DW Planet A 
Fossil fuels still supply 80% of our energy. And people point to this number to say it’s impossible to switch to renewables, especially if we want to do it quick enough to stop climate change. But their argument overlooks just how much energy we waste – and how we could do it better.
#planeta #fossilfuels #energyefficiency
We’re destroying our environment at an alarming rate. But it doesn’t need to be this way. Our new channel Planet A explores the shift towards an eco-friendly world — and challenges our ideas about what dealing with climate change means. We look at the big and the small: What we can do and how the system needs to change. Every Friday we’ll take a truly global look at how to get us out of this mess.
Follow Planet A on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@dw_planeta?lang=en
Credits:
Reporter: Adam Baheej Adada
Video Editor: Adam Baheej Adada
Supervising Editor: Michael Trobridge, Malte Rohwer-Kahlmann
Fact-check: Alexander Paquet
Thumbnail: Em Chabridon
Read more:
How reaching net zero could be easier than we think
https://about.bnef.com/blog/liebreich-net-zero-will-be-harder-than-you-think-and-easier-part-ii-easier/
More on heat pumps:
https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/heat-pumps
Nick Eyre’s paper:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12053-021-09982-9
Chapters:
00:00 Intro
00:49 THE chart
02:47 Wasted energy
04:10 Why so much waste?
06:29 The good news
08:58 Conclusion
source
About The Author
Do you think switching away from fossil fuels is easier than it seems?
Oh, and where do these energy waste products go? And how much of the original useful energy [exergy] can be reused? What is the final ratio of available energy to useful energy? And what was that waste byproduct again? Don’t we have a heat problem right now?
but switching to electricity isn't the silver bullet. Electricity generation is much more efficient yes. But the TRANSPORT of electricity is only like 30-35% efficient. A ton of energy is wasted just getting it to where it needs to be used. The best option would be to put renewables (wind/solar) on every house and every building so the energy is directly being generated where its used. But when the sun is down and the wind isn't blowing then the inefficient base load power is used which is inefficient to generate and really inefficient to transport.
great stuff. I especially like seeing the fact that renewables mostly create electricity instead of have to make heat which then makes electricity, skipping these steps is huge. Efficiency is very very important.
The problem with presentations like this is that their research starts with the conclusion they want to make and works backwards. All processes have inefficiencies. In a light bulb only 10% of the energy consumed actually produces visible light. The other 90% is wasted energy. However producing light by burning gas converts much higher efficiencies. So should we ditch light bulbs in favor of gas lamps?
No of course not! There are other costs and concerns for doing so. Like wise with the so called Green energies there are costs and concerns. When it comes to all electric vehicle the biggest cost and concern is the cost for battery replacements. There are other concerns such has losing charge and the time it takes to restore range (via recharging). But we hear none of that in this video.
Building efficiency is another easy way to save. We can build houses now that use a fraction of the energy of older homes.
Oh wow! What a giant pile of manipulative crap.
Funny, actually I did the transition for cooking from gas to induction, for heating the house from gas to heat pump and for transportation from thermal engine car to EV. yearly energy bill is 2k Euro versus 7K euros before. For heating the house, 27% reduction in kWh Heat which I guess is due to the way I manage the heating of the house differently as well as the effect of the buffer tank which did not exist with the gas boiler, It divided the kWh energy by 4.8 and an estimated reduction of 5.5 Tons of CO2 emission per year. Another reduction of 4 tons of CO2 emission for the EV with an energy cost of 480 Euros for 25,000km per year. Will eventually look at solar panels now that the house is fully electric. Not everyone can afford what I did, however my take is that all the people with disposable income should not just look at a quick return on investment but about their children and grand children and ask themselves the question: Did I really do everything I could for my children future.
Coming out of the steam age, heat energy dominated our designs and marketing, especially in improving agriculture for small farms, then automobile-escape from density. Like cities expanding haphazardly over rich sod. Unplanned through and through.
Please fire the person who thought it's a good idea to put some annoying music in the video the whole time when people are speaking. If I want to listen to music, I listen to music, but if I want to listen to people, I don't want to listen to music , because it makes it quite hard to understand what those people are actually saying!
I like the positive approach but i'm pretty sure the people talking between min 2:00 and minute 2:15 are well aware of the difference between potential energy and useful energy. The way you put it it seems that in the moment i understand 70% of the potential energy of my tank is lost as heat my car suddendly runs 3 times as far with the same fuel.
please make the background music quieter. it makes it straining and difficult to watch the video and try to process the narration.
It would be more watchable if the background music wasn’t so loud it makes it harder to hear the narrator
Perhaps how easy is not relevant.
If you believe in climate change should you consider how hard climate change will make things?
Rejected energy is actually heat. The more efficient a system is the cooler it produces work.
Your presentation is greatly flawed. First and most obvious is EV. The Department of Energy says that it takes so much more energy to building these cars will be recovered in about 5 years, about that time the batteries need to be replaces. This no doubt will change in the future. And the Second among many, the largest wind farm in the world in the Chinese desert. Wind energy is somewhat useless because of the energy lost in transmission. Please review your facts before making another flawed production.
Isn t "rejected energy" a consequence of the second law of thermodynamics? You can t trick with physics law.
As an engineer in the energy section, I was aware of this. I am very sure that Lomborg and the rest of the fossil fuel shills know this very well, too. The fact that they totally disregard this makes them absolutely dishonest.
Green energy is a scam.
Stop with the wind and solar nonsense!
Efficiency isn’t the problem, energy density is.
Work takes energy, and even at 99.99999% efficiency, there’s still a minimum required input to get the work done.
That’s not a defense of fossil fuels by the way, because even fossil fuel‘s are not going to be sufficient to meet our energy requirements.
The sheer scale of the amount of energy that just the United States uses is far beyond what most people are aware of, and it’s definitely beyond the ability of wind and solar to be a solution. The only energy source we have with the kind of energy density necessary for a 21st-century technological civilization, is nuclear.
For energy Germany must surrender to Putin. To servive.
Have had Solar since 2008. Drive an Electric car since August 2019. It's a no brainer.
I like this video… except when it gets down to vehicles… Battery EVs just don't have the energy density compared to petroleum, currently. We need to get off of Li-ion batteries, there is so much riding on the promises that new battery technology is suggesting but has yet to be completely actualised or able to be reproduced/mass manufactured.
Complete distortion. Thankfully we have fossil fuels to help deliver service and solutions to post hurricane damage areas and victims. The reality is one approach can't solve all the energy requirements today. The economic viability and technology simply doesn't exist to make that a reality. And the resistance in using nuclear only exacerbates the challenge.
Global warming propaganda
A heat pump does not generate 3-4 times more heat for the same primary energy they use. A heat pump uses 1 unit of electricity to produce 3 units of heat in mild weather (could go down to 1.5 in very cold weather). But you use 2 to 2.5 units of primary energy to produce the electricity needed to feed the heat pump. Usually heat pumps use PV and wind electricity to a very little extent. Instead they use marginal power m contributing to peak demand. So the primary efficiency of a heat pump is usually the COP divided by the PEF (primary energy factor) for electricity.
To conclude a heat pump will end up with a primary efficiency of 300%/2=150% in the best case scenario. The colder it gets and the less efficient the electricity production, then lower its primary energy efficiency.
This also assumes that a PV or wind is 100% efficient. But in fact their efficiencies are lower then 40%. This is ok on one hand because the wind & solar energy is "free". Yet, the materials that go into producing the PV/wind turbines have a cost. So we cannot completely ignore their inefficiencies.
Oil companies can justify anything as long as they can continue to make money. reminds me of the tobacco industry a few years back.
Big oil would have a fit for all of the world to see… unfortunately money is the ultimate goal no matter what the costs hence the current situation we are in 😢
However, the cost of getting renewable energy is much higher. How much does it cost to get a billion units of energy from coal, and how much does it cost to get a billion units of energy from renewables. We must build and replace windmills and solar panels every 30 years. So you must deduct that from the output of renewables. To have a sustainable windfarm, we would need to use 80% of the energy it produces just to fund the replacement. So it drops from 90% becomeing useable energy to 20% useable, since the energy going into creating the windmills must be deducted from the output. Cost = energy. It takes 10 units of energy to get 50 units of useable energy from fossil fuels. It take 40 units of energy to get 50 units of energy from windmills (or solar panels). In other words, if we had no fossil fuels then most of the energy from renewabls would be spent replacing windmills and solar panels, leaving only a small fraction to do everything else.
What were you saying the music is too much .
I’m a construction worker.
I can tell you with all honesty we don’t have enough workers to switch to renewable energy.
And aren’t we forgetting we are going to need an absurd amount of chemicals to do the switch???
Not to mention the rare earth metals.
How about the manufacturing of these devices.
It is simply inevitable it will take a long time to change.
Battery technology will change quite rapidly making other batteries obsolete.
There is so much that needs to be done.
Stop it dw…..just stop it. It doesn't matter what's cleaner. If you triple the efficiency of an energy generator, it still doesn't keep up with the global demand.
Just say it with me…. slowing down consumerism is the only way!
And that will have a significant price.
Human greed will defeat reason. I bet to survive, the public funding you get to keep dw going comes from investors that also invest in oil to make a buck
Not against the transition, it just needs to be done smartly, which is much more complex than this video suggests. First, battery technology and the recycling thereof needs to be improved, because most renewable energy does not produce on demand and requires storage systems. So those ‘Peak Usages’ he discusses will still require traditional plants that can provide peak demand output. If we switch 100% to electric cars, the electric grids will need to supply more energy (by far), which will also increase power plant size requirements when the renewables tank because of no wind or a cloudy day. Additionally, despite all that wasted energy, the fossil fuels are still typically cheaper to the end consumer. My house has no gas, so water and home heating is electric – it is NOT cheap. Lastly, renewables, especially solar, require some nasty rare earth minerals and metals which are sourced and processed in countries that don’t care so much about the environment.
Großen Öl-Konzernen gefällt dieses Video nicht 😂
Danke Shell, BP, Total Energies, Exxon, Chevron etc. dass ihr durch eure Profitgier noch heute (2024) die Welt jeden Tag ein großes Stück schlechter Macht! Immerhin kann man irgendwann in einer durch euch zerstören Umwelt zumindest kein Geld essen…
The problem with renewable energy is not efficiency but reliability.
-Wind and solar have low reliability, because you don't have power when there is no wind and sun.
-Water has medium reliability, because most water power plants have build in storage. Nuclear has medium reliability as well for that matter, because it takes a long time to power nuclear plants up and down.
-Fossil fuels have high reliability, because they can be turned on an of much faster than nuclear and are significantly less reliant on luck than renewables.
As long as people expect the light to turn on when they hit the switch, renewables are a hard sell.
8:00 hehe he heheheheh . Im 13 year old again
What the hell with background music.
The rejected energy is a result of our insistence on using heat engines to do work. Moving away from heat engines fixes this.
99.99% of energy generated by the sun is wasted, since it never reaches earth. Coal is much more efficient.
Very interesting video. Does the Sankey diagram take account of all the energy usage in the extraction and refining process?
CRIMINALLY underrated video, holy shit. I love this.
Perhaps we should be putting money into making fossil fuel burning more efficient. This video carefully avoids the obvious fact that at night and in Winter, when we need energy the most, renewables don’t work.
"Switching to renewables gives us a lot more bang for our buck"
This is misleading. Bang per buck depends on more than just thermal losses.
Manufacturing and EV or car has significant impact. zTRAINS
For climate change action to have any real impact we'll have to get countries to stop building coal burning power plants and stop using those they already have.
What i am not absolutely getting is why everything is moving so slow. Every person and their dogs know how bad fossil fuel is for the enviroment. It is not something that we are still learning. If death occurrence, cancer rates, breathing disorder, all absolutely and clearly linkable to pollution are not enough, i dont know what will make it easier for people to stop whining about that. Hybrid and EV should completely replace ICE cars up until new technologies will come back with a lot less pollution and a lot more efficiency. Nations worldwide should start increasing fines for older than Euro6 cars, and force them to be dismantled. Industries should immediately comply with transition. We are in no position to slouch into the mid '30 to wait for some change. Countries should help this transition instead of slowing it down. It is embarassing in my opinion. If i were someone important i would fight every single day of my (surely short) life to make that happen in the fastest way possible. Like by 2026 if your car is oldern than 4-5 yo, if you use your private jet to go buy a croissant, if you use AC, even while not at home, to have freezing temp (more than 7-8 degrees below outside temp, a little more during heatwave), you should receive a fine, a big one. We NEED to work towards a single goal. To make the planet liveable for our children and grandchildren. Not to exploit it as much as we can while we are still around here. Humanity disgusts me in this. Greedy little monster who do not care a bit about abyone else but their own.