Energy Vault -BUSTED!

we have developed a groundbreaking energy storage technology that will enable a planet powered by renewable resources what this is going to enable a planet that's gonna be completely green and blue our product consists of a collection of custom inexpensive bricks a unique six armed support crane electric motors generators sensors and control software which combined to deliver a 30-plus year life and round trip efficiency of around 90 percent awesome 90% efficiency and control by custom software now I know it's kind of a nitpick at this point but if you know all that about it what am I looking at a cartoon and not say for instance oh I'd note the actual device working as the crane lifts the bricks the energy is stored in the elevation gain building a self-supporting tower which is the charge state when the time comes to discharge the crane simply returns the bricks to their base state our specially engineered control software ensures that each brick is placed in the exact position each time and even takes into account the effects of extreme weather conditions specially engineered control software that can compensate for extreme weather no wonder this thing got over a million hits on court and a ninety something percent approval rating but again if you've done all that with your control software surely you can sue me something more than a cartoon I mean the plant is unmanned with many plants able to run from a single control center but it's a cartoon how could you control multiple of these units from a single control center if you can't even build custom bricks are the perfect combination of a steel baseplate a high strength concrete bottom plus recycled rock and concrete mixture you've not even built a single brick allowing gravity storage to achieve a radical price performance breaks oh I'm sorry it was a radical price performance breakthrough 50% cheaper than other methods I didn't think of this before bricks can be personalized either to blend into the environment with a single color or each brick can be considered an end your pixel and used to create a picture or company logo this is amazing that plans are so advanced that even thinking about what color they're gonna paint it yeah so why is this thing [ __ ] well kind of at the same reason that if someone looked at the idea of power generation and said hey hamsters run in wheels all the time why don't we use that to generate clean free power to run major cities yeah in principle you can do it it's just a really stupid way of doing it look gravity storage is fine but what you want to do it is a cheap material that is resilient that you can repeatedly move around easily and guess what people figured out what that material was some time ago it's called water and people have been using water for Cravath eternal storage for decades it's called pump storage surplus power could be used to pump water from low to high altitude reservoirs this water could in turn be released to generate power on days when demand is high and wind levels are low and therein is the fundamental problem a ton of untreated water costs basically nothing it literally falls from the sky meanwhile a ton of concrete it's not only fairly uninvent aliy friendly in that to create a ton of cement which you're gonna use to make that concrete create about a ton of carbon dioxide a ton of concrete also costs about $100 and the difference in density really isn't as much as you might think a cubic meter of water which is pretty similar to a cubic yard about the size the object this girl is sitting in if that's made up of water it weighs about a ton whereas if it's made up of concrete it weighs about two and a half tons further it's particularly easy to store water legs now all you need is two leaks close by at different heights now if you don't have a natural formation like that of course you're gonna have to do some damming of some sort to actually construct a system like this but then it stores an astronomical amount of power meanwhile if you want to store it by stacking rocks it requires all sorts of precision every time you move one of those rocks it's going to be able to take all of the weight in the new configuration that you're putting it down in and they need to be able to do this a thousands of times for decades and it still has to be structurally sound so it should do a quick recap of gravity storage using water versus concrete well with water of course the material is cheap whilst with concrete it's expensive the water is a self-healing liquid it basically means it doesn't suffer from differential heating it doesn't age it doesn't crack if you drop it too hard or stress it wrong or whatever none of which is true of concrete where damage blocks have to be monitored and if the damage is too much discarded or repair and of course the crane is moving parts central to store relatively modest amounts of energy you need to move thousands of things to store about the same amount of energy as you could just by running some water through a single turbine it may not therefore be that surprising the pump storage makes up some ninety-five percent of the world's energy storage but you know how it goes every now and again someone comes up with a brilliant idea like why don't we coat our roads with solar panels now save this planet and make it sustainable for your kids in all future generations of life who can look back and say hey at least they invented solar freakin roadways please follow the link to IndieGoGo calm you know this one comes along with an idea of addressing a problem that's been solved decades ago and say you know what this really needs it needs to cost ten times more to build with gazillions more moving parts and then we need to put it in somewhere that it's intrinsically unsuited to run it's one of those crazy things cranes are not very good at operating in even modest wins solace is no stranger to high winds and says in his field it's his biggest challenge this wind has been unbelievable it's about 45 50 mile an hour winds we tried to stay away from doing any kind of big lists anything like that and even then our guys will still have quite difficult time controlling that load anything below 20 miles per hour a crane can operate in but once when speeds exceed that Gonzales has to shut down most if not all production you know the upper wind limit for most cranes is about 10 meters per second at some 30 miles per hour which also by by coincidence is about the optimum wind speed for windmills basically putting these things near windmills would be almost the worst place that you could possibly build them and almost every piece of promotional bump these people put out yeah they're situated right next to windmills not helped simply but even in the tall buildings with long elevators in them those buildings get buffeted by the wind so the building's Rock about a bit skyscrapers sway in heavy winds making elevator cables vibrate like giant guitar strings which may cause snags and that can cause great problems just for the elevators the enclosed cranes inside the building just from the swaying of the building I mean you don't have to think about it long this is gonna be a hundred meter long cable and now they're just in gentle windy conditions you've got to get down 100 meters and lock onto something with millimeter precision I mean just imagine you're in modestly windy conditions you've got a call on a hundred meter long cable and you're trying to hook onto a block with a millimeter precision and then stack them somewhere else also with millimeter precision and do it in a way that you don't successively chip away the blocks each time you load or unload them but by I'm sure some of you watch the video and say hey but these people proved that it was possible but this amazing pilot study which wasn't quite a 400 feet or less ayah 130 or so meters that would be the real energy volt now they really had a 70 foot so 20 odd meter crane and they stack some some barrels with it hey energy vault I can do that exact same proof of study for much less than you did yours for me haha brilliant now what's this eautiful yeah not quite sure how this addresses any of the problems for building a machine like this where it's gonna run for 20 years in all weathers I mean it's crazy just look how much this cable is swaying around and they're not moving how massive concrete blocks that would swing for a long time here they're just living tiny barrels it's a proof of concept lore is this being driven by some massively complex custom-made super software our specially engineered control software ensures that each brick is placed in the exact position each time and even takes into account the effects of extreme weather conditions this is being done by a guy driving the crane and it's the quartz article points out this isn't an ordinary concrete battery this is a cutting-edge concrete battery I mean remember the hallmark of virtually all pseudo-scientific scams is the computer generated animation the compressor is powered by a micro battery that is supposedly 30 times smaller than its contemporaries but charges a thousand times faster the fartist prototype produces about 17 ounces of water an hour that's great for cycling how does never having to fill your car with gas again sound by simply replacing your engine with a system that runs on thorium one of the densest materials known to man you'll only need to refuel one SAS plastic road it's simple efficient low-cost and easier to construct it's sustainable contributes to a circular economy is lightweight and easy to repair also divided into different sections the social section offers an environment where you can enjoy your trip with friends and family in the far end of the pod a separate compartment can be found where private meetings can be held during the trip right they'd fire up the engines they pull the supports down so this stays completely in the same place but there's all this magnetism that's saving everybody while the earth is shaking wildly under it the earth is like okay I'm done the supports come back up everything's good so we were like of course you can probably with a million engines lift anything but that's gotta cost a fortune thirteen dollars and ten cents that's what we're talking about what it would take to hover a house so I developed this new way of stopping bullets it's called their hand you wanna know the awesome secret of how hand is gonna work I'll click Subscribe and hit the notification bell and I'll tell you oh by the way did I mention that hand is going to be four times more efficient than stopping bullets than the world's leading tank armor guaranteed sureties drop a like on this video and I'll tell ya it's dark secret you see this is how it's gonna work you hold out your hand and the influence of the thorium cars driving on solar roadways powered by micro compressors a thousand times more powerful than than lithium ion batteries synergized with ion thrusters running plastic rode hoverboards means that the bullets are just gonna stop they're just gonna increase the will to move but I know there's gonna be loads of people out there who say that this isn't possible but hey they laughed at Galileo they laughed at the Wright brothers and I'm sure there's gonna be a lot of people out there who laughs at hand but just think of a world when no one ever need died from a bullet again this is why the world needs hand I only need a million dollars support Mikey all of these things are very easy to do with a computer and slightly less easy to do in reality in fact it's a sure sign that you're dealing with artists not engineers when it comes to these animations and they're making kind of Mickey Mouse mistakes you know so this one made me laugh the year with a Hyperloop they put all of this effort into constructing these three-dimensional models and then they have their solar panels just like down on the top of it like that but any engineer will tell you that just laying your solar panels down flat like that reduces their efficiency by about thirty percent compared to if they would just sort of fixed at an angle that mostly points them towards the Sun during the day or in this Hyperloop animation it's also extremely energy-efficient due to solar power utilization in fact the Hyperloop could generate more power than it consumes as a closed system likewise in computer-generated scene after computer-generated scene the energy fault is depicted with windmills almost by definition the worst place that you would situate such a machine in terms of where on the equipment and operational difficulty or let's take how they rearrange their towers which is done from the level of physics you would expect most school kids to be able to get and some of the smarter monkeys look let's imagine we'll get a stack of five French remember the further we lower the blocks the more energy we get out so the first brick is gonna go down for bricks in height so it's gonna be a relative energy of four the next break goes down three the next two and the next one giving this a maximum energy storage of about ten now let's see if we do it in the way that energy vault was doing it where you don't spread out the blocks on the ground as much as possible but immediately start building a second tower well the first brick gets four energy units out the second one gets two energy units out that's basically it he'd done an arrangement like this half's the potential energy this thing could stall further there is absolutely no point in having bricks on the bottom here the bricks at the bottom store zero energy I mean what are their bricks there at all and then if you look around you'll find a video that they link to that gives us a price here they give super optimistic price of 8 million dollars for a unit and on the optimistic side this thing's gonna store some 20 megawatt hours well let's see how that compares to pump storage shall we well the largest pump storage systems in the world are about a thousand times bigger than this quite cost a thousand times more to build in fact let's just do the calculations for comparable amounts of energy storage you would need a thousand energy volts to equal one of these big pump storage systems a thousand energy volts by there are very optimistic numbers would cost you 8 billion dollars right there was a projected numbers their own optimistic projected numbers given that thus far this is the most sophisticated machine that they've actually made meanwhile the actual cost of building a working pumped storage system of the same size was about 1.6 billion five times cheaper plus it works when it's windy it works when it's wet and so forth now this number I got out of a video linked directly from the energy vault website however if you go directly to the energy vault website they magically claim that it's gonna operate for 50% of the cost of competing storage systems the compressor is powered by a micro battery that is supposedly 30 times smaller than its contemporaries but charges a thousand times faster yeah all about that they actually give any numbers there but do give us some marvelous insights into how they thought up this number pricing is dependent on several factors their capacity of the plant the cost of the foundation pad the cost of waste materials and that's it that's everything on their website on pricing and if you believe that I've got some wonderful unicorn flavored magic pills to sell yeah hell this reminds me that guide claiming did the Hyperloop would be 10 times safer than air trouble not mainly before and the humor too troubled by Hyperloop so the interior of the capsule isn't finished yet they didn't let any cameras inside currently it's a black tunnel it's waiting to be designed in the next step before one had even been built a lot of people worried about safety issues is this a safer way to get around the system itself is 10 times safer than in a plane for example yeah I'm gonna immediately push eggs to doubt these claims they say they're gonna be using 30 ton brakes and what's the cost of those brakes well they say that building this machine is going to cost about eight million dollars and let's divide that by the amount of tons they would need to move let's be generous and say that they're gonna lower each brick a hundred meters wait they're not gonna do but whatever let's let's give them that and they claim that it's gonna store 20 megawatt hours which means they've got a shift about 70,000 tons give or take about a hundred meters up in the sky now give or take that about the weight of the Yamato the largest battleship ever to be built which instantly you can get a model of the Yamato preassembled from my Amazon store below biggest battleship ever made and behind it is the American answer to it which is the very beautiful right so you gotta live something about the size of a battleship a hundred meters in the air the maximum storage capacity which means you've got to make all those critical load-bearing bricks for about $100 per ton now you may recall from earlier that a cubic meter cubic yard that sort of thing of concrete weighs about two and a half tons and costs about a hundred or so dollars and that's a nothing special concrete maybe maybe not something you want to build as 70,000 ton tower out of but anyway so that that would be about 50 ish dollars per ton which means that half of the price of this tower alone would go into the cost of the bargain-basement concrete cool then all you need is some cranes they can't cost that much right almost the bargain-basement tower cranes that you can get from China yeah they so max out at about ten tons lift capacity and one that'll lift about a hundred or so meters costs about half a million dollars so you are probably looking for the sort of grain capacity that they're looking at here of about a million dollars per shot and you need six of them so it's immediately up to about ten million dollars for the off-the-shelf price and that's without the special custom software that you'll need to run this completely automated or to run several of them from a single control room even in those are windy conditions or are the hallmarks of the earth the idiots or the scammers and beyond the trivial stuff I like making this great animation of this gravity storage system that they forgot to hook up to the greed but beyond that they actually promised that this thing is going to be great because it'll be able to go to full power in a hundredth of a second sorry three seconds which is not actually a very useful property for an energy storage system because energy demand tends to fluctuate over the period of minutes to hours you know it would be like someone saying but look this car is brilliant its speedometer gives you your speed accurate to one thousandth of a mile per hour well that's very nice it's just not really useful Joe yeah the brain trust here invented a brand new form of energy storage that's has to be around forever then added a zero to the construction cost and then decided they were gonna build it in a place where it was intrinsically bad to put such a thing yeah seventy thousand tons of wasted space which is totally unlike the Yamato of course which in its entire operational history did actually manage to fire its guns once in anger at a surface target which is in the Battle of Leyte Gulf I mean it's a long story but the largest battleship in history was actually turned around by some desperate escort carriers and a few plucky destroyers none of who fared that well basically her captain despite having a winning hand for laying waste to great swedes of the u.s. invasion force lost his nerve which was really pretty understandable giving Japan's disposition at that time of the war and the year or so later the u.s. sent more planes to attack this one ship than Japan did against the entire of Pearl Harbor the outcome was never in any doubt world's biggest battleship or not she wasn't going to survive so if you want a model of the Yamato links below and if you like this channel you might want to check out my voice of thunder channel links below [Music]

Channel: Thunderf00t

Views: 580,653

Rating: 4.8306851 out of 5

Keywords: energy, vault, busted, pump, storage, concrete, crane, lift, scam, pseudoscience, pseudo, science, physics, engineering, engineer

Id: NIhCuzxNvv0

Length: 23min 52sec (1432 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 05 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/68Cadillac]

While thuderffoot does make several good points about this method of gravity storage, his suggestion that water based gravity storage works better and cheaper assumes that the power you're generating is in an area of the world with a plentiful water and mountains. Not every place has the Cascades Mountains of North America.

Some places are deserts with lots of sun and little water.