13:45 Please research biomass further. United Kingdom generates biomass-powered energy "biomass" power plants across the country with a total capacity of 1583.7 MW. They burn wood pellets made from forests harvested in Canada. The carbon emissions are not counted in Canada because the wood has not been burned there. And the UK receives the wood pellets and does not count the carbon emissions either. Here in the US biomass is heavily subsidized. Essentially we are burning our old-growth forests to avoid burning fossil fuels.
there's a massive tree farm in british columbia that sources most of our wood. It's new growth and truly massive, and we still haven't used it to capacity. Trees we plant while chopping down more trees grow to fruition before we finish chopping the rest of the previous growth. So the forests we're chopping down have been replenishable new growth forests in british columbia.
It’s true. Tesla is actually the only profitable BEV maker. Tesla makes $6500 pure profit for each EV because of vertical integration, autonomous innovative empowered employees, incredibly innovative & efficient manufacturing, huge staff incentives, fully in house brilliant material science & engineering, in house software & hardware design & engineering (that’s just vehicles. Tesla energy division is hugely profitable & growing 140% pa) Model Y takes 10hrs to build. VW takes 30. All other western OEMS take more time per EV. BYD mostly makes a loss & barely breaks even. Ford GM VW Toyota Nissan etc etc are cutting back on EV to slow losses. They are staring into oblivion. Most of the 200 or so other BEV makers in China are toast without subsidies & the Govt wants most gone.
It depends on how you are doing the accounting. Because EVs are new a lot more R&D and factory build out/ retooling is being done to make them better that doesn’t need to be done for the mature Ice cars and when you add that cost in on the cars being produced now, then yes they aren’t profitable. These are more of caped costs and not Opex costs. As time goes on and less R&D and less factory build out is needed, the cars are all profitable.
@@matthewmanzi9504 There is only 1 method to count the profitability of a company. Does the company make a profit or not? All the other stuff is only good to impress investors.
@@matthewmanzi9504This is an important point. Not enough people get it. It is not accurate to say that Rivian, for example, loses money on every vehicle they sell. It's not the vehicle production that incurs these excessive costs it is everything else. If they increase production, then revenues would exceed costs.
So glad you covered this topic... It's tricky and nuanced and also really important to understand how BEVs can actually lower humanities energy requirements due to the negation of the huge heat engine losses... Kudos.
An interesting analysis! It makes sense to me, yet I do not have the knowledge to agree nor refute. The video was easy to follow and understand. Well done.
10:00 Here in the Seattle area, we have electric busses. But for transportation of heavier goods by rail is concerned, electrification of railroads should be a priority. For special applications and long-haul trucking, perhaps hybrids are probably a more practical answer for now. Take a look at the work being done by Canadian company Edison.
In Europe, we use trolleybuses instead, since batteries are expensive and overexertion makes them a fire hazard. Also trolleybuses don't need to charge and are much cheaper.
There are a number of other ways we can very significantly reduce the amount of energy needed going forward. 1. Paint our roofs and homes with light colored, highly reflective paints. 2. Insulate and seal/caulk our homes. 3. Just installing solar panels will add an air barrier and significantly cool roofs. 4. Install insulated curtains which offers a huge benefit at a low effort and cost. 5. Install smart electrical breakers. Our well pump only runs during daylight hours; we limit our hot water heater and clothes and dishwasher use to mostly daylight hours. In spring, early summer and fall, we open windows at night to cool the house. nights are cool enough that we mostly limit our heat pump home cooling system to sunlight hours. We charge our EV mostly during daylight hours.
Thanks for this explanation. To add to the conversation here, we need less expensive, home and small businesses sized, electricity storage batteries. We have a chance right now to free individual homes and businesses from the price gouging, gas and electric utility monopolies and cartels. In the Mountain West of the US, our winters can be snowy, but not that cold. But our summers are scorching hot (35-40+ C for a third or more of the year). We remodeled, insulated, fireproofed to the extent possible, and electrified (heat pump, LED, induction) a large, old home and turned it into an inn. To really go off grid and free ourselves of our local, predatory, electricity cartel, we’d need 50 kWh of storage. This high storage is necessitated by our need for cooling in summer. Installed battery storage is bout $1,000/kwh ($60,000 or more just for storage). This needs to come down by an order of magnitude to actually disrupt our corrupt and price gouging electricity cartel.
What suppliers have you looked at and how recently? Tesla is selling their Megapacks for around $350 / kWh including installation, but those are 3.9MWh, so too big. Prices came down in the second half of 2023 quite a bit. Other suppliers likely also down, likely because Li-ion battery prices came down significantly as many automakers are scaling back their manufacturing volumes.
Storing electricity in batteries is super expensive. As you mentioned you mainly want to use the energy to cool down buildings you are much better off by other means. E.g. power a heat-pump to cool down a medium, usually liquid when you have excess power and use the cool liquid to reduce temperature when needed.
BC Hydro in the PNW interestingly offers to bank our excess rooftop summer solar for our use in winter. Thus, rooftop solar could lessen summer power plant production, delaying its max output until winter. This is aside from a utility implementing nightly battery cycling to smooth curves.
I remember a couple years ago the hot talking point from the renewable FUDsters and fossil fuel apologists was the idea that there would never be enough solar and wind generation to replace all those GWh of energy. They would throw around these huge numbers and never mention that, in the US, the majority of it is just waste heat. Now, we see places like South Australia, California and England getting the majority of their electricity from solar and wind with battery storage, and sometimes 100%. And these places are still in the early stages of the transition. Plenty more can be done.
I am not going to pretend that I know how much energy South Australia gets from solar and wind. But the fact that you put England in that list makes me think that you have no business speaking about this issue either. Not to mention that even Californian legislators recognize that they dump much of the clean energy they produce because there is no need for it when is produced and then import dirty energy when hey need it. Sure if you compare energy produced with consumption you get the impression that a majority comes from renewables, but it is not so in practice.
“. . . a naïve observer might conclude that the rising share of new renewables (solar and wind) will usher in an era of falling electricity prices. But in reality, the opposite has been true.” Vaclav Smil, Numbers Don’t Lie, p.172
@@pintiliecatalin I'm just going off something I heard Englishman Robert Llewellyn say the other day. Perhaps I misheard him. But I do see that Carbon Brief have published, about three weeks ago, a very interesting report (based on data from the National Grid) showing that the average contribution of fossil fuels to the National Grid in Great Britain has dropped from 74% in 2009 to 26% in the first part of 2024 - and with the most recent four months showing a steep downward trend. In California, it appears that the average contribution of wind, solar and hydroelectric has been above 60% for a couple of months now. I don't know what planet you live on, but here on planet Earth, the global electric supply is rapidly shifting away from fossil fuels.
@@dzcav3 Can you imagine what it's going to cost when the risks to infrastructure from the warming climate and the rising sea levels make it impossible for insurance companies to operate in most places?
@@dzcav3 Vaclav Smil's Numbers Don't Lie is four years old, and the cost of PV continues to fall. He may have been looking at overall electricity prices that have a lot of other factors affecting them. Utilities have been raising their prices for transmission and distribution, for example. The Number that Doesn't Lie we might want to look at is Power Purchase Agreements for PV going off at 2.2 cents per kWh.
@@milofonbil True at the moment, but we can easily keep up with the gradual changeover of the auto fleet from ICE to EV. That changeover is not happening overnight.
All of the points in the video are valid, but I do believe consumption will still go up - due to energy abundance, we will start to do things that are currently expensive and not feasible - desalination, lots of air-con for far more people and places, etc. But you have strong point, I admit.
Also manufacturing e.g Graphene is expensive because of the high energy required to produce it. Get the cost of energy down and watch as companies rush to produce large scale quantities of it.
If energy usage starts to drop significantly that means price of energy will drop. If energy becomes cheap we will start to use considerably moore. In colder climates that means raising indoor temperature and in warmer climates that means moor AC. We would also see traveling get much cheaper, so we would see more traveling. All taken together there is no way we will reduce energy consumption to half.
@@Rohan4711 The point is that we don't need to replace what we're using today. We only need to replace the fraction of it that is not wasted. Of course electricity usage will increase if it's cheap, but as long as it's clean, what difference does it make?
I don't think we'll be looking at energy abundance anytime soon, as adopting these technologies will take quite a while. We've become used to binging on cheap stored solar energy (fossil fuels), but we'll probably have to adapt to fluctuating energy availability, as we rely on more renewables. Highly energy intensive activities might have to wait until a windy or sunny day.
1:45 I agree that the Adams Curve will not increase. People don't consume more energy simply because it's cheaper. This is true for home owners, renters and commercial properties. This is clearly one of those situations where the Microeconomics (supply and demand curves) do not really apply. It's like keeping the cost of of vegetables and grains does not increase their consumption. (albeit, creating addictive food probably does)
You are forgetting to account for industries that are currently held back by price of energy. Get the price down and watch as new industries start popping up and raising demand for energy. Like in your example cheaper vegies does not increase consumer demand but it does increase demand from the snack and food indistries.
In fact we have clear evidence in Europe for the last years that price of energy has a major impact on consumption. Due to the war in Ukraine the energy prices increased sharply. Many industries shut down completely and almost all buildings lowered indoor temperature considerably during the entire winter. As prices backed down to normal, the temperatures was restored and companies that didn't go bankrupt restarted energy intensive processes.
Pretty decent treatment of the topic. The substitution method includes some efficiency swapping as part of those graphs. Real simply, most places, converting as much light traffic/transport as possible to electric as can be done and cleaning the grid generation sources toward solar/wind will return huge benefits in reducing primary energy use. It's been encouraging seeing the attention applied to heat pumps the last 10 years and especially in their efficiency in lowest external temperatures for things like space heating. Now, to assure electricity prices don't rise...
Very nice, only thing that I don't like is sort of ignoring the battery problem. Solar/Wind are variable sources of energy, you can't make them a backbone of your country. Solving this issue with chemical batteries (specifically ones with heavy metals that can't be sustainably mined en-masse, such as lithium-ion) is a horrible idea, and although I guess that isn't what you implied, a lot of people think that just throwing the tesla style battery farms at things would solve everything. Energy storage is its own problem. Frankly there are some solutions to this: 1. The one you should use whenever possible and viable - water reservoirs 2. Alternative backbone (hydro or nuclear if no river) 3. Low-cost, weight-ignoring battery systems - iron oxide batteries Feel free to correct me or ad-in something. Thing we can agree on is that neither of these options contain coal, oil or gas and they are NEVER a better option.
1 sodium ion batteries, much cheaper. 2 large fleet of bidirectionally grid-tied EVs = massive distributed storage. 3 green ammonia, and many other storage options, currently under development
Assuming only a %5 efficiency loss from using energy storage is completely absurd. The existing *serious* grid storage solutions aren't even close to that. That's basically a figure for if you were using lithium batteries under perfectly ideal circumstances. Plus the idea of trying to build your entire grid off of lithium ion batteries is extremely silly because of their high cost and need to be replaced in a few years.
10:39 Fireplaces are even worse... 10 kWhs of primary heat worth of wood. 85% efficiency only refers to the conversion of wood to heat energy - combustion energy. The "overall efficiency" is far less, at about 50% because the combustion efficiency does not count the inefficiency of radiating the heat into the room with the fireplace. Furthermore, the energy that it took to get the wood from where it was harvested to your woodpile is not counted. Burning wood may be "carbon neutral" but burning wood emits far more than CO2 and water.
The Technological Progress is also the reason . Computer Chips Have Become More Powerful While Consuming Less Energy and Light Bulbs Have Become More Efficient too
Cutting line losses is a good thing. The heat produced by line losses is not relevant to climate. It's many orders of magnitude too small. The sun provides a kilowatt per square meter at the earth's surface, and the surface of the Earth has a LOT of square meters. One square km is a million square meters, so a terawatt of heat energy. That's a thousand times the output of a large power plant.
10:59 I think you are confusing primary energy with net electricity produced and electricity at the meter. Once electricity is produced, there are transmission losses. I do agree that a resistive heater is 100% efficient in converting electricity at the electrical outlet into heat. The emissions are "handled" at the power plant. So-called "renewable" power plants burning wood pulp from clear-cut forests producing electricity are 35% efficient in producing electricity and then suffer transmission line losses to the meter at your home. Again, the emissions are "handled" at the power plant. Your final point is that heat pumps are more efficient than resistive heaters. Why not use passive solar?
I am telling this story for a realy long time, but it is sometimes difficult to convince people of this logic. You explained it well. Now I can use this video in the future.
2:06 Sorry to be a nit-picker here. I think you are over-complicating things here with Power, Energy, Heat and Temperature. The SAE measurement for energy used in your 2009 (15 years old) Lawrence Livermore reference is in Quads or quadrillion of BTUs. The modern metric unit (the rest of the world uses) is Joules. A Quad is 1.0551E+18 joules. Heat and Watts are units of work or energy. Power is work per unit of time. Eg Kilowatts/hr. The "Rejected Energy" is wasted energy due to conversion inefficiencies. Eg. Steam-powered turbines used to convert fossil fuel to mechanical energy are only 35% efficient at most. Solar panels are only 40% efficient. In transportation a car engine may only be 35% efficient in converting fossil fuel energy into mechanical energy. The transmission and the tires are inefficient as well. Temperature is a measure of thermal state. A difference in temperature can be used to produce energy.
Your comment going through the science is irrelevant. The point is that different sources are typically used at very different efficiencies so just quoting how much energy each source has is useless when comparing sources.
You have a strong point with the efficiency. The video compares energy gained from burning coal to electric energy. That is two very different types of energy. Electrical energy is nice as it is versatile and easy to move. However it is very expensive per unit of energy. The video completely skipped this and just count energy. Simple, but highly misleading. This is the reason that it is uncommon to use electric radiators. They are 100% efficient, but compared to using other forms of heat energy or using a heat-pump the 100% efficiency is still bad. Claiming that we can reduce heating a lot with heat pumps assumes that we hardly use heat pumps today. In most parts of the world that assumption is not true.
@@Rohan4711 google: "According to the International Energy Agency, in 2022 electric heat pumps met only 10% of heating needs in buildings globally.Jun 12, 2023"
You didn’t consider the fact that we are transitioning into the AI age and new GW data farms are going to be opening left and right which will drive demand like crazy
Here’s a simple formula to calculate the energy in gasoline. (volume * density * hydrogen energy * efficiency) ÷ volume = gasoline energy. Here’s a simple example, gasoline density is 2.85769 kg per gallon, so (2.6918 * 2.85769 *33.33333 * 13%) ÷ 2.6918 = 12.38333 kwh per gallon of gasoline. Here’s another example, 8.1 gallons of gasoline has a mass of 23.147 kg * 13% equals 3 kg of hydrogen, so if you drive 371.5 miles and burn 8.1 gallons of gasoline that’s 45.86 miles per gallon of gasoline, or 16.05 miles per kg of gasoline, or 123.46 miles per kilogram of hydrogen. MPGe is actually miles per kilogram of hydrogen, NOT miles peg gallon of gasoline.
4:13 Your source: Our world in data, energy-substitution-method. To ‘correct’ for these different methods of accounting, researchers can apply the ‘substitution method’. This tries to adjust non-fossil energy sources to the inputs that would be needed if it was generated from fossil fuels. *Renewables are adjusted upwards* Primary energy measured by the ‘substitution method’ overstates the amount of energy that’s produced. The diagram shows how renewable energy is divided by 0.4 or multiplying by 2.5. The reason for this is they're compensating for the 65% inefficiency that's being assumed for fossil fuels in the big yellow box on the 2009 Lawrence Livermore US Estimated Energy use diagram. 0.35 / 0.4 = .87 (Seriously, there's really no conspiracy here)
15:00 Your assumption of storage losses may be very low. Energy to charge and discharge batteries is not 95% efficient. Also batteries tend to "leak" energy, they're not like gas tanks that don't leak.
90% efficiency for a lithium ion battery is reasonable. In addition not all energy will be stored in batteries. Pumped hydro is about 70% efficient. Flow batteries are also about 70% efficient. It is more complex than presented in the video.
Inductive cooktops are awesome. I just tried a gas stove and it doesn’t even compare with my inductive cooktop. And the inductive cooktop works off my solar panels.
Two factors which will slightly impact the analysis. The huge amount of energy used to extract, refine/compress & transport vast quantities of fossil fuels will no longer be required, however, Artificial Intelligence data centres will become ubiquitous. Each centre consuming the same power as a small city. From a total energy perspective perhaps they’ll cancel each other out?
If electricity cost goes down and the grid can handle it we will see a lot more AI data processing. They will also use more energy per area with newer generation of AI computers, so we might not need that many more data centers, but each one can use a lot more power than they do today. Today AI might use 1% of electricity. According to Nvidias CEO the machines they will release in 5 years will have about 1 million times the computing power. Even if that would be 100 times more energy efficient that still comes to 10 000% of all of today's electricity. That will not happen, just because we will not have the electricity or the grid to handle that load and that energy cost would likely be too expensive. Knowing what projects are out there in all sorts of fields just makes me wonder how this video came to the conclusion that we will reduce energy use for the world in a short while to half.
AI datacenters are overhyped as a driver of energy consumption Increasing EU electricity demand by 10% would require 800 million H100s, which would cost $40T. We're about 4 orders of magnitude below that
@@SizeMichaelIf Nvidias CEO is correct in what they will deliver in the next 5 years then it might just take 800 to 8000 computers. That sounds like very few AI computers to me. Also increasing EU electricity by 10% in 5 years takes quite a lot of effort and money. AI will be far from the only thing wanting more electricity. Things like electric vehicles, green steel production, increased production of goods inside EU due to new toll fees are a few examples. We could use 30% more electricity in 5 years if we can get it at a decent price, like euro 0.1 per kWh.
Finally, a video of solid human logic, numbers and development. I have just watched 30 bad videos on engineering and history and they were just made for clip bait and poorly put together. You, on the other hand, have a solid product thanks.
Most of those data centers are already built. And any new ones (or rebuilt) are substantially more energy efficient. LLM and other AI is already existing and broadly used, there is not a lot of expansion needed foe that. Also if you check out Intel and AMD latest processors, they are putting AI co-processors right in the endpoint device to avoid a lot of network chatter and datacenter requirements. The AI processor actually makes the CPU and GPU more efficient by properly distributing workload for the processor best suited for the job. So there is not really any more energy requirements for the new AI processing. The worry about data centers is all more petroleum industry FUD rhetoric. Anything running in a data center is a lot more efficient than it would be without the datacenter, so they are reducing global electricity demand by existing. The real worrisome use of electricity is crypto mining, uses way more electricity than AI ever will. Still up in the air if that will be a net benefit to society or not.
You are a Smart man and educated in physics and engineering. Thanks. The outcome will be a world where the total energy consumption will drop dramatically in the next 20-30 years.
If energy prices goes really high we will see drops in energy consumption and all sorts of other problems. If prices stay consistent or drop we will see energy use increase. At least that is the conclusion by energy researchers, economics and all energy producing companies I have read about.
@@Rohan4711 Well, I do not agree with those conclusions. energy is too much regulated by now by the governments for "green reasons" and geopolitical as well, so that the price is not longer a function of demand VS supply. it behaves differently. it is not a free market. where i live the electrical cost is dictated my government and most electricity is produced by government so they decide the cost based on the true cost it cost them to produce and not by free supply and demand equations. electricity and energy in general will drop all over the world as the video is explaining correctly and governments will make sure the use of energy is efficient so the demand will be kept artificially low.
@@AY-dw4om Do you agree that the demand for energy depends on the price for the end user? The price can be both based on real production costs or in most cases some form of taxes added on top, so there is some politics involved in the price. In many countries the price before taxes is set on the spot market. That often means the most expensive energy production source currently in use has a major impact on total price levels.
@@Rohan4711 No I do not agree. demand for energy is mostly based on needs. you do not buy more fuel for your car because its price has dropped. you buy the amount of fuel based on how much you drive your car. same with electricity use use at your home or factory - as much as you need regardless its price. there are commodities that their usage is not based by its price but the other way around. if the demand for energy drops because the use has dropped as explained to great length in this video, then the opposite happens: energy prices goes down due to low demand.
@@AY-dw4om Well, he claimed that energy use has dropped based on data up to 2020 from ourworldindata. Using that same site you now have data until 2022, and the energy use is ever increasing except for a small blipp in the curve for 2020. That blipp is due to COVID-19, so clearly an abnormality. The video claimed that falling energy usage is the trend, but data does not support that.
There another school of thought that as energy cost drop, be it from cheap solar, renewable, BEVs, society had always expanded the energy consumption per capita. AI training compute centers will consume giga-whrs, $coin mining, active carbon capture. Even robotaxis. If $/mile goes from $3 to $.5, ppl will hail rides much more, drive across town to meet for coffee, frivolous convenience shopping online. Amazon is an example. If shipping is free, ppl will buy a $3 doodad & have it deliver in hours. Most ppl mentally estimate the cost of driving to decide if a trip is worthwhile. If robotaxi cost next to nothing & one can do all the things one does at home while being driven, it encourage more mobility.
Mobility isn't just consumed it's also an input cost. For example one of the greatest feats of movement in the modern world is large-scale shipping. It beats pipelines on cost. What happens when LTL transport goes to pennies? It should even cut into FTL for trucks.Everyone gets wealthier.
So, on net congestion, there’s a lot of talk about that here in the Netherlands. But if you need so much less energy, and you have techniques like V to G, and V to X, would that already take care of that problem or do we still need the grid to be much ‘heavier’ ?
7:45 Net Zero: a target of completely negating the amount of greenhouse gases produced by human activity, to be achieved by reducing emissions and implementing methods of absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Net zero involves passive solar by orienting homes towards the sun for heating in the winter and overhangs to shade windows in the summer. Other components of Net Zero involve not wasting energy. For example heat exchangers are used to bring in fresh air into a building without bringing in heat with it during the summer and not leaking out the heat out during winter. Hot water heaters and clothes dryers based on more efficient heat pump principles rather than resistive elements. "Electrify everything" ignores transmission line inefficiencies. Relying on only "Wind, Water and Solar" ignores the fact we need to supply a base load. There's no sun at night. There's no wind when the wind doesn't blow. Many places are far away from hydropower. We should be looking into Thorium-based nuclear energy for providing the base load. Thorium cycle produces very little nuclear waste and does not produce long living nucleotides like Plutonium. Thorium is 4x as abundant than Uranium. In comparison, only 98% of Uranium fuel becomes nuclear waste.
@@OffgridApartment Yes, of course. Batteries, chargers and inverters are nowhere near 100% efficient. Have you ever heard of a Kill-a-watt? Assume your battery can't be depleted below 20%. Using a Kill-a-watt (or equivalent) energy meter, charge your battery to 100% and measure how much energy that took. Then discharge it back down to 20% and see how much energy your inverter produced. The ratio of power out / power in is the battery, charger and inverter (some people call this a "generator") is how efficient it is. Many people in the world can't afford do buy these so-called generators. And, yes, they may use DC lighting to remove the inverter.
@@OffgridApartmentthere is no way that current battery tech is sufficient to be able to ensure wind, solar can provide base load. And crypto and AI are proving to be a new massive demand for electricity?
Heating from solar is problematic, because you need heating in the winter and you get maybe 20 % of solar in these month. So you would need to overbuild solar plants by a factor of 5 and solar panels are not free. Neither cost wise nor resource wise. And I dont think we will ever have batteries big enough so store enough power in the summer to last us all winter.
Seasonal fluctuations cannot be covered by batteries. This is one of the reasons why we need something like green hydrogen. That is not really competitive yet, although briefly, when the gas prices skyrocketed, it suddenly was for a while. So we are not so far away from that breakthrough. Cheaper catalysts would probably do the trick.
The best way to put this is, that a power plant is its own largest customer. for simplest metric, They consume 3, 1 is waste, 1 powers themself, and 1 is sold to consumers.
Very nice video and explains very overlooked concept - efficiency. But I wouldn't be myself if I didn't point out certain things that were overlooked for brevity! Both batteries and electricity overall will become far cheaper - at least 2-3x drop for batteries (/kWh) and ~10x lower for solar electricity (likely multi junction printed stable perovskite PV). Generally speaking, so much lower prices will increase availability and sales not only for consumers who wouldn't be able to afford it otherwise, but larger consumption for _normal_ consumers. As for batteries - more people will be able to get electric cars, or even small vehicles like scooters since one of the main cost will drop extremely. Electric airplane travel will likely become multiple times cheaper, this creating much higher customer base, and therefore more flights. Similarly just cheaper energy might make things like heatpumps unnecessary or even economically unviable for many uses - COP drops greatly when you try to heat something above 100°C unless your source is way above ambient. On top of that, with possibly 10x cheaper electricity some processes that would be deemed uneconomical today, might become completely mainstream. Just some examples - water desalination, construction material synthesis, long term heat storage, methane storage/synthesis, closed loop farming and so on. It's not a bad thing that actual energy usage might increase if it goes towards building something stable. Also with cheap electricity and higher battery density you might expect people trying to drive faster to save more time.
8:33 "Same sticker price as internal combustion engine"? Even with a HUGE government subsidy, the base model Tesla Y you quote (Rear wheel drive only) is least expensive model. All others are more expensive. The subsidies essentially means that everyone else that is paying for Teslas with inflation, since we don't have a balanced budget. When the US Govt "prints" money, the money is borrowed into existence and dilutes the money that's already out there. None of the car makers can sustain $120,000 per vehicle cost of production versus the price on the car.
Long range all wheel drive model Y ~$48k with no subsidies. Average new car in the US is about $47k. Seems pretty comparable to me. Long range model Y rear wheel drive is ~$44k with no subsidies. Seems cheaper than average to me. Also, let’s not talk about the US subsidies of oil without which fuel for ICE vehicles would double if not triple.
@@OffgridApartment I'm assuming you mean no subsidies to you in the form of a rebate. There are concessions for companies to bring in jobs - property taxes, corporate taxes, etc. I rented an electric car the last time I needed to go to Denver. Who pays for the "free" charge point locations at the libraries or car dealerships. There are "free" charging stations where I work. Biden has promised all sorts of nation-wide charging stations. I've not seen a single government charging station yet on any of my electric charging apps. Who pays for those? It's all coming out of our, our kids and grandchildren's pockets. Many of the people driving cars using fossil fuels are paying for people buying electric cars through carbon taxes. They could be saving to buy a new electric car if they didn't have to subsidize electric cars for those that can afford them now. When we run out of things to argue on one point, it's easy to point at something else. It is true that oil is heavily subsidized the world over -- 5.9 Trillion USD in 2020. But arguing that oil is being subsidized doesn't change the argument about electric cars. With energy subsidies, the true cost of energy is hidden from the consumer.
The Lawrence Livermore energy maps are so revealing. I'm just wondering why you chose an old one (2009)? thanks for a well presented video showing just how wasteful fossil fuels are between 'primary energy' and getting work done.
I think AI is overhyped as a driver of energy demand. Increasing EU electricity demand by 10% would require 800 million H100s, which would cost $40T. We're about 4 orders of magnitude below that
Really interesting video. Thank you. I'm curious about how home solar production numbers are accounted for. What happens to the increasing amount of electricity being generated by homeowners etcétera? How is this factored into the numbers? For example I have effectively gone off-grid since November 23 and I'm producing and using over 1Mw per month. Multiply this by a few million and it obviously will make a huge difference.
Yeah, self-consumption might mess up the data as it becomes more significant For the most part, the data is collected, as inverters have SIM cards, and report their info to the manufacturer/installer, but most countries don't track this in a centralized manner like they track utility scale production
I'm a little confused about why you think that nuclear power is going to go away, especially by 2050. China, India, and France have made huge investments in nuclear energy in the last ten years with no end in sight. Small modular reactors are being developed by several countries and major corporations. Microsoft and Google have already expressed interest in using SMR technology to power their mega data centers completely independent of the grid. SMR technology is probably the best technology for powering large ships, producing synthetic fuel for aviation and spaceflight, and also for extra high-energy industrial processes like steel and aluminum production. Do not get me wrong. I absolutely believe that wind, water, and solar energy are extremely important, and we should build a hell of a lot more capacity, but nuclear power is a powerful tool for generating massive amounts of energy on demand without burning fossil fuel. It seems incredibly unlikely that nuclear power will suddenly be switched off at any point this century.
I agree with you. Any nuclear built today will likely last about 40 years, so well beyond 2050. As production of new plants are increasing rapidly it will be even longer. Video also thinks energy storage is easy and cheap. It is not. Another issue is that renewables, especially wind has major financial problems already. As soon as the amount of wind increased a lot in the grid the price falls to low or even negative on the spot market when there is good wind. Producers just get a lot less income than predicted even when the amount of energy is to plan. To increase even more requires adding super expensive energy storage. Next issue is the EROEI that is way to low for renewables and lack of storage means we need backup plants. In reality the major buildout of windfarms has increased the amount of coal used for electricity generation. We need a reliable grid that will work even in the coldest winter when we typically get almost no wind or solar. That means we still need full capacity covered by reliable energy sources regardless of the number of wind turbines installed. It is very inefficient to build lots of plants and have them shut down 90% of the year, but it is still the best way to get reliable power during winter. Should wind and solar pay for the time when plants are shut down as wind and solar provide the power?
Partly to simplify the video, I think the viewers can easily add nuclear back in just in their head if they think it will stay But I do have a bear case on nuclear: solar is unstoppable, because of the huge value proposition in self-consumption. Therefore, the net demand on the grid will drop to or below 0 at noon, inevitably. But nuclear already struggles with cost at a 95% capacity factor. How will it cope when it's forced to less than 60%?
@@SizeMichael The problem with adding lots on solar or wind is that your production will shift heavily and it will not correlate with demand. If you only have a little and you have a lot of hydro you can use that storage capacity. If not you will have to ramp up and down your stable capacity plant (normally referred to as base power). That will be real bad for the base power, so it will become very expensive to get that base power. Nuclear is not a great fit for ramping up and down, your best fit are gas powered plants. If you wanted to change to save the environment it will be a hard fail to go this route. As we have ramped up wind a lot in the world we see a clear increase in coal fired plants. If we do a massive ramp in solar (to cover something like 25% of electricity production in a country) we will se more of either coal or gas powered plants. A sure way to destroy the environment. If you have a month with real cold weather in the winter with hardly any solar and hardly any wind it does not matter how much your peak capacity is. You will need to have backup plants that can cover all your needs even in the coldest winter. Since they will have low utilization you will need to pay for them even when they are not used for 90% of the year. It is just a matter if you pay with general tax or put the cost on the price you pay for being connected to the grid.
With storage you will even dekrease consumption, because you will eliminate the need of balancing the electric grids that contributes to more losses than LION energy storage, and also WWS will lower the need of high voltage long distance transfers (because of more local generation nature), that also contribute to a lot of losses.
Assuming you have storage in a few areas you will still have issues with balancing the grid, just not as bad. Losses when charging and dischargeing a battery at high rates is higher than today's balancing losses. Water pump storage at good locations has lower losses and lower cost than battery storage. Main advantage of battery storage is quick and easy installation and you can increase the storage size over time.
It appears that in your examples you assumed solar to battery storage, and battery storage to alternating current electricity is 100% efficient (or has 0% heat loss/rejection). This is not true. Wildly better than burning fossil fuels for sure.
Towards the end, I add 5% loss for storage at the grid level The loss may be greater at the battery level, but most of the energy will likely be used instantaneously, so only a small portion will pass through batteries
0:51 Wind and Solar Renewables Cheaper? FACT-CHECK please. This obviously doesn't count the initial capital investment, the operating cost, including maintenance and the cost of sun-setting. It also does not cover the cost to cover the baseload when the sun doesn't shine (night) or when the wind doesn't blow (wind < 10 Mph) What are your EROI figures to prove this?
I don't remember the source, but per kilowatt generated they are. Once you factor in the cost of all infrastructure they're still more expensive, but that itself is also dropping, meaning solar will be genuinely cheaper than oil (for electricity generation, maybe not battery electric vehicles vs gasoline) pretty soon.
Yes, factoring in batteries, wind and solar, yes, they're still cheaper than nuclear or fossil. On a grid scale. You know when wind blows most? Night. The solution is wind, solar and batteries, plus a sprinkling of other renewable energy sources like hydro and geothermal which are really only applicable in particular and limited geography.
@@jonevansauthorI work at an energy producing company with lots of different types of energy. Having renewables (wind and solar) with energy storage is by far the most expensive of them all. Water power is great, when possible. Almost all locations for water power generation has already been used. Water and burning of waste and biofuels are a great base to reduce the amount of fossil fuel needed. Most grids over the world have major problems with intermittent energy, especially wind. Several places have been forced to stop connection of more wind as it lowers the stability of the grid to the point where we risk massive power outages. You are correct that wind often blows more at night. When do you have peak demand? During the day. This is one reason that solar is a much smaller problem than wind.
6:28 Strawman argument. There is no multiplication by three in anything. Although the example you give for recovering wasted energy from the power plant might be a good one in theory, I think you simply misunderstood the energy-substitution method for renewables. It's simply compensating for the higher efficiency of renewables, in 2009 this was already assumed to be 87%.
13:26 I disagree with your premise of needing a new chart due to "energy substitution method" I don't think you understood how it works. Please re-read Our world in data, energy-substitution-method (I can't post links to the actual resource on TH-cam), then you will understand that energy substitution method is an upward adjustment in favor of renewables, not fossil fuel as you claim. See my comment at 4:10. The second thing I have a problem with is that your initial premise used 2009 data for your initial hypothesis and now midstream, you are using Europe's figures and your "adjustments" for the primary energy mix. You should not mix apples and oranges and convert oranges to orange juice.
Renewables and maybe nuclear/fusion seem to be the way of the future for energy consumption. But there are hurdles. Our capacity (money and resources) to expand non-fossil energy production is one bottleneck. Building out the electrical grid, installing energy storage, converting existing structures and vehicles is another. Geopolitics and the wealthy with their vested interests in maintaining the status quo is another. What do you think Putin, Koch and Bin Salman really think about decarbonizing? I'm from Canada, and there are both cold weather and long distance related issues here that lower the ROI for some decarbonizing options although we already generate a great deal of renewable hydro and nuclear power. In 3rd world countries, the lack of stable governments and low investment capacity per capita create more roadblocks. All I'm saying is that the path to a zero carbon future is going to be a lot longer than the optimists hope for - not 2050, maybe 2100 or worse.
Seems like deployment can grow very quickly if the demand is there: Romania saw 300% YoY increase in PV deployment in 2023, and Poland kept a 100% CAGR for like 8 years It's unintuitive, but Canada is actually pretty well suited for solar. A place like Edmonton might be incredibly cold, but it's as sunny as Bulgaria, because it doesn't have the kind of clouds we get during European winters
I won't say that this isn't on the correct path. But there is a lot of things that makes me ponder the arguments made. There is a lot of "facts" here that seem dubious. Thermal efficiency in power plants is more or less never down at 30%, cars perhaps, power plants no... (every percentile of improved efficiency becomes quite a lot of income, and fairly basic efficiency improvements makes a large difference at relatively low cost, though eat space for breakfast so often aren't used in the transport industry due to space limitations.) CoP of air sourced heat pumps is in reality not all that often up above 3. Being down around 1.5 isn't atypical in winters if one gets snow outside (something most of Europe gets). Still better than simple joule heating. But not anywhere close to 3+. (Ground sourced heat pumps can be up there, but depending on geological conditions, this isn't always an option, not to mention the added cost of even installing it.) I would however say that reducing heating energy requirements by 30-50% seems realistic. It is however unrealistic to expect it to drop by 75% from heat pumps alone. Adding insulation and going to double/triple pane windows is however going to help reduce heating demands by a lot. (where I live 3 panes of glass is "old", 4 is the new "standard", and going to 5 layers of glass isn't out of the norm along with adding extra insulation to exterior walls.) The argument if one should multiply wind and solar's energy output or not, is somewhat debatable. In general I would agree and say no. It is true that energy consumption will be lower in the future. Energy efficiency improvements happens in more or less all industries. I wouldn't consider an over century old observation of the growth in the electrical market as particularly valid today. Saying "7% increase in power production per year" is an observation of history, and a plan for the potential future. It isn't a law of nature that shall be followed. Ie, I expect that it will never be touched again. Given that the curve started meaningfully deviating at around the same time that a large portion of the world had become electrified. Then it rather signifies that a sizable portion of those 7% were market expansion into new geographical areas. Once a region is electrified, it has electricity for its basic needs and won't generally need major improvements in capacity. Unless new applications crop up for this electrification. With new applications and demand, expansions in capacity is required, with improved efficiency, demand goes down, something it has done repeatedly throughout history. The rise in electric vehicles might nudge forth some new requirements for capacity, but transport isn't an endless requirement, so it will only add a certain amount. Some people argue that the increasing amount of data centers serving our information driven society will see a major requirement in new generating capacity, but even this struggles to keep pace with the decreasing demand in general. It is a sane observation that we likely might nearly halve our energy needs in the next couple of decades. Currently, wind, water, solar, is a decent combination. But I would honestly say that you missed bio-gas. Waste water treatment plants can fairly trivially be adapted to produce methane for use in both the transport and heating industries, as well as electrical production during winters. (A good example of a waste water treatment plant producing bio-gas is Henriksdalsverket in Stockholm) Bio-gas has the advantage of both being easy to store and fairly efficient to use, where its waste heat has the added bonus of district heating in winters. Europe has though historically not invested much at all in bio-gas production, mainly due to cheap natural gas from Russia, something recent geopolitics has changed.
3:32 "All of that wasted heat goes away" FACT CHECK PLEASE A wind turbine is not able to catch and convert all of the wind energy to mechanical power and the electrical generator also is not 100% efficient in converting mechanical energy to electric power. Wind turbines are only 30-45% efficient. The 55-70% inefficiencies are "rejected energy". It's heat. The same goes with solar. The amount of sun hitting the solar panel is not 100% converted to electricity. The amount of light that was not converted to electricity is "rejected energy". If the sun shines on a solar panel with a 20% efficiency rating, 20% of the sun's energy will convert to solar energy in ideal conditions. 80% is "rejected energy", this IS heat.
Renewable efficiency is not really relevant. Let's look at solar as an example. You have a regular roof. The roof is 0% efficient, it does not generate electricity. You add solar panels. They capture 30% of the energy. You now have electricity you didn't before. Sure 70% of the solar energy is lost, but tomorrow it will return. No action is necessary to replace the wasted energy. For fossil fuels we care about efficiency because waste means lost feedstock. You can't replace gas or oil that is wasted. You have to to go and dig more up. With renewables like solar the sun comes up and you have a new opportunity to capture energy, "waste" is automatically replaced the next day at no extra cost.
By the way the wasted heat from fosil fuels adds to global warming. The energy that is not picked up by the solar panels and wind turbines does not add to global warming. Also, heat pumps are making the planet less hotter than fosil fuels because they are only using a fraction of the energy to heat the space up that fosil fuel uses.
@JeanPierreWhite is correct. Unconverted sunlight and wind is not wasted heat or wasted energy. It would be there anyway. This is different from fossil fuels dug up from the ground and then burned to produce heat, only to have a small percentage used.
Don't heat pumps fail to produce enough heat durring winter in northern climates? You still need resistance back up for its shortcomings. This will have to be deducted from it's benifit. Having a heat pump for higher temps will make at least your fall heating bills mirror your summer ac costs, though
My understanding is that thermal combined cycle max theoretical efficiency is 40%. You cannot get past 40% no matter what you do meaning 60% is waste or low temp heat.
I don't see thermal nuclear energy generation go away by 2050. Many countries are building new nuclear plants to help them transition away from fossil fuels. WWS may be cheaper, but that is without the cost for storage. Although this transition will see us use our energy more efficiently, the general trend for increased energy consumption is still there in the background. Energy consumption has more or less plateaued in many countries thanks to efficiency gains, but on the other hand producing wind, solar and battery storage is costing more and more energy. AI is another increasing consumer of energy. If we manage to reduce our cost of energy, I'm sure consumers will find ways to consume more of it.
My pessimistic case on nuclear is that it will not be able to adapt to the hourly volatility of wind and solar, so the plants would have to survive economically off of dunkelflauten or other such multi-day events, and this might not be possible
@@SizeMichael I am not sure how large the role of nuclear will be, but I do see a role for it. Solar generation is going to be significantly lower in autumn and winter. It's not just about multi-day events, it's about the high cost of seasonal storage that you can avoid by building nuclear plants. People and companies are going to want to store electricity (in batteries), heat, hydrogen, and perhaps other energy intensive products. If we invest in large scale seasonal storage, then the price of electricity will not go down to low levels for months at a time. Nuclear plants can also supply heat and I expect that heat using industrial plants will want to locate themselves near them to avoid the cost of large-scale heat storage to bridge the winter months.
We should take a serious look at Throrium-Nuclear power. It was not found to be useful since during the cold-war era nuclear power plants produce Plutonium. The idea was to extract the Plutonium from the waste using the Purex process. However, Plutonium is a proliferation risk. Also, Plutonium plants Eg. Hanford and Rocky Flats are very environmentally destructive. China has taken the technology developed in Oak Ridge TN for the Molten Salt Reactor and improving on it. We should be looking into doing the same for a good, reliable base load.
@@SizeMichaelIf you give priority to wind and solar and only have wind, solar and nuclear then I agree that Nuclear will not work well. But that same argument would then leave us with only wind and solar. That will be a totally failed and crashed grid, so we would have long and very big power outages. In my book that is not a sufficient solution either. Also you argue that we get a COP of 3.5 for heat pumps. As an average I accept that number. However in the coldest winter heat pumps drop to COP 1 and you get almost no electricity from wind and solar. We can't accept a system where we freeze to death as soon as there is a cold winter. We need a system with spare capacity, robustness and that can produce power to meet demand. All this at a reasonable cost. To allow major plants that provides the stability we need and that prevents us from freezing to death in winter we need an economic system that pays not only for each kWh, but also takes the other necessary factors to run a grid. One such way is to give priority for base plant electricity production in the system. That means when we get most wind or most solar in the summer part of the wind or solar capacity is disconnected from the grid. Systems like this are already implemented in some countries, where Germany is leading this trend. My point is that we need a major part of the energy system to be reliable base power with capacity to ramp up to meet demand. When you need this base power anyway you need to pay for building and maintaining the plants. You can reduce the fuel used in that plant and possibly have them shut down for part of the year by adding intermittent renewable energy. In a few cases we can do with slightly less base plants due to intermittent renewables, but in most cases it only saves a bit on the operations costs. If you only compare cost of renewables to operation costs of a base plant every renewable project will be unprofitable. I do like renewables, and own both solar and wind. However when you look at all aspects of the energy system they create significant problems when they start to become a major part of the energy mix.
Didn't you omit from your calculations the massive amount of heat energy consumed by industrial processes (like cement, steel, etc.) and the massive amount of CO2 emissions associated with same?
I think it's mostly in district heating networks, but heating individual homes with coal that burns in their own boiler is apparently also very popular in Poland, probably thanks to their large hard coal resources
in 2009, 15 years ago. A lot of coal mines have been closed since then. A lot of coal is still being used for electric power generation. Trains continually go from Wyoming's Powder River Basin to power plants throughout the US. China is still building one to two coal power plants a week. The US and Australia sell a lot of coal to China to feed those plants. And with the Keystone pipeline blocked, using natural gas in place of coal has been made more difficult.
His reference frame is somewhere in Europe. In the US as a comparison 90% of coal is used for electricity generation, and is now only providing 16.2% of total US electricity. Rare to see something in the US heated by coal - most non-power generation is thermal process and not space heating anymore. NG has taken its place as space heating for the most part.
@@milofonbil There are 2 Keystone pipelines of discussion, one is up and running and has never not been in the last 15 years or so. What was stopped was the Keystone XL which was additional capacity and different route partially; none of XL was ever natural gas it was always crude/syncrude/dilbit solely. US coal production is basically half what it was in 1999. ~90% of coal in the US is used in power generation and that's dropped to only 16.2% of total US electricity generation. Virtually no electricity in the US generated from crude derived cuts anymore - less than .5% (mostly in AK, HI and LA and a few antiquated, seldom used peaker plants up the east coast). US exports of coal have been in a pretty steady band the last 5 years. Of note because of the slight unexpected twist - although China is increasing generation sites using coal, the percentage of their total generation from coal is actually dropping - because at the same time they're massively expanding things like wind, solar and hydro...
Although my Tesla Model Y is extremely energy efficient and dramatically reduces total energy usage compared to a gas car, it does increase electricity demand. Hopefully, we will be able to produce enough electricity soon enough to power all the new electric vehicles. If Elon is successful in producing robotaxis then gas powered cars will be replaced much faster than most people expect, because one robotaxi can replace ten gas cars. Great news for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, for healthy clean air in cities and an opportunity to replace parking lots with housing and parks.. However, it does mean electricity needs will grow quickly. As you point out, heat pumps will be able to reduce the amount of electricity currently used for low temp heating, so that helps, but some of the other energy reductions you mention do not reduce electricity usage. So we probably still need dramatic growth in wind and solar and we probably need to maintain hydro and nuclear to enable solar by producing power at night and in the winter. .. it will be many years until we have enough battery storage to allow wind and solar to take over completely.
The energy efficiency of a car can be counted in many ways. Looking at energy from outlet to wheels makes any electric car look great. Looking at an electric car standing still in traffic compared to an ICE car idling will in best base make the electric car infinitely more efficient. Or you could take the other extreme and claim that electricity for electric cars will always be the marginal electricity as it would not have needed to be produced if not needed for the electric car. That means it is always coal production. In this case the electric car will be a lot worse for the environment than similar ICE car. I see both as extremes and the "truth" is in between. It matters what country you live in, your options to charge conveniently, if you often can charge slowly at night when grid load is low etc. It also matters what you compare to. A pure petrol car is most commonly used for comparison, and it is the worst case. Petrol with ethanol mixed in is slightly better. Diesel is a lot better. Bio-gas is even better. Hybrid or plug in hybrid is massively better, especially for drivers with normal commute distances. Bio-diesle is best of all. Do you count energy for driving only or do you include production of car and recycling of car? Do you count energy or pollution to environment? Do you count cost of ownership per distance traveled or per year owned or combination? If you own a car part of its lifetime, do you count all manufacturing to the first owner of the car? Essentially you can get the result you want by measuring and comparing the preferable way. I am not saying any car or type of car is good or bad. Anything suited to the users needs is usually a good choice.
15:32 I respectfully disagree with your analysis. I hope you take time to read my comments and take them as constructive criticism. I'm on Twitter with the same handle. We can debate this very interesting topic further there with some fresh data and and better understanding of the "substitution method". Here are some thoughts on what you may not have considered: World population is still growing at 2% per year or doubling every 36 years (see rule of 72's). Each new household needs more energy. On the energy saving side of the ledger are energy savings measures like LED lighting, TV's that are LCD rather than CRT, the use of heat pumps for heating and air conditioning, water heating, clothes drying, induction stoves for cooking, better insulation and air-exchangers for homes. I also believe that passive-solar is very viable. I also believe that working from home versus having to go to the office can offer huge energy savings. A large part of the world is still burning wood, including first world countries where it's been re-marketed as "biomass". My take on it: You are right, we need to seek higher efficiencies, but it won't be as dramatic as your video presents.
I made a similar comment. There's huge energy consumption deficiencies in non-OECD. Also, overbuilding VRE, adding nuclear power and making hydrogen economy inroads will make for elevated energy losses/production patterns. It won't just be batteries alone to mitigate intermittence.
Population is not growing at 2% per year. It is growing at ~ 0.85% per year, and that rate is falling. Global population will not double in 36 years, or even ever on current trajectory. Population will probably plateau in the ~10B range around mid century or shortly after, and then decline. Fertility has collapsed almost everywhere in the world. e.g. China now well below replacement, and India below replacement, and falling. In the rich countries fertility has fallen off a cliff. Even in the few high-fertility countries of Africa and the ME, fertility is falling slowly. Serious arguments have been made to the effect that the world is facing a calamitous population bust, later this century. So, in short: your argument is premised on numbers that are far from correct, and getting more so with each passing year. On the other hand, it IS true that much of the world is still in an "energy deficit", and this must be corrected. But it will be easy to correct with renewables. The places with the worst energy deficits are perfect for solar.
@@alan2102X have you considered e.g. the monsoons' effect on solar? Anyway, you're right the population is set to plateau, but I fear it will be short lived. Evolution always wins.
@@jesan733 Short lived how? There is no evident plausible mechanism for population to soar; quite the opposite. The demographic transition has proven to be overwhelmingly strong and universal, i.e. NO country escapes it (just that some are slower than others). India is doing just fine with solar, thanks very much.
@@alan2102X properties that makes people want to have kids will be extremely selected for by evolution. You can check e.g. haredim or other such subgroups' fertility rates for a preview. No, India isn't doing well with solar.
OK, there's way more to this. First, energy consumption has leveled off or dropped around the world for the past 20 years primarily due to the introduction of an array of energy saving products. Most notable of these has been LED lights. A 100 Watt tungsten equivalent LED light uses only 10 Watts. That's a 90% drop in power consumed, and there are billions of them. Also, how many people use electric or gas ovens anymore? A lot of food is cooked using highly efficient microwave ovens now. And then there's air conditioning and refrigerators, which have also become a lot more efficient. These 4 things represent a huge chunk of overall power that's used, and will lead to less energy being consumed as time progresses, even as population increases. And as far as power sources are concerned, intermittent wind and solar only contribute about 14% to the overall mix, and this percentage has remained almost constant for the past 60 years. Hydropower was tapped out as a expandable source decades ago (no more rivers to dam), and nuclear was tapped out as well (the public's fear of such plants). As far as electric cars and the fact that their batteries hold the equivalent of 2 gallons of gas, this does not take into account that most electricity is generated by burning petroleum based products, powering large generators, and distributing this power via extensive tower-based systems. And when talking about renewables, calculations don't currently account for the enormous cost of building wind turbines and solar panels (and their relatively short useful lives), the enormous amount of real estate they consume, or that new transmission systems are often needed to get that power where it's to be used. They also don't reflect the enormous amount of resources that are consumed in the fabrication of batteries (250 tons of earth must be dug up to build each new EV battery), or the disposal of all these products and materials at the end of their useful lives (which in reality is 10-20 years). Right now, almost all of this is buried in landfills and not recycled.
Poland went from 10% wind and solar to 30% in the past 10 years, with few/no subsidies, and without blowing up its electricity prices The union went from about 14% to almost 30% in the same time period, although some countries did blow up their prices in the process, as a result of trying to stay ahead of the curve
2:36 This is where you may be confusing things by mixing units of Power and Energy. The diagram is in units of energy while your "clarification" is in terms of power (energy over time, or kWh). The "Rejected Energy" in gray in the example is wasted energy due to conversion inefficiencies. Again, power is (Heat or Work) over units of time. But I see your point: Energy conversion during electrical power production is very inefficient. It results in lots of rejected energy, a loss.
I am not 100% sure if it stays like this, but regional power production means, the transfer losses are reduced for roof top solar. So even less primary energy consumption. Edit: Spoiler: i guess you next video will then be about electrifying the chemical industry and other new methods of using potential vast amount of fusion energy.
they just develop a LED 50% more efficient, in 10 Year we will be using ice making as heat pump, keeping the motor inside prevent the inducción heat to go to waest,the ice can be stored for the summer.
Some claims like this are technically correct, but usually twists the facts so far from real life use that it is just misleading. Like when you see a claim that a particular electric engine has 25% less losses. Sounds great. Then you really look at the numbers and see that the standard engine had 98% efficiency and the super special engine has 98.5% efficiency at a much higher cost, higher maintenance and decreased lifespan. In real life the 98% engine will often have a much lower total cost per year. LEDs of today are really efficient, but they operate at a rather low voltage. So the majority of losses are in the circuit that transforms high voltage AC to low voltage DC. The gains with a higher efficiency LED for normal lighting can be minimal. In certain special scenarios it can be a lot better. To evaluate the usefulness we must compare apples to apples. How does it work in practical applications when you factor in costs and lifespan? Sometimes you actually get an improvement, but in 95% of cases these "breakthroughs" don't beat the current solution. My advice is to just be sceptical until you see real life applications tested by an independent organization.
Yes, a big problem is that we will have to expand the electical grids by 2 to 4 times their capacity at the moment. it is a major reason why we cannot go much faster than we are at the moment. However, it is doable and will get done.
This can't happen without massive grid upgrades or much, much cheaper storage. If you don't have your own charger, electric cars are too much of a hassle.
@@modarkthemauler Not every roof has a south-facing exposure, not blocked by trees. Not every Home Owner's Association will allow solar energy. Many current solar installations force you to sell to the power company and buy back energy at a higher rate.
@@milofonbil You produce less energy but even a north facing or shaded roof is better that no solar. My point was more along the lines of, you don't need to build a extra structure or use up farmland for solar, you can use the unused roof space that's already there. The HOAs and power companies can be forced by the government to let people do the solar install and use the energy created on site, but that would mean a government that's on the peoples side.
At the same time, the vast majority of the population does not use much energy because it is not easy and expensive to distribute and use coal, oil and gas: when electricity becomes more available and everything is electrified, the energy demand may explode. Imagine AC pretty much everywhere, for instance. Add cheap electric cars to that.
Tesla created both the hydroelectric dam and electric motors. He dreamed up the grid, as well. His vision was for a massless energy base, and we are seeing that build out, in real time. Mass based energy systems may have peaked with Kelvin. So, when contrasting the two approaches, more work could be carried out with less energy, in the Telsan world view. Optimize logistics and infrastructure with electricity, batteries, and hydrogen. Also, use metal powders to produce green heat, as needed. More facets are needed to fine tune global usage. But, a good start would lead to a good finish.
@@thecocktailian2091 He also had no idea about the inverse square law. You really can't effectively transmit electricity wirelessly due to inverse square law. Wires only suffer linear losses, not inverse square losses. Tesla had one thing very correct: Transmitting power using AC over wires instead of DC. Edison was wrong.
My step dad is an electrician. As a result, I know basically nothing about electrics. Ive seen some interesting wireless power experiments. people getting a lamp and a radio to work wirelessly. Never seen anything major powered. @@milofonbil
Current global primary energy consumption using the input-equivalent method is 170 GJ/capita in OECD and 56 GJ/capita in non-OECD. Let's say non-OECD catches up, so the entire world uses 170 GJ/capita. Then total energy demand increases by 125%, and that's not including population growth. If we assume OECD energy consumption per capita for 10 billion humans, then energy demand increases 180% over today's. So while unadjusted primary energy production will likely drop in OECD going in the coming few decades, I think it will not in the world in total, because in non-OECD, final energy consumption will grow faster than substitution to VRE. Also, it seems frightfully optimistic to assume 5% energy storage loss will fix the intermittence problem of VRE. It's not unthinkable that substantial overbuild and some hydrogen economy will make for 50% losses, effectively.
Reports of China increasing coal use, while building more solar farms and producing solar panels for the world, is a conundrum. Climate change must have a significant cost in increased demand for power due to air conditioning, and other adaptation efforts.
Yeah, global energy use is a different story For Europe in particular, climate change has reduced heating requirements by more than it has increased cooling requirements, so this works out for us, but not for lower latitudes
3:51 "Renewables save more power than they make" No. Not really. No renewables are 100% efficient, not even close. (Conspiracy theory, right. This is why there's the X-files sound, right?)
I completely agree with you. Video is mixing different things. One part is efficiency, another is the ratio of electricity you get. For a wind turbine you get essentially only electricity, so 100%. Or you have zero fuel input, so your fuel to electricity generation is infinite. Technically true, but irrelevant. Like comparing apples to oranges. If I had a plant with fuel that is free and no pollution or harmful waste products and high output, but only 10% is electricity and 90% is heat that would be an amazing power source that would revolutionize the world.
Wow, a whole new and positive view on the energy transition! Thanks!
13:45 Please research biomass further. United Kingdom generates biomass-powered energy "biomass" power plants across the country with a total capacity of 1583.7 MW. They burn wood pellets made from forests harvested in Canada. The carbon emissions are not counted in Canada because the wood has not been burned there. And the UK receives the wood pellets and does not count the carbon emissions either. Here in the US biomass is heavily subsidized. Essentially we are burning our old-growth forests to avoid burning fossil fuels.
there's a massive tree farm in british columbia that sources most of our wood. It's new growth and truly massive, and we still haven't used it to capacity. Trees we plant while chopping down more trees grow to fruition before we finish chopping the rest of the previous growth. So the forests we're chopping down have been replenishable new growth forests in british columbia.
I had to laugh hard at "there are only two profitable EV brands in the world: Tesla and BYD. And I‘m not even sure about BYD“
It’s true. Tesla is actually the only profitable BEV maker. Tesla makes $6500 pure profit for each EV because of vertical integration, autonomous innovative empowered employees, incredibly innovative & efficient manufacturing, huge staff incentives, fully in house brilliant material science & engineering, in house software & hardware design & engineering (that’s just vehicles. Tesla energy division is hugely profitable & growing 140% pa) Model Y takes 10hrs to build. VW takes 30. All other western OEMS take more time per EV.
BYD mostly makes a loss & barely breaks even. Ford GM VW Toyota Nissan etc etc are cutting back on EV to slow losses. They are staring into oblivion. Most of the 200 or so other BEV makers in China are toast without subsidies & the Govt wants most gone.
It depends on how you are doing the accounting. Because EVs are new a lot more R&D and factory build out/ retooling is being done to make them better that doesn’t need to be done for the mature Ice cars and when you add that cost in on the cars being produced now, then yes they aren’t profitable. These are more of caped costs and not Opex costs. As time goes on and less R&D and less factory build out is needed, the cars are all profitable.
@@matthewmanzi9504 There is only 1 method to count the profitability of a company. Does the company make a profit or not? All the other stuff is only good to impress investors.
@@R.E.A.L.I.T.Yyeah sure I‘ve seen enough Sandy Munro to believe you. I just thought it was a funny sentence the way he put it
@@matthewmanzi9504This is an important point. Not enough people get it.
It is not accurate to say that Rivian, for example, loses money on every vehicle they sell. It's not the vehicle production that incurs these excessive costs it is everything else. If they increase production, then revenues would exceed costs.
I'm going to spread this video around. This is the best explainer on energy usage I've seen and I've been telling people this for decades
So glad you covered this topic... It's tricky and nuanced and also really important to understand how BEVs can actually lower humanities energy requirements due to the negation of the huge heat engine losses... Kudos.
An interesting analysis! It makes sense to me, yet I do not have the knowledge to agree nor refute. The video was easy to follow and understand. Well done.
I agree. I didn't know about the "substitution method" - thank you for bringing that up.
I think he misses the fact that the "substitution method" actually corrects for the higher efficiency of wind and solar. See my comments for 4:13.
with my average understanding on this topic from school, what you present makes a lot of sense. good vid!
Thx for reading all our comments !
Amazing video, great analysis with data. Thank you.
10:00 Here in the Seattle area, we have electric busses. But for transportation of heavier goods by rail is concerned, electrification of railroads should be a priority. For special applications and long-haul trucking, perhaps hybrids are probably a more practical answer for now. Take a look at the work being done by Canadian company Edison.
Most of the world has settled on electrified rail as a sensible and economical solution. North America is curiously absent from that group.
In Europe, we use trolleybuses instead, since batteries are expensive and overexertion makes them a fire hazard.
Also trolleybuses don't need to charge and are much cheaper.
There are a number of other ways we can very significantly reduce the amount of energy needed going forward. 1. Paint our roofs and homes with light colored, highly reflective paints. 2. Insulate and seal/caulk our homes. 3. Just installing solar panels will add an air barrier and significantly cool roofs. 4. Install insulated curtains which offers a huge benefit at a low effort and cost. 5. Install smart electrical breakers. Our well pump only runs during daylight hours; we limit our hot water heater and clothes and dishwasher use to mostly daylight hours. In spring, early summer and fall, we open windows at night to cool the house. nights are cool enough that we mostly limit our heat pump home cooling system to sunlight hours. We charge our EV mostly during daylight hours.
Thanks for this explanation. To add to the conversation here, we need less expensive, home and small businesses sized, electricity storage batteries. We have a chance right now to free individual homes and businesses from the price gouging, gas and electric utility monopolies and cartels. In the Mountain West of the US, our winters can be snowy, but not that cold. But our summers are scorching hot (35-40+ C for a third or more of the year). We remodeled, insulated, fireproofed to the extent possible, and electrified (heat pump, LED, induction) a large, old home and turned it into an inn. To really go off grid and free ourselves of our local, predatory, electricity cartel, we’d need 50 kWh of storage. This high storage is necessitated by our need for cooling in summer. Installed battery storage is bout $1,000/kwh ($60,000 or more just for storage). This needs to come down by an order of magnitude to actually disrupt our corrupt and price gouging electricity cartel.
What suppliers have you looked at and how recently?
Tesla is selling their Megapacks for around $350 / kWh including installation, but those are 3.9MWh, so too big. Prices came down in the second half of 2023 quite a bit. Other suppliers likely also down, likely because Li-ion battery prices came down significantly as many automakers are scaling back their manufacturing volumes.
Storing electricity in batteries is super expensive. As you mentioned you mainly want to use the energy to cool down buildings you are much better off by other means. E.g. power a heat-pump to cool down a medium, usually liquid when you have excess power and use the cool liquid to reduce temperature when needed.
BC Hydro in the PNW interestingly offers to bank our excess rooftop summer solar for our use in winter. Thus, rooftop solar could lessen summer power plant production, delaying its max output until winter. This is aside from a utility implementing nightly battery cycling to smooth curves.
I remember a couple years ago the hot talking point from the renewable FUDsters and fossil fuel apologists was the idea that there would never be enough solar and wind generation to replace all those GWh of energy.
They would throw around these huge numbers and never mention that, in the US, the majority of it is just waste heat.
Now, we see places like South Australia, California and England getting the majority of their electricity from solar and wind with battery storage, and sometimes 100%.
And these places are still in the early stages of the transition. Plenty more can be done.
I am not going to pretend that I know how much energy South Australia gets from solar and wind. But the fact that you put England in that list makes me think that you have no business speaking about this issue either.
Not to mention that even Californian legislators recognize that they dump much of the clean energy they produce because there is no need for it when is produced and then import dirty energy when hey need it. Sure if you compare energy produced with consumption you get the impression that a majority comes from renewables, but it is not so in practice.
“. . . a naïve observer might conclude that the rising share of new renewables (solar and wind) will usher in an era of falling electricity prices. But in reality, the opposite has been true.” Vaclav Smil, Numbers Don’t Lie, p.172
@@pintiliecatalin I'm just going off something I heard Englishman Robert Llewellyn say the other day. Perhaps I misheard him. But I do see that Carbon Brief have published, about three weeks ago, a very interesting report (based on data from the National Grid) showing that the average contribution of fossil fuels to the National Grid in Great Britain has dropped from 74% in 2009 to 26% in the first part of 2024 - and with the most recent four months showing a steep downward trend.
In California, it appears that the average contribution of wind, solar and hydroelectric has been above 60% for a couple of months now.
I don't know what planet you live on, but here on planet Earth, the global electric supply is rapidly shifting away from fossil fuels.
@@dzcav3 Can you imagine what it's going to cost when the risks to infrastructure from the warming climate and the rising sea levels make it impossible for insurance companies to operate in most places?
@@dzcav3 Vaclav Smil's Numbers Don't Lie is four years old, and the cost of PV continues to fall. He may have been looking at overall electricity prices that have a lot of other factors affecting them. Utilities have been raising their prices for transmission and distribution, for example. The Number that Doesn't Lie we might want to look at is Power Purchase Agreements for PV going off at 2.2 cents per kWh.
The primary energy fallacy. Excellent analysis as usual.
Very sobering discussion on energy!
Yes, very sobering. We currently don't produce enough electricity to convert all fossil fuel cars to electric.
@@milofonbil True at the moment, but we can easily keep up with the gradual changeover of the auto fleet from ICE to EV. That changeover is not happening overnight.
All of the points in the video are valid, but I do believe consumption will still go up - due to energy abundance, we will start to do things that are currently expensive and not feasible - desalination, lots of air-con for far more people and places, etc. But you have strong point, I admit.
Also manufacturing e.g Graphene is expensive because of the high energy required to produce it. Get the cost of energy down and watch as companies rush to produce large scale quantities of it.
If energy usage starts to drop significantly that means price of energy will drop. If energy becomes cheap we will start to use considerably moore. In colder climates that means raising indoor temperature and in warmer climates that means moor AC.
We would also see traveling get much cheaper, so we would see more traveling.
All taken together there is no way we will reduce energy consumption to half.
@@Rohan4711 The point is that we don't need to replace what we're using today. We only need to replace the fraction of it that is not wasted. Of course electricity usage will increase if it's cheap, but as long as it's clean, what difference does it make?
I don't think we'll be looking at energy abundance anytime soon, as adopting these technologies will take quite a while. We've become used to binging on cheap stored solar energy (fossil fuels), but we'll probably have to adapt to fluctuating energy availability, as we rely on more renewables. Highly energy intensive activities might have to wait until a windy or sunny day.
1:45 I agree that the Adams Curve will not increase. People don't consume more energy simply because it's cheaper. This is true for home owners, renters and commercial properties. This is clearly one of those situations where the Microeconomics (supply and demand curves) do not really apply. It's like keeping the cost of of vegetables and grains does not increase their consumption. (albeit, creating addictive food probably does)
A secret! Supply and demand curves almost never apply. Still, they keep a lot of economists employed teaching them to naive undergraduates.
You are forgetting to account for industries that are currently held back by price of energy. Get the price down and watch as new industries start popping up and raising demand for energy. Like in your example cheaper vegies does not increase consumer demand but it does increase demand from the snack and food indistries.
In fact we have clear evidence in Europe for the last years that price of energy has a major impact on consumption. Due to the war in Ukraine the energy prices increased sharply. Many industries shut down completely and almost all buildings lowered indoor temperature considerably during the entire winter.
As prices backed down to normal, the temperatures was restored and companies that didn't go bankrupt restarted energy intensive processes.
Pretty decent treatment of the topic. The substitution method includes some efficiency swapping as part of those graphs. Real simply, most places, converting as much light traffic/transport as possible to electric as can be done and cleaning the grid generation sources toward solar/wind will return huge benefits in reducing primary energy use. It's been encouraging seeing the attention applied to heat pumps the last 10 years and especially in their efficiency in lowest external temperatures for things like space heating. Now, to assure electricity prices don't rise...
Small channel, extra quality
Very nice, only thing that I don't like is sort of ignoring the battery problem. Solar/Wind are variable sources of energy, you can't make them a backbone of your country. Solving this issue with chemical batteries (specifically ones with heavy metals that can't be sustainably mined en-masse, such as lithium-ion) is a horrible idea, and although I guess that isn't what you implied, a lot of people think that just throwing the tesla style battery farms at things would solve everything. Energy storage is its own problem. Frankly there are some solutions to this:
1. The one you should use whenever possible and viable - water reservoirs
2. Alternative backbone (hydro or nuclear if no river)
3. Low-cost, weight-ignoring battery systems - iron oxide batteries
Feel free to correct me or ad-in something.
Thing we can agree on is that neither of these options contain coal, oil or gas and they are NEVER a better option.
1 sodium ion batteries, much cheaper.
2 large fleet of bidirectionally grid-tied EVs = massive distributed storage.
3 green ammonia, and many other storage options, currently under development
9:24 I think there is a mixup with orders of magnitude here, if the intention was to discuss the ”family car” size.
Assuming only a %5 efficiency loss from using energy storage is completely absurd. The existing *serious* grid storage solutions aren't even close to that. That's basically a figure for if you were using lithium batteries under perfectly ideal circumstances. Plus the idea of trying to build your entire grid off of lithium ion batteries is extremely silly because of their high cost and need to be replaced in a few years.
Sodium ion batteries. Much cheaper.
10:39 Fireplaces are even worse... 10 kWhs of primary heat worth of wood. 85% efficiency only refers to the conversion of wood to heat energy - combustion energy. The "overall efficiency" is far less, at about 50% because the combustion efficiency does not count the inefficiency of radiating the heat into the room with the fireplace. Furthermore, the energy that it took to get the wood from where it was harvested to your woodpile is not counted. Burning wood may be "carbon neutral" but burning wood emits far more than CO2 and water.
The Technological Progress is also the reason . Computer Chips Have Become More Powerful While Consuming Less Energy and Light Bulbs Have Become More Efficient too
great video like always
You have the right analytical approach same as we do in our analysis in my company. Thank you for your nice illustration.😁
Efficiency in all consumption allows less materials used which is a win/win for Nature and Humans!!
Cost declines increase demand only for elastic commodities. Electricity for residential use isn’t particularly elastic in demand for most homes.
Don't forget that local solar helps cut down line losses, further reducing heat.
Cutting line losses is a good thing. The heat produced by line losses is not relevant to climate. It's many orders of magnitude too small. The sun provides a kilowatt per square meter at the earth's surface, and the surface of the Earth has a LOT of square meters. One square km is a million square meters, so a terawatt of heat energy. That's a thousand times the output of a large power plant.
Fully with you. I've similar conclusions, but your presentaton was excelent. I will link to it in social media.
10:59 I think you are confusing primary energy with net electricity produced and electricity at the meter. Once electricity is produced, there are transmission losses. I do agree that a resistive heater is 100% efficient in converting electricity at the electrical outlet into heat. The emissions are "handled" at the power plant. So-called "renewable" power plants burning wood pulp from clear-cut forests producing electricity are 35% efficient in producing electricity and then suffer transmission line losses to the meter at your home. Again, the emissions are "handled" at the power plant. Your final point is that heat pumps are more efficient than resistive heaters. Why not use passive solar?
Well done Michael. I absolutely love this. Subscribed.
I am telling this story for a realy long time, but it is sometimes difficult to convince people of this logic. You explained it well. Now I can use this video in the future.
Thanks for your video, which seems to me to be well researched and clearly expressed.
2:06 Sorry to be a nit-picker here. I think you are over-complicating things here with Power, Energy, Heat and Temperature. The SAE measurement for energy used in your 2009 (15 years old) Lawrence Livermore reference is in Quads or quadrillion of BTUs. The modern metric unit (the rest of the world uses) is Joules. A Quad is 1.0551E+18 joules. Heat and Watts are units of work or energy. Power is work per unit of time. Eg Kilowatts/hr. The "Rejected Energy" is wasted energy due to conversion inefficiencies. Eg. Steam-powered turbines used to convert fossil fuel to mechanical energy are only 35% efficient at most. Solar panels are only 40% efficient. In transportation a car engine may only be 35% efficient in converting fossil fuel energy into mechanical energy. The transmission and the tires are inefficient as well. Temperature is a measure of thermal state. A difference in temperature can be used to produce energy.
Your comment going through the science is irrelevant. The point is that different sources are typically used at very different efficiencies so just quoting how much energy each source has is useless when comparing sources.
You have a strong point with the efficiency. The video compares energy gained from burning coal to electric energy. That is two very different types of energy. Electrical energy is nice as it is versatile and easy to move. However it is very expensive per unit of energy.
The video completely skipped this and just count energy. Simple, but highly misleading.
This is the reason that it is uncommon to use electric radiators. They are 100% efficient, but compared to using other forms of heat energy or using a heat-pump the 100% efficiency is still bad.
Claiming that we can reduce heating a lot with heat pumps assumes that we hardly use heat pumps today. In most parts of the world that assumption is not true.
@@Rohan4711 google: "According to the International Energy Agency, in 2022 electric heat pumps met only 10% of heating needs in buildings globally.Jun 12, 2023"
One of the best videos ive watch. Cudos man
Rejected energy! So obvious, yet I'd never once considered it. Great explanation, TY. this is the first time watching your content, subbed!
You didn’t consider the fact that we are transitioning into the AI age and new GW data farms are going to be opening left and right which will drive demand like crazy
Here’s a simple formula to calculate the energy in gasoline. (volume * density * hydrogen energy * efficiency) ÷ volume = gasoline energy. Here’s a simple example, gasoline density is 2.85769 kg per gallon, so (2.6918 * 2.85769 *33.33333 * 13%) ÷ 2.6918 = 12.38333 kwh per gallon of gasoline. Here’s another example, 8.1 gallons of gasoline has a mass of 23.147 kg * 13% equals 3 kg of hydrogen, so if you drive 371.5 miles and burn 8.1 gallons of gasoline that’s 45.86 miles per gallon of gasoline, or 16.05 miles per kg of gasoline, or 123.46 miles per kilogram of hydrogen. MPGe is actually miles per kilogram of hydrogen, NOT miles peg gallon of gasoline.
4:13 Your source: Our world in data, energy-substitution-method. To ‘correct’ for these different methods of accounting, researchers can apply the ‘substitution method’. This tries to adjust non-fossil energy sources to the inputs that would be needed if it was generated from fossil fuels. *Renewables are adjusted upwards* Primary energy measured by the ‘substitution method’ overstates the amount of energy that’s produced. The diagram shows how renewable energy is divided by 0.4 or multiplying by 2.5. The reason for this is they're compensating for the 65% inefficiency that's being assumed for fossil fuels in the big yellow box on the 2009 Lawrence Livermore US Estimated Energy use diagram. 0.35 / 0.4 = .87 (Seriously, there's really no conspiracy here)
15:00 Your assumption of storage losses may be very low. Energy to charge and discharge batteries is not 95% efficient. Also batteries tend to "leak" energy, they're not like gas tanks that don't leak.
90% efficiency for a lithium ion battery is reasonable.
In addition not all energy will be stored in batteries. Pumped hydro is about 70% efficient. Flow batteries are also about 70% efficient.
It is more complex than presented in the video.
Inductive cooktops are awesome. I just tried a gas stove and it doesn’t even compare with my inductive cooktop. And the inductive cooktop works off my solar panels.
Agree.
Nice! On the other hand, we are re-industrializing. So we'll need more power for that.
Two factors which will slightly impact the analysis.
The huge amount of energy used to extract, refine/compress & transport vast quantities of fossil fuels will no longer be required, however, Artificial Intelligence data centres will become ubiquitous. Each centre consuming the same power as a small city. From a total energy perspective perhaps they’ll cancel each other out?
If electricity cost goes down and the grid can handle it we will see a lot more AI data processing.
They will also use more energy per area with newer generation of AI computers, so we might not need that many more data centers, but each one can use a lot more power than they do today.
Today AI might use 1% of electricity. According to Nvidias CEO the machines they will release in 5 years will have about 1 million times the computing power. Even if that would be 100 times more energy efficient that still comes to 10 000% of all of today's electricity.
That will not happen, just because we will not have the electricity or the grid to handle that load and that energy cost would likely be too expensive. Knowing what projects are out there in all sorts of fields just makes me wonder how this video came to the conclusion that we will reduce energy use for the world in a short while to half.
AI datacenters are overhyped as a driver of energy consumption
Increasing EU electricity demand by 10% would require 800 million H100s, which would cost $40T. We're about 4 orders of magnitude below that
@@SizeMichaelIf Nvidias CEO is correct in what they will deliver in the next 5 years then it might just take 800 to 8000 computers. That sounds like very few AI computers to me. Also increasing EU electricity by 10% in 5 years takes quite a lot of effort and money.
AI will be far from the only thing wanting more electricity. Things like electric vehicles, green steel production, increased production of goods inside EU due to new toll fees are a few examples.
We could use 30% more electricity in 5 years if we can get it at a decent price, like euro 0.1 per kWh.
Finally, a video of solid human logic, numbers and development. I have just watched 30 bad videos on engineering and history and they were just made for clip bait and poorly put together. You, on the other hand, have a solid product thanks.
Excellent video! Did you add in the large increase in power that will be used in the Future for AI LLM's data centers?
Most of those data centers are already built. And any new ones (or rebuilt) are substantially more energy efficient. LLM and other AI is already existing and broadly used, there is not a lot of expansion needed foe that.
Also if you check out Intel and AMD latest processors, they are putting AI co-processors right in the endpoint device to avoid a lot of network chatter and datacenter requirements. The AI processor actually makes the CPU and GPU more efficient by properly distributing workload for the processor best suited for the job. So there is not really any more energy requirements for the new AI processing.
The worry about data centers is all more petroleum industry FUD rhetoric. Anything running in a data center is a lot more efficient than it would be without the datacenter, so they are reducing global electricity demand by existing.
The real worrisome use of electricity is crypto mining, uses way more electricity than AI ever will. Still up in the air if that will be a net benefit to society or not.
Excellent analysis.
You are a Smart man and educated in physics and engineering. Thanks.
The outcome will be a world where the total energy consumption will drop dramatically in the next 20-30 years.
If energy prices goes really high we will see drops in energy consumption and all sorts of other problems.
If prices stay consistent or drop we will see energy use increase.
At least that is the conclusion by energy researchers, economics and all energy producing companies I have read about.
@@Rohan4711 Well, I do not agree with those conclusions. energy is too much regulated by now by the governments for "green reasons" and geopolitical as well, so that the price is not longer a function of demand VS supply. it behaves differently. it is not a free market. where i live the electrical cost is dictated my government and most electricity is produced by government so they decide the cost based on the true cost it cost them to produce and not by free supply and demand equations. electricity and energy in general will drop all over the world as the video is explaining correctly and governments will make sure the use of energy is efficient so the demand will be kept artificially low.
@@AY-dw4om Do you agree that the demand for energy depends on the price for the end user?
The price can be both based on real production costs or in most cases some form of taxes added on top, so there is some politics involved in the price.
In many countries the price before taxes is set on the spot market. That often means the most expensive energy production source currently in use has a major impact on total price levels.
@@Rohan4711 No I do not agree. demand for energy is mostly based on needs. you do not buy more fuel for your car because its price has dropped. you buy the amount of fuel based on how much you drive your car. same with electricity use use at your home or factory - as much as you need regardless its price. there are commodities that their usage is not based by its price but the other way around. if the demand for energy drops because the use has dropped as explained to great length in this video, then the opposite happens: energy prices goes down due to low demand.
@@AY-dw4om Well, he claimed that energy use has dropped based on data up to 2020 from ourworldindata. Using that same site you now have data until 2022, and the energy use is ever increasing except for a small blipp in the curve for 2020. That blipp is due to COVID-19, so clearly an abnormality.
The video claimed that falling energy usage is the trend, but data does not support that.
This is an excellent analysis. Thank you.
There another school of thought that as energy cost drop, be it from cheap solar, renewable, BEVs, society had always expanded the energy consumption per capita. AI training compute centers will consume giga-whrs, $coin mining, active carbon capture. Even robotaxis. If $/mile goes from $3 to $.5, ppl will hail rides much more, drive across town to meet for coffee, frivolous convenience shopping online. Amazon is an example. If shipping is free, ppl will buy a $3 doodad & have it deliver in hours. Most ppl mentally estimate the cost of driving to decide if a trip is worthwhile. If robotaxi cost next to nothing & one can do all the things one does at home while being driven, it encourage more mobility.
Mobility isn't just consumed it's also an input cost. For example one of the greatest feats of movement in the modern world is large-scale shipping. It beats pipelines on cost. What happens when LTL transport goes to pennies? It should even cut into FTL for trucks.Everyone gets wealthier.
So, on net congestion, there’s a lot of talk about that here in the Netherlands. But if you need so much less energy, and you have techniques like V to G, and V to X, would that already take care of that problem or do we still need the grid to be much ‘heavier’ ?
We need the grid to be heavier, because we will mostly use electricity for energy.
7:45 Net Zero: a target of completely negating the amount of greenhouse gases produced by human activity, to be achieved by reducing emissions and implementing methods of absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Net zero involves passive solar by orienting homes towards the sun for heating in the winter and overhangs to shade windows in the summer. Other components of Net Zero involve not wasting energy. For example heat exchangers are used to bring in fresh air into a building without bringing in heat with it during the summer and not leaking out the heat out during winter. Hot water heaters and clothes dryers based on more efficient heat pump principles rather than resistive elements. "Electrify everything" ignores transmission line inefficiencies. Relying on only "Wind, Water and Solar" ignores the fact we need to supply a base load. There's no sun at night. There's no wind when the wind doesn't blow. Many places are far away from hydropower. We should be looking into Thorium-based nuclear energy for providing the base load. Thorium cycle produces very little nuclear waste and does not produce long living nucleotides like Plutonium. Thorium is 4x as abundant than Uranium. In comparison, only 98% of Uranium fuel becomes nuclear waste.
Ever heard of a battery?
@@OffgridApartment Yes, of course. Batteries, chargers and inverters are nowhere near 100% efficient. Have you ever heard of a Kill-a-watt? Assume your battery can't be depleted below 20%. Using a Kill-a-watt (or equivalent) energy meter, charge your battery to 100% and measure how much energy that took. Then discharge it back down to 20% and see how much energy your inverter produced. The ratio of power out / power in is the battery, charger and inverter (some people call this a "generator") is how efficient it is. Many people in the world can't afford do buy these so-called generators. And, yes, they may use DC lighting to remove the inverter.
@@OffgridApartmentthere is no way that current battery tech is sufficient to be able to ensure wind, solar can provide base load. And crypto and AI are proving to be a new massive demand for electricity?
Heating from solar is problematic, because you need heating in the winter and you get maybe 20 % of solar in these month. So you would need to overbuild solar plants by a factor of 5 and solar panels are not free. Neither cost wise nor resource wise. And I dont think we will ever have batteries big enough so store enough power in the summer to last us all winter.
Seasonal fluctuations cannot be covered by batteries. This is one of the reasons why we need something like green hydrogen. That is not really competitive yet, although briefly, when the gas prices skyrocketed, it suddenly was for a while. So we are not so far away from that breakthrough. Cheaper catalysts would probably do the trick.
The best way to put this is, that a power plant is its own largest customer. for simplest metric, They consume 3, 1 is waste, 1 powers themself, and 1 is sold to consumers.
Well this just sold me on solar/battery/heat pump for my house build. Dreaming of an electric car. Imagine the efficiency
Very nice video and explains very overlooked concept - efficiency.
But I wouldn't be myself if I didn't point out certain things that were overlooked for brevity!
Both batteries and electricity overall will become far cheaper - at least 2-3x drop for batteries (/kWh) and ~10x lower for solar electricity (likely multi junction printed stable perovskite PV).
Generally speaking, so much lower prices will increase availability and sales not only for consumers who wouldn't be able to afford it otherwise, but larger consumption for _normal_ consumers.
As for batteries - more people will be able to get electric cars, or even small vehicles like scooters since one of the main cost will drop extremely.
Electric airplane travel will likely become multiple times cheaper, this creating much higher customer base, and therefore more flights.
Similarly just cheaper energy might make things like heatpumps unnecessary or even economically unviable for many uses - COP drops greatly when you try to heat something above 100°C unless your source is way above ambient.
On top of that, with possibly 10x cheaper electricity some processes that would be deemed uneconomical today, might become completely mainstream.
Just some examples - water desalination, construction material synthesis, long term heat storage, methane storage/synthesis, closed loop farming and so on.
It's not a bad thing that actual energy usage might increase if it goes towards building something stable.
Also with cheap electricity and higher battery density you might expect people trying to drive faster to save more time.
I already have solar, ev and heatpumps (3x: air-water (home), air-water (hot water), air-air conditioner) and it feels like magic
Are they lower repair cost? Source?
As shown on screen when I say it, source is Consumer Reports
8:33 "Same sticker price as internal combustion engine"? Even with a HUGE government subsidy, the base model Tesla Y you quote (Rear wheel drive only) is least expensive model. All others are more expensive. The subsidies essentially means that everyone else that is paying for Teslas with inflation, since we don't have a balanced budget. When the US Govt "prints" money, the money is borrowed into existence and dilutes the money that's already out there. None of the car makers can sustain $120,000 per vehicle cost of production versus the price on the car.
Long range all wheel drive model Y ~$48k with no subsidies. Average new car in the US is about $47k. Seems pretty comparable to me. Long range model Y rear wheel drive is ~$44k with no subsidies. Seems cheaper than average to me. Also, let’s not talk about the US subsidies of oil without which fuel for ICE vehicles would double if not triple.
@@OffgridApartment I'm assuming you mean no subsidies to you in the form of a rebate. There are concessions for companies to bring in jobs - property taxes, corporate taxes, etc. I rented an electric car the last time I needed to go to Denver. Who pays for the "free" charge point locations at the libraries or car dealerships. There are "free" charging stations where I work. Biden has promised all sorts of nation-wide charging stations. I've not seen a single government charging station yet on any of my electric charging apps. Who pays for those? It's all coming out of our, our kids and grandchildren's pockets. Many of the people driving cars using fossil fuels are paying for people buying electric cars through carbon taxes. They could be saving to buy a new electric car if they didn't have to subsidize electric cars for those that can afford them now.
When we run out of things to argue on one point, it's easy to point at something else. It is true that oil is heavily subsidized the world over -- 5.9 Trillion USD in 2020. But arguing that oil is being subsidized doesn't change the argument about electric cars. With energy subsidies, the true cost of energy is hidden from the consumer.
The Lawrence Livermore energy maps are so revealing. I'm just wondering why you chose an old one (2009)? thanks for a well presented video showing just how wasteful fossil fuels are between 'primary energy' and getting work done.
thank you for this information most of it I could follow and understand
Wouldn't electrifying rail and busses be a more efficient way to use electricity to move people in cities?
Thete is 1 error in the slides.
Outlet to wheel is 30-35 kwh/100 miles not 30-35 kwh/miles
But overall interesting perspective!
Can you make a video about the impact of AI compute on the electricity consumption out to 2050?
This is a major wild card in my opinion… much more so than Bitcoin or other proof of work blockchains AND less than 5 years of data arguably🤯
I think AI is overhyped as a driver of energy demand. Increasing EU electricity demand by 10% would require 800 million H100s, which would cost $40T. We're about 4 orders of magnitude below that
Really interesting video. Thank you. I'm curious about how home solar production numbers are accounted for. What happens to the increasing amount of electricity being generated by homeowners etcétera? How is this factored into the numbers?
For example I have effectively gone off-grid since November 23 and I'm producing and using over 1Mw per month. Multiply this by a few million and it obviously will make a huge difference.
Yeah, self-consumption might mess up the data as it becomes more significant
For the most part, the data is collected, as inverters have SIM cards, and report their info to the manufacturer/installer, but most countries don't track this in a centralized manner like they track utility scale production
great video. Thanks
Lots of interesting discussion. But you didn't mention the waste heat lost in the batteries for solar. That's got to count for something, no?
I'm a little confused about why you think that nuclear power is going to go away, especially by 2050. China, India, and France have made huge investments in nuclear energy in the last ten years with no end in sight. Small modular reactors are being developed by several countries and major corporations. Microsoft and Google have already expressed interest in using SMR technology to power their mega data centers completely independent of the grid. SMR technology is probably the best technology for powering large ships, producing synthetic fuel for aviation and spaceflight, and also for extra high-energy industrial processes like steel and aluminum production. Do not get me wrong. I absolutely believe that wind, water, and solar energy are extremely important, and we should build a hell of a lot more capacity, but nuclear power is a powerful tool for generating massive amounts of energy on demand without burning fossil fuel. It seems incredibly unlikely that nuclear power will suddenly be switched off at any point this century.
I agree with you. Any nuclear built today will likely last about 40 years, so well beyond 2050. As production of new plants are increasing rapidly it will be even longer.
Video also thinks energy storage is easy and cheap. It is not.
Another issue is that renewables, especially wind has major financial problems already. As soon as the amount of wind increased a lot in the grid the price falls to low or even negative on the spot market when there is good wind.
Producers just get a lot less income than predicted even when the amount of energy is to plan.
To increase even more requires adding super expensive energy storage.
Next issue is the EROEI that is way to low for renewables and lack of storage means we need backup plants.
In reality the major buildout of windfarms has increased the amount of coal used for electricity generation.
We need a reliable grid that will work even in the coldest winter when we typically get almost no wind or solar. That means we still need full capacity covered by reliable energy sources regardless of the number of wind turbines installed.
It is very inefficient to build lots of plants and have them shut down 90% of the year, but it is still the best way to get reliable power during winter. Should wind and solar pay for the time when plants are shut down as wind and solar provide the power?
Partly to simplify the video, I think the viewers can easily add nuclear back in just in their head if they think it will stay
But I do have a bear case on nuclear: solar is unstoppable, because of the huge value proposition in self-consumption. Therefore, the net demand on the grid will drop to or below 0 at noon, inevitably. But nuclear already struggles with cost at a 95% capacity factor. How will it cope when it's forced to less than 60%?
@@SizeMichael The problem with adding lots on solar or wind is that your production will shift heavily and it will not correlate with demand.
If you only have a little and you have a lot of hydro you can use that storage capacity. If not you will have to ramp up and down your stable capacity plant (normally referred to as base power). That will be real bad for the base power, so it will become very expensive to get that base power. Nuclear is not a great fit for ramping up and down, your best fit are gas powered plants. If you wanted to change to save the environment it will be a hard fail to go this route.
As we have ramped up wind a lot in the world we see a clear increase in coal fired plants.
If we do a massive ramp in solar (to cover something like 25% of electricity production in a country) we will se more of either coal or gas powered plants. A sure way to destroy the environment.
If you have a month with real cold weather in the winter with hardly any solar and hardly any wind it does not matter how much your peak capacity is. You will need to have backup plants that can cover all your needs even in the coldest winter. Since they will have low utilization you will need to pay for them even when they are not used for 90% of the year.
It is just a matter if you pay with general tax or put the cost on the price you pay for being connected to the grid.
What about datacenters?
With storage you will even dekrease consumption, because you will eliminate the need of balancing the electric grids that contributes to more losses than LION energy storage, and also WWS will lower the need of high voltage long distance transfers (because of more local generation nature), that also contribute to a lot of losses.
Assuming you have storage in a few areas you will still have issues with balancing the grid, just not as bad.
Losses when charging and dischargeing a battery at high rates is higher than today's balancing losses.
Water pump storage at good locations has lower losses and lower cost than battery storage.
Main advantage of battery storage is quick and easy installation and you can increase the storage size over time.
It appears that in your examples you assumed solar to battery storage, and battery storage to alternating current electricity is 100% efficient (or has 0% heat loss/rejection). This is not true. Wildly better than burning fossil fuels for sure.
Towards the end, I add 5% loss for storage at the grid level
The loss may be greater at the battery level, but most of the energy will likely be used instantaneously, so only a small portion will pass through batteries
0:51 Wind and Solar Renewables Cheaper? FACT-CHECK please. This obviously doesn't count the initial capital investment, the operating cost, including maintenance and the cost of sun-setting. It also does not cover the cost to cover the baseload when the sun doesn't shine (night) or when the wind doesn't blow (wind < 10 Mph) What are your EROI figures to prove this?
I don't remember the source, but per kilowatt generated they are. Once you factor in the cost of all infrastructure they're still more expensive, but that itself is also dropping, meaning solar will be genuinely cheaper than oil (for electricity generation, maybe not battery electric vehicles vs gasoline) pretty soon.
Yes, factoring in batteries, wind and solar, yes, they're still cheaper than nuclear or fossil. On a grid scale. You know when wind blows most? Night. The solution is wind, solar and batteries, plus a sprinkling of other renewable energy sources like hydro and geothermal which are really only applicable in particular and limited geography.
@@jonevansauthorI work at an energy producing company with lots of different types of energy.
Having renewables (wind and solar) with energy storage is by far the most expensive of them all.
Water power is great, when possible. Almost all locations for water power generation has already been used.
Water and burning of waste and biofuels are a great base to reduce the amount of fossil fuel needed.
Most grids over the world have major problems with intermittent energy, especially wind. Several places have been forced to stop connection of more wind as it lowers the stability of the grid to the point where we risk massive power outages.
You are correct that wind often blows more at night. When do you have peak demand? During the day.
This is one reason that solar is a much smaller problem than wind.
6:28 Strawman argument. There is no multiplication by three in anything. Although the example you give for recovering wasted energy from the power plant might be a good one in theory, I think you simply misunderstood the energy-substitution method for renewables. It's simply compensating for the higher efficiency of renewables, in 2009 this was already assumed to be 87%.
13:26 I disagree with your premise of needing a new chart due to "energy substitution method" I don't think you understood how it works. Please re-read Our world in data, energy-substitution-method (I can't post links to the actual resource on TH-cam), then you will understand that energy substitution method is an upward adjustment in favor of renewables, not fossil fuel as you claim.
See my comment at 4:10. The second thing I have a problem with is that your initial premise used 2009 data for your initial hypothesis and now midstream, you are using Europe's figures and your "adjustments" for the primary energy mix. You should not mix apples and oranges and convert oranges to orange juice.
Renewables and maybe nuclear/fusion seem to be the way of the future for energy consumption. But there are hurdles. Our capacity (money and resources) to expand non-fossil energy production is one bottleneck. Building out the electrical grid, installing energy storage, converting existing structures and vehicles is another. Geopolitics and the wealthy with their vested interests in maintaining the status quo is another. What do you think Putin, Koch and Bin Salman really think about decarbonizing?
I'm from Canada, and there are both cold weather and long distance related issues here that lower the ROI for some decarbonizing options although we already generate a great deal of renewable hydro and nuclear power. In 3rd world countries, the lack of stable governments and low investment capacity per capita create more roadblocks. All I'm saying is that the path to a zero carbon future is going to be a lot longer than the optimists hope for - not 2050, maybe 2100 or worse.
Seems like deployment can grow very quickly if the demand is there: Romania saw 300% YoY increase in PV deployment in 2023, and Poland kept a 100% CAGR for like 8 years
It's unintuitive, but Canada is actually pretty well suited for solar. A place like Edmonton might be incredibly cold, but it's as sunny as Bulgaria, because it doesn't have the kind of clouds we get during European winters
I won't say that this isn't on the correct path. But there is a lot of things that makes me ponder the arguments made.
There is a lot of "facts" here that seem dubious.
Thermal efficiency in power plants is more or less never down at 30%, cars perhaps, power plants no... (every percentile of improved efficiency becomes quite a lot of income, and fairly basic efficiency improvements makes a large difference at relatively low cost, though eat space for breakfast so often aren't used in the transport industry due to space limitations.)
CoP of air sourced heat pumps is in reality not all that often up above 3. Being down around 1.5 isn't atypical in winters if one gets snow outside (something most of Europe gets). Still better than simple joule heating. But not anywhere close to 3+. (Ground sourced heat pumps can be up there, but depending on geological conditions, this isn't always an option, not to mention the added cost of even installing it.)
I would however say that reducing heating energy requirements by 30-50% seems realistic. It is however unrealistic to expect it to drop by 75% from heat pumps alone. Adding insulation and going to double/triple pane windows is however going to help reduce heating demands by a lot. (where I live 3 panes of glass is "old", 4 is the new "standard", and going to 5 layers of glass isn't out of the norm along with adding extra insulation to exterior walls.)
The argument if one should multiply wind and solar's energy output or not, is somewhat debatable. In general I would agree and say no.
It is true that energy consumption will be lower in the future. Energy efficiency improvements happens in more or less all industries.
I wouldn't consider an over century old observation of the growth in the electrical market as particularly valid today.
Saying "7% increase in power production per year" is an observation of history, and a plan for the potential future. It isn't a law of nature that shall be followed. Ie, I expect that it will never be touched again.
Given that the curve started meaningfully deviating at around the same time that a large portion of the world had become electrified. Then it rather signifies that a sizable portion of those 7% were market expansion into new geographical areas. Once a region is electrified, it has electricity for its basic needs and won't generally need major improvements in capacity. Unless new applications crop up for this electrification. With new applications and demand, expansions in capacity is required, with improved efficiency, demand goes down, something it has done repeatedly throughout history.
The rise in electric vehicles might nudge forth some new requirements for capacity, but transport isn't an endless requirement, so it will only add a certain amount.
Some people argue that the increasing amount of data centers serving our information driven society will see a major requirement in new generating capacity, but even this struggles to keep pace with the decreasing demand in general.
It is a sane observation that we likely might nearly halve our energy needs in the next couple of decades.
Currently, wind, water, solar, is a decent combination. But I would honestly say that you missed bio-gas.
Waste water treatment plants can fairly trivially be adapted to produce methane for use in both the transport and heating industries, as well as electrical production during winters. (A good example of a waste water treatment plant producing bio-gas is Henriksdalsverket in Stockholm) Bio-gas has the advantage of both being easy to store and fairly efficient to use, where its waste heat has the added bonus of district heating in winters. Europe has though historically not invested much at all in bio-gas production, mainly due to cheap natural gas from Russia, something recent geopolitics has changed.
Your COP of heat pumps argument is nonsense. If you are serious about heat pumps you actually look at SCOPs anyway.
3:32 "All of that wasted heat goes away" FACT CHECK PLEASE A wind turbine is not able to catch and convert all of the wind energy to mechanical power and the electrical generator also is not 100% efficient in converting mechanical energy to electric power. Wind turbines are only 30-45% efficient. The 55-70% inefficiencies are "rejected energy". It's heat. The same goes with solar. The amount of sun hitting the solar panel is not 100% converted to electricity. The amount of light that was not converted to electricity is "rejected energy". If the sun shines on a solar panel with a 20% efficiency rating, 20% of the sun's energy will convert to solar energy in ideal conditions. 80% is "rejected energy", this IS heat.
Renewable efficiency is not really relevant. Let's look at solar as an example.
You have a regular roof. The roof is 0% efficient, it does not generate electricity.
You add solar panels. They capture 30% of the energy. You now have electricity you didn't before.
Sure 70% of the solar energy is lost, but tomorrow it will return. No action is necessary to replace the wasted energy.
For fossil fuels we care about efficiency because waste means lost feedstock. You can't replace gas or oil that is wasted. You have to to go and dig more up.
With renewables like solar the sun comes up and you have a new opportunity to capture energy, "waste" is automatically replaced the next day at no extra cost.
By the way the wasted heat from fosil fuels adds to global warming. The energy that is not picked up by the solar panels and wind turbines does not add to global warming. Also, heat pumps are making the planet less hotter than fosil fuels because they are only using a fraction of the energy to heat the space up that fosil fuel uses.
@JeanPierreWhite is correct. Unconverted sunlight and wind is not wasted heat or wasted energy. It would be there anyway. This is different from fossil fuels dug up from the ground and then burned to produce heat, only to have a small percentage used.
Don't heat pumps fail to produce enough heat durring winter in northern climates? You still need resistance back up for its shortcomings. This will have to be deducted from it's benifit. Having a heat pump for higher temps will make at least your fall heating bills mirror your summer ac costs, though
My understanding is that thermal combined cycle max theoretical efficiency is 40%. You cannot get past 40% no matter what you do meaning 60% is waste or low temp heat.
I don't see thermal nuclear energy generation go away by 2050. Many countries are building new nuclear plants to help them transition away from fossil fuels. WWS may be cheaper, but that is without the cost for storage.
Although this transition will see us use our energy more efficiently, the general trend for increased energy consumption is still there in the background. Energy consumption has more or less plateaued in many countries thanks to efficiency gains, but on the other hand producing wind, solar and battery storage is costing more and more energy. AI is another increasing consumer of energy. If we manage to reduce our cost of energy, I'm sure consumers will find ways to consume more of it.
My pessimistic case on nuclear is that it will not be able to adapt to the hourly volatility of wind and solar, so the plants would have to survive economically off of dunkelflauten or other such multi-day events, and this might not be possible
@@SizeMichael I am not sure how large the role of nuclear will be, but I do see a role for it. Solar generation is going to be significantly lower in autumn and winter. It's not just about multi-day events, it's about the high cost of seasonal storage that you can avoid by building nuclear plants. People and companies are going to want to store electricity (in batteries), heat, hydrogen, and perhaps other energy intensive products. If we invest in large scale seasonal storage, then the price of electricity will not go down to low levels for months at a time. Nuclear plants can also supply heat and I expect that heat using industrial plants will want to locate themselves near them to avoid the cost of large-scale heat storage to bridge the winter months.
We should take a serious look at Throrium-Nuclear power. It was not found to be useful since during the cold-war era nuclear power plants produce Plutonium. The idea was to extract the Plutonium from the waste using the Purex process. However, Plutonium is a proliferation risk. Also, Plutonium plants Eg. Hanford and Rocky Flats are very environmentally destructive. China has taken the technology developed in Oak Ridge TN for the Molten Salt Reactor and improving on it. We should be looking into doing the same for a good, reliable base load.
@@SizeMichaelIf you give priority to wind and solar and only have wind, solar and nuclear then I agree that Nuclear will not work well.
But that same argument would then leave us with only wind and solar. That will be a totally failed and crashed grid, so we would have long and very big power outages. In my book that is not a sufficient solution either.
Also you argue that we get a COP of 3.5 for heat pumps. As an average I accept that number.
However in the coldest winter heat pumps drop to COP 1 and you get almost no electricity from wind and solar.
We can't accept a system where we freeze to death as soon as there is a cold winter.
We need a system with spare capacity, robustness and that can produce power to meet demand. All this at a reasonable cost.
To allow major plants that provides the stability we need and that prevents us from freezing to death in winter we need an economic system that pays not only for each kWh, but also takes the other necessary factors to run a grid.
One such way is to give priority for base plant electricity production in the system. That means when we get most wind or most solar in the summer part of the wind or solar capacity is disconnected from the grid.
Systems like this are already implemented in some countries, where Germany is leading this trend.
My point is that we need a major part of the energy system to be reliable base power with capacity to ramp up to meet demand.
When you need this base power anyway you need to pay for building and maintaining the plants. You can reduce the fuel used in that plant and possibly have them shut down for part of the year by adding intermittent renewable energy.
In a few cases we can do with slightly less base plants due to intermittent renewables, but in most cases it only saves a bit on the operations costs. If you only compare cost of renewables to operation costs of a base plant every renewable project will be unprofitable.
I do like renewables, and own both solar and wind. However when you look at all aspects of the energy system they create significant problems when they start to become a major part of the energy mix.
Didn't you omit from your calculations the massive amount of heat energy consumed by industrial processes (like cement, steel, etc.) and the massive amount of CO2 emissions associated with same?
I never realized that a big chunk of coal was still used for heating!!! 🤯🤯🤯
I think it's mostly in district heating networks, but heating individual homes with coal that burns in their own boiler is apparently also very popular in Poland, probably thanks to their large hard coal resources
@@SizeMichael It's a efficient way to heat cities, nuclear waste heat is also being used to do that in Eastern Europe.
in 2009, 15 years ago. A lot of coal mines have been closed since then. A lot of coal is still being used for electric power generation. Trains continually go from Wyoming's Powder River Basin to power plants throughout the US. China is still building one to two coal power plants a week. The US and Australia sell a lot of coal to China to feed those plants. And with the Keystone pipeline blocked, using natural gas in place of coal has been made more difficult.
His reference frame is somewhere in Europe. In the US as a comparison 90% of coal is used for electricity generation, and is now only providing 16.2% of total US electricity. Rare to see something in the US heated by coal - most non-power generation is thermal process and not space heating anymore. NG has taken its place as space heating for the most part.
@@milofonbil There are 2 Keystone pipelines of discussion, one is up and running and has never not been in the last 15 years or so. What was stopped was the Keystone XL which was additional capacity and different route partially; none of XL was ever natural gas it was always crude/syncrude/dilbit solely. US coal production is basically half what it was in 1999. ~90% of coal in the US is used in power generation and that's dropped to only 16.2% of total US electricity generation. Virtually no electricity in the US generated from crude derived cuts anymore - less than .5% (mostly in AK, HI and LA and a few antiquated, seldom used peaker plants up the east coast). US exports of coal have been in a pretty steady band the last 5 years. Of note because of the slight unexpected twist - although China is increasing generation sites using coal, the percentage of their total generation from coal is actually dropping - because at the same time they're massively expanding things like wind, solar and hydro...
Although my Tesla Model Y is extremely energy efficient and dramatically reduces total energy usage compared to a gas car, it does increase electricity demand. Hopefully, we will be able to produce enough electricity soon enough to power all the new electric vehicles. If Elon is successful in producing robotaxis then gas powered cars will be replaced much faster than most people expect, because one robotaxi can replace ten gas cars. Great news for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, for healthy clean air in cities and an opportunity to replace parking lots with housing and parks.. However, it does mean electricity needs will grow quickly. As you point out, heat pumps will be able to reduce the amount of electricity currently used for low temp heating, so that helps, but some of the other energy reductions you mention do not reduce electricity usage. So we probably still need dramatic growth in wind and solar and we probably need to maintain hydro and nuclear to enable solar by producing power at night and in the winter. .. it will be many years until we have enough battery storage to allow wind and solar to take over completely.
The energy efficiency of a car can be counted in many ways.
Looking at energy from outlet to wheels makes any electric car look great.
Looking at an electric car standing still in traffic compared to an ICE car idling will in best base make the electric car infinitely more efficient.
Or you could take the other extreme and claim that electricity for electric cars will always be the marginal electricity as it would not have needed to be produced if not needed for the electric car. That means it is always coal production. In this case the electric car will be a lot worse for the environment than similar ICE car.
I see both as extremes and the "truth" is in between.
It matters what country you live in, your options to charge conveniently, if you often can charge slowly at night when grid load is low etc.
It also matters what you compare to. A pure petrol car is most commonly used for comparison, and it is the worst case.
Petrol with ethanol mixed in is slightly better.
Diesel is a lot better.
Bio-gas is even better.
Hybrid or plug in hybrid is massively better, especially for drivers with normal commute distances.
Bio-diesle is best of all.
Do you count energy for driving only or do you include production of car and recycling of car?
Do you count energy or pollution to environment?
Do you count cost of ownership per distance traveled or per year owned or combination?
If you own a car part of its lifetime, do you count all manufacturing to the first owner of the car?
Essentially you can get the result you want by measuring and comparing the preferable way.
I am not saying any car or type of car is good or bad. Anything suited to the users needs is usually a good choice.
Electricity in the uk is only 20% of total energy consumption.
That's why the bulk of the video is about the effects of electrification
15:32 I respectfully disagree with your analysis. I hope you take time to read my comments and take them as constructive criticism. I'm on Twitter with the same handle. We can debate this very interesting topic further there with some fresh data and and better understanding of the "substitution method". Here are some thoughts on what you may not have considered: World population is still growing at 2% per year or doubling every 36 years (see rule of 72's). Each new household needs more energy. On the energy saving side of the ledger are energy savings measures like LED lighting, TV's that are LCD rather than CRT, the use of heat pumps for heating and air conditioning, water heating, clothes drying, induction stoves for cooking, better insulation and air-exchangers for homes. I also believe that passive-solar is very viable. I also believe that working from home versus having to go to the office can offer huge energy savings. A large part of the world is still burning wood, including first world countries where it's been re-marketed as "biomass". My take on it: You are right, we need to seek higher efficiencies, but it won't be as dramatic as your video presents.
I made a similar comment. There's huge energy consumption deficiencies in non-OECD. Also, overbuilding VRE, adding nuclear power and making hydrogen economy inroads will make for elevated energy losses/production patterns. It won't just be batteries alone to mitigate intermittence.
Population is not growing at 2% per year. It is growing at ~ 0.85% per year, and that rate is falling. Global population will not double in 36 years, or even ever on current trajectory. Population will probably plateau in the ~10B range around mid century or shortly after, and then decline. Fertility has collapsed almost everywhere in the world. e.g. China now well below replacement, and India below replacement, and falling. In the rich countries fertility has fallen off a cliff. Even in the few high-fertility countries of Africa and the ME, fertility is falling slowly. Serious arguments have been made to the effect that the world is facing a calamitous population bust, later this century.
So, in short: your argument is premised on numbers that are far from correct, and getting more so with each passing year.
On the other hand, it IS true that much of the world is still in an "energy deficit", and this must be corrected. But it will be easy to correct with renewables. The places with the worst energy deficits are perfect for solar.
@@alan2102X have you considered e.g. the monsoons' effect on solar? Anyway, you're right the population is set to plateau, but I fear it will be short lived. Evolution always wins.
@@jesan733 Short lived how? There is no evident plausible mechanism for population to soar; quite the opposite. The demographic transition has proven to be overwhelmingly strong and universal, i.e. NO country escapes it (just that some are slower than others).
India is doing just fine with solar, thanks very much.
@@alan2102X properties that makes people want to have kids will be extremely selected for by evolution. You can check e.g. haredim or other such subgroups' fertility rates for a preview.
No, India isn't doing well with solar.
OK, there's way more to this. First, energy consumption has leveled off or dropped around the world for the past 20 years primarily due to the introduction of an array of energy saving products. Most notable of these has been LED lights. A 100 Watt tungsten equivalent LED light uses only 10 Watts. That's a 90% drop in power consumed, and there are billions of them. Also, how many people use electric or gas ovens anymore? A lot of food is cooked using highly efficient microwave ovens now. And then there's air conditioning and refrigerators, which have also become a lot more efficient. These 4 things represent a huge chunk of overall power that's used, and will lead to less energy being consumed as time progresses, even as population increases. And as far as power sources are concerned, intermittent wind and solar only contribute about 14% to the overall mix, and this percentage has remained almost constant for the past 60 years. Hydropower was tapped out as a expandable source decades ago (no more rivers to dam), and nuclear was tapped out as well (the public's fear of such plants). As far as electric cars and the fact that their batteries hold the equivalent of 2 gallons of gas, this does not take into account that most electricity is generated by burning petroleum based products, powering large generators, and distributing this power via extensive tower-based systems. And when talking about renewables, calculations don't currently account for the enormous cost of building wind turbines and solar panels (and their relatively short useful lives), the enormous amount of real estate they consume, or that new transmission systems are often needed to get that power where it's to be used. They also don't reflect the enormous amount of resources that are consumed in the fabrication of batteries (250 tons of earth must be dug up to build each new EV battery), or the disposal of all these products and materials at the end of their useful lives (which in reality is 10-20 years). Right now, almost all of this is buried in landfills and not recycled.
Poland went from 10% wind and solar to 30% in the past 10 years, with few/no subsidies, and without blowing up its electricity prices
The union went from about 14% to almost 30% in the same time period, although some countries did blow up their prices in the process, as a result of trying to stay ahead of the curve
2:36 This is where you may be confusing things by mixing units of Power and Energy. The diagram is in units of energy while your "clarification" is in terms of power (energy over time, or kWh). The "Rejected Energy" in gray in the example is wasted energy due to conversion inefficiencies. Again, power is (Heat or Work) over units of time. But I see your point: Energy conversion during electrical power production is very inefficient. It results in lots of rejected energy, a loss.
I am not 100% sure if it stays like this, but regional power production means, the transfer losses are reduced for roof top solar. So even less primary energy consumption.
Edit: Spoiler: i guess you next video will then be about electrifying the chemical industry and other new methods of using potential vast amount of fusion energy.
Now the question is how much energy AI and Bitcoin will use.
they just develop a LED 50% more efficient, in 10 Year we will be using ice making as heat pump, keeping the motor inside prevent the inducción heat to go to waest,the ice can be stored for the summer.
Some claims like this are technically correct, but usually twists the facts so far from real life use that it is just misleading.
Like when you see a claim that a particular electric engine has 25% less losses. Sounds great.
Then you really look at the numbers and see that the standard engine had 98% efficiency and the super special engine has 98.5% efficiency at a much higher cost, higher maintenance and decreased lifespan.
In real life the 98% engine will often have a much lower total cost per year.
LEDs of today are really efficient, but they operate at a rather low voltage. So the majority of losses are in the circuit that transforms high voltage AC to low voltage DC. The gains with a higher efficiency LED for normal lighting can be minimal.
In certain special scenarios it can be a lot better.
To evaluate the usefulness we must compare apples to apples.
How does it work in practical applications when you factor in costs and lifespan?
Sometimes you actually get an improvement, but in 95% of cases these "breakthroughs" don't beat the current solution.
My advice is to just be sceptical until you see real life applications tested by an independent organization.
@@Rohan4711 I agree with you the same thing happens with air conditioners
It's all nice to talk about these things in theory. In reality, there are many other practical engineering and cost considerations.
OK Share them
Yes, a big problem is that we will have to expand the electical grids by 2 to 4 times their capacity at the moment. it is a major reason why we cannot go much faster than we are at the moment. However, it is doable and will get done.
@@bobgriffin316 You appear to take the opposite viewpoint to the video author. Why do you think the grid will need such huge expansion?
This can't happen without massive grid upgrades or much, much cheaper storage. If you don't have your own charger, electric cars are too much of a hassle.
Solar can come without grid upgrades. Every building has a roof and most if not all of that energy should be used on site.
@@modarkthemauler Not every roof has a south-facing exposure, not blocked by trees. Not every Home Owner's Association will allow solar energy. Many current solar installations force you to sell to the power company and buy back energy at a higher rate.
Home chargers can charge cars when they're at home. The cars are normally home during evening through morning when the sun doesn't shine.
@@milofonbil You produce less energy but even a north facing or shaded roof is better that no solar. My point was more along the lines of, you don't need to build a extra structure or use up farmland for solar, you can use the unused roof space that's already there. The HOAs and power companies can be forced by the government to let people do the solar install and use the energy created on site, but that would mean a government that's on the peoples side.
At the same time, the vast majority of the population does not use much energy because it is not easy and expensive to distribute and use coal, oil and gas: when electricity becomes more available and everything is electrified, the energy demand may explode. Imagine AC pretty much everywhere, for instance. Add cheap electric cars to that.
Yeah, at a global level, energy consumption is probably going straight up. My analysis was more about developed and developed-ish economies
Are you forgetting about datacenters?
Tesla created both the hydroelectric dam and electric motors. He dreamed up the grid, as well. His vision was for a massless energy base, and we are seeing that build out, in real time.
Mass based energy systems may have peaked with Kelvin.
So, when contrasting the two approaches, more work could be carried out with less energy, in the Telsan world view.
Optimize logistics and infrastructure with electricity, batteries, and hydrogen. Also, use metal powders to produce green heat, as needed.
More facets are needed to fine tune global usage. But, a good start would lead to a good finish.
Didn't Tesla also do work on the wireless transferring of Energy as well?
@@thecocktailian2091 He also had no idea about the inverse square law. You really can't effectively transmit electricity wirelessly due to inverse square law. Wires only suffer linear losses, not inverse square losses. Tesla had one thing very correct: Transmitting power using AC over wires instead of DC. Edison was wrong.
My step dad is an electrician. As a result, I know basically nothing about electrics. Ive seen some interesting wireless power experiments. people getting a lamp and a radio to work wirelessly. Never seen anything major powered. @@milofonbil
Current global primary energy consumption using the input-equivalent method is 170 GJ/capita in OECD and 56 GJ/capita in non-OECD. Let's say non-OECD catches up, so the entire world uses 170 GJ/capita. Then total energy demand increases by 125%, and that's not including population growth. If we assume OECD energy consumption per capita for 10 billion humans, then energy demand increases 180% over today's.
So while unadjusted primary energy production will likely drop in OECD going in the coming few decades, I think it will not in the world in total, because in non-OECD, final energy consumption will grow faster than substitution to VRE.
Also, it seems frightfully optimistic to assume 5% energy storage loss will fix the intermittence problem of VRE. It's not unthinkable that substantial overbuild and some hydrogen economy will make for 50% losses, effectively.
Reports of China increasing coal use, while building more solar farms and producing solar panels for the world, is a conundrum. Climate change must have a significant cost in increased demand for power due to air conditioning, and other adaptation efforts.
Yeah, global energy use is a different story
For Europe in particular, climate change has reduced heating requirements by more than it has increased cooling requirements, so this works out for us, but not for lower latitudes
If I remember Hanna Richie in Not the End World correctly China is starting to peak already in CO2 emissions
The heat pump COP and battery losses are a bit optimistic compared to what I've seen in reality
3:51 "Renewables save more power than they make" No. Not really. No renewables are 100% efficient, not even close. (Conspiracy theory, right. This is why there's the X-files sound, right?)
I completely agree with you.
Video is mixing different things. One part is efficiency, another is the ratio of electricity you get.
For a wind turbine you get essentially only electricity, so 100%. Or you have zero fuel input, so your fuel to electricity generation is infinite. Technically true, but irrelevant. Like comparing apples to oranges.
If I had a plant with fuel that is free and no pollution or harmful waste products and high output, but only 10% is electricity and 90% is heat that would be an amazing power source that would revolutionize the world.