💡What do you think about the primary energy fallacy? 🔋This video is a slight simplification of the issue, as storage definitely needs to be taken into account. 📃Feel free to comment other video ideas and topics you feel are important! 🎁Consider subscribing, commenting and liking the video!
Primary energy does my fucking nut in. The UK's heating policy is riddled with it. Gas heating has a primary energy factor of 1.13 in SAP, which basically calls it "efficient" and makes it the default option on EPCs.
In order to better comprehend the current situation, one may have to go back to life of Nikola Tesla, and his implicit goals, when he designed the grid system. His theories may have been based on a critique of Lord Kelvin, and the facts that meat muscle, man or beast, did most of the work back then. Clearly, an all electric formula must stand alongside an all carbon formula, in order to get a decent feel for a clear outlook.
Yet again, a banal high school level fact for engineers; but permanently beyond the understanding of average citizen. Of course, what your treatment assumes is that the heat of thermal-based energy sources is wasted, which is not the case everywhere. Most of the countries in northern Europe utilize it in district heating, making flat waste assumption incorrect. In cold areas, heating accounts for a massive segment of total energy expenditure, so this matters. Then what even further complicates things is that heat pumps driven with electricity are widely used. They generate usable high temperature heat for ~3x the amount of electrical energy put in, and the low temp. heat source they draw from can be fossil energy waste heat, industrial plant waste heat, latent heat of urban sewege system, or dedicated heat reservoirs heated during the summer. None of that is taken into account in simple charts.
Sand batteries can produce heat for homes, while carbon batteries or metal powders can provide industrial heat. It is easier and cheaper to get heat from non-carbon based sources.
Also if you are going to make more videos about other aspects you missed out on, maybe instead you should have written a book like the one by Dr David Mackay which was pretty well done almost 20 years ago, it points out the fallacy of imagining how to base an economy on REs alone, basically you would need several times the land mass of the UK covered in PV or turbines to power some of the energy of another UK land mass elsewhere. Basically with REs, the UK just don't have the land area to be RE pure. The USA does but, bven Bill Gates had a go at it too, he was that awesome he had to rewrite the book for the US reader. "Without The Hot Air", it's a free PDF download and covers all the energy graphs and explains where all the energy use goes, and its a lot more than just powering yer home by 2 orders. The next fallacy that the climate folks are going to push is that Carbon Footprint is another fallacy that the fossil industry is pushing to spread the blame around. That one needs to be nipped in the bud before it takes off. Evryone just want to deny their footprint once they get a few PV panels on their roof. But read the fine book, Without the hot air.
Wind, solar, batteries, hydrogen, biogas, and dams can do it all. Modernization, knowledge capital, green spaces, and geothermal are also underutilized assets.
My home has illustrated this point , We have ditched 12 Mwhs of gas and the same12 mwhs in Petrol + diesel for our 2 cars and our electricity usage has only increased by a 5th of that. then by adding 3.25kw of PV we have an annual electrical consumption of 7 mwhs. time for more PV.
actually a really great point I hadn't even considered that coal and fossil fuels are so inefficient that most of their energy output won't even need to be matched by renewable sources
Well storage for fossil fuels is essentially free, the elephant in the room is that intermitent energy has huge storage costs vastly higher than the 33% eff of primary. And beside nat gas in CCNG power plants burns at 60% not 33%, and with O2 burning it goes up to 80% if O2 is free, 70% if paid for. And nuclear can easily reach 60% too if you go for higer temp reactors like Molten Salt. So the anti heat chemical folks have no clue about various eff cycles of production or storage. By the time you pay for storage of intermitent electrical, you will have to use engineering that involves either heat or chemical energy conversion with round trip efficiencies between 10-60% or so depending on path taken.
@@theclimateClub I didn't even consider that "energy usage of a country" given in TWh is NOT the useful energy. But I understand now, it's a fossil lobby thing to make them more valuable.
In Eastern Europe nuclear power stations were often connected to district heating systems, to provide heating using the waste heat. We should go back to that. Alternatively, heating up water massively reduces the energy needed to split it into hydrogen and oxygen, so it could be useful in electrolysis.
It's not that waste heat is captured, it's that fact that higher temperature sources have higher max isentropic efficiencies as a consequence of the second law of thermodynamics, with max thermal efficiency being approximated as (TH-TL)/TH. The higher the temperature of the heat source, the more convertible to work that energy is. Nuclear reactions are significantly hotter than chemical reactions. Some heat must be rejected for all processes in order to produce work, and that rejected heat cannot be recaptured without putting more energy into the system than is recaptured.
@@Brettfast_prod Exactly but current fission reactors are hindered by using bloody water as their coolant which limits Carnot eff to about 35%. Start using Molten Salts or dare I say liquid metals (not sodium water anywhere near it), and your Carnot limit goes to 60% eff but you would want to combine that with a super critical CO2 based heat engine to extract the energy with it, thats only recently been worked out. But nat gas can be improved too, 60% in air is the normal limit, but burn in oxygen its then 80%, or 70% if the nitrogen is wasted. Even those stupid Germans that switched from nuclear to coal, got new improved extra clean modern coal with I believe 45% eff, but its still fricken brown coal.
R'amen! You are correcting the 2nd Sin of Thermodynamics- confusing heat with work (electricity or mechanical energy) as if they're worth the same- rather like confusing American dollars with Jamaican dollars just because they are both units of money measured in dollars...
While the second law of thermodynamics applies to 'energy', the core global warming problem is the leveraged problem that CO2 has on the planet surface temperature (where we live) compared to the emission surface temperature (where the final CO2 layer is). It's "the size of a candle flame" problem when you can't see the flame 'colour'. The primary energy 'fallacy' is the magicians misdirection fallacy - the supposed waste energy is essential to the process of generating our residual (33%) useful (to us) energy. It's the 100% that is burnt that is the problem.
This video makes some valid points. However, it overlooks some other fallacies. SUBSTITUTION FALLACY: Fossil fuels are used to make plastics, nitrogen fertilizer (for food), steel, and concrete. There are currently no economic substitutes available. So these "primary energy" uses need to be retained. EFFICIENCY FALLACY: Different sources and processes have different efficiencies. For example, natural gas combined cycle electricity generation is about 65% efficient. (Also, modern coal plants are about 45% efficient, not 33%.) The usage matters also. Modern natural gas furnaces are about 95% efficient. The efficiency of heat pumps falls with outside temperature. So in temperatures below freezing, gas furnaces are the better option. INTERMITTENCY FALLACY: Intermittent renewables (e.g. wind and solar) only make electricity when it is windy or sunny. But electricity is needed all the time, not just in proportion to wind or sun. Also, costs for intermittent sources almost never include the requirement for dispatchable electricity (the kind we need). So in addition to the wind and solar, we need HUGE batteries, which are VERY expensive, or we need quick-reacting backup power sources such as fossil. Since these fossil sources are required to remain on costly standby, while the "cheap" renewables are doing their thing, the cost picture gets very distorted.
wait didn't know this. this practically means all graphs I've seen until now are just fossil fuel propaganda and the transition is like 3 times simpler than it seems. nice to know
Thank you for an easy-to-understand graphic showing how inefficient "green" hydrogen is. Get college kids on good e-cargo bikes, and proper safety & weather equipment. Then they will have clean transit to class, groceries, and jobs up to 8 or 10 miles, and the safety gear and training to teach others. Orders of magnitude less energy than gas! And a bike that makes it easy to carry babies & kids later. Many campuses are already bike friendly; I think uni systems should be smart enough to have their own scooter & ebike sharing, and safety training. MSU does have many EV vans, trucks, and cars for grounds care & maintenance.
Many people in Europe already know this, higher population density leads to much lower CO2 emisions per capita, but those pesky stupid people everwhere all wants to drive an SUV because they bloody deserve it, why do Americans get all the good stuff, they wants it too.
And don't forget the new research from Edinburgh University "Global Oil Depletion | Alister Hamilton" indicating that we are very near to zero oil energy. As he notes, it's a bit rich when they have to power their Oil Rigs from Wind Energy !
Transportation technology in which the prime mover is located in the vehicle is the worst, it wastes four-fifths of the energy put into it. However, this does represent progress over the reciprocating steam engine of one hundred years ago, which wasted all but 7% of the energy released by the burning fuel.
Yeah for sure. Will have to transition to electric cars, but also decrease car usage and increase substitutes (public transport, better city development etc)
Well the real problem is with all the stupid people that want to drive around in a comforatble house on wheels, 50 years ago we had much less efficient engines, but the vehicles were mostly half the weight or less, so 4 steps forward and 3 steps backwards. And then people go on about death traps tiny cars, the solution to that is we all drive in battle tanks, more steel, better outcome for driver, sod the other guy.
@@theclimateClub the "better city" development is 100% guaranteed to cause low birth rates. US car centric is dumb but it makes repalcement birth rate possible.
And this is why primary energy consumption has decoupled from GDP growth while electricity generation hasn’t. We need more renewables, storage and nuclear.
If you had enough solar and wind installed to cover needs, the construction and land use wastage would massively exceed the heat losses of fossil fuels. Renewables have such low losses because they shift inefficiencies unto fossil fuels, which sit idle shedding heat while solar is pumping energy in, but then need to be heated more when the sun sets to compensate.
That’s a fair point tbh, but I did want to include this section as there aren’t any videos on it. So I decided to put the “interesting” stuff at the beginning and then the calculations as the second section. I also think that a stand alone video on the calculations would potentially be boring
@theclimateClub the explanation is very straight forward, not complicated at all, props to you for managing this and mentioning the topic in the first place! Maybe a follow up video with actual studies that are being referenced most and show the world how these studies results would be with the useful energy calculations.
This young man has discovered what most engineers and planners have not noticed, even today. Well done. The real goal today is to replace fossils, while getting the effect of twice the total energy output, on a global scale. Once you understand the fundamentals of this video, you would see that the world is not so far from this goal. I hope you can come up with an even better formula, one to top the Larry Livermore graph.
I shall not criticize this video the least bit! At the contrary, it is excellent! Good job, young man! BUT, engineers HAVE noticed! They in fact know all that very well! Who do you think made all those energy-flow charts? Accountants?
@@st-ex8506 The salience is apparent in that the graphs show energy in BTU denominations, demonstrating the original Kelvinist approach. Such thinking is outdated, as electricity, primarily the grid, has emerged as the primary driver in modern thinking for energy generation, as massless energy forms (versus mass, ie fossils) are maturing. There is a yawning gap in approaches, within engineering circles, scientists, logisticians, what have you, to be succinct. Scientists compiled the graph data, most likely.
@@FlameofDemocracy I have compiled similar graphs of mass and/or energy for the processes I have participated in developing. I get your point about the need for thinking of energy in different terms... and so does also the author of the present video, it seams. But I don't see why there would be a "yawning gap" in thinking between engineers, scientists, etc... at least well-informed ones... which they should be. As to the different methods of compiling energies, they are all imperfect... but I don't have a better one to offer right off the bat! Maybe I should occupy my retirement time developing one?!?
That’s very nice of you! Unfortunately, I can’t claim the credit for finding this out but it’s definitely not talked about enough. Thanks for the kind words
The very first graph you showed from Our World in data is already corrected for inefficiencies and conversion losses ;) Stick to the substitution method and never worry about the primary energy fallacy again...
it's corrected using the substitution method, but it still has important flaws. Now that you said that though, I think I wanted to put the primary energy graph with the direct method instead! Hadn't spotted that. I do agree that sub is better than the rest IMO
@@theclimateClub Totally agree, that direct method is misleading. Underestimates wind, solar and hydro by a factor of ~3. But don't throw the baby out with the bathwater ;)
Hey, thanks for the great video! I have a doubt though: How will we represent renewable energy from biomass sources? Will we use primary energy since they're combusted/gasified like fossil fuels or will we use the substitution method?
Thanks a lot! Since biomass is also considered as thermal, in accounting it's similar to fossil fuels. In the PECM method it's given a 0.3 (30%) conversion factor for example. In substitution, it's normally the same as the others, although I have seen it be a slightly lower % in a paper. The only tricky bit with biomass, is when you start using it as biofuels. I'm not sure what happens then tbh, but I should have plenty of sources which explain it if you want
Since you cursed so much, its also good for your rebutal, you over simplified so much and missed out on the elephant in the room, intermitency and storage has massive costs, you dismissed energy storage almost as if its free. Renewabale Enengy is trading a high value intermitant electrical energy for a lower value of energy usually thermal or chemical that has to be converted with losses into electrical. But you ignore the storage costs and you also ignore how varied these processes can be. Every one of those waste heat sources comes with essentially free storage, in the case of coal oil and gas it is usaually consumed shortly after extraction but the storage can easily be for several months or years if need be. In the case of fission, the storage is essentially for millions of years after digging it up, it can be processed into yellow cake and then Uranium fuel at will. It is also available from the oceans at moderate cost too essentially at will. But your precious solar and wind can not be stored economically,, it's about 10,000 times more than chemical energy storage. The avg capacity factor of wind is only 30% max. The max capacity factor of PV is typically only 14% in the US NE. It can reach 20% or more in the US SW. In northern europe its only about 11% in the UK, but more in spain. Buy a plastic bucket for about $1 and it easily stores 30KWh of chemical energy either liquid or rock form worth at least 10-20KWhr(e) after conversion. Buy a Tesla wall battery and it stores only 10KWhr(e) for a whopping $10,000 or so and you have to pay for 1 of its wear and tear cycles say atleast $10 on top of its stored energy value of only $1 and that electrical storage in batteries is only for weeks at best. They self discharge you know. And batteries really really hate being full or empty, which is why Tesla keeps them in their 20-80% zone as much as possible when wear cycles are effectively 10x less severe. So to lkeep batteries near the 50% zone means you really have to double capacity to use the rated value, they suck. You know that in the USA, solar insolation is 5x better in the summer than the bloody winter. How the hell do you store summer electrical energy for months rather than just days. Even for wind you would need a month of storage if thats all you had. The Danes play a lot of complicated games with their wind to extract as much value as possible, but a huge proportion of it is used to make hot water for heat storage and if not enough storage, throw it away. Does you production graphs cover the curtailed energy from useless over production, I doubt it. Also the intermitency issue means that say you convert any of this precious energy into hydrogen for steel, you first have to make it 100% base load becaue all thermal and chemical industrial processes are always as continuious processes. God forbid your hydrogen production needs a catalyst like platinum while the electrical input capacity factor is mostly low. No improvemnet in battery energy storage is ever going to change this 10,000 ratio. If you could get 10KWhr(e) into the same space as a chemical, it would be a frickin chemical. The alternative for intermittent only energy source is bleak with out that free battery like chemical energy storage from combustible sources that you all take for granted. Dont you fucking hate it when anti climate people say they know more than climate scientists and deny the climate science. Well fucking electrical engineers hate it when climate science that denies the simplest facts on energy esp electrical. Everyone I meet that worships your fucking turbines has zero clue where the big battery on the grid is, they think the grid is just magical. That big battery is effectively the chemical energy that can be converted at will from the least efficient peaker plants. More renewables automatically means more lower eff peaker plants. If you studied physics, you know perfectly well a Joule is Joule is a Joule no matter what form it takes. Some are more useful than others but only if it is continuous and available on demand. The least valuable is almost always the most storable like a mountain of moveable dirt or rock, but also the least energy dense except the chemical and nuclear opnes. Have you heard about those morons that build cranes to lift concrete rocks into warehouse sized mountains, the stupidty of the renewable energy storage warrior knows no bounds. If you want to know what is likely the best way to store electrical energy, Its would be hydro pumped up a hill, but it has high upfront costs but good round trip efficiency of 60-80%. But water energy density as in head height and volume is very limited to special locations, more likely normal hydro will shut down because of the environmentalists saving the fishes. After this you have to convert your precious intermitent electrical into some less valuable energy like heat, or chemical, and every one of those has terrible round trip conversion efficiency. But I will save you the trouble of figuring this out, the probable best solution we have is storing electricity as a heat difference in compressed liquid air, not CAES, but liquified air and then storing that in cheap steel containers and also storing the rejected heat in a separate container. When the stored heat is recombined with the liquid air it returns some of its electrical energy inputs. The best cycle is about 60% efficient round trip which if it is low cost, is fricking bloody good. Not as good as pumped hydro, but the energy density is very good and its just air, sand and steel tanks. And all the technology was developed by the nat gas industry for other reasons, so thank them for saving your sorry arse. Several of these liquid air batteries are being built in the UK at energy capacity factors millions of times that of Li ion batteries. These will all be built near wind farms in Scotland. Think about that, discharge a fully charged Li ion battery into a useless task like liquifing air, and possibly leave it for weeks, and get 60% of that energy back is remarkable, and the materials used don't exactly wear out, are not solid state, are cheap as dirt. The mechanics are a bit complicated, but its std chemical industrial hardware that is orders cheaper than Li ion batteries or should be. And no fucking cobalt or lithium or precious kids in african mines to boot. If you did want to store your blessed electrical energy as chemical, you would have to go through the hydrogen gate keeper process and then for long term storage go through many more conversions to make more useful liquid fuels that store more easily say DME. Any idea what the round trip conversion would be, likely less than 10% and frickin expensive. But nuclear heat can do this very well, high temperature heat is very useful not just for making steel, fertilizers, its bloody good at breaking the H2O bonds and only needs Sulfur and Iodine as a catalyst, not bloody Rhodium/Platinum rare metals. Carnot always wins, higer working temps always raises efficiency, but you climate scientists absolutely hate working with heat. So the next time you go off on the waste heat cyle, consider the storage is nearly free, and storage must always be paid for. So if you did invest in storing intermitent electrical in liquid air, you are going right back to the primary energy storage as heat again, who would have thought it. And by the way, when wind and solar are described on the Energy flow graph diagram, they are scaled up based on them being electrical. Similarly a 1GWe nuclear plant is scaled to 3GWth because it is in fact a thermal energy source. So 1GWhr of primary solar is in fact only really 0.3GWhr of produced electrical. So you cover that, but then you cry about it either way. And who cares about Iceland, Norway, new Zealand, those are all tiny outlier countries with huge hydro, and Norway has vast amounts of petro and fission metals too. Its called geology, they won the lottery. And once you start to absorb the utility of liquid air storage, we are right back to primary energy storage. Also you know that nuclear should always be counted as a heat source because sometimes it is used for district heating, unfortunately todays reactors are not very efficient, so 33% conversion is fair enough, but high temperature reactors like Molten Salt could easily achieve efficiencies closer to those of nat gas of 60% because the Carnot efficiency is what matters. For nuclear to get to 60% it would need coolant temps closer to 700c or higher and probably use CO2 as the working fluid in the heat to electricty power plant. And while talking about nat gas, nat gas currently runs at either nearly 60% eff for CCNG baseload power plants but only close to 40% for peaker power plants ie jet engines that are used to back up intermittents. If you burn NG in a 60% eff CCNG plant and replace it with a mix of 40% eff peakers and wind at 30% penetration, you end up with bugger all CO2 savings since 2/3 times 1.5 is still fuckin 1 or 100%. So wind backed up by NG in peakers is a complete waste of time, no CO2 saved at all. But the windies don't give a tits arse where the backup power comes from and how efficient it is as long as the land is covered by frickin turbine temples. Here is another thought, suppose you could burn nat gas directly in O2, no nitrogen involved, the thermal eff goes to 80% and the burn is vastly cleaner, no NOx either. If you crack air into O2 and N2 and have a paying customer for nitrogen ie the fertilizer industry, CCNG could claim 80% eff. If the nitrogen is just vented off, the 80% is dropped to 70% for the hassle of seperating the N first. Since we absolutely need fertilizers for food production, join it to CCNG power plants for the least carbon inputs. Don't tell me, you don't want any fertilizer companies to survive, too.
Great essay there in the comments. I agree that you could definitely do a whole breakdown about storage when counting losses, however the video would have been way too long. So, I decided to mention it during the video but not go fully into detail. And FYI I am very aware of energy storage as I will be doing research on a particular technology this summer in the UK electricity context. I also don’t see how the cursing has anything to do. I will integrate your feedback for what it’s worth and for that I thank you, but you should probably do other more useful stuff instead of writing an essay in the comments
Massive storage media of any kind to deal with the intermittency of renewables is not really the way things are going with renewables. Renewable energy is so cheap and so abundant that massively “over”sizing the wind and solar production and global hvdc interconnection is the way forward. The current thinking is that sizing solar and wind for the relatively still and overcast days is still cheaper and better than battery storage. So a lot of your argument just falls away.
The other thing that you missed in your essay of a comment is that the need for peaker plants is already being mitigated by demand management. Octopus Energy are already actively managing demand by rewarding people for turning off high energy items in peak periods AND paying them large amounts to feed their home stored electricity back into the grid at peak demand times. People were getting paid about £2.47 per unit, I think, to feed in at those times. Demand management, dynamic pricing, vehicle to grid, all that stuff knocks a big hole in most of your arguments. And we need to start thinking of burning fossil fuels as being as bad as killing whales to use their blubber in our oil lamps, as bad as slavery, as bad as child-abuse. If you think I’m exaggerating, then you really don’t realise just how bad the climate crisis is. Just go and do some research.
@@dominicgoodwin1147 You said, "If you think I’m exaggerating, then you really don’t realise just how bad the climate crisis is. Just go and do some research." Actually, I have done extensive research on how bad the "climate crisis" is. It's even worse than you think, but it's also different than than you "know". The crisis is the blatant corruption and lying that has captured our institutions. The IPCC was founded on the PREMISE that climate was a problem. It is therefore doing its job of screaming that the sky is falling. Opposing viewpoints are censored and defunded. In fact, the climate is getting MILDER, not more extreme. CO2 is a greenhouse gas, and the greenhouse effect is real. But water vapor is by far the dominant greenhouse gas. And natural temperature change has been happening for millennia, and dwarfs human influences. Greenland was named and settled by Vikings a thousand years ago during the Medieval Warm Period. They were driven off the island by the Little Ice Age (LII), which peaked around the 1700s. As we came out of the LII, we had accurate thermometers for the first time, started measuring temperatures and noticed they were rising. This is kind of like getting a new thermometer for Christmas (in the northern hemisphere) and noticing that the outdoor temperatures were rising every week as summer got closer. The following is true for the US: High temperatures are not rising, low temperatures are. That's why the average is increasing. Severe weather is NOT increasing. The frequency and intensity of land-falling hurricanes shows NO increasing trend. Neither do droughts, floods, and wildfires. Heat waves peaked in the 1930s. This is all documented by government and independent data sources (not those "evil fossil fuel" boogeymen).
“In any system of energy, Control is what consumes energy the most. No energy store holds enough energy to extract an amount of energy equal to the total energy it stores. No system of energy can deliver sum useful energy in excess of the total energy put into constructing it. This universal truth applies to all systems. Energy, like time, flows from past to future” (2017).
This probably isn't that important to stats like energy per capita, but there are so much more datapoint to consider to calculate actual useful energy other than energy conversion. The energy required to build the plant, maintenance, life span and transportations costs and so on. All of these factors impact the amount of energy that comes out in the end.
Excellent video. We need to replace way less energy with renewable energy compared to what is normally told. Sad story which is also true - is that so far we do not replace anything. The energy transition continues to be energy addition.
This good vid assumes that Scientists, Engineers, or at least reasonable Humans will be calling the shots. Oligarchs will continue calling the shots, Dear Sir.
Well in Germany the stupid populace called the shots replacing nuclear with coal, they effectively did their own Nexit (nuclear exit) decades before the stupid Brits did brexit. Also not all scientists are reasonable, many in the climate space are anti nuclear to their rotten core, and anti chemistry and heat even though every good storage scheme needs to use chemistry and heat, its like they want to make every process into pure solid state electrical with zero heat or chemistry involved.
You are painting a pretty picture for wind and solar that it just not deserve and I'm not sure of the basis of your "wasted energy" from fossil fuels. A report came out from and Australian government agency last year stating that the total nameplate capacity of wind turbines across Australia produced just 30% of their stated nameplate capacity on average over a year. And for commercial solar it was just 20% of their capacity on average over a year. Pathetic in both cases. Wind and solar should not be measured by nameplate capacity against coal, gas or nuclear. They are not equal. In the case of wind and solar the nameplate is an indicator of their maximum output in ideal weather conditions. But the reality is that the output of energy in a given year from this infrastructure is an unknown. Whereas coal, gas and nuclear are 'engineered' to produce reliable energy 24/7 for 60 to 80 years without the need to roll-out tens of thousands of new transmission lines and on a tiny footprint of land. I have the misfortune of living in a designated renewable energy zone and what is planned, and the extent of what is planned for our wine, cropping and grazing land is absolutely horrendous. There are 54 projects in the pipeline just for our region alone. There are five of these zones in NSW and the infrastructure is built outside of the designated zones as well. Just 'one' wind/solar project planned will start a few kilometres from our home and will consist of 63 turbines at 6MW and standing 250m high, 200m wide and potentially with red flashing aviation lights and will utilise 77 square kilometres (30 square miles) of agricultural land. The million plus solar panels will utilise 13 square kilometres (5 square kilometres). The total site it 90 square kilometres and will also include hundreds of container sized battery packs each with four air-conditioning units, two substations and 11 kilometres of internal transmission lines to connect to the new national grid that has yet to be built. The cumulative effect of all this will be horrendous! And our region was rated the top regional tourist destination for two years running. Australia has a total land area of 7.688 million square kilometres and only 6% of that is deemed agricultural. This is where this industrial infrastructure is going, and many of these massive projects are back to back driving out or destroying every native species of birds, bats and marsupials innthe process. What part of this makes any sense, all for a source of energy that has a pathetic output and most of the infrastructure doesn't even last twenty years.
Renewables have their own inefficiencies though, some of them even greater. PV solar is usually ~20% of the sunlight hitting the panel for instance, so they should be given far greater area on a primary energy graph. In fact the fraction of space covered by solar is also a part of that inefficiency if you really think about it, so to be really fair we should just use graphs where everything is totally swamped by the total solar power incident on Earth (~173,000 terawatts).
Nuclear and geothermal get thire heat basically for free(fule wise not capital and other costs) so I don't think its fair to compare them to fossil fules.
That’s fair. What conversion factor would you give to them? Perhaps, scrap the 10% and 33% from the PECM method, and look at their electricity output. But just generally primary energy is a not a really good metric
@theclimateClub ya I think energy electricity output should be the way they are measured. Yes it's true they do have waste heat and typically are less efficient heat conversion wise than gas or coal plants but they don't burn any fule and release Co2 to make that heat.
The heat isn't for free, its a capital cost thing and depends on engineering and on the various merits of the design. When water is used as the coolant, the thermal eff is going to be 35% max, its the limit of how hot water can get under pressurization, water boils at 100c but in a reactor it pumpes around at 350c or so. Use a design based on Molten Salts or certain dangerous liquid metals and the eff can easily get to 60% with 700c temps, but that has its own cost, personlly I support Molten Salt reactors for so many reason.
So, I think you need to review the starting point of your calculation. A solar panel is at best 15% efficient in lab conditions, so about 5% in the field if you add seasons, weather and the day night cycle. Similar for wind power where its either to strong or not enough. There is also the challenge of making / replacing renewables without fossil fuels and also the backup / storing of an intermittent source. We have never transitioned from a dense energy source to disperse source so the need for massive grid changes is also challenging
This is energy-ignorant. Renewable energy provided 26% of U.S. final energy consumption in 2022. That means that it needs to replace 74% of 76 Quads or 56 Quads. Renewables currently provide 13 Quads so the amount needs to more than quadruple. Now figure how to transform the entire transport sector of which 6% is renewable. You are the one with the energy fallacy.
This video isn’t saying that renewables need to scale up by a lot, but that they don’t need to satisfy all primary energy demand. I think it was pretty clear tbh
Fossil fuels are heat engine based which are universally limited by Carnot's efficiency and other real thermodynamic cycles. However, solar and wind aren't that much better either. The best solar panels nowadays are only 22.5% efficient, and wind turbines about 30% (this is still very good, even compared to just 10 years ago). However, ultimately nuclear is the only option. Nuclear is about 33% efficient, comparable to fossil fuels, but 1 kg nuclear fuel produces over 86000000000000 (80 trillion Joules) and so even with losses at least 20 trillion joules of work with just 1 kg fuel. (Gasoline for comparison is 46000000 or 46 million joules per kg, and about 18 million J can be converted to work)/ TLDR, nuclear is the only source with enough sheer power to replace all of fossil fuels with zero emissions and minimal waste, especially with the new breeder reactors. Hence we should go nuclear despite the high initial costs.
Not really. Inefficiencies of renewables in terms of the output is very low. If are talking about efficiency rates of renewables (20% solar, 40% wind ish), then that’s not the comparison to be made because that energy isn’t “wasted” as it’s just there. The actual comparison to be made is with the output of both renewables and fossil fuels. Nice!
@@theclimateClub , if you want to state renewables are more efficient you MUST include their losses to have the effective energy. case in point. a lead acid battery will lose more than 20 percent of the energy you store. other batteries claim down into 10 percent. it means you have lost 10 percent as waste heat... and you can't ignore 10 percent . your point is good and there is no need to hide clear truths.
@@theclimateClub you take the heat losses into account with numbers and then skip them for renewables... no. if you use specifics you must put them on all data. coal is a good example for much of what you state.. 2/3s heat lost. but if you want to imply that all you need is 1/3 of that power in PV panels your argument is lost. PV's heat derate AND storage will puff you up to needing another 1/3...
This video makes some valid points. However, it overlooks some other fallacies. SUBSTITUTION FALLACY: Fossil fuels are used to make plastics, nitrogen fertilizer (for food), steel, and concrete. There are currently no economic substitutes available. So these "primary energy" uses need to be retained. EFFICIENCY FALLACY: Different sources and processes have different efficiencies. For example, natural gas combined cycle electricity generation is about 65% efficient. (Also, modern coal plants are about 45% efficient, not 33%.) The usage matters also. Modern natural gas furnaces are about 95% efficient. The efficiency of heat pumps falls with outside temperature. So in temperatures below freezing, gas furnaces are the better option. INTERMITTENCY FALLACY: Intermittent renewables (e.g. wind and solar) only make electricity when it is windy or sunny. But electricity is needed all the time, not just in proportion to wind or sun. Also, costs for intermittent sources almost never include the requirement for dispatchable electricity (the kind we need). So in addition to the wind and solar, we need HUGE batteries, which are VERY expensive, or we need quick-reacting backup power sources such as fossil. Since these fossil sources are required to remain on costly standby, while the "cheap" renewables are doing their thing, the cost picture gets very distorted.
False argument no-one is arguing the potential energy of coal be replaced, only the power realised at the alternators. Renewables have a similar problem. Wind turbines typically produce only 35% of their rated power as usable energy. The same problem applies to solar PV. Nuclear solves these problems by running 24/7. Thermally it is more efficient than coal as there are no flue losses and no need for CCS.
I'd love to agree but the sad truth is that most nuclear power uses water as a coolant which limits the working temperature to say 350c or so which in turn severley limits the Carnot eff at the generator stage. It doesn't have to be that way, Molten Salt and metal cooled high temp reactors could run at 700c or more and get closer to 60% eff.Nice if they used super critical CO2 as well and that does seem to be working now. Also in Germany all those CO2 free nuclear reactors that were shut down were also likely 35% eff at max and mostly got replaced by brown coal plants that run at 45% eff plus all the polution they create. But the 35% nuclear is vastly better than 45% coal under all circumsatnces unless you hate nuclear like German greens do.Whats even more amazing is that those 45% coal plant are run as peakers to match the wind and PV, if they also ran as base load they might even be higher eff, but would still be evil
True but one sided. There are plenty of "fallacies" going the other way. 1) Renewable energy is cheaper. Yes when the wind is blowing not if you consider the infrastructure, like back up when wind not blowing or inertia installations to preserve grid stability. If it really was cheaper then normal market forces would allow renewables to take over. 2) Heat pumps are more efficient. Yes but comparing cheap gas to expensive electricity. The delta T on a heat pump is poor so affected by ambient conditions and need radiators twice the size. 3) EVs. If these items were really better people would be buying them instead its top down with quotas. 4) Video misleading in that it suggests there won't need to be an increase in grid capacity as this is allowed for by relative efficiencies. Up to £400bn of investment is required in green infrastructure over the next decade if the UK is to meet its ambitious Net Zero target, according to a new report by PwC commissioned by the Global Infrastructure Investment Association (GIIA).
The video doesn’t suggest there won’t be a need to increase grid capacity, far from it. It’s 100% clear that grid capacity and transmission needs loads of investment. One of my next videos is precisely on this need for investment in the grid, especially as so many projects are backlogged because they can’t be connected. So I honestly don’t think this video suggests in any way that grid capacity will remain the same
@@theclimateClub Time index 9.14 "It sends the wrong message. The message being that we need to increase our energy supply from renewables substantially, instead of meeting the actual demand". But its not the wrong message, we do need to increase our energy supply from renewables substantially which is still true even with the efficiencies consideration. So who is being misleading? You could have accurately said "we need to increase our energy supply from renewables substantially although less when the efficiencies are taken into consideration". "So I honestly don’t think this video suggests in any way that grid capacity will remain the same". The video neither says stays the same or talks about the huge increase required. That you are aware of this makes this omission a political choice which is my point.
@@alanrobertson9790 perhaps it was unclear then. But that statement was in regards to the substitution method which inflates energy numbers. If we “inflate” what the real energy demand is then that can send the wrong message. The argument wasn’t about not needing to ramp up renewables. It was about meeting the actual demand instead of purely focusing on supply, not the inflated demand that comes from this accounting method. This point was also made by Michael Liebreich in “net zero will be harder…” paper. If it was unclear that that was my point then I apologise, however that argument was for the substitution method. So no, I’m not making it political
@@theclimateClub Re " in other words, it is the wrong message". To meet the actual demand we do need to increase our energy supply from renewables substantially. This is correct not wrong. You have already conceded the point and are about to do a video on the subject. I look forward to your video.
There is no fallacy that the heat engine cycle to shaft energy conversion is not ideal. That has been known for centuries because it greatly runs the modern world. Energy on the power gird is equated to MW hours therefore to replace a MW hour of coal fired electricity requires a MW hour of electricity. You have to replace all of it. Solar electric panels only provide useful stable energy when used with storage such as batteries. You'd be financially a head to invest the tens of thousands of dollars needed for a couple days of home battery storage in stocks and buy your electricity from the power grid. Wind turbine generators typically work with natural gas combined cycle plants that are cheap and easy to build, but are expensive to fuel with natural gas. It's the cheap to build NGCC plants that are the actual base load generators of electricity that make wind turbines somewhat economical. In the USA onshore wind farm costs when accepted with their electricity have always caused electric rates to go up substantially. Offshore wind is at least twice as much per MW than onshore wind. There is no mechanism that would allow greenhouse gas behavior to cause global warming. Global warming was officially stated at 1.1°C in 1991 and 1.06°C in 2022. The back of the United Nation's IPCC science report states it took its greenhouse gas samples at 20,000 meters altitude where it is common high school level knowledge there is no greenhouse radiant energy. This is typical practice for deceptive marketing to state legal data transparency protecting the perpetrators from fraud prosecution. Earth's greenhouse effect is frequently used as a primary example to high school students of a system always in saturation from the strong greenhouse gas water vapor absorbing all the greenhouse radiant energy from the earth with greenhouse gases within 20 meters of the surface that is all around us everyday and can't have its overall effect changed. There is no further greenhouse radiant energy to interact with greenhouse gases. At 1% average tropospheric water vapor over 99% of earth’s greenhouse effect is from water vapor. Water vapor would hold earth's greenhouse effect in saturation if it were the only greenhouse gas in the atmosphere. Atmospheric CO2 levels of 1200 ppm about three times what they are today would greatly invigorate C3 plants the majority of plant life on earth greatly greening the planet.
What d'ya do when wind doesn't blow and sun don't shine? The unreliable nature if intermittent so-calked renewables amounts to a very large inefficiency.
@@12pentaborane Ya cannae store the electricity stuff in a shed! That is to say that therr aint enough lithium in the world tae store even only a 24 hrs supply of several hundred megawatts of electricity. The most feasible approach is to sore it as potential energy by pumping massive volumes of water into uphill reservoirs and subsequently releasing the water to drive water turbines to generate electricity at tomes of peak demand. So, tge bottom line is, where in the UK are there suitable sites for excavating large suitably elevated reservoirs? Otherwise, keep on eating pie in the sky!
@@12pentaborane I have pointed out many times that storing electrical energy in a battery is up to 10,000 the price of storing liquid or rock energy in a plastic bucket. To get a handle on huge energy storage, it is going to have to be converted into chemical storage with huge losses but cheap storage, or for the short term as heat possibly in liquified air with riound trip eff not far below pumped hydro, but using not much more than air, sand and steel for the battery plus a whole oad of hardware from the gas industry. But it leaves out the fact that solar produce 5x as much energy in summer than winter in the US, so most of that sun is going to be wasted unless summer storage can store months worth of energy. And over a year, wind doesn't always average out, the lulls can be weeks longs.
Now if yer happen to be in Scotland, look out for those air liquification energy storage plants they actually have big storage and power ratings on them meant for wind farms. They are building a few of them.
@@johnjakson444 The issue isnae the power rating per se, but rather the duration over which the power can be supplied. It's not megawatts that matter, but megawatt hours. Less than a few days worth of megawatt storage is risible as far as balancing the grid is concerned.
You do not take transmission losses into account. Nor do you take the losses that are caused by charging and discharging chemical batteries. Pumped storage also has inefficiencies.
Transmission losses happen for both renewables and fossil fuels when talking about electricity. Furthermore in most countries they are very low. Then, I did mention the losses that will arise with storage.
Take a look at liquified air storage with heat recovery its getting a round trip eff conversion of about 60%, pretty darn good for cheap materials. And its being built for wind buffering in Scotland, so I approve of that one. Intermitents have another transmission problem, in the US wind states, the HVDC lines will be very long to connecting the east and west market grids but the wind only blows at 30% capacity factor, if all the wind was down that HVDC line won't be doing much. Better hope that those DC lines have something on them.
Renewables also have a bunch of waste energy... I'm not sure this fallacy is busted based on what you're saying unless you're Simpsons are an extremely ideal situation
The technologies themselves not really. There are some losses from source to consumer (transmission etc for example), but there isn’t really waste energy per say. If you mean “energy from renewables is often wasted”, then yes that’s true. A lot of it is curtailed due to a lack of storage, transmission etc. But fundamentally those issues are due to intermittency, not waste energy.
What mr smarty pants doesn't know is that in Europe and the US an awful lot of renewables isn't remotely electrical, its bloody biomass and bio fuels. In the UK a perfectly horrible CO2 spewing coal power plant (the Drax) was made instantly green by switching out black coal and bringing in wood chips from other side of the US, those shipping transport costs and the effects on the northern forests is largely ignored. And thats what climate scientist largely want to ignore. In Germany their CO2 emission are twice those of France because nuclear got replaced by brown coal, well at least the new clean coal is thermo 45% eff while the nuclear was likely only 33% eff, pity about the CO2 though. An all those biomass plants where to begin, its mostly a scam to play the games, look up the palm oil from asia forrests. Biomass should be mostly banned on principle because it is so abused.
You make some good points, but the "wasted" heat from fossil fuels isn't always wasted. It depends on where (and when) it's produced. Through a process called cogeneration the waste heat is used to heat homes. This is common in places like New York and Chicago, but isn't the case in places like Miami and Los Angeles. Here is more info on cogeneration: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cogeneration
Yeah that was a point I had kept in the script but then removed it because it would lengthen the video too much. I was going to talk about CHP for example. Thanks for making that point though
💡What do you think about the primary energy fallacy?
🔋This video is a slight simplification of the issue, as storage definitely needs to be taken into account.
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Primary energy does my fucking nut in. The UK's heating policy is riddled with it. Gas heating has a primary energy factor of 1.13 in SAP, which basically calls it "efficient" and makes it the default option on EPCs.
In order to better comprehend the current situation, one may have to go back to life of Nikola Tesla, and his implicit goals, when he designed the grid system.
His theories may have been based on a critique of Lord Kelvin, and the facts that meat muscle, man or beast, did most of the work back then.
Clearly, an all electric formula must stand alongside an all carbon formula, in order to get a decent feel for a clear outlook.
did you lock that door behind you so that someone doesn't slam the door on you while you're filming?
@@drzavahercegbosnaponosna5974 😂
Electricity is only one part of energy we consume. A huge part is heat energy itself
Why has nobody talked about this before on RUclips? Thank you. I have really learnt something important today!
Glad to hear that!
Yet again, a banal high school level fact for engineers; but permanently beyond the understanding of average citizen.
Of course, what your treatment assumes is that the heat of thermal-based energy sources is wasted, which is not the case everywhere. Most of the countries in northern Europe utilize it in district heating, making flat waste assumption incorrect. In cold areas, heating accounts for a massive segment of total energy expenditure, so this matters.
Then what even further complicates things is that heat pumps driven with electricity are widely used. They generate usable high temperature heat for ~3x the amount of electrical energy put in, and the low temp. heat source they draw from can be fossil energy waste heat, industrial plant waste heat, latent heat of urban sewege system, or dedicated heat reservoirs heated during the summer.
None of that is taken into account in simple charts.
Sand batteries can produce heat for homes, while carbon batteries or metal powders can provide industrial heat. It is easier and cheaper to get heat from non-carbon based sources.
@@FlameofDemocracy Produce or store? Describe this sand battery that produces energy?
@@MVHiltunen
See polar night energy's homepage.
Also if you are going to make more videos about other aspects you missed out on, maybe instead you should have written a book like the one by Dr David Mackay which was pretty well done almost 20 years ago, it points out the fallacy of imagining how to base an economy on REs alone, basically you would need several times the land mass of the UK covered in PV or turbines to power some of the energy of another UK land mass elsewhere. Basically with REs, the UK just don't have the land area to be RE pure. The USA does but, bven Bill Gates had a go at it too, he was that awesome he had to rewrite the book for the US reader.
"Without The Hot Air", it's a free PDF download and covers all the energy graphs and explains where all the energy use goes, and its a lot more than just powering yer home by 2 orders.
The next fallacy that the climate folks are going to push is that Carbon Footprint is another fallacy that the fossil industry is pushing to spread the blame around. That one needs to be nipped in the bud before it takes off. Evryone just want to deny their footprint once they get a few PV panels on their roof. But read the fine book, Without the hot air.
Wind, solar, batteries, hydrogen, biogas, and dams can do it all. Modernization, knowledge capital, green spaces, and geothermal are also underutilized assets.
My home has illustrated this point , We have ditched 12 Mwhs of gas and the same12 mwhs in Petrol + diesel for our 2 cars and our electricity usage has only increased by a 5th of that. then by adding 3.25kw of PV we have an annual electrical consumption of 7 mwhs. time for more PV.
actually a really great point
I hadn't even considered that coal and fossil fuels are so inefficient that most of their energy output won't even need to be matched by renewable sources
Exactly! This topic doesn’t seem to be very known for some reason, but it’s quite important
Well storage for fossil fuels is essentially free, the elephant in the room is that intermitent energy has huge storage costs vastly higher than the 33% eff of primary. And beside nat gas in CCNG power plants burns at 60% not 33%, and with O2 burning it goes up to 80% if O2 is free, 70% if paid for. And nuclear can easily reach 60% too if you go for higer temp reactors like Molten Salt. So the anti heat chemical folks have no clue about various eff cycles of production or storage.
By the time you pay for storage of intermitent electrical, you will have to use engineering that involves either heat or chemical energy conversion with round trip efficiencies between 10-60% or so depending on path taken.
@@theclimateClub I didn't even consider that "energy usage of a country" given in TWh is NOT the useful energy. But I understand now, it's a fossil lobby thing to make them more valuable.
Hence nuclear energy production for base load makes sense as waste heat is more easily captured. Plus other benefits.
In Eastern Europe nuclear power stations were often connected to district heating systems, to provide heating using the waste heat. We should go back to that.
Alternatively, heating up water massively reduces the energy needed to split it into hydrogen and oxygen, so it could be useful in electrolysis.
Mining for the fuel hardly make sense…
It's not that waste heat is captured, it's that fact that higher temperature sources have higher max isentropic efficiencies as a consequence of the second law of thermodynamics, with max thermal efficiency being approximated as (TH-TL)/TH. The higher the temperature of the heat source, the more convertible to work that energy is. Nuclear reactions are significantly hotter than chemical reactions. Some heat must be rejected for all processes in order to produce work, and that rejected heat cannot be recaptured without putting more energy into the system than is recaptured.
@@peterhansson7967 bollux
@@Brettfast_prod Exactly but current fission reactors are hindered by using bloody water as their coolant which limits Carnot eff to about 35%. Start using Molten Salts or dare I say liquid metals (not sodium water anywhere near it), and your Carnot limit goes to 60% eff but you would want to combine that with a super critical CO2 based heat engine to extract the energy with it, thats only recently been worked out.
But nat gas can be improved too, 60% in air is the normal limit, but burn in oxygen its then 80%, or 70% if the nitrogen is wasted.
Even those stupid Germans that switched from nuclear to coal, got new improved extra clean modern coal with I believe 45% eff, but its still fricken brown coal.
i've been guilty of not clearly marking the method of primary energy charts. I'll try to do better.
R'amen! You are correcting the 2nd Sin of Thermodynamics- confusing heat with work (electricity or mechanical energy) as if they're worth the same- rather like confusing American dollars with Jamaican dollars just because they are both units of money measured in dollars...
While the second law of thermodynamics applies to 'energy', the core global warming problem is the leveraged problem that CO2 has on the planet surface temperature (where we live) compared to the emission surface temperature (where the final CO2 layer is).
It's "the size of a candle flame" problem when you can't see the flame 'colour'.
The primary energy 'fallacy' is the magicians misdirection fallacy - the supposed waste energy is essential to the process of generating our residual (33%) useful (to us) energy. It's the 100% that is burnt that is the problem.
This video makes some valid points. However, it overlooks some other fallacies.
SUBSTITUTION FALLACY: Fossil fuels are used to make plastics, nitrogen fertilizer (for food), steel, and concrete. There are currently no economic substitutes available. So these "primary energy" uses need to be retained.
EFFICIENCY FALLACY: Different sources and processes have different efficiencies. For example, natural gas combined cycle electricity generation is about 65% efficient. (Also, modern coal plants are about 45% efficient, not 33%.) The usage matters also. Modern natural gas furnaces are about 95% efficient. The efficiency of heat pumps falls with outside temperature. So in temperatures below freezing, gas furnaces are the better option.
INTERMITTENCY FALLACY: Intermittent renewables (e.g. wind and solar) only make electricity when it is windy or sunny. But electricity is needed all the time, not just in proportion to wind or sun. Also, costs for intermittent sources almost never include the requirement for dispatchable electricity (the kind we need). So in addition to the wind and solar, we need HUGE batteries, which are VERY expensive, or we need quick-reacting backup power sources such as fossil. Since these fossil sources are required to remain on costly standby, while the "cheap" renewables are doing their thing, the cost picture gets very distorted.
wait didn't know this. this practically means all graphs I've seen until now are just fossil fuel propaganda and the transition is like 3 times simpler than it seems. nice to know
Kind of yeah. BUT we need flexibility (storage, interconnections and DSR), and transmission to accelerate. So yes, but still a lot of work to do
Get this man to COP29!
Thank you for an easy-to-understand graphic showing how inefficient "green" hydrogen is. Get college kids on good e-cargo bikes, and proper safety & weather equipment. Then they will have clean transit to class, groceries, and jobs up to 8 or 10 miles, and the safety gear and training to teach others. Orders of magnitude less energy than gas! And a bike that makes it easy to carry babies & kids later. Many campuses are already bike friendly; I think uni systems should be smart enough to have their own scooter & ebike sharing, and safety training. MSU does have many EV vans, trucks, and cars for grounds care & maintenance.
Many people in Europe already know this, higher population density leads to much lower CO2 emisions per capita, but those pesky stupid people everwhere all wants to drive an SUV because they bloody deserve it, why do Americans get all the good stuff, they wants it too.
Wow! Where's that been hiding?!!
Great analysis! Very granular, in a good way.
Thanks!
This should have more views!! Good job young lad
And don't forget the new research from Edinburgh University "Global Oil Depletion | Alister Hamilton" indicating that we are very near to zero oil energy. As he notes, it's a bit rich when they have to power their Oil Rigs from Wind Energy !
Will take at look at that paper!
Commenting to make the algorythm happy and to raise the profile.
Thank you 🙏
this needs more views
Hopefully!😂
This was very interesting and informative. Thank you!
Glad you enjoyed it!
Good video !
Thanks!
Sankey diagrams yay! I love that diagram so much. Good job, keep up the great work!
Same, never knew the name of them, just called them "energy flow diagrams" in my mind.
Transportation technology in which the prime mover is located in the vehicle is the worst, it wastes four-fifths of the energy put into it. However, this does represent progress over the reciprocating steam engine of one hundred years ago, which wasted all but 7% of the energy released by the burning fuel.
Yeah for sure. Will have to transition to electric cars, but also decrease car usage and increase substitutes (public transport, better city development etc)
Well the real problem is with all the stupid people that want to drive around in a comforatble house on wheels, 50 years ago we had much less efficient engines, but the vehicles were mostly half the weight or less, so 4 steps forward and 3 steps backwards. And then people go on about death traps tiny cars, the solution to that is we all drive in battle tanks, more steel, better outcome for driver, sod the other guy.
@@theclimateClub the "better city" development is 100% guaranteed to cause low birth rates. US car centric is dumb but it makes repalcement birth rate possible.
Sensational delivery of "fuck all". Take a bow, young man. 😂
Haha thanks 🙏 😂
If air and ground source heat pumps were so great they wouldn’t need to be subsidised.
End uses dont make decisions on the basis of primary energy usage.
And this is why primary energy consumption has decoupled from GDP growth while electricity generation hasn’t. We need more renewables, storage and nuclear.
wow face reveal! 😱😱
Congratulations. An excellent video about an essential subject on the use of energy, that hardly any people are aware about.
Thank you!
'Basically fuck all' Love it!
If you had enough solar and wind installed to cover needs, the construction and land use wastage would massively exceed the heat losses of fossil fuels. Renewables have such low losses because they shift inefficiencies unto fossil fuels, which sit idle shedding heat while solar is pumping energy in, but then need to be heated more when the sun sets to compensate.
Using installed capacity for renewables compounds the issue, because it hides the idle time and shifted inefficiencies that renewables cause.
Very interesting subject and explanation. you could keep the video more engaging if almost half wasn't about how the calculation is made.
That’s a fair point tbh, but I did want to include this section as there aren’t any videos on it. So I decided to put the “interesting” stuff at the beginning and then the calculations as the second section. I also think that a stand alone video on the calculations would potentially be boring
I also put more time into it due to it being “complicated”, so I wanted all audiences to be able to understand
@theclimateClub the explanation is very straight forward, not complicated at all, props to you for managing this and mentioning the topic in the first place!
Maybe a follow up video with actual studies that are being referenced most and show the world how these studies results would be with the useful energy calculations.
This young man has discovered what most engineers and planners have not noticed, even today. Well done.
The real goal today is to replace fossils, while getting the effect of twice the total energy output, on a global scale.
Once you understand the fundamentals of this video, you would see that the world is not so far from this goal.
I hope you can come up with an even better formula, one to top the Larry Livermore graph.
I shall not criticize this video the least bit! At the contrary, it is excellent! Good job, young man!
BUT, engineers HAVE noticed! They in fact know all that very well! Who do you think made all those energy-flow charts? Accountants?
@@st-ex8506
The salience is apparent in that the graphs show energy in BTU denominations, demonstrating the original Kelvinist approach.
Such thinking is outdated, as electricity, primarily the grid, has emerged as the primary driver in modern thinking for energy generation, as massless energy forms (versus mass, ie fossils) are maturing.
There is a yawning gap in approaches, within engineering circles, scientists, logisticians, what have you, to be succinct.
Scientists compiled the graph data, most likely.
@@FlameofDemocracy I have compiled similar graphs of mass and/or energy for the processes I have participated in developing.
I get your point about the need for thinking of energy in different terms... and so does also the author of the present video, it seams. But I don't see why there would be a "yawning gap" in thinking between engineers, scientists, etc... at least well-informed ones... which they should be.
As to the different methods of compiling energies, they are all imperfect... but I don't have a better one to offer right off the bat!
Maybe I should occupy my retirement time developing one?!?
That’s very nice of you! Unfortunately, I can’t claim the credit for finding this out but it’s definitely not talked about enough. Thanks for the kind words
@@st-ex8506Thanks!
The very first graph you showed from Our World in data is already corrected for inefficiencies and conversion losses ;)
Stick to the substitution method and never worry about the primary energy fallacy again...
it's corrected using the substitution method, but it still has important flaws. Now that you said that though, I think I wanted to put the primary energy graph with the direct method instead! Hadn't spotted that. I do agree that sub is better than the rest IMO
@@theclimateClub Totally agree, that direct method is misleading. Underestimates wind, solar and hydro by a factor of ~3. But don't throw the baby out with the bathwater ;)
The lurid language only detracts from your arguement.
I disagree. It brings some levity and humour to the video
Hey, thanks for the great video! I have a doubt though: How will we represent renewable energy from biomass sources? Will we use primary energy since they're combusted/gasified like fossil fuels or will we use the substitution method?
Thanks a lot! Since biomass is also considered as thermal, in accounting it's similar to fossil fuels. In the PECM method it's given a 0.3 (30%) conversion factor for example. In substitution, it's normally the same as the others, although I have seen it be a slightly lower % in a paper. The only tricky bit with biomass, is when you start using it as biofuels. I'm not sure what happens then tbh, but I should have plenty of sources which explain it if you want
@@theclimateClub I see, thanks for the reply! Sure I'd love to have a look at the sources!
Since you cursed so much, its also good for your rebutal, you over simplified so much and missed out on the elephant in the room, intermitency and storage has massive costs, you dismissed energy storage almost as if its free.
Renewabale Enengy is trading a high value intermitant electrical energy for a lower value of energy usually thermal or chemical that has to be converted with losses into electrical. But you ignore the storage costs and you also ignore how varied these processes can be. Every one of those waste heat sources comes with essentially free storage, in the case of coal oil and gas it is usaually consumed shortly after extraction but the storage can easily be for several months or years if need be. In the case of fission, the storage is essentially for millions of years after digging it up, it can be processed into yellow cake and then Uranium fuel at will. It is also available from the oceans at moderate cost too essentially at will.
But your precious solar and wind can not be stored economically,, it's about 10,000 times more than chemical energy storage. The avg capacity factor of wind is only 30% max. The max capacity factor of PV is typically only 14% in the US NE. It can reach 20% or more in the US SW. In northern europe its only about 11% in the UK, but more in spain.
Buy a plastic bucket for about $1 and it easily stores 30KWh of chemical energy either liquid or rock form worth at least 10-20KWhr(e) after conversion.
Buy a Tesla wall battery and it stores only 10KWhr(e) for a whopping $10,000 or so and you have to pay for 1 of its wear and tear cycles say atleast $10 on top of its stored energy value of only $1 and that electrical storage in batteries is only for weeks at best. They self discharge you know. And batteries really really hate being full or empty, which is why Tesla keeps them in their 20-80% zone as much as possible when wear cycles are effectively 10x less severe. So to lkeep batteries near the 50% zone means you really have to double capacity to use the rated value, they suck.
You know that in the USA, solar insolation is 5x better in the summer than the bloody winter. How the hell do you store summer electrical energy for months rather than just days. Even for wind you would need a month of storage if thats all you had. The Danes play a lot of complicated games with their wind to extract as much value as possible, but a huge proportion of it is used to make hot water for heat storage and if not enough storage, throw it away. Does you production graphs cover the curtailed energy from useless over production, I doubt it.
Also the intermitency issue means that say you convert any of this precious energy into hydrogen for steel, you first have to make it 100% base load becaue all thermal and chemical industrial processes are always as continuious processes. God forbid your hydrogen production needs a catalyst like platinum while the electrical input capacity factor is mostly low.
No improvemnet in battery energy storage is ever going to change this 10,000 ratio. If you could get 10KWhr(e) into the same space as a chemical, it would be a frickin chemical.
The alternative for intermittent only energy source is bleak with out that free battery like chemical energy storage from combustible sources that you all take for granted.
Dont you fucking hate it when anti climate people say they know more than climate scientists and deny the climate science.
Well fucking electrical engineers hate it when climate science that denies the simplest facts on energy esp electrical.
Everyone I meet that worships your fucking turbines has zero clue where the big battery on the grid is, they think the grid is just magical. That big battery is effectively the chemical energy that can be converted at will from the least efficient peaker plants. More renewables automatically means more lower eff peaker plants.
If you studied physics, you know perfectly well a Joule is Joule is a Joule no matter what form it takes. Some are more useful than others but only if it is continuous and available on demand. The least valuable is almost always the most storable like a mountain of moveable dirt or rock, but also the least energy dense except the chemical and nuclear opnes. Have you heard about those morons that build cranes to lift concrete rocks into warehouse sized mountains, the stupidty of the renewable energy storage warrior knows no bounds.
If you want to know what is likely the best way to store electrical energy, Its would be hydro pumped up a hill, but it has high upfront costs but good round trip efficiency of 60-80%. But water energy density as in head height and volume is very limited to special locations, more likely normal hydro will shut down because of the environmentalists saving the fishes.
After this you have to convert your precious intermitent electrical into some less valuable energy like heat, or chemical, and every one of those has terrible round trip conversion efficiency.
But I will save you the trouble of figuring this out, the probable best solution we have is storing electricity as a heat difference in compressed liquid air, not CAES, but liquified air and then storing that in cheap steel containers and also storing the rejected heat in a separate container. When the stored heat is recombined with the liquid air it returns some of its electrical energy inputs. The best cycle is about 60% efficient round trip which if it is low cost, is fricking bloody good. Not as good as pumped hydro, but the energy density is very good and its just air, sand and steel tanks. And all the technology was developed by the nat gas industry for other reasons, so thank them for saving your sorry arse. Several of these liquid air batteries are being built in the UK at energy capacity factors millions of times that of Li ion batteries. These will all be built near wind farms in Scotland.
Think about that, discharge a fully charged Li ion battery into a useless task like liquifing air, and possibly leave it for weeks, and get 60% of that energy back is remarkable, and the materials used don't exactly wear out, are not solid state, are cheap as dirt. The mechanics are a bit complicated, but its std chemical industrial hardware that is orders cheaper than Li ion batteries or should be. And no fucking cobalt or lithium or precious kids in african mines to boot.
If you did want to store your blessed electrical energy as chemical, you would have to go through the hydrogen gate keeper process and then for long term storage go through many more conversions to make more useful liquid fuels that store more easily say DME. Any idea what the round trip conversion would be, likely less than 10% and frickin expensive. But nuclear heat can do this very well, high temperature heat is very useful not just for making steel, fertilizers, its bloody good at breaking the H2O bonds and only needs Sulfur and Iodine as a catalyst, not bloody Rhodium/Platinum rare metals. Carnot always wins, higer working temps always raises efficiency, but you climate scientists absolutely hate working with heat.
So the next time you go off on the waste heat cyle, consider the storage is nearly free, and storage must always be paid for.
So if you did invest in storing intermitent electrical in liquid air, you are going right back to the primary energy storage as heat again, who would have thought it.
And by the way, when wind and solar are described on the Energy flow graph diagram, they are scaled up based on them being electrical. Similarly a 1GWe nuclear plant is scaled to 3GWth because it is in fact a thermal energy source. So 1GWhr of primary solar is in fact only really 0.3GWhr of produced electrical. So you cover that, but then you cry about it either way. And who cares about Iceland, Norway, new Zealand, those are all tiny outlier countries with huge hydro, and Norway has vast amounts of petro and fission metals too. Its called geology, they won the lottery.
And once you start to absorb the utility of liquid air storage, we are right back to primary energy storage.
Also you know that nuclear should always be counted as a heat source because sometimes it is used for district heating, unfortunately todays reactors are not very efficient, so 33% conversion is fair enough, but high temperature reactors like Molten Salt could easily achieve efficiencies closer to those of nat gas of 60% because the Carnot efficiency is what matters. For nuclear to get to 60% it would need coolant temps closer to 700c or higher and probably use CO2 as the working fluid in the heat to electricty power plant.
And while talking about nat gas, nat gas currently runs at either nearly 60% eff for CCNG baseload power plants but only close to 40% for peaker power plants ie jet engines that are used to back up intermittents. If you burn NG in a 60% eff CCNG plant and replace it with a mix of 40% eff peakers and wind at 30% penetration, you end up with bugger all CO2 savings since 2/3 times 1.5 is still fuckin 1 or 100%. So wind backed up by NG in peakers is a complete waste of time, no CO2 saved at all. But the windies don't give a tits arse where the backup power comes from and how efficient it is as long as the land is covered by frickin turbine temples.
Here is another thought, suppose you could burn nat gas directly in O2, no nitrogen involved, the thermal eff goes to 80% and the burn is vastly cleaner, no NOx either. If you crack air into O2 and N2 and have a paying customer for nitrogen ie the fertilizer industry, CCNG could claim 80% eff. If the nitrogen is just vented off, the 80% is dropped to 70% for the hassle of seperating the N first. Since we absolutely need fertilizers for food production, join it to CCNG power plants for the least carbon inputs.
Don't tell me, you don't want any fertilizer companies to survive, too.
Great essay there in the comments. I agree that you could definitely do a whole breakdown about storage when counting losses, however the video would have been way too long. So, I decided to mention it during the video but not go fully into detail. And FYI I am very aware of energy storage as I will be doing research on a particular technology this summer in the UK electricity context. I also don’t see how the cursing has anything to do. I will integrate your feedback for what it’s worth and for that I thank you, but you should probably do other more useful stuff instead of writing an essay in the comments
The cranes thing (Im assuming you’re referring to gravitational) is just dumb tbh
Massive storage media of any kind to deal with the intermittency of renewables is not really the way things are going with renewables. Renewable energy is so cheap and so abundant that massively “over”sizing the wind and solar production and global hvdc interconnection is the way forward.
The current thinking is that sizing solar and wind for the relatively still and overcast days is still cheaper and better than battery storage. So a lot of your argument just falls away.
The other thing that you missed in your essay of a comment is that the need for peaker plants is already being mitigated by demand management. Octopus Energy are already actively managing demand by rewarding people for turning off high energy items in peak periods AND paying them large amounts to feed their home stored electricity back into the grid at peak demand times. People were getting paid about £2.47 per unit, I think, to feed in at those times. Demand management, dynamic pricing, vehicle to grid, all that stuff knocks a big hole in most of your arguments.
And we need to start thinking of burning fossil fuels as being as bad as killing whales to use their blubber in our oil lamps, as bad as slavery, as bad as child-abuse.
If you think I’m exaggerating, then you really don’t realise just how bad the climate crisis is. Just go and do some research.
@@dominicgoodwin1147 You said, "If you think I’m exaggerating, then you really don’t realise just how bad the climate crisis is. Just go and do some research."
Actually, I have done extensive research on how bad the "climate crisis" is. It's even worse than you think, but it's also different than than you "know". The crisis is the blatant corruption and lying that has captured our institutions. The IPCC was founded on the PREMISE that climate was a problem. It is therefore doing its job of screaming that the sky is falling. Opposing viewpoints are censored and defunded.
In fact, the climate is getting MILDER, not more extreme. CO2 is a greenhouse gas, and the greenhouse effect is real. But water vapor is by far the dominant greenhouse gas. And natural temperature change has been happening for millennia, and dwarfs human influences. Greenland was named and settled by Vikings a thousand years ago during the Medieval Warm Period. They were driven off the island by the Little Ice Age (LII), which peaked around the 1700s. As we came out of the LII, we had accurate thermometers for the first time, started measuring temperatures and noticed they were rising. This is kind of like getting a new thermometer for Christmas (in the northern hemisphere) and noticing that the outdoor temperatures were rising every week as summer got closer.
The following is true for the US:
High temperatures are not rising, low temperatures are. That's why the average is increasing. Severe weather is NOT increasing. The frequency and intensity of land-falling hurricanes shows NO increasing trend. Neither do droughts, floods, and wildfires. Heat waves peaked in the 1930s. This is all documented by government and independent data sources (not those "evil fossil fuel" boogeymen).
Interesting. Thank you for sharing. 😊
Thanks!
🔝🔝
“In any system of energy, Control is what consumes energy the most.
No energy store holds enough energy to extract an amount of energy equal to the total energy it stores.
No system of energy can deliver sum useful energy in excess of the total energy put into constructing it.
This universal truth applies to all systems.
Energy, like time, flows from past to future” (2017).
Amazing video, once again!
Thank you my friend
This probably isn't that important to stats like energy per capita, but there are so much more datapoint to consider to calculate actual useful energy other than energy conversion.
The energy required to build the plant, maintenance, life span and transportations costs and so on. All of these factors impact the amount of energy that comes out in the end.
Excellent video. We need to replace way less energy with renewable energy compared to what is normally told. Sad story which is also true - is that so far we do not replace anything. The energy transition continues to be energy addition.
This good vid assumes that Scientists, Engineers, or at least reasonable Humans will be calling the shots. Oligarchs will continue calling the shots, Dear Sir.
Well in Germany the stupid populace called the shots replacing nuclear with coal, they effectively did their own Nexit (nuclear exit) decades before the stupid Brits did brexit.
Also not all scientists are reasonable, many in the climate space are anti nuclear to their rotten core, and anti chemistry and heat even though every good storage scheme needs to use chemistry and heat, its like they want to make every process into pure solid state electrical with zero heat or chemistry involved.
You are painting a pretty picture for wind and solar that it just not deserve and I'm not sure of the basis of your "wasted energy" from fossil fuels. A report came out from and Australian government agency last year stating that the total nameplate capacity of wind turbines across Australia produced just 30% of their stated nameplate capacity on average over a year. And for commercial solar it was just 20% of their capacity on average over a year. Pathetic in both cases.
Wind and solar should not be measured by nameplate capacity against coal, gas or nuclear. They are not equal. In the case of wind and solar the nameplate is an indicator of their maximum output in ideal weather conditions. But the reality is that the output of energy in a given year from this infrastructure is an unknown. Whereas coal, gas and nuclear are 'engineered' to produce reliable energy 24/7 for 60 to 80 years without the need to roll-out tens of thousands of new transmission lines and on a tiny footprint of land.
I have the misfortune of living in a designated renewable energy zone and what is planned, and the extent of what is planned for our wine, cropping and grazing land is absolutely horrendous. There are 54 projects in the pipeline just for our region alone. There are five of these zones in NSW and the infrastructure is built outside of the designated zones as well. Just 'one' wind/solar project planned will start a few kilometres from our home and will consist of 63 turbines at 6MW and standing 250m high, 200m wide and potentially with red flashing aviation lights and will utilise 77 square kilometres (30 square miles) of agricultural land. The million plus solar panels will utilise 13 square kilometres (5 square kilometres). The total site it 90 square kilometres and will also include hundreds of container sized battery packs each with four air-conditioning units, two substations and 11 kilometres of internal transmission lines to connect to the new national grid that has yet to be built. The cumulative effect of all this will be horrendous! And our region was rated the top regional tourist destination for two years running.
Australia has a total land area of 7.688 million square kilometres and only 6% of that is deemed agricultural. This is where this industrial infrastructure is going, and many of these massive projects are back to back driving out or destroying every native species of birds, bats and marsupials innthe process. What part of this makes any sense, all for a source of energy that has a pathetic output and most of the infrastructure doesn't even last twenty years.
Renewables have their own inefficiencies though, some of them even greater. PV solar is usually ~20% of the sunlight hitting the panel for instance, so they should be given far greater area on a primary energy graph.
In fact the fraction of space covered by solar is also a part of that inefficiency if you really think about it, so to be really fair we should just use graphs where everything is totally swamped by the total solar power incident on Earth (~173,000 terawatts).
Nuclear and geothermal get thire heat basically for free(fule wise not capital and other costs) so I don't think its fair to compare them to fossil fules.
That’s fair. What conversion factor would you give to them? Perhaps, scrap the 10% and 33% from the PECM method, and look at their electricity output. But just generally primary energy is a not a really good metric
@theclimateClub ya I think energy electricity output should be the way they are measured. Yes it's true they do have waste heat and typically are less efficient heat conversion wise than gas or coal plants but they don't burn any fule and release Co2 to make that heat.
The heat isn't for free, its a capital cost thing and depends on engineering and on the various merits of the design.
When water is used as the coolant, the thermal eff is going to be 35% max, its the limit of how hot water can get under pressurization, water boils at 100c but in a reactor it pumpes around at 350c or so. Use a design based on Molten Salts or certain dangerous liquid metals and the eff can easily get to 60% with 700c temps, but
that has its own cost, personlly I support Molten Salt reactors for so many reason.
So, I think you need to review the starting point of your calculation. A solar panel is at best 15% efficient in lab conditions, so about 5% in the field if you add seasons, weather and the day night cycle. Similar for wind power where its either to strong or not enough. There is also the challenge of making / replacing renewables without fossil fuels and also the backup / storing of an intermittent source. We have never transitioned from a dense energy source to disperse source so the need for massive grid changes is also challenging
This is energy-ignorant.
Renewable energy provided 26% of U.S. final energy consumption in 2022. That means that it needs to replace 74% of 76 Quads or 56 Quads.
Renewables currently provide 13 Quads so the amount needs to more than quadruple. Now figure how to transform the entire transport sector of which 6% is renewable.
You are the one with the energy fallacy.
This video isn’t saying that renewables need to scale up by a lot, but that they don’t need to satisfy all primary energy demand. I think it was pretty clear tbh
Here is what I think - "you suck." Please spare us your renewables zealotry.
Great argument tbh mate. Don’t know how I can answer that
Fossil fuels are heat engine based which are universally limited by Carnot's efficiency and other real thermodynamic cycles.
However, solar and wind aren't that much better either. The best solar panels nowadays are only 22.5% efficient, and wind turbines about 30% (this is still very good, even compared to just 10 years ago). However, ultimately nuclear is the only option. Nuclear is about 33% efficient, comparable to fossil fuels, but 1 kg nuclear fuel produces over 86000000000000 (80 trillion Joules) and so even with losses at least 20 trillion joules of work with just 1 kg fuel. (Gasoline for comparison is 46000000 or 46 million joules per kg, and about 18 million J can be converted to work)/
TLDR, nuclear is the only source with enough sheer power to replace all of fossil fuels with zero emissions and minimal waste, especially with the new breeder reactors. Hence we should go nuclear despite the high initial costs.
and you did an excellent job understating the inefficiencies of renewables... nice!
Not really. Inefficiencies of renewables in terms of the output is very low. If are talking about efficiency rates of renewables (20% solar, 40% wind ish), then that’s not the comparison to be made because that energy isn’t “wasted” as it’s just there. The actual comparison to be made is with the output of both renewables and fossil fuels. Nice!
@@theclimateClub , if you want to state renewables are more efficient you MUST include their losses to have
the effective energy. case in point. a lead acid battery will lose more than 20 percent of the energy you store.
other batteries claim down into 10 percent. it means you have lost 10 percent as waste heat...
and you can't ignore 10 percent . your point is good and there is no need to hide clear truths.
@@victormiranda9163i agree that will need to be taken into account which I mentioned in the video. 👍
@@theclimateClub you take the heat losses into account with numbers and then skip them for renewables... no. if you use specifics you must put them on all data.
coal is a good example for much of what you state.. 2/3s heat lost. but if you want to imply that all you need is 1/3 of that power in PV panels your argument is lost.
PV's heat derate AND storage will puff you
up to needing another 1/3...
This video makes some valid points. However, it overlooks some other fallacies.
SUBSTITUTION FALLACY: Fossil fuels are used to make plastics, nitrogen fertilizer (for food), steel, and concrete. There are currently no economic substitutes available. So these "primary energy" uses need to be retained.
EFFICIENCY FALLACY: Different sources and processes have different efficiencies. For example, natural gas combined cycle electricity generation is about 65% efficient. (Also, modern coal plants are about 45% efficient, not 33%.) The usage matters also. Modern natural gas furnaces are about 95% efficient. The efficiency of heat pumps falls with outside temperature. So in temperatures below freezing, gas furnaces are the better option.
INTERMITTENCY FALLACY: Intermittent renewables (e.g. wind and solar) only make electricity when it is windy or sunny. But electricity is needed all the time, not just in proportion to wind or sun. Also, costs for intermittent sources almost never include the requirement for dispatchable electricity (the kind we need). So in addition to the wind and solar, we need HUGE batteries, which are VERY expensive, or we need quick-reacting backup power sources such as fossil. Since these fossil sources are required to remain on costly standby, while the "cheap" renewables are doing their thing, the cost picture gets very distorted.
False argument no-one is arguing the potential energy of coal be replaced, only the power realised at the alternators.
Renewables have a similar problem. Wind turbines typically produce only 35% of their rated power as usable energy. The same problem applies to solar PV.
Nuclear solves these problems by running 24/7. Thermally it is more efficient than coal as there are no flue losses and no need for CCS.
Yes they are
I'd love to agree but the sad truth is that most nuclear power uses water as a coolant which limits the working temperature to say 350c or so which in turn severley limits the Carnot eff at the generator stage. It doesn't have to be that way, Molten Salt and metal cooled high temp reactors could run at 700c or more and get closer to 60% eff.Nice if they used super critical CO2 as well and that does seem to be working now.
Also in Germany all those CO2 free nuclear reactors that were shut down were also likely 35% eff at max and mostly got replaced by brown coal plants that run at 45% eff plus all the polution they create. But the 35% nuclear is vastly better than 45% coal under all circumsatnces unless you hate nuclear like German greens do.Whats even more amazing is that those 45% coal plant are run as peakers to match the wind and PV, if they also ran as base load they might even be higher eff, but would still be evil
True but one sided. There are plenty of "fallacies" going the other way. 1) Renewable energy is cheaper. Yes when the wind is blowing not if you consider the infrastructure, like back up when wind not blowing or inertia installations to preserve grid stability. If it really was cheaper then normal market forces would allow renewables to take over. 2) Heat pumps are more efficient. Yes but comparing cheap gas to expensive electricity. The delta T on a heat pump is poor so affected by ambient conditions and need radiators twice the size. 3) EVs. If these items were really better people would be buying them instead its top down with quotas. 4) Video misleading in that it suggests there won't need to be an increase in grid capacity as this is allowed for by relative efficiencies. Up to £400bn of investment is required in green infrastructure over the next decade if the UK is to meet its ambitious Net Zero target, according to a new report by PwC commissioned by the Global Infrastructure Investment Association (GIIA).
The video doesn’t suggest there won’t be a need to increase grid capacity, far from it. It’s 100% clear that grid capacity and transmission needs loads of investment. One of my next videos is precisely on this need for investment in the grid, especially as so many projects are backlogged because they can’t be connected. So I honestly don’t think this video suggests in any way that grid capacity will remain the same
@@theclimateClub Time index 9.14 "It sends the wrong message. The message being that we need to increase our energy supply from renewables substantially, instead of meeting the actual demand". But its not the wrong message, we do need to increase our energy supply from renewables substantially which is still true even with the efficiencies consideration. So who is being misleading? You could have accurately said "we need to increase our energy supply from renewables substantially although less when the efficiencies are taken into consideration". "So I honestly don’t think this video suggests in any way that grid capacity will remain the same". The video neither says stays the same or talks about the huge increase required. That you are aware of this makes this omission a political choice which is my point.
@@alanrobertson9790 perhaps it was unclear then. But that statement was in regards to the substitution method which inflates energy numbers. If we “inflate” what the real energy demand is then that can send the wrong message. The argument wasn’t about not needing to ramp up renewables. It was about meeting the actual demand instead of purely focusing on supply, not the inflated demand that comes from this accounting method. This point was also made by Michael Liebreich in “net zero will be harder…” paper. If it was unclear that that was my point then I apologise, however that argument was for the substitution method. So no, I’m not making it political
@@alanrobertson9790 in other words, it is the wrong message
@@theclimateClub Re " in other words, it is the wrong message". To meet the actual demand we do need to increase our energy supply from renewables substantially. This is correct not wrong. You have already conceded the point and are about to do a video on the subject. I look forward to your video.
There is no fallacy that the heat engine cycle to shaft energy conversion is not ideal. That has been known for centuries because it greatly runs the modern world. Energy on the power gird is equated to MW hours therefore to replace a MW hour of coal fired electricity requires a MW hour of electricity. You have to replace all of it.
Solar electric panels only provide useful stable energy when used with storage such as batteries. You'd be financially a head to invest the tens of thousands of dollars needed for a couple days of home battery storage in stocks and buy your electricity from the power grid. Wind turbine generators typically work with natural gas combined cycle plants that are cheap and easy to build, but are expensive to fuel with natural gas. It's the cheap to build NGCC plants that are the actual base load generators of electricity that make wind turbines somewhat economical. In the USA onshore wind farm costs when accepted with their electricity have always caused electric rates to go up substantially. Offshore wind is at least twice as much per MW than onshore wind.
There is no mechanism that would allow greenhouse gas behavior to cause global warming. Global warming was officially stated at 1.1°C in 1991 and 1.06°C in 2022. The back of the United Nation's IPCC science report states it took its greenhouse gas samples at 20,000 meters altitude where it is common high school level knowledge there is no greenhouse radiant energy. This is typical practice for deceptive marketing to state legal data transparency protecting the perpetrators from fraud prosecution.
Earth's greenhouse effect is frequently used as a primary example to high school students of a system always in saturation from the strong greenhouse gas water vapor absorbing all the greenhouse radiant energy from the earth with greenhouse gases within 20 meters of the surface that is all around us everyday and can't have its overall effect changed. There is no further greenhouse radiant energy to interact with greenhouse gases. At 1% average tropospheric water vapor over 99% of earth’s greenhouse effect is from water vapor. Water vapor would hold earth's greenhouse effect in saturation if it were the only greenhouse gas in the atmosphere.
Atmospheric CO2 levels of 1200 ppm about three times what they are today would greatly invigorate C3 plants the majority of plant life on earth greatly greening the planet.
What d'ya do when wind doesn't blow and sun don't shine? The unreliable nature if intermittent so-calked renewables amounts to a very large inefficiency.
Store the energy you do make on good days for bad days.
@@12pentaborane Ya cannae store the electricity stuff in a shed! That is to say that therr aint enough lithium in the world tae store even only a 24 hrs supply of several hundred megawatts of electricity. The most feasible approach is to sore it as potential energy by pumping massive volumes of water into uphill reservoirs and subsequently releasing the water to drive water turbines to generate electricity at tomes of peak demand. So, tge bottom line is, where in the UK are there suitable sites for excavating large suitably elevated reservoirs?
Otherwise, keep on eating pie in the sky!
@@12pentaborane I have pointed out many times that storing electrical energy in a battery is up to 10,000 the price of storing liquid or rock energy in a plastic bucket.
To get a handle on huge energy storage, it is going to have to be converted into chemical storage with huge losses but cheap storage, or for the short term as heat possibly in liquified air with riound trip eff not far below pumped hydro, but using not much more than air, sand and steel for the battery plus a whole oad of hardware from the gas industry.
But it leaves out the fact that solar produce 5x as much energy in summer than winter in the US, so most of that sun is going to be wasted unless summer storage can store months worth of energy. And over a year, wind doesn't always average out, the lulls can be weeks longs.
Now if yer happen to be in Scotland, look out for those air liquification energy storage plants they actually have big storage and power ratings on them meant for wind farms. They are building a few of them.
@@johnjakson444 The issue isnae the power rating per se, but rather the duration over which the power can be supplied. It's not megawatts that matter, but megawatt hours. Less than a few days worth of megawatt storage is risible as far as balancing the grid is concerned.
You do not take transmission losses into account. Nor do you take the losses that are caused by charging and discharging chemical batteries. Pumped storage also has inefficiencies.
Transmission losses happen for both renewables and fossil fuels when talking about electricity. Furthermore in most countries they are very low. Then, I did mention the losses that will arise with storage.
Take a look at liquified air storage with heat recovery its getting a round trip eff conversion of about 60%, pretty darn good for cheap materials. And its being built for wind buffering in Scotland, so I approve of that one.
Intermitents have another transmission problem, in the US wind states, the HVDC lines will be very long to connecting the east and west market grids but the wind only blows at 30% capacity factor, if all the wind was down that HVDC line won't be doing much. Better hope that those DC lines have something on them.
Renewables also have a bunch of waste energy... I'm not sure this fallacy is busted based on what you're saying unless you're Simpsons are an extremely ideal situation
The technologies themselves not really. There are some losses from source to consumer (transmission etc for example), but there isn’t really waste energy per say. If you mean “energy from renewables is often wasted”, then yes that’s true. A lot of it is curtailed due to a lack of storage, transmission etc. But fundamentally those issues are due to intermittency, not waste energy.
What mr smarty pants doesn't know is that in Europe and the US an awful lot of renewables isn't remotely electrical, its bloody biomass and bio fuels.
In the UK a perfectly horrible CO2 spewing coal power plant (the Drax) was made instantly green by switching out black coal and bringing in wood chips from other side of the US, those shipping transport costs and the effects on the northern forests is largely ignored. And thats what climate scientist largely want to ignore.
In Germany their CO2 emission are twice those of France because nuclear got replaced by brown coal, well at least the new clean coal is thermo 45% eff while the nuclear was likely only 33% eff, pity about the CO2 though.
An all those biomass plants where to begin, its mostly a scam to play the games, look up the palm oil from asia forrests.
Biomass should be mostly banned on principle because it is so abused.
Batteries and hydrogen production store and move energy to where it may be needed.
This is a great video, well done. 🫡
Thanks 🙏
You make some good points, but the "wasted" heat from fossil fuels isn't always wasted. It depends on where (and when) it's produced. Through a process called cogeneration the waste heat is used to heat homes. This is common in places like New York and Chicago, but isn't the case in places like Miami and Los Angeles. Here is more info on cogeneration: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cogeneration
Yeah that was a point I had kept in the script but then removed it because it would lengthen the video too much. I was going to talk about CHP for example. Thanks for making that point though
Rejected energy means it isn't used, as in 'in no manner or form.'