This video was made in partnership
with Bill Gates and his new book,
How to Avoid a Climate Disaster.
Hi.
Trace here.
I'm at the Alta Wind Energy Center
outside of Mojave, California.
My heart is beating really fast because they actually
kind of freak me out, because look how big they are!
There are wind machines everywhere in every direction
that we look.
And they are generating as much electricity as two and a half
typical coal plants.
And they're doing it without any emissions whatsoever.
These are a huge tool, both literally and figuratively,
in our fight against global warming and climate change.
But there is so much people don't know about these things.
So I bought a LEGO set.
I called my friend, Nick Uhas, so we
could build a wind tunnel, and I tried it for myself.
And y'all, it was an adventure.
So let's kick into it.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
OK, welcome back.
Like my brother, Inigo Montoya, said,
we have to go back to the beginning.
I love LEGO.
If you follow my social media, you already know this.
A while back, I thought it'd be really cool if we
built a LEGO windmill set and try to generate electricity
with it.
Whoa, it's generating, like, wind.
[LAUGHTER]
And what is the difference between something
like this and this?
Engineering, obviously.
Science, for sure.
But in practicality, they're actually not that different.
And a while back, I stumbled upon this thing
called the wind power equation.
And it looks like this.
The wind power equation tells engineers just how much energy
we can harvest from a windmill of a specific size.
The possible power is half the density of the swept area,
times the wind speed cubed.
It helps us determine where we would want to put a wind farm.
So what better way to explore the power of the wind
than build this LEGO set, fit it into the wind power equation,
and figure out if it works?
First, though, I'd need to retrofit, remodel,
and improvise.
The original LEGO set is battery powered.
It uses a motor to actually turn the blades, which
means the whole wind energy thing in the original set
is all for show.
But there is a solution for this.
LEGO set 9688.
It is a renewable energy Technic set
that comes with a generator and multimeter
so we can see the output of the experiments
that you were supposed to build with the set.
The thing is, it was discontinued in 2010.
But I found one on eBay and I won it!
[LAUGHING]
It arrived in the box.
It was still taped shut.
I had to open that.
Sorry, collectors.
It's for science, I swear.
I swear.
I completely re-geared and reworked
the head of the set to fit this large generator inside of it.
And then I headed out into the Alta Wind Energy Center
to actually try it in the wild.
All power plants use the same technique to make electricity.
You turn a turbine, almost always with a gas.
Coal, natural gas, and nuclear will use steam.
Hydro uses flowing water.
Wind uses flowing air.
As the generator turns, the mechanical energy
spins magnets through a coiled wire,
and that creates electricity.
And if all of these generators all
work the same way, why are we constantly mining and burning
these one-off pollutants if we can just
harvest it from nature?
And that is the ethos of wind energy.
According to my anemometer, the wind
is gusting over 45 miles an hour.
That is a lot.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
I set it up out here in Alta and--
Yes!
Yeah, it turn-- oh.
Well, it wasn't windy enough to get going,
but it sure was enough to knock it over and smash it
on the ground while the camera wasn't rolling.
So I think our little LEGO can do better.
We just need a more controlled lab scenario.
Perhaps the gusts were too much for it, and also
on top of that, I think the blades might be poorly designed
for this.
As they say in late 20th-century cinema,
if you want something done right, do it yourself.
So I'm going to pick up--
[LAUGHING]
[BLEEP]
You want something done right, do it yourself.
[SKYPE RING]
Hey, Nick.
What's up, Trace?
I have a question for you.
It's a little weird.
I have got a LEGO windmill and I would like to test it,
but I don't have a wind tunnel.
Do you happen to have a wind tunnel?
I do not happen to have one.
But I do know how to build one, kind of, in my garage, I think.
But I feel like with our brains together we could do it.
Awesome.
I will rebuild the LEGO set.
And I will be over to your house ASAP.
Yeah, perfect, dude.
All right.
Cool.
See you then.
So for version two of our windmill,
I made a more robust base to the upright.
I don't want it smashing again after we build the wind tunnel.
In the wild, these giant machines
are made of huge tubes of steel with fiberglass blades
that are light and strong.
And inside the windmills are these gearboxes, drive shafts,
wind monitors, and other electronics
to make sure that the thing is running efficiently-- but also
safely.
The LEGO one doesn't have any of that.
And in fact, the generator is directly connected
to the blades.
So I definitely want it to not smash.
Also in the wild, these things are super powerful.
If you visit the US Wind Turbine Database,
you can see every single windmill in the United States.
The one that I was standing in front
of at the beginning of the video is a Vestas V93MW.
That means it generates 3 megawatts.
And when I was standing in front of it with 45-mile-an-hour
gusts, it was likely generating near-peak power.
That's assuming 40% efficiency, of course.
It might be more than that.
We haven't actually talked about efficiency yet,
but that is the clincher in this whole power equation.
In 1919, German physicist Albert Betz calculated the max
efficiency of a windmill-- it's called Betz's Limit
or Betz's Law--
at 59%.
So put simply, the most perfect windmill in the world
would still only harvest 59% of the energy of the wind passing
through its blades.
And most wind would actually go around, under, or over.
That is how we know, by the way, that turbines don't slow down
the wind.
That is a myth busted right there.
As trillions of kilograms of mass shift around plains,
mountains, oceans, and forests, we feel that movement as wind.
Thinking that it slows down the wind
is sort of like thinking that a rocket taking off
is slowing down the Earth.
Sure, yeah.
It is.
But so imperceptibly, relative to the Earth's mass,
that it's basically nothing.
But back to efficiency.
Some wind farms peak at 45% efficient.
If you add that into the wind power equation,
engineers can use wind data to estimate
how much power an area can generate
or how efficient a single plastic model might be.
So that's when I headed to Nick's workshop
to try and generate some actual electricity.
[BIRDS CHIRPING]
So I met up with my friend, Nick Uhas,
who builds all sorts of stuff for his YouTube channel.
I figured maybe he can help me out.
I sure can, Trace.
So we're going to build a wind tunnel today.
And I thought that we would use this set-up with these tables,
since we already have this kind of perfect little base.
It's perfect.
It's almost even the right height, which is great.
And then we're going to use this material over here.
This is just regular insulation.
And I figure we're going to make this box, basically,
on the other side.
So 2 feet, 2 feet, 2 feet.
We're going to put box fans over here,
and we're going to stack them.
And we're going to push as much wind
as we can through our wind tunnel.
We're going to get something.
We're going to get something out of this.
Yeah.
Let's do it!
OK.
First step, getting the material.
Oh, right.
Yeah.
I'm a blacksmith and an Eagle Scout,
so I definitely am handy.
But Nick knows what he's doing.
Nick is super familiar with building things
like fire tornadoes and cool science stuff.
So I'm tapping into his expertise for this.
Basically, we're trying to get a constant wind
speed so we can learn the efficiency of this windmill
and nail down some blade design.
A wind tunnel is literally what it sounds like.
It's a tunnel of wind.
So once we set up all the fans, we set up the anemometer
to figure out how fast it was going,
and we thought, we can do better than that.
So after a quick rearranging of the fans--
Is this your fire tornado system?
[LAUGHING]
We were ready for attempt number one.
And yet, just like in Mojave, nothing happened.
We're getting 2 and 1/2 to 3 meters
per second wind speed, which is, like, almost 7 miles an hour.
Not a lot.
But it should be enough to get something to happen.
The renewable energy kit comes with these little scooped blade
things.
And that's what you're supposed to build their windmill
for their experiment with.
So let's try those.
Boom.
So now, we should be able to catch a little bit more wind.
We think.
It's turning!
It's just going.
It's going, bro!
[LAUGHTER]
The wind tunnel works!
It's flying!
Oh, my god!
We're generating electricity!
We're generating electricity from electricity!
Dude!
It is-- dude!
[LAUGHING] Yes!
I did not expect it to actually work!
Dude, it's rocking, man.
Look at that go!
With the multimeter and the anemometer,
plus some reference to online LEGO materials,
we can determine that this motor is
fairly efficient at generating electricity, which
still blows my mind.
Yeah!
Taking all that together, this windmill is probably--
big probably here-- in the neighborhood of 25%
efficient at converting mechanical energy
into electricity.
And that might not sound like a lot,
but it's actually way more than you think.
Coal operates at 33% efficiency.
That's way less than wind and only just above LEGO.
[LAUGHING]
Excepting hydroelectric, nothing bests wind for efficiency.
But before we get into that, let me just revel in the fact
that this worked for a minute.
And then we'll wrap it up.
OK.
Was that not just the coolest frickin' thing that
you've ever seen?
The most important thing that we can
learn from playing with wind power
is this energy is just out there.
It's out there all the time.
If we humans can efficiently harvest
some of that constantly-renewing system, driven by the sun,
warming our atmosphere, we would be one step closer
to a totally renewable society.
Any light that you're turning on would just
be powered by the sun.
Honestly, we're just capturing it in different ways.
I still just cannot believe that this thing worked--
thanks to these little teeny scoops here.
Well now it's off balance.
But either way.
That is crazy.
In big farms, the front turbines actually
capture the majority of the wind,
causing turbulence and decreasing the output
of the ones behind them.
If you space them out, though, the wind
has a chance to pick up again, and can increase the efficiency
overall of the system.
You can see this in your own life
if you've ever stood next to the wind coming off
the ocean or a flat plane near the mountains.
Yet another nail in the coffin of wind power
slows down the wind.
Wind picks up speed if left without a break
in the landscape.
It naturally does this because there's just
so much mass above us, pushing things down and moving things
around with the energy of the sun.
I can't say it enough.
This balance of where to put them
is, of course, being studied.
More research is needed to know how far apart or close together
to do that.
But speaking of research, let's talk a bit
about climate change.
It's happening.
The science is settled, y'all.
It's serious.
And we need a cross-disciplinary plan
to solve our climate crisis.
And this week someone actually wrote one--
Bill Gates.
This video was created in partnership with Bill Gates
and was partially inspired by his new book,
How to Avoid a Climate Disaster.
You can find out more about how we can all work together
to avoid the climate disaster in the link below or here
on the screen.
Here's what we know, though.
Carbon dioxide emissions continue to increase,
as does severe weather, sea level
rise, and overall global temperatures.
It is again likely going to be one of the hottest
years in history.
Fossil fuels and the release of carbon into our atmosphere
is what got us into this situation.
But we can get ourselves out.
It's not too late.
Wind power is one of the bricks in the new foundation
of energy economy, along with solar,
nuclear, geothermal, and more.
We're going to need new technologies, better
ideas, and bigger ideas, too.
It's going to take all of us.
In Bill Gates' new book, he lays out
what he's learned making strategic investments
and supporting innovative missions,
and probing the barriers of science
to fix the climate crisis--
things like efficiency, decarbonization,
and switching us to renewable energy sources.
There are a lot of levers to success here.
And we're going to need to pull all of them.
And some of them harder than others.
Either way, check out the book.
You can use the link in the description or on the screen,
and let me know what you think.
I thought it was really, really good.
Thanks again to Gates for helping with this video.
I also want to thank Nancy from the California Wind Energy
Association.
She really helped me get my head around this concept.
What a great little community.
Thanks, y'all.
Now that we know that this works and that you can actually
generate electricity using LEGO, y'all, wind energy has a lot
of myths.
It doesn't slow down the wind.
Yes, the blades do and can make noise
as the wind blows around them.
But that's adjustable.
We just sacrifice some power-generation abilities.
They've come a long way in the last couple of decades.
Now they can not only pitch the blades
and change the angles of the head,
they can do all sorts of things to generate different amounts
of power and also make them louder or quieter,
depending on where they're put in our society--
out to sea or on a mountaintop.
Yes, sometimes older models do need de-icing,
but the newer models, they've invented nano coatings
to cover the blades that keep water from pooling
up and getting ice on them.
They even have heating systems, built-in, using the energy
that they get from the rotation to combat those issues.
Even though windmills have been around for thousands of years--
the Persians used them to mill grain and pump water,
and also air-condition their homes--
the windmill that we know today, this is fairly new technology.
Like any new technology, of course
there are going to be barriers and boundaries to these.
The mechanical windmill that you recognize from farms
was only invented in the late 19th century.
As I was making this video, the US
got hit with a huge winter storm.
And these once-in-a-decade storms have knocked out
the power in Texas several times.
Climate change sucks, no matter where you live.
Some studies say windmills actually
perform better in the winter because it tends to be windier.
I have a whole video on that.
Thanks to the sun, wind blows on our planet all the time.
Let's use this unlimited resource
to get some free energy, and then we
can figure out solar on cloudy days
or wind when it's not windy.
Those kind of energy solutions come next.
These problems are solvable.
We just have to stop talking ourselves out of trying.
Finally, I'd like to thank you for watching this video
and for subscribing if you saw my video on Tom Scott's channel
about poppy seed bagels.
Y'all, I cried when that video came out because your tweets
and your comments and your likes and shares were incredible.
I've been making stuff for a long time
and the success of that video made me feel just so validated.
So thank you.
I'm Trace.
Try building this at home if you can get a hand on the sets.
And tweet at me if you have questions about how
we put all this together.
Maybe we can do a full Q&A if you're interested.
Let me know in the comments.
I love you all.
Keep your hands clean.
And I'll see you in the future.