Energy Storage: The Key to Clean, Reliable Electricity for Everyone | Tom Guarr | TEDxMacatawa

Einstein tells us that equals mc-squared but what does that really mean we need a more practical definition something that we can use to explain our everyday lives so let's turn to classical physics to get that definition classical physics defines energy as the capacity to do work we're going to change it slightly so that we can include members of Congress in the Kardashian family it's the capacity to do anything anything and everything that we do requires energy whether it's breathing walking driving the car heating our home firing a missile it requires energy where does that energy come from well for our bodies it comes from food that Apple that you ate at lunch your body converted it into chemicals that it could store and use them to generate energy whenever we need it whenever we need to do anything high storage so maybe storage is important to energy storage doesn't sound very sexy or exciting but energy storage the action of preserving energy in some form for future use is absolutely essential for us now what forms there's a lot of different forms that we can store energy in we can store it in mechanical energy let's say winding a spring for a clock we can store in thermal energy heating up a bowl of pot of water for cooking food chemical energy we talked about food there's also fuels wood gasoline diesel any type of fuel we can store it as electrical energy we can't create or destroy energy but we can convert it from one form to another quite easily for example if I pick up this baseball my body is converting chemical energy from the food I ate into mechanical energy my motion that energy is now stored in this ball and I can release that energy at any time let's talk a bit more about electrical energy humans have a voracious appetite appetite for electrical energy electrical consumption has grown by more than a factor of two in the last 25 years and it's projected to double again in the next 25 the UN several years ago established a series of sustainable development goals goal number seven is to bring reliable electrical power to everyone in the world how are we doing on that well not too great 1 billion people in the world still have no access to reliable electrical energy why not well we generate electrical power at giant stations giant utility plants and then we distribute it out on a grid composed of wires and substations to everyone who needs it not quite everyone yeah we missed a billion people we missed them primarily because they live in very remote areas far away from the grid the end of the grid or it's just too expensive to run it 600 miles for a dozen people so we forget about them they have no access to reliable electrical power and that 1 billion doesn't even include the outages that are caused by grid failures or storms and I'm not talking about the 1 or 2 hour power outages that we've all had little inconvenient but no big deal at all I'm talking about months a few years ago in India one day the grid went out 400 million people without power next day it got worse 700 million people without power 700 million people without power and that lasted in some cases for a month in Venezuela right now huge power blackouts crippling the company the country and their economy happens in the u.s. to Puerto Rico after hurricane Maria took 11 months to restore power to the island in some places what does being without power for a month mean well no lights obviously no pumps to bring fresh water no sewage treatment and perhaps cruelest of all no way to charge your cellphone so for those of us lucky enough to live in an area where we have reliable electrical power where does it come from mostly it comes from burning stuff in the US about a third of our electrical energy comes from natural gas about a third comes from coal and yes we still use coal and no there's not there's no such thing as clean coal about 20% comes from nuclear energy and the remainder comes from a variety of sources hydroelectric geothermal solar and wind but what happens when we when we flip that light switch well we expect the light to come on immediately right but the electrical grid actually has very little energy storage for a direct electrical energy storage we can store huge mounds of coal we can store natural gas in tanks but we're not very good at storing electrical energy itself the maintains a petroleum strategic petroleum reserve about 700 million barrels of oil that's enough if we were to lose all our ability to produce domestically all our ability to import oil that's enough to last for 45 days our electric storage capacity about 30 minutes so when you turn on that light switch what happens is the grid operator injects a little bit more natural gas in the gas turbine it spins a little faster generates a little bit more electricity and the light comes on our utilities have to matte because there's no storage our utilities have to match their production to consumption and they do that all the time that makes it really hard to bring wind and solar onto the grid doesn't it wind and solar aren't always there if we don't have a weight to store them efficiently then they're of little use most of it goes to waste so it's really hard to incorporate it onto the grid so how much electricity do we use globally it's about 21,000 terawatt-hours per year nobody knows what a terabyte hour is but you probably know what calories are more or less so I converted it for you I don't know what that number is but it's big it's really really really big we use a lot of electrical energy and like I said it's going to double in the next 25 years how are we going to meet that demand now let's just burn more stuff right I have a little bit of a problem with that and the problem is that anytime we burn anything we emit carbon dioxide and it goes up in the atmosphere and most of you probably recognize that that leads to a change on the right is a dynamic plot of average global temperature since the year 1850 as that circle gets larger that means it's getting hotter you'll notice when it reaches present day that it gets pretty hot and in fact the four hottest years on record anybody want to guess 2015 2016 2017 and 2018 coincidence I don't think so but if you're a skeptic and maybe you don't believe there's a connection between the plot on the left and the plot on the right let me pose this question wouldn't it still be better if we didn't burn so much stuff let's save the stuff we can burn for where its most efficient like for generating heat we've got lots of different ways we can generate electricity many of them better than burning things so let's come up with a new plan our new plan is going to be a five-step plan we're going to have an enormous power plant and let's make it a nuclear power plant mm-hmm silence maybe you don't like nuclear power it's pretty clean actually the real reason that you don't like nuclear power is because you don't want to near you so let's do it far away and let's use fusion instead of fission so let's put it very far away let's say Kansas but I have relatives in Kansas and I still like a few of them so let's put it even further away let's put it 93 million miles away fortunately there's already a big nuclear power plant 93 million miles away and we call it the Sun let's convert that nuclear energy to electromagnetic energy it's just a fancy term for heat and light and instead of running an extension cord to get that energy let's beam it to the earth in the form of heat and light so mother nature's already taken care of the first three steps in our five-step plan pretty good huh step four we need to convert that to electrical energy we already know how to do that we have solar panels that work pretty efficiently and convert sunlight directly to electrical energy and in fact in many areas of the world today it's cheaper to generate electricity from solar power than it is from natural gas or coal cheaper problem is it's not always available when you flip the switch so we need that last piece we need that storage remember I said we need energy we also need energy storage so let's convert that electrical energy to chemical energy for storage how are we going to do that well how about a battery batteries are great but they're kind of expensive and they also have some nasty things in we need a new battery and it's got to be really really cheap and let's get rid of the nasty stuff so let's not use lead but that's horrible in the environment let's not use lithium that lithium mining it's horrible let's not use cobalt Cobalts mined by 10 year olds in the Congo under unsafe conditions let's get rid of all that and let's use organic materials all organic materials maybe a little water and a little and then let's model our new battery after something that we know very well and has worked very well for over a hundred years the engine in your car the internal combustion engine you guys think I'm nuts and that maybe but the test results don't come back to Friday but but hear me out if we model it after the car we can make a battery that stores chemical energy in the form of liquids in tanks just like the gas tank in your car it's pumped to a central engine in this case the engine is an electrochemical cell rather than the true engine that you're more familiar with more rather than an internal combustion engine and that electrochemical cell can now convert our chemical energy into electrical energy directly cleanly without co2 emission we've removed combustion from the internal combustion engine this is a pipe dream actually these already exist we know how to make these and they work they're not perfect but we're striving to make them perfect and I envision a day in the not-too-distant future where we have these giant batteries located next to solar farms solar farm collects the electrical energy we store it in the giant battery which might be as big as this entire building and then it's distributed out onto the grid to everybody who wants it well almost everybody what we're also working to do and this is the cool part we're working to make them smaller and cheaper small and cheap enough to power small communities and even individual homes and that way we can disconnect from the grid entirely we don't have to run the wires to every home that's 600 miles away from the nearest grid grid point that gives us a way to finally bring 100% reliable solar derived power on a 24/7 basis to those 1 billion people that didn't have it 15 minutes ago thank you [Applause]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 10,913

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Science, Chemistry, Climate Change, Energy, Global issues, Solar energy, Wind energy

Id: 7wEA_zwk__c

Length: 16min 0sec (960 seconds)

Published: Fri May 03 2019