Is the Future of Renewable Energy Inevitable?

Sponsored by SurfShark VPN. Click the link in the description and enter promo code UNDECIDED to get 83% off and 3 extra months FREE. With solar panels and wind turbines spreading around the world, clean

energy

is replacing fossil fuels, which seem dead and buried, but are they? Is our

renewable

energy

future

really

inevitable

? I'm Matt Ferrell...welcome to Undecided. In 2019,

renewable

technologies accounted for only 11% of global primary energy. Although sectors such as solar and wind energy are growing rapidly, there is a lot of criticism that gives the perception that their

future

dominance may not be a sure bet. Panels and turbines typically last 20 to 30 years before needing service or replacement.

They are also intermittent and require energy storage to provide electricity constantly. Such energy storage can be expensive and often has a limited useful life. Not to mention the lingering questions about its recyclability. I know this sounds like I'm suggesting that renewables have significant disadvantages and will struggle to overtake fossil fuels, but before jumping to any conclusions, it's wise to remember what our grandparents and great-grandparents did in past industrial revolutions. . It can help provide context for what we are seeing happen today and where we are in the current transformation we are experiencing. Let's start with Great Britain, a gold mine... rather a coal mine full of opportunities.

In 1760, coal powered the major invention that fueled the first industrial revolution: steam-powered machines. Unlike mills, which relied on unreliable forces like water and wind (sound familiar?), this technology could rely on a constant supply of coal. That's why fields like transportation and textiles gained momentum...yes...I said it. But how quickly did steam engines develop during that period? In 1712, the first steam engine pumped water from Staffordshire mines with an efficiency of 1%... clearly not the best, right? But advances made over the next 100 years by people such as James Watt and Matthew Boulton continued to refine the design of the steam engine and improve its efficiency.

After 100 years of technological improvements, steam engines increased their efficiency 10 times. It was not until 1863 that the steam engine gave way to the internal combustion engine. We are now at the dawn of the second industrial revolution when Etienne Lenoir toured Paris in his hippomobile, the ancestor of our modern automobiles. His engine only consumed 4% fuel and his vehicle reached a dizzying speed of just under 4 miles per hour... a hippopotamus actually runs twice as fast as a hippomobile. Thanks to innovators like Otto, Diesel and others, at the beginning of the 20th century the internal combustion engine became more powerful and achieved greater efficiency... 13% in 1927.

And then we come to the real breakthrough of the second industrial revolution: the electricity. However, from the moment of Humphry Davy's light bulb in 1802, we have to wait 80 years for Thomas Edison's coal-fired power plant to illuminate New York's First District. That same year, Edison paved the way for the application of renewable energy on an industrial scale with the construction of the first hydroelectric plant. But there was a major flaw in Edison's power plants. They relied on direct current (DC), which was not efficient for long-distance electricity transmission. At the turn of the century, Westinghouse, Tesla, and others solved this problem by developing the alternating current (AC) power system.

At the beginning of the 20th century, electrons flowed several kilometers bringing artificial lighting to people's homes. Short-range power grids evolved over the years into megagrids like the United States' coast-to-coast infrastructure, which was completed in 1967. As we just saw, past technological advances were clearly not easy and They took time to achieve. But how does this relate to the transition to renewable energy and the industrial revolution we are experiencing right now? Take, for example, the evolution of solar energy. In a previous video, I talked about how the efficiency of photovoltaic panels has been increasing at the speed of the sun... light.

Over the past 60 years, commercial solar panels have become more than twice as efficient. If you compare that to the increase in efficiency of steam engines (ten times in 100 years), we are a little behind, but we have 40 years to catch up. 40 years may not seem like a long time to you, but it would be more than enough if the efficiency of solar panels grew exponentially. But what are the chances of that happening? Well, the development of many recent technologies has grown exponentially, such as computers and flights. There is an S-curve to these innovations and adoption rates. And this is particularly true when the technological cost follows an exponentially decreasing trend, as is the case with solar panels.

Follow the money. On top of that, the research looks promising. Last year, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) achieved a record efficiency of 47.1% for a solar cell manufactured at laboratory scale. Do you remember the internal combustion engine? It took approximately 50 years for its efficiency to increase 4 times. Not bad, but what about electric vehicles (EV)? The profitability of electric cars is mainly affected by their key component: their energy storage, also known as a battery. Over the past decade, the price of electric vehicles has dropped by a factor of 7 due to an increase in lithium-ion battery production. Sounds great, right?

Let's produce billions of Teslas and that's it. If only. Lithium-ion batteries are the fundamental challenge holding back the electric vehicle market because we need so many of them. Why is that a problem? Because lithium and other components are difficult to obtain. And in the case of lithium, its extraction process is far from efficient and not exactly environmentally friendly. So what do we do? There are some really interesting solutions emerging... But before we get to that, I'd like to thank Surfshark for sponsoring this video. I always use a VPN when using public Wifi, but VPNs can be very useful even when you're at home.

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Use my code to get 83% off plus 3 extra months free! SurfShark offers a 30-day money-back guarantee, so there's no risk in trying it out for yourself. The link is in the description below. Thanks to Surfshark and all of you for supporting the channel. So what solutions are on the horizon for lithium-ion batteries? First, we may have alternatives to lithium. Just one of many examples comes from María Helena Braga and John B. Goodenough. They have designed a dream battery with multiple advantages, including Sodium instead of Lithium as raw material. Sodium is greener and cheaper than lithium as it can be extracted from seawater.

John B. Goodenough is one of the original inventors of lithium-ion batteries, so his involvement lends a lot of weight to that research. And I don't know about you, but that's... enough... for me. Second, nanomaterials such as metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) could boost lithium recovery by up to 90%. Today they only recover around 30%. Think of MOFs as a sponge-like filter, absorbing or filtering out everything except the lithium, which passes through it. I have a video on this exact topic and the technology EnergyX is trying to bring to market. I'll include a link if you want to know more. This technology is still in progress, but its potential is very encouraging for the future.

Last but not least. What if I told you that electric vehicle batteries can be recycled in an environmentally friendly way? Li-Cycle is driving the circular electric vehicle revolution. This Canadian company developed low-impact recycling technology on an industrial scale. Its process does not involve any energy-intensive thermal steps and recovers 95% of the battery components. And they are not alone. Companies like American Manganese can recover almost 100% of valuable metals. And Redwood Materials, former CTO of J.B. Straubel's company Tesla, is also leading the way in new battery recycling techniques that could pave the way for a closed-loop battery manufacturing system.

Based on improvements in Transportation and Environment, battery recycling and efficiency technologies will reduce the amount of lithium needed to manufacture electric vehicles by 50% over the next 10 years. ⠀ ⠀ But there is something else that could drive the shift towards a fossil-free future:   The synergy between hydrogen and renewable energy sources (mainly solar and wind). In a word, green hydrogen. One of the most advanced methods for producing green hydrogen is to power renewable energy into an electrolyzer, which then splits the water molecule into hydrogen and oxygen. That's what's happening in Germany, where GP Joule is generating hydrogen from wind-powered electrolyzers.

At 95% efficiency, its facility will provide green hydrogen for fuel cell vehicles and other uses. Green hydrogen could be a key driver for a renewable energy-driven future as it can be used for a variety of applications. Not only as fuel for electric vehicles, trains and planes, but also as energy storage and replacement for natural gas. It sounds pretty good, but about 95% of today's hydrogen is produced from fossil fuels. So what is the true potential of scaling up green hydrogen? Frost & Sullivan said that global green hydrogen production will increase in the near future, reaching an incredible 57% growth rate by 2030.

The International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) reports that the future cost reduction of electrolyzer technology and renewables will make green energy Hydrogen more competitive than its fossil fuel alternatives by 2050. It is difficult to guess when exactly renewable energy will reach its full potential and separate from fossil fuels. But the rate of innovation and adoption has been increasing over time. For example, the telephone took 100 years to reach its peak adoption, while the tablet increased its adoption rate by 50% in just five years. Which is crazy if you think about it. Recent technologies require less infrastructure and today consumers are more connected and proactive in trying new things.

So is the future of renewable energy a reliable promise? It is unavoidable? Renewable energy will undoubtedly progress over time, just like other inventions during previous industrial revolutions. There are clearly some challenges (low efficiency, limitations in raw material availability, heavy dependence on fossil fuels), but there is also a lot of work underway to overcome them. Don't fall into the trap of status quo thinking. History gives us some context and points to a very interesting renewable future ahead. It is still early in the current transition. What do you think? Where will the next advance in renewable technology be?

Jump into the comments and let me know. If you liked this video, be sure to check out one of the ones I linked here. Be sure to subscribe and hit the notification bell if you think I've earned it. And as always, thanks to all my sponsors and all of you for watching. See you at the next one.