It’s true. Tesla is actually the only profitable BEV maker. Tesla makes $6500 pure profit for each EV because of vertical integration, autonomous innovative empowered employees, incredibly innovative & efficient manufacturing, huge staff incentives, fully in house brilliant material science & engineering, in house software & hardware design & engineering (that’s just vehicles. Tesla energy division is hugely profitable & growing 140% pa) Model Y takes 10hrs to build. VW takes 30. All other western OEMS take more time per EV. BYD mostly makes a loss & barely breaks even. Ford GM VW Toyota Nissan etc etc are cutting back on EV to slow losses. They are staring into oblivion. Most of the 200 or so other BEV makers in China are toast without subsidies & the Govt wants most gone.
It depends on how you are doing the accounting. Because EVs are new a lot more R&D and factory build out/ retooling is being done to make them better that doesn’t need to be done for the mature Ice cars and when you add that cost in on the cars being produced now, then yes they aren’t profitable. These are more of caped costs and not Opex costs. As time goes on and less R&D and less factory build out is needed, the cars are all profitable.
@@matthewmanzi9504 There is only 1 method to count the profitability of a company. Does the company make a profit or not? All the other stuff is only good to impress investors.
@@matthewmanzi9504This is an important point. Not enough people get it. It is not accurate to say that Rivian, for example, loses money on every vehicle they sell. It's not the vehicle production that incurs these excessive costs it is everything else. If they increase production, then revenues would exceed costs.
13:45 Please research biomass further. United Kingdom generates biomass-powered energy "biomass" power plants across the country with a total capacity of 1583.7 MW. They burn wood pellets made from forests harvested in Canada. The carbon emissions are not counted in Canada because the wood has not been burned there. And the UK receives the wood pellets and does not count the carbon emissions either. Here in the US biomass is heavily subsidized. Essentially we are burning our old-growth forests to avoid burning fossil fuels.
there's a massive tree farm in british columbia that sources most of our wood. It's new growth and truly massive, and we still haven't used it to capacity. Trees we plant while chopping down more trees grow to fruition before we finish chopping the rest of the previous growth. So the forests we're chopping down have been replenishable new growth forests in british columbia.
Yeah the vast majority of old growth forests were chopped down in the 18th-20th centuries. Not that I disagree that biomass and the dishonest accounting of carbon emissions is problematic, but it's generally not old growth. I think electricity generation should not be done with biomass or biofuel, except maybe in remote north areas or other off-grid situations where it's hard to use anything but liquid-fueled generators. Efficient wood stoves for heat also make sense in certain situations, esp. as supplementary or backup heat along with a heat pump, but burning it on a mega-scale is just not very sustainable.
I know in Switzerland, they count a part of the burned trash, which is always used for electricity and warm water as biomass. It is factually correct. Food, wood, paper or cardboard that ends up there for what ever reason is biomass.
Its not counted because its not fossil carbon being added to the atmsophere, it's just cycling of carbon already present. The same reason we don't count all the normal biological carbon cycling or people breathing. Stop being obsessed with counting things without first considering if it's appropriate or not.
@@kennethferland5579 That would mean, produce wood doesn't need any fossil fuel, or shipping it which is obviously not true. You can argue those emissions get counted somewhere else but then the picture is at least distorted.
I moved from an oil boiler, gas hob and petrol car to a heat pump, induction hob and EV. Converting all my energy usage to MWh per year, I used around 50-60 MWh annually before I electrified my home and transport. Now I use 16-18 MWh annually. A third of which I generate myself.
All of the points in the video are valid, but I do believe consumption will still go up - due to energy abundance, we will start to do things that are currently expensive and not feasible - desalination, lots of air-con for far more people and places, etc. But you have strong point, I admit.
Also manufacturing e.g Graphene is expensive because of the high energy required to produce it. Get the cost of energy down and watch as companies rush to produce large scale quantities of it.
If energy usage starts to drop significantly that means price of energy will drop. If energy becomes cheap we will start to use considerably moore. In colder climates that means raising indoor temperature and in warmer climates that means moor AC. We would also see traveling get much cheaper, so we would see more traveling. All taken together there is no way we will reduce energy consumption to half.
@@Rohan4711 The point is that we don't need to replace what we're using today. We only need to replace the fraction of it that is not wasted. Of course electricity usage will increase if it's cheap, but as long as it's clean, what difference does it make?
I don't think we'll be looking at energy abundance anytime soon, as adopting these technologies will take quite a while. We've become used to binging on cheap stored solar energy (fossil fuels), but we'll probably have to adapt to fluctuating energy availability, as we rely on more renewables. Highly energy intensive activities might have to wait until a windy or sunny day.
There are a number of other ways we can very significantly reduce the amount of energy needed going forward. 1. Paint our roofs and homes with light colored, highly reflective paints. 2. Insulate and seal/caulk our homes. 3. Just installing solar panels will add an air barrier and significantly cool roofs. 4. Install insulated curtains which offers a huge benefit at a low effort and cost. 5. Install smart electrical breakers. Our well pump only runs during daylight hours; we limit our hot water heater and clothes and dishwasher use to mostly daylight hours. In spring, early summer and fall, we open windows at night to cool the house. nights are cool enough that we mostly limit our heat pump home cooling system to sunlight hours. We charge our EV mostly during daylight hours.
Inductive cooktops are awesome. I just tried a gas stove and it doesn’t even compare with my inductive cooktop. And the inductive cooktop works off my solar panels.
10:00 Here in the Seattle area, we have electric busses. But for transportation of heavier goods by rail is concerned, electrification of railroads should be a priority. For special applications and long-haul trucking, perhaps hybrids are probably a more practical answer for now. Take a look at the work being done by Canadian company Edison.
In Europe, we use trolleybuses instead, since batteries are expensive and overexertion makes them a fire hazard. Also trolleybuses don't need to charge and are much cheaper.
An interesting analysis! It makes sense to me, yet I do not have the knowledge to agree nor refute. The video was easy to follow and understand. Well done.
That is one reason, another reason is our technology keeps getting more and more efficient. Even when energy is cheap, it still costs money, so there are always incentives to reduce power consumption. Going from incandescent light to LED light is a big reason why we consume less energy. This transition took light from being a major use of energy to almost insignificant.
13:45 Why exactly would nuclear not be used in a net-zero future? With the exception of concrete required to build the plant (and if we're counting that - well, by this logic, hydro should be out as well, as dams also take a lot of it), nuclear produces absolutely no CO2 emissions whatsoever. Sure, it might not be renewable per say, but it's still net-zero by its very nature. Even more than biomass because (as some other commenters pointed out) a lot of biomass-powered plants burn Canadian wood, which is mostly old-growth forests. Which means they release carbon into the air, that wasn't there before. That's pretty much coal without the extra step of "wait millions of years for the trees to turn into rock".
The levelized cost of energy for nuclear is high and not shrinking. It also takes 10-20 years to go from idea to kilowatt. They also are a go-big-or-go-home solution that *starts* in The billions or tens of billions. Most nuclear power plants haven't paid themselves off (if you include their unsubsidized cost to operate) and never will. Compared to a solar or wind + batteries, that pays off before you even start *building* a nuclear power plant.
@@DanSolowastaken I agree there is no reason to build new nuclear but continuing to use exist plants for another 20~30 years ( or the end of there lifespanes) is efficient.
Existing nuclear should definitely be kept as long as safety allows. But NEW nuclear is outrageously expensive and extremely long to bring on-line. Those resources would be much better used developing renewable generation, storage and the other measures that compensates for their intermittency (larger grids, long-distance transmission lines, shifts of peak consumption, etc)
I am telling this story for a realy long time, but it is sometimes difficult to convince people of this logic. You explained it well. Now I can use this video in the future.
So glad you covered this topic... It's tricky and nuanced and also really important to understand how BEVs can actually lower humanities energy requirements due to the negation of the huge heat engine losses... Kudos.
The best way to put this is, that a power plant is its own largest customer. for simplest metric, They consume 3, 1 is waste, 1 powers themself, and 1 is sold to consumers.
In case you do actually read this - there's a huge factor missing from the video, namely a whole continent with twice the Europe/NA population that is yet to consume a fraction of the energy westeners do. The other flaws are already pointed out by other commenters but I wanted to ask why did you completely remove nuclear from the energy mix?
That whole continent is a thing, but even so, the way things are shaking out means that the increase might be less than you think as they swap out fossil fuels for renewable electricity, and there will come a time when it happens.
@unconventionalideas5683 Even if they start with land transport, energy generation and climate control decarbonised that's not the meat of the pie here. It's product consumption - as people increase their standars of living they eat more meat, build bigger homes (making concrete is a big emitter too), buy electronics, cars, they travel. That would be magnitudes bigger then it is now, and a lot of industries involved can barely be decorbonized, for example, mining, shipping. That's why it goes reuse, reduce, recycle, in order of importance.
hi @SizeMichael your input at 4:30 around heat+power is really interesting. There might be a topic for a future video on this subject alone. In Denmark we have a large rollout of central heating coming from such plants already, but it's actually holding back a lot of the utilization of green energy, something Denmark has in surplus often. The demand for heating and power tends to be not aligned, so on very windy days we use a lot of heating but also get a lot of cheap energy from the north sea. The operators of the power+heat plants cant reduce the load on their plant because demand for heating is high and tend to end up (according to the news outlets) having to pay neighbours to take their excess power. Afaik no heating+power plants have successfully moved to electricity alone, which i suppose would remove some of the initial purpose.
15:00 Your assumption of storage losses may be very low. Energy to charge and discharge batteries is not 95% efficient. Also batteries tend to "leak" energy, they're not like gas tanks that don't leak.
90% efficiency for a lithium ion battery is reasonable. In addition not all energy will be stored in batteries. Pumped hydro is about 70% efficient. Flow batteries are also about 70% efficient. It is more complex than presented in the video.
@@JeanPierreWhite Modern pumped-hydro projects are significantly above 70% round-trip efficiency... more like 80%, with some projects reaching 87% according to literature.
Cutting line losses is a good thing. The heat produced by line losses is not relevant to climate. It's many orders of magnitude too small. The sun provides a kilowatt per square meter at the earth's surface, and the surface of the Earth has a LOT of square meters. One square km is a million square meters, so a terawatt of heat energy. That's a thousand times the output of a large power plant.
Pretty decent treatment of the topic. The substitution method includes some efficiency swapping as part of those graphs. Real simply, most places, converting as much light traffic/transport as possible to electric as can be done and cleaning the grid generation sources toward solar/wind will return huge benefits in reducing primary energy use. It's been encouraging seeing the attention applied to heat pumps the last 10 years and especially in their efficiency in lowest external temperatures for things like space heating. Now, to assure electricity prices don't rise...
Thanks for this explanation. To add to the conversation here, we need less expensive, home and small businesses sized, electricity storage batteries. We have a chance right now to free individual homes and businesses from the price gouging, gas and electric utility monopolies and cartels. In the Mountain West of the US, our winters can be snowy, but not that cold. But our summers are scorching hot (35-40+ C for a third or more of the year). We remodeled, insulated, fireproofed to the extent possible, and electrified (heat pump, LED, induction) a large, old home and turned it into an inn. To really go off grid and free ourselves of our local, predatory, electricity cartel, we’d need 50 kWh of storage. This high storage is necessitated by our need for cooling in summer. Installed battery storage is bout $1,000/kwh ($60,000 or more just for storage). This needs to come down by an order of magnitude to actually disrupt our corrupt and price gouging electricity cartel.
What suppliers have you looked at and how recently? Tesla is selling their Megapacks for around $350 / kWh including installation, but those are 3.9MWh, so too big. Prices came down in the second half of 2023 quite a bit. Other suppliers likely also down, likely because Li-ion battery prices came down significantly as many automakers are scaling back their manufacturing volumes.
Storing electricity in batteries is super expensive. As you mentioned you mainly want to use the energy to cool down buildings you are much better off by other means. E.g. power a heat-pump to cool down a medium, usually liquid when you have excess power and use the cool liquid to reduce temperature when needed.
BC Hydro in the PNW interestingly offers to bank our excess rooftop summer solar for our use in winter. Thus, rooftop solar could lessen summer power plant production, delaying its max output until winter. This is aside from a utility implementing nightly battery cycling to smooth curves.
Today modern LiFePO4 15 kWh battery may cost you even less $2k, especially if buy a DIY kit. That battery cell's price dropped almost in half for a past year
What I will hold against that is that plenty of sectors such as metallurgy (especially aluminium) are primarily constrained by energy costs. When (or if) renewables consistently decrease energy costs enough to base investments on it, a single sector alone could eat up any excess supply. And heavy industries are far from the only candidates, there's aviation, controlled environment agriculture, machine learning, etc. And even if none of those step up, we can always use cheap energy for CCS. Also a small criticism, but you make overly favourable assumptions even though more realistic ones would still support your point. E.g. at 12:00 the CoP of a modern boiler is around 1.08 (since it's based on the LHV) while neglecting to mention that the CoP of a heat pump highly depends on the application and heat source. A house with floor heating with a geothermal loop can easily exceed 3.5 for space heating, but a retrofitted air heat pump in a colder climate would be lucky to reach 2. And hot water always needs to be heated to 55-60°C for safety reasons, which also lowers the CoP. Also the round trip efficiency for pumped hydro, which is currently the main short term energy storage, is only around 70-80%. Your 5% loss assumption is absolutely utopic. And that doesn't even include the way less efficient seasonal storage that doesn't even really exist yet.
Assuming only a %5 efficiency loss from using energy storage is completely absurd. The existing *serious* grid storage solutions aren't even close to that. That's basically a figure for if you were using lithium batteries under perfectly ideal circumstances. Plus the idea of trying to build your entire grid off of lithium ion batteries is extremely silly because of their high cost and need to be replaced in a few years.
I agree. The best example we have right now is pumped hydro, and that has a 20-25% loss. his point still stands, but it probably omits the fact that the curve is still there, it's just being hidden by the efficiency gains during the transition.
@@SwissExperiments Plus even the areas lucky enough to have a big pumped hydro reservoir still don't have nearly enough energy storage to help deal with energy production variation of more than a day or two. RN there's nobody with any remotely viable energy storage solution that would help if you live somewhere that experiences weeks at a time of overcast weather with little wind.
Keep in mind most energy generated will not be stored at all, it would be used directly. So take this more like "half of the generation is stored at 90% efficiency"
Interesting topic and some good points in the coments. One question when you removed the oil consumption from transport I did not see you add a corresponding electric demand for the replacement. You also have to add in waste for storage on the vehicle as well as transmission losses. This later point is worth considering as it is unlikely that 24hr dispatchable power can be generated locally or even nationally in the EU. Also, how do you replace primariary avaiation oil consuption. Currently, no tech for this is mature enough for implementation. However, this was not your point, and I appreciated your primary point.
Today is the second time I've watched this video, and I still couldn't see anything about the electric demand replacement that removal of oil transport would necessarily induce. I think this is quite a serious flaw in the thesis being made in this video, and the reason why I downvoted it. The 2050 "clean energy total predictions" are being underestimated here by what, 20 to 30%? I haven't looked into the transfer efficiency of oil to fuel at the station vs WSH electricity to the outlet, but even if I assume they're comparable, those electric vehicles won't charge themselves. I also wish aviation was looked at a bit more closely, as the growth trajectory of air travel worldwide continues to look strong. Unfortunately, military uses of oil are also a thing and the prevailing tech seems far-removed from net zero, but idk if that's a big (or knowable) factor. And it would be great if the limitations of domestic and kerbside electrical supplies be considered a little more, even in merely a European context. Car charging infrastructure needs an order of magnitude greater current capacity than typical streelight installations, and could max out or exceed domestic supplies (I'm thinking Italy) even for night charging modes.
Two factors which will slightly impact the analysis. The huge amount of energy used to extract, refine/compress & transport vast quantities of fossil fuels will no longer be required, however, Artificial Intelligence data centres will become ubiquitous. Each centre consuming the same power as a small city. From a total energy perspective perhaps they’ll cancel each other out?
If electricity cost goes down and the grid can handle it we will see a lot more AI data processing. They will also use more energy per area with newer generation of AI computers, so we might not need that many more data centers, but each one can use a lot more power than they do today. Today AI might use 1% of electricity. According to Nvidias CEO the machines they will release in 5 years will have about 1 million times the computing power. Even if that would be 100 times more energy efficient that still comes to 10 000% of all of today's electricity. That will not happen, just because we will not have the electricity or the grid to handle that load and that energy cost would likely be too expensive. Knowing what projects are out there in all sorts of fields just makes me wonder how this video came to the conclusion that we will reduce energy use for the world in a short while to half.
AI datacenters are overhyped as a driver of energy consumption Increasing EU electricity demand by 10% would require 800 million H100s, which would cost $40T. We're about 4 orders of magnitude below that
@@SizeMichaelIf Nvidias CEO is correct in what they will deliver in the next 5 years then it might just take 800 to 8000 computers. That sounds like very few AI computers to me. Also increasing EU electricity by 10% in 5 years takes quite a lot of effort and money. AI will be far from the only thing wanting more electricity. Things like electric vehicles, green steel production, increased production of goods inside EU due to new toll fees are a few examples. We could use 30% more electricity in 5 years if we can get it at a decent price, like euro 0.1 per kWh.
Heating from solar is problematic, because you need heating in the winter and you get maybe 20 % of solar in these month. So you would need to overbuild solar plants by a factor of 5 and solar panels are not free. Neither cost wise nor resource wise. And I dont think we will ever have batteries big enough so store enough power in the summer to last us all winter.
Seasonal fluctuations cannot be covered by batteries. This is one of the reasons why we need something like green hydrogen. That is not really competitive yet, although briefly, when the gas prices skyrocketed, it suddenly was for a while. So we are not so far away from that breakthrough. Cheaper catalysts would probably do the trick.
One Possibility is also Biogas. Here in Germany most Cities and towns are in some way conneted via Gaspipes and these are in turn connected to old cool mines, where the pressured Gas ist stored underground in the summer and released back in Winter when demand is much higher. If Natural Gas demand now slows down those pipes and mines could could may be filled with parts of treatet biogas from Biogasplants all over the country and then used in electrifies which are already plenty in our country. But that would mean order of magnitudes lower lng and cng demand as biocapacity from waste or plants is limited.
@@milofonbil True at the moment, but we can easily keep up with the gradual changeover of the auto fleet from ICE to EV. That changeover is not happening overnight.
You are a Smart man and educated in physics and engineering. Thanks. The outcome will be a world where the total energy consumption will drop dramatically in the next 20-30 years.
If energy prices goes really high we will see drops in energy consumption and all sorts of other problems. If prices stay consistent or drop we will see energy use increase. At least that is the conclusion by energy researchers, economics and all energy producing companies I have read about.
@@Rohan4711 Well, I do not agree with those conclusions. energy is too much regulated by now by the governments for "green reasons" and geopolitical as well, so that the price is not longer a function of demand VS supply. it behaves differently. it is not a free market. where i live the electrical cost is dictated my government and most electricity is produced by government so they decide the cost based on the true cost it cost them to produce and not by free supply and demand equations. electricity and energy in general will drop all over the world as the video is explaining correctly and governments will make sure the use of energy is efficient so the demand will be kept artificially low.
@@AY-dw4om Do you agree that the demand for energy depends on the price for the end user? The price can be both based on real production costs or in most cases some form of taxes added on top, so there is some politics involved in the price. In many countries the price before taxes is set on the spot market. That often means the most expensive energy production source currently in use has a major impact on total price levels.
@@Rohan4711 No I do not agree. demand for energy is mostly based on needs. you do not buy more fuel for your car because its price has dropped. you buy the amount of fuel based on how much you drive your car. same with electricity use use at your home or factory - as much as you need regardless its price. there are commodities that their usage is not based by its price but the other way around. if the demand for energy drops because the use has dropped as explained to great length in this video, then the opposite happens: energy prices goes down due to low demand.
@@AY-dw4om Well, he claimed that energy use has dropped based on data up to 2020 from ourworldindata. Using that same site you now have data until 2022, and the energy use is ever increasing except for a small blipp in the curve for 2020. That blipp is due to COVID-19, so clearly an abnormality. The video claimed that falling energy usage is the trend, but data does not support that.
Min 9:33 please review? Are your data or calculations correct. One BOE (159 liter) crude has 5800000 BTU or 1700 kWh energy. The slide you show 110-175 kWh/mile looks a big elephant?
So, on net congestion, there’s a lot of talk about that here in the Netherlands. But if you need so much less energy, and you have techniques like V to G, and V to X, would that already take care of that problem or do we still need the grid to be much ‘heavier’ ?
10:50 your certainly there annoyed me the efficiency will be close to 100% but like that resistance heater shown in the video like many loose a little to visible light!
I remember a couple years ago the hot talking point from the renewable FUDsters and fossil fuel apologists was the idea that there would never be enough solar and wind generation to replace all those GWh of energy. They would throw around these huge numbers and never mention that, in the US, the majority of it is just waste heat. Now, we see places like South Australia, California and England getting the majority of their electricity from solar and wind with battery storage, and sometimes 100%. And these places are still in the early stages of the transition. Plenty more can be done.
I am not going to pretend that I know how much energy South Australia gets from solar and wind. But the fact that you put England in that list makes me think that you have no business speaking about this issue either. Not to mention that even Californian legislators recognize that they dump much of the clean energy they produce because there is no need for it when is produced and then import dirty energy when hey need it. Sure if you compare energy produced with consumption you get the impression that a majority comes from renewables, but it is not so in practice.
“. . . a naïve observer might conclude that the rising share of new renewables (solar and wind) will usher in an era of falling electricity prices. But in reality, the opposite has been true.” Vaclav Smil, Numbers Don’t Lie, p.172
@@pintiliecatalin I'm just going off something I heard Englishman Robert Llewellyn say the other day. Perhaps I misheard him. But I do see that Carbon Brief have published, about three weeks ago, a very interesting report (based on data from the National Grid) showing that the average contribution of fossil fuels to the National Grid in Great Britain has dropped from 74% in 2009 to 26% in the first part of 2024 - and with the most recent four months showing a steep downward trend. In California, it appears that the average contribution of wind, solar and hydroelectric has been above 60% for a couple of months now. I don't know what planet you live on, but here on planet Earth, the global electric supply is rapidly shifting away from fossil fuels.
@@dzcav3 Can you imagine what it's going to cost when the risks to infrastructure from the warming climate and the rising sea levels make it impossible for insurance companies to operate in most places?
@@dzcav3 Vaclav Smil's Numbers Don't Lie is four years old, and the cost of PV continues to fall. He may have been looking at overall electricity prices that have a lot of other factors affecting them. Utilities have been raising their prices for transmission and distribution, for example. The Number that Doesn't Lie we might want to look at is Power Purchase Agreements for PV going off at 2.2 cents per kWh.
Overall agree with you, but we must keep in mind that one reason of why we are "behind the curve" in energy consumption is industry délocalisation. The energy that we would have otherwise used is now used by other countries (like China) and then we import the final product
This is an awesome example of how making assumptions on how someone perceives a word or concept completely changes the result. This video sees energy use as metering what we pull from the ground. Energy use is GOING UP- A LOT but it is doing so in terms of electric meters spinning at the point of use, not measured in the view of this video- because the energy was not pulled from the ground but instead it is energy which was heading somewhere else (flowing stream, blowing wind, photon of light) but human technology Shanghi'ed it to perform some work for them first. Fewer new net therms.
Here’s a simple formula to calculate the energy in gasoline. (volume * density * hydrogen energy * efficiency) ÷ volume = gasoline energy. Here’s a simple example, gasoline density is 2.85769 kg per gallon, so (2.6918 * 2.85769 *33.33333 * 13%) ÷ 2.6918 = 12.38333 kwh per gallon of gasoline. Here’s another example, 8.1 gallons of gasoline has a mass of 23.147 kg * 13% equals 3 kg of hydrogen, so if you drive 371.5 miles and burn 8.1 gallons of gasoline that’s 45.86 miles per gallon of gasoline, or 16.05 miles per kg of gasoline, or 123.46 miles per kilogram of hydrogen. MPGe is actually miles per kilogram of hydrogen, NOT miles peg gallon of gasoline.
10:59 I think you are confusing primary energy with net electricity produced and electricity at the meter. Once electricity is produced, there are transmission losses. I do agree that a resistive heater is 100% efficient in converting electricity at the electrical outlet into heat. The emissions are "handled" at the power plant. So-called "renewable" power plants burning wood pulp from clear-cut forests producing electricity are 35% efficient in producing electricity and then suffer transmission line losses to the meter at your home. Again, the emissions are "handled" at the power plant. Your final point is that heat pumps are more efficient than resistive heaters. Why not use passive solar?
Passive solar doesn't work for most of the places that need heating. When it's -5 C out there and you need to heat your house so you don't freeze and the sun is below the horizon for like 16 hours a day, passive solar is completely useless. Passive solar for heating is a fun idea for taking a shower in a Spanish summer or heating your pool in California, but it just simply can't heat a house. Particularly not one with a small or non-existent roof surface, like apartment. Passive solar is a fun idea for those applications, but it is really a margin of error when we look at all heating.
Gas power stations DONT dispalce giga-watts of heat up the stack A large gas power station like the recently built Kedby 2 in England is a 850MWe unit and it dumps 500MW into the environment CCGTs are very efficient
Most of those data centers are already built. And any new ones (or rebuilt) are substantially more energy efficient. LLM and other AI is already existing and broadly used, there is not a lot of expansion needed foe that. Also if you check out Intel and AMD latest processors, they are putting AI co-processors right in the endpoint device to avoid a lot of network chatter and datacenter requirements. The AI processor actually makes the CPU and GPU more efficient by properly distributing workload for the processor best suited for the job. So there is not really any more energy requirements for the new AI processing. The worry about data centers is all more petroleum industry FUD rhetoric. Anything running in a data center is a lot more efficient than it would be without the datacenter, so they are reducing global electricity demand by existing. The real worrisome use of electricity is crypto mining, uses way more electricity than AI ever will. Still up in the air if that will be a net benefit to society or not.
The Technological Progress is also the reason . Computer Chips Have Become More Powerful While Consuming Less Energy and Light Bulbs Have Become More Efficient too
With storage you will even dekrease consumption, because you will eliminate the need of balancing the electric grids that contributes to more losses than LION energy storage, and also WWS will lower the need of high voltage long distance transfers (because of more local generation nature), that also contribute to a lot of losses.
Assuming you have storage in a few areas you will still have issues with balancing the grid, just not as bad. Losses when charging and dischargeing a battery at high rates is higher than today's balancing losses. Water pump storage at good locations has lower losses and lower cost than battery storage. Main advantage of battery storage is quick and easy installation and you can increase the storage size over time.
4:13 Your source: Our world in data, energy-substitution-method. To ‘correct’ for these different methods of accounting, researchers can apply the ‘substitution method’. This tries to adjust non-fossil energy sources to the inputs that would be needed if it was generated from fossil fuels. *Renewables are adjusted upwards* Primary energy measured by the ‘substitution method’ overstates the amount of energy that’s produced. The diagram shows how renewable energy is divided by 0.4 or multiplying by 2.5. The reason for this is they're compensating for the 65% inefficiency that's being assumed for fossil fuels in the big yellow box on the 2009 Lawrence Livermore US Estimated Energy use diagram. 0.35 / 0.4 = .87 (Seriously, there's really no conspiracy here)
I as a petrolhead should say: nobody's taking old cars away and newer cars have been iffy for a while now. If we learn how to preserve the old, then decarbonisation means we get to use the old cars for much longer, so electrification never was bad for us.
Finally, a video of solid human logic, numbers and development. I have just watched 30 bad videos on engineering and history and they were just made for clip bait and poorly put together. You, on the other hand, have a solid product thanks.
1:45 I agree that the Adams Curve will not increase. People don't consume more energy simply because it's cheaper. This is true for home owners, renters and commercial properties. This is clearly one of those situations where the Microeconomics (supply and demand curves) do not really apply. It's like keeping the cost of of vegetables and grains does not increase their consumption. (albeit, creating addictive food probably does)
You are forgetting to account for industries that are currently held back by price of energy. Get the price down and watch as new industries start popping up and raising demand for energy. Like in your example cheaper vegies does not increase consumer demand but it does increase demand from the snack and food indistries.
In fact we have clear evidence in Europe for the last years that price of energy has a major impact on consumption. Due to the war in Ukraine the energy prices increased sharply. Many industries shut down completely and almost all buildings lowered indoor temperature considerably during the entire winter. As prices backed down to normal, the temperatures was restored and companies that didn't go bankrupt restarted energy intensive processes.
@@Rohan4711 Exactly, > People don't consume more energy simply because it's cheaper This could not be more wrong, I haven't watched the video tbh but I actually expect this prophecy to be wrong, just based on the jevons paradox, let alone since we are getting rid of massive amounts of gas and replacing them all with electricity based appliances Getting an EV will increase your electricity usage by a 1/3rd at least, if you have 2 EV's you'll increase your electricity usage by over 50% easily
@@davidford694 Supply and demand still apply, you are just not considering elastic and non elastic goods. And they do teach that to undergrads, at least they did to me and my peers.
I think AI is overhyped as a driver of energy demand. Increasing EU electricity demand by 10% would require 800 million H100s, which would cost $40T. We're about 4 orders of magnitude below that
There another school of thought that as energy cost drop, be it from cheap solar, renewable, BEVs, society had always expanded the energy consumption per capita. AI training compute centers will consume giga-whrs, $coin mining, active carbon capture. Even robotaxis. If $/mile goes from $3 to $.5, ppl will hail rides much more, drive across town to meet for coffee, frivolous convenience shopping online. Amazon is an example. If shipping is free, ppl will buy a $3 doodad & have it deliver in hours. Most ppl mentally estimate the cost of driving to decide if a trip is worthwhile. If robotaxi cost next to nothing & one can do all the things one does at home while being driven, it encourage more mobility.
Mobility isn't just consumed it's also an input cost. For example one of the greatest feats of movement in the modern world is large-scale shipping. It beats pipelines on cost. What happens when LTL transport goes to pennies? It should even cut into FTL for trucks.Everyone gets wealthier.
It is difficult to fairly compare the efficiency of use for different kinds of primary energy. I would say that the energy coming from the sun is primary energy. PV solar panels installed today are around 20% efficient at using energy coming from the sun to make electricity. The other 80% is reflected back to the sky or absorbed as heat, which I would call rejected energy either way. Is PV solar really more efficient than coal burning? It's hard to say. Do wind turbines have any rejected energy? Maybe, but I don't want to try to define it. Fission is a CO2-free form of primary energy. If decarbonization motivates the use of wind and solar, why remove nuclear power from your chart? On the other hand, you have helped motivate me to replace my biomass (firewood) furnace with a heat pump.
Very nice, only thing that I don't like is sort of ignoring the battery problem. Solar/Wind are variable sources of energy, you can't make them a backbone of your country. Solving this issue with chemical batteries (specifically ones with heavy metals that can't be sustainably mined en-masse, such as lithium-ion) is a horrible idea, and although I guess that isn't what you implied, a lot of people think that just throwing the tesla style battery farms at things would solve everything. Energy storage is its own problem. Frankly there are some solutions to this: 1. The one you should use whenever possible and viable - water reservoirs 2. Alternative backbone (hydro or nuclear if no river) 3. Low-cost, weight-ignoring battery systems - iron oxide batteries Feel free to correct me or ad-in something. Thing we can agree on is that neither of these options contain coal, oil or gas and they are NEVER a better option.
1 sodium ion batteries, much cheaper. 2 large fleet of bidirectionally grid-tied EVs = massive distributed storage. 3 green ammonia, and many other storage options, currently under development
2:06 Sorry to be a nit-picker here. I think you are over-complicating things here with Power, Energy, Heat and Temperature. The SAE measurement for energy used in your 2009 (15 years old) Lawrence Livermore reference is in Quads or quadrillion of BTUs. The modern metric unit (the rest of the world uses) is Joules. A Quad is 1.0551E+18 joules. Heat and Watts are units of work or energy. Power is work per unit of time. Eg Kilowatts/hr. The "Rejected Energy" is wasted energy due to conversion inefficiencies. Eg. Steam-powered turbines used to convert fossil fuel to mechanical energy are only 35% efficient at most. Solar panels are only 40% efficient. In transportation a car engine may only be 35% efficient in converting fossil fuel energy into mechanical energy. The transmission and the tires are inefficient as well. Temperature is a measure of thermal state. A difference in temperature can be used to produce energy.
Your comment going through the science is irrelevant. The point is that different sources are typically used at very different efficiencies so just quoting how much energy each source has is useless when comparing sources.
You have a strong point with the efficiency. The video compares energy gained from burning coal to electric energy. That is two very different types of energy. Electrical energy is nice as it is versatile and easy to move. However it is very expensive per unit of energy. The video completely skipped this and just count energy. Simple, but highly misleading. This is the reason that it is uncommon to use electric radiators. They are 100% efficient, but compared to using other forms of heat energy or using a heat-pump the 100% efficiency is still bad. Claiming that we can reduce heating a lot with heat pumps assumes that we hardly use heat pumps today. In most parts of the world that assumption is not true.
@@Rohan4711 google: "According to the International Energy Agency, in 2022 electric heat pumps met only 10% of heating needs in buildings globally.Jun 12, 2023"
This confirms my assumptions about that chart. 😅 Yet i wonder why i never heard anyone else talk about that. It's a great argument on why the transition is more doable than it seems. I think i have to share this a bunch.
All this ignores one problem with renewable energy sources - they don't produce energy consistently. Example that just happened - Germany os turning on all their remaining coal power plants because renewable energy production has plummeted.
The translation to mostly renewables can't happen in a few years. Especially with our sluggish progress. Bavaria refuses to build wind farms but also refuses to build a new route to move energy from north to south Germany, while also not providing any other option,... Greetings from Bavaria btw.
The figures for EV efficiency are mistakenly in kWh / mile. It should be in Wh / mile or the numbers should be 0.25 - 0.30 kWh/mile for battery to wheel and 0.30 - 0.35 kWh / mile for outlet to wheel.
Clear and concise explanation of why, other things being equal, energy consumption will halve by 2050. In the UK demand for electricity is held back setting the price of renewables by the gas price. This can't go on and once this link to gas is broken then demand will surge (I'd turn my heating up, for one!).
Your missing that batteries are less than 20% energy efficient due to loss when power goes in (c.30%, is stored depends on time, and c.30% on discharge).
I'm a little confused about why you think that nuclear power is going to go away, especially by 2050. China, India, and France have made huge investments in nuclear energy in the last ten years with no end in sight. Small modular reactors are being developed by several countries and major corporations. Microsoft and Google have already expressed interest in using SMR technology to power their mega data centers completely independent of the grid. SMR technology is probably the best technology for powering large ships, producing synthetic fuel for aviation and spaceflight, and also for extra high-energy industrial processes like steel and aluminum production. Do not get me wrong. I absolutely believe that wind, water, and solar energy are extremely important, and we should build a hell of a lot more capacity, but nuclear power is a powerful tool for generating massive amounts of energy on demand without burning fossil fuel. It seems incredibly unlikely that nuclear power will suddenly be switched off at any point this century.
I agree with you. Any nuclear built today will likely last about 40 years, so well beyond 2050. As production of new plants are increasing rapidly it will be even longer. Video also thinks energy storage is easy and cheap. It is not. Another issue is that renewables, especially wind has major financial problems already. As soon as the amount of wind increased a lot in the grid the price falls to low or even negative on the spot market when there is good wind. Producers just get a lot less income than predicted even when the amount of energy is to plan. To increase even more requires adding super expensive energy storage. Next issue is the EROEI that is way to low for renewables and lack of storage means we need backup plants. In reality the major buildout of windfarms has increased the amount of coal used for electricity generation. We need a reliable grid that will work even in the coldest winter when we typically get almost no wind or solar. That means we still need full capacity covered by reliable energy sources regardless of the number of wind turbines installed. It is very inefficient to build lots of plants and have them shut down 90% of the year, but it is still the best way to get reliable power during winter. Should wind and solar pay for the time when plants are shut down as wind and solar provide the power?
Partly to simplify the video, I think the viewers can easily add nuclear back in just in their head if they think it will stay But I do have a bear case on nuclear: solar is unstoppable, because of the huge value proposition in self-consumption. Therefore, the net demand on the grid will drop to or below 0 at noon, inevitably. But nuclear already struggles with cost at a 95% capacity factor. How will it cope when it's forced to less than 60%?
@@SizeMichael The problem with adding lots on solar or wind is that your production will shift heavily and it will not correlate with demand. If you only have a little and you have a lot of hydro you can use that storage capacity. If not you will have to ramp up and down your stable capacity plant (normally referred to as base power). That will be real bad for the base power, so it will become very expensive to get that base power. Nuclear is not a great fit for ramping up and down, your best fit are gas powered plants. If you wanted to change to save the environment it will be a hard fail to go this route. As we have ramped up wind a lot in the world we see a clear increase in coal fired plants. If we do a massive ramp in solar (to cover something like 25% of electricity production in a country) we will se more of either coal or gas powered plants. A sure way to destroy the environment. If you have a month with real cold weather in the winter with hardly any solar and hardly any wind it does not matter how much your peak capacity is. You will need to have backup plants that can cover all your needs even in the coldest winter. Since they will have low utilization you will need to pay for them even when they are not used for 90% of the year. It is just a matter if you pay with general tax or put the cost on the price you pay for being connected to the grid.
Really interesting video. Thank you. I'm curious about how home solar production numbers are accounted for. What happens to the increasing amount of electricity being generated by homeowners etcétera? How is this factored into the numbers? For example I have effectively gone off-grid since November 23 and I'm producing and using over 1Mw per month. Multiply this by a few million and it obviously will make a huge difference.
Yeah, self-consumption might mess up the data as it becomes more significant For the most part, the data is collected, as inverters have SIM cards, and report their info to the manufacturer/installer, but most countries don't track this in a centralized manner like they track utility scale production
I find this fascinating, I just wanted to point out that we can increase our energy consumption once we are running renewables. We can do more things. Make life better. Energy will no longer be a limiting factor.
I live in cold NW Wisconsin so instead of a heat pump I heat with free scrounged wood in a 75% efficient wood stove, not the best option as far as efficiency but the cost is very low.
I won't say that this isn't on the correct path. But there is a lot of things that makes me ponder the arguments made. There is a lot of "facts" here that seem dubious. Thermal efficiency in power plants is more or less never down at 30%, cars perhaps, power plants no... (every percentile of improved efficiency becomes quite a lot of income, and fairly basic efficiency improvements makes a large difference at relatively low cost, though eat space for breakfast so often aren't used in the transport industry due to space limitations.) CoP of air sourced heat pumps is in reality not all that often up above 3. Being down around 1.5 isn't atypical in winters if one gets snow outside (something most of Europe gets). Still better than simple joule heating. But not anywhere close to 3+. (Ground sourced heat pumps can be up there, but depending on geological conditions, this isn't always an option, not to mention the added cost of even installing it.) I would however say that reducing heating energy requirements by 30-50% seems realistic. It is however unrealistic to expect it to drop by 75% from heat pumps alone. Adding insulation and going to double/triple pane windows is however going to help reduce heating demands by a lot. (where I live 3 panes of glass is "old", 4 is the new "standard", and going to 5 layers of glass isn't out of the norm along with adding extra insulation to exterior walls.) The argument if one should multiply wind and solar's energy output or not, is somewhat debatable. In general I would agree and say no. It is true that energy consumption will be lower in the future. Energy efficiency improvements happens in more or less all industries. I wouldn't consider an over century old observation of the growth in the electrical market as particularly valid today. Saying "7% increase in power production per year" is an observation of history, and a plan for the potential future. It isn't a law of nature that shall be followed. Ie, I expect that it will never be touched again. Given that the curve started meaningfully deviating at around the same time that a large portion of the world had become electrified. Then it rather signifies that a sizable portion of those 7% were market expansion into new geographical areas. Once a region is electrified, it has electricity for its basic needs and won't generally need major improvements in capacity. Unless new applications crop up for this electrification. With new applications and demand, expansions in capacity is required, with improved efficiency, demand goes down, something it has done repeatedly throughout history. The rise in electric vehicles might nudge forth some new requirements for capacity, but transport isn't an endless requirement, so it will only add a certain amount. Some people argue that the increasing amount of data centers serving our information driven society will see a major requirement in new generating capacity, but even this struggles to keep pace with the decreasing demand in general. It is a sane observation that we likely might nearly halve our energy needs in the next couple of decades. Currently, wind, water, solar, is a decent combination. But I would honestly say that you missed bio-gas. Waste water treatment plants can fairly trivially be adapted to produce methane for use in both the transport and heating industries, as well as electrical production during winters. (A good example of a waste water treatment plant producing bio-gas is Henriksdalsverket in Stockholm) Bio-gas has the advantage of both being easy to store and fairly efficient to use, where its waste heat has the added bonus of district heating in winters. Europe has though historically not invested much at all in bio-gas production, mainly due to cheap natural gas from Russia, something recent geopolitics has changed.
I agree about biomass, hard to replace, and as long as we have old coal power plants around, maintaining them for a ‘dunkelflaute’ is not a bad idea. But I would like your perspective on the amount of how much of the wood/bamboo on earth we end up burning, and wether that’s unrealistic (and when) In Denmark we have all but totally transitioned away from coal towards biomass (wind has been able to deliver 100% in DK for maaany years now) and the amount of wood pellets we use are waaay more than the size of the country allows for. With growing population in the world at least till 2090, we need to find truly scalable solutions… and is biomass really one of those ?
As you mentioned, some of the rejected heat is reused to heat residential buildings, and that should be replaced by other heating methods. Probably not changing much the calculation. The bigger problem is that it will take some time before the changeover is complete. The conversion of production is in full swing as it is being done by companies, but the conversion of consumption is still in the early stages as it depends on the general population. It is much easier for a company to make a decision to get credit and invest in improvements and much more difficult for an uninformed and/or poor person to do the same.
Wait, when they give the size of electricity consumption or power plant capacity, is that in electric energy supplied or input GW including rejected heat? I think it's electric energy, but not sure. So a 1GW gas or nuclear plant is delivering 1GW max electric power, and may be using 3X that of fuel due to rejected heat. We already knew about electric car efficiency vs. IC engines, makes no sense to be measuring cars and heaters in GW, just look at fuel replaced or go straight to carbon reduction. I guess which one you use depends on how you're using the metric.
Didn't you omit from your calculations the massive amount of heat energy consumed by industrial processes (like cement, steel, etc.) and the massive amount of CO2 emissions associated with same?
I had to laugh hard at "there are only two profitable EV brands in the world: Tesla and BYD. And I‘m not even sure about BYD“
It’s true. Tesla is actually the only profitable BEV maker. Tesla makes $6500 pure profit for each EV because of vertical integration, autonomous innovative empowered employees, incredibly innovative & efficient manufacturing, huge staff incentives, fully in house brilliant material science & engineering, in house software & hardware design & engineering (that’s just vehicles. Tesla energy division is hugely profitable & growing 140% pa) Model Y takes 10hrs to build. VW takes 30. All other western OEMS take more time per EV.
BYD mostly makes a loss & barely breaks even. Ford GM VW Toyota Nissan etc etc are cutting back on EV to slow losses. They are staring into oblivion. Most of the 200 or so other BEV makers in China are toast without subsidies & the Govt wants most gone.
It depends on how you are doing the accounting. Because EVs are new a lot more R&D and factory build out/ retooling is being done to make them better that doesn’t need to be done for the mature Ice cars and when you add that cost in on the cars being produced now, then yes they aren’t profitable. These are more of caped costs and not Opex costs. As time goes on and less R&D and less factory build out is needed, the cars are all profitable.
@@matthewmanzi9504 There is only 1 method to count the profitability of a company. Does the company make a profit or not? All the other stuff is only good to impress investors.
@@R.E.A.L.I.T.Yyeah sure I‘ve seen enough Sandy Munro to believe you. I just thought it was a funny sentence the way he put it
@@matthewmanzi9504This is an important point. Not enough people get it.
It is not accurate to say that Rivian, for example, loses money on every vehicle they sell. It's not the vehicle production that incurs these excessive costs it is everything else. If they increase production, then revenues would exceed costs.
Wow, a whole new and positive view on the energy transition! Thanks!
13:45 Please research biomass further. United Kingdom generates biomass-powered energy "biomass" power plants across the country with a total capacity of 1583.7 MW. They burn wood pellets made from forests harvested in Canada. The carbon emissions are not counted in Canada because the wood has not been burned there. And the UK receives the wood pellets and does not count the carbon emissions either. Here in the US biomass is heavily subsidized. Essentially we are burning our old-growth forests to avoid burning fossil fuels.
there's a massive tree farm in british columbia that sources most of our wood. It's new growth and truly massive, and we still haven't used it to capacity. Trees we plant while chopping down more trees grow to fruition before we finish chopping the rest of the previous growth. So the forests we're chopping down have been replenishable new growth forests in british columbia.
Yeah the vast majority of old growth forests were chopped down in the 18th-20th centuries. Not that I disagree that biomass and the dishonest accounting of carbon emissions is problematic, but it's generally not old growth. I think electricity generation should not be done with biomass or biofuel, except maybe in remote north areas or other off-grid situations where it's hard to use anything but liquid-fueled generators. Efficient wood stoves for heat also make sense in certain situations, esp. as supplementary or backup heat along with a heat pump, but burning it on a mega-scale is just not very sustainable.
I know in Switzerland, they count a part of the burned trash, which is always used for electricity and warm water as biomass. It is factually correct. Food, wood, paper or cardboard that ends up there for what ever reason is biomass.
Its not counted because its not fossil carbon being added to the atmsophere, it's just cycling of carbon already present. The same reason we don't count all the normal biological carbon cycling or people breathing. Stop being obsessed with counting things without first considering if it's appropriate or not.
@@kennethferland5579 That would mean, produce wood doesn't need any fossil fuel, or shipping it which is obviously not true. You can argue those emissions get counted somewhere else but then the picture is at least distorted.
I moved from an oil boiler, gas hob and petrol car to a heat pump, induction hob and EV. Converting all my energy usage to MWh per year, I used around 50-60 MWh annually before I electrified my home and transport. Now I use 16-18 MWh annually. A third of which I generate myself.
I love heat pumps
All of the points in the video are valid, but I do believe consumption will still go up - due to energy abundance, we will start to do things that are currently expensive and not feasible - desalination, lots of air-con for far more people and places, etc. But you have strong point, I admit.
Also manufacturing e.g Graphene is expensive because of the high energy required to produce it. Get the cost of energy down and watch as companies rush to produce large scale quantities of it.
If energy usage starts to drop significantly that means price of energy will drop. If energy becomes cheap we will start to use considerably moore. In colder climates that means raising indoor temperature and in warmer climates that means moor AC.
We would also see traveling get much cheaper, so we would see more traveling.
All taken together there is no way we will reduce energy consumption to half.
@@Rohan4711 The point is that we don't need to replace what we're using today. We only need to replace the fraction of it that is not wasted. Of course electricity usage will increase if it's cheap, but as long as it's clean, what difference does it make?
I don't think we'll be looking at energy abundance anytime soon, as adopting these technologies will take quite a while. We've become used to binging on cheap stored solar energy (fossil fuels), but we'll probably have to adapt to fluctuating energy availability, as we rely on more renewables. Highly energy intensive activities might have to wait until a windy or sunny day.
but Cooling is also more effecicnt if done with Heat pump instead of the old school AC so even with a uptake the efficency will eat a lot of that
Great Video. Just discovered your channel and subscribed. Keep up the good work
Amazing video, great analysis with data. Thank you.
There are a number of other ways we can very significantly reduce the amount of energy needed going forward. 1. Paint our roofs and homes with light colored, highly reflective paints. 2. Insulate and seal/caulk our homes. 3. Just installing solar panels will add an air barrier and significantly cool roofs. 4. Install insulated curtains which offers a huge benefit at a low effort and cost. 5. Install smart electrical breakers. Our well pump only runs during daylight hours; we limit our hot water heater and clothes and dishwasher use to mostly daylight hours. In spring, early summer and fall, we open windows at night to cool the house. nights are cool enough that we mostly limit our heat pump home cooling system to sunlight hours. We charge our EV mostly during daylight hours.
Use adaptive: thermochromic paint.
I agree. I didn't know about the "substitution method" - thank you for bringing that up.
I think he misses the fact that the "substitution method" actually corrects for the higher efficiency of wind and solar. See my comments for 4:13.
Inductive cooktops are awesome. I just tried a gas stove and it doesn’t even compare with my inductive cooktop. And the inductive cooktop works off my solar panels.
Agree.
10:00 Here in the Seattle area, we have electric busses. But for transportation of heavier goods by rail is concerned, electrification of railroads should be a priority. For special applications and long-haul trucking, perhaps hybrids are probably a more practical answer for now. Take a look at the work being done by Canadian company Edison.
Most of the world has settled on electrified rail as a sensible and economical solution. North America is curiously absent from that group.
In Europe, we use trolleybuses instead, since batteries are expensive and overexertion makes them a fire hazard.
Also trolleybuses don't need to charge and are much cheaper.
North America remains committed to not electrifying railroads. sth sth oil lobby.
An interesting analysis! It makes sense to me, yet I do not have the knowledge to agree nor refute. The video was easy to follow and understand. Well done.
I'm going to spread this video around. This is the best explainer on energy usage I've seen and I've been telling people this for decades
That is one reason, another reason is our technology keeps getting more and more efficient. Even when energy is cheap, it still costs money, so there are always incentives to reduce power consumption. Going from incandescent light to LED light is a big reason why we consume less energy. This transition took light from being a major use of energy to almost insignificant.
The primary energy fallacy. Excellent analysis as usual.
Thank you, what a lovely, concise, balanced video. I will be sharing it with my circle.
13:45 Why exactly would nuclear not be used in a net-zero future? With the exception of concrete required to build the plant (and if we're counting that - well, by this logic, hydro should be out as well, as dams also take a lot of it), nuclear produces absolutely no CO2 emissions whatsoever. Sure, it might not be renewable per say, but it's still net-zero by its very nature. Even more than biomass because (as some other commenters pointed out) a lot of biomass-powered plants burn Canadian wood, which is mostly old-growth forests. Which means they release carbon into the air, that wasn't there before. That's pretty much coal without the extra step of "wait millions of years for the trees to turn into rock".
Because nuclear is not profitable for the "green" "eco" fearmongers
The levelized cost of energy for nuclear is high and not shrinking. It also takes 10-20 years to go from idea to kilowatt. They also are a go-big-or-go-home solution that *starts* in The billions or tens of billions.
Most nuclear power plants haven't paid themselves off (if you include their unsubsidized cost to operate) and never will.
Compared to a solar or wind + batteries, that pays off before you even start *building* a nuclear power plant.
No, because nuclear has no future, as its fuel source is non renewable😉
@@DanSolowastaken I agree there is no reason to build new nuclear but continuing to use exist plants for another 20~30 years ( or the end of there lifespanes) is efficient.
Existing nuclear should definitely be kept as long as safety allows. But NEW nuclear is outrageously expensive and extremely long to bring on-line. Those resources would be much better used developing renewable generation, storage and the other measures that compensates for their intermittency (larger grids, long-distance transmission lines, shifts of peak consumption, etc)
I am telling this story for a realy long time, but it is sometimes difficult to convince people of this logic. You explained it well. Now I can use this video in the future.
Efficiency in all consumption allows less materials used which is a win/win for Nature and Humans!!
Thx for reading all our comments !
So glad you covered this topic... It's tricky and nuanced and also really important to understand how BEVs can actually lower humanities energy requirements due to the negation of the huge heat engine losses... Kudos.
The best way to put this is, that a power plant is its own largest customer. for simplest metric, They consume 3, 1 is waste, 1 powers themself, and 1 is sold to consumers.
Fully with you. I've similar conclusions, but your presentaton was excelent. I will link to it in social media.
with my average understanding on this topic from school, what you present makes a lot of sense. good vid!
In case you do actually read this - there's a huge factor missing from the video, namely a whole continent with twice the Europe/NA population that is yet to consume a fraction of the energy westeners do. The other flaws are already pointed out by other commenters but I wanted to ask why did you completely remove nuclear from the energy mix?
That whole continent is a thing, but even so, the way things are shaking out means that the increase might be less than you think as they swap out fossil fuels for renewable electricity, and there will come a time when it happens.
@unconventionalideas5683 Even if they start with land transport, energy generation and climate control decarbonised that's not the meat of the pie here. It's product consumption - as people increase their standars of living they eat more meat, build bigger homes (making concrete is a big emitter too), buy electronics, cars, they travel. That would be magnitudes bigger then it is now, and a lot of industries involved can barely be decorbonized, for example, mining, shipping. That's why it goes reuse, reduce, recycle, in order of importance.
hi @SizeMichael your input at 4:30 around heat+power is really interesting. There might be a topic for a future video on this subject alone. In Denmark we have a large rollout of central heating coming from such plants already, but it's actually holding back a lot of the utilization of green energy, something Denmark has in surplus often. The demand for heating and power tends to be not aligned, so on very windy days we use a lot of heating but also get a lot of cheap energy from the north sea. The operators of the power+heat plants cant reduce the load on their plant because demand for heating is high and tend to end up (according to the news outlets) having to pay neighbours to take their excess power. Afaik no heating+power plants have successfully moved to electricity alone, which i suppose would remove some of the initial purpose.
15:00 Your assumption of storage losses may be very low. Energy to charge and discharge batteries is not 95% efficient. Also batteries tend to "leak" energy, they're not like gas tanks that don't leak.
90% efficiency for a lithium ion battery is reasonable.
In addition not all energy will be stored in batteries. Pumped hydro is about 70% efficient. Flow batteries are also about 70% efficient.
It is more complex than presented in the video.
@@JeanPierreWhite Modern pumped-hydro projects are significantly above 70% round-trip efficiency... more like 80%, with some projects reaching 87% according to literature.
@@st-ex8506 Good to know.
Don't forget that local solar helps cut down line losses, further reducing heat.
Cutting line losses is a good thing. The heat produced by line losses is not relevant to climate. It's many orders of magnitude too small. The sun provides a kilowatt per square meter at the earth's surface, and the surface of the Earth has a LOT of square meters. One square km is a million square meters, so a terawatt of heat energy. That's a thousand times the output of a large power plant.
Small channel, extra quality
Well this just sold me on solar/battery/heat pump for my house build. Dreaming of an electric car. Imagine the efficiency
Pretty decent treatment of the topic. The substitution method includes some efficiency swapping as part of those graphs. Real simply, most places, converting as much light traffic/transport as possible to electric as can be done and cleaning the grid generation sources toward solar/wind will return huge benefits in reducing primary energy use. It's been encouraging seeing the attention applied to heat pumps the last 10 years and especially in their efficiency in lowest external temperatures for things like space heating. Now, to assure electricity prices don't rise...
Thanks for this explanation. To add to the conversation here, we need less expensive, home and small businesses sized, electricity storage batteries. We have a chance right now to free individual homes and businesses from the price gouging, gas and electric utility monopolies and cartels. In the Mountain West of the US, our winters can be snowy, but not that cold. But our summers are scorching hot (35-40+ C for a third or more of the year). We remodeled, insulated, fireproofed to the extent possible, and electrified (heat pump, LED, induction) a large, old home and turned it into an inn. To really go off grid and free ourselves of our local, predatory, electricity cartel, we’d need 50 kWh of storage. This high storage is necessitated by our need for cooling in summer. Installed battery storage is bout $1,000/kwh ($60,000 or more just for storage). This needs to come down by an order of magnitude to actually disrupt our corrupt and price gouging electricity cartel.
What suppliers have you looked at and how recently?
Tesla is selling their Megapacks for around $350 / kWh including installation, but those are 3.9MWh, so too big. Prices came down in the second half of 2023 quite a bit. Other suppliers likely also down, likely because Li-ion battery prices came down significantly as many automakers are scaling back their manufacturing volumes.
Storing electricity in batteries is super expensive. As you mentioned you mainly want to use the energy to cool down buildings you are much better off by other means. E.g. power a heat-pump to cool down a medium, usually liquid when you have excess power and use the cool liquid to reduce temperature when needed.
BC Hydro in the PNW interestingly offers to bank our excess rooftop summer solar for our use in winter. Thus, rooftop solar could lessen summer power plant production, delaying its max output until winter. This is aside from a utility implementing nightly battery cycling to smooth curves.
Today modern LiFePO4 15 kWh battery may cost you even less $2k, especially if buy a DIY kit. That battery cell's price dropped almost in half for a past year
You can buy a wrecked EV for $2000-3000 and take the battery for 60-100kwh of storage.
What I will hold against that is that plenty of sectors such as metallurgy (especially aluminium) are primarily constrained by energy costs. When (or if) renewables consistently decrease energy costs enough to base investments on it, a single sector alone could eat up any excess supply. And heavy industries are far from the only candidates, there's aviation, controlled environment agriculture, machine learning, etc. And even if none of those step up, we can always use cheap energy for CCS.
Also a small criticism, but you make overly favourable assumptions even though more realistic ones would still support your point. E.g. at 12:00 the CoP of a modern boiler is around 1.08 (since it's based on the LHV) while neglecting to mention that the CoP of a heat pump highly depends on the application and heat source. A house with floor heating with a geothermal loop can easily exceed 3.5 for space heating, but a retrofitted air heat pump in a colder climate would be lucky to reach 2. And hot water always needs to be heated to 55-60°C for safety reasons, which also lowers the CoP.
Also the round trip efficiency for pumped hydro, which is currently the main short term energy storage, is only around 70-80%. Your 5% loss assumption is absolutely utopic. And that doesn't even include the way less efficient seasonal storage that doesn't even really exist yet.
Assuming only a %5 efficiency loss from using energy storage is completely absurd. The existing *serious* grid storage solutions aren't even close to that. That's basically a figure for if you were using lithium batteries under perfectly ideal circumstances. Plus the idea of trying to build your entire grid off of lithium ion batteries is extremely silly because of their high cost and need to be replaced in a few years.
Sodium ion batteries. Much cheaper.
I agree. The best example we have right now is pumped hydro, and that has a 20-25% loss.
his point still stands, but it probably omits the fact that the curve is still there, it's just being hidden by the efficiency gains during the transition.
@@SwissExperiments Plus even the areas lucky enough to have a big pumped hydro reservoir still don't have nearly enough energy storage to help deal with energy production variation of more than a day or two. RN there's nobody with any remotely viable energy storage solution that would help if you live somewhere that experiences weeks at a time of overcast weather with little wind.
i was surprised, too, but figured we don't have to store all the energy we produce, only the excess when we have storage for it.
Keep in mind most energy generated will not be stored at all, it would be used directly.
So take this more like "half of the generation is stored at 90% efficiency"
Its like how the avg size of CPUs plummeted while average compute increased.
Interesting topic and some good points in the coments. One question when you removed the oil consumption from transport I did not see you add a corresponding electric demand for the replacement. You also have to add in waste for storage on the vehicle as well as transmission losses. This later point is worth considering as it is unlikely that 24hr dispatchable power can be generated locally or even nationally in the EU.
Also, how do you replace primariary avaiation oil consuption. Currently, no tech for this is mature enough for implementation. However, this was not your point, and I appreciated your primary point.
Today is the second time I've watched this video, and I still couldn't see anything about the electric demand replacement that removal of oil transport would necessarily induce. I think this is quite a serious flaw in the thesis being made in this video, and the reason why I downvoted it. The 2050 "clean energy total predictions" are being underestimated here by what, 20 to 30%? I haven't looked into the transfer efficiency of oil to fuel at the station vs WSH electricity to the outlet, but even if I assume they're comparable, those electric vehicles won't charge themselves.
I also wish aviation was looked at a bit more closely, as the growth trajectory of air travel worldwide continues to look strong. Unfortunately, military uses of oil are also a thing and the prevailing tech seems far-removed from net zero, but idk if that's a big (or knowable) factor.
And it would be great if the limitations of domestic and kerbside electrical supplies be considered a little more, even in merely a European context. Car charging infrastructure needs an order of magnitude greater current capacity than typical streelight installations, and could max out or exceed domestic supplies (I'm thinking Italy) even for night charging modes.
great video like always
Two factors which will slightly impact the analysis.
The huge amount of energy used to extract, refine/compress & transport vast quantities of fossil fuels will no longer be required, however, Artificial Intelligence data centres will become ubiquitous. Each centre consuming the same power as a small city. From a total energy perspective perhaps they’ll cancel each other out?
If electricity cost goes down and the grid can handle it we will see a lot more AI data processing.
They will also use more energy per area with newer generation of AI computers, so we might not need that many more data centers, but each one can use a lot more power than they do today.
Today AI might use 1% of electricity. According to Nvidias CEO the machines they will release in 5 years will have about 1 million times the computing power. Even if that would be 100 times more energy efficient that still comes to 10 000% of all of today's electricity.
That will not happen, just because we will not have the electricity or the grid to handle that load and that energy cost would likely be too expensive. Knowing what projects are out there in all sorts of fields just makes me wonder how this video came to the conclusion that we will reduce energy use for the world in a short while to half.
AI datacenters are overhyped as a driver of energy consumption
Increasing EU electricity demand by 10% would require 800 million H100s, which would cost $40T. We're about 4 orders of magnitude below that
@@SizeMichaelIf Nvidias CEO is correct in what they will deliver in the next 5 years then it might just take 800 to 8000 computers. That sounds like very few AI computers to me. Also increasing EU electricity by 10% in 5 years takes quite a lot of effort and money.
AI will be far from the only thing wanting more electricity. Things like electric vehicles, green steel production, increased production of goods inside EU due to new toll fees are a few examples.
We could use 30% more electricity in 5 years if we can get it at a decent price, like euro 0.1 per kWh.
Heating from solar is problematic, because you need heating in the winter and you get maybe 20 % of solar in these month. So you would need to overbuild solar plants by a factor of 5 and solar panels are not free. Neither cost wise nor resource wise. And I dont think we will ever have batteries big enough so store enough power in the summer to last us all winter.
Seasonal fluctuations cannot be covered by batteries. This is one of the reasons why we need something like green hydrogen. That is not really competitive yet, although briefly, when the gas prices skyrocketed, it suddenly was for a while. So we are not so far away from that breakthrough. Cheaper catalysts would probably do the trick.
One Possibility is also Biogas. Here in Germany most Cities and towns are in some way conneted via Gaspipes and these are in turn connected to old cool mines, where the pressured Gas ist stored underground in the summer and released back in Winter when demand is much higher. If Natural Gas demand now slows down those pipes and mines could could may be filled with parts of treatet biogas from Biogasplants all over the country and then used in electrifies which are already plenty in our country.
But that would mean order of magnitudes lower lng and cng demand as biocapacity from waste or plants is limited.
Are they lower repair cost? Source?
As shown on screen when I say it, source is Consumer Reports
Very sobering discussion on energy!
Yes, very sobering. We currently don't produce enough electricity to convert all fossil fuel cars to electric.
@@milofonbil True at the moment, but we can easily keep up with the gradual changeover of the auto fleet from ICE to EV. That changeover is not happening overnight.
You are a Smart man and educated in physics and engineering. Thanks.
The outcome will be a world where the total energy consumption will drop dramatically in the next 20-30 years.
If energy prices goes really high we will see drops in energy consumption and all sorts of other problems.
If prices stay consistent or drop we will see energy use increase.
At least that is the conclusion by energy researchers, economics and all energy producing companies I have read about.
@@Rohan4711 Well, I do not agree with those conclusions. energy is too much regulated by now by the governments for "green reasons" and geopolitical as well, so that the price is not longer a function of demand VS supply. it behaves differently. it is not a free market. where i live the electrical cost is dictated my government and most electricity is produced by government so they decide the cost based on the true cost it cost them to produce and not by free supply and demand equations. electricity and energy in general will drop all over the world as the video is explaining correctly and governments will make sure the use of energy is efficient so the demand will be kept artificially low.
@@AY-dw4om Do you agree that the demand for energy depends on the price for the end user?
The price can be both based on real production costs or in most cases some form of taxes added on top, so there is some politics involved in the price.
In many countries the price before taxes is set on the spot market. That often means the most expensive energy production source currently in use has a major impact on total price levels.
@@Rohan4711 No I do not agree. demand for energy is mostly based on needs. you do not buy more fuel for your car because its price has dropped. you buy the amount of fuel based on how much you drive your car. same with electricity use use at your home or factory - as much as you need regardless its price. there are commodities that their usage is not based by its price but the other way around. if the demand for energy drops because the use has dropped as explained to great length in this video, then the opposite happens: energy prices goes down due to low demand.
@@AY-dw4om Well, he claimed that energy use has dropped based on data up to 2020 from ourworldindata. Using that same site you now have data until 2022, and the energy use is ever increasing except for a small blipp in the curve for 2020. That blipp is due to COVID-19, so clearly an abnormality.
The video claimed that falling energy usage is the trend, but data does not support that.
I already have solar, ev and heatpumps (3x: air-water (home), air-water (hot water), air-air conditioner) and it feels like magic
Thanks for your video, which seems to me to be well researched and clearly expressed.
Nice! On the other hand, we are re-industrializing. So we'll need more power for that.
Well done Michael. I absolutely love this. Subscribed.
Rejected energy! So obvious, yet I'd never once considered it. Great explanation, TY. this is the first time watching your content, subbed!
Min 9:33 please review? Are your data or calculations correct. One BOE (159 liter) crude has 5800000 BTU or 1700 kWh energy. The slide you show 110-175 kWh/mile looks a big elephant?
Thanks. I will need to listen at least 3 times to fully understand.
So, on net congestion, there’s a lot of talk about that here in the Netherlands. But if you need so much less energy, and you have techniques like V to G, and V to X, would that already take care of that problem or do we still need the grid to be much ‘heavier’ ?
We need the grid to be heavier, because we will mostly use electricity for energy.
10:50 your certainly there annoyed me the efficiency will be close to 100% but like that resistance heater shown in the video like many loose a little to visible light!
I remember a couple years ago the hot talking point from the renewable FUDsters and fossil fuel apologists was the idea that there would never be enough solar and wind generation to replace all those GWh of energy.
They would throw around these huge numbers and never mention that, in the US, the majority of it is just waste heat.
Now, we see places like South Australia, California and England getting the majority of their electricity from solar and wind with battery storage, and sometimes 100%.
And these places are still in the early stages of the transition. Plenty more can be done.
I am not going to pretend that I know how much energy South Australia gets from solar and wind. But the fact that you put England in that list makes me think that you have no business speaking about this issue either.
Not to mention that even Californian legislators recognize that they dump much of the clean energy they produce because there is no need for it when is produced and then import dirty energy when hey need it. Sure if you compare energy produced with consumption you get the impression that a majority comes from renewables, but it is not so in practice.
“. . . a naïve observer might conclude that the rising share of new renewables (solar and wind) will usher in an era of falling electricity prices. But in reality, the opposite has been true.” Vaclav Smil, Numbers Don’t Lie, p.172
@@pintiliecatalin I'm just going off something I heard Englishman Robert Llewellyn say the other day. Perhaps I misheard him. But I do see that Carbon Brief have published, about three weeks ago, a very interesting report (based on data from the National Grid) showing that the average contribution of fossil fuels to the National Grid in Great Britain has dropped from 74% in 2009 to 26% in the first part of 2024 - and with the most recent four months showing a steep downward trend.
In California, it appears that the average contribution of wind, solar and hydroelectric has been above 60% for a couple of months now.
I don't know what planet you live on, but here on planet Earth, the global electric supply is rapidly shifting away from fossil fuels.
@@dzcav3 Can you imagine what it's going to cost when the risks to infrastructure from the warming climate and the rising sea levels make it impossible for insurance companies to operate in most places?
@@dzcav3 Vaclav Smil's Numbers Don't Lie is four years old, and the cost of PV continues to fall. He may have been looking at overall electricity prices that have a lot of other factors affecting them. Utilities have been raising their prices for transmission and distribution, for example. The Number that Doesn't Lie we might want to look at is Power Purchase Agreements for PV going off at 2.2 cents per kWh.
Overall agree with you, but we must keep in mind that one reason of why we are "behind the curve" in energy consumption is industry délocalisation. The energy that we would have otherwise used is now used by other countries (like China) and then we import the final product
This is an awesome example of how making assumptions on how someone perceives a word or concept completely changes the result. This video sees energy use as metering what we pull from the ground. Energy use is GOING UP- A LOT but it is doing so in terms of electric meters spinning at the point of use, not measured in the view of this video- because the energy was not pulled from the ground but instead it is energy which was heading somewhere else (flowing stream, blowing wind, photon of light) but human technology Shanghi'ed it to perform some work for them first. Fewer new net therms.
You have the right analytical approach same as we do in our analysis in my company. Thank you for your nice illustration.😁
Here’s a simple formula to calculate the energy in gasoline. (volume * density * hydrogen energy * efficiency) ÷ volume = gasoline energy. Here’s a simple example, gasoline density is 2.85769 kg per gallon, so (2.6918 * 2.85769 *33.33333 * 13%) ÷ 2.6918 = 12.38333 kwh per gallon of gasoline. Here’s another example, 8.1 gallons of gasoline has a mass of 23.147 kg * 13% equals 3 kg of hydrogen, so if you drive 371.5 miles and burn 8.1 gallons of gasoline that’s 45.86 miles per gallon of gasoline, or 16.05 miles per kg of gasoline, or 123.46 miles per kilogram of hydrogen. MPGe is actually miles per kilogram of hydrogen, NOT miles peg gallon of gasoline.
10:59 I think you are confusing primary energy with net electricity produced and electricity at the meter. Once electricity is produced, there are transmission losses. I do agree that a resistive heater is 100% efficient in converting electricity at the electrical outlet into heat. The emissions are "handled" at the power plant. So-called "renewable" power plants burning wood pulp from clear-cut forests producing electricity are 35% efficient in producing electricity and then suffer transmission line losses to the meter at your home. Again, the emissions are "handled" at the power plant. Your final point is that heat pumps are more efficient than resistive heaters. Why not use passive solar?
Passive solar doesn't work for most of the places that need heating. When it's -5 C out there and you need to heat your house so you don't freeze and the sun is below the horizon for like 16 hours a day, passive solar is completely useless.
Passive solar for heating is a fun idea for taking a shower in a Spanish summer or heating your pool in California, but it just simply can't heat a house. Particularly not one with a small or non-existent roof surface, like apartment. Passive solar is a fun idea for those applications, but it is really a margin of error when we look at all heating.
Gas power stations DONT dispalce giga-watts of heat up the stack
A large gas power station like the recently built Kedby 2 in England is a 850MWe unit and it dumps 500MW into the environment
CCGTs are very efficient
Excellent video! Did you add in the large increase in power that will be used in the Future for AI LLM's data centers?
Most of those data centers are already built. And any new ones (or rebuilt) are substantially more energy efficient. LLM and other AI is already existing and broadly used, there is not a lot of expansion needed foe that.
Also if you check out Intel and AMD latest processors, they are putting AI co-processors right in the endpoint device to avoid a lot of network chatter and datacenter requirements. The AI processor actually makes the CPU and GPU more efficient by properly distributing workload for the processor best suited for the job. So there is not really any more energy requirements for the new AI processing.
The worry about data centers is all more petroleum industry FUD rhetoric. Anything running in a data center is a lot more efficient than it would be without the datacenter, so they are reducing global electricity demand by existing.
The real worrisome use of electricity is crypto mining, uses way more electricity than AI ever will. Still up in the air if that will be a net benefit to society or not.
Cost declines increase demand only for elastic commodities. Electricity for residential use isn’t particularly elastic in demand for most homes.
One of the best videos ive watch. Cudos man
The Technological Progress is also the reason . Computer Chips Have Become More Powerful While Consuming Less Energy and Light Bulbs Have Become More Efficient too
With storage you will even dekrease consumption, because you will eliminate the need of balancing the electric grids that contributes to more losses than LION energy storage, and also WWS will lower the need of high voltage long distance transfers (because of more local generation nature), that also contribute to a lot of losses.
Assuming you have storage in a few areas you will still have issues with balancing the grid, just not as bad.
Losses when charging and dischargeing a battery at high rates is higher than today's balancing losses.
Water pump storage at good locations has lower losses and lower cost than battery storage.
Main advantage of battery storage is quick and easy installation and you can increase the storage size over time.
4:13 Your source: Our world in data, energy-substitution-method. To ‘correct’ for these different methods of accounting, researchers can apply the ‘substitution method’. This tries to adjust non-fossil energy sources to the inputs that would be needed if it was generated from fossil fuels. *Renewables are adjusted upwards* Primary energy measured by the ‘substitution method’ overstates the amount of energy that’s produced. The diagram shows how renewable energy is divided by 0.4 or multiplying by 2.5. The reason for this is they're compensating for the 65% inefficiency that's being assumed for fossil fuels in the big yellow box on the 2009 Lawrence Livermore US Estimated Energy use diagram. 0.35 / 0.4 = .87 (Seriously, there's really no conspiracy here)
I as a petrolhead should say: nobody's taking old cars away and newer cars have been iffy for a while now. If we learn how to preserve the old, then decarbonisation means we get to use the old cars for much longer, so electrification never was bad for us.
Finally, a video of solid human logic, numbers and development. I have just watched 30 bad videos on engineering and history and they were just made for clip bait and poorly put together. You, on the other hand, have a solid product thanks.
1:45 I agree that the Adams Curve will not increase. People don't consume more energy simply because it's cheaper. This is true for home owners, renters and commercial properties. This is clearly one of those situations where the Microeconomics (supply and demand curves) do not really apply. It's like keeping the cost of of vegetables and grains does not increase their consumption. (albeit, creating addictive food probably does)
A secret! Supply and demand curves almost never apply. Still, they keep a lot of economists employed teaching them to naive undergraduates.
You are forgetting to account for industries that are currently held back by price of energy. Get the price down and watch as new industries start popping up and raising demand for energy. Like in your example cheaper vegies does not increase consumer demand but it does increase demand from the snack and food indistries.
In fact we have clear evidence in Europe for the last years that price of energy has a major impact on consumption. Due to the war in Ukraine the energy prices increased sharply. Many industries shut down completely and almost all buildings lowered indoor temperature considerably during the entire winter.
As prices backed down to normal, the temperatures was restored and companies that didn't go bankrupt restarted energy intensive processes.
@@Rohan4711 Exactly,
> People don't consume more energy simply because it's cheaper
This could not be more wrong, I haven't watched the video tbh but I actually expect this prophecy to be wrong, just based on the jevons paradox, let alone since we are getting rid of massive amounts of gas and replacing them all with electricity based appliances
Getting an EV will increase your electricity usage by a 1/3rd at least, if you have 2 EV's you'll increase your electricity usage by over 50% easily
@@davidford694 Supply and demand still apply, you are just not considering elastic and non elastic goods. And they do teach that to undergrads, at least they did to me and my peers.
Can you make a video about the impact of AI compute on the electricity consumption out to 2050?
This is a major wild card in my opinion… much more so than Bitcoin or other proof of work blockchains AND less than 5 years of data arguably🤯
I think AI is overhyped as a driver of energy demand. Increasing EU electricity demand by 10% would require 800 million H100s, which would cost $40T. We're about 4 orders of magnitude below that
3:25 don't they use waste heat from power plants to heat up homes?
There another school of thought that as energy cost drop, be it from cheap solar, renewable, BEVs, society had always expanded the energy consumption per capita. AI training compute centers will consume giga-whrs, $coin mining, active carbon capture. Even robotaxis. If $/mile goes from $3 to $.5, ppl will hail rides much more, drive across town to meet for coffee, frivolous convenience shopping online. Amazon is an example. If shipping is free, ppl will buy a $3 doodad & have it deliver in hours. Most ppl mentally estimate the cost of driving to decide if a trip is worthwhile. If robotaxi cost next to nothing & one can do all the things one does at home while being driven, it encourage more mobility.
Mobility isn't just consumed it's also an input cost. For example one of the greatest feats of movement in the modern world is large-scale shipping. It beats pipelines on cost. What happens when LTL transport goes to pennies? It should even cut into FTL for trucks.Everyone gets wealthier.
Won't gain traction. Too much thought and analysis. Also, doesn't scare the rubes.
Doesn't solar also have wasted/rejected heat? That is why we need photovoltaic thermal hybrid panels which also use the heat.
What about datacenters?
It is difficult to fairly compare the efficiency of use for different kinds of primary energy. I would say that the energy coming from the sun is primary energy. PV solar panels installed today are around 20% efficient at using energy coming from the sun to make electricity. The other 80% is reflected back to the sky or absorbed as heat, which I would call rejected energy either way. Is PV solar really more efficient than coal burning? It's hard to say. Do wind turbines have any rejected energy? Maybe, but I don't want to try to define it.
Fission is a CO2-free form of primary energy. If decarbonization motivates the use of wind and solar, why remove nuclear power from your chart?
On the other hand, you have helped motivate me to replace my biomass (firewood) furnace with a heat pump.
Very nice, only thing that I don't like is sort of ignoring the battery problem. Solar/Wind are variable sources of energy, you can't make them a backbone of your country. Solving this issue with chemical batteries (specifically ones with heavy metals that can't be sustainably mined en-masse, such as lithium-ion) is a horrible idea, and although I guess that isn't what you implied, a lot of people think that just throwing the tesla style battery farms at things would solve everything. Energy storage is its own problem. Frankly there are some solutions to this:
1. The one you should use whenever possible and viable - water reservoirs
2. Alternative backbone (hydro or nuclear if no river)
3. Low-cost, weight-ignoring battery systems - iron oxide batteries
Feel free to correct me or ad-in something.
Thing we can agree on is that neither of these options contain coal, oil or gas and they are NEVER a better option.
1 sodium ion batteries, much cheaper.
2 large fleet of bidirectionally grid-tied EVs = massive distributed storage.
3 green ammonia, and many other storage options, currently under development
This is an excellent analysis. Thank you.
Lots of interesting discussion. But you didn't mention the waste heat lost in the batteries for solar. That's got to count for something, no?
2:06 Sorry to be a nit-picker here. I think you are over-complicating things here with Power, Energy, Heat and Temperature. The SAE measurement for energy used in your 2009 (15 years old) Lawrence Livermore reference is in Quads or quadrillion of BTUs. The modern metric unit (the rest of the world uses) is Joules. A Quad is 1.0551E+18 joules. Heat and Watts are units of work or energy. Power is work per unit of time. Eg Kilowatts/hr. The "Rejected Energy" is wasted energy due to conversion inefficiencies. Eg. Steam-powered turbines used to convert fossil fuel to mechanical energy are only 35% efficient at most. Solar panels are only 40% efficient. In transportation a car engine may only be 35% efficient in converting fossil fuel energy into mechanical energy. The transmission and the tires are inefficient as well. Temperature is a measure of thermal state. A difference in temperature can be used to produce energy.
Your comment going through the science is irrelevant. The point is that different sources are typically used at very different efficiencies so just quoting how much energy each source has is useless when comparing sources.
You have a strong point with the efficiency. The video compares energy gained from burning coal to electric energy. That is two very different types of energy. Electrical energy is nice as it is versatile and easy to move. However it is very expensive per unit of energy.
The video completely skipped this and just count energy. Simple, but highly misleading.
This is the reason that it is uncommon to use electric radiators. They are 100% efficient, but compared to using other forms of heat energy or using a heat-pump the 100% efficiency is still bad.
Claiming that we can reduce heating a lot with heat pumps assumes that we hardly use heat pumps today. In most parts of the world that assumption is not true.
@@Rohan4711 google: "According to the International Energy Agency, in 2022 electric heat pumps met only 10% of heating needs in buildings globally.Jun 12, 2023"
9:24 I think there is a mixup with orders of magnitude here, if the intention was to discuss the ”family car” size.
I like this, I didnt know so much heat was wasted, yet I think this change is gonna take longer than 2050
This confirms my assumptions about that chart. 😅
Yet i wonder why i never heard anyone else talk about that. It's a great argument on why the transition is more doable than it seems.
I think i have to share this a bunch.
Wouldn't electrifying rail and busses be a more efficient way to use electricity to move people in cities?
That is true already without electricity
All this ignores one problem with renewable energy sources - they don't produce energy consistently. Example that just happened - Germany os turning on all their remaining coal power plants because renewable energy production has plummeted.
The translation to mostly renewables can't happen in a few years. Especially with our sluggish progress.
Bavaria refuses to build wind farms but also refuses to build a new route to move energy from north to south Germany, while also not providing any other option,...
Greetings from Bavaria btw.
The figures for EV efficiency are mistakenly in kWh / mile. It should be in Wh / mile or the numbers should be 0.25 - 0.30 kWh/mile for battery to wheel and 0.30 - 0.35 kWh / mile for outlet to wheel.
Thete is 1 error in the slides.
Outlet to wheel is 30-35 kwh/100 miles not 30-35 kwh/miles
But overall interesting perspective!
Excellent analysis.
9:34 You missed by order of 100 or more. It is more like 0.3kWh/mile for EV and 1-2kWh/mile for fuel.
Clear and concise explanation of why, other things being equal, energy consumption will halve by 2050.
In the UK demand for electricity is held back setting the price of renewables by the gas price. This can't go on and once this link to gas is broken then demand will surge (I'd turn my heating up, for one!).
Your missing that batteries are less than 20% energy efficient due to loss when power goes in (c.30%, is stored depends on time, and c.30% on discharge).
I'm a little confused about why you think that nuclear power is going to go away, especially by 2050. China, India, and France have made huge investments in nuclear energy in the last ten years with no end in sight. Small modular reactors are being developed by several countries and major corporations. Microsoft and Google have already expressed interest in using SMR technology to power their mega data centers completely independent of the grid. SMR technology is probably the best technology for powering large ships, producing synthetic fuel for aviation and spaceflight, and also for extra high-energy industrial processes like steel and aluminum production. Do not get me wrong. I absolutely believe that wind, water, and solar energy are extremely important, and we should build a hell of a lot more capacity, but nuclear power is a powerful tool for generating massive amounts of energy on demand without burning fossil fuel. It seems incredibly unlikely that nuclear power will suddenly be switched off at any point this century.
I agree with you. Any nuclear built today will likely last about 40 years, so well beyond 2050. As production of new plants are increasing rapidly it will be even longer.
Video also thinks energy storage is easy and cheap. It is not.
Another issue is that renewables, especially wind has major financial problems already. As soon as the amount of wind increased a lot in the grid the price falls to low or even negative on the spot market when there is good wind.
Producers just get a lot less income than predicted even when the amount of energy is to plan.
To increase even more requires adding super expensive energy storage.
Next issue is the EROEI that is way to low for renewables and lack of storage means we need backup plants.
In reality the major buildout of windfarms has increased the amount of coal used for electricity generation.
We need a reliable grid that will work even in the coldest winter when we typically get almost no wind or solar. That means we still need full capacity covered by reliable energy sources regardless of the number of wind turbines installed.
It is very inefficient to build lots of plants and have them shut down 90% of the year, but it is still the best way to get reliable power during winter. Should wind and solar pay for the time when plants are shut down as wind and solar provide the power?
Partly to simplify the video, I think the viewers can easily add nuclear back in just in their head if they think it will stay
But I do have a bear case on nuclear: solar is unstoppable, because of the huge value proposition in self-consumption. Therefore, the net demand on the grid will drop to or below 0 at noon, inevitably. But nuclear already struggles with cost at a 95% capacity factor. How will it cope when it's forced to less than 60%?
@@SizeMichael The problem with adding lots on solar or wind is that your production will shift heavily and it will not correlate with demand.
If you only have a little and you have a lot of hydro you can use that storage capacity. If not you will have to ramp up and down your stable capacity plant (normally referred to as base power). That will be real bad for the base power, so it will become very expensive to get that base power. Nuclear is not a great fit for ramping up and down, your best fit are gas powered plants. If you wanted to change to save the environment it will be a hard fail to go this route.
As we have ramped up wind a lot in the world we see a clear increase in coal fired plants.
If we do a massive ramp in solar (to cover something like 25% of electricity production in a country) we will se more of either coal or gas powered plants. A sure way to destroy the environment.
If you have a month with real cold weather in the winter with hardly any solar and hardly any wind it does not matter how much your peak capacity is. You will need to have backup plants that can cover all your needs even in the coldest winter. Since they will have low utilization you will need to pay for them even when they are not used for 90% of the year.
It is just a matter if you pay with general tax or put the cost on the price you pay for being connected to the grid.
Really interesting video. Thank you. I'm curious about how home solar production numbers are accounted for. What happens to the increasing amount of electricity being generated by homeowners etcétera? How is this factored into the numbers?
For example I have effectively gone off-grid since November 23 and I'm producing and using over 1Mw per month. Multiply this by a few million and it obviously will make a huge difference.
Yeah, self-consumption might mess up the data as it becomes more significant
For the most part, the data is collected, as inverters have SIM cards, and report their info to the manufacturer/installer, but most countries don't track this in a centralized manner like they track utility scale production
I find this fascinating, I just wanted to point out that we can increase our energy consumption once we are running renewables. We can do more things. Make life better. Energy will no longer be a limiting factor.
I live in cold NW Wisconsin so instead of a heat pump I heat with free scrounged wood in a 75% efficient wood stove, not the best option as far as efficiency but the cost is very low.
I won't say that this isn't on the correct path. But there is a lot of things that makes me ponder the arguments made.
There is a lot of "facts" here that seem dubious.
Thermal efficiency in power plants is more or less never down at 30%, cars perhaps, power plants no... (every percentile of improved efficiency becomes quite a lot of income, and fairly basic efficiency improvements makes a large difference at relatively low cost, though eat space for breakfast so often aren't used in the transport industry due to space limitations.)
CoP of air sourced heat pumps is in reality not all that often up above 3. Being down around 1.5 isn't atypical in winters if one gets snow outside (something most of Europe gets). Still better than simple joule heating. But not anywhere close to 3+. (Ground sourced heat pumps can be up there, but depending on geological conditions, this isn't always an option, not to mention the added cost of even installing it.)
I would however say that reducing heating energy requirements by 30-50% seems realistic. It is however unrealistic to expect it to drop by 75% from heat pumps alone. Adding insulation and going to double/triple pane windows is however going to help reduce heating demands by a lot. (where I live 3 panes of glass is "old", 4 is the new "standard", and going to 5 layers of glass isn't out of the norm along with adding extra insulation to exterior walls.)
The argument if one should multiply wind and solar's energy output or not, is somewhat debatable. In general I would agree and say no.
It is true that energy consumption will be lower in the future. Energy efficiency improvements happens in more or less all industries.
I wouldn't consider an over century old observation of the growth in the electrical market as particularly valid today.
Saying "7% increase in power production per year" is an observation of history, and a plan for the potential future. It isn't a law of nature that shall be followed. Ie, I expect that it will never be touched again.
Given that the curve started meaningfully deviating at around the same time that a large portion of the world had become electrified. Then it rather signifies that a sizable portion of those 7% were market expansion into new geographical areas. Once a region is electrified, it has electricity for its basic needs and won't generally need major improvements in capacity. Unless new applications crop up for this electrification. With new applications and demand, expansions in capacity is required, with improved efficiency, demand goes down, something it has done repeatedly throughout history.
The rise in electric vehicles might nudge forth some new requirements for capacity, but transport isn't an endless requirement, so it will only add a certain amount.
Some people argue that the increasing amount of data centers serving our information driven society will see a major requirement in new generating capacity, but even this struggles to keep pace with the decreasing demand in general.
It is a sane observation that we likely might nearly halve our energy needs in the next couple of decades.
Currently, wind, water, solar, is a decent combination. But I would honestly say that you missed bio-gas.
Waste water treatment plants can fairly trivially be adapted to produce methane for use in both the transport and heating industries, as well as electrical production during winters. (A good example of a waste water treatment plant producing bio-gas is Henriksdalsverket in Stockholm) Bio-gas has the advantage of both being easy to store and fairly efficient to use, where its waste heat has the added bonus of district heating in winters. Europe has though historically not invested much at all in bio-gas production, mainly due to cheap natural gas from Russia, something recent geopolitics has changed.
Your COP of heat pumps argument is nonsense. If you are serious about heat pumps you actually look at SCOPs anyway.
I am Happy to have found you. ❤
I agree about biomass, hard to replace, and as long as we have old coal power plants around, maintaining them for a ‘dunkelflaute’ is not a bad idea.
But
I would like your perspective on the amount of how much of the wood/bamboo on earth we end up burning, and wether that’s unrealistic (and when)
In Denmark we have all but totally transitioned away from coal towards biomass (wind has been able to deliver 100% in DK for maaany years now) and the amount of wood pellets we use are waaay more than the size of the country allows for.
With growing population in the world at least till 2090, we need to find truly scalable solutions… and is biomass really one of those ?
As you mentioned, some of the rejected heat is reused to heat residential buildings, and that should be replaced by other heating methods. Probably not changing much the calculation.
The bigger problem is that it will take some time before the changeover is complete. The conversion of production is in full swing as it is being done by companies, but the conversion of consumption is still in the early stages as it depends on the general population. It is much easier for a company to make a decision to get credit and invest in improvements and much more difficult for an uninformed and/or poor person to do the same.
Wait, when they give the size of electricity consumption or power plant capacity, is that in electric energy supplied or input GW including rejected heat? I think it's electric energy, but not sure. So a 1GW gas or nuclear plant is delivering 1GW max electric power, and may be using 3X that of fuel due to rejected heat. We already knew about electric car efficiency vs. IC engines, makes no sense to be measuring cars and heaters in GW, just look at fuel replaced or go straight to carbon reduction. I guess which one you use depends on how you're using the metric.
Didn't you omit from your calculations the massive amount of heat energy consumed by industrial processes (like cement, steel, etc.) and the massive amount of CO2 emissions associated with same?
Are you forgetting about datacenters?