmental impact of all the mining necessary to hollow out mountains or to build artificial mountains for this purpose.
No way! I have been brainstorming this idea of pumping and reserving water as an energy storage facility or device, for the last year. I am a Chef/microbiologist, not an engineer. I have been given this inspiration from naturally working through the problem of how to store energy generated by wind turbine off the, oh, I almost told you where. How about that, someone has already figured it out. Bravo!
A couple of common misunderstandings about wind energy. You can vary electrical output per turbine on many of them, feathering(twisting) the blades and braking are two methods. Also you can dump excess energy into some of them by spinning up the blades and turning them to face into/away from the wind. If you know its going to be windy enough to generate in a few minutes you can set up the turbines to harvest more effectively... A bit more sophisticated level of controls than gas/hydro/... but also useful in some cases.
You say the controls are a bit more sophisticated, but in reality those controls serve only to get optimal use out of wind power to overcome its shortcomings and limitations, which are actually not present for gas.
@@timgibson3754 Lifespan is based on manufacturer, design, implementation, operating conditions, care of maintenance. They can be designed for long term use, and some are. However you need to consider it's still relatively early in the development of wind harvesting. Expect significant improvements in cost, reliability, production output and flexibility. Lots of design options exist for cheaper storage as well, just lifting water back into a hydro storage(dam) with available wind offer's huge potential. Especially in colder/wetter/windier climates. Most current wind harvesting uses moving parts, but even that is not required. Clever people are spraying ions into the air and then capturing the energy from the wind as the ions flow past a sensor plate. Don't be so easily fooled by press that wants to dumb you down...
I wonder if we should use the term battery for all energy storage, or differentiate it as electrochemical storage. I can see using the term being useful for explaining to the layman, but it could also be used as a simile.
If you like spending 15 years and $15 billion to build a single plant. There's a reason cheap and quick wind and solar are the majority of new generation in the USA and globally.
5:56 “....With nuclear industries in decline....” Wait why is nuclear industries in decline? Nuclear is the most reliable, greenest and cheap form of energy this earth has to offer.
"Cheapest" 😅. Go tell the economists behind Lazard's Levelized Cost of Electricity report that they're wrong. New nuclear is 3-5 times more expensive than wind or solar per MWh, and takes 15 years. That's why wind and solar are the majority of new generation in the USA and globally, and why no utility will build a new nuclear plant using current-gen technology. Maybe one or more of the next-generation liquid modular fluorine salt thorium blahblah small reactors will prove to be cheap and quick to build, after another 10 years and $10 billion of research and development...
@@skierpage Ok a couple things. When government subsidizes wind and solar, rejects several oil drilling permits and increases nuclear regulations you are going to have skewed numbers. Spain did that and crashed their economy. Germany is now doing the same causing their citizens to pay almost double in their energy usage. Texas had a black out for several weeks because their wind turbine froze and had No energy backups. Why is China building more nuclear power plants on their land but selling their solar and wind products to the US? Why are celebrities pushing for green energy while flying in their private jets causing more emissions? Providing public Wind and solar to a country is nothing but a gimmick.
say whaaaaaaaaaat? a corporative video trying to sell something we already knew about as a new technology??? COMPANIES LYING TO US?? nahhhh, it cant be!!! /s
@@sudosu4133 Please tell me how a solar panel is reliable in winter when it's cloudy for weeks on end, or how wind panels are reliable when there is no little to no wind.
@@rikkertbatzback1816 First of all: You are changing your assertion. Please re-read your reply. You do not mention "solar panels" but "solar and wind power". Solar and wind power are very reliable. The power wind and solar devices can generate depends on the intensity of the wind and solar radiation. The intensity is variable and intermittent, but the reliability of the device generating that power depends on the reliability of the device itself, not on the energy source (wind or solar). Solar panels are very reliable converting solar radiation (sunlight) into energy and so are wind generators. The power they generate varies because the intensity of the sources is intermittent, not because the sources, or the wind or solar devices , are unreliable.
What I guess you wanted to say is that wind and solar intensity is variable while your energy consumption is much less so. This is precisely why we need energy storage, which is what this excellent video is all about. You obviously failed to understand that.
They're reliably unreliable- or put in another way, intermittently productive in a predictable way. They're perfectly reliable in terms of performance to spec.
Pumping water up to a high lake to store energy has been used in Ireland since 1969. Turlough Hill Lake is filled with water by electric turbines when demand is low at night... but when you can't just switch off the power stations. During high demand the water pours down the same pipe and reverses the very same turbines which feed the saved energy back to the electric grid.
energy storage only matters when the energy creating system is inefficient. hydro power is incredibly efficient and acts like a battery in that all of the energy not used by the system is transmitted back into the river itself and in a way not wasted. the reality is that even with all of the possible locations of hydro power in countries like America the governments choose to fund inefficient forms of power instead because they are controlled by oil, coal, and gas companies and so they need batteries to store all of the wasted energy from burning fuel because the reaction of burning fuel is not directly connected to the energy usage. so much of that energy is wasted because they need to produce more power than what is required to make sure they have enough power to avoid failure but with hydro power the turbines will react to the extra power being drawn and produce that power on demand with almost no overproduction.
Isn't it amazing, a technology known for a long time but unused, probably because it is "too cheap" for investors to get behind. It also seems it would generate little to no pollution, iron is mostly benign and used by most (if not all) organisms...
I live in switzerland and we already use this technology in several places. I think it is better than stationary lithium batteries. Less dangerous, toxic and cheaper in the long run
If you have an offshore wind park that converts directly to hydrogen, you could pipeline the hydrogen to land like it was a natural gas rig, and once at its destination, use the hydrogen to power fuel cells. now you have both a fuel and electricity, where the fuel is the battery. Nothing stores as much energy per gram as hydrogen.
@@horsthotzenplotz3321 they want to store spent co2 underground, they could just as well store hydrogen underground then get it out when its needed, natural gas style. zThat way natural gas technology can be used for green purposes, sam,e tech, different gas.
There are lots of plans to build such offshore hydrogen generation plants, but you could also just send the generally-useful electricity to shore over a cable. Making the inefficient detour through hydrogen has to be worth doing over electrifying the process, which eliminates hydrogen for land transportation and home heating. The world will need megatonnes of green hydrogen, requiring a TW of renewable electricity, but it will be dwarfed by the rest of the renewable electricity market.
Yup! All, completely, 100% solved, forever. Great job everyone! Really, ZERO problems left for the world. We did it! All of that is sarcasm, because of your dumb statement.
Very interesting... Energy storage is the key to the success of the green energy transition. Super-batteries, supercapacitors, pumped storage, hydrogen-to-gas, integration of electric vehicles into the grid operation... all these will have to work in tandem for success. Nuclear fusion that uses renewable materials, if successful at scale, will change everything.
@@buildmotosykletist1987 They were, but read the latest Lazard analysis: the unsubsidized levelized cost of electricity from wind and solar is now cheaper than any other form of new generation, and cheaper than continuing to operate a coal plant. They'll be the majority of new generation from here on out, even if and when tax credits for them go away. We should tax fossil fuels for the undeniable massive harms that burning them cause now and in the future, but politicians are allergic to the 'T' word so we get tax incentives and credits for better alternatives instead.
Liquid air energy storage and similar technologies like liquid CO2 energy storage and compressed air energy storage are likely to proved much cheaper at the grid scale.
That was a comment for Americans. I had the largely same experience as you in the UK, and then I moved to the USA 23 years ago and experienced brownouts.
@@gpsfinancial6988 nah why should it. The european grid is really interconnected and our neighbors France and danmark produce more energy then they need
I did a project on the concept of pump storage during my masters degree in sustainability! We were trying to figure out how to make pump storage work in a very flat country with tons of water like the Netherlands.
It doesn't matter how you spin, it will take more energy to pump the water up to the holding reservoir then you'll ever get back when you release it to create electricity.
Yes, but if you have excess energy it's better than wasting that energy away. There are always lithium batteries but those are also expensive, you need to replace those from time to time and they have other disadvantages as well, while a water battery will work for a lot longer and comes with a few other perks, like having a clean water reservoir at your disposal.
In order to keep it clean at the same time as being able to support all the time growing need for energy, the best solution is already there - nuclear plants!
Pumped storage is great (If you have the geological situation for it), but what I do not understand is why it is presented as new? It has been around for many decades already..
Both wrong. It is great for dealing with peaks in demand for electricity, but it really depends on what electricity you use to pump the water up to the upper reservoir. If you limit the electricity to being the excess electricity being produced by renewable sources such as solar and wind, you add to the net generating capacity of all generators in the power grid, and you can consume that electricity when, the renewable sources are not available, such as night time when some solar is not available. If you don't restrict it to excess renewable electricity, then the system's sole purpose is to help cope with peaks in demand, and the overall effect is there is a loss in electrical energy, caused by loses in the system where the kWh generated is less than the kWh used to pump the water up to the upper reservoir
@@deang5622 Please. Whatever source is used to charge a pumped storage project, solar-nuclear-gas, on discharge less comes back out again, as with *any* storage mechanism. Some charging sources may or may not be prone to excess at night like nuclear, but that doesn't change the loss. And, if economics is the topic w PHS projects, intermittent sources are a poor choice. PHS works best when charged every day of the year, typically at night when demand is lowest, and discharged during peak demand.
@@Nill757 I think you have failed to understand the key point of my post. Firstly, there is no need to articulate further about the losses in your response as I comprehensively covered that topic. And nothing I said was factually incorrect in respect of that, so I see no merit in regurgitating it back in a response. The key point is that there are two ways to use a pumped storage system: 1. To cope with peaks in demand and provide temporary extra generation capacity when that power is needed. This does not add to the total net generation capacity in the network. Or 2. To add to the total net generation capacity. But this does NOT happen if you are using electricity from coal, gas, nuclear to pump the water up from the lower reservoir to the higher reservoir. So the idea here is, that energy from solar and wind generation stations is used to pump the water up, and you are then capturing the energy from the renewables and making it available when it wouldn't normally be available, and thereby overcoming the big problem with renewables. The problem with renewables is that the available of the power is not guaranteed 24/7 so you need a base level of generation capacity which can meet the demand need, so storing the energy from renewables can reduce the base generation capacity that is needed from non renewables
How to build a fusion reactor that could be done today no problem (with a lot of money) 1) Build a 10 cubic mile reinforced water tank 2) detonate small fusion bombs in the tank 3) use the steam to produce power Believe it or not, it actually would work as a highly efficient fusion reactor.
One word you never hear in this video is EFFICIENCY. The other thing you'll never hear is cost. One thing you'll never see is the professed but never present tipping point.
@4:37 Does anybody not see The absolute extreme similarity of the great pyramid of Giza in this? Look at the tunnels and how they are shaped they’re almost identical. Hmmm…..
The thing is we don't have to rely on solar and wind. There is wave energy in the oceans and ocean currents , geothermal and of course coal. The whole solar and wind thing is artificially being forced on people.
It is not even close to true that coal plants are reliable continuous sources of electricity. They need to be shut down for maintenance and can also have unplanned stoppages. Renewables actually tend to be much more reliable in this regard in that they tend to consist of many much smaller units so there is no large 'maintenance' windows to worry about. Even hydro electric or nuclear plants need maintenance.
Renewables are reliable? It is well known that the sun sets everyday and many days are clouded over. Wind likewise is unreliable and even worse you can’t tell how long it will be unusable. Then there are very strong windy days where the wind is too strong then windmills have to stopped to avoid damage. Nuclear is my favourite, small land area, massive power, and can run for years without stopping. There are about 14 such plants in Ontario where I live and some have been running for about 55 years with no problems.
@@edwardcoulter9361 Wind and solar have regular patterns and do need some battery backup solutions, but my point is they are regular and predictable whereas larger power stations can break down in a more unpredictable way leaving the grid with a very large amount of production missing for and extended period of time. You say the nuclear plants in Ontario have been running for 55 years 'with no problems' but you don't mention how often they are offline for maintenance/refueling. You are probably simply not aware that they do that. Probably be cause they have installed more capacity than they need. The same solution works with wind and solar to some degree. The difference is that when you install extra capacity with wind and solar that extra capacity can be used at minimal cost. Nuclear has many advantages over alternatives but the one big disadvantage is price, it is one of the most expensive forms of generation.
I will never understand why electric car owners think that they are being environmentally responsible. They seem to ignore the cost to the Earth and to the slaves at the mines.
WHOAH NOW! Don`t mess around with these woke leftists! You might cause more peaceful protests! We can`t afford anymore toxic smoke and PCPs in the air, water, and soil. They`ve already done enough environmental damage and sentenced millions to DNA damage and cancer!
They are no slaves who are mining this neither children only family who work together with thier children since in western world children don't help parents doesn't mean everywhere is same.
What this videos have to do with electric cars.and also normal gas powered cars are more horrible than electric the more longer you use them the worse they become.
Gigantic oil and gas tankers could be employed as floating offshore storage capacity to store harnessed energy from offshore power generation installations , like offshore wind turbines or wave and tidal power generators. In countries with land scarcity, the offshore energy storage strategy provides "gross value energy storage capacity", due to its close proximity to Metropolitan port cities.
How exactly are you storing energy in the tanker? If you're liquefying green hydrogen, the ship is very expensive and it's going to sail away to sell the hydrogen to Japan for its hydrogen economy™ boondoggle. Most plans for hydrogen energy storage call for storing it in underground salt caverns. A huge battery energy storage system does not take up a lot of space,; the problem is the cost of a GWh of batteries.
The best battery are those that have been forged inside a super nova explosion. Uranium, thorium, plutonium are all insanely energy dense and extremely plentiful. Using fast breeder reactors we could power the world off of our current spent nuclear fuel for almost a whole century. That's just off of the high level nuclear waste just sitting around being radiative waiting for long term storage ATM.
Three problems: 1. If all countries were to supply their energy need by fission, in 30 years there would be no more minable material. The required isotopes for fission are far from common or abundant. Together with the fact that a new reactor takes up to 10 years to build and Bilions and is the most expensive form of energy we can currently use, not feasible 2. Nuclear faces the same problem as renewables: nuclear reactors can't react to spikes or lows, they always produce the same output and changing the output amount takes weeks to take effect. 3. I want to see that thorium reactor. A physicist friend sometimes jokes about what will be finished first, Iter or a commercial thorium reactor able to use U233. By now there are just prototypes and countries like Norway are building their commercial version for two decades by now and spending tripple digit Billions. With Thorium reactors take too long to build to react to the current energy and climate crisis and they cost more than many countries earn in a year
@@fatalityin1 three counter arguments 1) that maybe true if you only use thermal reactors that derive their power from the fissioning of U235 which is only about 0.7% of the uranium in existence. Fast breeder reactors can utilize the much more plentiful U238 which accounts for the other 99.3% of uranium supply. We can power all of the world's energy needs from the worlds spent nuclear fuel for close to 70 years. Current reserves can carry us for literal millennium. 2) it's untrue that a reactor can't react to changing load, I myself have served on an aircraft carrier and we'd frequently alter reactor power answering various bells. I'm not saying all reactors can do this but it's possible. But outside of that there's many ways to even things out, just like with renewables. But I'd say it's a little more favorable for nuclear as it's heat can be used to drive useful chemical reactions directly. Reactions to make hydrogen, chemical fertilizer, synthetic aviation fuel, etc. Or it's heat can be stored directly for transients using molten salts as a medium. 3) fast breeder reactors can run on thorium as well. There are some fast breeders operational around the world today including one getting built in Wyoming in America. The don't run on thorium but they don't really need to since uranium is so plentiful, especially since they can run on "depleted" fuel from thermal reactors. But as I said before, the current reserves of uranium could power the world for over a thousand of years. This didn't include the billions of tons of uranium in the oceans but just includes what humanity had access to today (~10 million tons). I don't see any reason not to pursue thorium though as it has roughly the same energy density as uranium and it's more abundant giving us even more thousands of years of energy budget
@@zaurenstoates7306 To 1 and 3: you are naming numbers to all sources that are albeit plentifull either extremely ineconomic (filtering sea water would drive the price for nuclear power from currently 200$/MWh to around 500$/MWh) or simply infeasible (filtering earth's crust where 99% of U235 is located). To U238: 238 is used to min/max U235 rods longevity transforming U238 into U239. U238 can not realistically be used as sole fission material but is added at between 24%-30% to U235 rods. And finally, are you really comparing a nuclear boat with max 800MWh (most likely closer to 400 in day to day usage) to a modern commercial nuclear reactor with up to 6TWh output and saying that both can be as easily upscaled and downscaled? But that nuclear fission is very slow at adapting to energy needs is public news, if you don't believe me, a quick 2 seconds google search would give you the result. And maybe you want to talk about how nuclear is to most expensive form of energy creation? You ignored my point to that.
@@fatalityin1 Adding to your 3rd point, Molten Salt Reactors have been just around the corner for decades. As one wag put it: "X is the power source of the future, and always will be." Where X is fusion, MSR,... I don't mean to denigrate them, but endless hype doesn't help.
If the suitable mountain landscapes for the first solution are relatively rare, can't the cliffs by the sea be also used? I guess the reservoirs would have to be either made of concrete, or have some other lining to protect the surrounding nature from salt if the terrain is not rocky, but it would widen the choice significantly. Or am I missing something, like salt water can't be used or whatever? I was just intrigued by that statement, and besides there are many wind turbine installations in water, so they could choose locations suitable for both generation and storage etc...
You would flood a massive area of land for very little energy storage. Coastal cliffs are almost at sea level, they have very little gravitational potential energy. You ideally want your reservoir on top of a high mountain.
Gravity is an extremely weak force. Gravity storage is only worthwhile when nature supplies huge upper and lower storage areas (lakes or reservoirs) with a large height difference and a huge working mass (the Northfield pumped hydro in the video holds 20 million tonnes of water).
It's improper to say you're storing energy in this video (not directly), in fact, you store raw material to produce energy. It is similar to storing coal or hydrogen or gasoline. A.C. cant be stored, but D.C. can be stored in batteries - see photovoltaic systems.
Here's an idea: some mountains block clouds and have a dry side, build pumped hydro on them and instead of returning the water the same way, irrigate the other side and produce food while creating electricity.
@@XFDADX Hungry people don't care about environment or climate, and with the artificial famine coming soon, there will be lots of hungry ones. Also, greening the useless dry regions helps with carbon sequestering.
@@KiaAzad Everyone is on the side of not letting people suffer (because we are an endangered species after all) doing exactly what causes more suffering 🤌
As others have said, pumped hydroelectric is nothing new. I live in New Milford, Ct. not far from the Rocky River Hydroelectric Plant. Built in the late 1920's, it's credited as the first major project of this type the in US. It uses man-made Candlewood Lake as the upper reservoir, and the Housatonic River as the lower. Candlewood is fairly large lake with shorelines in several Western Connecticut towns, and a popular recreational resource. Of the people that enjoy this lake regularly, I doubt that many are aware of it's original purpose.
Love this one, thx. Will you teach us about aerated static composting? How much easier it’s creation is compared to the old manual rotation methods. Please share why this Biodiverse Compost helps create resilient farm crops, according to Elain Engam Food Soil Web, founder. it’s worth looking into. Im a handyman with a leaf blower, a tarp and a garden hose. Making high value Biodiverse compost.
A drip irrigation below the compost pile with occasional application of water and small amount of continuous air flow would be worth considering to accelerate composting process if that is the objective.
@@robertrogers6830informative response thank you. Something you may find interesting along this line, Robert. My chat with a famous Utuber, Hehe. That’s not all, Growing ur greens, John. Modern science agree’s. Our trash can be turned into High biodiversity Compost. High biodiversity Compost must be kept alive and moist. After only 30 mins oxygen levels in an unaerated compost pile will have dropped and the anaerobic bacteria emerge. Only living aerated static made type composts have large enough amounts of required biodiversity including: Nematodes, fungi, and anthropoids to name a few. In order to have a regenerative restart on most of our depleted American/worlds farmland soils and help insure National/world future food recourse. It’s Composts that will secure our food, not just money. 70% of Americans waist is compostable.
@@robertrogers6830 My chat with a famous Utuber. Hehe That’s not all, Growing your greens, John. Modern science agrees, our trash can be turned into High biodiversity Compost. High biodiversity Compost must be kept alive and moist. After only 30 mins, oxygen levels in an unaerated compost pile will have dropped and the anaerobic bacteria emerge. Only living aerated static made type composts have large enough amounts of required biodiversity including: Nematodes, fungi, and anthropoids to name a few. To have a regenerative restart on most of our depleted American/world's farmland soils and help insure National/world future food recourses. It’s Composts that will secure our food, not just money. 70% of Americans waste is compostable. So make a pile and donate it to your farmer today!
More resurch needs done on siphon power to generate electricity. Example pump ocean water from California to Great salt lake utah in a pipe line that is designed to siphon the ocean water to the salt lake and generate electricity when the siphon is active. Yes the pipe would have to be above ground on a tower to raise the water to a height above sea level to form a siphon effect. Pumps would be used to fill the pipe, and get air out of the system, to get the siphon started. Careful study of topographical maps will determine the best route possible for creating siphon pipe line. Tunneling through mountain ranges will be required. In some places.
I am working on a video on a similar topic to this about power storage and I learned about this fascinating thing called gravity battery. The future is going to be LIT by batteries lol
Another thing companies should be working on is "casual productivity." Figuring out how to build a factory or something that is actually practically useful, but that can turn on and off almost instantly, and only needs to operate when power is available. In that way, when there is excess power in the system, this facility could make something that takes a lot of energy. When power is low, everything would completely shut down. Obviously this would not be as productive as a 24/7 operation, but it wouldn't necessarily need to be, since it would be more efficient (using only "excess" energy), and would also need to be relatively low human-resource, just people checking in from time to time to make sure everything is running, rather than having a bunch of humans wandering around that would have nothing to do when the power is not available. If they can manage this sort of project well, then it would be a much more efficient use of variable resources than any form of storage.
A Bright future awaits electricity storage the iron batteries sound like a positive when you have Australia basically as one massive continent made of Iron ore's & materials. My favourite source for energy has always been geothermal taping into earths own energies.
The problem is scaling up all these Earth friendly energy sources. If it was that easy and cheaper than current solutions, it would have been done a long time ago. Solar and wind while they may work for individuals, it's a relatively inefficient way to generate electricity on a large cost effective scale. Nuclear and the currently experimental fusion are the most efficient means of getting large amounts of energy as cheaply as possible.
@@BillAnt Thanks for the input, here in New Zealand Geothermal makes up to 20% of our energy needs. The line of thought you are on is part of the problem now if cost was taken out of the mix & countries didn't all have their own agenda's some of the sources you mention probably could have been a reality by now as we have a massive resource (Unless your in a landlocked country) in using tidal energy but everyone wants to be first in the race same as fusion tech the know how & theoretic's have been around for years its only now when we are on the precipice that actual movement like in Japan has started but global destruction & dwindling resources are a great motivator in the energies race. Funny thing NZ doesn't have any Nuclear energies & unlike some countries we also don't have regular electricity blackouts our grid is old but as the greener energies come on line we embrace & try to improve instead of being reliant on potentially nightmare tech.
@@BillAnt with the pay as you go healthcare of the US in 20-30 years there will only be a fraction of the population you have now, But it's quite sad that out of the hundreds of millions of people in that one country your people aren't doing more just consuming at a rate the planet can't keep up with in fact most countries even my own are doing the same however we have actual departments of government devoted to renewable energies something your oil lobbyists would stop in a heartbeat, But no country is perfect some just want to help its citizens & some don't exactly the same as the environment.
There is clean coal plant CO2 sequestration demonstration project never built called NetZero or ZeroGen by US Dept of Energy. Cancelled since late 1990s. I worked for DOE. Much info has been taken off internet about it. 🤔
Also agree to move electricity across states or countries using high voltage DC transmission. NZ in 1965 with a population of 2.6million already put in a 600km line which carried 600 megawatts. That is mainly north to south but large east west conglomerates could transfer solar power from sunny to less sunny areas. Or wind power.
Half the city populations don’t have a roof, nor any property to put up a solar array. I have lots of roof but have waited 25 years to grow decent shade to reduce the heat load. I am not going to sacrifice my trees for solar. Not too far back roof solar was not economical as the quoted cost would have been barely paid by the energy recovered just at end of life of the array (about 20 years). Clearly not worth the cost or bother. You green fanciers have to realize that wind and solar energy is neither practical nor affordable to the majority of the population. You also need an expensive Solar Wall to get through the night.
the US would need 150,000 megawatts of transmission lines east to west. 346 million pop. and no one wants a transmission line built. Reaserch the grain belt transmission line from Iowa to chicago. Unbuilt for 10 years.
.@@kkarllwt wrote: "the US would need 150,000 megawatts of transmission lines east to west. 346 million pop. and no one wants a transmission line built. Reaserch the grain belt transmission line from Iowa to chicago. Unbuilt for 10 years" I reply: The grain belt struggle is about not wanting solar panels covering land. And they are not even considering solar panels for shade. High voltage direct current lines do not make the alternating EMF of the alternating current transmission lines which quite rightly people don' like to live under.
I had that very idea 30+ year's ago. A pond or lake as a giant battery. And possibly charged by lightning bolts that are coaxed down ,by a small rocket trailing a wire.
@@isk8atparks yes I agree...but I had to add my 2 cents...not worried if someone takes my idea and does something with it...it's obvious to me i'm not going to do anything with my many ideas.. .too busy scratching and clawing to make ends meet
Water dam storage turbine is an old idea used here in Virginia since 1970s. TVA Tennessee valley authority hydro also. Quebec hydro uses tides.. Awesome clean energy.
Theoretically thinking, It would be nice if such batteries can be scaled to also double as massive reservoirs for rain water. And not much need to rely on pumping water up from rivers…. when droughts hit due to hot summers some of this water can be released into the water grid and generating electricity at the same time. There are some challenges of course especially the demand for both water and electricity at particular times.
P.s. The industrial revolution was enabled by acquiring energy dense fuel which required reductions in mass to facilitate storage and transport. Solar and wind infrastructure reverses the energy density trend with predictable result.
It’s possible that ultra-large scale batteries will succeed perfectly where automotive batteries never can. So many viable formats exist for power storage on a very large scale that the term battery becomes quite flexible. Nature itself even creates some effective geological storage systems and our creations are refinements of the concept.
I have the strong sensation that getting electricity from green resources to pump water up to get again alectricity later is a 60% of energy trowed away.
Modern pumps and turbines are incredibly efficient, with the most modern stuff only having around a 1-5% total energy loss over any given time. That level of energy loss would be about the same as lost energy in the form of heat when charging batteries.
Underwhelming video. Pump storage is a bit of an old hat and the Iron-Air batteries are experimental at best. Still I’d maybe enjoyed the video if it wasn’t 14 minutes long.
Seems obvious that you can use different storage methods in different areas. Use power hydro where it’s available. Use gravity storage in mine shafts where available, use batteries where needed. Why does there only have to be one solution everywhere?
Yes, but despite a recent period of decline in solar output, the world is getting warmer. It's a complex system, and anyone who says it's one thing doesn't understand it.
I have two homes, each running a microgrid of 100Kw powered by fuel cells, and the heat is recovered and used to heat the houses and the two pools. - These guys got too many degrees!
Electric energy is great, but please stop mentioning the climate change BS. Let's focus on making air quality better in cities, and power supply sustainable for next generations.
![Lp. Сердце Вселенной #60 РОЖДЕНИЕ ЛОЛОЛОШКИ [Финал] • Майнкрафт](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/YoR0pAV9FVQ/mqdefault.jpg)
We have a similar device here in Czech Republic. It's called Dlouhé Stráně and it's an absolute technological marvel, built right into a natural reservation with esthetics and ecology in mind. I've been to multiple hikes there and an excursion. Some people hate it, because they cut a hill top flat, but I try to see the bigger picture. It's amazing.
at 7:05 they are Dlouhé stráně
...but these people want safe and green electricity...
@@joellebandan5244 wdym?
Yep we have same thing in Slovakia for 40 or 50 years, called Čierny Vah , also in natural reservation with beautiful views all around.
For 33 years I worked as an electrical engineer for a place that had pump storage facilities in California (the largest one) that was built in the 60's. We were no longer able to use it as pump storage because the pump and generators (synchronous motors, transformers, auxiliary equipment, and etc.) were old and cost of repair and maintenance were exceeding the benefits. There is a cost for everything. You can’t get something for nothing. One rewind would cost $5M and one transformer refurbishment would cost $1.5M……..
Our alternative is letting go of the struggle to keep California from burning down, drying up, and blowing away. We are going to have to prioritize the money.
@@aluisious California power problem is man made. They have not had new power plant, hydro, nuclear, etc.. in past 40 years despite the population doubled.
Just like solar panels installed on the rooftop of residential and commercial properties (i.e. there are long-term costs for repairs and maintenance). 🌞🏠🏣
Yes because nobody was able to do it and the one person who could was in so much demand that he could charge what he wanted. But what did it cost to build it, in today's dollars? And what part costs the most? And what's the cheapest it could cost? There are many people looking for work... what is missing? The initiative. New facilities are built daily... how can they make it? SpaceX exists because they did not accept what things cost, and started from the raw ore costs and worked their way up and eliminated all the bottlenecks.
@@Mindcroscope thats the catch, Solar panel in general doesn't require maintenance or negligible amount of maintenance cause there is no moving parts 🙂(just clean the panel with a hose pipe)
Switzerland has many pumped hydro powerplants already and we build even more. In my valley is a project with 1350m head and 1050 MW installed electric power. It is a very neat form of energy storage.
If only Switzerland could export mountains.
@@jimvj5897 Switzerland can export electricity.
Switzerland exported over 30,000,000 megawatt (MW) hours in 2020. Long-distance electricity transmission is significantly more efficient than most people realize.
You're not worried about killing the natural fisheries? Shame!
@@sw8741 You're not worried about killing the unloved electrons? Shame!
Hello fellow swiss person! Ja ich finds au no cool das mir so viel wasserkraftwerk händ, und es macht mich stolz druf än schwitzer z si ;)
One overlooked pump storage option is the Salton Sea and Pacific Ocean in California. Pump water out of the Salton Sea at night using geothermal energy and produce hydroelectric power during the day by adding Pacific ocean water to the Salton Sea. The surface area of the Salton sea is 343 square miles. There is a 225 feet of elevation difference between the Salton Sea and Pacific Ocean. They have already bored a hole in the mountain between the imperial valley and San Diego to transport fresh water. They could drill another one for this battery storage idea. Another advantage is you effectively reduce the high salinity of the Salton Sea while improving air quality of the imperial valley by covering the entire dry lake bed.
You should do a series on all these alternatives. There are about 20 contenders, including Sodium batteries, Redox flow, gravity, liquid air, H2, heat capacitors, etc. All of these could be scaled to GWh.
great but energy storage will depend on a steady production of excess energy from green sources (mainly solar and wind...) it also comes with an additional energy cost/waste.
@@rimshot6444 Not steady excess, but at least regular excess. Or even nuclear, as that delivers a very constant power, but demand is fluctuating over the day. That's what France does with hydro storage.
That's a lot of research work, filming, editting, etc.
Will you pay him extra to do all this work?
We need more distributed (local) storage and solar generation
No he shouldn't cuz it's b*******. The vast majority of climate change is driven by all the erupting volcanoes around the world. Humans have very little to do with climate change. Don't believe me do some real research. Stop listening to people that are paid to tell you.
Lots of kudos to engineers involved in these projects
all of them african
@@bogdan1213 racist
Of all races and ethnicities.
We're all humans after all :)
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And Kudos to those brave public servants who bring forth the motion to vote on these projects.
Small modular reactors, specifically designed to replace the existing coal, oil and gas boilers in existing power stations have a great future: all of the downstream power generation facilities: the turbines, generators, power conditioning, control and reticulation is already in place. So a major target to retro fit existing power stations nuclear units in the micro 50MW, small to 300MW and full sized with multi unit up to 1GW is still the best way to go, for quick CO2 reduction. We just have to get over the bad press that nuclear has had for decades.
SMR is going to be a huge part. Every time people start talking about nuclear and climate change they start getting all excited about fusion, which has never been demonstrated to yield excess energy outside of a bomb. We've got to get real honest about what we have the tech to do in 5 years.
I was told once that when nuclear energy was first worked on. The scientists figured out that micro units were the most stable and sustainable.
Germany's overdose of renewable energy article
All of the companies developing liquid molten sodium thorium small salt modular reactor blah blah blah designs are 10 years and 10 billion dollars away from demonstrating that their small reactors actually will be cheaper per MWh and quicker to build than current nuclear generation.
It's definitely worth researching, and I hope some of them actually deliver, but they're all irrelevant to the rapid decarbonization we need to achieve in the next decade.
The absurd delays and enormous cost overruns of the few nuclear plants under construction aren't "bad press," they're facts.
@@skierpage Who is mentioning small modular reactors except Gates and others who are dangerous with their explosive coolant. Your knowledge is very shallow, when writing about renewables infrastructure cost has to be mentioned, otherwise it makes no sense. Nothing about this make much sense.
Get your facts straight; USA had molten salt reactor running in 60's, results were great but funds cut because of oil lobby. As i'm writing this another plant MSR with Th fuel is running in China, their plan is to make all ele. this way by 2050. They will succeed. Russia has lots of knowledge about MSR too, unfortunately they don't get the same chances as other, despite urgency to move on!
South Korea just made several reactors for UAE for 7 billions in 7 years, since there are several at the same site other will be put online later. Chins is also capable of doing it but they rather focus on their needs. Things in UAE are going according to plans because they don't allow corruption we have here in EU and US.
SMRs (not MSRs, very different) are similar to those battery plants, very expensive and make no sense when we can resolve the problem with normal nuclear fission reactors of 3rd+ Gen.
You are right in saying it is worth researching this things, although burning fossil fuels and using batteries make no sense. They only do it because government pays for it. I hope rest of the world doesn't need the same lection Germany just had, here ya go again:
"Germany's overdose of renewable energy" article.
3:24 Northfield Mountain, Massachusetts; 50 year-old pumped hydro storage. 1.2 GW peak output. 7:40 iron air battery.
Pumped hydro is great, it allows for massive energy storage at *reasonable* costs there needs to be more initiative globally to support more projects like this though so that more significant energy storage is available
not sure if it would be cost effective, but it may work together with offshore windfarming and coastal desalination plants.
"reasonable" if you don't insider the construction time (during which the "dirty" generation remains) the construction cost ("billion dollar projects") and the declining number of sites available.
In Norway and other places with natural reservoirs, pumped hydro is a no brainer. We just have to build up a lot of wind farms.
@@la7dfa wasn't norway and germany doing an offshore windfarm project together?
Except the guy literally said that the geography is the problem, unless you are thinking in transporting thousands of tons of water and literally creating artificial mountains.
Then I don't think its economically viable anymore.
Ambri's new liquid metal battery, in my mind, takes the lead in this. Low cost and the fact they are shipped already built is going to change everything. I think they are releasing the first ones this year. I think each "battery" is a shipping container that can store 1MW (or something like that). Also easily scalable to GWh levels. They stack, no parts to replace, and are easily and quickly swappable. Super excited for them to take it mainstream.
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Wow
Nobody is going to buy Ambri's battery because it needs to be maintained at 450 degrees centigrade or so in order to function. It's a non starter.
@Daniel Meyers Nobody wants a battery that has to be kept heated at that temperature. It's an absurd idea that would be rejected within a minute in any board room.
@Daniel Meyers Interesting, so which company is currently using the batteries?
I think its worth mentioning that the type of salt used in the electrolysis that produces hydrogen would favorably be a non chlorine salt
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You don't need a salt to split water with electricity to produce hydrogen and oxygen. There are processes and catalysts that claim to accelerate electrolysis like alkaline hydrolysis, but it takes energy to maintain the high temperatures these require, which in China comes from burning coal. Example: "This article concerns the low-cost and green electrolytic production of hydrogen operating at such a low voltage performed by the dissolution of steam in high temperature molten salt electrolytes"
The Connections (2021) [short documentary] 🌳
Their company is called "Form energy," specifically leaving the "e" in energy as lowercase, because that makes their initials "Fe," which is the chemical symbol for iron. Brilliant.
I personally think they should layer sheets of iron instead, inserted between sheets of graphene.
Graphene is made of Carbon which is also very abundant.
The lattices of graphene shouldn't interact with the Iron oxidation and would help to provide a gap between iron sheets increasing its exposed surface per weight.
@@Supremax67 I think it is a goal of theirs to remove all carbon sources from the process though, which may have influenced their decision to steer away from the graphene solution. I may be mistaken on their wishes though. The video talked about a couple different companies.
Maybe when quantum dots become more advanced, then they can give such batteries extra power.
Again and again the most reliable source of 24/7 source of power with sustainable fuel sourcing is being neglected- Splitting Uranium, Thorium and Plutonium in well tested nuclear reactors. Only "wind and solar" mantra of something that performs so poorly (and with high material and environmental cost). Nuclear power could have been ideal partner for storage technologies to- enabling even higher utilisation of its cheap fuel for peak day usage to. Most sustainable in long run.
I agree
I feel like at this point they’re ignoring it on purpose. How else are we supposed to advance other forms of technology if we settle.
If only it weren't so expensive. LCOE is quite a bit higher.
@@tbhbananas9922 Biggest problem with nuclear is starting costs, then tear down costs. Nobody ants to deal with the teardown and getting rid of the waste . It has to be a government driven thing, private industry sees it as too many hurdles for what they make for profits
SMRs are going to be part of the equation.
This technology has been used for decades, especially in Canada & Russia. There’s nothing new here, it’s been extensively used in many countries.
Hey, I remember going to visit the Northfield Mountain pumped storage facility as a teen. My grandparents lived in Amherst (also where I ended up going to college) so one summer when I was visiting my grandfather took me there for one of their public tours. It's so large that I couldn't really get a grasp of the scale while visiting.
The Huge, Weird Batteries of the Future 0722am 5.8.22 CAN YOU DERIVE ENERGY FROM MAGNETS OR MAGNETIZED ROCK ETC ETC ETC?
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Germany's overdose of renewable energy article
@@codaalive5076 !
@@JJONNYREPP FROM MAGNETIC FIELD, THIS WAS JUST DISCOVERED. nikola tesla. elon musk. bill gates-. = Alvin M. Weinberg's MSRE!
Hopefully we can get these ginormous batteries in service ASAP to help with the energy crisis especially during the summers and to help rebuild after floods
We need to stop building in flood prone areas.
The Huge, Weird Batteries of the Future 0733am 5.8.22 how carcinogenic is the clean energy working environment for those working in such an environment...?
Kollkl
@@jghall00 lolol like llllllll
😆
We started using the mobile from about 15 to 20 years ago. Though battery tech has improved hugely, we still need to charge the phone atleast once a day. Nothing really revolutionary has happened beyond incremental improvements which happen in any other field.
Energy consumption of phones has also increased a lot.
Not so true, you have now a computer that is more powerful than most computers 10 20 years ago in the palm of your hand.
@@danielvilliers612 exactly
@@danielvilliers612 true, that is more due to miniaturization of chips based on Moore's law. Also has it improved or radically changed people's lives like the refrigerator did? How many normal people can really afford such a computer and have use for it. We had heard of some battery development that had been done in MIT or some such institution that would radically improve battery life of small devices. Mobiles would need to be charged just once a week or so. But, years later nothing is in production.
That's because the better batteries were used in another way: To make the phones smaller and lighter. You could easily have a phone that would last a week, but no-one is going to buy that because it would be the size of a 90s phone - and uncomfortable bulge in the pocket. Customers demanded their phones be smaller, lighter, and thinner - and that is what they got, by reducing the size of the battery while maintaining the target of a once-per-day charge.
There has been one of these systems in Wales for many, many years. Never been been able to find out the running costs, maintenance costs and efficiency - odd that.
The Connections (2021) [short documentary] 🌳
A battery based on the property of iron to rust and derust sounds ingenious. Hope it can be made to work!
Climate-Anxiety; do you suffer from it?
Seems like a gigantic scam to me. They've raised 300 million dollars another 700 million then they will call it quits. 😅
@@itsourlife it's not a scam, it just faces engineering challenges to scale up (like every novel process). Those cost $millions in R&D to overcome, and the company may run out of money before it demonstrates it can solve them affordably.
@@skierpage There's an art of making money without having to ever sell anything really. This is what it really is. Come back few years later when the company has shut down.
The Connections (2021) [short documentary] 🌳
All I understood from this video is that iron-air batteries are crazy complicated, even though the process is "just" rusting and unrusting iron.
assumably, like nickel and lithium batteries had once been.
There are always practical matters. The rust takes up a larger volume than the iron, so there's a terrible problem with the electrodes growing and shrinking, and gradually falling apart. The same problem is one of the limits on lifespan for lead-acid batteries.
and apparently causes the women that work on it to lose their hair
Like electrolysis
Volcano has molten (or melted) iron.
May be battery researchers should look into the possibility of making a series of giant "Iron-air Batteries" of a dormant volcano (i.e. a volcano that has erupted in the past but is unlikely to erupt soon). 👀🌋
We should talk about "energy matrix transformation" instead of "energy transition"....the system has to include broader elements i.e. Water Management.
The Connections (2021) [short documentary] 🌳
When talking pumped storage, one has to keep two things in mind: Capacity and means of recharging.
Northfield Mountain can produce about 1000 MW for 8 hours at full blast, then it needs to recharge. Meaning, it cannot run a city for any meaningfull amount of time. It is at best a giant emergency generator. A peaker plant, if you will.
If you wanted to use facilities like this to supply a large city like New York with electricity during a time of, say, low wind and / or solar energy production for a week, you would need a dozen or more of these.
And THEN you need to recharge them. Meaning, after the time of energy scarcity, if you want to have them ready again as quickly as possible, you need not only produce the energy you need right now, you also need to produce the energy needed to recharge these things.
If we want to do the latter in the same time we used to discharge them, that means we need TWICE the amount of power production to run the country during charging time. An enormous amount of excess capacity, all of which of course will then lie dormant once the reservoirs are fully charged, because we do not actually NEED that much power.
If on the other hand, you want to charge it with the occasional overproduction which wind and solar tend to produce, then you risk them not being full enough when you DO need them, whcih you cannot predict, because weather.
On a side note, Northfield was build to balance the nearby Vermont Yankee Nuclear powerplant. It uses Nuclear power to recharge its battery, not wind or solar.
The main strategy for a grid with high amount of renewable energy is to create better grid connections over a larger area. There's never zero wind and solar over a large area.
Yes, overproducing is what we'll have to do, so that the minimum output satisfies our baseload need. But in a future where we've solved climate change we are going to have a LOT of flexible load to accept the "excess". That's almost true by definition. We're electrifying all the things that used fuels, i.e. the thing where we needed flexible, portable energy.
Battery electric cars and hydrogen or ammonia trucks/ships/planes will represent a massive amount of flexible load. Hydrogen production in particular, which we also need for steel and fertilizers. Electrolysis plants are relatively cheap, and hydrogen can be stored. We can even feed hydrogen back to the grid if we really need to.
Batteries will mainly serve to smooth things out more, stabilize the frequency and maximize the value we get out of renewable energy.
Seasonal variations up north is best handled by burning trash. Yes. Reuse, reduce, recycle first. But eventually everything turns into low grade trash, and it's best in the end to burn it and filter out all the pollutants we've injected into so much of what we make. Could be combined with CCS to make it net carbon negative too.
@@auspiciouslywild If I understand this correctly your argument rests on a statement/assumption you made at the beginning:
"There's never zero wind and solar over a large area"
Two things about that. One, it is factually incorrect. Large power generation deficits can occur over large areas over extended periods of time.
To name two examples, Europe as a whole experienced significantly reduced Wind energy production during the last year, and during hurricane seasons, significantly large portions of countries like the united states will be cut of from both wind and solar energy production for weeks at a time.
If situations like the above should coincide with significant temporary loss of power generation in other parts of the country, which is bound to happen frequently, then the country in question would have a problem.
Two, your premise would require flexible long distance transportation of electricty. That is not really something we want to do, either because of the losses in energy it will result in, or the need for specialized infrastructure to prevent these losses.
To achieve the latter across a country like the US, you would need a secondary power grid in addition to the existing one, simply for the long range lossless transport of electricity.
Both of these options are enormously expensive, thus making electricity generation more expensive.
Not that you seem to have a problem with expensive energy, or you would not have mentioned Hydrogen. 30 Percent efficiency in the hydrogen cycle means three times the energy production, and thus three times the energy price.
@@Alexander_Kale very true look how droughts have disabled hydropower over large areas, not to mention loss of cooling water limits all other forms of thermal electric power generation (steam turbines), so that affects the obvious carbon oxidation but also the less obvious nuclear as is currently affecting France.
Grids over large areas, especially east- west orientation extends the solar day, many countries like Australia China USA and Europe can gain from this about 3 hours.
Grids like this are built in China over 3000kms running at a million volts DC.
It’s just the West hasn’t got the same long term planning ability, with their short popularity elected government terms.
@@williamgoode9114 Cooling cycles do not absolutely require water to function. True, a lot of them NOWADAYS are build that way, but you can absolutely create air coolers for steam turbine coolant.
Matter of fact, in places with water scarcity, this is already being done. The reason we normally don't is because we so far didn't have to content with water scarcity of any meaningful severity.
Second, the same issue of long distance high volume electricity transfer applies no matter were you do it, be that in the US or in CHina. if the chinese really want to shuffle large amounts of electricity around their country like this, then this would be just as moronic there as if done in the West.
Finnaly, if given the choice between living in a struggling democracy and a totalitarian state like China, I would choose the democracy ten times out of ten.
At least in the former, I don't suddenly disappear when I point out the problems...
@@auspiciouslywild I agree with you, I don’t think the OP recognizes this will be part of a varsity of sources and stores of energy, not just this. Also we still need to continue developing this type of sustainable technology, we’ve barely started! we wasted a lot of time, while giving oil companies endless handouts and passes after making the ocean light on fire and destroying ecosystems.
No matter how hard oil companies indirectly lobby against the nuclear energy it's still the future of cleanest energy we have till this day.
No it's not. The majority of new generation is wind and solar because they're cheap and quick. No private utility will build a current-generation nuclear plant that takes 15 years and $15 billion. And it will take 15 years and $15 billion for each of the next-generation liquid sodium molten fluoride small thorium modular blah blah nuclear reactor designs to prove whether it actually will be cheaper per MWh and quicker; they're worth R&D for future decarbonization, but they're irrelevant to achieving the rapid reduction in fossil fuel burning we need this decade.
The economic case for nuclear is even worse now than it was a decade ago, in the face of renewable electricity that is intermittently dirt cheap.
The Connections (2021) [short documentary] 🌳
Wouldnt water evaporation in the top reservoir, being equivalent to energy lost, be a problem? I wonder what the loss percentage is
It would be very, very tiny. A fraction of a percent, insignificant compared to other inefficiencies in the process. Water evaporation rate depends mostly on the surface area of the water, and will be a certain depth per day depending on air humidity, temperature, etc. Apparently pools lose about 1/4 inch of water per day. A useful pumped storage facility would probably see turnover thousands of times higher than this. You'd be more worried about the cost of building it, the cost of the turbines and pumps and the cost of maintaining them, and also the efficiency of the turbines.
Due to the cycles typically being Daily 24hrs pump up and down. Water evaporation during that time is very tiny. But yes if you left it up there for a few months just leaking and evap would waste a large fraction of your water/ energy potential.
Evaporative losses depend on surface area as you say but also on the weather. Wind velocity, temperature (a big one), and humidity. I agree that such losses would be minuscule though.
@@edwardcoulter9361 Yeah, I was tired and didn't feel like working out a realistic number based on the formulas when I posted that.
Great point! But wouldn't rain them Add to the efficiency?
How much power is needed to pump the water up relative to how much is produced when it's going down? What about water evaporation loss? I'm very interested in this.
I’d like the answers to those questions also. Waiting for thunderf00t debunk video 😉
Well, the thing to notice is that he said this was originally used in conjunction with a nuclear power plant. In a nuclear power application it makes sense since the nuclear plant is always generating power so you just use some it. However, to use this system as is being suggested, a lot of power would have to be spent and the claim is that wind and solar will provide it. I think that is a bit of a stretch. That is also considering that this place already existed and is being repurposed. To build such a facility from scratch would take an enormous amount of energy and all of that cost would have to be recovered before it could claim to be self-sufficient. No word on the environmental impact of all the mining necessary to hollow out mountains or to build artificial mountains for this purpose.
Pumped hydro is usually greater than 80% efficient.
80% over short term
they pump at night when energy usage is lowest.
No way! I have been brainstorming this idea of pumping and reserving water as an energy storage facility or device, for the last year. I am a Chef/microbiologist, not an engineer. I have been given this inspiration from naturally working through the problem of how to store energy generated by wind turbine off the, oh, I almost told you where. How about that, someone has already figured it out. Bravo!
A couple of common misunderstandings about wind energy. You can vary electrical output per turbine on many of them, feathering(twisting) the blades and braking are two methods. Also you can dump excess energy into some of them by spinning up the blades and turning them to face into/away from the wind. If you know its going to be windy enough to generate in a few minutes you can set up the turbines to harvest more effectively... A bit more sophisticated level of controls than gas/hydro/... but also useful in some cases.
You say the controls are a bit more sophisticated, but in reality those controls serve only to get optimal use out of wind power to overcome its shortcomings and limitations, which are actually not present for gas.
They also have a short lifespan
@@timgibson3754 Lifespan is based on manufacturer, design, implementation, operating conditions, care of maintenance. They can be designed for long term use, and some are. However you need to consider it's still relatively early in the development of wind harvesting. Expect significant improvements in cost, reliability, production output and flexibility. Lots of design options exist for cheaper storage as well, just lifting water back into a hydro storage(dam) with available wind offer's huge potential. Especially in colder/wetter/windier climates. Most current wind harvesting uses moving parts, but even that is not required. Clever people are spraying ions into the air and then capturing the energy from the wind as the ions flow past a sensor plate. Don't be so easily fooled by press that wants to dumb you down...
I wonder if we should use the term battery for all energy storage, or differentiate it as electrochemical storage. I can see using the term being useful for explaining to the layman, but it could also be used as a simile.
Sad to see nuclear not being used with renewables and pump storage.
Could it be because of $$$...???
Yeah its the most sustainable source of energy we have that can also be deployed pretty much anywhere
Nuclear is the best form of energy hands down!
If you like spending 15 years and $15 billion to build a single plant. There's a reason cheap and quick wind and solar are the majority of new generation in the USA and globally.
5:56
“....With nuclear industries in decline....”
Wait why is nuclear industries in decline? Nuclear is the most reliable, greenest and cheap form of energy this earth has to offer.
"Cheapest" 😅. Go tell the economists behind Lazard's Levelized Cost of Electricity report that they're wrong. New nuclear is 3-5 times more expensive than wind or solar per MWh, and takes 15 years. That's why wind and solar are the majority of new generation in the USA and globally, and why no utility will build a new nuclear plant using current-gen technology. Maybe one or more of the next-generation liquid modular fluorine salt thorium blahblah small reactors will prove to be cheap and quick to build, after another 10 years and $10 billion of research and development...
@@skierpage Ok a couple things. When government subsidizes wind and solar, rejects several oil drilling permits and increases nuclear regulations you are going to have skewed numbers.
Spain did that and crashed their economy. Germany is now doing the same causing their citizens to pay almost double in their energy usage.
Texas had a black out for several weeks because their wind turbine froze and had No energy backups.
Why is China building more nuclear power plants on their land but selling their solar and wind products to the US?
Why are celebrities pushing for green energy while flying in their private jets causing more emissions?
Providing public Wind and solar to a country is nothing but a gimmick.
We've been doing this (pumped hydro) in Australia for over forty years.
say whaaaaaaaaaat? a corporative video trying to sell something we already knew about as a new technology??? COMPANIES LYING TO US?? nahhhh, it cant be!!! /s
I love how the interviewees describe solar and wind power as "more intermittent" instead of "less reliable".
Solar and wind *are* reliable. What is your point?
@@sudosu4133 Please tell me how a solar panel is reliable in winter when it's cloudy for weeks on end, or how wind panels are reliable when there is no little to no wind.
@@rikkertbatzback1816 First of all: You are changing your assertion. Please re-read your reply. You do not mention "solar panels" but "solar and wind power". Solar and wind power are very reliable. The power wind and solar devices can generate depends on the intensity of the wind and solar radiation. The intensity is variable and intermittent, but the reliability of the device generating that power depends on the reliability of the device itself, not on the energy source (wind or solar). Solar panels are very reliable converting solar radiation (sunlight) into energy and so are wind generators. The power they generate varies because the intensity of the sources is intermittent, not because the sources, or the wind or solar devices , are unreliable.
What I guess you wanted to say is that wind and solar intensity is variable while your energy consumption is much less so. This is precisely why we need energy storage, which is what this excellent video is all about. You obviously failed to understand that.
They're reliably unreliable- or put in another way, intermittently productive in a predictable way. They're perfectly reliable in terms of performance to spec.
Pumping water up to a high lake to store energy has been used in Ireland since 1969.
Turlough Hill Lake is filled with water by electric turbines when demand is low at night... but when you can't just switch off the power stations.
During high demand the water pours down the same pipe and reverses the very same turbines which feed the saved energy back to the electric grid.
energy storage only matters when the energy creating system is inefficient. hydro power is incredibly efficient and acts like a battery in that all of the energy not used by the system is transmitted back into the river itself and in a way not wasted. the reality is that even with all of the possible locations of hydro power in countries like America the governments choose to fund inefficient forms of power instead because they are controlled by oil, coal, and gas companies and so they need batteries to store all of the wasted energy from burning fuel because the reaction of burning fuel is not directly connected to the energy usage. so much of that energy is wasted because they need to produce more power than what is required to make sure they have enough power to avoid failure but with hydro power the turbines will react to the extra power being drawn and produce that power on demand with almost no overproduction.
Isn't it amazing, a technology known for a long time but unused, probably because it is "too cheap" for investors to get behind. It also seems it would generate little to no pollution, iron is mostly benign and used by most (if not all) organisms...
I live in switzerland and we already use this technology in several places. I think it is better than stationary lithium batteries. Less dangerous, toxic and cheaper in the long run
Switzerland has it since 1907, Luxembourg Vianden Pumped Storage Plant since 1959, Northfield was built in 1964
It is not cheap at all - it is VERY expensive. That is the problem.
The Connections (2021) [short documentary] 🌳
If you have an offshore wind park that converts directly to hydrogen, you could pipeline the hydrogen to land like it was a natural gas rig, and once at its destination, use the hydrogen to power fuel cells. now you have both a fuel and electricity, where the fuel is the battery. Nothing stores as much energy per gram as hydrogen.
Hydrogen is hard to transport. The atoms are so small that they escape through the walls of the piping. You will need allot of very expansive piping.
„Per gram“, yes. But hydrogen‘s problem is „per volume“.
@@horsthotzenplotz3321 they want to store spent co2 underground, they could just as well store hydrogen underground then get it out when its needed, natural gas style. zThat way natural gas technology can be used for green purposes, sam,e tech, different gas.
@@ghffrsfygdhfjkjiysdz thats why we need a lot of cheap energy, thus, fusion
There are lots of plans to build such offshore hydrogen generation plants, but you could also just send the generally-useful electricity to shore over a cable. Making the inefficient detour through hydrogen has to be worth doing over electrifying the process, which eliminates hydrogen for land transportation and home heating. The world will need megatonnes of green hydrogen, requiring a TW of renewable electricity, but it will be dwarfed by the rest of the renewable electricity market.
Excellent work solving a massive problem. Well done.
Yup! All, completely, 100% solved, forever. Great job everyone! Really, ZERO problems left for the world. We did it!
All of that is sarcasm, because of your dumb statement.
The Connections (2021) [short documentary] 🌳
A similar battery exists in Missouri. Water pumped up at night and flows through generators when it is needed.
Taum Sauk Reservoir
And remember when that failed!!!
Arizona too
Those guys will save our planet!! You go guys!!!!!
Very interesting... Energy storage is the key to the success of the green energy transition. Super-batteries, supercapacitors, pumped storage, hydrogen-to-gas, integration of electric vehicles into the grid operation... all these will have to work in tandem for success. Nuclear fusion that uses renewable materials, if successful at scale, will change everything.
@@buildmotosykletist1987 They were, but read the latest Lazard analysis: the unsubsidized levelized cost of electricity from wind and solar is now cheaper than any other form of new generation, and cheaper than continuing to operate a coal plant. They'll be the majority of new generation from here on out, even if and when tax credits for them go away.
We should tax fossil fuels for the undeniable massive harms that burning them cause now and in the future, but politicians are allergic to the 'T' word so we get tax incentives and credits for better alternatives instead.
@@buildmotosykletist1987 You pay for energy, not power. What are their figures per kWh?
The Connections (2021) [short documentary] 🌳💖
Liquid air energy storage and similar technologies like liquid CO2 energy storage and compressed air energy storage are likely to proved much cheaper at the grid scale.
„Which we all knew, a brownout“
I live in Germany since 25 years and never had a brownout, blackout or whatsoever. Power was always there
That was a comment for Americans. I had the largely same experience as you in the UK, and then I moved to the USA 23 years ago and experienced brownouts.
So what you're saying is that you live in a civilized country. ;-)
Let's hope that lasts. I get the feeling that Germany is going to have all sorts of energy issues over the next year or two.
@@gpsfinancial6988 nah why should it. The european grid is really interconnected and our neighbors France and danmark produce more energy then they need
@@CaptivaLP France is an importer now. They have not looked after their nuclear assets and are paying the price.
I did a project on the concept of pump storage during my masters degree in sustainability! We were trying to figure out how to make pump storage work in a very flat country with tons of water like the Netherlands.
It doesn't matter how you spin, it will take more energy to pump the water up to the holding reservoir then you'll ever get back when you release it to create electricity.
Yes, but if you have excess energy it's better than wasting that energy away.
There are always lithium batteries but those are also expensive, you need to replace those from time to time and they have other disadvantages as well, while a water battery will work for a lot longer and comes with a few other perks, like having a clean water reservoir at your disposal.
Yeah, that's what a battery is. There is no escaping the laws of thermodynamics
My man's dedication is over the top!
In order to keep it clean at the same time as being able to support all the time growing need for energy, the best solution is already there - nuclear plants!
Pumped storage is great (If you have the geological situation for it), but what I do not understand is why it is presented as new? It has been around for many decades already..
Nicely done very informative; now we just need to get it all done!
The Connections (2021) [short documentary] 🌳
Pumped hydro appears to be the only grid scale battery that can work cost effectively.
Pump storage actually uses more electricity than it generates, but great for peaking.
That’s all energy storage else it would provide you infinite energy.
Both wrong.
It is great for dealing with peaks in demand for electricity, but it really depends on what electricity you use to pump the water up to the upper reservoir.
If you limit the electricity to being the excess electricity being produced by renewable sources such as solar and wind, you add to the net generating capacity of all generators in the power grid, and you can consume that electricity when, the renewable sources are not available, such as night time when some solar is not available.
If you don't restrict it to excess renewable electricity, then the system's sole purpose is to help cope with peaks in demand, and the overall effect is there is a loss in electrical energy, caused by loses in the system where the kWh generated is less than the kWh used to pump the water up to the upper reservoir
@@deang5622 Please. Whatever source is used to charge a pumped storage project, solar-nuclear-gas, on discharge less comes back out again, as with *any* storage mechanism. Some charging sources may or may not be prone to excess at night like nuclear, but that doesn't change the loss. And, if economics is the topic w PHS projects, intermittent sources are a poor choice. PHS works best when charged every day of the year, typically at night when demand is lowest, and discharged during peak demand.
@@Nill757 I think you have failed to understand the key point of my post.
Firstly, there is no need to articulate further about the losses in your response as I comprehensively covered that topic. And nothing I said was factually incorrect in respect of that, so I see no merit in regurgitating it back in a response.
The key point is that there are two ways to use a pumped storage system:
1. To cope with peaks in demand and provide temporary extra generation capacity when that power is needed.
This does not add to the total net generation capacity in the network.
Or
2. To add to the total net generation capacity. But this does NOT happen if you are using electricity from coal, gas, nuclear to pump the water up from the lower reservoir to the higher reservoir.
So the idea here is, that energy from solar and wind generation stations is used to pump the water up, and you are then capturing the energy from the renewables and making it available when it wouldn't normally be available, and thereby overcoming the big problem with renewables.
The problem with renewables is that the available of the power is not guaranteed 24/7 so you need a base level of generation capacity which can meet the demand need, so storing the energy from renewables can reduce the base generation capacity that is needed from non renewables
How to build a fusion reactor that could be done today no problem (with a lot of money)
1) Build a 10 cubic mile reinforced water tank
2) detonate small fusion bombs in the tank
3) use the steam to produce power
Believe it or not, it actually would work as a highly efficient fusion reactor.
One word you never hear in this video is EFFICIENCY.
The other thing you'll never hear is cost.
One thing you'll never see is the professed but never present tipping point.
They did say cost for these are billion dollar project.
I did not hear efficiency, was looking for that one too
@4:37
Does anybody not see The absolute extreme similarity of the great pyramid of Giza in this?
Look at the tunnels and how they are shaped they’re almost identical. Hmmm…..
The thing is we don't have to rely on solar and wind. There is wave energy in the oceans and ocean currents , geothermal and of course coal. The whole solar and wind thing is artificially being forced on people.
It is not even close to true that coal plants are reliable continuous sources of electricity. They need to be shut down for maintenance and can also have unplanned stoppages. Renewables actually tend to be much more reliable in this regard in that they tend to consist of many much smaller units so there is no large 'maintenance' windows to worry about. Even hydro electric or nuclear plants need maintenance.
Renewables are reliable? It is well known that the sun sets everyday and many days are clouded over. Wind likewise is unreliable and even worse you can’t tell how long it will be unusable. Then there are very strong windy days where the wind is too strong then windmills have to stopped to avoid damage.
Nuclear is my favourite, small land area, massive power, and can run for years without stopping. There are about 14 such plants in Ontario where I live and some have been running for about 55 years with no problems.
@@edwardcoulter9361 Wind and solar have regular patterns and do need some battery backup solutions, but my point is they are regular and predictable whereas larger power stations can break down in a more unpredictable way leaving the grid with a very large amount of production missing for and extended period of time. You say the nuclear plants in Ontario have been running for 55 years 'with no problems' but you don't mention how often they are offline for maintenance/refueling. You are probably simply not aware that they do that. Probably be cause they have installed more capacity than they need. The same solution works with wind and solar to some degree. The difference is that when you install extra capacity with wind and solar that extra capacity can be used at minimal cost. Nuclear has many advantages over alternatives but the one big disadvantage is price, it is one of the most expensive forms of generation.
The background sound is very irritating. Why add it?
In Germany we shut down most of these energy storages despite badly needing them. Bureaucracy is destroying this country.
I will never understand why electric car owners think that they are being environmentally responsible. They seem to ignore the cost to the Earth and to the slaves at the mines.
WHOAH NOW! Don`t mess around with these woke leftists! You might cause more peaceful protests! We can`t afford anymore toxic smoke and PCPs in the air, water, and soil. They`ve already done enough environmental damage and sentenced millions to DNA damage and cancer!
What's "the cost to the earth"?
The latest oil spill says "hi"
.
You think the materials Mined for fossil fuel vehicles are brought by the fairies?
.
No slaves needed for LFP batteries.
They are no slaves who are mining this neither children only family who work together with thier children since in western world children don't help parents doesn't mean everywhere is same.
What this videos have to do with electric cars.and also normal gas powered cars are more horrible than electric the more longer you use them the worse they become.
Gigantic oil and gas tankers could be employed as floating offshore storage capacity to store harnessed energy from offshore power generation installations , like offshore wind turbines or wave and tidal power generators.
In countries with land scarcity, the offshore energy storage strategy provides "gross value energy storage capacity", due to its close proximity to Metropolitan port cities.
How exactly are you storing energy in the tanker? If you're liquefying green hydrogen, the ship is very expensive and it's going to sail away to sell the hydrogen to Japan for its hydrogen economy™ boondoggle. Most plans for hydrogen energy storage call for storing it in underground salt caverns.
A huge battery energy storage system does not take up a lot of space,; the problem is the cost of a GWh of batteries.
The best battery are those that have been forged inside a super nova explosion. Uranium, thorium, plutonium are all insanely energy dense and extremely plentiful. Using fast breeder reactors we could power the world off of our current spent nuclear fuel for almost a whole century. That's just off of the high level nuclear waste just sitting around being radiative waiting for long term storage ATM.
Three problems:
1. If all countries were to supply their energy need by fission, in 30 years there would be no more minable material. The required isotopes for fission are far from common or abundant. Together with the fact that a new reactor takes up to 10 years to build and Bilions and is the most expensive form of energy we can currently use, not feasible
2. Nuclear faces the same problem as renewables: nuclear reactors can't react to spikes or lows, they always produce the same output and changing the output amount takes weeks to take effect.
3. I want to see that thorium reactor. A physicist friend sometimes jokes about what will be finished first, Iter or a commercial thorium reactor able to use U233. By now there are just prototypes and countries like Norway are building their commercial version for two decades by now and spending tripple digit Billions. With Thorium reactors take too long to build to react to the current energy and climate crisis and they cost more than many countries earn in a year
@@fatalityin1 three counter arguments
1) that maybe true if you only use thermal reactors that derive their power from the fissioning of U235 which is only about 0.7% of the uranium in existence. Fast breeder reactors can utilize the much more plentiful U238 which accounts for the other 99.3% of uranium supply. We can power all of the world's energy needs from the worlds spent nuclear fuel for close to 70 years. Current reserves can carry us for literal millennium.
2) it's untrue that a reactor can't react to changing load, I myself have served on an aircraft carrier and we'd frequently alter reactor power answering various bells. I'm not saying all reactors can do this but it's possible. But outside of that there's many ways to even things out, just like with renewables. But I'd say it's a little more favorable for nuclear as it's heat can be used to drive useful chemical reactions directly. Reactions to make hydrogen, chemical fertilizer, synthetic aviation fuel, etc. Or it's heat can be stored directly for transients using molten salts as a medium.
3) fast breeder reactors can run on thorium as well. There are some fast breeders operational around the world today including one getting built in Wyoming in America. The don't run on thorium but they don't really need to since uranium is so plentiful, especially since they can run on "depleted" fuel from thermal reactors. But as I said before, the current reserves of uranium could power the world for over a thousand of years. This didn't include the billions of tons of uranium in the oceans but just includes what humanity had access to today (~10 million tons). I don't see any reason not to pursue thorium though as it has roughly the same energy density as uranium and it's more abundant giving us even more thousands of years of energy budget
@@zaurenstoates7306 To 1 and 3: you are naming numbers to all sources that are albeit plentifull either extremely ineconomic (filtering sea water would drive the price for nuclear power from currently 200$/MWh to around 500$/MWh) or simply infeasible (filtering earth's crust where 99% of U235 is located).
To U238: 238 is used to min/max U235 rods longevity transforming U238 into U239. U238 can not realistically be used as sole fission material but is added at between 24%-30% to U235 rods.
And finally, are you really comparing a nuclear boat with max 800MWh (most likely closer to 400 in day to day usage) to a modern commercial nuclear reactor with up to 6TWh output and saying that both can be as easily upscaled and downscaled? But that nuclear fission is very slow at adapting to energy needs is public news, if you don't believe me, a quick 2 seconds google search would give you the result.
And maybe you want to talk about how nuclear is to most expensive form of energy creation? You ignored my point to that.
@@fatalityin1 Adding to your 3rd point, Molten Salt Reactors have been just around the corner for decades.
As one wag put it: "X is the power source of the future, and always will be." Where X is fusion, MSR,...
I don't mean to denigrate them, but endless hype doesn't help.
@@fatalityin1
Well said.
If the suitable mountain landscapes for the first solution are relatively rare, can't the cliffs by the sea be also used? I guess the reservoirs would have to be either made of concrete, or have some other lining to protect the surrounding nature from salt if the terrain is not rocky, but it would widen the choice significantly. Or am I missing something, like salt water can't be used or whatever? I was just intrigued by that statement, and besides there are many wind turbine installations in water, so they could choose locations suitable for both generation and storage etc...
You would flood a massive area of land for very little energy storage. Coastal cliffs are almost at sea level, they have very little gravitational potential energy. You ideally want your reservoir on top of a high mountain.
Gravity is an extremely weak force. Gravity storage is only worthwhile when nature supplies huge upper and lower storage areas (lakes or reservoirs) with a large height difference and a huge working mass (the Northfield pumped hydro in the video holds 20 million tonnes of water).
04:40 장난해? ㅋㅋㅋ 30년전부터 강릉에서 쓰던 양수식 발전소잖아 ㅋㅋㅋ
남는전기로 물 끌어올렸다가 피크때 발전하는거
허.. 이게 뭐가 새롭다고............
It's improper to say you're storing energy in this video (not directly), in fact, you store raw material to produce energy. It is similar to storing coal or hydrogen or gasoline.
A.C. cant be stored, but D.C. can be stored in batteries - see photovoltaic systems.
Here's an idea: some mountains block clouds and have a dry side, build pumped hydro on them and instead of returning the water the same way, irrigate the other side and produce food while creating electricity.
And destabilise weather/water currents, great way to f% up the environment and micro climates!
@@XFDADX Hungry people don't care about environment or climate, and with the artificial famine coming soon, there will be lots of hungry ones.
Also, greening the useless dry regions helps with carbon sequestering.
@@KiaAzad don't worry about that they'll only get more famine 🤌
@@XFDADX Well, I'm on the side of not letting people suffer if we can do something about it.
@@KiaAzad Everyone is on the side of not letting people suffer (because we are an endangered species after all) doing exactly what causes more suffering 🤌
As others have said, pumped hydroelectric is nothing new. I live in New Milford, Ct. not far from the Rocky River Hydroelectric Plant. Built in the late 1920's, it's credited as the first major project of this type the in US. It uses man-made Candlewood Lake as the upper reservoir, and the Housatonic River as the lower. Candlewood is fairly large lake with shorelines in several Western Connecticut towns, and a popular recreational resource. Of the people that enjoy this lake regularly, I doubt that many are aware of it's original purpose.
Love this one, thx.
Will you teach us about aerated static composting? How much easier it’s creation is compared to the old manual rotation methods. Please share why this Biodiverse Compost helps create resilient farm crops, according to Elain Engam Food Soil Web, founder.
it’s worth looking into. Im a handyman with a leaf blower, a tarp and a garden hose. Making high value Biodiverse compost.
A drip irrigation below the compost pile with occasional application of water and small amount of continuous air flow would be worth considering to accelerate composting process if that is the objective.
@@robertrogers6830informative response thank you. Something you may find interesting along this line, Robert.
My chat with a famous Utuber, Hehe.
That’s not all, Growing ur greens, John.
Modern science agree’s. Our trash can be turned into High biodiversity Compost. High biodiversity Compost must be kept alive and moist. After only 30 mins oxygen levels in an unaerated compost pile will have dropped and the anaerobic bacteria emerge. Only living aerated static made type composts have large enough amounts of required biodiversity including: Nematodes, fungi, and anthropoids to name a few. In order to have a regenerative restart on most of our depleted American/worlds farmland soils and help insure National/world future food recourse. It’s Composts that will secure our food, not just money. 70% of Americans waist is compostable.
@@robertrogers6830 My chat with a famous Utuber. Hehe
That’s not all, Growing your greens, John.
Modern science agrees, our trash can be turned into High biodiversity Compost. High biodiversity Compost must be kept alive and moist. After only 30 mins, oxygen levels in an unaerated compost pile will have dropped and the anaerobic bacteria emerge. Only living aerated static made type composts have large enough amounts of required biodiversity including: Nematodes, fungi, and anthropoids to name a few. To have a regenerative restart on most of our depleted American/world's farmland soils and help insure National/world future food recourses. It’s Composts that will secure our food, not just money. 70% of Americans waste is compostable. So make a pile and donate it to your farmer today!
More resurch needs done on siphon power to generate electricity. Example pump ocean water from California to Great salt lake utah in a pipe line that is designed to siphon the ocean water to the salt lake and generate electricity when the siphon is active. Yes the pipe would have to be above ground on a tower to raise the water to a height above sea level to form a siphon effect.
Pumps would be used to fill the pipe, and get air out of the system, to get the siphon started. Careful study of topographical maps will determine the best route possible for creating siphon pipe line. Tunneling through mountain ranges will be required. In some places.
I am working on a video on a similar topic to this about power storage and I learned about this fascinating thing called gravity battery. The future is going to be LIT by batteries lol
Thunderfoot. That is all.
The gravity battery has substantial flaws that I would urge you to research
@@rexmann1984 Oh those poor poor concrete blocks, I'm pretty sure the blocks themselves shed tears when that video was uploaded.
When gravity can power planes and ships get back to me.
I've done 10k miles on my electric unicycle last year. Batteries are truly the future.
They can convert the excess electricity into Hydrogen as storage.
When they need electricity we can convert the stored hydrogen into electricity.
They do that in Gran Canaria as well as there is a lot of wind there and they store inside the mountwin cracks with some losses
So they dessalinize first and then re mineralize in those mountains
Please bring large scale nuclear back!
Another thing companies should be working on is "casual productivity." Figuring out how to build a factory or something that is actually practically useful, but that can turn on and off almost instantly, and only needs to operate when power is available. In that way, when there is excess power in the system, this facility could make something that takes a lot of energy. When power is low, everything would completely shut down. Obviously this would not be as productive as a 24/7 operation, but it wouldn't necessarily need to be, since it would be more efficient (using only "excess" energy), and would also need to be relatively low human-resource, just people checking in from time to time to make sure everything is running, rather than having a bunch of humans wandering around that would have nothing to do when the power is not available. If they can manage this sort of project well, then it would be a much more efficient use of variable resources than any form of storage.
Why are they using iron pellets? Wouldn’t a really high surface area benefit this battery
Yes....they could use old automobile and appliance sheet metal.
Pellets have convoluted surfaces and therefore much higher surface area than any smooth finished piece of iron...DUH!!
@@jmccoomber1659 spheres have the smallest surface area at any volume
It needs to maintain a matrix shape to allow the fluid flow. They choose the smallest pellet that wont completely rust and fail structurally.
Do you know a new information platform named " Ganjing World " was launched recently in NY? It is so so different from all the others, I'm trying now!
10:35. I have those exact storage containers in my kitchen, for cereal.
A Bright future awaits electricity storage the iron batteries sound like a positive when you have Australia basically as one massive continent made of Iron ore's & materials. My favourite source for energy has always been geothermal taping into earths own energies.
The problem is scaling up all these Earth friendly energy sources. If it was that easy and cheaper than current solutions, it would have been done a long time ago. Solar and wind while they may work for individuals, it's a relatively inefficient way to generate electricity on a large cost effective scale. Nuclear and the currently experimental fusion are the most efficient means of getting large amounts of energy as cheaply as possible.
@@BillAnt Thanks for the input, here in New Zealand Geothermal makes up to 20% of our energy needs. The line of thought you are on is part of the problem now if cost was taken out of the mix & countries didn't all have their own agenda's some of the sources you mention probably could have been a reality by now as we have a massive resource (Unless your in a landlocked country) in using tidal energy but everyone wants to be first in the race same as fusion tech the know how & theoretic's have been around for years its only now when we are on the precipice that actual movement like in Japan has started but global destruction & dwindling resources are a great motivator in the energies race. Funny thing NZ doesn't have any Nuclear energies & unlike some countries we also don't have regular electricity blackouts our grid is old but as the greener energies come on line we embrace & try to improve instead of being reliant on potentially nightmare tech.
@@karlashdown5228 - Also can't compare the 5 million population of NZ with 330 of the US, itt is magnitudes higher requiring that much more energy.
@@BillAnt with the pay as you go healthcare of the US in 20-30 years there will only be a fraction of the population you have now, But it's quite sad that out of the hundreds of millions of people in that one country your people aren't doing more just consuming at a rate the planet can't keep up with in fact most countries even my own are doing the same however we have actual departments of government devoted to renewable energies something your oil lobbyists would stop in a heartbeat, But no country is perfect some just want to help its citizens & some don't exactly the same as the environment.
@@karlashdown5228 - As they say, different strokes for different folks. lol
Coal already is the most chemically efficient battery we have. This push for renewables will create ten times as much toxic waste. Madness.
There is clean coal plant CO2 sequestration demonstration project never built called NetZero or ZeroGen by US Dept of Energy.
Cancelled since late 1990s.
I worked for DOE.
Much info has been taken off internet about it.
🤔
Pumped hydro is a Battery?😕
Yes.
The first batteries were glass jars storing static electricity.
Also agree to move electricity across states or countries using high voltage DC transmission. NZ in 1965 with a population of 2.6million already put in a 600km line which carried 600 megawatts. That is mainly north to south but large east west conglomerates could transfer solar power from sunny to less sunny areas. Or wind power.
Or, you could put solar on every roof and "decentralise" with "local" storage, at the building, or at neighbourhood level.
Cheaper.
Half the city populations don’t have a roof, nor any property to put up a solar array. I have lots of roof but have waited 25 years to grow decent shade to reduce the heat load. I am not going to sacrifice my trees for solar.
Not too far back roof solar was not economical as the quoted cost would have been barely paid by the energy recovered just at end of life of the array (about 20 years). Clearly not worth the cost or bother.
You green fanciers have to realize that wind and solar energy is neither practical nor affordable to the majority of the population. You also need an expensive Solar Wall to get through the night.
the US would need 150,000 megawatts of transmission lines east to west. 346 million pop. and no one wants a transmission line built. Reaserch the grain belt transmission line from Iowa to chicago. Unbuilt for 10 years.
.@@kkarllwt wrote: "the US would need 150,000 megawatts of transmission lines east to west. 346 million pop. and no one wants a transmission line built. Reaserch the grain belt transmission line from Iowa to chicago. Unbuilt for 10 years" I reply: The grain belt struggle is about not wanting solar panels covering land. And they are not even considering solar panels for shade. High voltage direct current lines do not make the alternating EMF of the alternating current transmission lines which quite rightly people don' like to live under.
I had that very idea 30+ year's ago. A pond or lake as a giant battery. And possibly charged by lightning bolts that are coaxed down ,by a small rocket trailing a wire.
creative, but what is shown in this video is vastly different from that
@@isk8atparks yes I agree...but I had to add my 2 cents...not worried if someone takes my idea and does something with it...it's obvious to me i'm not going to do anything with my many ideas.. .too busy scratching and clawing to make ends meet
Hm this can be built at our country at Malaysia, Sarawak because of the month and rainforest, besides here have been frequently raining
Hydro potential energy is nothing new
Water dam storage turbine is an old idea used here in Virginia since 1970s.
TVA Tennessee valley authority hydro also.
Quebec hydro uses tides..
Awesome clean energy.
Theoretically thinking, It would be nice if such batteries can be scaled to also double as massive reservoirs for rain water. And not much need to rely on pumping water up from rivers…. when droughts hit due to hot summers some of this water can be released into the water grid and generating electricity at the same time. There are some challenges of course especially the demand for both water and electricity at particular times.
Wow reinventing the waterdamm amazing
What did you think watersheds and rivers were already doing? Or were you planning to entice clouds to rain directly over reservoirs?
You have an awesome job, thank you
Ya know this obvious idea has been around for over 30 years
P.s. The industrial revolution was enabled by acquiring energy dense fuel which required reductions in mass to facilitate storage and transport. Solar and wind infrastructure reverses the energy density trend with predictable result.
They're not weird, they're smart.
At 2:25 the narrator somehow forgets to mention the steady, reliable energy source called Nuclear… telling.
Or... Just use nuclear 🙄
It’s possible that ultra-large scale batteries will succeed perfectly where automotive batteries never can. So many viable formats exist for power storage on a very large scale that the term battery becomes quite flexible. Nature itself even creates some effective geological storage systems and our creations are refinements of the concept.
But automotive batteries can...
I have the strong sensation that getting electricity from green resources to pump water up to get again alectricity later is a 60% of energy trowed away.
Modern pumps and turbines are incredibly efficient, with the most modern stuff only having around a 1-5% total energy loss over any given time.
That level of energy loss would be about the same as lost energy in the form of heat when charging batteries.
What's your better solution?
@@DavidHeizer dyson sphere
"60%(+) thrown away" = Hydrogen.
That's why you leave engineering and science to people who actually calculate the right numbers, instead of just "having a feel" for them
I AM VERY SKEPTICAL...BUT THIS VIDEO MAY CAUSE ME TO RESEARCH THIS IN DEPTH...TY!!!
Underwhelming video. Pump storage is a bit of an old hat and the Iron-Air batteries are experimental at best. Still I’d maybe enjoyed the video if it wasn’t 14 minutes long.
Seems obvious that you can use different storage methods in different areas. Use power hydro where it’s available. Use gravity storage in mine shafts where available, use batteries where needed.
Why does there only have to be one solution everywhere?
Our star Sol drives Earth’s climate .. and always will .
Yes, but despite a recent period of decline in solar output, the world is getting warmer. It's a complex system, and anyone who says it's one thing doesn't understand it.
@@JonS
The trick is to remove "one thing" from the system (us)
I have two homes, each running a microgrid of 100Kw powered by fuel cells, and the heat is recovered and used to heat the houses and the two pools. - These guys got too many degrees!
Electric energy is great, but please stop mentioning the climate change BS. Let's focus on making air quality better in cities, and power supply sustainable for next generations.
For the pumped storage lake battery, would the effects of evaporation not lead to a pretty significant loss of energy?
Probably does cause an energy loss, but maybe not significant. The final efficiency would include that loss.
There is a loss anyway. You can't get the same out as you've put into it.