Do The EV Critics Have A Point?

Oh you’re cheating with EVS because all you’re doing is transferring the exhaust fumes from your car to the power station because your car is powered by coal and coal produces more pollution than your uh my petrol car does uh you’re cheating have you heard that one before uh let’s

Have a look at the grid and see what’s actually going on because it’s getting quite interesting out there and Dave welcome to Dave takes it on we’re looking today at the grid and renewable energy now when the grid first started we’re talking back in the 19 30s uh the

Only fuel we had then to do anything in any large quantity was coal the whole world ran on coal at one point steam engines and uh Coal Fired furnaces for steel and uh coal fires in the home everything was coal so in the 30s 40s 50s uh we burned coal uh everywhere uh

And that’s where it started the power stations when they started springing up in the 40s and the ‘ 50s uh they were almost all cold fired power stations as well so absolutely back then they were horrendous but then they started producing too much pollution we started getting smogs um people started dropping

Dead prematurely with respiratory diseases and uh pneumonia bronchitis all the lung diseases uh and then in 1957 they introduced a Clean Air Act which said you can’t do that anymore and since 1957 there’s been a gradual decline in the use of coal uh it’s been quite

Noticeable uh but in the last five or 10 years it’s taken a real steep dive uh today in the UK we have just one Coal Fired Power Station left and that one is scheduled to shut down this year so for the first time since the grid started

1938 we are going to end up with a situation where we don’t have a single Cal fired power station in the whole of the UK not even as a backup now what are we replacing it with well in the early 60s and 70s the flavor of

The day was n um natural gas straight from the North Sea uh natural gas came in really cheap uh they had a slogan at one time it’s going to be so cheap we’re going to have to pay you to burn it uh and they virtually did uh gas became the

Number one king we switched all our coal fires over to gas central heating uh or gas fires uh we switched our Coal Fire par stations over to gas fire pass stations and the beauty of those is they are very much cleaner the gas that they were using natural gas is mostly methane

Uh we didn’t know at the time how dangerous it is for the atmosphere but that’s that’s beside the point it’s mostly methane they put a chemical in it to make it smell like gas uh on its own doesn’t smell very much um and uh gradually our grid changed from coal to

Gas uh in the late 50s early 60s again we started doubling with nuclear uh so we ended up with windscale which since become copile because it’s such a toxic name they can’t use it anymore and then we got dungeon s and sew B and A and B

Uh so we started installing um uh nuclear power stations and they seem to be the answer to everything uh that was until uh we realized the amount of nuclear radioactive waste that they leave uh would you believe that the radioactive waste from the very first nuclear power

Station in the UK at um cellfield uh we still haven’t got rid of it we don’t know how to get rid of it and it’s still dangerous to this day it’s got a half life of like 10,000 100 thousand years it’s going to be around forever um a lot

Of stuff they’ve had to encase in glass to try and stop it radiating or reacting and then they submerge the gas in massive big underground uh water tanks to try and keep them cool this is waste there’s a nuclear reaction going on in this waste it’s producing heat and they

Have a vitrification plant which seals it in glass and then they drop that glass into a a deep um uh water puddle Pond um so we’re starting to find out that uh nuclear does have its drawbacks I know the latest ones are cleaner but I used to work I was a HVAC heating

Ventilating air conditioning engineer I used to work at cellfield I would go up there for visits um and everything I before I went in there had to take off and store in a in a Locker shoes socks pretty much everything just down your underpants and then you’d be given an

Overall and you have to sit on a a bench and swing your legs over and then put that on so there’s no cross contamination U and everything you used um all your clothing everything you touched uh it could all potentially be radioactive the other side this barrier

When you come out you have to strip everything off um that goes into low waste nuclear waste uh so everything I’ve just worn is now uh waste radioactive waste uh and then you stand virtually naked in front of a monitor which checks it and you have to put your

Fingers in because you can get um radioactive traces in your nails in your hair uh so they do all that um so these were found to be not so good after all uh there’s so much money being needed to get rid of the waste or try and get rid

Of it uh that uh the cost of disposing the radioactive waste is now greater than the power station itself uh France has got a different issue uh they went all electric in the 60s a massive investment huge investment private and uh government uh and they went about 80% nuclear literally overnight 80%

Nuclear uh the trouble is all of those nuclear power stations in France all built at the same time with 60s and70s they’re all now coming to the end of their life and France has a really serious well they have two problems actually the first problem is these are

All reaching the end of their life and they are now so expensive to try and build a new one because of all the safety measures and the radioactive waste that we now know about that they can’t afford to replace them all with new nuclear power stations they haven’t

Got the money and they can’t get the investment to do it the other problem they had was a really interesting one now don’t go into global warming but they are claiming that the temperatures Rising as temperatures rise they’re starting to get a few droughts we saw

This last year in Germany with the Rin drying up and we’ve seen in this country with rivers drying up and and hose pipe bands and over in France that’s really really hitting them hard because all nuclear power stations need cooling water uh the Radio Action radioactive uh

Reactor uh produces huge amount of heat that heat flushes water into steam the steam drives turbines um and that produces your electricity uh but uh you have to cool it all down down at the end of it otherwise the whole reactor o overheats so there’s a cooling water and two years

Ago they found to their horror that they had two problems the first problem was they were often built smaller ones on river banks and they would just divert some of the water through it but when the uh water levels started dropping with the droughts like it did on the

Rind they couldn’t even run the barges up down the rine then they found that they couldn’t get enough water through the made the reactor uh to cool it down the second thing was that that water was hot well say relatively hot it was really warm water so not only did

They have enough water coming through but they didn’t have enough uh cooling effect and so in the heat waves that they had in in France particularly in Paris in a few years ago they were actually throttling back the nuclear power stations because not because they couldn’t open them up but because they

Couldn’t couldn’t cool them down fast enough and they had widespread blackout and everything caused purely because not enough water now whether you like global warming or not we are seeing more droughts we’re seeing more Rivers drying up we’re seeing temperatures rising temperatur of oceans Rising so even for

Cellfield uh which is on the coast uh the water temperature if that goes up a couple of degrees that will have an impact on the cooling capacity um on top of that if we are getting um sea level rises which they’re predicting and saying some island nations are

Already affected then that some point these are going to flood they’re going to be underwater so because you have to build them in the UK down on the coast right down sea level so you can get sea water into them uh that means that when if if

And when the sea level rises the Finish you have to shut them down but how do you shut down a nuclear reactor you can’t we know that because we’ve still got all the radioactive waste from the ones back in the 50s and 60s so we’re having a big problem with nuclear Rector

So one of the answers is let’s turn the grid Green Let’s Go renewable oh you can’t do that everyone says um in actual fact that that they’re doing it give you one example the grid here has said that uh December last year uh year before last uh they had a total of

Five days where we didn’t use any fossil fuels at all so over the years we’ve added solar panel forms we’ve added uh Wind forms we’ve added hydroelectric we’ve added pumped water storage we’ve added a lot of things we’ve added biomass uh burning um growing growing and burning fuels um

And on a typical day now any day at all you act you look in daylight when the panels are working and potentially the windfalls are working uh we can be running 4050 60 70% off renewable don’t use the coal anymore the backup is gas and nuclear but on a typical day uh looking

Over several days you’ll find that uh Renewables are in the 40 50% Range gas is down less than 10% nucleus less than 10% the rest is made up through um PV and other things like that now at night you can’t use PV panels they don’t work uh they need sunlight but the witer

Bines still go around so they will still produce a background level overnight and that’s when demand drops so there’s a lot less needed a lot less Demand on the grid and therefore the wind turbines can cope quite happily so overnight the percentage is now heading towards um wind wind farms and

Renewable with the Advent of grid connected batteries we can now look at going actually totally renewable and that is because during the day uh if it’s lovely sunny day in the middle of summer and the wind’s blowing and the Sun’s shining then your panels are producing far far more power than you

Can possibly use in the whole of the grid your wind farms are producing far more electricity than you can possibly use in the whole of the grid and currently that one is just shut down literally shut down so they’ll switch off the W the wind farms they’ll switch

Off the solar panels because we just don’t need it so we can go hours in a day during sunlight and we can go hours in a whole day with wind where we’re actually switching them off and running gas turbines in case so we have a crazy situation at the moment now with the

Advent of grid storage batteries that is coming to an end it’s already happened big time in Australia they used to hold cold fired power stations back to fire up specifically a peak times they’re called pea plant uh and they would run flat out for a number of hours they charged an

Extortion of price for the electricity uh and then they’d shut down for the rest of the day until they needed again 24 hours later uh crazy situation but Australia was a cold State and change of government government brought in Renewables and now they’ve all gone all those coal stations cied power stations

They’re pretty much all gone and what’s happened they got massive big batteries in so while all this uh sun is shining the wind’s blowing the pump in all this electricity excess not using it into uh G batteries massive batteries and they storing it and then when there’s a

Sudden Demand on the grid and it’s greater than what they’re producing supplies they just release it back from the batteries back into the grid there’s always been a problem in the past with something called balancing uh but an actual fact uh batteries uh when they’re programmed properly are a better

Balancing than a gas fired uh Power Station in the UK the grid has said by 2025 most days will be running 100% off renewable energy during certain hours 100% so that day in December just over a year ago uh when we had five days of continuous use with no fossil fuel being

Burned at all uh we’re going to be getting those as regulars Clockwork within two year within one year now one and a half years uh so grids are heading towards renewable we need a final effort because what we need to do is keep on building up the Renewables now when we

Have excess we need to build up the battery storage as well because if we can store uh for example a whole day’s electricity in the batteries uh then it means that uh we just top it up throughout the day simple as that we don’t need any other um sources of

Electricity uh we’re heading towards that and the grid is announced they’re quite happy to do it now I know a lot of people have a go me it’s not the Grid it’s a DN no it’s not it’s the grid see the way the structure works in the UK is

You have power stations so they can be private they can be Global they can be owned by the grid they can be owned by uh utility company like Aon uh they can be owned by me it could be my panels on the roof right these are all power

Stations the Grid’s job is to take in all that power and get it into the grid and then distribute it so it is available where it is needed and this is all the h voltage stuff you’re talking about the overhead pylons 330 450 800 uh th000 volts uh this is massive stuff so

The grid takes electricity from the grid puts it into the grid Network and then that goes out to each area now in each area so for example Preston um it’s then brought down from 330 440,000 volts to a substation um which then drops it down to about 30,000 volts 40,000 volts

Something in that reach a dramatic drop down um and at that point this effectively is a ring main it’s a lower voltage ring m still 30 40,000 volts that ring main is controlled by the DN the distribution Network organizations and their job is to take the ring main

Tap into the ring Main and produce substations uh which are much smaller uh that will bring it down even further down to just a few thousand volts then from the substation to the end load which might be a supermarket or a shop or a charging installation uh that’s the responsibility of the

Supermarket or the shop or the chargeing network uh so that’s it so getting electricity into the grid is part of the grids problem and getting it round the country so it’s available for everyone to be able to draw what they need that’s the grids problem the dno takes over to

Then drop the voltage down and put it into areas where it will be needed and then to drop it from there down into a substation which then can be worked on by electricians nothing to do with grid nothing to do with the dns’s it’s very strictly uh defined so the grid is

Saying it can go renewable now from a dno’s point of view it doesn’t matter as long as the dno can tap into this uh ring main as I call it uh 330,000 volts whatever rate it is or 11,000 volts um as long as they can tap into that their job then is to

Distribute that to various stations and substations to make it available for domestic homes and businesses locally doesn’t matter where that comes from it’s not the responsibility of the dno gets confusing because someone like Eon is everything they are a dno they are parts of they own parts of the grid they

Actually have their own power stations they run nuclear power station stations and buy it in from Europe it gets confusing with certain people who think that because they actually own the power station the the dno no uh they all have their set tasks so the generators feed

It into the grid the National Grid feeds it out to wherever it’s needed the dnos will take it over so from a dno point of view they don’t care where the electricity comes from unless the dno is owned by Eon which has its own power plants and there’s a power strug power

Struggle yeah uh there’s a battle going on because they want their electricity into the grid first so when you can break that chain and all electricity coming in is from wind farms and solar farms and uh W tidal the grid itself can go renewable and that will happen

Probably by 2030 by 2030 if we carry on as we are which I think we will we’ll reach a point where all electricity will be renewable while it’s running solar panels join the day wind day and night uh and what we can’t use there and then

We will store and the storage element of it will go up um and so over time we will end up with more electricity than we need and more of it stored than the worst day can throw at us this is not very far away now at that point people

Say oh we need Hydra we need nuclear in the background we you don’t so we are heading very rapidly towards it now at that point guess where interesting because once we break away from the gas and the nuclear we end up with a situation where why have we tied our

Electricity price to the price of gas at some point people are going to say we don’t want to be tied to gas we want to set our own prices we’ll have our own grid we’ll have our own pricing and we’ll be able to sell it for whatever we

Want and we won’t be be holding to OPEC controlling the price of oil and gas and we won’t be beholden to the Middle East who provide our gas or or the North Sea or whatever it is uh we’ll just be merily making our own and you can envisage a situation where there’s so

Much electricity from renewable resources because we won’t stop we’ll just keep making it because we have interconnectors so if we produce too much we should be able to sell some of that across the channel to Norway Sweden Denmark or into Europe uh and actually have an export business but just picture

The scene this is going into fantasy now but at one day you have so much electricity uh that they can’t get rid of it we have it today electricity sometimes goes negative the grid will pay you to take electricity out of it because the so much coming in happens

Now if one day we produce so much electricity every day that we can’t use it all they’ll be saying look please take it for free take it for free so you can get some of your industries now we’ll run furnaces glass making plants car plants and they’ll be running off

Free electricity simply because there’s so much out there free that they can’t use it all other times you’ll have to pay for it so you’re going to be getting a variable tariff but could be quite exciting I’m looking forward to that day but also it’ll clear up the Skies of

Smoke and Smog and that will please me well thanks very much for watching I’m Dave if you’ve enjoyed this please subscribe and hit the notification Bell so that you’ll be notified when we release the next uh video um and thanks for watching I’m Dave

Electric vehicles may not produce emissions during operation but the electricity that powers them typically does. In fact, dirty sources of energy such as coal and gas typically make up a sizeable portion of grid energy. So, that begs the question: are EVs just as polluting as ICE vehicles? To find out what’s going on, stick around as Dave Takes It On.

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Dave Takes It On was founded in 2023 and focuses primarily on content about electric vehicles and issues that impact drivers. Dave is based in the North West of the UK and owns a Tesla Model S. He regularly travels around the country, so if you see him feel free to say hello. The channel is supported by his son Jonas, who supports with thumbnails, titles, and technical aspects of the channel.

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