The 2nd Channel for the EEVblog. Just random related or sometimes totally *unrelated* random stuff that either isn't polished enough for the main channel, or doesn't fit in with the expectations of the main EEVblog channel content. This could include family or other personal interest content unrelated to electronics, videos of me out on the road or on holidays etc. It is usually not properly produced content, and is often unedited single take video straight from the camera You should have ZERO expectations for this channel! Complaints about quality or frequency or type of content should be only be provided in Latin, on single ply toilet paper, delivered by carrier pigeon.
Can you swim in the ocean in winter time there? I can't forget on one of your rent walk videos by the ocean, you ended with "I go for a swim now" I was so gelous.
extremely dumb take on nuclear, the amount of "non renewable" uranium needed is way less in mass than the amount of material wasted to create, field and maintain the machines that convert wind and sun to energy you said for yourself that it's not polluting, that's it.
I don't know in your country, but here they're going to need fast smart grids, our grid is not made for injecting power in the grid, because it's not bidirectional. Now there are fires in houses because of falling converters that overload. And you probably know that electric fires are, very spooky things. Can only be extinguished with CO² extinguishers, or even foam. Like batteries, these need to be submerged, just like EVs.
The Solar Roadway promo can't even one simple fact right! The Sun's expected life is not 15 billion years, but 4.5-5.5 billion years until all hydrogen is consumed and it collapses to a white dwarf.
I appreciate that you touched upon the fact that even renewable energy is not clean. I get that you are pro renewable energy, especially solar, but I think you should have done an in depth comparison of renewables to nuclear, not fossil fuels. I think everyone already knows that fossil fuels are the least environmentally friendly and that we should curb our reliance on them. Not going in depth on nuclear is a disservice to your audience. Or are you just not very familiar with nuclear energy? If you compared it to renewables, you would find that the environmental impact of nuclear is substantially less than renewable energy sources like solar or wind, and we should be pushing more nuclear to ease reliance on fossil fuels. We're doing that here in Canada. In my province, more than 50% of our energy comes from nuclear and they are building three new SMRs.
Some sort of scalable fuel cell 2.0 that would render (most) batteries obsolete would be good. Usually these things get bought out & shutdown or ridiculed. Optimist says that those tables will turn sharply.
No source of energy should be off the table. We seem to need more and more yet relying on the weather (wind) or sun in some parts of the world just won't cut it. We should always have coal, gas an nuclear as a backup.
@@tschuuuls486 Investing in a renewable grid is bonkers. We should be using mixed energy sources. Nuclear is the best option for clean, stable power for households. Hybrid vehicles would be much better to wean ourselves off of fossil fuels but governments are overhyping electric vehicles as the saviour when they're not.
@@cdnron75 Nuclear Plants take 30 years to build and are one of the most expensive sources of energy to run. We don't have the time. Look at current projects, their budgets and when they are operational (eg. England). Nuclear Plants are just to slow to do more than cover base load, if you want to combine them with pv/wind you still need gas plants, or huge batteries. Hybrid vehicles are not needed for most people, with battery tech that will easily support you for 400km a charge. Why carry another engine with you when you usually don't drive more than that a day.
@@tschuuuls486 In my province, more than 50% of our energy comes from nuclear with more SMRs being built. Nuclear is the future for the most clean source of energy. You say we don't have the time? So you believe all of the doomer propaganda? As far as hybrid vs. EV, the benefits are more than just range, it's the massive environmental impact of battery production and how much it would need to be ramped up to replace all ICE vehicles with EVs. We're just trading one problem for another, and one non-renewable resource for another. Hybrid would lessen our reliance on both resources. Plus, hybrid vehicles don't need to be plugged in so there's no reliance on the grid to operate. Ever hear of the phrase, don't put all of your eggs in one basket? It applies to energy as well.
11:50 - There are many type of hydrogen... And mainly today hydrogen is cut from natural gas, and can thus not be called renewable. It is an important distinction when having an argument with anything hydogen. Commercial renewable electricity production was there in the form of hydro from the dawn of time, but it is still pretty far from it for hydrogen!!
The trouble with changing to clean renewable energy is that you are fighting against the many millions of people in the fossil fuel industries who don't want to lose their jobs and they will fight to death to KEEP their jobs. The only possible way out of that problem and to provide them all (quickly) with an alternative ..would be to make it financially worthwhile for people to SHARE the jobs we need people to do (jobs that aren't destroying the planet) and work much less.
I consider nuclear to be just as fossil as regular fossil fuels, sure it isn't made from diatoms (oil/gas) or trees (coal). But they are the remains of dead stars formed under high pressures and heat.
Renewable or not nuclear is our best option atm, most of the viable renewables dependant on the weather making it unrelaible and storing energy in batteries at grid scale is.aimply.not viable financially. At best renewables are only viable as a supplement to smooth out the peaks during the day. /edit Also wind is not renewable IMO because the blades are only good for 20 years and as it turned out those aint getting recycled, there is a cemetery for them in the desert.
I would like to see a study about the energy needed during the "life cycle" of the fossil fuels vs green energy. How much energy is used for excavating the fossil fuels, refining them, store/transport them, for the construction of building or device to burn & convert them to electricity. And on the other side the renewable energy, how much energy is used for excavating the raw materials, refining them, transport them, building the final product and for the recycling after the "End Of Life". How much waste do we get from all these steps fossil vs renewable? How much electrical energy do we get? All these normalized in a 100 year period. It's a big problem the recyclability of the broken/EOL renewable devices plus they broke much faster than what they say. For example PV inverters need repair after 5 to 10 years and the manufactures just replace them, that's a lot of e-waste. What it maters is how much energy did we used to get X amount of electrical energy over the span of 100 years (let's say 100 years as it is a really big number) as well much waste was created during this period from start till the end (from mining to recycling). I'm a bit skeptical that solar & wind renewable source are just "dirty green" and not that great they are prased. And we need the same comparison for storing energy, for example batteries. The differences of energy used & waste between different types of batteries. Are lithium batteries recyclable the same amount as older tech batteries?
Clearly the fossil fuel approach was cheaper or it wouldn't have been used for so long. It's controllable production and wind, solar aren't. Wind can drop to nothing, the sun goes in at night. If you don't meet demand exactly then blackouts occur which can be followed by surges that damage the grid.
Nuclear is an awful supplement to renewables. Mostly because, just like every big thermal plant, its output is hardly adjustable. It's also expensive af especially when you take insurance and disposal into account.
@@markusresch9889I dunno what you are smoking... Before electric grids go completely DC, rotating generators are essentially necessary to maintain inertia and frequency. Modern nuclear plants (e.g. ones designed in the digital era) are also more often than not quite throttleable. Not in a way to respond to your kettle being turned on like a hydro plant could, but still managing to keep up with wind and solar power and the demand between them. E.g. you can throttle many newer plants 50% of their peak power within less than a day.
@@EEVblog2 Bummer. Might have to find some postage paid stamps and get ya back in to it.. I got a lil energy meter that I am tempted to take the batt off.. then ill send it.. maybe... lel
Nuclear is the most renewable energy source we have. There's enough uranium and thorium on Earth to keep the lights on until after the Sun scorches the Earth. Modern coal fired power stations are way cleaner than the old ones. Thanks to bag houses, electrostatic precipitators and scrubbers all that goes up the chimney is warm nitrogen and CO2. The image you had in the background looked more to me like a steel works than a power station. Making steel, cement and even aluminium does put a lot of CO2 into the atmosphere.
Nuclear would hold frequency and keep the grid stable. Wind turbines can do it with gear boxes that don't have a great life span and along with solar it's only good when the sun or wind is favorable...
No, nuclear would make grid stability even harder. Mostly because it's hardly adjustable in power output. For frequency stability you need fast responders like gas, hydro or that new fangled battery-s**t. Even solar and wind plants that are not at the top of their output power can be great frequency stabilizes with modern inverter tech.
@@markusresch9889 I thought it had more to do with the inertia of the turbine/alternator that kept a stable frequency even under fluctuations in load... They don't seem to have too much issues on nuclear power plants...
@@markusresch9889Many newer plants can throttle a lot of their peak power. Not as fast as a hydro plant, but within hours. E.g. they can respond to changes in weather, which is plenty with solar and wind.
@@markusresch9889 Battery based storage on grid is really bad for frequency. And plus all electrical batteries suck. From lead acid to lithium they are all terrible. Lead acids don't hold as much, lithiums are fire and mining hazard, all can be mitigated at higher cost and potential to fail. All generator based power is stable for frequency not only because of the speed governors but inertia itself. We could store solar energy in form of water towers. Not only for power but also irrigation. How ever ridiculous sounding that is I see it as better alternative for batteries. Best form of energy by all metrics is water, where possible there should always be a dam. They not only produce power but regulate water fluctuations and flood control. Water can also produce compressed air, useful in mining world.
I've read somewhere that it takes as much energy to construct a nuclear power plant than it will produce over its life. All that cement takes a lot of energy to make. Coal plants can be made pretty clean, but at high cost. There is no free lunch.
Imo it is an easy calculation to make how much a nuclear plant generates over 40-60 years compared to building it for 20. Let's say 1600MW plant. If you factor in all the equipment and worker consumption, I doubt you even get past 100MW. In America the energy consumption per person is about 10kW so if you extrapolate from that or even double it you arrive at 40-80MW energy consumption for a nuclear plant being built by 4000 people. Over the course of 20 years that adds up to 14TWh, or just a little over one year's worth of electricity production for said example 1600MW plant. Remember, the heat power is about double electrical generation, so if you used that for something, it would be 6 months production's worth. Basically a nuclear plant produces almost two orders of magnitude more energy during 60 years of operation (700TWh) than it took to build one (7-14TWh)
You've read on the wrong place. Nuclear is on the very opposite end of the energy return ratio. A single reactor may produce 1000 MW for 60 years at 90% of availability, it's a huge amount of energy for the amount of concrete and steel that equals the amount used in an average sized dam.
But fossil fuels are what the ecology deposited in the past, does that mean we had more Co2 previously that help evolution. So are we not just returning the carbon to the environment so instead of a dying planet we are renewing it so the vegitation can regain the previous growth. Just saying (-:. Sadly people think the earth shoud be static, it has always not been that.
An oldie, but fun to watch! Not getting too deep, but I like your SFR rants. Speaking of which, the South Korean bike road with solar panels above it... It's complete bonkers too. No way in, no way out for kilometers. Noise from four lanes on the left and another four on the right, all you see is tarmac and cars, and you breath in the fumes. It's a nightmare. Oh, and Sagan and Huxley have grown so much since the other video :)
That "10g could power your phone for a month" calculation seems off to me. 240kJ is only 66Wh or so, at less then 50% efficiency, you get maybe 30Wh and that's it?
Yeah, WAY off. By like 6 orders of magnitude. 1kg of U235 can produce about 24,000,000 kWh of heat, and the heat to electric conversion efficiency of a nuclear power plant using steam turbines is around 33% efficient, so 1g = about 8000 kWh of electricity or 80,000 kWh for 10g. A phone probably uses around 1 kWh a year, say ~0.1 kWh a month, so closer to a MILLION phones for a month.
@GlutenEruption Leeloo was referencing the 10g of coal... 7:19 "if you compare that little 10g lump of coal that you've got there to, say, the lithium ion battery inside your phone, that little bit of coal could actually power your mobile, that 10g could power your mobile phone for more than a month"
Solar thermal is a total fail. They burn huge amounts of natural gas to keep the salt hot after the sun goes down. They also burn alive every bird that flies near the plant. Nuclear is the only path forward as long as they get rid of the pressurized reactors.
Would have loved to have someone like you hold presentations when I was in high school, so glad that you have been doing this, and hopefully you have been and will continue doing presentations for younger students!
You call that a Solar Panel (Crocodile Dundee Mocking), this is a solar panel..in China! ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-MX_PeNzz-Lw.html
Not that hard to solve. But even then it's not "clean" as I showed in the uranium mining photos, not the mention all the other materials that go into building the plant. You don't get a free lunch with any energy source. Best one is probably hydro in an existing natural creek or river.
@@Kalanchoe1 Never said it was, just using it as the example of the smallest embodied energy footprint if you already have a suitable river or falls, or whatever.
The tear down would be interesting. Would especially be curious to see any bulging electrolytic caps, or maybe some goop gone conductive? 10 years outside is a long time. Awesome it was reliable that whole time. 👍
I have a pair of 5kw Sunny Boy inverters on my system (western NY USA). One started logging intermittent ground faults a couple years ago. Mice had moved into that nice big compartment next to the display and built a large nest, plus chewed on the dc wires. I don't think they liked getting evicted into the snow. Mine are 8 years old.
Serious question for Dave. We know that much of the new system you added was 'given' or greatly 'discounted' to you. If that system you have would have to be purchased, how much are you looking at? I ask because here in 'merica where I live? The system for my home has quoted pricing between $50K and $90K. $60K is the lowest and are cheaper panels, no micro-inverters, and no battery solution. Better Panels, microinverters (and EVERY place has said 'you need them due to roof layout due to the immense shading you will have), and a battery solution shoots me to $80K~$90K. Federal government will give me something like $16K~$18K tax credit. NO state or local credits, and the power company has told me the only time they will PAY to have power sold is when the grid hits peak consumption, otherwise they can take the power for free...yep. I just don't see how this makes any sense to "do the right thing" here. Even if I quintupled my energy bills, I will be dust before hitting break even. Just shaking my head over this. :( P.S., A system where I have property is less than half that cost, it would be ground based, and ZERO shading so I could go with standard inverters. Also because there is no shading I can drop the size of the system by over 30% saving a lot of $$$ that way.
o.0 how big a system are you trying to get installed? The 6kW system I had installed on our previous house about 3 years ago (Enphase) was $AUD11k installed, I think without the STCs (essentially a government subsidy) it would've been closer to $AUD18k... No batteries just panels and microinverters (plus control gear).
That's nuts. A cheap 10kw system is about $5k installed here. This does includes the renewable rebate scheme though, maybe $8k without that rebate. A microinveretr system like Enphase will cost a fair bit more of course, maybe an extra $150 per panel. Basically, a 440W panel is about $200 retail here, plus a few grand for a cheap brand inverter, plus installation and misc hardware.
@@EEVblog2 10Kw here, just for the panels (if I went with 400W Panasonic) is nearly $10,000USD!!! That's freight (and I have to rent some kind of fork truck to get them off the truck, they don't take them off for you, that's an added $500 charge ON TOP of the crazy freight charges, in my neck of the woods) Not sure how you could possibly do a system for $5K (AUD) when the parts alone, from what I can find, are north of $25K for me. Then there is the installation and these guys are all quoting CRAZY numbers (equal to and greater than the part cost). The battery solution is CRAZY expensive (That was north of $25K if I went with the 2 Tesla Powerwalls they have all spec'd out). 2? Well, the power outages in my area are extending 3 and 4 days now, and they say 48 hours tops with the powerwall, less if you use electric stoves, air cons, etc. TWO of the 3 recommended I replace my 'relatively' new roof because if the roof needs to be replaced EVERYTHING comes off and I'll be out 5 figures tearing it off and putting it back on....on top of the roof replacement. Just can't justify these numbers...I've run them again and again, and it always comes back to MASSIVE costs. Even going 'cheap' panels only drops the cost a little bit because "labor".
@@SomeMorganSomewhere Because of my roof design and how it all faces 'optimal' sun load (and the fact I live where there are way more cloudy days than sunny days), they have spec'd 14Kw systems...every single one of them. At peak I use about 9Kw (That would be Electric Oven and A/C Running along with the standard home loads, but is not common in the summer, but it happens). They say at any time I would max out even on perfectly clear days about 8.5KW off the panels, we get about 10 of those days a year. LOL. We have a guy about a block from me who has solar on his roof, similar situation. He has 16Kw on it, and NEVER is not buying power from the power company because....shading, low sun load, etc. All this push for "solar", and the fact that nobody can actually afford it unless you do it yourself? No...just no. Can't justify it.
