I seek various credible sources (eg - Universities/NASA/Other/Some News Sources/Respected Scientists of the day) and cross reference a bit to sort out fact from fiction. I'm no scientist or brilliant PHD (avg Joe), but it's kind of a venn diagram analysis to aid decision making. Much like your efforts displayed in the documentary. Not an all day affair but a few minutes here and there and you can mostly sort out fact from fiction. Again, keep up the great work!
In my experience information does not normally help. It might sound hippie, but during many years of giving rational arguments i got the impression that it is only love anc respect what that might help create some crack in mental frames so crearly flawed... I only invest energy on people i care, trying to be gentle and respect their worldview, while letting them know there are valid arguments that lead to opposite conclusions... if the world order is falling appart, we are dealing with strong resistance to change, because at the end, it is our identity as a spieces were are questioning...
I'm a waste reduction specialist. I spend a lot of spare time debunking fossil fuel lobbyists who claim that recycling (their) plastic packaging is the solution to creating a more circular economy. The fact is that recycling is only halfway down the chain of priorities, with reduction of waste and refillables being far above. They are relentless, greedy and deliberately misleading people. We are surrounded by conmen.
eliminating waste is an end goal - reducing waste migration is a middle goal - energy recovery is often the highest value use for most low grade (increasingly plastic) trash - get that happening across the board, advertise all the turtles and dolphins saved, and all the money made by local initiatives. Yes there are conmen - everywhere: red, blue, black and green. No lobbyist paid by any industry sector can be deemed a reliable source of fact. No Reporter with emotional connection to their story can be called unbiased likewise.
Yeah drinks used to come in bottles that were washed and reused. And we're supposed to believe that throwing the container away and making a new one is more efficient. Newp.
It is like the fossil fuel industry learned from the tobacco industry. They also learned how to make it harder to get caught. If you were making a billion dollars a day from the status quo you would pay a million dollars a day to prevent change.
@@bobknezevic1151 well, we know that burning stuff and inhaling it is bad for humans. It ruins your lungs and blood vessels. Fine particulate matter comes from burning cigarettes, diesel, and gasoline. We should just slowly work to prevent that pollution, to help each other live longer and healthier lives. I am pretty sure climate change is proven. Why do you think Russia is militarizing the arctic? Global temperatures are heating up and pretty soon the arctic is going to be one of the busiest sea transport routes ever even in winter. When my parents were kids Lake Erie used to freeze over and you could walk to Canada. That hasn’t happened in my lifetime. The coast guard is going to disband the ice breaker fleet serving the Great Lakes because the lakes don’t get cold enough to build up enough ice for the ice breaking. Whoever is telling you that climate change is not proven is purposely misleading you. Stop listening to charismatic charlatans.
@@bobknezevic1151 exact equivalence. Exxon Moblie scientists were actually the first to find conclusive evidence that CO2 was causing CC, and the executives' decision was to hire the EXACT SAME PR firm - Hill & Knowlton - that the tobacco industry used to discredit the science that tobacco causes cancer.
its now been 6 years after i installed a solar system on my farm . Thats six years of not paying any electricity bill and yet i have all modern amenities . Now am considering adding even more panels.
My family has a farm where electricity is expensive and cuts out too frequently, but luckily the new house is designed to install solar panels and storage batteries. We're already saving considerable amounts on the power bills due to superior grounding, and with Starlink and solar panels hope to be capable to go fully off-grid without interruption when needed.
The fossil fuel industry is strong and good at spreading misinformation. However, what is not mentioned in this video, is that when comes to nuclear energy, which is considered by the IPCC as an important tool against climate change, there is at least the same amount of disinformation spread out there.
@@insertclevernamehere700 Regarding CO2? Probably, although I don't know how much its construction causes. But why is it that countries often build their reactors right next their borders? (See France and Belgium for example)
I’m so glad that you mentioned the dishonesty with picture of the wind turbines in Texas! One proposal which I thought was interesting was to do more “reverse image searching” of memes that gain a lot of traction very quickly. If they’re found to be connected to an older image than the algorithm temporarily stops putting them in front of new viewers until someone can fact check it and ensure that it’s not spreading misinformation.
Well, I found even this video a bit disingenuous about the power outage "Outages in fossil fuel power plants, especially those running on natural gas. Yes, some wind turbines also stopped working." implies all fossil plants failed and only some wind turbines. Whereas wind capacity were lost around 60% of generation, while gas lost around 50%. Maybe it would be better to dwell a few seconds more to explain Texas is not prepared for a cold like this. Yes, the wind turbines are not fitted with de-icer equipment. That's true to gas plants/pipelines which were frozen due to the water content of the gas. I certainly would love to see a balanced view.
@@Sekir80 The grid woes in Texas are more linked to a very capitalistic approach to power generation and distribution, as opposed to the public service it actually should be. Private operators have little to no incentives to prepare for worst-case scenarios, they get paid either way and skimming on de-icing equipment is a good way to cut corner. This is a political issue first and foremost, more than something specific to fossil or renewable technology. BTW, the EU seems to be drifting towards a Texas-style system by trying to turn everything into a "free market", and has actively worked to dismantle public services of energy like France's EDF.
It is true that Texas lost a lot of wind capacity due to freezing conditions, this happens all the time in climates with freezing conditions, this I know, living in a cold climate. What's missing from the discussion blaming wind power, is the key issue affecting all generation technologies during this amazing cold snap was that very few generators were properly winterized; that includes wind, natural gas plants and natural gas production. A lack of winterization was the common thread for all generation technologies. To my knowledge not one technology was spared from some kind of derating or forced outage, they all suffered. Ultimately it was a governance failure of ERCOT to compel generators to meet reasonable winterization standards.
@@axel6269 Well, yes. It's a bit sad to see capitalism raging this hard. To the second point: really? That's asking for disaster. Maybe I should prepare for a more unreliable electricity availability then!
In the case of the whole "turbines kill birds" thing, it seems that the fact that people can see them move makes people believe it easier compared to other causes of bird mortality such as power lines, cell towers, cats, windows, and even climate change itself. People generally discount or vastly under-estimate the number of birds killed per year by windows. Up to 1 BILLION a year in the US alone. Compare that to less than 1 million bird deaths per year in the US due to wind turbines.
What your analysis is missing is the disproportionate loss birds from of key top predator species, some of which are endangered. The avoidable death of 1000 bald eagles is a much bigger issue than the avoidable death of 1000 sparrows. This is a very localized issue depending very much on whether wind turbines are co-located on migration paths or within habitat used by threatened bird species, thankfully we are getting better at our environmental assessments and have the knowledge to avoid locating wind turbines where they can do serious harm to the ecosystems that they inhabit.
@@lindsaydempsey5683 Agreed that avian predator species are highly affected by habitat loss and other mortality factors, however wind turbines are attributable to a small percentage of large bird deaths compared to other factors as well. The biggest killer of large birds are road vehicles and habitat destruction. Wind turbines can always be improved, in fact I've been involved in some research through NREL/NWTC to do just that, but across the board for all types of birds wind turbines are the smallest source of avian mortality by a large margin.
@@craglevcarboncapture I'm not disagreeing, but do you have any sources for that data that clearly shows they lack of/low involvement of wind turbines. Also, even if other influences kill more top predator birds than poorly placed wind turbines, I would still advocate for protecting local ecology to the the greatest practical extent and that ALL generation projects regardless of technology need to be subject to accurate well-informed environmental impact assessments that can properly balance the benefits and risks as a whole, including those to local ecology.
@@lindsaydempsey5683 Avian predators should be protected for sure and I'm not trying to invalidate your point about that, I've even been involved in improving turbine design to do so. The argument I'm making is that, like DW says in the video, recognizing that improvements can be made doesn't mean that we should disregard a whole industry that benefits all types of birds through mitigating the effects of climate change as well as localized air pollution. As for stats, all I've seen are generalized towards all birds vs. large predatory birds, but even the most severe estimates show bird deaths from wind turbines are 1,000 times less than window collisions alone. If we want to most significantly reduce bird collisions, cities and cars are the biggest factor by far and reductions in avian mortality in those sectors will greatly improve bird numbers across the board.
@@craglevcarboncapture I'd like to understand that data better for my own interest, the company that I work for runs two wind farms and we have quite strict internal processes for documenting all bird or bat deaths and identifying what species they are. I think they key messaging on that topic should be avian mortality is a risk, but it only ever becomes a problem if wind turbines are located in unsuitable locations. And to your point there are a lot of initiatives looking to reduce the impacts on avian populations. In our case we could not do much about the turbines, but we could do things in the switchyard. Those changes almost halved the annual bird and bat kill, which were already small to start with.
It's so strange that this video popped up in my recommended! I JUST had to correct my parents after they parroted dis-information about what happened in Texas. They said the grid failure was because the wind turbines froze! I had to explain to them that there are turbines in Alaska, Norway, and even in Oregon where I live, where it freezes every winter! I also explained how the grid actually failed because the Texas power company didn't weatherproof their gas pipelines because they didn't want to spend the money. I also explained that the EPA warned Texas that this exact thing would happen if they got a major winter storm, but it went ignored. I don't think they expected me to be so informed. It's a mind virus. And we all have to do our part to rid the world of this virus!
There is no need for smear tactics or lies to be against push for solar and wind "future". It is enough to look at current performance in real world of different countries. At this very moment Germany makes power with 700g CO2/kWh(purely coal powered Poland 880g), while France goes by with just 113g CO2/kWh. This numbers fluctuate but pretty much always France with heavy Nuclear reliance plus some wind and solar is 4-5 times better (and it is better since 1970s). The fearmongering about nuclear power caused Germany to move backwards with climate goal and also in being great ally and sponsor for putin and not for its NATO allies and neighbours. And all that after spending some 500+GigaEuro on "green transition", and about highest electricity prices in EU. No smear, just real world realities of power generation and keeping the lights on.
Thank you for your service. The only person I bother arguing w/ is my brother, he likes to do his own research and comes back w/ all the points you listed and I counter him w/ the method you used. He pretends to not hear me, so I say it firmer, and then he acts like I am wrong, so I bring up the info and he asks "yeah, but how do you Know?" and I tell him about the scientific method and then he walks away claiming he needs a cigarette.
He does his own research? Gee... If he's doing his own research, he must have the years of education, the equipment and laboratories necessary. I'd start listening to him. Ohh - he just reads Twitter?
My mom is the same way, When you’ve refuted her claim to a point she can’t come up with an answer, she just shuts down and says I don’t want to talk about it…
I visited a wind farm in Eastern WA where they have a visitor center and give tours. It turns out that the big glass viewing windows on the visitor center killed more birds than the wind turbines on the site.
I live next to a wind farm in Eastern WA, and I can tell you, my cat and cars, and even my greenhouse with a hole in it, kill more birds per square foot than the turbines.
The bird kill is irrelevant. It is the waste of taxpayers money on uneconomical and unreliable renewable energy projects that is the problem. It is based upon a ridiculous popular delusion. The Climate Delusion. The false and delusional belief that mans effects on the earth’s climate are significant and dangerous. Since both the current mean surface temperature of Earth (15 degrees centigrade) and atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration (415ppm) are suboptimal the carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels are actually beneficial. Benefits include increased agricultural yields (main effect) reduced winter heating costs and fewer deaths from hypothermia.
@@Zero-oh8vm not that I remember. I have heard that painting blades can reduce strikes. They also said that it was more of a problem with old turbine towers that were built with a lattice that birds could use to build nests in. I don’t think any modern turbines have that problem
@@brucec954 there are 120 meter windmills here, it's also a major bird highway of sorts. One of the blades might get painted so the birds might get more effective in identifying the save path around, and don't try to fly through the path of the blades spinning.
They did not debunk anything. The same old new age nonsense.Wind and solar can't bootstrap wind and solar - it is always manufactured with fossil fuels, then most of the junked wind generator blades and solar panels are buried in landfills because its not recyclable. Most of the "renewable' technology is made from plastics from petroleum. The law must demand that wind generators and solar panels be recycled. This is not sustainable. Demand that the so called renewable tech be manufactured only from only wind and solar generated electricity and that zero fossil fuels be used in these products.
Nuclear energy also generates around 15g CO2/kWh. Plus it doesn't require batteries for storage. I think we should view nuclear power generation as a potential solution if not the solution.
It does require controlled storage for the life of its fuel though, which can be thousands of years. Even fusion isn't completely free of long-lasting toxic byproducts. Really the only nuclear that's safe for life is the one we're standing on: the heat of the Earth's mantle, where if anything goes wrong is no more dangerous than routine volcanic activity.
Back in 1982 Disney World opened a pavilion "Universe Of Energy" where they showed movies about energy production, including oil, wind and solar. But because real world oil refineries are too grimy and dirty looking, they actually hired a Hollywood effects company to fake the footage to show a pleasant Disney-fied view of an oil refinery. There's a video on YT where Ian Hunter talks about the miniature effects they build for this. Just to say, the misinformation has always been there in some form, but it is much more blatant and intense nowadays
Two criticisms with this video. And yes, I DO support renewable energy. 1: intermittency is a real challenge and warrants a discussion about new power storage technologies like sodium ion batteries and compresses air. As well as sustainable sources of hydrocarbon fuel to use when generation is low, such as hydrothermal carbonisation. 2: wind turbines do kill a significant number of birds. Yes, less than buildings, cars and cats, although there is a lot more of those than turbines, but also in a different way. Those causes mainly kill small, fast breeding, prey species that can support a higher mortality rate. Windbturbines disproportionately kill large soaring birds, these species tend to be slow breeding, not have as many natural predators and not do as well with increased mortality. Again, this warrants serious discussion on the methods available to minimise these deaths.
I had heard protests about wind turbines off the coast of RI saying that they would "use up all of the wind" and there wouldn't be enough wind left for sail boats. I laughed out loud. Humanity will not die of global warming but due to massive stupidity. I have little hope.
who said this is the truth? It all comes down to what someone want to believe. Th big problem with any, even scientific, research is, you can always do it in a way the wanted outcome is there.
This is why we can't have nice things. Great video. Let's just hope the algorithm doesn't shadowban this. Small channels like mine can't talk about these topics or I risk being tucked away by the algo; keep it up.
@@HaldaneSmith you will find lots of videos of people complaining that their videos have been been blocked or filtered because the automated systems can't tell the difference between arguing for or against any particular topic.
@@HaldaneSmith "Lots" of engagement is the clue. Small creators don't get "free" engagement. Engagement also depends on the charisma of the creator, among other things. For example, if you see my channel and compare it to other niches out there, growth is slow. RUclips doesn't promote stuff that isn't monetized, and the road to get there is also a huge death valley. I trust RUclips's AI though, coz after all, it's the only being capable of assigning numbers to abstract things -- like controversiality.
I understood that Texas's problem wasn't that they used renewables, and more that they didn't adequately protect them against extreme conditions, while also lacking the connection to the rest of the grid to fall back on. What I didn't realize was that the poor weatherization measures were so impactful across the board, and that the fossil fuels were actually impacted significantly harder.
IMO, no it did not, this could have been a great piece about extravagant claims made by many different people, but instead it is just a pro renewables puff piece that glosses over some of the challenges associated with large scale reliance on wind and solar to meet the energy needs of modern societies.
@@st-ex8506 Thanks for the reference. They do claim what you say, but those claims do not stand up to scrutiny. I have gone through both the presentation and the related report put out by ReThinkX, my conclusion is that must have smoked a lot of drugs while creating that material. My specific objections to their work is that they assume future price reductions going out to almost infinity that are future loaded (building most stuff at some miraculously low future price). Then on the practical side they assume a buildout of W&S that equates to ~5x the peak load being served. The scale of that buildout is beyond the scale of any electrical infrastructure buildout ever attempted by humans, ever; it is breathtaking to a scale that defies description. I do appreciate the reference to it and I do appreciate their work, it provides a point of comparison for other options. Also in favour of W&S, their work demonstrates that if you can build the equipment you can keep the lights on with 100% W,S and B if you build extreme quantities of it.
The main problem with "renewables" as in solar and wind, is not any of the stuff mentioned in this video. The problem is that an energy system cannot depend on them. 15 to 25% can come from solar and wind. But ALL OTHER plannable must be able to supply 100% of the energy needed on the worst day of the year, or actually the worst second of the year or even worse, the worst second in a 25-year period. That will most likely happen on a calm cold night in late January when it is extremely cold outside and it is snowing. But solar and wind are fantastic to lower the CO2 footprint as more CO2 "costly" production can be shut down to save fuel cost. But in Sweden where I live. We do not have any CO2-based electricity production (except for emergency usage). It is hydro and nuclear only, or at least it used to be. Now the influx of solar and wind have screwed up the business model of water and nuclear. So this video is totally US-centric and should have a warning label on it. It is not possible to build an electricity system solely on solar and wind. Nor is it possible to build an electricity system with higher than about 25 to 35% on solar and wind until we figure out how to handle the business model for the unique one second once in a 25-year period when the sun is down and it is no wind... That is the critical key question on "renewable energy", and nothing else. Solve that and I will be all in. Until then I do hate solar and wind energy, and I will go all the way to stop it (at least wind power).
I think they've talked about it before - but from memory it proves to be less of a problem than you would think when you have a large renewable grid: The wind always blows and the sun shines somewhere. You do probably need some help to cover the sporadic dips, which could be hydro, batteries, weirder things like pumped hydro (where you pump water back up when there's spare power), load following nuclear (rare in the US but France does it), or even, yes, fossil fuels - gas plants can spin up really fast if needed. This will probably require upgrading the power grid, since the better your long distance connections are, the more you can smooth out local variation. But that's a useful thing to do no matter how you generate power, so ...
@@dnebdal thanks for the reply. I don't disagree with your solutions. I just think it's a huge oversight on a video that is supposed to be debunking claims about renewables. Nuclear seems like one of the best options we have to provide high quality base load power that doesn't rely on fossil fuels.
All during this presentation I kept thinking this is great info. Who to share it with? Unfortunately the people I think of who most need to see it (my right wing relatives in Texas) would reject it outright and the information would fall on totally deaf ears (assuming they even listened past the first 5 minutes.) But thank you for putting it together, it is interesting. My one complaint is the focus on mainly Texas and US Right wing conspiracy theories. Unfortunately this is a global problem and focusing on the nuts in the US lets other country’s viewers misconstrue that it’s not a problem in their back yards. But this is a start.
So we agree - those on the right have varied opinions but the left worship group think! Explains why the left no longer desire free speech or individual rights. Someday you may identify that climate change militancy was a step to authoritarian control. Note: You are permitted to disagree, for the time being!
The only point you smartly avoid is the dependency of renewables on weather. This is the biggest (and the only significant) drawback of these technologies. We simply can't go full renewable because of this unpredictability. Germany is a great example - they have enough wind turbines to power an entire country from them, but that rarely happens and other means of electricity production still have to be ready at all times. As a result the overall costs for maintenance are still the same.
Wow, an eye opener. People would attack me about solar, wind and hydro because fossil fuels and nuclear energy were the way to go for every argument. I always believed that these were great alternatives and that small maintenance is negligible when it came to them lasting 15 - 25 years. Also, the argument of them turning off and people out of energy is just not feasible because of the fact that energy engineers know what they're doing when one energy is low, there is always back up sources. Wind and Solar is still the way to go as a great alternative and there should be much investment put into it for it to continue innovation, research and development.
It's inevitable and a waste of time to battle. Like I'd say videos like these are the best you can do to inform the misinformed but they usually are stubborn in their beliefs and don't believe it anyway. Best thing to do is to ignore them and keep working on renewables, don't let them waste your time.
the problem is that those people vote, while you are ignoring them because you feel like a waste of time, those with an agenda are working hard to attract more people to their side.
The wind turbines don’t make economic sense because wind has a low energy density and is intermittent. The costs of backup are too high. The carbon dioxide emissions are actually beneficial. Benefits include increased agricultural yields (main effect) reduced winter heating costs and fewer deaths from hypothermia. Geothermal energy is under-utilised and reliable.
Good video! To a degree, the general public is also responsible: first: many people do not want to hear bad news that they may need to change their lifestyles, and second: better education in real science and physics would make people less susceptible to misinformation and disinformation.
but also importantly, critical thinking, and researching & discerning bad sources from good sources. didn't get to learn the latter skill until college-level essay writing courses
@@driftingdruid Im a little confused by the slide at @5:46. Doesnt this show a collapse in Solar and Wind Power, even more so than Gas and Coal (in %), especially arround friday. Thats not really what the voiceover says, but im not familiar with when the wheather was how bad exactly. So why would it be Misinformation to claim that renewables were more affected than fossil?
@@driftingdruid People don't have as much time to do that, and if they did, they'd rather spend it with friends & family, enjoying themselves. If we truly wish to educate the common people, we need to address them as friends, not professionals. Professionalism kills movements.
I'm definitely NOT responsible. I don't believe misinformation, I use my brain and I'm smart. So would prefer if you removed me from your list, thanks..
I saw a movie about the problems with renewable energy a while back. I got the feeling that part of the problem was businesses who were fraudulently doing things that were supposed to be renewable but weren't really. It was also claimed that it was necessary to have fossil fuel power stations idling in case sun and wind both failed at once and that they couldn't easily switch these off and on so they were producing a lot of CO2. This struck me as dubious. Unfortunately, I can't remember what this movie was called or where I saw it, perhaps you could find a debunk it (or show that the problems are due to business fraud rather than inherent problems with green energy).
I work for an electric utility, and the biggest issue I've always heard, from people in this industry, is that, short of hydro, no renewable energy sources can handle peak demand, or unexpected demand. Normal everyday energy usage is measurable and can be accounted for. But when everyone goes home, energy demand goes up. That's "peak demand". It's an increase as more people fire up their stoves, plug in their cars, stream their favorite shows, and (depending on the time of year) turn on the heat or turn on the air conditioning/fans. The fairly stable, although elevated, energy usage from the day dips during the travel, and then surges back up to a higher volume until everyone goes to bed and the energy uses dip again. With a dramatic shift of vehicles to electric powered, you're going to have a significant demand during the nighttime hours, which is generally when it is less windy and the sun is definitely not shining. I don't know if those renewables would be able to produce so much power during the day that they could handle the normal load and then have ample leftover energy enough to put it into batteries and keep all of those vehicles charging throughout the night. And that is going to be a LOT of power, if you're talking about replacing every fuel burning vehicle with electric. Airplanes, trains, freight trucks, loaders, mining equipment, ships, busses, personal vehicles, military vehicles, military aircraft, tanks, manufacturing equipment, backup generators, and more. I'm all for using some renewables, but there has to be a way to account for peak demand and unexpected demand on the power grid.
You didn't debunk the lack of reliability argument(I'm not for or against renewables) you gave an example of people claiming unreliability of renewables in Texas was the cause of a power outage which was shown not to be true. This doesn't how debunk the believe that renewable energy sources are not as reliable as non renewable, a good example of this would be to show a city or town that runs fully on renewables for an extended time period and give report on any issues faced. But you didn't, seems as though you guys straw manned the argument. Again I'm not for or against renewables, I'm just pointing out an issue i have with your analysis
You didn't really talk about the most difficult thing to solve when it comes to renewable energy - ""cold Dunkelflaute", and here is a video by Sabine who does go through research and some basic numbers to see which of the possible technologies might be the best. But in the end it seems the solution is that on top of renewables + storage you also need somewhat decent percentage of base load in nuclear or gas (since they are lowest emittors). Want to do a video about this?
While the video does undoubtedly debunk some misinformation, it tries to deflect the central criticism of ‘unreliability’. And hence the video becomes a source of misinformation itself as you correctly state. Cold Dunkelflaute is key design scenario for the UK electricity system with a high pressure over the North Sea in winter resulting in very low levels of wind and solar. Twice this winter as a result of Dunkelflaute system has been running every nuclear and fossil fuel plant that remains. This week the situation deteriorated to the point that the grid had to pay people not to use electricity at peak times. How do the authors of this video and the experts interviewed expect the system to work when 1) the fossil fuel power stations are all closed, 2) heating using fossil fuels is replaced by heating using electricity e.g. heat pumps and 3) EVs replace petrol and diesel powered cars.
We need solar and wind power. Carbon tax credits are not going to slow down effects of climate change. Increase in frequency of extreme and worldwide weather events are already killing 99%.
If they care about Bird strikes so much, then they shouldn't have any windows in their house. More birds die from flying into windows than wind turbines
Why didn't you mentioned about your country Germany who's still digging coals and shutting down nuclear power plants (which is the biggest low carbon energy source) despite investing billions in renewables
"shutting down nuclear power plants despite investing in renewables" What are you trying to say? Did you mean to say "shutting down nuclear power plants despite still digging coals"? The topic of the video is not nuclear power. The video is about misinformation funded by the fossil fuel industry.
@@Viivek2309 Renewables can't replace fossil fuel over night. Germany is in a transitional phase where it is still dependent on fossil fuel. There are several factors delaying the transition, like the hasty shutdown of nuclear power plants after Fukushima, or the slow growth in wind energy over the last couple of years. On top of that, Germany no longer gets natural gas from Russia, making it even more dependent on coal as a transitional energy source.
Identifying our own biases and fears is something that should be taught at school level so that the next generation does not fall prey to misinformation. ❤
that is why I cringe every time people say that teaching philosophy and sociology in schools is a waste, and we should instead teach marketable skills. that is why the world is the way that it is, we teach kids how to pass tests and how to be a good capitalist, but we don't teach them critical thinking skills.
I've been thinking about this for a long time(a curriculum that teaches children to think critically and detect manipulation, be it "news" but also marketing and scams) - sadly I don't have any political power to push for things like this. It's time to teach it in schools though, it has become a serious issue with the wide reach of the internet
@@aliancemd Some wise person once told me, that “teachers and moms can change the world” I hope that individuals in this role realize this and start spreading the awareness ❤️
@@danilooliveira6580 ……and practice it to demonstrate by self experience. Our facing our biases means admitting to ourselves that we are wrong(in that situation). Being honest to ourselves is so difficult, but we have to keep trying and eventually the authenticity will get noticed and inspire. ❤️
@@hape3862 If we solely followed "economics" we wouldn't have renewable energy in the first place. Without any political action, fossil fuels will remain more profitable until it's too late. In the case of nuclear power, it *is* the most economic low-carbon method for ensuring continuity of production in a highly intermittent grid with low hydro potential. There's a reason France's power prices are among the lowest of developed countries... Nobody sane is arguing we need to replace 100% of our power production with nuclear. But claiming we can do away with nuclear entirely without dramatically altering our way of life is just as much of a fantasy.
Good point, there are multiple studies including an excellent one from MIT showing that the least cost way to a deeply decarbonized electricity sector (i.e. less than 50g CO2/kWh) has to include nuclear alongside other non-emitting technologies.
The only reason nuclear is expensive is because of red tape and old technology. Take a car from the sixties and try to 'fix' it to pass modern safety and emission standards using only military grade components. It will be quite expensive. There is a lot of innovation waiting to happen, but hold back because of red tape, lack of knowledge and fear.
2 things: Nothing can touch fossil fuels for cheap efficiency...and... Your renewables will NOT "save" the planet. But people must have some kind of religion to believe in, it seems.
Electricity generated from fossil fuels is the most expensive source in the German power grid by far. The industry relies on huge government subsidies to stay afloat and _still_ can't compete with the price of renewable electricity.
@@HeadsFullOfEyeballs I suspect that has a lot to do with the way that Germany acquires their fossil fuels, does it not? Does Germany have a robust industry that goes about seeking, finding, and drawing fossil fuels out of the ground? We do - and the ONE AND ONLY reason that it ever becomes difficult to process, market cheaply and still make a profit for the industry, is due to government intervention, government obstruction and government greed. The answer to our energy problems is NOT to pit one source against the other for political gain in the manner that some governments or entities are doing. Doesn't matter where we stand on these choices, we need ALL of them. And anyone who thinks that "big oil" is the only industry trying to manipulate the popular media in order to perpetuate myths and lies, is not paying attention and is likely a fool. Please understand, I'm not speaking of you or disagreeing with your comment. I'm just making a statement about the silliness of these types of videos.
We should start doing exactly the same. Start spreading the facts. As long and as often as you can. This fire can only be fought with fire. Lets use Social Media for our Advantage, too. You dont need to comment yourself if you dont have anything to add, liking does also help to heat up a topic quite much.
Problem with solar and wind is fact that oil (fossil fuels) is critical component. Withouth oil it s not possible to build and maintain solar and wind power plants. Is there technology which will step in once oil is not any more available in today's quantities?
"Manufacturing of renewable energy requires use of conventional energy..." well, yes. We can use renewable energy to manufacture renewable energy until we have renewable energy, and we can reduce the amount of conventional energy and increase renewable energy as we go. It feeds into itself. As for the anti-renewable campaigns, I suspect it's the same groups that funded anti-nuclear campaigns. Whether we should use nuclear or not, fossil fuel companies are trying as hard as they can to hold onto their profit generation and are attacking every potential competitor that would be susbstantially cheaper and cleaner.
I note that the video didn't address the intermittency of wind and solar. Plenty of respectable engineering channels on RUclips point this out and recognise that storage and/or peaker gas plants are required. If you wanted to cover the topic fully and respond to the unreliability criticism you ought to be talking about that too. Also, given that this channel originates in Germany, I'd be interested in a run down of the current energy production situation there, especially in light of Russia turning off their gas (or the EU countries opting not to buy it). That would make for an interesting analysis given that we outside of Europe hear conflicting reports.
Full supporter of renewable energies and reguarly engage in the debate with fossil fuel proponents but also wanted to see a more detailed discussion of issue of intermittent power production - days of no wind or several cloudy days in a row
In German there is an annual winter lull in wind while sunlight is minimal called Dunkelflaute. This can last longer than current technology can store electricity to compensate. This is typically when power might be imported if there is an interconnect to an unaffected country but this is unlikely as the Dunkelflaute may affect a large geographical area. That leaves the load to be met by duplicate electricity generation from the legacy systems like nuclear and fossil fuels. Yes, it is incredibly inefficient to maintain a duplicate fallback generation system.
The biggest issue with wind and solar is and always been storage. A slightly more honest talk about that would be great, most other problems are essentially solved. Sadly the storage one is also really hard to solve fully with it becoming more problematic the large share of the grid renewables are, as currently we Just solve it with other sources of energy mostly gas but that becomes harder when you dont use other sources anymore.
Storage is only now becoming an issue now that renewables have reached a limit in the energy mix, so it is a new problem to tackle at this level. Right now the various grids are connecting to the Norwegian grid (which stores energy behind their dams) to start solving this. But storage is not a huge technical problem to confront, both technically and cost wise, compared to nuclear energy.
@@chrisgwen2526 the fact that you didn't see the issue before doesn't mean other people couldn't. It was always obvious that if you wanted intermittent power to be a large part of your grid you needed massive industrial scale storage. This industrial scale storage still doesn't exist in a way that is scale-able/economic enough while also not emitting so much carbon that the whole exercise would be pointless to begin with. You wishing away these problems doesn't help anyone, and the longer you deny these issues the longer fossil fuels will stay in the fuel mix. If we do not embrace nuclear and we do not have some sort of massive technical breakthrough we will keep using fossil fuels. So in my opinion that makes nuclear a lesser evil we should have invested in a long time ago, as it is the only thing already technically capable of removing fossil fuels from the fuel mix. And sadly every year we allow the fossil lobby to play stall tactics by convincing ideologically driven green politics against nuclear is another year we will be using fossil fuels. ill be fine either way I live in a rich country so 10 years earlier or later won't affect me that much, but it is sort of frustrating to see the people who pro-port to care the most have such a large ideologically driven blind spot. Hopefully Im wrong and your right and it will all be happy ever after but I am not even remotely convinced that the technical challenges of storage have been solved.
@@alberts9781 Energy storage for renewables is certainly being solved as we speak. It's not that hard of a problem. The public doesn't see it yet because it's a new problem that is just starting to get the necessary investment, and the solutions are still in labs and early deployment. If you were following the energy storage sector, you would know that the news is pretty much all fantastic, with dozens of new battery chemistries popping up, many which use nothing but cheap, plentiful elements like iron, sulfur, and silicon, and some very interesting gravity batteries gaining traction. Your arguments against energy storage are the same ones originally used against cars, airplanes, computers, steam engines, solar, wind, and any other scaleable, high-demand new technology that started out expensive and small scale. People don't see it yet, the few are very expensive, so therefore it may well be impossible and a pipe dream. Be assured, batteries will scale up and get very cheap, because we already know how to manufacture any kind of battery on a large scale, and we definitely have many good battery designs that only use cheap elements, perfectly suitable for the grid. The demand for cheap grid storage is gigantic and will only get bigger. Cheap energy storage rolling out in the next two decades is a certainty, with the prices ultimately converging on the price of the raw materials such as iron.
@@charliedoyle7824 I'm not yet convinced that battery technology will get significantly more efficient, despite all the impressive-looking CGI videos that seem to pop up every few months, promoting the "next era" in batteries. One solution could be quite simple, reverse electricity metering: Power up all the high-capacity batteries in vehicles and buildings -- when they're not being used -- from the grid, when the wind blows and the sun shines. And -- also when they're not being used -- change direction and re-charge the grid, when there's no wind and no sun. A widespread electricity debit and credit system.
@@martin.feuchtwanger you're betting on battery technology to stop improving? 😆😆. Are you also betting on computers flatlining from now on? You're delusional. Battery improvement has been very rapid every year for decades now; it's a bit hard to see because it's incremental. Batteries dramatically improving for at least the next 50 years is a certainty. The physics and market demand assure it. The only reason we don't already have better batteries is there wasn't enough demand up until a few decades ago. This has nothing to do with CGI.
Someone told me that volcanos add a lot more CO2 in the atmosphere then humans. I know this is not true by a long shot but everyone else in the room accepted that as a fact, specially because they heard this before. Debunking is really hard work!
7:36 It is pretty interesting how they show how much of a far-right echo chamber 4chan really is it just being a random circle in that inter connected web
Normally I would have shared your report... However, the boom boom background "music" pollutes my brain and I will thus not share this good report report!
This is one of the saddest thing of our times. A very few sociopaths turning millions of people against each other, just to make those very few people more profit. More money than they could ever spend. We have to grow as a society and learn a few things: Who are socio and psychopaths. How they truly do not care about other beings. Just themselves. We need to learn how to stop them gaining position and power. We need to learn their tactics, we need to learn how to prevent them turning good willing people against each other. If we would know only these few things, I can guarantee you, our life on this planet would be incredibly better in any way.
Very interesting topic. There has been an opinion circulating a lot in Greece that the govt is intentionally setting protected natural areas on fire or allowing them to be destroyed so they'll allow wind turbines to be built. The threat to birds is also mentioned a lot, and the aesthetics of renewables in tourist destinations.
Thanks for the video. I retired some old solar panels from my roof after 25 years. When tested they were still producing about half their nominal output. The warranty then was 10 years, whereas new panels I have fitted have a 25 year warranty. Household batteries are a cost, though. They require good management. Fortunately in Australia, 97% of battery composition is recycled.
Thanks for writing. I meant off the roof. No, I don't know what to do with them, the wattage is low, but I still have them in my back yard. There might be a remote part of my farm where I need some low power one day.
Build your own system many people are doing it. Do it in stages and for the cost of a small car it can be done. The utility companies are corporations that want to maximise profit. I used to get 60 cents /kwhr export, now get 5 cents. The utility then sells it to other users for 40 cents a Kwhr. That is why I built my own OFF GRID system. My system has been working for 7 years and technology is getting cheaper and more reliable.
You left out a few things .... The Texas failure had a lot to do with the electrical infrastructure. The aging transmission & distribution system was in bad need of maintenance. Wind & solar are great, but to replace Oil/Coal/Nuclear on any real level, we need storage technology improvements to supply us with power when the sun is not shining & the wind is not blowing. Current battery tech has its own environmental & economic impacts. You should of also mentioned nuclear is the cleanest form of energy to this day. Thanks.
Germany creates almost 50% of their energy through renewables. You do not need massive storage systems. What you need is a well engineered & intelligent grid.
Finally, thank you At 3:40 a question I've been asking myself for so long is answered. How long does a wind power station have to run to produce the energy that it took to build and set up. Half a year.
@@georgetsokanis3542 No, because the question isn't how long it takes to earn the money back, but the *energy* that was needed to create and place it. That generally isn't subsidised, and i'm not entirely sure how one would even go about doing that.
@@georgetsokanis3542 Besides the fact its about energy not money as Llortnerof already pointed out, There have been multiple zero-subsidie windturbine parks granted in the north sea and around Denmark. And construction on at least one is already halfway complete. So that money argument is no longer true all the time either.
About the unreliability part, I was disappointed that you spent that section debunking the Texas outage instead of tackling the very real shortcomings of renewables when they make a significant proportion of the grid. Basically, it means you need a lot of reserve fossil fuel power production to compensate for the lack of solar and wind, which is expensive in infrastructure, and might not be very green overall.
Maybe short term fossil fuel plants are held in reserve to cover the intermediacy of solar and wind, but long term is increasing energy storage, pumped hydro, battery, and other technologies are becoming more and more feasible as the cost of solar and wind get less and less compared to fossil fuels.
@@cmbakerxx Sure, but all those storage system have a cost as well, in term of money but they also have their own environmental issues (batteries, beside still being incredibly expensive, need a lot of minerals. Mining is always dirty, and pumped hydro isn't free either, needs flooding a huge area, some countries just don't have space and elevation to do that). I am not saying that there is no way to make a 100% renewable energy grid work, I just think it is a bit misleading by the video to avoids the topic altogether by deflecting the audience's attention to something that has little to do with the issue (the texas outage). Well, something about renewables that should be tackled as well is the increased transportation cost, since electricity is produce farther from where it is consumed in the case of wind and dams.
@@cmbakerxx Of all the storage technologies, only pumped hydro can scale at significant enough levels to be worth mentioning, and they require flooding large areas of space (which might not even be carbon neutral if you're not very careful about how you go about it). To satisfy the storage requirements inherent to a high-intermittence grid, there simply isn't enough hydro potential to go around. Outside of that, batteries require way too much materials per MWh of storage to provide power to a country for more than a day, and power-to-gas-to-power wastes most of the electricity you put into it. You need a baseload, low-carbon source of power to ensure a basic amount of energy supply at all times, to cover for the variations in renewable production.
@@axel6269 Scrolling through the comments you are the only one I found who mentions the intermittent character of renewable power generation. And exactly as you say, it is the biggest problem. It was even mentioned in the videos shown as "misinformation" but still not explained. Don't get me wrong. I run a company in solar installation and am a fan of photovoltaics. But I am sorry to say I must rate this video with a thumb down, because that is just bad journalism bordering on misinformation (thus basically in no way better than the other videos shown here from the other side of the argument). Which is scary from such a big and reputable company as DW. Saying that, I still believe there is a way to solve the intermittent generation problem with technologies such as pumped hydro which already exists and is perfectly viable in suitable locations. Then there are of course future possible hopes such as new battery technologies or hydrogen storage, but these solutions are neither technologically sufficient nor economically efficient yet and there is no guarantee they will ever be (I'm not saying they won't be), which makes them in my opinion a gamble and a bad choice to rely on for the future of power engineering and thus the whole modern human civilization. Thanks for coming to my TED talk👀
Coming up on the outside is Vehicle to Grid battery storage. Production of electric cars with their large batteries is growing exponentially. It has been projected that once most cars have VtoG capability it will require less than 5% of the total capacity to solve the problem. People won't object. They get paid for the service.
You missed some incredibly important aspects here. First off, correct, the power outage in texas was not caused by renewables. However, it should also be common sense that wind and solar energy really isn't as reliable as it depends on the wind and the sun. So you can't completely rely on it, and for some places it is more efficient than other places. Second, It should also be said that solar energy often takes up large amounts of space. In smaller countries this means less farmland, less nature, less housing/industry. Third, energy and electricity are not the same thing. The power cables required for transporting the required amount of electricity have to be at least 10 times thicker. That also means they all have to be replaced. The production of these cables, the replacing of the current cables, and the removal of (gas) infastructure it is replacing, consumes tremendous amounts of recources and produces gigantic amounts of emission. People often forget this aspect. Fourth, the mining of minerals may not cause as much CO2 etc as fossil fuels do, they do cause extremely heavy ground pollution, making places uninhabitable for centuries. This can't be solved in any way, compared to cleanup possibilities with other kinds of pollution. It's like with arsenic dust. Fourth, money. Every aspect of green energy is very expensive. Partially because it requires way more development, and partially because it's very easy to drive up the price of something so new. Last but not least, lithium. It is very important for the imagined green world people want to see. The reserves aren't looking too bad. However, the biggest concern is if supply can keep up with the demand. And how long it takes for the supplies to run out. Don't get me wrong, I am in favor of green energy. However, in my eyes, the 'green' industry is not a hair better than the fossil industry. We had the chance to do it right this time, to build a truly sustainable and fair industry, and we already screwed up. Just like in the fossil industry, there are questionable mines, forced labor, and weird deals. With the minerals laying mostly in countries where human rights are optional. Maybe even more of this than in the fossil industry. It is also undeniable that the green industry does the same campaigning as the fossil industry. Examples of this are companies motivating people to put solar panels in places where the return rate is lower than the cost. They don't care, it's government subsidized, meaning we are indirectly paying for that. But also the massive hype for electric cars even though they're really not that much better than fossil cars right now. In my eyes, green energy just needs some more time to develop. And we skipped important steps such as nuclear fusion and hydrogen, and aren't investing enougg in nuclear fission. First because of the lobbying from fossil industries, but now also because of green industries.
Fred Perry jacket, nice! Im a right leaning conservative, and i dont mind solar and wind energy. CCP should be our main focus right now. Eliminate trade, and deficit from this country, they've gone off the handle. This problem is more pressing than climate change right now. Keep up the good innovation. We wont stop the population growth, it will stop itself. Meanwhile, were running into resource issues in various enclaves, its inevitable. We will need a huge breakthrough in order to stop carbon production globally, but we have bigger problems with China, so we cant expect the worlds biggest polluter to slow their carbon footprint without global dictatorship. Which do you prefer, freedom, or a comfortable martial law? Anyway, great study, and great approach to your findings! Albeit, i had a couple gag moments with the left-leaning stuff.. Thanks overall!!
3:13 also, for wind and solar up until now you need backup gas. In the future you need a smart grid or battery backup. When you take this into consideration, how does it compare to nuclear?
Hi there, according to the study we quote in the video, nuclear generates 13g CO2e/kWh. If you wanna see more, how about you check out our videos on nuclear here: ruclips.net/video/9X00al1FsjM/видео.html or here: ruclips.net/video/eyHovWQ49MI/видео.html 👍🏽
My problem with solar being used as a primary energy source is how spatially inefficient it is, you have to clear large plots of land to reach parity with other energy sources.
We have just 16 panels on our roof, with the help of Octopus Energy we have no power bills year round. If not for the world, do it for yourself. PS, no govt subsidies here in New Zealand.
@@donnamarie3617 that's how I think solar panels ought to be used as small installations over already built environments. I don't think it works as an option for larger communities and so on.
You really don't have to. Rooftops, parking and storage lots etc. can be fitted with solar panels without using any additional space, and those make up a large percentage of human-used land area. You can also put solar panels on fields and grow crops in between them, which doesn't even reduce yield much for some common crops. In more arid regions the shade can even _increase_ yields because it protects the crops from drying out.
@@donnamarie3617 I only have 11 panels, but I'm in California with a south facing roof at the proper slope. I actually get a (small) check annually. And yes the government paid 26% of the installation cost, or rather I was allowed to reduce my taxes by that amount.
The video doesn't talk about how to store the energy, that is the biggest thing. At the end its actually cheaper but if it is more expensive because of batteries or green hydrogen at the end is a negative in a business perspective.
Hey could you talk about recycling of Wind Turbins and Solar Panels ? I know they have been some projects to turn wind blades into bridges (but have only been used on a very small scale) and I believe it is right now not cost efficient to recyclable solar panels . Could you do a video about that ? That would be amazing ! Thanks so much for all your videos.
Solar panels haven't needed to be recycled yet because they last 30 years or more and almost none were installed in the 1990s. When the panels start piling up, companies and the tech will pop up and they'll easily be recycled. And as the panels get thinner, and as robots get much more capable, solar recycling will be no problem. Same with batteries, which already have some major recycling companies for lithium-ion. Windmill blades can be cut up, ultimately by robots, and eventually eaten by microbes, as will plastic at some point. In the long run, recycling renewables will be much cheaper and easier than decommissioning a nuke plant.
Wind turbine blades are primarily glass and carbon fiber encased in resin, and more inert to the environment than even composted food waste. Most times we just bury them, special landfill preparations not required -- they'll be good to dig up and recycle once we have an economical way of separating the materials.
Excellent video. We need more of this to a) Reach the "normal people" (parents, hairdressers, office colleagues, etc.) who are influenced by misinformation and b) reach some die-hard misinformation amplifiers. In fact, some of the latter can come around. A lot of them simply weren't taught how to think critically and how to use reliable sources.
Most people don't care whether what they believe is true or not. They have picked a side like they would with sports, and they will barrack for it to the end. It's just a big game of, "can I turn this idea into the truth?"
Why can’t people change their minds? Is it a sure thing that when presented with facts that contradict your worldview people reject those facts? I know I certainly look for new information that expands my worldview and I don’t think I’m the only one out there. This video reinforced most of my current thinking but I appreciate being armed with more information to assert the benefits of green energy.
Yes, it actually is. Once your world view is set, unless you yourself start having doubts, you will simply dismiss information that contradicts it. Just look at the ones believing in the more absurd conspiracies. They will go through the most ridiculous mental gymnastics to not have to abandon their beliefs and if that no longer works, they'll simply ignore you. The targets of debunking and fact checks are those that aren't set in their belief yet, the ones still on the fence. The "true believers" are already lost.
Good video! People always should keep their eyes open. And yes, it's all about the money, sometimes people forget about that and are being played with.
Ok, why don't you tell people how the parts to assemble these green energy wind mills that they are all transported by 18 wheeler tractors using fossil fuels?
What about the unreliable production claim. I assume the energy can be stored, but you didnt seem to address it. What do we do when the wind isnt blowing and the sun's not shining?
It is disappointing that DW shows information that does not display all the facts to try to stand by their unilateral vision. It is true, Wind Turbines were not the main reason the system failed in Texas, and it is also True that you can winterize the Wind Turbines to be able to stand that weather like in Canada; however, the same applies to the Texas Gas Plants that were not protected to stand that kind of weather like in Canada. The reality of the Texas outage was a combination of issues like poor interconnection with neighbour states, Generation Facilities, Nuclear, Wind, and Fossil fuels plants not prepared adequately to stand winter weather. So, in conclusion, if DW wants to promote Wind Energy, please research and show balance information so people can start believing in the information you offer. With my statement, I'm not saying wind power does not work because it does. However, wind power alone cannot provide firm energy and cannot be either ramp up on command following system needs; for that to happen, the wind power must be combined with storage, which is quite expensive.
There is loads of miss information all over the internet on Facebook and RUclips some intentional and spread by people who believe it. It's hard to tell someone there wrong it's easy to understand something but it's harder to explain that to somebody else. So it's not always easy to fight your corner. Some time I will try and find A article that debunks there claims but it's like talking to a brick wall sometimes.
This video doesn't really touch upon the real drawbacks of renewables, which are intermittency, e waste, and storage. Which is why I have take these videos with a grain of salt as well. I prefer trusting media that are willing to approach both sides of an argument.
Okay. In our home, we had installed a solar water heater six years ago. It absorbs and stores the sun's energy. Oftentimes, when I want to take a bath I don't need to switch the button to heat the water, but there are times when the weather is not good. It is cloudy. Then I have to switch the button in order to take a nice, warm bath. Simple as that. To me, renewables shouldn't replace natural gas and other forms of energy completely in short timespan. I'm the one who saw Michael Moore's documentary. There are many people out there who believe that climate change is not something that happened in the last 100 years. Every day of our lives we impact the planet and our environment whether we follow a "green" lifestyle or not.
I'm in the construction industry, where almost everyone is conservative and opposed to renewables. I am told all those talking points, and I have been accused of hating the environment because I support renewables. I have found this to be effective in rebutting them. I ask if they like the concept of free energy, such as from the sun or wind. I always hear "Yes, but..." Then I ask even if what they say is true, does that mean we should stop trying to improve things. I point out it's like saying that since car safety devices don't save everyone's life, we should just stop installing them since they are expensive. I've never had anyone actually agree with me on the spot, but the fact they almost always try to change the subject let's me know it registered with them
This, coming from a country that has failed to significantly reduce its CO2 emissions, has insanely expensive energy, can't eliminate coal, is dependent on Russia for gas and on energy imports from France... all because it chose wind and solar over nuclear.
@@nunofoo8620 Actually, we laugh, because you're always going to be dependent on natural gas for energy at night, or you're going to need to pay a fortune for batteries... which are absolutely NOT environmentally friendly to produce. We can also just look at how well France is doing relative to Germany and have a good laugh.
@@PistonAvatarGuy Maybe someone can invent something that works during the night? Maybe someone will invent hydro power plants that produce energy from dams? Sounds futuristic, i know. It's so recent that nuclear fanboys never heard of it. Or wind? Maybe we could use it to produce power? Why do you people have to be so intellectually dishonest? "which are absolutely NOT environmentally friendly to produce." Oh here's something we could agree on: Fossil fuels have an environmental cost Hydro has an environmental cost Wind power has an environmental cost Solar has an environmental cost All of these are true statements. But so is this one: Nuclear power has an environmental cost When you immature brats understand this then we can have a grown up conversation about energy
![I.N "HALLUCINATION" | [Stray Kids : SKZ-PLAYER]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/n5B5q1Hwt_U/mqdefault.jpg)
How do you combat misinformation about climate change?
we can only provide valid arguments. That's all...
Reporting the comments and videos.
I report them. RUclips and reddit now offer a "misinformation" report option.
I seek various credible sources (eg - Universities/NASA/Other/Some News Sources/Respected Scientists of the day) and cross reference a bit to sort out fact from fiction. I'm no scientist or brilliant PHD (avg Joe), but it's kind of a venn diagram analysis to aid decision making. Much like your efforts displayed in the documentary. Not an all day affair but a few minutes here and there and you can mostly sort out fact from fiction. Again, keep up the great work!
In my experience information does not normally help. It might sound hippie, but during many years of giving rational arguments i got the impression that it is only love anc respect what that might help create some crack in mental frames so crearly flawed...
I only invest energy on people i care, trying to be gentle and respect their worldview, while letting them know there are valid arguments that lead to opposite conclusions... if the world order is falling appart, we are dealing with strong resistance to change, because at the end, it is our identity as a spieces were are questioning...
I'm a waste reduction specialist. I spend a lot of spare time debunking fossil fuel lobbyists who claim that recycling (their) plastic packaging is the solution to creating a more circular economy.
The fact is that recycling is only halfway down the chain of priorities, with reduction of waste and refillables being far above.
They are relentless, greedy and deliberately misleading people. We are surrounded by conmen.
thank you for your input and your work, i greatly value what you do to help us all
eliminating waste is an end goal - reducing waste migration is a middle goal - energy recovery is often the highest value use for most low grade (increasingly plastic) trash - get that happening across the board, advertise all the turtles and dolphins saved, and all the money made by local initiatives.
Yes there are conmen - everywhere: red, blue, black and green. No lobbyist paid by any industry sector can be deemed a reliable source of fact. No Reporter with emotional connection to their story can be called unbiased likewise.
Capitalism at it best, mate...
As long as it make's money your and my opinion do not matter
Yeah drinks used to come in bottles that were washed and reused. And we're supposed to believe that throwing the container away and making a new one is more efficient. Newp.
Combating misinformation always seems to take way more time and energy than it did to put out the misinformation in the first place.
Yep, it the age old Gish Gallop
One of them doesnt have to give a source. And the people who belive it dont want sources.
It's because the misinformers have much more money like the public broadcasters.
Exactly. And this is why, although there is more information available than ever, we don't live in the information age but the disinformation age.
Is up to the people to question it, humans are getting smarter.
"Debunking is a hard and thankless job..." I really felt that
it's not thankless... the thanks are the changes when they inevitably occur... trying to dishearten debunkers is precisely the aim...
It is like the fossil fuel industry learned from the tobacco industry. They also learned how to make it harder to get caught. If you were making a billion dollars a day from the status quo you would pay a million dollars a day to prevent change.
I'd probably pay up to 99,9%, as the remaining 0,01% is still a shitload of money.
@@annekekramer3835 This is where youd go broke. That's too less a margin to pay salaries and plan for emergency like price falls etc.
False equivalence - SCIENCE eventually proved the harms of tobacco - the CO2 link to CC is an UNPROVEN hypothesis and hotly disputed
@@bobknezevic1151 well, we know that burning stuff and inhaling it is bad for humans. It ruins your lungs and blood vessels. Fine particulate matter comes from burning cigarettes, diesel, and gasoline. We should just slowly work to prevent that pollution, to help each other live longer and healthier lives.
I am pretty sure climate change is proven. Why do you think Russia is militarizing the arctic? Global temperatures are heating up and pretty soon the arctic is going to be one of the busiest sea transport routes ever even in winter.
When my parents were kids Lake Erie used to freeze over and you could walk to Canada. That hasn’t happened in my lifetime. The coast guard is going to disband the ice breaker fleet serving the Great Lakes because the lakes don’t get cold enough to build up enough ice for the ice breaking.
Whoever is telling you that climate change is not proven is purposely misleading you. Stop listening to charismatic charlatans.
@@bobknezevic1151 exact equivalence. Exxon Moblie scientists were actually the first to find conclusive evidence that CO2 was causing CC, and the executives' decision was to hire the EXACT SAME PR firm - Hill & Knowlton - that the tobacco industry used to discredit the science that tobacco causes cancer.
its now been 6 years after i installed a solar system on my farm .
Thats six years of not paying any electricity bill and yet i have all modern amenities . Now am considering adding even more panels.
My family has a farm where electricity is expensive and cuts out too frequently, but luckily the new house is designed to install solar panels and storage batteries. We're already saving considerable amounts on the power bills due to superior grounding, and with Starlink and solar panels hope to be capable to go fully off-grid without interruption when needed.
The fossil fuel industry is strong and good at spreading misinformation. However, what is not mentioned in this video, is that when comes to nuclear energy, which is considered by the IPCC as an important tool against climate change, there is at least the same amount of disinformation spread out there.
I’d like to see a clean version of nuclear energy.
@@SteveBueche1027 nuclear energy is like one of the cleanest forms of energy already LOL
Educate with facts.
@@insertclevernamehere700 Regarding CO2? Probably, although I don't know how much its construction causes. But why is it that countries often build their reactors right next their borders? (See France and Belgium for example)
@@ThePixel1983 I'd assume in case of accidents, to reduce damage.
I’m so glad that you mentioned the dishonesty with picture of the wind turbines in Texas! One proposal which I thought was interesting was to do more “reverse image searching” of memes that gain a lot of traction very quickly.
If they’re found to be connected to an older image than the algorithm temporarily stops putting them in front of new viewers until someone can fact check it and ensure that it’s not spreading misinformation.
Well, I found even this video a bit disingenuous about the power outage "Outages in fossil fuel power plants, especially those running on natural gas. Yes, some wind turbines also stopped working." implies all fossil plants failed and only some wind turbines. Whereas wind capacity were lost around 60% of generation, while gas lost around 50%.
Maybe it would be better to dwell a few seconds more to explain Texas is not prepared for a cold like this. Yes, the wind turbines are not fitted with de-icer equipment. That's true to gas plants/pipelines which were frozen due to the water content of the gas.
I certainly would love to see a balanced view.
@@Sekir80 The grid woes in Texas are more linked to a very capitalistic approach to power generation and distribution, as opposed to the public service it actually should be.
Private operators have little to no incentives to prepare for worst-case scenarios, they get paid either way and skimming on de-icing equipment is a good way to cut corner.
This is a political issue first and foremost, more than something specific to fossil or renewable technology. BTW, the EU seems to be drifting towards a Texas-style system by trying to turn everything into a "free market", and has actively worked to dismantle public services of energy like France's EDF.
It is true that Texas lost a lot of wind capacity due to freezing conditions, this happens all the time in climates with freezing conditions, this I know, living in a cold climate. What's missing from the discussion blaming wind power, is the key issue affecting all generation technologies during this amazing cold snap was that very few generators were properly winterized; that includes wind, natural gas plants and natural gas production. A lack of winterization was the common thread for all generation technologies. To my knowledge not one technology was spared from some kind of derating or forced outage, they all suffered. Ultimately it was a governance failure of ERCOT to compel generators to meet reasonable winterization standards.
What a great idea. I will do this thanks x
@@axel6269 Well, yes. It's a bit sad to see capitalism raging this hard.
To the second point: really? That's asking for disaster. Maybe I should prepare for a more unreliable electricity availability then!
In the case of the whole "turbines kill birds" thing, it seems that the fact that people can see them move makes people believe it easier compared to other causes of bird mortality such as power lines, cell towers, cats, windows, and even climate change itself. People generally discount or vastly under-estimate the number of birds killed per year by windows. Up to 1 BILLION a year in the US alone. Compare that to less than 1 million bird deaths per year in the US due to wind turbines.
What your analysis is missing is the disproportionate loss birds from of key top predator species, some of which are endangered. The avoidable death of 1000 bald eagles is a much bigger issue than the avoidable death of 1000 sparrows. This is a very localized issue depending very much on whether wind turbines are co-located on migration paths or within habitat used by threatened bird species, thankfully we are getting better at our environmental assessments and have the knowledge to avoid locating wind turbines where they can do serious harm to the ecosystems that they inhabit.
@@lindsaydempsey5683 Agreed that avian predator species are highly affected by habitat loss and other mortality factors, however wind turbines are attributable to a small percentage of large bird deaths compared to other factors as well. The biggest killer of large birds are road vehicles and habitat destruction. Wind turbines can always be improved, in fact I've been involved in some research through NREL/NWTC to do just that, but across the board for all types of birds wind turbines are the smallest source of avian mortality by a large margin.
@@craglevcarboncapture I'm not disagreeing, but do you have any sources for that data that clearly shows they lack of/low involvement of wind turbines. Also, even if other influences kill more top predator birds than poorly placed wind turbines, I would still advocate for protecting local ecology to the the greatest practical extent and that ALL generation projects regardless of technology need to be subject to accurate well-informed environmental impact assessments that can properly balance the benefits and risks as a whole, including those to local ecology.
@@lindsaydempsey5683 Avian predators should be protected for sure and I'm not trying to invalidate your point about that, I've even been involved in improving turbine design to do so. The argument I'm making is that, like DW says in the video, recognizing that improvements can be made doesn't mean that we should disregard a whole industry that benefits all types of birds through mitigating the effects of climate change as well as localized air pollution. As for stats, all I've seen are generalized towards all birds vs. large predatory birds, but even the most severe estimates show bird deaths from wind turbines are 1,000 times less than window collisions alone. If we want to most significantly reduce bird collisions, cities and cars are the biggest factor by far and reductions in avian mortality in those sectors will greatly improve bird numbers across the board.
@@craglevcarboncapture I'd like to understand that data better for my own interest, the company that I work for runs two wind farms and we have quite strict internal processes for documenting all bird or bat deaths and identifying what species they are.
I think they key messaging on that topic should be avian mortality is a risk, but it only ever becomes a problem if wind turbines are located in unsuitable locations. And to your point there are a lot of initiatives looking to reduce the impacts on avian populations. In our case we could not do much about the turbines, but we could do things in the switchyard. Those changes almost halved the annual bird and bat kill, which were already small to start with.
It's so strange that this video popped up in my recommended! I JUST had to correct my parents after they parroted dis-information about what happened in Texas. They said the grid failure was because the wind turbines froze! I had to explain to them that there are turbines in Alaska, Norway, and even in Oregon where I live, where it freezes every winter! I also explained how the grid actually failed because the Texas power company didn't weatherproof their gas pipelines because they didn't want to spend the money. I also explained that the EPA warned Texas that this exact thing would happen if they got a major winter storm, but it went ignored. I don't think they expected me to be so informed. It's a mind virus. And we all have to do our part to rid the world of this virus!
There is no need for smear tactics or lies to be against push for solar and wind "future". It is enough to look at current performance in real world of different countries. At this very moment Germany makes power with 700g CO2/kWh(purely coal powered Poland 880g), while France goes by with just 113g CO2/kWh. This numbers fluctuate but pretty much always France with heavy Nuclear reliance plus some wind and solar is 4-5 times better (and it is better since 1970s). The fearmongering about nuclear power caused Germany to move backwards with climate goal and also in being great ally and sponsor for putin and not for its NATO allies and neighbours. And all that after spending some 500+GigaEuro on "green transition", and about highest electricity prices in EU. No smear, just real world realities of power generation and keeping the lights on.
Thank you for your service. The only person I bother arguing w/ is my brother, he likes to do his own research and comes back w/ all the points you listed and I counter him w/ the method you used. He pretends to not hear me, so I say it firmer, and then he acts like I am wrong, so I bring up the info and he asks "yeah, but how do you Know?" and I tell him about the scientific method and then he walks away claiming he needs a cigarette.
He does his own research?
Gee... If he's doing his own research, he must have the years of education, the equipment and laboratories necessary. I'd start listening to him.
Ohh - he just reads Twitter?
My mom is the same way, When you’ve refuted her claim to a point she can’t come up with an answer, she just shuts down and says I don’t want to talk about it…
Your brother won't change until he quit smoking.
Cognitive dissonance
@@47f0 shouldn't the response to him then be "but how do you know"
I visited a wind farm in Eastern WA where they have a visitor center and give tours. It turns out that the big glass viewing windows on the visitor center killed more birds than the wind turbines on the site.
I live next to a wind farm in Eastern WA, and I can tell you, my cat and cars, and even my greenhouse with a hole in it, kill more birds per square foot than the turbines.
The bird kill is irrelevant. It is the waste of taxpayers money on uneconomical and unreliable renewable energy projects that is the problem.
It is based upon a ridiculous popular delusion. The Climate Delusion. The false and delusional belief that mans effects on the earth’s climate are significant and dangerous.
Since both the current mean surface temperature of Earth (15 degrees centigrade) and atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration (415ppm) are suboptimal the carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels are actually beneficial. Benefits include increased agricultural yields (main effect) reduced winter heating costs and fewer deaths from hypothermia.
Do the turbine blades have stripes on them?
@@Zero-oh8vm not that I remember. I have heard that painting blades can reduce strikes. They also said that it was more of a problem with old turbine towers that were built with a lattice that birds could use to build nests in. I don’t think any modern turbines have that problem
@@brucec954 there are 120 meter windmills here, it's also a major bird highway of sorts. One of the blades might get painted so the birds might get more effective in identifying the save path around, and don't try to fly through the path of the blades spinning.
Good job DW! Great to see the debunk legends getting the recognition they deserve.
They did not debunk anything. The same old new age nonsense.Wind and solar can't bootstrap wind and solar - it is always manufactured with fossil fuels, then most of the junked wind generator blades and solar panels are buried in landfills because its not recyclable. Most of the "renewable' technology is made from plastics from petroleum. The law must demand that wind generators and solar panels be recycled. This is not sustainable. Demand that the so called renewable tech be manufactured only from only wind and solar generated electricity and that zero fossil fuels be used in these products.
@@timothykeith1367 Get real now and find some of those debunks that these legends have made. They have all the answers you need.
who said this is the truth? Lately a lot of debunkers are debunked and a lot of fact checkers are fact checked to lie.
There are many people who criticise windmills unnecessary. Are there people who over promote them? Why not?
NO debunking. All opinions. no facts. My opinion is you need another beer. glad you agree.
Nuclear energy also generates around 15g CO2/kWh. Plus it doesn't require batteries for storage. I think we should view nuclear power generation as a potential solution if not the solution.
It does require controlled storage for the life of its fuel though, which can be thousands of years. Even fusion isn't completely free of long-lasting toxic byproducts. Really the only nuclear that's safe for life is the one we're standing on: the heat of the Earth's mantle, where if anything goes wrong is no more dangerous than routine volcanic activity.
Back in 1982 Disney World opened a pavilion "Universe Of Energy" where they showed movies about energy production, including oil, wind and solar.
But because real world oil refineries are too grimy and dirty looking, they actually hired a Hollywood effects company to fake the footage to show a pleasant Disney-fied view of an oil refinery. There's a video on YT where Ian Hunter talks about the miniature effects they build for this.
Just to say, the misinformation has always been there in some form, but it is much more blatant and intense nowadays
Two criticisms with this video. And yes, I DO support renewable energy.
1: intermittency is a real challenge and warrants a discussion about new power storage technologies like sodium ion batteries and compresses air. As well as sustainable sources of hydrocarbon fuel to use when generation is low, such as hydrothermal carbonisation.
2: wind turbines do kill a significant number of birds. Yes, less than buildings, cars and cats, although there is a lot more of those than turbines, but also in a different way. Those causes mainly kill small, fast breeding, prey species that can support a higher mortality rate. Windbturbines disproportionately kill large soaring birds, these species tend to be slow breeding, not have as many natural predators and not do as well with increased mortality. Again, this warrants serious discussion on the methods available to minimise these deaths.
I had heard protests about wind turbines off the coast of RI saying that they would "use up all of the wind" and there wouldn't be enough wind left for sail boats. I laughed out loud. Humanity will not die of global warming but due to massive stupidity. I have little hope.
Thank you for this video!! Debunking/Informing is hard work and I appreciate this channel for it immensely!
who said this is the truth? It all comes down to what someone want to believe. Th big problem with any, even scientific, research is, you can always do it in a way the wanted outcome is there.
@@jpsholland Belief isn't how truth works. And even having a 'wanted outcome' means you're not doing science.
"Debunking is a hard and thankless job,"
Well, allow me to say thank you. Debunking anti-science nonsense is so important.
Good video 👍🏼 I would like more please! Further detail!!!!!!!!!
This is why we can't have nice things. Great video. Let's just hope the algorithm doesn't shadowban this.
Small channels like mine can't talk about these topics or I risk being tucked away by the algo; keep it up.
I'm curious why the algorithm would stifle debunking videos? I thought the algorithm promoted controversial topics with lots of engagement.
@@HaldaneSmith you will find lots of videos of people complaining that their videos have been been blocked or filtered because the automated systems can't tell the difference between arguing for or against any particular topic.
@@HaldaneSmith "Lots" of engagement is the clue. Small creators don't get "free" engagement.
Engagement also depends on the charisma of the creator, among other things.
For example, if you see my channel and compare it to other niches out there, growth is slow. RUclips doesn't promote stuff that isn't monetized, and the road to get there is also a huge death valley.
I trust RUclips's AI though, coz after all, it's the only being capable of assigning numbers to abstract things -- like controversiality.
You are not shadow banned. You simply don't sell ads on truth and cold hard facts.
@@voster77hh well, the end result is the same, we may just need to come up with a new name for not attracting advertisers. How about "ad-shadowed"?
I understood that Texas's problem wasn't that they used renewables, and more that they didn't adequately protect them against extreme conditions, while also lacking the connection to the rest of the grid to fall back on. What I didn't realize was that the poor weatherization measures were so impactful across the board, and that the fossil fuels were actually impacted significantly harder.
The world really needed this. Thank you DW :')
IMO, no it did not, this could have been a great piece about extravagant claims made by many different people, but instead it is just a pro renewables puff piece that glosses over some of the challenges associated with large scale reliance on wind and solar to meet the energy needs of modern societies.
@@lindsaydempsey5683 enlighten us? But please cite your sources
@@lorissupportguides Which part? I'm happy to respond to specific questions.
@@lindsaydempsey5683 the large scale reliance on wind and solar
@@st-ex8506 Thanks for the reference. They do claim what you say, but those claims do not stand up to scrutiny. I have gone through both the presentation and the related report put out by ReThinkX, my conclusion is that must have smoked a lot of drugs while creating that material. My specific objections to their work is that they assume future price reductions going out to almost infinity that are future loaded (building most stuff at some miraculously low future price). Then on the practical side they assume a buildout of W&S that equates to ~5x the peak load being served. The scale of that buildout is beyond the scale of any electrical infrastructure buildout ever attempted by humans, ever; it is breathtaking to a scale that defies description.
I do appreciate the reference to it and I do appreciate their work, it provides a point of comparison for other options. Also in favour of W&S, their work demonstrates that if you can build the equipment you can keep the lights on with 100% W,S and B if you build extreme quantities of it.
The main problem with "renewables" as in solar and wind, is not any of the stuff mentioned in this video.
The problem is that an energy system cannot depend on them.
15 to 25% can come from solar and wind. But ALL OTHER plannable must be able to supply 100% of the energy needed on the worst day of the year, or actually the worst second of the year or even worse, the worst second in a 25-year period. That will most likely happen on a calm cold night in late January when it is extremely cold outside and it is snowing.
But solar and wind are fantastic to lower the CO2 footprint as more CO2 "costly" production can be shut down to save fuel cost.
But in Sweden where I live. We do not have any CO2-based electricity production (except for emergency usage). It is hydro and nuclear only, or at least it used to be. Now the influx of solar and wind have screwed up the business model of water and nuclear.
So this video is totally US-centric and should have a warning label on it.
It is not possible to build an electricity system solely on solar and wind. Nor is it possible to build an electricity system with higher than about 25 to 35% on solar and wind until we figure out how to handle the business model for the unique one second once in a 25-year period when the sun is down and it is no wind...
That is the critical key question on "renewable energy", and nothing else. Solve that and I will be all in. Until then I do hate solar and wind energy, and I will go all the way to stop it (at least wind power).
NOOOO INNOVATION IS NEEDED! NOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!
How about the intermittence problem? This wasn't addressed at all?
I think they've talked about it before - but from memory it proves to be less of a problem than you would think when you have a large renewable grid: The wind always blows and the sun shines somewhere. You do probably need some help to cover the sporadic dips, which could be hydro, batteries, weirder things like pumped hydro (where you pump water back up when there's spare power), load following nuclear (rare in the US but France does it), or even, yes, fossil fuels - gas plants can spin up really fast if needed.
This will probably require upgrading the power grid, since the better your long distance connections are, the more you can smooth out local variation. But that's a useful thing to do no matter how you generate power, so ...
@@dnebdal thanks for the reply. I don't disagree with your solutions. I just think it's a huge oversight on a video that is supposed to be debunking claims about renewables. Nuclear seems like one of the best options we have to provide high quality base load power that doesn't rely on fossil fuels.
Very nice video, now make on on nuclear that can actually replace fossil fuels for good, unlike renewables which can never be a grid baseload.
Which countries have gone 100% renewable and switched all their other electricity generators off? How is it going in a place like that?
New Zealand just reversed their ban on the import of fossil fuels.
All during this presentation I kept thinking this is great info. Who to share it with? Unfortunately the people I think of who most need to see it (my right wing relatives in Texas) would reject it outright and the information would fall on totally deaf ears (assuming they even listened past the first 5 minutes.) But thank you for putting it together, it is interesting. My one complaint is the focus on mainly Texas and US Right wing conspiracy theories. Unfortunately this is a global problem and focusing on the nuts in the US lets other country’s viewers misconstrue that it’s not a problem in their back yards. But this is a start.
So we agree - those on the right have varied opinions but the left worship group think! Explains why the left no longer desire free speech or individual rights. Someday you may identify that climate change militancy was a step to authoritarian control. Note: You are permitted to disagree, for the time being!
The only point you smartly avoid is the dependency of renewables on weather. This is the biggest (and the only significant) drawback of these technologies. We simply can't go full renewable because of this unpredictability. Germany is a great example - they have enough wind turbines to power an entire country from them, but that rarely happens and other means of electricity production still have to be ready at all times. As a result the overall costs for maintenance are still the same.
Wow, an eye opener. People would attack me about solar, wind and hydro because fossil fuels and nuclear energy were the way to go for every argument. I always believed that these were great alternatives and that small maintenance is negligible when it came to them lasting 15 - 25 years. Also, the argument of them turning off and people out of energy is just not feasible because of the fact that energy engineers know what they're doing when one energy is low, there is always back up sources. Wind and Solar is still the way to go as a great alternative and there should be much investment put into it for it to continue innovation, research and development.
It's inevitable and a waste of time to battle. Like I'd say videos like these are the best you can do to inform the misinformed but they usually are stubborn in their beliefs and don't believe it anyway. Best thing to do is to ignore them and keep working on renewables, don't let them waste your time.
the problem is that those people vote, while you are ignoring them because you feel like a waste of time, those with an agenda are working hard to attract more people to their side.
The wind turbines don’t make economic sense because wind has a low energy density and is intermittent.
The costs of backup are too high.
The carbon dioxide emissions are actually beneficial. Benefits include increased agricultural yields (main effect) reduced winter heating costs and fewer deaths from hypothermia.
Geothermal energy is under-utilised and reliable.
Renewables is like scientology.
@@johngeier8692 lol
Kann ich mal sagen, dass ihr einen gewaltig guten Job macht!
Good video! To a degree, the general public is also responsible: first: many people do not want to hear bad news that they may need to change their lifestyles, and second: better education in real science and physics would make people less susceptible to misinformation and disinformation.
but also importantly, critical thinking, and researching & discerning bad sources from good sources. didn't get to learn the latter skill until college-level essay writing courses
@@driftingdruid Im a little confused by the slide at @5:46. Doesnt this show a collapse in Solar and Wind Power, even more so than Gas and Coal (in %), especially arround friday.
Thats not really what the voiceover says, but im not familiar with when the wheather was how bad exactly. So why would it be Misinformation to claim that renewables were more affected than fossil?
People don't want the truth, but something to help them cope. Like you said, this disinformation only plays so they don't feel they have to change.
@@driftingdruid People don't have as much time to do that, and if they did, they'd rather spend it with friends & family, enjoying themselves. If we truly wish to educate the common people, we need to address them as friends, not professionals.
Professionalism kills movements.
I'm definitely NOT responsible. I don't believe misinformation, I use my brain and I'm smart. So would prefer if you removed me from your list, thanks..
I saw a movie about the problems with renewable energy a while back. I got the feeling that part of the problem was businesses who were fraudulently doing things that were supposed to be renewable but weren't really. It was also claimed that it was necessary to have fossil fuel power stations idling in case sun and wind both failed at once and that they couldn't easily switch these off and on so they were producing a lot of CO2. This struck me as dubious. Unfortunately, I can't remember what this movie was called or where I saw it, perhaps you could find a debunk it (or show that the problems are due to business fraud rather than inherent problems with green energy).
Your right, backup is the real problem with renewables which this video completely ignored. It was pro renewables misinformation.
Birds killed by wind turbines - 240k. By skyscrapers and cars - 800k. By cats - 2.4 million
I work for an electric utility, and the biggest issue I've always heard, from people in this industry, is that, short of hydro, no renewable energy sources can handle peak demand, or unexpected demand. Normal everyday energy usage is measurable and can be accounted for. But when everyone goes home, energy demand goes up. That's "peak demand". It's an increase as more people fire up their stoves, plug in their cars, stream their favorite shows, and (depending on the time of year) turn on the heat or turn on the air conditioning/fans. The fairly stable, although elevated, energy usage from the day dips during the travel, and then surges back up to a higher volume until everyone goes to bed and the energy uses dip again. With a dramatic shift of vehicles to electric powered, you're going to have a significant demand during the nighttime hours, which is generally when it is less windy and the sun is definitely not shining. I don't know if those renewables would be able to produce so much power during the day that they could handle the normal load and then have ample leftover energy enough to put it into batteries and keep all of those vehicles charging throughout the night. And that is going to be a LOT of power, if you're talking about replacing every fuel burning vehicle with electric. Airplanes, trains, freight trucks, loaders, mining equipment, ships, busses, personal vehicles, military vehicles, military aircraft, tanks, manufacturing equipment, backup generators, and more. I'm all for using some renewables, but there has to be a way to account for peak demand and unexpected demand on the power grid.
You didn't debunk the lack of reliability argument(I'm not for or against renewables) you gave an example of people claiming unreliability of renewables in Texas was the cause of a power outage which was shown not to be true. This doesn't how debunk the believe that renewable energy sources are not as reliable as non renewable, a good example of this would be to show a city or town that runs fully on renewables for an extended time period and give report on any issues faced. But you didn't, seems as though you guys straw manned the argument. Again I'm not for or against renewables, I'm just pointing out an issue i have with your analysis
Bingo!
You didn't really talk about the most difficult thing to solve when it comes to renewable energy - ""cold Dunkelflaute", and here is a video by Sabine who does go through research and some basic numbers to see which of the possible technologies might be the best. But in the end it seems the solution is that on top of renewables + storage you also need somewhat decent percentage of base load in nuclear or gas (since they are lowest emittors).
Want to do a video about this?
While the video does undoubtedly debunk some misinformation, it tries to deflect the central criticism of ‘unreliability’. And hence the video becomes a source of misinformation itself as you correctly state. Cold Dunkelflaute is key design scenario for the UK electricity system with a high pressure over the North Sea in winter resulting in very low levels of wind and solar. Twice this winter as a result of Dunkelflaute system has been running every nuclear and fossil fuel plant that remains. This week the situation deteriorated to the point that the grid had to pay people not to use electricity at peak times. How do the authors of this video and the experts interviewed expect the system to work when 1) the fossil fuel power stations are all closed, 2) heating using fossil fuels is replaced by heating using electricity e.g. heat pumps and 3) EVs replace petrol and diesel powered cars.
We need solar and wind power. Carbon tax credits are not going to slow down effects of climate change. Increase in frequency of extreme and worldwide weather events are already killing 99%.
If they care about Bird strikes so much, then they shouldn't have any windows in their house. More birds die from flying into windows than wind turbines
Why didn't you mentioned about your country Germany who's still digging coals and shutting down nuclear power plants (which is the biggest low carbon energy source) despite investing billions in renewables
This video is about debunking conspiracy theories that deny man-made climate change, not about government mismanagement.
"shutting down nuclear power plants despite investing in renewables"
What are you trying to say? Did you mean to say "shutting down nuclear power plants despite still digging coals"?
The topic of the video is not nuclear power. The video is about misinformation funded by the fossil fuel industry.
@@Theo0x89 no i meant why are they are digging coal when they had invested hundreds of billions of dollars in renewables
Hm, what's there to debunk in that?
@@Viivek2309 Renewables can't replace fossil fuel over night. Germany is in a transitional phase where it is still dependent on fossil fuel. There are several factors delaying the transition, like the hasty shutdown of nuclear power plants after Fukushima, or the slow growth in wind energy over the last couple of years. On top of that, Germany no longer gets natural gas from Russia, making it even more dependent on coal as a transitional energy source.
Identifying our own biases and fears is something that should be taught at school level so that the next generation does not fall prey to misinformation.
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that is why I cringe every time people say that teaching philosophy and sociology in schools is a waste, and we should instead teach marketable skills. that is why the world is the way that it is, we teach kids how to pass tests and how to be a good capitalist, but we don't teach them critical thinking skills.
I've been thinking about this for a long time(a curriculum that teaches children to think critically and detect manipulation, be it "news" but also marketing and scams) - sadly I don't have any political power to push for things like this. It's time to teach it in schools though, it has become a serious issue with the wide reach of the internet
@@aliancemd you don't, that is why you talk to people about it and spread the idea, eventually it will reach the ccongress.
@@aliancemd
Some wise person once told me, that “teachers and moms can change the world”
I hope that individuals in this role realize this and start spreading the awareness
❤️
@@danilooliveira6580
……and practice it to demonstrate by self experience. Our facing our biases means admitting to ourselves that we are wrong(in that situation). Being honest to ourselves is so difficult, but we have to keep trying and eventually the authenticity will get noticed and inspire.
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Loved the meta-reportage - on the internet, about the internet
I like the OCC channel's video on both fossil fascism and eco fascism. It really helped me understand the different movements.
Brilliant work. I wondered exactly the same thing about the mass of sludge comments I was seeing in online newspaper comments sections.
could you please do a video like this one but just about nuclear energy ? ( btw this video was amazing)
@@hape3862 they're also subject to murphy's law and will never be viable on a global scale in less than 30 years
@@hape3862 If we solely followed "economics" we wouldn't have renewable energy in the first place. Without any political action, fossil fuels will remain more profitable until it's too late.
In the case of nuclear power, it *is* the most economic low-carbon method for ensuring continuity of production in a highly intermittent grid with low hydro potential. There's a reason France's power prices are among the lowest of developed countries...
Nobody sane is arguing we need to replace 100% of our power production with nuclear. But claiming we can do away with nuclear entirely without dramatically altering our way of life is just as much of a fantasy.
Good point, there are multiple studies including an excellent one from MIT showing that the least cost way to a deeply decarbonized electricity sector (i.e. less than 50g CO2/kWh) has to include nuclear alongside other non-emitting technologies.
The only reason nuclear is expensive is because of red tape and old technology. Take a car from the sixties and try to 'fix' it to pass modern safety and emission standards using only military grade components. It will be quite expensive. There is a lot of innovation waiting to happen, but hold back because of red tape, lack of knowledge and fear.
@@hape3862 $1.05 trillion. That is the tax revenue generated in the US in 2021. After 30 years... you're looking at over $31.5 trillion accumulated.
2 things: Nothing can touch fossil fuels for cheap efficiency...and... Your renewables will NOT "save" the planet. But people must have some kind of religion to believe in, it seems.
Electricity generated from fossil fuels is the most expensive source in the German power grid by far. The industry relies on huge government subsidies to stay afloat and _still_ can't compete with the price of renewable electricity.
@@HeadsFullOfEyeballs I suspect that has a lot to do with the way that Germany acquires their fossil fuels, does it not? Does Germany have a robust industry that goes about seeking, finding, and drawing fossil fuels out of the ground? We do - and the ONE AND ONLY reason that it ever becomes difficult to process, market cheaply and still make a profit for the industry, is due to government intervention, government obstruction and government greed. The answer to our energy problems is NOT to pit one source against the other for political gain in the manner that some
governments or entities are doing. Doesn't matter where we stand on these choices, we need ALL of them. And anyone who thinks that "big oil" is the only industry trying to manipulate the popular media in order to perpetuate myths and lies, is not paying attention and is likely a fool. Please understand, I'm not speaking of you or disagreeing with your comment. I'm just making a statement about the silliness of these types of videos.
We should start doing exactly the same. Start spreading the facts. As long and as often as you can. This fire can only be fought with fire. Lets use Social Media for our Advantage, too. You dont need to comment yourself if you dont have anything to add, liking does also help to heat up a topic quite much.
Problem with solar and wind is fact that oil (fossil fuels) is critical component. Withouth oil it s not possible to build and maintain solar and wind power plants.
Is there technology which will step in once oil is not any more available in today's quantities?
"Manufacturing of renewable energy requires use of conventional energy..." well, yes. We can use renewable energy to manufacture renewable energy until we have renewable energy, and we can reduce the amount of conventional energy and increase renewable energy as we go. It feeds into itself.
As for the anti-renewable campaigns, I suspect it's the same groups that funded anti-nuclear campaigns. Whether we should use nuclear or not, fossil fuel companies are trying as hard as they can to hold onto their profit generation and are attacking every potential competitor that would be susbstantially cheaper and cleaner.
Great stuff! Can you now also expose the smear tactics against nuclear? Especially relevant for the domestic viewers of this German channel
They won't because DW itself is part of the club that smears Nuclear
I note that the video didn't address the intermittency of wind and solar. Plenty of respectable engineering channels on RUclips point this out and recognise that storage and/or peaker gas plants are required. If you wanted to cover the topic fully and respond to the unreliability criticism you ought to be talking about that too. Also, given that this channel originates in Germany, I'd be interested in a run down of the current energy production situation there, especially in light of Russia turning off their gas (or the EU countries opting not to buy it). That would make for an interesting analysis given that we outside of Europe hear conflicting reports.
Full supporter of renewable energies and reguarly engage in the debate with fossil fuel proponents but also wanted to see a more detailed discussion of issue of intermittent power production - days of no wind or several cloudy days in a row
In German there is an annual winter lull in wind while sunlight is minimal called Dunkelflaute. This can last longer than current technology can store electricity to compensate. This is typically when power might be imported if there is an interconnect to an unaffected country but this is unlikely as the Dunkelflaute may affect a large geographical area. That leaves the load to be met by duplicate electricity generation from the legacy systems like nuclear and fossil fuels. Yes, it is incredibly inefficient to maintain a duplicate fallback generation system.
The biggest issue with wind and solar is and always been storage. A slightly more honest talk about that would be great, most other problems are essentially solved. Sadly the storage one is also really hard to solve fully with it becoming more problematic the large share of the grid renewables are, as currently we Just solve it with other sources of energy mostly gas but that becomes harder when you dont use other sources anymore.
Storage is only now becoming an issue now that renewables have reached a limit in the energy mix, so it is a new problem to tackle at this level. Right now the various grids are connecting to the Norwegian grid (which stores energy behind their dams) to start solving this. But storage is not a huge technical problem to confront, both technically and cost wise, compared to nuclear energy.
@@chrisgwen2526 the fact that you didn't see the issue before doesn't mean other people couldn't. It was always obvious that if you wanted intermittent power to be a large part of your grid you needed massive industrial scale storage. This industrial scale storage still doesn't exist in a way that is scale-able/economic enough while also not emitting so much carbon that the whole exercise would be pointless to begin with. You wishing away these problems doesn't help anyone, and the longer you deny these issues the longer fossil fuels will stay in the fuel mix. If we do not embrace nuclear and we do not have some sort of massive technical breakthrough we will keep using fossil fuels. So in my opinion that makes nuclear a lesser evil we should have invested in a long time ago, as it is the only thing already technically capable of removing fossil fuels from the fuel mix. And sadly every year we allow the fossil lobby to play stall tactics by convincing ideologically driven green politics against nuclear is another year we will be using fossil fuels.
ill be fine either way I live in a rich country so 10 years earlier or later won't affect me that much, but it is sort of frustrating to see the people who pro-port to care the most have such a large ideologically driven blind spot. Hopefully Im wrong and your right and it will all be happy ever after but I am not even remotely convinced that the technical challenges of storage have been solved.
@@alberts9781 Energy storage for renewables is certainly being solved as we speak. It's not that hard of a problem. The public doesn't see it yet because it's a new problem that is just starting to get the necessary investment, and the solutions are still in labs and early deployment.
If you were following the energy storage sector, you would know that the news is pretty much all fantastic, with dozens of new battery chemistries popping up, many which use nothing but cheap, plentiful elements like iron, sulfur, and silicon, and some very interesting gravity batteries gaining traction.
Your arguments against energy storage are the same ones originally used against cars, airplanes, computers, steam engines, solar, wind, and any other scaleable, high-demand new technology that started out expensive and small scale. People don't see it yet, the few are very expensive, so therefore it may well be impossible and a pipe dream.
Be assured, batteries will scale up and get very cheap, because we already know how to manufacture any kind of battery on a large scale, and we definitely have many good battery designs that only use cheap elements, perfectly suitable for the grid. The demand for cheap grid storage is gigantic and will only get bigger.
Cheap energy storage rolling out in the next two decades is a certainty, with the prices ultimately converging on the price of the raw materials such as iron.
@@charliedoyle7824 I'm not yet convinced that battery technology will get significantly more efficient, despite all the impressive-looking CGI videos that seem to pop up every few months, promoting the "next era" in batteries. One solution could be quite simple, reverse electricity metering: Power up all the high-capacity batteries in vehicles and buildings -- when they're not being used -- from the grid, when the wind blows and the sun shines. And -- also when they're not being used -- change direction and re-charge the grid, when there's no wind and no sun. A widespread electricity debit and credit system.
@@martin.feuchtwanger you're betting on battery technology to stop improving? 😆😆. Are you also betting on computers flatlining from now on? You're delusional. Battery improvement has been very rapid every year for decades now; it's a bit hard to see because it's incremental.
Batteries dramatically improving for at least the next 50 years is a certainty. The physics and market demand assure it. The only reason we don't already have better batteries is there wasn't enough demand up until a few decades ago. This has nothing to do with CGI.
We are absolutely going to need recycling for all the decommissioned turbines and solar panels, so we need to include that in equation.
Someone told me that volcanos add a lot more CO2 in the atmosphere then humans.
I know this is not true by a long shot but everyone else in the room accepted that as a fact, specially because they heard this before.
Debunking is really hard work!
Why do you believe anything without proof outside of religion?
Ps: climate change panic is a religion!
7:36 It is pretty interesting how they show how much of a far-right echo chamber 4chan really is it just being a random circle in that inter connected web
I appreciate the effort you make to keep the truth alive.
Dw needs to talk about Ecosia they are a search engine that plants trees
Good suggestion
Would be really interesting.
Normally I would have shared your report... However, the boom boom background "music" pollutes my brain and I will thus not share this good report report!
This is one of the saddest thing of our times.
A very few sociopaths turning millions of people against each other, just to make those very few people more profit. More money than they could ever spend.
We have to grow as a society and learn a few things: Who are socio and psychopaths. How they truly do not care about other beings. Just themselves. We need to learn how to stop them gaining position and power. We need to learn their tactics, we need to learn how to prevent them turning good willing people against each other. If we would know only these few things, I can guarantee you, our life on this planet would be incredibly better in any way.
That's why we need to put our trust in leftist governments and their alphabet agencies to police the Internet.
Very interesting topic. There has been an opinion circulating a lot in Greece that the govt is intentionally setting protected natural areas on fire or allowing them to be destroyed so they'll allow wind turbines to be built.
The threat to birds is also mentioned a lot, and the aesthetics of renewables in tourist destinations.
Thanks for the video. I retired some old solar panels from my roof after 25 years. When tested they were still producing about half their nominal output. The warranty then was 10 years, whereas new panels I have fitted have a 25 year warranty. Household batteries are a cost, though. They require good management. Fortunately in Australia, 97% of battery composition is recycled.
Im curious as to what do you mean by “retired”? Is that a nice way of saying they now live in a landfill somewhere?
Thanks for writing. I meant off the roof. No, I don't know what to do with them, the wattage is low, but I still have them in my back yard. There might be a remote part of my farm where I need some low power one day.
Really appreciate this piece. Solid.
But putting in a little break with cat videos? GENIUS! 🤣🤣🤣🤣
The entire renewables con needs calling out!
Because now we're paying 300 to 400% more for what has been sold to us as the cheapest source of energy!
Build your own system many people are doing it. Do it in stages and for the cost of a small car it can be done. The utility companies are corporations that want to maximise profit. I used to get 60 cents /kwhr export, now get 5 cents. The utility then sells it to other users for 40 cents a Kwhr. That is why I built my own OFF GRID system. My system has been working for 7 years and technology is getting cheaper and more reliable.
You left out a few things .... The Texas failure had a lot to do with the electrical infrastructure. The aging transmission & distribution system was in bad need of maintenance. Wind & solar are great, but to replace Oil/Coal/Nuclear on any real level, we need storage technology improvements to supply us with power when the sun is not shining & the wind is not blowing. Current battery tech has its own environmental & economic impacts. You should of also mentioned nuclear is the cleanest form of energy to this day. Thanks.
Germany creates almost 50% of their energy through renewables. You do not need massive storage systems. What you need is a well engineered & intelligent grid.
Thank you for doing this (you said debunking is thankless)… 🙂
“Think tank” actually means “marketing consultancy” in this case…
Finally, thank you At 3:40 a question I've been asking myself for so long is answered. How long does a wind power station have to run to produce the energy that it took to build and set up. Half a year.
I assume you are including the massive government subsidies. Without them the answer would be never.
@@georgetsokanis3542 No, because the question isn't how long it takes to earn the money back, but the *energy* that was needed to create and place it. That generally isn't subsidised, and i'm not entirely sure how one would even go about doing that.
@@georgetsokanis3542 Besides the fact its about energy not money as Llortnerof already pointed out, There have been multiple zero-subsidie windturbine parks granted in the north sea and around Denmark. And construction on at least one is already halfway complete.
So that money argument is no longer true all the time either.
About the unreliability part, I was disappointed that you spent that section debunking the Texas outage instead of tackling the very real shortcomings of renewables when they make a significant proportion of the grid. Basically, it means you need a lot of reserve fossil fuel power production to compensate for the lack of solar and wind, which is expensive in infrastructure, and might not be very green overall.
Maybe short term fossil fuel plants are held in reserve to cover the intermediacy of solar and wind, but long term is increasing energy storage, pumped hydro, battery, and other technologies are becoming more and more feasible as the cost of solar and wind get less and less compared to fossil fuels.
@@cmbakerxx Sure, but all those storage system have a cost as well, in term of money but they also have their own environmental issues (batteries, beside still being incredibly expensive, need a lot of minerals. Mining is always dirty, and pumped hydro isn't free either, needs flooding a huge area, some countries just don't have space and elevation to do that). I am not saying that there is no way to make a 100% renewable energy grid work, I just think it is a bit misleading by the video to avoids the topic altogether by deflecting the audience's attention to something that has little to do with the issue (the texas outage). Well, something about renewables that should be tackled as well is the increased transportation cost, since electricity is produce farther from where it is consumed in the case of wind and dams.
@@cmbakerxx Of all the storage technologies, only pumped hydro can scale at significant enough levels to be worth mentioning, and they require flooding large areas of space (which might not even be carbon neutral if you're not very careful about how you go about it). To satisfy the storage requirements inherent to a high-intermittence grid, there simply isn't enough hydro potential to go around. Outside of that, batteries require way too much materials per MWh of storage to provide power to a country for more than a day, and power-to-gas-to-power wastes most of the electricity you put into it.
You need a baseload, low-carbon source of power to ensure a basic amount of energy supply at all times, to cover for the variations in renewable production.
@@axel6269 Scrolling through the comments you are the only one I found who mentions the intermittent character of renewable power generation. And exactly as you say, it is the biggest problem. It was even mentioned in the videos shown as "misinformation" but still not explained. Don't get me wrong. I run a company in solar installation and am a fan of photovoltaics. But I am sorry to say I must rate this video with a thumb down, because that is just bad journalism bordering on misinformation (thus basically in no way better than the other videos shown here from the other side of the argument). Which is scary from such a big and reputable company as DW.
Saying that, I still believe there is a way to solve the intermittent generation problem with technologies such as pumped hydro which already exists and is perfectly viable in suitable locations. Then there are of course future possible hopes such as new battery technologies or hydrogen storage, but these solutions are neither technologically sufficient nor economically efficient yet and there is no guarantee they will ever be (I'm not saying they won't be), which makes them in my opinion a gamble and a bad choice to rely on for the future of power engineering and thus the whole modern human civilization. Thanks for coming to my TED talk👀
Coming up on the outside is Vehicle to Grid battery storage. Production of electric cars with their large batteries is growing exponentially. It has been projected that once most cars have VtoG capability it will require less than 5% of the total capacity to solve the problem. People won't object. They get paid for the service.
Finally, a renowned news channel who dared to called out these lunatics...
We need more renewables, not less.
Absolutely fabulous! Too bad broadcasters in other countries don't have the same vision and courage!
Thank you for the great work DW!
You missed some incredibly important aspects here. First off, correct, the power outage in texas was not caused by renewables. However, it should also be common sense that wind and solar energy really isn't as reliable as it depends on the wind and the sun. So you can't completely rely on it, and for some places it is more efficient than other places. Second, It should also be said that solar energy often takes up large amounts of space. In smaller countries this means less farmland, less nature, less housing/industry.
Third, energy and electricity are not the same thing. The power cables required for transporting the required amount of electricity have to be at least 10 times thicker. That also means they all have to be replaced. The production of these cables, the replacing of the current cables, and the removal of (gas) infastructure it is replacing, consumes tremendous amounts of recources and produces gigantic amounts of emission. People often forget this aspect. Fourth, the mining of minerals may not cause as much CO2 etc as fossil fuels do, they do cause extremely heavy ground pollution, making places uninhabitable for centuries. This can't be solved in any way, compared to cleanup possibilities with other kinds of pollution. It's like with arsenic dust.
Fourth, money. Every aspect of green energy is very expensive. Partially because it requires way more development, and partially because it's very easy to drive up the price of something so new.
Last but not least, lithium. It is very important for the imagined green world people want to see. The reserves aren't looking too bad. However, the biggest concern is if supply can keep up with the demand. And how long it takes for the supplies to run out.
Don't get me wrong, I am in favor of green energy. However, in my eyes, the 'green' industry is not a hair better than the fossil industry. We had the chance to do it right this time, to build a truly sustainable and fair industry, and we already screwed up. Just like in the fossil industry, there are questionable mines, forced labor, and weird deals. With the minerals laying mostly in countries where human rights are optional. Maybe even more of this than in the fossil industry. It is also undeniable that the green industry does the same campaigning as the fossil industry. Examples of this are companies motivating people to put solar panels in places where the return rate is lower than the cost. They don't care, it's government subsidized, meaning we are indirectly paying for that. But also the massive hype for electric cars even though they're really not that much better than fossil cars right now. In my eyes, green energy just needs some more time to develop. And we skipped important steps such as nuclear fusion and hydrogen, and aren't investing enougg in nuclear fission. First because of the lobbying from fossil industries, but now also because of green industries.
Fred Perry jacket, nice! Im a right leaning conservative, and i dont mind solar and wind energy. CCP should be our main focus right now. Eliminate trade, and deficit from this country, they've gone off the handle. This problem is more pressing than climate change right now. Keep up the good innovation. We wont stop the population growth, it will stop itself. Meanwhile, were running into resource issues in various enclaves, its inevitable. We will need a huge breakthrough in order to stop carbon production globally, but we have bigger problems with China, so we cant expect the worlds biggest polluter to slow their carbon footprint without global dictatorship. Which do you prefer, freedom, or a comfortable martial law? Anyway, great study, and great approach to your findings! Albeit, i had a couple gag moments with the left-leaning stuff.. Thanks overall!!
3:13 also, for wind and solar up until now you need backup gas. In the future you need a smart grid or battery backup. When you take this into consideration, how does it compare to nuclear?
Hi there, according to the study we quote in the video, nuclear generates 13g CO2e/kWh. If you wanna see more, how about you check out our videos on nuclear here: ruclips.net/video/9X00al1FsjM/видео.html or here: ruclips.net/video/eyHovWQ49MI/видео.html 👍🏽
My problem with solar being used as a primary energy source is how spatially inefficient it is, you have to clear large plots of land to reach parity with other energy sources.
We have just 16 panels on our roof, with the help of Octopus Energy we have no power bills year round. If not for the world, do it for yourself. PS, no govt subsidies here in New Zealand.
@@donnamarie3617 that's how I think solar panels ought to be used as small installations over already built environments. I don't think it works as an option for larger communities and so on.
You really don't have to. Rooftops, parking and storage lots etc. can be fitted with solar panels without using any additional space, and those make up a large percentage of human-used land area. You can also put solar panels on fields and grow crops in between them, which doesn't even reduce yield much for some common crops. In more arid regions the shade can even _increase_ yields because it protects the crops from drying out.
@@donnamarie3617 I only have 11 panels, but I'm in California with a south facing roof at the proper slope. I actually get a (small) check annually. And yes the government paid 26% of the installation cost, or rather I was allowed to reduce my taxes by that amount.
Also what happens to the panels after they live their short lives? Are solar panels suddenly non-toxic?
This was a great video. It shows the importance of media literacy and critical thinking.
The video doesn't talk about how to store the energy, that is the biggest thing. At the end its actually cheaper but if it is more expensive because of batteries or green hydrogen at the end is a negative in a business perspective.
@@jakubnovak814 Really. You gave the same reply to more than one person... so how could they be the "only one"?
"Have you ever come across any bits of misinformation?"
Somebody hold my beer...
The counter information was kind of thin, mostly talk about sources of disinformation.
Hey could you talk about recycling of Wind Turbins and Solar Panels ? I know they have been some projects to turn wind blades into bridges (but have only been used on a very small scale) and I believe it is right now not cost efficient to recyclable solar panels . Could you do a video about that ? That would be amazing ! Thanks so much for all your videos.
Doesn't this explain why there are no such videos?
Solar panels haven't needed to be recycled yet because they last 30 years or more and almost none were installed in the 1990s. When the panels start piling up, companies and the tech will pop up and they'll easily be recycled. And as the panels get thinner, and as robots get much more capable, solar recycling will be no problem. Same with batteries, which already have some major recycling companies for lithium-ion.
Windmill blades can be cut up, ultimately by robots, and eventually eaten by microbes, as will plastic at some point.
In the long run, recycling renewables will be much cheaper and easier than decommissioning a nuke plant.
Wind turbine blades are primarily glass and carbon fiber encased in resin, and more inert to the environment than even composted food waste. Most times we just bury them, special landfill preparations not required -- they'll be good to dig up and recycle once we have an economical way of separating the materials.
Thanks for such interesting & entertaining exposing of renewable energy haters!
Excellent video. We need more of this to a) Reach the "normal people" (parents, hairdressers, office colleagues, etc.) who are influenced by misinformation and b) reach some die-hard misinformation amplifiers. In fact, some of the latter can come around. A lot of them simply weren't taught how to think critically and how to use reliable sources.
Most people don't care whether what they believe is true or not. They have picked a side like they would with sports, and they will barrack for it to the end.
It's just a big game of, "can I turn this idea into the truth?"
The pot calling the kettle black 😁
Why can’t people change their minds? Is it a sure thing that when presented with facts that contradict your worldview people reject those facts? I know I certainly look for new information that expands my worldview and I don’t think I’m the only one out there. This video reinforced most of my current thinking but I appreciate being armed with more information to assert the benefits of green energy.
Yes, it actually is. Once your world view is set, unless you yourself start having doubts, you will simply dismiss information that contradicts it. Just look at the ones believing in the more absurd conspiracies. They will go through the most ridiculous mental gymnastics to not have to abandon their beliefs and if that no longer works, they'll simply ignore you.
The targets of debunking and fact checks are those that aren't set in their belief yet, the ones still on the fence. The "true believers" are already lost.
Good video! People always should keep their eyes open. And yes, it's all about the money, sometimes people forget about that and are being played with.
Ok, why don't you tell people how the parts to assemble these green energy wind mills that they are all transported by 18 wheeler tractors using fossil fuels?
They show it at 2:19, but that's all included in the 13g/kWh.
What about the unreliable production claim. I assume the energy can be stored, but you didnt seem to address it. What do we do when the wind isnt blowing and the sun's not shining?
Don't assume! Anything beyond very short term storage of kinetic energy is not going to happen any time soon!
It is disappointing that DW shows information that does not display all the facts to try to stand by their unilateral vision. It is true, Wind Turbines were not the main reason the system failed in Texas, and it is also True that you can winterize the Wind Turbines to be able to stand that weather like in Canada; however, the same applies to the Texas Gas Plants that were not protected to stand that kind of weather like in Canada.
The reality of the Texas outage was a combination of issues like poor interconnection with neighbour states, Generation Facilities, Nuclear, Wind, and Fossil fuels plants not prepared adequately to stand winter weather. So, in conclusion, if DW wants to promote Wind Energy, please research and show balance information so people can start believing in the information you offer.
With my statement, I'm not saying wind power does not work because it does. However, wind power alone cannot provide firm energy and cannot be either ramp up on command following system needs; for that to happen, the wind power must be combined with storage, which is quite expensive.
There is loads of miss information all over the internet on Facebook and RUclips some intentional and spread by people who believe it. It's hard to tell someone there wrong it's easy to understand something but it's harder to explain that to somebody else. So it's not always easy to fight your corner. Some time I will try and find A article that debunks there claims but it's like talking to a brick wall sometimes.
Why aren't more programs like these? Great video!
This video doesn't really touch upon the real drawbacks of renewables, which are intermittency, e waste, and storage. Which is why I have take these videos with a grain of salt as well. I prefer trusting media that are willing to approach both sides of an argument.
Okay. In our home, we had installed a solar water heater six years ago. It absorbs and stores the sun's energy. Oftentimes, when I want to take a bath I don't need to switch the button to heat the water, but there are times when the weather is not good. It is cloudy. Then I have to switch the button in order to take a nice, warm bath. Simple as that. To me, renewables shouldn't replace natural gas and other forms of energy completely in short timespan. I'm the one who saw Michael Moore's documentary. There are many people out there who believe that climate change is not something that happened in the last 100 years. Every day of our lives we impact the planet and our environment whether we follow a "green" lifestyle or not.
I'm in the construction industry, where almost everyone is conservative and opposed to renewables. I am told all those talking points, and I have been accused of hating the environment because I support renewables.
I have found this to be effective in rebutting them. I ask if they like the concept of free energy, such as from the sun or wind. I always hear "Yes, but..." Then I ask even if what they say is true, does that mean we should stop trying to improve things. I point out it's like saying that since car safety devices don't save everyone's life, we should just stop installing them since they are expensive.
I've never had anyone actually agree with me on the spot, but the fact they almost always try to change the subject let's me know it registered with them
This, coming from a country that has failed to significantly reduce its CO2 emissions, has insanely expensive energy, can't eliminate coal, is dependent on Russia for gas and on energy imports from France... all because it chose wind and solar over nuclear.
Every time a solar panel is installed a nuclear fanboy sheds a tear :(
@@nunofoo8620 Actually, we laugh, because you're always going to be dependent on natural gas for energy at night, or you're going to need to pay a fortune for batteries... which are absolutely NOT environmentally friendly to produce.
We can also just look at how well France is doing relative to Germany and have a good laugh.
@@PistonAvatarGuy AchTUaLLy 🤓
@@PistonAvatarGuy Maybe someone can invent something that works during the night? Maybe someone will invent hydro power plants that produce energy from dams? Sounds futuristic, i know. It's so recent that nuclear fanboys never heard of it. Or wind? Maybe we could use it to produce power?
Why do you people have to be so intellectually dishonest?
"which are absolutely NOT environmentally friendly to produce."
Oh here's something we could agree on:
Fossil fuels have an environmental cost
Hydro has an environmental cost
Wind power has an environmental cost
Solar has an environmental cost
All of these are true statements. But so is this one: Nuclear power has an environmental cost
When you immature brats understand this then we can have a grown up conversation about energy
@@nunofoo8620 well, we all shed a tear when some empty-headed freedomlover runs his SUV alone to the gym, cos guess what: it affects us all
great work
You guys need 3M subs underappreciated channel right here!
Thanks for the video. Very much needed.