Tags for this video have been changed from 'Ted talks, solar roofs, solar windows, Ramez Naam' to 'Ted talks, solar roofs, solar windows, Ramez Naam, singularity university' - edited by Eklek

Your video, A Brilliant Analysis of Solar Energy into the Future, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

I agree for the most part, but with batteries, now becoming reasonable in size and price, it's not so hard to be totally off grid. Micro hydro can also be efficient power storage if properly designed with a dual reservoir system.
Granted, that seems to work best in small scale setups so far, but there is an island .....(https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2014/09/17/349223674/tiny-spanish-island-nears-its-goal-100-percent-renewable-energy)
...currently (since 2014) using this tech to be nearly 100% green.

Dismissing projections as unrealistic without fully examining them may doom our economy and planet.
That's what happened with solar, people just claimed it's expensive and unreliable, which meant those they convinced didn't know how wrong that is, and didn't buy systems or support solar farms. I ignored them and did some light math, and found that even an expensive high tech system with batteries, professionally installed, would pay for itself in about 8 years, with a 20 year expected lifespan (and I live in Humboldt county, with the foggiest airport in America, not Arizona). I'm damn glad I didn't listen. Even a 2 year delay would have cost me 1/2 my rebates, making the system take an extra 2+ years to pay for itself by costing me thousands upon thousands of dollars (instead of saving me thousands per year).

Edit: Also, here in Humboldt we just switched to choice in electricity, we can choose regular pge power (mostly old school generation), a mixture of up to 75% (I think, maybe higher) renewable for cheaper, or 100% renewable for more. All 3 now bill transmission (including voltage/frequency regulation) separately, so it's easy to see what generation alone costs. It's clear so far that mostly renewable is the best bet economically, and I assume it will become more renewable as new technologies become available.....at least I hope so.

Hardly a brilliant analysis - more like a brilliant piece of advocacy that, like most of its kind, is long on optimistic projections and very short on real numbers and a real analysis of those numbers. For instance: what is the megawatt hour cost of a solar power generation station that can replicate the power responsiveness and availability factor of a fossil power generation station (over a similar life cycle). He quotes the kwh cost for solar and wind power systems but each and every one of them is "backed up" by a much larger conventional power generation system that, ultimately, is burdened with the costs of maintaining grid stability, grid voltage, and grid frequency. There are huge engineering problems and substantial costs associated with maintaining a power supply that we now require to operate a modern economy. Just ONCE, I would like to see the green power advocates address those challenges and costs in a realistic way instead of glossing over them with their fantasy projections.
And I will say, as an aside, that I have spent my entire working career working in the renewable energy sector and fully agree that we need to transition to a renewable energy economy - but unrealistic projections are going to doom our economy if they are taken as being possible in the near term.

38 minutes of "brilliant analysis" later and wind power still requires subsidies and unbalances grids while nuclear power needs only more concentrated investment capital and long term government guarantees.

Building wind turbines is a good investment because they scale well and have political backing including subsidies. Nuclear power is a long term investment in a volatile sector.

Once the whole planet is run by banks and all continents are politically united, connected by a network of thick cables, wind and solar will have a chance to dominate. Right now you need backups for all those windless nights, safety valves for windy Sundays, and new transmission lines to be safe from crazy neighboring countries.

Not if done right.
There are ways to do it without excessive waste, safely with zero possibility of meltdown or radioactive release, but getting new processes approved beyond experimental plants is nearly impossible.

Also, ironically, it's anti nuclear activists that got America to store rather than re-refine our waste, which adds exponentially to the costs and dangers. Reenrichment on site removes all the dangers of transportation and storage of waste, and means up to 90% less mining for the same amount of fuel....but we don't.

Don't get me wrong....I'm far more in favor of solar, wind, wave, and tidal generation, but I think nuclear power has it's place, and already exists. I just think it's dumb to be doing it as wastefully and dangerously as possible.

I was taught that E=(+-)MC2. (This implies antimatter)

I'm disappointed he wasn't totally clear that all he was doing was adding kinetic energy to the base equation. Of course that adds energy to the system, but the base equation is about mass/energy (how much total energy a certain resting mass contains) not all energy. Heat the mass, you need another equation. Make it radioactive, another.

Also, maybe it's been proven wrong by now, but I recall experiments showing photons do have at least a pseudo mass, proven by their ability to move objects (like the spinning black and white squares inside a vacuum toy and theoretical solar sails).

Uh, what? Nobody said that at all. It is neither a "classic example" nor an assumption. The trajectory has been tracked since it was discovered, which is hyperbolic around the sun, and the speed of the object is such that there is no way it could have accelerated to its current velocity due to the gravity of our sun alone, hence it has to be interstellar, picking up kinetic energy from another system outside of our own. The orbit is not improbable, it is unusual compared to trajectories of asteroids that exist within our own solar system. Sharpen your crayon there bud, and stop trying to impress people with your new thesaurus for hipsters (come on, "undergird"?? Really?)

Sorry, but this is simply not true. Earthquakes are caused by activity under the earth's surface. It has never been demonstrated that there is a causal relationship between solar flares and earthquakes.

No Netflix for me, and no luck on a quick search of torrents, but I'll keep my eye out for that show/series.

Many metrics to compare. Ecologically, that system sounds great for static locations with enough of an elevation gradient and reservoir areas to make it work. On the other hand it seems like the ecological damage done by constructing batteries, factories, and disposing of them is likely quite small compared to many other alternatives, particularly fossil fuels (which also have long-term scarcity concerns on top of plenty of other issues).

A major advantage of battery tech over hydro storage would be mobility. If the thing consuming energy doesn't sit in one place, hydro storage won't work. Another somewhat less significant advantage is the ability to install anywhere -- a battery farm recharged by mains and/or a solar/wind farm could be installed in places where hydro storage couldn't. And for one more item in favor of batteries, I'd wager that the land area footprint required for batteries is much smaller per kWH stored, although that might be wrong for extremely large reservoirs (ie. a hydroelectric dam, pretty much). But by the time you're getting to that large scale, the location requirements and ecological disruption are also much more extreme.

Anyway, I don't mean to pooh-pooh the idea of hydro storage -- it really does seem like a very good and ingenious idea where it would be applicable. But there's certainly room for improved battery tech, too. I don't think that we're going to get fully or even significantly weaned off of fossil fuels quite as fast as the video would have us hope for, either. Fossil fuels were the primary tool in our toolbox for a LONG time. And as the saying goes, since all we've had is that "hammer", we've started to think of everything as a nail.

Hadn't heard of that, but I get the concept. Cool idea.

Off the top of my head, I'm concerned about pump and generator efficiency. You're going to use some amount more energy to pump a volume of water up to the high basin than you will get back by gravity feeding it through generators. To be fair, efficiency is a problem with using and recharging chemical batteries as well, but the limited amount that I remember from college engineering courses tells me that efficiency in the electrical / solid state world tends to be more easily obtained than in the mechanical world.

And as another "to be fair", efficiency is a bigger concern for things like fossil fuels, where burning one unit of fuel produces a set amount of energy and you have to improve efficiency to get the most value out of that energy. With things like solar and wind being "free" energy when active but requiring storage for when the source is inactive (night / calm winds), efficiency still certainly matters, but not as much as with a scarce / non-renewable source of energy.

Anyway, I'd like to see concrete numbers comparing the utility and efficiency (in various metrics) of your hydro storage vs battery storage.

Your video, Making Solar Panels With A Particle Accelerator, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

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The tech i would guess is sound, but what about Rayton Solar the company.

The way they will be pulling money out for themselves seems questionable.
https://rationalexuberancesite.wordpress.com/2017/05/14/rayton-solar-a-story-about-bill-nye-particle-accelerators-and-greed/

Is the technology financially viable? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15132816

Oh god, they've invaded Videosift! I get ads for this company all the time on facebook, begging me to invest in their company. Their technology seems neat but it's still waaaay to early to know if they will be a viable player in solar.

Your video, The Sweeping Shadow - Total Solar Eclipse, Nov 14 2012,, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.