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How about build gyms all over the country, where every single exercise machine generates power. Would be a way to convert the energy in food back to energy for the grid, while getting in shape lol.
@@oriolopocholo vox thinks it's efficiency is too bad perhaps although they mentioned heat storage roundtrip on that is comparable or worse i believe 🤔
Using nuclear energy instead of fossil fuels might eliminate the need for extreme energy storage infrastructure. And since it has no emissions and requires very little resources per generated unit of energy it would benefit both the environment and climate.
@@matthiasknutzen6061 They seem to have some sort of agenda against hydrogen. The fact that they have literally not mentioned it when it's a core player in electricity storage in the future is just bizarre
@@toyotaprius79 Not now. Solar and Wind are allready so cheap, that fossil fuels can't compete with it. When the new Na-Ion batteries enter the market, people WILL buy them for their home energystorage, which can be charged with windenergy in the night, which makes fossilfuels even more unattractive. This will push renewables and the longtermstorage solutions together. Nontheless I think that the gravity vault will definitely fail, because it's so flawed. Storing potential energy in mass only makes sense on massive scales. Lifting CONCRETE-weighst a few meters with expensive cranes wont do it.
Pumped hydro isn't ideal either. More and more studies are pointing to concerning amounts of methane emissions coming from large water reservoirs. There are lots of other battery options coming down the pike though. Batteries (in their different forms) are the way.
@@gorg8882 This claim does appear to be reputable, but the comment of it being "concerning" is a bit distorting. This is one of several papers: "Hydropower's Biogenic Carbon Footprint" from Plos One. Interestingly, hydrostorage has larger emissions than hydropower because the water is still and bacteria and algae can grow. That said, the greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels are still several times greater per unit power, and there are ways to mitigate the methane emissions. For example, you could keep it away from agricultural areas in order to prevent runoff and algae blooms, and you can maintain good water levels so that it isn't too shallow anywhere (apparently this matters!).
@@brianrcVids I don't think batteries will play a major role. Storing renewable energy in ammonia, heatbatteries and many other ways will be way more scalable for massive storage than a battery. Pumped hydro will keep it's place but will be complemented by new technologies. Maybe even undersee compressed air storage, but definitely not by the gravity vault.
That rust/Iron solution is actually amazing and the prototype they've installed in a Dutch brewery is doing rather well. Part of what makes the Rust/Iron cycle energy potential is that a) it's very clean when it burns and b) the base Iron is recyclable over and over. Great for boilers or fast to ramp up energy needs.
very interesting technology. Going to do some further investigation for my research project in SmartGrid technology. Do you have any suggestions for where I can get more information?
@@TH-lu9du No. That project is seriosly flawed. There are many reasons why we manly use fluids for storing potential kinetic energy. Only other interesting concept I've seen so far is undersee air storage, which is pumped storaged hydro but inverted.
@@haifutter4166 ah the company behind the concrete gravity idea. Sorry, I wasn't paying attention. Makes sense after I re-watched the video. "Energy vault" is such a generic nondescript name LOL.
Green energy is a scam. It's not about the planet or about energy. The people that complain the most about the environment are the ones that do the most destruction to it.
Their whole basis for battery alternatives is "lithium is only found in a few places," which couldn't be more false. It's literally everywhere and relatively easy to mine. It's cobalt that's ethically questionable, and it's already being phased out.
Love these pieces. As this is something I'm keenly interested in, I was familiar with all of these methods, but seeing it packaged into such a clear and concise video is always a pleasure. Thank you.
Outside of those non-scalable storage solutions, there's also the option of using large-scale low-carbon power sources like nuclear and (where applicable) regular hydro.
Nuclear definitely should be considered. I heard of developments in small scale reactors that don't require the massive construction of full scale plants. Reactors closer to the size of a cargo container
@@BhargavKrishnaReddy79 you also miss the point. Nuclear and hydro can work constantly for 24 hour. Meanwhile renewable sources like solar can't create energy during night (so it's need energy storage) and wind also don't have constant energy for 24 hours (so it's also need energy storage)
@@BhargavKrishnaReddy79 I'd say it is very much relevant, actually, since the inclusion of baseload and dispatchable energy sources greatly reduce the quantity of storage required to alleviate production variation in a renewable-heavy grid. You won't need remotely as much storage to compensate for a week-long low in wind+solar power production if nuclear+hydro make up ~30% of your capacity.
Nuclear power stations are very expensive to build so to get a return on investment they are on as much as possible. So thats why they are not used as backup
@@diegastdienuiestdoet Some French NPPs are set for load following. Besides, you don't need to use nuclear power plants as backup for them to reduce the need for storage. Baseload generation also greatly reduces the need for storage capacity. If you've got, say, 20GW of guaranteed continuous production, you need a lot less energy storage for moments when you have no wind nor sun.
Thanks Vox for highlighting the work scientists are doing to make batteries for grid energy storage. I'm a graduate chemical engineering student and we're currently working on finding viable electrodes for sodium-ion batteries, which would be much cheaper than the current lithium-ion ones.
Quidnet's idea seems to be much more realistic than Energy Vault's, it would take a comparable amount of engineering and would have less maintenance costs, since water doesn't erode like concrete does. And you don't have to reinvent the wheel here, it's just miniturisation of existing technology. Did I mention the CO_2 output of concrete production?
There is another method being tested in Germany and that is using Hydrogen: They simply use the excess energy produced to perform electrolysis and split water into Hydrogen and Oxygen and storing it, during peak energy consumption they use the stored hydrogen fuel to generate power again.
That seems like a great solution. The best of all since water is everywhere. How's the efficiency? Seems like it would be ok since hydrogen and oxygen can both be burned.
Im proud of everyone rallying for nuclear energy & wish Vox would cover this(Cleo did but it was about shutdowns). Im studying nuclear engineering, ATOMS FOR PEACE is NONproliferation, clean electricity & heating, medicine, fusion, transportation, space exploration, research, proper waste disposal & recycling, teaching, etc. The experts of the field know best & have statistics & facts to support that it's one of the safest & most energy dense carbon-free energy sources that can reliably deliver power day and night, through every season, almost anywhere on earth, that has been proven to work on a large scale. To stop a problem as big as climate change we need all the help we can get, mass technological & sociopolitical change, because even a few degrees off from our ambitious climate goals is disastrous. Shutting down nuclear plants just replaces them with coal & gas, it needs to continue to be advanced with renewables
Its sad people hate nuclear, we have had a good reliable renewable source of energy for decades but due to fearmongering it is sidelined. Yes the upfront cost is expensive but we need to see the long term gains and stop getting distracted by new shinny renewable projects.
@@sirnikkel6746 because nuclear weapons proliferation increases the risk of accidents and intentional acts. At this point, only countries that have been able to learn from the accidents and near misses of the 20th century can really be trusted with this power. But you can absolutely be pro nukes and pro nonproliferation.
This is the more reason why we should and need to invest more in renewable. The more we use it, the more people (try to) find a way to make them cheaper to produce, store, and use.
Solar panels are very cheap, but the issue is storing the energy they produce. In my off-grid setup, too much excess energy gets wasted because I have to disconnect the panels during peak hours. Too much sunlight can damage the wires, components, and batteries.
Another option is to overproduce wind and solar and beef up transmission so that it excess in one area can be distributed to an area that has less at that moment.
It can help to a certain degree, but it cannot replace storage entirely. Weather systems are very large so you'd need to move power vast distances to completely avoid adverse weather. If it's nighttime (no solar) and there is no wind, you might have to transport multiple countries worth of electrical energy across half a continent. Such transmission systems are not really economically feasible. And then there's the inefficiency of having that much overcapacity everywhere.
@Kevin Brooks the issue with H2 storage is efficiency. Electrolysis is currently too inefficient to make it economically viable unless the electric company is paying you to take the excess power.
AFAIR nuclear can't be so easily ramped up or down, but once it's built, it's a stupidly cheap way of getting a base load of electricity, helping the grid have higher surplusses when wind/solar pick up, and lower valleys when they don't; so you have more spare energy for storing it on the good times, and need less storage for the bad times.
@@cc_jmk Nuclear is very flexible! You can control the power output of the fission reaction, as well as the amount of steam that reaches the turbine. The department of energy has a good article on it.
@@ltmbookworm Nuclear reactors are "rampable." But the initial capital investment is so high, and the variable costs are so low, that operators want to operate as close to 100% as possible.
I'm surprised tech like Vanadium Redox Flow Batteries (VRFB) and Eavor's geothermal storage didn't get mentioned. Eavor has made significant gains in geothermal without needing a volcanic fissure to work and without pressurizing underground wells. And VRFBs have been around for decades. Major installations are in use all over the world for grid storage.
@@EvanKnightIsGood it should also be mentioned that the millions of expected energy drains fossil fuel fans scream about is actually an additional buffer. When the car (or whatever) is charged, the battery storage that charged it is still sitting there as a storage device, in every home that would cause the drain.
Fascinating techniques! I'd be interested to hear your take on other chemical methods of storage such as formic acid and amonia! As someone from the Netherlands, where we have little space and definitely no mountains, those techniques have been put forth as potential energy storage systems.
Very disappointed to see Energy Vault beeing presented as a legit Option for large scale energystorage. It cant beat the efficency of pumping water. proposing to build huge Watertowers to pump water up and down from would make more sense
Your initial chart showed both wind and solar failing to meet total demand at any time of day. That being the case, you don't need any storage whatsoever. You can keep adding wind and solar until they meet demand at one time of day at least before storage makes sense. And even then, initially over capacity at some times of day might work out to be a cheaper option before adding much storage.
Let's say that you need a mountain's worth of material to build that renewable infrastructure that you describe for a nation. Then consider that both wind and solar generators meet the end of their useful life in about 15 to 20 years. It's not that it can't be done... but extractive mining for metals and concrete will need to be scaled up significantly. You'll still need energy storage or baseload power sources for meteorological events called anticyclonic gloom (very low wind, very low ground level incident sunlight). Europe tends to get 2-10 of these events per year which last 50-150 hours per year. This could be fully covered if you have about 1500 hours of energy storage on tap. If we use Germany as an example, in 2021 they used 569 TWh, or roughly 65 GW for their moment by moment average, and they'd need about 97.5 TWh of storage to cover that. Given that lithium ion batteries cost around $153/kWh, that would run them around $153,000,000,000/TWh or roughly $14.9 trillion every 10-15 years (this is the expected lifespan of a lithium ion battery). At a gdp of $4.26 trillion per year -- that would be one heck of a sacrifice. And this doesn't take into account the added cost of spontaneous self incineration events from lithium ion battery farms (and they DO happen distressingly frequently).
@@gilian2587 I agree that lithium ion batteries are not suitable to supply full baseload power. But most nations will not run entirely on solar and wind. I am Zambian and we are nearly 100% hydro and will remain so for the foreseeable future. I live in South Africa which has lots of coal and some nuclear. Those are not going away instantly. They also have some pumped hydro and potential for more. My point was that until your solar and wind are a very significant part of your mix, storage is not so important and over capacity can be more economical initially than increasing storage. After all that is how most fossil fuel grids are run (over capacity with minimal storage). A common misunderstanding is that existing grids provide continuous reliable power whereas renewables do not. That is simply untrue. Renewables tend to have a daily and seasonal cycles but they are fairly predictable, whereas fossil fuels and nuclear have to be taken off line for maintenance or breakdowns so their cycles are different but still exist. They still need either over capacity or storage. As for 'a mountains worth of material' I really don't know what you are on about. Its almost like you didn't read my post but were complaining to someone else.
EnergyDome, an italian company which uses CO2 and it's thermodynamic process of compression (when there's an energy surplus) and Rarefraction (when energy is needed in the grid) also seems to be really promising. They are building out pilot projects and a gridwide solution is also already in the planing I guess Undecided with Matt Ferell made a really good video to explain the Process and it's up- and Downsides
This video just proved why solar and wind energy is being pushed instead of nuclear energy. They still need fossil fuel as "backup power" during down times.
There's nothing wrong with wind and solar energy but nuclear power should have been the primary source of clean electricity decades ago with those two helping nuclear.
Nuclear is great but it has the opposite problem. You can't really ramp them up and down. They are designed for mostly constant output. So you can't turn them up or down. There will always be a gap to "fill" either excess energy you need to store, or something else to turn up to meet demand.
@@jpcool95480 True but at least the power output is consistent, so you don't need like a week of backup storage to prevent days long blackouts because there was a particularly low wind/cloudy week. I think that's the part we are missing, cool daily averaging and stuff is quite easy because the amount of power storage for just matching supply with demand over a day is much easier. But we forget that renewables are not consistent over the year at all, which means you need to average out the year. While with nuclear sure it's pretty inefficient to power up and down, but you can just over produce and waste the rest and be sure you have power, or you can average out the day demand, but you don't need backup power for a full week (or whatever level makes blackouts rare enough to be acceptable with renewables ) With renewables what we are seemingly doing is just over producing because the cost per unit is quite low, but then we still can't store it so we need fossil fuel permanently on the grid until such time as we have enough grid level storage to store on the level of multiple days worth of energy.
Try adding the costs of all of that, including land cost grid expansion and extra materials and you quickly realise how expensive, in terms of cost, ecological devastation and additional emissions the renewables are in most cases! Yet there is proven clean method of creating heat and energy that is dismissed by many "environmentalists". Try guessing which one I have in mind...
Pumped hydro doesn't need mountains. It can also be done on the sea floor. Another type of energy storage is liquid air. And I know I have heard of other types of energy storage as well. I like how this video shows some alternative ways to batteries to store energy, but I wish the list was a bit longer
The end is a bit unsatisfying, I expected.. more. But thanks for the explanation anyway. I don't understand, in the first place, why isn't it a way more important issue to increase wind and solar energy production in the first place up to the point where they significantly peak over the net consumption. Because only then it will be important to store the overproduction. There, my second thought that is barely talked about, is, couldn't this energy overshoot be used for carbon capture facilities? So we build as much solar and wind as we can, and in the same time build enough capacities of CCS plants that can run whenever there's a plus? Would be very pleased to get an answer (although I think the simple answer is - too expensive)
I'm really intrigued by smart grid and dynamic load-type solutions - not a panacea, but part of the portfolio of options. For example, treating loads that don't need instantaneous power like water heaters and HVAC systems like on demand load dumps. Your water heater could be "charged up" during the day when renewable energy is most abundant. I'm also curious about incentive programs for getting residential battery storage more widely adopted. In that case, entire homes could be dynamic power loads, with the bonus that it buffers homes during power outages.
Using dynamic load signals to charge large numbers of EVs seems to be one of the best ways to store excess power using batteries we already have and need to charge. In that sense there's essentially no storage losses. California already has days when solar production exceeds demand and excess power is essentially wasted.
Surprised this didn't mention flow batteries. I'm not saying they are _the_ or even _a_ solution, just surprised they weren't mentioned, since just about everything else was.
@@TH-lu9duI don’t see how that’s a big issue. We have plenty of space and nuclear waste is really compact. How many people have ever been hurt by nuclear waste, a comically low number compared to every energy source lower than healthy renewables too
I am so glad to see Vox addressing this issue. This is possibly the single biggest hurdle to renewables. We definitely aren't there yet but it is an area that is getting a lot more attention nowadays, especially as the intermittency of renewables becomes a bigger issue.
i’m going into chemical engineering with a focus in batteries for renewable energy! i’d love to learn more about the specific companies facilitating this research on different kinds of energy storage
Great vid, makes me hopeful. didn't know about the rust or salt. a few nitpicks: 1) the graph in 0:28 is normally shown as the opposite, where the natural gas is on bottom and solar/wind on top. this is because natural gas and other hydrocarbons are consistent baseload primary power sources, while solar/wind is variable. 2) The map at 1:35 misses a lot of new deposits found in India this year. 3) Using solar/wind as a tool for hydrogen fuel cells (via water electrolyzers) is another promising energy storage opportunity
The very fact that a 100% fossil fuel grid up until recently is why such technologies aren't readily available because there wasn't a market for instantaneous energy storage - in contrast to gas peaker plants
It would help if people (Americans) stopped doing laundry 4 times a week, driving heavy cars every day, taking long showers, opposing energy taxes. Serious individual conservation is almost never emphasized.
we're gonna need all of the above, because there are a looooooooooot of people in this world who don't understand or support climate science and renewable energy, or are simply reliant on others to make the changes while they keep doing what they're doing.
There are a few other cool solutions for storing energy. You have old timey flywheels that you spin up, liquid air storage where you cool air and later let it heat up to expand and spin turbines, you could have some green hydrogen production, I think some people even tried storing electricity in sueprconductive coils. I guess another solution would be to link up a good deal of renewables and transmit it between places (although the US has a problem with its transmission grid, which is another topic). This could smooth out the peaks and valleys, especially if you're dealing with large land masses like the US, China or the like.
When I heard pumped storage, it immediately clicked in my mind: low demand -> convert to PE -> convert to KE -> work. The rest of the video was still fun to watch though. It's fun to think about the different forms of energy storage of this type.
two words: Nuclear power. Find me a net zero plan report that doesn't emphasize maintaining a Nuclear baseline by not shutting down nuclear plants/building new ones. We've had a practical climate change solution for the last 60 years and now is the time to call upon it.
Im glad people on here support nuclear and see through energy vault. I don't know how the public turned on nuclear but a good mix of energy sources is always good.
Norwegian company TechnipFMC is developing the DeepPurple system for storing excess energy from wind farms as hydrogen. I was lucky enough to see the prototype in action and i dear say it looks promising!
Very interesting! There cannot be a one-size-fits-all solution. Instead local adaptation of what is best economically and also in terms of energy efficiency and environmental impact is what is needed.
HMMM! IF (big IF here) the goal is reducing CO2 emissions, why all the waste of wind and solar farms when nuclear solves EVERYTHING. What a waste it is for anything else.
I reckon concerns about peak demand will mitigate somewhat as more and more people work from home. I definitely don't have a personal peak in usage in the morning and evening. Sure a bit less over night when I'm sleeping (although that's also when I crank up my AC the most, so maybe it's offset anyway), but pretty steady from the time I wake up until the time I go to bed. I don't use more/fewer lights or electronics at different times of day, and I might do laundry or run the dishwasher literally at any hour I'm awake.
I think you are demonstrating one of the great myths of consumption. Your personal peak usage includes all the users who are providing you with services. I am not sure there is any way to realistically evaluate your personal peak usage. I don't see why working from home would automatically change peak electrical use.
@@rosscollinswilliams I"m sorry, I don't believe I follow you. When you say all the users who are providing me services, what do you mean exactly? The electrical company? I'm the only one around the house using power during the day and the amount I use is fairly consistent with only occasional spikes for things like doing laundry or running the dishwasher, which occur at random, irregular times and not as part of a daily pattern. The reason working from home might eliminate/change peak electrical use is because people have more freedom and flexibility to do stuff throughout the day instead of cramming many/most high electrical use activities into an hour or two before work and an hour or two after work.
I'm really interested in a concept where rail cars are moved up an incline with a motor/generator and allowed to roll down to produce power when needed. Very scalable. Imagine hundreds of cars on dozens of tracks
Great video! However, I'd like to point out that lithium-ion batteries are not entirely unsuitable for grid-scale storage. Take the Hornsdale Power Reserve in South Australia, for example. It uses a grid-scale lithium-ion battery system to store and dispatch energy, effectively supporting the grid during peak demand periods. While the video does mention the limitations of lithium-ion batteries, it's worth noting that they're already being used in some instances for grid-scale energy storage.
I would have thought that hydrogen production from electrolysis would have been possible to load follow excess grid demand, while also storing hydrogen for a fuel cell based peaker power source
There are also seasonal variations that affect solar and wind. Energy from the sun is greater in summer, and lower in winter. The wind has seasonal characteristics too. Are more storage solutions or different storage solutions required for this?
One additional promising storage is compressed air with a heat storage combined. The pressurisation creates heat, the generator using compressed air later needs heat. China build the largest one yet some month ago. But long term heat storage in general(not only for electricity) is very very important. Look up salt solutions(NaOH), crystallisation(PCM) and solid sorption(nano sponge like materials). Compressed air/gravitational storage can also be done in the water, you reverse the materials and pump air down into a storage in the sea instead of water up a hill.
Nuclear is too slow and too expensive, even though it will take longer & more money to build an equivalent systems of thousands of wind turbines, batteries, and pumped storage. 😏
It’s not discussed in this video, but I’m interested to see to what extent green hydrogen can be an energy storage solution. I know it’s not very efficient as of now.
Hi Vox! Loved this quick update on potential storage solutions for renewalable energies. Bit of an odd question, but what is the song called you play in the outtro - last few seconds - ???? Many thanks!
That's... it? What about underwater pumped hydro? What about other battery chemistries? What about flow batteries? What about compressed air storage? What about compressed CO2 storage?
Earlier when these methods were there, they war criticised as far fetched and now the frequency of reputed channels reporting on this new tech increases. We can say they have improved everyone's perception
Or maybe we could just replace fossil fuels with nuclear which is a proven energy source that does not emit CO2 emissions.... Btw I'm advocating for nuclear vs unproven energy storage not nuclear vs renewables. I believe Renewables + nuclear is the answer...
I also heard about compressed air battery storage that carves our huge cavities underground, pushes high pressure air into them and then releases the air when needed.
Yeah but its also not easy to dispose of the waste. Sure, we can safelly store it but thats not solving the issue. 100 years from now, are we still going to have space?
@@BernardoPG "100 years from now, are we still going to have space?" Yes, easily, a lot. You can take all of the United State's nuclear waste since 1950 and put it in a football field in the ground just 10 yards deep. There is not a space issue with nuclear waste, it is purely a myth. Nuclear energy is a solution that works and a solution that we already have the technology for today. Nuclear energy is as safe as wind energy (measures in terms of deaths per unit of energy produced). And quite frankly we do not have time to wait for new technologies to arrive. There are some states, like my home state of Kentucky, where wind and solar just are not an option over here.
We need to move towards nuclear energy that doesn't require energy storage and make it our main source of power. Then support it with renewables in areas where environmental and geographical conditions are favorable.
I wish there was more public awareness that lithium ion is not the be all end all. There are already widely available longer life variants for grid storage in the likes of Lithium Iron Phosphate batteries that do away with cobalt, and sodium ion batteries that do away with the lithium. This should get more coverage.
LFP (lithium iron phosphate) batteries are better than NMC (nickel manganese cobalt) batteries for home storage because of the following advantages: Longer lifespan Higher safety rating Lower cost Better performing in the winter
0:58 Just use water. Pump the water up(hill etc.) when there is abundance of energy. And let it go down and generate hydro energy when there is a demand for energy.
I am disappointed that you didn't even explain that those solutions are categorized for time of storage and thus different properties are more important. Hydrogen is long term storage, Batteries would be short term. Also, sector coupling e.g. heat buffer storage in district heating was also missing.
These videos are really just an emotional crutch for people beating the renewable energy drum, but are completely blinded by the scale of the energy storage problem at a grid level, ESPECIALLY considering how there needs to be an enormous shift towards electrification globally to reduce CO2 emissions from heating, domestically and industrially. Unfortunately the only viable option for global CO2 reduction at scale is nuclear, in whatever flavor you prefer. Current rollout of RE is NOT reduction global CO2 emissions as it increased reliance on coal and gas. And every time a functional reactor is shut down prematurely, humanity goes backwards. Because politics.
You complete missed consumer side(behind the meter) solution for storage and therefore energy storage which is not for conversion back to electricity. There’s a company called Nostromo Energy which are supercooling water for energy storage to be used for A/C. We can have less energy losses when we only convert once, meaning no conversion back to electricity. This has the potential to be a big part of the solution for climate change. Please talk more about it.
i really hope the investors deem it profitable enough to save our planet! It's awesome that the environment has to make business sense, i love that!! :D
There are many solutions to energy storage. None of them are easy at the scale necessary, but it is possible to build any one or more technologies to suit the need. To me, it just comes down to which one is going to be the cheapest to deploy at scale. Lithium is around, structure to make pumped hydro and gravity batteries are all potentially viable, but so are vertical axis wind turbines. You just don’t see any vertical axis wind turbines built, and for good reason, they are just not as good as their more popular competition
Hydrogen conversion doesn’t have great round-trip efficiency and it’s tough to store in sufficient quantity to handle more than a few days worth. Now, synthesize hydrogen into a hydrocarbon form (methane, or methanol) and it can be stored in summer with excess power from solar and used in winter.
It's definitely not a perfect technology at this point, that's for sure - I actually just did a big research project on it and I agree about the efficiency loss. But it's getting a huge amount of investment from the IRA/infrastructure bill so I was surprised they didn't mention it at all.
