Not mentioning hydrogen in this video is strange

How about build gyms all over the country, where every single exercise machine generates power. Would be a way to convert the energy in food back to energy for the grid, while getting in shape lol.

​@@oriolopocholo vox thinks it's efficiency is too bad perhaps although they mentioned heat storage roundtrip on that is comparable or worse i believe 🤔

Using nuclear energy instead of fossil fuels might eliminate the need for extreme energy storage infrastructure. And since it has no emissions and requires very little resources per generated unit of energy it would benefit both the environment and climate.

@@matthiasknutzen6061 They seem to have some sort of agenda against hydrogen. The fact that they have literally not mentioned it when it's a core player in electricity storage in the future is just bizarre

You are 100% right

And most often, it's the free market that stops solutions in its tracks while fossil fuels recieve decades upon decades of incentives.

​@@toyotaprius79 Not now. Solar and Wind are allready so cheap, that fossil fuels can't compete with it. When the new Na-Ion batteries enter the market, people WILL buy them for their home energystorage, which can be charged with windenergy in the night, which makes fossilfuels even more unattractive. This will push renewables and the longtermstorage solutions together. Nontheless I think that the gravity vault will definitely fail, because it's so flawed. Storing potential energy in mass only makes sense on massive scales. Lifting CONCRETE-weighst a few meters with expensive cranes wont do it.

absolutely, wind+solar+hydro+nuclear= a fully efficient grid pretty much

​@@lourencovieira5424 You forget geothermal energy

Pumped hydro isn't ideal either. More and more studies are pointing to concerning amounts of methane emissions coming from large water reservoirs. There are lots of other battery options coming down the pike though. Batteries (in their different forms) are the way.

@@brianrcVids I never said "ideal" now can I get a link to those studies?

@@brianrcVids Pumped hydro isn't creating water it's storing existing water which would have been creating the same emissions.

@@gorg8882 This claim does appear to be reputable, but the comment of it being "concerning" is a bit distorting. This is one of several papers: "Hydropower's Biogenic Carbon Footprint" from Plos One. Interestingly, hydrostorage has larger emissions than hydropower because the water is still and bacteria and algae can grow. That said, the greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels are still several times greater per unit power, and there are ways to mitigate the methane emissions. For example, you could keep it away from agricultural areas in order to prevent runoff and algae blooms, and you can maintain good water levels so that it isn't too shallow anywhere (apparently this matters!).

​​​@@brianrcVids I don't think batteries will play a major role. Storing renewable energy in ammonia, heatbatteries and many other ways will be way more scalable for massive storage than a battery. Pumped hydro will keep it's place but will be complemented by new technologies. Maybe even undersee compressed air storage, but definitely not by the gravity vault.

very interesting technology. Going to do some further investigation for my research project in SmartGrid technology. Do you have any suggestions for where I can get more information?

You mean energy storage in general?

Yea ofc. But when the earth start changing everyone start to pay attention lol

It's a venture capital

​​@@TH-lu9du No. That project is seriosly flawed. There are many reasons why we manly use fluids for storing potential kinetic energy. Only other interesting concept I've seen so far is undersee air storage, which is pumped storaged hydro but inverted.

​@@haifutter4166 ah the company behind the concrete gravity idea. Sorry, I wasn't paying attention. Makes sense after I re-watched the video. "Energy vault" is such a generic nondescript name LOL.

i hat eyou

Now we have sodium batteries. Sea salt. We'll never run out! Lithium gives the longest range for EV's, but they're even using sodium for some shorter range but vastly CHEAPER EV's. But sodium batteries should be there for about 2 hours for each city, after that we need off-river pumped hydro for 2 days for each city. Overbuild your renewables for the worst weeks in winter. DONE!

I guess I found the target for this video. I found the title clickbaity and annoying. It's just a summary of the top 5 ways to store energy, which is interesting, but nothing ground breaking in any way at all.

All energy storage systems are batteries. They differ from each other only in terms of the materials used.

And flywheels, and molten/redox and flow batteries

Or hydrogen

@@Mesh17i82 that's the horse that oil companies are betting all odds on

@@toyotaprius79 if they spend Billions on it. Let‘s go

Also while not even mentioning hydrogen which has 100s of MW scale plants being built

Green energy is a scam. It's not about the planet or about energy. The people that complain the most about the environment are the ones that do the most destruction to it.

Nuclear definitely should be considered. I heard of developments in small scale reactors that don't require the massive construction of full scale plants. Reactors closer to the size of a cargo container

​@@BhargavKrishnaReddy79 you also miss the point. Nuclear and hydro can work constantly for 24 hour. Meanwhile renewable sources like solar can't create energy during night (so it's need energy storage) and wind also don't have constant energy for 24 hours (so it's also need energy storage)

@@BhargavKrishnaReddy79 I'd say it is very much relevant, actually, since the inclusion of baseload and dispatchable energy sources greatly reduce the quantity of storage required to alleviate production variation in a renewable-heavy grid. You won't need remotely as much storage to compensate for a week-long low in wind+solar power production if nuclear+hydro make up ~30% of your capacity.

Nuclear power stations are very expensive to build so to get a return on investment they are on as much as possible. So thats why they are not used as backup

@@diegastdienuiestdoet Some French NPPs are set for load following. Besides, you don't need to use nuclear power plants as backup for them to reduce the need for storage. Baseload generation also greatly reduces the need for storage capacity. If you've got, say, 20GW of guaranteed continuous production, you need a lot less energy storage for moments when you have no wind nor sun.

Water doesn't erode but the infrastructure it's in does erode.

It is about localisation… water you need gradient differences, just hanging weights, could be placed all over

@@szurketaltos2693 then build it underground?

the same is done with air actually

@@someguyyt8595 underground still requires infrastructure like pipes and coatings

That seems like a great solution. The best of all since water is everywhere. How's the efficiency? Seems like it would be ok since hydrogen and oxygen can both be burned.

I was searching in the comments whether someone would say about GREEN hydrogen. For sure it supposed to be mentioned in the video.

There's nothing wrong with wind and solar energy but nuclear power should have been the primary source of clean electricity decades ago with those two helping nuclear.

Nuclear is great but it has the opposite problem. You can't really ramp them up and down. They are designed for mostly constant output. So you can't turn them up or down. There will always be a gap to "fill" either excess energy you need to store, or something else to turn up to meet demand.

@@jpcool95480 True but at least the power output is consistent, so you don't need like a week of backup storage to prevent days long blackouts because there was a particularly low wind/cloudy week. I think that's the part we are missing, cool daily averaging and stuff is quite easy because the amount of power storage for just matching supply with demand over a day is much easier. But we forget that renewables are not consistent over the year at all, which means you need to average out the year. While with nuclear sure it's pretty inefficient to power up and down, but you can just over produce and waste the rest and be sure you have power, or you can average out the day demand, but you don't need backup power for a full week (or whatever level makes blackouts rare enough to be acceptable with renewables ) With renewables what we are seemingly doing is just over producing because the cost per unit is quite low, but then we still can't store it so we need fossil fuel permanently on the grid until such time as we have enough grid level storage to store on the level of multiple days worth of energy.

Pumped hydro is a great solution but only works in terrain that supports it. I imagine mined storage would work in more places

One problem is all nuclear waste is stored in "temporary" locations until we figure out an appropriate permanent location

@@TH-lu9duI don’t see how that’s a big issue. We have plenty of space and nuclear waste is really compact. How many people have ever been hurt by nuclear waste, a comically low number compared to every energy source lower than healthy renewables too

It can help to a certain degree, but it cannot replace storage entirely. Weather systems are very large so you'd need to move power vast distances to completely avoid adverse weather. If it's nighttime (no solar) and there is no wind, you might have to transport multiple countries worth of electrical energy across half a continent. Such transmission systems are not really economically feasible. And then there's the inefficiency of having that much overcapacity everywhere.

@@fixminer9797 agreed. Another storage option not mentioned in this video is hydrogen electrolysis.

@@kevinmbrooks Yeah, that seems rather promising and reasonably scalable. It's weird that they didn't even mention power-to-gas systems in the video.

​@Kevin Brooks the issue with H2 storage is efficiency. Electrolysis is currently too inefficient to make it economically viable unless the electric company is paying you to take the excess power.

@@stevk5181 for what it's worth, the Volts podcast had an episode about developing and scaling up elecrolyzers recently.

Totally agree. I recently got solar panels, now I have a negative energy bill :-)

Solar panels are very cheap, but the issue is storing the energy they produce. In my off-grid setup, too much excess energy gets wasted because I have to disconnect the panels during peak hours. Too much sunlight can damage the wires, components, and batteries.

same

People have been talking about it for more than 100 years.

looks like it cost way more money than building nuclear plants LOL

AFAIR nuclear can't be so easily ramped up or down, but once it's built, it's a stupidly cheap way of getting a base load of electricity, helping the grid have higher surplusses when wind/solar pick up, and lower valleys when they don't; so you have more spare energy for storing it on the good times, and need less storage for the bad times.

@@cc_jmk Nuclear is very flexible! You can control the power output of the fission reaction, as well as the amount of steam that reaches the turbine. The department of energy has a good article on it.

@@ltmbookworm Nuclear reactors are "rampable." But the initial capital investment is so high, and the variable costs are so low, that operators want to operate as close to 100% as possible.

Pumped hydro from watertowers is a terrible idea. But I 100% agree that it is still a better idea than energy vault.

Its sad people hate nuclear, we have had a good reliable renewable source of energy for decades but due to fearmongering it is sidelined. Yes the upfront cost is expensive but we need to see the long term gains and stop getting distracted by new shinny renewable projects.

> NON proliferation why is proliferation such a bad thing that all pro nuclears have to go the line of non nukes

@@sirnikkel6746 because nuclear weapons proliferation increases the risk of accidents and intentional acts. At this point, only countries that have been able to learn from the accidents and near misses of the 20th century can really be trusted with this power. But you can absolutely be pro nukes and pro nonproliferation.

@@Rysander1 YEY! NUKES FOR EVERYBODY! Each nation armed so it can't be trampled

@@forzer456 Nuclear energy is not renewable and therefore can't be our long term answer. It's not a nuclear vs renewables. We should have both.

Let's say that you need a mountain's worth of material to build that renewable infrastructure that you describe for a nation. Then consider that both wind and solar generators meet the end of their useful life in about 15 to 20 years. It's not that it can't be done... but extractive mining for metals and concrete will need to be scaled up significantly. You'll still need energy storage or baseload power sources for meteorological events called anticyclonic gloom (very low wind, very low ground level incident sunlight). Europe tends to get 2-10 of these events per year which last 50-150 hours per year. This could be fully covered if you have about 1500 hours of energy storage on tap. If we use Germany as an example, in 2021 they used 569 TWh, or roughly 65 GW for their moment by moment average, and they'd need about 97.5 TWh of storage to cover that. Given that lithium ion batteries cost around $153/kWh, that would run them around $153,000,000,000/TWh or roughly $14.9 trillion every 10-15 years (this is the expected lifespan of a lithium ion battery). At a gdp of $4.26 trillion per year -- that would be one heck of a sacrifice. And this doesn't take into account the added cost of spontaneous self incineration events from lithium ion battery farms (and they DO happen distressingly frequently).

@@gilian2587 I agree that lithium ion batteries are not suitable to supply full baseload power. But most nations will not run entirely on solar and wind. I am Zambian and we are nearly 100% hydro and will remain so for the foreseeable future. I live in South Africa which has lots of coal and some nuclear. Those are not going away instantly. They also have some pumped hydro and potential for more. My point was that until your solar and wind are a very significant part of your mix, storage is not so important and over capacity can be more economical initially than increasing storage. After all that is how most fossil fuel grids are run (over capacity with minimal storage). A common misunderstanding is that existing grids provide continuous reliable power whereas renewables do not. That is simply untrue. Renewables tend to have a daily and seasonal cycles but they are fairly predictable, whereas fossil fuels and nuclear have to be taken off line for maintenance or breakdowns so their cycles are different but still exist. They still need either over capacity or storage. As for 'a mountains worth of material' I really don't know what you are on about. Its almost like you didn't read my post but were complaining to someone else.

I was going to mention redox flow batteries too, thanks for bringing it up.

@@EvanKnightIsGood it should also be mentioned that the millions of expected energy drains fossil fuel fans scream about is actually an additional buffer. When the car (or whatever) is charged, the battery storage that charged it is still sitting there as a storage device, in every home that would cause the drain.

Just Have A Think has excellent videos on the topic

The very fact that a 100% fossil fuel grid up until recently is why such technologies aren't readily available because there wasn't a market for instantaneous energy storage - in contrast to gas peaker plants

Agreed! It’s safe and clean power that we aren’t yet fully utilizing.

I believe the EU is investing so much in hydrogen tank

Which one?

Maybe blocks should be made of waste products. That way waste also gets utilised and we have less recycling problem.

I was waiting for it to be mentioned, too. Clean, reliable power that isn’t even considered. :(

That's how you make money.

Just use water man. Don't need to reinvent the wheel lol

There just aren't enough places where water is an option. Obviously

No we need nuclear fusion.

Using dynamic load signals to charge large numbers of EVs seems to be one of the best ways to store excess power using batteries we already have and need to charge. In that sense there's essentially no storage losses. California already has days when solar production exceeds demand and excess power is essentially wasted.

@@rubic0n Yes! I totally forgot about that. Very cool idea.

But that would require communism!

I think you are demonstrating one of the great myths of consumption. Your personal peak usage includes all the users who are providing you with services. I am not sure there is any way to realistically evaluate your personal peak usage. I don't see why working from home would automatically change peak electrical use.

@@rosscollinswilliams I"m sorry, I don't believe I follow you. When you say all the users who are providing me services, what do you mean exactly? The electrical company? I'm the only one around the house using power during the day and the amount I use is fairly consistent with only occasional spikes for things like doing laundry or running the dishwasher, which occur at random, irregular times and not as part of a daily pattern. The reason working from home might eliminate/change peak electrical use is because people have more freedom and flexibility to do stuff throughout the day instead of cramming many/most high electrical use activities into an hour or two before work and an hour or two after work.

But the large industries and power consumers are not going that. No-one is running a smelter or boiler or factory from home.

Back of the envelope calc shows that it wouldn't even provide a day's worth of power -- when, ideally, there needs to be a minimum of 1-2 weeks of storage to account for periods of lower than average solar/wind. Assume 8M vehicles with an average capacity of 100kWh. Now assume you'd have 70% available to discharge at night (because nothing is ever ideally 100%). Now use an average future California energy demand of 40GW: (8M x 100kWh) / 1,000 = 800GWh 0.7 x 800GWh = 560GWh 560GWh / 40GW = 14 hours Sodium-ion grid-scale batteries should've been discussed as they have the potential to be significantly cheaper than lithium-ion batteries along with a nearly inexhaustible supply of sodium. Nuclear and advanced geothermal should also be on the table. The cost of nuclear could go down significantly if done at scale and not as one-off projects (e.g. Vogtle in Georgia).