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I dont understand why solar panels aren't used to shade the batteries and reduce cooling requirements? I'm sure access concerns could be mitigated with modular panel systems and/or plenty of clearance heights.
When there is no sun, no wind, where will we get the power? A nuclear powerplant is the most economic when it runs all the time. What is cheaper - build sun, wind AND the exact same number MWh as the Backup needed - or only build nuclear ? Why do we need sun and wind power (killing millions of birds and thousands tons of insects) - when we need to build the total amount of power needed in nuclear anyway ?
@@martina5328you don’t have to build a bunch of nuclear. And it’s simply tooo expensive. As solar keeps getting cheaper it will only make sense to just overbuild solar to produce the minimum base load needed on a stormy day. Batteries will get cheaper too as these companies build more battery projects and get more funding.
Hello from Moscow. I am happy for the UAE and Australia. In our region there were 2 (TWO) sunny days last December. From October to March we have this approximately every year. We also have so-called freezing rain every winter. In simple terms, this is when rain hits any surface (roofs, trees, wires, solar panels, cars) and instantly freezes and forms an ice shell. There is always hail, but not large, but once every 3-4 years there is such a hail that it can smash the roofs of houses to pieces, not to mention solar panels. Just for information.
@ I'd love to visit Moscow someday, hopefully it will be easier to travel to Russia from my country soon in the future when the war has ended. Peace and respect from Ireland 🙏
This project is not the end of nuclear. The UAE has recently built 5.3 GW of nuclear, so this 1 GW solar-battery just means that the UAE is pursuing an all-the-above energy strategy.
No. It is pursuing the strategy to have safe power first while building photovoltaics and wind as the future safe energy source...just like someone created LEDs under the light of incandescent lightbulbs. Nuclear is shit as hell. Expensive and nobody knows how to get rid of the waste. The US for example has not a single nuclear waste disposal site...a huge problem in the making.
Given the price difference and speed to build difference, this is another nail in the coffin for nuclear. Not the end of nuclear exactly but sensible people will see the cost and timeframe difference and will usually choose renewables plus storage. Not always - but most of the time.
@@mhirasuna in Australia... nuclear is gold plating at public expense for vc profit margins. We have the ultimate storage system... that isn't a battery system.
And it’s projected to cost £136Bn (and likely far in excess of that) to store nuclear waste from Sellafield in the UK deep underground, a project likely to take 50 years and leave many generations with problems. Nuclear power is insane (literally).
@@TheChzoronzon Russian build nuclear plants that do not leave any waste. Also they recyclate used fuel (waste) Your choice to stay with an outdated tech...
I don't think anyone would argue that Europe can't exist on solar panels and batteries alone, but even when reviewing the "sun belt" we should be somewhat circumspect. The UAE is to Solar what Norway is to hydro and we should be careful when extrapolating. It has enormous arid land with almost zero economic value so it's a no brainer to want to install solar panels there. And just looking at recent data, in 2022 UAE consumed 148,089 GWh which works out to 406 GWh per day so, assuming the sun doesn't shine at night, they will need battery storage for 203 GWh. Since a single Tesla mega pack stores 3.9 MWh they would need 52,051 of them, and at a unit cost of $1 million, that comes to $52 billion. This is a sizeable cost but probably affordable for such a rich country in a part of the world where vanity projects are par for the course. Most countries in the sun belt however, are quite poor so adding this cost burden to their populations is probably not achievable nor desirable. The idea that solar panels will replace everything else within a certain band of latitudes is just not credible imo.
"Most countries in the sun belt however, are quite poor" Pakistan is poor, and just increased its electricity production by 50%, almost all of it behind-the-meter rooftop or local ground mount solar. Whatever the cost burden, people in poor countries need electricity, and nothing costs less than solar.
According to the facts In 2023, renewable energy sources accounted for approximately 59.7% of Germany's net public electricity generation. It's the first time renewables have covered the majority of the country's electricity consumption. Wind power and solar energy were the leading contributors, with wind power alone providing 32% of the electricity. Seems they are doing quite well over there and expanding their green credentials on a monthly basis. P.S. Is that a typo as I thought Germany was still a Country I didn't know they had become a state, within the EU I suppose ?.
Not in the UK we came close to blackouts the other week as wind & solar were almost non existent! And we were importing double digit percent of UK demand over inter connectors from other countries!!!!
The UK imports as it's cheaper to do so than using gas generation (which is the most expensive generation source to the UK grid these days), that's why the number of interconnectors the UK has with the continent have and will continue to increase. The UK is part of a diversified pan European and North African network of grids nowadays, a private company is even laying a direct HVDC connection from Morocco to the UK. So high imports (or exports as has occured in some years) is not unexpected these days.
@GruffSillyGoat The UK has lost energy independence , and now suffers a high risk of blackouts and pays high prices for imported energy as a result of the over reliance upon unreliable wind and solar generation.
@@Leo555ZZZ - UK energy independence hasn't existed for a long time, parhaps since the 1950s. Most of the coal, particularly since the 1980s, and natrual gas (which took over in the 1960/70s from coal) is imported at high expense (especially in the last 10 years). Oddly blackouts were more a thing in the 1960s/70s/80s than now, but for various reasons. Imports, unlike the past, these days are about reducing the cost of energy not assuring against outages. The UK is more connected to other countries energy systems than ever before, with more international interconnects still being installed. Imports/Exports role nowadays is performed for energy trading rather than energy assurance. The UK is part of a cross European/North African grid network, where it both imports and exports energy, and intends to more exporting as renewables generation increases (with some recent years the UK being a nett exporter). The UK particularly imports energy when the cost is cheaper to do so than generating domestically, this is mainly due to the high cost of natural gas based generation. So imported energy, particularly the renewable and low carbon energy from Norway, Denmark and France, is cheaper than home generation when wind and solar resources are low. The solution to low renewable generation is a mixture of diversification of renewable sources (hydro, tidal, solar, wind and zero-carbon) and generation location (around more areas of the coastline). Basically creating a diversified baseload capability with low likelihood of simultaneous lull periods. Gas may well be retained in a backup role, until this itself is replaced with other storage technologies or generation technologies.
@GruffSillyGoat The move to wind and solar , which at times produces a tiny percentage of the installed capacity is the primary reason for increased costs and reduced system reliability being experienced in recent years. Solar produces nothing every night , and sometimes almost nothing during the day due to cloud and snow cover. Wind can produce almost nothing over the entire country when a large weather system is in place , regardless of how many turbines are installed...good luck relying on tidal , hydro and zero carbon to fill the shortfall. Usually it is filled by importing energy , which in itself is an inherent system weakness and liability caused by an over reliance upon weather and time of day dependent generation.
@@Leo555ZZZ - In 2024, renewables produced 43% of UK electricity (56.7%, if zero carbon Nuclear is included), whereas gas generated 25.9% of electricity. Likewise gas generates a tiny proportion of electricity at times, but unlike renewables has a disproportionate impact on the cost of electricity, being the most expensive generation source. Renewables are not the primary reason for increased costs this is the cost of electricity. The consumer price of electricity is determined by a national pricing framework that uses the highest cost of production at any point in time to set the cost of electricity, even if only one area of the country is using gas to generate 1% of electrical power it set's the national price. Take the study from 2023 for example, that determined that gas generation set the price 84% of the time, imports 15% and 'other' (which includes renewables and zero-carbon nuclear) just 1% of the time. Gas sets the wholesale cost of electricity most of the time, being the most expensive generation source, and is the primary reason costs have increased due to the high variability involved with its supply. The cost of renewables is not the driver of the cost of electricty, as the cost of transition to renewables is a very small proportion of the price of electricity (under 2%) as renewable infrastructure are now purchased on a Contract for Differences basis. Whereas the wholesale cost of energy, represents 30 to 35% of the cost (and as above is determined by the cost of gas generation most of the time). Further the gas based generation suppliers game the system (as occured recently), turning off prior to know low generation periods waiting for a peaking power request, then turning back on at over 50x the previous generation cost. The answer to this particular issue is to tightent the rules (yet again) and install more batteries and other energy storage systems, and store more of the curtailed renewable generation for times when production is lulls. However, many energy suppliers (Octopus, Ovo etc), OFGEM and industry bodies are seeking for a change to the pricing framework, from a national based one to a regionalised/area based one. The UK government is consulting on this, and it will be interesting to see the outcome - where it is expected that those areas with high renewable generation will see much lower electricity bills than now. Oddly, in terms of inherent weaknesses this has been shown to be more the case with fossil-fuel supply risks that can be highly variable and dependant on global events and competive supply demands outside of the UK's control. Events like gas tanker ships being directed to other higher paying consumers mid-transit delaying supply come to mind, geopolitical impacting supply (as occured recently sending the cost of electricity sky high), suppliers suddenly lowing supply capacity to rise the cost of gas to increase revenue or supply lines becoming damaged. If anything the more centralised, monopolised and constrained supply gas market makes it more susceptible to risks than that of the decentralised renewable generation model. Imports are not a system weakness, this is not like the dark old days of predominent fossil-fuel based generation, where imports where only performed at times of stress. Rather electrical energy imports and exports are now common as electricity is a traded commodity these days, with more transnational interconnects being deployed than ever before. Grids are connecting up and energy is flowing across larger and larger areas, directly as electrons not via more expensive and inefficient indirect energy cerriers like gas or oil. What the UK is doing is to transition the bulk of everyday generation to renewables and zero-carbon sources, supported by energy storages to be as efficient as possible whilst maintaining a backup capacity of older dispatchable sources for emergency use as well as looking at alternatives backup technologies. The system (diversified generation and energy storage) will be sized to handle the once in five year short duration (few day) dunkelflaute event, with backup/demand management being used for the rare one in thirty year two week event. This is no different to the snow outage strategy adopted in the UK, where since snow is such a infrequent and short term event it doesn't make sense to pay extensively and continuously to ensure when a short duration event occurs that things can operate as normal - that is the cost of doing outweights the risk and loss of not doing. If energy costs can be significantly lowered via renewables for 97% of the time, then for the 3% using the energy trading market, backup mechanisms and reducing demand is a more than workable cost effective approach.
Abu Dhabi is practically on the equator. Try doing this in the UK in winter. You would have no chance. Also the UK has a population nearly 10 times that of the Emirates.
I believe you, but it is my understanding that the UK has copious amounts of wind power. Several times in the last 2 years I have heard that in London and in Scotland there has been so much wind electricity that the power was given away.
@RenzoCanepari not so. Given away to whom? And how? Even when wholesale prices are negative, the users are still charged. If the wind isn't blowing the wind producers get paid! Last year it was 1 billion UK . 😅 Brilliant business model. Funded by the taxpayer. Do your homework and stop being stooged.
Hi, I've been following your videos for a long time and really enjoy them. I live in uk on the Suffolk coast next to sizewell nuclear power station. The uk is building a power station at a hinkly point and sizewell c. The amount of money they waste is amazing, and the time its going to take is more amazing. From today, it will take 15 years. Cost 60 to 100 billion, and when they switch it on. Every electric car battery is going to be linked to the owners house. Solar pannels everywhere. Costs of home batteries are so low, and life capacity is so long. I drive past the site every day, knowing i could work there, earn the same money, and not work. For the next 15 years
Where will Europe get the power - when it is cold during the winter (when it is really cold - there is most often zero wind, and as I am sure you have noticed, not much sun).
@@martina5328 I don't understand. Germany, highest amount of wind power, peaks its generation during the winter. Summer is lower. Winter is when it is cold.
@markvalery8632 When it get really cold in the winter, it is when there is no wind. Look it up. (Less heat in the atmosphere, i.e. less energy, less wind). It is very clear for us living here to. Rarely it is say -20 C and windy.
Nice to see more solar coming online. As per auto to home battery backup, I love the concept. The prices of EV's are over priced here in Canada. The subsidies are being paid by tax payers who may not have or afford an EV. The rich people can install EV to home battery backup, but i don't agree on subsidies to help them.
@@andyfreeze4072 Exactly what is bullshit - in the winter with no solar and no wind when it gets really cold (no wind goes with really cold) - where is the power. We have no more waterpower to utilize. What we have to choose from is fossil fuels or nuclear. Explain how we get any other power at scale?
This is easy for an oil-rich country with low population and lots of sunlight. This can't be replicated the world over because of higher populations, and therefore higher energy needs, because of less sunlight, and because of lack of infinite funds for a vanity project.
We have record coal usage this year despite all of this. Secondly study why large grids need turbines as they provide inertia which is needed for grid frequency balancing . Solar and battery can't do this at scale. You need pumped hydro or flywheels.
Hi Sam, I reviewed the article you mentioned at the end. In reading past the headline, it says the energy storage efficiency was 63%, which you'd have to compare to current batteries that are roughly 95% efficient. And then to make it self-sufficient, they paired to with a solar panel, just a regular solar panel, probably 25% efficient just like any panel today, and they state the overall efficiency was just over 5%. So for me, they still need to get supercapacitors much better, but it is promising research.
The measures of efficiency you mentioned are chemical and electrical efficiency and the efficiency of solar energy capture. While this is interesting and important to understand, in the end the bottom line is really just the cost per kilowatt hour.
In Australia we should use the cheapest large scale energy storage for our east coast grid, and that is pumped hydro. We have over 100 suitable pumped hydro sites just in NSW. Also we have more than enough land to supply 100% power using solar. Current batteries are great for short term stabilization and firming. Offshore wind like gas, coal and Nuclear are simply more expensive in Australia.
Did you hear about the solar project that’s going on in Australia? Western Green energy hub. 35 million solar panels, and 3000 wind turbines and Battery Storage Systems.
@@NAY2GAS Yes, a proposed export industry. Pumped hydro provides longer term higher capacity energy storage at a cheaper price. Snowy hydro 2 will have 350,000mW storage capacity. ://www.energy.nsw.gov.au/sites/default/files/2022-08/NSW%20Pumped%20Hydro%20Roadmap.pdf
Neighborhood level batteries linking residential and local commercial rooftop solar will do the trick. Add in the large solar farm linking them with UHDC lines and we've got excessive electricity!
That's a problem being worked out right now in California (northern part of the state and their electric supplier), but its too much power being generated by solar system installs. Laws passed in the early days of solar mandated that the power company buy the homeowner solar-generated electricity as a 'primary' source, but they have too much coming in. Battery storage systems helped, but its still an issue.
Try running Tomago Aluminium Smelter with solar, wind and battery. Won't last 45 mins. Unfortunately if you want to run a modern economy you need heavy consistent base load power. Your renewables won't cut it.
@@dannelson6980A smelter has a need to be operating at all times. If the smelting process is interrupted the plant can get damaged. So intermittent power generation is not sufficient.
@@dannelson6980 Unless the intermittent power supply from the sun comes back in sufficient force in time it will dwindle and die as well. All at an enormous cost that you have to replace in 10-15 years.
There are whole regions where is definitely will not work for the foreseeable future. Living in Australia skews your perspective. Even Seba set the required battery capacity at much higher than a lousy 24 hours.
A few weeks ago we in the UK nearly had a total Black Out at night as the wind stopped blowing and what's left of our gas and nuclear struggled to fill the shortfall.
No we didn’t. Nobody lost power. We just dipped into the planned reserve, that costs money, but only for a few hours. In other words, the worse case scenario is no problem. Just a few days later and we had a storm that plunged the price to almost nothing for a day, so we made back all the money we spent on the extra capacity. This is how the system is designed to work. You may have to purchase more expensive power for a few days of the year, but for the rest of the year, you are significantly better off. Your yearly costs will be lower with this system than the alternative.
Hi Sam. Sorry top put a damper on your enthusiasm for solar and batteries but the project in Abu Dubai still needs fossil fuel powered generators or the lights (and air-conditions) go out. If Statista are to be believed Abu Dubai have an average electricity demand of 22Gw per hour. This means that, as you said, the batteries are for base load and will last for just over 1 night at 1Gw per hour of supply from the batteries. The remaining 21Gwts per hour still have to be generated and this is mainly from fossil fuel and this is with the biggest storage battery in the world in perhaps the sunniest place in the world. This battery is only going to provide around 4% of their electricity at night and this assumes that the solar panels charging the battery can be kept clear of dust and the sun not blocked by sand storms. This project sounds to me like a virtue signalling response from a rich country with vast amounts of open space and 360 days of sunlight. As has been pointed out before batteries, for long term storage (over 8 hours), are not the way to go and at present we have NO technology the can store enough energy apart from fossil fuel and nuclear to last for days. Batteries defiantly will not cut it for long term storage no matter how much we hope they will.
Did you notice that those batteries cabinets in the Emirates are covered with vents and cooling fans. Heat both internal and external is the enemy of a Lithium storage battery. You need massive cooling to keep lithium under control, that is the achilles heel of lithium storage.
You always need backup solutions. In case that dust storms, fires or volcanic eruptions cloud the sun (even in a desert), we need a backup to solar. This could be wind and Nuclear. You never ever put all eggs in one basket.
In the US, I believe that we should have a mix of wind, solar and nuclear with some where around 70% nuclear. Hopefully, the price is going to come down an modular fast reactors which will burn some of the existing nuclear waste. The nuclear reactors are the safest form of energy although only marginally safer than wind or solar and require less overall infrastructure. The price is somewhat debatable depending on what is being included with the renewables such as the storage and additional transmission lines. In the US, getting permits for new transmission is not easy or quick.
The uk would need to have a massive increase in storage. We were down to 10% renewables during the latest cold snap. No wind for a few days and overcast and it will deplete the storage, until we have an international backup system the UK still needs nuclear. We also would be held hostage by the international supplier. We have a few days a year where most of the UK is covered in fog and no wind. Batteries and other storage will not provide enough storage. I am fully committed to a non nuclear and fossil free future. Fog bound for a few days at a time is our curse.
We have a problem of drifting sands, with breakwaters preventing the movement. If we were to replace those breakwaters with containers in a linen with small generators providing inlet/outlet we could generate electricity most of the day.
whatever you do DONT link into the euro grid, that would be a very very stupid idea. Dont store energy as ammonia or hydrogen. Look for every problem to stop the obvious not look for the simple solutions. Wont be fog bound over all of europe or north africa or Ukraine, or Greece.... and they will all have batteries, pumped hydro, wind, heat sinks, wind, hydrogen, ammonia. Look at Australia, it has a NATIONAL grid and its as big as europe and only 30 odd million.
Here in the UK we have to buy in around 14% of our power from France, Eire and Norway along with LPG from Norway and the USA, as you can see we need a lot more renewables and battery storage to keep our 300tWh of electricity needs rolling along. My main concern is how slow things get connected into the grid. National Grid, a privately owned virtual monopoly owned by the likes of BlackRock, Vanguard Group, Capital Group Companies, Lazard Asset Management, Legal & General Investment Management and of course Norges Bank Investment Management (Norway again!) get to decide where the power we use comes from, thing is they also have fingers in many of these providers pie's, it's not in their interest to have lots of small businesses or even private homes putting power into the grid (stealing their profits !) cheaper than their own businesses can provide power. National Grid like having everything centric, they control both the hare and the hounds with Ofgem doing little or nothing to even out the UK electricity playing field
You are little out of date on National Grid plc's role these days, the network operator function that makes the planning and day to day purchasing decisions was bought out last year by the government for £630m to create a new public body responsible for these roles, the National Energy System Operator (NESO). They also transferred part of OFGEM's planning and licencing role to NESO, to ensure the new national operator was fully in control of planning objectives. As to balancing/optimisation, which is where LV generation like home generation tends to reside, this mainly sits with the energy suppliers (like Octopus, Ovo, E.on, EDF etc., note some of these are the commercial arms of larger energy companys), who select the which, where and when of energy generators and energy storage providers (including home ones) to utilise to provide energy to their customers (in line with the tariffs they offer). Lastly, there are the distributed network operators (DNOs) who manage the MV/LV local grid services for connecting up domestic, commercial and retail customers to the grid, it's these who decide whether there is local capacity on their networks to connect a consumer/producer (such as domestic home PV system) or not. NESO now has direct control of the DNO's operating licenses (having gained that function from OFGEM, who still retain the regulator and monitoring role though). National Grid Plc now focussed on the grid's transmission infrastructure management (along with Scottish Power and SSE in Scotland) not the overall grid operator role for which they have the license to run, as well as running their own DNO in the central belt of the country (having bought the Western DNO a little while back). Sicne NESO was implemented the role of OFGEM is more focussed on energy regulation, future capacity market energy auctions and legislation implementation. NESO does the day to day operation of the grid, as well as the licencing and opertional management of the grid, dno and energy supplier companies. Whilst this all may seem a complex setup, it actually purposefully segmented and decentralised to prevent monopolies/cartels forming as the licences are issued with strict conditions, including separation of roles/duties within operating companies, and generates value for money as the licences are competively bidded for by the operators. There are some areas to address, such as the domestic pricing framework and commercial/domestic connection process, which are a bit long in the tooth (setup for a time whern only big generators or industrial consumers existed) but the enahancements to the processes to make these run smooth are already being developed.
You can increase your installed renewables many times , and batteries as well , but it will still fail to supply power when needed due to extended periods of little wind and sun over the entire UK . You main concern should be the failure to invest enough in reliable coal ,gas , hydro and nuclear power.
@@Leo555ZZZ - do you have evidence to support the whole wide area outage, the risk level involved, and duration. The energy planners who researched and modelled this already, and devised approaches that don't need coal/gas in the mix.
@GruffSillyGoat The 'energy planners' were working to push renewables . Just a few days ago your entire wind system provided less than 1% of the required electricity. That should be all the evidence you need to confirm that the idea that you can rely on wind and solar with no need for coal and gas , (or large nuclear and/ or hydro) , is a green fantasy.
@@Leo555ZZZ When did these periods occur, I've had a look through all the usual data sources but cannot find anything regarding extended periods of little wind and sun (daylight). The last time I remember anything like that was due to an Icelandic volcano kicking off a few years ago but the turbines were still spinning and we did get daylight just no sunshine
I think V2G is going to be a game changer, in combination with home batteries and grid scale / neighbourhood scale batteries!!! At least the Australian government is developing the V2G standard (luckily for us, it will be a AS/NZ standard, so should be applicable to the NZ market as well). Next thing is to incentivise it for the owners, that we get decent prices for selling our solar generated electricity back to the grid, day and night!!!! If we could just get actual wholesale prices rather than a very low feed in rate, it would make the solar installation and EV investment worth it for more people. Also getting low interest funding would be accessible if the feed in tariff is reasonable and guaranteed!!!
I am in Salt Lake City, USA - our 9 KW solar panels since November have averaged less than 100 Watts each daily. When they are covered with snow it's 1/3 that. Solar may work in warmer places, but not here since the cost and space requirement to hold 3 months+ worth of power in batteries is not affordable.
If you have battery storage could you buy cheap overnight electricity from your provider then use this during the day, say 12kWh of storage, would that cover your daily needs ?.
The sun always shines brightly somewhere in the world and direct current is super conductive in one direction across the sea... and in the opposite direction, the efficiency of the wire diameter becomes twice as good as alternating current.
Yes and no, if paired with a wind farm and an appropriately sized battery. Yes. So the question is, is there wind available in the specific area in question to supplement solar? For this story though, Sam did specify the "Sun belt" where this would be immediately viable, which would be equatorial and tropical regions and don't have long periods of dark winter days. The further you move to the poles, the bigger solar farms and batteries would need to be to be able to provide a base load.
The answer is no. The amount of storage required to make batteries a grid-wide solution for all residential and industrial needs is so large, costs will make industries uncompetitive. I believe no serious engineer or scientist considers this a viable solution. Politicians and music major might, but these are people that cannot find their way out of an Excel spreadsheet.
@@lukeearthcrawler896Have you put the numbers in your Excel spreadsheet? Have you really calculated how much battery is needed, and what it will cost? How much do you consider “needed”? Have you looked the expected future prices of batteries, following the Wright’s Law trends that have already reduced battery prices 97% in 30 years? Have you looked into alternatives like Form Energy’s iron-air batteries, or zinc batteries, that don’t use lithium and stick to the cheapest possible materials?
Is that the rail line running between San Francisco Bay and Los Angeles or the Los Angeles to Las Vegas line? The SFO > LA HSR rail is a mess, nothing 'HSR' about it. All the stops along the way will make it no better than a standard rail line, and the cost overruns are getting horrific. The Las Vegas > LA line might work, but its a private project so no taxpayer loss (hopefully, AFAIK).
@ the California Hi Speed Rail - it is still a few years away but work has begun both at the San Francisco end and the line south of Bakersfield - there are several miles of tunnels through the Tehachepi Mountains one of which is 40 miles long to prevent a steeper gradient than the train can tolerate. It will be the longest tunnel in North America.
@ could you tell me if the Bullet Train in Japan that opened in 1964 had cost over runs? I won’t wait for you to answer as you don’t know - and won’t bother to find out - it was twice the estimated original cost - no one complains about it now nor did they at the time - they also had the good fortune to extend their line at grade and having no mountains on the initial line. Can you also tell me which freeway is three times over its original cost and after 30 years is still not connected together even now? It is Hwy 69 from Minnesota to Dallas. How long do HSR tracks last? Decades with minor repairs. There are already additional lines planned between those already included such as a line to Phoenix from LA and a line to Lake Tahoe from San Francisco and those to Anaheim and San Diego. And stop dissing the Central Valley where 4 million live - there are plenty of cities connected by HSR lines with far lower populations that are highly used.
@@bright93 I would love if our cost overruns were only double. If I lived in Japan I wouldn't complain either. Here in California we rarely make anything less than ten times what it should cost and that is if they even complete it. In 2008 when we passed HSR the estimate was $9.9 billion. They won't even get to a running train between Bakersfield and Madera for less than $33 billion. I voted for this mess and now regret it. Our state should be studied for how not to build things.
It’s (S&B) been working for me in North Bondi, with 2 EVs and a large house. Anybody who thinks it doesn’t work does not know what there are talking about or has no experience with it.
All electricity generation methods are" intermittent " . Even baseload coal and nuclear . Nothing runs 100% of the time. Baseload coal plants have multiple generating units so that they have spare capacity for when one unit breaks down or needs to have maintenance work done. Energy storage for renewables is essentially doing the same thing .
Some places get a lot of sun AND have loads of desert or other 'waste' space to put them in but not all. Wind is often more reliable, certainly in winter.
@@martina5328All energy sources have their pros and cons. It's really about analyzing the use case for what option to use..Fossil fuels are mostly on the way out because the con of warming makes it a non-starter. Even then it will be a long time before you see long haul jumbo jets that don't use fossil because of jetfuel energy density. Wind turbine are great for windy places. Make no sense on top of homes because small turbines are expensive cost per wart., Solar are fantastic for putting in sunny places. Not as as good for cloudy countries and less economic sense the further north one goes due reduces solar radiation. Hydro is great when near rivers that can be repurposed for hydro without seriously damaging something else. . Nuclear are great for spacecraft or any other area where renewables are not as economically viable but come with drawback of waste that can stay radioactive for thousands of yers.,
I am not a fan of wind power for the following reasons: 1) they are quite expensive to build for large installations, 2) they are quite expensive to maintain (especially offshore installations) and 3) when the wind turbine is retired, we don't have a really effective way to recycle the materials used in a wind turbine (yet).
@@Sacto1654 As for 1) and 2) the strike price of wind power from Hornsea Project 3 is 1/3 of Hinkley Point C. Using a capacity factor of 50%, which is average for the Hornsea projects, the strike price for wind is 2/3 of that nuclear plant. As for 3), recycling of wind turbine blades with happen before any long term storage of nuclear waste happens. And if people keep saying that because of 3) wind farms should not be built, then then must agree that no nuclear plants should be built until there is long term storage in that country.
@ Actually, a reason why I advocate Generation IV nuclear power is that instead of uranium-235, the use of thorium-232 results in much smaller amounts of nuclear waste, waste that has the half-life of essentially 350 years! At that level, you could use retired salt mines for nuclear waste storage. Mind you, the waste from a thorium reactor is actually quite valuable for nuclear medicine, so the waste might not even make it to final storage.
UAE has 4 APR1400 nukes and is about to build another 4. These were built by the Koreans over 10 years. Nuclear pairs well with solar and batteries in hot sunny climates. The claim solar and batteries can do it alone is baseless in the context of the required reliability. Western Australia should replicate this model
Sure , governments need to give renewables companies even bigger taxpayer funded subsidies than they already do . That will solve all our problems and we will never have floods , droughts , fires and cyclones ever again.
Whilst Solar PV generation may fulfill a baseload roll in sunbelt countries, in more Northernly, particularly coastal, locations Wind generation will serve that role more than solar. As to home generation/storage being the preferred form of PV will help within the domestic demand segement of the electricity market this typically only represent a third of the overall electricity market, with commercial and industry electricity demand taking closer to half the overall market. Hence baseload sources via grid scale solar PV/wind generation is a more critical need to meet the industrial and commercial demands.
I agree.....for Aussie......every home could be self sufficient in elec if we had BETTER politicians, with commonsense and an open mind. Both attributes are uncommon in our Councils and Govts.
And for when there is no wind you still need nuclear power... So you need to build the same amount of nuclear - regardless if you have built wind power or not. Let that sink in.
@@martina5328nuclear is not suited for that. It delivers base load energy. Not flexible to jump in when its not sunny or windy. Luckily periods of no wind at all are rare in uk. And practically never much longer then a week. So the periods could be overcome with enough storage. But that would need a lot of storage.
@@martina5328 Within 20 miles there are 5 grid scale batteries. They are closing the last nuclear power station - Torness - this year and using the site and its connections to the grid for more battery storage. I worked in the nuclear industry and all I can say is 'thank god' - there would be riots if the public knew the real safety regime. Nuclear is finished in Scotland and hopefully the new station in the south of England will never be commissioned.
A cubic meter of compressed air can hold 10 to 20 kw and is cheaper than a battery loses can be replenish with only to solar power so the overall cost is lower and last many times more than any battery.
Look what happened to Germany when it tried to go Green. It has some of the most expensive electricity. To compensate for its catastrophic decision to go green, it has been buying large quantities of natural gas and restarting several coal plants.
The issue isn't that you can't do this on a small scale. The issue is that it doesn't scale, we don't have the minerals to build it out once nevermind once every 30 or so years. People just don't grasp the scale of the problem.
@@Leo555ZZZ The week before last, wind power generated around 27.4% of the UK's electricity. It seems like wind energy has been consistently contributing a significant portion to the UK's power mix recently, there did you get the figure of 1% from please ?.
I think we need to realize that to not everywhere in the world has access to vast empty land that can be used for solar farms. Much of Europe for example don't have this kind of space or sun. And this is not just for Europe, much of Asia has too high population density to lose this kind of space (like India or Bangladesh) That's why offshore wind and nuclear are so important. Unfortunately building new nuclear has become prohibitively expensive because of over regulation and that is why we get numbers like the one you cited (40 billion) in the UK for nuclear. A similar capacity nuclear plant can probably be built in China for 1/10th of the price. If you tried to build this base load capacity in the UK from solar + battery for example, you can be sure it would run multiple times over budget and take much much longer than initial schedule (and probably half of it would be cancelled).
Pick a crowded country, the UK for example, and look at a satellite map. Zoom out on google maps. What do you see? Endless farmland , much of it only profitable because my taxes fund the farmers (and they don't pay taxes). Do the same with India , Rajashthan for example. See the endless desert?
@@andyfreeze4072 That is not the main reason, the reactor he mentioned for example is a French EPR design that has many safety features and is built in other developed countries like Finland and France for much less cost. But the UK one is more expensive than even those because the UK regulations were so complex and particular that the entire reactor basically had to be redesigned during construction at enormous cost. The versions built in Finland and France are just as safe. This is a part of a broader pattern, you can see the same thing play out in HS2, where UK spent much more money on the construction of a high speed rail line in comparison to EU or Asian countries and failed to deliver it at the end due to cost. Building things in UK (and US) are so expensive that you can build the same project (goes for any infrastructure work) for half the price in EU and for 1/4th the price in Japan/Korea without sacrificing from quality.
@@gobot109I know in Japan they get around 10% of their electricity from solar and they ran out of space already (if you go to Japan you can see solar panels everywhere in the country side). Japan has a similar population density to the UK and gets more sun because it is more South. Maybe in the UK you have more farmland, parks and golf courses and less forests in comparison to Japan but there is a reason these areas were cleared from trees in the first place. Trying to re-purpose farmlands and parks for solar panels is not politically feasible long term
Has something changed drastically with supercapacitors. Present ones can only be charged to 2.7V so it takes a lot of supercapacitors in series to get to a HV car battery. I have been using supercaps for years but they cannot supply even the energy/per volume of even the poorest LiIon batteries. LiIon batteries can be charged to around 3.6V but they store 10 to 100 times the energy storage of a supercapacitor per unit volume. Please show me the article that you are reading this from.
Nuclear is by far the most efficient form of power generation and that’s why china is building new ones. Please do a video on how low the electricity prices are in china as compared to western countries.
For various factors USA Nuclear power construction costs seem to over run dramatically and seem to take forever to build. Maybe china has better engineering and construction techniques.
A 3 GW solar farm to generate 24 GWh per day. i.e. going on a conservative 8 hours of daily sunlight for that region of the world. Plus 16 GWh battery storage. That covers the 24 hour time period at 1 GW continuous power supply.
It looks like they are banking on around 9 hours of sunlight per day, hence their 2.6 GW solar farm estimate. Not entirely unreasonable for that region of the world, as it rests around the lower end of daily sunlight hours estimates.
@@JoeyBlogs007Does not matter because you need to build just as much nuclear power for when there is no sun or wind (here in Europe - that is usually when you need Power the most - during really cold parts of the winter, there is no wind then).
@BrentonSmythesfieldsaye The energy sector experts says nuclear power. Few things make more sense to produce at large scale than power. Left wing politicians manage to destroy the best energy mix / system in the world (here in Sweden) by closing down nuclear reactors and nuclear powerplants.
Sam, How do those desert, utility-scale solar arrays clean the sand/dust from the deserts including from sand storms? I'm very pro solar, but this is a question I've always had when seeing those desert solar farms. Please cover in a future video.
You NEED batteries for solar panels to smooth the production and consumption differences. That makes solar more expensive. The nuclear power station project in the UK is the most expensive in the world. I think the whole project was badly mismanaged. Both solar panels and batteries have a limited lifespan (25-30 years for panels, 10-12 years for batteries). Solar is not a panacea.
@ coal is orders of magnitude cheaper than solar. Each of those can provide constant output which solar can’t by itself, only in combination with other sources or batteries.
I worked out the cost of installing solar in my home and it just doesn't make sense. I've managed to get electricity use and costs down to a level where I'd never save enough off my monthly bill to be able to pay off the cost of a solar panel/battery installation system in my lifetime. I could install a small 'stand-alone' disconnected system to power a back-up source for infrequent power outages, but outages are rare in my area. Nuclear power still looks like a more valid option for large-scale energy needs in a metropolitan area.
There is little doubt that solar and wind excess can replace baseload if adequate storage is available.. trouble is 1 GW is likely not enough. Where I live, Portugal (10 million people), baseload oscillates between 2 and 4 GW. Irradiance maps say that saudi arabia facility should yield some 0.5 GW here, so we'd need at least 4 of them. That's a lot of lithium for just one small country. Not sure world lithium reserves are enough for this and all the new electrical applications (cars, planes, etc.). So you might still need nuclear for some decades until stuff like sodium batteries are viable as very large scale storage.
I’ve been saying this for a while. Batteries can handle the base load. That’s why you do it in your home (should you choose to instal a battery). There’s plenty of good information on this.
@ Why would anyone need to do that? Renewable facilities can be build almost anywhere so that the grid becomes decentralised instead of massive, centralised power stations. That means smaller facilities that wouldn’t be generating or storing that level of power.
@ Well, well, another one who wants to keep everyone on the same treadmill. Which fossil fuel company do you work for? Or are you a coalition operative? You want to stay shackled to a dead horse or pay to keep some oil industry billionaire on his private island? Go right ahead. You kiss your chains mate. Don’t expect me to kiss mine. I’m going off grid. I don’t care where you go.
You should do a video on how much energy people store in their Tesla powerwall vs how much gets discharged during peak hours. So much of the energy we generate gets wasted bc no one needs it when it is produced
@andyfreeze4072 It is a waste of resources - as we still have to run a nuclear powerplant, which is the most economical if it runs and gets paid all the time. The individual with solar cells on the roof may save some money during summer - but society as a whole end up paying more.
Having wind and solar electric generation charge batteries would allow them to not be stranded assets when the public power grid stops supporting their wild AC that takes more fuel than making all the electricity internally from economic fuel efficient means. They do not work with weather events lasting longer than the battery storage such as wildfire ash blocking solar panels.
Distributed generation and storage at the use level with car battery storage is beyond obvious, and has been for over two decades. Cheaper, no grid upgrade cost, and much greater resilience in the face of ever increasing large scale natural disasters that result from climate changed. The auto and carbon fuel industrial complexes have been doing everything they can to stop it.
You don't have to be some carbon industrial conspiracist to realize solar/wind are non-starters for residential in the large percentage of the world without sun/wind for weeks/months at a time seasonally each year. You just have to have a working brain. Same for most industrial areas. Even where sun/solar are effective they are a complete waste of money and surface area in most compared to local geothermal.
Oil companies try to defend their obsolete sector by pointing the production of batteries. They say that producing batteries is a polluting process. Once we now know this is not true (at least as how they say), what's the best tecnology when batteries are that big and what's their pollution rate in the production process?
Even in Australia we get periods of a week without sun just overcast and rain and violent hailstorms that will smash solar panels you would need massive battery systems at huge cost to keep a state going for a week with no daily input so I think you are dreaming
As I said weird then, how when people use math and computation then the things you claim are a huge problems turn out to be entirely doable for quite reasonable costs. I wonder who should I believe and why, you who simply said stuff, or people who did the math that I can review and check? Hell I ask: if you were me, who do you think I ought believe, you or the math that says otherwise. Or for that matter as the maths says otherwise how come you even believe your own wet finger guesstimate? Seems odd to me.
Offshore power isn't baseload either sometimes it is not windy out there too. Hell baseload isn't baseload as it is sometimes down for scheduled maintenance and then sometimes is down for unscheduled reasons. So is the supposed problem with VRE and storage all BS? Nope. But is it a huge unsolved problem? Also nope. But the solutions that really work and are quite cost-effective are not simple or simplistic. There is what is known as intra-day shifting such as household battery does shift daytime PV to the evening. We need lots of that. And then interday where we shift energy from one sunny day to not so sunny one. And then there is seasonal where VRE produces (in AU & east cost) less on average in Apr-Aug than the rest of the year. Some way to deal with that at a minimum extra cost. And then finally say once every 7 years or so there is one year that is just worse than average. All that needs solutions, and none of it news to any serious VRE proponent and yes it all has answers. And no energy won't be free, and yes it will be reliable. Yes almost anything _can_ work, however the most cost-effective solutions use a variety of different things each covering the weaknesses/problems of the other. There are as a fact many more cloudy days than there are days that are both cloudy and windless over large areas. Wind and PV have a degree of anticorrelation that results in needing less storage to firm a mix of the two than either alone.
I see the day when every new home built in Africa will have solar panels as its roof, a battery on the side, a heat pump installed for air conditioning, a small gas generator as backup and e-bikes as a perk to buy to house. Like cell phones that has eliminated phone lines, new homes will no longer need to run electric cables to each house which will save the government a ton of money.
Here in Kingston Ontario the city just cancelled ordering electric buses because they are worried about the draw on our electricity grid.🤨how do I, as a citizen, help alter that mindset?
Capacitors, any electronics nerd can tell you that a capacitor fully charged at 1v will have 1.1v available, yes a 10% gain over imput. They are a dark horse of electotickery!
You can certainly increase voltage at output - a fallback converter with a duty cycle of more than 0.5 will provide that - but you can't get more power out than you put in.
Abu Dhabi : We have created the worlds largest solar battery. Planet Earth : Hold my beer... Fossil fuels are 100% organic, produced with solar energy from H2O and CO2, and when burned produce the primary foods for life, H2O and CO2. It's the largest storage battery of solar energy on Earth.
What do you have against nuclear power? It's completely carbon neutral, actually even cleaner than solar panels, if we consider the amount of CO2 emitted during production and the lack of real recycling possibilities.
10,000 jobs for a year, and maybe 50 jobs the operate and maintain ... Solar + Storage is a leading low cost $ per MW solution that can fielded in say very large fields project by project and put them near interstate grid lines. I disagree with TEV about rooftop solar, as its a lot of hassle with your power provider for what you get. I would only consider if my power company sold me a systems they maintained.
You seem to have caught a sunstroke down there. Next year spend a quatre of the year (November, December, January) in Northern Europe, let's say in Hamburg or Copenhagen and then make this video again
If our power companies really wanted to go sustainable they would absolutely help home owners and businesses install solar with battery back-up. But we know better! They don't. Why? I'd suggest they require one days average use of batteries on every meter. Perhaps they could own them and charge a rental fee to the meter user.
No it’s not proof. Sure in some areas but definitely not all. Northern Canada here and solar struggles to hit 1/4 installed capacity. I’ve seen weeks go by that they didn’t even melt the snow off. Thankfully we live right by a large hydroelectric dam. The first stage was built in the 70’s and is still going strong a half century later! Let’s see how long these before all these batteries and solar panels need to be swapped out.
You are delusional here in the UK last week we had a few days where wind and solar were under 5% of the total energy needed gas went up to over 65% and 11% from interconnectors
A simple statement. Were are the facts listed ? Happy to have them, seriously this can be put on youtube for constsnt replay. A replaying loop. Including $kWh for each part. Grid facts $1million per km. 1million km. $1TRILLION grid costs. Generation costs 5cents kWh Consumer facts 50cents kWh Do you want me to write the script. ???
I still think there is a place for nuclear power, _but not today's pressurized vessel reactors cooled by water or molten metals like sodium_ . It would be more like Generation IV reactors fueled by thorium-232, new reactor designs that are much smaller than today's nuclear reactors and could be assembled in large numbers in a factory. They would be useful in parts of the world where there is less sunlight available, especially in the higher latitudes or areas with higher amounts of precipitation. I do see solar becoming a lot more common in parts of the world where there are enough sunny days for power generation. places that include the southwestern continental USA, northern Mexico, the Sahara Desert, the Middle East and the interior regions of Australia. Wind power may be possibly hitting its limits due to the huge cost of large-scale installations, the higher maintenance cost of large wind turbines and the cost of disposing retired wind turbine parts, especially the blades.
Take what you've invested on your set up and multiply it by at least 30,000,000. Don't get me wrong, I'm pro small scale off grid solar/wind, but when you scale it, the money runs out really quickly. You own your house and you can afford your power set up. That puts you in a very small percentile group.
@@davidbrayshaw3529 I did the same on our last home, going to attempt to set up a similar, bigger system when we get into our new home but you are correct there should be a bit more help to go electric either zero interest government backed loans or grants. The more folk who take up solar with battery storage the more people will get jobs in the renewables industry paying NI instead of signing on. Bit of win both ways there !.
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I live in South Carolina and have Tesla solar panels, Tesla batteries and Tesla model Y and really enjoy all !
Here in Adelaide, I make great solar power in the middle of winter. I love my solar system.
Bahahaha. You love it !!! FFS
How "great is your solar power" in winter? Is it sufficent to meet your day and night needs?
I dont understand why solar panels aren't used to shade the batteries and reduce cooling requirements? I'm sure access concerns could be mitigated with modular panel systems and/or plenty of clearance heights.
some are buried underground
Solar panels should be used to shade everything. Parking, rooftops, reservoirs, lakes, canals, etc.
When there is no sun, no wind, where will we get the power? A nuclear powerplant is the most economic when it runs all the time.
What is cheaper - build sun, wind AND the exact same number MWh as the Backup needed - or only build nuclear ?
Why do we need sun and wind power (killing millions of birds and thousands tons of insects) - when we need to build the total amount of power needed in nuclear anyway ?
Shading heats the batteries more up, because the modules generate heat and theyre black. White battery housings prevent more from heat
@@martina5328you don’t have to build a bunch of nuclear. And it’s simply tooo expensive. As solar keeps getting cheaper it will only make sense to just overbuild solar to produce the minimum base load needed on a stormy day. Batteries will get cheaper too as these companies build more battery projects and get more funding.
Hello from Moscow. I am happy for the UAE and Australia. In our region there were 2 (TWO) sunny days last December. From October to March we have this approximately every year. We also have so-called freezing rain every winter. In simple terms, this is when rain hits any surface (roofs, trees, wires, solar panels, cars) and instantly freezes and forms an ice shell. There is always hail, but not large, but once every 3-4 years there is such a hail that it can smash the roofs of houses to pieces, not to mention solar panels. Just for information.
In such extremes Solar will not be the solution, but most of the world does not live in such conditions!
@@rtmclean484 But from May to September Moscow is the N1 capital in the world. Welcome.))
@ I'd love to visit Moscow someday, hopefully it will be easier to travel to Russia from my country soon in the future when the war has ended. Peace and respect from Ireland 🙏
@@rtmclean484 You won't stay there long.
@@paulc6766 those who never been there say tat often lol
This project is not the end of nuclear. The UAE has recently built 5.3 GW of nuclear, so this 1 GW solar-battery just means that the UAE is pursuing an all-the-above energy strategy.
They use a ton of energy and have some of the world's highest emissions per capita. An unfathomably wasteful country.
No. It is pursuing the strategy to have safe power first while building photovoltaics and wind as the future safe energy source...just like someone created LEDs under the light of incandescent lightbulbs.
Nuclear is shit as hell. Expensive and nobody knows how to get rid of the waste. The US for example has not a single nuclear waste disposal site...a huge problem in the making.
That country IS a Showcase of what shouldnt be done. First they should stop wasting energy and resources at a colossal scale.
Given the price difference and speed to build difference, this is another nail in the coffin for nuclear. Not the end of nuclear exactly but sensible people will see the cost and timeframe difference and will usually choose renewables plus storage. Not always - but most of the time.
@@mhirasuna in Australia... nuclear is gold plating at public expense for vc profit margins. We have the ultimate storage system... that isn't a battery system.
THANKS SAM 🙏 GREAT NEWS INDEED ‼️🔋🔋🔋
And it’s projected to cost £136Bn (and likely far in excess of that) to store nuclear waste from Sellafield in the UK deep underground, a project likely to take 50 years and leave many generations with problems. Nuclear power is insane (literally).
lol
@@TheChzoronzon Russian build nuclear plants that do not leave any waste. Also they recyclate used fuel (waste)
Your choice to stay with an outdated tech...
More left wing BS
@ Excuse me?
they have to finish Hinckley Pt C yet. ++31 billion UKP. 2031..
I don't think anyone would argue that Europe can't exist on solar panels and batteries alone, but even when reviewing the "sun belt" we should be somewhat circumspect. The UAE is to Solar what Norway is to hydro and we should be careful when extrapolating. It has enormous arid land with almost zero economic value so it's a no brainer to want to install solar panels there. And just looking at recent data, in 2022 UAE consumed 148,089 GWh which works out to 406 GWh per day so, assuming the sun doesn't shine at night, they will need battery storage for 203 GWh. Since a single Tesla mega pack stores 3.9 MWh they would need 52,051 of them, and at a unit cost of $1 million, that comes to $52 billion. This is a sizeable cost but probably affordable for such a rich country in a part of the world where vanity projects are par for the course. Most countries in the sun belt however, are quite poor so adding this cost burden to their populations is probably not achievable nor desirable. The idea that solar panels will replace everything else within a certain band of latitudes is just not credible imo.
What’s the cost of a nuclear plant these days? About the same?
@@markjames2154maybe 🤷🏼♂️ but you need to feed the Nuke with fuel forever, what does that cost?
"Most countries in the sun belt however, are quite poor"
Pakistan is poor, and just increased its electricity production by 50%, almost all of it behind-the-meter rooftop or local ground mount solar. Whatever the cost burden, people in poor countries need electricity, and nothing costs less than solar.
@@markjames2154 and nukes can run 24/7 for 70 yrs. Renewables not so much. 40 percent of nameplate capacity. 😅
@@lancebenson8400 wrong.
Nuclear costs twice as much as initially advertised to build
@@davidlloyd8135 that's the standard ppp outcome for the taxpayer to fix.
🎉on the mark🎯 let's go electric
Viking 😂👍
everyone needs a battery
states like germany where theres litterally 3-4 month without any suffient solar power it wont ever work without nuclear or natural gas backup.
According to the facts In 2023, renewable energy sources accounted for approximately 59.7% of Germany's net public electricity generation. It's the first time renewables have covered the majority of the country's electricity consumption. Wind power and solar energy were the leading contributors, with wind power alone providing 32% of the electricity. Seems they are doing quite well over there and expanding their green credentials on a monthly basis.
P.S. Is that a typo as I thought Germany was still a Country I didn't know they had become a state, within the EU I suppose ?.
weird then
how many actual numerical analysis, say, and have computed with numbers, not rhetoric, that it can indeed be done.
Not in the UK we came close to blackouts the other week as wind & solar were almost non existent! And we were importing double digit percent of UK demand over inter connectors from other countries!!!!
The UK imports as it's cheaper to do so than using gas generation (which is the most expensive generation source to the UK grid these days), that's why the number of interconnectors the UK has with the continent have and will continue to increase. The UK is part of a diversified pan European and North African network of grids nowadays, a private company is even laying a direct HVDC connection from Morocco to the UK. So high imports (or exports as has occured in some years) is not unexpected these days.
@GruffSillyGoat The UK has lost energy independence , and now suffers a high risk of blackouts and pays high prices for imported energy as a result of the over reliance upon unreliable wind and solar generation.
@@Leo555ZZZ - UK energy independence hasn't existed for a long time, parhaps since the 1950s. Most of the coal, particularly since the 1980s, and natrual gas (which took over in the 1960/70s from coal) is imported at high expense (especially in the last 10 years). Oddly blackouts were more a thing in the 1960s/70s/80s than now, but for various reasons.
Imports, unlike the past, these days are about reducing the cost of energy not assuring against outages. The UK is more connected to other countries energy systems than ever before, with more international interconnects still being installed. Imports/Exports role nowadays is performed for energy trading rather than energy assurance.
The UK is part of a cross European/North African grid network, where it both imports and exports energy, and intends to more exporting as renewables generation increases (with some recent years the UK being a nett exporter).
The UK particularly imports energy when the cost is cheaper to do so than generating domestically, this is mainly due to the high cost of natural gas based generation. So imported energy, particularly the renewable and low carbon energy from Norway, Denmark and France, is cheaper than home generation when wind and solar resources are low.
The solution to low renewable generation is a mixture of diversification of renewable sources (hydro, tidal, solar, wind and zero-carbon) and generation location (around more areas of the coastline). Basically creating a diversified baseload capability with low likelihood of simultaneous lull periods.
Gas may well be retained in a backup role, until this itself is replaced with other storage technologies or generation technologies.
@GruffSillyGoat The move to wind and solar , which at times produces a tiny percentage of the installed capacity is the primary reason for increased costs and reduced system reliability being experienced in recent years.
Solar produces nothing every night , and sometimes almost nothing during the day due to cloud and snow cover.
Wind can produce almost nothing over the entire country when a large weather system is in place , regardless of how many turbines are installed...good luck relying on tidal , hydro and zero carbon to fill the shortfall.
Usually it is filled by importing energy , which in itself is an inherent system weakness and liability caused by an over reliance upon weather and time of day dependent generation.
@@Leo555ZZZ - In 2024, renewables produced 43% of UK electricity (56.7%, if zero carbon Nuclear is included), whereas gas generated 25.9% of electricity. Likewise gas generates a tiny proportion of electricity at times, but unlike renewables has a disproportionate impact on the cost of electricity, being the most expensive generation source. Renewables are not the primary reason for increased costs this is the cost of electricity.
The consumer price of electricity is determined by a national pricing framework that uses the highest cost of production at any point in time to set the cost of electricity, even if only one area of the country is using gas to generate 1% of electrical power it set's the national price. Take the study from 2023 for example, that determined that gas generation set the price 84% of the time, imports 15% and 'other' (which includes renewables and zero-carbon nuclear) just 1% of the time. Gas sets the wholesale cost of electricity most of the time, being the most expensive generation source, and is the primary reason costs have increased due to the high variability involved with its supply.
The cost of renewables is not the driver of the cost of electricty, as the cost of transition to renewables is a very small proportion of the price of electricity (under 2%) as renewable infrastructure are now purchased on a Contract for Differences basis. Whereas the wholesale cost of energy, represents 30 to 35% of the cost (and as above is determined by the cost of gas generation most of the time).
Further the gas based generation suppliers game the system (as occured recently), turning off prior to know low generation periods waiting for a peaking power request, then turning back on at over 50x the previous generation cost. The answer to this particular issue is to tightent the rules (yet again) and install more batteries and other energy storage systems, and store more of the curtailed renewable generation for times when production is lulls.
However, many energy suppliers (Octopus, Ovo etc), OFGEM and industry bodies are seeking for a change to the pricing framework, from a national based one to a regionalised/area based one. The UK government is consulting on this, and it will be interesting to see the outcome - where it is expected that those areas with high renewable generation will see much lower electricity bills than now.
Oddly, in terms of inherent weaknesses this has been shown to be more the case with fossil-fuel supply risks that can be highly variable and dependant on global events and competive supply demands outside of the UK's control. Events like gas tanker ships being directed to other higher paying consumers mid-transit delaying supply come to mind, geopolitical impacting supply (as occured recently sending the cost of electricity sky high), suppliers suddenly lowing supply capacity to rise the cost of gas to increase revenue or supply lines becoming damaged. If anything the more centralised, monopolised and constrained supply gas market makes it more susceptible to risks than that of the decentralised renewable generation model.
Imports are not a system weakness, this is not like the dark old days of predominent fossil-fuel based generation, where imports where only performed at times of stress. Rather electrical energy imports and exports are now common as electricity is a traded commodity these days, with more transnational interconnects being deployed than ever before. Grids are connecting up and energy is flowing across larger and larger areas, directly as electrons not via more expensive and inefficient indirect energy cerriers like gas or oil.
What the UK is doing is to transition the bulk of everyday generation to renewables and zero-carbon sources, supported by energy storages to be as efficient as possible whilst maintaining a backup capacity of older dispatchable sources for emergency use as well as looking at alternatives backup technologies. The system (diversified generation and energy storage) will be sized to handle the once in five year short duration (few day) dunkelflaute event, with backup/demand management being used for the rare one in thirty year two week event.
This is no different to the snow outage strategy adopted in the UK, where since snow is such a infrequent and short term event it doesn't make sense to pay extensively and continuously to ensure when a short duration event occurs that things can operate as normal - that is the cost of doing outweights the risk and loss of not doing. If energy costs can be significantly lowered via renewables for 97% of the time, then for the 3% using the energy trading market, backup mechanisms and reducing demand is a more than workable cost effective approach.
Abu Dhabi is practically on the equator. Try doing this in the UK in winter. You would have no chance. Also the UK has a population nearly 10 times that of the Emirates.
I believe you, but it is my understanding that the UK has copious amounts of wind power. Several times in the last 2 years I have heard that in London and in Scotland there has been so much wind electricity that the power was given away.
Wind energy is abundant in the UK, & more is yet to be harvested
@@guringai Please see my reply above.
@RenzoCanepari not so. Given away to whom? And how? Even when wholesale prices are negative, the users are still charged. If the wind isn't blowing the wind producers get paid! Last year it was 1 billion UK . 😅 Brilliant business model. Funded by the taxpayer. Do your homework and stop being stooged.
@@guringaiharvest wind energy? How? 😅😅😅😅
Hi, I've been following your videos for a long time and really enjoy them. I live in uk on the Suffolk coast next to sizewell nuclear power station. The uk is building a power station at a hinkly point and sizewell c. The amount of money they waste is amazing, and the time its going to take is more amazing. From today, it will take 15 years. Cost 60 to 100 billion, and when they switch it on. Every electric car battery is going to be linked to the owners house. Solar pannels everywhere. Costs of home batteries are so low, and life capacity is so long. I drive past the site every day, knowing i could work there, earn the same money, and not work. For the next 15 years
Where will Europe get the power - when it is cold during the winter (when it is really cold - there is most often zero wind, and as I am sure you have noticed, not much sun).
@@martina5328batteries. The simple solution ready to go today.
Unfortunately the fundamentalists like Sam and his like minded supporters dont live in this reality @@martina5328
@@martina5328 I don't understand. Germany, highest amount of wind power, peaks its generation during the winter. Summer is lower. Winter is when it is cold.
@markvalery8632 When it get really cold in the winter, it is when there is no wind. Look it up. (Less heat in the atmosphere, i.e. less energy, less wind). It is very clear for us living here to. Rarely it is say -20 C and windy.
Truth is refreshing.
Nice to see more solar coming online. As per auto to home battery backup, I love the concept. The prices of EV's are over priced here in Canada. The subsidies are being paid by tax payers who may not have or afford an EV. The rich people can install EV to home battery backup, but i don't agree on subsidies to help them.
It is a waste of money since we still need to build the same amount of nuclear for when it is not windy or sunny.
You don’t like it so nobody gets evs and vehicle to home. Life is a compromise.
@@martina5328 persistent with BS , are you not?
@@martina5328facts don’t care about your feelings or your bs.
@@andyfreeze4072 Exactly what is bullshit - in the winter with no solar and no wind when it gets really cold (no wind goes with really cold) - where is the power. We have no more waterpower to utilize. What we have to choose from is fossil fuels or nuclear. Explain how we get any other power at scale?
This is easy for an oil-rich country with low population and lots of sunlight. This can't be replicated the world over because of higher populations, and therefore higher energy needs, because of less sunlight, and because of lack of infinite funds for a vanity project.
We have record coal usage this year despite all of this. Secondly study why large grids need turbines as they provide inertia which is needed for grid frequency balancing . Solar and battery can't do this at scale. You need pumped hydro or flywheels.
Hi Sam, I reviewed the article you mentioned at the end. In reading past the headline, it says the energy storage efficiency was 63%, which you'd have to compare to current batteries that are roughly 95% efficient. And then to make it self-sufficient, they paired to with a solar panel, just a regular solar panel, probably 25% efficient just like any panel today, and they state the overall efficiency was just over 5%. So for me, they still need to get supercapacitors much better, but it is promising research.
The measures of efficiency you mentioned are chemical and electrical efficiency and the efficiency of solar energy capture. While this is interesting and important to understand, in the end the bottom line is really just the cost per kilowatt hour.
In Australia we should use the cheapest large scale energy storage for our east coast grid, and that is pumped hydro. We have over 100 suitable pumped hydro sites just in NSW. Also we have more than enough land to supply 100% power using solar. Current batteries are great for short term stabilization and firming. Offshore wind like gas, coal and Nuclear are simply more expensive in Australia.
Did you hear about the solar project that’s going on in Australia?
Western Green energy hub.
35 million solar panels, and 3000 wind turbines and Battery Storage Systems.
@@NAY2GAS Yes, a proposed export industry. Pumped hydro provides longer term higher capacity energy storage at a cheaper price. Snowy hydro 2 will have 350,000mW storage capacity. ://www.energy.nsw.gov.au/sites/default/files/2022-08/NSW%20Pumped%20Hydro%20Roadmap.pdf
Mr Generalisation again. We don't get the sun other countries get. So we're building new Nuclear power stations.
Neighborhood level batteries linking residential and local commercial rooftop solar will do the trick.
Add in the large solar farm linking them with UHDC lines and we've got excessive electricity!
That's a problem being worked out right now in California (northern part of the state and their electric supplier), but its too much power being generated by solar system installs. Laws passed in the early days of solar mandated that the power company buy the homeowner solar-generated electricity as a 'primary' source, but they have too much coming in. Battery storage systems helped, but its still an issue.
Try running Tomago Aluminium Smelter with solar, wind and battery. Won't last 45 mins. Unfortunately if you want to run a modern economy you need heavy consistent base load power. Your renewables won't cut it.
Yep.
It can easily run it. 15 seconds of research proves that.
@@dannelson6980A smelter has a need to be operating at all times. If the smelting process is interrupted the plant can get damaged. So intermittent power generation is not sufficient.
@@DanielWijk That is covered by the battery. This plant can output at least 1 GW base-load, the smelter only needs 850 MW you have some head room.
@@dannelson6980 Unless the intermittent power supply from the sun comes back in sufficient force in time it will dwindle and die as well.
All at an enormous cost that you have to replace in 10-15 years.
There are whole regions where is definitely will not work for the foreseeable future. Living in Australia skews your perspective. Even Seba set the required battery capacity at much higher than a lousy 24 hours.
No one is saying that this exact setup would work everywhere. The fundamental principles will work where most people live though.
A few weeks ago we in the UK nearly had a total Black Out at night as the wind stopped blowing and what's left of our gas and nuclear struggled to fill the shortfall.
Thankfully you have all those interconnectors with... EUROPE!!!
No we didn’t. Nobody lost power. We just dipped into the planned reserve, that costs money, but only for a few hours.
In other words, the worse case scenario is no problem.
Just a few days later and we had a storm that plunged the price to almost nothing for a day, so we made back all the money we spent on the extra capacity. This is how the system is designed to work. You may have to purchase more expensive power for a few days of the year, but for the rest of the year, you are significantly better off. Your yearly costs will be lower with this system than the alternative.
Hi Sam. Sorry top put a damper on your enthusiasm for solar and batteries but the project in Abu Dubai still needs fossil fuel powered generators or the lights (and air-conditions) go out. If Statista are to be believed Abu Dubai have an average electricity demand of 22Gw per hour. This means that, as you said, the batteries are for base load and will last for just over 1 night at 1Gw per hour of supply from the batteries. The remaining 21Gwts per hour still have to be generated and this is mainly from fossil fuel and this is with the biggest storage battery in the world in perhaps the sunniest place in the world. This battery is only going to provide around 4% of their electricity at night and this assumes that the solar panels charging the battery can be kept clear of dust and the sun not blocked by sand storms. This project sounds to me like a virtue signalling response from a rich country with vast amounts of open space and 360 days of sunlight. As has been pointed out before batteries, for long term storage (over 8 hours), are not the way to go and at present we have NO technology the can store enough energy apart from fossil fuel and nuclear to last for days. Batteries defiantly will not cut it for long term storage no matter how much we hope they will.
I've been Praying for Your Wife and Family, Sam. Much Hope for a Positive outcome.
Stop praying and send money.
Did you notice that those batteries cabinets in the Emirates are covered with vents and cooling fans. Heat both internal and external is the enemy of a Lithium storage battery. You need massive cooling to keep lithium under control, that is the achilles heel of lithium storage.
You always need backup solutions. In case that dust storms, fires or volcanic eruptions cloud the sun (even in a desert), we need a backup to solar. This could be wind and Nuclear. You never ever put all eggs in one basket.
@@HansMilling our pumped hydro is quite a good basket.
@@davidpearn5925 yep. Which supplies 2/10ths of fuck all.
@davidpearn5925 Hydrogen is too expensive and too dangerous to keep in storage.
@HansMilling water isn't
In the US, I believe that we should have a mix of wind, solar and nuclear with some where around 70% nuclear. Hopefully, the price is going to come down an modular fast reactors which will burn some of the existing nuclear waste. The nuclear reactors are the safest form of energy although only marginally safer than wind or solar and require less overall infrastructure. The price is somewhat debatable depending on what is being included with the renewables such as the storage and additional transmission lines. In the US, getting permits for new transmission is not easy or quick.
Absolutely spot on. Those disagreeing must be funded by fossil fuel companies. Potential for poor, sunny countries to sell their clean energy.
The uk would need to have a massive increase in storage. We were down to 10% renewables during the latest cold snap. No wind for a few days and overcast and it will deplete the storage, until we have an international backup system the UK still needs nuclear. We also would be held hostage by the international supplier.
We have a few days a year where most of the UK is covered in fog and no wind. Batteries and other storage will not provide enough storage.
I am fully committed to a non nuclear and fossil free future. Fog bound for a few days at a time is our curse.
Tidal is our best option
We have a problem of drifting sands, with breakwaters preventing the movement. If we were to replace those breakwaters with containers in a linen with small generators providing inlet/outlet we could generate electricity most of the day.
I think the supercapacitors are 63% efficient at capturing the 22% efficient solar. So it is 0.22 x 0.63
whatever you do DONT link into the euro grid, that would be a very very stupid idea. Dont store energy as ammonia or hydrogen. Look for every problem to stop the obvious not look for the simple solutions. Wont be fog bound over all of europe or north africa or Ukraine, or Greece.... and they will all have batteries, pumped hydro, wind, heat sinks, wind, hydrogen, ammonia. Look at Australia, it has a NATIONAL grid and its as big as europe and only 30 odd million.
Nuclear is necessary , it makes everything else more simple and makes customer prices lower
excellent
In Germany we also need wind power. There is not enough sun in the winter.
Aptera should look into it. It could replace some of the heavier batteries, maybe used to recover regenerative energy
Here in the UK we have to buy in around 14% of our power from France, Eire and Norway along with LPG from Norway and the USA, as you can see we need a lot more renewables and battery storage to keep our 300tWh of electricity needs rolling along.
My main concern is how slow things get connected into the grid.
National Grid, a privately owned virtual monopoly owned by the likes of BlackRock, Vanguard Group, Capital Group Companies, Lazard Asset Management, Legal & General Investment Management and of course Norges Bank Investment Management (Norway again!) get to decide where the power we use comes from, thing is they also have fingers in many of these providers pie's, it's not in their interest to have lots of small businesses or even private homes putting power into the grid (stealing their profits !) cheaper than their own businesses can provide power.
National Grid like having everything centric, they control both the hare and the hounds with Ofgem doing little or nothing to even out the UK electricity playing field
You are little out of date on National Grid plc's role these days, the network operator function that makes the planning and day to day purchasing decisions was bought out last year by the government for £630m to create a new public body responsible for these roles, the National Energy System Operator (NESO). They also transferred part of OFGEM's planning and licencing role to NESO, to ensure the new national operator was fully in control of planning objectives.
As to balancing/optimisation, which is where LV generation like home generation tends to reside, this mainly sits with the energy suppliers (like Octopus, Ovo, E.on, EDF etc., note some of these are the commercial arms of larger energy companys), who select the which, where and when of energy generators and energy storage providers (including home ones) to utilise to provide energy to their customers (in line with the tariffs they offer).
Lastly, there are the distributed network operators (DNOs) who manage the MV/LV local grid services for connecting up domestic, commercial and retail customers to the grid, it's these who decide whether there is local capacity on their networks to connect a consumer/producer (such as domestic home PV system) or not. NESO now has direct control of the DNO's operating licenses (having gained that function from OFGEM, who still retain the regulator and monitoring role though).
National Grid Plc now focussed on the grid's transmission infrastructure management (along with Scottish Power and SSE in Scotland) not the overall grid operator role for which they have the license to run, as well as running their own DNO in the central belt of the country (having bought the Western DNO a little while back).
Sicne NESO was implemented the role of OFGEM is more focussed on energy regulation, future capacity market energy auctions and legislation implementation. NESO does the day to day operation of the grid, as well as the licencing and opertional management of the grid, dno and energy supplier companies.
Whilst this all may seem a complex setup, it actually purposefully segmented and decentralised to prevent monopolies/cartels forming as the licences are issued with strict conditions, including separation of roles/duties within operating companies, and generates value for money as the licences are competively bidded for by the operators.
There are some areas to address, such as the domestic pricing framework and commercial/domestic connection process, which are a bit long in the tooth (setup for a time whern only big generators or industrial consumers existed) but the enahancements to the processes to make these run smooth are already being developed.
You can increase your installed renewables many times , and batteries as well , but it will still fail to supply power when needed due to extended periods of little wind and sun over the entire UK .
You main concern should be the failure to invest enough in reliable coal ,gas , hydro and nuclear power.
@@Leo555ZZZ - do you have evidence to support the whole wide area outage, the risk level involved, and duration. The energy planners who researched and modelled this already, and devised approaches that don't need coal/gas in the mix.
@GruffSillyGoat The 'energy planners' were working to push renewables .
Just a few days ago your entire wind system provided less than 1% of the required electricity.
That should be all the evidence you need to confirm that the idea that you can rely on wind and solar with no need for coal and gas , (or large nuclear and/ or hydro) , is a green fantasy.
@@Leo555ZZZ When did these periods occur, I've had a look through all the usual data sources but cannot find anything regarding extended periods of little wind and sun (daylight). The last time I remember anything like that was due to an Icelandic volcano kicking off a few years ago but the turbines were still spinning and we did get daylight just no sunshine
I think V2G is going to be a game changer, in combination with home batteries and grid scale / neighbourhood scale batteries!!! At least the Australian government is developing the V2G standard (luckily for us, it will be a AS/NZ standard, so should be applicable to the NZ market as well). Next thing is to incentivise it for the owners, that we get decent prices for selling our solar generated electricity back to the grid, day and night!!!! If we could just get actual wholesale prices rather than a very low feed in rate, it would make the solar installation and EV investment worth it for more people. Also getting low interest funding would be accessible if the feed in tariff is reasonable and guaranteed!!!
I am in Salt Lake City, USA - our 9 KW solar panels since November have averaged less than 100 Watts each daily. When they are covered with snow it's 1/3 that. Solar may work in warmer places, but not here since the cost and space requirement to hold 3 months+ worth of power in batteries is not affordable.
Get a long broom and clean off the snow it might help.
@@dylanthomas12321there's always one isn't there. And you are it. 😅
If you have battery storage could you buy cheap overnight electricity from your provider then use this during the day, say 12kWh of storage, would that cover your daily needs ?.
The sun always shines brightly somewhere in the world and direct current is super conductive in one direction across the sea... and in the opposite direction, the efficiency of the wire diameter becomes twice as good as alternating current.
We know that we can do renewables over 24 hours. The problem is: "Can we do renewables like that every day, even dark winter days?".
that's why batteries come in handy.......
Yes and no, if paired with a wind farm and an appropriately sized battery. Yes. So the question is, is there wind available in the specific area in question to supplement solar? For this story though, Sam did specify the "Sun belt" where this would be immediately viable, which would be equatorial and tropical regions and don't have long periods of dark winter days. The further you move to the poles, the bigger solar farms and batteries would need to be to be able to provide a base load.
The answer is no. The amount of storage required to make batteries a grid-wide solution for all residential and industrial needs is so large, costs will make industries uncompetitive. I believe no serious engineer or scientist considers this a viable solution. Politicians and music major might, but these are people that cannot find their way out of an Excel spreadsheet.
@@lukeearthcrawler896Have you put the numbers in your Excel spreadsheet? Have you really calculated how much battery is needed, and what it will cost? How much do you consider “needed”? Have you looked the expected future prices of batteries, following the Wright’s Law trends that have already reduced battery prices 97% in 30 years? Have you looked into alternatives like Form Energy’s iron-air batteries, or zinc batteries, that don’t use lithium and stick to the cheapest possible materials?
California is installing a pvc panel and battery installation in the desert to power its High Speed Rail.
Yeah and they're asking for another $100 billion to make progress. 15 years after passing HSR we still don't have a single train running.
Is that the rail line running between San Francisco Bay and Los Angeles or the Los Angeles to Las Vegas line? The SFO > LA HSR rail is a mess, nothing 'HSR' about it. All the stops along the way will make it no better than a standard rail line, and the cost overruns are getting horrific. The Las Vegas > LA line might work, but its a private project so no taxpayer loss (hopefully, AFAIK).
@ the California Hi Speed Rail - it is still a few years away but work has begun both at the San Francisco end and the line south of Bakersfield - there are several miles of tunnels through the Tehachepi Mountains one of which is 40 miles long to prevent a steeper gradient than the train can tolerate. It will be the longest tunnel in North America.
@ could you tell me if the Bullet Train in Japan that opened in 1964 had cost over runs? I won’t wait for you to answer as you don’t know - and won’t bother to find out - it was twice the estimated original cost - no one complains about it now nor did they at the time - they also had the good fortune to extend their line at grade and having no mountains on the initial line. Can you also tell me which freeway is three times over its original cost and after 30 years is still not connected together even now? It is Hwy 69 from Minnesota to Dallas. How long do HSR tracks last? Decades with minor repairs. There are already additional lines planned between those already included such as a line to Phoenix from LA and a line to Lake Tahoe from San Francisco and those to Anaheim and San Diego. And stop dissing the Central Valley where 4 million live - there are plenty of cities connected by HSR lines with far lower populations that are highly used.
@@bright93 I would love if our cost overruns were only double. If I lived in Japan I wouldn't complain either. Here in California we rarely make anything less than ten times what it should cost and that is if they even complete it. In 2008 when we passed HSR the estimate was $9.9 billion. They won't even get to a running train between Bakersfield and Madera for less than $33 billion. I voted for this mess and now regret it. Our state should be studied for how not to build things.
It’s (S&B) been working for me in North Bondi, with 2 EVs and a large house. Anybody who thinks it doesn’t work does not know what there are talking about or has no experience with it.
Surely this can't be accurate. With all the buzz over AI data centers increased power needs, it almost defies logic that solar could be enough(?)
All electricity generation methods are" intermittent " . Even baseload coal and nuclear . Nothing runs 100% of the time. Baseload coal plants have multiple generating units so that they have spare capacity for when one unit breaks down or needs to have maintenance work done. Energy storage for renewables is essentially doing the same thing .
Germany's fucked up energy policy shows that nuclear is the only way!
Few understands this at this fan base 😅
Most of the subs must have bumped their heads or be stroke survivors.
Some places get a lot of sun AND have loads of desert or other 'waste' space to put them in but not all. Wind is often more reliable, certainly in winter.
As it is not reliable - you need to roughly build just as much nuclear as if you had zero wind and sun. The cost becomes more than double as a result.
@@martina5328All energy sources have their pros and cons. It's really about analyzing the use case for what option to use..Fossil fuels are mostly on the way out because the con of warming makes it a non-starter. Even then it will be a long time before you see long haul jumbo jets that don't use fossil because of jetfuel energy density. Wind turbine are great for windy places. Make no sense on top of homes because small turbines are expensive cost per wart., Solar are fantastic for putting in sunny places. Not as as good for cloudy countries and less economic sense the further north one goes due reduces solar radiation. Hydro is great when near rivers that can be repurposed for hydro without seriously damaging something else. . Nuclear are great for spacecraft or any other area where renewables are not as economically viable but come with drawback of waste that can stay radioactive for thousands of yers.,
I am not a fan of wind power for the following reasons: 1) they are quite expensive to build for large installations, 2) they are quite expensive to maintain (especially offshore installations) and 3) when the wind turbine is retired, we don't have a really effective way to recycle the materials used in a wind turbine (yet).
@@Sacto1654 As for 1) and 2) the strike price of wind power from Hornsea Project 3 is 1/3 of Hinkley Point C. Using a capacity factor of 50%, which is average for the Hornsea projects, the strike price for wind is 2/3 of that nuclear plant. As for 3), recycling of wind turbine blades with happen before any long term storage of nuclear waste happens. And if people keep saying that because of 3) wind farms should not be built, then then must agree that no nuclear plants should be built until there is long term storage in that country.
@ Actually, a reason why I advocate Generation IV nuclear power is that instead of uranium-235, the use of thorium-232 results in much smaller amounts of nuclear waste, waste that has the half-life of essentially 350 years! At that level, you could use retired salt mines for nuclear waste storage. Mind you, the waste from a thorium reactor is actually quite valuable for nuclear medicine, so the waste might not even make it to final storage.
UAE has 4 APR1400 nukes and is about to build another 4. These were built by the Koreans over 10 years. Nuclear pairs well with solar and batteries in hot sunny climates. The claim solar and batteries can do it alone is baseless in the context of the required reliability. Western Australia should replicate this model
SOLID CARBON thermal batteries. Industrial thermal energy for. Making stuff. ❤❤
The key is to make renewables more profitable for investors and companies than fossil fuels. At that point fossil fuels are history.
Sure , governments need to give renewables companies even bigger taxpayer funded subsidies than they already do .
That will solve all our problems and we will never have floods , droughts , fires and cyclones ever again.
@@Leo555ZZZ I detect sarcasm.
@@robertfonovic3551 Well done .
Whilst Solar PV generation may fulfill a baseload roll in sunbelt countries, in more Northernly, particularly coastal, locations Wind generation will serve that role more than solar.
As to home generation/storage being the preferred form of PV will help within the domestic demand segement of the electricity market this typically only represent a third of the overall electricity market, with commercial and industry electricity demand taking closer to half the overall market. Hence baseload sources via grid scale solar PV/wind generation is a more critical need to meet the industrial and commercial demands.
Musk already said solar can power the whole US if we install 100 miles by 100 miles of solar
Nice location to sabotage.
I agree.....for Aussie......every home could be self sufficient in elec if we had BETTER politicians, with commonsense and an open mind.
Both attributes are uncommon in our Councils and Govts.
Heehaw Heehaw
Scotland needs offshore wind... There is no sunbelt in Scotland. Solar works well to the English border - then it's wind.
mmmmmmm strange.... how far North is Scotland....
@@lauchlanguddy1004 Further north than Kazakhstan and Mongolia. Solar is ok but not great in England. Next to no power over the winter quarter.
And for when there is no wind you still need nuclear power... So you need to build the same amount of nuclear - regardless if you have built wind power or not. Let that sink in.
@@martina5328nuclear is not suited for that. It delivers base load energy. Not flexible to jump in when its not sunny or windy. Luckily periods of no wind at all are rare in uk. And practically never much longer then a week. So the periods could be overcome with enough storage. But that would need a lot of storage.
@@martina5328 Within 20 miles there are 5 grid scale batteries. They are closing the last nuclear power station - Torness - this year and using the site and its connections to the grid for more battery storage. I worked in the nuclear industry and all I can say is 'thank god' - there would be riots if the public knew the real safety regime. Nuclear is finished in Scotland and hopefully the new station in the south of England will never be commissioned.
A cubic meter of compressed air can hold 10 to 20 kw and is cheaper than a battery loses can be replenish with only to solar power so the overall cost is lower and last many times more than any battery.
Living in Canada, a 63% efficiency on solar panels would finally make it worth while to go solar.
Look what happened to Germany when it tried to go Green. It has some of the most expensive electricity. To compensate for its catastrophic decision to go green, it has been buying large quantities of natural gas and restarting several coal plants.
I suspect battery installs at municipal or even just shopping center size would immediately make grids much more reliable. Should this be a priority?
The issue isn't that you can't do this on a small scale.
The issue is that it doesn't scale, we don't have the minerals to build it out once nevermind once every 30 or so years.
People just don't grasp the scale of the problem.
Not in the UK at present. Wind is the renewable base load.
At a time last week your wind generated less than 1% of your power ,,,and you call that baseload ? Good luck.
@@Leo555ZZZ The week before last, wind power generated around 27.4% of the UK's electricity. It seems like wind energy has been consistently contributing a significant portion to the UK's power mix recently, there did you get the figure of 1% from please ?.
I think we need to realize that to not everywhere in the world has access to vast empty land that can be used for solar farms. Much of Europe for example don't have this kind of space or sun. And this is not just for Europe, much of Asia has too high population density to lose this kind of space (like India or Bangladesh) That's why offshore wind and nuclear are so important.
Unfortunately building new nuclear has become prohibitively expensive because of over regulation and that is why we get numbers like the one you cited (40 billion) in the UK for nuclear. A similar capacity nuclear plant can probably be built in China for 1/10th of the price. If you tried to build this base load capacity in the UK from solar + battery for example, you can be sure it would run multiple times over budget and take much much longer than initial schedule (and probably half of it would be cancelled).
Pick a crowded country, the UK for example, and look at a satellite map. Zoom out on google maps. What do you see? Endless farmland , much of it only profitable because my taxes fund the farmers (and they don't pay taxes).
Do the same with India , Rajashthan for example. See the endless desert?
I think you drastically overestimate the amount of space needed. Especially when you include battery storage.
unfortunately nuclear is expensive to meet SAFETY STANDARDS. Thats what regulation is about, get over it.
@@andyfreeze4072 That is not the main reason, the reactor he mentioned for example is a French EPR design that has many safety features and is built in other developed countries like Finland and France for much less cost. But the UK one is more expensive than even those because the UK regulations were so complex and particular that the entire reactor basically had to be redesigned during construction at enormous cost. The versions built in Finland and France are just as safe.
This is a part of a broader pattern, you can see the same thing play out in HS2, where UK spent much more money on the construction of a high speed rail line in comparison to EU or Asian countries and failed to deliver it at the end due to cost. Building things in UK (and US) are so expensive that you can build the same project (goes for any infrastructure work) for half the price in EU and for 1/4th the price in Japan/Korea without sacrificing from quality.
@@gobot109I know in Japan they get around 10% of their electricity from solar and they ran out of space already (if you go to Japan you can see solar panels everywhere in the country side). Japan has a similar population density to the UK and gets more sun because it is more South. Maybe in the UK you have more farmland, parks and golf courses and less forests in comparison to Japan but there is a reason these areas were cleared from trees in the first place. Trying to re-purpose farmlands and parks for solar panels is not politically feasible long term
Has something changed drastically with supercapacitors. Present ones can only be charged to 2.7V so it takes a lot of supercapacitors in series to get to a HV car battery. I have been using supercaps for years but they cannot supply even the energy/per volume of even the poorest LiIon batteries. LiIon batteries can be charged to around 3.6V but they store 10 to 100 times the energy storage of a supercapacitor per unit volume. Please show me the article that you are reading this from.
Now you want to quote batteries in Gwhs! 😂
Nuclear is by far the most efficient form of power generation and that’s why china is building new ones. Please do a video on how low the electricity prices are in china as compared to western countries.
Most efficient at an exorbitant cost. The sun therefore must be super efficient..........and it costs nothing to build.......lol.
For various factors USA Nuclear power construction costs seem to over run dramatically and seem to take forever to build. Maybe china has better engineering and construction techniques.
There are lots of highly efficient and highly stupid things that we accept because a few people make money off of them.
Fuck nuclear. He just proved Solar all you need. People never listen
@@irwinsaltzman979 perhaps the security standards in China are lower, than in Europe...
A 3 GW solar farm to generate 24 GWh per day. i.e. going on a conservative 8 hours of daily sunlight for that region of the world. Plus 16 GWh battery storage. That covers the 24 hour time period at 1 GW continuous power supply.
It looks like they are banking on around 9 hours of sunlight per day, hence their 2.6 GW solar farm estimate. Not entirely unreasonable for that region of the world, as it rests around the lower end of daily sunlight hours estimates.
@@JoeyBlogs007Does not matter because you need to build just as much nuclear power for when there is no sun or wind (here in Europe - that is usually when you need Power the most - during really cold parts of the winter, there is no wind then).
@@martina5328 Cool your jets Martina. I am sure the energy sector experts know what they are doing.
@BrentonSmythesfieldsaye The energy sector experts says nuclear power. Few things make more sense to produce at large scale than power. Left wing politicians manage to destroy the best energy mix / system in the world (here in Sweden) by closing down nuclear reactors and nuclear powerplants.
@@martina5328you are just plain wrong and simply have no idea how to plan a renewable grid.
How will we make steel with renewables only?
Sam, How do those desert, utility-scale solar arrays clean the sand/dust from the deserts including from sand storms? I'm very pro solar, but this is a question I've always had when seeing those desert solar farms. Please cover in a future video.
They have 'creepers' that literally motor up and down the panels 24/7
You NEED batteries for solar panels to smooth the production and consumption differences. That makes solar more expensive.
The nuclear power station project in the UK is the most expensive in the world. I think the whole project was badly mismanaged.
Both solar panels and batteries have a limited lifespan (25-30 years for panels, 10-12 years for batteries).
Solar is not a panacea.
Nuclear, coal and gas power plants are far from maintenance free. Far worse than solar and wind.
@ coal is orders of magnitude cheaper than solar. Each of those can provide constant output which solar can’t by itself, only in combination with other sources or batteries.
I worked out the cost of installing solar in my home and it just doesn't make sense. I've managed to get electricity use and costs down to a level where I'd never save enough off my monthly bill to be able to pay off the cost of a solar panel/battery installation system in my lifetime. I could install a small 'stand-alone' disconnected system to power a back-up source for infrequent power outages, but outages are rare in my area. Nuclear power still looks like a more valid option for large-scale energy needs in a metropolitan area.
Wow...The Viking is tripp'n out once again. 🤦♂🙄😜🤣
There is little doubt that solar and wind excess can replace baseload if adequate storage is available.. trouble is 1 GW is likely not enough. Where I live, Portugal (10 million people), baseload oscillates between 2 and 4 GW. Irradiance maps say that saudi arabia facility should yield some 0.5 GW here, so we'd need at least 4 of them. That's a lot of lithium for just one small country. Not sure world lithium reserves are enough for this and all the new electrical applications (cars, planes, etc.). So you might still need nuclear for some decades until stuff like sodium batteries are viable as very large scale storage.
How do they plan to charge the Big Battery ?
I’ve been saying this for a while. Batteries can handle the base load. That’s why you do it in your home (should you choose to instal a battery). There’s plenty of good information on this.
How to you make a GWh capacity inverters? They don't have stable frequencies and intertia of turbine. This can collapse the grid very frequently.
@ Why would anyone need to do that? Renewable facilities can be build almost anywhere so that the grid becomes decentralised instead of massive, centralised power stations. That means smaller facilities that wouldn’t be generating or storing that level of power.
Try running and aluminum melting factory, or any industry at scale using batteries.... Wake up from your illusion..
@ Well, well, another one who wants to keep everyone on the same treadmill. Which fossil fuel company do you work for? Or are you a coalition operative? You want to stay shackled to a dead horse or pay to keep some oil industry billionaire on his private island? Go right ahead. You kiss your chains mate. Don’t expect me to kiss mine.
I’m going off grid.
I don’t care where you go.
@@thethirdman225 > You kiss your chains mate. Don’t expect me to kiss mine.
You are quite the kinky and spicy fellow!
You should do a video on how much energy people store in their Tesla powerwall vs how much gets discharged during peak hours.
So much of the energy we generate gets wasted bc no one needs it when it is produced
Exactly. That is why we do not need more wind or solar. We need more nuclear.
if the energy is in effect free, why is waste an issue for you? There is plenty more where it came from....the sun has another 5 billion yrs of life.
@andyfreeze4072 It is a waste of resources - as we still have to run a nuclear powerplant, which is the most economical if it runs and gets paid all the time. The individual with solar cells on the roof may save some money during summer - but society as a whole end up paying more.
Having wind and solar electric generation charge batteries would allow them to not be stranded assets when the public power grid stops supporting their wild AC that takes more fuel than making all the electricity internally from economic fuel efficient means. They do not work with weather events lasting longer than the battery storage such as wildfire ash blocking solar panels.
I think will be longer life... The batterie will not be used all days...
Distributed generation and storage at the use level with car battery storage is beyond obvious, and has been for over two decades. Cheaper, no grid upgrade cost, and much greater resilience in the face of ever increasing large scale natural disasters that result from climate changed. The auto and carbon fuel industrial complexes have been doing everything they can to stop it.
You don't have to be some carbon industrial conspiracist to realize solar/wind are non-starters for residential in the large percentage of the world without sun/wind for weeks/months at a time seasonally each year. You just have to have a working brain. Same for most industrial areas. Even where sun/solar are effective they are a complete waste of money and surface area in most compared to local geothermal.
Please explains to me how this can work in europe during winter time?
Oil companies try to defend their obsolete sector by pointing the production of batteries. They say that producing batteries is a polluting process. Once we now know this is not true (at least as how they say), what's the best tecnology when batteries are that big and what's their pollution rate in the production process?
Even in Australia we get periods of a week without sun just overcast and rain and violent hailstorms that will smash solar panels you would need massive battery systems at huge cost to keep a state going for a week with no daily input so I think you are dreaming
Delusional and ignorant, would be more appropriate 🙄
As I said weird then, how when people use math and computation then the things you claim are a huge problems turn out to be entirely doable for quite reasonable costs. I wonder who should I believe and why, you who simply said stuff, or people who did the math that I can review and check? Hell I ask: if you were me, who do you think I ought believe, you or the math that says otherwise. Or for that matter as the maths says otherwise how come you even believe your own wet finger guesstimate? Seems odd to me.
Offshore power isn't baseload either sometimes it is not windy out there too. Hell baseload isn't baseload as it is sometimes down for scheduled maintenance and then sometimes is down for unscheduled reasons. So is the supposed problem with VRE and storage all BS? Nope. But is it a huge unsolved problem? Also nope. But the solutions that really work and are quite cost-effective are not simple or simplistic. There is what is known as intra-day shifting such as household battery does shift daytime PV to the evening. We need lots of that. And then interday where we shift energy from one sunny day to not so sunny one. And then there is seasonal where VRE produces (in AU & east cost) less on average in Apr-Aug than the rest of the year. Some way to deal with that at a minimum extra cost. And then finally say once every 7 years or so there is one year that is just worse than average. All that needs solutions, and none of it news to any serious VRE proponent and yes it all has answers. And no energy won't be free, and yes it will be reliable. Yes almost anything _can_ work, however the most cost-effective solutions use a variety of different things each covering the weaknesses/problems of the other. There are as a fact many more cloudy days than there are days that are both cloudy and windless over large areas. Wind and PV have a degree of anticorrelation that results in needing less storage to firm a mix of the two than either alone.
Mount Tambora.
I see the day when every new home built in Africa will have solar panels as its roof, a battery on the side, a heat pump installed for air conditioning, a small gas generator as backup and e-bikes as a perk to buy to house. Like cell phones that has eliminated phone lines, new homes will no longer need to run electric cables to each house which will save the government a ton of money.
💯
Here in Kingston Ontario the city just cancelled ordering electric buses because they are worried about the draw on our electricity grid.🤨how do I, as a citizen, help alter that mindset?
It is not a mindset , it is a proven fact.
I like what Terrapower is doing. I love Tesla,no doubt. Just saying.
Capacitors, any electronics nerd can tell you that a capacitor fully charged at 1v will have 1.1v available, yes a 10% gain over imput. They are a dark horse of electotickery!
You can certainly increase voltage at output - a fallback converter with a duty cycle of more than 0.5 will provide that - but you can't get more power out than you put in.
Have a look at Eavor deep well closed loop power source an innovative Canadian company. Do you think this is a realistic alternative?
Abu Dhabi : We have created the worlds largest solar battery.
Planet Earth : Hold my beer...
Fossil fuels are 100% organic, produced with solar energy from H2O and CO2, and when burned produce the primary foods for life, H2O and CO2.
It's the largest storage battery of solar energy on Earth.
And the burning of fossil fuels provides free heat to the world with its CO2 by increasing global temperatures. A win win.
What do you have against nuclear power? It's completely carbon neutral, actually even cleaner than solar panels, if we consider the amount of CO2 emitted during production and the lack of real recycling possibilities.
I think it will work most all of the time, but not all of time. What if rains like two weeks strait? How could that work? I hope I am wrong.
10,000 jobs for a year, and maybe 50 jobs the operate and maintain ... Solar + Storage is a leading low cost $ per MW solution that can fielded in say very large fields project by project and put them near interstate grid lines. I disagree with TEV about rooftop solar, as its a lot of hassle with your power provider for what you get. I would only consider if my power company sold me a systems they maintained.
You seem to have caught a sunstroke down there. Next year spend a quatre of the year (November, December, January) in Northern Europe, let's say in Hamburg or Copenhagen and then make this video again
Hence the interconnection with other countries for electricity.
If our power companies really wanted to go sustainable they would absolutely help home owners and businesses install solar with battery back-up. But we know better! They don't. Why?
I'd suggest they require one days average use of batteries on every meter. Perhaps they could own them and charge a rental fee to the meter user.
No it’s not proof. Sure in some areas but definitely not all. Northern Canada here and solar struggles to hit 1/4 installed capacity. I’ve seen weeks go by that they didn’t even melt the snow off.
Thankfully we live right by a large hydroelectric dam. The first stage was built in the 70’s and is still going strong a half century later!
Let’s see how long these before all these batteries and solar panels need to be swapped out.
You are delusional here in the UK last week we had a few days where wind and solar were under 5% of the total energy needed gas went up to over 65% and 11% from interconnectors
Here we would require batteries that don't even exist at this time
A simple statement.
Were are the facts listed ?
Happy to have them, seriously this can be put on youtube for constsnt replay. A replaying loop. Including $kWh for each part.
Grid facts $1million per km. 1million km. $1TRILLION grid costs.
Generation costs 5cents kWh
Consumer facts 50cents kWh
Do you want me to write the script. ???
I still think there is a place for nuclear power, _but not today's pressurized vessel reactors cooled by water or molten metals like sodium_ . It would be more like Generation IV reactors fueled by thorium-232, new reactor designs that are much smaller than today's nuclear reactors and could be assembled in large numbers in a factory. They would be useful in parts of the world where there is less sunlight available, especially in the higher latitudes or areas with higher amounts of precipitation.
I do see solar becoming a lot more common in parts of the world where there are enough sunny days for power generation. places that include the southwestern continental USA, northern Mexico, the Sahara Desert, the Middle East and the interior regions of Australia. Wind power may be possibly hitting its limits due to the huge cost of large-scale installations, the higher maintenance cost of large wind turbines and the cost of disposing retired wind turbine parts, especially the blades.
I have solar and battery on my house and I have 24hr electricity without importing from the grid. Scale it up and everyone can benefit.
Take what you've invested on your set up and multiply it by at least 30,000,000. Don't get me wrong, I'm pro small scale off grid solar/wind, but when you scale it, the money runs out really quickly. You own your house and you can afford your power set up. That puts you in a very small percentile group.
@@davidbrayshaw3529 I did the same on our last home, going to attempt to set up a similar, bigger system when we get into our new home but you are correct there should be a bit more help to go electric either zero interest government backed loans or grants.
The more folk who take up solar with battery storage the more people will get jobs in the renewables industry paying NI instead of signing on. Bit of win both ways there !.