The Energy Crisis No One Is Talking About — Scott Tinker

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: what i wanted to ask you is first of all to break down the reality of energy patterns and consumption around the world like what is going on because if you live in the western country if you live in the city in the western country every second car is electric we're making this great energy transition everything's wonderful renewable energy everywhere you know you see sun panels and all of this stuff [00:00:27] Speaker 2: but that's not quite the reality of the world is it not the whole world no yeah two of my favorite words transition and renewable you know but uh we're not and they aren't okay and and i i said i said that in a ted talk actually to 1100 kids i went through well we started with food cow and kale to understand energy density and took them through different forms of energy and how some you just get a lot more bang for the buck but all of them come from the earth a solar panel comes from the earth a wind turbine comes from the earth the battery comes near this mind and then it's manufactured in these collection systems collects the sun light heat and motion of the wind and it's converted into electricity but those wear out and then we dump them into landfills and we do it over and over so there's no renewable [00:01:21] Speaker 1: energy there's no such thing as renewable energy no that's a myth we've carried forward in our schools [00:01:27] Speaker 2: and and the sun and the wind are there but you can't put sun in your car so you have to have these collection systems and those come from the earth they're mine other kinds of energy are denser coal came along at first it was wood and then the sun was the first form of energy it grew the hay that our vehicles of the day used oxen and horses and then we killed whales to get their oils for lighting our homes and then coal came along 1805 the first uh coal train in wales actually commercial coal power train you burn coal which nature took carbon plants and made it really dense for us so you get a lot of energy when you burn that coal heat boil water make steam turn a turbine run a generator light and that changed the modern world then oil hydrocarbons carbon and hydrogen not just carbon and coal even denser refine that put in our vehicles that's why we can travel so far the horse and the oxen had to eat a lot of hay a lot of hay to go 500 miles a good tank of gas will get you that far and then methane natural gas came along ch4 more hydrogen than carbon it'll sound weird but methane is denser than oil by weight so it's a much denser form of energy more hydrogen in it and then finally uranium and thorium the nuclear so this this energy density transition has been happening naturally for a couple of centuries now and that's where energy in the world is headed okay it's uh it's tough to negotiate with physics and we try all the time politically but but physics eventually wins and so does economics so that's this if there's a transition it's toward that okay now globally you asked um the wealthy world let's just break the world into three parts the emerging economies about half of the world four billion people the developing economies another three billion and then the lucky one plus billion of us who were born one lottery right and and so we have moved through our our mix of energy has changed from dominated by coal less coal now than most the modern world oil is actually percentage-wise decreasing natural gas and nuclear increasing in the modern world and solar and wind and i'm i'm fine with those by the way i'm not anti solar and wind that's a diverse portfolio is a good thing you know optionality like stocks or real estate options in that portfolio matter but they're not going to replace the dense forms of energy so the rich world has this op set of options now scott can i [00:04:18] Speaker 1: interrupt you there i want to come back to you tracing all the street yeah but you said something that to a lot of people who are not uh aware of any of this will sound um almost unbelievable it's like renew what we call renewables which you you say i mean it's not renewable i call them solar and wind so it's solar and wind good yeah they will not replace for denser form of energy no why not um you simply can't [00:04:45] Speaker 2: you can't two reasons two big reasons a lot of reasons but two big ones you can't mine enough to create the collection systems of solar panels and wind turbines which wear out in 15 to 20 years and so you have to keep building them because we don't recycle them you just can't mine enough to do that because the sun and the wind are so low density it takes a tremendous amount to collect the energy we need to power the modern world so uh vaslav smil is a very bright energy guy out of canada and he created a i when i'm talking about density before i was talking about you know per unit weight how much energy in a in an ounce or a pound of something you can't weigh the sun and the wind so he came up with something called surface power density which is uh area watts per meter squared so this the wind has a very low surface power density very low it takes a lot of area to collect energy from the wind the sun is a little better but i'm talking about one watt per meter squared or six not hundreds to 500 to approaching a thousand which you get from the dense forms of energy so you you you literally can't mine and replace enough of that stuff that's the one reason the second big reason is there's this weird thing called night okay and and it happens every day um when night happens or clouds you have to have something else there because we like our electricity 24 7 and when the wind goes away you have to have something else there that's called intermittent so the something else there is either a redundant system of natural gas power plants to fire up or now ever increasing giant batteries which have a lower density by weight than dung okay dung cow dung is about 40 times denser than a lithium ion battery by weight so we're charging these giant batteries which have very little energy density very low that's why it takes a thousand pounds of battery to run a nice tesla s let me say that again a tesla s a thousand pounds of battery on that floor but seven thousand cell phones in one car okay so that's the dent it's the physics it's not judgment it's just physics so you you're not going to be able to power the whole world particularly as the emerging and developing world come into hopefully wealth like we have they're going to require more energy more and more energy and that's a good thing not a bad thing lift the world up you just can't do it so they'll be a part of a portfolio and look i've installed solar in gunchukwa colombia in the arwako village of gunchukwa indigenous people that's all they could have there's no wires there's no roads there's no pipes first electricity to them was a three and a half kilowatt solar array and we put light bulbs in mud huts and ceiling fans in a refrigerator freezer for some medicines okay that's great that gets them started but it's light bulbs in mud hut we would call that a brown out it's not electrified it's light bulbs so then this progression constantin has to happen and that requires very dense energy okay and that's where you're headed toward methane hydrogen and nuclear both fission and fusion that's dense in fact if you look at it by weight i'm going to say this uranium and thorium which run fission reactors okay that radioactive breakdown creates a bunch of heat a lot of heat and that boils water makes steam turn a turbine run a generator it's exact same process as burning coal or gas it's a thermal process when you think about the density of a uranium pellet and we i visited many nuclear reactors and stuff them into these fuel rods fuel assemblies a uranium pellet about one centimeter tall and half a centimeter wide has as much energy in it and be enough to drive a car from new york to la and back to dallas texas one pellet that's how much energy is in there you know how much gasoline that would take a lot yeah and gasoline you know how much hay it would take so this is why the density wins this is this is why to power 8.3 billion people and growing to some point going to take a remarkable amount of dense energy to do that and it's always on a nuclear reactor is always running it doesn't shut down at night or when the wind stops blowing so the two reasons are density takes too much stuff and intermittency that conversation doesn't end there the next clip carries it on go on give it a click