This is just not how I'd expect it to happen at all. Turbine blades strike me as one of the most high-tech things in the world.- Yep. - And yet, this facility is using wax as a starting point.
And there's also what's called "run of the river" electricity where you don’t actually build a dam, you just extract the energy from flowing water. Tidal power basically a wind turbine under the water in tides. And the presence of tides. Geothermal power. You're extracting heat from the rocks under the earth and converting that into electricity. Thenthere's concentrated solar on the top left. Which you focus light from mirrors onto a central tower receiver to heat a fluid that then heats water and from the steam from the
So this a great occasion and I'll talk to you some more about some of the people in this photograph. On the far right is a man named George Huebner. He was the head of the turbine car program and a very, very flamboyant gentleman. I only found one photograph of him where he's not wearing an expensive suit, but in this image you'll see that he is.And then standing next to the car with his right hand on the fender of the car wearing a dark suit is a guy named Dr. Sam Williams. I'll talk some more about him as well.
So on the side there next to the gas cap on the left you'll see the tail end does say Turbine on the side, but that's all it says. It doesn't say anything else.A lot of people like the space age styling of the car. Everything about the car was designed
And then , close the loop by sending the results back into the cloud. airplane turbine engines will be communicating with each other in the cloud.
Really cool stuff there. the turbine ." Male #3: I've seen that many people that work in software industry where indeed we work with the computer in some kind of virtual world.
same guy designed it. Some people would jokingly call this the Engel Bird. But it's the Chrysler Ghia Turbine Car. And we call it the Turbine Car because it actually does not have a name. They toyed with the idea about naming it something. You don't have cars that don't have names. And
CAFE standards which is the Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards for all the cars that one car company builds. The turbine cars did not get good gas mileage. It wasn't bad gas mileage, but it wasn't good. And the problem was CAFE standards is that the government announced is simply, "You guys have gotta come out next year and have your gas standards here, the next year here," and
And then downstream somewhere, they would release the water. The turbines would spin. The electricity would be made.
and for the first time, now you know what the heck I'm talking about. Wind turbines , the electric ones, are they still windmills?
But between the combustion chamber and the outside air is this. Rows of turbine blades. So, in order for the gas to expand and get out, it needs to push these turbine blades out of the way.
As the gas rushes through the turbine and nozzle, its pressure drops from around 50 atmospheres down to one, and it expands by almost 20 times. And that spins these turbine blades up to 12,500 revolutions per minute. The fan that is pushing all that air backward and all those compressors that squeeze the air down, all of that is powered by the turbines back here.
in which machinery has to survive. - To keep a turbine blade whole and unaffected within an engine is like putting an ice cube inside your oven, turning up to max, leaving for work, coming back after an eight-hour shift, and finding it's still completely frozen in the oven.
- It sounds absurd. Not only do the turbine blades sit in a stream of gas that's over 1,500 degrees Celsius, they're also spinning at 12,500 RPM with the tip of each blade slicing through the air at nearly 1,900 kilometers per hour.
So, you can optimize for one thing, like the melting point, or a different thing like strength or weight. But the turbine pushes every variable to its limit. So what are these blades actually made of?
This is our wax pattern die. This is how a turbine blade starts its life. So, this is what's gonna go inside the wax pattern, a ceramic core.
Well, that strength comes at a cost. on a turbine blade, and the grains can actually start to slide past each other.
Well, that strength comes at a cost. - In a rotating turbine , the blade is being pulled along its length.
Well, that strength comes at a cost. So every turbine blade is also coated with two protective layers.
extra neutrons. And so you use the water and the fluid to then run a steam turbine to do traditional electricity generation run a steam turbine to do traditional electricity generation and output electricity through your steam turbine . and output electricity through your steam turbine . You end up with complicated systems of flowing liquids and flowing water, up with complicated systems of flowing liquids and flowing water, balancing the heat.
in those factories and don't work there anymore for the new tech jobs, skilled tech jobs that are emerging and are high demand as welders, as wind turbine repair people, and a long other list. If you go to Western Kansas now, you see the two competing industries.
But this is George Huebner and any time a camera was around it seems he got himself photographed near a turbine powered car. And so this is a car about 1961 or '62 and that's a jet engine under the hood and some
second. And I'll, yeah, okay. And this is another turbine powered car that George Huebner is kneeling behind and this one does say across the decklist it's says "Turbine Special." And as Chrysler became more and more confident that the cars would work they started putting
And we all know that Chrysler went bankrupt last year. Well they actually almost went bankrupt in the late 1960's, early 1970's. And right while all those things were happening the guys at the turbine program were saying, "Yeah, but we can build these cars." And they couldn't. So this was the car that they were going to put on the road. They actually toyed with the idea about building 500 of these.
um back in 2006 I was involved in a micro hydro electricity project in Afghanistan so there's this thing it's basically a turbine about this big and you make it in a we made them in a little Factory in carbal where we employed 70 Afghans it has a uh an intake valve and you you bring in water it needs like about a 20ft drop and it
employed 70 Afghans it has a uh an intake valve and you you bring in water it needs like about a 20ft drop and it turns this turbine and it produces enough power that it can power like a village uh Street or it can run a school or a doctor surgery whatever it's a great little device but we're having a lot of problems with this program because what we would do is we'd bring
For AI, that means getting their cloud-based hands on the resources they need for their end goal, like control of the solar panels or wind turbines that create the renewable energy in the first place, or even things like water, land, or money. Resources also include stuff like the compute and electricity AIs need to power themselves, and maybe even additional data to train on.
Village. And that was a remarkable experience. And there were wind turbines , and we had solar panels, and we had biodiesel generators, and we had healing domes and tepees and sacred spaces where people got to connect with the wisdom of ancient cultures.
make Steam that steam spins turbines the turbines then make electricity by connecting to spinning magnets as well in fact steam turbines make about 75 5% steam turbs make about 75% of the world's electricity it's a very important way to make electricity and then we use water to cool those steam power plants to bring the steam back down liquid water to repeat the cycle so
And so I checked on the website, and saw that there's a series kind of the more wide-ranging moonshot projects about life extension, self-driving cars, drones, for wind turbines and for transporting goods, Project Loon on the internet, Project Glass for hands-free reality displays, and artificial neural networks.
or something like that this is a very expensive kind of undertaking. Similarly with wind turbines they are oftentimes in very remote places, and they are very tall, and they're very hard to get to.
Technologies um water turbines um and then as we saw earlier a lot of our renewable energy actually also comes
And there are 68 of them. As the gas rushes through the turbine and nozzle, its pressure drops from around 50 atmospheres down to one, and it expands by almost 20 times. And that spins these turbine blades up to 12,500 revolutions per minute.
- Yeah, it's like loads lighter. - So if we were to make turbine blades out of titanium, each blade would be much lighter, and that would reduce the enormous centripetal forces it would experience.
Well, that strength comes at a cost. We've gone from a turbine blade that contained on the order of 50,000 crystal grains down to just one.
Now a crack in a turbine can be catastrophic, so manufacturers inspect them every 3000 flight cycles or 180 days, but inspections cost tens of thousands of dollars
run a steam turbine to do traditional electricity generation and output electricity through your steam turbine . and output electricity through your steam turbine . You end up with complicated systems of flowing liquids and flowing water, up with complicated systems of flowing liquids and flowing water, balancing the heat. balancing the heat. A lot of fission reactor design comes from that thermal balance of keeping this reaction comes from that thermal balance of keeping this reaction going, making sure it doesn't speed up, because that's
Steam at power plants and this is incredible number because boiling water is not a new technology this has been around for thousands of years we're making steam to spin the turbine make electricity because it's a robust way it's not a particularly efficient way but it is a robust way to get a lot of power in one place so steam tur are very very common around the world and then that steam needs to be cooled back to
into steam which drives a conventional turbine much as you use in a gas fired power plant, for example.
And here it's important that that is done automatically because there is nobody standing there. There's nobody standing on the wind turbine checking those probes on a daily basis, or on an hourly basis. It has to be done automatically.
We're working now on a little turbine turning 500,000 RPM.
The engineering team added a wind turbine , just because of the winter.
Two were workers trapped in the turbine hall of reactor 4, which ironically was the only reactor that contained no fuel at the time of the earthquake and tsunami.
This right here is a picture of George Huebner and like I said it's the only picture where he's not wearing a jacket. And the reason is, and he's the second man from the right, he was ahead of the turbine car program and he's the one who came to Chrysler and said, "I really want to build jet powered cars here," and he got them to put up the investment, let him hire the team. He his whole turbine department built around this.
And Bill Kerry's a fascinating guy. I interviewed him for this book. And he was a technician at Chrysler who came to Chrysler when he heard that they were gonna start building turbines . He'd worked in the military on turbine aircraft technology on helicopters. And when he went to Chrysler they said, "We've got just the job for you. You're gonna be the main mechanic on this fleet of cars." So when they built the 55 cars and lent them out to the public,
that drove their car cross country and it's someplace near the Continental Divide and they hopped up to take the picture. And the amazing thing about the turbine engine, along with the other stuff I told you, is that you could go out on a, on a pitch, cold day, as cold as you can make it, and hit the starter and the car'll start instantly.
That's me to the left of Jay Leno, 50 pounds ago. And people say, "Wow, Jay's shorter than I thought." And I say, "No, no, I'm taller than you thought." But that's Jay's turbine car. He actually bought that from Chrysler about a year ago when he came into town to do his free shows at the Palace for unemployed people. And Chrysler had kept three cars for themselves. The three cars they kept were identical because all the cars were identical.
went, "What you talkin' about?" And it's because there was as time when you'd see those cars everywhere. And they-they were almost common place. And the fact that they disappeared completely, and now people go "I wonder whatever happened to those turbine cars?" So that's also why I wrote the book. So -- Any questions? Okay. Female in audience: Talk to me about when you went to see all the families that had driven these. What were kind of the stories that they had?
to a solar factory or wind turbine factory, where he would say all the right things about the need to accelerate the transition to clean energy. He would talk about the need to cap
"Could I buy one of your turbine cars?" And apparently he got them to sell him one because male in audience: Uh-huh.