The truth about battery-powered cities and renewable energy
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- Опубликовано: 13 июл 2024
- The truth about battery-powered cities and renewable energy - they could be closer than you think. Go to brilliant.org/Undecided you can sign up for free. And also, the first 200 people will get 20% off their annual premium membership. If we want to replace fossil fuels entirely, we need to build batteries that can store enough renewable energy to power entire cities for much longer periods. With liquid redox flow batteries, there's a viable path forward for city-scale renewable energy storage. But where do we currently stand with the technology?
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Thanks for making the video, it's a really interesting topic. I think new battery technology is cool, but it's really important not to underestimate the scale of the challenge here. The US uses about 11 million MWh of electricity a day, mostly from fossil fuels. To replace fossil fuels with renewables and store just 1 day of US electricity would therefore need almost 14,000 of the 800MWh vanadium plants of the type you described being built in china. For comparison the US only has about 1000 power plants producing 200MW or more (i.e. same power output as the vanadium storage plants). Most estimates I've seen suggest that for solar and wind to be reliable enough to not require natural gas backup would require 2 weeks of storage capacity: 2 weeks would require almost 200,000 of the 800MWh vanadium plants.
Tom,
at last, a touch of realism, the fantasists also forget the need for extra generation capacity to charge these batteries.
The problem are not even the short (2 week ) term loading/unloading cycles but the annual.
For many countries the amount of energy stored varies greatly over the course of the year.
Fortunately in the summer solar produces more and in the winter wind. Still for most countries that gives not an even scale.
In Germany you would need to store and release energy in a 12 months cycle.
If you do not want to waste massive amounts of energy (because you scrap it) you will need to store energy in spring and give it back in autumn.
You can only work around that if your production capacity is so high that you will meet your demand in low production months.
That could also be an option but you would have massive amounts of excess energy to use. Maybe for producing Hydrogen or something else.
Which is why we call them greentards. This will never ever ever ever ever ever happen. If you think it will, you don't understand capital markets.
Please for the love of God:
Energy: MWh aka Megawatt-hour
Power: MW aka Megawatt
Awesome video man! Finally, an update on the next stage of city-sized batteries that are ESSENTIAL for transitioning to renewables.
Thanks for watching!
I'm not impressed. For an impressive grid scale battery check out the Ambri liquid metal battery. Their battery is good for 100,000 full charge full discharge cycles. That's with only abundant materials in their battery. Needs a heater at startup but needs no cooling. Operating at grid scale it is self heating. And very efficient with performance similar to pumped hydro, but with the nearly instant synthetic throttle and exciter response times of all battery systems. You could call it a 300 year battery, but as a practical matter it simply will outlast the infrastructure it is built for.
@@tsamuel6224 Ah, Sadoway's stuff! I'm hoping it will get somewhere!
TJ Grant,
I keep hearing and reading about 100% renewables no fossil fuels etc. It's a fantasy it is not going to happen. Renewable generation is inferior power and the reality is, that due to technical reasons, it is not suitable for large scale grid supply. Why, apart from intermittency (which batteries will not compensate for, another pipe dream), they are asynchronous power sources, so cannot support the grid frequency which is a critical parameter to control, they have no inertia which large steam plants have, another characteristic that keeps the frequency stable, They contribute to lowering short circuit current for the grid which inhibits effective operation of grid protection systems. Wind, in particular, is very unstable at times because of the cube law relationship between wind speed and power output.
Their lifespan is far shorter than conventional power plants and their load factor, i.e. how much power you actually get as opposed to name plate capacity is small, so you need lots of them. and even then there are times when their output is virtually zero.
Germany has spent trillions of Euros and still they are having to build new coal stations. The large capacity of renwable generation has made little effect on their CO2 emissions, it simply is not effective or reliable. Not only that their elctricity costs are about the highest in Europe with 'free wind and solar'1
@@UndecidedMF Please change your intro music! It's so annoying!
Can you mention Cryogenic Air storage too? Currently Highview Power is building a 250MWh system in Manchester, England.
No toxic or rare materials required, no shortage of raw materials and half the price of Li-ion. Easily scalable and can be built anywhere.
Yes, its only 60-75% efficient but there are no chemical process involved, only physical.
www.energy-storage.news/news/fossil-fuel-plant-in-england-will-get-250mwh-liquid-air-energy-storage-make
Yes, very interesting solution. Just store air under pressure...
@@StefanvanderFange no, it's not pressurised, that's the whole point. Because it's a cryogenic liquid it doesn't have to be pressurised, just well insulated which makes containment much less expensive.
@@MrGonzonator Thanks. It's been a while since I've done physics, but getting gas to liquid can be done in 2 ways, as I recall it: either cool it, or put in under pressure. Or a combination of both ofcourse. Keeping it cooled seems to cost much more energy, than keeping it under pressure...
There’s an excellent video about it. It says recycling the heat generated during compression is important to its efficiency.
--
Liquid Air Batteries. Literally energy from thin air. Seriously. Literally!
ruclips.net/video/tMLu9Dtw9yI/видео.html
@@StefanvanderFange A gas over it's critical temperature cannot be compressed into a liquid. This is also the difference in the definition of vapor and gas. A vapor can be compressed to a liquid. A gas cannot be compressed to a liquid but can be turned to a supercritical fluid.
Good to hear you adding more depth to the videos with layers of sound! Very cool
*edit* ok maybe a BIT too much but still great video
I've never heard a beat like that from a wind turbine in real life. It's not good promotion, showing them making that kind of noise.
Glad to hear that energy storage battery technology is progressing significantly, let’s not lose sight of the reality that the energy storage capacity even if built out at an aggressive pace with improving technology is and will be but a small fraction of solar and wind generation capability for a long time. Further more , it is at least an order of magnitude too small to address issues such as seasonal variation of solar. (Example: I have a modest 14 Kw home solar installation. On an annual basis, it meets 90% of household needs, but only 20% during the worst 2 winter months. A pair of original-spec Powerwalls would easily address a day or so of this seasonal deficit, but clearly not the remaining 60 days of inadequate system production. That is worse than an order of magnitude shortfall between hypothetical system capability and need.)
Awesome video and level of detail on the topic. Thanks for putting all this dense information in one video!
Amazing video mate.....short yet very informative!
Thank you for making this video. Keep it up!
Always learn so much with your videos - thanks for all the time and research you do. Have a great day!
Really appreciate that. Hope you have a great day too!
I just wanted to say thank you for the very interesting videos :D
You need to tell us how much a battery might cost that could run New York City for a day. Something tells me that cost is out of sight.
Try Mexico City. Mind boggling>
Brilliant review once again Matt.👊🏼👊🏼👊🏼
👊🏻
Hello, I just wanted to say thanks for the content
after watching several vids of your channel, you have got me :-)
greetings from germany
martin teuber
I recently modeled the addition of storage for a local 1.5 MW wind turbine. With a couple of years of daily generation, the model showed that the size of battery to avoid blackouts is int the order of 500 MWh. This is some 5 times the largest battery in existence today.
This amount of storage for each wind turbine is inconceivable!
Fascinating!! Explain your modeling better. This is good info sir!!!
@@MrElifire84 Probably is that you basically need two weeks of storage for windpower to get past maximum becalmed incidents. 500MWh/1.5MW is 300 hours.
we could also have a system wherein a large proportion of average energy demand is met with nuclear energy. witch by nature is very consistent (mostly for safety reasons) where the remainder of typical demand is met by renewables with the excess stored and used in place of peaking plants. not a perfect system, but more attainable and would more than serve as a multi decade solution while the tech and infrastructure is further developed for an entirely renewable energy environment
6:27 That's 22.5 kWh of space heaters! I had one just like those when I lived in Europe.
Thank you, sir. I will share this on.
Awesome, thank you!
Thanks Matt , I learned something new about flow battery.
I enjoyed the sound of the battery. :)
Not sure how I missed this video before but I appreciate the fact that you got citations listed without having to log into something like Facebook.
"Everyone owning a phone" that reminds me of a blizzard meme.
That bald dude with his red shirt and one strap backpack is a legend. Your comment cracked me up, thank you.
That's a lot of really cool energy storage technology :)
Some good directions for battery technology.
Storage is extremely helpful for transitioning to renewables, particularly having a couple of hours, which, as you mentioned, is very fast, and can help with grid stability providing frequency regulation, voltage regulation, and synthetic inertia. Long duration battery storage would be very helpful too, and super interesting to learn about, BUT, you can do 90 or 95% of the transition without it, and we are nowhere near that. Storage is but one tool, in the tool box. Adding transmission, demand management, overbuild, and keeping some gas plants operational for that week or two when we are really short can get us way down the road. Might even be able to do power to gas, and either make methane, or potentially store hydrogen and use fuel cells. We'll see.
Any storage that is added to the grid will not only help shave the peaks, and peak prices, but will help decrease the number of times the price of electricity goes too low. It will be easier to add more renewables if you can get paid for more hours.
90 or 95% of the transition without storage is nonsense. That's what causes blackouts. Unless you have extremely fast throttle and exciter response times (lots of fossil fuel), you need storage.
@@tsamuel6224 We already have storage, and the rate that we are adding it is going up exponentially, but we are only around 20% renewables. Getting to 40% is not that big of a deal. A little bit of battery storage with the right power electronics can do amazing things, as Australia found out when they got their Tesla battery system at the Hornsdale Power Reserve. Frequency and voltage regulation. They can both add and take power, and some systems can also provide synthetic inertia. cleantechnica.com/2020/03/02/neoen-says-hornsdale-battery-has-exceeded-expectations/
Thanks Matt!
Thanks for watching!
Great information
How about doing a video on nuclear technology? It has the best potential to reduce carbon emissions by a long shot without destroying the environment.
A couple of videos ago I did touch on nuclear with my Thorium energy video. Definitely an interesting path towards cleaner energy.
It was a prettY good video too.
@@UndecidedMF Thorium will likely be further in future. Small Modular Reactors are being reviewed by regulatory agencies and could be licensed and online within this decade. Thanks for doing these videos!
Matt lots if thanks for informative lectures , i would like to know the name of the music you play at the intro.of your videos ?
Thanks , Rik . Netherlands .
Hi Rik! It's Ganja by Ooyy.
Thanks , love it
Thank you for this most informative video. I'd love you to get more to the nitty gritty of figures as well but I understand it must appeal to everybody. If you have data, perhaps you could put it in a spreadsheet and put down under your video a link to a directory with those data in the cloud? I have been in storage in 2018 but things are moving fast. Mass storage is not being funded well. In EU there is no venture capital like in the USA. People prefer to invest in real estate for 'stones and ground don't run away'. Feudal think of the Middle Ages but there it is right in the 21st century.
Hello, What's your opinion on cryogenic energy storage solution by Highview Power? It seems more eco-friendly and scalable than all the other storage solutions. Thanks.
I don't know abt energy density of li-ion batteries but the knowledge density of this video is off the roof!!
Great video !
amazing video matt. Thanks
Glad you liked it!
The last battery you mentioned, made from cheap, abundant materials, might be the Sodium Ion battery. a company named "Aquion" made it, that battery hasn't taken off yet, with the company fading in and out over the years. According to their specifications of batteries they actually had for sale on the market would last ~3,000 cycles, but, it had a high equivalent series resistance, making it a long term storage option. (it could not be charged or discharged quickly) The only reason I don't have them, is because the total levelized cost per kWh of electrical energy storage was more expensive than Lead Acid, and Lithium Iron Phosphate. They were bulky, but that's fine for stationary energy storage applications like renewable energy.(wind, solar)
OMG!!! The energizer bunny just got arrested! He was charged with battery.
If it's a Sodium Ion battery, he could be charged with salt-in-battery!!🤣😂😁
that was such a textbook sample of a dad joke! :D
@@TheyCalledMeT and yet, the joke is still very much alive.
nice one
@@vincentrobinette1507 :) good one
as we have just seen demonstrated, fossil fuel burning slows so does the rain fall and cloud cover , therefore solar gets more productive = a feed back loop that's useful for once. Also liquid air / compressed air energy systems are starting to get the attention they should have gotten a very long time ago. Well done Manchester UK
I knew a young boy named Ferrell when I lived in the Philippines in 1956-1957. I was 9 and I think he was a year younger. If you are related to him, say hello for me. We were both "Air Force Brats" as we called ourselves. I enjoy your shows.
Flow batteries look promising for large scale energy storage. Please keep on sharing as the technologies evolve because we are all interested in the various energy storage options you have shared in the last year
I frequently see videos about batteries, and all the potential new designs that appear to still be years away from being used. However, if the point is easy to scale energy storage, then I think CAES is going to be a major player. Highview Power is a current CAES company that is operating in the UK, and just contracted to build a plant in the US. I'd love to see a video on this that would explore some pros and cons of this system!
Outstanding review of the various battery technologies and potential developments
Thanks!
Thanks Matt, an interesting dive into the nascent technologies trying to solve the grid level storage conundrum!
Many here comment on the sheer size of the storage required, for ever increasing energy requirements, a problem that I suspect will never go away.
My background is physics and engineering. Despite the put down of "It's always 50 years away" which has been the case for my whole adult life, I believe that in the end fusion power is the only truly viable longterm solution, unless we can halt our almost exponential growth of energy requirements.
This area has been starved of funding almost since its inception, which of course is one of the reasons that it is taking so long. I've watched documentaries where, highly qualified and experienced physicists and engineers are working out of small industrial units, using materials scavenged from past research at universities etc. Astonishing given the money poured into vanity projects all over the world
For instance in the UK our government spent $20 Billion on a track and trace app (which did not work) for coronovirus and a further £75 billion on a high speed rail link to shorten a journey time of 1.5 hours by 15 minutes, and yet only announced a grant of $275 million into fusion research over 5 years!!!
ITER in the south of France is an international collaboration for fusion research, which although it will not produce commercially viable electricity, will hopefully solve most of the problems facing this technology.
The other thing I have noticed from your videos is the speed at which technology is evolving in the energy storage and generation area. Often it seems that just as a technology like Vanadium flow is poised to enter the mainstream, along comes a newer tech that promises more, better or cheaper solutions, at which point I suspect that the projects in the pipeline for that technology either stall or collapse due to a lack of funding.
A classic example of this is the nuclear power plants developed in the UK back in the 60's and 70's, each one of which was effectively a prototype, resulting in a hard to manage and maintain generating capability. At some stage, in order to get some useful energy out of a system the decision has to be taken to standardise the product and go with it, warts and all, then you have a known set of problems with that design that can be corrected in all the instances of that product rather than needing s different solution for each instance.
Hey Matt. There is an energy storage company called Ambri that is about grid scale storage but I haven't heard an update about them in a bit. Can you look into them and tell us what you think.
Another option is to invest in thorium reactors.
Ding ding ding!! Right answer!!! Read my separate comments and the responses to this video and some others. You are correct sir.
I've been following Ramez Naam for years on the falling cost of batteries. At one point a few years ago he said the trend on batteries was a 20% drop in cost per year. While learning about all the different chemistries is fun, massive adoption obviously depends on lifecycle cost. The $80/kwh/3000 cycle batteries that were hyped in the news recently would dip below $0.03/kwh/cycle, which, combined with solar, could challenge natural gas right now. What's really exciting is when solar+batteries become cheaper than the _just the fuel_ for fossil fuel power plants (meaning you'll save money shutting down an existing plant even if it has plenty of life left and there aren't carbon taxes yet).
Thanks Matt, very positive video, even with the negative puns
MATT , could you look into cryo-air battery technology by High View Power. It appears to reuse well understood gas liquefaction technology in a new way. Stores energy for weeks and supposedly cost a fraction of the cost of lithium ion batteries at large scale. Currently , the company is building plant [ not a pilot plant ] in Manchester England.
Promising and exciting.
I want to reinforce the question traveller asked below. How about Liquid Air or Cryo storage large scale batteries. All the articles I find on this have no depth. They don't explain how it deals with the heat of compression or the chill of decompression. How they deal with the fact that each gas liquifies at different temperature. Also why wasn't it done before? What new development makes it practical now? I would love to see you go into this subject in depth.
Appreciate the shout out for that. Several folks have hit me up about that. Adding it to the list.
Good questions. Apparently now they store the waste heat created when compressing air and use it during decompression so the system is more efficient. Also, simply by building such storage near some place that requires cooling or produces waste heat allows both to save energy. Given AC is one of the main energy users, replacing it with few pipes that bring cold air to every apartment building in the city would save even more money than simply using the liquid air for energy storage to run the AC with cheaper electricity.
Why now and not before? Money, usually. It helps that we now have more push towards getting rid of fossil fuels and especially the peaker plants, renewables have proven they produce far more power than doubters have claimed, and various prototypes that have been in operation for decades in some cases show that energy storage also works and becomes even more economically viable as fuel costs and price of energy rises.
But the main issue is what can you get right now at cheap price. Tesla had a bunch of batteries ready to sell so they could get Hornsdale operational in couple months because they had made them for EVs and Powerwalls, but as useful as those megabatteries are, we need few thousands of them all over the world by yesterday and Tesla is not going to be able to produce that many any time soon. Concrete and steel are far cheaper and last longer than even simplest chemical batteries and the technology does not need to be more efficient than Tesla's best batteries to be useful, it only needs to be cheaper than the expensive peaker plants and available now instead of "maybe in few years we develop a cheaper chemical".
Hi! Can you do a video on alternatives to battery storage systems such as compressed air energy storage. I believe this is a viable solution for large scale grid storage.
Reminds me of the articles from Popular Mechanics or Engadget. Seems like every week there'd be a new fangled battery that promises the sun and the moon. We're still waaaiting!
how are we doing on the problem of long-distance electricity transportation (e.g. from sunny/windy production areas to consumer areas)?
High voltage DC transmission lines are a proven technology. The problems are political ones. Nobody seems to want them running near their house and nobody is willing to fund the building of extra lines.
I was half expecting one of those "renewables and batties won't work around the world..." videos, but this is very insightful and yes, we do need to research new technologies, in the end if we have the technology today then great! we can deploy it and when it advances we can replace it at the end of it's lifespan, if we don't then we can at least try to reduce the effects of the damaging sources of energy while we develop technologies.
Great review but only considers chemical batteries. For static applications ‘mechanical’ batteries that store energy by e.g. liquefying a gas (large scale Liquid Air batteries just being trialed now) have a lot of scope too.
The big heavy weights made grandfather clocks work fine. Perhaps for some stuff we should go back to that.
A very small but crucial mention in this video is the power of patents to hinder progress, either intentionally (fossil fuel industry) or otherwise. Intellect, when we desperately need these ideas for the greater benefit of humanity, shouldn't become property. Rewards should be wider than simple exclusive monetary gain.
Hi Matt, the solution for any problem with energy is the hydroelectric riverless.
It can generate as much you need will without rivers.
Do you mean pumped-storage? They do have a lot of limitations regarding geographics
I see a mix of storage being the future. Computers have a variety of types of memory in the various components that are optimized for a task. I could see home/ small commerical packs providing on sight power to peak shave while flow batteries store seasonal power from wind/solar for uses weeks/months later.
I also fall into the “it’s going to be a mix” camp. I really don’t see one technology being “the thing.” It’ll most likely be a combination of a bunch of things. Thanks for watching!
In the animation at 4:45 the ions are going the wrong way. The ions need to flow from the anode to the cathode, same as the electrons do.
Lithium is a pretty common element, new techniques & mines to extract it will reduce it's perceived rarity.
As for cobalt, latest research indicates it's only along for the ride. New techniques of how to put the battery together can essentially remove it's requirement entirely.
Hi Matt (or anyone informed on the subject)
what about the residues left from the batteries? are they toxic? will they be a bigger problem in the future if we rely on batteries too much?
Recyclable yes, about 80%. The rest is just as toxic as when it was an ore. If coal is radioactive (some isn’t) then the coal ash is radioactive too. Which would you prefer to have your school built on?
Add to your list: Liquid Air Energy Storage also called Cryogenic energy storage en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryogenic_energy_storage#United_Kingdom
www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/oct/21/uk-firm-highview-power-announces-plans-for-first-liquid-to-gas-cryogenic-battery
👍
Highview Power is the most promising of all the energy storage technologies. Batteries and Redox Flow can't simply scale. Mechanical Energy Storage systems like LAES ,CAES and Pumped Heat Energy Storage are the only scalable solutions.
I appreciate the thoughtfulness of the videos and information presented but the following statement needs some explanation and follow up: "Its taken around 40 years for lithium ion to reach the state we are at right now. But We don't have that kind of time to wait for grid scale storage to mature." Why don't we have that kind of time for large scale batteries? The entire video seemed to present clear and logical information on the topic with backing information outside of that statement.
Thank you.
Thanks as always, Ron!
promising tec. IMO usage might be a cycletime of a few days. For long term cylces, like seasonal storage, my money is still on P2X like methanation.
Thanks for the video, quite illuminating. Bottom line is that absent a significant breakthrough in battery technology, renewables won't supply the majority of the worlds energy needs at scale or reasonable cost. If one of these technologies takes off it will certainly be a game changer, but for now hydrocarbons are going to be doing the majority of the heavy lifting.
Chemical batteries are not the only solution to large scale energy storage. There is gravity storage which you alluded to with pumping water, but you can lift other things. There is also phase change storage and liquid air storage is already viable, neiither of which require long, complicated development.
4:06 she couldn't park more far from the charging point 🤣
What about more mechanical battery tech, like Gravitricity’s energy well system?
What about just using excess electricity for the electrolysis of water to produce hydrogen, and then burning the hydrogen in off-peak hours to generate steam for turbines or other methods of electricity generation? Would be a cheap stopgap solution untill cheap scalable solid state batteries become available. Sure would be less efficient than batteries, but much cheaper. Could you do a video on that? Maybe compare efficiency rates for all the possible technologies?
I'd like to hear what you think of Ambri's new liquid metal grid storage battery. Cheap and abundant material and long lasting.
Great video! There are also non-chemical energy storage approaches, like the stone/concrete based heat storages that can store large amounts of energy by heating stone, and later producing steam for retrieval.
A big tank of water is better than concrete. Water can be pumped to the heat exchanger.
Ken Smith the idea is that heated concrete can store tons of heat, which can be transferred to water to power turbines as needed. Water alone doesn’t store that much heat.
@@chrisdistant9040
Water is has about the highest specific heat going.
www.engineeringtoolbox.com/specific-heat-capacity-d_391.html
Water is waaaaay better than concrete on this.
@@kensmith5694 Huh you are right. There must be a reason Siemens and others use concrete or volcanic rock to store energy though. Maybe the reason is to keep the pressure during storage low, so only when they want to power a turbine, high pressures convert to kinetic/electrical energy.
@@kensmith5694 www.siemensgamesa.com/products-and-services/hybrid-and-storage/thermal-energy-storage-with-etes
Nice video and good subject. For energy storage, I still prefer capacitors over batteries.
@@memberwhen22 I know they don't have as much energy density as batteries. However, they last almost forever, allow for fast charging, are easy and cheap to make and there is no hazardous chemicals or hazardous waste.
Dennis Tucker
They really are amazing!!! If we could just get their energy density higher. Latest I saw was the best are approaching the energy density of lead acid batteries. Not to close to Lithium ion yet.
However, grid scale storage is a different matter!! We don’t need to move or Propel a stationary grid battery so size and weight hardly matter! And the power rate for both charge and discharge coupled with unlimited life seems like a great fit for grid scale storage! I wonder why capacitors aren’t used more? Anybody know? Matt? Is it cost?
As a home builder here in Canada, I would say that insulation is the most important battery in this country. No matter what the heat source is for your home, or cooling source in summer, insulation will keep your home warm or cool for much longer. The materials needed to insulate are the most common materials on the planet and they work for hundreds of years without any added energy when installed properly. No it is not a sexy solution but it is so very important to reduce the demand for energy while maintaining a good quality of life over the long run.
Yes, "rock wool" is really good stuff. Foam is better but costs more.
For windows, "nothing works" as in two sheets of glass held apart with small glass spacers and a vacuum is the way to go.
Nearly any nation could make a better future for its people by making those upgrades today.
I loved the occasional crickets in the background. Great video.
What are your thoughts on zero point energy sources? (Dr Steven Greer)
"zero point energy" is the term for the minimum energy that can be in the components of an atom. This energy can never be taken out of the atom so it is simply never available to use. Many folks have adopted the term to "baffle with BS" about their various scams and cons. Sadly this has lead to a common disinformation effect that ends up holding back alternative energy work.
The Hornsdale expansion completed in April and my understanding has been operational since then and is now rated as 150MW/193.5 MWh. Tesla project with has PG&E project should be underway by now and initial targets for 182.5MW/730MWh with option to expand to 1.2 GWh. And there are other large projects Tesla has planned/proprosed and/or been accepted. To be honest today we have plenty of energy more than enough. A major part of the problem is the majority of buildings are low performance. Probably should do a video about Net Zero and Passive home construction. Building or upgrading to passive home & commercial construction with only minimal increased costs can probably reduce energy needs in the country by half if not more (if excluding electric vehicles).
In order for renewable energy to replace fossil fuels the cost per kWh has to be close to the same as fossil fuels and as reliable. Next video: How to use renewables to power an aluminum production plant.
Great video as usual, but the sound was distracting (crickets, typing on a laptop).
Appreciate the feedback. I’ll do better next time.
Undecided with Matt Ferrell, thanks. Your videos are great. I dance like an idiot whenever the theme music comes on (solid choice!). 😂
How can we address the heat waste of all these transitions? Conventional power plant has a 66% waste heat? Love the technology.
If the intention is to run air conditioning each evening, batteries suit short daily use. If the intention is to replace natural gas then weather events lasting a few days is more typical of pumped storage. Maybe multiple solutions for multiple circumstances?
5:50-6:00 Gee that sounds like solar panels.
I’ve been a proponent of flow batteries for years. We should save lithium for applications that require light weight and portable power.
I see flow batteries as a park of the distributed generation grid concept
What are the energy densities of the most promising solutions? Energy storage for large cities seemly would take up vast amounts of space.
Imagine a "big box store". Make that a battery and you have enough for about 100,000 homes.
🤩🤩🤩🤩 need more Vedios like these
The problem is that Tesla's Powerwall is still quite expensive because of the need to use lithium-ion battery packs. A better solution is going with less expensive means of power storage like molten salt batteries, which is less of an issue since you don't have size limitations like you have with electric vehicles.
Another battery technology is the Liquid Metal Battery from Ambi, developed out of Dr. Donald Sadoway's group at MIT. Cheap components and virtually unlimited life.
Matt, Your content is so good. Have you seen Graham Stephan. He’s great and ruthlessly with a flair of humor asks for likes on every episode....and it works. You deserve a lot more likes. Maybe you could use a little of what works for him, in your own way/ watered down. U rock. I appreciate what you do. May may enjoy watching some of his posts on how much money he makes from his posts. It’s amazing.
Batteries are a major concern and we need more of them. But it is also important to realize that if we need to fire up those old gas, oil or coil generators few weeks a year, we still reduce 95% of our carbon emissions so we may not need to substitute all our energy needs on batteries. Maybe only 95%.
replacing peaker plants makes sense .. replacing base load plants with solar/wind and battery storage (for the low production times i.e. night and or no wind) is beyond ineffective and even a net negative for the environment .. so replacing base load coal/gas with water or fusion power plants (.. which don't exist yet) sure i'm all in! Untill then .. replacing coal/gas isn't an option without quadrupling the electricity bill whilst effectively damaging the environment (the scale of required battery parks is so enormous .. their production/construction and later deconstruction/recycling would cause more problems/toxic waste/pollution than letting regular power plants run for another 2 decades)
An inconvenient truth..sadly
Could you please do a video on grid size? For example Australias NEM grid covers the east half of the country. It's size means it's always sunny or windy somewhere on the grid. Where is the balance point between over building generation and the need for storage?
Also:
Places like the US have enough spread to always have sun on parts of it.
In many places a long line of windmills placed north to south will always have some wind.
Ken Smith - Huh ??? Are you actually saying that at, say 2am on the East coast of the US, there is sun in some parts of the rest of the country?? Really?? What planet are YOU on??
@@Nicholas.T
I am from planet earth.
I'll let you calculate timezones
sunrise-sunset.org/us/atka-ak
Ken Smith - Ken, I was talking about the contiguous USA of course. Hawaii and Alaska hardly count when it comes to generating electricity from solar because it is nigh on impossible to economically deliver the power to the other 48 states. In the middle of winter, Alaska, for example, has very little daylight hours (4-6 hours on average), let alone at night!
@@Nicholas.T
My initial comment was made figuratively about the sun shining. I was referring to the cloud cover situation. Still, taken literally as you seemed to want to do, it was still correct.
I would love to see a video from you about electric aircraft with batteries, hydrogen and fuel cells.
👍
@@UndecidedMF YES! me too!
Jason Bowman Jason, have a look at fuel cell powered aircraft. In California there is an electric plane that will fly 500 miles. It will only need a small battery. The hydrogen can be made at the airport. It can be cheaper to manufacture and run than a conventional plane. I am hoping it is the future.
I’m an aviator by trade. Real Engineering did a great video on this. I Have a Tesla and have run some numbers on this topic myself wondering why not electric airplanes? Bottom line, Battery powered electric airplanes is a pretty hopeless idea for any commercial application similar to what we currently do in airline traffic or cargo. Stop reading here if you don’t want to see the numbers but the numbers flesh out why. Bit long comment tho.
First thing to understand, one of the primary engineering factors to consider for aviation is weight. That means the energy density of your “fuel” is critical. Aviation kerosene has an energy density of about 46 mega joules per kilogram. Batteries? Only about 1!! That’s a 46 to 1 advantage! Yeah, bad! So how do electric cars get away with it? Efficiency and weight trade offs. Internal combustion engines are around 25% efficient taking that stored energy and turning it into motion. 30% at best. Electric motors? Above 90% efficient! That moves the advantage from 46 to 1 down to only 15 to 1. Still bad but better. My Tesla has a battery that weighs around 1000 pounds. It stores about 2 gallons worth of equivalent gas energy. My Corolla has a gas tank that stores 10 gallons and only weighs 70 pounds or so. Advantage Corolla. My Tesla has no transmission and small and relatively light electric motors. My Corolla has an engine and transmission that come up with a total drivetrain weight of around 800 pounds. Advantage Tesla. You can probably see where I’m going with this. Trade drivetrain weight in Corolla for battery weight in Tesla. The efficiency of the Tesla electric motors means that with that 2 gallons worth of energy, it can still go almost as far as my Corolla on a full tank. Even still the Tesla is somewhat heavier but on a road, who really cares.
Now to aviation numbers. Modern turbofans are not as efficient as electric motors, however they are much better than motor vehicles engines. Turbofans approach nearly 50% efficiency. So instead of going from a 46 to 1 advantage to 15 to 1, there is only a reduction to 23 or so to 1. Then factor in that in a modern jet aircraft the relative weight of fuel to overall weight is dramatically higher than in motor vehicles because the aircraft is made to be structurally very light so it can fly and also go farther. My Corolla has 70 pounds of fuel for a 2800 pound vehicle giving a fuel to weight ratio of 40 to 1. Fuel is nothing compared to total weight. My Boeing 737? Caries around 46,000 pounds of fuel. Total vehicle weight? Depends on passenger count but typical is around 150,000 pounds at takeoff. That means my fuel to weight ratio is close to 3 to 1. So if I wanted to take my 737 and make it run on batteries and go as far as it currently can with electric motors and account for their increased efficiency etc etc, I would need a total plane weight with batteries of around, ...wait for it, ....about 1,150,000 pounds!!!! Basically multiplying the aircraft weight by more than 7!!!! Yeah, it’s crazy! Simply not feasible with current battery tech.
Show me a battery that has about 10 to 15 times the energy per weight, than maybe we could start talking about electric passenger aircraft. Until then... we need liquid fuels! Does that mean we need to pollute with CO2? Naw. We could use large amounts of cheap electricity to generate aviation and other fuels from captured CO2 and other materials thereby creating a net zero CO2 sum game.
So where to get cheap and abundant electricity? Hmm?
Yup. Nuclear again folks.
@@MrElifire84 Thanks for all that analysis. I am optimistic, maybe too optimistic. New battery technology will come, they will get more kWh/Kg. I think making hydrogen at the airports from renewable electricity is a big plus too. Consider Norway (frantic EV promoters) - they have said that at some future date, local short haul trips must be made with electric aircraft. BTW I once has a Tesla, I have a better EV now.
Learn how to use less power is the first step, then we'll be able to reach out goals.
It’s not one or the other, it’s both!
Yes, 3 great tips are: insulate, insulate and insulate
Europe is miles ahead of the USA in reducing usage, due to crippling energy costs! Maybe add more tax to energy in the USA to motivate people to insulate / reduce usage!
@@Muppetkeeper - Carrots and sticks.
Not likely, the developing world uses orders of magnitude less energy than the US per person.
As these countries develop, billions of people will demand more and more power, dwarfing what they use now. Its not possible to achieve global equality of opportunity whilst reducing overall energy use.
The only hope is to ensure renewables and storage are the most economic options for those nations, and avoid the heavily poluting expansion phase of industrial growth which plagued the developed world in the past.
'Liquid Air', is probably the grid scale storage technology you're looking for.
@NotTheCIA I.think Already being built! www.bbc.co.uk/news/amp/uk-england-manchester-53097208
There's many other ways for storage. To rely on just batteries which are very expensive is not the way to go. A combination of pumped, gravitational, thermal, air inflation and batteries are just some that already exist. Looking forward to a cleaner future.
I am surprised you did not mention the sodium and nickel chloride batteries developed at MIT.
LiFePo4 is a better storage alternative than Li-Ion, especially in small scale like homes. It's more expensive though. We need EV manufacturers to start adding V2H in cars.
Roger Starkey
I can see you’re a Tesla fan. Nothing wrong with that! I am too. I own a model 3. Amazing vehicle. And Tesla and Elon’s Solar roof is brilliant. But, we do have to be realistic. And what I’ve said in our other exchanges on other comments to this video still stand. Renewables are great. Just not great enough. We need Nuclear in a big way.
Ha! I hope so.
I can understand the need of energy density for portable stuff, like phones or vehicles, but energy density is not a big factor when we are talking about static batteries in the outskirts of cities where space is not a problem. Let's dump the energy in the cheapest battery type , no matter how much it occupies.
The lead acid battery is a cheap technology, but we will need to open dozens of lead mines to supply the material. That wile increase the cost of lead as demand will surge over that of supply. lead will be like silver price wise if that were to happen, no longer cheap.
Did you look at AMBRI and Dr. Don Sadoway out of MIT? Are they making any progress in this field?
YES! All the alt-energy 'tubers either don't know about this tech, or perhaps have knowledge that I don't, because none of them seem to cover it. It seems like the most promising new battery tech to me.
TLDR on AMBRI's tech: It's an electrometallurgical battery. You pump huge amounts of energy in, and the metals de-alloy. You draw power out, and the metals alloy with each other..
Pros: Virtually limitless cycles with extremely little loss of capacity over it's life, inexpensive materials
Con: High operating temperature means it's more lossy than other technologies.
The thing is: we were so desperate to make cheap renewable energy production, that we forgot about cheap storage.
Redox batteries look promising for stationary grid level batteries, as long as the demand keeps growing the technology will get cheaper.
But without major increase of cheap energy production there wouldn't be so much demand for cheap storage. The real issue is companies and politicians refusing to improve the grid infrastructure, as we could simply build loads of renewables in best locations and power the whole world with them if there just were enough cables to transmit the energy.