3:14 I think it should've been helpful to add the caveat that cats tend to kill the smaller more common birds that aren't threatened, while wind turbines can be a threat to big and endangered birds of prey. So just saying "cats kill x billion birds" could give the wrong impression as if this can be compared 1 to 1 with the impact that wind turbines have on bird species.
An idea for what you could cover next could be do books have a big impact on the environment. I’m a book lover but also care about the environment and I’ve been wondering how much environmental cost is attached to a book being produced. I realize it’s not the most interesting topic but it’s just something I’ve been wondering.
Maybe talk about the potential of nuclear fusion and the iter project, and how this could change everything in energy production. There was a construction milestone recently, so it would fit perfectly
I left another comment talking about this but I'll suggest you make a full video on it. You made this whole video but didn't mention nuclear power at all. Could you do one covering the use of uranium and thorium reactors on the way to renewable energy?
Just some more points: 1. Smart grids are going to be a very powerful tool. The idea is that you use electricity when it is avaiable. So you heat up the water in your house, charge the car or wash the dishes with the dishwasher, when we have lots of sun and wind automatically. 2. We have to electrify a lot more systems. The electricity production consums something like 20% of primary energy right now worldwide. The big other ones are transport and heating(mainly buildings). They can be electrified or replaced with other systems, like electric vehicles, bikes and heat pumps. 3. Storage is very complicated. Grid fluctuations can kill a grid and many storage solutions need some time to switch on. So you need batteries, which can be started up instantly and bigger cheaper systems like hydro or compressed air storage for bigger down times. On UA-cam JustHaveAThink has an amazing channel, with a great comment section, about stuff like that.
Using less electricity is a much better solution. We can make use of the Thermal Dynamics and make houses with thicker outer-walls, that that store heat energy generated by the sun, and release the heat, when it becomes too cold. You can also run vents through the soil and turn hot air outside into cool air without any use of electricity. You can completely eliminate all electric usage for heating and cooling through these methods.
@@Gamerad360 I agree on saving energy and better buildings surely are part of the solution, but tearing down every building, which is not passive is extremly wasteful. Electricity is relativly clean and changing heating and cooling to electric can be done easily in old buildings. Insulation to a pratical degree will be necessary thou.
@@MrMakabar I never said tear down every building. Straw-man. You can retrofit older buildings. You don't need expensive insulation, as the thicker the walls, the more insulated the walls are. Unless you live in Canada you don't need insulation, as the thick walls provide insulation. The reason conventional homes need insulation is, because their walls are so thin. Grid Electricity is 80% non-renewable, which is terrible for the environment, where not using the electricity to begin with will be great for the environment.
@@Gamerad360 Thick walls are insulation and you can not easily thicken walls. But insultion can not heat or cool a building, it only preseves the temperaturer. To heat it in a building without any sort of active energy input, you usually use windows, which for older buildings might not be build in the right diection and angle to do so efficently. Cooling can be done by using some cold mass ususally the ground to cool down inflowing air, as you mentioned above. So you are likely to have to add pipes etc. to an older building to allow the cool air frrom the ground to move throu out the house. Which again is hard to retrofit. Now most climates require some sort of temperaturer control, not just Canada. Most areas in the wolrd have either temperatures below freezing or heat waves, which require cooling. The question has to be that, if you can not easily retrofit a buildding to need no active energy input, how to heat and cool the building. As for heating burning plants is a good solution, but it is still fairly wasteful and bad for air quality. So you need another source and electricity can do that. As for CO2 emissions only 66% of worldwide electricity prodution emits large amounts(e.g. is fossil fuel excluding nuclear) and getting that numbe higher is technically possible and being done everywhere.
It seems you've been going in a more conceptual direction, so I was thinking it'd be interesting to see a video and have a conversation about future societies dependant more on their own personal and community output of energy (human energy) rather depending on finding new ways to grow and rely on external energy output. A society that can function without growth of economy, population, or energy consumption. I'm not talking about going back to pre-industrial society and forgoing all technologies, but simplification and reduction of consumption. A more calculated and strategic expenditure of resources which are not unlimited, rare earth metals or copper just for an example.
I have seen Planet of Humans recently, I too felt that it has mainly talked about problems with renewables and pointed towards population growth control as solution which is true to an extent but no realistic solutions. Also another point mentioned was bio fuel as back up for these renewable which is taking wood chips to cut trees and raw materials for Solar panel using carbon etc., There was a graph showing Bio, Wind and Solar where Bio is more than 60% or sth., I wish this Video covered those aspects too as major current obstacles or challenges to look for improved technologies for alternative raw materials or workaround without Bio Fuel. There is mention of water pumping in solutions though not sure how many places it is feasible. Nevertheless good attempt to create some hope after watching Planet of Humans that Renewables are going other way around and don't solve climate change problems.
i think renewables have done a lot to reduce the impact we have now and prevent the worst case warming scenario. However there is some points that you neglegted here in my oppinion. I study at wageningen University of lifesciences and i actually just had a course about this. The energy storage problem is one that is often used to critique renewable energy souces but every technology has its own set of problems. Solarpannels and wind tubines both use a lot of scarce commocities ( like rare metals and minderals). When you showed the infographic that a fully renewable future is possible, it really supprised me because that is not the case ,to my knoledge. At least not for the whole world. I actually wrote a paper about this toppic if anyone cares to read. Here i back up the information with scientific sources: How sustainable are renewable sources? To investigate the sustainability of renewable energy sources , the different available technologies are explained and assessed based on their advantages and disadvantages. Firstly biomass. Biomass is an abundant waste product which can be burned. But burning Biomass can result in pollutive emissions, which is counterproductive when attempting to lower greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. It also may not be the most cost-effective choice (Ellabban et al., 2014, p. 749) (Giurco et al., 2019, p. 455). Geothermal energy. This technology is considered cost effective and reliable. However, installation and maintenance costs can run high. (Ellabban et al., 2014, p. 749) (Giurco et al., 2019, p. 455). Hydro energy is relatively inexpensive and offers recreational benefits in areas of boating and fishing and is most ideal for island countries. Its opportunities are also its weaknesses as hydropower can only be used in areas with sufficient water and best sites for dams have already been developed. Furthermore, their construction is very expensive (Ellabban et al., 2014, p. 749) (Giurco et al., 2019, p. 455). Marine Energy works in similar fashion. It captures energy that would otherwise not be collected and is potentially infinite. But it is takes up a lot of space, which makes it difficult for shipping to move around. And more importantly it has negative impacts on wildlife. And storage and backups are neccessary (Ellabban et al., 2014, p. 749) (Giurco et al., 2019, p. 455). Solar energy causes no air or water pollution and is an infinite source of energy. But its reliability depends on the presence of sunlight and a lot of space to catch that light. Thus, it can be cost ineffective and is poorly suited for cold light scarce seasons (Ellabban et al., 2014, p. 749) (Giurco et al., 2019, p. 455). Wind energy runs into the same reliability issue as sunlight. It requires constant and significant amounts of wind and windfarms require significant amounts of land on top of that. They also need better ways to store the produced energy. The advantage is that they are also a free energy source and they produce no pollution in water or air. Land space around farms is still usable. But they can be invasive to flying wildlife like gees and bats (Ellabban et al., 2014, p. 749) (Giurco et al., 2019, p. 455). Renewable energy sources have many advantages and the challenges named above all seem to be manageable in individual cases. Every area has a specific type of renewable energy that fits best so countries and areas can find optimal placement for reasonable sacrifices. It appears that humanity is coming closer to reaching the IPCCs temperature target of staying below 1,5 degrees warming over preindustrial level (IPCC Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2018). But there is another problem that comes with renewables, their sustainability. The production of many of these technologies uses scarce and finite resources (Chakarvarty, n.d.). Solar Panels require five mineral commodities listed by the department of the interior as critical. These commodities are Arsenic, Gallium, Germanium, Indium, and Tellurium. (Critical Mineral Commodities in Renewable Energy, 2019) Wind turbines, likewise require commodities that were designated as critical. Namely Aluminium and rare-earth Elements. (Critical Mineral Commodities in Renewable Energy, 2019) Batteries are essential for renewable energy sources, because they allow excess power to be stored. This is essential as most renewable technology is dependent on unpredictable sources like wind and sunlight. Unfortunately, the commodities involved in their production are critical as well, particularly cobalt, graphite, lithium and manganese. (Critical Mineral Commodities in Renewable Energy, 2019) And it does not stop here unfortunately. In her report Chakarvarty, describes that the use of critical materials is not limited to the technologies described above. “The use of neodymium and dysprosium is essential to make powerful generators used in wind technologies. Neodymium and dysprosium also find use in making motors for vehicles. In order to make Li-ion batteries for plug-in-hybrid electric vehicles, lithium and cobalt are a critical material requirement. Hybrid electric vehicle using NiMH batteries make use of rare earths such as cerium, lanthanum, neodymium and praseodymium. In order to make fuel cells, critical materials such as yttrium, platinum, palladium and some other platinum group materials are required as catalysts and separators. Lighting (solid state and fluorescent) use rare earths such as yttrium, cerium, lanthanum, europium and terbium as part of the phosphors.” (Chakarvarty, n. d.) This is the reason why we should aim for innovative sources of nuclear energy in my opinion. Renewable sources are great and they should be implemented where possible to counter teh climate crisis. But beliving they can supply the entire planet is untrue and unjust. THey will create a gap between poor and rich and leave developing countries with the effect sof climatechange and the smog of fossilfuels.
Chemical and thermal storage will outgrow the pumped hydro . This needs to happen as fast as possible but luckily concentrated solar with molten salts and hydrogen are penetrating the market better.
In 2020 actually more than 50% of the energy in Europe was generated by renewable energy although climate neutrality by 2050 will not be enough to meet the Paris Agreement of 1.5°C. especially Germany (where I am from) is blocking a faster transition to renewables to fight climate crisis.
important to add that the reason the EU has managed to make the progress that it has in terms of renewables and environmental legislation is because most of its production is outsourced to to the third world, the "factories of the world", where environmental legislation is never allowed to pass. there can be no climate solution that does not address imperialism
The reason why it's not fully embraced because the government doesn't want to educate or help those people who are used to mining coal pits to adapt. Or that people still rely on mining coal as their own source of income.
You'll have to change public opinion on nuclear. Noone wants to live near a nuclear power plant, nor can they live on / build on the site of a former plant for many years :(
@@samspencer7765 in the UK several generations of nuclear reactors are built on the same sites, with necessary expansions ofc, so these relatively small sites can be used to generate clean energy whilst decommissioning of the old reactors are taking place.
@@chapter4travels Diversity is good in a grid. If for any reason natural or man-made we have to temporarily shut down reactors it'd be good to have a diverse grid with grid tied storage for redundancy.
Hi guys! if u care for the environment, please use Ecosia as your search engine. For every 45 searches u make, a tree will be planted somewhere. If you think this is fake, u can always check out their UA-cam channel. Stay safe guys :) bai bai
Only nuclear power is capable of replacing the normal fossil burning plants for large cities. The other renewables cannot power large cities, but can work in tiny communities (supposing they are made well, and not the privatized garbage grid in Texas). My mid-sized city between a mountain range and a large lake would be an impossible goal for panels or turbines, without a much larger field of turbines and panels than the city itself (the geography and local government regulations on solar panels prevents that). Additionally, if you don't like the Tesla batteries, you definitely won't like the long-term battery solutions for wind and solar.
I must say you are very naive. Pumped water storage is not at all the solution for the simple reason that only a lucky few areas in the world are good enough for it to work well. And that giant piston is just a joke. It needs a seal that is just makes it unreasonable to construct and for the seal to up stand the pressure it would be very tight, having tons of losses on friction alone. I also want a renewable future. But the storage problem is just not that simple to solve. The real answer here is shown in 3:52. Nuclear. Why not use Nuclear? As you correctly said it's the best thing out there in terms of CO2. It's a solution that is available NOW. Why are we so stupid to not use it? If countries and companies had invested in nuclear the same they have in renewables, maybe those CO2 reduction milestones would be a reality. But that stupid fear to nuclear is killing us and the planet.
LIQUID. FLUORIDE. THORIUM. REACTORS. Nuclear needs to be part of this conversation. It's ludicrous not to--it's the only sustainable, base load option.
I'm quite late but you are 100% correct. Nuclear is by far the best renewable option there is. A primarily nuclear power grid supplemented by wind, solar, and hydro is the best option until fusion becomes possible.
@@Dalton93H but thorium, not uranium. They say Th isn't ready for prime time, what's the hold up I say?? Many uranium power plants are being decommissioned or have been. After all the disasters, many in the public don't trust them anymore and are worried about the waste. Th would be an improvement across all nuclear metrics, but many don't know about it. China seems to be on the forefront of Th tech currently. Hopefully we will soon follow.
Here's a great video by Tom Scott on this specific pumped-storage hydro station: ua-cam.com/video/6Jx_bJgIFhI/v-deo.html The official name for the place is Dinorwig Power Station
Yes and where can the other thousand be build in Britain. It is not that easy to create more. Britain' has a high part of huge Gas energy stations versus wind. Fortunately the build up of Nuclear has also been setup and will reduce the reliance on the gas/wind system.
@@ferkeap pumped storage is indeed not the ideal solution for GB, thankfully, other solutions already exist, like interconnections, lithium batteries, hydrogen, gravity batteries (like the concrete lifting pump) and to a lesser extent, giant flywheels, capacitors and inductors. You can read more about this, specifically for GB, in the new "Haynes Manual for Electricity Storage" cdn.ymaws.com/www.renewableuk.com/resource/resmgr/haynes_manual_final_july_202.pdf
The first pump-up hydro storage system was built over 100 years ago. There are many PuHS facilities around the world, several in the US. Most were built when countries were building nuclear plants a half century ago. Since reactors and coal plants were poor at load following storage was needed to match supply to demand. The US has, probably, over 7,000 existing dams that could be converted to PuHS. Some already have been. Just create a smaller reservoir lower than the main reservoir and bore a small diameter tunnel between them. Use a hybrid pump/turbine and you're in business. The lower reservoir needs to hold only a few days output from generation.
@@ferkeap Your grasp of the UK energy market is technically poor and driven through bias. Nuclear is only good for base load and is too expensive to ever be the dominant energy source given the HARD figures and absolute cock ups that have been documented through 70 years of the British Nuclear Program. The UK goverment are reluctantly backing it as part of an energy (MIX)!!!!. The real money is going into offshore wind, (which is currently the cheapest technology per MW) and storage which is mainly battery based and is recoginised now as commercially competitve. Gas power is an interem the govement is using to boost green credentials by closing coal plants and is also practical, as its quicker to fire up a gas generator and shut it down again, before and after peak load (Not something that can be done with a reacter unless you want to waste energy on mass by blowing steam into the air rather than a turbine). If you looked at a map of energy project planning applications and approvals you would be very dumb founded. If you regulary looked at an energy dashboard like MyGridUK, you would quickly recognise that Nuclear is a small but consistent proportion of the current UK energy mix, while Gas or Wind dominate the largest percentage. Over time you will recognise that wind is increasing its competitiveness against gas steadily whilst completeley dominating it on obvious windy days. Time to exit your bubble.
The EU goal? I can pretty confidently say that my homecountry (Belgium) is probably doing worse, as we were fossil of the day in the COP Madrid last year.
@likira - I feel for you, per my reply to Nikolai Toxværd Jørgensen @@Simon-nx1sc Cheer up! Belgium is doing worse in total, but better than Denmark in Electricity and Heat! extending my Nikolai Toxværd Jørgensen table tot e&h only Europe 5.9 2.1 Denmark 5.5 1.5 62% non-hydro renewables; 0% nuclear Belgium 7.9 1.4 30% non-hydro renewables; 32% nuclear UK 5.3 1.2 32% non-hydro renewables; 20% nuclear Sweden 3.6 0.7 21% non-hydro renewables; 49% nuclear France 4.4 0.5 10% non-hydro renewables; 86% nuclear www.iea.org/countries/Belgium Population: 11 million Renewables (7499/8% wind; 4520/5% biofuels; 3972/4% solarPV; 943/1% waste): 30% Nuclear: 28579/32%
@@factnotfiction5915 Thank you for the interesting information and source! we're not doing that bad after all, after reading this. Altough we were elected fossil of the day during COP Madrid, and the governement is still not agreeing on wheter or not to close nuclear plants by 2025. This is a problem, to cite your source: "To attract critical investments in the energy sector - especially in electricity generation - the government should follow closely the principles of transparency, predictability and regulatory certainty." --IEA Also, i didn't know what IEA was and that it existed, i now see that it's running on governement and private donations. How neutral is this organisation? Thanks! Simon
@@Simon-nx1sc Not sure how 'neutral' the IEA is. It was founded by the OECD, and similar to the IPCC is an intergovernmental organization. It obviously answers to its member governments, but I doubt it sets policy. I presume it is more raw-data collection, analysis, and distribution.
This is a great and appealing video that shows a good introduction to the renewables. However, one flaw of the video is that it mixes what is technically possible with what is feasible in reality: 1 - (we should focus on) "Technologies that are already available, ready to deploy and offer tangible solutions to the problems that renewables face" - Completely agree. But viable storage for large-scale are not available, nor ready to deploy. Just like dams,hydro-storage is very good, but area dependent. Lesser-good areas make projects too complex and costly, while other types of storage face other problems - the one in this video is just a concept so far. 2 - Interconnectors are a great idea in paper, but, in reality, they are a completely different story. You have costs and technical challenges associated with "passing electricity" through countries. In your example, Spain would have to go through France - a very independent country in terms of electricity. It wants no imports. Then you still have Germany. Are the costs really worth it? This problem is a very common problem in my country - Portugal - where neither Spain nor France wants our electricity most of the time, and all other countries are far away. The costs are so high, that we are just better off curtailing it. The connections are here already, but it's just not feasible. 3 - 08:50 graphic. Talking about Variable Renewable Energy problems and then show a graphic of top countries of Renewable Energy, is counterproductive, as these include Hydroelectric, which works in a totally different way. It makes look like it's simple to apply 100% RE and we just don't do it cause of some other reason (#damnpoliticians). 4 - While USA is a big energy consumer, and people overall should use energy more wisely, your comparison vs other countries was completely cherry-picked. China, India and Brazil are Developing Countries. You can't compare the lifestyle of three countries where there are huge differences in the style of low-income to high-income; to a country where even the average citizen has the benefit of Air Conditioning Unit in their house. The average USA citizen will always spend more, but, in return, have a healthier, better, and more comfortable lifestyle. The same logic applies to the top 10% rich in the world that has modern houses spending much more than the poorest, whose houses electricity are more likely for a single lamp and a small fridge. At the end of the day, we should have a realistic and neutral focus on everything. RE+Storage is good but, alone, is not feasible. Several studies show that planning energy grids with only RE+storage leads to extreme oversizing - you never know how bad the weather can be next year! And no amount of newer storage is gonna change that. It is just not feasible to go 100% with it.
Very good points indeed, I might like to add that also the point of energy consumption is not really heading towards te right direction. The plans for digitisation of the EU on nearly all fronts will probably enlarge the energy consumption. Only renewables won't cut it. Considering the combination of nuclear energy should be on the political tables too
You said, "However, one flaw of the video is that it mixes what is technically possible with what is feasible in reality:" - What reality are we talking about? You say he is mixing what is technically possible with some current reality that has fake, human-made barriers to change. That's what you are suggesting, it seems. You make excuses for countries to not work together on energy sharing. You assume any storage capacity we could ever make won't be good enough. Well, that said, I partly agree. In the current reality of the socio-economic global system we all share, 100% renewables won't happen because there is still way too much profit to be made in fossil fuels. I hope you are not making excuses for the current system also. Because what greater change we need as a species is out of the box we made for ourselves that restricts us based on an outdated principle of monetary-market trade and towards a new system that actually works with natural law and resource management in a collaborative, intelligent way to improve public health and sustainability worldwide. Simply put: Market capitalism is unsustainable socially, ecologically and economically. We need a new, viable alternative like a resource based economy so that what is technically possible is rapidly done because it can be and no body, no government organization or private company is holding up innovations and problem solving like now, because they are worried about their bottom line.
@@coolioso808 the irony of your comment is that going 100% RE is the essence of short-term Market Capitalism. RE existed for decades. But now, suddenly, when China opens to the world the possibility of supercheap solar panels and wind turbine materials, it suddenly became the solution that solves everything. The projects are easy to implement, easy to finance, with a short ROI. On top of it all, if a country is going RE, it is a given that it becomes more reliant on Natural Gas. It is no coincidence that companies like Shell and Total are investing in Solar and Wind to "go green", but don't invest on other sources of energy that would be independent of gas (hydro, geothermal, nuclear, ....). Quick buck for them, that makes clients even more dependant on their main product. A clear example can be seen if you compare Sweden Vs Germany. Both countries invested quite a bit on RE - Sweden on wind, Germany on Solar. Sweden went diverse: they also have nice dams, and, on top of that , they also got nuclear energy, to give even more energy independence and stable, clean energy to their country. It basically achieved, what many countries want to achieve in 2050 emissions wise (on the electricity part). Germany, with their EnergieWende, want as much RE as possible, much like the video suggested. The country right now is so focused on that, it became a natural gas dependant country, since gas couples very well with RE. With Russia threatening to cut natural gas supplies, Germany was "forced" to reignite coal power plants. However, they see this as a transition, since they will phase it out in 2040. In the meantime, ironically, they decommission nuclear power plants perfectly working last year, and plan to close other 3 by the end of this year. They are phasing out nuclear almost 20 years sooner than coal, under a climate change crisis. The stand Germany is in is a clear one where the climate change problem was very undermined. Where ideologies took precedence of logic,where a quick, easy-buck took place instead of considering a balanced-energy mix, while investing in R&D. They decided to go their own way, phase out nuclear, because they "don't need it, since RE will be enough", with 0 regard to environmental impact, and became even more dependant on a resource from a country with very different political views from their own. This is only electricity size, which is what most countries are focused on. Saying that RE can solve it all does not touch on enormous other topics: massive industrial, transport and agriculture sectors, the massive mining and environmental impact the RE+storage would lead to, it does not solve the lack of landfills/forestation/ocean treatment that we have, how CO2 capture is required, and RE can't offset the carbon input to justify it, etc.etc. RE is a good solution. Relying only on it to solve the whole climate change problem is not.
@@miguelsousa9802 You misinterpret my comment. Going 100% renewable IS NOT going to happen under market capitalism. I know how the system works, I know about greenwashing, I know about short-term ROI and fake green revolution for profit. I'm well aware of that. That's why I know renewable energy will not happen holistically until the economy treats sustainability and natural law with respect and works on reason and technical efficiency, not profit motives of the already rich. You are right that better baseload renewable energy sources such as hydro, geothermal and fusion are highly underdeveloped because they haven't been found to have a big short term ROI. They've made solar and wind cheap and quick ROI and that's why we most of that happening as a 'green revolution' instead of other renewable technologies that could be solved very fast if the technical solutions were taken, not the profit solutions. I also don't suggest a literally physical transition to happen super fast. And furthermore you are also correct that renewables are not the only problem, the entire ecological pollution crisis involves our entire production and distribution system and each sector from industry, transport to agriculture and mining ALL need to be addressed. The solution? Well, it certainly isn't trying to use the same system that has failed to end poverty and homelessness decades ago. Technical problems that could have been solved long ago if it weren't for a anti-economical, anti-human, unsustainable system is the main structural change we need. We don't get a sustainable world without a sustainable economic system that is guided by reason and Natural Law. I think you are able to put the pieces together to see that this system does not work and we need a new system structure if we hope to have anything resembling a sustainable future.
I feel like this guy is intentionally dodging nuclear energy. He didn't mention at all how nuclear has the lowest emissions life cycle. Then when talking about how the European countries are moving towards renewables showing how much clean energy they are generating he counted it as percentage of renewables made but didn't mention at all how France makes 70% from nuclear meaning they barely use any fossil fuels in comparison to even the Nordic countries. Nuclear is also a much better base load power source than any renewable and it wouldn't force us to have to try and use less energy to make it work. The only downside is it's expensive, and the waste needs to be managed but really it's the solution to our energy problems that we've been looking for and we've had it for years. TLDR nuclear is slept on and we should really be investing more into it to help reduce emissions.
Actually onshore wind has a lower lifecycle emission than nuclear power. Generally nuclear just isn't counted as renewable thus why should he bring it up? This is often done. Nuclear is almost as expensive as renewables with storage and has a bad (undeserved) reputation with the public. In the end the costs are going to see it burried for now.
@@MDP1702 i agree nuclear is not renewable, but isn't the point rn just to stop emissions, which nuclear doesn't really produce many. Outside that it's just an easy source of energy to use. It doesn't require storage systems which is a huge advantage not because of cost, nuclear is insanely expensive, but just logistics. The amount of energy storage we need for wind and solar would be astronaimical. It's not unachievable but i don't see the point in trying to go through all the effort of renewables when we could research better nuclear tech. Besides if we were to start focusing on reestablishing nuclear more money would go to R&D of nuclear techs which I believe would culminate in fusion power which would more or less solve all or energy problems.
@@nicholasgiampetro782 Nuclear would either require storage or gas peak plants seeing its a baseload plant and not flexible enough to follow the demand. Fusion power is already being researched, more funding for or usage of fission would not really change that. I see nuclear possibly as a temporary transisition fuel either untill we get fusion or untill we essentially use solarfields in space and "beam" down the energy. Furthermore better storage (more specifically batteries) could be usefull for many other things: EV's, electric planes or ships, emergency supply, space, ....
@@nicholasgiampetro782 Nuclear is simply too expensive. And then there's the problem that we have no acceptable solution for storing used fuel for hundreds of thousands of years. Add in the time it takes to bring a reactor online and nuclear simply no longer makes sense. If nuclear were cheaper it would still require storage or some sort of dispatchable generation in order to match supply to demand. It would be possible to roughly load follow with nuclear but that means running reactors at lower than full output which further increases the cost of the electricity produced. Nuclear would have to become incredibly cheaper to get back into the game. Right now the cost of electricity from new reactors in the West is about $0.15/kWh (Vogtle 3&4 and Hinkley Point). Wind and solar are well under $0.05. Nuclear would have to drop its cost by more than 65% to be attractive to markets. How do you reduce the cost of a mature technology by almost 70%? Got magic?
It is worth looking at why solar so cheap, essentially made in China by heavily state subsidised industries that have driven many western manufacturers out of business. This is not really sustainable nor strategically judicious. Wind is a better proposition but if relied on heavily alienates large expanses of landscape and requires substantial investment in load and supply levelling (pumped hydro, batteries etc). Modern nuclear proposals should deliver power at prices comparable to wind if load levelling costs are included. More importantly, molten salt reactors if realised will have a load following characteristics. The Moltex SSR proposal for example, when linked to a network including renewables, includes a heat store that can absorb excess wind energy and release this when needed. If such systems get regulatory and financial backing they could be on line within 15 years and have widespread rollout by 2050 replacing coal and gas plants for electricity generation as well as providing the substantial process heat needed for industry (steel, cement, aluminium, hydrogen and synthetic fuels, desalination, chemicals etc).
@@nikolaitoxvaerd Other than that, I'm currently thinking about moving to Denmark, Norway or Sweden at some point. Or at least live and work there for some part of the year. Greetings from you neighbor in Germany 😄
This is correct, @Our Changing Climate should make a correction, and understand the difference here. Commercial scale energy storage projects, have two main metrics of measurement, POWER and ENERGY. Currently, many LiON battery storage projects paired with solar would be labeled something like '1MW/4MWh' or, '1MW, 4 hours'. Where power denotes maximum peak output from the storage, and MWh being the volume of 'how much' energy it can store.
I came here to say the same. MW is a rate measurement of energy: million Joules per second. In general, energy rates are not stored in lakes. People often seem confused by this, probably because Watt does not sounds like a rate. Most rates have the word per and a time unit in them, e.g. miles per hour, dollars per year, and words per minute.
It is so strange that those you think should know this just doesn’t... and unfortunately I’m not certain of they just made an ”error” or if they really don’t know and/or can explain the difference!? This also takes a toll on the credibility; what else have they got wrong in the video... hope they comment on this!
@@rh9596 As someone who works in this space and follows it closely, outside of this 'communication error' everything else is in line with the truth and facts. In fact, OCC had the opportunity to be even more bullish /optimistic in the statements about how rapidly the costs here are decreasing, and how the adoption is likely to play out (much faster than IEA and fossil fuel companies have stated in their projections). And, it is still surprising to me how a chunk of people (non-engineers) will make this mistake in industry.
The goal should not be 100% renewables it should be 100% low-carbon. Limiting our options to just wind and solar ignores other low-carbon energy sources like nuclear and hydro and makes mitigating anthropogenic climate change much harder, much more expensive, and take longer
Why put the focus on only solar and wind energy when nuclear energy has got a smaller carbon footprint. It has gotten much safer and is also a much more realistic solution. But it doesn’t appeal the ‘green’ mindset.
When it comes to turbines kill bird, there are engineering solutions trying to prevent that. On of these solutions being used worldwide is called IdentiFlight.
Great video! We can and have to be more responsible about our energy consumption, until we can be 100% sustainable. Then we can use as much energy from the sun, wind, geothermal, and nuclear as we want! :)
We can and have to be more responsible about our energy consumption, until we can be 100% sustainable. Then we can use as much energy from the sun, wind, geothermal, and nuclear as we want! :) Herds and hives.
A solution to the bird problem is to put a small percentage of the $$ from wind energy generation to acquire and maintain bird habitats. Ultimately it is habitat loss that affect their numbers the most. The growth in EVs presents an opportunity to charge it with excess renewable energy during times of excess and to give back to the grid during deficits. One EV has enough storage capacity for 3-10 periods of daily deficits.
Even with an unrealistic boom in energy storage you'd still have the problem of lack of grid stability and inertia, that's if the price of that much renewable capacity is even economically viable, 100% renewables is not possible. We need Nuclear Energy
@@Hyperactivi The evidence used in the film is so bad some of the better points they had to make were lost by the jaw dropping way they were happy to distort facts to suite the doom & gloom message they wanted to make. Most worrying of all is it was so easy to prove how they had played with reality by carefully choosing what they showed and yet even now the the Film Makers don't care. The tragedy is that there was an ember of a good idea/intention in the film about consumerism and making sure green solutions were just that, better than what has gone before... but they threw it all away by making the facts fit the argument and basically telling a whole lot of lies. A good take down of what they did was done at the time by Dave at Just Have a Think... ua-cam.com/video/ZmNjLHRAP2U/v-deo.html
Cool video. Very well done. Some thoughts I had were that oil spills from fossil fuels, and nuclear waste kill fishes. It’s easier to see dead birds than dead fishes. Also Net zero carbon is only the beginning there’s already lots of Carbon in the atmosphere. Carbon capturing is the next step.
Nice that pumped storage works so well with wind/solar but I've heard natural gas turbines are a lot cheaper to install, producing about 35% of the worlds electricity. So how to make the switch away from cheap and dirty?
We will never reach a completely renewable future without the use of Nuclear power along the way. Whether that's uranium based or thorium based doesn't matter, we can use both. But wind turbines are too expensive, solarpanels and batteries need too many rare earth resources, and they all take up an enormous amount of space. I know nuclear has the drawback of meltdowns but in reality. The chance of that is minimal. When we think of Chernobyl and Fukashima we have to remember those reactors were built on tech from decades ago and I'm 2020 the chances would shrink farther with better tech, and the more we use them and learn better ways to use them.
Nuclear power is so expensive and dangerous. Renewables are already cheaper and their prices will keep falling. As mentioned in 4:05 the carbon debt of a solar panel is paid off after 1.6 years. And the raw material needed (mainly silicon) is not a rare earth resource: It's available almost everywhere in the world. The future is renewable.
While that’s true, thorium would be much more effective. It creates more energy and less waste, and is much more common to find. Not to mention that we only have about 80 years worth of uranium left to use. But I agree that renewables should be implemented before nuclear power plants.
@@emil5588 the problem is that we compare the price of 1MW of nuclear with 1MW of renewables capacities while you also need to count the stockage price and the fact that 1MW of installed renewables is not producing 1MV (for exemple in france the solar is producing in average 15% of the installed power and eolien is producing 24.3% of the installed power). When you take that into account studies show that nuclear is actually way cheaper than wind/solar.
@@333kirua When you think of the storage: The dangerous nuclear waste must be stored safely for hundreds of thousands of years. In order to calculate honestly, you must take these huge costs into account. Still ignoring the fact that a 100% safe storage location doesn't even yet exist on earth. Renewable energy sources don't have those flaws.
@@emil5588 The price of the storage is usually included in the price estimation of nuclear energy (but yeah, for this part it's only an estimation). As for the safety of the storage I would argue that it's not really a problem, there is a lot of geological traps which have existed for millions or even billions of years without moving. A good example is the one trapping the nuclear waste of a natural nuclear reactor which was in activity 1.7 billion years ago in gabon (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reactor)
I saw nuclear on your graphs a few times. On one of them it seemed to be the option with the lowest carbon cost per life cycle. I know nuclear can be scary but it is also a young technology. Many new designs seem to be safer and more sustainable.
If each country built huge solar arrays and transported the energy through high voltage lines to countries in their night time and then they send it back when it is our night then we wouldn't need batteries. It would be symbolic of us coming together as one race also, a concept we desperately need to grasp..
when you mentioned the doc i stopped the video and watched it, then got really depressed, came back to this video and now im a little more hopeful again o.o
High population is a factor to climate change, but it's not the one we should go for. The one we should go for is our incredibly wasteful neoliberal economic system.
"I can't swim and I'm drowning in a pool, but I'm not worried about all the water, just that there's a giant hole in the ground." Resource-wise, you could have thousands of people (at least) living like kings and it wouldn't be unsustainable, because Magnitude Matters. But there aren't thousands, or hundreds of thousands, or millions of people using resources, there are Billions. I can't imagine engaging in the mental gymnastics people do to ignore the problem of almost 8 billion people, with no slowdown in global birthrate in sight. Having billions of humans is, by itself an ethical problem on a single planet simply due to the fact that the value of human life has lost any meaning at all. A human life actually has negative value in a very real sense, both culturally, and in a survival sense.
Great video mate, you make a extraordinary job in explaining complicated issues to the general public. I just have one issue, the capacity of storage in terms of energy is measured in MWh, otherwise is installed capacity (power) measured in MW. Indeed the Bath county pumped storage have a installed capacity of 3000MW. However, its storage capacity is 24000MWh. The use of either of those depends on context, but I guess your point is better illustrated by the later, and equally installed capacity is not equivalent to dispachability. Unfortunately I observed the same mistake made even in scientific papers, I guess because those terms are quite confusing.
living in Sweden, one thing I get a bit frustrated about in our everyday lives is how we bake in inefficiency into our lives through the ideals of how a home should look and function. A pretty good example of this is how we heat up our homes (which are often very well insulated), only to put refrigerators and freezers into them (out of convenience). Where I live, in the south of Sweden it's basically fridge temperatures outside around 7-8 months per year. and up north you get 3-6months freezer temperature. I could quite easily make a cold insulated pantry that is thermally stable, utilizing outdoor and indoor air, with sensors and fans to regulate temperature. In the end that kind of fridge would require mW of power during the majority of the year. These pantries could be accessible indoors, so really, you won't reduce any comfort, and in fact this was something we did in the past. In my apartment from the 1940s I have such a pantry which basically just lets cold air in through a valve. It's a very primitive design. But with modern regulations and requirements for food you could easily add filters, temperature control etc, this could easily be made for a fraction of the power a normal compressor fridge would require...
Thank You for putting a more positive outlook for future energy than can be to often the case. Doom & gloom unfortunately increases web site interest. As a Brit my favourite energy storage as part of the solution to renewable's sync issues is Highview Power's liquid air storage system. They've pretty much gone under the radar despite proving themselves something more than another paper exercise with two test plants. Now they are about to start building to large storage plants here in the UK and another in America. What I have always liked about there system is it uses off the shelf technology that can be scaled up or moved and so can make use of oil & gas workers with minimum training and all without any geology restrictions. The method they use is to use spare electricity to clean & compress air into cryogenic storage tanks ready to be warmed and released to spin a turbine when needed. The setup is around 60-65% efficient but can increase that slightly if there is waste heat near the plant. The air is scrubbed and what comes it is clean air. Highview Power's storage units work best at large scale town/city and can store more energy and for longer just by adding more cryo tanks. With the speed of battery storage to power fluctuations and power cuts combined with liquid air's long term storage abilities the future isn't as dark as some may think.
the video ignores the TYPES of birds that wind turbines kill. you cannot make the "cats kill more" argument without accounting for the fact that domestic cats do NOT klll large soaring or migratory species in significant numbers. likewise, turbines do not generally kill small birds. size matters, and looking solely at bird deaths per GWh without accounting for the exact species that are killed, their national population (including placement on threatened listings) and their reproductive rates is just as bad if not worse than those "right wing politicians". if you're going to use statistics, use them PROPERLY.
Yes, ok, but you didn't address the problem of space. You need a lot of it to make efficient wind and solar farms. Where ever you go you'll see turbines and solar panels instead of nature, which is defeating the purpose. Renewables are supposed to save the nature (and us) from CO2, and idk if covering it up in man-made things is called "saving". Maybe I am wrong, and renewables don't cover up much space. Whoever knows, please tell me.
No doubt about it, pumped hydro works, and is practical in many places. It makes up most of today's electricity storage. It's not going to be practical to rely on for all energy storage. IMO the real key to meeting the needs to make 100% renewables work is the Grid. With the right kind of grid, you can use the best type of energy storage for each location, and share electrical supply over large areas.
I feel conflicted about this video. On one hand I think it's the kind of content we need to make some difference. On the other hand its message is sadly narrow minded (it assumes 100% renewables is a desirable and necessary goal to begin with, thus painting a false dichotomy) and riddled with both historic and practical inaccuracies that are simply inexcusable (the author either evidently didn't bother researching some of the things he asserted as facts or purposely misrepresented what he knew to be true for ideological reasons). Overall, the broad message is fine but somewhat fallacious, and I'm definitely tired of being fed ideologically skewed information 24/7. Failing to be different from the norm and original isn't an issue per se, but it does come off as a disappointment nonetheless. I guess my expectations were too high. Not his fault though. 🤷
I think it's somewhat disingenuous to compare the lifestyles of people in America to Brazil, India & China. The quality of living, general health & economic output of each country is heavily depedant on the amount of energy each citizen recieves.
My state, Tasmania, Australia, is so lucky. We use the water storage method described in the video, but instead of needing to pump water up to it, it fills naturally through rain. It's free energy!
On a flight across the Appalachians I noticed multiple places which were clear cut of all trees and appeared to be very close to flat, as far as one can tell from the air. They really stood out because they weren't small, and their deep gray color contrasted to the soil color every other place I could get a sense of it. I was past the mountains when I realized suddenly I had been looking at mountaintop removal mining. It left behind a complete wasteland, poisoned by remnants of coal, not a bit of organic matter, spoiled land which is useful for nothing. Or is it? These empty, infertile areas of land would be ideal for joint wind and solar farms. cover the ground with solar, with wind turbines pushing up into the steady breezes which run across the mountains. These installations could provide good quality, well-paid jobs for a region where that's uncommon.
So nuclear power plants is contributing the most in zero emissions energy today and not one mention of it. A typical 1GW nuclear plant will need 4million solar panels or 400 wind turbines to equal power output assuming optimal sun and wind conditions. If you want to provide sufficient energy ie extra power to charge batteries you need to multiply at least 5 the number of panels and 3 the number of turbines given average capacity factors of 20% and 40% respectively. This is assuming 100% for storage and retrieval process which in real world is likely around 50% requiring even more generating capacity to offset efficiency. You also forgot to mention that every solar and wind farm is backed up by natural gas plant to help stabilize output before allowing to get onto grid. Just do the basic math and you will clearly see that 100% renewables is a false prophecy and not achievable. You must include on demand 24x7x365 generators which is either fossil or nuclear or hydro which is limited areas around the globe. Germany and California are some of the richest economies in the world and have failed to reduce emissions after decades of renewable build. France has the best model for reducing emissions with more than 70% nuclear energy and lowest emissions and electricity cost in Europe. They were able to go from 20% to 70% in less than 2 decades.
Although nuclear can be clean and safe in the short term, to make it safe is incredibly expensive. (Except maybe for countries like france, that have colonial economical benefits in getting Uranium) I wouldn't call it the best new power station to build. Especially economically speaking. (src: ua-cam.com/video/UC_BCz0pzMw/v-deo.html and wikipedia research) Also, in Belgium, our nuclear power stations have a capacity factor of around 60%, because they're getting old, often have problems causing shutdowns, and are way too expensive to thoroughly repair or renew
France has been able to standardize reactor vessel manufacturing minimizing cost and have consistent quality. They also reprocess used fuel and minimize waste and uranium imports. While it does cost more to build reactors their lifecycle is typically 60 to 80+ years compared to approximately 20yrs for solar or wind. The video you referenced shows the payback exceeding NG plant after 20yrs plus NG plants will need to be replaced after 30-40yrs. Nuclear technology has not been static. There are many new designs that have built in passive walk away safety features. ua-cam.com/video/_mJ3S-VQuHY/v-deo.html
I love renewables, especially as an independently-produced power source for a local home or business (screw the state-sponsored monopolies that are our utility companies). However, if we do continue to have a primarily centralized and distributed grid, renewables are gonna be hard to roll out when it comes to land use, electrical transmission, and storage. Even if we meet these challenges, they will be somewhat unreliable on high-demand days (like in the middle of summer with lots of air conditioning going on, or the same in the middle of winter with heaters running) unless we REALLY overbuild renewable capacity. Then, that over-building would waste a lot energy in the spring and fall. It'll take something like ultra-safe/inexpensive nuclear tech, widespread hydrogen power use, fission power, or independent micro-grids to save us from a warmer future while maintaining our Western lifestyles.
Thanks for this great presentation, Charlie. Please forgive the jargon. A focus on power-to-biofuel-backup for grids will help smooth the supply-demand curve through the day and throughout the year -- chemical storage being particularly good at lasting for years, and with much less footprint than pumped hydro, much less ground impact than subterranean hot rock or pressurized gas storage, and more versatility than mechanical (gravity or flywheel) storage. Using eutectic salt pyrolysis to turn excess electric energy into processing that unleashes the same benefits as fossil fuels from waste biomass (we do have to harvest those trees we plant as a rain shield and clear the forest of debris) turned into volatile organic compounds, then zeolite processing to upgrade VOCs to drop-in replacement for aviation and vehicle fuel, means instant ancillary smart grid services to protect from intermittency, a vast reservoir of biochar to sequester carbon as soil amendment, and displacing fossil fuels on the market with cheaper biofuels while we bridge to electric coastal vessels and ground transport vehicles. With this policy we invert the perverse system of rewards for cutting without replanting, for extraction without sequestration, by making sequestration so profitable everyone will want to do it, by making replanting so attractive no one will be able to stop. Grid power and ancillary service is a real opportunity, ten times bigger than bitumen ever could be. Power-to-Fuel is what the Germans are doing, but their focus is Hydrogen, which is energetically expensive (only about 10% efficient) and expensive to produce, store or transport, plus escapes storage rapidly. Their way doesn't sequester carbon, the way making biofuel does. The same amount of energy used to convert different species of biomass to components of fuel (pyrolysis to make cellulose into VOCs; Bosch-Haber to make ammonia and urea from nitrogen/hydrogen rich wastes) produces more net energy than is put into it, because the biomass starts with ample chemical energy, and the forms created using efficient zeolite media are the same as what geology produces after millions of years: gasoline, kerosene, diesel, heavy oil. I'd rather have 140% of what I put in than 10%, and in the form of aviation and marine fuel, gas and truck fuel, and biochar to amend soil and reduce need for fertilizer. (Fertilizer also a byproduct of the process.) We have ample kaolin for zeolite; ample cellulose waste; ample biomass waste rich in nitrates; ample potential for cheap intermittent power that needs backup. This seems the smart technical route, and I'm amazed so few are working on it, but not very amazed. Saying "Hydrogen" causes some people's eyes to glaze over with fascination. Saying "wood chips" or "sewage" less so. There are more complicated technologies involved, but they're all well-developed on their own, and only need bringing together.
As the article you reference around 4:00, the cleanest energy is, of course, nuclear, which is also the safest per MWh generated and is not intermittent. What happens when a country succumbs to fossil-fuel lobby fueled antinuclear hysteria is best seen in Germany: despite enormous money spent on residential solar, and lots of wind, when they started shutting down nuclear power plants their consumption of natural gas skyrocketed, and they are even talking about reopening old lignite mines. 6:00 - 3GW is not the _enegy_ capacity, but maximum _power_ (which is, confusingly, also sometimes referred to as "capacity', but _power capacity,_ not _energy capacity_ ) BTW, it _is_ pretty huge - like a large multi-reactor nuclear plant. The storage capacity (according to Wikipedia) is about 24GWh - it can run at peak power only for less than half a day. Please let's not confuse energy with power, especially in this kind of video. FWIW, countries that have favorable topology (e.g. Norway or my Croatia) have been using pumped hydro for half a century. EU is investing heavily in interconnects, but it is interesting to see where many countries go for that 10% of capacity they are missing at some given moment: to France and their ample, stable supply from nuclear plants. We _might_ be able to get by with wind, solar, hydro, geothermal plus storage, continental-scale grids and curtailing consumption. With nuclear there is no question - we certainly can.
Yeah but nuclear is politically to implement, and some places are too small for nuclear energy. Additionally, nuclear plants take lots of time to create. Of course we should use nuclear, but I feel that we still need a decent chunk of energy to be in the form of renewables. (Nuclear waste could just get buried like it is in Finland) P.S. We should really also try to root out the long-lasting influence of the Koch brothers and oil companies from society.
@@acxesta2 Though, why Sweden is the highest to having clean energy by 2030 is just because of our nuclear energy. We get approximately 40 percent of our energy from nuclear power plants. And then also from our many water power plants as well. From water, 40 percent of our energy is produced as well.
Yeah, I'll just nominate your entire potential lineage to keep watch on the nuclear waste that will be around longer than human civilization, never mind the fact that nuclear waste is often grossly mishandled at the outset of its "disposal", leading to immediate environmental contamination.
Love your videos and this one is excellent. Curious - I’ve heard that wind turbines kill more endangered birds and birds of prey, whereas house cats, sky scrapers, and fossil fuels kill birds that are not endangered. Wondering if there is research into engineering turbines in such a way as to protect these rare birds.
Very interesting and factual. The only point I would make is that there is no chance of reducing energy usage! No chance! In addition the third world will continue to increase its energy use on a massive basis. The only way to reduce energy use would be for Governments to limit how much individuals can use. That will not happen in western countries. Keep up the good work.
Above a certain latitude solar never pays off its carbon footprint. You did not include nuclear which is the cleanest power supply. 'The taste on solar is an incredible problem - not solved. I was water resource engineer too the Dinorwic pumped storage system in Wales. This was created in the 1970's before the climate alarmism madness and was needed then. Today with the extreme problems from renewables there is simply not enough locations where this canc be done. Also the cost is high and has too be added to the cost of renewables. I could go on with the wishful thinking in this video but we really do not need to curtail the out put of plant food others known as CO2. Tell me what level of nCO2 are you trying to achieve> The drought pre-industrial level?
First off, really appreicate the new content and keeping up withe fight. Climate change is an issue more important than ever and unfortunately, us as a world have become distracted with 'everything' that is going on. As some other commenters have said, you should make a correction and understand the difference between Power and Energy, particularly in the fight to decarbonize our energy system. Commercial scale energy storage projects have two main metrics of measurement, POWER and ENERGY. Currently, many LiON battery storage projects paired with solar would be labeled something like '1MW/4MWh' or, '1MW, 4 hours'. Where power denotes maximum peak output from the storage, and MWh being the volume of 'how much' energy it can store. Other energy storage systems and technologies have different ratios depending on the underlying technology and physics. Things like 'flow' batteries, may be something like 100kWh/2MWh simply because it takes longer to 'discharge' the battery, but you can more easily 'build up' stored energy. Similarly, a hydrogen energy storage system would be limited in energy capacity based on how much space there is in the tanks for hydrogen, but is limited in 'Power' by the peak output of the fuel cells at that facility.
Geat video, but you forgot to mention the energy loss from pump storage. There is around a 20% energy loss from pumping the water and generating power again.
Correct, I’m not speaking against a solution. Although I believe a better solution would be utility scale batteries. The cost has been decreasing and the efficiency has been improving.
Sry, I generally really like what you are doing on this channel as discuss environmental topics, showing light at more facets and not being superficial. But this video is way lower than your normal standards. I know it is not feasible to talk about every topic of renewable energy in under 15 minutes, but there were just way to many important aspects that you didn't even mentioned. Instead of dramatically showing one example of storage that is also far from the best one as it suffers under a very low efficiency and energy-loss, you could have, in my opinion better show a few more option that are out there. Showing the benefits and flaws of each. Also the example of energy transfer if there is an overproduction is a bit misleading. Sure later you explained that this can be used if the renewables of another country dont produce that much. But 5 Minutes of research would have shown you that this export often just allows countries to hold on to there fossil energy. Because the one that overproduce can say, that they make so much green energy that they even export it. While countries that import it can argue that they buy into green energy without changing there grid. As said: I know that it is impassible to discuss everything in such a short video and my complains are also only just a few examples of missing topics. But in my eyes this video is just way to superficial and thus under your standards. Hope you understand my criticism and where I come from^^
To a person who's is very educated in renewables and has done their research I can see how you may see this video as superficial. But there are a lot of people who maybe don't have as much knowledge about this topic or aren't as invested into sustainability. To make a longer, intenser(information wise) video may turn their interest away. The more people who get on board to a path of a greener future, the faster we will get there and the stronger we will be once we are there. Greetings from Canada.
@@nicolebernard4859 I have to disagree. What turns critical people away isn't a video with a good and a structure of arguments that wouldn't receive the worst grade in school, but a superficial video that seems to completely ignore all other aspects of the reality. you do not need to be super detailed. but showing some counterargument and than counter them with examples and arguments shows that this video is based of actual research and isnt made out of an information bubble.
Sylens Drake that is a fair point. Climate change is a heavy topic, all I know is that this video sparked hope for me after watching it and Hope is a very powerful thing. Hope drives people forward, it fuels the fight for a green future. To hope that one day we won’t have to watch videos about renewable energy, but to see it running our very own cities.
There is some useful info in this video, but the proposed "solutions" (pumped storage and energy trading) are well known and are already being implemented where they are feasible and make economic sense. I'm sure we could find more opportunities to implement them further, but they will always be only be a small part of the solution, as will wind and solar generation. The video seems to imply that the big problem is how to reduce carbon emissions in wealthy countries. This is false. The vast majority of future carbon emissions will come from China, India, Indonesia and Africa. To expect these countries to rely on wind, solar, pumped storage and other expensive and unreliable sources is completely unrealistic, not to mention unfair. They are determined to double or quadruple their GDP in the next few decades, and this will not be possible without abundant and affordable energy resources. People should go to Our World in Data and find out what is really happening wrt energy sources and uses in this world.
Could you address the price of energy alongside this? If ways of storage are improving but the price per unit charge is going up, that may not work in the long term.
Wind and solar, due to their intermittent nature, bash themselves. The more you add the greater their problems become. (i.e. all solar or wind generation hitting the grid at the same time, or leaving the grid at the same time) That's why they need other zero carbon sources to help them out, and the only option left is nuclear. Storage can help a bit, but it's far, far to expensive, and compared to the demand for storage there is nowhere even enough. (Yes, even pumped hydro. We can't build enough new mountains and lakes.) Here is an example with 100% capacity of pumped hydro, backing up wind: www.electricitymap.org/zone/ES-CN-HI Most of the time it runs on the diesel fuel backup.
Couldn't we also use: Lithium ion batteries, transitioning to solid state batteries in the near future. Also compressed air, raised hydraulic mass storage, molten salt etc?
@Greg Barton I like the use of electricity map! But using El Hierro as an example is not really representative. El Hierro is very small scale, without interconnections. And as we know: one solution won't cut it. We need BOTH interconnections AND storage AND smart grids AND ....
Strange that " the only option left is nuclear", in the EU biomass and natural gas are popular. Is there a country where nuclear backs up renewables ie: the reactor shuts down on sunny/windy days? There are 150 countries generating hydroelectricity but "We can't build enough new mountains and lakes"??
btw, an important thing about nuclear, that everyone seems to forget: Their power is fixed. It's not economical for nuclear plants to follow demand. So you have the same old storage problems here.
I find this channel overwhelmingly informative. It does cause some anxiety, in that getting governments and the top to agree and make a TRUE change to benefit the ENTIRE population is as difficult as reversing climate change.
2050? It will happen way before that. Solar and wind prices are dropping every year and so are prices for various storage solutions. Within the next 10 years it will switch purely for economic reasons. It will go faster with the right politics (currently fossil fuels are heavily subsidized because they have larger lobbying influence (corruption) ). But it will happen regardless. The easiest way to encourage it is smarter grids which are willing to price electricity accordingly which will encourage large power users to use cheaper power when renewables have excess, avoiding curtailment, and encourage storage providers to develop and build storage solutions. If California said that power was free or extremely cheap at certain times of day then it would not be long before curtailment would no-longer be necessary as power users would show up to take advantage. This is probably already happening, its just that there is a delay between the power being made available and the industries coming to utilize it. But it won't take 50 years. 2050 is too far off.
@@ObjectiveTruth5168 Price is obviously price / power provided. So it is capable by definition. I realize that some power generation solutions such a solar produce power at specific times and must therefore be used in combination with storage solutions, so the price must be calculated as the total of generation and storage. But quite a lot of power usage can be moved to a different time of day if the pricing is right. Before 2050 it will be cheaper for the average suburban household to put solar on the roof and have a battery backup than to pay for a power cable to the house. Cities and industry will be different depending on available area, but wind/solar/storage will be cheaper than fossil fuels long before 2050. Actually its cheaper already for about half the use cases. Hundreds of planned now coal power stations were cancelled in the last few years because they were no longer viable, and many more existing fossil fuel power stations are being shut down early because they are no-longer economically viable. This trend will continue as the price of wind/solar/storage continue to drop. It does take time to build new solar panels and wind turbines and other infrastructure, so it will take maybe 10 or 20 years to do the whole world, but it WILL happen before 2050. And it will happen faster if governments put the right incentives in place and stop subsidizing fossil fuels. Here in South Africa the switch has been delayed by political corruption which led to the previous administration wanting to get nuclear from Russia, and now a desperate attempt to hold on to some coal plants that are uneconomical and keep breaking down leaving us in darkness, but the coal unions have political power. That is already starting to change though as some provinces have started to realize that they can benefit from solar.
I was hoping vehicle to grid (V2G) or vehicle to home (V2H) would be mentioned. I think it's a promising technology esp if we're already moving to EVs.
Hey there! I just had a question. At 5:55 when you discuss the Pumped Hydro vs Li-ion storage numbers, you mention "3003MW of energy" and "62.5MW". Did you mean MWh? MW is a measurement of power, or how much energy can be discharged per unit time. While MJ or MWh is a measurement of how much actual energy capacity can be stored.
Thank you for such an informational and easy to watch video. It would be great if you could make a video on how an individual household can conserve energy!
Warning : Energy (kWh) and power (kW) should not be confused. Power represents the speed of electrons (kW), and energy represents the amount of electrons (kWh). 1 kWh is the quantity of electrons accumulated for 1 hour at 1 kW.
Hey :) Congrats for this video - and the whole channel really. This is the way the climate crisis should be explained and discussed! I love how you translate complex issues in an easy language + images. The aim of our channel itself is to talk about the climate crisis as we would do it with any topic around friends and drinks, "translating" the climate science too. Hope it is ok to use your videos as a resource! And we will look at your new platform as we are having the same issues. Cheers!
Question about Curiosity Stream. Does it have its own streaming service or do I need to watch videos from them and Nebula on You Tube. The reason I ask is because You Tube downgraded their graphics and does not have true 4K from what I see on my screen. If curiosoty streams like Netflix from its own server and has true 4K I will sign up at that level. Thanks.
Yes.. wind turbines "could" (Be the Solution to Reaching 100% Renewable)... but it "isn't"... because they "won't"... not because they "can't". SO.. THEN.. the next subject to cover/question to ask is.. (We're well past the wondering if "could" or "couldn't" stage while pwaying baby crib music).. why.. WON'T... they?? (dweedoo dweedo dweedoo..)
The problem is insane consumption of the global north; one child in UK uses 12 tons of CO2 in first year of life, one child in Africa 1/2 tone. USA has 3% world children population but use 43% of toys,a child in Bangladesh 54 times less resources than one in West, and on and on
You had everything right until you made a terrible mistake in 5:58. mw of energy? FIrst of all, Megawatt is not "mw", it's "MW" capital. Otherwise it is mili-something that doesn't exist. Second, energy is not measured in watt. It is measured in joule or watt times time, which normally is watt-hour. You wanted to say Megawatt-hour, MWh for short. Please correct and re-upload the video because this mistake makes it unsharable. Thank you.
The aim is a decarbonize world or a 100% renewable world? Because they are not synonymous, we can decarbonize world without 100% renewables, I mean, pumped hydro is yet everywhere near full capacity, because hydro in the past was the first source of electricity when coal wasn't available (in Italy we have 98% of storage made by pumped hydro, and till 1970 70% of electricity was from hydro), and stuff like the cylinder is absolutely crazy in my opinion, I mean, how much concrete do you need? Concrete whose heat made from coal of course, because with renewables is insanely costly generating heat, only with nuclear you can achieve 0% carbon heat. But if go nuclear, there is no more 100% renewables, and also, if go nuclear you don't need so much storage. So what's matter? A decarbonize world or a 100% renewables world?
"Could This Be the Solution to Reaching 100% Renewable Energy?" No. "All headlines that end with a question can be answered with the word 'no' " Betteridges Law of Headlines
You are not using mw or mwh correctly. You skip over the possibilty of implementation of pumped hydro. There isn't much. The need for even more capacity of wind/solar. More materials and higher co2 output, hydro has a bad methane production in it start, depending which are you flood. Stanfords plans have been shown to be ubreasonable and mostly based on hydro projects. Jacobson Stanford University, has been fined to pay court costs for his slandering to demand $10M from scientist that disproved his research. Consumer behaviour change is very slow and has slight effects. The real solution is carbon pricing. And the build of deployable clean energy. Geothermal as medium clean And nuclear as very clean. As in you graph, nuclear is even better, when energy gets consumed directly. But wind and solar are curtailed as said, or need another production step, so there effective co2 reduction gets less. Don't block geothermal and nuclear and wind/solar will be next to that.
🌍 What should I cover next?
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3:14 I think it should've been helpful to add the caveat that cats tend to kill the smaller more common birds that aren't threatened, while wind turbines can be a threat to big and endangered birds of prey. So just saying "cats kill x billion birds" could give the wrong impression as if this can be compared 1 to 1 with the impact that wind turbines have on bird species.
An idea for what you could cover next could be do books have a big impact on the environment. I’m a book lover but also care about the environment and I’ve been wondering how much environmental cost is attached to a book being produced.
I realize it’s not the most interesting topic but it’s just something I’ve been wondering.
Maybe talk about the potential of nuclear fusion and the iter project, and how this could change everything in energy production. There was a construction milestone recently, so it would fit perfectly
I left another comment talking about this but I'll suggest you make a full video on it. You made this whole video but didn't mention nuclear power at all. Could you do one covering the use of uranium and thorium reactors on the way to renewable energy?
You could cover what each country is doing to combat climate change. You could do it in a small series or just one video.
Congratulations on yet another exquisitely beautiful piece of video mastery. You are a real inspiration. Thank you for your work 😊
Great to see two of the best climate channels admire eachother.
JHAT and OCC, you and other climate activists on UA-cam should collaborate for content so that you cover more diverse range of Topics
Just some more points:
1. Smart grids are going to be a very powerful tool. The idea is that you use electricity when it is avaiable. So you heat up the water in your house, charge the car or wash the dishes with the dishwasher, when we have lots of sun and wind automatically.
2. We have to electrify a lot more systems. The electricity production consums something like 20% of primary energy right now worldwide. The big other ones are transport and heating(mainly buildings). They can be electrified or replaced with other systems, like electric vehicles, bikes and heat pumps.
3. Storage is very complicated. Grid fluctuations can kill a grid and many storage solutions need some time to switch on. So you need batteries, which can be started up instantly and bigger cheaper systems like hydro or compressed air storage for bigger down times.
On UA-cam JustHaveAThink has an amazing channel, with a great comment section, about stuff like that.
Using less electricity is a much better solution. We can make use of the Thermal Dynamics and make houses with thicker outer-walls, that that store heat energy generated by the sun, and release the heat, when it becomes too cold. You can also run vents through the soil and turn hot air outside into cool air without any use of electricity. You can completely eliminate all electric usage for heating and cooling through these methods.
@@Gamerad360 I agree on saving energy and better buildings surely are part of the solution, but tearing down every building, which is not passive is extremly wasteful.
Electricity is relativly clean and changing heating and cooling to electric can be done easily in old buildings. Insulation to a pratical degree will be necessary thou.
@@MrMakabar I never said tear down every building. Straw-man. You can retrofit older buildings.
You don't need expensive insulation, as the thicker the walls, the more insulated the walls are. Unless you live in Canada you don't need insulation, as the thick walls provide insulation. The reason conventional homes need insulation is, because their walls are so thin.
Grid Electricity is 80% non-renewable, which is terrible for the environment, where not using the electricity to begin with will be great for the environment.
Idk why nuclear isn't considered as a solution tbh.
@@Gamerad360 Thick walls are insulation and you can not easily thicken walls. But insultion can not heat or cool a building, it only preseves the temperaturer. To heat it in a building without any sort of active energy input, you usually use windows, which for older buildings might not be build in the right diection and angle to do so efficently. Cooling can be done by using some cold mass ususally the ground to cool down inflowing air, as you mentioned above. So you are likely to have to add pipes etc. to an older building to allow the cool air frrom the ground to move throu out the house. Which again is hard to retrofit.
Now most climates require some sort of temperaturer control, not just Canada. Most areas in the wolrd have either temperatures below freezing or heat waves, which require cooling.
The question has to be that, if you can not easily retrofit a buildding to need no active energy input, how to heat and cool the building. As for heating burning plants is a good solution, but it is still fairly wasteful and bad for air quality. So you need another source and electricity can do that.
As for CO2 emissions only 66% of worldwide electricity prodution emits large amounts(e.g. is fossil fuel excluding nuclear) and getting that numbe higher is technically possible and being done everywhere.
you are one of the best channels on this platform! just signed up for nebula and curiosity stream with your link :) keep up the great work!
Pumped hydro is great but it's only feasible when you have the right local geography, which is relatively rare. ps: 5:55 MWhr, not MW.
It seems you've been going in a more conceptual direction, so I was thinking it'd be interesting to see a video and have a conversation about future societies dependant more on their own personal and community output of energy (human energy) rather depending on finding new ways to grow and rely on external energy output. A society that can function without growth of economy, population, or energy consumption. I'm not talking about going back to pre-industrial society and forgoing all technologies, but simplification and reduction of consumption. A more calculated and strategic expenditure of resources which are not unlimited, rare earth metals or copper just for an example.
I have seen Planet of Humans recently, I too felt that it has mainly talked about problems with renewables and pointed towards population growth control as solution which is true to an extent but no realistic solutions. Also another point mentioned was bio fuel as back up for these renewable which is taking wood chips to cut trees and raw materials for Solar panel using carbon etc., There was a graph showing Bio, Wind and Solar where Bio is more than 60% or sth., I wish this Video covered those aspects too as major current obstacles or challenges to look for improved technologies for alternative raw materials or workaround without Bio Fuel. There is mention of water pumping in solutions though not sure how many places it is feasible. Nevertheless good attempt to create some hope after watching Planet of Humans that Renewables are going other way around and don't solve climate change problems.
What about RNG, Hydrogen and Compressed air battery's.
i think renewables have done a lot to reduce the impact we have now and prevent the worst case warming scenario. However there is some points that you neglegted here in my oppinion. I study at wageningen University of lifesciences and i actually just had a course about this. The energy storage problem is one that is often used to critique renewable energy souces but every technology has its own set of problems. Solarpannels and wind tubines both use a lot of scarce commocities ( like rare metals and minderals). When you showed the infographic that a fully renewable future is possible, it really supprised me because that is not the case ,to my knoledge. At least not for the whole world.
I actually wrote a paper about this toppic if anyone cares to read. Here i back up the information with scientific sources:
How sustainable are renewable sources?
To investigate the sustainability of renewable energy sources , the different available technologies are explained and assessed based on their advantages and disadvantages.
Firstly biomass. Biomass is an abundant waste product which can be burned. But burning Biomass can result in pollutive emissions, which is counterproductive when attempting to lower greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. It also may not be the most cost-effective choice (Ellabban et al., 2014, p. 749) (Giurco et al., 2019, p. 455).
Geothermal energy. This technology is considered cost effective and reliable. However, installation and maintenance costs can run high. (Ellabban et al., 2014, p. 749) (Giurco et al., 2019, p. 455).
Hydro energy is relatively inexpensive and offers recreational benefits in areas of boating and fishing and is most ideal for island countries. Its opportunities are also its weaknesses as hydropower can only be used in areas with sufficient water and best sites for dams have already been developed. Furthermore, their construction is very expensive (Ellabban et al., 2014, p. 749) (Giurco et al., 2019, p. 455).
Marine Energy works in similar fashion. It captures energy that would otherwise not be collected and is potentially infinite. But it is takes up a lot of space, which makes it difficult for shipping to move around. And more importantly it has negative impacts on wildlife. And storage and backups are neccessary (Ellabban et al., 2014, p. 749) (Giurco et al., 2019, p. 455).
Solar energy causes no air or water pollution and is an infinite source of energy. But its reliability depends on the presence of sunlight and a lot of space to catch that light. Thus, it can be cost ineffective and is poorly suited for cold light scarce seasons (Ellabban et al., 2014, p. 749) (Giurco et al., 2019, p. 455).
Wind energy runs into the same reliability issue as sunlight. It requires constant and significant amounts of wind and windfarms require significant amounts of land on top of that. They also need better ways to store the produced energy. The advantage is that they are also a free energy source and they produce no pollution in water or air. Land space around farms is still usable. But they can be invasive to flying wildlife like gees and bats (Ellabban et al., 2014, p. 749) (Giurco et al., 2019, p. 455).
Renewable energy sources have many advantages and the challenges named above all seem to be manageable in individual cases. Every area has a specific type of renewable energy that fits best so countries and areas can find optimal placement for reasonable sacrifices.
It appears that humanity is coming closer to reaching the IPCCs temperature target of staying below 1,5 degrees warming over preindustrial level (IPCC Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2018).
But there is another problem that comes with renewables, their sustainability.
The production of many of these technologies uses scarce and finite resources (Chakarvarty, n.d.).
Solar Panels require five mineral commodities listed by the department of the interior as critical. These commodities are Arsenic, Gallium, Germanium, Indium, and Tellurium. (Critical Mineral Commodities in Renewable Energy, 2019)
Wind turbines, likewise require commodities that were designated as critical. Namely Aluminium and rare-earth Elements. (Critical Mineral Commodities in Renewable Energy, 2019)
Batteries are essential for renewable energy sources, because they allow excess power to be stored. This is essential as most renewable technology is dependent on unpredictable sources like wind and sunlight. Unfortunately, the commodities involved in their production are critical as well, particularly cobalt, graphite, lithium and manganese. (Critical Mineral Commodities in Renewable Energy, 2019)
And it does not stop here unfortunately.
In her report Chakarvarty, describes that the use of critical materials is not limited to the technologies described above. “The use of neodymium and dysprosium is essential to make powerful generators used in wind technologies. Neodymium and dysprosium also find use in making motors for vehicles. In order to make Li-ion batteries for plug-in-hybrid electric vehicles, lithium and cobalt are a critical material requirement. Hybrid electric vehicle using NiMH batteries make use of rare earths such as cerium, lanthanum, neodymium and praseodymium. In order to make fuel cells, critical materials such as yttrium, platinum, palladium and some other platinum group materials are required as catalysts and separators. Lighting (solid state and fluorescent) use rare earths such as yttrium, cerium, lanthanum, europium and terbium as part of the phosphors.” (Chakarvarty, n. d.)
This is the reason why we should aim for innovative sources of nuclear energy in my opinion. Renewable sources are great and they should be implemented where possible to counter teh climate crisis. But beliving they can supply the entire planet is untrue and unjust. THey will create a gap between poor and rich and leave developing countries with the effect sof climatechange and the smog of fossilfuels.
Chemical and thermal storage will outgrow the pumped hydro . This needs to happen as fast as possible but luckily concentrated solar with molten salts and hydrogen are penetrating the market better.
In 2020 actually more than 50% of the energy in Europe was generated by renewable energy although climate neutrality by 2050 will not be enough to meet the Paris Agreement of 1.5°C. especially Germany (where I am from) is blocking a faster transition to renewables to fight climate crisis.
well told
important to add that the reason the EU has managed to make the progress that it has in terms of renewables and environmental legislation is because most of its production is outsourced to to the third world, the "factories of the world", where environmental legislation is never allowed to pass. there can be no climate solution that does not address imperialism
6:28 this is no news, this was first created 1974 in Wales, UK, called "electric mountain". That's 10 years before Bath county.
Pumped-storage is a lot older. A lot of them have been build in 1920s and 1930s. Bath County is just the largest.
@@MrMakabar I see.
The reason why it's not fully embraced because the government doesn't want to educate or help those people who are used to mining coal pits to adapt. Or that people still rely on mining coal as their own source of income.
Nice vid
We should look to nuclear energy also.
Or we could use nuclear.
Together with renewables we would not need batteries.
You'll have to change public opinion on nuclear. Noone wants to live near a nuclear power plant, nor can they live on / build on the site of a former plant for many years :(
@@samspencer7765 in the UK several generations of nuclear reactors are built on the same sites, with necessary expansions ofc, so these relatively small sites can be used to generate clean energy whilst decommissioning of the old reactors are taking place.
If you build nuclear, why bother with wind or solar, they would just add cost, complexity and land use.
@@chapter4travels Diversity is good in a grid. If for any reason natural or man-made we have to temporarily shut down reactors it'd be good to have a diverse grid with grid tied storage for redundancy.
@@samspencer7765 You can't rely on intermittent sources for backup, they are useless. Thermal storage with advanced nuclear is easy and cheap.
Hi guys! if u care for the environment, please use Ecosia as your search engine. For every 45 searches u make, a tree will be planted somewhere. If you think this is fake, u can always check out their UA-cam channel. Stay safe guys :) bai bai
Only nuclear power is capable of replacing the normal fossil burning plants for large cities. The other renewables cannot power large cities, but can work in tiny communities (supposing they are made well, and not the privatized garbage grid in Texas). My mid-sized city between a mountain range and a large lake would be an impossible goal for panels or turbines, without a much larger field of turbines and panels than the city itself (the geography and local government regulations on solar panels prevents that). Additionally, if you don't like the Tesla batteries, you definitely won't like the long-term battery solutions for wind and solar.
I must say you are very naive.
Pumped water storage is not at all the solution for the simple reason that only a lucky few areas in the world are good enough for it to work well. And that giant piston is just a joke. It needs a seal that is just makes it unreasonable to construct and for the seal to up stand the pressure it would be very tight, having tons of losses on friction alone.
I also want a renewable future. But the storage problem is just not that simple to solve.
The real answer here is shown in 3:52. Nuclear. Why not use Nuclear? As you correctly said it's the best thing out there in terms of CO2. It's a solution that is available NOW. Why are we so stupid to not use it? If countries and companies had invested in nuclear the same they have in renewables, maybe those CO2 reduction milestones would be a reality. But that stupid fear to nuclear is killing us and the planet.
Wind and solar do not work at this time, and may never work. But please keep misleading the general public. They seem to enjoy it.
state of the art solar panels are way better than 50 gramms co2e per kwh, this is an old number, its more like 10 now
LIQUID. FLUORIDE. THORIUM. REACTORS.
Nuclear needs to be part of this conversation. It's ludicrous not to--it's the only sustainable, base load option.
I'm quite late but you are 100% correct. Nuclear is by far the best renewable option there is. A primarily nuclear power grid supplemented by wind, solar, and hydro is the best option until fusion becomes possible.
@@Dalton93H but thorium, not uranium. They say Th isn't ready for prime time, what's the hold up I say??
Many uranium power plants are being decommissioned or have been. After all the disasters, many in the public don't trust them anymore and are worried about the waste. Th would be an improvement across all nuclear metrics, but many don't know about it. China seems to be on the forefront of Th tech currently. Hopefully we will soon follow.
There's been one of these in Wales for years. See electric mountain
Here's a great video by Tom Scott on this specific pumped-storage hydro station: ua-cam.com/video/6Jx_bJgIFhI/v-deo.html
The official name for the place is Dinorwig Power Station
Yes and where can the other thousand be build in Britain.
It is not that easy to create more.
Britain' has a high part of huge Gas energy stations versus wind.
Fortunately the build up of Nuclear has also been setup and will reduce the reliance on the gas/wind system.
@@ferkeap pumped storage is indeed not the ideal solution for GB, thankfully, other solutions already exist, like interconnections, lithium batteries, hydrogen, gravity batteries (like the concrete lifting pump) and to a lesser extent, giant flywheels, capacitors and inductors.
You can read more about this, specifically for GB, in the new "Haynes Manual for Electricity Storage"
cdn.ymaws.com/www.renewableuk.com/resource/resmgr/haynes_manual_final_july_202.pdf
The first pump-up hydro storage system was built over 100 years ago. There are many PuHS facilities around the world, several in the US. Most were built when countries were building nuclear plants a half century ago. Since reactors and coal plants were poor at load following storage was needed to match supply to demand.
The US has, probably, over 7,000 existing dams that could be converted to PuHS. Some already have been. Just create a smaller reservoir lower than the main reservoir and bore a small diameter tunnel between them. Use a hybrid pump/turbine and you're in business. The lower reservoir needs to hold only a few days output from generation.
@@ferkeap Your grasp of the UK energy market is technically poor and driven through bias. Nuclear is only good for base load and is too expensive to ever be the dominant energy source given the HARD figures and absolute cock ups that have been documented through 70 years of the British Nuclear Program. The UK goverment are reluctantly backing it as part of an energy (MIX)!!!!. The real money is going into offshore wind, (which is currently the cheapest technology per MW) and storage which is mainly battery based and is recoginised now as commercially competitve. Gas power is an interem the govement is using to boost green credentials by closing coal plants and is also practical, as its quicker to fire up a gas generator and shut it down again, before and after peak load (Not something that can be done with a reacter unless you want to waste energy on mass by blowing steam into the air rather than a turbine). If you looked at a map of energy project planning applications and approvals you would be very dumb founded. If you regulary looked at an energy dashboard like MyGridUK, you would quickly recognise that Nuclear is a small but consistent proportion of the current UK energy mix, while Gas or Wind dominate the largest percentage. Over time you will recognise that wind is increasing its competitiveness against gas steadily whilst completeley dominating it on obvious windy days. Time to exit your bubble.
As a Dane hearing my country mentioned is bittersweet because all the news are about how we aren't meeting that goal.
lol another comment here said u guys got 70% from them this year but I think he means electricity
You mean primary energy right?
The EU goal?
I can pretty confidently say that my homecountry (Belgium) is probably doing worse, as we were fossil of the day in the COP Madrid last year.
@likira - I feel for you, per my reply to
Nikolai Toxværd Jørgensen
@@Simon-nx1sc Cheer up! Belgium is doing worse in total, but better than Denmark in Electricity and Heat!
extending my Nikolai Toxværd Jørgensen table
tot e&h only
Europe 5.9 2.1
Denmark 5.5 1.5 62% non-hydro renewables; 0% nuclear
Belgium 7.9 1.4 30% non-hydro renewables; 32% nuclear
UK 5.3 1.2 32% non-hydro renewables; 20% nuclear
Sweden 3.6 0.7 21% non-hydro renewables; 49% nuclear
France 4.4 0.5 10% non-hydro renewables; 86% nuclear
www.iea.org/countries/Belgium
Population: 11 million
Renewables (7499/8% wind; 4520/5% biofuels; 3972/4% solarPV; 943/1% waste): 30%
Nuclear: 28579/32%
@@factnotfiction5915 Thank you for the interesting information and source!
we're not doing that bad after all, after reading this. Altough we were elected fossil of the day during COP Madrid, and the governement is still not agreeing on wheter or not to close nuclear plants by 2025. This is a problem, to cite your source: "To attract critical investments in the energy sector - especially in electricity generation - the government should follow closely the principles of transparency, predictability and regulatory certainty." --IEA
Also, i didn't know what IEA was and that it existed, i now see that it's running on governement and private donations. How neutral is this organisation?
Thanks!
Simon
@@Simon-nx1sc Not sure how 'neutral' the IEA is.
It was founded by the OECD, and similar to the IPCC is an intergovernmental organization. It obviously answers to its member governments, but I doubt it sets policy. I presume it is more raw-data collection, analysis, and distribution.
This is a great and appealing video that shows a good introduction to the renewables. However, one flaw of the video is that it mixes what is technically possible with what is feasible in reality:
1 - (we should focus on) "Technologies that are already available, ready to deploy and offer tangible solutions to the problems that renewables face" - Completely agree. But viable storage for large-scale are not available, nor ready to deploy. Just like dams,hydro-storage is very good, but area dependent. Lesser-good areas make projects too complex and costly, while other types of storage face other problems - the one in this video is just a concept so far.
2 - Interconnectors are a great idea in paper, but, in reality, they are a completely different story. You have costs and technical challenges associated with "passing electricity" through countries. In your example, Spain would have to go through France - a very independent country in terms of electricity. It wants no imports. Then you still have Germany. Are the costs really worth it?
This problem is a very common problem in my country - Portugal - where neither Spain nor France wants our electricity most of the time, and all other countries are far away. The costs are so high, that we are just better off curtailing it. The connections are here already, but it's just not feasible.
3 - 08:50 graphic. Talking about Variable Renewable Energy problems and then show a graphic of top countries of Renewable Energy, is counterproductive, as these include Hydroelectric, which works in a totally different way. It makes look like it's simple to apply 100% RE and we just don't do it cause of some other reason (#damnpoliticians).
4 - While USA is a big energy consumer, and people overall should use energy more wisely, your comparison vs other countries was completely cherry-picked. China, India and Brazil are Developing Countries. You can't compare the lifestyle of three countries where there are huge differences in the style of low-income to high-income; to a country where even the average citizen has the benefit of Air Conditioning Unit in their house. The average USA citizen will always spend more, but, in return, have a healthier, better, and more comfortable lifestyle. The same logic applies to the top 10% rich in the world that has modern houses spending much more than the poorest, whose houses electricity are more likely for a single lamp and a small fridge.
At the end of the day, we should have a realistic and neutral focus on everything. RE+Storage is good but, alone, is not feasible. Several studies show that planning energy grids with only RE+storage leads to extreme oversizing - you never know how bad the weather can be next year! And no amount of newer storage is gonna change that. It is just not feasible to go 100% with it.
I am not against renewables but that is a good reply and reality check on renewables.
Very good points indeed, I might like to add that also the point of energy consumption is not really heading towards te right direction. The plans for digitisation of the EU on nearly all fronts will probably enlarge the energy consumption. Only renewables won't cut it. Considering the combination of nuclear energy should be on the political tables too
You said, "However, one flaw of the video is that it mixes what is technically possible with what is feasible in reality:" - What reality are we talking about? You say he is mixing what is technically possible with some current reality that has fake, human-made barriers to change. That's what you are suggesting, it seems. You make excuses for countries to not work together on energy sharing. You assume any storage capacity we could ever make won't be good enough.
Well, that said, I partly agree. In the current reality of the socio-economic global system we all share, 100% renewables won't happen because there is still way too much profit to be made in fossil fuels.
I hope you are not making excuses for the current system also. Because what greater change we need as a species is out of the box we made for ourselves that restricts us based on an outdated principle of monetary-market trade and towards a new system that actually works with natural law and resource management in a collaborative, intelligent way to improve public health and sustainability worldwide.
Simply put: Market capitalism is unsustainable socially, ecologically and economically. We need a new, viable alternative like a resource based economy so that what is technically possible is rapidly done because it can be and no body, no government organization or private company is holding up innovations and problem solving like now, because they are worried about their bottom line.
@@coolioso808 the irony of your comment is that going 100% RE is the essence of short-term Market Capitalism.
RE existed for decades. But now, suddenly, when China opens to the world the possibility of supercheap solar panels and wind turbine materials, it suddenly became the solution that solves everything. The projects are easy to implement, easy to finance, with a short ROI. On top of it all, if a country is going RE, it is a given that it becomes more reliant on Natural Gas. It is no coincidence that companies like Shell and Total are investing in Solar and Wind to "go green", but don't invest on other sources of energy that would be independent of gas (hydro, geothermal, nuclear, ....). Quick buck for them, that makes clients even more dependant on their main product.
A clear example can be seen if you compare Sweden Vs Germany. Both countries invested quite a bit on RE - Sweden on wind, Germany on Solar. Sweden went diverse: they also have nice dams, and, on top of that , they also got nuclear energy, to give even more energy independence and stable, clean energy to their country. It basically achieved, what many countries want to achieve in 2050 emissions wise (on the electricity part).
Germany, with their EnergieWende, want as much RE as possible, much like the video suggested. The country right now is so focused on that, it became a natural gas dependant country, since gas couples very well with RE. With Russia threatening to cut natural gas supplies, Germany was "forced" to reignite coal power plants. However, they see this as a transition, since they will phase it out in 2040. In the meantime, ironically, they decommission nuclear power plants perfectly working last year, and plan to close other 3 by the end of this year. They are phasing out nuclear almost 20 years sooner than coal, under a climate change crisis.
The stand Germany is in is a clear one where the climate change problem was very undermined. Where ideologies took precedence of logic,where a quick, easy-buck took place instead of considering a balanced-energy mix, while investing in R&D. They decided to go their own way, phase out nuclear, because they "don't need it, since RE will be enough", with 0 regard to environmental impact, and became even more dependant on a resource from a country with very different political views from their own.
This is only electricity size, which is what most countries are focused on. Saying that RE can solve it all does not touch on enormous other topics: massive industrial, transport and agriculture sectors, the massive mining and environmental impact the RE+storage would lead to, it does not solve the lack of landfills/forestation/ocean treatment that we have, how CO2 capture is required, and RE can't offset the carbon input to justify it, etc.etc.
RE is a good solution. Relying only on it to solve the whole climate change problem is not.
@@miguelsousa9802 You misinterpret my comment. Going 100% renewable IS NOT going to happen under market capitalism. I know how the system works, I know about greenwashing, I know about short-term ROI and fake green revolution for profit. I'm well aware of that. That's why I know renewable energy will not happen holistically until the economy treats sustainability and natural law with respect and works on reason and technical efficiency, not profit motives of the already rich.
You are right that better baseload renewable energy sources such as hydro, geothermal and fusion are highly underdeveloped because they haven't been found to have a big short term ROI. They've made solar and wind cheap and quick ROI and that's why we most of that happening as a 'green revolution' instead of other renewable technologies that could be solved very fast if the technical solutions were taken, not the profit solutions.
I also don't suggest a literally physical transition to happen super fast. And furthermore you are also correct that renewables are not the only problem, the entire ecological pollution crisis involves our entire production and distribution system and each sector from industry, transport to agriculture and mining ALL need to be addressed.
The solution? Well, it certainly isn't trying to use the same system that has failed to end poverty and homelessness decades ago. Technical problems that could have been solved long ago if it weren't for a anti-economical, anti-human, unsustainable system is the main structural change we need.
We don't get a sustainable world without a sustainable economic system that is guided by reason and Natural Law. I think you are able to put the pieces together to see that this system does not work and we need a new system structure if we hope to have anything resembling a sustainable future.
I feel like this guy is intentionally dodging nuclear energy. He didn't mention at all how nuclear has the lowest emissions life cycle. Then when talking about how the European countries are moving towards renewables showing how much clean energy they are generating he counted it as percentage of renewables made but didn't mention at all how France makes 70% from nuclear meaning they barely use any fossil fuels in comparison to even the Nordic countries. Nuclear is also a much better base load power source than any renewable and it wouldn't force us to have to try and use less energy to make it work. The only downside is it's expensive, and the waste needs to be managed but really it's the solution to our energy problems that we've been looking for and we've had it for years.
TLDR nuclear is slept on and we should really be investing more into it to help reduce emissions.
Actually onshore wind has a lower lifecycle emission than nuclear power. Generally nuclear just isn't counted as renewable thus why should he bring it up? This is often done. Nuclear is almost as expensive as renewables with storage and has a bad (undeserved) reputation with the public. In the end the costs are going to see it burried for now.
@@MDP1702 i agree nuclear is not renewable, but isn't the point rn just to stop emissions, which nuclear doesn't really produce many. Outside that it's just an easy source of energy to use. It doesn't require storage systems which is a huge advantage not because of cost, nuclear is insanely expensive, but just logistics. The amount of energy storage we need for wind and solar would be astronaimical. It's not unachievable but i don't see the point in trying to go through all the effort of renewables when we could research better nuclear tech. Besides if we were to start focusing on reestablishing nuclear more money would go to R&D of nuclear techs which I believe would culminate in fusion power which would more or less solve all or energy problems.
@@nicholasgiampetro782 Nuclear would either require storage or gas peak plants seeing its a baseload plant and not flexible enough to follow the demand.
Fusion power is already being researched, more funding for or usage of fission would not really change that.
I see nuclear possibly as a temporary transisition fuel either untill we get fusion or untill we essentially use solarfields in space and "beam" down the energy.
Furthermore better storage (more specifically batteries) could be usefull for many other things: EV's, electric planes or ships, emergency supply, space, ....
@@nicholasgiampetro782 Nuclear is simply too expensive. And then there's the problem that we have no acceptable solution for storing used fuel for hundreds of thousands of years. Add in the time it takes to bring a reactor online and nuclear simply no longer makes sense.
If nuclear were cheaper it would still require storage or some sort of dispatchable generation in order to match supply to demand. It would be possible to roughly load follow with nuclear but that means running reactors at lower than full output which further increases the cost of the electricity produced. Nuclear would have to become incredibly cheaper to get back into the game.
Right now the cost of electricity from new reactors in the West is about $0.15/kWh (Vogtle 3&4 and Hinkley Point). Wind and solar are well under $0.05. Nuclear would have to drop its cost by more than 65% to be attractive to markets. How do you reduce the cost of a mature technology by almost 70%? Got magic?
It is worth looking at why solar so cheap, essentially made in China by heavily state subsidised industries that have driven many western manufacturers out of business. This is not really sustainable nor strategically judicious.
Wind is a better proposition but if relied on heavily alienates large expanses of landscape and requires substantial investment in load and supply levelling (pumped hydro, batteries etc).
Modern nuclear proposals should deliver power at prices comparable to wind if load levelling costs are included. More importantly, molten salt reactors if realised will have a load following characteristics. The Moltex SSR proposal for example, when linked to a network including renewables, includes a heat store that can absorb excess wind energy and release this when needed. If such systems get regulatory and financial backing they could be on line within 15 years and have widespread rollout by 2050 replacing coal and gas plants for electricity generation as well as providing the substantial process heat needed for industry (steel, cement, aluminium, hydrogen and synthetic fuels, desalination, chemicals etc).
We in Denmark already have around 70% green energy. 100% on a good windy day :)
Sounds like paradise. What are the citizenship requirements? ;)
I think you mean electricity, which is only one part of energy.
@@Fireball821 u pay a lot in tax, and live with windy and rainy weather
@@brokkoliomg6103 I think u are right about that :)
@@nikolaitoxvaerd Other than that, I'm currently thinking about moving to Denmark, Norway or Sweden at some point. Or at least live and work there for some part of the year. Greetings from you neighbor in Germany 😄
At 5:57 and 6:05, did you mean to say MWhr? MW is a unit of power, not energy.
This is correct, @Our Changing Climate should make a correction, and understand the difference here. Commercial scale energy storage projects, have two main metrics of measurement, POWER and ENERGY. Currently, many LiON battery storage projects paired with solar would be labeled something like '1MW/4MWh' or, '1MW, 4 hours'. Where power denotes maximum peak output from the storage, and MWh being the volume of 'how much' energy it can store.
I came here to say the same. MW is a rate measurement of energy: million Joules per second. In general, energy rates are not stored in lakes. People often seem confused by this, probably because Watt does not sounds like a rate. Most rates have the word per and a time unit in them, e.g. miles per hour, dollars per year, and words per minute.
Yes. Also, maybe use capital M and W instead of lower case.
It is so strange that those you think should know this just doesn’t... and unfortunately I’m not certain of they just made an ”error” or if they really don’t know and/or can explain the difference!? This also takes a toll on the credibility; what else have they got wrong in the video... hope they comment on this!
@@rh9596 As someone who works in this space and follows it closely, outside of this 'communication error' everything else is in line with the truth and facts.
In fact, OCC had the opportunity to be even more bullish /optimistic in the statements about how rapidly the costs here are decreasing, and how the adoption is likely to play out (much faster than IEA and fossil fuel companies have stated in their projections).
And, it is still surprising to me how a chunk of people (non-engineers) will make this mistake in industry.
This videos are so beautifully written, animated, presented and produced! You need more subs! Keep up the great work from Hong Kong!
The goal should not be 100% renewables it should be 100% low-carbon. Limiting our options to just wind and solar ignores other low-carbon energy sources like nuclear and hydro and makes mitigating anthropogenic climate change much harder, much more expensive, and take longer
Why put the focus on only solar and wind energy when nuclear energy has got a smaller carbon footprint. It has gotten much safer and is also a much more realistic solution. But it doesn’t appeal the ‘green’ mindset.
JE MAINTIENDRAI It is very hard to change public opinion, I also have tried convinced people around me but some treats me like a scam
When it comes to turbines kill bird, there are engineering solutions trying to prevent that. On of these solutions being used worldwide is called IdentiFlight.
Systems are already in operation. Cameras mounted on the towers allow computers to track birds and slow/stop rotors if birds get too close.
Recently found your channel and I love the hopeful but real perspective you offer for the climate crisis. Thanks for all that you do!
Great video! We can and have to be more responsible about our energy consumption, until we can be 100% sustainable. Then we can use as much energy from the sun, wind, geothermal, and nuclear as we want! :)
We can and have to be more responsible about
our energy consumption, until
we can be 100% sustainable. Then
we can use as much energy from the sun, wind, geothermal, and nuclear as
we want! :)
Herds and hives.
A solution to the bird problem is to put a small percentage of the $$ from wind energy generation to acquire and maintain bird habitats. Ultimately it is habitat loss that affect their numbers the most.
The growth in EVs presents an opportunity to charge it with excess renewable energy during times of excess and to give back to the grid during deficits. One EV has enough storage capacity for 3-10 periods of daily deficits.
Even with an unrealistic boom in energy storage you'd still have the problem of lack of grid stability and inertia, that's if the price of that much renewable capacity is even economically viable, 100% renewables is not possible.
We need Nuclear Energy
Planet of the Humans was a terrible "documentary". Out of date and misleading.
please consider explaining :)
@@Hyperactivi Troll
@@Hyperactivi The evidence used in the film is so bad some of the better points they had to make were lost by the jaw dropping way they were happy to distort facts to suite the doom & gloom message they wanted to make.
Most worrying of all is it was so easy to prove how they had played with reality by carefully choosing what they showed and yet even now the the Film Makers don't care.
The tragedy is that there was an ember of a good idea/intention in the film about consumerism and making sure green solutions were just that, better than what has gone before... but they threw it all away by making the facts fit the argument and basically telling a whole lot of lies.
A good take down of what they did was done at the time by Dave at Just Have a Think... ua-cam.com/video/ZmNjLHRAP2U/v-deo.html
@@Hyperactivi he did, all through this piece
@@helenlawson8426 thank you for the explanation :)
Cool video. Very well done. Some thoughts I had were that oil spills from fossil fuels, and nuclear waste kill fishes. It’s easier to see dead birds than dead fishes. Also Net zero carbon is only the beginning there’s already lots of Carbon in the atmosphere. Carbon capturing is the next step.
Nice that pumped storage works so well with wind/solar but I've heard natural gas turbines are a lot cheaper to install, producing about 35% of the worlds electricity. So how to make the switch away from cheap and dirty?
We will never reach a completely renewable future without the use of Nuclear power along the way. Whether that's uranium based or thorium based doesn't matter, we can use both. But wind turbines are too expensive, solarpanels and batteries need too many rare earth resources, and they all take up an enormous amount of space. I know nuclear has the drawback of meltdowns but in reality. The chance of that is minimal. When we think of Chernobyl and Fukashima we have to remember those reactors were built on tech from decades ago and I'm 2020 the chances would shrink farther with better tech, and the more we use them and learn better ways to use them.
Nuclear power is so expensive and dangerous. Renewables are already cheaper and their prices will keep falling. As mentioned in 4:05 the carbon debt of a solar panel is paid off after 1.6 years. And the raw material needed (mainly silicon) is not a rare earth resource: It's available almost everywhere in the world. The future is renewable.
While that’s true, thorium would be much more effective. It creates more energy and less waste, and is much more common to find. Not to mention that we only have about 80 years worth of uranium left to use. But I agree that renewables should be implemented before nuclear power plants.
@@emil5588 the problem is that we compare the price of 1MW of nuclear with 1MW of renewables capacities while you also need to count the stockage price and the fact that 1MW of installed renewables is not producing 1MV (for exemple in france the solar is producing in average 15% of the installed power and eolien is producing 24.3% of the installed power).
When you take that into account studies show that nuclear is actually way cheaper than wind/solar.
@@333kirua When you think of the storage: The dangerous nuclear waste must be stored safely for hundreds of thousands of years. In order to calculate honestly, you must take these huge costs into account. Still ignoring the fact that a 100% safe storage location doesn't even yet exist on earth.
Renewable energy sources don't have those flaws.
@@emil5588 The price of the storage is usually included in the price estimation of nuclear energy (but yeah, for this part it's only an estimation).
As for the safety of the storage I would argue that it's not really a problem, there is a lot of geological traps which have existed for millions or even billions of years without moving. A good example is the one trapping the nuclear waste of a natural nuclear reactor which was in activity 1.7 billion years ago in gabon (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reactor)
I saw nuclear on your graphs a few times. On one of them it seemed to be the option with the lowest carbon cost per life cycle. I know nuclear can be scary but it is also a young technology. Many new designs seem to be safer and more sustainable.
If each country built huge solar arrays and transported the energy through high voltage lines to countries in their night time and then they send it back when it is our night then we wouldn't need batteries. It would be symbolic of us coming together as one race also, a concept we desperately need to grasp..
This video is beautifully made, thank you!
It's a joy to watch. :)
when you mentioned the doc i stopped the video and watched it, then got really depressed, came back to this video and now im a little more hopeful again o.o
I know I keep watching these videos and making myself sad, but then come back so that I can learn what we Should do. 😅
High population is a factor to climate change, but it's not the one we should go for. The one we should go for is our incredibly wasteful neoliberal economic system.
"I can't swim and I'm drowning in a pool, but I'm not worried about all the water, just that there's a giant hole in the ground."
Resource-wise, you could have thousands of people (at least) living like kings and it wouldn't be unsustainable, because Magnitude Matters.
But there aren't thousands, or hundreds of thousands, or millions of people using resources, there are Billions. I can't imagine engaging in the mental gymnastics people do to ignore the problem of almost 8 billion people, with no slowdown in global birthrate in sight.
Having billions of humans is, by itself an ethical problem on a single planet simply due to the fact that the value of human life has lost any meaning at all. A human life actually has negative value in a very real sense, both culturally, and in a survival sense.
Great video mate, you make a extraordinary job in explaining complicated issues to the general public. I just have one issue, the capacity of storage in terms of energy is measured in MWh, otherwise is installed capacity (power) measured in MW. Indeed the Bath county pumped storage have a installed capacity of 3000MW. However, its storage capacity is 24000MWh. The use of either of those depends on context, but I guess your point is better illustrated by the later, and equally installed capacity is not equivalent to dispachability. Unfortunately I observed the same mistake made even in scientific papers, I guess because those terms are quite confusing.
living in Sweden, one thing I get a bit frustrated about in our everyday lives is how we bake in inefficiency into our lives through the ideals of how a home should look and function. A pretty good example of this is how we heat up our homes (which are often very well insulated), only to put refrigerators and freezers into them (out of convenience). Where I live, in the south of Sweden it's basically fridge temperatures outside around 7-8 months per year. and up north you get 3-6months freezer temperature. I could quite easily make a cold insulated pantry that is thermally stable, utilizing outdoor and indoor air, with sensors and fans to regulate temperature. In the end that kind of fridge would require mW of power during the majority of the year. These pantries could be accessible indoors, so really, you won't reduce any comfort, and in fact this was something we did in the past. In my apartment from the 1940s I have such a pantry which basically just lets cold air in through a valve. It's a very primitive design. But with modern regulations and requirements for food you could easily add filters, temperature control etc, this could easily be made for a fraction of the power a normal compressor fridge would require...
Thank you for making these videos. They may not be perfect as these topics are just very complex, but at least they spark more interest!
Thank You for putting a more positive outlook for future energy than can be to often the case. Doom & gloom unfortunately increases web site interest.
As a Brit my favourite energy storage as part of the solution to renewable's sync issues is Highview Power's liquid air storage system.
They've pretty much gone under the radar despite proving themselves something more than another paper exercise with two test plants. Now they are about to start building to large storage plants here in the UK and another in America.
What I have always liked about there system is it uses off the shelf technology that can be scaled up or moved and so can make use of oil & gas workers with minimum training and all without any geology restrictions.
The method they use is to use spare electricity to clean & compress air into cryogenic storage tanks ready to be warmed and released to spin a turbine when needed.
The setup is around 60-65% efficient but can increase that slightly if there is waste heat near the plant. The air is scrubbed and what comes it is clean air.
Highview Power's storage units work best at large scale town/city and can store more energy and for longer just by adding more cryo tanks. With the speed of battery storage to power fluctuations and power cuts combined with liquid air's long term storage abilities the future isn't as dark as some may think.
the video ignores the TYPES of birds that wind turbines kill. you cannot make the "cats kill more" argument without accounting for the fact that domestic cats do NOT klll large soaring or migratory species in significant numbers. likewise, turbines do not generally kill small birds. size matters, and looking solely at bird deaths per GWh without accounting for the exact species that are killed, their national population (including placement on threatened listings) and their reproductive rates is just as bad if not worse than those "right wing politicians".
if you're going to use statistics, use them PROPERLY.
Yes, ok, but you didn't address the problem of space. You need a lot of it to make efficient wind and solar farms. Where ever you go you'll see turbines and solar panels instead of nature, which is defeating the purpose. Renewables are supposed to save the nature (and us) from CO2, and idk if covering it up in man-made things is called "saving". Maybe I am wrong, and renewables don't cover up much space. Whoever knows, please tell me.
No doubt about it, pumped hydro works, and is practical in many places. It makes up most of today's electricity storage. It's not going to be practical to rely on for all energy storage. IMO the real key to meeting the needs to make 100% renewables work is the Grid. With the right kind of grid, you can use the best type of energy storage for each location, and share electrical supply over large areas.
I feel conflicted about this video. On one hand I think it's the kind of content we need to make some difference.
On the other hand its message is sadly narrow minded (it assumes 100% renewables is a desirable and necessary goal to begin with, thus painting a false dichotomy) and riddled with both historic and practical inaccuracies that are simply inexcusable (the author either evidently didn't bother researching some of the things he asserted as facts or purposely misrepresented what he knew to be true for ideological reasons).
Overall, the broad message is fine but somewhat fallacious, and I'm definitely tired of being fed ideologically skewed information 24/7. Failing to be different from the norm and original isn't an issue per se, but it does come off as a disappointment nonetheless. I guess my expectations were too high. Not his fault though. 🤷
I think it's somewhat disingenuous to compare the lifestyles of people in America to Brazil, India & China. The quality of living, general health & economic output of each country is heavily depedant on the amount of energy each citizen recieves.
My state, Tasmania, Australia, is so lucky. We use the water storage method described in the video, but instead of needing to pump water up to it, it fills naturally through rain. It's free energy!
On a flight across the Appalachians I noticed multiple places which were clear cut of all trees and appeared to be very close to flat, as far as one can tell from the air. They really stood out because they weren't small, and their deep gray color contrasted to the soil color every other place I could get a sense of it. I was past the mountains when I realized suddenly I had been looking at mountaintop removal mining. It left behind a complete wasteland, poisoned by remnants of coal, not a bit of organic matter, spoiled land which is useful for nothing.
Or is it? These empty, infertile areas of land would be ideal for joint wind and solar farms. cover the ground with solar, with wind turbines pushing up into the steady breezes which run across the mountains. These installations could provide good quality, well-paid jobs for a region where that's uncommon.
Comment for the algorithm, so more people see this....
So nuclear power plants is contributing the most in zero emissions energy today and not one mention of it. A typical 1GW nuclear plant will need 4million solar panels or 400 wind turbines to equal power output assuming optimal sun and wind conditions. If you want to provide sufficient energy ie extra power to charge batteries you need to multiply at least 5 the number of panels and 3 the number of turbines given average capacity factors of 20% and 40% respectively. This is assuming 100% for storage and retrieval process which in real world is likely around 50% requiring even more generating capacity to offset efficiency. You also forgot to mention that every solar and wind farm is backed up by natural gas plant to help stabilize output before allowing to get onto grid. Just do the basic math and you will clearly see that 100% renewables is a false prophecy and not achievable. You must include on demand 24x7x365 generators which is either fossil or nuclear or hydro which is limited areas around the globe. Germany and California are some of the richest economies in the world and have failed to reduce emissions after decades of renewable build. France has the best model for reducing emissions with more than 70% nuclear energy and lowest emissions and electricity cost in Europe. They were able to go from 20% to 70% in less than 2 decades.
Although nuclear can be clean and safe in the short term, to make it safe is incredibly expensive.
(Except maybe for countries like france, that have colonial economical benefits in getting Uranium)
I wouldn't call it the best new power station to build. Especially economically speaking.
(src: ua-cam.com/video/UC_BCz0pzMw/v-deo.html and wikipedia research)
Also, in Belgium, our nuclear power stations have a capacity factor of around 60%, because they're getting old, often have problems causing shutdowns, and are way too expensive to thoroughly repair or renew
France has been able to standardize reactor vessel manufacturing minimizing cost and have consistent quality. They also reprocess used fuel and minimize waste and uranium imports. While it does cost more to build reactors their lifecycle is typically 60 to 80+ years compared to approximately 20yrs for solar or wind. The video you referenced shows the payback exceeding NG plant after 20yrs plus NG plants will need to be replaced after 30-40yrs.
Nuclear technology has not been static. There are many new designs that have built in passive walk away safety features.
ua-cam.com/video/_mJ3S-VQuHY/v-deo.html
As Greta said...."I want you to panic".....until then nothing of importance will change.
Just build more nuclear power plants, it isn't that difficult...
Please be careful with units of energy, it loses credibility when you make those kind of mistakes.
I love renewables, especially as an independently-produced power source for a local home or business (screw the state-sponsored monopolies that are our utility companies). However, if we do continue to have a primarily centralized and distributed grid, renewables are gonna be hard to roll out when it comes to land use, electrical transmission, and storage. Even if we meet these challenges, they will be somewhat unreliable on high-demand days (like in the middle of summer with lots of air conditioning going on, or the same in the middle of winter with heaters running) unless we REALLY overbuild renewable capacity. Then, that over-building would waste a lot energy in the spring and fall. It'll take something like ultra-safe/inexpensive nuclear tech, widespread hydrogen power use, fission power, or independent micro-grids to save us from a warmer future while maintaining our Western lifestyles.
Thanks for this great presentation, Charlie.
Please forgive the jargon. A focus on power-to-biofuel-backup for grids will help smooth the supply-demand curve through the day and throughout the year -- chemical storage being particularly good at lasting for years, and with much less footprint than pumped hydro, much less ground impact than subterranean hot rock or pressurized gas storage, and more versatility than mechanical (gravity or flywheel) storage.
Using eutectic salt pyrolysis to turn excess electric energy into processing that unleashes the same benefits as fossil fuels from waste biomass (we do have to harvest those trees we plant as a rain shield and clear the forest of debris) turned into volatile organic compounds, then zeolite processing to upgrade VOCs to drop-in replacement for aviation and vehicle fuel, means instant ancillary smart grid services to protect from intermittency, a vast reservoir of biochar to sequester carbon as soil amendment, and displacing fossil fuels on the market with cheaper biofuels while we bridge to electric coastal vessels and ground transport vehicles.
With this policy we invert the perverse system of rewards for cutting without replanting, for extraction without sequestration, by making sequestration so profitable everyone will want to do it, by making replanting so attractive no one will be able to stop. Grid power and ancillary service is a real opportunity, ten times bigger than bitumen ever could be.
Power-to-Fuel is what the Germans are doing, but their focus is Hydrogen, which is energetically expensive (only about 10% efficient) and expensive to produce, store or transport, plus escapes storage rapidly. Their way doesn't sequester carbon, the way making biofuel does.
The same amount of energy used to convert different species of biomass to components of fuel (pyrolysis to make cellulose into VOCs; Bosch-Haber to make ammonia and urea from nitrogen/hydrogen rich wastes) produces more net energy than is put into it, because the biomass starts with ample chemical energy, and the forms created using efficient zeolite media are the same as what geology produces after millions of years: gasoline, kerosene, diesel, heavy oil.
I'd rather have 140% of what I put in than 10%, and in the form of aviation and marine fuel, gas and truck fuel, and biochar to amend soil and reduce need for fertilizer. (Fertilizer also a byproduct of the process.)
We have ample kaolin for zeolite; ample cellulose waste; ample biomass waste rich in nitrates; ample potential for cheap intermittent power that needs backup. This seems the smart technical route, and I'm amazed so few are working on it, but not very amazed. Saying "Hydrogen" causes some people's eyes to glaze over with fascination. Saying "wood chips" or "sewage" less so. There are more complicated technologies involved, but they're all well-developed on their own, and only need bringing together.
As the article you reference around 4:00, the cleanest energy is, of course, nuclear, which is also the safest per MWh generated and is not intermittent. What happens when a country succumbs to fossil-fuel lobby fueled antinuclear hysteria is best seen in Germany: despite enormous money spent on residential solar, and lots of wind, when they started shutting down nuclear power plants their consumption of natural gas skyrocketed, and they are even talking about reopening old lignite mines.
6:00 - 3GW is not the _enegy_ capacity, but maximum _power_ (which is, confusingly, also sometimes referred to as "capacity', but _power capacity,_ not _energy capacity_ ) BTW, it _is_ pretty huge - like a large multi-reactor nuclear plant. The storage capacity (according to Wikipedia) is about 24GWh - it can run at peak power only for less than half a day. Please let's not confuse energy with power, especially in this kind of video.
FWIW, countries that have favorable topology (e.g. Norway or my Croatia) have been using pumped hydro for half a century.
EU is investing heavily in interconnects, but it is interesting to see where many countries go for that 10% of capacity they are missing at some given moment: to France and their ample, stable supply from nuclear plants.
We _might_ be able to get by with wind, solar, hydro, geothermal plus storage, continental-scale grids and curtailing consumption. With nuclear there is no question - we certainly can.
Yeah but nuclear is politically to implement, and some places are too small for nuclear energy. Additionally, nuclear plants take lots of time to create. Of course we should use nuclear, but I feel that we still need a decent chunk of energy to be in the form of renewables. (Nuclear waste could just get buried like it is in Finland)
P.S. We should really also try to root out the long-lasting influence of the Koch brothers and oil companies from society.
@@acxesta2 Though, why Sweden is the highest to having clean energy by 2030 is just because of our nuclear energy. We get approximately 40 percent of our energy from nuclear power plants. And then also from our many water power plants as well. From water, 40 percent of our energy is produced as well.
Yeah, I'll just nominate your entire potential lineage to keep watch on the nuclear waste that will be around longer than human civilization, never mind the fact that nuclear waste is often grossly mishandled at the outset of its "disposal", leading to immediate environmental contamination.
@@acxesta2 Agreed.
@@Isak-ys1ie Exacly.
Great Video, The use of reservoirs as a way to store power and not just generate it could be a game changer
The more technology is used , the cheaper it is. The carbon fuels are used , the more expensive the are.
All Danes going crazy cuz our hyggelig little country got mentioned, not just once, but TWICE!
Love your videos and this one is excellent. Curious - I’ve heard that wind turbines kill more endangered birds and birds of prey, whereas house cats, sky scrapers, and fossil fuels kill birds that are not endangered. Wondering if there is research into engineering turbines in such a way as to protect these rare birds.
Very interesting and factual. The only point I would make is that there is no chance of reducing energy usage! No chance! In addition the third world will continue to increase its energy use on a massive basis. The only way to reduce energy use would be for Governments to limit how much individuals can use. That will not happen in western countries. Keep up the good work.
Yeah. That's just not gonna happen. Especially in the U.S. Would throw a giant wretch in our efforts to decarbonize our grid.
Above a certain latitude solar never pays off its carbon footprint.
You did not include nuclear which is the cleanest power supply.
'The taste on solar is an incredible problem - not solved.
I was water resource engineer too the Dinorwic pumped storage system in Wales.
This was created in the 1970's before the climate alarmism madness and was needed then.
Today with the extreme problems from renewables there is simply not enough locations where this canc be done. Also the cost is high and has too be added to the cost of renewables.
I could go on with the wishful thinking in this video but we really do not need to curtail the out put of plant food others known as CO2.
Tell me what level of nCO2 are you trying to achieve> The drought pre-industrial level?
First off, really appreicate the new content and keeping up withe fight. Climate change is an issue more important than ever and unfortunately, us as a world have become distracted with 'everything' that is going on.
As some other commenters have said, you should make a correction and understand the difference between Power and Energy, particularly in the fight to decarbonize our energy system.
Commercial scale energy storage projects have two main metrics of measurement, POWER and ENERGY. Currently, many LiON battery storage projects paired with solar would be labeled something like '1MW/4MWh' or, '1MW, 4 hours'. Where power denotes maximum peak output from the storage, and MWh being the volume of 'how much' energy it can store.
Other energy storage systems and technologies have different ratios depending on the underlying technology and physics. Things like 'flow' batteries, may be something like 100kWh/2MWh simply because it takes longer to 'discharge' the battery, but you can more easily 'build up' stored energy.
Similarly, a hydrogen energy storage system would be limited in energy capacity based on how much space there is in the tanks for hydrogen, but is limited in 'Power' by the peak output of the fuel cells at that facility.
Geat video, but you forgot to mention the energy loss from pump storage. There is around a 20% energy loss from pumping the water and generating power again.
Correct, I’m not speaking against a solution. Although I believe a better solution would be utility scale batteries. The cost has been decreasing and the efficiency has been improving.
Sry, I generally really like what you are doing on this channel as discuss environmental topics, showing light at more facets and not being superficial.
But this video is way lower than your normal standards.
I know it is not feasible to talk about every topic of renewable energy in under 15 minutes, but there were just way to many important aspects that you didn't even mentioned.
Instead of dramatically showing one example of storage that is also far from the best one as it suffers under a very low efficiency and energy-loss, you could have, in my opinion better show a few more option that are out there. Showing the benefits and flaws of each.
Also the example of energy transfer if there is an overproduction is a bit misleading.
Sure later you explained that this can be used if the renewables of another country dont produce that much. But 5 Minutes of research would have shown you that this export often just allows countries to hold on to there fossil energy.
Because the one that overproduce can say, that they make so much green energy that they even export it.
While countries that import it can argue that they buy into green energy without changing there grid.
As said: I know that it is impassible to discuss everything in such a short video and my complains are also only just a few examples of missing topics.
But in my eyes this video is just way to superficial and thus under your standards.
Hope you understand my criticism and where I come from^^
To a person who's is very educated in renewables and has done their research I can see how you may see this video as superficial. But there are a lot of people who maybe don't have as much knowledge about this topic or aren't as invested into sustainability. To make a longer, intenser(information wise) video may turn their interest away. The more people who get on board to a path of a greener future, the faster we will get there and the stronger we will be once we are there. Greetings from Canada.
@@nicolebernard4859 I have to disagree.
What turns critical people away isn't a video with a good and a structure of arguments that wouldn't receive the worst grade in school, but a superficial video that seems to completely ignore all other aspects of the reality.
you do not need to be super detailed.
but showing some counterargument and than counter them with examples and arguments shows that this video is based of actual research and isnt made out of an information bubble.
Sylens Drake that is a fair point. Climate change is a heavy topic, all I know is that this video sparked hope for me after watching it and Hope is a very powerful thing. Hope drives people forward, it fuels the fight for a green future. To hope that one day we won’t have to watch videos about renewable energy, but to see it running our very own cities.
There is some useful info in this video, but the proposed "solutions" (pumped storage and energy trading) are well known and are already being implemented where they are feasible and make economic sense. I'm sure we could find more opportunities to implement them further, but they will always be only be a small part of the solution, as will wind and solar generation. The video seems to imply that the big problem is how to reduce carbon emissions in wealthy countries. This is false. The vast majority of future carbon emissions will come from China, India, Indonesia and Africa. To expect these countries to rely on wind, solar, pumped storage and other expensive and unreliable sources is completely unrealistic, not to mention unfair. They are determined to double or quadruple their GDP in the next few decades, and this will not be possible without abundant and affordable energy resources. People should go to Our World in Data and find out what is really happening wrt energy sources and uses in this world.
Could you address the price of energy alongside this? If ways of storage are improving but the price per unit charge is going up, that may not work in the long term.
what's with this insane video editing and transitions 0:50
I'm looking forward to liquid air storage, sounds interesting.
Everyone should use ecosia or Ocean Hero
Wind and solar, due to their intermittent nature, bash themselves. The more you add the greater their problems become. (i.e. all solar or wind generation hitting the grid at the same time, or leaving the grid at the same time) That's why they need other zero carbon sources to help them out, and the only option left is nuclear. Storage can help a bit, but it's far, far to expensive, and compared to the demand for storage there is nowhere even enough. (Yes, even pumped hydro. We can't build enough new mountains and lakes.)
Here is an example with 100% capacity of pumped hydro, backing up wind: www.electricitymap.org/zone/ES-CN-HI Most of the time it runs on the diesel fuel backup.
It's funny you used the word storage but don't bother to mention the "storage problem" of nuclear.
Couldn't we also use:
Lithium ion batteries, transitioning to solid state batteries in the near future. Also compressed air, raised hydraulic mass storage, molten salt etc?
@Greg Barton
I like the use of electricity map! But using El Hierro as an example is not really representative.
El Hierro is very small scale, without interconnections. And as we know: one solution won't cut it. We need BOTH interconnections AND storage AND smart grids AND ....
Strange that " the only option left is nuclear", in the EU biomass and natural gas are popular. Is there a country where nuclear backs up renewables ie: the reactor shuts down on sunny/windy days? There are 150 countries generating hydroelectricity but "We can't build enough new mountains and lakes"??
btw, an important thing about nuclear, that everyone seems to forget: Their power is fixed. It's not economical for nuclear plants to follow demand. So you have the same old storage problems here.
I find this channel overwhelmingly informative. It does cause some anxiety, in that getting governments and the top to agree and make a TRUE change to benefit the ENTIRE population is as difficult as reversing climate change.
2050? It will happen way before that. Solar and wind prices are dropping every year and so are prices for various storage solutions. Within the next 10 years it will switch purely for economic reasons. It will go faster with the right politics (currently fossil fuels are heavily subsidized because they have larger lobbying influence (corruption) ). But it will happen regardless.
The easiest way to encourage it is smarter grids which are willing to price electricity accordingly which will encourage large power users to use cheaper power when renewables have excess, avoiding curtailment, and encourage storage providers to develop and build storage solutions.
If California said that power was free or extremely cheap at certain times of day then it would not be long before curtailment would no-longer be necessary as power users would show up to take advantage. This is probably already happening, its just that there is a delay between the power being made available and the industries coming to utilize it. But it won't take 50 years. 2050 is too far off.
the price is irrelevant if the technology you're buyiing into is incapable of doing the job.
@@ObjectiveTruth5168 Price is obviously price / power provided. So it is capable by definition. I realize that some power generation solutions such a solar produce power at specific times and must therefore be used in combination with storage solutions, so the price must be calculated as the total of generation and storage. But quite a lot of power usage can be moved to a different time of day if the pricing is right.
Before 2050 it will be cheaper for the average suburban household to put solar on the roof and have a battery backup than to pay for a power cable to the house. Cities and industry will be different depending on available area, but wind/solar/storage will be cheaper than fossil fuels long before 2050. Actually its cheaper already for about half the use cases. Hundreds of planned now coal power stations were cancelled in the last few years because they were no longer viable, and many more existing fossil fuel power stations are being shut down early because they are no-longer economically viable. This trend will continue as the price of wind/solar/storage continue to drop. It does take time to build new solar panels and wind turbines and other infrastructure, so it will take maybe 10 or 20 years to do the whole world, but it WILL happen before 2050. And it will happen faster if governments put the right incentives in place and stop subsidizing fossil fuels. Here in South Africa the switch has been delayed by political corruption which led to the previous administration wanting to get nuclear from Russia, and now a desperate attempt to hold on to some coal plants that are uneconomical and keep breaking down leaving us in darkness, but the coal unions have political power. That is already starting to change though as some provinces have started to realize that they can benefit from solar.
3:19 So when we get rid of cats we could build 10000 times as much wind turbines.
love your humorous comment
I was hoping vehicle to grid (V2G) or vehicle to home (V2H) would be mentioned. I think it's a promising technology esp if we're already moving to EVs.
Hey there! I just had a question. At 5:55 when you discuss the Pumped Hydro vs Li-ion storage numbers, you mention "3003MW of energy" and "62.5MW". Did you mean MWh? MW is a measurement of power, or how much energy can be discharged per unit time. While MJ or MWh is a measurement of how much actual energy capacity can be stored.
4:49 thats not a problem. you have grid trade. You can sell and buy capacity whenever you need, on demand. My father works on such project.
No, no it won't.
Thank you for such an informational and easy to watch video. It would be great if you could make a video on how an individual household can conserve energy!
Warning : Energy (kWh) and power (kW) should not be confused. Power represents the speed of electrons (kW), and energy represents the amount of electrons (kWh). 1 kWh is the quantity of electrons accumulated for 1 hour at 1 kW.
Hey :)
Congrats for this video - and the whole channel really. This is the way the climate crisis should be explained and discussed! I love how you translate complex issues in an easy language + images.
The aim of our channel itself is to talk about the climate crisis as we would do it with any topic around friends and drinks, "translating" the climate science too. Hope it is ok to use your videos as a resource!
And we will look at your new platform as we are having the same issues. Cheers!
Question about Curiosity Stream. Does it have its own streaming service or do I need to watch videos from them and Nebula on You Tube. The reason I ask is because You Tube downgraded their graphics and does not have true 4K from what I see on my screen. If curiosoty streams like Netflix from its own server and has true 4K I will sign up at that level. Thanks.
Or just go nuclear🤗
Yes.. wind turbines "could" (Be the Solution to Reaching 100% Renewable)... but it "isn't"... because they "won't"... not because they "can't". SO.. THEN..
the next subject to cover/question to ask is.. (We're well past the wondering if "could" or "couldn't" stage while pwaying baby crib music).. why.. WON'T... they??
(dweedoo dweedo dweedoo..)
You usually only show stats for wind, solar, nucelar, coal,oil but not Hydro why?
The problem is insane consumption of the global north; one child in UK uses 12 tons of CO2 in first year of life, one child in Africa 1/2 tone.
USA has 3% world children population but use 43% of toys,a child in Bangladesh 54 times less resources than one in West, and on and on
You had everything right until you made a terrible mistake in 5:58.
mw of energy? FIrst of all, Megawatt is not "mw", it's "MW" capital. Otherwise it is mili-something that doesn't exist. Second, energy is not measured in watt. It is measured in joule or watt times time, which normally is watt-hour. You wanted to say Megawatt-hour, MWh for short. Please correct and re-upload the video because this mistake makes it unsharable. Thank you.
The aim is a decarbonize world or a 100% renewable world? Because they are not synonymous, we can decarbonize world without 100% renewables, I mean, pumped hydro is yet everywhere near full capacity, because hydro in the past was the first source of electricity when coal wasn't available (in Italy we have 98% of storage made by pumped hydro, and till 1970 70% of electricity was from hydro), and stuff like the cylinder is absolutely crazy in my opinion, I mean, how much concrete do you need? Concrete whose heat made from coal of course, because with renewables is insanely costly generating heat, only with nuclear you can achieve 0% carbon heat. But if go nuclear, there is no more 100% renewables, and also, if go nuclear you don't need so much storage. So what's matter? A decarbonize world or a 100% renewables world?
"Could This Be the Solution to Reaching 100% Renewable Energy?"
No. "All headlines that end with a question can be answered with the word 'no' " Betteridges Law of Headlines
You are not using mw or mwh correctly.
You skip over the possibilty of implementation of pumped hydro.
There isn't much.
The need for even more capacity of wind/solar.
More materials and higher co2 output, hydro has a bad methane production in it start, depending which are you flood.
Stanfords plans have been shown to be ubreasonable and mostly based on hydro projects.
Jacobson Stanford University, has been fined to pay court costs for his slandering to demand $10M from scientist that disproved his research.
Consumer behaviour change is very slow and has slight effects.
The real solution is carbon pricing.
And the build of deployable clean energy.
Geothermal as medium clean
And nuclear as very clean.
As in you graph, nuclear is even better, when energy gets consumed directly.
But wind and solar are curtailed as said, or need another production step, so there effective co2 reduction gets less.
Don't block geothermal and nuclear and wind/solar will be next to that.