Comments by "Tony Wilson" (@tonywilson4713) on "The Missing Link in Renewables" video.

@lordsamich755 Actually you are quite wrong there. Sorry if this is a bit long, but there have been dramatic changes in what we now know about the financial aspects of renewable energy. The Germans spent €1.3 trillion on renewable energy and did NOT the outcomes they expected. I'm Australian engineer and I've worked with German engineers and they are bloody smart and they worked out some things. The first thing they realised is that wind and solar are most reliable at different times of the day. Solar is obviously best when the sun is up. Wind is most reliable in early morning and late afternoon, because its driven by the different rates the land and oceans heat up and cool down. What the Germans worked out is that if you balance the amount of wind versus solar efficiency you can save around 23% in outright costs, because you don't need to install as much to get the same delivered power. Normally you need to install about 2.2kW of renewable power for every 1kW of coal or nuke you turn off. With a balanced wind solar system the Germans claim that can come down to about 1.7 kW (about 23% less). That saving on wind turbines and solar panels can go into storage where there is an even bigger advantage. The Germans worked out that FINANCIALLY the worst thing for renewable energy is the exact opposite of what most people thought. Its not when there isn't enough wind and sun its when there's too much, because it overpowers the grid. Basically if you inject to much energy into a grid the voltage climbs and stuff starts melting. From a financial investment point if your renewable energy system has to be disconnected or locked out. The its NOT making any money when it should. Even worse is if you have to pay someone to burn the excess off and that's happened in Germany. With storage you don't lose that excess energy you get to sell some of it when the wind & sun die down. In the system described here instead of earning nothing for that excess energy you get $0.70 of it back (he said its got 70% efficiency). The Liquid air battery being developed in England only gets 60% but it can be massive and can store for longer. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMLu9Dtw9yI That's the really big lesson from the Germans. A smarter design that balances the wind, solar & storage costs less and works better and EARNS MORE. I hope that helps - sorry if its a long answer.
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Dude you are usually very good on your technology - your video on ventilators was a 12 out of 10, not just a 10 or an 11 it was a 12. It shut up quite a few people who were building ventilators out of industrial components that WOULD have killed people. I do industrial automation and I know industrial equipment cannot work accurately enough to match the requirements you described. That video may well have saved lives. But on this one you have screwed the pooch a bit on the South Australian information. Like most industrialized countries its simply not accurate to say that power grids are designed. They don't simply design and plan power grids. The y are constantly being reviewed and added to and are better described as "evolved." South Australia's real problem was that they turned of both of their base load cola fired plants before they had *ANY alternative generation let alone renewable generation ready. As for the Tesla "big battery" it does NOT respond to frequency it responds to voltage. Possibly that was just a mind slip. What design there is in Power grids comes from the standpoint of where power is generated to how it is distributed. In Australia we now have a huge issue with WHERE our power is now being generated. In Victoria (where I am from) our grid evolved around 3 major coal fired units in the Eastern part of the state and we now generate vast amounts of wind energy from the Western side of the state. So our grid was designed to inject power in the East NOT the west. In South Australia there grid evolved around 2 coal fired units right next to each other in Adelaide. Now its generated 100s of kilometers away. Now one of our biggest problems is that where we generate the grids cannot handle the power we are trying to inject. On the liquid batteries this was fantastic. I have seen other vids on them and they are potentially a game changer. Having each house have its own battery is very nice for the shareholders of Tesla but its totally uneconomical for an entire society. We will move to large localized batteries in future, because most substations have room around them to do their job efficiently. The most important thing about batteries is that they stabilize the grid and with more and more small scale generation (including domestic solar) getting connected to the grid large local batteries (sometimes called community batteries will become vital for grid stability. BUT for actual backup power for grids batteries are unlikely to solve the problem. They are great for transient dampening but suck if you need to keep a power grid up for a couple of days. Pumped hydro is great for massive storage the Snowy 2.0 project is planned to have 7 days of energy reserve. BUT pumped hydro has 1 massive issue - you must have suitable geography for it. Hydrogen is a great possibility because if you can generate enough and cheap enough you can simply use it instead of coal in existing power stations. It has one huge issue and that is its basic nature. I work in automation and control systems. I'm trained and certified in EEHA and hydrogen is a bitch because you have to be extra careful because of how easily it ignites and how violently it explodes and hot hot it burns. Hydrogen really is a bitch to do any electrical work around. One technology I had not hear of until recently is the liquid air battery. I find this really interesting because it uses a lot of off the shelf technology that we know and understand. In automation we call that kind of design work "integration' where we take bits form other solutions and combine or integrate them into a new solution for a similar or unrelated problem. Here's a link to the vid done by Dave Borlace on his channel Just Have a Think. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMLu9Dtw9yI In that system large chunks like the compressors, liquid air system and turbines are fairly standard items. The thermal storage part is the innovation. My opinion is that is a technology that should be pursued because it can provide several days of backup.
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@t60-flying95 Great question. I have no answer as I'd not heard of them before your question. I am aware that there is underdevelopment at the University of Illinois- Chicago a Lithium-Air battery. Its advantage is that it uses the air around the batterie as the other half of the battery and has the potential for a massive change in storage density. The concept isn't new but they have struggled to make the membrane work. They did have a "break though" about mid 2018 and had batteries that they did something like a 1000 recharge/discharge cycles with. So there is a lot of work going on in the storage area. Elon's new battery is apparently a big step forward. Sandy Munro (here on YT) did an extensive vid on it and why its so much better.
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@lordsamich755 Simple your statement "Any process to store wind or solar energy is going to increase it's cost. Any honest assessment of the full requirement. Is always going to place wind and solar energy as substantially more expensive that it needs to be; were it a truly viable option." Its fundamentally flawed because it does not consider the lessons learned by the Germans about renewable energy grid design. Its also ignores the facts that as renewable energy systems develop and production of those technologies scales up they are getting more efficient and less expensive. So the profitability is getting better all the time. I just had a face to face argument the other day with yet another old school pro-coal clown who whined about how it cant be done without subsidies. That's just so hypocritically ignorant and infuriating because it ignores all the subsidies and government handouts the carbon industries have had for decades. That said renewables CANNOT do everything and I argue that all the time with Greenies. We've always had a mix of energy sources and we'll continue to have a mix of energy sources. I don't know why people don't get that.
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@lordsamich755 On your other question YES. Increased energy storage makes renewable energy more PROFTABLE. Its not so much that it reduces the price you just have more energy to sell from the assets you own. Think simple economics. If you have a wind turbine that CAN generate 100MWH a year but the network manager only lets you sell 80MWH then you didn't make as much money as can. I don't know about you but if I own a 100MWH turbine I'd like to sell a 100MWH of energy and make as much money as possible, but I also know that's not how energy markets work and at times the network manager will tell me to lock it down.. But if you can keep the turbine spinning and capture that other 20MWH with a liquid metal battery then at 70% you can then sell 14MWH later when the network wants it. Yes initial costs are more because you had to buy a turbine and a battery but you have more energy to sell and if you do your math and manage your assets you'll make more money. In future renewable Energy will be like any other commodity.
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@lordsamich755 Red herring I can call that bullshit and say that all you are doing is arguing in circles. Its strange how you keep writing things that make sense and then you run off on tangents that make no sense at all. You say batteries are no good and then pumped hydro is the solution. You clearly haven't done any actual research because you just parroting stuff I already know. Yes Pumped Hydro exists and has existed for decades. A boss I worked for who had been in that industry explained that to me over 25 years ago. It has one huge flaw its limited by geography as all hydro is. Do you even know WHY it has existed for decades? Hmmm - Clearly you don't or you wouldn't be arguing nonsense. Hydro turbines take time to spin up and shut down they do not have a fast response like gas turbines and stream turbines. Once spinning and synched to the network the operators & owners don't like turning them off. So when demands drop they have 2 choices dump energy or recover it. That's why they have pumped hydro its a way to recover and store energy for when network demands rise. Australia is currently building the biggest pumped Hydro in the world Snowy 2.0. I argue with people all the time about how important it is. They think it will clash with the renewable sector when instead it will help support it, by providing the storage needed. Yes it has issues, but they'll get sorted out. Wind turbines matched with batteries is the same principle as traditional hydro & pumped hydro with but with different technologies. Now if you wan to learn something fine if you want to just be an argumentative clown bother someone else.
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@lordsamich755 I am Australian you effing clown - how do you think I know about Snowy 2.0. I also know it has several major conceptual flaws that need to be dealt with but probably wont. Some of the stupidity surrounding it is so bad we should reintroduce hanging. But on the other hand if you actually understood the engineering issues with renewable energy you'd know its one of the most important projects Australia will do in the next 50 years. If you understood the issues with hydro it always comes down to geography. As for our rivers that's our saddest joke and its you New South Welshmen right in the middle of that screw up. Your governments corruption and mismanagement there is staggering. They bought back low class water at nearly 10x the value they sold it netting close to $50 million for a company based in a Caribbean tax haven. Then there's stupidity of the $470M NSW spent pumping water out of the Murray UPSTREAM to Broken Hill. Gladys Brainspace is arguably the stupidest political leader in Australian history, but sadly others are challenging her for that title. After the stupidity of water rights there is the straight out theft that's gone on because the NSW government disbanded the police unit set up to investigate water theft. And that's before we get onto the bullshit the Queenslanders have done which is almost as stupid and what the South Australians wont admit to which is equally as stupid or the issues Victoria ignores which are just as disgraceful. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-03-06/billions-of-litres-of-water-missing-from-murray-darling-basin/10873782 Don't tell me about the water mismanagement. Our space Agency commissioned the "Space Road Map" one of the few things they did well. Its first item was advanced space based water management but put it its delivery at around 2035.* My degree is in aerospace and I spent a year of my life working out how we could start to deliver that in 3 years. The Space Agency were so stupid they ignored their own report. They claimed it could no be justified and instead wanted to spend their money on GPS, because Suzie Super Brain and the rest of the millennials need to know the location of there mobiles to the nearest centimeter. Yeah - Our Ag and tourism industries which rely on water are worth over $200billion a year and employ over 850,000 Australians. If you want to ague that go argue with Deloitte and the Farmers Federation they gave me those numbers. I asked for $720million over 6 years (which was based on half the Manus Island contract) and that was too much but then they gave the Airforce $7 billion for a their version of Space Force and the navy $55billion for new submarines that's since blown out to $80 billion. That's why were aren't getting any major advancements in water management. The navy needs subs and the air force wants more toys and we know many other ass holes want their money too. If I sound like a pissed of frustrated angry engineer ready to tear the head off the next idiotic clown - FINE, that's what I am. As far as energy goes I scored a small consult job a few years back with a Taiwanese investment firm who handed me the 2016 clean Energy Council report asked me to make sense of it. Combined with PowerStation data (ages & commissioning dates) from Wikipedia the cost of kW for kW replacement of our aging coal fired power stations over the next 15 years was ~$80billlion. But from other research that needs to be multiplied by 2.2 and it jumped to ~$176 billion then you ad in the fact our population has risen from 20 to 25 million with out building a single baseload power station and its expected to rise to 35million by 2035 and that number is above $260billion. That's why arguing about semantics is fucking worthless. The idiots in Victoria turned of 3 power stations with no replacement and South Australia switched of both theirs without replacement. All that has been built is renewable and according to the clean energy council less that 20% of what has been turned off has been replaced. What's actually saved Australia has been the domestic solar which has installed so much its the equivalent of a big power station BUT WITHOUT STORAGE it creates issues. So those German engineers who were defending their work a few years ago while assholes like Michael Schellenberger played their misdirection games might just be able to save us a $30, $40, $50 billion or more. Go check the Clean Energy Council Reports and International Energy Agency reports because its not just Australia the entire world is heading into an energy crisis. It started 20years ago when we stopped building power stations while various groups squealed and screamed at each other.
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