The Truth About Pumped Hydro
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- Опубликовано: 8 фев 2025
- This video was created in partnership with Bill Gates, inspired by his new book “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster.” Find out more here: gatesnot.es/2Zn...
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References:
[1] www.irena.org/...
[2] www.irena.org/...
[3] www.esb.ie/doc...
[4]smartgriddashb...
[5] smartgriddashb...
[6] smartgriddashb...
[7] www.sciencedir...
[8] www.sciencedir...
[9] www.hydrorevie...
[10] www.waterpower...
[11] www.sciencedir...
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I like what you said : "Not just one solution". Too often people are looking for a silver bullet instead of several solutions working together to solve a problem.
And this comment section is full of them.
That's the trouble. The world is full of idiots with simple solutions to complex problems.
You're so right, hydrogen, batterys, pumped hydro, biomass. Theywillall e usedin some kind of area sooner or later.
Yeah you need a gun that can fire silver bullets and cartridges and all that jazz
@@laredobenjamin7438 "there are situations where the single solution is the most efficient" - you are aware of the 'there are situations' part of your statement? ;-)
Seeing footage of the actual area is so much nicer than the stock footage that we're usually bombarded with.
still stock footage is quite good in this types of videos
The Truth about Pumping Out High Quality Videos
Ha
Nebula saved'em.
“What is sleep?”
You can't handle the truth
It's funny what people write and get 100s of likes
Fun fact:
In Slovakia our largest pumped hydro plant Čierny Váh has 7 turbines with collective power of 735MW (6 Francis @ 122MW and 1 Kaplan @ 0,7MW) and head of about 400m.
About 83% of our power is produced in 2 nuclear power plants and 11% in hydro plants.
Only 5% of electricity in Slovakia comes from fossil fuels.
That's one thing I can be proud of about my country. Way to go...
Nuclear and pumped hydro sounds like a great winning combo for the environment indeed! Too bad we don't hear a lot about your country's success on this matter, thanks for sharing.
That's amazing.
I only wish Germany would be this ahead in carbon neutral energy production.
Instead we went all in on natural gas while at the same time throtteling renewables and shutting down nuclear power plants.
Now we have one of the worst energy productions, in terms of CO2 output, while also being among the most expensive in the world.
🥲
@@GiorgosKoukoubagia In news, its mostly negativity that gets all the attention, why post about some country's success when you could talk about dumb climate activist gluing themselves on the highway, or talk about nuclear disasters for the billionth time. Honestly if Slovakia's success were spread, maybe many more countries could be half way on their way to carbon neutral.
way to go slovaks!
my country (Indonesia) is a net coal producer, so that's reflected on our electricity generation, and with neither soviets nor developed countries as our neighbor, putting up nuclear plant is kinda difficult
What about that last 1%, what produces it? 😁
Can "an ungodly rush" be made an official unit for water? Also, that is a beautiful machine.
The empirical measurement for a hydro-dam flow, Good Friday shoppers' stampede, and a horse pissing,
Truly a beautiful machine. I love engineering, especially when it comes to renewables, but this makes me love it 10000x more
Perfect name for a metal band.
That implies the existence of a Godly rush. Ungodly is water flowing down and godly is water flowing up?
Why not? we already have "fuckton" anyway
i must be in an alternate reality where Real Engineering posts 2 videos in 2 days
let's hope Bill gate's book can keep sponsoring Real Engineering :)
Yup
But do u know how much lobbying cost, pretty sure thats changes subsidies especially with competition.
Remember when Saudi oil didn't like American fracking competition?
And what also just happened just one year ago.
ruclips.net/video/DebpajQGRV0/видео.html
They were trying to flood the market and that dropped prices to being free for a full month in the american market due to them using all their ships at once and only so much oil can be refined at a time while ships have to keep moving otjer wise it cost them money.
My dude, the subsidies are not the issue when it comes to constant market control globally and constant regional monopolies that want to be the only game in town.
Crack open a book.
I like that reality.
@@marcusjackson5837 Who are you talking to?
this is the fourth time I've woken from a nap to see a Real Engineering video uploaded 20 seconds ago
I’m watching you
🤨
he is like santa or a stalker
@@RealEngineering oh no
I'd close your curtains
Nice video, having worked in the power industry in system operations for over 3 decades operating 2 pump storage facilities you were very accurate with most of the video. I only found one slight misunderstanding, the pony motors are used to bring the unit up to speed and synchronize the main motor/generator to the grid smoothly in the pumping mode. Once unit is tied into grid the pony motor is shut down. They are not needed in generation mode since you have water to spin the water wheel. Once unit is synchronized in pump mode the air is purged and gates opened, pumping starts the instant the water hits the wheel. At one time there was talk of sea level pump storage being built in NYC and was proposed to use subterranean caverns carved out of the bedrock as the lower reservoir. Idea was shot down but have to believe it might be used in other locations.
I worked on a sewer trunk line once that required crossing a creek and then scaling a hill. Once built the pump pushed sewage up the hill, and was then shut off, as a siphon effect kept it flowing.
Sea or Ocean exchange is exactly what I was thinking. I wonder how many natural locations there are. My first thought was Dover Cliffs in England. There should multiple location in the Americas in a variety of locations. Either way this is good basic tech with minimal operating costs, good efficiency and durable.
@@johnnysystem2579 the main problem with pump/storage now days is the deregulation of the power industry has leveled the prices between day and night. In the past the price extremes between very low at night and astronomical in the day have ruined the business model for pump storage to be cycled daily, it is now being used more now as a source of reserve in emergencies since the difference between day and night costs seldom covers the pumping losses. At best they are typically not better than 67% efficient. There are other situations where greater efficiency can be had but not in a simple isolated pump/ storage hydro plant. With the experience I’ve had in pump/storage, the greatest element when storing energy is the cycle efficiency. Every time I see mention of grid tied electric cars for storage it makes me laugh. Never have i ever seen a number for the charge/discharge efficiency of a lithium battery, lots of other information but not that, oh and you have a limited cycle life, and your going to waste charging cycles helping out the power grid for pennies in exchange. Not something I would ever do.
@@tbix1963 I agree with some points but not with others. The efficiency for LI batteries is freely available, there is even a video done by this channel. Leveling out the day/night cycle would result in massive savings. Where I live we dump power every night in huge quantities. If you understand power then you know the effect on power factor. By moving all consumer power to electric you move the problem to the source and make it that much easier to effect change in the future. No one said this was easy and there is no one solution and I don't believe we will get there on time to stop irreversible climate change but at least one, maybe two generations get to live on earth. After that bend over and kiss your ...
@@johnnysystem2579 over 30 years ago when I first started in the industry there was plenty of dump energy that you could get to the pumps and it was a wonderful experience turning waste energy into a useful product the next day. Unfortunately after deregulation the market I live and used to work in has been modified to protect the reliability of the system ahead of economics. There is plenty of dump energy out there at times but it’s usually limited behind transmission constraints that prevent it getting to where it’s needed. Deregulation took a system that worked and modified it so uninvolved persons could play in its market and make money off of the ratepayers. In doing so system reliability had to be preserved and limiting rules were created to allow the market to function without endangering the reliability of the system to the ratepayers. Just took a peak at the publicly available data from yesterday. For the region with pump storage and the next cheapest region. Daytime $44/MW and next door $34/MW. Night time. $128/MW in the pumping region and next door $44/MW. Very interesting data, from my experience I can tell you that they were likely pumping to restore required reserves for reliability driving the prices to insane levels in that region. Pumping at $128/MW will result in a price in the pond of $191/MW in the pond plus the typical adder of $5 for maintenance. The energy put back into the pond will now need to sell at $196/MW just to break even. In the old days we used to have an in the pond price of $12.4 in the pond and typical daytime prices were between $18 and $38. There was plenty of room to make savings that we passed on to the ratepayers. Today all the savings are eaten away by the overhead of the market and extra involved players that didn’t exist pre deregulation. As for the efficiency of LI I’ve seen numbers posted but never actually put in context so it would be useful. I seriously doubt the numbers they post are applicable to be used for actual economic calculations, hopefully I’m wrong. Just what are the cycle efficiency of LI batteries anyway? Just take the energy needed to charge and the actual energy you get out. I know that for the pump/storage I used to run that for every 100MW we pumped we only got back 67MW and that was after being upgraded to state of the art. For LI you would need to compare the energy into the charger than the energy received after the inverter since the energy into the battery has to come from somewhere and the DC in the battery isn’t very useful until it’s converted back to AC. The efficiency of the battery alone isn’t very useful, you need the efficiency of the entire system used to store and deliver the energy to the doorstep of the plant.
That man at 2:13 must have been very careful to not lose his head as soon as he walks away
P.S. this series of video about energy storage is the most well done I've seen about this topic
Ugh. Work safety standards were not so high back than.
He was just drying his hair
Oh my God, clearly pre-OSHA work conditions.
You better hope he never has a eureka moment down there...
@@CaptainBill22 and how does this correlate to a man doing maintenance below a giant spinning wheel of doom
That very accurate wind forecasting for the wind turbines had me saying WOW out loud, quite impressive 9:25
I'd be a little more impressed (or maybe not) if I knew what the prediction timeframe was. 5 minutes, 30 minutes, 12 hours. It needs to be sufficient to enable load balancing from whatever is providing the base load generation (whatever that might be).
@@Thermalions there are dates on the x axis, I think we’re looking at a (roughly) one month graph
@@thomas.02 But that doesn't reflect how far in advance that fairly accurate prediction is being done for that month.
It's like weather predictions generally - they naturally get more accurate the closer you are to the time being predicted.
@@Thermalions oh I see what you mean, my bad for the confusion
i guess the general rule would be they'd do it as accurate as required say if they need a couple of hours to spin up the backup generators when demand increases then they'd need to predict the wind at least a couple of hours in advance
Its not that hard to predict wind turbine power for 5-7 days ahead.. Its to some extent easier than prediction the weather.
Also its not that hard to predict how the average wind will be over the next season, we have plenty of data for that.
The issue is that predicting is not the same as controlling. While the pump power storage look huge.. in matter of time they can give power, its really just matter of hours, possible a day or two ... But we really need it to last at least two weeks.
A other issue is the efficiency. Even with 80% efficiency (and that is really the high end), you really don´t wan´t to run them if you don´t need to.
That is.. wind and solar unplanability is not solveable with pumped hydro, batteries or hydrogen. Nothing will work.
Also even the largest pumped hydro stations are tiny. 292MW of power is a pittyfull amount. Compare that to one single nuclear reactor at 1600MW, and that is 24/7.
The irony of it is that a nuclear power reactor that PRODUCE power is actually cheaper MW per MW than all storage alternatives. Pretty much rendering wind and solar utterly useless.
This guy inspires me to get through college while I’m studying engineering.
Honestly same
Same here 😂 electrical engineering* 😂😂
He inspires us all
He is keeping me away from homework and online lectures🤣
Godspeed man. I thought I would be able to become an engineer for the sake of the renewable revolution but I found the maths and physics too difficult for me
Good article! In New Zealand, there is active investigation (with $30M to fund the investigation) to use Lake Onslow as a 5TWh storage lake. That allows long term (as in seasonal) storage. Est cost $4B. New Zealand uses about 39TWh a year (before we all go electric), so the storage represents about 13% of the total use. Other solutions will help.
I dont think a lot of New Zealanders appreciate the scale of the Lake Onslow Scheme, the total worldwide installed pumped hydro storage capacity is somewhere around 10TWh, Lake Onslow is currently penciled in to possibly be 5TWh, but it could theoretically be up to 12TWh if they go for the maximum possible. We could literally have the majority of the worlds pumped hydro capacity in one lake.
@@kecuthbertson Is Science all you keep yourself updated about?
1/8 of the total ANNUAL consumption in one single storage site is insane
5:30 PM, when several million electric kettles are put on simultaneously ;)
This is actually a really incisive point. One of the ways of reducing energy problems is by smoothing out energy loads. Right now the grid is like an 87 lane wide highway with all the cars next to each other. It has to be wide enough to carry the very worst traffic during rush hour without slowing down at all. If that load can be spread out it would significantly reduce the amount of power necessary to store. One way I've proposed of solving this problem is by offering government subsidies directly to people who log internet-of-things-automated appliances in to an online controller, which would use location and energy data to determine when those appliances turn on in order to spread their loads. This means that clothes driers and dish washers and such could be filled when people are home, but activated to turn on while they're at work, or even asleep. You get your clothes and dishes done for you (to some extent) and even get some money for doing it (which could easily come from energy production savings) and the grid itself gets smoothed-out energy draws. Something similar is being practiced in California, I'm told, but the state-subsidies idea is my own, which I intend to propose to lawmakers once the automated appliance technology is sufficiently developed. As for that... I'm working on it.
Similarly, passively heated housing and housing that stores thermal energy will likely flatten that particular curve as well.
My father was an area controller for a power company all his life and he said just this. When 500,000 stoves come on, it takes a fair bit to power them.
Technically tax credits, not subsidies.
@@RandomAmbles 00
@@RandomAmbles This is already being done in Pennsylvania with water heaters, kind of... Well, with the electric cooperatives at least. With a load control device installed on the water heater, the co-op can shut this off during times of high electric usage. Members who have them, get a credit or discount on their monthly bill.
I just want to say, as an Irish man (from South Armagh), seeing someone explain how energy is stored in Ireland on RUclips on such a popular RUclips channel (which has about half the population of Ireland as its subscriber base) makes me feel ecstatic. I feel so proud of my fellow countryman. I love your videos, and I hope your subscriber base will grow, and you continue to tell subjects about Ireland.
I had no idea this power station existed in Ireland, and I'm glad I know it now :)
I have one question, however. Would it not be beneficial to have one pump for pumping water up to the reservoir, and one electricity creating turbine for water coming down? It seems in my mind that the price of the energy needed to pump may increase in the time it takes to swap directions, and over a long time, would this not be beneficial? I know there's a compressed air system, but would a section/gate redirecting the water to the other system not be more efficient? It just interests me that we could maybe make more efficient decisions about how the water flows through the system in each turbine/motor.
For example, a Pelton wheel design may be more beneficial for energy creation, but not good for pumping water upwards.
I bet that someone has already figured this out, but with a place with so much wind, we really should be taking more advantage of it.
Thx for your videos, they are a massive inspiration to not just me, but my wee cousins and other young people. Iontach maith Brian, you're a saint.
Unlike the story of the lake at the top of Slieve Gullion in which Fionn mac Cumhaill had his hair turned grey by a witch, this video about pumped storage provides hope about lakes on top of mountains, and rejuvinates the hope of the future generation. Slán abhaile mo cara
I have a feeling they might be using a variable pitch impeller....
Aussie here, not a hydroelectric engineer but I looked into this some time ago when the climate change denialists started banging on about the "waste and pointlessness" of our Snowy Mountains pumped hydro project, since I had the same questions mentioned here. As with many significant choices on large infrastructure projects, the design comes down to money; in this case, total operating cost over the projected lifespan of the facility. For a pumped hydro station, the electrical generation/interconnection side of things is largely a solved problem that can be budgeted pretty accurately. Most of the complexity/uncertainty (therefore the lion's share of the costs) comes down to hydraulic engineering, "where the rubber meets the road" or more accurately where the water meets the wheel. That "ungodly rush of water" necessary to generate meaningful power requires some insane levels of robustness and safety/redundancy in all the pipework, valves, control systems etc., costs commensurate with requirements and rising exponentially with added complexity due to the engineering time and specialised manufacturing required. More equipment and pipework means more earthworks are required, so capital costs are higher there too.
Maintenance over the operating lifespan is also a major concern; basically a fixed cost for the generators, much harder to predict for the hydraulic stuff. Long story short, simpler is better, cheaper, easier to maintain, more economically attractive. All of those considerations outweigh the relatively small efficiency gain to be had by running seperate pumping/generation systems and their associated water handling components.
@@oadka I wondered about that too, but I don't think so.
The Engineering challenges in building a variable-pitch impeller with that kind of mass that can spin at 500rpm and deal with the forces involved would be.... considerable. Not impossible, but very very expensive. And think of the maintenance costs! I'm fairly certain that the impellers are solid units which are optimised through simulation to be as efficient as possible when generating flow in either direction. Typically the design would lean more towards efficiency in generation mode, since you want to get the absolute maximum out of the potential energy when required. Pumping the water back uphill can stand to be a little less efficient since it's being done off-peak when power costs are cheaper.
I'm from Donegal, sure we could go 100% wind, there's bare wind all the time.
good luck for Ireland
2:12 Hi! What's your job? Oh, I crawl under the highspeed whirling death machine and read the meter and record it on my notepad with this pencil.
If he grew his hair just a little bit longer...........
Ah yes, the days before Health and Safety was invented!
Two words. Remote readout.
@@Brian_Friesen he would get free haircuts.
Don’t wear long sleeved shirts.
"there's always rain in Ireland" yup... makes me wanna cry ,but then there would be even more water :(
Renewables + nuclear is the only logical way forward. I really wish people would get educated about nuclear energy and radiation.
Yes! It may be the most important public education campaign in human history!
I get that Nuclear plants are inherently safe, but the waste is a long-term nightmare.
@@mrmobius Thank you for providing an example for the comment above yours. (fission fuel cells can be used it other types of reactor, so it isn't long-term waste, it is "future fuel".)
@@mrmobius which is why we need to actually work on a plan for that, probably at the same time we work on the climate change one.
Thorium reactors are an important step that should be pushed forward because it's less dangerous in the waste aspect.
And that long term storage site that the US started building but has never used would be nice to get running
You can reuse the waste moreover use can use much cleaner and cheap thorium, convert it to uranium from the energy by waste reusing but setting up these types of combination plants require a shitload of money
So no one wants to invest in building one rather people are focusing on hydrogen
“Solar and Wind have reached maturity”
So they’re renewable and ready to mingle?
Edit: You guys are looking into this too much. I just wanna take one of them out for dinner
GAGAGAGAGAGA!!! I watched this video and it is really not that good compared to my perfect videos. GAGAGAGAGA!!! This is NOT self-promotion! This is the reality! This is the world! We are the people! Don't disl****ke my vide*****s, my dear oscae
@@AxxLAfriku wtff
@@AxxLAfriku ok
@@AxxLAfriku i disliked
It's unfortunate that Bill Gates has co-opted this channel. It's just a religion now.
So we not gonna talk about the B-roll at 2:15 with a dude chilling under a massive spinning turbine with his head 12 inches away from it?
Elfin Safety would love that setup :)
Yep. Don’t stand up.
Caught my eye as well.
2:13
Lol that’s his hiding spot at work 😹
Easily the most impressive thing in this video is how closely the predicted wind generation matched actual production.
Not really: centuries of observation give you an incredible amount of data to work with or train your NN; I think any European coastal area could duplicate this; ...and then you add earth observation satellites.
the Texas grid ERCOT site has panels for about a dozen key stats which update all day. Well worth a watch - one of them is the projected day output for both wind and solar. Pretty accurate projections, and I say that knowing the time intervals they're using are a bit blocky. Its just ercot and a business domain ending - then look for dashboards. You can do things like watch the fuel mix panel, current day and see what percentage is currently coming from which generation sources at various hours ... pretty decent site and you can see the correlation between prices and such as well. I'm sure as time passes, their increased data set for weather and use patterns will get more and more accurate as well. TX is the largest electricity generating state in the US by almost 2x over FL. Last year they got about 32% of annual total from just wind and solar as a set.
0:37 - minor note, but subsidy cost per KwH would be a better and more accurate comparison. It would drastically change that graph and I wouldn't be surprised if biofuels are actually the most heavily subsidized.
Those US maize subsidies are pretty hefty, I've heard.
If I remember correctly, he said that more renewable capacity was installed. For renewables at least, the main cost is installation. For me the best comparison would be subsidies per new kw of capacity installed times the load factor.
@@C4pt41nN3m0 some of those skilled do seem to be inordinately ... fond ... of a good corn-cobbing.
Wouldn't cost per KwH be misleading in a different way? Subsidizes tend to be given to new electric generation moreso than maintenance. He mentioned that 75% of new electric sources are renewable.
That makes sense to use absolute over per kwh because to really get into where the subsidies are going it would become to long to fit into the video and per kwh would be even more misleading in own ways.
2:12 That dude, that hair, and those propellers spinning overhead
No PPE either. Simpler times.
@@PnlBtr manlier times
He's gonna get a haitcut
*OSHA has entered the chat*
@@3dpyromaniac560 Pointlessly riskier times. Being maimed so you're no good to anyone doesn't make you manlier. Sure, some OH&S stuff goes over-board and is annoying, but lowering accidents and deaths in general across a number of types of work is only a good thing. Insurance crap stopping stuff from happening - now that's another issue.
I live an hour from one such facility. Ludington, Michigan has been in operation nearly 50 years.
Came here to post this!
In another post, I asked if it works in freezing weather, but if it works in Michigan then the cold must not be a problem.
Hermonie voice : How can it be nearly 50 years?
I live an hour from turloc hill, the facility he referenced in the video.
How are your property values? Is it an eyesore? That seems to be one of the arguments people make against them lmao.
"Imagine having to pollute the world in order to make relatively short-lasting batteries made from scarce materials so you can store green energy in" - This post was made my pumped hydro gang.
"imagine having to excavate large amounts of material and ruin the natural environment to store energy" - Not sure if this post was made by battery storage or pumped hydro because both do this.
Elon Musk is in danger of stealing Thomas Midgley Jr's crown as history's most toxic organism. Pushing batteries for green energy storage, pushing his idiotic transport schemes harming viable mass transit projects not to mention there being a good argument that his disruption of the EV market will delay mass market penetration by years if not decades.
@@dairallan ...What? I'd argue that if Tesla did not popularize EV, we might not be seeing a huge surge in the EV market within this generation.
I mean, I never expected old-auto like GM, Chevy, and others to come out with an electric car *ever* and take it seriously. The only exception would be Nissan with their Leaf but barely anyone liked that car until the later versions when its range got better. Perhaps Musk did not revolutionize anything, but he and his company definitely made the waves to get the others to hustle, and that's something to consider.
And that's how I can summarize Elon Musk: the wavemaker. Whether or not he personally succeeds or fails is irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. He's influencing others to haul ass or be left behind whether it's in the EV market, solar, power storage, space industry, internet, and tunnel boring --- whatever. I'd argue that people are innovating faster because of him and it's resulting in newer, greener technologies.
@@BrokenLifeCycle The standard product model for manufacturing sees established producers adopt new technology, then leverage the cash stream from high value Early Adopters to fund bringing the line to the mass market.
Musk has subverted that cash flow with, albeit clever manifacture of hype, and with no ability to bring EVs to the mass market. indeed established manuifacturers (with often far superior products) have seen failure after failure to entice early adopters and severaly hampered the standard model.
Musk has easily added 10 years to EV adoption which was building significantly driven by established players unti lhe "disrupted" the market.
It isnt black or white, transportation of eletricity over great distances leads to loses and not every place can build a dam, there are alot of ways to store energy hydrogen production and "hot rock" ar the ones I think have a lot of potencial
You should take a look at the "El hierro hydro-wind plant" in the Canary Islands, it uses an old volcanic caldera and sea water.
Oh for real? I tried to find cool examples, but that didn’t come up in my search.
Indeed, the El Hierro 100% renewable island has been huge for a while, said to be the best example of such a solution, and it is.... Because it's a massive failure, the whole thing is so far from the claimed 100% renewable that it is laughable. No wonder it doesn't pop up anymore besides being used as an example of what such a "solution" brings:
- Massive price increase in power cost
- Blackouts
- Still more than 50% of all electricity is produced by diesel generators
This is exactly what this solution brings and is that perfect example of what _NOT_ to do.
@@RealEngineering www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/11/10/2812/htm
Easy to find information on that, but some pro-renewable sites have removed all mentions of it, I wonder why...
@@RealEngineering for a visit Cruachan (built1965) is a cracker and the climb up the Ben (Cruachan) is dramatic and almost lunar.
El Heirro:
What Kind Of Pumps Do They Use? Wind? Perhaps They Could Also Include A Battery Of Freznel Based Solar Condensation Pressure Boilers, With Hydraulic Pistons, Check Valves, And Inline Drop Points, Similar To A Combination Of Heart Pump Mechanisms And Transpiration, To Supplement To Pumping Operations? In Proper Applications, It Can Not Only Basically Combust Water Instantaneously, But Distill It As Well, While Producing Excess Extractable Energy.
Fo Realz.
Two medium sized nuclear power plants and Ireland is safe in terms of electricity. And space taken by them is laughauble in comparison to water reservoires required to operate to cover the needs of a country.
Though, of course, you'd have to build pumped storage for the nuclear power. That's what pumped storage is mostly used for, at least on my continent.
@@bearcubdaycare the continuous operation of plants would help reduce the need for that, although cooling pools and just water supplies for plants in general takes lots of water
again, the right tool at the right time and place
Ireland need both base load power generation and fast acting power storage
we need both, not one or the other
@@bee5440 continuous operation doesn't help you when its night and nobody wants the energy... if you only have slow reacting nuclear powerplants you need a ton of storage aswell or you will have to discard most of their power most times of the day
The thing is calculating the price of a renewable energy withtout calculating the cost of its backup power source is pointless.
Period
You've committed a fallacy when discussing the subsidies of each industry. The fossil fuel industry is 3-4x bigger than renewable, so it's more intellectually honest to consider what % of each sector is subsidized.
Fossil fuel industry is more than 4x bigger. But I thought that too, because fossil fuels are dominating the energy sector and renewables are a fraction of that. Moreover, fossil fuels are highly taxed.
Nuclear is the best source of clean power production that is available. Renewables are not capable of supplying enough base load capacity and are also not ideal for handling peak power spikes compared to gas plants.
That's probably because you care about the truth, not about being told a naive beautiful fairy tale.
The VP misguides his own viewers by showing that fossil fuels got 4x times more subsidies worldwide but conveniently forgets to mention that they generated 10+ times more power while also being a lot cheaper. In the Ukraine for example renewable energy is almost 10 times more expensive than nuclear but thru subsidies and taxes the government is trying to make them about the same price for the end customers which is yet another illusion about renewable's real cost.
The truth is, except if real sunny places, nuclear or natural gas power plants are the best in terms of price, clean power, stability and abundance.
@@georgecarlin2656 thank you. I spent 8 years operating our great US Navy “nuclear powered” submarines and another 4 years earning my mechanical engineering degree with a minor in nuclear engineering. The biggest things holding nuclear back is the general public’s perception thereby influencing political decisions and all the red tape that makes them cost so much.
@@upperhandcustoms11 bingo
aight there's a whole debate around the concept of base load being outdated but even ignoring that theres a simple math problem with the nuclear option
we have roughly 11 years to be completely carbon neutral or negative before climate change becomes irreversible
the median construction time for a nuclear plant is around 10 years and many run late, up to 20-25 years
does playing chicken with the apocalypse sound like a responsible thing to do?
@@sabotabby3372 you know that the earth goes through natural temperature cycles right? Ever heard of the ice age? Did you know that there was more than 1 of them? Even if we as humans have had an impact on our planets environment, there is nothing that we can do to stop Mother Nature.
Also do you know how many decades people have been saying that the world is going to end due to climate change? I’ve been hearing it since the 1980’s and I’m sure it’s likely older than that. In the last 75 years our planets average temperature has only risen 1 degree. Hardly a planet destroying number.
Hey! Both Real Science and Real Engineering have released videos on the same day!
Can't we all just get along? This is a great option where the topography is suitable but no single option will make ALL of the others realistically go away totally any time soon.
It’s about power but it’s political power not electricity.
Even if we could, even if we respected each other's opinions. Would we be able to fix our global climate.
@@ppapshrek4485 that’s if the climate needs fixed. Way to many lies and inconsistencies to be sure.
@Robert Sears Very well then, perish together it is...
Free will and all that good stuff, eh?
@@ljkking622 What humanity needs to do before our era comes to an end in one way or other is to figure out a way to fashion our human ecosystem into a more flexible enduring type that's able to withstand whatever happens with the planet... at least until we figure out how to make the jump into being a true space-faring species.
As George Carlin and others have intimated, The Earth doesn't care. It will carry on regardless. It's only *our* survival that's at stake.
There's probably not enough time or resources left to use before we move past too many tipping points to keep going down blind alleys with mega projects that don't lead to meaningful success. We're doing stupid things like wasting precious helium gas on party balloons. We're still burning off methane from landfills as a nuisance in some places without getting any work from the power. The list goes on.
Being rival fanboys for various sorts of systems due to personal or national politics or employment/educational affiliation is NOT going to allow a rigorous scientific conclusion to be formed.
20th century energy storage: Pump water up and down.
21st century tech bros: Stack concrete blocks!
I say we use more nuclear. The technology behind molten Thorium salt reactors is particularly interesting and is incredibly safe. People kind of gloss over nuclear but it could be a valuable tool to fight climate change.
Nuclear is not flexible when it comes to capacity. Throughout a day supply and demand of energy fluctuates dramatically...only natural gas plants can react in time to these quick changes. The alternative to natural gas will be bulk storage as discussed in this video.
@@AaronSmith-sx4ez good point. Historically, nuclear‘s role in energy production has been to provide baseload power, however, it is possible to build reactors capable of quickly ramping up/down their output.
“French utility EDF began making its nuclear plants more “maneuverable” in the 1980s, and today it says a 1,300-MW reactor can increase or decrease its output by 900 MW within about 30 minutes.”
Source: www.powermag.com/flexible-operation-of-nuclear-power-plants-ramps-up/
@@AaronSmith-sx4ez small modular reactors might be able to help with that.
@@bensonboys6609 wow. I didn't know about that, thanks
@@AaronSmith-sx4ez thats only if your using the old tech and haven't set up your plant correctly, look at molten salt reactor, they have a high heat reactor(800C+) that can easily be ramped up and down by controlling the flow from the pumps, also you wouldn't want to ramp it anyway you run it full till and use the excess heat to fuel the production of fresh water, liquid fuels, fertilizers and any other high heat needing reactions/chemicals.
When I worked in the UK electricity industry (before it was ruined by privatisation) I saw the value of pumped storage (during a training visit to the South Western Grid Control at Bristol) not just for peak-lopping but when 2 large generators had tripped in close succession whilst we were there. Dinorwig came up to full generation within seconds and maintained stability of the grid. Very impressed.
Even as an interdisciplinary engineering major, I completely forgot that you can just store potential energy like that 😂 but it makes sense, y’know.
I took a class on energy systems, people have some dumb ideas about energy storage like in mechanical kinetic systems (flywheels), blocks on hills (rail storage), and heating a large block for later use. And the worst offender is lithium ion batteries which degrade by cycle lives to need replacement every 2-3 years.
But then there are some good methods like electrolyzing hydrogen for later and pumped hydro.
@@jasonreed7522 why do you need peak density for a lithium ion battery when it’s for the grid. Use recycled lithium ion batteries smh
@@jasonreed7522 Not sure what you see a "dumb" about any of those ideas..? Flywheel is probably the worst of them because of the massive friction losses, but there's a lot of work on reducing that via maglev systems and the like (yes the magnets would induce a loss of their own, but as long as that's less than the loss due to friction in something like a ball bearing wheel, its still a net win).
Of course you're never going to scale a single rail car to 292Mw or whatever the number was, but there's also no reason you'd have to - just have a whole fleet of them covering a mountainside. Perhaps not the most aesthetically pleasing structure in the world but entirely doable.
All of those methods have drawbacks yes, but so does pumped hydro and so does hydrogen electrolysis.. and so does not even trying and just continuing to burn a shit ton more fossil fuels. And every individual power station's needs will be different (political, geological, etc) so having many options available with different benefit/drawback tradeoffs is never going to be a bad thing.
@@altrag Modern flywheels don't need to have massive friction losses.
You can run them in a vacum chamber on magnetic bearings. The loss is below 10%/day. Doesn't work for long-term storage, but for short-term storage and compensating fluctuation in the grid, it strikes me as an interesting option. The flywheel can switch from storing to releasing energy in a fraction of a second and unlike a battery, it can provide some grid inertia.
Not sure how well it scales though.
@@Bird_Dog00 Battery systems like Tesla's installation in Australia can switch in milliseconds. Speed definitely isn't an issue with batteries.
As for scaling.. that's not really _hard_ per se - just build a bunch of them and hook them together. There's definitely going to be an engineering limit for building bigger and bigger individual flywheels, but not really for building as many as you want in a row. That's mostly a cost and land use issue.
At the cost of $1B for 230MW per 6 hour storage facility, Ireland may as well just build a new 4 1000MW reactor nuclear power station to provide enough base load.
Can you really compare abolute values invested subsidies into fossil vs renewable?? It should be price per kwh generated not the entire industry.
Why did fossil received any subsidies at all? The gov is paying the companies that are destroying the planet :/
Even trickier is the definition of "subsidy". Some would just take the amount in cash grants as subsidy, and draw the line there. Others would take a look at the entire costs of fossil fuels paid for by government-- including the cost of clean ups and disaster compensations, and consider that part of the whole subsidy picture. There's little doubt in my mind that if the full costs of environmental clean ups various governments have paid for over the years showed up directly at the gas pump, we'd have been either peddling bikes or driving electric cars for decades already. The only thing that makes fossil fuels so attractive, price wise, is that it's probably our biggest "social program".
@@julianatlas5172 renewables aren't much better either. Nuclear is the way to go.
@@julianatlas5172 agreed, also a carbon tax to account for the negative externalities of fossil fuels would level the playing field until renewables become a real solution to feed our industrial energy hunger.
@@julianatlas5172 Define destroying the planet. I want you to take a beach or mountain vacation only to see a wind farm. I want you to give the ok to have a wind turbine set up in your back yard and a water storage unit installed above your family home? Everything is fine until it directly impacts you or your property value. Or better yet do your part and live without electricity, gas and oil.
Take your whining to the polluting counties that are the real root cause of this so called "global warming" instead of fixing a problem that has little to do with the western world.
www.ventusky.com/?p=33;-126;1&l=pm25
Really interesting video, it's a shame we haven't built any others in Ireland since the late 60s even in spite of the issues you mentioned in your video
Pumped storage are mainly installed to support nuclear stations by consuming electricity when demand is low and generating when it is high. Their main function was to regulate the grid when the demands is low as you can't regulate a nuc plant down in output. The pumping plants were built as part of the nuclear project.
The main issue stopping more which plants is the economics. There is no real economics vehicle to pay the plants for regulating the grid as an independent plant storage from a nuclear plant. They get paid for just straight power production and that doesn't provide a reasonable return on investment
Ireland's geography is a major hurdle. Not enough of the right kind of hills.
Plus, considering the way the country does budgets, (cough, New Children's Hospital) we'd spend more on it than ITER are spending on their fusion reactor.
@@laredobenjamin7438 recent reactors can go down to 25%, which still isn’t totally off. Back in the ‘70s, you were lucky to be able to bring it down to 50%, 75% was more common if any at all was done.
Though I agree with your point about baseload, yet the original point Jeff made about the build planning to be to support the nuclear project was true. It was projected to need a lot more storage with a majority-nuclear grid. That’s where the political will for pumped hydro came from. Even though they can be useful for any baseload supply today.
Not to mention, absorbing the unused power at night is only part of it. Another contributing factor was being able to absorb _demand spikes._ Even if you’re able to ramp up your nuclear from 50 to 100, you don’t want to have to cut off supply while it’s rising. It’s demand-shaving, like most grid scale batteries are offering now, and like water towers and gasometers always allowed. Again, as part of the political idea in the ‘60s and ‘70s of using nuclear for basically everything, not just baseload, they figured they’d need to be able to absorb pretty large demand spikes. Thus, pumped hydro was presented as the solution.
@@laredobenjamin7438 you are correct that it "can" be done... however, it takes a long time to change load and stabilize thereby making it so you need an alternate method of consuming the electricity... hence pumped storage...
There was a group a while back called 'The Spirit of Ireland' that wanted to dam off hydraulically isolated valleys facing towards the sea on the west coast (They found a few suitable sites) and use them as reservoirs for pumped seawater. Nothing came of it because every square mm of land in this country is owned by someone, and even if they're sub-subsistence farming (Couldn't survive on farming income without EU grants) it - they would still delay any construction for decades or indefinitely in the courts. Irish people are not fans of taking people's land - even if they're extremely well compensated for it.
I always knew australia was a war torn country, must be the Emus again!
They are fighting the coal exports or so ;P
I was a Bush Walloper many years ago and I shot a number of roos and emus that tourists thought were friendly until the animal concerned gutted them with one kick, some men and women were not killed but they weren't ever going to have children. Most of the kids died very quickly.
@@edwardanderson4678 Yeah they usually show polar bears on TV after the blood's been rinsed off.
This video makes me sad that my country, Norway, has not build more power cables to the continent. We have 87 TWh of hydro storage capacity, enough to storage all of the EU's and UK's electricity consumption for 1.6 weeks.
2 videos in under a week
That’s what I like
Man. With amount of work u put in. U deserve every bit. Never compromise with quality. Your channel will grow more and more.
"Hydrogen looks poised to seize long duration energy storage". It's been poised for 50 years now. Now hydro using old mines.... You can also extract heat from the returning water for process or district heating.
If the fuel cell is inside a home you can use (un)waste directly as heating and create sterile drinking water.
You can also incinerate trash to boil water thus turning it a steam turbine, we can almost eliminate land fills
50 years ago, climate wasnt part of the equation
Co2, when pumped back into the ground, takes up more space than the stuff it was mined from. You will run out of old mines before you make a meaningful impact on the problem, and most surface or close to surface mines cannot be used for this at all, for obvious reasons...
It’s like they say about fusion.. “Hydrogen’s the wave of the future, and it always will be”😆
As an engineer with 40 years experience in power and renewables, working on various other solutions, I found this to be an absolutely excellent, balanced and very well informed analysis. I just wish you hadn't entitled it "the truth about..." because most YT videos with that sort of title are full of conspiracy theory, lies, deception and misinformation. But otherwise, very well done.
Mike
Disagree. While truthful, this was wholly incomplete with no mention of any of the preexisting hydroelectric dams that have yet to be augmented by water reclamation pumps. Therefore, the number of storage reservoirs necessary is inflated.
@@davebauman4991 you could possibly say this video was on a very specific topic and idea.
damn the sponsorship was smooth af, that's how you do it so it blends with the video
Yeah, and how you lose hundreds of subscriptions if not thousands
@@johndee2990 Losing conspiracy nutjobs isn't really a big loss.
Trusting a guy who wants to eliminate crypto like Bitcoin, who wants inefficient green tech yet was fully supporting the nuclear power industry when he was still in competition with Mac (think 90's)
A guy who is tied up with African vaccine scams and contaminations from his "relief" efforts..
A guy who expressed interest in depopulation..
Yeah I wouldn't tust that guy if he was just some random neighbor, so why should I trust him if he has money?
Epstein had money, and he was a demon in the flesh.. and there was less to research about that guy and his thoughts until finally he shot the bed..
So trust known liars for all I care.
As far as I am concerned, dismissing your own best interest is what nutjobs do.. not guarding against a possible threat to one's livelihood
@@johndee2990 hmm 🤔
yea its gross bill gates really ewww
I like how you went straight for the shut down on the subsidy argument 👍👍👍
He should do a collab w/potholer54
Those numbers are brought to you by Bill Gates, so take with a huge grain of salt.
The argument in the video is really bad. Total subsidies are not relevant without knowing the total expenses in the sector, nor the total product.
He didn't compare the subsidies with the actual energy generated per year (his graph was back in 2017 at 0:30). Fossil fuel subsidies are pretty mundane when you look at the productivity, not that I like those subsidies. Don't compare installed capacity either, compare actual energy generated since solar and wind have an annual capacity factor of 10-20% and 10-50% or so. Even the Hover Dam is drying up and its capacity factor is like 20% when the dams near me are around 50%.
@@taylorc2542 Not really since he had to do his own research for the vid, bill was just supporting the vid. it's real engineering research. and to be honest, when is bill wrong he's right most of the time.
Nice that ur releasing earlier on Nebula
Trying to be better about that. We have been behind schedule for a few months, but gradually catching up.
I'm curious, on Point #1, what's the subsidy comparison measured in per MW, rather than raw numbers?
SShhhhh
Don't ask intelligent questions. Just go along with the narrative.
Nuclear starts looking real good when you ask that question.
Coming from decades of experience in the oil and gas industry, they're just as reliant on subsidies as anyone, especially since 2016. I don't have a problem with subsidies either way, but the way they are used.
For example I worked on a significant compressor upgrade subsidy, entirely paid by the provincial government. A few teams of 20 guys and equipment went around the province and upgraded about 200 each. It was good work and we were paid for it. Now the equipment was supposed to produce less nox and be about 10% more efficient. Sounds good, except the oil companies sold a significant amount of the upgraded units outside of the country.
So inevitably the subsidy only padded company coffers and did little for the environment locally.
Yeah, that my my immediate thought as well. He did not refute the statement at all.
"In 2017 The Fossil Fuel Industry received $447 B in subsidies." I'm no saying you're wrong/right, but how do you or I back this up? Subsidies for solar & wind are usually direct payments from governments, tax abatements, etc. If I were to argue $447 B . . . how did it get in the hands of producers? What concerns me is that deducting the cost of drilling IS NOT a subsidy, it's the cost of engaging in a business to produce an income - like salaries - not a subsidy. Can you point to real government transfers of money and not the usual tax policy?
Bill Gates. Lying with statistics, again..
A few billionaires which are nowhere near expert in climate science and renewable energy pushed their pet project, which goodwill elite and middle class parrot without researching deeply.
And then the world’s poor starve and die for expensive energy.
Just another excuse to ask government to subsidy these so called “clean energy”.
We do not need solar panel, which is at 20% solar energy absorption rate. We have plants which are much more efficient at absorbing solar energy.
Yet we are cutting down Forrest to lay out solar farm. How dump is that. That’s what happens when you have government subsidy.
I feel like all the comments currently in chat haven't had enough time to actually watch the video
Obviously. It was uploaded less time ago than the length of the video.
3.1x speed is a thing.
@@recklessroges I believe that only serves to prove my point.
While there will always be people who comment just from seeing the title, most of the comments stem from his opening statement that renewable energy is cheaper than traditional power generation without doing the math and showing the proof. It may even actually have become cheaper with the increases in technology but he has provided no way of knowing and the one graph he supplied may as well be comparing apples to oranges. Both are fruit but have different components making up the whole and an analysis would only have taken a couple more minutes and silenced at least some of his critics. It always comes down to actually doing the math and starting at the beginning.
It's 2021.
Folk don't need facts to have opinions. Are some sort of swivel eyed Communist?
The animations are STUNNING!
You’re stunning
@@insertyourfeelingshere8106NO YOU'RE STUNNING!!
lmfao you made my day.
@@deformercr6680 You are stunning
And Brave 😎💅
With progressive watershed management there could be created a lot of catchments, overflows and spillways with small generators. Would help to protect areas more and more prone to flood and assist in irrigation too.
0:35
That doesn’t take into account how much each source is used. Sure, overall fossil fuels might get more subsidies- but per MWH?
How dare you ask for important contextual information!
As of 2010, estimated subsidies per unit of energy produced were about 6 times higher for solar. That would not have looked quite as good in the video, I assume...
@@Alexander_Kale 2010 was over a decade ago. The price of solar, and the subsidies for solar, have gone down significantly since then.
This is the main thing that makes me skeptical when listening to any green energy advocate: the amount of intentional misinformarion. I was also really surprised to see this "fact" at the beginning of the video and went looking for the real number.
Factor in over TCO- subsidies for installation (and maintenance) ve. subsidies for installation, maintenance, AND ALL FUEL USED. There's no comparison, fuel is a continuing cost of operation.
@15:25 You used some of my research group's findings in paper [11] - Oli is gonna have such a big head when I tell him his "fantastic paper" was featured XD
Been using that paper for a lot of this energy storage series. Primary reference paper really. Lovely graphics.
nice :D
@@RealEngineering he said it "made his day"! If you need any more contacts with researchers on this, subscribe to my channel... (sorry I couldn't resist) but drop me a message and I can try link you with people :)
Such amazing production quality. I've been watching you for a long time and it's always a treat when a new video comes out! Concise and clear with enough details to get a good grip of the topic. Keep up the good work!
Quality of these videos just keeps getting better and better, fair play.
Everyone will become dependent on minerals from highly unstable regions. To scale up renewables even further, we need massive new mining projects fast, and lots of them.
Or we could keep using the coal we have, and invest in nuclear for the future, but that would make too much sense
@@davedelecto4148 You there! Stop making rational suggestions!
@@davedelecto4148 I'm on board with nuclear, but air pollution from coal is a real killer. Coal fired plants should be decommissioned ASAP.
@@daleharper5361 I agree that climate change mitigation is too narrowly focused on CO2. Since the actual goal should be to prevent the planet from warming. However the goal seems to more and more become to reduce CO2. Which is one way to prevent the planet from warming, there are other ways too however.
Personally, I'm more in favor of orbital megaprojects such as constructing orbital shields to block infrared light. A project such as this could be implemented by corporations in cooperation with governments. most crucially, it would not require behavioral change in all individual people, and the totalitarian restructuring of society to affect that behavioral change.
The reason the US looks so green in Sat images is because of the Front and Backyards of the typical American household
I'am from switzerland. Thanks to the alps we acually had nuclear reactors and hydro power / pump storage for decades. So less a problem for us i think : )
Most of your electricity is from France
@@pdeuart1306 I think you forgot to substract the exports from that number... But it is true that we run our pumped hydro plants with nuclear energy from France
The problem with these things is, the way the media present them as ideas and totally glosses over the details. Most of the public seems to think that pumped hydro is feasible with a small stream, five acres of pond, and a 10 or 15 foot change in elevation. Yeah maybe if you,re powering one energy-efficient home
Everything passive is big. Everyone needs to get their head around that. Fortunately, the earth is big too.
Yet surface area is an invaluable resource, so how much is too much depends on the size of the country..
Ireland is small, especially compared to any North American Countries..
So how much farmland? Fishing shores? Traversable land?
What is telling is that Nuclear power was ignored, because of the uneasy control the weapons industry has over it..
That Bill "I want to be the Antichrist" Gates is a sponsor, just adds the "You need to Unsubscribe Now" Cherry on top
Pumped-storage hydropower is the necessary supplementary system to efficiently use and store energy from the sun and wind that is only available at times ...
I still like Thorium as a better alternative to fossil fuel, the stuff is everywhere, perfectly safe to he around on it's own, reactors using it physically cant melt down without intentional sabotage, it's 100x more efficient with uranium with the majority of its byproducts also being safe. Not to mention you don't need multiple backup powerplants on cloudy/still days. Until we get fusion figured out and can run all the power we're ever going to need off of sea water or space ice if environmentalists freak out about the idea of using water as fuel.
You’re exactly right. Small footprint, safe and cheap. And they wouldn’t have to dig giant holes all over Ireland. What a mess.
I'm a huuuuge fan of nuclear (with thorium as a subsidiary of that) as our best option for long-term renewable energy. I think it will serve our existing infrastructure much better compared to widely distributed but low-producing means like wind and solar. My biggest issue with people on the renewables boat, is that the change in infrastructure will be extremely expensive to undertake. Switching power sources alone isn't as hard as the upheaval of a century + of infrastructure based around the way we use fossil fuels. This is doubly true for those who think we are going to replace residential gas with hydrogen.
@@adriansaidan1736 So natural gas has half the Co2 of coal. So why not convert the burners to natural gas now. It’s an easy swap and it’s very clean. Methane is 4 hydrogen to 1 carbon atom. Almost hydrogen. In the mean time we could be building liquid fuel thorium reactors. They will take a while just to get past red tape. There. We fixed the world.
Fusion will never be economical and existing fission reactors are more than capable of providing low cost safe electricity now. Thorium is not necessary.
@@garry8390 exactly. And the newest type 4 don’t use high pressure water for cooling. They don’t even need a containment vessel.
2:12 Workplace safety on the level that cost my grandfather a leg.
yeah dont sneeze!
Could you do a video on next generation nuclear reactors? They’ve been looking very exciting. Also, check out Ontario Canada grams CO2/KWH. That’s where I live
I just gotta say: BC can stuff it with their anti-nuclear drivel. Canada's gonna be leading the world in nuclear again. Or are we already. Ah whatever.
Nuclear is no longer economicly viable. Who wants to invest billions in huge paperweights lol.
@@baronvonlimbourgh1716 You're going to have to back that claim up and also explain why that is important when it comes to solving the climate change. You can't just put up wind turbines and solar panels and expect the power grid to work, that's what this video is about too.
@@baronvonlimbourgh1716 You really have no clue what you’re talking about.
Nuclear would SMASH "renewables" in to the pieces:
ruclips.net/video/V2KNqluP8M0/видео.html
As someone working in the hydro energy industry, I really liked and appreciate your video. Not only are the quality and informations top notch, I also liked the more detailed look on the turbines/generators. And most important, it will help to get the information out to the people, that this important technology exists! As in my oppinion, this is a technology that we should usw much more around the globe! Not only because I work in this industrie, but also because I think that it makes much sense seen globaly, to try to catch the energy spikes in the grid with pumped hydro! And get some 24/7 basic energy production with run-of-the-river power plants, which is my more specific sector.
Can you do one on liquid air storage? It seems to me that liquid air storage could solve most of the storage problems. It doesn't use a lot of toxic materials to make it, it actually cleans air and it doesn't need a lot of space.
If that refers to co2 storage, then the problem is that co2, even in liquid form, takes up more space than the fossil fuel it was produced from. Meaning we will run out of storage space before we make a meaningful dent in the problem.
@@Alexander_Kale Googling "liquid air storage" redirects to "Cryogenic energy storage" which makes more sense and explains the working principle better. Storing large amounts of compressed air is not cost effective because of the pressure vessels required. Storing a cold liquid at atmospheric pressure benefits from the square-cube law when scaling up. But I still doubt it can compete with electric batteries.
If Cleaner Nuclear Reactors were "allowed" by the weapons industry then this would be how some reactors would generate enough electricity to run Refrigerator units and pumps as as sink heat before a possible meltdown..
But you know, depleted uranium make Bigger holes in stuff
@@mennol3885 I am sorry, are you really suggesting we build giant refridgerators, requiring constant power input, to store the ginormous amounts of co2 produced on a global scale in an active system?
What do you think this is, Star Trek?
@@Alexander_Kale Haha, no of course not. It has nothing to do with co2. It is about temporary energy storage, not production. And I think the technology cannot compete with bateries in the long run, but I might be wrong on that and it is intetesting stuff.
8:40 Hahaha, the kettle peak! Them tea-drinkers :-D
Imagine depending on fossil fuels to power your electric grid.
_This meme was made by Brazil gang_
Bro don't be overly confident, you guys are destroying rivers and forests to build your hydro dams
Big dam destroy humans and nature hehe
@@rfldss89 this problem can be easily solved just by finding a better place to put the dam, the itaipu dam, the biggest brazilian dam, its placed on a very good place as its as precarious the condition before it. Would be a wrong if we build one on the amazon river, but thanks God that Brazil has many rivers
@@caorusso4926 LOL, Belo Monte says hi.
@@FastSloth87 i see nothing wrong on that, the land is from the federal government and every possible action was taken
Put them under the sea floor. Use electricity to pump water out and then let the water back in to make electricity.
Environmental concerns halting projects to address environmental concerns. Sounds like the paradox of our time
Exactly lol its like ‘dont use plastic its bad, use paper instead as it degrades’
Then ‘stop using paper you’re cutting down too many trees’
@@ultrascreens5206 In grad school (environmental engineering) we read a published research paper on the environmental impacts of paper vs plastic. It was interesting and broke down the number of plastic bags needs vs one paper and the electrical requirements to recycle both etc. Still came out nearly even, but the educational message that there is no magic bullet solution and improvement is the key.
@14:16 Closed due to lack of demand for energy? Is this bad planning or what? Storing energy is only required because of uneven 'green energy' supply. No mention of Nuclear power.
Nuclear power is still controlled by weapon industry.
No boom means no funds or cleaner advancement.
Nuclear power is stagnant and still stuck in the cold war.
Liquid thorium salt reactors would outperform "green" energy like a F1 racecar outperforms a Jalopy
@@johndee2990 Nuclear power was undermined by the left and the green movement, france changed over their entire grid to nuclear decades ago, we lost the momentum of development and know how because the same people spinning climate fears were doing the same against nuclear decades ago.
@@johndee2990 Not in Japan.
@@johndee2990 Also, I love thorium as muxh as the next guy, but the issue with MSRs is getting an affordable metal than won't corrode to contain it.
(Also, MSRs were invented to power a nuclear bomber, so the common thesis that we haven't made more progress on 'em is because of the Cold War is wrong - without the Cold War, we wouldn't have any progress at all - not every bad thing that happens is the result of a malicious conspiracy)
@@jeffbenton6183 yea that is true but their development was stopped due to political reasons and the fact they couldn't make nuclear bombs from them as easily, not the technical issues of corrosion(hasn't that been fix now? don't hear much about it anymore, hear more about needing funding and outdated regulations getting in the way?)
Let me see if I understand this: 1) Pumped storage is old technology with little prospect for technological improvement. 2) There are few new locations where it can be sited economically, and those are typically highly valued for recreation and wilderness. So they are going to face a lot of opposition. Especially considering that every existing facility is a visual disaster. 3) It is very capital intensive, with payouts on the order of decades.
Subsidies in the form of tax relief vary greatly from subsidies derived from taxation.
13:30 For the cost of 950 Mil and power of 292 MW 8:29 not including the cost of wind turbines and other power sources will be the same as 9 Billion for 2 GW of a modern nuclear power plant. Probably better to go nuclear.
You ok having every nation on world having access to nuclear power plants?
Iran would like you to sign this petition.
@@Minuz1 This is the question of Proliferation, it is a huge and convoluted topic where I am not strong at all.
You better tell me if it is economically or environmentally not viable and doesn't stand a chance to either traditional fossil fuel or green energy.
Besides that, we don't even need to dig into proliferation at all. I have just read wiki article Nuclear power in Ireland, it is said nuclear fission energy is prohibited in Ireland. Since the video is about Ireland, the case closed.
MAN POSTED 2 VIDS IN A WEEK POGGGGGG
GOAT
What have you been doing on your keyboard to make the G key so sticky?
@@philmatthews3537 you may not wanna know that
Phil Matthews CCi z da r
I think your argument against the subsidies argument was weak. Renewable energy receives far more than its share of subsidies relative to its output compared to fossil fuels. It doesn't matter though, because solar is cheaper regardless of subsidies. I think there is pretty concrete proof of this and showing it would at least force people to think twice about the subsidies argument.
Nuclear power-- the best energy source!
Not that I'm against it but it is incredibly expensive.
Will be great when the technology is affordable to use safely. It’s getting there.
@@RealEngineering I'm really excited for the day as well. Old nuclear tech... Works... Fairly safe... But stupid expensive to get up and running and could be safer
What energy is used to mine and refine the uranium?
I agree with you, btw.
Fossil generation getting more subsidies in total = renewable is more economical. I don't get it.
Corruption.
Not to mention he didn't compare subsidy per unit of energy produced. It would be clear that subsidizing fossil fuels is much more economical.
Simple the more economical renewables become the harder governments have to work to keep fossil fuels alive. Every government needs to keep fossil fuels alive what ever the cost to the tax payer. If they don't they might lose some party donors. That's not corruption that's just politics and business get used to it. But it won't cange much long term.
Nuclear gets the least amount of subsidies according this video, is the most reliable, zero emissions and yet wind and solar get touted as the solution to a clean energy economy
Because construction of reactors is longer than politicians terms sadly....
Nuclear gets more than enough subsidies as well, more than renewables in most countries. And no, nuclear has not zero emissions. The whole process of mining uranium ores and refining as well as the intense powerplant construction and storage of radioactive waste gives you around 90 -140 g CO2/kWh. For comparison, this is a lot better than modern coal plants with 1000-1100 g CO2/kWh and still better than gas plants at around 330-360 g CO2/kWh. But solar, wind and water power comes in at 10-40 g CO2/kWh. (www.stormsmith.nl/nuclearco2.html) With increasing rarity of uranium ores around the world, the CO2 expenses for mining are expected to rise to around 300g CO2/kWh after 2050. So please stop with the zero emissions bullshit, it is the easy argument for nuclear to compete with renewables but it leaves out 90% of what it means to get nuclear power.
Additionally, since Fukushima the cost per kWh in nuclear has risen from an estimated 700 Euros in 2010 ( "World Nuclear Industry Status Report 2013“) to around 5000 Euros because of safety standards and risks/damages/insurance costs. Estimated damages for Fukushima start at 187 Billion Euros, but are likely to be multiples of this. Even within a super rich country like Germany, the highest damage a insurance will cover are around 2 billion. It is basically a game of high risk, high reward until shit hits the fan and then everybody starts wondering how this could happen. Nuclear will only be cheap if the risks and problems with waste are ignored.
@@daleharper5361 both photovoltaic and battery productions are a mess, I am hoping for less toxic emissions there soon, too. CO2 aquivalents are a scary thing to be made aware of, expecially with fluoride-chlorine-hydrocarbons being the norm for coolants and past styropor foams.
Personally, I never heard of increased methane emissions in pumped hydrostorages, but I assume it has to do with expecially anaerobic sediments in the stroage reservoirs. But then, pretty much every lake, reservoir or river has anaerobic microorganisms with CH4 producing skills, so it does not sound like something very critical nor limited to pumping stations.
And yes, water vapor is a powerful energy storage and is an important greenhouse gas. But as hydroelectric powerplants usually are in regions of high water quantity and usually near rivers or lakes to feed the waterneeds, I would not expect the additional surface area to substantially increase the humidity or even the microclimate.
Do you have 5B dollars to pay for a new plant? Thought not...pay up or GTFO
zero emissions until decommissioned or an accident happens... not saying it's bad but i dont like tagging zero emissions onto it
Incredible how well they can predict wind patterns ahead of time.
The counter-argument against the subsidy argument is flawed because it looks at total subsidies and not subsidies per Megawatt, and specially not in percentage of investment.
For example if I subsidise 95% of all costs of 3d printing, it will amount to a smaller total amount than if I subsidise 40% of all costs of producing food.
Claerly, in the example above, 3D printing would be more subsidized than food production.
I am not saying that renewables are cheaper only because of that, not that they are only economic viable because of that. What I am saying is that the argument presented in the video is really flawed.
I think he meant to address that point, but he didn't make his reasoning clear. His argument seems to rely on the notion that when an energy company is subsidized, what's being paid for is the construction of new energy production facilities--and going by those rates, fossil fuels are subsidized more than renewables.
It's an interesting argument, but it ignores the concept of fungibility, and it doesn't seem to match how the report that he cites defines "subsidy", anyway. It's a complicated issue, and it would be nice if he refrained from making judgements of the intelligence or character of those who disagree with him.
@@mvmlego1212 I totally agree with you. He seems to make such an assumption, and if this was the case then his argument would follow as you pointed out. However this is not the case, he made a huge logical jump (maybe by ignorance of economics?) and his argument totally fails. There are two perspectives that we can take about subsidy, the proportion of the cost that the government pays, or the amount of money the government pays by a said quantity of the good.
These two perspectives can conflict, and therefore understand what each focuses on is important to debate about that.
@@mvmlego1212 Also, you are totally right about his behaviour. This was disgusting, a shame, since I really like his videos.
Obligatory comment calling out anyone who makes a video on renewables and doesn't mention nuclear energy once.
Nuclear energy technically isn't renewable.
@@garethbaus5471 Technically neither is the sun. 🙄
@@A_Box mic drop
yeah it's not renewable but it is clean-ish (saying that having worked on nuclear subs and lived near a shutdown nuclear power plant, Zion IL, that is kinda finally cleaned up after 20 some years)
@@Indpendent01 It's clean-ish in terms of greenhouse gases, the problem is we still haven't found a solution for the waste other than "let's bury it deep under the earth and forget about it", plus the issue of pollution in case something goes really wrong.
Deep in the heart of Alberta's oil production fields (traditional, not sands) sits a large reservoir that is being converted to pumped hydro. The reservoir was built in 1965 and the plans are to increase capacity for generation from 355 MW to 900 MW. The operator is closing down its oldest coal fired plant 150 km away this fall and will be closing its newest and cleanest coal plant at the same site (10 years old) in 4 years. I believe there is still a place for natural gas fired plants in the renewable future, but we definitely need to reduce them to the minority and get them to the point of being backups, instead of primary sources.
Energy = life,
The more energy the higher the standard of living and the less poverty. The less poverty the less unnecessary death.
Deliberately choosing to not use the most energy dense per £ invested sources is amoral.
It is choosing someone elses life over your feelings.
@@James-sk4db Are you arguing for or against renewables? Gravity battery or lithium ion?
@@kstricl Im arguing against anti-fossil fuel, but i'm all for renewables, so long as they are cost effective, hydro-electro and geothermal come to mind as well as nuclear.
If you have £1bn to invest in energy you should use it to use it to generate the absolute most energy possible as the more you produce the less scarcity there is in the rest of the world.
Gen 3.5 and Gen 4 nuclear are the answer
Renewable are a nice augmentation
It reminded me of my visit to Itaipu Dam. But each generator has 10 times the power of this one. It's really, really mind blowing.
Pumped Hydro and Hydro... Fk recognise a fooking massive difference in size FFS.
@@AKUJIVALDO I know there's a size difference!! So what? It reminded me of Itaipu and I commented. You don't have to prove you're smarter than everybody else in every comment.
@@danielquirco1 of course there is a difference. One is a damn DAM and other is a Pumped Storage. You might compare their basin sizes too.
3 size and type differences.
@@AKUJIVALDO actually, a hydro dam can and does serve as hydro storage battery for electricity... It's possible to pump water into the reservoir, in the event of excess electrical capacity... They are exactly the same thing!
@@growtocycle6992 except it isn't the "same thing", you potato.
Pumped storage is 2 reservoirs, used for producing peak usage of electricity(then water is pumped back with cheap night's electricity).
Dam is a DAM up river, for constant electricity production. And water runs off to the ocean/sea.
Worldwide subsidies seems like a disingenuous metric, last time I checked in the US green energy had similar amounts of subsidies as Oil and Nat gas.
They hide the lion’s share of the subsidies by enacting mandates
First video I've watched on this channel. Very impressed with the effort and depth of the video. Nice job!
What are the fossil fuel subsidies? I always hear this point but no one actually says what they are. However we all see direct subsidies handed out to consumers for purchasing solar panels and electric vehicles.
I want to see more nuclear power plants
Yes, but that would mean something that actually works and no one seems to want that. :P
Thorium is the future!
stalinium?
Thorium is the near future. Fusion is the future
Thorium 8s 25 years to late at this point.
This sounds like a game sometimes, it is unlimited, but not reliable or it is finite and powerful but also gives a health penalty
Yeah, otherwise there wouldnt be any "energy problem"
Its why understanding compromise is so important. A melding of Renewables, nuclear, battery storage and kinetic storage is required to end fossile fuels for good. There isn't a "good" ratio, because it will change based on the geographical point of reference. Arid countries could probably go almost full solar and be fine, but for example, a country like fance does not have consistent enough sun, wind or hydro to use that as a baseload, only nuclear energy fits the bill.
Understanding that a diverse grid is what is needed for a good transition is what doomed many transitions in the past that have actually lead countries to end up WORSE than where they started. Germany dumped its nuclear park and made a lot of efforts to dismantle it, both its plants and its knowledge base of plant building and operations in a moslty self destructive endeavour. They then tried to push for solar as a baseload, a nonsense for the environemental condition of the country. Now Germany is one of the worst poluters in all of europe as a result, because by dumping their nuclear park, they have raised their dependence on gas as a baseload. A predictable (and predicted) outcome.
@@mobiuscoreindustries Also, remember that German oil comes from Russia. That's why Germany today are not so strict when it comes to criticizing Russia
@@darnit1944 yeah, just political games being hidden behind "a good cause" as ususal. Its so easy to spot when politicians go on speech after speech on how they will take strong actions against climate change, and then evade questions when asked on how they actually plan on doing it. Just an easy way of building and selling influence
When you consider the utility of fossil fuels versus the cost they are significantly cheaper than renewables. To try to claim otherwise is dishonest.
and the problem is He nor any of these other liars who are pushing this wind and solar catastrophe will ever have to face any questions from anyone. never have to defend his ridiculous lies from any serious debate. any person who has done a cost benefit analysis on wind and solar would tear him a new asshole within 15 minutes. it gets so frustrating. i mean it seems like the more and bigger the lies the better with these assholes. He starts the video out with fossil fuels are subsidized more than wind and solar. hahaha makes me want to pull my hair out. this is not just a lie. it is like the anti truth. Fossil fuels are actually being forced to subsidise the wind and solar.
Bruh, 2 videos in one week? Make sure you sleep lol
We'd have unlimited energy if we weren't scared of nuclear plants
Carbon free, cheap energy just like France.
Up till about 20 years ago this was correct, but nuclear power costs way more per installed kWhr and takes way longer to construct than solar or wind at this stage, and this has been the case for some time. Also using nuclear would mean most countries are just swapping dependence on one group of despotic scumbags for oil to dependence on another for nuclear fuel, so it's not a good decision for any country that wants genuine energy independence.
@@peglor folks like you don't seem to know where rare earths and many of the elements come from that are used in "green" energy. Many if not most come from places with despotic scumbags.
@@peglor We could go carbon NEGATIVE right now if we put fossil fuel/wind/solar subsidies into nuclear like France. We're wasting time because of political reasons and the fossil/wind/solar lobbies trying to enrich themselves.
@@SwordFighterPKN The difference is you get the raw materials once and can keep recycling them to make more batteries/solar panels. They're not consumed irrecoverably by the process of being used to generate power while pumping more CO2 into the atmosphere like fossil fuels.
You've really overestimated how much you need. Probably closer to needing 4-5 total Facilities like this. Good summary though.
Here's where your calcs went wrong: At 10:00s you start talking about replacing fossil fuels with pump storage. You don't replace generation with storage, you replace it with alternative generation (solar, wind, nuclear, etc) ... Storage just helps smooth the output, since you can burn fuel as - needed, but the sun shines /wind blows when it wants to, so power has to be harnessed when the getting is good so it can be released when people turn their lights on. Then, at 10:40 you talk about needing 24hr generation. Both of these assumptions are taking about needing power generation, not storage capacity (and max power output of that storage) . You mentioned this, but your calcs didn't make the same assumptions. As long as there is a pretty good mix of generation (IE, half of your average capacity is available at any moment), having storage power output that can exceed ~half of the total consumption is all you need. The Average output of generation (not storage) over a ~10 hour period (twice the reserve capacity duration at max output) will have to equal total consumption + losses over the same time, but that's a generation problem, not storage.
I was thinking about that too. I'd love to see how the numbers work out assuming that generation comes from wind, and storage is 100% pumped hydro.
maybe he's assuming a worst case scenario at peak power consumption- no sunlight & no wind, at 5:30pm
@@davisburnside9609 yea, i think that's what he was trying to do, but it's a bit of a false dilemma. It's a hugely worst-case, because even in your scenario, you'd need 10hrs to start getting solar again, not 24. In any realistic conversion to renewable energy, your going to need some sort of continuous generation "base loading" to have a mix so you make the worst-case not so bad. (like nuclear, geothermal, hydro, etc). Then, you need to look at total carbon /energy footprint. If you can run completely on renewable energy 99% of the time, it's probably more environmentally sustainable AND economic to have some diesel/natural gas peaking plants / emergency backup generation to get you through "worst case" scenarios. Spending ~1B$/£/€ per install x 10 additional installs to get to 99.9999xx availability still doesn't completely eliminate the need for backups/emergency fossil fuel units (disaster recovery scenarios etc) , but those reservoirs cost TONS of concrete and steel (read Gates' book on the entrained energy in those materials), and represents burning of more energy than they will save; because you're in the realm of diminishing returns. What I'm saying is: even if the budget/willpower was there, building that much more than you really need is a bad environmental decision. I bring this up because the public and policymakers can easily swing too far the other way. Optimization is key to minimizing negative human impacts on our environment.
Grossly over-building to try to get to 100% "renewable" as an arbitrary goal is counterproductive in two ways:
First, it can end up requiring too much energy as I mentioned, canceling out a significant amount of environmental gain. Second, it makes the goal of minimizing or reversing human-caused environmental impact seem less achievable and causes hopelessness, which in turn motivates rationalization of conspiracy theories.
The goal of mitigating negative environmental impact is not nearly as far out of reach in practice.
So, don't calculate for "worst case", calculate for the 99% case and then come up with backup plans/mitigations/protocols for the edge cases - That's Engineering.
Under appreciated comment. Indeed it is about storage. And any location is limited by it's product of volume and height difference. And to calculate the required storage capacity the area between the graphs of production and consumption needs to be taken. And if, as you mentioned, keep gas powered energy production as backup for the ~1% of wind still and cloudy days than the required capacity is probably much less than 10h at max consumption.
And if you factor in that Ireland is really green and capable of producing methane gas biologically, than sourcing that amount of gas is a non-issue.
What needs to be considered is that a large surplus of energy generation from wind and solar will be required to replenish the (water) storage for times when W&S are not available.
Any prolonged windless and sunless days will soon deplete the limited water storage you have.
Nuclear power will be essential to make any renewable a major source of green electricity.
This is especially important now there is a growing pressure/demand for electric vehicles.
The increased need for electricity will place huge demands on its generation leading to the question, "How and when are you going to be able to charge your electric car and also keep the lights on?
Asking for a friend....
Smith Mountain Lake in Virginia is a great example of a pumped storage hydroelectric lake that provides a tremendous amount of energy for peak demand while maintaining a largely constant surface level. Check it out. Only fluctuates a couple feet under normal conditions.
The biggest problem in Norway for us not to use more water energy is because the climate activist, they always complain when we want to build a dam, road or so on.
This is from a Norwegian.
It’s the same in North America. The public is unwilling to give up their modern conveniences, but somehow think they magically come from thin air. 🤔🤨
These people clearly haven’t looked into the issue. I am assuming they are worried about salmon, because that is the most well known migrating fish that is affected by the dams in my area. There are salmon “flumes” where thy gather the fish at the bottom and suck them to the top hypertube style. Really cool system, has the potential to alleviate most issues with dams.
as they should do, any new infrastructure will come with its own unforeseeable problem
if we mention the problem as early as possible we can make a system that has as little of a problem as we can engineer
at least Norway is already producing like 99% of it's electricity and much of the general energy needs with hydro power already
@@skippy9214 They still oppose it even if it's just upgrading.
And as I like to point out they dam are ussaly built where the streams are more powerful and there's plenty of other places fishes can go.
I for one has supported rebuild projects and upgrades to the equipment we already got. To increase the power output. Still clime actevist are against that. Also not to mention we also got sea planets for it. But that's still not considered okay.
37 Turlough Hills, or 1 large nuclear powerplant to fully replace Ireland's power generation.
I hope ITER works
Nuclear needs backup power too. Makes no financial sense to go nuclear and I live in Ontario where our power is expensive nuclear
This wouldnt work in the real world because of politics. But Id like to see a video about pumped hydro using the already existing 100-meter difference between Lake Erie and Lake Ontario.
All it would take is an unnoticeable 15 to 20 cm across the 25,600 sq km of Lake Erie.
@12:05 There is a big issue.
Ontario has pumped hydro at Niagara Falls. So it does work exactly where you suggested.
That guy checking the meters underneath the spinning rotor!