@@tanimation7289 luckily, there’s been no spontaneous catastrophe in a functional nation. Chernobyl happened in the Soviet union which wasn’t a functional in terms of keeping it’s citizens secure and free
@@daytoncoates4930 2011 Japan? But I'm still with you, especially with modern reactors they've become extremely safe and reliable where meltdowns on that scale are nearly impossible.
@@bmbunch8825 well, the meltdown wasn’t spontaneous. A tsunami smashed into the reactor, causing the meltdown. So trying to calculate the death toll is like finding the damage done by a pipe-bomb in a tornado
Sponsored by BIG OIL / Gas ? My 3 kw solar power system kicks my electricity bills into a CREDIT BILL ! Had solar Hot Water for over 20 years , no dirty gas heaters , 5 years and solar power system payed off (2 years to go )next will be a battery( Redflow) 10kw Z-CELL Bromide flow battery , to store MY OWN 100% GREEN POWER .
MyBarry2009 it only works on small scales, like a single house in your case, even in your case, your house is still likely receiving power from nuclear, and fossil fuels, that is if you get you power from a grid and pay your electricity bill. Renewable simply doesn't have the capacity to power a city or even a single neighborhood
First off I do not believe oil is formed from fossils. Having said that will entertain the idea. Ok,a fossil is formed when something living dies correct? Life & death are constant correct? The Sun produces solar rays that arrive here everyday correct? However the sun rays we catch are not recycled into new rays so after we use a ray of sun we get new ones correct? One could say fossils are more renewable than sun rays because the sun has a life span (so we think) and life is constant. Now I might not have all the scientific terms that have been created correct but do you see my point?
Hi @@wandameadows5736 hopefully you've had a awesome day😉 I can see where your going with your death is consistent so therefore the supply of fossil fuels should be too right? But the thing u overlooked is time. The sheer "eons" of time it takes to slowly but surely convert the animals caucuses n plant/marine life into usable fuels. Source www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/energy/reference/fossil-fuels/ And of cause will not be replenished fast enough at current rate of use.
@D Chapo Nope. Geothermal and hydropower too. They have no fuel cost and hydropower is the most efficient way to make electricity in terms of energy out relative to energy in.
@@Jemalacane0 There is only very limited opportunity to expand hydropower globally, compared to nuclear; in drought-stricken areas, declining water levels are already restricting hydro generating capacity. Geothermal has high up-front costs and short plant lifetimes (maybe 25 years) leading to it only barely being cost-competitive using substantial subsidies, has limited known locations at this time, requires a massive amount of land to achieve a high enough generating capacity, has not very high utilization (existing plants generate electricity less than 2/3 of the time), and can cause geotechnical problems such as earthquakes. Currently there is less than 4% as much geothermal in the world as nuclear. I just don't see the expansion of either hydro or geothermal as ever being able to replace more than a tiny fraction of fossil fuel burning.
@@Jemalacane0 Ok, that means the total expansion of hydropower and geothermal combined can generate about 5% of current US energy needs? Yes, that will solve all of our problems...
@@matthewv789 And geothermal power can run all the time. The heat in the earth is always available. It's definitely not dependent on wind or sun. Not to mention geothermal power has *no fuel cost*.
Battery storage can work, but a) it's expensive compared to natural gas, b) we would need to build about a million times more storage globally than currently exists (which would take a MASSIVE amount of lithium mining), c) wind and solar would need to be over-provisioned by about a factor of 4x compared to peak energy needs, or about 40x what is currently installed in the world (neglecting any increases in demand), which would take a massive amount of land. And in the meantime, until the duration of storage is measured in weeks rather than hours, we'd need to continue operating natural gas plants with equivalent power generation to the total of wind and solar in order to balance loads throughout the day and year (don't forget the havoc winter can wreak on solar generation even during the day). Nuclear plants, on the other hand, would each directly replace coal and natural gas, not require any energy storage, not need to be over-provisioned, take up far less land, and likely cost a LOT less in the long run.
There are thousands and thousands of products made from oil and natural gas specifically ethane which makes plastic. That’s the biggest one. The world literally can’t stop producing it as a whole until we find an alternative for plastic.
Petroleum is used as a binding agent for plastics because thats what government subsidized/ welfared research and development for these past 50 years. That will change with plant based binding agents, like hemp.
People have to get over "it works at my place" ie my backyard. My little house in my little yard is very different from a city of five million. Get over thinking your life is the world.
6 year old video and yet we're all still here, using even more fossil fuels and never been safer, healthier or more prosperous than at any time in history.
Anthony Morris you must have a real tiny teenie weenie brain... 2023 was the hottest year in history... AGW is destroying the planet. Yet you think you won because your " still here " OMG get help and an education
4 and 5 are incorrect. Costs are comparable usually, and we are able to pump water uphill so we can use it as hydro for reserves and peak. A recent study found that there's enough locations where this is viable for us to run the entire country on such a system. The inefficiency of such systems probably make it more expensive, but the argument here is feasibility.
Costs that look comparable end up being higher once the needed energy storage or paired natural gas plants are included. This is why electricity prices tend to rise the more renewables we have despite them being the "cheapest" form of energy generation, supposedly. The fact that they are intermittent and cannot be used on their own kills their cost advantage. The quoted cost for solar and wind should ALWAYS include full battery storage and/or natural gas plants to even the load when the renewable sources are not generating power, in order to depict the cost honestly. And while storage technologies do exist, none are deployed on a large scale yet (and may not very cost-effective compared to natural gas or nuclear), meaning that what gets paired with wind and solar in practice is new NATURAL GAS PLANTS, which sit idle maybe half the time. The problem is we are not only not investing nearly enough in nuclear, we've actually been cutting back on nuclear (as have many countries). All the wind and solar installed in the world to date hasn't displaced a single ton of CO2 emissions. In fact, it's only replaced about half the reductions in nuclear. The rest of the lost nuclear has been replaced by natural gas. Natural gas has also powered increases in demand, as well as replacing some coal. If we don't want to keep increasing installations of fossil fuel plants and boosting prices, we NEED to increase nuclear. Solar and wind will not accomplish that any time soon (probably not within the next 20-30 years). (Hydro might be another option, but opportunities to expand it are extremely limited, so nuclear is the ONLY viable large-scale option to grow clean, steady, base-load power.)
@@matthewv789 Nuclear is coming but that's only really good for base load. The only green option is storage. Which you're right about. It is expensive. The exciting thing is that there's a ton of new tech coming. Iron air batteries, molten salt solar storage, kinetic storage, farther reaching grids. We'll need a little of each to become carbon neutral.
@@ironmonkey720 The problem is the base load plants are still needed with full capacity until you literally have about 4x peak load worth of wind and solar coupled with literally weeks if not months worth of storage (not just a few hours), particularly with regard to solar. And the base load would be idle much of the time, more so the more renewable overcapacity and battery storage you have, but it would still be needed up until the point you finally get such a massive amount of storage to power you through the winter. You can’t shut down ANY of those plants for good until then because when the batteries run out and the sun is barely registering through the winter clouds and sun for weeks on end, you still need something to generate 100% of the electricity but aren’t getting any from solar. Keeping all those plants operational but mostly idle is pretty much a waste of money, especially so when talking about nuclear, which is why those plants will almost certainly be natural gas. It’s going to take us DECADES to start to even slightly reduce natural gas burning, and even longer to start shutting down any of the plants, if we rely primarily on wind and solar for clean energy, and meanwhile all those idle plants alongside all those new renewable generators and their energy storage facilities will keep prices high - much higher than the quoted price for wind or solar alone. This is why the fossil fuel industry is HAPPY to promote wind and solar, because they know that the focus on renewables guarantees increased demand for natural gas and high energy prices for the foreseeable future. The thing the fossil fuel industry is terrified of is nuclear, not renewables,
ready to give up your heating, electricity, automobiles, wind turbines, and solar panels then? all require oil. oh don't forget your medicines, cosmetics and just about everything else you need to live. have a good life living by an open fire.. oh wait that's not acceptable either lol
1. The sun never stops shining 2. "Solar panels do produce electricity in cloudy weather. ... Solar panels can still can produce 10-25% of their typical output on a cloudy day"
And don´t forget the one who rose to power to stop the war on coal. The role for coal is shrinking day by day, no matter his backwards arguments and promises.
Matthew, yes that' strue but the video didn't go far enough. The grid needs synchronous generation to keep demand and supply in balance. Renewables, hydro excepted, are asynchronous and cannot supply a grid in isolation, gas, oil or coal generation is essential for a stable grid. Renewables, again hydro excepted, have no inertia which gas, oil coal and nuclear have a great deal of. Again a characterisrtic that renewbles do not have. Intermittency is huge problem, which batteries cannot solve but nothing can solve the unsuited characteristics of renewables as an option to fossil fuels, hydro or nuclear. People that talk of a 100% renewables grid are wrong and probably are unaware of the technicalities, there are a couple more but those are enough to ensure use of fossil fuelled generation for decades to come. Someone ought to tell Governor Newson of California of this.:-)
@@iareid8255 Yes you are completely correct. Batteries might work, but we would need about a million times (literally) more batteries than we currently have installed, because they would need to last for weeks (to get solar through the winter) not just hours or even days. And we’d need to build probably around 4x the amount of solar and wind as is needed at peak generating times, if not more, just to be generating enough surplus to charge the batteries, which is to say about 40x more wind and solar than currently exists in the world. Until we have that, every unit of solar and wind must be paired with an equivalent amount of natural gas generation, which ends up generating most of the power but yet sits idle much of the time, too. (Natural gas because it can spin up and down pretty quickly, and the plants are cheap to build, so don’t cost as much to be idle. But the gas itself is kind of expensive and going up in price as well as demand, just as the fossil fuel industry has been planning for decades by killing nuclear and promoting renewables.) Despite these backup generators, grid instability is increasingly a problem the more wind and solar is added. Naturally batteries, over-provisioning, and partly idle natural gas plants add considerably to the cost of wind and solar, but nobody ever includes them in the quoted cost. That’s why the more wind and solar there is, the higher electricity prices tend to get despite them supposedly being among the cheapest forms of energy. This could all be avoided by focusing on nuclear, instead, as we should have been for the past 50 years. (Hydro has only very limited opportunities for growth.) We wouldn’t be in anywhere near the same climate mess today if we’d done that, and wouldn’t be scrambling with how to replace all those fossil fuels, because we would have already largely done so in many countries.
Mathew, Nuclear has been neglected but slowly it is beginning to dawn that renewables are not working although many governments have yet to learn that lesson. There has been so much ill informed opposition to nuclear that trying to build them is very expensive due to the time it takes to get past all the opposition.. For non CO2 generating electricity there is no choice, (except hydro for the very few who have the right geography and rainfall), it is nuclear.
@@iareid8255 Yes, exactly. Only nuclear has to strictly control for all of its waste products and adhere to such high safety standards, which makes it more expensive to construct. If fossil fuels had to live up to the same standards they'd be insanely expensive. But nuclear still manages to be cheap in the long run, and among the safest, cleanest, and most reliable sources of electricity. It's insane that plants are being retired early and countries are trying to transition AWAY from nuclear. Stupidest capitulation to the fossil fuel industry I have ever seen, and sure to guarantee that nothing will effectively be done to reduce carbon emissions for years or decades into the future.
If we are able to have wind turbines/windmills solar panels storage systems and the ability to have solar panels in space that can transfer energy from space to earth we would never need oil or gas with nuclear as well
Sure, but antimatter or dilithium would be even better. In all seriousness, just realize that in order to replace all the coal, natural gas, and nuclear with solar and wind (in an equal mix), you'd need something like 3-4x as much generating capacity as needed for peak energy needs, and literally weeks worth of energy storage (to get you through the winter, not just overnight). This is compared to needing 1x peak energy needs and no energy storage at all when you run coal, natural gas, or nuclear. Since right now no more than about 10% of the world's energy comes from wind and solar combined, we'd need to build something like 40x more wind and solar than has been installed to date, along with at least a million times as much energy storage as we currently have installed globally. In the meantime, for the decades until that's nearly all built, we will also need to keep pretty much 100% of our current natural gas plants operational to take over when the wind and solar aren't generating (along with any additional natural gas plants needed to replace coal or nuclear plants we get rid of, not to mention increases in demand). Or we could build a bunch of nuclear plants, each directly replacing existing coal and natural gas, and not bother with all that energy storage and overcapacity and land usage and complementary load-balancing natural gas plants.
@@matthewv789 I 100% agree but if we really focused on capturing energy and storing it we could make advancements to store and "take" alot more energy out of the sun in a day to the point where we would only have to build 4x the solar and wind turbines vs 40x solar and wind turbines and storage would be a lot YES but if we actually cared enough to advance it we could get to a point where we can make safe enough storage for energy to power the world let alone the US it would takes years alot of money and a lot of time and research but if start now we could get that done in maybe 100-200 years to the point wed only ever have to rely on maybe nuclear and gas very rarely
but those batteries for storage uses lithium & it has a low energy density so people need lots of lithium, meanwhile 1 pellet of Uranium is equal to 1 ton of coal
Renewables Can Cost Less than Fossil Fuels The old excuse that renewable energy is too expensive is just that: an excuse. These days, the energy produced by renewables is just as affordable as energy produced by fossil fuels, if not cheaper in some cases. Some solar panel projects can even generate power at roughly half the cost of fossil fuels like coal. That’s a lot of potential savings. And, what’s more, renewable energy is only projected to get cheaper over time.
What price does oil and gas have to be for renewables to be cheaper? You don't know do you? If they were cheaper they wouldn't have to be mandated and subsidized. Renewables will never be cheaper because they require coal, gas and nuclear to back them up because they are unreliable.
nuclear is expensive yet it gives people really high energy density, meanwhile renewables are cheap yet their energy density is low compared to coal (plus wind & solar don't last as long as nuclear energy). People got what they paid for...
@@anthonymorris5084 That is because battery technology has been stifled since the 1920s in favor of oil. We are about to see rapid battery development in the next 10 years and we will very soon have a battery system that can do that. When we do, it will be devastating to power companies and they know it.
@@shutinalley We are not currently even close to having this technology, let alone scaling it up to power entire cities. The number of materials required, the mining operations that will begin and the disposal of these toxic materials are also serious challenges. Right now wind and solar represent 3% of global energy. Wind and solar will never replace fossil fuels, it's a pipe dream. They are unreliable and there is nothing "renewable" about them. Just like fossil fuels the materials come from the ground and are finite.
