The Formula That Will Determine Our Energy Future | Answers With Joe

this video is supported by brilliant [Music] this video was a mess guys i've been doing this channel for six years now and i still every once in a while will run across a video that just just breaks me just breaks me like i thought i knew what i wanted to do with this video and then i then i didn't and then i did and then i looked the research and the research didn't quite line up with what i wanted to say so i thought about scrapping it all together and then i thought no maybe it's important to put the stuff out there that you know contradicts maybe what you want to be true we need to be re-examining our beliefs you know this is an important thing in the world right now and and maybe i should just do that and lead by example long story short i want to do a video about how renewables like solar and wind are definitely absolutely going to take over for coal eventually not because of some environmental do-goodery or whatever but because simply it is cheaper it just makes more economic sense i mean when it all comes down to it that is what's going to determine our energy mix for the future you know i mean i would love to say that you know we could read the writing on the wall and make the decisions to transfer our energy production from one thing to another because that's what's best for the world and the planet and our species but that's not the world we live in i mean there is evidence for this that wind and solar are becoming cheaper and could eventually take over for for coal completely i mean over 30 states in the united states produce most of their energy from renewables and that's amazing so i dug into the numbers thinking that it would paint a very clear picture and it the picture was not as clear as i would have liked for it to be there's a lot of room for interpretation anyway so that's basically what this video is going to be i'm going to look at the economic formula that determines the efficiency of the different types of energy systems we have going on right now and just you know see what we can glean from that so strap in because we're going to get into some economics up in here god help me [Music] last week the u.s saw joe biden get sworn in as our next president and on his list of agenda items on top of of course getting covet 19 under control one of his biggest agenda items is climate change legislation including rejoining the paris climate accords and look that's great i'm all for that government regulation and policy definitely has a role to play but as long as energy generation is a private enterprise it's all going to come down to the money like any private enterprise you have to have a margin you want to be able to sell your product for more than it took to make it and that way you make money for your shareholders if you're making say a vitamin supplement like i do then there's a fixed cost for this bottle that i have to buy right like i can buy it from the labs there's a little bit of fluctuation for scale and whatnot but for the most part i don't have any control over what i have to pay for this now what i can control is what i sell it for so i make sure and sell it for a margin that helps to keep the business going now with electricity it's it's kind of different the prices are not set by the people producing the power it's set by third parties so you know the guy running the electricity plant on the edge of town they're not the ones telling you how much you pay for that electricity so in order to make more money selling energy it's all about producing it as cheaply as possible luckily we have nerdy ways of determining this and those are the levelized cost of energy and a levelized avoided cost of energy or the lace and the lcoe or the lacoe look away look away this is basically a measure of how much energy you're getting per dollar spent or the amount of dollars you're spending per unit of energy or in fancier language they are the estimates of the revenue required to build and operate a generator over a specific cost recovery period of time and the revenue available to that generator over that same period the lcoe is the one that's used most often and it's sometimes called levelized cost of electricity instead of energy but the acronym's the same but it basically measures the amount of efficiency of a plant over its lifetime again in fancy language it's the ratio between all the discounted costs over the lifetime of electricity generating plant divided by a discounted sum of the actual energy amounts delivered typically this is measured in dollars per megawatt hour or cents per kilowatt hour and it involves a whole list of variables that i can put up on the screen right here uh there are videos that go into detail on this that i'll link down below but suffice to say it's thorough so then there's the levelized avoided cost of energy or lace and this actually measures a plant's utility to the grid as a whole so again in fancy talk it reflects the cost that would be incurred to provide the electricity displaced by a new generation project as an estimate of the revenue available to the plant like say you wanted to replace a coal plant with a solar power plant it would show you what cost you're avoiding by doing so costs like maintenance fuel costs cost of management and that kind of thing basically if the lace is better than lcoe you're in a good situation now mostly we'll be talking about the lcoe for this video that's what we're going to use to compare the different types of energy production but i wanted to mention the lace just so that you know about it and one disclaimer before we get into the numbers is that these numbers are projected and estimated out for 20 to 50 years so there's a lot of variables a lot of things can change in that time so it's not really an exact science there is an exact formula for it though and it looks it looks just like this so there you go but that's just a disclaimer it's not perfect but it's the best we've got so let's just start these things off with the bad boy itself the old standard coal coal obviously has been used for energy generation for a very very long time i don't need to go into the whole history of it here that's not necessary but suffice to say it is a mature technology there's not a lot of improvement left to be done on coal but it is as we all know one of the worst drivers of climate change so any improvements that are made to coal mostly are made towards making it cleaner now clean coal is a term that we've heard a lot the idea being that you can capture the carbon as it comes out of the smoke stack making the process cleaner i mean great idea in theory but in practice most ccs plants don't capture all the carbon in fact some of them only get like 10 percent and then what they do with that 10 percent is to sequester it underground but the way they usually use it is to pump it into oil wells to kind of push out as much oil as possible just kind of squeeze it like a grapefruit to get every last drop of oil out of there so you know you're putting it underground which is good and that extracted oil can help offset the cost of the ccs systems but they are using co2 from burning coal to get out more oil to burning cars which will create more co2 so yeah cool all of that aside though coal is good at a lot of things it's reliable it's scalable and it's cheap the holy trinity of energy production but again it is about as efficient as we're likely to get and coal plants are about 37 to 47 percent efficient but because coal is so cheap it does still have a low lcoe at around 4 cents to 15 cents per kilowatt hour next up is natural gas which a lot of people associate with fracking because that's been in the news a lot but to some it's the holy grail of energy production because it's cheap and considerably cleaner than coal granted that's a low bar natural gas is usually used in peaker plants because they can scale up really quickly if you need some extra energy just open a valve and boom you got energy being so cheap with improved technologies for extraction the lcoe for natural gas is unsurprisingly low fossil fuels are bad for the planet but man they are they're super savers when it comes to cost all that gives natural gas an lcoe score of two cents to eight cents per kilowatt hour going a bit more green next up we've got hydroelectricity this is electricity that's created by moving water and dams and reservoirs and whatnot hydro is crazy efficient almost 95 percent efficient and all you really need is gravity gravity does the work and the fuel is free there's a little bit of maintenance along the way but for the most part it's just free energy once you get it set up now of course there are a lot of upfront costs dams aren't cheap and they also tend to destroy a lot of land and displace a lot of wildlife but over the lifetime of a hydro plant those costs can be made up many times over because dams and hydroelectric plants can go for decades even centuries and it's for that reason that hydro has a great lcoe though it does produce different results according to the scale of the plants small hydro goes for about 2 to 26 cents per kilowatt hour and larger hydro goes for 1 to 28 cents per kilowatt hour from the power of water to the power of air we're just making our way through the planeteers at this point wind is obviously super clean but it's not without its problems for example it has a lot of concrete involved in making wind farms and concrete actually puts a lot of greenhouse gasses into the air then there's a problem of what to do with the blades at the end of its life cycle which is already starting to become a concern and then there's the old issue with migrating birds which actually they found out that if you paint one blade black it actually reduces bird dust by quite a bit which is kind of a weird little trick but it works but still once you set up the turbines it's just nothing but energy with some maintenance which gives on land wind and lcoe of 4 cents to 12 cents per kilowatt hour so that's on land wind farms offshore wind energy can actually get a lot more energy because the ocean is flat there's nothing in the way of the wind so it's a lot more consistent and it's a lot more strong some of the bigger offshore wind farms include the beatrice offshore wind farm in scotland it has 84 huge turbines that create energy for 450 000 homes or about 588 megawatts other success stories include the london array and the gemini wind farm overall offshore wind does have a lot more up front cost i mean you're building out in the middle of the ocean which adds a lot to the complexity and everything but once you get it set up it's it's pretty much out of sight out of mind but that upfront cost does increase the lcoe score giving it 10 cents to 21 cents per kilowatt hour almost double that of on land wind solar is one of the fastest growing energy sources in the world it's one of the cleanest sources of energy and it's becoming more efficient all the time once upon a time it was thought that solar pv couldn't actually get above 30 efficiency this was known as the shockley kaiser limit now that limit itself was later recalculated to 33.7 percent which is a very specific number but even that has been beaten by home pv technologies getting up to 39 efficiency and then what you have up on the iss is called multi-junction cells that goes up to 45 efficiency granted the iss cells go for 300 million dollars which is kind of expensive but you know tech gets cheaper over time who knows someday you might have that on the roof of your house now there is an issue that they call light induced degradation that can actually reduce the efficiency by 0.5 to 1 per year new technologies are combating that but the point is solar is still improving and with the improved cost of battery storage coming along with it it's going to be a major player in the energy grid over the years it doesn't require much maintenance and it can last decades which net solar pv and lcoe score of 6 cents to 56 cents which is a pretty wide range but there are a lot of variables including commercial production and residential production and whatnot all right so that's solar pv there's also concentrated solar so whereas photovoltaic solar you know absorbs light and that light breaks off some electrons that can then be used for electricity concentrated solar actually collects energy as heat and then heats up water and does exactly what all the other sources like nuclear and coal and gas that they all do they heat up water create steam steam turns a turbine turbine makes energy it's been around for a long time over 100 years now there are four different types of concentrated solar there are trough systems that use curved mirrors to focus on a tube filled with oil when it's heated it goes through a steam generator that can generate up to 80 megawatts of electricity some of them have a tube in each trough and then some combined troughs to heat up a larger oil tube only thing about this type is there's no thermal storage capacity a dish system reflects into a receiver which it heats and compresses as a fluid as it hits the receiver then expanding it through a turbine or with a piston to produce mechanical power this mechanical power is then converted up to 50 kilowatts of electrical power in this csp like the trough system it moves in tandem with the sun to take full advantage of the sunlight these are known as heliostats and then there's a central receiver system this one uses dozens or even hundreds of parabolic mirrors to shoot their light energy at a central point usually at the top of a tower this central point is filled with a special type of salt that gets heated to 1050 degrees which then heats water to turn a turbine more importantly it allows for storage of that heat the sodium can actually hold onto the heat for up to 10 hours meaning it's very consistent all around even at night kind of energy currently the largest concentrated solar plant is in the uae which makes sense they got plenty of sun there and with little maintenance after it's built and 43 energy conversions csp systems come with an lcoe score of 6 cents to 25 cents per kilowatt hour so i mentioned nuclear a second ago yeah let's just jump over to that nuclear is the promise of the future and the devastation of the future depending on the u.s nuclear has a bad rap mostly because when things go wrong with nuclear they go spectacularly wrong humans are pretty good at making things go spectacularly wrong so there's a reason to be concerned about that but man they produce a ton of energy the most powerful nuclear plant in the world is the kashiwazaki kariwa power plant in japan at 8 212 megawatts taking up only 4.6 square kilometers although currently it it's it's it's producing zero because japan increased the quality standards after the fukushima incident so it's offline right now getting renewed and set up for that now to appreciate just how much energy that is in india they have the badla solar park which covers 40 square kilometers to produce 2 245 megawatts which that space doesn't seem like a lot and until it does it it would take up this much space now of course nuclear comes with the waste issue we all know about that but it also has fuel that has to be mined and refined and processed in order to be used all of that comes with a cost but still the plants are so powerful and efficient that it comes out with an lcoe score of 5 cents to 13 cents per kilowatt hour so now on to one of my favorites geothermal which simply takes the heat from inside the earth and uses it to make electricity i mean think of all the hoops that we jump through and all these other energy systems just to heat up water and turn it into steam to make electricity out of it with geothermal it comes preheated all you have to do is just use it traditionally geothermal is limited to places with hot springs usually along fault lines where the crust is cracked and all that heat from down below can get up easier to the surface places like iceland that are all over geothermal energy but there are newer methods where you can just drill down into the crust where it gets hot enough to heat up water to do work sometimes this is combined with a fluid with a lower boiling point like ammonia where the heated water goes through a heat exchanger to heat up the ammonia which flashes into a gas then turns a turbine this is known as enhanced geothermal it's been calculated the geothermal could make up 10 of the u.s energy grid so it's not the biggest player out there but it's worth expanding because due to its simplicity and efficiency it comes in with an lcoe of 5 cents to 15 cents per kilowatt hour now if that ammonia trick sounded familiar you might remember it from my video in ocean thermal energy conversion which does basically the same thing by taking the temperature differential between cold deep water and warmer surface water now otech is brand new technology really it's still burgeoning it's still in its infancy that's still developing so it's kind of hard to tell over its lifetime exactly what its lcoe score might be but according to a research document that i'll link down in the description it gets 10 to 17 cents per kilowatt hour depending on the size of the plant and last but main is title power as a certain cable news man once said tide goes in tide goes out you can't explain that but you can't harness it there's a lot of promise and tidal energy because the tides carry a lot of energy with it and it's regular it happens every day twice a day has nothing to do with the weather or anything else it is regular consistent energy but it's also kind of tricky because you have to build a barrage which is basically like a dam underwater and that can cause problems with marine life now there's also the option of spinning vertical turbines under water that can kind of capture that that title as it comes in but um spinning parts underwater sounds like a maintenance nightmare to me but according to the international energy agency it is expected to grow over time and its projected lcoe of 15 cents per kilowatt hour for larger scale installations for smaller scale wins it actually gets a little pricey closer to 40 cents per kilowatt hour so that was a lot of numbers thrown at your face you kind of need to put them all on a chart to make any sense of it so let's do that and when we do that we can see that the clear winners are hydroelectric followed by natural gas with coal and wind right about even behind it nuclear and geothermal are next in line followed by solar with otech tidal and offshore wind taking up the rear so there's good news and bad news here i'll be honest i really wanted to see solar do better than it shows up on here i really wanted to make this video about how solar is destined to overcome coal but as you can see it's it's not quite that simple because one thing that's not factored in here is storage you know except for the concentrated solar with the sodium that can heat up overnight uh regular solar pv it only works half the day it doesn't work at night it's very intermittent so you have to have some kind of storage solution for it to be some kind of baseline power and that storage is going to add to the cost of solar if it's really going to be comparable to coal so as much as it's disappointing that it's not already whipping coal it's actually kind of skewed in the wrong direction now the good news is this is the situation right now and solar and storage are both plummeting in price over the last decade and will continue to do so whereas coal as i mentioned earlier it's a mature technology it's not going to get much cheaper and the same is true for wind which is already neck and neck with coal but just like with solar it is intermittent so storage needs to be part of the equation storage and diversification you know many of these types of energy are location specific now hydro gets crazy lcoe numbers but you have to live near some kind of body of water and a lot of people just don't same is true for tidal and otech same can be said for traditional geothermal it has to be near a fault line where that kind of hot water is already at the surface and it's already neck and neck with coal which is great but there's also this enhanced geothermal like i was talking about this actually gets me really excited because theoretically you could drill deep down enough anywhere in the world and reach temperatures that are hot enough to get the job done like the deepest hole in the world the cola super deep borehole in russia they reached a certain point and they had to stop not because they physically or mechanically couldn't drill any further down but because it just got too hot it got up to 180 degrees celsius now granted that's the deepest hole in the world and it took them decades to do it but the point is you go down deep enough and it'll get hot enough to be useful and what i like even more about this is that the skills required for drilling for enhanced geothermal is almost the same as drilling for oil meaning as we phase out fossil fuels over the years all of those displaced workers are going to be losing their their livelihoods because of the fossil fuels going away they can take those same hard-earned skills that they've got and put it toward this you know there is a human cost to the policy changes that are required for us to really transform our energy grid and there's always talk of retraining people who have been you know working in the oil fields to do something else but in this case you wouldn't have to retrain them at all in fact those skills are incredibly useful to this enhanced geothermal anyway i think geothermal is really cool and the idea that we could be doing it in more places than just iceland is really exciting to me and last but not least is nuclear now again it is neck and neck with coal in terms of the lcoe which is good but along with all the other problems associated with nuclear is the upfront cost nuclear power plants are extremely expensive and it's really hard to get the political will and the money together to make those things happen now granted over the long term of the plant which it can go on for decades it comes out pretty well but it's kind of like the same argument that people make with electric cars like yes over its lifetime it saves you money but that doesn't really matter if you can't make the monthly payments for it you know there's also been a massive amount of advancement in nuclear technology over the years most of the nuclear plants that are in operation right now are working on technology that's decades old and then you have the potential of small modular reactors which i've never really covered on this channel but that could bring the cost way down and that doesn't get rid of the problem of nuclear waste but there's also the idea of nuclear diamond batteries this is where they refine and compress down the nuclear waste into nanodiamonds that actually release this radiation and that radiation is captured and reused as electricity so it can just power small devices and whatnot but that's a whole infrastructure that hasn't been built out yet it's more theoretical than anything at this point but there is a use for the nuclear waste is the point there so what did we learn today kids i learned through this exercise that if my wu-tang cash rules everything around me theory is correct then natural gas and coal probably aren't going anywhere for a while as long as they are the cheapest and most readily available source of energy out there they will continue to kind of be a part of the energy grid if not dominated but wind and solar are coming up fast and starting to overtake them and some would argue that the lcoe is heavily skewed in favor of the coal and natural gas sectors because it doesn't factor in the environmental cost of its waste product you know this is the idea behind the carbon tax which i know is a heavily debated topic but it's kind of like if you had a chemical company releasing chemicals into a river you would expect that company to pay to clean up those chemicals it's the same general idea but that gets into policy which is a whole other can of worms so i'll put this to you what did you make of these numbers good bad about what you expected did i leave anything out let me rephrase that what did i leave out let me know in the comments below oh and as i mentioned before there is a formula behind the lcoe so if you wanted to play with that you can totally do so but if that doesn't make much sense to you then you might want to bone up on your algebra god knows i do so maybe we should both go check out the algebra fundamentals course on brilliant through 38 interactive quizzes covering 325 concepts this course will put you on the road to actually understanding algebra if you're anything 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are james davis lilith s me yells quite true joseph summer ripas hassan muhammad gaw patrick hanley daryl feingold walter staley lisa kassen mark johnson and deborah lloyd thank you guys so much if you'd like to join them again just click the little join button down below and the magic will begin please do like and share this video if you liked it and if this is your first time here google thinks you'll like that one so why not or you can try any of the others down there that have a little face on them and if you enjoy them and you want to see more i invite you to subscribe come back with videos every monday all right that's it for now you guys go out there have an eyeopening week and i'll see you next monday love you guys take care

Channel: Joe Scott

Views: 432,744

Keywords: answers with joe, joe scott

Id: Z6PTKXz_2r0

Length: 23min 56sec (1436 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 25 2021