The Problem With Renewable Energy (and how we're fixing it) 

Just noticed a correction for the corrections page! The link that should go to this video actually goes to the video about running out of RU-vid IDs.

thought that seemed excessive

I have a question tom?

Hey tom you don’t half get about your vids are interesting especially the on about the secret pipeline that run through uk underground yes it pops up near to me and then back in the ground

Jesus. That thing would’ve been taken off by now.

#tbt Technical Difficulties...or was that a Citation Needed joke?

Citation Needed. It's Gary's joke, IIRC.

Which episode is that?

1x06 (Neckarwestheim)

Citation needed. The Neckarwestheim Nuclear Power Plant one.

amitzohar42, You have angered the gird.

amitzohar42, You have angered the gird.

@Russ Gallagher Not any nuclear power stations no. Uranium refineries, and experimental/ school owned reactors, yes.

Translated from the Russian, presumably.

no worries!

second 1000th like today!

@@everettrailfan Get out.

"paid for itself" 🤣🤣🤣

@@russmillerskipplestein dont know what that means? Or you know more on the topic and it has not yet payed for itself?

Depends on several factors. Could easily be pretty warm or even rather hot actually...

RealLuckless Run liquid nitrogen in it

Bob Shaw Compressed gas energy storage: The battery IS liquid nitrogen!

RealLuckless Even better!

Easy bomb target

Hang on, why are they a scam?

Photovoltaic panels are barely profitable under perfect conditions. And those conditions include being turned sunwards, perfectly clean and not overshadowed by anything. Roads get dirty, face directly up and are covered by cars. Plus, You would need a shitload of super hard transparent material to keep them form being crushed. Storage problems mentioned in the video aside.

Search for +eevblog and thunderf00t's videos on the subject

+GraemeMarkNI Because they only work in the land of unicorns, right where they came from.

It would be infinitely more efficient in terms of installation and generation capacity to just shove the PV cells on rooftops or in fields rather than digging up the entire road network to replace it with something that will function poorly as a road surface and even worse as a power station.

Well.. is it interesting yet?

That's because you went to the University of Norwich or some other backwards place like it.

British people say "y'all"? Awesome!

Have fun in the Arctic! 😊

Wear 2 pairs of sock, I've heard it's cold.

Bring me back a penguin! >_^

damnit. i forgot i was wanting to do that video thing you mentioned last time. oh dangit. late again! enjoy the ice and no falling in freezing water this time.

How modest. But yes, Tom is indeed really interesting in this, as usual in all his videos.

Concur.

r/iamverysmart

Hm, yeah.... reading it again it sound like I'm waving a "I'm so smart" flag with a marching band backing me up. That was not my intention, rather a bumbling attempt of explaining the way I speak and like here, give honest praise, not by stating "this is the best video ever" on every second video I post, but by stating how it impressed me and exceeded my expectations. But your comments about modesty gave me a good chuckle and I might try to phrase things a little more mindful hereafter.

Wolfram Stahl I too do english

more Gary Brannan's joke from 2014, though with more concise phrasing.

from 1x06 in tom's citation needed playlist i believe

not the worst episode but it definitely doesn't hold a candle to the big lobster, simplehuman or flag of mars from the same series

So true. Re-watching the episode, Gary introduces the concept, but Chris creates the exact quote Tom used here.

Reminds me of a joke from Citation Needed. The Neckarwestheim(sp?) episode.

And math teacher and informatics teacher and physics teacher and language teacher and and and...

Nillie Indeed.

+gatesofcerdes What you're describing is called a *funny* and *very entertaining* video. The issue with it is that only about half of the video (or less) is actual information (and not all of it useful).

***** I'd agree, except you don't need breaks *that* often. Every 30-45min is usually enough.

Nillie Not at all, but their density of (useful/interesting) information is usually much lower than one of Tom's great Things You Might Not Know videos.

Only on traditional power stations that boil water: coal, oil, gas and nuclear! But yes: they all work in time. They have to, the physics of alternating current requires it!

A pretty impressive synchronised song and dance, though not a particularly pleasant one.

***** Here in Sweden we burn trash to create power, but I bet it's the same deal.

If they rotate 60 times a second, you get 60hertz electricity. If you rotate 50 times, you get 50. Every time the turbine turns, it pushes electricity one way through the wire and then the magnets flip and they push electricity the other way. The magnets are literally pushing electrons inside the wire, those electrons push other electrons and so on for thousands of miles of power line. Eventually the electrons push and push all the way into your house until they push your fan to make it turn. Or they might push through a heater so the friction makes the wire heat up. No matter what you use it for, there are a bunch of turbines pushing electrons into your house. The electrical grid isn't a single powerline that goes to your house, it doesn't work like that. The power grid has to push "450,000 miles of high-voltage transmission lines" (source: Energy.gov) before it can push any energy into your house. Imagine hooking up a garden hose, since its empty of water you have to wait for it to fill before water comes out the end. Now imagine you have 450,000 miles of garden hoses. they are all connected together but you have several spigots feeding the hoses. That is the grid. If you use power, you are pouring water from the grid, which means somewhere has to pour more water in. Now what does this analogy mean for this video? Turbines are VERY GOOD at giving a steady power source. Like the video said when they drop they might only drop to 59.8hertz before going back to 60. Wind power on the other hand depends on the wind, and also you have to "brake" to slow down wind turbines if you aren't geared specifically enough to end up with 60hertz. Changing how the blades of the wind turbine catch the wind isn't only for getting the most amount of power, its about keeping it regular. And don't get me started on how spotty solar power is. Nuclear power plants work in 4 or 8 year cycles. (barring problems) They produce 99.99% to 100% capacity constantly. After 4 to 8 years, they shut down the plant to add more nuclear material and do maintenance on things which have broken down. Emergency shutoffs loose several million dollars a day. This is called an "outage" and they pay a LOT OF MONEY for high quality workers that can work faster. If they would lose 15m dollars a day, they will pay 14.9999m dollars to make the outage 1 day faster. But I digress. Basically, The only reason that we (currently) have the ability to use wind and solar power is because the grid has hundreds of turbines pushing the grid. The the large turbines are like 100 horses pushing a heavy cart of electrons while wind/solar is like someone hitting the back of a cart with a hammer, yea it does push the electrons but not nearly as well as the team of horses. There have been steps to run the grid fully on renewable resources, but in my opinion the longterm goal of that has a lot of problems which are solved by large turbines. When damn power is not available, nuclear is the next best thing. (Source for opinions on nuclear power: Father worked in nuclear power for navy 21 years, currently works in a nuclear power plant training program. In order to be a trainer you must have 100% credentials and licenses to be able to run a power plant so he could easily run a nuclear power plant) (Source #2 for opinions on outages: I'm a welder) (Source #3 for amount of deaths caused by coal: A. J. Cohen et al., The global burden of disease due to outdoor air pollution, Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health, Part A, 68: 1301-1307 NAS, Hidden Costs of Energy: Unpriced Consequences of Energy Production and Use Committee on Health, Environmental, and Other External Costs and Benefits of Energy Production and Consumption; Nat. Res. Council, Wash., D.C. ISBN: 0-309-14641-0 (2010). )

they are called synchronous machines and they do this naturally, you don't really need to make them do it, you just need to make sure they stick at the right frequency. it happens because there is an electromagnetic coupling (i.e. they stick to each other like an elastic band) between the spinning turbine and the electricity generated in the grid. if one slows down the other pulls it back to where it needs to be and vice versa.

Kelli, if it’s breeze it is very unlikely the the turbines are producing any electricity. Nothing, when the breeze is below a certain threshold.Wind turbines HAVE TO HAVE INERTIA BACK UP UNDER THESE CONDITIONS.

+Sven Slootweg Iceland has volcanoes. Their turbines are powered by just pumping water down and letting the earth heat it up. Once you've paid to set up the equipment, the power and hot water is basically free!

... and since it is steam turbine based it has the same resilience mechanism as coal and nuclear stations.

No thats not right we use geothermal power stations that pump up water that is about 300°c (Wich is not pumped down like you said) Those stations produce about 30% of our electricity, the rest is mostly produced by hydropower plants.

Hydropower as in dams or hydropower as in tidal?

hydro as in Dam in pretty much a nuclear station but with water and gravity instead of steam and nuclear fission. In Quebec we are about 90% hydro, 2% fossil (remote areas), 8% new energy (wind & solar mostly) and 0% nuclear and we don't have any of those problems. The hydros station act as an kinetic accumulator just as much as a steam generator.

Tom Scott has made a video on that very system in Britain

As I write this, that's a very difficult and politically sensitive question: the government is hesitating about a new (and extremely expensive) nuclear power plant. We won't know the answer for a few weeks!

Lets hope they move toward nuclear power.

Yes they are building a new nuclear power station at Hinkley Point C (in Somerset) problem is it is too expensive compared to Wind in Price per MWatt, and relies heavily on Chinese investment to get going. It was recently put on hold but seems to be because of the economic instability from Brexit and worries whether the EDF (who are supposed to be building it) can keep their end of the bargain investment wise.

As an American I don't know the UK's stance on nuclear. Here the only real opposistion are environmental groups and the Green Party

I think Hinckley is going to be a bit of a fail for the history books. I'd now be looking to Wylfa, where the (british) company responsible for building the next generation NPP in Wales is already putting financial feelers out to the local community to start growing new, LOCAL nuclear technicians, because nuclear personnel shortage is a massive problem facing both the National Grid and the Navy. It looks like they've got a good plan, at least compared to the Hinckley debacle.

Ah, blast! Three people reviewed the script, and then the finished video and none of us spotted I said "second" instead of "minute"! You're absolutely right: that should be thousands of times a *minute*.

Most steam turbines for power generation are directly coupled (no gearbox) to the altenator. That mean they turn at 3000rpm or 50 times a second (3600rpm 60Hz in US). Tom should have said thousands of times per minute.

+finbat I think he says second, but the closed captioning says minute. At the very least the CC should be edited.

if you turn on subtitles it says minutes. i guess thats what he had in the script but brains do weird stuff sometimes.

The closed captions correct this lapse.

I've visited Dinorwig, a couple of years ago -- they didn't allow cameras in, and I didn't have enough subscribers to be able to get in. Some other time :)

Let me know if you want a contact for that Tom, I'll see what I can do ;)

They let Robert Llewellyn in with cameras.

@@TomScottGo how about now?

+Nillie That's the one! It was really bugging me that I couldn't remember which one it was! That said...I should've made an educated guess that it was in the episode about the nuclear power station.

Yes, that is exactly why they are different. It was a way to remove one possible element of interference in the early days of television.

Yes. Many kinds of electric lights subtly flicker at double the mains frequency (so 100 or 120Hz) and if your video capture isn't at a multiple of this you get weird flicker effects.

This is also why video recordings of most CRTs have a horizontal black bar that moves up or down the screen, at different speeds, depending on if you are in a 60Hz or 50Hz country, since video is usually recorded at 24 (+/- a few fractional frames) fps.

thomas - you mean film? videotape is 25 or 30, and digital is 25, 30, 50 or 60 (usually 30 though, because of american companies)

wow, i can't edit my post. i was going to add that digital CAN do 24 but usually doesn't, except on super expensive gear, but even then, that's usually equipment for making a big cinematic release, not someone recording a home video with their tv in.

that's what the fuzzy things on the end of mics is for

Jeez guys. I know about mic wind gaurds. I just thought it was funny.

The turbine was also turned off for maintenance. And the other turbines weren't very fast, so the wind was probably not very strong when they filmed it.

But Nuclear Fission isn't renewable, there is only a finite amount of fuel. It also requires a lot of security. Nuclear Fusion looks like the future.

*cough cough* thorium *cough cough* While LFTR may not be the best technology, it does prove a point... there are other ways to get power from atoms that doesnt have the extremely bad fission products. Oh and thorium is one of the more abundant elements on the planet. But hey, this is all absurd. Wind power and tofu! Thats the way of the future!

We are currently using 1% of the potential energy of uranium. Nuclear energy provides 10% of electricity globally since about 50 years. So if we switch to better reactors (fast breeders) that can release all energy from the fuel, than we could power the world from the currently existing waste for 500 years. And that's just the civilian reactors, bomb making also creates a huge amount of waste. We don't even know how much uranium is available, because we didn't have to look too hard so far. Than there is thorium which is 4x more abundant, and it's the byproduct of rare earth mining.

András Bíró you dont understand! wind and solar have been chosen as the new energy sources!

theonlyari Not everywhere, and it still can change. In most countries the share of renewables is single digit. There are few countries that use lot more renewables. but that's because they lucky, and have lot more hydro, geothermal, or wind then most others. Solar may be usable in deserts, but the cost is still very high. Nuclear energy can be used everywhere, and it's one of the cheapest of all energy sources. And France proved that it can be quickly deployed at large scale. Politicians support wind and solar because they are owned by Big Oil, and they know that those are not a big threat to fossil fuels. When will wind and solar be ready to power at least 90% of the world? 100 years? Nuclear could have eliminated fossil fuels decades ago.

Edit. I should have listened to whole video before typing this message out. -_-

the also have Gas turbine open cycle stations on very short run up times 20 mins or so

Are hydroelectric power plants on the rise as a replacement for fossil fuels? If so, that opens another area of sustainability, in terms of our influence on the flow of rivers and surrounding ecologies.

Im not sure how about rest of the world, but in Czech Republic we are already using most of our hydroelectric potential and it makes up for only 4% of electric consumption. I guess that most of developed countries are in similar ssitutation.

Why don't we just use big masses of steel rotating that are powered with abundant electricity and use them when said is needed. If they are oiled well or suspended in another efficient way, they might be very good at keeping their momentum. And they aren't very expensive, you could make steel containers and fill them with sand or rock. Just the suspension is difficult to build. Maybe some kind of magnets would work. But probably not electric ones...

nice meme

yeah thorium molten salt reactors are pretty interesting.

I'm glad to hear another person say something like that. :D

Problem with nuclear is the safety rings around it that prevent alot of km in radios from being built in.

nuclear power is constant, it can't be added or removed at the drop of a hat.

Yes, but it's still a store of energy from gravitational collapse.

Nuclear power can be very responsive, depending on how you design the reactor. The plants in nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers can ramp up and down quickly, for example. You're right that most of the ones currently built for power generation can't do it very well though. The French have a shedload of nuclear power and load-follow with it pretty effectively, without using highly enriched uranium like the military reactors, so it can be done in civilian applications. Most existing reactors don't even bother trying because the fuel costs are so low compared to the capital and operating costs that you can practically give the power away and it still makes more economic sense than having your multi-billion-dollar investment sitting idle.

But Fission isn't renewable.

You can recycle nuclear fuel for longer than the Sun will last. Plus, Thorium, a nuclear fuel, is brought up with almost any ore, especially rare earths, so we'd be running off the wasteproducts of mining.

It'd still last alot longer than hydrocarbons, and pollutes less if you do it right. (The US doesn't, and seemingly never will.)

In the VERY long term? No. But Gen IV reactors will be able to create more fuel-grade fissile material than they consume, and in future we may be able to gather it from space.

We just have to buy enough time to develop fusion, and than we are good for a few quadrillion years.

Apparently those have issues with containing molten salts. We may not have a reactor vessel capable of holding them.

Or fusion which run on hydrogen and the only bi-product is completely fresh water. A few years in the future but its amazing.

+ReddwarfIV Two prototype reactors were running for years in the '60s, so it's not impossible. Corrosion is a problem, but not unsolvable. And it's also possible to build the reactor for 20 years instead of 60 and then the corrosion is less important.

+TangoNation Radioactive helium, not fresh water. And then the protective plates in the reactor that become radioactive and have to be replaced at regular intervals. But it's quite tame compared to fission in terms of waste.

Miku Chan Ah never-mind then. I stand corrected ha

Probly

Probably. 50Hz by definition means 50 times a second.

+ReddwarfIV Yeah, but that's the frequency of the AC delivered at the end; it needn't be the same as the rotor's revolutions per second. Of course, while it's to be expected that the rotor would have more than one coil/magnet along its circumference, it's rather harder to imagine a setup with _less_ than one. But that doesn't preclude some mechanical or electrical shenanigans between the turbine and the output.

50hz is after the gearbox.

Yes. The ones used in power plants are typically something like 3,000 or 3,600 RPM. (Google Siemens SST-900 for an example.)

Tesla literally setup a country wide system of charging stations for the U.S..

***** so what, everyone plans a few hours of their day to hang around at those charging stations?

It only takes a few minutes to get a full charge. and the tech only gets. You already spend time at gas stations. Stop being short sighted.

Those are called superchargers, because it only takes 20-30 minutes. Those cars can go up to 400 kms without recharging, so you would probably only use superchargers if you went for a longer trip, otherwise you can just charge it at home during night. If I recall correctly those superchargers are also free!

***** standard SAEJ1772 can charge at ~20kW and the modelS has like 60-90kWh batteries, now do the math how long it takes. Even with superchargers you provide 120kW, which takes at least 30min for small 60kWh batteries (assuming 100% efficieny btw.)

Politicians are the biggest parasites on the planet. They feed on us until the day we die. The dont contribute to society they can only take from society.

The power outage wasnt caused by a single turbine. it was caused by an entire wind farm AND a gas fired plant shutting down. As for cars used for back up, the system is designed to be intelligent with the owners deciding how much to contribute. Typically the grid will only request about 3% of any vehicle's capacity, but the owner can inhibit any contribution for a planned long journey the next day or increase contribution if they plan not to use the car.

Because wind is the ONLY source of renewable energy on the planet! AND there are NO ways to store energy! AND we can NOT invent new ways of storing energy because as everyone knows technology is NOT advancing at an incredible rate! Also the battery thing Tom mentioned. Doesn't sound like the most brilliant idea assuming that you might actually want to drive that car but it's a start.

I had a good chuckle from that, he's referencing a line from Citation Needed! Episode 1x06, about Neckarwestheim, give it a watch when you have the time! (I would link it, but it would mark my comment as spam...)

Nuclear is only part of the solution, nations should maximize their potential to generate electricity from renewables, let nuclear guarantee supply when the wind isn't blowing or the sun isn't shining. Nuclear plants still have to be "fueled", solar, wind, tidal et al just need to be maintained.

@@davidkeenan5642 What I meant is that the main source/baseload is nuclear toped of with hydro, gas, and renewables.

Basicly this. The Tesla Powerl Wall already works towards that solution. Combined with the cars, you do really have a lot of "small" batteries.

Let's hope it is actually cost effective, unlike hyper loop

+SECONDQUEST Hyperloop is more of a concept. And it could work on very busy routes in the future, but we aren't ready for it.

The vacuum train you speak of was from victorian era. A maglev train in an evacuated tube is a much different beast... The one cannot be compared to the other for purposes of saying "the Hyperloop will not work." The vacuum train did work, by the way. Just never very fast or reliably (because it was the victorian era and things like standardized parts hadn't been invented yet), and wound up being more of a tourist attraction than anything.

that and the seals were made of leather because plastics just simply weren't there and rats ate them

No they're having a very good day operating at their normal speeds

Reread -- per SECOND. most steam turbines run at around 3000-3600 rpm to generate the 60 hz electricity output we need. "thousands per second = minimum 2000 per second * 60 = 120,000 revs per MINUTE. Giant turbines would rip themselves apart at that speed.

Actually that would make things worse. Because synchronous generators are reversible, when the wind wasn't blowing quite right then the generator would act as a motor and suck power from the grid to keep turning at 50Hz, and because wind comes in gusts it'll never quite be blowing right. That's why actual wind turbines don't use synchronous generators and don't contribute to grid stability.

They cannot provide inherent (no delay) inertia since they are decoupled from the grid but they could provide synthetic inertia (through power converter controls). However, synthetic inertia has a lot of issues (measuring df/dt - time delays due to filtering, limited wind turbine rotor speed deviations, non-ideal tip speed ratio - second frequency dip...)

The kinetic energy being transferred to electric energy is done with near 100% efficiency