How do you imagine the future of energy?
Maybe you’ve already said:
“It would be nice if we closed all these coal plants,
if we shut down all the nuclear power plants themselves,
and replace all that with renewable. “
But, most of you, you may have said:
” It’s just a dream.
It will never happen.
It’s a nice idea maybe, but that’s it. “
What if it was not just a dream?
If there was a way to make it a reality?
If I told you it was possible?
How would you react?
My name is Andrei Klochko
and today, I’m going to give you a little history of energy.
According to you, where does the energy that we consume come from, where does it really come from?
To see it, we have to go back in time.
We must turn back time
to see where things really come from
Let’s start with cars,
the cars we drive.
Cars are fuel, gas.
Gasoline is oil, it comes from under the Earth.
That, until then, it’s easy enough.
But the oil itself,
millions of years ago, it was something else, biomass:
corpses of animals and plants,
who landed at the bottom of the oceans and peat bogs
and these animals drew their energy from the plants,
and the plants, suddenly, drew their energy, in fine, from the sun.
Oil is solar energy stored over millions of years.
We do not realize it most of the time.
That’s why I needed this picture.
Let’s take another energy, for example, the wind.
There is a hot zone, a cold zone:
one area at a higher pressure than the other.
But these areas are heated, also by the sun.
Finally, wind energy is also solar energy
with a small delay.
Take the wave energy
still a form of energy that still comes from the wind and the sun.
Finally, it’s the same thing.
We always come back to the same thing.
And now nuclear, you will tell me.
Nuclear power is more complicated, yes.
But in fact, it comes from the stars too. Demonstration!
Nuclear power is uranium.
Uranium has been in the earth’s crust for millions of years,
even billions of years.
And he did not move, it’s a chemical element.
You can not destroy it like that.
He can only destroy himself by making a radioactive disintegration.
He was brought there by the meteorites that formed the Earth
billions of years ago.
That’s where it comes from.
These meteorites come from interstellar clouds.
And in the interstellar clouds,
there were cataclysmic events billions of years ago:
the supernova,
the fire of a star about to die.
It converts all its energy.
It consumes 10 ^ 50 atoms in a matter of seconds
expelling his material
to the confines of the surrounding solar systems,
cataclysmic events that do not produce often.
And these explosions come from the stars,
stars like the sun.
Uranium is the death of a star, stored over billions of years.
To recreate uranium, you have to kill other stars.
Now you may have an idea of what we are playing with nuclear power.
Here.
But, so if we look until now,
we had solar direct flow, solar and wind,
the solar stored at the scale of a human life,
the biomass,
stored on geological scales such as hydrocarbons,
and stored on an even longer scale, nuclear.
There is another form of nuclear energy: nuclear fusion energy.
What is it ?
It is the man who takes the sun,
put it on Earth, put it in a box,
and says he thinks he’s controlling it.
That could work.
It can really work.
In fact, either we become a God,
someone very dangerous,
and in between, it’s going to depend on what’s going to happen.
What is nuclear fusion?
You have heavy hydrogen, as in the ITER reactor, at Cadarache,
deuterium and tritium that merge
to form an atom, a helium nucleus and a neutron.
Because of this neutron, the walls of the reactor will become radioactive.
Suddenly, it produces radioactive waste.
Tritium itself, heavy hydrogen with 3 nucleons, is also radioactive.
Finally, it’s not the ultimate solution.
If we want to go further, we have to go to 600 million ° C,
and not 100 million.
We must still confine the placement 500 times better than we know how to do it.
And here we come to the Bore + Hydrogen fusion:
a merger that does not consume a radioactive element
and who does not produce either.
With that, we will really have an energy of the future.
Our greatest magicians and wizards are putting all their knowledge
to try to give us this technology.
But it could take a very, very long time, maybe never.
So, in the meantime, what do we do?
Because in the meantime, oil, it continues to burn.
In 100 years at most,
we will have converted most of our hydrocarbon reserves
in carbon dioxide.
In 200 years, resources will have been squandered
created over millions of years.
To have a comparison,
imagine a rich heir who would squander the money of 3 generations,
in a few hours.
It is more or less that.
How can we stop living on credit,
a credit that can not be refunded?
The only solution would be to take solar direct flow,
to no longer take credit, to take solar photovoltaic,
or take wind,
which is direct solar energy too.
But only, you say to yourself:
“Solar panels are nothing,
it’s so much smaller than a nuclear power plant.
It will never be a drop of water.
We could very well stay with nuclear power.
Cars stink much less today than 20 years ago, etc.
Finally, no need to change, everything will be fine, everything will eventually work out. “
If you believe that, you have stayed in a world of dreams.
The world has changed a lot in recent years,
and there may be things you did not see coming.
Here is the world as it is today.
75 gigawatts of wind power deployed in the United States.
100 gigawatts of solar will be deployed in India by 2022.
150 gigawatts of wind power already deployed in China,
with 43 gigawatts of solar.
To compare,
the total power of the world is 2 terawatts, so 2000 gigawatts.
Finally, it’s not that much.
And also a last number:
the solar, the solar energy that comes to Earth every second,
it’s 65 petawatts: 65,000 terawatts.
What it means,
is that with 0.01% of the Earth’s surface with photovoltaics,
300 by 200 kilometers in the Sahara,
you are feeding the world with electricity.
Finally, it’s not much, so it works.
But how did we get here?
The solar was so small,
only you neglected a parameter, the economic parameter.
It does not matter if a plant takes up more space,
the important thing is that it is cheaper.
Finally, this great demon of the economy,
because of the crisis of 2008,
could very well be the one who saves us from oil.
Because in 2025,
a solar power station will already be cheaper than a coal-fired power station.
Even China is going to solar, and it is already doing so.
Only, there is a problem,
solar energy as it is subjected to a limit,
a limit that it can not exceed if we do not help it.
As it stands, it’s 30% of our energy.
Only 30% of the world’s energy could be supplied in solar.
Why ? Lets go see.
For this, we have to go in the future.
Imagine a 100% renewable world.
The ecologists have won.
You are at home, the weather is nice, it’s hot,
not like today.
The sun goes down and the air is still.
Night is falling.
You want to turn on the light,
but it does not work.
Nothing is happening. Why is that ?
You have probably already guessed it.
The sun goes down and the wind falls,
they produce nothing.
They do not store anything and provide everything they produced
at the moment they produce it, Suddenly the light goes out at your place.
The problem is not only at home,
it’s all over Europe,
all Europe falls into the night at the same time,
and in 30-day wind holes, every year,
where it produces only 25% of the capacity of its wind farms.
There are times when there is no renewable energy produced.
So what can we do?
The problem is a problem, not production, but production time.
If only, we could make the sun shine at night.
But maybe in fact,
it is enough to provide this energy at night.
The solution was before our eyes.
It’s energy storage.
Store solar energy during the day to restore it at night.
Store wind energy to restore it during nights without wind.
Thanks to energy storage,
we can go from 30% to 100%
renewable energy.
That’s the missing link.
Storing energy, we already know how to do it.
EDF also installed 6 gigawatts of double dams:
a dam at the top and a dam at the bottom, which are water …
who come down from the water when we need
and who goes back when we have too much.
It’s been working very well for 50 years.
The problem is if there is no river,
or when you live in the middle of a plain.
There, it does not work anymore, you need something else.
So … I see you coming,
a huge lithium battery, what would it give?
It has two problems: it’s expensive
and the materials are toxic and flammable.
We can do better with compressed air.
Isothermal compressed air,
25 years of life, 2 times cheaper than lithium,
no toxic material, 100% recyclable.
A solution for the future, among others.
We will see who will win.
Now, thanks to good storage techno,
we have to break the 30% limit,
we break the 30% limit
we can go up to 100% renewable energies
even before discovering nuclear fusion reactors.
We can even then,
generate fuels from this renewable energy,
make methane and synthetic hydrogen.
With that, we can feed cars
except that it will be from carbon dioxide that will have been captured.
We will finally be in circular economy.
Finally, all our primary energy will come from the sun,
in direct debit, no more debt.
We will stop living with debts that can not be repaid.
We will make a land for our children, not ravaged,
but as we found it.
We will discover the interstellar journey,
and other civilizations, not to loot them,
and take everything on their planet, but come in peace.
In the end, humanity will have reached the age of energetic reason.
We are not dying in 100 years,
but in a million years, if we take the right path today.
Thank you.
(Applause)
”
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