Solar Farm Grid boost at night! How do they do that? 

The energy density of molten salt is amazing. He also recently talked to some people in Scandinavia about a really simple hot sand storage concept for season-shifting power from the summer to the winter! (Although I might be thinking of a fellow traveler here, there are a couple of good RU-vidrs who unfortunately get jumbled together in my silly fat old man mind! 8-P)

Especially for windfarms at sea, they can be located where the power lines come ashore.

Hi Cliff. Thanks for your feedback. I understand your point about the title. The system does result in more available power overall though, so there is a net gain there.

@@JustHaveaThink Its not from solar though is it,?

A ridiculous title makes me listen to this s**t for 10 minutes and I still dont know where the energy comes from. I have to first listen to all the activities form BP and then in 3 seconds we hear that it nas nothing to do with the title. Is that how they want to make RU-vid money? Forget it, I blocked this channel from the suggestions.

@@cliffbartle3772 it's sort of technically true, since the farm itself is providing it with its equipment, but no the panels are not doing so. It's just the other equipment on the farm increasing the efficiency of other grid sources, to get more real power out of the net input power. "Solar farm boost" is technically correct in this instance but indeed you could install the same inverters without a solar farm for the same purpose, also using the inverters inside grid scale battery storage, and so forth.

I don't understand how this makes more energy at night. Am I missing something?

it could be the lefty thing... conspiracy theory == narrative

check out what reactive power is.

Cheers Andy. Judging by some of the comments, this week's video was a bit of a head scratcher for some folks, and I can understand why it can seem counter-intuitive. Other commenters have provided some extra very useful detail around the capacitance of solar inverters etc. so I think they have answered most people's queries. As always, I am extremely grateful for your support and feedback. Have a great week. All the best. Dave

I didn't understand the practical process either but I will take Dave's word for it that it is a viable working technology !

@@mikeharrington5593 don't!

Dave did say that he would go into things in more detail in a later video.

@@mikeharrington5593 I didn't understand it either, the guy talks too fast and the technical stuff sounds like another language what i do know is that it's all a great con to make the public pay over the odds for their power. People used to mock the renewables for not working in cloudy/windless weather so the boffins claimed they work but poorly now they sat they can have a purpose at night. The big benefit is for landowners who get paid well to let the generators on their land and still get to use the area to graze livestock :=)

The thing with AC power is that both the voltage and current oscillate. Depending on your location, this could be 50 Hz or 60 Hz. With purely active power draw from the grid, the voltage and current oscillate in synch. However, when you add reactive power into the mix, the voltage and current maintain the frequency but are now oscillating out of synch. Because the voltage and current switch polarity at different intervals, there will be a fraction of the oscillation period when energy is sent back to the source occurring every cycle. This is unavoidable when there are loads that are not fully resistive but also have characteristics that make loads temporarily store and release energy -- whether it's energy stored in the form of magnetic fields or electric fields. And no, this energy storage cannot be used to store solar energy during the day for use at night.

You jammy sod :D

mafarmerga I do too, in the U.K. we can buy cheap energy from share.octopus.energy/funny-rose-57 They supply our energy at just 4.8 pence per kWh between 00.30 & 04.30. We charge our car, Powerwall & run the dishwasher during those hours then use the Powerwall during the day. Summertime and the solar panels do all our power needs.

Hi Mafarmerga. I'm very pleased you enjoyed it. Thanks for your feedback, as always. Much appreciated. Great to hear you're getting the benefit of cheap supply!

Wow, that's an amazing deal! Where do you live?

IncognitoTorpedo Hi yes we are very happy with it. We live in East Sussex England, if you click the link you can read all about it. The U.K. has some of the cheapest power in Europe and with our off shore wind farms now producing energy cheaper than any other method of production we are reaping the benefits. Our peak rate is 15 pence per kWh between 04-30 & 00.30 but I never buy power then because of the Powerwall. What’s more octopus energy have other deals were by they buy surplus energy from you, if you have solar panels and then if you have a battery storage system they will sometimes pay you to take surplus energy from the grid to smooth things out. That scheme is based on a half hourly measurement of power, via smart meters that are fitted in the houses, so you can even earn money by helping the grid. I’ve opted for Octopus Go Tariff because I already get paid 5p per kilowatt on every kilowatt we generate, regardless of it we use or export it! And another 4p per kilowatt on 50% of what we generate base on the assumption that we export 50% that’s paid even if we use all ourselves.. unfortunately the government has closed that insensitive scheme which is why Octopus energy have started their schemes.

Glad somebody knows what the score is. This is clever but not rocket science. Boosted BPs share price no doubt :)

Hi Logik. I've now added BP's technical paper to the description so you can have a read through

same. I hope I can get a quick answer through those white papers

Nonsense, that’s why.. Notice the careful wording, grid support, not capacity. The actual energy still needs to come from somewhere and on a still night.... you need smart meters so you can selectively turn off “non essential “ users. We’re in trouble.

@@JustHaveaThink Thanks for the link. I bookmarked it for later reading. For now, though, count me as a skeptic. From your description, it sounds as if you're talking about storing energy in solar panels. I don't see how that would work, apart from backing every solar cell with a supercapacitor and some conditioning electronics. And actually, I can see how something like that could make sense, but I have a feeling that is not what is being described here.

The description in the video is somewhat muddled. The description in the linked PDF is clear, though somewhat light on details about what the inverter is actually doing. I'm guessing that it uses existing internal capacitors for absorbing and releasing power at the right moments.

Hi Yora.. I've now added BP's technical paper to the description so you can have a read through

Thanks Bruno. Much appreciated 😊

John Johansen nuclear still better

@@andreaswickman1508 Ummm... not any more, it isn't. UK Hinkley Point, initially slated at £9bn twelve years ago, recently announced it needed another £2bn - taking cost to date, to £22bn. And it hasn't even generated a Higgs Boson's worth of wattage yet. If this £22bn had been invested in only wind and solar, the UK would probably be free of ALL carbon and nuclear. Nuclear had its day, but we don't need it anymore.

@@andreaswickman1508 Nuclear is still better for the people constructing the nuclear power plants. All of them are relatives of the politicians. They are rich-Rich-RICH! And even if it ever gets constructed it will never pay for itself. The UK would make more money by tearing it down immediately and replacing it with solar and wind. But that may not be as good for the relatives of those politicians.

@@brunosmith6925 Nuclear, coal, wind, and solar PV are all in the cheap electron business, and wind and PV are cheaper.

@@tradcon3096 GW is an amount of power, GWHr is an amount of energy. Maybe that's where the confusion lies?

Kelvin Ham Yeah, about that battery.......I crunched the numbers ( using real statistics not biased info) such as average Australian power usage per capita, South Australia’s population (1.7 million) and battery capacity (150 megawatt hours) and here are the FACTS. In order to supply battery power (for 1 average day, ) South Australia’s 1.7 million population would require 17.5 Tesla battery banks. That’s for one day. If you had a few days of overcast, low wind conditions ( or say for instance no wind bushfire smoke haze a bit like we have had a whole lot of lately and a visual check of my inverter showed woeful output from my rooftop panels) and you are gonna deplete those batteries real quick. Now I’m trying to imagine a population of 1.7 million people paying for enough batteries to supply power for one day and it gets expensive, given their life span, recycling costs etc. So does reliable electricity become a luxury for the rich while the rest get used to black and brown outs? To back up this they need gas turbine generators which spew out carbon (and are also expensive) Just a little reality check here.

@@rachels209 no, thats not how this works. You are looking at batteries and their implementation the same way as Morrison did. That is not the intended use of Batteries, firstly their inverter is not capable of suppling stand alone power to the grid. Batteries are brilliant at supplying large current for a very short time. Grid stability is a complicated subject, load matching involves a complex power control systems. When a large load is introduced to the power grid, somewhere generating capacity has to ramp up to meet that demand. In the past, coal power stations had to run as if peak load was online, even though it wasn't, not possible to ramp these stations up. Add a battery and you can then run your station at the mean average expected load with the battery and inverters acting as peak load generation or, when demand drops off, a power sink. In this case, the sink current can be used to charge the batteries. This results in significant reduction in co2 emissions due to power stations being able to run for the average load through the day. Add Renewables and further call on fossil fuel plants are reduced. One of the significant problems is not renewables dropping off line all at once, these sources of power can be in diverse locations with a mix of hydro, solar and wind. History show that thermal steam (coal) stations can drop off suddenly due to turbine faults, extreme heat, or fuel feed interruption. When these stations do go offline, the battery picks up the load almost instantly, this gives breathing space to allow ramp up of other generating sources.

@@kelvinham8576 Spot on Kelvin. I have relies in S.A. and they are over the moon with the stability these batteries have provided. Funny hey, folks who have not seen them work can stand back and tell the folks who actually have it, it doesn't work ? L.O.L.

Solar-nuclear, the Green quandary. Rub the panels with a lump of coal first to improve them ?

You are exactly correct. The only information I would add is this: Power factor is based on the fact that some loads are resistive (i.e. electric heaters) and many loads are, most typically, inductive (i.e. electric motors). When a voltage is applied to a resistive load, the current (amps) exactly follows (in timing) the applied voltage (volts) which is a power factor of 1. For inductive loads, the current lags behind (in time) the applied voltage. Real power is the instantaneous product of voltage and current. Apparent power is the product of RMS ("root-mean-square" = the average of the AC sine wave) current and voltage. BOTH real and apparent power have to be supplied to power systems for the system loads which are most often inductive. Typically, power companies "correct" poor system power factor with capacitors or inductors which can be switched in or out as needed. The closer to a power factor of 1, the closer to only needing to supply the real power. I'm not familiar with the way inverters can supply apparent (reactive) power to a power system, but if it's true it could save the infrastructure costs of the power factor correcting equipment.

Andrew, IF you live in Australia, and wish to become self sufficient in power, you could look at W.A.'s Synergy power company. Which recently after bush fires a couple of years back, took out the grid to Esperance, found the cost of rebuilding said grid was far too expensive and again vulnerable to more fires in future. Instead they decide to install mini solar instalations in the towns/farms that previously were on the grid, these instalations were coupled up to batteries of sufficient capacity to provide the required power, the whole system is stand alone and requires only minimal maintenance a few times a year. The ABC has a good segment on it that they recently ran.

@@itchyvet I have 9.6Kw of solar ready to install. 2 5Kw inverters. 700Ah @48vdc of lithium batteries usable, batrium battery management system and all sundry components. Oh I'm an electrician as well

They could be better at than physical spinning reserves and battery farms considering each inverter is capable of putting out much more power (reactively) than the house usually consumes. Whereas a big battery farm is designed to put out power at the max rate the batteries can economically handle, which isnt as much headroom as the inverters are built with. Hydro can do frequency regulation but only by brute force, power electronics should be more responsive and efficient.

Yes but these are existing and not utilised at that time. This is relatively cheap by making better use of existing resources and can be quickly got running.

I think this is supposed to be in concert with them..

Just like gravitricity, gravitation electricity, with weight being lifted through night current or other "peak lots". And when the current is scarce, the kinetic drop of the weight gets formed into other types of energy. Keep systems open for optimized ideas

Never ever trust an oil company, that's my advise. They are pure evil and the people behind those oil companies have no morals at all. A much better solution would be to use the ultra capacitors from a company called Skeleton Ultra capacitors. Or to convert excess energy into hydrogen or some other clever solution to store energy. A Scottish island is already using the product from Skeleton ultra capacitors for their completely self sufficient grid. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-3RUY0BUgFjs.html And this is a video from the fully charged channel who went to visit the company, and they spoke with the owner from the company. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-KQ2Eo6wl5r0.html Just don't give the oil companies access to your inverters, because they can't be trusted. The people behind those oil companies are like drug dealers, they want you to stay addicted to their grid, and they want to have total control over your energy supply. It makes no sense at all to use inverters to deal with energy spikes in the grid. It only means that they are going to use the inverters as some sort of resistor to convert excess energy into heat. And that is just a pure waste of energy. Remember the laws about preservation of energy. You can't make energy magically disappear. Since inverters and solar panels do not store energy the inverters can only deal with spikes in the grid by wasting energy and by turning the excess energy into heat. So basically they will use the transistors inside your inverter as a resistor in order to convert excess energy into heat. I know one thing, giving the oil company access to your solar panel inverter would be the same thing as giving a thief access to your vault or wallet. You have been warned!!!

Hi Alexandra.. I've now added BP's technical paper to the description so you can have a read through, and we may well revisit with a more technical explanation later in the year.

Hi Alexandra.. I've now added BP's technical paper to the description so you can have a read through, and we may well revisit with a more technical explanation later in the year.

Does it bother you just how full of shit this Vidio is, Kiss Gretta's ring all will be well as your Country goes broke!

Unfortunately it was all wrong. What those inverters will do is with their capacitance do power factor correction on the very inductive grid making it use less energy for the same amount of real energy delivered. But that capacitance is super tiny so doesn't make a shit of a difference.

"until we have Mr. Fusion" Superconductors ! Magnets that require no power at all because they are powered by Suspicious Ben's Electrified Universe or by my own British Steam Universe.

Hi Eric. Thanks for your feedback. Always appreciated. There have been lots of requests for more technical detail so I've added BP's technical paper to the description. All the best. Dave

theconversation.com/how-a-solar-farm-in-south-east-england-could-bring-a-new-dawn-for-renewable-energy-99530 The energy is stored in batteries. See the link. We could also store it in flywheels, as hydrogen or as heat.

@@franklinrussell4750 But this episode wasnt acutally talking about energy stored in batteries, its about energy stored in capacitors which can be filled and released in 1/60th of a second. Each home inverter has enough capacitance to store enough power to supply about 100Kw - but only for 1/60th of a second. This enables a thousand of them to push the AC waveform forward or backwards as hard as 100Mw turbine could, which is pretty useful for keeping the waveform regular which keeps current flowing efficiently in the grid.

@@adymode theconversation.com/how-a-solar-farm-in-south-east-england-could-bring-a-new-dawn-for-renewable-energy-99530 Yes, but the energy backing up the grid is battery storage. A smart grid is an additional benefit. I think we should rethink the idea of a grid and replace it with community coops that produce their own energy. We could then take down all those hideously ugly high power lines.

1. Power grid has one big problem : maintaining a stable voltage (tension) on the grid, so your appliances don't break. 2. To do this, in a normal system the power plants (generators) apply Reactive power to stabilize the voltage level. Problem is, they waste energy doing that. 3. Solution is : solar arrays inverters (that turn DC to AC) are tweaked to provide Reactive power at night when they're not producing Real power. Power plants can thus only focus on being efficient at providing real power. Less damage on the grid, lower blackouts risk, more efficiency, more money.

@@franklinrussell4750 Many, many problems with this idea. No grid mean when you have a problem on your autonomous system (which ALWAYS happen), you're left in the dark. When you have an excess of power, it's not redistributed, so it's efficiently wasted. Having a grid connecting every sources allow the most efficient use of renewable power, which isn't constant : the main problem was *Balance*, and this video just explained the clever solution. You can have multiple variable sources, and the system will balance itself without compromising constant sources power plant efficiency, thus it's more reliable. Storage is a different matter entirely.

Lookup "Power factor Correction" to get the right Idea of what they are trying to do...

That's not what the video is talking about, although it is a way of saving energy.

It's to do with something called power factor and real and apparent power. A pure (resistive) load uses 100% real power. A load that is purely capacitive or inductive only uses apparent power (the voltage and current of the AC are out of phase with each other and no _real_ power is used), most real loads are somewhere in between (although most are designed to be of a high power factor , and I think there are rules on this too for equipment manufacturers). Different loads on the grid result in the current and voltage going out of phase which can make a much higher current needed to be passed through the network that doesn't perform any real work, but does heat cables and equipment so power gets wasted. The inverters must have been programmed to simulate the correct power factor for a load that would get the current and voltage in phase again on the grid (this is also what a power factor correction capacitor is for in some equipment, like motors and the old magnetic ballast fluorescent tube fixtures). If you look up power factor you'll get a handle on it - my explanation may not be the best (especially if you aren't familiar with real and apparent power, reactive loads and power factor). This wikipedia page should help: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AC_power

Hi David. It is a weird concept I must admit. I had to read through the research several times before I got anywhere close to getting my head around it. As I understand it, no new power is generated, but rather some lost power is avoided - i.e the power loss in the generators while they're being used to smooth out the voltage. So if the solar inverters can do that work instead at a time when they would other wise be doing nothing at all, because it's dark and the solar panels are 'asleep', then that allows the generators to work at better efficiencies... The final bit of the vid about people getting paid to use electricity is really just an extension of what the grid has always done during times of unexpected reduction in consumption - they have alway had two options : 1. Pay factories to switch on machines and use the electricity that, by definition, has to go somewhere or 2. Temporarily shutdown one of their power stations, which is a nightmare for them and costs them a fortune. So it's cheaper to pay the factories. Now that we have a smart grid and people's home electrical systems can be used like millions of micro energy users all of which can now 'talk' constantly to the grid through modern software, then the end users can be paid a little bit to use that electricity instead of the factories,. And of course you can bet that the Grid will pay the domestic consumers far less than they ever had to pay the factories, and the domestic users like it because they're getting paid something they never got paid before, so it's a bit of a win-win situation. And as an added bonus of course, the more we have battery storage on the grid, the easier it is to actually store excess energy. Battery storage is like manna from heaven for grid operators - it more or less fixes their grid management difficulties. Promising times ahead for smart grid technology ! :-) Cheers. Dave

Thanks 3m Jim. I understand a little about how an inductive or capacitive load the voltage and current are out of phase. I am wondering how the phase at the load would change the phase on the grid, especially if the high voltage is stepped down with transformers. Also, would an inverter be able to sink much power in order to modify the incoming voltage & current? I will take a look at power factor to get a better grip on it, thanks for the link.

No one said it was "generation" just that solar farm equipment is proving very useful in stabilizing the grid at night. Just a complicated, positive side benefit to such facilities. Solar farms storing extra energy in batteries or pumping water up a hill and letting it run down at night is a totally different issue.

@@ElazarusWills You made my point for me. If the title said "stabilize the grid at night" rather than "grid boost" I wouldn't have made my comment implying misleading click-bait.

How I understand this ,guys ( BP ) will generate " clean and free " Ho-ho-ho energy at day time using solar panels and wind turbines , and at night time will dump excess energy generated by wind turbines , through grid inverters into solar panels . How ? Solar panels can generate electric power using sun , and can consume electric power at night ( this is why some solar panels have blocking diodes to stop this ) . Build wind turbines , consumer will pay more for " clean and free " energy ( I know one person who have solar panels on the roof , and him told me I thing in 2013 , what FEED IN TARIFF pay to him £0.48 per Kilowatt energy produced !!!!! I pay at moment about £0.16 per Kilowatt in 2020 !!! So ..... what we have now ...., "clean and free " energy will be generated , FEED IN TARIFF will pay for this energy ...., and then excess energy will be dumped in solar panels . FANTASTICO !!!!!! HA-HA-HA !!!!!!

Yeah, this video was very unclear perhaps intentionally on this point. Am guessing that the "innovation" is that grid balancers and likely more specifically inverters probably convert excess electricity to heat and simply let it evacuate into the atmosphere to cool the grid and keep it operating within its thresholds... But instead of simply converting to heat the excess electricity is stored for later use. Doesn't sound that innovative, but could be a step in the right direction for a more efficient, "smart" grid.

Plastic comes from petroleum crude oil. If you pyrolysis it you are dumping more fossil carbon into the atmosphere via CO2 emissions. The best use for plastic currently is as recycled raw material for making new plastic products, or, in my opinion, bury it in a land fill, underground whence it came, locked away from getting into the atmosphere.

@@alivation thanks.that answers the question.

@@alivation Pyrolysis isn't burning. It's a way to decompose the plastic into simpler molecules which can then be put to other uses. It's promising technology, but my sense of it is that it's not something that's likely to make economic sense at the village scale. I agree with you that landfilling plastic may well be the most ecologically and economically sound approach at this time for a village.

IncognitoTorpedo yes I’m aware of what pyrolysis is. The point of doing it in a civic type installation is to produce a fuel gas which will burn cleanly and is easily to reticulate. It is typically used for heating or to produce electricity via a steam turbine. Whatever, the pyrolysis gas which is a mixture of short chain hydrocarbons and maybe CO is burnt to produce heat, water and carbon dioxide. It’s this CO2 which will get into the atmosphere unless scrubbed and contained. I suspect the financials could be made to work if the cost of acquiring the waste plastic is close to zero AND the environmental costs are rated at zero, which is irresponsible at a minimum in my opinion.

That makes sense. I second this question

Not quite. No new power is generated. Instead the loss of power from generators is being avoided by using inverters to smooth the voltage instead. So effectively it is an increase in efficiency and an increase in available real power.

Not quite. The tricky thing has to do with the electricity being AC (changing direction in the wires). Typically the voltage and current fluctuations tend to get shifted in time (out of sync) by all of the coils in the electric system(motors, transformers etc.), but the electronics in the solar park converters can be programmed to counter that effect.

@@ChrisTheLaCat That's power factor?

@@_a.z Yes. Took me a while to get there as well. Poor power factor (current out of phase with the voltage) loads the generating plant and assets without actually doing anything. If you "realign" the current with the voltage it effectively reduces the load on the generating and distribution plant.

could have*

thats because uv and ir are the most energetic and easy to convert.

@@prydzen uv is high energy, ir is low energy on the opposite side of the visible spectrum.

Like with food and water, production might not even be the biggest problem. Just getting the most of it to the consumers without loosing most of it on the way.

Allen Loser here is an answer: phys.org/news/2019-07-explore-mysteries-magic-angle-superconductors.html

Hi Dave. It's really not about the solar panels themselves at all in all honesty, so arguably the title is a slight misnomer. It is to do with the capacitance of the solar inverters which allows the voltage generated by the variable rotation of the wind turbines (which may therefore be causing uneven voltage) to be taken in and modified back to the correct level before being sent back out onto the grid again. But of course if we did not have solar farms as part of the grid system then these inverters would not exist either. As you say, no NEW power is being generated anywhere. But existing power is being saved because if the inverters were not doing that job then the traditional generators would have to do it and that would mean they were producing less 'real power;' that the consumer could use. The net effect is an increase in available power for the end user.

Yes, that's it. The pdf in the first link in the description has a brief but good explanation.

Does it bother you just how full of shit this Vidio is, Kiss Gretta's ring all will be well as your Country goes broke!

@@curtdenson2360 So I'm guessing that you won't be asking Greta to accompany you when you shop for your new solar panel installation.

You big show off. I turn the heat up on nuclear off peak so's I sweat like a pig. I collect all that hot sweat in a pickle jar and use it for heating during tea time peak. There was one debacle about the missus including pickles for tea time sandwiches so I might have to switch to your method.

@@grindupBaker you should make a video on that. Where are you from?

Frank Z I live in the US on fossil fuel and nuclear energy. It is cheap and reliable, and I do not have to scurry around trying to use power on sunny days, or go without power for certain appliances on cloudy days. I hit the switch and whatever it is turns on. I flip it off, and it stops. What you describe sounds like a huge pain in the rear.

Is why a smart grid that can transport energy very long distances is essential to a successful deployment. Doesn't necessarily require anything exotic, just a way to transport electricity thousands of miles with as little loss as possible. We probably have the technology today, but would require massive investment in upgrades.

WTF there is an Input & Output. That's how Time Shifting Battery Energy Storage work. Quite sure the MODified inverters in this case has Input Lines from the grid.

Musicians also know the problem. Speed of sound is roughly 300m/s, so if the choir sits 30m away from the orchestra, it is 1/10 of a second late to hear the orchestra and sing along. If you sit at the opposite direction as a spectator, you will hear the choir and orchestra out of sync.

At this moment (2022), there are 440 reactors operating in 39 countries, with 55 more under construction - and probably more than 55 at risk of closure in the next decade due to age and obsolescence, or inability to compete with less expensive renewables and modern natural gas plants. So scaling from the current 10% of our energy to the kind of numbers needed to totally replace fossil fuels would be every bit as much of an effort for nuclear as it would be for renewables and storage. That’s without considering the fact that there are over 150 countries with no nuclear power at all, most of whom currently lack the industrial and social base required to even operate a nuclear plant, much less build one. Despite your claims, building energy storage is a straightforward exercise with many possible solutions, and hundreds of companies actively involved in developing new ones (because they can see the opportunity). It’s not an impossible technical problem - it’s an EASY problem. Humans have been storing energy since the first caveman noticed that rocks placed close to the fire stay warm all day. So the problem isn’t technology, it’s just cost and effort. And we don’t need to build weeks of storage out, especially not right away, as it will be built against existing fossil grid stability. Relatively low-tech thermal or gravity-based storage, or off-the-shelf battery tech, can be used in ANY country, along with off-the-shelf solar/wind generators, without risks of proliferation, difficulties with waste management, need for a massive and stable existing grid, or the need for large numbers of trained nuclear engineers (and a society to support these high-skill workers). Since this is a global problem, not a US/Europe problem, we need a solution that works for everyone. That’s solar, wind, and storage. That’s your uncomfortable truth.

@@davestagner There are a few ways to store the kind of power we need to be storing to go fully renewable. But the amount of money and effort, not least the destruction of lands, communities and wildlife that would go with it. Pumped hydro is the only existing, ready to go solution of the scale we need. In the UK there is at least one of these functioning as a capacitor smoothing out the edges between demand spikes and power plant ramp up/down. I think the documentary on it suggested it could supply the whole grid, but while unlikely physically for it to do that, it would only last minutes. Pumped hydro has some very strict requirements for a suitable location and even before you consider flooding an entire valley and the impact that has these sites are very rare. On solar, wind et. al. They aren't only intermittent, they are variable. So it's not like they are on at 100% and off at 0%. There will be entire days or weeks where they are only able to produce 20% of them capacity. IF, if, we can get storage to back it up, we need enough source energy to meet 100% demand AND recharge the storage in reasonable time, if good conditions prevail. We can't even get to 25% constant average in countries like UK. Sure there have been a few hours were Scotland over generated wind. But over all it's 25% of demand. ish. So we don't just need 4 times more solar/wind, we need about 8-16 times more solar and wind. There will be days when solar and wind will be next to nothing. So we need storage backup capacity to cover that period. If that is the direction we go, I see heavy taxation, rolling load bans, energy levies for use during poor generation days. Like not being able to charge your electric car for 3 days because it's been calm and cloudy. All that said. Local micro-generation with local micro-storage is just about becoming "viable" affordable. Like £10k for a 4kW solar array and a 10kWh battery. Reducing residential load will not make a massive dent in electric usage, but if people steer towards charging their cars at home off the house battery, shifting residential travel off grid would have a noticable impact. Regards electric cars, sensible estimates indicate a doubling of grid demand even if only all consumer vehicles go electric. Adding in trucks, ships, trains probably more like quarupling the grid demand. Looping back above, that means we need 64 times more renewable generation. A lot of places are out of land area for wind farms and are building them out to sea. That pony is looking like it's running it's last few miles unless she start shipping power internationally and the headache/loss that causes.

@@1over137 Wind and solar are really separate storage problems. Wind variability is very well understood and backed by detailed data (going back decades on an industry basis). So base load level stability needs can be calculated very accurately for both power and duration, for both hourly variability and seasonal variability. The idea of “What if the wind doesn’t blow?” is a popular criticism, but doesn’t actually reflect reality as measured. Wind a hundred meters up is different from surface wind. Solar has large daily (well, nightly) gaps, as well as reduced efficiency during cloud cover, so it needs a lot more storage than wind to do base load service. And it would benefit from multiple storage layers - short term for nightly needs, long term for seasonal, and seasonal storage can help with a few cloudy days in a row. But in all cases, the idea that this is an unsolvable technical problem is frankly absurd. It’s just a cost management problem, and getting to where it’s cheaper than fossil even with storage. Once that happens, it’ll be inevitable, for pure economics. As my father used to say, “Can’t never did anything”. Storing energy isn’t impossible. It’s not even hard. And “What if the Sun stops shining?” is ridiculous. (My favorite is “What if a super volcano or an asteroid smashing the Earth blocks the Sun for years?” I’ve seen that crap. Sheesh.) Now, I totally agree with need 8-16 times more solar and wind. We need to not just replace fossil fuels, but also provide new energy above and beyond what fossil has given us. Survival is insufficient. What I don’t agree on is the idea that this is impossible, or even dangerously difficult.

@@davestagner Try and put some numbers on it. Go and look at some generation mix charts from countries who have adopted renewables in a good way, like a lot of Europe and the UK. The wind generation charts are NOT constant. They are hugely variable with entire blocks of 2 or 3 days were wind is generating about 10-15% of it's capacity. That is the UK, notorious for it's constant battering of Atlantic depressions and Scotland, one of the windiest places on Earth. It's not "impossible" in the same way building a bridge across the Atlantic is not impossible. If we put our minds and wallets to it we could do it. I'm sure the figures exist somewhere, but I'd put a finger in the air estimate that if you by a wind farm capable of generating in your strongest winds, it will be putting out an average of about 25% over the year. Solar probably lower still. The UK has about 10GW of total renewable generation. If we did have enough storage, we would need somewhere like 200GW and that's before all the transport starts going electric which will double that.

One item that does struggle towards the impossible. Certainly within countries. Land. Space to put the wind farms etc. Sure places like the US have large expanses of mostly nothing to put them on, but places like the UK ran out of "Free" space centuries ago.

That's called V2G. In this case the grid could be a microgrid like your home. thedriven.io/2018/10/19/v2g-whats-the-state-of-play-with-vehicle-to-grid-vehicle-to-home-technology/

Hi Chris. Thanks for your suggestion. We may well look at something along those lines later this year. All the best. Dave

Nathan, I think rather than building additional infrastructure this video is about utilising already existing equipment, i.e. the inverters on commercial solar farms that are not in use otherwise during night time hours.

@@TerraPosse That's logical, but commercial solar farms are not often located where load is located reactive and real power is always strongest near plants/generation and it weakens as power flows through a conductor. Capacitors and reactors are most useful roughly halfway between load and source, or in remote regions far from generation. I am looking at an actual switching map/Grid map right now, there are 3 major solar facilities in my region (still tiny compared to real power plants) and not one is located in an area where it would be more advantageous to use solar inverters vs SVC systems. Simply put solar is built in regions where the power flow is strong and therefore does not require additional voltage control systems and if voltage control was required in a particular region it would be there long before solar was ever installed.

You big show off. Was that you got me out of Sir Adam Beck II at Niagara Falls 30 years ago ? I didn't know semi-public Ontario Hydro quit 3 pm sharp no matter what and I was suddenly alone & lost in an empty plant. Got on the roof by the Niagara beneath the power lines, got in some huge room with clanking lifting chains like in Alien, open a door and it was a chuteway down, found a room with the turbines/generators and they had cute brass award plaques like "Generator 3 awarded best generator of 1982 with a million billion gillion rpms between bearing failures". Then some guy with dials behnd a glass wall said "Hey you !" and showed me the proper escape door. Was that you ?

@@grindupBaker Can't say it was me. Mostly because 30 years ago I wasn't so much operating a hydro dam, and moreso learning how to say dad, mom and use the big boy potty.

Can't give you a definitive view on that one just yet, but it is a form of geoengineering I think isn't it?

Here's the link : ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-e1Ro9nXObYA.html

German energy prices nearly DOUBLED because of so called "renewable energy"...air quality dropped too! I can tell because i live in Poland and German imission is HORRIBLE!!!

@@WadcaWymiaru lmao. poland is notorious for their coal power plants and polluting all of europe. get out of here with your nonsense.

Sounds like your input would be useful here Sebastian. Are you involved, or can you get involved?

Hi Fram. Great to hear from you and thanks for your feedback. Sounds like you've got a lovely clean slate to work with. In all honesty your best bit is to consult with a green energy installer or designer. Also worth looking at ground source heat pumps. All the best. Dave

You're missin the big label under the graph boyo, 5:38

@@adymode I'll look again, it's really hard to pause and look at this on my phone because it overlays a dark color so you can't hardly read anything.

@@aaronbono4688 No worries, its there if you feel like looking into it later. "National Grid Future Energy Scenarios: 2019" ( Bing/Duck/Google to get url of the pdfs)

theconversation.com/how-a-solar-farm-in-south-east-england-could-bring-a-new-dawn-for-renewable-energy-99530........ It is stored in batteries.

@@franklinrussell4750 That link didn't work. Removed the dots. theconversation.com/how-a-solar-farm-in-south-east-england-could-bring-a-new-dawn-for-renewable-energy-99530 So, in short: BATTERIES, applied in a smart way.

Does it bother you just how full of shit this Vidio is, Kiss Gretta's ring all will be well as your Country goes broke!