There's not a lot that there's, like, purely a human thing when we look at the world, but this is one of them.

This is Joe Hanson, host of "It's OK to be Smart."

He's OK, he's smart, and he's made a bunch of videos about energy, so we decided to ask him about it.

Human history has kind of been about turning energy into other things.

The harnessing of fire was the first time we did this.

We took the ability to take thermal energy and do things with it, like cook meat or make light inside the cave so we could make the fun cave paintings or something like that.

Everybody talks about this Industrial Revolution, this big thing that happened in history.

But if you boil that down-- pun intended, I guess-- it's the ability to take the thermal energy for the first time and convert it into kinetic energy.

That's what the steam engine was, and that is what has changed our world into an unrecognizable place in a few hundred years.

And no other animal has been able to do that.

The manipulation of energy is what makes us human.

Our current way of life wouldn't even be possible without the harnessing of energy.

Yet we often take it for granted, Craig.

That's right, Matt.

In this playlist, we're going to learn about energy-- how we get it, where we get it, and where we'll get it in the future.

But first, let's take a look at the largest machine ever built and how we use it every day without even really thinking about it.

What is it?

Is it my car?

No, not even close.

It's way bigger.

Whoa.

Yeah, it's pretty amazing.

That's huge.

Something bigger than your car, your Toyota Corolla.

You see it every day.

It's everywhere, lining every street and alley, filling huge areas of land in our cities, and connecting every single home and business.

We see it so much we don't even think about it.

It's the power grid, potentially the most complicated kind of machine ever built, but also one of the easiest ones to use.

All you got to do is plug something in or flip on a switch.

But all that power has to come from somewhere.

So if we want to understand how the power grid works, we're going to have to start from the beginning, which is a few million years ago, give or take.

Where does the bulk of our energy come from?

Well, here in the United States, we use something like five or six times more energy per person than anywhere else in the world.

And a lot of that comes from burning fossil fuels.

We're changing where we get energy today, but the fact is a lot of it comes from burning things like coal, natural gas, even oil and things like that.

About 2/3 of our electricity in the United States is produced through the burning of fossil fuels.

19% is nuclear.

6% is hydropower.

And the last 7% is all the other renewable sources combined, including biomass, geothermal, solar, and wind.

Solar energy itself only accounts for 0.4% of our total energy production.

Got to step up your game, solar.

Come on, now.

Let's do this.

But the funny thing about all those sources is they really do start at the sun.

Solar energy-- duh.

It comes from the sun.

But fossil fuels used to be things like plants that came from the sun.

Even if there used to be things like animals, well, animals eat plants that came from the sun.

Even wind energy is powered by the sun heating the earth in different ways and spinning it around and creating all those air currents.

So when we burn fossil fuels like coal, we're tapping into the energy all those plants soaked up from the sun over millions of years.

That's why they're such a great energy source and why they're so problematic.

All life on earth is carbon-based.

Plants are full of carbon they get from the carbon dioxide they breathe out of the air.

So that carbon that's been put there from dead plants for millions and millions of years, we're burning it and putting back into the atmosphere in a matter of hundreds of years.

And the earth just can't respond in a couple hundred years to these major changes.

The production of electricity pumps more CO2 into our atmosphere than any other method.

And most of that CO2 comes from the burning of coal.

Because not only is coal the most widely used fossil fuel, it packs the most carbon emissions.

The biggest consumer of that electricity is us, or rather our lights and our appliances.

Hundreds of millions of light bulbs and toasters and TVs and doodads and computers all tap into that electricity through the grid.

It's the biggest machine that's ever been built.

I mean, like that large Hadron collider thing puts that thing to shame.

The electrical grid is the most massive machine humans have ever built.

It's what connects-- it's the reason everything works.

We take that for granted.

You've seen parts of the grid-- power lines, outlets, and the occasional power plant, but you'll never be able to see it in its entirety.

There over 700,000 kilometers of high voltage power lines and over 250,000 kilometers of overhead transmission lines in the United States alone.

That's enough to wrap around the entire Earth 24 times-- 24.

When you flip a switch on the wall and you want to turn on your lights, that's completing a circuit that begins very far away when somebody burns fossil fuel or nuclear energy or collects solar power at a power plant.

And that power plant produces electricity at a very high voltage, which is then sent out long distances over high power transmission lines.

Then, the closer it gets to your house, it starts stepping that down to a less deadly level, although it's still pretty deadly.

And that's done by transformers and substations in a series of little tiny-- it's like funnels that get closer and closer to your house, so that by the time you plug that plug in in the wall, you get down to, like, here in the US 120 volts or something like that.

The grid makes basically every part of our modern lives possible, but this massive machine isn't perfect.

Far from it.

Besides using tons of fossil fuels and spewing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, there's another problem with the grid.

Our energy grid is not very efficient.

We actually lose about 60% of the energy that we generate, which would probably come to a shock.

That means is it's never used.

It never comes out the plug in your house.

It never gets applied to a light bulb or a battery or whatever.

All along the path, from the power plant to your house, there's loss and converting it from higher to lower voltage.

There's heat that escapes out of the wires in the process of creating that energy, burning the fuels.

There's even unused energy.

If wind turbines are spinning and there's nobody there to use that electricity, we can't always store it to use it later.

I mean, one of the biggest parts of this is just physics itself.

Is just entropy.

When you try to make energy travel a long distance, you're just going to lose part of it.

It's like death by 1,000 paper cuts.

It's, you lose a little bit of energy here, a little bit there.

But by the time it gets to your house, more than half of it has been lost along the way.

[bleep] entropy.

I know.

It's going to be the end of the universe, too.

It's a real bummer.

Can you think of possibly someday we'll be able to capture that heat that we lose and use it?

Is there some way we can do that?

Because we'd be millionaires if we could figure that out.

This is one of the biggest parts-- one of the areas of focus in energy research is not just coming with new sources of energy, but changing how we use it and trying to find these places where we lose it, where we lose these things that are unusable.

One of the ways to make the grid more efficient is to make it smarter.

This is called the smart grid, which is basically an overhaul of our current grid, utilizing computer technology to allow power plants and home appliances and everything in between to communicate with each other and work out problems in the system to make it more efficient.

For example, imagine that your air conditioner could turn itself off when the electrical grid was overloaded.

We could avoid blackouts and undue stress to the system and save money in the process by using less power when electricity rates are high.

The other major problem with the grid is energy storage.

Right now, there is no way to store energy at a large scale, which is a big problem, particularly with renewable energy.

With fossil fuel plants, if energy demand is high, we just burn more fossil fuels.

Unfortunately, we have far less control over renewable sources like wind and solar.

Nature is unpredictable and generally doesn't produce more sun and wind just because everyone's microwaving a Hot Pocket at the same time.

And when demand is low, we could potentially be missing out on a lot of extra free wind and solar power because we have no way to store it.

Now, there is some energy storage in use, and new technologies are being developed.

But we still have a ways to go.

If we can get the storage issue figured out and get the various parts of our massive grid communicating with each other and working together like a giant brain, the hope is we can reduce our energy loss and use less energy overall.

How societies use energy has always been a defining quality of who they are.

Like, the Dutch are famous because they love windmills.

And now we're famous because we like gasoline.

Most of our history has been about these energy transitions.

So think about the change from wood to coal.

Coal was a way to save the world from deforestation back then.

Seeing that trend over time, it's not necessarily that we always want to be cleaner or that we always want something cheaper.

It's that were motivated when something starts running out and we almost have to get into this crisis mode before we agree to take a step.

And unfortunately, I don't think we have time to do that today.

We're going to come up with a different reason, and I'm crossing my fingers that we can do it for the first time.

As Earth's population grows and more people around the world want to live the way that we've been lucky enough to live and have the stuff we've been lucky enough to have, it's going to require more and more energy.

We've got to come up with ways to do things more efficiently.

Because there's going to be more and more people wanting to plug in and get energy in the future.

And we've got to solve both problems.

Well, how do we do it?

How do I that?

I don't know.

That's why we need young, smart engineers to come in and figure that out.

It's new inventions and new technologies.

The grid is a giant, complicated machine.

It's one of the most uniquely human achievements we've accomplished.

And just like us, it isn't perfect.

We might take the grid for granted.

We might not even realize it's there half the time.

But we do have to realize that we are the ones in control of this massive machine.

Turning off lights, using energy-efficient bulbs, and working together to use energy more efficiently will go a long way.

Just as the grid can be smarter with the way it uses energy, so can we.

And we don't need to be upgraded.

We should already be smart enough.

Thanks to Joe Hanson for lending his expertise about energy.

He did a whole series of three videos about energy.

I'll link it right there.

Go check it out.

Subscribe to his channel.

It's really good.

What do you guys think?

What do you think of this energy grid?

Are we going to make it better or what?

Are we headed for disaster, or is there are things just fine the way they are?

Let us know in the comments.

And we will take your suggestions to government.

We'll write our congressman and see what they do about it.

Yeah, your comments are going to go directly into policy.

Whatever you say, so be careful.

Be careful.

Don't screw up.

Because we know people in high places.

We don't.

That was a lie.

If you want more about cool science topics, like all this energy business, climate change, or maybe some happier topics like why dinosaurs are cool or why space is awesome, then come check out my channel at YouTube.com/itsoktobesmart.

I happen to think it's the best science channel out there.

All right.

Stay curious.

Ours is pretty good though, too.

Oh, yeah.

Good Stuff is pretty awesome too.

If you enjoyed-- oh, stomach is growling quite a bit.

Ooh, I need more energy from food.

If you like what you just saw, consider clicking Like and subscribing.

And if you'd like to support our show, you go to our Patreon page.

There's some awesome perks over there, like we do a monthly live show and stuff.

Great.

Yeah, you could help us generate monetary power through you.

You'd be like the power plant.

What we really want is power.

Well, you'd be the power, the person people-- it's like people power.

It'd be like using people for energy, to keep the show going.

Like in "The Matrix"?

Yeah, basically.

You'd be human batteries, which surprisingly enough, we're going to do a video about.

Not human batteries, regular batteries.

New batteries, though, futuristic batteries.

This isn't going well.

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