I'm sure much of tildes is already familiar with Technology Connections, but I thought I'd post this video anyway. It's very different from his normal content and probably not a ton new...
I'm sure much of tildes is already familiar with Technology Connections, but I thought I'd post this video anyway. It's very different from his normal content and probably not a ton new information to most here, but it's still interesting and a very good take on how to reason with those influenced by misinformation about renewable energy.
I'd also recommend watching the "epilogue" and showing the whole video to anybody you think may be interested.
Good video and a very detailed breakdown that more people probably need. I do wish he’d touched on a few of the flaws with personal solar panels more but even if I think he’s a little optimistic...
Good video and a very detailed breakdown that more people probably need.
I do wish he’d touched on a few of the flaws with personal solar panels more but even if I think he’s a little optimistic about lithium mining demands it doesn’t change the fact that yes, every state power company should be building solar at this point.
As for the ending rant, obviously something that’s been discussed to death in other topics so I’ll leave that be and just say yep I get it. At least he’s saying something. The utter silence from the gun community given recent events is damming.
I tried not to editorialize the points too much but in order to summarize better I did modify the order of some statements and modify phrasing or insert meanings that were stated elsewhere in the...
Exemplary
I tried not to editorialize the points too much but in order to summarize better I did modify the order of some statements and modify phrasing or insert meanings that were stated elsewhere in the video to maintain similar context. Some parts were so long that I did have to purely just interpret the meaning of his remark and then come up with my own explanation to shorten it.
Approaches this first section from a practical standpoint than a judgement or ethics based one.
Very few of the devices or machines we use run off petroleum products directly, we're instead converting it to produce electricity to power these devices and machines.
Petroleum is a finite resource and it's single-use, you burn it, it's gone, you have to keep extracting more to keep using it. Also because we have to extract more, our situations become more precarious because we become reliant on other countries to extract oil.
Solar power (along with battery storage) is too good of a deal to pass up, claims it's better than every other energy production option.
Reminds viewer to think of the cost of gasoline to operate vehicles over its life. For a 30mpg vehicle at 188k miles, that's 6,250 gallons of gas which is $19,500 based on a pricing estimate chosen for historical prices of gasoline in the US. The relevance of focusing on cost of gasoline in the car is that cars are the primary source for which people still use a machine that directly relies on petroleum for energy, since nearly everything else we use is electric.
Solar panels produce free electricity, and panels continue to work after producing electricity, up to multiple decades of use, very unlike single-use petroleum. Yes there is a cost of producing the solar panels, but the cost is decreasing rapidly.
The $19,500 spent on gasoline for the aforementioned car could be used to power a half dozen homes for decades with solar panels. If Technology Connections guy (I don't remember his name if he's ever said it) just compared powering his electric vehicle to powering the gasoline vehicle used as an example already, it would take $2,100 of solar panels to cover all costs of electricity to charge his electric vehicle.
Doesn't necessarily advocate for viewers to go set up their own solar farm systems, makes a case for how grid operators and energy producers working at scale are far more effective at producing energy and that even when they are making a healthy profit, the energy costs will still be less for people getting electricity off the grid than from other sources of energy the grid is currently using.
Claims that grid scale battery costs are low enough that the costs of solar farms and grid scale batteries are at a lower cost than any other source of electricity and still able to provide electricity to the grid 24/7.
Heading off a worry of solar farms that they use too much space, shows a corn farm in Illinois and how it's rather an inefficient use of space because they only harvest corn once a year and claims much of the corn coming from that field or fields like it is used for ethanol in gasoline, so replacing corn fields like that with solar farms wouldn't displace corn for food but rather corn for gasoline.
Showed a 120 acre 27 megawatt solar farm makes a case that a 120 acre corn farm would produce 66,000 gallons of ethanol. With generous assumptions, that can produce 2 million miles of driving in vehicles that can utilize this fuel source. Compares this to less than generous assumptions on an electric vehicle of 2 miles per kilowatt and that same solar farm produces 37,000,000 kilowatt hours which means electric vehicles could go 74 million miles on the power produced by that. So 74 million miles compared to 2 million produced by the corn field's ethanol.
Replacing 25 million acres of land used to produce corn, which is a rough estimate of amount of land utilized for corn that goes into ethanol production, this same amount of land replaced with solar farms instead, using assumptions from the Illinois solar farm figures he already used, could produce 84% more electricity than what is currently produced on the entire electrical grid in the US (based on figures from 2023).
Briefly mentions wind just to acknowledge it exists and covers that it's better than other energy sources but not quite as good as solar as there is more maintenance and ongoing costs involved.
Covers that making that many solar farms involves lots of materials to make the panels. Also mentions there's a lot of resources involved in gas production as well, including the gas itself, and the gas gets burned up in a single use while the materials in the solar panels are durable and last longer. Solar panels predominantly involve glass and aluminum materials which are plentiful and recyclable.
Covers some claims that solar panels contain toxic materials, but refutes this by saying while a small portion of toxic substances are in lesser used solar panels, the main types have very little and an example of what kind they contain, lead used for soldering the electrical connections on the panels is one he covers. And so these kinds of materials can also be contained to not cause issues if we're responsible about it.
Onto the batteries, yes they can contain some nasty chemicals and hard to get materials, but the chemicals are contained and can be recovered and reused. This also covers the materials used, so even though the mining process of the materials can be extensive, when the battery life is at it's end, which can be up to 15 years or more, we can recover all the materials in those to make new batteries.
This is just based on batteries we have now, but it is fairly reasonable to believe we will keep improving batteries.
Electrification of things has allowed us to be more adaptable because it doesn't matter what new things we come up with, we can just plug it into the grid that already exists to power it.
Goes into some meta commentary about his own assumptions of why this makes sense and why he had at some points claimed malice for others who disagreed, but then a conversation with one person where he changed their mind that solar was the future made him realize that not everyone sees things as he does in terms of looking towards the future and trying to be more efficient and that some people see things as what the landscape is right now, which is that gas production is still fairly cheap but it's only going to get more expensive in the future.
Talks about politics and how he believes he's also shown his politics to his viewer but not in the partisan politics way. This section is harder to summarize due to it being more to his personal thoughts so if you want to get into that I'd say to start here which starts where I ended the rest of the summary.
Edit: I will say the title of the video is why he gets into in the politics in the last part of the video. He says Republicans and other interests are lying about renewable energy, which is why the title of the video, but I just don't want to summarize it past that because I don't think it's fair when he intentionally set up the title and the video to lead into that dialogue about his politics and it wouldn't be possible to capture everything that is important to him or the emotional weight he puts into it.
It’s probably worth mentioning that two big reasons to continue to include wind in the mix despite the economic strides solar has made: It works at night, reducing the need for fossil fuels during...
Briefly mentions wind just to acknowledge it exists and covers that it's better than other energy sources but not quite as good as solar as there is more maintenance and ongoing costs involved.
It’s probably worth mentioning that two big reasons to continue to include wind in the mix despite the economic strides solar has made:
It works at night, reducing the need for fossil fuels during the winter
In a lot of climates, the peak times for wind generation are times when solar is at offpeak (e.g. dark cloudy days are often windy) which reduces the need for top up gas power
I'm a big proponent of solar and wind, I just want to caution people against a perception that wind farms are always operating throughout the day and night. In video games windmills are often...
It works at night, reducing the need for fossil fuels during the winter
I'm a big proponent of solar and wind, I just want to caution people against a perception that wind farms are always operating throughout the day and night. In video games windmills are often generating ~100% of their capability all of the time, however this isn't typically the case in reality. Some games like Cities: Skylines have added realism by building in pseudo-weather where wind capacity diminishes during certain periods of the day/night or there will be seasonal shifts.
In reality, wind is a climate phenomenon that is affected by areas of different temperatures attempting to reach an equilibrium (atmospheric circulation), which could involve warm ocean waters and cooler air passing over it, or heat rising from the desert and catching moist ocean air in the atmosphere. Convection and the Coriolis forces create by low-pressure and high-pressure systems, they redistribute energy and even particulate matter that can cause blizzards or intense thunderstorms.
Windmills require a certain amount of wind energy to activate (this can be as little as 11 kph (7 mph)). Without reaching that threshold, the turbines either won't overcome the mechanical friction to spin up, or the operator of the wind farm will have it disabled because at very low speeds it's wearing out parts without providing enough financial benefit to pay for the maintenance. Further, without reaching their optimal operating speeds (which can be 35-88 kph (22-55 mph)) windmills won't be generating electricity at their most efficient.
Some wind farms almost exclusively operate during the day because the climate conditions are ideal at those times. Others operate primarily at night because that's what's optimal in that region; that's very useful because it does offset solar production and also can be used to load balance/grid balance the power grids at a regional scale. Nuclear and fossil fuel plants help to maintain the correct balance (and load factor) at night be reducing the amount of electricity they're supplying (although ideally nuclear power plants don't spin down from their optimal levels), however they always have to provide a margin for error so that a sudden change in usage (sporting events, blizzards) or power line frequency doesn't trip the system and cause a partial blackout taking down a large swath of the regional power grid (and even causing fail-overs into other grids). I would imagine that wind farms can load balance by simply turning individual windmills on or off as-needed, without having to wastefully over-provision. However that's only possible for wind farms currently generating electricity. Obviously, the opposite situation is also possible: wind energy falling off unexpectedly leading to a shortage for the grid, but that's another topic.
TL;DR: A friendly reminder that wind farms are built in different areas to take advantage of the wind, but the wind doesn't have 100% uptime and is influenced by atmospheric circulation (day/night and seasonal) and the Coriolis effect. Wind is still beneficial as an offset to solar generation and helping to balance the power grid's load.
Well I don't recall that he dived too deep into the economic comparisons between solar and wind, I think his main argument is that solar paired with batteries is cheaper than anything else, which...
Well I don't recall that he dived too deep into the economic comparisons between solar and wind, I think his main argument is that solar paired with batteries is cheaper than anything else, which I assume must mean that it's cheaper than wind-powered electric generation if that claim is to be believed. So while he acknowledged wind, he didn't really do so in a way as though it was a significant factor to complement solar. He did mention that wind can be used in different scenarios, including that it can share the land with crops in a way that solar can't necessarily at the moment, but he didn't seem to make a claim that it was essential to the grid. That is if you believe him that solar and batteries are already at a point where they can cover all grid demands then wind-powered electric generation wouldn't be needed.
I'm sure he would acquiesce that there could be certain areas where solar is far less reliable than wind that it makes sense, but I think he was just talking more big picture generalities than saying it covers 100% of all possible scenarios ever.
I think he focused on solar so much for this reason and also because it's a really simple parallel structure to gas/oil that's easy to follow. Wind, as he mentioned, requires moving parts and...
which I assume must mean that it's cheaper than wind-powered electric generation if that claim is to be believed
I think he focused on solar so much for this reason and also because it's a really simple parallel structure to gas/oil that's easy to follow. Wind, as he mentioned, requires moving parts and ongoing maintenance which add to the cost and complexity.
If I were making a true, full, and good-faith argument for renewables I'd include that off-shore wind generation solves a lot of the downsides of wind power while increasing its output. I just think Alec was mostly focused on reframing people's conception of solar in particular because it has changed dramatically in a short time.
Ultimately, the entire video is about "solar + batteries are a great deal", end of story (and no argument from me on that point). Now that said ... while it is very much a "YMMV" situation, in...
Ultimately, the entire video is about "solar + batteries are a great deal", end of story (and no argument from me on that point).
Now that said ... while it is very much a "YMMV" situation, in many (probably most) locations ... "solar + wind + a few batteries" is both cheaper and more reliable than "only solar + a lot of batteries to cover all the 'no-sun' periods".
On part that stayed with me is that even thought batteries (and panels) needs material to be extracted from the earth, once it's done and if there's a will we can be very good to keep using them....
Onto the batteries, yes they can contain some nasty chemicals and hard to get materials, but the chemicals are contained and can be recovered and reused. This also covers the materials used, so even though the mining process of the materials can be extensive, when the battery life is at it's end, which can be up to 15 years or more, we can recover all the materials in those to make new batteries.
On part that stayed with me is that even thought batteries (and panels) needs material to be extracted from the earth, once it's done and if there's a will we can be very good to keep using them. As an example he takes the lead acid batteries which are nowadays made of... 99% old lead acid batteries (Wikipedia says 99 recycled, I don't know if it's a shortcut or not).
The main problem with fossil duel is that you use it by burning it, leaving you with nothing (you must always extract more). Whereas renewable, in particular solar panels, is already much much...
The main problem with fossil duel is that you use it by burning it, leaving you with nothing (you must always extract more).
Whereas renewable, in particular solar panels, is already much much cheaper in the long term (10 years), even when taking storage cost into account, and will keep on giving...
Shortcomings of solar are often overblown. They are recyclable, land use is negligible. And the technology is getting improved all the time. Going solar full steam ahead is a no brainer if you look at the numbers.
Political and corporate interests are actively working to spread misinformation and confuse the public, hindering the transition away from fossil fuels.
I'd been wondering where he'd been since No Effort November, and now I have my answer :) Takes a while to put together an hour and a half video, even for him, I'd guess!
I'd been wondering where he'd been since No Effort November, and now I have my answer :)
Takes a while to put together an hour and a half video, even for him, I'd guess!
Speaking as someone from the area, there is no way he's worked on certain parts of this video in the last month. It's been subzero and snowy for the last month. There's certainly a part which was...
Speaking as someone from the area, there is no way he's worked on certain parts of this video in the last month. It's been subzero and snowy for the last month.
There's certainly a part which was recently made though...
Yeah... I think I just ignored those because I already agreed with his earlier videos about dishwashers and don't have a whole home to humidify. Absolutely love him for going into such detail...
Yeah... I think I just ignored those because I already agreed with his earlier videos about dishwashers and don't have a whole home to humidify. Absolutely love him for going into such detail about simple ways to make our lives better.
With you most of the way but I feel like it's a bit more than internet contrarianism when the US leadership is signing executive orders like this. Key excerpt: "For too long, the Federal...
With you most of the way but I feel like it's a bit more than internet contrarianism when the US leadership is signing executive orders like this. Key excerpt: "For too long, the Federal Government has forced American taxpayers to subsidize expensive and unreliable energy sources like wind and solar. The proliferation of these projects displaces affordable, reliable, dispatchable domestic energy sources, compromises our electric grid, and denigrates the beauty of our Nation’s natural landscape."
But as you mentioned hopefully all of this is a moot point. Usually the dollar wins out and people just want a cheaper electric bill.
I would add that online discourse has increasingly been influencing voting behavior and policy (a system dubbed by Hank Green in a recent coincidentally-related video a “discoursacracy”) and so it...
I would add that online discourse has increasingly been influencing voting behavior and policy (a system dubbed by Hank Green in a recent coincidentally-related video a “discoursacracy”) and so it naturally follows that people spreading FUD about renewables online could partially end up determining who ends up getting into office and what gets passed as law.
I'm sorry if this isn't what you meant by your comment, but there definitely is a well funded and documented long-running smear campaign against renewables backed by fossil fuel companies and...
I'm sorry if this isn't what you meant by your comment, but there definitely is a well funded and documented long-running smear campaign against renewables backed by fossil fuel companies and their stakeholders. This isn't a conspiracy, its an established fact.
And coming from someone who has a parent who frequents conspiratorial news websites like the epoch times; I regularly get forwarded FUD stories about renewables talking about how Solar panels will poison the earth, take land away from farmers, and how the battery storage plants are huge fire risks. Hilariously some of them are literally written by ex-oil industry executives, they're not even trying to hide the obvious conflict of interest.
It's also not a conspiracy to say that the president of the united states has regularly disparaged renewables and cut funding to programs that were put in place to help grow their presence in the US. The talking points he brings up are the ones I most commonly see parroted by phony right wing pundits who don't actually give a shit about the agenda, they're just trying to get more eyes on their brand because of the attention economy.
Still giving it a chance, but already, 20 seconds into a 90-minute youtube speech, we get this... "...very few of the things we use are powered by petroleum products." What?!?
Still giving it a chance, but already, 20 seconds into a 90-minute youtube speech, we get this...
"...very few of the things we use are powered by petroleum products."
I am fairly certain he means directly powered by petroleum and can accept any alternative fuel source, be that wind, solar, hydro, nuclear, or something else. The few things in this household I...
I am fairly certain he means directly powered by petroleum and can accept any alternative fuel source, be that wind, solar, hydro, nuclear, or something else. The few things in this household I can think of that use petroleum as a sole power source can be counted on one hand.
He explains as much shortly after. Rather to be clear explains that basically everything in your home except probably your car and water heater is powered by electricity. What generates that...
He explains as much shortly after. Rather to be clear explains that basically everything in your home except probably your car and water heater is powered by electricity.
What generates that electricity is obviously a big focus of the video but you aren’t pouring gas into your phone and burning lamp oil
The set of items I own which use any external power source other than electricity is: Both cars (but one is a plug-in hybrid, which slightly complicates the accounting here) Furnace Hot water...
The set of items I own which use any external power source other than electricity is:
Both cars (but one is a plug-in hybrid, which slightly complicates the accounting here)
Furnace
Hot water heater
Stove
…Candles?
Some people might reasonably have, like, a camp stove. But yeah, with the exception of transportation and heating, society has almost uniformly centered on electrical current as the energy delivery mechanism of choice.
edit: Given the weather, I completely forgot two outside fuel-burning items:
Grill
Fire pit
Both perhaps notable, but not really bucking the trend.
There are petroleum based candles (made with paraffin wax), but there are also many candles made with renewable sources of fuel such as beeswax and soy wax. But unless it specifically says what...
There are petroleum based candles (made with paraffin wax), but there are also many candles made with renewable sources of fuel such as beeswax and soy wax.
But unless it specifically says what kind it is, it's likely to be paraffin.
Cars, heat, 99.9% of all commercial/public transportation, 99% of all construction, everything concrete, everything steel, everything plastic, everything with an electronic component in it ('cuz...
Cars, heat, 99.9% of all commercial/public transportation, 99% of all construction, everything concrete, everything steel, everything plastic, everything with an electronic component in it ('cuz all of that stuff was mined, transported and made almost entirely with fossil fuels), etc.
That's just off the top of my head.
My gripe is how painfully, blatantly disingenuous that statement is, like just because people aren't literally pouring a cup of crude oil into their stuff to use them, it somehow does not count as "using" fossil fuels.
I mean, within another 3-4 minutes into the piece, he's listing exactly the same stuff, so (shrug).
The point being made in the video is about switching energy sources from fossil fuels to solar power. It hasn't got anything to do with products which are made from petroleum. I mean the quote is...
made almost entirely with fossil fuels
The point being made in the video is about switching energy sources from fossil fuels to solar power. It hasn't got anything to do with products which are made from petroleum. I mean the quote is "powered by petroleum products", you can't expand that to include other uses of petroleum.
He isn't talking about the oil used as plastic, he is talking about the oil used as fuel to provide the energy to crack oil into plastic, to smelt metals, to bake cement, to power raw resourses...
He isn't talking about the oil used as plastic, he is talking about the oil used as fuel to provide the energy to crack oil into plastic, to smelt metals, to bake cement, to power raw resourses extraction, ect.
It's totally fair to include those use of oil into consideration here. They really are powered from oil, not just made of oil.
They often could, but for some industrial application requiring high temperature (steel and cement), adapting the manufacturing process is apparently more technically difficult than low heat...
They often could,
but for some industrial application requiring high temperature (steel and cement), adapting the manufacturing process is apparently more technically difficult than low heat application, and is currently still being worked on.
and plants are expensive and long‑lived, retrofitting them (kilns, furnaces) will take decades.
AFAIK steel mills have been gradually switching to electric arc heating here in Europe. But simultaneously many have been closing down, the business has been moving to Asia due to costs for a long...
AFAIK steel mills have been gradually switching to electric arc heating here in Europe. But simultaneously many have been closing down, the business has been moving to Asia due to costs for a long time, and I have no idea about those. It is true that it takes a long time for the whole industry to switch, I'm just saying that it's already happening.
Yeah, all industries/manufacturing still heavily uses fossil fuels. For anyone interested in finding out more, look up "embodied carbon". And both side of the debate (green vs burn baby burn) lie...
Yeah, all industries/manufacturing still heavily uses fossil fuels.
For anyone interested in finding out more, look up "embodied carbon".
And both side of the debate (green vs burn baby burn) lie purposefully or through wishfull thinking.
Environmentalist act like we can keep our standard of living by just easely changing energy production source and small adjustment (so not changing anything for the regular voter), while anti-environmentalist act like we can just keep our standard of living by just not changing anything...
Both are wrong, we will not be able to keep consuming as much as we are right now no matter what.
We can mitigate the hit to standard of living through some tech, but mostly frugality and long term thinking,
but many thing will have to go, volontarily or when we crash.
Cars, even EV, won't be viable for regular individual travel,
eating meat everyday
big individual houses instead of small appartment
most long distance tourism
and mainly just buying less new crap
Either we accept those sacrifice now and use what's left of the oil to soften the landing and find alternatives ways to address what we truly don't want to give up (medicine? Internet?) Or we will be made to accept those sacrifice later more brutally and with less resources to adapt.
Yeah, it just became clearer to me, why that statement offended me. "...very few of the things we use are powered by petroleum products." The underlying assumption of that statement is that "the...
Yeah, it just became clearer to me, why that statement offended me.
"...very few of the things we use are powered by petroleum products."
The underlying assumption of that statement is that "the climate/energy crisis" == "the electricity/energy that individual end-users use directly in their homes/lives".
This is the same kind of bullshit that led to people tracking their personal "carbon footprint".
And, again, I don't want to take away from the bigger point the guy is making, which is basically, even if you completely don't care about/believe in Climate Change, at today's prices, it's just stupid to not switch over to solar, as much as possible, as fast as possible.
That is a very good message to be preaching to the non-believers. It's just not a good "opening statement" to that message.
How many electric planes do you have? How many electric semis? How many electric tankers and giant global cargo ships and rockets and military-anything-that-moves? Globally, counting everything we...
How many electric planes do you have? How many electric semis? How many electric tankers and giant global cargo ships and rockets and military-anything-that-moves?
Globally, counting everything we use to move people and stuff, "99.9% of all transport" is probably overstating it, but not by much.
It absolutely is overstating it, though, and the margin will certainly increase as things that are able to be electrified very easily (like buses and trains, where the technology already clearly...
It absolutely is overstating it, though, and the margin will certainly increase as things that are able to be electrified very easily (like buses and trains, where the technology already clearly exists and works well) are electrified. There will be increasing economic pressure to do this as petroleum becomes more expensive as we run out of it anyway.
And, given that petroleum is a finite resource, it is actually still extremely beneficial to switch to renewables for the huge number of things that are able to be electrified even while acknowledging that there are some domains where electrification isn't currently practical or possible, because using petroleum exclusively for things where electrification isn't possible gives us longer before we run out to develop solutions and alternatives for these use cases.
The only thing that I use on a daily basis that is powered by burning petroleum products is my car engine. Everything else is electric, including most of the things in my car. Is your situation...
The only thing that I use on a daily basis that is powered by burning petroleum products is my car engine. Everything else is electric, including most of the things in my car. Is your situation different?
Since the video is this long, I have to ask: does he talk about the issue with the fact that pretty much all solar panels are made in China? (are they still? is there any movement to change that?)...
Since the video is this long, I have to ask: does he talk about the issue with the fact that pretty much all solar panels are made in China? (are they still? is there any movement to change that?)
In the recent years it's become clear that unfortunately we may be getting back into an era of global scale conflicts. The west is way too dependent on China in many areas, but specifically energy infrastructure is possibly the most important one of them all. It's necessary for literally everything else.
I'm not convinced that we should avoid solar because of this, but surely it has to be part of the decision process. As much as I hate coal (I was born in a region devastated by coal mining), I think that from the point of view of energetic security phasing it out so aggressively here in the EU as one of the only truly independent source of energy is extremely short sighted.
One great disappointment for me in the current willy-nilly application of tariffs by the US federal government is that they actually could be put to decent and reasonable use on things like this....
One great disappointment for me in the current willy-nilly application of tariffs by the US federal government is that they actually could be put to decent and reasonable use on things like this.
"Just" tariff Chinese panels and provide incentives to build solar panel manufacturing capability in the US, and we could, hopefully, give our industry here the time that it needs to grow to meet demand and scale to lower prices.
But, alas, judicious, long-term industrial policy is not our forte, and we'll just continue to do absurd things that push away our trade partners.
I think this video focused more on the general state of renewables and less about the specifics of the global economy. It discusses concerns about recyclability of solar cells and batteries, land...
I think this video focused more on the general state of renewables and less about the specifics of the global economy. It discusses concerns about recyclability of solar cells and batteries, land use, etc.
It seems like its more of a discussion the long term impacts of renewables and our transition out of fossil fuels, not the (hopefully) temporary roadblocks that we're currently facing.
Something you might be interested to know though, is that a growing percentage of Solar PV panels actually aren't manufactured in China, they're being sourced from countries like Cambodia, India, Taiwan, Malaysia, etc. Of course a lot of the components are originally sourced from China, but there's no reason that can't change.
Something you might be interested to know though, is that a growing percentage of Solar PV panels actually aren't manufactured in China, they're being sourced from countries like Cambodia, India, Taiwan, Malaysia, etc. Of course a lot of the components are originally sourced from China, but there's no reason that can't change.
No, and I don't think it's the main point of the video.
Since the video is this long, I have to ask: does he talk about the issue with the fact that pretty much all solar panels are made in China? (are they still? is there any movement to change that?)
No, and I don't think it's the main point of the video.
I'm sure much of tildes is already familiar with Technology Connections, but I thought I'd post this video anyway. It's very different from his normal content and probably not a ton new information to most here, but it's still interesting and a very good take on how to reason with those influenced by misinformation about renewable energy.
I'd also recommend watching the "epilogue" and showing the whole video to anybody you think may be interested.
Good video and a very detailed breakdown that more people probably need.
I do wish he’d touched on a few of the flaws with personal solar panels more but even if I think he’s a little optimistic about lithium mining demands it doesn’t change the fact that yes, every state power company should be building solar at this point.
As for the ending rant, obviously something that’s been discussed to death in other topics so I’ll leave that be and just say yep I get it. At least he’s saying something. The utter silence from the gun community given recent events is damming.
Could someone summarize the video?
I tried not to editorialize the points too much but in order to summarize better I did modify the order of some statements and modify phrasing or insert meanings that were stated elsewhere in the video to maintain similar context. Some parts were so long that I did have to purely just interpret the meaning of his remark and then come up with my own explanation to shorten it.
Approaches this first section from a practical standpoint than a judgement or ethics based one.
Very few of the devices or machines we use run off petroleum products directly, we're instead converting it to produce electricity to power these devices and machines.
Petroleum is a finite resource and it's single-use, you burn it, it's gone, you have to keep extracting more to keep using it. Also because we have to extract more, our situations become more precarious because we become reliant on other countries to extract oil.
Solar power (along with battery storage) is too good of a deal to pass up, claims it's better than every other energy production option.
Reminds viewer to think of the cost of gasoline to operate vehicles over its life. For a 30mpg vehicle at 188k miles, that's 6,250 gallons of gas which is $19,500 based on a pricing estimate chosen for historical prices of gasoline in the US. The relevance of focusing on cost of gasoline in the car is that cars are the primary source for which people still use a machine that directly relies on petroleum for energy, since nearly everything else we use is electric.
Solar panels produce free electricity, and panels continue to work after producing electricity, up to multiple decades of use, very unlike single-use petroleum. Yes there is a cost of producing the solar panels, but the cost is decreasing rapidly.
The $19,500 spent on gasoline for the aforementioned car could be used to power a half dozen homes for decades with solar panels. If Technology Connections guy (I don't remember his name if he's ever said it) just compared powering his electric vehicle to powering the gasoline vehicle used as an example already, it would take $2,100 of solar panels to cover all costs of electricity to charge his electric vehicle.
Doesn't necessarily advocate for viewers to go set up their own solar farm systems, makes a case for how grid operators and energy producers working at scale are far more effective at producing energy and that even when they are making a healthy profit, the energy costs will still be less for people getting electricity off the grid than from other sources of energy the grid is currently using.
Claims that grid scale battery costs are low enough that the costs of solar farms and grid scale batteries are at a lower cost than any other source of electricity and still able to provide electricity to the grid 24/7.
Heading off a worry of solar farms that they use too much space, shows a corn farm in Illinois and how it's rather an inefficient use of space because they only harvest corn once a year and claims much of the corn coming from that field or fields like it is used for ethanol in gasoline, so replacing corn fields like that with solar farms wouldn't displace corn for food but rather corn for gasoline.
Showed a 120 acre 27 megawatt solar farm makes a case that a 120 acre corn farm would produce 66,000 gallons of ethanol. With generous assumptions, that can produce 2 million miles of driving in vehicles that can utilize this fuel source. Compares this to less than generous assumptions on an electric vehicle of 2 miles per kilowatt and that same solar farm produces 37,000,000 kilowatt hours which means electric vehicles could go 74 million miles on the power produced by that. So 74 million miles compared to 2 million produced by the corn field's ethanol.
Replacing 25 million acres of land used to produce corn, which is a rough estimate of amount of land utilized for corn that goes into ethanol production, this same amount of land replaced with solar farms instead, using assumptions from the Illinois solar farm figures he already used, could produce 84% more electricity than what is currently produced on the entire electrical grid in the US (based on figures from 2023).
Briefly mentions wind just to acknowledge it exists and covers that it's better than other energy sources but not quite as good as solar as there is more maintenance and ongoing costs involved.
Covers that making that many solar farms involves lots of materials to make the panels. Also mentions there's a lot of resources involved in gas production as well, including the gas itself, and the gas gets burned up in a single use while the materials in the solar panels are durable and last longer. Solar panels predominantly involve glass and aluminum materials which are plentiful and recyclable.
Covers some claims that solar panels contain toxic materials, but refutes this by saying while a small portion of toxic substances are in lesser used solar panels, the main types have very little and an example of what kind they contain, lead used for soldering the electrical connections on the panels is one he covers. And so these kinds of materials can also be contained to not cause issues if we're responsible about it.
Onto the batteries, yes they can contain some nasty chemicals and hard to get materials, but the chemicals are contained and can be recovered and reused. This also covers the materials used, so even though the mining process of the materials can be extensive, when the battery life is at it's end, which can be up to 15 years or more, we can recover all the materials in those to make new batteries.
This is just based on batteries we have now, but it is fairly reasonable to believe we will keep improving batteries.
Electrification of things has allowed us to be more adaptable because it doesn't matter what new things we come up with, we can just plug it into the grid that already exists to power it.
Goes into some meta commentary about his own assumptions of why this makes sense and why he had at some points claimed malice for others who disagreed, but then a conversation with one person where he changed their mind that solar was the future made him realize that not everyone sees things as he does in terms of looking towards the future and trying to be more efficient and that some people see things as what the landscape is right now, which is that gas production is still fairly cheap but it's only going to get more expensive in the future.
Talks about politics and how he believes he's also shown his politics to his viewer but not in the partisan politics way. This section is harder to summarize due to it being more to his personal thoughts so if you want to get into that I'd say to start here which starts where I ended the rest of the summary.
Edit: I will say the title of the video is why he gets into in the politics in the last part of the video. He says Republicans and other interests are lying about renewable energy, which is why the title of the video, but I just don't want to summarize it past that because I don't think it's fair when he intentionally set up the title and the video to lead into that dialogue about his politics and it wouldn't be possible to capture everything that is important to him or the emotional weight he puts into it.
It’s probably worth mentioning that two big reasons to continue to include wind in the mix despite the economic strides solar has made:
I'm a big proponent of solar and wind, I just want to caution people against a perception that wind farms are always operating throughout the day and night. In video games windmills are often generating ~100% of their capability all of the time, however this isn't typically the case in reality. Some games like Cities: Skylines have added realism by building in pseudo-weather where wind capacity diminishes during certain periods of the day/night or there will be seasonal shifts.
In reality, wind is a climate phenomenon that is affected by areas of different temperatures attempting to reach an equilibrium (atmospheric circulation), which could involve warm ocean waters and cooler air passing over it, or heat rising from the desert and catching moist ocean air in the atmosphere. Convection and the Coriolis forces create by low-pressure and high-pressure systems, they redistribute energy and even particulate matter that can cause blizzards or intense thunderstorms.
Windmills require a certain amount of wind energy to activate (this can be as little as 11 kph (7 mph)). Without reaching that threshold, the turbines either won't overcome the mechanical friction to spin up, or the operator of the wind farm will have it disabled because at very low speeds it's wearing out parts without providing enough financial benefit to pay for the maintenance. Further, without reaching their optimal operating speeds (which can be 35-88 kph (22-55 mph)) windmills won't be generating electricity at their most efficient.
Some wind farms almost exclusively operate during the day because the climate conditions are ideal at those times. Others operate primarily at night because that's what's optimal in that region; that's very useful because it does offset solar production and also can be used to load balance/grid balance the power grids at a regional scale. Nuclear and fossil fuel plants help to maintain the correct balance (and load factor) at night be reducing the amount of electricity they're supplying (although ideally nuclear power plants don't spin down from their optimal levels), however they always have to provide a margin for error so that a sudden change in usage (sporting events, blizzards) or power line frequency doesn't trip the system and cause a partial blackout taking down a large swath of the regional power grid (and even causing fail-overs into other grids). I would imagine that wind farms can load balance by simply turning individual windmills on or off as-needed, without having to wastefully over-provision. However that's only possible for wind farms currently generating electricity. Obviously, the opposite situation is also possible: wind energy falling off unexpectedly leading to a shortage for the grid, but that's another topic.
TL;DR: A friendly reminder that wind farms are built in different areas to take advantage of the wind, but the wind doesn't have 100% uptime and is influenced by atmospheric circulation (day/night and seasonal) and the Coriolis effect. Wind is still beneficial as an offset to solar generation and helping to balance the power grid's load.
Well I don't recall that he dived too deep into the economic comparisons between solar and wind, I think his main argument is that solar paired with batteries is cheaper than anything else, which I assume must mean that it's cheaper than wind-powered electric generation if that claim is to be believed. So while he acknowledged wind, he didn't really do so in a way as though it was a significant factor to complement solar. He did mention that wind can be used in different scenarios, including that it can share the land with crops in a way that solar can't necessarily at the moment, but he didn't seem to make a claim that it was essential to the grid. That is if you believe him that solar and batteries are already at a point where they can cover all grid demands then wind-powered electric generation wouldn't be needed.
I'm sure he would acquiesce that there could be certain areas where solar is far less reliable than wind that it makes sense, but I think he was just talking more big picture generalities than saying it covers 100% of all possible scenarios ever.
I think he focused on solar so much for this reason and also because it's a really simple parallel structure to gas/oil that's easy to follow. Wind, as he mentioned, requires moving parts and ongoing maintenance which add to the cost and complexity.
If I were making a true, full, and good-faith argument for renewables I'd include that off-shore wind generation solves a lot of the downsides of wind power while increasing its output. I just think Alec was mostly focused on reframing people's conception of solar in particular because it has changed dramatically in a short time.
Ultimately, the entire video is about "solar + batteries are a great deal", end of story (and no argument from me on that point).
Now that said ... while it is very much a "YMMV" situation, in many (probably most) locations ... "solar + wind + a few batteries" is both cheaper and more reliable than "only solar + a lot of batteries to cover all the 'no-sun' periods".
On part that stayed with me is that even thought batteries (and panels) needs material to be extracted from the earth, once it's done and if there's a will we can be very good to keep using them. As an example he takes the lead acid batteries which are nowadays made of... 99% old lead acid batteries (Wikipedia says 99 recycled, I don't know if it's a shortcut or not).
Great summary! As for his name: he's called Alec.
The main problem with fossil duel is that you use it by burning it, leaving you with nothing (you must always extract more).
Whereas renewable, in particular solar panels, is already much much cheaper in the long term (10 years), even when taking storage cost into account, and will keep on giving...
Shortcomings of solar are often overblown. They are recyclable, land use is negligible. And the technology is getting improved all the time. Going solar full steam ahead is a no brainer if you look at the numbers.
Political and corporate interests are actively working to spread misinformation and confuse the public, hindering the transition away from fossil fuels.
Okay, yeah, solar is great. The rapid growth of solar seems pretty well known.
I think that if you asked folks about solar, you'd get a shocking number of them saying it didn’t work or simply saying they didn’t know that.
I'd been wondering where he'd been since No Effort November, and now I have my answer :)
Takes a while to put together an hour and a half video, even for him, I'd guess!
Speaking as someone from the area, there is no way he's worked on certain parts of this video in the last month. It's been subzero and snowy for the last month.
There's certainly a part which was recently made though...
he did do a good one on dishwashers and then whole home humidfiers in december afair - both were insightful and enjoyable to me.
Yeah... I think I just ignored those because I already agreed with his earlier videos about dishwashers and don't have a whole home to humidify. Absolutely love him for going into such detail about simple ways to make our lives better.
Such a fantastic video from Alec, honestly the rant at the end was amazing and put into words many of my current feelings.
With you most of the way but I feel like it's a bit more than internet contrarianism when the US leadership is signing executive orders like this. Key excerpt: "For too long, the Federal Government has forced American taxpayers to subsidize expensive and unreliable energy sources like wind and solar. The proliferation of these projects displaces affordable, reliable, dispatchable domestic energy sources, compromises our electric grid, and denigrates the beauty of our Nation’s natural landscape."
But as you mentioned hopefully all of this is a moot point. Usually the dollar wins out and people just want a cheaper electric bill.
I would add that online discourse has increasingly been influencing voting behavior and policy (a system dubbed by Hank Green in a recent coincidentally-related video a “discoursacracy”) and so it naturally follows that people spreading FUD about renewables online could partially end up determining who ends up getting into office and what gets passed as law.
I'm sorry if this isn't what you meant by your comment, but there definitely is a well funded and documented long-running smear campaign against renewables backed by fossil fuel companies and their stakeholders. This isn't a conspiracy, its an established fact.
And coming from someone who has a parent who frequents conspiratorial news websites like the epoch times; I regularly get forwarded FUD stories about renewables talking about how Solar panels will poison the earth, take land away from farmers, and how the battery storage plants are huge fire risks. Hilariously some of them are literally written by ex-oil industry executives, they're not even trying to hide the obvious conflict of interest.
It's also not a conspiracy to say that the president of the united states has regularly disparaged renewables and cut funding to programs that were put in place to help grow their presence in the US. The talking points he brings up are the ones I most commonly see parroted by phony right wing pundits who don't actually give a shit about the agenda, they're just trying to get more eyes on their brand because of the attention economy.
Still giving it a chance, but already, 20 seconds into a 90-minute youtube speech, we get this...
"...very few of the things we use are powered by petroleum products."
What?!?
I am fairly certain he means directly powered by petroleum and can accept any alternative fuel source, be that wind, solar, hydro, nuclear, or something else. The few things in this household I can think of that use petroleum as a sole power source can be counted on one hand.
He explains as much shortly after. Rather to be clear explains that basically everything in your home except probably your car and water heater is powered by electricity.
What generates that electricity is obviously a big focus of the video but you aren’t pouring gas into your phone and burning lamp oil
The set of items I own which use any external power source other than electricity is:
Some people might reasonably have, like, a camp stove. But yeah, with the exception of transportation and heating, society has almost uniformly centered on electrical current as the energy delivery mechanism of choice.
edit: Given the weather, I completely forgot two outside fuel-burning items:
Both perhaps notable, but not really bucking the trend.
Basically me except that we have a heat pump with auxiliary furnace (which has been getting a workout lately)
There are petroleum based candles (made with paraffin wax), but there are also many candles made with renewable sources of fuel such as beeswax and soy wax.
But unless it specifically says what kind it is, it's likely to be paraffin.
Cars, heat, 99.9% of all commercial/public transportation, 99% of all construction, everything concrete, everything steel, everything plastic, everything with an electronic component in it ('cuz all of that stuff was mined, transported and made almost entirely with fossil fuels), etc.
That's just off the top of my head.
My gripe is how painfully, blatantly disingenuous that statement is, like just because people aren't literally pouring a cup of crude oil into their stuff to use them, it somehow does not count as "using" fossil fuels.
I mean, within another 3-4 minutes into the piece, he's listing exactly the same stuff, so (shrug).
The point being made in the video is about switching energy sources from fossil fuels to solar power. It hasn't got anything to do with products which are made from petroleum. I mean the quote is "powered by petroleum products", you can't expand that to include other uses of petroleum.
He isn't talking about the oil used as plastic, he is talking about the oil used as fuel to provide the energy to crack oil into plastic, to smelt metals, to bake cement, to power raw resourses extraction, ect.
It's totally fair to include those use of oil into consideration here. They really are powered from oil, not just made of oil.
Why can't those things draw power from the electrical grid?
They often could,
but for some industrial application requiring high temperature (steel and cement), adapting the manufacturing process is apparently more technically difficult than low heat application, and is currently still being worked on.
and plants are expensive and long‑lived, retrofitting them (kilns, furnaces) will take decades.
AFAIK steel mills have been gradually switching to electric arc heating here in Europe. But simultaneously many have been closing down, the business has been moving to Asia due to costs for a long time, and I have no idea about those. It is true that it takes a long time for the whole industry to switch, I'm just saying that it's already happening.
No idea about cement.
Yeah, all industries/manufacturing still heavily uses fossil fuels.
For anyone interested in finding out more, look up "embodied carbon".
And both side of the debate (green vs burn baby burn) lie purposefully or through wishfull thinking.
Environmentalist act like we can keep our standard of living by just easely changing energy production source and small adjustment (so not changing anything for the regular voter), while anti-environmentalist act like we can just keep our standard of living by just not changing anything...
Both are wrong, we will not be able to keep consuming as much as we are right now no matter what.
We can mitigate the hit to standard of living through some tech, but mostly frugality and long term thinking,
but many thing will have to go, volontarily or when we crash.
Either we accept those sacrifice now and use what's left of the oil to soften the landing and find alternatives ways to address what we truly don't want to give up (medicine? Internet?) Or we will be made to accept those sacrifice later more brutally and with less resources to adapt.
Yeah, it just became clearer to me, why that statement offended me.
"...very few of the things we use are powered by petroleum products."
The underlying assumption of that statement is that "the climate/energy crisis" == "the electricity/energy that individual end-users use directly in their homes/lives".
This is the same kind of bullshit that led to people tracking their personal "carbon footprint".
And, again, I don't want to take away from the bigger point the guy is making, which is basically, even if you completely don't care about/believe in Climate Change, at today's prices, it's just stupid to not switch over to solar, as much as possible, as fast as possible.
That is a very good message to be preaching to the non-believers. It's just not a good "opening statement" to that message.
*in the USA (European countries have figures around 50%; in Switzerland I'm pretty sure we have 95% electric trains)
How many electric planes do you have? How many electric semis? How many electric tankers and giant global cargo ships and rockets and military-anything-that-moves?
Globally, counting everything we use to move people and stuff, "99.9% of all transport" is probably overstating it, but not by much.
It absolutely is overstating it, though, and the margin will certainly increase as things that are able to be electrified very easily (like buses and trains, where the technology already clearly exists and works well) are electrified. There will be increasing economic pressure to do this as petroleum becomes more expensive as we run out of it anyway.
And, given that petroleum is a finite resource, it is actually still extremely beneficial to switch to renewables for the huge number of things that are able to be electrified even while acknowledging that there are some domains where electrification isn't currently practical or possible, because using petroleum exclusively for things where electrification isn't possible gives us longer before we run out to develop solutions and alternatives for these use cases.
The only thing that I use on a daily basis that is powered by burning petroleum products is my car engine. Everything else is electric, including most of the things in my car. Is your situation different?
Since the video is this long, I have to ask: does he talk about the issue with the fact that pretty much all solar panels are made in China? (are they still? is there any movement to change that?)
In the recent years it's become clear that unfortunately we may be getting back into an era of global scale conflicts. The west is way too dependent on China in many areas, but specifically energy infrastructure is possibly the most important one of them all. It's necessary for literally everything else.
I'm not convinced that we should avoid solar because of this, but surely it has to be part of the decision process. As much as I hate coal (I was born in a region devastated by coal mining), I think that from the point of view of energetic security phasing it out so aggressively here in the EU as one of the only truly independent source of energy is extremely short sighted.
One great disappointment for me in the current willy-nilly application of tariffs by the US federal government is that they actually could be put to decent and reasonable use on things like this.
"Just" tariff Chinese panels and provide incentives to build solar panel manufacturing capability in the US, and we could, hopefully, give our industry here the time that it needs to grow to meet demand and scale to lower prices.
But, alas, judicious, long-term industrial policy is not our forte, and we'll just continue to do absurd things that push away our trade partners.
I think this video focused more on the general state of renewables and less about the specifics of the global economy. It discusses concerns about recyclability of solar cells and batteries, land use, etc.
It seems like its more of a discussion the long term impacts of renewables and our transition out of fossil fuels, not the (hopefully) temporary roadblocks that we're currently facing.
Something you might be interested to know though, is that a growing percentage of Solar PV panels actually aren't manufactured in China, they're being sourced from countries like Cambodia, India, Taiwan, Malaysia, etc. Of course a lot of the components are originally sourced from China, but there's no reason that can't change.
Thanks! That's good to hear.
No, and I don't think it's the main point of the video.