So I have some big news. I have joined forces with Wendover Productions, CGP Grey, Kurzgesagt and many more EDU friends to start our own video streaming platform. www.watchnebula.com. We currently have some original content from Isaac Arthur, Polyphonic and Real Life Lore/Second Thought online. I will be adding my own Nebula Original series in the next month or two. This platform was created to remove the creative shackles that the algorithm places on creators. I want to be able to make more military content without worry of demonetisation. I want to experiment with new ideas without worry about my views being affected. This platform is going to allow me to make more content for you!
@@riparianlife97701 1:40 Here he briefly mentioned solar power. Actually solar only become relevant as it's implemented in a concise way with well planned installation. Rooftop is very irregular because not all the house or building have the same height or have a good orientation toward the Sun for peak energy capture. As explained by the video one way to offset peak demand is that each household can storage enough energy to satisfy their own demand by way of a battery storage that charge when the grid is off the peek demand and electricity is easier to generate and kick off when the grid is saturated.
azmanabdula, because it’s a terrible idea. Hydrogen is a nuisance to store and if even less efficient at storing energy than batteries. Real Engineering even has a video about the problems.
California: Let's build an electric high speed rail to provide green public Transportation statewide! Also California: we're gonna build it from Bakersfield to Merced
Germany: let's go carbon free also Germany: shuts down nuclear energy plants also Germany: without nuclear energy, we can't rely purely on renewable energy. We need to further use coal and oil
Cali is strange, no doubt about it, but often 15-20+ years later what they do is followed up by midwestern america. We probably would not have the mass of electric cars we have now if it weren't for their governor back in the 80s mandating 2% be non petrol vehicles.
Yeah I'm annoyed that slipped through. The rest of the script has the correct terminology and I calculated most of the figures myself, so I clearly understand the difference.....I'm just a dumbass sometimes when writing quickly.
Just like solar water heating panels on my roof in Orlando, FL Solar electric panels HEAT the area over these panels as much as 10 F!! I did this experiment on July 15th, 2008, with thermometers mounted 5 feet above on my boat roof with no panels next to my home roof with both solar water heaters and solar electric panels. I see solar panels as causing global warming??? LOL By the way, I switched thermometers and the results were the same the next day!
@Ramen Lover I figured out what I saved with the solar electric panels and the cost to buy them/install them/maintain them (the electrical wire connections corroded often with weather/high temps/sun deteriorating the plastic covering) that I did do better than break even but not by much! I bought the the highest output what was at the time most reliable solar panels 1,200 sq ft total. . I found it to be a project that would result in bigger savings and was greatly disappointed. The pool solar heater was a great success though.
They better start training rickshaw operators for when AOC plan to wreck the trucking industry, petroleum industry, have massive unemployment, with her "no fossil fuel" plan she conceived while in the lunatic asylum with Greta. The highways will be jammed with rickshaws headed to Walmart with consumer goods instead of 18 wheel trucks.
5 Billion to build a battery that will last maybe a decade, or 15 billion for a nuclear power plant that produces 5 times the energy every hour than what that battery can store, and will produce that for the next 60 years. Yeah not absurd at all....
I wonder if California has any reasons it is uncomfortable with a sizeable increase in nuclear power, maybe some kind of fault line that goes through the state. Nah, everyone knows that earthquakes have never been a problem in California or nuclear power.
@@isnochaos Just as you can make a building earthquake resistant, you can do the same for a nuclear power plant. Lots of increases in technology in the field recently. I wouldn't expect any building from the 60's, 70's or 80's to be earth quake resistant, so why expect power plants to be? They need to focus on retrofitting and building new plants with new structure standards.
Yeah energy wise nuclear is the best.. The only bad part about nuclear is the worst case scenarios.. If shit hits the fan one day, things can get very nasty. It makes since for desolate places, but for California and their huge population and bad fault lines... It might be best to avoid
The stupid thing is making those batteries out of lithium ion. Salt water batteries exist. Sure, they're not often used because they're not as compact, but you don't need a high density, lightweight battery if it isn't. Going anywhere. Just shove several floors of saltwater batteries underground and call it a day.
It would really be foolish to remove Nuclear entirely. It has been stagnating in innovation since the 70's. It needs improvements but it also needs investment for those improvements.
Yeah. Kurzgesagt did an episode of Nuclear energy iirc, where they mentioned that there are loads of better solutions to do nuclear (Like thorium) but investors want to see results rapidly, which is _seriously_ not how Atomic Science works.
Geothermal kind of does, in the sense that you want to generate the power now and use it later - you won't overload if you just shut it off now, but you'll need to store it for later somehow. The problem doesn't exist for hydro though, because hydro _is_ a battery.
@rafael Perez Just FYI, more radiation has been released by fossil plants than has ever been released by nuclear power (barring the Soviet f-ck up that was Chernobyl.) And the environmental impact of nuclear waste is far less than the environmental impact of fly ash and other combustion byproducts. Fossil plants release their waste while nukes contain it.
True. And assuming wind will always normalize each point is a dangerous assumption. Both these points are probably well outside the scope of this video, but is anyone actually crunching the numbers or is California just going to blunder it's way to greenness?
Not necessarily. If you spread out the solar installations across different locations you may expect less variation from less impact by local weather patterns.
Nuclear is a good measure for filling the gaps. And sure the waste is a problem, but letting that hold back what really is one of the best energy generation methods would be just dumb. Since it's a problem we can work around. Having a lot of the grid be renewable power sources is good and ideal. But we are simply stuck from a practical stand point when it comes to filling in the gaps. And if we have to go and use a non renewable method, nuclear is the best option.
@@leonst99 There's much better ways to do nuclear that are in development right now. They're currently hamstrung by regulation due to their designs being radically different from the types of reactors that the regulations were built around.
@@leonst99 Yeah true, it's expensive but their main goal is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Having just a few modern nuclear plants (which are safe) you could have them as backup for when renewables can't meet demand.
France receives about 75% of their energy from nuclear and use second generation reactors that can reuse nuclear waste and reduces the waste's lifespan to 200 years. The US doesn't follow these practices and instead processes our waste into unusable lumps of radioactive glass. If we could change our practices and public opinion about nuclear, it would solve the compounding problem of renewable.
@TerkToSpec i think by then we will have better solutions. If you realy think we are going to be using fission for thousands of years then you underestimate the speed that technology will progress. I know its a meme, "FuSiOn Is OnLy TwEnTy YeArS aWaY!" But im pretty confident that given a thousand years we will have a solution.
There are a few, pumped hydro, flywheels and I think a few others. I still think that lead acid may be better for long term storage but nothing is perfect.
@@crissd8283 yeah, in my home country we use it. Because if u just make it somewhere up high and unconnected to rivers, then the damage done to the environment wouldnt be that big, i guess
You know, it baffles me just how much information you have to curate and summarize for each of your videos. It does not go unnoticed. Then you present it in such a well thought out script AND go into all the math to help those of us who speak engineer to help us understand the scale of what you're presenting in the video. Bravo, you bright Paddy, you. Lol at the "kill me now" file name
He is also doing it in a very unbiased and logical way, weighing all the options available. It also seems like he is doing a better job looking at the California energy issues then government funded think tanks and reports.
yeah, but... this is bull shit information. key facts are neglected. hey, "scientists" i got a question? where are you going to get all the different poisons and pollutants that you help put into our food and water once you trick everyone into "renewable" energy? hey, clowns, where do you fucken sheep think they get all your precious fluorine and bromine and other "natural flavors?"
I found it kind of worrying, suicide isn't a joking matter. Some people have real problems in their life and need help of those around them, so turning it in to a joke could make people not want to come forward for support for fear of being laughed at. Sorry to be a downer on the topic.
@@ElesarioGet a grip, brother. Yes, people have problems. However, there's a difference between a cry for help and a snarko-cynical wisecrack made in a youtube video. We all appreciate your vigilance. I want you to know that I'm here if there's anything you need to talk about and that is not a hollow youtube comment.
Yes, but he has a video where he discusses liquid-air batteries, not sure of the efficiency comparisons but they aren't limited to large river systems.
Was actually a proposal related to California's biggest source of hydro, Hoover dam. Idea was to use excess electricity generated to pump downstream water back upstream behind the dam. Turned out, the proposal is fundamentally flawed. You should be able to find various RUclips videos and Internet articles on this proposal if you want.
They have not built any HPSPPs in the US since Duke completed Bad Creek in the early 90's. Georgia Power completed their pumped storage project in the 90's, These facilities cost billions and are difficult to permit. Finding financing is nearly impossible since payback requires decades, and the market is uncertain. I worked in Hydro Pumped Storage for 28 years, and the future is in batteries. Hydro pumped storage plants were built to absorb excess generation from nuclear power plants. Only way that the economics made sense, free electricity to pump all night.
Closing down nuclear facilities is surely a questionable move which looks like more of a political decision rather than a choice made from an energy context. Nuclear power is easily the best and most stable form of energy available while being carbon-free. However there are reasons to be cautious about it but I believe nuclear power can be our best hope to have an alternative power supply. Nuclear power should be the last to close if we ever truly want a conpletely renewable-dependent world. Without it, we may have some rocky unstable days ahead of us.
@@nicevideomancanada well its not like you can totally ignore the " harmful waste" from solar cell production but, it doesnt compare to that if battery production. eitherway. coal is cheapest. you are scared of plant food. thorium for the win.
Nuclear has come a long way since the last generation of plants. Nuclear waste can be re-used in certain reactors and meltdowns are an impossibility in some. It's cheap, stable and is much safer than coal.
While nuclear is much better than coal or oil it still is nowhere near CO2 neutral. Mining and processing uranium, and reprocessing the used fuel costs quite a bit of energy (and is responsible for a majority of the waste). Solar Thermic Plants would do much better in CO2 and cost factor, and the liquid salt based ones can store energy for the night. The bigger the storage the more efficient it gets.
@James Muecke Very true, but the idea is that with a panel it will last far longer than other sources of energy, with nuclear you have to obtain the materials for the rod which will only last so long, where as with the panels you obtain the materials to create the panels that last longer and output more energy than a nuclear power plant....provided you have enough panels rated at a high enough conversion rate. not only that but in the near future with the ever increasing efficiency in solar we can take the older models and recycle them into the newer, modern, more efficient panels
The key here is that California may not be using coal or oil IN STATE, but they are benefiting from coal and oil based energy by borrowing it from 'other' states. Not so self sufficient Cali.
Southern Utah and Nevada have installed huge photovoltaic farms, because California does not want to purchase coal produced electricity. If you fly from Salt Lake City International to LAX, you can look down and see the lake-size photovoltaic arrays, as well as concentrated solar.(heliostatic controlled mirrors, with a big collection tower in the middle)
Please do a video about nuclear energy and the major benefits it has over all other types of production! Nuclear doesn't have nearly enough positive PR as it should. They're closing so many stations all over the world just because they are expensive. However I would argue that it is worth it given the fact that it is the safest, most reliable and best way of getting lots of clean energy that the world needs!
@@NoName.was.taken. First of all, Japan shouldn't even have nuclear reactors in such an earthquake and tsunami ridden place (And they are getting rid of their's for that reason) and second of all, they killed more people by moving them and the panic they caused than the radiation actually did, (Look into the actual numbers of people that died in Fukoshima and what they died from). And about the waste, there are modern plants that have very little waste, expensive ways of completely getting rid of it or just burying it under tons of concrete. The amount of waste that humanity has created in total would only be the size of a football field, and it is all dealt with with strict rules on how to dispose of it so it does not affect the environment (Unlike some production methods like solar where extremely dangerous materials have no rules of how they should be dealt with, and they often negatively affect the environment, unlike nuclear.)
Totally agree about the fact that it's way cleaner and pretty safe. But in California, I'm pretty sure it isn't a good idea building new Nuclear Power plants... Earthquakes aren't rare, and San Andreas fault could potentially be disastrous if there was a nuclear power plant anywhere near.
Also, 4th Generation overcomes meltdown risk, and can use nuclear waste as fuel, and so is a very promising future nuclear technology pathway. At the very least there needs to be significant R&D, and especially regulatory support for getting new designs tested and certified (the biggest block currently).
What are they going to do in 20 to 30 years when millions of solar panels reach their end of life? Replace them at consumers cost? Abandon the entire project due to excessive costs? What about the recycling of the panels? Curently there is not one company or program to address this problem. And it WILL be a problem, a really big one. Good luck California.
A nuke plant will take 60 years to decommission. What about car tires? their is no absolute panacea just the least dirty shirt. Time will tell about the solar panels. And the panels pay for themselves in a few years. Good luck with your energy bills.
The British Company Moltex is building a nuclear plant (shock horror) in Canada which will burn the high level waste fuel from an old nuclear plant next door. It's zero CO2 with a very low waste profile. The cost built on site is cheaper than a gas fired plant. When they go to factory modules it will be cheaper than coal - the cheapest (dirty) source there is. Moltex plants are cheap and safe because they have designed out the hazardous components which need expensive engineering to make them safe. They also use a thermal store to iron out the daily load fluctuations but that wont give months of energy storage.
Martin Balber Long trips definitely are the challenge for EVs. But the big majority of driving miles are 50 mile trips or less which EVs are perfect for. Even longer trips are getting easier but it does depend on your car and the infrastructure around you. If you have a 250KW charging Tesla 3 and plenty of superchargers on your route then you are stopping only as much as you would to rest. But most EVs can't match that yet. But they are coming.
Michael RCH the problem going all electric, once there are more on the road the government bails out, and you will be stuck paying more for electricity than gas, unless you want to invest big into solar charging but that is probably a slow charge, and then road tax guy will be after us and insurance is already, Higher so unless you’re will to help polar bears , I don’t think it’s worth it, there great for smog control like it’s funny LA has not band all gas burning cars it’s coming there they have band it in some new homes,
Martin Balber All the cheapest electric generation contracts that utilities are now doing are renewable. Indiana did a deal for solar at 2c per kWh. In the UK they just did a deal for offshore wind at about 5c per kWh. Just 4 years ago, offshore wind cost 3x as much. And onshore is even cheaper. And those costs are all much less than coal and gas. And every year they get cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. Coal and gas are getting MORE expensive as regulations on extraction and generation increase (the Trump slash-and-burn policies notwithstanding). Same goes for regulations on car emissions. Right now the cost of driving electric is anywhere from half to a fifth the cost per mile of using gas. Electricity is getting cheaper and gas isn't. VW expect the sticker price of their EVs to be the same as a comparable ICE car by 2023. And then your driving is up to 80% cheaper per mile. This thing is going in one direction only.
@@randommodnar7141 This is easily verifiable with a 2 minute google search, and it's a well known fact within the industry, which is why you're the only person asking for a source.
Great video explaining the supply and demand problem we have to solve with renewables. Smart grids will play a key role but so will micro grids and storing electrical energy in the batteries of our electric cars known as vehicle to Grid / House (V2G or V2H) as we do currently at our experimental facility at Helios Eco Lab. Always thinking of the 'Big' grid / national/global wide solution can sometimes obscure the opportunities of a multitude of small solutions. A multitude of small has the benefit of engaging the individual user and making them more aware of their consumption and how they can manage this consumption in a better way. This is the first time since the start of the industrial revolution that a multitude of decentralised energy 'Prosumers' (co producers and consumers) as opposed to mega centralised projects becomes viable.
That's an important point. Is there a reference? Found it: "PG&E came back in July with an ambitious proposal: four projects, totaling 567.5 megawatts/2,270 megawatt-hours, to go into the transmission-constrained Moss Landing area south of the San Francisco Bay." www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/pges-recording-breaking-battery-proposal-wins-loses Note that Daniel Hermes is foreign and uses a comma instead of a decimal point, so what he said was 2.27GWh.
Always gotta be the assholes that cant seem to not RUIN the whole fkn field trip with their own social love of doing so....we ALL fkn know MOST of this skeleton of this extinct ANIMAL is....imagined by what we actually have....but gd .....its STILL A GD TARADACTYL (edit:that someone even bothered to collect and put together !!!) skeleton.....now....lookit how many more "Kardashians" you made vs ....one....Bill Nye in this crowd of 13 kids ..... Future of ..."whats important" vs....how snooty your ass FELT wasn't worth it was it ....BRYCE .... I have no beef or even know a Bryce...I just feel like thats what his name would be as I rolled my eyes not even TURNING when I hear him just clear his throat first behind us all ....
That's what I thought aswell, similar to a water tower. The only problem is it is not verry efficient. Think of all the enegry loss from the pump and friction and back through a turbine. Not to mention that California has a lack of fresh water.
They have one in California that I'm aware of, San Juan reservoir in central California. It operates as pump gen to store energy. If you drive to Monterey via I-5 you'll pass by it. Pump gen is actually the most efficient form of energy storage, far more than batteries.
@@bob14775523 It is efficient compared to all batteries. The highest capacity batteries with the most efficient charging (lithium ion) also have the worst retention and lose charge quickly. Water pumping can be as efficient as 40%, has huge capacity, is cheap to install, and has no losses over time. Perfect for storing summer energy.
At 12:40 when you scale the graph, you dont actually scale it. What you are doing is adding a baseline. As an example: you did cos(x) +1, when you were supposed to do 2*cos(x). The variance of energy production from solar will increase proportional to production.
@@Orandu That's what all liberals want, look at every socialist nation in existence and you will see a very rich political class on top and poor peasants on the bottom no middle to be found
The ultra Hollywood elites in thier gated communities and their serf slaves clinging to survival. When they die off thet will have many more hungry serf bastards to choose from.
Adam Smith it’s easy to spot the people who don’t understand what socialism is. What, you think despots are going to call their country the “Oligarchy of Korea”?
天吉Mark let’s say on a sunny day you generate 10MW, on a cloudy day you generate 2MW. So you generated 20% of your expected energy. If you add more solar panels and generate 100MW now, then on a cloudy day you’d generate 20% * 100 = 20MW. Which is a stretch. An offset would be expecting to generate 92MW which would be wrong. Obviously this is all an oversimplification but it’s the basic idea.
Agreed. If you triple the solar, you have to multiply each data point by 3. This means the difference, in MW, between the low production days and high production days increases by 3 times. By simply adding a fixed amount to all the days, it greatly understates the problem.
Why not use pumped storage? Water doesn't become less efficient over time, has huge amounts of storage, and can help store the extra energy when solar/wind production is high.
I think a Power and Water Park at San Onofre CA could be done if the Department of Reclamations gets motivated. ruclips.net/video/jPHSWM4Lmsk/видео.html Here is my 13 minute video. Any thoughts?
I noticed an error. When you visibly "scaled" renewable energy, you just shifted it. You did a + C, not an × B. Multiplying renewables would create larger peaks and deeper valleys, not just raise the line to meet the demand curve.
The problem for large hydro is the silting up of the area behind the dam. Oh and catastrophic ruptures, but we still need dams and I feel bad the environment is often ruined by them.
@@bobchainey5280 I guess you don't feel bad about all the wild lands that are covered up with solar power cells? Solar star power plant takes up 3,200 acres of wildlife land. Now those solar panels need to be protected from animals chewing on them or breaking them so. It only produces 579 MWH at peak levels. Thanks for destroying so much wild lands to build such minimal power levels.
@@bobchainey5280 I already live in a studio apartment, have a mini fridge instead of a full size one, don't drive a car, about the only electricity I use is a room fan, my PC, and a cell phone. Maybe Al Gore should consider using less electricity considering his one mansion uses 34 times the amount of energy the average family home uses. Funny how you leftists expect me to reduce my carbon footprint while your fearless leaders who preach the end of the world uses over 60,000 kWh just heating their fucking swimming pool.
There is one flaw in your assumptions which is that “battery” capacity needs to cover only one day of consumption. What if there are 2-3 or more of cloudy days? Germany added more solar panels but the overall production of electricity from solar declined. They checked the weather and sure enough they had more cloudy days. California sun is not guaranteed either.
he said he was being generous. it just shows how severe this problem actually is: even being super super generous and optimistic in his estimations, renewables are just too inconsistent and are incapable of fluctuating with demand - if we had cheap, long-term, large scale grid storage, that would almost entirely fix it
Actually, Bill Gates company, TerraPower, is developing a Traveling Wave Reactor, and Molten Salt Reactors that can use multiple types of fissionable fuels, including Thorium.
Columbus1152 I heard the Terrapower concept was a flop because they didn’t moderate the neutrons. It sucks because this is the one Bill sunk a lot of money into. But he does know about thorium, he mentioned it in his talk “innovating to zero”
@@robertweekes5783 TerraPower is pretty secretive, but as I understand it, they are still working on the TWR using molten salts as a coolant, so it's shifted more towards the breeder concept. They were supposed to begin building a full scale plant in China this year, but the current administration has placed technology embargoes on several countries which includes China. So, it seems they're still alive and still working on power by fission. Hope they can iron it out.
What he did there was a rigid translation, not scaling. Scaling would have produced peaks that were 6 times greater than the lowest point, just like the original graph. In order for the minimum output to satisfy full demand, then the maximum would have to be 6 times higher, which means a lot more solar, and a lot more solar wasted. Unless we find something else to use that electricity for. Usually, when you have an excess of a resource, somebody will invent a way to make money off of the excess. If you had access to large amounts of electricity for a variable amount of time each day, what would you use it for?
California also has a problem that they've exported their manufacturing out of state. At least 1/3 of California's net planetary scale consumption occurs elsewhere. If coal powers the factories that manufacture your car on the other side of the planet, that's still your carbon footprint.
Sure, every country needs to cut carbon emissions. China installs more renewables than even California. And California high-value manufacturing is doing fine making rockets and electric cars.
@@crazeddutchman4957 Ahem, CO2 gives life, without CO2 in the atmosphere there would be no life at all on the planet. You've been fooled by banking oligarch money.
@@crazeddutchman4957 Below 150ppm plants begin to die of CO2 starvation. At .04% of the atmosphere, CO2 is critical for all life to exist. The air in submarines is typically at 3,000ppm CO2. The air coming out of your mouth contains 40,000ppm CO2. CO2 is not a pollutant despite what corrupt, robed lawyers on the Supreme Court have said. CO2 is life.
@@ThekiBoran no one is talking about eliminating CO2! What we know is the entirely human-caused increase in concentrations of CO2 and other greenhouse gases since the Industrial Revolution are the cause of the unprecedentedly rapid global warming that we've undeniably observed since the pre-1970 average. That is having multiple worsening consequences (and a few local benefits). Plants only benefit from increased CO2 if temperature doesn't rise too high, soil nutrients remain, there's sufficient water, etc. Easy to ensure in a commercial greenhouse, but in the real world most crop yields are expected to go down in much of the world "southern Africa could lose more than 30% of its main crop, maize, by 2030. In South Asia losses of many regional staples, such as rice, millet and maize could top 10%". The Wikipedia article on Climate change and agriculture had a good summary in the section "Impact of climate change on agriculture."
@@rogerborg We see that so often. It can't always be accidental. Electricity comprises less than 50% of current energy demand in the US, and a lot less in many other countries.
Something to keep in mind when a power company speaks of batteries, they're often speaking of stored energy. Often this is a pond on top of a hill to which they pump water using the excess energy. then they will later send the water through turbines to recover the energy using gravity. A lot cheaper than Tesla batteries.
and when the tesla batteries become old and are taken out of service, what then (to the individual batteries), what toxins do they have -- better, or worse than the problems of nuclear fission spent fuel?
@Christopher the Lazard levelized cost of energy report puts solar and wind cheaper per MWh than coal, while nuclear is much more expensive. It's cold hard economics that is boosting installation of wind and solar and no new nuclear plant in America for decades. I completely support the research & development of next-generation nuclear, but it'll take $15 billion and 15 years for each of the four competing designs.
@Christopher by making a market for it to make it viable faster. Which demonstrably worked... It was ready to compete way faster than it would've been but beyond that gas is very heavily subsidized so the other sources should get at least the same or should be diverted away from it. Also it is sustainable to have a plan that includes having a planet in 50 years so change is necessary.
You should talk about progress in long-term power storage, such as using excess power to pump water to a higher elevated reservoir and then using a hydroelectric power as converting the water back into power.
@@soul1d Sadly, people only hear nuclear and go...well, nuclear. The average joe doesn't even differentiate between nuclear fission power plants and fusion power plants.
@@Quotenbrtchen It's like this evil invisible thing people are irrationally scared of. Like being scared of radiation exposure if you have a nuclear power plant in your town (even though you could stand a couple meters away from the pressure vessel and barely read above background levels) but don't even consider that there is uranium in the bricks of their house, or in the coal that is burned in power stations, so the fly ash would likely give you a greater exposure to radiation than living near a nuclear plant would.
'capacity' of batteries has been confused with storage/output, just as is done with windfarms. Ask anyone with a boat/yacht about having to manage the flow and retention of juice in a battery to keep them functioning and not dying fast
There is als a huge misunderstanding between Generation capacity Vs actual average production. Fact is, YES we have about 10 - 15% of our national generating capacity tied up in wind power, However said wind generation capacity operates at around 20 - 30% average output depending on the season meaning actual wind power makes less than 3% of the national natural energy production despite representing 10 - 15% of the national generating capacity. Solar has the same problem. Advertized generating capacity isn't the same as average production value which as the video points out is typically about 20 - 25% of nameplate capacity values.
@Dean It's like a car, the car has a motor, which determines how powerful it is, in a battery that is the amount of Volts. The car also has a petrol tank that determines how far it can drive, it's capacity, that is indicated in Amps for a battery. More powerful batteries use up their Amps faster then a lower power battery, just like a car with a less powerful motor uses less petrol from the tank.
aka, a total headache. Batteries are worse for the environment also, from their production to their scrapping ... but the 'Green' movement isn't about outcomes, they're about the movement; it's a pseudo-religion servicing a selfish need to proclaim virtue and in the process it will kill the environment faster while slapping themselves on the back and taking part in their 2 minutes of hate screaming at their ideological opponents with lovely, delicious, prejudice .... Mmmm, prejudice! Gotta love that left-wing prejudice fix, so warm and fuzzy.
@@russianbot4418 Most (serious) economists and scientists don't work with the optimum for their calcs since they are trying to fix a real problem. The only time the optimum matters is when attempting to get a stable average closer to it with storage and distribution technologies.
@@mandelbro777 You should rename yourself to "EyesClosedDueToPoliticalBias." Battery production is not nearly as much of a problem as you state. They can be largely (~98-99%) recycled. Research is going on to get rid of the rarer/more annoying to deal with components and its making more progress than the fake campeign you fell for.
I think the real problem is not keeping the supply great enough, but the fact that the demand is so high. My wife and I live on a sailboat as we sail around the world. After 2 years, we still meet all our power needs with just 300W of panels. That gives us all the power we need to maintain our lives and batteries. Making more power is never as effective as using less power.
It's true that more focus should be placed on consumption, but don't forget that your boat, furniture, electronics, and food were made by industries that have huge power demands. So you actually use more than 300W.
Saif Addeen Al-Manaseer that was a one time event 50 years ago. The daily living doesn’t require that amount of power consumption. Plants that are making things are in need of power. People living at home burning through just as much power need to trim back!
@Michael Madden Whaa? The weed sucks in the CO2 when it grows and when you smoke it and burn the methane it releases the same CO2, it's carbon neutral. But if you're past capacity of methane or compost bins thats when you just start burying the dead plants and that will sequester CO2 from the environment, reducing overall levels and creating new fossil fuels for the next generation... er, or next species.
@Michael Madden The renewability of coal and oil is beyond our ability to determine. Could be if organic matter sits in the ground and is exposed extreme pressures it will turn into coal and oil. Or possibly there has to be little to no oxygen in the environment. Regardless, simply burying wood deep in the ground accomplishes a similar result granted the resulting energy product may not be as convenient as coal. I always thought it was Shiva you watch out for, not Vishnu.
Why not use pumped storage? Pump water into massive lakes in the summer and use it in winter for hydro. Cover the water in reflective balls, which has already been done elsewhere, to minimize evaporation.
I think a Power and Water Park at San Onofre CA could be done if the Department of Reclamations gets motivated. ruclips.net/video/jPHSWM4Lmsk/видео.html Here is my 13 minute video. Any thoughts?
I don't get why they would shut down the nuclear plant. Seems like keeping it open would fix some of the problems in this video. They already spent the 13b to build it, might as well use it.
Because politicians have investments in solar companies. Dumping public funds into these businesses raises their stock value and the politicians make bank. This is the real green scam
diablo canyon is being closed because of economics, not because of an irrational fear or nuclear. my roommate is working on understanding how the closure will impact the local economy and is working with the people who made the decision. its unfortunate, but is also why we need new next gen nuclear plants which are cheaper and safer than these plants developed in the 60s and 70s
@@ssimarsawhneyExcept that part of the economics was that the state was requiring PG&E to increase Diablo Canyon's structural stability to withstand above a 7.8 magnitude earthquake. This is rather bizarre considering the following: 1. Diablo Canyon has highest seismic rating of any piece of infrastructure in a 500 miles radius of Diablo Canyon, if the risk of a 7.5 magnitude earthquake was so high why is no other piece of infrastructure in the entire state being regulated to same standards of Diablo Canyon? 2. The evidence presented against Diablo Canyon was in the worst case theoretical scenario that Hosgri-Shoreline fault would produce a compounded slip fault resulting a 7.8 magnituide earthquake, but whats more bizarre is that the State of California presented the scenario resulting in a Fukushima type disaster. This means the state is more concerned about a tsunami than the actual earthquake. Heres the problems with this scenario. 1. Diablo Canyon is a PWR, versus Fukushima was a BWR nuclear facility. 2. Hosgri-Shoreline is locate about 3 miles off coast, versus the Tohoku Earthquake impacted about 70 miles off coast. 3. The elevation by which Hosgri-Shoreline is relative the coast is significantly smaller than the epicenter of the Tohoku Earthquake. 4. Diablo Canyon sits at 54 feet above sea level, and the maximum wave height of the Tohoku Tsunami that impacted Fukushima was 44ft. So miraculously a 7.8 magnitude earthquake will effect a smaller volume of water, yet will create a higher maximum wave height than a 9.3 magnitude earthquake on a larger volume of water. Id love an explanation on this one.... 3. If the risk of the scenario is so high, why on earth does the Municipal Government of San Luis Obispo have a public emergency preparedness plan for just a 6.5 magnitude earthquake? Youd think if the state of California is so concerned about the possible structural failure of one nuclear plant they would at least inspect the city government's plans to prepare for such an event. There is an insane amount of convenience regarding the non-compliance of this plant for you to claim that its purely economic reasons for this plant to fall.
@@hdfhvcftyv There are plenty of reactor designs in the pipeline that will happily eat the remaining 98% of energy available in the waste from an old reactor. There's only one good reason to kill old nuclear plants: we've built new better ones.
Really sad everyone is so scared of the nuclear boogeyman. Energy production would be insanely cheap, clean, and plentiful if the momentum we had in nuclear development in the 50s and 60s continued into the 80s and 90s. Waste and catastrophic failures have been more or less solved with newer reactor designs but no one will invest in it because of the nightmarish and completely unwarranted fear of nuclear in modern society. Nuclear is the perfect way to stabilize renewable sources cheaply and in volume and would fix the issues in CA as well.
Well people are also fearing reactors because of the toxic waste it leaves behind, and we cant reuse that waste nor do we know how to dispose it properly yet.
@@stephanzondiros Nuclear waste is the only kind of power production waste thats actually contained. CO2 from power plants is waste and is just as harmful as nuclear waste given how much we produce. Look at how many people die each year from breathing polluted air and at climate change of course. So even if I agreed that nuclear waste is a "big" problem it would be better and easier to deal with than CO2 and I would replace our current CO2 waste problem Gwh for Gwh for nuclear waste. I would have more hope for the future if the big problem in the news was dealing with the nuclear waste build up rather than CO2 build up since at the very least it would currently be in containers in a holding facility not ruining the planet and killing daily. Also there is significantly less of it to deal with and only local catastrophe implications instead of global. Secondly if like op said we had been working on nuclear actively since the 60s we would already have nuclear power plants built and running of the newest designs built instead of just being worked on today. Modern plant designs produce less waste and the types of waste the produce are significantly safer than older plant designs. Long term waste disposal from these plants is a much easier task.
As a solar guy, I’d be happy if nuclear power would work, safely. The issue is going to be when civilization cannot take care of them anymore, boom 💥 and the earth becomes uninhabited. Agreed that nuclear could have done better with more investment. And what if we had been subsidizing and working on renewables instead of fossil fuels? Would solar companies have lied and said the sun does not cause skin Cancer too?
Yes, yes. See Nuclear Power in France as an example of nuke success. 70% electricity is generated by nuke. They use breeder reactors which recycle nuclear waste which in fact creates more fissionable material. No more toxic waste, no more radiated water, no more storage problem. As a result, France enjoys the lowest emissions and the lowest power rates in Europe. This is a benefit to the citizens.
@@jasonsmith6283 Breeder reactor. If we can put a reactor in a submarine, we can make a safe breeder reactor. Give the engineers the mandate and the money and they will succeed.
Instead of battery storage for excess energy (chemical energy), how about potential energy storage? When the sun shines or the wind blows, pump water uphill into a dam. Use the hydro generation to supply the grid all the time, rain or shine. Thus, the dam acts as the storage medium and a low-pass filter in the system (like a huge capacitor). Ignore the losses in the pumping system, because those losses can be traded off against the energy that was not converted into potential energy. The reliability of traditional motors and generators far exceeds the reliability of semiconductor switching power supply systems.
I think a Power and Water Park at San Onofre CA could be done if the Department of Reclamations gets motivated. ruclips.net/video/jPHSWM4Lmsk/видео.html Here is my 13 minute video. Any thoughts?
Better inform yourself. France has big problems with their old nuke plants and the new ones get more expensive every year of construction. And they do not get them finished.
@@JakobFischer60 Yes, but a day in France with less than 95% free-carbon electricity is a very bad day. And we have a lot of R&D about Power2Gas and Gas2Power (H2 or CH4). I'm surprised that there is not mention of it in this video. this is the best electricity storage months to months.... P-S: great internet site to visit : www.electricitymap.org we still have a ton of work to do with transport and industries
Nukes have a high initial investment but very less running cost.and modern nukes have a lifespan of almost a century. So if you consider total energy produced and total cost, they are very much efficient. On the other hand solar panels will last for max 25 years, they they will be thrown as electronic waste, but spend fuel from thermal reactors can be used in fast spectrum reactors.
@@TheKeule33 gotta accept them. Risk is everywere in everything. Proper maintenance, computerization and operators means nuclear fission is much less risky than you think
At 13:30, you can't just start scaling Solar+Wind by sliding it up and down the grid without changing the volatility scale. That volatility would also grow 10x if you scaled the capacity 10x. Also if you're going to count environmental damage of hydro, you have to count the environmental damage of solar and wind killing wildlife by cooking or smashing them or by habitat displacement.
@@agent_bedrock5844 the point I was making in the first half stands even if you don't agree with it. Volatility is proportional to the amount of solar and wind.
How is wind and solar going to cook wildlife? Also many more birds die from windows on your house and from traffic than ever will die from wind turbines
2:25 567 MW is just the maximum power that batteries can deliver. The batteries will last 4 hours at this demant. The actual energy they can hold is 2268 MWh, which is 567 MW * 4 hours rating
One of the possible solutions to the storage question may be the Liquid Air or Cryogenic Battery being Utility 5MW scale tested in Manchester UK by HighView Power. It is eminently scalable and can complement ordinary Batteries by occupying the niche above, longer duration and more power. The Liquid Air Battery absorbs excess wind and solar generation thus avoiding curtailment of these systems. I am impressed and believe it’s one of the storage answers.
@Kernels Well you know, when your power program is a byproduct of your weapons development program it tends to cast the power program in the same light. Even if the evidence shows it to be the safest technology we have developed.
Adam Smith lol, I'm a democrat and I think nuclear is awesome.... Let's not generalize for no reason, please. That's called stereotyping and it makes having productive conversations on important issues difficult.
well if you prove that living next to the reactor chamber is completely healthy, then maybe they will build one, these days people used to live next to solar panel or wind turbine, and yes even with maintenance, they fail from time to time
Close Nuclear, the cleanest and safest form of energy because of a few news reports, we'll regret handing our trust over to those companies developing batteries. This certainly proves how much influence the media has on twisting the perception of those policy makers.
@M Detlef apparently my comment went way over your head. What I was saying is if California can't make it work despite having the best weather in North America those of us who have the full spectrum of temperature will never be able to rely on solar and wind for much of our energy needs.
I was thinking... we already got recycling facilities and quite a lot of them around the world, some of which use burning to recycle. Why aren't we using those furnaces to good use, like making it into a steam engine at the same time? I mean, the quantity burned will differ based on seasons and even events, but it's an addition. Steel smelting, furnaces and such could be used for this too.
At the same time the payback on that battery has been incredibly quick since the "emergencies" can be small enough that it saves the company costs related to transmission, distribution, or other various fees associated with unreliability or congestion.
@@FutureChaosTV you seem to miss the joke, he referencing the amount of human excrement on San Francisco streets(the amount is high enough that's its required a dedicated workforce) and the ever increasing rat problem there due to the sanitary problems arising from the previous problem and other issues.
No they do not, but California have a bigger problem; water The last water reservoir was constructed during the 1960,since that time the population have double and growing. The solution have been to limit water supply to farmers and water conservation. There were plans during 1960 to create 6 more reservoir but the plans never came to be because the opposition from land owners, environmentalist and politicians that care more for reelection than solving rear problems. The irony is ;You can not save what you do not have. '
If you've got an energy surplus in the summertime, guess what? You now have energy to spare for other desperately needed things like desalination during dry seasons. CA is already gonna have a hell of a time trying to get water once the colorado river and all that ground water dries up (which is happening FAST). If you end up with too much fresh water and all the reservoirs are full, then use that excess energy to pump water into the forests so that you can isolate entire zones with irrigation lines during those inevitable summer wildfires. And if you still have energy after that's all done, send it to a subsidized, open-air C02 capture facility or something. Honestly, when it comes to CO2 capture there is an absolutely bottomless need for energy. To curtail renewable energy production is practically criminal considering what we're up against.
I think a Power and Water Park at San Onofre CA could be done if the Department of Reclamations gets motivated. ruclips.net/video/jPHSWM4Lmsk/видео.html Here is my 13 minute video. Any thoughts?
At 12:10 onwards you scaled solar capacity by shifting the line up, but kept the variability in output unscaled. The highs and lows should also be exaggerated in proportion as well, assuming that the panels are installed in the same area. I'm not sure that this visualization truely represented the scope of the engineering challenge presented by solar and wind. Scale is _hard_.
Battery charge retention can be expected to diminish by about 2% annually. The cradle to grave environmental consequences of scaling up solar, wind, and LiFePO4 storage are rarely accounted for. Closing Diablo Canyon is dumbest thing ever. We should be adding nuclear capacity.
If sufficient forethought into safety can be considered concerning Nuclear power, By all means Yes!. Unfortunately stupid people can be in charge of nuclear power projects and end up building them on fault zones, by the ocean, like in Japan in a tsunami prone zone and then add another layer of stupidity on top of that, by positioning the emergency cooling pump generators on the friggen seawall where they will end up getting submerged in the event of such an event, which is guaranteed to happen. Nuclear as well as hydro electricity is the most cost effective , reliable and cleanest forms of energy production.
That is a good way to use wasted production, but it doesn't solve the problem of underproduction at night and during the winter. If you aren't using batteries at those times, you need another source of power.
I only see nuclear energy that is both reliable, powerful, and is not polluting the air. Too bad that people still view our 2019 nuclear technology like a 1986 technology. The majority don't want it so nuclear funding is heavily reduced. Only statistics shows us this. Just compare the emission and electricity cost charts between a german gold renewable energy vs an active french nuclear energy. Only the storage in waste is the problem, but the technology isnt advancing further in this case as people dont wanty it. ps typed this in one hand while eating buffalo wings xd sry 4 bad englIsH@
What you miss is that you do not scale your system for just any January but instead for a historically cold one. Otherwise you will have problems in a 1 in 50 Winter
Nuclear power needs to be optimized. Lots of promising progress has been made on safer designs and more efficient use of fuel rods, but everyone is still too scared of it.
In Canada we have the CANDU reactors that have, if I recall, five different "layers" of containment for any escaping radiation- That and we're way, way more capable of preventing nuclear accidents than the 1970's reactors like Chernobyl, Fukushima and 3 Mile Island. These days, even standard fission plants are incredibly, incredibly safe and clean (given how well the waste is dealt with). And that's to say nothing of fusion reactors, which are, of course, being quite heavily worked on in Canada and Europe. But then again, the US has a president who thinks global warming is a Chinese hoax, soooo...
As a science teachers this instantly triggered me as well :D. Dont mix energy and power units. People have enough problems telling them apart in the first place!
Thank you. I remember getting into an argument with a journalist about this once. Peak output is a useful thing to know, but it's kind of a pointless stat if you don't know how long it can sustain it.
"Batteries are not suitable for long term storage." Emphasize lithium. Molten metal batteries, or better yet, physical / mechanical means are more than capable of providing long-term muni-scale storage. Pumping water into a dam or storage facility and extracting energy through turbines is one example. Lifting multi-ton blocks and extracting energy from allowing them to drop (converting potential into kinetic energy) would be another. I can't help but think water processing could be combined with ocean desal at a muni-scale to solve both water shortage and energy storage issues.
Compressed air storage boasts 80% efficiency. Gravitational storage can provide as high as 85% efficiency. And there are pumped storage solutions as high as 87%. I think you'll find that this compares favorably with about anything else out there for long term storage. I think what we'll find is that Lithium and flow batteries will be used for short term buffering with long term storage kicking in for more dramatic changes.
We have huge amounts of hydro power here in the PNW that need to go (salmon > electricity). However, there are other ways of leveraging water for storage that don't involve destruction of natural / critical marine habitat. A nation's distributed facilities for water storage tanks could be upgraded and leveraged for power generation. Additionally, artificial reservoirs, perhaps underground in elevated locations, could be built to store water for power. If these were placed in locations that were relatively near the ocean, but in areas of frequent drought (SoCal), the water released for power could be directed to replenish natural water tables, farming / irrigation, and fresh water supplies for neighboring communities through desal and a network of pumping stations. While this may seem expensive, droughts and the decimation of entire regions due to lack of water has an even higher price.
@@jklappenbach Yea I was actually doing some napkin math and the water storage method easily covers the seasonal swing using a fraction of existing hydro infrastructure (if by some miracle my math is all correct). The ability to pump water up would need to be added of course, but the technology is already deployed elsewhere so that's not in need of solving just doing. The thing I wanted to check was when California gets water and when it needs it. It turns out that works against a mutual seasonal need plan. It's wet winters, so when power is needed they don't have any other purpose to let water down. Doesn't help recapture efficiency at all. Might as well pump sea water up and just let it down back into the sea. Of course if we do in fact want to remove damns, and we also need a lot of fresh water in the summer, the most efficient in terms of reduced infrastructure and complexity might be to just consume the extra energy in the desalination process and not worry about the extra complexity and loss of efficiency of pumping it up at all. If however you already have to pump it over mountains just to get it there, say around Fresno for instance, then one might as well just put everything in one place. It looks like just south of San Jose you could take out water from Monterey Bay, pump it up through Watsonville to be processed in Holister. Strip the tops of the mountains like they do in Appalachia to put up wind turbines and solar panels and desalinate right there on sight. Fill a large reservoir with fresh water and let it down as needed to recapture power and refill the San Luis reservoir which has the infrastructure already in place to let it down to the Fresno area. Not sure it's going to be efficient or work to smooth seasonal needs at all as I said. But, since we may need to desalinate anyway, might as well set it up that way and tweak necessary infrastructure to create a way to use and store the extra power anyway. Just my 2 cents and bad math.
But it is faar less efficient so you would nee alloooot of infrastructure to be build and you owuld need allot of room... the cost would be astronomical
How would pumped hydroelectric storage factor into this? Is it more cost-effective than battery storage? Also, we should really be using nuclear more. Renewables are great, but nuclear is also carbon-neutral and more suitable for less sunny or windy areas.
@@johnnypenso9574 It is absolutely not inefficient. A typical hydropower storage plant, has next to 100% efficiency, both in the pumping and the turbine cycle, leading to next to no energy loss. The only significant sources of loss are wall friction in the penstock and headrace down to the turbine, and up from the pump. The energy used by the pump, is the energy you are storing in the basin. It is not lost. The big problem is locations, as was previously stated.
I guess pumped hydro is lot cheaper than batteries, but it requires lot of land at high altitude. Perhaps California could find enough land for daily storage, but not enough for summer to winter storage. This is one of few reason hydrogen might be usable.
We need safe Gen 3/4 nuclear plants to supply the baseline so that we're robust against extended periods of low solar and wind production that otherwise must be buffered with massive amounts of battery.
You can store the energy as momentum (spin up a ring levitating and balanced on magnets, in vacuum), it might happen sometime in the future. That'll make storing energy cheaper, probably economically and also in energy loss. Anyway, nuclear is cleaner and just better in every way. Especially if we manage to make Molten salt work.
@@glasstuna Gen 4 nuclear produces very little waste, and consumes existing waste, which still has >95% of its energy left. Thank goodness they quit that Yucca Mountain nonsense.
@@glasstuna A couple centuries is *nothing.* Shallow graves in the backwoods often go undisturbed for that long. Just dump the waste in a mine shaft somewhere away from any aquifers.
I live in California, the big problem that everyone seems to forget is that the cost of electricity for the rate payer has skyrocketed in recent years. Cost of electricity is so expensive here that I've looked into just installing a natural gas generator to see if that is more economical compared to being connected to the grid.
@@joshn2342323 and of course they're not reliable. You still need 100% backup capacity in the form of a generator and fuel truck. I've done the math myself. The break even point for solar, in the optimum scenario (peak efficiency at all time there during daylight hours, no degradation, no cloud cover, sun at optimum angle always, etc. etc.) they take 8-10 years to break even without taking the cost of maintenance and eventual disposal into account. Of course the actual efficiency not only degrades over time, after just 5 years it's down to just about 50-70% original depending on the model, but the sun isn't at its optimal angle for 90% of the time it's over the horizon at all, AND the weather isn't (at least here) optimal for 90% or so of the time, making the actual break even point closer to 15 years. The lifespan of solar panels however (the point at which you need to replace them because maintenance cost starts to become higher than the value of the power they generate) is just 12 years, give or take.
We have a large pumped storage project planned for Big Chino Valley. It will also be rated at 2GW, but I would not call it massive. It is primarily for dealing with the increasing solar in California and wind in Arizona. The Great Plains states, particularly Texas. have no locations suitable for pumped storage.
In California pumped hydro has some major issues with building reservoirs in a seismically active area. No one wants another Saint Francis dam disaster. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Francis_Dam
Really you need both as all batteries have a maximum that they are able to supply. Also I wish that someone would teach the reporters what the difference is between MW and MWh as I am having a difficult time finding articles with both of them.
@@Felix199393 Haha I just came up with it on the fly and thought it was funny my dude 😅👌🏻 But seriously tho... people need to get their shit together when it comes to basic physics 👍🏻
Here's the perfect solution for CA (and pretty much every other high energy cost state, like HI and MA). Every time a house is sold, the Mortgage needs to include money for a properly sized Solar Roof and Backup Battery (Obviously new or remodeled homes would have this already included). The homeowners cost per month would actually go down, because financed over 30 years the average of around an additional 50K would work out to around $250.00 a month. Less than your typical CA electric bill. All the homes would tie together on a Smart Grid, with the utility being able to "Tap" into batteries to smooth out spikes and sags in the grid. Fully charging in sunny times and discharging during peak usage times. Over time, all homes would be upgraded and the grid completely distributed. The need for large scale implementations (such as for Skyscrapers) would be greatly diminished as more and more of Suburbia produces, stores and distributes their own electricity.
After thinking about this for a moment, I realized you can do the same for Apartments, Condos and Office buildings, but where you can't add Solar panels you can always add a Battery Backup. The grid can then charge up the battery when there's peak Solar, and discharge it later in the evening when the demand picks up. Considering that CA PAYS for users to "Take" electricity during peak times, the batteries would actually pay for themselves, so the $50.00 a month or so that the average person would have to pay extra in their mortgage would be more than saved off their electric bill.
What you need is energy storage and not 'batteries'. Example: You can pump water back a mountain to once again harvest the kinetic energy when needed. Other ways of storage: Heat, liquid salt batteries, lifting and lowering a weight and many more. Each cannot be MW size but together it might.
Pumping water back up a mountain is itself a waste of energy. You'll expend more energy pumping it back up then you'll get when it comes back down. Thermodynamics just won't allow it. Even cars are only about 25-30% efficient thermodynamically speaking. As for heat, heat moves from places of high concentration to areas of low concentration. Again, blame thermodynamics. Liquid salt batteries explode when they get hot, so that's a major strike against them.
@@jamestanzer9188 Pumped hydro has an 80% roundtrip efficiency. Sure, you lose some energy but if energy generation is cheap enough, that is not a gamebreaking issue.
Yes and get the water from the ocean to make it drought proof. Building large storage ponds high in the coastal mountains and dump excess daily energy into pumping ocean water up into high level storage, to be drawn off into generators in peak times. Not super efficient , but probably cheaper than batteries.
Yes, pumped hydro is fairly efficient and very reliable. It is a great way to store that excess energy. However, environmentalists tend to fight such projects.
Yes, a very good idea. You use natural water to spin the turbine in a hydro dam, and then you use the excess power from solar to pump that same water back up into the dam, which gets used over and over (at night). If you're close to the ocean, you could even use salt water.
@@Saugaverse While pumped hydro is a great concept and one which I fully support, what happens when there's not excess renewable power to run the pumps? You have to fire up your fossil-fuel/nuclear generators to get that water back to the top.
@@wadesworld6250 Well no, you only pump water when you have excess solar power. Once the sun goes down, you revert back to your main power generation. Storing excess power using water seems alot cheaper than using a massive bank of batteries.
But it still produces Nuclear Waste, which requires an awful lot more money to be spent on building a permanent storage. I love nuclear, but chasing fission seems a bit like a waste of money... Plus, you then have to spend lodsemone on decommissioning once it's past it's operational lifespan.
@@josephmoore4764 Nuclear can ramp, you use molten salt storage tanks like the ones used in concentrated solar thermal plants, but instead of a solar receiver, you use a molten salt reactor to supply the heat
You should make a video on energy usage and what technologies can reduce it. For example: if air conditioning is a huge energy consumer, what is a carbon free solution for this? or a technology that reduces drastically the energy consumption of air conditioners? Great video by the way!
California has two major "pumped storage" stations which amount to about 2,000 MW[e] of generation at Helms & Balsam Meadow in the Sierras. Both stations required extensive civil engineering in the form of going through miles of granite with tunnels to provide production flows needed. Capital cost per installed kW is every bit as high as hydro power and more.
Yes there is. But we shouldn't rely all together on photovoltaik (solar panels) due to the practical challenges that come with this technology, as stated in the video. Not to mention the political and ethical issues with gaining those rare elements needed to battery compenents. In countries with high solar radiation, it should be considered to focus on technologies like solar thermal power plants, that use thermal energy storage in molten salt to have a steady power output even at night. Just one of many things that could be done in addition to solar panels and batteries. :)
@Feanor Silva You could always use the excess renewable energy to make hydrogen via electrolysis and using the hydrogen to power vehicles with fuel cells.
@@suserman7775 I'm just curious of the numbers, the best form of energy is probably molten salt nuclear. I want to have enough info to be certain how ridiculous governmental decisions of forcing "green" energy is.
@@suserman7775 Problems with molten salt? I would like to see that, all i've seen of then has pointed to it being better than pressurized water reactors.
This confirms that US suck at nuclear power. Modern Russian and French nuclear reactors are tremendously safe and both these countries possess the technology for implementing a virtually waste-free closed fuel cycle, and yet many countries, while chasing the sustainable energy, keep closing the only RELIABLE source of maybe not renewable but sustainable energy... idiots.
@@mihan2d You cant power everything on nuclear. At night, youll have 100 % output, with no way to turn it on and off. If the daytime power salient is met....youll melt the power cables and everything. Nuclear is reliable , but it inst controllable as others. Its why france has to went out the power during the night. Its never that simple///
@@cactusmann5542 You didn't get it from the video? The nuclear DOESN'T NEED to power everything. It provides reliable baseline power, exactly the thing California, as an example in this video, is lacking, and which would drastically ease their problem. Nuclear can (and should) amount to 30-50% of the power production, then it will power about the minimum daily (/seasonal daily) demand and all other less reliable but more flexible sources will power the rest. This would make the grid not only low on emissions but the one which is ACTUALLY efficient and not multiplies their own problems in a desperate attempt to fix those. For now the only country which figured it out is France, at 71% nuclear, that's way more than enough for baseline, but that's because they heavily rely on export. In Russia, for example, it is at 19%, which is also good, but could be easily doubled without introducing the "overflow of energy" problem. UPD: Actually I learned that US also have about 20% of overall generation being nuclear, so apparently it's mostly California's problem in that case, but with the current trend this number will imminently drop. Whereas it should rise, because renewable power sources cannot make it on their own, not with the current technology.
What about using stored hydro energy instead of wasteful lithium batteries? The California Water Project ACTUALLY already does this on a smaller scale. There's at least one dam (and I'm guessing there are others) called San Luis Reservoir (east of San Jose). Which pumps water uphill from a forebay (the water comes in its entirety by aqueduct from Northern California and is destined for use in the LA area). At night, when electric rates are low, the water is pumped uphill. This fills the main reservoir. During the day, when electric rates are at their peak, the water is allowed to flow back into the forebay. On the way, it turns massive turbines to feed power back into the grid. The profit is then used to pay for maintenance on the system and keeps water rates lower than they would be otherwise. Rather an ingenious thing. Since the reservoir is in a dry area with few natural water courses, it has little impact on the environment. It's a proven technology and could be implemented relatively quickly.
I think a Power and Water Park at San Onofre CA could be done if the Department of Reclamations gets motivated. ruclips.net/video/jPHSWM4Lmsk/видео.html Here is my 13 minute video. Any thoughts?
Redox flow battery would scale a lot better in megawatt scales than lithium ion batteries. Need more storage? Add more fluid. Still think nuclear power is the way to go in the future. It's greener than just about any other way.
Could also use the gas stations and use power2gas(hydrogen/methane) or power2liquid(formic acid). Hydrogen is a bit tricky to store large amounts of unless you have an empty gas field lying around but formic acid can just be stored in large tanks. It's about 50% efficient, and around 70 when the waste heat is used to warm houses. Sound like a bad deal compared to batteries but it is cheaper to store large amounts, even then flow batteries. And it can store it for months. But like renewables it's probably going to be a mix of a lot of solutions.
Except for the nuclear waste, of course, especially if used at very large scales, even if each individual plant produces little waste, add it all together and you get much waste. Waste that will be radioactive for millions of years.
Forget that. All of these energy solutions are too expensive, unreliable, or not viable. The only energy source to get us off everything else is the energy in the empty space between atoms. As Richard Feynman once stated, “One teacup of empty space contains enough energy to boil all the world’s oceans.”
This seems like a good idea. Quick googling showed that a similar approach has been tested by "Stensea" 2 or 3 years ago at Lake Constance in Germany. They sank hollow concrete balls in the lake and made use of the high pressure under water by pumping the water in and out. The Canadian startup Hydrostor blows air into underwater nylon balls and also captures the heat generated from the compression in order to improve the efficiency. It seems both approaches are significantly cheaper than batteries, but you obviously depend on having a deep body of water nearby.
Many questions here. If we think about Wind Turbines, Solar Panels and Batteries. The first thing that comes to mind is that these have a life of 20 years. It would take colossal mining operations using fossil-fuelled vehicles to dig up the raw materials to build all this. Also, many rare minerals are required, these largely come from China at this time. So, every 20 years you would have to replace this lot!.., the impact on the environment and the costs would be staggering... Another consideration is every 20 years, would be the disposal of these items?.. When you say “100% renewables” you are missing the elephant in the room. This would devastate the environment and bankrupt everybody just building it all.. Would it not be a better idea to use nuclear?. Yes, there is an upfront cost, but you would get a 60-year life span of each reactor, and enormous amounts of cheap, clean, safe, reliable energy. Maybe a couple or three Rolls-Royce Small Modular Reactors (SMR), and everything is sorted.., you could then use the wind and solar as a backup power source. I’m hoping this video is a “prototype” idea?, you haven’t actually built it.., have you?
There is one other point that I think should be mentioned. Natural Gas and Oil are often obtained from the same wells. Ideally, oil companies will sell both the oil and natural gas for profit...but recently, oil companies have been producing so much oil, and they don't have enough buyers for the natural gas, even if they give it away for free...and they also don't have enough storage for it. So what do they do? They burn it. Not for energy, not for any use, they completely waste it and burn it into the atmosphere. About 600 Billion cubic feet last year. Under these conditions where natural gas is being wasted and burned anyway...it seems like we are getting ahead of ourselves to shut down natural gas plants. Shouldn't we at least extract energy from the natural gas if we are going to burn it regardless? Isn't this less wasteful? I realize we want to get away from fossil fuels...but we can be smarter about it. If shutting down natural gas plants will not result in less natural gas being burned...then why shut them down today? Let's continue to replace ICE cars with electric cars so there is less demand for oil...then we won't have this excess natural gas...then it would be a good time to shut the natural gas plants. I think California is sometimes so eager to get away from fossil fuels that they get ahead of themselves in a wasteful way.
What about the toxic waste electric cars produce? Battery life is typically 3 to,5 years under normal use. Today's batteries are not recyclable. Plus don't forget all the plastic that goes into making those electric cars. Here's the biggest issue, to,charge an,electric car you still need a source of electricity which comes from, oil, gas, or nuclear. Oh and This one really sticks in my crew, air pods. What happens to the toxic materials in,those when they get thrown away? When,they end up,in,a landfill they have the potential to start a conflagration ( a fire) !
@@gsheac - It's human nature to fear things we don't understand very well...and (no offense) it's apparent by your comment that you don't understand electric cars very well. 1. Electric car batteries are designed to last the life of the car...NOT 3 to 5 years. (There were some outliers such as the 2011 Nissan Leaf who had battery problems, but they were outliers. Tesla batteries have only rarely failed in the first 200,000 miles) 2. The batteries used in EV cars CAN be recycled...in fact the lithium is so valuable, (this is what make the batteries expensive) that it is cheaper to recycle it than to find new lithium. So car batteries are NOT being thrown away, even after they've failed the lithium is too valuable not to recycle. 3. Plastic in electric cars...you're going to have to explain futher what you mean, I'm not aware of BEVs using more plastic than an ICE Car 4. Yes, it's true there are emissions from fossil fuels to produce electricity. However, this has been extensively studied, and even the power from coal...the dirtiest of all, equates to about 1/2 the carbon emissions when used in an electric car than using gasoline. Not to mention diesel cars emit NOX which causes cancer in an estimated 10,000 American's per year. (This was what the VW lawsuit was all about). Emissions from Natural Gas are a small fraction of using gasoline directly...and obviously nuclear emits nothing. In short...the lifecyle and all the pollution associated with EVs (and yes there is pollution) is found to be SIGNIFICANTLY less (far less than 1/2) than for a gasoline car over the lifetime of the car. Here is a good article if you'd like to know more: www.ucsusa.org/clean-vehicles/electric-vehicles/life-cycle-ev-emissions
Lithium is not renewable and will have to be mined from the ground. This will in effect make it just the next "fossil fuel". Yes it doesn't produce CO2 when used but the damage to ecosystems from mining, as well as the need to fuel the drilling equipment will still be a drain on the environment.
@@zacksstuff That's still expensive, and do you also have a tiered rate? So after X kWh do you have to pay extra? I noticed that scam is applied all over Europe and has also crept into Canadian electricity billing, too.
@@heckler73 we don't have a tiered rate, but we do have time of use. It varies from $0.09 per kWh from midnight to 6 AM to $0.28 per kWh from 5-8 PM in summer months. Overall, we still pay about 30-40% less than the rest of the state for electricity.
The most promising solutions seem to be pumped-storage hydro (a dam that also pumps water up into the upper reservoir during excess production) and molten salt (heat is very cheap and easy to store compared to electricity)
@@oystla Mark my words: nuclear will take most of the grid power market when the failure of the renewables experiment becomes obvious. This is just a matter of time. Grid _storage_ might make sense to some extent, but it will have to be really cheap.
Thanks. Very informative. Technical but mostly understandable. Would like to hear more about the nuclear option today without all the paranoia that goes along with that.
So I have some big news. I have joined forces with Wendover Productions, CGP Grey, Kurzgesagt and many more EDU friends to start our own video streaming platform. www.watchnebula.com. We currently have some original content from Isaac Arthur, Polyphonic and Real Life Lore/Second Thought online. I will be adding my own Nebula Original series in the next month or two. This platform was created to remove the creative shackles that the algorithm places on creators. I want to be able to make more military content without worry of demonetisation. I want to experiment with new ideas without worry about my views being affected. This platform is going to allow me to make more content for you!
Sounds GREAT! 👍🏻
sign me up
You completely ignored rooftop solar and home batteries.
Great decision! Looking forward to more military stuff!
@@riparianlife97701 1:40 Here he briefly mentioned solar power. Actually solar only become relevant as it's implemented in a concise way with well planned installation. Rooftop is very irregular because not all the house or building have the same height or have a good orientation toward the Sun for peak energy capture. As explained by the video one way to offset peak demand is that each household can storage enough energy to satisfy their own demand by way of a battery storage that charge when the grid is off the peek demand and electricity is easier to generate and kick off when the grid is saturated.
Instead of curtailing overproduction, they should desalinate seawater with the excess. Fresh water IS something California needs more of.
This is actually a great idea.
This does seem like a good idea and they could always sell the excess fresh water
And you’re going to add a huge cost, probably even worse than batteries.
@@kokofan50 Why not use hydrogen
Use electricity to separate H20 into H2 and O2
Store the energy in Hydrogen...
Batteries gone
azmanabdula, because it’s a terrible idea. Hydrogen is a nuisance to store and if even less efficient at storing energy than batteries. Real Engineering even has a video about the problems.
California: ‘Let’s go carbon-free!’
Also California: ‘Let’s close down a carbon-free plant which supplies 15% of our power.’
Try to explain nuclear physics to gluten-free vegans.
California: Let's build an electric high speed rail to provide green public Transportation statewide!
Also California: we're gonna build it from Bakersfield to Merced
Ya as a citizen of the state this upsets me...
Germany: let's go carbon free
also Germany: shuts down nuclear energy plants
also Germany: without nuclear energy, we can't rely purely on renewable energy. We need to further use coal and oil
Cali is strange, no doubt about it, but often 15-20+ years later what they do is followed up by midwestern america. We probably would not have the mass of electric cars we have now if it weren't for their governor back in the 80s mandating 2% be non petrol vehicles.
2:30 Storage cannot be in MW - Power unit. Storage/energy unis can be in MWh.
Maybe the output of the storage?
This
I swear all engineers I’ve met can’t understand the difference between the two. It makes me crazy
Yeah I'm annoyed that slipped through. The rest of the script has the correct terminology and I calculated most of the figures myself, so I clearly understand the difference.....I'm just a dumbass sometimes when writing quickly.
@@thestudentofficial5483 but then say power, he was saying energy, still wrong nevertheless
As a California native I can confirm California’s suppositions of energy reliance is based of magical thinking and NIMBY
They should come and ask u. Yes this qualifies u to be an authority.
100%
Just like solar water heating panels on my roof in Orlando, FL Solar electric panels HEAT the area over these panels as much as 10 F!! I did this experiment on July 15th, 2008, with thermometers mounted 5 feet above on my boat roof with no panels next to my home roof with both solar water heaters and solar electric panels. I see solar panels as causing global warming??? LOL By the way, I switched thermometers and the results were the same the next day!
@@brucesteger2699 wow.... you switched thermometers, want a goddamn medal? So amaze, lol boomers these days getting more decrepit every day
@Ramen Lover I figured out what I saved with the solar electric panels and the cost to buy them/install them/maintain them (the electrical wire connections corroded often with weather/high temps/sun deteriorating the plastic covering) that I did do better than break even but not by much! I bought the the highest output what was at the time most reliable solar panels 1,200 sq ft total. . I found it to be a project that would result in bigger savings and was greatly disappointed. The pool solar heater was a great success though.
Obviously the answer here is to dedicate 45% of our population to running on tread mills to produce energy.
You summed up environmentalism.
They better start training rickshaw operators for when AOC plan to wreck the trucking industry, petroleum industry, have massive unemployment, with her "no fossil fuel" plan she conceived while in the lunatic asylum with Greta. The highways will be jammed with rickshaws headed to Walmart with consumer goods instead of 18 wheel trucks.
Plenty of the population is stupid enough to make this an almost efficient idea... Especially in the US with its horribly broken education system...
That’s hidden on page 2,997 in the new UNAgenda 2030.
Just the overly obese murricans
5 Billion to build a battery that will last maybe a decade, or 15 billion for a nuclear power plant that produces 5 times the energy every hour than what that battery can store, and will produce that for the next 60 years. Yeah not absurd at all....
Nailed it
I wonder if California has any reasons it is uncomfortable with a sizeable increase in nuclear power, maybe some kind of fault line that goes through the state.
Nah, everyone knows that earthquakes have never been a problem in California or nuclear power.
@@isnochaos Just as you can make a building earthquake resistant, you can do the same for a nuclear power plant. Lots of increases in technology in the field recently. I wouldn't expect any building from the 60's, 70's or 80's to be earth quake resistant, so why expect power plants to be? They need to focus on retrofitting and building new plants with new structure standards.
Yeah energy wise nuclear is the best.. The only bad part about nuclear is the worst case scenarios.. If shit hits the fan one day, things can get very nasty. It makes since for desolate places, but for California and their huge population and bad fault lines... It might be best to avoid
The stupid thing is making those batteries out of lithium ion. Salt water batteries exist. Sure, they're not often used because they're not as compact, but you don't need a high density, lightweight battery if it isn't. Going anywhere. Just shove several floors of saltwater batteries underground and call it a day.
It would really be foolish to remove Nuclear entirely. It has been stagnating in innovation since the 70's. It needs improvements but it also needs investment for those improvements.
Yes read about molten salt reactors (a.k.a Thorium reactors). One is being built in China and should finsh in 2020
Renewable and Nuclear should be seen as allies, because we need both of them to stop climate change
some people forgot that chernobyl almost made europa and half asia toxicated
Yeah. Kurzgesagt did an episode of Nuclear energy iirc, where they mentioned that there are loads of better solutions to do nuclear (Like thorium) but investors want to see results rapidly, which is _seriously_ not how Atomic Science works.
@@xxtimtheplayaxx we are not going to use RBMK reactors ya dingus, france gets most of thwir energy from nuclear power, and no problems
When you say “renewables” you are really talking about wind and solar. Geothermal and hydro don’t suffer from the battery dilemma.
Geothermal kind of does, in the sense that you want to generate the power now and use it later - you won't overload if you just shut it off now, but you'll need to store it for later somehow.
The problem doesn't exist for hydro though, because hydro _is_ a battery.
Neither does biomass
Dont forget Nuclear! Although it is technically nonrenewable, it has virtually 0 emissions.
@@xavier1964 The Sun will have engulfed the Earth by the time we run out of fissile material IF we reprocess spent fuel.
@rafael Perez Just FYI, more radiation has been released by fossil plants than has ever been released by nuclear power (barring the Soviet f-ck up that was Chernobyl.) And the environmental impact of nuclear waste is far less than the environmental impact of fly ash and other combustion byproducts. Fossil plants release their waste while nukes contain it.
A note about 12:48: you can't just move the solar graph up, the variation size would also increase.
True. And assuming wind will always normalize each point is a dangerous assumption. Both these points are probably well outside the scope of this video, but is anyone actually crunching the numbers or is California just going to blunder it's way to greenness?
@@duckbilldaniel yup, where I live both wind and solar are usually at their minimum at peak load.
Not necessarily. If you spread out the solar installations across different locations you may expect less variation from less impact by local weather patterns.
I am ashamed I didn't notice this
@@monkeyman2233-g9o correct in theory, but I believe you would need a much larger area than California for that.
Nuclear is a good measure for filling the gaps. And sure the waste is a problem, but letting that hold back what really is one of the best energy generation methods would be just dumb. Since it's a problem we can work around. Having a lot of the grid be renewable power sources is good and ideal. But we are simply stuck from a practical stand point when it comes to filling in the gaps. And if we have to go and use a non renewable method, nuclear is the best option.
The problem with nuclear: You get waste you have to take care of forever. These costs are so high, that everything else is much more cheaper.
@@leonst99 There's much better ways to do nuclear that are in development right now. They're currently hamstrung by regulation due to their designs being radically different from the types of reactors that the regulations were built around.
@@leonst99 Yeah true, it's expensive but their main goal is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Having just a few modern nuclear plants (which are safe) you could have them as backup for when renewables can't meet demand.
France receives about 75% of their energy from nuclear and use second generation reactors that can reuse nuclear waste and reduces the waste's lifespan to 200 years. The US doesn't follow these practices and instead processes our waste into unusable lumps of radioactive glass. If we could change our practices and public opinion about nuclear, it would solve the compounding problem of renewable.
@TerkToSpec i think by then we will have better solutions. If you realy think we are going to be using fission for thousands of years then you underestimate the speed that technology will progress. I know its a meme, "FuSiOn Is OnLy TwEnTy YeArS aWaY!" But im pretty confident that given a thousand years we will have a solution.
Can you make a video talking about alternative energy storage methods besides batteries?
I am also suprised he didn't talk about this. I used to live next to a solar farm that used electrolysisto store energy in the form of hydrogen.
I'm for pumped hydro.
There are a few, pumped hydro, flywheels and I think a few others. I still think that lead acid may be better for long term storage but nothing is perfect.
@@crissd8283 yeah, in my home country we use it. Because if u just make it somewhere up high and unconnected to rivers, then the damage done to the environment wouldnt be that big, i guess
Surprised he didn't talk about pumped hydro, solves all the issues he mentioned, and is realistically the only way to have a 100% wind/solar grid.
California's goal for 2050 will be greatly assisted by the fact that, by that time, most people will have moved to other states.
California will be net zero by 2050 but bankrupt and abandoned by 2035
Thanks to the wildfires and record heat waves obviously not caused by humans
Haha so true !
@@kevinng3563 maybe all the solar panels absorbing all that sun is heating up california 🤔
And they will turn those states blue, lmao you all are toast
You know, it baffles me just how much information you have to curate and summarize for each of your videos. It does not go unnoticed. Then you present it in such a well thought out script AND go into all the math to help those of us who speak engineer to help us understand the scale of what you're presenting in the video. Bravo, you bright Paddy, you.
Lol at the "kill me now" file name
He is also doing it in a very unbiased and logical way, weighing all the options available. It also seems like he is doing a better job looking at the California energy issues then government funded think tanks and reports.
@@Swarm509 Good points. Real Engineering is the antithesis of fake news
yeah, but... this is bull shit information. key facts are neglected.
hey, "scientists" i got a question? where are you going to get all the different poisons and pollutants that you help put into our food and water once you trick everyone into "renewable" energy?
hey, clowns, where do you fucken sheep think they get all your precious fluorine and bromine and other "natural flavors?"
molten salt reactors for the win. just gotta wait for all you retards to die first.
Too bad alot of shit is wrong... lol we are going away from coal because solar is getting cheaper? LOLWUT?
Everyone is here being productive and critiquing your work. I'm still just laughing at "kill me now.pdf 23"
you saw it first, ladies and gentlemen, Real engineering's silent cry for help: "kill me now.xls"
I found it kind of worrying, suicide isn't a joking matter. Some people have real problems in their life and need help of those around them, so turning it in to a joke could make people not want to come forward for support for fear of being laughed at. Sorry to be a downer on the topic.
@@Elesario Get fucked. Virtue signaling is yesteryear.
@@ElesarioGet a grip, brother. Yes, people have problems. However, there's a difference between a cry for help and a snarko-cynical wisecrack made in a youtube video. We all appreciate your vigilance. I want you to know that I'm here if there's anything you need to talk about and that is not a hollow youtube comment.
@@Elesario By the way, stating the obvious is not a virtue.
Kill me now (15), Milk of poppy for the pain (5) 🧐 12:12
Came looking fir this comment. Hilarious file names
Poppies contains trace amounts of opioids, including heroin. Pain relief?
@@davidv.3865 thats the joke
My thoughts exactly sometimes.Tbesr light particles are intense.
@@davidv.3865 O I thought he was talking about a hamburger.
I love a deep dive into pumped hydro's ability to be that battery that's required to add more renewables to the grid.
Yes, but he has a video where he discusses liquid-air batteries, not sure of the efficiency comparisons but they aren't limited to large river systems.
Was actually a proposal related to California's biggest source of hydro, Hoover dam.
Idea was to use excess electricity generated to pump downstream water back upstream behind the dam.
Turned out, the proposal is fundamentally flawed.
You should be able to find various RUclips videos and Internet articles on this proposal if you want.
They have not built any HPSPPs in the US since Duke completed Bad Creek in the early 90's. Georgia Power completed their pumped storage project in the 90's, These facilities cost billions and are difficult to permit. Finding financing is nearly impossible since payback requires decades, and the market is uncertain. I worked in Hydro Pumped Storage for 28 years, and the future is in batteries. Hydro pumped storage plants were built to absorb excess generation from nuclear power plants. Only way that the economics made sense, free electricity to pump all night.
Closing down nuclear facilities is surely a questionable move which looks like more of a political decision rather than a choice made from an energy context.
Nuclear power is easily the best and most stable form of energy available while being carbon-free. However there are reasons to be cautious about it but I believe nuclear power can be our best hope to have an alternative power supply.
Nuclear power should be the last to close if we ever truly want a conpletely renewable-dependent world. Without it, we may have some rocky unstable days ahead of us.
In the US nuclear plants close purely due to economic reasons.
Except nuclear reactor vessels are subject to neutron embrittlement which presents a physical lifetime limit.
molten salt reactors for the win
Nuclear Power waste is Pollution. Solar Energy has no waste and thus no pollution.
@@nicevideomancanada well its not like you can totally ignore the " harmful waste" from solar cell production but, it doesnt compare to that if battery production.
eitherway. coal is cheapest. you are scared of plant food. thorium for the win.
Nuclear has come a long way since the last generation of plants. Nuclear waste can be re-used in certain reactors and meltdowns are an impossibility in some.
It's cheap, stable and is much safer than coal.
They said the titanic was unsinkable. Be careful with impossibilitys
@@emrefifty5281 Don't worry. The new power plants are iceberg proof.
@@Kirealta They might not be terrorist proof, however :/
@@unvergebeneid THOSE ICEBERGS WERE FREEDOM FIGHTERS!
Reusing nuclear waste is illegal in America federally
Please don t turn on the lights at night, heat or air-conditioning or charge your car until further notice. Welcome to California.
California wants carbon free energy
Also closes their nuclear plants 🤦
Also solves intermittent energy shortages by simply shutting the power off enmasse and saying it was because of climate change.
Leftists in California are not good at the science thingee.
Earthquakes?
While nuclear is much better than coal or oil it still is nowhere near CO2 neutral. Mining and processing uranium, and reprocessing the used fuel costs quite a bit of energy (and is responsible for a majority of the waste). Solar Thermic Plants would do much better in CO2 and cost factor, and the liquid salt based ones can store energy for the night. The bigger the storage the more efficient it gets.
@James Muecke Very true, but the idea is that with a panel it will last far longer than other sources of energy, with nuclear you have to obtain the materials for the rod which will only last so long, where as with the panels you obtain the materials to create the panels that last longer and output more energy than a nuclear power plant....provided you have enough panels rated at a high enough conversion rate. not only that but in the near future with the ever increasing efficiency in solar we can take the older models and recycle them into the newer, modern, more efficient panels
The key here is that California may not be using coal or oil IN STATE, but they are benefiting from coal and oil based energy by borrowing it from 'other' states. Not so self sufficient Cali.
You are true, but it is not the point, ....the point is that ... you are a HERETIC!
@@jirichuran NUCLEAR ENERGY all the way!
Everything else is too inefficient.
Southern Utah and Nevada have installed huge photovoltaic farms, because California does not want to purchase coal produced electricity. If you fly from Salt Lake City International to LAX, you can look down and see the lake-size photovoltaic arrays, as well as concentrated solar.(heliostatic controlled mirrors, with a big collection tower in the middle)
True, true... Agreed! Calif is governed by a bunch of SCAM ARTISTS and MORONS!
@@jirichuran lol
Please do a video about nuclear energy and the major benefits it has over all other types of production!
Nuclear doesn't have nearly enough positive PR as it should. They're closing so many stations all over the world just because they are expensive. However I would argue that it is worth it given the fact that it is the safest, most reliable and best way of getting lots of clean energy that the world needs!
He should also look into waste storage methods to get the facts about that out too.
Save? Fukushima.
Clean? Radioactive waste.
@@NoName.was.taken. First of all, Japan shouldn't even have nuclear reactors in such an earthquake and tsunami ridden place (And they are getting rid of their's for that reason) and second of all, they killed more people by moving them and the panic they caused than the radiation actually did, (Look into the actual numbers of people that died in Fukoshima and what they died from).
And about the waste, there are modern plants that have very little waste, expensive ways of completely getting rid of it or just burying it under tons of concrete. The amount of waste that humanity has created in total would only be the size of a football field, and it is all dealt with with strict rules on how to dispose of it so it does not affect the environment (Unlike some production methods like solar where extremely dangerous materials have no rules of how they should be dealt with, and they often negatively affect the environment, unlike nuclear.)
Totally agree about the fact that it's way cleaner and pretty safe. But in California, I'm pretty sure it isn't a good idea building new Nuclear Power plants... Earthquakes aren't rare, and San Andreas fault could potentially be disastrous if there was a nuclear power plant anywhere near.
Also, 4th Generation overcomes meltdown risk, and can use nuclear waste as fuel, and so is a very promising future nuclear technology pathway. At the very least there needs to be significant R&D, and especially regulatory support for getting new designs tested and certified (the biggest block currently).
What are they going to do in 20 to 30 years when millions of solar panels reach their end of life? Replace them at consumers cost?
Abandon the entire project due to excessive costs? What about the recycling of the panels? Curently there is not one company or program to address this problem. And it WILL be a problem, a really big one. Good luck California.
Watch the jealous dumb trumpers come out to play
just more blackouts
@@m2heavyindustries378 Love how an insult is your only reply. Real convincing argument you got there.
@@m2heavyindustries378 look enviromentalist here
A nuke plant will take 60 years to decommission. What about car tires? their is no absolute panacea just the least dirty shirt. Time will tell about the solar panels. And the panels pay for themselves in a few years. Good luck with your energy bills.
The British Company Moltex is building a nuclear plant (shock horror) in Canada which will burn the high level waste fuel from an old nuclear plant next door. It's zero CO2 with a very low waste profile.
The cost built on site is cheaper than a gas fired plant. When they go to factory modules it will be cheaper than coal - the cheapest (dirty) source there is. Moltex plants are cheap and safe because they have designed out the hazardous components which need expensive engineering to make them safe. They also use a thermal store to iron out the daily load fluctuations but that wont give months of energy storage.
Wait until they start plugging in all the electric cars which need to charge in the evening your usage graph will change
Just wait until PG&E does a public safety power shut off and all those electric cars will be stranded every time the wind blows.
What of people charge up their electric cars at work during the day? It's a free perk at my office.
Martin Balber
Long trips definitely are the challenge for EVs. But the big majority of driving miles are 50 mile trips or less which EVs are perfect for.
Even longer trips are getting easier but it does depend on your car and the infrastructure around you. If you have a 250KW charging Tesla 3 and plenty of superchargers on your route then you are stopping only as much as you would to rest.
But most EVs can't match that yet.
But they are coming.
Michael RCH the problem going all electric, once there are more on the road the government bails out, and you will be stuck paying more for electricity than gas, unless you want to invest big into solar charging but that is probably a slow charge, and then road tax guy will be after us and insurance is already, Higher so unless you’re will to help polar bears , I don’t think it’s worth it, there great for smog control like it’s funny LA has not band all gas burning cars it’s coming there they have band it in some new homes,
Martin Balber
All the cheapest electric generation contracts that utilities are now doing are renewable. Indiana did a deal for solar at 2c per kWh.
In the UK they just did a deal for offshore wind at about 5c per kWh. Just 4 years ago, offshore wind cost 3x as much. And onshore is even cheaper.
And those costs are all much less than coal and gas.
And every year they get cheaper and cheaper and cheaper.
Coal and gas are getting MORE expensive as regulations on extraction and generation increase (the Trump slash-and-burn policies notwithstanding). Same goes for regulations on car emissions.
Right now the cost of driving electric is anywhere from half to a fifth the cost per mile of using gas.
Electricity is getting cheaper and gas isn't.
VW expect the sticker price of their EVs to be the same as a comparable ICE car by 2023. And then your driving is up to 80% cheaper per mile.
This thing is going in one direction only.
California imports their coal plant electricity from adjacent states. California just shifts the CO2 to out of state
I can't speak for southern California, but northern California is now down to less than 2% coal produced energy. We get more from geothermal.
Mostly Southern California due to the bulk of the population being there.
Source
@@randommodnar7141 This is easily verifiable with a 2 minute google search, and it's a well known fact within the industry, which is why you're the only person asking for a source.
@@benbosco7904 if its so verifiable provide a source then
Great video explaining the supply and demand problem we have to solve with renewables. Smart grids will play a key role but so will micro grids and storing electrical energy in the batteries of our electric cars known as vehicle to Grid / House (V2G or V2H) as we do currently at our experimental facility at Helios Eco Lab. Always thinking of the 'Big' grid / national/global wide solution can sometimes obscure the opportunities of a multitude of small solutions. A multitude of small has the benefit of engaging the individual user and making them more aware of their consumption and how they can manage this consumption in a better way. This is the first time since the start of the industrial revolution that a multitude of decentralised energy 'Prosumers' (co producers and consumers) as opposed to mega centralised projects becomes viable.
Unicorn farts 🦄 ☁️ 🌤
2:20 556 MW is NOT a storage capacity. It's the power the facility is able to provide. Rated at four hours, the total capacity is 2,27 GWh.
So would the cost of storage be higher than the 3T he predicted?
@@electronichouse0fficial321 yes about 4.08x times more expencive
@@RubySapior no. Not at all
That's an important point. Is there a reference?
Found it: "PG&E came back in July with an ambitious proposal: four projects, totaling 567.5 megawatts/2,270 megawatt-hours, to go into the transmission-constrained Moss Landing area south of the San Francisco Bay." www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/pges-recording-breaking-battery-proposal-wins-loses
Note that Daniel Hermes is foreign and uses a comma instead of a decimal point, so what he said was 2.27GWh.
Me: how’s that research going?
RE: 12:11
Tyler Hall I saw this and I loved it 😂
Research? He talked about downloading data... and did it. So it's not going. Because it's done.
um, Mr. Real Engineering, are you doing okay?
@@therealctoo4183 yeah everything's archived.His brain is a time machine.
Always gotta be the assholes that cant seem to not RUIN the whole fkn field trip with their own social love of doing so....we ALL fkn know MOST of this skeleton of this extinct ANIMAL is....imagined by what we actually have....but gd .....its STILL A GD TARADACTYL (edit:that someone even bothered to collect and put together !!!) skeleton.....now....lookit how many more "Kardashians" you made vs ....one....Bill Nye in this crowd of 13 kids .....
Future of ..."whats important" vs....how snooty your ass FELT wasn't worth it was it ....BRYCE ....
I have no beef or even know a Bryce...I just feel like thats what his name would be as I rolled my eyes not even TURNING when I hear him just clear his throat first behind us all ....
should just build more mechanical batteries e.g. pumping water up hill. has the long term stability necessary and is scalable
That's what I thought aswell, similar to a water tower. The only problem is it is not verry efficient. Think of all the enegry loss from the pump and friction and back through a turbine. Not to mention that California has a lack of fresh water.
They have one in California that I'm aware of, San Juan reservoir in central California. It operates as pump gen to store energy. If you drive to Monterey via I-5 you'll pass by it. Pump gen is actually the most efficient form of energy storage, far more than batteries.
There are also incline railroad storage solutions, although I don't know how the efficiency compares.
Also what I was thinking - we have one in Michigan that pumps Lake Michigan water into a reservoir and strategically releases it.
@@bob14775523 It is efficient compared to all batteries. The highest capacity batteries with the most efficient charging (lithium ion) also have the worst retention and lose charge quickly. Water pumping can be as efficient as 40%, has huge capacity, is cheap to install, and has no losses over time. Perfect for storing summer energy.
At 12:40 when you scale the graph, you dont actually scale it. What you are doing is adding a baseline. As an example: you did cos(x) +1, when you were supposed to do 2*cos(x). The variance of energy production from solar will increase proportional to production.
You need nuclear, California’s prices went up 6x on renewables , I can’t imagine who will be able to afford to live there in a decade or so.
Jeremy that’s what they want. Just very rich people and poor people to be their quasi-slaves.
@@Orandu That's what all liberals want, look at every socialist nation in existence and you will see a very rich political class on top and poor peasants on the bottom no middle to be found
I don’t think this is a rich person conspiracy, misguided do-gooders most likely
The ultra Hollywood elites in thier gated communities and their serf slaves clinging to survival. When they die off thet will have many more hungry serf bastards to choose from.
Adam Smith it’s easy to spot the people who don’t understand what socialism is. What, you think despots are going to call their country the “Oligarchy of Korea”?
The way you illustrated the scaling of solar up to the demand wasn't correct, it should be stretched, not offset.
Yeah, that was a pretty bad mistake.
im not an engineering student, do anyone mind explaining why is this so? 😅 thanks in advance
天吉Mark let’s say on a sunny day you generate 10MW, on a cloudy day you generate 2MW. So you generated 20% of your expected energy. If you add more solar panels and generate 100MW now, then on a cloudy day you’d generate 20% * 100 = 20MW. Which is a stretch. An offset would be expecting to generate 92MW which would be wrong.
Obviously this is all an oversimplification but it’s the basic idea.
I was thinking that, too. The offset is actually optimistic. The stretch emphasizes the vulnerability of scaling an uneven power source.
Agreed. If you triple the solar, you have to multiply each data point by 3. This means the difference, in MW, between the low production days and high production days increases by 3 times. By simply adding a fixed amount to all the days, it greatly understates the problem.
In Switzerland they use dams to store energy and when there is surplus they pump water up the dam making it a huge battery.
Yes use pumped hydro instead of curtailing that wasted solar
There are several pumped hydro-solutions in use in Missouri. You don’t need to go to Europe to come across energy solutions
@J G 😑😡
@@BlJkScTr which is even better, people have a hard time learning of good examples they think are foreign to 'their way of life'.
Why not use pumped storage? Water doesn't become less efficient over time, has huge amounts of storage, and can help store the extra energy when solar/wind production is high.
I think a Power and Water Park at San Onofre CA could be done if the Department of Reclamations gets motivated. ruclips.net/video/jPHSWM4Lmsk/видео.html Here is my 13 minute video. Any thoughts?
I noticed an error. When you visibly "scaled" renewable energy, you just shifted it. You did a + C, not an × B. Multiplying renewables would create larger peaks and deeper valleys, not just raise the line to meet the demand curve.
"policymakers do not want large hydro facilities watering down their efforts". Nice pun
The problem for large hydro is the silting up of the area behind the dam. Oh and catastrophic ruptures, but we still need dams and I feel bad the environment is often ruined by them.
@@bobchainey5280 I guess you don't feel bad about all the wild lands that are covered up with solar power cells? Solar star power plant takes up 3,200 acres of wildlife land. Now those solar panels need to be protected from animals chewing on them or breaking them so. It only produces 579 MWH at peak levels. Thanks for destroying so much wild lands to build such minimal power levels.
@@keinlieb3818 Consider using less electricity.
@@bobchainey5280 I already live in a studio apartment, have a mini fridge instead of a full size one, don't drive a car, about the only electricity I use is a room fan, my PC, and a cell phone. Maybe Al Gore should consider using less electricity considering his one mansion uses 34 times the amount of energy the average family home uses. Funny how you leftists expect me to reduce my carbon footprint while your fearless leaders who preach the end of the world uses over 60,000 kWh just heating their fucking swimming pool.
Concrete is soooo 1950s...today the money in in high tech
"policymakers won't want large hydroelectric dams watering down their efforts" nice pun, intended or not
I laughed when he said: for our purposes this is silly. About large hydro.
There is one flaw in your assumptions which is that “battery” capacity needs to cover only one day of consumption. What if there are 2-3 or more of cloudy days?
Germany added more solar panels but the overall production of electricity from solar declined. They checked the weather and sure enough they had more cloudy days.
California sun is not guaranteed either.
he said he was being generous. it just shows how severe this problem actually is: even being super super generous and optimistic in his estimations, renewables are just too inconsistent and are incapable of fluctuating with demand - if we had cheap, long-term, large scale grid storage, that would almost entirely fix it
@@ovencake523 The answer is V2H. Problem solved. Next one please.
@@lesp315 please elaborate on V2H
@@ovencake523 V2H Vehicle to home energy. Tesla Model 3 has it already build in. You can power your home or supply power to the grid from a car.
@@lesp315 Great, so it's cloudy for a couple days and suddenly nobody can drive anywhere. There's no way that goes wrong at all.
The only answer that I see as viable at the moment is nuclear powered by thorium.
Almost, mini nuke plants is the better way to go. Less cost build faster and nearer to demand.
Actually, Bill Gates company, TerraPower, is developing a Traveling Wave Reactor, and Molten Salt Reactors that can use multiple types of fissionable fuels, including Thorium.
Columbus1152 I heard the Terrapower concept was a flop because they didn’t moderate the neutrons. It sucks because this is the one Bill sunk a lot of money into. But he does know about thorium, he mentioned it in his talk “innovating to zero”
@@robertweekes5783 TerraPower is pretty secretive, but as I understand it, they are still working on the TWR using molten salts as a coolant, so it's shifted more towards the breeder concept. They were supposed to begin building a full scale plant in China this year, but the current administration has placed technology embargoes on several countries which includes China. So, it seems they're still alive and still working on power by fission. Hope they can iron it out.
Robert Weekes hopefully the money he paid went to individuals who spent their income wisely and didn’t just buy more lollies and Gold bullion.
12:52 The scaling should "extremefy" not just add a flat value (by moving it up)
yeah, scaling by def is multiplication operation instead of addition.
Came here to say this.
I noticed that as well. The peaks and troughs would be much more aggressive which would further exasperate the issue hes exploring.
But did he plot scaling or just combination of sources on that graph?
What he did there was a rigid translation, not scaling. Scaling would have produced peaks that were 6 times greater than the lowest point, just like the original graph. In order for the minimum output to satisfy full demand, then the maximum would have to be 6 times higher, which means a lot more solar, and a lot more solar wasted. Unless we find something else to use that electricity for. Usually, when you have an excess of a resource, somebody will invent a way to make money off of the excess. If you had access to large amounts of electricity for a variable amount of time each day, what would you use it for?
I got it! They could scoop up all the poop in SF's sidewalks, and burn it for energy.
Liberal egos are a limitless source of hot air.
Sorry that is a fossil fuel. It should be dumped on politicians properties
and use the urine as a form of bio hydro
@@caseymuni4097 No, it's Organic!
@@wallishaines7247 Window cleaner, cuz it's got ammonia for a streak free shine.. Although some yellowing may occur.
Protest signs made from Hydrocarbons make me laugh.
Yes! Gotta appreciate the quick wit.
California also has a problem that they've exported their manufacturing out of state. At least 1/3 of California's net planetary scale consumption occurs elsewhere.
If coal powers the factories that manufacture your car on the other side of the planet, that's still your carbon footprint.
Sure, every country needs to cut carbon emissions. China installs more renewables than even California. And California high-value manufacturing is doing fine making rockets and electric cars.
@@skierpage
Why? CO2 is not a problem. The biosphere would benefit from higher CO2 levels.
@@crazeddutchman4957
Ahem, CO2 gives life, without CO2 in the atmosphere there would be no life at all on the planet. You've been fooled by banking oligarch money.
@@crazeddutchman4957
Below 150ppm plants begin to die of CO2 starvation. At .04% of the atmosphere, CO2 is critical for all life to exist. The air in submarines is typically at 3,000ppm CO2. The air coming out of your mouth contains 40,000ppm CO2. CO2 is not a pollutant despite what corrupt, robed lawyers on the Supreme Court have said. CO2 is life.
@@ThekiBoran no one is talking about eliminating CO2! What we know is the entirely human-caused increase in concentrations of CO2 and other greenhouse gases since the Industrial Revolution are the cause of the unprecedentedly rapid global warming that we've undeniably observed since the pre-1970 average. That is having multiple worsening consequences (and a few local benefits). Plants only benefit from increased CO2 if temperature doesn't rise too high, soil nutrients remain, there's sufficient water, etc. Easy to ensure in a commercial greenhouse, but in the real world most crop yields are expected to go down in much of the world "southern Africa could lose more than 30% of its main crop, maize, by 2030. In South Asia losses of many regional staples, such as rice, millet and maize could top 10%". The Wikipedia article on Climate change and agriculture had a good summary in the section "Impact of climate change on agriculture."
I can see this short 20 minutes video is fed with weeks of researchs and data collections. Great job and thumbs up.
Shame he doesn't know the difference between power and energy.
@@rogerborg We see that so often. It can't always be accidental. Electricity comprises less than 50% of current energy demand in the US, and a lot less in many other countries.
Something to keep in mind when a power company speaks of batteries, they're often speaking of stored energy. Often this is a pond on top of a hill to which they pump water using the excess energy. then they will later send the water through turbines to recover the energy using gravity. A lot cheaper than Tesla batteries.
and when the tesla batteries become old and are taken out of service, what then (to the individual batteries), what toxins do they have -- better, or worse than the problems of nuclear fission spent fuel?
@Christopher "even the solar/wind folks acknowledge this"
Do they reeeaally now?
@Christopher the Lazard levelized cost of energy report puts solar and wind cheaper per MWh than coal, while nuclear is much more expensive. It's cold hard economics that is boosting installation of wind and solar and no new nuclear plant in America for decades. I completely support the research & development of next-generation nuclear, but it'll take $15 billion and 15 years for each of the four competing designs.
@@skierpage Thorium Salt Reactors y'all
@Christopher by making a market for it to make it viable faster. Which demonstrably worked... It was ready to compete way faster than it would've been but beyond that gas is very heavily subsidized so the other sources should get at least the same or should be diverted away from it. Also it is sustainable to have a plan that includes having a planet in 50 years so change is necessary.
You should talk about progress in long-term power storage, such as using excess power to pump water to a higher elevated reservoir and then using a hydroelectric power as converting the water back into power.
It does not work. ruclips.net/video/aO5K2SjNsaI/видео.html
How advance we would be if people didn't become deathly afraid of nuclear due to Godzilla films.
Eh, thats the wrong question, having more nuclear power plants would not make us more advanced just least dependant on oil and coal
@@carso1500 what i mean is if we continued to develop the technology, we would likely be closer to things such as fusion etc.
@@soul1d Sadly, people only hear nuclear and go...well, nuclear. The average joe doesn't even differentiate between nuclear fission power plants and fusion power plants.
People fear what they don't understand. Two great examples are nuclear energy production and climate change.
@@Quotenbrtchen It's like this evil invisible thing people are irrationally scared of. Like being scared of radiation exposure if you have a nuclear power plant in your town (even though you could stand a couple meters away from the pressure vessel and barely read above background levels) but don't even consider that there is uranium in the bricks of their house, or in the coal that is burned in power stations, so the fly ash would likely give you a greater exposure to radiation than living near a nuclear plant would.
'capacity' of batteries has been confused with storage/output, just as is done with windfarms. Ask anyone with a boat/yacht about having to manage the flow and retention of juice in a battery to keep them functioning and not dying fast
There is als a huge misunderstanding between Generation capacity Vs actual average production. Fact is, YES we have about 10 - 15% of our national generating capacity tied up in wind power, However said wind generation capacity operates at around 20 - 30% average output depending on the season meaning actual wind power makes less than 3% of the national natural energy production despite representing 10 - 15% of the national generating capacity.
Solar has the same problem. Advertized generating capacity isn't the same as average production value which as the video points out is typically about 20 - 25% of nameplate capacity values.
@Dean It's like a car, the car has a motor, which determines how powerful it is, in a battery that is the amount of Volts. The car also has a petrol tank that determines how far it can drive, it's capacity, that is indicated in Amps for a battery. More powerful batteries use up their Amps faster then a lower power battery, just like a car with a less powerful motor uses less petrol from the tank.
aka, a total headache. Batteries are worse for the environment also, from their production to their scrapping ... but the 'Green' movement isn't about outcomes, they're about the movement; it's a pseudo-religion servicing a selfish need to proclaim virtue and in the process it will kill the environment faster while slapping themselves on the back and taking part in their 2 minutes of hate screaming at their ideological opponents with lovely, delicious, prejudice .... Mmmm, prejudice! Gotta love that left-wing prejudice fix, so warm and fuzzy.
@@russianbot4418 Most (serious) economists and scientists don't work with the optimum for their calcs since they are trying to fix a real problem. The only time the optimum matters is when attempting to get a stable average closer to it with storage and distribution technologies.
@@mandelbro777 You should rename yourself to "EyesClosedDueToPoliticalBias." Battery production is not nearly as much of a problem as you state. They can be largely (~98-99%) recycled. Research is going on to get rid of the rarer/more annoying to deal with components and its making more progress than the fake campeign you fell for.
I think the real problem is not keeping the supply great enough, but the fact that the demand is so high.
My wife and I live on a sailboat as we sail around the world. After 2 years, we still meet all our power needs with just 300W of panels. That gives us all the power we need to maintain our lives and batteries.
Making more power is never as effective as using less power.
It's true that more focus should be placed on consumption, but don't forget that your boat, furniture, electronics, and food were made by industries that have huge power demands. So you actually use more than 300W.
We can also go back to burning wood for our heat, light, and cooking needs. It's easy to adopt for individuals, but hard to scale up.
Saif Addeen Al-Manaseer that was a one time event 50 years ago. The daily living doesn’t require that amount of power consumption.
Plants that are making things are in need of power. People living at home burning through just as much power need to trim back!
@Michael Madden Whaa? The weed sucks in the CO2 when it grows and when you smoke it and burn the methane it releases the same CO2, it's carbon neutral. But if you're past capacity of methane or compost bins thats when you just start burying the dead plants and that will sequester CO2 from the environment, reducing overall levels and creating new fossil fuels for the next generation... er, or next species.
@Michael Madden The renewability of coal and oil is beyond our ability to determine. Could be if organic matter sits in the ground and is exposed extreme pressures it will turn into coal and oil. Or possibly there has to be little to no oxygen in the environment. Regardless, simply burying wood deep in the ground accomplishes a similar result granted the resulting energy product may not be as convenient as coal. I always thought it was Shiva you watch out for, not Vishnu.
Why not use pumped storage? Pump water into massive lakes in the summer and use it in winter for hydro. Cover the water in reflective balls, which has already been done elsewhere, to minimize evaporation.
I think a Power and Water Park at San Onofre CA could be done if the Department of Reclamations gets motivated. ruclips.net/video/jPHSWM4Lmsk/видео.html Here is my 13 minute video. Any thoughts?
I don't get why they would shut down the nuclear plant. Seems like keeping it open would fix some of the problems in this video. They already spent the 13b to build it, might as well use it.
Californian greenies are more anti-nuclear than they are anti-climate change, unfortunately.
Because politicians have investments in solar companies. Dumping public funds into these businesses raises their stock value and the politicians make bank. This is the real green scam
Earthquake anyone?
diablo canyon is being closed because of economics, not because of an irrational fear or nuclear. my roommate is working on understanding how the closure will impact the local economy and is working with the people who made the decision. its unfortunate, but is also why we need new next gen nuclear plants which are cheaper and safer than these plants developed in the 60s and 70s
@@ssimarsawhneyExcept that part of the economics was that the state was requiring PG&E to increase Diablo Canyon's structural stability to withstand above a 7.8 magnitude earthquake. This is rather bizarre considering the following:
1. Diablo Canyon has highest seismic rating of any piece of infrastructure in a 500 miles radius of Diablo Canyon, if the risk of a 7.5 magnitude earthquake was so high why is no other piece of infrastructure in the entire state being regulated to same standards of Diablo Canyon?
2. The evidence presented against Diablo Canyon was in the worst case theoretical scenario that Hosgri-Shoreline fault would produce a compounded slip fault resulting a 7.8 magnituide earthquake, but whats more bizarre is that the State of California presented the scenario resulting in a Fukushima type disaster. This means the state is more concerned about a tsunami than the actual earthquake.
Heres the problems with this scenario. 1. Diablo Canyon is a PWR, versus Fukushima was a BWR nuclear facility. 2. Hosgri-Shoreline is locate about 3 miles off coast, versus the Tohoku Earthquake impacted about 70 miles off coast. 3. The elevation by which Hosgri-Shoreline is relative the coast is significantly smaller than the epicenter of the Tohoku Earthquake. 4. Diablo Canyon sits at 54 feet above sea level, and the maximum wave height of the Tohoku Tsunami that impacted Fukushima was 44ft.
So miraculously a 7.8 magnitude earthquake will effect a smaller volume of water, yet will create a higher maximum wave height than a 9.3 magnitude earthquake on a larger volume of water. Id love an explanation on this one....
3. If the risk of the scenario is so high, why on earth does the Municipal Government of San Luis Obispo have a public emergency preparedness plan for just a 6.5 magnitude earthquake? Youd think if the state of California is so concerned about the possible structural failure of one nuclear plant they would at least inspect the city government's plans to prepare for such an event.
There is an insane amount of convenience regarding the non-compliance of this plant for you to claim that its purely economic reasons for this plant to fall.
politicians: we want to reduce carbon emissions
also politicians: lets close down all our clean nuclear power plants
And hydro too, oh wind is loud NIMBY, oh my favorite forest has to have transmission towers - wires thru it? No way! Etc...
They still produce radioactive byproduct which is very hard to dispose of..... maybe that's why they decided to close
Greenpeace is cancer
Nuclear waste sticks around for 50000 years so... yeah, not that clean.
@@hdfhvcftyv There are plenty of reactor designs in the pipeline that will happily eat the remaining 98% of energy available in the waste from an old reactor. There's only one good reason to kill old nuclear plants: we've built new better ones.
Really sad everyone is so scared of the nuclear boogeyman. Energy production would be insanely cheap, clean, and plentiful if the momentum we had in nuclear development in the 50s and 60s continued into the 80s and 90s. Waste and catastrophic failures have been more or less solved with newer reactor designs but no one will invest in it because of the nightmarish and completely unwarranted fear of nuclear in modern society. Nuclear is the perfect way to stabilize renewable sources cheaply and in volume and would fix the issues in CA as well.
Well people are also fearing reactors because of the toxic waste it leaves behind, and we cant reuse that waste nor do we know how to dispose it properly yet.
@@stephanzondiros Nuclear waste is the only kind of power production waste thats actually contained.
CO2 from power plants is waste and is just as harmful as nuclear waste given how much we produce. Look at how many people die each year from breathing polluted air and at climate change of course.
So even if I agreed that nuclear waste is a "big" problem it would be better and easier to deal with than CO2 and I would replace our current CO2 waste problem Gwh for Gwh for nuclear waste. I would have more hope for the future if the big problem in the news was dealing with the nuclear waste build up rather than CO2 build up since at the very least it would currently be in containers in a holding facility not ruining the planet and killing daily.
Also there is significantly less of it to deal with and only local catastrophe implications instead of global.
Secondly if like op said we had been working on nuclear actively since the 60s we would already have nuclear power plants built and running of the newest designs built instead of just being worked on today. Modern plant designs produce less waste and the types of waste the produce are significantly safer than older plant designs. Long term waste disposal from these plants is a much easier task.
As a solar guy, I’d be happy if nuclear power would work, safely. The issue is going to be when civilization cannot take care of them anymore, boom 💥 and the earth becomes uninhabited.
Agreed that nuclear could have done better with more investment. And what if we had been subsidizing and working on renewables instead of fossil fuels? Would solar companies have lied and said the sun does not cause skin Cancer too?
Yes, yes. See Nuclear Power in France as an example of nuke success. 70% electricity is generated by nuke. They use breeder reactors which recycle nuclear waste which in fact creates more fissionable material. No more toxic waste, no more radiated water, no more storage problem. As a result, France enjoys the lowest emissions and the lowest power rates in Europe. This is a benefit to the citizens.
@@jasonsmith6283 Breeder reactor. If we can put a reactor in a submarine, we can make a safe breeder reactor. Give the engineers the mandate and the money and they will succeed.
Instead of battery storage for excess energy (chemical energy), how about potential energy storage? When the sun shines or the wind blows, pump water uphill into a dam. Use the hydro generation to supply the grid all the time, rain or shine. Thus, the dam acts as the storage medium and a low-pass filter in the system (like a huge capacitor). Ignore the losses in the pumping system, because those losses can be traded off against the energy that was not converted into potential energy. The reliability of traditional motors and generators far exceeds the reliability of semiconductor switching power supply systems.
I think a Power and Water Park at San Onofre CA could be done if the Department of Reclamations gets motivated. ruclips.net/video/jPHSWM4Lmsk/видео.html Here is my 13 minute video. Any thoughts?
We have to deploy nuclear plants as France did in 80s. Now they enjoy the cheapest and least carbon electricity in Europe
Better inform yourself. France has big problems with their old nuke plants and the new ones get more expensive every year of construction. And they do not get them finished.
@@JakobFischer60 Yes, but a day in France with less than 95% free-carbon electricity is a very bad day.
And we have a lot of R&D about Power2Gas and Gas2Power (H2 or CH4). I'm surprised that there is not mention of it in this video. this is the best electricity storage months to months....
P-S: great internet site to visit : www.electricitymap.org
we still have a ton of work to do with transport and industries
What about the risks?
Nukes have a high initial investment but very less running cost.and modern nukes have a lifespan of almost a century. So if you consider total energy produced and total cost, they are very much efficient. On the other hand solar panels will last for max 25 years, they they will be thrown as electronic waste, but spend fuel from thermal reactors can be used in fast spectrum reactors.
@@TheKeule33 gotta accept them. Risk is everywere in everything. Proper maintenance, computerization and operators means nuclear fission is much less risky than you think
At 13:30, you can't just start scaling Solar+Wind by sliding it up and down the grid without changing the volatility scale. That volatility would also grow 10x if you scaled the capacity 10x.
Also if you're going to count environmental damage of hydro, you have to count the environmental damage of solar and wind killing wildlife by cooking or smashing them or by habitat displacement.
You lost me in the first half, but got me with cooked and smashed animals
@@agent_bedrock5844 the point I was making in the first half stands even if you don't agree with it. Volatility is proportional to the amount of solar and wind.
How is wind and solar going to cook wildlife? Also many more birds die from windows on your house and from traffic than ever will die from wind turbines
Sssshhhh🤫 you’re not supposed to state the obvious!👍🏻
2:25 567 MW is just the maximum power that batteries can deliver. The batteries will last 4 hours at this demant. The actual energy they can hold is 2268 MWh, which is 567 MW * 4 hours rating
I love you for this.*demand
I hate MWh as a unit. It just feels so... unintuitive to me, compared to just using Joules. Kinda ironic.
Another point is batteries are not perfect and the capacity drops over time this starts to become a problem in costs and then disposal.
One of the possible solutions to the storage question may be the Liquid Air or Cryogenic Battery being Utility 5MW scale tested in Manchester UK by HighView Power. It is eminently scalable and can complement ordinary Batteries by occupying the niche above, longer duration and more power. The Liquid Air Battery absorbs excess wind and solar generation thus avoiding curtailment of these systems. I am impressed and believe it’s one of the storage answers.
If cali made IV generation nuclear power plants it could be possible without adding a few trillion more debt.
But but nuclear is SCARY and EVIL according to Democrats
@Kernels
Well you know, when your power program is a byproduct of your weapons development program it tends to cast the power program in the same light. Even if the evidence shows it to be the safest technology we have developed.
@@AdamSmith-gs2dv It has nothing to do with political party. Every party is adverse to nuclear energy
Adam Smith lol, I'm a democrat and I think nuclear is awesome.... Let's not generalize for no reason, please. That's called stereotyping and it makes having productive conversations on important issues difficult.
well if you prove that living next to the reactor chamber is completely healthy, then maybe they will build one, these days people used to live next to solar panel or wind turbine, and yes even with maintenance, they fail from time to time
Close Nuclear, the cleanest and safest form of energy because of a few news reports, we'll regret handing our trust over to those companies developing batteries. This certainly proves how much influence the media has on twisting the perception of those policy makers.
What?
Heat and air conditioning are by far the largest part of our electric bill. The reason California became so popular is the weather.
@M Detlef apparently my comment went way over your head.
What I was saying is if California can't make it work despite having the best weather in North America those of us who have the full spectrum of temperature will never be able to rely on solar and wind for much of our energy needs.
I was thinking... we already got recycling facilities and quite a lot of them around the world, some of which use burning to recycle.
Why aren't we using those furnaces to good use, like making it into a steam engine at the same time?
I mean, the quantity burned will differ based on seasons and even events, but it's an addition.
Steel smelting, furnaces and such could be used for this too.
Important to also note that South Australian battery backup is designed for emergencies... Not regular power use.
At the same time the payback on that battery has been incredibly quick since the "emergencies" can be small enough that it saves the company costs related to transmission, distribution, or other various fees associated with unreliability or congestion.
San Francisco can build a poop powered plant with a rat powered flywheel dynamos backup system. Two problems solved!
Just have to find something to do with all those used drug needles
Are you going to sit on the shitter and open your mouth 24/7 to provide the energy. You seem capable.
@@FutureChaosTV you seem to miss the joke, he referencing the amount of human excrement on San Francisco streets(the amount is high enough that's its required a dedicated workforce) and the ever increasing rat problem there due to the sanitary problems arising from the previous problem and other issues.
some of that already happens with biodigesters in the sewage treatment process... biogas recovery. Same with garbage dumps, by law nationally.
Poop power sounds interesting. Its just like Mad Max 3.
Geez. It's almost as though politicians have no clue what their policies actually do.
It lines the pockets of their pals, none of their messianic bloviating has as anything to do with helping California’s citizens.
No they do not, but California have a bigger problem; water The last water reservoir was constructed during the 1960,since that time the population have double and growing. The solution have been to limit water supply to farmers and water conservation. There were plans during 1960 to create 6 more reservoir but the plans never came to be because the opposition from land owners, environmentalist and politicians that care more for reelection than solving rear problems. The irony is ;You can not save what you do not have.
'
no idea.
Politicians are self interested they do whatever will get them votes.
Politicians represent their constituents who are completely ignorant of science and reality.
If you've got an energy surplus in the summertime, guess what? You now have energy to spare for other desperately needed things like desalination during dry seasons. CA is already gonna have a hell of a time trying to get water once the colorado river and all that ground water dries up (which is happening FAST). If you end up with too much fresh water and all the reservoirs are full, then use that excess energy to pump water into the forests so that you can isolate entire zones with irrigation lines during those inevitable summer wildfires. And if you still have energy after that's all done, send it to a subsidized, open-air C02 capture facility or something. Honestly, when it comes to CO2 capture there is an absolutely bottomless need for energy. To curtail renewable energy production is practically criminal considering what we're up against.
I think a Power and Water Park at San Onofre CA could be done if the Department of Reclamations gets motivated. ruclips.net/video/jPHSWM4Lmsk/видео.html Here is my 13 minute video. Any thoughts?
At 12:10 onwards you scaled solar capacity by shifting the line up, but kept the variability in output unscaled. The highs and lows should also be exaggerated in proportion as well, assuming that the panels are installed in the same area. I'm not sure that this visualization truely represented the scope of the engineering challenge presented by solar and wind. Scale is _hard_.
Battery charge retention can be expected to diminish by about 2% annually. The cradle to grave environmental consequences of scaling up solar, wind, and LiFePO4 storage are rarely accounted for. Closing Diablo Canyon is dumbest thing ever. We should be adding nuclear capacity.
If sufficient forethought into safety can be considered concerning Nuclear power, By all means Yes!. Unfortunately stupid people can be in charge of nuclear power projects and end up building them on fault zones, by the ocean, like in Japan in a tsunami prone zone and then add another layer of stupidity on top of that, by positioning the emergency cooling pump generators on the friggen seawall where they will end up getting submerged in the event of such an event, which is guaranteed to happen. Nuclear as well as hydro electricity is the most cost effective , reliable and cleanest forms of energy production.
Build a bunch of desalination plants and run them off the excess electricity. Kill 2 birds with one stone.
All the birds have already being killed off from the windmills
That is a good way to use wasted production, but it doesn't solve the problem of underproduction at night and during the winter. If you aren't using batteries at those times, you need another source of power.
Excess electricity can produce hydrogen.
@@jacquesmersereau4173 hydrogen generation is just not economical at this point. Especially for electricity generation.
I only see nuclear energy that is both reliable, powerful, and is not polluting the air. Too bad that people still view our 2019 nuclear technology like a 1986 technology. The majority don't want it so nuclear funding is heavily reduced. Only statistics shows us this. Just compare the emission and electricity cost charts between a german gold renewable energy vs an active french nuclear energy.
Only the storage in waste is the problem, but the technology isnt advancing further in this case as people dont wanty it.
ps typed this in one hand while eating buffalo wings xd sry 4 bad englIsH@
What you miss is that you do not scale your system for just any January but instead for a historically cold one. Otherwise you will have problems in a 1 in 50 Winter
Nuclear power needs to be optimized. Lots of promising progress has been made on safer designs and more efficient use of fuel rods, but everyone is still too scared of it.
My impression is safe systems have been made. I fully expect unknowleable raving protesters to cause unnecessary commotion.
There is good reason for the fear. The same dweebs that made the previous botched designs are still the guys likely to be hired.
@@kensmith5694 "dweebs"? Niiice ¡
We could have had any/all of the Gen4 ideas up and running and in production if we spent as much money/time/effort on them as we have wind/solar...
In Canada we have the CANDU reactors that have, if I recall, five different "layers" of containment for any escaping radiation- That and we're way, way more capable of preventing nuclear accidents than the 1970's reactors like Chernobyl, Fukushima and 3 Mile Island. These days, even standard fission plants are incredibly, incredibly safe and clean (given how well the waste is dealt with). And that's to say nothing of fusion reactors, which are, of course, being quite heavily worked on in Canada and Europe.
But then again, the US has a president who thinks global warming is a Chinese hoax, soooo...
You cannot store 567MW... It's either 567MWh or 567MJ. The facility has a capacity of 2.28GWh with a peak output of 567MW...
I was in the comments to check if someone has spotted it already. Please correct!!!
As a science teachers this instantly triggered me as well :D. Dont mix energy and power units. People have enough problems telling them apart in the first place!
He is supposed to be an engineer...
Thank you. I remember getting into an argument with a journalist about this once. Peak output is a useful thing to know, but it's kind of a pointless stat if you don't know how long it can sustain it.
"Batteries are not suitable for long term storage."
Emphasize lithium. Molten metal batteries, or better yet, physical / mechanical means are more than capable of providing long-term muni-scale storage. Pumping water into a dam or storage facility and extracting energy through turbines is one example. Lifting multi-ton blocks and extracting energy from allowing them to drop (converting potential into kinetic energy) would be another. I can't help but think water processing could be combined with ocean desal at a muni-scale to solve both water shortage and energy storage issues.
Compressed air storage boasts 80% efficiency. Gravitational storage can provide as high as 85% efficiency. And there are pumped storage solutions as high as 87%. I think you'll find that this compares favorably with about anything else out there for long term storage. I think what we'll find is that Lithium and flow batteries will be used for short term buffering with long term storage kicking in for more dramatic changes.
The video mentioned hydro power is BAD!
We have huge amounts of hydro power here in the PNW that need to go (salmon > electricity). However, there are other ways of leveraging water for storage that don't involve destruction of natural / critical marine habitat. A nation's distributed facilities for water storage tanks could be upgraded and leveraged for power generation. Additionally, artificial reservoirs, perhaps underground in elevated locations, could be built to store water for power. If these were placed in locations that were relatively near the ocean, but in areas of frequent drought (SoCal), the water released for power could be directed to replenish natural water tables, farming / irrigation, and fresh water supplies for neighboring communities through desal and a network of pumping stations. While this may seem expensive, droughts and the decimation of entire regions due to lack of water has an even higher price.
@@jklappenbach Yea I was actually doing some napkin math and the water storage method easily covers the seasonal swing using a fraction of existing hydro infrastructure (if by some miracle my math is all correct). The ability to pump water up would need to be added of course, but the technology is already deployed elsewhere so that's not in need of solving just doing.
The thing I wanted to check was when California gets water and when it needs it. It turns out that works against a mutual seasonal need plan. It's wet winters, so when power is needed they don't have any other purpose to let water down. Doesn't help recapture efficiency at all. Might as well pump sea water up and just let it down back into the sea. Of course if we do in fact want to remove damns, and we also need a lot of fresh water in the summer, the most efficient in terms of reduced infrastructure and complexity might be to just consume the extra energy in the desalination process and not worry about the extra complexity and loss of efficiency of pumping it up at all.
If however you already have to pump it over mountains just to get it there, say around Fresno for instance, then one might as well just put everything in one place. It looks like just south of San Jose you could take out water from Monterey Bay, pump it up through Watsonville to be processed in Holister. Strip the tops of the mountains like they do in Appalachia to put up wind turbines and solar panels and desalinate right there on sight. Fill a large reservoir with fresh water and let it down as needed to recapture power and refill the San Luis reservoir which has the infrastructure already in place to let it down to the Fresno area. Not sure it's going to be efficient or work to smooth seasonal needs at all as I said. But, since we may need to desalinate anyway, might as well set it up that way and tweak necessary infrastructure to create a way to use and store the extra power anyway.
Just my 2 cents and bad math.
But it is faar less efficient so you would nee alloooot of infrastructure to be build and you owuld need allot of room... the cost would be astronomical
No phones, no lights, no motor cars
Not a single luxury
Like Robinson Crusoe
It's primitive as can be - Gilligan's Island
How would pumped hydroelectric storage factor into this? Is it more cost-effective than battery storage?
Also, we should really be using nuclear more. Renewables are great, but nuclear is also carbon-neutral and more suitable for less sunny or windy areas.
you need a large basin of water with a large elevation difference, can't just put it anywhere lol
And a lot of energy is used up on the storage process. It's very inefficient compared to the carbon based or nuclear alternatives.
@@johnnypenso9574 It is absolutely not inefficient. A typical hydropower storage plant, has next to 100% efficiency, both in the pumping and the turbine cycle, leading to next to no energy loss. The only significant sources of loss are wall friction in the penstock and headrace down to the turbine, and up from the pump. The energy used by the pump, is the energy you are storing in the basin. It is not lost.
The big problem is locations, as was previously stated.
Nuclear may be carbon neutral but the radioactive waste is deadly
I guess pumped hydro is lot cheaper than batteries, but it requires lot of land at high altitude. Perhaps California could find enough land for daily storage, but not enough for summer to winter storage. This is one of few reason hydrogen might be usable.
We need safe Gen 3/4 nuclear plants to supply the baseline so that we're robust against extended periods of low solar and wind production that otherwise must be buffered with massive amounts of battery.
To do that we need a politician with balls to designate a safe disposal site.
You can store the energy as momentum (spin up a ring levitating and balanced on magnets, in vacuum), it might happen sometime in the future. That'll make storing energy cheaper, probably economically and also in energy loss.
Anyway, nuclear is cleaner and just better in every way. Especially if we manage to make Molten salt work.
@@glasstuna Gen 4 nuclear produces very little waste, and consumes existing waste, which still has >95% of its energy left. Thank goodness they quit that Yucca Mountain nonsense.
@@curtmcd fission products still take several hundred years to decay
@@glasstuna A couple centuries is *nothing.* Shallow graves in the backwoods often go undisturbed for that long. Just dump the waste in a mine shaft somewhere away from any aquifers.
I live in California, the big problem that everyone seems to forget is that the cost of electricity for the rate payer has skyrocketed in recent years. Cost of electricity is so expensive here that I've looked into just installing a natural gas generator to see if that is more economical compared to being connected to the grid.
@@nicfoster1763 Yes. The upfront cost is too expensive for me so I am not interested in it.
Welcome to the land of renewables, also known as unreliables, also known as subsidy generators.
@@joshn2342323 and of course they're not reliable. You still need 100% backup capacity in the form of a generator and fuel truck.
I've done the math myself. The break even point for solar, in the optimum scenario (peak efficiency at all time there during daylight hours, no degradation, no cloud cover, sun at optimum angle always, etc. etc.) they take 8-10 years to break even without taking the cost of maintenance and eventual disposal into account.
Of course the actual efficiency not only degrades over time, after just 5 years it's down to just about 50-70% original depending on the model, but the sun isn't at its optimal angle for 90% of the time it's over the horizon at all, AND the weather isn't (at least here) optimal for 90% or so of the time, making the actual break even point closer to 15 years.
The lifespan of solar panels however (the point at which you need to replace them because maintenance cost starts to become higher than the value of the power they generate) is just 12 years, give or take.
If it gets to $1/kWh, I'll look into self-generation, or solar and massive batteries. Next year.
It's their way of forcing everyone to go to individual solar on their own roofs.
Great video and ironic that this is exactly related to the August 2020 Power outages that occurred in California
Fossil fuels 🔥 are solar energy chemical batteries 🔋
I'm surprised there was no mention of pumped hydro. In Australia we will be building massive 2GW systems,
Kind of hard to use pumped storage when all your water comes from other states.
@@ssholum you can use seawater for that, california certailny has some Hills next to the sea :)
We have a large pumped storage project planned for Big Chino Valley. It will also be rated at 2GW, but I would not call it massive. It is primarily for dealing with the increasing solar in California and wind in Arizona. The Great Plains states, particularly Texas. have no locations suitable for pumped storage.
California has lots of pumped hydro storage: Helms, Castaic, and San Luis to name a few. Even Oroville can be used as pumped hydro storage.
In California pumped hydro has some major issues with building reservoirs in a seismically active area. No one wants another Saint Francis dam disaster. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Francis_Dam
Great video, I appreciate the amount of effort you put into researching the topics you cover
He's got 1.7 million subscribers. He probably has a staff of 50.
@@omnipitous4648 Exactly
2:28
It's actually "MegaWatt-Hours" if you talk about energy, as MW is a unit of power, not energy :)
Yeah. It's so annoying when people don't realise there's a difference. They're completely different things.
Really you need both as all batteries have a maximum that they are able to supply.
Also I wish that someone would teach the reporters what the difference is between MW and MWh as I am having a difficult time finding articles with both of them.
Winter is coming... for your piss poor understanding of the difference between energy and power! 👍🏻😅
@@Sin526
lol I haven't heard that one before 😂
I am sure that was just a quick and honest mistake and he knows the difference :)
@@Felix199393 Haha I just came up with it on the fly and thought it was funny my dude 😅👌🏻
But seriously tho... people need to get their shit together when it comes to basic physics 👍🏻
Here's the perfect solution for CA (and pretty much every other high energy cost state, like HI and MA). Every time a house is sold, the Mortgage needs to include money for a properly sized Solar Roof and Backup Battery (Obviously new or remodeled homes would have this already included). The homeowners cost per month would actually go down, because financed over 30 years the average of around an additional 50K would work out to around $250.00 a month. Less than your typical CA electric bill. All the homes would tie together on a Smart Grid, with the utility being able to "Tap" into batteries to smooth out spikes and sags in the grid. Fully charging in sunny times and discharging during peak usage times. Over time, all homes would be upgraded and the grid completely distributed. The need for large scale implementations (such as for Skyscrapers) would be greatly diminished as more and more of Suburbia produces, stores and distributes their own electricity.
After thinking about this for a moment, I realized you can do the same for Apartments, Condos and Office buildings, but where you can't add Solar panels you can always add a Battery Backup. The grid can then charge up the battery when there's peak Solar, and discharge it later in the evening when the demand picks up. Considering that CA PAYS for users to "Take" electricity during peak times, the batteries would actually pay for themselves, so the $50.00 a month or so that the average person would have to pay extra in their mortgage would be more than saved off their electric bill.
What you need is energy storage and not 'batteries'. Example: You can pump water back a mountain to once again harvest the kinetic energy when needed.
Other ways of storage: Heat, liquid salt batteries, lifting and lowering a weight and many more. Each cannot be MW size but together it might.
Pumping water back up a mountain is itself a waste of energy. You'll expend more energy pumping it back up then you'll get when it comes back down. Thermodynamics just won't allow it. Even cars are only about 25-30% efficient thermodynamically speaking. As for heat, heat moves from places of high concentration to areas of low concentration. Again, blame thermodynamics. Liquid salt batteries explode when they get hot, so that's a major strike against them.
@@jamestanzer9188 Pumped hydro has an 80% roundtrip efficiency. Sure, you lose some energy but if energy generation is cheap enough, that is not a gamebreaking issue.
You simply cannot store the demand of a country for a week with no wind or sun with any realistic amount of pumped storage.
@@jamestanzer9188 Energy storage with water is very practical and used in many places through out the world.
You should include kinetic/potential energy systems such energy vault or pumping water to dams, in your future video.
Yes and get the water from the ocean to make it drought proof. Building large storage ponds high in the coastal mountains and dump excess daily energy into pumping ocean water up into high level storage, to be drawn off into generators in peak times. Not super efficient , but probably cheaper than batteries.
Yes, pumped hydro is fairly efficient and very reliable. It is a great way to store that excess energy. However, environmentalists tend to fight such projects.
Yes, a very good idea.
You use natural water to spin the turbine in a hydro dam, and then you use the excess power from solar to pump that same water back up into the dam, which gets used over and over (at night).
If you're close to the ocean, you could even use salt water.
@@Saugaverse While pumped hydro is a great concept and one which I fully support, what happens when there's not excess renewable power to run the pumps? You have to fire up your fossil-fuel/nuclear generators to get that water back to the top.
@@wadesworld6250 Well no, you only pump water when you have excess solar power.
Once the sun goes down, you revert back to your main power generation.
Storing excess power using water seems alot cheaper than using a massive bank of batteries.
everyone is making suchn a fuzz about renewable etc.
Just invest into nuclear research and make a kolten sal reactor ffs...
Diablo Canyon did nothing wrong.
Nuclear can't ramp, although energy storage is easier than with solar
But it still produces Nuclear Waste, which requires an awful lot more money to be spent on building a permanent storage. I love nuclear, but chasing fission seems a bit like a waste of money...
Plus, you then have to spend lodsemone on decommissioning once it's past it's operational lifespan.
@@josephmoore4764 there are other ways of ramping up power, for example hydro, but otherwise nuclear power is an excellent baseline power provider
@@josephmoore4764 Nuclear can ramp, you use molten salt storage tanks like the ones used in concentrated solar thermal plants, but instead of a solar receiver, you use a molten salt reactor to supply the heat
You should make a video on energy usage and what technologies can reduce it. For example: if air conditioning is a huge energy consumer, what is a carbon free solution for this? or a technology that reduces drastically the energy consumption of air conditioners?
Great video by the way!
Batteries are not the only option. There's also efficiency, pumped hydro, (geo)thermal storage, electrochemical fuel synthesis, and more.
one of my favorites is a molten salt battery
California has two major "pumped storage" stations which amount to about 2,000 MW[e] of generation at Helms & Balsam Meadow in the Sierras. Both stations required extensive civil engineering in the form of going through miles of granite with tunnels to provide production flows needed. Capital cost per installed kW is every bit as high as hydro power and more.
Is there even enough materials to produce all the solar panels and batteries necessary for a zero carbon world without nuclear?
Yes there is. But we shouldn't rely all together on photovoltaik (solar panels) due to the practical challenges that come with this technology, as stated in the video. Not to mention the political and ethical issues with gaining those rare elements needed to battery compenents. In countries with high solar radiation, it should be considered to focus on technologies like solar thermal power plants, that use thermal energy storage in molten salt to have a steady power output even at night. Just one of many things that could be done in addition to solar panels and batteries. :)
@Feanor Silva You could always use the excess renewable energy to make hydrogen via electrolysis and using the hydrogen to power vehicles with fuel cells.
@@suserman7775 I'm just curious of the numbers, the best form of energy is probably molten salt nuclear. I want to have enough info to be certain how ridiculous governmental decisions of forcing "green" energy is.
@@suserman7775 Problems with molten salt?
I would like to see that, all i've seen of then has pointed to it being better than pressurized water reactors.
Yes, lithium is the most abundant crust material we have.
More nukes in power in more modern scalable plants.
Nothing to fear just making power not superhereos and villians.
This confirms that US suck at nuclear power. Modern Russian and French nuclear reactors are tremendously safe and both these countries possess the technology for implementing a virtually waste-free closed fuel cycle, and yet many countries, while chasing the sustainable energy, keep closing the only RELIABLE source of maybe not renewable but sustainable energy... idiots.
@@mihan2d You cant power everything on nuclear. At night, youll have 100 % output, with no way to turn it on and off. If the daytime power salient is met....youll melt the power cables and everything. Nuclear is reliable , but it inst controllable as others. Its why france has to went out the power during the night. Its never that simple///
@@cactusmann5542 You didn't get it from the video? The nuclear DOESN'T NEED to power everything. It provides reliable baseline power, exactly the thing California, as an example in this video, is lacking, and which would drastically ease their problem.
Nuclear can (and should) amount to 30-50% of the power production, then it will power about the minimum daily (/seasonal daily) demand and all other less reliable but more flexible sources will power the rest. This would make the grid not only low on emissions but the one which is ACTUALLY efficient and not multiplies their own problems in a desperate attempt to fix those.
For now the only country which figured it out is France, at 71% nuclear, that's way more than enough for baseline, but that's because they heavily rely on export. In Russia, for example, it is at 19%, which is also good, but could be easily doubled without introducing the "overflow of energy" problem.
UPD: Actually I learned that US also have about 20% of overall generation being nuclear, so apparently it's mostly California's problem in that case, but with the current trend this number will imminently drop. Whereas it should rise, because renewable power sources cannot make it on their own, not with the current technology.
@@mihan2d California also has a water deficiency, and its costlier to use saltwater to power NPPS.
What about using stored hydro energy instead of wasteful lithium batteries? The California Water Project ACTUALLY already does this on a smaller scale. There's at least one dam (and I'm guessing there are others) called San Luis Reservoir (east of San Jose). Which pumps water uphill from a forebay (the water comes in its entirety by aqueduct from Northern California and is destined for use in the LA area). At night, when electric rates are low, the water is pumped uphill. This fills the main reservoir. During the day, when electric rates are at their peak, the water is allowed to flow back into the forebay. On the way, it turns massive turbines to feed power back into the grid. The profit is then used to pay for maintenance on the system and keeps water rates lower than they would be otherwise. Rather an ingenious thing. Since the reservoir is in a dry area with few natural water courses, it has little impact on the environment. It's a proven technology and could be implemented relatively quickly.
I think a Power and Water Park at San Onofre CA could be done if the Department of Reclamations gets motivated. ruclips.net/video/jPHSWM4Lmsk/видео.html Here is my 13 minute video. Any thoughts?
Redox flow battery would scale a lot better in megawatt scales than lithium ion batteries. Need more storage? Add more fluid.
Still think nuclear power is the way to go in the future. It's greener than just about any other way.
Could also use the gas stations and use power2gas(hydrogen/methane) or power2liquid(formic acid). Hydrogen is a bit tricky to store large amounts of unless you have an empty gas field lying around but formic acid can just be stored in large tanks. It's about 50% efficient, and around 70 when the waste heat is used to warm houses. Sound like a bad deal compared to batteries but it is cheaper to store large amounts, even then flow batteries. And it can store it for months. But like renewables it's probably going to be a mix of a lot of solutions.
Except for the nuclear waste, of course, especially if used at very large scales, even if each individual plant produces little waste, add it all together and you get much waste. Waste that will be radioactive for millions of years.
Pumped hydro from the sea. Pump it during the day with solar. Hydro it back at night.
Hydrogen production for energy storage
good idea
Forget that. All of these energy solutions are too expensive, unreliable, or not viable.
The only energy source to get us off everything else is the energy in the empty space between atoms.
As Richard Feynman once stated, “One teacup of empty space contains enough energy to boil all the world’s oceans.”
That's not a bad idea. They could be set up as pure mechanical wind driven pumps. Low tech ftw!
This seems like a good idea. Quick googling showed that a similar approach has been tested by "Stensea" 2 or 3 years ago at Lake Constance in Germany. They sank hollow concrete balls in the lake and made use of the high pressure under water by pumping the water in and out. The Canadian startup Hydrostor blows air into underwater nylon balls and also captures the heat generated from the compression in order to improve the efficiency. It seems both approaches are significantly cheaper than batteries, but you obviously depend on having a deep body of water nearby.
2:30
Megawatts aren't a unit of energy storage. You might have meant megawatt-hours.
Many questions here. If we think about Wind Turbines, Solar Panels and Batteries. The first thing that comes to mind is that these have a life of 20 years. It would take colossal mining operations using fossil-fuelled vehicles to dig up the raw materials to build all this. Also, many rare minerals are required, these largely come from China at this time. So, every 20 years you would have to replace this lot!.., the impact on the environment and the costs would be staggering... Another consideration is every 20 years, would be the disposal of these items?.. When you say “100% renewables” you are missing the elephant in the room. This would devastate the environment and bankrupt everybody just building it all..
Would it not be a better idea to use nuclear?. Yes, there is an upfront cost, but you would get a 60-year life span of each reactor, and enormous amounts of cheap, clean, safe, reliable energy. Maybe a couple or three Rolls-Royce Small Modular Reactors (SMR), and everything is sorted.., you could then use the wind and solar as a backup power source.
I’m hoping this video is a “prototype” idea?, you haven’t actually built it.., have you?
There is one other point that I think should be mentioned. Natural Gas and Oil are often obtained from the same wells. Ideally, oil companies will sell both the oil and natural gas for profit...but recently, oil companies have been producing so much oil, and they don't have enough buyers for the natural gas, even if they give it away for free...and they also don't have enough storage for it. So what do they do?
They burn it. Not for energy, not for any use, they completely waste it and burn it into the atmosphere. About 600 Billion cubic feet last year.
Under these conditions where natural gas is being wasted and burned anyway...it seems like we are getting ahead of ourselves to shut down natural gas plants. Shouldn't we at least extract energy from the natural gas if we are going to burn it regardless? Isn't this less wasteful?
I realize we want to get away from fossil fuels...but we can be smarter about it. If shutting down natural gas plants will not result in less natural gas being burned...then why shut them down today? Let's continue to replace ICE cars with electric cars so there is less demand for oil...then we won't have this excess natural gas...then it would be a good time to shut the natural gas plants.
I think California is sometimes so eager to get away from fossil fuels that they get ahead of themselves in a wasteful way.
U are right about the buyers, but changing oil to electric car make new problems like it's expensive car
California is just stupid in its hatred of 'fossil fuels' and one of the reasons why California is one of the most expensive places to live.
What about the toxic waste electric cars produce? Battery life is typically 3 to,5 years under normal use. Today's batteries are not recyclable. Plus don't forget all the plastic that goes into making those electric cars. Here's the biggest issue, to,charge an,electric car you still need a source of electricity which comes from, oil, gas, or nuclear. Oh and This one really sticks in my crew, air pods. What happens to the toxic materials in,those when they get thrown away? When,they end up,in,a landfill they have the potential to start a conflagration ( a fire) !
@@gsheac - It's human nature to fear things we don't understand very well...and (no offense) it's apparent by your comment that you don't understand electric cars very well.
1. Electric car batteries are designed to last the life of the car...NOT 3 to 5 years. (There were some outliers such as the 2011 Nissan Leaf who had battery problems, but they were outliers. Tesla batteries have only rarely failed in the first 200,000 miles)
2. The batteries used in EV cars CAN be recycled...in fact the lithium is so valuable, (this is what make the batteries expensive) that it is cheaper to recycle it than to find new lithium. So car batteries are NOT being thrown away, even after they've failed the lithium is too valuable not to recycle.
3. Plastic in electric cars...you're going to have to explain futher what you mean, I'm not aware of BEVs using more plastic than an ICE Car
4. Yes, it's true there are emissions from fossil fuels to produce electricity. However, this has been extensively studied, and even the power from coal...the dirtiest of all, equates to about 1/2 the carbon emissions when used in an electric car than using gasoline. Not to mention diesel cars emit NOX which causes cancer in an estimated 10,000 American's per year. (This was what the VW lawsuit was all about). Emissions from Natural Gas are a small fraction of using gasoline directly...and obviously nuclear emits nothing.
In short...the lifecyle and all the pollution associated with EVs (and yes there is pollution) is found to be SIGNIFICANTLY less (far less than 1/2) than for a gasoline car over the lifetime of the car.
Here is a good article if you'd like to know more: www.ucsusa.org/clean-vehicles/electric-vehicles/life-cycle-ev-emissions
Lithium is not renewable and will have to be mined from the ground. This will in effect make it just the next "fossil fuel". Yes it doesn't produce CO2 when used but the damage to ecosystems from mining, as well as the need to fuel the drilling equipment will still be a drain on the environment.
How are you liking that 27 cents a kilowatt?
Cant wait to see where it goes when diablo canyon shuts down.
Here in Sacramento we have SMUD with $0.13 per kWh. It's nice.
Stable genius. Diablo is built on major fault lines.
@@zacksstuff That's still expensive, and do you also have a tiered rate? So after X kWh do you have to pay extra?
I noticed that scam is applied all over Europe and has also crept into Canadian electricity billing, too.
@@zacksstuff basic electricity here .12 and right on the ocean.
@@heckler73 we don't have a tiered rate, but we do have time of use. It varies from $0.09 per kWh from midnight to 6 AM to $0.28 per kWh from 5-8 PM in summer months. Overall, we still pay about 30-40% less than the rest of the state for electricity.
The future of dirt Cheap grid scale energy storage will not be lithium batteries, but another storage technology.
The most promising solutions seem to be pumped-storage hydro (a dam that also pumps water up into the upper reservoir during excess production) and molten salt (heat is very cheap and easy to store compared to electricity)
@@doujinflip there are many start-up companies. Too early to conclude.
In other words, uranium energy storage.
Pham Nuwen well I think flow batteries have a brighter future than uranium😉
@@oystla Mark my words: nuclear will take most of the grid power market when the failure of the renewables experiment becomes obvious. This is just a matter of time.
Grid _storage_ might make sense to some extent, but it will have to be really cheap.
Thanks. Very informative. Technical but mostly understandable. Would like to hear more about the nuclear option today without all the paranoia that goes along with that.