Warm welcome back to "Uno Dos of Trace."
Thank you for watching "Hello Science" last week.
I really hope you loved it.
I got so excited when so many of you tuned in.
Hello, new people.
Welcome to the channel.
This is great.
OK, let's kick into it.
Wintertime makes people crazy.
Now I say that because no one wants
to compete with the snow and the terrible weather
and being trapped inside away from knowledge, I guess,
because that's the only explanation
I can think of for this.
They have this new green deal or whatever
where they want to eliminate all oil and gas in 10 years.
WOMAN: Yeah, 10 years.
If you're in the polar vortex, how
are you going to stay warm with solar panels?
MAN: It's a bit cold outside this morning in middle America.
Aren't you glad you aren't heating your home
with a solar panel like nitwit socialist AOC is demanding?
How well is wind power going to heat your house
when it's 30 below?
Look, I'm not usually one to give credence to the crazies.
Who am I kidding?
That's one of my jams, y'all.
I love doing that.
So today, on "Uno Dos of Trace," does green energy do worse
in the winter?
I have questions.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
So after the undereducated decided to spout off out
into the world, my girl, Emily Calandrelli,
had the best clap back ever.
So I went to Emily, and I asked her more about it.
Emily, Hi.
Hi.
Now we're at Emily's house.
Hi.
It's a house.
Welcome.
It's big.
You have no idea where we are.
Echo.
It's a huge mansion.
You have no idea.
In the middle of a field.
That sounded like a cathedral--
perhaps a cathedral setting.
Oh, yeah, my house is a refurbished cathedral.
Wonderful.
So what happened with the solar panel thing?
Tell me all about it.
OK, so on Twitter--
you've heard of Twitter--
The tweet machine.
There is a viral tweet from somebody
who suggested that you could not heat your home in the winter
with solar panels.
So I understand why people might be confused
because we associate light with warmth,
but that's not how solar panels work.
We use solar panels in space.
It's very cold in space.
So solar panels down here on Earth--
they work when it's sunny out.
And so they're absorbing light energy
and converting it to electrical energy
that you would then presumably use an electric heating
system to heat your damn house.
Exactly.
And it's great.
And in fact, they actually work
better when it's cold outside because the reactions
inside solar panels are more efficient when
it's cold outside.
So a solar panel on a very sunny day in Alaska
will give you more power than an equally sunny day
with the same amount of sunlight hours
with a solar panel in the middle of a very hot desert.
Hmm, just because the solar panel
itself is working more efficiently.
Exactly, and then the other thing to consider
is that in the winter, oftentimes, you have snow.
And so as long as the snow is not covering the solar panels
and you have like a blanket of snow on the ground,
then that snow will act like a mirror
to reflect more light onto your solar panels
and make the solar panels work even better.
That sounds awesome.
It's very cool.
It's called the albedo effect.
So long story short, the guy didn't really
know what he was talking about, and solar panels
work great when it's cold.
The only caveat here is that, obviously, in the winter,
you don't have as much daylight.
You don't have as much direct daylight.
And so if you look at like the wattage
that you're going to get throughout the year,
it's going to peak probably in the summer
and go down in the winter for that reason.
But it has nothing to do with cold.
It has to do with the daylight.
Like a 24-hour day in Alaska, amazing for solar panels,
a six-hour day in Alaska, if it's been snowing,
solar panels work real good, but there's not a lot of wattage
that you're going to get.
Regardless, though, temperature dunna matter.
It doesn't matter.
Well, I guess I should go back to my studio then.
Thanks for having me at your house.
You're welcome.
Oh, she's awesome.
So once the snow melts-- something
we didn't get to talk about-- that actually cleans
the solar panels, which means not only
are they better in the winter, but they're
great in the spring too because it increases their efficiency.
The snow bonds with the dirt and pulls it right off,
so they're nice and shiny.
But that's not all--
other green energies work well in the winter too.
For example, geothermal-- even though the air is cold,
the Earth is still warm.
And you use that warm Earth to provide energy.
It's usually associated with cold places,
for example, Iceland.
You have hot springs, and you have
all these volcanoes and stuff.
So people think geothermal energy,
but they're actually number two on the list.
Number one on the list of top geothermal countries is Kenya.
51% of the country's energy comes
from Mother Earth herself.
We've got solar.
Yeah, the sun that doesn't really
change and geothermal-- sure, the Earth.
That doesn't really change.
But you know what does change in the winter?
Wind-- yeah, exactly.
Those big blades-- oh, my god in the winter looks flimsy.
What if it gets windy?
What if a windstorm comes to the wind power.
Wind power generation is a simple equation
to determine output.
It's p equals one half a little p av cubed.
That's watts of power equals one half air density
times blade area that's sweeping through times wind velocity
cubed.
Now, you can take into account gearboxes and capacitor
efficiencies and stuff.
But this is the simple equation.
So when you look at this equation,
think about cold weather.
Remember elementary science-- cold things-- they get denser.
So that little p that makes a big difference.
Also think about wintertime temperature variations.
It's cold one day.
It's a little warmer the other day.
And those temperature variations are
greater in the winter, which means
air is moving around a lot and that means wind
speed increases, on average.
In the winter, this has been studied quite heavily.
Windmill power does better in colder weather.
How much better?
A study by the Canadian government found 6% better.
Though admittedly, there are other concerns
when you have something that big in some place that
cold, for example, icing on the blades.
They've created tech to solve that.
But ice does build up.
So they heat the blades, and that melts the ice.
Or they have special textures, which are reducing ice buildup.
They're still working on it.
But generally, wind power can operate down
to negative 30 Celsius--
that's cold.
Canada's wind energy advocacy organization
says that power increases at almost 60%
are possible in winter if we can figure out
these technological hurdles.
And according to the NRDC, The Natural Resources Defense
Council, wind power, even not in Canada,
makes the power grid safer, more stable,
and a consistent source of energy.
And this is evidence from cold winters in Texas, the Midwest,
and the mid-Atlantic.
Wind power could have kept the lights on where
you live in a bad storm.
So non-renewable sources-- dirty energies
like coal and natural gas.
They actually perform the same no matter the weather
because, if you think about it, they're burning in a furnace
inside.
So if it's cold outside, it doesn't necessarily matter.
But that's not the energy that is the issue when it
comes to dirty energy sources.
It's getting the energy from where it was mined
or pulled out of the ground.
Coal plants-- maybe you know this-- are not actually built
on top of coal mines.
Coal is transported by rail and natural gas, lesser extent rail
and truck, mostly pipelines.
During severe cold weather, snow can cause trucks to get halted.
It blocks roads.
In extreme cold weather, rails--
the railroad rails-- they can crack.
In Chicago, they actually lit fires around the rails
to keep the metal from retracting
because, just like the air with wind power,
metal retracts too in the cold.
On top of that, coal piles can freeze.
They're just rocks, and they are commonly
kept outside so that the coal plants have lots of energy
available to them.
But if it's frozen, how do they get to it?
So I looked it up.
And this coal energy advocacy organization
says, no, no, no, no, no, they don't freeze.
While outer layers can freeze in very cold weather,
coal piles are constantly being worked by bulldozers
to break up frozen layers, and deicing agents
are used to prevent freezing.
So they don't freeze.
They're burning fossil fuels to keep fossil fuels from freezing
so that we can burn more fossil fuels.
So it makes total sense.
They did not say that the coal doesn't freeze.
They actually said the coal does.
Now if the coal freezes and they weren't ready for it.
And the natural gas gets halted, that causes a power outage.
So for example, coal plants burn coal
to make the power for your house.
They don't charge up giant batteries.
They don't keep reserves anywhere of power.
They actually have to burn more coal to power your house
if you turn on your light, and they
have reserves in case everybody turns on their lights
at the same time.
And they can put those reserves into a furnace
within 10 minutes--
but if they fail, blackouts.
This actually happened during the 2014 polar vortex.
The utility PJM, which services Pennsylvania, West Virginia,
and some of the mid-Atlantic, had rolling blackouts
because they couldn't get their 10-minute reserves
into the furnace fast enough.
According to their report on the failure,
they said, one, they didn't have any reserves, two,
they couldn't actually generate enough power for the demand,
and they didn't buy any from neighboring grids.
So rolling blackouts was their solution
during the polar vortex--
lovely.
But it's not just coal.
Natural gas can have supply problems too.
In my home state of Michigan, the governor asked people
not to turn their natural gas heating above 68 degrees
because it could run out, and they
can't replace it-- during a polar vortex, not great.
I don't want to leave you with the idea the blackouts only
happen when the power plant runs out of power.
Commonly, its transmission lines that
go down because of heavy snow or wind.
That's the most major factor, not more coal
or natural gas or whatever.
But regardless of how you slice it,
supplying these non-renewable resources to these plants
is an issue.
Overall, meeting any sudden demand
is the biggest issue with all power generation,
whether that's solar and wind farms or natural gas and coal
and oil.
Wind farms are creating models to predict wind speed
and variability more accurately.
Wind power is working with a smaller historical data set,
but every year, they get better.
And it's not like polar vortices are going to go away.
All a polar vortex is super cold air
that spun off the North Pole because a warm jet stream kind
of pushed it out of the way--
kind of like imagine a hot air balloon in this room.
The cold helium balloon that I have would just get
pushed out of the way.
And the vortex is just like that-- only not
shaped like my initials.
Every time someone says global warming,
whatever, who cares-- it's never going to affect us,
we're going to break 16 hot records for every cold one we
break in the next century, if we keep warming.
So let's get green energy going--
augment our existing system, make sure
that the grid is stable.
We don't need to shut down all coal today,
but we do need to shut down coal slowly over time as we perfects
its replacement.
Dirty energy got us really far, but it's had its time.
So let's retire it, and let these new technologies take us
into the future.
OK, everybody, green energy--
it's amazing.
Let me know what you think in the comments
of this video and all the other videos on the channel.
If you haven't watched the video about the taxidermy from last
week-- although so many of you have watched--
I'm so happy.
Thank you.
New people-- welcome--
this is awesome.
There's going to be another "Hello Science" coming,
I promise.
I swear it's going to come out.
I'm working on it now.
I can't tell you anything about it,
but you're going to love it.
So I'm Trace.
Make sure you come back next week,
and I'll see you in the future.