How To Turn The Ocean Into A Battery | Answers With Joe

this video supported by curiosity stream hey you know it's cool like one of the most awesome things we've ever discovered in the history of our species Cole yes Cole what why you look at me like that seriously though Cole is literally rock made out of solar energy millions of years ago photosynthetic algae absorb the sun's energy they lock that energy into chemical bonds then they died settled on the ocean floor got covered up by sediment and over millions of years got compressed into this rock and all you have to do to get that solar energy back out of the rock is burn it of course by burning it you're also releasing all that carbon that's been locked away for millions of years up into the atmosphere all at once which has the little side effect of you know destabilizing the climate which is bad but Cole is essentially a battery a battery that lasts for millions of years and never loses in the energy now of course photovoltaic cells or solar panels they kind of skip the middleman by just absorbing that energy and pumping it right into the grid and solar panels are awesome but of course there's that whole you know intermittency problem the Sun doesn't shine at night so we're trying to get around that by building batteries to store that energy just like Cole does any the batteries don't get burned and spew stuff out into the atmosphere or anything but they do take energy to create and they contain toxic elements that have to be recycled later on now none of that has meant the disparage batteries batteries are awesome they're getting better all the time but wouldn't it be great if there was a natural battery one you didn't have to build when he didn't have to burn one that lasts forever and it's plentiful and never loses energy we do have exactly that it's called the ocean and the process to get the energy out of the ocean is called ocean thermal energy conversion or otech and it's kind of Awesome the first commercial steam engine was built in 1698 by Thomas Savery and this may be hard to believe but here we are today 300 years later and most of our energy is still generated on those same principles because when we talked about releasing energy from coal to make electricity what we're really talking about is using that coal to heat up water to make steam that steam expands and the force of that expansion turns a turbine makes electricity so yeah next time you boil water to make macaroni and cheese you're seeing the process that powers our entire world it's known as the Rankine cycle and there are lots of different ways of man I won't wreck or haze there are lots of different variations on the Rankine cycle but it generally boils down to four parts a boiler a turbine a condenser and a feed pump the boiler heats the water till it turns into superheated steam that steam spins a turbine or turbine Marv you want to say it the turbine spins and makes electricity the steam is collected cooled and condenses back in the liquid form to be boiled again and this process repeats itself over and over again heating water into steam cooling it back down into water this is an old tried-and-true method we've been doing it for 300 years and really the big question what it always comes down to is just how do you heat the water you know coal natural gas nuclear these are all just different ways of boiling water water boils at 100 degrees Celsius or 212 freedom' units and that's what determines how much energy needs to be produced at you know abnormal atmospheric pressure and we're kind of stuck with that you know with that that's how much energy you have to produce that's why you have to burn coal in order to make that water evaporate but who says it has to be water ammonia and other refrigerants have a boiling point way lower than water closer to water's freezing point so you can have the same process work the same way but only have to raise and lower the temperature by about 20 degrees or so and that is the idea behind ocean thermal energy conversion or otech the oceans surface absorbs solar radiation all day and that warms the surface to around 22 degrees Celsius but the deep water a kilometer or so down is closer to 5 degrees so no tape facility has two pipes one that pumps water in from the warm surface layer and one that draws water up from the cold depths the warm water heats the ammonia which boils and expands turn turbine thing gets cooled by the deep water back into liquid ammonia and the cycle repeats itself so in this case the water isn't the thing that boils it's the heat source the ocean is the coal of otech and just like coal it absorbs a lot of energy 173,000 terawatts of solar energy hits the Earth's surface at any given time and 71% of the planet is on that's an equivalent heat energy of 250 billion barrels of oil every day even capturing a fraction of a fraction of a percent of that energy would be more than enough to power the entire United States four times over now that would be on a massive scale obviously but the energy is out there just ready to be taken and that amount of energy is going up ocean temperatures are rising right along with the atmosphere so this is actually an energy source that can take advantage of that and within the technology of otech there are a few different methods to choose from there's closed loop open loop and hybrid in the closed loop cycle or Andersen cycle the ammonia solution never leaves the system as the name implies it continues to cycle around and around heated by the warm water and the evaporator through the turbines into the condenser where it's cooled by the deep water and back around again in the open loop system or Claude cycle this is far different in this method the sea water itself is turned into steam using flash evaporation I was careful earlier to say that 100 degrees Celsius is the temperature the water boils at normal atmospheric pressure but in a low-pressure environment that boiling point goes down so warm water is pumped into the system put through a flash evaporator that turns it into steam through low pressure and then the steam turns a turbine and then it's passed over the cold deep water and a condenser now the bad news is that the water isn't cycled back through the system but the good news is that that newly condensed water is clean fresh water this can actually double as a desalinization plant and this would highly benefit island nations that are short undependable power and potable water do you realize what that could mean to the starving nations of the earth they'd have enough salt to last forever the hybrid loop obviously combines both systems together the warm water is used to heat the ammonia first then the ammonia goes on to do its normal closed-loop thing but then the warm water is fed into the flash evaporator and then goes on to do the open-loop thing to make freshwater and then cold water is used to condense both cycles these are of course ridiculously simple and there's many different variations of each but that gets the idea across in terms of how and where you can implement you know tech system obviously it has to be on a coastline preferably in a tropical warm environment they can be installed on land with pipes going out into the sea or out on platforms in the ocean now platforms can be more efficient for energy production there's less distance to pump the water so less energy required to do that and then the electricity generated can just be wired back through undersea cable to the shore whereas land-based otech systems can take advantage of the of the open-loop cycle and produce clean water for agriculture and people now if you're anything like me you're looking at this and you're thinking wow this sounds awesome why aren't they all over the place well there are some pros and cons on the pro side you can take full solar advantage of the Sun like I said before seventy one percent of the planet is ocean so even if you covered every square inch of land with solar panels you're still only getting twenty nine percent of the solar energy that's hitting the earth it's already being absorbed out there we just have to go get it it can provide base load power otech is one of the very few renewable energy sources that run 24 hours a day all day long it doesn't matter if the sun shining doesn't matter if the winds blowing this is stable energy generation that can actually compete with fossil fuels it's dispatchable power otech is dispatchable meaning it can be ramped up and down at a moment's notice and can compensate for fluctuating energy demand it's complementary to other renewables since otech is so dispatchable it can kind of almost be used as a peeker plant it can kind of even out what other renewables are doing it basically creates more space for renewables to be implemented it provides energy security ootek offers an immense energy resource that can't be controlled by other countries it can be done offshore so you can do otech on offshore platforms it's not going to be taking up land that could be used for housing and agriculture and it's low risk you're not dealing with anything explosive no oil to spill not a lot of moving parts no radioactive stuff and no waste material hey Joe that's great did you say something about cons yeah there are some cons the biggest one being that you're limited location when I say 71% of the sun's energy hits the oceans that's not a lie but it doesn't hit the oceans all equally oh text-only really feasible in a narrow band across the middle of the planet and that makes only about 30 countries really able to advantage of it and most of those are fairly poor but two of those countries are India and Brazil which are highly populous and could get a lot of use out of it and again obviously it can only be taken advantage of by countries that border an ocean another con is that there are maintenance issues anybody who works with water can tell you that after a while the works can kind of get gummed up with algae and other microorganisms barnacles and whatnot this is known as bio fouling especially the deep ocean pipes they would have to constantly be cleaned and check for debris although this could be done by robotic submersibles and last but not least they're not very efficient like the top theoretical efficiency for a no tech plant as around 7% and after running all the pumps and everything off of it it's really closer to 2% now that's 2% that's going 24seven but still now one caveat though and something that's really cool about otech is that once you get it started once the process gets going it literally powers itself like you don't have to do anything there's no outside energy that's required to make the thing run so it just powers itself off of the ocean temperature now you can also expect improvements in efficiencies over time as the you know technology gets perfected but that's one of the reasons why otech really hasn't taken off more than it has because that kind of research requires investment now luckily there are some test projects that are proving out this concept there's a 100 kilowatt demonstration plan called the kumejima plant that opened in okinawa japan in 2013 and hawaii a company called Makai ocean engineering is operating a 100 kilowatt otech plant which opened in 2015 now this is enough to power 120 homes in Hawaii this is still considered a testbed that they have plans to expand it to a 10 megawatt system in the future a 16 megawatt platform was built off of Martinique but was shut down in 2018 due to technical issues in India has a one megawatt plant with bigger projects on the way there are also a lot of plans in development right now in the US Virgin Islands Guam the Philippines Puerto Rico and Zanzibar Tanzania and Ghana in Africa but as of right now the biggest power plants that are proving out this technology are platforms ocean platforms like the Hainan 100 megawatt power plant in China this is a partnership between lucky Martin and the Rainwood group out of Hong Kong and it can produce up to 1.3 million barrels of oil worth of energy and take down carbon emissions by half a million tons but maybe the most interesting concept is one called ocean mechanical thermal energy conversion this is the brainchild of Patrick McNulty who's been promoting this idea since 2007 but it's a solar barge that takes advantage of ocean currents to move water passively through the barge of the ocean surface with a 600 meter pipe pulling cold water up from below the water passing through the top creates a low-pressure zone that sucks water up from below which then mixes in with the water behind the barge and lowering the temperature solar panels run the pumps which don't have to work as hard because the system is mostly passive and the power generated is sent via underwater cables to the shore now what's cool about this idea is it's a standardized platform that can be produced at scale so entire fleets of barges could be linked together to create as much or as little energy as you need and when you get up to massive scales there's some interesting byproducts that occur because these platforms would take in warm water and mix it with the cold water and then release it out the back meaning that the water behind it would be a little bit cooler so with enough of these platforms and yes we're talking massive scales here you could actually lower the temperature of the surface of the ocean and this could actually help with hurricanes hurricanes kind of feed off the energy of the ocean which is why as the planet is warming and the oceans are warming hurricanes are getting stronger all the time they're gonna be getting even stronger in the future but if you could lower the temperature of the ocean around land that could actually reduce the amount of energy in the hurricane and make it smaller and less destructive in theory now Patrick McNulty takes us even further and claims that if you do enough of this so you could cool the oceans enough to kind of rebuild the ice caps and cool off the whole planet he talks about this a lot actually now a few caveats that I have here is that if you're lowering the temperature of the surface then you're obviously going to be probably messing with the efficiency of the barges downstream which might lower the efficiency of the entire system but there's also the danger I feel of maybe messing with the Gulfstream the thermohaline current that plays such a big role in weather stability and also speaking of hurricanes I had my doubts as to how well a fleet of these things would handle a big storm like that and this is just my opinion here but I kind of feel like by focusing on these big like almost terraforming techniques of cooling off the whole planet and saving the world that McNulty might actually kind of be shooting himself in the foot it might be keeping people from from taking the legit you know opportunity here seriously but regardless even if all these things do is produce energy I still think it's a cool idea that's worth pursuing so hopefully we'll see some movement happen on that also I want to thank Dave from just have a thank for sharing that animation with me he goes a lot deeper into the subject you can follow the link and see it yourself but I'll toss this one of you guys is this the ultimate renewable energy solution or just another big idea that's never gonna pan out talking about yourselves in the comments if you want to take a deeper dive into otech and other future renewable energy solutions you may want to check out energy of the future part of the dream the future series on curiosity stream narrated by Sigourney Weaver this episode looks at innovations like concentrated solar micro wind energy fusion energy and yes ootek and how they're paving the way to meet the increasing energy needs of the coming decades in fact there's a whole section shot at the Makai plant in Hawaii so you can get a better idea of how that whole thing works and from there you can check out the rest of the series transportation of the future cities of the future schools of the future and so on 19 episodes and all and they're all fascinating and this is of course just one of thousands of documentaries on curiosity stream and everything from science history art you name it curiosity streams packed with some of the top documentaries in the world by award-winning filmmakers if you like this channel well the curiosity shrinks better and it's only $2.99 a month which is just nuts it's it's easily the best deal on streaming services out there plus when you sign up to get access to nebula the streaming service that I'm a part of along with tons of other educational youtubers like real engineering Isaac Arthur minutephysics up in Adam and more where you can find our content ad free in one place plus get access to maybe low exclusives that you can't find anywhere else and they now have an app on Apple TV that's brand new so you can go 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Channel: Joe Scott

Views: 344,475

Rating: 4.9375954 out of 5

Keywords: answers with joe, joe scott, OTEC, ocean thermal energy conversion, coal energy, rankine cycle, clean energy, base load power, green energy

Id: 8PUlIHgRos8

Length: 15min 44sec (944 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 06 2020