Brilliant episode, thanks gentlemen. Good one on Heat pump, and 'low quality' heat source for district heating (DH). How about deeper analysis on distributed thermal energy storage (TES) for DH ? Such discussion is getting us ever closer to realizing all our energy needs from low quality heat source alone, i.e.: no need for nuclear fission heat source at all !
When we had 2 fossil fuel cars our annual 2800 liters(26600 kWh equivalent ) of fuel and our homes 12000 kWh of gas are now 8000 kWh of electricity from the grid total plus 3300 kWh we generate ourselves with our PV. So 38600 just cars and heating compared to 11500 total now.
The second car is an important move. We found the Ev, a Zoe became the favourite car to use with a diesel for the long journeys. It was a leap of faith to trust the charging network and get a second EV. The next move is to convince others because the media fear is very powerful but glad I ditched the diesel. When we charge from home overnight we are helping grid efficiency.
@@stephengreen8986 Yes we just did a weeks holiday in Scotland , 14 public charges all of which worked and between 52-72p a kWh. We have been to Paris in it , and hopefully will be able to use it for V2G.
@@stephengreen8986 struggle is 50% of the country can't charge at home me being one of them in a terrace with no road outside hardly able to park in the same road 😅. And I'd imagine most of those can't charge at work like us either. Only things stopping us really is the upfront cost of a EV that will cover our usage reasonably well and the cost of public charging. Our AYGO does 50+MPG round town 60+MPG on the motorway. Our fiesta is worse but does very few miles a day Local charger costs £0.85 a kWh 🥲 We don't do big shops only 2 of us so graze shop so can't really do destination charging for much longer than 30 mins. It was a stretch to convince the wife to get a heat pump which cost us £4000 from my nans inheritance couldn't have afforded it other wise. We are trying but not rich 😅
Ha, wishful thinking I am afraid, if talking the Uk, renewables are around 2% of total energy. Renewables are the silver lining of a very large cloud, that depend on the cloud to exist.
Stanford's latest Sankey chart shows waste energy at 61%. Yes we must get after this low hanging fruit. New building codes alone could have a quick long term benefit.
It’s a really good point about efficiency. Renewables have their place but scale is a huge issue. Without talking about scale you ignore mining and the offshore manufacturing required - every 20 years for renewables. The market focuses on making money and ignores long term ecological outcomes. Rather than money maybe you should start there.
Renewables and batteries tech are an excellent way to gain competitive advantage on a national and international kevel. Plus they're still getting cheaper!! Transport for example: ev trucks running at like something 100kWh/100km vs 10-14 mpg.. lower maintenance costs, powered by warehouse solar or on site wind. Cheaper distribution lowers costs down the supply.
To get one gallon of gasoline into your tank requires on average 7kwh. It takes energy to pump up oil from underground, transport it to refinery, boil it to separate the fuels and transport the motor fuel to your local gas station and into your car…..
You're right, its boring. Solar, Wind, and Batteries (SWB) is proving that there is no shortage of resources 'since the mists of time'. Even a tiny, populous nation has access to all the energy it needs... just go get it. Retrofitting buildings for energy efficiency is a wise decision when the building is getting modernized... but the long path (it's been going on 'since the mists of time') to energy independence. Try SWB if you'd like to get there this decade.
The obscene obsession with money which exists in our brains over the biosphere source of all life is repulsive. When we're killing our neighbors in wartime money is no problem. Bezo's $350 million yacht money could put heat pumps in several hundred homes.
Does the information contained in the August 2024 ExxonMobil's global outlook executive summary influence your thinking? Im not a guru in any way but it states that we're depleting reserves at rate of 15% annually 2X faster than international energy agency predictions. States that every 6 days another 1 million net new precious humans joun us. Each needs everything! Sez by 2050 we will be 10 billion. States were using 100 million barrels per day and before long we will have ability to extract 30 million barrels. Many other eye-opening nuggets
I thought Mike's point about the scale of the 100mil fund in contrast to the 100bl problem cut straight to the core of it. Lots of hopeful and optimistic rhetoric today fails to take the enormity of the problem into account and offers solutions which fall short of what's necessary, resulting in all of our attention being consumed by pseudo solutions. I don't understand how you can start with wasted energy / efficiency, locational pricing, and end with putting data centres near London. Besides latency, which isn't that important, there is absolutely no reason to locate a data centre anywhere near London, hardly anyone actually works in them besides security guards and cleaners. Scotland would be a better idea. The AI hype, and tech hype in general, is doing more harm than good atm.
Use the regenerative grid strategy. Turn surplus grid streams into battery fill and hydrogen. Beyond that, make biogas at all wastewater treatment plants. Universal LED lighting build outs, to include traffic lights, also save tremendous amounts of money. Solar panels should also be placed on school roofing, over parking lots, or at airports. Take the easy money by making the more obvious moves.
Don't solve for 5 9s reliabilty. Data centres already have UPS to ensure continuity and quality of supply. Lean on them to up storage and contribute to grid stability, whilst ensuring their own continuity of supply.
"Great, i love bicycle, but when it's raining, where ist the roof ... - it seems I need a car" .Dear Investors of the world ... maby i should call Elon not to built space shuttles - better he should built bikes with a roof.
Yes. I'm not excited about a 2C world, but the idea it will be some post-collapse hellscape is not what the science says. If you doubt this, read the IPCC AR6 - don't get your science from Extinction Rebellion. I get up every day and work on stuff that will limit climate change; 2C will be an ugly and less just version of where we are today, but better than 2.1C, and much better than 3C.
To my mind the solution to getting renewable offshore energy to the places it needed, is by using the already in place infrastructure. Rail, our railway system is designed to bring coal to our power stations, or wood in the case with Brax. So in todays world a standard shipping container can carry 6.4Gw of energy, each train can pull about 14 of these containers and bring the renewable energy to the old plant. you could have 3 of these trains one at the input end, one at the output end and the other in transit. Problem solved! So why spend all that money in the short term to bring industry to the coastline when the energy can come to them via rail.
GW is a measure of power, not energy. I think you need to do your numbers, and see how many trains full of whatever you would need to keep a city like Tokyo functioning.
Energy isn’t conserved unless it profits industry. If successful, Aptera is positioning themselves to decimate the competition by producing the most efficient car in the marketplace and thereby force all other car makers to prioritize efficiency or lose to those who do.
Please don't troll a perfectly interesting conversation with plugs for Aptera. You may think people want to drive around in that absurd contraption, and frankly, I would be happy if you were right though I am pretty sure you won't be. But it has NOTHING TO DO with Jonathan and my conversation.
At around 1 hour you talk about a PUE of 1.1 meaning that 10% of the energy is wasted. NO, it does not. If you dump all the heat it means that close to 100% of the energy used is wasted as the heat could be reused. However PUE is a bad measure of energy efficiency. The data centre contains servers with fans that can consume 10 to 20% of the server power at full speed. Your top end DC may consume 1.1MW but the computer components only get day 850kW, meaning around 30% of energy is used in cooling. PUEs for air cooled data centres are probably mythical, but if you really want to get the most compute per MW then it's liquid immersion cooling where on 5% of input power is needed for cooling, and the output can be at a high enough temp to be useful.
Good ways to get the power for a new data centre in West London: A/ take over the (electrical) heating needs of a large building complex, install a data centre and use the waste heat for the building B/ find an existing traditional data centre, PUE of around 1.5 (quite standard) convert it to liquid immersion cooling and, as if by magic, you have loads of spare power capacity for your new data centre.
Aerospace engineer here and I am going to REFUTE some of this stuff especially some of the claims about Hydrogen. FYI - I'm Australian but did me degree in America. I work in industrial control systems. I have worked in manufacturing, mining, water treatment and other industries. SORRY FOR THE LONGE COMMENT, but some things need to be said. AND YES if anyone wants me to appear on this or their podcast I am available. FIRST I am in favor of improving the efficiency of using electricity. That's a basic reality we (the human race) MUST deal with going forward. 1) Right at the very start there's a claim about data centres NOT being able to get power in London. This is probably true for most large cities and its simply because of how much energy these data centres require and the capacity of the local grids to support such centres. I've designed factories and and one of the major issues is FIRST checking BEFOR EYOU EVEN START if the local power grid has the capacity you need. So I know from experience that trying to put one of these massive data centres ANYWHERE is a major issue for the local grid. 2) On Hydrogen I want to SCREAM and SCREAM LOUDLY. There's this constant claim that hydrogen is not a fuel that its a store of energy. If that's true then its true for *EVERY OTHER FUEL WE USE* including coal, methane, uranium, thorium,....... because they all have in their structure potential energy that can be used by us in machines to extract energy in a different form. This is one of the basic laws of thermodynamics and ENGINEERS should know this basic fact. As to where and how hydrogen gets used that is a different matter that needs to be discussed and I would be happy to come on this or any other podcast to discuss where hydrogen does and doesn't have a future and it does have a huge future in some cases and almost no future in others. 2a) One technology that gets almost ZERO mention on any of the podcasts are gas turbines which can run with hydrogen. This is normally difficult as hydrogen gets absorbed by metals like steel and it goes brittle. Here in Australia we did massive damage to one of our large gas turbine power stations because there was hydrogen in the natural gas. This is also why Hydrogen has no future in domestic gas systems. You'd need to replace the entire gas network. However during the 1990s when aerospace engineers thought we'd shift to hydrogen for aircraft the hydrogen issues in gas turbines were solved. What killed hydrogen for aircraft off was the storage tanks & refuelling at airports, the actual tanks in the airplanes and the fact it wasn't needed. Both GE and Siemens now have ready to go off the shelf turbines than can run on up to 100% hydrogen but more commonly 50% hydrogen like the GE 9HA which can operate at almost 65% efficiency in cogeneration mode. To make hydrogen work in our electricity supply systems hydrogen has to be considered the same way natural gas is. *AS A FUEL* that is created in one place, processed and then piped to the power station. This nonsense that its a battery is just an idiotic claim by a person who wants an alternative narrative. At the end of the day the only thing that matters to a householder, shareholder, factory manager, retail business operator, stockbroker (with his computers) or anyone else is *HOW MUCH DOES THEIR ELECTRICITY COSTS.* How it got to the power point or switch or lightbulb is irrelevant. Plus nobody cares about efficiency unless they're an engineer and that's only because we have to deal with these issues. 3) On energy efficiency they do NOT discuss one of the known cases where massive energy can be save and emissions reduced and that is the the giant glass monoliths architects keep designing. Mark Blyth, the Scottish born political economist at Brown U in America quotes an engineering study that estimates if America simply went an triple glazed all of its skyscrapers they'd save much energy that America would easily meet its Paris Accord requirements. Here in Australia its well known that those buildings are massive energy hogs. In the heat of our summers they consume massive amounts of energy to keep them cool and in Winter they need massive amounts of energy to keep them warm. 3a) On the efficiency of Hydrogen systems I keep seeing all sorts of figures and NOBODY actually explaining how they get those figures except in the most round-about way. If you go and look at the Wikipedia page for the Electrolysis of Water you'll find references to PEM (proton Exchange Membranes) that get over 90% efficiency. So how people like Saul Griffith who's been on this podcast keep claiming you lose 25% of the energy just making the hydrogen needs to get their facts right. If you have a PEM system feeding hydrogen to a Cogeneration gas turbine you get over 58% efficiency less the pumping losses between the PEM system and the turbine. To put that into perspective the BEST of latest generation of nuclear power, the French EPR 2 gets about 36% efficiency and the best of coal fired power stations get around 42% thermal efficiency. AGAIN efficiency is not the real issue. The real issue is can you deliver electricity to the end user at an affordable price and NOBODY wants to discuss that.
@@corradoalamanni179 I am new to this channel and working my way through a few. Right now I am watching Ep 176 with Eva Schmid for the 3rd time. At times damn hard not to scream because she's coming at the problem from the "we have to start doing things" and he's coming from the Devil's Advocate side of questioning everything. I get both those positions because I have been in both those positions at various times. They are both right at times and both horribly wrong at times. One thing they are BOTH WRONG on and its not easy or obvious to pick up but they BOTH keep coming back to "energy markets." I started my search into WHY isn't Australia doing anything and that lead straight to ECONOMISTS and that lead straight to the "free market" neoliberal ideologies. My reply to economists right now is: *You can EITHER have your free markets OR have a planet to live on BUT YOU CAN'T HAVE BOTH.* The problem with the free marketeer ideology is that its totally centered around 1 singular thought which Milton Freidman put it "There is one and only one social responsibility of business-to use it resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits..." That's as much of that quote most free marketeers ever read because they hate the rest of that quote which is: _"so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud”_ And that's the real problem with free marketeers. They dominate all our conversations while only considering profit and having NO CONSDIERATIONS for the future of the human race and its survival on this planet. And I can tell you very clearly there is NO OTHER PLACE humanity can survive than this planet. Yes there are some grand dreams but I can tell you with 100% certainty that we don't have the technology to deliver any of those dreams and wont have that technology before its too late. And with what just happened in America that is now guaranteed.
Civilisations rise and fall, it's re-evolution of overlapping temporal thermodynamical Fusion-Fission Function heterodyne era. (You should ask the Physicists of the new generation about the Mathemagical Thought Experimentalist's Intuitions embedded in good SiFi stories about the log-antilog logic of Singularity-point i-reflection containment Superposition-point Singularity Positioning and how all time-timing exists as Quantum Operator Chemistry) A walk around any society would reveal the vertically integrated nature of personal education levels, coexisting in parallel overlapping experience and degrees of relative-timing involvement. The criminality of Deliberate Blindness, disinformation and ignorance set against the Deliberate Education required of functional Democracy, is very apparent globally.
Electricity being 15 or so percent of total uk energy aren't we wasting our time talking about just a small percentage of electricity and we should stop using the term energy as electricity, it confuses the issue as total energy is important, not just reducing electricity.
It's 17% of final energy, but about 25% of energy services (final energy is the fuel you put in your car or the electricity you put in your heat pump, but not the motive power or heat you actually use). And don't mention exergy :-) The reason electricity b is so important if that it will need to cover over 80% of energy services in any net zero energy system of the future.
@@MLiebreich Electricity was 15.68% of total energy in the UK i think the last time I looked, not sure what you mean by 25% of energy services. Not sure what you second paragraph is to mean?
You should look at the danish use of powerplant cooling for housing heat since the energy crisis in 1973 and 1980. Ask professor Brian Vad Mathiesen for a chat. Brian might also have new theories on solutions on energy efficiency and resiliance. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Vad_Mathiesen
I'm more concerned that, despite being able to see more that 150 wind turbines from my home in the North Highlands, I have to pay full price for electricity 24/7 because there's no smart meter signal in this area. Yet there are people in parts of England paying 7p/kWhr overnight, a price that's only possible because of cheap Scottish renewables, whilst also signing petitions against pylons.
@@garysmith5025 I live in the Scottish Borders where the energy from the Firth of Forth wind farm comes on shore. All the employees who service the wind turbines from Eyemouth are English. I have put solar on my roof and have batteries so I don't pay for electricity.
@@steverichmond7142 I have solar PV, two EVs, no batteries but I have a very large thermal store; however there's no way I can get enough from my panels from about now until mid-February to meet demand. The two cars doing 200 miles per week requires about 90kWhr, I'd be lucky to get from the 4.8kW array during the whole of December or January.
@@garysmith5025 I only have one EV at home doing 150 miles per week. I have 8kW solar with mirrors. My house is airtight with passive HRVS and instant water heaters.
Please stop talking about 'wasted energy' when burning fossil fuels, if you don't address utilisation factors and curtailment for renewables and nuclear generation energy loss. This is just a 'shell game' and you know it.
Why is this channel so tiny? Please, please subscribe! It needs to be shouted from the roof tops!! This is so important.
It's absolutely excellent, high quality, high level discussions
@@Lewis_Standing Thanks Lewis, your consistent support is very much appreciated!
Fully agreed. We waste energy everywhwere. Thank you for this podcast.
Great stuff, thank you.
Brilliant episode, thanks gentlemen.
Good one on Heat pump, and 'low quality' heat source for district heating (DH). How about deeper analysis on distributed thermal energy storage (TES) for DH ?
Such discussion is getting us ever closer to realizing all our energy needs from low quality heat source alone, i.e.: no need for nuclear fission heat source at all !
We need to do a deep dive on thermal storage overall. I'll think of a guest.
@@MLiebreichcomparing cost/unit energy vs. batteries or other storage means..
When we had 2 fossil fuel cars our annual 2800 liters(26600 kWh equivalent ) of fuel and our homes 12000 kWh of gas are now 8000 kWh of electricity from the grid total plus 3300 kWh we generate ourselves with our PV. So 38600 just cars and heating compared to 11500 total now.
The second car is an important move. We found the Ev, a Zoe became the favourite car to use with a diesel for the long journeys. It was a leap of faith to trust the charging network and get a second EV. The next move is to convince others because the media fear is very powerful but glad I ditched the diesel. When we charge from home overnight we are helping grid efficiency.
@@stephengreen8986 Yes we just did a weeks holiday in Scotland , 14 public charges all of which worked and between 52-72p a kWh. We have been to Paris in it , and hopefully will be able to use it for V2G.
@@stephengreen8986 struggle is 50% of the country can't charge at home me being one of them in a terrace with no road outside hardly able to park in the same road 😅. And I'd imagine most of those can't charge at work like us either.
Only things stopping us really is the upfront cost of a EV that will cover our usage reasonably well and the cost of public charging.
Our AYGO does 50+MPG round town 60+MPG on the motorway.
Our fiesta is worse but does very few miles a day
Local charger costs £0.85 a kWh 🥲
We don't do big shops only 2 of us so graze shop so can't really do destination charging for much longer than 30 mins.
It was a stretch to convince the wife to get a heat pump which cost us £4000 from my nans inheritance couldn't have afforded it other wise. We are trying but not rich 😅
Renewables are the hammer and energy efficiency is the anvil. We need to both to reduce fossil fuel use from both sides.
Nice analogy. Right now there is almost no anvil, that's the problem - we are hammering on marshmallow.
Ha, wishful thinking I am afraid, if talking the Uk, renewables are around 2% of total energy. Renewables are the silver lining of a very large cloud, that depend on the cloud to exist.
For years wondered why we didn't have huge industrial parks around a nuclear plant.
Stanford's latest Sankey chart shows waste energy at 61%. Yes we must get after this low hanging fruit. New building codes alone could have a quick long term benefit.
Seems like it may come down to cost to upgrade vs cost to implement new solar/battery..
Looking at investing in SDCL we have to improve energy efficiency.
Thought I'd just quickly check out the first 10 minutes in the background, et voila, dropped everything and listened to the very end.
It’s a really good point about efficiency. Renewables have their place but scale is a huge issue. Without talking about scale you ignore mining and the offshore manufacturing required - every 20 years for renewables. The market focuses on making money and ignores long term ecological outcomes. Rather than money maybe you should start there.
DW planet has an excellent video about Sankey charts and primary and rejected energy.
Great discussions on the Big Issues with Energy!!
Excellent, always a font of knowledge
Renewables and batteries tech are an excellent way to gain competitive advantage on a national and international kevel. Plus they're still getting cheaper!! Transport for example: ev trucks running at like something 100kWh/100km vs 10-14 mpg.. lower maintenance costs, powered by warehouse solar or on site wind. Cheaper distribution lowers costs down the supply.
To get one gallon of gasoline into your tank requires on average 7kwh.
It takes energy to pump up oil from underground, transport it to refinery, boil it to separate the fuels and transport the motor fuel to your local gas station and into your car…..
You're right, its boring. Solar, Wind, and Batteries (SWB) is proving that there is no shortage of resources 'since the mists of time'. Even a tiny, populous nation has access to all the energy it needs... just go get it. Retrofitting buildings for energy efficiency is a wise decision when the building is getting modernized... but the long path (it's been going on 'since the mists of time') to energy independence.
Try SWB if you'd like to get there this decade.
The obscene obsession with money which exists in our brains over the biosphere source of all life is repulsive. When we're killing our neighbors in wartime money is no problem. Bezo's $350 million yacht money could put heat pumps in several hundred homes.
Tens of thousands actually
Does the information contained in the August 2024 ExxonMobil's global outlook executive summary influence your thinking? Im not a guru in any way but it states that we're depleting reserves at rate of 15% annually 2X faster than international energy agency predictions. States that every 6 days another 1 million net new precious humans joun us. Each needs everything! Sez by 2050 we will be 10 billion. States were using 100 million barrels per day and before long we will have ability to extract 30 million barrels. Many other eye-opening nuggets
I thought Mike's point about the scale of the 100mil fund in contrast to the 100bl problem cut straight to the core of it. Lots of hopeful and optimistic rhetoric today fails to take the enormity of the problem into account and offers solutions which fall short of what's necessary, resulting in all of our attention being consumed by pseudo solutions.
I don't understand how you can start with wasted energy / efficiency, locational pricing, and end with putting data centres near London. Besides latency, which isn't that important, there is absolutely no reason to locate a data centre anywhere near London, hardly anyone actually works in them besides security guards and cleaners. Scotland would be a better idea. The AI hype, and tech hype in general, is doing more harm than good atm.
Good points. But it's Michael, not Mike 😊
Use the regenerative grid strategy. Turn surplus grid streams into battery fill and hydrogen. Beyond that, make biogas at all wastewater treatment plants.
Universal LED lighting build outs, to include traffic lights, also save tremendous amounts of money.
Solar panels should also be placed on school roofing, over parking lots, or at airports.
Take the easy money by making the more obvious moves.
Don't solve for 5 9s reliabilty. Data centres already have UPS to ensure continuity and quality of supply. Lean on them to up storage and contribute to grid stability, whilst ensuring their own continuity of supply.
"Great, i love bicycle, but when it's raining, where ist the roof ... - it seems I need a car" .Dear Investors of the world ... maby i should call Elon not to built space shuttles - better he should built bikes with a roof.
Wet weather clothing
Do you really think well have podcasts in a 2C world? 😔
Yes. I'm not excited about a 2C world, but the idea it will be some post-collapse hellscape is not what the science says. If you doubt this, read the IPCC AR6 - don't get your science from Extinction Rebellion. I get up every day and work on stuff that will limit climate change; 2C will be an ugly and less just version of where we are today, but better than 2.1C, and much better than 3C.
To my mind the solution to getting renewable offshore energy to the places it needed, is by using the already in place infrastructure. Rail, our railway system is designed to bring coal to our power stations, or wood in the case with Brax. So in todays world a standard shipping container can carry 6.4Gw of energy, each train can pull about 14 of these containers and bring the renewable energy to the old plant. you could have 3 of these trains one at the input end, one at the output end and the other in transit. Problem solved! So why spend all that money in the short term to bring industry to the coastline when the energy can come to them via rail.
GW is a measure of power, not energy. I think you need to do your numbers, and see how many trains full of whatever you would need to keep a city like Tokyo functioning.
Energy isn’t conserved unless it profits industry. If successful, Aptera is positioning themselves to decimate the competition by producing the most efficient car in the marketplace and thereby force all other car makers to prioritize efficiency or lose to those who do.
Please don't troll a perfectly interesting conversation with plugs for Aptera. You may think people want to drive around in that absurd contraption, and frankly, I would be happy if you were right though I am pretty sure you won't be. But it has NOTHING TO DO with Jonathan and my conversation.
At around 1 hour you talk about a PUE of 1.1 meaning that 10% of the energy is wasted.
NO, it does not.
If you dump all the heat it means that close to 100% of the energy used is wasted as the heat could be reused. However PUE is a bad measure of energy efficiency.
The data centre contains servers with fans that can consume 10 to 20% of the server power at full speed. Your top end DC may consume 1.1MW but the computer components only get day 850kW, meaning around 30% of energy is used in cooling.
PUEs for air cooled data centres are probably mythical, but if you really want to get the most compute per MW then it's liquid immersion cooling where on 5% of input power is needed for cooling, and the output can be at a high enough temp to be useful.
Good ways to get the power for a new data centre in West London:
A/ take over the (electrical) heating needs of a large building complex, install a data centre and use the waste heat for the building
B/ find an existing traditional data centre, PUE of around 1.5 (quite standard) convert it to liquid immersion cooling and, as if by magic, you have loads of spare power capacity for your new data centre.
Aerospace engineer here and I am going to REFUTE some of this stuff especially some of the claims about Hydrogen.
FYI - I'm Australian but did me degree in America. I work in industrial control systems. I have worked in manufacturing, mining, water treatment and other industries.
SORRY FOR THE LONGE COMMENT, but some things need to be said.
AND YES if anyone wants me to appear on this or their podcast I am available.
FIRST I am in favor of improving the efficiency of using electricity.
That's a basic reality we (the human race) MUST deal with going forward.
1) Right at the very start there's a claim about data centres NOT being able to get power in London. This is probably true for most large cities and its simply because of how much energy these data centres require and the capacity of the local grids to support such centres. I've designed factories and and one of the major issues is FIRST checking BEFOR EYOU EVEN START if the local power grid has the capacity you need. So I know from experience that trying to put one of these massive data centres ANYWHERE is a major issue for the local grid.
2) On Hydrogen I want to SCREAM and SCREAM LOUDLY.
There's this constant claim that hydrogen is not a fuel that its a store of energy. If that's true then its true for *EVERY OTHER FUEL WE USE* including coal, methane, uranium, thorium,....... because they all have in their structure potential energy that can be used by us in machines to extract energy in a different form. This is one of the basic laws of thermodynamics and ENGINEERS should know this basic fact.
As to where and how hydrogen gets used that is a different matter that needs to be discussed and I would be happy to come on this or any other podcast to discuss where hydrogen does and doesn't have a future and it does have a huge future in some cases and almost no future in others.
2a) One technology that gets almost ZERO mention on any of the podcasts are gas turbines which can run with hydrogen. This is normally difficult as hydrogen gets absorbed by metals like steel and it goes brittle. Here in Australia we did massive damage to one of our large gas turbine power stations because there was hydrogen in the natural gas. This is also why Hydrogen has no future in domestic gas systems. You'd need to replace the entire gas network.
However during the 1990s when aerospace engineers thought we'd shift to hydrogen for aircraft the hydrogen issues in gas turbines were solved. What killed hydrogen for aircraft off was the storage tanks & refuelling at airports, the actual tanks in the airplanes and the fact it wasn't needed. Both GE and Siemens now have ready to go off the shelf turbines than can run on up to 100% hydrogen but more commonly 50% hydrogen like the GE 9HA which can operate at almost 65% efficiency in cogeneration mode.
To make hydrogen work in our electricity supply systems hydrogen has to be considered the same way natural gas is. *AS A FUEL* that is created in one place, processed and then piped to the power station. This nonsense that its a battery is just an idiotic claim by a person who wants an alternative narrative. At the end of the day the only thing that matters to a householder, shareholder, factory manager, retail business operator, stockbroker (with his computers) or anyone else is *HOW MUCH DOES THEIR ELECTRICITY COSTS.* How it got to the power point or switch or lightbulb is irrelevant. Plus nobody cares about efficiency unless they're an engineer and that's only because we have to deal with these issues.
3) On energy efficiency they do NOT discuss one of the known cases where massive energy can be save and emissions reduced and that is the the giant glass monoliths architects keep designing. Mark Blyth, the Scottish born political economist at Brown U in America quotes an engineering study that estimates if America simply went an triple glazed all of its skyscrapers they'd save much energy that America would easily meet its Paris Accord requirements.
Here in Australia its well known that those buildings are massive energy hogs. In the heat of our summers they consume massive amounts of energy to keep them cool and in Winter they need massive amounts of energy to keep them warm.
3a) On the efficiency of Hydrogen systems I keep seeing all sorts of figures and NOBODY actually explaining how they get those figures except in the most round-about way.
If you go and look at the Wikipedia page for the Electrolysis of Water you'll find references to PEM (proton Exchange Membranes) that get over 90% efficiency. So how people like Saul Griffith who's been on this podcast keep claiming you lose 25% of the energy just making the hydrogen needs to get their facts right.
If you have a PEM system feeding hydrogen to a Cogeneration gas turbine you get over 58% efficiency less the pumping losses between the PEM system and the turbine. To put that into perspective the BEST of latest generation of nuclear power, the French EPR 2 gets about 36% efficiency and the best of coal fired power stations get around 42% thermal efficiency.
AGAIN efficiency is not the real issue.
The real issue is can you deliver electricity to the end user at an affordable price and NOBODY wants to discuss that.
What do you think about the hydrogen proposers episodes? Did they talked about your points?
@@corradoalamanni179 I am new to this channel and working my way through a few. Right now I am watching Ep 176 with Eva Schmid for the 3rd time.
At times damn hard not to scream because she's coming at the problem from the "we have to start doing things" and he's coming from the Devil's Advocate side of questioning everything. I get both those positions because I have been in both those positions at various times.
They are both right at times and both horribly wrong at times. One thing they are BOTH WRONG on and its not easy or obvious to pick up but they BOTH keep coming back to "energy markets."
I started my search into WHY isn't Australia doing anything and that lead straight to ECONOMISTS and that lead straight to the "free market" neoliberal ideologies.
My reply to economists right now is: *You can EITHER have your free markets OR have a planet to live on BUT YOU CAN'T HAVE BOTH.*
The problem with the free marketeer ideology is that its totally centered around 1 singular thought which Milton Freidman put it "There is one and only one social responsibility of business-to use it resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits..."
That's as much of that quote most free marketeers ever read because they hate the rest of that quote which is: _"so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud”_
And that's the real problem with free marketeers. They dominate all our conversations while only considering profit and having NO CONSDIERATIONS for the future of the human race and its survival on this planet.
And I can tell you very clearly there is NO OTHER PLACE humanity can survive than this planet. Yes there are some grand dreams but I can tell you with 100% certainty that we don't have the technology to deliver any of those dreams and wont have that technology before its too late.
And with what just happened in America that is now guaranteed.
The one silver lining.Oh God. Lol. Im laughing with you folks.
Civilisations rise and fall, it's re-evolution of overlapping temporal thermodynamical Fusion-Fission Function heterodyne era. (You should ask the Physicists of the new generation about the Mathemagical Thought Experimentalist's Intuitions embedded in good SiFi stories about the log-antilog logic of Singularity-point i-reflection containment Superposition-point Singularity Positioning and how all time-timing exists as Quantum Operator Chemistry)
A walk around any society would reveal the vertically integrated nature of personal education levels, coexisting in parallel overlapping experience and degrees of relative-timing involvement.
The criminality of Deliberate Blindness, disinformation and ignorance set against the Deliberate Education required of functional Democracy, is very apparent globally.
Electricity being 15 or so percent of total uk energy aren't we wasting our time talking about just a small percentage of electricity and we should stop using the term energy as electricity, it confuses the issue as total energy is important, not just reducing electricity.
It's 17% of final energy, but about 25% of energy services (final energy is the fuel you put in your car or the electricity you put in your heat pump, but not the motive power or heat you actually use).
And don't mention exergy :-)
The reason electricity b is so important if that it will need to cover over 80% of energy services in any net zero energy system of the future.
@@MLiebreich Electricity was 15.68% of total energy in the UK i think the last time I looked, not sure what you mean by 25% of energy services.
Not sure what you second paragraph is to mean?
You should look at the danish use of powerplant cooling for housing heat since the energy crisis in 1973 and 1980. Ask professor Brian Vad Mathiesen for a chat. Brian might also have new theories on solutions on energy efficiency and resiliance. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Vad_Mathiesen
Scottish energy is being sent south over the border to Yorkshire, when it should go to new industries in the Scottish industrial belt.
I'm more concerned that, despite being able to see more that 150 wind turbines from my home in the North Highlands, I have to pay full price for electricity 24/7 because there's no smart meter signal in this area. Yet there are people in parts of England paying 7p/kWhr overnight, a price that's only possible because of cheap Scottish renewables, whilst also signing petitions against pylons.
@@garysmith5025 I live in the Scottish Borders where the energy from the Firth of Forth wind farm comes on shore. All the employees who service the wind turbines from Eyemouth are English. I have put solar on my roof and have batteries so I don't pay for electricity.
@@steverichmond7142 I have solar PV, two EVs, no batteries but I have a very large thermal store; however there's no way I can get enough from my panels from about now until mid-February to meet demand. The two cars doing 200 miles per week requires about 90kWhr, I'd be lucky to get from the 4.8kW array during the whole of December or January.
@@garysmith5025 I only have one EV at home doing 150 miles per week. I have 8kW solar with mirrors. My house is airtight with passive HRVS and instant water heaters.
Please stop talking about 'wasted energy' when burning fossil fuels, if you don't address utilisation factors and curtailment for renewables and nuclear generation energy loss. This is just a 'shell game' and you know it.
Making hydrogen from grid surpluses, curtailment, grid congestion, and seasonal surpluses would be a winning strategy.