Thanks for making the video, it's a really interesting topic. I think new battery technology is cool, but it's really important not to underestimate the scale of the challenge here. The US uses about 11 million MWh of electricity a day, mostly from fossil fuels. To replace fossil fuels with renewables and store just 1 day of US electricity would therefore need almost 14,000 of the 800MWh vanadium plants of the type you described being built in china. For comparison the US only has about 1000 power plants producing 200MW or more (i.e. same power output as the vanadium storage plants). Most estimates I've seen suggest that for solar and wind to be reliable enough to not require natural gas backup would require 2 weeks of storage capacity: 2 weeks would require almost 200,000 of the 800MWh vanadium plants.
The problem are not even the short (2 week ) term loading/unloading cycles but the annual. For many countries the amount of energy stored varies greatly over the course of the year. Fortunately in the summer solar produces more and in the winter wind. Still for most countries that gives not an even scale. In Germany you would need to store and release energy in a 12 months cycle. If you do not want to waste massive amounts of energy (because you scrap it) you will need to store energy in spring and give it back in autumn. You can only work around that if your production capacity is so high that you will meet your demand in low production months. That could also be an option but you would have massive amounts of excess energy to use. Maybe for producing Hydrogen or something else.
I'm not impressed. For an impressive grid scale battery check out the Ambri liquid metal battery. Their battery is good for 100,000 full charge full discharge cycles. That's with only abundant materials in their battery. Needs a heater at startup but needs no cooling. Operating at grid scale it is self heating. And very efficient with performance similar to pumped hydro, but with the nearly instant synthetic throttle and exciter response times of all battery systems. You could call it a 300 year battery, but as a practical matter it simply will outlast the infrastructure it is built for.
TJ Grant, I keep hearing and reading about 100% renewables no fossil fuels etc. It's a fantasy it is not going to happen. Renewable generation is inferior power and the reality is, that due to technical reasons, it is not suitable for large scale grid supply. Why, apart from intermittency (which batteries will not compensate for, another pipe dream), they are asynchronous power sources, so cannot support the grid frequency which is a critical parameter to control, they have no inertia which large steam plants have, another characteristic that keeps the frequency stable, They contribute to lowering short circuit current for the grid which inhibits effective operation of grid protection systems. Wind, in particular, is very unstable at times because of the cube law relationship between wind speed and power output. Their lifespan is far shorter than conventional power plants and their load factor, i.e. how much power you actually get as opposed to name plate capacity is small, so you need lots of them. and even then there are times when their output is virtually zero. Germany has spent trillions of Euros and still they are having to build new coal stations. The large capacity of renwable generation has made little effect on their CO2 emissions, it simply is not effective or reliable. Not only that their elctricity costs are about the highest in Europe with 'free wind and solar'1
Can you mention Cryogenic Air storage too? Currently Highview Power is building a 250MWh system in Manchester, England. No toxic or rare materials required, no shortage of raw materials and half the price of Li-ion. Easily scalable and can be built anywhere. Yes, its only 60-75% efficient but there are no chemical process involved, only physical.
www.energy-storage.news/news/fossil-fuel-plant-in-england-will-get-250mwh-liquid-air-energy-storage-make Yes, very interesting solution. Just store air under pressure...
@@StefanvanderFange no, it's not pressurised, that's the whole point. Because it's a cryogenic liquid it doesn't have to be pressurised, just well insulated which makes containment much less expensive.
@@MrGonzonator Thanks. It's been a while since I've done physics, but getting gas to liquid can be done in 2 ways, as I recall it: either cool it, or put in under pressure. Or a combination of both ofcourse. Keeping it cooled seems to cost much more energy, than keeping it under pressure...
There’s an excellent video about it. It says recycling the heat generated during compression is important to its efficiency. -- Liquid Air Batteries. Literally energy from thin air. Seriously. Literally! th-cam.com/video/tMLu9Dtw9yI/w-d-xo.html
@@StefanvanderFange A gas over it's critical temperature cannot be compressed into a liquid. This is also the difference in the definition of vapor and gas. A vapor can be compressed to a liquid. A gas cannot be compressed to a liquid but can be turned to a supercritical fluid.
Glad to hear that energy storage battery technology is progressing significantly, let’s not lose sight of the reality that the energy storage capacity even if built out at an aggressive pace with improving technology is and will be but a small fraction of solar and wind generation capability for a long time. Further more , it is at least an order of magnitude too small to address issues such as seasonal variation of solar. (Example: I have a modest 14 Kw home solar installation. On an annual basis, it meets 90% of household needs, but only 20% during the worst 2 winter months. A pair of original-spec Powerwalls would easily address a day or so of this seasonal deficit, but clearly not the remaining 60 days of inadequate system production. That is worse than an order of magnitude shortfall between hypothetical system capability and need.)
we could also have a system wherein a large proportion of average energy demand is met with nuclear energy. witch by nature is very consistent (mostly for safety reasons) where the remainder of typical demand is met by renewables with the excess stored and used in place of peaking plants. not a perfect system, but more attainable and would more than serve as a multi decade solution while the tech and infrastructure is further developed for an entirely renewable energy environment
I recently modeled the addition of storage for a local 1.5 MW wind turbine. With a couple of years of daily generation, the model showed that the size of battery to avoid blackouts is int the order of 500 MWh. This is some 5 times the largest battery in existence today. This amount of storage for each wind turbine is inconceivable!
@@MrElifire84 Probably is that you basically need two weeks of storage for windpower to get past maximum becalmed incidents. 500MWh/1.5MW is 300 hours.
Storage is extremely helpful for transitioning to renewables, particularly having a couple of hours, which, as you mentioned, is very fast, and can help with grid stability providing frequency regulation, voltage regulation, and synthetic inertia. Long duration battery storage would be very helpful too, and super interesting to learn about, BUT, you can do 90 or 95% of the transition without it, and we are nowhere near that. Storage is but one tool, in the tool box. Adding transmission, demand management, overbuild, and keeping some gas plants operational for that week or two when we are really short can get us way down the road. Might even be able to do power to gas, and either make methane, or potentially store hydrogen and use fuel cells. We'll see. Any storage that is added to the grid will not only help shave the peaks, and peak prices, but will help decrease the number of times the price of electricity goes too low. It will be easier to add more renewables if you can get paid for more hours.
90 or 95% of the transition without storage is nonsense. That's what causes blackouts. Unless you have extremely fast throttle and exciter response times (lots of fossil fuel), you need storage.
@@tsamuel6224 We already have storage, and the rate that we are adding it is going up exponentially, but we are only around 20% renewables. Getting to 40% is not that big of a deal. A little bit of battery storage with the right power electronics can do amazing things, as Australia found out when they got their Tesla battery system at the Hornsdale Power Reserve. Frequency and voltage regulation. They can both add and take power, and some systems can also provide synthetic inertia. cleantechnica.com/2020/03/02/neoen-says-hornsdale-battery-has-exceeded-expectations/
as we have just seen demonstrated, fossil fuel burning slows so does the rain fall and cloud cover , therefore solar gets more productive = a feed back loop that's useful for once. Also liquid air / compressed air energy systems are starting to get the attention they should have gotten a very long time ago. Well done Manchester UK
@@UndecidedMF Thorium will likely be further in future. Small Modular Reactors are being reviewed by regulatory agencies and could be licensed and online within this decade. Thanks for doing these videos!
I want to reinforce the question traveller asked below. How about Liquid Air or Cryo storage large scale batteries. All the articles I find on this have no depth. They don't explain how it deals with the heat of compression or the chill of decompression. How they deal with the fact that each gas liquifies at different temperature. Also why wasn't it done before? What new development makes it practical now? I would love to see you go into this subject in depth.
Good questions. Apparently now they store the waste heat created when compressing air and use it during decompression so the system is more efficient. Also, simply by building such storage near some place that requires cooling or produces waste heat allows both to save energy. Given AC is one of the main energy users, replacing it with few pipes that bring cold air to every apartment building in the city would save even more money than simply using the liquid air for energy storage to run the AC with cheaper electricity. Why now and not before? Money, usually. It helps that we now have more push towards getting rid of fossil fuels and especially the peaker plants, renewables have proven they produce far more power than doubters have claimed, and various prototypes that have been in operation for decades in some cases show that energy storage also works and becomes even more economically viable as fuel costs and price of energy rises. But the main issue is what can you get right now at cheap price. Tesla had a bunch of batteries ready to sell so they could get Hornsdale operational in couple months because they had made them for EVs and Powerwalls, but as useful as those megabatteries are, we need few thousands of them all over the world by yesterday and Tesla is not going to be able to produce that many any time soon. Concrete and steel are far cheaper and last longer than even simplest chemical batteries and the technology does not need to be more efficient than Tesla's best batteries to be useful, it only needs to be cheaper than the expensive peaker plants and available now instead of "maybe in few years we develop a cheaper chemical".
Hello, What's your opinion on cryogenic energy storage solution by Highview Power? It seems more eco-friendly and scalable than all the other storage solutions. Thanks.
YES! All the alt-energy 'tubers either don't know about this tech, or perhaps have knowledge that I don't, because none of them seem to cover it. It seems like the most promising new battery tech to me.
TLDR on AMBRI's tech: It's an electrometallurgical battery. You pump huge amounts of energy in, and the metals de-alloy. You draw power out, and the metals alloy with each other.. Pros: Virtually limitless cycles with extremely little loss of capacity over it's life, inexpensive materials Con: High operating temperature means it's more lossy than other technologies.
The last battery you mentioned, made from cheap, abundant materials, might be the Sodium Ion battery. a company named "Aquion" made it, that battery hasn't taken off yet, with the company fading in and out over the years. According to their specifications of batteries they actually had for sale on the market would last ~3,000 cycles, but, it had a high equivalent series resistance, making it a long term storage option. (it could not be charged or discharged quickly) The only reason I don't have them, is because the total levelized cost per kWh of electrical energy storage was more expensive than Lead Acid, and Lithium Iron Phosphate. They were bulky, but that's fine for stationary energy storage applications like renewable energy.(wind, solar)
Thank you for this most informative video. I'd love you to get more to the nitty gritty of figures as well but I understand it must appeal to everybody. If you have data, perhaps you could put it in a spreadsheet and put down under your video a link to a directory with those data in the cloud? I have been in storage in 2018 but things are moving fast. Mass storage is not being funded well. In EU there is no venture capital like in the USA. People prefer to invest in real estate for 'stones and ground don't run away'. Feudal think of the Middle Ages but there it is right in the 21st century.
Thanks Matt, an interesting dive into the nascent technologies trying to solve the grid level storage conundrum! Many here comment on the sheer size of the storage required, for ever increasing energy requirements, a problem that I suspect will never go away. My background is physics and engineering. Despite the put down of "It's always 50 years away" which has been the case for my whole adult life, I believe that in the end fusion power is the only truly viable longterm solution, unless we can halt our almost exponential growth of energy requirements. This area has been starved of funding almost since its inception, which of course is one of the reasons that it is taking so long. I've watched documentaries where, highly qualified and experienced physicists and engineers are working out of small industrial units, using materials scavenged from past research at universities etc. Astonishing given the money poured into vanity projects all over the world For instance in the UK our government spent $20 Billion on a track and trace app (which did not work) for coronovirus and a further £75 billion on a high speed rail link to shorten a journey time of 1.5 hours by 15 minutes, and yet only announced a grant of $275 million into fusion research over 5 years!!! ITER in the south of France is an international collaboration for fusion research, which although it will not produce commercially viable electricity, will hopefully solve most of the problems facing this technology. The other thing I have noticed from your videos is the speed at which technology is evolving in the energy storage and generation area. Often it seems that just as a technology like Vanadium flow is poised to enter the mainstream, along comes a newer tech that promises more, better or cheaper solutions, at which point I suspect that the projects in the pipeline for that technology either stall or collapse due to a lack of funding. A classic example of this is the nuclear power plants developed in the UK back in the 60's and 70's, each one of which was effectively a prototype, resulting in a hard to manage and maintain generating capability. At some stage, in order to get some useful energy out of a system the decision has to be taken to standardise the product and go with it, warts and all, then you have a known set of problems with that design that can be corrected in all the instances of that product rather than needing s different solution for each instance.
Chemical batteries are not the only solution to large scale energy storage. There is gravity storage which you alluded to with pumping water, but you can lift other things. There is also phase change storage and liquid air storage is already viable, neiither of which require long, complicated development.
Matt. This is exciting but there is a tremendous danger in storage that some miss! Cheap energy storage won’t just be a boon to renewable technologies. Cheap energy storage can just as easily be used to supplement smaller fossil fuel generation. Imagine building a smaller Coal plant that operates at full capacity constantly while storing energy during off peak demand times in these redox flow batteries and then meeting peak demand with battery discharge. In other words, the utilities will go for the cheapest power source sized to meet the demand. When you calculate that renewables have far lower capacity factors than other sources, the overbuilding required would again put their costs higher than fossil fuel sources. For example, if you need a gigawatt, it may be slightly cheaper to build a gigawatt of solar than coal but since it’s capacity factor is only 25% you would need 4 gigawatts vs the 1 from the coal. Thereby making the Coal actually cheaper! And really, All this completely misses the real problem of renewables! It’s not storage. It’s real estate. I think I’ve showed you the numbers before, but to be short, if we wanted to power the US on Solar for example, it would require a land footprint so large it would damage massive areas. Area numbers so large they are somewhere north of 130,000 square miles for the US alone. As big as New York State, Pennsylvania, and Virginia combined! Crazy!!! A better alternative? How about storing energy in small stockpiles of extremely dense material? How about energy storage in the form of Thorium and Uranium? Small, extremely safe, extremely powerful, and if done right, extremely affordable next generation nuclear reactors! No massive real estate required! Batteries maybe helpful but not essential since we’ve stored the energy in small nuclear fuel stockpiles! Let’s put Nuclear at the front of our future energy hopes as it really is the best solution overall. Looking forward to your response.
Molten salt reactors don't need batteries to do what you are saying. We could have a small MSR optimized to run all out, 24/7, storing energy in thermal storage of the salt, cheap and easy. The amount of storage would be very small and predictable. Storage for renewables would have to be huge to account for a cloudy week of no wind and then as you say the over-build needed to charge that back up would be enormous. The part you left off is when the batteries are full and you are getting plenty of sun and wind. Where does that excess go? Prices go negative and power companies go broke. If everyone is using renewables, then there is no one to use it, this is really bad for a balanced grid.
Damn straight. The load on the grid swings up and down by about 20 GW in the UK winter requiring imports and all sorts of peaker plants. Cheap storage would end up being used to store the baseload power from closed cycle gas turbine power at night rather than ramp the gas down. This could then replace the less efficient open cycle turbines that spin up to meet peak load so would be a small carbon saving but a far cry from the renewables people had in mind when discussing the storage to begin with.
Roger Starkey Roger, I’m not assuming everything centralized. The numbers just give the scale. And you’re using the same 100k numbers that are totally wrong. US energy in 2019 was 100 quadrillion BTU. That’s 29 million Gigawatt hours. Divide that by 365 days then 24 hours is a average constant demand of 3300 gigawatt. It takes roughly 10 square miles of solar per gigawatt at peak rate. That’s then 33,000 square miles. But average US capacity factor is 24.7% so multiply by 4. More than 130,000 square miles. Total Us Urban area? 106k square miles!!! What’s the relative rooftop area available for solar of those urban area miles? No real good numbers. But 20% is probably silly optimistic! Just do a google maps view of your own lot and see how much is roof top!! Then think of large cities and roads and skyscrapers with minimal rooftop but loads of energy demand. So even if you could cut this mythical 20% with roof top solar, you’re still north of 100,000 square miles. The scale is ridiculous. Check my math. It ain’t wrong.
Great review but only considers chemical batteries. For static applications ‘mechanical’ batteries that store energy by e.g. liquefying a gas (large scale Liquid Air batteries just being trialed now) have a lot of scope too.
As a home builder here in Canada, I would say that insulation is the most important battery in this country. No matter what the heat source is for your home, or cooling source in summer, insulation will keep your home warm or cool for much longer. The materials needed to insulate are the most common materials on the planet and they work for hundreds of years without any added energy when installed properly. No it is not a sexy solution but it is so very important to reduce the demand for energy while maintaining a good quality of life over the long run.
Yes, "rock wool" is really good stuff. Foam is better but costs more. For windows, "nothing works" as in two sheets of glass held apart with small glass spacers and a vacuum is the way to go. Nearly any nation could make a better future for its people by making those upgrades today.
Highview Power is the most promising of all the energy storage technologies. Batteries and Redox Flow can't simply scale. Mechanical Energy Storage systems like LAES ,CAES and Pumped Heat Energy Storage are the only scalable solutions.
I appreciate the thoughtfulness of the videos and information presented but the following statement needs some explanation and follow up: "Its taken around 40 years for lithium ion to reach the state we are at right now. But We don't have that kind of time to wait for grid scale storage to mature." Why don't we have that kind of time for large scale batteries? The entire video seemed to present clear and logical information on the topic with backing information outside of that statement.
I was half expecting one of those "renewables and batties won't work around the world..." videos, but this is very insightful and yes, we do need to research new technologies, in the end if we have the technology today then great! we can deploy it and when it advances we can replace it at the end of it's lifespan, if we don't then we can at least try to reduce the effects of the damaging sources of energy while we develop technologies.
Reminds me of the articles from Popular Mechanics or Engadget. Seems like every week there'd be a new fangled battery that promises the sun and the moon. We're still waaaiting!
I frequently see videos about batteries, and all the potential new designs that appear to still be years away from being used. However, if the point is easy to scale energy storage, then I think CAES is going to be a major player. Highview Power is a current CAES company that is operating in the UK, and just contracted to build a plant in the US. I'd love to see a video on this that would explore some pros and cons of this system!
A very small but crucial mention in this video is the power of patents to hinder progress, either intentionally (fossil fuel industry) or otherwise. Intellect, when we desperately need these ideas for the greater benefit of humanity, shouldn't become property. Rewards should be wider than simple exclusive monetary gain.
What about just using excess electricity for the electrolysis of water to produce hydrogen, and then burning the hydrogen in off-peak hours to generate steam for turbines or other methods of electricity generation? Would be a cheap stopgap solution untill cheap scalable solid state batteries become available. Sure would be less efficient than batteries, but much cheaper. Could you do a video on that? Maybe compare efficiency rates for all the possible technologies?
replacing peaker plants makes sense .. replacing base load plants with solar/wind and battery storage (for the low production times i.e. night and or no wind) is beyond ineffective and even a net negative for the environment .. so replacing base load coal/gas with water or fusion power plants (.. which don't exist yet) sure i'm all in! Untill then .. replacing coal/gas isn't an option without quadrupling the electricity bill whilst effectively damaging the environment (the scale of required battery parks is so enormous .. their production/construction and later deconstruction/recycling would cause more problems/toxic waste/pollution than letting regular power plants run for another 2 decades)
I've been following Ramez Naam for years on the falling cost of batteries. At one point a few years ago he said the trend on batteries was a 20% drop in cost per year. While learning about all the different chemistries is fun, massive adoption obviously depends on lifecycle cost. The $80/kwh/3000 cycle batteries that were hyped in the news recently would dip below $0.03/kwh/cycle, which, combined with solar, could challenge natural gas right now. What's really exciting is when solar+batteries become cheaper than the _just the fuel_ for fossil fuel power plants (meaning you'll save money shutting down an existing plant even if it has plenty of life left and there aren't carbon taxes yet).
Batteries are a major concern and we need more of them. But it is also important to realize that if we need to fire up those old gas, oil or coil generators few weeks a year, we still reduce 95% of our carbon emissions so we may not need to substitute all our energy needs on batteries. Maybe only 95%.
The problem is that Tesla's Powerwall is still quite expensive because of the need to use lithium-ion battery packs. A better solution is going with less expensive means of power storage like molten salt batteries, which is less of an issue since you don't have size limitations like you have with electric vehicles.
I can understand the need of energy density for portable stuff, like phones or vehicles, but energy density is not a big factor when we are talking about static batteries in the outskirts of cities where space is not a problem. Let's dump the energy in the cheapest battery type , no matter how much it occupies.
The lead acid battery is a cheap technology, but we will need to open dozens of lead mines to supply the material. That wile increase the cost of lead as demand will surge over that of supply. lead will be like silver price wise if that were to happen, no longer cheap.
I knew a young boy named Ferrell when I lived in the Philippines in 1956-1957. I was 9 and I think he was a year younger. If you are related to him, say hello for me. We were both "Air Force Brats" as we called ourselves. I enjoy your shows.
In order for renewable energy to replace fossil fuels the cost per kWh has to be close to the same as fossil fuels and as reliable. Next video: How to use renewables to power an aluminum production plant.
MATT , could you look into cryo-air battery technology by High View Power. It appears to reuse well understood gas liquefaction technology in a new way. Stores energy for weeks and supposedly cost a fraction of the cost of lithium ion batteries at large scale. Currently , the company is building plant [ not a pilot plant ] in Manchester England.
I think the idea that batteries need to be able to 'power entire cities for hours' is not really true. In a decentralised and diverse power network there isn't ever one source. Batteries will play a role but there will be other sources too like hydro, liquid air, gravity storage, flywheel etc.
How about at night turn off office lighting for a start. Cities have vast amounts of waste. Many Developing countries use 1/10th the energy or less and everyone lives to tell the tale
Europe is miles ahead of the USA in reducing usage, due to crippling energy costs! Maybe add more tax to energy in the USA to motivate people to insulate / reduce usage!
Not likely, the developing world uses orders of magnitude less energy than the US per person. As these countries develop, billions of people will demand more and more power, dwarfing what they use now. Its not possible to achieve global equality of opportunity whilst reducing overall energy use. The only hope is to ensure renewables and storage are the most economic options for those nations, and avoid the heavily poluting expansion phase of industrial growth which plagued the developed world in the past.
Thanks for the video, quite illuminating. Bottom line is that absent a significant breakthrough in battery technology, renewables won't supply the majority of the worlds energy needs at scale or reasonable cost. If one of these technologies takes off it will certainly be a game changer, but for now hydrocarbons are going to be doing the majority of the heavy lifting.
I genuinely get very confused when i hear people use kilowatt to describe storage or amounts of energy like when you said "tesla may have broken the 100 dollar per kilowatt barrier" like that means anything. Please use kilowatt hours for measured energy and use kilowatt like your supposed to.
Correct, it’s also important to know if that cost is at the cell level, or the pack level too, as the pack electronics and connections can add 10-15% to the cost. I believe Tesla May already be at $100 per kWh at cell level, and may have been for some time, pack level not so sure.
He DID mention that, when he was describing the battery system in Australia. He correctly defined it as a 100 megawatt battery, with a capacity of 129 megawatt hours.
The thing is: we were so desperate to make cheap renewable energy production, that we forgot about cheap storage. Redox batteries look promising for stationary grid level batteries, as long as the demand keeps growing the technology will get cheaper.
But without major increase of cheap energy production there wouldn't be so much demand for cheap storage. The real issue is companies and politicians refusing to improve the grid infrastructure, as we could simply build loads of renewables in best locations and power the whole world with them if there just were enough cables to transmit the energy.
When you look at the Tesla battery in South Australia it can rally only power 30,000 homes for only 8 hours .In a city of 1,000,000 people thats a spit in the bucket .Numbers talk so this battery ( the worlds largest real can only power 10,000 homes for One DAY , but you need at least 3 DAY storage for bad weather when wind docent blow or solar docent work . So on that basis thats about 3,000 homes . SO they spent $100 million for 3,000 homes that $33,000 per home just to HELP Alternative energy. Of coarse South Australia has the highest electricity prices and everyone forgets it has built Gas fired power plants near the Tesla site . Why? well because they are closing down some coal fired power plants 1000 klms away so that state does not have excess power to sell to South Australia . I'm sorry to inform people but Government policies are the major reason most alternative power generation are installed . Electricity is generated at much cheaper rates at Hydro coal gas and Nuclear plants than wind or solar systems when you look at yearly actual production not maximum generating capacity multiplied by 24 hours of every day. Every bitt of subsidy for home solar and batteries is taking money from the poor and not improving their lives . Nice for middle class yuppies to feel good about the environment , not so good for the poor who have to spend more money on power to make these yuppies feel good .
Flow batteries look promising for large scale energy storage. Please keep on sharing as the technologies evolve because we are all interested in the various energy storage options you have shared in the last year
We should just have every building producing its own power independently. Buildings with lots of sun can go solar, buildings that have a lot of wind can go wind, buildings with a stream or river etc that has a current can go Hydro.
There's many other ways for storage. To rely on just batteries which are very expensive is not the way to go. A combination of pumped, gravitational, thermal, air inflation and batteries are just some that already exist. Looking forward to a cleaner future.
You're half right. Fusion has not been successfully tested for any more than a few seconds. Flow batteries are already up and running in pilot programs. It's just the simple matter of reducing the cost, to make them practical.
I did some math, correct me if I'm wrong: 279.6 million vehicles are in use daily in the US Suppose we replaced them all with electric vehicles, with an average 24 kW battery at 34 kW for 161km (100 miles). Then, further suppose we seek to charge these vehicles with wind turbines. At 1,500 kW/hr produced for each turbine, it would take 559,200 wind turbines to fully charge all the vehicles in use in the US to full each day, if we consider an average charge time of 8 hours. Wind turbines need to be placed about 560 meters apart from one another. 559,200 turbines at 560 meters apart means we would need 313,152 km/squared of land dedicated to wind turbines to fully charge all those vehicles. If we account for people traveling on average about 37 km per day (accounting for car pooling and such), we would need 71,965 km squared of land for a daily recharge. The US is 9.834 million km/squared. It would take anywhere from 0.73% to 3.18% of the available land in the US to place the wind turbines. We would need a combined space between the sizes of South Carolina (82,933 km/squared) and New Mexico (314,917 km/squared) to be completely covered in wind turbines to switch completely to a 'carbon-free' vehicle system. That's not even accounting for what it would cost to power everything else, this is just for vehicles and a daily recharge. At the 3.99 trillion kW/hr consumption total of the US for the year of 2019, to power both the vehicles (charging them to full) and match our current consumption we would need 862,853 km/squared of space dedicated to wind turbines. That's a high-end of 8.77% of the total land in the US. To say this is a pipe-dream is an understatement.
Things to consider: 1. Modern Wind turbines are now around 5 to 14 MW providing a lot more power per KM2, and let's say at an average of 8 MW spaced 1 kilometre apart and running for 8 hours a day would need a mere 104,860 square kilometres 2. You don't have to dedicate the land to turbines, can still grow croups or even solar panels. the turbine base and service access only take around 1% of land under a wind farm. 3. The USA is 1/3 arid or semi-arid desert lands doing almost nothing, more than 3 million square kilometres, plus mountain ranges and rooftops etc. 4. Enough Offshore wind exist around the USA to power the USA 5. Plus solar, hydro, geothermal, biomass and tidal. The USA has enough potential renewable energy to provide all energy needs many many times over without hardly touching any land currently been used. And currently, 11% of all USA energy is from renewables (most from Hydro) So only need 10 times what currently have! And anyway if did have to dedicate a few % of land to renewables, so what, energy is the most important thing a modern industrialized society needs and fossil fuels will be run out this century! Things have to change!
@@stevetaylor2818 1. I haven't found any documentation of wind turbines getting past 8 MW that are both actually in use and verifiably pull those numbers. Needless to say, those figures are optimistic, not a standard. Even citing a dependent source, on-shore clock out at 3 MW while offshore clock out at over 3.6 MW. Seeing how 3 MW is only twice the figure I used , I'm not certain of your math. 2. Stacking wind turbines and solar panels is a logistical nightmare, not to mention a huge hazard to wildlife. If it is done, it isn't done frequently, not as I assume you envision. 3. Keep in mind, we can't just centralize all the wind/solar/hydro power from a single partitioned off space and then 'pipe' it in from that location. Every stretch of power line loses energy due to heat. If I were to put a wind turbine farm out in the middle of the desert (assuming there even is enough wind in the desert) by the time it was funneled toward any major city, you'd lose at least half of the energy you collected just to heat due to the nature of electrical resistance. Not to mention the power lines stretching across the nation. 4. Offshore wind has drastically more crippling maintenance costs due to erosion of the base due to sea water. Also, they are out at quite a distance, so we still lose energy due to heat loss. 5. Solar is at its limits in terms of the technology - experts admit they have milked all the energy they possibly can out of the current platform. Not to mention the vast amount of volatile waste that goes into making the darn things; China is the only one who manufacture the panels because they are the only ones without qualms of tossing toxic waste into their water supply. Hydro (i.e. dams) ruin any water source they feed off because they create large reservoirs that aren't moving and heat up due to the sun, drastically altering the ecosystem for anything that relies on that water source. Geothermal, which I'm in favor of, is the best bet, but unless you're on a fault you have to deal with the process of injecting water into the ground to break it up (almost exactly like fracking) and that can result in unlocking latent earthquakes. Biomass energy is just waste-disposal by another name. We've been burning waste for energy for centuries. Rockefeller used the waste from making kerosene to power his kerosene plants -- until he realized that waste, which we now call gasoline, can be used to run cars. Finally, tidal energy is a pipe dream. It just doesn't have the urgency to be used practically and the maintenance and harm to wildlife is astronomical. Salt in the ocean is just to volatile to machinery. --- No -- wind power, solar power, hydro power, geothermal power; they are all the same in that they have to be built relatively close to where the energy is to be used, otherwise you're just wasting energy by tossing it as heat right back through the power lines. That's why California can't keep the lights on, because their grid is stretched out so far from the actual point of use. At the slightest surge in energy use the whole system buckles. Fossil fuel and nuclear power plants can be built just about anywhere there is an ample supply of water and road networks and runs 24/7. That's just plain hard to beat. I wish there was a good renewable energy source, I really do, but they all have flaws that put them so much further back from fossil fuels. Solar and wind aren't even always cheaper than fossil fuels. It only seems that way because of government subsidies. So many studies say 'Solar panels and wind turbines are so much cheaper to build!' while ignoring the fact the government usually pays 50% of it which they are happy to write off. Be certain of this truth: if a company can lie to make money and get away with it, they will. What we really need is a heat battery (not a thermal battery, which is more akin to interruptible heat pumps). Being able to store and transport heat without substantial loss to thermodynamic equilibrium is the next step forward. Imagine being able to absorb all the energy of the sun WITHOUT having to convert it into electricity first. You could pipe the heat to any existing power plant and just boil the water, turn the turbine, and you're set. The major flaw I see with the energy industry is that it focuses too much on electrical energy and not enough on heat energy. Both renewables and fossil fuels stand to benefit from that research.
Hey Matt. There is an energy storage company called Ambri that is about grid scale storage but I haven't heard an update about them in a bit. Can you look into them and tell us what you think.
Another battery technology is the Liquid Metal Battery from Ambi, developed out of Dr. Donald Sadoway's group at MIT. Cheap components and virtually unlimited life.
The Hornsdale expansion completed in April and my understanding has been operational since then and is now rated as 150MW/193.5 MWh. Tesla project with has PG&E project should be underway by now and initial targets for 182.5MW/730MWh with option to expand to 1.2 GWh. And there are other large projects Tesla has planned/proprosed and/or been accepted. To be honest today we have plenty of energy more than enough. A major part of the problem is the majority of buildings are low performance. Probably should do a video about Net Zero and Passive home construction. Building or upgrading to passive home & commercial construction with only minimal increased costs can probably reduce energy needs in the country by half if not more (if excluding electric vehicles).
Jason Bowman Jason, have a look at fuel cell powered aircraft. In California there is an electric plane that will fly 500 miles. It will only need a small battery. The hydrogen can be made at the airport. It can be cheaper to manufacture and run than a conventional plane. I am hoping it is the future.
I’m an aviator by trade. Real Engineering did a great video on this. I Have a Tesla and have run some numbers on this topic myself wondering why not electric airplanes? Bottom line, Battery powered electric airplanes is a pretty hopeless idea for any commercial application similar to what we currently do in airline traffic or cargo. Stop reading here if you don’t want to see the numbers but the numbers flesh out why. Bit long comment tho. First thing to understand, one of the primary engineering factors to consider for aviation is weight. That means the energy density of your “fuel” is critical. Aviation kerosene has an energy density of about 46 mega joules per kilogram. Batteries? Only about 1!! That’s a 46 to 1 advantage! Yeah, bad! So how do electric cars get away with it? Efficiency and weight trade offs. Internal combustion engines are around 25% efficient taking that stored energy and turning it into motion. 30% at best. Electric motors? Above 90% efficient! That moves the advantage from 46 to 1 down to only 15 to 1. Still bad but better. My Tesla has a battery that weighs around 1000 pounds. It stores about 2 gallons worth of equivalent gas energy. My Corolla has a gas tank that stores 10 gallons and only weighs 70 pounds or so. Advantage Corolla. My Tesla has no transmission and small and relatively light electric motors. My Corolla has an engine and transmission that come up with a total drivetrain weight of around 800 pounds. Advantage Tesla. You can probably see where I’m going with this. Trade drivetrain weight in Corolla for battery weight in Tesla. The efficiency of the Tesla electric motors means that with that 2 gallons worth of energy, it can still go almost as far as my Corolla on a full tank. Even still the Tesla is somewhat heavier but on a road, who really cares. Now to aviation numbers. Modern turbofans are not as efficient as electric motors, however they are much better than motor vehicles engines. Turbofans approach nearly 50% efficiency. So instead of going from a 46 to 1 advantage to 15 to 1, there is only a reduction to 23 or so to 1. Then factor in that in a modern jet aircraft the relative weight of fuel to overall weight is dramatically higher than in motor vehicles because the aircraft is made to be structurally very light so it can fly and also go farther. My Corolla has 70 pounds of fuel for a 2800 pound vehicle giving a fuel to weight ratio of 40 to 1. Fuel is nothing compared to total weight. My Boeing 737? Caries around 46,000 pounds of fuel. Total vehicle weight? Depends on passenger count but typical is around 150,000 pounds at takeoff. That means my fuel to weight ratio is close to 3 to 1. So if I wanted to take my 737 and make it run on batteries and go as far as it currently can with electric motors and account for their increased efficiency etc etc, I would need a total plane weight with batteries of around, ...wait for it, ....about 1,150,000 pounds!!!! Basically multiplying the aircraft weight by more than 7!!!! Yeah, it’s crazy! Simply not feasible with current battery tech. Show me a battery that has about 10 to 15 times the energy per weight, than maybe we could start talking about electric passenger aircraft. Until then... we need liquid fuels! Does that mean we need to pollute with CO2? Naw. We could use large amounts of cheap electricity to generate aviation and other fuels from captured CO2 and other materials thereby creating a net zero CO2 sum game. So where to get cheap and abundant electricity? Hmm? Yup. Nuclear again folks.
@@MrElifire84 Thanks for all that analysis. I am optimistic, maybe too optimistic. New battery technology will come, they will get more kWh/Kg. I think making hydrogen at the airports from renewable electricity is a big plus too. Consider Norway (frantic EV promoters) - they have said that at some future date, local short haul trips must be made with electric aircraft. BTW I once has a Tesla, I have a better EV now.
I read read recently about liquid air energy storage. Converting air to liquid then as it is turned back to air it turns a turbine to generate electricity. I wonder how viable that is.
@NotTheCIA I.think I recently saw a video that talked about this tech. They said they believed it to be a compliment to batteries, not a competitor. Apparently battery banks are concidered 4 hour storage at best. It appears noone is building or planning a battery array to supply to the grid backup power for longer than that. While it meets that need quite well, with liquid air you can supply the grid for 10 hours or better. Also they are easy and cheap to scale up. Once you have the infrastructure in to provide the megawatts per hour that is required, you need only add more storage tanks, to add morre hours of backup.
@NotTheCIA I.think Thanks for the lesson. I believe I grasp it. Maybe this is why tjey said batteries and liquid air compliment each other. Liquid air is billed as power storage, like.pumped hydro.
@NotTheCIA I.think Thanks again. A friend and I recently started up a non profit. Main goal is building farms to supply orphanages with sustainable food source. Our first farm is 29 acres just outside of Jinja Uganda. I know there is no power there now. Not sure of the distance and the cost to bring it in, but even then it is notoriously unreliable. Lots of blackouts. Therefore offgrid may be the way to go . I'm trying to learn what I can about power.
@NotTheCIA I.think Yeah, I don't have many specifics at this point. This particular farm is to provide food primarily for an orphanage of 75 kids, + staff members. Things we would like to have. Housing for workers and their families. The goal is to employ widows with children. Give them housing, tie the kids into the education system the orphanage uses. We of course need a barn and food processing facility. We want to install a cannery inorder to preserve food. We would like to put in a vocational school for kids aging out of the orphanage that don't wish to go on to college. Agricultural, equipment repair, welding... those types of things. We also hope to build guest housing to host church groups on mission trips. (Income) Lots of electrical needs. Actually was checking into freeze-dried foods, because it is the best way to preserve, but those machines use major kilowatts.
@NotTheCIA I.think They would. I have to have some viable preservation method. The childten presently live off of corn meal mush and cooked dried beans. They get maybe one ounce of chicken a week. Most food is not meat therefore I dont think smoking is a viable option. Besides that, smoked meats lead to stomach cancer. Often at a young age.
The trick with batteries is to charge them. Where I live, the batteries would have to be able to provide 16 hours for several months every year. That means I have eight hours to charge them while also providing all the power the city normally uses during the day light hours. That implies much larger solar fields and more wind turbines. And that has the potential to lead to increased instability of the power grid which makes our power much more prone to black-outs. Progress has been made in this area but the take away should be that better batteries is only part of a much bigger problem to be addressed.
@NotTheCIA I.think Wind has similar reliability issues to solar because the wind does not blow all the time and sometimes it blows to hard to be useful. Why would you use the other generation technologies to charge batteries? It does not make financial sense to pay for the fuel to charge a battery. The best battery applications are used with what are called non-dispatchable assets such as solar, wind and oceans. Adding the battery makes those assets dispatchable which means they can be used when needed, not just when the sun is out, the sind is blowing, or the tide is changing.
NotTheCIA I.think I am. I'm a power engineer currently working on a BESS system to back up a land fill gas generator. I know very well how power distribution works. You would not use a large thermal or hydro asset to charge batteries. The efficiencies and economics make it a bad investment. Most large batteries are used at solar and wind to normalize their power flow. This is critical since it was found that if your power production is 30% renewables, a power system becomes unstable and collapses. The addition of batteries and improved control systems helps keep the system stable. Your explanation falls short of my experiance.
NotTheCIA I.think You do not have a good understanding of how the power system and generators work. When called on for power, generators open the throttle to provide more power and close the throttle when demand falls. You need to operate the machines below rated capacity or you run the risk of destabilizing the grid. Peaked plants, such as you describe, can take up to 30 minutes to come on-line but they are dispatched before they are needed so they are ready when needed. The interesting thing is that the gas peaker is currently cheaper than a battery if similar capacity. Nothing is built in this industry that does not make somebody money and that fact alone makes batteries less attractive. Combine that with an 8 to 12 year battery life and the economics get very complicated.
@NotTheCIA I.think Not bluffing, working in a different economy than yours. The fact remains that Lithium Ion batteries have a life of about 8 to 12 years. In the US, when doing life cycle cost analysis for a BESS, we include a complete battery replacement at 10 years. Yes, you can get a 15 year warranty the guarantees 70% at the end of that period. That means that you have lost 30% of your capacity over 15 years. What was your load growth during that same 15 years? Just a design constraint that must be considered during planning to determine the optimal size. Same thing with solar fields, they lose efficiency over time and a typical life cycle cost analysis assumes that the panels must be replaced in 20 years. They can go longer of course, but they continue to lose efficiency until they are largely useless. What you call my anecdotes are actually a set of design constraints for where I live. I imagine that your design constrains are something different. That does not invalidate mine. So my initial point remains: Charging the batteries while providing the required base load is a challenge, especially for systems that have a high percentage of renewable energy sources in their system.
High voltage DC transmission lines are a proven technology. The problems are political ones. Nobody seems to want them running near their house and nobody is willing to fund the building of extra lines.
Matt lots if thanks for informative lectures , i would like to know the name of the music you play at the intro.of your videos ? Thanks , Rik . Netherlands .
If the intention is to run air conditioning each evening, batteries suit short daily use. If the intention is to replace natural gas then weather events lasting a few days is more typical of pumped storage. Maybe multiple solutions for multiple circumstances?
Huh? A charge/discharge cycle would be as needed, not per day. For example if no extra energy is needed the whole summer, then that counts as one charge cycle for the whole summer.
For some things, "supercaps" may be an option. You can get millions of watts for several seconds with them. This seems useful for grid stability issues.
City size batteries would have to store dangerous amounts of energy. Li battery failures go until all the energy is released - that is why 300 watt hours is the airline carry-on limit. For NYC at 11 gigawatt-hr/ day , a three day backup battery for cloudy periods needs about the same energy as a 30 kiloton bomb (i.e about a Hiroshima + a Nagasaki). Its a sobering calculation. LA's usage at 71 Gigawatt-hr/day, makes the storage problem much larger but there is much more room for dispersed battery storage. City battery farms would need to be kept to an acceptable size (probably much less than a Hiroshima bomb equivalent), dispersed, and well guarded against accident and sabotage. There would have to be so many batteries that a few catastrophic failures would happen from time to time and we would have to be ready to deal them. Nuclear power for part of the baseload could reduce the risk because of the reduced amount of needed battery storage.
A much better answer to your original question is to simply abandon the baseless idea that renewable energy and by extension batteries is even a good idea, or possible as really neither is the case. Really, if we want to protect the environment and go carbon free the best, and only, option is nuclear power.
LiFePo4 is a better storage alternative than Li-Ion, especially in small scale like homes. It's more expensive though. We need EV manufacturers to start adding V2H in cars.
Roger Starkey I can see you’re a Tesla fan. Nothing wrong with that! I am too. I own a model 3. Amazing vehicle. And Tesla and Elon’s Solar roof is brilliant. But, we do have to be realistic. And what I’ve said in our other exchanges on other comments to this video still stand. Renewables are great. Just not great enough. We need Nuclear in a big way.
Don't forget liquid air storage, another very promising energy storage technology. Now You Know had a very interesting video on the subject a week or two ago.
So we could build tens of thousands of battery power plants that could supply power to the US for a day or so. Wouldn't it be better and cheaper to build several dozen advanced design nuclear power plants instead?
Hi Matt (or anyone informed on the subject) what about the residues left from the batteries? are they toxic? will they be a bigger problem in the future if we rely on batteries too much?
Recyclable yes, about 80%. The rest is just as toxic as when it was an ore. If coal is radioactive (some isn’t) then the coal ash is radioactive too. Which would you prefer to have your school built on?
We, the people are more concerned with micro grids and beyond substation batteries as opposed to "grid scale". Grid scale is for interchanges of power producers on a grid scale. These profiteers send power hither and yon to prey on poor management of investor owned utilities. Once subdivisions begin to incorporating micro grids, batteries and natural gas back up generators, what use will a grid be to most people?
Not nessassay. Just batteries, other energy storage such as hydro lakes and air compressor power stations, Molten salt generators are just as important than just upscaled lithium
IMO lLiquid Air/Cryogenic Battery tech is a proven and affordable grid energy storage option that can be scaled for large scale application. Energy can be stored for weeks and potentially even longer, addressing a big drawback of Lithium Ion. Cells.
Thanks for making the video, it's a really interesting topic. I think new battery technology is cool, but it's really important not to underestimate the scale of the challenge here. The US uses about 11 million MWh of electricity a day, mostly from fossil fuels. To replace fossil fuels with renewables and store just 1 day of US electricity would therefore need almost 14,000 of the 800MWh vanadium plants of the type you described being built in china. For comparison the US only has about 1000 power plants producing 200MW or more (i.e. same power output as the vanadium storage plants). Most estimates I've seen suggest that for solar and wind to be reliable enough to not require natural gas backup would require 2 weeks of storage capacity: 2 weeks would require almost 200,000 of the 800MWh vanadium plants.
Tom,
at last, a touch of realism, the fantasists also forget the need for extra generation capacity to charge these batteries.
The problem are not even the short (2 week ) term loading/unloading cycles but the annual.
For many countries the amount of energy stored varies greatly over the course of the year.
Fortunately in the summer solar produces more and in the winter wind. Still for most countries that gives not an even scale.
In Germany you would need to store and release energy in a 12 months cycle.
If you do not want to waste massive amounts of energy (because you scrap it) you will need to store energy in spring and give it back in autumn.
You can only work around that if your production capacity is so high that you will meet your demand in low production months.
That could also be an option but you would have massive amounts of excess energy to use. Maybe for producing Hydrogen or something else.
Which is why we call them greentards. This will never ever ever ever ever ever happen. If you think it will, you don't understand capital markets.
Awesome video man! Finally, an update on the next stage of city-sized batteries that are ESSENTIAL for transitioning to renewables.
Thanks for watching!
I'm not impressed. For an impressive grid scale battery check out the Ambri liquid metal battery. Their battery is good for 100,000 full charge full discharge cycles. That's with only abundant materials in their battery. Needs a heater at startup but needs no cooling. Operating at grid scale it is self heating. And very efficient with performance similar to pumped hydro, but with the nearly instant synthetic throttle and exciter response times of all battery systems. You could call it a 300 year battery, but as a practical matter it simply will outlast the infrastructure it is built for.
@@tsamuel6224 Ah, Sadoway's stuff! I'm hoping it will get somewhere!
TJ Grant,
I keep hearing and reading about 100% renewables no fossil fuels etc. It's a fantasy it is not going to happen. Renewable generation is inferior power and the reality is, that due to technical reasons, it is not suitable for large scale grid supply. Why, apart from intermittency (which batteries will not compensate for, another pipe dream), they are asynchronous power sources, so cannot support the grid frequency which is a critical parameter to control, they have no inertia which large steam plants have, another characteristic that keeps the frequency stable, They contribute to lowering short circuit current for the grid which inhibits effective operation of grid protection systems. Wind, in particular, is very unstable at times because of the cube law relationship between wind speed and power output.
Their lifespan is far shorter than conventional power plants and their load factor, i.e. how much power you actually get as opposed to name plate capacity is small, so you need lots of them. and even then there are times when their output is virtually zero.
Germany has spent trillions of Euros and still they are having to build new coal stations. The large capacity of renwable generation has made little effect on their CO2 emissions, it simply is not effective or reliable. Not only that their elctricity costs are about the highest in Europe with 'free wind and solar'1
@@UndecidedMF Please change your intro music! It's so annoying!
Can you mention Cryogenic Air storage too? Currently Highview Power is building a 250MWh system in Manchester, England.
No toxic or rare materials required, no shortage of raw materials and half the price of Li-ion. Easily scalable and can be built anywhere.
Yes, its only 60-75% efficient but there are no chemical process involved, only physical.
www.energy-storage.news/news/fossil-fuel-plant-in-england-will-get-250mwh-liquid-air-energy-storage-make
Yes, very interesting solution. Just store air under pressure...
@@StefanvanderFange no, it's not pressurised, that's the whole point. Because it's a cryogenic liquid it doesn't have to be pressurised, just well insulated which makes containment much less expensive.
@@MrGonzonator Thanks. It's been a while since I've done physics, but getting gas to liquid can be done in 2 ways, as I recall it: either cool it, or put in under pressure. Or a combination of both ofcourse. Keeping it cooled seems to cost much more energy, than keeping it under pressure...
There’s an excellent video about it. It says recycling the heat generated during compression is important to its efficiency.
--
Liquid Air Batteries. Literally energy from thin air. Seriously. Literally!
th-cam.com/video/tMLu9Dtw9yI/w-d-xo.html
@@StefanvanderFange A gas over it's critical temperature cannot be compressed into a liquid. This is also the difference in the definition of vapor and gas. A vapor can be compressed to a liquid. A gas cannot be compressed to a liquid but can be turned to a supercritical fluid.
Please for the love of God:
Energy: MWh aka Megawatt-hour
Power: MW aka Megawatt
Glad to hear that energy storage battery technology is progressing significantly, let’s not lose sight of the reality that the energy storage capacity even if built out at an aggressive pace with improving technology is and will be but a small fraction of solar and wind generation capability for a long time. Further more , it is at least an order of magnitude too small to address issues such as seasonal variation of solar. (Example: I have a modest 14 Kw home solar installation. On an annual basis, it meets 90% of household needs, but only 20% during the worst 2 winter months. A pair of original-spec Powerwalls would easily address a day or so of this seasonal deficit, but clearly not the remaining 60 days of inadequate system production. That is worse than an order of magnitude shortfall between hypothetical system capability and need.)
we could also have a system wherein a large proportion of average energy demand is met with nuclear energy. witch by nature is very consistent (mostly for safety reasons) where the remainder of typical demand is met by renewables with the excess stored and used in place of peaking plants. not a perfect system, but more attainable and would more than serve as a multi decade solution while the tech and infrastructure is further developed for an entirely renewable energy environment
Good to hear you adding more depth to the videos with layers of sound! Very cool
*edit* ok maybe a BIT too much but still great video
I've never heard a beat like that from a wind turbine in real life. It's not good promotion, showing them making that kind of noise.
You need to tell us how much a battery might cost that could run New York City for a day. Something tells me that cost is out of sight.
Try Mexico City. Mind boggling>
I recently modeled the addition of storage for a local 1.5 MW wind turbine. With a couple of years of daily generation, the model showed that the size of battery to avoid blackouts is int the order of 500 MWh. This is some 5 times the largest battery in existence today.
This amount of storage for each wind turbine is inconceivable!
Fascinating!! Explain your modeling better. This is good info sir!!!
@@MrElifire84 Probably is that you basically need two weeks of storage for windpower to get past maximum becalmed incidents. 500MWh/1.5MW is 300 hours.
Storage is extremely helpful for transitioning to renewables, particularly having a couple of hours, which, as you mentioned, is very fast, and can help with grid stability providing frequency regulation, voltage regulation, and synthetic inertia. Long duration battery storage would be very helpful too, and super interesting to learn about, BUT, you can do 90 or 95% of the transition without it, and we are nowhere near that. Storage is but one tool, in the tool box. Adding transmission, demand management, overbuild, and keeping some gas plants operational for that week or two when we are really short can get us way down the road. Might even be able to do power to gas, and either make methane, or potentially store hydrogen and use fuel cells. We'll see.
Any storage that is added to the grid will not only help shave the peaks, and peak prices, but will help decrease the number of times the price of electricity goes too low. It will be easier to add more renewables if you can get paid for more hours.
90 or 95% of the transition without storage is nonsense. That's what causes blackouts. Unless you have extremely fast throttle and exciter response times (lots of fossil fuel), you need storage.
@@tsamuel6224 We already have storage, and the rate that we are adding it is going up exponentially, but we are only around 20% renewables. Getting to 40% is not that big of a deal. A little bit of battery storage with the right power electronics can do amazing things, as Australia found out when they got their Tesla battery system at the Hornsdale Power Reserve. Frequency and voltage regulation. They can both add and take power, and some systems can also provide synthetic inertia. cleantechnica.com/2020/03/02/neoen-says-hornsdale-battery-has-exceeded-expectations/
I enjoyed the sound of the battery. :)
"Everyone owning a phone" that reminds me of a blizzard meme.
That bald dude with his red shirt and one strap backpack is a legend. Your comment cracked me up, thank you.
Thanks Matt!
Thanks for watching!
Always learn so much with your videos - thanks for all the time and research you do. Have a great day!
Really appreciate that. Hope you have a great day too!
Another option is to invest in thorium reactors.
Ding ding ding!! Right answer!!! Read my separate comments and the responses to this video and some others. You are correct sir.
Outstanding review of the various battery technologies and potential developments
Thanks!
as we have just seen demonstrated, fossil fuel burning slows so does the rain fall and cloud cover , therefore solar gets more productive = a feed back loop that's useful for once. Also liquid air / compressed air energy systems are starting to get the attention they should have gotten a very long time ago. Well done Manchester UK
Thank you, sir. I will share this on.
Awesome, thank you!
How about doing a video on nuclear technology? It has the best potential to reduce carbon emissions by a long shot without destroying the environment.
A couple of videos ago I did touch on nuclear with my Thorium energy video. Definitely an interesting path towards cleaner energy.
It was a prettY good video too.
@@UndecidedMF Thorium will likely be further in future. Small Modular Reactors are being reviewed by regulatory agencies and could be licensed and online within this decade. Thanks for doing these videos!
I want to reinforce the question traveller asked below. How about Liquid Air or Cryo storage large scale batteries. All the articles I find on this have no depth. They don't explain how it deals with the heat of compression or the chill of decompression. How they deal with the fact that each gas liquifies at different temperature. Also why wasn't it done before? What new development makes it practical now? I would love to see you go into this subject in depth.
Appreciate the shout out for that. Several folks have hit me up about that. Adding it to the list.
Good questions. Apparently now they store the waste heat created when compressing air and use it during decompression so the system is more efficient. Also, simply by building such storage near some place that requires cooling or produces waste heat allows both to save energy. Given AC is one of the main energy users, replacing it with few pipes that bring cold air to every apartment building in the city would save even more money than simply using the liquid air for energy storage to run the AC with cheaper electricity.
Why now and not before? Money, usually. It helps that we now have more push towards getting rid of fossil fuels and especially the peaker plants, renewables have proven they produce far more power than doubters have claimed, and various prototypes that have been in operation for decades in some cases show that energy storage also works and becomes even more economically viable as fuel costs and price of energy rises.
But the main issue is what can you get right now at cheap price. Tesla had a bunch of batteries ready to sell so they could get Hornsdale operational in couple months because they had made them for EVs and Powerwalls, but as useful as those megabatteries are, we need few thousands of them all over the world by yesterday and Tesla is not going to be able to produce that many any time soon. Concrete and steel are far cheaper and last longer than even simplest chemical batteries and the technology does not need to be more efficient than Tesla's best batteries to be useful, it only needs to be cheaper than the expensive peaker plants and available now instead of "maybe in few years we develop a cheaper chemical".
Awesome video and level of detail on the topic. Thanks for putting all this dense information in one video!
Brilliant review once again Matt.👊🏼👊🏼👊🏼
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OMG!!! The energizer bunny just got arrested! He was charged with battery.
If it's a Sodium Ion battery, he could be charged with salt-in-battery!!🤣😂😁
that was such a textbook sample of a dad joke! :D
@@TheyCalledMeT and yet, the joke is still very much alive.
nice one
@@vincentrobinette1507 :) good one
Hello, What's your opinion on cryogenic energy storage solution by Highview Power? It seems more eco-friendly and scalable than all the other storage solutions. Thanks.
Did you look at AMBRI and Dr. Don Sadoway out of MIT? Are they making any progress in this field?
YES! All the alt-energy 'tubers either don't know about this tech, or perhaps have knowledge that I don't, because none of them seem to cover it. It seems like the most promising new battery tech to me.
TLDR on AMBRI's tech: It's an electrometallurgical battery. You pump huge amounts of energy in, and the metals de-alloy. You draw power out, and the metals alloy with each other..
Pros: Virtually limitless cycles with extremely little loss of capacity over it's life, inexpensive materials
Con: High operating temperature means it's more lossy than other technologies.
The last battery you mentioned, made from cheap, abundant materials, might be the Sodium Ion battery. a company named "Aquion" made it, that battery hasn't taken off yet, with the company fading in and out over the years. According to their specifications of batteries they actually had for sale on the market would last ~3,000 cycles, but, it had a high equivalent series resistance, making it a long term storage option. (it could not be charged or discharged quickly) The only reason I don't have them, is because the total levelized cost per kWh of electrical energy storage was more expensive than Lead Acid, and Lithium Iron Phosphate. They were bulky, but that's fine for stationary energy storage applications like renewable energy.(wind, solar)
Thank you for this most informative video. I'd love you to get more to the nitty gritty of figures as well but I understand it must appeal to everybody. If you have data, perhaps you could put it in a spreadsheet and put down under your video a link to a directory with those data in the cloud? I have been in storage in 2018 but things are moving fast. Mass storage is not being funded well. In EU there is no venture capital like in the USA. People prefer to invest in real estate for 'stones and ground don't run away'. Feudal think of the Middle Ages but there it is right in the 21st century.
Thanks Matt, an interesting dive into the nascent technologies trying to solve the grid level storage conundrum!
Many here comment on the sheer size of the storage required, for ever increasing energy requirements, a problem that I suspect will never go away.
My background is physics and engineering. Despite the put down of "It's always 50 years away" which has been the case for my whole adult life, I believe that in the end fusion power is the only truly viable longterm solution, unless we can halt our almost exponential growth of energy requirements.
This area has been starved of funding almost since its inception, which of course is one of the reasons that it is taking so long. I've watched documentaries where, highly qualified and experienced physicists and engineers are working out of small industrial units, using materials scavenged from past research at universities etc. Astonishing given the money poured into vanity projects all over the world
For instance in the UK our government spent $20 Billion on a track and trace app (which did not work) for coronovirus and a further £75 billion on a high speed rail link to shorten a journey time of 1.5 hours by 15 minutes, and yet only announced a grant of $275 million into fusion research over 5 years!!!
ITER in the south of France is an international collaboration for fusion research, which although it will not produce commercially viable electricity, will hopefully solve most of the problems facing this technology.
The other thing I have noticed from your videos is the speed at which technology is evolving in the energy storage and generation area. Often it seems that just as a technology like Vanadium flow is poised to enter the mainstream, along comes a newer tech that promises more, better or cheaper solutions, at which point I suspect that the projects in the pipeline for that technology either stall or collapse due to a lack of funding.
A classic example of this is the nuclear power plants developed in the UK back in the 60's and 70's, each one of which was effectively a prototype, resulting in a hard to manage and maintain generating capability. At some stage, in order to get some useful energy out of a system the decision has to be taken to standardise the product and go with it, warts and all, then you have a known set of problems with that design that can be corrected in all the instances of that product rather than needing s different solution for each instance.
Chemical batteries are not the only solution to large scale energy storage. There is gravity storage which you alluded to with pumping water, but you can lift other things. There is also phase change storage and liquid air storage is already viable, neiither of which require long, complicated development.
Hello, I just wanted to say thanks for the content
Matt. This is exciting but there is a tremendous danger in storage that some miss! Cheap energy storage won’t just be a boon to renewable technologies. Cheap energy storage can just as easily be used to supplement smaller fossil fuel generation. Imagine building a smaller Coal plant that operates at full capacity constantly while storing energy during off peak demand times in these redox flow batteries and then meeting peak demand with battery discharge. In other words, the utilities will go for the cheapest power source sized to meet the demand. When you calculate that renewables have far lower capacity factors than other sources, the overbuilding required would again put their costs higher than fossil fuel sources. For example, if you need a gigawatt, it may be slightly cheaper to build a gigawatt of solar than coal but since it’s capacity factor is only 25% you would need 4 gigawatts vs the 1 from the coal. Thereby making the Coal actually cheaper!
And really, All this completely misses the real problem of renewables! It’s not storage. It’s real estate. I think I’ve showed you the numbers before, but to be short, if we wanted to power the US on Solar for example, it would require a land footprint so large it would damage massive areas. Area numbers so large they are somewhere north of 130,000 square miles for the US alone. As big as New York State, Pennsylvania, and Virginia combined! Crazy!!!
A better alternative? How about storing energy in small stockpiles of extremely dense material? How about energy storage in the form of Thorium and Uranium? Small, extremely safe, extremely powerful, and if done right, extremely affordable next generation nuclear reactors! No massive real estate required! Batteries maybe helpful but not essential since we’ve stored the energy in small nuclear fuel stockpiles!
Let’s put Nuclear at the front of our future energy hopes as it really is the best solution overall.
Looking forward to your response.
Molten salt reactors don't need batteries to do what you are saying. We could have a small MSR optimized to run all out, 24/7, storing energy in thermal storage of the salt, cheap and easy. The amount of storage would be very small and predictable. Storage for renewables would have to be huge to account for a cloudy week of no wind and then as you say the over-build needed to charge that back up would be enormous. The part you left off is when the batteries are full and you are getting plenty of sun and wind. Where does that excess go? Prices go negative and power companies go broke. If everyone is using renewables, then there is no one to use it, this is really bad for a balanced grid.
Damn straight. The load on the grid swings up and down by about 20 GW in the UK winter requiring imports and all sorts of peaker plants. Cheap storage would end up being used to store the baseload power from closed cycle gas turbine power at night rather than ramp the gas down.
This could then replace the less efficient open cycle turbines that spin up to meet peak load so would be a small carbon saving but a far cry from the renewables people had in mind when discussing the storage to begin with.
Roger Starkey
Roger, I’m not assuming everything centralized. The numbers just give the scale. And you’re using the same 100k numbers that are totally wrong. US energy in 2019 was 100 quadrillion BTU. That’s 29 million Gigawatt hours. Divide that by 365 days then 24 hours is a average constant demand of 3300 gigawatt. It takes roughly 10 square miles of solar per gigawatt at peak rate. That’s then 33,000 square miles. But average US capacity factor is 24.7% so multiply by 4. More than 130,000 square miles. Total Us Urban area? 106k square miles!!! What’s the relative rooftop area available for solar of those urban area miles? No real good numbers. But 20% is probably silly optimistic! Just do a google maps view of your own lot and see how much is roof top!! Then think of large cities and roads and skyscrapers with minimal rooftop but loads of energy demand. So even if you could cut this mythical 20% with roof top solar, you’re still north of 100,000 square miles. The scale is ridiculous. Check my math. It ain’t wrong.
@@MrElifire84 thank you you saved me the effort of schooling that dude. You're not wrong
Dominic Adams
Thanks.
Great review but only considers chemical batteries. For static applications ‘mechanical’ batteries that store energy by e.g. liquefying a gas (large scale Liquid Air batteries just being trialed now) have a lot of scope too.
The big heavy weights made grandfather clocks work fine. Perhaps for some stuff we should go back to that.
after watching several vids of your channel, you have got me :-)
greetings from germany
martin teuber
As a home builder here in Canada, I would say that insulation is the most important battery in this country. No matter what the heat source is for your home, or cooling source in summer, insulation will keep your home warm or cool for much longer. The materials needed to insulate are the most common materials on the planet and they work for hundreds of years without any added energy when installed properly. No it is not a sexy solution but it is so very important to reduce the demand for energy while maintaining a good quality of life over the long run.
Yes, "rock wool" is really good stuff. Foam is better but costs more.
For windows, "nothing works" as in two sheets of glass held apart with small glass spacers and a vacuum is the way to go.
Nearly any nation could make a better future for its people by making those upgrades today.
Not sure how I missed this video before but I appreciate the fact that you got citations listed without having to log into something like Facebook.
Not sure where you got that info from about Australia but its extremely wrong.
Add to your list: Liquid Air Energy Storage also called Cryogenic energy storage en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryogenic_energy_storage#United_Kingdom
www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/oct/21/uk-firm-highview-power-announces-plans-for-first-liquid-to-gas-cryogenic-battery
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Highview Power is the most promising of all the energy storage technologies. Batteries and Redox Flow can't simply scale. Mechanical Energy Storage systems like LAES ,CAES and Pumped Heat Energy Storage are the only scalable solutions.
I appreciate the thoughtfulness of the videos and information presented but the following statement needs some explanation and follow up: "Its taken around 40 years for lithium ion to reach the state we are at right now. But We don't have that kind of time to wait for grid scale storage to mature." Why don't we have that kind of time for large scale batteries? The entire video seemed to present clear and logical information on the topic with backing information outside of that statement.
I was half expecting one of those "renewables and batties won't work around the world..." videos, but this is very insightful and yes, we do need to research new technologies, in the end if we have the technology today then great! we can deploy it and when it advances we can replace it at the end of it's lifespan, if we don't then we can at least try to reduce the effects of the damaging sources of energy while we develop technologies.
Reminds me of the articles from Popular Mechanics or Engadget. Seems like every week there'd be a new fangled battery that promises the sun and the moon. We're still waaaiting!
I frequently see videos about batteries, and all the potential new designs that appear to still be years away from being used. However, if the point is easy to scale energy storage, then I think CAES is going to be a major player. Highview Power is a current CAES company that is operating in the UK, and just contracted to build a plant in the US. I'd love to see a video on this that would explore some pros and cons of this system!
A very small but crucial mention in this video is the power of patents to hinder progress, either intentionally (fossil fuel industry) or otherwise. Intellect, when we desperately need these ideas for the greater benefit of humanity, shouldn't become property. Rewards should be wider than simple exclusive monetary gain.
What about just using excess electricity for the electrolysis of water to produce hydrogen, and then burning the hydrogen in off-peak hours to generate steam for turbines or other methods of electricity generation? Would be a cheap stopgap solution untill cheap scalable solid state batteries become available. Sure would be less efficient than batteries, but much cheaper. Could you do a video on that? Maybe compare efficiency rates for all the possible technologies?
Hi Matt, the solution for any problem with energy is the hydroelectric riverless.
It can generate as much you need will without rivers.
Do you mean pumped-storage? They do have a lot of limitations regarding geographics
I just wanted to say thank you for the very interesting videos :D
replacing peaker plants makes sense .. replacing base load plants with solar/wind and battery storage (for the low production times i.e. night and or no wind) is beyond ineffective and even a net negative for the environment .. so replacing base load coal/gas with water or fusion power plants (.. which don't exist yet) sure i'm all in! Untill then .. replacing coal/gas isn't an option without quadrupling the electricity bill whilst effectively damaging the environment (the scale of required battery parks is so enormous .. their production/construction and later deconstruction/recycling would cause more problems/toxic waste/pollution than letting regular power plants run for another 2 decades)
I've been following Ramez Naam for years on the falling cost of batteries. At one point a few years ago he said the trend on batteries was a 20% drop in cost per year. While learning about all the different chemistries is fun, massive adoption obviously depends on lifecycle cost. The $80/kwh/3000 cycle batteries that were hyped in the news recently would dip below $0.03/kwh/cycle, which, combined with solar, could challenge natural gas right now. What's really exciting is when solar+batteries become cheaper than the _just the fuel_ for fossil fuel power plants (meaning you'll save money shutting down an existing plant even if it has plenty of life left and there aren't carbon taxes yet).
Batteries are a major concern and we need more of them. But it is also important to realize that if we need to fire up those old gas, oil or coil generators few weeks a year, we still reduce 95% of our carbon emissions so we may not need to substitute all our energy needs on batteries. Maybe only 95%.
The problem is that Tesla's Powerwall is still quite expensive because of the need to use lithium-ion battery packs. A better solution is going with less expensive means of power storage like molten salt batteries, which is less of an issue since you don't have size limitations like you have with electric vehicles.
I can understand the need of energy density for portable stuff, like phones or vehicles, but energy density is not a big factor when we are talking about static batteries in the outskirts of cities where space is not a problem. Let's dump the energy in the cheapest battery type , no matter how much it occupies.
The lead acid battery is a cheap technology, but we will need to open dozens of lead mines to supply the material. That wile increase the cost of lead as demand will surge over that of supply. lead will be like silver price wise if that were to happen, no longer cheap.
I knew a young boy named Ferrell when I lived in the Philippines in 1956-1957. I was 9 and I think he was a year younger. If you are related to him, say hello for me. We were both "Air Force Brats" as we called ourselves. I enjoy your shows.
In order for renewable energy to replace fossil fuels the cost per kWh has to be close to the same as fossil fuels and as reliable. Next video: How to use renewables to power an aluminum production plant.
MATT , could you look into cryo-air battery technology by High View Power. It appears to reuse well understood gas liquefaction technology in a new way. Stores energy for weeks and supposedly cost a fraction of the cost of lithium ion batteries at large scale. Currently , the company is building plant [ not a pilot plant ] in Manchester England.
2:58 please consider blacking out the ads...it distracts from the article you are attempting to focus on. Thanks for the vid!
Good point! Appreciate the feedback.
Was thinking exactly the same thing. Not sure why you wouldn't just crop the screen cap to the relevant part of the page.
What ads?
I think the idea that batteries need to be able to 'power entire cities for hours' is not really true. In a decentralised and diverse power network there isn't ever one source. Batteries will play a role but there will be other sources too like hydro, liquid air, gravity storage, flywheel etc.
How about at night turn off office lighting for a start. Cities have vast amounts of waste.
Many Developing countries use 1/10th the energy or less and everyone lives to tell the tale
Learn how to use less power is the first step, then we'll be able to reach out goals.
It’s not one or the other, it’s both!
Yes, 3 great tips are: insulate, insulate and insulate
Europe is miles ahead of the USA in reducing usage, due to crippling energy costs! Maybe add more tax to energy in the USA to motivate people to insulate / reduce usage!
@@Muppetkeeper - Carrots and sticks.
Not likely, the developing world uses orders of magnitude less energy than the US per person.
As these countries develop, billions of people will demand more and more power, dwarfing what they use now. Its not possible to achieve global equality of opportunity whilst reducing overall energy use.
The only hope is to ensure renewables and storage are the most economic options for those nations, and avoid the heavily poluting expansion phase of industrial growth which plagued the developed world in the past.
In the animation at 4:45 the ions are going the wrong way. The ions need to flow from the anode to the cathode, same as the electrons do.
Thanks for the video, quite illuminating. Bottom line is that absent a significant breakthrough in battery technology, renewables won't supply the majority of the worlds energy needs at scale or reasonable cost. If one of these technologies takes off it will certainly be a game changer, but for now hydrocarbons are going to be doing the majority of the heavy lifting.
Amazing video mate.....short yet very informative!
I genuinely get very confused when i hear people use kilowatt to describe storage or amounts of energy like when you said "tesla may have broken the 100 dollar per kilowatt barrier" like that means anything. Please use kilowatt hours for measured energy and use kilowatt like your supposed to.
Correct, it’s also important to know if that cost is at the cell level, or the pack level too, as the pack electronics and connections can add 10-15% to the cost. I believe Tesla May already be at $100 per kWh at cell level, and may have been for some time, pack level not so sure.
He DID mention that, when he was describing the battery system in Australia. He correctly defined it as a 100 megawatt battery, with a capacity of 129 megawatt hours.
Thank you for making this video. Keep it up!
Some good directions for battery technology.
That's a lot of really cool energy storage technology :)
The thing is: we were so desperate to make cheap renewable energy production, that we forgot about cheap storage.
Redox batteries look promising for stationary grid level batteries, as long as the demand keeps growing the technology will get cheaper.
But without major increase of cheap energy production there wouldn't be so much demand for cheap storage. The real issue is companies and politicians refusing to improve the grid infrastructure, as we could simply build loads of renewables in best locations and power the whole world with them if there just were enough cables to transmit the energy.
When you look at the Tesla battery in South Australia it can rally only power 30,000 homes for only 8 hours .In a city of 1,000,000 people thats a spit in the bucket .Numbers talk so this battery ( the worlds largest real can only power 10,000 homes for One DAY , but you need at least 3 DAY storage for bad weather when wind docent blow or solar docent work . So on that basis thats about 3,000 homes . SO they spent $100 million for 3,000 homes that $33,000 per home just to HELP Alternative energy. Of coarse South Australia has the highest electricity prices and everyone forgets it has built Gas fired power plants near the Tesla site . Why? well because they are closing down some coal fired power plants 1000 klms away so that state does not have excess power to sell to South Australia . I'm sorry to inform people but Government policies are the major reason most alternative power generation are installed . Electricity is generated at much cheaper rates at Hydro coal gas and Nuclear plants than wind or solar systems when you look at yearly actual production not maximum generating capacity multiplied by 24 hours of every day. Every bitt of subsidy for home solar and batteries is taking money from the poor and not improving their lives . Nice for middle class yuppies to feel good about the environment , not so good for the poor who have to spend more money on power to make these yuppies feel good .
Flow batteries look promising for large scale energy storage. Please keep on sharing as the technologies evolve because we are all interested in the various energy storage options you have shared in the last year
We should just have every building producing its own power independently. Buildings with lots of sun can go solar, buildings that have a lot of wind can go wind, buildings with a stream or river etc that has a current can go Hydro.
There's many other ways for storage. To rely on just batteries which are very expensive is not the way to go. A combination of pumped, gravitational, thermal, air inflation and batteries are just some that already exist. Looking forward to a cleaner future.
Its a bit like with fusion - solid state and flow batteries are always 20 years off.
@@rogerstarkey5390 There are no utility-scale flow battery installations. But i am sure they are just around the corner..
You're half right. Fusion has not been successfully tested for any more than a few seconds. Flow batteries are already up and running in pilot programs. It's just the simple matter of reducing the cost, to make them practical.
I did some math, correct me if I'm wrong:
279.6 million vehicles are in use daily in the US
Suppose we replaced them all with electric vehicles, with an average 24 kW battery at 34 kW for 161km (100 miles).
Then, further suppose we seek to charge these vehicles with wind turbines.
At 1,500 kW/hr produced for each turbine, it would take 559,200 wind turbines to fully charge all the vehicles in use in the US to full each day, if we consider an average charge time of 8 hours.
Wind turbines need to be placed about 560 meters apart from one another.
559,200 turbines at 560 meters apart means we would need 313,152 km/squared of land dedicated to wind turbines to fully charge all those vehicles.
If we account for people traveling on average about 37 km per day (accounting for car pooling and such), we would need 71,965 km squared of land for a daily recharge.
The US is 9.834 million km/squared. It would take anywhere from 0.73% to 3.18% of the available land in the US to place the wind turbines.
We would need a combined space between the sizes of South Carolina (82,933 km/squared) and New Mexico (314,917 km/squared) to be completely covered in wind turbines to switch completely to a 'carbon-free' vehicle system.
That's not even accounting for what it would cost to power everything else, this is just for vehicles and a daily recharge.
At the 3.99 trillion kW/hr consumption total of the US for the year of 2019, to power both the vehicles (charging them to full) and match our current consumption we would need 862,853 km/squared of space dedicated to wind turbines. That's a high-end of 8.77% of the total land in the US.
To say this is a pipe-dream is an understatement.
Did you count the number of days it will take to replace the current fleet of ICE vehicles? I am quite certain the maths >>only
Things to consider:
1. Modern Wind turbines are now around 5 to 14 MW providing a lot more power per KM2, and let's say at an average of 8 MW spaced 1 kilometre apart and running for 8 hours a day would need a mere 104,860 square kilometres
2. You don't have to dedicate the land to turbines, can still grow croups or even solar panels. the turbine base and service access only take around 1% of land under a wind farm.
3. The USA is 1/3 arid or semi-arid desert lands doing almost nothing, more than 3 million square kilometres, plus mountain ranges and rooftops etc.
4. Enough Offshore wind exist around the USA to power the USA
5. Plus solar, hydro, geothermal, biomass and tidal.
The USA has enough potential renewable energy to provide all energy needs many many times over without hardly touching any land currently been used.
And currently, 11% of all USA energy is from renewables (most from Hydro) So only need 10 times what currently have!
And anyway if did have to dedicate a few % of land to renewables, so what, energy is the most important thing a modern industrialized society needs and fossil fuels will be run out this century! Things have to change!
@@stevetaylor2818
1. I haven't found any documentation of wind turbines getting past 8 MW that are both actually in use and verifiably pull those numbers. Needless to say, those figures are optimistic, not a standard. Even citing a dependent source, on-shore clock out at 3 MW while offshore clock out at over 3.6 MW. Seeing how 3 MW is only twice the figure I used , I'm not certain of your math.
2. Stacking wind turbines and solar panels is a logistical nightmare, not to mention a huge hazard to wildlife. If it is done, it isn't done frequently, not as I assume you envision.
3. Keep in mind, we can't just centralize all the wind/solar/hydro power from a single partitioned off space and then 'pipe' it in from that location. Every stretch of power line loses energy due to heat.
If I were to put a wind turbine farm out in the middle of the desert (assuming there even is enough wind in the desert) by the time it was funneled toward any major city, you'd lose at least half of the energy you collected just to heat due to the nature of electrical resistance. Not to mention the power lines stretching across the nation.
4. Offshore wind has drastically more crippling maintenance costs due to erosion of the base due to sea water. Also, they are out at quite a distance, so we still lose energy due to heat loss.
5. Solar is at its limits in terms of the technology - experts admit they have milked all the energy they possibly can out of the current platform. Not to mention the vast amount of volatile waste that goes into making the darn things; China is the only one who manufacture the panels because they are the only ones without qualms of tossing toxic waste into their water supply.
Hydro (i.e. dams) ruin any water source they feed off because they create large reservoirs that aren't moving and heat up due to the sun, drastically altering the ecosystem for anything that relies on that water source.
Geothermal, which I'm in favor of, is the best bet, but unless you're on a fault you have to deal with the process of injecting water into the ground to break it up (almost exactly like fracking) and that can result in unlocking latent earthquakes.
Biomass energy is just waste-disposal by another name. We've been burning waste for energy for centuries. Rockefeller used the waste from making kerosene to power his kerosene plants -- until he realized that waste, which we now call gasoline, can be used to run cars.
Finally, tidal energy is a pipe dream. It just doesn't have the urgency to be used practically and the maintenance and harm to wildlife is astronomical. Salt in the ocean is just to volatile to machinery.
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No -- wind power, solar power, hydro power, geothermal power; they are all the same in that they have to be built relatively close to where the energy is to be used, otherwise you're just wasting energy by tossing it as heat right back through the power lines. That's why California can't keep the lights on, because their grid is stretched out so far from the actual point of use. At the slightest surge in energy use the whole system buckles.
Fossil fuel and nuclear power plants can be built just about anywhere there is an ample supply of water and road networks and runs 24/7. That's just plain hard to beat.
I wish there was a good renewable energy source, I really do, but they all have flaws that put them so much further back from fossil fuels.
Solar and wind aren't even always cheaper than fossil fuels. It only seems that way because of government subsidies. So many studies say 'Solar panels and wind turbines are so much cheaper to build!' while ignoring the fact the government usually pays 50% of it which they are happy to write off. Be certain of this truth: if a company can lie to make money and get away with it, they will.
What we really need is a heat battery (not a thermal battery, which is more akin to interruptible heat pumps). Being able to store and transport heat without substantial loss to thermodynamic equilibrium is the next step forward. Imagine being able to absorb all the energy of the sun WITHOUT having to convert it into electricity first. You could pipe the heat to any existing power plant and just boil the water, turn the turbine, and you're set.
The major flaw I see with the energy industry is that it focuses too much on electrical energy and not enough on heat energy. Both renewables and fossil fuels stand to benefit from that research.
Hey Matt. There is an energy storage company called Ambri that is about grid scale storage but I haven't heard an update about them in a bit. Can you look into them and tell us what you think.
Another battery technology is the Liquid Metal Battery from Ambi, developed out of Dr. Donald Sadoway's group at MIT. Cheap components and virtually unlimited life.
The Hornsdale expansion completed in April and my understanding has been operational since then and is now rated as 150MW/193.5 MWh. Tesla project with has PG&E project should be underway by now and initial targets for 182.5MW/730MWh with option to expand to 1.2 GWh. And there are other large projects Tesla has planned/proprosed and/or been accepted. To be honest today we have plenty of energy more than enough. A major part of the problem is the majority of buildings are low performance. Probably should do a video about Net Zero and Passive home construction. Building or upgrading to passive home & commercial construction with only minimal increased costs can probably reduce energy needs in the country by half if not more (if excluding electric vehicles).
How can we address the heat waste of all these transitions? Conventional power plant has a 66% waste heat? Love the technology.
I would love to see a video from you about electric aircraft with batteries, hydrogen and fuel cells.
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@@UndecidedMF YES! me too!
Jason Bowman Jason, have a look at fuel cell powered aircraft. In California there is an electric plane that will fly 500 miles. It will only need a small battery. The hydrogen can be made at the airport. It can be cheaper to manufacture and run than a conventional plane. I am hoping it is the future.
I’m an aviator by trade. Real Engineering did a great video on this. I Have a Tesla and have run some numbers on this topic myself wondering why not electric airplanes? Bottom line, Battery powered electric airplanes is a pretty hopeless idea for any commercial application similar to what we currently do in airline traffic or cargo. Stop reading here if you don’t want to see the numbers but the numbers flesh out why. Bit long comment tho.
First thing to understand, one of the primary engineering factors to consider for aviation is weight. That means the energy density of your “fuel” is critical. Aviation kerosene has an energy density of about 46 mega joules per kilogram. Batteries? Only about 1!! That’s a 46 to 1 advantage! Yeah, bad! So how do electric cars get away with it? Efficiency and weight trade offs. Internal combustion engines are around 25% efficient taking that stored energy and turning it into motion. 30% at best. Electric motors? Above 90% efficient! That moves the advantage from 46 to 1 down to only 15 to 1. Still bad but better. My Tesla has a battery that weighs around 1000 pounds. It stores about 2 gallons worth of equivalent gas energy. My Corolla has a gas tank that stores 10 gallons and only weighs 70 pounds or so. Advantage Corolla. My Tesla has no transmission and small and relatively light electric motors. My Corolla has an engine and transmission that come up with a total drivetrain weight of around 800 pounds. Advantage Tesla. You can probably see where I’m going with this. Trade drivetrain weight in Corolla for battery weight in Tesla. The efficiency of the Tesla electric motors means that with that 2 gallons worth of energy, it can still go almost as far as my Corolla on a full tank. Even still the Tesla is somewhat heavier but on a road, who really cares.
Now to aviation numbers. Modern turbofans are not as efficient as electric motors, however they are much better than motor vehicles engines. Turbofans approach nearly 50% efficiency. So instead of going from a 46 to 1 advantage to 15 to 1, there is only a reduction to 23 or so to 1. Then factor in that in a modern jet aircraft the relative weight of fuel to overall weight is dramatically higher than in motor vehicles because the aircraft is made to be structurally very light so it can fly and also go farther. My Corolla has 70 pounds of fuel for a 2800 pound vehicle giving a fuel to weight ratio of 40 to 1. Fuel is nothing compared to total weight. My Boeing 737? Caries around 46,000 pounds of fuel. Total vehicle weight? Depends on passenger count but typical is around 150,000 pounds at takeoff. That means my fuel to weight ratio is close to 3 to 1. So if I wanted to take my 737 and make it run on batteries and go as far as it currently can with electric motors and account for their increased efficiency etc etc, I would need a total plane weight with batteries of around, ...wait for it, ....about 1,150,000 pounds!!!! Basically multiplying the aircraft weight by more than 7!!!! Yeah, it’s crazy! Simply not feasible with current battery tech.
Show me a battery that has about 10 to 15 times the energy per weight, than maybe we could start talking about electric passenger aircraft. Until then... we need liquid fuels! Does that mean we need to pollute with CO2? Naw. We could use large amounts of cheap electricity to generate aviation and other fuels from captured CO2 and other materials thereby creating a net zero CO2 sum game.
So where to get cheap and abundant electricity? Hmm?
Yup. Nuclear again folks.
@@MrElifire84 Thanks for all that analysis. I am optimistic, maybe too optimistic. New battery technology will come, they will get more kWh/Kg. I think making hydrogen at the airports from renewable electricity is a big plus too. Consider Norway (frantic EV promoters) - they have said that at some future date, local short haul trips must be made with electric aircraft. BTW I once has a Tesla, I have a better EV now.
This is exactly why we need to take back our manufacturing. We can not depend of other countries to make and recycle our products.
I read read recently about liquid air energy storage. Converting air to liquid then as it is turned back to air it turns a turbine to generate electricity. I wonder how viable that is.
@NotTheCIA I.think I recently saw a video that talked about this tech. They said they believed it to be a compliment to batteries, not a competitor. Apparently battery banks are concidered 4 hour storage at best. It appears noone is building or planning a battery array to supply to the grid backup power for longer than that. While it meets that need quite well, with liquid air you can supply the grid for 10 hours or better. Also they are easy and cheap to scale up. Once you have the infrastructure in to provide the megawatts per hour that is required, you need only add more storage tanks, to add morre hours of backup.
@NotTheCIA I.think Thanks for the lesson. I believe I grasp it. Maybe this is why tjey said batteries and liquid air compliment each other. Liquid air is billed as power storage, like.pumped hydro.
@NotTheCIA I.think Thanks again. A friend and I recently started up a non profit. Main goal is building farms to supply orphanages with sustainable food source. Our first farm is 29 acres just outside of Jinja Uganda. I know there is no power there now. Not sure of the distance and the cost to bring it in, but even then it is notoriously unreliable. Lots of blackouts. Therefore offgrid may be the way to go . I'm trying to learn what I can about power.
@NotTheCIA I.think Yeah, I don't have many specifics at this point. This particular farm is to provide food primarily for an orphanage of 75 kids, + staff members.
Things we would like to have.
Housing for workers and their families. The goal is to employ widows with children. Give them housing, tie the kids into the education system the orphanage uses. We of course need a barn and food processing facility. We want to install a cannery inorder to preserve food. We would like to put in a vocational school for kids aging out of the orphanage that don't wish to go on to college. Agricultural, equipment repair, welding... those types of things.
We also hope to build guest housing to host church groups on mission trips. (Income)
Lots of electrical needs.
Actually was checking into freeze-dried foods, because it is the best way to preserve, but those machines use major kilowatts.
@NotTheCIA I.think They would. I have to have some viable preservation method. The childten presently live off of corn meal mush and cooked dried beans. They get maybe one ounce of chicken a week. Most food is not meat therefore I dont think smoking is a viable option. Besides that, smoked meats lead to stomach cancer. Often at a young age.
An inconvenient truth..sadly
I am surprised you did not mention the sodium and nickel chloride batteries developed at MIT.
The trick with batteries is to charge them. Where I live, the batteries would have to be able to provide 16 hours for several months every year. That means I have eight hours to charge them while also providing all the power the city normally uses during the day light hours. That implies much larger solar fields and more wind turbines. And that has the potential to lead to increased instability of the power grid which makes our power much more prone to black-outs. Progress has been made in this area but the take away should be that better batteries is only part of a much bigger problem to be addressed.
@NotTheCIA I.think Wind has similar reliability issues to solar because the wind does not blow all the time and sometimes it blows to hard to be useful.
Why would you use the other generation technologies to charge batteries? It does not make financial sense to pay for the fuel to charge a battery. The best battery applications are used with what are called non-dispatchable assets such as solar, wind and oceans. Adding the battery makes those assets dispatchable which means they can be used when needed, not just when the sun is out, the sind is blowing, or the tide is changing.
NotTheCIA I.think I am. I'm a power engineer currently working on a BESS system to back up a land fill gas generator. I know very well how power distribution works. You would not use a large thermal or hydro asset to charge batteries. The efficiencies and economics make it a bad investment. Most large batteries are used at solar and wind to normalize their power flow. This is critical since it was found that if your power production is 30% renewables, a power system becomes unstable and collapses. The addition of batteries and improved control systems helps keep the system stable. Your explanation falls short of my experiance.
NotTheCIA I.think You do not have a good understanding of how the power system and generators work. When called on for power, generators open the throttle to provide more power and close the throttle when demand falls. You need to operate the machines below rated capacity or you run the risk of destabilizing the grid. Peaked plants, such as you describe, can take up to 30 minutes to come on-line but they are dispatched before they are needed so they are ready when needed. The interesting thing is that the gas peaker is currently cheaper than a battery if similar capacity. Nothing is built in this industry that does not make somebody money and that fact alone makes batteries less attractive. Combine that with an 8 to 12 year battery life and the economics get very complicated.
@NotTheCIA I.think Not bluffing, working in a different economy than yours. The fact remains that Lithium Ion batteries have a life of about 8 to 12 years. In the US, when doing life cycle cost analysis for a BESS, we include a complete battery replacement at 10 years. Yes, you can get a 15 year warranty the guarantees 70% at the end of that period. That means that you have lost 30% of your capacity over 15 years. What was your load growth during that same 15 years? Just a design constraint that must be considered during planning to determine the optimal size. Same thing with solar fields, they lose efficiency over time and a typical life cycle cost analysis assumes that the panels must be replaced in 20 years. They can go longer of course, but they continue to lose efficiency until they are largely useless.
What you call my anecdotes are actually a set of design constraints for where I live. I imagine that your design constrains are something different. That does not invalidate mine.
So my initial point remains: Charging the batteries while providing the required base load is a challenge, especially for systems that have a high percentage of renewable energy sources in their system.
@NotTheCIA I.think As I said, different economies, different constraints. It will be interesting to watch the continued development of this sector.
how are we doing on the problem of long-distance electricity transportation (e.g. from sunny/windy production areas to consumer areas)?
High voltage DC transmission lines are a proven technology. The problems are political ones. Nobody seems to want them running near their house and nobody is willing to fund the building of extra lines.
Matt lots if thanks for informative lectures , i would like to know the name of the music you play at the intro.of your videos ?
Thanks , Rik . Netherlands .
Hi Rik! It's Ganja by Ooyy.
Thanks , love it
'Liquid Air', is probably the grid scale storage technology you're looking for.
@NotTheCIA I.think Already being built! www.bbc.co.uk/news/amp/uk-england-manchester-53097208
If the intention is to run air conditioning each evening, batteries suit short daily use. If the intention is to replace natural gas then weather events lasting a few days is more typical of pumped storage. Maybe multiple solutions for multiple circumstances?
8:48 100s of times doesn't seem good enough for a peeker plant. A plant that lasts 50s of days can't be cost effective.
Huh? A charge/discharge cycle would be as needed, not per day. For example if no extra energy is needed the whole summer, then that counts as one charge cycle for the whole summer.
@@DataSmithy There are different kinds of peaker plant usages. Obviously I was referring to the usage style that's best for batteries.
For some things, "supercaps" may be an option. You can get millions of watts for several seconds with them. This seems useful for grid stability issues.
I don't know abt energy density of li-ion batteries but the knowledge density of this video is off the roof!!
Great video !
City size batteries would have to store dangerous amounts of energy. Li battery failures go until all the energy is released - that is why 300 watt hours is the airline carry-on limit. For NYC at 11 gigawatt-hr/ day , a three day backup battery for cloudy periods needs about the same energy as a 30 kiloton bomb (i.e about a Hiroshima + a Nagasaki). Its a sobering calculation. LA's usage at 71 Gigawatt-hr/day, makes the storage problem much larger but there is much more room for dispersed battery storage. City battery farms would need to be kept to an acceptable size (probably much less than a Hiroshima bomb equivalent), dispersed, and well guarded against accident and sabotage. There would have to be so many batteries that a few catastrophic failures would happen from time to time and we would have to be ready to deal them.
Nuclear power for part of the baseload could reduce the risk because of the reduced amount of needed battery storage.
I'd like to hear what you think of Ambri's new liquid metal grid storage battery. Cheap and abundant material and long lasting.
A much better answer to your original question is to simply abandon the baseless idea that renewable energy and by extension batteries is even a good idea, or possible as really neither is the case. Really, if we want to protect the environment and go carbon free the best, and only, option is nuclear power.
LiFePo4 is a better storage alternative than Li-Ion, especially in small scale like homes. It's more expensive though. We need EV manufacturers to start adding V2H in cars.
Roger Starkey
I can see you’re a Tesla fan. Nothing wrong with that! I am too. I own a model 3. Amazing vehicle. And Tesla and Elon’s Solar roof is brilliant. But, we do have to be realistic. And what I’ve said in our other exchanges on other comments to this video still stand. Renewables are great. Just not great enough. We need Nuclear in a big way.
Ha! I hope so.
Don't forget liquid air storage, another very promising energy storage technology. Now You Know had a very interesting video on the subject a week or two ago.
So we could build tens of thousands of battery power plants that could supply power to the US for a day or so.
Wouldn't it be better and cheaper to build several dozen advanced design nuclear power plants instead?
Thanks Matt , I learned something new about flow battery.
5:50-6:00 Gee that sounds like solar panels.
2:39 Tesla's Battery Day no longer "any day now", tentatively set for Sep. 15
If Tesla battery day offers less than perfection there will be huge disappointment. It’s been way over hyped.
Hi Matt (or anyone informed on the subject)
what about the residues left from the batteries? are they toxic? will they be a bigger problem in the future if we rely on batteries too much?
Recyclable yes, about 80%. The rest is just as toxic as when it was an ore. If coal is radioactive (some isn’t) then the coal ash is radioactive too. Which would you prefer to have your school built on?
We, the people are more concerned with micro grids and beyond substation batteries as opposed to "grid scale".
Grid scale is for interchanges of power producers on a grid scale. These profiteers send power hither and yon to prey on poor management of investor owned utilities.
Once subdivisions begin to incorporating micro grids, batteries and natural gas back up generators, what use will a grid be to most people?
Not nessassay. Just batteries, other energy storage such as hydro lakes and air compressor power stations, Molten salt generators are just as important than just upscaled lithium
High view power is much cheaper at scale.
IMO lLiquid Air/Cryogenic Battery tech is a proven and affordable grid energy storage option that can be scaled for large scale application. Energy can be stored for weeks and potentially even longer, addressing a big drawback of Lithium Ion. Cells.