Neil deGrasse Tyson Explains Electric Power

[Music] we're back chuck i'm back in your face that's right that's right i'm here for you i i am here for you i appreciate it i like it i like it i like it on my face i i my face becomes a lot smarter when you're in it [Laughter] people actually see me that sounds weird but i think it's a compliment i don't know what happened your face looks smarter was never grass tyson in your face recently yeah man yeah the world is changing everybody's going to electricity if we're all you know electrifying cars and everything i'm totally about it because you're talking about maybe upgrading the grid we're talking about electric cars we're talking about uh public transportation systems and all of this supposedly is uh going to minimize you know our carbon emissions but here's the thing yeah electricity what is i mean aren't we burning fossil fuels to get electricity yeah yeah i mean that's the whole concept of a coal-fired power plant yeah that's uh you know i'm just saying that's a little ugly that's kind of like i'm not on drugs anymore i used to have a terrible heroin problem well what are you doing now morphine you know it's like i mean i'm happy for you but i'd rather you not be on any drugs at all i don't know if you've ever visited one of these coal-fired power plants so they have train tracks many of them have train tracks that are right alongside the power plant and the coal cars drive each car is filled with coal like to the brim yeah you know it's convex on top and they and they line up against these huge bins these vats out there's a surely an official word for it and then the coal cars just tip sideways and all the coal drops into these hoppers and then they write themselves back up and the train goes about its way and then the coal drops in it gets pulverized and then burned instantaneously right you know you think of charcoal briquettes in your fire how come it won't blight and then finally lights and it stays lit imagine to take imagine taking that briquette and completely pulverizing it into powder that's not cool and then inject it into a furnace it burns instantly yeah and and super hot too and super hot exactly so that's what's going on there why delay the energy you need in this moment anyhow so so that's an important question what's going on here so last numbers i looked i think about about two-thirds of all electrical power is supplied by some kind of fossil fuel so if i'm going to say let me not drive my car with a combustion engine let me plug it in yeah the car has no emissions all right he's just running on a battery but maybe the emissions are just just someplace else transferred transferred to the power plant so uh let me just tell you that the bigger story that's going on here okay so um i'm gonna base some of this on uh there was a book published back in 2009. the book is called turning oil into salt it was published in 2009 let me get their author's name here ann corin and gail luft and let me just share with you some perspectives there and i've forever changed for having read their book all right uh do you know how much salt cost um i think it's a dollar ten for a giant thing um okay so you unless it's kosher in which case it's a little more unless it's himalayan salt which is a little bit himalayan which is a little more and pink and delicious okay but salty you're not budgeting for your salt purchase that's right you're not thinking my gosh we gotta run out and get salt nor do you really think or care not to do your thinking and caring for you but i'm betting you're not wondering where your salt came from unless it says it explicitly and it's a gourmet fact it's not a sort of strategic fact you're not saying if you're not buying some morton salt and say gee where did the salt come from you're not i hope this is fair trade salt i know you're just not yeah you don't care you're not however you go back 150 years you knew to the penny how much you were paying for your salt you knew where it was coming from you would not be caught without it because salt was a strategic commodity it was strategic because salt was necessary to survive the winter when you were storing your your your your harvested crops so that you can not die before your next harvest and your next access to food right strategic commodity what is it called a preservative yeah i'll preserve it thank you it was a preservative all right and by the way uh grant in this civil war bombed the southern supplies of salt as as a strategic move to try to get them to surrender sooner realizing they wouldn't be able to survive the winter so that's how important salt is and in fact if you if you dig up an early episode of star talk before we were even video we had a guy who wrote a whole book on salt and was one of the more fascinating episodes ever of star talk all right and that's when you learned that the very word salary comes from the word the latin word for salt and in ancient rome they would pay soldiers and salt wow what a suck-ass job it was to be a roman soldier oh my god i just spent eight months out in a battle risking my damn life fighting these barbarians and now here i am back and they handed me a bag of salt literal barbarians they're fighting the literal barbarians fighting the literal barbarians and you paid me in a bag of salt wait wait till your next paycheck from star talk before you talk star talk we pay you in pepper but don't worry it's full of peppercorns [Laughter] so okay so here's the thing so what happens over the decades you we oh wait a minute we figure out how to can food right canning becomes a way to preserve it and then it goes well beyond just the winter because canning you can can for years uh what else oh refrigeration once we electrified cities even before we electrified cities the there's the icebox right once you could refrigerate food once transportation channels became efficient and quicker that reduced the time between production of the food and when you consumed it so all of this meant that salting foods was no longer the strategic act necessary for you to not die over the winter and so salt just became just something else in the grocery list right and not something you had to have for your survival you used to be hot salt no longer now now it's chipotle so today you know where our oil comes from wars are fought over oil that's right when the price of oil changes it makes headlines in the news that's right because your car runs on oil and on nothing else so your car has no choice you have to buy the product that your car runs on and you don't control all the access to that product that makes it a strategic asset right okay so the car really just needs power does that power have to come from gasoline no it can come from some other source all right so now suppose i turn my combustion engine car into an electric car so now i'm not putting oil into it gasoline into it i take it and i plug it in chuck when you plug things into the wall i don't care what a toaster your hair dryer whatever do you use a hair dryer probably not okay no but i do bathe with a toaster when things get bad you've clearly forgotten to plug it in every time you take a bath with him so that's what i'm doing wrong that's what you're doing that's what i'm doing wrong they never tell you that but this is it never bathed with a toaster and you did the experiment and it was no problem i don't get the big deal every time i took a bath the toaster's right here with we have the cleanest toaster in the world so you plug things into the wall are you asking yourself i wonder what kind of power this is are you are you even wondering what it cost you it's actually relatively cheap all right relative i mean compared to other things you spend money on it's it's so cheap that if you're driving away and you realize guys i left the living room light on are you going to stop the car turn around and go back and turn out tell the light and then continue to your dinner no you just say i'll turn it out when i go when i get home right that's how casual we are about this so you plug it into the wall you don't know what produced that energy it could be coal could be oil it could be a hydro it could be solar panels it could be nuclear it could be tidal you don't know and in fact you don't care so if laws change if we run out of oil if we whatever goes on in the energy marketplace doesn't have to concern you the power company says i will now generate power from wind from from solar from from hydro by the way wind and hydroelectric are both solar powered right the sun evaporates ocean water and that moves on land it comes out as rain to some high lake you damn that or a river you damn that and then you have hydro power and of course wind powers the uneven heating of earth's surface causing wind movement so so solar panels wind and hydro all solar power okay so the the electric company if the price of oil goes high let's swap in more solar if we outlaw coal they put bring in hydro by bringing nuclear whatever else it is they're not beholden to oil to create power that comes out of your wall socket so if transportation and other things that use combustion engines that have a carbon footprint if they all plug into the wall you are planting the seeds of a future where we have no dependence on oil whatsoever all right well i like that and we would have turned oil into salt nice uh except i am not putting oil on my french fries i'm just saying no no because you boiled them in oil exactly so you're not putting crude oil on your face i'm just going to say i'm not putting 10 w40 or you know or uh oh some some uh was light sweet crude i'm not i'm not going light sweet crude on my french fries so that's just some of the sort of backdrop of what's going on with electricity yeah and one of the great challenges before we land this plane here is uh one great advantage that oil gasoline has over these other forms of energy is i can take a bucket of gas and i can move it from like here to there right and just leave it available to me when i need it when i need it okay whereas solar power you don't there's no unless you stored that in a battery right and then carry the battery around the actual act of collecting solar power uh is not the same as storing it and transporting it absolutely so if you don't have a way to store the solar power you only get to use it while it's coming down while it's happening so there's still some challenges you know plus batteries are like 150 year old technology all right and uh volta was one of the first who sort of pioneered a good version of a battery and of course we named volts after him uh but so there's still challenges to making this work in its fullest expression but i'm just saying the sun is handing you free energy every sunny day of the year and to just let it go to waste while we are burning fossil fuels warming the earth is a travesty and so we need to put our brain power where in ways apply our brain power in ways that can represent us as good shepherds of our own civilization so that generations to come will be proud of what we have done for them rather than ashamed yes excellent excellent we gotta call it quits there chuck all right all right so that's uh some earth day uh perspectives for you i like it all right all right happy earth day happy earth day to everybody and uh let's let's look forward to the day when we don't need a freaking earth day because earth is just fine and our relationship with it is stellar see what i did there that would be great yes and it would be i saw what you did there you saw what i did all right there's been a a star talk explainer video all about electrical power i'm neil degrasse tyson as always bidding to keep looking up you

Channel: StarTalk

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Keywords: startalk, star talk, startalk radio, neil degrasse tyson, neil tyson, science, space, astrophysics, astronomy, podcast, space podcast, science podcast, astronomy podcast, niel degrasse tyson, physics, earth day, green power, sustainability, renewable energy, electric vehicles, electric cars, hybrid cars, tesla, elon musk, coal power, clean energy, power grid

Id: u88j_Kmh8zg

Length: 14min 19sec (859 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 22 2021