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tv   Planet A  Deutsche Welle  July 2, 2024 1:15am-1:31am CEST

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back to a lower quartz and with that, you're all up to date after the break plan is a looks at how about 80 percent of our energy still comes from fossil fuels and how quickly that could be changed on the go fairly, thank you so much for your company, the, the letter in charlotte, the currently move people the on the world wide and such a big saffel tacit committed to actually find out about robina story info. my grands why do, humming? does not get drunk. why do gravitational waves squeeze all bodies?
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how much do we need to put a pond claim for help find the offices get smaller on dw science and i'll take 10 of the this might look like a bunch of pipes, but this video isn't about coming. it's about this. we had grass that shows all the energy made and used in the united states in 2022. i know it looks complicated and a little boring, but bear with me because it made me realize that there's something fundamentally wrong with how we talk about energy. a see distress, something in common with this one from germany and china and india and australia and basically every country on us. it's this part right here. and it was single handedly reshape how we think about switching away from fossil fuels to clean or forms of energy like sun and wind. because it turns out we don't need to replace
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all of the fossil fuels or dining. we actually need to replace a 3rd of them. here's why. this type of graph is called a sankey flow chart. it's a birds eye view of how energy flows into and through martin society. that's breakdown what's actually going on. the graphs measure the amount of energy at 4 different stages in the energy chain. they called primary secondary final and useful primary energy is the original stuff that's used to produce power. whether it's a piece of coal or the wind, that tons of turbine. but primary energy is converted into secondary image, which basically makes it transportable. that's the electricity that goes into the grid. well, the petrol that gets sent to a little petro station. when that electricity or potential gets to you, it's called final energy. this type is going to be really important later on. and then when you actually use it, it's called useful energy. now if we look at where the vast majority of the primary energy comes from, things look really bad. just
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by decades of activism, an investment and renewables, fossil fuels, to supply an 80 percent of the world's energy. that's the figure that people who are skeptical about renewables bring up a lot. they use it to say it was stuck with fossil fuels because it's impossible to replace them in time. fossil fuels right now or 80 percent of the world's energy. all these plans involve using all solar and wind in the near future. and i think there's no evidence that's doable. and so when, when can be amazing, paddle it can help somewhat, but it's not going to be the main supplier we are. and for a long time we shall be made a saw. so if you would civilization beautiful, but the 80 percent number is really only half the story. this graph also shows something that the skeptics i'm talking about very much. and that's all these gray lines. let's see, every stage of this process is inefficient and some portion of the energy is wasted . it ends up in this huge section here, it's just called rejected energy. and all these flow charts from around the world chart pretty much the same thing. the majority of the energy we produce is wasted.
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people are always shocked by the amount of, you know, what we refer to as projected energy or wasted energy. that's kimberly may feel the research scientist to leads the team along civil law national laboratory. it makes me strong scientists who have been drawing them since the middle of the 20th century. let me go find my oldest dusty assortment here, the yellow ink paper and they've been in the page protectors here. actually got 1970 us energy flow, motivated the bar in tennessee. it. she says that despite the data going back in the 6 decades, most people just aren't aware of how. ready efficient of carbon systems. it's not something that you can see. it's not like, uh, so like there's a garbage bins or rejected. energy goes into. i think that if there was a garbage pin where everybody saw wasted electrons piling up, they might really, you know, take notice and, and see the rejected energy and the big impact that efficiencies have. right. so
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what happens, we take notice of illness and efficiency is any of this actually is fixable from an engineering point of view. it's good fun that's. i'm assuming she's an energy efficiency analyst at the international energy agency, one of the biggest practice of how modern energy systems work. it's like being a detective sometimes. like how can i make this better? you know, what can i do to improve the system? let's go back to the graph. it's pretty easy to see one of the biggest conferences generating electricity. when coal on natural gas is done to move the steam turbine, the majority of that heat is lost to the environment. these are huge tents. these times costs the last part, the equipment costs the loss, and they can be in use for maybe 20 or 30 years. so they might start off as being efficient. but by the time they get towards the end of their life, they're getting more and more inefficient. and well, most pallets on operate is claimed to run $0.20. do need to go offline with a full time maintenance. so due to unexpected outages that creates
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a lot to invoice it. energy. it takes time for thing systems to warm up and you get a lot of heat loss just in the system, guessing more of so you can about can you and have a huge partner. for example, in a huge boiler full of metals that needs to shop itself before it can start getting to the temperature so that it needs to generate electricity. so there are lots of losses about public gets even more. so when we push the electricity grid to its limits, that's called pick them up. and when they reach or exceeded utility companies start to turn on all the less efficient plants to keep up with a demand. even if it's only a tiny, tiny amount over a fund we normally use, we have to bring on line some of the older plans. when we bring online, the older fence there inefficient. and they're not generation at their full capacity. but why not just losing energy on this side of the graph? a lot of it, the majority in fact, gets lost too many go from final energy to useful energy. and that's because of how inefficient fossil fuel based appliances, an engines. i think of putting your hand over a gas stove top, even if you
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a heating something up most of the energy from dining, the gas is lost as ambient heat in your kitchen. and you're on 40 percent of that, he's actually being used to cool things. got similar to what happens in a car engine or to every leader of petrol that goes into a tank. only about 20 to 30 percent is actually used to move your call. the rest is just wasted, whether us demo losses from the engine, what of how other parts of the cost system. and when you add up all the ways in which energy gets lost from heating your home to big industrial processes to moving all about stuff around with the trucks, we get to this crazy number at the end, around 2 thirds of the energy that goes in. so it's absolutely no purpose for us. so that sounds pretty bad. but in reality, this is a really good deal. that's because renewable energy generate is like solar panels, wind turbines, and 100 health sense. don't need to go in anything to which you said a tricity. it's not stuck there more efficient, it's just that we use them straight away. so we use also fuels to generate the
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drives, the turbine that generates electricity. when we do a wind turbine or skipping those 1st 2 processes and going straight to the turbine, which generates electricity, even when you factor in the losses that come from the grid, battery storage go hydro electric turbines. the vast majority of the energy generated from these sources ends up becoming electricity that you can use as something else really important. what happens if we got rid of fossil fuels? all of the machines we rely on today and gas in the federal to work with now have to use that a tricity instead. and that makes them way more efficient to take that same gas step up from the phone. if you spell it out within induction step, which way very new introduce heat. you end up using are in a 3rd of the primary energy, but against i'm talking about switching to anything called now using around 90 percent of the energy that goes in to move your call and some electric options like heat pumps are able to do 3 or 4 times as much work for the same amount of primary
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in a used at the feel base alternative. if we have to replace all current energy use with renewables, i really would be very good question mistake if we can really replace hoff bhaskar and change with energy efficiency and then the other off with renewables. and then it looks a whole lot that sneak in an energy and climate policy research reduction. he wrote a paper in 2021 that worked out how much energy we would be using, and a fully electrified design thinking. they've done it for individual bits of the transition, but no one has been. so they've been stupid enough to try to plows through well then it just to test fiction. and there's a whole lot. what he found was that we would be saving a lot of energy. in fact, we may have about 40 percent less final energy that we currently do in our vendor. ringback got this side of the grid, not that's on the switch to renewables, involves a switch to add attrition to which helps energy efficiency. so you've got the synergy between the efficiency renewables,
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so it's not just off doing one off doing the other. when you look at the whole system, the to house healthy it's easy to feel like we're moving way too slow when it comes to transitioning away from fossil fuels. but if we shift thinking away from the amount of stuff we need to put in to the amount of stuff we need to get out, the picture looks a whole lot less bleak. switching to renewables gives us a lot more bang for our buck. and it means we have to electrify, most of the things we do, which makes us things less energy intensive in the 1st place. and for a lot of us, there's not much we can do individually to change where we get our primary energy. but focusing more on how to efficiently get what we need, something that everyone can do. so the next time you hit climate skeptic site, it's simply too difficult to switch to renewables. and then we simply have to depend on fossil fuels for that the sable future. think back to this graph. so what do you think is getting rid of fossil fuels easier than it seems? the comments the lower subscribe to general reducing if you use for your every
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friday the
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made, which was i felt under enormous pressure.

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