No. There are 296 million serviceable automobiles in America alone, but most of our energy demands come from Manufacturing. If it were easy to switch away from fossil fuels it would have happened already. The issues surrounding alternative energy is and always will be the economics. We built our infrastructure around fossil fuel use, and without trillions of dollars of investment and trillions of man hour investments away from that system, it will not change. Fossil fuels are a fantastically chemical energy dense storage method of energy, whose transport, containment, and use is well understood by modern societies. We can't just flip a switch and have an entirely different system overnight. In all seriousness though, you invest in the infrastructure first. You want the change to happen, so put your money where your mouth is. That is what the oil barrens of old did, which is why we have the system we have today. I'm challenging you to invest in the future you want to see.
No. You forgot to take cost into consideration... If it was any cheaper for industrial processes to be run on electricity they already would be... And then there's the obvious large increase on energy consumption when you try to electrify most industrial processes...
@@matthewdancz9152 We are adding batteries + wind + solar to the grid. Battery storage is RAPIDLY solving the energy wastage problem. (Batteries now have a long lifespan now, and are highly recyclable). Despite what some people say, batteries are changing everything. Businesses, manufacturers, and homeowners are also getting their own solar + battery systems, taking load off of the grid more and more. Also, sunlight is free, and the price of solar panels has dropped more than 80% in the last 20 years (I'm being conservative here). Solar panels have become A LOT more efficient as well, not just cheaper. We don't have to start from scratch on the infrastructure either. Far from it. In fact, battery storage will reduce the need for transmission, making us all more resilient.
On paper renewable energy looks amazing, in the real world it's completely impractical and expensive to run everything from electricity. Electricity is a high grade energy source, it's wasteful to use it to do your cooking when you can use a low grade energy source such as gas. How much does it cost to run your gas cooker versus how much does it cost to an electric cooker ? It's like choosing to burn wooden furniture instead of burning scrap bits of wood and claim that burning wooden furniture is more efficient because there less effort is required to get the same energy output ? Another major problem is 'dunkelflaute'. Renewable energy capturing systems such as wind and solar are 'make hay while the sun shines' system. No wind and no sunlight means no energy is captured. You are at the mercy of weather conditions. Fossil fuel burning on the other hand is amazingly reliable, it's a power on demand system. You can think of it similar to timed tv broadcast versus tv on demand? Renewables have their advantages and disadvantages; and like any other system should be deployed in scenarios where it makes sense to do so. Not all industries are able to work around the drawbacks of renewables. Notice how the video does not mention a single drawback of using renewables.
I’m a great believer in the 80/20 rule where we can do 80% of a job with 20% of the effort and then the last 20% takes 80% of the effort. Skeptics look at how much effort it will take to get rid of 100% of fossil fuel use by looking at the hardest problems to solve. In reality tackling the easiest problems to solve to get most of the benefit and then look at how we can deal with the difficult things.
solar and wind only last 10 years at best. weather wipes them out, flip 5 quarters 5 times a day if they all come up heads your solar farm or wind farm just got wiped out by mother nature. do this every day for the rest of your life. how's that safety and security? reliability is everything, penalties for unreliable energy need to be raise 150,000% on solar and wind, because the companies just go bankrupt after stealing the subsidies and abandon their toxic waste farms all over farm land. solar and wind should be confined to city buildings only. keep your toxic waste out of the food supply and where the toxic waste of humanity breeds the worst of humanity
@@aprilgeneric8027 a quick google search revealed 25-30 years industrial life expectancy for solar parks and at least 20 years for wind parks. Yes building anything into nature sucks. but the alternative is worse.
Brisbane, Australia. In 2019 we spent $16 500 AUD on a 13.2 kW solar and 12 kWh battery system, and we save $2000 AUD a year by no longer getting (paying) a power bill. For the first 4 years our feed in tarrif was 20 cents a kW so we made $2000 for the extra power we export. In 2020 we bought a 2010 i-MiEV and save $3500 a year on petrol we no longer have to buy for our transport needs. Just in that time we've saved / made $32 000 AUD. With a 20 + year warranty on most of the Solar system components we are looking forward to many more years of savings! If Governments won't lead the push to Renewables, it's up to those of us that can to lead the way.
Despite counting dollar savings, which feels great on personal level, solar and EVs go incredibly well together, and their advantage relates to this video closely.
What is the length of the battery life? Mine lasted 2 years and is now dead. By the time the time battery dies and needs replacement, it will have 'saved' you the original acquisition price...
Yep - love the fact that, contrary to the opinions above, we paid for our solar and battery system, benefit from not importing any electricity for most of the year and can charge our EV for nothing and run it very efficiently with no emissions @@blackduck531
As an Energy Engineer working in this industry, this videos are great and show how things are not so straightforward. However, we shouldn't downplay how difficult it is replacing all energy uses with renewable electricity. Industrial heat is not currently possible to provide it with electricity when high temperature is required. Jet fuel is another example of a hard to decarbonise industry. Moreover, we should not forget that electricity transport over long distances isn't cheap, if a country doesn't have much renewable potential, they may be required to import the energy in other forms such as traditional fossil fuels, which is a more efficient way of transporting large quantities of energy over long distances. An example of this could be Japan. So whilst what you are mentioning here is true and important for people to understand, we shouldn't underestimate the complexity of the challenge our generation is facing. Edit: to clarify, I am not against the transition or saying it is impossible. Just stating that it will take the use of many technologies, energy vectors, energy sources and it won't be a walk in the park. But it is definitely achievable.
I agree with you. However I do think that SOME of those industries could be at least partially electrified if looked at from a higher level. Jet fuel: jets are used for transporting goods and people; there are other modes of transportation that could reduce the load. Flying slower can also reduce fuel costs as well. Steel manufacturing: as a building material and there are ways we could swap in alternative materials in certain situations (see glue lam beams). At the end of the day, we will need fossil fuels for some things, but with a bit of problem solving, rethinking material use, and compromise, we can significantly reduce the need.
Industrial applications that require high heat, like smelting ores? We have a natural fusion engine that exists 1 AU away that produces higher temperatures on earth when concentrated than burning fossil fuels could ever supply. There are also plasma confinement systems using electromagnets and lasers that reach temperatures comparable to those that occur in stars, that were developed for nuclear fusion. Don't tell me that the technology doesn't exist for high temperature applications, we're just to stupid to use much smaller systems for industrial processes because fossil fuels are easier/cheaper at the moment. We could just not use Jet engines for non military purposes. We the people don't need commercial jets, we need to go back to a robust train, and ship public transit system, but since you rich people have to have your jet engine planes, just make them smaller. Less mass means higher efficiency, and higher efficiency is the societal goal here.
We don't need to go down to zero carbon emissions to stop climate change though, aviation accounts for about 2.5% of total co2 emissions and we could totally keep that as it is if we fixed all the rest. Also afaik work is being done to find a solution to high heat industries but I can't comment on that as I have too little info. Surely we would need less energy capacity if each end product that uses said energy was way more efficient. Policy could really help with that.
My prayers have been answered: My presenter included this Sankey diagram in his presentation yesterday on home electrification where he looked at "How much power do we really need" (video in preparation) and I said later that everybody should spend 15 minutes with this graph and absorb its central message about "rejected energy".
@@gregorymalchuk272 No I won't: the fossil fuel industry has lied to the public for decades, manipulated and bought politicians, wreaked havoc wherever they trampled ("resource curse") and are continuing to slow down, torpedo and sabotage the energy transition away from pollution and climate disaster. Last week convicted felon Trump asked O&G to donate a billion dollars to his campaign with the promise to immediately wreck any and all meaningful climate and energy action. Same with the fossil aligned Heritage Project 2025. It is pure evil.
Put up 30kW of solar in 2011. 14 years later the grid infrastructure operator is installing batteries to soak up all the rooftop solar to help flatten the duck curve. SE Queensland Australia
Its still misleading. if your town needs 1 GWh of electricity, then it needs exactly 1 GWh of electricity not one third of that, and regardless of what source it comes from. So no the demand wont change a bit.
The more inefficient we have been, the easier it is to make it more efficient. Here in Denmark, we have properly insulated houses and district heating with solar panels making all the needed heat between april and october. It makes the next steps a bit more expensive to implement, but we are still pushing due to high energy taxes. In reality we only have certain industries that are wasting a lot of energy, the usual suspects: concrete and iron/steel production.
@@poulhennedistrict heating in Denmark in fact anywhere have a big amount of heat loss in distribution, you can see that with your bare Eyes only when you in light freezing temperatures have ice and snow melting only above were there are district heating pipes in ground under asphalt and at peoples driveways, there as much heat loss as 1/3 yearly, even more in sommer due to the fact that there almost only needs to heat tapwater in homes. So district heating have to produce yearly about 130% heat out of plant to deliver 100% to buildings. Individual heat pumps are far more efficient in areas where you have separate one family houses. If those one family homes have Solar on there roof it will be further efficiency. In Denmark where you we use a great amount of straw or wood chips in district heating its greenwashed to be CO2 neutral to burn that type of captured carbon, totaly stupidity, captured carbon/ coal, shall not be burned, even more disturbing in Aalborg DK, there is used coal to generate heat to district heating in a plant placed about 10 km from Greater Aalborg there are a significant heat loss. District heating is not, efficiency first, we should adress district heating Heat losses by not open new areas whit district heating, was great, 30-40 years ago but not anymore. District heating should be banned a lot of place.
@@poulhenne I hope Denmark and Nordic countries also do something about their extreme ecological footprint, consumption and waste production... as at the moment they are still (among) the worst in Europe.
@@withoutshadowww Unfortunately they aren't and most Nordic people tend to think they're very sustainable. Homes are very often heated to 21-25 degrees in the middle winter when it's -20°C or even colder outside and people hang out at home in shorts. Even shopping malls are so hot that you have to take your coat off when your enter. Whereas in summer people are using more and more of air conditioning even in low temperatures of less than 25°C. The modern architecture doesn't even take into account that the homes should stay cool during summer as they simply assume that people will get AC. People also have the tendency to drive to every place by car and the diet is basically nothing but animal products. Earning money doesn't make people into more sustaible consumers and instead they keep wasting more money into fast fashion, decor etc. This is my perception as someone from Finland.
Nice video, but hard to follow when you have loud background noise/music and low voice volume. I usually skip videos that do this, but yours is important.
@@edlauber3585 Well, this is really interesting, but please explain me why does Americans liberates four times more fossil CO2 than the average of humain people ? Or explain me how to install heat pumps in Africa, particlularly where the is no electricity at all.
The idea is not to convince with arguments but to hammer the slogan into the audience. After the basic idea one could start to analyze where to start the conversion most effectively, which requires more work than just making noise.
I recently got an induction cooktop. There was a bit of a learning curve, but now my gas stove just seems too slow and imprecise. The induction cooks just as well but with perfect control.
Yes. I was pleasantly surprised when using our new induction cooktop that there no longer was a flood of hot air coming up around the cooking pot. Handles didn't get hot, the room didn't get as hot, I didn't feel as hot. Reminded me of the speed and simplicity of using an electric kettle vs the old way of putting a kettle on a stove.
The newer gas stoves are indeed crap. However older gas stoves from around the 70's are really really good. I also have a gas oven, and i still prefer that instead of an electric oven because it is able to heat up so fast and able to moisturize the contents. Remember 1 cubic meter of natural gas contains almost 10Kwh of energy.
How about we shift our thinking away from providing energy to changing our lifestyles and architecture so we don't use so much in the first place? And stop buying stuff that has no real use to you!
This is how we are supposed to use technology correctly but us humans are too prideful, increasing efficiency then going renewable is the best solution for society as a whole not doing either will hurt further generations
ITS Coorparate USA UK IMperialism Money capitalism world dictatorship enslavery and digging natural ressources for free by occopying other countries and sell it to others while pretending to invade because of human rights, peace and democracy :D
It's not just about money, it's about jobs. Electrification will eliminate all the jobs in the middle. Think about the miners, the maintenance workers, etc. Efficiency requires less people and effort which means you will need more new industries
As an engineer I love efficiency, and when you look around there are so many low hanging fruits. But time and time again there is no political will or imagination. Climate change is not a new problem and it is disappointing how we have not even managed to slow down the CO2 released into the air. The problem is much easier to solve technically than it is solving politically.😡
I am chocked to learn that some countries still just flare off the natural gas from their oil fields. And even more sad that the flaring is only about 92% effektive, releasing unburnt methane. One would think a cleaner burning should be possible. But it is probably just a profit issue as always.
@@poulhenneI saw a documentary somewhere about methane leakage at gas wells. They tested for leakage at many wells and it was so bad that gas is possibly no greener than coal because methane is so bad versa co2.
@@poulhenne I feel your. I should get chocked way more than I am, after learning about energy system on and off for 20 years, you do become numb and cynical. There are a lot of people that spend a lot of time on finding arguments to justify idiotic behavior. But with the economic system we are contently using we don't include all the costs. If it is too difficult to include a cost we just omit it. Thus sometimes when you are pumping oil up from the ground you get a little "natural gas", but not enough to be useful and reqube the cost of a pipeline. Thus the cheapest solution is just to vent it off into the air and let it become others problem. The when people realises this we put on some minimum of restriction, like you will at least have to burn most of the "natural gas". But things like this happen everywhere and when you start to see it can be a little infuriating, and when you point it out people acts like you are the crazy one and use arguments like "but we have always done it this way", "companies makes money they don't solve problems" or "it's not worth it". How many products could last much much longer if they cost 10% more.... It is easy to compare price when you buy something new, but it is impossible to know what washing machine will last you +10 years and be easy to repair. Thus you buy the cheapest washing machine or the one at looks cool, or the one with the phone app. If it is easy to measure we include it if it is hard we omit it. That way we create a world that suchs while convinsing ourselfs that we are doing the best thing. 😥
A diagram of tinned food versus refrigeration energy/carbon given same nutritional value/flavour and price should be on supermarket walls? Frozen tomatoes or tinned bread would not be on the diagram? Freeze dried passata or anaerobic tinned dough mix perhaps? Astronaut haute cuisine.
What we get wrong, is that nuclear energy, could be a renewable energy too. A lot of the fuel, is recyclable... If we only used it in a proper breeder cycle.
Nuclear is a perfectly valid type of renewable energy. The problem with it is not safety or waste, (both vastly overrrated problems), but simply cost: Cost curves for solar and batteries just keep going down with no real bottom in sight. Ten years ago, there was still a decent case for nuclear. Today you have to rely on the theoretical promises of reactors that haven't proven themselves. And the only cost curves we have for nuclear actually go up in price rather than down. In another ten years, I'm afraid the picture will become crystal clear. A nuclear reactor will always require the turbines and cooling systems, even if you can build the reactor itself completely free. We will probably see solar and batteries become cheaper than even that. So no matter how advanced your reactor is, breeder, molten salt, thorium, even if you somehow get fusion working, solar will still be cheaper. The dunkelflaute problem persists both for nuclear and renewable systems, and will probably be solved with a combination of burning waste, biomass, and hydrogen for the couple of weeks we need it.
@@Tr1ploidsolid state fusion could be in the race eventually. It does not require large power plants. Maybe someday when all the vacuum fusion physicists past on or get a clue. The US department finally flipped on solid state fusion a couple years ago. But I still would put my money on solar and wind. The US potential for wind power production totally exceeds our electrical energy needs and even jet fuel can be made from sea water, US Navy looked into that. Distributed solar power on the roofs of houses and businesses greatly reduces the cost and losses of electrical grids. The countries that transition will have a massive advantage going forward.
Where's the energy costs for the manufacturing of those EV batteries? They claim EVs are 80 - 90% efficient, but does that include the production aspects, too? 🤔
Yes they lie and stretch the truth quite a bit to try to convince and confuse people. Evs probably are 90% efficient with using power to move the vehicle. The problem is exactly what you mentioned. Power does not magically appear nor does that ev. That’s the only pro for evs when comparing gas cars as gas cars are only like 20% efficient. They never bring up the fact EVs are 3x worse for the environment to just make then gas cars. Gas cars are far better for the environment in every way, way to many to mention.
None of our appliances talk to each other for what they need. We use refrigerator takes the heat away from our foods but dissipates the heat back to the living room. Then AC has to remove that heat once again to outside. We use shower with warm water that has its own heat source. Our desktop computers generate heat. I can go on, but you get the picture.
In the winter, having a fridge dissipate it's heat into the room is good but in the summer it is not so. We do not have AC so the fridges just make the house unbearable in summer.
absolutely true - the question is how efficent would it be to use these wasted energies..? for showers / waste water it can make significant sense - but e.g. installing a separate heat-capturing system to capture the fridge, computer-cpu etc might be a big overhead for small gains. Definitely nice to think about such things though! :D
I've heard of at least one person setting up their refrigerator to dissipate its heat into a sand battery that can then later be used for heating at night or potentially converted back into electricity.
@@Edsbar THIS, winter vs summer conditions make it difficult to manage heating and cooling and energy use. Add to that the differences between how one generates heat vs electricity and it gets doubly complicated.
Thanks for the good news. But that analysis is still missing a big chunk of the problem because it starts with coal lumps and oil. To be more complete, you should start with a mountain with coal veins in it, or the oil deep in the soil somewhere - getting those out takes a lot of energy as well.
You're not wrong, but this was about a specific existing analysis that starts with lumps and barrels. Basically the 80% figure is deceptive as it measures energy input. So right now fossil fuels are doing maybe 65% of the work. Still not great, but not 80%.
@@tristanridley1601 Yes the 80% is deceptive and it is used because that is what fossil fuel lobbyists and PR campaigns use. They specifically chose that number because it allowed them to claim more renewable energy would be needed than is actually needed.
@@ralpharmsby8040 And why have farms to grow food when you can just get it at the supermarket? That's the logic of just plugging in your EV to get its fuel.
In a very small scale as a family of five that is exactly what we experienced. In the last couple of years we put solar on our house got a heat pump and two electric cars, and we are not burning any stuff at all anymore. Energy consumption went down by 65% and emissions went down by 93% ! The overall investment was quite a lot, but it’s paying back overtime because the costs also came down by 59%. What works for us as a family will also work for countries and humanity. It’s possible so let’s do it 💪
Your home energy footprint is not even 10% of your life carbon footprint, the other 90% is in your transport, heating/cooling, industry, all goods produced have a footprint.Its right on the diagram.
That's great. I wish we had room for more solar panels but even so we run the house and car form much of the year with almost no electricity from the grid. In time the panels will get more efficient of course. Our 12 are rated at 385 W each but there are already some doing 500. We will consider upgrading in another 5 or 10 years perhaps.
My opinion : 1+2 world war was mainly for energy or fossil fuels . Each pv modul each windcraft is against war.But do you think Exxon and all the others will give up so fast, I don´t believe it.
@@henrybrett113that would be a gross oversimplification. The first world war was for territory that austria hungary wanted. The second because hitler was a crazy dictator, but in the second world war, resources, especially oil were a deciding factor. The germans mostly focused on food from france, metal from norway and oil from russia, although they never got the later.
I agree with this outlook completely. I would further add that domestic energy is the way to go every time. Shipping oil, coal, electricity around far and wide makes no sense. Use what you have where you are and instantly shipping costs will be eliminated. Not to mention the amount of energy that is used to go to war to steal oil and other things is astronomical. If all that metal, manpower, oil, equipment and such was put to use to improve the country that you are in, so much energy would be saved.
As someone who lives in a country where more than 75% of the electricity is generated by green sources, I tell you that petrol is still going to be king on the transportation industry for a long time, because it's simply more convenient, as of now there are simply 0 viable alternatives in the market, outside of the niche small distance urban transportation.
This is why you should spend money on audio professionals. Your message is diluted when people are distracted by a questionable mix. Good audio is unnoticed, while BAD audio stands out like a sore thumb. The audio on this vid stands out.
This is a wonderful video! This is another reason why I think Lithium-ion battery powered ships are the future of logistical transportation. At present, 90% of ships are electric, but burn diesel or heavy fuel oil to generate that electricity, with an efficiency of around 30%. If we can get batteries to a volumetric energy density of 1000Wh/L(presently around 700), it'd be only twice less dense in energy than methanol and four times less than diesel. This is important because the efficiency of directly running the ship from this electricity is around 95%, compared to previously states 25-30%. So, what this means is, we could entirely expect the shipping industry to be carbon neutral in the future.
The airline industry could also become carbon neutral with SAF produced from Methanol produced from Green Hydrogen and CCS. ExxonMobil is presently pioneering this process. It is unalike to the Fischer-Tropsch process.
Good comment! There is a massive chemical challenge here that requires a paradigm shift in battery technology. Such a massive step up in energy storage density (from 700 to 1.000 kWh/L - about 50%) requires highly reactive and quite dangerous electrode and electrolyte chemistries. As a chemist, I advise battery manufacturers about the lurking dangers that surround current battery manufacturing and usage, including accident-bound or quality-induced catastrophic failure. Very often it ends in not extinguishable runaway Fluorine-fed metal fires, which often lead to the total destruction of the battery itself and the vehicle. Extremely toxic Hydrofluoric acid contaminates everything, making it very hard for fire brigades to deal with the wrecks. It will need many generations and battery design iterations to develop batteries that pack a 50% higher energy punch which also containing less dangerous chemicals with a lesser environmental impact during end-of-service-life deconstruction and materials re-processing. My chemistry background is high energy chemistry and Fluorine based propellants, so a dying breed as no university provides lectures or research on this Cold War chemistry anymore. However, to safely operate such high density energy storage sources, we need many, many more of my kind to teach and design-in Poka Yoke features to new marketable batteries. Otherwise these new battery designs will literally (!!!) blow up in our faces...
I work at a manufacturing plant built only 8 years ago. One end of the very large building has ovens that heat treat 18K pound forgings burning an insane amount of natural gas. In the other end everyone wears coats in the winter because the waste heat is pumped out of the roof rather than being captured to heat the rest of the facility.
You missed one critical step. Mining the minerals to make solar panels and such. It takes a lot of fuel for every production step before you get an end product that you can use.
i dont understand why and HOW they miss that part when talking about renewables. efficiency of the ENTIRE system should be considered when talking about which way is more efficient and feasable to produce energy. renewables arent bad. its just not the entire solution
@@live.levi.19 That is the trillion dollar question. How much energy does it really take to make a solar panel VS the amount of energy it will produce in its lifetime. They claim such low numbers and short durations but I highly doubt any of it is true, simply marketing wank.
Solar panels are really good. They don't take a lot of minerals nor energy to produce, while generating a lot of electricity for a long time and requiring zero maintenance. True marvels of engineering. Nothing was missed here, DW just didn't want to pack too much into one video. Look up the statistics yourself, you will see how amazing solar panels are nowadays
@@oznerol256 idk how you can say all this. Bc solar panels and all other renewable alternatives do infact use a Lot of minerals and energy to be produced. Major part of it are the batteries. For solar, it's also the panels themselves. And worst part is all the used up panels, wind turbine blades are very hard to recycle. And i didn't even point out the efficiency aspect of all these yet. I'm not against renewable alternatives. Heck i even have a degree in it. What people need to understand is that they are just alternatives. Not the entire solution. An ideal country will have its energy generated from different sources for redundancy, energy security and other aspects. Renewable and non renewable sources both should be used to prosper humanity and our zero carbon goals.
This is why i have always believed that rooftop solar will be a game chnager. The rooftop solar can have the lowest rejected energy as it will travel lower distances when compared to any other source of energy.
@@Ratinevo Definition of the primary energy fallacy. This is the assumption that all of the energy embedded in the fossil fuels we burn today needs to be replaced by an equivalent amount of clean energy. Opponents of change use this to suggest that a transition is impossible - by using a figure that is three times higher than it needs to be.
It is even better if you add heat pumps to heating stuff. Sudenli, you need a third of a third of energy. It is even hard to comprehend how little you need to go renewable.
And even if you replace a gas heater with a heat pump and that gas is now electrified in a power plant, you still only need a third of your original energy need
Just use a heat pump and maybe put solar panels on the roof. That would be pretty smart but unfortunately if the roof is not huge it's hard to cover all the demand.
@@imtheeastgermanguy5431 If I wanted my home to cover the entire carbon footprint of all the people under the roof, I would need 300 solar panels per person to get to the equiv of the 10kWpr of power that every US person uses. The 10kW does not get divied by 3, because you have to use lossy storage to make the RE work, so 10/3*3 right back to 10kW. A new Sankey diagram that covers all the losses in long term storage, meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
This point was made by Dr. Amory Lovins in the early '80s. He focused on reducing the need, being more efficient, at Rocky Mountain Institute. He called this producing nega=watts.
And Mr Amory Lovins has no actual science degree just like Elon Musk, and was a huge fan of using gas for all energy use, the gas industry funds that RMI scam.
While using the Sankey chart is great in terms of showing where inefficiency is, it completely hides the other dynamics at play that keep our systems on fossil fuels. For example, you simply cannot run heavy construction equipment on electricity with current battery tech, as the batteries would be too heavy for the equipment and duty cycle needed, plus the time it takes to charge. Same with large delivery trucks. This is why combustible hydrogen engines are being looked at. Also, 75% of a battery plant consists of natural gas burners to dry off all the solvents and catalysts used in battery manufacture. Also, this video even mentioned some of the energy of the car was being wasted even though it's important to have heat in the winter, and defrost systems on your windows. On top of that is the problem of power density - the amount of power generated or used in a given area. There are many areas of the world where power consumption is large, the area is small, and the generation must stay within that small area for various reasons (jurisdictional, geopolitical, geographical, etc). That means there will be lots of places that don't have the space for solar and wind, and that don't want to take the risk of having critical infrastructure outside their border. This is why nuclear power is important, and SMR reactors have a role in remote, poor sun/wind characteristics, and hugely expensive to run electrical lines thousands of kilometers. The hard truth is, if we try a full on renewables transition now, you will find that you will not magically reclaim the 2/3 wasted energy but you'll be still using much more, that you'll still be burning lots of natural gas to make all the batteries needed, that electricity prices will go up because people won't have choices of energy source to choose from, and some industries like construction are going to need an exemption anyway to run all the heavy equipment, or, you are going to build out a separate hydrogen infrastructure to run equipment where battery weight is a factor (kinda like we have gas for light passenger vehicles and diesel for heavy equipment), and your energy efficiency is going to be awful again. The Devil is, and will always remain, in the details.
This is one of the key aspects that people need to understand but do not in fact understand. I even meet Professors, who do not seem to understand this even though they are interested in the subject. So this message really needs repeating and i hope that you repeat it often in different ways so that a more people understand this. Other channels also need to educate people about this simple truth. Anyways, thank you for finally talking about this!
Energy is heat, so we're warming the planet directly, 3 times as much as we have to compared to what we use. Insulate your house! It's not all about cost savings on your heating bill, as you can now see. Think of the other two thirds that's wasted.
Not to mention that the wasted energy of wind or solarpower production doesn't produce CO2, while the wasted energy of coal burning does produce CO2. So not only is green energy more efficient, the wasted energy is less harmful.
Jeremiah Coleman, of Coleman's Mustard in the UK once claimed he made his fortune from the mustard people left on the side of their plate. This is also where the fossil fuel companies make their enormous profits - they have a vested interest in maximising wasted energy.
@@markhathaway9456 Hi Mark, it might be a conspiracy if they were fixing the traffic light patterns to keep you stationary for longer. TBH there have been so many road works in our village recently that paranoia is starting to set in.
@@gregorymalchuk272 Hi Gregory, as I mentioned I live in a village in the UK, I had to go into town yesterday and you could taste the fumes on the air. Keeping cars out of city centres just makes them cleaner, healthier, more pleasant places to be.
As an engineering science, thermodynamics is important for the various possibilities of energy conversion, and in process engineering it describes the properties and behavior of substances involved in processes. The French physicist Sadi Carnot, who wrote his groundbreaking work in 1824, is considered to be its founder.
There’s something called a duck curve. Transition to renewables can’t be achieved without a cheap and reliable grid scale energy storage solution. Energy storage, the biggest challenge facing humanity.
You have completed missed on "Solar Thermal" use case when you say that renewable energy means only electrical energy. Solar water heating and solar drying of crop are good examples.
True, solar thermal is useful. The efficiency of commercial solar PV was about 12% a decade ago, now it is ~20%, and so large scale solar thermal less competitive, except when combined with thermal storage to enable 24 hour uptime. As you note, water heating (etc) still a very good use case!
I'm wondering since I live in a tropical climate and we use solar thermal for water a lot. In temperate or frigid climates, how does it work out? It works until it's winter then you have to use heaters?
Solar water heating became obsolete with the invention of high temp heat pumps. Solar heating (I have two systems running) have a huge amount of drawbacks. I wouldn't install another one. For example: you need electrical support energy for the pumps. You've got a lot of thermal losses, especially in storage. And biggest problem for me: what to do with the heat when your hot water tanks are full? I have to add: I'm from Germany. We have cold winters and so we need to run our solar heating with water-glycol mixtures. Glycol burns or chars when getting too hot. Although in Germany it is forbidden to waste collected heat, f.e. by feeding it to an outside positioned convector. And most people don't have a Swimmingpool which they could heat with the excess energy. Photovoltaic panels are the better choice for me. A warm-water heat pump does a great job with high efficiency and is quite cheap now.
@@WolfTheTrueKingyes, exactly. Here in Germany a house owner can replace their heaters with the solar just for the summer month. May till September. We use a different type of solar heat collectors in combination with multi-purpose hot water tanks in our basements. This way we can use the thermal heat generated in the winter month to support our heating system, but most of the time it's not sufficient to generate hot drinking water of useful temperature. But with vaccum tube collectors you can still harvest a good amount of heat on a sunny winter day. But the financial benefit is low in comparison to f.e. gas prices. Gas is still "too cheap" to make solar heating economically.
They still haven't become very popular, but combined panels for PV and heat would be ideal. A part of the electricity from PV would be used for pumping the water (or glycol liquid in colder climates) around. This provides warm water and cools the panels making the PV part more efficient, as their efficiency drops when they get warm.
OK first, labeling people skeptical of radical rapid energy decarbonization as climate skeptics is inaccurate. Second, barely mentioned the need for base load power when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing. Third, and probably the most important, conversion to all electric final energy consumption would require at least a tripling of the carrying capacity of the electrical grid. We can not do this on anything like a short time scale. It will require many decades just as it has taken us over a century to create the energy infrastructure we now employ. Talk is cheap and it only takes a short TH-cam video to imagine an all electric future but making that a reality will cost many trillions and take most of a century. That is why reasonable people are are pointing out that fossil fuels will be a substantial part of our energy consumption for many decades to come.
You forgott one significant downside . When there is no wind and the sun goes down, what do we do? Energi storage or reliability to deliver energy should be included in the graph oversight.
All well and good but as an individual I couldn't care less about how and where the energy comes from. All I care about is that I'm warm in the winter, that my car can be refilled to full in 5 minutes and not loose half the range in the winter or be written off if I have a minor collision. However what happens is that every time people start to save energy in their homes it somehow magically gets more expensive per kWh. So not only I have to invest my money into creating efficiency (insulate, buy an induction stove, a heat pump and so on) but the return on investment is very long. For example my floor insulation will pay for itself in approx 70 years (yes, seventy) at the current energy prices. If I get panels that's probably 10-15 years IF nothing goes wrong. Electric cars are getting cheaper mainly because nobody wants them and manufacturers are forced to sell more of them but for what they now gain with low prices and little to no maintenance they loose with expensive chargers, huge depreciation of second hand market values. So again - come back selling me this when it's all nice and cheap and an actual benefit to me rather than another propaganda spin. Everyone knows there are huge losses in the chain - make it cheaper and more attractive, people will switch without needing to convince.
More efficient evs like Aptera can use an insane amount less energy through higher efficiency. Ebikes and velomobiles are also a great tool to reduce energy needs for commuting
I'm just going to mention Jevons Paradox here. Getting away from fossil fuels is good, but it's only part of the challenge. Access to any form of cheap abundant energy is exactly what enables us to extract, destroy and pollute at the rates we do. We need to use significantly less energy.
Renewables have their own challenges with regard to efficiency issues. You need longer electricity grids to deliver energy from one place to another. You have the issue of saving the energy. On a small scale, you can use batteries with a relatively low amount of wasted energy. But on bigger scales, even the so far most promising saving methods like Hydrogen lose a lot of energy - so much so that the amount of rejected energy would increase.
Something else not often considered. The energy needed to extract, process, transport, store, refine, distribute and dispense fossil fuels is immense... Not to mention the equipment and industries needed to produce and maintain that infrastructure and equipment. With renewables, that's no longer needed. Oil wells and drilling rigs. Massive tanker ships, and the energy they need. Storage facilities, and the equipment and energy needed. Refineries and the massive energy they need, not to mention the massive infrastructure and equipment. The tanker trucks to distribute fuel. And the industries needed to produce all the parts for the ultimate burning of that fuel. It all goes away. Sure, its replaced by renewables, but they are much lower maintenance, and much simpler. And with EV's they are much simpler, requiring less industrial input. And very minimal maintenance.
The United States also maintains aircraft carrier groups in part to protect international shipping lanes from pirates. How many times have we gone to war over oil? It's very expensive.
The problem of transportation of renewable energy on big distances is not solved at all for today. So yes, "that's no longer needed" because it simply impossible.
And the "solution" to renewable energy is to triple the size of the power grid. That's not cheap either. And have conventional gas and coal burning power stations with their turbines idling and the furnaces banked waiting for a cloud to blow over or the wind to die down.
I've had an EV since 2016 and is on my second EV now, and can not imagine going back to noisy fossil cars. The old poorly insulated house I live is on its second heat pump since 1998, it alone save a huge amount of energy. Re-insulating the house would be best, but the cost of a heat pump versus re-insulating is currently not worth it. Would have considered solar panels on my house, but as I live above the arctic circle we have not much sunlight in the winter when energy costs could be worth the investment.
@@oznerol256 Current model is a ~5kW Toshiba about 8 years old. The cost to run is irrelevant as energy costs varies by hour, whats relevant is the amount of energy from the HP vs energy put into the HP. This model has a COP ~4-5 which means that with 1kW of power in I can expect 4-5 kW of heat delivered. This amount be reduced when the outdoor temp falls below -15deg C. And I guess it's about 1 at -30. So extra heating could be required, we have a 7kW wood stove as well.
I belive that no we cannot completely replace the fossil fuels , as the renewables depend on the environmental conditions, hence we cannot control the amount of energy that renewables generate
The sad thing that I see happening yet again in politics, is the focus on short term solutions. We see this in energy as well, right now we are still telling people to use less and pay more. We have not solved anything!
and I see the exact same thing here, we speak of renewables as if they are going to solve everything... like I said, we are urged to use less electricity and pay more for it. We have solved nothing, because we have not made an real investments in the networks that transfer energy to and from the end users. As long as we do not solve the problem of getting MORE electricity available to the end users, we are not going to solve anything with renewables.
If you have your own solar panels, often people talk about how inefficient they are 15-20%. 5x less than grid (Wasted energy is about 10-15%) So total useful energy is 13-16% By the time it reaches you, grid electricity average efficiency is 33%. Only 2x instead of 5x! Shows how important local generation is and more competitive than you would expect!
It's not going to happen as fast as we want unless we address the split incentive for renters and landlords. Renters are financially incentivized to be more efficient, but they don't have the power to place things in their homes. Land lords have the power, but have little financial incentive. We will just have to wait for new rental properties to be built according to new requirements, phasing the older, less efficient properties out.
My old landlord upgraded our windows and insulation and installed solar panels in order to take advantage of the feed-in tariff that the UK government was offering at the time. He was in a rush to get it done because they were massively reducing the amount you could get for feeding electricity into the grid and he wanted to lock in the price before the cut off date. The reason for upgrading the insulation was because it was part of the legislation that the building needed a certain energy efficiency rating to qualify. Our governments could make this happen quickly if they wanted to...
Unfortunately most of the housing stock in the UK and in the US is pretty much utter crap and low eff, people are strugling first to get housiing than for efficiency.
Also depends on the system. In the Netherlands most rentals in suburbs are by a corporation without much profit. Rent went up a little but got triple glas and beter isolation as well as solar panels. For that I mostly became an energy producer but there is a grid lock for new projects
The elephant in the room is nuclear: it's both clean *and* reliable. A mix or nuclear and renewable would compensate each others shortcomings, yet all we're talking about is a 100% renewable grid.
Because I have read my science textbook, I know that some energy is lost whenever we change the energy type. However, I was shocked to learn that one-third of our total produced energy is lost, and we end up using only one-third of the energy. I believe we should focus on finding alternatives to address climate change and decrease the amount of "rejected energy."
I don´t believe this figure. I think by all the transforms ,we lose more. But the companies will not offer you anything. I believe ,we have no more than 20% real use .
This is an excellent video, and capturing this efficiency differential is immensely important in achieving sustainability. The critical, timely, energy transition is a massive undertaking, but many of the needed resources are already at hand. Not all renewables, for example, are intermittent. Storage hydro is one of the oldest and most reliable forms of baseload generation globally. It only accounts for a smaller part of the US grid mix, but there are very significant additional imports from Canada, where hydroelectricity accounts for about 60% of all electric generation there. This storage hydro capacity is effectively a massive existing, long duration, grid tied battery. What we need is to commercially re-task all this this from baseload to peaker generation, using intermittent renewable power, when it is available, to allow the reservoirs to replenish capacity. This would allow for the very extensive proliferation of additional wind and solar. Other solutions such as allowing plugged in EVs to feed/sell power back to the grid at a profit when demand needs capacity, and supply cushion sensitive hourly power pricing (do we need 10 million hot tubs and pools heating for the 1 hour, no wind, no sun, dinner hour, when the supply cushion is under pressure?) are also excellent market driven tools available for implementation reasonably quickly.
They put in the music because they’re trying to hypnotize you to believe their bullshit. Germany is in an economic crisis because they went hard “green”
I would like to see this graph have one important, but missing piece added to the left. All of the energy that goes into producing the items used at each stage from raw materials in the ground. The cost to build and maintain wind turbines, solar panels, coal plants, natural gas plants, etc. The cost to obtain the "primary" source of energy from the ground. Think all of the constituent materials of all types that are used to create the energy.
This is not mind-blowing, when you got a scientific background. 1. Fossil fuels are attached to thermal engines. The first and second law of thermodynamics limit the efficiency to ~40% at best. 2. The form of energy plays an important role for using it. Electricity is a very high, ordered form of energy, regarding its structure. Having such a low entropy form of energy, it is very quick to use but difficult to storage because of it is volatile/fugitive.
The "adiabatic flame temperature" of fossil fuels, after mixing them with the stoichiometrically correct amount of oxygen (if pure oxygen, take into account the cost of separation from atmospheric nitrogen) and combusting the mixture, is usually well above 3000 K. In an ambient 300 K world this corresponds to a Carnot efficiency of over 90%. So the truth is rather that actually existing thermal engines are still far away from the ideal reversible engine.
Germany is quite cold, I'm surprised that they don't have more Cogeneration plants. Even low-grade heat could be pumped underground in summer to be used during winter.
@@5th_decile You might be genius. Or you might be wrong. I think you are wrong: 1. Laws of thermodynamics: There is no such thing like an ideal reversible engine/perpetuum mobile. 2. Let's assume: Flame temperature about 3000 K (a little bit high, but let's go with this number). Temperature of the exhaust gases 1300K. efficiency = 1 - (Tmin/Tmax) = 1 - (1300/3000) = 56,6...% And 56% is a very good value, most combustion engines are around 30% at best. The problem is, that combustion engines are only efficient in a very close rpm-bandwidth. So they need gears to widen that bandwidth -> more less efficiency.
I don't understand why efficiency matters here. Solar panels are at best 20%, while wind turbines are a bit better. If we "wasted energy" then renewables end up losing
Not to poo poo on this but someone has to point out the fact that at the beginning of the flow of energy ignoring the cost in The amount of energy that it takes to produce the equipment for wind and solar is rather ignorant. The production of carbon fiber and steel and silicon, which are the primary components of all of these devices, are very energy intensive. Never to mind the fact that the recycling of windmills is incredibly energy intensive and most solar panels are not designed to be recycled. So you have to stereotypically mine fresh material.
Wind turbines are decommissioned just after 20 years of usage (some get lifetime extensions by 5-10 years). But they need at least 15 years of constant usage to be carbon neutral (dependent on the size). Europe has currently over 34.000 wind turbines that are 15 years or older. In the next 5-10 years *all* of them have to be decommissioned. After the decommission, the wind turbine blades buried under pile of dirt, since none of them are recyclable. For 34.000 wind turbines (x3 blades each), that's 102.000 blades.
What's really mind-blowing to me is that so many can't understand that we don't need to replace the amount of primary energy we use with the same amount of useful energy even when it's explained to them. Another thing that's mind-blowing to me is that we burn fuels to generate power, in part to generate heat via resistive heaters somewhere else. Or that we use a lot of power to pump heat out from indoor air, into hot ambient air outside, and then have a different system that use a lot of energy to produce hot water, it's often even quite cold water that we heat up, to a high temperature, that we then mix with cold water again to get the temperature that we want.
Someone recently questioned my calculations that showed a 30% reduction in energy use just by electrifying ground transport and heating. They couldn't believe it would make such a big difference.
We only need to heat water to a high temperature to avoid legionella. And heating homes should not be neccesary if built and insulated properly. Cooling should likewise be solved with blinds and shutters before spending precious power on an AC. But we are so used to wasting energy in our daily life, that we hardly notice it anymore.
@@Paul-yh8km In the video they didn't even mention how much electric power is lost due to long transmission lines. Electricity needs to be used over the short-run because long-haul lines lose it to the air. Yep, all that effort to get coal or oil from the ground and then it's lost to the air.
@@markhathaway9456 There are ways to reduce the losses in transmission. Considering it's dependence on Current, you can raise voltage using transformers to hundreds of thousands of volts, then transport the energy at that voltage. Transmission losses in the US is only 2%.
A large increase in renewables would mean a need for energy storage, which leads to greater losses on the renewables side. Not as big as with fossil fuels, but it's something to keep in mind. Also, there are a lot of other factors, too.
We did a video on this topic you might want to check out! 👇 "This is what's REALLY holding back wind and solar" th-cam.com/video/u-DsDuTceTo/w-d-xo.html
As the costs of renewables and battery storage keeps dropping, more and more old systems will get squeezed out of the supply side due to costs. We are at a time where environmental and economic factors seem to be headed in the same direction. In the sectors where this is not happening very fast (EVs and heat pumps for buildings), and economic choices are not available, good governmental regulations are needed to help focus research and development efforts, and encourage economies of scale. Mining and industrial production will be the slowest in some aspects, as many systems are complex and fragile, and need careful control of transitions at various places in the production chain. But if the economics make sense, those transitions will occur. Unfortunately many of these transitions are happening much faster in China than in the US or Europe, where many industry leaders are scared of change.
They are basing their decision on the lobbying by some very wealthy people and corporations who make money from these bad energy decisions. So explaining it to politicians won't help much it needs to be explained to voters.
They base their decisions on profit, which is only partly affected by efficiency. Other costs like labor, machinery, fuel price and energy price tend to dominate, I'd guess.
This is very good "news", it is incredibly important, and it has been in our hands all along. We just need to move beyond decades of fossil fuel industry... gas-lighting!
And replace it with electrification based on intermittency that will have quite low round trip efficient long term storage systems. New Sankey, same as the old one. In the US NE, energy production from solar is 5x better in summer than in the winter, that spells massive long term energy storage bill at very low efficiency. Or we could just use nuclear that needs no storage at all even though MSRs have built in heat storage for constant heat with variable on demand electric output.
@@johnjakson444 Don't forget about hydro. It only accounts for about 6% of the US grid mix, but there are very significant additional imports from Canada. This storage hydro is effectively a massive existing grid tied battery. What we need is to just commercially re-task this from baseload to peaker, using renewable power, when it is available, to allow the reservoirs to replenish capacity. Other solutions such as allowing plugged in EVs to feed/sell power back to the grid at a profit when demand needs capacity, and supply cushion sensitive hourly power pricing (do we need 10 million hot tubs and pools heating for the 1 hour, no wind, no sun, dinner hour, when the supply cushion is under pressure?) are also excellent market driven tools available for implementation quickly.
This film seems over simplistic❓It focusses primarily on renewable electricity being more efficient for converting primary energy to usable energy - which, of course, it is. But it says very little about the many real world realities of using it & converting to using it. - Transmission losses over distance & the complex grid upgrades needed - Storage: energy density of current batteries is too low for many forms of tranport - particularly aircraft - Overall carbon foot print of manufacturing electric cars is so much higher than making petrol cars that you have to drive 70,000km on average just to break even - Base loads: to cover when wind & sun aren't working - to be emission free these require nuclear power stations - etc It promotes one vald point well but ignores the whole picture.
The heat loss in fossil fuel energy generation is irrelevant here, because it's not counted in the numbers we always see for energy production, which are the "secondary" value. So the ideas you had of how difficult it is to replace fossil fuels are still valid (or as valid as before, at least).
What this video can best teach you is the distinction between an academic analysis of a component vs. a practical analysis of a system. Conspicuously absent is any mention of *cost*. It’s never been a mystery why a 20% net efficient unit outperforms a 90% net efficient unit when you factor *unit cost* of both. Then factoring infrastructure and initial investment… The fabled space pen comparison comes to mind.
Look at Molten Salt Reactors, they include free energy storage in the coolant loop, they can produce baseload heat but have variable electric output taking heat as needed from the salt storage tanks, can even back up REs easily. No other storage needed at all.
No it isn't, DW has been massively behind the energy transition in Germany where good nuclear was replaced with new coal, German carbon intensity is 2x that of France which is mostly nuclear in the electric sector, but that is stil only 40% of the whole primary cycle.
So when and at what part of this spread sheet does the environmental impact come into play with this transition to renewable get added into it ?? All this is on about is gasses on the atmosphere that affecting the planet , what about all the extra open cut mining for all the renewable resources that are required, don't tell that that's not having a impact
Building renewables is not carbon-free by any means but the life cycle greenhouse gas emissions are remarkably lower than those of coal, oil & natural gas. 🔗www.nrel.gov/docs/fy21osti/80580.pdf
Unless there is no electric grid. And the whole of the electricity is produced with the help of fosil fuels. The fact that americans are the most important energy consumers doesnt mean that America is the only setlement of human beeings.
The Sankey diagrams are cool and do highlight a potential for “waste reduction”. However Carnot’s cycle shows there would always be some loss, as does thermodynamics (entropy). The bigger challenge however is that we don’t have a closed loop case for renewables. Today renewables are mined using fossil fuels, the mined material transported via vehicles using fossil fuel. This is where EROI calculations come in, and diffuse sources of energy do not have the requisite EROI as oil. The second part, which was hinted in the video, but glossed over in the conclusion is how does renewable handle peak demand challenges, esp. peak supply would definitely differ (and cant be flexed). Does it then make sense to build a backup gas plant, idling most of the time? And those claiming batteries as solution need to think what scale battery deployment has happened till date. The video truly doesn’t address the key issue - what’s realistic conversion away from fossil fuel
"Rejected energy" are just energy losses in accordance with the 2nd law of thermodynamics. There is nothing odd about it. There are no "electrons piling up" this is just mostly heat energy lost. Our energy supply and demand also isn´t just about this one topic which is efficiency it´s about many topics. Like energy storage, cost, how fast we can add more energy to the system when demand is rising quickly etc. So fully calculate and compare say wind and solar power to natural gas you would also have to include energy storage with it´s losses for wind and solar power because most of the time the way of generating energy is very efficient with renewables (although only 20% of the total solar energy really makes it ever into electrons, so 80% losses on the solar power side) but then you end up with a surplus of energy in peak hours where it´s all wasted even more than with fossil fuels.
2/3 beyond the pail? I’ve always belied we could make this work, I have always dreaded we would give in to pessimism. I use a pressure cooker and I ride a bicycle and since I am human I read and therefore can build anything they can short of billion dollar microprocessors.
This blew my mind. And you know what: that waste energy? It actually also contributes to global warming by *directly* heating up the atmosphere. All waste energy (even from renewables) does.
Not so much, rejected energy is very low grade heat, it mostly radiates right back into space. The heat trapping of CO2, methane are a far bigger problem.
@@johnjakson444 I think I read in New Scientist recently that the direct heating effect from all our energy use is small, but it is growing (around 5% of atmospheric warning by now).
"All waste energy (even from renewables)" Thats not true. Waste energy from renewables (excluding nuclear) don't count to atmosphere temperature rise because it is just transformed direct sun energy which is constantly hitting earth.
And replace it with RE intermitency and short, medium and long term energy storage at eff of 90%, 60% and say 10% round trip efficiency, high cost hours, medium cost days, low cost for months of storage. New Sankey, same as the old one, but most all the losses are in long term storage.
@@johnjakson444Yes, the solution is NUCLEAR ENERGY. It is stable source with low raw material requirements per unit of energy produced. Why to use dispersed nuclear energy (solar, wind, fossil) if you can use concentrated nuclear energy?
My co-op board wants to insist that we MUST replace our broken gas stove from the 1970s with another gas stove, instead of letting us switch to electric - and the NY state ban on gas stoves goes into effect in 1.5 years. I'm probably going to have to fight them on letting us switch to electric now, even if that means we have to use a hot plate until they relent or the law takes effect.
The coal plant my boyfriends worked at for over 20 years has had all four boilers offline since the beginning of January! He said this is the longest hes ever known of any plant going completely offline without atleast one boiler up and running producing power! Another thing to think about when looking at your energy bill and the rates your paying. Is that electricity is traded on the stock market. So the people that died in Texas A few years ago? Didnt have to die because theyre windmills froze! If people on the other side werent playing political games! Electricity couldve been rerouted to those areas with people snowed in!
In the 40 degree Celsius weather in Athens, it's insane to feel the amount of heat coming out of cars when you cross the roads; it jumps from 40 degrees to something that feels like 50. It's sad how uncommon electric vehicles are here when they also create much less noise pollution.
It's not mind blowing, this is thermodynamic law. What is mind-blowing, that 60-70% of wasted or rejected heat from a thermal power plant CAN be used as useful low grade heat. Switzerland uses district heating (i.e. waste heat) from their nuclear plants to heat entire cities. China is following suit. I also find it funny how DW Planet also fails to mention that only 15% of global energy requirement is electricity. The remaining 85% is heat provided by, as they correctly said, inefficient fossil fuels. We could seriously decarbonise large chunks of this sector with newer higher temperature nuclear reaction technology. I'm pro renewables but nuclear uses a fraction of the land and raw material requirements per GWh generated. The real mind blowing thing is researching EROEI (energy returned on energy invested) on the entire lifecycle analysis of each energy source.
you are completely wrong though about heat, you forgot heat pumps. also please actually look into EROEI and dont just use it as an argument while you have actually fallen for an urban myth
@@sirati9770 Eh, that's your reason I'm completely wrong? I didn't forget heat pumps, maybe you forgot heat pumps can only provide low grade heat, anything above 80-90 deg C is thermodynamically impossible. They cannot provide high temperature process heat for any industrial applications. Quantifying energy inputs and outputs, i.e. things humans can actually measure and quantify isn't an urban myth.
20% of global energy is electricity, 30% is transportation and 50% is heat. of that 50%, 50% is high temperature industrial heat (and 50% of that is >400c) that is hard to decarbonize. the rest of heat demand can be switched to heat pumps. the interesting property of a majority renewables grid is that it produces energy surpluses which cause a near zero cost of electricity at those peaking times. this can be taken advantage of through production of green hydrogen which can partially cover hard to decarbonize industries that need high temperatures or high energy density. base load and industrial heat needs means that other energy sources are necessary at least for the next 30 years or so but in the long term, it will likely become economically unfeasible to produce electricity with anything but renewables. unless there is a breakthrough in nuclear that slashes cost and time to build and to decommission, wind and solar with batteries seems to be the way.
@@enricod.7198 it depends, standard SMRs that use water as a coolant have an output temp of 300 deg C. With reactors that use molten salt and gas coolants, we can achieve temperatures well over 600 deg C.
You seem to have completely missed the electrical energy loss from power cables. Transmission is around the cable not through it. This heats the atmosphere. The further the transmission line the greater the energy loss.
But those power lines are used for all power, regardless if produced by fossil fuels or by renewable, so it doesn't really change the result. And with solar power and wind power normally being installed closer to the customers (sometime even on their own roofs), renewable energy actually has another advantage there, too!
@@IgorRockt Then you need to consider the whole context of mining, production, operation, maintenance, recycling and geopolitics of all the equipment used in fossil fuel and "renewable" (=rebuildable) energy sources as well. So yeah it does change the results, greatly...
This video is basically the whole argument against hydrogen. With hydro power u switch input to green fuel, but u keep the middle 2 steps which lose efficiency. And u need to produce the hydrogen upfront, lowering efficiency even further
@@HolgerJakobs It's cleaner in terms of carbon emissions, which is the main drive of the energy shift. However, it's still a system that produces heat/steam to feed turbines, so it wastes heat and is inefficient, like fossil fuels. Also, even if nuclear waste gets reused as fuel (there are good prospects on that front,) uranium extraction itself isn't clean at all.
Agree 100% with the analysis. 30% to 40% is the reduction in energy use we would see via electrification. But that is still a big increase in generation capacity from where we are now and the biggest thing stopping it is politics. An example is the EUs target of 300GW of wind farms by 2050. That is a joke.
Great insights. Most debates on the transition to renewables ignore the 2/3 of global energy that is wasted yet it is the key. Reducing this waste can speed up the transition.
Do you think switching away from fossil fuels is easier than it seems?
It's easy IF we shift the our mindset, behavior, values & rules. Renewables are great, but low consumption is even better.
No. There are 296 million serviceable automobiles in America alone, but most of our energy demands come from Manufacturing. If it were easy to switch away from fossil fuels it would have happened already. The issues surrounding alternative energy is and always will be the economics. We built our infrastructure around fossil fuel use, and without trillions of dollars of investment and trillions of man hour investments away from that system, it will not change.
Fossil fuels are a fantastically chemical energy dense storage method of energy, whose transport, containment, and use is well understood by modern societies. We can't just flip a switch and have an entirely different system overnight.
In all seriousness though, you invest in the infrastructure first. You want the change to happen, so put your money where your mouth is. That is what the oil barrens of old did, which is why we have the system we have today. I'm challenging you to invest in the future you want to see.
No. You forgot to take cost into consideration... If it was any cheaper for industrial processes to be run on electricity they already would be... And then there's the obvious large increase on energy consumption when you try to electrify most industrial processes...
@@matthewdancz9152 We are adding batteries + wind + solar to the grid. Battery storage is RAPIDLY solving the energy wastage problem. (Batteries now have a long lifespan now, and are highly recyclable). Despite what some people say, batteries are changing everything. Businesses, manufacturers, and homeowners are also getting their own solar + battery systems, taking load off of the grid more and more. Also, sunlight is free, and the price of solar panels has dropped more than 80% in the last 20 years (I'm being conservative here). Solar panels have become A LOT more efficient as well, not just cheaper. We don't have to start from scratch on the infrastructure either. Far from it. In fact, battery storage will reduce the need for transmission, making us all more resilient.
On paper renewable energy looks amazing, in the real world it's completely impractical and expensive to run everything from electricity.
Electricity is a high grade energy source, it's wasteful to use it to do your cooking when you can use a low grade energy source such as gas. How much does it cost to run your gas cooker versus how much does it cost to an electric cooker ? It's like choosing to burn wooden furniture instead of burning scrap bits of wood and claim that burning wooden furniture is more efficient because there less effort is required to get the same energy output ?
Another major problem is 'dunkelflaute'. Renewable energy capturing systems such as wind and solar are 'make hay while the sun shines' system. No wind and no sunlight means no energy is captured. You are at the mercy of weather conditions. Fossil fuel burning on the other hand is amazingly reliable, it's a power on demand system. You can think of it similar to timed tv broadcast versus tv on demand?
Renewables have their advantages and disadvantages; and like any other system should be deployed in scenarios where it makes sense to do so. Not all industries are able to work around the drawbacks of renewables. Notice how the video does not mention a single drawback of using renewables.
I’m a great believer in the 80/20 rule where we can do 80% of a job with 20% of the effort and then the last 20% takes 80% of the effort. Skeptics look at how much effort it will take to get rid of 100% of fossil fuel use by looking at the hardest problems to solve. In reality tackling the easiest problems to solve to get most of the benefit and then look at how we can deal with the difficult things.
The real problem is that green is up for virtue signalling. You cant show off your heatpump, but you can show off your electric car.
It's very easy to achieve the low hanging fruits, and not expensive at all❤❤
solar and wind only last 10 years at best. weather wipes them out, flip 5 quarters 5 times a day if they all come up heads your solar farm or wind farm just got wiped out by mother nature. do this every day for the rest of your life. how's that safety and security? reliability is everything, penalties for unreliable energy need to be raise 150,000% on solar and wind, because the companies just go bankrupt after stealing the subsidies and abandon their toxic waste farms all over farm land. solar and wind should be confined to city buildings only. keep your toxic waste out of the food supply and where the toxic waste of humanity breeds the worst of humanity
Carnot heat engines are about 35% efficient. Now news here
@@aprilgeneric8027 a quick google search revealed 25-30 years industrial life expectancy for solar parks and at least 20 years for wind parks. Yes building anything into nature sucks. but the alternative is worse.
Brisbane, Australia. In 2019 we spent $16 500 AUD on a 13.2 kW solar and 12 kWh battery system, and we save $2000 AUD a year by no longer getting (paying) a power bill. For the first 4 years our feed in tarrif was 20 cents a kW so we made $2000 for the extra power we export. In 2020 we bought a 2010 i-MiEV and save $3500 a year on petrol we no longer have to buy for our transport needs. Just in that time we've saved / made $32 000 AUD. With a 20 + year warranty on most of the Solar system components we are looking forward to many more years of savings! If Governments won't lead the push to Renewables, it's up to those of us that can to lead the way.
Most of your "savings" are subsidies provided by the taxpayer and other grid and road users.
Despite counting dollar savings, which feels great on personal level, solar and EVs go incredibly well together, and their advantage relates to this video closely.
@@jonathanrabbittExactly. There's no such thing as a saving, someone else paid for it...
What is the length of the battery life? Mine lasted 2 years and is now dead. By the time the time battery dies and needs replacement, it will have 'saved' you the original acquisition price...
Yep - love the fact that, contrary to the opinions above, we paid for our solar and battery system, benefit from not importing any electricity for most of the year and can charge our EV for nothing and run it very efficiently with no emissions @@blackduck531
As an Energy Engineer working in this industry, this videos are great and show how things are not so straightforward. However, we shouldn't downplay how difficult it is replacing all energy uses with renewable electricity. Industrial heat is not currently possible to provide it with electricity when high temperature is required. Jet fuel is another example of a hard to decarbonise industry.
Moreover, we should not forget that electricity transport over long distances isn't cheap, if a country doesn't have much renewable potential, they may be required to import the energy in other forms such as traditional fossil fuels, which is a more efficient way of transporting large quantities of energy over long distances. An example of this could be Japan.
So whilst what you are mentioning here is true and important for people to understand, we shouldn't underestimate the complexity of the challenge our generation is facing.
Edit: to clarify, I am not against the transition or saying it is impossible. Just stating that it will take the use of many technologies, energy vectors, energy sources and it won't be a walk in the park. But it is definitely achievable.
I agree with you. However I do think that SOME of those industries could be at least partially electrified if looked at from a higher level. Jet fuel: jets are used for transporting goods and people; there are other modes of transportation that could reduce the load. Flying slower can also reduce fuel costs as well. Steel manufacturing: as a building material and there are ways we could swap in alternative materials in certain situations (see glue lam beams).
At the end of the day, we will need fossil fuels for some things, but with a bit of problem solving, rethinking material use, and compromise, we can significantly reduce the need.
Industrial applications that require high heat, like smelting ores? We have a natural fusion engine that exists 1 AU away that produces higher temperatures on earth when concentrated than burning fossil fuels could ever supply. There are also plasma confinement systems using electromagnets and lasers that reach temperatures comparable to those that occur in stars, that were developed for nuclear fusion. Don't tell me that the technology doesn't exist for high temperature applications, we're just to stupid to use much smaller systems for industrial processes because fossil fuels are easier/cheaper at the moment.
We could just not use Jet engines for non military purposes. We the people don't need commercial jets, we need to go back to a robust train, and ship public transit system, but since you rich people have to have your jet engine planes, just make them smaller. Less mass means higher efficiency, and higher efficiency is the societal goal here.
We don't need to go down to zero carbon emissions to stop climate change though, aviation accounts for about 2.5% of total co2 emissions and we could totally keep that as it is if we fixed all the rest. Also afaik work is being done to find a solution to high heat industries but I can't comment on that as I have too little info. Surely we would need less energy capacity if each end product that uses said energy was way more efficient. Policy could really help with that.
I have a picture of a ghost on a tv.
There's also nuclear, which Japan does utilise
My prayers have been answered: My presenter included this Sankey diagram in his presentation yesterday on home electrification where he looked at "How much power do we really need" (video in preparation) and I said later that everybody should spend 15 minutes with this graph and absorb its central message about "rejected energy".
Well then go and provide the energy. Stop trying to ban the competition.
@@gregorymalchuk272 No I won't: the fossil fuel industry has lied to the public for decades, manipulated and bought politicians, wreaked havoc wherever they trampled ("resource curse") and are continuing to slow down, torpedo and sabotage the energy transition away from pollution and climate disaster. Last week convicted felon Trump asked O&G to donate a billion dollars to his campaign with the promise to immediately wreck any and all meaningful climate and energy action. Same with the fossil aligned Heritage Project 2025. It is pure evil.
Put up 30kW of solar in 2011.
14 years later the grid infrastructure operator is installing batteries to soak up all the rooftop solar to help flatten the duck curve.
SE Queensland Australia
Its still misleading. if your town needs 1 GWh of electricity, then it needs exactly 1 GWh of electricity not one third of that, and regardless of what source it comes from. So no the demand wont change a bit.
@@andrewradford3953 Are you connected to the grid?
Make the music louder, I can almost hear what they're saying
It has become a nasty habit to add loud music. Very annoying.
Wow, that's one of the rare moments where bad stuff is actually good news lol
The more inefficient we have been, the easier it is to make it more efficient.
Here in Denmark, we have properly insulated houses and district heating with solar panels making all the needed heat between april and october. It makes the next steps a bit more expensive to implement, but we are still pushing due to high energy taxes.
In reality we only have certain industries that are wasting a lot of energy, the usual suspects: concrete and iron/steel production.
It's all green washing without new storage technology.
@@poulhennedistrict heating in Denmark in fact anywhere have a big amount of heat loss in distribution, you can see that with your bare Eyes only when you in light freezing temperatures have ice and snow melting only above were there are district heating pipes in ground under asphalt and at peoples driveways, there as much heat loss as 1/3 yearly, even more in sommer due to the fact that there almost only needs to heat tapwater in homes.
So district heating have to produce yearly about 130% heat out of plant to deliver 100% to buildings.
Individual heat pumps are far more efficient in areas where you have separate one family houses.
If those one family homes have Solar on there roof it will be further efficiency.
In Denmark where you we use a great amount of straw or wood chips in district heating its greenwashed to be CO2 neutral to burn that type of captured carbon, totaly stupidity, captured carbon/ coal, shall not be burned, even more disturbing in Aalborg DK, there is used coal to generate heat to district heating in a plant placed about 10 km from Greater Aalborg there are a significant heat loss.
District heating is not, efficiency first, we should adress district heating Heat losses by not open new areas whit district heating, was great, 30-40 years ago but not anymore.
District heating should be banned a lot of place.
@@poulhenne I hope Denmark and Nordic countries also do something about their extreme ecological footprint, consumption and waste production... as at the moment they are still (among) the worst in Europe.
@@withoutshadowww Unfortunately they aren't and most Nordic people tend to think they're very sustainable. Homes are very often heated to 21-25 degrees in the middle winter when it's -20°C or even colder outside and people hang out at home in shorts. Even shopping malls are so hot that you have to take your coat off when your enter. Whereas in summer people are using more and more of air conditioning even in low temperatures of less than 25°C. The modern architecture doesn't even take into account that the homes should stay cool during summer as they simply assume that people will get AC.
People also have the tendency to drive to every place by car and the diet is basically nothing but animal products. Earning money doesn't make people into more sustaible consumers and instead they keep wasting more money into fast fashion, decor etc.
This is my perception as someone from Finland.
Nice video, but hard to follow when you have loud background noise/music and low voice volume. I usually skip videos that do this, but yours is important.
Switch on captions? That's what I did. Hope it helps.
@@xchoppIt's important to point out if the music is too loud.
@@edlauber3585 I think you've replied to the wrong comment.
This thread is complaining about the unecessarily loud music...
@@edlauber3585 Well, this is really interesting, but please explain me why does Americans liberates four times more fossil CO2 than the average of humain people ?
Or explain me how to install heat pumps in Africa, particlularly where the is no electricity at all.
The music is way too loud
The idea is not to convince with arguments but to hammer the slogan into the audience. After the basic idea one could start to analyze where to start the conversion most effectively, which requires more work than just making noise.
I agree, but fortunately it doesn't use a lot of energy.
@@Manf-ft6zk That might be true in some videos, but surely not this one.
And pointless
@@Manf-ft6zki think it was just an editing mistake.
Their arguments are actually good.
I recently got an induction cooktop. There was a bit of a learning curve, but now my gas stove just seems too slow and imprecise. The induction cooks just as well but with perfect control.
I feel the same way about my Tesla Model Y vs my old Acura MDX. The EV is just so much more precise.
Yes. I was pleasantly surprised when using our new induction cooktop that there no longer was a flood of hot air coming up around the cooking pot. Handles didn't get hot, the room didn't get as hot, I didn't feel as hot.
Reminded me of the speed and simplicity of using an electric kettle vs the old way of putting a kettle on a stove.
@@jm493Less moisture (from burning gas) in the kitchen air as well.
The newer gas stoves are indeed crap. However older gas stoves from around the 70's are really really good. I also have a gas oven, and i still prefer that instead of an electric oven because it is able to heat up so fast and able to moisturize the contents. Remember 1 cubic meter of natural gas contains almost 10Kwh of energy.
Switched over 10 years ago, no regrets whatsoever.
How about we shift our thinking away from providing energy to changing our lifestyles and architecture so we don't use so much in the first place? And stop buying stuff that has no real use to you!
That would be great! 🌱 Did you hear of Degrowth movement yet? We have a video exploring it here 👉 th-cam.com/video/_22mKe_OLsg/w-d-xo.html
This is how we are supposed to use technology correctly but us humans are too prideful, increasing efficiency then going renewable is the best solution for society as a whole not doing either will hurt further generations
It’s not pride, it’s ignorance.
@ALuckyDonkey it's both pride isn't what you think it is. It's the lack of understanding or over ego. Pride over investment of one's self.
@@Christopher-cr7pw it's not pride neither ignorance, it's about monyey
ITS Coorparate USA UK IMperialism Money capitalism world dictatorship enslavery and digging natural ressources for free by occopying other countries and sell it to others while pretending to invade because of human rights, peace and democracy :D
It's not just about money, it's about jobs. Electrification will eliminate all the jobs in the middle. Think about the miners, the maintenance workers, etc. Efficiency requires less people and effort which means you will need more new industries
As an engineer I love efficiency, and when you look around there are so many low hanging fruits.
But time and time again there is no political will or imagination. Climate change is not a new problem and it is disappointing how we have not even managed to slow down the CO2 released into the air. The problem is much easier to solve technically than it is solving politically.😡
I am chocked to learn that some countries still just flare off the natural gas from their oil fields.
And even more sad that the flaring is only about 92% effektive, releasing unburnt methane. One would think a cleaner burning should be possible.
But it is probably just a profit issue as always.
@@poulhenneI saw a documentary somewhere about methane leakage at gas wells. They tested for leakage at many wells and it was so bad that gas is possibly no greener than coal because methane is so bad versa co2.
@@poulhenne I feel your. I should get chocked way more than I am, after learning about energy system on and off for 20 years, you do become numb and cynical.
There are a lot of people that spend a lot of time on finding arguments to justify idiotic behavior.
But with the economic system we are contently using we don't include all the costs. If it is too difficult to include a cost we just omit it.
Thus sometimes when you are pumping oil up from the ground you get a little "natural gas", but not enough to be useful and reqube the cost of a pipeline. Thus the cheapest solution is just to vent it off into the air and let it become others problem. The when people realises this we put on some minimum of restriction, like you will at least have to burn most of the "natural gas".
But things like this happen everywhere and when you start to see it can be a little infuriating, and when you point it out people acts like you are the crazy one and use arguments like "but we have always done it this way", "companies makes money they don't solve problems" or "it's not worth it".
How many products could last much much longer if they cost 10% more.... It is easy to compare price when you buy something new, but it is impossible to know what washing machine will last you +10 years and be easy to repair. Thus you buy the cheapest washing machine or the one at looks cool, or the one with the phone app.
If it is easy to measure we include it if it is hard we omit it. That way we create a world that suchs while convinsing ourselfs that we are doing the best thing. 😥
@@David-bi6lfit's not gas wells but oil wells.
@@st-ex8506methane emissions on oil is much higher than on gas. Especially on the drilling sites.
Finally a good use of a Sankey diagram!
This and cashflow is the only good use for it lol
@@nisbahmumtaz909 Skateboard park design, though.
A diagram of tinned food versus refrigeration energy/carbon given same nutritional value/flavour and price should be on supermarket walls? Frozen tomatoes or tinned bread would not be on the diagram? Freeze dried passata or anaerobic tinned dough mix perhaps? Astronaut haute cuisine.
Cooking on a glass top sucks
@@Euphorica Whhy, its so easy to clean, and it never gets really hot, so the food doesn't burn on like the old ceramic hobs
What we get wrong, is that nuclear energy, could be a renewable energy too. A lot of the fuel, is recyclable... If we only used it in a proper breeder cycle.
Nuclear is a perfectly valid type of renewable energy. The problem with it is not safety or waste, (both vastly overrrated problems), but simply cost: Cost curves for solar and batteries just keep going down with no real bottom in sight. Ten years ago, there was still a decent case for nuclear. Today you have to rely on the theoretical promises of reactors that haven't proven themselves. And the only cost curves we have for nuclear actually go up in price rather than down. In another ten years, I'm afraid the picture will become crystal clear. A nuclear reactor will always require the turbines and cooling systems, even if you can build the reactor itself completely free. We will probably see solar and batteries become cheaper than even that. So no matter how advanced your reactor is, breeder, molten salt, thorium, even if you somehow get fusion working, solar will still be cheaper. The dunkelflaute problem persists both for nuclear and renewable systems, and will probably be solved with a combination of burning waste, biomass, and hydrogen for the couple of weeks we need it.
@@Tr1ploidsolid state fusion could be in the race eventually. It does not require large power plants. Maybe someday when all the vacuum fusion physicists past on or get a clue. The US department finally flipped on solid state fusion a couple years ago. But I still would put my money on solar and wind. The US potential for wind power production totally exceeds our electrical energy needs and even jet fuel can be made from sea water, US Navy looked into that. Distributed solar power on the roofs of houses and businesses greatly reduces the cost and losses of electrical grids. The countries that transition will have a massive advantage going forward.
No green documentary is complete without that ubiquitous marimba playing in the background!
It’s because they are made in a renewable, environmentally friendly way and materials. It’s for the environment.
Can't hear the dialogue over the background sound effects.
The narrator voice level drops greatly shortly after the start.
I had no problem, i guess they changed it
He's just making sure the viewers get 100% of the final sound to reduce inneficiencies.
@@samuelmelton8353 I don't know what this means. If I can't hear the dialogue, that's a bad thing.
@@falsificationism He's just reducing waste sound by making sure 100% of it goes into your ears.
Where's the energy costs for the manufacturing of those EV batteries? They claim EVs are 80 - 90% efficient, but does that include the production aspects, too?
🤔
Yes they lie and stretch the truth quite a bit to try to convince and confuse people. Evs probably are 90% efficient with using power to move the vehicle. The problem is exactly what you mentioned. Power does not magically appear nor does that ev. That’s the only pro for evs when comparing gas cars as gas cars are only like 20% efficient. They never bring up the fact EVs are 3x worse for the environment to just make then gas cars. Gas cars are far better for the environment in every way, way to many to mention.
@@danielmiddleton2900 Thats just not true.
None of our appliances talk to each other for what they need.
We use refrigerator takes the heat away from our foods but dissipates the heat back to the living room. Then AC has to remove that heat once again to outside.
We use shower with warm water that has its own heat source. Our desktop computers generate heat. I can go on, but you get the picture.
In the winter, having a fridge dissipate it's heat into the room is good but in the summer it is not so. We do not have AC so the fridges just make the house unbearable in summer.
absolutely true - the question is how efficent would it be to use these wasted energies..? for showers / waste water it can make significant sense - but e.g. installing a separate heat-capturing system to capture the fridge, computer-cpu etc might be a big overhead for small gains. Definitely nice to think about such things though! :D
I've heard of at least one person setting up their refrigerator to dissipate its heat into a sand battery that can then later be used for heating at night or potentially converted back into electricity.
@@EdsbarNot really a big issue, fridges only use 10s of watts so not a lot of heat gets into your room.
@@Edsbar THIS, winter vs summer conditions make it difficult to manage heating and cooling and energy use. Add to that the differences between how one generates heat vs electricity and it gets doubly complicated.
Thanks for the good news. But that analysis is still missing a big chunk of the problem because it starts with coal lumps and oil. To be more complete, you should start with a mountain with coal veins in it, or the oil deep in the soil somewhere - getting those out takes a lot of energy as well.
You're not wrong, but this was about a specific existing analysis that starts with lumps and barrels. Basically the 80% figure is deceptive as it measures energy input.
So right now fossil fuels are doing maybe 65% of the work. Still not great, but not 80%.
Transporting oil, refining it and then transporting petrol is also grossly inefficient especially when you can just plug your EV in to get its 'fuel'.
@@ralpharmsby8040 as opposed to solar cells that just spontaniously plop into existance?
@@tristanridley1601 Yes the 80% is deceptive and it is used because that is what fossil fuel lobbyists and PR campaigns use. They specifically chose that number because it allowed them to claim more renewable energy would be needed than is actually needed.
@@ralpharmsby8040 And why have farms to grow food when you can just get it at the supermarket? That's the logic of just plugging in your EV to get its fuel.
In a very small scale as a family of five that is exactly what we experienced. In the last couple of years we put solar on our house got a heat pump and two electric cars, and we are not burning any stuff at all anymore.
Energy consumption went down by 65% and emissions went down by 93% ! The overall investment was quite a lot, but it’s paying back overtime because the costs also came down by 59%.
What works for us as a family will also work for countries and humanity.
It’s possible so let’s do it 💪
Your cost savings are much smaller than the other reductions. Why is that?
Your home energy footprint is not even 10% of your life carbon footprint, the other 90% is in your transport, heating/cooling, industry, all goods produced have a footprint.Its right on the diagram.
@@johnjakson444 If you read @hajodebuhr4324 's post, he says he *did* electrify and reduce emissions from his family's "transport, heating/cooling"
That's great. I wish we had room for more solar panels but even so we run the house and car form much of the year with almost no electricity from the grid. In time the panels will get more efficient of course. Our 12 are rated at 385 W each but there are already some doing 500. We will consider upgrading in another 5 or 10 years perhaps.
@@johnjakson444"heat pump and two electric cars", he was not just talking about past home electricity use.
Getting rid of fossil fuels would be a lot easier if the fossil fuel industry wasn’t in control of governments and economies.
That seems to be the case in Brazil. They have powerful congressman and congresswoman
My opinion : 1+2 world war was mainly for energy or fossil fuels . Each pv modul each windcraft is against war.But do you think Exxon and all the others will give up so fast, I don´t believe it.
@@henrybrett113that would be a gross oversimplification. The first world war was for territory that austria hungary wanted. The second because hitler was a crazy dictator, but in the second world war, resources, especially oil were a deciding factor. The germans mostly focused on food from france, metal from norway and oil from russia, although they never got the later.
Brazil's graph is one of the few whose electricity generated has less losses than useful energy, exactly because the country is mostly renewable
Has hydro
This is why green energy is quoted in BOE (Barrels of Oil Equivalent) and that is where this efficiency difference is calculated.
Exactly, we are just replacing a problem with another problem so we can feel good about ourselves.
I agree with this outlook completely. I would further add that domestic energy is the way to go every time. Shipping oil, coal, electricity around far and wide makes no sense. Use what you have where you are and instantly shipping costs will be eliminated. Not to mention the amount of energy that is used to go to war to steal oil and other things is astronomical. If all that metal, manpower, oil, equipment and such was put to use to improve the country that you are in, so much energy would be saved.
Hey! You could be keen to watch this video from us on military emissions: th-cam.com/video/Q2ZUrzGohCI/w-d-xo.html 👀
As someone who lives in a country where more than 75% of the electricity is generated by green sources, I tell you that petrol is still going to be king on the transportation industry for a long time, because it's simply more convenient, as of now there are simply 0 viable alternatives in the market, outside of the niche small distance urban transportation.
I’d hardly call “small distance” urban transportation a niche. Many small changes can have a massive impact.
why is the music so loud and the speaker is getting quieter and quieter? And this video has TWO supervising editors !!! 😂😂😂😂😂!
This is why you should spend money on audio professionals. Your message is diluted when people are distracted by a questionable mix. Good audio is unnoticed, while BAD audio stands out like a sore thumb. The audio on this vid stands out.
Agreed, the music is outof control! what a shame for a great video like.
Great video, but the annoying recirculating backing track was so loud it was a struggle to hear the dialogue.
@@briangilbert3884 hugely agreed. My father was a BBC sound man, he said that for decades. He won BAFTA nominations.
Hey, thanks a lot for your feedback. Other commenters pointed this one out too. We will take a note and keep this in mind for out future videos! 🎷
This is a wonderful video! This is another reason why I think Lithium-ion battery powered ships are the future of logistical transportation. At present, 90% of ships are electric, but burn diesel or heavy fuel oil to generate that electricity, with an efficiency of around 30%. If we can get batteries to a volumetric energy density of 1000Wh/L(presently around 700), it'd be only twice less dense in energy than methanol and four times less than diesel. This is important because the efficiency of directly running the ship from this electricity is around 95%, compared to previously states 25-30%. So, what this means is, we could entirely expect the shipping industry to be carbon neutral in the future.
The airline industry could also become carbon neutral with SAF produced from Methanol produced from Green Hydrogen and CCS. ExxonMobil is presently pioneering this process. It is unalike to the Fischer-Tropsch process.
Good comment! There is a massive chemical challenge here that requires a paradigm shift in battery technology.
Such a massive step up in energy storage density (from 700 to 1.000 kWh/L - about 50%) requires highly reactive and quite dangerous electrode and electrolyte chemistries.
As a chemist, I advise battery manufacturers about the lurking dangers that surround current battery manufacturing and usage, including accident-bound or quality-induced catastrophic failure. Very often it ends in not extinguishable runaway Fluorine-fed metal fires, which often lead to the total destruction of the battery itself and the vehicle. Extremely toxic Hydrofluoric acid contaminates everything, making it very hard for fire brigades to deal with the wrecks.
It will need many generations and battery design iterations to develop batteries that pack a 50% higher energy punch which also containing less dangerous chemicals with a lesser environmental impact during end-of-service-life deconstruction and materials re-processing.
My chemistry background is high energy chemistry and Fluorine based propellants, so a dying breed as no university provides lectures or research on this Cold War chemistry anymore.
However, to safely operate such high density energy storage sources, we need many, many more of my kind to teach and design-in Poka Yoke features to new marketable batteries. Otherwise these new battery designs will literally (!!!) blow up in our faces...
I work at a manufacturing plant built only 8 years ago. One end of the very large building has ovens that heat treat 18K pound forgings burning an insane amount of natural gas. In the other end everyone wears coats in the winter because the waste heat is pumped out of the roof rather than being captured to heat the rest of the facility.
Definition of "business as usual"....
Well the engine area needs to be cool to extract higher amounts of Electricity, but other than that, yeah it should be reused.
You missed one critical step. Mining the minerals to make solar panels and such. It takes a lot of fuel for every production step before you get an end product that you can use.
That's the part they have intentionally missed! Otherwise all this blabbering would have been right away bullshit
i dont understand why and HOW they miss that part when talking about renewables. efficiency of the ENTIRE system should be considered when talking about which way is more efficient and feasable to produce energy. renewables arent bad. its just not the entire solution
@@live.levi.19 That is the trillion dollar question. How much energy does it really take to make a solar panel VS the amount of energy it will produce in its lifetime. They claim such low numbers and short durations but I highly doubt any of it is true, simply marketing wank.
Solar panels are really good. They don't take a lot of minerals nor energy to produce, while generating a lot of electricity for a long time and requiring zero maintenance. True marvels of engineering.
Nothing was missed here, DW just didn't want to pack too much into one video. Look up the statistics yourself, you will see how amazing solar panels are nowadays
@@oznerol256 idk how you can say all this. Bc solar panels and all other renewable alternatives do infact use a Lot of minerals and energy to be produced. Major part of it are the batteries. For solar, it's also the panels themselves. And worst part is all the used up panels, wind turbine blades are very hard to recycle. And i didn't even point out the efficiency aspect of all these yet.
I'm not against renewable alternatives. Heck i even have a degree in it. What people need to understand is that they are just alternatives. Not the entire solution. An ideal country will have its energy generated from different sources for redundancy, energy security and other aspects. Renewable and non renewable sources both should be used to prosper humanity and our zero carbon goals.
This is why i have always believed that rooftop solar will be a game chnager. The rooftop solar can have the lowest rejected energy as it will travel lower distances when compared to any other source of energy.
This is often known as the Primary Energy Fallacy.
Thank you , Simon.
THANK YOU FOR SAYING THIS. This video is a Cinderella-Snow-white kinda fairy tale. All make believe.
@@Ratinevo Definition of the primary energy fallacy. This is the assumption that all of the energy embedded in the fossil fuels we burn today needs to be replaced by an equivalent amount of clean energy. Opponents of change use this to suggest that a transition is impossible - by using a figure that is three times higher than it needs to be.
It is even better if you add heat pumps to heating stuff. Sudenli, you need a third of a third of energy. It is even hard to comprehend how little you need to go renewable.
And even if you replace a gas heater with a heat pump and that gas is now electrified in a power plant, you still only need a third of your original energy need
Just use a heat pump and maybe put solar panels on the roof. That would be pretty smart but unfortunately if the roof is not huge it's hard to cover all the demand.
*Suddenly
@@imtheeastgermanguy5431 1 or 2 solarpanels on each balcony and 10 on the rooftop. Thats enough
@@imtheeastgermanguy5431 If I wanted my home to cover the entire carbon footprint of all the people under the roof, I would need 300 solar panels per person to get to the equiv of the 10kWpr of power that every US person uses. The 10kW does not get divied by 3, because you have to use lossy storage to make the RE work, so 10/3*3 right back to 10kW. A new Sankey diagram that covers all the losses in long term storage, meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
This point was made by Dr. Amory Lovins in the early '80s. He focused on reducing the need, being more efficient, at Rocky Mountain Institute. He called this producing nega=watts.
And Mr Amory Lovins has no actual science degree just like Elon Musk, and was a huge fan of using gas for all energy use, the gas industry funds that RMI scam.
While using the Sankey chart is great in terms of showing where inefficiency is, it completely hides the other dynamics at play that keep our systems on fossil fuels. For example, you simply cannot run heavy construction equipment on electricity with current battery tech, as the batteries would be too heavy for the equipment and duty cycle needed, plus the time it takes to charge. Same with large delivery trucks. This is why combustible hydrogen engines are being looked at. Also, 75% of a battery plant consists of natural gas burners to dry off all the solvents and catalysts used in battery manufacture. Also, this video even mentioned some of the energy of the car was being wasted even though it's important to have heat in the winter, and defrost systems on your windows. On top of that is the problem of power density - the amount of power generated or used in a given area. There are many areas of the world where power consumption is large, the area is small, and the generation must stay within that small area for various reasons (jurisdictional, geopolitical, geographical, etc). That means there will be lots of places that don't have the space for solar and wind, and that don't want to take the risk of having critical infrastructure outside their border. This is why nuclear power is important, and SMR reactors have a role in remote, poor sun/wind characteristics, and hugely expensive to run electrical lines thousands of kilometers. The hard truth is, if we try a full on renewables transition now, you will find that you will not magically reclaim the 2/3 wasted energy but you'll be still using much more, that you'll still be burning lots of natural gas to make all the batteries needed, that electricity prices will go up because people won't have choices of energy source to choose from, and some industries like construction are going to need an exemption anyway to run all the heavy equipment, or, you are going to build out a separate hydrogen infrastructure to run equipment where battery weight is a factor (kinda like we have gas for light passenger vehicles and diesel for heavy equipment), and your energy efficiency is going to be awful again. The Devil is, and will always remain, in the details.
This is one of the key aspects that people need to understand but do not in fact understand. I even meet Professors, who do not seem to understand this even though they are interested in the subject.
So this message really needs repeating and i hope that you repeat it often in different ways so that a more people understand this. Other channels also need to educate people about this simple truth.
Anyways, thank you for finally talking about this!
Energy is heat, so we're warming the planet directly, 3 times as much as we have to compared to what we use. Insulate your house! It's not all about cost savings on your heating bill, as you can now see. Think of the other two thirds that's wasted.
Not to mention that the wasted energy of wind or solarpower production doesn't produce CO2, while the wasted energy of coal burning does produce CO2. So not only is green energy more efficient, the wasted energy is less harmful.
Jeremiah Coleman, of Coleman's Mustard in the UK once claimed he made his fortune from the mustard people left on the side of their plate. This is also where the fossil fuel companies make their enormous profits - they have a vested interest in maximising wasted energy.
Is it a conspiracy when you see stop lights and massive traffic jams with ICE cars burning fuel while NOT moving? EVs don't waste fuel that way.
@@markhathaway9456 Hi Mark, it might be a conspiracy if they were fixing the traffic light patterns to keep you stationary for longer. TBH there have been so many road works in our village recently that paranoia is starting to set in.
@@philiptaylor7902They do. It's done by greens claiming that by limiting the number of cars entering a city center, they are being "green".
@@gregorymalchuk272 Hi Gregory, as I mentioned I live in a village in the UK, I had to go into town yesterday and you could taste the fumes on the air. Keeping cars out of city centres just makes them cleaner, healthier, more pleasant places to be.
As an engineering science, thermodynamics is important for the various possibilities of energy conversion, and in process engineering it describes the properties and behavior of substances involved in processes. The French physicist Sadi Carnot, who wrote his groundbreaking work in 1824, is considered to be its founder.
There’s something called a duck curve. Transition to renewables can’t be achieved without a cheap and reliable grid scale energy storage solution. Energy storage, the biggest challenge facing humanity.
You have completed missed on "Solar Thermal" use case when you say that renewable energy means only electrical energy. Solar water heating and solar drying of crop are good examples.
True, solar thermal is useful. The efficiency of commercial solar PV was about 12% a decade ago, now it is ~20%, and so large scale solar thermal less competitive,
except when combined with thermal storage to enable 24 hour uptime. As you note, water heating (etc) still a very good use case!
I'm wondering since I live in a tropical climate and we use solar thermal for water a lot. In temperate or frigid climates, how does it work out? It works until it's winter then you have to use heaters?
Solar water heating became obsolete with the invention of high temp heat pumps. Solar heating (I have two systems running) have a huge amount of drawbacks. I wouldn't install another one. For example: you need electrical support energy for the pumps. You've got a lot of thermal losses, especially in storage. And biggest problem for me: what to do with the heat when your hot water tanks are full?
I have to add: I'm from Germany. We have cold winters and so we need to run our solar heating with water-glycol mixtures. Glycol burns or chars when getting too hot. Although in Germany it is forbidden to waste collected heat, f.e. by feeding it to an outside positioned convector. And most people don't have a Swimmingpool which they could heat with the excess energy.
Photovoltaic panels are the better choice for me. A warm-water heat pump does a great job with high efficiency and is quite cheap now.
@@WolfTheTrueKingyes, exactly. Here in Germany a house owner can replace their heaters with the solar just for the summer month. May till September. We use a different type of solar heat collectors in combination with multi-purpose hot water tanks in our basements. This way we can use the thermal heat generated in the winter month to support our heating system, but most of the time it's not sufficient to generate hot drinking water of useful temperature. But with vaccum tube collectors you can still harvest a good amount of heat on a sunny winter day. But the financial benefit is low in comparison to f.e. gas prices. Gas is still "too cheap" to make solar heating economically.
They still haven't become very popular, but combined panels for PV and heat would be ideal. A part of the electricity from PV would be used for pumping the water (or glycol liquid in colder climates) around. This provides warm water and cools the panels making the PV part more efficient, as their efficiency drops when they get warm.
THANK YOU! This Sankey diagram should be the starting point for any discussion about energy!
As long as you explain it's limitations whi h he has not
OK first, labeling people skeptical of radical rapid energy decarbonization as climate skeptics is inaccurate.
Second, barely mentioned the need for base load power when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing.
Third, and probably the most important, conversion to all electric final energy consumption would require at least a tripling of the carrying capacity of the electrical grid.
We can not do this on anything like a short time scale. It will require many decades just as it has taken us over a century to create the energy infrastructure we now employ. Talk is cheap and it only takes a short TH-cam video to imagine an all electric future but making that a reality will cost many trillions and take most of a century. That is why reasonable people are are pointing out that fossil fuels will be a substantial part of our energy consumption for many decades to come.
You forgott one significant downside . When there is no wind and the sun goes down, what do we do? Energi storage or reliability to deliver energy should be included in the graph oversight.
All well and good but as an individual I couldn't care less about how and where the energy comes from. All I care about is that I'm warm in the winter, that my car can be refilled to full in 5 minutes and not loose half the range in the winter or be written off if I have a minor collision. However what happens is that every time people start to save energy in their homes it somehow magically gets more expensive per kWh. So not only I have to invest my money into creating efficiency (insulate, buy an induction stove, a heat pump and so on) but the return on investment is very long. For example my floor insulation will pay for itself in approx 70 years (yes, seventy) at the current energy prices. If I get panels that's probably 10-15 years IF nothing goes wrong. Electric cars are getting cheaper mainly because nobody wants them and manufacturers are forced to sell more of them but for what they now gain with low prices and little to no maintenance they loose with expensive chargers, huge depreciation of second hand market values. So again - come back selling me this when it's all nice and cheap and an actual benefit to me rather than another propaganda spin. Everyone knows there are huge losses in the chain - make it cheaper and more attractive, people will switch without needing to convince.
Everyone should be aware of this!!
More efficient evs like Aptera can use an insane amount less energy through higher efficiency. Ebikes and velomobiles are also a great tool to reduce energy needs for commuting
At the end of the day it all boils down to which is less costly to consume for end users. Going all electric is easy however it's very expensive.
I'm just going to mention Jevons Paradox here. Getting away from fossil fuels is good, but it's only part of the challenge. Access to any form of cheap abundant energy is exactly what enables us to extract, destroy and pollute at the rates we do. We need to use significantly less energy.
Renewables have their own challenges with regard to efficiency issues. You need longer electricity grids to deliver energy from one place to another. You have the issue of saving the energy. On a small scale, you can use batteries with a relatively low amount of wasted energy. But on bigger scales, even the so far most promising saving methods like Hydrogen lose a lot of energy - so much so that the amount of rejected energy would increase.
Something else not often considered.
The energy needed to extract, process, transport, store, refine, distribute and dispense fossil fuels is immense...
Not to mention the equipment and industries needed to produce and maintain that infrastructure and equipment.
With renewables, that's no longer needed.
Oil wells and drilling rigs. Massive tanker ships, and the energy they need. Storage facilities, and the equipment and energy needed. Refineries and the massive energy they need, not to mention the massive infrastructure and equipment. The tanker trucks to distribute fuel. And the industries needed to produce all the parts for the ultimate burning of that fuel.
It all goes away. Sure, its replaced by renewables, but they are much lower maintenance, and much simpler. And with EV's they are much simpler, requiring less industrial input. And very minimal maintenance.
The United States also maintains aircraft carrier groups in part to protect international shipping lanes from pirates. How many times have we gone to war over oil? It's very expensive.
@@markhathaway9456 War itself is changing. A single drone uses a puny fraction of the energy of a jet fighter or bomber, and can be as effective.
The problem of transportation of renewable energy on big distances is not solved at all for today. So yes, "that's no longer needed" because it simply impossible.
@@TomasSawer Biofuels are just as good for 'big distances', plus more secure.
And the "solution" to renewable energy is to triple the size of the power grid. That's not cheap either. And have conventional gas and coal burning power stations with their turbines idling and the furnaces banked waiting for a cloud to blow over or the wind to die down.
A good video spoiled by the "music" drowning out the commentary in some parts.
thanks for your feedback - noted!
I've had an EV since 2016 and is on my second EV now, and can not imagine going back to noisy fossil cars. The old poorly insulated house I live is on its second heat pump since 1998, it alone save a huge amount of energy.
Re-insulating the house would be best, but the cost of a heat pump versus re-insulating is currently not worth it. Would have considered solar panels on my house, but as I live above the arctic circle we have not much sunlight in the winter when energy costs could be worth the investment.
that means ,you don´twant to go back to your vibrating plate ?Ha,ha,ha
Badly insulated house in the arctic circle and running a heat pump? That's awesome. What model do you use? How expensive is it to run?
@@oznerol256 Current model is a ~5kW Toshiba about 8 years old. The cost to run is irrelevant as energy costs varies by hour, whats relevant is the amount of energy from the HP vs energy put into the HP. This model has a COP ~4-5 which means that with 1kW of power in I can expect 4-5 kW of heat delivered.
This amount be reduced when the outdoor temp falls below -15deg C. And I guess it's about 1 at -30. So extra heating could be required, we have a 7kW wood stove as well.
Insulate a bit at a time and the results build.
I belive that no we cannot completely replace the fossil fuels , as the renewables depend on the environmental conditions, hence we cannot control the amount of energy that renewables generate
The sad thing that I see happening yet again in politics, is the focus on short term solutions.
We see this in energy as well, right now we are still telling people to use less and pay more. We have not solved anything!
and I see the exact same thing here, we speak of renewables as if they are going to solve everything... like I said, we are urged to use less electricity and pay more for it.
We have solved nothing, because we have not made an real investments in the networks that transfer energy to and from the end users. As long as we do not solve the problem of getting MORE electricity available to the end users, we are not going to solve anything with renewables.
If you have your own solar panels, often people talk about how inefficient they are 15-20%. 5x less than grid
(Wasted energy is about 10-15%)
So total useful energy is 13-16%
By the time it reaches you, grid electricity average efficiency is 33%. Only 2x instead of 5x!
Shows how important local generation is and more competitive than you would expect!
true
I'm from the States here. And this illustrates a big part of the problem with renewables here...the fact that they make sense.
It's not going to happen as fast as we want unless we address the split incentive for renters and landlords. Renters are financially incentivized to be more efficient, but they don't have the power to place things in their homes. Land lords have the power, but have little financial incentive. We will just have to wait for new rental properties to be built according to new requirements, phasing the older, less efficient properties out.
My old landlord upgraded our windows and insulation and installed solar panels in order to take advantage of the feed-in tariff that the UK government was offering at the time. He was in a rush to get it done because they were massively reducing the amount you could get for feeding electricity into the grid and he wanted to lock in the price before the cut off date. The reason for upgrading the insulation was because it was part of the legislation that the building needed a certain energy efficiency rating to qualify.
Our governments could make this happen quickly if they wanted to...
Unfortunately most of the housing stock in the UK and in the US is pretty much utter crap and low eff, people are strugling first to get housiing than for efficiency.
Also depends on the system. In the Netherlands most rentals in suburbs are by a corporation without much profit. Rent went up a little but got triple glas and beter isolation as well as solar panels. For that I mostly became an energy producer but there is a grid lock for new projects
The elephant in the room is nuclear: it's both clean *and* reliable. A mix or nuclear and renewable would compensate each others shortcomings, yet all we're talking about is a 100% renewable grid.
Because I have read my science textbook, I know that some energy is lost whenever we change the energy type. However, I was shocked to learn that one-third of our total produced energy is lost, and we end up using only one-third of the energy. I believe we should focus on finding alternatives to address climate change and decrease the amount of "rejected energy."
I don´t believe this figure. I think by all the transforms ,we lose more. But the companies will not offer you anything. I believe ,we have no more than 20% real use .
Anyone that dispels the silver bullet approach to energy challenges is Okay with me. Thanks
You are a practical human being. 🫶
This is an excellent video, and capturing this efficiency differential is immensely important in achieving sustainability. The critical, timely, energy transition is a massive undertaking, but many of the needed resources are already at hand. Not all renewables, for example, are intermittent. Storage hydro is one of the oldest and most reliable forms of baseload generation globally. It only accounts for a smaller part of the US grid mix, but there are very significant additional imports from Canada, where hydroelectricity accounts for about 60% of all electric generation there. This storage hydro capacity is effectively a massive existing, long duration, grid tied battery. What we need is to commercially re-task all this this from baseload to peaker generation, using intermittent renewable power, when it is available, to allow the reservoirs to replenish capacity. This would allow for the very extensive proliferation of additional wind and solar. Other solutions such as allowing plugged in EVs to feed/sell power back to the grid at a profit when demand needs capacity, and supply cushion sensitive hourly power pricing (do we need 10 million hot tubs and pools heating for the 1 hour, no wind, no sun, dinner hour, when the supply cushion is under pressure?) are also excellent market driven tools available for implementation reasonably quickly.
Great video, EXCEPT for the annoying and MUCH TOO LOUD background music!!!
Noted!
They put in the music because they’re trying to hypnotize you to believe their bullshit. Germany is in an economic crisis because they went hard “green”
@@DWPlanetA Change this and re-upload, please.
With renewables, you have conversion efficiency. With fossil fuels, you have energy density. So far, we've valued the latter more than the former.
I would like to see this graph have one important, but missing piece added to the left. All of the energy that goes into producing the items used at each stage from raw materials in the ground. The cost to build and maintain wind turbines, solar panels, coal plants, natural gas plants, etc. The cost to obtain the "primary" source of energy from the ground. Think all of the constituent materials of all types that are used to create the energy.
This is not mind-blowing, when you got a scientific background.
1. Fossil fuels are attached to thermal engines. The first and second law of thermodynamics limit the efficiency to ~40% at best.
2. The form of energy plays an important role for using it. Electricity is a very high, ordered form of energy, regarding its structure. Having such a low entropy form of energy, it is very quick to use but difficult to storage because of it is volatile/fugitive.
The "adiabatic flame temperature" of fossil fuels, after mixing them with the stoichiometrically correct amount of oxygen (if pure oxygen, take into account the cost of separation from atmospheric nitrogen) and combusting the mixture, is usually well above 3000 K. In an ambient 300 K world this corresponds to a Carnot efficiency of over 90%. So the truth is rather that actually existing thermal engines are still far away from the ideal reversible engine.
Germany is quite cold, I'm surprised that they don't have more Cogeneration plants. Even low-grade heat could be pumped underground in summer to be used during winter.
@@5th_decile You might be genius. Or you might be wrong.
I think you are wrong:
1. Laws of thermodynamics: There is no such thing like an ideal reversible engine/perpetuum mobile.
2. Let's assume: Flame temperature about 3000 K (a little bit high, but let's go with this number). Temperature of the exhaust gases 1300K.
efficiency = 1 - (Tmin/Tmax) = 1 - (1300/3000) = 56,6...%
And 56% is a very good value, most combustion engines are around 30% at best.
The problem is, that combustion engines are only efficient in a very close rpm-bandwidth. So they need gears to widen that bandwidth -> more less efficiency.
I don't understand why efficiency matters here. Solar panels are at best 20%, while wind turbines are a bit better. If we "wasted energy" then renewables end up losing
Electricity can be stored in salt or sand batteries,, quite easily. Otherwise, generate hydrogen.
Not to poo poo on this but someone has to point out the fact that at the beginning of the flow of energy ignoring the cost in The amount of energy that it takes to produce the equipment for wind and solar is rather ignorant. The production of carbon fiber and steel and silicon, which are the primary components of all of these devices, are very energy intensive. Never to mind the fact that the recycling of windmills is incredibly energy intensive and most solar panels are not designed to be recycled. So you have to stereotypically mine fresh material.
Wind turbines are decommissioned just after 20 years of usage (some get lifetime extensions by 5-10 years). But they need at least 15 years of constant usage to be carbon neutral (dependent on the size). Europe has currently over 34.000 wind turbines that are 15 years or older. In the next 5-10 years *all* of them have to be decommissioned.
After the decommission, the wind turbine blades buried under pile of dirt, since none of them are recyclable. For 34.000 wind turbines (x3 blades each), that's 102.000 blades.
What's really mind-blowing to me is that so many can't understand that we don't need to replace the amount of primary energy we use with the same amount of useful energy even when it's explained to them.
Another thing that's mind-blowing to me is that we burn fuels to generate power, in part to generate heat via resistive heaters somewhere else.
Or that we use a lot of power to pump heat out from indoor air, into hot ambient air outside, and then have a different system that use a lot of energy to produce hot water, it's often even quite cold water that we heat up, to a high temperature, that we then mix with cold water again to get the temperature that we want.
Someone recently questioned my calculations that showed a 30% reduction in energy use just by electrifying ground transport and heating.
They couldn't believe it would make such a big difference.
We only need to heat water to a high temperature to avoid legionella.
And heating homes should not be neccesary if built and insulated properly. Cooling should likewise be solved with blinds and shutters before spending precious power on an AC.
But we are so used to wasting energy in our daily life, that we hardly notice it anymore.
@@Paul-yh8km In the video they didn't even mention how much electric power is lost due to long transmission lines. Electricity needs to be used over the short-run because long-haul lines lose it to the air. Yep, all that effort to get coal or oil from the ground and then it's lost to the air.
@@markhathaway9456 There are ways to reduce the losses in transmission. Considering it's dependence on Current, you can raise voltage using transformers to hundreds of thousands of volts, then transport the energy at that voltage. Transmission losses in the US is only 2%.
@@Paul-yh8km Yes and in reality the saving can be even higher.
A large increase in renewables would mean a need for energy storage, which leads to greater losses on the renewables side. Not as big as with fossil fuels, but it's something to keep in mind.
Also, there are a lot of other factors, too.
We did a video on this topic you might want to check out! 👇
"This is what's REALLY holding back wind and solar"
th-cam.com/video/u-DsDuTceTo/w-d-xo.html
As the costs of renewables and battery storage keeps dropping, more and more old systems will get squeezed out of the supply side due to costs. We are at a time where environmental and economic factors seem to be headed in the same direction. In the sectors where this is not happening very fast (EVs and heat pumps for buildings), and economic choices are not available, good governmental regulations are needed to help focus research and development efforts, and encourage economies of scale. Mining and industrial production will be the slowest in some aspects, as many systems are complex and fragile, and need careful control of transitions at various places in the production chain. But if the economics make sense, those transitions will occur. Unfortunately many of these transitions are happening much faster in China than in the US or Europe, where many industry leaders are scared of change.
Brilliant analysis. Now, please explain this to the politicians and corporations that continue to make bad energy decisions.
They are basing their decision on the lobbying by some very wealthy people and corporations who make money from these bad energy decisions. So explaining it to politicians won't help much it needs to be explained to voters.
They base their decisions on profit, which is only partly affected by efficiency. Other costs like labor, machinery, fuel price and energy price tend to dominate, I'd guess.
Bottom line is that to get more renewable energy, it has to outcompete fossil fuel in cost, and outcompete their entrenched lobbying.
@@yeroca Political lobbying, PR campaigns and government subsidies to well-connected corporations also play a big part in decisions.
@@ryuuguu01 Yeah, I mentioned the lobbying. The goverment subsidies are a result of the lobbying.
This is very good "news", it is incredibly important, and it has been in our hands all along. We just need to move beyond decades of fossil fuel industry... gas-lighting!
And replace it with electrification based on intermittency that will have quite low round trip efficient long term storage systems. New Sankey, same as the old one.
In the US NE, energy production from solar is 5x better in summer than in the winter, that spells massive long term energy storage bill at very low efficiency.
Or we could just use nuclear that needs no storage at all even though MSRs have built in heat storage for constant heat with variable on demand electric output.
@@johnjakson444 Don't forget about hydro. It only accounts for about 6% of the US grid mix, but there are very significant additional imports from Canada. This storage hydro is effectively a massive existing grid tied battery. What we need is to just commercially re-task this from baseload to peaker, using renewable power, when it is available, to allow the reservoirs to replenish capacity. Other solutions such as allowing plugged in EVs to feed/sell power back to the grid at a profit when demand needs capacity, and supply cushion sensitive hourly power pricing (do we need 10 million hot tubs and pools heating for the 1 hour, no wind, no sun, dinner hour, when the supply cushion is under pressure?) are also excellent market driven tools available for implementation quickly.
This film seems over simplistic❓It focusses primarily on renewable electricity being more efficient for converting primary energy to usable energy - which, of course, it is. But it says very little about the many real world realities of using it & converting to using it.
- Transmission losses over distance & the complex grid upgrades needed
- Storage: energy density of current batteries is too low for many forms of tranport - particularly aircraft
- Overall carbon foot print of manufacturing electric cars is so much higher than making petrol cars that you have to drive 70,000km on average just to break even
- Base loads: to cover when wind & sun aren't working - to be emission free these require nuclear power stations
- etc
It promotes one vald point well but ignores the whole picture.
The heat loss in fossil fuel energy generation is irrelevant here, because it's not counted in the numbers we always see for energy production, which are the "secondary" value. So the ideas you had of how difficult it is to replace fossil fuels are still valid (or as valid as before, at least).
What this video can best teach you is the distinction between an academic analysis of a component vs. a practical analysis of a system. Conspicuously absent is any mention of *cost*.
It’s never been a mystery why a 20% net efficient unit outperforms a 90% net efficient unit when you factor *unit cost* of both. Then factoring infrastructure and initial investment…
The fabled space pen comparison comes to mind.
I hope we see more nuclear power plants as well as renewables in the future
Coal and nuclear plants are closing because wind and solar are now cheaper. Corporations work with real numbers, not fantasies.
Look at Molten Salt Reactors, they include free energy storage in the coolant loop, they can produce baseload heat but have variable electric output taking heat as needed from the salt storage tanks, can even back up REs easily. No other storage needed at all.
DW is mostly knocking it out of the park on these topics. Thanks guys!
No it isn't, DW has been massively behind the energy transition in Germany where good nuclear was replaced with new coal, German carbon intensity is 2x that of France which is mostly nuclear in the electric sector, but that is stil only 40% of the whole primary cycle.
Glad you think so! 🌞
Source: destatis
Coal
2021 156 mrd kwh
2022 170 mrd kwh 33
2023 117 mrd kwh 26
Green energy
2022 236 mrd kwh 46%
2023 252 mrd kwh 56%
@@johnjakson444
So when and at what part of this spread sheet does the environmental impact come into play with this transition to renewable get added into it ??
All this is on about is gasses on the atmosphere that affecting the planet , what about all the extra open cut mining for all the renewable resources that are required, don't tell that that's not having a impact
Building renewables is not carbon-free by any means but the life cycle greenhouse gas emissions are remarkably lower than those of coal, oil & natural gas. 🔗www.nrel.gov/docs/fy21osti/80580.pdf
An absolute no-brainer to switch to electricity wherever possible.
Unless there is no electric grid. And the whole of the electricity is produced with the help of fosil fuels. The fact that americans are the most important energy consumers doesnt mean that America is the only setlement of human beeings.
I love when the manufacturing, instalation and recycling of wind turbine isn’t talk about. And hydroelectricity without water is so amazing
And the short lifespan of windmills. 15-25 years compared to up to 70 years for nuclear and hydro.
Great video!! This gives me hope
Yep. The fewest people understand energy at all.
Music is way to loud even when someone talks.
The Sankey diagrams are cool and do highlight a potential for “waste reduction”. However Carnot’s cycle shows there would always be some loss, as does thermodynamics (entropy). The bigger challenge however is that we don’t have a closed loop case for renewables. Today renewables are mined using fossil fuels, the mined material transported via vehicles using fossil fuel. This is where EROI calculations come in, and diffuse sources of energy do not have the requisite EROI as oil. The second part, which was hinted in the video, but glossed over in the conclusion is how does renewable handle peak demand challenges, esp. peak supply would definitely differ (and cant be flexed). Does it then make sense to build a backup gas plant, idling most of the time? And those claiming batteries as solution need to think what scale battery deployment has happened till date. The video truly doesn’t address the key issue - what’s realistic conversion away from fossil fuel
"Rejected energy" are just energy losses in accordance with the 2nd law of thermodynamics. There is nothing odd about it.
There are no "electrons piling up" this is just mostly heat energy lost.
Our energy supply and demand also isn´t just about this one topic which is efficiency it´s about many topics. Like energy storage, cost, how fast we can add more energy to the system when demand is rising quickly etc. So fully calculate and compare say wind and solar power to natural gas you would also have to include energy storage with it´s losses for wind and solar power because most of the time the way of generating energy is very efficient with renewables (although only 20% of the total solar energy really makes it ever into electrons, so 80% losses on the solar power side) but then you end up with a surplus of energy in peak hours where it´s all wasted even more than with fossil fuels.
2/3 beyond the pail?
I’ve always belied we could make this work, I have always dreaded we would give in to pessimism.
I use a pressure cooker and I ride a bicycle and since I am human I read and therefore can build anything they can short of billion dollar microprocessors.
This blew my mind. And you know what: that waste energy? It actually also contributes to global warming by *directly* heating up the atmosphere. All waste energy (even from renewables) does.
Not so much, rejected energy is very low grade heat, it mostly radiates right back into space. The heat trapping of CO2, methane are a far bigger problem.
@@johnjakson444 I think I read in New Scientist recently that the direct heating effect from all our energy use is small, but it is growing (around 5% of atmospheric warning by now).
"All waste energy (even from renewables)" Thats not true. Waste energy from renewables (excluding nuclear) don't count to atmosphere temperature rise because it is just transformed direct sun energy which is constantly hitting earth.
That rejected bin is costing us money. Imagine how much money the economy would save if we weren't wasting so much energy.
And replace it with RE intermitency and short, medium and long term energy storage at eff of 90%, 60% and say 10% round trip efficiency, high cost hours, medium cost days, low cost for months of storage. New Sankey, same as the old one, but most all the losses are in long term storage.
@@johnjakson444Yes, the solution is NUCLEAR ENERGY. It is stable source with low raw material requirements per unit of energy produced. Why to use dispersed nuclear energy (solar, wind, fossil) if you can use concentrated nuclear energy?
My co-op board wants to insist that we MUST replace our broken gas stove from the 1970s with another gas stove, instead of letting us switch to electric - and the NY state ban on gas stoves goes into effect in 1.5 years. I'm probably going to have to fight them on letting us switch to electric now, even if that means we have to use a hot plate until they relent or the law takes effect.
The coal plant my boyfriends worked at for over 20 years has had all four boilers offline since the beginning of January! He said this is the longest hes ever known of any plant going completely offline without atleast one boiler up and running producing power! Another thing to think about when looking at your energy bill and the rates your paying. Is that electricity is traded on the stock market. So the people that died in Texas A few years ago? Didnt have to die because theyre windmills froze! If people on the other side werent playing political games! Electricity couldve been rerouted to those areas with people snowed in!
In the 40 degree Celsius weather in Athens, it's insane to feel the amount of heat coming out of cars when you cross the roads; it jumps from 40 degrees to something that feels like 50. It's sad how uncommon electric vehicles are here when they also create much less noise pollution.
Create much less noise pollution - Unlike all the incidental music/noises in this video
It's not mind blowing, this is thermodynamic law. What is mind-blowing, that 60-70% of wasted or rejected heat from a thermal power plant CAN be used as useful low grade heat. Switzerland uses district heating (i.e. waste heat) from their nuclear plants to heat entire cities. China is following suit.
I also find it funny how DW Planet also fails to mention that only 15% of global energy requirement is electricity. The remaining 85% is heat provided by, as they correctly said, inefficient fossil fuels. We could seriously decarbonise large chunks of this sector with newer higher temperature nuclear reaction technology. I'm pro renewables but nuclear uses a fraction of the land and raw material requirements per GWh generated. The real mind blowing thing is researching EROEI (energy returned on energy invested) on the entire lifecycle analysis of each energy source.
Soooo in the end small modular nuclear for industries' heat needs?
you are completely wrong though about heat, you forgot heat pumps. also please actually look into EROEI and dont just use it as an argument while you have actually fallen for an urban myth
@@sirati9770 Eh, that's your reason I'm completely wrong? I didn't forget heat pumps, maybe you forgot heat pumps can only provide low grade heat, anything above 80-90 deg C is thermodynamically impossible. They cannot provide high temperature process heat for any industrial applications. Quantifying energy inputs and outputs, i.e. things humans can actually measure and quantify isn't an urban myth.
20% of global energy is electricity, 30% is transportation and 50% is heat. of that 50%, 50% is high temperature industrial heat (and 50% of that is >400c) that is hard to decarbonize. the rest of heat demand can be switched to heat pumps.
the interesting property of a majority renewables grid is that it produces energy surpluses which cause a near zero cost of electricity at those peaking times. this can be taken advantage of through production of green hydrogen which can partially cover hard to decarbonize industries that need high temperatures or high energy density.
base load and industrial heat needs means that other energy sources are necessary at least for the next 30 years or so but in the long term, it will likely become economically unfeasible to produce electricity with anything but renewables. unless there is a breakthrough in nuclear that slashes cost and time to build and to decommission, wind and solar with batteries seems to be the way.
@@enricod.7198 it depends, standard SMRs that use water as a coolant have an output temp of 300 deg C. With reactors that use molten salt and gas coolants, we can achieve temperatures well over 600 deg C.
You seem to have completely missed the electrical energy loss from power cables. Transmission is around the cable not through it. This heats the atmosphere. The further the transmission line the greater the energy loss.
But those power lines are used for all power, regardless if produced by fossil fuels or by renewable, so it doesn't really change the result. And with solar power and wind power normally being installed closer to the customers (sometime even on their own roofs), renewable energy actually has another advantage there, too!
Yeah, about 5-10% is lost on transmission.
@@IgorRockt Then you need to consider the whole context of mining, production, operation, maintenance, recycling and geopolitics of all the equipment used in fossil fuel and "renewable" (=rebuildable) energy sources as well. So yeah it does change the results, greatly...
did you even watch the video?
This video is basically the whole argument against hydrogen. With hydro power u switch input to green fuel, but u keep the middle 2 steps which lose efficiency. And u need to produce the hydrogen upfront, lowering efficiency even further
Also, nuclear. While not being renewable, they certainly can produce a boatload of clean energy
NOT clean at all. There is still no solution whatsoever regarding nuclear waste. Plus, in total, nuclear energy is EXTREMELY expensive.
@@HolgerJakobs It's cleaner in terms of carbon emissions, which is the main drive of the energy shift. However, it's still a system that produces heat/steam to feed turbines, so it wastes heat and is inefficient, like fossil fuels. Also, even if nuclear waste gets reused as fuel (there are good prospects on that front,) uranium extraction itself isn't clean at all.
Capacity factors, you need almost two coal or three to four renewable plants (each of 1 GW size) to match a 1GW Nuclear Plant.
Agree 100% with the analysis.
30% to 40% is the reduction in energy use we would see via electrification.
But that is still a big increase in generation capacity from where we are now and the biggest thing stopping it is politics. An example is the EUs target of 300GW of wind farms by 2050.
That is a joke.
The music is louder than the narrator
Great insights. Most debates on the transition to renewables ignore the 2/3 of global energy that is wasted yet it is the key. Reducing this waste can speed up the transition.