The Truth About Pumped Hydro 

Ha

Nebula saved'em.

“What is sleep?”

You can't handle the truth

It's funny what people write and get 100s of likes

And this comment section is full of them.

That's the trouble. The world is full of idiots with simple solutions to complex problems.

You're so right, hydrogen, batterys, pumped hydro, biomass. Theywillall e usedin some kind of area sooner or later.

There is a silver bullet. Its called nuclear. wth

Yeah you need a gun that can fire silver bullets and cartridges and all that jazz

Nuclear and pumped hydro sounds like a great winning combo for the environment indeed! Too bad we don't hear a lot about your country's success on this matter, thanks for sharing.

That's amazing. I only wish Germany would be this ahead in carbon neutral energy production. Instead we went all in on natural gas while at the same time throtteling renewables and shutting down nuclear power plants. Now we have one of the worst energy productions, in terms of CO2 output, while also being among the most expensive in the world. 🥲

@@GiorgosKoukoubagia In news, its mostly negativity that gets all the attention, why post about some country's success when you could talk about dumb climate activist gluing themselves on the highway, or talk about nuclear disasters for the billionth time. Honestly if Slovakia's success were spread, maybe many more countries could be half way on their way to carbon neutral.

way to go slovaks! my country (Indonesia) is a net coal producer, so that's reflected on our electricity generation, and with neither soviets nor developed countries as our neighbor, putting up nuclear plant is kinda difficult

What about that last 1%, what produces it? 😁

I dont think a lot of New Zealanders appreciate the scale of the Lake Onslow Scheme, the total worldwide installed pumped hydro storage capacity is somewhere around 10TWh, Lake Onslow is currently penciled in to possibly be 5TWh, but it could theoretically be up to 12TWh if they go for the maximum possible. We could literally have the majority of the worlds pumped hydro capacity in one lake.

@@kecuthbertson Is Science all you keep yourself updated about?

1/8 of the total ANNUAL consumption in one single storage site is insane

still stock footage is quite good in this types of videos

The empirical measurement for a hydro-dam flow, Good Friday shoppers' stampede, and a horse pissing,

Truly a beautiful machine. I love engineering, especially when it comes to renewables, but this makes me love it 10000x more

Perfect name for a metal band.

That implies the existence of a Godly rush. Ungodly is water flowing down and godly is water flowing up?

Why not? we already have "fuckton" anyway

I worked on a sewer trunk line once that required crossing a creek and then scaling a hill. Once built the pump pushed sewage up the hill, and was then shut off, as a siphon effect kept it flowing.

Sea or Ocean exchange is exactly what I was thinking. I wonder how many natural locations there are. My first thought was Dover Cliffs in England. There should multiple location in the Americas in a variety of locations. Either way this is good basic tech with minimal operating costs, good efficiency and durable.

@@johnnysystem2579 the main problem with pump/storage now days is the deregulation of the power industry has leveled the prices between day and night. In the past the price extremes between very low at night and astronomical in the day have ruined the business model for pump storage to be cycled daily, it is now being used more now as a source of reserve in emergencies since the difference between day and night costs seldom covers the pumping losses. At best they are typically not better than 67% efficient. There are other situations where greater efficiency can be had but not in a simple isolated pump/ storage hydro plant. With the experience I’ve had in pump/storage, the greatest element when storing energy is the cycle efficiency. Every time I see mention of grid tied electric cars for storage it makes me laugh. Never have i ever seen a number for the charge/discharge efficiency of a lithium battery, lots of other information but not that, oh and you have a limited cycle life, and your going to waste charging cycles helping out the power grid for pennies in exchange. Not something I would ever do.

@@tbix1963 I agree with some points but not with others. The efficiency for LI batteries is freely available, there is even a video done by this channel. Leveling out the day/night cycle would result in massive savings. Where I live we dump power every night in huge quantities. If you understand power then you know the effect on power factor. By moving all consumer power to electric you move the problem to the source and make it that much easier to effect change in the future. No one said this was easy and there is no one solution and I don't believe we will get there on time to stop irreversible climate change but at least one, maybe two generations get to live on earth. After that bend over and kiss your ...

@@johnnysystem2579 over 30 years ago when I first started in the industry there was plenty of dump energy that you could get to the pumps and it was a wonderful experience turning waste energy into a useful product the next day. Unfortunately after deregulation the market I live and used to work in has been modified to protect the reliability of the system ahead of economics. There is plenty of dump energy out there at times but it’s usually limited behind transmission constraints that prevent it getting to where it’s needed. Deregulation took a system that worked and modified it so uninvolved persons could play in its market and make money off of the ratepayers. In doing so system reliability had to be preserved and limiting rules were created to allow the market to function without endangering the reliability of the system to the ratepayers. Just took a peak at the publicly available data from yesterday. For the region with pump storage and the next cheapest region. Daytime $44/MW and next door $34/MW. Night time. $128/MW in the pumping region and next door $44/MW. Very interesting data, from my experience I can tell you that they were likely pumping to restore required reserves for reliability driving the prices to insane levels in that region. Pumping at $128/MW will result in a price in the pond of $191/MW in the pond plus the typical adder of $5 for maintenance. The energy put back into the pond will now need to sell at $196/MW just to break even. In the old days we used to have an in the pond price of $12.4 in the pond and typical daytime prices were between $18 and $38. There was plenty of room to make savings that we passed on to the ratepayers. Today all the savings are eaten away by the overhead of the market and extra involved players that didn’t exist pre deregulation. As for the efficiency of LI I’ve seen numbers posted but never actually put in context so it would be useful. I seriously doubt the numbers they post are applicable to be used for actual economic calculations, hopefully I’m wrong. Just what are the cycle efficiency of LI batteries anyway? Just take the energy needed to charge and the actual energy you get out. I know that for the pump/storage I used to run that for every 100MW we pumped we only got back 67MW and that was after being upgraded to state of the art. For LI you would need to compare the energy into the charger than the energy received after the inverter since the energy into the battery has to come from somewhere and the DC in the battery isn’t very useful until it’s converted back to AC. The efficiency of the battery alone isn’t very useful, you need the efficiency of the entire system used to store and deliver the energy to the doorstep of the plant.

Ugh. Work safety standards were not so high back than.

He was just drying his hair

Oh my God, clearly pre-OSHA work conditions.

You better hope he never has a eureka moment down there...

@@CaptainBill22 and how does this correlate to a man doing maintenance below a giant spinning wheel of doom

let's hope Bill gate's book can keep sponsoring Real Engineering :)

Yup

But do u know how much lobbying cost, pretty sure thats changes subsidies especially with competition. Remember when Saudi oil didn't like American fracking competition? And what also just happened just one year ago. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-DebpajQGRV0.html They were trying to flood the market and that dropped prices to being free for a full month in the american market due to them using all their ships at once and only so much oil can be refined at a time while ships have to keep moving otjer wise it cost them money. My dude, the subsidies are not the issue when it comes to constant market control globally and constant regional monopolies that want to be the only game in town. Crack open a book.

I like that reality.

@@marcusjackson5837 Who are you talking to?

"imagine having to excavate large amounts of material and ruin the natural environment to store energy" - Not sure if this post was made by battery storage or pumped hydro because both do this.

Elon Musk is in danger of stealing Thomas Midgley Jr's crown as history's most toxic organism. Pushing batteries for green energy storage, pushing his idiotic transport schemes harming viable mass transit projects not to mention there being a good argument that his disruption of the EV market will delay mass market penetration by years if not decades.

​@@dairallan ...What? I'd argue that if Tesla did not popularize EV, we might not be seeing a huge surge in the EV market within this generation. I mean, I never expected old-auto like GM, Chevy, and others to come out with an electric car *ever* and take it seriously. The only exception would be Nissan with their Leaf but barely anyone liked that car until the later versions when its range got better. Perhaps Musk did not revolutionize anything, but he and his company definitely made the waves to get the others to hustle, and that's something to consider. And that's how I can summarize Elon Musk: the wavemaker. Whether or not he personally succeeds or fails is irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. He's influencing others to haul ass or be left behind whether it's in the EV market, solar, power storage, space industry, internet, and tunnel boring --- whatever. I'd argue that people are innovating faster because of him and it's resulting in newer, greener technologies.

@@BrokenLifeCycle The standard product model for manufacturing sees established producers adopt new technology, then leverage the cash stream from high value Early Adopters to fund bringing the line to the mass market. Musk has subverted that cash flow with, albeit clever manifacture of hype, and with no ability to bring EVs to the mass market. indeed established manuifacturers (with often far superior products) have seen failure after failure to entice early adopters and severaly hampered the standard model. Musk has easily added 10 years to EV adoption which was building significantly driven by established players unti lhe "disrupted" the market.

It isnt black or white, transportation of eletricity over great distances leads to loses and not every place can build a dam, there are alot of ways to store energy hydrogen production and "hot rock" ar the ones I think have a lot of potencial

I'd be a little more impressed (or maybe not) if I knew what the prediction timeframe was. 5 minutes, 30 minutes, 12 hours. It needs to be sufficient to enable load balancing from whatever is providing the base load generation (whatever that might be).

@@Thermalions there are dates on the x axis, I think we’re looking at a (roughly) one month graph

@@thomas.02 But that doesn't reflect how far in advance that fairly accurate prediction is being done for that month. It's like weather predictions generally - they naturally get more accurate the closer you are to the time being predicted.

​@@Thermalions oh I see what you mean, my bad for the confusion i guess the general rule would be they'd do it as accurate as required say if they need a couple of hours to spin up the backup generators when demand increases then they'd need to predict the wind at least a couple of hours in advance

Its not that hard to predict wind turbine power for 5-7 days ahead.. Its to some extent easier than prediction the weather. Also its not that hard to predict how the average wind will be over the next season, we have plenty of data for that. The issue is that predicting is not the same as controlling. While the pump power storage look huge.. in matter of time they can give power, its really just matter of hours, possible a day or two ... But we really need it to last at least two weeks. A other issue is the efficiency. Even with 80% efficiency (and that is really the high end), you really don´t wan´t to run them if you don´t need to. That is.. wind and solar unplanability is not solveable with pumped hydro, batteries or hydrogen. Nothing will work. Also even the largest pumped hydro stations are tiny. 292MW of power is a pittyfull amount. Compare that to one single nuclear reactor at 1600MW, and that is 24/7. The irony of it is that a nuclear power reactor that PRODUCE power is actually cheaper MW per MW than all storage alternatives. Pretty much rendering wind and solar utterly useless.

I’m watching you

🤨

he is like santa or a stalker

@@RealEngineering oh no

I'd close your curtains

Not really: centuries of observation give you an incredible amount of data to work with or train your NN; I think any European coastal area could duplicate this; ...and then you add earth observation satellites.

the Texas grid ERCOT site has panels for about a dozen key stats which update all day. Well worth a watch - one of them is the projected day output for both wind and solar. Pretty accurate projections, and I say that knowing the time intervals they're using are a bit blocky. Its just ercot and a business domain ending - then look for dashboards. You can do things like watch the fuel mix panel, current day and see what percentage is currently coming from which generation sources at various hours ... pretty decent site and you can see the correlation between prices and such as well. I'm sure as time passes, their increased data set for weather and use patterns will get more and more accurate as well. TX is the largest electricity generating state in the US by almost 2x over FL. Last year they got about 32% of annual total from just wind and solar as a set.

Disagree. While truthful, this was wholly incomplete with no mention of any of the preexisting hydroelectric dams that have yet to be augmented by water reclamation pumps. Therefore, the number of storage reservoirs necessary is inflated.

@@davebauman4991 you could possibly say this video was on a very specific topic and idea.

If he grew his hair just a little bit longer...........

Ah yes, the days before Health and Safety was invented!

Two words. Remote readout.

@@Brian_Friesen he would get free haircuts.

Don’t wear long sleeved shirts.

I have a feeling they might be using a variable pitch impeller....

Aussie here, not a hydroelectric engineer but I looked into this some time ago when the climate change denialists started banging on about the "waste and pointlessness" of our Snowy Mountains pumped hydro project, since I had the same questions mentioned here. As with many significant choices on large infrastructure projects, the design comes down to money; in this case, total operating cost over the projected lifespan of the facility. For a pumped hydro station, the electrical generation/interconnection side of things is largely a solved problem that can be budgeted pretty accurately. Most of the complexity/uncertainty (therefore the lion's share of the costs) comes down to hydraulic engineering, "where the rubber meets the road" or more accurately where the water meets the wheel. That "ungodly rush of water" necessary to generate meaningful power requires some insane levels of robustness and safety/redundancy in all the pipework, valves, control systems etc., costs commensurate with requirements and rising exponentially with added complexity due to the engineering time and specialised manufacturing required. More equipment and pipework means more earthworks are required, so capital costs are higher there too. Maintenance over the operating lifespan is also a major concern; basically a fixed cost for the generators, much harder to predict for the hydraulic stuff. Long story short, simpler is better, cheaper, easier to maintain, more economically attractive. All of those considerations outweigh the relatively small efficiency gain to be had by running seperate pumping/generation systems and their associated water handling components.

@@oadka I wondered about that too, but I don't think so. The Engineering challenges in building a variable-pitch impeller with that kind of mass that can spin at 500rpm and deal with the forces involved would be.... considerable. Not impossible, but very very expensive. And think of the maintenance costs! I'm fairly certain that the impellers are solid units which are optimised through simulation to be as efficient as possible when generating flow in either direction. Typically the design would lean more towards efficiency in generation mode, since you want to get the absolute maximum out of the potential energy when required. Pumping the water back uphill can stand to be a little less efficient since it's being done off-peak when power costs are cheaper.

I'm from Donegal, sure we could go 100% wind, there's bare wind all the time.

good luck for Ireland

Honestly same

Same here 😂 electrical engineering* 😂😂

He inspires us all

He is keeping me away from homework and online lectures🤣

Godspeed man. I thought I would be able to become an engineer for the sake of the renewable revolution but I found the maths and physics too difficult for me

This is actually a really incisive point. One of the ways of reducing energy problems is by smoothing out energy loads. Right now the grid is like an 87 lane wide highway with all the cars next to each other. It has to be wide enough to carry the very worst traffic during rush hour without slowing down at all. If that load can be spread out it would significantly reduce the amount of power necessary to store. One way I've proposed of solving this problem is by offering government subsidies directly to people who log internet-of-things-automated appliances in to an online controller, which would use location and energy data to determine when those appliances turn on in order to spread their loads. This means that clothes driers and dish washers and such could be filled when people are home, but activated to turn on while they're at work, or even asleep. You get your clothes and dishes done for you (to some extent) and even get some money for doing it (which could easily come from energy production savings) and the grid itself gets smoothed-out energy draws. Something similar is being practiced in California, I'm told, but the state-subsidies idea is my own, which I intend to propose to lawmakers once the automated appliance technology is sufficiently developed. As for that... I'm working on it. Similarly, passively heated housing and housing that stores thermal energy will likely flatten that particular curve as well.

My father was an area controller for a power company all his life and he said just this. When 500,000 stoves come on, it takes a fair bit to power them.

Technically tax credits, not subsidies.

@@RandomAmbles 00

@@RandomAmbles This is already being done in Pennsylvania with water heaters, kind of... Well, with the electric cooperatives at least. With a load control device installed on the water heater, the co-op can shut this off during times of high electric usage. Members who have them, get a credit or discount on their monthly bill.

SShhhhh

Don't ask intelligent questions. Just go along with the narrative.

Nuclear starts looking real good when you ask that question.

Coming from decades of experience in the oil and gas industry, they're just as reliant on subsidies as anyone, especially since 2016. I don't have a problem with subsidies either way, but the way they are used. For example I worked on a significant compressor upgrade subsidy, entirely paid by the provincial government. A few teams of 20 guys and equipment went around the province and upgraded about 200 each. It was good work and we were paid for it. Now the equipment was supposed to produce less nox and be about 10% more efficient. Sounds good, except the oil companies sold a significant amount of the upgraded units outside of the country. So inevitably the subsidy only padded company coffers and did little for the environment locally.

Yeah, that my my immediate thought as well. He did not refute the statement at all.

Elfin Safety would love that setup :)

Yep. Don’t stand up.

Caught my eye as well.

2:13

Lol that’s his hiding spot at work 😹

GAGAGAGAGAGA!!! I watched this video and it is really not that good compared to my perfect videos. GAGAGAGAGA!!! This is NOT self-promotion! This is the reality! This is the world! We are the people! Don't disl****ke my vide*****s, my dear oscae

@@AxxLAfriku wtff

@@AxxLAfriku ok

@@AxxLAfriku i disliked

It's unfortunate that Bill Gates has co-opted this channel. It's just a religion now.

Those US maize subsidies are pretty hefty, I've heard.

If I remember correctly, he said that more renewable capacity was installed. For renewables at least, the main cost is installation. For me the best comparison would be subsidies per new kw of capacity installed times the load factor.

@@C4pt41nN3m0 some of those skilled do seem to be inordinately ... fond ... of a good corn-cobbing.

Wouldn't cost per KwH be misleading in a different way? Subsidizes tend to be given to new electric generation moreso than maintenance. He mentioned that 75% of new electric sources are renewable.

That makes sense to use absolute over per kwh because to really get into where the subsidies are going it would become to long to fit into the video and per kwh would be even more misleading in own ways.

No PPE either. Simpler times.

@@PnlBtr manlier times

He's gonna get a haitcut

*OSHA has entered the chat*

@@3dpyromaniac560 Pointlessly riskier times. Being maimed so you're no good to anyone doesn't make you manlier. Sure, some OH&S stuff goes over-board and is annoying, but lowering accidents and deaths in general across a number of types of work is only a good thing. Insurance crap stopping stuff from happening - now that's another issue.

Yes! It may be the most important public education campaign in human history!

I get that Nuclear plants are inherently safe, but the waste is a long-term nightmare.

@@mrmobius Thank you for providing an example for the comment above yours. (fission fuel cells can be used it other types of reactor, so it isn't long-term waste, it is "future fuel".)

@@mrmobius which is why we need to actually work on a plan for that, probably at the same time we work on the climate change one. Thorium reactors are an important step that should be pushed forward because it's less dangerous in the waste aspect. And that long term storage site that the US started building but has never used would be nice to get running

You can reuse the waste moreover use can use much cleaner and cheap thorium, convert it to uranium from the energy by waste reusing but setting up these types of combination plants require a shitload of money So no one wants to invest in building one rather people are focusing on hydrogen

Though, of course, you'd have to build pumped storage for the nuclear power. That's what pumped storage is mostly used for, at least on my continent.

@@bearcubdaycare the continuous operation of plants would help reduce the need for that, although cooling pools and just water supplies for plants in general takes lots of water

again, the right tool at the right time and place Ireland need both base load power generation and fast acting power storage we need both, not one or the other

@@bee5440 continuous operation doesn't help you when its night and nobody wants the energy... if you only have slow reacting nuclear powerplants you need a ton of storage aswell or you will have to discard most of their power most times of the day

Energy = life, The more energy the higher the standard of living and the less poverty. The less poverty the less unnecessary death. Deliberately choosing to not use the most energy dense per £ invested sources is amoral. It is choosing someone elses life over your feelings.

@@James-sk4db Are you arguing for or against renewables? Gravity battery or lithium ion?

@@kstricl Im arguing against anti-fossil fuel, but i'm all for renewables, so long as they are cost effective, hydro-electro and geothermal come to mind as well as nuclear. If you have £1bn to invest in energy you should use it to use it to generate the absolute most energy possible as the more you produce the less scarcity there is in the rest of the world.

Came here to post this!

In another post, I asked if it works in freezing weather, but if it works in Michigan then the cold must not be a problem.

Hermonie voice : How can it be nearly 50 years?

I live an hour from turloc hill, the facility he referenced in the video.

How are your property values? Is it an eyesore? That seems to be one of the arguments people make against them lmao.

In New Zealand hydro the compressed air system is referred to as tail water depression (TWD) which allows the rotor to spin unimpeded. I think on this mode they can generate reactive power to counteract imbalances from inductive devices.

I was a Bush Walloper many years ago and I shot a number of roos and emus that tourists thought were friendly until the animal concerned gutted them with one kick, some men and women were not killed but they weren't ever going to have children. Most of the kids died very quickly.

@@edwardanderson4678 Yeah they usually show polar bears on TV after the blood's been rinsed off.

Oh for real? I tried to find cool examples, but that didn’t come up in my search.

Indeed, the El Hierro 100% renewable island has been huge for a while, said to be the best example of such a solution, and it is.... Because it's a massive failure, the whole thing is so far from the claimed 100% renewable that it is laughable. No wonder it doesn't pop up anymore besides being used as an example of what such a "solution" brings: - Massive price increase in power cost - Blackouts - Still more than 50% of all electricity is produced by diesel generators This is exactly what this solution brings and is that perfect example of what _NOT_ to do.

@@RealEngineering www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/11/10/2812/htm Easy to find information on that, but some pro-renewable sites have removed all mentions of it, I wonder why...

@@RealEngineering for a visit Cruachan (built1965) is a cracker and the climb up the Ben (Cruachan) is dramatic and almost lunar.

El Heirro: What Kind Of Pumps Do They Use? Wind? Perhaps They Could Also Include A Battery Of Freznel Based Solar Condensation Pressure Boilers, With Hydraulic Pistons, Check Valves, And Inline Drop Points, Similar To A Combination Of Heart Pump Mechanisms And Transpiration, To Supplement To Pumping Operations? In Proper Applications, It Can Not Only Basically Combust Water Instantaneously, But Distill It As Well, While Producing Excess Extractable Energy. Fo Realz.

Fossil fuel industry is more than 4x bigger. But I thought that too, because fossil fuels are dominating the energy sector and renewables are a fraction of that. Moreover, fossil fuels are highly taxed.

I took a class on energy systems, people have some dumb ideas about energy storage like in mechanical kinetic systems (flywheels), blocks on hills (rail storage), and heating a large block for later use. And the worst offender is lithium ion batteries which degrade by cycle lives to need replacement every 2-3 years. But then there are some good methods like electrolyzing hydrogen for later and pumped hydro.

@@jasonreed7522 why do you need peak density for a lithium ion battery when it’s for the grid. Use recycled lithium ion batteries smh

@@jasonreed7522 Not sure what you see a "dumb" about any of those ideas..? Flywheel is probably the worst of them because of the massive friction losses, but there's a lot of work on reducing that via maglev systems and the like (yes the magnets would induce a loss of their own, but as long as that's less than the loss due to friction in something like a ball bearing wheel, its still a net win). Of course you're never going to scale a single rail car to 292Mw or whatever the number was, but there's also no reason you'd have to - just have a whole fleet of them covering a mountainside. Perhaps not the most aesthetically pleasing structure in the world but entirely doable. All of those methods have drawbacks yes, but so does pumped hydro and so does hydrogen electrolysis.. and so does not even trying and just continuing to burn a shit ton more fossil fuels. And every individual power station's needs will be different (political, geological, etc) so having many options available with different benefit/drawback tradeoffs is never going to be a bad thing.

@@altrag Modern flywheels don't need to have massive friction losses. You can run them in a vacum chamber on magnetic bearings. The loss is below 10%/day. Doesn't work for long-term storage, but for short-term storage and compensating fluctuation in the grid, it strikes me as an interesting option. The flywheel can switch from storing to releasing energy in a fraction of a second and unlike a battery, it can provide some grid inertia. Not sure how well it scales though.

@@Bird_Dog00 Battery systems like Tesla's installation in Australia can switch in milliseconds. Speed definitely isn't an issue with batteries. As for scaling.. that's not really _hard_ per se - just build a bunch of them and hook them together. There's definitely going to be an engineering limit for building bigger and bigger individual flywheels, but not really for building as many as you want in a row. That's mostly a cost and land use issue.

Why did fossil received any subsidies at all? The gov is paying the companies that are destroying the planet :/

Even trickier is the definition of "subsidy". Some would just take the amount in cash grants as subsidy, and draw the line there. Others would take a look at the entire costs of fossil fuels paid for by government-- including the cost of clean ups and disaster compensations, and consider that part of the whole subsidy picture. There's little doubt in my mind that if the full costs of environmental clean ups various governments have paid for over the years showed up directly at the gas pump, we'd have been either peddling bikes or driving electric cars for decades already. The only thing that makes fossil fuels so attractive, price wise, is that it's probably our biggest "social program".

@@julianatlas5172 renewables aren't much better either. Nuclear is the way to go.

@@julianatlas5172 agreed, also a carbon tax to account for the negative externalities of fossil fuels would level the playing field until renewables become a real solution to feed our industrial energy hunger.

@@julianatlas5172 Define destroying the planet. I want you to take a beach or mountain vacation only to see a wind farm. I want you to give the ok to have a wind turbine set up in your back yard and a water storage unit installed above your family home? Everything is fine until it directly impacts you or your property value. Or better yet do your part and live without electricity, gas and oil. Take your whining to the polluting counties that are the real root cause of this so called "global warming" instead of fixing a problem that has little to do with the western world. www.ventusky.com/?p=33;-126;1&l=pm25

I had to put my volume to the max to hear it, but yeah, it's there.

Pumped storage are mainly installed to support nuclear stations by consuming electricity when demand is low and generating when it is high. Their main function was to regulate the grid when the demands is low as you can't regulate a nuc plant down in output. The pumping plants were built as part of the nuclear project. The main issue stopping more which plants is the economics. There is no real economics vehicle to pay the plants for regulating the grid as an independent plant storage from a nuclear plant. They get paid for just straight power production and that doesn't provide a reasonable return on investment

Ireland's geography is a major hurdle. Not enough of the right kind of hills. Plus, considering the way the country does budgets, (cough, New Children's Hospital) we'd spend more on it than ITER are spending on their fusion reactor.

@@laredobenjamin7438 recent reactors can go down to 25%, which still isn’t totally off. Back in the ‘70s, you were lucky to be able to bring it down to 50%, 75% was more common if any at all was done. Though I agree with your point about baseload, yet the original point Jeff made about the build planning to be to support the nuclear project was true. It was projected to need a lot more storage with a majority-nuclear grid. That’s where the political will for pumped hydro came from. Even though they can be useful for any baseload supply today. Not to mention, absorbing the unused power at night is only part of it. Another contributing factor was being able to absorb _demand spikes._ Even if you’re able to ramp up your nuclear from 50 to 100, you don’t want to have to cut off supply while it’s rising. It’s demand-shaving, like most grid scale batteries are offering now, and like water towers and gasometers always allowed. Again, as part of the political idea in the ‘60s and ‘70s of using nuclear for basically everything, not just baseload, they figured they’d need to be able to absorb pretty large demand spikes. Thus, pumped hydro was presented as the solution.

@@laredobenjamin7438 you are correct that it "can" be done... however, it takes a long time to change load and stabilize thereby making it so you need an alternate method of consuming the electricity... hence pumped storage...

There was a group a while back called 'The Spirit of Ireland' that wanted to dam off hydraulically isolated valleys facing towards the sea on the west coast (They found a few suitable sites) and use them as reservoirs for pumped seawater. Nothing came of it because every square mm of land in this country is owned by someone, and even if they're sub-subsistence farming (Couldn't survive on farming income without EU grants) it - they would still delay any construction for decades or indefinitely in the courts. Irish people are not fans of taking people's land - even if they're extremely well compensated for it.

If the fuel cell is inside a home you can use (un)waste directly as heating and create sterile drinking water.

You can also incinerate trash to boil water thus turning it a steam turbine, we can almost eliminate land fills

50 years ago, climate wasnt part of the equation

Co2, when pumped back into the ground, takes up more space than the stuff it was mined from. You will run out of old mines before you make a meaningful impact on the problem, and most surface or close to surface mines cannot be used for this at all, for obvious reasons...

It’s like they say about fusion.. “Hydrogen’s the wave of the future, and it always will be”😆

You basically just said “salt water bad” in like five different ways.

I wonder if they could desalinate the water during the conversion to make up some of the lost efficiency somehow... or get the added benefit of turning salt water to fresh water before it gets pumped. No more extra maintenance due to the salt and its drinkable...🤷‍♂️

imagine the number of salt water organisms that will be killed as they are pumped back and forth through a salt water system. Then the amount of maintenance keeping the barnacles from growing and clogging it up. I'd say there were lots of downsides to it.

How dare you ask for important contextual information!

As of 2010, estimated subsidies per unit of energy produced were about 6 times higher for solar. That would not have looked quite as good in the video, I assume...

@@Alexander_Kale 2010 was over a decade ago. The price of solar, and the subsidies for solar, have gone down significantly since then.

This is the main thing that makes me skeptical when listening to any green energy advocate: the amount of intentional misinformarion. I was also really surprised to see this "fact" at the beginning of the video and went looking for the real number.

Factor in over TCO- subsidies for installation (and maintenance) ve. subsidies for installation, maintenance, AND ALL FUEL USED. There's no comparison, fuel is a continuing cost of operation.

With proper voltage, even over 500 km of power lines can have negligible losses.

Obviously. It was uploaded less time ago than the length of the video.

3.1x speed is a thing.

@@recklessroges I believe that only serves to prove my point.

While there will always be people who comment just from seeing the title, most of the comments stem from his opening statement that renewable energy is cheaper than traditional power generation without doing the math and showing the proof. It may even actually have become cheaper with the increases in technology but he has provided no way of knowing and the one graph he supplied may as well be comparing apples to oranges. Both are fruit but have different components making up the whole and an analysis would only have taken a couple more minutes and silenced at least some of his critics. It always comes down to actually doing the math and starting at the beginning.

It's 2021. Folk don't need facts to have opinions. Are some sort of swivel eyed Communist?

Amen dude, was thinking the same thing!

There is certain agenda being pushed from this channel, to me, it's no longer 'True Engineering' but a marketing channel. It's really a shame though.

Valid point, and something I had wondered about when seeing that in the video. From another point of view: Why are there still subsidies for coal? If anything, there should be penalties for it's continued use.

@@threelowlys Yeah if he's taking sponsors from eugenicists like Bill Gates he can go get fucked. Enjoyed a lot of older videos but he seems to be on an agenda as an ideologue now. It is a shame.

@@johnsimpson99 do you realize how much of the world depends on coal and fossil fuels just to survive? Do you realize how many products are made from fossil fuels? If you ended them tomorrow, or started penalizing people for using them, it would destroy the economy and cause mass starvation. This isn’t combing from some rando on the internet. The world economic forum claimed that something like 10-50 million people would die if we immediately abandoned fossil fuel use. People like you have these grand, utopic ideas that are totally disconnected from reality. It is clear that you have zero idea how things are made, or how the world works.

You ok having every nation on world having access to nuclear power plants? Iran would like you to sign this petition.

@@Minuz1 This is the question of Proliferation, it is a huge and convoluted topic where I am not strong at all. You better tell me if it is economically or environmentally not viable and doesn't stand a chance to either traditional fossil fuel or green energy. Besides that, we don't even need to dig into proliferation at all. I have just read wiki article Nuclear power in Ireland, it is said nuclear fission energy is prohibited in Ireland. Since the video is about Ireland, the case closed.

It’s about power but it’s political power not electricity.

Even if we could, even if we respected each other's opinions. Would we be able to fix our global climate.

@@ppapshrek4485 that’s if the climate needs fixed. Way to many lies and inconsistencies to be sure.

@Robert Sears Very well then, perish together it is... Free will and all that good stuff, eh?

@@ljkking622 What humanity needs to do before our era comes to an end in one way or other is to figure out a way to fashion our human ecosystem into a more flexible enduring type that's able to withstand whatever happens with the planet... at least until we figure out how to make the jump into being a true space-faring species. As George Carlin and others have intimated, The Earth doesn't care. It will carry on regardless. It's only *our* survival that's at stake. There's probably not enough time or resources left to use before we move past too many tipping points to keep going down blind alleys with mega projects that don't lead to meaningful success. We're doing stupid things like wasting precious helium gas on party balloons. We're still burning off methane from landfills as a nuisance in some places without getting any work from the power. The list goes on. Being rival fanboys for various sorts of systems due to personal or national politics or employment/educational affiliation is NOT going to allow a rigorous scientific conclusion to be formed.

You’re stunning

@@insertyourfeelingshere8106NO YOU'RE STUNNING!! lmfao you made my day.

@@deformercr6680 You are stunning

And Brave 😎💅

Would you agree catastrophic weather related events are increasing? Do you agree putting all your eggs in one basket is risky? Now consider long term durability of renewables in an ever more volatile environment. One hurricane, tornado, or even wildfire vs countless square miles of power production. Now compare it to more traditional power stations protected by a concrete building in those same volatile weather events. Don't gamble everything playing roulette on the rare one tile of green.

​@@Cerberus984 A grid with distributed renewable generation is well suited to be reliable and improved recycling will allow perpetual maintenance. Renewables have won the competition for lowest cost generation. Large central power plants can work if they are carbon free, safe, and low cost, but current fossil and nuclear plants don't meet those requirements at low cost. We do need a highly interconnected grid with open markets and hardening of transmission and distribution especially in weather prone locations.

Exactly lol its like ‘dont use plastic its bad, use paper instead as it degrades’ Then ‘stop using paper you’re cutting down too many trees’

@@ultrascreens5206 In grad school (environmental engineering) we read a published research paper on the environmental impacts of paper vs plastic. It was interesting and broke down the number of plastic bags needs vs one paper and the electrical requirements to recycle both etc. Still came out nearly even, but the educational message that there is no magic bullet solution and improvement is the key.

Trying to be better about that. We have been behind schedule for a few months, but gradually catching up.

That's probably because you care about the truth, not about being told a naive beautiful fairy tale. The VP misguides his own viewers by showing that fossil fuels got 4x times more subsidies worldwide but conveniently forgets to mention that they generated 10+ times more power while also being a lot cheaper. In the Ukraine for example renewable energy is almost 10 times more expensive than nuclear but thru subsidies and taxes the government is trying to make them about the same price for the end customers which is yet another illusion about renewable's real cost. The truth is, except if real sunny places, nuclear or natural gas power plants are the best in terms of price, clean power, stability and abundance.

@@georgecarlin2656 thank you. I spent 8 years operating our great US Navy “nuclear powered” submarines and another 4 years earning my mechanical engineering degree with a minor in nuclear engineering. The biggest things holding nuclear back is the general public’s perception thereby influencing political decisions and all the red tape that makes them cost so much.

@@upperhandcustoms11 bingo

aight there's a whole debate around the concept of base load being outdated but even ignoring that theres a simple math problem with the nuclear option we have roughly 11 years to be completely carbon neutral or negative before climate change becomes irreversible the median construction time for a nuclear plant is around 10 years and many run late, up to 20-25 years does playing chicken with the apocalypse sound like a responsible thing to do?

@@sabotabby3372 you know that the earth goes through natural temperature cycles right? Ever heard of the ice age? Did you know that there was more than 1 of them? Even if we as humans have had an impact on our planets environment, there is nothing that we can do to stop Mother Nature. Also do you know how many decades people have been saying that the world is going to end due to climate change? I’ve been hearing it since the 1980’s and I’m sure it’s likely older than that. In the last 75 years our planets average temperature has only risen 1 degree. Hardly a planet destroying number.

Most of your electricity is from France

@@pdeuart1306 I think you forgot to substract the exports from that number... But it is true that we run our pumped hydro plants with nuclear energy from France

Bill Gates. Lying with statistics, again..

A few billionaires which are nowhere near expert in climate science and renewable energy pushed their pet project, which goodwill elite and middle class parrot without researching deeply. And then the world’s poor starve and die for expensive energy. Just another excuse to ask government to subsidy these so called “clean energy”. We do not need solar panel, which is at 20% solar energy absorption rate. We have plants which are much more efficient at absorbing solar energy. Yet we are cutting down Forrest to lay out solar farm. How dump is that. That’s what happens when you have government subsidy.

Bro don't be overly confident, you guys are destroying rivers and forests to build your hydro dams

Big dam destroy humans and nature hehe

@@rfldss89 this problem can be easily solved just by finding a better place to put the dam, the itaipu dam, the biggest brazilian dam, its placed on a very good place as its as precarious the condition before it. Would be a wrong if we build one on the amazon river, but thanks God that Brazil has many rivers

@@caorusso4926 LOL, Belo Monte says hi.

@@FastSloth87 i see nothing wrong on that, the land is from the federal government and every possible action was taken

Been using that paper for a lot of this energy storage series. Primary reference paper really. Lovely graphics.

nice :D

@@RealEngineering he said it "made his day"! If you need any more contacts with researchers on this, subscribe to my channel... (sorry I couldn't resist) but drop me a message and I can try link you with people :)

Because water is abundant, heavy, and the technology for its use is basically the same as any other hydropower setup so the expertise for its use is cheaper than a novel design.

You're missing everything. Water and wind are fluids, that's why we can use pumps and turbines to store/release energy. Please see the mass flow rate in a typical hydro turbine and calculate how many boulders you'll need per second to generate that kind of electricity.

@@Chopper153 I get that we don’t want to rebuild the entire infrastructure to use boulders. What I am suggesting is you put an old cargo ships on the water and load it up with weights. Wouldn’t that increase the total gravitational potential that we are storing and give us a way to get more out of the system? I feel there is a flaw in my thinking, just can’t think my way to find it.

@@Rkcuddles How will floating a heavy mass on the top lake increase potential energy? Potential energy depends on height of water body, not on things floating on it.

@@Rkcuddles In order for a ship to float, it has to displace the same weight of water as the ship weighs. So if you want to float a thousand ton ship, you lose a thousand tons of water (at the same height in the reservoir). Ultimately you aren't raising and lowering the weight of the ship as far as you are the water.

Everything passive is big. Everyone needs to get their head around that. Fortunately, the earth is big too.

Yet surface area is an invaluable resource, so how much is too much depends on the size of the country.. Ireland is small, especially compared to any North American Countries.. So how much farmland? Fishing shores? Traversable land? What is telling is that Nuclear power was ignored, because of the uneasy control the weapons industry has over it.. That Bill "I want to be the Antichrist" Gates is a sponsor, just adds the "You need to Unsubscribe Now" Cherry on top

Why does it not occur to anyone to compare the energy consumption for lifting water with the energy generated by falling from the top. After all, then, humanity will receive a real "green"! The famous experiment of Pascal B. had to abandon the pumped storage tank, replacing it with CLOSED WATER CIRCUITS that provide a CIRCUIT of water! Eternal water cycle! Why not?

@@Eugen_Belyaev I’m not sure I understand your point.. the amount of energy you get from falling water is of course not enough to pump it up to the same level again. But I guess that’s not your point? :)

@@macjonte ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-xV1PxxWlT3E.html ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-v72I2AOd1qU.html

@@macjonte By closed watercourses, I mean pump-turbine pairs operating on closed individual watercourses. All pairs of units are mounted on a common shaft, at the end of which there is a generator. Generator power in the range of units - hundreds of megawatts. Exit to the operating mode takes a few minutes.

Nuclear has pretty incredible energy storage

yeah dont sneeze!

I think the electricity used is about 80% of the electricity generated.

It also has to do with they way the power grid works. It's not like a water tap, where there's pipes with water constantly running through it. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-xhxo2oXRiio.html This video from Wendover, beautifully explains how the power grid works. For example, in England they used to (not sure, if they still do) have to buy electricity from France during the ad-breaks of the most popular tv shows, because a big part of the population would get up and make tea at the same time, which consumed more electricity than England could produce. That's why energy storage is such a huge issue right now. Hope that helped!

Why does it not occur to anyone to compare the energy consumption for lifting water with the energy generated by falling from the top. After all, then, humanity will receive a real "green"! The famous experiment of Pascal B. had to abandon the pumped storage tank, replacing it with CLOSED WATER CIRCUITS that provide a CIRCUIT of water!

The mistake you are making is thinking of it as "storing when cheap". What storage like this does is "stores when excess is being generated". The supply to the grid has to be adjusted continuously. Feedback loops that work in less than a second, in some cases. So when a gust of wind increases avaliable wind power, there are three choices. Other generators drop their output, some electricity gets diverted to storage... or the windmills disengage their blades and lower their output. Basically if you want to capture as much energy as possible from wind and solar, you need storage. The grid can't use erratic inputs.

@@mukansamonkey You need to start with definitions: You are completely confused! First, give clear scientific definitions of MASS, ENERGY, GRAVITY; in accordance with the logical law of IDENTITY! Energy is not something tangible that you can store and accumulate! Concentrate, stop raving!

Or we could keep using the coal we have, and invest in nuclear for the future, but that would make too much sense

@@davedelecto4148 You there! Stop making rational suggestions!

@@davedelecto4148 I'm on board with nuclear, but air pollution from coal is a real killer. Coal fired plants should be decommissioned ASAP.

@@daleharper5361 I agree that climate change mitigation is too narrowly focused on CO2. Since the actual goal should be to prevent the planet from warming. However the goal seems to more and more become to reduce CO2. Which is one way to prevent the planet from warming, there are other ways too however. Personally, I'm more in favor of orbital megaprojects such as constructing orbital shields to block infrared light. A project such as this could be implemented by corporations in cooperation with governments. most crucially, it would not require behavioral change in all individual people, and the totalitarian restructuring of society to affect that behavioral change.

The reason the US looks so green in Sat images is because of the Front and Backyards of the typical American household

Nuclear is not flexible when it comes to capacity. Throughout a day supply and demand of energy fluctuates dramatically...only natural gas plants can react in time to these quick changes. The alternative to natural gas will be bulk storage as discussed in this video.

@@AaronSmith-sx4ez good point. Historically, nuclear‘s role in energy production has been to provide baseload power, however, it is possible to build reactors capable of quickly ramping up/down their output. “French utility EDF began making its nuclear plants more “maneuverable” in the 1980s, and today it says a 1,300-MW reactor can increase or decrease its output by 900 MW within about 30 minutes.” Source: www.powermag.com/flexible-operation-of-nuclear-power-plants-ramps-up/

@@AaronSmith-sx4ez small modular reactors might be able to help with that.

@@bensonboys6609 wow. I didn't know about that, thanks

@@AaronSmith-sx4ez thats only if your using the old tech and haven't set up your plant correctly, look at molten salt reactor, they have a high heat reactor(800C+) that can easily be ramped up and down by controlling the flow from the pumps, also you wouldn't want to ramp it anyway you run it full till and use the excess heat to fuel the production of fresh water, liquid fuels, fertilizers and any other high heat needing reactions/chemicals.