Energy Expert Answers Gas, Solar and Nuclear Questions From Twitter | Tech Support | WIRED

i'm jeremiah bauman with the u.s department of energy and today i'll be answering your questions from twitter this is energy support [Music] so at red sweet jones asks dog why is gas so damn high i'm about to throw up who isn't let's be honest uh it's very very high and it's kind of a big problem like so many things during the pandemic production of oil and gas plummeted because you know suddenly nobody was driving anywhere for a few months back there and then hardly driving for almost a year year and a half so oil and gas companies cut back production once things started opening up planes are flying again everyone's buying oil and gas again but because production hadn't caught up prices went up and one that's kind of going on right now is that oil and gas companies are making way more money than they've ever made before on oil and gas and so they might be not quite so inclined to increase production that would bring prices down or do other things that would bring prices down at chris underscore ashworth asks does geothermal heat mean diverting rivers of molten lava into your home i am open to this idea please advise as much as i think we would all love a molten river of lava side home geothermal heat means drilling down into the ground and tapping into the energy of the earth the earth is naturally hot everywhere basically they actually drill into the earth much like they do for drilling for oil and gas and the hot water comes up and creates steam that can drive a turbine and generate electricity at princi sov asks how does electricity get to the grid and then siphoned off to all the homes and buildings to the end consumer the grid is often described as the biggest man-made machine on the planet what it actually is is a giant electrical circuit and it's literally a bunch of wires connecting a power source and it's circulating around you can imagine each of these little stations is a home or a business or a factory or anything that needs electricity if you close the circuit breaker and it creates a loop that lets all these electrons start circulating through this which is electricity so the national grid is actually broken up into lots of regional and even local grids and the biggest grid is mostly broken into three giant sections it's called the western interconnect and the eastern interconnect and the third one is of course independent-minded texas insisted managing their own grid off on their own with just a few connections to the rest of us then within those regions states or regions it gets broken down to the even more local level so you've probably seen in your neighborhood or off somewhere in the field fenced in areas they're just full of all this clearly electrical equipment with massive wires coming in right a lot of that equipment is often what's called step down transformers that take the power from the massive grid that actually runs at a different power level and breaks it down to a lower power level for your neighborhood and it's all one giant loop that has to always stay connected has step up transformers to take that power level back up the other side of the circle to feed it back to the bulk transmission grid at the spirit of 77 asks but seriously do wind turbines cause cancer or jobs or both okay seriously wind turbines cause lots and lots and lots of jobs and economic development for counties and income for farmers whose land they go on but they do not cause cancer wind turbines super cool they're these giant towers they literally spin and generate electricity they're not without controversy some people don't want them and some states are just going gangbusters iowa is going to soon have enough wind power to meet its entire electricity needs the high plains states the dakotas kansas nebraska is rapidly growing all these states down to oklahoma and texas generate tons and tons of electricity from wind power already at micro dan asks i am all in favor of green energy so this is an honest question while evs themselves have zero emissions when you factor in the carbon emissions from the generation of electricity how do they compare to cars that run on fossil fuels great question it is still cleaner to charge your car on electricity and drive it that way than it is to burn gasoline in the tank the grid is way cleaner than it was even five or ten years ago electric motors are so much more efficient you burn way less gas or coal upstream to get enough electricity to power a car than you do if you're trying to actually explode gasoline right in your car in order to get enough power to drive at ken r stewart asks texas produces almost 2 billion barrels of oil a day why do texans have to pay so much for their gas is it because big oil dictates the prices at the pumps and not government state and federal governments need to step in and deal with big oil gouging people one thing that makes the united states different than a lot of countries is the government does not set the price for oil we don't even manage how much gets produced or how much gets consumed which some governments do those are usually considered very aggressive forms of government we like more of a free market and so literally the market decides how much we end up paying at the end of the day it's a global market we are competing at specific market places with the entire planet with china with saudi arabia with russia with europe with south america literally everyone we don't tell people how much oil to produce there are things governments do try to do the house representatives passed a bill to crack down on price gouging at the pump how do you know when the local gas station is charging more than they should or if they're actually just passing on costs from what they're paying to get gasoline from 10 steps upstream at the refiner so it is a really hard question about the role of government in society at john lewis19212130 asks how is the strategic oil reserve going to be replenished the strategic petroleum reserve this is a huge amount of oil that is stored in a series of caverns underground in louisiana and texas that your department of energy owns and manages as a strategic reserve basically in case of emergency the average cavern is deeper than the empire state building is tall this president has actually released more oil from the strategic reserve than any president has before to try to get the price of gasoline to come down there's literally a million barrels a day coming out of strategic petroleum reserve in an effort to bring gas prices down so we do need to replenish it there's a couple different ways you can do it one thing is we do sell the oil when we release it from the reserve and so the government is getting revenue from selling all that oil we'd love to turn around and use some of that revenue to buy more oil once prices are nice and low again which will hopefully be a day that comes sooner rather than later to fill the oil back up depending on how all that plays out the way our funding works is that every year congress literally give the department of energy enough money for its uh annual operations including money to go out and buy more oil if that's what we need to do at rig chick asks nah bt dub how many different types of renewable energy are there there are five types of renewable energy wind solar hydropower which comes from rivers geothermal and marine or tidal which comes from the movement of ocean currents nationally we're somewhere in the 20 renewable range renewables are abundant and they're cheap so everybody's trying to build them fast and we should be pushing utilities in the states to build faster everywhere at mostafa18369324 asks in your opinion what is the best renewable energy and why first of all it's tempting to say solar because it's getting super cheap and it literally works everywhere oregon known for being cloudy and rainy could have so much more solar power that it does it's not as cloudy and radiant as germany and japan who used to be totally kicking our butts in solar power at fairy gray 19 would like to know how does solar energy work solar panels like this one here is like a tiny i guess it's technically a toy but i think it's actually a solar panel that will actually generate electricity the material on this panel which all starts with silicon which is one of the most abundant elements we've got it's made from sand and when solar rays like cosmic rays strike the material in the solar panel it literally excites the electrons in those atoms and it set up there's little wires in there so the electrons get channeled into wires and then they're fed into electrical grid to send those electrons as electricity all the way to your home and fire your appliances at general bullpu asks why is crude oil so important in our lives when we have better alternatives am i just losing my mind here we do have better alternatives for some things and we've actually stopped using oil for some things like if you look back in the 60s and 70s we're using a lot of oil to burn in power plants to generate electricity there's this huge oil crisis that you probably hear people talk about and we did a huge concerted effort to get off of oil used for electricity but it's still everywhere and it's not just the places that you most think of it right like when you fill up your car with gas you have a pretty good sense that came directly from oil and you're kind of just transferring barely changed oil into your fuel tank there's some uses of oil that we just don't have that many alternatives for lots of the chemicals that turn into things like plastics and you can just imagine all the uses of plastic throughout the society not just in your day-to-day life there just aren't alternatives that can make them as cheaply and readably right now today as we can by turning oil into plastics at quad machine 09 asks so why is nuclear power bad again i would argue this nuclear power is one of our most important forms of electricity if only for one reason right now it's the single biggest source of carbon-free electricity meaning the kind of power that does not cause global warming or climate change and there are real downsides to nuclear power and they're serious right like people have heard about chernobyl a massive nuclear accident fukushima in japan just a few years ago in a tsunami had a similar problem where the nuclear reactor went into disaster mode so the things you have to solve for to make sure we have reliable and safe nuclear power are basically the risk of accidents some kind of security like a terrorism attack and then we put this nuclear fuel into a nuclear reactor that again generates steam that turns a turbine that creates electricity it leaves nuclear waste that itself is radioactive and it stays radioactive for thousands of years so how do you store it safely what most nuclear power plants do is they keep it on site it stays actually in cooling ponds until it cools down until it's a lot less dangerous and it gets transferred into uh these dry casks and it gets stored in a secure location on site right now now we'd all like to get that out of those locations and into some more even further safe and secure locations and that's actually one thing the department of energy is working on so at kingsley54272009 asks on a serious note what is natural gas so imagine like a swamp with a bunch of like decomposing plant and animal matter in it millions of years of sediment accumulating pushing all that stuff down into the earth as that matter uh decays it gives off natural gas or methane it's often called it's cheaper than coal and it's also cleaner than coal when it comes to public health so that's literally what natural gas is it's also a huge source of energy in our economy the problem is it's not without downsides it still does create a fair amount of pollution including carbon dioxide one of the chief gases that causes global warming or climate change at mysticraven84 asks pardon my ignorance here mate but how is fracking clean energy number one what is fracking it's actually short for hydraulic fracturing it's where you drill into the ground you literally like inject all these fluids and chemicals to shatter the rock underground to fracture it and release the gas then comes back up it gets called clean energy by some people because it's a lot cleaner than coal but it still causes climate change it still causes other problems there's concerns about it reaching water supplies in some cases it's caused actually seismic activity and earthquakes you know it's probably better if we can find ways not to inject things into the ground that are going to contaminate groundwater but it's an issue that people are going to have to keep working on in some places where there's fracking near populations at a e i loves cats asks someone let me know what an electric current is an electric current is literally just electrons moving through a charged electrical field inside a conductor like a wire richard937-83516 asks thought of the day can anyone tell me why the use of our rivers for green energy never seems to be mentioned it's what powered the first industrial revolution in this country why don't we use them now richard's right it did power the first industrial revolution that was actually a slightly different form it was water that would turn wheels that would actually just do the work itself like you hear about grist mills where literally the water is turning a giant thing that's like grinding flower or anything else that needs grinding why don't we talk about it more today so number one a lot of us do talk about it a lot it's still a very commonly used electricity source i think about 10 of our electricity comes from hydropower of our 20 total that is renewable about 10 half of it is hydropower and they generate huge amounts of electricity what you do in most cases you build a dam that literally blocks the river and these things that just spin when they spin they generate electricity and it goes downstream after it goes through the turbines when you damn that river there are some problems number one salmon very cool animals they're born way up in the mountains in little tiny streams they migrate all the way down to the ocean they swim hundreds and hundreds of miles and at the end of their lives they migrate all the way back up the river all the way up to the little creek they find the spot they were born where they lay eggs and they die unfortunately it kind of screws everything up if they can't make that migration we've invented lots of technology to mitigate for that fish ladders or some dams where there's like literally a like suction thing inside the reservoir and shoots the salmon out back into the river below the dam we are still working on hydropower and we still invent invest in technology that makes the dams less harmful for fish and if you've got a dam that's already in place but not drinking electricity we should add electricity get some power from that dam while it's gonna be there and we've actually got a whole program at the department of energy to help local utilities do exactly that at myself2677s can renewable energy sources replace fossil fuels renewable energy sources can replace most of fossil fuels but with current technology not yet all of course the wind doesn't always blow and the sun doesn't always shine so when that's not happening and you don't have geothermal or hydropower available locally where is your electricity going to come from well today we get a bunch of it from batteries actually it's a small slug right now but it's growing really rapidly fossil fuels can have a future in all this too and they employ millions of americans in america so we want to research every option to keep those jobs and those industries going so it's called carbon capture and it literally attaches to the emissions coming off that place that the oil or coal or gas is being burned and it separates out the carbon dioxide that otherwise cause global warming and then it literally injects it deep underground into salt caverns so that's the other thing that we're working actively on is another way to give us 24 7 100 clean power atom guillory asks imagine we all somehow get electric cars and now need to charge them how does the grid support that and not become a massive liability the grid goes down during a natural disaster people have blackouts or brownouts and now you're going to like plug in millions of cars not only that we're actually trying to switch buildings and homes from using fossil fuels for heat to using electricity for heat so even more stuff plugging into this grid that's why we need to not just update and modernize the grid but at the same time do two things number one build out way more grid there's just not the grid connections to get them to the places that need more electricity so just doing that is going to help a ton the other kind of really cool thing here is that a lot of these technologies like electric vehicles can actually have the grid work in both ways meaning the car charges when it needs to fill up its battery but if it's plugged in and it doesn't need more electricity it's a giant battery connected to the grid so you can actually set it up so that at certain times of day the utility can just draw a little bit of power from thousands of vehicles the bottom line is we just need to build a lot more power grid to power this new future that's going to have electric vehicles electric buildings we're going to try to switch as many things as we can onto the grid so we need more grid at pelham fall asks i do wonder what the macroeconomic impacts would be of a complete phase-out of using gasoline for vehicles like what does zofik do after that so opec organization of petroleum exporting countries dominated by saudi arabia the biggest opec producer and their middle eastern allies and then countries like russia and venezuela actively work with them to jointly reduce how much oil they're selling to drive prices up or sometimes they'll release more when prices get too high the problem is the u.s is actually the number one producer of oil and gas in the world and we have millions of people who work in that industry so it also would affect jobs and that's why one big thing we try to work on is how do you find jobs and create jobs people that work in oil and gas in technologies like geothermal and other renewable energy technologies so we minimize any harm to build livelihoods at the same time that we're getting that huge economic boost from no longer buying gasoline at post 0341 asks i'm still yet to hear detailed explanation of how the paris accords either help or hurt earth or economy based on technicalities of treaty the paris accords were a huge epic historic deal literally at this point every country is part of a global agreement to tackle global warming and how we're going to reduce emissions and then every country has to submit its own plan for the specific steps that we're going to take to do it so the u.s has a whole plan for this and it breaks it down by every part of the economy here's how much clean energy we're going to build whether that's renewable energy or fossil with carbon capture or nuclear here's how we're going to deploy electric vehicles a whole plan a plan for five years from now for 10 years from now and for 2050 and then every year all these governments meet and hash out who's doing what and how are we getting through all this and how's it going how do we take advantage of the clean energy getting cheaper to set higher goals and it's literally going to be the whole world working together every country sitting at a table every year for the next 40 years and even then we're going to have to keep working because climate change is that big of a problem

Channel: WIRED

Views: 303,920

Keywords: doe, energy, energy expert, energy expert tech support, energy support, energy tech support, gas prices, innovation, jeremiah baumann, oil prices, ott tech support, power grid, prices, renewable energy, science & technology, solar energy, tech support energy, tech support wired, thermal energy, us department of energy, us doe, wind energy explained, wind turbines explained, wired, wired tech support

Id: AyUSO5-9IOg

Length: 17min 44sec (1064 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 20 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/improvius]

Thought I'd share this here because he addresses several questions about or related to EVs. It's a good video to share with folks who are skeptical about EV adoption.

[u/BiggieJohnATX]

the questions are F'ing stupid, but the answers are at least addressing what they wre trying to ask (maybe?).