What if We Replaced Nuclear With Potatoes
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- čas přidán 4. 08. 2024
- This video was made in partnership with Gates Ventures.
Energy use can be confusing - I mean, how do you compare gasoline in your car to electricity piped to your house? That's why we made these things spud-tacularly simple.
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To learn more about this topic, start your googling with these keywords:
- Calorie: the energy needed to raise the temperature of 1 gram of water through 1°C (now usually defined as 4.1868 joules).
- Energy: power derived from the utilization of physical or chemical resources, especially to provide light and heat or to work machines.
- Joule: the SI unit of work or energy, equal to the work done by a force of one newton when its point of application moves one meter in the direction of action of the force, equivalent to one 3600th of a watt-hour.
- Watt: the SI unit of power, equivalent to one joule per second, corresponding to the power in an electric circuit in which the potential difference is one volt and the current one ampere.
- Watt-hour: a measure of electrical energy equivalent to a power consumption of one watt for one hour.
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Cameron Duke | Script Writer, Narrator and Director
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REFERENCES
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“All-Electric Vehicles” (2017) www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/evtec...
“Apple’s Electricity Use 2020.” Statista, www.statista.com/statistics/5...
“Statistical Review of World Energy.” BP Global, 2021, www.bp.com/en/global/corporat...
“Cameco U101 - Fuel Manufacturing.” www.cameco.com/uranium_101/fu...
“FoodData Central.” Usda.gov, 2019, fdc.nal.usda.gov/fdc-app.html...
“This Is What It Costs to Light 7 of the Brightest Landmarks in the World for a Year.” Business Insider, www.businessinsider.com/the-c...
Ritchie, Hannah, et al. “Energy Production and Consumption.” Our World in Data, 2020, ourworldindata.org/energy-pro...
"The shipping industry looks for green fuels." Acs.org, 2022, cen.acs.org/environment/green... - Věda a technologie
I'm not gonna lie, after he said the potatoes would be deep enough to cover Idaho and started the next sentence with "85% of those potatoes..." I thought he was gonna end the sentence with "Are already IN Idaho."
i thought it was "85% of those potatoes... is the enery we use"
Latviaaaa, Irelaaaand
Edit:why is this getting liked bruv
As a non-american, what I learned from this video is where Idaho actually is
@@datpanu3015 Idaho is in the USA
I thought that was already in Idaho
I dunno if I trust that guy in red, I've seen too many impostors
you posting this comment 20 hours before the video was made public is sus
@@TheRealBFKelleher premium guy is the imposter
This one's spotted in electrical (in a power plant), he's fine.
Sus
Since the kids have stopped playing Among Us so much, I guess old folks like me are finally allowed to get the references ;)
"How much power does a nuclear reactor make?"
"About 800 MW"
"No I mean... in potatoes"
Potatoes per second?
@@BrainPermaDeD Potatoes per 2 hours
4.17 million potatoes per hour
@@TimpBizkit Or 8.34 million potatoes per 2 hours.
and then the potato war begun not the energy war but the POTATO WAR
I like how this was sponsored by Bill Gates and therefore called out Apple for their energy use and not Microsoft.
Well... Apple MAKES their physical products. Microsoft doesn't. Other companies make the physical devices on which MS software runs. But did you ALSO know that the bulk of the physical hardware that serves the internet uses LINUX software? So that is neither Apple nor MS.😃
Plus, if you normalize Apple's energy usage by dividing by the number of people it serves, it's way less than a potato per person. But that's not impressive so they misuse the scale to make it big.
I don't like Apple for many reasons, but their energy use isn't anything to worry about.
@@rickkwitkoski1976 It would be pretty weird for a software or hardware vendor to take responsibility for the energy usage of their products. This figure is probably their offices and servers, with manufacturing likely delegated to a subsidiary. Large scale datacenters companies like Microsoft or AWS operate can probably account for the majority of energy usage of the entire tech sector.
This kind of energy use plays an important role, so it shouldn't be brushed aside, since their monopolistic efforts and limitless scaling have created plenty of induced demand from the enterprise sector.
Though, tech manufacturing may very well be one of the most energy-intense industries, making any efforts by companies like Apple to stop proper repair of their products or even the act of marketing a newer model a direct source of e-waste and all of its environmental effects, including the production of newer devices that would have been otherwise avoided.
@@rickkwitkoski1976 You forgot MS Azure. Their lots of servers consume a huge amount of potatoes every minute.
@@rickkwitkoski1976 Microsoft has several branded devices
radioactive potato is mighty.
ppl don't realize how efficient and safe it is compared to the alternatives.
I read somewhere that the most dangerous radioactive source of electricity is coal. Living near a coal power plant is much worse in terms of radiation compared to living near a nuclear plant (and obviously much more worse than living close to renewables)
xkcd 1162
@@Ghi102 yeah coal has been in the soil for a long time, naturally occurring radioactive materials like vanadium infiltrate it and when burned gets released into the surrounding atmosphere.
also you should ventilate basements since radon can collect there.
What's funny is normal potatoes are actually fairly radioactive, potato chips are one of the most radioactive things we regularly eat.
@@creamofbotulismsoup9900 they not above bananas as far as I know.
Everyone's talking about the among us reference but not how efficient chainsaw man aki is at living a low potato life
Exactamente lo que pensaba
Exactly what I was thinking
I've been searching the comments section for that exact comment, thank you. for a minute i was worried and thinking "isn't it Aki there? or I've been watching too much chainsaw man content lately?" lol
The comment I was looking for!
I was waiting for a Lord of the rings reference.
For the record, it should be kWh instead of KW/h. The former is the product of a rate (kW) and time (hours). The latter doesn't make any sort of sense.
Well, it describes the rate of change of power, which I guess could be useful for quantifying how quickly a system can ramp up/down.
@@Dayanto true, its analogous to velocity vs acceleration
I just wanted to comment on this...
It's m/s not ms
So on that note its kw/h
@@destroyerofminecraft3249 nope, you're wrong. m/s is meters per second - it's division. kwh is kilowatt-hours - it's multiplication
Many things aren't good in this video, especially around 2:30, where they mix up primary energy, final energy and useful energy.
If the authors intended to consider the whole primary-to-useful energy chain, starting with 85% (for fossil fuels), removing 2/3 of this to obtain 28%, and then comparing it to 2% nuclear energy is wrong, because to end-up with 2% energy for nuclear, you also need to start with 6% nuclear in the initial energy balance.
Of course, if you do that, the initial balance doesn't add-up to 100%.
And I don't expand here on the renewable part, for which the primary-to-final energy conversion ratio is more tricky and depends on the meaning we expect from the percentage.
Or maybe the authors meant to talk specifically about the final-to-useful energy conversion? Then there's still an inconsistency in the fact that they use a yield of 1/3 for fossil fuel.
This yield would correspond to the final-to-useful energy conversion when the useful energy is under the form of movement.
But movement is far from being the only useful energy in the mix, heat represents more or less half of the useful energy, and is not subject to the 1/3 yield.
The authors seem to believe that the 1/3 yield is due to the energy resource supply chain (primary > final energy), which is absolutely not the correct order of magnitude. They disregard the second law of thermodynamics (this is corroborated by 1:00, where they essentially attribute the engine yield to... friction!?)
Finally, call me picky but "13% come from renewable like solar panels, wind turbines, or hydroelectric dams"... Although not wrong, it gives the impression that solar panels and wind turbine are the main renewable sources. At world scale, they are marginal. The main renewable sources are biomass (for heat - yes, again), and hydroelectric, by far.
The idea of the video, namely, to provide orders of magnitude, is great. Too bad this passage gives an incorrect representation of said orders of magnitude in the energy mix.
I cringed as soon as I saw the "KW/h" instead of kWh at 0:24, the science is really bad for a wannabe science channel this big
they dont get paid to you. but to brainwash you into accepting the spending of billions of taxpayer money in nuclear
Yeah, another problem is that chemical energy stored in a potato is not same as energy usable for the human body. Humans can't extract all of the energy that's present in the potato.
Smartest renewable energy enthusiast
What the f### is this this is so BIG!!!!!!
Ya know, the Apple computer example seemed kinda weird until you mentioned the sponsor lol
bill
Why would it be weird?
Apple is largest/wealthiest company in world.
@@LENZ5369 just had to look it up. Apple with 365 billion VS Microsoft 168 billion net worth.
@@christopherjohnston6343 I know, it's so depressing. So tired of Apple and their everything... (I've been biased against Mac and all the other Apple products since always. Hated that their system had annoying interface and only a single button on the mouse. Then it only got worse with their locking batteries in phones to force consumers to use their battery-changing services rather than let them just swap a battery themselves.)
@@LENZ5369 Because it does not make sense, what does it even mean "the whole apple company uses X amounts of energy"
A friend asks: If we can measure fuel usage in potatoes, how much energy would we get in a potato serving of uranium?
2:42
Simply: from a potato sized chunk of uranium, we get 350000 potatoes worth of energy.
1 green potato = 350k potatoes
1 g of uranium is about 1,000,000,000 cal
Funfact: the trace amounts of uranium present in potatoes have more energy than the potatoes themselves.
@@wren_. so don't eat uranium if you're on a diet?
@@vaclavzajac214 In a research made by the National Library of Medicine; Toxicological Profile for Uranium, a gram of Potatoes has 2.66-2.92ng of Uranium.
Actually "1,000,000,000cal per gram of Uranium" is a bit misleading because that is for U235, and most of the Uranium in the world (99.3% to be more specific) is U238, which has only 400,000,000cal per gram.
2.92ng * 400,000,000cal = 1.168cal/g (Uranium in potat) < 770cal/g (Raw potat)
Friction is only one part of the reason for ICEs low efficiency. The laws of thermodynamics make up a large portion of it as well. IIRC it's not practically possible for an ICE to be more than ~50% efficient due to the laws of thermodynamics alone.
Yes, thank you! From what I remember from my thermo classes, 50% is a theoretical maximum if very high temperatures are possible. With modern cars, something like 30% efficiency is possible at the ideal RPM with the throttle wide open. In practice 20% is typical because throttling the intake requires extra pump work.
@@abev236 throttling, sitting idle, accessories, low loads, inefficient gear selection.
The second I saw that among us in the thumbnail I nearly had a heart attack, thanks minute earth!
After seeing the video, I can say that that is a lot of potatoes.
Looks like adventure communist was onto something making you gather billions of potatoes, maybe they were planning on taking over the world? Who knows?
They changed the thumbnail, which is rather sus. We should vote red out for that.
did not see that...
They are taking not over the world but over Idaho
getoutofmyheadgetoutofmyheadgetoutofmyheadgetoutofmyheadgetoutofmyheadgetoutofmyhead
I saw it immediately as well
2:42 WHEN THE POTATOE ENERGY IS SUS
e
a mongus
I physically went "DING DING DING DING DING"
(to the tune of amogus drip)
Idaho has an area of 216,632 km². That's a bit larger than Belarus' 207,500 km² and Guiana's 214,970 km². Just converting the measurement to a more global audience.
muito obrigado. pegar um país da américa do sul, e outro da europa realmente ajuda a visualizar melhor =)
Looks like Aki has both of his arms in the MinuteEarth universe.
Bro I thought I was the only one who noticed
same
What do you mean both?
@@Lucien_Mhe lost his arm :D
0:21 I think you mean KWh. KW/h is kilowatt per hour, which is kilojoule per second per hour. KWh is an amount of energy: 1 KW delivered for 1 hour. KW is the rate of energy, it is energy per time or in SI Units: 1000 (cuz Kilo) joules per second. Multiply this with a unit of time (like hour😉) and you get energy, hense KiloWattHour, not KiloWatt per Hour.
Depends on what that image is meant to convey. If it's meant to show the confusion many people have when thinking about power and energy, it's a perfect illustration. :)
My father keeps making this same mistake. He doesn't even get it when I explain why it's wrong. Now I just interpret what he says without mentioning it, but on the inside I cringe every time XD
0:25 KW/h as a unit of energy? 😮
Well... Is how energy comapanies charge us, isn't it? :P
Edit: Mistakes were made! As pointed in a posterior comment, I thought about KW*h even thought what was actually written was KW/h. A 'square hour' mistake, if you will. ^^
Sure is 1000 W * 1 hour = 3.6 MJ
Actually you are the best kind of correct, technically, In the video it gets the unit of energy wrong as kW/h
@@guiguspi no you are charged kWh which is power • time not kW/h which is power ÷ time. The former measures energy, the latter measures the second derivative of energy but would never be used instead of the more standard J/s^2. (Its the equivalent of position amd acceleration, one is measured as m the other as m/s. To my knowledge we only have a name for energy and its first derivative which is called power.)
@@jasonreed7522 You are corret, I read W*h where was actually written W/h.
The reasons your car loses 80% of it's fuel to heat is because that's that maximum efficiency of gas powered engines. I took a class on thermodynamics where we calculated the maximum efficiency of engines based on their properties. Diesel engines are much more efficient because they have higher compression.
its funny to think that even with all the losses, EV are still way more efficient than ICE. and they even used a conservative efficiency for the power plants, some modern fossil fuel power plants can go as high as 90% efficiency.
@@danilooliveira6580 they also grossly overestimated the ICE consumption. even using their own numbers in the foot note, 8.6 x 60 miles (30MPH for 2H) is 516. plus 22 MPG is pretty low. i get 38MPG at 30 MPH and i drive a '19 Altima, that works out to 300 per 2 hours, which is pretty comparable to the 240 EV honestly.
Plus you dont get to pick where your power comes from, so the number they use would have to be an avg of the entire grid. 40% seems fair.
Well that does not account for the devestating toxic waste battery production generates, and replacing them as well, a fule tank is kinda easy to replace, it's pritty much a box of metal, and combine the best of both you get hydrogen cares, you may even be able to produce the fule at home, add some solar and water, and you quite close to preducing your own fule AND a smaller battery to boot
Electric cars are actually not that efficient, we often skip the transformation loss wich is the actual problem, thing is electric cars lose a lot of energy during the transfer of said energy (of curse same could be said for fosil fuel cars but they actually win in that regard) in the end electric cars are rughly 10-20% more energy efficient than for example diesels cars of same technology (depends on a car)
The largest problem with those cars tho is the total pulution they create, as while yes you are good on ecology front while driving the car itself creates way more polution during its creation/disposal than standard cars cupled with their inherit short livespan (most become useless after 5 years while some convencial cars can last up to 20 with some repairs) means that if you look at bigger picture they are significantly less eco friendly than even some old diesels.
That being said tho from my current knowledge hybrids cars are a good alternative, as they make it so you use less fuel meaning the convencional cars become more efficient, they can be repaired and for most their batteries can also be easily swaped meaning you don't need to produce a whole car.
As Michael Schellenberger says --- your entire energy needs for your whole life, can be contained in one coffee mug of Uranium. The energy density of Uranium and with Nuclear (vs chemical) energy is just off the charts for people to grasp
Is that a chainsawman reference at 0:08 looks like Aki Hayakawa
Oh yeah he's reading a newspaper 00:43 it's definitely him.
Yaaaa It’s Aki. They should’ve put denji there too
Def him
So what I’m getting from this, is if I drink enough oil to fuel the shipping industry for 2 hours, I’ll have enough energy for 8.4 billion hours, which is almost 1 million years?
Sound like a good idea😂
No, fuel oil is poisonous and you would die
Yuck! Drinking that type of oil sounds disgusting. No, what he is talking about is plugging your electrical devices into potatoes. I did that with my tablet a few hours ago and its
Longevity hacc unlocked 🤣 /s.
@@davidroddini1512 and its? What happened? Are you still alive or are your devices broken or something?
@@oddpotato4038 his tablet exploded before he could finish his sentence
sussy mogus in thumbnail!!!!!!
0:15 IS THAT AKI FROM CSM??😂
In winter that "waste heat" actually becomes useful.
in summer tho you will suffer
Sure, but it's still not as efficient as a heat pump (so don't intentionally replace LEDs with incandescents). And if you're still producing that heat in the summer, it puts an extra load on your heat pump, so it's a wash unless you spend more of the year heating than cooling
2:13 ah,the idahoan dream
Meanwhile in Russia: "Welcome to power plant...is potato."
The fact that on the back of the car said"POT8O" shows the little ditails they put into these videos!
Break down that is done is remarkable, and much more relatable than kcals, joules
Techno blade has enough to potatoes to power a rocket
YOU GUYS HAD ALL THESE POTATOES THE ENITRE TIME AND YOU STILL LET THE POTATO FAMINE HAPPEN
I dont think i would trust a person in a red spacesuit he's kinda sus
When you said it was sponsored by bill gates, the bashing of apple in particular taking too many potatoes of energy suddenly seemed to have a different purpose.
I love how they make a video then change the title and the thumbnail a few hours later
its something a lot of youtubers are doing now, they keep trying different titles and thumbnails to see which one is blessed by the algorithm, then they just stick with the one that gave better results.
You know exactly why you got more clicks.
That was pretty clever
I wonder how many clicks (on a Geiger counter) a radioactive potato would generate? 🤔
I can't believe you did electric cars like that. What a sweeping generalisation.
Ah yes, the potato battery. Thanks Portal.
Americans really will use any unit to avoid metric
Mre intriguing question: how much potato/rice can one cook on a nuclear reactor?
I like the potato analogy. It's a great way to convey energy consumption.
Meanwhile the main topic in Ministries of Energy in Latvia, Belarus and Ireland:
Nice vid, MinuteEarth...!!! 🍟😋💯👍
You should do a video on what if we lined all the freeways with native trees and the effects that can have on are citys and are health.
Thank you for this interesting video, but that illustration at 1:23 is very misleading, as it suggests that combustion takes place inside the cooling tower which completely wrong. The only thing that happens in a cooling tower is that hot water evaporates. Nothing is burned, no toxic gases are released.
Honestly I always knew nuclear power so much more efficient. It just needs to be funded and regulated more in rural areas away from hot spots to avoid disasters.
0:22 shouldn't it be kW *times* h?
This would be interesting as a minute labs tool
you say"useless heat", but i hear it as soul-soothing entropy
There were a total of 7 potato jokes in this video.
2:47
among us?
'So if you genetically modify a potato to not only be very delicious but also up to 10 or 20 potatoes can charge up a generator to give electricity to a huge concrete jungle of a city.' - Chrome
*sees thumbnail*
GET OUT OF MY HEAD GET OUT OF MY HEAD GET OUT OF MY HEAD
The biggest reason why combustion engines have such a bad efficiency is not the friction. All thermodynamic engines have a maximum efficiency based on the highest and lowest temperature of the thermodynamic process. Search for "Carnot efficiency"
Skyblock: Potato War 4
(RIP Technoblade)
I was searching for this comment
I love nuclear energy I love nuclear energy
You forgot to mention the better Uranium Alternative Thorium. Sam o'nella would not be pleased.
Replace nuclear with potato
Meanwhile Lay's: Gentlemen potato chips gonna be more profitable
How many potatoes per year go into manufacturing, shipping and lighting of holiday decorations?
considering that basically all Christmas lights are now led based, I bet not a lot. manufacturing and shipping though its hard to say because you need to take many things into account, but more importantly, you need to compare it with the average energy spent with manufacturing and shipping of any frivolous product and see if it increases the overall use, or if it replaces it as people buy less frivolous products to buy Christmas decorations instead. so it can increase, decrease or be neutral in potato use.
@@danilooliveira6580 Yeah, I dunno. There's still a fair few incandescent ones out there and while LEDs are usually around 1/10th the power for a given brightness, the shift to LED seems to have made a lot of people just put up more and expand to extravagant Halloween lighting as well. It does help that LEDs are less likely to burn out so people are more likely to keep reusing them longer rather than buying new strings. A lot of people just couldn't be bothered with the effort of tracking down a blown bulb or fuse that took out a whole string. It does seems a difficult thing to account for accurately but it's a pretty wasteful practice with little point other than "look at me, I'm more celebrative than you!"
@@protocol6 a lot of things are wasteful practices with little point, and as all those other things, people do it because it makes them happy, they like to make their house look amazing. and you also need to take into consideration that only a fraction of the world will celebrate Christmas, only a fraction will celebrate with decorations, and only a fraction of that fraction of that fraction at extravagant proportions to be relevant.
I thought this was somehow a way to generate electricity from potatos !
Just burn them and call it biomass. "It's renewable, technically, we promise."
*throws a glowing green potato at you*
"RAD POTAT!!!"
"there are too many units of energy, so let's introduce another one... potatoes"
Considering a potato is 94% water it's not a good reference to fuel, cooking oil would be a better comparison
0:17 That fuel is pretty bri'ish
a single car vs. the whole global shipping industry seems a slightly biased setup
What an informative video genuinly very interesting.
That sus man 🗡📕
I love how Americans are more willing to use potatoes to measure things than the metric system
Now I'm feeling a hankerin' for some french fries.
And the more you look into it, the more chaotic it gets.
You also have to take into consideration the energy needed to create, transport and maintain all the components of all those different things, and then to see where the raw resources came from.
It's a never-ending rabbit hole.
Sure X uses this many potatoes per 2 hours, but how many people does that provide for? What's the potato per person for 2 hours of a powerplant? Also, what percentage of the potato a person eats get turned into heat? Just felt like the metric of what is being compared wasn't constant.
How would you calculate the number of people a powerplant provides for? Sure, you could take the mean annual energy consumption of a typical household. But that would be scewed again, since most energy goes not to households but to industry. And how would you factor in how many people that industry provides for?
@@lonestarr1490 But that's my point. One potato is not equal to another.
@@felixthecrazy Yeah. But they're more equal than what we're calculating with now. That's the point of the video. It doesn't claim that potatoes are the perfect means of energy measurement. If they were, we would already be using them as such.
Amogus
SUS
The title is not what I thought this video was going to be about lmfao
PO-TAY-TOES. boil 'em, mash 'em, burn 'em to power your stuff.
You’re really mashed this topic into the ground keep up the great work
Yes
#MinuteEarth, a friendly reminder. I got confused at how you used the US customary system or imperial system. I am from the United States, but I use the metric system for reasons of international collaboration and convenience. All countries and international organizations use this international system of measurements. As long as you include metric units in your videos, I would be absolutely fine with that.
At 0:48: "10.7 L / 100 km (4.545 km / L), 48 km/h, flat road. Basically 13.84 potatoes per kilometer."
At 1:34: "201 watt hours / km, 7.84 L / 100 km (12.75 km / L), flat road."
Edit: A mistake I made 7.84 L / 100 km converts to 12.75 km / L not 3.333 km / L
There's a sussy Among Us in your thumbnail!
I doubt a lot that the dissipated heat mostly comes from friction in a combustion engine. Most of the heat should be created by the combustion itself and then the heat is dissipated through the oil cooler, water cooler, and the exhaust gases.
I truly don't get why global shipping in container ships gets so much flak.
They are incredibly efficient at what they do.
The carbon emissions to transport a bag of chips from one end of the world to the other in a cargo ship is less than the carbon emissions for the last mile delivery.
This is way better than the cybertruck or similar vehicles even if it runs on half renewables.
Source: trust me bro
Google last mile delivery carbon emissions or something idk
I know what you mean. Trucks are the worst when it comes to hauling cargo (emission vise)
Yeah, divide that "big number" by the number of people served and it's very small potatoes.
@@DavidGuild yep, literally only 3% of the world's co2 emmisions apparently.
That's really low when you realize all the good it does.
why there is a among us in this video!!!!
Until I saw the timestamp I thought this was a dig at Peter Dutton.
Interesting, simple and easy
Ask Bill about his Epstein connections
Kilowatt backslash hours? 😭 Otherwise, an entertaining take on energy use. I thought coal and gas power plants were more efficient than stated.
Then Irish Potato Disease would cause all of our lights to go out.
Thanks to this video, I have discovered the power to smite my enemies.
2:45 why amogus?
Stop eating potatoes!
Potatoes are cute and adorable plant beings. They have the rights to live and to be loved. Just like any other roots and tubers. That's why eating potatoes is a barbaric, cruel, and inhumane behaviour!
Potat is humanity's best friend and should be devoured at every meal.
Pro tip: don't eat glowing green potatoes, however tasty they might look
We need to calculate the number of potatoes used in refining oil, too.
2:25 Ok, this is epic partisan malevolence. You can say that the yield of the fossil fuels makes only for a minority of their energy to become useful and not just heat (even if some of this heat is in fact really used). But then you should do the same with "renewables" too ; they also have a yield, and it's not 100 % at all. (One could also argue for comparing ratios between capital invested and energy harvested, but that may be a bit complex for this channel).
Such a disappointment.
ok le epic reddit guy, what's the yield
Extracting energy from the wind or the sun doesn’t add additional heat to the environment, unlike combustion. You’re right that they have an efficiency (wind turbines can extract ~ 2/3 of the wind’s kinetic energy) but it’s not “wasting” energy as heat in the same way hydrocarbons do when combusted. It’s not “epic partisan malevolence”, it’s thermodynamics. Sheesh.
@@matthewmuscheid Check your numbers, and check your thermodynamics credentials too.
A perfect wind turbine would extract at most 59 % of the wind energy (called the Betz limit), and real ones generally extract around 45-50 %. They also create massive turbulence, and turbulence means transforming (macroscopic, ordered) movement into (microscopic, disordered) heat ; the technical term is the "energy cascade" (described by Kolmogorov and Richardson).
Moreover, a wind turbine has an alternator, which has moving parts, which have friction, which create heat ; and the heat created is, to simplify, proportional to the square of the turbine dimensions, whereas the power output is proportional to the cube of the same dimensions (one of the many reasons wind turbine alternators have a lower yield than big power stations, whether fossil or nuclear).
About solar cells, I'm quite surprised you really think solar cells don't create heat ; you may never have touched solar cells working. First of all, solar cells have a theoretical maximal yield at about 33 % (the Shockley-Queisser limit), and real-life ones generally have 20-25 % yield (only for the most recent technologies ; older ones are much lower).
Second, solar cells are usually made of very dark materials ; their low albedo absorbs most of the light that is not converted into electricity, and convert it into heat, as any dark material would do. As most materials on the Earth's surface is not as dark as solar cells, one can easily conclude that the presence of solar panels generate much more heat than would have been generated otherwise. If you don't believe me, just remember you can easily cook an egg on a productive solar panel, whereas you wouldn't on the ground or on grass.
And remember, we didn't even talk about production costs, or recyclability, or "drive-ability" (I don't know the exact word in English, which isn't my native tongue).
You totally missed the point of the video. You don’t burn anything to get energy from wind or solar. The point is we are replacing combustible fuels with potatoes. And before you respond with the “um, actually producing wind and solar facilities uses combustible fuels” I’ll just save you the effort and say you missed the point. Again.
@@matthewmuscheid So, you're not talking thermodynamics anymore ? Paint me surprised.
If the "burning" part is what really bothers you, well, fortunately no one listened to people like you whan our ancestors domesticated fire half a million years ago.
Physics 101 : energy isn't produced (see Noether's theorem), it just can be converted from one form to another. So, either you get your electrical energy from chemical potential energy, or from nuclear potential energy (what you call "burning"), or you take it from wind movement or from solar light. But in each and every case, you change something and you create unwanted effects on our environment.
No energy conversion is "clean" or "free" or "magic", every source of energy has effects, externalities and costs, that you may consider worth it, or not worth it. Believing that using some of these sources would have no effect whatsoever is not science, it's religion, it's cultish mysticism.
By the way, the point of the video was that some energy sources are much more concentrated than others, nuclear energy being the most concentrated of all the sources humanity can use. This is true ; but what I was criticizing was a highly misleading, although subordinate, detail in the video.
aki fights the energy bill devil
Lmaooooo
Energy bill devil def an avengers level threat
That nuclear potato looks mighty sus.
Ok, so potatoes aren't too efficient as a fuel source but what about corn?
I say cucumbers are the most efficient
Uhhh, I feel strongly a follow up to this video is needed: an episode dedicated to electric car energy usage and how it compares to that of internal combustion engines.
Would love that too
Seems the comments already said the energy savings from electric are already immense.
That guy in the thumbnail is the Sussy imposter
0:58 This is almost backwards - ironically, the more accurate explanation sounds even worse. The whole mechanism of the engine is trying to convert heat (and pressure) from the burning into motion, so producing "heat" doesn't have to be a waste. But car engines are just really bad at converting heat into motion energy, and it gets less efficient the faster you try to do it. Even in theory, you can only get ~2/3 of the energy to convert into motion. But then a ton of the heat is simply wasted out the tailpipe because it's too much of a bother (time, space, complexity) actually maximize the harvest.
Nice reference, idaho, sure everyone on the world can relate
Loving the aki hayakawa haircut.
I lost it when I saw him RIP
Aki does like his potatoes.
That a great idea