Renewable Energy Series: Solar Vs Wind | Answers With Joe
When you think about it, all of our energy comes from the Sun wind and the weather it brings is all caused by the heating and cooling of the air that’s, warmed by the Sun. The tides are caused by the moon, mostly, but in a smaller part, by the gravitation from the Sun.
Geothermal heat was created during the formation of the earth and the Sun, and the entire solar system and fossil fuels are basically just sequestered solar energy that was gathered by photosynthetic algae millions of years ago.
So here’s, an idea why don’t we just cut out the middleman. Today I’m wrapping up. My three part series on renewable energy with wind and solar enjoy [ Music, ], renewable energy, really shouldn’t, be a political issue, but somehow it became one and there’s.
Two particular types of energy that tend to split a crowd than most so I saved those for last. First is wind energy, legendary oil man, t boone, Pickens called the United States, the Saudi Arabia of wind, and when you look at maps like this, it’s.
Easy to see why, as the Earth rotates toward the west, it slides underneath the atmosphere which, from our perspective, gives it a general eastward direction that eastward wind sweeps over the Rocky Mountains and then rushes down across the plains.
Creating one of the largest wind corridors in the world and in the last 10 years, investments in commercial wind have boomed in the United States, economies of scale is starting to kick in and the price of wind turbines have gone down.
It also cost a little to maintain and operate and help create energy independence and smaller communities, and it creates a revenue source for local ranchers who lease out their land to the energy companies, and they’re more space efficient on the ground.
They actually take up very little space, which means that those ranchers at least out that land can still use that land for agriculture, plus it’s, a huge growth sector for jobs currently employing over a hundred thousand people and it’s.
Expected to employ over 600,000 people in the next thirty years, all good things wait for it. While the price is going down, they are still expensive and inefficient and they work best in remote areas that require a lot of infrastructure to get that power into the cities.
Where it’s needed the most noises they make tend to bother some people and reportedly they kill around 400,000 birds and bats annually. Now, in fairness, it should be noted that over 900 million birds die every year by flying into buildings.
This is Mayor. Does that sound like a lot of birds, but the biggest problem is that they’re wildly intermittent tidal energy, for example, is intermittent, but predictable wind is we unpredictable. Whole days can pass with no energy coming out of these things.
So without a robust energy storage solution in place, wind is always gonna be supplemental and the worldwide energy potential for wind energy is 400 terra watts, which is impressive, but still supplemental.
Now there are some ideas in place to use, kites and inflatable turbines to get energy from the jet stream. That’s way up high in the atmosphere that may generate a lot more energy, but right now those are just in the experimental phase.
So right now, wind energy is a mixed bag. Economically, it does really great things, but it’s, still a ways to go and some technology it needs to be developed in order to make it in he’s anywhere near a base.
Load, energy solutions – and all of that brings us to our final energy source, solar energy. Now there’s, a reason why I save solar for last, because there’s, something different about solar, something different from all types of energy, clean and dirty photovoltaic solar cells.
Our PV cells have no moving parts. All the other sources of energy create electricity by turning a turbine either through using steam or heat or water or wind, but solar literally just collects the energy coming out of the sky when asked if he was interested in fusion power as a source of energy, Elon.
Musk famously said that we have a giant fusion reactor in the sky, just raining energy down on us every day. All we have to do is collect it. Now there are some negatives to solar power. Let’s just get that out of the way.
The first and most obvious one is there’s no Sun at night, so this is definitely an intermittent power source, but it’s intermittent more, like tidal energy than like wind energy, because the Sun is gonna come up every day.
If it doesn’t, we got bigger problems, and yet, even in cloudy weather, it’s still producing something. They also take up a lot of land, unlike the wind farm that we were talking about earlier. If the rancher wanted to lease out his land to put up solar cells, there’s, nothing else.
He’d, be able to do with that land, but you can use currently existing infrastructure like buildings and transport corridors. Now the big hang-ups for most people come in the construction of the solar panels because they do have some environmentally hazardous materials involved in some rare earth elements that need to be disposed of properly and some PV panels require rare earth elements like those found in cadmium Telluride or copper beryllium, gallium selenide, which is all the more reason to recycle the panel’s properly.
Luckily, 96 % of a solar panel can be recycled. Unfortunately, the recycling infrastructure is pretty small right now, but it’s expected to blow up quite a bit in the next 30 years, but the one that gets the solar haters the most twisted up is the fact that it does produce greenhouse gases to Make solar panels specifically nitrogen trifluoride and sulfur hexafluoride, and yes, that sucks, but the argument that we should stick with coal over solar because of those greenhouse gas emissions is frankly absurd because with solar panels it’s a one-shot deal and then you’re, getting clean, free energy for the next 20 to 30 years with coal, you’re, constantly pumping out greenhouse gases that entire time it can’t even be compared.
This debate was laid to rest Bo, Willa, Fred, Vance Ark of Utrecht University in the Netherlands. In a paper for the trade nature communications, he and his team calculated the amount of greenhouse gas emissions created by PV panel production, all the way back to 1975 to see how long it would take before they made back.
Instead, they adjusted for the different processes used over time and for the different conditions that those panels were made in in different places around the world. What they found was that solar panels created back in 1975 created 300 to 400 grams of greenhouse gases, whereas solar panels created today only put out 20 grams of greenhouse gases, so panels made back in 1975 would take 20 years to make back their carbon dead.
Today. It’s only 2 years, that’s both because they’re, producing a lot fewer emissions when they make them, but also because they’re far more efficient. Overall, the clean energy output of solar panels will exceed the carbon debt of all solar panels ever made in 2018, meaning after next year.
Solar panels will be a net negative source of carbon until the end of time boom. Now, whenever I & # 39, ve been able to find the information I’ve shared with the worldwide potential for these energy resources are so that we can compare them against the worldwide energy consumption and for the most part they & # 39.
Ve been underwhelming whelming at best, but the total global worldwide potential for solar is mind-blowing. This is where solar really shines. The amount of sunlight that reaches the Earth’s surface every day is over 3 million terawatt-hours that’s.
A hundred and forty-two times our global energy expenditure for the entire year now, of course, we can’t cover the entire planet with solar panels, and we don’t need to collect nearly that much electricity.
So what can we actually do with this information? Well, let’s Malthus. Out of this all right. According to Wikipedia three million, eight hundred fifty-thousand exajoules of energy reached the surface from the Sun every year that converts to 1 billion 69 million 440 4444 terawatt-hours now only 21 % of the earth services lands, so that comes out to 224 million 580 3333 terawatt-hours hitting The land and according to the World Bank World Development Report humans and have it about 10 percent of the Earth’s land, so that comes down to 22 million four hundred and eighty five thousand three hundred and thirty three terawatt-hours a year.
If we put solar panels on just one percent of that already inhabited and developed land, those panels would capture 224 thousand five hundred and eighty three terawatt-hours per year. We factor in an average efficiency of 15 percent for solar panels, which is getting better every year by the way we’re, generating 30 3687 terawatt hours per year, 59 percent, more than global electricity consumption, that’s, 1 %.
This is not impossible. Solar has its drawbacks, but it’s easily. The most scalable of our renewable energy resources, not every place in the world has a river. You can dam or tides that you can use or a crack in the earth.
You can manipulate or a lot of wind for that matter, but the Sun shines everywhere. True, it shines more in some places than others, but it shines everywhere. But to me the best thing about solar: is it’s, something that you can do you can’t build a dam.
You can’t harness tide. You can’t build a biomass plant, but you can put solar panels on your roof and you can make money by selling that energy back into the electricity grid can’t afford to buy them.
They’re leasing options where you can just pay the installation company out of the money that you’re making by selling that energy. Until it’s paid off live in an apartment, you can form what they call community solar Gardens where the other people in the apartment complex, all pull their money together to put up a solar installation.
Then you all split the profits from that. There are so many things in this world that we have no control over and it leads to this sort of defeatist complacency, but this is something you can actually do now because of the intermittency.
Solar is something that is just not going to be a baseload power solution unless you have some kind of massive energy storage infrastructure. This is why Elon Musk created the tesla powerwall in the commercial power pack solution.
It’s, the first step to a solar based, decentralized energy grid, backed up by base load carriers like hydroelectric biomass and when necessary, fossil fuels. I didn’t even mention the other type of solar energy, which has concentrated solar thermal plants.
These are the ones that used hundreds of mirrors to heat up a steam furnace, and some people prefer this over PV because it doesn’t. Have those rare earth elements and hazardous materials that P P does CST plants have another little trick up their sleeve, which is they store that energy in molten salt? So it can continue to make energy throughout the night when the Sun isn’t shining, but they aren’t as efficient as TVs and haven’t been as economically profitable as we hope they’d, be In the beginning, now what’s really amazing is as much energy that hits the surface of the earth every day a whole bunch of it never even reaches the surface of the earth.
It gets reflected off in the atmosphere, so the Japanese space agency JAXA, is working on a space-based solar power system. It would capture unfiltered solar power directly from the Sun and then beam that down to a station on the ground through microwave radiation.
So there’s, that the energy grid of the future is going to be more decentralized and more diverse, which is a good thing. It’s, never good to have all your eggs in one basket. It’s. Gon na take a combination of all these things: wind, solar, biomass, hydro, tidal energy to get us where we need to be, but it’s.
The combination of all those things that can direct us towards a cleaner future, so I set out at the beginning of this series to be as objective as I possibly could and honestly my opinions did change a little bit for one thing is many problems, as we Have with coal I understand now why it works so well and why it’s such a hard energy source to be, I became a lot more disillusioned with geothermal and wind, but I was pleasantly surprised by biomass.
I was already on board with solar so that didn’t change, but hopefully this gives a clearer picture of the challenges with renewable energy, the places we need to work on the places that are doing really well.
What works? What doesn & #? 39? T work and at least give you a little something to think about, or you may disagree with me completely, which is always an option and you can do that down below and if you haven’t seen the first two videos in this series that Definitely encourage you to do that.
I will put up a link right here on the in screen alright. Now, if this is your first time on this channel, first go watch those other videos and watch some of my other videos, because if you like this type of topic, I do stuff like this all the time so subscribe and see new videos.
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If you liked it now, you guys go out there and have an eye-opening week, and I will see you next Monday love. You guys take care.
