Can We Make Electricity Without Fossil Fuels?: Crash Course Climate & Energy #3

hello from the internet I'm coming to you on demand through a vast interconnected network of wires and electromagnetic waves that spans the globe and chances are you're watching this in the comfort of your home school or workplace that's lit and heated on demand too you can cook up mac and cheese charge your cell phone and put on the TV to keep the dog company as easy

as flipping a switch or pushing a button but none of this would be possible without electricity our lifestyles are centered around electricity and worldwide we consume more than 22 000 terawatt hours every year that's enough to microwave about 2 trillion Mac and cheeses but the way we make electricity is changing hi hi I'm M Jackson and this is Crash Course climate and energy [Music] swimming pools

full of mac and cheese aside making all that electricity is taking a toll on Earth's climate power plants running on fossil fuels are pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere enhancing in a bad way the planet's greenhouse effect which warms the earth scientists agree that we have to find ways to make electricity without releasing so much carbon dioxide also known as decarbonizing the electricity Supply this would

make a huge impact because a little over a quarter of all of our greenhouse gas emissions come from generating electricity and that's not even including the electricity it takes to manufacture things or power large-scale agriculture which are often counted as their own categories when measuring fossil fuel emissions by sector a growing number of countries are committing to becoming carbon neutral by 2050. that means reaching no

net carbon emissions by both massively reducing emissions and offsetting the ones we can avoid by scrubbing extra carbon to the air but in an increasingly populous world with an ever-growing appetite for energy this is a challenge we'll need to find a way to decarbonize while also meeting people's needs the good news is we have options some biggies are solar and wind power solar power involves capturing

radiation from the Sun and converting it to electricity most often this happens in photovoltaic panels these panels contain metals like Silicon that absorb particles of light called photons and emit electrons those electrons are captured to form an electric current the sun's energy can also be captured on a large scale in what are called concentrating solar power plants here instead of using a bunch of separate panels

a big field of mirrors focuses sunlight onto a single receiver where temperatures can reach hundreds of degrees Celsius it's like the coolest laser on the planet that heat can then be used to boil water and create steam which can turn a turbine and generate electricity like in a fossil fuel power plant but crucially it does this without releasing a bunch of carbon dioxide another option is

wind power which uses the force of moving air to turn turbines and directly generate electricity there are different turbine designs for different locations but especially if you've ever driven through a rural area you've probably seen some of them in the wild lurking in the fields like strange high-tech crops in the last decade the costs of both wind and solar energy have dropped massively helping to make

the more affordable worldwide because of this wind and solar now account for about seven percent of the global electricity Supply and if we built and installed more panels and more turbines that number would go up which would definitely help in reducing carbon dioxide emissions but don't bring out the balloons yet scientists don't think that wind and solar could ever completely replace fossil fuel power plants that's

partly because wind and solar need a lot more space for instance to generate the same amount of energy as a one square kilometer power plant you might need 5 000 square kilometers of wind turbines depending on how efficient they are but there's also another major barrier supply and demand let's head to the thought bubble think of the electricity grid as a huge bucket of water the

water itself is the electricity if you haven't guessed and when homes and businesses need to use some of that electricity the water flows out of the holes of the bottom of the bucket then through the hoses to the destination so when you flip on the TV for a movie marathon some water flows out and needs to be replaced at the top that's where electricity generation comes

in power that comes from fossil fuel power plants is like water pumped from underground into our bucket utility companies can provide a constant flow of water which they can switch on or off to control the amount flowing out of the bottom of the bucket but groundwater going into the bucket just like fossil fuels is finite once it's gone it's gone so instead you could opt to

refill your bucket with rain water and like solar and wind power the rain is renewable you'll always be able to get more of it but you have no control over when that rain falls just like you have little control over how much The Sun Shines or the wind blows as convenient as that would be so if you relied on rainfall alone to refill your bucket the

levels could get dangerously low or in a big downpour the Pucket might overflow damaging the whole system and then there goes your plans for movie night and potentially your TV thanks thought bubble the key here is that there's a crucial difference between electricity capacity and electricity generation in a given area in a hypothetical world with unlimited space you might be able to install enough solar panels

or wind turbines to supply the entire planet with electricity when the sun is shining the brightest or the wind is blowing the hardest but what happens when the sun goes down and the wind drops even though you might have the capacity to supply everyone's needs the conditions outside can't generate the right amount of energy at the right time the supply is intermittent it comes and goes

add that to the fact that our electricity usage isn't always the same either there's always some demand for power which is known as a base load but at certain times of the day and year this can increase to a peak load for example say every refrigerator in your neighborhood is always running that's the kitchen's base load but in the evenings when everyone on the Block is

cooking dinner and running the dishwasher and has all the lights on the electricity grid will have to supply a lot more power than in the middle of the night when it's just powering the fridge or you know the fridge plus a few people who are reheating pizza for a midnight snack so whatever we use to supply electricity it needs to be able to adapt to these

changes and right now our demand for well power on demand just isn't compatible with the intermittency of wind and solar power that's where some other low carbon options come in for instance hydroelectric power makes use of that old adage what goes up must come down essentially you trap huge amounts of water in a reservoir at the top of a hill then you control that flow of

base load to Peak load right now the biggest hydroelectric facility in the world is at the Three Gorges Dam in China in 2021 it generated enough energy to hypothetically power a small country like the Netherlands worldwide hydroelectric power accounts for about 16 percent of all electricity generation but maybe hold the confetti cannons because it's not all good news building a reservoir capable of powering cities comes

with serious environmental and economic consequences Three Gorges took nearly 20 years to build and cost at least 28 billion dollars more than 1.3 million people also had to be moved from their homes and the Yangtze river valleys were submerged more than 600 kilometers Upstream destroying huge swallows of the natural environment also hydroelectric plants only really work when you have plenty of water and plenty of drop

realistically a flat country like the Netherlands could never hope to power itself hydroelectrically so another alternative and one that can be a bit more flexible is nuclear power when you hit a large atom of uranium with another particle the uranium undergoes nuclear fission it breaks down into other elements while releasing Heat by harnessing that fission in a controlled Chain Reaction the generated heat can be used

to create Steam and turn a turbine just like in a fossil fuel power plant the benefit here is that nuclear fission doesn't release any carbon and by carefully tweaking the amount of fission happening at any time the plant can easily ramp up production to meet Peak demand now uranium fuel itself isn't renewable so there's only a limited Supply but the next generation of nuclear plants is

finding ways to make it last longer by using one of the leftovers from uranium Vision to make even more heat after round one right now nuclear fission supplies around 10 percent of the world's electricity and since it's so flexible and scales up so well it could Supply more but there are significant challenges building nuclear power plants is costly and slow and there have also been a

few high-profile and devastating accidents throughout the years power plants at Three Mile Island Chernobyl and Fukushima all made headlines when they're dangerously radioactive insides leaked outside in reality far more people have been killed by air pollution from fossil fuel power plants than nuclear accidents but there's still a level of risk not everyone is comfortable with solar wind hydroelectric nuclear the point here is that there's not

going to be a single solution to completely decarbonizing our electricity Supply it's going to take a variety of Technologies and none of these transitions will be cheap compared with fossil fuel sources all low carbon options come with what's known as a green premium over the years many countries have done what they can to keep the price of fossil fuels low in order to boost their economies

and technological development they've tapped into whatever fuel reserves they have nearby and provided tax cuts and subsidies to allow companies to produce and use that fuel cheaply that means any new technology that doesn't use fossil fuels seems artificially expensive even while the resources themselves like sunlight wind might be free installing new facilities also requires research and development as well as new infrastructure and right now there

aren't many policies out there to reduce that cost these are not insurmountable challenges though the incredible thing is that if we can decarbonize electricity it'll have an impact on the other major industries that currently release greenhouse gases new generations of vehicles can be fueled by carbon free electricity instead of guzzling tankfuls of gas and homes can be heated efficiently without emitting carbon dioxide decarbonizing electricity would

even help the agricultural industry not by electrifying the crop somehow but by powering everything that goes into growing them we're talking electrifying tractors pumps and watering systems the machines that pick your green beans heavy equipment that currently runs on fossil fuels and for the emissions that are left researchers are looking into ways to capture the excess carbon and lock it away where it can't cause further

warming so decarbonizing our electricity supplies won't solve the climate crisis by its self but it can take us a good way in that direction someday soon the electricity that powers your internet or your midnight Pizza might come from something like solar or hydroelectric power in fact it might already that being said the biggest hurdle to large-scale carbon-free electricity won't actually be generating it but rather storing

and transmitting it so we can use it exactly when and where we need it in other words we need to seriously improve our water buckets we'll explore how we do that and why it's harder than you might Imagine Next time special thanks to John Lee this episode's mac and cheese caterer John we're still talking about the cool backflip you did into the swimming pool of macaroni

and we're still washing the cheddar Aroma off ourselves foreign thanks for supporting us on patreon Crash Course climate and energy is produced by complexly with support provided by breakthrough energy and Gates Ventures this episode is filmed at Castle Garrity studio and was made with the help of all of these nice people if you want to help keep crash course free for everyone forever you can join

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